"Sir, we cannot possibly hide this. A woman disappeared." A man who seems to be a doctor by the looks of his shriveled white coat coupled with a young scratchy beard, flails his arms in a grand gesture of incomprehension. His convulsing hands pat his pockets in search of a little box of cancer-giving, stress-relieving burning sticks. He stops himself before his nervous fingers spill the entirety of the box on the ground. He clenches his fist around the package.
Another doctor, one who was unabashedly smoking by an opened window, sneers as he extinguishes the remains of a cig's butt against the wooden sill. His dark, half-lidded eyes offer nothing but contempt. "We can and we should."
Silence is the only thing the last man, siting behind a creaking desk, offers.
Three men, two opposing opinions. A dim-lit room. Winter wind against goose bumps.
It is such a picture that delivered itself to the tightly locked office of the director of Kuoh Hospital.
The director links his hands over a never-disappearing heap of papers. The little warmth they exchange does not stop the cold that pierces his bones.
"Beside, she's dead." The dark-eyed man spits out as he lights another cigarette. The flame of his lighter sparks brown flecks in his eyes and brings a twisted remorse to his face that is snuffed out as easily as his fire-igniter is put to rest, safely secured in his pocket.
"What do you mean, Tokou?" asks the first doctor. A cigarette falls from his trembling hand and rolls under the director's massive desk.
No one tries to reach for it.
The director unlinks his hands. He leans forward and listens.
"Kusogiri," the smoking professional sighs the name out exasperatedly. He turns to their boss with an explanation ready for a more intelligent mortal. "Director, she is dead. She was in catatonic state. Moving her from her equipment, from her respirator, made sure she would die."
Kusogiri pats his coat's pockets. He fishes inside, jostling and clinking tiny forgotten things around. He finally leaves them be when his hand comes out with a cheap blue lighter. "So it's a murder. The cops need to be notified. It could be one of us," he shakes the words out.
The director stays silent, a statue of seriousness and severity. Tokou snorts.
Kusogiri's head makes a sharp turn. "Are you comfortable working with a murderer?"
"People die in a hospital. Especially in that wing. If we go by your childish logic, any doctor or nurse that unplugs a living corpse is a murderer."
Kusogiri shifts, weight going from one leg to another. His thumb plays uselessly with the wheel of his lighter, sparking nothing. "They didn't simply unplug her. They took her. And what about that exploded pot in the hallway?"
Tokou puffs a long cloud of smoke out. His twisted lips around his cig show yellow teeth and urgent derision. "If people went through so much to steal a corpse, you can be sure they will do far more to cover their tracks. In ways you can't start to even imagine."
Another long puff, followed by a shorter one and a cough. Kusogiri continues to turn and use the wheel of his lighter. He frowns and opens his mouth.
Tokou cuts him off before he has the time to voice any of his internal struggling. "But you are always so righteous." He sneers. "Do you not understand the police will come here and investigate? They will ask for files, for everything. They might stumble on other business while they're here. Even you have things you prefer to keep away from their eyes."
"Sir." Kusogiri, turns towards their superior with a nervous jolt. He doesn't deny his colleague's accusation. He toys with his crumbled box of cigs. "What are we going to tell her husband?"
Their chief flickers his gaze towards the high windows that let the budding sunrise in. His spotted and wrinkled hands stay flat on his papers, hiding from view their content to wandering and curious eyes. When he focuses back on his employees, his grave and exhausted countenance takes on a somber air.
"Do you have something to add, Tokou?" he first asks his most controversial aid.
Tokou nods and comes closer to the desk. When only a nice plank of wood garnished with papers and homely family photos stands between them, he whispers. "We have a few unnamed, unclaimed bodies in the morgue. I know the chief of the crematorium. The guys there will not talk. They know to keep their mouth shut, with the amount of stuff they've seen."
Kusogiri lets his box of cheap cigs fall to the ground. "This is despicable."
Tokou doesn't even turn his head, doesn't break eye contact with the director. "As much as your business with that married, male nurse."
Kusogiri covers his left hand with a startle. He blankets from view a tiny, plain band that hugs his ring finger. It represents his marriage with a woman his staff believes him to love dearly. "How-"
The director frowns. Personal matters are distasteful to bring up in such a setting. This one, more than any others. "Enough. I asked for your opinion, not your squabbling." The older man sends a pointed glance at the sneering doctor. It serves as a silent warning of sort.
Tokou doesn't back down under the furrowed gaze of his superior. "Sir, the hospital will have to offer a settlement to Mister Hyoudou. We cannot afford this. We cannot afford another scandal."
"We cannot afford to house a murderer or its accomplice either!"
The director raises his hand high in the air. "Enough, I said," he rumbles.
The two doctors still. Tokou presses his lips together while his co-worker slaps his mouth shut. They know better than to continue bickering like two old grandmas fighting for the same loaf of bread in front of their boss. There is a limit to his patience. Getting fired just after the winter holiday doesn't sound that good of an idea.
The director sighs. He massages the bridge of his nose thoughtfully. Silence permeates the air. A cold wind brushes the curtains of his office. It travels around the room like a snake, twirling and twisting with coldness and promises of death. The winter holidays can either be a happy occurrence or a final one in people's life. Those who are left behind, those who have nobody, they often fill the morgue during this time of the year.
"Kusogiri. There will be an investigation." The director glances at the Devil's advocate. "Tokou. It will be a private one."
The director resolutely casts his gaze downward after his decision has been made.
"Yes, sir." Tokou nods and drags an unwilling Kusogiri by the collar before he can spew more stupidities about the murky waters they have found themselves in.
The familiar creak of an old door being closed softly echoes.
The director, left alone to his silence and thoughts, relaxes his back against the dossier of his chair. He eyes his desk. Closes his eyes. Opens them. Closes them. Sighs. Opens his eyes and blinks tiredly.
With a swipe, he pushes the blank paper away from the top of the heap of papers that so neatly keep his family photos out of his view. Under that blank paper, a death certificate for a comatose woman bears no signature. Written by the hospital computers, it claims the poor woman was brain dead and thus unplugged with her husband's blessing. Under it are the papers her husband did sign the morning of the fateful day Hyoudou Hikari mysteriously disappeared. Whoever did this corpse's kidnapping know, they knew and acted, and this knowledge does not help his heart find peace.
The director does not remember the man's face. He was not the one who met him to legalize the liberation of his hospital's bed, but Kusogiri assured him he met Mister Hyoudou in passing and even shook his hand.
"Despicable is the word." He murmurs as the ink of his pen stains the death certificate with his signature.
On the 23th of December, Hyoudou Hikari died. Brain failure. Nothing could have saved her, not even a miracle.
"Mom."
Hayashi Hikari turns her head and her faraway eyes focus on him. He marvels at the attention. "D-do you want apple juice or green tea?" He feels a little stupid to call for her attention for such a small matter, but she needs to stay hydrated. The teen holds high the bottle of juice and the pitiful bag of crumpled tea he found in the bottom of his bag, next to his not-smelly socks. Juice's full of vitamins and sugar and shit. Green tea is great for the body, any Japanese with a grain of knowledge know that.
(Ah. Can't he admit the truth, even to himself? He needs to know she's not going anywhere. Her mind has to stay with him. His mind will go down the drain and straight into the sewers of insanity if after the whole fuckery that was the Underworld, his mother is still out of his reach.)
He clenches his fist around the bottle of juice and imagines he is strangling his thoughts.
"We have tea?" His mother shifts in her seat. She stretches her neck in her effort to peer at the options he holds in his hands. He takes a step forward, taunt for a fall that never happens. She's sitting straight and well.
She is so small in the clothes he bought. She is so small in the wheelchair he stole. His red scarf, draped over her bird-like shoulders, looks like a blanket. His checkered tuque is almost too big for her, covering her thin eyebrows from view and making ripples around her nape. Her blankets overwhelms her form, but he refuses to let her take it off. He put the Glorygold seal inside; the dancing, fiery flower will keep her safe ans sound.
To hide his internal fascination (turmoil), Issei jiggles the crumpled bag of tea with a smile he wants to be conniving. He remembered her favorite drink right. They share their love for tea. Shared. "Water's already boiling."
"Why…" His mother muffles a chuckle behind her hand. The action is all too familiar and Issei's heart is melting. "Why do you even ask, then."
Issei glances at the tiny kettle he had turned on before he asked for her preference, just in case, to be sure she did want tea. Making her wait would have been distasteful. He filled the little thing with two cups worth of water. Two cups. One for her to drink. One for him to hide behind. He doesn't want to drink or smell the thing for a while. It will do a fine job at hiding his face, though.
He twists his mouth in a semblance of a smile. "I just wanted to make sure."
A tenuous wisp of warm cloud is already leaving the beak of the kettle. Soon, the telltale sound of boiling will bubble from it too.
He turns it off before his ears pick on any sounds. Into two plastic cups goes his crumpled green tea. His cup gets a sprinkle. His mother's gets a generous spoonful.
He comes to her with a smile and a not-steaming cup of slowly unraveling tea. He puts it down in front of her, on the little nightstand he moved so she could have a table where she could put things down if they were too heavy for her hands. Or just to throw the things that are bothering her in any ways somewhere.
His mother smiles as she bends to reach for her cup and really, it would have been better if he had just given her the damn thing directly. He can't do a single thing right.
He plasters a smile on his face to return hers anyway. He sits on the edge of the bed on which she dozed off after their adventure of the night. He was content to stare at her from there during those horrible hours where her chest would imperceptibly go up and then go down in her slumber. He bit his knuckles and scraped his teeth against his bones. Her chest always went up though.
She's still breathing fine, even now.
Issei still wants to abuse his knuckles. He controls the urge. What would his mother think, feel if he started gnawing on his hands like some sort of deranged beasts? He prefers to die on the spot than to be the reason she goes into shock. He won't be the reason she's shipped back to Kuoh hospital and its gloomy hallways haunted by wild teens and other nefarious monsters.
His innards twist on themselves. He watches as she sips her tea with a contented hum. He bought snacks, but no real, solid food. She already had some light, fake miso soup as breakfast. It did not upset her fragile, awaken organs. She needs something heavier. He does, too.
He moistens his lips. His teeth inadvertently scratch his bottom lip. "Do you want to eat out? Or I can get us some food and we can cook something in the hostel's kitchen."
It's something they apparently can do, according to the hostel's manual laying on the ground. He read it to pass the time, to stay awake, to stop obsessing over the falls and the ups of her breath. He learnt something useful out of that dry experience.
His mother purses her bottom lip. Ah. He got that from her too. "How about we cook some fish?"
"Fish and rice?" He asks. Light enough. Simple too. It wouldn't upset her fragile stomach. Hopefully.
"Fish and rice." She nods in ascent.
The familiarity of her favorite would make him all fuzzy and warm inside, if his offer hadn't caused another unforeseen problem to appear out of nowhere.
Does he leave her here while he goes to buy food?
Either he takes her with him so she doesn't get out of his sight and she might be recognized by someone, either he leaves her in a false sense of safety in a room they are supposed to vacate in a few hours.
Shit. Shit, shit, shit.
Issei gulps down a dozen explanations as to why they can't eat ever again, actually. He ducks his head, hunching his shoulders under her gaze, sinking into a seemingly admiration for the pale color of his tea.
That man did not recognize him, and his face was almost directly next to his photo, he reasons. Nobody will recognize her. Their eyes might see, but their mind does not compute the information.
Plus… Plus, Hayashi Hikari looks young. She isn't old per say. She had him pretty young, he has to admit. His parents fell in love hard and marriage talks came easily and quickly. Baby Issei was on the way before they had the time to say 'Honeymoon!'. Or so the story his parents told him at bedtime goes. The registry of the hospital told another story. A story of misfortune, miscarriages, and two stillborn baby girls who never had a chance to taste the crispy polluted air of their world and be taken to a tiny river that turns and swivels, flower's petals or fallen leaves dancing and riding its current.
Hairless, paler than fresh snow and skinnier than the digitally models that pollutes teen magazines, his mother, against all reasons, does not look ten years older than her real age. She looks impossibly younger.
Her sickly pale cheeks are slowly turning a healthy rosy color. The tea is perhaps to blame. Issei prefers to blame the swirling Phenex tears he gave her.
Still. He cannot spend all his time marveling at her returned health. He needs to focus. Focus. Oh, one of her eyelash fell on her cheek, maybe he should-
Issei forcefully tears his gaze away from his mother's cheek and fallen eyelash and entire being.
He has rejoiced enough already. Now, what's the plan?
There is no way he can logically explain why she looks so young and healthy to anybody who might notice their real identities. No way. They will attract attention. Normal humans and abnormal ones will flock towards them. The Supernatural part of their world might even notice something's incredibly weird with her recovery from a lethal cancerous tumor in her brain. If they find her, they will find him.
Issei's not enthused with the idea of anybody 'finding' him. It brings too many uncertainties. What they will do will decide his next course of action, but some routes he prefers to others. His favorite is where people leave him be with his family, leave him live a normal life without forcing him into an impossible situation. Will they do that, though? Issei has never been the most optimistic guy in the universe, and even such a person would probably not think such an outcome possible.
… they cannot stay in Kuoh. For his safety and hers.
He glances up from his seemingly fascinating cup of warm tea. His mother takes her gaze off him and observes the wall with the upmost attention. They are both so, so awkward.
His mother does not ask him anything, even now. She… respects his silence. (She probably doesn't know what to ask or how to do it, really.)
Or perhaps the drugs she was constantly fed in her vegetative state has something to do with her dull acceptance of his reticence to speak and her unexplainable rescue.
He does not probe her mind, does not ask if she has wandering thoughts, does not help her out of their silence. He refuses to address the internal turmoil they are both facing. He does not dare to. Her silent questions and wild musings, if they were voiced, he wouldn't necessarily know how to answer them. He doesn't know if there is anything he can be honest about with her.
So he slides from the bed, takes his dead phone he left on the hostel's manual and plugs it by the empty space where the nightstand used to stand. He hesitates to sink to his knees there, hidden by the bulky bed from his mother's gaze. If he is hidden from her view, she is hidden from his. He sits back on the bed, butt on pillows and back against the hard board.
His mother is staring through the window at the naked trees and cement of their town. Her shoulders, covered by his scarf, go up and down gently with each of her deep breaths.
He looks down, staring at the screen of his reanimated phone. A new message has been waiting for him for a day now. The person who wrote it has probably eaten her entire set of nails, facing his day long silence.
Issei erases the 'sorry' he typed by reflex. They're family. No need for useless niceties nobody believes to be true.
He doesn't go read what her anxious mind may have written. Instead, Issei browses and browses the web, going deep and finding many unpleasant things, only to come to the grim conclusion that trying to move anywhere in Japan during the winter holidays, without having booked at least a few months in advance, is impossible. Everything, from bus tickets to train and plane, is taken. He would need a small fortune to get out of Kuoh now.
The other option is out of the question the moment his rotten brain remembers he has a working seal. He said his goodbye to the guardian. He said his goodbye to the Underworld. He is not using the Underworld Train and neither will his mother. They need something else. That something else does not exist, apparently.
Homeless and incapable of moving.
What a shitty reality.
He pinches his lips together. Now, he is in the right state of mind to talk with his grandmother. Whatever she has to say, it won't make him anymore unhappy. His dying optimistic side musters the strength to whisper that she could be the harbinger of good news. His realist side snickers at the thought.
[Are you well.] His grandmother typed that a day ago.
It's not a bad start. She didn't start by berating him for his disappearing act. He swipes his thumb over the surface of the screen.
[I am.]
Not, time will tell him if she is a reliable-
His phone buzzes to life in his hands. He checks it with raised brows. His grandma has learnt to type fast.
[Come home.]
Issei surveys his fingers. His nails are almost at a normal length now. A strange white part has spouted from his fingers, going father than the tender flesh his nails are supposed to protect. When he straightens his curled fingers forcefully, a band of pink meat under his nails turn white, as if it was pushing his nails, ready to break free. Is he really going to gnaw on them? Oh yes, he is. He chooses his pinky as his first victim. [Don't tell your son about this.] He types.
His phone vibrates in his hand. [I won't.]
Hard to believe.
Another vibration trembles throughout his arm. [Your mother's funeral is in two days. They are going to cremate her body.]
Issei glances at his mother. She is staring at him, rocking her cup between her hands. Her thin bones are covered by a paper-like layer of skin and they somehow succeed in being paler than her white cup. She does not ask him who he is texting. She is breathing and alive and focused and oh, they're burning another corpse to cover up, aren't they?
His phone buzzes.
[She will be put in her family's vault.]
Issei tears off a good chunk of his once healthy nail. Blood seeps from the broken edge. He tastes metal and his teeth search for remains of jutting wisps of flesh.
"Issei." A hoarse voice calls him. The tee looks up. His mother tilts her head. "Come here."
He turns off his phone against his thigh before she has a chance to see the thread of messages he exchanged with his grandmother and her estranged mother-in-law. She does not need to be shocked right now. She needs peace and quiet. Peace and quiet.
Where is he supposed to find that?
He puts his phone on the table that stands before them. It clinks loudly as it meets its polished wood surface.
He remembers a house made of wood and memories.
He slides his butt on the bed as gracefully as a swaggering duck to get to the side of her wheelchair. "What is it?"
She reaches her arms out. He shifts and hunkers.
A hand brushes against his skin. His mother takes his abused hand in her own. Feather-like touch traces the bruises he made along his knuckles during the night. She massages his knuckles softly, silently. She covers his bloody finger.
Issei wants to explain, find a stupid reason why he is like that, but he has none to offer. He has a feeling she wouldn't believe his lies. It's a novelty, this situation. She is sane and well, and he has to be truthful now. His lies would have to be perfectly crafted to not be noticed. Hayashi Hikari knows his tells, she knows him.
His mother lets go of his hand and sighs. He pulls his limb out of her surrounding and on his lap. He reaches for his cup with his other hand to hide his face behind something. The sip he dares to take burns his tongue. He gulps it down anyway. It burns and flares its way to his stomach too slowly. There's a fire in his belly.
There is a hell storm of questions and pity and sadness in his mother's limpid eyes.
He gulps down. His throat is filled with shards of broken glass. He nurses his cup between his two hands and faces his mother. "Do you think grandma will be unhappy if we come a few days before the 4th?"
She takes her time to answer him, mulling over her response. He likes that habit of hers. She really does think before she speaks. It makes her look serious in any situation. It makes her interlocutors feel important; cared for. That's what Issei feels, anyway.
Her brows crinkle as she opens her mouth. "I think she will be delighted. After the heart attack we will cause."
"A heart attack, really?" He chuckles his jitters away.
"She will survive," his mother answers softly. She smooths an edge of her scarf mindlessly. "She lived through worst."
Issei would have thought it a jest a few months ago. Now, though. Now, he sees how the corner of his mother's eyes do not crinkle up, how mischievousness does not spark her gaze alight after she uttered words that could have passed as a joke. If his family has secrets that can threaten their safety, he will uncover them only to dig a deeper pit for them and burn them until not even the ashes of a skeleton remain.
He edges closer to her seat. "Do you want to go there? Stay at grandma's?"
Please say yes. (Please say no.)
Her eyes are trained on him, yet he feels she has gone somewhere else in the way she nibbles on her bottom lips, the way her right hand smoothes the nonexistent wrinkles of the red scarf that hangs loosely around her brittle collarbone. "I haven't seen the mountains in a while, haven't I?"
'In a while.' That is a way to say it, yes. "No."
She blinks. Her nibbling on her reddening lip stops and suddenly, his mother is back on her wheelchair, at his side. "How long was I… out of it?"
"A year." More or less. Issei can't find the exact number. His head hurts. So much over thinking and so little sleep.
Another silence stands between them after he spills the truth out. He wonders if holding her hand between his will soothe the conflicted emotions that flicker on her face and that he cannot truly read. He offered her the truth and he can't help but to internally start to eat metaphorical nails. Was it a foolish move his tired brain made? Would have silencing the truth done any bad?
Her fingers play with the frayed end of his scarf. Her movement brings him back to the present and his distressed parent.
"I don't remember all of it. Pieces, moments, that book about Japanese trees we read, the time you cooked that horrible fish… I don't, something is missing. I was losing my mind," she murmurs, limpid eyes staring at him, staring at his soul.
"Yes." Issei doesn't want to lie anymore. Not to her.
"I feel better now." She follows the seam of the blanket Issei ripped from her bed with her bony fingers. "You gave me something," his mother says softly, and her words form a question.
Issei thinks of red tears and red blood and everything that happened in between. His mother sure is clever. He doesn't think he inherited that from her and that's a true pity. He stays silent.
"Issei." She grasps his hand there, and for a person who was in a vegetative state a day ago, her grip is strong and steady. "I remember losing my mind. I feel like it hasn't ended yet. Tell me."
"I don't know how," he mutters.
"Talk to me." She shakes his hand when her son avoids her gaze, her questions and her affection. "Issei. Talk to your mother."
So her son gives in, for he knows what insanity feels like. "Would you care for a story, mom?"
"A story?"
He covers the small hand that grasps his own with his free limb. His hands are bigger than hers now. She has always had hands that were not much bigger or thicker than that of a child's, he recalls. Small, soft, almost boneless, it is as he remembers it. She is as he always knew her; a caring parent. It's refreshing to know somebody did not change through the events.
He nods and smiles. For once, it does not feel forced. "A story in a book. It might take me some times to get it for you, but I think reading it will be worth the wait."
She sighs, but Issei knows everything's okay, because her sigh sounds like the beginning of a chuckle. "The author seems to be a very busy man."
He caresses her white knuckles under her white skin with hands he hopes are warm enough to chase away the cold. He does it the way she did when she stopped him from biting his nails off. "He is. He's all over the place," he admits.
She lets him play with her hands. A strange feeling has overtaken them, something that is far from the angst of unanswered questions and fear of tomorrows. "What does he do, when he is not all over the place?" she asks, a smile tugging her thin lips upwards. Colors decorated her cheekbones and they are there to stay.
Issei looks around, searching for inspiration. It strikes him quickly. He abandons her hands and reaches for his cup of tea. He raises it to her eye level. Lukewarm tea swivels out and onto his fingers. His pinky burns when a drop of liquid seeps into his opened wound. He smiles through the burns. His mother is watching and she needs laughter. He does too. "He drinks tea."
He goes for a sip and grins against the rim of his cheap plastic cup when she laughs.
Second arc is here, darling readers. Ready for the ride?
16/04/2019