A/N: Do thine eyes deceive thee? Nay! Aveza is finally updating! Unfortunately, as I have forewarned you all, this chapter is OC-centric. Not your cup of tea? Then don't drink it. Most of the spotlight will be on Hana and, surprise surprise! Ryo Hiraki. I don't expect any of you to be fans of either of them, but if you are in the least interested in their respective backstories, this might be a worthwhile read—particularly if you are curious about what happened with Hana's mother. Ryo is in here because I felt like I didn't give him the character development he deserved in The Center of Everything. But now I'm blabbing too much. Read at your own risk.
xXx
Mal de Tête
xXx
He knew precisely where she was. Seventeen years of friendship made locating her ridiculously simple. When she decided to 'run away' at age five, he knew to look for her at the theatre—more specifically, the empty stage. A decade later and when he picked up the phone one cold day in January, he knew what she would say on the other line, and he was out of the house and on a plane to France that same night.
They joked that he understood her better than she understood herself. It was true. If she couldn't put a name to a feeling, he'd define it for her. He could sit in silence with her for five minutes and then sum up her sentiments in one objective sentence, diagnose her with her temporary teenage syndrome of the day.
When he received the call from her father, a distressed, exhausted-sounding message, he hopped into his car and drove. By fate he was in the city that day, paying a mandatory visit to his father, who had made one of his rare, in-person appearances after months of long-distance travel and a trail of grumbled voicemails clogging up his mobile phone.
The necessary questions didn't have to be asked: when did you last see her, Mr. Kurosawa? What did she say in your last phone call with her? Where was she when you last called her? All he had needed were a few basic details. She had gotten a call from Mr. Kamiya during ballet practice. He had told her Tai was in the hospital.
When Mr. Kurosawa relayed the information to Ryo over the phone, he could perfectly imagine Hana's immediate reaction to the news: she shook her head, whispered delicately into the receiver, "W-What?," shivered as goosebumps traveled across her shoulders. After a quick blink of his blue eyes, the next scenario played out in his head like a clip from a film. Hana's perfect posture turned crooked, her oval face blanched to an icy white. She became a marionette, wooden and painted prettily in fear.
Her next move, he knew, was to bolt, to grab her things and dash out of the studio. Pointe slippers would be clopping over the tile, propelling her toward the nearest exit, where she would push open the doors and collide into the endless streams of commuter traffic.
Cold, single-minded, and oblivious, he could envision her navigating her way through paths of transit, teeth chewing on a nail, green eyes stinging against the winter air. In her mind, he could see two words cycling around her brain, intensifying in speed with every complete gyration—like gusts of wind swirling around a hurricane's eye.
Hospital. Tai. Hospital. Tai.
Hospital.
Tai.
Once at the metro station, he had a feeling she'd falter, glance down at her slippered feet and catch traces of a similar trek made a few years prior: a skinny school girl running to catch the next train, desperate to make up for lost time, more anger than sadness boiling behind the tears that would eventually spill out of her at the hospital doors.
Sighing, Ryo shook his head, as if he were fighting a bout of drowsiness. His car swerved a little as he jerked the wheel to stay in his lane. Sometimes he liked to think that his connection with Hana was so strong that he couldn't differentiate between which memories were his and which were hers. Other people he could analyze, pick apart with mental pincers, maintain a strict, clerical distance. But her he could he feel, empathize, absorb.
It wore him out, feeling her so strongly. It tired him, made him wish he knew her just a little bit less, so that when moments of crisis arose, when he received those phone calls from her father, he could move the phone away from his ear, sit back, and, for once in his life, do nothing about them.
Instead, he always found himself driving toward her, in hot pursuit of her rescue, damning himself for his chivalry every mile of the way.
With a shriek of his tires, he veered sharply into the closest Kiss & Ride. He parked his car, slammed the door, and took the stairs down into the metro station. Briskly, he walked, matching the paces of the commuters alongside him, stuffing his hands into his pockets and trying not to get distracted by the questions of where these people were going, where they were coming from, and what baggage they carried.
The ground quaked subtly as he stepped onto the cement landing of the boarding area. A silver train rushed by, sending hair and coat tails flapping, bringing with it wisps of the city's smoky, smoggy breath. People pressed close, crossed paths, made mad lunges into the cars once the doors pinged open. Ryo resisted. He stood against the current facing away, calmly blocking several strangers from easy access to the train.
Travelers moved like fluid in a blood transfusion. People went in, people went out, quick as the palming of a secret note, and then the train charged on. The cycle would repeat, as certain as the sunrise and the slow spin of Earth, and these bygone passengers—these dead-eyed students, corporate servants, men and women of the new, chrome-plated millennium, were ignorant of it all, of how greatly they depended on that surety. What would it be like, Ryo wondered, to wake up one morning and find the train dead? How then would one get on with the day? The breakdown of one machine and the hours were in shambles.
As pedestrians cleared, he caught a better view of her, though he had been attuned to her presence ever since he entered the station. She made the air different—not in an enchanting, mysterious way, like a pheromone or perfume, but in an eerie manner, the sort of awareness that made the hairs on the back of the neck spike up. Slowly, he approached her.
She was crouched against a cement pillar, her elbows resting on her knees. Her head was bowed between her legs. She was the very picture of despondence, and she was ignored completely because of the deliberate show.
"Hana," he said. He stopped before her, tempted to reach down and pull her up, but he kept his hands fisted in his pockets.
Her head lifted.
"Ryo," she said. Her voice was dead, cracked and dry, as if she were gargling pebbles. She must have cried before he arrived.
He said nothing and waited for her to stand, which she did, without requesting his help or reaching out to him. His heart calmed significantly. His hands loosened in his pockets.
"Why'd you stop?" he asked her.
She glanced at him, and her stare in that second was hard, dangerous. Slender fingers wrapped around her elbows as she folded her arms. Her reply was spoken to her left shoulder.
"I didn't know where to go," she answered, shrugging. She kicked the peeling, satin toe of her pointe slipper against the dirty ground. "I got this far and I realized..." A sigh fled her, and her chest caved as she leaned against the pillar. "…I don't know where the hospital is. I never had to find it while I've been here."
Liar. Ryo's eyes sharpened, blue irises studying her with near predatory attention. He honed on specific parts: the tilted chin, the hooded eyes, the fact that she was still dressed in her leotard and tights in thirty-degree weather.
The question he wanted to ask her fought against release. Habit resigned him to letting her have her way, but he couldn't oblige. It was time he treated her like everybody else, exercised with her the same enforced, scientific distance he placed between himself and others. He didn't want her problems to become his problems. He just wanted them to be problems.
"You don't know where it is?" he echoed, reaching out to her. He touched her arm, and immediately her attention was his. "Or," he added, "you just don't want to find it?"
The dull light reflected in her eyes wavered, dizzying him the way the sun on ocean waves shattered into a million winks of brightness. Water threatened to drip from the tip of a wet eyelash.
"Don't start, Ryo," she seethed, jerking her elbow away from him. It smacked against the pillar, and the hand that instantly went to soothe the joint suggested that she had shaken her funny bone. "If you came all this way just to play psychiatrist, then I don't want you here."
"I'm trying to help you, Hana."
The words came out lamentably hollow and she noticed it. She continued to rest against the rough cement, finding in it more comfort than she would in him. Ryo stepped towards her, saying, as he claimed more ground, "I can't help you if I don't understand what's going on in your head, Han."
"Don't understand?" Her face warped in disgust. "Ryo," she said, yelling his name as she advanced, "you of all people should understand exactly what is going through my mind right now!"
He could feel himself getting exasperated, sense the muscles in his jaw cramping.
"There's no need to yell, Hana."
"I'll yell if I—"
"Stop."
He held up a hand and kept it hovering over her face long enough to feel the anger radiating out of her—toxic and unfiltered. When he removed it, he grabbed her wrist, pulling her behind him a few paces before he let go.
Without turning back, he knew she had paused, fingers bunching by her sides, ready to throw a tantrum like a baby, but he trusted that she would master the urge, realize she was an adolescent woman expected to express some control over her emotions in public.
Why he continued walking without dragging her along was an action done out of routine. Following him was her choice to make. It just so happened to be the only choice she ever picked. To turn and walk in the other direction or to stay where she was was not something she was capable of doing. He wished she had the courage to say no, to defy him, but she was pliant material under his influence, mush for him to shape or, rather, to crush, and the only person who could show her that another option existed was the same one who started the entire mess.
As he neared his parked car, indications that she was dutifully pursuing him began to become clearer. He could hear the worn pads of her dance shoes pat the asphalt of the parking lot, listen to her hiss and shudder against the air's skin-flaking coldness. His keys were dug out of his pockets, and as he pressed the button to unlock the doors, he turned around, acting in time to keep Hana from bumping into him.
"Let's get a few facts straight here, Han." He looked directly at her, but she wouldn't return the stare. She looked cowardly and disinterested, as if she were being scolded by her late mother for doing something she had been expressly forbidden to do. He hated repeating himself to deliberately dense people.
"Hana."
Her name snapped her to an unpleasant attention.
"What?" she challenged.
His eyes narrowed.
"You're lucky I was in the city when your dad called me, because I wouldn't be here right now if I wasn't. I'd still be driving all the way from Kyoto to haul you out of your pity party back in the metro station, sparing your father—who is neck-deep in final exams for his students—from putting his job on pause to organize a search and rescue mission for his only daughter and family in this country of one hundred and twenty-six million people. So when you see me, when I'm standing two feet away from you, have no doubt that I'm here for you and not anyone else, do you understand?"
He forced himself to a ceasefire, his tongue pressing against the roof of his mouth to check a potential increase in volume. As much as he wanted to continue, he had to give his rant the chance to seep into Hana's brain, but she didn't even look back at him. Her gaze was riveted to the side mirror of his car, focused on something mundane in order to dull the barbed brunt of his words. Seeing her responding to him in such a defeated manner made him feel unbearably old, parental, and, strangely, abusive. It didn't seem fair for him to exert the power to lecture on someone whom he considered his best friend. Their partnership was supposed to be equal.
He sighed.
"Just... indulge me a little, Hana." He implored her gently. She could have given him one atom of herself and he'd repay such generosity with a galaxy that would never stop growing.
Warily, she looked up at him, face white enough to start looking like a matte, powdery blue. He knew that face so well, felt every millimeter of its surface with his fingertips, kissed it when all it could do was shrivel up and cry. He felt like repeating the actions, her green gaze alone transporting him back to the memories likely revolving around her mind, but he stepped away and turned, opening the driver's door.
"The questions I ask," he said, "I ask them for a reason. Answer them." He could feel his eyes working to sustain her gaze, trying to follow the stare that continued to elude him. The chase could only be kept up for so long. He gave up and looked away, stooping into his car.
"If you trusted me," he said softly, confident that she wouldn't hear him, "you'd know it would help."
xXx
She was ten, red as a lobster from vacationing through Europe and its beaches with her parents. The windows to her family's two-bedroom flat were wide open, the nightlife symphony of Paris in June filtering through the blowing curtains—chatter, laughter, the occasional drunken shout. It was warm. The atmosphere tingled with a dreamy balminess, as if it, too, were drunk on wine.
Hana was digging through a chest in the living room, rummaging for the delicate paper fan given to her from her late grandmother on her father's side. Her mother was taking a shower, the fragrant steam of her bath leaking under the door, moistening the air with a sweet dewiness that made her aunt's hair frizz and look like a poodle's.
Her father indulged her talkative tante, who had stopped by for her usual evening chat, while a late supper was set on the table. His chuckles were deep, awkward, as if he never understood what she was saying even though he was fluent in French. He was telling her how they had had to cut their travels short. During their most recent trip to Neuschwanstein Castle, her mother had complained of a headache, and an entire day of Hana posing in the sun and shouting 'Fromage!' was shortened to a brief afternoon.
"Que s'est-il passé?" her aunt asked, exhaling a stream of smoke from her cigarette. "Est-ce grave?"
"Non, non," her father insisted. "Elle dit, 'C'est juste un mal de tête, mon savant.' C'est tout."
Unconsciously, he mimicked the exact movements his wife had made when she had expressed the symptom. He rubbed the back of his head, wincing a little, the scalp seemingly tender with a pulsing pain.
Hana paid no attention to them. She was elbow-deep in the dust and mustiness of the chest, flinging aside childhood relics from her father's youth in Japan. When she spied the dark, thin wooden handle of her fan, her excitement grew so fervent that she yanked it out at once. The paper tore with a body-cringing rip—splitting the air like a clap of thunder—and she spun around, tears ready to spill from her eyes only to see her father and aunt speed toward the bathroom.
The door was kicked open. Her father shouted her mother's name. Hana ran to them, clutching the broken fan in her hands. She had barely gotten one good look into the bathroom when her aunt reeled her back, spinning her around so that her face was pressed into a ribcage, a heartbeat flush against her cheek.
On the tiled floor was her mother, naked beneath her robe, convulsing like a wind-up toy tipped over on its side. Shards of a ceramic toothbrush holder shook around her, poorly masking the thud and smack of a body on stone. A voice Hana couldn't recognize or claim as her own left her mouth—frail and diminutive:
"Maman? Maman?"
It was all she could say in the minutes that passed. Every feeling, every thought, was reduced to an affectionate, familiar name. She felt even more of a child then, as young as she was when pain didn't result in a cry for help, but a plea for her mother. A scrape on the knee? She'd cry, 'Maman?' A confusing passage in a book? 'Maman?' again. Her mother encompassed everything, existing as both her question and her answer.
Eventually, the words were drowned out by her aunt's inane coos. Hana's voice was tamped down, smothered with the tranquility and insistence with which her aunt spoke, so much so that they rivaled the sirens that followed, blocked out the flickering lights, made the squeak of panicky wheels as a bed was rolled and rattled down a fluorescent hallway seem like the idle musings of a mouse.
But what they could not overwhelm was the sound of her father's footsteps as he traveled alongside that procession. They were clunky, fumbling, ungraceful, and they echoed in time to the words whispered painfully to the white hand in his grasp, pressed to his mouth. It was the hand Hana remembered examining over bedtime stories, tracing with curiosity the blue veins and fondly brushing the ridge of a prominent tendon and knuckle to the tale of Le Petit Prince or Perrault's La Belle au Bois Dormant.
She wondered in that moment if what had happened to her mother was just a spell. She had just fallen into slumber like Sleeping Beauty, playing a game with her father who would wake her up with a kiss. It was the type of story her aunt would tell her, one that made her parents seem like magical beings, heroes and damsels.
But there was no fantasy created to entertain her. All she received were trite wishes on repeat:
"It will be all right, ma cherie," her Tante Zsazsa soothed.
Her aunt's normally sultry voice was quaky, frazzled with swallowed sobs. Hana was held tightly in her skinny arms, green eyes staring out over her elbows, stunned blank with confusion. She could feel her aunt's chest shudder as a breath was exhaled with determined slowness. Her dark hair was stroked, petted, kisses of smoke left on her head. She wanted to be comforted, but she was immune to the affection, zombie-stiff in her denial.
"Tout ira bien," her aunt said. "Everything will be all right..."
xXx
Hana felt her body jerk forward, the side of her skull banging once against a hard surface. She stirred, jarred awake from what she was unable to define as daydream or slumber. Her surroundings were soaked in: the cold, fogging glass of the shotgun window she leaned against, the black leather seat, Ryo on the driver's side, glimpsing at her with his icy blue eyes.
"I fell asleep?" she asked, massaging her forehead.
"No. I just hit the brakes too hard."
"Don't joke."
"I wasn't. You were awake, Hana. Zoned out, but awake."
She repositioned herself in her seat, bringing her legs up so she sat, curled in a ball and facing him.
"You want to talk about it?"
The question was probably the least engaging thing he had ever said to her. It sounded odd coming out of his mouth, flaky and unpolished, like a stranger trying to chat her up on the metro.
"What's there to talk about?" she retorted. "You were there. You know."
"And Tai being in the hospital relates... how?"
Her lower jaw loosened, making space for the growl prowling up her throat. He had placed her in the patient's chair, magically transformed the setting so that she lay on a puckered, leather sofa, vulnerable to the invisible weight of a looming ceiling, left to confess her drifting thoughts and loaded memories to a blank slate while he sat off in a corner, playing connect the dots with the scatterplot of her ego.
"I'd just like to avoid hospitals, thank you," she replied through her teeth. "I'd rather... I don't... I..." She moaned, shifting again so that her forehead rested on her raised knees. It was foolish to think that if she could not see, then the world could not see her.
"I can't..."
"Come on, Hana," Ryo teased. "Don't be a drama queen."
She wanted to scowl at him for not treating her with seriousness, but he had tried that already and she had rebuffed him all the same. Sighing, she lifted her head, leaning back as she blinked her watery eyes at the window. For a moment, she thought she saw Ryo's faded reflection in the glass, his eyes turning away from the road to peek at her, a hand lifting from the wheel, aiming for her shoulder.
Nothing happened. Risking a look over her shoulder yielded no evidence of the fact. Ryo was back to staring out the windshield, both hands holding onto the wheel. It was like coming to terms with a mirage. That she couldn't sustain his attention hurt some small, obscure part of her. She could feel her face crumbling, cracking like porcelain.
"I just..."
The palm went up to her right eyebrow, head lowering to meet it halfway, each preparing for the saltwater to rain, for the lungs to collapse. It didn't occur to her that the mere act of walking into a hospital would resurrect memories she had managed to submerge with life's general trivia. She had hammered them away, owing to Tai much of that evasion, until he somehow, unintentionally, ironically, broken them free.
Abruptly, the car jerked, startling Hana enough to delay her tears. Ryo reached for her, his hand landing on her knee.
"Hana."
He didn't need to say anything more than her name. As judging as his stare could be, as boldly honest and curt as he was, she was defenseless against it. Forgiving him for past wrongs was done too easily, she knew, but unlike many people who knew him, Hana understood that Ryo's attention was a privilege to be earned. To have it, even for a minute, was to take advantage of it, to bleed it dry.
She let his hand stay where it was, warmed and comforted by its heat. Gradually, she inched towards it, fingertips reading the bumps of his knuckles, tracing the rough edges of a few fingerbones before she held on.
Too embarrassed to look in his direction, her gaze drifted, eyes watching the heavens, waiting for night to settle on Tokyo's frigid skyline. Her free hand was kept under her nose, stationed precisely should she at last succumb to her emotions.
The first time her mother had been hospitalized, the incident was treated as if nothing had changed. Her mother was out of the hospital in a couple of days with some medication to help with her recurring migraines. Hana remembered asking her mother what had happened, and her mother had smiled at her the way she smiled on stage—professional, practiced, and painted.
"You scared me, Maman," Hana had told her.
"Non, non, ma cherie," her mother had chided, petting her face. "Do not be afraid for Maman. She just got a headache."
"But—"
"Ça suffit," she interrupted, making Hana jump. "That's enough. I am tired, Hana."
Of course, it wasn't enough. For the next five years, her mother was plagued by headaches, the severities of which yo-yo'ed between tame and skull-crushing. Typically, they were brushed off as the daily pangs of old age, though Hana's mother looked barely a day over forty. There were no telltale signs of premature aging. No dark circles under the eyes. No wrinkles save for some capillary-thin crow's feet.
With time, however, came complications. Her mother would frequently become sick. She'd stay in bed, gray as a corpse, for days with the shades and curtains drawn. She'd retch in the echoless void of her bedroom. On days she was well, her mother would complain in angry, muttered French about her pills, nearly working herself to tears when she put a comb to her head and sieved out clumps of beautiful, auburn hair.
The visits to the doctor and the hospital Hana wouldn't know about until much later. Her parents took advantage of her preoccupations with school and ballet, and they saw her mother's doctors and underwent treatment sessions while Hana sat safe in a classroom. It was true Hana observed that her mother was paying an alarming amount of visits to a variety of physicians, but the excuses were inarguable. They were routine check-ups, her parents told her. Her mother felt a cold coming on. The ankle she had injured during her dancing days was giving her trouble again.
Hana understood it well to keep silent the first time she doubted her mother's brusque, 'Ça suffit,' and, thankfully, she didn't have to go to sleep burdened with the guilt of compliance—at least not all the time. Ballet kept her busy enough to avoid the anxiety. It became her constant, continuing on in the same manner it always had while the rest of her life changed in undetectable degrees. At the end of every day, ballet was hers to claim. If the sky had fallen, or if the earth beneath her had cracked into an abyss, the pointe shoes would still be laced on, the hair done up, and she would have her moment of grace before cataclysm.
But dance, even at its strongest, was just a veil, a thin mesh suspending Hana from the reality from which she was uniquely spared. An off feeling began to develop within her, nurtured by the disintegrating state of her family's apartment: the towering pile of dishes in the sink, the stale air accumulating within the bounds of their closed, covered windows, her mother moving silently through the house like a vesper, stepping so lightly she didn't even disturb the dust. It might have been as small as a mustard seed, benign, ignorable, but the feeling was there, lodged in her chest like a splinter in the palm, weighty enough to make Hana begin to have trouble sleeping.
One afternoon, she came home from ballet practice. Fall was descending on Paris, the city air stifled with cold, her familiar commute viewed through a grey filter. Sniffing, she could smell the exhaust of the train on her, feel the slight tremor in the earth as it rode into the station. The path home seemed longer than usual that time of year, lengthened by the dreariness of the overcast sky, slowed by the approaching chill of winter, but she enjoyed it. The seasons might have changed, but the route was the same—cozy, even. She could have walked it blind.
As she turned onto her street, she looked on at their apartment building, a pale film of cloud behind its slate blue roof. The windows to their flat were shut, the white curtains parted, blackness behind the still drapes. She didn't know why, but her pace quickened. Be it eagerness or anxiousness, she was moved to reach home as swiftly as possible, and when she unlocked the door, panting from the sprint up the stairs, her father was waiting for her. Her mother was not present.
"Hana," he said. He held her stare for a fraction of a second before he choked and said no more, his hand rising to cover his mouth.
"Papa?" she cried. Her belongings were dropped at the door. She ran to him as he stumbled into the closet chair. "Papa?" she repeated, shaking him.
The panic that overwhelmed her was alien and acidic, consuming every part of her, breaking her down. At fifteen, she had no concept of what it was like to fret over a parent. Her age made her biologically disposed to be self-obsessed, but as she beheld her father, she could feel the strain of decades on her, tugging at her skin, planting wrinkles over her body and years of pain in her brain.
Reality's gravity had finally hit her, and she struggled to locate familiar ground amidst a helplessness both foreign and disorienting. Her limbs went limp. She wanted to cry with her father but couldn't summon the tears. How had it happened that she was in the position to soothe when all her life she had been the one protected and coddled?
"What happened?" she demanded. "What happened?"
It took effort, and it took time, but her father told her, in the briefest of terms, what she had secretly and unconsciously feared since that summer when she was ten.
Her mother had been hospitalized—for the final time.
xXx
Ryo sighed as he sat in the hospital ward's wait area. He bent forward, placing his elbows on his bobbing knees, hands clasped under his chin. This, he thought, was what hell must have been like: an endless, itchy anticipation. He glanced at the other faces in purgatory with him.
Matt and Sora occupied a pair of chairs adjacent to Ryo, the couple sitting silent and glassy-eyed. Two seats beside him was Izzy. The fellow redhead sat upright and faintly agitated, judging by the digits he drummed against his thigh. His dark eyes glared at the exit sign lying smack in his line of vision.
Across from Matt and Sora sat T.K. and Kari. The Kamiyas had been with them, but they had left a minute earlier with the doctor who came by to deliver good news. Tai was going to be all right. One would think relief would quickly follow, descend on them like a refreshing breeze, but Ryo was in the presences of biblical Thomases. They needed to see Tai to believe it, and so the wait game continued—something he was loath to endure.
The truth that Ryo would never admit to anybody (except, maybe, Hana), was that he despised hospitals. When he and Hana had finally passed through the main entrance, he had difficulty maintaining a sense of confidence that would convince Hana that he knew precisely what he was doing.
To him, navigating through hospitals was like being perpetually trapped in a dream. He was just another soul lost in the labyrinth of milk-white wards, circling hallways over and over, being redirected here, told to wait there. It was maddening. Everything just flowed. People, nurses, doctors. There was no stopping, no cease to the cycle. It was like the train stations all over again. Commuters caged in cars, traveling through tunnels only to end up back where they started at the end of the day.
It frightened him to view such robotic motions in an institution designed to nurture and extend human life. Where was the magic of existence? Everyone was reduced to blood and bile, and everything he loved and admired—intellect, beauty, creation—felt purposeless, made frail and futile by the inevitability of decay.
When he and Hana had finally reached the correct department, Ryo gladly relinquished her to her father, leaving himself, unburdened, to debate an immediate departure. He idled for two seconds before he took a neutral position, neither throwing himself in the midst of people he barely knew nor titling himself the social outcast.
Since their arrival, Mr. Kurosawa and his daughter kept mostly to themselves. When they did speak—and it was in murmurs—they spoke in French, the switch in tongues forming a barrier between themselves and everybody else. Nobody was bothered by it. Nobody was offended. The language of pain was a private, personal thing, after all.
Heads lifted and eyes blinked bleariness away when Mr. and Mrs. Kamiya returned—this time, as heralds. They extended their hands, beckoning their daughter first to rise and follow them. Kari went, T.K. hesitating a heartbeat before he followed, reaching for the hand Kari held nervously behind her back.
Hana was offered the honor of the next visit, but she declined, said a blunt, "I'll go last," and turned her green eyes on Izzy, Matt, and Sora.
With the waiting room emptied of everybody except for himself and the Kurosawas, Ryo felt compelled to speak, to empty the memories he shared with these people into the silence pooling around them. The environment seemed to demand that sort of emotional convening, but Hana stood and wandered around the room, restless and unapproachable. Mr. Kurosawa sat like a statue in a memorial: fixed in his chair, head bent, stare removed and intense. Ryo cleared his throat, garnered no attention, and wriggled uneasily in his seat. Even to the people who knew him, he was still their outsider looking in, the scribe mentally documenting every moment of their temporary grief.
It was the role he assumed the last time he sat in a hospital. He had loved Mrs. Kurosawa, yes, but he still believed that his period of mourning was a secondhand despair, siphoned and diluted from Hana's. He was sorry for her loss, truly, but what destroyed him was the regret that hit several months later.
He knew what he meant to her, what he had always meant to Hana's mother since he was a boy. Whenever her blue eyes settled on him, he could see in their proud sparkle the plans she had had for him, the kind a mother dreamed for her son. How greatly she had trusted him to take care of her daughter, to love her when the rest of the world would or could not. Weeks after her final hospitalization, and she lay in bed, bald, skeletal, an antithesis of everything she had been. He held her bony hand, expending all his energy to look at her both directly and to make sure the show of bravery seemed as natural as possible.
"You'll watch out for her, Ryo," she had said. It was an order—whispered—but it was a mandate nonetheless.
"Of course, Tante," he promised. She smiled weakly at him. It could barely merit the definition of one, and it nearly made him sick. He tightened his hold on her hand. "I love your daughter, Mme. Kurosawa," he declared. "There isn't anything I wouldn't do for her. You know that. That's why I'm here."
She nodded at him in confirmation, said something in French which he forgot a week later. All he knew was that in that exchange, she expressed a desire to live. She held his hand back, shed a tear, and talked to him for the rest of the afternoon.
Of course, it didn't mean anything in the end. Hana still lost her mother. He still lost a woman who held him in the highest regard. And, several months later, he still broke his promise to that dear woman the instant he broke her daughter's heart.
For a while now he had been meaning to ask Hana a question that had haunted him since he ended their relationship.
"Would she have forgiven me, your mother, if she knew what I had done to you?"
With a sigh, Ryo reeled himself back to the present. He rubbed his face, his vision shifting between blips of darkness and light as his hands passed over his eyes. When he removed them, Hana was no longer in the wait area, and the others had returned to their seats.
"Did she...?" he asked, unaware that he was speaking the question aloud.
"Yes, Ryo," Mr. Kurosawa answered.
His brow furrowed.
"And you're not...?"
Mr. Kurosawa met his thin, blue gaze with a calm, but firm, resilience.
"She's okay, Ryo," he replied. "So long as that's true, then I shouldn't need to be with her."
In other words, Ryo gathered, this was something Hana had to do on her own, and unlike him, Hana's father knew when to give his daughter autonomy in difficult situations.
Ryo tried to construct a reply that would persuade Mr. Kurosawa otherwise, but he fell backwards into wondering why he felt such action was necessary. He fidgeted in his seat, turning his head once over his shoulder to look down the hall that would take him to Tai's hospital room. His palms lay flat on his seat, ready to push him up, prepping him to pursue.
He wouldn't have felt so inclined to follow had it not been for the simple fact that Hana wasn't present when her mother passed away. She hadn't stood in the hospital room like he had, watching her father kiss her mother on the forehead one last time. Hana had been, of all places, at school, and while she had been told that someone would get her when the time came near, no one had. She had to find out from a school administrator who had stopped her in the hallway, telling her that the doctor had called.
When she finally reached the hospital, she was furious. She flung open the door in a rage. Ryo had been standing to the side, in the shadows, staring at the tile and wondering why the floor wasn't blurring, why he didn't feel his heart sagging like a sand bag in his chest.
Her screams broke him free from his daze, and he stared on in a fusion of horror and amazement as she shouted a series of circumstances that would never be: 'You were supposed to come get me! You were supposed to tell me when!' when what she meant was, 'You were never supposed to leave me.'
Her father held her while she wept, and she wept for what seemed like hours. He told her, 'She loved you very much, Hana. She didn't want you to see her go because she knew it would hurt you. She asked it to be this way because she loved you.'
But to speak to Hana in that way suggested that love equaled abandonment, and Ryo didn't so much recognize love as a state of being but as a need. He knew he could have left immediately, taken the first flight back to Japan in the days after her mother's passing, but he stayed—for her, for her family. What else could he have done? She had lost enough already. Did he dare leave her too?
Now, finding himself back in a hospital with her, the guilt was resurfacing. The truth of the matter was that Ryo did leave Hana. He was lost to her for a time. Was this, he wondered as he stared down the hallway, his method of atoning for his sins?
"God damn it," he muttered, shaking his head. He beat a fist on the edge of his seat, stalling two seconds before he got up and walked in the direction his feet were taking him.
Without a look back, he said, "I'm just going to check on her."
xXx
Hana stood just out of sight by the entrance. Tai's parents had already walked in, holding the door open for her. She wasn't going to keep them waiting on her simply for being polite, so she eased her way in, thankful for the satin toes of her ballet slippers. They allowed her to easily slide into the room, lacking a rubber heel that could be used as both brake and pivot if she decided, on the spur of the moment, to run away.
On the way there, Mr. and Mrs. Kamiya had explained the extent of Tai's accident and injuries. The impact from the car that had hit him was bad enough to knock him out cold on the pavement. He suffered mild trauma to the brain—a concussion, in more concise terms—and sustained a handful of bruises, scratches, and scabs, none of them bad enough to require stitches or special attention, though there was a good chance a few of them would leave minor scars.
"He's not awake, unfortunately," Mrs. Kamiya said. She was still ashen from the entire ordeal, still unable to look at anyone directly. Her fingers shook, and she fiddled constantly with the pendant of the necklace she wore, hand poised over her heart, perhaps to cover the fact that the organ was likely palpitating. "The doctor says the brain needs some rest, but you're welcome to talk to him." She set a stiff hand on Hana's cold shoulder and guided her further in. "We all have," she encouraged.
"We're not sure if he can hear us, either," Mr. Kamiya added, grinning a little.
He was coping with the incident better than many others were—Hana herself included. She knew as she looked into Mr. Kamiya's face, read the jovial glint of hope in his brown eyes, that she was looking at a part of Tai she saw nearly every time she was with him. This was courage at its most pure. There was no pretense, no sense of putting up a front. To be brave was to be vulnerable, to recognize and speak the doubt gathering in one's heart and to act in spite of it.
"Yuuko and I have already given him hell for his negligence—" Hana smiled weakly as Mr. Kamiya set his hand on her other shoulder, "—but, you know," he resumed, nudging her forward, "a little extra from you wouldn't hurt."
Hana nodded, keeping her grim smile as she thanked them with a short bow.
"If I know Taichi," she said, swallowing the quaver in her vocal chords, "he'll put up a fight." She sniffed and looked down. "I'll try my best."
She was left alone, Tai's parents reminding her on their way out that they'd be right outside if she needed them. Coward that she was, Hana almost didn't want them to leave. She wanted the safety cushion that their presences provided her. With them there, she'd have an excuse not to say a single thing, appearing too embarrassed to speak her mind in front of her boyfriend's parents. But they abandoned her, granted her complete privacy and the honesty that it entailed.
Taking in a breath, Hana held on to the fleeting bits of courage Mr. and Mrs. Kamiya had lent her through their comfort. She wiped her eyes and took a step forward, keeping her posture erect. Tai lay comatose on his hospital bed, his eyes closed, body still, bandages wrapped around his head. The longer she stared, counting the purple bruises visible on his skin, the more she felt her spine dissolving. Her breathing grew labored. Even the air seemed to thicken with dread, to the point where it became oppressive—vital, but oppressive.
She had to stop. A hand cupped itself over her mouth, suppressing a shudder as that paralyzing heat rose up to her face, pushing water behind her eyes and leaving her lungs numb and panicking for attention.
"No," she told herself, murmuring the word into her palm. No, this isn't the same. He's all right. He's okay. He's okay.
She tore her hand away from her mouth and stamped her foot on the ground, scowling.
"I know you can't hear me," she said aloud, and she couldn't help but think it stupid that she was speaking without knowing or caring if her words would ever be received. But she was used to it. She had done it when her mother passed away. She had said so much in such a short span of time that she ran out of things to say. All that would leave her mouth was a pitiful, "Maman." Over and over, reaffirming again and again what she was, as if one could still exist in a word, be considered living because a pair of human lips dared to utter it.
"You scared me, you know that?" Hana cried. "Mon Dieu, Taichi, sometimes I can't believe you. You don't even... You have no idea what... Bringing me to this place because of... How do you expect me to...?"
Her accusations were kept unfinished, halved and incomplete, and likely to stay that way. She didn't even know why she was getting angry. She should have felt relief, she should have been grateful. But she couldn't deny what she felt, and she wouldn't take the effort to change her feelings. Situations such as these called for honesty. If anger was what she felt, then she would feel it, burn it out, and pray that something better would follow.
"I don't think you realize how much you mean to me, Tai." The tears were flowing steadily now. She couldn't see straight and paced around the hospital room in a blind fury. "I don't... I don't..." She paused, tilting her face up to the ceiling, blinking the tears free, granting her mind a few precious moments to catch up to what her heart longed to say, to censor and filter it, to make thoughts whole, coherent, worthwhile.
"I don't have a lot of people in my life, Tai," she confessed. "My father's parents have been long dead, my grandfather on my mom's side, gone, too. I have no siblings, no aunts and uncles save the one in Paris, no cousins." Her voice failed her. "My mom..." She brushed the heel of her palm over her eyes, smearing water across her cheeks. "The people I meet, Tai, the people I befriend, I know I don't show it enough, and I know I take advantage of those friendships a lot of the time, but they mean a lot to me. So when things like this happen, when I see for myself how easily I can lose you, I can't just sit back and say it's okay, because it's not. Because I don't think I'm cut out to brave this world alone. Because I'm already too many people down to risk losing anymore, okay? Because I'm a coward. Because I'm scared. Because I love you."
She couldn't say anymore. Her diaphragm was jerking. Both her words and breath had been exhausted, and she was clawing for air. Ça suffit, her body was telling her. That's enough. The room was suddenly too small, too confining, shrinking under her soliloquy. She had unloaded too much, and before she could think twice about it, she turned and went for the door, swung it wide open and fled.
A pair of familiar hands stopped her.
"Hana." Ryo looked as confused as she was surprised. He said her name as if he didn't know her, as if he just recognized who it was he beheld.
His grip on her was loose enough that she could easily slip free. She separated herself from him at the soonest moment. "I-I have to go, Ryo," she stammered.
His brow wrinkled. He glanced once through the window of Tai's hospital room door, and Hana's heel slid back an inch. She could almost see his thoughts piecing the situation together, read in her aura the foul stench of fear.
He cast his head down, the hands that had held her slipping into his pockets.
"Well, I'm… I'm here, Han." She was stunned by his stutter. The escape she had planned was permanently halted. He wasn't even looking at her as he spoke, unless he thought she was the floor under their feet. "... if you need me, that is," he added.
"I… I know," she replied. He raised his head and, finally, looked at her in a way with which she was familiar. He didn't seem convinced, and, frankly, neither was she. She knew she'd need him again—probably sooner rather than later, but at that moment, she was confident that what she needed—who she needed—was not him.
He said nothing. He did nothing. Where a few years back he'd embrace her and give her free license to cry until her throat ached, now he was aloof. Either he knew that she didn't need the comfort, or he was taking a stand against being her receptacle for grief. If it was the latter, then she knew how much he resented the burden of her drama, of sharing her heavy heart, in which case, perhaps he was never built to be the one to carry it.
She glanced over her shoulder, staring into Tai's hospital room.
"Go back, Hana."
She drew her eyes away.
"What?" she questioned.
The corners of his mouth drooped, the frown tight on his face. He reached for the door, twisted the handle, and pushed it back open.
"You don't leave the people you love behind, Hana."
"I know you don't," she started, spinning around, "but—"
"There aren't exceptions to this rule."
She wanted to argue, "But what about Maman? Didn't she leave me when I needed her? Didn't you leave me when I needed you?" but she bit her tongue. For the longest time, she had thought the world had done her wrong for taking what she had every right to keep—or so she believed. It was different when she was the object in danger of being lost, when she was the one choosing to leave.
"It hurts to look at him, Ryo," she wept. "I can't look at him."
She hated that she was falling apart in front of him. Already she could imagine what he was thinking. Here she was trying to earn his pity, to draw attention to herself, to be babied and told that everything would be all right. If any of that was true, she couldn't know and she didn't care. Her mind was free-associating, launching anything and everything generated in that chaotic, mental slew.
"When I look at him, all I see is how close I was to losing someone else—again. How can you expect me to just stay here and face that? You can't. You think, if I run away, if I get as far away from this as possible, it won't hurt me, it won't happen—ever—because I can't see it, because I'm removing myself from it."
"It doesn't work that way, Hana." Ryo's reply was fast, sure, brutal. "I can tell you for a fact it doesn't work that way."
"Then how?" she cried. For once in her life, she was the one hitting him with the difficult questions. He would know what it was to flounder for answers, and to doubt each of them as they formed in his brain.
"Because you'll come back, Hana," he said. He stepped away from her, planting one foot out into the hallway. A hand passed over his mouth, as if the words being spoken were leaving him covered in a mess. "You can try running away a hundred—a thousand—times, Hana, but you will always come back. And when you do, when you find yourself flung back to the exact spot you ran away from, you'll wonder why you didn't just stay. So I'm telling you now, I'm professing to you now, to stay, Hana."
There was an awful sincerity in his confession that sent a wave of cold rushing over her. She stared straight at him, her brain working out the nuances of such a stacked assertion. But he knew her best of all, didn't he? If he told her she needed to stay, then she had to honor his message.
Reluctantly, Hana nodded, and the gesture was her only reply. She didn't wait for Ryo's affirmation or his farewell. His advice was put into play immediately. She turned and walked over to Tai's hospital bed, hesitating and withdrawing her hand several times before she finally collected the courage to touch his forehead, to bend down and kiss the side of his bruised face.
It dawned on her too late to thank Ryo for his help, and when she turned, expecting him to still be waiting for her by the door, she was crestfallen to find he wasn't there—though not especially. Even if he didn't abide by the same rules he set for everybody else, the laws of the universe still applied. If he ran, then he'd come back, and she could thank him, though it never occurred to Hana that the return might be as painful as the departure; that, in a way, it was worse. He'd have to remember the reason why he left. He'd have to relive the exact instant when every part of him could bear no more.
