Euthymia
"Toya."
The one being called looks up from his reading, only to find Ikuko leaning down in front of him, her face uncomfortably close to his.
For himself, Toya jumps back, which he can't accomplish very well when sitting in one of the living room easy chairs as he is now. "Jeez, Ikuko!" he gasps, dropping his book in his lap and staring off to one side; out of the corner of his eye he catches Ikuko smirking an unusually… buoyant smirk. "What do you want?"
Ikuko straightens, adjusting the familiar white, broad-brimmed, dark purple-ribboned hat Toya's just now noticing she's wearing. Her smirk widens into a bigger version of her cat-smile. "I am going into town, to the bookstore. You're coming with me."
Given that Toya's heard absolutely nothing about this before now, and given that he does not want to go into town, he can't help but be a little skeptical about this. Or maybe hugely skeptical. Or maybe both. "Since when am I going to town with you?" he asks, raising an eyebrow. You want me to go around in crowds with you. You want me to get in that death trap you call a car for anything other than "life or death" (or White Day) circumstances. Why, exactly, do you think this is going to happen?
Probably worryingly, Ikuko's smile never so much as fluctuates. "Since right now, or since when you get properly dressed for the journey. Yes, I suspect that things like shoes, a jacket and maybe a hat would be essential for the journey."
Okay, she's being serious about this. Toya sighs and sets his book aside. "Ikuko, you know I hate the car."
"We won't use the car. We'll walk. It's a long walk, but I think we can make it."
"You know I hate crowds."
"You're expecting crowds in a secondhand bookstore?"
When Toya still looks unconvinced, Ikuko seems to decide to take a different approach. Her normally half-shut eyes open wide, like the shutter pulling back from a camera lens. "Just imagine, Toya. A shop full of books you've never read before, just waiting to be bought. It's your chance to broaden your horizons, to acquaint yourself with new worlds! Would you really pass that up? Would you really choose to stay here, in ignorance and doubt, when you could be out there, gaining knowledge about your world?"
Toya sighs again. If he stays home, Ikuko will never let him hear the end of it; she'll probably go so far as to not let him read the books she buys. And if Toya goes with her, as uncomfortable as it will be to have to deal with other people, at least he'll get some new books out of it. And I probably need the exercise.
He smiles ruefully, waving a hand at her. "Yeah, yeah, I'll come. Since you asked so nicely."
If Ikuko caught the irony in Toya's voice, she ignores it quite thoroughly. She clasps her hands in front of her, beaming delightedly. "Wonderful! Go get your things!"
-0-0-0-
Mercifully, the weather has been warming up for a few weeks, though it's still what could best be defined as "brisk", especially when the wind blows; Ikuko's long hair whips back and forth beneath her hat and Toya adjusts his scarf, wincing and squinting away from the sun. The sky has cleared, from dull, murky gray to soaring azure blue; there's nary a cloud to be seen. Now if the temperature would only go up about ten, fifteen degrees. At least it probably won't rain…
"Some… walk," he gasps, huffing and puffing. They've been walking for a good half hour, the town is still nowhere in sight, and Toya is starting to get just a touch winded. I guess this just goes to show how embarrassingly out of shape I am. Even Ikuko can keep a better pace than I can.
For once, Ikuko seems somewhat sympathetic to his plight. At the crest of a sandy hill topped with wiry, gray-green grass, she stops, and waits for him to catch up. "We can walk more slowly, I think," she says in response. Up close, Toya can sees that her normally porcelain-pale cheeks are flushed and red. "It's not like we're in any hurry."
So, to Toya's immense relief, their pace slows considerably after that, lagging off to a considerably, more leisurely walk. Oh yeah, much better. At least I can catch my breath now.
Off to their left, the tide booms against the rocks. Toya looks down and is immediately greeted by a dizzying sight: the shore, some fifty feet below. He drags his eyes away and wastes no time in backing away from the cliff, heart pounding. I had no idea that the drop was so sheer over here. Jeez, what a wake-up call.
Ikuko's eyes gleam. "Ah, I see you've noticed the cliff. You've never walked this far from the house, have you, Toya?"
"No, I haven't." All the time that he's lived here, his world has been confined to how far he's willing to walk—about fifteen minutes in any direction, in this case. He can't claim to have ever really seen this before.
She smiles, adjusting the broad brim of her hat. "Ooh, this place right here used to be infamous. People would fall off the edge of the cliff by mistake, or jump off to commit suicide. I think at least sixty people have died here."
Trust Ikuko to know something like that. Something piques Toya's interest, though. "What do you mean "used" to be infamous?"
"It's just not that popular a suicide spot anymore. I couldn't tell you why."
They continue on, occasionally digressing from their companionable silence to make comments about the weather, or the terrain, or the fact that the tourists have been coming to the beaches a bit earlier than usual this year. Ikuko finds out about Toya's discomfort around strangers when he's by himself and laughs, a shrewd gleam flickering in her eyes before vanishing. And did you know that this particular piece of land is also famous for being the site of several local ghost stories? Neither did Toya until Ikuko told him so, and he should think that the reasons for that are so obvious that Ikuko didn't need to tell him that it was because of the suicides.
Eventually, they surmount a dune-like hill only to find that what they look on is not more untamed, undeveloped land, but the expanse of the town that confidently calls itself the island's only major population center. Come to think of it, Toya's been hearing a guttural humming noise for some time which he now realizes belongs to the collective engine-noise of any number of cars cruising up the streets.
"Just follow me to the bookstore." Ikuko's eyes shine, but they take a moment away to adopt a playful gleam instead. "And Toya? I know you told me that you don't care for talking to strangers, but do try to make an effort today if you have to. I'd hate to have to roll you home if you chose to curl up into a ball like a hedgehog. My hands would be quite bloody by the end of it, and think of all the quills you would lose!"
Toya rolls his eyes. "Yeah, yeah, sure. Just point the way. I am, after all, completely at your mercy." Especially since he's completely forgotten where anything is since the last time he was here.
Striking forward straight ahead, Ikuko confidently walks down the main thoroughfare, walking a path she's clearly traversed a thousand times before. She comes to a halt in front of a shop with the sign "Books For the Sun" and a yellow sun painted on it, and motions for Toya to follow her inside. "This is the place. Come follow me."
Somewhat apprehensively, Toya does so.
The first thing that Toya notices about the shop is that no one appears to have dusted it since roughly the time when the first land-dwelling animals crawled out of the sea. The air is choked with dust; dust motes glitter like stars in the patches of sunlight cast by the windows. Toya can catch sight of whole galaxies of stars in a stray sunbeam.
The next thing he notices about the shop is that it's absolutely huge.
And by huge, we don't mean "average-sized corner bookstore stuffed from floor to ceiling with books" huge. We mean huge, huge. Like, "bigger than Ikuko's library by at least three times" huge. "Bigger on the inside" huge.
"Hello, Hachijo-san!" a cheery voice greets them. Ikuko and Toya both looks over in the direction of the cash register, though the latter soon realizes, abashed (and secretly relieved), that Ikuko was the one being addressed.
A young woman with curly brown hair sits behind the cash register, beaming at Ikuko. "Hello, Naomi-san," Ikuko greets her in return. Polite, Toya notices, but not with any special note in her voice that would intimate familiarity.
Maybe Naomi thinks differently about their relationship.
The moment the young cashier spots Toya and realizes that Ikuko isn't alone, her eyes light up. "Who's that, Hachijo-san?" She grins. "Do you have a boyfriend?"
Wait, what? If Toya was drinking something, this probably would have been the moment when he spat it out. He gapes, gob smacked, at the grinning cashier, who seems to care nothing for the fact that he might have just a fuse in his brain, and that it's entirely her fault.
Ikuko, also gob smacked (Toya might have wished for a camera had he not been too busy trying to digest that… inquiry), recovers first, frowning deeply. "A friend, you'll find," she responds firmly. Suddenly, Toya feels her ringed hand close around his wrist. "Come on, Toya," she mutters in his ear.
Once they're further back in the store (which, as Ikuko had implied it would be, is quite empty), and can be reasonably sure that they're out of earshot of the cashier, Toya asks, perhaps just a little touchily, "Friend of yours?" But then, shouldn't he be touchy?
"Acquaintance." Ikuko pinches the skin between her eyes. "Just your average over-familiar cashier. Nosing into people's personal lives and trying to bully them into buying more things than they want to seems to be part of the job description. Ignore her. Now go and look for some books."
The two part company, and Toya begins his search in earnest.
The books aren't in alphabetical order. Toya supposes he shouldn't expect them to be; in a shop this size with apparently only one employee that would be an absolute pain to maintain. However, he's gotten used to books being in an easy-to-access, alphabetical organization. Though Ikuko may be pretty lax on order in all other aspects of her life (or not concerned about order at all—the coffee table groaning under the weight of a legion of old newspapers and Ikuko's disordered study come to mind), Ikuko has always insisted on the books in the library being ordered alphabetically, by author. The one time Toya made the mistake of putting a book back in out of order, she had found it and gotten rather upset. In a typically Ikuko—tight-lipped smile and cutting comments—sort of way.
Soon, however, his lament over the tragic lack of alphabetization melts away.
Toya grins as he comes across title after title and author after author that he's never seen before. There are so many books that he's never heard of, and he wants to read them all. Knowing, though, that he won't be able to carry them all, Toya decides that he's going to have to limit himself. Unfortunately.
I hate to admit it, but I'm glad Ikuko decided to drag me to town with her today. Even if the walk home is going to be murder.
Eventually settling on a few (just a few. Really!) books to take home and wholesale devour, Toya goes to find Ikuko.
When she sees him, she giggles.
"What?"
"Um, Toya? You are aware that we're walking home, right?"
"Yeah…"
"I think you need to put a few books back."
"What? Why? I've only got…" he pauses to count them "…twelve!"
"You know, the bookstore's not going anywhere."
"Yeah, but the books might."
"Oh, do as you like. But I'm not helping you carry them."