#26 Tears
Because A. Pseudonym (excellent pen name BTW) asked so nicely, here it is, the Watari chapter!
Dear Elizabeth would have loved to see the boys.
My Elizabeth, the first day I saw her across the crowded lecture hall I was smitten. Her dark hair was always in a bun, flyaway strands clung around her pale face, and always wearing something the colour of cream.
She was a wonderful woman; dear old Roger competed with me for her hand while we were at University. We were the best of friends through it all, of course, but we fought like tigers for the hand of the lovely Elizabeth.
I am so very grateful that we managed to remain friends, even when one of us lost.
I was the victor of her heart. We had a lovely life for a time, good jobs after university, a house in the country. But always, always, she was consumed by the desire to have children. And the sad truth was that she could not bring a baby to term.
But she was never one to sit around and allow herself to be unhappy. She set up a fund to build an orphanage, began making plans to build an orphanage, because what she wanted so badly was to give a home.
And then she passed away.
My dear lovely Elizabeth… she begged both myself and Roger with her dying wish that we would continue what she began and set up Wammy's House.
We built the house and made a home for them.
And she would have loved to see them.
She would have loved to see little Beyond and Lawliet running around together. She always wanted sons.
She would have loved to see Angel too, with her big round glasses and neatly plaited hair. She would have sat for hours brushing it for her.
Still, Elizabeth's main joy would have doubtless been the sewing. A task that fell on me in the end.
When one is running an orphanage, even one filled with prodigies, they will manage to rip their jeans and shirts, either through fighting or playing or, in the case of some of the stranger children, because 'It's part of an experiment'.
Elizabeth enjoyed sewing; she had very neat little stitches.
Mine are untidy, but they do seem to hold.
I never could fathom out how until one day the twins told me.
Liam and Brian Lawliet, or L and B, as they preferred to be known. At the same time the wisest and silliest of all the children who I had known to pass through the gates of Wammy's house.
They walked up to me that autumn afternoon, both just turned ten, Identical sheepish smiles across their faces.
I remember I sighed and put down the book I was reading, resigning myself to the fact that I would never find out the ending. "What have you two done this time?"
I didn't need an answer really, A quick glance over their twin shapes told me that they'd managed to tear the knees of their jeans, and one of L's back pockets was hanging off the rear of his trousers by a few threads.
"We were playing Detectives." L chirped.
B giggled in his odd way; "L was Sherlock."
"And B was Professor Moriaty." L continued, obsidian eyes shining innocently.
I ought to have just accepted that, long ago deciding that these two would always be something of a question mark, but instead I probed further, "Why not Dr. Watson?"
B bit his thumb, "Because."
L rubbed the back of his head, "Angel's always Dr. Watson anyway. B's a brilliant Moriaty." He cleared his throat, "Anyway, I was chasing B up the waterfall-"
B giggled, weird red eyes glinting. "Slide."
"…Slide, and-"
I shook my head and held up one hand to stop him, "Never mind, I get the general idea. I sometimes think you rip your clothes on purpose."
Both the boys giggled, B squeaked out in his pre-pubescent voice, "Not on purpose… but we do like seeing the sewing lady."
I remember halting in all movement, and then pressing them for details.
We had never employed a woman to sew up the rips in the children's clothes.
After questioning, the boys explained, in tandem, what they meant.
It seemed that all the children in the house knew of this.
When the children had clothes that had been sewn back together, they would be awoken in the night by something none of them could name, some odd feeling or another.
Upon sitting up in their bed, the child would see a woman sitting in their desk chair. A beautiful woman, with her dark hair up in a bun and a pale dress upon her form, her skin translucently pale, a faint golden glow around her. The recently fixed item would be on her lap, so the boys said, she would be making motions as though she were adding her own stitches, but as far as they could tell, she had no needle or thread.
They told me she was very pretty, and smiled when she saw the awoken child. They told me how she would carefully fold whatever she had been mending and stand up, placing it on the chair, where it would be found in the morning…
They told me she would walk to the side of the bed, gently leading the child in question to lay back down, tucking him or her in tightly, and placing a kiss on their forehead that made them instantly sleepy.
They all called her the sewing lady.
To them she was just a kindly spirit, or a shared hallucination.
To me she was confirmation that I had done as she would have wished, and given her a home full of happy children.
To me it meant she was still, in some small way, with me, strengthening my stitches with her own invisible ones.
Mending the tears I could not, giving to our poor, lonely children the one thing I could not give, mothers love and adoration.
Oh, I know very well the boys could have been making it up, and to this day I myself have never seen the mysterious spirit they spoke of.
But I desperately believe that she is still there.
Mending the tears.