A Hanadan Carol
Part II
I don't have my manga volume 11 or 12 with me, so I apologize if some of the details of this are wrong.
~~
"Tsukushi?" Tsukasa repeated the name. It sounded unfamiliar rolling off his tongue, the name that everyone wanted him to remember. The name that was the last word off that ghostly Shigeru's lips before she faded into a patch of golden haze. Tsukasa was sure he was dreaming. But the cold draft coming in through his window, the muted clatter below him on the fourth floor... these were too real. He shook his head violently, as though trying to throw off the clinging memories of the last few moments. It failed. He repeated again. "Tsu.. kushi..."
"Yeah, that's right," said a tenor male voice from behind him. "Tsukushi-chan. Of course, you called her Makino."
Tsukasa wheeled. Sitting on the shelf where that unlucky vase had been, also looking slightly ephemeral, was a young man wearing a sweatshirt, jeans, and a baseball cap turned backwards. He leaned forward, resting his chin on his upturned palm, and smiled gently at Tsukasa with a face a little long, a little harried, but optimistic all the same. "Hi," he said, waving his free hand and grinning for a moment.
"You..." Tsukasa stared a moment, then groaned. "Not again."
"'Fraid so, Doumyouji-kun," the man said. "Do you know who I am?"
After a moment's pause, Tsukasa answered slowly, "You look... familiar."
"Amakusa Seinosuke." The ghostly figure jumped off the ledge and began to circle Tsukasa's bed, finally sitting down on the foot of it. "And Tsukushi-chan called ME 'Kin-san'. Why, I'm not quite sure. But it was cute."
"Of course," Tsukasa growled. "You're the false-faced bastard who tried to..." And again, his voice just stopped. "To..." There was an ending to that sentence, he was sure of it! There had to be a reason anger was welling up inside him, and not just because of the strangeness of this whole infuriating situation. This guy had done something, had pulled something - but what!? Tsukasa gave a little incoherent growl and clenched his fists.
"Don't worry," Kin-san said lightly after a moment. "It's been a whole year... exactly a year, in fact... since we last saw each other. At the Teen of Japan competition, last Christmas Eve." He stood and walked to the door of the room, opening it. "After you."
Tsukasa stared. Through the door, instead of the hallway he anticipated, a strange white haze seemed to stretch out before his eyes. Instinctively, he leapt up and charged through, as though once he left the room he might be out of this crazy dream. But as soon as the doorframe pased behind him and faded into his peripheral vision, Tsukasa was surrounded, drowning in snowy nothingness. He heard a bell toll.
When the whiteness faded, he was in a crowded auditorium milling with people. "Where the hell--"
"The Teen of Japan competition." Kin-san lagged a little behind him. "Don't you remember going to see it?"
Something rang true about the statement, and Tsukasa thought he remembered being in this place before. But... "Why the hell would I go to a Teen of Japan competition?" he mused out loud. "It's not like Nee-chan was in it again this year. Oh, I know!" He slammed his fist into his other palm for emphasis. "Soujirou and Akira must have dragged us to make us look at the women. Goddamnit! SOUJIROU!" For indeed Soujirou was approaching the pair, laughing loudly with Akira and followed by an impeccably dressed but slightly nervous-looking Tsubaki. "You..."
Tsukasa didn't get to finish his sentence. Soujirou was walking right towards him, but didn't seem to acknowledge his existence. Tsukasa faced him head-on as though to impede his progress, but when Soujirou reached the angry face of his friend, he kept on walking - and passed right through him! Tsukasa clutched at the air in disbelief. Akira passed through his right shoulder, and then Tsubaki walked right through him, at which point Tsukasa could see Rui following behind... and then himself! "What the..."
"We're not really here, Doumyouji-kun," Kin-san explained in his breezy Tokyo dialect, passing his hand through a few people's heads for comedic effect. "We're just looking at a memory. Christmas Past, so to speak."
"We're what?" The idea had a tough time worming its way into Tsukasa's mind, and he stood in shock until he noticed some activity off to one side.
It was him - and much to the chagrin of the F3, he was trying to get past the row of security guards that blocked off access to the stage. He had a huge piece of white cloth, ripped rather crudely from the decorations that lined the place, and pieces of thick black letters bled through as Tsukasa-of-the-past held it up for all to see. The Tsukasa watching muttered a "What am I doing!?" and took off running toward the source of the confusion. Kin-san adjusted his baseball cap, shrugged, and followed.
1 MILLION YEN
That was the figure written on the cloth, in huge sloppy handwriting that had to be Tsukasa's own. He repeated the words in a confused voice before his counterpart from the past started shouting at the top of his lungs. "MAKINO!" And as the dreaming Tsukasa turned, he saw a girl stopped in the wings just offstage, staring with hollow eyes.
"Makino!!" Past-Tsukasa yelled so loud the whole audience was watching. "Your objective is the one million yen! Don't forget it!!"
"One milion yen?" his observer whispered one more time, and turned to his guide. "Oi! What's this about?!"
"That's the prize money for the competition," Kin-san said as he strolled up beside Tsukasa. "She has to earn it so she can pay you back."
"I lent that woman a million yen!?" Tsukasa stammered. "What the hell for!?"
"She needed it. Her father was in trouble, from what I recall. It still drives me crazy that she would go to you and not to me, though. But you told her that you'd lend it to her if she entered this competition to try and pay you back. So here she is, and here you are."
Tsukasa stared at the wordless exchange between his past self and the girl backstage. Heaving breaths escaped his mouth, making his curls shake slightly with every exhalation. The purposeful scowl that darkened his face was pierced by dark, hopeful eyes. And the girl... Makino Tsukushi... had stopped just staring and was beginning to smile, just barely, some color coming into her cheeks. She was wearing the same short dress and heels that all the contestants did. And she looked... fairly cute.
Tsukasa was surprised at his own reaction. Putting a hand on his chest as though to control the compulsive pounding before anyone else could hear it, he frowned. He'd been surrounded with beautiful women all his life without being stirred. This girl wasn't even all that stunning... long, limp dark hair, a face a little rounder than ideal. But somehow his body, or his heart, was responding to her as though she were something special. For the first time, he considered the possibility that she had really meant something to him.
As he turned inward for that moment, the scene around him seemed to shift. He was still in that auditorium, but now he was facing the audience, watching himself watch the stage. The face he saw was flushed, slack-jawed... an idiotic expression. Tsukasa wanted to punch himself.
He turned to see the stage. The lights were down in the house now and the pageant was in full swing. That girl Makino was doing her best to parade across the runway, wearing an outfit that looked more torn than anything else. She swallowed hard and bit her lip nervously, aware of the strangeness of her costume and the eyes of hundreds. Tsukasa felt himself turn red, mirroring his past self's reaction. Something in that pride, something in the knowledge that this girl was doing all this to pay him back a measly million-yen debt... no girl had ever bothered to pay him back for anything before. Why should they, when what they wanted was his money in the first place? Yet he had the feeling that she was putting herself on the line for some sort of pride he couldn't understand. Something that had made him jump security lines just to remind her of. He felt himself hoping she won.
Again, the scene shifted, and he was watching the contestants converse with an old British woman in more or less flawless English. Then out came Makino, and she trembled, fidgeted, and finally burst forward with a heavily accented "HA-RO!" that toppled the lady right over with its force. Tsukasa felt like either groaning or laughing, he didn't know which. The conversation went on, and Tsukasa noticed that the old woman was looking kind of pale. The lights were beating down on the pair, and sweat beaded on her brow. He looked up at Makino's face and saw that she was noticing it too. Without realizing what he was doing, he pleaded silently with her to reach out and help. And when the woman finally crumpled forward, help she did... calling out "Pale!" and catching the old women squarely by both shoulders before she could faint to the floor. Tsukasa took in a long breath of relief. He knew she would save her.
Another shift, and Makino was onstage alongside a lovely young woman with elegantly cut blonde hair. A bunch of children in tiny suits and bowties were sitting around the blonde woman, singing happily along with them, while Makino was facing off with one of the more ill-mannered kids and not doing much to charm him. Tsukasa was watching from the wings, now, and behind him he heard the whispered chatter of the other contestants.
"I can't believe she made the finals. What were those judges thinking!?"
"I don't know how she managed to get the answer to that question out of that old bag. She must have done something dirty."
"Just take a look. There's no comparison. She hasn't got a chance!"
Tsukasa spun round and roared, "Shut up! She's doing the best she can!"
But his only response was Kin-san's laughter. "That's exactly what you said to those guys in the audience that night," he said. "I was a few rows back and heard the whole thing. You were pretty adamantly defending her."
"...Shut up," Tsukasa repeated in Kin-san's direction, looking bashful.
And then the call echoed around the room. "I'm going to fix your attitudes!"
Tsukasa's every hair stood on end.
He whirled to face the stage. He had heard those words, in that voice, a long time ago...
Makino was getting along better with the kids now. She was challenging them to duels of cup-and-ball, doing cartwheels that made the audience gasp in shock at such a tomboyish trick, grabbing a jump rope from a nearby toy chest and calling across the stage to her rival. "Ayano-san! Why don't you come play with us? It's more fun with two!" And then the whole stage was one giant playground, knee-high boys jumping rope and running around, laughing and pulling on the two finalists' arms and legs, as they stood like two pillars and swung the jump rope in loose, wide arcs between them. Tsukasa stood transfixed. The other contestants were talking trash about this woman? The girl who turned a competition into a team affair, who shook her rival's hand when it was all through?
And then it echoed in his mind again. "I'm going to fix your attitudes!"
A red tag slapped to his face. And a PUNCH...
The hospital room returned in gloomy colors to the space around Tsukasa. He was standing near his bed, where Kin-san was still sitting, and somehow he was all upset again. "I'm not impressed," he snarled. "Low-class woman who borrowed a million yen off me and then has the gall to punch me!? Forget it!"
"Well, it's true Tsukushi-chan is low-class, at least where economics are concerned," Kin-san sighed. "She's got it worse than most. And yet she still comes to see you every day, Doumyouji-kun... every day despite you throwing her out almost immediately..."
"Who asked you!?"
Kin-san looked morose. "I get it. Maybe you still don't have a conception of what that girl goes through, and how hard she's trying right now. Maybe what you need to see is what she's doing right at this moment. But that's not my department." And just as Shigeru had, Kin-san began to fade, shimmering into crystal fragments like hovering ice. "Maybe your next visitor can help you with that. Good luck, Doumyouji-kun... and let me leave you with just one more memory."
And as Kin-san faded entirely, Tsukasa saw in the open doorway a running Makino, cheeks flushed and breath puffing ahead of her in the cold air. She was in the street just outside the theatre where the competition had taken place. And as she came to a stop, Tsukasa could see Kin-san... one from the past... waiting for her.
"I really like you, Kin-san," she was saying sadly. "But... I'm sorry."
The boy smiled. "Hey, I'm not the kind of guy who gets all depressed over something silly like a girl rejecting him!" His smile faded. "This means... you love Doumyouji, though, right?"
Makino had tears in her eyes. She leaned forward and put a hand to her head, as though trying to sort everything out. "I don't know," she admitted. "But... during all this, the one who was there for me when things were hardest... was him."
Kin-san patted her head as her tears flowed freely.
Then the vision was gone.
"I was?" said Tsukasa aloud to the empty room.
~to be continued~
Part II
I don't have my manga volume 11 or 12 with me, so I apologize if some of the details of this are wrong.
~~
"Tsukushi?" Tsukasa repeated the name. It sounded unfamiliar rolling off his tongue, the name that everyone wanted him to remember. The name that was the last word off that ghostly Shigeru's lips before she faded into a patch of golden haze. Tsukasa was sure he was dreaming. But the cold draft coming in through his window, the muted clatter below him on the fourth floor... these were too real. He shook his head violently, as though trying to throw off the clinging memories of the last few moments. It failed. He repeated again. "Tsu.. kushi..."
"Yeah, that's right," said a tenor male voice from behind him. "Tsukushi-chan. Of course, you called her Makino."
Tsukasa wheeled. Sitting on the shelf where that unlucky vase had been, also looking slightly ephemeral, was a young man wearing a sweatshirt, jeans, and a baseball cap turned backwards. He leaned forward, resting his chin on his upturned palm, and smiled gently at Tsukasa with a face a little long, a little harried, but optimistic all the same. "Hi," he said, waving his free hand and grinning for a moment.
"You..." Tsukasa stared a moment, then groaned. "Not again."
"'Fraid so, Doumyouji-kun," the man said. "Do you know who I am?"
After a moment's pause, Tsukasa answered slowly, "You look... familiar."
"Amakusa Seinosuke." The ghostly figure jumped off the ledge and began to circle Tsukasa's bed, finally sitting down on the foot of it. "And Tsukushi-chan called ME 'Kin-san'. Why, I'm not quite sure. But it was cute."
"Of course," Tsukasa growled. "You're the false-faced bastard who tried to..." And again, his voice just stopped. "To..." There was an ending to that sentence, he was sure of it! There had to be a reason anger was welling up inside him, and not just because of the strangeness of this whole infuriating situation. This guy had done something, had pulled something - but what!? Tsukasa gave a little incoherent growl and clenched his fists.
"Don't worry," Kin-san said lightly after a moment. "It's been a whole year... exactly a year, in fact... since we last saw each other. At the Teen of Japan competition, last Christmas Eve." He stood and walked to the door of the room, opening it. "After you."
Tsukasa stared. Through the door, instead of the hallway he anticipated, a strange white haze seemed to stretch out before his eyes. Instinctively, he leapt up and charged through, as though once he left the room he might be out of this crazy dream. But as soon as the doorframe pased behind him and faded into his peripheral vision, Tsukasa was surrounded, drowning in snowy nothingness. He heard a bell toll.
When the whiteness faded, he was in a crowded auditorium milling with people. "Where the hell--"
"The Teen of Japan competition." Kin-san lagged a little behind him. "Don't you remember going to see it?"
Something rang true about the statement, and Tsukasa thought he remembered being in this place before. But... "Why the hell would I go to a Teen of Japan competition?" he mused out loud. "It's not like Nee-chan was in it again this year. Oh, I know!" He slammed his fist into his other palm for emphasis. "Soujirou and Akira must have dragged us to make us look at the women. Goddamnit! SOUJIROU!" For indeed Soujirou was approaching the pair, laughing loudly with Akira and followed by an impeccably dressed but slightly nervous-looking Tsubaki. "You..."
Tsukasa didn't get to finish his sentence. Soujirou was walking right towards him, but didn't seem to acknowledge his existence. Tsukasa faced him head-on as though to impede his progress, but when Soujirou reached the angry face of his friend, he kept on walking - and passed right through him! Tsukasa clutched at the air in disbelief. Akira passed through his right shoulder, and then Tsubaki walked right through him, at which point Tsukasa could see Rui following behind... and then himself! "What the..."
"We're not really here, Doumyouji-kun," Kin-san explained in his breezy Tokyo dialect, passing his hand through a few people's heads for comedic effect. "We're just looking at a memory. Christmas Past, so to speak."
"We're what?" The idea had a tough time worming its way into Tsukasa's mind, and he stood in shock until he noticed some activity off to one side.
It was him - and much to the chagrin of the F3, he was trying to get past the row of security guards that blocked off access to the stage. He had a huge piece of white cloth, ripped rather crudely from the decorations that lined the place, and pieces of thick black letters bled through as Tsukasa-of-the-past held it up for all to see. The Tsukasa watching muttered a "What am I doing!?" and took off running toward the source of the confusion. Kin-san adjusted his baseball cap, shrugged, and followed.
1 MILLION YEN
That was the figure written on the cloth, in huge sloppy handwriting that had to be Tsukasa's own. He repeated the words in a confused voice before his counterpart from the past started shouting at the top of his lungs. "MAKINO!" And as the dreaming Tsukasa turned, he saw a girl stopped in the wings just offstage, staring with hollow eyes.
"Makino!!" Past-Tsukasa yelled so loud the whole audience was watching. "Your objective is the one million yen! Don't forget it!!"
"One milion yen?" his observer whispered one more time, and turned to his guide. "Oi! What's this about?!"
"That's the prize money for the competition," Kin-san said as he strolled up beside Tsukasa. "She has to earn it so she can pay you back."
"I lent that woman a million yen!?" Tsukasa stammered. "What the hell for!?"
"She needed it. Her father was in trouble, from what I recall. It still drives me crazy that she would go to you and not to me, though. But you told her that you'd lend it to her if she entered this competition to try and pay you back. So here she is, and here you are."
Tsukasa stared at the wordless exchange between his past self and the girl backstage. Heaving breaths escaped his mouth, making his curls shake slightly with every exhalation. The purposeful scowl that darkened his face was pierced by dark, hopeful eyes. And the girl... Makino Tsukushi... had stopped just staring and was beginning to smile, just barely, some color coming into her cheeks. She was wearing the same short dress and heels that all the contestants did. And she looked... fairly cute.
Tsukasa was surprised at his own reaction. Putting a hand on his chest as though to control the compulsive pounding before anyone else could hear it, he frowned. He'd been surrounded with beautiful women all his life without being stirred. This girl wasn't even all that stunning... long, limp dark hair, a face a little rounder than ideal. But somehow his body, or his heart, was responding to her as though she were something special. For the first time, he considered the possibility that she had really meant something to him.
As he turned inward for that moment, the scene around him seemed to shift. He was still in that auditorium, but now he was facing the audience, watching himself watch the stage. The face he saw was flushed, slack-jawed... an idiotic expression. Tsukasa wanted to punch himself.
He turned to see the stage. The lights were down in the house now and the pageant was in full swing. That girl Makino was doing her best to parade across the runway, wearing an outfit that looked more torn than anything else. She swallowed hard and bit her lip nervously, aware of the strangeness of her costume and the eyes of hundreds. Tsukasa felt himself turn red, mirroring his past self's reaction. Something in that pride, something in the knowledge that this girl was doing all this to pay him back a measly million-yen debt... no girl had ever bothered to pay him back for anything before. Why should they, when what they wanted was his money in the first place? Yet he had the feeling that she was putting herself on the line for some sort of pride he couldn't understand. Something that had made him jump security lines just to remind her of. He felt himself hoping she won.
Again, the scene shifted, and he was watching the contestants converse with an old British woman in more or less flawless English. Then out came Makino, and she trembled, fidgeted, and finally burst forward with a heavily accented "HA-RO!" that toppled the lady right over with its force. Tsukasa felt like either groaning or laughing, he didn't know which. The conversation went on, and Tsukasa noticed that the old woman was looking kind of pale. The lights were beating down on the pair, and sweat beaded on her brow. He looked up at Makino's face and saw that she was noticing it too. Without realizing what he was doing, he pleaded silently with her to reach out and help. And when the woman finally crumpled forward, help she did... calling out "Pale!" and catching the old women squarely by both shoulders before she could faint to the floor. Tsukasa took in a long breath of relief. He knew she would save her.
Another shift, and Makino was onstage alongside a lovely young woman with elegantly cut blonde hair. A bunch of children in tiny suits and bowties were sitting around the blonde woman, singing happily along with them, while Makino was facing off with one of the more ill-mannered kids and not doing much to charm him. Tsukasa was watching from the wings, now, and behind him he heard the whispered chatter of the other contestants.
"I can't believe she made the finals. What were those judges thinking!?"
"I don't know how she managed to get the answer to that question out of that old bag. She must have done something dirty."
"Just take a look. There's no comparison. She hasn't got a chance!"
Tsukasa spun round and roared, "Shut up! She's doing the best she can!"
But his only response was Kin-san's laughter. "That's exactly what you said to those guys in the audience that night," he said. "I was a few rows back and heard the whole thing. You were pretty adamantly defending her."
"...Shut up," Tsukasa repeated in Kin-san's direction, looking bashful.
And then the call echoed around the room. "I'm going to fix your attitudes!"
Tsukasa's every hair stood on end.
He whirled to face the stage. He had heard those words, in that voice, a long time ago...
Makino was getting along better with the kids now. She was challenging them to duels of cup-and-ball, doing cartwheels that made the audience gasp in shock at such a tomboyish trick, grabbing a jump rope from a nearby toy chest and calling across the stage to her rival. "Ayano-san! Why don't you come play with us? It's more fun with two!" And then the whole stage was one giant playground, knee-high boys jumping rope and running around, laughing and pulling on the two finalists' arms and legs, as they stood like two pillars and swung the jump rope in loose, wide arcs between them. Tsukasa stood transfixed. The other contestants were talking trash about this woman? The girl who turned a competition into a team affair, who shook her rival's hand when it was all through?
And then it echoed in his mind again. "I'm going to fix your attitudes!"
A red tag slapped to his face. And a PUNCH...
The hospital room returned in gloomy colors to the space around Tsukasa. He was standing near his bed, where Kin-san was still sitting, and somehow he was all upset again. "I'm not impressed," he snarled. "Low-class woman who borrowed a million yen off me and then has the gall to punch me!? Forget it!"
"Well, it's true Tsukushi-chan is low-class, at least where economics are concerned," Kin-san sighed. "She's got it worse than most. And yet she still comes to see you every day, Doumyouji-kun... every day despite you throwing her out almost immediately..."
"Who asked you!?"
Kin-san looked morose. "I get it. Maybe you still don't have a conception of what that girl goes through, and how hard she's trying right now. Maybe what you need to see is what she's doing right at this moment. But that's not my department." And just as Shigeru had, Kin-san began to fade, shimmering into crystal fragments like hovering ice. "Maybe your next visitor can help you with that. Good luck, Doumyouji-kun... and let me leave you with just one more memory."
And as Kin-san faded entirely, Tsukasa saw in the open doorway a running Makino, cheeks flushed and breath puffing ahead of her in the cold air. She was in the street just outside the theatre where the competition had taken place. And as she came to a stop, Tsukasa could see Kin-san... one from the past... waiting for her.
"I really like you, Kin-san," she was saying sadly. "But... I'm sorry."
The boy smiled. "Hey, I'm not the kind of guy who gets all depressed over something silly like a girl rejecting him!" His smile faded. "This means... you love Doumyouji, though, right?"
Makino had tears in her eyes. She leaned forward and put a hand to her head, as though trying to sort everything out. "I don't know," she admitted. "But... during all this, the one who was there for me when things were hardest... was him."
Kin-san patted her head as her tears flowed freely.
Then the vision was gone.
"I was?" said Tsukasa aloud to the empty room.
~to be continued~
