A Hanadan Carol

Part III

dedicated to the lovely reviewer on ff.net who reminded me of the next guest character's existence :D

~~

Things were getting far too creepy for Tsukasa. Determined more than ever to block out all thoughts of mysterious girls and disappearing ghosts, he flopped on the bed and shut his eyes purposefully. He would sleep, and this time he wouldn't have any more strange dreams. He scowled.

He WOULD ignore that shadow that was looming over his bed now.

He would NOT open his eyes and be subjected to another weird nighttime visitor.

"Bah," he muttered, as though trying to shoo away the spook.

"BAH!" echoed the owner of the shadow. "That's my line!" A burst of boyish laughter ensued. Tsukasa lost patience. His eyes flew open.

He was staring at the brightest orange pants he'd ever seen.

Cursing as though they'd leapt out and attacked him, he averted his eyes and sat up slowly. The orange jeans were part of a whole ensemble of painfully gaudy colors - yellow sneakers below and a loose-fitting blouse of a pale periwinkle color above. The boy standing before him wore horn-rimmed glasses and had flyaway straw-colored hair. He looked like a strange ragged scarecrow too late for Halloween.

"Long time no see, Doumyouji-san," the boy grinned, his smile wide and innocent enough to melt a stone. "Remember me?"

Tsukasa stiffened. "You... weren't you satisfied the last time you came to my hospital room to harass me?!"

Oribe Junpei threw back his head and laughed again. "You're a card, Doumyouji-san. You remember that, but you don't remember why you were in the hospital in the first place?"

"I remember that!" Tsukasa snarled. "You and your weakling goons ganged up on me. Cracked my goddamn ribs."

"Eh?" Junpei cupped a hand to his ear. "Say that one more time? Weakling goons? Why, Doumyouji-san... I do believe you're implying you could have taken us all at once if you'd wanted to."

"Damn straight," Tsukasa puffed up, full of self-important pride. "And I would have, too, if..."

And it happened again.

White fuzziness where there ought to be memory. A sense of purpose lost. And Tsukasa's voice scraping empty, gutteral syllables instead of forming words, making sense. He sat up seriously and looked Junpei in the face. "All right. Just do your ghost thing and get it over with. I want to get some sleep."

"If you say so," Junpei said as he shrugged. "My job is to show you what Makino-san's doing tonight... how she's spending Christmas Present. Shall we take a stroll?" Tsukasa got up and followed him obediently through the door into that weird white haze, muttering under his breath all the while.

~

"Nee-chan! You are going to make a Christmas cake this year, aren't you?"

A puffy-faced boy of about eleven called in a squeaky voice from among a pile of manga, his foot absently banging rhythmically on the hardwood floor. The room was tiny, almost cramped, and Tsukasa had to bend his knees to keep the top of his head from scraping through the ceiling. Two futons lay rolled awkwardly on one side of the room, and from the small alcove to the side, Tsukasa could hear the banging of pots. "Maison Makino," Junpei announced with a deep bow.

"Be quiet, Susumu!" exploded a voice from the alcove, and the same girl from the pageant stuck her head into the room, frowning sternly. Only now she didn't look very glamorous. With a rumpled blouse, her hair tied back with a scarf, and a rolling pin in one hand, she looked more like a harried housewife. "And stop banging your foot like that, the people downstairs will complain. Unroll the futons, would you? It's past midnight and we should both be in bed."

"The cake, Nee-chan," repeated Susumu somewhat incoherently, his cheeks stuffed full with chips he was popping in his mouth one by one.

"I'll see what I can do! And the way you're eating those, I don't want to hear you complaining on New Year's Eve when I make you clean that crumb-covered floor, you got that?"

"Whatever." Susumu rolled over onto his back and held a manga above his head, still munching messily on the chips. "There's only one room to clean, so it'll take no time anyway."

"One room?" For the first time since he'd arrived in this place, Tsukasa spoke. "This is the place they live? Just in this one room?"

"Bingo." Junpei was examining some of the open manga on the floor near Susumu.

"Where are their parents?" Tsukasa was almost certain that most people lived with their parents, despite his unhappy situation.

"Couldn't find work in the city anymore and took off to a fishing village on the coast," Junpei explained. "In a word, Doumyouji-san... she's fending for herself here."

"That's..." The rest of the words, whatever they were, couldn't make it past his throat.

Susumu laid out the futons with a series of grumbling complaints and tucked himself in, falling quickly asleep and starting to snore tiny, wheezy snores. Tsukushi peeked in again, and at the sight of him sleeping, switched off the light in the tiny room. The glow of the kitchen alcove remained, though, and Tsukasa stepped through the room to peek at what she was doing.

A baking sheet lay on the stove burners, silver foil catching the dim light where it wrinkled and creased. The girl was slowly, quietly, lifting off with a spatula and placing into a little basket each of a series of tiny cookies, golden brown on top and slightly burned on the bottom. They had a funny shape to them, and Tsukasa knelt to see what they were. What he saw nearly made him laugh out loud.

Each of the little sweets was molded into a caricature of his face, curly hair and any of a number of perfectly ridiculous expressions. He knew them all. Cocky grin, angry scowl, shocked blush... He couldn't decide whether to be enraged with her for daring to mock him, or utterly charmed with her effort. As it was, he found himself just staring blankly into the basket.

"I think these came out better than last time," Tsukushi said softly, startling him. He fell backwards into a sitting position on the floor. Was she talking to him? No, just herself, and as she peeled the last few cookies off the baking sheet, she went on. "They won't smell like fish, at least."

She made a fist with her free hand and looked purposefully forward - Tsukasa felt, not for the first time, that she was looking right at him. "I'm just going to muster up my courage and give them to him," she said in hushed, but firm, tones. "Even if they don't help him remember. I just want to give him something on Christmas."

Her voice slowed, and her eyes looked down at the basket as she carefully placed the final pair of cookies, shaped differently than the others, on the pile. "Because if he did remember... we'd be on a Christmas date tomorrow."

One of the two cookies was shaped like the planet Saturn. The other was perfectly round, but had impressions of stitches placed into it, like a baseball. Tsukasa gazed at them and felt a whir of emotion, but it was a scary one, and he shook it away.

She drew a cloth from the cupboard and began to wrap the basket in it. "Let's see. Tomorrow I've got that one job in the morning, and then I'll come back and see if I can't make Susumu that Christmas cake. Then there's that other job, which I have to go to because they're offering extra pay for Christmas workers. And by the end of the day, I should have enough to afford skipping out for a half hour to go see Doumy..." Her hands, dextrously tying the corners of the fabric into a knot, suddenly faltered, and her face dropped.

"Oi!" Tsukasa called in a stage whisper to Junpei, who was folding paper airplanes out of discarded manga pages he'd found ripped out of the magazines. "How many jobs does this woman have?"

"As many as she needs to," Junpei said, paying a ridiculous amount of attention to every crease in the paper. "She has a brother to support, too."

Tsukasa turned his attention, wordlessly, back to the girl before him. Her eyes were still downturned. She'd taken out one of the cookies - a caricature of him with a boyish grin - and was staring at it. Her lips trembled. "...ji..."

His eyes widened.

She took the little cookie and held it to her cheek briefly. "Doumyouji..." A shining tear came down to meet it and pooled on her cheek where the cookie blocked its path.

Tsukasa's whole body began to ache. He wrapped his arms around himself as if to contain it, but the shivering, the pain was all over him and around him now. He'd hurt this girl... hurt her badly. He was sure of that now. In ways he couldn't undo. Now the very thought of him caused her pain. God, what had he done? He was afraid to remember. He wanted desperately to wipe those tears away, but he couldn't. He couldn't do a thing to soothe her. "Damn it," he said in a soft voice.

A paper airplane flew past his nose, nearly giving him a paper cut, and Tsukasa started. Junpei waved at him from across the room, grinning a grin that was half innocent, half insidious.

"It's no good," Tsukasa blurted out. "Look at this. I'm already hurting her and I don't even know her."

"You hurt her from the beginning," Junpei shrugged, his pose casual but his eyes on fire. Tsukasa thought he looked more than a little scary. "She even tried to tell you so, but you started shouting that you'd chase her into hell. Stubborn S.O.B."

"Then I shouldn't remember her." Tsukasa's voice rose almost to a shout. "She should just forget about me and move on. That'd..." He faltered. "That'd be better for both of us."

Junpei laughed, and this time the malice in his voice was undisguised. "That's what you think, huh?" He raised a paper airplane above his head and threw it. "Think you should just fly away...?" The little craft sailed through the air and Tsukasa watched it, transfixed, until it began to eclipse his vision...

~

First came the snow falling, then the window that shut it all out. Then the rest of the hospital room came into focus, and once more, Tsukasa was on his bed, arms still clutching his body as though he were desperately cold. His nerves were on fire. He shook.

"You look pretty tense there, Doumyouji-san," said Junpei, once more the innocent boy without a care in the world. "Why don't you just give in and remember her? It'll save you a visit."

"No way in hell," Tsukasa insisted, too upset to hide the desperate edge to his voice. "She should give up on me. She ought to go on with her life, and leave me to mine."

"And then everything will be fine?" Junpei cocked his head to the side and looked quizzically at Tsukasa. "I guess you are going to need some more convincing. Fine, fine. Someone else will be by to say hello, Doumyouji-san. Don't go anywhere!" He snapped his fingers and was gone.

Tsukasa put his head in his hands. He was sure now that this Makino had been important to him, that she was in every memory that the white fog obscured. But he was even surer that he was no good for her. "Once this dream is over," he told himself, "I'll forget it ever happened. And we'll both be able to get on with our lives.

"That's the way it has to be."

~to be continued~