happiness part two, rated pg-13. kanae-centric (garbage challenge). post-series. 737 words.
(don't say no to me daddy)
The clink of silver against china hurts her head, but she knows perfectly well that she is to stay silent and deferent, as is the role of the eldest and only daughter of a man like her father.
"So, your son is not staying on another year? It's truly a pity," her mother remarks, taking a small and cultured sip of wine from the crystal glass. The gold bracelet on her slender wrist catches the light from the chandelier and throws it into Kanae's unprotected eyes, making her wince.
The only guest at this table of three echoes her mother's movement, pressing his own glass to his narrow lips. "No, he's not, though of course he will stay affiliated with this school. He will be attending the sister campus in Amsterdam."
"And his sister, your lovely daughter, will she be going too?"
"Oh, of course. It will be easier to keep an eye on them both, given that I am working in Amsterdam myself at the moment."
"The school will miss you, of course."
"Yes, I understand that things are rather difficult for you now, what with the loss of your former acting dean. Kanae isn't marrying him after all, I hear?"
"No," her mother sighs, as Kanae stares at her plate and wonders why it only occurred to her now that being talked about as if one was not really there is one of the most singularly horrible things to have to endure at a dinner table. She's done it for years…but only tonight has she realised how much she hates it.
"No," her mother repeats, "unfortunately Akio-san feels the need to follow his sister, who has most inappropriately run away from the school without warning. Of course we'll find another man suited to our daughter and to the school, but…never one quite like him, I imagine. Kanae is of course very upset, but she knows that she'll find her happiness elsewhere."
Kanae herself is not so sure; as she watches one of the serving-hands fill first Kaoru-san's plate, then her mother's, then her own…she remembers a conversation with her father, her begged words to be released now that Akio has left her out in the cold without a husband, without the future she had been so dependent on.
"You can't go, Kanae," her father's reedy voice had whispered across the heavy stale air of his sickroom. "You are my only daughter, and the only way this family will continue. This family is the school, and you are the family…therefore you are the school as much as I am, and you cannot leave."
She had thought bitterly that her father's illness must be great indeed if he thought that this school was still that of the Ohtori family. Akio might be indicating his inclination to leave, but she thought that the presence of that dangerous and beautiful man would forever be a part of these old French buildings. It was like the way pictures left imprints of unfaded wallpaper on the walls after many years hanging there. Akio would be gone, perhaps, but everyone would always know that he had been here once upon a more peculiar dream-time.
And now he was leaving, leaving because his strange alien of a sister had left before him, and he apparently could not stay without her.
Funny. While Anthy was here, she had never considered how the girl had felt about anything. She had been like a walking talking living doll, always doing as asked – even if she did said things in peculiar fashions – and Kanae had never thought it strange at all, had simply been jealous of the hold Anthy had always held over Akio's heart. It isn't until now, sitting across from her mother and perpendicular to Kaoru-san, father of the former secretary of the student council, that she realises that the blankness in Anthy's empty gaze and emptier smiles wasn't so disturbing because there was nothing there…it was so disturbing because there was. And it had been something that cried for release even as it understood completely that some song-birds were bred to be caged forever.
And Kanae, looking down now at the plate filled for her with food she doesn't want to eat, realises that the true depth of her uneasiness comes from realising that if someone looked at her face now, they might see the same thing she now knows was always in Anthy's.