Ballad
Dusk was the end of the day, bringing the birds back to their nests, chattering desperately before a deathlike darkness silenced them all. The setting sun painted the skies with his blinding colors, while the moon watched silently on the opposite side of the heavens, face to face with his counterpart.
He reached out.
So close they were in identity, yet the thing that drew them together was also the very one that pushed them apart, putting a roaring abyss called the world between them.
This was a small town, with a long culture of its own that dated way back before the Cultural Revolution, where everybody knew everyone else. It was not enough to only be acquainted with your neighbor, you must know his parents, his grandparents and preferably, even his great grandparents. But despite the closeness of this community, its cheerful inhabitants had always thrown out their arms and welcomed strangers into their world, making sure that they would not remain strangers for long.
It was the last place anyone with numerous skeletons in the family closet would want to be in, but it was the first place the young man had chosen to move to.
He needed a place where nobody would think to look. He wanted to run and run, and never get caught. With the precious cargo he brought with him, he could not afford to get caught. Not that he ever had—he was usually the one doing all the catching.
"Ah! Hikari-san, konbanwa!" A jovial voice greeted.
Hiwatari—or Hikari Satoshi, as he was now known as, gave a polite smile to the old lady who lived across the street from him. The old woman smiled widely back in return and gestured for him to wait. Retrieving a sharp pair of garden scissors lying on the quaint little white table next to her, she skillfully clipped a newly bloomed rose from her bushes and handed it to the young man. Satoshi nodded and accepted her gift with sincere gratitude, before he continued to make his way down the street.
"For that special one," she had said. The pale boy closed his eyes as he walked on, taking in the faint soothing scent of the pale yellow rose. Common, he thought. He probably would not like it, but Satoshi knew someone who would.
As always, he stopped outside the door, his hand raised in a loose fist, wondering if he should knock. As always the man inside the room seemed to know he was there, and as always he said, in that voice without the warmth Satoshi missed so much, that he could enter.
So he did.
The room was flooded with the light—from fluorescent tubes on the ceiling to halogen lamps set on tables around the room. The curtains were drawn, shutting out whatever natural light the sun and moon could provide. The man sat, the way he always did whenever Satoshi came to visit, in front of a blank canvas, a paintbrush set on a palette of drying paints set on the table next to him.
"I couldn't paint anything today either," the man murmured under his breath, still staring blankly at the canvas. "What about you, Satoshi?"
The blue eyed boy pursed his lips together, and then stepped around the chair the man was sitting on, kneeling on one knee beside him and placed a hand over the other's larger one.
"Father," Satoshi whispered, barely heard. Mechanically, the man turned, his dark blue eyes dulled by a living death. The boy caressed the slight stubble peppering his father's chin with a tenderness that belied his somewhat unfeeling appearance. He stood up and looked around, finally finding what he wanted at the far corner of the room.
Satoshi picked up the small knife used for carving sculptures and moved to kneel beside his father once more.
"Hold still," he requested, and slowly, gently, began to shave off the stubble carefully. There weren't many duties he had fulfilled, though being a son to this man who had given him his name but not his heritage, whom he had repaid his love and kindness to him with a curse that came with the blood that flowed in him.
The man did not respond. If not for the breathing in and exhaling of air he could not control, he would truly be a dead man.
After Satoshi was done, he stood up again to replace the knife. Lightly, he placed his hand on the door knob and hesitated. Before turning it and stepping out into the world once more. He knew that the next time he returned, the man who was once his father would still be sitting there like a puppet with cut strings, staring at the same piece of blank canvas, with the same brush and the same palette beside him.
This was one request of his father he could not abide. The Hikari's Art would die with him. The last Hikari would never paint again.
It was already evening by the time he was home. The rose given to him earlier still clutched tightly in his hand, its thorns removed by green fingers and an incredibly bored mind on the way back.
Just as Satoshi passed the nineteenth streetlamp counting from the station, he stopped. Though it was night, the young man felt most keenly what colors looked like. It looked like home, and was made up of the most beautiful shades ever, of reds and oranges that danced against the playful glow of the front porch light. The burden he had carried with him all day lifted. He knew now, the way he had known everyday since he was fourteen, that there was someone he could always come home to.
Sitting on the simple white garden swing was him. With uncharacteristic shyness, Satoshi placed the dainty rose on the other boy's lap, pressing his lips lightly between those soulful ruby eyes, breathing in the scent of innocence that never seemed to disappear with time.
"Tadaima."