Chapter 4: Distortion
Cameras. Microphones. Noisy, pushy reporters. Tohru Honda was awakened by loud voices outside. She groaned- someone was creating an article in the paper about the Institution. Hopefully, the reporters would stay out of her room- she really didn't want to be bothered. She had too much on her mind to talk to anybody, especially if anything she said would be warped and then displayed to the public eye.
She could hear the woman in the next room being interviewed.
"So… Mrs. Johnson, what has your life been like at Green Oaks?"
"………"
"Mrs. Johnson, did you here the question?"
"………."
"Mrs. Johnson, it would be great if you could answer some of these nice lady's questions. After you do that, you may go to lunch, and you may have some delicious fried chicken, and maybe even some chocolate cake…"
"NOOO! GO AWAY NOW! LEAVE ME ALONE! I HAVE A RIGHT TO MY OWN PRIVACY! JUST BECAUSE YOU THINK I'M A CRACKPOT DOESN'T MEAN I DON'T HAVE RIGHTS…" After yelling at the reporter and Dr. Sherman, Mrs. Johnson returned to her usual routine, which always went a bit like this: "You people never ever listen. No one ever listens to poor little me. I can say anything, even if it's the most important damn thing in the whole goddamn world and no one would even care, cause no one ever listens to me, they just hear blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, well, maybe some day I will have something important to say, huh? And maybe then I won't tell anyone! It's just the same, since they wouldn't listen to a "crazy" old lady anyway…" Dr. Sherman uttered an exasperated sigh, and they left Mrs. Johnson to her muttering. Tohru chuckled. What did they think they would get out of that old bat, anyhow?
Then, to Tohru's dismay, there was a knock at the door. She groaned.
"Miss Honda, please let us in…" Dr. Sherman said when she didn't answer the door. She reluctantly turned the knob, and in stepped the Dr. Sherman and a blonde reporter, who looked oddly familiar…
"Alright, Miss Honda, this lady is going to ask you a few questions now, okay? It won't take long at all, and then you will be excused to lunch." Tohru nodded, just out of habit. There was just something weird about Dr. Sherman's voice that made you want to agree with her.
"Alright, then… I suppose I'll leave you two alone for a bit, alright?" Dr. Sherman grinned her fake smile again and gently closed the door as she exited the room.
Tohru suddenly realized who the reporter was.
"Uo!" She said. Arisa Uotani laughed.
"No one has called me that for years and years. I'm really sorry to bother you with this whole newspaper thing, but it's the only way I can see you… I'm not supposed to, you know…"
"Why not?" inquired Tohru, who was now extremely confused.
"Well… it's… complicated…" She seemed like she was hiding something. Tohru decided not to push it.
"So… you're a reporter now?" Tohru said, eyeing Arisa's professional looking uniform.
"Journalist, actually," she said, "crazy, isn't it?" Tohru nodded.
"So… what ever happened to Hana? Or, I suppose people call her Saki now…" A dark look came over Arisa's face.
"…That's… complicated, too…." She said in a tone that was so serious that it was almost disturbing. This didn't exactly make Tohru feel comfortable…
"So, the actual reason why I'm here," she lowered her voice, "is to ask you something… about Tai," she said. For some reason, Tohru felt like crying.
"Yes?"
"Well… yesterday… after you had a visit with him… he came home very upset. What… happened?"
"I guess he just wasn't very used to the fact that I'm his mother…"
"I guess not," Arisa eyed her suspiciously. Tohru bit her lip. She did not want to reveal the part when Tai had asked her about his father. For some reason, she didn't think that Arisa would be very happy that she had kept it a secret from him. In fact, Tohru was pretty sure that Arisa didn't know the real truth about Tai's father herself. And there was no way that she was going to reveal that.
"Only about two more minutes in there, okay Mrs. Uotani?" Came Dr. Sherman's disgustingly cheerful voice from another room.
"Listen… I've got to leave, so let me get a few pictures that I can use in the article. I'll just make up some interview crap later, so I won't get nailed for coming to see you, okay?" Tohru did not have time to answer, for Arisa whipped out her camera and snapped several shots almost in the blink of an eye.
"Take care of yourself, okay?" Arisa said, as she hugged Tohru, just like the old days. She was about to leave, when she turned around one more time and said, "that chocolate cake that you guys have here looks pretty good… do you think they'd give me some? I'm starving…" Tohru laughed and told her it was in the kitchen. Yeah, that was definitely the same old Uo. She wished that she were the same old Tohru, just like before… She almost had blink away tears. She heard the ringing of the lunch bell, but decided she'd skip it. She wasn't hungry anyway, and she didn't want to deal with a big crowd of people. She then lay back down in her warm bed, the only place where she was safe. She closed her eyes, fell asleep almost instantly, and began having dreams of the past.
She had not had these sort of dreams for a long time; not since she had first came to the Institution. They always began with the cries of an infant. The screams and screeches were so loud and pitiful that Tohru couldn't stand it.
"Give me back my baby! Why are you taking him away from me? Give me back my little boy! Give him back!" A much younger Tohru sobbed. She tried to get up, and try to retrieve her baby, but she was in too much pain from the birth.
"It's for your own good, Tohru…" came a voice. But Tohru could not tell whose it was, because it was very dark in her dream. Everything now would grow very quiet, with her sobs and the baby's cries fading away. She felt a temporary relief, that all of the terrible noises were gone, but it was pointless, for the next dream was even more disturbing than the first.
She sat in a chair, in the middle of a vast, black room. A tall man stood in front of her, and she could see everything but his face. The man spoke, clearly and strongly, as he asked just one question:
"Who is the father?" The man's voice was overpoweringly loud, and the question echoed through her head again and again, and the volume increased every time:
"who is the father?"
"Who is the father?"
"Who is the father?"
"WHO IS THE FATHER?"
Tohru tried with all of her will to answer that question, hoping that her answer would silence the awful voice, but her lips would not part, nor would any words escape them. She tried again and again to answer the question, but no sound would come out. As she became more and more frustrated with herself, the music began to play in the back of her mind again. It somehow both mixed and clashed with the voice, and she began to scream, scream at the top of her lungs, but still she could not speak. She could only cry in agony.
She woke up in a cold sweat, panting and shaking. That was a dreadful dream; even more dreadful than the first time that she had dreamed it. She looked at the clock on her wall. It was 1:04 AM. She knew that she would probably not be able to sleep for the whole rest of the night, so she rubbed her eyes and sat up. Outside in the hall, she heard a door slam. Who in the institution could be out at this hour? The doctors had all left, except for the night watchman, and all of the patients were locked in their rooms. The door sounded pretty close by; it could have been the next-door down. Tohru's room was at the end of the hall, so it would have had to be Mrs. Johnson, since the next room over from hers was vacant. But why would Mrs. Johnson be out at this hour? Oh, well. That was just one more mystery that Tohru didn't understand…
Kyo stood outside a small, dirty little market, next to the payphones and the newspaper machines. He was so damn bored; he couldn't stand it anymore. And he needed a cigarette, but he had tossed out his only pack after he burned down that arcade place. Yeah, you might think that he'd be running from the police, but there was no real reason. He had dyed his hair, and had his sunglasses on and his trench coat collar pulled over half his face most of the time, so it wasn't very likely that anyone would recognize him. And he was really far away from the crime scene, anyway. Trying to satisfy his boredom, he put a quarter in the newspaper machine and bought one, just like a model citizen. He didn't even try to use a fake coin or anything. That'd really make his parents proud… he bit his lip when he thought about his parents. Especially about his mother… he quickly shut the bad thoughts out of his head. He was tough enough not too think about the goddamn past. It made him mad as hell. He flipped through the newspaper, skipping the front page, which read, "Interview With a Rockville Mall Fire Survivor". He honestly didn't care who survived and who kicked the bucket. He looked in the comic's section, and the sports section. He was about to toss the newspaper out, when an article caught his eye. Well, not the article, exactly… more like a person in the article…
"Green Oaks Mental Institution: Are Patients Really Happy Here?" The article included an interview with the head doctor, and a few words from the patients. It was an ordinary article, except for one picture of a small, skinny brunette, with large, scared looking eyes. Was it… her? He studied the picture further. Yes, it was definitely her. He grinned. So he had finally found her…