Disclaimer I don't own any of the HYD characters nor the original plotline of HYD, but I certainly own this particular plot and all the characters I created for it...

Note : sorry if you think I'm dwelling to much on this part, but I think it's important, and I want to write it... ;o)

Also, let's say it happens in 2006... Because no actual dates were given in the drama, I think... and because it doesn't really matter for the story, anyway... ;o)

Thanks to my faithful reviewers kashuneko, snuffyTHEmonkey, Juliana and az09.

Kashuneko : you're right, once again ! The story is off topic, as far as Akira's question is concerned... And my reason for telling all of this is because it affects Akira's behaviour and so, his possible future with Sophie... But in Izumi's place, I'd still want to share the story I had to hide for all these years with him... That's why the true confrontation will only occur in chapter24... I'm dwelling, I'm dwelling, but it's important to give all the elements... ;o) Thanks for the great review, love your little analysises... And, believe it or not, it actually helps me get some perspective on what I'm writing, and so to make it better :oD

STM : the Japanese TV drama, with the hunky Abe Tsuyoshi playing Akira... Why do you think I chose to write an Akira fanfic ? LOL Yes, I know I update quite frequently, and I'm so very happy that my reviewers are there to show me they read me... So thanks, again, for taking the time to review!

Juliana : please don't kill me... because I love to leave unresolved angsty situations between chapters... and I update fairly regularly, so I may be forgiven, may not I ? ;o) You'll tell me if you had guessed...

az09 : I have always been captivated by what birth extracts represent – mark my word, I don't spend my days reading them or collecting them – because they're actually the only official piece of paper proving that you actually legally exist, as a citizen of your country but also as a person, who was born. And it's also the only acceptable proof of filiation, because it cannot be tempered with, and that only you - and your direct relatives if they have good reason to do so – can ask for it. If the books where it is consigned were to be destroyed and no copy existed, you would legally not exist anymore. Scary, huh ? Well, that's why it fascinates me, somehow. Somewhere in the attics of the town hall of the little city where I was born lies the only un-temperable proof that I exist, and, one very far day, the only proof that I existed. :o)

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23-Izumi's story

"I don't think you remember much of your Mimasaka grandparents. The only thing you know of them is the picture in the main hall of the Corporation building and the fact that they died when you were six, when their private jet crashed in the middle of the Pacific. And, believe me or not, I still think that accident may have been a very good thing for your mental health and your happiness, Akira, whatever you choose to think in the end.

My parents... They built the Mimasaka fortune together, but they never shared much love – their marriage was an arranged one, as was the tradition in their time. Maybe that's why they never saw any use or any interest in something as unrequested and irrational as this feeling. What they put before everything else was their legacy, the empire they had managed to build.

I grew up a lot like you, surrounded in wealth and with people worshipping the very air I breathed because of it. It kind of disgusted me, you know, but I managed. I had numerous affairs with elegant women, collected girlfriends from among the daughters of my parents' business partners. Not that I regret any of it : they were throwing them at me. But none of it left me satisfied. Some of them were actually pretty decent women, but with no passion, no sparkle, no inner fire. They always bored me rapidly. None of them made me feel like I wouldn't be able to live without them. Well, from what I know of your lifestyle, I believe you may be experiencing the same kind of phase at the moment.

When I finally turned twenty-two, Mother decided I should begin to familiarize myself more with the business that would one day be mine to manage. In the time of a year or so, the branch they had put under my control made considerable progress, and many considered the decision to put me in charge a very clever one. So Economics-specialized newspapers kept pushing to get interviews of the 'young Mimasaka prodigy', as they liked to call me then.

Among the journalists that the Corporation deemed worthy to meet me, there was this brilliant young woman who worked independently, but was already considered a reference in her domain. She had studied abroad, had graduated from the London School of Economics and had got a degree in journalism at the same time.

Kyoko Shoji was her name. An Economics trends analyst, yes, but also a breathtakingly beautiful lady. If this nightmare of yours really is the memory of the night that she left us, then you can probably remember a little how she looked like. Tall and slender, with long wavy hair, sparkling dark eyes... But none of her particular features taken apart could begin to explain the effect she had on men. I don't even have a picture of her left – they took everything that connected the two of us, when they won. They wiped her out of my life – everywhere but in one place : where you went to look this morning. Well, that and the contract they had made her sign. But I'm getting ahead of my story already.

So well, I'll spare you some of unnecessary details. I think I fell in love with her almost immediately. She made me shy, and I believe I kind of made a fool of myself during that interview. Maybe the fact that she didn't seem impressed at all by my records increased the admiration she had provoked in me. I wouldn't take no for an answer. And I managed to be everywhere she went before she even got there... I guess it amused her a little, and she finished by accepting my attentions. We fell in love. Up to that point, my parents still didn't care – I could take all the mistresses I wanted, even without a family fortune or any connections, because it didn't threaten any of their plans for me.

But then, I asked her to marry me. And, when I introduced her to the family as my fiancée, hell began to invade our heaven. They tried to discourage her, without my knowledge, and when they found she would not be bribed or scared away that easily, they began pulling strings. Her articles were refused by all the newspapers, when a few weeks before, they were killing each other to have the privilege to publish her next economical analysis.

Her landlord suddenly found his daughter was coming back from Europe and would need her flat ASAP ; we used this as an opportunity to begin living together. And multiple vexations were occurring everyday. Kyoko tried to push me to move back to London with her, where she had studied, and where her contacts were more valuable than those of the Mimasaka family. But I kept telling her they would stop and accept her. After eight months of this nightmare, she told me she couldn't take anymore. I remember how she told me that 'she loved me above anyone else on this earth but herself, and that she was beginning to hate herself, becoming some kind of a kept woman'.

Maybe, if I had been less selfish, I would have let her go at that point. But I loved her too much, and I was ready to do anything to be with her. My parents had clearly overdone it, and I don't think they had anticipated the consequences. So I went to see them and told them I would be forsaking the Mimasaka name – and the attached heirloom – to go with her live in London.

Do you know how they took this announcement ? You'd think they'd try to stop me, understanding I was serious. But, no. They laughed. They told me I would not last a week without the family wealth, and that I was useless if not in management of my branch of the Mimasaka Corp. They told me I'd be back groveling for them to take me back in no time. I left without adding anything more, determined never to see them again.

So Kyoko and I went to London. And I lasted much more than a week. Of course, as far as the uselessness was concerned, they had not been so wrong. While Kyoko resumed her journalist job with as big a success as before, the only work that I was able to find was a part time typesetter job in a local newspaper and assistant Japanese teacher in a private school. But I was happy, and I'd still like to think that so was your mother. We didn't really care about our reduced means...

After six months of this life, your grandparents understood I would not give in to them, even if I had to live with Kyoko in that small two-bedrooms apartment on the sixth floor of an old building, without a lift, for the rest of my life. So they came. They came to us with a proposition. A proposition we should not have accepted, maybe. But it's way too late to think of that, isn't it ? No amounts of 'ifs' will change the past... Yet, I still wonder if she would have gone mad all the same, had we stayed in London, where we were happy.

As you well know, I'm an only child. If I didn't inherit, the empire was to be dismantled and sold to various competitors when my parents would die or retire. They didn't want that to happen : if anything, the Mimasaka Corporation was more their baby than I was. So, even though I had forsaken the name, they were hoping to make me take it again – as well as everything that came with it – in exchange for some promises.

Of course, there were concessions as well as conditions. On the one hand, they would accept our marriage, stop making Kyoko's life miserable in Japan and give me back my position in the Corporation and all the comfort that came with it. But on the other hand, Kyoko had to make two binding promises – they had prepared a contract for that : first, she had to provide the Mimasaka family with an heir within a year of our return in Japan, and second, she was to prevent ever bringing shame or scandal to our name. I was to sign a contract of my own to give my word that I would stick to the Family, even if Kyoko's contract was to be breeched. They bound us.

I see you're smiling between the glares. I guess you see the fun and the perverseness of it all. I didn't. Sure, I wanted to decline, if only because I did not want to owe them for my life any more, but, oddly enough, it was Kyoko who made me accept. She felt awful to have been the instrument of such a rupture inside of our family. Having lost her parents when she was very young, she was even more an advocate of familial love and respect than anyone else.

We wanted to have children, of course, but we also wanted to wait a little before having them. After my parents made their proposition, she pointed out to me that with the return of my social status would return the opportunity to have them earlier, because we would have the means to bring them up, immediately. So we could begin to try as soon as we got back in Tokyo. Start our own family. And as for the second term of the contract, she dismissed it, reasoning that to bring shame or scandal to the Mimasaka name would be the last possible thing that could ever happen. And to think that was actually the real reason... Gosh... We were so happy, when we got back to Japan, we felt free, we felt like we had won. We were fools...

To sum up what you may have guessed already, we tried, we succeeded, and there you were. We had produced the requested heir. The pregnancy was difficult, and it upset her a little, but, after a while, everything went back to normal. After a year, helped by my family's constant remarks, we decided to try to give you some siblings so as to stabilize her position in the family by building our own family further.

Because the contract had not stipulated they should be nice and polite with her, they didn't even try to be. And since this was a marriage of love anyway, we didn't mind having another child – we even looked forward to it.

She miscarried three times, and the doctors were completely unable to determine why physiologically. And my parents knew of it, somehow. They kept finding ways to tell us this was a proof that our marriage had been a mistake, that it was not approved by the ancestors. That we were cursed.

It began so slowly that I didn't notice it, at first. She would snap at me for no reason. She would storm out of the room because of a small matter. And then, she began acting like I wasn't there, and developed the idea that her reason for not being able to mother more children was that her first pregnancy had left her somewhat deformed. That's when she began relieving her frustrations on you. Never with physical violence, but she would rag you, snap at you, punish you severely even for little matters, even when you were as young as two years old. And it got worse as time went by. I think she was becoming crazy. She was severely depressed, in any case. And I hold my parents responsible for that : they drove her crazy.

If I remember accurately what you told me of your nightmare, a few years ago, you witnessed part of the fight that led to the end of our marriage. I don't know how accurately you remember what was said and how it ended. But... my parents were waiting for something of the sort to happen. They immediately deemed her conduct scandalous, and, therefore, a breech of the contract they had signed with her. As a consequence, she was stripped of her rights as your mother, and the divorce was almost immediate. Considering how she hated me, and how she could barely bear to see you anymore, it was wise to separate us from her. You may not agree, but I hope you understand this much. That's why I didn't resist at that point. My only thought was to protect you. I didn't think that anything could be done for her, at that point. And for that, you can blame me. There is not a day that passes now when I don't blame myself, anyway.

They handled everything – and, more even than the other parties involved, I was left in the dark. In less than a fortnight, every evidence of her had been erased in the house : the pictures she was in, the few things we had taken back with us from London, the baby book she had made for you. Everything that could link us to her. And since our wedding had been very private, in London, and that I was still just a minor branch director, very few people actually knew of her as Kyoko Mimasaka, and even fewer would have been able to say what she looked like. I don't know how they shut those people up and managed to change the official version of my life and, conjointly yours.

They didn't have to convince me much that I had to remarry. It was clear that you needed a mother, a mother who would love you as her own son. I wanted you to grow up being loved.

I finally chose to marry Chie, a much more suitable match, if you listened to them, than my first. She accepted to adopt you and raise you as her own child. And she did. Whatever you think of me, whatever you chose to do about it, don't forget that she is your mother. She's the one that was there when you needed her, the one that soothed you tears, that told you stories before you went to sleep, the one who loved you – who loves you. They said that it would be better for you never to know the truth, since Chie accepted you as her own child, and I agreed, to protect you. I reasoned that you were too young at the time to remember any of it, anyway.

I guess their plan was not so bad. It worked on everyone for almost fifteen years. And, if not for that piece of paper, it might have worked forever. Still, I must say I'm amazed you thought of this, of digging in the one place your grandparents were unable to reach. Then again, maybe I should not be amazed at the fact that you're a clever young man. You're her son, after all."

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Okay, next chapter, Akira gets pissed and spills his anger. The fight is coming... Afterwards, we'll go back to more lighter parts of the story for a little while... ;o)

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