Goggles.
----------------------------
By: Sonfaro
----------------------------
Takuya: Aggravation
-------------------------------------
He'd gotten them from someone close. Some one who he both wanted to hug, and DDT to the floor.
Most younger siblings were like that, Takuya Kanbara would later realize. They were often fickle creatures, those extra children the mother tended to have. At one end they could be close friends. At the other, they could be the most annoying creatures on the face of the earth. Often times, at least as far as Shinya was concerned, it was hard to tell.
Takuya still remembered how he had gained those goggles. It had been his birthday. All of his friends had gotten him things he could use in life. Like a new video game, a soccer ball. Something like that. And he was perfectly happy with those gifts. To Takuya, these gifts made sense.
Shinya's gift however, did not.
"What are these?" Takuya would remember asking. He hadn't been excited about his little brothers gift to begin with, but upon opening it found himself even more disappointed than he had expected.
"Goggles", said Shinya, as if it were the most natural gift in the world.
Takuya frowned. "What am I going to use goggles for?"
Shinya made a face. "You don't like it?"
Of course, Takuya Kanbara wasn't enamored by the pair of goggles his little brother Shinya had given him on his birthday. In fact, the nine-year-old brunette had been annoyed by the 'gift', if one could call it that. He had pestered his mother about the obviously cheap brand goggles.
"What am I going to do with a pair of goggles momma?
"Well it was all that your brother could afford". His mother had told him.
Begrudgingly, Takuya stuck it on a nearby hat and left it there. He never took it off. Shinya and his mother thought he was being nice. Takuya was just being lazy. The goggles kept his hat tighter, and that was all he cared about.
And yet, when ever he and Shinya went out to play soccer, or wrestle on the deck, or go fishing in the park, his little brother never failed to remind his elder that he still wore those goggles on his head. Takuya often wanted to hurl the things back at his brother, but never got around to it. Takuya couldn't quite put his finger on it, but something (or someone) was telling him to keep his goggles.
Three years later, it would be the only link that Takuya still had to his family.
He sat beneath one of the many tree's in the forest terminal and just looked at them for a moment. They were cheap, and had no value to him in this strange new world he and the others had discovered. And yet, they were all he had. He chuckled at the irony of his situation.
He looked around to see the others. They were all so far from home. So far from the normalcy's of life. It was often easy for them to forget the people closest to them, still waiting on the other side.
But Takuya had a way to remember. For him, no matter how annoying his little brother was, the gift he gave him would always remind him of happiness. Home. And most of all family.
End Aggravation...