Summer Rain - Chapter 2

At nine, how many children can comprehend death?

Strangely, he did.

He could vaguely see her lovely auburn hair, undone and spread out messily across his chest. She was in an awkward position, lying on him, her head tucked between the crook of his neck and her arms hanging around his upper body.

"Mommy?"

Instinctively, he knew something was wrong. He could feel the dark puddle of sticky fluid against his palm as he pushed himself up to a sitting position. His mother's hands slid limply off his body and hit the ground with a dull thud. He reached out to touch his mother's hand, which still felt warm, but somehow, he knew that she was no longer alive. It was more than the stillness of her body, more than the absence of breath, more than the quietness of her heart. It was just a sick, nauseating feeling at the pit of his stomach that told him. And not knowing what to do, he just sat there and stared, for a long time.

He did not know how much time had passed, it could have been seconds, minutes or even hours, he did not know. But there was a point during that night when a shadow was cast upon his mother's motionless form, and he had turned around. Though the person's face was darkened by his own shadow, Ichigo knew that the person standing there, drenched from the pouring rain, was his father.

He kneeled down beside Ichigo and held him against his chest, wrapping his coat around him. His father had gently urged Ichigo to release his mother's hand, which had already gone cold. Unknowingly, his own small hands had also gone cold. He did not want to let go. He did not want to leave his mother's side. He did not know if he was shaking from the cold, the shock or the anguish – perhaps it had been all - but he was shaking so hard that he could not find the strength to retaliate against his father.

Everything that happened after that was nothing but a muddled memory of flashing lights and strangers in uniforms. They talked to him, but he could not remember what they said. They whispered around him but he could only hear the noise. They offered him blankets but he forgot if he accepted it.

He only remembered walking through the crowd to where his mother lay, and watching in horror as the medical team bagged his mother and strapped her onto a stretcher to carry her into the truck. He wanted to scream then, to tell them that she would die in there, to stop them from bringing her away. But instead of doing that, he just fell onto the ground and threw up.

He also remembered his father arriving to his side and carrying him away from the scene, away from the dizzying lights and away from those muttering strangers. At the side of the road, far away from the noise, he bent over and held Ichigo tightly, and with a slight tremble in his voice, he whispered, "We'll be fine." Ichigo looked up, and in response, his father had smiled uncertainly for some reason, and his eyes had appeared moist, but it was so dark that Ichigo could not be sure. It was a look that Ichigo would see again, but when that time came, he would still be unsure of what he had seen.

He did not realize then, but he stopped talking right after that. It was like he had suddenly lost his ability to talk, to cry, to smile, to react. He would watch his sisters cry, he would see his father sit in silence, he would see those people who knew his mother weep for her death, but he would not respond in any way.

He had overheard the doctors in the hospital suggesting that he should be brought to see a child psychologist, but his father had not taken their advice. Perhaps there was no father who would be willing to believe that there was something wrong with his own child. That there was something so wrong with his own son that he, himself, was unable to solve. Or perhaps his father, just like him, was trying to avoid the problem, to pretend that nothing was wrong and that everything was going to turn out fine.

So for weeks, Ichigo would remain in his disconnected world, standing in a strange place that he suddenly could not recognise, losing grip of what was real. He would become an empty shell of the person he had been before this incident. But throughout those weeks, he was acutely aware of one thing: his mother was dead. And that he wanted to go to where she was.

He wanted to die.

But he would live. And he would talk again. And he would cry.

But the smile would never come back; at least, never back to the way it was before.

- YL -

Note: One of my greatest fear, is losing my mother. So this is like a writing propelled by fear.

I'll never want to be Ichigo.