Disclaimer: Gokusen is the property of Kozueko Morimoto.
She had been seven when her parents did not come home.
Instead, there'd been a policeman, uniformed and nervous, who came to kneel down in front of her and say, in a quiet, uncomfortable voice, "There has been an accident."
Kumiko remembers exactly how everything seemed to become slightly...flat. Static. The policeman's voice was the last clear thing she heard for a long while. She doesn't remember being frightened. No, the thing that took a hold of her then was more like...numbness. As if her skin had turned to plastic, as if she forgot, for a while, how to feel or hear anything. Voices faded in and out, shapes and figures passing to and fro before her. Images, stark and gray, flat on a wall. A series of black dresses, doors, cars, streets, pictures, coffins, neighbors, strangers, and houses.
There had been one face. A tall, stern-looking man with gray hair, who had sat looking at her, his eyes indecipherable, and then told her, in a firm, carrying voice that managed to penetrate the fog in her mind, "I am your grandfather."
But even that had paled, weakened, growing gray and watery, and there'd been another stretch of time where nothing mattered and nothing made sense.
Then—
"Ojou...you can't cry, OK? You can't cry!"
She remembers what his voice sounded like the first time she heard it. A male voice, young and full of life, awkward with sympathy and unease. A voice that filled her ears with its kindness. She remembers being struck by it like a gong being struck by a mallet, as if something inside, something within her, recognized and responded to that voice.
She remembers looking up, eyes wide.
A young man, tall, his hair short on top and long in back, wearing something like a worker's uniform. The scar over his left eye, already old.
He had knelt in front of her, like the policeman had, and put his hands on her shoulders, like the policeman hadn't.
His hands had been tough, Kumiko remembers, even then, long-fingered and callused.
"You can't cry," he'd said, even though she hadn't been crying and hadn't been about to start and actually it was him who'd been crying, the tears already on his face.
No one else had cried. Not in front of her. Not the policeman, not the neighbors, not even that stern-looking man who had said he was her grandfather. It had been that man, that young man holding her shoulders, who had been the first person Kumiko ever saw crying over the death of her parents, who showed anything on his face beyond worry or discomfort to be talking to a little girl about her dead mother and father.
The fog had lifted, blown away, had gone. The world had focused, sharpened.
"Why are you crying?" The bigger, older man who had brought her to the young man had thumped him on the head. "Kyo, you idiot! Don't cry in front of a little girl!"
His hands had left her shoulders.
"I ain't crying!" Except he had been, and he'd wiped his sleeve over his eyes.
Kyo, she had thought, and Kumiko remembers how her heart had squeezed and hurt and then fell into her stomach, so that she'd felt slightly sick, the first thing she'd been able to feel since the policeman, and how at the time she'd thought it just meant she was hungry.