DISCLAIMER: I do not own Kamui and Toru.
Toru's Secret
He snapped out of his reverie when a gentle hand brushed through his hair. He looked up and met Toru Shirou's eyes. I'm worried about you, her eyes said. I know you won't tell me anything because you're all grown up now and my job as a mother stops at just watching over you from a distance. I thought that I could do this on my own. I've never realized that what a boy truly needs is a father. If you had a father, maybe you wouldn't look the way you do right now. Maybe life would have been easier for you.
All these ran through Toru's mind as she looked at her son and he gripped her hand back in assurance.
"I'm alright," Kamui told her. "Just thinking."
Sitting down next to him, Toru passed him a cup of freshly brewed coffee, her own cup in hand. "Do you wanna talk about it?"
A promising silence hung between mother and son, her mind fidgeting around the hope that he might finally open up to her.
Kamui shook his head, not noticing the disappointment instantly plunging into the gray pools of his mother's eyes. She patted his hand and was about to stand when he said, "it's not that I don't wanna talk about it. It's just... I don't know where to start."
Toru sat back down and waited, careful not to appear too anxious.
"I keep having these strange recurring dreams. I don't remember much by the time I wake up but they always leave me feeling sad. Sometimes I'll even be crying."
"You don't remember anything?" Toru doesn't know much about dreams but she knows their power.
Kamui knitted his eyebrows and thought deeply, trying to pull parts of the dream memories back until his temple hurts. "A girl with wings... trying to tell me something. Sometimes there was blood... and I can hear a man mourning... those are the times I'd wake up crying and it can get very unbearable and painful sometimes that I can't go back to sleep. The pain felt so real like... whatever happened in the dream happened to me." He turned back towards Toru, "have you ever had dreams like that?"
"Everyone has dreams," Toru said.
"But not like that!" Kamui snapped.
Toru looked at her son, knowing that if she made any more arbitrary statements she'll be shut out from her son's world once again and this time it would definitely be her fault. Maybe she should start sharing her own piece of knowledge. It isn't much but...
"There are two kinds of dreams," Toru began. "One is the kind that Sigmund Freud talked about. The kind of the dream that reveals the true nature of you. When you suppress your true desires during your waking life, be it because of the expectations that others have on you, or be it because of the rules that state that certain desires are wrong, it takes a toll on your mind that they come back at you in the form of dreams. It's just the way your brain deals with the pain of being unable to live its truest uttermost wanted desires. Such dreams eat at you without you even knowing and that's why people become unhappy when they're awake. They prefer to dream."
"What's the other kind of dream?" Kamui asked.
"Even the greatest scientists in the world couldn't figure it out," Toru said. "But what I believe is when your mind reaches a certain level of consciousness, it'll start to reach out."
She stretched out her fingers and grabbed the air around her. To Kamui, they looked like claws as he examined her unpolished nails.
"It'll try to grab at something that is of the same level. Like a monkey that keeps climbing until it reaches the highest tree branch. That's what this super consciousness, or whatever you wanna call it, does. It'll grab onto anything that vibrates on the same level. A past memory, an idea, other super consciousnesses from different dimensions."
She dropped her hands back onto her lap.
"The only time it could do that is when the conscious brain is asleep and that's when dreams happen. It's either you reaching out or something else reaching into you."
Kamui stared at his mother, eyes grown slightly wide. He had never known this side of her and seeing it for the first time made him feel pleased. How? he thought and opened his mouth to ask but clamped it shut again because he already knew the answer. Those books she kept reading of course! All these years and he never knew his mother was a learned woman. Not much in the modern sense but still.
"A few weeks ago, I was asked if I wanted to see a priestess. They said she could read dreams."
"Is her name Hinoto?"
Kamui nodded.
"Did you see her?"
He shook his head. "How did you know about her?"
"I know many things, Kamui. I just never wanted you to find out."
"Why?" Kamui asked. He couldn't bring himself to be angry at her for keeping him in the dark all these years. Maybe she had very good reasons.
Toru's smile was weak. "To protect you. It's not something to be proud of. People laugh at this sort of talk. Except..." she paused suddenly and Kamui immediately grabbed that opportunity.
"My father?" Kamui finished for her. His eyes bore into her shocked ones.
It's time we talk about him, they both thought.
Toru nodded, knowing she can't run away. For the longest time, she had done her best to avoid talking about him. The easiest way was to lie to Kamui and said that the man whom she had loved and who had loved her back walked out of their lives because he was simply a bad and irresponsible man.
But guess what? The past always catches up with you, doesn't it Toru Shirou?
"I guess it's time to tell you the truth about your father," Toru said. "and the reason why I never let go of his family name and gave you mine instead."
Kamui's eyes darted to the clock hanging on their kitchen wall. 7:30A.M. There's time, he thought.
"But first, let me tell you what I know about my family name Magami."
Magami, Kamui repeated the name in his head and remembered how he had once asked with his child-like curiosity where are the rest of his mother's family.
"Kamui? Who made you cry?"
Toru embraced her son as he sobbed against her, his small fists gripping tightly around her fallen locks. A fresh young schoolboy who had just arrived in Okinawa, she had expected
(or secretly hoped)
for him to come home with the excitement to tell her of all the new friends he had made in his new school.
Kamui rubbed his tears away with his 7-year old hands and as his shoulders ceased to shake, Toru slowly pulled away from him and waited for him to speak.
"Mama," Kamui choked. "Am I an unwanted child?"
Taken back, Toru only stared at Kamui. How naïve she had been to think that Kamui could live as a normal child.
"They said a child without a father is an unwanted child. So am I an unwanted child?"
Kamui finally met his mother's eyes and waited for an answer. So much pain, so much loss and Toru could feel her own tears welling up. But instead she smiled and took Kamui's small hands in her own. As a mother, it's her duty to teach strength to her only son.
"Of course you're not an unwanted child. You still have me."
"But everyone else said-"
"Everyone else is afraid of what they don't understand," Toru said. "Everyone gets to walk the same path. Except you, except me. Our roads are different from others. And different is sometimes also difficult. What you're experiencing is difficult and not many boys and girls your age get to feel what you're feeling right now."
"I don't understand," Kamui said.
"You will as you get older," Toru assured him. "I didn't too when I was your age and I had to learn it all by myself."
"Why?"
"I didn't have a mother and father."
Kamui's eyes grew wider with shock and his lips trembled with the realization that brought him a pain much bigger than the one he had felt earlier. Knowing what her son realized,Toru nodded.
"I'm an unwanted child."
Once again, the tears kept falling but this time Toru did not try to comfort him. This was part of a child's growth. To understand that there are bigger pains out there and there are some things that a child must learn by himself.
"Mama, I'm sorry," Kamui croaked once the tears stopped flowing. After tonight, he would vow to become stronger for his mother and face the world with no more shame. He's got a different path to walk from the rest.
"What happened to them?" Kamui asked and Toru knew he meant her parents.
"They died in the name of Magami."
But Kamui only looked at her quizzically. "Magami?"
Toru began to lead them home. "One day Kamui, when you're older, I'll explain to you what Magami means. Right now, you're still too young to understand and such knowledge would only ruin your young mind. So, please promise me that you'll try to live as normal a life as you can. Then when you're ready, I promise I'll tell you."
"Thousands of years ago, for some unknown reason the Magami clan was chosen for a special duty. That duty was to serve the world as kagenie. If anyone of high importance was fated to die, a Magami member would have to act as his substitute and die instead, thus prolonging the life of the other."
"Voodoo dolls," Kamui said. "You're like voodoo dolls." She nodded.
"Do people have to pay a lot of money for that?" Kamui asked.
Toru nodded silently, still unable to believe the number of zeros she had seen in her family's ledger.
"For generations, the Magami clan led lives that could never reach a ripe old age. The oldest Magami member that ever lived was your great-grandmother, Chiaki Magami but even then she only got to live until 50. My mother only lived till 30. I was only 12 then and your aunt was 10 when our mother died."
Toru paused to take a few sips of her coffee. She gazed towards the window with a faraway look in her eyes, feeling the wash of memories coming in through the shades of morning sunlight that were spilling in. Kamui waited patiently for her to continue, at the same time admiring this side of his mother which he has never seen before.
"My father was then playing an important role in the government and that was how he learned of my mother because she had been chosen as his kagenie. It was against rules for kagenie and owner to meet but my father was infamous for breaking the rules. He fell in love with my mother the minute he saw her and being the rebel that he was he married her. Knowing that because of him she would die, he took a step back from his duties and went low profile. I should say that other than the years after having you, those first 12 years of my life were my happiest. But it all ended when he became the target of an assassination. And as you would have guessed, my mother took the fall instead. I was there when it happened. Unable to handle the loss, my father wanted to take Tokiko and me away. He knew that our time to act as kagenie would come and he wanted to free us from it. But he never came to get us. It wasn't until years later that I learned he was murdered on the night he planned to take us. Killed exactly the same way my mother was killed. I had never mourned so hard in my life even though by then I've already accepted my fate as a Magami and the thought of running away never crossed my mind."
"Tokiko and I were then taken to a shrine by some people who claimed to be family and they raised us there. It was customary for a Magami to begin their duty as kagenie at the start of 16 and I knew that I was already chosen for someone. We weren't supposed to leave the shrine on certain dates. That's because those were the dates when the great meetings are being held. And like I said, it's against rules to meet the one I'm going to die for. But either I was curious or I started my training very late in age or I must have inherited that rebellious streak from my father, I went out and ended up in the diet building."
Toru paused and looked at Kamui. His eyes were wide, already knowing what she was revealing next.
"That's where I met your father."