A/N- Yup. I'm back with the next chapter. Had a lotta problems with my computer. I've switched to Win XP now.
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Chapter 2
Chiyoe sighed as she sipped her tea daintily. It's warm fragrance curled comfortingly around her as she closed her eyes and savoured the taste.
"You seem far away" Fujitaka Kinomoto murmured as he cast a sad smile at his wife of three years. "May I ask what occupies your mind so early in the morning?"
"I was merely reflecting on the years, Fujitaka." Chiyoe smiled. The pink rosebud patterned china clinked as she set her cup down. "The last three years, especially."
A light frown marred her husband's features as he folded up his newspapers and placed them on a side table.
"There is something I have wanted to ask you for a long time now, Chiyoe."
"Yes, Fujitaka?"
He took a deep breath. "I must know this. It has been worrying me, of late. Has..Have you..do you regret this? Becoming my wife? Both of us know the conditions were not ideal. I, myself understand that.."
"Fujitaka." Chiyoe's soft voice interrupted his rambling and he looked up nervously.
"I do not regret this in the least."
He returned her rather watery smile as she leaned over to grasp his hand.
"We may not be lovers, Fujitaka. But we are, I hope, friends."
He smiled warmly.
"You will always be my friend, Chiyoe." He said quietly. "I have a great many things I must thank you for. Touya is like the son I never had and you have been …very good to my daughter. I can ask for no more."
Chiyoe smiled sadly. She started to say something when a door banged somewhere along the corridoor. She frowned as she heard the clatter of uneven steps as someone raced down the passage.
"What on earth.." Fujitaka murmured, rising from the chair. He pushed his chair backwards, moving away from the table. Seconds later a furious girl pushed open the door, slamming it behind her in her rage as she grasped the wall for support, her face almost hidden under a mass of auburn curls that cascaded down her forehead and back..
"Sakura?" Chiyoe frowned. She rose from the table, moving towards the girl she had grown to care about quite a bit in the last three years.
"You're upset. " Her frown turned even more pronounced. "Is it Jin again? Sakura, I know divorce is unpleasant. But it's no reason to be so volatile. "
Sakura raised red rimmed eyes to her and Chiyoe's mouth dropped.
Fujitaka looked distressed as he stepped towards his daughter, in an attempt to find out what was wrong. Her words stopped him in his tracks.
"Why?"
"Sakura?" He stared at her, puzzled. " Why what?"
"What's wrong?" Chiyoe echoed his bewilderment.
Sakura only spoke two words, but they were enough to turn his life upside down, sending him, pale, shocked and limp, crashing back down to his seat.
"She's alive"
"Sakura.." He whispered.
"She's alive!" Sakura cried. "She's been alive, all this time and you've lied to me all my life!"
Chiyoe turned pale.
"Sakura, what are you talking about?" She sounded panicked, pleading.
Sakura raised her tear streaked face to her stepmother.
"My mother's alive." She whispered. "She's alive."
Pain raced through Fujitaka, keen as a scalpel. "Where did you get an idea like that?" He asked in a low voice.
"From her" Sakura's tone was bitter and still pulsing with fury. "I heard it from her."
Only then did he catch sight of the creamy sheet she held in her hands and he was unable to hold back the fear and shock in his voice.
"Sakura, what is..?
"A letter." His daughter's voice shook with shock and betrayal.
"A letter from my mother."
Fujitak raised a hand to his forehead.
"May I?" He whispered, gesturing weakly towards the sheet.
"Is my mother dead?" It was almost a challenge and Fujitaka bit his lower lip to keep it from trembling.
He wavered, holding the lie as close to his heart as he held his daughter. It was a closely guarded secret he had kept for fifteen years. But he knew, as much as he wished it could be otherwise, he knew with a certainity that was shockingly powerful and almost numbing to him, that if he kept one, he would lose the other
"No." His final response was quiet, almost controlled.
"Just like that." The tears swam dangerously close to the surface. "Just a no? After all this time, all the lies? All these years?"
Only one lie, he thought painfully, and not nearly enough time. "I'll do my best to explain it all to you, Sakura. But I'd like to see the letter."
He watched, almost detatched, as she flung the paper onto the table with trembling hands.
His own shook as he clutched at the paper, raising it to his eyes, while another hand fumbled with the silver rimmed spectacles on his nose.
The paper shook so in Fujitaka's hand that he was forced to set the sheet back on the table in front of him. The handwriting was unmistakable. Dreaded. He read it carefully, word by word.
Dear Sakura,
I realize this letter might come as a surprise to you. It seemed unwise, or at least unfair, to contact you before this, for reasons that you will soon know. Perhaps a phone call might have been more personal. However, it was my belief that you would need time. And a letter gives you more of a choice on your options. Something that you were deprived of in the beginning.
They will have told you I died when you were very young. In some ways, I suppose it was true, and I agreed with the decision to spare you the pain and the problems that would have arisen with the knowledge of the truth over time, not merely in the beginning. Over fifteen years have passed, and you're no longer a child, but a strong capable woman. I do not have the right to be proud of your accomplishments, since I was absent for the greater part of your life. However, I do rejoice in them.
You have, I believe, the right to know that your mother is alive. You will, perhaps, not welcome the news. However, I made the decision to contact you, and I won't regret it.
If you want to see me, or simply have questions that demand answers that others cannot give you, you will be welcome. My home is at Lone Pine, on the outskirts of Tomoeda. The invitation is an open one. If you decide to accept it, I will be pleased to have you stay as long as it suits you to. If you don't contact me, I'll understand that you don't wish to pursue the relationship. I hope the curiosity that pushed you as a child will tempt you to at least speak with me.
Yours,
Nadeshiko Amamiya Itsuike
Nadeshiko. Fujitaka closed his eyes. Good God, Nadeshiko.
Nearly sixteen years had passed since he'd last seen her, but he remembered everything about her with ridiculously utter clarity. The scent she'd worn that reminded him of autumn in all its gentle, yet fiery brown splendour, the quick, tinkling, infectious laugh that never failed to turn heads, the dark, uniquely part grey, part mahogany hair that flowed like rain down her back, the sooty eyes and willowy, deceptively fragile looking body.
So clear were his memories that when Fujitaka wearily opened his eyes again he thought he saw her. His heart took one hard, violent leap into his throat that was part fear, part long-suppressed desire.
But it was Sakura, her back ramrod stiff, now facing away from him.
How could he have ever forgotten Nadeshiko? He asked himself, when he had only to look at their daughter to see her?
Chiyoe stood, all but forgotten at the door. A pale figure in her long yellow dress. Fujitaka sighed, sending her a sad glance, before rising and looking to his daughter.
"What do you plan to do?" he asked Sakura, quietly.
"I haven't made a decision." She kept her back to him. "A great deal of it depends on what you tell me."
Fujitaka wished he could go to her, touch her shoulders, turn her round to face him and make her see how hard it was for him to bring up the past.
To make her see he was hurting too, to reassure her that everything would be alright and that he loved her and always would. But she wouldn't welcome him now. He wished he could sit back down, bury his face in his hands.
But that would be weak, and useless. Not as though he had done anything but be useless for the last decade and a half.
More, much more, he wished he could go back sixteen years and do something, anything, to stop fate from running recklessly over his life. To keep Nadeshiko in his arms, where she belonged, to keep their family safe and secure…
But that was impossible.
"It isn't a simple matter, Sakura."
"Lies are usually complicated." She shot back.
She turned then, and his eyes flashed with pain. She looked so much like his Nadeshiko, his own sweet Nade.The bright hair carelessly tumbled, the emarald eyes dark and smouldering, the skin over those long, delicate facial bones flushed luminously with passion. Some women looked their best when their emotions were at a dangerous peak.
Tear streaked or not, she looke beautiful, fiery, ready.
So it had been with Nadeshiko. So it was with her daughter.
"That's what you've done all these years, isn't it?" Sakura continued bitterly. "You've lied to me. Grandfather lied. He lied." Sakura gestured toward the desk where the letter lay. "If that letter hadn't come, you would've continued to lie to me."
"Yes, as long as I continued to think it was best for you."
"Best for me?" Sakura cried out. "How could it be best for me to believe my mother was dead? How can a lie ever be best for anyone?"
"You've always been so sure of right and wrong, Sakura. It's an admirable quality." Fujitaka said softly.
"You're not answering me" Sakura bit out.
"I ask that you give me time, Sakura, only that."
She hesitated, then nodded slightly.
"Even as a child, your ethics were unwavering. So difficult for mere mortals to measure up."
Her eyes kindled. It was close, much too close to what Jin su had accused her of. "So, it's my fault, now?"She asked bitterly.
"No. No." He closed his eyes and rubbed absently at a point in the center of his forehead. "Please understand this, Sakura. None of it was your fault, none of it at all and all of it was because of you."
At this point, Chiyoe spoke up quietly.
"Your father, he had a reason, Sakura. You were the reason, most of it, but you were never the cause of the problems."
Sakura drew a sharp breath, stiffened her spine. "You knew?"
"Yes. I had to tell her before we were married." Her father answered.
" 'Had to tell her,' " Sakura repeated, mockingly. "But not me."
"It was not, I assure you, a decision that I made lightly. That any of us made lightly. Nadeshiko, your…your grandfather, and I all believed it was in your best interest that this deception be made. You were only three, Sakura. Hardly more than a baby."
"That's no excuse" Sakura snapped. "Perhaps, in the beginning. But I've been an adult for some time, 'tou san. I've been married, divorced."
"And the years go by in leaps and bounds." He said softly, pensively. He'd convinced himself that this moment of confrontation would never come. That his life was too staid, too stable to ever take this spinning dip on the roller coaster again. But Nadeshiko, he thought, had never settled for staid.
Neither had Sakura. And now it was time for the truth to emerge.
"I told you, long ago, how it was that I met your mother" He began.
"You were her teacher" Sakura said stiffly.
"Hai. I was. She was beautiful, young, vibrant. I've never really understood why she was attracted to me. It happened quite quickly, really. We were married within six months after we met, much to the displeasure of …her family, mine as well."
"Ji san did not like my mother, then?"
"He did not understand her, perhaps I didn't, enough, either. But I loved her and so we plunged into marriage headfirst. It was too soon. Six months was hardly long enough for either of us to understand how truly opposite we were in nature.
We lived in Sayon. We'd both come from what you'd call privileged backgrounds, but she had a freedom I could never emulate, a life that was a part of her I could never understand. A wildness, a lust for people, for things, for places. And, of course.." He finished, bitterly, "Her horses."
He swallowed and looked away, to ease some of the pain of remembering. "I think it was the horses more than anything else that first came between us. After you were born, she wanted desperately to move back to the farm in Tomoeda.
She wanted you to be raised there, to grow up to love her world as she did. My ambitions and hopes for the future were here. I was working on my doctorate, and even then I had my eye set on becoming the head of the paleantology department here.
For a while we compromised, and I spent what weekends I could spare in Tomoeda. I gave up my plans for a dig in Tunisia. She, somehow, could harly spend a week away from her farm. If it wasn't the Derby, it was the North Races and if it wasn't that, it was the West course. It wasn't enough. It's simplest to say we grew apart."
'Safer to say it' he thought, staring at his ring finger. And certainly less painful. "We decided to divorce. She wanted you in Tomoeda with her. I wanted you here, with me. I neither understood nor cared for the racing crowd she ran with, the gamblers, the jockeys. We fought, bitterly. Now, I think it was more that I didn't want to understand that part of her world. It was different, very different from mine, yes.
But it was also that your mother loved that world, made it her heart and breath and soul and it was hard for me to accept how much more that farm and the horses meant to her that what we had together. But then things got worse."
He let out a deep breath "Then we hired lawyers."
"A custody suit?" Stunned, Sakura gaped at her father. "You fought over me? Over custody?"
"It was an ugly business, unbelievably vile. I hated every moment of it. How two people who had loved each other, had created a child together, could become such mortal enemies, willing, almost despearate to prove that one was a better parent that the other, is a pathetic commentary on human nature." He looked up again, finally, and faced her.
"I'm not proud of it, Sakura, but I believed in my heart that you belonged with me. She was already seeing other men. It was rumored that one of them had ties to organized crime. A woman like Nadeshiko would always attract men. It was as though she was flaunting them, the parties, her lifestyle, daring me and the world to condemn her for doing as she pleased."
"So you won," Sakura said quietly. "You won the suit, and me, then decided to tell me she'd died." She turned away again, facing the window. "People divorced in the seventies, 'tou san. Children coped. There should have been visitation. I should have been allowed to see her."
"She didn't want you to see her. Neither did I."
"Why? Because she ran off with one of her men?" Sakura spat, furiously, turning to face him. Her beautiful luminous emarald eyes shining with a fierce, furious light.
"No." Fujitaka fumbled with a napkin in his hand, twisting it nervously. "It was because she killed one of them, Sakura. Because your mother spent ten years in prison for murder."