Minimum Damage
Sunny Side Up: Chapter Two
Recent rain leaves mist draped across green pastures. Wet grasses, morning-cold, chill tender paws. The kit bolted from the scene of his dam's death, hackles raised, tail curled under but now, at a safe distance, already the hounds' baying dims in his ears, the grief of his loss likewise.
Within the mind of the animal the past is something that must be shed quickly for survival. Only the present exists.
Sharp eyes catch movement beneath bent, sodden blades. The tucked brush of tail unfurls and pointed ears switch forward. A shiny black nose presses to damp earth and the infant fox's mind reels with the burst of information drawn in with its first curious sniff. Within seconds any lingering notion of "mother" evaporates, the kit's entire consciousness now bent solely on tracking the path of the field mouse's flight to its burrow.
Suddenly, within this grey-green world everything freezes. Another set of young ears twitch, but these are attached to a light-blond head.
Akihiko blinks his eyes as they shift outwards from the rich world within him. It takes a moment for his vision to clear, but all too soon everything comes back into focus: the greasy, London drops sliding down the panes of the window beside him, the stark walls of his room. His head tilts slightly, carefully, as though he's afraid that if he tips it too far its fantastical contents will tumble out. Pinking ears strain and a smooth brow wrinkles with the effort.
Then he hears it.
A sad huff escapes between rosy lips. He had thought that after their breakfast run-in that morning his reprieve would last all day; that she would forget about him again. But apparently not.
It was to be a "new start" day, after all.
Generally Akihiko moves so languidly it unnerves people, his stillness unbecoming a six-year old boy. But now that his fear is confirmed, he shoots up from the padded window seat he's been curled in and moves with a speed that seems equally unnatural. Tucking his notebook, ink still wet on its pages, beneath the seat's thick cushion he pulls another out. This done, he darts out of his velvet nest, scooping up thick novels and a Kanji dictionary from the floor and shoves these under the pillow at the head of his crisply made bed.
Heart pounding in his ears Akihiko returns to his windowsill, hoping anything incriminating has been successfully stashed. His eyes sweep over a row of bright, model sports cars as he makes one final scan of his room. Gifts from his grandfather, his mother had the maid put them up on a shelf that's so high he hasn't been able to touch them since each was pulled from its brightly wrapped box. The cars' flash of color is the only thing child-like in his small, militarily Spartan bedroom.
Someday I will have wide-open spaces and rooms filled with toys I can play with whenever I want.
A blush creeps upon pale cheeks at the foolishness of this pledge, but before he can bring himself to further self-recrimination, alert ears once again catch the whisper of footsteps.
Frowning at the loss of the world he's been so rudely pulled from, Akihiko drops his eyes, cheeks still aflame. He picks up his pen and the new notebook. Thin fingers begin to move the nib over the page but his mind is not there: his thoughts remain with his story and not the new words he's setting down.
A hawk will scare the kit from the field and into a bramble. Exhausted, the little one will fall asleep hiding from the bird's cruel eyes. He'll awaken to the noise of footsteps trampling the brush nearby.
Akihiko's lean body quakes as a shiver snakes through him. He is not sure if it's the imagined kit's fear he feels or his own. Within his mind he tries to soothe his small, wild creature, assuring it that there is nothing menacing out in the bush. In fact, he has determined that a rough but kind-hearted groundskeeper will find the kit and take it in. He has already seen the young fox sleeping peacefully later in the story, curled up on a crude pillow next to a crackling fire, his now-human parent sitting silently nearby, contentedly smoking.
The palsy in his tender flesh stills when Akihiko realizes that in this scene the kit's rescuer looks startlingly like the new Tanaka. Before he has time to consider the implications of this, his gaze flickers over to the door of his bedroom where the knob suddenly rattles. Akihiko drops his eyes to the notebook and turns to a fresh page, his face becoming equally blank.
He hears the door open and the pad of bare feet. Soon the long cushion of the window seat shifts with the weight of a new occupant; its sigh at this addition is only slightly softer than the one that escapes Aiko. While Akihiko's eyes remain fixed on his notebook all his other senses are functioning in overdrive. He feels heat radiating from newly-showered skin, hears the shift of the silk slip she's wearing as she settles. His nostrils quiver, filling with spices and flowers. Beneath this there is the scent of a heavier fruit; it is a perfume that makes Akihiko's throat suddenly catch and his thin chest ache.
It will not be a "new start" day after all. Despite her earlier coffee and declarations, the pull is obviously too much; she's started drinking already, though it's barely past noon.
The hand holding his pen drops limp to his lap as the notebook is pulled from him. Akihiko keeps his head down as his mother reads the decoy he has crafted for her perusal. He had shown her one of his stories months ago, but only after he'd offered it to one of his afternoon tutors. Akihiko can still recall feeling of firm chest against his back as he sat in his tutor's lap while the man read. It was not an unpleasant sensation.
He also remembers, however, the hard press of something else against him that was far less comfortable.
In a moment of rare praise, his tutor had declared his short story "promising." Aiko, however, had offered him a new frown and called it "banal." Akihiko chose to believe her until a month later he found his story, slightly altered, published under one of her pseudonyms in a magazine.
He's shown no one his real words since.
"Still writing, Autumn? I thought you'd move past this craze more quickly."
Akihiko's head remains down; he can tell by the tone of voice and the rustle of pages that she's not looking at him and doesn't expect an answer. After a few minutes of quiet, his eyes shift and from the corner of his vision, he watches as Aiko tosses the notebook aside. Its pages make distressed flapping noises as it tumbles to the polished wood floor.
Only when cold fingers find his chin, does Akihiko's head finally raise. He struggles to keep his expression dull. His mind flashes to his real story and the circling hawk. He wishes that there was a bush nearby that he could dart into, some protected, wooded circle where he was safe.
"I would think that you have seen enough of my trials you'd know already that writing is an exercise in despair and frustration."
The backroom boys' crudeness she displayed talking with her editor at breakfast is gone from her voice and her words now are polished to a hard aristocratic sheen.
His lips involuntarily tighten as Akihiko fights back a snort: for him, in the world of his words he's found only freedom.
Akio's eyes conduct another visual interrogation of her son, but whatever it is that she's hoping to find in his unusually-hued gaze escapes her. After a breath laden with disappointment, she removes her hand from her child's jaw. With a feline's grace she reconfigures herself and moments later she is on her back in the window seat, her still-damp head resting on Akihiko's lap, between bony knees.
A tight knot is suddenly tied in Akihiko's stomach; it stretches upwards and lassos his heart as well. It seems his mother still wants to pretend that they are intimates today and not strangers who reside in the same flat. He tenses as he waits for her to reveal which alien has run of her body at present.
"I was at Oxford, you know. Head of my class in literature. My advisers said I was brilliant… destined for greatness."
Akihiko has kept his head up this time. He watches one of Aiko's hands wave in accompaniment to this oft-sung dirge. The wet hair in his lap feels like a nest of eels. He dares not look down.
"I could have made it … If it wasn't for the cruelty of men. You're all bastards, Autumn."
Though his shoulders feel the desire to curve inward at this critique of his forming character, Akihiko suddenly imagines that last night while asleep, a beam from the moon turned his spine into steel. Aiko senses her son's discomfort and in a rare moment makes an attempt to soften her words.
Well, perhaps you're not…" Even here, however, she's too contaminated by her own personal poison to leave it at this. "Yet… But believe me, I've no doubt you'll grow into it."
Moon-iron intact while he ponders this, Akihiko sits rigidly, unmoving as Akio shifts and resettles herself between his thighs.
"Speaking of bastards… He called this morning…"
At last Akihiko looks down, wondering if he'll be able to discern from his mother's expression which particular "He" she's referring too. However, her eyes are now closed, her face unusually serene, causing him to wonder if perhaps she's passed out. This certainly wouldn't be the first time such a thing has occurred.
She looks very young when the age in her gaze isn't visible. Without make up, her skin is so pale as to be almost translucent. Akihiko's gaze drifts downwards. A slender strap of her slip is off a porcelain shoulder. Beneath thin silk he sees the peaks of hard nipples crowning the swell of her breasts. The rouged half-moon of an areola winks out at him where the silk dips.
His eyes shift away: not from guilt, but distaste.
At last Aiko's lids flutter open again. She gazes up at her son with an expression of annoyed curiosity; the softness of long lashes does nothing to blunt the impact of hard eyes. Her lush mouth purses.
"Why didn't you tell me your birthday was next week?"
Ah, so it's that bastard…
Before Akihiko can answer, Aiko captures one of his stunned hands and brings it to her lips. She nips it none-too-softly before settling it atop her crown.
"He's demanding to see you this week instead of next. Something about business… as usual. I suppose I'll have to concede.
"That means we'll be spending your birthday together this year." A dark gaze shifts towards the window. "I think I'll call my publicist; at the very least I should be able to get a photo op out of it." Aiko closes her eyes again and pushes up into her son's palm.
Numb fingers begin to clumsily comb through shower-tangled tresses. Akihiko knows that this is what she wants, and that soothing her is his penance for troubling her first with his birth and secondly for forcing an interaction with his father.
"Did he ask you what you wanted?"
Blue veined lids snap open again and Aiko fixes her eyes back on her only son. Akihiko works hard not to blink beneath her now-cool gaze. The nod of a head is all that is offered in answer.
"And what did you tell him?"
As careful as he's been, his tongue suddenly betrays him and the words bubble forth before he can stop them.
"I told him I wanted a bear as big as myself."
It's difficult for Akihiko not to start when this causes Aiko to bolt upright. She twists and tilts her head as she studies him. Seeing he's earnest, a sharp barking laugh escapes her.
"Leave it to you, Autumn… What on earth would you want something like that for? I have never heard of anything so ridiculous."
The chill of her words makes Akihiko's face burn. He turns bright cheeks to the gray London sky outside his bedroom window. His voice is soft.
"I just do."
He's surprised when rather than sting him further with a slap for his impertinence, Aiko merely shakes her head and moments later resettles herself into her previous posture. Apparently she's only drunk enough so far to be in "mellow mode."
Anger mode must still be a few swallows away.
Icy fingers take his as Akihiko feels his reluctant hand drawn back to his mother's thick hair. The iron in his spine begins to dissolve. He hesitates only a moment before pressing gentle circles at Aiko's temple. A weary sigh breaks from his chest.
"Bear was your father's nickname, you know. I gave it to him on our first excursion together."
Aiko stares up at her son, but his gaze is fixed on some unseen thing outside the window. Once she realizes he does not intend to look back at her, she looks away herself and continues.
"When your great Uncle Usami died, my father knew he'd be called to step in as president of Usami-corps. That meant no more European high-life… It was back to the corporate trenches of Japan. In his years abroad as international director, your grandfather had been too corrupted by Western influences to find such a shift palatable."
Visions of Akihiko's grandfather suddenly fill a six-year-old head: the now-patriarch of the Usami clan whose command of language and manner is such that he moves between the elite of Japan and Europe with the grace and nimbleness of a hart. Despite how much she hates him, Aiko Usami is like her father in this. Grandfather Usami says the same is expected of him now, as they share the same genes. Keeping his face turned away from his softly drunken mother, Akihiko suddenly wonders what other inheritance has been gifted to him within the family DNA.
"So father wanted someone to step in, someone hungry for a new name and new opportunities. He pulled me from school and told me it was time to marry or else. Apparently he's only really Western when it suits him."
At the catch in his mother's voice Akihiko can't help but tilt his head. He chances a glance down and is stunned to see something there that looks akin to honesty.
"It is not in my blood to be poor, Autumn."
Aiko's eyes and her tone stir an unfamiliar feeling in Akihiko and he wonders if there's a word that exists to articulate it.
There must be, there is a word for everything if one searches hard enough.
"So the suitors came and when it was your father's turn he took me to the zoo, of all places. It was nothing like the other introductions… all fancy dinners and fine art affairs.
"We walked around for hours. It was sunny that day for the first time in weeks. I had such a lovely outing… I thought that he might actually be different from my other prospects."
"I should have been smart enough to realize that the man simply liked seeing things in cages."
Shifting away from the suddenly bitter expression on Aiko's face, Akihiko clenches the hand not carding his mother's hair until his knuckles turn white. He wonders that if this is really the truth, why he's not held Usami Fuyuhiko's attention more raptly.
"When we stopped outside the bear pit, I watched them and I thought that he was rather bear-like himself: all growly and lumbering. He laughed when I told him so."
"Then he smiled and told me as charmingly awkward as they might look, that they're quite voracious predators."
This said, Aiko pushes her son's stilled hand from her hair and rises. She turns and faces Akihiko as she shrugs the wayward strap of silk back up onto her shoulder. Standing there, barefoot, slip-clad, her tumbled tresses awry, if not for her proud posture she would look like a waif.
"So, I suppose one way or another, the nickname I gave your father was quite apt."
For a moment Aiko's mask falls away again and the woman looks quite lost. Her head tips to the side and after an uncomfortable minute, clouded eyes find and focus on Akihiko once more. She stares at her inscrutable child, sitting there, beholding her so solemnly: raised in England but already so much more Japanese than she. A deep sigh rattles her chest.
"He'll be here for you tomorrow at nine sharp."
It frustrates Aiko that this announcement brings no shift in Akihiko's expression. If he would only behave in a more normal manner, she assures herself that she might like her son more. It is the child's fault that his stoicism drives her to be cruel. Were her vision not softened from earlier imbibing, however, she might see the vein in her son's slender neck suddenly pulsing at a racehorse's pace.
"He'll bring you your bear, Autumn. And this time I'll let you keep it.
She turns to walk away, not caring to see where her spear lands, suddenly consumed with an irrational hatred for her sole offspring, matched only by her disdain of the man who planted such an aberrant seed within her and then left to tend other gardens.
"It can remind you that no matter what gifts he offers to woo you, he has another family… One that he loves. You are merely an investment in his financial future, a security deposit so to speak."
Aiko pauses in her trek to the door for a moment, allowing her words to sink in. There's no noise but the sound of raindrops pattering against the window's thick glass. Disappointed with the silence that follows her revelation, her shoulders slump slightly, but she shakes this off quickly and straightens. A moment later she's gone, the door closing with a loud "click" behind her.
Minutes tick by as Akihiko sits unmoving. He's heard whispers of Usami Fuyuhiko's other family among the servants, but this is the first time that his mother has ever spoken of it. Hearing the words said out loud by Aiko causes a startling weight to suddenly settle on Akihiko's chest. He feels like he did the time he got thrown off one of grandfather's ponies and was left with no breath.
At last some part of him regains motion. Akihiko can feel the warm wetness of this loosed bit of himself sliding down from the corner of one of his unblinking eyes. He gathers the teardrop up on the tip of his finger. The drop sits fatly there, quivering slightly.
Surface tension… That's what holding it together.
Akihiko wonders if the same can be said of humans. Not immediately arriving at an answer, he presses his finger against the chilled pane beside him so that his tear can join its wild counterparts slicking down the other side of the glass.
Let the sky cry for me, I have no use for tears.
This done, he rises and steps silently to his bedroom door. With the soft creak of hinges he's out in the hall and soon finds himself standing outside Aiko's own closed bedroom door. Tipping his head, he can hear on the other side of the polished mahogany the tap of fingers on keyboard, the clink of ice rattling loosely in a crystal tumbler, and every now and again a soft curse or a hiccupping sob.
After listening to this repeating chorus for a number of minutes, Akihiko returns to his room quietly closing the door behind him. He steps back to his window seat and bends over, retrieving his false notebook. Small hands smooth the ruffled feathers of his decoy's pages before he tucks it away again and pulls out his real words.
Resettling himself back into his cushioned perch, he opens his notebook. Its creased back falls open easily to where he left off. Pale eyes scan the page looking for the words: the key to portal that will allow him to fall back into this world.
Within the mind of the animal the past is something that must be shed quickly for survival. Only the present exists.
Akihiko is unconscious of the soft sigh that escapes him as he picks up his pen and begins writing.
Thank you for reading and for your patience in awaiting an update.