Note:
Flashbacks and thoughts in italics
I do not condone or encourage any behaviors in this story. It is simply a fictional story.
"The Art Of Water"
CHAPTER 4
Cry Baby
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"What is this Utahime? You told me that they will come up with the goods." The man's voice quivered from old age. But if you think he's weak, then you have been led up the leafy garden path because his noggin was unlike his voice. This is a geezer who is cunningly wise.
"The first car we sent arrived before time and they did keep the sword securely inside Ashiya Mayura's grave. And Miwa was a successful distraction. But there is a new modification in the plans." Utahime puckered her forehead in a mix of contemplation and worry. "I got a call from Rakuhoku Medical Centre... Something happened to Miwa." In Japan, there are not many cemeteries where a body can be buried. The dead are cremated before burying. She had initially intended to put off the schedules.
Patting his long white beard, Gakuganji inhaled a deep breath and blew out slowly. "I thought the kid returned? There wasn't a mission." He raised a probing eyebrow. "Is it an accident?"
On the one hand, Kasumi has always finished whatever duty she had been notified of and come back before the first goldish speck of daybreak daubs over the fields. "No. No accident. No curses. They said she's okay aside from a cut on the forehead." On the other hand, maybe, this whole shebang is a silly, inconsequential venture.
"Even though she requires additional training, I know for sure that Miwa, the kid is not clumsy enough to trip. What else must have happened inside the graveyard other than what I had instructed?" Conceivably, Miwa got up on the wrong side of the bed. Or perhaps, just perhaps, this is a blessing in disguise. But that, of course, is a pie in the sky.
"That's what I'm concerned about... They're bringing her here. And I think it's safer to have her inside our campus."
"Fair enough. This better not be something troublesome." About that, Utahime will have to double-check to let principal Gakuganji know.
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"Aah. Great! Absolutely!"
Caramel skin basked well enough as the woman laid flat on the spread-out sheets. With the sea-green waves crashing on the shore, the sun in all his pomp, splashing light on the earthy pastels, Layla was nigh cloud nine. No blues could kill the excitement of a beach day proposal. She gazed through her tinted Cat Eye sunglasses, an eyebrow lifted as it should be. Dawdling onto her personal space in his fancy floral shirt and white shorts was Satoru, the eminent ladies man of the prestigious Gojo clan.
"Long time no see Hanazawa."
Drawling in his ambiguous suggestive tone, Gojo grinned down at her like a Cheshire cat from wonderland, which felt engaging with it being him. The open shirt gave a nice view of the muscles on his chest, and Layla didn't look away while he flexed. Frankly, it felt gratifying to her eyes. It was an uncanny deja vu of what happened the last time they met up at a bar in Kanagawa, she noted, smirking. Layla lifted her long legs, and with the back of her feet, she gave him a jog to sit on a wooden log that lay lone and soaked in brine and sand a little away to her left side.
"Over there, at the end of the corridors, to the left is my room." Layla gave a glance at his thumb that pointed to the third floor of the postmodern architecture standing sky-high, a considerably long distance off from the beach, they could see the bustling silhouettes of waiters and bellhops across the different floors through the dark draped glass walls. The hotel was gargantuan, so tall and vogue that the people in it seemed like tiny disciplined ants in a colony.
She knew all too well why he provided her that information.
"Tonight? Am I making you thirsty, Mr. Gojo?" At that, Satoru raised an eyebrow, as if he was about to say something cool that'll make her embarrassed.
"Mr. Gojo? Last time at the motel, I do remember how you screamed my name, screeching drunk." But she didn't budge, her smirk still in place. She's heard the dirtiest jokes in the whole of Tokyo, albeit it didn't mean that the Casanova who's flirting with her couldn't get dirty. In any case, Layla knew he was true. He was the one who had to drag her ass from there when she passed out in the middle of whatever they had been doing (which she'd rather not say with that crude mouth of hers) at the moment. She owed him. "By the way, how was your night at Yokohama with that funny-haired gentleman?", He inquired, sniggering...
Layla thought back to her Halloween Day fling. She would've forgotten him by now, as it happens to her other casual one-night stands if it weren't for his dull purple hair and amphitheater-wide grin. She scoffed and chuckled. Gentleman would best fit as his antonym, for the young geezer loved inclining to blatant-and-brash temperaments. Satoru knew the fact, for Layla "ditched him for that purple punk" as she heard him scoff that night at Yokohama Hotel.
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"Where am I?" She sobbed to the silence as the slimy liquid seeped from the darkness to prickle atop her bare calves. Her breathing hitched as she felt it, an eerie silence that heeded her of the unknown, like an unearthly touch of black magic that would encompass the room to devour her soul. The rattling chains tore apart her silent musings, and as he neared, a chill ran up her spine, a blizzard cold encasing her will to move.
If there is one word that she would use to describe her state, it is murk; dark, smeared, dirty murk.
"Help me. Somebody!" she screamed. "Suki! Please."
The storm brewing outside was a soothing rasp in her strive to breathe amidst the putrid draft; she wondered if it was acid pouring down the skies so dusky like her cell. She saw her brother through the flashing screen like a vivid dream before her orbs, unreachable.
She hoped he'd hear...
"Are you scared?" The man asked while he edged the blade closer to her chest, almost scraping the pale skin beneath. She couldn't breathe. His cold breath on her shoulders was paralyzing. She closed her eyes from a dull pang as the needle punctured into the skin of her neck drugging her in a daze. Dragging his nails along her navel, he whispered deranged chants: "Miwa. Kasumi. Miwa. Kasumi..." She shivered at his touch, which didn't help her pleas to halt the torture. The figure loomed over her, a ghost clambering the mist, chuckling puffs of white. His hair fell over his shoulders in a tight, classic ponytail, imperial and horrid.
"We don't have all the time in the world, Ryu. Make it fast." It was a boy about her age that commanded. "We've been here for half an hour, and all you did was grope her. I would've done more."
But Ryusei didn't seem to oblige, so far. "Can't you see? I'm enjoying myself."
"No shit Sherlock, bro." To Ryusei, the other teenager was just an irking screech in the background, for they were equal in authority. Kasumi's eyes darted to the screen where the blurring frame moved, her brother. Maybe, she is hallucinating.
Oh, if only her brother could hear her. She thought.
Suddenly, a white noise agonized her ears as it reechoed off the damp tiles. The screens on the walls turned into a black emptiness devoid of vigor. He stopped, pulling off the needle of the syringe from her body sheathed in tattered clothes.
There was a smirk painted evilly on his face as the words escaped his lips. What were they thinking? Kasumi tried to kick her legs, but to no avail: all strength had oozed out of her the moment she was hauled inside this ghastly cubicle. She didn't know when, but she was soon dozing off into an endless dream as Ryusei observed through his sharp glasses, intently. Beside him, his friend was jabbing the cigarette butt onto the brick wall."
"Bullshit. It seems like someone saw us." After some disturbances of scuffling around, she got carried out of the room.
She pondered if it'd be her last heartbeat before her world gets caught in the grim loop of death, though there weren't enough seconds left for her mind to blacken. Flashes of her days in Hamamatsu floated across her mind like a burning-out picture film before the flickers died out to embers. Her memories only added fuel to her wish to live, so she stopped thinking. She couldn't bear these overwhelming emotions.
They had carried her, probably to shift her onto a different chamber filled with nasty things she'd rather not imagine. Fortunately, they did not do that. Some heavenly luck. As she fell on the floor with a thud, she heard that voice she wanted to hear, the concerned tension in his voice, calling her name, welcoming a hope of salvation in her chest. But as Kasumi's eyes fluttered open, she wasn't greeted by the pleasance of his sweaty visage.
It wasn't him.
It was Toge. Inumaki.
In the next instant, she was falling from the void into a fluffy bed. In the next, she sank inside a mattress, popped the feathers off it along the way, busted the timber, cracked the cemented floor, and tumbled down through the debris into another bed. In the next breath, she was falling all over again, tearing the mattress, splintering an oak bed frame, crushing tiles in the same vein. This continued a couple more times until—
Miwa huffed, shifting her head on the pillows, waking up with a start. She pinched her eyes shut from the light illuminating the room, so much so that her eyes burned. "Ach!"
It was not a mere nightmare. This time she had a memory. Of the rape attempt, 3 years ago in Hiromatsu High School, Hamamatsu... What could've been a "rape" became "attempted rape." However, those two high school students, or rather the criminals involved, got away without a trace... Inumaki had come to their school for a football tournament at the time. From what she heard, he found her at the back of the school laboratory, propped against a pillar, wearing only a simple white bathrobe that stopped at her mid-thigh and nothing more. He had pulled her up and carried her to the infirmary.
In other words, the very first time both of them had met was way before the Curse Technical High's sports festival.
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Her back hurt bad but that was nothing compared to the pounding in her head. There were bandages right above her eyebrows, and it ached when she wrinkled her forehead. This morning couldn't get worse. She fumbled around searching for her phone, hitting her elbow hard on the table lamp and knocking it down. "Ow. Ow. Ow."
Deciding to calm the fuck down, Kasumi sighed onto the pillows, caressing the part where it hurt the most. Thunder rumbled outside like a loud crack of laughter, splitting the sky into two. I could've been more alert. I could've done better, instead of making a fuss. I'm being useless again. She wouldn't have had to be taken to the hospital. Is it that I'm just not fit for combat; for this job?
She tilted her head and yawned. A little exasperated, a little gloomy. As things go, Miwa was spooked, shaken. She just wished to vanish into the mattress, along the same lines as in her dream. The room was well-lit, medium-sized with clean featherlight drapes covering the casement windows to the east. Straight opposite to her feet, from the position on the bed, was an ivory white door with a lever handle. She was at pains to roll out of the bed, and step over the floor, yet hooray, she managed.
With life on a fast lane, news, bad or good, travels like a bullet train. It is not secluded from Japan's railway stations, for that matter. Notwithstanding that, some news about Kasumi Miwa flying fast and for her to gain overnight attention, the rarest occurrence in the long 18 years of her existence, sounds as nutty as a fruit cake, at least to her. Come on, this is Miwa Kasumi we're talking about. Everything in her life had been dragged on until now, beneath the motivating label: "half a loaf is better than no bread." What a display of legit optimism?
Be as it may, Miwa never prayed for easy money. She had known that money doesn't grow on trees. The concept simply doesn't capture her attention.
Kasumi held an arm to her throat, coughing. She was slightly under the weather. Furthermore, even in the adoption center, she had no luck. Somehow, those people must've figured out that they would be buying a lemon by adopting me.
So, if someone came rushing now, saying that this has all been a "simple" irrelevant experience compared to what she is about to experience, she will kindly request them to go jump in a lake. The door squeaked a bit. There was a clunk and another clunk. Miwa rubbed her eyelids and took in a quavering breath as nervous as a long-tailed cat in a room full of rocking chairs. "Sensei."
Utahime stepped inside with calm, cautious steps. "You're awake." The corners of her lips tugged up into a smile, delighted, before speaking to Kasumi in a mellow voice.
Miwa got to know that she was taken to the hospital after the guard walked inside the cemetery to check up on her, curious as to what she must've been doing inside for so long. She was found flat on the bank of a pond, unconscious. Apparently, the man checked her pulse to make sure she was alive. Even with it raining cats and dogs, how Kasumi laid stock still, waist down in the water and waist up, pale and cold on the mud, is something that puzzles even her. As far as she can recollect, she was nowhere near the pond at that time.
"Mhmm... You were unconscious for a week."
"W-What? Then why did I not heal yet? I don't feel all that refreshed."
"Relax dear. I'll explain." Utahime put a comforting hand over her shoulders, nodding. "But first, I need you to tell me what you remember, and if you're feeling anything strange."
Author's Note:
To my dear readers:
Thanks for the reviews, favorites and follows
Satoru Ackerman: my pleasure :D
TheOtherDestiny: A tipsy Kasumi. I loved it too! I'm glad you're understanding. I have a lot more to pen, like who that tiny woman is, why she knocked Kasumi out, whose grave it is, and so on. Hahaha.
I'd love to check out all your stories when I get the time. It's wonderful to know that you're about to finish two stories. Happy writing to you too!
Moria13: aww. Definitely dear.
Bonus points
*so guess what, in this story, Inumaki can speak without the fear of his curse speech activating unnecessarily.
*Also, in case you're interested, Yokohama city is in Kanagawa Prefecture.
I had a busy week. But got the boost I needed. Have a peaceful week :)