bored411: Thank you very much! The next couple chapters are going to cover Kosuke's life after this. I'm going to warn you right here and now: it's going to get worse.
Lillyannp: *clasps your shoulder* Death flags. Death flags everywhere.
JuggernautJJ: Character development 'bout to hit this girl like a train.
infinityneverlasts: You know I was honestly concerned that it would come too out-of-left-field and take readers too much by surprise but then I re-read the past two chapters and I realized there are 1032057 signs that it was coming.
Cyan Rubies: Thank you soooo much! It's so nostalgic reading reviews from my old readers, haha. This Kosuke (that you have read thus far) stems a bit from myself, not going to lie.
Thank you so much to everyone again for keeping up with the story! I did a little bit of re-arranging and snipping of the next chapters. Thus, the first seven chapters are going to cover Kosuke's life, and we'll finally be seeing Kyoya again in the eighth chapter.
I am going to warn you guys straight-up now that this chapter is going to be a hot steaming cup of depresso. So be aware.
I'm always so excited to write this story and post its chapters. Thank you all again for the feedback!
Two people are dead after a one-car crash yesterday evening.
According to Corporal Ken Yoshida, Marti Nakahara of Karuizawa was driving a 2003 Honda Odyssey just outside of city limits on an unnamed dirt road. Nakahara seemed to have been speeding around a tight turn and lost control of the vehicle.
The car veered off the road and dropped down a steep hill, overturning an unknown number of times before crashing into trees.
Marti's wife, Emiko Nakahara, was also in the car at the time of the accident. Both were killed on impact.
The crash is currently under investigation.
Kosuke thinks it's funny in a not very funny way that the end of everything she knows got summed up in five choppy paragraphs.
The author doesn't mention her or Minami or Hitsuji.
They don't mention that Emiko and Marti were parents at all.
Or that they owned the local restaurant The Lily Bowl.
Or that they were heading to a business trip.
Or that their oldest daughter was getting ready for college.
Or that Emiko was trying to give up smoking.
Or that Marti still had his high school clothes in cardboard boxes.
Or that Emiko liked to read horror books in her free time.
Or that Marti used to cater cruise ships and travelled all over the ocean.
Or that Emiko and Marti Nakahara were two actual, living people that couldn't be summed up in five choppy paragraphs.
A lot of people end up coming to The Lily Bowl that day. Neighbors and friends.
Kohta and Okina, of course. At some point, Jet and Tomoko. A teacher or two from school. Ai.
The whole place is full to the point where not everyone can fit inside.
Kosuke cries.
She cries, and she cries, and she cries until it hurts but she can't stop.
She cries into Kohta's chest and soaks the front of his shirt.
She cries into dozens of handkerchiefs that women old and young seem to give her at every other moment.
She cries against Okina, completely slung over her while the girl struggles to keep her on her feet.
She goes to the bathroom to take a break from it all, but then she's on the floor, back against the wall, her head between her knees, crying so hard she can't breathe. The bathroom is too small. Her broken voice sounds tinny in her ears.
It hurts.
It hurts so bad.
Her eyes hurt.
Her throat hurts.
Her chest hurts.
She's drowning and no one can pull her to safety.
She's drowning and all the comforting hugs, the prayers, the tears wiped away with fingers that aren't her own, they all make her sink faster.
Minami. Hitsuji.
Oh god, her baby brother and sister.
Minami understands but she can't accept it.
Kosuke can't escape her sounds.
The bawling.
The screaming.
The demands for Mommy and Daddy to come home.
People try to comfort her, but they are strangers.
Hitsuji does not understand.
He knows that a lot of people are in his house but Mama and Daddy aren't. He knows that Kobuay and Meeamee are crying, but he doesn't know why.
Kosuke—the one remaining "adult" of his family—is too weak to comfort him in any way, shape, or form, so it is up to Okina to tend to him when she isn't propping up her friend.
A few adults, mostly women, and most of those women sort-of family friends, try to console him or distract him. But so many strangers suddenly so close to him just freaks him out.
He and another child, a slightly older one no doubt dragged there by his parents, sequester themselves outside to play.
Kosuke can't escape any of it.
She can't escape the murmur of the crowd, the whispers, her sister's screams, the patter of Hitsuji's feet, confused, across the floor.
So she screams, too.
She clamps her hands over her ears and just screams as loud as she can, loud enough to tear her throat, loud enough for everything to spill out at once. It feels like something is ripping its way out of her, something horrible and wretched.
Afterwards, she's exhausted.
It's a heavy weight off her shoulders but she's still left with pins and needles stinging everywhere.
She stops crying.
Her eyes are as red as her hair. Snot and drool run down her chin.
She wipes them away.
She can't talk anymore.
She comes out of the bathroom seconds, minutes, hours later and everyone seems to understand that she can't talk because no one asks anything. A stray handkerchief or two dab away her tears and she has to restrain from slapping them away.
The sun starts to set. People start to leave.
She wonders where Minami is. She asks. She's upstairs, locked in her room. Hitsuji is sleeping.
An elderly woman that may or may not be familiar comes to her, and she's the first person that day to talk to her in a way that isn't sugary or quiet.
She's straightforward, but kindly. She offers her help with the funeral arrangements. She'll help them figure out how to pay the bills. She'll help them with everything they need.
Kosuke realizes then that this is going to keep going.
Kosuke realizes that this is going to go on tomorrow, next week, forever and ever.
They're gone.
Time doesn't seem to make sense after this.
Eventually, it's night. Only a handful of people remain, and they leave one by one.
Kohta has to go home or his parents will begin to worry. He kisses her forehead again and again. He wipes the tears from her eyes. She sees tears in his eyes, too, and wonders distantly why. He had never been particularly close to either of her parents for the two years they'd been together. But maybe that's why, that he had missed an opportunity to know them.
Kosuke wants to ask him not to go, but she can't. He leaves.
Her house, the restaurant—what's going to happen to the restaurant?—is full of strangers. She is offered places to stay. So many people ask if she and her siblings want to spend the night, the week, at their home. Okina almost demands it. Her parents, who Kosuke has met many times before and were always nothing but kind to her, agree.
Kosuke says no.
She doesn't know why.
Maybe because she can't grasp that there's a reason for Okina to stay over. That Okina sleeping over is not for fun, not one of their usual routines, but because Okina does not want to leave her to her own grief, is a pill that she can't swallow.
Okina has been holding her throughout the day, and she's holding her then and there. She's held her around her waist and almost carried her from one room to the other, but now her fingers are gripping Kosuke's arms and her eyes are steely on her. She is silently commanding Kosuke to stay standing. She's not crying because she already has. She'd known Marti and Emiko for years and years—the man who had carried her two city blocks when she fell off her bike and skinned her knee, the woman who always whipped up chicken noodle soup each and every time she got sick, both of them coming to every performance they ever could—and though she would miss them, they were not her parents.
Okina holds Kosuke upright and she's saying something that Kosuke can't really hear even though she's right there and it's to her and her alone. Okina does not leave her until she is convinced that Kosuke will not fall down, and before she goes, she hugs her, squeezes her, and pulls back to press a kiss against Kosuke's bangs.
After she goes, Kosuke is alone.
The house is quiet.
She realizes that she has not eaten a thing all day, but her stomach is roiling too much to take anything. The thought of food alone makes her sick.
The crowd has left chairs out of place, things that were not where they should have been. The trash cans are full. Someone got plastic cups out for water and now they're everywhere.
She doesn't have the energy to fix any of it.
She's lazy, she's a slob, but now she truly just does not have the energy to fix anything.
She locks the doors and closes the windows.
She looks up at the clock and wonders when her mother and father are coming home.
She remembers that they won't.
Kosuke goes upstairs.
She wants to go into her bed. No pajamas, no teeth-brushing. Just go into her bed and never wake up, or wake up and find out that it is all a bad dream. She can imagine it as a day like any other. She'd be woken up, probably crying, and she would explain to a confused and worried Marti and maybe Emiko the dream she'd just had. They would comfort her and laugh at the fear that anything would ever happen to them.
A morning like any other, like yesterday.
Like yesterday.
She passes by the bathroom door and pauses.
She knocks. Minami yells at her to go away.
Kosuke begs her to open the door. Her voice sounds and feels like sandpaper.
Minami finally does. Her eyes are red and her cheeks are wet. Snot bubbles in her nose. She can't breathe right.
Kosuke holds her. She doesn't hug her, she just holds her and lets her fade like she did.
Minami begins to scream again. It's muffled in Kosuke's clothes.
Kosuke tries to run her fingers through her hair, but her hands are stiff.
She begins to cry again, too. It does not consume her as it did before. She doesn't even realize it until drops begin to fall in Minami's hair. The tears feel hot running down her face.
The two end up in Minami's bed, and of all the times that Kosuke has hated herself for not being able to pick up her sister, it's nothing compared to now. The bed is small, and Kosuke won't fit.
But she stays there, until Minami's breaths begin to quiet, until the hiccups fade away. She falls asleep, leaving Kosuke alone. She realizes that her fingers are still tangled in Minami's hair and she pulls them away, wondering when her hair got that long and curly.
On the other side of the room, Hitsuji sleeps on. He's quiet, and he's small. Impossibly small. He's so young that Kosuke cannot even begin to guess what he'll look like when he's older. She realizes then and there that Emiko and Marti will never find out. They will never see him in high school, or college. He will grow and get tall and his voice will get deeper and he will be almost unrecognizable compared to the little boy now and they aren't going to see any of it.
There will be birthdays and Christmases and Halloweens, summer vacations and winter breaks, school parties and festivals, Hitsuji's first lost tooth, the first time Minami rides a bike without training wheels, the first day of kindergarten, recitals, plays, sport team tryouts, ball games, first boyfriend, first girlfriend, first breakups, first jobs, graduations, diplomas, weddings, and more and more and more and more and there will now always be two empty places where a mother and father should be.
Kosuke sits between their beds, and sitting there in the blue moonlight with only the sounds of children's breathing to accompany her, she doesn't feel real.
Kosuke can't take this.
She can't live like this.
She can't—
Who's going to pick up Minami from school for now on?
Who's going to run the restaurant?
Who's going to take care of them? Her?
Her parents are dead, and it's not just that it's unfair and cruel and crushes down upon her like a physical weight, it's that it just doesn't feel right. It's not like a book that has no ending, but a book that has had its main character ripped from it, leaving a noticeable void and only a vague sense that something should be there, but isn't.
Come back, Kosuke thinks in the quiet of the house, with her sleeping siblings at her head and feet. She feels something wretched crawling up her throat and she stifles it in a blanket so they don't hear. Come back, come back. Don't go.
There is a strange period that follows between that day and the funeral proper, and the only way Kosuke would be able to describe it (to both herself and the very few people who she would confess to later) was like a dream. She would admit (again, to both herself and those few people) that that sounds very, very cheesy, but she means it as literally as she can. It happened, she knew that, but she remembers very few details and only a vague idea that she was even there to see it happen.
The vast, vast majority of it will be completely lost to her only weeks afterward. She does not remember eating breakfast or buying groceries for the first time by herself, nor does she remember getting dressed every morning or going to sleep every night. She doesn't even really remember any showers she had or the times she brushed her teeth, and she wonders every now and then if she even did those things.
The vague things are the talks she has with people over the week.
Okina just about never leaves her side, let alone her house. Okina heats up microwave dinners for her and brushes her hair when she can't get knots out. Kosuke would later swear that there was one day where Okina helped her into her pajamas when she couldn't do it herself, but maybe that didn't happen at all. Besides just her, Okina plays with Hitsuji when he gets restless, and pulls Minami away when she begins to ask questions ("Are Mommy and Daddy really dead?"), and especially when those questions turn angry ("No, they're not! They're not!"). Not three days ago, Okina had glared at Kosuke when she wouldn't carry Minami, but now she pulls her sister away because she knows she can't take it.
Kohta comes, just not as frequently, but Kosuke takes what she can get from him. Admittedly, the two of them don't talk much at all. Almost all their time is just him holding her, brushing her hair back from her face again and again. He also plays with the children, but it's awkward and stilted and even the little ones know it's not real. When she cries, he comforts her. When she sleeps, he's there when she wakes. There are times when she struggles to even stand and he holds her hands until her feet find balance.
(They kiss once and only once when he's leaving one night, and even though it's soft and tender and almost feels like a promise, Kosuke knew there and then that what she had been dreading was true all along, but the closure of that would only come later.)
Okina's parents—their names were Mai and Akinari, which Kosuke would always remember even when they faded from her life—come by every now and then, more or less just to make sure the house doesn't collapse. Mai dusts and cleans and does laundry, and she almost teaches Kosuke how to do it before she realizes that she just isn't up to it. Akinari actually proves to be the most helpful person during the time. It's him and the woman who had been there before—Kosuke had never remembered her name, and that would bother her for years and years after—that make funeral arrangements and pay the taxes and pretty much anything that involves paper.
They ask her when she wants to pick out coffins and tombstones and she more or less begs them to just do it themselves. They end up choosing ones that are pretty but affordable. And if Kosuke is later bothered that she doesn't remember that unknown woman's name, there would be times when she almost cries remembering the kindness these people had given to her in that time.
Minami is always either dead quiet, yelling, or crying. There are literally no in-betweens. If she's not wandering around the house as quiet as a ghost, then she's yelling at everyone to leave her alone, and if she's not doing that she's crying so hard that Mai at one point goes outside and comes back with red eyes. She rarely does what she's told, and who can blame her?
Hitsuji has apparently grasped that his parents are really, truly not going back, but he's still so much more confused than anything else. As if he understands the finality of it but he still asks when they're coming back, or just where they are in general. It doesn't matter how many times they explain it to him then, because he just won't get it. But between the confusion, he's laughing and playing and fussing about what he does and doesn't want. He's just being a child, a normal child, but the overall mood of the house and everyone in it makes it seem like he's always loud.
Kosuke does what Kosuke apparently does best: just about nothing. She sleeps, wakes up, eats, repeat. She's behaving just as she always has, and she finds herself once again in that paradox of beating herself up over how she is but not doing a thing to change it. When spoken to, she speaks. When asked to do something, she answers. She talks to Minami and Hitsuji like they aren't even there, or that she wishes they weren't. And it was true that at times, when Minami yelled too loudly or Hitsuji laughed too happily, that Kosuke really did wish they weren't there.
The future version of her would take some bittersweet pride in that this was as low as she ever got, while at the same time wanting to go back in time, grab that past girl and throttle her until she was a pulp.
The wake comes in all of its haunting, you-can't-hide-anymore glory. Kosuke dresses in the only black dress she has, and even then it doesn't seem fitting for the occasion and never before has she regretted dying her hair red this badly. Minami's dress looks better than hers, and they pull her curls back in a black ribbon. Someone—who?—finds Hitsuji's one, single formal suit and dresses him in it.
They go to there, driven there by Okina's family, and Kosuke spends the next three hours exhausted, then more exhausted, then more. There is very little difference in this affair than when so many people had come to her house before. She has to shake hands and give hugs and nod and just give the most mechanical of responses. Yes. Thank you for coming. Of course. She sees people she has never met before crying, and that almost makes her angry, and even she doesn't know why.
Minami and Hitsuji are more or less being paraded around. Kosuke is an "adult" now. She knows what's going on and has encountered death before. She'd been to her fair share of funerals, she had a goldfish or two buried in the backyard. But Minami and Hitsuji are always being knelt down and whispered to. Strangers call them brave and tell them to be strong. They remind them that Mommy and Daddy loved them very much, and to just think of this as a "see you later" instead of a "goodbye." Minami cries and Kosuke still can't confront it and Hitsuji asks what the two boxes in the front of the room are for and someone pulls him away.
There are several people from school there. Kohta, Tomoko, Jet, so on. The three of them mostly stick together when Kohta isn't at Kosuke's side. Tomoko spends most of the time on her phone, nothing out of the usual, and Jet at least reins himself in enough to not be…himself. Okina more or less runs the whole thing, answering questions and giving directions about what should go where. Even the black dress she wears looks almost like a ballerina's costume and Kosuke actually laughs about it, but it sounds so much like a sob that it brings four people flocking over to her at the sound.
There are flowers everywhere and Kosuke guesses that's where the "wake" smell comes from, because she recognized it the second she walked in. There are bluebells and chrysanthemums and daisies and so on, so forth, all beautiful and waxy in their vases.
There's supposed to be a time in which the friends and family place flowers in the coffins around the heads of the deceased to wreath them. Maybe a few sentimental objects, too, but mostly flowers. If things had turned out maybe just slightly different—if the car had not crashed the way it did, if it had not rolled over so many times—maybe they would be doing this. Everyone would see Emiko in a white dress with daisies studding her almost silvery hair, and Marti would be in black with bluebells in the chestnut waves of his hair. Beautiful and handsome, but eerily waxy, physically there but not seeming real.
Instead, the only thing to see at the front is two long, wooden boxes, and that's it. No final looks, no white dresses or black suits, nothing. She knows she talked to someone about it at some point, but it's just another hazy detail in so many other hazy details. You'll probably want to keep the caskets closed, they had said, whoever they were. Kosuke had agreed in her stupor, but now she thinks that maybe that was for the best.
But when the time comes for her to come to the two coffins, standing between them much like how she had sat between Minami and Hitsuji's beds the first night of this nightmare, Kosuke almost screams again. There's nothing between her and her parents but two sheets of hard, glossy wood and that might just hurt more than seeing them in their entirety.
So that ends, and the funeral comes the day after, and everyone wears the same clothes and goes to the same place. It really doesn't seem like there has been any pause between the two events at all. The coffins are taken to hearses, and the hearses go to the crematorium, and the three Nakahara children—or orphans, rather—climb into the back of the Henkas' car and follow.
The night before there had been something close to an argument between them all about the cremation, more specifically who would go and who would stay. Mai made it clear that she thought all three of the children should be there for it, while Kosuke made it clear that if her baby brother and baby sister didn't want to see two boxes and their parents within them go up in flames, then they wouldn't have to, and neither Marti nor Emiko would be forcing them otherwise. Mai was unhappy with this and Kosuke comes very close to telling the mother of her best friend to mind her own business and remember that what she does and doesn't like doesn't really matter right now, does it?
Minami almost chose to stay behind, and that was at first fine by Kosuke, but she wanted Minami to understand her decision. It at first didn't matter if she asked Minami if she would regret it later, or if she didn't want to say goodbye—see you later—one last time, because the girl's mind couldn't get past burn and Mommy and Daddy. It's only when they are standing at the doors, watching the coffins being carried down the steps, that she changes her mind.
Kosuke is surprised and unsurprised that Hitsuji agrees to go almost without question. He's been doing very well this whole time, but once again, it is only because of the blessed naiveté of a four-year-old. Kosuke wondered if Minami will regret not seeing her parents' cremation when she's older, but she also wondered if Hitsuji would even realize that he did until he was older. Even as they climb into the car, the little boy really just looks confused and curious.
In hindsight, watching those coffins go up in flames should have been the hardest part of it all, but it's really the easiest. The full weight of losing her parents has already hit her full force and nothing after can really do any more damage. They were gone and not coming back, and since she'd already realized and taken that, what could watching one more "yes, it's true" really do to her?
Kosuke has her sister on her leg and her brother in her arms, somehow, when the heat of the fire washes over them.
There's a very strange calmness that comes over her, and just when she thinks that maybe tears would build in her eyes again, the feeling dies away and her head is clearer than it has ever been in the past week. She feels so at peace, in fact, that she finds herself forgetting about the burning fire in front of her in favor of wondering just what on earth is happening.
Was she in some state of shock? Was this some grievous disassociating?
They go home, at least until it's time for them to return. She is the first to get out of the car, and makes a beeline to the door in her still-lingering stupor. She knows that there will be some inevitable talk between everyone about what comes next, but for now she's just focusing on getting the door open.
She does, and the yellow sunlight spreads across the floorboards of the Lily Bowl. Kosuke sees the dining room, same as it had always been, but she sees other things too, things that aren't really there. She sees years of commitment and hard work. More than that, she sees feet walking across the floorboards, people smiling and chatting over their meals. Beyond that, in the kitchen, she sees Emiko and Marti, sweat on their brows and never pausing for a moment. She sees a man who had committed his life to making good food, and a woman who discovered it by chance.
Then Kosuke sees three pairs of feet walking into the room for the first time—a mother, her husband of a year, and their now-shared daughter of seven. She sees her getting her first haircut, Emiko trying to get it just right before finally giving the scissors to Marti. Her first day of school, saluting her parents like a soldier going to war, only to pick up her backpack and immediately topple over, Marti and Emiko rushing over to help. Carrying a plate to a table, only ten years old, smiling when the couple praise her for her good work, catching her mother's eye as she heads back to the kitchen and the two of them smiling to one another.
Coming home with her new baby sister and introducing her to the house as if she has any idea what she's saying. Minami taking her first steps and their parents laughing while Kosuke is practically shrieking her head off in joy. Minami's first day of kindergarten, holding her sister's hand, and Kosuke being close enough that she's the one who picks her up when the backpack topples Minami over. Minami dancing in circles when she finds out she's going to have a brother, and Kosuke feigning surprise when she already knew for weeks. Their brother's first birthday, all laughing and having fun, even as rain beat down from outside and Emiko took unhappy glances at the bright candy red of her daughter's hair.
Birthdays and Christmases, Halloweens and New Years. Late nights and rush hours, unexpected field trip groups and bad reviews. All together in this one room.
Kosuke sees them, and she realizes that the calmness she's feeling is…Well, no. She still doesn't know what she's feeling. Determination, perhaps? But it's not a roaring fire, more like a steady burning that's going through her from her chest outward.
A long time after that—a long time—she would swear that just for a moment, she feels a hand on either of her shoulders. She does not hear two voices, but she still somehow hears what they want to tell her.
Keep going and be strong.
Kosuke decides then and there that she will.