If the characters belonged to me, Takeru would be a lot more depressed. ^.~

Wolfie and Arylwren, doumo arigatou gozaimashita yo!

And arigatou to everyone for their invaluable feedback, praise and encouragement. If it wasn’t for all of you, this story may never have found its way out of my head.

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A STORM OVER BLOSSOMS

CHAPTER 13

THE BOOK OF REVELATIONS

Standing in front of the Takaishi’s door, Taichi checked his watch. It would be a few hours before his mother’s tranquiliser wore off, and she needed him again. He was afraid to leave her alone for too long. The previous day, he had come back from soccer practice to find her crying over a bottle of broken perfume. The air in the apartment had been heavy with its sweet, musky fragrance. She had evidently tried to put together the shards of glass, because her hands had been bleeding. As he had entered her room, she had looked up at him and had asked him where the sunlight had gone. Helpless, he had not known what to say, other than that it would be back again in the morning. Then, she had smiled a strange, insane smile and had replied that she knew Hikari would be coming home soon.

Not for the first time, anger towards his sister rose hot and quick in Taichi’s chest. How could Hikari have been so selfish? How could she have run away without a second thought for the people she would hurt by leaving behind? His father was staying out later and drinking more every night. His mother was suffering a nervous breakdown. Takeru was shutting out all of his other friends. And it had fallen to him to put aside his own pain and deal with everyone else’s.

Sighing, he pressed the doorbell. A tinny chime echoed from within the Takaishi’s apartment, and the door opened a few moments later to reveal Natsuko. She had evidently been working on an article, because a pencil was balanced behind her ear and another was stuck in her brown hair.

“Taichi,” the familiar look of sympathy came to her eyes when she saw him, “I haven’t seen you for a long time.”

He gave her a sheepish smile in return, “Yeah. Is Takeru home?”

“He’s in his bedroom working,” she stepped aside to let him into the apartment, “Please go through.”

“Thanks,” Taichi walked down the hallway towards Takeru’s room. Through the doorway, he could see him sitting at his desk and chewing thoughtfully on a yellow pencil. There was something different about him, something about the way he held his head and his shoulders, which Taichi could not quite pinpoint. Papers and books were spread in front of him, while still others were piled around him on the floor. It looked more like Jyou’s room before a major exam than Takeru’s, he thought in surprise. Daisuke had been right when he had said the younger boy needed help.

“Hey, kiddo,” he greeted, stepping over the pile of maths’ books that were blocking the doorway.

“Taichi? Have you. . . .” Takeru sat up straighter, the hope in his eyes painful to see, then he slumped back into the chair, “No, of course you haven’t.”

Resting his hands on his knees, Taichi sat on the bed and looked at the younger boy. It was not hard to guess the remainder of the question that Takeru had been about to ask, or why he had cut himself short.

“So, how have you been? None of us have seen much of you lately.”

“I’ve been busy,” he replied with a tight smile, “Basketball season is coming up, and coach seems to think we won’t be ready unless we practise 24/7. Sometimes it feels more like I’m in an army troop than a sport’s team.”

“You haven’t been avoiding us?” Taichi asked bluntly.

His expression was almost too innocent, “Why would I be avoiding you?”

“Because of Hikari.”

Just saying her name was painful, but Taichi forced himself to do it. Naked pain flashed across Takeru’s blue eyes, but he said in an even voice, “It’s been three months, Taichi. I know she’s not coming back and it’s time to move on, if that’s what you’re trying to say.”

“Which was why your first question was whether we’d found her or not,” he leaned forward to stare the younger boy in the eyes, “There’s nothing wrong with still loving her, you know. I know I haven’t stopped.”

“Then, I guess I’m lucky,” Takeru said coolly, folding his arms across his chest, “Because I never did.”

Looking at him, Taichi realised that Takeru had more in common with Yamato than he had ever imagined. He had always thought that the two brothers could not have been more different. Yamato might have been closed and secretive at times, he had thought, but Takeru was as simple as sunshine. He wasn’t capable of hiding anything. His clear, blue eyes revealed every emotion. When he was happy, they shone with it. When he was angry, they darkened like the sky before a storm. Taichi had just had to look at him to know what he was thinking or how he was feeling. Now, he couldn’t read him at all, and he was beginning to see that Takeru’s similarities to Yamato didn’t begin and end with his looks.

He sighed. Sometimes there was only one way to knock sense into an Ishida’s thick skull. . . .

Gathering up all his strength, he punched Takeru squarely in the face. The chair rocked backwards, but did not fall. The younger boy looked at him in horror, clutching his cheek. Taichi could see a red blotch spreading between his fingers. His treacherous memory threw up the image of Hikari with a slap-mark on her face, glaring at their mother and yelling at her that she had wasted her life.

“What was that for, Taichi?” he sounded more shocked than angry.

“For being an ass and lying to me,” he replied, shaking his sore hand, “And for reminding me of your brother.”

“I thought you liked Yamato,” Takeru grumbled, getting to his feet. He walked to his mirror and squinted into it, touching his swollen cheekbone with his fingertips, “Urgh. You do know I’ve got a big game this weekend and need to see out of both eyes?”

Taichi ignored the second comment, “Yeah, but that doesn’t mean the world needs two of him. And the punch was mainly for lying to me about Hikari.”

“I guess I deserved it,” he said quietly, looking down at his shoes, “But it doesn’t matter how I felt about her, because she didn’t . . . well, she didn’t.”

“Don’t be so sure,” he reached into his pocket and pulled out Hikari’s little diary. It had a picture of a white kitten on the cover, over which her name was written in pink, sparkly ink. She’d drawn an arrow to the kitten, which she had labelled ‘Tailmon.’ Just looking at it made Taichi’s chest tighten in pain. Telling himself he had to be strong, he flipped through it in search of the entry he had seen on that awful day when he had woken up to find her missing. He cleared his throat, “The other day, I was sitting in the stands watching our team play basketball. . . .”

“Taichi!” Takeru interrupted, “That’s her diary, isn’t it? It’s private. I shouldn’t be reading what she wrote in it.”

“Then it’s a good thing I’m reading it to you, because you need to hear this,” he said, his firm tone belying the fact that he had spent the previous night lying awake and wondering whether or not to share his sister’s diary with the boy she had loved, “The other day, I was sitting in the stands watching our team play basketball. Okay, I guess I have to be honest with you, diary, if nobody else. I was watching Takeru play basketball, because I hate the sport but like my best friend. Anyway, I’ve forgotten the exact score, but they were a basket behind or something with a few seconds to go and the other team had the ball. Out of nowhere, Takeru snatches the ball, dribbles it just past the halfway line (dribble is such a stupid word, isn’t it?), and makes a perfect jumpshot from there. The ball swishes through the net. Odaiba wins the match in the last seconds. But ‘our conquering captain’ (as the school newspaper put it! Ai is always so melodramatic!) doesn’t look at his coach; he doesn’t look at the team; he looks at me and he grins. And I felt something shift inside me, like everything I knew about our friendship was wrong and like there was something bigger and better and scarier waiting for me if I would just go up to him and take his hand. (Sorry, Ai, I can also be pretty melodramatic.) So, does this mean I’m falling in love with him?”

Taichi choked to a halt, hot tears coming to his eyes. He had been at that match with Hikari, and could see in his mind’s eye the way she had looked that day. Her hair had been pulled into two, little plaits, tied at the end by ribbons in Odaiba’s white-and-blue, and her cheeks had been painted in the same colours. She had been wearing his old soccer jacket, he remembered, because she didn’t have any clothes to match. She had looked so happy and so carefree, like a girl who knew she was loved. Fiercely blinking back his tears, he looked at Takeru to judge his reaction.

The younger boy looked almost as stunned as he had on the day when he had heard Hikari was missing. His blue eyes were dark with shock, and his cheeks were flushed. Evidently not trusting his legs to support him, he walked over to the bed and sat down heavily on it, his hands on his knees.

When he spoke, his voice was an agonised whisper, “If she loved me, why did she leave me alone?”

“There was a lot of stuff going on in her life,” Taichi sat next to him and put an arm around his shoulders, “Mom was putting pressure on her about . . . about everything. Her schoolwork, the entrance exams for the private school, her friends, her relationship with you . . . . I guess it got too much in the end. I guess she thought the only way to deal with it was to run away from it, if she was thinking at all.”

Hesitantly, as if afraid to ask, “What does her diary say about that?”

Placing the book between them, Taichi flipped through the remainder of the entries until he came to the last two pages, on which she had written the characters for ‘Dark Ocean’ over and over again in watery, grey ink. They still sent a little thrill of fear down his spine. He couldn’t imagine what Hikari’s state of mind must have been for her to write something like that. He looked up at Takeru and saw his fear mirrored on the younger boy’s face, “That’s why I came to your apartment that day. I thought she was in the Dark Ocean and you could take me to her, but . . .” he shrugged, pretending a nonchalance he did not feel, “As I said, there was a lot of stuff going on in her life and she couldn’t take it. Maybe she felt like the Dark Ocean was going to swallow her up again, and ran because of that.”

Takeru was silent, tracing the characters on the page with a forefinger. He had a perplexed expression on his face, like a child trying to make sense of a puzzle. His lips moved slightly, but Taichi could not make out what he was mouthing to himself.

“Takeru,” Taichi said in a firm voice, worried about him, “Hikari’s not in the Dark Ocean. We checked every inch of it, and there were no signs of her.”

“I won’t let you go,” he whispered, looking up at him in sudden horror, “Taichi, I remember now. I don’t know how I could have forgotten it. I guess I thought it was my fever or something. She came to me the night she vanished. She was wearing a white nightdress, but its hem was wet and it had sand around its edges. And she was . . . rippling, like water in the sunlight. I don’t know how else to put it. She said the Deep Ones were taking her, she said she didn’t have the strength to fight them and she needed my help. She gave me her hands and I tried to hold onto her, but I couldn’t. I couldn’t, and she slipped away from me. It’s all my fault, Taichi, because I also was too weak. I’m sorry, Taichi, I’m so sorry.”

Takeru was crying in a way he had not seen him cry since he was eight; loud, painful sobs that shook his whole body. Taichi took a deep breath. He wanted so much to accept that Takeru’s story was true, that he had seen Hikari and she was in the Dark Ocean. As bad as that place sounded, it was better than her being alone in some strange city doing heaven knew what to keep body and soul together. He could go there and save her, and everything would be normal again. Even after their unsucessful sortie into the Dark Ocean, it had taken him a long time to let go of the hope that she might be there, and he could not afford to cling onto it again. He had to move on with his life, and that meant letting go of his illusions.

Taichi put his hands on the younger boy’s shoulders and turned him to face him, staring him directly in the eyes, “Takeru. You were sick that night. Your mom said your fever was off the charts. It was just an hallucination. I know that because we checked everywhere the Dark Ocean, and Hikari wasn’t there. She wasn’t there.”

Sniffing, “No, we didn’t. We didn’t check underneath it.”

*

TO BE CONTINUED

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This concludes the second movement of the story. We now move into the third and penultimate movement. Your thoughts and criticisms on the narrative up to this point would be gratefully welcomed. (Gak. How English Major do I sound there?)