Hi, fellows! Here's our next bright cheery foray into hopelessness! Oh wait, a foray means it's usually "outside one's accustomed sphere". Like a novelist trying his hand at nonfiction. So, I suppose foray is the wrong word!
This story is pretty uplifting compared to me, though. Hoo hoo hoo.
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Installment Seven
Had he been anyone else, anyone normal, he wouldn't have been able to tell dream from reality. They would melt into each other, the ceiling regularly shifting into the sky of whatever world his mind created. But he wasn't normal, and he could tell dream from reality because when he was awake, his body wasn't awash in pain as he was cut into pieces, as his mangled limbs were slowly crushed into useless meat, as
Of course, the pain he felt--the pain his brain created, as it was a dream, after all--was nothing compared to the real pain of being mutilated. It had assured him of that. This was just a trailer before a movie, only a sneak peek at what it had promised he would feel.
His parents often commented on what a sound sleeper he was. They always thought it was strange that he slept the same number of hours each night, as if there were some quota he had to meet before he was able to wake or be woken.
As he sat up in bed, instantly breaking into a cold sweat, he thought for a moment that he could still taste the blood.
He couldn't, of course. It was only his imagination.
---
None of them expected him to get out of bed, that morning, though Shinobu Maehara, in her infinite kindness, threw occasional glaces at the door to the landlord's room, in case Keitaro would step out of it, hobbling painfully and clutching his stomach with one hand, pushing against the wall with the other.
She was fully prepared to at least attempt to support his weight and lead his to the table on which she had prepared food, because it was important to remember to eat and drink when you were sick or injured. Your body was working overtime to heal itself, after all.
So, she was the only one who saw Keitaro when he stepped out of the room with a strange smile on his face, both hand in his pockets on the sides of his jeans, bookbag around his shoulder, walking steadily on his feet--and why shouldn't he walk steadily? After all, Keitaro Urashima didn't even have a scratch on him!
Shonibu dropped the broom she was using to sweep the hallway. "Oh, you're up." she tried to say, but didn't, couldn't. She tried again, and completely failed to say "Good morning."
Keitaro fixed a bloodshot eye on the girl, assessing her. Young kid. Probably still in middle school. Cute, in a little sister sort of way. The quiet type, the sort of person the world grabbed, chewed up and spit out.
Some people, he thought, get all the fucking luck.
Keitaro held back the urge to shut the door and retreat back into his bed, and instead fixed his gaze to the right of and past the girl's head.
"Where's Aunt Haruka?" he growled.
---
Aunt Haruka was sitting in the teahouse, doing what most people saw her do most of the day.
With a broom in her hands, her cynical expression, and her lit cigarette, she looked like some antithesis of Shinobu. She was doing much less work than Shinobu, too; she tried to ignore the fact that she had been sweeping the square meter of flooring for the last hour.
Haruka was not a woman who appeared to worry often, but now, with nobody watching her, she allowed her mask to drop and her face wore anxious expression. All she could think of was her nephew--first he had run out in the middle of that conversation with the girls, and then, a day later, he had come by bloody--well, bloody was a sort of understatement.
And then, he had insisted that it was alright, and discouraged her attempts to alert the hospitals. She would have agreed with Keitaro if his injuries had been something like gunshot wounds, but those...
Haruka closed her eyes and took in a deep breath.
The girls had insisted she not be so nervous--after all, if Keitaro wasn't complaining, it must not have been as bad as it'd looked, right? But every five minutes or so, she found herself stomping over to the House and getting one of the girls to check on him, then answer her questions: Was he okay? Was he breathing? Was his heartbeat regular? Did he feel like he had a fever? Was his--
"Look," Naru had said the last time. "if it makes you feel better, think of it like karma. That pervert peeped on us, and now he's kind of paying of all the pain he caused." It had certainly made Naru feel better, anyway--ever since the girls had seen Keitaro after he'd reappeared, the mood inside the House was somber. Naru, on the other hand, had been downright jovial.
Haruka would never admit it, but she'd really wanted to slap her.
Hell, even Motoko had expressed a little concern--alright, maybe it wasn't concerned, but she had offhandedly remarked that Keitaro's wounds seemed "grave", whatever that meant. Of course, after Keitaro'd insisted he was alright, she'd gone back to her sword practice.
The other girls had reacted as Haruka had expected them to react, for the most part. Su was Su, her childlike nature dismissing the entire incident as mostly irrelevant. Shinobu was terribly worried. And Kitsune...
Actually, Kitsune hadn't come back until later. She'd been acting strange, too. She'd run into Keitaro on the streets, and had seen or heard something that had spooked her.
Deep in thought, she took the cigarette from her mouth and looked at it, studying the embers at the tip of it, before bringing it back to her mouth.
There were four sharp knocks, and Haruka started, the cigarette flying from her hands and going out under a chair.
The door opened slightly.
"Aunt Haruka?" spoke a voice she knew well. "Are you there?"
And then the door opened the rest of the way, and Haruka could see Keitaro, healthy and smiling.
"Oh, there you are." Keitaro said, as if it everything that had happened the last few days was perfectly natural, perfectly normal.
Shocked into senselessness by having been given a sight of what was completely impossible, Haruka forgot even to replace the worry on her face with her normal apathy. She said nothing, busy following an infinite thread in a circle: Keitaro's okay but he can't be okay because he's hurt bad but he's okay but he can't be okay because
"This was a mistake." Keitaro's mumbled comment jolted her out of her dizziness, and she watched as he walked (not staggered, not limped, but walked) to a nearby chair and sat in it. He looked down at his knees, then up at Haruka, grinning. The smile didn't reach his eyes at all.
"This was a mistake." said Keitaro again, as if trying to make sure his aunt heard and understood every word he was saying. "I shouldn't have come here." He shifted, obviously uncomfortable. Haruka stared at him, wanting badly to say something, anything, but not knowing what.
"I guess the real..." Keitaro trailed off, not grinning anymore. Is he...crying? Haruka thought, gripping her broom tightly.
"I guess the real reason I came here--I mean, I said--I tried to say--"
He took a deep breath and tried again. "I convinced myself that the reason I came here was to study for Tokyo University--I'm a ronin, you see--" he glanced at her face, searching for a sign that she was disappointed in him. She gave none. "and I mean, that makes sense, right? Since it's so close, and all."
He went on. "But that's not the real reason. The real reason is because..."
He was crying.
Keitaro didn't cry.
Haruka internally panicked. Keitaro never cried. Keitaro was the one who faced every hardship optimistically. Even if given a broken heart, he would go on with a wide happy grin for the world to see, because that was the sort of person Keitaro was. You could make him sad, you could tear everything that made him happy away, but he'd never cry.
Something was dreadfully wrong.
"I'm here to say goodbye, Aunt."
Sheer incredulity froze her face as she mentally translated his ambiguous words into the only restatement that fit. She felt like a child, given a jigsaw puzzle and only now piecing the entire picture together. Still, she couldn't, didn't want to, refused to believe what she saw. "What--why are you going to--" She choked on the last syllable, unable to continue.
Keitaro's face darkened. "I can't tell you that."
Haruka painfully drew her face into expressionlessness once again. "I see."
There was silence for a time, only the two of them, staring into nothingness. Finally, slowly, deliberately, Keitaro rose and left without a word, his footsteps fading as he moved further and further away, but only when they were completely out of earshot did Haruka allowed herself to huddle into a ball and weep.
---
Did I do good? I had trouble with the interaction between Keitaro and his aunt, but I think I did pretty well.
Everyone's got this flat picture of Haruka as a tough woman who'd mow down children with a machine gun if she absolutely had to. But if you'd have stopped reading Love Hina at book one, you wouldn't have got that impression at all. Haruka's the very model of a carin' aunt. She doesn't hit him for calling her 'aunt', and she isn't the sort that says "tough luck". Yeah, she's a bit quiet, but she smiles.
I see Haruka as the sort of person who'd blast a man's head off easily if he were a thorough bad dude, murderer and arsonist and all that, but would only really roughly disarm a nice guy if he were holding up a bank because he was down on his luck. And Keitaro's her nephew, you know? She cares.