奇蹟 ~kiseki~ - 02/XX - ToraXSaga
Title: 奇蹟 ~kiseki~
Chapter: 02/?
Author: chibi_bisque and akichuu
Rating: Overall R
Genre: Angst, AU.
Pairing(s): Tora x Saga
Band(s): alice nine.
Disclaimer: The story belongs to us.
Summary: In this cruel world, there's only one thing they've been looking for...
Notes: An RP project that we've been working together (chibi_bisque came up with most of the idea, actually). Saga's POV is done by (chibi_bisque and Tora's by me, link to the previous chapter is down below. Without further delay, hereby I bring you chapter 2.
奇蹟 ~kiseki~
Chapter 02
================
Shirt: check.
Zipper: check.
Teaching materials: check.
Hair: check. Well, the last time I had seen it on the mirror, which was five minutes ago, my hair looked pretty neat. My efforts of making it look sleek and less-spiky this morning should’ve gotten an award, if I may say so myself.
I ran another thorough inspection, taking a peak at my rear side, returning to the front, before I decided that I looked pretty decent. A disconcerting sense of something rising to my throat told me more fact than I could handle; fact about my insides that didn’t synchronize with how well I might’ve appeared on the surface. I could feel my stomach churning as if I had eaten a whole bowl of two weeks old rice (all yucky and mushy and definitely unhealthy), and if the exhilarating sensation of food poisoning wasn’t enough, I felt my hands and feet dead. My fingers were like they had been put inside the freezer for two days, and I didn’t know how to move them without pushing the last ounce of my brain to kick those paralyzed neurons on the butts and get them to work.
Anyhow, aside from all the stomach-turning calamities, I was supposed to be thrilled; this was going to be my first day teaching.
Teaching, giving lectures; all the same.
The point was: this was the morning (a bright, barely clouded morning, I might add) when I would begin my path as a lecturer.
Oh dear… my stomach twisted again; I supposed I had put the whole deal in a much too severe intonation.
Repeatedly I had tried making myself think of this as nothing more but a short-period thing-unless Sekigahara-sensei decided to escape the country without informing me about it; then I should be worried about signing contracts and being a regular employee here in the campus. It was just for a month, a couple of hours per week; what could be so hard about standing in front of a class, full of third semester students-eager eyes and curious minds and all-for two hours? It shouldn’t be harder than facing my mother on her worst of days; now that would be hell, literally. More than that, this was only a Drama class. I believed I would survive well blabbering about Shakespearean tragedy associated with Japan’s alarming rate of suicide-not that they were closely related; after all, what common youth in Japan would be reading Shakespeare these days, and not to mention letting the essence of true love depicted in the stories affect their judgment of life and death? But tragedies, as far as I could remember (in the memories of my own third semester days-which had passed for four years or so now), had always been a magnet for attention.
God only knows why youngsters loved listening about two people ending their lives, just because their love wasn’t approved by their parents.
To think again: I couldn’t protest; there hadn’t been such thing as an instant marriage at Vegas, back then in the days when Shakespeare still lived. And I also didn’t think Shakespeare had ever had the heart to make Juliet marry Paris just to please her father, and then kill the poor guy with the toxic she’d bought, instead of drinking from the bottle herself. But, then again, without her and Romeo’s death, there would never be the world’s most memorable love story ever.
I sighed. It was only fact that, throughout time, sweet, simple and happy ending had never managed easily to be a best seller.
And supposedly I had more time; I would ponder on it endlessly! But I didn’t, and there was only-I peered at my wristwatch-two and a half minutes to reach the class down the hall, make my grand entrance and perform my eloquent introduction. After all, I was supposed to be the Drama lecturer; it was only expected if I made it all dramatic.
Only, the matter was the only dramatic role I knew how to perform was the drunk-guy in the short play that I had written back in the same class, four years ago. Of course, I bagged the idea and hid it deep inside my head; those thirty minutes had been embarrassing enough for one lifetime, to repeat it was definitely out of the question.
As I resolved on keeping my introduction brief and solid (what importance did it hold anyways? By the beginning of next month I’d already be off their sight…), I began making my way to my destination. Rushing students, new and old, lecturers and such were passing by me; the corridor suddenly seemed too short as the door I had aimed for appeared in my sight without an earlier cue.
This is it, I thought, drawing a long, shaky breath. Two hours, Tora. You’ll make it just fine…
///
It was as I had anticipated that the most annoying reaction of all was the endless murmuring coming from a major part of the students. If they had meant themselves to be inaudible, then they truly failed. I had to be grateful that they hadn’t overreacted when I mentioned my age (yes, I wasn’t more than 4 years older than them); but I couldn’t have asked for a less excessive response than what everyone had given when I mentioned my surname. Fortunately I had a whole lifetime, as in 24 years of it, to learn how not to cringe too visibly whenever someone asked the same old rhetoric: “Amano? As in Amano Yuuko?”
It’s funny what reputation could do to an innocent man-a man who had never chosen to have a successful, multimillionaire businesswoman as a mother; a man who, in time, would eventually inherit the whole richness and fame, despite his unwillingness of it all.
A perfectly in-tune ensemble of whining-overflowed with disappointment-was clearly heard when I told them I was only assisting Sekigahara-sensei and would not be permanently replacing him. I wouldn’t think of being a regular lecturer in this campus, although in two or three years from now it might be a different story, when I had my Master’s degree and a license to give lectures.
That was, if I could actually survive-undetected-applying to a Post Graduate program at all.
“Any other question?” I asked, happy enough that my voice didn’t waver. The introduction was a big success, I considered, with it being so brief and simple. One of the major advantages of being so young-younger than most docents and lecturers here, at least-was that I knew what these kids were thinking, since my own days in their seats hadn’t been gone that long. From what I could remember back in the days, I hadn’t liked it much when a lecturer gave too much intro at the beginning of the class-especially an afternoon class like this one-so I had kept my own intro as short as it seemed comfortable.
Not hearing a response to my question, I decided they were content. I smiled, pushing my glasses up my nose (trying to ignore the soft, unified sighs which I believed was coming from random spots in the crowd); I walked up to the blackboard and started to wipe my name off the surface. The aligned characters vanished at the stroke of the eraser, deteriorating into nothing but chalk remaining that fell on the floor or flew away, airborne.
Once the board was scribbling-free, I turned right back around. I was halfway mustering up the next words to say but the effort stopped short.
The door of the class, which I had left unlocked, swung opened, making a hideous screeching noise as its lower surface chafed against the floor, and a light-brown haired man practically stumbled his whole way in. I couldn’t help but stare. It wasn’t because the boy was horribly late, no… well, at least I had never considered 20 minutes late as horrible. And it also wasn’t because his starkly tall but skinny figure-he looked as lanky as a bamboo twig-although it did occur to my mind an image of him and the mentioned bamboo twig, swaying side by side as the wind blew past them.
Well, probably it was the lanky image of him; added with the mess he had arrived with, he truly was a spectacle to behold.
“Sensei, I’m very sorry,” the boy bowed, “I promise I won’t be late again.”
The brown haired boy kept his head down and mumbling something unclear; he didn’t seem to notice me coming his way-he might not notice a bulldozer coming his way if he kept his head down like that. I suddenly knew how it felt like being a superior and having to face a truant employee; my mother must’ve known the feeling very well, I presumed.
But upon looking at the boy, although he certainly was late and guilty for stealing my grand entrance, I couldn’t bring myself to be upset. He looked pitiful enough that I resolved to stand there in front of him, staring at him while he kept staring at the floor. Cruel as it may seem but I found it amusing when I saw him lifting his sight, an inch at a time; at first he marveled at my shoes, and then my pants, and then, finally, my face. The epic anti-climax of it was the look he had on his face when he saw me: it changed from fear, to surprise, to confusion in merely a minute.
It was almost weird, eerie even, when I suddenly felt like I had seen those eyes, somewhere.
“Have I entered the wrong class?” the boy asked as the realization seemed to dawn on him.
“That depends,” I spoke, struggling hard not to grin, “On what class exactly you need to attend, young man.”
He didn’t answer immediately, but spared a quick glance around the room first, before returning his sight to me; the same confusion was still thick on his expression, although, upon seeing his fellow classmates, he should’ve realized this was the right class. The right class; just the wrong teacher.
“I… Where… Drama class?”
I held another urge to grin, and it was hard, considering just how funny the way the boy stuttered just now.
“This is Drama class,” I nodded, letting loose a smile on my lips.
He frowned. “But… but…”
“But?”
“Sekigahara-sensei?”
My smile grew wider despite my effort of holding back the mirth deep down so as to not risking me humiliating the poor boy any further. He did look like he could pass out at any moment now (his extremely skinny figure didn’t help much to my visual judgment), and the whole mess that he was made me want to ask if he’d actually experienced something bad on his way here-like, running into a pack of agitated, wild horses or whatever. I let my humanist side took over, easing up my smile.
“Sekigahara-sensei is currently attending a seminar in Osaka-it was in a short notice, he hadn’t had the chance to inform his students before he left,” I explained, “I’m just replacing him momentarily.”
The boy gawked; again, I fought the urge to tease him.
“So, are you just going to stand there until the class ends, or…?” I asked, lifting one brow.
The way he nearly jumped right out of his shoes, twenty feet to the sky, had me thinking that I might as well just strike him with a lightning or something. Brown haired boy scrambled on his feet, but before he went anywhere, he made a gesture of suddenly remembering something. With his mouth a wide ‘O’, he opened the binder he had been carrying, extracted several sheets of paper from the jungle of chaos that was in the binder, and handed them to me. A bit surprised, I accepted the papers from him.
“And this is…?”
“Assignment, Sensei,” he answered clumsily, swaying sideway when he readjusted his backpack on his shoulder (made me think that it might’ve weighed more than the boy himself).
“Ah… yes, Sekigahara-sensei mentioned this,” I nodded, “Thank you. You can go sit now.”
As a matter of fact, I wouldn’t have remembered about the assignment if the boy hadn’t reminded me about it; with all the information Sekigahara-sensei had left me before he left-and all in such a short time-I could barely recall which class I was supposed to head to, let alone remembering an assignment. I smiled one last time towards the retreating boy (couldn’t help following him with my gaze until he sat-four rows from the back), before I turned to face the rest of the class.
“Well, then,” I said, “We might as well just start the class now, shall we?”
///
The big, spacey house was empty-like a music hall when there was no concert on. I never meant to be bitter about it, but there was something a little disturbing about a big-huge house that lacked its inhabitants, until it seemed like the furniture became the actual owners of the place, since they were here all the time and we were not. My mother… well, without a second guessing, I already knew she would still be at the office. She practically lived there; like, 89% of her life was spent there, and sadly, the number seemed to increase lately, ever since a serious fluctuation on the exchange rate took place and affected the company’s profit flow.
I cringed when I caught sight of the clock; I reached for my phone and speed dialed. Every time things got too busy in the office, I would have to check up on my mother often, to remind her about a lot of stuffs I knew she’d forget.
In a twisted way, I played the role as the babysitter, and my mother was the baby. An old, grouchy and spoiled baby, to be precise.
Her voice sounded dry when she greeted.
“Okaa-san,” I mumbled, “Dinner.”
“Oh God… What time is it, Tora?” she sighed heavily; I couldn’t begin imagining how tired she must be.
“Almost ten,” I answered, “You coming home tonight?”
She hummed before answering, “I am. Just a bit late, I think…”
“Okay. I’ll tell the securities out front.”
“Thank you…”
“Anytime, Okaa-san. Now go eat before you get sick.”
“I will, I will.”
“Don’t push yourself too much.”
“I won’t.”
“Be careful on your way home.”
“Yes, sir,” she laughed softly, “See you tonight, Sweetie. You tell me about your day when I get home, okay?”
“I’ll bore you to death.” I doubted she would want to know the truth.
She laughed again. “Just think you’re reading me a bedtime story.”
I smiled, despite the short but disturbing surge of guilt that ran through my veins. “See you later, Okaa-san.”
Very soon, the phone was back in my pocket, and I was strutting up to my room. The stack of assignments was clutched under my arm; I felt oddly excited about reading them.
Sekigahara-sensei, surprisingly, had become yet another fan of tragedy. For as long as I had known him, and even in the days of me being his student, he had been famous for his non-mainstream favoritism-that when everyone else indulged in tears and suicides, he marched proudly with his love of patriotism. When the rest of us yearned for death and broken hearts, he agitated us instead with cynical insinuations filled with political load. Well, look at what he was doing now…
To say that I was amused with his change of heart would be an understatement. I was exhilarated, truthfully, and I was really curious as to what he was planning for this year’s Drama class. Now that I had a whole stack of tragic stories to read, I couldn’t help visualizing Sekigahara-sensei’s round face, contorted in agony at so many students, shedding fake tears or playing dead on stage. Oh, I would pamper myself with all the sadness and grieving-the masochist that I was-but I wasn’t sure it would dwell easily with Sekigahara-sensei’s overly-logical senses. Which only brought me to more amazement; why the heck had he told his students to write tragedies?
My socks-covered feet made a dull thumping sound against the carpet of my room; I slipped them off quickly, neglecting them God knew where, and threw the papers stack on my bed. My stomach grumbled lowly-that’s what you get for eating too much-as I stripped my shirt off. Randomly pulling out a t-shirt from the closet, I put it on without even looking, and jumped down to bed.
Beginning with one of the most horribly fabricated romantic stories, which most of its dialogues taken from a rather well known modern movie (I was saddened as to what children these days appreciated more, such wasted taste…), I quickly sunk into my own world of tormented hearts and bleeding wrists. It scared me, at some point, to find just how many of these kids had given such serious thoughts to suicide-I had to cringe at one overly violent act, in which the character killed himself by drinking acid that would melt his internal organs. Though greatly impressed as I was-I must say that some were very creative-I preferred the deaths to be less explicit; why couldn’t they have come up with something beautiful, although still tragic? Like a scene that froze at the part where two lovers holding hands at the edge of a cliff; I believed not everyone would want to see details of what had become of the two lovers after they crashed onto the cruel rocks below.
The stack, surprisingly, reduced quite fast, since I had skipped several papers that I considered plainly senseless. And suddenly I came upon a certain paper-wrinkled at the edges-and without a doubt, I knew which student exactly that had handed me this. The brown haired one, the late-coming boy; the shabby looking papers resembled him somewhat.
The title was ‘Kiseki’-‘Miracle’. Unavoidably, the first phrase that came up in my mind was ‘fairy tale’. Helpless as it may seem, but it just came out so in my brain: princes and princesses, fluttering little winged creatures, knights and strong horses… I passed the title page and went straight to page one.
Unlike the first stories I’d read, this one was mostly beyond my expectation. Why I said it was beyond my expectation, because from the theme given (‘Tragedy’) I had assumed that everyone would coil around love stories; I supposed that was one of the regrettable things about Shakespeare’s masterpieces, the lovers’ suicide was much too famous and too overrated. But this one that I read right here… it was actually a story of a family. Of a once harmonious family that shattered in the middle of the way, leaving only a boy, tortured under the care of his careless father. The scenes were almost ghastly vivid; where the father beat the hell out of his son, threw him out on the streets, forced him to work and find money… It continued with the desperateness of the boy in his effort to find his long lost brother, only to be consumed with jealousy once he found him, because he saw that his brother was leading a happy life while he had to suffer.
I hadn’t realized I had been gaping until I finished reading the whole script. The theme, undoubtedly, had been taken to a whole different aspect in life. I’d only figured that, in spite of the largely grown trend, ‘Tragedy’ did not only occur between lovers. ‘Tragedy’ could very well appear in between blood related individuals, between two strangers, between a man and the world… ‘Tragedy’ was not only expressed with betrayal, broken hearts and dismembered promises; ‘Tragedy’ was also in the bitter words of a father to his son, in a man’s jealousy against the brighter world, in a mother’s curse of her conceited child.
The story was tragic.
It was brilliant.
I had no other words to describe the work of art; it was simply brilliant, and definitely innovative, since the rest of the class seemed to have stuck in the same old idea of non-happy-ending love stories.
Something else that emerged from the depth of me, something disturbing, told me that I also recognized the plot-not from some published, older stories, but from real life.
Hurriedly, I flipped the whole paper back to the front page, the title page. Underneath the large font title (‘Kiseki’) was listed the names of the members of the group that would be performing this script.
One name made my heart cease to beat.
I clutched on the paper tightly, wondering if I had seen the characters right, wondering if my eyes were not fooling with me even as I opened them wide. But despite me vaguely wishing the words to change, somehow, they remained as they were.
This was impossible; fate should not be toying with me, not now. My brain and my heart seemed to wrestle against each other with opposite convictions. Though my brain insisted that there should’ve been hundreds, thousands maybe, Japanese people with the same name, my heart resiliently argued about the so-called ‘destiny’ (it and its silly obsession of romantic effigies), saying that this might just be what I’d been looking for my whole life.
The paper fell from my grip-looking more wrinkled than before I had touched it-and I stared at it; dismayed.
No. It couldn’t be him… It shouldn’t be him.
=== TBC ===
Previous chapters: 01 / 02
Chapter: 02/?
Author: chibi_bisque and akichuu
Rating: Overall R
Genre: Angst, AU.
Pairing(s): Tora x Saga
Band(s): alice nine.
Disclaimer: The story belongs to us.
Summary: In this cruel world, there's only one thing they've been looking for...
Notes: An RP project that we've been working together (chibi_bisque came up with most of the idea, actually). Saga's POV is done by (chibi_bisque and Tora's by me, link to the previous chapter is down below. Without further delay, hereby I bring you chapter 2.
奇蹟 ~kiseki~
Chapter 02
================
Shirt: check.
Zipper: check.
Teaching materials: check.
Hair: check. Well, the last time I had seen it on the mirror, which was five minutes ago, my hair looked pretty neat. My efforts of making it look sleek and less-spiky this morning should’ve gotten an award, if I may say so myself.
I ran another thorough inspection, taking a peak at my rear side, returning to the front, before I decided that I looked pretty decent. A disconcerting sense of something rising to my throat told me more fact than I could handle; fact about my insides that didn’t synchronize with how well I might’ve appeared on the surface. I could feel my stomach churning as if I had eaten a whole bowl of two weeks old rice (all yucky and mushy and definitely unhealthy), and if the exhilarating sensation of food poisoning wasn’t enough, I felt my hands and feet dead. My fingers were like they had been put inside the freezer for two days, and I didn’t know how to move them without pushing the last ounce of my brain to kick those paralyzed neurons on the butts and get them to work.
Anyhow, aside from all the stomach-turning calamities, I was supposed to be thrilled; this was going to be my first day teaching.
Teaching, giving lectures; all the same.
The point was: this was the morning (a bright, barely clouded morning, I might add) when I would begin my path as a lecturer.
Oh dear… my stomach twisted again; I supposed I had put the whole deal in a much too severe intonation.
Repeatedly I had tried making myself think of this as nothing more but a short-period thing-unless Sekigahara-sensei decided to escape the country without informing me about it; then I should be worried about signing contracts and being a regular employee here in the campus. It was just for a month, a couple of hours per week; what could be so hard about standing in front of a class, full of third semester students-eager eyes and curious minds and all-for two hours? It shouldn’t be harder than facing my mother on her worst of days; now that would be hell, literally. More than that, this was only a Drama class. I believed I would survive well blabbering about Shakespearean tragedy associated with Japan’s alarming rate of suicide-not that they were closely related; after all, what common youth in Japan would be reading Shakespeare these days, and not to mention letting the essence of true love depicted in the stories affect their judgment of life and death? But tragedies, as far as I could remember (in the memories of my own third semester days-which had passed for four years or so now), had always been a magnet for attention.
God only knows why youngsters loved listening about two people ending their lives, just because their love wasn’t approved by their parents.
To think again: I couldn’t protest; there hadn’t been such thing as an instant marriage at Vegas, back then in the days when Shakespeare still lived. And I also didn’t think Shakespeare had ever had the heart to make Juliet marry Paris just to please her father, and then kill the poor guy with the toxic she’d bought, instead of drinking from the bottle herself. But, then again, without her and Romeo’s death, there would never be the world’s most memorable love story ever.
I sighed. It was only fact that, throughout time, sweet, simple and happy ending had never managed easily to be a best seller.
And supposedly I had more time; I would ponder on it endlessly! But I didn’t, and there was only-I peered at my wristwatch-two and a half minutes to reach the class down the hall, make my grand entrance and perform my eloquent introduction. After all, I was supposed to be the Drama lecturer; it was only expected if I made it all dramatic.
Only, the matter was the only dramatic role I knew how to perform was the drunk-guy in the short play that I had written back in the same class, four years ago. Of course, I bagged the idea and hid it deep inside my head; those thirty minutes had been embarrassing enough for one lifetime, to repeat it was definitely out of the question.
As I resolved on keeping my introduction brief and solid (what importance did it hold anyways? By the beginning of next month I’d already be off their sight…), I began making my way to my destination. Rushing students, new and old, lecturers and such were passing by me; the corridor suddenly seemed too short as the door I had aimed for appeared in my sight without an earlier cue.
This is it, I thought, drawing a long, shaky breath. Two hours, Tora. You’ll make it just fine…
///
It was as I had anticipated that the most annoying reaction of all was the endless murmuring coming from a major part of the students. If they had meant themselves to be inaudible, then they truly failed. I had to be grateful that they hadn’t overreacted when I mentioned my age (yes, I wasn’t more than 4 years older than them); but I couldn’t have asked for a less excessive response than what everyone had given when I mentioned my surname. Fortunately I had a whole lifetime, as in 24 years of it, to learn how not to cringe too visibly whenever someone asked the same old rhetoric: “Amano? As in Amano Yuuko?”
It’s funny what reputation could do to an innocent man-a man who had never chosen to have a successful, multimillionaire businesswoman as a mother; a man who, in time, would eventually inherit the whole richness and fame, despite his unwillingness of it all.
A perfectly in-tune ensemble of whining-overflowed with disappointment-was clearly heard when I told them I was only assisting Sekigahara-sensei and would not be permanently replacing him. I wouldn’t think of being a regular lecturer in this campus, although in two or three years from now it might be a different story, when I had my Master’s degree and a license to give lectures.
That was, if I could actually survive-undetected-applying to a Post Graduate program at all.
“Any other question?” I asked, happy enough that my voice didn’t waver. The introduction was a big success, I considered, with it being so brief and simple. One of the major advantages of being so young-younger than most docents and lecturers here, at least-was that I knew what these kids were thinking, since my own days in their seats hadn’t been gone that long. From what I could remember back in the days, I hadn’t liked it much when a lecturer gave too much intro at the beginning of the class-especially an afternoon class like this one-so I had kept my own intro as short as it seemed comfortable.
Not hearing a response to my question, I decided they were content. I smiled, pushing my glasses up my nose (trying to ignore the soft, unified sighs which I believed was coming from random spots in the crowd); I walked up to the blackboard and started to wipe my name off the surface. The aligned characters vanished at the stroke of the eraser, deteriorating into nothing but chalk remaining that fell on the floor or flew away, airborne.
Once the board was scribbling-free, I turned right back around. I was halfway mustering up the next words to say but the effort stopped short.
The door of the class, which I had left unlocked, swung opened, making a hideous screeching noise as its lower surface chafed against the floor, and a light-brown haired man practically stumbled his whole way in. I couldn’t help but stare. It wasn’t because the boy was horribly late, no… well, at least I had never considered 20 minutes late as horrible. And it also wasn’t because his starkly tall but skinny figure-he looked as lanky as a bamboo twig-although it did occur to my mind an image of him and the mentioned bamboo twig, swaying side by side as the wind blew past them.
Well, probably it was the lanky image of him; added with the mess he had arrived with, he truly was a spectacle to behold.
“Sensei, I’m very sorry,” the boy bowed, “I promise I won’t be late again.”
The brown haired boy kept his head down and mumbling something unclear; he didn’t seem to notice me coming his way-he might not notice a bulldozer coming his way if he kept his head down like that. I suddenly knew how it felt like being a superior and having to face a truant employee; my mother must’ve known the feeling very well, I presumed.
But upon looking at the boy, although he certainly was late and guilty for stealing my grand entrance, I couldn’t bring myself to be upset. He looked pitiful enough that I resolved to stand there in front of him, staring at him while he kept staring at the floor. Cruel as it may seem but I found it amusing when I saw him lifting his sight, an inch at a time; at first he marveled at my shoes, and then my pants, and then, finally, my face. The epic anti-climax of it was the look he had on his face when he saw me: it changed from fear, to surprise, to confusion in merely a minute.
It was almost weird, eerie even, when I suddenly felt like I had seen those eyes, somewhere.
“Have I entered the wrong class?” the boy asked as the realization seemed to dawn on him.
“That depends,” I spoke, struggling hard not to grin, “On what class exactly you need to attend, young man.”
He didn’t answer immediately, but spared a quick glance around the room first, before returning his sight to me; the same confusion was still thick on his expression, although, upon seeing his fellow classmates, he should’ve realized this was the right class. The right class; just the wrong teacher.
“I… Where… Drama class?”
I held another urge to grin, and it was hard, considering just how funny the way the boy stuttered just now.
“This is Drama class,” I nodded, letting loose a smile on my lips.
He frowned. “But… but…”
“But?”
“Sekigahara-sensei?”
My smile grew wider despite my effort of holding back the mirth deep down so as to not risking me humiliating the poor boy any further. He did look like he could pass out at any moment now (his extremely skinny figure didn’t help much to my visual judgment), and the whole mess that he was made me want to ask if he’d actually experienced something bad on his way here-like, running into a pack of agitated, wild horses or whatever. I let my humanist side took over, easing up my smile.
“Sekigahara-sensei is currently attending a seminar in Osaka-it was in a short notice, he hadn’t had the chance to inform his students before he left,” I explained, “I’m just replacing him momentarily.”
The boy gawked; again, I fought the urge to tease him.
“So, are you just going to stand there until the class ends, or…?” I asked, lifting one brow.
The way he nearly jumped right out of his shoes, twenty feet to the sky, had me thinking that I might as well just strike him with a lightning or something. Brown haired boy scrambled on his feet, but before he went anywhere, he made a gesture of suddenly remembering something. With his mouth a wide ‘O’, he opened the binder he had been carrying, extracted several sheets of paper from the jungle of chaos that was in the binder, and handed them to me. A bit surprised, I accepted the papers from him.
“And this is…?”
“Assignment, Sensei,” he answered clumsily, swaying sideway when he readjusted his backpack on his shoulder (made me think that it might’ve weighed more than the boy himself).
“Ah… yes, Sekigahara-sensei mentioned this,” I nodded, “Thank you. You can go sit now.”
As a matter of fact, I wouldn’t have remembered about the assignment if the boy hadn’t reminded me about it; with all the information Sekigahara-sensei had left me before he left-and all in such a short time-I could barely recall which class I was supposed to head to, let alone remembering an assignment. I smiled one last time towards the retreating boy (couldn’t help following him with my gaze until he sat-four rows from the back), before I turned to face the rest of the class.
“Well, then,” I said, “We might as well just start the class now, shall we?”
///
The big, spacey house was empty-like a music hall when there was no concert on. I never meant to be bitter about it, but there was something a little disturbing about a big-huge house that lacked its inhabitants, until it seemed like the furniture became the actual owners of the place, since they were here all the time and we were not. My mother… well, without a second guessing, I already knew she would still be at the office. She practically lived there; like, 89% of her life was spent there, and sadly, the number seemed to increase lately, ever since a serious fluctuation on the exchange rate took place and affected the company’s profit flow.
I cringed when I caught sight of the clock; I reached for my phone and speed dialed. Every time things got too busy in the office, I would have to check up on my mother often, to remind her about a lot of stuffs I knew she’d forget.
In a twisted way, I played the role as the babysitter, and my mother was the baby. An old, grouchy and spoiled baby, to be precise.
Her voice sounded dry when she greeted.
“Okaa-san,” I mumbled, “Dinner.”
“Oh God… What time is it, Tora?” she sighed heavily; I couldn’t begin imagining how tired she must be.
“Almost ten,” I answered, “You coming home tonight?”
She hummed before answering, “I am. Just a bit late, I think…”
“Okay. I’ll tell the securities out front.”
“Thank you…”
“Anytime, Okaa-san. Now go eat before you get sick.”
“I will, I will.”
“Don’t push yourself too much.”
“I won’t.”
“Be careful on your way home.”
“Yes, sir,” she laughed softly, “See you tonight, Sweetie. You tell me about your day when I get home, okay?”
“I’ll bore you to death.” I doubted she would want to know the truth.
She laughed again. “Just think you’re reading me a bedtime story.”
I smiled, despite the short but disturbing surge of guilt that ran through my veins. “See you later, Okaa-san.”
Very soon, the phone was back in my pocket, and I was strutting up to my room. The stack of assignments was clutched under my arm; I felt oddly excited about reading them.
Sekigahara-sensei, surprisingly, had become yet another fan of tragedy. For as long as I had known him, and even in the days of me being his student, he had been famous for his non-mainstream favoritism-that when everyone else indulged in tears and suicides, he marched proudly with his love of patriotism. When the rest of us yearned for death and broken hearts, he agitated us instead with cynical insinuations filled with political load. Well, look at what he was doing now…
To say that I was amused with his change of heart would be an understatement. I was exhilarated, truthfully, and I was really curious as to what he was planning for this year’s Drama class. Now that I had a whole stack of tragic stories to read, I couldn’t help visualizing Sekigahara-sensei’s round face, contorted in agony at so many students, shedding fake tears or playing dead on stage. Oh, I would pamper myself with all the sadness and grieving-the masochist that I was-but I wasn’t sure it would dwell easily with Sekigahara-sensei’s overly-logical senses. Which only brought me to more amazement; why the heck had he told his students to write tragedies?
My socks-covered feet made a dull thumping sound against the carpet of my room; I slipped them off quickly, neglecting them God knew where, and threw the papers stack on my bed. My stomach grumbled lowly-that’s what you get for eating too much-as I stripped my shirt off. Randomly pulling out a t-shirt from the closet, I put it on without even looking, and jumped down to bed.
Beginning with one of the most horribly fabricated romantic stories, which most of its dialogues taken from a rather well known modern movie (I was saddened as to what children these days appreciated more, such wasted taste…), I quickly sunk into my own world of tormented hearts and bleeding wrists. It scared me, at some point, to find just how many of these kids had given such serious thoughts to suicide-I had to cringe at one overly violent act, in which the character killed himself by drinking acid that would melt his internal organs. Though greatly impressed as I was-I must say that some were very creative-I preferred the deaths to be less explicit; why couldn’t they have come up with something beautiful, although still tragic? Like a scene that froze at the part where two lovers holding hands at the edge of a cliff; I believed not everyone would want to see details of what had become of the two lovers after they crashed onto the cruel rocks below.
The stack, surprisingly, reduced quite fast, since I had skipped several papers that I considered plainly senseless. And suddenly I came upon a certain paper-wrinkled at the edges-and without a doubt, I knew which student exactly that had handed me this. The brown haired one, the late-coming boy; the shabby looking papers resembled him somewhat.
The title was ‘Kiseki’-‘Miracle’. Unavoidably, the first phrase that came up in my mind was ‘fairy tale’. Helpless as it may seem, but it just came out so in my brain: princes and princesses, fluttering little winged creatures, knights and strong horses… I passed the title page and went straight to page one.
Unlike the first stories I’d read, this one was mostly beyond my expectation. Why I said it was beyond my expectation, because from the theme given (‘Tragedy’) I had assumed that everyone would coil around love stories; I supposed that was one of the regrettable things about Shakespeare’s masterpieces, the lovers’ suicide was much too famous and too overrated. But this one that I read right here… it was actually a story of a family. Of a once harmonious family that shattered in the middle of the way, leaving only a boy, tortured under the care of his careless father. The scenes were almost ghastly vivid; where the father beat the hell out of his son, threw him out on the streets, forced him to work and find money… It continued with the desperateness of the boy in his effort to find his long lost brother, only to be consumed with jealousy once he found him, because he saw that his brother was leading a happy life while he had to suffer.
I hadn’t realized I had been gaping until I finished reading the whole script. The theme, undoubtedly, had been taken to a whole different aspect in life. I’d only figured that, in spite of the largely grown trend, ‘Tragedy’ did not only occur between lovers. ‘Tragedy’ could very well appear in between blood related individuals, between two strangers, between a man and the world… ‘Tragedy’ was not only expressed with betrayal, broken hearts and dismembered promises; ‘Tragedy’ was also in the bitter words of a father to his son, in a man’s jealousy against the brighter world, in a mother’s curse of her conceited child.
The story was tragic.
It was brilliant.
I had no other words to describe the work of art; it was simply brilliant, and definitely innovative, since the rest of the class seemed to have stuck in the same old idea of non-happy-ending love stories.
Something else that emerged from the depth of me, something disturbing, told me that I also recognized the plot-not from some published, older stories, but from real life.
Hurriedly, I flipped the whole paper back to the front page, the title page. Underneath the large font title (‘Kiseki’) was listed the names of the members of the group that would be performing this script.
One name made my heart cease to beat.
I clutched on the paper tightly, wondering if I had seen the characters right, wondering if my eyes were not fooling with me even as I opened them wide. But despite me vaguely wishing the words to change, somehow, they remained as they were.
This was impossible; fate should not be toying with me, not now. My brain and my heart seemed to wrestle against each other with opposite convictions. Though my brain insisted that there should’ve been hundreds, thousands maybe, Japanese people with the same name, my heart resiliently argued about the so-called ‘destiny’ (it and its silly obsession of romantic effigies), saying that this might just be what I’d been looking for my whole life.
The paper fell from my grip-looking more wrinkled than before I had touched it-and I stared at it; dismayed.
No. It couldn’t be him… It shouldn’t be him.
=== TBC ===
Previous chapters: 01 / 02