Now and Forever...Itsumademo... - Chapter 18B
Title: Now and Forever…いつまでも…
Author: Mayonaka no Taiyou/Unare Haineko
Pairing: [Juntoshi] Matsumoto Jun x Ohno Satoshi
Rating: R-ish, but NC-17 for this chapter.
Summary: This story follows Ayumu, a more or less normal child born in 2012, three years after the ending of ‘Kodoku kara Umareta Ai’ (which you can read here). His parents, Jun and Ohno, are everything but ‘normal’ in their often unconventional attempts to deal with some of the challenges of parenthood as they try to ‘blend in’ with ‘normal people’.
0-0-0-0-0
Ohno followed Jun up to Ayumu’s room, where Ayumu was clearly whining at the top of his lungs.
“Sensei!!! I wanna go home already,” Ayumu whined. “I dun wanna be poked no more with the needles!”
“Ayumu, you cut that out right now!” Jun bellowed. “What did I tell you about not making trouble?!”
“Uh oh…hi, Jun-papa,” Ayumu said, sliding into the sheets meekly.
“Sorry, we’re late,” Jun apologized. “Matsumoto Jun. Thank you for treating Ayumu.”
Jun elbowed Ohno.
“Uh….Ohno Satoshi,” Ohno mumbled.
“Sensei, I’m terribly sorry for the inconvenience. What happened to his grandmother? She said she was going to stay here with him.”
“I’m not sure. When I got here, he was alone.”
“Ayumu, where did baachan and jiichan go?”
“Baachan said her battery was low, so she sent jiichan to the car to get her char…char….charger? But jiichan got lost and had to call baachan for help…And then I don’t know where she went…”
“Ayumu, apologize,” Jun commanded.
“Sorry, sensei.”
“It’s alright, Ayumu-kun,” the young doctor smiled. “It looks like he’s going to be alright. He should be able to go home tomorrow.”
“Really? Thank you so much, sensei!” Jun said bowing profusely.
“You might want to keep him at home for another twenty-four to forty-eight hours after that if he seems tired.”
“Okay,” Jun nodded.
“There isn’t much I can really tell you except make sure he doesn’t ingest any more. We have established that he is allergic to the green kind of bell peppers, but just to be sure, you may want to have him avoid exposure to other kinds for awhile. Also, because of the severe nature of his reaction to bell peppers, it is possible for him to develop a cross reaction to other nightshade vegetables such as tomatoes, eggplant, potatoes, or even tobacco.”
“He will react the same way if he’s allergic and exposed to it? I mean, he’s already been exposed to all of those without a reaction…”
“It’s hard to say. Children develop allergies all the time and fortunately, he’s not allergic to latex as seventy percent of people with latex allergies will experience cross-reactions with food. But people have varying degrees in terms of their reactions to members of the nightshade family. Sometimes cooking the vegetable is enough to make it suitable for consumption. Other times, just touching the juice or eating a seed is enough to send them to the hospital. Also, it is possible for people to be allergic to only one particular strain of pepper and not the others.”
“Should I just remove all nightshade vegetables from his diet?
“You can try eliminating them from his diet one by one and seeing if he appears healthier. If you eliminate them one by one and then have him go say, forty-eight hours without any nightshades, if you add one back in and he seems sluggish or he seems to feel ill, you know you may have another culprit.”
“Isn’t that dangerous? Wouldn’t it be better to just have him lab-tested by an allergist or something?”
“We actually send all our tests to America to be done. It takes three to six weeks.”
“No one does it in Japan?”
“It’s a highly specialized field and much of the little allergy research that is done in Japan is dedicated to allergies that Japanese people commonly have such as pollen, soy, or shellfish. We want to be sure the test results are accurate, which is why we send everything to our sister hospital in California.”
“I see.”
“Do you or Ohno-san smoke?”
“I do, he sometimes does,” Jun said, gesturing to the silent other father.
“For the sake of your health and Ayumu’s you may want to consider quitting, especially if he has an allergy to tomatoes-”
“But Jun-papa likes his cigarettes,” piped up Ayumu. “He’ll never give them up. Satoshi-papa and me always cut them up and put them in water…He gets grumpy if he doesn’t have them.”
“I do not-“
“Yeah, you do,” Ayumu and Ohno agreed.
“Jun-papa gets scary like that time he went to the store and they didn’t have his brand,” Ayumu added. “He was gonna hit the cashier. It’s better if he smokes. He’s much happier.”
The doctor chuckled, but he was stunned when Jun bent down and faced the boy sitting on the bed.
“I don’t want you to get sick because of me, Ayumu,” Jun said, holding Ayumu’s tiny hand in his own. “I’ll give up my cigarettes for you.”
“Really?” Ayumu said.
“Of course.”
“But you’ll be sad that you can’t smoke.”
“It’s okay. I’ll do anything for you, Ayumu.”
“You really do love me, Jun-papa,” Ayumu said, reaching for Jun’s chest so he could bury his face into Jun’s chest. “I love you more than anything in the world!”
“They’re cute together, aren’t they?” the doctor commented to Ohno. “He doesn’t have a mother?”
“No, Jun is his mother,” Ohno’s mother replied having returned with her charger.
“Kaachan!”
“Satoshi, just where the hell have you been?”
“At home…”
“Why didn’t you pick up the phone? I’ve been trying to call you.”
“Sorry. I was sleeping. Oh, hello, touchan. How’s it going?”
“I had to go look for your father. I ask him to go get the charger from the car and he gets lost. Do you know where he was? ICU! Imagine that! What did you do, dear, just keep walking forward hoping to get to the parking lot?”
“Um…was that bad?” Ohno’s father asked bashfully.
“Well, the main thing was that you got your charger, right, kaachan?” Ohno pointed out.
“Yes, but-“
“Okaasan,” Jun said acknowledging her presence as he stood up with Ayumu clinging to Jun like a little monkey on his hip.
“Oh, good. Nothing like Jun to knock some sense into our foolish son,” she laughed as she handed the doctor a bag of goodies in appreciation. “Thank you so much for helping us through this. We shall make more conscious efforts to monitor Ayumu’s diet.”
“Anytime, Ohno-san. Well, you have my card. Please do not hesitate to contact me if you have any questions or concerns. Excuse me.”
“Baachan! Baachan!” Ayumu said, reaching forward so that he could be carried by his grandmother. “Did you hear how cool Jun-papa was just now?”
“Jun-papa was cool?”
“He said he would give up his cigarettes for me! Just for me! Imagine that! He loves his cigarettes, but I might get sick, so he’s not gonna smoke no more. Hooray for Jun-papa! He’s just like the brave hero in the fairy tales. He will protect me!”
“Aren’t you lucky you have such a wonderful papa?” she said, kissing Ayumu on the cheek.
Ayumu looked at Ohno between kisses.
“I’m sorry, Satoshi-papa,” Ayumu said. “I’m sorry for not listening to you when Jun-papa wasn’t here. Please forgive me.”
Ayumu held out his arms.
“’s okay…” he said, taking Ayumu and carrying him.
“I love you, Satoshi-papa,” Ayumu said, wrapping his arms tightly around Ohno’s neck.
“I love you too….” Ohno reassured him.
Jun looked on and decided that even though the crack in the flower pot had not truly been repaired, that a surface patch to hold it together in the meantime was better than it shattering. For in a shattered pot could grow no flower. Even if it had the best soil and someone was religiously giving it water, without a pot and sunshine, the water would only wash away the soil and there would be no place for the flower to take root. Something was better than nothing but Jun knew that if he did not fix that crack soon, it would only get bigger until it could no longer sustain anything.
0-0-0-0-0
Daisuke was stirring the tofu into the spicy pork sauce for his mabo tofu when he suddenly felt something warm press against the side of his body.
“Ahnn,” Nino said playfully, opening his mouth next to Daisuke’s shoulder.
“K-K-Kazu-san!” stammered Daisuke, startled by Nino’s sudden appearance. “Just a minute, I’m almost done getting lunch-“
“Calm down, Oh-chan,” Nino said, taking the wooden spoon from Daisuke’s trembling hands.
“What are you doing?”
“Testing for anthrax,” Nino replied, popping a few cubes of tofu into his mouth.
“Anthrax?”
“It’s safe to eat,” Nino smiled impishly, handing the spoon back to Daisuke and picking at the hot rice before picking up the newspaper on the counter.
Daisuke looked back at Nino who was sitting down at the table reading the ‘Entertainment’ section of the newspaper.
“Oh-chan,” Nino said, startling Daisuke.
“Yes, Kazu-san?” Daisuke replied, afraid he would be reprimanded for staring.
“Next week Friday night…the 24th,” began Nino, his eyes never leaving the printed material.
“Yes?”
“What are you doing?”
“Nothing. Why?”
“I want you to accompany me to a dinner.”
“What time?”
“Five-thirty.”
“Isn’t that early for dinner?”
“Are you busy?”
“No, well…Okay, where?”
“A ryokan in Asakusa called Tachibana (橘).”
“Tachi…bana…?”
“You can make it, right? Is there a problem?”
“N-N-No…”
“Good,” Nino smiled as he sat down to lunch.
No sooner had Nino taken a few bites of his lunch when suddenly his phone rang.
“Hello?” Nino said, picking it up off the table and answering the call. “…Yes?...Uh huh…”
Daisuke watched Nino shovel his lunch into his mouth while he talked on the phone.
“No…Do I have to?” Nino whined. “Oh…fine…Bye.”
Nino closed his phone and tossed it to the side.
“Oh-chan,” he said, rolling his eyes.
“Yes, Kazu-san?”
“I need you to run an errand for me.”
“Okay.”
“Do you know where Chuo-rinkan is?”
“Isn’t that the end of the Denen-toshi Line?”
“Yeah. Well, I’m supposed to be there to sign this paper, but there’s this promotion for a game that I want to start lining up for…” Nino paused for effect.
“Do you want me to go sign on your behalf again?”
“It isn’t too much trouble?”
“It’s alright. But won’t your manager get angry?”
“Oh, never mind him. He’ll get over it. Just take one of the permission slips, you know where they are,” Nino gestured vaguely to the file cabinet. “And stamp my name on the permission slip. Show them the permission slip that acknowledges that you are signing on my behalf, yada yada, you know the drill, right Oh-chan?”
“Okay, Kazu-san. Should I leave now?”
“Meh, they’re not expecting me for another hour,” shrugged Nino. “Take your time…”
“But it takes an hour to get there from here-“
“Oh, alright, you can leave after you clean up,” conceded Nino, lighting up a cigarette.
Nino watched out of the corner of his eye as Daisuke scrambled to clean everything up. After he finished his cigarette, he went to take a shower. By the time, he came out, Daisuke was gone.
I know there’s got to be something…
Nino opened the door to Daisuke’s sparse room and began combing through his things once again, searching for something that would tell him more about his mysterious assistant. Time was of the essence as the errand he sent Daisuke on would probably only take three or four hours at most. Nino knew that he needed to make a move before Daisuke had a chance to regroup.
Something isn’t right about him. He’s hiding something. I just know it…
Nino checked under the bed and between the sheets as well. The room was so sparse that he could hardly believe that Daisuke could manage to hide something from him without him noticing. However, that would require admitting that Daisuke was perhaps craftier than the prince of games, something he was not about to admit just yet.
Calm down, Kazunari. Now, if I were the boy and I worked for someone like me…where would I hide stuff?
Nino looked around.
It’s spotless…
Then his beady eyes zoomed in on a small pile of clothes in the corner.
In plain sight…?
Nino rummaged through the clothes and to his delight he was rewarded with the clunk of something hard hitting the floor. Picking it up off the floor, Nino examined the small box that would be just right to fit two anpan pastries or a large melon pan pastry inside.
Himtsu-bako (秘密箱)…?
Nino turned the box on its side while sliding his fingers over the smooth yosegi geometrically patterned box. There were no hinges or key holes. The finish was seamless and the skill of the craftsman was obvious. This was a box that could not be opened by conventional means. The simplest of puzzle boxes opened in two moves, but the more complex ones could take up to two-hundred precise movements in order to open the box. Had Nino been an average person, he might have been discouraged; however no sooner had he ran his fingernails over one of the surfaces while gently pressing against the edges of one of the faces when the first part slid to the right.
Upon examining a part of the inner woodwork of the puzzle box, he knew that the box had no chance. Compared to the ones his grandfather had sent him from his distant relative, the renowned puzzle box master, Ninomiya Yoshiyuki (二宮義之), Daisuke’s was like a stray kitten against the mountain lions that his grandfather was fond of sending him. Granted, it had been over ten years since he last played with one, but manipulating puzzle boxed was a skill that was easily retrieved from memory.
As he unlocked the fourteenth piece, he chucked to himself as he remembered how frustrated he would be when he could not solve the puzzle before dinner. When he was a child, he could not rest until he was able to open the box to expose the secret cavity. Nino’s first boxes had been simple and contained only a few pieces of candy or a bit of spending money as motivation, but as he grew older, his grandfather commissioned Yoshiyuki to place a small piece of another puzzle as the ‘prize’ with the intent of having Nino collect all the pieces and put them together to exchange for the real prize. His grandfather passed away when he was eleven, but every few months, Yoshiyuki continued to send Nino the remaining puzzles that had been designed by his grandfather until he completed them all. It took him nearly two years and the puzzle containing the last piece came on his thirteenth birthday, two days before he formally entered the jimusho.
Nino pulled a piece of the box towards the bottom and when it connected with the other piece, Nino knew that he had solved the puzzle. He lifted the top of the wood inlay and exposed the cavity. He was surprised when he lifted the top that a rather sad tune began to play. Nino dumped the contents out onto the cold floor.
What the…?
Nino sorted the items by usefulness and relevance. He started with the things that told him nothing. There was Daisuke’s bank information, which was useless since Nino already had that information. Nino flipped through the brochures, most of which were deemed ‘useless’ as Nino had no use for brochures of famous pastry shops. But then he came across the brochure for the actual pastry school.
He wants to go to pastry school…and it’s gonna cost him 11 million yen.
Nino referred back to the bank information.
Good, he’s still quite a ways to reaching his goal…
As if archiving the information in his brain, Nino nodded and placed the brochures together and moved to the small stack of pictures, which were mostly pictures of food or scenery (which failed to capture Nino’s interest). Nino was pleasantly surprised that the last three photos actually contained people. The first was a photo of a little girl of five or six wearing a yukata while holding a fan. The second photo was taken from the back and showed a slim woman in her early thirties standing in front of a stove. Nino deduced that it was most likely someone’s mother as the woman wore an apron and fuzzy house slippers. The final picture was of the girl in the first picture and the woman from the second picture. There was not much to see as it was only a head shot with the woman smiling brightly and the girl looking at the camera shyly.
His mother and his sister?
Nino shrugged and placed the photos with the brochures before searching through the trinkets-a tiny hand sewn rabbit filled with dry beans, a mobile phone strap with a plastic encased picture of a boy named ‘Tsukishima Hideki’, the plastic of which had been smashed over the face of the boy Hideki who posed arrogantly with his baseball bat, a bookmark with a branch of leaves and red ‘berries’ that read ‘YEW’ in large roman letters, and a stopped coverless, chainless silver pocket watch with a crack across its face that read ‘6:11’. The more he looked, the more confused Nino became. And when he found a student identification card, he flipped it over.
The celebrity gamer nearly had a heart attack when he realized the girl in the pictures was not a girl, but a boy by the name of Tsukishima Daisuke. Nino shuffled through the newspaper clippings.
‘Wife of local political official dies in car crash’…Tsukishima Saeko (42), wife of Tsukishima Seiji and mother of two sons, superstar athlete Hideki and Ichimatsu doll-faced Daisuke, was driving home with her son Daisuke after picking him up after his school activities ten minutes after six in the evening when a utility pole suddenly fell into the middle of the Miryuu (深柳)-doori intersection, sideswiping the driver’s side of the car Tsukishima was driving and causing her to veer off the road. She crashed into the concrete blocks of the road expansion construction project. The first officer on the scene pronounced her dead upon impact and was able to pull out son Daisuke from the wreckage. Daisuke was taken to the Izumo City Hospital where he was treated and later released. Local residents have been asking that the city officials to replace the ‘wobbly utility poles’ along Miryuu-doori for quite some time and many are enraged at the fact that Tsukishima’s death was completely avoidable and preventable…. Ironically, Tsukishima’s husband’s political platform on the previous election had been on road expansion. The political figure had dismissed the urgency of utility pole safety in favor of using traffic and transportation budget funds to expand roads… According to the forensics department and traffic investigators, Tsukishima would have survived had she not collided into the concrete blocks.’
The other articles stated more or less the same thing as the first article that Nino had picked up so he returned the contents of the puzzle box to the cavity and moved the outside yosegi pieces to their original positions. After stuffing the box back under the laundry, Nino lit another cigarette and wandered about the house.
Now what does this all mean?
>>> Chapter 18C
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