6A/N: Somewhat of a spin-off of my one-shot, Girls, in which Taichi tries to talk girls with his teenage son. Same universe, at least. Here, we have the Ishida eldest and her [rather innocent] first encounter with romance. But mostly it's about the Sorato—at least seen through their child's eyes. Happy reading. ;)
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- Hands -
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Kazuko Ishida remembered a question. She had asked it as a child. Sitting in the backseat of her parents' compact car with her baby brother swaddled in the car seat, she swung her little legs. Blue eyes had peeked out the window at tufts of cloud and sunshine.
"Mama," she had said. "Papa," she had added. "Why do people hold hands?"
The answer then had been simple, easy to digest, something that could stick and be remembered.
"To keep you close," her mother had said.
"To keep you safe," her father had said.
"To connect you to me," they both had said.
They had spared her the universal, underlying reason: "Because I love you." A child understood love in action, in expression. Language was limited, and when it came to love being defined for so young and naive a brain, there could be no room for error.
Kazuko was spared.
But now she was revisiting the question and its answers. Leaning against the headboard of her bed, knees up, hands open and close to her face. She traced the fingers in each bone, stretched each digit out, felt every popping vein, every ridge of a knuckle. In the examination she remembered another hand—not hers, a boy's–holding that intricate extremity. Heat had tingled between the palms, wedged a circle of warmth between kissing wrists.
She had held hands with her siblings, her parents, but those were natural seams made when their fingers entwined, an enmeshment of blood and bond as familiar as herself. Nothing was thought of them. Nothing particularly special. An Ishida hand-hold. That was all.
"Hands are weird things," she concluded, writing the proclamation in her journal.
Even as she did so, her eyes drifted from the lines on the page to the precise, fluid motions of her thumb and fingers as they wielded the pen, held it with the same poise as a painter, the same control and gentleness when her mother did ikebana.
She remembered her father coming home one evening to find her mother kneeling before her latest arrangement. A little ceramic pot sat atop the glossy surface of a low table, sprouting stems, leaves, and a gradient of blossoms.
Silence then (and now) had never been demanded but requested, and Kazuko had known to give it out of respect. She liked watching her mother work, red-brown eyes blind with focus, pupils dilated. Ikebana wasn't just a hobby. It was an experience, a trance.
Usually, Kazuko stayed off by the entrance to the hallway that led to the bedrooms, bouncing stuffed animals in mime while her mother practiced her art. The time her father had come home in the middle of it, her mother hadn't even paused in her work. She was absorbed, and her father, inversely, was absorbed in her.
Kazuko had caught her father's stare. He knelt quietly a small distance away from her mother, keeping in her periphery but in Kazuko's full view. A finger pressed to his closed lips, tapping them twice. Kazuko understood the message and went on with her play.
When next she glanced up, her father knelt beside her mother at the table, somehow, silently, invisibly, able to close the gap between. And when her mother reached for the next stalk to add, he handed it to her. Only then did the spell break, and her fingers closed around his, slipping the reed out of his grasp. She was about to put it in place but reconsidered and gave it back to him. The exchange was done in silence, without question, only wonder.
At her complete direction, her father placed the reed where it was destined to be, a flourish of green between white-pink petals. She had guided his hand throughout. Both hands covered his, as if they were lighting a prayer candle together, energies fused as tightly as the wound fibers of wicks.
It was almost as if her father's hand had become the next piece to the ensemble. It was handled with that much care, a tenderness both exact and intimate. Kazuko had watched it all quietly from the hallway, the dancing bunnies once in her grasp limp on the floor.
She sighed and looked up from her journal as the memory passed, ears pricking as her mother's voice punctured daydream. Her guitar lessons were waiting, and, after a thoughtful pause, she shut the book and stowed the pen. On her way out her room she nabbed the neck of her resting guitar and lifted the shoulder strap over her head.
Thankfully, lessons were conducted in-home. More fortunately, her teacher was her father, who taught soul in music as much as he taught method. The only pitfall was that his talents in rock and high-energy rhythms had Kazuko's classical repertoire severely lacking, which was what she was truly interested in.
Space was made for her on the living room sofa as she approached. She sat and looked at her father as he brought out the sheet music, drew his own guitar over his lap. Silver streaked his blond hair–hair she inherited–but it was nonetheless cut and styled in fashion; his clothes, too. Though, perhaps that was the perk of being married to her fashion designer mother.
"You're never late for lessons, Kazuko," her father said. "Your mother never has to remind you."
"I know," she said, unoffended. "I was distracted."
Her father eyed her with that blue stare she herself possessed–a somewhat omnipresently suspicious, somewhat guarded look with glimmers of grey, but what was it the boy had said to her the other day?
Still oh so very beautiful…
"Hmm…" he said. "Distracted."
"Yes."
"I see."
Kazuko flipped a page of the sheet music, diverting her father's attentions.
"What am I learning today?"
He told her, and they went on to review meter and tempo, the chords to play, strums mimed and not struck—not yet. She only half paid attention. Her eyes had fallen on his hands as he demonstrated the first few measures. Left hand taut and precise as it curled over the neck, fingerpads pinching frets; right hand looser, knuckle and fingernail brushing metal strings. The room filled with song, its tone clean, its melody light. Kazuko wondered: could music defy gravity?
She recalled a time, long ago, when she was still a very small girl, a night when her mother had just put her to sleep. It had been a long and quiet past few months, days filled with murmur, white noise, and her baby brother's demanding cries. Her father was away. At that age, Kazuko didn't know where he was exactly or what he did, but when she asked her mother, she would bring her out onto the balcony, always at night.
Her mother would lift her or kneel to her eye level and raise her slender arm, point a finger up, over the violet skyline, beyond the white glare of the city lights, and into the indigo infinity. Her mother's hand would spread out and move in an arc over the night sky, as if she were scattering the stars, as if she could rearrange them, a cast of salt grains on black paper.
But that night, after Kazuko had had her peek of the universe and her mother had put her to bed, she couldn't sleep. As she had stood on the balcony with her mother, she saw a streak, a star move like a teardrop, and she wondered where it fell and why.
Her mother had opened her door.
"Kazuko," she had lightly chided, "go to sleep."
"I can't."
"You'll be tired in the morning."
"I miss Daddy."
Her mother's face had changed then, stiff then soft, so soft Kazuko had reached out to her, wanting to touch, to hold. She received her wish. Her mother came to her and Kazuko crawled onto her lap, let herself be cradled, let herself listen to her mother's heartbeat, thump-thump against her ear, the first music she listened to in the womb.
As her mind drifted, dipped into slumber, her mother began to sing. Her voice had been unsure at first, rickety, shy, but strengthened with the passing seconds. Her father had always been the one crooning lullabies. Her mother would hum at most, but she never sang. It was a song Kazuko knew as her own, her anthem, composed by her father, and her anxiousness fell away. The music faded. Calm crept in.
She slept.
She woke some time later with music in her ears, a tiny thread of tune weaving through her dreams. Her song. But there was no voice to it. It was the instrument only, a resonance that summoned her out of bed.
Her door had been left ajar and she stumbled toward the sliver of light in the crack. One blue eye peered through, and she saw her parents on the living room sofa, her mother's red head against her father's shoulder, her face shiny, wet.
Kazuko blinked several times, heart beginning to race when every blink didn't rub the image of her father away. He was there, he was there. She turned her gaze, glanced at the door, and saw his luggage, his shoes.
She was about to push open the door, run out to him, cry, but he opened his mouth. She noticed the guitar on his lap, his hands already grasping the neck, plucking strings. Her mother laughed, a weepy laugh, a hiccuped laugh.
And Kazuko sank to her knees by the narrow opening of her bedroom door, listening, watching, until the song ended prematurely, her mother's hands on her father's, stopping him. And at the silent request, he ceased his playing, set the guitar aside, and took her fingers in his, said words to her Kazuko couldn't hear. He kissed the backs of her hands. He kissed her face.
"Kazuko."
Her father's voice disrupted her, ended the memory. She shook her head.
"Yes?"
He looked at her.
"Still distracted, I see."
"I'm not—" She sighed.
Her mother stepped into the room.
"Where's the music?" she teased.
"Kazu is distracted."
"Oh?" Her mother wandered into their midst, standing behind the sofa. She set a hand on each of their shoulders, a light pressure pressing, tilting them both back. "Something troubling you?"
Kazuko looked down, at the hollow of her guitar, at her empty hands lying limp below it.
"Mama," she said. "Papa," she added. She looked up, blue eyes finding their faces, each of them looking at her teenage self with openness, understanding. They were always so empathetic. "Why do people hold hands?"
Her parents looked at each other. Perhaps her question was not what they were expecting.
"Did you hold someone's hand, Kazuko?" her father asked.
"Yes," she said. "A boy's," she confessed.
"And how did that make you feel?" her mother asked.
"I don't know. Happy, I guess. Like my heart was... was in prestissimo." She motioned the feeling for them, fluttering her hand over her chest like the wings of a hummingbird.
Her mother giggled. Her father smiled.
"I don't like the feeling without the reason," Kazuko explained, vaguely annoyed with her parents' frivolity over the matter. "I remember you two holding hands, not just when we're out in the city, but in the house, when you're not even doing anything. You're just sitting, but you're holding hands. Mama, you're doing ikebana, and Papa takes your hand and you drop the flower. And Papa, you play guitar and Mama just takes your hand and you stop music for her. Why?"
And as if to prove the fruits of her lesson, her parents reached for her, each one taking one of her hands in their own.
"This answer is simple, Kazuko," her father said, "but the reason is not simple."
"Why do people hold hands?" her mother echoed.
"Because they love," her father replied. "Because they care enough to keep you close, to keep you safe, to connect you to them."
"Is that what it means to love?" asked Kazuko.
"Not the whole definition," her father contended. "But in some ways, yes."
Her mother leaned down, stroked Kazuko's cheek, pushed fallen hair behind her ear.
"Why does this trouble you, Kazu?"
Kazuko observed her hands, held them down below her heart, then up above it.
"I just… I don't want to do it if it's not what I feel. But... I feel it. I do. I didn't think I would. Special feelings are for special people, aren't they? It's a weird thing. Hands are weird things, too."
Her parents laughed.
"You said it yourself, Kazu," said her mother. "Special feelings are for unique individuals."
She squeezed her hand.
"You could not have been spared."
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A/N: Kazuko is a bit of an airy girl, isn't she? I think she takes after her Uncle Takeru, wondering, wondering, wondering. Anywho, this was very... on-the-spot, you could say. So the writing is not my normal nor my best.
Nonetheless, I hope you enjoyed it! :D
Cheers,
Aveza