[Kachi]: 373.Modern Fantasy.Steel Sakura

Another old piece, although I still like it despite its faults. I think it goes to prove in some respects that I never did get the hang of writing 'happy endings'. Warning: somewhat fangirl Japanese in places.

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Steel Sakura

  Alone, Yolei stood by the chain-link fence and watched as the sun went down, revelling in the red beauty of the event. And so, she was the only one who saw the strange young man stumbling down the road. She stared in surprise at the boy as he walked aimlessly towards her, his eyes shut tightly and his mouth slightly open. Unsure of what to make of him, she stood and watched only. She didn’t quite dare approach him - after all, for all she knew he might be some kind of lunatic from an asylum.
  Stepping back a little, moving behind the fence, she held the wires with one hand, all the time keeping her eyes locked on his slim form. He appeared to be about her age, slightly taller than her, lightly built and brown haired. As he approached her hiding place, she saw that his mouth was not pointlessly open; rather, he seemed to be mouthing the words to something, some unknown chant or song that only he could hear. She stared at him, slightly scared but equally curious, as he passed by. As he walked, however, she glanced to his hand, then did a double-take and gasped audibly. Both palms was facing forwards, what looked to be an uncomfortable position, but in his right palm - or perhaps part of it - was a strange flower. To Yolei, it looked to be a cherry blossom, but not one she had ever seen before. It was odd: instead of pink or red or white, it was a dull silver, shining a little in the failing light, and looking suspiciously like metal. Maybe steel, she thought as she stared, entranced, at the abnormality. She sighed a little, looking at his hand still, and then gasped again as he froze at the sound. Tensing every muscle, she watched as his head swing round, first to the left, making her wonder if he was blind, or something worse, if there could be anything so. Then he turned again and faced her. The moment she saw his face directly, he paused. Yolei started to tremble all over as the young man stared at her without opening his eyes, and a strange feeling crept over her. He wasn’t alone. The realisation scared her more than he did; she could feel the energy around him, like many people pressing up against him, looking round as he did. Unable to help herself, she whimpered, almost inaudibly.
  Then she almost cried out again as his eyes opened, and she found herself staring at a pair of impossibly red eyes: as red or redder than the setting sun, redder than fresh blood, and as fiery as the all-consuming flames that had destroyed her home when she was smaller. She found herself mesmerised by him - although she was no longer enraptured by his strange and vulnerable beauty, she could have no more looked away from him as she could have taken her eyes away from her favourite part of her favourite film.
  He stared at her, seemingly as surprised as she, and opened his mouth to speak. She braced herself for the voice of this terrible phenomenon, but none came. He was looking perhaps almost as scared as her, his mouth moving yet no sound coming forth. He clenched his fist over the blossom set into his palm and looked at her with an expression she found to be both helpless and peculiarly compelling. She unhooked her now clenched grip on the fence, and moved to the side: still with enough space to turn and run if she needed it, but enough to show him that she was no threat. Then, in a gentle voice, Yolei whispered to him. "Do you have a name?"
  He stared at her a moment longer, then nodded a little, his eyes never leaving hers. After gentle prompting from the girl, he somehow managed to whisper "...Sakura..."
Yolei stared at him. "But... that’s a girl’s name! You can’t be called Sakura!"
  His uncomprehending look showed her that he really didn’t understand her meaning well. Then hesitantly he held forth his closed fist, thumb upwards. As Yolei stared at this pale, long fingered hand, he opened his grip. The cherry blossom remained in his palm, uncrushed, uncreased, and as strangely delicate as his hand. He showed her the extraordinary flower, smiled a little and said in the same quiet voice: "...Sakura."
  And this time, Yolei didn’t dispute his unusual choice of name.
 
  After he had gone, she leaned against the fence and looked up at the sky. Now it was night, and she was alone again. And, alone, she was free to wonder and think. She was finding it hard to believe what she had just seen, who she had just met. After all, how many young men went around with a steel cherry blossom embedded into the palm of their hand? She slid down the fence until she was sat on the ground, and rested her hands on her knees. Unbidden, one of her hands turned itself over. She looked at her own palm, almost as pale as his had been, and wondered what had happened to him to have that flower planted into his hand. Where had he come from, she wondered as she stared at her own palm as uncomprehendingly as he had stared at her. That boy had no memory of his name, and he didn’t appear to know where he came from or why he was walking down the road, and for some reason Yolei felt incredibly sorry for him. She wondered if he had a family, people who would miss him when they realised that he was gone from wherever he had come from in the first place. Or, and here her imagination took a fanciful turn, was he some kind of secret experiment, escaped from a lab where he was cruelly treated, to be free and lost in the world? She decided that she would never know and sighed, shutting her eyes a moment. Then, feeling still a little sad, she stood and walked home, back to her own waiting family.

  They were eating dinner in front of the television when the news came on. No one in Yolei’s family normally were too interested in the news; they sat talking until Yolei happened to glance from her meal to the screen. Taken aback, she cried out in shock, causing her sister stare to at her and ask her what was wrong. Unable to remove her eyes from the screen, she just pointed to the article.
  Her mother turned the volume up, and Yolei listened in stunned surprise to the droning voice of the reader. Her sister glanced sidelong at her. "Why are you so interested in this?"
   Yolei just shushed her, listening.
  "And now back to the main piece in tonight’s programme. Several police cars were mysteriously destroyed in a freak accident today as they rushed to the scene of an explosion in the warehouse area of Kineyo. Several witnesses have reported seeing a strange young man in the area, and some have even reported that this unknown youth might have been the actual cause of the incidents." The scene cut to an interview with a distraught-looking young woman.
  She spoke fast, evidently shaken. "Then this boy just looked round at me, and he had the strangest eyes..." she broke off a moment, taking a deep breath. "He looked so lost, so I asked him if he was okay, just he just stared at me as if he didn’t understand a thing I was saying, then walked away." The scene changed again to another interview with an older man with a bristling moustache and greying hair. "These cars came speeding round the corner towards the explosion, and that boy just seemed to freeze. He looked at them and I could see he looked so scared... He held out his hand, and I swear there seemed to be something in it... Like a cherry blossom or something... But he held out his hand and screamed, I mean screamed something like ‘Stay away!’, then the cars all exploded. It was terrifying..." The man broke off, shaking a little.

  Yolei stared, transfixed, at the screen as an artist’s impression of the boy was posted up. "It couldn’t be..." She murmured, her eyes wide.
  Later that night, she went to bed with no intention of staying there. As soon as she was sure that her parents were asleep and unlikely to notice if she vanished from the house, she gently pulled open her window, sat on the sill and swung her legs over, dropping the small distance to the grass of the garden. Unnerved as she was, she felt some kind of pull that was irresistible to her. She just had to find out who that mysterious boy was, and what he was doing here, for the more she thought of him, the surer she became that he was not intended for this place.

  She ran lightly across the lawn and into the street, her sneakered feet making no sound as she sped silently down the road. The warehouse area of her home town was not far from the place she now lived. Common sense told her that the boy would not have stayed there, seemingly the source of his pain, yet something deeper told her that he would too scared to leave. That which does not kill us will only make us stronger, the saying went, but she wasn’t sure that he could survive much longer.

  The warehouses were brightly illuminated, but the shadows were darker than the ones that surrounded her home at midnight, she contemplated as she now walked down the narrow lanes between the tall buildings. The further she walked, the more crowded the shadows seemed to become, and the closer she knew she was getting to the scared boy she had met earlier. Somehow, although the prospect of meeting him again made her feel apprehensive, she didn’t feel scared. Although she was fully aware of the possibility he could hurt her, she thought that in some way, he was as scared of himself as others were.

  He wouldn’t hurt her.

  Wrapped in her thoughts as she was, she almost didn’t hear the snuffling noise coming from behind the boxes to her right. Her first thought was one of fear: that it might be some kind of rodent. She had a deep, ingrained fear of animals such as mice and rats, and backed away from the heavy wooden crates nervously. Then she stopped. That was no animal sound, she realised, and walked towards the cases again.
  Peering behind them, she gasped in surprise as she saw the boy, huddled up with his arms wrapped around his legs and his cheek resting against his knees. Those impossibly red eyes were fixed upon a point Yolei didn’t think she would be able to see even if she tried; he was muttering something that sounded like "hi...tori...kiri..." over and over again.
  Pity filled her heart and before she was able to stop herself she moved behind the boxes and sat down beside him, putting her arms around his thin shoulders and hugging him tightly, stroking his hair and murmuring words of comfort to him. "You’re not alone now..." she whispered to him, smiling slightly.
  He looked at her, tears standing out in those entrancing eyes, looking as lost and alone as when she had first seen him. He stared at her with an expression of pain, the beauty of his face both marred and enhanced by his extraordinary eyes. She couldn’t look away from them, again reliving the feelings that had traced themselves across her soul as she had seen him first. His fist was clenched round the blossom in his hand - he looked as though he would prefer never to open his hand again. Yolei glanced from his face to his hand, then back to his face, and blinked in surprise as he looked away from her, sadness - or shame - written across his face.
  He remained like that for what seemed an eternity, while Yolei watched him. At length, she plucked up the courage to ask the question that had been on her mind since she had first laid her own green eyes on him. "Where are you from?" she asked hesitantly.
  He wouldn’t look at her, staring at a spot on the floor just past his bare feet, his knuckles turning white as he clenched his fist more tightly. Finally, barely a whisper, she heard him say "kiseki no umi..." Refusing to look at her, he gazed more intently on the patch of ground that seemed to hold so much fascination for him. She gently closed her eyes a moment and sighed. "That is no more than a myth?" She had intended for it to be a statement, but found it hard to believe that this lost boy would lie to her.
  Again, not even attempting to look at her, he shook his head.
 
  Without thinking, she removed her arms from him, looking at him with incredulous eyes. "You lie..."
  Looking more miserable than before, he again shook his head. "Iie." His soft hair, golden and white now, despite it’s earlier colouring, fell into his eyes, masking his feelings from her as he held out his hand in front of himself, uncurling the fingers so the steel sakura was visible, shining in his palm. Closing his eyes, he started to sing. The same chant as she had heard as he walked towards her all those hours ago filled the air. The air seemed to thicken around him as she felt all those strong presences from the shadows cluster round him. Suddenly claustophobic, she backed away again, until she was pressed against the farthest crate from him. As she watched, the cherry blossom set into his hand started to shine more brightly, either reflecting light from some other non-visible source or, somehow, generating it for itself. As the light grew more bright, she was able to make out the occasional figure in the swirling mist. She bit back a scream.
  The glow became more intense as his voice lifted, powerfully carried on the light breeze. The tune changed, his voice sounded sweet and light, the concealed pain carried in a song that sounded ancient and beautiful and full of a hidden foreboding all at once. Yolei found that she wasn’t able to see the sakura for the light now: the aurora almost blinding her. He raised his head, the tears overspilling and running down his cheeks, shining in the light, and sang as if his heart would break. Behind him formed another glow - as he sang to the sakura, to his memory, a pair of steel wings formed on his back growing and spreading as the light shone from the blossom and illuminated the small area of warehouse wall. Yolei stared at them - the bloom far too bright for her to even consider glancing at it now - awestruck by the perfection of the metal and light. Each feather was delicately made, shining with its own fire, connected to a framework of steel and silver that joined his back in a flower of light.
  Although the terror at the forefront of her mind made it hard to think consciously, she knew that somehow this was right, correct. These wings of flawlessness, the faultless sakura, the innocent beauty of the boy. He was truly from the Sea of Miracles, and in Yolei’s heard she knew he should be there now, in a place he could understand and be understood. The Japanese that he spoke, that she understood, was his only way of communication to this closed off world. His emotions were incomprehensible, his heart a mystery.
  Without thinking why, she too joined in the song, holding out her own right hand palm upwards, an exact copy of his gesture.
  He opened his eyes and looked at her wide-eyed, never missing a word, seemingly never having to breathe. Yolei smiled at him, and as she did so, a shape began to form in her hand. She already knew what this was - knew that all was right. This that she had feared before was actually the most natural thing she had ever done. Denying heritage and power, living as ‘normal’.
  They both stood, singing as one, hearts in unison. Despite feeling a sharp burn on her back, Yolei smiled to him. Her wings. Those also of steel, also of perfection and grace, and hers alone. He stepped forward to her, and she to him, and they both linked hands, facing one another, looking into one anothers eyes. His eyes of pure burning red, fire and change, hers of taming green, peace and tranquility. Their hands joined as one, both sharing a blossom, both destined.

  Peace. The kiseki no umi reclaimed them, taking its children back. Again to be forever together.

  Devastated, her parents frantically begged for manhunts, DNA testing, thorough searches of the countryside. Their daughter was never returned them. Speculation was rife about what kind of monster would kidnap an innocent girl and dispose of her body in such a way as to never be found. The disappearance of the boy merited a fourth page column.