If you could change one thing about your past, what would it be?
Ask Me No Questions, and I’ll Tell You No Lies: 2/5
[ 竜 ] – He doesn’t remember much about the day of his father’s funeral, but he remembers that morning. He remembers sitting in the courtyard, the fog still wet, heavy, and grey, still clinging to the branches of the cherry trees that had long since lost their fleeting pink blossoms. Everything had lost its color, and the wind painted ghosts along the engawa. He remembers how it lingered, even after the sun rose, and not a drop of pigment had been regained.
He remembered waiting. Waiting for someone who never showed. Waiting with the futile hopes for all the times he twisted and snapped, breaking his back to lay before his brother, to be there for him in any time of his need, taking his faults as his own, the favor would be returned, when he needed him most. But Hanzo never came.
He remembered running, but he doesn’t remember exactly when he stopped, nor any moment after that which followed. He made a point not to. Lost in the highs, the bodies, false color, the smell of sex, sweat, alcohol and the freedoms they gave him, freedoms he never found elsewhere, freedoms that left him craving more and more but never enough to be satisfied.
It was a week later before he remembered anything again. Was it a week? How many days had passed? It blurred.
And it was perhaps that which he remembered, and what followed, that wanted to forget the most.
“...I would have been there.” It’s not a lie. But it there’s ambiguity as to it’s meaning. Perhaps if anyone knew the thoughts in his head, they’d know what he meant.
He should have been there, his father’s funeral.
It was his duty to be there. His obligation to a distant man he only thought he knew.
And for the first time ever, he left his brother’s side unguarded.
But by then, he knew he didn’t have him anymore. By then, he had nothing left to lose.