Blossoms of The Forgotten Day Chapter 21: Chapter 21

Read chapter 21 of Blossoms of The Forgotten Day by Simply No One on NovelPedia.

I had imagined this moment before. Not deliberately. Not sitting down and constructing it. But in the way the mind works at night when you have stopped managing it, producing things you did not ask for and cannot stop. I had imagined it in fragments, pieces of it arriving without order, a face here, a voice there, the quality of light that might exist in a place between places. None of those fragments had come close to this. They stood in the warmth of the impossible light and they were exactly themselves. Not faded, not translucent, not the way the dead look in the stories people tell about them. Just themselves, present on the slope above the valley in the late winter afternoon, as real and particular as the stone behind me and the cold ground beneath my feet and the sound of Haruki breathing very carefully somewhere behind me. My father with his hand in his coat pocket and the bottom button of his jacket open. Akari with her dawn-colored hair and her eyes the blue of the stone I had just set at the base of the memorial. Looking at me. I could not move. I was not sure my legs would hold if I tried. I stood where I was and looked back at them and the wind moved through the bare trees above the slope and the valley lay still below and the world continued its ordinary business all around this one impossible thing. Then Akari smiled. Small and easy, exactly the way she always had, the smile that never asked for anything back. As if this were the most natural thing. As if standing in impossible light on a mountain slope were simply the next moment after the last one and there was nothing in it to be afraid of. "You found the clearing," she said. Her voice. The same voice that had filled the arts center hall, that had held the song on a single thread while I stood with a bleeding hand and looked up at the yellow light. Here it was smaller, warmer, meant only for this slope and this moment and me. "You knew it," I said. My voice came out steadier than I expected. "You already knew it. That is why you took me there." "I used to sit there when I was small," she said. "When I wanted to think. The river sounds different from up there. More patient." She tilted her head slightly. "I thought you would like it." "I did," I said. She looked at me for a moment with that expression I had never fully learned to read, the one that sat underneath the easy smile, real and unguarded. Then she said, "I am sorry I did not tell you who I was. I wanted to. But I did not think it would help you. I thought if you knew, you would carry it differently. You would play for me instead of playing for yourself. And that was not what you needed." I thought about that. About the clearing and the music room and the stage. About the melody from when I was five, coming up from the deep ground without permission. About standing on a stage with a bleeding hand and saying yes, I want to play, no, play with you, and meaning both at once. "You were right," I said. She nodded once. Just that. The way she accepted things that were true without making more of them than they were. "You came back for me," I said. "I came back because you needed someone who already knew the weight," she said. "And because." She paused, and for the first time something moved across her face that was not the easy warmth, something quieter and more serious. "Because I wanted to see who you had become. I wanted to hear you play." A small breath. "I am glad I did." The wind moved through the trees. The light around them did not waver. I looked at my father. He was watching me with the expression I remembered from the competition hall. Focused and quiet and present. The expression that meant he was seeing me clearly and choosing his words with care. "I did not keep the promise," I said to him. "I ran. I know I ran. I have known every day since." He was quiet for a moment. The same way he had always been quiet before saying the thing that mattered. "No," he said. Just that word. Sitting in the cold