K-Shounen!

[LordDarknus]

“L-Lionel?” Iwanako meekly asks through sadness, “If you're happier here, with Kaori.. why do you want to go back?”

“Because I need the job at my Pa's company. It's a chance-- the ONLY chance I have to get a proper job with high salary, the only opportunity to show Yuki, and everyone else that I'm better than him-- than Akira. ..That I'm not a despicable cripple, then I would not be at fault, for being blind.”

“But.. w-wh... what is your dream? Lionel? -- What is it that you most want?”

Lionel turns his ears away from Iwanako, refusing to hear her.

“Lionel.. you don't want to go back at all, do you?”

“NO! ..No, I don't, Iwanako. But I have no choice. What's that quote?”

“..Huh?”

“That quote from Hamlet, the Player King, about apples ripening in our heads and falling up like silly dreams, or dropping into the heart and rotting away. An analogy that our desires are nothing more than desperations of emotions of the moment, foolish promises made under fleeting circumstances. About fate deciding our roll of the dice, and taking away all the winnings in our lif-”

“What to ourselves in passion we propose,
The passion ending, doth the purpose lose.

The violence of either grief or joy
Their own enactures with themselves destroy.

Where joy most revels, grief doth most lament.
Grief joys, joy grieves on slender accident.

This world is not for aye, nor 'tis not strange
That even our loves should with our fortunes change.

For 'tis a question left us yet to prove,
Whether love lead fortune, or else fortune love.”

“Y-yea... yeah, that scene.”

[LordDarknus]

“Lionel.. what is your answer? To the question?”

“I don't need proof, I've seen that-- fortune toys with our love. I should never have loved Kaori, I should have seen it coming. If my uncle didn't die, I don't think Pa would have even wanted me to come home, and...”

“You are happy.. staying with Kaori.”

“Yeah... yeah I am. But it can't last, I have to-”

“Bullsh*t! You have a choice!”

“I-Iwanako?”

“How do you think Kaori feels? That you would choose an empty, unhappy life than be with her? She's your family now! You're each other's hearts! You don't simply part! If fate tells you to! Foolish if you do! You hold on with her, happy together. Joy if you're wealthy, or if they pity! --Us wretched creatures, and our poor futures. Never despair in poverty, when you forge your own destiny. Can't you see you're living..? The worth of believing?”

“I don't.. I don't know if... if I can see.. the tides that will crash upon me, ..the changes ...that will come over us. ..How will we brave the darkness?”

“When either choice damns you, trust what your heart tells you.”

[LordDarknus]

Iwanako is right, I can't believe I couldn't see it before...

I hold her warmly.. and thank her softly. Then immediately get up, and RUN, minding to be careful as I go past Principal Katayama, deeply bowing and thanking her too.

I think I understand Saki now... what she would do.. when she couldn't hold on to the world anymore...

She'd sing a song, any song.. and believe in her dreams...

[Insert Song: 海阔天空 by BEYOND]

Forgive me, Ma.. Pa.., for taking up this wretched life of mine. ..But you'll never take.. my freedom.

Even if I am afraid... that one day.. I'd fall.

Giving up and discarding dreams... anyone can do that.

So why come to fear that there'd be a day.. when we'd be all we have?

I'll hold on... to what I believe.. to Kaori. Even if the world turns its back on me. For now I see... that only in our choices; are we truly free.

[LordDarknus]

I know what I have to do now, I know what to trust in, ..the value of living.

Running blind on a winter morning, giving up all your belongings, your favorite jacket and even the shirt on your back if you had to, because you HAVE TO tell someone, to let her know what she means to you, that no matter what circumstances stand between you, even if she doesn't return your love; You STILL love her, with all your heart, until your very last breath.

Because happiness is a risk worth taking, it gives life a heading, a meaning, a dream so fulfilling, that you simply don't stop believing.

[Insert Song: Don't Stop Believin' by Glee]

Life is a journey, cliché as that is. -- I run myself into the coffee room... no, she's not here.

It's a snow covered road, of soft crystal dreams and crushed virgin roses. -- No one's seen her come to class, or go to the roof, everyone I ask doesn't know where she is.

But perhaps I'm listening now; that it's a living painting.., a song of the heart. -- I suddenly hear her voice... soothing with the piano she's playing...


Life is a journey, we see the end. -- Oh Kaori... guide me, lead me home.. I'll follow your voice, to the ends of the land and beyond...

How we see it end, becomes what we live. -- I stagger to her... Kaori.. my love... I've found you.

[Insert Song: Starry Starry Night (piano) by Kaori]


“I'm listening Kaori. I'm finally listening... set me free.”

“L-Lionel?”

“I love you.”


I hear.. a teardrop, on the piano keys.

[LordDarknus]

[Insert Song: Your Song by Elton John]

I hear the lock in her heart breaking open... but she holds the tears back, and straightens herself, and perhaps is forcing a smile.

“I-I.. I was thinking, that-- in my visual novel, with the canon love interest Lilly, three 'L's.. the beautiful blonde foreigner, you know? Maybe.. at the end, the player runs to her, and catches her at the airport, and maybe even some other clichés before that.”

“Yeah..”

“I was thinking.. of using a song, ..'Fields of Gold' by Sting, for the ending. Since, the protagonist, who doesn't have long to live, travels with her.. to the brilliant sunlight and silver clouds of faraway Hokkaido, to this.. golden wheat field, or barley field, or.. whatever, as long as it's gold.”

“Sounds beautiful..”

“She confesses to him, tells him how happy she is, that--” her whimpering voice cracks into tears, but she forces herself to go on, “that he.. would promise, ..to never go away. To never ever go away again...”

“I promise..”

I run to her and forcefully embrace her, with all my might; she gives in to herself and finally cries, with all her heart. I comfort her, holding her tightly as she pulls me harder, crying away all the pain in her heart. I tell her I love her, I love her and I'll never leave her again, not for a moment, not for the memory of a past love, ..nor for the hurtful hope of a better person finding her, and loving her as much as I do.

Because she has chosen to stay beside me, to walk with me, on my journey-- on our long long journey, through hardships and life, into darkness and light.

And at the end, we'll look back, ...we'll see how far we've come. …We'll smile at who we are now, at us walking hand-in-hand on that long long road, at the choices we are making, and all the risks we're taking. ...And those sincere smiles, from our silver reflections in the rain, far ahead in the snow of our golden years... they will tell us.... that it's all... worth it..

[ED: Fields of Gold by Celtic Woman]

[LordDarknus]

I had a dream about Lionel... about catching a glimpse of him, a world away from me, yet so close in tracks of destiny, for one last time, for just a New York Minute.

It was a bittersweet dream.. I wore a golden wedding ring from Hanzou, and he wore a silver one from a young Irish girl.

In that dream, I was savoring how silver stars and moonlight shone, and remembering why golden seas and sunflowers flowed. And we were together again in my heart, as we were fleeting by on distant midnight trains; Lionel found a good woman to love him, while I traveled to the ends of the earth.

I cried, accepting that I would never see our children... or never should.

But I saw them.. as ghostly reflections and pale shadows, between the windows of passing trains. I called to him through the howling rain, screaming his name over rippling puddles wild with memory. It was a magical, but.. wistful, moment. A fantasy, where longing fears that would tear at my heart, was a reality of sorrowful tears, for all the years forever torn apart.

I asked Lionel to promise me, to stay with me, to not become a distant passenger, a disappearing face lost to a moving window. I want us to walk together, hand-in-hand, cane-beside-cane, holding our love as my guiding light in the coming darkness...

I don't remember the sights my eyes first saw, but I swear Lionel will be.. the last person... I'll ever see.

[LordDarknus]

A bump in the tracks woke me up... I softly open my eyes, to the train's lights swaying with the motions of my head, giving me the start of a great headache.

I force myself to look away, to.. see Lionel, sleeping on my shoulder. I lightly kiss his handsome head, and brush my cheek gently against his soft, somewhat fluffy hair, warmly whispering 'I love you' in the freezing silence of night.

Cold sleek metal framed a shadowy pane, a dim glass ghostly with reflections, of us over starkly-lit carriage interiors. Beyond that, the train's window ran with moonlight sights, darkly clear with rushing structures and twinkling lights.

Yuki and Acair are sitting opposite of us, on this midnight train.. 'going anywhere'. --Actually, to the beach house, and Acair's real name is actually Akira, though only Lionel calls him that, just to be an annoying little brother.

Lionel seems to have.. patched things up, with Yuki and Acair, even greeting them warmly when we picked them up at the airport. Though.. they still fought a little, with Acair telling everyone how Lionel used to go all over the bathroom when he was little, and Lionel telling even louder how Acair used to wear a nightgown to bed.

At least Hanzou and Iwanako have made up, over a shared box of Ricola sweets. I look over my shoulder and seat, spying on them; she's asleep, and holding his arm, while he rests his head gently on hers. ..They look so innocent together...

[LordDarknus]

Sasha and Shizuo are asleep on the seat opposite of them; Sasha still has his suave smile on despite sleeping like a log, as Shizuo snuggles between his arm and the seat, drooling a little as he does. ..Huh, I guess Shizuo Little must have spent the whole night looking out the window, fascinated by the passing view. Hmm, I smile a little, and wish him 'goodnight, sweet prince --of class 3-1 and Iwanako's dreams.'

Wait a minute, I just noticed an absence; Where's Rai? I thought he-- oh, there he is. Sleeping on Iwanako's lap, dreaming and pawing at her skirt like an errant cat. I try to reach over and pinch him in the face, gently pushing Lionel's head off my shoulder as I do. --Err, I'm not.. my arm isn't.. I can't reach him. Hmph, I'm not going to get up and... oh whatever, 'he's not so dirty-minded', I tell myself. He's a good kid, and I know it.

I think Iwanako must have let him sleep on her lap anyway, ..she's such a nice innocent girl. I remember how she stayed up 'till late at night, making a new mask for Hanzou, all by herself, sewing soft breathable fabrics over an adjustable wire frame. It was pretty impressive handiwork, even the eye holes could be enlarged or reshaped.

To complete her precious gift, she bought a new pair of expensive black leather gloves, totally breathable and utterly stylish. Though, I thought it made him look even more like a chauffeur than before, given his black student cap. A bit like that bald Frank Martin guy in the 'Transporter' movies, especially with his old, traditional black student uniform on.

No wait, Kato! From the 'Green Hornet'! Yeah! They should make a 'Green Hornet' or 'Kato's Adventures in Shanghai or~ something' movie, because that's EXACTLY what Hanzou looks like! Who knew? Mild-- ILL-mannered Student Council President by day, and Braille / Sign / multi-lingual superhero by night! And when he puts on his Yamaku blazer, he becomes 'The Green Chauffeur'! His only weakness? A foul on the field witnessed at a parallax by the referee, who pulls out a yellow card! Hah~hahahah!

“What's so funny Kaori?” Yuki suddenly questions softly, mildly startling me.

“Umm.. nothing, sorry.” I whisper and look around.. only Yuki and I are awake, everyone else is still asleep..

[LordDarknus]

“Funny dream?” She quietly asks, with her voice even more graceful and measured than usual so she doesn't wake anyone else up.

“No.. just... lame, western comic book references, I guess..”

Indeed, that's what it was. Yuki just smiles and tilts her head slightly. ...Her light-gray eyes are completely cloudy, almost entirely a ghostly white. I yawn a little, suddenly realizing again how late it actually is, while various descriptions come to my mind about Yuki's eyes; 'soft snow', 'gentle milkiness', 'wispy mists', 'cloudy sky', 'moonlight dancing upon a river'?

In one of the first.. most intimate moments, between me and my love, he timidly asked me: what did his eyes look like? He was so innocent, so vulnerable in my arms, listening with childlike wonder as I described the blue of his eyes to him. I said they were 'a beautiful summer day'. Along with his handsome face, his charming visage.. they were 'a lovely summer dream', and every time I would gaze upon him, I felt.. 'lost in fields of gold'.

I yawn again.. my brain is trying to sleep without me.

Yuki smiles at me, suddenly asking me if.., if Lionel has truly moved on from loving her.

I smile with affirmation, and say, “He's learned to let go as much as he's determined to hold on, but.. he still has a special place for you in his heart. You were the first to capture and nurture it after all, and he is rather loyal to a fault.”

“Indeed..”

[LordDarknus]

“Umm.. Yuki? Can I ask you.. something?”

“Is it about me and Acair?”

“No, ..well, maybe, --sort of. Umm, your wedding rings, you know they.. they look like they're made of-- fake jade.”

“Yes.. yes they are... They're a precious gift.. from a very special Christmas morning. They were carefully set beside my bed, when I heard hurried footsteps down the stairs, and the rude shutting of the front door. I knew that, they came from someone, whose soul had been so purely surrendered to me, only to have his young heart be coldly broken again.

A promise, a shed of tears, and the boy under the stairs.. I held him so dearly in my arms, kept him safe and warm. With all his heart he came to love me, even though I could never return his honesty.

Acair followed after the noise in the living room, and seeing a cuboid digital clock mistakenly thrown into the fireplace, he tried to remove it. Before he could put it out in the snow, the battery burst and scarred his hand. It was, dangerously close to robbing his sight.

He nearly sacrificed so much over worthless counterfeits. Despite that, Acair still forgave and forget, accepting the gift as our wedding rings, our precious symbols of love and happiness, remembering and cherishing an innocence carried so strong.

In our sacred vows, with God as our witness, Acair spoke 'blood is thicker than water', cliché as it was. I boldly said 'love is stronger than loss. There's nothing we can suffer that can't be overcome, nothing we can do that can't be done. It's easy; all we need is love.'”

[Insert Song: All You Need Is Love by The Beatles]

The worth of believing is in striving, the value of living is in believing.


Don't fear what tomorrow may bring, nor fret what yesterday took away...

If you truly love someone today, you'll have been together forever and a day.

[Insert Song: Fields of Gold by Eva Cassidy]

[LordDarknus]

“We are alone in the universe...”, a sentence that rang seemingly true, for a long long time.

We discovered that there wasn't life on Mars, nor on Jupiter's moons. Nor anywhere within shuttle reach. No matter how far nor desperate we called out to the stars, only emptiness echoed back.

We seemed to.. lament our loneliness in the universe, while still celebrating our uniqueness. We judged ourselves worthy of colonising the distant stars. --We started with Mars.

Our little establishments on the red planet was boasted as a stepping stone, 'one small step'... to something bigger.

Sending out deep space probes and exploration shuttles, we let our imaginations take a huge leap beyond the explored systems, we sent out grand invitations and proof of human life, --and something bigger answered.

[LordDarknus]

A dimensional tear occurred-- a rift, of cosmological fabrics. A warp-tunnel, from a distant planet called Char, opened up, fixing its exit point deep in a fissure, in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. Locking on to Earth's magnetic signature, the “space bridge” let something cross over into our world, something-- bigger --than our imaginations...

The first Zerg flood, 1997. -- The skies were darkened by strange, grotesque creatures that floated slowly towards the shore. The coastlines of San Francisco were infested by living structures that crawled like detached organs. The Golden Gate Bridge was overrun with nightmarish alien beings that killed and ate everyone they came across.

We responded with tanks, fighter jets, and everything else that couldn't be eaten or infested. But the worst of their landing force wasn't so easily shot down by tank shells and missiles, no, the alien creatures had something bigger in mind. They had an Ultralisk the size of entire city blocks, and it came lumbering out of the ocean, dwarfing anything we could have thrown at it. It chewed on the Golden Gate Bridge, with soldiers living, dead, or infested still on it, pulling at the tensile steel frame like it was a strip of meat.

When it became clear that San Francisco was lost, with all hope exhausted and no other choice left in sight, we launched a nuclear strike. Then two more, before all of the spreading Zerg forces on land were wiped out, and the Ultralisk finally burned away into a choking field of overcooked flesh and crackling bone.

The remaining Zerg swiftly retreated, disappearing back into the poisoned depths, and quietly closed the space bridge behind them, leaving nothing but pieces of their dead behind to burn and rot, scarring our history and memories forever, with the haunting hell of an alien war that fell on our shores, literally without warning or mercy.

[LordDarknus]

It seemed it was over, it seemed like we won. We pushed back the aliens who heard our calls from out beyond the stars, and we strongly denied them their beachhead. We kindly told them to 'stay the hell off our planet'.

Three years later, they hit Mars. A space bridge opened up in the only body of water available; our own man-made 'Triton Sea'. Artificially created when we settled on Mars, the northern ice cap was harvested and melted for the means to support human life, and we left the door wide open for the second Zerg Flood.

No standing force was on site, not even a simple security guard. We watched in horror as our valued research developments, our historical sites and landmarks, every one of our brightest minds... consumed, in the shadow of another giant beast.

We shot every nuclear warhead it took to vaporise the water, taking the Zerg along with it. We ended up destroying the planet surface, overly thorough in burning the subterranean seas to deny them a foothold, outright killing all hope for life on our own sister planet.

One year later, in our mourning and grief, the Third Flood struck Manilla, another coastline burned in blood. The space bridge reopened in the Pacific, and we sent every warhead we had to close it. Not a single shot went through. We tried to collapse it, burying it under firepower, toxic debris and all our hatred. It took months before we finally gave up, realising it can't be closed from our end.

[LordDarknus]

“We are NOT alone...”, the Zerg is merciless, they are tireless, they will NOT stop advancing. We braced the Flood, it came again, and again, and again. Pushed to the brink of existence, we decided to fight back in kind. We decided to stand up to them. We stared down the dark abyss of our apocalypse. --And created our own monsters.



'Kaiju' -- Japanese loanword.
Literal translation: 'Strange creature'.
General meaning: 'Giant Alien Bastard'

'Jaeger' -- German loanword.
Literal translation: 'Hunter'
General meaning: 'Giant Badass Robot'



“-I repeat! Category-3 Kaiju inbound! Iwanako! Hisao! Wake up!”

“Aah!” I scream in a startle, rolling off my bed.

[LordDarknus]

“Mecha-cavalry Teams 'Caboose' and 'Donut' are already dispatched, they will intercept the initial Zerg wave in fifteen minutes. That Kaiju will hit us in about twenty, get docked and loaded now-”

“What's its name?” I ask eagerly over the intercom.

“Wha-? Errr.. Rhyhorn,”

“Rhyhorn? ...Where do you get these names, Kaori?”

“....., just get into your Jaeger, Iwanako.”