The Little Things

The Little Things

Time Placement: Early PAX Serenity

It was all Aino Minako could do to avoid missing the chair as she involuntarily dropped to a sitting position, the blood gone from her legs.

"Take it easy, mom!" Sakura protested, rushing over and catching her before she fell. It wasn't as though, even at her great age, that a fall could really do much to harm her, Sakura noted as she steadied her mother by bracing against her briefly, and then helped her to her seat, it was that in her state of mind, Minako would just choose to lie on the floor. Rassilon knew she wanted to.

All Sakura Xadium Aino had wanted to do was cry. Cry her eyes out until no more liquid could spill. Pound her fists on the ground until either the earth cracked or her own fists had been rendered bloody stumps of meat. Perhaps the pain would dull then. But she knew from experience that it would not.

Just as it had been when she had thought her parents dead-- then when her father had died for real-- Sakura had felt the empty hollow weakness, the soul-eater of dark despair. The first time she had been alone, traumatized, with only rei.bot to help her. The second time, she had chosen to push down the pain, to be strong and comfort her mother, who had almost gone mad with grief.

And here, again, she was, performing her role as comforter-confessor. But unlike last time, when the news of her father's death had come in unawares-- in a sad, strange way sparing her the shock of seeing the sad moment of finality-- here, this time-- she had seen it happen. She had seen Ikari Furu die, right before her eyes. She had been in a position to possibly stop it-- and she had not.

"Sakura," Minako said weakly, her crystal-blue eyes filled to the brim with tears and bloodshot, "Was he in pain?"

Sakura shook her head. Whatever demon-thing had possessed Furu's soul had left him probably more surprised than anything at his own termination.

"Sakura," Minako began again, slowly turning to look at her daughter. The two women, who had once looked so much alike, were now markedly different to one another. Minako's hair was gray and limp, without much body or life to it. Her outfit was bland and drab, a far cry from the flashy style of her youth. Her movements were slower, sometimes ponderously so. The older woman was slowly dying of old age.

Minako had honestly never thought she would become like this, withering away with each passing day. She had expected, somewhat foolishly, to either keep her youthful looks until the day she died, or to go out in a blaze of glorious battle. But through it all-- Beryl, Wise Man, Pharaoh 90, Nephelenia, Galaxia, Miss Dream, Senshimon, The Heralds of Peace, the Daleks, the Tairon Overfiend, and even the first battles with the Revenant, she had survived. Outlived many of her friends, outlived Artemis, even outlived her husband. Only Sakura, who seemed eternally youthful, was left of her family now. Because Furu, the sweet innocent boy she had long ago adopted as a younger brother, had died.

Sakura too, thought of Furu as a brother, albeit as a big one. There was just a childishness about him stemming from their first encounter that had rendered her unable to think of him as "uncle." But that child, in a quest to become stronger, had sacrificed his flesh and bone for the technological power of the Jinzouningen-- the artificial cyborg human-- and then taken the transformation one step too far, integrating DG cells into his body which eventually tainted his soul, turning him into a force of pure evil-- a force which today, had been put down for all time.

"I never... noticed," Minako said slowly, her throat dry. "I mean, his future self would come visit us in the past, the way you would, Sakura-chan," Minako began slowly, "but I could never tell the difference."

"They looked the same," Sakura lied, trying to get her mother off this line of thought. "Even I had trouble." She tried to crack one of her trademark smiles. but her face would not comply. Today was too sad a day for even feigned joviality.

"Don't lie to your mother," Minako said after taking a deep breath, shaking a finger at Sakura three times with a sort of snapping motion. "I never paid attention to him, that's what it was."

"Mom..." Sakura began slowly, but Minako cut her off with a glare.

"I always talked to him, but never really looked at him," Minako said slowly, tears filling her eyes. "To me he was always a stereo player."

"Stereotype," Sakura corrected gently.

"That too," Minako replied, nodding in assent and coughing a bit. "But to me he was either always that cute little innocent boy who was like a walking, nosebleeding plushie, or a strange sex maniac."

"He wasn't a sex maniac, mom," Sakura reminded her, going over to an antique table and picking up a picture of the fresh-faced, green haired boy. "You just freaked out after you came back home and finding out he had had his first... experience in that regard."

"Well it was like my own child had done that!" Minako snapped, stamping her foot on the floor and sobbing. "I always had a picture in my head of what he was like, letting my imagination send in the tanks. To me he was always a kid... when he became a man I couldn't believe it and so I made a new picture of him in my head as some kind of urotskidoji tentacle fiend... just so I'd have an excuse to run away from him and not confront the fact... that he'd grown up all of a sudden while I was away."

Sakura nodded slowly, walking over to her mother and holding her hand, trying to soothe her. "You shouldn't get so agitated, mama..."

"Mama!" Minako jumped out her chair, causing it to tip over and crash behind her. "What kind of mama was I to Furu!!"

"You weren't his mother at all," Sakura protested. "He had parents, as you found out after you adopted him. You were his big sister."

"I wanted to be his mama!" Minako snapped, striking her chest with the palm of her hand. "I wanted to make life happy and fun for him, to show him he wasn't alone. I wanted to give him the world I had at my fingertips! So what if I called him little brother! He was more than that to me!!"

Sakura looked at her mother wide-eyed. There had been some kind of childlike innocence about Furu in the early days that did in fact make him seem like a thing to be protected, sheltered, nurtured. Granted, Furu had actually had a much more complex and rich history, full of its own adult pain and sorrow, but at the time, no one had known-- for all the world he had seemed a happy-go-lucky, ordinary sweet boy. Even Sakura had gone out of her way to try and preserve that innocence. But in the end, it had been lost, horrifically, sadly lost.

"And I never told him--" Minako cried, taking the picture from Sakura's hands. "I never told him how I really felt, how much he meant to me, or what he was to me. I just played with him like a sister would, trying to get him to enjoy life, to go places and do things-- I--" her voice broke for a moment. "I should have SAID SOMETHING, SAKURA-CHAN!!"

Weeping openly now, Minako leaned on Sakura, pushing the younger girl back slightly. Sakura let her mom rest her head on her shoulder, and began smoothing out her hair and patting her back.

"So should I, mama," Sakura replied quietly. "So should I. But we never say the things we want to say, because we're afraid we might scare the ones we want closest to us... and then we lose our opportunity..."

"I never looked at him, really," Minako continued, her voice muffled as she rested her head on Sakura's shoulder, chin pressed into the leather shoulder-flap on Sakura's vest. "Never saw him for what he really was at the moment- a young man. The day he struck his deal with Gero I didn't notice the change until he started flying around. I never even noticed when he got the DG cells put in... or when he started to slip away from us... I always looked past him somehow, and always treated him like... the child I wanted him to be."

Sakura said nothing and just continued to smooth her mother's gray hair. A leaden silence descended on the room.

"If only I hadn't teased him--" Minako began after some time.

"I know," Sakura replied quietly.

"If only I had taken care of him instead of playing silly games--"

"I know."

"If only I'd noticed how badly in trouble he was--" Minako's voice trailed off into a weak whimper.

"I know, mama..." Sakura's voice was heavy with grief as well.

"I failed him...." Minako forced out, physically becoming unable to say more, for the grief.

"We both did," Sakura said hoarsely, the first sobs coming now. Even her resolve was broken.

For a long time mother and daughter stood there in each other's arms simply crying, and remembering.