Description: Kurow checks in on Hotaru, perhaps testing to see how well his tampering with her memory is holding up. Though he slips up in a few places, the overall effect is strong enough to allow him a private joke at her expense on his way out.
It would take one with Kurow's resources almost no effort track down Hotaru Futaba after her return to Southtown once everything Shadaloo had built up came falling down in Thailand. She follows a pretty predictable routine. Weekdays are class at Seijyun, having to do some summer school to make up for an entire missing year from her education to travel abroad. Afternoons are either spent stirring something up at Gedo High going straight to the Kyokugen Dojo for daily training. And weekends she spends time here - An old church building nestled in a quiet, residential neighborhood of Southtown Village.
Further inquiries would reveal that while she seems to get a long with almost everyone she meets on a superficial level, the girl has effectively no close friends with whom she spends a lot of time. Too spirited for the typical Seijyun girl and too upper class for the average Gedo student, she doesn't really fit in anywhere she goes. Which is probably why she spends her weekends alone in this quiet place.
Presently, she is kneeling next to a flower garden that is need of some weeding. She's having to make up for weeks of neglect while being out of the country Saving The World. A blue, plastic tarp is next to her on the grass and it is onto that she tosses the weeds she's pulling, one by one. She passes the time with this mundane, doldrum task by humming to herself; rotating through a variety of pithy tunes.
Those who are relatively alone are often the best to work with; the more voids that there are in someone's life, the more voids -- obviously -- one can slowly but surely attempt to fill. After all -- the best way to make sure someone won't leave you in /any/ field of life is to make sure they have no reason to look elsewhere for fulfillment. This may be what brings Kurow Kirishima to check up on the young lady who was such a thorn in his side, once. Perhaps it's simply a desire to pass the time /somehow/ until he gets confirmation on what he already fears.
The youth glances around the church, but doesn't spend too long admiring the architecture or wondering at just how long the building's stood on this spot. He's interested in the person who comes by so often, after all, not a bunch of stones stacked atop one another. Following that distant humming, Kurow finds Hotaru in relatively short order, waiting a few seconds and simply watching her garden before calling attention to himself.
"Do you need a hand?" he asks, seemingly the very model of kindness and charity. "... and, for that matter -- wait a minute..." He pauses, a calculated gesture -- he can't seem /too/ interested in the young lady, after all. "Hotaru Futaba, isn't it? I hope you're feeling better than you were last time we met."
At the sound of someone having come behind her, Hotaru stops what she is doing. Straightening up, she tosses another weed onto the pile at her side and glances over her shoulder, "Oh!" she replies, grinning a little, "Yes, yes, that's right." comes the obviously unneeded confirmation of her name.
She glances back at the garden as if weighing something, but then pushes herself to her feet, brushing her slightly dirty hands off. "I'm feeling much better now, Kurow." Her tone is pleasant, amiable, as if greeting an aquaintance with whom she has only had pleasent experiences in the past. "I hope that in the confusing aftermath of events there, things turned out okay for you as well."
She gestures to the flower garden - a bed of summer blooming blossoms of all colors. Greens, blues, violets, reds, pinks, yellows. It isn't quite the scale of the famous Seijyun flower gardens. But for its size, it's almost equally impressive. "I'm just catching up on this little side project. I wouldn't trouble yourself with it. It's just something I do," she states with a faint smile.
"What brings you this way? Are you looking for something?" It isn't unusual for people to wander onto these grounds as seekers. Searching for answers, a place to meditate, a quiet corner to pray or reflect, or maybe just someone to talk to. Hotaru seems to think his being here merely a coincidence, nothing more.
"If you're sure," Kurow says, sitting next to her -- if she doesn't want help, after all, he has no business giving it at the moment. He does, however, walk over and sit down next to her, watching the young lady tend to that remarkable garden -- even he knows when to be impressed, /especially/ if this is her project and hers alone. Even a monster like Kurow Kirishima can appreciate the beauty in something like this.
Oh, right -- she asked a question. There's time to stop and smell the flowers, but not /too/ much! "I just needed somewhere to go that was relatively peaceful for a little while," he lies, before continuing, "I suffered a few -- disappointments, in Thailand. Someone -- no, I'd rather not talk too much about it, actually." If only Hotaru knew that his disappointments were intimately tied to what would no doubt be a remarkably happy occasion for her -- but then, such is life.
The youth looks off to the side for a while, his gaze not on Hotaru but off in the distance. "... actually, I don't mean to burden you, but could I get a few things off my chest? I'd do you the same courtesy, too, if you'd like." He really does /sound/ like he's just a typical young man with -- for someone who went to Thailand and suffered -- relatively typical problems, at least. "I understand you've had a few difficult spots of your own lately."
"If you're looking for a peaceful place, I hope these grounds can suffice," Hotaru replies, clearly sounding pleased that perhaps the property she spends so much time maintaining might provide a tranquil refuge for the young man who seems to have a lot on his mind.
Kneeling again, she leans forward to start picking at the weeds again, small hands wrapping around the unwanted invaders in the otherse meticulously maintained garden. It is with decisive strength that she pulls each one from the ground with just the right touch and pressure to avoid severing the stalks from the roots, keeping the weed in one place.
At his question she pauses, leaning her head to the side. "It wouldn't be a bother," Hotaru states. "If you'd like, perhaps you can help me after all. I find it's good to have something to keep your hands busy with when your mind is weighed down." she offers, looking at him from the side even as he gazes into the distance, smiling quietly for a moment, then leaning back down to pluck the next weed within reach and toss it onto the pile. "What is it that's bothering you?" she asks after a moment, leaning forward to study the stalk of a tulip carefully, perhaps inspecting it for signs of aphids.
Gardening has never been quite Kurow's forte, but he helps just the same; his primary skill seems to be pulling up weeds with perhaps all too machine-like precision. He doesn't have quite the perfect touch Hotaru does, but he makes up for it with regularity -- once he finds that sweet spot, he pulls up every weed with almost exactly the same motion. For a little while, he simply does this -- after all, he's trying to get his thoughts in order. He can't say too much, but he can't -quite- outright lie either. After all, she'd probably notice.
"Oh, it's simply -- well, I imagine it's the same frustrations you had when you were in Thailand. I wasn't sure I should talk about it, but..." He forces a sigh that seems just a little too hard, just a little too long to be genuine -- but then, maybe he's just a little awkward. "Do you ever have a moment where you do everything right, create something beautiful, but it all ends up shattered by someone else's ignorance?"
He looks out toward the garden, and gets an idea. If nothing else, it's something relatively easy to relate to! Hotaru is not -too- difficult to read, especially in a place as dear to her as this, which is a fact Kurow is quite thankful for right now. "Imagine if -- oh -- one of those thugs from Gedo were to run in and accidentally trample this garden."
Even with the tampering, Hotaru remains a very perceptive girl. The longer Kurow spends with her, the more he risks tripping over her intuition and putting at risk the work he has done thus far with young Futaba. She pauses at the sigh, looking toward him now, giving him her full attention, settling back into a kneeling position, her hands resting in her lap.
At his example, she frowns, glancing toward the garden itself as if picturing it after having been violated by the feet of an uncaring, thoughtless miscreant. All of her hard work in carefully planting, tending, and maintaining the plant life destroyed in a moment. The pained expression on her face is easy enough to read. She understands what he is getting at.
"That would make me very sad. And, well, angry too. For a while. It would be hard for me to forgive someone for doing that." Hotaru states, her tone soft, thoughtful. "But in the end, I would have to find a way. My mother taught me that anger harbored in our heart can fester like a poison."
She glances over her shoulder now, toward a far corner of the property. From near the garden it isn't too hard to see a number of small gravestones sticking up out of the grass as well as a larger structure - a sepulcher of grey granite adorned with a bronze statue of an angle, her wings outstretched, her hands steepled in front of her as if in prayer for the souls of those entombed there. "I've seen it enough in others that I believe her. She always had a way of knowing these kinds of things." She shakes her head and scoots to the side a little, putting her in range of more weeds to pull.
Curiously, the more the pair work, the more Kurow's own motions start to become less mechanical and more -- well, more like the way Hotaru pulls weeds. It's a little eerie -- but then, from a man who learned one of Hakyokusaken's critical techniques just by watching Rock enough, a little shift in movements to match a more experienced gardener is hardly much of a shock. As he finishes with what's in reach, he scoots a little to the other side, likewise continuing, only stopping for a second to see what Hotaru's looking toward.
The attention Hotaru pays Kurow is appreciated, in some way -- having her stop to listen is encouraging, if not in the way she probably thinks it is. "Your mother must have been quite the compassionate woman," he says, with a little grin. "I can imagine you resemble her in a lot of ways. But..." He looks back to her, a little of his frustration coming out in his expression. "If I forgive them so soon, if I don't show them what they've ruined, I don't think they'll learn." He puts a smile back on his face a second later, though, and goes back to helping with the garden.
The youth, at this point, thinks he may be revealing a little too much -- Hotaru isn't a /threat/ anymore, but she's hardly under his thumb. He still has to keep his guard up, and so, he tries to maneuver the topic off of himself. "... What about your father?" Whenever the topic of family comes up, he's always curious to see just what secrets lie there -- after all, very often they're very surprising.
As he compares her to her mother, the girl's cheeks blush just a little even as her eyes stay focused at the fertile soil in front of her. "You're right," she agrees with him. "Mercy and justice are two virtues that are very difficult to balance. If justice is never metted, then the wrong doer never learns, never understands the pain they've caused. But if only justice is executed... well, we have all done things worthy of unpleasant consequences. That doesn't mean we should suffer forever for them. That is why mercy is necessary as well." She speaks of these things comfortably, perhaps reciting further lessons taught by her mother.
"My father was a powerful fighter. He fought using techniques passed down from many generations of the Futaba family. He took good care of us. He trained my brother and me, entrusting my family's fighting legacy to us." What comes next is a mixture of truths and untruths; facts blurred and recolored by an almost deliberate naivete. It is a story of things as Hotaru has wished for them to be for so long that in her mind it has become the truth.
"Though sometimes we made him angry, he always cared for us. He wanted us to do our best and any time it seemed that maybe we weren't trying hard enough, he would get frustrated. But it was our fault anyway. He just wanted us to follow his example. He was a master of his art." With her hands, she kneads the dirt around a flower a little. The soil is too dry, she muses, she will need to water it more later.
"When my mother died four years ago, it was more than my big brother could handle. He left the home then and I've been looking for him ever since. My father left as well. He must be looking for my brother just like me. Someday I will find them both and we can all stop looking."
Kirishima, of course, completely disagrees with Hotaru, but he isn't about to say that -- he doesn't want to start challenging deep-seated beliefs just yet, after all! That way lies only terrible things. Instead, he waits and listens to the story of the Futaba family, the picture of attentiveness. When she starts to tell those half-truths, though, he becomes particularly interested -- something seems the slightest bit 'off,' even if he can't quite place it. She certainly believes it to be true, though, so in the end he simply takes these things at face value.
"Honestly, I think you've done all right by his mastery of his art, if nothing else," Kurow says, with a little smile. "I'm sure they'll be impressed with how far you've come, when you finally find each other. You're quite the fighter -- you don't have timing down yet for trying to catch someone while they've overcommitted, but you definitely have form well in hand." But -- how would he know that? How would he be able to make those critiques when in the only fight the pair have had (as far as Hotaru knows), she actually had him on the ropes by /not/ going in until he was back on the defensive?
There is something wrong here, and it is very likely that -- even if Hotaru doesn't consciously know it -- she is probably getting some small clues, especially if she tries to figure out just where he got that information. It /seems/ like it should fall together /somewhere/, but it simply /can't/ -- and that's the kind of thing that tends to cause headaches, both literally and figuratively.
She stops weeding as he speaks about her ability as a fighter, looking toward him with a demure smile, shy at the compliments but taking the rest of the analysis to heart as well. In fact it does cause her to pause, brow furrowing a little as she gives him a curious look for a moment.
She had mentioned to Acacia the other day that she had felt she had forgotten something important in Thailand. That nagging, subtle distress strikes her again in that moment. There's a reason he should know all about her fighting style and it feels like it's just out of reach of her conscious mind as to what that reason is.
But then it comes to her. Kurow Kirishima pays close attention to fighters his age. She isn't sure how she knows this as she can't remember the conversation it would have come up in. But it feels logical enough and her mind accepts it as the reasonable explanation it needs in order to let the temporary uncertainty to drop. "Why, Kurow Kirishima, have you been watching my fights?" Hotaru asks, grinning a little, sounding a little flattered that the fighting prodigy she faced at Justice High would
...have taken the time to follow her progress through the fighting circuits. Some victories mingled with streaks of losses, her record tended to not be of much interest to the upper echelons of combatants and her consistant fans tended to be less interested in her abilities as a /fighter/ than she would prefer.
That could have been a little dangerous, if Hotaru had tried harder to place it -- fortunately, she doesn't, and so Kurow continues on, likely blissfully unaware of the holes in his handiwork. "I took an interest in your style after that first fight," he says. Thinking on the topic for a little while, he continues, "I went through your Neo League challenges after that, mostly out of curiosity -- I really like your particular take on the 'ball of energy' that most styles have... I think I might try it out."
The last time they had this conversation, the circumstances were so very different. "You're still holding steady at sixth, right? I really am impressed by that," he adds -- evidently, even if a lot of people are interested in things other than Hotaru's fighting prowess, /Kurow/ is clearly very intrigued by it! He picks up the last few weeds he'll be grabbing for now, and gives Hotaru a little smile back.
There's mistakes now. Perhaps he's growing too comfortable in the company of the pig-tailed girl he thinks he has growing sway over. 'That first fight' implies subsequent fights between the two and the attempt to make sense of the phrasing in some context is written on her face. But it doesn't mean she's tuned out the rest of what he says either.
When he mentions her chiball technique, Hotaru smiles faintly, almost as if uneasy about the subject, her left hand reaching over to wrap around her right forearm and rub it absently, as if mentioning that ability of hers has brought up something that bothers her.
And then he brings up her Neo League standing and Hotaru nods slightly, looking a little distant for a moment. A memory - or rather, the hints of one come to mind. A beach somewhere. It has to be Thailand. She was talking with someone and her recent victories had come up in a context not too unlike this one. But who was it she was speaking with then? And why can't she remember.
Hotaru lifts her hand, going from rubbing her forearm to her left temple, as if feeling some slight discomfort in her head. "Yes, for now, I am." she smiles just the same, as sincere as ever. "Thank you," she then comments. "I call it a Hakki Shou." A Focused Strike.
It's easy to get too comfortable -- Hotaru certainly doesn't make it difficult. When she massages her head a little, though, that's when Kurow knows that something's wrong -- he isn't sure what, but he does have to be careful. That much he can tell instantly -- he needs to keep himself focused on simple topics, things that might not piece together some of Hotaru's fractured memories. This is such a risky business -- it has the potential for great rewards, but right now Kurow isn't at his best. He's preoccupied, and that means Hotaru is likely getting what she will likely later recognize as a few lucky breaks.
"It's quite the technique, with quite the name -- I'll tell you how it goes if I try it out," he says, before looking at that forearm with measured, false concern in his expression. "Are you all right? Sometimes working like this after you've been away from it for so long is really taxing -- I can't even look at a calculus text without getting a headache right now," the youth inquires, scooting closer to Hotaru again. "Do you want me to get you anything, or do anything for you?"
The concern, as disingenuous it may be, is very effective on the girl as Kurow cajoles her back into a false sense of comfort with the young man. "Nn," Hotaru states after a moment. It felt good to get back to gardening here after living in the completely out of CONTROL garden that is the jungle of Thailand. But it isn't exactly cool here, either, and she's been out in the sun for a while.
"I think," she begins, chosing her words carefully as if she wants to make sure to not say something she doesn't mean, "that I just need to take a break. Maybe get some lunch. You don't need to worry about it. I'll be all right." She shifts out of her kneeling position into one of sitting on the grass, leaning back against her hands, not seeming to mind the closer proximity from Kurow. Given that his presence used to cause her to recoil with fear and disgust, he can at least rest assured that his work is holding up so far. "I was just in such a hurry to get back to more familiar routines I think maybe I pushed myself a bit hard. Still..."
She glances at the garden. It won't take more than another hour or so to finish the weeding. Then she can get to trimming and maintaining the plants themselves. "It looks like I made enough headway for one day. No need to push it." she grins with a shrug. "Let me know how it goes learning the Hakki Shou. My big brother never was able to quite get it down."
"Yes, that might be best -- sometimes that's all you need, is a little break." Nodding to Hotaru, Kurow says, "I hope you find a pace soon -- it must be difficult with how upside-down things have been for you lately." That complete lack of discomfort at his scoot closer is noted, and indeed, just as hoped; even if she's starting to have those phantom memories bother her, the overall thrust of what he's done is maintained, which is as good as he can hope for under the circumstances.
"I'll let you know as soon as I get it down," Kurow says, with a smirk -- evidently, he's completely confident in his ability to at least /approximate/ the move. It's likely it'll never be a /real/ Hakki Shou, but then, to Kurow, there's no real difference between a 'true,' studied version of an attack and a functionally identical forgery.
"I'll let you get some lunch, then," he finishes, standing up and taking a few steps back toward where he came from. As if not wanting to seem rude, somehow, he appends, "Thank you for letting me get that off my chest -- you're quite the kind, forgiving young lady... if a little scatterbrained." Allowing himself a small, pleasant laugh as if at some private joke, he continues on his way out.
Log created on 12:20:32 07/08/2007 by Hotaru, and last modified on 17:56:30 07/08/2007.