Mother's Memory

~A Mother’s Memory~

Notes/Warnings: No warnings today, except maybe an exorbitant amount of sap and maternal introspection. Written for Mother’s Day in honor of all moms, and especially mine. Mom, you will never know all of my secrets, but you have always loved me in spite of them. I love you, and Happy Mother’s Day.

Summary: Kurama has always shielded his mother from the truth, but is the woman who raised him as oblivious as he hopes? The pages turn back again, and Shiori remembers secrets and sorrow, the life of her beloved, mysterious child.

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A mother’s memory runs deep. She will always remember her child’s first steps, his first words, and his first heartache. Even when all she can do is watch silently as her young one grows and changes, the things she sees will burn themselves into her heart, forever young, beautifully sad and terribly beautiful.

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A photo album rested in the woman’s lap, and her hands ran over the slightly worn, green velvet cover. She had chosen the color as a reminder, because it was the same, vibrant emerald as the eyes of her eldest son. No one could ever forget such eyes, not if they lived to be a thousand, and so the brilliant hue served well to spark the older memories even as they were covered by new ones.

Shiori opened the album to the first and oldest page. Wrapped in a pale, kelly-green hospital blanket, her little one’s emerald eyes looked up at her as though for the first time. Even then he had possessed a fine head of red hair, and he had gazed at her with such phenomenal intelligence, it was as though he reached out and touched her very soul. No one at the hospital could understand how his eyes had opened within mere hours of his birth, or how they could focus so well on whatever they landed upon. Shiori hadn’t questioned it; he was her very own son, and nothing could dampen the joy she felt with him settled snugly in her arms.

The woman closed her own deep-brown eyes for a long moment, remembering the previous autumn when she had first realized she had conceived. It had been frightening at first. She had still been relatively young, and had no idea how to raise a child. She and her first husband had not even spoken about it at that time; she had been too scared to tell him.

After several tests to make certain, she had gone for a walk to soothe her nerves. There in a park, surrounded by green life, she had stood with eyes full of tears for what seemed like hours. How would she be a mother? How could she rise to meet such a trial, when she and her spouse were still learning how to live as one? There would be problems with money, education, care giving; it was overwhelming, and she had stood there paralyzed by the enormity of it all.

Then, as a light breeze had just begun to blow through the trees, it was as though her whole body was suffused with sudden warmth. It was a light so bright she could feel it inside her, though her eyes could not see it. Her whole “self” had tingled, filled up to the brink with that light, and by the time it faded she had realized she was no longer afraid. A calm and confidence her own and somehow not her own had descended upon her, and she had recognized the strangest feeling of being safe at last. More than that, she had realized she felt…whole.

In wonder she had touched the place where her new child was growing within her. There was life there, where before there had only been mystery, and the vague sensation of the unknown. A strong presence resided within her, and it was that presence that had given her the courage to go home and tell her husband the wonderful news. They would be parents before this time next year.

Summer was ending when her baby arrived, and there had been flowers blooming their last in the window box next to her hospital bed. The pain had been terrible, but somehow glorious; it was not the pain of death, but the pain of new life, life which she had taken part in giving. And when it was over and the nurse handed her that beautiful baby boy, a feeling like nothing she had ever known had swept through her. It was joy, beyond any joy that had existed in her life before.

“This is the happiest day of my life,” she had whispered, weak from the birth, but beaming. “I’ll call him…Suuichi.”

Shiori opened her eyes and smiled fondly at the photograph on that first page. The smile faltered as she turned her eyes toward the photos on the next. As a baby, Suuichi had been unusually aware, but he had laughed and cried like an otherwise normal child. On the day he turned two, the smiles went away. He had grown quiet, and contemplative, and though he had never really seemed to take part in the so-called “Terrible Twos,” those toddler years had tested Shiori greatly in that her heart had struggled to understand him. He had learned to crawl and then to walk through the normal trial and error, but when his attempts failed he had not wailed until comforted (indeed, he had refused any attempts by Shiori or her spouse to help him). He had picked himself up carefully and continued on with a single-minded determination the other mothers in the neighborhood had called “odd,” and when they had thought Shiori could not hear, “creepy.”

He hadn’t wanted to be held as much anymore; she’d had to catch him off guard to give his cheek a kiss, and hugs were received with an aloof air, and never initiated. He no longer fussed when he needed something; he had simply waited until what he required was offered, or, once he had learned to walk sufficiently, gone after it himself if he could. His unusual intelligence had made potty training a simple, quickly accomplished affair, and though Shiori had been pleased with that, she had also begun to worry. He was quick to learn basic words as well, and by age three was talking like a tiny adult. Some had labeled him tentatively as a genius. His mother had just looked on in astonishment, wishing she could be more proud than confused.

When her husband died, Suuichi had stood by her side at the funeral a small, unaffected presence. He had not seemed sad at all, only mildly curious about the tears that had tracked down his mother’s face during the wake. It had been at that moment that her worries had cumulated to sheer bewilderment. It was as though her little one was forging full-speed toward manhood, and he had not even reached preadolescence. Confusion had become the first stirrings of guilt. Had she been responsible somehow for her son’s disturbingly quiet nature, for his lack of emotional empathy? She had prayed each night and each morning that the coming days would somehow bring the smile back to her baby’s face.

Shiori turned the next page, a faint, almost wry smile touching her lips as she looked at the pictures. School had been a test of sorts for both of them. She had been hard-pressed to let him go when she was already beginning to feel she had lost him. Suuichi, on the other hand, had said his goodbye that first morning almost stiffly, as though embarrassed that she should be making such a fuss. He had been like that too, she remembered. Once he had learned speech and become all but completely self-sufficient, he had started to less subtly reject her attempts at mothering. He had been so proud; that was the only word she could think to describe it. When she had looked into his eyes back then, she had somehow felt as though she were the child, and not him.

His teachers had been possessed of a divided opinion where her little boy was concerned. On the one hand, they had lauded his intelligence in each star-sticker-covered report they sent home with him. On the other, they told Shiori during parent-teacher meetings that Suuichi behaved strangely with the other children. He either dismissed them entirely, or treated them almost like pawns, directing their actions in group activities or else quietly refusing to participate at all. He had no patience for their childish attempts to play with him or otherwise make friends, the teachers had said. Shiori had tried to talk to him about these things once, because she had been concerned that his development might suffer if he kept himself walled off from his peers.

“Why don’t you want to be friends with the other children?” she had asked him.

He had looked at her with those guarded green eyes and replied that his classmates were “incapable of understanding his way of thinking.” They were not worth playing with, he had said, if he was required to lower himself to their level to do it. He had emphasized the word “playing” as though it were beneath him, and his mother had sat in the living room, baffled, long after he had gone about his own way.

It was about then that Shiori reached a page with a different kind of photo on it. In this picture, her son smiled at the camera at last. The expression was tentative, as though he had forgotten how to make it, which might have been close to the truth. Suuichi in the photo was standing next to her, holding a small bouquet of flowers. Shiori’s arms were wrapped in bandages in the picture, the fact barely visible under her long, loose dress sleeves. She remembered that day. The doctor had called to say the wrappings were ready to come off. On the way into the hospital, a stranger had commented on how sweet she and her son looked together, and had offered to take their picture.

It was not that day that things had begun to change, however. It was several days before, when Suuichi had been assigned a project for his class. Each child was to bring a proper container to school for growing a pea plant in, and as usual, her red-haired offspring had come up with a plan almost immediately. He had gotten hold of a stepping stool and dragged it into the kitchen where his mother was doing dishes. She had leant her eye to the going’s-on now and then as he had dragged the stool over to the refrigerator; on top was a row of empty cans Shiori typically used for storing baking implements. One such can was his goal; it was not currently being used, and he had probably seen no reason why she should object to his using it.

The stool positioned, Suuichi had climbed it quickly and placed one small foot on the nearby countertop for more height, and reached out to grab the desired can. For all his brilliance, he somehow reached just a little too far, and overbalanced.

His cry as the dubious perch gave way had sent a stab of cold through Shiori’s heart. To this day she did not know how she had moved fast enough to catch him. The stepping stool had taken a stack of drying plates down with it, and the shattered remains were what she had been so desperate to shield him from in that instant. The pain as the pieces cut her skin had been quickly overshadowed by relief when she had registered him unscathed in her arms.

Her voice, asking him if he was all right, had seemed then to bring him out of some kind of shock, and he had looked at her as though seeing her for the first time. She had set him in a chair at the kitchen table and called the hospital to let them know she would be coming. His eyes had followed her intently the entire time, and each time she caught them with her own, they were wide with emotions she could not quite read. Confusion, perhaps, and maybe realization. She could not have said for certain. He had seemed dazed for a while after that. As he had sat in a nearby plastic chair while the doctor tended her cuts, he had never once taken his eyes off her, though they were clouded with what could have been any number of thoughts and feelings.

After that, he had slowly but surely begun to change. The day of the photo, he had smiled again for the first time since he was one, and many more smiles, more and more sincere, had shown themselves over time.

Those had been uncertain times in their own right, Shiori thought. It was as if they had each relearned each other, testing the boundaries anew. Suuichi had grown less standoffish and more thoughtful. His favorite place to spend time as a child had been the big cherry tree behind their house, and Shiori had often found him there when she sought him out for mealtimes, or bedtimes, or when she had simply wanted to tell him he was loved. He would always be nestled in the stronger branches, lost in thought, when she arrived. Before, he had reacted to her summons with a nod and a promise to come in after just a moment. The day after Shiori’s cuts had fully healed, she’d had an impulse, and instead of simply asking him to come down, had opened her arms and called his name. His usual nod did not come; instead, he had stared at her for a long moment, and then, with a look that was not quite pain and not quite relief, had jumped from the branches into her waiting embrace. His small arms clinging tightly to her, her own joyful laugh; these were still clear in her memory. It had been the beginning of his acceptance, his acknowledgment of her great love for her son.

In the years that followed, Shiori had noticed things that made her wonder all over again about her strange child. He had become friendlier toward his schoolmates, but he had never really made any friends. He kept his peers at arms’ length, and Shiori had often thought that the look in his eyes had become far less cold, but so much lonelier. In middle school she noted his internal struggles from afar; something was happening in his life that she could not be a part of. He was growing, changing in ways that set him apart from his fellow students, from any of those children his age. That intelligence was still very much a part of him, and it distanced him even more. Yet his genius was not what made him so different, Shiori had felt. Something else was unique about him that had nothing to do with his advanced mentality.

She thought she caught a glimpse of it one night, after she had long since sent Suuichi to bed. She had gone to bed herself an hour since, but a forgotten chore nagged at her until she had risen once again to see to it.

A soft mutter from her son’s bedroom had drawn her near on silent feet, and she had peered in through the slightly open door (she did not like him to keep it closed all the way, as she preferred to be able to hear him if he needed her).

There on the floor had knelt her son, and something made her suppress her initial motherly urge to send him back to bed. He had in his hands a cut rose from her garden, just a large bud on a stem, really. As she watched, however, the bud had done a most spectacular thing: it opened. In her gifted child’s hands, the sleeping flower had bloomed with strange, magical speed, becoming a fully-blossomed rose. Suuichi had made a small, satisfied smile, and after tucking the rose safely under his bed, had burrowed under the covers and gone to sleep.

She had never spoken to him about that incident, but it was not the last. Other hints cropped up over time, proving to her in small ways that there was something beyond just unusual about her son. The scent of roses that sometimes clung to him, the way he had occasionally disappeared at odd hours, and that boy, the boy with the black, spiky hair Suuichi had carried unconscious home one night when he thought she had already gone to sleep.[1] He had been careful to clean the bloodstains from the carpet before she rose the next morning, but she had seen them already that night. It might have been shock that had kept her from demanding answers that time, or it might have been something else, some instinct that told her this was not for her to interfere with. The strange boy was gone the next day, and she did not see him again for another couple of years. That incident remained another secret on the growing list of those she suspected he kept from her.

But then, Shiori mused as she paged through the photo album, it wasn’t as though she hadn’t kept secrets too. Suuichi had been well on his way into his final year of middle school before she had admitted, under his gentle insistence, that she was sick. He had seen the signs, she was sure, but she had told him over and over that she was fine, not wanting his worry for her to affect his schooling. He had grown so much more attached to her during those years; she just hadn’t wanted him to be distracted by her illness at such a crucial stage in his life. His focus needed to be on learning himself, adjusting to the way his mind and body were growing, and on the other people his age, and on his education. She had not believed that he needed the added stress of his sick mother, and so she had kept quiet.

At last, though, it had no longer been doable to keep her illness a secret, and he had pried the information out of her. That accomplished, he had coaxed her to see a doctor, which she had done only because he had asked her so earnestly. The diagnosis had not been promising. The sickness she had contracted was progressive, and difficult to treat. Again, she had shielded her son from the worst of the truth, but she knew now he had figured it out anyway.

Suuichi had entered Mayo Academy at her insistence, though he had made it clear he would rather have stayed home with her. She wouldn’t hear of such a waste of his intelligence, and so he had gone. A few short weeks after he had enrolled, Shiori was admitted on an indefinite basis to the hospital. She had been a little frightened for herself, but she had struggled not to show it for her son’s sake. He had changed so much, she realized during those next weeks. He was so much kinder than he had once been; he was considerate of his teachers and his peers, generous with his smiles, and so much more attentive to Shiori personally. His heart had still been somehow unreachable to most, but he had opened it more readily to her.

Yet beneath the love she had also seen guilt, as though he blamed himself for her sickness, and perhaps for much more than that. Did he recall the aloof, even cold demeanor of his youth, too? Did he remember how he had treated his peers, his teachers, and even his mother as though he were on some superior level? Was the guilt behind his beautiful smiles born of those memories, and if so, was he now trying to atone?

She had only been able to reassure him then by loving him even more, if that were at all possible. The more love she showed him, the deeper the love and the sorrow in his eyes had become. Then, the night had arrived when she had been sure she would die. He had visited her as the sun was just beginning to sink toward the horizon, and she had noted with bleary eyes the other boy standing by the door. Not a friend, she had thought, for he had not had any then. Suuichi had left her for a time, taking the other boy with him, and sometime between then and his return, Shiori was sure she had almost died. It had been an odd feeling, not as scary as she had supposed it would be. There was a little pain, perhaps some shortness of breath; nothing had been very clear. Then, there was nothing for a while…until she felt it. That same warmth from fifteen years before, when she had known with certainty she would be a mother. Light had filled her again, so much like the light from back then, and when it faded, when she opened her eyes, he had been standing there by her side with a look of sheer relief. He had never looked so happy, and she had smiled to see it.

Shiori flipped through pages of photos, almost like a time-progression film made of a hundred stills. Suuichi grew older with each few pages, and his expression changed with each year. There were moments in these pages where Shiori could see the underlying emotions in her son’s face, beneath the handsome smile he turned to the lens. There was that loneliness in the picture of Suuichi dressed in middle school blue. There, in a later photo, his concern for her peeked through. There, in a photo taken later still, a sincere bit of joy, but with a touch of distraction to it, like he was thinking of things far away. In this picture, he actually stood surrounded by friends, and here Shiori paused once more to reflect.

She knew their names well by now, and she remembered the first official meeting with each. Yusuke Urameshi was the boy who had accompanied her son to the hospital that miracle day, when she had been saved from her illness by some unexplained event. From what she had gleaned in his rare visits, Yusuke was a headstrong youth with a tendency to be loud, and act before thinking. He was the complete opposite of her child, yet he seemed to have a special place in Suuichi’s growing circle, as a kind of leader. He had a confidence about him that seemed to bolster Suuichi’s own, and a kindness in his heart that was not immediately recognizable beneath the overblown teenage bravado.

The first time he had come to her home, it was supposedly to get some advice on an obscure school project. He was, Shiori had thought with some amusement, a terrible liar. Whatever they had discussed, it certainly hadn’t been schoolwork to result in raised voices and Suuichi’s frantic shushing before she had entered the room with snacks. The two boys had given her guilty smiles and been very quiet until she was gone. Again, she had not questioned, and that time she had fully recognized the instinct that told her she was an outsider.

Hiei—and she knew no other name for him—had been an oddity from the start. The day he had arrived on her doorstep, asking gruffly after her son, she had been forced to suppress a look of astonishment. It was the same black-haired youth Suuichi had brought home years ago, banged up and bloody as though he had been in a terrible fight. She had pretended not to notice the missing bandages and disinfectant, or the faint stains that had not quite lifted from the floor, but that night was still emblazoned on her memory as though it had only occurred yesterday.

The boy said little on the occasions that he was over, and what did come out of his mouth indicated poor social skills. Shiori suspected he was an orphan, or at least that he had a turbulent home life. He seemed bewildered and put off by her attempts to be motherly when he was around, and he often responded by staring at her with odd, crimson eyes, and then muttering some noncommittal sound and ignoring her. He too, she had always thought, had more to him than it seemed. For all his aloof, even standoffish nature, he attempted to be polite when he was in her home, and he and Suuichi did seem to have a strong understanding. Hiei would never be what Shiori thought of as “friendly,” but she believed he was good where it counted, and so she continued to reach out to him when she could.

Kazuma Kuwabara was another in Yusuke’s ilk; that was to say, loud and typically boyish. He was the one Shiori knew best, as he had made a habit of visiting during the latter of Suuichi’s high school years. He was very polite towards her, and she had him pegged for a nice boy with a little bad influence growing up. His strong personality offset Suuichi’s more reserved nature, and they got along splendidly from what she could tell.

Kuwabara, for that was what everyone seemed to call him, sometimes reminded her of her son. Not because they were similar in personality, but because sometimes, the faraway look in the tall boy’s eyes was much like the one Suuichi often wore. They were both capable of great sensitivity, and that was one of the things Shiori liked about their friendship. Kuwabara was at times goofy, and at other times strangely thoughtful. Sometimes, when he and Suuichi ran out of things to talk about and the two of them sat not speaking for a while, he could look deeply sad. At those times she was especially kind to him, as she would have been for her child, and Suuichi’s smiles in her direction told her he had noticed it too.

They were a close-knit group, she had come to realize. When one or the other of them would disappear for a time, the others would show signs of being deeply affected by the absence. They had all been through things together she would never know about, and they had formed bonds she would never completely understand. It occurred to her shortly before her marriage to her new husband that they knew Suuichi’s secrets too. It had hurt back then to realize that a trio of mysterious boys knew more about her son than she did, but she had come to accept it. It was just one of those things being a mother was about, she supposed: taking a back seat now and then to her child’s friends.

Still, realizing that Suuichi shared his secrets with them, but not her, made her wonder just how much he thought she didn’t know. She likely knew a great deal more than he assumed, she thought as she traced the edge of a photograph with her finger. She had noticed the times he grew distant, his eyes full of strange and sometimes terrible thoughts. She had noticed whenever he left for days on end, and she suspected it was never for the tame, simple reasons he gave her. She had noticed when he came home from some undisclosed venture with a careful, stiff sort of walk, and how he avoided her hugs for a little while, and otherwise moved gingerly, painfully about the house. She had noticed his friends calling him a strange name, “Kurama,” when she was just outside the room. She had seen the rare times when those same friends, one or the other, would visit briefly, their careful, pained manner the same as Suuichi’s sometimes was. She had noticed the slight shadow of guilt in his gaze when he spoke to her sometimes, and it was at those times she suspected he was lying.

He’s trying to protect me from something, Shiori had caught herself thinking many times. It had struck her as silly the first time, that a child should want to protect his parent. The more she had thought about it, though, the more she had come to feel the truth of it. Suuichi was being protective with his silence. So she had honored that wish by keeping silent herself, and she could only hope it was not to his detriment, though she felt in her heart that it must be.

The last page in the album with pictures in fact had only one. It was a very recent photo, of Suuichi and his friends on a beach together. The four boys stood with four of their other friends, girls that now and then were a part of their circle as well. The group looked content, cheerful, whole. The days before the photo had been taken, Shiori had noticed her son behaving in what she could only describe as a wistful manner. He and Kuwabara had both been that way for a long time, almost two years that Shiori had noticed, perhaps longer. Suuichi had gone to school and otherwise carried on as normal, smiling whenever she looked at him in askance. She had always been able to tell, though. He’d had that lonely look again. In the photo from the beach, however, the loneliness and the wistfulness were gone.

There might be a time when the secrets clouded her son’s eyes with sadness and guilt once more, but for the time being they were clear as could be. And if they ever did have those shadows in them again, Shiori would have the memory of them burning brightly to hold her until they cleared. She would let him have his mystery, and she would be the constant he could always come back to. She didn’t have to know everything about him. She just had to do what she always had: love him with all her being.

She sighed and closed the album, running her fingers one more time over the velvet cover. A hand fell gently on her shoulder, and she looked up into vibrant emerald and smiled.

“Oh, Suuichi, I didn’t hear you get up.”

Her son returned her happy expression, the smile making his eyes seem brighter than ever. Some girl was going to lose herself to those eyes someday, Shiori thought, and resisted the urge to laugh like a young girl herself. Well, for now she could hold onto her little boy just a while longer, until he gave his devotion to the one who would be his match.

“You’re in a good mood today,” Suuichi observed. He glanced at the album resting idly in her hands. “Pleasant memories?”

“All the memories I have,” she answered, reaching up to touch his hand where it rested on her shoulder still. “Every one, happy and sad, and all of them precious.”

“Yes,” he agreed softly, and there was that look again, the one that made her feel he was so much older than she. But there was no scorn as in his early childhood, just wisdom beyond his years. It lay between them like a heavy blanket, and Shiori gazed up at him, her mind filled with wonder. Which of them, she wondered, was really the child?

“I’m going out, Mother,” he said, lifting the spell. “I’m meeting my friends in the park, and if it’s all right, afterward we thought we’d all go together for breakfast.”

“Have fun, and be careful,” she told him, motherly instincts still strong, though her offspring was well into his late teens.

“I will,” he promised. He leaned down and kissed her cheek, an impulse she knew was uncommon for him. “I love you, Mother,” he said, and she returned the heartfelt sentiment. He gave her one of his luminous smiles, and turned to go. When he reached the door, he paused with his hand on the knob, and from where she knelt with the album in her hands, she thought she saw a hint of a more wistful smile on his face. “Precious memories....” he murmured.

Then he was gone, and Shiori knelt there and looked off into the distance for a while. Eventually, however, maternal notions forced her to rise, and with a small shake of her head, she went to start her day. There was laundry to do, Suuichi’s younger brother to wake, and a host of other tasks to complete. It would be a busy day, but that was all right; it was all part of motherhood. She would do all she could to make this house a home for her husband and children. That way, even once her boys were grown and gone, this would always be a fond place for them to look back on. A place…of precious memories.

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~The End~

[1] A reference to the side story in the Yu Yu Hakusho manga series, wherein Kurama and Hiei meet for the first time, and Hiei is found to be injured. Kurama treats his wounds, and the two forge a temporary alliance to defeat an evil demon. But that’s a whole other story. n_~

Hope you liked (and didn’t choke on the fluff), and please review! Be kind, though, folks. It’s what your mommas would want you to do.