Katou (katoustheshit) wrote in valarlogs, @ 2015-06-08 18:00:00 |
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Entry tags: | !complete, yue katou |
Who: Katou and Sae [NPC]
When: Saturday, June 6 after this log
Where: Sae's House
What: Katou goes to make amends with the sister he hasn't really seen in two years.
Warnings/Rating: Low rating, though talk of child abuse and drug addiction.
Status: Complete
Katou couldn’t remember being so nervous in a long time. He had been standing outside of Sae’s doorway for what felt like hours, though in reality it had only been a couple of minutes, picking leaves off the flowers that he had bought for her and trying to work up the nerve to ring the doorbell.
Well, he was already here, and he had just paid for this stupid bouquet of flowers, and he was sure that if her neighbours popped their heads out of their houses they’d think that Sae had someone courting her, despite the fact that she was married. He had visited her in his dreams, but that had been different. There, time on Earth was standing still, and he had been a spirit. There had been no chance of her actually seeing him, of actually talking to him. So, with a deep breath, he screwed his eyes shut and rang the doorbell.
Almost immediately he heard his sister’s voice call out – “Just a minute!” and he felt his heart clench a little. This was so awkward. Maybe he should have called ahead first, but then, he didn’t really know her phone number.
Sae opened the door, and when she saw Katou, she stopped in her tracks, mouth slightly agape. It didn’t take her long to snap out of it. “Yuu!” she exclaimed loudly, and then more quietly added “What are you doing here?”
“I uh…” Katou cleared his throat and then held out the flowers to her. “I just wanted to come by and like… chat and shit.”
Sae’s mouth fell open a little again, and she took the flowers as though she was in a daze. “Oh, Yuu, thank you. These flowers are absolutely beautiful,” she said. She opened her mouth and closed it a couple times, as though wanting to say something but not quite knowing how to say it. “You… You’re not high right now, are you?”
Katou could almost understand why she was so nervous to ask something like that. It had been a question like that that had set him off the last time he had paid her an unannounced visit. He had wanted to return the old antique box that he had buried when he was a kid to her as a wedding present, but when he had presented her with the gift that he had hand-wrapped for her, she had asked if it was stolen, which had sent him into a rage. He wasn’t about to rage this time though.
“No, I uh… I’ve been clean for a couplea weeks now. Since May 15th, actually.” He felt a little self-conscious, and he wasn’t sure exactly how she would react. He actually hadn’t been sure if she had known that he had done drugs, that he was a – well, he had to admit it – an addict, but he supposed that had answered that question. Then again, he had been high every time he had seen her in the last three years or so.
Sae burst into a smile, and almost took a half-step toward him before apparently reconsidering it. Instead, she stepped back out of the doorway, and held the door open. “Please, come in,” she said.
When he stepped into the house, feeling awkward as he slipped off his shoes, she took the flowers from him. “There’s are beautiful, Yuu,” she said. “Here, I’ll go put these in water. Please, have a seat.”
She took the flowers out and left into where he assumed the kitchen was, while he himself looked around the living room. He didn’t move toward one of the large couches, but instead toward the mantelpiece. There were a lot of photos sitting on it, of her and her husband (a man Katou had never met personally, but according to the wedding invitation his mother had given to him two years ago, his name was Jacob Anderson. He wondered if that made his sister Sae Anderson instead of Sae Katou now), and of … well, that was a small baby in the photos. Had Sae had a baby? She looked so happy in all of her photographs, happier by far than she had been in the last couple of years before he left home for good.
It was the first think Katou had noticed, but he had wanted to see what kind of life Sae had been having before he focused on it. Just like in his dreams, displayed on the mantelpiece for everyone to see, was the old antique box he had tried to return to her for her wedding present. She, or someone, had glued it back together, and it looked ugly as hell. And sitting in it was a photograph of the two of them when they had been children, Katou nine and Sae fourteen. Katou and Sae both were smiling. He had ripped the photograph up before he had run away, but Sae had taped it together with scotch tape. Both of them were the ugliest things on the mantelpiece – not at all like the happy family photos and knickknacks that adorned the mantelpiece, and he wondered how she explained their presence to her guests.
“Oh yes, that’s me and my little brother. Why have you never met him? Well, he ran off when he was thirteen, became a junkie, and the last time we actually spoke he attempted to kick the shit out of me.”
He hadn’t even realized he had picked up the photo and definitely didn’t notice Sae coming back into the room until she was only about a foot away from him.
“It’s my favourite photo of us,” she said pleasantly, and Katou nearly jumped out of his skin.
“Jesus fuck, Sae,” Katou said. “Don’t sneak up on people like that.”
Sae laughed. “Here, I brought you some tea,” she said, holding out the mug to him. He put the photo back where he had taken it from, and cradled the tea in his hands. “There’s someone I want you to meet,” she said, and hurried out of the room again.
Katou decided then to sit down the couch, and look around her living room. It really was a nice house. She and her husband obviously had a good life, and he was happy for them. It was a minute later when she walked into the room, carrying a small child.
“Put down your tea, Yuu,” Sae said cheerfully, and Katou placed the tea on the end table.
“This is my son, Yue,” she said, sitting beside him. She offered it out to Katou, and, feeling kind of like he was all elbows, he awkwardly took the baby, looking about as awkward as someone who has never held a baby in their life could possibly look.
“The fuck would you name him that?” Katou asked, raising an eyebrow at her. “Don’t care for him much?”
“Because I love him, Yuu,” she said, giving Katou a pointed look. He felt himself colour, and instead looked down at the little boy he was holding so awkwardly, feeling decidedly uncomfortable. But then the little Yue reached up and grabbed Katou’s earring. Katou laughed a little as he attempted to unattach the small human’s hand from his ear, but as soon as he did, Yue grabbed onto his hair.
“Oh man, you are kind of a pain in the ass,” Katou chided softly, though he was smiling a warm smile and his heart ached, though in a decidedly good way.
“Just like his uncle was,” Sae said softly, and it took a moment for Katou to realize by ‘his uncle’ she was referring to him. He was an uncle now. He had a nephew. Well, he’d obviously been an uncle for a while now, but he hadn’t known about it before.
“How old is he?” Katou asked.
“He just turned a year on May 10th,” she said. It was after a few minutes of watching Katou gently bounce the baby on his knee, finally looking a little less awkward, that she took a breath. “You’re welcome to come visit him – visit us whenever you’d like,” Sae said slowly. “But I won’t have him be around someone who uses drugs.”
Katou couldn’t really bring himself to look at her – or at Yue either – and instead just stared at a bit of dirt that was on his jeans. Maybe he should do laundry soon. “I … I’m not planning on using again,” he said after a while. “I would… I think I would like that. Coming to visit, I mean. This whole quitting thing is for life; I’m going to meetings and everything.”
“Have you visited Mom lately?” Sae asked.
Katou shifted his weight, shifting Yue to his other knee, and bit his lip. He wasn’t entirely sure how to answer that, and it took him a few very long seconds to finally formulate an answer.
“No,” he said after a while. “I’m uh… I’m not sure if I’m going to. I’m not… I don’t think I’m angry at her anymore. I just…” He took a deep breath, and kind of looked over at Sae. “You were the only one who stood up for me. You’re the only one who tried to make him stop, you know. I used to think that maybe sometimes Mom was glad he was beating me, because it meant he wasn’t beating her.” He still thought that a lot of the time, when he let himself focus on those moments.
His earliest memory had been his mother crying ‘stop it, you’ll kill him’ as his father started beating him – he couldn’t have been older than two or three at the time, though since it was such a common memory it was hard to put an exact date on it. But as Katou got older, his mother tried to intervene less and less, eventually not trying at all. Afterward, sometimes she tried to comfort him – if his father had left after – but that wasn’t enough.
Because every time Sae had been home, Sae had said something. She had said something when she got gifts from their father’s overseas trips and Katou got nothing. She had always had his back, and while he had hated her then, he couldn’t help but love her now. When he thought of his mother, he didn’t feel the same anger he had for all those years, but he didn’t feel any love, either. While he was sure if he never saw his mother again, he’d probably regret it, he wasn’t sure if he wanted to see her again any time soon.
“She’s not doing well, now that father has passed,” Sae said gently. “You know, she cried all the time when you left home. She misses you.”
It was probably because his old man had lost his favourite punching bag, and had to resort to his second favourite, though Katou bit his tongue and resisted the urge to say so out loud. That was his old way of thinking, and he knew it. He was trying to do better.
“Maybe someday I’ll see her again.”
“Well, if you wanted, I could have a family dinner here.”
Katou considered her offer for a while, and then shrugged. “I mean, yeah, that’d be the best way for it to happen I guess. I just… not yet. Not soon.”
Sae seemed to understand, or, at the very least, she didn’t push the issue very much. The two of them talked for most of the afternoon, about the new stuff in their respective lives. She had been in University for a while, before Yue came along. She and her husband were trying for another one, though she was also thinking of finishing her degree and becoming a teacher. Her husband was a kind man who treated her well, which was good to hear, since Katou had been worried that she would marry a man like their father, and he worked for the computer company that their father had run in life. Katou told her all about Wendy and Jack, and their help in giving him a place to live, and about his new friends, and about how hard he was trying to pass his classes.
Katou hadn’t even noticed the time going by, but eventually Sae exclaimed “Oh my, I have to start making supper. Jacob is going to be home soon.” There was a hesitant pause, before she added, “Would you like to meet him? You could stay for supper if you’d like.”
Katou frowned, not sure how comfortable he felt about the idea. He had never met Jacob, and really knew absolutely nothing about him, but he assumed Jacob would know all about Katou’s visit to Sae near their wedding night, and about Katou’s problems with drugs and how Katou got into trouble all the time.
Still, Sae still obviously cared about Katou for some reason. Maybe she had, well, talked him up. And besides, if he and Sae were going to get to know one another again, he supposed meeting her husband was something that was going to happen eventually. Maybe once he got to know him, Jacob wouldn’t think Katou was so bad after all. Assuming he wasn’t some fucking loser.
“Yeah,” Katou said after a while. “I think I’d like that.”