Blue Summer

Chapter 6: Redemption

"Appa should be out," Rui replied.

Misao handed the letter to Rui, explaining the meeting and asked him to give it to their father. Rui nodded and took the letter. Misao took Ibuki with her up to her room.

He sat near the window while Misao rummaged through her dresser, looking for something. She came, sat next to him, and handed a box wrapped in gift paper. Ibuki took it, perplexed, and opened it. Inside was a phone.

"Do you like it?"

Ibuki smiled and hugged Misao, thanking her.

"I will get something to eat. Wait for me." Misao went downstairs to get something.

Ibuki looked at the box and felt happy. However, after a moment, he felt like he did not want to keep the gift.

"Gifts. Yes, I have seen what they did to my father. Gifts ruined him. They will ruin me, too." Ibuki thought to himself and then got up. He kept the box on the table and wrote a note placing it atop the box. Then he left without letting Misao know, and when she came back up, she was confused. She took the note, and it said: "Misao, thank you. But I shall not take it. Gifts are to me like poison that will spread in me slowly and then I will have no choice but to take my own life. I will fall into a pit and keep falling."

Misao sank to her bed, feeling down in the dumps. Why did Ibuki refuse to take the gift?

From there, the day began taking the course of inflicting mountable pain on Ibuki. He locked himself in his room, turning the order of it upside down. He threw things around and kept sobbing.

"Why doesn't this day just end already?! Why?!" he yelled, tearing his things into pieces and sobbing afterwards. He was on his knees, sobbing heavily, when anger took him over, and he blasted out of his room and ran out. His mother tried to call after him, but he paid no heed.

Ibuki kept running without even pausing for a moment to take a breath. His legs, although weak, kept him going in a fit of rage. He began sweating and panting but did not stop. He ran through streets, colliding with a passerby occasionally. But nothing stopped him. Finally, he made his way into the old rusty building that had become to him his only way to freedom from his life. Still engulfed in rage, he rushed upstairs and dashed across the roof to jump.

At the pinnacle of the moment, his rage let go of him, and he realised what he was about to do. His fear took him over, and he tried to stop himself, but it was as if something alien was controlling his body, and he could do nothing. It was too late for him to fight the momentum he had built up. Momentum was no less than God's will, and Ibuki could not go against it. He closed his eyes as the floor beneath disappeared, and he was at the mercy of yet another God's forces. However, reluctant to give hope, in the fraction of a second he was between life and death, he hung onto the former. He held to an iron rod protruding from the walls of the building in a bid to keep himself from falling to death.

He cried out loud in pain as his right hand could not hold its grip and gave way, bleeding heavily. All his fate now hung on either his left hand or his will to live, whichever was the strongest. The hand eventually proved to be the weaker and caved in, but his will did not. Only in a brisk of a moment when his hand let go, he felt someone's hand hold onto him, preventing him from ascending to the heavens.

Ibuki was dragged up to the roof by the person, and when he opened his eyes, he saw a blonde-haired man accompanied by a few more men, seemingly bodyguards of sorts. Ibuki gave a huge sigh before laying himself on the floor.

"You were lucky we passed by. Had we not, you would have died," the man said briskly.

Ibuki gulped his fear down and asked, gasping, "Who.... Who are.... Who are you?"