[ Like always, @teclajellymon made me notice I hadn’t cross-posted my monthly (laughing) Junzumi one-shot here, so ,thank you, Tecla. Again.This time I offer you a different Junzumi, not really the one you’re used to because Izumi isn’t really that present in this, except in an indirect way. Actually I think it’s high time I started dealing with creating a family background for Izumi , and soon for Junpei as well. So, something different for September. But hello, it’s already October✨ .]
{La gente che incontri nella pioggia } | {Those you meet under the rain}
If Blitzmon hated him so much, because there was no way he could bring himself to believe he was detested by Nature itself, he should tell him that right away, so they could find a good compromise allowing him to live a normal life.
He wasn’t asking for that much. He just wanted to be safely allowed to jump on a train taking him far from home, get off at a random stop, take a stroll through the narrow streets of a park and their shadows, wandering in a maze made of hundred alleys.
Until it dawned on him the building complex he had been led to looked way too familiar along with that little square before it, the benches, the trees scattering leaves on their white marble, the residents hurrying to the glass door, eager to go back home after a long work day and just giving a glance to that young bizarre stranger they had never seen before.
And his ravings, with which he had been repeating the same two or three sentences, suddenly quieted down, getting stuck in his throat as if to warn him there was someone else who wanted to talk as much as he wanted to, though with much more resolution.
“If you…I just…I mean, nothin-“ He knew it was just a mischievous illusion that had just made him believe the scenario in front of him had shaken like if devastated by an earthquake.
Still, what came afterwards, the chilly feeling of drops falling on the tip of his fingers, the sensation of wiping them as they slipped down his skin was real, just like the expletive he soon muttered with all the irritation building up in his bosom.
At that point, after having done, indeed, not done that so many times, it would have been better if he just gave up getting angry at himself and that matching part of his spirit he had left who knew where.
He was a peculiar gone case, constantly perservering in forgetting his umbrella at home. Buttoning his shirt up downstairs while keeping the TV turned on in the background, a woman blabbing and pointing at a map dotted with glowing clouds dominating the screen, hadn’t helped, either, apparently.
Blitzmon had nothing to do with his tendency to make the same mistakes all over again, no matter Izumi herself had scolded him over that once, back when he had showed up at a meeting of their group soaking wet from head to toe…Grinning like an idiot because he believed that would magically calm her down. He hated being treated like Takuya and that afternoon she unfortunately had, which was the reason why he hadn’t been able to enjoy the rare shower of attention he had been receiving by no one else but her.
Much stronger than before, no longer sounding like someone shifting furniture by making wood legs slid and screech against the floor, the second thunder of that tempest ensured Junpei heard its roar loud and clear at that round.
Ok, ok, I get it. it’s high time I went back home.
After all he had nothing to do there.
Needless to underline how he didn’t dare to speak after that rumble, but even if he had had, his usual blabbing would have come out in the form of incoherent stutters, even worse than the ones he had been fighting against for hours. To the boy who’s still deathly afraid of the voice of the skies, those shouts would almost sound deafening, like the steps of giant dinosaurs created by special effects in those documentaries he often enjoyed watching; like the prelude to an imminent end of the world.
Thus, petrified yet trembling at the same time, - out of both terror and cold-, unable to go further or back, he stood still in the heart of that cascade seeming to have gained tonnes in weight. Water was getting heavier, thicker, freezing, infiltrating not only in his shoes and socks, but also in the opening spaces of his gakuran.
If he was restored to his mobility, he was sure he would stay where he was, maybe exploiting that silent bless just to crouch down and sigh, because the subsequent, abrupt drop of temperature was brought by a mist of condensation quickly swallowing his surroundings in a humid blur. He had paradoxically got lost in a place he knew pretty well. Though he was aware in what exact spot he was, he found himself getting progressively confused about which direction would have led him to the station in brighter, -literally and figuratively-, circumstances. Whether he headed for right or left, or took the path behind him ,whose contours were fading in the spectral greyness in leaps and bounds, it wasn’t granted he wouldn’t disappear as well, swift hypothesis that made him resign to the fact he had exchanged his rationality for a mush of nonsense.
Like usual, nothing new there. No matter how often he would keep on getting caught in the storm, he would always go through all the stages of that descent into the most recondite parts of his brain: it was precisely in those moments when he tossed the crumbs of his common sense away like bread thrown at pidgeons, he would understand why they had been secluded in such depths.
In most cases he would manage to snap out of it by himself. The puzzle his present had transformed into would tidy its tiles; the shivers running up and down his body would start making him feel more alive than ever; his orbs, which had been wide open for the whole time being, would feel like having just come out from the darkness to make him realize there was another kind of fog that should concern him more than the one hovering over Shinjuku, and he would need to dissipate it as soon as possible before he developed a cold or worse.
He would with his willpower, his hands, or…An umbrella.
An umbrella that wasn’t his, of course. Although he was in that emaciated state, he could have never had doubts about that.
The metallic tip pointed at his chest, piercing through the pall of moisture like a sword, didn’t obviously belong to him.
He blinked at the item suspended in the air, exclusively focusing on its cylindrical shape as if it was being held by an invisible ghost and not by a tall man in the flesh. It could be stated he was ignoring that silhouette on purpose, not finding it reassuring to acknowledge the only elements of the enviroment that were clearly visible were that stranger and his two umbrellas, -the one he had unsheathed against him and another perched on his shoulder to protect his well-combed strands from the rain. His blonde strands.
“Prendi,” To him, it was much easier to convince himself an umbrella had just spoken with a tenebrous tone, -in italian, nonetheless!-, than accepting that man, an ordinary human, had. “Oh! I’m talking to you,” Still, Junpei’s foolish intent became increasingly harder due to those tugs given to the item to highlight the peremptory message. “Will you grab this umbrella, per l’amor del cielo…? Oh mio Dio, possibile che siate tutti degli idioti?”
Now there were so many other things making him shudder: the tangible exasperation expressed in an advanced italian, almost dialectal, which he would have never been able to translate without a vocabulary, the boiling impatience clashing with the azure of peaceful mornings, wrinkles creating furrows on the surface of a wide forehead, -the type itself you would associate with men endowed with remarkable intelligence-.
No…It wasn’t weird. He might not be a great observant, -or so he was bound to believe for reasons-, but back when Izumi had decided to organize her twelfth birthday party at her place, oh if he hadn’t stared.
It wasn’t a miracle if he could still recall some specific details after years from that day, still vividly blushing at the memory of her endeared mother giggling at that Junpei-Kun being such a shy child, unlike the other boys, even someone as reserved as Kouji who had been amiably chatting with the welcoming couple, quenching their lovely curiosity’s thirst by replying to any question of theirs.
In his defence, he couldn’t help it: in spite of how different she looked from Izumi, with those soft auburn curls framing her angular features, the woman was so beautiful he hadn’t been able to keep himself from wondering Izumi would grow up in such a gorgeous adult someday. Whenever she asked him about his hobbies, he would avert his gaze and stammer on his own answer, which would make the woman gently laugh and occasionally coo.
He absolutely wasn’t like that, but he had let Izumi’s parents temporarily consider him as a polite, timid, bashful friend of their daughter. He had told himself he would introduce himself properly next time they would cross paths, but it seemed it wasn’t an urgent necessity for now, -or, perhaps, it was never going to be-, judging from his behaviour in the man’s regards.
“Ehm…No,” He mumbled, internally screaming since he had no idea about what he was exactly doing. He chose to pick a courteous expression he had learnt to heart from a list of useful phrases any tourist going to Italy should keep in mind. The magic formula that would rescue him from his embarrassing trouble in the blink of an eye. For Heaven’s sake, what had he done? “No, grazie, S-Signor Orimoto.”
“N-no grazie?” The man predictably repeated and the echo of his own idiocies made him wish his briefcase, brimming with the most desparate, useless bits and pieces, could make him sink underground. Nevertheless, what happened was that he got dragged to the entrance of the building, under a roof which made the rain tapping turn muffled and even relaxing at some extent, -if he could just calm down!- “No grazie?! What does that even mean? Vedi se prendi questo ombrello! And hurry, please! I have to pick Izumi up.”
So, she isn’t at home. I see. This whole mess for nothing, He found himself cracking a smile of incomprehensible relief, making the adult fairly perplexed.
“No!” Waving his hands in front of his visual field, now shadowed by the tangle of his longish bangs, he attempted to recompose himself without success. He would have bowed repeatedly, if he hadn't known it would spoil his hairstyle even more. " Signor Orimoto, I thank you again, but I don’t really need your umbrella. It only takes two minutes to get to the station. I-I will be fine, no need to worry about me, eh eh.”
“I know where the station is and I still insist you do,” If he could forget that tragicomedy he was living in and mute that sort of scold, he would take his time to appreciate that unique dance of fingers of his. As collected as she wanted to be, Izumi would try avoiding being so colourful in her silver tongue as much as she could, keeping her hands on her thighs and making them hang onto them when the urge became too unbearable to control. “You can keep it until you see Izumi again. It’s just a spare umbrella. We are the ones not needing it.”
His irises , now filled not only with honey but also with uninvited melancholy, jumped back into the insubstantiality of a non-existent horizon. Though that was what he initially wanted, he didn’t get the so-longed result of succeeding at kicking some certain thoughts away.
You see, the fact is that I never get to see Izumi-Chan. Otherwise, I wouldn’t have been here in the hope of talking to her after so long. But now…I’m kinda glad my plan has failed so miserably. What would have I told her if she had found me here, seriously?! How could she have believed I was just taking a stroll?! Couldn’t you have just called her, idiot?!
It came a spontaneous consequence for him to ask himself if that hadn’t been some kind of punishment for his incorrigible immaturity, his indelibile cowardice. Actually , if he could be honest with himself, in that pattern of concatenated events he could definitely identify something similar to a law of retaliation. He had been dreaming about meeting Izumi in a sunny afternoon for days, picturing her surprised response, her shining, alluring jades conveying the same happiness he was feeling, whereas in his reality he had run into her father in the middle of a pouring disaster and had also annoyed him with that attitude of his.
Again, what was he thinking he was doing?
“So you won’t accept to borrow my umbrella.”
Overwhelmed by the speed of that unappreciated stream of consciousness, he limited himself to hang his head in a willing mutism.
“You have deliberately chosen to go back to the station without my umbrella.”
Then, he raised his chin, and ,somehow, the man found that funny enough to burst into a series of entertained chuckles.
“You have retreated into the shell again, haven’t you? I guess I have insisted too much. It’s just that you boys are so reckless nowadays. You are all the same, cookie-cutter.”
“I’m n-not reckless,” At those insinuations, he couldn’t continue escaping from the direct contact with him any more. “I just…I just…” But it dawned on him it wasn’t like he had a lot of arguments to cling to, especially in front of a skilled, respected diplomat. He couldn’t really complain about how he didn’t want to be compared with people like Takuya, the only impulsive one of their group, when he was...When he was just stupid. So stupid. And now he had been left questioning if there was an actual difference between their flawed personalities. Simultaneously, he couldn’t really explain him why he had been rejecting his offer with so much determination, either.
“Yeah, it feels strange to label someone like you reckless,” After a second of startled hesitation, the man pretended to be clearing his throat with a fake cough. “But today I felt like I’ve got to get a glimpse of a side of yourself I would have never imagined it even existed.”
“You mean…The side of myself that can speak?”
He regretted having been so blunt, externalizing a wave of ashamed disgust towards those recollections they shared.
“More or less, yeah. I like finding out what you boys hide under your surface. At first I told myself Takuya acted without thinking, would hurt himself by putting his hand in fire, but then I have realized he does that because he puts his safety behind the one of those he cares about,” Like that, he went on scrolling through a past spent with Izumi’s friends, an amount of time he seemed to have greatly benefited from. At a certain point Junpei got the impression Izumi was by his side, as he was convinced there was no one else who knew them so well. Yet, he might have been wrong for all those years or, probably, it was merely one of the special gifts the family had been given. As far as concerned himself, he could only blather in that way when it came to Izumi’s endless list of good points and talents. “Kouji often gives you the impression you are bothering him, but the truth is that there are just days he doesn’t feel like being in the company of other people. Kouichi is placid, it’s soothing to chat with him, but sometimes I get the feeling he has gone through a lot and I will start pondering my words, -you know, I tend to talk a lot and my wife says I should shut up because I sound like a parrot, ah ah-. Tomoki is one of those lads you should never understeem. Of course, he’s the youngest of you all, so I used to treat him differently, if you get what I mean. I’m glad he made me notice I should have given him more credit. He’s so clever and he can also handle debates brilliantly. And finally-“
“And finally there’s me…Who can speak,” He didn’t know if he was feeling a pang of envy at those compliments addressed to the others, but he recognized he was at fault there since he had been running away from an enormous amount of chances. During his middle school years his crush on Izumi had…Changed, and a hunch would always suggest he should decline each of Izumi’s invitation at her place, bizarre as it sounded, -and bitter as it would taste later-.
“I admit I couldn’t believe to Izumi’s words when she told me you are not like that. Junpei non è cosi’, Papà. Non è cosí. Then, I asked her what you are like.”
“A-And what did she tell you?” The desire to vanish in a hole, which was supposed to take shape in the ground beneath his feet out of blue, became even more annoying after that display of excited interest. He thanked the rain for having sewn a curtain of hair on his face, as he was feeling tremendously self-conscious about the scarlet blood animating his cheeks and the lucid enthusiasm reflecting in his orbs. And could he be blamed about that? He absolutely wanted to listen to what Izumi thought about him. He was eager to find out if she had some peculiar opinion about him!
“She told me…” Since he was wavering, he didn’t intend to suspect he was manufacturing some lie not to make him curl up in his taciturnity again. “Papà, Junpei is Junpei.”
“J-Junpei is Junpei…” Well, that…Wasn’t what he was expecting. He wasn’t going to deny it, though he wasn’t sure whether he was disappointed or jealous because, like usual, the others seemed to blow her mind, her senses , and her sweet descriptions held such a grace they were structured as impalpable poetry carried by the wind. He could invent time machine, travel back in centuries and millennia to pick the first flower ever that had been bathed by dew, hurry back to give it to her and everything would be the same.
Of course, it would, because I don’t want to make Izumi-Chan fall for me by impressing her. Still…Still…Junpei is Junpei. What does that even mean…?
“I wonder if you know what it means,” As if he had read his mind, the man’s pensive comment overlapped with his internal struggles.
“No, I don’t.” But I wish I did.
“But how is it possible you don’t know who Junpei is?” Both flinched at one of those sporadic lightnings dashing down the wall of the waterfall, unannounced. “This damned thunderstorm is getting worse, isn’t it?”
“You should call Izumi to ensure she has been waiting for you somewhere safe instead of being here, wasting time chatting with me,” Almost comforted by that break fracturing that dialogue of theirs, Junpei promptly seized the moment to sneak out of that inconvenience.
“Hey, calma, calma, ragazzo. Izumi hasn’t finished her photoshot yet. She will call me when she does. And talking to you boys is never a waste of time. I want to know my daughter’s friends because I want her to be surrounded with wonderful people deserving to be part of her life. My wife wasn’t that pleased when she heard Izumi had a group of friends made up of boys. I was so happy, instead. The more people in my little pupa’s life, the better. That’s why it’s important for me to know you better day after day.”
It made sense, Junpei nodded to himself. He might not be the protective kind of father he imagined he would be, but he was legitimately worried about who Izumi hanged out with.
“I-I see,” He nodded for a second time just to fill the the void the man had left behind his speech, now caring about playing a more active role as an interlocutor.
”So…who is Junpei? May I know who he is?”
Without tossing that mess of mahogany attached to his forehead, he cautiously peeped at the man, at the way he was looking at him with those eyes encarved with the same jades whose shimmering he had been marveled by for years. It was a new-found familiarity, a welcome light generated by a very pleasant warmth. He smiled at himself, a grin of cautious pride his rebel strands would never manage to reach and camouflage. He could tell him more about himself. He wanted to, in spite of all that awkardness he would have to trudge through. After all, ridiculous or not, the awareness he didn't know who Junpei was yet didn't imply he had no idea about who Junpei wasn't. “I've recently decided I want to study opera singing. Oh, and I like playing piano. There's that too."
In the hope of discovering who he was, of course.
“Opera singing is hard. You must be really passionate to want to take such a path. What pushed you to make such a decision?”
”I-I,” His neck was going to sustain a big tomato instead of his head very soon. “I-l like i-italian. And I like entertaining people, seeing smiles or tears on their face, it makes any sense.”
”Junpei, ma è meraviglioso!” The bento he had frantically prepared in the morning took the way upwards from his stomach, once a powerful pat landed on his back. That lean man astoundingly concealed such a power in his muscles it made him trip in his own fears about him again. He kept on torturing his poor shoulder blades like that, chirping with renewed spirit. At that point the real question was who Signor Orimoto really was. “Then, it’s mandatory: you have to come home like the others do and tell me everything about opera. Would you look at how life mocks you? Years ago I would refuse to go to opera with colleagues, now my daughter has got a future opera singer as friend.”
Speaking of Izumi, an old-fashioned ring started vibrating in the pocket of the man’s elegant coat, right when he needed for providential help the most.
“Oh, it’s my little pupa!” As soon as he let Junpei go, the boy risked to fall on his knees, panting, with his tongue out. The only force preventing him from indulging in that state was his panic, immediately catching some words he would need to repress as soon as he could.
“No, please! Perfavore!” He cried, but in vain. When a father received a call from his daughter after a tough day of work, he would isolate himself from the whole universe to savour every single second spent with her.
“Izumi, you don’t know who-“
So, he resorted to other methods, simple yet, -he hoped-, effective. Italians spoke through gestures, so it would be hilarious if the man couldn’t get the meaning of his clasped hands, his frame oscillating back and forth, his gritted teeth, his,- detail he preferred omitting-, puppy eyes he didn’t even want to know what they looked like on him.
Please, I beg you, don’t tell her I came here to visit.
And Signor Orimoto back-pedalled at once, not resisting to give him a playful wink, though. “You don’t know who is probably coming to Japan…!”
He wasn’t certain if he was just imagining Izumi’s squeals guessing the mysterious guest without a shred of hint, but what mattered the most was that she would never know about what had happened that afternoon.
Still… Still, both she and her mother failed to understand why ,all of a sudden, the man started becoming a fan of opera, eventually also buying CDs to put in the background of the house’s library.
Years ago it had beem the turn of football, sport he had always detested, and videogames, -yes, videogames-, after a while he had begun watching documentaries about far and dangerous zones of the world and tv series about doctors, -the only one of those unexplainable interests he had ended up dropping very quickly-.
Signora Orimoto wasn’t that content about that new passion of her husband’s. At all. If she wanted to take an afternoon nap, she would have to plug her ears due to that music making the walls of their house quake.
”So, will you take this umbrella for once and for all?”
He scratched his chin, mulling over the persistent request with more affection now.
“I suppose, I will. Va bene.”
So he would find a more solid excuse to meet Izumi without making a fool of himself.
After all, Junpei was Junpei.
Italian notes (surprise, surprise~~~)
• Per l’amor del cielo: For Heaven’s sake.
• Oh mio Dio, possibile che siete tutti degli idioti?: “Oh my God, is it possible you all are a bunch of idiots?” Signor Orimoto was trying being *polite* and having tact in the regards of poor Junpei, eh XD?
Vedi se prendi questo ombrello: it’s a colloquial way to urge someone to, -in this case-, grab an offered umbrella as soon as they can.
• Junpei non è cosi’, Papà. Non è cosí: Junpei is not like that, Papà. He is not like that.
• Pupa is girl in sicilian. I like thinking Signor Orimoto enjoyed Sicily a lot, but that will be another story XD. However, it might also be connected with pupi siciliani, dolls used in the traditional theatre from there. By the way, I don’t think it’s that common as an affectionate nickname for your child, but my sicilian grandmother calls me that.
• Ma è meraviglioso! - But it’s wonderful !
