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It was three minutes after noon. The corridor was nigh empty, and the resounding footsteps of another person had faded long ago. The distant sounds of cars passing by from an open window and the muted beeping of a monitor comprised all ambience in the area.
Yet there he was, a single visitor there, in front of a hospital door. The hallway was filled with an eerie silence unfamiliarly familiar to his ears.
Though, it hadn't always been like this.
To his recollection, it used to be bustling with nurses and doctors running four-wheeled stretchers down the hall every hour, with the cries of grieving families ringing out every minute. Families, constantly praying for the safety of their loved ones, desperately wishing for any, any miracle to occur.
But eventually, a new unit of the hospital was built as a replacement, and as patients were discharged or moved one by one from the section, the noises of desperate cries became less frequent,leaving behind only the occasional whisper of a draft and the echoes of sobs. As such, the gradual change over the years from the busy atmosphere to a lack thereof was something E-noru eventually stopped paying mind to.
The boy shook his head.
Whatever. It didn't matter. He was only here for one person, anyway.
So just as he had done thousands of times before, he pushed the door to the ward open.
E-noru's senses were immediately greeted by a multitude of things upon entering the room. The clarity of the steady, mechanical rhythm of a machine reached his ears, and a usual stench of antiseptic permeated his nostrils, with faint hints of a more pleasant fragrance in the air. The air felt... dry. Not fresh, but not stale enough to be stuffy.
Every portion of the room was a dull white. The walls were washed with white, with a few cracks of exposed brown layer underneath here and there. The curtains drawn beside the window were white. And the chair and monitor were an equally monotonous navy blue and gray.
The only things that gave the room color were the ash-blonde of hair and the flowers set in a maroon vase on the corner desk of the room.
Not that E-noru was surprised by any of this, of course.
He hummed. How could someone dream in such a lifeless, colorless place, he wondered.
He walked over to the arrangement of flowers and examined them. The lifeless and discolored petals of some flowers scattered the desk and floor, whilst others loosely clung to drooping, brittle stems, as though fighting to thrive with their last remnants of life.
E-noru didn’t pay them much glance, and just as he had done every visit, he switched out the assortment of wilted flowers with thriving ones, propping them up in place in a quarter-full vase of water. They would be enough to bring a tinge of hue and aroma once more to the room for the next two weeks.
Until the next visit.
Truth be told, he didn't remember how long he had established this routine for.
Six months?
A year? Or maybe two years?
Ten years?
It's a wonder he hadn't gotten sick of it yet.
(Maybe he had, a long time ago.)
“Hey, E-ki-kun.” Those same, sardonic words escaped from his mouth. Aside from the constant tone of the heart rate monitor, E-ki displayed no response—not that he expected one.
“I transferred into your school last week,” he continued, not caring about whether or not his uncle could even hear him. “Turns out you and your friends have become urban legends of sorts.”
The pulse of the machine simply continued, unceasing and unwavering.
A click of a tongue. "Except there were four described in the legend, not five." And they all died, he omitted. "So you must be the fifth."
Was it that he had been erased from the legend, or had he simply never been a part of it? E-noru couldn’t figure it out.
But nothing would give him answers. Nothing would change.
He sucked in a breath and continued.
"Just how long will you sleep?” he inquired rhetorically, irritation rising in his voice. “Don’t you know that there are people waiting for you? My moth—your sister, for example, who has to cover for your medical expenses on her own. And there’s also that weary old teacher, who hangs around the old school building all the time. Like he's looking for ghosts of the past.”
He paused, eyes wandering to the vase at the corner of the room. Sometimes when he visited, the flowers were different from what he last remembered.
Usually they’d be of a different kind. And rather than store-bought like E-noru's, they seemed to be treated with a certain gentleness and care that made him think they were home-grown.
E-noru's mother stopped paying visits to her brother long ago (of course she did, entrusting the responsibility to the son whose face she couldn't stand to see), so he knew it couldn’t be her. And other than once or twice, that teacher, W-sensei, never carried a flower arrangement with him during his visits. Meaning that, he deduced, other than himself, that person must’ve replaced the flowers.
His eyes flicked back to the unresponsive man on the bed.
“There’s another person,” E-noru resumed, voicing his thoughts out loud. “A bit of an elusive figure; a young man with tired eyes. I don’t know who he is, but strangely enough, he has visited you as well, as of lately.”
E-noru never got a chance to talk to the mysterious man, as he always left the ward as quickly as he came. But he suspected that, given the peculiar flower arrangements, he might have been visiting for longer than he initially believed him to be.
“I managed to catch a few glimpses of him, and he seemed to be… How should I put this? Burdened by something. Do you perhaps know him, my dear uncle?”
Of course, E-noru knew, there wasn’t going to be an answer to either of his questions from his uncle's mouth. He quietly laughed to himself.
(Not like it's his life.)
The monitor tones had become white noise at this point.
His lips curled into a smirk. "Certainly not. All four of those students… were your friends, right? And they’re dead. And if you had more friends, they certainly would have shown up in the past decade. How lonely you must be."
Though he said those words, it actually did baffle him. How could there be an unknown visitor?
A lightbulb went off in his head.
Unless…
“...How lucky would you be, E-ki, if it turned out that one of your friends was alive?”
It was a ridiculous notion, a ridiculous prospect. But not one he could put completely out of the question. After, there were many things still left unknown about the circumstances behind his uncle's hospitalization.
Although, the implications...
...
E-noru cut his train of thought, unamused.
He was getting tired of this.
(He didn't even know E-ki, beyond distant memories of smiles and laughter as his uncle played with and babysitted him, early in his childhood, when his mother was too busy to do so herself.
Yet he lived after E-ki, constantly conflated with and compared to him, expected to follow his path and be like him. All because a series of genetic coincidences dictated that, yes, E-noru must, must just happen to look identical to his uncle.
"I hate you," he once spat beside his bed, several years ago. "I hate you so much. It's all about you, isn't it? My mother—She doesn't see me when she looks at me. She doesn't actually love me. All she sees is you, her dear younger brother who just... won't wake up. So just, wake up already!"
Maybe if his uncle woke up, he had thought, maybe then his mother would stop denying her grief. Maybe then she would stop using E-noru as a stand-in for someone long gone.
Maybe she would come to love E-noru for who he actually was, rather than who he mirrored.
Such were things he used to think about more.
Used to.)
"I don't know what I'm looking for, to be honest," he admitted, suddenly feeling more fatigued than the man who slept for a decade. "Maybe it's the truth behind what happened to you. Or at least, that's I've always told myself."
No response.
"But for whose sake? Yours? My mother's? That teacher's? Mine?"
No matter how much he questioned his uncle, no response would come. Of course he knew that, he was just...
"What the hell do I do?"
Just...
exhausted.
E-noru slumped his shoulders.
He didn't know whether to feel any respect, sympathy, or even anger towards his uncle.
He didn't have a single clue as to what he wanted anymore.
...
But maybe it no longer mattered. He'd do just as he had always done.
"You know what? Forget about it," he said, picking up his bag and pushing the chair and back to its original spot.
"Goodbye, E-ki."
The voice that left him was dry, lacking of any sincerity.
E-noru's story was decided from the start, and it wasn't as though he hadn't already accepted the role.
He had adorned the same type of hairclip as his uncle, the same necklace, same fashion style, same hairstyle—though with a ponytail, of course, because ponytails were obviously cooler. He even transferred into his uncle's school, joined a club that investigated the events of ten years ago, trying to unravel the mystery as though filling in the blanks of an unfinished novel.
All his life, he was living through the consequences of what E-ki left behind.
So his role, determined ever since that day ten years ago...
...was that, wasn't it? To take the reigns of the mystery, finish what E-ki started.
Because otherwise, what else was he supposed to do, if he wasn't allowed to be his own person?
It was his role,
to be the parallel to his uncle in some messed-up story,
to become the new E-ki, the storyteller that had been silenced for eternity.
Just as he had done thousands of times before, he slid the door open to the old school building’s music room.