School Girls' Stories - New Generation

Anyone interested in a VERY detailed family tree feel free to e-mail me so I can send it to you. It is in word doc, so it keeps the colors, and it was made by TT/Shadows. (Go Tiera). It\'ll help for those still kind of confused, Hell, it helped me!!


Chapter 24 – The Truth about the Oshidori Parents

Bliss and Link walked into the Wisconsin diner, Bliss’s eyes immediately spotting her father in the same booth he had been in the first time she had walked in on him, and the second. She and Link walked over and slid into the booth across from him. This time he seemed much more congenial, smiling at them both and signifying the waitress to bring two more cups of coffee.

“You have a new boyfriend already?” Nakago asked of his daughter, a bit bitterly, gazing over at Link who pushed back a few strands of hair from his eyes so he could glare back.

“No, no,” Bliss explained hurriedly. “This is Link Kiseki, he’s Yuki’s son.”

Nakago smiled at Link, assessing him in a whole new light. “Well, that would make me your uncle,” Nakago explained. “Nice to meet you. I never thought Yuki would have a blonde child, she must have married that singer.”

Link shifted uncomfortably. Yuki had sat him and his siblings down to explain about Bliss being their cousin, and that her parents had thought it was best that Shai and Kyoei raise them. He knew the truth, but it did not make meeting his uncle any more comfortable. He had not even thought of it as him going and meeting his uncle. He was thinking it was him taking Bliss to talk to her father, who coincidentally was his uncle. Should he be feeling awkward?

“She married Shinwa Kiseki,” Link confirmed for his uncle.

“Good for her,” Nakago smiled. “Is she still with him?”

“They are still married,” Link said stiffly. This man seemed so casual, what was he supposed to say?

“Good,” Nakago said, almost genuinely, but his attention to Link did not last. It quickly moved from his nephew to his daughter, and he smiled at her, though she was the spitting image of her father. Not one thing about her could be denied those features.

“So,” Nakago said, when Bliss was unable to utter out the words she wanted to say.

“Sorry,” Bliss suddenly apologized, looking down at the coffee delivered to her and hating herself for dragging Link into this. “I’m sorry, I just… I was beginning to feel so lost, and then I felt so guilty. I felt guilty because when I was asked what the most important thing in the world was to me I did not think of you, or Kaori, I thought of Shai, and that she was the best thing that ever happened to me, and I wondered if…”

“You should love Shai,” Nakago said, nodding his head and leaning back in the booth. “Shai took care of you, by herself. She was a single mother at the time and she wanted more for you than Kaori or I could give you. It was not for a lack of love for you, Bliss, that we gave you up.”

“Are you sure?” Bliss asked coldly. “Kaori made it seem that I could have mattered less than the dirt on her Prada heels.”

Nakago smirked. “Kaori does not know how to show emotion, she never learned properly, and I blame that on our parents.”
Bliss looked up at Nakago, who looked uncomfortably at Link. “I hate to do this, nephew,” he said, demeaning the word nephew, “but can I talk to Bliss alone for a moment. There is something I want to tell her about your family that I don’t want you to know, since even your mother didn’t know it.”

Link got up and double checked Bliss, suddenly wary. “Are you going to be all right?” he asked of her.

Bliss smiled at his concern. “If you don’t watch it, cousin, I may think you are worried,” she said to him, but she offered him a smile and a nod anyway to let him know that she would be all right without his care for a little bit.

“I’m going to take a walk,” he said. “If you need me I’ll be right outside.”

“What did Kaori tell you?” Nakago questioned after Link had gone outside, mostly to sulk for not being allowed to be a part of this conversation.

“She told me the truth about you, her, and James Grant,” Bliss explained sullenly.

“Did she ever tell you why she chose Shai to raise you?” Nakago asked.

“No,” Bliss admitted sadly.

Nakago sat back and nodded his head, as if knowing the answer already. “I had known the moment Kaori disappeared why she had left,” Nakago explained. “She did not even tell me that she was going back to Japan to stay with our parents, and in a lot of ways it was more calculating than to just have James think that the baby had died.

“As you can probably tell from your little meeting with Kaori, she is pretty selfish,” Nakago continued, explaining something that Bliss already knew for herself. “But not only is she selfish, she has a fierce streak in her when it comes to revenge. She hated our parents, madly, insanely, and when it came to leaving she had not been too terribly upset. She would not miss her mother, and especially not her father. So, going home was all a calculation to her.”

“I don’t get it,” Bliss admitted. He was talking in circles, and she seemed to be getting nowhere.

“There’s something Yuki does not know about our childhood,” Nakago told his daughter before taking a long gulp of the ice water he had in front of him, next to his coffee. “Yuki was young, and not quite the most attractive baby in the world. That is more my opinion though, but, it has nothing to do with this, or it has everything. There is a reason Kaori and I were close, there is a reason we picked on Yuki more than we should have, and there is a reason we turned out the way we did: our father molested us. Both of us.” He said it so matter-of-factly that Bliss had to blink and try to re-register the whole explanation.
“What?” was all she managed to spit out.

Nakago looked slightly smug, which surprised Bliss considering it was such a horrid thing to be telling your daughter about your grandfather, a man she had seen many times at Christmas parties, a man her family had forced her to interact with, and now she knew why: he was her grandfather, and a child molester?

“Both of you?” Bliss asked, registering more, but still falling desperately into confusion. “He… molested you both?”

“Yeah,” Nakago laughed bitterly. “Great dad we have, huh? It started when I was about five, Kaori was only six. Our mom ‘didn’t know’, but I began to think otherwise. It last for years, too many years, and finally Kaori started to bleed. Mom was so excited, she thought her daughter got her first period, but it turned out to be far worse. I won’t tell you, you can guess, but this traumatized Kaori, and it fucked me in the head. Sorry,” Nakago apologized for his swear and bowed his head. “We didn’t know how to react; we did not know who to go to for guidance. Our mother begged us to forgive him, and to not let our sister, who idolized him, know. We flat out were told to forget this had ever happened to us.

“Our father tried to make it up to us, to give us everything we wanted. He bought me a car, Kaori got every article of clothing she could ask for. We were free as birds, while Yuki was taken on a different road. Perhaps he saw her as a real daughter, I don’t know, she lucked out, though.

“One night Kaori and I went away with a bunch of friends to the beach for summer break. That was the night I lost my virginity to her, but she did not lose her virginity to me. I was her first, willing, and it was a mistake, but we did not know who else we could turn to. We only had one thing in common, but that thing had linked us so closely together that we had no one else but each other.

“We turned each other away, for having an incestuous relationship that we could blame our father on, and Kaori turned into a slut, and I turned into a druggie, who ended up becoming a murderer. When our parents finally sent Kaori away it was not because she was a raging whore, it was not because she and I were finally having our day together happily, it was because he could not stand to see what he had done to his children. When Yuki started having problems Mom became so racked with guilt she forgot about Yuki and thought she was Kaori, not because she missed Kaori, but because now she was blaming herself.

“When Kaori was pregnant she went home to our parents not to be joyous, not to be taken care, not to hide it from James. She wanted to show them she was having a grandchild that was made by her two children. And then she asked Shai to take care of you. Not because Shai would be the best possible mom, though, it seems she did a decent job and I love her for it, and please tell her thank you for everything, including the pictures. Sorry, I’m losing track. No, Kaori did ask Shai because she knew she could do it, but she did not ask our parents because of two reasons, she wanted them to watch their granddaughter be raised by someone else, someone she respected more, and she did not want the same thing to happen to her child that happened to us.”

Bliss was speechless, which for her was quite a twist on things. She stared at her father, her eyes blurry from the tears that were falling. She suddenly pitied her mother and father. She never thought it would happen, never thought it would happen to anyone she knew, anyone that close to her.

“I’m so sorry,” Bliss cried.

“Don’t be,” and Nakago was smiling. “Because of it, we got you. Wow, doesn’t that sound sappy?”

“Are you proud of me?” Bliss asked, looking at him, watching his face as he watched her.

“Every day,” he said. “Shai sends me letters constantly, and pictures, and nothing embarrassing if you are worried about it. There are no pictures of you naked in the bath tub, instead there are pictures of you standing for the first time, laughing, eating cake, playing with a bunny.”

“I knew she was a little camera happy,” Bliss chuckled to herself.

“She loves you more than you think, and she was happy to take you. It was never a question in her mind if she would take you. Her father tried to convince her that she should not be taking another child, she was already a single mother of one, but Shai wouldn’t hear it. Not that your grandfather doesn’t love you, I’m sure he does, but he was looking out for his daughter.”
“Grandpa died a few years ago,” Bliss admitted. “He had a heart attack while traveling in France with ‘grandma’ or Gigei. He always did treat me well, but not as well as Shu, Harmony, and Darrke.”

Nakago smiled at her, reaching across the table to brush strands of hair out of her face. “He loved you,” Nakago said kindly. “I love you. I’m sorry I treated you coldly the first time I met you, but I did not know how to react to you. You’ve been a photo and a piece of paper all of my life. To have you standing in front of me, all I could think was, ‘I don’t deserve this girl to be in my life. And she doesn’t deserve to be ruined by me in hers.’ Have you ever just been so happy you were speechless?”
“I am today,” Bliss admitted after a choked up minute.

“I’m glad,” Nakago said calmly. “Your cousin looks like he is about to feed me to the wolves.” Bliss turned to face the window while Link paced outside, looking angry, his eyes darting into the café every three steps. When he caught Bliss’s eyes he turned them angrily down to the ground.

“Thank you for meeting with me,” Bliss smiled at him. “Is it possible that this doesn’t have to be our last time meeting together?”

“Very possible,” Nakago smiled. “You have my phone number, but if you ever see Kaori again, don’t give it to her, okay?”
“Why did you leave her?” Bliss blurted out before she could stop herself.

Nakago chuckled. “She would have you believe I left her,” he said patiently. “However, she left me, literally, here with a lot of money and wide open spaces. She wanted nothing to do with me anymore, because I had threatened to tell James what she really was, to expose her.”

“Why expose her now?”

Nakago sighed, staring down into the blackness of the coffee cup, which had long since grown cold. “She was pregnant again, she didn’t even think she could have kids anymore after several abortions, but she ended up pregnant about three years ago. She wanted to abort this one, but I told her not to, this one was mine, I knew it, and I wanted a child. She said something along the lines of the chances of it not turning out as well as you did, and I threatened to tell James about her. There was no sad ending of me leaving her, I was left here.”

“I’m sorry,” Bliss said. “Why didn’t you go after her?”

“I was tired of fighting her to get her to come back to me,” Nakago admitted. “I just am too old and I do not have the energy to put up with her anymore. She will always be the one person I loved, but it is time for me to live my life for me, not for her.”

Bliss smiled at him, not knowing what else to say to him. Nakago stood from the booth and gently gave his daughter his hand and helped her out of the booth. Link stopped his façade of walking and just stared in the window at Nakago and Bliss as Nakago pulled his daughter into her arms and gave her a warm embrace. “Call me, anytime,” he told her. “I want to hear your voice now that I know you are really real.”

Outside in the cold Bliss leaned over and kissed Link on the cheek. He looked at her shocked, all the two of them ever did was fight, but today she looked like something else had happened to her. “Thank you,” she smiled, and slid into the passenger seat.