Genre: Angst, Historical, Horror, Hurt/Comfort, Tragedy, Psychological

Summary: August 6th, 1945, Hiroshima, Japan.

History will remember this fateful date as the beginning of the nuclear era and the introduction of mass destruction weapons. For some, it is only a trivial distant fact, a story illustrating the human decline, so far from their reality. For others, their whole lives have turned into a daily hell, with only a fall of 44.4 seconds. Eunbi cannot bear to stay powerless in this atrocious war that has left scars on both sides. She goes there to help the atomic bomb survivors after Japan's surrender, as a nurse to care for the traumatized orphans. Sakura, who has gone wild since she saw her family being blown up, tries to find the peace in her mind and will be pushed beyond her limits.

Together, they will try to heal their wounds and regain faith in this humanity. What does the future hold for them? Will they be free from all the violence around them?

TW: This story may cause emotional distress. Mentions of war, suicide and self-harm.

Word Count: 6005

Hashtag: #KkubiFestival_NeverGiveUp

Never Give Up

Plot:

"Mom… Where are you? Dad, Sou-chan? Is anyone there…" Sakura is restless in her sleep. She moves around in her bed, wrapping herself in her sheets. She is trembling and scared, stuck in her nightmares since this fateful day that destroyed her whole life…

August 6th, 1945

It is morning, 8 a.m. on the clock and the weather is nice, a refreshing breeze cooling this summer day. Everything is quiet and people are getting up softly to start a new day. Nothing could be more ordinary than this for a rural village in the Japanese countryside, right on the outskirts of Hiroshima. The Miyawaki family house is only about ten kilometers away. The two children pack their things in their school bag, already dressed in their uniforms and about to go to school, the father prepares himself, arranging his tie in front of the mirror while whistling in the living room to give himself a little bit of courage before leaving for his job in the city administration, the mother packs the meals in the kitchen for the whole family, some bentô prepared with love and with the support of the grandmother who comes to distract the youngest for now.

Sakura, the oldest daughter, is eager and excited to go back to school after her summer vacation. She will finally be able to see her friends again and enjoy their usual chat after school about the latest gossips in the region, not forgetting to eat umeboshis from the supermarket next the institute, her favorite snack. Despite these times of war, the city has been spared until now, the battlefields being on the other side of the sea, a thousand miles from here. The people lived a life like any other. The young girl, having finished putting on her shoes, runs across the garden and waits at the front gate for her little brother to come and join her. She hears the screams of the kids in the neighborhood, all as excited as she is to meet their friends at school.

"Sou-chan! It's time to go, we're going to be late!"

"Wait for me Onee-chan, I'm coming!" the boy is whining, not happy to be left behind. Sakura laughs heartfully finding his brother cute. She decides to hide inside the bushes that serve as a fence to scare her little brother. It is in her mischievous nature, which does not stop her from loving her little brother and always helping her parents at home, as well as taking care of her grandmother who fills her with small attentions. For nothing in the world would she wish to change what she currently has, all these instants are a part of her, as deep-rooted in her genes and inseparable from who she is.

Right at this moment, a silence engulfs all the district. Not the kind of silence synonymous with peace and serenity. No, rather a silence that foreshadows sorrow, something terrible is about to happen. A silence that Hiroshima was not ready for. It is 8:15 am, Sakura feels her hair bristling unconsciously and does not understand why. She gets up a little, pulling her head out of the bushes to try to see what is going on and ends up seeing in the firmament, in this clear blue sky, a military plane passing by, a lone bomber, which is unusual in times of war. Why is it flying alone? Why is it not accompanied in its exploration mission? Should she go to take refuge as the inhabitants are asked to do every time an enemy plane flies over the city?

"Bi-niju-kyu! Bi-niju-kyu! Bi-niju-kyu!" ("B29! B29! B29!") cries out a neighbor waving his arms around like a crazy man delivering a funeral psalmody. Sakura comes out of her torpor and raises her eyes again. In a roar of propellers, the "Little Boy" bomb is then dropped by the plane, so tiny and yet ready to enter History with its trail of corpses, blood and ruined buildings, ready to mark Humanity on the thought of how huge the damages of such a small object can inflict. Everything stops, time now passes in slow motion like the reel of an old film that we rewind. The young girl has the opportunity to follow the drop of "Little Boy" on the city, like a balloon that a child would have dropped from the stars to come and play with his friends and distract them. A few seconds later, after the bomb disappears, Sakura is holding her breath, nothing happens.

…

…

…

BOOM!

A huge explosion coming from Hiroshima. Time stops for a fraction of a second, and suddenly a huge bubble of incandescent gas arrives at high speed, emitting a powerful thermal radiation. The girl then sees a dazzling light, as if thousands of light bulbs had exploded in unison, totally blinded on the spot. She tries to take refuge by retracing quickly her steps to her house, but the shock wave arrives with full force and sweeps Sakura along her path, as well as her house and all the surrounding infrastructure.

Everything becomes white. First it was white, then everything becomes black. Sakura crouches down, and covers her face, but her right arm and her back are totally burned. Then comes a sandstorm with a roar that completely obscures the sun. The Japanese woman feels that is filled with dust and coughs loudly, decomposing as she spits blood. Her right arm swells, a huge pain runs all over her body. But Sakura does not think about that, what matters to her is what her family has become. She runs home, but to her dismay, there is nothing left, just rubble. She tries as best as she can to remove the debris, but nothing changes, and after about twenty minutes, she gives up, desperate.

" Mom… Where are you? Dad, Sou-chan? Is anyone there…"

Through the destroyed roof of the house, after a while, the young girl sees the blue sky, clear again after the blast, as if the nature had already forgotten the bombing, as if nothing had happened, insensitive and imposing in front of these men who are totally disoriented by what they witnessed. She then hears the survivors shouting to flee without waiting. But to go where? To go and do what? To escape from whom or what? The image in front of her is unbearable to look at: the shattered bodies of her family, crushed by the beams of the house, her mother staring at her with an empty gaze, her little brother cut in half. Sakura retreats trembling and vomits into a corner crying, unable to stand the situation. No, no, no! This is not possible, this cannot happen! Not her family! Not her! Why is she still standing? Why is she alive? The girl ends up running out of the house, chasing by the hellish shadows, to a shrine where there are already many people wounded, crying and scared. In one blowout, she lost her entire family. In one blowout, she lost her city. In one blowout, she lost her life.

Arriving at the rescue center, she finally realizes the carnage that has just occurred. Men and women, looking more like zombies than humans, walk through all the alleys, wandering and dying slowly, begging a charitable soul to end their suffering, asking for water to quench their thirst even if it is contaminated, searching with a haggard look where their loved ones are or what is left of them. Sakura has just entered a new world, atrocious and ruthless, that has destroyed the last trace of her recklessness, of what was left of her past life. A child approaches her. She recognizes a boy who lives a stone's throw from her house, with whom she had just played the day before. He is all scruffy, his clothes torn like hers. She grabs his arms and steps back frightened: shreds of burnt skin fall off from him, he walks with his arms out in front because he can no longer place them on his sides. He continues his way to no destination asking for water, just waiting for Death to come and take him in its arms, merciful and saving.

The city of Hiroshima has turned blood red and ash black, colored by fires lit to incinerate the corpses that were beginning to pile up in masses, filthy and inhuman. Hiroshima becomes Hell, Hell becomes Hiroshima, and Sakura was in the middle of it...

"NOOOO!!!!!!!" Sakura screams and rises abruptly in her bed, still trembling and sweating. Her heart beats so hard and pounds through her whole body. These scenes of horror haunt all her nights so much that, at one point, she refuses to fall asleep and does anything to stay awake. Unfortunately, exhaustion eventually builds up over the days and it is impossible for her not to succumb to sleep, her demons taking over her. Several times the Japanese girl has tried to end her life, but it seems that her fate is not this merciful, and her body today carries the marks of her suicide attempts as well as the scars of her burns.

"Sakura? What's going on? Are you okay?" The girl looks up and sees at the door of her room the nurse who has been taking care of her since her arrival at the orphanage in Tokyo, Kwon Eunbi. Not having the strength to remain seated and keeping her eyes open in this suffocating darkness, she then passively goes back to bed, takes her sheets and wraps herself inside as if to make a cocoon, safe from this cruel world, from what could hurt her. She continues to sob, in rage against herself for not being able to overcome her hauntings, her fears, day after day. Eunbi sighs, sad that the girl has decided once again to struggle alone.

"Forget it Eunbi-san, the Hibakusha will never be able to integrate our society again," says Matsui Jurina, another nurse in the same orphanage who just makes her nightly rounds. "I don't know why you insist like this. You know, I think it's better if the Death could come to get them, it would be less painful for them... And less painful for us to watch them. You shouldn't be attached to these people, they are nothing anymore" she spats again and leaves emotionless in the corridor.

(Hibakusha = people affected by the 1945 atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hibakusha )

However, Eunbi disagrees with this mindset and intends to show through her actions. The Korean woman had joined the medical staff to help the atomic bomb survivors after Japan surrendered, meaning the end of World War II. This event had totally shocked her, and it still saddens her. How could someone be so cruel in destroying his fellow peer, reducing him to ashes? How could he manage to push the atrocity even further than it already was? Why was he willing to spend so much money to destroy and so little to build and help mankind? How did this world come to this, to the depths of horror, hatred and indifference? Where and when did we go wrong? Is that our punishment for pretending to be God?

People stopped talking about the war as days passed. As if it was a taboo, a shame they wanted to forget. The whole country was turned towards the reconstruction and the future, leaving in their woes the unfortunate ones, the victims who had only their eyes to cry. They were discriminated, because safe people did not want to see what their past actions had produced, the ugliness that they had showed in a broad daylight. They were seen as monsters, irradiated, just taking advantage of the bombing to dramatize their state and benefit from state aid. They were the rejected ones, the scraps of society, useless and incapable of giving birth to healthy children. Outsiders of this contemporary era, worse than trash.

For these survivors, it was impossible to voice out their feelings, to describe the horror of that day, their relatives not understanding as well. Survivors will eventually hit a huge wall, and over the years, an obstruction will grow as they will fear to get a family that could potentially be swept away like theirs once was. An isolation in spite of themselves, a miserable life in spite of themselves.

Eunbi was ferociously against this mentality. For her, it was important to get to the heart of the matter, to face the problem without evading it, to take it in hand and find a solution. She never considered a cause as lost and has always hoped that better days would come soon. Although the last war had shaken her convictions somewhat, especially the last two bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, she had quickly recovered and regained her optimism when she met Sakura.

It had been more than a year since Sakura was accepted at the orphanage in Tokyo. Eunbi had volunteered to take care of her personally, in addition of the other war orphans. During this time, it was almost impossible to get the Japanese girl to speak, she was unable to talk during her sessions with the health professionals, too scared of herself. If her screams during the night were not proof of the contrary, one would have thought that she had lost her voice. It was also impossible to approach her, except for Eunbi who, with great patience,