View source for Kaede Tanaka-Worthington

{{Infobox character
| name             = Kaede Tanaka-Worthington
| image            = Kaede Tanaka-Worthington.png
| gender           = Female
| nicknames        = 
| born             = 9 July 1940
| family           = [[The Tanaka-Worthington Family]]
| bloodtype        = Pureblood
| social_class     = Upper
| house            = Slytherin
| graduation_year  = Class of 1922
| occupation       = Student
| residence        = London, England & Tokyo, Japan
| wand             = 
| patronus         = 
| significant_other= 
| friends          = [[Rosalie Laurence]], [[Cassian McCormick]], [[Benji Laurence]]
| status           = Alive
}}

== Overview ==
Kaede is the kind of girl who likes to keep to herself. She has built her own world—one where only those who really wish to understand her are allowed to enter—and keeps her hopes and dreams, as well as her thoughts, tightly close to the chest.

Delicate is a good word to describe her—she speaks and moves with softness. She’s a gentle, old soul. Shy, and trapped in a melancholy that almost doesn’t belong to her, having been carried for all the women on her family line for thousands of years, her eyes always look sad.

Smart, Kaede enjoys reading books in the quiet of her room, but not as much as she likes to draw. Drawing gives her, in many ways, an outlet. She draws the world as her eyes see it, and she draws everything she can’t express into words. Her creativity flows like a river, untamed and more forceful than it could seem for such an even tempered girl.

When she was a little kid, her mother used to tell her she had the power of turning invisible. Kaede sticks to being a wallflower, hiding from the noise of the world, and hiding from any feelings that might complicate something she already feels as an immovable truth—her days are numbered.

For years, she had carefully avoided any attempts of getting close to her done by her classmates, but it was Rosalie Laurence who, in fourth year, was finally able to pass through the walls of polite distance she had put between herself and the world.

Kaede is not, by any means, selfish. All she does, all the walls she puts up, exist because she wishes to protect people from the kind of pain her mother inflicted on her father the night she died. Seeing his grief, and knowing she was damned to have the same fate, she turned from an introverted girl to someone who barely allows anyone in.

Her drawings, and her own world—the one she imagines every night, when she can’t sleep—are the only places where she’s truly herself. She has accepted her future with the kind of dignity many adults don’t know, and relies on dreams as her only source of comfort.

=== History ===
The year Archibald Worthington met Sayoko Tanaka as she peeked through the door of her father’s office, was, by all means, doomed.

It was January, and snowflakes gently fell outside the window. He was uncomfortable, his back too straight, as he tried to make a case for the deal she was offering for the most beautiful silks he had ever seen, when something even more beautiful caught his eye.

A curtain of hair—black as ink—framing a pale face, with a small nose; thin, pink tinted lips, and slanted dark eyes that glimmered with both amusement and curiosity as Sayoko tried to catch a glimpse of the foreigner that talked to her father.

He knew then, he would marry her. It didn’t matter how, it didn’t matter how his father might feel about it—but he would marry her.

She knew it, too. For her, it wasn’t an impulse, it wasn’t a sudden rush of young love pumping through her veins. It was as if she was just then understanding something that had been foretold a long time ago.
With a smile and a wave, she closed the door before her father could see her, knowing their fate was already sealed.
----It was just the start of one of the hardest, longest, winters England had ever seen.

Fire crackled on Worthington’s ornamented fireplace, as Sayoko laid on bed, her frame frail and her face so pale she looked ghostly.
Her five year old daughter, Kaede, was curled up against her, allowing the woman to stroke her long, dark hair, listening as Sayoko sang in broken, yet still melodic voice an old lullaby. The same lullaby her mother had sang to her as she, too, died, her heart too sick for her to leave bed.
“Nenne ko, nenne ko, okorō ga, nenne ko yoi ko da.”
Sleep, sleep, my child. The demon will not come if you sleep well.
It was a warning. A way to tell her, to tell her small daughter, she too, carried it with her. Their sickness. Hoping it would do something to save her, when Sayoko was no longer there to protect her from the monsters.
----The day she had turned sixteen, she had spended it in bed, burning in a fever that made her see butterflies and walled cities that only existed in her dreams.

Her flare ups had started to happen more and more often, and the only thing she could think about when the heat was gone and she could meditate about it in clarity, was how she would hide it from the only friend she had ever had.
[[Category:Class of 1922]]
[[Category:Slytherin]]
[[Category:Hogwarts Students]]
{{DEFAULTSORT:Tanaka-Worthington, Kaede}}