2006/06/18 | Sakura and Snow Prologue & 1－5
类别(他山之石) | 评论(0) | 阅读(1041) | 发表于 10:28
同人怎能没有ＣＬＡＭＰ的作品呢？以下是大名远扬的《樱花雪》。中译各位可以在"露西弗"找到，是多位前辈合作完成的，我曾经也有它的译文，但是电脑发疯两次后再也……
原文地址见友情连接。


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Sakura and Snow
<BR />

Prologue





By Natalie Baan
<BR />



All over Tokyo the cherry trees were in bloom, but nowhere as luxuriantly as in Ueno Park. The park was unusually empty, though, despite the fine spring weather. Ordinarily it would be a solid mass of salarymen and office ladies, happy, exuberant families and paired-off couples, but today few people were there at all. And of those who did come to spread their blankets on the grass, to laugh and eat and drink as they watched the petals drifting down, most seemed at least a little nervous.

That wasn't surprising. The talk on every blanket was largely of the earthquake which had struck the city earlier that day. Nakano Sun Plaza had been entirely destroyed. It was a terrible thing.

Heedlessly, though, a few young children ran and shouted under the cherry trees, oblivious to the conversations or the concerns that troubled grown-ups. The rose-pink petals tumbled all about them.

Sakurazuka Seishirou touched the trunk of one particular tree.

He smiled.



Narrow pieces of paper fluttered to the pavement, flashes of white marked by black lettering. They settled onto the concrete, and onto the corpse which was lying there, and onto the blood which pooled around the corpse. Blood soaked through the fiber of the papers like oil being drawn into a wick, and a subtle poison seeped into the ground beneath the plaza, tainting what had kept that place secure.

A tremendous burst of light split earth and sky--

A Dragon of power coiled into the air.



Seishirou reached up and drew down the tip of a flowering twig. He let the delicate blooms brush against his cheek. Behind dark glasses, his eyes were closed and peaceful.

He was remembering.



Nakano, after the earthquake...the distant noise of screams and sirens. The sweet taste of power so recently used still filled him. The plaza was choked with rubble, as were the surrounding sidewalks and the streets; broken glass glittered dully on the pavement. Somewhere a fire sent thin veils of smoke into the air, but the smoke and clouds of dust were slowly disappearing, being carried away on the wind that had arisen. The sky was growing clear once more.

Nakano Sun Plaza...the sound of hurrying footsteps echoed from shattered walls.

Seishirou turned around. He smiled, very softly, at that approaching person.

"Subaru-kun."



Seishirou opened his eyes and watched the slow, slow rain of cherry blossoms. The smile did not leave his face. He had not forgotten this one....

No, he had never forgotten this one.

The one he had permitted to escape him.

The one that he was someday going to kill.

He had already chosen the moment....



"I have been looking for you," Subaru said in a quiet voice.

"Why?"

"To make my wish a reality."

From Subaru's hand a star-shaped space sprang out, luminous and growing.

The kekkai of one of the Seven Seals....



<Hey,> Seishirou called out silently, teasingly, even though the Sumeragi couldn't hear him. <Now that I know you're a Seal, Subaru-kun, I've decided it at last.>

<I'll kill you on the final day.>

<Because you and this fragile "cornerstone," this Tokyo, have been two projects that I've spent a lot of time on and your fates are so closely intertwined-->

<It's an elegant conclusion, to finish both at once.>

A wind moved strongly through the sakura, combing the waves of Seishirou's dark hair. It picked out a stray petal that had nestled there, and stole it swiftly away. The branches of the trees whispered against each other, soft sound of wood contacting wood. Slow clouds began to pass before the sun.

<Sumeragi and Sakurazukamori...two faces of the coin of onmyoudo, the light and the dark. It would have been appropriate for us to meet in any event, on the threshold of this human world's destruction, even if I hadn't marked you as my catch so long ago. And considering that, considering how long I've been meddling in your life already-->

<Yes. To see you die on the final day would be right.>

<So for those reasons, I'll continue to overlook you for a while. For those reasons-->

<--and for one more.>



"You said you had a wish. Is your wish...to kill me?" He looked so very serious, and Seishirou had to laugh.

"You really are cute, Subaru-kun...."



<You really are.>

<You want to fight me, don't you? Well, I want that too. I want to see how well you'll do against me.>

<The thirteenth head of the Sumeragi clan....>

<Will you challenge me on that day, Sumeragi Subaru?>



Powerful winds whipped around the two practitioners. Their voices rose, one over the other, in words that strove to summon and to deny. Magical forces sang in each syllable, each gesture.

"/On makayakisha bazara sataba....jakuunban kohara beisha un./"

Torrents of supernatural energy wove around Subaru's hands. He stood fast among the screaming, lashing winds, and his green eyes never left the figure of his enemy.

Seishirou appraised the strength of this opponent. When he was satisfied with his knowledge, he exerted himself in a certain way. The unseen threads which held magic to Subaru's will were abruptly bound.

"/On asanmagini unhatta...on bazarato...shikoku./"

Subaru gasped.

Seishirou's power hurled Subaru backwards, and he struck the wall of the building.



One of the littlest children wailed suddenly, as he tripped on a root and fell. He lay there for a moment, and then scrambled to his feet and dashed after the others, crying for them to wait. The children trampled over the fallen petals, and where it had been crushed that tender silk turned darker, like a human bruise.

A stain of blood, spread out beneath the skin....



Seishirou walked over to where Subaru was kneeling and gazed down upon the younger man. Powerful, yes, as the leader of Japan's onmyouji should be: far more powerful than he'd been in the past. Of the Seven Seals, he might stand second only to Kamui himself. He was highly trained, intensely disciplined; his workings were carried out with all the skill that single-minded dedication and years of experience could give...but he was not Seishirou's equal.

There was a "flaw" in him somewhere, a fracturing of his energies which hindered him from his full potential.

The tremendous promise of his spiritual power had never been fulfilled.



<That very combination of prowess and weakness....>

<Subaru-kun.>

<You're strong enough now to be an amusing test of my own powers, but not possibly strong enough to defeat me.>

<Another sure bet like this....>

Seishirou laughed again.

<How can I resist?>



Within the space of the barrier kekkai, the winds were gradually diminishing. Seishirou stood over that victim, the one for whom he had so long bent the silent laws of the Sakurazukamori. He had always intended to finish their game someday...and now he knew when.

He smiled down at the injured onmyouji.

"Then...I will see you again."



<Yes.>

<On that final day....>

A child's voice shouted: "Wait! Hey, wait for me! It isn't /fair/!" Small figures scattered in-between the trees. The sound of high-pitched laughter echoed among the sakura, gradually dying away into the distance.

That single voice cried out to them again, and then was still.

Seishirou laid his hand upon the tree once more.

<Subaru-kun, everything dies eventually. Like this city's future, your time is running out.>

< It's not that I "hate" you, or that I particularly "wish" for you to die-->

<It's just something that's going to happen, is all.>

<I'm Sakurazukamori, and I'm going to kill you.>

<It really is that simple.>

Still smiling, Seishirou let his hand slip down from the cherry tree. After a little while, he turned and walked away. On all sides the petals fell without surcease, pitiless and beautiful.

Somewhere, a mother was calling for her son.



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Sakura and Snow


Chapter 1




By Natalie Baan




Subaru was still sitting in the park. The little fool had been waiting on that bench for hours, his gaze scarcely wavering from the snow-bound cherry tree.

What did he think that he'd accomplish there?

Seishirou shrugged off the farsight vision for a moment, letting his mind return to the low-lit confines of his apartment's living room. Picking up the glass by his side, he took a measured sip of its contents, savoring the sweet, pleasant fire of the alcohol. Then once more he glanced across the distance, amused by the persistence of his enemy.

Not such a /little/ fool, of course. Not anymore. Subaru had grown taller in the intervening years, his face leaner with developing maturity. He dressed casually, now that he wasn't a victim of his sister's fashion whims, and it made him look less like...how had she put it?...a "dress-up doll." And the eyes...those were most different of all. They had ceased to be such drowning pools of innocence, shimmering with every emotion that touched his heart. Subaru had had eyes like an animal's, Seishirou thought, eyes that understood nothing--and perhaps there was a time when Subaru might have been flattered by at least part of that comparison. Those eyes had narrowed though, and they guarded themselves: deep green mirrors no longer full of light. There were things that he had come to understand.

But he was still a fool.

Seishirou looked away from him again, long enough to find the stereo remote. He thumbed it on, and the CD-player whirred softly, shifting through its program. As that ended and the low pulse of music began, Seishirou leaned back against the cushions of his chair. He closed his eyes and smiled at the Sumeragi heir: out haunting Ueno Park on this winter's night, so very like the ghosts it was that family's work to ease.

<So restless and so futile...are you waiting for me to discover you there? Will you challenge me, when I arrive to defend the cherry tree barrow? What nonsense. I have better things to do with my time, I assure you. Especially on a night as cold as this.>

<Did you really think that I would come to you?>

Seishirou's eyes opened slowly, one golden-brown and one a cloudy swirl of white. He gazed at Subaru with mild curiosity, wondering what passed through the other's mind at times like these.

<What is it you hope for? What do you intend to do? Strike out against the sakura itself?> Seishirou chuckled softly at that.

<Well, perhaps you're only there to torment yourself....>

<You've always had a talent for suffering.>

Subaru stood up and began pacing in front of the bench, something he'd done more than once already. Most likely he was trying to keep warm. Seishirou watched him cough briefly, and flick the end of his cigarette into a snowbank. The sound of the cough was quiet, muted by distance; the music on Seishirou's end nearly drowned it out. After another moment Subaru paused, and made a halfhearted attempt to feel for scrying. Seishirou thinned his farsight out deftly, diffusing the field of vision across the entire end of the park, and Subaru, seeking a direct gaze, didn't notice him at all.

<Clumsy, Subaru-kun. You're usually not so careless.>

Subaru searched for a little while longer, but his determination appeared to waver and he soon gave up the effort. Seishirou watched him slump onto the bench again. It was like observing something from the corner of one's eye, discerning what could only half be seen. In the dimness and from this new, unfocused vantage, the onmyouji was scarcely visible: a blur of shadow and motion that soon became still.

That waited, as if the gesture itself was what mattered.

<Well, I suppose it's not important what your reasons are. There's nothing you can do out there that would affect me. If your presence near the sakura was any sort of danger, I would have already taken care of it. Believe me-->

<I would not have spared you.>

The music changed, shifting into the beginning of the next song. It happened to be one that Seishirou particularly liked, and he let the sound lure him back to his apartment. He listened through the song with pleasure, singing along softly on a couple of the choruses, but still he left the lightest strand of contact open to the park, and he glanced that way from time to time. Subaru hadn't quite exhausted his interest for tonight: there was still the possibility that something might happen, and so Seishirou continued his idle scrutiny, just in case. It was the hunter in him, that could not take its eye from the prey so long as there was any hint of life; it was also the sorcerer's instinct, to be alert to loose ends and forces not accounted for.

He had let Subaru go for a long, long time...like everything else, though, that respite was a temporary thing.

The song ended. In the silence between tracks Seishirou tapped one fingernail consideringly against his glass, listening the faint chime of the crystal.

/Subaru./

Beautiful and fragile and breakable...and, like all such items, of limited duration, even more so than the rest of this impermanent world. He might so easily have been killed years ago. Indeed, for a while Seishirou had thought there could be no more point to keeping Subaru alive. Then his sister's choice, her dying, had had such dramatic repercussions: Subaru had broken free in that tidal surge of loss and pain, and the unexpected intensity, that flash of power, had renewed Seishirou's fading interest in the boy. Without that he might not have thought to wait: to see how the bent twig would grow, to discover what Subaru might yet become. And then last spring, on that day in Nakano, he had finally found out.

He should be grateful to Hokuto, perhaps. He would consider it.

She had, after all, been his most ardent supporter.

Seishirou looked out musingly at the formless shadow-on-shadow that was Subaru. He was willing to admit that this was an extravagant game. The watchword of the Sakurazukamori was "do not be seen," and being seen, leave no survivor. Any witness at all was a hazard, let alone a practitioner, let alone the thirteenth head of the Sumeragi clan, a person who knew what he faced and who held some measure of power. Seishirou's ancestors would surely not have approved.

Unfortunately for them, Seishirou was quite indifferent to what they might have thought or done. The opinions of the living never moved him in the slightest, so why should the dead matter either? Besides, no one was ever going to know what happened here. The dead were well and truly gone, and there would be no son or daughter to replace him.

Not ever.

After all, the world was about to end.

At that thought, Seishirou smiled once again. He raised his drink in humorous salute to all who had come before him, the murdering and murdered magicians whose blood was in his veins and on his hands. Only he would not die on the cherry tree mound; only he would not shed his life to feed another's power.

He would be the last of the Sakurazukamori. That fact gave him a definite satisfaction.

Seishirou drank and then lowered the glass, becoming serious for a moment as he did so. He gazed into the darkly translucent liquid without really seeing it, his vision returning instead to that person near the sakura tree.

He had never forsaken what he was. Being that--being Sakurazukamori--there were things that were required. Any person who saw the "cherry tree barrow guardian" at work had to be killed. No one that the Sakurazukamori singled out for death ever escaped. Such things were not open to dispute: they were an incontrovertible part of himself, as intrinsic to his nature as his height, or the darkness of his hair, or the wide, bright spaces of his mind and self. He was Sakurazukamori, and Subaru was going to die.

But /not/ before Seishirou was ready to kill him.

Seishirou laughed, recovering his usual cheerfulness.

<It really is almost time now. Are you ready for that final day? Or will you truly break as easily as this glass after all? All this time I've been wondering, I've been waiting patiently to find out, Subaru-kun.>

<How much do you hate me?Will you try to "punish" me?>

<What are you going to do?>

Right now, Subaru wasn't doing much of anything. Seishirou brought the blurred image back into clarity, since the onmyouji was no longer looking for him. He slipped his point of view around the shoulder to look into the grave, emotionless face. Subaru stared past in the general direction of the sakura; whether he truly saw the tree or was merely lost in thought or memory was debatable. There was no movement at all, though, other than the occasional small shift of position. It seemed Subaru was going to be tedious for a while.

<Hmm...well if that's so, then I'll leave you to it.>

Losing interest for the time being, Seishirou drew his attention all the way back to the apartment, meticulously checking his wards as he passed them. He scanned the surrounding area for farsight spying as well, before unweaving the subtle flows of power that he held. As it turned out he hadn't been "followed"--he hadn't expected that he would be--but he was careful of these things nonetheless. It was one reason he felt quite secure, even though he was being "hunted."

<Even if it's you, Sumeragi Subaru. Because if the diviner under the Diet building can't find me, you certainly won't.>

<But I can always find you....>

<Always.>

Seishirou blinked away the last shadows of the scrying, and stretched languidly. So now that this diversion was over, what was he going do tonight? He could go out, but he'd seen enough of this frigid winter night already, and he was disinclined to walk around in it. Besides, he was feeling lazy...perhaps he'd stay home and read instead. He'd picked up a few magazines earlier in the day; some were "work"-related (these millennial "New Age" groups put out the most ridiculous fluff, but they could be amusing, and nothing that might remotely touch on coming events should be ignored) and a couple were simply entertainment. That was surely enough to occupy him. However....

However, it was also nice simply to sit, he reflected: to listen to the music and to think of nothing in particular. He probably should enjoy this quiet moment, if only because there weren't so many of them left. It was a rare thing...everything became rare in these last days, and it gave one a pleasant nostalgia, a sense of transience that in itself was a good enough reason for the end.

The magazines would keep for a while, Seishirou decided, and he relaxed contentedly into his chair. He noticed that the glass was still in his hand--nearly empty, and he went to finish it.

"Eh?"

A thin snap of energy sparked in his mind, a fierce crackle of alertness. It ran down his spine and out along his nerves like something alive. Seishirou set down the drink.

Subaru was moving.

He had stood up from the bench, and now walked toward the cherry tree. Snow crunched under his feet. Stopping just beyond the span of leafless branches, he reached into the sleeve of his coat and drew out a sheaf of ofuda.

"/On./"

With a practiced flick, Subaru cast the paper talismans toward the tree. They caught in the air around the trunk, and began to glow with soft fire.

So....

Subaru was actually going to attempt the sakura. This could be interesting.

"/On...batarei ya sowaka..../"

Branches began to move slightly, although there was no wind. Small swirls of snow, dislodged, scattered to the ground.

"/On...batarei ya sowaka..../"

Seishirou stood up and paced into the bedroom. He drew up the blind on the large picture window there and stared through his reflection in the glass--then ceased to see anything at all on the physical level, his vision wholly occupied with that faraway working.

"/On...batarei ya sowaka..../"

The stirring of the twigs transmitted itself to the air; the air began to shake silently, as if disturbed by a tremendous noise just beyond human hearing. It was power that had begun to wake, and for those with eyes to see the night was utterly transformed. The city sky, never truly black, became so, and the shadows of the park grew thicker and sharper edged. Near the sakura those shadows took on the dull reddish color of rust, and they moved, gradually seeping outward like the ooze of blood from a heart that had nearly ceased to beat.

The tree whispered, <Enemy>. Only Seishirou could hear.

<Subaru-kun. Do you have any idea what you're attempting?>

Subaru clasped his gloved hands in the mitsu-in, index fingers raised before his face as he continued to chant. In the dimness, the light of his magic was the only bright thing. The movement of the air intensified, its vibration verging on an audible moan as it caught up those shadow streamers and unfurled them wider--as it joined with them, so that the shadows and the wind became one swirling, wrathful force that whipped around the inside of Subaru's working with growing violence. Still it could not quite approach him, bound in by the radiance of the ofuda.

<No. I'm sure you don't have the slightest clue. And I know you well enough to know that you won't have slept or eaten properly beforehand--that you're coming into this from a place of weakness, as you always seem to.>

<Well, anyway...let's see how you do.>

Raising his voice against the fury of the wind, Subaru began his main invocation, the words a fragile spindle on which to shape the magic.

"/On nama samanta vajuranam chanda maharoshana, savata on tiraka hanba sowaka..../"

He set his will upon the tree.

Power surged between the onmyouji and the ancient sakura. In four discrete brilliant flares, the ofuda were destroyed. Subaru let them go without flinching, caught the protective energy they had held and sustained it through his both skill instead...impressive, that. The sound of the wind increased to a snarling wail. Subaru lifted his hands above his head, eyes dark and intense as he repeated the words, as he swiftly bound the three threads of his spell together...

To call forth, to contain, and to cleanse.

<You tried this once before when you were only a child, and you failed, as you will fail now. Innocence protected you then from the full consequences of your actions, but you are no longer innocent--and the sakura will kill you because that is its nature. Subaru-kun-->

--magic coursed into the space between Subaru's hands--

<--you can die here. >

"/On batarei ya sowaka!/"

White fire exploded around Subaru and the tree as he threw his arms wide in the spell's release. The force of his will flamed against the darkness, lit every crevice of the great trunk in a fierce blaze of power. Light dazzled off the fallen snow as he turned night temporarily into day: a spiritual light, as well as a visible one, even as the shadows that he contended with were more than just the darkness one could see.

They were the dead.

That was what the child-Subaru had felt so powerfully that it drew him across Tokyo, from one path of destiny onto another: the suffering and malice of so many victims that they could not be counted. Mindless, speechless, all volition stripped away, their souls were pressed into the barrow and its guardian tree, just as their bodies were buried beneath it. It was their unliving existence that gave the tree its power, their resentment and ravaged humanity that gave it something near sentience: a mind that carried over from tree to seed to sapling, so that it always was renewed. Ally and symbol to the Sakurazukamori, as old as any living thing upon the earth....

<Subaru-kun....>

<Twenty centuries of magic and blood, of hate and death and fear.>

<Do you really think you stand any chance against that?>

Subaru was still sustaining power, focusing light that was more than light onto the sakura, striving to reach its heart. His lips moved silently, and there was a frown of concentration on his face. A high degree of skill, yes, but skill alone could take him only so far. At this point it was his personal power against that of the tree, and Seishirou could feel in the magical emanations that he was nearly to his limit.

Despite that, he did not give in. He poured out his power in a constant tide of force, pushing at those boundaries he could not break...calling, but never answered.

The tree keened. There was a terrible snapping sensation suddenly, as of a branch bent too far that slips free and whips back.

And Subaru was fighting for his life.

That quickly the balance shifted, as the tree's full magic came to bear. Fury whirled out at him, a lash of pure savagery that splintered his warding spell with ease. Subaru snatched back the shards of protective power, spinning those remnants into a desperate shield of brilliance around himself. Wind and shadow roared past him to surround the narrow circle that his magic made. He struck out from that fragile shelter with what force he could spare, but the storm ate his blow at once and began to drive inward, pressing inexorably closer. Subaru's light intensified as its radius shrank, but his strength wouldn't hold for more than moments. And he knew it.

"/On!/" Subaru screamed the seed-syllable, his voice almost inaudible over the howling of the wind. His power flared and thinned. Murder raged only an inch of light away from him--

"/ON!/"

--plunged over him like a wave.

In that instant, Seishirou sent his thought out from the apartment. His illusion manifested next to the trunk of the cherry tree: the perfect image of himself, with every seeming of substance.

He lifted up his ghost's hand and his will.

The shadows swirled abruptly away from Subaru. They formed a clear circle around him and from there drew slowly back, wreathing themselves about Seishirou's image with reluctant obedience before fragmenting into the dimness of the Tokyo night. The wind dwindled as well until it vanished entirely, leaving nothing behind but the thin bite of winter cold: a cold Seishirou was aware of through distant senses, although he couldn't truly feel it. It seemed less chill than before, however; the weather appeared to be changing.

Perhaps there would be some more snow.

Seishirou cocked his head, gazing down at Subaru.

<Mine>, the tree muttered sullenly.

<Yes--isn't everyone?> Seishirou replied. <Now, please hush.> In illusion he stepped away from the tree and walked to within a few feet of the other onmyouji.

Shuddering, trying to catch his breath, Subaru had fallen to his knees, one hand raised wardingly before his face. The rawness of the air got to him, and he began to cough again. Seishirou inspected him minutely, noting the exhaustion, the stark paleness of his skin, the worn sneakers and the coat whose sleeves fell just slightly short, outgrown...missing no detail, because the Sumeragi was an enemy and a practitioner, and while Seishirou had his whims he was also not a fool. It was possible that this could be a trap, that his sending could be traced back to its source, though naturally he had taken precautions against such a thing...but everything he saw seemed to read the same way. Subaru had nothing left, not the strength nor the magic nor even the will to fight. He had spent it all in the struggle with the sakura.

Some of it, perhaps, even before that.

<An onmyouji who worked for the government could have afforded a new coat, if he cared. But you've never been concerned for yourself, even in far more important matters. No self-interest, no self-preservation: you spend yourself too easily, and it makes you weaker than you really are.> Seishirou shook his head in a pretense of sadness, even as he smiled very slightly.

<That's not the mark of a "pro.">

Subaru looked up at him suddenly, and Seishirou found himself still smiling as he stared into those green eyes. They were brilliant with an almost uncanny light, like a liquid gold flash of brightness on the sharp edge of broken glass, and behind the brilliance, empty of life. This light was a new thing, Seishirou thought--not that luminosity which had once been there. It was more like a reflection from the dark surface of a jewel: an emerald, if any emerald had that deep richness of color. Such beautiful eyes he had always had--had even now, when they were like windows closed against the world. It was a kind of self-defense that he had learned.

"/Seishirou-san,/" Subaru breathed, his voice hoarse and ragged, torn like the thin nonsubstance of a spirit.

"Hello, Subaru-kun." Seishirou's own speech was flawlessly normal-sounding, despite the fact that he wasn't physically present. His "breath" was even frosting in the air. Perfection of illusion was a point of pride. "That's a nasty cough you have. Are you seeing a doctor?"

"That was you," whispered Subaru tonelessly. "Breaking the spell." The words could be meant as a question, but Subaru showed no real enthusiasm for the answer. Seishirou chose to ignore it for now. He let his smile soften a little instead, as if showing concern.

"It's a cold night to be out playing in the snow," Seishirou remarked. He had "appeared" wearing a coat, and now put illusionary hands in pockets. "You should dress more warmly next time." Subaru was indeed shivering, but his eyes were fixed blankly on Seishirou's and they gave back nothing.

"If you're going to be outside for long in the wintertime, it's also good not to smoke," Seishirou continued. "Did you know that smoking constricts the blood vessels? You can get frostbite much more easily when the circulation is reduced like that."

There was no reply, other than the empty stare. Seishirou contemplated that emptiness for a moment, and then tried a different subject.

"Have you been busy with 'work'?" He had a pretty good idea of what Subaru had been busy with lately, but Subaru might not know that...the only response was another coughing fit, though: longer this time, and harsh. Seishirou sighed to himself and glanced at the backs of Subaru's hands as he waited for it to pass. They were gloved for warmth, not protection, and Seishirou could sense the presence of his stars quite plainly: signs invisible to ordinary eyes, but not to his. They were like a beacon to him, always, and if he chose he could reach out through the link they made and feel Subaru's life like a small, warm glow between his own hands. Subaru had never made any effort to mask the signs, although it was conceivable that he could. It was as if he wanted Seishirou to find him, to come to him...well, of course, he did.

He meant to track down and kill his sister's murderer, after all.

The coughing ended, but Subaru did not look up or speak again. Silence strung itself out between them, the same strange silence there had been at their last meeting, only perhaps even bleaker now on Subaru's part. There wasn't even movement from the Sumeragi this time, no flicker of involvement in his face, no physical reaction to Seishirou's presence--only that slight trembling as he knelt there in the snow. It was as though he had gone away inside, was no longer alive to anything.

It was sort of boring. Idly, Seishirou played with his illusion a bit, letting the edges of his coat stir and ripple as if moved by a strong breeze. He let the "breeze" catch his own hair and even Subaru's, swirl the loose snow that had fallen from the sakura in sparkling drifts around the two of them--those were effects that took work, moving the real with the insubstantial. Snow pattered gently against Subaru's face, but he didn't even flinch.

Hmm.

How best to stir some reaction?

"The sakura broke your spell," Seishirou said at last, allowing a gentle amusement to show in his voice. "It's not without defenses. Don't you remember, Subaru-kun? That day we first met?"

<You performed your first exorcism on this tree, and it stung you, didn't it? It would have hurt you a lot worse that time, if you hadn't been so little threat. You were so much a child that it could hardly even see you.>

<So innocent...but not any more.>

Subaru said nothing, his eyes fixed on the snowy ground at Seishirou's feet. The ghost would leave shallow footprints when it departed, a detail that pleased Seishirou, even if Subaru seemed oblivious...could it be that Subaru didn't realize that it was an illusion? Did he think that Seishirou was actually present, here?

"Perhaps you don't remember. Perhaps you'd prefer to forget. Is that your wish, Subaru-kun?"

Subaru's voice was like a sleepwalker stumbling through a room, awkward and remote and slow.

"I only wish for one thing,"

An answer. It was remarkable.

"To kill me?" Seishirou asked, still smiling, and he swept out one arm in invitation. "Would you like to try it now?"

It would be laughable if Subaru tried to attack his ghost, but it probably wouldn't happen. Even if Subaru mustered the will, he seemed to be too weak. A monosyllable reply, then, or probably just silence...so Seishirou was a little surprised when Subaru looked up at him again, as blank as the surface of a pond, and as transparent. It was as though Seishirou could see right through him, and nothing was even there.

"If I kill you, I become you," Subaru said without the least inflection: not hatred, or anger, or fear. There wasn't even a sense of expectation in the words, whether of good or ill, but only a hollow vacancy.

It was very odd indeed.

To cover his slight perplexity, Seishirou laughed.

"There's more to the rite of succession than that," he responded. He thought back, trying to remember what he could have said all those years ago that might have suggested the idea. "I didn't know you were interested, Subaru-kun."

"I will not," Subaru said dully, fatally. "I will not commit that wrong." His voice was resolved, for all that it was so flat and lifeless, and Seishirou felt a little interest wake in him again. There was something there at last, besides the silence.

"Wrong to kill me?" Seishirou asked then, swift and gentle as the touch of fire. "Or to become me?"

Subaru didn't seem to hear. He was still speaking, but the words came more sluggishly now: falling hard, like stones, and requiring a breath of recovery afterward.

"...no matter what happens...," he mumbled, "...no matter...how much...."

"Subaru-kun--"

"No matter," Subaru was muttering, "no matter, no...matter," as if he had lost the connection of the words, his mind wandering even with his enemy here before him, and suddenly Seishirou put it all together, the paleness and trembling, the too-bright eyes, the cough--

Fever. Bronchial infection as well, probably.

<"Working" when you're this sick? /Honestly,/ Subaru-kun....>

Perhaps on some level Subaru recognized that he was rambling. He breathed "no" one more time with demented quietness, and then shut up.

There was silence once again.

<Well,> Seishirou thought, <that's that.>

He looked up at the moonless, starless sky, clouds flushed vaguely pinkish by the city's glare. It was indeed about to snow--no, it /was/ snowing; the first small flakes were already descending, trailing down from above one by one. A couple passed through the body of his ghost as they fell. They marred the effect of the illusion a little, but the flaw was very small and it no longer seemed especially important. He was nearly done here anyway.

Seishirou let his gaze turn back to Subaru.

<I wonder if you've really decided not to try to kill me, or if you're just delirious.> He shrugged, not giving the question much thought. <It doesn't matter anyway.>

<You couldn't kill me.>

<You couldn't be the "cherry tree barrow guardian," even if it was that simple. >

<I used to imagine that you might at least challenge me someday. Now I'm not so sure. I thought-->

<Well, never mind.>

A little wind kicked up, stirring Subaru's hair for real this time, and making the occasional snowflakes swirl sideways. It carried a star of snow past Seishirou, and he watched that white fleck dance by.

<Maybe I should kill you now and get it over with. In the condition you're in, I could do it all the way from here. You would never be able to stop me.>

<Maybe I should....>

"Shall I?" he murmured to himself. Subaru glanced up at him spiritlessly, then let his eyes drift down again, their gaze leaving Seishirou like light leaving a blown-out candle flame. He bowed his dark head and was still.

Almost as if he was expecting to die.

As if he were waiting for it.

"No," Seishirou said.

He flared the blackness of the coat his ghost was wearing around "himself." Dim lights flickered in the depths of its shadow like the flashing of falling leaves, muted pale greens and silvery-greys. Their swirling movement transformed itself into a sighing of the air as he evoked the sakura wind, not the red, rage-filled fury of the dead but that other wind which was his own to call, cool and strong and achingly beautiful. With its coming, he briefly brought down the dark of a full maboroshi around Subaru--but Subaru had already fainted, and was falling forward into unconsciousness, letting go the tenuous grip of his will over mind and body. Seishirou watched as he toppled, observed the green eyes glaze and close, and then, shrugging once more, let the wind take all the magic, ghost and maboroshi both, and unravel it into nothing.

A pair of sakura petals spun out on the last breath of wind, and as it faded they fluttered to the ground. They came to rest gently beside Subaru, two fleeting stains of pale rose against the snow.

Soon after, they too vanished.

Seishirou looked at the dark, reflective surface of his bedroom window. For a moment, he could still see Subaru's senseless form crumpled on the ground before the cherry tree. Then he shut the farsight image from his mind entirely, tied off the ends of power, and released them, terminating the spell.

He let the blind fall closed.

<The thirteenth head of the Sumeragi clan....> he thought.

<You'll have to do a lot better than /that./>

The other room was silent. The CD must have ended while he was "out." Well, he'd listen to it again on some other night. He wandered back out to the living room to turn off the stereo, and as he did he noticed the drink that he hadn't gotten around to finishing. There wasn't very much of it left.

Seishirou picked the glass up and stared at it.

It had been a disappointing encounter. He was confident, though, that Subaru did have more to offer. He remembered the easy skill with which Subaru had balanced the disparate forces of his spell, the swift reaction to the breaking of his ward, even sick as he'd been...remembered other nights, other workings, a boy's deep, unfailing dedication to what was required of him, a pure heart that held nothing back, and then a white-hot explosion of suffering and betrayal.... Subaru had resources to drawn on that he might not even be aware of.

Perhaps when his health improved he would recall what had happened tonight, his failure, and fight harder because of it.

One could anticipate such things, Seishirou thought, and smiled.

<"Fight harder, Subaru!" Isn't that what your sister would say?>

<I can almost hear her now....>

Seishirou turned the glass in his hand, gazing into its circular mouth in a very brief moment of reminiscence. The small amount of purplish wine swirled somewhere indefinite at the bottom of it. After nine years, he had gotten used to the curious flattening of his vision: the loss of depth perception was something he noticed only at certain times, usually when he was thinking about the past.

He had been doing a lot of that this evening, he realized. It was a very bad habit, even when one was incapable, as he was, of feeling regret.

Seishirou knocked back the rest of the drink, and then yawned.

Although it wasn't yet excessively late, he decided to call it a night.





**************************************************************************


Sakura and Snow


Chapter 2




By Natalie Baan





Seishirou had awakened early, after his usual dreamless sleep, and having dressed, made coffee, and smoked the first cigarette of the day, he was tending to his plants.

He took a certain pleasure in them. They were attractive to look at, and he'd found that the twice-weekly ritual of grooming and watering had its own benefits. That small amount of care was like a very minor meditation, producing a subtle centering effect with almost no effort on his part. In addition, seeing the plants thrive was a source of satisfaction, especially since he'd challenged himself to use no magic in their care. And he hadn't lost a single one yet, although it had been touch-and-go with the two ferns.

He was examining those now, parting the fronds with gentle fingers as he checked for dead or dying growth. They were his favorites--their airy grace appealed to his sense of beauty--but they were also troublesome. They were constantly threatening to shrivel up and die. It was the arid heat in the apartment that did for them, he had discovered, but humidifying trays and proper vigilance in watering seemed to be turning the trick. Anyway, the ratio of dead shoots to green, living ones was much improved: there were only a couple of brittle fronds, which he picked off diligently. Both ferns were dry, though, as all the plants seemed to be this morning...dry and a bit dusty.

"Well, how about a shower?" he asked them. "Would you like that?"

He imagined they would like that very much. He scooped the ferns off the spiral plant stand and carried them into the bathroom. Rather than risk dropping anything, he made a second trip back for the little inumaki at the top of the stand. Humming off and on to himself, he pinched out a few of its growing tips so as to encourage greater fullness, tucked it into the crook of his arm, and went to gather the half-meter dieffenbachia from the corner by the bed. He glanced out the window as he passed. It certainly wasn't sunny, but at least it was brightish outside. The cloud-ceiling was high and thin, a very pale pearly gray. A substantial amount of snow had come down overnight: he could see the fresh layer of whiteness mantling the low roofs opposite. Below him, though, the street cleaners had probably already reduced it to the usual thin brown sludge.

Leaving those two plants with the ferns, Seishirou went back to the kitchenette to freshen up his now-lukewarm coffee, and also to collect the ivy from the window there. As he poured a new cup from the coffeemaker, he eyed the happy little decorative pot that the florist shop had sold the plant in. It was very cute, he thought, but one of these days he was going to have to find something slightly more...appropriate. The ivy could stand to be pinched back as well, but he decided to leave it for now. Perhaps he could let grow it longer and train it up the side of the window. It would be more pleasant to look at than the wall of the neighboring building. At least the large picture window in the bedroom did offer its expansive view of sky and rooftops, and in the distance parts of downtown Tokyo. It was one of the apartment's better features.

He took the ivy and his coffee into the bathroom, put the plant down with its colleagues on the shower stall's white tile floor, and switched the spray to a gentle setting. While the water pattered down onto the leaves, he turned and looked back into the bedroom. That was another benefit to having plants, he thought: even though these were few and mostly small, they still managed to transform the energy of what without them was a somewhat boxy room. They gave it a much-needed quality of life and vibrancy.

Still, it wasn't a bad apartment, only perhaps a little ordinary. He'd lived in places he'd liked better, but this one sufficed for his needs. And it did have what all real estate agents claimed was most important--"location"--even if not every person would agree that it did. It was distant from Tokyo's center, yes, but not inconveniently far from mass transit, and it had the distinct advantage of absolutely no major kekkai in the vicinity, and thus little danger of earthquake or nearby magical battle. That had been his primary factor in choosing it. Even Dragons needed to sleep, and having the roof fall on his head in the middle of the night was not something he wanted to experience.

At one point he'd been invited to join Kanoe and her children in their lair, but of course he had declined. The thought of living under the Government Building was amusing, but aside from that the idea did not appeal to him at all. It made them all too obvious a target. Besides, he'd always been a solitary hunter--it was his nature--and although he understood his role in the coming events precisely, he didn't consider involvement in the end necessarily to mean involvement with the other Dragons of Earth. It certainly wasn't required that they all live together. The Seals were doing that, and he was amazed that they hadn't killed each other off yet and saved the Angels the trouble.

It might have been fun to take Kanoe up on her offer though, just to see how long he could hold out against the temptation to merge Yatouji Satsuki's parts with her computer permanently. He had to chuckle at the thought. Children, these days...but the girl was very good at what she did, and that really was what mattered.

As he saw it, the others would do their things, and he would do what he was best at, and as long as no one got in anyone else's way it would all be satisfactory.

The plants had probably had enough, and Seishirou turned off the shower before too much dirt could wash out of the pots. He decided to leave the plants there until they drained. Wandering out to the bedroom window, he sipped at his coffee and gazed across the snowy rooftops toward the distant view of skyscrapers.

No, not a bad place at all...of course, his favorite apartment had been the one in Shinjuku, above the clinic. It had had so much /space./ Walking into it had been like an act of liberation, like an indrawn breath. But now those high rises made the area a deadly place to live, and anyway he could not have stayed there after the conclusion of his little bet with Subaru. He accepted that completely--it was simply one of the minor inconveniences he'd had to deal with as a consequence of his actions. Giving up veterinary practice had been another. This enemy would watch animal hospitals, knowing the little that he knew, and one could not /hide/ a clinic. It would be ridiculous. As much as the novelty of being hunted amused him, Seishirou did not intend to make things so easy for the Sumeragi. He had found other ways to earn his living.

It was a pity, though. Using his patients as alternates had been such an elegant solution to the problem of magical return. But of course, there were a lot of other lives in Tokyo....

Thinking about Shinjuku and the clinic and the year of their bet, Seishirou remembered the previous night's play under the cherry tree, Subaru's weird behavior, and his eventual collapse. He wondered if Subaru had wound up spending the entire night out in the snow. His curiosity tugged at him, insistent as usual, and he gave into it with a smile. Focusing himself, he caught lightly at power, and threw a faint thread of seeing out toward the familiar locale of the sakura. For a place he knew so well, it took no time or effort at all...no, Subaru wasn't there. So he'd come to his senses eventually and taken himself home--either that, or someone else had found him and carried him off, which Seishirou supposed could be possible. Still feeling inquisitive, Seishirou extended his senses further, sweeping out across the city to where he knew Subaru lived.

At a certain invisible boundary he stopped short, and with utmost care began feeling for that well-known presence, for the answering touch of his signs. The house where the Seals hid was warded exceptionally well, its interlocking walls of warning and defense masked to all magical perception, even his. At best, one might notice a sensation as of a flash of sunlight or the shifting suggestion of a cloud: nothing solid or certain, nothing that would draw the eye or the mind, but an indiscreet touch would alert the will that had created it, and a direct attack would unquestionably be met with violent return. Seishirou suspected it was the work of the girl from Ise, and he admired its subtlety.

He wondered how Subaru would feel, though, if he knew that he was Seishirou's entrance into this warded sanctuary: that the marks carved into him were a way and a door through which Seishirou's farsight, at least, could pass those secret walls. If this means of passage were not potentially so useful, Seishirou would be tempted to let him discover it just to study his reaction. However, that would be a terrible waste. There was much that could be learned from watching these Seals, and someday he would want to do far more than merely observe them. That flaw in their protections would be invaluable then. Seishirou did not confuse his play and his work; he would never throw away such an advantage merely for the sake of his own amusement.

He was not sure precisely where the wards began and ended, but he knew that they were not at this place where he was, and so he remained there, sending that silent, most intimate call. Nothing answered, nothing opened up to him within the wards. Subaru was not here, either.

His gaze soared up and away from that place, flashed back to his body after casting one last glance at the nondescript building. No one would guess that it was the only home and headquarters of the Dragons of Heaven. Six of the Seven Seals lived there, and the Seventh, the girl from the soapland "Flower," visited with great frequency. Seishirou couldn't resist a slight, feline grin. None of the other Dragons of Earth knew the identity of the Seventh Seal. None of them had even been able to track the Seals to their hideaway, or to discover, let alone pierce, those shifting, enigmatic wards.

<So there, little Satsuki-kun. Your computers do not know everything yet.>

Once more in his apartment, Seishirou stared out the window speculatively. Subaru was not in either of the two most likely places. Therefore, he could be anywhere. Tokyo was a very big place, and it would be too tedious to feel his way across all of it, seeking for the occult brilliance of those stars. There was a quicker way.

He raised his cup to eye level. There was still the slightest hint of steam rising from it. Good. He blew lightly on the steam, and as it swirled and spun away from his breath he wove that movement into the semblance of wings fanning the air, into claws and grey-white feathers, sharp beak and bright hunter's eyes...a peregrine, pale and ghostly, and far smaller than the great grey eagle shikigami that he used as a weapon. He called the bird out of the air and onto his hand. Reaching into himself, he summoned up the recollection of Subaru, the image and essence, the soft radiance of life perceived through the conduit of the bond that marked him--felt the actual bloom of that life then, faint and tenuous against his palm, and let it pass into the creature he had made.

"Please find this person."

The bird cried without sound and hurtled from Seishirou in a flash of translucent feathers, passing through the glass of the window and disappearing rapidly into the pallid winter sky.

Seishirou took another sip of his coffee and contemplated snow for a minute or two.

Like the ringing of struck crystal, the peregrine's psychic cry echoed in his mind. It had found its quarry.

Sometimes it was just so much more efficient to delegate matters.

He let his perception fuse with the shiki's, watched the city wheel madly beneath its circling flight, and then felt its small, mindless exultation as it stooped from the sky toward a certain building, one which, when Seishirou saw it, was eminently familiar.

Shinjuku General Hospital.

<Subaru-kun, why am I not surprised?>

In casting his spell, he'd noticed that the pulse of life was thinner than usual...obviously, this was the explanation. Subaru had been ill enough last night, and after an extended vigil in the cold it was no surprise he needed to see a doctor. Subaru had always been vulnerable to sickness and its complications.

The bird winged invisibly through the substance of the building. Walls and corridors blurred by it, a flicker in Seishirou's sight. It swerved left suddenly, flew through a door and between a set of cloth partition-walls, and alighted on the foot of a bed. Emptily, its yellow eyes stared at the occupant of that bed, and at the array of monitors, lights, and transparent strands of tubing that surrounded that person. It understood none of these things. It knew only that it had achieved the purpose of its creation, and now it waited with insentient patience for its form to be dispersed.

Seishirou, who did understand the significance of the equipment, studied it for a moment through the lens of the bird's sight. Then, with a minor releasing of his attention, he allowed the shiki to fade back into a ghost of steam and vanish.

No, he wasn't surprised at all. He smiled a little at Subaru, who was so cutely predictable. Of all the onmyouji of the Sumeragi clan since time out of mind, Subaru had to be the only one who ran himself into the ground so consistently and with such small regard for his own body. This time, though, he really seemed to have outdone himself.

Seishirou finished his coffee in a leisurely way, and then went to clean out the cup and the coffeemaker. Once he'd tidied up the place and put back his plants, he'd go out. There was that little shrine he had been meaning to see to, with its kekkai...and perhaps he would stop, on his way, and pay a bedside visit to a certain onmyouji.



* * * * *



Seishirou strode easily down the hospital corridor, carrying a small, tasteful arrangement of flowers. None of the hurrying doctors or nurses spared him a second glance. Of course not; after all, he was entirely unremarkable, and they were much too busy with the victims of an unsettled city, the people caught in earthquakes, strange explosions, fires, or simple human violence, like rioting and looting. They had better things to worry about than whether his visitor's pass was in order.

Tokyo was not a healthy place to live these days.

Soon he reached the proper wing of the hospital and found the room that he was looking for. He slipped inside. It was a large public ward, but the bed he wanted was conveniently near the door. Seishirou had been observing his target for most of the trip, and so he knew Subaru presently was unconscious and alone; he therefore stepped through the privacy curtain with perfect unconcern, not bothering to prepare himself for discovery or a fight. It seemed as though Subaru was going be out for a while, and if he threatened to wake he could always be lulled back to sleep again.

Seishirou drew the curtain closed behind him, and looked down at the still form of the person he'd come to see. Subaru had certainly had livelier moments...he was thin and drawn, and the wintery-sky color of the hospital gown he was wearing did nothing to contrast with the stark pallor of his skin. One slender arm was flung out from under the covers; his hand was wrapped in bandages, and they had him on an IV feed. He had tubes down the throat, too...how unpleasant. All in all, he was looking less than lovely.

Seishirou cradled the flowers in one arm as he picked up Subaru's chart from the end of the bed. He peered at the schizoid spiders of the doctor's handwriting. Advanced pneumonia, frostbite...no loss of digits, though. Well, that was some good news. Apparently he'd been found unconscious and with no identification: that was even more good fortune. If his name had hit the hospital's computer banks, it would have all been over quickly. Seishirou doubted, however, that Satsuki checked up on every anonymous patient. Subaru was safe, at least for now.

<You've fought her before and won, but right now you're at a bit of a disadvantage.>

<I'd probably have to do something uncivilized if she tried to interfere with my fun.>

He continued to study the chart. That was fairly serious medication, and Subaru was on some sort of respirator. <I think you're going to be here for a while, Subaru-kun. I wonder if your friends are looking for you? Well, I probably shouldn't stay too long, just in case. Amusing as it might be to play with them, I do have errands that I need to attend to. They would only be a distraction, and not so very appealing a one.>

He would go in one more moment, he decided, but--he glanced at the monitors. He just wanted to do his own examination first. Those vital signs looked poor...and the record on the chart was puzzling.

Not responding to treatment?

Seishirou let the chart drop back into its place, and he walked toward the head of the bed. Reaching to brush back the dark bangs, he touched Subaru's burning forehead; he ran his hand down the length of the thin arm, and measured the thread of the pulse. He frowned just a little.

No, that /wasn't/ very good.

Seishirou passed his hand over Subaru's face and down across his body: not actually touching him this time, but probing for inner energies, the bright, fiery currents of life. After a moment, he stopped short. He went back and checked the life force again, thoroughly, just to be sure, and found the same thing. It was...weak. In fact, it was /very/ weak, much weaker than it ought to be--that fire was barely perceptible at all. It was a scant flickering under his fingertips that wavered, and at times hinted it might disappear. He dug deeper into Subaru, eyes half-closed as he concentrated on sensations other than sight or physical feeling. He brought his hand to rest over the other's, over the mark that was there, and let that serve as a channel guiding him far into the tenor of Subaru's body. A dim light pulsed through the bandages, the keen lines of the star diffused by the gauze into a featureless glow. The heart rate on the monitor fluttered slightly and he felt the small increase of its beat through those other senses--Subaru's reaction on an unconscious level to this invasion--but it was a surface matter only, and not what he sought to uncover.

Seishirou reached down as far as he could go without entering the inner landscape of Subaru's heart. He touched the place where spirit joined with body, the true source from which that life, that fire, sprang, but it felt cold under his touch, and somehow empty, like a room on which the door had just been shut and locked. Empty...he laid gentle, noncorporeal "fingers" on Subaru's will to live and he felt...ash.

Ash.

Seishirou moved his hand away, ending the exploration. He rubbed his fingers together absently, as if the sensation was from something that might linger on his physical being.

It wasn't the feel of the death that he dealt in. The death that he brought came swiftly, with surprise--the sudden strike from the dark, the ordinary and familiar turned to something "other." Not this slow, extended fading-out of life. Nonetheless, he recognized these signs. This kind of thing....

It was something that most medical doctors never comprehended, and even if they did, were not able to treat. No one could. It was the person's inner self that decided to live or not to live, and if the will chose not to fight then all the medicines or machines in the world couldn't save more than an empty, hollow shell. A hearth without a fire...a place without inhabitant.

Without any desire to live, Subaru would die here. He wouldn't even last until the final day.

It seemed their game already was over.

Seishirou gazed at the thirteenth head of the Sumeragi clan, unconscious in the hospital bed. Around them the machines hummed softly and occasionally pinged. He looked down into that stillness and wondered, as he sometimes did, about the impulses that moved other people, or that failed to move them sufficiently.

He couldn't imagine what it was like, just to give up on life like that.

<What happened, Subaru-kun? I wonder what it was that broke you, after hanging on this long. Did you just fail one too many times? I thought you were a little bit stronger than that.>

<In the end, it seems not even your "one wish" was enough to keep you alive....>

To have Subaru give out on him like this was something of a let-down. He'd rather been looking forward to the end.

<I should have expected it, though. You've always been ready to lie down and die, sometimes for the most ridiculous of reasons.>

<You've given me the win so easily.>

<You didn't even really try to fight.>

<Well, now you're dead, Subaru-kun...and after all the time I've put into you, it's sort of a pathetic way to end matters, isn't it?>

<Whether I kill you, whether I just leave you to die here--there's hardly any difference at all.>

It made the whole affair rather stupid and pointless.

<But I'll kill you anyway, before I go. You /are/ my kill, after all.>

<Still, it's pathetic....>

<Was this what you were heading toward, all that time?>

<Is this all that you're good for, Subaru-kun?>

Seishirou stared down into the bed, feeling his jaw set in what he admitted to be disappointment, and he felt something else then, a strange tension in himself, an unaccustomed tightness in his body that matched a sort of mental resistance: a emotion that felt hot and sour and at the same time sweet in its unfamiliarity--

/Anger./

Subaru had managed to make him angry, just the littlest bit.

The feeling stopped him instantly, and he savored it, the differentness of it. Rare, rare for anything to disrupt his usual equilibrium. Pleasure or displeasure, amusement or boredom, those sensations were one thing, but /anger/...he could count on one hand the number of times he'd been angry since he'd come into his full power, and he'd probably have fingers left over for the "victory" sign. There were just so few things that could thwart what he desired.

With all the other emotions that he didn't know, that he had never even felt at all, simply to feel this one little spark was to him a most amazing thing.

He stood there and explored the feeling with fascination until it started to fade. Then he turned his attention back to its cause.

<Subaru-kun,> he thought, and smiled.

<Maybe you've given up.>

<But /I/ haven't.>

<You're not going to escape me quite that easily.>

<Most definitely not.>

Seishirou took a moment to deposit his flowers by a neighboring patient. It amused him, to think of the person's surprise upon waking...as he returned to Subaru's bedside, he flung the swift, subtle touch of a spell across the mind of the attendant at the nurses' station who was supposed to be watching the patient monitors. A simple distraction, and the assurance that nothing could be out of the ordinary...the attendant was unbelievably easy to distract. Satisfied with his result, Seishirou lingered only a moment, looking down at his currently unresponsive prey. Then he leaned over the bed and began confidently to detach Subaru from the machines.

As he did so, Seishirou suddenly grinned.

He'd never stolen a body from a hospital before.

It promised to be entertaining.



* * * * *



Seishirou flipped back the covers one-handed and eased his "guest" down onto the bed. Subaru was heavier than the boy he'd been, but certainly still manageable. Straightening, Seishirou surveyed the sprawled form. Then, shrugging out of his coat, he went to hang it up; he came back, stowed Subaru's belongings, and began to disentangle the onmyouji from the hospital blanket.

There had been no complications. Under the guise of illusion, no one had even seen them leave the hospital: Seishirou had just walked out, with Subaru over his shoulder. After that, a "borrowed" car had gotten them back to his neighborhood without much fuss. It had been a while since he'd driven, and he'd forgotten how much fun it could be. He'd been circumspect, though, and the transportation in question now rested happily on a side street a safe distance from this building, not even scratched. Then a short walk, and a quick trip up in the freight elevator to the apartment, and here they were. Subaru had stirred and whimpered a little in the car, threatening to wake, but a light touch on his mind had sent him back into unconsciousness. Otherwise, the trip had been perfectly quiet.

Really, the whole thing had been pretty easy.

He unwrapped Subaru the rest of the way from the blanket and began to arrange him on the mattress. He couldn't resist running his hand through Subaru's hair as he laid the young man's head on the pillow. Subaru had always had such soft hair, as light to the touch as the down feathers of a bird...much finer than was usual for dark hair. Seishirou trailed his fingers through it again, then ran them around behind the ear and down onto Subaru's neck to feel for the pulse. Faint, as was to be expected. He cupped his hand lightly under Subaru's jaw, cocked his head and listened to the wet, almost bubbling rasp of Subaru's breathing, which had grown more labored during their journey. Soon he was going to have to do something about that.

Seishirou lay Subaru on his back and straightened out his legs. He really was too thin...the hospital gown had ridden up a little; Seishirou went to pull it down, and it was then that he noticed two small scars on the front of Subaru's thigh. They intrigued him--he didn't have any idea how Subaru had come by them--and he examined them closely. Short, each one only a couple of inches long and very straight...it had been a cutting tool of some sort. Too crude to be wind-razors, though, and besides these were stab wounds, not slashes. It hadn't been a sword, either, judging by the size of the cuts, so most probably a knife...Seishirou touched the scars, probing at them carefully. Magically healed as well, he suspected. The smoothness and subtle silvering of the scars gave it away.

If they'd been magically healed, Subaru could have acquired them any time in the last nine years. Not knowing "when," Seishirou surely couldn't determine "how" or "why." But maybe he could do something to find out.

<Jealous lover, Subaru-kun?> he mused. <Well, at least they missed.> Seishirou tugged down the hem of the gown. He pulled the covers up over Subaru, drawing the arms out and laying them on top of the bedspread. Having settled Subaru more or less to his satisfaction, he noted once again the effort Subaru was making to breathe, and decided he probably ought to get to work.

He sat down on the edge of the bed, one leg curled underneath him, and closed his eyes. Reaching inside himself, he swept away all distractions with the swift ease of practice, finding the center he needed almost instantly. A breath...another breath...he breathed into the stillness of magic, that place of clear and perfect intention, and from that clarity he put forth a silent call.

He nudged at the "mind" of the barrow tree, and it stirred to his touch.

<Hello,> he said.

<You,> the spirit acknowledged, recognizing him. Seishirou caressed it with his will and it submitted at once. It opened up to him even as it lapsed back into slumber, and he reached into its restless, dreamless sleep, into its heart, to tap its core of power. He brought that power back into himself.

/Fire./

Red and gold fire moved into him, fire that wasn't swift but slow, as slow as sap rising in ancient branches, fire that didn't sear with pain but that burned nonetheless, a sweet, fierce almost-pleasure that pulsed in every part of his blood. Fire of life and growth...fire springing from the ashes of death....

/Fire./ His heart beat more quickly, and he could feel a sweat break out. On one level he registered these changes, while at the same time he concentrated on the power itself, on embracing it fully and turning it to his desire.

He tamed it. Inside him, the power coiled and flowed ceaselessly, contained by his will. At its touch, the incipient ache in his back faded away; the desire he'd been feeling for a cigarette vanished. He shaped its force slightly, while he was at it, and let it pass through his lungs, clearing away the damage that smoking inevitably caused.

Seishirou opened his eyes then, still holding onto power. The room around him seemed exceptionally vivid, every detail sharp and immediate. The living things--himself, the plants, and Subaru--were almost shining, as if their edges had been limned with light.

He reached out and placed one hand on Subaru's forehead, while with the other he took up one of Subaru's bandaged hands. Bringing it to his face, he touched the back of it to his lips. He opened the way between them, letting that healing fire travel into Subaru's body, and the power swept in as irresistibly as a tide, although Seishirou muted some of its force by channeling it through himself. It flowed into every part of Subaru, a liquid, burning stream that surrounded each physical illness, each hurt, and dissolved it into nothing, that took all pain and weakness and in their place restored the body's inner strength, its natural inclination toward health and life.

It took only moments as Seishirou guided the energy through Subaru, watching closely to be sure that nothing was missed. As he did so, he passed his awareness over that one thing he was curious about, those scars...recent, he discovered, a week or two at most. That was intriguing. Then the healing was done, and, satisfied, he unloosed the magic's power. The flow of fire surged back into its place, returning to the sakura, all but the small residue caught in their bodies, which Seishirou allowed to bleed off into the air. Light, that red and gold entwined, spiraled out around the two of them. It dripped tiny flames of brightness before disappearing.

In the stillness of the next instant, Subaru took a slow, deep breath, and then after it second, clear and without any trace of difficulty. Seishirou lowered the hand from his face. He unwound the bandages on it, freeing Subaru's fingers, and turned Subaru's hand in his own. There were no blisters, no marks of frostbite. Seishirou touched the pulse point at the wrist and felt the steady strength of its beat.

Good.

Seishirou made sure that the bonds of sleep were secure on Subaru, and then stood up and stretched, shaking off the lingering, distracting energy of the healing magic. It had worked very well. He had never healed anything so serious, had in fact never healed anybody but himself, and that only very minor things, but he had been fairly confident that he could manage this. In fact, had his eye not been injured in the middle of a hospital, in front of doctors and nurses who had immediately taken him into their care and who had certain expectations of the duration of the healing process, he probably could have fixed that as well. Perhaps the doctors' surgery and medicines were to blame, or perhaps they were not, but by the time he'd extricated himself and turned his attention toward such matters it seemed some window of opportunity had passed. Nothing he'd tried had had any effect on his damaged vision.

Oh, well...it wasn't that important, and right now he had other things to concern himself with. Healing Subaru physically was only half the battle.

He'd get to the next bit in a minute.

Seishirou walked around the room until he felt reasonably settled, then went back to sit by Subaru again.

<Feeling better, Subaru-kun? I imagine you are.>

<Now that we've taken care of your body, it's time to do something about your spirit.>

<I think I know what the problem is, and it's probably my doing. I left you alone for far too long. I let the trail get too cold, and you've always been a low-key sort of person, haven't you? You're very passive when left to yourself. Perhaps you need a little more encouragement, a little inspiration.>

<I think it's definitely time to stir the pot.>

He noticed that he had only unbandaged one of Subaru's hands, and he stretched across Subaru's body to get the other one. He unwrapped the gauze, and then, still leaning over Subaru, he paused. His gaze had caught on Subaru's face, which no longer had that bluish paleness or the deep shadows under the eyes. From there he found it wandering, tracing the vulnerable arch of Subaru's throat as he lay with his head turned slightly to one side, traveling down the vague outline of his body, all that was revealed beneath the blankets; and Seishirou felt the sudden, distinct urge then to touch both what he saw and what he didn't, became aware of the familiar sensations of desire.

He chuckled at himself. Healing magic did have certain side effects.

It was true, too, that he had always found Subaru extremely attractive. He smiled, remembering how long and seriously he had debated with himself at the beginning of the year of their bet. If he were truly to behave as if he "loved" someone, if he were to protect that person from everything, did that forbid him from seducing the person in question? He had wanted to achieve verisimilitude, after all.... It was the same pride in his art that led him to perfect his illusions, down to the last detail. In the end, he had come to the conclusion that it was purely situational. To "take advantage" of Subaru would be "wrong," but if Subaru offered him any encouragement, any answering sign of desire, Seishirou was permitted to consider him fair game. Unfortunately, Subaru had been impossibly naive, not to mention vehemently modest, and had ignored or fled in panic from any suggestion. So much for that.

<Every life has its lost opportunities...ah, well.>

He picked up the gauze and began rolling it. Fortunately, he had never invested himself too heavily in sex. It was a pleasant and necessary release, one he made sure to get often enough that frustration never distracted him from more important things, but it also tended to cause complications. For that reason, he had been sticking with paid professionals recently. It was just so much tidier and more convenient.

He finished with the bandages, went and got a drink of water, and by the time he came back to the bed he had managed to put the inclination out of his mind, at least for the moment. He sat down again and laid his hand over Subaru's face, fingers once more touching the forehead lightly. Taking a few deep breaths, he found his way back to center.

"/Soubou akyasha.../" he whispered then, from that place, "/...kyarbaya on arikya...maribori sowaka./"

He didn't always use the words. He chose to this time, as a focus. It was not a time to allow distraction.

"/Soubou akyasha...kyarbaya on arikya...maribori sowaka./"

This was the potentially difficult and dangerous action...

...to enter another person's heart...

...especially a person who was your enemy.

"/Soubou...akyasha.... Kyarbaya...on arikya.... Maribori..../"

He let his conscious mind slip free, from one body into another. Falling...

"/...sowaka./"

...into the dark.

He landed and gazed around himself. It always amazed him how dark it was inside other people--how dark their dreams were. Seishirou rarely dreamed, but when he did he found himself in endlessly open, radiant spaces, luminous and clear.

Never in such darkness.

And Subaru was in here someplace. Seishirou began to search, moving as silently, as softly as he was able to through that black and empty space--and the movement was very silent, very soft indeed. With the ease of power and the grace of long familiarity, he made himself seem no more than a part of that soundless darkness, invisible to any observation. There was always danger from the innermost defenses of a person, if one was seen as an invader: the threat of psychic rejection at best, and, at worst, outright attack.

Seishirou did not intend to be seen at all...not yet. He'd find Subaru first.

<I marked you,> Seishirou thought, <and you're here.>

<Certainly, I'll find you.>

It was that surety that led him, as he had known it would: the knowledge of Subaru which was the inner world reflection of those Sakurazukamori stars engraved onto the flesh. In this place, it was the thought that was important, and it was that which brought him at last to a place very deep in Subaru's heart.

Seishirou looked at the barrier that was before him. It was black against the blackness all around. The surface, though, seemed almost to catch a light that wasn't there. It had the shimmering, reflective quality of a soap bubble, and that sense of delicacy, but it wasn't at all transparent. Nor, Seishirou suspected, was it quite so fragile.

He walked around it. It was in fact a globe, but not so very large--a little larger than a person. It seemed to float there weightlessly. Of course, there wasn't really ground to float above, just space, and Seishirou was only "walking" because he liked to imagine that he was, but he knew better than to worry much about these things. Instead, he continued to study the sphere.

<Soap bubble indeed,> he thought, amused.

<Or a pearl, maybe.>

<A Dragon's pearl....>

A little daringly, Seishirou put out his hand and touched the surface. It was neither cool nor warm and the texture felt like glass, but when he tapped it gently his fingers made no sound at all.

<Interesting.>

He left his hand there a moment longer as he finished assessing the barrier, and then decisively he drew it back.

He called power into it--

--and /struck/.

He hit the barrier hard, and it shattered in absolute silence, broke into large and jagged pieces as though it were glass after all. Black shards hung in midair, revolving slowly, soundlessly, obscuring what lay beyond, but then through them he caught a glimpse--

--a glimpse of Subaru, turning to look at him: a stark flash of wild green eyes as Subaru /saw/ him at that moment, as Subaru recognized him, was shocked aware--

"Hello, Subaru-kun," Seishirou said with a smile, "it's me."

And he leaped out of Subaru's heart.



************************************************************************************************************************


Sakura and Snow


Chapter 3





By Natalie Baan







Seishirou stood between the window and the bed, the thin, weak light of the winter's day coming in at his back. He watched his still-unconscious visitor. Beneath the magical sleep that was laid upon him, Subaru was restless now, his eyes flickering under their lids, his fingers knotted in the bedspread. Something inside him knew that things were amiss.

The shield that he had been hiding behind had been broken.

Seishirou walked over to him, and reached down to stroke his hair and his face. He sat down once again on the bed. It was probably about time to let Subaru wake up. Then they could get on to the third part of the plan.

<I've healed you.>

<I've opened your heart.>

<Now, I'll hurt you.>

Not too much, of course--just enough pain to prod Subaru into action, replacing his apathy with a new, fresh sense of purpose. Sort of like lancing and cleaning out an infected wound. He was certain that Subaru would be a lot more energetic when it was done.

<You're going to bleed a little bit now, Subaru-kun.>

<You'll find it very therapeutic, I'm sure.>

He slipped the bond of sleep off from Subaru, who almost immediately made a soft sound and began to stir. Seishirou pivoted slightly, so that Subaru was to his left side. He raised his head and gazed out the window serenely, though he still kept a watch on his patient from the corner of his eye.

Subaru's own eyes began to come open, in little blinks. He stared off to one side, sleep-fogged, and shifted his head against the pillow--looked confused. Seeming to register that he was not where he ought to be, he rolled his head. His eyes tracked slowly across the room, taking in his surroundings...and Seishirou, sitting beside him. Subaru's gaze stopped there with the natural inevitability of a leaf settling down onto the ground. "Seishirou-san," he murmured, still seeming not to know where he truly was, or when, as if it might be that the last nine years had been a dream.

Seishirou turned his head and let Subaru see the other eye.

There was a frozen moment.

"/You!/" Subaru gasped, and he scrambled upright.

It was not a polite word. Health had obviously not restored his boyhood manners.

Seishirou smiled and said, "Feeling better, Subaru-kun?"

Subaru's gaze whipped around the room, looking for an exit.

"It seems you've been pretty sick," Seishirou went on blithely. "You look a lot more fit now, though." Subaru tried to bolt from the bed. Seishirou's arm flashed out, so quickly that it was almost invisible, and Subaru rebounded from it and fell back on the mattress.

"A little rest...and some food..."

Disoriented, Subaru tried to leap to his feet. Seishirou uncoiled gracefully from the bed, and as he did swept Subaru's legs out from under him in a casual, thoughtless manner. Subaru went sprawling.

"...and you'll be good as new."

Subaru thrashed his way back to a sitting position.

"Are you hungry? I've made some soup."

The look Subaru gave him was a priceless blend of near-hysteria and fury. Seishirou controlled himself sternly, to keep from laughing.

"Just wait there, and I'll go heat some up." As he moved around the end of the bed, Seishirou added, "Better get back under the covers, Subaru-kun--you don't want to catch a cold." He looked rather pointedly at Subaru, who abruptly realized just how little modesty the hospital gown left him and snatched the blankets over himself with a glare. Seishirou beamed and strolled out of the room, although still with a certain caution. He didn't quite turn his back upon the other onmyouji.

Out in the kitchenette, Seishirou turned up the heat beneath the tea kettle, and he stirred the pot of soup that he'd left simmering. His eyes were on what he was doing, but he kept his other senses entirely attuned to the bedroom. He heard and sensed no movement at all, could feel no gathering of magical energies. Perhaps Subaru still was in shock.

He was actually going to wait.

Seishirou ladled out a bowl of soup, and made tea for Subaru and for himself. Fishing a breakfast tray from the closet, he arranged everything on it neatly and carried it into the bedroom. Subaru was sitting rigidly upright, staring out the window with a fixed determination. He remained silent and immobile as Seishirou entered the room, but his body language clearly was declaring martyrdom.

Seishirou set the tray down in front of Subaru, who flicked a cursory glance at it--and him--and then went back to glowering at the view. Seishirou reseated himself comfortably on the edge of the bed and helped himself to his tea.

"It looks like it's going to snow again," he remarked, following the direction of Subaru's stare. The clouds had gotten a bit lower and heavier, and their gray color had deepened. "It's unusual, this much snow so early in December." Subaru did not respond.

"Is something wrong?" Seishirou asked, putting on his best "concerned" expression. He let his gaze drop to the tray, and then rise slowly back to Subaru's face, aware of Subaru watching him sidelong while pretending not to. "Well," he said at last, "I know I'm only a poor bachelor, Subaru-kun, but I don't think my cooking has ever done you harm."

Subaru rather obviously bit back a response to that. He ducked his head instead of speaking, and tried hard not to look at Seishirou or the soup. He had to be ravenous after his illness and healing, though, and the soup /did/ smell good--Seishirou actually considered himself to be quite a competent cook. Subaru couldn't help glancing at the tray once or twice. Seishirou sighed and gazed with mournful patience into his tea, playing the part of rebuffed host while he calculated how long Subaru would hold out.

Not long, as it happened. Subaru's hand crept out furtively, and he picked up the bowl of soup. He sniffed at it, tasted it, and then warily began to eat. Seishirou gave him a delighted smile.

He wondered a bit, though.

<You're being awfully quiet, Subaru-kun. And it isn't just that you're not speaking; other than that rather feeble attempt to escape, you haven't done anything. It's being a bit too pliable, even for you. Not even a magical incantation...though it's true you're probably still too drained to be effective with your spells. Perhaps you're just biding your time until you've gotten your strength back.>

<Well anyway, I'd better start shaking you up a little.>

He let Subaru take a few more slow swallows of the soup. "My condolences," he said then, "on the death of your grandmother."

Green eyes flicked up above the rim of the bowl, and stared into his face a moment before dark lashes veiled them over.

"I saw the announcement in the papers...a stroke, wasn't it?" Seishirou nodded to himself seriously. "At least it seems she didn't suffer." He watched Subaru's fingers on the bowl, the subtle tension in them which was all Subaru allowed himself to show. "It really is the end of an era, isn't it, with the passing of the older generation...even in that company, she was a remarkable woman. Truly remarkable....

"I respected her."

Perhaps Subaru was contemplating the nuances that Seishirou had put into the phrase: the implications of where respect was given and not given. Seishirou allowed him some time for that.

"Did you go to Kyoto for the funeral?" Subaru looked up at him again with that same stiff wariness, met Seishirou's eyes briefly before wincing away. He didn't speak, but that might have been a slight, curt nod of his head as he lowered his gaze. He took a small sip of tea and returned to the soup.

"Is the soup all right?" Seishirou asked. Subaru hesitated, and then he nodded again, just a little.

"/Good,/" Seishirou said, with pleased emphasis. Subaru's eyes came up, which was what Seishirou had been aiming for; Subaru glanced at Seishirou's face, and then again there was that flinch...before his gaze could shift entirely away, Seishirou inclined toward him, a slight but definite move that snared Subaru's attention: that caught him looking, and held him fast.

"Subaru-kun," Seishirou said, staring intently into that pale face, those strikingly dark eyes, "do you still blame yourself--" and he indicated his own eye "--for this?"

Subaru's breathing stilled. And yes, the mirror was cracked, vulnerable places in his heart were losing their defense, because there was an instant of pain in the green depths of his gaze before Subaru camouflaged it by reaching for his tea. His hand was shaking, though; there was no doubt. Subaru really was an amazing one for self-recrimination.

"I thought we already had our talk about this," Seishirou said, amused. He'd never understood Subaru's obsession with this guilt. "I'm not the one who's blaming you, Subaru-kun; that's your choice in the matter." He gestured to his lost right eye again. "There's nothing you could have done for this."

"I was afraid you were going to go blind," Subaru said, breaking his silence at last in a way that Seishirou hadn't expected. His speech was soft and so taut with strain that he sounded almost hoarse. "Because you wore glasses anyway. I wanted to get you a seeing-eye dog. I would have gone all the way to 'Morristown' for you, if it had meant that." Something twisted in his face and in his voice, and he ducked his head once more.

He really was exceptionally cute.

"That was sweet of you, Subaru-kun. Unnecessary, but sweet nonetheless...I never really needed the glasses, you know." Seishirou sat back comfortably. "I appreciate the thought, however."

"Seishirou-san," Subaru murmured, his voice quiet and flat now, his manner suddenly very formal. His gaze was fixed on the stitching of the bedspread. "Why are you doing this?"

"Doing what?" Seishirou asked quizzically. After all, "this" could be any one of a number of things....

"/This./ Why--" Subaru started to make a distressed gesture, and cut it off swiftly as he caught himself. He was trying very hard to hang onto his remoteness and his self-control. "I know that I was sick," he said, "and now, I'm not. And also, underneath the tree...was it last night?" Seishirou nodded. "I remember you being there. I would have died, the spirit was too strong and it would have killed me, but you stopped it. You broke its spell." Subaru's voice rose a little, despite himself, becoming tighter with stress. "And then waking up here, and this," he managed not to slop soup as he held up the bowl. "/Why,/ Seishirou-san?"

He looked up into Seishirou's face as if it might offer him some revelation, and Seishirou smiled tenderly back. "I'm not a wasteful person," Seishirou said then, the tone as caressing as the words themselves were cold.

"I don't throw things away before I've finished with them."

He watched the words as they impacted on Subaru, observed the further shattering taking place behind Subaru's eyes, in his heart, in his soul.... <Did you hope still, Subaru-kun, that I was your friend?> He appraised those places of weakness, measuring, because if Subaru broke too easily, too entirely, he would be little good at the end. But something at Subaru's core still held, the discipline required of an onmyouji sustaining him, and although his eyes were filled with pain, they did not fill with tears.

"Bastard." Subaru breathed the word, thin and sharp and aching. "Bastard....

"I loved you."

Seishirou blinked.

Loved?

It gave him pause. Hokuto had mentioned something to that effect once or twice, but he hadn't really credited that it was so.

Considering the strength of her intuition, maybe he should have.

It certainly put a whole new face on matters.

"Did you?" Seishirou said lightly. Despite the surprise, he had retained his smile. "Did you really? /What/ did you love, Subaru-kun? You never even knew who I was."

"I...no...you were...." As Subaru struggled with words, Seishirou leaned forward across the breakfast tray that separated them. He let the mask of ordinariness slip as his stare bored into the younger man's confusion--the hunter's stare, smiling, carelessly intense--and Subaru froze as he had time and again: froze just like the helpless and betrayed teenager he had once been...like the little child that had looked up into a sakura's flowering branches and met a killer's eyes.

Seishirou reached out across the small distance that separated them. He laid a hand against Subaru's cheek.

"You mistook 'congeniality' for 'a nice person,'" Seishirou said, his voice very gentle and very soft. "You believed in every word I said, everything I did." He leaned nearer still, until his breath touched Subaru's face. Subaru shut his eyes. "That was /painfully/ stupid."

He removed his hand from Subaru and sat back again, his manner now unconcerned. "Ah well," he said, shrugging, resuming his usual bantering tone, "I guess it's true after all. You got all the magic of the Sumeragi clan, and your sister inherited the brains. Too bad--"

He had been expecting the inchoate cry of rage and anguish, had felt it building for some time--expected as well the bowl of soup that was flung at him in fury, and he threw up an instant small shield to deflect it.

Somehow, though, he hadn't quite expected Subaru to lunge at him physically, hurling aside the tray: a two-fingered 'jitsu strike aimed directly at Seishirou's good eye. Seishirou jerked his head aside. He felt only the wind of Subaru's strike as it skimmed past him and thought that he'd been missed entirely until sudden pain flowered along his cheekbone. He grabbed at Subaru's wrist and with his other hand he caught the onmyouji by the throat. Green eyes blazed at him with a fire not so very unlike madness; Seishirou met that rage with cool laughter in his own. He dug his fingers into Subaru's windpipe, cutting back the flow of air.

"Subaru-kun, you're getting a little over-excited," he murmured. "I think it's time for you to rest now." Subaru struggled against his grip, and he tightened his fingers further.

"Sleep, Subaru-kun," he whispered.

"/Sleep./"

He reached out with his magic. Subaru fought him, all the way down, the onmyouji's will wrestling to escape the bindings that Seishirou lay upon him, but the combination of anoxia and the pure force of Seishirou's intention overcame him at last. He slumped, unconscious, into Seishirou's arms.

Seishirou let the limp form fall to the bed. For a few moments he examined Subaru, making certain that the bonds of sleep were fast, before he tucked the onmyouji underneath the covers once again. Straightening the blankets over Subaru, he smoothed the rumpled dark hair.

The remnants of soup and tea were splattered all over the wall and the floor, and there was broken china...he would have to clean that up. On the way to the kitchen, though, he paused, going over to the full-length mirror. He turned his head to study his reflection, the red mark seared along the left side of his face, barely more than a few centimeters below his eye. Not even a direct touch, but merely the power in the blow brushing past a little to one side.

A killing blow, possibly, if it had landed squarely and with enough force.

A blinding one, certainly.

<Nasty, Subaru-kun...I honestly wasn't sure you had it in you. And the fact that you managed to fight against my spell.... Perhaps I need to be a bit more careful around you. It would be a waste if you forced me to finish you too soon.>

Seishirou touched power, extending himself to catch the slightest wisp of healing flame. He used it to smooth away the mark.

<Still, I'd much rather be surprised than disappointed....>

<Only, you're not going to surprise me quite like /this/ again.>

He grinned at his now-unblemished reflection, and went to get the mop.



* * * * *



Subaru stirred a little, deep in disturbed slumber, a prisoner of those magical bonds...and Seishirou, standing by the head of the bed, gazed down at him and wondered.

<What do you dream about these days, Subaru-kun? Still the sakura? Still the wind stirring in its branches, the flowers falling, and the blood?>

<Still "that person" you met, underneath the cherry tree?>

He wondered...he was curious. Dreams were endlessly fascinating to him, who so seldom had them, and he knew from past experience what Subaru's dreams were like: lovely and sad and strange.

<Maybe you're dreaming of your sister, dying, in magic and blood and white shouzoku....>

Seishirou looked at his watch. His intention was to keep Subaru asleep for the rest of the afternoon, to restore the onmyouji's strength before giving him one last trial. There were hours yet to go, and he was feeling bored and restless.

He really wanted to see what Subaru was dreaming.

<If anything is ever going to kill me,> he thought with amused resignation, <it'll be my curiosity.>

Still, if he were sufficiently careful and didn't allow himself to be drawn in too deeply...Seishirou toyed with the possibility, then decided to go ahead, to be just a bit reckless in this. It wasn't as though he'd never spied on Subaru's dreams before. He would just look on for a little while, stealthily, and Subaru would probably never even notice.

And if Subaru did...it would be an interesting test.

Having made his decision, Seishirou acted on it. He reached inside for and embraced that center--

--he shut his eyes and dropped into the dark.

He found himself there at once, in the customary blackness of dreams: that endless, infinitely reshapable landscape. He passed through it with fluid grace, letting his sense of Subaru guide him to a spot just at the edge of the sleeping consciousness. There he found a promising vantage point--a place that felt "higher" than any other place, like a rocky crag or a rooftop--and he settled himself in to wait and to watch.

Dreams, he had discovered, often came to the observer.

After a few seconds, he could feel something like a slow wind or a current of invisible water approaching the place where he was. It passed him by obliviously, but the fringes of it touched him--

--and opened to him....



...dark...still dark, but very cold...dark glass, and a landscape rushing by behind Subaru's lit reflection, a rumpled landscape unrelieved by lights, traveling at high speed...coldness that had nothing to do with the heat from a radiator beneath the window, a cold that was inside, an empty soul....

And the rushing became air, and a child's voice called out, high and light: "I'm sorry...I couldn't hear very well because of the sound of the wind...."

And another voice, his own voice, spoke: "Who was that person...?"

And blood...blood falling onto the sakura's petals, blood spreading out onto white cloth...the deafening rhythm of a heartbeat as it accelerated....

<Who....>

A person, two people, vanishing into the sakura blossoms....

Two people vanishing....

A smile--



There was a sudden wrench as the flow of images and sensations stopped, and then there was stillness. For a moment, Seishirou felt a strange sense of presence, almost like a familiar person pausing at the far end of a room to turn and to look back. There was an odd quality to that presence, something that didn't quite belong here...but it passed, and nothing seemed alerted to him. He took a cautious breath, and then glanced down into the darkness. A figure was lying there, sprawled on the black, nonexistent ground...a teenaged boy, the slight body wearing his sister's bright choice of clothing, the long, dark fringes of hair brushing his face, those green eyes closed in sleep.

<That's me,> Subaru's voice said quietly.

<I was sixteen.>

There was no light, but the figure was perfectly clear against the darkness.

<Sixteen....>

Sometimes Subaru appeared to feel it necessary to narrate his own dreams. Seishirou had noticed it before and found it charming, if bizarre.

<Nine years have passed since that time,> the soft, disembodied voice whispered, <and nothing has changed.>

<Nothing ever changes.>

<After so long, on that day in Nakano-->



...smoke and dust, the sudden shock of winds, the distant cries....



<--still, I couldn't do anything.>

<Facing that person, I tried to fight him and I failed.>

<I failed...again.>

A shadow moved in the darkness--it was a person. That person came and settled beside the unconscious boy. Its form remained unclear, and only pieces of it could be seen: a vague outline of the body, the knees as it sank to the ground, the hand that reached to caress the boy's face....

"Because of you."

A familiar voice, too.

The figure leaned forward slightly and came into clarity, entering vision as if light were flowing over it, although there wasn't any light at all.

It was Subaru also.

The young man's expression held an emptiness that might be mistaken for serenity.

He touched the teenager's face again.

"You....

"You are the part of me that still can feel something. That is vulnerable to pain, and to confusion...and to other things."

The long fingers stroked the sleeping boy's brow, and then withdrew.

"It may be that you're a good person, but...

"...you're weak.

"Because of you, I lost the fight that day in Nakano Sun Plaza.

"Because of you, I can't fulfill my promise. I can't do what I must....

"Because of you.

"Therefore...." The older Subaru picked up something that lay beside him, a slender object wrapped in white cloth. He undid the ties around it, and the cloth unfurled gradually to reveal the ceremonial knife of the Sumeragi clan. Without expression, he raised the sheathed blade up before his face.

"Therefore," he said, as gently as a petal falling to the ground--

"I'll kill you."

He slipped the scabbard free of the blade and raised his hand to strike....

"Hello! What are you doing?"

In the darkness, the soft, high-pitched voice rang like a chime. Subaru lifted his gaze to meet that of the white-robed child standing before him. He stared into those wide, guileless, entirely innocent eyes that understood very little of what lay in front of them...that hadn't yet learned the significance of murder.

Subaru's hand began to tremble. He looked down at his sixteen-year-old self, and the mask of his expressionlessness broke.

His gaze became stark and horrified.

The sixteen-year-old opened his eyes.

<I couldn't do it....>

The scene froze, like a still shot from a movie. It cracked, as though made of glass. The fragments began to fall apart from each other, to separate and drift upward, weightlessly....

They carried pieces of the three figures away.

<To become the person capable of that....>

<I couldn't do it.>

The tableau faded until it vanished altogether into darkness.

<Even though there are things that are expected of me...even though there are things I said that I would do....>

<To do that....>

<To become that....>

<I can't.>

Snow began to fall like stars, appearing from a pinkish sky: the small flakes growing larger, dancing down. There was a soft sound, like a wind that was moving in branches.

<But if I do nothing at all,> Subaru murmured, <what then? What kind of person does that make me? After all that's happened, just to do that....>

<The past would become meaningless.>

<And so would I.>

<If only there could be some other way....>

The impression of the moving branches had become more distinct. They were almost visible, a slender, shifting lattice that was deeply familiar to Seishirou: the light and shadows and sounds of a grove of sakura.

<So I was thinking about about it: about whether there was anything I could do that would make a difference, any difference at all. Even if it only was a little thing...>

<...even if it only was for me.>

<An action without evil consequence.>

<And then I had an idea.>

<If I could go back...if I could do what I was trying to do all those years ago, and exorcise the sakura....>

<Wouldn't that be worth something, at least?>

<To find what I've been looking for for so long....>

<Wouldn't that make everything all right?>

<But then, in that attempt also...I didn't succeed.>

Streams of darkness grew across the sky. They began swallowing up the snow. The darkness spread wider and wider until, after only a few brief minutes, there was nothing more to be seen.

<So all I wanted then was to die.>

<And even that was denied me.>

Through the darkness of this place of dreams, the wind was still blowing. Seishirou could feel it; it touched his face, fanned his shirt against his skin....

<Now, I have no more answers.>

There was just the darkness, the wind...

...and the voice.

"Seishirou-san."

Seishirou turned. Subaru was standing behind him, facing away but looking back over his shoulder: Subaru as he was now, pale and much too thin, with the flimsy cloth of the hospital gown billowing around him in the wind that also stirred the fine dark silk of his hair. His eyes as they looked at Seishirou were wholly green, pupilless, and infinite. Somehow they did not appear to see. The two of them faced each other there, their long, white shadows stretching out into the night.

"Seishirou-san," Subaru breathed.

"In this dark place you are my only landmark...my only guide.

"You are the only meaning that I know."

In the manner of dreams he was suddenly near--he was reaching out his hand to touch Seishirou.

"Who am I?" Subaru whispered.

That hand came to rest over Seishirou's heart.

"Who are you?"

Seishirou opened his eyes with a jolt.

He looked down at Subaru, lying there in the bed, and he checked closely to make sure the spell of sleep was secure. It was. Subaru slept: still now, and quiet, with his breathing the only motion. Seishirou watched him for several minutes, just to be certain.

<Interesting little psychodrama,> he thought then, coolly.

<How your mind functions, I just can't imagine....>

No harm done, at least...Subaru hadn't struck at him, hadn't tried to ensnare him in the dream. He probably hadn't even realized that he was speaking to the actual person, rather than a construct of his own mind and memory. Subaru had had trouble before, distinguishing dream from reality.

So that was all right.

Seishirou filed the events of the dream away for now. He would consider them further at another time. He realized that he was propping himself up on the wall then, and pushed himself to his feet with a sigh.

A few minutes down, and the whole rest of the afternoon to go.

So what was he going to do now?



* * * * *



He was restless.

He had been pacing in the bedroom. Now he stopped beside the window once again and gazed out at the lowering gray clouds. It was really very dark for early afternoon.

Definitely more snow coming.

Maybe it was the gloom that had him feeling somewhat out of sorts. He liked most kinds of weather--sun, rain, snow, wind--and was equally comfortable with daylight and darkness, but the atmosphere right now was something not quite any of these, as if it were hovering, waiting on the transition point of becoming whatever it was going to be.

He wished it would just get on with it.

Maybe the feeling was adrenaline, too...having one's enemy in one's own bed, helpless though he might be. Maybe anticipation, thinking of the final part in today's little play....

He was going to let Subaru sleep, and wake alone, and then, if Subaru were capable of it, allow him to fight his way out of the apartment. Seishirou had been working on the set-up. Some wards, a few with backlash, some set spells as traps, definitely some form of illusion...maybe himself in illusion, to finish it. Let Subaru think he'd faced down his enemy, and gotten away.

<I'd thought as much, and now your dream has confirmed it: there have been too many failures. You have so much promise, you're so intriguing to play with, and it would be a shame if you broke now underneath their weight. A very small success will give you hope, and that false hope will sweeten the event when the final day comes.>

Of course, that assumed Subaru did manage to run the gauntlet and get out alive. But if he didn't--well, then he wouldn't have fulfilled his purpose as a challenge. In that case, it would be just as well if he died today.

<But you'll make it, Subaru-kun.>

<I'm quite certain that you will.>

Seishirou frowned and rubbed his temple. He'd had a bit of a headache earlier and had taken care of it, but now he could feel it returning. He readjusted the levels of his body's energy. That seemed to do the trick; the nascent pain melted back into nothing. He glanced out the window again.

He would have to find a new apartment once this was over. The plants, too, would probably be lost in the scuffle...ah, well. Neither was a terribly great concern. Actually, he thought, the situation offered a pleasant prospect for change. He had the luxury of plenty of money and very little future to spend it in. Perhaps he might live someplace truly palatial for a change. It would be a novelty.

He looked at Subaru again, who was naturally still asleep, and then prowled into the living room. He ignored the pile of magazines that was waiting for him. Earlier he'd started on them but hadn't quite managed to finish, and right now he didn't feel like reading. He picked up the remote control instead.

Rather than choose a CD, he decided to skim the airwaves. His usual station, unfortunately, was in the middle of a DJ talk session which he tended to find misguided and shallow at best, and outright stupid at worst. Leaning on the back of the chair, he thumbed the seek button and listened to the soft whisper of static as the radio shifted upward through the stations. It stopped at the first clear signal. A song was just ending in an indeterminate trail of notes, and the DJ mixed the next song in practically on top of it: a couple of lines of repetitive chant, sung by a male voice. It didn't sound too promising. They were followed by a rising surge of instrumental music, shimmery and full of synthesizers and drums, and then the voice began singing in English.



"Love....
"Devotion....
"Feeling....
"Emotion...."



Who allowed people to import this kind of thing? Impatiently, Seishirou pushed the seek button.



"...-orever Dream....
"Kore ijou arukenai....
"Oh tell me why...oh tell me true...."



<Ugh,> Seishirou thought. He hit the button again. On this third try he found an enka, and he made it through about three lines of that before giving up and switching off the stereo in disgust. He tossed the remote control onto the side table. His lighter and a pack of cigarettes were lying there, where he had left them after his last smoke, and it reminded him that he sort of felt like having another. He picked up the pack...hmm. He could have sworn there'd been one more cigarette. Well, no matter; there should be a pack in his coat as well, he thought. He walked over to the rack--

Damn.

Fortunately there was a vending machine downstairs. He checked the spell on Subaru again, grabbed a handful of change, and headed out.

There had definitely been cigarettes in his coat, he thought as the elevator doors closed on him. He distinctly remembered buying a new pack this morning on the way to the hospital. He must have dropped them or left them behind somewhere. It was an unusual carelessness on his part.

<Distraction,> he murmured to himself, recognizing the effects of it then. <Very dangerous....>

<Subaru-kun...it's you, isn't it?>

He'd allowed himself to become a little too preoccupied with his "visitor," he was realizing: too focused on his play and on the possibilities of the future. If he weren't more careful, it could become a problem. He needed to tie the matter up soon, so he could return his mind to what he was about in the present.

There was calculated risk, and then there was stupidity.

The doors opened, and Mrs. Nakamura from the fifth floor got into the elevator. The two of them bowed and exchanged polite greetings with each other. "Sakurazuka-san, you're not going out, I hope," she said, looking somewhat askance at his shirtsleeves. He smiled down reassuringly.

"Oh, no," he replied, "just to the lobby for cigarettes."

Nakamura-san, in her large and very fluffy second-hand fur coat, was most certainly going out. The elderly mother-in-law of a friend had just died, she informed Seishirou, and she had offered to help with the "arrangements."

"Indeed."

"Yes...it's a terrible thing, Sakurazuka-san! Yohko went upstairs to visit her one day, and there she was in the middle of the floor, all covered in blood! It was as if her heart had just exploded!" The woman shook her head. "I'd never heard of such a thing."

So that was where the backlash for that particular spell had hit. Seishirou suppressed a sigh. It was so random, not having precise targets for his magical returns...he would have to readjust his protections to try to bounce the next one further away. Too many deaths this close to him would be suspicious.

"She always did have high blood pressure, though...."

It was a very slow elevator.

"Oh, and Sakurazuka-san? Ko-chan's kitty has gotten out of the apartment again--if you see it, would you please try to catch it for her?"

<If your child was the least bit careful with the creature, or--perish the thought--trained to close doors behind herself, you wouldn't be putting the building on alert for that cat every other week.>

"I'll keep an eye out for it," Seishirou said, grinning down at Nakamura-san. She looked up into his face and almost managed to restrain a little squeak. Perhaps he hadn't chosen the best way of putting that--and he really should have worn his glasses, even on this little trip. He kept an old pair around for when sunglasses weren't really appropriate; they were enough of a focus to distract people somewhat from his eyes. His stare had been a bit disconcerting even when he'd had a matched set.

He gave her his politest and most innocuous smile, and as they stepped out of the elevator on the ground floor he touched her mind just enough to fuzz the memory a little. No, he wasn't anything out of the ordinary...not at all. He got his cigarettes from the vending machine and decided not to risk the elevator again. It made him feel claustrophobic anyway. Definitely, his next apartment building would be something luxurious and decadent, if he could find one of those that wasn't a Shinjuku high rise. He pulled open the door to the stairwell and took the stairs at a lope.

As he reached his own floor, he caught a flash of white at the edge of his peripheral vision. He looked up and saw something small and four-legged vanish around the corner of the next landing.

Aha.

He went up a couple of steps further. "Here, kitty, kitty," he called. What was its name? He could never remember. "Puss, psss, psss, psss...come here." The creature had stopped and was staring through the railing at him with its pale green eyes. It was white with orange and black markings: a lucky, three-colored cat. He continued calling to it softly, inching up the stairs with his fingers held out invitingly, and after a moment it padded back down to the landing, came around the corner, and stretched out its neck to sniff at his hand. He scooped it up. The cat struggled briefly, but he held it by the scruff and crooned to it until it relaxed. He scritched under its chin and it began to purr.

Animals were so easy to deal with. All it required was that certain combination of gentleness and firmness.

Seishirou carried the cat back to the apartment, cradled in his arms. He went first to check on Subaru. He was being exceedingly cautious--even if Subaru were able to unravel the spell while still asleep, which was not an easy trick, it would have taken more time than this--but he didn't feel at all inclined to take chances. And especially not now, when he'd identified Subaru as the source of his distraction and possibly of that strange restlessness he'd been feeling as well.

Very soon he'd start to work on getting Subaru out of the apartment. First, though, he wanted that cigarette. He took the cat into the kitchenette with him and set it down on the counter. Leaving it to its own devices for a moment, he put the kettle on for tea. He lit the cigarette and inhaled deeply and with pleasure. Much better. The first cigarette after a healing always burned going down; he hadn't really been able to enjoy that one. He felt a little of his jumpiness fade away.

The cat had its front paws up on the window sill, investigating the ivy. "That's not for you," Seishirou told it, and he picked it up again. It acquiesced happily. He stroked the short, soft fur, thinking, running things over in his mind...he scratched between the cat's ears and in the little hollow between its shoulderblades, listening to its warm, vibrating purr...he slipped his fingers underneath its chin to scratch there, and as it raised its head, its eyes shut in ecstasy, he gently closed his hand around its neck and crushed the fragile windpipe.

The water was boiling. He put the struggling cat down on the counter and went to prepare the tea. Slowly he sipped tea and smoked his cigarette as he watched the cat thrash and choke, trying to draw breath through its collapsed trachea, until at last, with a final brief spasm, it died.

He mashed the cigarette out in the ash tray. Stepping over to the cat, he ran his hand along its body, the fur just as soft in death as it had been in life.

Gratuitous, he thought. He hadn't really needed to do that.

But then, everything died someday. That was just the way things were.

And a little girl was going to discover, when her kitty didn't come home, that the world was an uncertain place, where nothing one "cared" about could ever be secure. It was a useful lesson to remember. Of course, she wouldn't have much of a lifetime in which to benefit from it, what with the world coming to an end and all...well, it didn't really matter, one way or another.

In the end, nothing really mattered anyway.

He looked down at the cat's twisted face, the slight froth of blood on lips drawn back from sharply pointed teeth, the eyes rolled up so that their green was half-hidden and the white sclera was visible.

For an instant, looking at those pale eyes, he saw vividly Subaru lying in death, the white shikifuku splattered with red and the dark green eyes half-closed.

He took a sharp breath--

He looked down at the cat again.

It was just a cat.

Its green eyes were nothing like the color of Subaru's.

<A hallucination?> he wondered. <A foreseeing?> He wasn't usually inclined toward either, but the vision had been so clear, so...real. Gingerly he reached out and touched the fur again.

Soft, and still, and very dead.

It was just a cat, after all.

Just another broken thing.

For some reason, looking at the corpse began to annoy him. Taking a garbage bag out from under the sink, he stuffed the tiny body into it. He wiped down the countertop with a dishcloth, then tossed that in the bag as well. Walking out of the apartment and down the hall to the garbage chute, he shoved the bag through the door with perhaps a little more vehemence than was strictly necessary. Seishirou let the door thunk shut.

He stared at it for a long moment.

/Anger,/ he realized.

He was feeling anger for the second time today--inexplicable anger and restless energy and the distinct sense that something was wrong. And his headache had come back again. That was out of the ordinary too.

/Subaru./

He turned and strode back to his apartment, grabbed hold of the door knob--

It refused to turn.

His fingers brushed the empty fabric of his pocket--

He'd left his keys inside of the apartment.

He'd just managed to lock himself out.

Seishirou took a couple of deep, centering breaths. He shifted his mental focus, blocked out the disturbing feelings, and made the headache's discomfort vanish from his conscious mind. He should have done that much earlier. Very calmly, he sent a minor bolt of magic through the locking mechanism.

The door swung open and he stepped inside.

Almost immediately a flood of dizziness hit him. He gritted his teeth, and made it to the couch on nothing more than the determination not to fall on his face. Dropping onto it, he leaned back against the cushions and pushed his hands wearily through his hair. His body felt weirdly drained of energy, but his mind was already hunting fiercely despite its disarray--was going back over the day's events, looking for clues that would let him track the mental and physical disruption to its source, because none of this was not normal, not for him. Somewhere, something had happened. He touched the magical traces of his workings and followed them. Had something gone wrong? Some outside influence he hadn't taken into account...a bad aspect or...or an alignment of forces...or maybe...

...a spell?

If only he wasn't so...

...tired.

He realized that he'd started to slide sideways. He slid until he was lying down, his cheek coming to rest on one of the pillows of the couch. The apartment was still spinning, but he didn't notice it as much from here and that felt pretty good.

And he was just going to close his eyes for one moment....

Just going to go to sleep.

<Wait a minute,> he thought, <I absolutely can't sleep now.>

<Subaru's still here....>

He pried his eyes open with difficulty, tried to raise his head but didn't get far...and as he fell back again, his eyes drifting closed, a tremendous wave swept in on him. It was an undertow of power that dragged him toward unconsciousness, even as he identified it for what it was--

/The healing spell...coming back..../

The wave swept out once more, and took Seishirou with it.



************************************************************************************************************************<BR />



Sakura and Snow


Chapter 4





By Natalie Baan







The space of his own mind surrounded him: wide, and high, and luminous with a muted gold light. He was looking up into the "sky." A crack had opened in it, and the crack was spreading jaggedly, relentlessly. Inside, there was nothing in particular. There was no wind, but he could feel the force of that broken sky pulling at him. It made him ache, bone-deep, soul-deep, in a way he didn't really understand.

He braced himself and stared at it defiantly. He set the force of his will against it, but it would not obey. The crack continued to widen inexorably, and it threatened to swallow everything, to take into itself all those pieces he was made of. He held onto them fiercely as he raised his hands to fight--

The magic did not come.

Looking up, he felt that damaged sky tearing at him, trying to rip things away, and he didn't know what he could hold onto in this place, if his own abilities were not enough, didn't know how to defend himself against the danger.

He looked, and he was...afraid.

/Afraid./

He clung to his sense of himself, and he glared into that sky.

He was Sakurazukamori.

He must not lose himself to this.

And then, all at once, there was a cool wind that reached him, and water, and a soft sound like the crying of birds. He felt a strange and sudden peace. The crack in the sky above him began to melt away....

Seishirou fell back into a dreamless sleep.



* * * * *



He woke slowly, drifting out of unconsciousness. It seemed as though he'd been dreaming, but the details all were vague. Still feeling a little muzzy-headed, he cracked his eyes open just a bit, letting the room swim into focus around him. The soft, steady glow of the overhead light was reassuring after...wait.

Light?

He snapped alert immediately, lifted his head and started to get up, because it had been mid-afternoon when he'd fallen asleep, he remembered it, and he definitely hadn't been the one to turn on the light. He looked around and--

/--Subaru--/

--was curled up in the chair across from him.

Subaru's legs were drawn up beneath him, his arms were wrapped around his chest, and his eyes were closed. He appeared to be asleep.

Seishirou allowed himself to exhale. He swung his legs off the couch and sat up slowly and very carefully, wondering how much time had passed, what had happened while he was unconscious.... Something fluttered down from the back of the couch and landed beside him.

Paper.

He had caught a glimpse of thin and graceful calligraphy.

He snatched up the talisman and turned it over--stared at it. It was...it was....

A ward?

"You were dreaming," Subaru said.

Seishirou looked at his adversary. Subaru was awake after all, regarding him with a kind of taut stillness that seemed to speak of hard-won inner control. At least, the inclination to rip Seishirou's face off appeared to have left him...Seishirou glanced down again at the piece of paper in his hand. It had been torn from the note pad by the phone, he noticed, the incantation written out in ball-point pen. He frowned at it very slightly. Crumpling it into a tiny ball, he shot it at the wastebasket across the room. It bounced off the wall and went in.

<Three points,> he thought.

He stretched at length, put his hand casually to his shirt pocket and found the new pack of cigarettes still there. Tapping one out, he reached for his lighter.

He wasn't about to let Subaru know how badly disconcerted he was.

Subaru seemed calm enough himself, but his eyes locked onto the cigarettes in Seishirou's hand with the intensity of an addict. Seishirou scrutinized him for a moment, then slid the pack and lighter across the coffee table. Subaru set his jaw. He refused to accept the offer, instead lowering his gaze and tracing one finger down the upholstery of the chair, as if it presented him with some meaning.

Seishirou leaned back, one arm along the top of the couch, and exhaled smoke in a leisurely way. He watched Subaru in silence, unsmiling. Though his mind wanted to race, to try to put together the events of the last however many hours, he didn't permit his attention to wander from the person before him--did not choose to speak, either, to get caught up in the temptingly easy dance of words, the verbal sparring that could so easily be a distraction. Let the burden of conversation rest on the Sumeragi a while.

As a result, there was a long silence. Seishirou's cigarette had almost burned down when Subaru finally spoke. "Seishirou-san," he said, and hesitated. When he went on again his voice was very small. "Where is my sister?"

The question seemed tangential...Seishirou had noted the slight hesitation and wondered whether it was what Subaru had truly meant to say. A feint, perhaps? No...that was his own inclination speaking. Subaru was more direct, more honest than that. This would of course be an urgent matter for him, yet also one that was difficult to express.

"What makes you think /I/ know where she is?" Seishirou asked.

"I've looked for her a long time," Subaru murmured. "Everywhere I go, I ask each ghost and spirit that I meet if they've seen her. None of them ever has. So I tried, a couple of years ago, to call to her myself. I tried to summon her back from the other world just to see her, just to speak with her one more time. I know that it was wrong, and that the dead should be left in peace, but still--" He shivered, and flinched slightly, abandoning that train of thought. "I couldn't find her," he whispered instead. "I called for days, but there was nothing. If she could have answered me, I know she would have. I know it, but--" That flinch again. Subaru was rubbing the back of one hand, and Seishirou wondered if he was conscious of the gesture. "I found the sakura again. I studied it, and I know that the souls of all the people that you've...that have died there are bound to the tree.

"That was the other thing I was trying to do that night. I was looking for Hokuto-chan among the souls in the sakura. But she wasn't there, either.

"So I wondered...if you had done something else. If you had done something different with her...." He lifted his head to look at Seishirou, his eyes filled with a kind of hopeless prayer.

Seishirou frowned again.

"Why would I do something like that?"

The look vanished instantly as Subaru's face went cold, and he sat up straight, stiff with the dignity of those who feel themselves made fools of. "Yes--" he said sharply, "--why /would/ you." He uncurled from the chair, stood up and demanded, "Where are my clothes?

Seishirou did smile now, a very little. "The plastic hospital bag in the closet." Poor Subaru, too polite even to rifle through his unconscious enemy's belongings. Turning his back on Seishirou, Subaru stalked out of the room, and Seishirou let him get away with it, that potentially fatal error. He listened to the near-silent sound of retreating bare footsteps, the noise of the closet door opening in the other room....

His eyes flicked to the kitchenette window, now that he had the chance. It was dark outside. Seishirou looked at his watch, and almost couldn't believe it.

He had been asleep for hours.

How long had Subaru been roaming around the apartment?

</Lucky,/> he thought, <I'm lucky that you seem to have reverted to being a pacifist again.>

<Far luckier than I deserve for being such a fool.>

He smiled into the empty living room, and ruthlessly suppressed the desire that had risen in him: the wish to walk into that other room and plunge his hand through Subaru's heart right now, and in one eruption of magic and blood stop the whole ridiculous, /stupid/ affair which had already taken up so much--too much--of his time and energy. The source of that desire was purely embarrassment at how near he'd come to disaster, he was certain of it, and such a feeling was not anything that had a right to motivate him.

Such a feeling did not serve him.

He crushed it in his mind.

/Stubborn/...he had no intention of being moved by anything other than his will and the necessities of being the creature he was.

And he would play the game out to its conclusion. He had decided the outcome long ago, and saw no reason to change his mind.

<I started this, and I'll see it to the end. I'll finish you when and how I choose. I won't be forced in anything, and especially not in this, Sumeragi Subaru.>

<I won't be made a fool of once again.>

<Indeed, you should have killed me today, when you had the chance. Well, too bad for you.>

<I've learned from my mistakes now.>

<Will you be able to do the same?>

He realized then that he was still more than a bit disturbed: probably the last vestiges of the healing spell's return. That wouldn't do at all. As Seishirou attended to the soft, awkward sounds of Subaru in the other room, taking clothes out of the plastic bag, he carefully put his own mind in order, letting the bright pieces of its structure settle into their usual configurations. After a while, it felt as though the effects of backlash were fading. That had been very odd...he couldn't understand why a wholly positive spell, one he'd performed for himself numerous times, would come back in that way--and if it had, why his protections hadn't stopped it. Maybe it was because he'd called more power than was usual for the spell and sustained it longer...or maybe because he'd used it to heal another person.

Well, he wouldn't do that again, anyway.

Seishirou stretched again and ran a hand through his hair. He felt quite clear now in mind and body. There was still one very small disquiet, though, and it bothered him.

He didn't know what had happened to Hokuto.

It was true, as Subaru had said, that the souls of all the Sakurazukamori's victims were bound to the ancient tree. What Subaru perhaps didn't realize was that those souls lost their identity in the binding; even if Hokuto had been among them, Subaru would not have been able to find the person that he had known and loved.

But when Seishirou had reached out to bind that one victim's soul, he had found...nothing. A hint of essence that vanished even as he tried to touch it, and that was all.

Hokuto had gone somewhere, in the moment of her death, and Seishirou had no idea where she could be.

He had wondered at the time if Subaru had had something to do with it, or if possibly it had been the grandmother's action. If Subaru didn't know about it, though, then it seemed that neither was the case. Perhaps something else had already claimed her soul...or perhaps her uniquely carefree nature had given her the ability to escape his spell.

In any case, a single mislaid soul shouldn't cause any problems. She had not been a magician, after all...he didn't imagine that she could do anything to affect him, should she happen to turn up again. But he didn't like leaving the matter even the least bit uncertain--and particularly not now, when he felt a new and urgent need to be alert in all things regarding Subaru. He would have to put some effort into tying up that loose end as well.

It was a bother and a complication.

Seishirou scowled slightly. The combination of cigarettes and the afternoon sleep had left a vile taste in his mouth. He swung off the couch and strode into the bedroom, ignoring Subaru's outraged yip at being caught half-dressed.

<Too thin...seen better.>

He didn't speak or offer Subaru more than that briefest of glances as he passed through. Best if Subaru left quickly, Seishirou decided...best to give him the opportunity, if he chose to take it.

Seishirou walked into the bathroom and shut the door.



* * * * *



He'd brushed his teeth.

He'd brushed his hair.

He'd gone out into the bedroom and closed the closet door and made the bed and stood gazing at his reflection in the window for more than a suitable amount of time and /still/ Subaru was hanging about in the other room.

<Subaru-kun, do I have to pick you up and put you out the door?>

It was almost getting to that point, Seishirou thought. Shading his eye against the light in the bedroom, he looked outside. Dark, as far as Tokyo ever got dark, and enormous flakes of snow were falling steadily: several inches had come down already, and it showed no signs of stopping.

He could put Subaru to sleep again and leave him in another snowdrift.

The idea had distinct possibilities.

Well...no matter what he decided to do in the end, right now he had better go out there. Probably Subaru felt there was something more to be said, and once that was taken care of it was quite likely that he might simply leave. He'd certainly had his chance to kill Seishirou, if that was what he wished to accomplish.

And if Subaru had changed his mind and did want to fight him now, Seishirou was ready.

Of course....

He walked into the other room, moving softly despite his house shoes--so softly that Subaru didn't appear to hear him. The younger man was meandering back and forth in short, aimless steps, a movement not even resolute enough to be called pacing: a restless, directionless energy which could find no other outlet. He stopped by the stereo finally, his back to Seishirou, and drew a finger slowly along its sleek black edge.

As Seishirou came around the side of the chair, Subaru finally seemed to sense him and looked back over his shoulder: still a suggestion of the broken and betrayed look, but the pain now sealed behind a certain fatalism. He watched in silence as Seishirou sat easily in the chair, picked up the remote, and began toying with it. Then he turned away for long moments, staring down once more at the top of the stereo.

It definitely didn't look as though he was thinking of fighting.

<Pacifist,> Seishirou thought again. <Well, even if your hatred for me no longer rules you, it doesn't matter for my plans.>

<There's always your "duty" to motivate you...the fact of your being one of the Seven Seals. There's your consideration for the well-being of other people. I can't believe it's true, as you've said, that you care nothing for the future of the earth.>

<But even if you don't care for that....>

<You'll meet me on the final day, one way or another...and you know it.>

<It's waiting for both of us, Subaru-kun.>

Seishirou watched Subaru teeter on the verge of saying something, and then back away from it. He chose to be patient. He leaned back, crossed his legs, and merely observed the slender figure before him, letting time pass until Subaru chose to speak.

"Seishirou-san," Subaru said eventually, after a few more minutes had gone by, "there's one more thing I want to know."

It was a question again, as Seishirou had rather suspected: Subaru was still looking for answers. Seishirou wondered what he'd found to ask about now. One would think the important matters had been made abundantly clear to him.

"What if you had lost?" the Sumeragi asked.

"Eh?" Seishirou blinked.

"What if you had lost your bet with me? What then?"

Seishirou thought it over for a moment, amused. "I probably would have let you go," he said at length, "I suppose." He might have, in fact, if it had come to that--but it had not, and he had known that it would not, had known that he was not like other people and that the exercise had been largely futile, an excuse to play with his prey in a new and interesting way. The play itself was what mattered, and that had been exceptional--even now, he admitted, when Subaru was being vexingly difficult to move, it offered him a challenge that was unusual. The game had been everything that he had ever expected. That he had proven incapable of love after all was not really significant. "I probably would have let you live."

"/No,/" Subaru said, with emphasis, "that isn't what I'm asking. What would /you/ have done then? What would you have done, if you had found that you could feel something--could you have gone on in the same way, and still been...this?"

Seishirou frowned. "What ifs" were not something that interested him, and he rarely concerned himself with them. He'd never even considered such a question. He was as he was...there were no other possibilities.

"What does it matter?" he asked. "It doesn't change anything. I /won,/ Subaru-kun."

"But what if--" Subaru mastered his evident frustration as he turned to face Seishirou. "Why would you even bother?" he insisted. "Why take the chance that I might live and become a person who could fight against you? Why risk the possibility, however small, that the bet might change you, might make you into something that you don't even understand--why would a person like you make a bet like that!"

His breath caught, stilling the rush of words.

"Are you lonely?" he asked.

Seishirou smiled at the mortal seriousness in Subaru's face. "You sound like a phone-sex girl," he replied. "Are you considering a new occupation?"

Subaru's mouth tightened. He glared into Seishirou's mismatched eyes briefly before turning away. Drawing himself up, he gathered the last shreds of his pride around himself, and coldly he informed Seishirou, "I'm leaving."

Seishirou didn't bother to reply to the obvious. Neither did he trouble himself to follow Subaru with his eyes as the onmyouji left, relying instead on hearing and that "other" awareness of Subaru's presence to track the onmyouji as he walked to the door and struggled into his sneakers. Seishirou twirled the remote control lightly between his fingers, then tapped the end of it against his cheek as he listened to Subaru take his coat down off the rack and put it on, as he heard the door open. The sounds fell silent for a moment. Then there was a step, and a second one, and the door closed behind the Sumeragi. His presence was receding down the hall.

It was quiet.

Seishirou sat in his chair for another minute or so, listening to that stillness. Finally, he bestirred himself and smiled a little. It was done with at last: Subaru was out of the way, and if it perhaps hadn't gone quite as he'd intended it, well, Subaru was alive, and had plenty of things to think about in the interval before the final day.

He had reasons enough to live. Reasons to fight. That much was certain....

Seishirou started out of what threatened to be a reverie. He'd better pack, just in case Subaru decided to be uncivilized and not wait for the appointed moment. And while he was doing that...Seishirou lifted up the remote control. He aimed it at the stereo, and moved his finger over the power button, wanting to bring the sound of voices into this silent room.

He stopped.

He stared at the stereo and the featureless walls behind it, unseeing.

The sound of....

The remote slipped out of his fingers. He let it fall to the rug. Standing up swiftly, he strode toward the door. He kicked off his slippers and stepped into a pair of shoes.

/The sound of voices./

In the hallway, he glanced at the elevator. It had left the floor already, of course. Seishirou pulled open the door to the stairwell and started down the stairs. Taking the first couple of flights at a walk, he calculated the speed of the elevator, the amount of time it had been traveling; and he picked up his pace then, began to run, vaulting the railing at the corners of the stairs, the sounds his feet made echoing faintly up the well.

He reached the bottom. Stopping a moment, his hand on the fire door (he was not out of breath at all...good), he tried to sense Subaru. Subaru was...not that close.

All right.

He opened the door and looked across the lobby. There were glass doors at the other end of the long, narrow hall; through them he could see the empty, snow-covered street and sidewalk, more snow coming down hard and fast, and Subaru, standing irresolutely just outside the doors, looking first one way and then the other.

Subaru raised his hand suddenly and took a step forward. By some miracle, a taxi passed in front of the doors, the only traffic on the entire street. As it left Seishirou's angle of view it was starting to pull cautiously toward the curb. Wrapping his coat around himself, Subaru hurried in that direction and disappeared from sight as well. Seishirou stepped out of the stairwell and walked up to the front of the lobby. Looking out through the glass, he saw where the taxi had come to a slightly skidding stop. Subaru was talking to the driver through the man's open window.

Subaru nodded then, and put his hand on the taxi's rear door handle.

Seishirou opened the door of the apartment building and stepped out into the snow. Neither the streets nor the sidewalks had been cleaned yet this evening; his feet sank into a blanket of whiteness that had only been disturbed by Subaru before him. He took another step, coming out from the lee of the building into the full dizzying falling of the snow.

Subaru turned his head. He looked back from where he was standing with the cab door open, ready to climb in. Seishirou could feel the snow settling onto himself as he returned that gaze: snow coming to rest on his hair and on his shoulders, the cold wetness melting through the cloth of his shirt.

The two of them stared at each other.

Then Subaru murmured something to the driver. He closed the door and stepped away from the cab. The taxi pulled slowly from the curb, fishtailing a little before gaining purchase. Its red tail lights gleamed at them briefly until it vanished from sight.

Subaru took a step toward Seishirou. He stopped then, hands clenched, as if he had run into a wall that he could not pass through. His face was a set mask: a different kind of containment, giving nothing more away. Seishirou understood. He himself had made it this far, but he couldn't take that next step either...he simply was not capable of it. Though all that lay between them physically was that expanse of whiteness, there were barricades of time as well--of words and deeds and two irrefutably different natures--and neither one could cross what parted them.

They stood facing each other in the snow.

"I know," Seishirou said then, slowly, softly, his breath frosting thinly among the flakes of snow, "I know where Hokuto-chan is." Subaru went tense and wary and hopeful, all at once; a change in his stance, mostly, but also the slightest flicker in his face, like fire, like something that might be warm and alive.

"She's...here." It was an effort to say the words. Seishirou struggled with them, who so seldom found himself at a loss, trying to get something across, though he himself wasn't sure what. "She's /here./" He made a tiny, directionless gesture. "Between--Subaru-kun, can't you /feel/ it?"

And Subaru's eyes grew wide. He reacted as if struck by the force of a spell: gasped and buckled suddenly, his arms coming up and crossing over his heart, his hands clutching tightly at his shoulders. He bent forward, and Seishirou saw his gaze shifting away...shifting inside....

...inside himself.

/He knew./

Subaru shut his eyes. Light condensed out of the air in front of him, a silver-white evocation that gradually assumed a shape: the indistinct form of a human figure lapped in shimmering layers of brightness, a figure that hung suspended, gleaming, above the snow. Its back was to Seishirou...he was unable to see its face.

Subaru raised his head, opening his eyes again. He straightened slowly, and extended a hand toward the figure, the light playing over his anguished, yearning expression. The figure reached out as well and touched fingertips to his. Seishirou had seen pain and death and even what people claimed was love; he had seen the looks that accompanied those states, and what lived and moved in Subaru's eyes then was all those things and far, far more: feelings so vivid, so alien to anything Seishirou knew that he had no references for them at all, and could only watch them pass in silence.

"I'm sorry," Subaru breathed, his voice cracking on the words. "Neesan, I'm sorry....

"Please--

"/Forgive me./"

Something intangible moved between them, brother and sister, living and dead--passed like a thought traveling between two halves of one mind. Then--

"Go," Subaru whispered--

"/Go./"

The ghost escaped into the air like a cry--like the cry that broke from Subaru as it vanished, as the light began to fade, a single, fractured cry of utter loss--

--but the ghost's flight was a cry of freedom.

The last of the light disappeared from the sidewalk. The snow that it had briefly illuminated into sparkling brilliance continued steadily to fall.

Subaru's hands had dropped. He looked down at his empty hands; looked up at Seishirou, across the distance that separated them, and he was trembling, his eyes brilliant as if they still held light...no, it was tears, finally, tears from out of a soul that perhaps had not wept in nine years, not since one particular day.... Subaru staggered then, took a swift stride into the space between them--moved forward in an unexpected, hurtling rush that made Seishirou take a half-step backward in surprise. Then Subaru's arms were flung around Seishirou's chest, Subaru's face was buried in his side, and Subaru was crying, tremendous sobs wracking his entire body, and the tears falling free at last.

Seishirou caught his balance on the snow-covered sidewalk, and then he stood very still. He let Subaru spend that grief upon him in the midst of the falling snow, in the muffled silence of the storm-bound city. It was easy enough to do.... He ignored the snow melting on his hair and clothes and into his shoes, and he concentrated on one thing only: the thirteenth head of the Sumeragi clan, who was holding onto the precarious support Seishirou offered as though it were the only anchor in his world.

How people clung to things, Seishirou mused to himself, even those things that hurt them so badly. How difficult they found it to let go.... Subaru had loved Hokuto--his twin, his second self--and in that moment of feeling her death he had drawn her to himself, across the city. He had drawn Hokuto's soul /inside/ himself and had bound her within his own heart for nine long years.

And he hadn't even realized that he had done it.

<You, Subaru-kun, who are the head of the Sumeragi clan...whose duty is to bind Japan's onmyouji against the "misuse" of powers...who should have known better.>

<All these years, you were a prisoner of what you had done just as much as she was.>

<Denying yourself every happiness, every hope, in a quest for revenge that she would never have asked for...isn't that so? Trapping her in the walls you put around your own heart, those walls of loneliness and pain....>

<It was Hokuto-chan who touched me in your dream, wasn't it?>

<And now that she's gone, now that you have discovered what you've done and found it in yourself to let her go at last...here you are. Bereft, with no family, your sister and grandmother both dead, you are turning back to me. Is it only because I'm here, because I'm a convenient person?>

<Or because I'm truly all that you have left?>

<Subaru-kun, I think perhaps you still feel love for the person you thought I was.>

<I think that's why you spared my life.>

<You should know better in that regard, too.>

He laid a hand gently on Subaru's back.

<But then...is it so different with me?>

<I, also, should have known better.>

<You were right.>

<You were right, and I didn't even realize it until you left me to the silence and your words came back to me-->

/Are you lonely?/

<Of course....>

</Of course./>

Seishirou stared at where, on the fabric of Subaru's coat, lacy openwork stars came to rest: flakes of snow forming patterns, touching each other, spreading into networks of white. How could one be other than lonely, when in the whole world there was only oneself...and "other people," who were nothing more than shadows?

Nothing more than things.

Ordinary people, who were no more than half-present in their own existence, let alone in his, consumed by fleeting, futile wishes and continual distractions...whose bravery was at its best the stupid, blind bravery of the ignorant and whose attention was a flimsy, uncomprehending thing...who knew nothing, understood nothing at all outside their small lives, felt nothing but fear in the face what he stood for...he could not really perceive them, any of them, as real.

He could admire them for that courage they showed when struck by the great or little difficulties of their lives; he could ignore them, when it suited him, as being utterly insignificant; he could watch the endlessly repeated joys and tragedies and everyday, mundane occurrences of their existences...but he could not fit himself into their world, or them into his.

/Could not./

Not without destroying himself...and in the end he knew he wanted to continue more than he wanted that other thing.

But still that emptiness, that sense of lack, remained.

<And then there was you, Subaru-kun...a child...and a practitioner.>

<Mine completely, to do with as I wished.>

<And so I made that choice.>

<When I made that bet with you, I was so young myself. I don't think I was really conscious of what drove me. There was only that sense of hunger...of wanting something that I couldn't identify.>

<You were like me, and yet entirely unlike. I thought that I might find that thing in you.>

<I didn't know what seeking it would mean....>

<Since that day you have been with me, always. When nothing else could move me, I bent my life around you. Waiting for you to grow up, playing out the one promised year...and then, when the chance arose to hold onto you--for you to continue to exist until the moment when my purpose was fulfilled, and my own life began to come to its end--jumping at it despite every instinct, despite everything I know, foolishly.... >

<Without intending it, I let myself grow to be affected by you.>

<I'm no longer able to imagine a world where you don't exist.>

<Almost seventeen years...almost half my life...you have been that constant presence. >

<My adversary. >

<My plaything.>

<My beautiful and pure reflection.>

<You are something that reacts to me, that acknowledges what I am...you're something I can speak to, even if it's only inside my own head...>

<...like this...>

<...and you have become necessary to me...to who I am.>

<In the very act of making the bet, I lost.>

Snowflakes spun down all around them. As he tilted his head back, looking up into the sky, they touched his face gently: little feathery touches.

<But still, Subaru-kun, after all of that....>

<I don't love you.>

<I think perhaps I really am not capable of it.>

<I don't feel anything for you.>

<No regret, no remorse for all the pain I've caused...nothing that would stop me from hurting you again. I only feel that emptiness inside me, and the fact that you fill it, a little.>

<I don't really care for you. I don't feel love....>

<I don't even know how.>

<Well...it doesn't matter, does it?>

<It doesn't really matter after all.>

<All that matters, all that counts, is that you continue to exist until it's time for you to die.>

<That you give me something to struggle with, something to speak to...>

<...so I know that I am not so absolutely alone.>

The snowflakes were falling into Seishirou's face as he gazed up, catching on his eyelashes and threatening to blind him. He raised his hand to brush them all away.

They left a tiny dampness on his skin.

He looked down at Subaru, crumpled against him, whose sobs were quieting at last, and whose trembling seemed nearly to have ceased. Seishirou smiled with unmerciful tenderness. He wiped the snow from Subaru's shoulders and from his dark hair...and as Subaru straightened slightly, his eyes still dulled and glazed with pain, Seishirou slipped one arm about the onmyouji and turned him around.

Seishirou began to walk toward the door of the apartment building, and Subaru went with him silently, without the slightest hesitation.




************************************************************************************************************************<BR />


Sakura and Snow



Chapter 5




By Natalie Baan






Seishirou hung Subaru's coat on the rack and, shaking the last of the snow from his hair, stepped out of his shoes and up onto the floor. As Subaru bent to attend to his own shoes, Seishirou left him there and wandered off absently in the direction of the kitchenette counter. He felt secure enough at the moment to step away like that--did not think that Subaru could possibly do anything to him without more time to recover. Besides, he needed to consider what to do next.... It was definitely a peculiar situation, he mused, and one he did not entirely feel he had a grasp on. He was not even sure of why he had brought Subaru upstairs with him, let alone of why Subaru had come.

He paused, and glanced back at the onmyouji. Subaru was sitting on the edge of the floor to unlace his sneakers, his face wearing the closed look of utter exhaustion--exhaustion of the heart, not the body, although probably he was still weak physically as well. There had been too much passing back and forth between tension and relief, and Subaru always seemed to feel everything so intensely. Whatever closure he had achieved with his sister's ghost, the process could not have been easy.

What exactly it had been that had passed between them...Seishirou could only wonder about it, and that wondering reminded him of the distance he could not traverse, that space between himself and other people. He looked across the room at Subaru, and though with the damage to his eye he visually could not quite measure the width of the floor that separated them, he suddenly was aware of every inch of it--and what kept him apart was infinitely more vast.

Then his eye trailed up along the line of Subaru's body as the other finished with his laces and began to stand, and for a moment the rose fire of the healing magic came back to him: the fire, and the heat....

Perhaps there was a certain distance that he /could/ cross, after all.

He walked back across the floor toward Subaru. As he neared, Subaru turned to look up at him, balancing awkwardly with one foot half-out of its shoe, his expression still translucent with shock. Seishirou stopped at the raised edge of the floor. With the extra height the step gave him, it was something like looking down at the teenaged Subaru again, only the proportions of the tall, slender body were different, and the close-cropped hair, and the face.... He stared into the face that was raised to his for a long moment. Then he leaned forward, cupping a hand under Subaru's chin, and kissed the young man gently on the lips.

He could feel Subaru become still, the mouth against his own going taut and surprised at the contact, but Subaru did not struggle or try to break away. He held Subaru there another moment before releasing him. Then Seishirou straightened, and gazed down into those eyes that were wide with startlement.

"I don't love you," Seishirou said. "But I want you." It was truth, as much truth as he had ever given Subaru. Seishirou followed the ripples that those words caused in the deep green water of Subaru's stare, the shifting, interlocking movement of emotions that had to be, at best, contradictory. He did not wait to determine what exactly those emotions might be, or for Subaru make any kind of response. Instead, he bent down again with patient slowness, never taking his eye from Subaru's face, from Subaru watching him draw nearer--and then Subaru tilting his head back slightly, his eyes closing this time as their mouths touched once more and he yielded like cloud or water to the soft pressure of the kiss. Seishirou let his own eyes shut, savoring the feel of the Sumeragi, that perfectly delectable surrender. He slid his arms around Subaru and kissed him more deeply, felt Subaru's lips trembling against his in the same way that sakura trembled the moment before the wind took them, and with the same softness, as Subaru's mouth parted for him and let him in.

/Yes..../

<Subaru-kun...I can't love you. Perhaps I can't really understand you for what you are....>

<But I can have you.>

<And I will....>

<I will.>



* * * * *



Seishirou looked down at the slender V-shape of the onmyouji's torso, at the back of his dark head, his face hidden in the crook of his arm. He felt simply the clean, empty lassitude that usually followed climax. It would be easy and pleasant to abandon himself to that, to lie down and drift in the quietness that followed release, but he probably should not. Standing up, he went to the closet and got his robe, took it with him as he went into the bathroom to clean himself off. When he came out a few minutes later, Subaru had not moved significantly.

Perhaps he had fallen asleep.

Wandering out into the main room, Seishirou collected his lighter and cigarettes from the coffee table. He took one of the stools from the eating side of the counter and swung it around into the kitchenette. He sat down there, in the half-light that reached him from the living room fixture, and lit up a cigarette. Slowly he breathed in the rich, familiar smoke.

It had been entirely satisfactory.

In a way, though...there was something almost disappointing about that.

Though the physical pleasure was enjoyable enough, while it lasted, in the end it was just as brilliant and as transient as any other thing. He could not build upon it...he could not make it into that human connection.

And it did not tell him anything about what it was to love.

He knew better than that, of course.... After all, it was foolishness to think that mere sex could solve anything. For what the evening's experience had been, it had been very good, and he took it for that, and savored it, and then set it away, gently, into memory.

Seishirou heard then the soft sounds of movement from the other room, and at that he put his reflections aside, becoming attentive once again: listening, and waiting. It seemed his "guest" was awake after all.... In a little while, Subaru appeared in the doorway. It took him a few moments to locate Seishirou, sitting in the unlit kitchenette; when he did, he began to wander over haltingly, almost disjointedly, as if neither body nor mind were quite functional yet. He had put his jeans back on, but he was barefoot and wore Seishirou's shirt. Seishirou wondered if that was significant, or if it had simply been the first article of clothing that had come to hand.

As Subaru came to the end of the counter, Seishirou pushed the cigarette pack wordlessly toward him, and this time Subaru accepted, tapping one out with a quiet dignity and a steadiness that belied the awkwardness he'd shown coming across the floor. He did not meet Seishirou's gaze, though.... Seishirou held out his lighter, and as Subaru leaned close the flame's glow flickered over his face, the gold of it flowing over his pale skin, leaving shadows here and there, at the line of his jaw, and in his half-closed eyes. The cigarette caught, and Subaru straightened up and nodded, murmuring a polite thank you, and then retreated. There was a wooden chair in one corner of the kitchenette. Subaru went over and curled himself up on it, as if trying to make himself unobtrusive, and then he lapsed into stillness, doing nothing but stare into space. Seishirou watched him for a minute, but he did not seem to notice, lost in whatever thoughts might be going through his mind.

Perhaps there were no thoughts at all. Perhaps Subaru had withdrawn into himself, and was merely existing until the next force came to act upon him. He had been like that occasionally in times past...perhaps he still could be.

Seishirou left part of his attention on the onmyouji, and returned to his own silent musings.

No, nothing had really changed in him, but now he was aware of that motivation which had escaped his conscious mind until tonight: aware of that hunger, that hidden need...that loneliness. He was a bit disturbed that he could act on such an impulse for so long without recognizing it. If there was one thing that he counted on, one thing that was true and certain in his life, it was his own self-identity, the knowledge of who and what he was, that intimate familiarity with his capabilities and with every aspect of his mind, heart, and body.

/Sakurazukamori./ That was the largest part of it, as necessary to him as breathing: the piece of him that gave shape to all the rest.

Being the killer, being the "cherry tree barrow guardian"....

Should he be lonely?

Should he permit it?

Seishirou stubbed out his cigarette and clasped his hands thoughtfully before his mouth. It was a difficult question.... For a brief moment he found himself wondering if any of the others who had come before him had felt loneliness, wondered if they had been capable of love, or if that lack was something unique to himself....

Then he shrugged.

Really, he didn't care.

Whether they had been like him or not--

It didn't matter.

There was only himself now, and the one important thing was that he recognized what lay within him, acknowledged it, and then took steps to make certain that it served his will. A "feeling" could not betray him as long as he was aware of it, as long as he was watching out for its effects.

And now, he was.

There was a short, violent outburst of coughing from the corner, as Subaru's newly healed throat and lungs protested the cigarette, and Seishirou smiled wryly to himself. Funny that it had been the healing spell's return that had broken him open, that had cracked his mind wide enough to let him see such things. Just as he had used that living flame of power to clear away the shadows that had clouded Subaru's body--to restore the onmyouji to a normal state of health--in just that way the magic had tried to "restore" /him,/ opening him up inside to reveal this hidden thing. He had meant to probe the Sumeragi's damaged heart, and instead had found something quite surprising in himself.

<Healing out, healing back, though not as I might have intended it...and because there was no "harm," my protections didn't function. I understand it now.>

<Still, I can't help but wonder, Subaru-kun, if you hadn't warded me then...>

<...what might you have found, when I finally woke up.>

That feeling of disintegration...he remembered it quite clearly from his dream, the pull from that ripped apart sky....

Would he even have been recognizable as himself?

<It's ironic, isn't it, Subaru-kun?>

<In trying to protect me, you may well be the reason that I'm still the person I am.>

<Still the same person...in the end, I haven't really been changed.>

<It's ironic.>

Seishirou shrugged again. Abandoning that train of thought, he returned his attention to the real issue at hand...what /should/ he do about that "loneliness"? What action, if any, could he take? To block the ache from his mind would at best be a temporary thing, no more than what he had already done for years unconsciously, and he suspected that to try to extirpate it entirely would somehow be unwise. In any case, he found as he considered the matter that he didn't particularly want to make that attempt, didn't want to lose even that slight, strange awareness of lack. Even this "feeling," odd and uncomfortable as it was...it was still a part of him. And anything that was part of him, he would not let go.

So instead of destroying it he would leave it be, Seishirou decided, simply remaining at all times aware of its existence and its possible ramifications, in much the same way that he would allow Subaru himself walk out that door tonight, and live for the few brief weeks until the final storm broke and the onmyouji died as Seishirou had always intended that he should. It was overconfidence, perhaps, that Seishirou considered both the Sumeragi and the need he answered to be acceptable dangers...perhaps that surety was a weakness in and of itself. But he was aware of that, too. It also was a part of him, and he would not relinquish it any more than he would allow his eye and his will to leave the prey that he had chosen.

He would not let Subaru go...at least, not permanently.

After all, Subaru's life, and death, still belonged to him.

For tonight, though, Subaru could certainly leave: just like the little bird in a nukume dori painting, allowed to escape the falcon's claws and fly away into the sudden respite of an open sky. Yet sooner or later the day would come for it, too, and the little bird would fall, its bright feathers scattering over the snow.

He had always liked that image.

He nodded to himself, then glanced at the Sumeragi.

"Subaru-kun, wake up. You're going to fall off the chair."

Subaru sat up with a start. He uncoiled partway from his seat, putting one foot down on the floor, and as he moved the long tail of ash at the end of his cigarette fell off onto the linoleum. "Sorry...," he began automatically, and fumbled for the ashtray on the end of the counter.

Seishirou couldn't help smiling slightly at Subaru's obvious and very appealing confusion. Still so easily flustered, even now.... Reaching into the cabinet under the sink, Seishirou pulled out the dustpan and broom. He went to where Subaru was sitting, and knelt down, beginning to sweep up the spilled ash. "Go and get dressed," he said gently. "I'll call a cab for you this time. On a night like this, to find one just driving by--I doubt you'll be so lucky once again."

"I want to stay with you."

Seishirou glanced up at Subaru, the briefest of glances, and then dropped his eyes again, hiding his amused expression. He had rather thought so, seeing Subaru come out of the bedroom in his shirt--it seemed that Subaru was beginning to harbor illusions once more about the person he was, and about what this night might possibly mean. Seishirou bent forward, chasing a bit of ash that had fallen under Subaru's chair. "Don't be silly, Subaru-kun. You can't stay here--"

"/I know what you are./"

The sudden, raw starkness in Subaru's tone stopped him at once. His gaze flicked up again.

"/Sakurazukamori,/" Subaru said, the word taut and fierce, spoken with a strangely complicated intensity. "I know. I want to stay." And Seishirou found himself staring at Subaru, into the shadowed places of those green eyes that had always communicated far more than language could for Subaru.... Indeed, Subaru's voice faltered a little as he met that stare.

"I-if you'll have me," he said.

Of course, there were all sorts of very good reasons why Subaru absolutely could not stay. Seishirou reached for them, but found that they somehow were not coming to mind--were scattering even as he looked for them, like light fracturing on ripples of deep green water. Subaru was still looking at him. Those beautiful eyes were filled with something aching, and Seishirou was not at all certain of what it meant.

Then Subaru reached out a hand toward him, moving very slowly, a deliberate and careful gesture that couldn't be construed as danger. No, not even a spell.... He pushed his fingers into Seishirou's bangs and lifted them, brushing them aside, then ran that quiet touch like rain down Seishirou's cheek. His hand slipped behind Seishirou and drew him forward--drew him down until Seishirou's head was resting on Subaru's knees....

Subaru began to stroke his hair with gentle fingers.

And just for one moment, Seishirou closed his eyes.




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