[ Watashi ]

[ Tomodachi ]

[ Saint Seiya ]

[ Clamp ]

[ Fanfiction ]

Where Fate is concerned, there is no such thing as chance. But does Fate exist ? And if so, who is the one who shapes it ?

It was a beautiful morning of April.

Beautiful...

Well, it was how anybody would have qualified this day. The sun was shining, a gentle breeze was blowing and the temperature was almost warm.

As to whether the day was really beautiful...

I chuckled inwardly, shrugging slightly.

Did it even matter ?

Not to me.

No more than the month, the year, the birds singing in the trees, the cars passing by or the colour of the traffic lights did matter.

The park was empty but for me, which suited me fine.

I smiled as I perceived faint voices beyond the sound of the breeze rustling the young leaves and the blossoms.

Voices only I could hear.

Yes I was the only one who could hear them now.

I looked at the tree in front of me and slowly walked up to it.

What was I doing here ?

I closed my eyes for a second and focused inward.

Something was amiss.

Oh, not much...

No, it was like a microscopic stain in the corner of a huge tapestry, like the last waning ripple a small pebble would have made in a pond.

Nothing really.

Still, the perfection of the void was marred.

My right hand reached out and gently, carefully stroked the trunk of the young tree beside me.

I smiled.

Well, there might be a reason after all.

I looked up and admired the myriad of fragile sakura blossoms.

They were fresh, and their colour was perfect, the faint touch of red so vivid...

Oh yes, this was beauty. Perfection.

The gentle breeze flew a petal towards me and I let it land in the palm of my left hand.

"The sakura have never been so beautiful Subaru-kun, thanks to you..."

Deep emerald eyes, so full of pain and sorrow, of bitterness and hatred... Lines in a face which hadn't known a smile for years...

Strange that one whose soul had been so much poisoned by resentment and senseless anger could inspire the sakura so...

Or perhaps not...

I laid a kiss on my fingertips and touched them to the trunk briefly.

There had been love left in him behind the veil of hatred.

Subaru-kun...

I shook my head slowly.

I should have stored him in my memory, and forgotten about him, gone on my way. He had been nothing to me but another prey. Special perhaps, but still a prey. Nothing more.

There had been the joy, the pleasure of the fulfillment of the Hunt, the exquisite feeling of his warm blood covering my body, the taste of his lips, and of his last heartbeat...

Since that day of the Winter Solstice, things had somehow changed.

Life had been grey. Dull.

Not that I cared, but... The thirteenth Head of the Sumeragi Clan had been a bright light to subdue and smother before the Hunt could end. Other preys had all been, without exception, inconveniences to be dispatched as quickly as possible.

Somehow, I had found myself relishing this one Hunt, perhaps more than I should have. Since the end, there had been other preys, not many, just as had been required, but none of the deaths had brought me anything.

There had been no satisfaction. It had been too easy, each time. It had not been worthy of being called a hunt.

Subaru-kun had been different, because of the purity in his heart, his one weakeness and strength, the one thing that had damned him from the start. And of course he had been an Onmyouji himself.

The others...

Ugly little pebbles to be kicked out of the way.

I smiled as I thought of the day of the burial...

I had assisted to the ceremony, as much as a challenge to the twelfth Head of the Sumeragi as out of curiosity. To see how the old woman would manage the rites, given the very special situation. To my surprise and silent mirth, she had celebrated Subaru-kun's passing here. At the foot of this very sakura. The woman had proved herself delightfully ressourceful again. Not that she had been able to do anything for the soul absorbed by the tree. But still I had had to admit that she had played the game very well.

Only one thing had disappointed me.

The fourteenth Head of the Clan...

A teenager girl who had looked like she had just arrived from Hokkaido. Not even fully trained...

Grey.

Uninteresting.

Ordinary.

That one had nothing to fear from me.

I chuckled softly.

Just as I had nothing to fear from the likes of her.

I would miss the slow weaving of the web around Subaru-kun, the hesitant love filling his heart, the sight and feeling his pain and sorrow... Of his desperate refusal... Of his futile anger...

But then there was only one such Hunt in a Sakurazukamori's life... And I knew not every one of my predecessors had been given the chance of hunting such a prey.

My fingers closed on the fragile blossom and crushed it slowly.

I tensed suddenly and looked around me.

Something had brushed my shields.

Like the featherlight touch of an angel's wing...

Fifteen meters away from me, a young woman was looking at me.

Her right hand holding a few sakura blossoms the breeze had carried away.

Curiosity and something that looked like sadness or nostalgia in her eyes. Deep dark green eyes.

Somehow, I hadn't felt her presence before.

It didn't matter.

Besides, she was nothing but a gaijin, a tourist who had lost her way most likely.

She smiled gently, bowing slightly as if to excuse herself for having intruded and I put my sunglasses back on, answering her smile out of habit.

I opened my hand and let the blossom be taken away by the breeze.

It was time for me to go.

At the same time, she got a look at her watch and sighed.

Only then did I notice how tired she looked.

She bowed again, and went away, turning her back on me.

As she was reaching the edge of the park, she stumbled and almost fell, catching her balance in what appeared to be a pure stroke of luck.

I smiled to no one or nothing in particular, and went on my way, briefly wondering what this young gaijin would have thought if she knew what the blossoms she had held in her hand were.

Japan...

Hell...

I sighed, feeling exhaustion like a mantle of lead on my shoulders.

Damn time lag.

Damn plane.

Damn trains.

I shook my head, trying to control the anger I could feel rising inside me. This was definitely not a good way to begin my stay.

But damnit, those inscriptions !

Shit, hiraganas I could manage pretty well, them and katakanas, but kanjis had always been my nightmare. And of course all the station names had had almost nothing else than kanjis on them... And no furiganas of course. Hell, why should there have been furiganas ? Only Japanese speaking people took the trains, or groups accompanied by someone who spoke the language. Not lonely stupid fools like me.

What was more, I had not been prepared for the damn punctuality of Japanese trains. When they said nine fifteen it was nine fifteen, and if one exhausted gaijin arrived on the track at nine seventeen and found a train it was not the godsrotted nine fiteen train, it was the cursed nine seventeen train which was going somewhere else entirely...

As for picking up what the driver was saying before coming to each station... Hell, I might begin to be able to cut the sentence into words with a bit of practise but this morning, it had been a complete fiasco...

I should have accepted when they had proposed to come and pick me at the airport.

But damn if I would let them categorize me as the stupid uneducated gaijin who couldn't even find an address in Tokyo.

It hadn't been so easy to set up contacts and to make the Japanese accept my presence. I was a gaijin, and, what was more, a woman.

The hell if I would let myself fit the image they were bound to have of me.

Ugh... I laughed shortly in the fresh morning air.

I was in a bad mood indeed.

Planes did that to me. I couldn't sleep in them, and the journey had been so damn long... I shook my head and admired the pure blue sky. It was a splendid day. I checked my watch and saw that my appointment was still a good twenty minutes away. I stretched lazily, yawning, and suddenly noticed a small park on the other side of the avenue. Full of beautiful cherry trees...

I slowly entered the park, and looked down at the bed of petals covering the ground.

April was the month of the Cherry Blossom Festival in San Fransisco, I could remember being part of it. Somehow, the fact that this month was April hadn't registered in my mind, well, not its connection with the cherry blossoms anyway.

I absentmindedly noted a man's presence in the park. Apart from him, there wasn't anybody here. Silently, I went towards one of the trees and looked at the sky through its canopy of leaves and blossoms.

It was beautiful.

The breeze caressed me gently, bringing a few stray petals to my hand and I caught them out of habit.

Strange, this silence...

So deep...

Eerie...

It was as if this park had been some kind of shrine or holy place... I knew there were many such places in Japan but still, this was a simple park...

I looked down at my hand, and smiled at the petals.

Cherry tree...

Sakura...

I had always fancied the Japanese name.

Fragile, delicate... Like the blossoms themselves.

Symbol of life and death, the shortness of life, the renewal through death... Or at least it was what I remembered.

Sakura blossoms always evoked mixed feelings inside me.

Some kind of sadness I had never understood, like a forgotten nostalgia... And happiness too, at seeing them blossoming each year, like a hope that would be reborn with each Spring, stubbornly refusing to accept death.

Winter was my season.

I loved the deep infinite silence of the snow covering the earth, I revelled in the feeling of the flakes slowly landing in my hands, in the icy purity of the air, in the beauty of a snow crystal...

But it was true that Winter couldn't exist in my heart if Spring didn't follow after it.

Life and death, day and night, sleeping and waking... The wheel kept turning, endlessly.

Death reaps the beauty of the world,

And be still.

I smiled.

This poem of Stephen Donaldson had engraved itself in my heart the first time I had seen it. It evoked too many things, too many feelings and memories... Suddenly, I felt something strange, like an echo of my own emotions, although so faint... It was as if I had been sent back my feelings by a mirror. I looked up absentmindedly.

The man was still there.

In his hand, he was holding a solitary sakura petal.

A distant part of me thought that we could have been the reflection of each other had there been a glass severing the park in two.

He was smiling, his eyes contemplating things only he could see.

I could have sworn there was something like nostalgia written on his face.

He was tall, unusually so for a Japanese man, and although he was not exactly a muscle man, power exuded from his lean frame. Somehow, my mind kept bringing up the picture of a black panther and I wondered : why black ?

Suddenly, I noticed that his right eye was blind.

In a fraction of a second, his left eye regained focus and settled on me.

I felt a shiver running along my spine.

Cold...

The damn breeze was not as gentle as I had thought. I realised I was still looking straight at him and felt like an bad-mannered child. Berating myself for staring like that, I bowed slightly, hoping he wouldn't take offense. He smiled back at me, and put a pair of sunglasses on. Sunglasses ? Oh well...

Shit, waiting in the park wouldn't be possible anymore, I felt too much like a blundering fool. I looked at my watch.

Eleven twenty-seven.

Good.

I had a relieved sigh.

It was time. I bowed once again and went away, turning my back on him.

Strangely, I had no wish to see his smile again.

Too cold, much too cold for my liking.

I faltered as I tripped on a loose stone and barely caught my balance. Damn, I needed to sleep.

I crossed the street and quickly entered the modern building.

I let my case fall on the ground.

The inside of this building was buzzing like a hive. I looked at the people and had the sinking feeling that this was going to be like an episode of "You're Under Arrest". I heard steps and saw a man coming in my direction. He stopped before me and bowed, smiling.

"We were expecting you Ange-san. I am inspector Tanaka Toshiro. Welcome to the criminal brigade of Tokyo Police..."

End of the Prologue.

On to Next Part.

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