Disclaimer: Do not own X. Clamp owns X. Sue not.
Many thanks to my beta, Cait-hime-sama-dono.
Hair
Her hair turning completely white during one night's time is not something Hinoto cared to remember.
She had had premonition dreams before. She had been sitting at the Diet Building's basement weaving dreams for her country's politicians for many years. It was nothing new for her.
The night her hair turned white was the night that changed her whole perception of her gift of seeing the future.
It's not like she never saw horrible, tragic things in her dreams before, but most were relatively small tragedies such as the death of a politician's wife in a car crash or a stroke which completely neutralized one of the more significant ministers.
Not even her own mother's demise in a train accident left that mark on Hinoto and as she woke up from that specific dream she did not bother to tell her mother about it; this was, after all, the mother who pulled her out of school, locked her in her room with her dreams and snatched her away from her only friend and sister until her precious little Kanoe became her biggest despiser.
The dream Hinoto sank into with magnificent long jet torrents of hair and awoke from to intense anxiety's death-pale white locks was the dream of The Battle of the Apocalypse.
It was mere glimpses of short images yet each struck Hinoto with immense force. At once she came to realize the full extent of what it meant to have the end of the world hanging above her head like a pendulum.
She saw the faces of the Battle's warriors, she learned their names, the things they loved and hated the most, the people they held dear and the delicate web the world wove around them, and finally, she saw their demises.
The flashes of future Tokyo in destruction were enough to send Hinoto reeling. She looked upon so many corpse-scattered broken buildings that her eyes became accustomed to such sights of horrors until she no long pondered on notions such as 'what is that round shape? Is that a skull?', 'what are those white things sticking out in the dark red patch? Are those protruding broken bones?' and 'why is that man's face so black? The rats already got to him?'. She ceased to acknowledge the broken human figures were people who once moved and spoke and loved.
The small visions of Seals fighting Harbingers for the world's sake did not help to move Hinoto from the pit of emotional cold hollowness; each Seal and each Harbinger were heading towards a new hurt in that year.
There was nothing to console herself with in that dream and no tools to help her recover from it.
In the following days after the dream Hinoto could be found sitting in mental silence in her small shrine and slowly brush her pallid tresses.
She was too late in noticing the new arrival in her soul; her tool of coping with 1999, her other self.
When she came to fully know this sweetly smiling ambushing presence she wove a new dream, a new wish for her own future.
White hairs scattered on the floor, slowly covered by warm dark crimson.
(tbc)