Healing of the Heart
By
Sango-chan
Prologue
The four
young people sat in a raggedy circle, each one carefully avoiding the other's
eyes. All four sets of eyes –
amber-gold, violet, brown, and gray – stared fixedly at the ground. Biting her lip to hold back the flow of
tears, a teenage girl dressed in a sailor fuku carefully divided the small pile
of tiny glasslike shards that lay on her palm. As the girl silently handed two slivers to each of her former friends, the
suffocating hush was broken by the dry, muffled sobs of a bushy-tailed child
who sat behind the broken group, perched on a bike. For a second, all the people looked in the kitsune's direction,
two shards clenched in their hands, frozen by their individual painful
memories, and then the spell was broken as a white-haired young man in a red
kimono stood up and left without once looking back. One girl watched him go as the tears she had fought to keep away
broke loose, streaming down her cheeks from gray eyes. Slowly, the other girl left, taking with her
a small cat and a huge boomerang. As
she disappeared into the foggy morning mist, the teenager dressed in monk's
robes stood and walked off in the opposite direction.
For a few
seconds the last girl sat watching the empty landscape around her. Then she turned towards her bike with the
young youkai in it and wheeled it slowly towards an old vine-strangled well in
the middle of the forest. The girl
pushed her bicycle down the dry well shaft first, then held the child and stood
on the edge, preparing to jump. She
hesitated, looking around the woods quickly, scanning for any movement,
questioning, hoping, wishing that someone would come back to stop her.
No one
came.
She
jumped.
A/N: K, so you may have noticed, if you've read
this before, that all I did was change the format a bit and make a few
corrections, separate the prologue, and make a lot of minor adjustments. Hopefully, though, you'll see an
improvement. If not…^^;