Only In Dreams

by BrokenWish

Three years post-series. Mugen and Fuu have lived different lives, but were destined to see each other again. When they meet again they both struggle with repressed feelings towards each other; while wrestling with their own personal emotional battles. THERE IS A PROBLEM IN THE FIRST FEW CHAPTERS, I'M WORKING ON IT.

1. Prologue

It had been three long and uneventful years since the day she separated from her two companions. For the first year and a half she was lost, not psychically, but emotionally.

Fuu no longer seemed capable of forming human relationships of any kind, she felt completely empty. With her only friends gone and her life goal completed she seemed to have lost her purpose all together; so she wandered.

She acquired odd jobs in different towns, just to make enough money to move on to the next one. Her employers would often beg her to stay, since she was a beautiful single girl traveling alone, but she always kindly refused.

While she was extremely lonely, she just couldn't bring herself to stop moving. Perhaps she hoped that she would run into one of them, or maybe the fear of being abandoned again was so strong that it prevented her from making friends. It had been her idea to split up, but she knew that once the quest was finished they would leave, and for once in her life she wanted it to be on her terms. Knowing that they separated on her terms didn't help her sleep at night, and didn't keep the demons at bay. She knew he was dead, but sometimes he could feel his hands roaming over her body in her sleep, and she would always wake up screaming.

After a year and a half of aimless wandering, she found herself in a small town nestled in the Kiso Valley. It sat on the main "highway" and was miles from Edo and Kyoto, which meant many travelers came though. She quickly acquired a job at one of the tea houses as a waitress, and decided to stay for awhile. The villagers thought she was a rather odd girl, being 17, alone, and so quiet; but they helped her all the same.

The owner of the tea house, Daisuke and his wife, Atsuko, took her in for a time and helped her build a modest house on the outskirts of town so that she could have some privacy. It had taken them a year to build it, but it was a sound house with more than enough room for a young woman. She had only been living it in for three months when her life was suddenly turned upside down again.

Fuu knew that she had chosen this town for a reason, though she would never admit it to anyone. She knew that here, along the highway, that one of them was bound to show up eventually. But she wasn't quite prepared when it happened.