Wing Child
Set in a time five years after Hitomi Kanzaki returns from Gaea, Wing Child will follow old and new characters alike. Currently, Hitomi is in her third year of college, and though she still dreams of her time on Gaea, she is gradually beginning to forget the promise she made to Van, and believe that everything was just a figment of her imagination.
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I sought with my hands… feeling.. But not. Seeing…. Nothing.
I held on to him with my hands… yearning.. But not. Loving….. But…
The black night shattered in an instant amidst a swirl of the blackest of feathers. Too numb to register fear, she stood there. Wondering. Dream? But when she finally did raise her hands, absently bringing them to her face, the too-real tang of hot blood paralyzed her long enough for the vision to change, bringing her to the edge of a bottomless chasm she had left far behind the night before, but now…
BEHIND YOU!
The shout put her in motion, turning she was expecting almost anything, a giant… Guymelef… but no, it was nothing. Just her bloodstained hands, and…
Nothing.
There was nothing now, nothing but the sensation of falling, until even that was gone….
Gone….
But for a single white feather that floated at her side, always.
I'll never leave you…no matter what.
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Started awake, Hitomi Kanzanki wondered, and not for the first time, why the seemingly senseless dreams always brought her to tears the next morning. Her pillow was soaked again, further proof of her weakness, as were the damp tangles of her shoulder length hair. But no matter how hard she tried, her memories of the dreams were nothing but illusions, mist maidens amid a storm of depression and self doubt. Both of which were not at all unusual states for the young college student to be in these days. Bah, no use dwelling on the bad things this early, there are more then enough hours in the day to feel appropriately sorry for myself. She berated herself silently, turning over and opening her eyes.
Blinking back the remnants sleep, she glanced at her bedside table where her alarm clock was ringing shrilly, announcing the beginning of the day in a most terrible fashion. Oddly, the simple machinery comforted her, and she gently turned it off and sat up, letting the lightweight sateen sheet fall from her shoulders gracefully. The simple black clock was the one thing she had brought with her from home, and despite its high pitched tone, she found the piece a suiting reminder of her younger years. Life at home after her, NO! Her green eyes hardened as she forcibly rethought that pattern.
Life during her sophomore year in high school had been rough. Her love for Amano was quite unceremoniously trampled on by dreams she now couldn't remember… and his blossoming love for her best friend Yukari. At the time, she had wished them well, never thinking that seeing them together could wound her over and over again, and in ways she would have thought impossible. But it did, until she just stopped seeing them, averting her eyes at school, begging off from social interactions like frightened deer. Then her mom had fallen mysteriously ill. Her father had to beat the hospital every day, leaving Hitomi in charge of her younger brother… also forcing her to quit the track team. Then they got the news, cancer…. lung cancer. Her father hadn't answered her when she asked how long mom had to live, but instead of shielding her, that silence only cut through her like a knife.
Her junior and senior years barely register in her mind now, except as an endless wave of examinations and one brief brilliant flash where her mother had been brought specially from the hospital to see Hitomi's graduation ceremony. They said she was fighting the cancer.. That treatments were successful, and Hitomi had smiled. That was the last real smile Hitomi remembered wearing, since right afterwards her mother had suffered a massive relapse, forcing her to be kept in the hospitals intensive care unit, where she was today, breathing with assistance, and painfully aware of every staggering breath… every tear her husband, daughter, and son shed for her.
So Hitomi had stopped crying, except in dreams, and wore a porcelain mask for a face… her face shaped face and a smile shaped smile, where no one would ask her questions like "How are you?" instead asking nothing at all… allowing her to remain silent. An observer.
That was what she really was now, an observer. Society didn't fear her, nor did it exclude her, she was allowed to mingle and dwell with the rest of her fellow man.. But somehow she felt apart from it. Her friends grew distant, but never really left her. She would still go out with them, sometimes to watch a movie she never remembered, other times to visit a favorite pizzeria where they would meet up with more people. As an observer, Hitomi was silent unless spoken too, her expression carefully constructed to not offend, but not to invite either.
Now in college, her only friend was Yukari… the stoic redhead who refused to 'give up,' the only one who she had told about her visions and the dreams back in high school.
...the only one who believed them, since Hitomi no longer believed them herself.
Morosely irritated with her mental reflections now, Hitomi shook herself back to the present, and swung out of bed. She had class to attend, and even if she didn't feel particularly up to the task, she wouldn't allow herself to slip academically. Academia was her haven now, as it had become back in high school when she no longer had the track team to find sanctuary. After all, history was already written, and it didn't care about an insignificant twenty-something in 21st century Japan. Girls like her didn't make history books and change the world.
Pulling herself together was a little more involved then it had been back in high school. She had the freedom to pick her own clothes now, and she even indulged in a little make up with a faint shimmer of lipgloss to accent what Yukari joking called the only non-boyish thing about her.. Her lips. She was, however, mortally glad that her University did not require a dress code, other the professional decency, and had she been the sort, she might have burned the dreadful uniforms she had been forced to wear back in secondary school. But she wasn't that sort, in fact that thought hadn't originally crossed her mind, having instead been proposed by a gleeful Yukari the last day of classes. She had also smiled then, now that she thought about it.
Pondering that memory, Hitomi made a sudden decision to talk to Yukari later the day, perhaps rekindle something of that old friendship over lunch. It wasn't as if she didn't enjoy her friend's company, nor that of others... not really. Thinking about it more, she realized she may even miss the old times, and the friends she used to have when she had been Hitomi the Fortune Teller, Hitomi the Runner, Hitomi the Approachable. Depressing as life was now, there was a time when even the depressed had enough, and today was turning out to be one of those "Enough!" days.