Disclaimer: I don't own TMM. What I do own is the main idea of this fic.
The night was still young and the air was slightly cooler than usual. Everything had some kind of eerie silence attached to it, a dead stillness and the buildings had some kind of ghastliness that kept the passers away from their walls, but there was no sign of danger. There were no blades glistening in the moonlight and no sound of material rubbing against material that signified the enemy getting closer to the target. Also, Ichigo's senses were calm as she strode down the street with her backpack tossed carelessly against one of her shoulders.
While many people thought of this night as one of the creepiest, she thought of it as one of the most serene. The Halloween. Smooth sea of blackness. But where were the children dressed in fancy costumes ?
Usually, there were pirates, princesses and ghosts, but here and there a vampire or an alien made an appearance.
Alien?
Ichigo whipped her head from left to right in search of green.
No alien tonight. She sighed.
At last, she got to spend the evening in the middle of her family and then she was going to take a good night's rest, without wondering whether someone'll tap at her window or wake her up with an insistent stare.
"I'm home." She announced, as she closed the door behind her with one foot.
The yellow light in the hall spiked her eyes as she looked up toward the staircase. The difference of light between the outside and the inside was pretty distressing.
Shrugging her shoulders to get rid of the stiffness in her back, she peaked through the open door into the kitchen.
Her mother had a sad smile on her face as she stood next to her seated father and they both looked down toward the table at a – what was that?
"Hey, guys. What are you doing?"
They both looked up as Ichigo entered the room with a confused look upon her face. Her father stared at her for a while, as if scanning her from head to toe and a look of melancholy crossed his peanut brown eyes.
And, as a matter of fact, her mother did the same. But still, she was the first one to take a step away from where Shintaro sat and snatched the kitchen knife from the counter.
Ichigo froze.
Her father got up and headed to the door. Both of his hands were empty, his face was now blank, but the eyes glinted strangely. It was like a shark beneath the ocean's surface, a look of malevolence drown in the depth of his brown irises.
Ichigo tensed and got ready to sprint up the stairwell if necessary.
But she hadn't got the chance, because her father's hands sneaked around her own, bringing them both back and bending them so that he kept her immobilized.
Then Sakura lunged and the magenta haired girl that stared in shock at the knife as it was ready to be buried deep within her belly.
The impact her head made with another solid object threw both her body and the other one back. She landed soundlessly in her bed while the object she hit fell to the floor with a thud. Then it got up as if it was alive and came right toward her…
She screamed. Somebody had to hear her before it was too late! She was going to be killed, for Godsakes!
But the sounds were muffled by a hand and she scratched it with her nails until she was sure the person in front of her – who now moved behind her so that could stop her from thrashing around – started bleeding and swore vehemently.
"Stop it, dammit!"
She smelled the blood and she became even more agitated. Someone was in her room. At night.
She did the only thing she could think of, she bit down hard and jumped away from the mattress.
She hit the closet, head first. And she fell, but two arms caught her before she would have broken something against the floor.
Glass shattered and touched her feet and her nightstand stood upside down next to the bed. What the hell?
The person behind her started saying something but was cut short by another one.
"Ichigo, are you alright?" A voice shouted from the other side of the door. And that's when she stopped moving.
The boy behind her was panting and tensing. Her mother was freaking out in the hall. Her father knocked at her door, to get her open it up.
It was as if the fog that draped over her mind was lifting slowly, one inch at a time and she started to distinguish the form of the objects around her. And she had something in her hand. The medallion.
In her head a circle of words kept repeating. Metamorphose. Mew. Enemy. Fight. Dream.
Dream?
And she realized it had been , indeed, a dream. No parent would want his kid dead. No one murdered their children if they loved them. Her parents would never do that. It was sick.
She was crazy.
And she was calming down thanks to a warm chest against her back.
Ichigo blushed. This shouldn't be happening.
Untangling herself from between the other's limbs, she took a deep breath and shouted back:
"Yeah. I'm okay. I tripped over… something."
There was a moment or two when she just waited for the response, trying to hide her face from the alien's eyes. Her cheeks were burning with embarrassment.
"You sure? You're not hurt, right?"
"I'm okay." Ichigo repeated, this time more relaxed and fixed Kish with her eyes.
"Okay, sweetie. Do you need something?"
The boy looked as if he just came from a good fight, and got his ass beaten.
"No. I said I'm okay!"
As her parents responded, she added on a low tone to the one in front of her.
"What do you think you are doing here in the middle of the night?"
With a confused look on his face and an irritated twitch of one of his ears, he responded.
"I just stopped you from getting yourself killed."
The alien sat down on the edge of her bed as she wiped away the blood on his arms. The scratches were deep and didn't stop bleeding until she washed them with hydrogen peroxide. She couldn't look up to meet his eyes, because she was too ashamed of what she had just done.
Mentally, she smacked away that thought.
It was his fault, too. She added. Why was he even there, in the middle of the night, standing above her bed?
Inwardly, she sighed, and before she could stop herself she got up to inspect the bruise on his forehead.
She was sure her own forehead had one, too. She hit him pretty hard.
She groaned.
No. She shouldn't care whether she hit him or not. She hit herself against his damned forehead, okay? His fault, not hers!
One of Kish's hands locked around her wrist to stop her from bandaging the cuts. He must have noticed the conflict she was having with herself, because he made her sit down next to him and touched her own forehead bump.
Ichigo winced and backed off a little.
Kisshu grimaced as if it hurt him, too, at the same time and whispered, loud enough only for her to hear:
"I'm sorry."
The girl looked puzzled, so he added:
"Because I was there when you woke up and scared you."
He was wrong. Ichigo knew.
"You didn't…" she stopped, pausing to gather her words."I had a bad dream. That's all. I was already freaked out."
"Yeah but I added to it."
And they silenced themselves, letting all the exaplanations go. Anymore words and Ichigo's face will be set aflame. It already felt like she had a sunburn. She didn't expect to feel better, though, when Kisshu's palm gently met one side of the throat. It was cold, even though inside her room the heat was on.
It was, actually, the 31st of October. The Halloween.
Her eyes went to the window. Actually, maybe it was the 1st of November. The sky started to lighten up.
She couldn't contain the yawn any longer, and when she let it out, the alien pushed her back against the mattress, dragging the quilt over her legs and got up.
She panicked.
"Where are you going?" Ichigo asked, without thinking. She was too tired, though, to really care if she asked stupid things.
The alien looked resigned as he stretched his scratched arms behind his head and then backed off from her bed.
"I'll leave, you have to sleep." He explained.
"Well, could you at least stay a little longer, like… fifteen minutes, or so?" The question that rose in the alien's eyes made Ichigo add another thing to her pretty convincing demand.
"Just until I fall asleep, really." But she already said it as her eyelids closed over her eyes.
The muffled okay coming from the alien almost passed unheard by her ears. Almost. And she smiled, knowing that he couldn't say no to something like that. Not now, not ever. So he sat back down, beside her, laying his back against the empty side of the mattress.
She fell fast asleep, snuggling farther into his embrace. Kisshu placed a soft kiss upon her forehead and soon, he was drowning in a deep slumber, too.