"Why Don't You Invite Your New Friend?" by Dr. Abraxas 2011-07-26
Mrs. Higurashi zipped Souta.
"Who did you invite?"
He flipped the hood of the jacket and yanked at its drawstring.
She chuckled at the sight of the outfit and thought my astronaut.
"Donno ... got to see who's left."
The child rocketed out of that temple and into a world of onyx sky and ashy earth. Frost, prickly clump of dew, sparkled as it wafted about air. Yet there was not a hint of fear to be felt about the winter. There was no need to be afraid of the trek. School was nearby and there were always children to be found. Always! Always? Almost always.
Souta was stunned at the corner - it happened again - where Yuki should have been racing to school there was a weepy mother and a somber father speaking to police. There too appeared Kagome's friend from another time and space.
"Aniki Youkai!"
The boy gazed through the tight, scrunched gap of the hood at the figure - the perfect, ageless figure.
They journeyed to school. They cut into a playground where fields where altogether lifeless and decayed like the scape of another world. They found a poster - it was stapled to the trunk of a tree.
A missing child poster.
They gazed as it fluttered against that skeletal, gnarled bulk of what used to be an elm. The poster ... its edges frayed, its image faded. Souta recognized the face; Sesshoumaru, too, although the demon did not utter a word, only replying by whetting lips.
"Have you seen my friend?"
"No."
The image ripped and its pieces sprinkled onto the dirt.
"It was Koji - we played at the temple."
They continued their trek.
The sky glowed shades of red. The earth reflected that new found splendor. The daylight did not spread joy, however, as with each and every step it exposed winter's struggle against life. The work of spring, that all too fragile and brief season, was strewn about shattered, obliterated, like the carnage of a battlefield, at the wake of winter's unyielding, exacting rage.
Yet it was the silence of the children missing that chilled beyond the torment of the season.
"Mom wants to know who I'm inviting to my birthday. I got so many friends, so many friends ... they keep going away. Like Kagome. Only you remain."
At school they were met by Chuan - an older Chinese boy. Souta greeted while Sesshoumaru again stared and whet lip. Everybody, Chuan said, was upset about Yuki. A teacher said the body had been found. Like that a ghastly urban rumor continued its spread through the whispers of students.
"Souta."
The child raised his head, hood parting, falling to reveal a face ruddy with cold.
"Why don't you invite your new friend?"
END