The Next Chapter

My life, my love, my drive, it came from
Pain!
You made me a, you made me a believer

[Believer: Imagine Dragons]

For the sake of my beloved,

Now, what can I do?

There aren't any dreams that won't come true

I truly believe

[Itooshi Hito No Tame Ni: Fushigi Yuugi opening theme]

The god Suzaku opened his eyes on the blank white of his bedroom ceiling, and heard his mother's indrawn breath as ash fell through the air like snow and caught on his face and clothes. The bed swayed dizzily under him, and he closed his eyes again, fingers splaying and digging into the quilt as if he were trying to stop himself from falling off.

"Daisuke?" His mother's voice sounded as if it were coming from a long way away, choked and uncertain, and he heard the soft noise of her feet crushing charred scraps of the book into the carpet.

"Oh, Daisuke."

Then he was in his mother's arms, crying with great, gulping sobs that shook him apart. Miaka held him close.

"I know," she whispered. "I know, my darling. I know."

And he buried his face in her shoulder as he broke down.

Some time, a long time, later his mother tucked him into bed, bending over him with a kiss and a gentle hand to brush back his hair, but every time he closed his eyes he could see Marin in the darkness, her hand stretched out to him as she disappeared in a shower of sparks. The harder he had tried to reach out to save her, the faster Suzaku's fire had consumed her.

The world had changed without her. Daisuke got out of bed the next morning when his mother called him. He put on his clothes, the jeans and tshirt feeling strange to him, and he mechanically ate whatever his mother put in front of him, but the warmth had gone out of the air and summer was fading into the chill of a dying season. As the nights grew longer, Daisuke found himself walking in the dark streets, unable to sleep for the nightmares. There was a hollowness behind everything, as if it were all a façade that he could push through if he reached out. The concrete wall beside him didn't seem solid enough, and the yellow light that drifted over him was chalky and wrong. There was no wind, no rain, no warmth, he realised. There hadn't been since he returned.

The days passed. At school, his classmates whispered, their glances sliding away from him when he walked past, and teachers left him sunk in his unresponsive abstraction. At least he wasn't causing trouble.

He came and went, moving like a ghost through the house while his parents exchanged worried looks and silent conversations. When his mother spoke his name, he could hardly hear her through the empty roar in his own ears. He climbed the stairs to his bedroom.

From where Daisuke lay splayed on his bed, staring up at the bland white ceiling, he could sense his mother in the doorway of his room.

"Your homeroom teacher called again today. He's worried about you."

Daisuke said indifferently, "I've been going to school."

"I'm worried about you, too. I think it's time you started to keep the promise you made to Marin," she said gently, but there was an implacable note in her voice. Daisuke sat up, and saw the sheaf of blank paper in her arms. "It's time to write the next chapter."

His mother dropped the stack onto his desk. There was a scrap of frayed and antique silk sitting on top of it marked with almost illegible characters and the darker, newer translation in Marin's careful handwriting. Daisuke sucked in a stinging lungful of air at the sight. For a long time he stared at the empty pages and the shred of the Records.

"What if I can't do it?" he asked her a little shakily, and looked up at her with all the raw desperation he felt painted on his face. "What if it doesn't work?"

His mother put her arms around him, cuddling him close as she had when he was a child, and he felt her gently rocking him.

"If anyone can make miracles happen," she whispered into his hair, "you can, my darling boy."

She left eventually, and Daisuke pulled the paper towards him. His fingers trembled and steadied as he uncapped the pen, glanced at the silk piece that was all that was left of the Universe of the Four Gods, and inked the first, careful line of the incantation.

"The four palaces of the heavens. The four corners of the earth. I invoke them all and call them into being…" he breathed into the empty page and the black symbols that filled it, and he felt something spark under his fingertips.

He started to draw the story panels, feeling the pull of his art. He sketched in the wide sweep of the temple courtyard as he'd first seen it, and the stone steps rising up to the temple against a clear blue sky. When he slept that night he dreamed of sweeping over the mountains and rivers and the high walls of Rongyao on wings of fire.

Daisuke woke from his dreams in a sweat, and the days that followed were full of feverish creation. The world was rewriting itself under his hand. The wish had worked, he could feel it. At least Marin didn't give her life for nothing … He flinched away from that thought abruptly.

Images of the Seishi flowed from his pen. He drew them happy. Meixing he drew incandescent with joy in the middle of a field, her lap full of flowers, while Tian Zhen ruffled her hair fondly as he passed.

He was a little startled to find himself drawing Jing Yun, prosperous and smiling, not in the streets of Rongyao but leaning against the prow railing of a ship as he watched the dolphins leaping through the waves ahead. It felt right, though, when Zhu Yi came to stand beside Jing Yun, his inked features more relaxed and unguarded than Daisuke had ever seen the archer in all their travels as Jing Yun reached out a hand and they leaned into each other.

He drew a village rebuilt and populated, and Zhang Yong surrounded by his family, unshadowed by dreams of tengu and wishes.

The panel that made Daisuke grin, though, was the drawing of Zhao Zifeng's sour expression as Xuelian firmly plucked the calligraphy brush from his hand and forced a cup of some concoction into it instead. Judging from Zifeng's face, it tasted as nasty as it looked.

"You've been sitting over the land reports all day," Daisuke could almost hear Xuelian's voice saying sternly. "I need to go down into the town to take this tonic to Cao Guang's family, and as your doctor, I'm ordering you to come with me. You need the fresh air and exercise before that frown sets between your brows permanently, and I…" Daisuke drew the soft hesitation, and the flurry of petals around her. "I would like your company."

Daisuke drew Zhao Zifeng setting aside the paperwork that was his now, his lands and his people now that his father was gone. He drew Xuelian's downcast eyes as she waited for him, but Zhao Zifeng's smile as he glanced down at the doctor's smooth head drew itself.

Dawn rose on Daisuke slumped over a growing pile of pages, his head buzzing with the story. In the bright light of day, Daisuke felt a strangeness to everything around him. For weeks, while he feverishly drew the Universe, he wandered through his school, barely seeing the other students pushing past him, and everywhere there was something just outside his line of sight, something just beyond the threshold of sound. When he reached out to push open the classroom door, he almost expected to feel the smooth, heavy wood of Zifeng's gate under his hand. When he closed his eyes, leaning his head on his arms, he thought he could almost hear the market place in Rongyao behind the cheerful chaos of his maths class.

When Daisuke heard the thin cry of a new god's birth echo between the worlds, though, it was clear in his ears and sharp as glass. Daisuke sat up with a jerk, and his chair clattered on the floor. The teacher looked around with a frown.

"So glad to see that you're still with us, Mr Sukunami."

Daisuke stared at the teacher blankly. In the panel he had been drawing, hidden by his maths textbook, it almost seemed that the dark-inked dragon writhed on the page, and in another world Daisuke felt Seiryuu as He opened His eyes for the first time and roared. Outside, there was a low rumble of thunder, and Daisuke turned to see rain running heavily down the glass of the window.

The rain seemed to have done strange things, washing the hollowness out of everything, and the things that he touched had substance now. He walked out of the school gates staring in something like wonder at the puddles forming on the roads. A group of kids ran past him, holding their schoolbags over their heads in a vain attempt to stay dry, splashing through the rain. Daisuke turned his face up, feeling the rain run over his face and soak into his coat. It was easing a little now as he walked.

That night, after the rain had passed, Daisuke looked out his window at a world washed clean and a sky full of blazing stars and constellations. Then he pulled out the stack of manuscript he'd filled with images and stories of Sky and Earth, and he turned the pages slowly until he reached a blank page. This had to work.

"Out of the ashes," he murmured, and Daisuke picked up his favourite pencil to sketch in the first line of a new story with a shaking hand. Every stroke grew more confident as his heroine flamed into life on the page.

The girl woke up in the library, brushing her dark, wayward hair back from her eyes as she looked around in confusion.

Daisuke inked in the words, "What a strange dream…"

And the girl got to her feet, gathered her bag, and walked out into the night-time streets of Tokyo…

In the brief moments, deep in the middle of the night when everything was absolutely still except the faint scratch of his pencil on the page, Daisuke could sense something new happening. The story he was writing unravelled back through the year behind him like a dropped scroll, and ran on into the future, quickening the pulse in Daisuke's veins.

For weeks after he began her story he startled every time the doorbell rang, hoping against hope that it was her, and he kicked himself for not finding out where she lived. Time and again he found himself outside the gates of Midorikawa Academy. His hand trailed along the iron bars as he looked for her familiar face in the crowd of students flooding out of the gate. Several girls shot him sidelong glances as they passed, turning away to giggle and whisper, but he was unaware of how long he'd been standing there, staring, until one broke away from her friends to run up to him.

"Looking for someone, handsome?" she asked coquettishly, and he gave her an easy grin as he backed away.

"Not this time, darling." He didn't think he could bear to ask and find out that no one here had ever heard of Marin.

As he turned and walked away, he heard the girl call out, "Too bad!" He kept going.

That was the last time he let himself lurk around Midorikawa Academy. They would both be graduating soon and there was no more reason to look for her there. If it had worked, she didn't remember or she would have come looking for him. If it hadn't worked, he wasn't sure he wanted to know.

In the pages, Marin took the entrance exams with highest honours (because of course she did) and was accepted into Tokyo University (Undergraduate arts and sciences, then post-grad in Chinese literature and mythological studies, she whispered to him, and that's what he drew).

He drew the day she faced down her mother and told her that she had other plans for her own life as if he could see it.

She took up shorinji kempo, and Daisuke raised an eyebrow as he paused mid-stroke. Really? He could swear he saw her illustration grin back at him, a glint in her eye. You never know when it might come in handy, she told him.

It all spilled onto the page with an urgency that he could barely keep up with, and it felt like a conversation in his head. It felt like she was there, just out of sight, telling him all about it as he drew her, and gods, how he wished that were true. He poured all of that longing into the artwork that filled up the pages, wanting badly to believe that it was really Marin he was hearing and not just his grieving imagination.

As he drew, he told her about his plans to spend the year ahead in study school and re-sit the entrance exams to the Tokyo University of the Arts. He'd done better than he'd expected in his highschool finals, and his art teacher had promised him a glowing reference if he could get his portfolio together, but a month or two of dedication didn't make up for years of neglected study.

Sometimes he thought he caught glimpses of her in the places he'd drawn her, but never for certain, and somehow he couldn't draw himself into her story. He tried, but those were the pages that felt lifeless under his pen, and ended up in crumpled balls thrown at the wall.

The day he drew the final panel, he sat at his desk, staring at it for a long moment. Finally, he drew an unsteady breath and gathered the papers together.

"Please let this work," he breathed his own desperate wish. "Please bring her back."

Now to wait and see what the future would write for him next.

...

"Oi, Sukunami!"

One of his friends rapped on the glass window of the tiny bookshop, waving at him, and Daisuke looked up from the art book he'd been skimming through and slid it carefully back onto its shelf. He slung his bag over his shoulder and scooped up his sketchbook and the newly bound volume he'd just picked up from the printers and headed out of the shop. Takeo punched Daisuke's shoulder in a friendly way as the door tinkled shut behind him.

"Loved the latest instalment of the webcomic last night," Takeo said, falling into step beside Daisuke. He nodded at the volume in Daisuke's hand. "The Book of Sky and Earth - what's that? Is that your new project? When do we get to read it?"

Daisuke shook his head with a wry grin. "This is something I need to return to the library."

He hitched his bag higher and glanced down at the dark red book.

"And I'm going to be late if I don't get going now," he said. "Later."

He was halfway across the wide plaza in front of the National Library when he saw a handful of guys he'd noticed there before, sidling around one girl after another with suggestive comments and raucous laughter when their targets picked up their pace and hurried away. Daisuke sighed, and strode towards them as they circled another girl.

As he drew closer he caught a glimpse of her flyaway dark hair and pale cheek as she turned away. The biggest punk had looped an arm around her waist, tugging her into him.

"No still means no," the girl said, and Daisuke knew that voice. He was already breaking into a run when he saw the flash of a familiar blade in her hand. The guy yanked his arm from her waist with a stifled shout of fury.

"Ow! You bitch, you stabbed me!"

"Then you shouldn't have put your hands where they don't belong. I barely scratched you," the girl said dismissively, but the four punks were squaring up around her now.

Daisuke could feel himself ignite in a blaze of strange excitement, and the heat felt like something he'd missed badly. It felt good.

His sketchbook and The Book of Sky and Earth scattered across the concrete like petals as they fell. He was on the closest punk before they'd even realised he was there, and the guy dropped in a quiet little heap of ragged coat. Daisuke could feel the marks of Suzaku blaze into life like livid tattoos under his skin. The heat spilled through him and he welcomed it. He was on the next, and the next. He gave a feral little grin.

When he looked around, one of them had taken off and there were two left groaning in the gutter. They would recover. Daisuke flexed his hand.

The one that the girl had dealt with left a trail of blood drops across the plaza, and there was no sign of him now. On the footsteps of the Library, the girl bent to pick up the book that had spilled open. Daisuke knelt quickly to grab his sketchbook, dusting it off with one hand.

She was staring at the open pages.

"Rongyao," she breathed, as if it was something she was calling up from distant memory. She flipped feverishly through the pages, her voice growing more urgent. "I thought I'd just dreamed it. How do you know this place?"

"You could say thank you, sugar," he managed to say as his heart constricted painfully. He couldn't breathe. He suddenly couldn't breathe as she looked up, eyes as dark as a storm cloud and familiar as his own heartbeat. A smoky drift of hair caught across her pale face.

"How… I… " She took a deep breath, still clutching the book in her hands, and there was confusion, recognition, disbelief and growing wonder. "I know you. Have we met?"

Daisuke felt as if there were fireworks thundering through him in time with his heartbeat, raining sparks of fire down his veins.

Daisuke grinned at her, ignoring the fact that his hands were trembling.

"We have now."

"… Daisuke?" she breathed, as if she was testing his name, and his grin grew brighter, fiercer than the sun, hotter than summer. He felt like he could have lit the sky with the joy raging through him.

The incredulous, dawning smile that answered in Marin's eyes was the most beautiful thing that he had ever seen

And a new chapter began.

Ed notes: This has been a labour of love for a while now. If you enjoyed Stars and Fire, I'd be grateful if you let me know. And thank you for reading.