Healing of the Heart

By Sango-chan

Prologue

The four young people sat in a raggedy circle, each one carefully avoiding the other's eyes. All four sets of eyes – amber-gold, violet, brown, and gray – stared fixedly at the ground. Biting her lip to hold back the flow of tears, a teenage girl dressed in a sailor fuku carefully divided the small pile of tiny glasslike shards that lay on her palm. As the girl silently handed two slivers to each of her former friends, the suffocating hush was broken by the dry, muffled sobs of a bushy-tailed child who sat behind the broken group, perched on a bike. For a second, all the people looked in the kitsune's direction, two shards clenched in their hands, frozen by their individual painful memories, and then the spell was broken as a white-haired young man in a red kimono stood up and left without once looking back. One girl watched him go as the tears she had fought to keep away broke loose, streaming down her cheeks from gray eyes. Slowly, the other girl left, taking with her a small cat and a huge boomerang. As she disappeared into the foggy morning mist, the teenager dressed in monk's robes stood and walked off in the opposite direction.

For a few seconds the last girl sat watching the empty landscape around her. Then she turned towards her bike with the young youkai in it and wheeled it slowly towards an old vine-strangled well in the middle of the forest. The girl pushed her bicycle down the dry well shaft first, then held the child and stood on the edge, preparing to jump. She hesitated, looking around the woods quickly, scanning for any movement, questioning, hoping, wishing that someone would come back to stop her.

No one came.

She jumped.

A/N: K, so you may have noticed, if you've read this before, that all I did was change the format a bit and make a few corrections, separate the prologue, and make a lot of minor adjustments. Hopefully, though, you'll see an improvement. If not…^^;