A/N: Well, here we are again. Thanks to all my reviewers. It's very gratifying to know someone likes what I've written enough to tell me so :)
Disclaimer: To riff on part three: never mine and never will be.
Imaginary
Paper flowers
It was time.
Kagome rose from her position near the fire and crossed quietly to her bag where it lay by her kitsune-occupied bedroll, trying not to wake her sleeping companions.
There was something she needed to do, now, before she lost her nerve.
Carefully opening the backpack, she shifted the contents around, digging down to the bottom where her goal lay carefully concealed. Her fingers closed over the stiff cardboard, and she withdrew her prize.
I linger in the doorway
Of alarm clock screaming monsters
Calling my name
Let me stay
Where the wind will whisper to me
Where the raindrops as they're falling tell a story
Returning to her previous position, she rubbed her fingers over the cover of the book she had retrieved, as she had done many, many times before.
Reluctantly, wishing she could go on without this need for a final revisiting of the love she was finally leaving behind, she began flipping through the pages, examining their contents.
Drawings.
Poems.
An origami rose, carefully folded.
All the ornaments and effusions of a teenager in the throes of her first love.
She hesitated at one page, remembering the scene depicted, an image of Inuyasha's human form sleeping on the terrifying night when he had been forced to reluctantly share his greatest secret.
You smell good, he had told her then, his voice a whisper. Wait a minute! You said you hated my scent! Well ... I was lying.
Was that when she had fallen in love with him? she wondered, not noticing as tears fell and washed the lines of ink away.
In my field of paper flowers
And candy clouds of lullaby
I lie inside myself for hours
And watch my purple sky fly over me
Slowly, rhythmically, she turned the stiff paper sheets, smiling at the memories contained between them even as her tears continued to fall. She let herself wallow in the memories they conjured. Lingered nostalgically over the dreams they had captured.
She had written that poem when she had decided to go back to Inuyasha after seeing him with Kikyou.
Was that when she had begun to build her fantasy that one day Inuyasha would be hers?
Don't say I'm out of touch
With this rampant chaos your reality
I know well what lies beyond my sleeping refuge
The nightmare I built my own world to escape
She had always known that Inuyasha loved Kikyou, even before the priestess had been resurrected. It had been one of the first stories Kaede had told her. But still she had dreamed.
Maybe that was it. Maybe she had always known that Inuyasha would never truly be hers, and that was why she had been able to love him so passionately. Because there was no risk of him returning her feelings.
Or was the truth much simpler than that? Had she merely been refusing to admit to herself the truth that she now saw so clearly?
Had she built a dream of the future to avoid the reality of unrequited love?
In my field of paper flowers
And candy clouds of lullaby
I lie inside myself for hours
And watch my purple sky fly over me
How many hours had she poured into this paper shrine? she wondered. Stolen hours in the night, long after Sango had fallen asleep in some room Miroku had swindled, or in the future on one of her increasingly rare visits to her family.
She had poured her soul into her work as she dreamed fluffy pink dreams of Inuyasha and love and their future.
Drying her eyes, she tore the first page out and tossed it onto the embers of the evening's cookfire, watching impassively as it shriveled into ashes and lifted away on the updraft.
And then the next page.
And the next.
Swallowed up in the sound of my screaming
Cannot cease for the fear of silent nights
Oh how I long for the deep sleep dreaming
The goddess of imaginary light
Long after the last of the pages had been swallowed by the dying flames, Kagome was startled when Sango woke and sat up.
"Are you all right?" she asked, crossing to kneel by her friend. Sango smiled.
"Yes. But it seemed like you could use some rest, so I'll stand watch until dawn. You sleep."
Kagome smiled forcedly. It was true that she needed to rest after the day's traumas, but she didn't want to face the dreams she knew would come. Resigning herself, she crossed to her bedroll, nudging Shippo to one side of the mat and curling herself around the sleeping kit.
Nestling down, she closed her eyes and prayed to sleep dreamlessly.
She had drifted to the warm edge of unconsciousness when she heard a rustling in the bushes. Inuyasha? she wondered vaguely. She pushed the thought away and was rapidly nearing oblivion when she heard Sango cry out.
Startled, Kagome rolled over and opened her eyes. As the situation broke in on her she leapt to her feet, grabbing her bow as she rose and swiftly drawing an arrow.
There was a lizard youkai in the clearing with them, hissing and facing off against the exterminator. Sango had her boomerang out, but the creature was moving too quickly for her to get a shot at it.
Kagome nocked the arrow to her bowstring, but before she could draw it the youkai's tail lashed out, knocking her bow out of her hands. She felt a solid thud against her stomach and instinctively brought up one hand to cover the damaged area. The pain faded and she looked down.
At first her mind refused to process what her eyes were seeing.
In my field of paper flowersAnd candy clouds of lullaby
I lie inside myself for hours
And watch my purple sky fly over me
"I'm ... bleeding?"
Paper flowersA/N: Writing this story is a *lot* harder than I thought it would be at first. The music I'm writing to is wonderfully angsty, but let's face it, angst is a one shot, not a plot for a chaptered fic. And I keep wanting to wander off in directions the structure doesn't allow. Oh well. It's been good for 'The Bargain', which I've finally restarted work on.
With that thought, I'd like to get on a bit of a soapbox, because I'm still pissed off about a conversation I had earlier today.
The reason I stopped writing for several months is because I was suffering from major depression. I was almost non-functional for about three of those months, and when I started drawing pictures on my skin with a knife I decided it was time to get myself to a doctor and try medication since I obviously wasn't pulling out of it on my own. So now I'm drugged into happiness and I probably will be for a large chunk of the rest of my life: it was my third episode (I'm in my mid 20's) and the probability of my having another is now around 90%.
And now the preaching: if you know someone who's depressed, try to help. Do some research online to find out what the best way to do it would be, talk to a counselor, whatever. Even if all you can do is to make sure they know you care whether they live or die, it matters more than you can believe. And if they end up on anti-depressants, don't treat them as though they're "giving up" or "copping out" by taking medication instead of "just getting their act together". It's not that f*cking easy. Trust me. I've done it both ways and I know. *gives her brother the finger and gets down*
