Chapter 15: Fifty Mirrors

Omg…. A short chapter title! Lol. Please enjoy this chapter, even if it is mostly set in Tohru's dreams it is very significant.

Painful screeches of agony ring through the ears of the young lady. Someone's horrible suffering was disturbing her sleep. The yelling grew louder and louder by the second and she flinches as her dream-self takes a couple steps forward. As her footsteps lightly echo down the extensively droning hallway, she blinks and winces as she attempts to make out the details of a door just a ways down. Quickly, she runs closer and - more eagerly- she reaches. Her hand finally takes a firm hold of the icy doorknob and for a short moment, she pauses to listen. The yelling was even louder then before and almost deafening. It was an excruciating thing to listen to.

She turns the knob and closes her eyes as she pulls it open. Entering the room with her eyes shut, dream-Tohru stumbles around for a moment then decides that having her eyes open would be much safer. After reopening her eyes, she spots something fairly shocking. In the darkest part of the room, in the depths of the back, against the wall, there was a stand with a small mirror on it. The mirror itself was upright and being held in its erect position by small, dyed, black slabs of wood.

"A… A mirror?" her voice in the dream echoes loudly and gives off the exact impression of confusion. It felt as if she were really there. Experiencing something strange. "But… there… there was yelling and screaming. Are the people okay? Maybe… oh no… what if they are locked up some where!" Dream-Tohru exclaims in worry and looks around the room frantically. "Hello!" she shouts hopefully, "Where are you! I'll help you as much as I can! Answer… please..." her voice grew almost quiet and very desperate. She couldn't bear the fact that she may fail these prisoners.

The dream version of Tohru spins around and runs to one of the four walls in the room. The wall she went to –the left one- was covered in at least fifty mirrors. Each portion of glass within the mirrors reflected her back in many different ways. In one mirror, Tohru was all dolled up and she was wearing a beautiful dress and magnificent, shimmering jewelry. Contradicting that reflection was a version of Tohru that showed her as a complete bum. In that second reflection, Tohru was wearing torn clothes and was covered in mud and soot. It was almost as if she were being forced to clean chimneys and separate the dirt from the grass. Other mirrors showed her as a clown or a president, a veterinarian, a circus performer, and even a doctor. But for some reason, none of those came close to what she wanted in life. There was a variety of things the mirrors showed her but there was so many.

"Lover? Dog tamer? Queen? Servant, slave, monster, devil, angel…" she whispers as she deciphers what each mirror shows. She goes through each mirror slowly not completely understanding how she can be any of the things depicted. Tohru always felt that she was the kind of girl that would do some kind of thing that involved cleaning and being nice to others. "What is with these mirrors…." She mutters under her breath hearing it echo through her sleeping ears.

The yelling begins once again, cracking through the thin, eerie ambiance of the room that her dream created. She spins around and hugs herself tightly in fright. "Who…whose there!" Tohru shouts looking around becoming more and more scared by the second. The shouting got louder and louder and before long, the glass in twenty-five of the mirrors crack, fall to pieces, and shatter as they clash against the black, marble floor. Her eyes grow wide and she stumbles backwards, staring at the small, but many, pieces of glass that was all over the floor.

Some of the yelling stopped the moment the twenty-five mirrors broke, but there was still more moans and groans of pain and torture. Finally an elderly voice yells, "Save us! Please! Bring us home!" and it echoes throughout the shadowy room.

An icy feeling of fright runs up her spine and then circulates through her body making her feel chilly and get the goose bumps. Her eyes wander all around the room in hopes of spotting the old man that was calling to her for help. It remained as empty as ever. All she saw in the room was the mirror in the back that was on the table and the once fifty mirrors on the wall she was closest too. Suddenly, she locks her eyes on the bottom few mirrors that was a part of the –now- twenty- five mirror set. There was a person's face in it. An old man's yelling expression was locked inside the mirror.

Without thinking, she goes towards the mirrors and slams her elbow into that single one and shouts in pain. Blood began to soak her sleeve thoroughly until it was a dark red. She looks at it and begins to shake over and over again. "Ah… are… are you okay?" she whispers weakly, looking at some of the shattered glass on the floor in search of a few shards that were red from her blood. "Old… Old man? Are you free?" Tohru asks another question wondering if it was the mirrors that held the screaming people's souls.

"Thank you…" the voice trembles and fades off.

She smiles and looks at her elbow, "It… hurts so much…" she lets her voice trail off and be consumed by the darkness of the room.

Out of nowhere, more screaming erupts throughout the room. Tohru stumbles backwards and almost loses her footing on the glass. She weakly shuffles back to the mirrors and picks up a thick shard of glass from the ground and one by one she tosses it at the mirror, hoping that large shard doesn't break each time. Gasps fill the room after twenty-three of the mirrors are broken. The old man's mirror was originally the twenty-fifth mirror and then she broke twenty-two other mirrors on that same wall. There was one left and she didn't have the heart to destroy it. She slowly approaches that single mirror and presses her hand up against the glass of it. "This one…" tears drip from her eyes, glisten, and illuminate the room from all the glass on the ground, "isn't a mirror. It's… a picture." She pulls it off the wall, opens the back of it, and pulls out the picture. "A photo… of…" The dream slowly disappears before she can finish her sentence.

"Miss Honda! Please wake up!" the voice desperately shouts.

The door of the room swings open and another man comes in and stands at the bedside. "Wake up you ditz!" he exclaims. He takes hold of her arm and pulls it out from under the covers. "Bl… Blood," he stutters weakly and pulls her out of bed. "Wake up Tohru!" he yells as if in pain, "Please!" he let that last word come out as a slight gasp.

Her eyes open and she smiles at the person holding her up. "Kyo…" she whispers and then hugs him. "I had the most horrible dream. There were mirrors and people yelling. Then… I found a picture of you and my mother. It…. was so strange. That was the only part that made me happy. Then…it all vanished." Tohru explains and then turns around to see Yuki picking something up from her bed and his eyes growing wide as he looks at it.

"What's that you damn rat?" Kyo questions almost eagerly. Yuki turns the paper around and Kyo stares at in incredulously. "The… picture. Is that the one you saw Tohru?" he asks looking at her curiously. As he sees her nod, he bites his bottom lip and looks down at her elbow. "How… did you cut your elbow? Did you like wake up in the middle of the night, get all clutzy, and hurt yourself or something? Tell me!" he says practically ordering her to answer his questions.

She looks at Kyo and answers, "N-no Kyo-kun. I didn't get up at all last night. You… I walked into your door, remember?"

"I hit you with the door by accident." He groans, looking at the ground.

Tohru giggles and continues with her explanation, "I elbowed a mirror in my dream because I was so frightened. I didn't know what else to do so… I thought quickly. I freed an old man, Kyo-kun! He…" she thinks for a moment, tapping her chin with a finger that was attached to her uninjured arm, "was wearing your bracelet Kyo-kun," Tohru smiles proudly because she remembered what she was going to say and said it.

"My… bracelet?" he repeats quietly, looking at his wrist. "The Juzu beads…. Shishou's grandfather?" he exclaims in disbelief.

"His grandfather was the cat! I forgot all about that…" Yuki says getting to his feet and walks towards them.

Tohru looks at Kyo then Yuki and then back to Cat-san. "I … freed him. He must have been captive for quite some time." She says softly as she falls backward in pain and lands on the bed.

"Tohru!" "Miss Honda!" Kyo and Yuki call in the same instant.

"I'm fine." She rubs her elbow and ends up cutting her finger. "AH!" Tohru yelps in pain and lifts her hand revealing a small cut in her palm that was carefully trickling out her blood.

Kyo and Yuki run around the room frantically and then end up saying, "We'll be right back!" and run down stairs in search of gauze pads and sprays, bandages and ointments, as well as crutches and even more boxes of bandages.

She looks at her hand and then her elbow. "Shigure-san is going to be mad about all the stains on the bed sheets…" Tohru whispers and lifts her arms up so that the blood would eventually drip onto her clothes instead of the once completely spotless bed. Hearing Kyo and Yuki hurrying up the steps, she drops her arms in her lap as she sits up on the edge of the bed.

"Here Tohru!" Kyo yells competitively and runs to her, dropping to his knees, and grabbing her hand. He comfortably wraps a bandage around her hand after rubbing a disinfectant ointment on the large cut. "How's that!" he exclaims proudly, pouncing to his feet. "No one can rub in an ointment or wrap a bandage better then me, " he glances at Yuki who was working on the opposite arm due to her elbow, "Especially that damn Yuki!" he yells angrily at Yuki, shaking his arm around as he points at him frantically.

"Don't you ever shut up?" Yuki says softly sounding halfway annoyed.

"NO! I don't!" he yells at him, stomping one foot in his direction to make it seem intimidating.

Yuki sighs and says, "Well you should. You'll give Miss Honda an even worse headache."

Kyo's eyes go a little narrow and then he looks at Tohru and sighs, turning around to look at the ground while blushing incredibly. "You're lucky you can use Tohru as your defense every five seconds…" he mutters roughly and then glances at Yuki over his shoulder, his face a little less red now, "You suck at wrapping bandages… wimpy rat," Kyo grunts and crosses his arms over his chest.

"Shut up already." Yuki says sounding a little angrier then moments ago.

"Make me!" Kyo challenges turning around to face him, pointing his finger at Yuki once more. Seeing Tohru flinch and wince at their yelling, Kyo sighs and says, "I'm sorry, Tohru. I wont yell again… while your injured…" he adds the last part at the end because he knows he is physically and mentally incapable of not yelling for more then a few days.

Tohru smiles at the both of them and then lies on her bed cozily, nestling her head into her pillow. "Thank you Kyo-kun. Thank you Yuki-kun." She says happily as she closes her eyes just to rest for a little bit.

"Your welcome Honda-san." Yuki says bowing his head a little to show respect.

"No problem…" Kyo replies and hardly bows his head because he's too embarrassed to. "Just… don't get hurt… in your dreams again." He whispers and leaves the room.

I just had to add some classic Kyo and Yuki competition and yelling. It felt like the perfect chance to get it in, even though this chapter is EXtremely significant.