"Time flows," said a voice. "but in one direction. It will not turn for you, my darling."

She whipped her head around once more to see a figure looming directly in front of her. Her eyes trailed up the length of the figure's body to be met with a hard shaped face and long emerald hair. The figure's face was hidden behind a black mask that was impossible to see through.

"What are you doing?" she asked calmly.

"What am I doing?" It asked. "What are you doing? Wasting fourteen years for a lonesome thing like me?"

A dark smile crept upon its face; white teeth bearing through a black smog surrounding its face. The young woman knew she was not talking to the dragon she knew, but still questioned it as if she knew it well. The figure slowly knelt down and met her eye to eye; however, it had no eyes. Just a gleaming white smile with a plain black face. Its hair wavered around its head but she did not budge.

"I have given up, you no longer matter to me. I have my own life to live. I have my own time, and you can't take that away anymore."

It moved its face closer. The creature let its breath roll on to her pale skin.

"So you think, eh? Maybe we will take a trip back, back to the beginning of time? Our time?"

A chuckle ripped through the air and everything turned colorless. The backdrop of the field turned to black and faded away like smeared paint on a messy canvas. The grass melted into the ground turning into black guck that enveloped the girls feet. The wind also ceased, leaving a relentless silence that would haunt her once again.

"The beginning?"


All those years waiting, waiting patiently and consciously, had been for nothing. She tried to hope. That's all she could so right? At the age of twenty-five, waiting for this long was starting to get childish. Waiting this long, wasting this much time, had it been for nothing? The years had passed by in a blur and the years of her youth gone with the wind. Adulthood, before she knew it, surrounded her and whisked her in an unknown world without bathhouses and dragons.

High school came and went, her friends had come and gone. She wished that maybe, just maybe, she could've spent that time with some of her friends or doing things she had so wanted to do. This young woman wasn't into material items of sorts, her life could have been bereft of them, and nothing wouldn't have mattered. She would have wasted all the time she had back then on waiting for her dragon and doing the things she loved.

Time, it was a precious thing, a thing that only flowed in one direction and never went back. It held memories that could either be remembered or forgotten, that was for the person to decide. She wished that time would go back, go back to the time she had at the bathhouse, but even she knew, time didn't flow backwards.

So now, that is why she had this regret of wasting all that time. If he would've come, that doubt would've never came. She knew deep down though that this regret was simply something of her imagination. The young woman knew she would continue to wait for him. Continue to wait for him until time would end, but for now, she had to get home, continue on with the life she had, not the one she dreamed of.

And with the time it took her to get home, she would still think of him. The time he could have been with her, the time she had lost waiting.


"HAKU!"

She found herself screaming that as she blinked at the world before her. A sunrise? She wasn't just looking at this was she? A peculiar feeling ran through her petite body. Wait, petite? She looked down to find a child's body in place of her adult one. Her throat ached at the fact she had just screamed her soul out to a never ending sky of pinks and oranges, but why? A wave of realization hit her and her frail body stumbled back. A child once more?

"So you think, eh? Maybe we will take a trip back, back to the beginning of time? Our time?"

The beginning of her suffering? Is this what she was doomed to? To relive the fact she dwelled in a fairy tale for fourteen years? Time was not supposed to go back for her though, was it no? Or does it flow back at its own will? For its own pleasure? Did it abide only by its own rules and torture the weak and relentless to never-ending nightmares?

In the end, it was just an instance, one which she wouldn't see Haku.

In the end, one that would leave her waiting.

In the end, one that would leave her lonely.