SLEEP DISORDERS

Dreams, Nightmares and Night Terrors

Insomnia

Sleepwalking and Talking

Sleep Paralysis and Hallucinations

Mizuno Ami, propping her pounding head in her hand, eyed with distaste the copious notes under each header as she thumbed through the scarred S volume of the Medical Encyclopedia. They were the notes of either a medical student, which she was, or a very sleep disturbed individual…which, recently, she also was.

She'd crawled out of bed, bleary and red-eyed, dragging herself to class where she'd gone through the motions of learning, but without a single scrap of her usual enthusiasm or interest. It had been noticeable to such an extent that several of her professors had recommended student social services to her, not wanting to see such a bright light burn out under the pressure of higher education.

Even the Head Librarian, who was usually lost in her private world of books, had noticed and commented worriedly on the change in this most studious of her library's frequent fliers. All day long Ami's normally energetic stride had been slow and muted and if the bags under her eyes had been any larger, she could have used them, instead of her backpack, to haul her textbooks around.

"You don't need to worry so about your exams, Mizuno-san," the rather absent-minded woman had assured her, pressing a palm to Ami's forehead in a motherly fashion. Finding no fever, she'd then ruffled the petite girl's cropped sapphire locks affectionately.

"You have never done less than brilliantly on an exam, my dear, and I expect no change this time. But you need to take better care of yourself. I've half a mind to shoo you out of here so that you can go home and get some sleep and maybe something to eat. A good breeze could blow you to Yokohama and you need your rest or you'll get sick."

Ami could hardly explain to the older woman that sleep was the main source of her problem and a very new one at that.

Never would she, prior to the last few days, have imagined that a scant few uneasy nights could have so thrown her off her stride. Of course, uneasy was not exactly the word for what she had experienced when her eyes had closed.

The term 'nightmares' did not begin to cover the images that had confronted Ami in her sleep over the last two nights either. Night terrors was a far more accurate description, if not clinically speaking, then at least in the common parlance. The visions which came in her sleep were filled with blood and destruction and anguish on such a scale that they left her shaking and chill, weeping silently into her pillow. And by far the most terrifying aspect of the dreams had been the fact that they were, she knew, real and unchangeable. There was no shrugging them off as the mind's fevered attempts to sort out present day issues. Rather, suppressed memories of her past life and subsequent death in combat had chosen now to make their reappearance and Ami was not looking forward to another night of it.

Plus, she had a nasty feeling that if she was experiencing it, the other girls soon would be, if they weren't already.

Maybe I should call a special senshi meeting.

And perhaps more disturbing than the dreams of blood and destruction were those that preceded it.

Ami shivered uneasily. Who was she trying to kid? The dream memories that preceded the nightmares were far more disturbing. Full of flirtation and discovery, passion and profound joy…before it all turned to ash. It wasn't every day that you discovered that your murderer and the man who had, in fact, tried multiple times to kill you again after rebirth in Tokyo, was also your former lover, whom you had loved almost more than life itself. And the most disturbing thing of all was the feeling of longing for him that she still felt and the painful questions, pressing like heavy stones in her throat.

Why, if he loved her, had he left and turned to evil? Why had he betrayed them all? Why had what felt so entirely right gone so devastatingly wrong? And why, in spite of everything she knew, did she still wish she could have saved him?

She'd always had a longing for knowledge. Understanding the whys of the universe was Ami's stock in trade. But since she'd become a senshi she'd had to learn to accept that sometimes she couldn't always find out the why. Sometimes she could only try to deal with it.

In this case the only person who could have helped answer the whys was dead and gone, leaving only a bruised psyche, a broken heart, and anxious nights.

Which was why she was researching sleep disorders. Anything to help with the stress.

"Right…Stress disorders too…" she made another notation, sighing wearily as she pushed her slipping reading glasses back up onto her nose. "St…"

As she flipped toward the next section of the book, she was suddenly stopped as a hand reached over her shoulder and blocked her from turning the pages. An arm reached around her from the other side, shoving the book back across the battered wooden table top.

"Still always wanting the answers, aren't you, Amity? Look under 'SO' instead…for soulmates."

Startled at the soft, familiar, sing-song tone in her ear, Ami jerked upright, only to find herself eye to eye with the man who had haunted her. His bright glass-green eyes were gleaming as he stared at her intently.

She blinked rapidly.

He didn't look like a ghost with his copper tinged blonde curls softly framing a lightly tanned, finely chiseled face. The ends of his lips were thinned, slightly pale and worried looking. She couldn't be dreaming. Her sensory imagination wasn't that good, was it?

A hint of sandalwood teased her nose, making it twitch helplessly like a rabbit's. He didn't smell like a ghost either.

And when he reached out, plucking her pencil from nerveless fingers to toss it carelessly onto the tabletop, he felt shockingly corporeal…and warm.

For once Ami's excellent brain failed her. Nothing in her past lives or present had prepared her for how to deal with a ghost made flesh and blood. She only knew that she was ringed by the arms of the man who'd once loved her and once slain her and multiple times tried to harm her and her senshi sisters.

Since before she was even old enough to sign her first borrowing card, Mizuno Ami had been schooled on the proper, quietly courteous behavior that was expected, nay demanded, in a library. She had not once, in multiple lifetimes, breeched that unspoken scholarly code that one did not, by either word or deed, disturb or in any way interfere with others making use of such places. One conducted one's self in a sensible, restrained and civilized manner, expecting that others would do the same. Making any kind of scene in such a location would, therefore, have appalled Ami's well-trained mind as being in the worst possible taste and as unthinkable as defacing the library's books themselves.

However, Ami's mind was no longer making the decisions. Her body, therefore, reacted without the good judgment and quiet, thoughtful contemplation that usually characterized her nature. Her nervous system insisted that she was trapped with nowhere to turn and nowhere to hide. So she forgot multiple lifetimes of carefully cultivated decorum and simply reacted. For once in her lifetime Ami created a complete and utter to-do that would shock every student, teacher, and library staff member within range of her voice and make her forever after infamous in the book of the Head Librarian, who would ever after say, "she was such a sensible girl once."

Ami screamed her head off, her voice ripping shrilly through the stillness of the stacks, echoing off the walls, and ringing off the wood ceiling panels so that she could be heard on multiple floors.

"Hush, honey," her horrified, would-be suitor pleaded, holding up his hands in a gesture of peace. "I'm not going to hurt you. Hush…please."

Ami shrieked louder, her eyes glassy and unfocused like those of a deer caught in the lights of an oncoming semi.

Zoisite flinched as a multitude of suspicious eyes bored into him, though no one nearby quite dared to make a move to break the library-induced inertia. Forced into making a rapid-fire decision, he grabbed Ami by the shoulders and silenced her, stifling her shriek in the most expedient fashion possible.

He kissed her until she hushed. He kissed her until her glasses fogged up and her toes curled. He kissed her until her arms were no longer frantically trying to shove him away from her, but were locked around his neck, her fingers twined in his hair as she kissed him back. And he kissed her until they again both quite forgot that they were standing in the medical reference section of a major, metropolitan university library with students and librarians breathlessly and quite shamelessly staring and security staff racing toward them.

And then he kissed her some more just because it felt so damned good to have her in his arms again.

Hearing, Sight, Smell, and Touch all previously accounted for, Ami's mind dimly reasserted itself to check off the one last sensory box that slotted this encounter in the 'really real and not a dream' box before letting her body take over again.

He tasted too sweet to be a ghost.