Hello minna! Here's the first chapter of Fur and Field! Enjoy!

Oh yeah, before I forget…I don't own RW, some other very lucky people do. However, the new stuff is MINE!!! Miiiiiinnnee! -Grins-

Enjoy!

Fur and Field
By Windsong
Chapter One: Dreams
Written January 2000

"And so the chase begins. The true battle is here."
-Captain Feyarre, from Figgy's fanfic Lady Chaos

Midterms were coming up at the University, and all the Ronins were studying frantically. "Jeez, who knew archaeology was so hard?" Grumped Kento as he slammed the book shut and sat back in his chair.

"Maybe it's hard for you because you've barely looked at that book this semester," said Ryo.

"Oh, and like you've studied any more than me, you soccer freak?"

Right before they really started arguing, Sai came out of the kitchen, wearing an apron. "Dinner's served, everyone!"

"I'm starved! Let's eat!" Bellowed Kento as he moved to the table with startling swiftness.

"Well, obviously studying hasn't done anything to his appetite," said Rowen.

After dinner, mores studying ensued until a fed up and sleepy Mia put a stop to it. "You've been studying since the moment you got home! It's almost midnight! You've still got a week to study! Now GO TO SLEEP!"

One by one, Rowen, Ryo, Sai, Sage, and Kento shut their books and headed upstairs to their bedrooms. No one wanted to argue with Mia's stern tone and flashing eyes.

Sage mind's was fuzzy as he changed into his pajamas. Still going over math theorems in his head, he crawled into bed and drifted off to sleep.

That night, Sage had the weirdest dreams of his life.

------

…A cry like a bird of prey that filled the air, a sound so fierce and sorrowful that it tore at the heartstrings…

…A flash of purple, metallic and yet warm, soft, that spoke of the whisper of fur…

…A flash of gold, sunny, shining like steel, speaking of fields of endless green, the dusky smell of flowers…

…Laughing green eyes with streaks of mahogany in them, warm, gentle, and yet sad…

…Stormy silver-gray eyes with streaks of gold in them, proud, stern, and yet amused, with a sorrowful tale hidden in their depths…

…The quick noiseless slice of two weapons, leaving signatures in the air…

…A gentle laugh, ringing through the soft silence…

And so on though the night, repeating over and over and over…

------

When Sage came down for breakfast, his eyes were half-closed and had dark circles under them. "Wow, Sage, what happened? You look like you were hit by a truck," remarked Kento.

"Just some bad dreams…hey, where's Ro? Is he sleeping late again?"

"What, you got so little sleep that you forgot how much Rowen loves his? If you want to try and wake him up, you're more than welcome." Remarked Sai with a bemused grin.

And so passed the rest of the day. Rowen came down halfway through the morning bustle and ended up eating breakfast on the bus, as usual. Classes whizzed by; Sage nearly fell asleep in Calculus. They came home and studied like mad until Mia yelled with them to go to sleep.

As Sage changed into his nightclothes, he wondered if the dreams meant anything, and if they would appear in his sleep that night. He decided that the dreams were just a freak accident, and fell asleep to the lullaby of Kento reciting archaeological terms.

That night, the dreams visited him again.

Little did poor Sage know that the dreams would haunt his sleep that entire week.

By the end of the day before midterms, Sage was so tired that he really did fall asleep in Calculus, and he looked so fatigued by the time he got home that even Kento new something was wrong. "Hey, Sage, you okay? You look like a wreck. Bad dreams again?" queried Sai.

"Yeah…" mumbled Sage, half-asleep.

"Maybe you should tell us about it."

"All right…" agreed Sage.

Sage gathered his sleepy wits. "Well, they're not really dreams like you would normally think of them. They're more like flashes of images and snippets of sound. I'd hear laughing…the sounds of people talking, but I couldn't hear the words…a scream like a bird of prey, it's a beautiful sound. And then the images… I saw flashes of color, weapons so sharp that they could sever the very atoms of the air. But the most frequent image were these two pairs of eyes…One of them was green, the most caring, gentle eyes I've ever seen…but the other pair is what really sticks in my mind. They're gray, fierce, proud, and yet humorous…They're like the eyes of a wolf, wild and intelligent. The images of those two pairs of eyes have been getting more and more frequent in my dreams…if I ever saw those eyes in real life, I would recognize them instantly…" Sage's voice drifted off.

"They sound like visions, not dreams," remarked Rowen.

"Yeah, they might be visions…but I've never heard a bird of prey cry like that. And I've never met anyone with eyes like the ones I saw in my dreams…I have a feeling they're trying to tell me something, but what?"

Hope you all liked it! I can't believe it only took me a couple of hours to write that…I'll be writing a lot more now that I've got the idea in my head…

Ja ne!

Oh, and about that quote in the beginning...it seemed to fit, and I LOVE Figgy and think that quote's really cool, so...yeah. GO READ FIGGY! -waves Ninja-to threateningly-

Windsong - windsong 137 at gmail dot com

"He drives like TACO!" -My fencing coach, Eugene