Disclaimer: I still don't own anything but Anita, Il'Guin, and an aggravation at the growing list of disclaimers that I have to do.
Death the Kid
She loved his voice. That was often the first thing to attract her, she realized. And his neurotics just amused her. Still, when something bad happened to him, Anita found herself leaning toward the screen, wishing it would stop.
And Death the Kid (or, as everyone called him, Kid) had a good sense of humor, too. It was odd at first, being that another version of his father was her husband, but they all took it with good humor—it probably helped that her husband and Kid's father weren't in the least bit similar. But all four of them often walked together.
Anita had been having memory problems for a while now. She was sad often, if she paused to think. People killed her daily; she was tortured weekly. Ashura tried to get her soul more times than she cared to count.
But she didn't remember the wedding. It tore her up. She thought she was the one to propose, and she knew when the wedding was—August eighth, the first time a wedding of hers had not been on an eleventh or a twenty-first—but she knew she loved him. He was gentle. She barely remembered the other weddings now—if she ever told of them, most of it would have to be made up. There were bits, pieces that she remembered. But strain as she could, she didn't remember getting married to Kid.
It had been planned, oh yes. She remembered kissing him, but there had been so many times she did not know which one it was she remembered. She felt as if she were shattering—just like the Kishin did, in the last episode, only slowly, so slowly. She drifted apart.
Daydreams that used to be pleasant trips were now visions of torture. The number of times she killed herself in those dreams were so high she couldn't count them, and they all bled into one another.
Her happiness was slowly shattering. She could no longer find the stars that marked her home world or the Realm. She tried to scrabble for some hold of her sanity, but she failed.
And the people she loved were drifting away. She could feel them fading. So she redoubled her efforts. She watched the shows. She started to buy and read the manga. But she couldn't bear the lack of seeing, of feeling, of tasting the people she had mixed souls with.
She had mixed with Kid when the Kishin had wounded him, but she didn't remember it. She remembered when Kid had been stabbed through, though, with that spike, her worry and anguish—she had thought he was dead.
She caught a glimpse of a star that might have been her home, and tears formed in her eyes. She wished she could race through her life, see none of it, and go home, but she still lived, worked, got stronger and stronger.
She didn't know how long she could last. Even the arms of one of her husbands clasping her tight did not comfort her. She started to become terrified for no identifyable reason.
The nightmares got worse. It all got a little better, the frenzied chaos slowing when she met the next man.
A/N: So here we come to some rising action. Things start to fall apart here.
Memory doesn't work. Magic is powerful. Fastreena is boring. But there's always the longing, so we'll see what happens.
On a lighter note, I'm loving spring break. I wanna go to Ireland and Germany, but I'll wait until we can go. My math teacher went to Dublin over break; I asked her to look out for Derek Landy and take pictures if she met him. So I'm hopeful. Wouldn't be cool if Derek Landy became my pen-pal? I could ask all sorts of questions and stuff…but I suppose the conversation would run down rather quickly.
I wonder, d'you think authors read fanfiction of their series when they're not writing it? That'd be interesting…
And I have decided that if and when I get a book published, I'll give people an author's contact method. 'Cause that could be fun. If not too many people actually e-mailed me…
Anyway, done with the endless rambling now.