7. Blood

"Hrmphhh!" Anna exclaimed again as she paused in her writing. She didn't want to raise her hand up because she was absolutely sure that she had once again made a mistake in her letter. She sighed and willed herself to do it. An ugly black blot of ink had leaked out from the pen she was using, totally obscuring several words around it. She winced as she began crumpling up the piece of paper. It had taken a huge amount of effort on her part, not to mention risking her life and several others, in order to just even acquire the measly amount of letter paper and treasured pen and ink from Kino. It involved a lot of sneaking around, booby trapping Kino's bedroom, and blaming the neighboring kids once her mentor found some of her writing supplies missing. But that's a different story.

Anna bit her lip and carefully stowed the discarded paper in the long sleeve of her shirt. She decided to give herself a break to rest both her hand and her mind before continuing (a wise decision considering that out of all thirteen pieces of paper she had managed to pilfer, only one single sheet remained). She reclined in her chair and closed her eyes, flexing her cramping up fingers.

"Hello!" she called out suddenly. She slowly shut her mouth out of embarrassment even if no one else was around to hear it. Why did I just yell that out? she thought, trying to sort out her irrational behavior. "I suppose it was too quiet…" She leaned forward, resting her chin on her folded arms on the desk. "It's been so silent ever since Matamune passed away…" And since Yoh went back home. Her jaw snapped shut automatically as it always did whenever she felt that she was…missing (Anna's eye twitched at the use of the word. It implied that she was weak) her fiancée.

Her first friend.

She felt blood beginning to seep out from the small wound, sweet and yet still unpleasant and unwanted.

Quite similar, one might say, to Yoh's departure nearly four months ago.

Anna snorted and shook her head of such a thought. Such a cheesy thought, she thought disapprovingly to herself. Instead, she took a well worn piece of paper out from her pocket and read it for the one hundred twelfth time.

Not that she was counting or anything.

It was a letter that Yoh had sent to her, telling her of his daily training, his parents, his grandparents, summoning spirits, his studies, a shy girl named Tamao. Or something like that. It sounded like heaven to her. She quickly put it away and began writing, suddenly reinvigorated and inspired.

In her eagerness she whipped the last remaining piece of paper towards her, the fine edge of it whirring across the delicate flesh of her thumb. She immediately recoiled and her thumb instinctively flew to her mouth. She rolled her eyes at her reaction and extracted the finger from her nursing mouth.

"It's just a paper cut," she muttered, picking up the pen she had quickly dropped when she had incurred the small wound. The skin that was slashed had been thin, causing the blood that was just beneath the surface to pool up in a generous amount and drop, thick and heavy, spattering and spreading as intricate as a spider's web across the interwoven pulp strands of the last surviving eggshell white paper. The warm blood was rapidly absorbed by the fibers of her sheet as if the paper itself had been longing for something all its time to slake its perpetual thirst. The slightly sweaty soft skin of her hands agilely rubbed at it, instead ending up smearing the bright red trail of ribbons of blood until it was resolutely ingrained into her letter.

"Crap."

"Yoh, you have a—" Keiko held up an envelope in front of her son as soon as he entered the house after a long day at school.

"Letter?" His eyes, which had up until that point been tearing up, brightened as if someone had injected new life into him with a syringe.

"Yeah, from Osorezan. Honey, why are you—" Before she could finish her inquiry, Yoh had snatched the letter from her hands and darted up the stairs. "Crying." She sighed as she shut the door. "Those letters are the only thing that cheers him up nowadays," she mused to herself.

Yoh had in fact just returned from a particularly trying session from school. Normally, the standard run-of-the-mill insults about his ability to see ghosts never fazed him and he would brush them off with a simple shrugging of the shoulders and zoning out. But lately, some kid picked up at school that Yoh's parents were almost never home at the same time. The poor boy had already tried to become accustomed to the fact that his father was almost never home, growing up with Yohmei sometimes and with Keiko sometimes when she wasn't at the temple. Having his fellow classmates torment him about it on the playground was…well…

Yoh blew his nose on his sleeve and wiped away his remaining tears.

Enough said.

He stared at the envelope. He had missed having a friend. The only people who were nice to him were Keiko and Tamao. Keiko didn't count because she was his mother so it was her job to be nice to him. And Tamao was kind enough but for some reason she always yelped and fled away every time he tried having more than a one sentence conversation with her. He just couldn't manage to shake that feeling of a master-servant dynamic whenever he talked to her.

Yoh smiled. "I hope she got the picture I sent her." The boy had received another pair of headphones from his mother when she had seen that he had returned from visiting his grandmother with a broken pair. And his birthday was coming up anyways. In his post-gift excitement, he had taken a Polaroid of his new present and sent it to Anna in his last letter. "I wonder what she said about them." He bent the corner of the sealed letter back forth in anticipation. But somehow he couldn't bring himself to open it quite yet. Curiously enough, he had deliberated over sending Anna the photograph for several days, anxious and even nervous of what she would say. How she would react. Her opinion.

You know the works.

He lugged the cardboard box filled with all the letters she had written to him over the past four months.

I wonder if she saves mine.

He took a deep breath and tore open the envelope that was laden with stamps and discarded it. His hands were shaking so much that when he was unfolding it, it skimmed across his thumb, effectively cutting it, leaving behind an off white line of skin.

He winced as the acute burning pain set in and a pinprick of blood spilled out from the wound and into the left edge of the paper.

He bit his lip in an effort to keep from crying out.

On the opposite edge of the letter, there was an identical smear of color, but unlike the bright red one he created, it was an old rust hue. The two mirrored each other, creating a bloody design of conflicted bittersweet symmetry.

His and hers.

A/N: yet another installment of the delightful, engaged pairing Yohna. Anywhoo, if you guys are at all interested (probably not), I've started a fanfic progress livejournal so you can see which stories I'm working on and how far along I am. And you can also comment on it telling me to hurry my ass up with the next update haha:

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