Adopt-a-WIP
There ought to be a place to put up abandoned WIPs for adoption. I've been going through my old story folders, and there are so many unfinished stories that I still like the idea of very much, but will never finish...*
( Cut for longish list of abandoned WIPs... )
( Cut for longish list of abandoned WIPs... )
It started as a twinge - almost like an upset stomach, or standing up too quickly after a long session of meditation and not enough food. For a moment, Subaru couldn't place the off-balance feeling, and he had begun to reach out a hand to steady himself against the wall when he realized what this was. A spiritual disturbance... a ripple spreading through the ether of the spiritual world. Sparked by...?
Something flickered. Subaru blinked, but his vision was clear. Not a ripple, more of a surge -
That was when the floor dropped out.
Subaru gasped and realized, vaguely, that the man in front of him had stopped talking and was now eyeing him strangely, with a hint of curiosity and wariness: *what is wrong with the Sumeragi? I thought he looked too young/strained/pale*
Nothing had changed. He was still standing in the doorway of an office, one hand stretched out towards the off-white wall, fingertips not quite touching it. The ground was steady beneath his feet. The only sounds were the quiet hum of air-conditioning, the rise and fall of distant traffic, and the breathing of the middle-aged man in front of him.
On the spiritual plane, something vast had broken, and everything was rushing to fill the void, swirling and eddying in the quiet corners, roaring and screaming everywhere else. Chaos, and something missing, something that Subaru had never been consciously aware of before now - now, when its absence marked the territory it had held.
Disruption, disorder - the balance had been lost.
The alarm that rose in Subaru was sharp for only an instant before, at last, he recognized the shape of the power that had vanished. Finally, he placed the flavor of the broken energy fading from the world even as he reached out to taste it - an echo with nothing of power or presence behind it.
And his heart froze in his chest, panic constricting his throat.
The sakura.
Later, he would find the time to realize that his worry was entirely justified, and that the imbalance in the spiritual world that had been caused by the sakura's sudden disappearance was a matter of utmost urgency.
Now, there was only one thought in his mind, and there was no room for worries about the balance of everything, the shifting tides of the spiritual world, and the chaos unfolding before his spiritual sight.
Seishirou-san.
***
He never knew what he said to the man whose dead wife had been visiting him in dreams, or how he got from the bereaved man's office to Ueno Park. It was spring, and the sakura were in full bloom, glorious snowy trees lining the pathways and dotting the grounds. People were everywhere, laughing beneath blossom-heavy branches on blue plastic sheets, eating ice-cream, okonomiyaki and slices of sweet potatoes fried in oil and turned in sugar. Celebrating the fleeting beauty of the cherry blossoms, that were already showering the ground with a snowstorm of falling petals.
The oldest sakura in the park had always been in full bloom. In the winter, snow had dusted the delicate blossoms without marring their beauty.
Now, on the lawn behind the Tokyo National Museum where the one sakura that had never lost its glorious bloom should have been, there was a miasma of magic and power that was so thick Subaru nearly gagged pushing through. It prickled and pushed against his skin - an alien power, non-human magic, strong, too strong even as no more than a dissipating echo.
Of the sakura, there was no sign. Subaru hadn't known what to expect, but surely there should have been something - if not a charred stump, then at least some other sign that this had been the place where an ancient, twisted creature that fed on human souls had twisted its roots into the ground, waiting for its guardian to come.
But the lawn was smooth and unbroken, gently curved and deeply, evenly green. Something had destroyed the sakura so utterly that not even a charred stump remained.
There was no power trace, only a vacant space rapidly filling up with chaotically swirling, fragmented forces drawn in from the vicinity. There was no sakura, no link to be traced. No sign of the demon-tree's guardian.
*Seishirou-san.*
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He might never have thought to check the hospitals if not for his long history of cooperating with the police; even so, he almost didn't think of it at all. But a half-dozen phone calls and several favors called in later, he had finally located his quarry.
There was something fundamentally wrong about the sight of the Sakurazukamori in a hospital bed - too pale, too still, too... diminished.
He'd never looked like this, not even when he'd lost his eye. No, not like this… this was different. This was real.
"Seishirou-san," Subaru whispered. He couldn't stop the words from escaping, and though he winced at the lost tone of his voice, it hardly mattered what he sounded like. Seishirou couldn't hear him, couldn't hear anything.
"We don't know what's wrong with him yet," the young doctor who had escorted him into the room reported conversationally, only the quick sideways flick of her eyes betraying her interest in Subaru's reason for being here. "He suffered a complete circulatory collapse and was brought in with dangerously low blood pressure as well as some arrhythmia, but both of that steadied out, and since then there's been no sign of heart problems. He seems to be in a state of complete exhaustion, and we haven't found any reason for it - he's fit, seems healthy, no drugs that we can detect, no other telling symptoms, nothing wrong with any of his organs that we can tell. But we're still waiting for the results of the complete blood test. Maybe it's a rare disease of some kind, in which case we can only hope we have the resources to detect it."
"You won't find anything," Subaru said after a too-long pause. "It's not an illness - it's spiritual injury and shock. You can't help him."
The doctor's face reflected her scepticism, but she said nothing. Someone had evidently told her about the Sumeragi and his field of expertise. She might not believe in anything her instruments couldn't pick up, but that didn't matter - her superiors did, and there were many people who owed Subaru favors. He hadn't called in many of them - he'd never had a reason to.
Until now.
"I'll take it from here," he said. His voice sounded distant and thin to his own ears, but even he could hear the certainty in it. He would take it from here. It was not a question, merely a fact. "Please detach the machines."
"Detach the machines? Sumeragi-san, I'm sorry, but that's not a good idea. As I said, we don't know what's wrong with him yet, and you can't be sure -"
"I'm sure." He didn't bother raising his voice. "Thank you for your concern. I realize this may be difficult for you to believe, but the fact is that you can't do anything for him, and he will die unless his injury is seen to. And now, please detach the machines. I'm taking it from here."
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(The comment has been removed)
Na, das hört sich eigentlich nicht so besonders tragisch an. :-)
Ja, ich find auch schade, dass die Geschichte nicht weitergehen wird... *seufz*
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