Fandom: Tokyo Babylon / X
Title: Nakushita. (Lost.)
Pairing: Seishirou + Subaru, Subaru + Kamui
Rating: PG
Description: Subaru meets a strange woman in his dreams.

Disclaimer: Tokyo Babylon and X are from the geniuses that make up Clamp.

I knew that there something behind that smile...
Everyone's sadness is always hidden behind that curve of the lips...

Seishirou's smile had been no different and it had never changed. But he didn't know, like everyone else, that behind this innocent face lied a dark secret.

For how can one know innocence without the guilt following it?

Nakushita. (Lost.)
by Miyamoto Yui

"Tasukete kudasai! Dareka!"

The voice. It's a girl's?

It was then that I saw a girl off in the distance and she was kneeling to the ground. She was hugging herself. But as I ran closer towards the voice, I stopped a few feet in front of the girl who was surrounded by a pool of blood.
"I'm coming!" I shouted.

The beautiful girl's face, who had looked no more than fifteen, looked up and began to cry even more. I wrapped my arms around her as my boots and trenchcoat were soaking up the red substance I'd noticed leaking out from the girl's womb.
"Th-Thank you..." She wrapped her arms around me. "No one would help me...I called out and no one came."
Shaking, she held her stomach and had a hand on my shoulder. With tears in her eyes, she told me, "I lost my baby..."

At that moment, I hugged her even tighter.

I didn't know what to do, nor did I know what to think at that particular moment. But I knew my heart had become heavy.
I wanted to help this girl. It was not only because of my nature, but something in my heart moved me. Maybe it was because my mother held Hokuto and me before she died in front our eyes...

Maybe it was because this was the first time I'd ever gone into someone else's dream...
Maybe it was because I never had this type of feeling stirring inside me before...

It was like a dark cloud before a storm, and yet, with all these clashing emotions of pity and movement, they came out in a soft patter of rain. Sad as it was, it was still showing its true beauty through this trouble erupting.

In that pure blackness and in that pool of blood, there I sat with that girl hugging me.
"Just keep on crying." I tried to console.
"They made me give it up..."
"Who would make you do such a thing?" I asked. That had to be one of the cruelest things I had ever heard of in my life...
"My family..."

And there she sobbed until the end of the dream.

When I went to school, she was still on my mind. But there was something that bugged me.
Her face...her face looked so similar to someone I knew...

And because I had used up my energy in the dream, I was ready to faint at any time. But I wouldn't let myself do so because Hokuto-chan was sitting next to me. And if she found out what had happened, she'd give me a lecture, be all over me about it, and be a little jealous over me paying attention to someone besides her.

It seemed petty at the time. But I just didn't want to tell her. Even when I built the courage to, something or someone would interrupt us. And that's when I understood that fate just didn't want these things to overlap...

The next week, in my dream, I was by the beach on some tip of Japan.

Oh, if I could just float away...

When I looked at the sun, I smiled at the birds flying over me. And I began to sing a song I had made a long time ago when the Sakurazukamori boy, this nameless boy, had cursed my life:

"Will you remember my name
when I am gone,
please do not cry,
I guess this is just fate
playing with me,
a chained boy to a beautiful tree...

Don't cry because
I already am.
This is some kind of twisted happiness,

I want to be alone,
I want to be free of my life
but maybe this is the only way
for me to live
the best I can.

But wherever you are Nanashi boy,
I hope you will remember me at least,
that this curse will somehow
counter back so that I can break your heart
like you did with mine."

I was angry. Silently angry at that time...but it had subsided to find the goodness in others. And yet again, I was faced with that question of goodness within all humans.

Then, when I opened my eyes from singing, there was a girl in front of me. It was the same one from the other day. But she was blankly looking out into the crashing sea with something in swaddling clothes in her lap. There she sat like a doll herself.

"So, we meet again?" I found myself saying though I had no idea how to approach her.
She turned her head to look up to me. But those eyes were somewhere else as she looked at me. "Would you like to see my baby?"

At this point, anyone would have been confused. At first, there was a lost child and now there was another one?

But as she pulled down the cloth to reveal the face, it was a doll and a tear suddenly came from my eye as I turned around.
"You are scared of my child...like everyone else." She had said in a tone that was slightly annoyed, yet understanding of such an awful situation. "But you will see..."

After wiping my face, I turned to face her. Kneeling down to her, I smiled while touching the cheek of the doll. "I'm not scared of your child."

How...? How do I help this girl?

She put her head down. "You know, don't you?"
Again with eyes filled with tears, she put the baby doll down. "You know it's not real."
She stood up and pounded a fist against her heart. "But I know he's alive! I will not accept that he isn't!"
Breaking down, she fell to her knees. "I...I just can't."

"Why did you call me?" I found myself asking. And before I knew it, I bent my knees and picked the broken girl in my arms. "I'll ask you again, why did you call me?"
"Because I had to believe there was someone who wouldn't be so cruel. That was what my baby represented to me. Kindness." She pointed towards a scene in reality. "I...I'm going to die, you see? Because of this world..."

There, she was in a bed with a mask on her face. She was holding on for dear life.

But all the while, she had tears streaming down the sides of her face though she didn't talk. And her hand was over her stomach.

She got down from my arms and held my face between them with a smile on her face. "Thank you for hearing...for listening for my cry of sorrow."
"You're welcome." I stared into her golden eyes...

...like those of a vampire.

Without any effort, she was taking my life in her hands...
...and I was letting her...
a willing servant giving blood to their master...

But care, I did not.

"Take care of my child when you see him." She kissed me in the lips...and that was my first kiss.

At fourteen, I had fallen for a woman I hardly knew, but who held gracefulness and gentleness along with her alluring attractiveness. And those eyes...

Those eyes.

"I called you because I asked kami-sama to send me someone who would take care of my child..." Looking up to my eyes and searching deeply into them, she continued, "...the next time he awakens."

"How? How will I know?"

Pushing me away from her, she held the doll in swaddling clothes again. "The yumemi told me. She said he will be a child..."

She took my hand, which to my surprise wasn't gloved, and followed the design of the star with her finger; and she smiled calmly at me.

"...lost like you will become." Looking through my eyes with her golden ones, she said, "No one can escape their fate. No one."

Then, she disappeared as a flush of sakura suddenly fell in front of us.

As I held my hand to my face to block the cherry blossoms from hitting me almost making little cuts on my face. "I don't even know you're name!"
"Megumi! Subaru, my name is Megumi!"

What? How did you-

"Matte!" I shouted as I reached my hand out in front of me. But when I looked around, I was in my room staring at that cursed gloved hand of mine.

"Megumi..." I mumbled softly to myself.

But it wasn't because I had needed to tell her something that I wanted her to stop. No, it was because I had noticed…
...when she was fading with the sakura falling, her heart was bleeding...

...she too had been killed by one of the other clan.
But she was not of my time at all. This girl had died years ago after she'd killed her own child so that he wouldn't feel the pain of killing her.

And it was only through that, her soul couldn't rest without finding me.

As I walked away from the apartment I had lived in with Hokuto-chan, I had changed as she had said.

This one with psychic powers had warned me.
She had believed in the world…only to find me. And who would have known I was going to ask the same question of cruelty by fate?

As I looked forward with tears unable to fall anymore, I thought of that one person who brought my heart out again after Megumi had died and yet crushed it in the leaves of the sakura.

Seishirou.

+/+/+/+/+/

Yet again, I had that same feeling of longing to touch yet not knowing what to do…

When I saw the one named Kamui, the one who holds everyone's fate, lying in bed with a blank face unable to face reality while holding his dead sweetheart's head in his arms lovingly, I saw myself.

I saw myself outside of myself. Someone else was feeling my pain.
No...no...he mustn't...it's so lonely and painful.

So, I entered his head...

...to find a child.
A lost child...
...with tears in his eyes...

...With golden eyes...

and because I had been so numbed by humanity and its patsies with my life, I couldn't feel anything.

No, not until that moment I tried to act so tough,
only to become as unstable as water in one's hands.

How can one cry when one is water and a broken glass cup at the same time?

So, when I took the child and brought him back to reality, I took a good look at him, at those eyes, as they reverted back to brown. That face smiled back at me. At this, I smiled slightly.

"No one can escape their fate. No one."
For a second, a flash came to my head. And I had remembered my sister dying in front of me again. But why did I fail to see it? Megumi had looked like an older version of Hokuto-chan.

I had finally understood.
"No one can escape their fate. No one."

If Hokuto-chan was a reincarnation of…

Then, I must take care of you, Kamui...
Kamui is...

Is...

I thought as I weakly was unable to touch his cheek and it was then that my eyes became blurry.

One must die. You and I can't exist at the same time.

Only one…

Fwump.

Owari. / The End.

Author's note: I'll let you decide what Kamui is. Mean, isn't it?

I didn't see this part of the manga until now and it was so touching! I didn't expect it for to end like this, but I am glad it did. I'm always trying find some kind of twist.

Very confusing, ne? Well, now that I think about it...I guess you're right about the one-shoters, Hiki-chan...

January 2, 2002