Here’s the next chapter. Obvious by now, this has spoilers up to volume 18 of X. Please review if you get the chance! They're good motivation (and maybe, just maybe they'll motivate me enough not to take close to three months on another chapter).

Warnings: This fic also contains references to shounen-ai relationships (male/male relationships), so if that offends you, don’t read any farther. Any flames will be used to make s’mores. ^o^

Disclaimer: As everyone knows by this point, Subaru and Seishirou do not belong to anyone but CLAMP. This fic is just for entertainment and I am not making any profit, so don’t sue - you would get around 300 yen (after all, I’m a poor college student).

Chapter 1 - Deadly Influences

Were dreams always so dark? For as long as he could remember, Subaru’s were always dark. Was every person’s dream just as dark or did it speak to the way he viewed the world? In more lighthearted times, Subaru had often wondered the answer to those questions; anything to avoid the dreams that he knew would come to haunt his sleep. His only answer to those questions was the blackness stretching out for an indeterminable length, threatening to drown him.

Walking through the darkness as if on solid ground, he knew this place only held dreams that had caused him pain. Most people sought dreams as a means to escape from the harshness of reality. Subaru both envied and despised them for the gift they possessed. Ever since that day, sixteen years before, his dreams never allowed him a respite from reality.

He no longer liked his dreams. Most brought him painful memories of things he did not want to remember, but also could not forget…dreams of a bet beneath the sakura, dreams of happier times in Tokyo, dreams of betrayal. They left Subaru unbalanced and feeling a little lost. Whether or not they were a figment of his imagination, Subaru had known too many dreams to be potentially fatal to let them slip from his mind completely.

Subaru morosely wondered which dream would come to haunt him this night. Perhaps a bet from the past; or perhaps his sister’s untimely death. The dreams never left him. Or maybe his mind would choose to taunt him with the death of the only person he had held dear, the only one who could have granted his wish. If it had not been for Seishirou’s own wish, Subaru could have well wasted away since even that had been taken from him. It was only his inherent nature of putting others’ needs and wishes before his own that kept him alive to this day.

As he walked through the incorporeal nothingness, an almost imperceptible sound whispered in the still air of the dream. The sound was coming as if from a far-off distance; the sound of dripping water. ‘Odd. None of my dreams have ever begun in this way,’ he thought, a sense of both foreboding and curiosity gripping his mind. His intuition told him that he should flee, but something led him onward, as if calling for him.

Following the faint sound, Subaru first caught a wisp of sakura on the air, and the tree soon materialized from the darkness, it’s full blooming grandeur causing it to almost glow against the dark backdrop of the dreamscape. Small supple branches snaked out to ensnare Subaru’s arms, leading him closer; like a child leading a parent by the hand to a treasure.

Something in Subaru’s conscious mind screamed for him to break away from the Sakura’s hold, and run as far from this place as he could. What stayed him was the reassuring ‘voice’ of the tree urging him on telling him, "No, don’t leave. Let me show you something, my guardian", and it continued to lead him towards its great bough and the source of the sound.

As it lead him around to the far side of the trunk, his foot rippled a puddle that was being caused by the dripping. Looking downwards, he saw that the liquid was not the clear water he had expected. Rather it had the ruddy hue to which he was becoming too accustomed. He knew from then that he did not want to see what the tree wished to show him, started resisting it's insistent pull, but it still drew him along, that resistance doing nothing to slow its progress.

The sakura drew him into full view of what it wished to show him. Despite his apprehension, Subaru could not avert his eyes from the sight before him. Ensconced within the gnarled bough of the tree, Seishirou’s corpse lay like a marionette with cut strings. From one extended hand, the steady drip of blood continued, pooling at the base of the tree, staining its roots. The Sakura’s branches gripped Subaru’s arms even tighter, almost seeming to purr. "Guardian, I want more…I am hungry. Kill for me…Please…"

Wide eyed and shocked, Subaru again struggled vainly to flee the tree’s embrace. It held tighter, the branches winding tight enough to cut the circulation of blood to his limbs. Managing to move his hand far enough, he produced several elaborately scripted o-fuda from his sleeve. Casting them one by one at the tree, they alighted to the bases of the branches holding him. Placing his right hand in a mudra1, his index and middle fingers held together and extended upward, Subaru closed his eyes and concentrated on the talismans and the power he drew upon for his spells. Channeling that energy through the o-fuda, he concentrated the strike at the center of the tree’s presence within the dream. One clear syllable rang through the dreamscape, the single seed-syllable ‘On’ broke through the tree’s apparition and shattered the dream, like a mirror breaking into two pieces from a crack down its center.

Subaru woke with a start, jolting up from his resting-place on the couch. Gripping his shirt near his heart and shivering from the adrenaline, he closed his eyes and breathed deeply trying to calm his raging heartbeat. Reaching up to wipe the sweat from his brow with his free hand, he glanced around, finding his surroundings to be the living room of the Sakurazuka household, just as it had been when he had collapsed from exhaustion.

‘The Sakura’s influence is getting stronger by the day. It’s getting harder to resist its demands for blood’, Subaru acknowledged, knowing that the dream he just had was no ordinary dream. As the adrenaline rush began to subside, Subaru was able to achieve a relative state of calm. Standing, he straightened the trench coat that he had not taken off and then walked over to the soji screen and opened it, revealing the garden. Stepping through the threshold, he looked out at the night sky, letting the cool night air take away the last vestiges of the dream.

Pausing to take a lighter and cigarette from the box in his trench coat pocket, he gazed out over the simple garden and the odd mixture of camellias and sakura. Lighting it and taking a welcome drag to calm his nerves, he exhaled the smoke, letting the slight breeze twist it into intricate swirls.

Subaru had not been sleeping well recently; he slept only when utterly exhausted. Only when he succumbed to sleep was he powerless to stop the Sakura from asserting its influence over him. He placed his free hand over his right eye, or rather the honey-brown orb that had taken its place. Ever since he had invoked the inherent spell on the eye, he had felt the Sakura’s bloodlust present in the back of his mind.

Pulling a letter from his pocket, written in the stylized script of his grandmother, he sighed. The tree was not the least of his problems. The clan knew what had become of him. This letter was the only thing that had saved his life; his grandmother’s discreet interference that saved him from the wrath of the clans’ conflict. He knew now that the Sumeragi clan considered their 13th head dead and the title passed back to the previous head until they could train a suitable heir; probably a distant cousin of which Subaru would have no knowledge. To go against the clan’s decision and warn Subaru, she must have had good reason. Or perhaps beneath that strict and stoic exterior she had truly loved him.

That was how he had ended up here, staying in the Sakurazuka household. His old apartment was no longer safe, since the clan knew of its existence. Seishirou had left a note there, tucked under the door…perhaps right before the final battle, stating that this estate was his so long as he retained the role of Sakurazukamori. Subaru sighed, as he took another drag of the cigarette. Looking out over the garden again at the sakura and camellia that filled the air with sweet fragrances, he truly felt out of place. Rather than treating the fully furnished estate as his own as Seishirou had intended, Subaru felt like a stranger who had overstayed his welcome.

It was almost as if he were a stranger, even to himself. The person he had been for twenty-five years seemed so far removed that it felt like a separate life. He looked down at his hands, clothed once again in black leather. He could no longer look upon his hands without cringing, seeing the blood from the day he had stabbed his hand through Seishirou’s heart despite the fact that that blood had long been washed away.

He shivered not just from the chill in the air and snubbed out his half-smoked cigarette. Going back inside, he carefully placed the remainder in an ashtray and continued through the room. He needed a change of scenery, since the atmosphere of that place was starting to get to him. Moving down a hall, a small room off to the left, its door slightly a-jar, caught his eye. He had not noticed this room before, and pushed the door completely open, revealing a small library of sorts, bookshelves set against all four walls.

The room smelled century-old, most of the books leather-bound and covered with a copious amount of dust. 'Apparently the Sakurazukamori did not have the interest or need of these books often,' Subaru observed, moving to look at the objects occupying the surface of the single desk in the middle of the room. Calligraphy brushes, inks and o-fuda papers were neatly arranged in an opened box off to one side of the desk. Next to that there was another leather bound book, the leather ties lying limply across the tabletop's blotter.

Picking it up he opened it to a random page and scanned the text. It looked like the configurations for a sleep spell like the one that Seishirou used on him countless times. It appeared very similar to the states Subaru used to enter into a person’s consciousness; the chant was only slightly different and recited mentally. Flipping further into the text, he stopped at the diagram of a reverse pentagram. He looked at the layout of the spell and realized that it was one and the same as the spell he used on the tree when he was nine, only the hand gestures were described in reverse order. He frowned at the significance of these diagrams.

Realizing that he was looking at a dark onmyoujutsu spell, he slammed the book closed, seeing a folded slip of paper fall gracefully from between the pages to the floor. Placing the book back on the desk a little roughly, Subaru stooped to pick up the paper. Unfolding it, he immediately recognized Seishirou's elegant script:

Crumbling the note in a clinched fist, he tried in vain to calm the anger that went deep down to his soul. Seishirou had obviously planned everything; he hadn't left out a single detail. It was if he had expected Subaru to grant his wish. And as an added insult to his memories, the way Seishirou had signed the note stung; one last comment to taunt him.

Dropping the crumpled note to the tatami mat, he left the room, walked briskly down the hall intent on leaving the place. Everything in the house seemed to lock him to the past and mock him in his future; from the garden's sakura branches swaying in breeze, to the discreetly placed book bearing the spells he had spent his life to that point trying to stop.

He paused long enough in the entryway to break down the threads of wards he had placed on the house and to tear down the larger mandala-like2 talisman he had incorporated into those wards. Then, opening the door he stepped out into the brisk night air intending that he would never step through that doorway again.