Disclaimer: Sometimes I pretend I own Fushigi Yuugi and its characters. If I actually did, I wouldn’t be so delusional.

Warnings: Rrrright…this chapter makes my head hurt. ~.~() I tried to address Nuriko’s, ah…shall we say, "neuroses" (?) more closely than I think I have before, and I don’t know if I’ve done it very well. I hope it’s better than I think it is. Any comments/criticisms/suggestions for improvement are welcome. ^_^

Oh, yeah. Cheese-o-meter: through the roof. O.o

At first, it hurt to be alone. But I soon found that it hurt even more not to be.

Still shaky from the sudden, vanished pain that had overtaken me just moments before, I looked around wildly, knowing that someone was there with me… and it didn’t take me long to find him. For he was shining, just like me, the two of us the only visible objects in that infinite world of blackness.

My breath caught in my throat and I swallowed an anguished cry, then rushed to where he lay, as if asleep; I crossed the vast space between us in what seemed to be only a few bounding steps, my slippered feet padding soundlessly on the somehow solid—but otherwise indistinguishable—ground beneath me. Falling to my knees beside him, I mentally berated myself for the stupid tears beginning to flow down my cheeks—honestly, you’ve cried more in the past fifteen minutes than you have in the last five years of your life!!—and reached out my hand to touch his face.

But I couldn’t. I stopped my hand, pulled it back almost violently. I couldn’t wake him. Why disturb him, after all? Why force upon him this accursed awareness of death?! My hand went to my mouth as I shut my eyes tightly, forcing myself to keep in control. Stop it. Stop it. You’re an idiot. You’re a man now, remember?…

Then… "Nuriko-sama?" A soft, small voice. "What’s the matter?"

Smile, I ordered myself. SMILE.

I opened my eyes and put on a cheerful, welcoming, fabricated grin. "Ch-Chiriko! Well, you’re quite a sleeper, aren’t you?!"

He regarded me with wide, intelligent eyes.

"Um, this is…uh…" Stop shaking, you pathetic excuse for a voice. "This is…where we are! Taiitsu-kun’s around here somewhere, she came to see me once; how do you feel? Are you hungry? Do you want me to see if I can find, uh, something for you to eat? What would you like?" I rambled desperately, bordering on hysteria. For crying out loud, I didn’t even know if we could eat anymore, now that we were…now that…

"I’m dead," Chiriko stated calmly, and I broke.

Gods, I couldn’t help it. He was just a child! A child!! What genius decided to make him one of the shichiseishi?! What cruel, twisted, heartless weaver of lives made him have to suffer, to bear this impossible weight? Who killed him? Who?! I’d rather be alone again, if this is the alternative…I’d rather be alone!

Small arms wrapped around me, squeezed my shoulders with their tiny strength. "It’s all right, you know, Nuriko-sama," said Chiriko. "Don’t cry. I don’t mind being dead; I don’t, honestly!"

His childish embrace, his comforting words…they sent a sharp stab of shame into my heart, made me realize with bitter self-reproach just how incredibly selfish I was being. I was the strong one! I had to be! And there I was, sobbing like a girl—a very little, cry-baby of a girl—in the arms of a thirteen-year-old child when, by all rights and all amount of logic, I should be the one reassuring him!

With these harsh truths to anchor me down, I managed to force my emotions back inside me, buried them deep. They were useless emotions, of which no good would ever come; I’d believed I had learned that lesson long ago, but once again, I had proved myself wrong. Pushing myself away from him, I wiped away my tears with a furious hand and donned my mask of composure.

Chichiri had thousands of masks, but they were all the same. Mine were different. I just had two. One was laughter, which I think might have been the closest to the Real Me, if the Real Me hadn’t died when I was ten. I always used to laugh when I was little; my aniki told me so. Unlike my parents, he hadn’t ostracized me when I’d become Kourin, but had frantically attempted to bring me back during those first, awful months of mourning. "Why don’t you laugh anymore?" he’d say. "You never laugh anymore…I wish you could be happy again…"

…And I’d say, "I can’t be happy, aniki, now that Ryuen’s dead."

I don’t mean to say that, in the years after the accident, I was never happy. It’s just that, frequently, I was happy when I shouldn’t have been, when my heart—Ryuen’s heart—called out to me, crying that something wasn’t right. In those instances I would laugh to drown out the sound of the urgent voice, would go out of my way to find someone to make me laugh, to take my mind off of the battle inside me.

The other mask was composure, my greatest lie to the world, insisting that I was perfectly fine, that nothing inside me was rotting or twisting or buried. For no one who had nightmares almost every night, no one whose mind seemed to be made of two warring sides, could appear to be so calm; could they?

I had started to ignore my two well-worn disguises lately: I told Tamahome and Miaka about Kourin; I even told Tamahome that I was in love with Miaka. And for the first time in years, when we stood at the entrance of Tamahome’s tiny home, staring at the corpses of his slaughtered family…for the first time, the masks hadn’t come. When Tama had gone after Suboshi, I had fallen apart, sobbed against him as I held him back…my actions had been strong, my words had been strong…my heart—without a shield—had been weak.

It had torn me up inside. But it had made me human.

I couldn’t be human now, though; I couldn’t let myself give in. I know there’s a difference between being human and being weak, but I couldn’t stop to consider it. So I regressed into my life before becoming a seishi, and composed myself, despite the fact that all I wanted to do was curl up and weep.

"What happened?" I asked. "Was it those two Genbu seishi?" Had I saved Miaka only to let them have Chiriko? For the love of the Four Gods, why had I let myself pass out so soon?

Chiriko blinked. "Oh, no, Nuriko-sama. It was long after that"

Long after that. I stared at him. "Well, h-how long? How long has it been since then?"

"It must be almost a month now since you and Ashitare…" he trailed off, regarding me curiously. "Hasn’t it been that long here?"

I shook my head. "No. Um, I must have been sleeping…I suppose." Suzaku…what had happened in all that time?!

"It was Miboshi," said Chiriko, answering my initial question. "Another of the Seiryuu no shichiseishi."

That was the last he said about it, and I respected that. He’d said he didn’t mind being dead, but that didn’t mean he necessarily wanted to talk about it. I certainly didn’t want to speak of my death. He wanted to know about what had happened after I’d died, though; I told him how I’d helped Miaka break free of the ice, but other than that, I was as clueless as he was about the strange plane where Taiitsu-kun had us stored away for a rainy day. As we began to talk of other things—what had happened since they’d found the Shinzaho, Miaka discovering that Amiboshi was still alive, the Seiryuu seishi all killing each other—I started to relax. If I didn’t think about Chiriko being dead, it didn’t seem real. We were just…two companions, sharing stories in a darkened room.

I think I knew from the start that the illusion couldn’t last, that I’d have to face reality sooner or later. I just hoped feebly, selfishly, that it could last just a little longer…

TBC…

~.^;;

Yikes.

Notes: I dunno how long it really was between Nuriko’s and Chiriko’s deaths. It seemed to me like it could be a month or so…so that’s what I put down. Anyone know for sure?