A/N: Hello. Is an Aiko crazy, why yes she is. It's fun.

Challenge Fills: Tale in Fragments Challenge, 50 prompts, easy list 1 for 44- rigid, Advent Calendar Challenge day 8. write an AU, and Diversity Writing Challenge. J10. Write a story with no prologue or epilogue.

First story in a series here, too! Name of the series escapes me now but... hey, that's life.

Warning for magic, eventual murder, violence, maybe a swear or two, and situations harmful to minors. This has elements of the Kara no Kyoukai series in it, but not enough that you need to watch the series to know what's going on. Just stuff might stick out.

Okay, all of the technical stuff is out of the way, here we go. Please read and review!

1. The Still Night

When she wakes for the first time, Hikari hears nothing.

She doesn't hear herself breathe, and she wonders if she is. When she opens her eyes, the world she sees is muted watercolor.

She feels no cold. Her body is bare and pale. Around her, the world expands endlessly, and she is alone in it.

Onii-chan? Where am I?

She makes to say it aloud, but her lips refuse to move and she realizes she can't blink. Her chest aches and the world bends around her for a moment, but all goes still again and she wavers.

How did I get here?

The question is delayed, perhaps by her own sluggish mind. She desires the answer for all of the few seconds it takes to process the thought and then it is gone.

She is tired. She wants to sleep.

So again and again, Hikari closes her eyes and drifts away. And each time, each time it is so much harder to go back, like there are tentacles in her soul that say to sleep forever. They're wonderful and she wants to listen to them even though they have no voices and she shouldn't hear anything at all in the silent, noiseless air.

Even so, she wants to sleep and dream and doesn't know why she can't keep dreaming. Her eyes shut and open and the drift happens like the waves from a beach shore and the next thing she knows there is a voice ripping her eardrums and crying.

Where are you? Where are you?

Who are you?

She can't identify the first speaker, and it scares her like someone following her home. But nothing comes from it and everything falls quiet. Her heart beats like a bird's trapped in a cage and screaming. She feels the tears in her blood but it isn't quite the same as the voiceless urge to sleep and dream of this world for eternity.

For some reason, she can't help but resist now. She wants to move. She feels stiff and wants to move but ends up drifting away again.

The air begins to ring and she can hear and it is real hearing this time and all she can think is that something is about to happen.

Then her body tears down the middle and she sees blood and has no idea what to think or to feel because there is no pain and she knows it should hurt and bleed. All she thinks is how much the pain isn't there and without the pain, there is something else missing.

Hurry up and open your eyes.

When did she close them?

Hikari drifts in this state, wishing for it to end because there's somewhere else she needs to be, somewhere where it's not cold and there are actual voices, things she can understand.

Did the Digimon bring her here? They brought Koromon to her and her brother back then, was she joining them?

"Why are you still sleeping?"

Her eyes open but they don't open because the void is still around her but now she isn't alone in it. There is a woman there now and she is staring with bright eyes and a crooked smile. Or perhaps it's not a smile, but it's not a sad face either. Maybe she doesn't know what her face looks like.

"Why are you still sleeping?" she repeats with a mouth that does not move. "What is tying you here?"

"i don't know," she says before she can stop herself and the other woman chuckles.

"Liar," she says, not unkindly."You resist the pull, one way or another way. Why?"

Hikari wished she could shake her head because she doesn't understand, but instead tells the woman this. She earns a laugh like a breath of air and the woman floats closer. She is moving, how is she actually moving? Her fingers touch Hikari's cheek.

"I see," she says. "You are trying to communicate. Yes, you hear me and see me but I can't return this, I see..." She makes that air laugh again and pushes Hikari away. "You are a stubborn one."

This time she doesn't drift but fall and when Hikari's eyes open again, she sees a white ceiling and bright light and everything is very heavy and painful now.

"Yagami-chan!"