Morning
For Meg/Suppi-chan

Notes: Funbari no Uta universe

Sunlight in his eyes. Grass on the back of his neck. The smell of woodsmoke scratching his throat. The pipping and screeching of birds. Crickets whining.

Yoh tries to turn over and bury his face under a pillow before he realises that there isn't one. He wraps his arms around his head instead with an unhappy mumble.

But the world, having wormed its way into his consciousness, isn't letting go now. He gives up, in the end, throws his arms out and yawns. He squints up at the sunlight falling bright through the trees overhead and closes his eyes again. It's much, much too bright.

He was dreaming. What was he dreaming?

Footsteps rustle through the grass, and a shadow falls over his face.

"You're awake."

A woman's voice. He opens his eyes again; her hair is pale, gold in the morning light, her eyes stern, her mouth disapproving.

"Anna," he says, surprised. His voice comes out strange - rusty from disuse, deeper than it should be. He flails to sit up and his arms and legs are longer and heavier than he remembers them being; his hair straggles down his back and into his eyes. He looks down at himself, up at her.

Ah. She's older too.

A trickle of a memory, of a dream: light, endless and colourless and featureless, all around him, in a place with no time or end.

He wriggles his fingers and looks at his unfamiliar, suddenly too bony hands.

"How long?" he asks.

"Six years," she tells him.

He blinks. "That was longer than I expected."

"You took your time," she says, and he half expects a slap. Instead, she watches him. He stares back at her; her eyes are very dark. "Where is he?"

He blinks. "He. Oh. Hao?" He looks at the forest around them, the small fire burning in the middle of the clearing, and feels his vision shift, disconnect from the world he has so recently returned to. It settles back in place, and he blinks. Something inside him has searched and not known - quite - where to look. But if he thinks, if he reaches - here -

His hands open and close, then open again and come to rest on his chest. "He's here," he says, eyes shut. For a moment, the timbre of his voice takes the note of a different man (one who'd worn his absolute faith in his world like a cloak, one they know maybe too well).

Yoh opens his eyes and looks up at Anna. Her face is impassive.

"Is that so," she says. She turns to the fire, the beads around her neck clacking against each other. "Come to breakfast," she tells him.

She has fish from the river; Yoh wonders how she caught them, but doesn't ask. She guts them with a knife, leaving their insides shining red beside her, then skewers them by the fire. The smell makes his stomach rumble and he tries to eat his too soon.

"Ouagh!" he manages, sticking his burnt tongue out.

"Idiot," she scoffs, unsympathetic.

He knows this very well indeed, even if he does not know where they are, or what has happened to the world while he was gone.

"What would you have done if Hao had come back?" he asks, suddenly, mouth full of fish.

She spits out a bone. "Killed him," she says.

"Oh. Even if I was with him?" The way Hao was with Yoh now, in every beat of their heart, the places in their souls where they'd met and never been able to leave? He knows she would have. "That's cold," he says, mournful.

"Don't be foolish," Anna says. "I knew you would come back."

"So I must be the Shaman King now," he says.

"It's about time you kept your promise," she says.

"You've been waiting for a long time," he agrees, and drops the remains of the fish bones into the fire.

A bird wings through the sky, high above the trees. He watches the light fall through the leaves, green-gold and unpredictable, feels the world turn beneath him, shrugs into his still-strange skin and bones. Standing, he stretches and yawns again.

"It's good to be back," he grins.

Anna humphs and throws the pack at him. He staggers at its weight, then slings it over his shoulder. She looks at him for a moment, her gaze long and clear and steady. Reaching out, he touches her face.

"I missed you," he says, simply.

"Of course you did," she says. She wraps a hand around his wrist. "Come. They're waiting for us."

"Where are we going?" he asks.

She smiles. Yoh can count the number of times he's seen Anna smile on his fingers; but he knows her smile too, even better than he knows his own.

"Where else?"

Ah. Home.

end

September 2005