Title: Echoes of the past

Theme: 30. There's an echo following me

Character/Pairing: Sakura, hints of Sakura/Syaoran

A/N: This will be the start of a collection, hopefully updated once a week. Feel free to request with character/pairings. This will be my way of getting ready to make an actual big one-shot for Tsubasa.

Summary: It's a ghost in the attic of her memory, a voice that repeats itself with no end or beginning.

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Someone says her name, softly, tenderly, lovingly and Sakura swims toward the sound. Wait! she yells, Wait!

It doesn't quite leave but it doesn't stay either. At the distant edges of her mind, the border between reality and illusion, the voice calls out to her and she follows it. She has no choice but she isn't sure why. That voice is important and special, that much she knows.

She also knows that if she could just catch it, she would understand his furtive glances. Sometimes Syaoran gave her a look she didn't understand but echoed in her heart until she could feel it. It was the feeling of chasing and chasing, but never catching; the feeling of reaching for something that disappeared at the faintest touch. Sakura would try to grab it but it slipped through her hands, water leaking out the crevasses of her hand, and all too soon she would be desperately trying again.

It whispers again and Sakura runs toward it. She flies past a jumble of memories, a mountain of images that remains unsorted out. Maybe one day, when she finally succeeds, she'll come back and try to organize the landscape of her thoughts. Put the furniture back into their proper spots, the missing people into their rooms, and see the puzzle as a whole instead of tiny fragments that piled onto one another. Put the voice back into its proper room too, where it belongs and should be. Right now it's a ghost in the attic of her memory, a voice that repeats itself with no end or beginning.

Stay! she cries when it disappears from her sight again. It doesn't listen to her and fades away. Like a magician bowing out, it did the final magic trick until the next show. The only thing is that she doesn't know when the next show would start. All she can do is wait patiently.

Sakura doesn't worry about it returning because it never really leaves. It just grows fainter until it's a hum that sings in the back of her mind, only to a song she doesn't know the words to and she can't turn the volume up. It just stays there, waiting for the day she can finally catch it.

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