Rain

Kiba turned around an avenue in his human form; this world wasn't like the old one, not yet, anyway, but showing his true form in the middle of the city would still cause a stir. There would be pest control, guns, and eventually angry animal rights activists. Being a human was just so much simpler.

He had met hid friends from the old world. They had been born here, and they're experiences had shaped them different ways. Toboe was an innocent young boy, having forgotten his true inner wolf, just starting school. Tsume lead a wild wolf pack. Hige lived as he had in the old one, shifting between forms and trying to eat as much as possible. Blue lived with her old man on a farm with his family.

Maybe this was their paradise. Maybe those lives were all they ever wanted.

They hadn't had any memories, they had come into this world with nothing at all of the old one. Kiba hadn't been born, he had just awoken in a back-alley with the rain falling on his face.

He had sought the others out, until satisfied that they were happy here. He didn't think he could ever be happy here, maybe that was why he came here with his memories.

He had no aim here, no impossible fabricated paradise to reach.

He was alone, lonely in it. And there was one thought that filled his head with longing: Cheza. That word breathed onto his skin. He had to find her, she told him to. He was looking, but it was hard. How was he to know where she was?

It rained so much where he was. Almost every day.

There were a few flowers here and there in this new world. He figured it was half-way through; not apocalyptic or broken, but not new and innocent, either. Maybe it was the best place to be, maybe it just painfully reminded him of the old one.

Sometimes his journey did seem faint and far away, like a dream or a whisper, maybe made-up. But he never really stopped looking for Cheza.

And it was in that alley that he found her, partly, anyway.

He had seen lunar flowers before, but not like this one. Not like the one trodden down by the concrete, but still visible with the rain dripping off it.

There was no question about it; it was her.

Kiba wasn't sure what to think. He hadn't imagined meeting her like this. Not in a place poisoned with what the humans had done to it. Not her as a flower, not in a form where they couldn't communicate.

Carefully he dug her up and carried her to a field outside the city where a thousand other flowers bloomed. He set her down besides them all and lay with her.

"I finally found you," he told the flower. It gave no reply.

And as it did so much here, it began to rain.