#adelectabledream

   A shiver ran down the girl's spine at the touch, the voice smooth and alluring, making her not turn around right away. She stood, frozen, wondering how long the stranger had been watching. How much had they heard? She almost felt embarrassed to be caught in such a state of nostalgia-- no, longing. She wasn't one to display how unhappy she was with things now. Always the one to stay positive and hopeful for the future.

  That's what people expected, and that's how she wanted to be seen.

  What she wanted to believe.

  Heather remained still while fingers played with her hair. Oddly, she didn't mind as much as she thought she would. Each strand that fell back into place felt familiar to a ticking clock, the gears turning as her mind did. Waiting. Telling her not to move, only listen. Already guessing the question before they could finish it and the temptation of admitting such a wish caused her breath to catch in her throat. Hazel eyes focused back on the photograph in her hands. A photograph of a distance, other time, admittedly better than this. Seeing it felt like looking into the window of another, happier world. A world where anything was still possible and terrible mistakes didn't exist.

  Would she relive those days if she could? To do them over?

  The question echoed around her mind and her heart grew heavier each time. She let out a shaken sigh, her shoulders slumping. The question held so much weight, so much impact, that she almost wanted to cry at the possibility of having one more day like the ones in her memories.

        ❈~ "Long blond hair? Blue eyes? Ah, you must be Llewellen's boyfriend, then!"

"Well... this is the last place I'd've expected to find one of them."

Gumi stood at the base of an oddly shaped hill; at first glance, it didn't look too much different from the others near it - surprisingly tall with steeply sloped sides, rounding off at the top and looking for all the world like a giant child had filled a bowl with soil and upended it on the ground, much like a sand castle, some hundreds of years ago. Wildflowers ringed the outer edge of the hill, in riotous combinations of colour, though it was difficult to make them out in the gloom of night.

They were beautiful, in a strange sort of way. It was just a shame that most of them held the bodies of the dead. Barrow-mounds - artificial hills serving as tombs for the honoured dead of civilizations long passed. In the generations that followed them, those who forgot what lay beneath began to imagine that these green hillocks were home to creatures of faerie.

The hill Gumi stood at the base of was much like the others - perhaps a trifle larger, a touch rounder. The only real indication of its ownership was the pattern of the flowers; unlike the chaos of the wildflowers about the other barrows, the ones here followed a mathematical precision, with a repeating pattern of colours that deflected the eye and made one leery of looking too closely. A fine means of discouraging too close an inspection, for certain.

Of course, none of that would've made a difference if not for the door. Was that... mahogany? Whether it was or not, the door was richly varnished, and clearly in good keeping. There was no visible handle, but its occupant likely didn't need one to open or close it. Of course, that also kept the reaper out - unless she wanted to break it down.

Not yet. Not unless the occupant proved... reluctant to open up.

Once, twice, thrice, Gumi rapped on the door with her knuckles. "Hello? Allen? Are you home?"

After everything that had happened recently, it was a relief to sit down and do some desk-work. Gumi was usually pretty quick with hers, so the Bureau had gotten in the habit of sending other paperwork to her for handling. Sometimes she even happened across something entertaining to read.

Not this time, sadly. Pretty much everything in the pile had been dry, dull, and boring. Only when she reached the end was there something even remotely interesting... and these were ones that she had the least amount of work to do.

Even with all that the Bureau had at its disposal, there were still times when they lost track of souls under their protection. Usually, someone was able to determine what had happened... but in rare circumstances, not only did those souls cease to exist, but no trace of them remained, no hint as to the cause of their disappearance.

In most cases, with no possible way to recover the soul, there was little point in looking after several years. Even without the proper rites, a bereft soul with no purpose would eventually discorporate on its own, dissolved into raw soul-stuff and absorbed back into the aether. Thus, all she could do in most of these cases was agree with the statement of the last case worker, and mark the file as closed.

Reading through these cases always made her a bit melancholic, so she was already in a gloomy mood when she reached the last file. The lost soul in question here was a little girl, very young and very sickly. The disease she suffered from hadn't been curable in her time, so she'd been consigned to an early death. At least she had family to worry and care for her in her final days.

On the surface, the case file looked like a simple case of mismanagement; the girl passed on roughly a week before she had been scheduled to, and by the time someone got around to looking in on her, her soul had already disappeared. It never turned up in processing; of course it would be marked as lost. The pink-haired reaper was just about to set the file aside when something pricked at her perceptions.

She rewound the file to the last recorded image of the girl - pale and looking weak, but still cheerful. Next to her was a tall clean-shaved man with glasses and a small boy with buckteeth. Her family, most likely... and from the file notes, the picture had been taken by a nurse at the hospital, so that was all in order.

It was the bear in the girl's arms that caught her attention. After a few moments, she realized why. The bear seemed brand-new - a gift, surely, meant to comfort her - but it was wearing a distinctly unusual outfit.

A black tailcoat with knee-length pants. A yellow vest over a white shirt. A tiny yellow bow tie.

And, atop one ear, tipped rakishly to one side, a black boater hat.

Gumi leaned forward in her seat, as though disbelieving the image. That outfit could have been a coincidence, certainly... but she stopped believing in coincidences twelve years ago. This was definitely the sort of thing she needed to look into... because if a dream eater had been involved with this girl, there was a chance, however small, that he was responsible for her early death.

She collapsed the file back into its natural cubic shape and stashed it away in her vest, mentally checking on her parolee's current location as she did so. Briefly checking the level of the cat food in the bowl along one wall of the room, she called out into the apartment for the only other occupant.

"Grim! I'm going out, don't know when I'll be back. If you go hunting, PLEASE leave something for the reapers to collect?"

A black feline shape on the couch raised its head disdainfully for a moment before dropping back to the upholstery; with a sigh, Gumi stepped sideways into the aether and made her way towards her destination.

It was time to ask Baku about the rest of his kin.

.. right?

Despite his insisting on the subject, the sheer volume of the .. unpleasant visions he'd been experiencing as of late was beginning to become far too much to ignore. He might have initially thought it simple common sense that an artificial being wasn't capable of having such .. 'human' things as nightmares ..

Ugh.

Rin had gone to sleep a while ago - he'd been checking on her routinely for the last hour - and he was finally beginning to get drowsy, but something was.. off. 

There was an uneasiness to his person, a sort of dread that trailed after him as he moved from in front of Rin's room to his own door. Slowly, cautiously, he pushed it open, letting his eyes shut and a rather loud sigh pass his lips as he did so.

Damn it, he wasn't even real.