It's all Yue's fault, you know.

At first I didn't want to watch other anime besides Yu Yu Hakusho because I didn't want to be sidetracked from my Eien no Hakusho project. Later I found out it was possible to watch an anime and not to feel the irresistible compulsion to write about it. And although Card Captor Sakura is definitely my second favorite anime, I did think that watching all its episodes would be safe.

Until the Judgment.

*blushes* And to think I used to laugh at my friend Seeress for her enthusiastic crushes on several anime bishounen... "C'mon, it's just a dang 2D drawing," I would tell myself. "Falling for a movie character performed by a flesh-and-blood actor, that I can understand. But how can anyone have a crush on a flat celluloid creature?" I mean, I think Hiei is the cutest flat celluloid creature ever created, but I never had an actual crush on him.

I don't know what's my thing with Yue. I'll try to write a rambling about it someday. All I can say for now is that I caught myself gaping in awe at his beauty and wondering incessantly about his serious features and sorrowful eyes, and of course, dying to watch the next episode to see if he'd show up or not.

As it often happens to me, whenever I feel some identification with a certain character, I start trying to see the story from that character's perspective, speculating about his feelings regarding every new event, looking for the slightest subtleties in his relationships with the other characters... And there was so much to conjecture about Yue!

Noticing my more-than-obvious hanyaan mode for the silvery Moon Guardian of Card Captor Sakura, some friends started with their own conjectures: is Morgan going to start writing CCS fics now?

Hn. "OF COURSE NOT", I told them.

No way. I can't. I don't have the time. I don't feel like it. It's not that interesting. What about my Eien no Hakusho project? I can't cheat on the YYH fandom. And CCS is too genki, there's no place to my usual humorous-angsty stuff. No one would read it anyway.

I sometimes wonder if I managed to convince anyone. I certainly failed miserably in convincing myself.

You see, my subconscious betrayed me. One night I had this vivid dream about a gloomy Yue asking if Sakura would someday create new Guardians to replace him and Kerberus, just like Eriol seemed to have done. I woke up very depressed, brooding about the inescapable passing of time, and imagining how Yue and Kerberus would feel about finding new masters/friends/lovers only to see them replacing them and dying, not necessarily in that order, again and again...

I imagined Kerberus trying to answer the question Yue had made in my dream. And Sakura reacting with another of her I-can't-be-Clow-san crisis. And Touya torn between comforting Yue or bashing the angel's head for making his little sister cry. Gosh, I think I spent a whole week brooding and picturing the scene. When I was done, I had a complete CCS fic in my mind, just waiting to be written down.

I fought against it for a day or two. But I eventually shrugged and told myself I'd better write the dang thing and get over it, or else that story would be haunting me forever, distracting me from my Eien no Hakusho series. One fic, and that would be all.

*rolls eyes* Yeah, right.

Anyway, I did think A Guardian's Heart would be my only CCS fic ever. Especially when I was getting close to finish it -- I honestly thought of it as the worst fic I could ever have written. I couldn't decide which character sounded more out of character, and the narration is so didactic and boring... not to mention the raw metaphors and the sickening, fast jumps of perspective from one character to another...

I hated A Guardian's Heart. I thought it was presumptuous and poorly written.

That was one of the reasons I didn't want to send it to Jenny, one of my beta-readers. She'd probably hate it and I wasn't sure my heart could take it if she really, really hated it. So I sent it only to Theresa Ann Wymer, who knew I was writing a CCS fic and had already asked me to let her read it. Poor Teka, I kept her awake so late into the night, fixing my typos and listening to my bitter mutterings on how English grammar never lets me use the words I want to use...

Well, Teka liked the fic. It was a bit of a surprise, but then she's always so supportive and reassuring towards me, I confess I didn't take her praising too seriously. "She doesn't want me to feel bad," I thought.

Only lots of people emailed me so I wouldn't feel bad. Some were Eien no Hakusho readers saying that A Guardian's Heart was the best fic I ever wrote. Some were people I never had heard of, saying that A Guardian's Heart was the best CCS fic they had ever read.

*shivers* I can't describe how weird this all felt. I've re-read the fic a dozen times by now, trying to figure what's so good about it, and I still can't find it. Of course, after such warm feedback it's impossible for me to think of it as the worst thing I ever wrote... but I can't get over the feeling that it's a display of really clumsy writing.

What? Writing a sequel?

Hn. "OF COURSE NOT!"

No way. One was bad enough. And it's not like I know how the story would continue anyway. I can't. I still don't have the time. I gotta go back to the Eien no Hakusho project, remember? Sorry, I'm done with the CCS fandom.

*sigh* Me and my categorical resolutions...

Okay, so I changed my mind. But there're three people I must blame for tipping me over the edge.