Disclaimer:I Do Not Own Yu Yu Hakusho.

This story came about when I remembered reading a story where a fangirl comes into the YuYuHakusho world as Kuronue. This is something along the same lines. I think the story was call The Pendant. Been a while since I reread it. This will be slightly more serious.

Some say that hearing is the first thing to reach cognizance, and the last thing to go.

For me, I think it is superseded by the first level of the sense 'touch'. Part of me has always felt that there are levels of physical feeling, which is why you can be perfectly comfortable until you wake up more and those little aches and pains make you uncomfortable enough to roll over.

In this case, I woke up with the feeling akin to sleeping half-submerged in soft river silt and blanketed by cool salt water. There was something off, but I was comfortable.

Then hearing crept in, followed by the sound of someone wading into water, but heard from under-water, with indistinct murmuring in the background. Something was off, but I was comfortable.

Then came the second level of feeling, with all the little aches that come upon waking, so I shifted and stretched, rising and shifting in my bed of silt. Something was off, but I was still able to ignore it and try to drift back off to sleep.

I dozed for a time, the voices and sounds coming and going, as the little aches harried at my consciousness until I opened my eyes.

It took a bit for my eyes to realise what it was that I was seeing, because it was so odd.

Have you ever been to a deep-water aquarium where you can look up at the sharks as they pass over the underwater tunnel? It was like that, except there was nothing but water and the surface above me.

There was also the issue of nothing between me and the water, not even goggles, and yet I could see the world around me as clearly as if through a video camera.

There was nothing around me but the silt floor within which I had been half-buried, and twenty to thirty feet of water above me.

I was not breathing.

This is what distressed me the most, more than the eye-sight, the sleeping on the bottom of a water-bed, or the possibility of sharks. To breathe is a natural body function that can be both conscious and subconscious.

I looked around the water-bed a moment longer and finally noticed the bumps and rises of other bodies lying asleep upon and under the silt.

I pushed myself up in the water and got my feet under me, only to find myself unbalanced.

Glancing back at the weight, I found folds of black skin and bone attached to my back that were akin to folded bat wings. A little worried, I glanced myself over to see if there were any other additions.

...I realise it was kind of stupid of me not to previously have notice my lack of apparel, but I was distracted.

Looking down at the hard plains of my pectorals and rigid six-pack, I couldn't help but feel there should have been breasts and softly curved hips in their place, though a part of me was plainly ignoring that which lay between long legs that I felt should have been shorter and chunkier. There was something odd about my toes, but I dismissed this to ascertain that I did not have a tail.

The face that I ran my long calloused claw-tipped fingers over was sharp and masculine, with high cheek-bones, a wide mouth, highly arched brows and large, exotically tilted eyes that gave the appearance of narrow when they were really just heavily lidded. Large pointed ears the size of my hand were tilted up and back at around a seventy degree angle. My hair was inky black and fine, swirling and tickling around my torso at uneven lengths between the small of my back and the bottom of my firm and curved (oddly non-pudgy) ass. I took a few moments to locate my near-invisible belly-button just above my happy trail. Something that gave birth to multiple young, perhaps?

I vaguely noted that I had an odd lack of body-hair aside from my head and groin, and even these were sleeker than the coarse curls that they should have become with the onset of sexual maturity.

Idly running my tongue (oddly furred, but not bristled like a cat's) along my teeth, I noted the molars at the back but slightly sharper teeth towards the front with elongated eye and canine teeth. General configuration inferred a fruit eater.

After determining that the wings were the biggest oddity in my appearance, I turned my full attention to them.

It is difficult to describe the addition of a new set of limbs when you have only had the four your entire life. I imagine it would be like a child who went into a coma, only to wake up as either nearly an adult or a teenager. There is next to no coordination and movements were jerky. Their only saving grace was that they had muscle memory, so I was able to get a few soft flaps out of them, lifting me from the water-bed and kicking up silt.

Using a combination of all six limbs, I swam up to the surface-

-and popped out in a puddle of rain water on a deserted street, a light rain sprinkling down from the sky overhead.

Leaning my hands over the submerged lip of the puddle, I ducked down under the water and looked around at the empty ocean where I had awoken.

Something in me found it amusing to pop my head out into the street and then back into the slightly salty ocean.

I eventually clambered out awkwardly when I had a brief image in my head of a shark with the back end of an octopus. 'Octoshark'? Or would that be 'Sharktopus?'

I awkwardly wrapped my wings around my torso by folding them under my arms and hooking the wing-hook/finger/claws together.

I looked around and found that either everything was child-sized, or I was very tall. I was leaning towards the latter when a front light flicked 'on' on one of the houses.

The door opened and a small woman with mid-length black hair and dark eyes shuffled out. There was a sense of something frail about her, causing me to sniff the air subconsciously. That 'something' informed me that she had been deathly sick in the last year or so, and her body had yet to finish shedding the dead, sickly cells.

For whatever reason, the woman looked up and saw me watching her over my shoulder, still standing in the drizzling rain and pre-dawn light across the street, feet still in the body-temperature puddle.

Her dark eyes took in my towering height, hovered over my sharply pointed ears and drifted to to my folded wings and the strip of pale flesh between them, hinting at my lack of clothing.

I tilted my head slightly in wary curiosity as to what she would do next.

(space)

Ten minutes later, I was sitting on a lounge, wrapped in blankets and my hair in a towel, sipping a hot cup of green tea, as the woman, Minamino Shiori, fluttered about the dining room and kitchen, cutting up some fruit for me, and pacing anxiously.

But she wasn't afraid of me, more worried for me.

Apparently, her son was off at some kind of math camp, tutoring the less intelligent because he was just that kind and intelligent.

Something about this place and the soft buzzing against my skin was relaxing, the soft scent of plant-life drift through the building from the many potted plants she had around.

There was a stronger, muskier scent that most humans wouldn't take note of, but was almost sickly rank to me, hanging around the place as if marked by some predator. For some reason, this scent also made me relax under a strong wave of safety.

As Shiori-san wandered back into the room with a bowl of fruit (how had she known that?)I spoke for the first time.

"Why are you not afraid of me?"

To the human ear it was a pleasant, though rough and slightly dark, voice, but to my own, there were multiple levels of sound and meaning in my voice. Some part of me knew these vocals and nuances were important to communications between others like me, and that, should I choose to, I would be able to place my energy wit in the soundwaves to influence those around me.

Shiori-san smiled sadly and sat down on the settee across from me, hands folded on her lap.

"As a girl," She began, "I had a gift. I was able to see the true forms of those around me, and often had prophetic dreams regarding the future of myself and those around me. My best friends going through primary school were a nekomata and a squirrel youkai. But as I grew, my second vision started to fade, and I didn't know why."

The sad smile was more a painful line of grief than a smile now, hands twisting in her lap.

"My friends eventually found out that my neighbour was a tengu witch who was syphoning off my power and life-force for her own use. I would have died within the year had she not been stopped, but the damage to my powers was done, and it would not come back. My life span was cut back greatly, and I would have died earlier this year had someone not interfered."

The smile was sad again as tears began trickling down her cheeks, heavy loss hanging over her like a funeral shroud.

"I wouldn't be surprised if Ruki-chan and Momo-chan killed the witch for what she did. I haven't seen them in years, it was too painful for me to go on our adventures and not be able to truly see what was happening, so we drifted apart." Then her smile turned brighter. "Then my Shuichi-kun was conceived. The doctors thought he would be still-born because of his weak heart, but I remember the sudden rush of power that went through me that day in the park, when I was trying to decide if it wouldn't be kinder to terminate the foetus. I went to my mentor from when I still had my prophetic powers, and she told me that I was carrying a changeling child; that he would be important to the survival of the human world."

Then she looked up at me, happy smile and tears still in her eyes. "She said that he would forever be in love with a dead man whom he met before he was born. That he would forever greive for the loos of the one person he loved above all. The name she gave me was-"

-It was a paradigm shift; the world tilting on its axis-

"Youko-"

-It was gravity and vertigo and weightlessness and white noise-

"-Kurama."

Click.

MINE.

I passed out.