Disclaimer: Unfortunately, this is merely a fanfiction, not a reality. If this was a reality, I would be very, very happy, though only if I could chose which one of my characters I got to become and which character I got to hook up with. Let me just say that Yu Yu Hakusho is one of the coolest anime shows out there, in my opinion, but, also unfortunately, I own no part of the show or any of its characters in any way shape or form. If I owned Yu Yu Hakusho, in particular a certain little fire demon named Hiei, I wouldn't be sitting around wasting time writing about possible Hiei fluff, I'd be out acting it out wink wink Ack! hides from angry mob as they throw smoldering sticks at my head puppy dog eyes I can have my dreams, even if Hiei doesn't like fluff. happy Besides, I have ways of convincing him to participate. What are they, all you Hiei fans ask? Well, you'll just have to read my piece of crap story to find out, now won't you…

Prologue

Kisu…

Kisu. Kisuko Tanira. That is the label of everything I hate. If I could say that this was not going to be a tale of self-hate, self-deception, of being too dense to see the truth…

A girl thrashed in her bed, deep asleep and in the throes of a nightmare. The tangled sheets became the imagined hands that tried to throttle her.

…then I would…

She gave a strangled cry of fury, and lashed out with a strength hidden by her slim arms. The sheets ripped and she landed painfully on the floor, immediately curling into a tight ball. She remained still, hair drenched by a cold sweat.

…but I can't… to say that it wasn't would be lying. I am what I am, and I hate it. Half blood demon, from my full-blooded mother, and a quarter human, quarter shape shifter from my ignorant father. Even after having a daughter he doesn't know about his own heritage… He's too dense, and my mother was to good at hiding what she was…

The girl's back suddenly bent in remembered pain. She whimpered softly as invisible fists pummeled her prone form before biting her lip hard enough to draw blood, to stop herself from making another sound. Even in sleep she refused to show any more pain than was strictly necessary.

I lived with my mother and her tribe in the Makai until the age of eight. In that time I learned more about fighting, pain, and betrayal than most humans do in a lifetime. My first lesson was, and remains, the most painful. My mother was always forced to choose between the continuation of her life among the people of her tribe, and the protection of me, her daughter…

The girl began to thrash again as the dream beating intensified, and reached out straining arms to an unseen figure…

And she chose them over me every single time, until the day it looked like they were finally going to kill me and put me out of my misery. Even then I wanted to die, longed to die. But suicide would have been, and still would be, admitting that I am weak and that all of their twisted affections affected me more than I ever let on…

She stopped. Her eyes opened, yet remained dry, despite the pain hidden in their depths. She sat up and let her arms drop back into her lap. And then stared at a point on the floor, seeing a scene that had long since played itself out, but continued to repeat itself within the confines of her mind. An image of her mother's severed head rolled towards her across her bedroom floor, and the woman's final scream rang, fading, in her ears, while the girl watched, unable to do anything to stop it.

And then she paid the ultimate price to save me. If she'd known what would happen that day… when she finally spoke out against my treatment… when she finally said maybe they shouldn't be quite so harsh... had she known that they would turn from my torture to hers with such ghoulish grins stretched across their faces… then I doubt that she would have interfered, even at the cost of a slightly guilty conscious… because that would have been all that my mother, my would-be, should-have-been protector, would have felt…

She stared at the ground blankly for a moment, then blinked, and visibly pulled herself back together. Not that there was anyone there to see or care, no one to witness her momentary loss of control, the momentary lowering of mental and emotional shields… And she had been careful to keep it that way, never allowing anyone to reach helpful fingers into her wounded core. She wearily hauled herself to her feet, absently rubbing a hand across dry cheeks as though wiping away the imaginary, unshed tears.

They hadn't even really cared which one of us died. They hadn't cared which one of us lived, and which one of us was left to be tortured further. They wanted to cause pain, and they knew that the death of one would hurt the other. They were right, but where my mother would have felt a pinprick I had a gapping hole.

She leaned heavily against the black wall, and then staggered across the room to the adjoined bathroom, deftly avoiding the boxes and piles of junk that she had yet to unpack into this new room.

That day, as I lay in the dirt to weak to move, and watched as they forced her to the ground so they could hack at her neck with a dull blade, I blamed myself. I blamed myself for being too weak, too young, to retaliate, to save her. For being weak enough to myself be hurt, to potentially be killed…

She stood in the doorway of the bathroom, fingers making dents in the doorjamb, and flipped the lights on. She squinted; her sensitive eyes burned in response to the blinding white walls now illuminated by an equally blinding light, and then clutched her stomach as it suddenly churned. She collapsed next to the toilet and puked up the remnants of the previous night's supper.

…but I also blamed her…

She again pulled herself to her feet, wiping her mouth with the back of a hand, and reached across the sink to the medicine cabinet to pull out a pair of pill bottles.

…because it was her fault, not mine, that she fell in love with an idiotic prick who dumped her when he found out she was pregnant. I'm the result, not the instigator of that mistake. And it was her fault that she crawled back to the bigoted bastards that spawned her a heartbroken mess, instead of standing up straight and brushing it off like they expected her to. It was her fault she didn't return showing the expected response, therefore damning herself forevermore in their eyes, another reason they weren't as slow as they could have been to grab at an opportunity to be rid of her. It's not my fault, either, that I've always been stronger than her, stronger than her in all ways since the day I was born. Or that I've always been able to withstand the torture and tests of character that the tribes constantly dole out like candy, presents to be hoped for, better than she…

The girl walked back into her room, the most recent in a line of many that she had painted black, more awake now, recovering from her nightmare. She studied the bottles in her hand, not for the first time, as she made her way towards the mini fridge she had placed on the desk in the corner of the room.

…and back to the point of this little flashback…

I lay there, unable to move, face to face with her dead head, lying in her spreading, cooling blood. The others laughed at the final demise of the weakest member of their tribe, weaker even than the bastard mixed blood that she had birthed. And then they gathered around me, eagerly awaiting my response to this new development in my already tragically inclined life. And, having lived with these creatures for the better part of my short existence, I knew that if I was to show any weakness, emotional or physical, despite what I had just witnessed and been put through before that, that they would gleefully fall on me as well, and use it as an excuse to execute me as they had my mother minutes before. I was not about to give them that chance.

So, because I really had no choice, I gathered all of my little remaining strength and pulled myself painfully upright. And then, when I stood as straight as someone with multiple deep tissue bruises, a fractured kneecap, a broken arm, and three cracked ribs can, all this time refusing to let any emotion, let alone pain, cross my face, I tilted my head so that I could look disdainfully down my nose at my mother's corpse, and then spit on her remains.

Therefore, at the cost of the death of the last part of my eight-year-old soul, or maybe just the very deep burying of it, I snuffed out my will to live. I buried that part of me that allowed me to hold out some sense of hope, for a partner…not necessarily a lover, I was too young for that…a friend, someone that I could compare to, talk to, trust…the hope of finding someone that meant something to me, and I meant something to. I did this to unsure that I would live, knowing that my life would never be ended by my own hand, despite the temptation presented by that solution. Because that would be succumbing to yet another of their evil pressures.

I was assured that I would be allowed to live until the age of at least fifty by the tribe elder, and, because I was now without a guardian that lived within the tribe, that I would be assigned one. It would be up to them to see to my care until that age, at which time the elder would reconsider my status and standing as a member of the tribe. But, I was also given the option of choosing to go live with my father, however unfit a guardian he might be considered. The elder made his opinion very clear on this. My father was an unfit guardian because he was not a tribe member, and, even though I was only part blood demon and not worth more to them than the scum on the bottom of a pond, I still carried some of the tribes' most sacred substance, which, of course, is blood. Though, it was also that same reason, that same substance, that allowed me that option. He was my blood relative, and that is, at times, one of the most powerful connections you could sport among 'my' people.

I stayed with them long enough for my external wounds to heal, for them to begin to tire of me, to them to be willing to let me go…and then I left…

She stood in front of the fridge for a moment, then reached forward, yanked the door open, and grabbed the single bottle remaining in it. She pushed it closed with her elbow as she turned around and drifted back to her bed. She held the pills in one hand, and this new bottle in the other. The bottle contained a thick, red liquid, marked O positive. She looked despairingly between the two as she jumped back onto her bed, and some feeling began to leak back into her empty eyes for the first time since she had woken up. She looked at the curse of her existence, the thing she longed for, craved, needed to survive, yet despised and was revolted by, and then threw it to the floor with a bestial growl and snarl, where it smashed and began to soak into the charcoal gray carpet.

They grew bored of me, and that had been my plan. One of the few good things about living with them had been that it taught me the art of deceit, planning, and tricking people into giving me what I wanted. All were required skills if you wished to survive in their village, though mostly it was so you could recognize the actions in others when they used them on you, and successfully deflect some of the intended damage.

I was a play toy that had lost its luster, to everyone but the one, particularly annoying tribe member that had been assigned the task of my guardianship. The fun in torturing a victim who refuses to respond fades quickly, something I had observed over the years. So I began to shut off all of my emotions, and force all of my many mental wounds, if not to heal, then to scab over so thickly that barely anything could reopen them. I suppose I'm mentally advanced for my age, downright ancient compared to most humans, but this was something that my childlike plan for survival had deemed essential early on. I had been convinced that there was nothing useful about emotions, and that I should therefore make every effort to dispose of them. Before this there had not been a reason strong enough, dire enough, to give me the strength to do it though. There was no reason to vanquish my greatest weakness, to lend me the power of mind and resolution. But now there was, because I wanted nothing more than to escape from their grasp.

I was no fun to mess with when I had no reachable weak spots, so everyone slowly began to leave me alone, to forget about me. I started to become part of the scenery, to just exist. I went to the elders and petitioned to be allowed to go live with my father, obviously under an oath of silence and secrecy, pertaining to the three worlds, and the existence of the Youkai, especially the Blood Tribes. They agreed, and sent me on my way, six months after my mother's death, but not before imparting one final horror…

She sighed, anger already gone, and slipped off the bed again, grabbing the pill bottles on her way, already regretting her impulsive action. Disgusting was the nice way to describe the taste of long dead, bottled blood, but even as she cursed the substance, she knew she needed it to function, and would feel the affects of her lack of food tomorrow, by way of hunger, energy, and pissy attitude. She was fine now, but that was because she was still half-asleep. Tomorrow would be a different story. She would be like a coffee addict that hadn't gotten their morning caffeine boost, except worse, because it would last all day whether she drank her morning coffee or not. Not that she even liked coffee, in her opinion it tasted like dirty water. And tomorrow would be her first day in her new school, in another new town, where she didn't know a soul. Joyous. She decided then that she would take advantage of the time she would have before first-bell, which didn't ring until 9:00, and spend the morning checking out her new blood supplier. She walked back across the room, disregarding the shards of glass in the carpet. Physical pain wasn't that difficult to deal with. Hell, it was barely noticeable…

They took away the two freedoms I actually cared about…

She grabbed a towel and tossed it onto the wet splotch, and patted it down with her foot. No matter what she did it was going to stain her new carpet, so why bother? She would just buy some cheap stain remover products tomorrow and hope for the best. Maybe while she was out looking for her contact's hideout? She wasn't all that sure where it was located. Besides, wasn't that her usual plan of action? Going with it, or for it, and letting things turn out the way they wanted? It meant less stress over friends and grades, at least. If she didn't have care, or have any, how could failure in those categories bother her? She reentered the overly bright bathroom and grabbed the cup she kept on the counter. Filling it with water first, she gently set it so she could fumble with the lids of the pill bottles she had yet to open.

They told me that, while living outside of the tribe, I was not allowed to hunt for live blood. I was only allowed to feed on blood of the bottled variety, purchased from demons that for some reason thought blood would be in high demand in Ningenkai. Hey, it's not my spot to question, just to be thankful I don't usually have to go out of my way to find a food source. And it's not like I want to do anything besides that anyway. It's more that, despite everything I've been through, or because of everything I've been through, I react badly to attempts to undermine my independence. This? This doesn't even really bother me. Irks me, yes. But bother? No. It's the other demand they placed on me that pisses me off. It makes me want to rip the heads off of that pompous assed freak every single day, and watch his life blood slowly pump from his throat as he dies. Besides, this first demand is one I would have followed anyway, even if they hadn't said I would be violating my part in the agreement that allowed me to escape from them. I would have followed this whether they demanded it or not, because of a certain little Reikai rule that says feeding off of a human is illegal, and, with enough offenses, punishable by death. Fun, fun. I think I'll pass.

The lid finally popped off and she shook two Motrin into her hand. She swallowed them with a sip of the water and hoped that, for once, they would actually do their job and cure her headache, or, more accurately, the headache and discomfort that she would soon be experiencing.

As I said earlier, I am also a shape shifter, though not in the traditional sense that people think of. I don't change into an animal. I can't. Some of the pure shape shifters probably can, but the side affect of having a rather mixed background is that I don't have enough power. I don't have enough strength or skill, and have no one to teach me how to use this part of me any better than I have taught myself. Hanyous almost always develop the same abilities as the rest of their species, although usually weaker and less defined. There are also the rare few that are twice as powerful, or even more than that, than anyone in either of his or her lineages. I'm guessing that we who have human blood aren't quite so lucky. Though not knowing any other demons, or even any humans with distant demon ancestors, except for my father, it's a little hard to tell. But I'm thinking that the human blood dampens everything, considering that I haven't developed the majority of the most basic of the abilities most of the Blood Tribes members possess. I also don't know how it will affect my aging, considering most demons grow at a human rate until the age of 16 or 17 and then stop, and since I'm only 15,it will take a few years to figure it out if this still applies to me or not. So, will I be young forever, and only die when fate decides to wield her hand and bring into play an unnatural death for me? Or will I age like a human, and be past my prime, weakening, by the time the tribes' people are willing to look at me again? Does it matter? No.

My shape shifter abilities are limited to changing any part of my physical appearance, to a degree. I can change my skin tone, eye color and shape, hair length, color, texture, facial structure, and make slight changes to my physical frame. The elders' second demand didn't restrain any of that; it just forbid me to ever 'wear' my natural form, to ever again let my concentration drift entirely from the maintenance of a physical shield. It had something to do with not being worthy of my ancestry until they decided I was. Who says I even want to be part of their little exclusive club anyway?

They did the brunt of the work to establish the containment/form I would wear, which would prevent me from letting all illusions drop completely. I was too young to know how, or to learn, even if they had wanted to teach me, which they didn't. They gave me pills that would keep most of it in place, so that I wouldn't constantly be drained by the effort of maintaining such a complex image. And now the only time I feel drained is right after ingesting one of the pills, or when I've forgotten to take them for an extended amount of time. I suspect they also found a way to bind a portion of my energy and abilities so that I'm unable to access them. That might be a more probable theory than my ideas about the dampening qualities of human blood.

She opened the other bottle now, and stuck a finger into it to pull out a single pill. She held it up to the light, close to her face, and studied it for what must have been the millionth time, as she tried to discover what was in it, and what made them such a successful binding force. She closed her eyes and sniffed, glad that she had always been allowed to keep her extra sensitive senses…i.e. hearing, sight, smell, touch, and the ability to sense reiki…and was met by the familiar smell of unknown herbs. Some less poisonous sub-species of demonsbane was probably a key component of the mix, though there was also a faint residue of youki that made her think the effect the pills caused had been achieved more through chants cast by village herb masters than the actual herbs. The pill's appearance was unobtrusive, in fact it looked like a very large vitamin, but she knew better. She popped it in her mouth, quickly washing it down with a good portion of the remaining water in the cup, firmly placing a hand on the edge of the counter top.

They send me more of these lovely little baubles every month. They used to send me cases of blood every week too, but that stopped when I turned thirteen. Apparently my guardian deemed I was old enough to find and pay for it on my own at that age, and let me tell you, blood doesn't come cheap. Being left to provide myself with a supply means that I sometimes find myself without nourishment, either because I forgot to go pick it up, didn't have enough cash that week, had just moved and therefore didn't have a new source to buy from, or hadn't gotten around to checking if the source was fairly legitimate…or more likely, what the chances are of the operation being busted anytime soon, since very few of the sources I have used have had the ruler of the spirit world's approval.

Nothing happened for a few moments, and then she almost face-planted it as all the muscles in her body went limp, then tensed in pain as the invisible, yet familiar chains of foreign youki tightened around her essence. Her back arched and she panted as she felt knots tighten. The slack that had developed in her restraints over the last couple of days was eaten up, and she again experienced the sensation of a sharpening of her features, a sense that her form was taking on a crisper edge, as abilities and forms were blocked and hidden as though they had never existed, and her natural energy was forced deep inside her center. The pain stopped as suddenly as it had started, and she almost fell over backwards with the force of the lightheadedness she was now experiencing, feeling as though she had just willingly stepped into an over-tight corset. If she didn't know better, she would have sworn that she could bounce herself up to the ceiling…and brain herself on it. Not a pleasant thought, but she knew better. She also knew that she was going to have a massive headache tomorrow, one of hangover quality, and be intensely hungry. She was seriously wishing that she had controlled that little outburst with the blood earlier so that she could have taken the edge off of it. Due either to genetics or the pills her body refused solid food more often than not, part of the reason for the puking earlier, but also allowed her to live more effectively on the bottled brand than some of her full-blooded relatives might have. That, or she had just never been conditioned to prefer the feeling of someone else's life energy pumping into her mouth and down to her gut over the more detached feeling of drinking the stuff out of the bottle like soda.

She stalked out of the bathroom, scowling, already sinking into a bad mood for tomorrow, as she hit a button on her alarm clock, setting it for 6:00. About to climb into the bed she froze, and suddenly did an about-face as scenes of the nightmare again flashed through her head. She headed back into the bathroom, snatched another bottle from the medicine cabinet, and downed two sleeping pills. After all, her clock still only read 12:30. She wanted to get some more sleep tonight, and this way she was guaranteed to get it, even if it meant she would be even groggier and crankier tomorrow. She just wanted some dreamless sleep…

So, I live from week to week, hoping my contacts won't have been arrested between one visit and the next, and do my best to just survive, because that's the best any of us should hope for…

She returned to her bed, dragging the covers up from the floor with her, and slipped into a blissfully drugged sleep.

…and now you know my basic, tormented background, and the reason I predicted at the beginning of this night that this tale would become a tale of my own stupidity, and blindness, since that's probably what it's been up to this point anyway. That's the way I am. That's just the way I live. That is the way, I, Kisuko, live. I am the girl in this dark room, sleeping a blank dream, hoping for something to come and end this existence for me. I am the being that I hate even more than the ones that made me this way. And, considering that my life has been quiet, quiet for me at least, for the last couple of years…no new tortures, no twists and turns, except for those accidentally forced on me by my clueless father…I'm predicting that I'm in for an adventure, or at least a mildly chaotic time. I mean, why else would I be here, telling you about my past? Why else would you read about my past, however choppy a version of it this may be? And about the adventure, a girl's got the right to dream, right? I get tired of the same old fears, hopes, stresses, day after day, just like all of you. I feel like I'm due for some fresh spice in my life.

…but…what would I know about the future? How could I know? Why would I want to know? I couldn't, and I wouldn't want to. I can't…because…I'm still waiting for it to happen…and that's what makes it so exciting…

That's why it's the only thing I have left to look forward to.