What We've Started [SEQUEL to A Pure Sacrafice From A Dark Heart]

Christmas Part II

Star's P.O.V:

At least they shared one thing in common: waking up and choosing violence.

"Leave Sesshomaru! I can handle him!" I yelled at the human, hoping and praying he'd leave.

This version of me in all my suppressed glory wasn't handling the demon in front of me in any kind of way. Except flat on my ass. And I most certainly did not want to reveal myself the demon hater.

"I know what you are." The words traveled clearly from his place yards away, but I still answered with confusion.

"What?" My eyes left the demon Sesshomaru atop the dusty scaffold and landed on the man squatting behind his car's door, gun still trained on the demon, who had also let his eyes slowly travel the human's way. This was not how I wanted to dive into the Christmas season.

"You think I didn't know? Didn't know of the unwelcome occupants in one of my most successful and old schools?" He taunted me with such calm, for I could feel my insides warm in subtle anger. Was he insinuating what I believed?

Oh, perfect. This is getting even more interesting. 

A rather aggravatingly taunting voice sprung from within, doing nothing to snuff my mind's racing conclusions and assumptions.

No one asked for you to speak. Shut up lest you wish to boil because I will not hesitate to-

To what? You can't get to me. I am you.

I refused to acknowledge him. Ignoring him was the best I could do at the moment. He was a distraction - a leech. Compared to the matter before me, he was nothing.

"For how long?" I seethed with large amounts of restraint, watching my breath form visible tufts of air. I didn't want to fall into conclusions, but my mind was not ready to hear what I knew was coming. Small pieces of rubble subtly fell from demon Sesshomaru's perch atop the scaffold as he relaxed in his stance.

"I knew the moment they came and went. . . Aoi, Setsuko, you. . . among others in the past. Very few and far in between. Some of them. . . never graduated - drop outs, becoming criminals and the such." He shrugged casually, as if it didn't concern him. I'd gone blank.

My body paralyzed, I thought about the moment I first stepped foot into The Academy as an adolescent.

Numbness.

A shell.

At that time in my life, I had no idea what was truly going on with my evil personality switches and wouldn't until ten or so years in the future, when I'd find myself 500 years in the past. At the time, I believed myself to simply be a monster and nothing more.

And that made me numb. I felt. . . heavy.

"Star?" Human Sesshomaru called out to me with minor tones of discreet worry in his voice. He didn't sound worried about my well-being, though. Did his fear really run so deeply that it fed into an estuary of hate?

I would know what that felt like. The memories my body held felt like many rivers feeding into an estuary that eventually became the sea of me - the sea I drowned in as a child. All at once, that sea flooded me with lived knowledge of my time as an adolescent – of my first encounters with Setsuko at the Social Services Office, of my deeply rooted self-loathing, and of. . .

"Hikaru," the name dripped from my lips like sizzling flesh. Not only had he been evil in this time, but he'd been no better 500 years in the past. I was met with wafting guilty silence from the human, "you knew. You knew that man was a monster! And-"