So. Um. Let me start off first by saying hi. And second I shall say I'm sorry, but I have a pretty good reason for not doing anything about this story in a year. After the last chapter, I immediately started on this chapter. I got half way done, then the next day I got started on a very heavy medication for migraines called Topomax. Or… topamax. Whatever. It's an anti-convulsant, but it works wonders for migraines. (Which was very needed, I missed 60 classes my junior years because of them and we decided I couldn't deal with that again.) So you can imagine it's strength. It made me an idiot. I'm not kidding you, for a full year I was somebody completely other than myself. I tried to write, really I did. I sat down countless times to do something about this chapter by I couldn't write a single word. There were no thoughts. Just nothing. Senior year was incredibly difficult for me. It like gave me ADD or something. But focusing on anything for more than five minutes was a bitch. Anyway, I'm off it now. So I'll ask you to please not be upset with me for not writing. I really wanted to. I hope this chapter kind of makes up for it. It isn't especially long or anything, but it gives you some insight on why Kagome is so messed up, and why she hates Kikyo. Okay, thank you for being understanding. Here you go!

"Oh just awesome." Kagome immediately backed into her apartment's living room. She roughly shoved her hands through her hair, rubbing her temples with her palms in exasperation. "Would you do me the honor of either giving me a Nobel Prize winning explanation of why you're in my house, or getting the hell out of it?"

Kikyo winced at the volume of her sister's thunderous voice as she stepped inside and shut the door. Apparently she was not going to get a warm welcome after all the years of ceased contact. Though, now that she thought about it, her own greeting words were more along the lines of insulting and less along the lines of warm and fuzzy—she and Kagome hadn't really been overflowing with sisterly love these past few years.

"I'm here to get you. You are to come with me."

She stared at her. Well that couldn't have been a more dodgy, bossy, cryptic, annoying, enter-some-other-displeasing-to-Kagome-adjective-here statement if Inuyasha himself tried to think one up. But that was Kikyo and that was one of that many reasons why Kagome loathed every inch of her. Kikyo and her damn superiority complex were hard to stomach; she was actually getting nauseous at the woman's audacity.

She crossed her arms and hissed through her teeth, "Oh, swing and a miss. Now get out of my house."

Kikyo was a paler, much more stoic version Kagome, with enough baggage to sink a navy ship. None, however, rivaled the woman when a glare was in order. Or a command, for that matter. She loved her false sense of dominance she just had to have over everyone and their mothers.

"I'm your older sister. Can you just do what I say for once?"

"Find me a sister that didn't kill my parents and I'll obey her unconditionally! I promise," Kagome snapped with her hands clenched tightly into fists. She kept them pressed to her sides, every inch of her focused on not ripping the bitch into tiny, bite sized shreds.

Kikyo didn't say a word, only studied Kagome fume in her exasperation. If anything, she almost looked amused. In a slightly vexed way.

She was going to snap. Seriously. Breath in, breath out. Fake smile. Here we go. "I'll tell you what, Kikyo, I won't call the police if you get the fuck out now." She stopped, realizing that threat was too empty to even laugh about, then added, "If you don't, so help me God my foot is going so far up your ass."

Kagome didn't really expect Kikyo to move, really she didn't—thatwould just make her evening far too pleasant. The universe wouldn't give her freebee like that, would it? No, it would not. Still though, when the chick refused to budge, Kagome's gasket blew. "Okay. I warned you." No, she did not expect this to work out well for herself. Did she often do self destructive things? Why, yes, yes she did. She started toward Kikyo, her hands placed roughly on the small of her back, attempting to push her in the direction of the door.

Apparently this was the wrong move—okay, her bad, sorry—because Kagome found her self met with the most unpleasant of coffee cups so unpleasantly and unceremoniously flung against her head. Her head. Come on. What an utterly unpleasant experience. Flying coffee cup. No shit.

"Ow! What the hell!"

Kikyo smiled lightly—a rare occurrence, Kagome hadn't seen one of those in years—watching her opponent jump around, cradling her head in obvious discomfort. "Don't touch me. I don't trust you not to divide my body's elements into God knows how many chemicals." She could have sighed at Kagome's dumfounded expression, "It would undoubtedly kill me. Idiot." Her face screamed confusion, still. Kikyo scowled, yet moved on despite the girl's stupidity, "And I have explained the past to you several times. I did not kill our parents. You're astounding inability to understand anything at all ever astonishes me."

She blanched, her head forgotten. "Okay first off I couldn't even do that if I wanted to. Which I do. And secondly yes, you did kill them. Death is death is death. Your hands are your hands so why don't you just lay back, accept the fact that I will forever hate the sight of you, and make good with the fact that it's justified?" Kagome turned away as she made her way to couch. She did hate Kikyo, she thought; after everything, the only feeling she could possibly find for her sister was hate. And some fear. Maybe.

Kagome put her feet up on the coffee table and her hands behind her head. Kikyo watched, eyes darkening with the overwhelming sense of being written off.

She didn't loathe Kagome, per se, but damn if she didn't annoy the holy hell out of her. Looking at the girl was literally like looking at a version of herself that she could have been had she not been the very spawn of family dysfunction and Murphy's Law. They looked exactly alike, so much so that they could have been twins, so the fact that Kikyo was older by two years and only a half sister to Kagome was on the verge of appalling. In appearance it was easy enough to tell them apart as Kikyo wore dark eye makeup—not not horridly excessive, but dark enough to match her composed, horrifyingly deadly disposition. Her lips and cheeks remained free of color as she took on the appearance of a porcelain doll—her immaculately spotless skin and flawlessly sleek hair demanded such a perfect nature.

Yes, a glare from this woman could be quite lethal and, actually, it was more often than not as her temper was more of a short stick than she let on. She wasn't sure how much longer Kagome could continue berating her before she broke one of her more important appendages. The flying coffee cup, mysterious as it was,—Kikyo shoved down a chuckle that threatened to rise to the surface—had only been a fraction of what she could do with her ability, for they had shared a different mother whose power's aspects had been pulled in two different directions between the two girls when they were born.

Kikyo was soon lost in the reverie of her mother who could have quite possibly been one of the most powerful differences the world had ever known to have created a being like Kagome with a mere human as a father. She wasn't stupid; though she was vastly more trained than her younger sibling and could crush her beneath her feet at the current moment, Kagome could destroy ten demons with three times the level of Kikyo's power given a little training. It would only take the snap of a finger.

And that was why she was here.

She had been watching Kagome. She knew that was trying to get stronger. It was time for her to join the ranks of great demons, differences, and deixas like herself. It was time for Kagome to join the Commission; but damn it all if Kagome didn't want anything to do with any part of her. She wore red lipstick—a deep red, almost purple—and colored her cheeks just because Kikyo didn't. She refused any eye makeup, excluding basic mascara, purely because she wanted to be distinguishable from her sister.

It wasn't always that way, Kikyo thought with a sigh. There was a time when they wore matching outfits and held hands at supermarkets, finished each other's sentences and shared an unconditional love that sister's often share. They weren't twins, but they might has well have been. There's something about being different that brings siblings together—especially two that have the same face.

However, this concept can and did go both ways. After the accident, to Kagome looking at Kikyo was like looking at a version of herself that she would always despise. It was like wanting to stab herself in the heart every waking moment of every single day. The day her little brother was born had changed everything for them.

Now, Kikyo and Kagome both shared a mother. Kikyo's father was a one of the first differences to be black bagged when she was at the tender age of one year. Having a child and needing support but not wanting to bear the pain of losing another husband to the prejudice of the government, her mother remarried almost immediately to a human. The wedding night marked Kagome's conception.

Their mother learned to love the man very much, but she never told him of what she was. She buried her powers in her past, thinking that if she just pretended they weren't there, they wouldn't be. The government's system for dealing with demons was getting stricter and better known as time went on. She would gage her husbands reaction to the news whenever a story of such interest was released and he would slander them terribly; he called them heathens, monsters. Some of them were. She had to admit that the demons they showed on TV were rather destructive.

If only he knew how gentle some of them were. If only he knew his daughters, his beautiful daughters, were two of the fiends he hated so much.

She had already told them that once their powers started developing that they were to never use them. She told them they were to never tell anyone of whom or what they were. They were human. They were and forever would be normal because that was what was socially acceptable. She begged her daughters not to judge their father for the terrible things he said about their kind and that it wasn't his fault—his mind was washed by the media and the government and he only knew what they wanted him to know. Kikyo, though extremely young, argued that he should love every part of them anyway. She often found herself missing her old father and disliking her new one.

The family lived a relatively happy life for twelve years. But at the tender age of twelve, Kikyo had been forced to do the unthinkable to save what little she had left. A feat she considered to mark the death of a free-spirited young girl and the birth of whatever it was she had become. What had she become? She didn't laugh, she hardly smiled, she had somehow managed to alienate the person who had loved her unconditionally, save for Alina. But who knew where the hell Alina was. Parading around fucking England, she thought bitterly. Fuck that day five years ago. Damn it to the furthest, shittiest place the universe had to offer.

The world had killed their family. The world had no idea what fair was. The world would certainly not have allowed her fucking human stepfather into their lives, a bigot as he was, to ruin them, if it did. No, it definitely wouldn't have allowed her little brother to die in the way he did, and her mother—

Her thoughts must have shown on her face, because Kagome—bless her heart with her complete and utter lack of self preservation sense—interrupted her thoughts with an uncouth, "What in the world is wrong with you? You look like someone just stabbed your puppy."

She went still. Memories rushing to her head, blood pounding in her ears, the insolence of that demented girl.

Rage, Kikyo thought. How foreign, to feel rage. A pure, unadulterated hated bubbled up within her. She screeched and twisted her face into the worst kind of snarl.

To Kagome, she didn't know what in the holy hell was going on. Actually, she had an idea when the most horrible growl erupted from Kikyo (she'd have to ask her how she managed to make such a menacing sound) and—well, it's not really that she didn't see it coming, it was all just too damn fast for her to do a damn thing about it—she was thrust against the wall, hard. And now, oh fuck, she thought wearily, there was pretty much nothing she could do to get out of it.

Kikyo compressed air with the slightest movement of her hands. She scrunched the chemicals in air together, allowing them to become something akin to a solid mass or hold weight when the object in question was unable to slip through the space between the elements. And oh, did Kagome ever feel that compression. It felt like she was stuck between her living room wall and something resembling brick house. And through all of this, she couldn't help but wonder, what in the hell did she say?

"You know what Kagome? I did kill them. How about that?" Kikyo was through. She was done trying to get this girl to listen. She comes down here, forced by her agency to recruit this fucking brainless piece of fucktard and what? She gets her shit stirred up in the nastiest way because yes, it was an excellent idea to visit the one link she had to the incident that ruined her. "Did you ever consider I killed him to save you?"

A few yards away, one hand raised, keeping Kagome in place against the opposing the wall, the other slowly, but surely, closing, choking the girl into submission, "I wish I had let him kill you, you arrogant, ungrateful little brat!"

The day Souta was born, it was such a happy day for all of them. That day they had come home from the hospital, mother and son both declared healthy, friends and neighbors eagerly awaiting the arrival of the family with smiles as bright as the sun. It was bliss, for exactly five hours. When the doctor had shown up, dutifully 'warning' the family that the results of Souta's blood test were less than promising, that he was different, everything she had loved was squashed into the ground. The universe then decided her life was insignificant. Her father had said 'I see' with a look that clearly said 'we didn't know you took his blood'. He promised the doctor that he would take care of it, saying 'thank you' as politely as possibly. At the time, as she watched the whole encounter leaned over her cereal bowl at the kitchen table, she hadn't known what take care of it meant.

Thirty seconds later she would learn it meant killing her baby brother in a fit of anger so palpable, she could have combusted under the heat of his rage. He screamed at her mother, calling baby Souta an abomination, a demon, though he meant it as derogatory as possible, not literally, never literally. As he strangled Souta, her mother refusing to hurt the man she loved with her different abilities, Kikyo ran into her room and demanded that a frightened, twelve year old Kagome stay in her room at all costs, no matter what horrid noises she heard, that mommy and dad were having a fight.

When she had finally dared to come out, Souta was dead. That man had strangled her little brother—he looked peaceful, almost as if he were having a nice dream. But she knew. She stared, eyes wide at a horror that should never be forced on a child. He stabbed her mother repeatedly right in front of her, the look on her face trained on Kikyo, pleading with her to take Kagome and run to someplace safe, where their father could never find them. No, not father. Monster.

She desperately wanted to obey her mother's last wish, she did, but her own rage, laden

with vengeance and turmoil, wanted otherwise. She unleashed her untrained ability, smashing what she assumed was similar to a something very heavy on her father. The force, thick, compressed air, repeatedly, up and down, up and down. When she grew tired of it all, she picked him up, thrust him to the wall, then to the other. Side to side, up and down, floor to ceiling. He was broken, so broken, she could have fit what was left of him in a shoe box.

She remembered every detail. She remembered falling to her knees, panting with the strain dealt to her physical and emotional being. She wished she couldn't remember, but it was if it had happened the previous night. It probably had, she thought, in her dreams. Every dream, all the time, every night. She remembered pulling herself by her red-soaked arms across the floor to her mother. Had she seen? Was she alive to watch her death be avenged? She cradled her body, lifeless as it was. There was so much blood. Blood everywhere. Kagome was covered in it, her wide, horrified eyes a stark contrast to the crimson. Had she been watching? She must have been, to be covered in so many pieces of her father.

Hard wall against her back, immovable force around her throat, Kagome tried with all will she had to spit a malicious 'fuck you' at her sister. It proved worthless, the force of such a trained ability wrapped tightly around her neck forcing anything other than a gasp back down. Yet she demanded the words 'I hate—hate you' come through, and she knew her own grave was being dug. She felt Kikyo's thick, unyielding spite. She really didn't understand what she could possibly be thinking, what reason she could have for this horrid treatment. Kagome had done nothing to her.

She had lived with her for as many years as she could stand; she bought groceries for them, stole anything they would need. She outran the cops too many times to count so that the two of them could stay afloat—Kikyo off doing God knows what.

She didn't say thank you, she didn't acknowledge what she went through to do the things she did. She just took and took and said the occasional 'good, we'll need this'. She supposed that was as close to thanks as she would ever get.

Kikyo explained to her once the facts of her family's death. As a twelve year old she had blocked out the memories and accepted Kikyo's words as truth. But as the months passed, and pieces of the puzzle fit together to form a terrible scene that would forever be imprinted in her mind, the story she was told seemed less and less likely.

She had seen it—she knew what happened. Kikyo and her lies, Kikyo and her family's blood, Kikyo and her horrible, ugly fucking face.

She never wanted to see her. She never wanted to be her. She just wanted Kikyo to die. Why couldn't she just die?

"Just die," she whispered. It was so hard to breathe. She knew Kikyo wouldn't kill her, but she was very aware that she was about to black out all over this floor. "Go join my family in the hell you threw them into."

And then, the force was loosened. Air, sweet air. But also, all the pain. So much. Her hand, this pain, how was it all happening? Was she actually surviving this? A bloodcurdling scream—that's all she could really do other than exist. Kikyo's face was now impassive. No emotion, she pushed it back down, where it was safe. And her hand was made into a fist clasped tightly together, crushing Kagome's with collapsing air.

It felt like shrinking steal, she thought. Between the tears and screaming, all she could think about was the metal, not there, but somehow very real, crushing her livelihood. It happened, she couldn't believe it happened. Her own sister did it; she couldn't blame herself for not seeing it coming.

And then she was on the floor, gasping, grasping and cradling her hand—bloody, bruised, and broken. Fuck.

Kikyo looked at the floor at her feet. She wouldn't look at her victim after that brash display. This was why she didn't feel. Feelings caused horrible things to happen. She thought back to that night, they always caused her to do horrible things. Why only her?

Calm, poisonous exterior back in place, "Kagome," she looked at the door, contemplating the fresh air, and how she needed it, "I expect you to be ready the next time I come for you. You need to join the Commission." She chanced a look at the girl on the floor, "It is non-negotiable."

And then she was gone. How long did that all take? Kagome wondered with the small part of her brain that was still functioning, the part that wasn't shrieking at her in agony. Like four minutes? All of it, the entrance to the end?

It had happened. Her hand was so, so wrecked. What could she do but lay there? She was as good as dead anyway. She was sure she had enemies. Didn't everyone have enemies? They would come for her now, they would beat her and—and—oh God—to be defenseless—

"K—Kagome?"

She blinked. "Shippo," she breathed, "I told you to stop breaking into my apartment you little fuck."

She was so relieved to hear his voice. It proved she was still a part of this planet.

He scrambled out of the farthest corner from beneath the kitchen table. "I—I saw everything. The woman—um—you need to go to the hospital."

"Just shut up and get the first aid kit."

He looked at her hand, eyeing it with unease, "I don't that's gonna do it."

She was almost out. Her eyes were so heavy. "Just do it, Shippo!" She shouted, and then added, in a soft voice as she left the world for a little awhile, "And then I'll make us some food okay? And we'll watch some TV. It'll be nice, won't it, Souta?"

And then, head on the ground, she was asleep, passed out, maybe. Shippo sighed. Of all the times he had to patch up this woman, he had never seen her so… just so.

I'll have you know I've thought up so many nice things to do with this story. It's gonna be a long one. I'm about to be off to college, but I'll find time to write! It's UC San Diego by the way. So if any of you are there, represent! I'm very excited for the new experiences. Okay, review if you like, Lord knows I love it and constructive criticism is always welcome. Thank you!