Promise, it's not as bad as it looks, she's not the typical Mary-Sue. (It IS a self-insert, forgive me, but I like who I am. I tried not to be too perfect, I have a bad habit about doing that, but there are complexes and not-perfect things and problems in the character, and I didn't go out of my way to describe beauty, at any point. Oh, shut up, stop looking at me like that.)

Hello. This one will be long, a warning now.

I tried to be original.

Please read it. Flames welcome. Reviews welcome, too. Suggestions, corrections, all that, I'm up for anything, I just want to know what people think.

Also- if anyone has an opinion on this-- Um, do you guys MIND second person (i.e. the "you" thing instead of "she" or "I"?) thing? 'cos. I mean. Some like it, some don't, but I wrote it that way first. I could just replace these chapters.

Doumo. Saijonara.

Ah, yeah. And, um, I tried to be nice with the languages, all the stuff not in the dominant language of the chapter (or my SI) is in italics.

-R.F.

Indestructible

"Hey MER! C'mere, bitch!"

She tries to tune them out. One blares his car horn. She flips him off. She went out early, tonight. Dumbass. She knew better than that.

He does it again. "COME HERE!"

She pushes her thumbnail into her palm to see how sharp it is. It's pretty sharp. An inch long, too. That'll be good, won't it?

So she turns on her toes to approach them.

One stays. The rest shut themselves up in the car. She walks up to him.

"Hey. You gonna cast a spell on me?" Ah, this whole thing again. God, that was eighth grade, and a temporary switch of religion, why the hell--

"You can't be serious. No, I'm not," she sighs annoyedly, staring up at him with cold blue eyes. She's fixed her face so that the expression is colder than normal--she tightens the corners of her mouth just enough to straighten out that curl, she narrows her eyes a little (not enough to make the muscles look too tensed), and she keeps her teeth apart in her closed mouth to elongate her face. He looks at her and smirks.

"You can't cast a spell, huh? Don't wanna turn me into a frog?"

"Don't have to, you're already a pile of shit, why would I wanna do you the favor of turning you into a higher creature? Do me a favor, and take this into consideration." She holds up her hand. "Look at the fingernails. You see how pointed they are?"

He gawps a second. "So what? They can't hurt, and I'll punch you if you even try."

She holds her thumb up. "Doesn't matter. All I need is to get this to your eye. Just a scratch, and I can pop that little ocular organ right out of your skull. You know that? You hit me, whatever hand you hit me with will be busy, and all I'll have to do is move fast enough to get through that opening. You're a big person- you're slow. It'll be so easy. And tonight is the wrong night to push me."

He gets into the car. "Jeez, I was just playing. Dude, let's go."

The car speeds off. She sits on the ground against the coke machines as soon as they're out of sight. She's really tired, for some reason. She always gets tired when she's threatening someone. Her heart is beating harder than she's used to.

Insolent fuckers.

At least they didn't challenge her. She'd be torn between keeping her word and not hurting the guy.

Tonight... sucks. That's about all she has to say or think about it. She's tired, she feels horrible, she's achey, and something just feels wrong.

She had decided earlier that night to go out walking. She left early, tonight, because there was no one online, and she didn't feel well. Unfortunately, the idiots are still out at this time of night, and they love to mock her. It was a wonder they even bothered sticking around after calling her over, this time.

Phantom footsteps sound a little to the north, and she jumps nearly a foot in the air and freezes in her walking to see if it continues. No, it's gone. Dammit.

"Will you knock it off?" she shouts at it. "Fucking bastards, you've been doing this for too long." And they have. For months, she's been hearing noises that come from nothing, and it's starting to piss off. Every once in a while, she can entertain the fantasy that it's a ghost or stalker or something, but never for long. There have been flickers of motion, the feeling of being watched, weird chills, and things touching her... She thought it was a ghost, for a while, but only some of those actions were his. Some things, he can't do. Most of the time, all he ever did was float in doorways and touch her.

A flash of light makes her jump, and she snaps to in order to look at it, but nothing's there.

If these are hallucinations, they're awful creative.

"Whoever the hell you are, wish you'd cut it out and just come the hell out," she mumbles quietly. She gets back to her feet and starts moving again, this time, out the back way, down where she's certain no one will be waiting.

While she's walking, she starts thinking again. The thoughts are empty and meaningless, but she allows them to continue through her head. So far, she's been wandering aimlessly, and her body feels like it's asleep. She starts wondering if she's even real. Pain would be a relief, to wake her up. A purpose, that's what she needs. Someone to take her away, take her somewhere fun. Too bad the only reason anyone kidnaps anyone is a bad idea. The power or money offered by rape/murder and ransom.

"Wow, that's depressing," she says aloud when she realizes what she's thinking about. She dismisses the thoughts as she crosses the school yard and run to the shadows to hide, dodging the guard. She creeps around back and climbs onto the railing and reaches over to grab the edge of the roof and dangle helplessly for a second until she starts to drag herself up. Her arms shake and she can feel the strain, and she tries to kick off the wall, but there's nothing for her feet to catch. She gets up to about chin height, and she switches one arm around, but then she drops hrrself onto her chin and she dangles again. Dammit.

She tries again and pulls herself back up and rolls onto the roof and sits for a second, grinning triumphantly. She hears a soft noise below her and she looks down, but nothing's there. When she looks back over the roof, she sees a flicker of motion, and she goes to look at where it disappeared, and she swears a little when she doesn't find anything.

"Goddammit," she curses, crawling behind the wall along the edge of the roof and keeping out of sight of the people on the road, and she goes to the auditorium's roof and climbs up and lies down on the edge of the wall with one leg dangling off.

She starts thinking about Cody back there. She wonders if she could bring herself to take out his eye, really. She doubts it. She's a brave person, and she will go to incredible lengths to prove a point, but she doesn't like hurting people. He's one of those people that used to make fun of her, before she hit him in the face with an apple in the seventh grade, then convinced everyone she was a witch and "cursed' a boy in class in eighth grade. Cody still likes to exact revenge from a distance. She normally ignores him, but tonight, she's on edge.

She really doesn't think she could have really hurt him. She would have tried and let him hold her back, or limited it to knocking him down and showing him that she could have done it.

What was wrong with him that he couldn't leave her alone, anyway? All of these jackasses... Just can't be nice to anyone, can anyone? Even she's cold, though. She doesn't make fun of anyone, though. Humanity... sucks, she decides, for the hundredth time. If it were up to her, she'd just be alone, and the race would die out when she bit the big one.

And, again, she wishes she were somewhere else. She wishes she were somewhere that didn't have... people.

She's about to give in to whatever sadness that is lurking outside her mind. It's been bugging the shit out of her for an age and a half, and she's not sure what's causing it, but she doesn't have any money for ice cream.

"Fu-- AAH!"

She started to say "fuck this shit", but she were interrupted when she realized that there was someone standing on the edge of the roof. She only just heard him come up. She sits bolt upright and falls off her perch, and she barely catches herself, saving her from the thirty foot fall.

"Kuso," the person standing there says, and she can hear quick footsteps before his face appears over her. She almost drops, not sure what to do, now, but he grabs her wrist before she lets go, and he pulls her up easily, as if she were as light as a doll.

"Daijobu ka?" he asks quickly after she gets her feet on the ground again.

"Daijou," she answers, looking at him. She's only half aware that he spoke to her in Japanese and that she answered the same way. He's a little taller than her, ruddy-skinned, with slicked back black hair and rounded brown eyes, but just looking at him lets her know he's not from around here. In fact, he's about twelve time zones away. (Maybe thirteen or fourteen, she never did manage to get those straight.) His white t-shirt and blue jeans and tennis shoes kind of ease the out-of-placeness of him, but it's still clear that he is not where he belongs.

"Matte. Hanasu Nihongo ka?" he asks, looking confused.

"Iie. Anata hanasu Eigo ka?"

"Iie. Kuso," he mumbles. Then he looks over to a different part of the roof and calls out, "Oi! Kurama!" She hears a set of footsteps, and she looks over to see a girly-looking boy with long red hair approaching. He looks more American than his friend, but he's still just as Japanese as the other one. Blue-jeans as well, though his legs don't look as gangly, and the fitting green polo shirt makes less effort than the loose Tee to hide his almost bizarrely pretty slim figure. When he looks at her, she can see that his eyes are green, too. Odd.

"K... Hello," the guy says. Apparently, this is Kurama. "I apologize if we've startled you." He's not real sure how to speak English, at first, but he seems to figure it out after he gets a few words into his second sentence. He looks nervous. She feels a little more confident, seeing their disease, but she's still confused. The first boy doesn't move- he keeps behind the red-head with his arms crossed, and he doesn't say anything.

"Well, I don't care that much about the being startled, but... How'd you get up here?" Then a second question occurs to her. "Oi, you're the freaks that've been making all those weird sounds!"

The redhead smiles bashfully and puts his head down a bit. He isn't looking at her, she notices. He never was. She tries to remember if that's an Asian thing or not--she knows the custom differences...

"I suppose that I should come right out and say it then," he says simply. He seems more confident, now. He was trying to figure out how to tell her that they had been following her. Damn. "Yes, we are. We've been following you for the better part of six months. And tonight is the night the spying is ending. If you are willing, we are going to take you with us to meet someone. You have every right to refuse, but we cannot, and will not, answer questions now."

The first boy she met asks the red-headed one something beginning with "What", and the red-head answers with three words that she doesn't understand. Whatever he said, though, it pisses off the first one, and he grabs the red-head's collar and starts shouting. The red-head reacts calmly, taking hold on the first one's wrist and taking it off his shirt, and he speaks for a second until, finally, he looks back at her.

"If you would, we would appreciate if you climbed down and came with us."

"Uh." A series of thoughts rush through her head. There had been a certain emptiness of mind that heard everything, and now she is letting it sink in. It was very easy to believe that these two had been following her for a while- it explained a lot, and was actually a relief. Go with them, she thinks. Her instincts trust them. She's uneasy, but she is already moving toward them. She watches as her body moves for them, but then she freezes herself. Why am I hesitating? she asks her. Weren't we just wishing someone would come take us away? Weren't we just thinking about how cool it would be to be taken somewhere? Didn't we need a purpose?

"Take your time," the red-head says gently. "I understand your distrust, but we will not harm you." He's looking at her, now, watching her think. Something about him seems. Off. He's hiding something, she guesses. Could it be a plot? If they're about to kill me, I can take down one of them. I'm tough enough--I'll deal with getting marked up. There are people near here, they'll hear the screaming. Pay phone too.

"Fuck it, let's go. Give me a minute, I'll get to where I can drop."

Notes: Conversation in Japanese I wrote out-

"Are you okay?"
"I'm okay."

"Wait. You speak Japanese?"

"No. You speak English?"

"No. Shit. Hey, Kurama!"