Summary: Before they were the Black Cats of the Full Moon, they were their school's close-knit Computer Research Club. Sachi and her friends can't wait for the release of SAO, but it turns out they need to solve a little problem with their NerveGears first.

Takes place before the Aincrad arc.

Disclaimer: Sword Art Online is owned by Reki Kawahara. I own absolutely nothing in relation to this work, except for the plot of this particular story.

Prologue

In the years later, Sachi would look back and realize that the formation of the Black Cats started with the most innocuous of events. In this case, it was when a group of boys tried to feed worms to the school hens.

It was supposed to be something that taught primary-schoolers some aspects of responsibility. They would divide into groups of five, and each team would be assigned a chore – watering plants, clearing the track of stones, stuff like that. It wasn't uncommon for Japanese schools to keep rabbits and chickens as impromptu pets so that the older grades could feed them or clean their pens as well. Sachi, then a fourth-year, and her group had been intending to do just that.

Things had been going all right...up until they actually arrived at the pen. Apparently, this other group had been doing something else nearby (Sachi couldn't recall exactly what) that led them to suddenly finding a lot of worms in the dirt. Things kinda spiraled down from there.

"Whoa... Look at how many it's eating!"

"Oh, ew, that worm got bitten in half! And it's still moving!"

"C'mon guys, dig up some more!"

The sole girl amongst them fidgeted nervously. For boys, it must've been something fascinating to watch Mother Nature in action, where only the fittest survived and the weak was devoured in a vaguely gruesome manner. For Sachi, little Sachi who would never hurt a fly and was horrified of blood, the very thought of the worms' deaths left her nothing short of nauseous.

"Oota-san..." she let out softly, "I don't think we should be doing this..."

Oota was the biggest of the lot, and the one who egged on the others the most, which was why she named him. She immediately wished she hadn't; when the boy rounded on her, she was reminded of the boy's reputation with painful clarity. He was a bully. And he liked settling things physically.

He grabbed Sachi by her shoulder, heedless of her yelp, and dragged her forward until she was almost pressed against the chain-link fence that he had earlier flung worms through. "And what's wrong with it, huh? Isn't it fun to watch? Don't tell me you're a scaredy-cat!"

Helplessly, Sachi glanced to her side. Even after the years, the judgmental eyes of Oota's group, staring relentlessly at her, seemed as sharp as a needle; they were clearly on his side. Her own group, well... She didn't really get along with them – she made it a point to relocate herself as far away as she could when they were having their rough-and-tumbles, and they were all very awkward at talking to the opposite gender (and for Sachi, she felt awkward talking to anyone). It was sort of an unspoken agreement that this was a completely temporary arrangement, and Sachi didn't even try remembering their names. Not for the first time, she wondered what her teacher had been thinking, sticking one girl into a group of boys.

At the very least though, they didn't seem to be taking sides at all, watching with an uncertain air about them. That was something.

She turned back to Oota. "No, that's not it, it's just –" She searched her mind for an excuse. "It's just, if the hens get fed too much, they might overeat and die..."

"Then the school'll buy more hens," Oota said, "and we'll get to feed them again. There, everyone's happy. Now go on, throw them in."

He tossed several worms at Sachi unexpectedly, making her give a little shriek and drop them.

"What was that for?" the boy said angrily. "And I was nice enough to give some to you too! Pick them up!"

Nine-year-old Sachi shrunk back. "I –"

"Pick them up!"

Sachi flinched. It was well known by her classmates that she was timid, easily frightened. She fled from violence as if it was an incoming rock slide. And though most didn't know it, she had a very good reason to fear getting hurt. In all honesty, she herself wouldn't have been surprised if that outburst convinced her to meekly obey.

Except, she didn't. For what was possibly the first time in her life, for the sake of mere earthworms that couldn't stand up for themselves, she gathered her courage, glared at Oota solidly, and said, "No."

Oota's face darkened. And then he pushed her, hard.

Sachi screamed as she tried to regain her balance, but though she managed to grab the fencing the momentum was enough for her head to bang heavily against the side of the pen. She fell on the ground, stunned and blinking stars away from her eyes, but unharmed as far as she could tell.

Oota stepped forward, but her own group finally intervened. "Hey, come on Oota," said one of the boys, the de facto leader of their four-man band. "She's just a girl."

The bigger boy sent a glare at the speaker, who wisely retreated a few steps. "Whatever," Oota muttered, turning around. "C'mon guys, let's go. This isn't fun."

Sachi let out a relived, trembling sigh as the other group finally left. "I..." she started, intending to thank the boys, when her hand unconsciously felt the side of her face and came away wet.

She froze.

"There's a cut on your cheek," said one of the boys, not the first one. "It's pretty small, though."

The voice sounded far away, as if it was from the other end of a tunnel. All her attention was on the bottom of her palm.

Blood.

Her blood.

She was bleeding.

Her heart pounded, loudly. She couldn't breathe. The nausea came back with twice the force, as she thoroughly, completely, digested the fact that there was a cut on her cheek and it was bleeding.

"Hey, you okay? You look really pale."

Sachi's eyes refocused. Brown hair. Reluctant expression. It was the leader, the one that the others naturally relied on.

"Help," she whispered.

His brow furrowed. "'Help'?" he parroted, sounding unsure. "With what, the cut? Just leave it, it'll stop soon."

Sachi shook her head, and now the boy looked annoyed.

"Look, it's not a big deal, is it? It's just a little cut. If you really want to get it looked at go to the nurse's office."

He made as if to stand up, but Sachi desperately clung onto his hand. The blood smeared easily on his skin. "H-help," Sachi stammered, pleading.

"Oi –" the leader began exasperatedly, but one of the others cut him off, sniggering.

"Oh come on, it's not like it's a big deal, is it? Besides, we'll get to skip outta this period if we go with her and say we want to make sure she's okay."

The leader looked unsure, until another one of the boys said, "I'll tell the nurse we're coming!" and shot away. Then he sighed.

"Fine, let's go. You can walk, right?"

Sachi, at that time, missed the sarcastic tone in his voice. She rose unsteadily, leaning against the boy more than she'd normally be comfortable with, and all but made him carry her into the school building. Blearily, she registered the other two boys following leisurely behind them.

"Hey, watch it! You're getting blood on my clothes!"

Sachi shivered. She tried her best not to press against the boy, but try as she might, her arms refused to obey her – not out of inability, but out of fright.

Behind heard, she heard:

"Man, we're leaving blood on the floor. The teachers are gonna kill us."

"Then why don't you clean it up?"

"Wait, what!? Why me!?"

"You're the one who suggested following them."

Sachi's grip involuntarily tightened. The boy beside her winced in pain.

"What is wrong with you?" the leader said, his frustration evident.

He probably hadn't asked that seriously. He might not have wanted an answer, even. But Sachi heard him loud and clear, and clung to the question like a lifeline, hugging it tight, seeking reassurance.

"I'm scared."

"What?" Now the boy sounded confused again. "Um, okay." A pause. Then –

"Wait," he said slowly. "That's a lot of blood coming from just a small cut."

Sachi shivered, and her hand slipped from its hold on the boy's arm.

"Whoa!" One of the other boys caught her before her legs managed to fully give out, and Sachi felt a rush of gratitude towards him. "Careful!"

"Hurry up, guys!" called out the boy who had run ahead to the nurse's office, just some metres in front.

With some difficulty, Sachi finally managed to enter her destination. As the boys let her go, she teetered with unsteady steps towards the nurse, who looked up from some papers on her desk. "What can I do for you?" she asked kindly, but then her eyes widened. "What's happened? Why is there this much blood on you boys?"

Sachi was exceedingly conscious of the boys still behind her. Suddenly, she didn't want to say it. She didn't want to tell them, she didn't want to let out her dark, dark secret because they might run away from her in disgust just when she finally thought she might be able to be friends with them. But she was tired, and she was scared. And when time was most likely a major factor against her, friendless was preferable to dead.

Sachi managed one, pained whisper.

"I...I, have...hemophilia."

Behind her, there was a startled gasp. The nurse looked utterly flabbergasted for a full moment, and then she leapt out of her seat.

"You mean – it's not treated!?" she near-shouted. "Why didn't you tell anyone – No, before that, you shouldn't be moving! Oh my goodness, oh my goodness – I really hope you know what type you are, at least –!"

"Hemophilia?" Sachi heard the leader say behind her, quietly. "What's that?"

"It's when the bleeding doesn't stop," one of the boys said. "In the worst case..."

As the nurse hurriedly carried Sachi to the back, Sachi managed a glance back and saw the speaker's eyes aimed at her. She recognized the boy as the one who had run ahead to the nurse's office.

"In the worst case, the bleeding would keep going until she bled everything out and died."

Lying on one of the beds of the nurse's office, Sachi miserably thought.

It was about three years ago, in a shopping mall, that six-year-old Sachi learned that something was very wrong with her body. She had somehow wound up separated from her mother and wandered the floor alone. She remembered heading into the toys section, that place with the wonderful reflective plastic containers and the amazing models they contained inside. She remembered straining to grab one from where it hung, and getting to look at them closer. And she quite distinctly remembered one of them falling, because that was how she got a shallow but long paper cut on her hand.

At first she paid it no attention. It was just a little twinge, after all. But the longer she was enraptured by all the cool little features of such a tiny little thing, the more uncomfortable she became. There was a drip, drip sound that hadn't stopped at all for a while and sounded quite close, and for some reason her hand had felt very wet. So she decided she had enough and put her object of attention onto a nearby shelf.

That was when she realized her hand and the floor was covered in blood.

Sachi was not, naturally, a very loud person. It didn't even occur to her to scream, or to ask someone for help. To be honest, she didn't even understand what was going on. She simply stood there, staring with horrified fascination at her hand, and could do nothing but wonder how in the world all this blood fit in her body...and whether it would run out soon.

It was a stroke of fortune that a store attendant found her and realized immediately what she had. He had made a snap decision, a commendable one – he took her hand, wiped her arm the best he could, and led her out of the shop. There was another store in the mall, a pharmacy with a fully qualified doctor on-duty, that could help her where normal first-aid kits would not suffice. It was there that the grizzled old doctor patched her as well as he could, did a blood test on her, and then injected her with something called "Advate". He gave her a lollipop, asked her to hold on to the jar of Advate concentrate, and then told her that she had "Type A hemophilia" stemming from being "a carrier of a recessive X-linked chromosome" that "underwent a rare mutation, rendering the amount of clotting Factor VIII from your other X-chromosome", "insufficient".

"If you bleed too much, you can die."

It was a stroke of misfortune that her mother wasn't there at the time, or else what happened next would not have happened as it did. Frightened and lonely, learning just how fragile her life really is, Sachi had been trembling, beside herself, needing comfort that a doctor, a stranger, simply couldn't give. So when she actually did glimpse her mother, outside the pharmacy and searching for her, she ignored the doctor's repeated warnings to stay and ran outside when he wasn't looking.

"Sachi!" her mother had gasped, when Sachi crashed into her legs and hugged tightly, and then she snapped, "Where were you? Why did you go off on your own?" And then: "Who gave you that lollipop? And that jar?"

A little caught off-guard, Sachi had answered: "A nice man gave it to me."

It was a testament to Sachi's naïveté of the time that she didn't realize how this sounded to her mother.

Said mother's face tightened. "Did a nice man bring you here, too?"

Sachi nodded, unsure.

Without another word, her mother took both the candy and the jar from her, and then threw them into a nearby trash can without looking at the jar closely enough.

"We're leaving, Sachi."

A stroke of misfortune indeed, that Sachi completely missed her opportunity to tell her mother just what had happened.

Ah, she remembered thinking, mind and body numb from the sudden betrayal by her very own mother. So she doesn't care. She doesn't care that I left, she doesn't care that I need that medicine to live...and she doesn't care that I might die any moment.

That night, she cried herself to sleep.

"You're lucky it was a cut and not a bruise," the nurse said, after having sprinted into the city and back to get what she needed. "If it had been a bruise, you might've never realized you were bleeding at all. Really, why didn't you tell anyone?"

Sachi just raised the cover of the bed a little higher.

The principal had been notified, a local hospital had been notified, and – worst of all – her parents had been notified. She could just imagine it now, her mother and her father striding in. Taking a disinterested glance at her. Commenting, Why isn't this girl dead yet? We made sure she hasn't had the medication for years now, and this is how she repays us? By surviving?

And as if it had been a cue, there was a knock on the nurse's office. Sachi whimpered, then dug herself deeper into the bed.

"You may come in!" the nurse called out.

Sachi was lucky. In the following hour, she would learn, rather embarrassedly, that she had misjudged her parents all along, that in reality they really were kind and caring even if somewhat strict figures, and that her mother simply never realized the significance of throwing out the small jar that the younger Sachi had held. They would cry, they would hug, and they would ultimately make up before a misunderstanding of this magnitude could lead to a tragedy.

At the moment however, it wasn't her parents that entered.

The first clue was the nurse's shocked voice. "Boys! What happened?"

"Can we see her?" was the answer.

Timidly, Sachi peeked out from under her bedcovers. And then she shot straight up. "What – what happened!?" she repeated, gaping.

The boys from her group looked terrible. As if her blood hadn't been enough, they were all scuffed up like a cat had mauled them. One of the boys was nursing his side, another had a black eye, and the leader had actually lost a tooth.

But they were all grinning, and the leader was looking at Sachi resolutely.

"I just wanted to say –" To Sachi's bewilderment, the leader dropped his head down to a deep bow. "We're so sorry! We've been a group for so long, and we didn't even know... I feel really horrible just thinking about how we stayed back when Oota picked on you!"

Sachi connected the dots. "So – so you fought him!?" she squeaked out.

The leader raised his head and nodded, a sort of fulfilled expression on his face.

"Aaah, but we lost, though..." the boy with the black eye whined. "Four on one, and we got beat up instead. That sucked!"

"H-hey! We weren't going to tell her that!"

Sachi couldn't help it. She let out weak laugh. The boys had such looks of satisfaction on their faces, like they had fought for their own sake. It was the first time someone had done so overt an act of kindness for her, and...and...

And she felt touched.

"Thank you..." Sachi said softly, and to her embarrassment, she had tears of happiness in her eyes. "I'm sorry...I never even remembered your names, and yet..."

"Don't worry about it!" the leader laughed, sheepishly rubbing the back of his head. "We're at fault for that, too... But it's not like we can't start over again here, you know?"

Grinning, the boy indicated to himself with his thumb.

"You can call me Keita!"

Changelog:

10/17/2013: I fail basic biology forever... Thanks to random guy (reviewer), the dialogue with the doctor has been changed so that Sachi is no longer some bizarre male-female freak of nature...or hermaphrodite...or a female Klinefelter...or a boy in drag.

I may as well note here, I'm planning on rewriting parts of this (including the dialogue with the doctor) after I complete this story. That's why I'm keeping a changelog. This'll probably include the x-inactivation phenomenon that random guy also suggested, so thanks for that idea as well. (I did go over the wiki page, I swear I have no idea how I missed that part...)