The man usually loved to whip him. Whenever he came back from the bar he would search for him, reach for him, tear him out of his protective spot kicking and screaming his lungs out under the bed or in the farthest corner of the closet. If he had found him in there then he would laugh out loud, his breath filling the air with the scent of alcohol and say he had always guessed that he had been 'one of those' and he would set him straight. In every sense of the word. Before he could even defend himself the man would quickly take the belt from around the loop of his pants and strike him against his bare skin, his arms, his legs, his bare back, sometimes doing more than that under the cover of night with nothing but the moon present to watch his blood flow down his pale and skinny body.

If the man had taken in too much drink before hand then after a while of this then the boy would get lucky and the man would just pass out in a drunk stopper on the kitchen floor and he would crawl away from the man to another room and lock the door and tie a pair of clean bandages around his arms. Sometimes it would be too much for him and all he could do was just lie there on the cool fowl smelling floor with the bandages tied loosely on his naked arm and let the tears he had held back for so long during the beating flow down his crimson stained cheeks until he felt them freeze on his face against the weather was set deep in midwinter spreading its icy chill across the bare house.

His mother and sister had left him long ago. They had packed their bags and left in the middle of the night leaving him behind. Very soon after that his father had taken him out of school the very next day making up a lie about home schooling him so he could not confined in any other adult. His father kept him under lock and key whenever he left anyhow so there would be no chance of that. He warned him to not even try to open the door, and he was too scared to try in any case.

From his tiny attic window he would watch the world below him watching the people on the streets below go about their carefree lives watching the world change. Watching the normal families go by. Sometimes he would see a boy dressed in some sort of ridicules denim shorts accompanied with roller blades or a black jersey walking by. More than once he had seen him with an ever-changing stream of men and woman alike. How he envied him more than anyone else for that. Even more than a few times he felt that this man could save him.

But he never did.

There was more often than not a creepy girl in a white kimono sometimes wearing a mask who had followed closely beside the man. She had more than once looked up and seen him at his window and smiled as if watching some sort of wonderful spectacle and turned her back to him. Sometimes he would see her perched on a street lamp like an acrobat with perfect poise under the shadow of the moon and watching in and smiling that odd smile as he was beaten. He had quickly given up trying to tell his father that there was a girl watching he would never see her and would continue with his beating this time twice as hard but mindful just so he would not die. He couldn't have him dying on him.

Until that one day when he took it all too far.

He had not taken in too much or too little drink before he left. But still he was still in an utterly foul move - mode, mood... whatever - from the hours previously that he had drowned out with liquor and had gone home seeing nothing but a deep shade of red, a red that he soon let out and let splash against the peeling kitchen's walls, laughing all the while at the severed unrecognizable body under his feet.

Ryu fell like a limp doll to the ground, unblinking and unmoving. The man took one last look at the small broken body under his feet and walked away to get a beer, not seeing the small white sphere that appeared in the air right above the body. The soul took one last look at the bloody body under it and zoomed out into the night afraid and wanting to get away from what he had seen.

The white kimono girl knelt down to the unmoving body hands on her chin and chuckled lightly to herself, a sound that echoed eerily off the walls.

"Such pretty eyes... The birds will find it quite delectable..."

As a human he had been bound, as a spirit he was free but so very fragile, snow like in fact. Still he was free to watch as that man drunk himself blind and then dead. Watched as an unfamiliar woman grew old and die, watched as her daughter married into a rich family of doctors and follow her mother to death's door. He watched as a boy dressed all in black spray-painted his number on bus stations and blank walls, always making sure he hid himself whenever he looked at what was behind him.

Who these people were and what they even meant to him he did not know. He did remember the boy whose broken and slashed body was the first thing he had been aware of. But slowly he began to forget who that boy was. He spent his days just wondering around the island of Japan. How he knew that is was even an island he did not even know.

Occasionally he would flout in front of a shrine and a long-haired woman would appear out of nowhere accompanied by a stuffy looking man in a suite and glasses and look fondly up at him with a strange look in her eyes and make an odd sign in the air before him. But he left before she could finish it, racing away from her cries to come back. He quickly learned to avoid places like that. He soon saw strange things move out of the corner of his sight. Whenever he saw them he would quickly hide.

He watched the world change as countless years went by, and he grew more and more lonely.

One day he became aware of a girl jumping to one telephone pole to another. If that wasn't stranger he saw a sort of tail coming out of her. He followed her watching as that boy joined her and then quickly disappeared again.

He wanted nothing more to do with that girl after that.

Later he saw the two of them running form a monster and he hid himself but he was quickly discovered by that man and he could not escape. He didn't want to either, he so was tired of running.

"Thou art Yuki!"

A warm, gentle light filled his being, he felt as his small shape change, he felt himself being wrapped in hands that he knew were not human and dripping with warmth and sweat. He saw that all though there was nothing but white and speaks of black all around and yet at the same time he saw the night sky and the jersey boy who was holding him. He felt as he was being lifted in the air and felt the slice as he tore his way out of the monster.

When he opened his eyes trying to remember what and who he was he could recall nothing. All he saw was a girl and a fool faced boy. The boy was his master he was his Shinki. But he felt nothing but disdain towards him. A feeling that only grew stronger day by day.

Very quickly he released that he would not allow this so-called 'god' to touch him ever again. No. Never. So he tried to find a way to get out of it so he curbed his emotions by stealing, since he was dead and no one could possible see him he thought it would be okay. But never would he have thought the consequences would be so severe. Never would he have ever thought he might kill Yato. Never did he think he could really turn into a phantom or have them burrowed firmly onto his own body.

"Yukine! You were given the name of a person so live as a person!"

Through the darkness expelling the light of the ritual from his eyes he looked at the figure on the ground who was usually so annoying and loud now on his knees bloodstained and exhausted coughing up dark blood all because of him he felt the tears hot and cold in his eyes.

"I-Im sorry!"

The ritual he had been forced to go through had been painful yes but then again it had opened his eyes. He, Yato had given him a name of a person, he had given him a new life, and an identity. Something that he had nearly destroyed with his carelessness. He might still be just as annoying and useless as he was before but if anything they now worked semi perfectly insync with each-other. He was his father and mother and he was his son. That was how it was for them. They were... a family...

Gods how he wanted to kick himself for thinking that...