Woo hoo!  Another snow day, so here's three more chaps.  :)  watch out, it gets a little crazy.  Keep in mind that Kaori's bipolar.

Chapter Ten

Kaori woke early in the morning, aware of the pressure against her back.  Hayden, her mind registered.  Somehow they'd ended up so that their backs were pressed together as they curled facing opposite directions.  Strange, she thought.  Making sure she didn't disturb him, she crawled out of bed and put her pajamas back on.  She tied the string of the pants.  That should keep them on now, she thought.  Kaori looked back at the sleeping face of Hayden.  Maybe she wasn't in such a hurry to keep her pants on, she decided, untying the strings and letting the little bit of elastic keep her baggy pajama pants from falling off her hips. 

Reaching up and stretching, Kaori then smoothed her hair back into her usual ponytail.  Her back hurt.  Twin-sized beds just weren't meant to have two people sleeping in them.  She wondered briefly if Mei was able to stay in Hayden's bed last night, or did she give in to the Maxwell charm and slip into Luke's?  She looked back at Hayden.  The early morning light caught on the wisps of hair that fanned around his face, giving him the look of an angel.  They'd definitely have to do this trading roommates thing more often.

She splashed a little bit of water on her face to freshen up and grabbed her gun off the bedside table before she left the room.  Not caring about her pajamas or her bare feet, Kaori padded down the still hallway of the dorm and made her way to the gym.  Sometimes she just needed a good workout early in the morning before anyone got up.  There was sure to be no one else in the gym at this hour.

She was not alone.

The longer she looked at the girl in front of her, the more rapidly her good mood faded.

Kaori glared at the girl in the gym.  She hated her.  And Kaori did not use the word "hate" lightly.  In fact, she had never used that word to describe anyone in her life.  Except for the girl standing in front of her.

Her anger boiled inside her chest as she stared at her.  Her jaw hurt.  But she wasn't thinking clearly enough to realize the clenching of her teeth caused that.  She felt a fever rise in her face and chest.  Her rage grew harder and harder to control.

Suddenly, she was thankful that she was alone with her in the gym.  It was too early in the morning for anyone else to be awake.  None of the students had woken for breakfast.  Kaori's eyes narrowed as she stared at her.  Her brow ached with the frowning snarl that contorted across her face.  She hated her.

The girl was ugly.  Like hate, that was yet another word that Kaori refrained from using.  Except when she referred to this girl.  She stared at the girl's features, sickened by the sight of her face.  The only thing uglier than the way the girl looked, was what Kaori saw inside.  Kaori saw her heart, blackened and rotten inside her chest.  She was truly ugly inside, and that made Kaori hate her even more.

She took a rigid step forward, coming even closer to the object of her loathing.  The girl mimicked her actions, her details becoming sharper in Kaori's eyes as the distance between them diminished.  Both of them glared, eyes stone cold and unrelenting. 

Kaori's fingers flexed before tensing into a tight fist.  The muscles of her arms and shoulders twitched with strain as she tried to keep herself from attacking the girl.  Her fist closed tighter, and she ignored the stinging pain of her own fingernails as they dug into her palm.  In the back of her mind, she knew that her father would question about the new scars, as he did every time she came home with a new mark on her.  As she glared harder at the girl in front of her, she didn't care what her father would think.  Her hatred was all that mattered to her now. 

Hate.  It churned inside of her, burning to be released.  Her fury clouded her thoughts, threatening to take control of her mind and body.  Hatred would claim her actions, and she stopped struggling against it.

Her fist flew at the girl, Kaori's knuckles landing squarely on her ugly face.  Her arm jarred with bone-wrenching force, popping her shoulder out of joint and sending searing pain across her back and up her neck.

She remained, her arm extended and her fist lingering in the place where the girl's face had been.  Glass rained down around her hand, cutting her wrist and forearm as the shards clattered down from the wall.  Her hand bled from the shattered knuckles and the cuts on her arm. 

The face was no longer there.  Only the yellow wall behind the large gym mirror remained, save for the cracked glass stuck in her knuckles or the few pieces of mirror still pinned between her fist and the wall.  Seeing that her reflection had disappeared, Kaori drew her arm back slowly.  Painfully.  The last few shards of mirror fell to the ground, shattering as they hit the floor. 

Straightening to her full height, she peered down at her hand.  Chips of mirror were embedded in her hand.  The white bones of her knuckles contrasted the bloody flesh of her fist.  Her shoulder ached as much as her hand did.  Biting back the scream of pain that constantly threatened to tear from her lungs, she started walking. 

She left the gym and shattered mirror behind.

*   *   *   *   *   *   *

Wufei felt the breath stop in his throat.  Blood.  In the elevator, there was blood on the wall, the floor.  And it was a lot of blood.  Nothing jugular threatening, but not just a paper cut either.  Bad thing was: the blood was in an elevator.  Meaning the trail could end or begin again on any other floor.  Finding that floor was the hard part. 

For a moment, the Chinese pilot considered whether he should go up or go down from the sixth floor.  Of course, systematically he should either go up one floor at a time or down one floor at a time and check for the blood trail.  Most likely the bleeder would not have the security clearance to go up past this floor.  But did that mean he shouldn't bother with searching upstairs yet, or should he go there first to knock out the easy floors of his search pattern? 

Check out the easy floors first, he decided, and pressed the button for floor seven. 

And to Wufei's surprise, the blood trail led down the seventh floor hallway.  He followed it, down the hall, around the corner, to…Sally's lab?  Carefully, Wufei pushed the door open and gasped.

Kaori was lying on the exam table, a bloody lower arm draped over her stomach.  He could hear her heavy breathing, the only evidence that the girl on the table was still alive.  Cautiously, Wufei walked closer, trying to make enough of a sound that he wouldn't take her by surprise. 

"Uncle Wu," she whined.  "Can you get Aunt Sally?"

"Why didn't you call her?" Wufei asked, seeing that Kaori was in an unusually pleasant mood despite her grim condition.  His close relationship with Sally caused him to pick up on many of her skills.  He ran his fingers lightly over her arm, stopping before he reached her wrist.  Not wanting to aggravate her injury, he refrained from his first impulse to pull out the shards of glass that remained embedded in between her knuckles.  That would only increase the bleeding. 

"I'm too tired to call," Kaori answered finally, her voice soft and meek.  "My heart hurts."  She moaned a little as she took a deep breath, the rising of her chest moving her hand ever so slightly. 

Wufei took moment to compose himself.  This wasn't the first time.  Meditation could wait, he had to find Sally to stop her bleeding.  And Kaori's arm looked wrong.  Something about it didn't fit right.  Find Sally, he reminded himself.  "I'll go and get Sally," he told her, putting a calming hand on her forehead before running fullspeed down the hallway.

*   *   *   *   *   *   *

"Heero!"

Snapping out of his slumber and training his gun on the door, Heero recognized Wufei's voice calling him. 

"I'm coming!" he grumbled back.  Trowa was in the den before Heero could make it to the door, a confused look on his face.  Heero just waved a hand at him, gesturing for him to put his gun away.  "Why didn't you just come in?" Heero asked as he opened the door.

"You kidding?  You and him armed in here?  I'm not going to burst in this door and get my ass shot," Wufei said hurriedly.  He was a little out of breath.  "But there's a problem, Heero.  It's Kaori."

Heero was out the door, disregarding his need for footware, before Wufei could think to turn around and follow.  Trowa remained behind in the apartment, in case he was needed to protect his family.

"Dad," he heard her moan before he rounded the corner to the exam room.  Remarkably, he'd kept some composure through smelling and seeing her blood in the elevator.  He lost that composure now, seeing her. 

Sally had an oxygen mask over her mouth and nose, trying to keep her calm as she administered her aid.  Kaori's arm was strapped to the table in restraints – to keep her arm still as Sally worked.  Using tweezers and a gauze to soak up spurts of blood, Sally slowly made progress in pulling out the chips of glass in Kaori's hand.  Wufei moved to Sally's side, helping with whatever he could.

Trying to keep a smile on his face, Heero walked to Kaori's left side.  He took her hand in his, noticing the thin bloody moon-shaped marks on her palm.  Keeping his eyes locked on hers, he traced his finger over the recent inflictions of pain before holding her hand firmly between both of his. 

"I'm sorry, Daddy," she said softly.  Her eyes seemed bluer when she was sad, Heero noticed.  No doubt they'd seemed as bright scarlet as her mother's eyes when Kaori was angry, when Kaori did this to herself.  He closed his eyes, feeling droplets of water fall.

"It's ok," he found himself muttering as his head fell to the table, next to her head.  The cool of the metal tabled soothed his forehead.  "It's ok."

She flinched.  Heero's head snapped up, seeing Sally tug on a particularly large piece of glass.  He looked back into his daughter's eyes.  They were clear and watery with her own tears.  Kaori had not been drugged prior to Sally's medical attention.  Her eyes told him she felt every sting of pain.  She had probably asked to forgo the anesthetic, to feel everything.  To pay for everything.

He'd never understood.  The way his daughter felt so much anger inside.  The way she felt responsible for the cruelties of the world.  Her habit had started little.  With a pocket knife, she'd started cutting paper-thin cuts on her palm when she was thirteen.  By the time she was fifteen, she'd graduated to holding that same knife over a flame, letting it get red-hot before pressing it to the skin of her arm.  The brands still showed, four years later.  Random marks on her left arm.  Always the left arm – she had to hold the knife with her right.  She was right-handed.  Then the ears…Heero looked up from the table, running his finger along the four studs in her ear.  There were three on the other side, he knew.  They had thought she was getting better, when he and Jin had agreed for her to go to the Academy for the first time.  Her bouts with self-mutilation had subsided.  They had breathed a sigh of relief, thinking that she was getting better.  Then, in one swift decision two years ago, she'd shattered that…

"I think that's all the glass, Kaori," Sally said in her doctor tone.  "You've lost some bone from your knuckles.  Little chips of bone, nothing that can be fixed, but you'll do fine without it."  Kaori nodded as well as she could while laying flat on a table.  "Are you still with me?"

"Yes."

"I'm going to stitch up the gashes now.  Mostly on your knuckles, but some on your wrists, forearms, and the back of your hand.  Falling glass must have caused those cuts.  You understand, Kaori?" Sally asked.  She must have been trying to assess his daughter's mental state.

"Yes."

"You'll have to be very careful for a while, Kaori," Sally said, talking as she worked.  Perhaps for calming Kaori's nerves, perhaps for calming her own.  "These stitches will be delicate for a good couple of weeks.  You've suffered some major damage here.  I'll make sure you have a certain type of splint that we have available here.  It's made for immobilizing the hand in the event of a serious wrist injury, but it will also work in keeping you from closing your hand into a fist.  Doing that would make these stitches split open." 

Sally continued to talk softly as she worked.  Wufei had begun cleaning the blood off of the table and floor.  Stitching was a one-person job. 

"My shoulder…" Kaori said through clenched teeth.  The pain must be overwhelming for her to have to clench her jaw like that, Heero thought. 

"We'll put that back in place as soon as I finish with the bleeding parts of you," Sally said.  "And I suggest that you let me do it," she mentioned, noticing Kaori squirm.  She knew Kaori was capable of pressing back against the table and snapping her shoulder back into place.  More or less.  "I'll make sure it's correct, which is more than you can do right now.  I know it's not in your family's nature, but try to be patient."

Kaori took a deep breath and settled back onto the table.