Bloodlust

By Moonraker One

A/N: Swearing is in this chapter, be warned.

CHAPTER FOUR – "My inner demons first."

A pitch black void of empty nothingness lingered in every direction around a cold and frightened Keiko Yukimura. The only light seemed to be coming from within her, and it circled and emanated from her, a dark red, almost evil light that did not provide much solace from the all-consuming darkness. She was practically naked, garbed only in her bra and panties, which were pink with soft edges. Scared almost out of her wits at why she lay in total blank darkness, she violently whipped her head left then right, eagerly searching for another form of life, an act which ultimately proved futile. Suddenly, she both heard and felt a whoosh of air rushing past her nearly unclothed form, and it almost made her jump. Much to her horror, a pair of light footsteps approaching behind her had immediately followed it up. Fear had taken root within her as she quivered, creaking her head slowly around to peer at the figure coming up on her.

The situation outside her mind, out in the forest area where the quartet of demons painfully watched as the girl they'd begun the demonifying process on shook in pain and fear. Hiei saw Keiko shake violently, sometimes coming close to dislocating her own arms as she applied counterforce to the chains holding her against the smooth rock's surface. From all the years he'd seen, he'd never seen someone quite as brave, especially not among the ranks of the mortal women. Kurama had done this before, and her ability to remain sane thus far absolutely amazed her. Some of the people he'd put through the process of making someone into a demon did not make it this far before they either went into complete psychosis or died from thrashing about until they broke themselves apart. Only Yusuke had trouble breathing as he watched her cry in pain and writhe about.

"Guys, I just CAN'T keep watching this!" he shouted. Hiei rolled his eyes. Kurama attempted to calm him down.

"Yusuke, calm down," the thousand year-old youko told his ally.

"YOU calm down! I'm worried!"

"Yusuke, you need to realize that she is doing extraordinarily well. I've seen people shake until they broke their own back. She's going to be just fine. You lit the candles?"

Yusuke nodded. "Yeah. And I see your point; the candles really do cover up the smell of the aura. But why does the aura stink?"

"Because a human and demon aura mixing does not happen easily," Hiei answered. "It takes huge amounts of power to force them to combine and to change human into demon aura. Plus, the sweet scent of the candles and incense has a soothing effect on the subject, making her dealing with inner demons easier."

Yusuke practically shot his head to the left to stare with wide eyes at Hiei. "Woah, there. What the hell do you mean 'inner demons!'"

"She must tackle the demons of her past before she can become one herself."

"You disappoint me, Keiko," the figure, cloaked by the darkness that seemed almost to tightly embrace him, uttered. The sound of his voice seemed to resonate throughout the empty space as if they were in a concert hall, although she could see nothing in any direction except the omnipresent darkness. "I would have thought you stronger."

Once the figure closed in, and revealed itself to be Yusuke, she looked at him with bewilderment. "What do you mean? I just wanted to understand what it meant to be a demon!" She sincerely could not understand, as she stared at his demon form, why he had an insane look on his face.

"No, you misunderstand me," he argued, his tone sharpening, causing her to almost recoil in the manner of a wounded animal. "I consider you weak because you'll never be anything except a miserable little bitch!" She almost jumped backward in a combination of both anger and sorrow as he knelt to her position and took hold of her by her chin. "You never were much to speak of, and I always hated you."

Tears rolled down her face as she felt her proverbial heart breaking. How could someone she cared for so much, possibly say such piercing words of hatred towards her? She never had done anything bad to him. Then it struck her; she had. Her face contorted in shock as she brought it to mind. It had been a time when he was only six years old, and she was a few days away from her sixth birthday.

A young child, standing quivering in the middle of the playground, felt cold and alone as others his age crowded around him to pelt him with rocks. He knew the reason that they were so against his mere existence; it had to do with his hair, his markings, his blood, and most of all, his very soul. He stood for the one thing that they held prejudice against. He was a demon, and they knew it from the rumors that persisted in spreading thanks to the loose lips of misunderstanding and apathetic adults. Parents of children that held hatred against a young and frightened Yusuke Urameshi held the same hatred themselves although they didn't show it as often, mainly because of his origins. To them, it was not bad enough that a twenty-nine year old woman had been impregnated by a man with a long-standing demonic series of genes amidst his otherwise human genome, but that she had been impregnated at fifteen years of age and had given birth to a full-blooded demon. None of that mattered to him as much as the pain he felt.

He begged both verbally and in his mind, that they would quit hurtling the painful objects his way. The rocks did no physical harm to him that his demonic blood would not heal, but the psychological damage that pierced his brain did enough damage on its own. He looked at the crowd, a diverse grouping of boys and girls around his age, none older than eight, shouted horrible fates at him as they continued to hurtle whatever gravel they could accumulate in his direction. Suddenly, a young girl of his age, dark hair and a cute pink outfit, consisting of a pink skirt and a shirt which was a lighter shade of the same color, approached him. The crowd did not cease their shouting or their rock-throwing, but allowed a space just wide enough to allow her through. She, at first, looked with confusion at him, but when she saw his elongated hair (a mass of almost jet black hair stretching to his ankles and wider than his shoulders) and the markings on his arms and chest via his torn shirt, she quivered inside. He could not look at her due to the fact that doing so would subject his face to rock pelting, but he could smell her aura and he knew she did not belong amidst the group.

"Freak!" she screamed, grabbing a rock and drawing her arm back. She prepared to nail him directly in the head, in hopes that it would at least remove him from her sight.

It was almost like the workings of God himself.

For the briefest of moments, the crowd let up in hopes to get more gravel to hurtle at him, which allowed him to remove his arms from their position shielding his face. An eye blink would have been longer than his reprieve from the pelting, but nonetheless he brought up his face to stare at hers, his eyes meeting with hers for ever a short instant. The very moment her gentle eyes—looking very much out of place on her mixture of anger and fear contorted facial expression—met with his pained gaze, her heart nearly skipped a beat. A million words were exchanged in the fraction of a second that he saw her eyes. He pierced straight to her heart with the eyes of his, almost as if he had looked through her. Although it was only a glance, she knew what she was doing was wrong.

Hindsight is always twenty-twenty. Despite her seeing the utter injustice that was the rock throwing, she let hers go anyway. It did no more physical damage than any other person's, but it did twice as much psychological harm due to the fact that she'd realized beforehand that it was not good. His turning his head to the side to recover from her rock's impact did the trick—no one else tried to throw it at him. But as the crowd scattered, crying their laughter at his plight and shouting as they retreated horrible fates for him to suffer, only she stood, frozen in place it seemed, by the power that was his fleeting glance of disappointment as he walked away. She could almost hear, through the deafening silence of his demeanor as he left, his disappointment for letting his belief that she was different down.

She wiped away a tear as she sat agape in the trance-like dark room she was in. The most painful memory of all had just brought itself to the surface. She remembered walking away crying that day, looking over her shoulder every other step to see if he had left her sight yet, and praying to be punished by god for having let him down. The very next morning she made it her mission to track him down and apologize and attempt to make it up to him (although she found it very difficult to believe she could), and he'd smiled by the end of the day and considered her his new (and possibly only) best friend, but the memory of pain lingered.

She looked up at him, in her presence, and noticed that standing in her presence, next to the teenage Yusuke she knew well, was the six year old demon that she'd caused so much pain to that day in the playground. "It's something, isn't it!" he shouted, bringing the little Yusuke to in front of her. "It's really something to see those painful memories after all this time, isn't it! You will suffer for every injustice you've ever caused!"

The little Yusuke of the past, crying as he edged out from his position behind the teenage Yusuke, approached Keiko and his face instantly contorted in the angriest look imaginable. He held up his hand and took her hard by the neck. "YOU!" he screeched, tightening his grip on her neck. "You saw that I'd had enough! You had to throw a rock at me anyway, didn't you! I'm going to make you suffer, you bitch!"

Then, with tears in her eyes and her vision blurring from the young Yusuke's tight grip on her neck, she found the air to speak. The teenage Yusuke smiled evilly as he prepared to let the younger him tear her apart once she begged for her life. It was the next words that baffled him.

"Go ahead," she weakly whispered. "I don't deserve to live."

The real Yusuke, outside the vision in the real world, watching her struggling against the chains holding her to the rock, saw the vision of the past that she was experiencing in her trance-like state, and saw in her heart her obvious choice of action. His breathing could have stopped that moment. "NO, KEIKO!" he screamed at the top of his lungs, struggling against Hiei and Kurama holding him back. "IT'S JUST A VISION! DON'T THROW YOUR LIFE AWAY FOR SOMETHING THAT LONG AGO, DAMMIT!"

Both visions, the teenage Yusuke and the younger him, looked at each other in confusion.

"Did…I hear you correctly?" the teenage Yusuke said.

"You…you would die… allow me to kill you…just to atone for what went down that day!" the younger one finished.

"Anything to cleanse my sins," she cried.

Grinning wickedly, both visions of Yusuke prepared for the next course of action. Teenage Yusuke held her head still as the younger him tightened his grip on her neck and drew back his fist in preparation for the final blow. She slammed her eyes shut as she saw him throw his fist.

A whole minute of silence followed.

It was then that she realized that she was not only still alive, but that no longer was someone holding her head or her neck. When her eyes opened, she saw her surroundings had drastically changed. The dark room she was in had become a cave, lit by torches attached to the wall. Three shadowed figures stood in a triangular formation at opposing ends of the room. Confused, she looked around and saw…that each of the three was a different variant of her.

"Welcome to your inner soul chamber," the first Majin Keiko began.

"It is here that the final act of demonification will commence," the second one added.

"One of us will become you. You must take your pick," the third one finished.

"Huh? I have to pick which of you for my demon form?"

The first demon version of Keiko stepped forward. "Regardless of your pick, you will still retain your outer human appearance for a ruse. We are what you will look like when no spell is concealing us." The first one plainly had Hiei's influence. She looked somewhat intriguing, with the same color and style hair as regular Keiko but with the fire apparition's white spot at the front, as well as his green skin and countless jagan's all across her body. Although this version of demon Keiko looked enticing, the multiple eye thing just turned her off to it. The second one took notice and stepped into the light.

The second demon version of Keiko was a beautiful youko female, with the same visible appearance of normal human Keiko but with gray hair and fox ears and tail. She shimmered in the dim light as she showed off her body. Keiko imagined herself looking this way around Yusuke, but did not like the thought of having a tail. It kind of seemed bulky and a useless add-on. This caused the third and final one to appear. Keiko expected this demon version of herself to look like her with Yusuke's hair and markings.

Instead, it was a combination of all three. Some traits of Jaganshi Hiei, some of Youko Kurama, and some of Yusuke Urameshi, even, were present. The long flowing hair of Yusuke, as well as his arm and upper chest markings were visible, the fox ears of Youko Kurama the same dark color as the hair (but minus the tail), and the Jagan of Hiei. She looked at the third one with delight, as it provided beauty through variety.

"You," she said, putting her hand approvingly on the third version's shoulder.

"Now, the transformation begins," they all said, disappearing. Keiko found herself slammed back to consciousness in her own body, as it became surrounded by demonic energy. Pain rushed in like a flood, causing her to convulse harder.

"KEIKO!" Yusuke screamed. He attempted to break free of Hiei and Kurama's grip but they held firm.

"This is it, Yusuke," Kurama explained. "Interfere now and you could kill her."