Summary: In a place where everyone has an animal soul,known as your 'Other Half', how can one personcope with the fact that he doesn't?Will he ever find his? KxK SxM AxM maybe YxT

Disclaimer: I don't own Rurouni Kenshin.

Key: "speech", 'thoughts'

Beta Read by: Someone Really Special. Thanks for helping me!

Claw & Fang

Prologue

I am, apparently, a late bloomer of my kind. The other half of my soul has not been placed. They say that the second half of our soul comes with the birth of our personalities. So, then, I am human, ifI can be counted as one with onlyhalf a soul. My mother was a raven. My father a stag. My two brothers, twins, were a pair of martens. All of them received the second halves of their souls between the ages of nine through thirteen, just like everybody else.

My fifteenth birthday was yesterday.

I have asked around, and most of my people just scorn me, saying that I am not one of them. As far as the records go, no one has ever gotten their souls past the ages of fourteen. There is only a one year difference, but the results are centuries apart.

So, why then, am I so different?

Maybe it is the way my personality seemed to twist itself around, surprising people by being bold and outgoing one week, and quiet and collected the next.

Or maybe it has to do with all of the deaths that have followed me around for the past ten years. It started with my parents. They died of the plague. My brothers and I left that home, living, for a while, in an orphanage. They were adopted shortly after. They had tried to take me with them, but the circumstances disagreed. I told them that I would be fine, and made them go.

If I had known their fate, I would have done otherwise.

The family, it seems, had been having some troubles with the local yakuza. After they could not pay their debts, the entire family – including my brothers – was slaughtered.

After that, I had sort of slipped into a kind of depression, saying that it was all my fault, that if I had not made them leave, they would be alive and well. But then, I found a ray of sunlight in the darkness that was my heart. I met her. Tomoe. She and her brother arrived shortly after my thirteenth birthday, and I soon found myself falling in love.

But fate would play another cold trick in my life, sending the dead themselves after my newfound happiness. They had been her reason to come to the orphanage. She had decided, that if she lay low for awhile with her brother, the souls of war would soon leave, for they had gotten their revenge.

Her father had been a commander, and had destroyed many lives with barely a breath. He had only to give the word, and legions could be killed. They had returned the favor after their deaths, for a necromancer had given them a second chance.

Her father thought that maybe if he gave his life, then the whole mess would be over. But he was wrong. Dead wrong, if you'll pardon the pun. The haunted souls would not allow themselves to rest until every Yukishiro had been destroyed. So they did not. Tomoe and Enishi were murdered shortly before my fourteenth birthday.

Lately, I've been slipping in and out of depression, thinking that everyone I hold on to will die. But fate, in that interesting way that it does, twisted one more time.

Hopefully for the better.

I am being adopted, and going to high school.

A/N: Well, there's the first of it. Please R&R.Yes, the chapters will be longer, this is just the prologue. Thanks for reading! See you next chapter.