This story is about Shuichi. If you're willing to look a little deeper, it's about everyone who's ever found themselves in an alternative lifestyle, or looking down another path than the one they expected. But mostly it's about Shuichi.

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Ten years. When you've lived three hundred, it sounds like nothing. A feud between lovers could last longer. I can't even remember the first five years – you told me that it's normal. We learn so much in those first years that there isn't enough room for remembering the colour of our first bedroom, or the name of our first friend. I was eight when I began to truly remember who I was – who I had been. And then I hated myself.

You're brought up properly – brought up right and then… you realise YOU ARE WRONG. Not just wrong; bad. Evil in the way the nemeses of the superheroes on television are. Stealing from the poor to give to make yourself richer, bad. Killer bad.

Ten years… At ten years my yoki was building and I was sickened by the sight of myself. Something had happened – and I couldn't break free.

We had the best crop of cherries the neighbours had ever seen that summer – the summer of my tenth birthday. I had tried so hard to package away that part of me that I hated so, that it had broken free. It was a sad weakened shadow of its former self – made so by my hatred for it and by the human form that contained it – but it was there. A yoki, foreign in the body of a boy.

I often wonder if Shuichi would have had a strong reiki of his own had I not interfered. There is a taste – a colour – a scent – to my spirit energy now. I am infected with the human stain. Why can I not bring myself to hate it? I could break free… how easy it would be. But what would I lose?

And that is the question, is it not?

I could cut that part of me out like some kind of tumour. But how much of me is in that part? Ten years… it is Shuichi's lifetime. It's my lifetime. I have lived three hundred years and I have lived ten.

I am Shuichi. I am Yoko. I am Kurama.

I am alive.

And you're dying.

Tell me why.

Mother.

Tell me why.

Shiori's eyelashes fluttered and she opened her eyes to her son's face. Her beautiful son. "Oh, Shuichi. Have you been here long?"

"A lifetime, mother. And no time at all." Resting his head on his mother's shoulder – so thin, too thin – Shuichi cried for what he was losing. And for what he had gained.