A/N Hello all! Whew, it's been a while since I've posted anything on this story, but I've got a new one-shot for you! I love developing characters, particularly if they're ones who don't have that much revealed about them in the actual books - it leaves so much scope to play around with.

When I first wrote the scene back in chapter 5 with Star asking Max about how it felt to know Maya was dead, I didn't think much more would come of it. But recently thoughts about Star's past have been niggling at the back of my brain, and I decided that I need to find out what her life had been like before joining the flock. Then this happened.

Quick disclaimer: obviously Star, Kate, and all the other flock members belong to James Patterson, but this one-shot is set in the 'After Angel' universe, as it were.

Enjoy!

People sucked.

She learned that pretty early on. It wasn't as if she was short on subject matter; it doesn't exactly help your confidence to grow up knowing that your mom ran out on your dad barely six months after you were born. The fact that she took your twin and left you behind is really just insult on top of injury.

Her dad was okay. Good enough. He made good money, they lived in a nice house in the suburbs, and he took care of her and put food on the table and sent her to an esteemed school. He tried. But parenting didn't come naturally to him. He was never the 'let's sit down and talk it out' kind of dad, and even though he attempted over and over again to have real, proper conversations with her, he just seemed so awkward that it made her feel sorry for him, and feeling sorry for him always led to feeling mad at him for making her feel sorry for him. So by the time Star was ten they'd kind of settled into an 'I won't ask if you won't tell' kind of situation; she didn't let him know when something wrong, he didn't ask about her problems, and they were both better off for it, she was sure.

It wasn't as if she didn't care about him – he was her dad, she couldn't help it – but she just… God, she just couldn't stand him. She couldn't stand how weak he was, the fact that he couldn't find it in himself to man up and be a father.

She hated her mum for leaving, for not trying hard enough. She hated her dad for needing to try as hard as he did. They were just opposite sides of the same coin to Star.

Of course, that hadn't always been her name. Her parents might have been total let-downs, but who in their right mind would name their kid 'Star'? No, that name had come in middle school, when it started to become obvious that – for want of a less clichéd phrase – she wasn't like the other kids. Perhaps a part of her had hoped she could just be left to get on with her own life, get good grades so that she could leave home as soon as possible and start out on her own.

But no.

Because people sucked.

Less than a month into the school year her peers caught onto her quick mind and short temper, a combination that thrilled some of the more unruly students. A kind of game formed, an unspoken contest to see who could get the biggest rise out of her, who could push her the furthest, so one morning when their maths teacher gave her back yet another perfect score accompanied with the phrase 'you're a star', there was really no other way things could have gone.

Star became her name, her identity; within no time at all her old name had been completely discarded by her fellow students, and Star was all she was. It wasn't too long before she stopped fighting it. If they wanted to provoke her, to get under her skin, to see her snarl and kick out and fight back, then she was going to play them one better. So she embraced the name, taking it on in her own head until she didn't even feel like her old name anymore, and with that came a strange shift in power – suddenly she was stronger, less manic in her anger and more tactical in the blows that she dealt out. Suddenly people weren't laughing anymore when she lost her temper. It wasn't exactly respect, but fear was a decent enough alternative. At least it meant she got left alone.

Then one day, a few years down the line, she came home from school and met her mum for the first time. Or at least the first time that she could remember.

Star could've gone her whole life without that meeting. She could've lived happily without the image of that dishevelled, crying woman sitting at the kitchen table burned into her mind; she'd seen a couple of pictures before, and that was more than enough for her. But life was a bitch.

It was the first time in a long time that she'd felt truly uncertain, standing there in the doorway, looking at her parents – her parents, both of them, in the same room – as they turned and stood up abruptly at the sight of her. Her father rubbed a hand across his face, and she felt a distant pang in the depths of her chest, because sure, he always seemed kind of fragile and tired, but since when did he look so sad? She laced her fingers together, cracking her knuckles in the way that had become a habit for her whenever she felt awkward.

This was so out of her comfort zone. There were too many emotions running through her head, and she didn't know what to do with them all. Some of them didn't even feel like hers. Yes, there was the anger and bitterness she was used to feeling at the thought of her mother, the niggling annoyance that ate at her whenever her father was around, the confusion, the doubt, the vague sense of pity she felt for the people in front of her. But there was also this intense sense of longing mingled in with it all; it was as if something hidden and primal was pounding at her insides, crying for a life where her mum was around and her dad was actually capable of talking to her, a life where it wasn't jarring to see the two of them together.

Definitely out of her comfort zone.

'Charlotte.' Her mum's voice cut into the silence. 'I thi-'

'Star,' she interrupted quietly. 'It's Star. No one's called me Charlotte in ages.'

A look of confusion crossed the woman's face, but she gave a faint nod before continuing.

'Um, okay… I, um… Something happened. I think you might want to sit down.'

'I'm fine here.'

'Star…' her dad began, but her gaze flickered over to him and something in her face must have made him pause. She wasn't surprised – she could feel a kind of desperation spreading through her, a need to be somewhere else, somewhere that wasn't here. Her fingers started to ache as she tugged at them, hard, trying to find a joint that she hadn't cracked yet.

Her mother took a few quick steps towards her then seemed to catch herself, hesitating just a couple of feet away from Star.

'Okay,' she breathed, eyes filling with fresh tears. 'Okay, well… Cha-… Star. This morning I got a call from the hospital. Rachel was out last night and…' She took a shaky breath. 'Someone found her passed out in a back alley. She'd taken something, too much of something, and they took her…' The woman's voice cracked, her face twisting around the words. 'They took her to hospital but they couldn't… They didn't, they couldn't…'

Star's dad moved forwards and wrapped an arm around her mother's shoulders.

'They couldn't save her,' he finished gently. 'She passed away early this morning.'

For a moment, the only sound in the room was her mother's sobbing. The sound grated at Star's ears, rasping through the mess of thoughts in her head, and she just wished that the woman would shut up for a second to let her think.

'Rachel,' she said eventually. 'Rachel as in…'

'Your sister,' her dad nodded, his eyes glistening, mouth pressed into a tight line. 'Your twin.'

Another few moments of near-silence followed as Star dropped her gaze to the floor, chewing at her lip and still pulling on her fingers. Then she took a breath in, lifted her head, and gave a quick nod.

'Alright.'

She'd left the room before her dad could reply.

He tried multiple times over the next year or so to get her to open up and talk to him about how she felt, but the truth was that she didn't really understand it herself. She'd never known her sister, never met her, and any pictures she'd seen had been of the two of them as babies, barely a few months old. Not enough to form any kind of attachment. Not enough to make her feel as though she knew the girl who'd been just a bit too trusting or a bit too stupid or a bit too unhappy and taken those drugs.

But at the same time she felt so… affected by it, in a way that she didn't want to think about or talk about or try to understand. It was almost disturbing, how much it affected her. Because somehow, without ever having it in the first place, she'd lost something. There had been someone out there who at one time was literally a part of her, who shared her face and her genes.

They'd been the same. Or the same but different, anyway. They'd had the same DNA. So that girl was kind of a part of Star. And then she was gone.

Any normal person would think that was enough inner conflict and unhappiness and tragedy for one life, that maybe after all that, Star would catch a break.

But, again, no.

Because, again, people sucked.

Some more than others, of course. The kids at school sucked in a kind of insignificant way, a minor annoyance once she figured out how to deal with them. The people who shot her and that girl Kate with sedatives in the museum bathroom and threw them in the back of a van headed to hell on Earth were on a whole new level of sucking. Those guys could represent the planet in an intergalactic suckfest.

Her time in the lab wasn't anything particularly special relative to the stories she'd heard since. They injected her with various concoctions, they forced her to complete tests and assessments and workouts that left her shaking and throwing up whatever she had in her stomach after the pathetic excuses for meals that she was given in that place. They made her run, faster and faster each time as the treatments they were giving her started to take effect, they made her fight, they made her ache in places she didn't know she had. Same old run-of-the-mill story that you'd hear from any mad scientist's plaything.

The only thing that Star saw as special in her story was Kate. Completely unexpectedly, this girl who had barely crossed her radar in the ten years they'd been at school together was suddenly the most important person in her life. Kate became a point of focus for Star, something that she could train her thoughts on and use to block everything else out during times when she was afraid or in pain or being pushed light-years beyond her limits; as long as she stayed in control, stayed conscious, stayed alive, Kate wouldn't be on her own. Looking back, Star often wondered how this person managed to get under her skin in a way that no one else ever had. Perhaps it was the extreme circumstances that they'd been thrown into together, perhaps it was just Kate being Kate, but over the months that they spent in that place, Star found herself slowly opening up to the other girl.

'I can't breathe,' Kate gasped, her shoulders hunching forwards, knuckles white as she desperately tried to pull some air into her lungs.

'Kate, hey, hey, calm down.' Star's voice carried across the space between their cages in a loud, urgent whisper. 'You need to calm down. You feel like you can't breathe because you're breathing way too fast – you're gonna pass out if you keep doing that. Slow it down, take it easy, breathe in deep.'

'I can't!' The words were torn out of Kate's throat in a half-shout, followed quickly by a coughing fit that only intensified her struggle to breathe properly. Her whole body was shaking from the exhaustion that the panic attack was bringing, and her face was wet with tears that just wouldn't stop.

'Damn it, Kate, get a grip!' snapped Star. 'You can and you will because if you don't I'm going to slap you so hard next time you're within reaching distance that you'll feel it for the next year.'

Her words were met with some more shallow, rattling breaths that only got louder as time passed. Cracking her knuckles, she moved right up to the wall of her cage, pressing herself against the bars to get as close to her friend as she could.

'When I was younger, just starting to talk, everything that moved was called a duck,' she said, her voice quiet, eyes focussed on Kate. 'Didn't matter what it looked like, how many legs it had, any animal was a duck. Cats, dogs, horses… I called all of them ducks.

'And I had a twin sister. I never met her, but she died about a year ago. It was really weird and it got to me more than I ever let on to my dad.

'And…

'And that time back in seventh grade when Michael Ashton got in trouble for letting the frogs in the biology room out, that was actually me. I thought it would be funny. And it kinda was. I always thought he looked a bit like a frog, too.'

'What are you doing?' Kate asked, her breath wheezing with each word.

'I'm distracting you, so just listen to me, okay? Listen to me, and stop thinking about everything else.'

A lot of their time in the lab was spent that way, whispering back and forth from their cages, spilling redundant secrets from their lives before they were taken.

There were multiple times after they got out when Kate said that Star was the reason she was alive, that she'd saved her, kept her sane. Star didn't think her friend would ever really understand just how much the same was true of her.

Two years down the line, everything had changed yet again; the two of them had joined Fang's gang, and later the flock as a whole. They'd brought down the bad guys, saved the world, been home in time for dinner. And then it was as if Star's own breathing was slowing down, like her whole life up until then had been one long panic attack, and she was finally feeling what it was like to actually fill her lungs with good, honest-to-God air.

Being in the house, being surrounded by the people she'd fought next to and saved and been saved by, suddenly that strange yearning that she'd felt back in her father's kitchen was gone. She'd barely even realised she was still carrying it with her from that day, but its abrupt absence was unmistakable, as if she hadn't known it was there until it left her.

She had a family of sorts – a weird, rag-tag, genetically altered family, but a family nonetheless. And contentment hit her before she had a chance to see it coming.

It was possible that maybe people didn't suck so much after all.

A/N Please let me know what you thought of that. Like I said before, character-based work is a particular interest of mine, so it really helps to know how it's being received by people. Hope you're all having a wonderful lead-up to summer! :)