A/N: Hey guys. Yes, I'm back. Not on a regular schedule, (was I ever to begin with?) but back. I just couldn't abandon you all like that, your reviews made me feel horrible.

Warning! I was in a bit of a bad mood when I wrote this so there's some dark and/or gory parts. Nothing as bad as Cupcakes, though.

I ran. I ran like the coward I am, ran away from this past, from my best friend re-incarnated, and I ran away from what could have been my future.

"Haruka, what..?" Shino asked as I streaked past him into his house. I sat hunched over on his bed, every hair on my body bristling as waves of fear crashed over my still-trembling form.

"Haruka!" Shino said more urgently, with a slight sense of concern coloring his normally even voice. "Haruka tell me what's wrong!"

I barely noticed when he picked me up and rushed me out of his room and out of his house. My mind was full of the glance Natsume had given me when I had ran. It was the eyes of a predator. Cold, unflinching. Had I expected some sort of recognition? I was a cat, he wasn't going to recognize me. But still... The fear I had felt when I saw him, that was... unprecedented. He had a tattoo, a kanji that meant "love", if I remembered Natsume correctly. So... what if it wasn't Natsume? A doppelganger? But that's absurd! I'd just have to show him, tell him it's me! He'll remember!

Shino suddenly stopped and I looked up to see Kiba's house, and a very surprised-looking Kiba on it's doorstep.

"Shi-"

"Something's wrong with Haruka!"

"What? What do you want me to do about it, I can't talk to cats." Kiba looked like he was hit upside the head with a frying pan.

"Do something, she won't or can't talk to me, because something's scared her, I think, it might have been the test this morning, but she was fine when she wandered off, she does that sometimes, and she came back just now and she's not talking to me, maybe because something's stopped her flow of chakra, do you think it was an enemy nin? Maybe one of those foreign ninja that have come to take the chunin exam, because they want to stop me and therefore you and Hinata from competing? Maybe-"

"Shut up! I'll get Akamaru to talk to her, Gods." Kiba muttered darkly to himself as he walked up to Akamaru.

"Hey kid, what's up? I've never heard Shino talk that much before." I looked up to see Akamaru standing before me nonchalant and bored.

"Shut up, dog, I'm about as old as you are." I muttered, half to myself.

He cocked his head to the side, "What happened?"

"There was... a nin-"

"An enemy?"

"No, would you just shut up, I'm the one telling the story. I'm pretty sure he was a sand-nin-"

"How could you tell?"

"He, uh, smelled like the desert and sand." How could I tell Akamaru that my neighbor, the person that I was currently describing, had described to me this person, (essentially himself? I have no idea, it's all really confusing) before I had died and come here?

"Anyway, he had a massive chakra. He smelled like blood. Just, a stench of blood rolling off of him. And... this presence. I had the feeling that if he wanted to destroy half the village, it would be easy for him to do." I shuddered. And the look in his eyes... the stare of a predator totally consumed with finding another victim and hunting it until he watched it's death throes.

"Hm." Akamaru sat back on his haunches, and surveyed me, then retold everything I had said to Kiba, then Kiba to Shino. It was like a bad game of Telephone.

Shino looked down at me wordlessly, his eyes hidden behind tinted glass, his face erased of what trace amounts of concern he had held.

"Alright. I should take her home now. It sounds like one of our competitors for the chunin exam. It sounds like we should try to stay out of his way."

"Shino!" Kiba seemed surprised. "This guy sounds like a threat to the village or something, we need to do something!"

Shino slowly turned around and looked Kiba in the eyes.

"Do you want to die, Kiba?" Kiba started, surprised. "Do you want to leave your family and friends and Akamaru all alone? That's what will happen if you pick a fight with this guy."

Shino turned around, and started walking down the street towards his house. "He sounds like a real demon."

It was nighttime. The dark sky bejeweled with stars. The gentle breathing (and occasional snore) of Shino was something I did not share. I sat awake on his windowsill, thinking of the day, of my Natsume. Wondering, thinking, and hoping. I hesitated, looking down at Shino's prone form. I looked up at the sky, the night stars, and made my decision.

My body felt light without the vest and headband as I floated across the rooftops. I wasn't stupid, though. I had hidden my five custom senbon in my mouth, in case I ran into any trouble. And, knowing me, that was pretty much a guarantee.

The building was tall, square, and had that nondescript look of people putting as little time into it as possible without people being offended by how ugly it was.

I lifted my nose to the air and took a big inhalation of air, catching up all the scents and odors of the night. I didn't want to drain my admittedly low reserves of chakra this early on, so I refrained from enhancing my nose. It turned out I didn't need to.

The light was off, but I could tell it was the right apartment. I snuck in through the window, and lightly leapt to the floor. And nearly died of a heart attack. A disemboweled wooden puppet lay grinning at me, discarded bandages, nuts, bolts, wheels, cogs, and an astonishing amount of sharp pointy objects lay heaped about it. Realizing that I must be in Purple Face's room (and that this must be the infamous Crow), I tried to quietly sidestep the creepy death machine in search for Natsume's lodgings. Of course, one should never try to count on me being stealthy.

My paw tripped over something in the dark, pulling it loose. Was that... a wire? I had time to think before all hell broke loose.

A grating wailing sound shrieked out of the puppet, Purple Boy sat up shouting "Where's the ramen!" and Ponytails charged into the room with a giant fan. I didn't quite know what the point of the fan was, but I wasn't about to stick around and wait for it to turn into a deadly chainsaw or something. I hauled tail.

By this point His Royal Purpleness had staggered out of bed, and was blocking the window. With no choice, I ran straight towards the fan-wielding maniac, between her legs, and down the hall. I heard them cursing at each other, and the sound of them running behind me. Without risking a glance back, I hurled myself out of the nearest window, knowing that whatever damage that would have happened to me, was nothing compared to being caught by those two. Of course, I've been wrong before.

I landed on a tile roof, skidded, spun, and ended up on my bum staring at the window I'd just escaped from. The two maniacs stood at the window, frozen, staring at something behind me. That was when I first smelled the stench of blood.

I whipped my head around so fast it cricked my neck. Natsume was sitting next to me, or rather, I had been flung out of a window to land next to Natsume. He was staring at the moon, with that same hungry look in his eye. One of his large pupil-less irises slid down to the corner of his eye, to stare at me.

Yes, I was terrified, but I was strangely ecstatic at seeing my Natsume up close again after what seemed like ages. There were the dark circles under his eyes, marked there from the severe insomnia I knew he suffered from. The rough and naturally spiky red hair, the light sea-foam green eyes. There were slight differences. Differences that bothered me more than they should have. His tattoo, that looked more like a scar upon closer inspection. Had some sick torturer carved that onto his face? His pupil-less eyes, so empty when I once knew they could be so full of life. He wasn't wearing his outrageously thick glasses (the ones he needed because he had been born with a disease that had contracted and frozen the muscles of this irises nearly shut, causing him to be nearly blind). And yet... with all those differences, he was still Natsume. My Natsume.

He turned his head toward me slightly, and I heard a hissing sound coming from the gourd strapped to his back. The smell of blood intensified, and a small stream of sand wound its way out of the container. His right eye twitched slightly, and I knew suddenly with crushing force, that this was not Natsume. He never was, I had been deluding myself from the very beginning, and that I would die here. He was an animalistic force of nature, a demon.

I let loose the terror and fear that had been tugging at my limbs as soon as I had known it was he who sat behind me on the room. My emotions let loose the chakra inside of me, pouring into every inch of skin and fur that I possessed. I effectually vanished. I had just enough time to register the fact that he blinked slowly, once, as if in confusion, before I heard hissing, and felt a sledge hammer of sand smash into my side. I fell down the steep angle of the roof, tumbling down the tiles before his sand picked me up again, crushing me as I tried to regain my breath. Suddenly, he released me. I fell to the roof only to be picked up again, smothered and being suffocated by the small bloody desert he carried around with him. I felt my concentration and my vision ( what little I could see under the shifting mass of sand) begin to weaken. My only regret was that I hadn't told Shino where I was going. I would just not turn up in the morning, and he wouldn't find me. Or maybe he would find my mangled body in an alley somewhere... But I hoped for his sake I would simply disappear.

And then it was gone. No crushing sand, no smell of blood. I struggled to open my eyes and I saw him walking away. As I drifted away into a deep sleep, a thought occurred to me. I wasn't interesting enough to kill.

Thank God I was a cat.

A/N: Now review, darn you! I nearly didn't finish an essay because of you guys!