A/N: Wow, this was actually a decent updating time. I think. Um, well, Happy New Year. We're officially in 2009. My finals are over, and I didn't die. Anyways, thanks to everyone for their support and everything. I don't have much to say for once, besides that I hope you like it. Read and review, please! And tell me whether this story's working or not... I have my doubts, especially about this chapter, which I churned out. Please ignore the boring first part and get to the later part, which I like better. And if my plot is weird, because I can't keep what I've written and what I've thought separate, please tell me. It's good to know if I'm being confusing. Anyways, please enjoy the third chapter of End.

End

3

Love is the strangest thing you will ever find. Nothing else is so cruel as to give you wings and lift you up to fly, only to ready its gun and shoot you when you're at your highest. Nothing else is as fragile as glass and at the same time as immovable as a mountain. Nothing else can make water and fire work in harmony. Nothing else will ever be as immortal, and nothing will ever be as short-lived.

I flipped off the television set, and slumped back in my chair.

Of all the things I had been afraid of, boredom was the thing that got me. I had hardly been inside the steel building of the organization for a week, and yet I heard myself sighing and staring off into space. Besides the television, and some board games in the large closet, I had no entertainment. And besides my first interest in the T.V., I found it boring. I had never been the owner of a television before, as it was rare for anyone to own one. Jill had one, but her house had been closed off, boarded up. Weeds grew in her once beautiful field.

I shut my eyes tightly, and removed that from my thoughts. Mineral Town was impossible now; a dream of the past that would never return. I was trapped here, in my large room. The plush bed, the lavish furnishings, the television, and the strange machines I now owned meant nothing.

I was a prisoner.

There was a crash from just outside my door. I don't know why I went to look, but boredom may have fueled me. I should have been wary, but I wasn't. I had something fun and interesting to do, and I was dying to do it.

Caitlin stood there, red hair wild as the squirming little boy in her grasp screamed and flailed.

"I WANT TO GO HOME!!!" He bellowed, tiny fists battering the taller girl. Angry tears fell onto the carpet below them. "WHY DID YOU TAKE ME AWAY?!"

My heartbeat pounded loud in my ears, and through the scene in front of me, I saw my mental battle with Kai.

I wanted to do that, to pound and hit at Kai, to have a fit and make him take me home. I wanted to be my chicken girl self. I wanted to scream those words at him and make him listen. This little boy and I were the same. Trapped, held in by someone.

"Shhh. You're fine... um, sweetheart. We've told you. We're going to take care of you from now on."

"I DON'T WANT YOU TO!" He swung around with a sharp kick, and managed to hit me. Finally, Caitlin noticed that I was standing there. She blinked for a few seconds, and the boy took the opportunity to deliver a punch to her nose. She reeled back, mumbling a furious word. He scrambled up, then ran for the elevator. Suddenly, I realized.

I was following him. I could easily keep up. He had short little legs, and ran exactly like Stu had. I grabbed him, twirling him up and around, and caught him lightly. Despite the murderous expression on his face, he was really just a little kid. There was one thing, though, that I had not noticed before, a trait that made my stomach drop and my hands shake.

His eyes were entirely black, so black it almost darkened the hall around us.

"Let me go," he commanded with fury. My body began to move to do as he said, pulled by some unknown force. I protested then, forcing my arms to hold tight. I wouldn't let him go- he was just a little boy. I didn't care if the organization here was trying to do something to him. He was determined, in a way I had only seen men years older than him be. He would try to swim away from here, if he couldn't walk. He would drown in the harsh waves. And, probably, the organization wouldn't care. I wanted to hold him tight, wanted to make sure he wouldn't do it. I wanted to protect him. Even though he looked nothing like Stu, acted nothing like Stu, I could only see Stu's little face, attached onto his own. I could only see Stu crying and hurting himself.

I didn't want that to happen.

He quieted then, and blinked up at me with blue eyes. The black was gone, some strange trick of the light, or perhaps of his anger.

"You're different," was all he mumbled.

Caitlin, massaging her nose, moved towards us, and he stiffened. As a reflex, I held on tighter.

"What? Why did you stop now? We injected enough sleeping liquid in you to kill an elephant earlier, and now you calm down." She rolled her eyes, and I wondered if she was joking. "Little brat. Your dark power won't work on me, if you hadn't noticed." Curiously, she observed him in my arms. "She's just a regular human- you could easily kill her. So why aren't you doing so?" She smiled then, snapping her fingers. "Oh, I remember. You can read minds. She's innocent, isn't she?"

He didn't respond. I, meanwhile, had lost myself in the speech. Mind reading. Dark powers, sleeping liquid, killing me. A regular human. Something in the way she said it made me think that she wasn't, that he wasn't. I looked down at the child's angry face, worried.

I recognized it then.

It was the little boy in the picture on the screen from a week ago, my first day here, standing with the woman in front of the orphanage. The frowning, yet happy little boy. I recalled her strange statements; she had said something about picking someone up.

It was this little boy. Wherever he had been, he was here now. Why, when, and how didn't matter. He was here, and from the way she was looking at him, with a kind pity, I could tell. He was the same thing as me. A prisoner here, trapped and helpless, afraid and almost angry.

"Good job, Popuri." She picked him up, and he started screaming again, reaching out for me. My heart gave a wrench. "I'll be sure to mention this to the boss."

"Caitlin-" I opened my mouth, to tell her to put him down, to tell her please to let him go. He was just a little boy. He didn't deserve this.

"Popuri, it's what we do. These monsters may as well have a purpose. You're going to have to get used to it. Sorry." She held him tightly by his tiny wrists, and began to drag him down the hall, the opposite direction. He screamed and wailed and tried to punch her again, but it was no use. He was just too small to make an impact.

His screams echoed in my dreams and thoughts.

Why did you take me away?!

I knew the answer to that one. Because I had asked, begged Kai. Because I had cried and told him to.

Every night that I had the dream, I would wake up in a pool of sweat, trembling. I didn't want to be a prisoner, I didn't want the little boy to be a prisoner. Why couldn't we be free? Why hadn't I helped him, turned around and ran with him? It might have prevented him from going with Caitlin to- to wherever she took him, if only for a second. She had called him a monster, and looking in his black eyes, I realized I had felt the same. I had wanted to drop him like a rock, to give him to Caitlin before those black eyes drowned me. It was only the memory of Stu that kept me from letting him go.

I would roll out of my huge bed, and just sit and think for hours, staring out my window at the sea below. It used to be I could never sit still; I wanted to go out to the Spring, or to church, or to hang out with Kai, or Jill. I wanted to do things, not be stuck inside with my mother, selling things at a store which almost nobody came to. I hated being cooped up, hated being restricted. I was both, and there was nobody to complain to about it. Patience was something that you learned, not something that came naturally, especially for me.

Impatience didn't matter, though, when you couldn't hear the ticking noises of a clock over your own thoughts and the screams of a little boy. I don't know why it affected me so much, one incident that didn't even really involve me. If I hadn't intervened, he would still have gone away, scooped up in Caitlin's arms, held captive. I wondered if, when they first went and took him from that orphanage, if he asked them to bring him along. That thought above all made me sick with the nausea of what could have been.

I could have been sitting in my mother's arms, maybe a little regretful about Kai leaving, but still whole. I would have been with her, and Stu, and Rick, and everyone else. I wouldn't have known things about the world that would have shattered my confidence in my small existence. Like Rick being a werewolf, or Kai being a member of this organization. Or the awful fact that despite a few moments of tenderness, he didn't love me, and probably never would.

I hadn't gathered the courage to go knock on that door, the one only three steps away from my own.

I had talked to Kai, yes, on the strange little screen he had given me, which apparently was some cordless phone. One was a call to ask if my fridge was stocked, and the other I wasn't even sure was from him, a call right before I went to sleep. That call had scared and comforted me, when I picked it up and didn't hear a thing, not even breathing. "Hello?" I had said, and there was still silence on the other end of the line. I had taken a deep breath, waiting. And then there was the beep that let me know the call was over. That one call was enough to make me pathetically wonder, and dream, about Kai. Speaking of dreams.

It was during the fifth dream that week of the screaming little boy that I felt a hand shake me awake.

"Popuri." A hand gathered my hair and gave it a gentle tug. "Wake up, please."

I was going to scream, because there was a man in my room. A man with chocolate eyes, a purple bandanna, and a sad smile. I felt my beating heart speed up even further from its temporary scare.

"H-how did you get in?" I managed to gasp.

"Your window's open," he replied, as if that explained everything. Yes, my window had been open. If the ocean couldn't drown out the boy's echoing cries, then nothing could. The waves seemed to crash against the beach more loudly here, perhaps because of the angry steel building that overlooked the huge rocky cliff, facing the ocean.

"But-"

"Come," he motioned, and began to walk towards my door. I flung off my covers and rushed after him, the cold breath of air on my legs reminding me that I needed to ask for a new nightgown, one that wasn't a pink summer one.

It was only once we were outside and walking down the dark, deserted hallway that he explained.

"I can't take you home, Popuri." My breath hitched in my throat. Why was he bringing that up? Why, in the middle of the night, was he shaking me awake and leading me off somewhere? "...But I can do something similar."

He wouldn't turn to look at me, wouldn't let his eyes tell me the truth. He slid his card through the slot next to the elevator, and we were going up. I had only ever been on the lower floor before. Even before the elevator reached its final destination, I could hear a strumming pulse. It beat through the elevator, through the floor, through my very soul. It beat in time with my own heart, steady and neverending. My pulse sped up at the sound, and the other beat accelerated to match it. The elevator doors opened, and the beat just got louder.

There was a huge machine in front of me, wires running all across the room. In front of the large screen lay one simple chair, encased in a glass ball attached to the floor. Patterns of electric ran across the shining surface, and I realized I was clutching to Kai's arm.

"We have a name for it... Translated, it comes out as The Heart of the World." He stepped forwards, and I was forced to move with him. I couldn't pull my hands from their attachment onto his arm, could only move my bare feet until we were standing in front of the glass-encased chair. "...If you sit in it, it'll let you view whatever you wish." I reached a hand out to touch the smooth surface, but he wouldn't let me. Instead, he gently peeled my hand off his arm and walked over to the screen, tapping a few keys. "I've set it to Mineral Town. You can... You can go there whenever you wish. You just... Need me there with you. We aren't really supposed to be up here, you see. So you can't ask anyone else."

With a crackling of lightning, the glass ball opened, blue electric dancing across it.

"Do I sit there?" My voice was so quiet even I couldn't hear it. Apparently, Kai could.

"Yes." He came over and put a hand out as if to nudge me, but stopped himself, slowly lowering the hand to his side. "Just sit down, and you can see it. All of it." His knuckles clutched at his side. "...Sometimes, Popuri, things aren't all they seem to be. But the Heart of the World has no problem seeing straight through that. It sees everything, whether it's actually visible or not."

I had no idea what he was talking about, but it didn't matter at the time. I made my way over to the chair. It was cold, despite the electricity that surrounded it. I lowered myself into the steel seat, and the glass ball slowly closed itself. I could only see Kai for a moment past then, before the electricity blurred out everything. It was brighter than the sun, and I felt my skin burn from the heat of it. There was a tingling feel all over my body, and all I could hear was the steady beat of the machine... Or was it my heart? I couldn't tell anymore. It was too bright, too hot, and...

"Jill!" Breathing hard, Rick ran towards a glowing light. If I squeezed my eyes until they were almost shut, I could almost see the form of a girl, of my friend Jill, inside the bright ball. Besides that, all I could see was light, some green and flowing, some white and filling everything around her. Rick himself was considerably... Hairier than I had ever seen him, and when he opened his mouth, his teeth were sharper than they should have been. But his eyes were still pure blue, human. "Goddess, we've looked everywhere! Why won't you just tell me where Popuri is?! She's my sister, darn it! I have to know!"

I wanted to open my mouth and tell him, tell him I was right here... But he passed through me like I didn't exist. It had been so real... He had been so real. Then, he passed through me like I was smoke. I wanted to cry, because then I remembered that I wasn't home in Mineral Town. I was just in a machine that did who-knows-what.

"She's gone," the light whispered in the voice of my former best friend. "...He took her away. If I get my hands on him, I swear I will-"

Electricity crackled, and suddenly I was looking at my mother. Or what was left of her. Her face would have been as radiant as ever, if not for the worried frown that was on it. They had realized I was gone by that time; but they would never know where. My mother's curls, although limp, were just as pink as ever. It was her torso and her legs that made my whole body tremble and my heart cry out.

They were black, convulsed, and I could see her red blood flowing through them so slowly. The blood didn't even flow past her ankles, and her feet were a sickening pile of black soot. She was sitting behind her counter, hands propping up her face, worrying about me while her lower body wasted away to nothing, clutched in the dark hands of disease. I had always known that my mother was sick, slowly losing her ability to walk- I had just never seen it like this before. This way of seeing my mother, marked as half-dead, made me cry out, made me afraid. I didn't want to see her die, she couldn't die, she couldn't!!!

"Mama!" I cried, and she looked at me, red eyes wide, like she had heard me. I wanted her to hear me, wanted her to know that I loved her, that I was sorry for going away... so sorry...

"P-Popuri?!" She breathed, and reached one pale hand out to me. But as with my brother, it slid straight through me. I wanted to touch her, to have her hold me and tell me everything was all right. She stood up, and her black legs made an awful snapping noise, dark and moaning, as she edged towards me. "My baby... Are you there?"

I forced myself to look at her face, only at her face, as she wrapped her arms around me, or tried. She just keep slipping away from me, and there was nothing I could do to stop her. She was water in my hands, except for the black diseased part. That, I could feel. That propped against me, freezing cold with death. It was dead, and so it could touch me. That was what I had become.

"Mama, I didn't want to go away, not really... I'm sorry, Mama... I love you..."

The door of my former home opened, and in walked Elli, carrying a basket of eggs.

"Mrs. Chite, I went and took care of your chi- Ah!" She let out a scream as she looked at me. She, too, could see me. But with the arrival of Elli, my mother had lost the fragile bond between our worlds.

"Popuri!" She wailed, and moved her arms through me again, searching. "Popuri!" A pathetic whimper escaped my lips, but she was lost to me. Then, another crackling of electric, and everything went black.

I wanted it to be a dream. I never wanted to see my mother that way.

I opened my eyes, and Kai pulled me out of the chair.

"The system malfunctioned. We lost the connection." He ran his hands all over my face, my hair, my shoulders, my arms. "Are you all right? You were talking, you were crying... I shouldn't have shown you that, but you were just so unhappy without your family... I thought if you saw them again, it would be better for you- please, I'm sorry, don't cry." He babbled, something I had never seen Kai do before, his words a torrent in my ears. It was a relief to know that someone could touch me, that I was real, that I wasn't just a shadow in the world.

Yes, I was crying. And even though I had just seen a terrible vision of my mother, and had an almost nightmarish experience, I felt that stupid warm glow again, because Kai was there, touching me and holding me, supporting me.

It always hit me at the worst times, that awful weight that slammed me when I realized exactly how much I loved Kai. It could be emotional things that triggered it, or stupid things, or just seeing him. Even when I was just watching a romance show on T.V., every time a couple did something together, I compared it to our relationship. And it hurt when I figured out that our relationship had no romantic qualities, that Kai and I may as well be brother and sister. He protected me and spent time with me. That didn't mean he loved me. He didn't kiss me or take me out on dates or say romantic things. Even when, hardly a week before, Caitlin had told me that he had fallen in love with me, I had hardly slept that night, and not only because I was trapped. It was partially because I was thinking it over, thinking over his hug in the elevator, over everything he had said to me since we had arrived.

It was one of those awful moments when I knew I loved him more than anything else in the whole world.

He went quiet, staring at me, and I realized he was waiting for me to say something. I opened my mouth, and out came another wail. And Kai, the ever-confident 'womanizer', looked absolutely terrified at what he should do with a sobbing girl. Unfortunately, he didn't have to deal with it for long, because the screen in his pocket let out beeping noises, and he pulled it out. After scanning it with his eyes, he looked to me.

"My father says he's hearing noises up in the room where The Heart of the World is," he said wryly. "He wants me to look into it." I couldn't help but smile a little over my tears at the irony. "Come on, let's go, before someone else is sent up here."

We headed back through the dark hallways, and went into my room. He tucked me under the covers like you might your child, and smiled down at me through the thick veil of darkness, a simple traveller on the beach again for that one blinding moment. I sleepily smiled back. Even if he didn't love me, sometimes I thought I could get along on simple fondness. That was the intensity of my stupid lovesickness. He was sitting on my windowsill, about to leave, when I heard my own voice say something.

"Thank you, Kai."

"You're welcome, Poppy." He hadn't used my nickname since we first arrived. I had thought I would never hear it, not anymore. Once again, I was crushed with that awful realization. This time, due to it being about three in the morning, and me having been thoroughly traumatized, I voiced it.

"Kai," I mumbled, feeling my eyes weighed down with sleep, "I love you."

I would have been embarassed, or angry, or upset, or felt plain stupid had I not fallen asleep the next instant. I couldn't see Kai's reaction, couldn't listen to my own mind bereave me. The emotion that I felt was calm. Despite seeing my mother almost dead before my eyes, despite my confession, despite that the little boy should have still been screaming in my head, and despite me being miles away from home, trapped in an institution where they kidnapped children, I fell into a dreamless sleep. For the first time since the summer had ended, and my nightmare of a life had begun, the only thing I could do was listen to ocean waves gently lulling me to sleep, and breathe in the lingering scent of pineapple.

A/N: Whew, that's off my back! Anyways, time for me to babble.

supernae- Yep, finals are over. Yay! And now I can post and all. Anyways, thank you for reviewing! I'm glad that you like this story. Hope you liked this chapter too!

All right. Now I'm off to go be a freak and listen to some music. And eat. And play piano. And be happy at the three day weekend. I hope you guys like it too. Bye! See you next chapter!