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It was the senior class's last day of school at Middleton High. Everyone had just finished their last exam and they were all busy heading out to the buses and cars, laughing and talking about what they were doing for vacation. Three students were out behind the school, making sure that they weren't attracting anyone's gaze, having their last bit of fun before graduation. After a while, they headed out, leaving a fourth student - their victim - lying in the grass behind them.

Kaze didn't try to get up. His body hurt too much for that. He just lay there, vision blurred, watching his three assailants walking away from him leaving him. He could hear them laughing as they left, talking about what they wanted to do tonight, not even sparing a thought for the one behind them. Bruised and beaten, he let them walk away without as much as a scratch.

A while after the boys were gone, Kaze was able to pull himself up, and started to brush himself off. He lightly pressed on his chest and limbs, trying to find out where most of the pain and bruises were going to come from. Fortunately it wasn't too bad, there definitely wasn't anything broken. Luckily his arms and wings hadn't been hurt bad, so he would still be able to continue flying.

As he wiped his face, his right eye throbbed in pain at the touch. He jerked his hand back, and then wiped that area more tenderly. After that, Kaze walked back into the school and walked to the restroom to get a look at himself in the mirror. He saw that his nose was bleeding, as well as a cut on his lower lip. He held a paper towel to his face to give it some time to heal. After about five minutes he washed his face and decided that the cut wouldn't be noticeable to anyone who wasn't looking for it.

His right eye, which had started to swell shut, was a different story. By pulling back the fur around it he saw that the skin was starting to gain a purplish color. He would have to make sure that no one saw it before he had a chance to get it under some ice for a while. He thanked God that neither of his parents were going to be home until evening. After putting on some sunglasses to cover it up, he slipped out of the school, got into his car, and started driving home.

It wasn't the first time that this had ever happened; he had gotten used to similar treatment over the years, ever since he started in elementary school. Kaze had always been the shy kid, starting school without knowing anyone and not really talking to anyone. When he had talked he also had a tendency to stutter and ramble, which made him seem even weirder than he already was. Add that to the fact of him being a hybrid - the child of a wyvern and a red wolf - he showed himself to be ripe fodder for all of the bullies of the school.

After years of constantly going home and crying after school, he had developed a way of coping with regular beatings and teasing: ignore it. All of those videos about bullying that teachers were told to show kids during school had always said to do just that: if you ignore the bully, then eventually they would become tired of you and go away. He knew it didn't work like that, but he learned that reacting to it just made the others go at him out of anger instead of just for fun. He found that things worked out better if you just didn't make a big deal out of it, and learned to stonewall his emotions. He hadn't cried for almost five years now.

After about fifteen minutes he got home, pulling up into the family driveway. Turning off the car, he got out, walked up to the front door and headed inside. He closed the door behind him, kicked off his shoes and started to-

"Hello?" called out a feminine voice. Kaze froze. His sister, Ali! He had completely forgotten that she was coming home from college today. His mind raced, trying to figure out how to respond. In lack of any better ideas, he decided to go for casual.

"Hey," he called out to her. "It's Kaze."

"Oh, hi Kaze!" she said, genuinely excited. "How did your finals go?"

"They were okay," he said, in a neutral, somewhat disinterested voice. He headed for the kitchen, hoping to be able to get the ice without her catching on. "They weren't too bad, and I think I did alright on them."

"Oh." There was a brief pause. Then she asked, "How are you?"

"Fine," He replied automatically. He realized that He'd fallen into her trap.

Ali walked into the kitchen and stood there, looking at him. She was only an inch or two shorter than Kaze, with wavy, auburn colored hair which fell just over her shoulders. While they were both the same wyvern/wolf hybrid, she made it look exotic in the same way that Kaze made it look weird. While Kaze had inherited his father's blue and green coloring, Ali had gotten her mother's bright red fur. Instead of also having his mother's deep purple eyes, she had her father's bright green ones. She was built like a model, and that on top of her high grades made her very popular in school. She was three years older than him, and she had really taken care of Kaze when he was younger, both of their parents working full-time jobs. Ali was the one person who really knew him, who he confided in when growing up. Add that to her recent studies in psychology, and she could read Kaze like a book.

"Hey," she said, a little bit of concern mixed in with her voice, "what's wrong?"

He hesitated for a second, and then sighed. There was no point in trying to hide anything from her any longer. He took off the sunglasses, revealing the now fully swollen eye. He saw Ali's eyes flash as she saw his eye, and he felt a sense of joy from seeing her sympathetic anger.

"Who was it?" she asked.

"Drew Stephens and Co." He said, putting a sense of familiarity to the statement.

Her lips pulled back in a snarl. "Those pure-blooded assholes!" she spat. Drew and his friends, Kyle and Mike, were all 'pure dragons,' decedents from a long line of dragons that did very little mixing with anyone who wasn't of their own breed, much less other races. For Kaze's father, also a pure, to go and fall in love with a wolf was considered almost blasphemous. As such, Drew and his friends had come to be his most regular tormentors.

"Didn't you do anything?" she asked, her anger still in her voice. She had a very effective angry expression, and her red hair and fur gave the impression that she was practically on fire.

Kaze shrugged, going to the freezer and pulling out an ice pack. "No point," he said, putting the ice pack on his eye as he did. He sighed in relief, the burning cold doing wonders for his throbbing bruise.

"Damn it, Kaz," she yelled, frustration obvious in her voice. "You've got to stop doing this!"

"Doing what?"

"Doing nothing! You never try to stand up for yourself, never try to get any help, always just taking all of this shit." She was getting agitated, her long tail whipping back and forth behind her like a violent snake.

Kaze looked at her in surprise, laying back his ears and tucking in his tail in an effort to show submission and get her to calm down. "Well what do you expect me to do?" He said, trying to approach her with reason. "I'm not strong enough to do anything besides piss them off even more, and 'getting help' might have stopped it for a while, but it just ended up coming back worse than before. So what exactly do you think I should do?"

Instead of calming down, Ali became even more frustrated, "You should have done SOMETHING! Anything other than this punching bag routine you've been doing! I know you've got your damn pride, but-"

"'Pride'?" Kaze exclaimed, his own temper starting to flare up. "What pride? I don't have any friends, don't have any goals, and haven't really accomplished anything my entire life, unless you want to count getting my A's in school and surviving up to this point! The only reason people even know my name is because I'm 'that one hybrid freak!'"

Ali's eyes had gone wide, surprised at his unexpected outburst. She muttered, "I just-".

He cut her off. "Every time I think I do something right, it always just ends up blowing up in my face! For every single good thing that happens in my life, a dozen other little things all come in and beat me over the head with all the things that I've done wrong, or how inadequate I am!" He wasn't holding anything back anymore: twelve years of bottled up frustration and anger were all breaking free of him and there wasn't anything he could do to control it.

"I hate it! Everything I ever do feels like a mistake, and no one even bothers to tell me how I can do better! And whenever I do get any advice, it's always 'It'll get better' or 'You just need to try harder' or some other useless bullshit! I just... I just..." And then he broke. His eyes welled up, and his throat became wracked with sobbing. He leaned against the kitchen table, letting the tears flow and the sobs come. The ice pack had fallen to the floor, but that didn't matter; the pain of his eye didn't come close to matching the pain in his chest. He just cried, for the first time in five years.

He didn't know how long he just stood there, letting the tears come; for all he knew it could have been hours. After a while though, Ali came up to and lightly embraced him. He clung back to her, just as he did when he was just a kid. After a minute, when he had his voice back under control, he croaked "There, I did something."

Ali gave out a soft laugh. "Yes, you did," she said softly, with a warm voice, "you big idiot."

"Jerk."

And then everything was alright.