A/N: Check out this: I own nothing. When I say that I don't have a lot more written about Blue, it doesn't mean that I've not got a whole lot more to write. Fortunately, I finished the draft for Chapter 66 immediately after Chapter 65, so there's one less long wait for my readers and reviewers, even if the chapter is rather short in comparision to the last... Also, although the jump my not be for a couple of chapters yet, you may want to start scanning under "all ratings" for this fic in the future. "Blues" may yet earn an M rating.

I’m the first one to admit I don’t understand alchemy. Neige’s tried to explain some of the philosophy of it, even tried to show me some of the rudimentary nuts and bolts, so to speak, but it all went right over my head. There are times when it seems like basic biochemistry or physics: breaking one thing down in order to create another. Other times, (and perhaps it’s just Neige and her teacher,) it seems almost akin to a religion - “the study of souls,” my friend once called it, and what might be done with them. Of all the sciences, alchemy is the hardest to grasp for the uninitiated, not quite requiring a mind as magical as its effects in order to study it. It’s of little wonder that it was regarded as a pseudoscience many times over its ten-thousand-year history.

At this moment, it was hard to deny that whatever else it might be, it was definitely real. I couldn’t see what was going on around me, but I could all but feel my blood drain into the lines, flowing down, down, around, and no longer parallel in their paths. I could not see the symbol as it filled with red; there was no earthly way for me to be able to trace the design, yet I still could probably give you a shaky drawing of the pentagram if I could ever make my hands steady enough to commit the impression to paper.

Even as my thoughts drained out with the blood, something began to flash beneath my eyelids: disconnected images of Hige, Pops, Bruce, Toboe, Kiba, people I never remembered meeting well enough to remember now as the important bits of my life flashed before my eyes, mixing with snatches of music, of my father’s voice as he spoke with Detective Lebowski over clinking glass bottles, of wolf howls, of the rustle of high grass in the wind, muddled with scents of flowers and Momma’s cooking spices and gunpowder and blood… the blood that even now must surely be more within the tubes of Jaguara’s array than my own body…

Hello.

Funny, I always thought Death or God or whatever confronted me at the gates to the afterlife would sound a bit more impressive. The most overwhelming trait I could use to describe the soft, girlish tone gently interrupting the swirl of impressions from my quickly extinguishing existence - or perhaps, from the last few existences; there seemed too much to have all happened in a mere twenty-four years - was, to put it mildly, mild. It was a sweet, pretty voice, certainly enough, and the jumbled mass of my collected memory suggested that it would be beautiful in song, but it was little more powerful than a downy feather pillow.

Who are you?

Fair enough. “I’m…” It should be easy enough, too, but “Blue Yaiden” seemed meaningless here, swirling with “Jaguara” and “Rebecca” and “Tia” and “Neige” and “Cher” and half a dozen other names, all of which evoked a stronger response in me than that of an adopted bounty hunter I’d known somewhere. It wasn’t that I’d forgotten the life slipping away from me so quickly, far from it. But here, I might remember other lives, every one that I’d had under this name and others like it, with only the others’ roles to anchor me to any particular chain of memory. They tangled here, for this was not the first life I’d known Cher Degre. This was not the first time I’d faced Jaguara. Then there was that last name, the one I’d only heard from Kiba and the scarred gray who ran at his side. At last, I knew who that name fit. “Cheza? Who am I? What am I?”

This one cannot decide that. You must choose for yourself.

That simple, huh? I could be Pop’s girl again and not worry about the wolf within, because there’d be no wolf within; I could choose whatever life and name I wanted because I’d be leaving it behind in the spilled blood snaking down beneath Jaguara’s secret lab. And yet… yes, as past lives expanded over each other, muddying the lines between them, I began to pick out patterns in the fractal. I could live all my life as a human, or as a wild wolf, or as nothing more than a pet dog. I’d done it before.

There would be a cost. There was always a cost. As a human, I’d never know what strength I might possess, never see so much as a glimpse of the paradise Kiba would search for. As a dog, I was left mute, with no one left that I could communicate with. Pops tried - he and Bruce always tried, but a dog’s means of communication are sharply limited. Then there was the life of a wolf… It would be peaceful, out in the wilds, surviving as a proud and independent creature, but I’d never know my Pops. I wasn’t even sure I’d ever meet Hige or Toboe or Kiba if I spent my days as free as the chill winds that ruffled but never penetrated my fur.

This one remembers a lifetime when you were not fully any of these, Cheza suggested serenely.

“I… I don’t really care either way,” I told her, bits of incredulous laughter bubbling up as I realized that it was true: wolf or human or half-breed, it didn’t matter. I was dying and it didn’t matter to me what I might become in my next life. “As long as I can be with Hige and stay at Pop’s side. That’s where I belong, and that all that matters.”

Are you quite sure about this? You might make it to paradise more quickly without them. Kiba or Tsume could lead you home, too.

“You don’t understand.” No, this had not been the first lifetime I had known them. This was not the first time that I had sworn myself to them. “They are my home, my paradise. My family is what makes me who I am.”

It will hurt.

And this didn’t? “I’m prepared to face the consequences.”

As you wish, Blue Yaiden.

With that, my blood began to flow backwards, defying gravity, osmosis, evaporation, and entropy under the force of some greater alchemy. With it retreated my conscious thoughts. The last thing I remembered of my first encounter with Cheza was that returning to life hurt like hell.