In her sleep, Kaori didn't exactly dream, but rather reflected. 

The vision that came to her took her back to the modest home of her human life. Through those eyes, the world had been so much dimmer, and so unclear. She couldn't focus on more than one sight at a time. It felt like she had cotton in her ears when she couldn't discern the sounds from the next room, or count the number of heartbeats in the small building. She felt horribly weak.  

Slowly - [i]so slowly[/i] - she rotated where she stood in the small, plain kitchen that had belonged to her mortal family. The little room, with its sad implications of poverty, felt as if it had a chokehold around her throat, suffocating her. It was strange, the feeling of suffocation after not needing air for so many years. 

Through her muffled ears, she heard the sound of footsteps behind her, and the kind, affectionate calling of her name, "Kaori?" Her frail body softened at the tone, reacting from a place of emotion. [i]Why?[/i] She turned towards the voice that sung out from the doorway only a few feet from where she stood. In the voice's body, she recognized pieces of herself. Like a puzzle of a self-portriat that had been put together slightly inaccurately. The body was too short, and a little more wrinkled than she. But somewhere in those pieces, she recognized the smooth slope of her own cheeks, and the dark, comfortable depth of her eyes that had never quite gone away. "Mom," she breathed, shattering the cold resolve of her new life to experience, for a rare moment, the painful warmth of human longing. 

----

Her dark lashes trembled, and then slowly blinked apart. It was the first movement she made, and the only other sign of life was the enrichment of her pale skin tone when her blood began to pump. She didn't gasp for the air the way they did in the movies. She didn't need air. 

The vampire's keen eyes opened to a dank space. She could feel the dust particles on her skin, and as she took her first breath, she could smell it in the air. She rolled her head from where it had been resting against the wall to look ahead, finding the room littered with random chairs, one of which held the hunter.

Her eyes narrowed a bit. It was partially a look of distaste for him, but mostly an expression of confusion. The room was unfamiliar, and the last she could remember of the hunter was draining his blood on the rooftop. She ran the tip of her tongue over her bottom lip where the blood had since dried. How long had it been?

When she tried to sit up, she winced at the still-closing chest wound. Her stomach had healed since taking a gut-full of lead. Between the two injuries, her shirt had been torn to near-rags, and was covered in dried and fresh pools of blood. She took a glance at the decorative robe that hung from her shoulders. It had survived the encounter in one piece with only a few bloodspots. 

She shifted a bit in her bounds, looking around the room warily, like a wounded animal. For a vampire, she was weakened. She might still be capable of holding her own against an inexperienced mortal, but it was unlikely that she would be breaking out of this room full of supernatural beings in her current state. Finally, she closed back in on the hunter, "Where...am I?" she weakly managed. Out of the heat of battle, her voice was surprisingly and distinctly feminine.