A small smile crossed Hatsu's face and he let out a laugh. "I'm sorry," he said. "I'm not trying to be rude. It's just that... nothing's changed at all for me." His eyes seemed to fog over for a bit, as if he was remembering something far away. "It's funny, but what you were saying... I felt like you were describing my entire life up to this point." The boy paused for a moment, then seemed to settle on telling more or less his life story to this girl he'd known for only a short time and fought with only a few times.<br/><br/>"I've always been an orphan-- a street kid. I've never had a home, or anything besides the clothes on my back-- and they're not even mine. Everything was fighting: getting food, fending off the bigger kids, mean adults, and street punks. It's always been a reality for me that if I lose a fight I die. Even if the fight didn't kill you, there was never a doctor to treat us. All the kids I hung out with are either dead now or betrayed me somewhere along the line, and moving on was always the only choice I had."<br/><br/>He shook his head, "Life isn't like a cartoon or a comic book. No one ever steps in to save the underdog. A street kid can't risk being the underdog. I learned to fight and got strong early on. I beat up the big kids all the time, so to them I've always been a monster, whether I'm a human or a Hunter.. it never mattered." He gave a small laugh and lifted a hand to finger at his chopped up, uneven black hair. "I remember that whenever I wanted a hair cut I had to go beat up some bigger kid with a pocket knife so I could do it. It was either that or cutting my hand trying to do it with broken glass." For the first time now, one might notice a long line on Hatsu's right hand that wasn't a natural palm line.<br/><br/>"As far as I see, I've never really had any other options in life than to fight to stay alive. No offense, but it was almost always the street girls that died first. I purposefully never fell in love or got any crushes on girls so that I wouldn't have to lose anyone too important to me. Marriage was the farthest thing from my mind. And for so long I've never known what was going to happen to me next. I'm kind of just numb to it now."<br/><br/>"But hey," he said, "you're without a doubt the strongest girl I've ever seen. Any guy who can support himself won't have to be afraid to fall in love with you because you won't ever have to die and leave them so suddenly. And also," he added, "no decent guy would think of one of the saviors of his sorry ass a monster."