This is the first flashback. This story contains four flashbacks, each revolving around the past lives of the characters. The main events (i.e the present) will begin after the flashbacks.

ONE

When Anya shifted to her new home which was directly situated behind the patios of vacant to-let houses packed with gloomy bungalows; she was devastated. She had every right in her hand to go and rip out the living soul of her previous school Principal who had taken the cold blooded decision of suspending the Frost siblings.

For what? For sticking a tiny piece of strawberry flavored chewing gum on the huge leathery surface of the Principal's office chair. Not that she had a forbidden grudge over her, it was that the old crook's daily persistence of black-mailing her father for the school fee plus doing it in front of the whole class was getting out of her hands...

Who would then not leave her alone a single minute before asking a million questions on how her father came late, when had he left her mother, even if she had a mother or if her sister was adopted?

They'd say it with a slight hint of humor and with a slight coating of pity. They would then give her a pat on the back, nod apologetically and leave chuckling. Never had she minded and mourned over the hurting words she heard every day, in fact, the more questions she received the more she felt honored to answer them with sarcastic answers.

It was not that she didn't care and that it wouldn't have stung, but once after when she saw her father lying on their tiny sofa, crying over a newspaper article on the rise of price and then shattering the bottle of beer with anger, she dared not go complain any further. That afternoon, she had decided to sleep with her little sister.

But yes, her eyes weren't dry when she went to sleep. Of course she hadn't cried while with her baby sis, maybe it was the toxic fume of cigarettes and alcohol... Anya thought it was useless to again bang her head and strain her throat on the bedroom door. For, she chose to give that night to her dad.

Later that night, it was full of screeches, colorful comments and a lot of strange faces, Anya found herself closed in their room with her hands running over her test papers. Unsurprisingly, her brows bunched at the one digit numbers; three out of ten, six out of ten, two marks out of ten in Literature etc...

Then a grin cracked as she flipped over the pages of her sketch book. They held her precious gems; a rough sketch of the principal with horns, another handsome outline of her father in an expensive-looking cardigan, an imitation of her with fangs and on the last page, a drawing of Michael.

She liked Michael.

She would willingly die in sewers but would never dare to speak anything about it. She'd think of it and then bury it as a souvenir in her sketch book.

Anya had a remarkable talent in art- is what her neighbours used to say- the details of everything and anything fascinated her. She also was quite famous for her unpaid assistance in the history and science lectures while infamous for her quirky mouth.

While other girls sat in groups and talked, occasionally giggling and nudging each other, busying themselves, Anya sat in the first bench, slouched over and drew and wrote notes in her precious notebook.

Scribbling and erasing. Looking. Blushing. Reading.

Maybe this boy named Michael sitting just beside her, did not notice the quick peeps and the looks Anya gave while making herself engrossed with her books. If he would ever catch her staring, he'd smile but then his smile would falter into a thinly pressed line accompanied by a confused shrug.

The one who would receive the smile would gawk and stare adjust her spectacles on her pixie nose and bury her head deeper in her books.

Anya never understood why others would behave as if she emitted poisonous gas or like her head was a fluffy dandruff circus.

They avoided her.

She tried to talk and poke her nose into other's conversations, but, whenever she would settle herself and get ready to question and answer; she'd fail to comprehend a single thing. Then when she finds a suitable line to say, she'd self destruct the whole decorum with her weird voice modulation. Sometimes high then low and when she'd  laugh like an awkward seal clapping her hands, people would just run out of excuses and ask her to go away then and there.

At First, she let herself cry inside the washroom, second it happened and she went and kept staring at the jig-jag pattern on her locker's interior, thrice it happened and she puffed her chest out and went to complain about it to her class teacher only to get a smoldering mini lecture on how she should respect other's privacy.

Fourth time it happened and she just kept staring at the one who screamed at her.

Day in, day out, she busied herself inside her tiny world of Sci-Fi  TV serials, video games, laptop, her miniature history and science book and comic collection and with a more than willing to hear anything sister Lily.

Lily would talk crazy like her sister, nod on the sheepish jokes her sister failed to crack and would always sit and listen carefully whatever her sister tried to say.

She also understood why her sister would come home all gloomy, she understood the reasons why her lunchbox was empty even though Anya was not fond of eating and she also knew that Anya was the one who got into a hair-pulling fight between the bullies who threatened her.

Though Lily felt anger for her sister as she got all those snide remarks and still not burst up and take a break, Anya's fragile attempts of comforting her whenever they had a fight with their father made her blood boil and she felt that liquid pump hard inside her brain which knitted plans and choices her elder sister should've taken. Lily was always forced to stand back in any family conversation and then when she came up and tried to resolve it with her adrenaline fueled father; he'd bark at her, forcing her to shrink back.

He once hit Anya and Lily saw. She saw how the skin turned from Anya's  tanned skin colour to a cherry red. She saw how Anya was stopping him from selling the kitchen equipments and how his hands lashed forward like a snake!

But then again, her naïve sister was disagreeing like a blind person; Lily wondered how long her sister would pretend to hold that man back...

Lily wasn't so sure that day after they were suspended from the school, was it or was is not because of Anya? Her one half was happy to know that for once her good-for-nothing sister did something of a cause but the other half of her was irrevocably angry, she was angry when he'd scolded her and change their home to a place between nowhere. And she'd guessed, maybe it was because of him.

Was that a punishment? Because, Lily wasn't so sure.

~o~

"No one can see me and I've lost all feeling but I know I won't die alone~'

--I'll stop you from breathing and all your deceiving and this house is not my home!" Anya dipped her head low once and her fingers wiggled over an imaginary guitar fret board, her thin fingers trying to make out random chords and her lips moved accordingly.

"NO! More forgiveness...NO! and the reason is I know I won't die alone!"

She bolted up straight from her Double Decker bed and it shook violently, she expertly picked her left fingers up and down, screeches and shrieks which were supposed to be noises made by a guitar escaped her wide smiling lips.

"I HAVE RETURNED!~' she attempted a small head bang and Lily who is sprawled on the floor with a taped controller chuckles and shakes her head, returning her focus on the moderate sized TV screen.

It displayed two graphic hands aiming a weapon, numerous types of bars of attractive denotations decorated the small window to the virtual game; hands bucked up as the gun trembled and the bold noises of firing produced from the speakers and the apartment's walls buzzed.

'...and everyone dies...and everyone lies...They're waiting for the second coming again~"

Black brows swoop up in a sad frown whilst the tune drastically lowers, sounding like a dying cat's cry.

Anya sings and shakes her head, voice trembling when falling a notch and Lily paused her game to see her elder sister sing their favorite part of the song. Corners as pursed as a sympathetic frown, Lily's eyes draws how the bruise over Anya's forehead had swollen to a noticeable extend and a flash of haziness clouds Lily's eyes as it reminded her of her father.

"Everyone tries to hold onto their lives, when no one's alive...' Anya's voice cracks to a muffled screech--

'BRING ME 115!" she finishes the verse with a dramatic bow and proceeds to pull out the head phones she had been wearing for about an hour. Indeed, her ears felt soar from the constant contact of the rubber pieces of the ear phones. She put her pinkie finger inside one of her ears and her eyes scrutinized Lily's expression; a hint of tears forming under the brim of her eye lids. An oval face drooped and thumbs played nervously along the joystick.

"Oi!... What's wrong egg-face?" Anya sat besides Lily, one hand resting over her shoulders. She tilted her head to meet Lily's and intentionally resumed the video game. The screen came back into life once again and the character on the screen moved as the virtual enemy invaded, hitting the character twice.

It got hit; real-like crimson blood splat and a masculine voice rang through "Dang! Zombitches!"

"Hehe! Look, Tank's getting angry at us. Come on, you don't want to see him dead, do you?" Anya nudged at her sister's side, elbow bumping the ribs underneath, earning a giggle from the body.

"Eh? Is he? I didn't know..." Lily sniffed in and shakily held the controller.

"Will ya tell me what's wrong?" Anya said, watching her sister- Tank Dempsey - killing zombies one by one.

"Nothing, your bruise..." Lily replied, eyes unnervingly glued to the screen.

"What about my bruise?" Anya asked quizzically, tilting her head at the screen. One of the zombie's head popped like a grape, another got berated by a hailing rain of lead, it's dead body falling down dead again; twitching and getting flattened still over bright red.

Her eyes darted from one head to another, staring at the blinking yellow dots as it came forward getting bigger and bigger then turning red after bullets met its plush surface. Anya waited for her sister to run into clearing.

"Dad hit you badly this time, why didn't you hit him back?" piped Lily, her voice sounded almost strained. Each word stretched and ended with a question mark. It stung Anya, to the core. It stung her to tell that her father fed and clothed them. The roof on top of their hopeless heads were because of him, however, she couldn't make herself to tell this to Lily.

"Exactly! He's my dad, I can't hit him! You egg-face! Look how many you've killed! Amazing, I am jealous..."

Anya squealed in utter delight as a nuke blast made a group of twelve reanimated corpses fly in every direction. Blood splattered on the screen, red slim flowing down to disappear under the brim of the screen--

"Cut it out, Anya!" The controller skidded to a halt after hitting the nearest wall, Lily pushed Anya on her chest hard in a really depressed manner; eyes bloodshot and dripping with free flowing tears. Mouth twisted in a struggling fight for the right emotion.

"What?" Anya leaned forward to wipe away the tears from her sister's face but to no avail. She knelt on both her hands and lifted the controller, touching and feeling the cool plastic of the tape and shaking it lightly; checking for any fracture. It was the only wireless controller left and since they had an issue with money, buying a new one was completely out of the question.

"Just- H-how can you live under that monster?" croaked Lily. Her eyes lingered over Anya's face for unanswered questions. She sniffed and shifted from one foot to another, desperately.

"He's terrible! He hit you, twice!" She aggressively poked Anyas forehead angrily, a hint of red lacing the angry flesh; an absolute evidence. Lily's poked it intensely earning an 'Ow' from Anya.

"And this?! This was because you said 'NO' to that unknown man? Huh?"

It'd been true. Early that morning, Anya and Lily welcomed some of their unwanted guests; three men of late thirties. Not 'their' guests to be exact, why would two females of barely twenties invite utter strangers to their house?

They came. They enjoyed themselves, unreserved of the youngsters and their privacy. And one of them tried to get 'too' close to Lily, and next thing the girl knew was her  sister's palm plastering over that alien face and a knuckle colliding hard to her eyes...

"Well, he got what he deserved. Besides, it was not that bad." a battered face turned towards a shocked face of Lily Frost; whose face now twisted into a mixed concoction of amazement and rage.

"That idiot was getting onto my nerves" she replied coldly, Anya fished up the plastic equipment and invested all her attention to the television.

"OMG! Imma loving this game so much!' Two zombies went down with one shot. "Close your mouth Lily, flies might get in" It was true, there were a bunch of flies enjoying the thick awkwardness among the siblings...

"Baldy, you are such a thick head..." Lily couldn't help but say so.

"Ha! Eggface."Came an equal answer from Anya.

Lily found her anger and voice trapped inside her throat like a knot.

"Baldy..."

"Eggface."

Frozen and still contemplating over the present, hazel eyes stared down at the head bobbing left and right with rhythm as bangs and fires blared through the speakers.

"What?! It's epic 'K?'" answered Anya to her silent sibling. "And don't call me baldy, Eggface."

Lily stood there exhausted, all energy wasted on the thick-head in front of her who would no matter what, turn the whole issue into simple rubbish. What Lily thought, was of getting some answers and here she was--

"My, my... It's late. Go to sleep Lily; tomorrow's school." Anya yawned and wriggled her fingers over the controller, stepping over to the Quit-Game option.

Lily let out a long tiring soundless breath and decided to retire for the night...