In the Hall of Golden Fortunes [5/5, ShoYou]
Title: In the Hall of Golden Fortunes
Pairing: Jinnai Sho/Omi Youichirou
Rating/Warnings: PG, RPS, vampire romance, MURDER D||
Genre: Heian Court Vampire AU. sobs.
Word Count: 2788
Summary: A simple love affair between a princess and a mid-ranking courtier grows increasingly complicated.
Notes: The last chapter!!! I hope you enjoy it ;u;
--
Chapter 5: The Ink of a Thousand Unwritten Letters
At first he could not believe his eyes, nor could he bring himself to touch her, lest she be an illusion. He got to his feet, but could do no more. She solved his problem by taking a few steps closer, drawing him close, and kissing him. He clung to her, so overwhelmed by her presence that everything was the softness of her silks, the warmth of her body, her hands holding him close, and her lips, her mouth, her tongue. “What are you doing here?” he breathed into her skin, but he didn’t need an answer, and she didn’t give him one for several more minutes.
“I couldn’t leave matters between us unfinished,” she said at last, and dropped to the reed mat that was the room’s only furnishing. He squatted beside her, unsure whether he would be allowed to come any closer. She drew in a deep breath and let it out with a sigh. Her eyes focused sharply on his, as if she was seeing him for the first time, and as if she was seeing something so horrible and yet fascinating that she couldn’t look away.
“There are two secrets I have kept from you,” she said, “and I cannot imagine how you will react to learning either of them, but I also cannot keep them from you any longer. I… don’t want to keep them from you.”
“First… I don’t know that the thought has ever crossed your mind, but there was a reason I was able to recover so quickly, despite how much you drank from me that first night. There was a reason I wasn’t already waiting outside your door in response to the letter you sent. There was a reason I wept when you spoke to me of forever.” She paused, searching his face as he tried to comprehend that what he hadn’t been able to hope for was true. “I too am a vampire.”
He reached for her, and she allowed him to slip his thumb into her mouth and feel the fangs that he hadn’t been able to see for the blacking, hadn’t felt for the force with which she had always kissed him. “You’re a vampire,” he said in wonder, his face resolving into a grin. “You’re a vampire,” he repeated, “and you promised to love me forever. I promised to love you forever.”
“You did not know what you were promising,” she murmured, avoiding his eyes.
“Honestly? Right now forever almost doesn’t seem long enough.” He cupped her chin in his hand and leaned forward to kiss her. This time she didn’t force himself upon him, though she was still very much an active participant, and oh, what a difference it made! What he had intended to be a quick kiss of reassurance became more, and only ended when he attempted to undo the front of her robe.
She pushed his hands away. “I still have one secret. A bigger one. Otherwise I would have told you right away that I was a vampire, that we might dispense of the unnecessary trappings of rank and nobility. But with such mutual understandings, new questions arise. I could see it in your eyes from the moment you realized. Growing behind the initial wave of surprise and elation, curiosity about how I came to be here, how I was made a vampire, who I had been. And that I was not ready to tell you.”
“But you are now.”
“I…” She stood abruptly and paced the short length of the room until she had calmed enough to settle beside him again, if a little further away. “May I ask you a question? The given name you use is Masakatsu. What was your original name, when you were still human?”
The long-unused name came easily to his lips. “Sho. It was Sho. It was a common name, for a common servant, and it was never written down, but it was my name. After I was changed, after I learned to read and write, I chose a character to write it with, and I’ve used it in each of my names since.” He traced the character lightly on the back of her hand.
“Sho. Is that what I may call you?” Her tone was strangely formal, as if they were being introduced all over again - and perhaps they were.
“Please. Nothing would give my heart greater joy than the sound of my true name coming from your lips.”
“Sho,” she said again, and he could feel his blood heating up. “I wish I could tell you the same thing, and yet the name I was given does not give me the same pleasure.
“The name I take now comes from the Chinese reading of the province in which I was born, Omi. You claim a humble origin, but in my mortal life I was nothing more than a farmer, the sort the people of the court see as less than human and undeserving even of a name.” He tried to say something in protest, but she pressed a finger to his lips. “I had a name. My name was Ichirou.” She left her finger on his mouth a moment longer before letting it fall back into her lap.
They sat in silence as he thought this over. At last, he ventured, “So, when you were still human, were you a man?”
“Essentially, yes.” She sighed and rubbed at her brow. “And though I am now a vampire, my body remains that of a man.”
“But you are a woman.” He held his hand out, unsure whether or not she wanted to touch him. After a moment’s hesitation, she put her hand in his and he brought it to his heart. He hadn’t fed recently and its beat was sluggish, but she seemed to relax when she felt it.
“I can’t explain it. There aren’t any poetic allusions I could make that would help, and even among all the legends of Japan and China and Korea and India, such events are incredibly rare. All I can tell you is how I felt, and how I continue to feel.” She began to move her hand in small, soothing circles. “At that time, it wasn’t important. We all had greater concerns, like feeding ourselves through the winter and producing enough to pay taxes. I might not have always felt like I was a man, but I was able to be one. I took a wife and we had two beautiful children, and probably would have had more. And it would have been enough, if I had lived just that one lifetime. It would have been enough. But instead, I lived half a lifetime as a man, and the second half a monster-” Her hand tightened into a fist, bunching the fabric of his robe together, before she let go “-and when I woke from these horrors, I found I was no longer a man. I never really was. It’s just, for a while I was good at pretending.” Her smile was sad, and it didn’t suit her in the least. He couldn’t bear to look at it, so he pulled her into his arms instead and let her cling to him.
“You don’t have to pretend” was all he could thing to say, and though she shook in his arms, her normal smile had returned by the time she let go.
She wiped a single red tear away and laughed. “It is a good thing we vampires are less prone to tears than ordinary humans. Otherwise I fear all my sleeves would be as crimson as the one you once gave me.” She loosened her obi and let her layers of kimono slide just off her shoulders. “I wasn’t comfortable letting you touch me because I didn’t want you to find out before I told you. But I’d happily let you do it now.”
He grinned and began to stroke the creamy skin of her shoulders, slipping her robes further off. It wasn’t the sight of her flat chest but the thin veins and heartbeat he could just barely see that gave him a start, and he knew she understood that. He traced the lines of her neck down over her collarbones and to her heart, then back up, first with his fingers, then with his lips. Her skin began to heat under his touch, flushing a light pink as her blood quickened. He bit down softly, not hard enough to break the skin, just enough to leave a mark, and then drew back. “Ah, my lady, you tempt me sorely. You should know that whatever your body’s state, I fully intend to mark every inch of it with my fangs.” He rocked back on his elbows and allowed a lazy smirk to play across his face as he toyed with the sash that held his robe closed. “But I would be remiss if I did not allow you to do the same.”
If he had thought her smile bright before, it dimmed in comparison to the grin that split her face now. She discarded several layers of clothing, leaving only two partially-transparent under robes around her waist. Kneeling beside him, she untied his sash and bared his skin to the cold night air and the warmth of her touch.
But she didn’t touch him, not at first. She looked at him and she continued to look at him, as if she were drinking in his vision before drinking his blood. “Sho. You say I am beautiful-”
“You are.”
“-and I thank you for it. But to me you are the most beautiful creature on earth.” At last she moved from her position beside him to stand over him - she was so tall, he thought again - and then moved slowly, slowly down on top of him. Her hair spilled over her shoulders and tickled his chest and he couldn’t control the low gasp that slipped from the back of his throat. “It is almost a shame to mark skin so perfect,” she whispered, and he saw her fangs for the first time, a flash of black against the red of her lips. She exhaled, and all the blood in his body rose at once as she kissed him. “Almost.”
Without warning she bit into his lip, fastening on the holes and sucking greedily. So this was how it felt, he thought dizzily, his head clouding over from the weight of her body on top of his and the immense pressure in his blood. Despite the chill of the night and the stone floor beneath him, it was making him feverishly hot, and the two small cuts didn’t alleviate the pressure in the least. He thrashed weakly, half trying to escape her warmth, half trying to press closer, that it might consume him all the quicker. He closed his eyes. The steady pressure of her teeth was awful and yet wonderful, cruel, and yet not as cruel as the softness of her hands caressing his neck and shoulders. He drifted in those soft touches only to be dashed against that bristling wall of teeth again and again until he had to open his eyes or be lost in that bloody tide.
His eyes met hers and he understood why she had spent so long just looking at him, because her eyes were as dark and deep as whirlpools, and greedier. He was only vaguely aware of her lessening the pressure of her teeth and swiping her tongue across his lips once, twice. Now he could see a tiny pinprick of light in the center of her maelstrom eyes, dim and yet brighter than the sun. She held him like that, promising pain and heartbreak and laughter and all the love in the world. When she smiled, she no longer looked like the Buddha but something far more savage and divine, a wild-eyed goddess dispensing mercy and ruin as the mood took her, and right now inclined toward the latter. For a second his blood went to ice and he swallowed convulsively.
He could scarcely breathe as she began to kiss his neck, her lips soft and pliant and all too gentle against the pulsing veins. The breath caught in his throat and he choked back something like a sob as she slid her tongue over his skin and exhaled, long and cold. At last she began testing her teeth against him, lightly at first. The harder she bit, the more fiercely his blood raged, so desperate to escape his body he thought his veins would burst. When at last her fangs broke the skin, the relief he needed hit him, but only for a second. Her teeth filled him, pressing back against the rushing stream. It wasn’t until she dug in deeper and the holes widened that he could feel it begin to spill out of him and into her mouth. He could feel her swallow the first mouthful, and with it he felt the last of her restraint vanish. She had been holding him down, but now she let go in order to get a better angle on his neck. It didn’t matter. His strength had left him and he had no way to regain it. He couldn’t stop her even if he wanted to, needed to, but now that she had finally started in earnest, there was nothing he wanted less.
The heat and pressure began to dissipate the more she drank, and he was no longer reduced to irrepressible gasps and moans. He lay back, letting any tension in his body slip away with his lazily draining blood. He knew he loved her, but this went beyond love and into power and control and ownership and other things he had never ever surrendered to anyone else. It felt good, almost better than being bitten. Even if she lost control and drank him dry, he wouldn’t mind at all. He couldn’t think of a more pleasant way to die.
His heartbeat slowed so much he couldn’t keep his eyes open, and he drifted into unconsciousness, unknowing and uncaring whether he would ever wake again.
When he did, it was to blood dripping into his mouth and then to her frowning face. “Oh Sho, I’m sorry. I thought you’d tell me to stop.”
He licked more blood away, absently noting that the wrist dangling above him didn’t belong to her. “Didn’t want you to,” he mumbled at last, and struggled to sit up. Immediately she was cradling him to her chest, the foreign arm flung aside. He laughed weakly and rubbed against her. “Ichirou. Lovely lady Ichirou. I looove you.” He could feel her skin heating up and it managed to bring him slightly more to his senses. “Sorry, do you not like that name?”
“When you are the one saying it, it brings only pleasure to my ears,” she said, and laughed as he began kissing her neck.
“Then I suppose it will do until we find a more suitable one.” He reached up to kiss the bottom of her jaw.
She eased him slowly back onto the mat, then lay beside him and just smiled at him for a long time. Eventually she said, “You know, I thought about waiting. It would be just like a romance out of a tale. Years and years and years apart, but our bond never weakened, and we were reunited. You thought me a ghost and wept to see me, and all the world wept with you, but ours was no ordinary fate. Though we were bound by love, we were not destroyed by it over those years as so many others are.”
“You court ladies always did spend too much time listening to silly tales,” he teased, and reached out to hold her hand.
“You have been a good influence on me, then,” she murmured, and when she smiled the blood rose hot to his face. “I am glad I didn’t wait.”
He wanted to say so much, but “I am too” was all he managed before they were losing themselves in another long, deep kiss.
“What do you intend to do next?” she asked after he had exhausted himself getting familiarized with all the curves and lines of her body. “Do you think your priest friend will allow us to stay on despite devouring one of his acolytes?” She lifted one of the corpse’s arms and waved it languidly at him.
He didn’t spare the man a glance. “I don’t know. I know not what I will do or where I will go, but it will be with you, and so the details matter little. And Lady Ichirou, we will be happy.”
And they were.
--
So here is the end of this vampire prequel ;u; I hope you enjoyed it! Probably there will be other vampire prequels to come detailing many things such as vampire names and vampire road trips to make new friends and vampire prequels that aren't Shos and Yous! But this is definitely one of the first ones in continuity so it's good that it is out of the way :)))
NOW for probably long and excessive notes about this particular one. First of all if you think these vampires are acting excessively dramatic and romanchikku and stuff you are right! It is the vampire honeymoon stage ;o Eventually they will get a sense of perspective and settle down into the still romanchikku but less frivolous dudes we all know and love -u- But that will come later.
Another thing is, Sho-chan's blog just now reminded me of this, but back in the past they didn't really have the concept of "love" as we think of it. Their "love" was almost always a very tragic thing that forced people away from embracing enlightenment and shackled them to this awful existence on earth (or worse D:). Even around the start of the 20th century, it still wasn't really a thing. (One of the stories Sho-chan told was the one about the famous novelist and translator Natsume Soseki translating "I love you" as "The moon is beautiful, isn't it?") So I guess they might not be too into the whole happy relationship thing at first and make a bunch of impassioned declarations of tragedy wrt lovey-dovey feelings but I think they'll probably get over it pretty quickly and then only do it for funsies.
This is probably only the second multi-chapter fanfiction I have ever managed to finish in my life ;;;; The chapters average out to a bit over 3000 words each :D But 1 and 5 were actually both in the 2700s and 4 was way too long, hahaha. Finishing things sets a good precedent, let's do it more often :) Never give up!
I guess that is probably about it! Thank you for reading this story all the way through! I would super appreciate it if you left a comment telling me what you thought of it ♥
Pairing: Jinnai Sho/Omi Youichirou
Rating/Warnings: PG, RPS, vampire romance, MURDER D||
Genre: Heian Court Vampire AU. sobs.
Word Count: 2788
Summary: A simple love affair between a princess and a mid-ranking courtier grows increasingly complicated.
Notes: The last chapter!!! I hope you enjoy it ;u;
--
Chapter 5: The Ink of a Thousand Unwritten Letters
At first he could not believe his eyes, nor could he bring himself to touch her, lest she be an illusion. He got to his feet, but could do no more. She solved his problem by taking a few steps closer, drawing him close, and kissing him. He clung to her, so overwhelmed by her presence that everything was the softness of her silks, the warmth of her body, her hands holding him close, and her lips, her mouth, her tongue. “What are you doing here?” he breathed into her skin, but he didn’t need an answer, and she didn’t give him one for several more minutes.
“I couldn’t leave matters between us unfinished,” she said at last, and dropped to the reed mat that was the room’s only furnishing. He squatted beside her, unsure whether he would be allowed to come any closer. She drew in a deep breath and let it out with a sigh. Her eyes focused sharply on his, as if she was seeing him for the first time, and as if she was seeing something so horrible and yet fascinating that she couldn’t look away.
“There are two secrets I have kept from you,” she said, “and I cannot imagine how you will react to learning either of them, but I also cannot keep them from you any longer. I… don’t want to keep them from you.”
“First… I don’t know that the thought has ever crossed your mind, but there was a reason I was able to recover so quickly, despite how much you drank from me that first night. There was a reason I wasn’t already waiting outside your door in response to the letter you sent. There was a reason I wept when you spoke to me of forever.” She paused, searching his face as he tried to comprehend that what he hadn’t been able to hope for was true. “I too am a vampire.”
He reached for her, and she allowed him to slip his thumb into her mouth and feel the fangs that he hadn’t been able to see for the blacking, hadn’t felt for the force with which she had always kissed him. “You’re a vampire,” he said in wonder, his face resolving into a grin. “You’re a vampire,” he repeated, “and you promised to love me forever. I promised to love you forever.”
“You did not know what you were promising,” she murmured, avoiding his eyes.
“Honestly? Right now forever almost doesn’t seem long enough.” He cupped her chin in his hand and leaned forward to kiss her. This time she didn’t force himself upon him, though she was still very much an active participant, and oh, what a difference it made! What he had intended to be a quick kiss of reassurance became more, and only ended when he attempted to undo the front of her robe.
She pushed his hands away. “I still have one secret. A bigger one. Otherwise I would have told you right away that I was a vampire, that we might dispense of the unnecessary trappings of rank and nobility. But with such mutual understandings, new questions arise. I could see it in your eyes from the moment you realized. Growing behind the initial wave of surprise and elation, curiosity about how I came to be here, how I was made a vampire, who I had been. And that I was not ready to tell you.”
“But you are now.”
“I…” She stood abruptly and paced the short length of the room until she had calmed enough to settle beside him again, if a little further away. “May I ask you a question? The given name you use is Masakatsu. What was your original name, when you were still human?”
The long-unused name came easily to his lips. “Sho. It was Sho. It was a common name, for a common servant, and it was never written down, but it was my name. After I was changed, after I learned to read and write, I chose a character to write it with, and I’ve used it in each of my names since.” He traced the character lightly on the back of her hand.
“Sho. Is that what I may call you?” Her tone was strangely formal, as if they were being introduced all over again - and perhaps they were.
“Please. Nothing would give my heart greater joy than the sound of my true name coming from your lips.”
“Sho,” she said again, and he could feel his blood heating up. “I wish I could tell you the same thing, and yet the name I was given does not give me the same pleasure.
“The name I take now comes from the Chinese reading of the province in which I was born, Omi. You claim a humble origin, but in my mortal life I was nothing more than a farmer, the sort the people of the court see as less than human and undeserving even of a name.” He tried to say something in protest, but she pressed a finger to his lips. “I had a name. My name was Ichirou.” She left her finger on his mouth a moment longer before letting it fall back into her lap.
They sat in silence as he thought this over. At last, he ventured, “So, when you were still human, were you a man?”
“Essentially, yes.” She sighed and rubbed at her brow. “And though I am now a vampire, my body remains that of a man.”
“But you are a woman.” He held his hand out, unsure whether or not she wanted to touch him. After a moment’s hesitation, she put her hand in his and he brought it to his heart. He hadn’t fed recently and its beat was sluggish, but she seemed to relax when she felt it.
“I can’t explain it. There aren’t any poetic allusions I could make that would help, and even among all the legends of Japan and China and Korea and India, such events are incredibly rare. All I can tell you is how I felt, and how I continue to feel.” She began to move her hand in small, soothing circles. “At that time, it wasn’t important. We all had greater concerns, like feeding ourselves through the winter and producing enough to pay taxes. I might not have always felt like I was a man, but I was able to be one. I took a wife and we had two beautiful children, and probably would have had more. And it would have been enough, if I had lived just that one lifetime. It would have been enough. But instead, I lived half a lifetime as a man, and the second half a monster-” Her hand tightened into a fist, bunching the fabric of his robe together, before she let go “-and when I woke from these horrors, I found I was no longer a man. I never really was. It’s just, for a while I was good at pretending.” Her smile was sad, and it didn’t suit her in the least. He couldn’t bear to look at it, so he pulled her into his arms instead and let her cling to him.
“You don’t have to pretend” was all he could thing to say, and though she shook in his arms, her normal smile had returned by the time she let go.
She wiped a single red tear away and laughed. “It is a good thing we vampires are less prone to tears than ordinary humans. Otherwise I fear all my sleeves would be as crimson as the one you once gave me.” She loosened her obi and let her layers of kimono slide just off her shoulders. “I wasn’t comfortable letting you touch me because I didn’t want you to find out before I told you. But I’d happily let you do it now.”
He grinned and began to stroke the creamy skin of her shoulders, slipping her robes further off. It wasn’t the sight of her flat chest but the thin veins and heartbeat he could just barely see that gave him a start, and he knew she understood that. He traced the lines of her neck down over her collarbones and to her heart, then back up, first with his fingers, then with his lips. Her skin began to heat under his touch, flushing a light pink as her blood quickened. He bit down softly, not hard enough to break the skin, just enough to leave a mark, and then drew back. “Ah, my lady, you tempt me sorely. You should know that whatever your body’s state, I fully intend to mark every inch of it with my fangs.” He rocked back on his elbows and allowed a lazy smirk to play across his face as he toyed with the sash that held his robe closed. “But I would be remiss if I did not allow you to do the same.”
If he had thought her smile bright before, it dimmed in comparison to the grin that split her face now. She discarded several layers of clothing, leaving only two partially-transparent under robes around her waist. Kneeling beside him, she untied his sash and bared his skin to the cold night air and the warmth of her touch.
But she didn’t touch him, not at first. She looked at him and she continued to look at him, as if she were drinking in his vision before drinking his blood. “Sho. You say I am beautiful-”
“You are.”
“-and I thank you for it. But to me you are the most beautiful creature on earth.” At last she moved from her position beside him to stand over him - she was so tall, he thought again - and then moved slowly, slowly down on top of him. Her hair spilled over her shoulders and tickled his chest and he couldn’t control the low gasp that slipped from the back of his throat. “It is almost a shame to mark skin so perfect,” she whispered, and he saw her fangs for the first time, a flash of black against the red of her lips. She exhaled, and all the blood in his body rose at once as she kissed him. “Almost.”
Without warning she bit into his lip, fastening on the holes and sucking greedily. So this was how it felt, he thought dizzily, his head clouding over from the weight of her body on top of his and the immense pressure in his blood. Despite the chill of the night and the stone floor beneath him, it was making him feverishly hot, and the two small cuts didn’t alleviate the pressure in the least. He thrashed weakly, half trying to escape her warmth, half trying to press closer, that it might consume him all the quicker. He closed his eyes. The steady pressure of her teeth was awful and yet wonderful, cruel, and yet not as cruel as the softness of her hands caressing his neck and shoulders. He drifted in those soft touches only to be dashed against that bristling wall of teeth again and again until he had to open his eyes or be lost in that bloody tide.
His eyes met hers and he understood why she had spent so long just looking at him, because her eyes were as dark and deep as whirlpools, and greedier. He was only vaguely aware of her lessening the pressure of her teeth and swiping her tongue across his lips once, twice. Now he could see a tiny pinprick of light in the center of her maelstrom eyes, dim and yet brighter than the sun. She held him like that, promising pain and heartbreak and laughter and all the love in the world. When she smiled, she no longer looked like the Buddha but something far more savage and divine, a wild-eyed goddess dispensing mercy and ruin as the mood took her, and right now inclined toward the latter. For a second his blood went to ice and he swallowed convulsively.
He could scarcely breathe as she began to kiss his neck, her lips soft and pliant and all too gentle against the pulsing veins. The breath caught in his throat and he choked back something like a sob as she slid her tongue over his skin and exhaled, long and cold. At last she began testing her teeth against him, lightly at first. The harder she bit, the more fiercely his blood raged, so desperate to escape his body he thought his veins would burst. When at last her fangs broke the skin, the relief he needed hit him, but only for a second. Her teeth filled him, pressing back against the rushing stream. It wasn’t until she dug in deeper and the holes widened that he could feel it begin to spill out of him and into her mouth. He could feel her swallow the first mouthful, and with it he felt the last of her restraint vanish. She had been holding him down, but now she let go in order to get a better angle on his neck. It didn’t matter. His strength had left him and he had no way to regain it. He couldn’t stop her even if he wanted to, needed to, but now that she had finally started in earnest, there was nothing he wanted less.
The heat and pressure began to dissipate the more she drank, and he was no longer reduced to irrepressible gasps and moans. He lay back, letting any tension in his body slip away with his lazily draining blood. He knew he loved her, but this went beyond love and into power and control and ownership and other things he had never ever surrendered to anyone else. It felt good, almost better than being bitten. Even if she lost control and drank him dry, he wouldn’t mind at all. He couldn’t think of a more pleasant way to die.
His heartbeat slowed so much he couldn’t keep his eyes open, and he drifted into unconsciousness, unknowing and uncaring whether he would ever wake again.
When he did, it was to blood dripping into his mouth and then to her frowning face. “Oh Sho, I’m sorry. I thought you’d tell me to stop.”
He licked more blood away, absently noting that the wrist dangling above him didn’t belong to her. “Didn’t want you to,” he mumbled at last, and struggled to sit up. Immediately she was cradling him to her chest, the foreign arm flung aside. He laughed weakly and rubbed against her. “Ichirou. Lovely lady Ichirou. I looove you.” He could feel her skin heating up and it managed to bring him slightly more to his senses. “Sorry, do you not like that name?”
“When you are the one saying it, it brings only pleasure to my ears,” she said, and laughed as he began kissing her neck.
“Then I suppose it will do until we find a more suitable one.” He reached up to kiss the bottom of her jaw.
She eased him slowly back onto the mat, then lay beside him and just smiled at him for a long time. Eventually she said, “You know, I thought about waiting. It would be just like a romance out of a tale. Years and years and years apart, but our bond never weakened, and we were reunited. You thought me a ghost and wept to see me, and all the world wept with you, but ours was no ordinary fate. Though we were bound by love, we were not destroyed by it over those years as so many others are.”
“You court ladies always did spend too much time listening to silly tales,” he teased, and reached out to hold her hand.
“You have been a good influence on me, then,” she murmured, and when she smiled the blood rose hot to his face. “I am glad I didn’t wait.”
He wanted to say so much, but “I am too” was all he managed before they were losing themselves in another long, deep kiss.
“What do you intend to do next?” she asked after he had exhausted himself getting familiarized with all the curves and lines of her body. “Do you think your priest friend will allow us to stay on despite devouring one of his acolytes?” She lifted one of the corpse’s arms and waved it languidly at him.
He didn’t spare the man a glance. “I don’t know. I know not what I will do or where I will go, but it will be with you, and so the details matter little. And Lady Ichirou, we will be happy.”
And they were.
--
So here is the end of this vampire prequel ;u; I hope you enjoyed it! Probably there will be other vampire prequels to come detailing many things such as vampire names and vampire road trips to make new friends and vampire prequels that aren't Shos and Yous! But this is definitely one of the first ones in continuity so it's good that it is out of the way :)))
NOW for probably long and excessive notes about this particular one. First of all if you think these vampires are acting excessively dramatic and romanchikku and stuff you are right! It is the vampire honeymoon stage ;o Eventually they will get a sense of perspective and settle down into the still romanchikku but less frivolous dudes we all know and love -u- But that will come later.
Another thing is, Sho-chan's blog just now reminded me of this, but back in the past they didn't really have the concept of "love" as we think of it. Their "love" was almost always a very tragic thing that forced people away from embracing enlightenment and shackled them to this awful existence on earth (or worse D:). Even around the start of the 20th century, it still wasn't really a thing. (One of the stories Sho-chan told was the one about the famous novelist and translator Natsume Soseki translating "I love you" as "The moon is beautiful, isn't it?") So I guess they might not be too into the whole happy relationship thing at first and make a bunch of impassioned declarations of tragedy wrt lovey-dovey feelings but I think they'll probably get over it pretty quickly and then only do it for funsies.
This is probably only the second multi-chapter fanfiction I have ever managed to finish in my life ;;;; The chapters average out to a bit over 3000 words each :D But 1 and 5 were actually both in the 2700s and 4 was way too long, hahaha. Finishing things sets a good precedent, let's do it more often :) Never give up!
I guess that is probably about it! Thank you for reading this story all the way through! I would super appreciate it if you left a comment telling me what you thought of it ♥