Bloodlove - Pt 2
title: Bloodlove
part: ii - the blur (leading up to...)
fandom: Ouran
pairing: KyouHaru
rating: T
a/n: Part two is finished! The angst continues! Part three will be up... as soon as I finish up my April flashfic for Bleach. Enjoy and comment. :]
Kyouya will excel at whatever he chooses to do.
It is not a promise.
It is not a hyperbole.
It is not something printed purely for dramatic effect.
It is a fact.
He may be a businessman, but he has been well-trained in the sciences over the years; and so with the rest of his wealth he finds himself an oddity: he returns to the university. And he studies some more.
He disappears.
He leaves an address, actually, for wherever residence he is at. But his father, disgraced at his son’s desertion of family morals, business, and materialism, is not pleased and does not try to find him. His sister is not informed of his location.
And when the university has nothing left to teach him, and he’s grown bored and antsy (he’s a clever one, and short on patience) he goes on to speak with top scholars.
Low on money, he refuses to sell the old house. He is twenty-five and flat-out broke, penniless but for a beautiful, deserted estate. He is still a perfect gentleman with a nose that is finely upturned, no matter how sorely he misses the sound of coins jingling in his pockets, or the tick of his golden pocket watch. He does not sell the estate.
===
He is twenty-seven. He is becoming confident in his scientific ability. Very confident, actually. Smug, almost, comfortable. He expands his scientific studies into the paranormal.
He receives a letter from his family’s attorney. His father has died - young - of cardiac arrest. His eldest brother will be inheriting most of it. There is also a large sum for Kyouya. He was not disowned after all! Will he come to claim it?
Kyouya sits down, fills up his ink-well pen, and for the first time he replies:
Yes, thank you.
But he will not be able to claim it, and will they please place it into a bank account?
And, as an afterthought:
How is his sister doing?
(Kyouya has so very little patience when it comes to being poor. Being poor is for people far less gifted than he.)
===
The family lawyer agrees; Kyouya arranges to get his hands on the money. It is more than he had thought. The feel of notes in his hands is more fulfilling than he had imagined. At this point, only vengeance and his dead wife’s touch could feel better.
The lawyer includes one sentence about Fuyumi. It says: Your sister is well, with a new child on the way. There is no more and no less. Kyouya reminds himself that he is talking to a lawyer, another business man. It is no more and no less than he expected, and yet he reads the sentence so many times that is burned into his memory.
He buys himself an apartment in an Austrian city, where he will be one of many. It is small, because he knows, deep down, that he will not be living there for very long.
He is twenty-eight. He decides: he has sufficient funds, he has sufficient knowledge. The time now is the time. He has dissected, he has examined, he has studied, he has interviewed the experts - and now is the time.
===
There is blood in it. A lot of blood. A lot of mixes. Very specific ones. That of fresher human corpses, and that of a South American bat. That of living humans. (Humans who were… not right. Who looked too much like his dead wife for his tastes, but who had a different, freakish glint to their eyes and teeth.)
He feels his heart slow at the idea of having this in his bloodstream, at the repercussions.
He brings the thought of his wife to the forefront of his mind, and slides the needle into his arm.
It hurts, but he is too precise to cry out.
===
The next day, when he wakes up, he feels something funny as he breathes, as he cleans his teeth, as he eats his breakfast. It’s a very strange feeling, almost heavy.
He feels for his pulse.
It isn’t there.
He waits, for a long minute, for ten minutes.
Finally, he feels one beat.
He is not sure if his heart stopped beating after that, or if it continues to beat very slowly. Though he is part scientist, he has never wanted to know.
===
Other than that, it’s very gradual.
Very, very much so. It takes years for him to see it. And that’s when he sees it.
He should be thirty-five -should have spotted a gray hair, have worse eyesight, simply looked different.
But he does not look or feel older than twenty-eight.
He also notices that his teeth are a little sharper.
==
“I think it would be very suited to your tastes, sir.”
Kyouya smiles, a devil’s smile, a small, charming, evil smile. His smile.
“And what do you think my tastes are, Mr.Barry?”
The real-estate dealer looks at Kyouya warily. “You want the truth?”
Kyouya shrugs. Elegant as always. The little smile remains. He is also calculated. Amused.
“You’re a wealthy bachelor, with a sensible, smart dressing style. But too quiet to want company, much less that of a woman.”
Kyouya’s smiles. Innocently, almost. His teeth, the dealer notices nervously, are pointed (a bit), and he wonders if he might just be dealing with the devil.
“Yes, on that point you’re right. I don’t want the company of any women. I want a quiet life alone. I actually own a manor in Hungary, although it must be in ruins by this point.”
The dealer comes closer, intrigued. “Forgive me sir, but I do international business. If you need someone to -“
“No, no, that won’t be necessary.” His clipped tone warns the dealer not to come closer.
The dealer is enough of a business man to know when ‘no’ means ‘no’. He changes the topic.
“You can move in next week if you want it. It’s in shape to function already.”
“Do you have a contract with you?”
The dealer blinks.
“I would like to see the contract, please.”
The dealer hastily pulls it out of his briefcase.
Kyouya reads it over carefully. He stands there for ten minutes, reading it. The dealer begins to feel even more nervous.
“I’ll take it.”
He signs.
“You - you don’t want a lawyer or-?”
Kyouya opens his own briefcase. Stacks and stacks of pounds flash before the dealer. He gapes. Kyouya hands him the briefcase.
The dealer counts it up, greedily, hungrily, disbelievingly. Kyouya watches him with distaste.
“Excuse me, but I need you out of my house. Now.”
The dealer leaves with a quick, Thank you for you business, Mr. Ohtori, and he does not come back.
Kyouya looks out the window. He stands in his empty apartment.
Do I really look that young? he thinks, both wryly and with disgust.
I do, he answers himself. It’s been years.
In his homeland, in his village, he is certain, the rumors will still run wild. But there is nothing they can legally do now to any poor woman dying of consumption. They cannot make her poor husband drink the ashes of her heart.
Truthfully, Kyouya is about a hundred and seventy years old.
He still looks twenty-eight, but his wife is dead; his sister, his brother, his mother, cousins, and friends, all of those townspeople: all dead. They have been buried in the ground, and he can hardly imagine his gentle, fumbling, pretty sister - nearly his age - rotting away in her tomb.
But then, he could not imagine his beautiful, precious wife that way, either.
===
(It was natural, you know. Her decomposition, that is. A hundred and seventy years of study had taught him long, long ago that science offered a warm, welcome explanation to his wife’s unusual post-death condition.)
===
He moves, and he moves fairly often.
It is not as though he has any neighbors who take particular notice of his appearance, but nonetheless, it is only logical that one must move.
He stays in Britain, for the most part. At least, he stays away Eastern Europe for another hundred years or so, until the word ‘vampire’ is something that children fling around for a cheap fright. They don’t taste the word’s muck when they say it. Because they have never seen or tasted what he has.
Years past, hard economic times pass; all the while, Kyouya (or whatever name he plays by, at that time) grows richer and richer. He has always been clever, he has always been discreet. He succeeds in stock, just as he has succeeded in science and business. He has always been tricky, and so he is able to keep up the barrage of new identities without anyone the wiser.
His game would amuse him sometimes, if he weren’t so bored.
And lonely.
It has never occurred to him that he could reunite with her in death, because if it had he might have tipped over the brink and finally stick a crucifix into his own heart.
(Then again, he might be headed to hell at this point.)
==
Many, many years pass.
They are all the same.
Except he has realized something: he craves blood, and he can only be satiated by that of humans.
So for those many, many years he will find a new one. It gets worse and worse, until it’s necessary to find new prey every six months. At the very most.
It’s not like he can just ignore the craving. It is hungry and all-consuming. If he ignores it, it will swallow him up, and he is sure (based on his hypotheses) that he will either age rapidly and die, or go crazy and turn into something worse than a monster.
But those are no problems, because it’s very easy, really. It’s always a girl. Kyouya finds them the easiest to lure into the dark. Of charms, looks, and money, Kyouya is not lacking. These three traits are enough to get pretty, rosy-cheeked girls (they taste the best) into his bedroom, and from there it’s very easy to take what he needs.
It is sad, really, how some of the girls shallowly follow him into the dark, giggling coquettishly at whatever might pass his lips. They annoy him, but at that point he can practically taste their steely-sweet blood, and is loathe to stop before he gets his fix.
It is even sadder when the girls are shy and honest, when they blush and are genuinely swept away by his words and smirks.
He always keeps them on the verge of death, allowing them to live if they are strong enough. But it takes more and more blood to drink his fill, and it becomes harder and harder to restrain. There is no way that he could have a steady source, and so he roams, finding a new source (girl) every few months.
Sadistically, he finds more and more pleasuring in trapping innocent and more innocent girls.
Right down the ones he aids in scholarship.