Bloodlove - Pt 1
title: Bloodlove
part: i - in those days (prologue)
fandom: Ouran
pairing: KyouHaru
rating: T
a/n: I am way too elaborate on the KyouHaru requests. @_@ About half of the 'Vampire Kyouya' prompt is finished, but I'm posting it in three parts to start with. When I post it to fanfiction.net I'll probably combine it into just a plain 'ol oneshot. ^^ Anyway, this is TERRIBLY AU. You've been warned. oO
I. In those days (prologue)
He would never forget the way she looked, although at that point it was hardly even really her anymore.
He was expecting some decomposition - that was reasonable, that was practical, that was normal. That was going to make him queasy, but when they forced him to open her tomb, it was the best thing he could hope for.
He didn’t quite expect to see her small, small, delicate body the way it was now. He didn’t expect to see her smooth, pale skin like this.
(He didn’t expect to the most beautiful, precious thing in his world, the woman he loved…)
He didn’t expect to see half-dried blood gushed out of her nose, smeared around her mouth. His blood was pumping. His heart was beating madly.
(… he didn’t expect her like this…)
He saw that her face was red and flushed, morbidly drunk. A tick. Gorged on blood. That was what she looked like. Nothing like she had been in life. She was undead, a demon, no longer even human. His wife. A monster. Logic said no, that such a thing couldn’t be, his heart said no, that his wife could never be…
And yet, an exhausting emotion grabbed at him and shook him till his heart shook, too, in his chest.
(She had bled in life. Consumption. He remembered it all too well. She had always been pale, small, but never so fragile as in those last months. She had coughed up blood, right into her delicate, lacy handkerchief embroidered with his family’s seal. She would make a face with annoyance. But, ‘I’m not sick,’ she would assure in him in a lie.
Consumption, they’d said.
The village had insisted different.)
They burned her heart, after that.
They made him drink the ashes mixed with water, and the only thing he could be grateful for was that he had not been forced to cut out it out himself.
===
He thinks the ashes turned his heart black, after that.
And, funniest of all, he had a strange, hollow desire to fix it.
He had been a wealthy business man, despite being a third son. He had been a lover for a year, and then, for only three months, he had been a husband, as well.
In the first month of their marriage, a brother, his second-eldest, and a doctor, had come for holiday out in the country, in order to breathe the country air. He had always been frail, the second-youngest, and had been naïve enough to say, I want to save people when choosing his career.
Kyouya’s career, on the other hand, was highly successful. He had to travel to work (business), quite a distance, to get to the city. He went every week, spent (he saw in retrospect) too little time with her, but at the time he thought it was worth it. She liked the countryside, even though she didn’t say it, and Kyouya had hopelessly hoped that the air would do her good.
This brother’s presence not only irritated Kyouya - who was not fond of his siblings, save for his gentle, fumbling, pretty sister - but it also created great inconvenience.
Because his doctor, his idiotic, damned brother, the so-called doctor, caught her consumption.
And died.
(Kyouya mourned, oh, yes, of course he did, and he cried. He realized that he had loved his stupid brother more than he had thought. He grieved, yes, but this was before he knew that this death would cost him what he held most valuable.)
And another villager, and another, and soon they were dropping like flies, all hacking up blood before burning up with fever. And she, she, was somehow still alive and was looking paler and gaunter, and the shadows under her eyes darkened, shadows that grow longer and sharper in the dusk.
“I’m dying,” she said, matter-of-factly one day.
He smiled at her, wanly. The look in his eyes was more hardened than a smile should belie.
“So you’ve finally stopped denying it.”
“I was never really… denying it. I just thought maybe it would go away.”
For the rest of the day, she wouldn’t talk to him. But not so much out of anger as out of inner-turmoil, the futile fight to reconcile one’s life one’s self.
She was only nineteen.
===
“You should probably leave town.”
She was wringing her handkerchief in her hands and had refused the food and drink he had offered her. His gentle, fumbling, pretty sister. She was well-dressed as always, out-of-place in this little rural area, almost as out of place as his home. She could have been another doll at a tea party, but the life in her eyes gave her away.
He stared her down. Her gentle eyes did not waver.
“What do you mean by that?”
It was not in his usual roundabout way, although he supposed he knew the answer.
“The town’s people are suspicious, angry. She was one of them, they had all accepted-“
“Don’t say her name.”
She picked up on her brother’s terse tone, fidgeted, and then continued.
“- and then they would have had her killed, if she had not died herself. And still, the people, they were dying from that disease, it was spreading like wildfire - she may not even have been the first one to have it, you know, it could have been that family, you know, the ones with all the children who are always-“
“Fuyumi. It doesn’t matter anymore. She’s dead. All right, they hate me.” He stood. “I suppose I’ll leave the village, then.” And she can hear the bitterness in his voice. “And what will I do with this house, then?”
“Sell it?”
He laughed, and she flinched under her bonnet.
“There’s no one who would buy a house when it’s so far from the village square. There’s no one who would buy such an expensive house in such an unsophisticated village. A village loses its quaint charm when it’s being near-decimated by disease.”
She looked at him sadly.
“It wouldn’t sell for anything,” he says shortly, suddenly losing his taste for the bitter, “but I’ll leave it. For somewhere else.”
It was practical, it was fact, it is him, after all.
But for that same reason the truth went unspoken: it smelled of her, it was built for her, it was a part of her and them that he can hold.
She smiles. “Stay safe, Kyouya.”
He hugged his sister goodbye, she climbed into the carriage and, in her tea-doll dress, waving to him until she’s out of view, she goes back to the city to be a good socialite wife.
It’s the last time he ever saw her.
He genuinely hopes that her life was better than his is.
(end pt 1)