Fic: The Palace Cracked, Vampire Knight
Title: The Palace Cracked
Fandom: Vampire Knight
Characters/Pairings: Juuri/Haruka, Yuuki/Kaname
Word Count: 3,200
Umm. Well, both pairings are canon, consummated incest, so do I even need to warn for it? Well, regardless, consider yourself warned. Also, spoilers up through chapter 50 (awww, Zero rescues kittens from trees), though mostly it pertains to the extra that came with chapter 48.
i'm not a saint
Everybody says that something's changed, after Juuri comes back to the Kuran estate with a diploma from a human high school. They can't really fathom why she did it, just that it was cute in a "I'll never understand the young kids these days" kind of way, and wasn't it a good thing her brother went with her to keep her out of trouble?
The elder Kuran chuckles deep in his throat and says, "All according to plan."
you
Her skin is slippery and cool to the touch, and the thin layers of her clothes stick together like wet leaves, and peeling them off is like peeling apart sodden newspaper, the words swirling and dissoluted. The door clicks shut behind them, and the sound of the rain outside fades to a whisper.
He bumps her hip into the side table, and she murmurs, "careful, you jerk," as the vase wobbles uncertainly.
He holds the umbrella out to the side, shaking it so that droplets of water fly everywhere, catching on the walls and in the cracks on the hard wood floor. Then, with a great clatter, he lets it fall, putting his hands to the curve of her waist, rubbing through the fabric of her undershirt to find the chilled flesh beneath.
She stretches up onto her tiptoes for him, so one hand slips down to her thigh, hefting it up onto his hip so his fingers could trace across the tender skin at the back of her knee, down her calf. "How was school today, big sister?" he breathes into her hair, and she pulls back to punch his shoulder.
"I should ask you the same thing," she replies tartly, putting both feet back on the ground and smoothing down her uniform skirt. "What do you do all day, anyway, while I'm at school? And please don't tell me you follow me, because all my friends think you're creepy enough already."
He watches her as she picks up her sweater where it fell in the entryway, takes a hangar from the coat closet and hangs it somewhere to dry. He is leaving a small puddle on the wood floors, he knows, but he can't help but smile as she puts her school bag on the table, checks the phone for messages from their grandfather on an answering machine that is years before its time, tucks a lock of hair behind her ear. She frowns as the elder Kuran's low voice mentions nothing about Rido's well-being, as it's done for the past four messages.
"I do a lot of thinking, mostly," he says, after a pause so long she startles like she's forgotten she even asked him anything. "I've never been this far from home for this long before. It's nice to be away from ... everything," he shrugs.
She studies him. "Grandfather, you mean."
"Do you think he planned this?" he sheds his coat; it makes a wet, sloppy noise as he tosses it over the back of the nearest chair, and she scowls at him. "When you rented this apartment and announced your intention to go to a human school? When he made me go with you? Do you think he intended it?"
"I know he did," she replies, turning her body towards him, her hands at her hair again. "What's your conclusion?"
Her eyes are large and sympathetic, and Haruka doesn't look away. "That even if Grandfather planned for this to happen, for us to happen, there's still nowhere else I'd rather be."
Her whole expression melts, the way it does when he says things like that, so he adds, "No one else I'd rather be with."
She sniffs. "I should hope not," she says primly, though her smile is still watery at the corners. "The only other available pureblood vampire is Shizuka Hiou and she's more vapid than a gnat."
He keeps looking at her, his hair dripping little rivulets of rainwater down the sides of his face, and after a moment, she opens her arms and says very soflty, "Come here."
He does, letting her twine her arms around his neck and pull him against her body. She makes a soft noise in her throat when he lifts her up so that she wraps her legs around his waist, ankles locking in the small of his back. "Hi," he says against her lips, pushing away from the chair. It tips sideways from the force and from the weight of his heavy coat, and they stagger for a moment.
"Jerk," she snaps, and he presses her back against the wall. Her mouth is the only part of her that's warm, and he kisses it for one long moment before he tilts his head down, pressing his nose into the pulse at her neck.
"Is what they say true?" he wonders, in a voice no louder than the hiss of the rain falling outside. "That only the blood of the one you love above all others will satisfy you?"
"Haruka," she breathes, and there is nothing, nothing, in the world like hearing his sister say his name like that.
She tugs open the collar of his shirt.
look
Everyone says that something's different, and in the vampire world, there's no such thing as keeping secrets, no matter how hard everybody tries to pretend. In public, Haruka Kuran puts his hand in the small of his elder sister's back, guiding her through the throng of people, and while they wait for their car to come and get them, she leans her shoulder into his. It's a foregone conclusion, people say with sagely nods, and Shizuka Hiou sniffs haughtily, keeping her best insulted mask, but the Level D vampire at her side looks relieved, and remember what they say about secrets.
"It wasn't supposed to happen like this," hisses Rido, and throws a picture of the three of them against the mantle above the fireplace. The sprinkle of glass hitting the hearth sounds like raindrops falling.
great
Juuri doesn't know it yet, but she only has five years left to live. She might have seen it coming, perhaps -- the warning signs have been there since the very beginning, and she and Haruka have a plan, but at the moment, she isn't thinking about how she's going to die, about how the floors of her ancestral home will never really be scrubbed clean of her blood, nor about how her daughter is going to stumble out into the cold and the snow and not wake from her nightmare for ten years.
Right now, she's thinking that maybe she has the heat set in the cellar room a little too high, that the stitch she just made in a new dress is too wide and she should redo it before it ruins the rest of the stitches down the line, and that even though she shouldn't, she's really not worried that Kaname is tucked up on the loveseat beside her, watching unblinkingly as she rocks the cradle with her foot, watches Yuuki sleepily rub at her face with tiny infant hands.
She's not quite sure what she thinks of Kaname yet -- who he is or what he wants, whether or not he's a pawn of Rido's, a timebomb ticking slowly at their hearth. She hopes like she has never hoped for anything before that he's not, that he's not some abomination of their brother's sent to them wearing the beloved face of their firstborn child. Kaname, who is all Haruka; the gentle shape of his eyes, the careless fall of his hair, his steady, serious silence.
"You've been studying her for a while now, Kaname," she ventures after a moment. "What do you think of her?"
He gives the question its due consideration. "She's very small," he decides on. "I could lose her, or leave her somewhere, or hurt her. Very easily."
Juuri looks at her daughter, who's no longer stirring but fast asleep, her hair a dark down halo around her skull. "That's true," she says. "Which is why you must be very careful and protect her all the time, Kaname, until she's old enough to do it on her own." She sets her stitching down, removing her thimble so she can ruffle her fingers through his hair affectionately. "Do you understand?"
He nods, and opens his mouth to reply, but at that moment, the key scrapes in the lock and Haruka steps in.
The stench of blood hits her immediately. She leaps to her feet, her sewing project tumbling from her lap and its pieces scattering out of their careful alignment, but she kicks it aside in her haste to get to her brother's side. "You're hurt!" she cries. She notes quickly that he's favoring his left arm, hidden underneath his coat. "What happened?"
"I met some hunters," Haruka tells her grimly, as Kaname watches on with avid interest. "Some friends of yours, actually. Do you know a Kaien Cross?"
Juuri is suddenly thankful for her long, curly brown hair, because it hides the blush that springs to her cheeks at the mention of the name. She slips the coat off his shoulders, turning him around so she can inspect the wound. It's not deep; three slashes running across his arm, like he'd flung it in front of his face to defend himself. It has the markings of a tainted cut, the kind you get for picking fights with vampire hunters. "Did he do this to you?"
"No, his friends did, but when I told them who I was, he got them to back off. Said they were only letting me go because of you."
His eyes track her every movement as she unbuttons his shirt, slipping it off of him. It was ruined, of course, but that tends to happen in vampire families. She still isn't quite sure why everyone she knows is so fond of silk -- one drop of blood and the outfit was worthless after that.
He waits for her to finish the story and explain it. She's never kept anything from him before.
"Kaien Cross is just a hunter who fancies himself infatuated with me," she tells him matter-of-factly. "He's the best hunter the association has, I hear, and what human is more likely to fall in love with one of us than someone who's dedicated their lives to understanding us? He knows I would have been incredibly upset if they killed you."
Haruka blinks. "Do you ... know him well?"
"Well enough. He sends me letters, keeps me informed of what's going on in the human world. He's got an eye out for Rido too, brother. He knows we won't rest safe until he's found, and he's talking about building a safe house. A sanctuary of sorts." Seeing the question in his eyes, she smiles, resting her forehead against his. "Don't worry. He doesn't know about Yuuki."
"I trust you," he says simply, and she smiles as he lifts her head to kiss her, his lips as gentle and familiar as a lullaby. He then turns to Kaname, who's still a small huddle on the loveseat. "And I trust you, too. There is no one in the world I trust more with Yuuki's safety than those in this room right now."
Yes, thinks Juuri, watching as a shy, pleased smile makes its way to Kaname's face. Somehow, and I'm not sure when it happened, but somehow, that little baby girl because the most important out of all of us. She's our future.
in
Nobody is sure what to make of the disaster that happens at Cross Academy come winter, or the termination of the human-vampire peace agreement. Nobody is quite comfortable with the role Kaname Kuran seems to have, right in the thick of things, and even in polite society, that's a bit of an understatement. Even more shocking is that Kaname's quest to gather the vampires in again -- uniting all levels as no one has ever done before, purebloods standing side-by-side with the Level D -- is spearheaded by Yuuki Kuran, his long-lost sister, his wife-to-be. The two of them are piecing the blood world back together, Yuuki at the front and Kaname behind the scenes, and nobody knows that they're the reason it fell apart to begin with.
"It was ... unexpected," says Zero, because he's gotten very good at understatements, and Yagami snorts something that sounds suspiciously like, "bullshit."
bloodstains
In her windowless cellar six feet deep, a pale princess in a dollhouse of delicate things, Yuuki draws her legs up against her chest, crouches down low so that the shadows crawl deep into the creases in her body. Every muscle in her body screams, every bone aches, and even when she presses her fingers so hard into her neck that she sees spots on her vision, her pulse is shaky at best.
She is hungry.
Very, very hungry.
She slides her hands up underneath her hair, squeezing her skull from either side like she's hoping it will pop like a melon. She kicks out, slamming her heels against the wall, the floor, the legs of the dresser, and still, the hunger and the thirst dog at her. Unbearably, unbearably, day in, day out. It's worse than being hungry ever was when she was human. Every part of her wants, and she understands now, what they meant by the curse of blood.
She hears a noise from the doorway and looks up. Kaname stands there, one hand still on the doorframe, and she knows he saw her, twisted in a knot in the corner of the room, knows exactly what she's going through. The pain in his eyes shatters like glass, and she scrambles to her feet. Her legs wobble underneath her like a newborn colt, but they hold.
"Yuuki..." he starts, and she shakes her head quickly, seeks to head him off before he can start.
"I'm fine!" she says, smiling. She scurries across the room to pour a cup of tea from the cold kettle, because her human habits die hard. She adds the blood tablet as an afterthought. "How was your trip? Kill anybody important?"
The words are out before she can stop them, and his eyebrows go up.
"You're not fine, Yuuki," he says. He steps further into the room, shutting the door behind him, and her heart shakes a little inside her chest with the familiarity of it. This was the room she was locked in as a child and he was the brother that visited her, smelling of dirt and water and coppery things like yen. Sometimes she thinks he might still be that little boy, bringing her tiny keepsakes of the world beyond her walls. A child, possessive of his favorite things. A man, maybe, in love.
Both are frightening possibilities.
She takes a deep breath and keeps on smiling at him. "Just bored, big brother. I miss the sunlight."
He reaches her, his hands outstretched to fold around hers. She realizes, belatedly, that her fingers are trembling with the force it takes to hold herself together, sending ripples across the surface of the tea in the cup she holds. He takes it from her, sets it on the table. His eyes never leave her face, steady but worried. Always worried, these days, every time she sees him. It's the last thing she wants.
"Yuuki," he says, and she feels a speech coming. "More than anything, I want you by my side. Since you were very small, it's all I've wanted, was to create a world for the two of us to be safe, a world where you're happy. I want you to see the sunlight again, too, if it's what you really want." He brushes a lock of hair out of her face, his smile tender. "You always did love the things that would hurt you."
He shakes his head slightly. "But for us to live together, you need to be a vampire, Yuuki. A true vampire. You're the pureblood princess of the Kuran family, and by right, you should be our queen. But you can't be that, not while you still cling to your human past."
She twists out of his grasp, but there is nowhere to run. Her room is the same cellar prison is was when she was a child, but the memories of the outside world are sharp and clear as crystal in her mind, as bright and glittering as raindrops in sunlight. She misses everything as acutely as if she'd been cut. She lets out a hard breath through her nose. Her thoughts come at her fractal, like different shades of light falling from a prism, in bits and spurts of reasoning.
In and out and around her hunger, she remembers flashes of her childhood -- both as vampire and as a human. The sweet smell of her father's blood on her mother's breath, as comforting as her arms wrapped around her, mixes with the cold, hard fear, the memory of the Level E vampire lunging at her in the snow, fangs bared. It's a fear that still thrills under her skin every time, no matter how many times Zero and Kaname bend their heads to the pulse point in her neck.
She remembers the helplessness she felt, watching Zero wash the blood out of his clothes, after the first time he attacked her. (The bloodstains are probably still in the carpet, she thinks, assuming that staircase survived.) She didn't like knowing that he was going to fall, slowly and painfully, and there wasn't anything she could do to stop it. She didn't like the idea of losing him, so she made the promise to suppress the monster inside of him.
Yuuki always did have the problem of making promises and keeping them.
She can feel them, the two of them inside of her, Yuuki Kuran who could corral the vampire world the way she'd once corralled school girls, and Yuuki Cross, who would rather be a human forever than be a monster wearing a human face for even a moment. There is no blurred line between them; she's too hungry for a grey area. They're both Yuuki.
"Brother," she says, turning back to him. Her legs and hands are no longer trembling. "You're not looking at it properly. I'm clinging to nothing. I am using common sense. We are one of the last lines of purebloods left. All the rest have fallen, having fraternized with humans one way or another. They are becoming impossible to avoid. If we're going to create an empire of vampires that will last even a fraction of time longer than the council you destroyed, then you're going to need a queen who was once human, who knows them."
She steps in close to him, feeling the familiarity of him warm against her like sunshine on a summer day. A promise, she thinks -- she will always come back to his arms. He is her brother, and someday, her husband.
To gain a little, she must give, and she bares her fangs in a grin -- even just the feel of them against her upper lip sends a chill down her spine, sharp as candy canes sucked thin. "Now, brother, please take off your scarf. If it's all right with you, I'm a little hungry."
Fandom: Vampire Knight
Characters/Pairings: Juuri/Haruka, Yuuki/Kaname
Word Count: 3,200
Umm. Well, both pairings are canon, consummated incest, so do I even need to warn for it? Well, regardless, consider yourself warned. Also, spoilers up through chapter 50 (awww, Zero rescues kittens from trees), though mostly it pertains to the extra that came with chapter 48.
i'm not a saint
Everybody says that something's changed, after Juuri comes back to the Kuran estate with a diploma from a human high school. They can't really fathom why she did it, just that it was cute in a "I'll never understand the young kids these days" kind of way, and wasn't it a good thing her brother went with her to keep her out of trouble?
The elder Kuran chuckles deep in his throat and says, "All according to plan."
you
Her skin is slippery and cool to the touch, and the thin layers of her clothes stick together like wet leaves, and peeling them off is like peeling apart sodden newspaper, the words swirling and dissoluted. The door clicks shut behind them, and the sound of the rain outside fades to a whisper.
He bumps her hip into the side table, and she murmurs, "careful, you jerk," as the vase wobbles uncertainly.
He holds the umbrella out to the side, shaking it so that droplets of water fly everywhere, catching on the walls and in the cracks on the hard wood floor. Then, with a great clatter, he lets it fall, putting his hands to the curve of her waist, rubbing through the fabric of her undershirt to find the chilled flesh beneath.
She stretches up onto her tiptoes for him, so one hand slips down to her thigh, hefting it up onto his hip so his fingers could trace across the tender skin at the back of her knee, down her calf. "How was school today, big sister?" he breathes into her hair, and she pulls back to punch his shoulder.
"I should ask you the same thing," she replies tartly, putting both feet back on the ground and smoothing down her uniform skirt. "What do you do all day, anyway, while I'm at school? And please don't tell me you follow me, because all my friends think you're creepy enough already."
He watches her as she picks up her sweater where it fell in the entryway, takes a hangar from the coat closet and hangs it somewhere to dry. He is leaving a small puddle on the wood floors, he knows, but he can't help but smile as she puts her school bag on the table, checks the phone for messages from their grandfather on an answering machine that is years before its time, tucks a lock of hair behind her ear. She frowns as the elder Kuran's low voice mentions nothing about Rido's well-being, as it's done for the past four messages.
"I do a lot of thinking, mostly," he says, after a pause so long she startles like she's forgotten she even asked him anything. "I've never been this far from home for this long before. It's nice to be away from ... everything," he shrugs.
She studies him. "Grandfather, you mean."
"Do you think he planned this?" he sheds his coat; it makes a wet, sloppy noise as he tosses it over the back of the nearest chair, and she scowls at him. "When you rented this apartment and announced your intention to go to a human school? When he made me go with you? Do you think he intended it?"
"I know he did," she replies, turning her body towards him, her hands at her hair again. "What's your conclusion?"
Her eyes are large and sympathetic, and Haruka doesn't look away. "That even if Grandfather planned for this to happen, for us to happen, there's still nowhere else I'd rather be."
Her whole expression melts, the way it does when he says things like that, so he adds, "No one else I'd rather be with."
She sniffs. "I should hope not," she says primly, though her smile is still watery at the corners. "The only other available pureblood vampire is Shizuka Hiou and she's more vapid than a gnat."
He keeps looking at her, his hair dripping little rivulets of rainwater down the sides of his face, and after a moment, she opens her arms and says very soflty, "Come here."
He does, letting her twine her arms around his neck and pull him against her body. She makes a soft noise in her throat when he lifts her up so that she wraps her legs around his waist, ankles locking in the small of his back. "Hi," he says against her lips, pushing away from the chair. It tips sideways from the force and from the weight of his heavy coat, and they stagger for a moment.
"Jerk," she snaps, and he presses her back against the wall. Her mouth is the only part of her that's warm, and he kisses it for one long moment before he tilts his head down, pressing his nose into the pulse at her neck.
"Is what they say true?" he wonders, in a voice no louder than the hiss of the rain falling outside. "That only the blood of the one you love above all others will satisfy you?"
"Haruka," she breathes, and there is nothing, nothing, in the world like hearing his sister say his name like that.
She tugs open the collar of his shirt.
look
Everyone says that something's different, and in the vampire world, there's no such thing as keeping secrets, no matter how hard everybody tries to pretend. In public, Haruka Kuran puts his hand in the small of his elder sister's back, guiding her through the throng of people, and while they wait for their car to come and get them, she leans her shoulder into his. It's a foregone conclusion, people say with sagely nods, and Shizuka Hiou sniffs haughtily, keeping her best insulted mask, but the Level D vampire at her side looks relieved, and remember what they say about secrets.
"It wasn't supposed to happen like this," hisses Rido, and throws a picture of the three of them against the mantle above the fireplace. The sprinkle of glass hitting the hearth sounds like raindrops falling.
great
Juuri doesn't know it yet, but she only has five years left to live. She might have seen it coming, perhaps -- the warning signs have been there since the very beginning, and she and Haruka have a plan, but at the moment, she isn't thinking about how she's going to die, about how the floors of her ancestral home will never really be scrubbed clean of her blood, nor about how her daughter is going to stumble out into the cold and the snow and not wake from her nightmare for ten years.
Right now, she's thinking that maybe she has the heat set in the cellar room a little too high, that the stitch she just made in a new dress is too wide and she should redo it before it ruins the rest of the stitches down the line, and that even though she shouldn't, she's really not worried that Kaname is tucked up on the loveseat beside her, watching unblinkingly as she rocks the cradle with her foot, watches Yuuki sleepily rub at her face with tiny infant hands.
She's not quite sure what she thinks of Kaname yet -- who he is or what he wants, whether or not he's a pawn of Rido's, a timebomb ticking slowly at their hearth. She hopes like she has never hoped for anything before that he's not, that he's not some abomination of their brother's sent to them wearing the beloved face of their firstborn child. Kaname, who is all Haruka; the gentle shape of his eyes, the careless fall of his hair, his steady, serious silence.
"You've been studying her for a while now, Kaname," she ventures after a moment. "What do you think of her?"
He gives the question its due consideration. "She's very small," he decides on. "I could lose her, or leave her somewhere, or hurt her. Very easily."
Juuri looks at her daughter, who's no longer stirring but fast asleep, her hair a dark down halo around her skull. "That's true," she says. "Which is why you must be very careful and protect her all the time, Kaname, until she's old enough to do it on her own." She sets her stitching down, removing her thimble so she can ruffle her fingers through his hair affectionately. "Do you understand?"
He nods, and opens his mouth to reply, but at that moment, the key scrapes in the lock and Haruka steps in.
The stench of blood hits her immediately. She leaps to her feet, her sewing project tumbling from her lap and its pieces scattering out of their careful alignment, but she kicks it aside in her haste to get to her brother's side. "You're hurt!" she cries. She notes quickly that he's favoring his left arm, hidden underneath his coat. "What happened?"
"I met some hunters," Haruka tells her grimly, as Kaname watches on with avid interest. "Some friends of yours, actually. Do you know a Kaien Cross?"
Juuri is suddenly thankful for her long, curly brown hair, because it hides the blush that springs to her cheeks at the mention of the name. She slips the coat off his shoulders, turning him around so she can inspect the wound. It's not deep; three slashes running across his arm, like he'd flung it in front of his face to defend himself. It has the markings of a tainted cut, the kind you get for picking fights with vampire hunters. "Did he do this to you?"
"No, his friends did, but when I told them who I was, he got them to back off. Said they were only letting me go because of you."
His eyes track her every movement as she unbuttons his shirt, slipping it off of him. It was ruined, of course, but that tends to happen in vampire families. She still isn't quite sure why everyone she knows is so fond of silk -- one drop of blood and the outfit was worthless after that.
He waits for her to finish the story and explain it. She's never kept anything from him before.
"Kaien Cross is just a hunter who fancies himself infatuated with me," she tells him matter-of-factly. "He's the best hunter the association has, I hear, and what human is more likely to fall in love with one of us than someone who's dedicated their lives to understanding us? He knows I would have been incredibly upset if they killed you."
Haruka blinks. "Do you ... know him well?"
"Well enough. He sends me letters, keeps me informed of what's going on in the human world. He's got an eye out for Rido too, brother. He knows we won't rest safe until he's found, and he's talking about building a safe house. A sanctuary of sorts." Seeing the question in his eyes, she smiles, resting her forehead against his. "Don't worry. He doesn't know about Yuuki."
"I trust you," he says simply, and she smiles as he lifts her head to kiss her, his lips as gentle and familiar as a lullaby. He then turns to Kaname, who's still a small huddle on the loveseat. "And I trust you, too. There is no one in the world I trust more with Yuuki's safety than those in this room right now."
Yes, thinks Juuri, watching as a shy, pleased smile makes its way to Kaname's face. Somehow, and I'm not sure when it happened, but somehow, that little baby girl because the most important out of all of us. She's our future.
in
Nobody is sure what to make of the disaster that happens at Cross Academy come winter, or the termination of the human-vampire peace agreement. Nobody is quite comfortable with the role Kaname Kuran seems to have, right in the thick of things, and even in polite society, that's a bit of an understatement. Even more shocking is that Kaname's quest to gather the vampires in again -- uniting all levels as no one has ever done before, purebloods standing side-by-side with the Level D -- is spearheaded by Yuuki Kuran, his long-lost sister, his wife-to-be. The two of them are piecing the blood world back together, Yuuki at the front and Kaname behind the scenes, and nobody knows that they're the reason it fell apart to begin with.
"It was ... unexpected," says Zero, because he's gotten very good at understatements, and Yagami snorts something that sounds suspiciously like, "bullshit."
bloodstains
In her windowless cellar six feet deep, a pale princess in a dollhouse of delicate things, Yuuki draws her legs up against her chest, crouches down low so that the shadows crawl deep into the creases in her body. Every muscle in her body screams, every bone aches, and even when she presses her fingers so hard into her neck that she sees spots on her vision, her pulse is shaky at best.
She is hungry.
Very, very hungry.
She slides her hands up underneath her hair, squeezing her skull from either side like she's hoping it will pop like a melon. She kicks out, slamming her heels against the wall, the floor, the legs of the dresser, and still, the hunger and the thirst dog at her. Unbearably, unbearably, day in, day out. It's worse than being hungry ever was when she was human. Every part of her wants, and she understands now, what they meant by the curse of blood.
She hears a noise from the doorway and looks up. Kaname stands there, one hand still on the doorframe, and she knows he saw her, twisted in a knot in the corner of the room, knows exactly what she's going through. The pain in his eyes shatters like glass, and she scrambles to her feet. Her legs wobble underneath her like a newborn colt, but they hold.
"Yuuki..." he starts, and she shakes her head quickly, seeks to head him off before he can start.
"I'm fine!" she says, smiling. She scurries across the room to pour a cup of tea from the cold kettle, because her human habits die hard. She adds the blood tablet as an afterthought. "How was your trip? Kill anybody important?"
The words are out before she can stop them, and his eyebrows go up.
"You're not fine, Yuuki," he says. He steps further into the room, shutting the door behind him, and her heart shakes a little inside her chest with the familiarity of it. This was the room she was locked in as a child and he was the brother that visited her, smelling of dirt and water and coppery things like yen. Sometimes she thinks he might still be that little boy, bringing her tiny keepsakes of the world beyond her walls. A child, possessive of his favorite things. A man, maybe, in love.
Both are frightening possibilities.
She takes a deep breath and keeps on smiling at him. "Just bored, big brother. I miss the sunlight."
He reaches her, his hands outstretched to fold around hers. She realizes, belatedly, that her fingers are trembling with the force it takes to hold herself together, sending ripples across the surface of the tea in the cup she holds. He takes it from her, sets it on the table. His eyes never leave her face, steady but worried. Always worried, these days, every time she sees him. It's the last thing she wants.
"Yuuki," he says, and she feels a speech coming. "More than anything, I want you by my side. Since you were very small, it's all I've wanted, was to create a world for the two of us to be safe, a world where you're happy. I want you to see the sunlight again, too, if it's what you really want." He brushes a lock of hair out of her face, his smile tender. "You always did love the things that would hurt you."
He shakes his head slightly. "But for us to live together, you need to be a vampire, Yuuki. A true vampire. You're the pureblood princess of the Kuran family, and by right, you should be our queen. But you can't be that, not while you still cling to your human past."
She twists out of his grasp, but there is nowhere to run. Her room is the same cellar prison is was when she was a child, but the memories of the outside world are sharp and clear as crystal in her mind, as bright and glittering as raindrops in sunlight. She misses everything as acutely as if she'd been cut. She lets out a hard breath through her nose. Her thoughts come at her fractal, like different shades of light falling from a prism, in bits and spurts of reasoning.
In and out and around her hunger, she remembers flashes of her childhood -- both as vampire and as a human. The sweet smell of her father's blood on her mother's breath, as comforting as her arms wrapped around her, mixes with the cold, hard fear, the memory of the Level E vampire lunging at her in the snow, fangs bared. It's a fear that still thrills under her skin every time, no matter how many times Zero and Kaname bend their heads to the pulse point in her neck.
She remembers the helplessness she felt, watching Zero wash the blood out of his clothes, after the first time he attacked her. (The bloodstains are probably still in the carpet, she thinks, assuming that staircase survived.) She didn't like knowing that he was going to fall, slowly and painfully, and there wasn't anything she could do to stop it. She didn't like the idea of losing him, so she made the promise to suppress the monster inside of him.
Yuuki always did have the problem of making promises and keeping them.
She can feel them, the two of them inside of her, Yuuki Kuran who could corral the vampire world the way she'd once corralled school girls, and Yuuki Cross, who would rather be a human forever than be a monster wearing a human face for even a moment. There is no blurred line between them; she's too hungry for a grey area. They're both Yuuki.
"Brother," she says, turning back to him. Her legs and hands are no longer trembling. "You're not looking at it properly. I'm clinging to nothing. I am using common sense. We are one of the last lines of purebloods left. All the rest have fallen, having fraternized with humans one way or another. They are becoming impossible to avoid. If we're going to create an empire of vampires that will last even a fraction of time longer than the council you destroyed, then you're going to need a queen who was once human, who knows them."
She steps in close to him, feeling the familiarity of him warm against her like sunshine on a summer day. A promise, she thinks -- she will always come back to his arms. He is her brother, and someday, her husband.
To gain a little, she must give, and she bares her fangs in a grin -- even just the feel of them against her upper lip sends a chill down her spine, sharp as candy canes sucked thin. "Now, brother, please take off your scarf. If it's all right with you, I'm a little hungry."