Chapter Text
Sleepy Ash doesn’t notice at first.
He spends weeks wandering Japan in a daze. Most of his time is spent as a cat; he sleeps in alleys and under awnings and trees during rainfall, losing himself in the foggy grief blanketing him.
Had his choice been correct?
He wants to ask Gear, who in spite of his lack of interest in the lives of those he does not know had looked at him with an odd sort of concern when Sleepy Ash declared his intent to head for Japan.
When Sleepy Ash had first left for Italy to meet with his siblings, he hadn’t seemed so worried; had muttered about CCC trying to control too much, but had otherwise been too interested in the camera he had somehow gotten his hands on to care.
But then Gear had looked at him upon his return, his brow furrowed in the dim candlelight of their room, something closer to worry than he would usually show on his face.
He dwells on it regardless and when he shifts for the first time in weeks, feeling uncomfortable in his human skin, he chalks the ache in his lungs up to the difference in the air.
Japan is a long way from England, after all. Gear had mentioned the air might be different—less smoky, for one.
Sleepy Ash spends more time as a cat than as a person.
He can't stand to look at himself—even without the strange itchiness in his lungs and throat plaguing him each time he shifts, when he catches sight of himself he feels sick to his stomach.
He misses Gear more than ever come winter. Sleepy Ash runs cold, his heart thudding slower in his chest than a human heart should; the cold sinks into him painfully.
Gear had always run warm, as if on the cusp of fever; when Sleepy Ash had asked about it during their first fumbling few weeks of acquaintance, Gear had claimed it was a werewolf thing. It was helpful in winter—Gear complained, but never actually shoved Sleepy Ash away when he would get clingy and leech off his warmth.
He’s been remembering stuff like this a lot. It’s easier to think about Gear than it is to question himself and his choices; easier to remember Gear’s warmth, his low voice, his rare smiles.
Sleepy Ash spends his birthday like this: damp and too thin, weighed down by wet fur as he takes shelter in a stone roadside shrine near a river of snowmelt, alone for the first time in almost a century.
When he guiltily gives in to the painful hunger in his gut and chews away at some dried fish left as an offering, he wonders what Gear is doing.
...Probably still fawning over his camera. He seemed pretty excited about sewing machines, too.
Sleepy Ash should go back. He had said he would—had promised, so that he and Gear could fix that hole in the roof together. Gear had said a few years of travel would be inconsequential, but not to keep him waiting too long, and...how long has it been? Already almost four whole years.
He tells himself he will. He'll go back when he can bring himself to transform long enough to make the trip, when the sight of his own face doesn't make him recoil with disgust.
Soon, surely. It's already been a year since he had met his creator one last time.
Surely he'll sort out his feelings soon.
(The thought feels like a lie.)
It’s summer.
The heat of the sun sinks deep into Sleepy Ash’s fur; it becomes scalding in its intensity, made worse by the humidity. The only relief brought by nightfall is the absence of the burning sun—it’s still warm to the point of discomfort, the air syrupy-thick and clinging to his fur.
He’s been holed up in a dilapidated shrine—a wooden structure built more like a house but damaged by mudslides this past spring. Sleepy Ash had heard the villagers talking about repairing it soon and thought it might be as good a place as any to sleep away the heat undisturbed by everything but the song of surrounding cicadas.
(Gear would be pleased, he thinks, that his Japanese is so good now—would be smug, too, that he’d had the foresight to introduce Sleepy Ash to a Dutch trader who could teach him the basics.)
Sleepy Ash had been mostly right, but he hadn’t really slept much because of the heat; whenever he finally dozes, his sleep is even more fitful than usual—he wakes crying, his tiny feline body so much louder than it has any right to be.
This time he wakes, writhing, his limbs too long and heavy—for a dizzying, fearful moment he thinks he’s changing into that beast again, but no. He had simply ended up back in his barely-human skin and he cries as much from relief as he does with the lingering memory of his creator’s vague, ever-indulgent smile.
He can taste blood in his mouth. Not his own, but theirs; he feels as if that hulking, shadowy monster of a lion is trying to claw its way out from his skin and he shakes and sobs on the rotting wooden floor of the shrine, pulling his dark coat tightly against himself.
Sleepy Ash cries until he’s heaving, breathless and out of tears, forehead pressed into the wood. He wants to go home. He misses the foggy streets of England, the forest he and Gear had built their home in; the way the two of them would walk, every day without fail, along the winding river to the edge of the treeline; he misses Gear and the thought of him makes something ache in Sleepy Ashe’s chest.
Maybe it’s time. Maybe he should go home, even if he can’t be in this form for long; maybe he can sneak onto a boat as a cat. Gear’s been waiting five years now. He’s probably already fixed that stupid hole in their roof.
Maybe he isn’t waiting, though. Maybe he doesn’t care enough to; maybe he already gave up on Sleepy Ash.
Sleepy Ash coughs, groaning, his stomach aching with what must be hunger, his throat burning with what must be thirst. He coughs again, and then again and again as something thick rises in his throat.
It’s soft and slimy when it reaches his mouth; he coughs it onto the floor, wide-eyed, terror seizing him at the sight.
The head of a flower, petals long and purple; autumn crocus, he thinks, dizzy with horror. He knows them by name because they grew in the countryside where he had once lived. Gear had called them meadow saffrons instead.
The thought of Gear makes his throat itch.
Sleepy Ash feels sick, crawling away from the offending plant fearfully. He had known it was possible—when last he had seen Lawless, he had been choking on the grief of his loss, so far gone that the asphodels in his lungs were coming up as whole plants, wood-like stems and all, the white petals damp with spit and reddened with blood.
But he had not known it was possible for him. Not him, the most monstrous of his pseudo-siblings; not him, cowardly and unable to love even his own self.
But he loves Gear. The realization is wrought with guilt. How can he go back like this? He remembers Gear scoffing at such things, at the people who could love another so strongly their own feelings gradually tried to kill them.
Sleepy Ash had, in a rare moment of courage, asked Gear if he’d ever experienced such love. Gear had looked at him, his gold eyes too bright in the evening light, and said that he had.
Sleepy Ash had not pressed. He hadn’t wanted to know. In retrospect, his reluctance had not been born out of respect for Gear’s privacy or general disinterest. He coughs again, pressing his hand to his own throat, afraid. He can’t go back, he decides.
Not like this. Not when the thought of Gear is growing flowers in his lungs. Gear has done so much for him; the least Sleepy Ash can do is stay away from him.
Gear would feel bad, after all, even if it’s something that can’t be helped, even if he would pretend otherwise. The werewolf is better off without him; Sleepy Ash had all but forced his way into the other’s life, after all.
So Sleepy Ash—recalling what All of Love had told Lawless about the symptoms not manifesting in animal form—swallows back another cough and forces himself back into being a cat.
He feels both better and worse for it.
Sleepy Ash closes his eyes and breathes. His tiny body shakes with the effort.
The sound of the unbothered cicadas outside rings in his ears until he falls back asleep.
Years pass.
Sleepy Ash sleeps and sleeps. For days or weeks at a time he sleeps, under old shrines or shadowed by abandoned fishing sheds at the riverside.
In his waking hours he takes vague note of the passing of time; he checks newspapers, he listens to people talk. He wanders in cat form, eating scraps offered by children or pitying adults; rarely does he take his human shape, but when he does, he has to remind himself of the changing fashion and adjust to that as well.
Two wars come and go. He sleeps through those, hiding in shelters and closing his eyes and ears alike.
Technology advances. Telegrams become phones. Automobiles become wildly popular. Television is invented; cameras are able to record moving pictures. Soon they become colorized. Phones get smaller, more mobile; computers are commercialized.
Every time he sees something new he thinks of Gear, of what he must think, of the way his tired eyes always became brighter whenever he got his hands on new things. The first time Sleepy Ash steps into an arcade in the 1970’s he imagines Gear’s starry eyes and subtle grin and has to hide away in the bathrooms, coughing and coughing until whole flowers—stems and all—cover the dirty floor.
He doesn’t go back.
He sleeps for six months under the stairs of a particularly isolated shrine and only wakes when nearby construction forces him to.
The new millennium arrives with little fanfare. He vaguely wonders how his siblings spent it; he wonders how the Count might have spent it; he wonders about Gear. He sleeps.
When he meets someone properly for the first time in decades, maybe a whole century, he’s still half asleep. He wanders into the city in his underfed cat form, wondering what year it is, what month; a boy finds him, picks him up like he truly is nothing more than an animal before Sleepy Ash has the chance to flee.
He’s just a child. He smells like flour and human sweat, his face plain, his body lithe; he carries Sleepy Ash carefully in his arms as if he’s fragile. His human heart beats quickly in his chest, his body so warm that Sleepy Ash finds himself falling asleep again; he wakes in the boy's apartment, a bell being fastened around his neck.
Oh no, he thinks with sinking realization as the boy names him.
“Kuro,” the boy calls him, voice warm. It makes something unfamiliar shudder and snap into place inside Sleepy Ash. A contract, he knows instinctively. He knows even if he’s never taken one before, but it’s weak and incomplete.
It’s fine, Sleepy Ash consoles himself; as long as he remains in his cat form and the boy—Mahiru, he tells Sleepy Ash—doesn’t call him by his new name, it won’t settle. He can leave.
But Mahiru’s home is comfortably cool from the amazingly modern invention of air conditioning. He gives Sleepy Ash fresh food. He tells himself one day, just one day, maybe two or three at most; he’ll take advantage of the comfort of a home for the first time in forever.
Mahiru is a child, after all. A student. He seems to live alone—since when did kids become so independent?—and so he can sleep the night away undisturbed. Mahiru has school, so Sleepy Ash can spend the day eating real, human food that isn’t stolen and stale dumpster food or shrine offerings while he watches the news.
So he does. He makes himself some instant ramen—humans are geniuses—and flips between several news channels all morning while he eats and skims magazines that had been left stacked by the chabudai.
He loses track of the news because some kind of animated show about girls magically changing into bright costumes and fighting off some strange, vaguely humanoid enemies with odd powers that they hide from friends and family. It’s colorful and fascinating and one of the characters turns into a cat just like he does, so he loses track of time watching it.
Mahiru comes home. Sleepy Ash, later, will barely remember what happens—he’s tired, he wants to sleep again. Mahiru hits him with a broom. The curtains open; he turns into a cat; the curtains get yanked shut again. He moans pitifully when he changes back.
Then Mahiru says, “I thought you were a cat so I called you Kuro,” before Sleepy Ash can get his bearings and force himself into cat form; Sleepy Ash—Kuro, he’s Kuro—shudders and bites his tongue so hard he tastes blood when he feels something wrapping around his neck like a vice, sinking into his skin and settling beneath the surface.
He hates it. He’s scared of it. Mahiru is confused and belligerent; he doesn’t listen to Kuro—no, he tells himself, he’s Sleepy Ash—trying to explain.
It’s not like he hates the kid. Mahiru mentions the loss of his mother, neglects to mention a father and says his uncle is working. Sleepy Ash feels for him. He knows loneliness all too well, after all, but he doesn’t want this.
He lets Mahiru drag him out to his friends, sullen and quiet; he doesn’t speak when Mahiru shoves his skinny, feline body at his equally young and wide-eyed friends, who listen to Mahiru’s ramblings about vampire cats with dubious expressions.
He’s almost grateful when the crazy magician shows up, even if she smells like flowers and her heart beats too slow to be human. He knows what she is even before she strikes Mahiru’s friend; he wonders which of his siblings might have such a grudge against him and thinks Lawless.
He wants to leave.
Mahiru wants to fight.
“Run away by yourself,” Mahiru tells him, angry disgust in his voice and his expression. Sleepy Ash watches him walk away and thinks of Lawless, whose voice had broken on sickly coughs as he screamed and cried and cursed Sleepy Ash in the aftermath of his decision.
What right does Mahiru have to look at him that way? Sleepy Ash didn’t want this. He didn’t ask for this. Mahiru picked him up without thinking about how Sleepy Ash would feel; he gave him this name without understanding any consequences, barely listened or comprehended Sleepy Ash’s admittedly fumbled attempts to explain his existence.
He smells blood. He feels the shadow of Mahiru’s desperation and hope through the surface of their half-finished contract. He thinks about his creator beneath the weight of his massive paws, between his jaws, and how he’d wanted to do the right thing.
It’s your choice, Gear had said when he hadn’t known whether to discard CCC’s letter or speak to his siblings and the thought of him makes Sleepy Ash swallow back a cough.
He doesn’t want to make any more choices. Not when every single one has driven him to regret. Still, Sleepy Ash finds himself moving, sucking in a breath and tasting warm blood in the air. He tries to remember how to move like this—he hasn’t in so, so long—and forces himself into movement.
The magician’s sword stabs clean through him, bloodying Mahiru’s uniform behind him.
It hurts. The blade slides between his ribs, through muscle and skin and his lung and right through his back and when he grabs onto the blade instinctively with a groan of pain it cuts into the skin of his palm as well.
“Oh my,” the magician says, voice husky and eyes gleaming like rubies behind the lenses of her glasses.
“Kuro,” Mahiru wheezes, interrupting his scattered thoughts, the fear and regret in his voice echoed shallowly in the beat of Sleepy Ash’s heart.
“I haven’t had blood in centuries,” Sleepy Ash coughs out, feeling relieved when only blood spills past his lips. “I’m mostly just a cat, now. But if you give me yours...neither of us can back out, you know. It’s a pain.”
The magician’s eyes narrow. She seems surprised, like she hadn’t realized that maybe their contract had yet to be solidified—
Mahiru tugs at him, holding his arm up. He all but shoves his wrist against Sleepy Ash’s mouth.
“If it’s us together,” he says, like they haven’t known each other for a handful of hours, “We can do it, Kuro.”
He grimaces. Even though he doesn’t want to, he sinks his teeth into Mahiru’s wrist as the magician yanks her sword back out with a sickening squelch and a rush of blood—but Mahiru is healthy and uninjured, the taste of his certainty and determination heady on Sleepy Ash’s tongue. He can feel his damaged flesh knitting back together as the contract finishes snapping into place, tightening around his throat like a noose.
Sleepy Ash shudders, closing his eyes, swallowing. Kuro licks the last remnants of blood from his mouth and opens his eyes, redder than they’ve been in hundreds of years.
“Okay,” he says slowly, voice raspy. Something is lodged in his throat; he swallows it down with the blood, beginning to feel dizzy, limbs heavy and numb.
“Whatever happens from here on isn’t my fault, okay?”
Because Mahiru’s the one who wanted to fight so badly.
The magician barely has time to blink before Kuro stalks forward, willing the shadows inside himself to bleed out of the skin of his hands. They spill out, coating his fingers and lengthening sharply into claws.
Kuro doesn’t even think about it. Doesn’t let himself. The magician is choking on her own blood in moments, stumbling back from him—Kuro’s always been fast when he needs to be—but he doesn’t let her. His claws hook into the fabric of her bright clothes, yanking her back in. He thinks he hears Mahiru speaking but his ears are full of cotton as he opens his mouth, bracing himself for the taste of her blood.
She’s a subclass, after all. She’ll die easily once he bites down.
He doesn’t get the chance. The chain around his neck is being yanked, choking him; he lets go of the magician as he gags and stumbles back, turning with watery eyes to face Mahiru’s anger.
“I said enough! We don’t have to kill her if she can’t even fight anymore! You said I’m responsible for what you do now, right? So stop!”
Mahiru stops yanking at the chain when Kuro is an arms length away from the magician; he coughs and Mahiru, anger shifting into guilt, lets go of the chain as Kuro’s shadowy claws melt off of his hands into the concrete beneath them.
Kuro glances back towards the magician, rubbing his aching throat. She’s on the ground, blood pooling beneath her and spreading out on the road, a plethora of curses leaving her mouth as she punches her fist against the concrete to try and push herself up.
“Contestants,” she coughs bloodily at them, a manic smile on her face, “Do you not understand where this train is going? A vampire parade in hell! A super-fun nightmare scenario you’ll never escape! You’ll wish you killed me when you got the chance, baby Eve!”
Then she reaches her blood-soaked hand to grab at her hat and shove it back on her head, her body transforming into that of a felt doll.
Kuro is as surprised by that as Mahiru is.
“Is she dead…?” Mahiru asks tentatively as he walks over, picking up the doll from the pool of blood.
“Are you an idiot?!” The doll scream-laughs, startling Mahiru into almost dropping it. “I’m a vampire!”
“Shut up, you’re giving me a headache,” Kuro groans, as if he doesn’t already have one. He needs to change back soon—he can feel the flowers trying to make their way up his throat and knows if he stays like this much longer the symptoms of their poison will worsen.
“No way! You never answered my carefully prepared quiz!” The magician cries, her felt-mouth unmoving, the red buttons of her eyes gleaming.
It’s getting darker out. The streetlamps nearby are beginning to flicker on.
“You mentioned a Tsubaki,” Mahiru remembers, lifting the doll by the neck with a frown. Had she? Kuro doesn’t remember. He hadn’t really been listening.
“Yes, yes,” the doll sings. “Poor Tsubaki. It seems you don’t know him, either—poor, darling Tsubaki! No one knows him! Not even his siblings! That’s why he’s going to KILL☆EVERYONE!”
“Okay,” Kuro mutters, eyelids growing heavy. Seriously, what the hell…? He met an old lady named Tsubaki once, but that was...before the second world war, so forever ago, and she’d been very human and ran a tea shop with her equally human husband.
“You could pay a bit more attention,” Mahiru grouses. “I mean, someone wants to kill you! And a bunch of other people!”
“I welcome him to try,” Kuro says before he can really stop himself. Mahiru looks confused, brow creasing as he opens his mouth to speak, but—
Ah. Something moves in the corner of his vision; the heaviness in his limbs is familiar, now. Kuro should have noticed sooner.
He’s unconscious before he hits the ground.
Kuro wakes when Mahiru does, if only briefly and because the boy grabs him out of the cat bed he’d been left in. He yawns and squirms in Mahiru’s grasp, the sun spilling brightly into the room through the uncovered windows.
“Was it a dream?!” Mahiru all but demands in hysterics; Kuro mumbles and paws at his face, too tired and sore to think about it all. His chest still aches where the magician had thrust her sword, his back and legs tender from so much movement.
So Kuro simply lets Mahiru manhandle him, ending up stuffed into his school bag as the kid leaves in a rush, frantic with the memory of his friend's injury.
The magician-doll is in Mahiru’s bag, too.
“Get off of me!” She whines and he hisses until she shuts up so he can fall back asleep despite being jostled with Mahiru’s every movement.
His sleep this time is more restless; All of Love must have used their power to ensure his sleep would be deep and restful—and he does, in fact, feel more rested than he has since...well, since England.
He still manages to sleep for another hour or so before the magician wakes him with her whining. Mahiru opens his bag in class, making Kuro squint as the fluorescent lighting in the ceiling hits his gaze, and goes from annoyed to deathly pale in the span of seconds once he realizes the magician is in his bag.
“So annoying I could die,” Kuro groans when Mahiru closes his bag, yells an excuse at his teacher, and runs out of the room. The jostling has him and the magician hitting each other with each movement.
“Then hurry and die,” she says, voice mockingly high pitched.
Mahiru opens his bag again once he’s off of school grounds, lifting the magician as Kuro squirms out and climbs onto his shoulder to get some fresh air.
“How did you even get in my bag? Hey, how did we even get home?”
“Don’t know, don’t care,” the magician says, her stitched smile unmoving. “I’m hungry! I need blood, you know! I’m a vampire, remember?”
“I don’t think you need enough to murder for it,” Mahiru snaps unthinkingly, then goes red-faced when a few people they pass give him odd looks. He slaps a hand over the magician's mouth as if that will silence her as he shoves her back into his bag—she’s a doll, so of course her subsequent cursing is heard clearly.
“You goddamn brat! Ugh, Tsubaki’s gonna kill you! I bet he’ll let me eat you when he’s done!”
“You keep mentioning this guy...hey, Kuro, you really don’t know him?” Mahiru asks. Kuro flexes his claws in Mahiru’s jacket to keep himself in place as the boy picks up his pace.
“I already said I didn’t. I’m a defenseless cat—I haven’t talked to anyone in, um…” he tries to think about it. Maybe since the 90’s? He thinks he had talked to a kid who wandered into the forest and wound up near the roadside shrine he’d been sleeping in. “Well, a while.”
Then he meows, hitting the back of Mahiru’s head with his tail, and the boy shoots him an annoyed glance.
“You’re a vampire, not a cat.”
I’m obviously both, Kuro is going to retort, but—
A shiver crawls across his spine, skin crawling and fur standing on end. His tail puffs, his whiskers shaking, and moments later it begins to rain.
“A sunshower…?” Mahiru mutters, lifting a hand to catch the water in his palm. Kuro’s claws dig through the fabric of his jacket and into his skin, making him wince as the familiar sound of geta on concrete rings out in Kuro’s ears.
A thick white mist spills out from behind them. Mahiru tilts his head up as the white mist rises, solidifying around them, and—
“Hey, you there.”
An unfamiliar voice.
The magician giggles.
Mahiru turns. The one who spoke is a young looking man, dark hair clinging wetly to his handsome face, his eyes glinting red behind the dark lenses of his sunglasses. Despite it being the middle of the city, no festivals in sight, he’s clad in a dark yukata and a haori that bleeds from white to a red so rich it looks like blood.
“Yes, you,” the man says, his voice smooth and hypnotic. Kuro would think it pleasant were it not for the way every single one of his senses screams danger, danger at the sight of him. “There’s something interesting you want to tell me...right?”
He smiles with a hint of teeth.
“One day,” the magician begins to recite from Mahiru’s bag, “A young boy picked up a lost kitty...but! It was actually a suuuper☆strong vampire! Then, the boy obtained power from this vampire and nearly killed a beautiful poor magician! He was sooo done for☆!”
“We should go,” Kuro tries to say as the magician speaks; he doesn’t think Mahiru even hears him over how loud the magician’s voice is.
Then the man—the vampire, because it’s what he has to be, with eyes so red and a heartbeat so slow—laughs. He laughs and he laughs, his head thrown back in mirth, but he doesn’t sound happy. He cuts his own laughter off so abruptly that it’s jarring.
“Ahhh...” he sighs, dropping his chin and staring back at them with dull eyes, “How boring.”
Kuro slides off of Mahiru’s shoulder, ready to bolt, but Mahiru grabs him by the scruff of his neck before he can.
“Don’t run, idiot! You know this weird guy, right?” Mahiru hisses at him.
“Of course I don’t, but I have self preservation instincts!” Kuro snaps back, trying to squirm out of his grip.
“My, you two are quite something,” the man speaks again, sounding bored. Kuro and Mahiru both look back to him as he smiles and lifts a familiar bag.
“Thank you, by the way. I was looking for this,” he says as he pulls the magician out.
Kuro hadn’t seen him move, hadn’t felt him get close, and his throat tightens anxiously.
“Tsubakyun is late! Do you know how sore I am now? They were so rough with me!” The magician complains.
“Tsubakyun,” Mahiru repeats in a mutter, shell-shocked.
“But you saved me,” the magician goes on, “So thank youuu, Tsubakyun☆! I’ll buy you a tub of Haagen Dazs later.”
“Your life is worth a single Haagen Dazs?” The man asks and then laughs so hard his body shakes with it.
“We should leave. Like, um, right now,” Kuro hisses at Mahiru, who is watching with horrified fascination.
“He just came out of nowhere…” he’s muttering to himself. “And...Tsubakyun? He has to be…”
The man appears before them in the span of a blink, a breath; he’s smiling blandly, pale lips stretching wide, and this close Kuro can see the evidence of sleeplessness under his eyes.
“That’s right,” the man says in that hypnotic voice. “I’m Tsubaki. What of it?”
Mahiru sucks in a breath. Kuro flexes his claws in Mahiru’s arm.
“I caused all of the fighting,” Tsubaki continues, his tone as bland as his smile, “So what? I want to kill humans and vampires alike. So what? You see, I’m very…” he reaches out, then, before either of them can register the movement; he rips Kuro off of Mahiru’s arm, throwing him aside, and his body twists and begins shifting of its own accord; he’s human-shaped when he hits the asphalt in a rush of breath.
“Depressed.” Tsubaki finishes as Kuro gasps on the road, dazed, his lungs burning. Tsubaki is smiling down at him when he sits up and blinks the stars out of his eyes.
“Sleepy Ash,” Tsubaki calls him, but something about the way he says it makes something uncomfortable twist in Kuro’s gut, “Or perhaps you prefer Sloth? Of all of my siblings, you ought to agree the world is a worthless place. I’m going to start a war—so how about it?”
“I think you’ve got the wrong guy,” Kuro mutters, pushing himself off the ground and inching back behind Mahiru, who gives him an exhausted glance. He’s still working it out—Tsubaki is a vampire, but he can’t be a subclass; that would make him a Servamp, which can’t be right. It can’t.
Tsubaki laughs.
“How mean! How awful, how terrible!” He laughs and laughs, his gaze becoming a wild, terrifying thing. “Not even you? None of my siblings know who I am either? How boring!” And he laughs even more, Kuro’s skin crawling with it.
Mahiru looks disturbed, even more so when Tsubaki once again stops laughing with eerie suddenness.
“You, boy,” Tsubaki says breathlessly, pointing to Mahiru. Kuro digs his fingers into Mahiru’s shoulders as if that will somehow keep him safe. “Do you know how many Servamps there are?”
Mahiru, startled, glances between Kuro over his shoulder and back at the still-smiling Tsubaki.
“I heard there were seven,” he says slowly. Ah. So he had kind of listened when Kuro tried to explain things, though at this point Kuro himself barely remembers the conversation.
“Wrong!” Tsubaki sings, clapping his hands, the magician slung over the crook of his elbow. “So close! There are eight, you see.”
His smile goes wider still, the faintest hint of teeth too sharp to be human showing themselves. Kuro can’t breathe. It’s not true. It can’t be true.
“I am the eighth,” Tsubaki continues, that wild gleam still in his eyes. “He Who Is Coming, Uninvited—I am Tsubaki, I am Melancholy, your darling youngest sibling.”
Melancholy. Kuro swallows, tongue heavy in his mouth, panic squirming in his gut. He would have known if their creator had made another, wouldn’t he?
(But would he? He avoided them, he ran away in the hours after his own creation, he had not seen them in centuries until the rainy night he had found them in that small Japanese village—)
“Kuro looks younger, though,” Mahiru says. Of course that’s what his mind sticks on; he sounds genuinely bothered by it.
“Vampires don’t age so appearance doesn’t matter. I was the first,” Kuro says, barely registering his own voice as he stares at Tsubaki. The dark hair, the delicate looking skin, the misery that radiates from him even as he smiles—
Kuro wouldn’t forget someone like him. There’s no way they’ve met before.
“Ah, well,” Tsubaki chuckles, carefully adjusting the magician in his arms and fixing his haori. “I suppose that means you’ve yet to meet the others, young Eve? No butterflies or snakes? You’ll find we’re quite the diverse lot.”
Cold unrelated to the still-present rain creeps into Kuro’s veins—All of Love he expected, considering yesterday’s interference, but is Doubt Doubt in the country…? That’s two too many of his siblings.
At Mahiru’s confused expression, Tsubaki laughs once more, though not as wildly as before.
“Haa...how boring. Well, that’s enough for one day. Shall we go home, Belkia?” He says that last bit to the doll in his arms; the magician responds with a groaned finaaaaally.
Kuro agrees with the sentiment.
Mahiru clearly doesn’t, because he shrugs Kuro’s hands off his shoulders and steps forward with a “Hey, wait a minute!”
Please keep walking away, please keep walking away, Kuro chants in his mind, but alas, Tsubaki pauses as the thick white fog begins to dissipate.
“Didn’t you say you’re going to destroy us? Destroy mankind?” Mahiru asks. Kuro starts to inch away—he doesn’t want to be part of this, he feels dizzy and nauseous; he wants to be a cat, he wants to sleep—but Mahiru, without even looking, grabs at the back of his coat to keep him in place. Kuro is so desperate he’s almost tempted to slip out of the thing.
“And what’s with this whole ‘war’ business?” Mahiru continues, getting progressively more worked up as he shakes out of his earlier shock. “All those reports and rumors of vampires attacking random people—was that you? Are you killing people?”
Mahiru says killing people like it’s the worst thing in the world. Objectively it might be, but Kuro thinks about himself, of his creator, of the people he had killed even before then in his uncontrolled rampages—the taste of their blood thick and syrupy in his mouth, bones splintering beneath his massive paws.
Kuro looks away. He feels faint.
“Of course,” Tsubaki is replying, sounding almost amused. “If you haven’t noticed...I’m a vampire.”
As if that’s justification for death; as if they can’t take blood without killing. As if they need it to survive.
“I only came to pick up Belkia, but...you’re quite the find, Shirota Mahiru,” Tsubaki adds, tone growing worryingly close to thoughtful. “Tell me, then. Do you know how many people died in this town yesterday? You don’t, do you? Of course not, with how many die all over the world each day. Counting how many were killed by vampires and how many weren’t—there’s no point, is there?”
Kuro winces at the way Mahiru’s grip on his jacket tightens; he steps forward in his anger, pulling Kuro with him.
“Are you joking? Of course it matters! A life lost in an accident, a life lost to something deliberate—there’s a difference! What the hell are you trying to do?! Stop getting random people involved!”
“Mahiru,” Kuro croaks, trying to say we need to go right fucking now, but he ends up coughing instead, watery eyed and swallowing back more bile than petals.
“Random people…?” Tsubaki echoes, his faint amusement vanishing. His voice sounds unnervingly flat now and Kuro wants to run. “Ahhh...fools who think they have nothing to do with me...bore me to tears.”
Kuro dislodges himself from Mahiru’s grip just in time to feel Tsubaki’s wooden geta slamming into his head. He hits the road so hard the asphalt cracks under him; he wheezes, choking on spit and sick and swallowing back the thick, soft flower trying to escape.
“That means you especially, Sleepy Ash. You—all of you think you can get away with acting like an innocent bystander—”
Tsubaki’s tirade is cut off when Mahiru throws himself at him; Kuro’s heart stops in his chest, panic seizing him at the sound of Tsubaki’s angered out of my way; before he realizes it, he’s slamming his hands against the concrete, forcing himself to flip upward and kick Tsubaki’s arms away from Mahiru, his vision blurry with dizziness and the blood dripping from his injured head.
“Enough,” he wheezes, coughing into his sleeve while grabbing onto Mahiru for leverage with his other hand. “God damn it, ow.”
“Are you okay?” Mahiru shouts in a whisper as he grabs onto the hand clutching at his sweater vest.
Do I look okay, Kuro wants to snap, but he just grimaces. He can’t answer anyway—Tsubaki is laughing again, slapping his knee with the effort of it.
“Sleepy Ash? Protecting someone? Protecting a human? So you really did make a contract! You, the one who never wanted an Eve to begin with!”
He stops laughing. Belkia, the magician, groans in his arms about motion sickness; under his breath, too low for human ears, Kuro hears Tsubaki mutter So I’m the only Servamp unbound.
“Kuro, come on,” Mahiru says, trying to help him up, but Kuro’s limbs feel too heavy for his own body to carry, let alone for Mahiru; at first he thinks the boy has finally seen sense and wants to escape, but then he says, “If you drink my blood, we can win.”
“No,” Kuro says immediately, his own blood and sick sour in the back of his throat. Mahiru glares, frustration radiating from his frame.
“Why not? This guy is dead serious! We won’t win if you don’t!”
“Because you provoked him,” Kuro finally snaps. “I don’t want to fight! I’m sore, I’m tired, I don’t even know him! It’s not my business!”
He feels woozy as Mahiru somehow manages to drag him up by the lapels of his coat, shaking him with righteous indignation. It takes effort not to be sick all over him and Kuro is half-tempted to stop holding back.
“What do you mean it’s not your business?! Even if you don’t know him, he knows you and people's lives are at stake! Stop complaining and fight!”
Kuro grunts and opens his mouth to protest again when Mahiru shoves his wrist right against his mouth, scraping the skin on Kuro’s fangs; this time Kuro doesn’t hold himself back and wrestles away from Mahiru, spitting the blood against the road and staggering on his feet.
“I said no,” he wheezes, vision going white-edged. “Yesterday, yesterday hurt. I don’t want to. I never wanted to do any of this. God, you’re such a pain!”
He thinks Mahiru says something, maybe, but it’s hard to tell over the static in his brain and nausea roiling in his gut alongside hot shame and anger. It takes so much not to give in to the panicked desire to devour Mahiru, to change his shape not to that of a cat but that beast and crush Mahiru’s small, frail body between his teeth for making him feel like this.
Someone laughs. It’s not Tsubaki. It’s quieter, raspier, audible only to him; the remnants of that creature he’d begged Gear to carve away from him, still clinging to his rotten soul, shadows creeping across his vision and his skin.
He chokes on his breath, crouching and wheezing, trying to remember how to breathe—how did he do it before? How did Gear show him, all those years ago? He used to press Kuro’s hand to his chest so he could feel each inhale, each exhale, counting the seconds with him.
Gear isn’t here. Mahiru is saying something or maybe he’s not. Kuro doesn’t know. The rainfall comes down heavier, shadows shimmering red-hued against the pavement, and Kuro squeezes his eyes shut and tries not to think about that creature—that parody of his feline form, with its sewn-shut mouth and sly voice.
He thinks about breathing. He thinks about the taste of cup ramen, black tea, scones, pudding. Not blood, not meat.
By the time Kuro is aware of himself again he can’t tell how long it’s been—whether he had been out of it for a few seconds or a few minutes, he has no idea, but when he looks up Mahiru is pushing himself off the ground. When had he fallen?
“Those catchphrases of yours,” Mahiru is saying as the static begins to fade from Kuro’s ears, “Are simple when you get down to it, aren’t they? ‘What a pain’ means ‘I’m scared’—” No, no it doesn’t, that’s not it at all—“and ‘how boring’ means ‘I’m lonely!’ So I’m saying I’ll give you a name and face you head on!”
Kuro blinks the lingering spots out of his vision, as dazed by Mahiru’s proclamation as Tsubaki appears to be. Is that possible? Can someone do that? He’s never heard of his siblings sharing an Eve before; fear jolts through his heart as Mahiru begins throwing himself toward Tsubaki, grabbing the front of his yukata.
He’s angry. That doesn’t mean he wants Mahiru to accidentally get himself killed. Something flutters in his visions periphery, delicate and pink.
“You have to let him go,” Kuro tries to shout around the sudden coughing fit that seizes his throat, at the same time Mahiru yells “Your name is going to be—”
Kuro wheezes, crushed under Mahiru’s weight as they land next to a pile of trash in an alley.
All of Love again, he thinks dizzily. He hadn't expected their help twice, had assumed that they were simply observing.
“What th—Kuro, was that you?” Mahiru manages to get out, sounding rather out of breath himself as he slides off Kuro’s body.
“No,” he mutters into the concrete. “If I could do that, I would’ve done it sooner. It was...those butterflies.”
“Uh, butterflies?” Mahiru looks at him like he's crazy when Kuro lifts his head and he rolls his eyes, then grimaces because it makes the dizziness worse.
“You saw them, right? They were illusions. My sibling, the Servamp of Lust, called All of Love...they can create illusions and swap objects around.”
“Oh...then, that means he’s on our side, right? Is he still around?” Mahiru asks, craning his neck around the alley as if All of Love will pop out of one the trash bins.
“No way. They were probably just passing by,” Kuro refutes, sitting up and leaning back against the brick wall behind him, heedless of the filth. He’s too tired to care.
“You’ll get killed if you pull more stunts like that, you know,” he adds, wiping some of the drying blood sticking to his face off with the sleeve of his coat as Mahiru turns back to look at him. “Seriously. Being my Eve makes you a bit more durable, but I can’t do a lot.”
“Oh jeez, that Tsubaki guy did a number on you. Are you really okay?” Mahiru asks worriedly, ignoring what he’d just said. Please die, Kuro wants to say, but he swallows it back because it’s mean and uncalled for.
“I’ll be fine,” he mutters. Mahiru sighs with relief, then joins him in slumping against the wall.
“God, life got so complicated so quickly…I’m beat,” he admits, as if he’s the one who his face curbstomped. Kuro grumbles, slouching further, and finally releases his grasp on his human skin in favor of becoming a cat.
“I’m done dealing with this now...forming a contract was a mistake,” he complains, mostly to himself. His fuzzy, nausea-addled thoughts begin to clear now that he isn’t choking on toxic flowers and his own panic.
For a moment Mahiru is quiet. He reaches out to stroke Kuro’s fur as if he’s truly only a housecat and despite himself Kuro purrs, pressing into Mahiru’s hand.
“Should we...find the other Servamps?” Mahiru eventually asks. Kuro abruptly stops purring and looks at him incredulously, but the boy is—of course—serious.
“Um, absolutely not,” Kuro says, wanting to hide his face in his paws. Mahiru huffs.
“Why not? Right now we might be the only one of them to know what that Tsubaki guy is up to. We should work together.”
Kuro groans and this time he really does hide his face in his paws as Mahiru lifts him by the scruff.
“Even if you say that, I don’t know any of their addresses, numbers, or even email,” he says and is about to add and I don’t even want to do this when a slip of paper drifts down between them onto Mahiru’s lap.
[email protected].
“...Scary,” Kuro mutters. “They’ve got ears everywhere, I guess.”
“Well. This is a start, at least,” Mahiru says, sounding pleased as he tucks the paper away and carefully lifts Kuro in his arms. “Come on. I never got my bag back from that Tsubaki guy, but I only had a few things in it...ah, I don’t like lying but I guess I’ll have to tell sensei that I left it on the train since my textbooks were in there…”
Kuro dozes as Mahiru rambles, the exhaustion finally catching up to him.
At least his dreams are a bit quieter when so close to someone else.