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The first night in Infinity is difficult. The princess, with the Manjuu Bun, is suffering from the pain in her leg, hidden behind the doors of a second room. The new kid is locked in the bathroom, the shower running. The idiot is huddled closest to the window. He doesn’t move much. His golden eye is staring out across the single room, focused on Kurogane. He had deduced long ago that it means that the vampire is hungry, but the idiot is too stubborn to admit to it.
He’s coming to understand the vampire. He didn’t expect Fai to embrace the change with open arms. He’d begged for death there in the borrowed bedroom. But, he didn’t expect for Fai to actively deny himself until it was almost too late either. Fai was trembling, his body was thin. Far too thin and emaciated when he ate food; he was worse after having been forced onto his liquid diet. The blood keeps Fai alive. But that is the limits of its effectiveness.
He shudders as he slides the knife through his own wrist, something he should’ve realized he’d have to do, and turns to face the wizard huddled by the window. His eye is brilliant gold and fangs are extended as his pink tongue slips between his lips. He’s hungry, starving himself to death, and he won’t do anything to remedy that issue.
“Drink or I’m just going to bleed out on the floor.”
Fai has no choice but to obey. The scent and the desire the blood calls up in him is enough to make him near crazy. He latches onto Kurogane’s bloody wrist with fervor. His tongue laps at the cut and Fai feels the rush of power with every sip. It’s intoxicating, and even though Fai is only sucking at his wrist, a wave of lust rolls over Kurogane.
It’s been more difficult since the transformation. He had thought only to save his lover, but now Fai wants as little to do with him as possible. The flamboyancy is gone. The happiness is gone. Fai is no longer the diminished wizard he’d introduced himself as. Now, he is just a vampire. He goes through the motions and he protects the little princess.
They’re both broken. And until he can figure out how to save them, Kurogane can only tend to the basic needs, even if that means forcing Fai to eat.
The physical connection is gone. Sex is not a basic need that needs to be tended to and so it has been allowed to slide off into obscurity. Even though Kurogane craves the tightness of Fai’s body, the silken strands of hair that used to slip and slide over his chest and stomach, the closeness of his slight body’s warmth, he won’t push for it. Fai needs to be allowed to find himself as a vampire, and make his own choices as long as those choices don’t kill him.
Fai breaks off with a gasp and he sits on his heels, breathing –digesting- before he laps lightly at the cut, sealing and healing the wound.
-.-.-.-
They’ve been in Infinity for two weeks now. Five chess matches, and they’ve won all of them. They were granted accommodations in the city to make things easier for them during the tournament in which to rest. And they fight.
It’s been a week since Fai took blood, and it’s not a surprise.
The princess and the boy are getting along a little better. She has quit avoiding him completely, but she can’t return to the level of friendship they had created when she first woke up. Kurogane feels bad for the boy, but he can’t allow himself to be focused on their relationship. Not when the one he’s supposed to be protecting is slowly trying to kill himself day after day through a hunger strike.
They’ve just come home from the latest chess game. The princess is alone in her room and the boy is locked in the bathroom. Kurogane and Fai are alone. It’s not an unusual occurrence, but now, he has to make the vampire eat. He pulls his small pocket knife free and pierces his forearm, below his elbow. He cuts a small incision into the skin. “Eat,” he grunts, offering the bloodied appendage.
“Stop forcing this,” Fai protests. His hands fist at his side, and his eye falls closed as he fights the animalistic urge. His body shivers as he watches the blood dripping down Kurogane’s arm, curling around his wrist, turning to a puddle in his hand.
“Drink. You need it. The kids need you, and I won’t let you go,” Kurogane admits softly.
“I hate you,” Fai confesses before he falls to his knees and latches onto his former lover’s arm.
-.-.-.-
“You have to drink,” Kurogane says, like it’s nothing new. “Why don’t you just break the skin yourself?”
“I’m not a monster, even though you seem intent on making me out to be one.”
Kurogane doesn’t say anything to that. He has a truth, in his hate-filled words. Fai could have died as a wizard, he could have lain in that bed in Tokyo and passed into whatever was the afterlife and the travelers could have continued on without him. The bloodletting wouldn’t have to happen. The secrecy and the shame would be non-existent.
But Kurogane hadn’t been willing to lose his lover like that. He was getting soft in his old age, and he hated it, but he wouldn’t let his lover go. He wasn’t ready to let Fai go. And this was they’re punishment. Kurogane nodded at Fai and slid the pocket knife he carried through his wrist, across, so he didn’t cut too deeply.
Fai stands there, his eye narrowed in a glare and he doesn’t move for a long minute. Kurogane watches Fai, who is watching the blood bubble along the cut on his wrist. He studies the movement of the blood, and it seems like a switch is flipped on when he kneels before Kurogane and suckles at the wrist. There’s a flood of desire that pours through Kurogane’s body, and it’s only the ninja training that keeps him from thrusting up against Fai. In another time, it would’ve been something different.
Kurogane can only close his eyes and enjoy the surge of pleasure that having Fai drink brings him. The pull of blood is intense, and seductive. He wants to slide a hand through Fai’s hair, but he knows that it wouldn’t be welcome.
Fai pulls back before Kurogane can lift his hand, his tongue slides over the cut and then Fai is gone.
-.-.-.-
“Why do you want me to be that monster?” Fai asks quietly.
“It’s not that. I want you to survive.”
Survival. Because Fai seems to lack any sort of preservation skills of his own. He doesn’t seem to care that he could die without the nutrients of Kurogane’s blood. He doesn’t seem to care that he has a place in the children’s lives, and in Kurogane’s. He doesn’t think himself important enough to matter. And it bothers Kurogane more than it would with any other person.
They’ve been in Infinity for months. It seems like Infinity has a feather, but the white manjuu can’t identify it. It says over and over that there is power, but it doesn’t know what the power is. So, they struggle through these chess tournaments and learn more about the world. But Kurogane isn’t satisfied with that. He wants to protect Fai, and he wants Fai to protect himself, but he’s not sure that he can.
He won’t meet Kurogane’s crimson eyes. It’s not unusual, unfortunately.
“Then give me your neck,” Fai demands. It is the first time he’s asked for anything since the change, and it’s startling enough that Kurogane tips his head back submissively. And if Kurogane had been paying any kind of attention, he would have realized just how out of character this was for Fai.
There’s a sharp, immediate piercing pain in his neck and then there’s the familiar flow of blood being pulled from his body and the surge of lust that pours through him as a result. He can’t stop the grunt of pleasure as Fai shifts in his lap and brushes against the erection growing. Fai snarls into the skin between his lips and moves backward, enough to stop the teasing, but not to stop feeding.
Kurogane wraps his hands around the slender hips and fights every impulse that says to pull him close and keep him tight. Fai has already expressed his unwillingness to do anything more than feed. And he won’t force the issue.
It seems a small eternity before he is given relief. Fai laps slowly, teasingly at the wound he created before he stood up. “I am a monster. Are you happy, prey?”