[Fanfiction] - Kaname/Zero - Catharsis
Title: Catharsis (Part 5/5)
Fandom: Vampire Knight
Beta: kashibanohikari
Characters/Pairing: KanamexZero, ZeroxKaname
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: Yaoi (duh XD), biting, violence, implied sex, BDSM themes.
Disclaimer: If VK belonged to me, there would be a lot more of this. *points to fic*
Summary: Catharsis: n. from Greek katharsis, from kathairein, to purge, from katharos, pure. In the end, something has to give, and as Zero surrenders to his darker side, will Kaname be his saviour or his damnation?
Notes: AU, but could technically probably slot in to canon just after the end of season 1 of the anime. I haven't read past volume 7 of the manga or season 2 episode 10 of the anime, so apologies for any inconsistencies. I also feel I should mention that Kaname's past, which is alluded too, is from my imagination, though influenced by both Sagakure and Blackened Wing. Follows on immediately after part 4. :)
Part one is here: Games
Part two is here: Need
Part three is here: Hunger
Part four is here: Yearning
Kaname tasted of blood, thick and ambrosial, only sweetened by the tang of his fear and the sound of his heart beating a frantic tattoo against his ribcage. Zero deepened the kiss, searching for the rich, dark warmth of blood as Kaname shuddered beneath him, hopelessly trapped. His submission was almost as delicious as his blood, the feeling of his lithe body as it writhed and tensed; the slender fragility of the wrist beneath Zero’s fingers. There was a perverse beauty to his helplessness, the cant of his head, the staccato of his gasping breaths. Zero couldn’t decide, in that moment, if he wanted to piece back together the scattered fragments of a crystalline soul, or smash them anew and find a new kind of loveliness in the fragments.
His fang nicked Kaname’s lip and the kiss turned blood-drenched again, their desperate melody taking on a darker cadence. He was beyond thinking, beyond reason. He’d walked a razor’s edge between sanity and the macabre allure of madness for too long, this intoxicating, violent delirium tasted far too sweet for him to stop. He wasn’t sure what he wanted, only that Kaname’s thundering heartbeat and delectable blood were doing something to assuage the rapacious hunger gnawing at his soul. He didn’t want this anymore, he needed it, like a heroin addict who craves the rapture even as what brings them bliss devours them whole. What he didn’t understand was why Kaname was permitting this, why the pureblood was still supine beneath him. The last tatters of his reason told him Kaname could have turned the tables on him at any moment. He pulled back a little, staring into unreadable dark eyes.
‘What game are you playing?’ he hissed. Kaname just stared at him, blood on his lips and his throat.
What game are you playing? Time slowed down as Kaname gazed at the vampire above him, losing himself in crimson eyes that still contained the barest hint of amethyst. Games? Yes, this had been a game once. But now…now his white knight had sprung from the chequered board and enslaved him with his heat and his rage. The pieces were so easy to move when they had neither life nor breath, when they were just chips of ebony of ivory, knocked off the board at his whim. This had never been part of his plan. Zero, oh god, Zero, beguiling him with his own ruination. He wasn’t playing games anymore. The chilled him to the marrow with terror.
‘I…’ before he had time to finish, Zero cut him off.
‘I’m not your pawn,’ he growled, fangs bared. ‘I am not your pawn!’ Kaname had a moment to wonder at the truth of that, before Zero’s lips were on his again and all thought was obliterated by a rush of heat.
Zero knew he should stop. Knew it as surely as he knew he couldn’t stop. Something inside him had snapped, and he found himself buffeted by the tempest of his passions, drunk on blood and the perfection to be found in yielding to sin. He was drowning in their kiss, lost in a twilight labyrinth of crushed velvet and decaying roses, stumbling through briars and long strings of ivy that pulled at his ankles. His hand slid under Kaname’s shirt, pushing the silk up to expose his stomach. He trailed his nails over the bared skin and smiled darkly as Kaname choked on a gasp. He caught Kaname’s bottom lip in his teeth, and blood spilled into their fused mouths, drenching his world in a sanguinary delirium. He pressed himself harder into the pureblood, needing to cling on to something as he felt himself coming apart at the seams, everything he’d tried to suppress spilling out like cotton wool from the insides of a battered ragdoll.
He ripped Kaname’s shirt open, careless of the buttons he sent ricocheting across the floor, and pulled back, soaking up the almost decadent portrait the pureblood made. His eyes were closed, his head tilted back, his shirt pooling around him to expose his perfect, pale body, the only stain on his beauty the rusty blood still smeared on his throat. Zero bent to press a kiss to the hollow above his collarbone and the pureblood shivered. The power was intoxicating. He let his fangs graze Kaname’s skin and smiled darkly as the pureblood whimpered. He slid his hand up to cup Kaname’s face tenderly, the other still holding his wrist. He trailed his fingers lightly down the purebloods cheek, the traced the curve of his parted lips, grazing the pad of one finger against Kaname’s exposed fangs. He paused for a moment, eyes closed, lips hovering over Kaname’s throat, then dragged his fingernails brutally down the pureblood’s bare torso, blood spilling from the shallow cuts to trickle over his alabaster skin.
Kaname cried out, jerking in something perverse between pleasure and pain. The sudden agony snatched his breath away. Zero leant down, dragging his tongue from the pureblood’s navel to his collarbone, licking up the spilt blood. The wounds healed as he caressed them, and somehow that fuelled the fire burning within Zero. He wanted to mark Kaname. Wanted to see what that porcelain skin would look like littered with bruises, wanted to do something, anything, that would leave an indelible mark on the immaculate pureblood. He hurt, and all he knew was that when Kaname’s blood spread over his skin like crimson silk it ignited a dark type of pleasure. Kaname shuddered as Zero’s lips found his throat again, his wrist flexing in Zero’s grasp. He turned his head to the side, dark hair falling to obscure his face, but Zero could see the becoming flush on his cheeks, hear the rasping cadence of his breathing.
‘Is this a game?’ he whispered, nipping Kaname’s earlobe as he bent closer. ‘Are you just toying with me?’ he asked, sliding his free hand up Kaname’s body, tracing the pureblood’s ribs. He was slender, willowy as a wood nymph, the delicate arches of his bones apparent beneath his smooth skin. Zero knew all too well how strong he was, but there was an intoxicating sort of fragility to his pallid beauty; the helpless cant of his head, the blood stains on his exposed throat. His chest rose and fell with his breathing, as the livid red marks faded to a raw pink. He slid his hand up to close around Kaname’s throat, not tight enough to cut off his breathing, but firmly enough that he saw Kaname’s eye flicker shut as he fought back some fleeting emotion. He brought his face close to the pureblood’s, leaning in until their lips were nearly touching. ‘Do you enjoy this?’ he breathed, tightening his hold a little.
Kaname shut his eyes, trying to block out the image of sin incarnate leaning over him. It was useless. Zero was seared onto the backs of his eyelids, and shutting out the portrait of him merely heightened his acute awareness of the hunter’s body, pressed so intimately against his, the slender fingers clasped around his throat.
‘Do you?’ Zero whispered again, brushing a light kiss over Kaname’s lips. Kaname opened his eyes and stared into a blood-drenched purity that took his breath away. Zero smiled, fangs glinting in his mouth, and squeezed a little harder. ‘How does it feel?’ he hissed, ‘how does it feel to have somebody playing with you?’ Suddenly, Kaname couldn’t breathe. Memories reached up clammy fingers to rip through his composure, shredding his carefully constructed armour as he gasped for air, panic coursing through his veins. Chains, he could remember chains, and hands on his throat, fingernails digging into his skin, then pain, so much pain, someone was screaming…he cried out, the fear snatching away his strength. Distantly, he felt Zero freeze, and this time the eyes he met with his were wide, horrified, and amethyst free of any ruby tint.
Zero tumbled off him, collapsing onto the floor in a broken heap. Kaname lay still for a moment, breathless, the scratches on his chest stinging a little as they healed. His tattered shirt slipped off his shoulders as he sat up, his wrist screaming as he changed his position. Zero’s shoulders shook, and Kaname realised with a thrill of some undefinable emotion that the hunter was crying. Not sobbing, not weeping, just crying softly, the gentle tears of someone who had nothing left to lose, and nothing left in the world. Somebody who knew there was no point in screaming until his throat bled, because nobody would hear him or care. Somebody utterly, painfully alone.
‘What have I done?’ The broken whisper was almost too faint even for his hearing. Zero buried his head in his hands, fingers tightening convulsively in his hair. ‘What have I done?’ He wrenched his fingernails downs his cheeks, opening blood gashes in the skin. Kaname couldn’t bite back an exhalation of shock. The hunter just stared at him through blank amethyst eyes, salty tears mingling with blood as it ran down his face.
His eyes. Those brilliant eyes, always alight with something, burning with passion, with fire, with fury, with lust, with fervour, they looked dead. Cold. Like chips of gemstone in the face of a perfect sculpture. They looked…like the eyes he saw staring back at him in the mirror every day. Without thinking, Kaname slid to the ground to sit beside him, reaching out tentatively to lay a hand on Zero’s shoulder. Zero flinched away from the touch as if he’d been burned.
‘Don’t touch me,’ he whispered. ‘Please.’ His voice broke on the last word and he rocked forward again, pulling his knees to his chest as blood dripped down his chin onto his shirt. He looked suddenly like a child, desperately frightened and horribly alone, trapped by his own self-loathing.
‘I…’ he trailed off, choking on the words. ‘You should just kill me,’ he rasped. ‘Kill me, for god’s sake, kill me!’ He shuddered, reaching reflexively for the Bloody Rose, and Kaname seized his wrist. Zero turned on him, eyes still yawning maws of emptiness. ‘You were right,’ he rasped. ‘I am weak. I am selfish. I…I can’t…I can’t protect her. I can’t even protect her from myself.’ He slammed his fist into the ground, hard enough to crack the wood on the floor. ‘Does that make you happy?’ he asked viciously. ‘Knowing you’re right?’
‘No,’ Kaname said simply, without thinking. He had been cruel, he’d goaded the hunter, fired arrow after arrow dripping with the pure poison of truth into his heart, ripped him open and forced him to bathe in his every weakness, but he hadn’t done it because he’d wanted too. Even he wasn’t that much of a sadist. He almost smiled at that. He would never be quite cruel enough to win. He should have crushed the hunter a long time ago, destroyed him the second he became a threat, no matter how inadvertent. Yet he couldn’t. Couldn’t tear out the heart of the one wild card in the deck he’d rigged. Couldn’t bear to have that blood on hands already bathed in crimson. Couldn’t watch the spark in those eyes peter into nothingness.
Zero shuddered. ‘I’m a monster. How can I…what I wanted to do…’ he trailed off again, clenching his fists hard enough that his fingernails drew bloody rents in his palms. He glanced at Kaname, feasted his eyes on his handiwork. The pureblood was a dishevelled, bloody mess, his shirt falling off his shoulders in tatters, blood smeared over his throat and torso from the gashes that had already healed. His face was unmarked, but Zero could remember all to vividly the feeling as he’s smashed his fist into those prefect features, the way the blood had roared in his ears as he’d shattered Kaname’s composure like a glass mask, revelling in the blood in the air and the pain in the pureblood’s eyes. The way the bones in his wrist has shifted as he’d slammed them against wood. He closed his eyes, trying to block out the memories of Kaname sprawled beneath him as a sacrifice on the altar of his lust, gasping in pain and whimpering in pleasure. ‘A monster, you’ve…made me a monster.’ he whispered, wishing he could believe that himself. Wishing he could still blame Kaname for what he knew was his own depravity.
Kaname nearly flinched. The accusation, no matter how hollow it rang, stung. ‘You’re not human anymore, Zero,’ he said, as gently as he could. ‘But you’re not a monster. Shizuka made you a vampire. Only you can make you a monster.’ Zero shook his head, silvery hair sticking to the blood on his cheeks.
‘I…to you. I…’ he buried his face in his hands. ‘I am a monster,’ he said again, brokenly. Kaname laid a hand on his shoulder.
‘You can’t keep fighting what you are, Zero. The more you deny it, the stronger it becomes. You think you’re a monster. Do monsters love? Do monsters feel ashamed? You can’t accept that you can be a vampire without being an animal. And unless you do, you’ll tear yourself apart.’ Zero shivered.
‘I shouldn’t be alive,’ he rasped. Kaname shook his head, fighting the urge to shake some sense into the hunter.
‘Stop it!’ he told Zero. ‘Do you enjoy this? Martyring yourself, punishing yourself for something you have no control over? There’s no strength in what you’re doing, there’s only selfishness. Dying is easy. Living is hard. If you want to be strong, if you want to prove something, if you want to help her, then live, Zero. Live.’
Zero raised his head and stared at Kaname for a moment, something moving behind his hollow eyes. Before he could speak, Kaname continued ruthlessly.
‘Do you truly think this proves something? Will you feel vindicated if you do become a monster, because you’ll prove that that’s all vampires are? This is about you, Zero, and you alone. It’s your choice. Destroying yourself proves nothing, other that that you are weak.’ For a moment, he thought he’d gone too far. Though he’d misjudged, and tempered this blade for too long in the fire. Then Zero folded forward into his embrace, collapsing in a tangle of grief and shame.
The hunter was crying again, but this time Kaname sensed there was a healing in it. Gentle autumn rains, cleansing the heat of summer from the sere earth. He cradled the hunter gently, stroking his silvery hair, and letting his tears mingle with the blood on his bare chest. He held him, because part of his was afraid that if he didn’t the other vampire might melt away in his arms, turn to sand or ashes and fly away on the evening breeze. There was a queer ache inside him, somewhere in the vicinity of his heart, an odd, tight sensation that only grew as Zero wept with the abandon he’d always been denied. He realised he envied the hunter, envied every shuddering, choking sob, every tear, every gasping breath. Here, in this moment, Zero found a perfect, tragic simplicity he would never have. He always had a hand of cards, always had an ace tucked in his sleeve, a knife in his belt, a rigged die in his pocket. He could never allow his barriers to crumble, never allow the poison in his soul to spill out and drain in a caustic rush that would soothe even as it burned.
He bowed his head, refusing to let the tears glittering in his eyes fall. Fingers brushed his cheek and he looked up, Zero’s face turned to burnished bronze and molten silver by the firelight and his tear-blurred gaze. He closed his eyes, fighting the urge to lean into the other vampire’s touch.
‘Kaname…’ Zero hesitated, as though the capricious words had fled just as he went to speak them, leaving him mute. Silently, slowly, Zero stretched up to brush his lips against Kaname’s in a sweet, almost chaste, kiss. His lips were wet with tears, and still flavoured with the barest hint of Kaname’s own blood. Zero ducked his head, looking up at Kaname through lowered lashes. ‘Thankyou,’ he said simply, though Kaname could see how much the words cost him. They weren’t easy to say.
Zero swallowed, looking everywhere but at the vampire above him. Something about the raw, desperate look in Kaname’s eyes struck a chord inside him. He wondered, then, how much longer the pureblood could endure. Even stone, unyielding and cold, could be worn down by the insistent caress of a mischievous stream, ground into a million tiny fragments of white sand. He wasn’t sure whether he kissed Kaname, or Kaname kissed him, all he knew was that they were falling together again in a blur of white skin and scorching kisses, that somewhere, somehow, their violence had metamorphosed into a tenderness only they could understand. This was their language, a bewildering mixture of bloody glyphs and meaning hidden between clumsy words, but there was a beauty in it that defied the world they fought against.
They tumbled together, and as they came apart in each others arms, for a few moments they forgot who they were, and became everything they wanted to be.
*****
Zero lay sprawled on the floor, tangled in his shirt, arms akimbo, the starlight and the gentle glow from the dying fire casting soft shadows that coiled around his naked body. Kaname watched him as he slept, an errant lock of hair rising and falling with his breathing, one hand pressed under his cheek like a child. The scent of blood lingered in the air as the perfume of flowers sometimes lingers when the flowers themselves have gone, igniting vivid memories. Amethyst eyes, dark with pleasure. Pale skin, covered in a faint sheen of sweat. The elegant arch of his exposed throat as he’d flung his head back, caught up in a moment that lasted forever and no time at all. Kaname leant forward to trace a finger gently down his sleeping lover’s cheek.
‘You’ll do your duty,’ he murmured, something behind his eyes hardening. ‘Don’t fail me, Zero Kiryuu.’ He let his touch linger for a moment, then pulled away, suddenly cold. He could pretend. Pretend this was part of his plan, pretend it was all for the sake of his pure white queen, pretend he was as removed from this as a god from the mortals they toyed with. He was, after all, wonderfully good at living a lie.
He stayed and watched the fire die, the rosy glow fading to embers, then stayed because the darkness hid his tears.
*****
THE END
Author's Notes: Well, that's it. The official conclusion to my first multi-part fanfic. Thankyou all so much for reading, the reviews have kept me going and kept me smiling. :) I am sorry there was not more smut, I really am. But come on. Use your imagination. I certainly did. XD
Comments? Feelings? *hides from potential barrage of sharp objects*
Fandom: Vampire Knight
Beta: kashibanohikari
Characters/Pairing: KanamexZero, ZeroxKaname
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: Yaoi (duh XD), biting, violence, implied sex, BDSM themes.
Disclaimer: If VK belonged to me, there would be a lot more of this. *points to fic*
Summary: Catharsis: n. from Greek katharsis, from kathairein, to purge, from katharos, pure. In the end, something has to give, and as Zero surrenders to his darker side, will Kaname be his saviour or his damnation?
Notes: AU, but could technically probably slot in to canon just after the end of season 1 of the anime. I haven't read past volume 7 of the manga or season 2 episode 10 of the anime, so apologies for any inconsistencies. I also feel I should mention that Kaname's past, which is alluded too, is from my imagination, though influenced by both Sagakure and Blackened Wing. Follows on immediately after part 4. :)
Part one is here: Games
Part two is here: Need
Part three is here: Hunger
Part four is here: Yearning
Kaname tasted of blood, thick and ambrosial, only sweetened by the tang of his fear and the sound of his heart beating a frantic tattoo against his ribcage. Zero deepened the kiss, searching for the rich, dark warmth of blood as Kaname shuddered beneath him, hopelessly trapped. His submission was almost as delicious as his blood, the feeling of his lithe body as it writhed and tensed; the slender fragility of the wrist beneath Zero’s fingers. There was a perverse beauty to his helplessness, the cant of his head, the staccato of his gasping breaths. Zero couldn’t decide, in that moment, if he wanted to piece back together the scattered fragments of a crystalline soul, or smash them anew and find a new kind of loveliness in the fragments.
His fang nicked Kaname’s lip and the kiss turned blood-drenched again, their desperate melody taking on a darker cadence. He was beyond thinking, beyond reason. He’d walked a razor’s edge between sanity and the macabre allure of madness for too long, this intoxicating, violent delirium tasted far too sweet for him to stop. He wasn’t sure what he wanted, only that Kaname’s thundering heartbeat and delectable blood were doing something to assuage the rapacious hunger gnawing at his soul. He didn’t want this anymore, he needed it, like a heroin addict who craves the rapture even as what brings them bliss devours them whole. What he didn’t understand was why Kaname was permitting this, why the pureblood was still supine beneath him. The last tatters of his reason told him Kaname could have turned the tables on him at any moment. He pulled back a little, staring into unreadable dark eyes.
‘What game are you playing?’ he hissed. Kaname just stared at him, blood on his lips and his throat.
What game are you playing? Time slowed down as Kaname gazed at the vampire above him, losing himself in crimson eyes that still contained the barest hint of amethyst. Games? Yes, this had been a game once. But now…now his white knight had sprung from the chequered board and enslaved him with his heat and his rage. The pieces were so easy to move when they had neither life nor breath, when they were just chips of ebony of ivory, knocked off the board at his whim. This had never been part of his plan. Zero, oh god, Zero, beguiling him with his own ruination. He wasn’t playing games anymore. The chilled him to the marrow with terror.
‘I…’ before he had time to finish, Zero cut him off.
‘I’m not your pawn,’ he growled, fangs bared. ‘I am not your pawn!’ Kaname had a moment to wonder at the truth of that, before Zero’s lips were on his again and all thought was obliterated by a rush of heat.
Zero knew he should stop. Knew it as surely as he knew he couldn’t stop. Something inside him had snapped, and he found himself buffeted by the tempest of his passions, drunk on blood and the perfection to be found in yielding to sin. He was drowning in their kiss, lost in a twilight labyrinth of crushed velvet and decaying roses, stumbling through briars and long strings of ivy that pulled at his ankles. His hand slid under Kaname’s shirt, pushing the silk up to expose his stomach. He trailed his nails over the bared skin and smiled darkly as Kaname choked on a gasp. He caught Kaname’s bottom lip in his teeth, and blood spilled into their fused mouths, drenching his world in a sanguinary delirium. He pressed himself harder into the pureblood, needing to cling on to something as he felt himself coming apart at the seams, everything he’d tried to suppress spilling out like cotton wool from the insides of a battered ragdoll.
He ripped Kaname’s shirt open, careless of the buttons he sent ricocheting across the floor, and pulled back, soaking up the almost decadent portrait the pureblood made. His eyes were closed, his head tilted back, his shirt pooling around him to expose his perfect, pale body, the only stain on his beauty the rusty blood still smeared on his throat. Zero bent to press a kiss to the hollow above his collarbone and the pureblood shivered. The power was intoxicating. He let his fangs graze Kaname’s skin and smiled darkly as the pureblood whimpered. He slid his hand up to cup Kaname’s face tenderly, the other still holding his wrist. He trailed his fingers lightly down the purebloods cheek, the traced the curve of his parted lips, grazing the pad of one finger against Kaname’s exposed fangs. He paused for a moment, eyes closed, lips hovering over Kaname’s throat, then dragged his fingernails brutally down the pureblood’s bare torso, blood spilling from the shallow cuts to trickle over his alabaster skin.
Kaname cried out, jerking in something perverse between pleasure and pain. The sudden agony snatched his breath away. Zero leant down, dragging his tongue from the pureblood’s navel to his collarbone, licking up the spilt blood. The wounds healed as he caressed them, and somehow that fuelled the fire burning within Zero. He wanted to mark Kaname. Wanted to see what that porcelain skin would look like littered with bruises, wanted to do something, anything, that would leave an indelible mark on the immaculate pureblood. He hurt, and all he knew was that when Kaname’s blood spread over his skin like crimson silk it ignited a dark type of pleasure. Kaname shuddered as Zero’s lips found his throat again, his wrist flexing in Zero’s grasp. He turned his head to the side, dark hair falling to obscure his face, but Zero could see the becoming flush on his cheeks, hear the rasping cadence of his breathing.
‘Is this a game?’ he whispered, nipping Kaname’s earlobe as he bent closer. ‘Are you just toying with me?’ he asked, sliding his free hand up Kaname’s body, tracing the pureblood’s ribs. He was slender, willowy as a wood nymph, the delicate arches of his bones apparent beneath his smooth skin. Zero knew all too well how strong he was, but there was an intoxicating sort of fragility to his pallid beauty; the helpless cant of his head, the blood stains on his exposed throat. His chest rose and fell with his breathing, as the livid red marks faded to a raw pink. He slid his hand up to close around Kaname’s throat, not tight enough to cut off his breathing, but firmly enough that he saw Kaname’s eye flicker shut as he fought back some fleeting emotion. He brought his face close to the pureblood’s, leaning in until their lips were nearly touching. ‘Do you enjoy this?’ he breathed, tightening his hold a little.
Kaname shut his eyes, trying to block out the image of sin incarnate leaning over him. It was useless. Zero was seared onto the backs of his eyelids, and shutting out the portrait of him merely heightened his acute awareness of the hunter’s body, pressed so intimately against his, the slender fingers clasped around his throat.
‘Do you?’ Zero whispered again, brushing a light kiss over Kaname’s lips. Kaname opened his eyes and stared into a blood-drenched purity that took his breath away. Zero smiled, fangs glinting in his mouth, and squeezed a little harder. ‘How does it feel?’ he hissed, ‘how does it feel to have somebody playing with you?’ Suddenly, Kaname couldn’t breathe. Memories reached up clammy fingers to rip through his composure, shredding his carefully constructed armour as he gasped for air, panic coursing through his veins. Chains, he could remember chains, and hands on his throat, fingernails digging into his skin, then pain, so much pain, someone was screaming…he cried out, the fear snatching away his strength. Distantly, he felt Zero freeze, and this time the eyes he met with his were wide, horrified, and amethyst free of any ruby tint.
Zero tumbled off him, collapsing onto the floor in a broken heap. Kaname lay still for a moment, breathless, the scratches on his chest stinging a little as they healed. His tattered shirt slipped off his shoulders as he sat up, his wrist screaming as he changed his position. Zero’s shoulders shook, and Kaname realised with a thrill of some undefinable emotion that the hunter was crying. Not sobbing, not weeping, just crying softly, the gentle tears of someone who had nothing left to lose, and nothing left in the world. Somebody who knew there was no point in screaming until his throat bled, because nobody would hear him or care. Somebody utterly, painfully alone.
‘What have I done?’ The broken whisper was almost too faint even for his hearing. Zero buried his head in his hands, fingers tightening convulsively in his hair. ‘What have I done?’ He wrenched his fingernails downs his cheeks, opening blood gashes in the skin. Kaname couldn’t bite back an exhalation of shock. The hunter just stared at him through blank amethyst eyes, salty tears mingling with blood as it ran down his face.
His eyes. Those brilliant eyes, always alight with something, burning with passion, with fire, with fury, with lust, with fervour, they looked dead. Cold. Like chips of gemstone in the face of a perfect sculpture. They looked…like the eyes he saw staring back at him in the mirror every day. Without thinking, Kaname slid to the ground to sit beside him, reaching out tentatively to lay a hand on Zero’s shoulder. Zero flinched away from the touch as if he’d been burned.
‘Don’t touch me,’ he whispered. ‘Please.’ His voice broke on the last word and he rocked forward again, pulling his knees to his chest as blood dripped down his chin onto his shirt. He looked suddenly like a child, desperately frightened and horribly alone, trapped by his own self-loathing.
‘I…’ he trailed off, choking on the words. ‘You should just kill me,’ he rasped. ‘Kill me, for god’s sake, kill me!’ He shuddered, reaching reflexively for the Bloody Rose, and Kaname seized his wrist. Zero turned on him, eyes still yawning maws of emptiness. ‘You were right,’ he rasped. ‘I am weak. I am selfish. I…I can’t…I can’t protect her. I can’t even protect her from myself.’ He slammed his fist into the ground, hard enough to crack the wood on the floor. ‘Does that make you happy?’ he asked viciously. ‘Knowing you’re right?’
‘No,’ Kaname said simply, without thinking. He had been cruel, he’d goaded the hunter, fired arrow after arrow dripping with the pure poison of truth into his heart, ripped him open and forced him to bathe in his every weakness, but he hadn’t done it because he’d wanted too. Even he wasn’t that much of a sadist. He almost smiled at that. He would never be quite cruel enough to win. He should have crushed the hunter a long time ago, destroyed him the second he became a threat, no matter how inadvertent. Yet he couldn’t. Couldn’t tear out the heart of the one wild card in the deck he’d rigged. Couldn’t bear to have that blood on hands already bathed in crimson. Couldn’t watch the spark in those eyes peter into nothingness.
Zero shuddered. ‘I’m a monster. How can I…what I wanted to do…’ he trailed off again, clenching his fists hard enough that his fingernails drew bloody rents in his palms. He glanced at Kaname, feasted his eyes on his handiwork. The pureblood was a dishevelled, bloody mess, his shirt falling off his shoulders in tatters, blood smeared over his throat and torso from the gashes that had already healed. His face was unmarked, but Zero could remember all to vividly the feeling as he’s smashed his fist into those prefect features, the way the blood had roared in his ears as he’d shattered Kaname’s composure like a glass mask, revelling in the blood in the air and the pain in the pureblood’s eyes. The way the bones in his wrist has shifted as he’d slammed them against wood. He closed his eyes, trying to block out the memories of Kaname sprawled beneath him as a sacrifice on the altar of his lust, gasping in pain and whimpering in pleasure. ‘A monster, you’ve…made me a monster.’ he whispered, wishing he could believe that himself. Wishing he could still blame Kaname for what he knew was his own depravity.
Kaname nearly flinched. The accusation, no matter how hollow it rang, stung. ‘You’re not human anymore, Zero,’ he said, as gently as he could. ‘But you’re not a monster. Shizuka made you a vampire. Only you can make you a monster.’ Zero shook his head, silvery hair sticking to the blood on his cheeks.
‘I…to you. I…’ he buried his face in his hands. ‘I am a monster,’ he said again, brokenly. Kaname laid a hand on his shoulder.
‘You can’t keep fighting what you are, Zero. The more you deny it, the stronger it becomes. You think you’re a monster. Do monsters love? Do monsters feel ashamed? You can’t accept that you can be a vampire without being an animal. And unless you do, you’ll tear yourself apart.’ Zero shivered.
‘I shouldn’t be alive,’ he rasped. Kaname shook his head, fighting the urge to shake some sense into the hunter.
‘Stop it!’ he told Zero. ‘Do you enjoy this? Martyring yourself, punishing yourself for something you have no control over? There’s no strength in what you’re doing, there’s only selfishness. Dying is easy. Living is hard. If you want to be strong, if you want to prove something, if you want to help her, then live, Zero. Live.’
Zero raised his head and stared at Kaname for a moment, something moving behind his hollow eyes. Before he could speak, Kaname continued ruthlessly.
‘Do you truly think this proves something? Will you feel vindicated if you do become a monster, because you’ll prove that that’s all vampires are? This is about you, Zero, and you alone. It’s your choice. Destroying yourself proves nothing, other that that you are weak.’ For a moment, he thought he’d gone too far. Though he’d misjudged, and tempered this blade for too long in the fire. Then Zero folded forward into his embrace, collapsing in a tangle of grief and shame.
The hunter was crying again, but this time Kaname sensed there was a healing in it. Gentle autumn rains, cleansing the heat of summer from the sere earth. He cradled the hunter gently, stroking his silvery hair, and letting his tears mingle with the blood on his bare chest. He held him, because part of his was afraid that if he didn’t the other vampire might melt away in his arms, turn to sand or ashes and fly away on the evening breeze. There was a queer ache inside him, somewhere in the vicinity of his heart, an odd, tight sensation that only grew as Zero wept with the abandon he’d always been denied. He realised he envied the hunter, envied every shuddering, choking sob, every tear, every gasping breath. Here, in this moment, Zero found a perfect, tragic simplicity he would never have. He always had a hand of cards, always had an ace tucked in his sleeve, a knife in his belt, a rigged die in his pocket. He could never allow his barriers to crumble, never allow the poison in his soul to spill out and drain in a caustic rush that would soothe even as it burned.
He bowed his head, refusing to let the tears glittering in his eyes fall. Fingers brushed his cheek and he looked up, Zero’s face turned to burnished bronze and molten silver by the firelight and his tear-blurred gaze. He closed his eyes, fighting the urge to lean into the other vampire’s touch.
‘Kaname…’ Zero hesitated, as though the capricious words had fled just as he went to speak them, leaving him mute. Silently, slowly, Zero stretched up to brush his lips against Kaname’s in a sweet, almost chaste, kiss. His lips were wet with tears, and still flavoured with the barest hint of Kaname’s own blood. Zero ducked his head, looking up at Kaname through lowered lashes. ‘Thankyou,’ he said simply, though Kaname could see how much the words cost him. They weren’t easy to say.
Zero swallowed, looking everywhere but at the vampire above him. Something about the raw, desperate look in Kaname’s eyes struck a chord inside him. He wondered, then, how much longer the pureblood could endure. Even stone, unyielding and cold, could be worn down by the insistent caress of a mischievous stream, ground into a million tiny fragments of white sand. He wasn’t sure whether he kissed Kaname, or Kaname kissed him, all he knew was that they were falling together again in a blur of white skin and scorching kisses, that somewhere, somehow, their violence had metamorphosed into a tenderness only they could understand. This was their language, a bewildering mixture of bloody glyphs and meaning hidden between clumsy words, but there was a beauty in it that defied the world they fought against.
They tumbled together, and as they came apart in each others arms, for a few moments they forgot who they were, and became everything they wanted to be.
*****
Zero lay sprawled on the floor, tangled in his shirt, arms akimbo, the starlight and the gentle glow from the dying fire casting soft shadows that coiled around his naked body. Kaname watched him as he slept, an errant lock of hair rising and falling with his breathing, one hand pressed under his cheek like a child. The scent of blood lingered in the air as the perfume of flowers sometimes lingers when the flowers themselves have gone, igniting vivid memories. Amethyst eyes, dark with pleasure. Pale skin, covered in a faint sheen of sweat. The elegant arch of his exposed throat as he’d flung his head back, caught up in a moment that lasted forever and no time at all. Kaname leant forward to trace a finger gently down his sleeping lover’s cheek.
‘You’ll do your duty,’ he murmured, something behind his eyes hardening. ‘Don’t fail me, Zero Kiryuu.’ He let his touch linger for a moment, then pulled away, suddenly cold. He could pretend. Pretend this was part of his plan, pretend it was all for the sake of his pure white queen, pretend he was as removed from this as a god from the mortals they toyed with. He was, after all, wonderfully good at living a lie.
He stayed and watched the fire die, the rosy glow fading to embers, then stayed because the darkness hid his tears.
*****
THE END
Author's Notes: Well, that's it. The official conclusion to my first multi-part fanfic. Thankyou all so much for reading, the reviews have kept me going and kept me smiling. :) I am sorry there was not more smut, I really am. But come on. Use your imagination. I certainly did. XD
Comments? Feelings? *hides from potential barrage of sharp objects*