Because I missed this series so much I did a little one shot... NOT TO BE READ AT TEN O CLOCK AT NIGHT ALONE! (when I wrote it)

Gakupo groaned as he finished his dinner. He'd been looking forward to having a long, well-deserved rest since he'd been working on the new song for his CD but he'd just remembered he had been asked to come up with a new single for the fans.

Sighing he opened up the new dishwasher and put his plate in one of the neat white wired slots. His was going to be the first plate washed, which, he figured, was something to be happy about.

The house was weirdly quiet. It was normal to hear the whirring of mechanical tools drifting up from the basement-lab where the Master worked but there was only silence. Gakupo figured that either she had fallen asleep or she was working on the design for something new.

None of the other Vocaloids seemed to be stirring either. For the first time in many months there was no discordant melody emanating from upstairs, no jarring guitar chords as someone taught themselves a new song, no fighting, bickering, or music of any kind.

Just silence.

Gakupo liked the quiet and paused at the foot of the stairs to savor it. It wasn't often that he was allowed a moment of peace and he relished in it while it lasted.

On his way up stairs he experimented with the sounds of his footfalls against the thick carpet. He made a short rhythm, listened to see if he liked it then sped up or slowed down until he found a beat that he could follow. When he got to his room he would jot down the tempo and rhythm of the beats he liked and see if he could compose a melody to follow the beat.

He never told any of the other Vocaloid that that was how he wrote his songs, he was afraid that they might try and mess him up. Sure, it was a bit unorthodox, but it was his method and he liked it.

Too soon the end of the stairs came and he had to just walk down to his room, but before he did he slowed down his breathing to the gentle silent lapping of a wave against some beach and listened around. He heard nothing.

None of the other Vocaloid were moving, talking, or even listening to music. With thirteen Vocaloids in the house at the moment, it was incredible that not a single one was stirring or making a noticeable noise of any kind.

Except for Dell. He seemed to sleep eighteen hours of every day and it was rare to see him moving for more than food or the occasional cigarette. Dr. Evil had sent him over from another Vocaloid correspondent, Dr. Rita to see if the Master could reprogram him or fix whatever kept him asleep for so long.

Gakupo glanced down the deep, black hallway and tugged his tee-shirt away from his neck as he was suddenly seized by the sensation that it was choking him. The darkened hall seemed like the abysmal passage to another world as the unsettling silence pressed against his eardrums, making them rumble with every slight trembling step he took.

"I have to make it to my bedroom" that was the only thought on his mind. "Once I'm there, near the window where I can see the sun I'll feel silly for being so scared."

The doors which stood on either side of the walls that used to be passage ways to friends and family now seemed to him to stand like ominous overlords; standing, watching, guarding the poor lost soul plunging down deeper into the darkness.

At the end of the hallway was a single door. Gakupo knew it led to Meiko's room; silly, drunk, motherly Meiko that they all knew. He didn't care.

It was a simple, plain door and it hadn't changed at all since he'd seen it that morning; yet somehow the simplicity and the homeliness of the scene made it all the more terrifying.

"Meiko isn't in that room anymore." He told himself as a trail of goose bumps crept along a path up the back of his neck and he clenched his fists against a sudden cold trail of water running in his veins.

No, Meiko was forever absent from that room. Her presence had been wiped away. He'd done it himself. He'd taken the last proof of her there and had whittled it away until it had disappeared.

He was standing at his door, his breathing still at a slow meditative pace. He was hardly breathing at all and had actually been relaxing into a stupor. He began to breath normally again and shook off the sensation that he'd been drifting off to sleep.

With his hand on the doorknob he felt safe, reassured. There was nothing in the world strange of odd or scary, except that there was a rare few minutes of quiet in the house.

But then that wasn't true anymore. There was a creaking noise now. It was next to silent, but in that dark hallway, with his silent breathing against his racing heart it might as well have been screaming.

The gentle, almost complacent groaning. The wood moaning like one who has long suffered and no longer wishes for relief, only to express the pain.

Gakupo glanced down the blackened hallway. Meiko's old door stood slightly ajar.

Slightly ajar. Silently pleading, almost goading, if not begging someone to come and grasp the shiny door handle and take the miniscule effort needed to open the door the rest of the way and step inside.

Partly open like a hungry mouth, that sees its prey and hangs its drooling jaw just a bit to let the lingering scent inside and play around the mouth, teeth, the tongue. Taunting. Yet that only makes it the more satisfying when it seizes up its seducer.

It was cracked slightly, like a smile. A boldfaced smile in the face of all of his assurance and all of his denial that something scary was happening. It had swung open, or so it seemed, just to show that his rationalizations were unfounded.

A thin line of blue light from the window enticed Gakupo to step forward, like a thin tongue of blue fire that lolled out onto the floor, giving the very plain looking door the further appearance of being a portal to another world.

"Another world, another dimension, another space, another time; or just another room?" He asked himself, hand resting self-assured on his own, fine, familiar doorknob.

He turned to stare at his hand. It was lazily, almost limply lying across his doorknob that had been shined with constant use over the few years of his life. To him it said: "Don't risk it. You're here, just ignore it." Like a loyal friend with an acute sense of danger.

"Danger? What danger?" Gakupo let his hand slide off the doorknob and hang at his side. His fingers were momentarily caught and lingered, as if refusing at first to succumb to his will but gravity finished the job for him.

He looked at the opened door. It was almost arrogant in its denial of all of his comforting, if not scornful deductions.

With a sudden rush of adrenaline he raced for the door, before his better sense could prompt him to do otherwise. He suddenly found himself flying down the hallway, his footsteps echoing the tremulous beating of his heart that throbbed on either side of his temples like the dull crack of sledge hammers working away at his skull.

The doors passed by as if by magic, and the distance between footsteps seemed to gradually become longer and longer. He felt as though he were leaping and staying in the air for minutes at a time and that the doors were zooming past him like streetlights on the highway.

Then suddenly he was there.

He was at the door, just barely slowing himself down enough to halt his momentum and keep from crashing into the wood. He was so close to it he could feel his hot breath bounce back and hit him in the face.

He looked down and saw that tongue of blue fire lying across his boot. He thoughtlessly picked up his foot, scolding himself a moment later for being foolish. It wasn't actually a tongue of blue fire; it was a beam of light being filtered in through the window.

"Push it you chicken." He goaded himself, looking down at the gleaming crystal doorknob. "There's nothing to be scared of." he reassured himself in the same breath.

For all of the hype and all of the certainty in his mind that there was nothing unusual in the room he still found it impossible to move for several seconds. Whenever he picked up his hand and reached for the knob his stomach would clench with fear, and an eerie smile would play across his face as though he KNEW what he found on the other side would turn that smile that he just couldn't control into a scream.

Finally, he gritted his teeth and grinned in the face of unknown and unspoken terror. He ignored the clenching of his stomach that was like one million flapping bird wings tickling his insides and with all of the strength in his arm he clenched the knob.

Once he had the shiny, iridescent thing in his clutches the next part was the simplest: Push!

The door swung open with the very least of his prompting. A thrill of fear rocked Gakupo and he had to put his hand to his chest to keep his metal heart from pounding itself free.

From beneath his black tee-shirt he could feel the thin, lightweight metal bars that made up the human-esque ribcage of his. From somewhere beneath these bars his poor heart was fluttering madly like a frantic song bird terrified and panicked. The veins and skin pushed against his fingers like the cloth over a gilded cage.

"Maybe that's all I ever was." Gakupo thought as he closed his eyes and tried to reign in the intense feelings. "A walking, talking birdcage filled with all manners of birds desperate to be free; sensing with their animal instinct the danger I choose to ignore, desperate to abandon this suicide mission."

But as he opened his eyes and looked around he finally felt what he had wanted to feel all along: silly.

There was nothing in the room. It was completely empty. Meiko had taken her things with her when she moved out of the house with Kaito that May, after their marriage. He had helped her clean up himself.

Gakupo sighed and smiled. He wanted to laugh at himself for getting so worked up, but he settled for smiling. It was funny after all, and the relief made it almost doubly more so.

He walked around, looking at the imprints on the carpet where Meiko's furniture used to lay feeling both sad, and happy. But most of all nostalgic.

He missed Kaito, and he missed Meiko. They were both a lot of fun to be around, but when Kaito moved out he felt as though he'd lost a great friend, and one of the few people who understood him. He still saw him for work and for fun sometimes but nothing could compare to them living together.

Gakupo shook his head and turned around to take one last parting glimpse of the room before retiring to his own room and working on the beat he'd come up with on the stairs. And of course sleeping.

He blinked twice and screamed.

There, in the corner of the room, lurking in shadows was a hideous creature the likes of which he had never seen. Its face was a sickly white, the white of a fish's belly which stood in direct contrast with the black, shiny, soulless pits that emanated from where eyes were supposed to be. It cocked its head and the crimson red of its mouth was bathed in the fading sunlight. White, sharp, crooked teeth jutted from the mouth like a horrible reptile; some foul lizard that thirsted for smaller prey that he could sink his terrible fangs into with a sickening crunch.

Oh god, Gakupo could hear the crunch of something in between its jaws. He could hear it as plainly as if it were happening before him. The terrible crunch that you could feel from several feet away and that made you sick to your stomach.

The shadows of the sunset etched caverns of darkness across a face so twisted and deformed it looked painfully jovial. It staring him down with neither joy, nor humor it its black eyes, yet a perpetual grin was stretched across its thin bony face. A fat, red grin across slick shiny lips fringed with white teeth. The skin pulling away in grievously deep laugh lines and sending fissures up the round, jolly cheeks and scraggily cracks into the canyons that seemed to be eyes.

He looked up into the eyes. The eyes which vanished into the monster's forehead. The black empty pits were flickering madly.

The complete analysis of the creature took less than a second. The next second was easily the most taxing of his whole life.

The monster proved it was alive by leaning out to grab him; leering from out of the shadows it stretched its two massive hands in one sudden motion, as if to seize his face and pull him in closer to the thing where it could hold him down, or even take a bite out of him, if it so pleased.

For Gakupo, it was as though he was trapped in some horrible dream. He saw the thing, he saw the hands. The stiff fingers and broken ugly nails that were filled with dirt; as though the monster had clawed and dug and fought its way straight out of some god-forsaken grave to get here.

The fingers were unbelievably long, and they seemed to stretch out as they came closer to him. He was reminded of the strange happenings when he ran to the door, how time seemed to slow down, and wondered briefly if he was hallucinating.

Suddenly it was all too real. He looked up and saw that hideous face, and a river of blood-red hair that was twisted and gnarled into a flower that spread away from the back of its head. It reminded him of the dead bodies of TV, floating in still water with their hair billowing up like a water lily. The blood-lily hair disappeared into the shadows like a scarlet tether to another world, the only portal to which lies in the shadows behind its back.

He didn't want to go. He didn't want it to touch him with the white, limp, clammy hands that spoke of one long, long dead. If it touched him the chill alone would kill him, his heart wouldn't be able to stand it. If it touched him and he somehow survived it would pull him into the shadows, where he had no inkling what might become of him. It was somehow an even worse threat than the possibility of being eaten at that moment. The uncertainty was the worst fear.

He imagined the crunch. The feeling of his bones shattering and splintering against the stone-hardened teeth. He forgot momentarily that he was an android.

At that moment the monster decided to let out a guttural growl, and Gakupo felt the last of his breath turn cold in his chest and escape him in a horrified sigh.

It was too much, too much. There was too much human in the animalistic sound he'd heard. It was almost a human voice attempting to speak, but choked by a horrible primal roar. The humanity made it so much more terrible.

Then suddenly it hit him: plastic. The creature's face was plastic. It was a mask, and a mask that he'd seen before as a matter of fact!

He groaned, no longer afraid and collapsed to his knees. His legs had turned to jelly and would no longer support him. He brought his fists up to his face and closed his eyes, waiting for the adrenaline to wear off and his heart to return to a normal pace.

The entire charade took no more than five seconds in total, but to Gakupo it had been a lifetime. He was exhausted and the demon clown began to chime a chorus of high-pitched giggling to fit his ridiculous mood.

"I can't believe you screamed like that!" Len said pulling off the terrifying face.

"You scream like a girl!" Rin said emerging from Meiko's empty closet. They exchanged glances and descended into a fit of hysterics, occasionally trying to imitate his girly scream.

"Hey, is every one alright? I heard a scream." Luka said opening the door and peering in.

"It was Gakupo! He shrieked!" Rin said in between gasps for breath.

Gakupo stood up now that the blood had returned to his legs and his heart had slowed down. He walked over to the door and grabbed the door jamb for support as his legs pitched and threw him slightly.

He looked into Luka's concerned, curious eyes and felt ashamed of his cowardice, but also redeemed for his fears.

"This is my word of warning ahead of time: I'm going to kill your siblings."