Just To Love

The thirst was making it impossible to think straight. Kaname clutched his throat and bit back the searing pain. Haruka and Yuuri were out for the night, leaving the two children alone in the basement of the mansion. They trusted him unconditionally and he despised it, because he could not trust himself.

He tensed up, almost collapsing on the couch, as he felt her small hands land in his hair and caress it. Frozen in shock for a moment, he pressed his lips together and wanted to push her away before he lost all control.

"Yuuki…" He mumbled, voice raspy and half-choked, but she kept on stroking his hair with her small, soft hands, as if she was unaware of his desperate condition.

"I wrote you a song, Onii-sama," she mumbled, calm and soft. He was half-lying on the sofa and she was sitting by his head, and when she leaned over him her long, silky strands stroked his face. Her sweet scent enveloped him completely and made saliva pool around his fangs, but he bit back the urge.

"You did?" he said, trying to sound encouraging and curious as he always was to whatever she did, even though the thirst dimmed his senses. He bit into the back of his own palm, but it could not soothe him.

"Uh-huh." The five-year-old nodded proudly. She mumbled quick and melodic words, the melody entwining so delicately with her voice. Yuuki was not musically inclined, they had noticed, and Yuri would sometimes smile when her daughter sang off-key. The words were as light as butterflies, the happy safe fantasies of a child who had always been sheltered and never known darkness. It made his chest twist, like so many times before, to know why. This room without windows was her entire world. She loved looking at pictures of sunsets and rain in a book, without ever feeling it against her skin.

Yet she sung like she had reason to be the happiest girl on earth.

The song enveloped him and momentarily dulled the thirst. Her constant smiling faces and assuring that she was fine here - could he not fight back his instincts for that? If he ever scared her, he would never forgive himself.

He was a monster for craving this little girl, whose eyes were the sun and the moon, the innocence and unselfishness she wore like a halo – she had not even once requested to leave the basement, knowing it would cause a disagreement between Kaname, who advocated for her sake, and their parents who wanted to keep her safe more than anything else.

Before her, there had been an endless darker, wastelands of nothing but destruction. There was only that girl in the very furthest depths of his memory, back when he was about to turn into a monster, after the disastrous loss he had suffered. Back then, in a place that now lingered in his memory, the world had turned on him, crushed him, with the peaceful corpse of the hooded woman, whose heart had melted in the furnace. She had left him behind.

She, the strange girl, had stepped on a piece of a broken mirror and immediately alerted his senses. He had looked up with his weapon at hand, prepared to kill – as his instincts had taught him – when he saw her.

She wore a black uniform with a bow and her long, dark hair moved in the night breeze. Her eyes were wide, filled with hurt, and he suddenly wanted to know why.

She had looked at Kaname, the ancestor, as if she knew him very well. But no one knew him - he had just lost the only one that he had ever loved, and he wanted to tear out his own heart and turn to dust.

"Artemis?" she said, looking at the deadly scythe in his hand, as if she knew it very well. It gleamed sharply in the moonlight.

"It certainly is a worthy name for this thing," he had said, extending the scythe in her direction. He saw the flicker of uncertainty in her eyes, one of her shoes scraping against the ground as if she was about to take a step backwards. He had felt compelled to speak his mind, in the strange young girl's company.

"No one can be a replacement for another person," he had told her when she attempted to mend his grief with her empty but kind words. That's why farewells are always so difficult.

Now, thinking of this memory in his newly awakened ten-year-old self, he knew it had been a lie. Yuuki had become his everything.

The strange girl in his adult self's memory had disappeared after naming his weapon. Turning his eyes to the little vampire girl next to him on the couch in the Kuran mansion, she had the same nuance of her long hair and wide eyes.

The thirst had diminished enough when he distracted himself with his memories, let his body and mind rest in fear of what would happen if he ever were to hurt this girl, and it helped him control himself.

She – the woman from his past, who gave him a name and a reason to exist, would be happy for him. She would smile her kind smile to see him happy again, but it faded to white compared to Yuuki's warmth and presence. The hooded woman must have mourned when he had given in to the numbing darkness and laid down in his coffin, paralyzed by his own grief, and fell into a thousand-year-old sleep.

Yuuki's hand and singing voice soothed him, mended him, dusted off the pieces of hurt and self-hatred and shock and agony of being awakened in a child's body, knowing very well the life that had been taken in order for him to awaken.

Maybe it was worth awakening after millennia, just for this child. To protect her and look after her and make sure she would always be happy. To care for something among this mess and bloodshed and curses, that was inherently pure. It was reason enough for his existence.

Her tiny finger stroked his cheek, catching a drop there, and she looked at him with wide, wondering eyes as she tasted his tear. "Onii-sama?"

Pushing back the thirst was easier now, focusing on her brightness, and he managed to ignore and suppress the burn in his throat as he wrapped his arms around her and held her tight to his chest. She snuggled up at once, placing her head against his neck.

"Don't be sad, don't be sad," she sing-sang, her voice so bright, so knowing. "I'll sing my song for you every night, Onii-sama, so you'll never have to be sad again."

Once again he thought of the young woman that he saw in that wasteland of a village millennia ago. If Yuuki ever found out the truth, would she be appalled and disgusted by what she would see in him?

But he couldn't imagine a world where she would possibly have access to his dark memories, how she could ever travel back to that empty place.

He lay down on the couch, gently adjusting her to rest by his side, and decided to not linger on those thoughts. Yuuki was next to him, mumbling soothing words and cuddling him. He stroked her hair with all the tenderness he had left, looking into her eyes that he recognized so well.

Yuuki loved him, unconditionally, as he loved her, and that could be enough. She was here now, and she had no concept of furnaces and anti-vampire weapons, of cures and human villagers, sacrifices and betrayal, not even of the world outside this house. But some day she would know, he knew that, and his greatest fear was not being able to protect her from it.

She, the only warmth that remained in this world.

.

More than a decade later, after the enormous wait and separation and he could finally hold his most beloved in his arms again, to feel her heart skip and shudder like before, only seeing the new gleam in her eye, he wondered, for a short moment, how come she had decided to go with him, to be his forever, to choose him over everything else.

She was now resting on the lid of his coffin, the one that had been his place of rest for millennia, still lost in the real Kaname's memories. She woke up with a gasp of pain, or thirst.

He was sitting next to her, seeing the thousands of little things that flickered through her eyes when she recognized him. She finally knew who he was, and she did not recoil.

She reached up her hand without a word, eyes still wide with emotion, and touched his face. He looked into her eyes and thought that maybe this was enough.

If only she would sing for him again.

"The greatest thing you'll ever learn, is just to love, and be loved in return."

Fin.

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