Maybe that was why, hidden in the back of the classroom, at the very bottom of a trophy cabinet (one filled with all sorts of plaques and medals, papers and certificates heralding achievements) lay an old, worn-out baseball.
It hadn't been used in ages.
Come to think of it, the poor thing hadn't been looked at in years excusing the time it had taken Korso to place it at the very bottom of the cabinet. After and before that, it had simply been discarded, never to be looked at, touched, or messed with.
The owner of the baseball, the rightful one, had held a special place in Korso's heart, for however long that had been.
Blond hair, eyes blue like ice, he'd been a star pitcher for some American team the pureblood vampire hadn't cared to remember the name of. Young and promising, on his way to the major leagues...he had been the pride and joy of his parents.
Korso had certainly felt something like pride when he'd seen him for the first time in a lifetime, standing there at bat, ready to take a swing and hit a homerun.
Korso had also felt something like pride when Thomas had tried not to scream, squirming against the ropes that bound him to the wall.
His eyes of blue had long turned red, canines elongating to bite painfully against his own lip, aching for just the slightest hint of blood.
"Do you remember me?" Korso had asked, sitting before him, legs crossed, a glass of red liquid in his hand, relaxed as though nothing in the world was wrong at that moment.
He only received a snap and a growl in response.
"I remember you," the pureblood continued. He slowly twirled the glass in his hand, the thick liquid coating the sides of the glass. "I was never sure whether or not you were one of us, convinced you'd be some deformed half-breed I'd have to put down. You can't trust those dhampirs after all."
His laughter was the only one that rose in the room.
"But then I find out that you're nothing of the sort. Imagine my surprise. I suppose that bitch really was a vampire after all." The liquid found its way down his throat, the sustenance of vampires filling him in a way that nothing else ever would.
Eyes red and fangs bared, Korso picked himself up, getting oh-so-close to Thomas, the one who snapped and growled at him, lunging forward with a fierceness in his eyes that hadn't been there for the past four days.
"I'm not done with you yet, dear Thomas." A hand reached out, dragging steel-like nails across the exposed skin of the baseball player's arms. Where once blood would leak, spill across the unforgiving stone floor, nothing came forth. Thomas had been bled dry each day now, pumped full of the blood of dead animals to sustain him - a sort of poison in its own right.
Again and again, he'd been promised that if he could do this, act like this, talk like this, he'd be set free. He'd been promised, a smile on Korso's face that never reached his eyes, that no more holy water would be shoved down his throat, no more stakes driven into his arms, no more flesh pulled away.
But Korso promised a lot of things.
As the days passed, the fight in Thomas slowly drained away, the light in his eyes fading as the poison and holy water took its effect. Korso kept him company through and through, talking with him as though they were old friends even as he drove screws under the boy's fingernails.
When at last it was enough, Korso smiled once more, stake in hand.
"Just remember," he said as he began to drive it through Thomas' undead heart slowly, hammering it in painful inch by inch, "I love you, my son."
Those were the last words Thomas had heard.
Korso had never looked at Thomas' baseball after that.
But it was still there to remind him.
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