˗ˏˋ kei ⭒ 22 ⭒ she/her ⭒ EN/日本語 ⭒ multi fandom ⭒ multi purpose ˎˊ˗
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Hey hey! I've been making OCs and writing about them since I was a little kid. I also have way too many interests. Hope you like my fics :))
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☆ The re:Genesis Project: Shuu x OC [Masterlist] [Ongoing]
☆ Family Traditions: Sebastian Sallow x OC [Masterlist]
☆ Beasts from the East: Newt Scamander x OC [Masterlist]
☆ 12 Days of Christmas 2024 Challenge [Masterlist]
WIP
☆ nothing at the moment...
Please reblog and follow if you enjoy my work! It's greatly appreciated ✩
tags:
#keirandom - random thoughts i have
#keifanfics - my fanfics!
#keioriginals - original creative pieces or essays
#keiresearch - every update post relating to my dissertation research on female fanfiction writers (this research was completed as of may 2025)
#keinavigation - navigation (this post!)
#keimasterlist - masterlist
i'm going to say something insane. i think the overall pronounced fandom cultural slide away from complex plotty violent work and towards kidfic and coffee shops AUs and cozy domestic romcoms is a symptom of fascism.
Reblogging this for the term "neopastoralism", because I think that's fantastic.
Coffee shop AUs are, like... fine. They're not my thing, but they're hardly going to end the world. We don't need to have a moral panic about people enjoying coffee shop AUs. I'm also not about to come for anyone seeking escapism in the current hellscape.
However, I do think it's interesting to examine the tendency within these AUs to project a sort of idyll onto the coffee shop: here is a whimsical place where you can spend time with your friends and potentially meet your true love; here is a world where the greatest dilemma you may face is choosing the right coffee syrup for a new beverage or sneaking your number onto that to-go cup without being obvious.
The fantasy of the coffee shop AU is divorced almost entirely from the reality of an actual coffee shop. There are no abusive, creepy customers or bosses; there is no mention of the barista's wages; we don't see the dishwasher sweating at their station, the cashiers' aching feet; the person whose job it is to clean the (customer-only?) toilets. These topics are Political and Depressing and Must Be Avoided, because Political and Depressing things are antithetical to this kind of escapism.
The coffee shop AU exists, not in a world without capitalism (because this is a setting where commerce is actively happening) but in a world where capitalism has no teeth: a world where capitalism somehow works. In order to be convinced and soothed by this fantasy, you must suspend your disbelief and avert your eyes. You must filter the coffee shop through a neopastoralist lens.
Fandom: Fantastic Beasts
Pairing: Newt Scamander x OC (Rosalind Leitch)
Word count: 3.3k
Synopsis: Rosalind Leitch is perfectly comfortable being a muggle, hiding away in her village in Scotland and tending to her magical plants. But when Newt Scamander asks her to journey across China with him in search of the Qilin, she cannot find it in herself to say no.
Warnings: description of mild injury
Read on AO3
Beasts from the East Masterlist
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The sun had only just begun crawling over Oban’s forested horizon when Rosalind pulled on her shoes at the front door. Her coffee had already cooled on the kitchen counter, forgotten during her daily morning retreat into the greenhouse behind her wardrobe doors. Rosalind checked her wrist watch and seethed; she whispered to herself, “Shit.” She was running late already.
But when she locked the front door behind her and dropped the keys into her bag, she realised how oddly light it was. Of course, caught up in her usual bid to water all her plants on time, she’d left behind the one thing she needed for the day. With a huff, Rosalind forced herself back into her narrow terraced home, up the stairs cluttered with simple potted plants, and back into her walnut wardrobe. On the other side was her version of heaven: a jungle captured under a dome of foggy glass. The plants underneath were separated into four cloisters each protruding from the circle in the centre; a willow sprouted in the middle from the dry and cracked dirt floor, its branches multiplied endlessly the taller it grew. Spindly claws that could grow no higher creeped along the ceiling instead—leaves of pale green hung from each branch in bunches, they were just low enough to brush the top of Rosalind’s hair as she walked by.
A dusty green recliner was laid invitingly in front of the thick trunk. There was a dark brown desk on the other side, behind the tree, so old that one leg had to be propped up by a bit of folded paper, but it worked well enough. She searched skittishly through the various book spines piled high: One Thousand Magical Herbs and Fungi, Encyclopedia of Toadstools, Beasts from the East, and— there was a letter hanging carelessly out from between the pages of that one. It was written in an awfully messy hand that she could somehow still understand because it was from her sister, Celia, detailing her recent exploits in Hong Kong with a rich wizarding merchant. Rosalind tossed the letter back onto the desk and kept searching. Finally, the one she was looking for—Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them—sat pretty at the very bottom of the pile. She sighed in relief and pulled it out carelessly, turning away before the rest of the books scattered across the desk with a thump.
Her walk to work was as uneventful as ever. The weeds that grew between the cobblestones were slightly taller than last week, and the old lady’s garden that Rosalind often tended to was still prim and proper. The lady herself stood in the doorway in her dressing gown as usual, a cigarette dying between her fingers. She waved at Rosalind, who plastered a smile on her face and waved back. Then she continued on her way. Her boss, Sir Radley, was already slouched at the desk in his office when she entered; she hurried to put her things down at her own desk that guarded his office door, gathered the agenda for the day, and entered his room without even a knock.
“Miss Leitch!” Radley glanced up at her with a weaselly smile. His eyes slid down from the grey cloche hat still on her head to the way her trouser hems draped just above her Mary Janes. Then he lifted his gaze to meet hers again and said, “Trousers today?”
She had to blink—hard—to stop her eyes from rolling into the back of her head. “Yes, sir. Always when I have a date.”
He tried, poorly, to mask his scoff with a laugh. “That’s right, you’ve been working for me for so long that I’ve nearly forgotten how old you are!” he harrumphed, “I hope you can find a man to settle down with soon.”
“Thank you, sir,” Rosalind said through gritted teeth. She could think of nothing worse. “Well, about your meeting with Mr Craig later today…”
The day ticked away much more slowly than Rosalind would have liked, but Radley’s ‘sympathies’ towards her love life allowed her to leave the office earlier than usual. She approached a familiar alley just two streets away, slotted between the florist and the bakery, and looked around cautiously at the chipped stone storefronts around her; not a single soul was in sight, they still slaved away at their day jobs for now. Rosalind took one step into the alley and let the darkness consume her. One foot in front of the other, she continued on until a light glinted at her from the other end; it grew wider and taller until she stepped through into a world of eternal sunset.
Rosalind had lost track of the hours here many times before; narrow shops each three stories tall loomed over her, blocking the desperate sun’s golden rays from reaching her. The witches and wizards that pushed past her in the busy streets of this wizarding enclave, Dene, had no idea a muggle knew how to enter their shopping district. Even without the ability to wield magic, if Rosalind dressed just slightly unconventionally, nobody would bat an eye at her presence—hence the trousers today. She had her dear sister to thank for all her forbidden knowledge.
Despite being identical twins, Celia was the muggle-born Witch while Rosalind was… just a muggle. The two of them tried so very hard to find ways for Rosalind to turn into a Witch—perhaps her magic was simply latent or locked away somehow. In their pursuit, they found ways to enjoy magic together whenever Celia came home from Hogwarts. They’d spend her scarce Galleons on all sorts of magical trinkets and potions that muggles could handle, but Rosalind found the most joy in plants, especially since they were so plentiful in the forest nearby. Enough time pouring over Celia’s old Herbology textbooks taught her how to spot them all throughout Oban. Celia created the wardrobe-greenhouse for her shortly after her bedroom became much too jungle-like.
When Rosalind moved on from her foolish, albeit happy, stint in pretending to be a Witch, she was still determined to use her Herbology skills for good. She agreed with Celia that the International Statute of Secrecy was ridiculous, and she agreed even more so after witnessing first-hand the devastations of post-war pestilence. Whenever Rosalind laid a sheet over yet another corpse, some potion that could have cured their plight always came to mind. Instead, she did what she could for them with plants; at least that made some sort of a difference, she told herself every night.
Rosalind came to when she brushed shoulders with a Witch. She muttered an apology and endeavoured to pay more attention. Most of the people who wandered the worn cobbles were strangers to Rosalind. She’d never ventured down one of the many other dark alleyways spotted around Dene, but she knew from the talk of passers-by that they led to other, distant parts of Scotland. Dene was an enclave that existed only between the cracks in muggle imagination, allowing its alleys to connect every wizard from Dumfries to Shetland. If she really needed to, Rosalind could travel to Edinburgh by foot in just half a day by meandering carefully through the narrow streets. It was a simple part of everyday wizarding life in Scotland, and enclaves were probably much the same in other countries too, but that didn’t stop the odd English wizard from popping up every now and then to marvel at such an ‘invention’.
There used to be maps intended to help both wizard and muggle alike to navigate such delicately woven enclaves, made by a curiously named Desdemona Villiers. Celia was obsessed with the concept, writing about them to Rosalind in every other letter during their school years. They apparently had a special way of illustrating the connections of enclaves to the muggle world, such that there was only one copy of each, and the Ministry held onto them very tightly. After all, if muggles were to find out how to access wizarding enclaves, there could be problems.
That only spurred Celia on more to get her hands on them and redistribute them all. If she couldn’t turn her sister into a Witch, she could at least tear down the wall between muggles and wizards that forced them to lead such different lives. But when the Great War came, the Ministry destroyed all of those maps for its renewed fear of muggles. Over a decade later, Rosalind still grimaced at the memory of how much Celia cried upon hearing the news. She didn’t cry for long, however, for she determinedly set her sights on the one map the Ministry did not have: the Enclave Map of China.
It was in the hands of some prominent Chinese wizard as he was the one who commissioned it from Ms Villiers. Somehow, as recently as Rosalind had seen her, Celia had befriended an English merchant Wizard based in Hong Kong who was in conversation with the man about trading the map, all for a magical Chinese beast they had captured. Apparently, that map held the key to turning Rosalind into a Witch. When Celia approached her a few weeks later with a book all about the concoction, Rosalind turned her away, and she hadn’t heard from her since. She harrumphed at her own brooding, turning her attention to more important matters.
Now, Rosalind would usually run her errands at Pottering Plants and quickly return home. But today was different. She immediately made for the book shop, Quills & Quivers. She stopped briefly to glance at the chalkboard posted up outside, ‘Fantastic Beasts - Book Signing Today!’ She hurried inside; the bell above the door chimed with her arrival. The bookshop itself was small and used mostly to display singular copies of recent publications; the rest of the store’s stock stretched out infinitely behind the counter before her, shelves upon shelves of books that seemed to lead to nowhere. There were only three people queuing in front of her—they obscured the hunched figure of the author behind the counter that she wished to talk to, so Rosalind opted to kill time by looking at some of the ridiculous titles on display.
When the man in front of her finally stepped aside, Rosalind froze for a moment, her eyes bearing into the meek author in front of her. For a moment, blue eyes stared back at her. And then the unthinkable happened: she smiled. It was a genuine smile, creeping across her face like crawling ivy; her mouth threatened to burst open and reveal her teeth. She schooled her features quickly when she thought she might be making a fool of herself. Newt Scamander, with his head bowed down slightly and his eyes darting nervously all about the place, had made Rosalind smile! She calmed herself, breathing in and out slowly, before she placed her book open on the table in front of Newt.
He paused for a moment to glide his fingers across the paper edges. They were warped and the fibres were frayed at the corners. One quick flick through, a look at the smudged ink, told him it was from water damage. Rosalind caught onto his confusion and, uncharacteristically bashful, she said, “Sorry, I keep it in my greenhouse.”
“Oh, you’re a Herbologist?” Newt glanced up at her reluctantly for a moment to see her nod in response.
“Something like that.”
He dabbed his quill in the drying ink pot and leaned down against the counter to start writing. Then he froze, refusing to look up at her again through his overgrown fringe, “Sorry, what’s your name?”
“Rosalind,” she croaked. He started scribbling in the book instantly. She wished he would slow down; she wanted to talk, she wanted to say literally anything. But her rehearsed questions about how many countries he’s visited, or how he first discovered his love of magical beasts, all faded from her mind. Resigned to her fate, her fear of experiencing something new, no matter how much she longed for it, Rosalind simply chewed at her lip and waited for him to finish.
“If you’re a Herbologist, could you tell me the best place to find Petalwort?” He set the quill down and fanned his hand above the page to speed up the ink’s drying process. The answer to this was simple: there was a small domesticated patch on the other side of Dene. Newt could simply walk over and harvest a few without any hassle, but Rosalind had just been served her opportunity on a silver platter.
“Dunollie Wood is just a ten minute walk from the Oban exit, there’s an abundance of Petalwort over there. Why do you need it?” she asked.
The ink finally dried, and so Newt closed the cover on it. The title stared back at him, a daunting reminder that he was still, legally, forbidden from travelling. “It’s for one of my creatures,” he said.
Unlikely. Rosalind knew every plant in Dunollie wood well, and petalwort was only ever useful for destructive purposes (or a well-staged prank). Even more the reason for her to check up on him, she told herself. “Just be careful when you harvest it,” she warned him, “twist the stem twice to the left, and then five times to the right.”
“Thank you,” Newt nodded and handed her slightly faded book back to her, “I’ll see you.”
When her back was finally turned to him, her book safely returned to her bag, Rosalind scrunched her face up a little. See you, a harmless greeting that didn’t actually indicate any intent to see her again—well, she was going to make it happen anyway. Newt still had a few more people to sign for, but Rosalind figured it would be best to go on ahead of him. Dunollie was her land, after all; wouldn’t it be weird if he didn’t bump into her? Her feet carried her swiftly back through the long and dark alleyway out of Dene.
Darkness had already greeted Dunollie Wood like an old friend when Rosalind arrived. There was a straight path beaten directly through the coniferous trees which led to the next town over, a result of centuries of humans who walked through here before her. As always, when she approached a particularly looming Rowan tree, Rosalind stepped to the right and disappeared into the unfeeling shadow; it was the effect of a luscious and leafy canopy above that blocked the moonlight, and the floor was unforgiving with thick roots and shed leaves.
She used to make the mistake of staying out too late under doting Pines, Birch, and Oaks many times in her childhood; with her town below being a little too safe for her liking, Rosalind sought adventure in Dunollie’s year-round bounty of magical herbs. At twenty-nine years, she had already brought every single one back to her greenhouse, but the thrill of trotting through the wood, her wood, at night never faded. Still, she thought it might be terribly inconvenient if she were to trip and ruin her clothes.
Rosalind felt all around with her hands at the familiar trees for support, as if she were hugging and receiving old relatives, until her fingers grazed the smooth and twisting bark of a Juniper tree. She crouched down and plucked one, two, seven small mushroom caps from its roots, rubbed them together between her hands, and blew their disintegrated pieces to the wind. The spores—Solas nymphs, they were called—acted immediately upon being set free; tiny balls of light floated all around her in blue and orange and green. It was enough light to guide her the rest of the way to the lichen grove: a small grassy haven which glowed permanently in the light of a thousand Solas nymphs.
And there he was, undeniably, on the other side of the grove: Newt Scamander from the bookstore, with his briefcase laid open just a few steps behind him. Rosalind mentally cursed herself for forgetting that he had the advantage of using magic while she did not. Of course he was going to be able to beat her here. His back was turned to her, showing only his dark blue woolen coat, but Rosalind was sure it was him—she had never seen any other man hold themselves in the same way as him. Even when approaching the invasive and colourful mosses which carpeted almost the entire grove, his movements were gentle, tentative, meek. He crouched down and made himself smaller yet before reaching his hand out to pluck a bunch of Petalworts, their slimy coating shining blue in the glow of the surrounding light-spores. Rosalind decided now might be a good time to finally speak up.
But she was too late; she had only just stepped out from the safety of a nearby tree trunk when she saw Newt twist the moss the wrong way. He ripped it out of the soil with delicacy, but as soon as its anchors left the ground, a white light flashed across the forest floor. Rosalind braced herself, gritting her teeth and shielding her eyes from the spark. A loud rumble and crash soon followed, a strike of lightning without rain, and Newt was already halfway to her side of the grove, a small and perfectly circular scorch mark left where he had torn the Petalwort from its root. He writhed against the ground, small white flowers and leaves tangling into his wiry hair. Then he fell still.
Rosalind rushed over and practically skidded onto her knees next to him (so much for not ruining her clothes). It had been many years since she’d needed to do this, but she knew the routine well: two fingers to the jaw to check for a pulse, hand under his nose to check he was breathing, and then move on to assessing the damage. She lifted up his coat sleeve, now slightly singed at the hem, to see his freckled skin mottled red with an angry swelling; it branched outwards infinitely, down onto his fingers and up the length of his arm, and it took the shape of fine pine needles: an imprint of lightning burned onto his rough skin.
She leaned back and sighed. It was nothing Rosalind hadn’t dealt with before—she had her fair share of struggles with Petalwort when first learning how to harvest it—but she never had to treat somebody else for it. And getting Newt back to her greenhouse for treatment would certainly prove a challenge; it would also look especially scandalous to any neighbour who might see her hoist him through her front door.
Just then, she heard a high-pitched sort of chirping, and she swivelled her head around to where the case still laid open. There was a little furry creature staring at her with black, beady eyes, its fleshy beak twitching. Rosalind blinked, hard, and realised what she was looking at—a Niffler. Of course, Newt’s case was nothing ordinary; he did not publicly declare it in his book or anywhere else, but Rosalind had read (rather unfavourable) coverage of him in the Daily Prophet—his case was bigger on the inside.
The Niffler didn’t seem to mind when Rosalind picked up the case and brought it closer to Newt. It only watched intently, its beak—which she knew now was actually a snout—twitching and sniffing the air as she heaved Newt’s body into the case, resting him precariously against the steep stairs descending into whatever he kept below. When she turned back to the Niffler, it pounced at her with its little claws outstretched, ferociously scrabbling around her chest until it pulled out a silver chain from under her shirt. From it hung two silver tags—a simple thing worn to identify soldiers, if they were lucky enough to die intact. With her eyebrows furrowed, she snatched it from the misshapen and greedy platypus before thrusting him into the case too.
Once she shut the lid with a click, she picked the case up with a little too much force, expecting it to be much heavier, but it weighed as much as any empty briefcase. It was definitely a useful feature, she thought, before carefully treading her way back through the forest.
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Day 4: Playing board games | "I have no regrets."
Bungou Stray Dogs: Ranpo Edogawa x Fem!Reader
Warnings/Genre: fluff, suggestive but no smut, not proof read
Word count: 1,152
Summary: Ranpo’s Ultra Deduction and your reality altering luck ability go head to head.
AN: whether or not the twist towards the end is real, or ranpo allows it, is up to you. p.s. the flop, the turn, and the river refer to stages of a poker game
Read on AO3
With so many people working at the Agency now, the boss greenlit the idea to host a Christmas party in the office. After all, what else was a gang of stray dogs going to do, with nowhere to go, on Christmas Day?
Each desk was set with a different board or card game - Monopoly, Uno!, Catan, Cluedo… There would have been space for Scrabble, but Kunikida insisted his desk was not to be touched. He did not leave its side all night, watching innocent bystanders from behind his misted glasses.
You tried each of the games once, but strategy wasn’t your strong suit. You won one game of Uno! and lost at all the other board games - the ones where luck was not the only important factor in winning. Heavily, you fall into one of the couches in the corner, letting yourself sink far into its worn cushions. Dazai was watching from the opposite couch with an unreadable expression.
He throws a standard pack of playing cards on the table between you. That would have been enough to convince you, but of course, this was Dazai. Sparks were practically shooting from his head, “I’ve always wondered - can you beat The World’s Greatest Detective, bella?”
With a tut and a flick of your hair, you stride over to your colleagues playing Scrabble at your desk, and motion for them to move to the floor. Atsushi was not going to say no to you. With their tiles carefully replicated in the middle of the office’s green-tiled floor, you pull the poker set out of your top drawer - the one Dazai took the cards from.
The World’s Greatest Detective, aka Edogawa Ranpo, needed no convincing from Dazai, he sat at the other side of your desk in an instant, his eyes following your nimble hand movements as you distributed the poker chips between you evenly. “Does anybody else want to join?” You called out to the rest of the room. They all shook their heads; now was the time to watch. Even you didn’t know what would happen - you wondered if Ranpo did?
Your special ability was Good Luck. It didn’t always work in the way you wanted, but it got you to where you were today. Before joining the agency, you had made a living in casinos and then by playing poker professionally. Not once, in your life, have you ever lost a game. But facing off against the world’s smartest man (sorry, detective) left you stiff in your chair. He can’t read minds or break through poker faces, but he was your boyfriend too - he knew every single face you could make like the back of his hand. Chances are that your luck, your reality-altering ability, may not save you this time. Not against the talented Ranpo.
Twice! He’s beaten you twice now! Your chips dwindle - they’ve never done that before. Ranpo guards them nonchalantly, waving a lollipop around as he talks, “The World’s Greatest Detective really is unbeatable, huh?” he pops the sweet back into his mouth. One more time, you can’t walk away from this a total loser.
Yosano collects the cards and begins shuffling them, weaving them elegantly between her fingers. You close your eyes and exhale, turn it off, the sound of the cards slapping against each other is like music to your ears, give me something terrible. The last, and only, time you ever turned your luck off truly was terrible. Fukuzawa restrained it in you, a poor attempt to stop you from ‘swindling’ patrons at casinos. “It’s unbecoming of a future detective,” he’d said.
Well, you got it back two days later. Only because it became evident that you couldn’t live without it - a close call with the stairs, the lift, a car on the street. It was more trouble than it was worth, as you weren’t even able to leave the agency office - or indeed stay inside it - unharmed.
But this would be worth it, you decided, and Ranpo wouldn’t see it coming. Fukuzawa’s theory that it helped you function was being proven once again, for you cut yourself on your cards as you picked them up and you bruised your knee on the underside of the table in your excitement. You couldn’t be unluckier. A black two, a red three. There’s no way a sane person could win with this hand. Straight lipped and dead-eyed, you stare at Ranpo over your cards.
The flop. Both you and Ranpo are confident, you raise the bet and he matches. The turn. He hesitates when you raise your bet by a substantial amount, but pushes the same number of chips in anyway, “Call,” he mumbles.
The river. “All in,” your excitement is beating through your chest, you swallow the smile crawling onto your face. Ranpo’s too distracted by your erratic move. Surely you’ve got something good?
He contemplates for an eternity, jade eyes dart between his hand, the dealer’s hand, your face. Ranpo can’t see through you at all. This is the smart man’s dilemma, you’re beaming in your head, the most intelligent man in the world could never call such a foolish bet, no matter how good his cards were.
“I fold,” he throws his cards face up on the table, a whine tinges his voice.
“Ha!” You slam both hands on the table, startling Ranpo as he’s rocking on the hind legs of his chair. He quickly reaches for the desk to steady himself and looks at your measly two and three. If he just had the nerve, if he matched you at the end, he would have ruined you with the singular Ace in his deck. But he didn’t. He surrendered to you, of all people.
He huffed and crossed his arms, turning his face away from the amused laughter and chatter. “What an entertaining game!” Dazai clapped his hands together slowly, a disturbing smile spreading across his face.
“Anytime,” you bow to them all with exaggerated hand movements, relief washed over you as you felt luck, pure gold, returning to your veins.
Ranpo sulked all the way home. Not a single word, not a single sweet eaten, not a single brush of his fingers against yours. Just him trailing two paces behind while you still basked in the glory of your dramatic win.
Click! The front door of your shared apartment shuts behind you, there’s no time for you to lock it as Ranpo takes both your wrists in one hand and pins them above your head. He locks you in place with a knee between your legs, pushing up just enough to make you whimper.
Your boyfriend leans forward and whispers in your ear, “I’m gonna punish you for showing me up in front of everyone like that.” He presses his leg higher again into your core, just a little; just enough to leave you wanting more.
“I have no regrets,” you grin.
@12daysofchristmas
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I love how whenever ATLA recognizes Sokka is smart enough to solve a problem but it’d be too fast they just stick him in some kind of situation. Like he COULD’VE stopped jet from drowning a town so they tied him up and dumped him in a forest. He COULD’VE figured out what that spirits deal was so they lost him in the spirit world for 24 hours.
This is how writers should deal with characters who are too smart for the arc instead of making them suddenly dumber for no apparent reason.
If you frequently find yourself in random situations while your friends happen to be experiencing problems maybe you, too, are too smart for the narrative.
Fandom: Diabolik Lovers
Pairing: Shuu Sakamaki x OC (Hiro Komori)
Word count: 4.4k
Read on AO3
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I had no clue if my hastily cobbled together plan would work; it relied on a few too many assumptions. For one, I guessed my father would only bring at most four other Hunters with him—they were the only ones in the diocese able-bodied enough. In terms of numbers, that seemed to even the playing field, if only Hunters weren’t so numerous in their tools, drugs, and training that they might actually be able to rival even a pureblood one-to-one, just as Karlheinz said. We would be relying, mostly, on the surprise that the myth of Vampires being weaker on a new moon was false. That was probably another reason why they thought walking outnumbered into an unexplored manor supposedly filled with six pureblooded Vampires was a good idea.
“Or maybe they’re just that obsessed with killing us off,” Yuma said. I had started doubting if only five would really show up during my explanation, but he was my staunchest supporter throughout. “The religious really don’t have a lot of common sense, even these days.”
Before we could smooth out any wrinkles, I heard the grumbling of a car engine growing closer, and eventually it switched off, followed by the sound of car doors clicking open and slamming shut. Everybody jumped into their hiding positions without a word: Ruki crouched behind the pillar next to the door, so that when it opened he would be obscured completely, while Kou, being the fastest, dashed into the corridor on the right and stepped just out of sight from the doorway. The remaining two ducked into the shadows either side of the staircase, shielded from immediate sight by the first flight’s unnecessary ledge overhang.
Meanwhile, I shuffled reluctantly to the first landing and perched myself on the ledge; I watched the door intensely as I heard their footsteps shuffle closer. There were definitely only five pairs, and I instinctively heaved a sigh of relief—I heard Yuma do the same from below. A strong knock came from the wood, much more stern than Yuma’s frenzied banging earlier, followed by a long silence. “It’s open,” my voice eventually rang out, though the words were caught in my throat like bile for a while.
The doors flew open in unison, swinging so fast that they had little chance to creak or groan before smashing into the pillars behind them. I felt the manor shake a little, and I started to shake too, looking at the priests below me. The two at the front were just lowering their legs after kicking their way in unnecessarily (and if they could kick open a heavy door like that with just one foot, I did not fancy our chances) and all of them were decked out over their robes with guns, bullets and daggers of silver, and an assortment of ropes, traps, syringes—everything else you might expect a hunter to have and more. One of them was trembling a little, and I realised he must be the one who replaced my father recently. Fresh faced, he couldn’t have been much older than me at all.
Behind their orderly line of four was a bishop, a purple sash adorning his garb and his eyes burning such a warm brown, they nearly looked red. Yes, that was my father, and he had definitely come to kill me. “Move in,” he ordered the other hunters, before he even dared to acknowledge me, “we must identify and subdue another six targets at least.”
I threw my hands up with my palms open. The priests obeyed him without hesitation, scattering slowly and steadily into the parlour, their eyes scanning every wall and doorway, burning a mental map of this place into their brains. All the while, they rested their hands on their weapons belt but they did not draw, although they were ready too; the smallest unexpected movement and sound, and I could possibly wind up with a silver bullet in my head before I even heard the gun shot go off. But apparently I was not a threat to them—for now anyway. I found myself wondering just what my father had told them.
“Dad,” I cried out, using my quivering form to my advantage to sound powerless and scared. Deep down, at the receiving end of his glare as he stepped over the entrance’s threshold, I think I truly still felt that way. “What’s going on?”
“I think you know,” his icy voice bounced off the walls, and he started reaching for the gun holstered under his arm, but it already felt as if I’d been shot.
As he drew and aimed the barrel at me, the rest of the hunters had all strayed far enough from each other that the brothers had all started to emerge; Kou was the first, a blur of pink that zipped from the doorway and pounced on top the burly priest heading in his direction. Ruki had already tackled the priest closest to him to the floor, and in just a second he was pinning the middle-aged man into the pillar behind him by the neck, pushing so hard that a faint crack spiralled out from behind his head in the marble.
All this commotion drew the attention of the two priests nearer the steps, who both turned on their heels and attempted to draw their weapons too, but Azusa and Yuma had already crept up on them from behind. My father switched his aim in an instant to Azusa, who had targeted the new priest, and fired; the shot was too loud as it rang through my ears, reverberating within my skull even from this distance. I clasped my hands over my ears and squeezed my eyes shut—damn this enhanced hearing!
When that clanging in my head finally dissipated, I opened my eyes to see Azusa had dodged those shots successfully, the silver bullets now embedded into the stone floor just a few feet away from him. The hunter he attacked had stopped writhing now and lay completely still, likely passed out from shock more than anything else—my father must have drawn his gun away in a feeble attempt to protect the fresh priest, likely on his first big assassination. Perhaps he could have done so by not coming here, I thought. But that wasn’t right—I called them here, and I served the route to them on a silver platter. Whatever happens to these priests and my father after today will be entirely my responsibility.
What a terrifying thought.
My father gritted his teeth and nimbly slotted another bullet into his gun, snapping the instrument shut and aiming at Ruki next, possibly trying to protect the oldest in the group now. The poor man had grey threaded through his dark hair; his face was nearly all blue, and his neck was already bruised from Ruki’s tight grip. Another shot rang out, and this time I was able to keep my focus for long enough to see how—almost in slow motion—Azusa yanked Ruki back by his collar at the last minute, the eldest having been lost deeply in some rage. It was close, too, as the bullet scratched off just a little skin from his hand as it passed by, and then they both dropped onto the floor together.
The old man fell too, slumping slowly against the pillar. He still seemed to be conscious, but it would be a miracle if he could find it in him to move in the next few minutes. He looked dazed, as though he had been so close to verifying whether God was real or not. Part of me was glad my father had taken that shot, otherwise Ruki most certainly would’ve ended up killing that man.
Things were not going so well on the other side. Yuma’s opponent was a thin young man, though he had trouble defeating him with pure strength alone. He was much too slippery; just when Yuma had thrust his fist through the air in perfect precision, the hunter would slip underneath his arm, then Yuma would turn as fast as he could—which is not the fastest I’ve seen a vampire move, mind you—and reach out to grab him. He would just about catch the man’s wrist every time before watching him slip away again and brandish his blade, returning to the fight with the silver weapon in full swing. Yuma had been pushed onto his back foot, resorted to a futile battle of dodging and weaving this Hunter’s attacks as best he could, though it seemed clear to him who would be winning when he finally tired.
Kou, however, had already been pummelled into the floor once, and was just now wriggling out of the brawny priest’s grip on him—he had him pinned to the wall with just one forearm pressed flat against his chest, his feet scrabbling to touch the floor. In desperation, Kou clawed at the priest’s face, and so his iron grip loosened and Kou was able to slither free. Just as he landed on his own two feet again, and while his opponent still rubbed at his scratched up face, I saw him shoot a glare towards Yuma, who was becoming precariously sluggish in his evasive manoeuvres now.
They both nodded, and Kou crossed the room in a flash, kicking the lithe hunter in the back of the shins and driving his elbow hard into the top of his head as he fell. His silver blade fell to the floor with an unsavoury clack, followed soon by his face being pressed into the cold ground by the sole of Kou’s shoe. They had been here for less than a minute, and another fight was already over.
Yuma fled towards the strong man, who drew himself up as he saw his new opponent approaching. They ran into each other like two goats ramming horns, arms gripping onto the other tightly as they tussled for another long moment while everybody watched on. Except, my father had reloaded his gun, and that awful bang rang out once more.
Before I could even call out Yuma’s name, I realised I had half-staggered, half-fallen down to the very last step. And now I found myself staring down the wide barrel of a gun, the metal practically searing against my forehead as it still cooled from its last shot. I wanted to look over at Yuma, to at least know if he was okay or not, but all I could see in front of me was the gun, and the man behind it—my father.
I should have been more panicked, but all I could do was laugh.
It came out more like a choked sputter, a car exhaust giving one last hurrah before the engine finally died, but it was enough for my father to screw up his features indiscernibly, though his red-hot eyes still flamed bright.
“Why are you laughing?” he demanded, in much the same voice he used with me when I got myself in trouble as a kid. Every muscle in me seized up, and instinctively I choked back my grin. It was exactly like I was back in that empty Church hall with him, or that broom cupboard, and I was fighting with everything I had just to be able to breathe.
But there was nothing to be afraid of, I had to remind myself. The time after firing at Yuma and me arriving at the bottom of the staircase was a second at most—hardly enough time to reload a single-shot gun. “It isn’t loaded,” I pointed out.
His eye twitched, but he pulled the gun away, though he sucked his teeth while he did so. “I’m aware of that,” he hissed.
And, perhaps he thought he was being sneaky—maybe he was—but I saw how his free arm sat oddly at his side, slightly twisted. It was draped over with his robe, so perhaps I was just being paranoid, but I had seen him pull a similar move before, where he hid that crucifix for me tucked just slightly under the sleeve, only to drop it into his hand at the last second before handing it to me.
I furrowed my brows and drew a long, deep breath. If only I could get this next part right—his free arm jerked, and fire flooded through my veins, there was no time to think how to do it properly, so I heard myself yell, “Stop!”
A deep voice trailed alongside mine, that was how I knew I had done it right. That, and the silver knife that was now pointing at, and nearly making contact with, the very centre of my chest. My father had dropped it into his hand, the blade twinkling slightly as the light hit it, and attempted to drive it fast into my torso. But he failed, because he was part demon himself, so I was able to command him like I could now command any demon subject. And, if he was the discarded son of the Adler king like I suspected, that meant he was my real father after all, too.
His face was crease with concentration as he tried again to thrust the blade into me, but he just couln’t—and then I noticed tears start to pool in the corners of his eyes. He tried his best to blink them away to no avail, it only made them fall faster; fat droplets rolled down his wrinkled face and splashed onto the floor, the knife between us, and also onto his purple sash, sending dark splotches throughout the coarse fabric.
“Surrender,” I commanded him again, and instantly he dropped the blade to the floor with a thunderous clatter as he raised his empty palms above his head. Ruki was behind him the next second, snatching his arms behind his back and securing them with a rope—when I looked to my right, I saw that Kou was securing his own opponent in a similar way, and the brutish man Yuma had been fighting just before was slumped against the nearby pillar, held up only by the tightness of the rope that bound him. A trickle of blood dripped slowly from his forehead, but he still looked to be alive.
And then there was Yuma, lying perfectly still on the floor with his head in Azusa’s lap. I pressed my hand to my mouth, ready to choke back the coming sob, as I saw the blood sweeping through his white shirt, moving out slowly from his shoulder where Azusa had pressed his hands to. But Yuma had his eyes wide open, and he was smiling at me.
“We did it!” he wheezed.
“Shut up,” I fell to my knees next to his head and pressed two fingers against his neck. His heartbeat seemed a bit slow, but otherwise steady; I looked up at Azusa with confusion writ all over my face, demanding an explanation.
“He was shot with silver, but…” Azusa motioned his head to the wall behind him, where another crater had appeared in the stone, “the bullet went straight through. He’ll be fine.”
I fell backwards onto my elbows, staring at the open landing in pure relief. Although the heat had washed over and through my body and was now dissipating slowly, I could feel my limbs quivering still, my heart beating abnormally fast and loud in my chest.
Kou’s face appeared above mine, though upside down; he had just approached after finishing tying up his guy. “We won’t be doing anything like this for you again,” he said fiercely.
I laughed. Properly, this time. The joy spread infectiously throughout me, seemingly erasing all the times my body had ever felt sadness, or fear, and suddenly I felt relaxed. I was not just trying to survive anymore—had I ever felt happy like this before?
Azusa and I stifled Yuma’s wound, which turned out to be much less nasty than I had imagined. The bullet had taken a bite out of the top of his shoulder, where it connected to his neck, but it hadn’t actually gone through his body. While that made it easy to patch up—we even fashioned a sling for him with the leftover bandages I found in the kitchen—the muscle looked as if it had been chewed at. Yuma would probably never be able to lift anything heavy with that arm again; we all knew it, but none of us said anything.
Ruki and Kou had dragged all our bound victims to the very centre of the room and positioned them all in a circle facing outwards. Only my father was still awake, but he might as well have been unconscious with his head hung low and his eyes dark. Just as Ruki readied to wind another length of rope around them all, two sets of footsteps, rich leather soles slapping carelessly against the unfeeling floors, approached from behind the staircase, where the courtyard entrance was. We all drew up at the noise, ready for another fight; Kou swung for the intruders, but he shifted his weight just in time to retrieve his rogue fist, staggering back a few steps, when we realised who it was.
Subaru and Laito were staring wide-eyed at us. Or, more accurately, at the bundle of unconscious priests on the floor behind us. They were in markedly different attire than before—an attempt had been made to tame Subaru’s unruly hair while Laito held onto the brim of a black fedora trimmed with a gold ribbon instead of the usual red. They both wore luxurious princely attire, much like what I had seen Shuu be forced into before I left, although it was embroidered less plentifully. Laito donned a rich emerald shirt with large frills among the collar and cuffs and a coordinated black jacket slung over his shoulder, while Subaru looked stiff in a suit of silver with white threaded throughout, a turquoise-gem bolo tie hanging loosely from his neck.
Just because they weren’t hunters, however, it didn’t mean any of us were ready to relax. “What are you doing here?” I demanded, my voice clearly high-strung from all that just happened.
Laito leaned against the staircase railing with the same flair as always, his ruffled sleeves only adding to the drama. “Your doting fiance, who you neglected to mention to us was King now, by the way, shut himself in his room and refused to talk to us when we arrived,” he lamented, “so, after Ayato was kidnapped by our father’s former advisors to be hastily crowned Vampire King under the Great Demon Lord Shuu, we sought out Reiji for answers.
“Well, Subaru and I did. Kanato could not be bothered. But our second-eldest brother did, though sardonically, tell us what a mess you had gotten yourself into. As your soon-to-be brothers-in-law, we figured we should come and help you out, even if it meant sneaking past palace guards—not that they really care what the youngest sons get up to. But…” Laito paused in his tirade to gesture vaguely at our pile of victims, “you seem to have it all under control, I see.”
“This was a waste of time,” Subaru grunted from where he had settled into the wall, with one foot pressed flat against it and his arms folded.
“Why?” my voice cracked.
Laito gave me a serious look then, almost sorrowful, and he simply said, “Because I was rooting for you.”
Subaru had his eyes closed and his face impossibly still, but I still felt there was something implacable behind those stern features too. Something similar to Laito’s longing gaze—it was as if they were both replaying a memory behind their eyes, a painful one that was also so full of joy. They had come close to being in Shuu’s position before, hadn’t they? Close, but not enough.
If I continued to look at them standing there, bearing their shattered hearts as the reason they came to help us, my own heart might break. I tore my gaze away—I was fragile enough right now.
“Well, you can help us carry these into the Underworld,” I suggested, as if nothing more than pleasantries had been exchanged just now.
Subaru pushed forward to get a closer look at them, marveling at how they were all definitely down for the count. “Why would you bother bringing them when you can just leave them be?”
“They’ll kill every last demon in Omura. If we stop them from returning to the church, maybe the practice of hunting will die out.” I said, “Besides, I need them to prove something to the Kings.”
“Oh, you’re smart, aren’t you?” Laito purred.
I felt myself shrivel a little at that comment.
Subaru made no more noise besides letting out an emphatic “hmph”, which I took to mean that he was impressed with my reasoning, otherwise he would probably make up something to say about it. So, after we ensured Yuma could stand with the help of a doting Azusa, I took my father’s rope in my hand while Laito and Subaru took care of the other four between them. The Mukamis would be staying behind to get Yuma some proper help, and perhaps they would return to their house, too.
We travelled through that tear in reality in the courtyard, and already before we had even set foot inside the castle, the priests started staring longingly all around us, mostly at the large, blood moon hanging low above. Only after a few rough yanks did they finally get the message to start moving again.
I wanted to wash my hands of the priests as quickly as possible—to lock them away in the cellars for now so that I could talk to Shuu in private. But, with such a big group appearing out of thin air, and in such a busy castle no less, it was only a matter of seconds before frightened servants started scurrying around to each other with the news. It was my guess that, before we could even make it into the building at our slow pace, most of Shuu’s council would have learned of our arrival, likely through their spies in the scullery or among the minor nobility wandering around. If they wanted to make a big deal of it, then I would give it to them.
Gripping the rope tight in my palm, I walked at the front on my own, leading the makeshift procession into the inviting golden glow of the castle’s corridors with my plodding father separating me from the others. Laito followed closely behind me, the two priests he was holding onto falling in just behind my father as a result. Subaru followed at the very back, prodding the two in his care to move forward from behind, rather than have him unattended at the very end of our cavalcade.
As we moved through the labyrinth of miscellaneous rooms, staggered staircases, and ornately decorated hallways, we gathered quite the audience of servants and minor aristocracy from all four clans alike. Without the crucifix to play with anymore, I bit at the inside of my cheek and fixed my gaze ahead; these people thought only of others when it was time to judge them, so why should I let their hushed whispers, hidden behind feathered fans, bother me?
It was another few minutes before we finally approached the doors to the throne room, where I hoped Shuu would be, possibly being held hostage by the stuffy party inside—even from behind the heavy doors could I hear the music swell. Our group had now grown heavy, with several dozen nosy and intrigued courtiers stalking us at a safe distance, although I did not doubt they had every intent to file into the hall with us and gossip about how they were esteemed enough to fight their way onto such a unique procession. The ceiling-high, golden plated double doors were already being pulled open by a cluster of desperate bats either side when we rounded the corner, so we were able to walk right through without even pausing.
Sitting on the far side of the room, connected by a long red carpet that could fit two, maybe three people side by side, was Shuu. His blonde hair had been swept away from his face uncannily, allowing his heavy crown to rest easy upon his head, and this time he had been stuffed into a different fancy suit of dark blue with white accents. There was a cape draped over him of a matching blue, but lined yellow-gold on the inside; it was splayed out all over the back and arm rest of one side of his throne, obscuring the eerie carvings. Almost anyone else would look regal from wearing the clothes alone, but Shuu had his features pulled down in an unamused scowl, although his eyes rounded into big sapphires when he realised I was walking towards him.
His chair was on a dais, and on either side of it were two slightly lower platforms; spaced evenly apart on each one were two less dignified looking thrones. Ayato was on the chair closest to Shuu’s right; his green eyes darted around the room, and he shifted impatiently in his seat. Next to him was a woman so old she was shrivelled like a prune, and on the other platform were two men—one who still looked rather young, not much older than Shuu, with pale blonde hair, and a middle-aged man with tanned skin and long, brown hair in braids.
The dancing guests parted for our procession. As I walked up the steps of the dais, Shuu sprang to his feet and pulled me towards him. Our lips met and, for a brief moment, the entire ballroom before us faded away. But they returned just as quickly with the raucous sound of cheering and swooning—it seemed these people would stand for anything that counted as a good show. We pulled apart and I glanced over at the pale-haired man, who couldn’t have been anyone else other than King Arne.
He was staring wide-eyed at my father, who was now kneeling before the raised platform and quivering with rage. Arne did a good job of schooling his features, but I didn’t miss the way he clutched at his throne so desperately that his knuckles turned white—we had caught him out after all. And that meant we would be safe to rule, as King and Queen of the Underworld.
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Fandom: Diabolik Lovers
Pairing: Shuu Sakamaki x OC (Hiro Komori)
Word count: 4.4k
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There was only one thing he could have meant by “those four snakes”. But Ruki had made it clear to me that they would not be returning to Omura, so whatever did he mean by that? Would they be able to help with the hunters? In all honesty, I had started considering simply leaving that matter and returning to the Underworld with Shuu’s brothers. But having your Overworld residence be overrun with hunters because your formerly human Queen had a moment of weakness would not do well to support Shuu’s claim to the throne. Besides, he was right—I can’t run anymore.
And then there was my relation to the Adler King, and the story of the hybrid boy who grew up in the Church. Having grown up in those very walls too, I knew just how cruel the nuns could be, even if my father had stopped them from enacting their physical punishments on me. That was one of his few saving graces—I wonder why he did that, I thought.
If I found my real father, perhaps I could use that to pacify the Adler King—maybe it would be enough of an embarrassment that it would work. Except, I hadn’t the slightest clue of his whereabouts.
I was practically drowning in my thoughts, my head hanging low despite my beautiful dress, as I strode into the manor through its rear entrance. Before I even made it all the way through the kitchens, I was pounced upon by the triplets.
“How’s Vampirism?” Ayato beamed at me, “I hope you like it, because you’re stuck like that forever now.”
“Oh, it’s going great,” I responded exaggeratedly, bringing my hands together dramatically with a clap. The irony was lost on Ayato, who nodded emphatically in agreement.
Kanato’s face twisted with disgust the second he stepped just a little closer to me, “You reek of death,” he blurted out. I turned my nose up at him and ignored the comment—I had not the energy.
“I sense something else about you has changed,” Laito hummed in curiosity, casting a hungry gaze across my body as he adjusted his hat.
I figured I should just bite the bullet and tell them, in as few words as possible, what transpired over the past few days. “Yes, actually—”
“Where’s Shuu?” Subaru’s voice rumbled from a distance, commanding everyone’s attention—I did not notice him walk in. “And Four-Eyes, too.”
My hand balled into a fist behind my back. If he had not interrupted me, I would have told him. But then, how did one go about telling their future in-laws their eldest brother had become King? And an entirely different species, too. No, I didn’t have time; sucking in a deep breath, I changed my course of action: just get them out of here as soon as possible. Then I would have time to think.
“In the Underworld,” I said through gritted teeth, “which is where I just came from—Shuu wants all of you over there as soon as possible.”
Subaru eyed me suspiciously but said nothing. After a brief pause, the first to speak was Ayato, of course, “Are you sure our Shuu said that? That he wanted something?”
Oh, I really do not need this right now, I thought.
“But our summer break is just starting. I’ve made so many fun plans,” Laito sighed, turning his bottom lip down in a pout.
Kanato started rubbing one of the ears of his teddy between his fingers—the most normal thing I’ll ever see him do, probably—and simply shrugged his shoulders. At least one of them was, for lack of a better word, amenable to the idea, even if it was the craziest one.
“And who are you to tell us what to do?” Subaru tutted, jerking his head to flip his fringe out the way, “Just because you’ve been turned into a—”
“Will you just go?” Already at the end of my tether, I raised my voice, and that infernal thing spoke along with me again.
They all froze stiff, staring between themselves, and cautiously back at me, wordlessly. That probably conveyed enough of what they needed to know. But they all looked so uncharacteristically terrified—even Kanato. I hadn’t meant to use the Founder’s Voice; how was I supposed to control it? More importantly, once they all left for the Underworld, how was I going to clean up my own mess and find this hybrid?
The fatigue and anger and guilt were weighing down heavily on me; it felt as if, at any moment, I was about to snap into two…
Once the tension had finally simmered down, seconds or minutes later, I had no clue, Subaru pushed off against the wall he was leaning against and took off to his room. Kanato followed down that corridor too, stumbling silently with Teddy in his hands, but Ayato and Laito stayed and looked between each other for one moment. “We’ll leave,” Ayato stuttered.
I almost did a double-take. What on earth had I done to make them all behave like this? I placed my palms flat on the dining table before us and leaned forward, taking the strain off my aching feet—God, I hope I never have to wear those heels again. “Thank you,” I said under my breath, before padding wearily to my own room.
The second I was locked safely inside, I fell against the door and slid until my knees hit the familiar, soft carpet. I tried to choke back the sobs stuck in my throat, but it was no use.
My phone sat on the bedside table, where I had left it before venturing into Shuu’s world. With little energy left to stand again, I scrambled over to it and searched for Yuma’s contact. It rang once, then twice; I was about to give up after a few more seconds, but the line crackled, and I heard a familiar voice.
“Hiro?” he sounded taken aback and, out of pure relief, I sobbed into my palm once more. “I tried to call you so many times, you know! We were worried.”
“Yuma,” I sniffled, “My father is coming to the manor with all his hunters, but Shuu and all of his brothers are gone—”
“Gone!” he sneered. “Of course they would be,” I could imagine him turning up his nose at them.
I hummed affirmatively, “I know I’ve troubled you guys enough, but could you come and help me out?”
“Well, could we help out the chick who took on a pureblooded psycho while we just walked away?” He paused. “Of course, you dummy.”
Embarrassingly, I burst into tears yet again, to which Yuma scrambled fruitlessly to comfort me. After I finally calmed down and told him how to get here, he hung up. I was left in the silence of my room once more, but with my chest feeling so extraordinarily light.
Akila’s picture, the one I had taken with her in the photobooth so long ago now, watched over me cheerfully from its place on the wall, her deep brown eyes invitingly warm and almost proud.
My ears, now much more finely tuned to the sounds of the world around me, twitched as they heard a distant thumping. It was coming from the front door, I could hear how the heavy wood of the double doors scratched against each other with each desperate bang. Although the night had yet to fully close in, it seemed I was out of time.
I pulled myself to my feet and went to the door, but I tossed one final glance over at the grand piano as I did. I would much prefer if I had a plan, or at least some idea of what I was going to do, but life had told me in its own way, sometimes, that it didn’t matter. I once made plans to sit by a large window and look out at a gold-speckled nighttime skyline, and I once made plans to get out of this manor alive; both I did, rather clumsily, in a way I never would have imagined. It was much like playing the piano: playing perfectly what was written down would make you feel one way, perhaps it would make you laugh or send a shiver down your spine, but I always achieved the same effect with my eyes closed. When my father steps into the parlour today, I thought, I will just have to do the same.
The banging of the door had ceased already when I approached the staircase and I heard the shuffling of boots against the foyer’s cold stone—four or five pairs, I couldn’t tell. Teetering at the edge of the first step, just before I would come into view of the Hunters below, I caught myself thumbing my crucifix once again. Then I did the strangest thing: I yanked the pendant straight down, snapping the chain cleanly from my neck, and tossed it over my shoulder.
But when I reached the end of my first descent and turned slowly, carefully, to face my guests from the safety of yet another flight of stairs, I was looking not at my father and his priests, but at Yuma. He was massaging his shoulder, his gaze darting around the room until it landed on me; he broke out into a smile, but he could not hide the nervousness lingering beneath it. His brothers were there too—Kou had taken to wandering about the place and inspecting the decor up close with his hands on his hips, and Azusa had seated himself in a chair and slouched over the small round table before him. Ruki was there too, standing at a distance so still that he nearly blended into the grey walls behind him. His eyes flickered between Yuma and I cautiously.
Any makeshift plans I had about remaining on the first landing dissolved in an instant, my heart feeling impeccably light now that there were some familiar faces around. I practically flew down the stairs at a gallop to meet Yuma, throwing my arms around him without warning. He staggered backwards—no wonder, with the force I had just thrown myself at him—before standing awkwardly there, hands in the air. Just as I was about to pull away and release him from his torment, he encased his arms around me and patted my back once; I did my best not to laugh.
When I finally stepped back, I looked between all of the brothers and asked, “Why are you here?”
“Ask this suicidal idiot,” Kou chimed in before anybody else could, gesturing to Yuma, “we just followed him.”
Yuma rolled his eyes at that, but before he responded he turned back to Ruki, who was staring intensely out the window now, and quickly I gathered that he was keeping an eye out for the Hunters. Ruki’s lack of response was confirmation enough for Yuma to speak, though in a much lower voice than I was used to, “I remembered everything. About what you told me, I mean.”
“That you’re Edgar?” I said.
He nodded hesitantly, “Yeah, although I don’t know if I could ever use that name again,” Yuma sighed.
“But, I remembered running back home after being bullied by that prick with glasses at the party, and feeling incredibly angry at myself for blaming it all on Shuu,” he continued, his eyes jittery and avoidant as he rubbed at the back of his neck. “It felt like I was just doing that all over again by leaving you that night, and then I remembered that you called the hunters here and—Where is that NEET anyway?” He shifted his gaze onto me, and then his nose twitched.
I hung my head.
“And you,” he paused, “you smell different?”
“She’s awakened,” Ruki said drily, not tearing his glare from the window for a moment.
Before Yuma could say anymore, I took this opportunity to interject, “As for Shuu, he’s being… held up in Rotinberg,” I said. But Yuma cast me a doubtful look, and suddenly I felt I had no choice but to spill the rest, “Those advisors—the other Kings and Queens—all believe neither of us is up to the task. They sent me back here to deal with everything alone while they bombard Shuu with all their proposals. He’s a good person but I don’t know what awful things he’ll agree to without me there to remind him—”
Yuma sighed, “Even hundreds of years later, of course he would allow himself to be pushed around.”
“So, it’s four impure Vampires and one fledgling First Blood against five Hunters,” Kou groaned, “this will go so well.”
While the blonde continued whining, Azusa, who had been observing silently from his seat this entire time, stood abruptly, the legs of his chair scraping brutishly against the stone floor and emitting a high-pitched screech; we all snapped our heads in his direction. He, however, was unfazed. Azusa pulled something from his loose sleeve and held it out in my direction, the object glinting under the numerous lights of the crystal chandelier above. It was a knife.
Not an especially decorative or large knife, unlike some of the others I had glanced at in his collection before, but it was definitely well cared for. The blade was a silver steel sharpened to a razor-thin point, and the plain white handle had a slot in the top, a place for the blade to fold into. I stumbled over awkwardly, my footsteps the only sound filling the room, and took it from him with a wary smile. For a moment, I turned the thing over in my hand and considered his silent proposal—if I used this to draw blood and feed it to the brothers, they would win this fight without a doubt.
I thought about it so much that I had already lined up the sharp edge against my palm, ready to slice through my skin in one clean stroke. But, at the last second, I snatched the blade away from my hand and tucked it back into its slot before returning it to an expressionless Azusa. There was only ever one person I had ever willingly given my blood to, and it was because I trusted him, even if I hadn’t known it yet. To now throw it out to anybody who asked, just to fix a disaster I had gotten myself into, would haunt me forever. And that phrase cannot be an exaggeration anymore.
“I appreciate you guys coming here, and I would forever be in your debt if you decide to stay, but I can’t offer you that,” I explained
“To be expected,” Ruki, who had spared me a glance only in that singular moment, commented.
“It was worth a shot,” Kou sighed, shrugging his shoulders.
Yuma puffed his chest out a little, already bracing himself, “We’ll be staying.”
“Good,” I smiled, “I just came up with a plan.” And, whether there really was a God watching over me, I prayed to him that it would work.
Droplets of blood rolled down the cold, silver blade of the sword in my hand, glistening like rubies as they dripped onto a growing pool of red on the granite floor below. I blinked hard, still unable to believe what I had just done, but the sword was no longer there. One attendant had foisted it from my grasp while another mopped up the mess on the floor; in an instant, it was as if nothing had happened at all.
I looked up at the throne, squinting at how the gold dazzled under the overwhelmingly bright lights from above. It was exactly how I remembered, shining unapologetically with the heads of the four demon species carved into the legs, holding up the seat cushioned with red velvet. I startled at a hand being pressed into my back, looking over my shoulder to find the Wolf Queen, so old that she was shrivelled and small, looking up at me blankly. She nudged me forward and, reluctantly, I turned and sat upon the ornate chair.
It was comfortable. Or, it would have been if not for the hundreds of unfamiliar faces staring up at me in awe. All members of the withering aristocracy, I assumed, although each clan stuck to their own—there was a sea of demons with red and ginger hair, a smaller group of Vibora with their dark eyes and tanned skin. The Adlers, with their hair so pale it was nearly white, stuck to the walls while the Vampires took up most of the space, their mix of red and blue eyes watching me hungrily. I was safe here, for now, being raised above the rest of the ballroom by a platform, the stairs of which had two guards stationed in front of it on either side.
My father’s headless body was already being carted away; the servants had covered it so quickly with thick, red fabric—befitting of the Demon Lord—that I hadn't had the chance to look upon it. I wasn’t sure if I even wanted to see it. When I entered the party late, the usher called out my name and the ocean of guests parted so that I may approach my father. Perhaps they had expected me to finally take upon myself the responsibility of Vampire King. Instead, I had approached the dais and greeted my father not with words, but by slicing my sharpened blade clean through his neck. If the party-goers were shocked or appalled to see their long-reining King dismembered, however, they did not show it. To die as an immortal was, after all, a weakness that could not be forgiven.
The Wolf Queen, the woman I had told just a few hours ago that I was actually her grandson, was the one who placed the crown on my head. It was simple, but still made of gold and engraved with the symbols of each of the four clans to match the chair. My neck struggled to hold up the weight, so I leant my head back into the chair for support, looking down on everybody in the room. They all dipped low, the women into perfectly polished curtsies and the men onto one knee, and bowed their heads. Even the three kings, from their slightly lower platforms on either side of me, stood and paid their respects too, although I was not fooled by the smile plastered across Arne’s face.
Shakily, I projected my voice as loudly as I could and commanded everybody to rise. Having lived such long lives, they probably would not have minded to go on kneeling before me for a few more minutes, but I could not suffer their attention on me any longer. What would my father have done? As the guests rose one by one, I searched the room desperately until my eyes landed on the musicians, each with their own instrument in hand, and gestured at them to continue. They did, playing hesitantly at first, but as the guests shrugged off the events of the past few minutes and began dancing again, the music started to swell so loud it nearly could have drowned out all my thoughts.
My gaze flickered to the empty throne on my right, between me and the Wolf Queen—the seat for the Vampire King. Where was Ayato? Hiro was capable enough to handle my brothers, that much I knew, but I couldn’t help fretting over whether she was doing well back in the manor. She may not have noticed it, but she had been trembling ever so slightly all through the morning, even up until we said goodbye to each other, as if she had pent up so much inside it was threatening to all burst out of her. Had I put too much on her shoulders?
“I’ll have to prepare a throne for her,” I whispered to myself, glancing around me to see if there was enough space on the platform. I had no intention of doing this alone.
Just then, the ridiculously large double doors started creaking open once again, and the usher cried out, his voice wavering with uncertainty, “Prince Ayato and Prince Kanato!”
Only the two of them? I scowled. When the doors opened fully, the crowd parted yet again to make way for my brothers. Uncharacteristically, Ayato had anxiety writ all over his features, and he had been forced into clothes not too dissimilar from mine, although they were red and more subtle—whoever dressed him, however, evidently didn’t get the chance to tame his hair. Kanato would have almost blended into the background in his brown suit, if it weren’t for the hideous teddy he always held so tightly in his arms.
When they finally reached the platform, they gave me a shallow bow—that was already enough from them, anything more would have been a mockery—before coming closer.
“Oi,” Ayato called out, his dissident voice masked by the loud music and incessant chatter, “What’s going on here?”
I hushed him, wary of the looks we were receiving from Arne and Uthman to my left. If he wanted a proper explanation, he was going to have to wait, although I knew he was not so dumb that he couldn’t figure out that our father was dead, and I had killed him. “You’re going to be Vampire King,” I explained, my expression vacant, “Where are the others?”
“Stop fuckin’ around,” Ayato growled.
I sighed, reaching up to rub my temples with my fingers, “I’m not. Can you just answer my question or sit down?” I gestured to the empty seat.
Ayato drew back, thinking over what he could retort with, but Kanato was the first to respond, “We were the first to leave our rooms.”
“Right,” I sighed, resting my chin in my hand, my elbow on the solid gold arm of the throne, and closing my eyes. This conversation was over. I heard Ayato grunt, but a set of footsteps belonging to the quiet shoes of a servant ushered him, grumbling, to his chair. Kanato’s steps descended the stairs of the dais, disappearing into rhythmic tapping of the dancing crowd below
The festivities carried on while I watched, miserably, from my gilded throne. For every minute that ticked by where Hiro had yet to arrive—or my other two brothers, for that matter—was another minute I spent contemplating storming out of this stuffy ballroom and going back to the manor myself. She’d be angry at me if I did that. Leaving the throne unattended already would not help us, but I couldn’t find it in me to worry about such a trivial matter.
Some servants made their rounds with trays of mangled entrees and champagne flutes filled halfway with viscous blood, sloshing around as the Vampires who held them nattered away with each other. Ayato gratefully took a glass and drained it in one before reaching for another; I turned my gaze away from the waiter when he brought a glass to me, and he walked backwards reluctantly, off the stage.
My eyelids grew heavy, and I was certain that I had started dozing off at one point, although I came to when the doors creaked open yet again: Laito and Subaru had just been announced, and they were now striding over to me as if they hadn’t been late. Well, Laito was the one who strutted confidently over—Subaru lagged behind a little, his gait clumsy as usual but his gaze acutely aware of how everybody stared at him. They greeted me with the same shallow bows as before, with Subaru barely bothering to tip his head down at all, before they approached.
“Where the hell have you been?” I asked.
“Woah, I’ve never seen you so fired up before,” Laito teased. “We just went to speak to our dear brother in the cellars, and we found out something most interesting.”
“I’m sure you did,” I scoffed.
Laito frowned, his face unusually stern for once, “It’s about our dear Hiro, I’m afraid.”
My hands gripped the arms of the throne tighter, but I said nothing. Laito continued, “Her father is the Bishop of St Marina, and he’s on his way to the manor. Tonight.”
A Bishop… It was a Bishop from St Magdalene who killed my mother. That was the first time we learned the demon hunters had been absorbed into the Church. I sprang onto my feet, ready to sprint over there at a moment’s notice—but the other kings were looking at me crudely, so I hesitantly lowered myself back into my seat.
If Reiji was the one who told them, there had to be a catch. Perhaps he wanted me to throw everything away just to be at her side—it would be the perfect opportunity for him to make a claim to the throne and be rid of me once and for all. I couldn’t even be sure his information was true, although Hiro would have surely returned already if it wasn’t, and she wouldn’t have parted with me so ruefully before. “How does he know this?” I asked.
“The creep sent a familiar to the Mukami household,” Subaru said, fiddling with the black cravat tied tightly around his neck. He yanked it off and discarded it on the floor, from where a servant snatched it and disappeared in an instant. “Hiro called them to the manor weeks ago.”
“Why…” I wondered out loud. But I shut my mouth quickly—why had she called them over, and why did she never tell me? I would never know if I couldn’t be sure she would get out of there alive.
I set my jaw and looked up at the two of them. “Go to the manor, and bring her back in one piece.”
Subaru scoffed, but he didn’t storm off either. Laito bowed again, this time taking off his hat so that he could go slightly lower. “Of course, Your Highness,” he said. Just what had gotten into him?
Although his words were playful, when he lifted his head, I could see sorrow written all over his face. I thought I could see the same behind Subaru’s eyes, but he and Laito had soon turned their backs on me. Ayato threw me a quizzical look as I watched their backs; the double doors squeaked and groaned as they opened just wide enough for them to pass, and then they fell shut again with a bang.
Please reblog and follow if you enjoy my work! It's greatly appreciated ✩
Fandom: Diabolik Lovers
Pairing: Shuu Sakamaki x OC (Hiro Komori)
Word count: 3.7k
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The candles in our room had already been put out when we entered, and the curtains were drawn, too. We were plunged into darkness the second I shut the door, except for a sliver of crimson moonlight that streamed in through a crack in the curtains. Shuu shrugged off his jacket and let it drop to the floor. He planted face-first into the bed, sending some of the pillows flying upwards in the impact.
I, however, was still stuck in this ridiculously tight and expensive dress with no way out, until a familiar maid with brown eyes came knocking at the door. She poked her head into the room curiously at first, and when she saw that Shuu was firmly asleep on the bed, a soft smile touched her lips for a small moment before she pointed at my dress and, silently, made a spinning gesture with her finger.
I turned around, letting her work at the lacing of my corset while I stared aimlessly at the wardrobe in front of me; the air rushing back into my lungs was almost dizzying.
“Firenze, is it?” I whispered over my shoulder. In the corner of my eye I saw her nod slightly, though she dared not to look up from her work. “You served Beatrix, right?”
“Yes,” she finally whispered back; her voice was refined like you’d expect from an aristocrat or a noble. I wagered that wasn’t normal for a maid who dressed people up and tidied their rooms. “I was supposed to serve the young master after…” she choked back the words, her fingers trembling slightly as they plucked at the strings. But she swallowed the lump in her throat and continued, “but they were sent to the Overworld and I was made to remain here, as a common maid.”
“Maybe that can change again,” I ventured, rather uncharacteristically. Perhaps it was because I had seen this same woman in my dream, who had served Shuu’s mother so faithfully for her entire life and who looked at his sleeping form as if he were her own son, but I found myself wanting to trust her. I was scarce of anybody else to trust in this place, so I thought it might do to put some faith in the one who dressed me, at least. “His father seems to be tired of his work.”
Firenze stepped back at that moment, and finally I was free of the fabric contraption; I peeled it off me by the sleeves and removed the several layers of underskirts too. The dress pooled into a neat ring at my feet, and I stepped out of it. I crossed my arms over my chest, suddenly feeling the chill streaming in through the balcony door now that I was in nothing but a thin chemise. Firenze crossed the room in a second to shut the door, and then she went about picking up all the discarded clothes and hanging them up neatly in the large wardrobe, where I could peek at a few other similarly constrictive dresses. My skin crawled at the idea of getting back into one of them.
When she was done, with one hand still resting on the wardrobe handle, Firenze turned to me and said, “It’ll be dangerous, once he takes over.”
“What do you mean?”
“The other rulers, and the councillors, value strength in a leader over anything. Otherwise they would just simply overthrow them. It’s not enough to simply behead your predecessor,” she explained, still keeping her voice low.
My heart dropped. “How do we do that?”
“You have to get three of the four monarchs on your side, somehow,” her brows were drawn as she spoke, almost as if she believed it would be impossible. “The Wolf Queen is old but passive; I believe she knows he is part of her clan—even if he is a hybrid, it would be hard for her, who is so entrenched in our traditions, to go against someone of her own blood.”
“What about the Vampire clan?” I asked.
“It’s vacant.”
My eyes widened. “How?”
“It should have gone to Beatrix’s father, but the King managed to keep it vacant on the basis that there was no Founder,” even in the darkness, I could see how her eyes searched me from head to toe. I retreated into myself even more: why did this dress have to be so see-through?
I thought for a moment—the next eligible person would surely have been Reiji, as the second eldest, but that ship had sailed. So then, perhaps we should quickly put Ayato on the throne. He was not the easiest person, but he would be an ally. The final question that lingered was just how to deal with the Vibora or the Adler clans.
“Thank you, Firenze,” I smiled at her; she smiled back, almost triumphantly. She bobbed a quick curtsy, and then she was out of the room and gone.
I stared silently at Shuu’s sleeping form for a moment and, rather suddenly, brought my hand to my face and struck hard. The sting was a welcome feeling, an uncharacteristically numb yet vigorous feeling spreading through my cheek. I couldn’t believe how I just froze up in front of Shuu’s father today—we came for answers, but I only left with more questions. I had never cared once in my life who my real parents were, but now I so desperately wanted to know.
With a heavy sigh, the day’s events finally crashed over me, and I fell into bed beside Shuu. From behind, I snaked my arms around his torso—one under his neck and one over his arm—and pressed my body against his tight. He hummed involuntarily, pushing himself deeper into the embrace. “Are you awake?” I said softly.
There was a long silence, punctuated by nothing but the sound of our disordered breathing. Just when I was about to give up, he responded faintly, more of a grunt than anything, “Yeah.”
“Do you want to do it?” I questioned. Karlheinz had only sprung the idea on us tonight, but if we were going to make a decision, it needed to be by tomorrow. How cruel.
Shuu shrugged lopsidedly, “I have to.”
I propped myself up on one elbow to get a better look at him. “No, you don’t. You didn’t ask your father for any of this,” I said, brushing the hair out of his eyes. “We could just run away,” I didn’t entirely mind the idea—going back to living an easy and simple life would have been ideal. But something about the words sounded wrong when they left my mouth; a small frown etched itself into my face.
“We’ve both done enough running,” he rolled onto his back and smiled up at me, blue eyes sparkling like jewels in the faint red moonlight. Strange that, even in a moment like this, he could take my breath away.
Everything important buzzing and swarming in my head—Karlheinz’s death, the other clans, and my newfound demon ancestry—went suddenly quiet. I wanted to talk about them, to make a plan, but every time I opened my mouth, I could only close it again. The only thing in my thoughts was the man lying beneath me, reaching his hand up to caress my cheek. Eagerly, I leaned down and captured his lips in mine, savouring the feeling of his tongue running along my sharp teeth; I swung one leg over his torso and he wrapped both his arms around me tight, pulling me in closer.
We awoke some hours later in, what I could only have assumed to be, the morning, although it was still dark outside with the red moon looming large. Shuu was already awake, hunched over the dresser with his head half in his hands. It was an odd sight—I struggled to recall the last time I had seen him sit at a desk. Even when I managed to force him to do his homework, he would do it from the comfort of whichever napping place he had chosen that day.
I slipped out of bed, wrapping the covers around my shoulders and trailing them behind me, and rested a hand on one of his tense shoulders. He was working away at a piece of paper diligently with a quill, writing in what I now recognised to be the common language they used in this place. It was so strange that I could suddenly read so easily—but I noticed that he had written Ayato’s name.
“What are you up to?” I asked him, working out the tension in his muscles with my fingers.
Without so much as tearing his eyes from the page, he replied, “Since my father took the throne, the other Kings have been waiting for their turn. I need to get them on our side to even stand a chance.”
“So you’re going to make Ayato the Vampire King,” I said, emptily. Behind my eyes, I was trying to imagine what that would even look like: he may be a few centuries old, and pushed just as hard as Shuu was to be the eldest son, but with his carefree disposition and his inability to wear his trousers properly, it was a distorted image. As if I could judge him.
Shuu hummed, “I need everyone else here, too.” He put the quill to the paper again, but the words didn’t seem to flow out; with his hand clutching the feather so tightly, his knuckles turning white, he pushed the tip into the page so hard that ink started bubbling around it. And then, snap, the metal nib broke. He tossed the feather back onto the desk.
I leaned forward and took one side of Shuu’s face in my hand, turning him to face me. Before I could even ask him what was wrong, he breathed a heavy sigh, his lips trembling, and spilled, “I’m going to meet with the Wolf Queen today, before the ball. She’s the longest ruling monarch, and she’s only managed to stay that way because she acts for her family rather than for power. If she’s really my great-grandmother, then we might have one less faction to worry about.”
“Well, that’s great, isn’t it?” I smiled, as best as I could.
“But there’s the other two,” his words punctuated the brief shimmer of hope I had felt, “Uthman, the Vibora King, and Arne, the Adler King. Uthman is a bit of a fool who took his throne too early, so he mostly follows Arne around, even though he only came to power a few decades ago. That’s who I’m truly worried about.” He turned back to the paper, which was now being warped by an unsightly, wet ink blot.
I frowned. “Is there nothing you can use against him?”
“My father might know something, but—”
“I’ll talk to him,” I said, retreating my hands from his face and drawing myself up tall. “I’ll go and get your brothers, too,” I would have to think about how best to deal with the hunters later.
He stared at me, dumbfounded, with his eyes wide. It took a few seconds for him to be able to formulate his next words, “You’re crazy.”
That I was. “Well, we have to try,” I muttered. But I wasn’t being as selfless as Shuu might believe me to be—the clock had been ticking down to the hunters’ arrival, and if Shuu simply sent for his brothers, they might leave much too late. And, perhaps I was still a human underneath after all, because I really wanted to give Karlheinz a piece of my mind before he died.
I had already made my way to the looming wardrobe and pulled its doors open, ruffling through them for a dress that might be more comfortable to wear. Wherever my normal clothes had disappeared to, I didn’t have time to worry about right now.
Watching my struggle, Shuu pulled at a chain in the corner of the room, and I heard the faintest sound of a bell ringing in the room next door. Not a few seconds later, a gentle knock came at the door and I whirled around to find a maid letting herself into the room with a humble curtsy.
She bound me up in one of the dresses I had picked out—a lighter, pale yellow version of what I had been wearing yesterday—while Shuu managed to pull on most of his clothes by himself. When the servant had finished dressing me, even combing my hair out for me (miraculously, without any pain) so that it looked more presentable, she gingerly tidied up Shuu’s collar and combed his hair over before scurrying out of the room.
Shuu’s hair stubbornly resisted the style. A few loose strands fell over his eyes; it only made him look even more charming. He still sported that trembling frown, and that furrowed brow. I walked over with my arms held out, and he took them in his hands and pulled me closer, until our foreheads were touching and all I could see was him, and all I could hear were his gentle, cold breaths against my face. “I love you,” I whispered. The words slipped out as naturally as breathing, and I found myself angling my face upwards to kiss him, softly and tenderly.
Another knock at the door came, this one firmer, and we reluctantly pulled apart. Shuu had finally stopped quivering, and it was in that brief moment, before the door opened, that he said unwaveringly, “I love you too.”
A butler stepped into the room, clearing his throat to make his presence known, and he bowed when we both turned to face him, “Young Master, the Wolf Queen is waiting in her rooms for you,” he proclaimed.
The Young Master in question nodded, his expression grim, and began to walk away. I held onto one of his arms until the very last moment, our index fingers linking together just as he was a little out of reach—and then my arm dropped back to my side, empty. If I couldn’t stop the hunters tonight, this might very well be the last time I see him. “Arrange for a meeting between my father and Hiro,” Shuu said to the butler, who responded only with a nod. And then the door was shut, and they were gone.
The man returned an hour later, of which I spent sitting slouched on the foot of the bed with my gaze paralysed on the clock hanging from the wall. I stood immediately upon his arrival, and he quickly led me through the labyrinth of corridors dazzling with ornate furniture and gold-plated accessories, until finally I arrived at that strange room again, with the unweathered wooden door. When I was finally led inside, and the door creaked shut eerily behind me, Karlheinz was waiting for me in the same spot with a disturbing smile plastered on his face; he gestured for me to take a seat, and I did.
I was spared the frustration of watching the little bats struggle to pour tea this time. In fact, when I looked up at the ceiling, I found they were no longer there at all. “Wondering where my familiars have gone to?” came Karlheinz’s honeyed voice, at once both soothing and unsettling. “They make for great spies, always returning and whispering little things in my ear. But I’ve no need for that now that I am set to die—I’m rather enjoying the silence after such a long time.”
That would have been useful to know, I thought, had I not been an impure Vampire. Perhaps Shuu would make use of it once he becomes King. But, between information about the Adler King and my own heritage, what should I have asked first? The correct answer was obvious, though it wasn’t what I wanted. “Who are my parents?” I blurted out ungracefully.
Karlheinz narrowed his eyes, “Well, I don’t know them any better than you do,” he grinned.
“Yes you do,” I raised my voice; I felt my face contort in anger, the hot rage bubbling from my chest. “How is a hybrid even possible?”
“Oh, it is possible. Of course it is possible, my dear,” he said, the pet name pricking my ears. But while he seemed to enjoy running his mouth, he showed no signs of actually telling me.
How could a man like him exist, even among demons? He was beyond arrogant, so much so that his wives, children, and even his own life mattered so little to him. He conducted this great experiment for the sake of demonkind, but there were no good intentions behind it—just pure madness—and now he wouldn’t even see it to the end, to make sure that his son, turned Founder, would be able to hold onto the throne. There was nothing more to it; I was angry. “Tell me!” I shouted, or at least I thought I did, but when the sound left my mouth, my voice seemed to splinter; it felt almost as if there were another person inside of me, speaking the same thing, only deeper, and much more commandeering.
I wasn’t the only one taken aback. Karlheinz’s pale eyes were open wide now, if only for a second, before he regained his composure. My hand flew to my throat, which was now a little bit sore, as if I had just been screaming at the top of my lungs. “What—What was that?” I stammered.
“That,” Karlheinz clapped his hands together in delight, “is the voice of a Founder. You can command practically any demon to do your bidding. I’m afraid it doesn’t work so well on the Four Kings, though. How else would they keep the Demon King in check?”
He eyed my astonished features closely, awaiting some kind of reaction. “What good is it, then?” I spat, clenching my fists under the table.
Karlheinz held his palms out, surrendering jokingly. “Let me first tell you about the hybrids,” he suggested, his voice still light and playful despite my tempest, “perhaps that will give you an idea. And if you and my son cannot figure out how to keep the throne, then perhaps you were never meant to be there in the first place, and I would have failed.”
Asshole. The word appeared involuntarily in my mind, but I forced my mouth shut and forced a smile, a sign that, even if it was begrudgingly, I would listen.
“Demon-human hybrids are extremely rare, but not impossible. I’ve encountered only a handful in my long, long life—most of them from before the Industrial age,” he began, moving his hands about performatively. “These hybrids are always of Adler descent, because they do not bare fangs, nor do they crave blood like Vampires or flesh like the Vibora.
“Now, demon traits are powerful but easily diluted by human genetics. As such, hybrids always appear mostly human. Barring, perhaps, red eyes or slightly sharper teeth.
“The first and only hybrid I have discovered in recent decades was in Omura—a half Adler boy whose mother had been abandoned by his father. She didn’t know, of course. She just thought he was possessed, so she sought out exorcism after exorcism until, finally, she just abandoned him on the very Church steps upon which you were also to be left.”
“So,” I swallowed, “that boy was my real father?”
“Indeed, Hiro,” Karlheinz smiled arrogantly, as if to hint there may or may not be a catch. I shuddered—he knew more than me, and he was having fun with that fact. “Unfortunately, I had to return to the Underworld to hold onto my waning power as Demon King, but I would’ve liked to take him under my wing. He ended up being raised by the nuns in that Church, who I’m sure you are familiar with. They beat him blue and bloody for struggling to read the scripture. As a benefactor, I did try to pass it off as dyslexia, but they just forced him to learn the Holy Book off by heart instead. How strange humans are, hm?”
That story sounded familiar. But Karlheinz was staring at me eagerly, his chin resting on his hands. He had told me about my parents—or one of them, at least—but I was no closer to knowing how to put the Adler King in his place, and I was running out of time. The clock behind the Demon King ticked ominously, closer and closer to the end of the day. Thank God it was the summer, when the sun set later, or I would have had even less time to retrieve Shuu’s brothers. But I was still wracking my brain for how to deal with my adoptive father, one of the few messes I had brought upon myself.
“What does this have to do with King Arne?” I asked.
“That’s the dirt I have on him,” Karlheinz grinned, his fangs glowing under the chandelier’s low candlelight. “He’s the father of that hybrid.”
“He’s my…” grandfather, I wanted to say, but I couldn’t quite get the words out.
Karlheinz pressed his index finger to his lips and shushed me, “But Arne is young—he does not value family ties like the Wolf Queen does. You must find another way to get under his skin.”
I scoffed, “How!”
A harsh knock came from the door behind me, and I shot onto my feet.
“Well! It’s time for me to go to my death. And you…” his eyes surveyed me from head to toe. I folded my arms over my chest, for what little comfort it provided me. “You have some hunters to deal with, do you not?” he said.
My eyes bulged. I was about to ask how he knew when the door swung open; I spun around to find the same butler who escorted me here, “I shall lead you back to the manor, my lady,” he said with his head bowed.
So, with my head spinning and my back burning from Karlheinz’s gaze, I reluctantly left the room. Just when I thought I had heard enough of his taunting voice, he called out to me just as I was to turn into the corridor, “Oh, and one more thing.”
I twisted my neck to look at him as he said, “Say goodbye to those four snakes for me, will you?”
The door swung shut with a loud bang, nearly throwing me off my feet at its sheer finality.
Please reblog and follow if you enjoy my work! It's greatly appreciated ✩
Fandom: Diabolik Lovers
Pairing: Shuu Sakamaki x OC (Hiro Komori)
Word count: 5.4k
Read on AO3
The re:Genesis Project Masterlist
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My wish to never see Reiji’s face again would have to be put on hold, it seemed. Although, it was rather entertaining to see him in this state.
As soon as night blanketed the horizon fully in her indigo embrace, I readied myself to accompany Shuu and his prisoner-brother to the Underworld. So, here I was in the gardens, standing defiantly face-to-face with the man I killed myself to stop. Reiji was in the same clothes as that night, his shirt and trouser leg ripped open where he had been stabbed, dark and dried bloodstains muddying the fabric still. He wore no glasses, and so he squinted slightly as he was pushed in the right direction by Shuu, and shattered pride was written all over his face.
“Is that really enough to hold him?” I gestured at his silver handcuffs, keeping his hands together at his front. Between the chains that connected them, another bigger chain had been attached to pull him along, which Shuu had placed in my hand before I could protest. Standing just a few feet away from Reiji, the chain was already slightly tense—just one tug and I could watch the disgraced demon fall flat on his nose.
Shuu nodded, “There’s also one silver needle in each of his limbs. It probably hurts like hell to even be standing upright. He’s not going anywhere.” I could not tell if he was right, despite Reiji's gritted teeth, for he always did that. Perhaps Shuu didn’t even have to bother with the needles, if Reiji’s ego was already in so much pain.
“I’m gonna go ahead and make sure the entrance is still here,” he said, walking straight past us; I turned around fast to follow after him, wary of being alone with Reiji again, but Shuu had already disappeared. We were past the maze of hedges and so there was only a sea of violet and crimson flowers before us swaying gently in the wind, and nowhere he could have disappeared to. In the middle of that colourful ocean was a stone gazebo, its intricately stained glass dome upheld by chiselled pillars, but nobody was there either. Was the entrance to the Underworld right in front of us? I couldn’t be sure, so I stayed put and turned back to Reiji.
His red eyes scanned my body from head to toe, and instinctively I bared my teeth at him, just because I could. I had already decided against using my fangs if I could help it, but I could still flash them. But Reiji just returned a dry laugh. “Why bother to take me all the way to the Underworld?”
“I would ask the same thing,” I spat, my face twisting into a scowl despite my wishes to remain composed, “but your brother cares for you, it seems.”
He scoffed. “For a Demon, death is the merciful—loving, even—punishment. That’s why I had our mother killed.”
“You—You’re,” I stepped back involuntarily, his twisted face from my dream flashing through my head. To do it was one thing, to brag about it was something else entirely. “You’re actually crazy.”
“No,” he smiled disconcertingly, “she was being tormented by our Father and that woman whose heart you stole. Can you imagine an eternity of that? My brother flaunts his morals but rarely considers the actual consequences.”
Don’t goad him, I thought to myself. But it was so difficult! What was wrong with this guy? He licked his lips, just like he did when he drank from me, and opened his awful mouth once again, “And you: you’re hardly any better than me. Did you not call your Hunter father to our manor, with zero regard for whether he shall kill or be killed himself?”
He was squinting slightly in the sun, but his red eyes shone unmistakably in the light.
The fucking bat! I thought I had seen two red eyes watching me at the Mukami house.
Just as I thought about raising my palm to his face, a familiar hand rested on my shoulder from behind; Shuu was back, thank God. His hand slipped down my arm and took the chain from me, replacing my grip with his free hand. Without so much as uttering a word, he turned back the way he came and started marching forwards with me trailing behind, stumbling as I struggled to catch up to him at first. Reiji lagged even further behind in defiance, although I would hear his pace quicken whenever the chain links started grinding against each other.
“How does this work?” I asked, looking up at Shuu expectantly. He was focusing hard, his brows furrowed low over his eyes as we stepped into the flower field and began wading our way through inky purples and bright blues.
“In places, there are cracks between our realms, thin enough that no human would be able to see, but if a Demon concentrates hard enough, they can simply step through,” he explained, tilting his head forward in an attempt to gesture at the dead air in front of us. For just a moment, I stopped walking to squint my eyes and… it was there, a small tear through the air that shimmered like the starry sky above.
“There’s many of these in Omura. That’s why there are so many Demons here,” he commented again, reaching his hand out and gripping one side of the tear. “This one leads to the castle’s courtyard. Are you ready?” He turned back to me to ask that last question, his eyes softening immediately when they landed on my face.
“I think so?”
With that, he pulled at the rip suddenly, widening the gap enough for us to step through. Once I was safely across the threshold, Shuu yanked on the chain and practically dragged Reiji across, and the rip shrank back to its original size as soon as he was over. I let go of Shuu’s hand, eager to look around at exactly what kind of world I had just stumbled into.
It looked mostly the same as the Overworld. Well, the slightly squelchy grass beneath my feet felt the same, and the trees smelt like normal trees. Although, I wondered how they grew; surely there was no such thing as daytime here? I couldn’t tell, because it was definitely nighttime here, too, although the sky above had not a star in sight, just plain black darkness, and it was boxed in by the courtyard’s tall brick walls, and a turret in one corner. What shocked me most of all, though, was the large, bright red moon peeking out from behind the turret. I rubbed at my eyes and looked again, but it was still red, and very big.
“Don’t worry, it’s supposed to look like that,” came Shuu’s voice. “And, before you ask, we don’t get sunlight here.”
A grey-haired butler approached us not long after, bumbling his apologies for being unaware of our arrival before leading us out of the courtyard. He was a member of one of the lesser demon races, according to Shuu. Just like the butler at the manor—that made a lot of sense, I thought.
“You arrived at a great time. Our King has had festivities practically every night this year to celebrate his three thousandth birthday. He doesn’t seem entirely pleased about the jubilee, but seeing his two eldest sons might cheer him up,” the servant explained. His irises darted to the very corners of his eyes, throwing me a hesitant look. I, however, was much more concerned with the three thousand number.
“Your father is really that old?” I whispered to Shuu as we fell behind the butler just enough to escape earshot.
“Of course,” he answered calmly.
“And you are, how old?”
He thought for a moment, “Four—No, five h—”
“Nevermind,” I interrupted, my head already spinning. “Is it normal, then, to have kids at… over two thousand? What else are you guys doing?” I had always seen having children as what one does when they have lived enough that they start to get bored, and figure they have enough wisdom to pass onto the next generation. For people with infinite time on their hands, you would think they would have children a lot earlier than that.
“Oh, are you thinking about that already?” Shuu’s voice cut through my thoughts. I glowered at him, but he just laughed. He relented, however, upon seeing how I continued to glare, “Most Vampires choose not to have children. We live forever—we can continue our own legacies, so unless nearly an entire clan has been killed off, it’s pointless. I assume that’s also why most Vampires are former humans, because the upper classes just see no point in reproducing.”
“So your Father had you with the intention of dying?” I asked.
“Yep,” Shuu sighed, “usually you’d just go dormant for a few centuries if you got tired of living, but not if you’re a King.”
Dormancy was not something I heard of before. I wanted to question him on that now, too, but the butler was shooting glances over his shoulder, and so we caught up with him promptly. The castle was a hundred times bigger than the manor—you could live your entire life in one corner and never come across someone who lived on the other side. That was what the brothers did, I supposed. That thought left me quite sour as we were led up yet another flight of stairs, carpeted in its entirety with an impossibly long red rug. A few more turns, down another corridor, and the servant was gesturing at three separate doors all spread terribly far apart; I dreaded how big the rooms were going to be.
When Shuu bent down to whisper in the servant’s ear, likely to tell him that Reiji’s room would be in the dungeon, the hale old man bowed and apologised profusely. Shuu looked back at me with a haggard but mildly amused look on his face, as if he was playing with a child; the corner of my mouth twisted up at him before my gaze drifted to Reiji, who was standing obediently just a few steps away, staring distantly down the wide corridor.
“I’ll go with him to the dungeon,” Shuu said before gesturing at the door, “You should get ready to meet my father.”
“Get ready for—how?” I called after him, scrambling over my words as I reached out for his arm; but he was already trotting down the corridor again with Reiji in tow. I let out a nervous laugh at the sight of their backs before my mind flung itself back into a frenzy. How do you get ready to meet a king? This must have been such a normal part of Shuu’s childhood that he didn’t think it possible someone couldn’t know. Honestly!
Wary of lingering in the hallway, I fled into the nearest of the three rooms and clicked the ridiculously ornate and heavy wooden door shut behind me. The room was not so different from mine at the manor, bar the walls being made of pale grey stones which made me feel the cold just by looking at them.
Each stone was uniquely chipped and uneven, but they had been laid so carefully beside the next that it felt rather homely. A dresser with three large mirrors, all with their own engraved golden frames, was pushed against the wall to one side, and on the other side was a bed much larger than could ever be necessary—covered with black brocade silk, it was piled high with an assortment of matching gold and silver pillows. And, glinting at the very centre of my vision, was the large window spanning the entire remaining wall. There was only a pause for more bricks in one corner, where another small and slightly decaying wooden door led out onto the balcony. I headed straight for it without a second thought.
Cold air bit my skin as soon as I stepped outside, though I felt no need to fold in on myself for warmth as a human would have done. I still wasn’t sure if I welcomed such a change, because happiness is sometimes so much sweeter after suffering a little, but perhaps Vampires had their own sorrowful ways. Even so, the sight in front of me was endlessly beautiful, something I could look at forever.
Past the castle’s high walls, there were dozens of yellow dots, lights, flickering underneath the surrounding forest, all the way to the horizon and beyond. But from such a distance, they all blurred together in vertical streaks of gold like little sunbeams. With my hands gripping the railing, I leaned forward and narrowed my eyes, counting how each handful of lights seemed to cluster together, and I realised that these were countless villages surrounding us, with God knows how many demons in each one. I wondered just how far over the horizon these settlements stretched, and suddenly I felt giddy; I wanted to move, to go down and meet those people so different from me just to know, but I had no idea where to start.
The bedroom door opened just then, as if somebody had sensed how eager I was that I might have jumped over the edge. I spun around and put one tentative foot back into the room to find that two young women, dressed clearly as maids in their all-black dresses and tied up hair, had entered with their eyes downcast. If they were servants, then I figured they must be “ghouls” too—they had the usual pale black hair, although one of them had eyes of a deep and rich brown rather than the usual grey. She looked rather familiar.
“Can I help you?” I asked as I reluctantly stepped further in, closing the balcony door behind me without ever taking my eyes off the maids.
Barely moving their heads, they threw scattered glares at each other first, deciding who should speak, before the one on the right with the brown eyes looked up at me through her eyelashes and said, “We are here to get the Lady ready for her meeting with the King.”
‘Lady’. God—I did not like that title at all. But the two girls looked as if they would crumble if I even breathed slightly aggressively, so I left that alone. If I started insisting that they refer to me as an equal, who knows if they would graciously accept, deny me with flattery, or take it as an insult? I did not yet know how this society worked, so I aimed just to get rid of them quickly, “I can manage by myself,” I lied. I usually did, so surely getting into a dress could not have been much different.
How utterly wrong I was.
They both glanced over at the bed, upon which a dress had been laid. It looked far more luxurious than anything I ever had the chance to wear before, its lush forest green fabric forming the outline of a long sleeved, off-shoulder bodice and matching skirt. The top half, on closer inspection, also had an open panel made of a softer green and cut with white ruffled lace; I soon discovered, however, that it would be a nightmare to put on. The maids pulled away the comfort of my shirt and shorts and started lacing up a corrset—a horrible contraption—from the back, and the ordeal wasn’t even over until I put on several petticoats underneath the dress, just to give it some volume. When I was finally dressed, with my hair pulled back neatly in a half up-do I had never considered before, I already felt exhausted. How was I supposed to make a good impression like this?
The maids had been staring at me silently, admiring their work, when an overly confident rapping came from the door. It was Shuu—I could tell just by the way he knocked slightly slower than one usually would; the women tending me seemed to know it was him, too. They scurried out of the room silently, dipping panicked curried to Shuu before disappearing completely behind the door frame.
When he finally pushed the door shut behind him, my knees wobbled at the sight before me; there was no way the man in front of me was the same one as before, who owned several of the same sweater and could hardly be bothered to change out of his school uniform most days. Shuu looked rather comfortable in his teal waistcoat, adorned with silk lapels in the same shade and gold buttons. Underneath, he was wearing a black shirt with the collar upturned and a tie of gold fabric pulled around it, tucked neatly into the vest. Even his hair was combed neatly too, revealing just how long it had grown since I had first met him. He looked every bit the image of a prince and, strange enough, I found myself liking it.
I realised just how long I had been gawking at him, and how his sapphire eyes similarly lingered on my ridiculous dress. I threw my gaze somewhere less interesting—the door behind him. But he closed the distance between us in a second, placing his hands at my unnaturally cinched waist. Securely in his grasp, I had no choice but to look up at him, to fall into those eyes and lose myself once more. “Hello,” I said, breathlessly.
Shuu’s smile, which had still only managed to turn up one corner of his mouth, softened at my bashfulness. He leaned down and placed a kiss, small and quick, on my lips, and then he pulled away. The shock took a second longer still to wash over me; I shook my head, as much as my elaborate hairstyle would allow, and threaded my arm under his. “Are you ready?” he asked me gently.
“Nope,” I said honestly, earning another smile from him. “By the way, who was that maid? The one with the brown eyes,” I tagged on as we started to walk back through the hallways, the occasional serving gent or lady stopping to bow their head at Shuu.
“Firenze,” he replied after a long pause. “She served my mother since she was little, although my father had her stay in the Underworld when we moved to Omura—he didn’t want any serving women in the manor.”
So I had really been in Shuu’s mother’s body for that dream, I thought. I had felt so heavy that entire time, as if I were overloaded with emptiness. Was that what she felt, especially after she was forced to live in the Overworld without her dear friend?
After sweeping through dozens of long, gilded corridors, we eventually arrived at, jarringly, a rather understated wooden door. It was small with sharp corners, and the walls around it were devoid of any decoration. There was just one guard with a spear, not even in full armour, that stood stock still to one side. “This is my father’s office,” Shuu announced, sucking in a breath.
At that, the ring handle of the door lifted on its own, and the slab of wood swung inwards, revealing a dark, windowless room lit only by the gentle warm glow of a few candles. Shelves filled with old and crumbling leather book spines lined every wall, becoming the wall itself, and a large, round table with an immaculately polished surface sat perfectly in the middle. The King—Karlheinz—was perched on one of the cushioned chairs opposite us, pure white hair framing his pale face and yellow-washed eyes. A blue-willow patterned teapot sat before him, surrounded by three small teacups; the man, who was imposing even when sitting, gestured at the two seats laid out before us before tucking his hand back under his chin in thought.
When I just barely managed to slide into the chair and sit, struggling through several layers of hot fabric, two little bats flapped down from the ceiling—I had not noticed them there before—and struggled together to lift the teapot by its handle. Somehow, painfully slowly, they managed to dip the spout of the pot just enough to pour tea into one tiny cup without spilling anything, and then they managed to repeat the same thing for the other two cups. We all sat there silently, my gaze fixed on the struggling bats while the King’s eerie smile focused on me. Surely it would have been much easier to just pour the tea ourselves?
“It’s good to finally meet you, Eve,” the man said, his voice slightly muffled as he rested his chin on his hands. The bats finally finished pouring the last of the tea and zipped back up to the ceiling, folding the stretched skin of their wings around themselves like a cocoon. Karlheinz flicked his gaze over to Shuu, and his mouth twisted downwards a little, “And my son. You’ve surprised me.”
“I could say as much for you, Father,” Shuu replied through gritted teeth, practically spitting the last word.
Karlheinz brought his palm down on the table hard and fast; the flat sound of his hand against the wood, and the clatter of the teacups as they struggled to contain their tea, made me flinch. My heart was racing, and I thought that if I didn’t want to be in this room with Shuu’s father before, then I definitely didn’t want to be now. He seemed to catch even himself by surprise, for his eyes widened and he retraced his hand, holding it firm under the table, before clearing his throat, “You may have lost your studious rigor since your mother passed away,” Shuu winced at the memory, but his father showed no concern to his son’s distress. He didn’t even pause to reflect on his deceased wife as he continued on, “You’ve secretly wanted this your whole life, haven’t you?
“Where your brothers all struggled and flailed to become Adam, you succeeded on the first try. Now, not only will you be able to take my throne and create your vision of humans and demons co-existing peacefully, you can also feel the most potent human emotion of all. Love,” he hooked his two forefingers through his teacup handle and leaned back to take a long and very loud sip. I looked at Shuu through furrowed brows, and he looked at me with just as much confusion. We came here for answers on what happened to us, but we were silently beginning to realise we might be hard pressed to find any.
As the silence stretched on longer, testing the limits of what we could put up with, finally I cleared my throat. “I found your notes,” I announced, testing the waters.
Karlheinz set his cup down and leaned forward again, towards me, in curiosity. “Oh?” he cooed, “Were you able to read them?”
“I—” I cut myself off. I wasn’t expecting such a question, “Yes?”
The corners of his lips stretched outwards again, into that unsettling smile; but then he twirled his hand in front of him, gesturing for me to continue. “You wanted to recreate the Founders by mixing the blood of a human and all the demon clans,” I ventured, observing carefully how he nodded along to my account, “I have the heart of a Vibora and Founder, and I’ve drank Vampire blood… but how was that enough?”
Somehow, he smiled even wider, all without baring his fangs. Then he let out a low chuckle, something like a rumble, his pupils narrowing and painting a crazed look in his eyes while Shuu and I could do nothing; we sat stiffly until his fit of giggles ceased. “You have not had the chance to read the latest volume, I gather,” he said. I remembered there were other journals on the shelf behind the desk, but I had picked up what I presumed to be the most recent one. He added, casually, “You were born with a sliver of Adler blood in you, Eve.”
My fingers, hidden under the dark wood of the table, gripped at the expensive fabric of my skirts. With the silk bundled between my nails, I knew I would be leaving unsavoury creases and even snag marks in the material, but I couldn’t find it in myself to care. The white hair and black clothes of the man opposite me bled into each other and something pricked at my eyes, perhaps the loose hairs falling from my ridiculous up-do; I lowered my head to my lap and blinked the feeling away furiously.
Karlheinz continued nattering away; I heard the first few words, “You’re only a quarter. At that level, although the blood is still flowing through your veins, the traits are hardly likely to surface…” but the rest faded away. How could I have been part demon, and housed in a Church, all along?
“That’s probably why you have trouble reading—most hybrids do. My assumption is that, as with all genes, there’s a dominant and recessive allele,” my Father continued. He was staring right at Hiro, who had bowed her head and was clearly not taking in this information any longer, but that did not deter him, “The demon alleles are powerful but quite rare, in that respect, although something in there seems to make all hybrids struggle to comprehend anything that is not the language in use here in the Underworld; pure-bloods are able to quickly learn the difference.”
She was gripping at her dress so tight now that I worried, with a simple miscalculation of her newfound strength, she might just rip the thing clean in half. Maybe that was what she needed right now—to tear things up—but it would have to wait until later. I reached over as discreetly as possible, forcing my fingers in under her palms until finally she accepted me, squeezing (and nearly crushing) my hand tight in hers.
I looked over at my father defiantly, who had finally finished his yammering and looked at her expectantly for a response, none-the-wiser to our exchange under the table. His little spiel earlier about being able to feel love was strange and absurd, but it also made me feel a little sorry for him and all the other pure-blood demons in high society. Living so long with so little struggle, reclining comfortably in their castles with no ambition while the greater demon world of the “impure” rotted and fell off around them—no wonder their empathy had all but evaporated.
“That still doesn’t explain everything,” I said, as sternly as I could. We came here to get answers, and we weren’t going to leave without them. But I regretted the words almost as soon as they left my mouth; some strands of hair fell in front of my eyes, unused to being tamed in such a neat style, and somehow I knew what the bastard was going to say before he even opened his mouth.
“Oh, I thought you would have known,” my father’s downturned eyebrows could have suggested anything from disappointment to pity. “Just as you received the blood of the Founder, Vibora, and Adler from Hiro, she took blood into her system from you. Blood that was not just from a Vampire, but also a part Wolf, too,”
I supposed I should have seen it coming, especially with the way my mother always liked to comb my hair and get all emotional about it. “You’re so beautiful, my dear son,” she would say, “don’t let anybody tell you otherwise.” I thought she was just being overbearing, or even narcissistic, considering how much we looked alike. I was always so up in the clouds about big ideas that I never stopped to consider the smaller things, like how Cordleia would call her a “mutt” and bark at her jokingly, or how not a single pure-blooded Vampire before us had boasted blonde hair.
I could excuse myself for being so unconcerned with running the manor that I had not even the slightest idea about the Adam and Eve project, but this. This was an entirely different matter. I wished to avert my gaze, too, but I didn’t feel I deserved it.
“There was always some gossip that your grandmother had gotten involved with the current Crown Prince of the Wolf Clan, but she quashed the rumours by simply hiding Beatrix away. And she was lucky indeed that she didn’t have the smell of a Wolf,” my father went back to nursing his teacup now, holding it by the rim between his spindly fingers between sips. “Once she was married to me, there was no longer any room to criticise her—and I had another chance to make the perfect Adam candidate.
“My first wife was a good bet at first, you see, but I was going to have to transplant her heart eventually, and then I would be in a tight spot to find a human who was part Wolf and Adler—”
“Shut up!” I raised my voice, feeling a new edge to it that I hadn’t before. So loud was I that I hadn’t noticed I had stood up, violently toppling over the lavish chair behind me in the process. When was the last time I had spoken that loudly? At any rate, I was successful in getting my father to be silent: he was watching me carefully now, his mouth set straight and his face unreadably neutral. Hiro had finally lifted her head up too; her eyes were slightly red, but she had done her best not to cry a mess. I would have rather she just cried. “Is there anything else, or can we be done with this?” I cut through the silence.
There was that awful smile again, the one that sent shivers throughout my whole body. It was the crazed look of a scientist, not a father, and he had just realised another one of his cruel experiments. “Kill me,” he said, with that wide-eyed, crazy look. “You already have all the blood flowing through your veins. The power is teeming, pushing at your limits, isn’t it?” he taunted, looking knowingly between Hiro and I, who were even more frozen in place than before, “And you’ve taken your Eve—your Queen. You have taken her, haven’t you?”
Hiro and I looked at each other nervously, the meaning of his words registering a second too late. My father, however, had already moved on. He stood, trying to put us on an even field again. But I was much taller than him now—his eyes widened at the realisation. The last time he saw me, I was nowhere near this tall.
“Being on the throne in the Underworld is like being in charge of filling up a great, big pot: only a Founder could ever have so much power to fill it up to the very top. I have only managed to keep it half-full, the liquid draining ever so slowly over time,” he explained, his fingers dancing across the immaculately polished wood as he circled the table, coming closer now to me. I drew myself up taller, so that he had to tilt his head back slightly just to look me in the eye.
He smiled a dry smile and, unexpectedly, put a hand to my cheek. It was cold to the touch, even colder than a Vampire should have been, and still devoid of any fatherly love. “Once you kill me, the throne will be yours,” he whispered, “You will have the capacity to wield all that power—”
The bastard trailed off almost listlessly, as if in a daze; he retreated his hand and stepped around me, plodding over to the door in apparent defeat. I watched on in bewilderment as he rapped at the well-kept wood and a guard wrenched the thing open. My father looked back at me one more time, and the dangerous flame was flickering behind his eyes again, for a brief moment. He clasped his hands together and exclaimed, “Better yet, let us make a spectacle of it! You will do it at the ball tomorrow—then everybody will know undeniably that you are King.” And then he walked out of the room with such uncharacteristic fervour that he was practically dancing.
I looked over at Hiro, who was similarly flabbergasted, but I had nothing to say; my mouth opened and closed wordlessly. I did hate the man, but how was I supposed to kill my own father?
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Fandom: Diabolik Lovers
Pairing: Shuu Sakamaki x OC (Hiro Komori)
Word count: 3.3k
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The re:Genesis Project Masterlist
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When you fall in a dream, even though it’s just a dream, it feels so very real. Your stomach drops, your whole body seizes up, and you feel like kicking your legs, thrashing meaninglessly at the wind pushing you from all sides. But when you hit the ground, you wake up, and for a split second you think you might have just escaped death by landing on a safe, soft mattress.
I started awake that way in an unfamiliar bed, staring blankly at the gauzy red fabric draped over the canopy above; it doubled as a sheer curtain, too, hanging gracefully over all three open sides of the bed and obscuring the bustling silhouettes just outside. From what I could see, the room around me was large, much larger than anybody’s room needed to be, and it boasted the most beautiful nighttime view with its large windows and, just outside, the… red moon?
My own legs, my whole body were unfamiliar to me too, I soon realised. My limbs were much longer and much paler than anything I’d ever seen before—yes, even more than the vampires I had just been living with. I had little time to think about it, however, when one of the shadowy figures stepped forward and delicately pulled back the hangings on one side, tying them to a post with a matching red ribbon.
The figure was dressed in clothes typical of a maid’s, maybe a few hundred years ago, with dark hair tied neatly back—with her slightly ashy skin, she looked very much like the butler from the manor, who was apparently a ghoul. A flame roared in the fireplace opposite, the only source of warmth in this room made of cold, unfeeling stone. I felt myself sit up involuntarily; no matter how much I tried to move, this body simply wouldn’t obey. Eventually, I gave up, able to do nothing more than blink and watch.
I was ushered to a grand dressing table filled with many different kinds of powders and rouges, probably all handmade, and definitely nothing you could buy in a drugstore. The rest of the silhouettes I had seen before—other similarly dressed maids—began bustling about my face, smacking every type of powder they could on it while I did my best not to cough, or to notice how my nose tickled from the feeling. When they finally released me, I had the chance to look in the mirror and realise, this was not me.
Still, I looked awfully familiar. The powder had made my complexion look a little less sickly, and now that one of the maids was wrenching my long hair up into some fancy style, I could see how it glittered golden-blonde by candlelight, and how my eyes were stone blue. An unusual colouring for a vampire, I found myself thinking, although I never remembered having any knowledge of what colour hair vampires were supposed to have. Yet, somehow, I felt that I had been concerned about this oddity my entire life, a life much longer than the measly eighteen years I had actually lived.
“Your hair is beautiful as ever, my lady,” my maid seemed to pick up on how intensely I’d been staring at the colour. Her watchful brown eyes, an unusual colour for a ghoul, seemed to always notice me when my parents did not. “And the dress your mother picked out for you today will bring out your eyes nicely,” she hummed.
My mother? Yes, I have one of those, I think I remember—she has beautiful black hair even longer than mine, just like my father’s. While he has red eyes, though, just like any vampire does, my mother’s eyes are a sparkling teal; they’re her most prized possession. If only I hadn’t been born such a surprise, with these awful, nearly ginger locks, perhaps my eyes could be beautiful, too.
After being bundled into that dress, made with uncomfortable velvet of crimson red, decorated all over by black lace and black-dyed pearls, I was led to a modest tearoom, where my mother lay reclined in a lavish seat, black curls piled high on top of her head while she looked through me with those cyan eyes, unimpressed.
Almost on instinct, I dipped into a low curtsy before her; my stomach fell flat when she did not even respond to that, even though she never had the hundreds of times I had done it before. “Well, I don’t know what I was expecting, but it will have to do,” she croaked, barely sparing even a glance in my direction, “if you return to me today without a ring on your finger, don’t bother returning at all.”
So, in a daze, I was bundled into a carriage, then through a well-tended courtyard and some disorienting and decadent hallways; so decked out were they with shining chandeliers and mirrors and ornaments that that the floors might as well have been made out of gold, too. I was lucky to have my longtime maid with me, the one with brown eyes who had served me since I was a child, otherwise I would have gotten lost straight away.
Right, it was coming back to me now, as I found myself sitting opposite a very handsome man. At least, I thought he was handsome, with his long, pale hair and even paler eyes, but I certainly didn’t feel that way. Deep down, I had a bad feeling about him, but I pushed it down. He was the King of the entire Underworld, and I was the eldest daughter of an old vampire family with fading wealth and fading power. If I could secure such a match, then my younger sisters with their shining black hair and malachite eyes could marry whomever they pleased. And maybe I could find a purpose, rather than laying about in my room all day, hiding away from the world because my mother had told me to.
He held out his hand, and in a gentle voice he asked, “Your hair is so beautiful, Beatrix. Why don’t you stay with me here, from now on?”
Swallowing hard, I gingerly took his hand and nodded my answer.
Then I awoke in bed again, in a different room this time, though my body was sore all over, and I could smell blood in the air, on the linen sheets, but none of that mattered. Hot tears rolled down my face and soaked into the fabric I had swaddled between my arms, where a red and slightly wrinkled face poked out—my son. When the nurses passed him to me, I checked his little hairs immediately only to be dismayed that they were blonde like mine. But when he finally opened his eyes, and I found two precious blue stones staring back at me, I choked back a sob. He had inherited those cursed colours from me, but I thought at least that he looked beautiful. I would never make him feel he needed to hide away because of his looks, I decided.
Despite bearing the King’s first two children, both sons at that, my life still did not change much; I continued to shut myself in my rooms, although I did venture out to see my sons every day and make sure their education was under way. I could not bring myself to do much more than that—the King’s first wife, a vicious purple-haired woman named Cordelia—constantly prowled the corridors as if this castle were her kingdom. She hated me, taunted me every day since I arrived with mean pranks and death threats. I could tolerate it at first, with the King at my side, but after Cordelia gave birth to her triplet sons, he hardly ever came to talk to me again. It was easy, when you lived in a castle this big.
Even when we moved to Wallachia, in the Overworld, that castle was big enough that he could manage to avoid me. At least I could shield myself and my sons from Cordelia, at the same time, except for at parties. Events like that were just the perfect opportunity for Cordelia to parade her sons about. With the third wife, whose name I could not even recall, having been sick ever since giving birth to her own son, I was evidently the only real competition in her own eyes. I did not want to play her stupid games, but I would push my dear son so hard before every day, to learn all his politics and languages and instruments. He might be the eldest, but his succession was not guaranteed, simply because the King had not married me first. I began to wonder if he created this mess on purpose.
So many years later, I found myself looking down at my maroon corset, where an even deeper red seeped slowly through the fabric, out from the splintered wooden stake that had been driven right through my heart. I was slouched on a familiar floor, in the red-carpeted corridor of the manor in Japan. Actually, I had the feeling that this was my residence alone. The other wives all lived in other places, a safe distance away, but Cordelia’s messages still came to taunt me throughout the years. “Mongrel,” she called me once, “with hair like the fur of a dog.” How dare she insult my hair like that; it was the colour of my son’s hair, too.
Perhaps this stake was from her. Omura had no shortage of hunters, as the King had warned me. My attacker had dashed away at a moment’s notice after doing his job, but when I looked up at the new figure that had made its way before me, I hoped to see my darling son’s face just one last time. Except, this was not the son I was hoping to see.
“I know you’ve been suffering,” Reiji said, pushing his spectacles up over his piercing red eyes. Perhaps he was right; I couldn’t remember a single happy day in my life, except the day my other son was born. He was not just some tool for a power grab to me, like how Cordelia might have treated her own sons, but a reflection of myself. A better version of me, perhaps. I tearfully wondered if he would be sad to see me this way. “Goodnight, Mother,” the raven-haired boy reached forward and closed his fingers around the stake. He twisted it once, out of spite, and wrenched it out, sending droplets of blood flying out all in slow motion.
But I felt no pain… only a gentle warmth, one that I had never known before, envelope me and pull me forwards. I tumbled over myself, as if the floor had just given way beneath me, and found myself, once again, falling endlessly down.
When my heart dropped to my stomach yet again, I startled awake; I opened my eyes, and I knew I was really awake this time—in my dream, I hadn’t felt so… cold. There was a chill deep within my bones, icier than any winter I had experienced before, and yet I wasn’t shivering—I felt quite warm inside, in fact; happy.
I sat up, my eyes scanning the familiar decor of my room. Everything was where I had left it: the stack of textbooks on my desk, the grand piano before my bed with the stool adjusted perfectly for my height, the unnecessary throw pillows lining the bay windowsill, overlooking the garden below. And, to my right, lay Shuu dozing peacefully. Although he was on top of the covers, he had still managed to curl into my side in his sleep; his face was completely relaxed, his lips slightly parted and not a crease visible in his brow, unlike when he pretended to be asleep. Unconsciously, I reached for his mussed hair and combed my fingers through the soft golden strands, gently snagging at a few tangles along the way.
How did we get here? I remembered the rush of heat from when the wine glass shattered against my wrist, wincing as I recalled how the blood squirted out endlessly. Even if that wound wasn’t life-threatening, it most definitely should have left a scar, so… where was it? I retreated my hand, turning my arm this way and that, but there was not a single scratch; I checked the other arm too. Nothing. Shuu roused just then, his pale lashes beating softly against his cheeks as he fought the urge to fall back asleep. Then his deep blue eyes looked up at me adoringly, unburdened by thought for one moment before recognition flashed behind his eyes.
“Hiro!” he exclaimed, shock seizing his features. Propping himself up on an elbow, he reached his free hand out and took my chin, angling my face downwards so he could look into my eyes properly. Still not entirely sure what was happening, I stayed put and let him go about his business; once he had decided everything was fine, with a prompt nod he let my face go. “You’re alive,” he sighed with relief.
I creased my brows. “Shuu, what happened?” I held out my clean arm, waving it in front of his face in demand of an explanation, “I’m supposed to be dead, right?”
“Well,” he trailed off, his gaze drifting to the side, “technically, you are.”
“Shuu,” I said, firmly.
“I turned you into a Vampire,” he blurted, averting his gaze. I barely had time to register what he said before he was already blubbering the next thing, “I did ask, and you said yes, but then you weren’t really in the state to agree—and then I remembered that people can still die despite drinking a pureblood Vampire’s blood, if they don’t feel they have unfinished business to attend to…”
His voice faded out, and I really only saw his lips moving frantically. Just three months ago, I was absolutely terrified of this man. He ignored me, and I was intent to keep it that way. How ridiculous was it, then, that I could do nothing but smile, laugh at his rambling? Shuu stilled when he saw the grin break out onto my face.
“You aren’t upset?”
If he had turned me just a few weeks ago, perhaps I would have been. Back then, I had already firmly determined I wanted nothing more than a simple life. But this was the hand I had been dealt, and I was done running from it. Besides, this meant I would get to spend forever with Shuu, right? That didn’t sound so bad. The rest, I could figure out later. “Only a little,” I said playfully.
“It’s not so bad. For you, I mean,” Shuu explained, flopping back fully into the bed. “You can still see in the sun, and you can survive entirely off normal food,” he said. Then, he wriggled his nose, as if he were sniffing something. “Although…” he gave me a sidelong glare, “you smell like death.”
I grabbed the nearest thing—a pillow—and brought it down hard on Shuu’s chest. It barely fazed him, but I had definitely done it with much more strength and speed than I had ever done anything before; feathers spilled from it, jumping into the air and floating side to side slowly on their way down. “Weird,” I gazed at my hand absently. I was far from an experienced fighter, but at least I would not be completely defenceless against hunters—
“Shuu,” I gasped, and he surged upright at my urgency. “How long have I been out?” I asked.
“A week?” he sighed, rubbing the back of his neck in frustration. “What’s the rush? I’m still sleepy.”
“A week…” I muttered. So there was only a week left until my Father would come. What was I going to tell Shuu? That I hated his brother so much, I decided to call some hunters to their front door? That guy—
“What happened to Reiji?” I found myself asking. In truth, I did not care if he lived or died, but I knew Shuu did. That was enough for me to ask.
He turned his head away, looking at nothing in particular. “In the dungeons,” he said quietly. I wasn’t sure if I heard right, but I didn’t dare ask again. “I’m going to take him to the Underworld,” he continued, “I believe he will be less of a nuisance there.” Without looking him directly in the eye, my hand found its way into his, and our fingers laced together naturally. He squeezed my hand once; I smiled.
The Underworld: my mind lingered on that unknown place. I was curious about how it looked, and I wanted to take a look at this castle Shuu had apparently grown up in. But there was something, someone even more important there—Shuu’s father. Karlheinz, the Demon King, the man who gave me my heart, and the one who started the Adam and Eve project. Now that I was a vampire, I wondered if the project had worked.
“Have you felt any different recently?” I asked suddenly. But time was running out even as we sat here in this tender moment; I needed to know.
“What?” He turned back, staring back at me blankly.
I pressed my lips together in thought, at how I might better explain myself. “I mean, have you felt… stronger?”
“I guess? I—” Shuu trailed off and leaned in a little closer, observing my face again to see if there might be something wrong with me after all. There was nothing, of course, except determination. He drew back and answered, firmly, “Yes. But I did have some of your blood when you—”
Died. Do not say it like that, I thought. “Only some of it?” I butted in before he could finish, “So, you were able to stop?”
“Hiro,” he leaned back on his hands and slumped into himself, somehow overexerted, “What are you talking about?”
“I need to tell you about something—well, lots of things—and you need to just sit there and listen while I do, okay?” I said, scanning him carefully for his response. In standard Shuu fashion, he did not move. But he did not protest, either, and so I went on: about Adam and Eve, the split between humans and demons, my heart, the project his father so sickeningly devised, and the powers “Adam” is supposed to receive. Shuu remained still throughout it all, listening patiently as I droned on and on; he was so still at some points that I worried he might not have actually been paying attention. I avoided talking about the hunters—for me, they were only a reminder of my stupidity. Reiji had attacked me, and I wanted him dead, and that was all I could think of in that moment. For Shuu, maybe that would be too much to come to terms with.
I slouched into the headboard after wrapping up my lecture and looked at Shuu expectantly. “Well, that definitely sounds like something my Father would do,” he quipped.
“Be serious,” I pleaded.
“Fine,” he sighed. “Honestly, I have no more of an idea than you do about how this works, but this ‘project’ is probably real, at least. My father has sent many girls to this manor, and he referred to them all as ‘brides’—”
I shuddered, “Gross.”
“Be serious,” he shot me a look.
“Sorry.”
“The only way to know for sure is to ask my father,” he finished.
I blanked. From what I heard of Karlheinz, he didn’t exactly come across as an amiable person. But he was the reason my entire life played out the way it did. And he was the so-called King of the Demons, and apparently thousands of years old. Even if he would be the farthest thing from a human that I could ever converse with—almost like a God—perhaps it would be interesting.
“Let’s head over when you’re feeling better,” Shuu said softly. He leaned over and planted a gentle kiss on my forehead. I must have truly been tired, having just come back from the dead and all, because when he helped me to lie back down, I closed my eyes and drifted away again immediately.
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Fandom: Diabolik Lovers
Pairing: Shuu Sakamaki x OC (Hiro Komori)
Word count: 2.1k
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Peeking through the tall dining room windows, I turned my gaze heavenward to bask in the moon shining brilliantly above. There was nothing but inky blackness behind her, so that she looked all the more beautiful—the centre of attention. And she looked so lonely, too. Standing so high above, where nobody could reach, she did not look down on me approvingly. She did not look down on me at all.
I let the velvety drapes fall in front of the window again, obscuring the reminder of what was about to come. After some brief goodbyes, the Mukamis had left only moments ago, and Yuma admitted it was unlikely they would return. Somehow, my heart sank even lower, but I plastered a smile on my face and watched them go, their heads soon disappearing from the pale moonlit glow.
There was one place laid out at the table, with just a silver knife and fork, and a plain ceramic plate, too. Rather barbaric by fine dining standards, but there just wasn’t enough time. The clock would strike midnight any moment now, and I would soon find out if my trust in Shuu was correct. “It will be,” I told myself, lowering onto the piano stool and cracking my knuckles, one by one. With my back straight and my fingers outstretched, a sense of calm, still, and absolute tranquility washed over me. It felt like drifting down a canal dotted with bursts of pink waterlilies, the boat rocking playfully to and fro, but never enough to tip the boat over. The sun bore down not only from above, but by being reflected in the still waters, and yet a breeze would come and it wouldn’t fix the heat, but for a moment it made everything okay. I began to play.
Of course, I did not remember Moonlight Sonata by heart, nor did I even remember how I played it with Shuu. But I could never forget how beautifully he played it on the violin. So, with his music drifting gently among the clutter of my mind, I beat on; just as he poured his soul into his performance, I did so too, and it almost felt as if he were playing with me again. I did not fool myself into thinking I could play so perfectly like him—my fingers moved on their own most of the time, and I had no business in schooling them to go where they didn’t want to go. But as I fumbled here and there, and started branching off and playing into those newfound corridors, I eased into the piece more and more.
People memorised intense classical pieces all the time, and they did it well, but I never saw any fun in that. There was joy, and perhaps I could learn something in life from music, in messing up—in allowing myself to stumble over the keys. Because whenever I made a mistake, I learned to pick myself back up again, to simply follow the music in my heart. Although I was playing for only a few moments, when I closed my eyes I felt that I was exactly where I was supposed to be. There could never be a past, future, or present that made sense if I was not lost in the piano, and I feared that if I withdrew my hand, my life may never be like floating down that canal again.
But I did, I retreated my hands. After I let the final note sit, a swan song of its own, I begrudgingly opened my eyes and looked across the room. Behind the long dinner table, leaning into the doorframe with his arms crossed over his chest, was Shuu. I thrust myself to my feet, and I would have run over to him if my head didn’t splinter at that very moment. I gripped the side of the piano hard. The room faded for a moment, and Shuu disappeared from the doorway; I worried I had dreamed him. Except I felt his arms wrap around my middle, pulling me into his chest so that I didn’t have to fight to stand any longer. My eyes fluttered shut, and I hugged back, daring to enjoy his embrace for just one moment.
He pulled at the collar of my scratchy sweater, revealing two of Reiji’s bite marks. I had looked at them in the mirror every day, so I knew exactly what he was looking at—the bruising had mostly disappeared except for a tinge of yellow, but the fang marks were still scarlet and slightly scabby. It would be a while longer before they healed over, unlike Shuu’s bite mark, and the scars would likely be permanent. “I’m sorry,” he breathed into my ear.
Still with my arms wrapped around him, I drew back to look up into his blue eyes. I missed them, and though I didn’t enjoy seeing him so distressed, there was something ethereal in the way they glistened. I sighed, “You’re an asshole.”
Shuu hung his head a little, “I know.”
“But you won’t let him hurt me, or anyone else, again, right?” I said. Rhetorically, more than anything.
“No—”
“Then I trust you,” I smiled, cheered at how Shuu straightened up at my comment. I continued, “and once we deal with him, we have another problem to solve.”
Before Shuu could respond, he had torn his arms from me and turned to the doorframe, ushering me behind his back. I dared not to peek around him, for I knew who had finally arrived, and I thought that I might keel over at the sight of him alone. When he drew breath to speak, my legs wobbled, and I absently grabbed a fistful of Shuu’s shirt for support.
“Oh, older brother,” Reiji tutted, his wavering voice revealing the cracks in his composure, “it’s a little too late to start trying, don’t you think?”
Then I was flung across the room. With my hands outstretched, I made contact with the edge of the table and just barely slowed to a stumble. A jarring crash sounded behind me, along with an ominous cacophony of several long piano notes. When I whipped my head around to the piano, it was no more; Reiji had flown across the room, driving Shuu right into the middle of the keyboard and splitting the instrument down its middle. Now they were scrapping in the remains of the fractured wood and strings with their bare hands, and Reiji was winning. Shuu may be the older brother, but he had managed to resist indulging in my blood. I wasn’t going to let him pay the price for it.
This is what I had Ruki set the table for. I grabbed at one of the pieces of cutlery and began floundering across the room to their struggle. Only when halfway over did I realise I had grabbed the fork and not the knife—damn these Westerners and their complicated utensils—but I resolved to use it anyway. With both hands wrapped around the small handle tight and, before I could talk myself out of it, I brought the silver fork down on Reiji’s back. Hard.
The prongs were only halfway into his shoulder blade when I pulled away, unable to bear the sensation of driving a weapon into somebody’s flesh. I was foolish, perhaps, in that moment, because I was so stunned by how easy it was to pierce somebody with a fork, like stabbing at a steak, that I did not seize my chance to flee. Reiji, with his grip around Shuu’s throat loosening, twitched as he turned his head slowly to look at me. His blood-red eyes fell first on the fork handle sticking out of his back, then on my frozen form. I staggered backwards, feeling behind me for the table, as I watched the blacks and greys of his hair and clothes smear, and he became nothing more than a blur.
He must have pushed me, because the air left my lungs and suddenly my back was throbbing from striking the arms of one of the chairs. Before I could stand up again, Reiji picked me up by my sweater—I could hear the seams ripping as he lifted me off my feet—and plopped me flat on the table. He pitched forward, ready to tear into my skin yet again, but he hadn’t learned his lesson from the fork. The place setting was still nearby; my fingers grabbed at whatever I could—the plate. Within an instant, I smashed the beautiful blue-willow pattern into hundreds of fine shards over his head, the rest of it all hailing down over my dress.
Reiji retreated with a strangled cry, unbecoming from somebody usually so composed like him. But then he screeched and roared; Shuu had come up behind him, his messed up golden hair just barely visible past Reiji’s outline, and pushed at the fork handle sticking out his back. He writhed some more and then, all of a sudden, he was grinning again, and then Shuu was in front of him—Reiji had spun them around, pinning him into the table beside me, and was laughing maniacally at his win. I creased my brows and reached out behind me, my hand slapping nothing but the empty table. Where was the knife? I wondered—
In Reiji’s hand. The knife was in his hand, and he was aiming the point right in the middle of Shuu’s chest, using both his arms and all of his body to push the knife as far down as he could. Shuu struggled as much as he could, teeth gritted as he pushed his brother’s arms away. He was trying his hardest, the desperation consuming his every muscle as he fought for his very life, for our lives. Shuu wavered just a little, and that was enough for Reiji to bring the knife close to his chest once more, dipping the knife’s tip beneath Shuu’s skin. I let out a wordless cry—he could not lose, not again.
Only the wine glass was left on the table, somehow untouched by our brawl. I surged onto my feet and, ignoring how I was beginning to feel fuzzy and how the room seemed overly bright, I waded just a little further away from the brothers’ struggle. Gripping the stem of the glass tightly, my knuckles blanching, I tipped my head up to the ceiling and, although I had given up on God many years ago, I found myself muttering a prayer. I brought the glass down over my outstretched wrist, a sharp and fiery pain surged all the way up my arm. Blood, bright red, pooled at the cluster of incisions, trickling down regrettably onto the carpeted floor.
As planned. He smelled my blood, and he stopped struggling. Reiji looked over his shoulder at me incredulously, almost vibrating with how little he could control himself. In his moment of weakness, Shuu sent him toppling backwards onto the floor, bouncing once and wincing as the fork went even deeper into him. Relief shot through me when I saw that Shuu, despite the small circle of blood staining the centre of his shirt, was okay. He had the knife in his hand, too, and he hesitated a moment at the sight of his little brother squirming helplessly on the floor. But then he ran the knife through his thigh anyway, lodging it in as far as it could go. Reiji would not be moving again anytime soon. Glad, I crumpled to the floor.
Shuu was at my side in an instant, resting my head in his lap as he frantically pulled at the sleeves of his button-up and shrugged it off his shoulders. I could not find it in me to pay his frenzy any mind. “You did it,” I stared up at him, positive that I was smiling. Yet he looked back at me in horror, and so I strained my neck to look down at my arm, bone-white and slicked with blood. To say I was covered in blood would be an understatement, because it was actually flowing freely from one of the gashes in my wrist, and then I thought my eyes were closing; there was a black border growing around my vision, but actually it was. It was… The room was getting further away, and I think I felt Shuu wrap his shirt around the searing pain, but I couldn’t be so sure. He started saying something in a whisper, and I remember responding with my heart, like I would if I messed up at the piano; and then, even though I was lying down, I felt as if I was falling backwards, and he was gone.
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Fandom: Diabolik Lovers
Pairing: Shuu Sakamaki x OC (Hiro Komori)
Word count: 4.4k
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Hiro’s friend has disappeared.
I feared she might be next. When I visited the neighbourhoods of each missing student, I noticed that the hunters had started with the lowest ranking demons, and were starting to work their way up. Starting with the weaker ones that nobody would care about was to be expected but, plotted on a map, it was so blatantly obvious that I could have hit myself—the hunters had started on those lower demons who lived close to the south border with St Marina, and as they took out each one, they started moving further in.
Omura’s demon district, Ryoutei, where we have existed alongside humans for centuries, is sandwiched between two church districts. St Magdalene enveloped half of Ryoutei from the northwest, and St Marina’s streets stretched themselves thin to cover the rest of the empty space. In the past, we only ever had trouble from St Magdalene’s hunters. My own mother was killed by a hunter from there—an experienced Bishop. That was when we first realised that demon hunters operated in the churches.
We managed to capture him, and he spent the rest of his days rotting in our dungeons in his purple sash. I recall asking him how he managed to come all the way to our manor in the middle of the district, although he only seemed able to spit on my shoes. I retrieved the Bible from his belongings, although between its pages I did not find scripture, but expedition notes.
An ambitious and meticulous man, his entries dated back from when he was first promoted to Bishop, a role which imbued him with power over his entire Church district of St Magdalene—but also in command of all the Priests, who were secretly hunters as well. He vowed to eradicate all demons from Omura, starting with daily expeditions into Ryoutei. They covered immense swathes of ground, and to this day, the North side of Ryoutei has never recovered from their killings. But he managed to skip the belt of middle-ranking demons and reach my mother in our manor, but he did not have the time to update his journal for how he achieved such a feat.
I recalled how that expedition started up again with the election of a new Bishop, and racked my brain for a familiar thought. Had Hiro told me before about her father’s role in the church? St Marina… they were always so weak, and yet they seemed to be conducting the exact same expedition pattern. Soon, they would approach the middle-ranking demons and, who knows how far they would get?
Perhaps Hiro would know more about this, I thought. So, I dragged my feet to her room, but I didn’t knock. Her door was shut as usual, but I couldn’t sense her presence inside; there was a faint remnant of her smell, but not enough that meant she had been in there recently. I twisted the knob with little resistance, and the door creaked open a crack. I thought she might be out with a friend, but Akila was no longer around.
A chilling yet familiar feeling crawled up my spine, and I turned my head slowly to see Reiji standing behind me. “Looking for something?” he scowled.
“Where’s Hiro?” I asked, turning to face him fully now.
Reiji pushed his brows together, “She did not return home on Friday.”
“She’s not here?” I exclaimed.
“I’m appalled you didn’t notice sooner,” he grinned. Just then, I could have sworn I smelled Hiro on him, radiating from him, as if she was hiding just behind his back, “then again, you did sever your protection.”
I—I what?
“She’s all yours,” he mimicked my painfully slothful voice. “Were you half asleep when you said those words, or are you really just stupid?”
Those words flashed through my head, and I squeezed my eyes shut. Hiro has asked me not to release my protection of her, yet I did, and I couldn’t even remember it. And, like a coward, I slept and slept until I had pushed the memory away, and somehow I expected her to still be waiting in her room for me. She was right to leave—except, without my protection, anything could have happened to her.
I grabbed Reiji by his collar, lifting him from the ground an inch to meet my gaze. “What did you do to her?” I growled.
But, despite being my little brother, he did not act like it. He wrapped a hand around my wrist and pried me off him like trash. For a younger Vampire, winning in terms of pure strength alone should be impossible. And yet—
“She has the heart of a First Blood—whose, I don’t know—which can strengthen our abilities as if it were a full moon”
My eyes blew wide open. “You drank from her?” I yelled.
“Of course,” Reiji straightened out his collar, “I don’t waste people’s time or resources, unlike you.” Smirking at how I seethed, he added, “Now that she’s helped me to locate the Mukami household, I can finish both jobs in one go.”
Mukami… where had I heard such a name before? They’re a coven of impure vampires, I was sure, but for demons of their rank, they lived strangely close to the centre of Ryoutei. But Hiro had mentioned the name before, I remembered that time well because it was when I told her about Edgar, something I had never done before. Mukami, Mukami, Yuma Mukami! Who was also Edgar—I shot my brother a look, but I could not see his eyes behind the sinister glint in his glasses. To “finish” Edgar could only mean one thing: he had started that village fire in the first place, so many centuries ago.
“Mother—” I gulped, frozen in place, the horrible image of her body lying limp next to a bloodied stake surfacing again. I blinked fast, hoping it would go away. There was no point in fighting Reiji, at least not until the full moon, so all I could do was stand there in my pathetic and anguished garbling, “Were you the one that led the hunter here?”
He warned us all to be careful, but somehow he knew about the disappearance of the Adler boy before classes had even started for the day. Before Subaru, his own classmate, even knew about it. “How else would I have such detailed information on the disappearances?” Reiji taunted, retreating and merging with the shadowy corridor. “You’ll be able to see Hiro again soon, when the moon turns in my favour.”
With a deep breath, I scrambled back to my room and searched through my drawers desperately, pulling them out with such force that they nearly fell off their tracks. Finally, I found some paper, and an envelope too. I scribbled hastily, everything I wanted to say flowing out the pen nib freely.
“So,” I sucked my teeth, looking incredulously at the unopened envelope on my table, “he just handed this to you?” I shifted in my seat to look up at Yuma, who stood behind me with his hands on his hips
He nodded, although his brows were drawn in confusion. “Yep, just said to pass it on,” he affirmed.
I called the school on Monday evening, before classes started, faking a terrible fever that would keep me in bed for at least a few days. The receptionist sounded so concerned for me, and so relieved that I hadn’t fallen victim to another disappearance, that my absence after Friday’s lunch period went unquestioned. In truth, I had no intention to return to that school at all while Reiji and Shuu were still in attendance, and especially now that Akila was gone; I had more important things on my mind. A demon hunter’s daughter, hunting hunters. Funny.
“Why does he care all of a sudden?” I asked nobody in particular. Determined to leave his letter unopened, although I couldn’t quite bring myself to discard it just yet, I scraped the chair against the floor dramatically as I stood.
“Have you come up with any ideas since Monday?” Yuma asked. Everybody’s jaws dropped at my casual dinner-time announcement just a few days ago. Well, everybody except Ruki, who asked me what I was going to do about it.
“Not really,” I admitted, “I’ve mostly been trying to sleep the anemia away, to be honest,” at a normal time, too. I sleep through the night and, when I finally feel enough strength in my legs, I stumble to the garden and waste away most of my days there, basking in the sun and doing my best not to think. Impure vampires apparently do not lose their eyesight in the sun, and so the Mukami household keeps a regular schedule, more or less. I don’t think they really sleep at all—that made a lot of sense to me. Only somebody who had not experienced the threat of mortality could waste their time dozing unnecessarily.
“However…” I continued, dashing Shuu’s envelope to the side, forgotten in a pile of other crumpled papers I had already somehow accumulated over the past week, and laid a wall calendar on the table. It was travel-themed, with each month boasting a photo on its top page of a different European city. This month, July, we were looking at a cathedral in Milan. I tried not to let my mind wander onto the possibility of Italian Demons and Demon Hunters.
“Did you take this from our foyer?” Yuma grumbled.
“Why, did you notice it was gone?”
“...No.”
I flicked back to April, when the school year started, and pointed out all the squares I circled, “These are when the disappearances happened.” The Adler boy disappeared in the last week of the month. May: the Wolf student disappeared in the last week, too. Akila, in June—Yuma caught on, but he was quick to point out what I had first noticed.
“They’re about a month apart, but the dates are all different. That could be anything.”
“They’re about one solar month apart, but exactly one lunar month. Look—” I pointed to the black circles in the calendar squares, signifying the new moon. “Are demons weaker on a new moon?”
“That’s—” Yuma pulled back in thought, but then he confidently declared, “No, only during an eclipse.”
“Why do they all line up on the new moon?” I murmured.
Yuma shrugged again. When it became clear to him that I would remain unresponsive for much longer, staring blankly at the wall calendar with my chin in my hand, he left my room with a sigh. Akila went missing over a week ago, and I was certain that the next attack would happen on the new moon in three weeks. But why?
Tearing my hair out over this pattern only proved so effective. Catholics were rarely rational, my father and I included—me siding with demons, and his ability to send a child into a house full of Vampires was proof enough of that. But, why was that necessary? Had a hunter not found his way into the Sakamaki manor before?
“Ryoutei appears differently on the map to how it does in real life,” Ruki explained a few days later, intrigued by the numerous red dots and lines I had scribbled on a printed map of Omura. Sitting alone in a corner of the basement games room, hunched over a desk while everybody else chatted away, he must have felt sorry for me. He pointed to the road between the Sakamaki manor and the Academy—it was a relatively short distance, but the pavement winded up and down confusingly, like one of those circular maze games. It came naturally to walk that route in real life, but the map was difficult to make sense of.
“You can probably understand it, since you’ve taken that route many times,” he said, “but for a human who has never been there before, and who knows there’s a large demon population there, walking straight in is risky.”
“But a Hunter managed to get to the manor a few hundred years ago, even though no expedition has come that close,” I slumped in my chair, refusing to look up at Ruki in case he might sense the defeat writ all over my face.
He retrieved his hand from the map, burying it deep in his trouser pocket and slouching into himself slightly, deep in thought. “Perhaps somebody showed him the way,” he suggested, “Unless he managed to push that far in by himself, by stalking and killing off even the higher ranking demons, then I cannot think of another way.”
“And you guys definitely don’t get weak on a new moon?”
“No,” he scoffed, “that’s a human superstition.”
Of course. Of course it is.
Upon returning to my room, I did something I would normally deem foolish. I opened up my phone and, with shaky fingers, dialled my father’s number. The feeling of Reiji’s fangs in my skin, hot blood pooling at each wound he bit into my body, was still fresh in my mind. And now that I knew how I might get him to pay the price, I was springing into action without thinking twice.
My father picked up instantly. “Can you pick me up for the summer holiday?” I asked, hoping my voice wasn’t trembling too much.
“I’m back home the weekend it starts, why not?” He replied almost immediately. My gaze darted to the calendar—that weekend was when the new moon was due. How predictable. “Can you tell me the address, the Archbishop never told me.”
Well, the Archbishop likely didn’t know the address either. When the taxi picked me up, I had to change to another car just a few streets into the district of Ryoutei. Come to think of it, I didn’t know the manor’s address—I just knew how to get there from the school. “This district is so old, and the manor is in a weird position, it’s best if I give you directions. Go straight from 5th Street until the statue of Miki, then turn left. Follow the winding road and count three right turns, take the fourth one.”
“How thorough. I will be there in the early evening.” He did not even question why there was no address. If I did not believe he was a Hunter before, I certainly did now. There was not a doubt in my mind as well that he knows I’ve figured it out. When he arrives at the manor in two weeks, he may be picking me up, but I suspect he will also be bringing every Hunter in St Marina. The problem is, our district is small, so there are only four “Priests”. What’s more, the man who replaced my father’s role at our local church, I knew to be young and, probably, very inexperienced. Coupled with the fact that Vampires are not actually weak on a new moon, I thought that the brothers combined would be able to subdue them.
Thud. Something loud had hit my closed window. I ran over, expecting to see a dazed pigeon on the other side, but there was nothing. As I gazed into the distance, the hills shadowed only by the dark sky, I thought I saw two red dots blinking in the distant trees. A signal tower, perhaps? Shrugging off the sensation that I was being watched, I threw myself back into the chair and stared blankly at the desk’s grainy wood.
What I had just done was unforgiveable, and I felt no better for it after hanging up. I had just set up Shuu and his brothers to be ambushed by hunters. Maybe they would be able to handle it—maybe not. I wondered how they were doing, though; if life didn’t change much at all now I was gone, except for the limousine having more space. Before I knew it, I was reaching for Shuu’s envelope, which hadn’t moved from the corner of the desk I banished it to nearly two weeks ago. I tore it open and squinted, trying to parse one cursive letter from another.
I know what Reiji did to you. I let you down, and I’m sorry. But he was the one who burned down Edgar’s village, and he’s going to come and finish the job on the full moon—and he’ll take you, too. I will be there, trust me.
I sat—no, fell—into my chair. The calendar, with its over-glorified depiction of Milan’s Cathedral shining golden, sat in the corner of my eye. Next to today’s date: a white circle. Today. The full moon was today; I peered around my drapes and through the immaculately clear window to find the moon a full white pearl, already cresting in the midnight sky.
Again, I failed to trust Shuu. I could not believe in him enough to think more than twice about his stupid note. And again, Reiji would take advantage of that. I escaped him, but only for a brief moment.
My feet carried myself to the door, along the corridor, thundering down the stairs. All the while, I wondered if the four brothers, impure Vampires though they might be, could take on one pureblooded Vampire. Older than them. Possibly still drunk on my blood. And definitely much higher ranking than them. I had never seen Vampires fight before, but I was not so foolish to believe that would be an easy fight. No, I was going to tell them to leave. Yuma, especially—Shuu sent that note not just for me, but for him too. That was the least I could do. The rest, I could figure out; Reiji would not kill me. Not immediately, at least.
Finally outside their little basement games room, I hesitated for a moment. The Sakamaki brothers had been recruited and broken to an unseeable end for their Father’s scientific amusement, and now I was sending a Hunter to their house. The Mukami brothers, too, had been wrapped up in this. Why they did so willingly, I have no clue, but I knew they cared for each other. Every early morning after school, they’d gather here in this very room, their absurd and unique personalities on show, to spend time with one another. By coming here, I might have ruined that. I pushed the door open; it swung on its hinges with a creak, and the four boys all craned their necks to look at me, careless laughter melting from their faces.
“You need to leave,” I started blubbering. I prepared a whole speech on my way down here, but I was reduced to this, “Reiji is coming to get me, and it’s a full moon, and I think he’s going to kill you all too—” Regrettably, my knees chose that moment to give out. Sprinting here did not do wonders for my enduring anemia. My heart did its best to keep up, pounding so quickly in my chest that it was all I could hear. God, why was I so useless?
“Did she have a nightmare?” came Kou’s sharp voice.
Yuma padded over to me, his eyes creased with concern, “We should get her back to her room.” He crouched and scooped one arm under my back, readying himself to pick me up like he did to first bring me here. But while my legs had turned to jelly, there was still enough strength in my arm to strike him across the face. If he was human, and if I wasn’t sitting in a heap on the floor, I would have been at least mildly concerned for him; but my slap likely barely registered as painful to him. His eyes snapped open wide—he was more shocked than anything; Yuma retracted his arm and stood, stumbling back from me a step.
Kou was clutching a nearby pool cue like a pitchfork, and Ruki had jumped out of his ornate armchair to pacify him. “I believe her. We should go,” he said firmly.
“But why—” Kou growled, only to be cut off by Ruki’s cold stare. I shuddered.
“She passed. Remember?” he said.
Kou schooled his features right there, as if he was never angry in the first place, or never capable of being angry. Happy that his brother had been assuaged, Ruki made his way to me, and our gazes all followed him silently. He stretched his hand out—I took it gingerly and, clutching onto the door handle for support too, managed to stand on my two treacherous feet again.
“Is there anything you need?” He asked.
My mind fell on the grand piano in the dining hall, that I had not worked up the courage to play even once during my stay here. But my fingers itched more and more everyday to feel the keys fall and rise beneath them, even when a distant part of me thought I didn’t deserve to play ever again. The grounds were large, but not so large that you could stop the melody of, say, Moonlight Sonata rolling over the breeze, blending in with the rustling of trees. Reiji would be able to hear what room I was in instantly, which was coincidentally on the opposite side of the house to the back entrance. More importantly, though, is that I believed Shuu would find me first. He stood a chance against Reiji; I was staking my life on it.
“Can you set the table for one before you go?” I blinked innocently. Just behind Ruki, Yuma’s face contorted in confusion. But Ruki nodded, a smile of amusement stretching across his face. He knew.
The others all promptly left to gather their things. Ruki and Azusa did so promptly, while Kou grumbled to himself about it before finally taking his leave. Yuma stayed behind in the games room with me, sitting on the other end of the couch and eyeing me curiously, as if I were a puzzle he was trying to crack. The silence, punctuated occasionally by some hurried footsteps passing overhead, was deafening.
“Yuma—” I forced myself to say.
He sat up immediately, “What is it?”
But now I wasn’t so sure. Ever since Shuu had told me what happened to Yuma, to this boy called “Edgar”, I’ve privately thought that Yuma had a right to know. Did he need to know? It’s been hundreds of years since then, and Yuma has his brothers now—does it matter if he goes on like this, forever not knowing? If Shuu and I don’t manage to make it out tonight, then he’ll lose that chance forever.
“I know what happened to you,” I gazed at him sorrowfully; his eyes widened in confusion. “Before you lost your memory,” I added.
“What?” He half-yelled in disbelief, “How?”
I asked, “Are you sure you want to know?”
Yuma nodded eagerly, his arm resting on the back of the couch now as he leaned in closer, as if he might miss something if he was not careful.
“Shuu told me,” I said, immediately earning a distrustful grunt from him. I couldn’t blame him, but it was likely the truth. “The family used to live in a castle in Romania, and one day Shuu ran away from home and met you at the bottom of the hill…” I began. The rest spilled out without further complaint from Yuma, who remained perfectly still, even when I told him about the fire.
“And that note he sent me, he warned me that Reiji would be coming here. But it also said that Reiji was the one responsible for your village.” I finished.
Yuma slumped back into his corner. After a few moments, stretched to eternity, of watching him think, he finally spoke up, “That guy…”
“Do you remember anything?” I asked.
Slowly, he shook his head. “I just remember the fire. Or, the feeling of being burned. And of choking…” he refused to tear his eyes away from the floor. “But still, I wanna kill him.”
I shook my head; he stood up, more animated now with the idea planted in his head, “There’s only one of him and four of us, we could do it.”
“That’s why you need to leave,” I said, looking up at him from where I was still perched on the couch—if I tried to stand up and match him, I would certainly go dizzy and end up on my knees again. “I don’t think Shuu would manage if something happened to either one of you,” I added. It was true: the eldest son had a soft spot for all of his younger brothers, no matter how psychotic they could be. It was obvious in how he knew them so well, despite always being apparently asleep. Besides, a crazed pureblood on a full moon, doped up on the blood of Eve—four impure vampires might just be a distraction
“Oh, but it’s fine if you’re there?” Yuma said sardonically, although he was lowering the fists he had been dramatically clenching.
“I think it’s time I go back,” I forced a smile, “there’s a certain mess I need to clean up.”
“Oh, yeah,” he grumbled, “What are you going to do about that?”
“No clue,” I admitted. I was still coming to terms with the fact that I had done something so stupid, so emotionally charged, all because I felt Shuu betrayed me. He did, in a way. But that was unlike me.
The hunters would be arriving at a house filled with pureblooded vampires, however. It wouldn’t be a full moon, but it was not as if they would be weakened by the new moon, as the hunters apparently believed. It couldn’t be so bad, I told myself.
Just as Yuma went to open his mouth, the door to the games room swung open, revealing a rather solemn looking Ruki. These guys had probably outlived many houses, but they were still human somewhere in there—it couldn’t be easy for them to leave at a moment’s notice. It still felt rather stilted to me; if they could just have a little faith that Shuu and I might be able to subdue Reiji tonight, then they would be able to return shortly. Ruki, however, seemed to already have it in his head that he and his brothers had accomplished whatever it was they came here to do.
“Let’s go,” was all he said, and then he stalked off. Yuma first helped me slowly lift myself off the couch before quickly following after him.
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