Lovely Diabolik Schism [ VAMPIRE ]
{ Hell || Abyss || Chasm || Schism: BRUTE || Schism: MANSERVANT || Schism: VAMPIRE || Elysium }
"Viola, leave your room at once," came Reiji's voice through the door to her room. Rather, his room, which she had been using at his insistence since his father had orchestrated the "fiasco" (as Reiji liked to call it) of a formal gathering.
"You killed him, didn't you?" she mumbled her head pressed tight to her upraised knees. "You found him, and you killed him. You killed the only man that ever even gave a thought to wanting me."
"Even if I did," Reiji said, laying his hand on the doorknob, tempted to open it, "Why should that matter when the only way you will leave my side is as a corpse?"
"Is a blind, incompetent servant that valuable to you?" she asked bitterly. "Is abusing me the only thing that fuels your miserable ego and satisfies your wicked sadism?"
Reiji blinked at the door.
"Why are you trying to run back to him?" Reiji asked, irritation rapidly building in his voice, and he bit his tongue until it bled to stop himself from asking that painfully revealing question---
Why am I not good enough?
---
Vampire
In torturous tranquility, Reiji waited for an answer, and he opened his mouth to demand an answer when Viola unlocked and opened the door to look up at the vampire in all her red-nosed, snivelly majesty.
"I don't know anymore," she replied, her voice nearly inaudible. "I'll never get it back, and I'll never feel the way he made me feel again, so what's the point? Why shouldn't I just fucking kill myself?"
"You already tried by proxy, but I still want you alive, you worthless woman," he murmured, his eyes lingering over her bloodshot eyes. The blind eyes that were fixed elsewhere. "Just what makes you think that the empty void that thing left behind can be filled by nothing else?" By no one else.
"I've tried," she whispered back, almost pleadingly. Perhaps a request for mercy, or perhaps...?
"Clearly, not hard enough." To some of his surprise, Reiji watched outrage blaze up into her eyes. The outrage of someone who had tried and tried and tried again. And tried. And tried.
Reiji was amazed she hadn't struck him with the sheer amount of anger quivering in her expression, and that surprise only escalated as a face of resign stared up at him instead.
"I must not have," she replied with a bitter, hollow laugh that made Reiji's heart wither. "It must be my fault. Just like it must be my fault that he broke away without saying a word. I just didn't try hard enough." The self-loathing in her voice dripped with a poison she clearly longed to drink, and Reiji gritted his teeth.
Why did he (she) have to fight a man that was dead to her?
"Why don't you understand that you're better off as a maid to me rather than a lover to him?!" Reiji snapped out, unable to restrain himself, and Viola's blank stare barely brought a hint of sense into his frustration. "Humans are greedy, arrogant sacks of blood, so why don't you just get down on your knees and beg for my attention?"
Viola continued to stare, and though her eyes remained unfocused, Reiji realized her attention was fully on him. The attention he had craved.
"If..." Viola hesitated, and tears bloomed into the corners of her eyes again as her voice warbled and threatened to fail. "If I got down on my knees... would you hug me?"
Reiji was so astonished by the question that he nearly forgot to respond at all. And yet, his body was moving as if someone else had prodded him forward. His arms were already around her, and he was almost confused as the scent of her body filled his nose. He had known he was doing it, and yet it hadn't fully registered.
"Rei... ji?" she mumbled, her trembling hands nevertheless reaching up his back. Gradually holding him - squeezing him! - in her fragile arms, a gesture which made both their hearts tremble. It was nice, she thought, for someone like him to shove her tearstained, snotty face against his shoulder.
"I... don't need you to beg for something like this," Reiji eventually mumbled into her shoulder. She was warm. It was comfortable.
He didn't want her to leave.
"But it's not for free," Reiji added after a moment, and some apprehension littered its way over her mood. "You... You will keep me company... and stay in my arms while I sleep. Understood?" He didn't dare look at her face. He didn't want to see her disgust.
"...that's an odd way of asking to cuddle," she replied once the shock has disappeared from her visage, and Reiji was surprised by the faint humor in her voice. The teasing humor.
For the first time since he'd met Viola, there was the barest hint of life breaking through her shell of misery.
"Silence. I don't want to cuddle." He really did.
"I didn't know you had this kind of side." An embarrassingly crooked giggle slipped from her mouth, as if her vocal cords had forgotten how to do it properly.
"I said shut up."
Despite himself, Reiji smiled an almost childlike grin.
Satisfaction, perhaps, that he had won his fight with a dead man. Could it have been contentment with the feel of some form of affection for the first time in hundreds of years? Delight, at the prospect of her utter subservience?
Perhaps, perhaps, perhaps.
