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Dust laid over the store like a forgotten blanket. Outlines of corpses long reduced to bone were scattered about the tiles, ghosts of a world Mikaela hadn’t tasted in so long he’d nearly begun to think it had never happened at all. Maybe he’d always been like this - something ugly, something wrong. Better days seemed so far away now, untouchable. He felt ashamed to remember them. He didn’t deserve them anymore.
He stood under the stifling, heavy quiet at the cash desk. A small handprint marred the dust at the edge of the counter where someone, someone small, had made their way over. He reached out a claw to trace its tiny, grasping fingers.
Akane’s hands came to mind, soft, always reaching for him or Yuu or one of the other kids, always wanting contact. To hold, to be held.
Her soft eyes, broad grin. His family.
He stepped abruptly away, crossing to the nearest aisle and scanning the highest shelves for any unpilfered goods. He bit gently at his bottom lip, the pain of his fangs piercing flesh helping him focus on what was in front of him. Upturned and rat-bitten boxes of cereal that were more crumb and cardboard than anything else. Cups of fruits and juices that bulged and warped with the fermented gasses of their contents.
Anything worthwhile had been taken a long, long time ago.
He forced his mind forward, onto problem-solving. He could find the storage - only a vampire would be able to reach the topmost shelves without any equipment. Some goods had to be there. Yuu-chan was depending on him. The squad needed to eat.
His stomach tightened at the thought.
He dutifully ignored it. He’d fed five days ago, and he could go at least a week per feeding now. It was excruciating and made him nearly blind with hunger, but he’d gotten used to that by now. The squad had learned when to back off. There’d been enough snappish squabbles and near-attacks to teach them caution when he was starving. They protested, of course. Tried to convince and persuade or flat out argue him into feeding more often. He refused. Having a vampire around was bad enough already, and putting Yuu out of action for even a few hours after each feeding while his demon made up for lost blood was unbearable. He didn’t need to draw more attention to the fact that he was there. To what he was.
He’d circled about half the building by now, skirting the lingering stench of unidentifiable freezer foods turned to black ooze. Large black double doors stood between two sections of freezers up ahead, and he jogged to reach them.
Kicking them open none too gently with his booted heel, he slunk in.
There weren’t many windows. His eyes took a moment to adjust to the gloom, and he was met with the sight of towering metal shelves and many, many empty boxes. His hope shriveled a bit.
Still, he had to be thorough. Scrambling up the nearest shelf to the top, he kicked through crumbling wooden palettes and slowly, ever so slowly, picked his way through the ruins. Expired jars of sauce. Mummified bread and bagels. Flat cans of soda.
Pausing, he stooped to inspect a box of vitamins. He’d heard Mistuba talk about them once with Shinoa, how the tablets kept better than the chewable ones. He wondered idly if taking expired vitamins was in any way dangerous, or if they simply lost their potency as they aged. Still, it had to be worth a try. He plucked a few small bottles out of the pile and tucked them into his pockets. He’d ask Yuu to check with the squad.
As he was crouched, a stripe of light flickered across his face.
He blinked hard, then stood to escape the glare. His glare zeroed in on the source.
An emergency exit at the end of the aisle was open, and slowly closing.
Mikaela’s heart leapt into his throat, and he dashed across the shelves to the other side of the vast room. Making the distance from the shelf to the door in one jump, he rolled to a stop just as the door clicked shut and he was once again plunged into darkness.
He swallowed. If it was another vampire, he’d have to kill them and evacuate the squad. If Ferid caught wind of them out here, they would never rest again. He drew his sword, letting out a low hiss as the thorns burrowed into his palm and wrist. Shaking a few droplets of sluggish blood out of his sleeve, he pressed close to the door and turned the handle.
Breathe in. Breathe out.
He threw the door open, swiftly stepping out into the alley and to the side to avoid it as it swung shut again, sword up and steady in his grasp.
Children froze mere steps away, eyes wide and horrified, bodies trembling. One was older, with wild brown hair that stood out in all directions. She held a hand over the chest of the younger, as if she could stand between him and a creature like Mikaela.
He stared at them. They stared back.
Suddenly the girl shoved the boy hard. He staggered back, looking shell-shocked. “Run!” cried the girl. “Go!”
The boy bolted. The girl took a few quavering steps backward, eyes locked with Mikaela’s, before she turned as well and ran.
He didn’t think.
Mikaela’s body followed suit. Sword dropping like lead from his hand, his feet carried him quick as fire down the alley until his shadow fell over the girl’s head. She shrieked, tripped, and rolled. He dropped over her, arms bracketing her body. His hair stood on end. His thick dead blood pounded in his ears. His stomach twisted, his throat burned, and he was thirsty.
Her little feet pounded against his stomach, and the spell was broken.
He was stumbling backward before he’d even realized what he’d done, and immediately he dropped to his knees and retched. Nothing came up but bile. His breathing came ragged and panicked, one breath catching on another until he was hiccupping and coughing and gagging. His body shook. His head ached. Terror, hot and violent, took him in its jaws and crushed him like brittle bones. Suddenly, he wanted to die. He had to die. The thought churned through his mind like a blender, scattering all other thoughts and narrowing his world to a single point: he needed to be dead, right now.
He knelt, heaving, for a long time.
By the time the fear abated and he remembered where he was, the girl was gone. He looked blankly at the empty alley, at the overturned rusted bins and heaps of rubble. The sun was on its way to setting, a slow descent that washed him in pink and gold light.
He wanted to cry so, so badly. He wanted to scream and sob. Every second that passed made him more other, more monstrous. His eyes itched, and no tears fell. His stomach twisted into knots, equal parts nausea and hunger. He couldn’t stay like this. He needed to find the darkest, deepest hole on Earth and crawl into it until he wasted away. He needed to be gone. He had to get away from them, from people. From humans. He couldn’t keep pretending like he wasn’t this.
Finally, he stood. His knees were weak and his steps unsteady, but he picked up his sword and found his way back to the door, slipping into the storage room out of the sunlight, out of the eyes of whatever sick god was watching his humanity be stripped away by every breath he took that didn’t need to be taken. He sat heavily with his back to the door and buried his face into his knees.
Somehow, being unable to cry hurt worse than anything else. He couldn’t even fucking mourn his own loss. It was cruel.
He flexed his claws against his legs, feeling the prick of inhuman talons through the thick leather of his boots. He couldn’t even hold himself.
He needed to feel something. Something human.
Taking a deep, shaking breath, he dug his claws in a little further, just until it started to hurt. And then he pressed harder, until the sting became a flash, and his breath hitched. And harder still, until his thighs opened up like overripe fruit. He drew deep gouges from knee to hip, watching dully as viscous blood oozed through the scars of torn leather and stained fabric. He curled his fingers as he reached his waist, hooking his thumb into his stomach as well.
He needed to feel it.
Gasping as he withdrew his claws, Mikaela watched his body struggle to heal. Five days without feeding, and the flesh was slow to knit itself back together. His boots were shredded. His pants were a dark red, the bottom edges of his shirt already sucking greedily at the blood.
It seemed distant, almost. Like he was sitting just a few degrees outside of his own body, and nothing was really happening to it. He was just seeing things.
He did it again. He kicked off his boots and did it a third time, digging his nails so hard into his calves that he severed muscle and scraped against bone. And then he curled his hand over his heart and did it to his chest as well, like he might tear the stupid thing out. Just an organ. He could live without it now, couldn’t he?
Finished, he sat, quietly, and closed his eyes.
He could feel this. Maybe not safety, or sorrow, or humanity. But he could feel this. Right now, that was enough.
The sensation of his body stitching itself together wasn’t foreign, but it was still uncomfortable. A tugging sensation that started numb and heightened into a flame and lapped slowly across his skin, from end to end of the wound, before making its way back down again. Layer by layer, cell by cell. He breathed slowly and focused, until he was sure he could feel every second of it.
This, he could feel.
He sat for an hour, maybe more, thoughtless and hazy. The regeneration became almost a meditation, a rhythm under his skin, something he could follow without thinking. The storage room grew dim and orange, and then dark. A chill settled over him, like fog clinging low to the ground.
He was jolted from mindlessness by a muffled clatter from somewhere in the store.
He pushed himself to his feet - still a little groggy, still a little weak where his muscles had started to repair - and picked his sword up from where he’d tossed it to the concrete floor. He padded to the doors, crouching just below the grimy plastic windows.
“Mika!” came a cry, a lot closer than he expected, and his nerves lit up.
Yuu-chan.
He looked down himself, and reality was like a cold bucket of water dousing him from the head down. Dread settled deep in his stomach.
What the fuck had he done?
He felt sick again. His legs hurt. He needed to get the hell out of here. He could keep an eye on Yuu from a distance. He’d stay away. He’d feed on … feed on ….
The door swung inward, catching him squarely in the shoulder and sending him stumbling back.
“Oh! Shit, Mika, where the hell were y-” Yuu cut himself off, blinking stupidly as his demon-enhanced vision cut through the darkness. Mikaela scowled. And then Yuu was on him, pulling at the edges of his cape, turning him this way and that. “What fucking happened? Are you okay? Were there vampires?”
Mikaela’s words caught in his throat. A lie, strangled somewhere on its way up. “I … no.”
Why did he say that?
Yuu looked up at him, eyes wide. “What? Was it something else? There’s been no horsemen, Asuramaru would have warned - was it humans? Mika, are you okay?”
How was he supposed to live like this?
Yuu looked wretched. “Mika. Please.”
“I ….” Mikaela’s eyes itched. “Yuu-chan, I - I didn’t mean to -” He ducked his head, voice wavering. “There were kids. I was thirsty, I didn’t - I wasn’t thinking right.”
He needed to shut up.
But it was Yuu. Yuu, whose eyes softened, who looked so worried, so careful, so gentle. Yuu, whose hands loosened on his shoulders and whose next words came as a whisper.
“Did you hurt them? Can you tell me where they are?”
Mikaela wished so, so terribly that he could cry.
“I didn’t touch them.” Is that really what Yuu thought of him? “They’re gone. I didn’t touch them.”
Yuu’s tone was delicate. “Did you do this?” His hands ran down from his arms to his chest, smoothing down the torn uniform over sticky blood.
“I’m sorry, Yuu-chan.”
“It’s okay.”
Mikaela could hardly breathe. “I couldn’t …. I had to feel ….”
Yuu brought a hand up to hold the back of his head, fingers carding through his hair, and put his forehead to Mikaela’s. Mikaela stared at his feet. He couldn’t bear to look Yuu in the eyes right now. Yuu held him there anyway. “You weren’t thinking right. You’d never hurt someone like that. You’re just like that, Mika, you’re strong. You wouldn’t hurt children. You didn’t need to do this.”
Mikaela disagreed. He kept his mouth shut.
Selfish, but he wanted Yuu to keep talking.
And he did, slowly and steadily, with his fingers still tangled in Mikaela’s hair. “Maybe you should feed more often. I can do it every day if I have to, so you don’t need to worry. But if you’re feeling like this, if you feel like you can’t control yourself, then maybe we should -”
“I can’t.” Mikaela’s hand curled into a fist at his side, and his grip on his sword tightened. “Yuu-chan, it’s not right. You’re all I have left. You’re all I have left, and I’m … I can’t keep doing this to you.”
“We’re in this together, aren’t we? Didn’t we make that promise? That you’ll stay alive for me?”
Mikaela breathed in. Breathed out. What a difficult thing to do. What a horrible thing to ask.
“Can you please feed? I can smell ash. You’re making me worry.”
He shook his head.
“Mika?”
“I’m sorry,” he said quietly. “Not now.”
Yuu pulled back, loudly looking him up and down without making a sound. “I’m not taking no for an answer.”
“Yuu. No.”
“Mika, I-”
Mikaela snapped at him, then. “No.”
There was a pause, and strangely enough, Yuu acquiesced. He stepped away, quiet. “Okay,” he said. “But we need to head back. You were supposed to meet back at camp hours ago. Everyone’s worried.” He tucked his hand into Mikaela’s free one, and pulled him through the doors, back into the graveyard of the store. “We’ll tell them you ran into some rogue vampires. Nobody affiliated with the hierarchy.”
Mikaela nodded, not that Yuu could see it.
They walked, hand in hand, back to camp.
-------------------------------------------
It was night. The fire had long since died down, and only embers remained in the pit, casting a fragile glow over the room.
Mikaela sat guard by the window, accompanied by the deep breathing of Yuu’s new family and the white light of the moon peering through the missing roof. Yuu’s breaths were heavy, impossible to miss, a certain cadence Mikaela was stunned he’d managed to survive so long without hearing.
The hunger was there, too. Stronger than before. And his body still ached - burned, really, low and constant - but the pain wasn’t distracting anymore. A million thoughts coalesced, swirling in currents and eddies, jumping and repeating and spiraling.
One thought stayed constant, a neon sign standing still in the torrent.
He needed to die.
Mikaela looked to where Yuu lay curled against his pack, calm and dreaming. His stomach constricted and his throat worked, dry. He swallowed it back.
But maybe he didn’t have to die quite yet.