Archive of Our Own

1. Garlic Bread

“I’m home!”

From his lax recline on the bed, Hanako calls out a lazy welcome back. He doesn’t get up because he’s far too comfortable watching old primetime reruns of ridiculous game shows, and also -- well. 

He’s a little unhappy.

Ah, maybe not unhappy. That’s a rather strong word -- sensation? Feeling? For someone who’s felt a lot of them for a very long time, Hanako isn’t the most adept at categorizing his own emotions. Let alone experiencing them. It’s much more convenient to acknowledge that something probably important is sounding off in his chest, and then leave it alone to run its course. Hands-off is always the way to go. Less messy that way.

But then, he’s forced to deal with complex situations such as these:

The lovely, strange, absolutely enrapturing human being whose life he feels lucky enough to occupy even just a small, miniscule part of -- flouncing into his bedroom, all bright eyes and wide-lipped smiles and rosy cheeks and limbs jittering in excitement at seeing him after a mere handful of hours spent apart--

And Hanako, whose cold, dead heart threatens to jolt back to life at the mere sight of her.

How odd. He wonders what it means, and then immediately stops doing that. Hands-off. Mess free.

“Hanako-kun!” Greets Yashiro, rushing to stand at his side, her stockinged feet thump-thump-thumping at the hardwood in a rapid, red-blooded pulse. Her hair flows freely today, which is unusual. Normally, she has it pulled back and away from her face, in one neat platinum sphere at the base of her neck. There’s a decorative clip or three in there, somewhere, too.

Where are those tonight? What happened to the disturbingly skull-shaped barrette? He likes that one. “Hanako-kun, look! For you!”

Oh, she’s holding something. He hadn’t even noticed. Upon closer inspection, it seems to be…

“A greasy paper bag,” Hanako deadpans. “How kind of you, Yashiro.”

She rolls her eyes, and stomps her foot. He can see the vibrant red of her painted toenails even through those dark tights she insists on wearing out everyday. These are one of her nicer pairs, though. No rips or runs in sight. Not even when Hanako scans her legs up and down and up again, just to check. Just to make sure.

Yashiro’s irate scoff sends his eyes scrambling very rapidly back to meet her own. “You’re impossible. You gotta guess what’s in- side the bag, dummy.”

“Radishes. No, wait, we already have plenty of those on hand.”

“Oh my God, I am literally going to kill you. Do you wanna die?” Hanako almost laughs. “Last chance before I change my mind and don’t let you have any!”

“Ohhh. Something I can have?”

Yashiro nods. Hanako tracks the movement of her jaw like a vulture circling a corpse, freshly splayed open and vulnerable and tantalizing with how red the blood, how plump the flesh, how easy it would be to sink his talons in and bare his teeth and--

“I have no idea,” he muses, “what that would be, then.”

“You’re so weird sometimes, Hanako-kun. Anyways, remember how I went over to Kou-kun’s tonight? Because he needed a taste-tester for his school assignments? Remember?”

Ah, and here he returns to the root issue of tonight’s predicament. Hanako is swiftly delivered back into the strange sensation of discontent that plagued him mere moments prior to Yashiro’s arrival. She’d distracted him -- as she is so often does -- from his brooding. 

Hanako remembers that he’s supposed to be brooding.

Hanako begins to brood. 

It’s a pitiful attempt, really, because Yashiro is hellbent on injecting the evening with her unique brand of excitable fanfare, and Hanako has never been able to put up much of a fight against her. He’s weak to the sun and all it’s gifts of brightness, after all.

In a last-ditch effort to save face, he manages to pout. Yes, this will show her. This will express to her his deep-seated dissatisfaction! 

“Hmph. I guess,” sighs Hanako, batting his lashes for good measure.

“Oh quit it. Don’t look like such a jealous puppy--”

“-- Excuse me--”

“--Especially ‘cause I brought you such a good gift! Look!”

And then Yashiro reaches into the bag and pulls out a slice of greasy, buttery, deliciously succulent garlic bread.

Hanako doesn’t even have the time to process her accusation of jealousy (which, hello? A little absurd if you ask him.) as he’s preoccupied with scrambling backwards to the opposite side of the bed, as fast as what will hopefully appear to be humanly possible.

“Kou-kun’s in the middle of his global unit in school, and he chose to make some Italian dishes, so I thought I’d bring home-- hey!! Where are you going!” Yashiro, clearly perplexed, pauses in her bubbly explanation. “Don’t be like that! I know you don’t like Kou-kun for whatever stupid reason, but really? He made it just for you!”

Of course he did, thinks Hanako, scathingly. He will deal with that overgrown menace of a mutt later, when his physical body is not in imminent danger and Yashiro is not growing steadily closer, brandishing the bread as though it were a sword, or rapier.

Oh, if only she knew.

Normally, Hanako would be elated -- ecstatic, even -- to see Yashiro crawling across his mattress, chasing him with a dark intensity in her eyes and a palm outstretched. But the issue here is that her palm, as sweet-smelling and milky soft as it looks and probably feels (Hanako wouldn’t know), is currently wielding a weapon of mass destruction.

He tries to placate her, or at least slow her steady advance, but it’s all for naught. “H-Hey now, Yashiro--”

He should throw her off. She shouldn’t even be in his home in the first place, let alone in his bed, but somewhere along the way Hanako had started making inappropriate, foolish, misguided allowances for this strange woman, and then he… never stopped.

Honestly? For a mistake as silly as entertaining a human of all things, he supposes he should go out in an equally as embarrassing fashion: death by sliced bread.

Yashiro is on top of him now, her thick calves bracketing the bony jut of his hips as she sits on his chest and leans over him, her cheeks incensed a bright and healthy rouge -- a mere few shades darker than those glittering fuschia eyes. Hanako can’t help but wonder just how red she can get; how much red she has to spare. How much red would be enough to burst her open and leak along the sides of her pristinely pale canvas like spilled acrylic in one big, gory, spattering mess. 

For two (definitely, totally, absolutely) mutually exclusive reasons, Hanako feels his stomach contract.

“You’re being ridiculous,” announces Yashiro from her perch atop his body, blissfully unaware of the fact that Hanako could very easily toss her clean across the city if he so chose. 

(Or maybe, it’s the fact that might know, and is unafraid of the prospect. As though she believes he won’t. Humans are such an arrogant, fickle species. He can’t say that he particularly misses being amongst their ranks.)

“It’s bread. Would it kill you to be agreeable for once and just take a freaking bite?”

Her heartbeat. He can hear it loud and clear even as he lays underneath the vice grip of her sturdy legs. Does she even know how fast her pulse rams itself against her veins? Like it’s begging to be rescued from the confines of that pretty, porcelain cage? 

Fuck. Fuck.

Hands-off. 

Mess free. 

“I’m allergic,” says Hanako, slowly, face blank and clean as a slate as he stares unblinkingly back up at his captor. “To garlic.”

There’s a curtain of shimmering white that cascades around the two of them, shifting to block out any and all extraneous stimuli. He should remind her to pick up some more bleach the next time she takes a trip to Daiso. It’s time to touch-up her roots again.

“Allergic,” she parrots.

The way her lips shape around the word, tasting it and rolling it around in suspicion, is captivating. In all his years of dealings on this earth never has Hanako followed a journey so gripping, so intense, as the way that Yashiro Nene’s mouth moves across a sentence. “Allergic,” she says again, flat and faint.

He’s just barely able to nod. “Deathly.”

“You’re deathly allergic to garlic.”

Time grinds to a painful, halting stop. The gradual slowing of the outside world is so acute that Hanako can track with his eyes the moment that Yashiro’s gaze flickers down to his cracked lips and the steady in-and-out of her breath is all but frozen in place. It’s excruciating, the level of detail he’s been subjected to bear witness to as a creature borne of blood and misery. He hates that he can hear her lungs rattle in suspense. He hates that he can name each muscle that goes still and locks solidly into place, anchoring around him in a rigid, tense embrace. He hates that he can smell her fear.

“Precisely. And you are straddling me. Are we done stating facts or would you like to continue on, Yashiro?”

It’s a bad habit he has, relying on humorous deflection. He’s amassed whole lifetimes of bad habits, and never has one felt more grievous than the way his lifeless body threatens to rise again after Yashiro launches herself off of him in mortified realization of their compromising position. A bad habit, thinks Hanako, watching his roommate flee away as he barely resists the urge to give chase. Predator and prey. A body drained dry. I’d take good care of you.

The crumbs in his bed dig into his skin and burn there, serving as a very stark, very physical reminder of his worst habit.

He’s already served his penance. Is currently serving it. Is slated to serve it for the rest of whatever conceivable eternity awaits him. 

So why, then, does his chest twist and ache with an ardor he thought had died with him, all that time ago? 

2. Reflection

The only reason he’d agreed to tag along was because Yashiro promised him that he didn’t have to speak if he didn’t want to. He isn’t much inclined to converse with random humans -- especially not over cheap, young wine. 

But this is, of course, exactly what he finds himself doing on a Thursday evening he would otherwise spend alone, holed up in his room, with his blackout curtains drawn to the side to bask in the glow of the full moon. Longingly, Hanako glances out of the large window he’d surreptitiously made a home next to immediately upon their arrival. Ah, well. Next month.

A round of boisterous laughter startles him out of his reverie. He chances a glance back to the sectional sofa in front of him and is greeted by the sight of Yashiro nearly doubled over in apparent amusement, wine glass tipping dangerously to the wayside. Her cheeks are speckled with the beginnings of a youthful pink. Unshed tears cling to her thin eyelashes. When she straightens up to catch her breath, she meets his gaze and allows her grin to melt into something soft and warm and entirely unsuited for the terrible, awful things that run through Hanako’s mind faster than the speed of light.

Having fun? She mouths discreetly, bringing the glass up to take another sip.

He nods, draining the red in his own grasp long and slow. It tastes like ash on his tongue. 

One of the other humans speaks, then. It isn’t the orange haired fellow who’d immediately struck Hanako as a sniveling, blindsided, spineless fool of a man -- no, it’s his wife, who’s entirely too preoccupied with asking questions about Hanako’s personal life for his comfort. 

“Hanako-san,” she begins pleasantly, gripping the wine bottle by the neck as she tops off his glass. Unprompted. “I’ve been wondering about something! Nene-chan is an Insta-freak, you know, right?” A what? “But you’re never on her page,” she continues with a pout, “And you aren’t tagged in any photos. Are you shy? That’s adorable!”

How can a woman speak so politely with eyes as cold as hers? They glitter at him underneath the fluorescent lighting of the living area, small and hard and blindingly bright, a twin set of enchantingly haunted jewels. Delicately, she tastes at the rim of her glass, and says nothing else.

Before he can conjure up a response that isn’t mood-killing and really little more than a thinly veiled threat, Yashiro pipes up. “Hanako-kun’s super off-grid!” She stresses, eyes wide, words comically over exaggerated as though she is delivering information of the utmost importance. “He has a very troubled childhood! He doesn’t like talking about it! So that’s why!”

“A troubled childhood,” muses the purple haired menace.

Yashiro nods solemnly, gulping another hit of her dry white. “Yeah! He’s got a bunch of weird allergies, too. Did you know that he can’t eat garlic? Not even garlic bread? Isn’t that so sad!”

“...Indeed it is. My condolences, Hanako-san.”

Right.

The evening doesn’t really improve from there, apart from Yashiro falling into his side after she gets a bit too wine drunk. Hanako can smell more than just the saccharine perfume she slathers on all the time; no, from this close, Hanako inhales and internalizes the scent of a robust, earthy musk, far richer than anything spritzed or patted superficially into the skin. Hanako can smell underneath her skin. Hell, Hanako can practically see -- can practically taste the delicacies hidden there, with how firmly she leans onto him. Would she still feel comfortable holding clutching onto his arm, if she knew the kinds of things he thinks about her? About doing to her?

They say good night to the amethyst wench and her sad excuse of a clueless human husband not long after that. The apartment isn’t far away and it’s too late to stumble into the car of a subway, so the pair of them trek home on foot.

A quiet night. The moon is as full as she is healing, and Hanako returns to himself a little bit more underneath her watchful, healing gaze.

“Now that I think about it… we really don’t have any pictures together.”

Although Yashiro has sobered up enough to stand straight, she still maintains a loose grasp on his arm. Her fingernails curl into the sleeve of his button down, a splash of bright, vivid red disappearing in the deep dark of a moonless night. Swallowed right up without a second thought. “Is it… is it because you’re embarrassed, Hanako-kun? Of, um… well. Do you not want to be seen with me? I’m sorry…”

He could break his own neck. He should. He would, if she asked him to.

“You own a Polaroid camera, yes?”

“Ah! You mean my Hello Kitty one? Uh-huh! Why?”

“When we return home,” Hanako says, like a fool, “We can take a picture.”

If he were a defendable creature, he’d point to Yashiro’s sudden and swift ascent into excitement as the justification for the latest manifestation of his long, long list of bad habits. Her strong ankles defy gravity and carry her as she floats on air, giggling as she skips the whole way home. Even as they make their way through the front door. Even as she must root around in her cluttered bedroom (that Hanako cannot follow her into, for obvious reasons). Even as she struggles to remember how to change the film, and inputs a decorative mascot-inspired roll, nicking more than a few of her pale, slender fingers in the process.

Even as she wades through darkness, Yashiro is so bright. 

The actual photo itself requires some set-up which eventually results in Hanako reversing the contraption unto them and pressing down on what he’s only halfway sure is the capture button. He assumes that he’s done well when a thin strip of glossy paper leaks out from the bottom and Yashiro swipes at it in a giddy stupor, remnants of the Riesling from earlier that evening rendering her sloppy and uncoordinated. 

“‘Kay, it’s gotta develop now… should only be a few more seconds! Will you keep it safe tonight? ‘M sooooo tired, and I really gotta shower before I pass out…”

Yashiro is already stumbling away, back towards her bedroom. She slips the rapidly lightening square in his palm as she slips back, lingering for one moment too long against the doorframe.

“Thanks, Hanako-kun. G’night.”

And then she is gone.

Which is probably for the best. The film has finally pulled itself from the murky depths of ambiguity. Hanako looks down at the picture in his palm and Yashiro stares back at him: her bold, red lips and silver-spun hair are two twin beacons of color, misplaced and incongruent within the impenetrable sea of blackness surrounding her. 

Where Hanako should have been instead lies a lapse in composition. The photograph is blank and undeveloped around his general silhouette. But that is not the strangest thing about the photograph.

The strangest thing is howYashiro leans into the darkness, unafraid of the way it spindles into her own boisterous portrait and slowly eats at the brightly hued pigments of her warm flesh, her pretty, frilly dress, her smile. That unerringly loud, human smile.

How long will it take, he wonders, before the shot is entirely eclipsed by that cold, dead void.

3. Sunlight

It’s a bad day before he even opens his eyes.

As a creature of indeterminate longevity and supernatural capabilities, sleep is not the necessity it once was for him. But he indulges, from time to time, when there’s little to do during the daylight hours. After all, he’s confined to his bedroom from sunrise until sunset. Pacing the perimeter of a lion’s cage grows tiresome, even to eternally patient apex predators such as himself. Much easier to force his body to shut down and pass the time for him, as his consciousness wanders aimlessly through the realm of a deep, dreamless slumber.

This day is not one of those days. This day is the peak of Summer’s cruel, tyrannical reign. This day is suffocating. This day is warm. This day is bright. 

This day maneuvers above and below and all around the blackout curtains that are always painstakingly drawn over his windows. This day leaks into his bedroom and weasels its way into his sheets, underneath his skin, scorching him from the inside out with such a ferocity that it renders him immobile. Every fiber of his being threatens to splice into terrifying, meaningless oblivion. 

When Yashiro first asked, Hanako told her it was migraines.

It was a vague excuse that pinpointed some rare, untreatable immune-disease that left him inexplicably weak to sunlight. Yashiro really should have been more persistent in hunting down the real truth -- the actual truth -- especially considering her occupation as an urgent clinic nurse. He considers the idea that it’s an answer she doesn’t care enough to unearth. He mulls over the alternative, which is that she is too frightened by whatever she may find to go searching for it in the first place. He then decides he’s done thinking about her. Today is torture enough.

A gentle knock at his door renders all of his efforts fruitless, however. “Hanako-kun?” Her voice filters easily through the heavy fog clouding his awareness, like a blade through slackened flesh. “You okay?”

She’s still standing hesitantly in his doorway, as though waiting for permission to enter. He’d laugh if it didn’t hurt so badly to do anything other than lay still and flat as a corpse.

He can’t afford to expend any unnecessary effort lest he wear himself out completely, so he goes for the most direct course of action:

Snakes his arm out of the big, black ball of sheets and comforter in which he’s coffined himself inside. Holds back a curse as he’s made aware of just how weak he’s become. Struggles not to drop his cellular phone when he finally manages to blindly locate it. Unplugs the device single handedly with tremorous fingers. Holds it out to the open air.

“Take this,” says Hanako, voice dim and tepid. “Dial the contact ‘Tsukasa.’ Give him this address.”

Not for the first time, Hanako realizes that he should be grateful for this human’s absence of curiosity. He has amassed plenty of bad habits in the past, all of them metastasizing entirely too close for comfort until he’d been forced to handle them in a way that had been entirely hands-on and the very opposite of mess-free. For Yashiro to wordlessly collect the cellular phone from his trembling grasp and do as she’s told is what he’d call a blessing, if he still believed in feats as fickle as faith. 

She is confused as she makes the phonecall. Hanako can hear the shift of her hair sliding past one shoulder as she tilts her head. He can feel the way her chest flutters in a muted gasp of surprise when the line connects after the first ring. She can’t be more than three or four feet away. Close enough for him to reach out and brush, with the pitifully pale pads of his fingertips. What a sight that would paint, muses Hanako, deliriously. Icarus and his glittering, lethal lover.

Time ebbs and flows and bends and breaks after that. He’s distantly aware that he drops in and out of consciousness. The hot wax slathering each of his limbs is an imagined thing, he’s sure, as is the sensation of free-falling to an anticipated, blunt death. These sensations are from the dreamscape that pulls him beneath its suffocating depths only to release him at the last second, in a cruel imitation of the sea and all her unfathomable terror. 

(He has not dreamt in so very, very long. It’s a bad habit.)

The final time he breaks the surface, he surges up against something -- cold. The kind of cold that forces his own to bow its head. The kind of cold that relieves him of his fever, and sends a violent chill through his body, all at once. The kind of cold one should only absorb in small doses, with limited contact. A once-in-every-three-decades kind of cold. That kind of cold.

“Hi, Amane! You look terrible!”

Tsukasa’s hand on his forehead is frigid enough that it loops back into the realm of burning. Hanako must gently bat it away and blink blearily up at the sight of his twin brother, just as bright-eyed and bushy-tailed as he always was. Always is.

“Hi, Tsu.”

“Hold still, ‘kay? I brought the bendy straws you like. All you gotta do is sip. Open wide!”

Obediently, Hanako parts his lips and accepts the flimsy piece of plastic. 

He tries not to think about what, exactly, it is that he’s doing. If he closes his eyes and holds his breath, Hanako can almost pretend that he’s being fed by different hands, in a different world, as a different person. 

“Hey, Amane?”

Gulp, shudder. Resist the instinctive gag that claws its way up his throat like a beast bending the bars of its cage. “Yeah, Tsu?”

“Why are you starving yourself?”

Eyes closed. Mouth shut. Another swallow. Hands-off. Mess free.

“You have food right there,” Tsukasa whispers. “Is there something wrong with her? Is she sick? Y’know, I’m not picky. If you don’t want her, I can--”

Hanako, with newfound strength, launches upright into a sitting position. What wonders a couple of mouthfuls can do. 

Oh, how to explain this. Oh, how to navigate his way through an intersection of muddled implications and unspoken subtleties, all of which will go right over Tsukasa’s head. How can Hanako pretend to be a creature of innuendo and self-control, when his biggest, most glaring lapse in judgement sits across from him in the damned den of his own design?

He struggles for a moment, running a tired hand down his face. “Yashiro is a -- friend.”

“A friend?”

“Yes,” confirms Hanako, desperately avoiding Tsukasa’s curious gaze. “And friends don’t eat friends.”

The words are slimy and leave a bad taste in his mouth. Well. Maybe the words themselves aren’t what lingers at the back of his tongue and stains his teeth. But they are odious, nonetheless, and hang in the air like empty nooses dripping down from a gallows.

“Friends don’t let friends starve,” is Tsukasa’s counterpoint. “If it were me, Amane, I’d let you. Even though you already did, I’d let you do it again. I’d always let you.”

Hanako has never understood why Tsukasa refuses to cover up the twin bite marks that marr his jugular. Is it to punish him? Is it not punishment enough, that Hanako has to see his face at all? 

When his brother grins at him, it cuts like a knife. Hanako remembers a time where those cheeks stretched wider, when those eyes glistened with something other than black ice. Tsukasa plucks the bendy straw out of the cup and drinks straight from the rim, tossing his head back to give Hanako full view of the way his throat opens and closes around the infernal contents. 

He can’t stop staring at the scars: two lone stars fixed in an empty, pallid, apocalyptic sky.

The younger boy is sated only when the cup has been drained dry -- and even then, he pants, exhilarated, pupils blown large and dangerously obsidian as they flitter back and forth as though in search of more, more, more. 

Why are you starving yourself?

He’d always been a messy eater. His baby brother, Tsukasa. Tsukasa who loved Katanuki. Tsukasa who loved to paint. Tsukasa who still loves to paint, but now works solely in abstract monochrome. Tsukasa, who paints himself over and over and over again until he’s dripping, covered head-to-toe in a masterpiece of his own design. Tsukasa, who licks his canvas clean at the end of each night only to start anew in tomorrow’s dangerous twilight dusk. Tsukasa, who collects victims like portraits.

Tsukasa, who had once been a portrait himself. Hanako, who held the brush in his hands and created something freakishly beautiful that wretched, awful night.

Why are you starving yourself?

He feels full enough, watching Tsukasa pass his tongue over his chops. He feels like he’ll never need to eat again.

By the time his brother makes his departure, the sun has long since sunk beneath the horizon. Hanako’s room is once again as it should be: a thick, inky fog of opaque black. It’s so dark, in fact, that had he not been what he is, he would never have spotted the slight gap between his door and its frame, where a slender figure lingers in apprehensive wait.

Yashiro is checking on him, he realizes belatedly. 

Why are you starving yourself?

“Good night,” She calls, softly. “I’m about to head out for a double.”

“Be safe.”

“‘Course! I always am… I hope you feel better soon, Hanako-kun.”

He couldn’t have this if he ate like an animal. He couldn’t have Yashiro -- sweet, gentle, lovely Yashiro -- living alongside him as he devoured bodies made in her image. Already, Hanako struggles with what his baser instincts urge him towards… to give into those temptations would be putting her in danger. 

His door clicks quietly shut. His room is bathed in the cover of night once more.

Left alone to his own devices, the beat begins to roam its cage. A growl sounds, low and deep and mortally wounded. Not from his throat -- but from the very pit of his stomach.

Resistance is one thing, but ignorance, however feigned, is quickly ruled out of the realm of his personal possibility. There is no disregarding the sensations that fester inside of him. There is no course for his desires to run. There is only the ugly, maddening truth:

Hanako is hungry.

Hanako needs to put his hands on something.

Hanako needs to make a mess.

4. Silver

“Promise rings!”

“... Excuse me?”

“N-Not in a weird way, or anything like that!” Stutters Yashiro, fumbling with the miniature wooden box in her shaking, manicured grasp. “They’re just little cheap ones. I saw them on display at the mall, and I couldn’t just not… plus, do you even know what day it is?”

Hanako raises a brow. “Enlighten me.”

“It’s our six-months-as-roommates-a-versary!”

“Wow.”

“I’m really happy you recognize the importance here, Hanako-kun. Now stick out your hand so I can put yours on! And then you do me!”

If he didn’t know any better, Hanako would wonder how Yashiro gets anything done with those delicate fingers of hers. They’re as soft-looking and malleable and enticingly peachy as the rest of her, topped off at their gracefully tapered ends with a neat coat of ruby red. They dance along everything they touch, nimble little ballerinas hopping from pose to pose, commanding rapt attention wherever they leap. 

As his own hand raises to meet hers, he must fight the urge to clench into an ugly, defensive fist. 

The first touch sends something like electricity ricocheting down his spine like lightning through a weather vane. She is so gentle. How can she be so gentle? How can she be so round-edged and rosy-cheeked and expect him to just stand here, wordlessly, with nothing to do or say about it? How can she live in his house for six months and celebrate, rather than mourn? How can she look at him, a creature innate to unsightly presence and habit, and say to herself: this is something worthy of care.

The second touch is just as unnerving, but for all the wrong reasons.

“I thought you said this was cheap,” grits Hanako, exhaling sharply through his nose as the silver ring slides slow and meticulously down the length of his finger. 

Yashiro pauses, eyes narrowed. “Is it not? How can you even tell?”

“A-allergic… !”

To her credit, she’s properly mortified. Yashiro almost falls all over herself  to wrench the offending piece of jewelry off and away, apologizing profusely as she studies the burn wound on his middle finger. Her mouth twists into a tense little knot. Hanako wants to smooth it out.

Instead, he follows her obediently into her bathroom after she tells him to come inside and sit his ass down on the toilet -- which he does, sheepishly.

“I can’t believe -- oh, God, I’m so sorry, Hanako-kun… Just, hold still okay? It’s only gonna hurt a little, I promise.”

It’s an injury that would’ve long since healed itself by now, if he were in any other state than the one he currently occupies; which is to say that he’s rather unhealthy. Which is to say that the rats and possums and other small rodents he guiltily entraps in the alley behind the house do nothing besides sate a momentary desire. Which is to say that it is impossibly difficult to keep himself aware and conscious and disciplined enough not to careen head-first into Yashiro’s exposed clavicle and unhinge his jaw and feel his skull shift to accommodate the extra layer of fangs and sink his claws into her perfect, supple hips and feel her go paralyzed with terror as he--

“Okay! All done. Do you feel better now?”

“Yes.” It’s a pretty bandage. Pink and bright with tiny dancing radishes along the perimeter.

“I really am sorry,” mumbles Yashiro, encasing his frigid hands with her own, squeezing and rubbing with her soft thumbs. “I don’t ever want to hurt you. You’ve always -- you’re always so kind to me, all the time, and it just seems like… well, I don’t know. Lately I feel like I just never know how to help you, Hanako-kun. I feel like I just make things… worse. So can you promise me something?”

“Anything,” says Hanako, unblinkingly, because blinking is a sign of dishonesty.

“You have to tell me when you need something. Or when you don’t need something. Or when you -- uh, well, I really want you to be honest with me. Okay? Can you promise me that? Because it makes me really sad that you struggle with… a lot, and there’s not so much I know about how to help. So, please? Do you promise? To be honest?”

“I promise,” says Hanako, unblinkingly, because blinking is a sign of dishonestly and also because he can’t close his eyes without seeing her body splayed out in the bathtub behind her, limbs limp and gore overflowing past the rim and into his eagerly awaiting mouth. In this fantasy, he uses his tongue to follow the carmine droplets bulleting down the porcelain edge, licking and slurping until he reaches the source of the mess, the heart of the storm, the original inspiration to all his reverence. He would take his time. 

(Or would he lose himself? Would it be hands-on? Would it be messy?)

“Thank you for trusting me. I trust you… with my life, you know. Maybe it’s naive, but I hope one day you could do the same.”

He can’t touch her, not right now, even though she looks like she’s about to shake apart at the seams. All Hanako can do is watch from a safe distance, and wonder. And want. And ache.

As always.

5. Blood

She comes home early.

Hanako has only just padded his way into the kitchen when he hears the front door unlock. Is it that time, already? No, it can’t be. Yashiro usually arrives when he is just settling in to go back to sleep. She brings with her the pale light of a budding dawn, and although Hanako regrets their sparse interactions and conflicting schedules, he’d rather not disintegrate into a pile of ashes atop the living room couch just because he felt like saying welcome home, honey.

Tonight is different, apparently. A cursory glance thrown over to the microwave clock reveals that it’s only a few minutes past the witching hour. And despite there being a total absence of sunlight when Yashiro opens the door, Hanako still falls to his knees in a sudden onslaught of unadulterated agony.

His vision turns spotty, only worsening as Yashiro rushes inside and screams at the sight of his crumpled body. “Hanako-kun? Oh my God! Oh my God, can you hear me?”

Barely, is what he wants to say, but can’t. His throat is too tight, too dry. His mouth begins to salivate at an alarmingly disgusting rate. 

That smell.

Pathetically, he crawls over to her on his hands and knees, body running on autopilot as it drives him towards the source. Hanako can feel his body shift and transform with the pavlovian response he’s developed over the decades -- an instinct borne out of the memory of a chase, of a hunt,of warm flesh twisting and stretching and tearing underneath his capable grasp, of muffled screams and kicking legs and the eventual, gradual descent into permanent stillness, of hands scrabbling desperately into dirt, into pavement, into carpet, as they scream his name and beg him -- no -- no, stop -- what are you -- Hanako-san--!

Blood. But, not just any kind of blood. 

Fresh, human blood.

Six months is a very, very long time to go without food.

The scent wafts from the messenger bag thrown haphazardly over Yashiro’s shoulder. Hanako claws weakly at it, burying his nose into the worn fabric and moaning in relief at the contact. 

“Fuck,” he sighs, breathy. The debauched soundtrack of his own muffled desperation would embarrass him, probably, if he were cognizant of anything other than the metallic tang filling his nostrils.

The last thing he remembers is Yashiro running her fingers through his hair, shushing him quietly. 

And then it all fades to black.

“Oh, Good. You’re awake!”

Hanako gets about halfway through a sarcastic reply before something is shoved past his lips. Something… familiar. Something -- bendy?

“Drink up,” huffs Yashiro, pushing the straw more firmly into his mouth. “You’re lucky we had a contaminated batch of bags today. I-it’s still safe to drink, though! Or at least… I hope… tell me if it tastes funny, okay? Jeez, Hanako-kun… I didn’t know you were so hungry! Why didn’t you tell me sooner?

His lack of a response only propels her onward. 

“Well… I know you don’t like to talk about it… I’m sorry if this is making you uncomfortable, but I couldn’t just sit and watch you waste away--”

“You knew?”

“... Um. Was I not supposed to know?”

“You knew,” Hanako repeats numbly around the plastic in his mouth, dumbfounded. “This whole time, you knew.”

Unimpressed, Yashiro raises an eyebrow. “That you’re a vampire? Duh. Allergic to garlic? And silver? And sunlight? I’m not stupid, and you aren’t nearly as slick as you think you are, mister.”

 The chuckle she gives after this quickly peters off into something more melancholy, a little bit darker in origin. From where she’s perched on the couch, leaning above him to adjust the straw’s positioning into the medical packet on his chest, Hanako can see the sorrow, there, in her big, doe-like eyes. 

“You never brought it up… and I didn’t want to overstep any boundaries! I’ve never, erm, done ‘this’ before… if you couldn’t already tell. But since you never said anything… I just thought that, I don’t know? Maybe my blood wasn’t good enough to drink, or something like tha--”

“That is absolutely not the case.” 

He’s quick to cut her off. Too quick. “Far from it, really,” he attempts to joke in an effort to lessen the intensity of the blow, but the damage has already been done. Yashiro’s hand freezes around the blood bag, her eyes flitting up to lock onto his own. 

It’s unfairly attractive, the way her blush blossoms across her face. Hanako takes a long drag from the straw and swallows, never breaking his stare.

“I would… definitely be okay. More than okay. With doing -- ahem. That.”

“Drinking,” supplies Nene, so quietly that Hanako reads her lips more than he hears the charged word spill from her pink, glistening tongue. “You’d drink from me?”

What a question. Oh, if only she knew.

“Sure,” he hums, easily, “as long as you promise not to bring home anymore garlic bread. Especially not from that mangy mutt.”

“Hey, that isn’t very nice! Kou-kun isn’t… wait. You’re… you don’t mean…?”

“Yep.”

“Oh my god. That’s why you don’t like him!”

“His pack leader really, really hates me. Heh.”

“You know, you probably shouldn’t look so pleased about that.” She says, with a fond smile. Hanako wants to taste it. 

On his next sip, he’s met with an ugly slurping sound. Normally, the fact that he’d sucked down a pint of blood in less than five minutes would be cause for concern. But his circumstances are not normal. His circumstances haven’t been normal for quite a good while, really, and Hanako can’t bring himself to think about it too hard. Not when his worst bad habit is within arms’ reach; not when she’s digging into her bag and procuring another packet of blood for him to puncture with the blunt end of his straw.

“Thank you,” he murmurs, awestruck.

“And I’ve got seven more where that came from! So just take your time, okay? No rush. I’ll stay here and make sure you get your fill… I promise.”

Hanako thinks he will hold her to that.

+1: Feeding

This is nothing like the first time, which is what he’d originally been terrified of. This is nothing like the second, or third, or fourth or fiftieth or hundredth time.

(How could it be? How could having her pliant and wanton underneath his capable grasp be anything other than pure ecstasy?)

Before he takes the plunge, he -- has to warn her. Again. Just in case she’s changed her mind. “Last chance,” Hanako breathes into the fleshy meat of her, the aroma of pumping blood doing unspeakable things to his mind. “This is your last chance to back out, Yashiro.”

She’s pretty as a portrait, the way she shifts and wriggles underneath his body reminiscent of the melding of a varied color palette coming together in one grand, epic composition. 

But he’s about to stain her in monochrome. 

“Don’t be gentle,” Yashiro gasps, dragging his hands to hold her down. “I’m not afraid o-of a little mess.”

You should have been, thinks Hanako, mournfully, as he paints his first stroke of bright, brilliant red.