Bitter Nocturne
A Weiss Kreuz fanfiction by laila

Standard Copyright Disclaimer: Weiss Kreuz, it's characters, indices, and all other associated intellectual assets remain the property of Kyoko Tsuchiya, Koyasu Takehito, Project Weiss and Movic, as well as the American companies responsible for releasing it in the West. This is a fan work written for no reason other than to share my love for the series. No profit is being made or ever will be made from the authoring of this fiction.

Author's Notes: I have, in my time, come across quite a lot of Weiss Kreuz fanfiction involving the supernatural. This would be my small attempt to contribute. This story owes its creation to a discussion I had with Rokesmith on the subject of Vampire AUs which, being as we are who we are, very quickly turned into a brainstorming session. Though I'm pretty sure the actual storyline was 80% his idea because it nearly always is, I for some reason have ended up assuming authorial duties on this one. Here's hoping I can do justice to it.

Warnings: Strong language and violence from the start, some mature themes.

"I'm not afraid of werewolves or vampires or haunted hotels.
"I'm afraid of what real human beings to do other real human beings."
Walter Jon Williams

Overture: Laura and the Cats

The room was full of shadows, and full of smoke.

A window was open and the curtains were billowing in the breeze, but it didn't seem to bother the smoke any. It just hung there unmoving, with absolutely nothing to connect to, while the curtains snapped and rustled to themselves. It was in no particular hurry, that smoke. It could wait all day.

Ken lay on his back amongst tangled, blood-spattered bedsheets and blinked up at the ceiling, and there'd been a creature on top of him. Some night creature, hot and heavy and wild-eyed, reeking of sweat and terror, and it had pinned his body beneath its own and lowered its head to gnaw at the bare flesh of his arm and throat, and now it was gone. Gone so completely it might never have been there at all, and maybe it never was. Maybe he'd dreamed it all. Maybe, Ken thought, maybe someone else still was, Christ knew he didn't feel real any more either.

There'd been a girl with a shroud-pale face half swallowed up by the shadows she stood in, and she'd had something wrong with one of her eyes. If he raised his head Ken could almost imagine he might still see her, fragile and delicate and dressed in black, offering him nothing but the averted plane of one cheek as she gazed at the door.

I'm sorry, she would say. She probably was sorry.

She could have had the common courtesy to go for a less complicated arrangement.

The last thing that Ken remembered with any real clarity was standing in a hotel corridor with a bouquet in his arms, checking the address on an order docket, and a girl who had something the matter with her eyes. Now there were roses and fronds of fern and Casablanca lilies everywhere and a damp spot on the sweep of the carpeted floor where the water had seeped into the pile, and it had taken Aya half a bastard hour to finish that order. Fuck, he was gonna be pissed. The vase hadn't broken, at least. Ken supposed he could take that back with him.

He had said, Good evening. He had said, I'm sorry to disturb you, but I've got a delivery for Ai Tanaka.

The girl stepped back to let him past. She said, I'm so sorry.

Had even that been real? Something of the sort must have happened, and yet now – and how strange it sounded! – now it felt almost like a scene from a stranger's life. He might have been listening to someone else talk, watching from a distance as a boy gave flowers to a pretty girl, and stepped through an invitingly open door, and vanished.

If all she'd wanted was to crack him over the head, why spend 12,950 goddamn yen for the privilege? Never mind the cost of the hotel room. It was a lot to pay just to hit someone.

Pretty cheap for a life. No wonder she'd asked for a funeral arrangement.

Ken struggled to sit, blinking as the room seemed to swim before his eyes. His head felt heavy and strange, as if he had borrowed someone else's for the afternoon and only now realized that the one he'd traded for was two sizes too large and every instinct he possessed screamed that he felt like crap, yet he didn't. Where the Hell was the pain? He'd been hurt, he knew it, and yet Ken felt he could have taken on the world if only he hadn't been so damned dizzy…

He leaned over the side of the bed, hair hanging in his face. He vomited and felt better.

The room was full of shadows and full of smoke, and it reeked of roses and the metallic tang of spilled blood. There was blood on the sheets, still warm and wet, looking almost black in the half-light. Like pools of ink or blood in a manga, color optional. My blood, Ken thought, but it was just that: a thought. It, like the smoke, had nothing to connect to and no relevance to anything. Just he was bleeding somewhere, in terrifying, desperate amounts, and it didn't hurt.

It should have hurt. Ken struggled to push himself upright again, scrabbling at the sheets with one hand. Couldn't get a grip. The bedsheets felt slippery beneath his fingers. Muttering something that could have been a curse or a prayer or nothing at all, Ken dragged himself back onto the bed and upright, wiping at his mouth with the back of one hand. Christ. He was breathing too hard and too fast, sweat pearling up across his shoulders, his back. His legs were tangled in the bedsheets. Oh, Christ—

His right arm looked like he'd been using it to play Fetch with the biggest Doberman on earth, and the dog clearly hadn't wanted to stop playing.

For a moment Ken just stared in sickened fascination, watching heavy droplets of blood crawling in slow and ticklish skeins down the pallid, mangled skin of his arm. It spattered his clothing, it seeped slowly into the sheets and it hardly seemed real, either. Spellbound, he brushed the tips of his fingers against ravaged flesh and the blood was warm to the touch, warm and sticky. It felt real, at least.

For a moment he wondered whose arm it was and if its owner knew he was bleeding to death.

I'm sorry, said the girl with the broken eyes. I'm so sorry.

Tourniquet, something small and persistent murmured in a voice that sounded rather like Omi's. Undertone of, finally paying attention, are you? Even if it wasn't Ken who was bleeding, whoever the arm belonged to needed help. Ken reached behind him, fingers groping for – there. Clumsily, his stained fingers leaving smears of gore across the clean white fabric, Ken shook the pillow from its case and tore the slipcover to shreds with nails and teeth. Tourniquet. He fumbled for the longest, largest strip and carefully drew it tight about his upper arm, pulling until the bloodflow eased, then tying it in place with a hard, mean little knot.

Had to get help. Had to get help before he or whoever that arm belonged to bled out… Ken fought to free himself from the sticky, clinging sheets, fought to stand. Someone had cut the cord of the phone that sat by the bed and it wasn't even a surprise. This had been planned, right down to the flowers that had scattered on the carpet. Stock was out of season. Everything was out of season this late in the year. ¥12,950 was a lot to pay to strew the floor with flowers…

Ken had known he'd forget the vase. Stupid really, leaving empty-handed after all that. He stumbled toward the door, barely noticing that he was crushing the flowers underfoot. Someone thoughtful had left it half-open, leaving the light from the hallway spilling into the shadow-veiled room. Though the view was of nothing more interesting than a slice of a carpeted hotel corridor, a blank-faced and blameless expanse of white-painted wall, Ken felt himself starting to smile. He nudged the door open with one foot, slipped through into the corridor and how did they cope, how were they supposed to see when it was so bright? The light had him blinking and rubbing at his eyes with the heel of one hand. It hurt. The light hurt, and the smoke just hung there unmoving.

The smoke could wait all day, but not Ken. Not Ken. Had to get help. Okay. Okay. Had to find a lift, or the stairs. Maybe there'd be someone he could talk to who would tell him what to do—Get help, Ken. Help the guy with the fucked-up arm, maybe himself, or… could have been another man trapped back there, could be he'd left him lying in the sheets.

It might have been easier if he'd known whose feet these were. It wasn't funny at all, but Ken was giggling. Drunk on duty. Must be they'd given him some whiskey, the girl in black had gotten him drunk and then the creature had come…

He stopped short. There was a figure at the far end of the hall: a woman by the looks of her, struggling to turn a key that had become jammed in a recalcitrant lock.

"Hey," Ken called, and his voice rasped uncomfortably in his throat. "Hey!"

Help.

She must have noticed him because she raised her head. Her hair slipped back across her shoulder, and he just about caught a glimpse of the pale smear of her face before her painted lips parted in a perfect O of shock and, wrenching at the door handle, she ducked into her room and slammed the door behind her.

Well fuck you too, lady.

Ken sighed. Dragging his fingers against the wall – at least he knew that was there, it had to be because his fingers were bloody and they left gory, printless smears tracked against the pale paintwork – he started down the corridor, cautious as a three-day drunk trying to stumble through a sobriety test. Emergency stairs, they were the closest… Omi was gonna be pissed, he'd dropped the flowers and now here he was stumbling home wasted and it would have been so easy to sit down here. It would be the easiest thing he'd ever done, just sitting down and closing his eyes. Keep moving. The legs had nothing to do with him, but he couldn't stop. Keep moving…

Just keep moving. A man was bleeding to death somewhere and it might even have been him, had to get help—and the world looked blurred and vague as if he were trapped behind a curtain of gauze, him on one side, everything else in the goddamn universe on the other.

It seemed to take a private eternity for Ken to find his way to the stairwell. Penned in by blank walls painted an insipid shade of cream, stumbling past closed door after closed door, he might just as easily have been trying to chase rainbows as searching for the stairs. It felt for all the world like being trapped in an endless, featureless maze, running from nowhere in particular toward nothing at all. It was a scene from a half-forgotten dream, not a good dream either. A dream that was all repetition, the brain filling up the blank hours between dusk and dawn.

Fire escape.

Ken almost fell onto the crash bar, was pitched off his feet when the emergency doors swung open before him and sent him sprawling onto the landing of the fire stairs. It should have hurt, but it didn't.

For a moment the boy simply lay there, blinking out at the rush-hour crowded street spread out before him. The road was clogged with cars, the sidewalk cluttered with the usual extras, pinstripe commuters and sway-hipped secretaries and the inevitable knots of schoolgirls, their skirts pinned up several inches above regulation height and bare knees goose-pimpling in the evening chill. It could have been any street in any city, anywhere and here he was lying dazed and breathless and shivering on a fire escape, just watching it all as if it had nothing whatever to do with him. Grabbing the railings in front of him, Ken dragged himself back to his feet.

Two flights down and he had tripped and lost his footing, crying out more in surprise than in fear or pain, snatching for the guardrail beside him. Ken's blood-slick fingers closed about the handrail for a second, no more, and then his grip had failed and he was falling. He caught his head a sickening crack on the treads of one of the stairs and landed in a crumpled heap on the landing, caught halfway between the sixth floor and the seventh. He probably should have tried to find the lift, after all…

He couldn't move, and it didn't matter.

It didn't matter at all. Nothing mattered to Ken but the chill of the evening – and hadn't he had his jacket on when he left the store? Christ, that had better not have gone missing – and his own laughter bubbling up in his throat. Still there was no pain. Somewhere on the edge of hearing he imagined he could hear the sound of an alarm. He must have been dreaming all along and now, Ken thought as his eyes slipped closed, now it must be morning.

That was it. It was morning, and the dream would come to an end.

All he had to do was wake up.