The first time Adam met her, she had locked herself inside her bedroom, isolating herself from the rest of the dorm she lived in. He had watched her for two minutes as she sat on her bed, curled up and silent. Outside, someone claimed they had food and would leave it at the door. She did not even twitch or make a response. Still, she was the one that spoke first.
"Who are you?" she demanded, heterochromatic eyes peeking over her knees at him. In all his years, he had never seen a human with features like hers – hair that reminded him of snow, and eyes that reminded him of dried blood and cherry blossoms.
He cleared his throat, preparing to say his speech of sympathy over her loss and how it was God's fault and how he could bring that person back. "I am the Millennium Earl! I sensed your sorrow, my dear lady. You have lost someone dear to you."
The woman raised her head, revealing tear stains and lips pressed into a thin line. "Come to tell me that you can bring her back?"
He paused, mouth open to tell her who to blame and what to do. "Yes…yes I am."
"The Millennium Earl, I take it?" she questioned, but she continued without an answer. "I've heard of you, but I never expected that I or anyone else from my people would draw your attention."
"But you did. Do you want her back?" he asked, stepping forward and offering her a handkerchief. She took it with a smile, dabbing her eyes and drying them.
"She would never forgive me if I brought her back to this world, Millennium Earl. I mourn my mother because I knew her so little. Have you ever had a taste of something and had it stolen from you and destroyed?" she asked with a bitter smile. "I mourn my mother, but I mourn the time we almost had more."
"I see," he responded, understanding her feelings because once upon a time, he had been a normal person who felt that way about things, too. "May I ask your name, my lady?"
"Tsukiko. Hiou Tsukiko, Millennium Earl, it's a pleasure-" Something rattled the window, drawing both of their attention. Quickly climbing off her bed and gliding to the door, she looked outside, her mouth opening slightly as her eyes widened. She did not hesitate to throw the window open, leaning out. "Ichiru! What are you doing here?"
"I had to make sure you were alright. For Lady Shizuka," a boy answered, and Adam decided it was time he left, leaving the first person to deny him in millennia to overcome her sorrow on her own.
The second time they met was not too long afterwards as she stood over ashes blowing away in the wind and a sword in her hand. She looked like a goddess in the morning sun, but her eyes told stories that gods would not dare to approach. Tsukiko turned to him, greeting him with a smile that did not reach her eyes. He did not know how she had sensed his silent approach, but he did not ask her how.
"I must be a strange one, to summon you twice," she told him. "My people do not mourn the dead, Millennium Earl. We do not look to the past, and we do not hold onto memories when our loved ones die."
"Yet here I am, summoned by your sorrow. May I ask who?" he replied, tipping his hat to her.
She turned back to the ashes. "My father. He was a horrible man, Millennium Earl, that does not deserve a second chance at life – especially after all the effort we put in to kill him. Cruel, treating everyone like pawns. I was born because he raped my mother. He stole me away from her and had her locked away, and he had someone kill the only person she was able to bond with in that captivity. He toyed with my brother's mother, breaking her mentally and destroying her life. He killed my cousin, his own nephew, when the child was a babe for some selfish desire. He tried to kill my other cousin before he tried raping her because she looks like her mother. He forced me to do thing I never wanted to do, yet here I am, unable to forget the times when he loved me like a daughter."
"So you mourn the man he could have been, if only he was a better person," Adam said, walking forward until he stood beside her and the ashes, staring down at what must have once been her father. "I know how that feels very well. A part of me loves my Father for how great He could be. The rest of me hate Him for all the pain and neglect my siblings and I suffered at His hands."
She sighed, looking up at the rising sun. "Sometimes, you have no say in who you love and why you love them. You can only learn to live with it. My father was far from being a saint, but he was still my father." From the corner of his eye, he watched as her face began to twitch into a mask, watching as a smile formed on her face that did not quite reach her eyes. He had been around for far too long – he could see through even Tsukiko's well-made illusion of contentment.
"And so the world continues."
"And so it does. Next time we meet, Millennium Earl, let it be you dropping by for tea and snacks. I would not mind entertaining you when you need an escape from your endless world."
Adam smiled both behind the caricature of the Millennium Earl and on the mask he hid behind for so many millennia. With a nod, he disappeared from her sight.
The third time they met, he wondered how she had stayed so young despite the decades. Perhaps looking only five years older than when they met the day her father died, seventy years had already flown by. She stood in front of a fresh grave that time, the name of a man who had lived a long life etched into the stone. She didn't turn to greet him with a fake smile that time.
"You never came for tea and snacks, Millennium Earl," she told him. "You would have known I wasn't human if you had."
"If not human, what are you?" he responded, shedding his mask in front of a stranger for the first time in centuries. She still did not look.
"A pureblood queen of vampires," she told him. "I told you that my people do not mourn the dead because our lives are too long for that. I will live far too long a life and almost everyone around me will die before me. Even my husband died before me."
"Is this his grave?" She nodded, unshed tears pooling at the rims of her eyes. He passed her the same handkerchief he had given her the first time they met. "A human?"
"I never really understood how, but he and my mother had somehow bonded when she had gone to kill his parents. As vampire hunters, they had killed her companion, though he should not have been on their list. He had voluntarily accompanied her as she sought to kill my father, who had toyed with too many people. We bonded because of the loss of my mother. I took over my mother's role as his guardian, and he told me stories about her that I would never otherwise know. Eventually, we started a family, and here we are now. Seventy-three years and four children later."
"I would say that is an impressive feat. I bet he begged you to turn him into a vampire."
"Many times. I could never bring myself to do it, to curse him to such an existence. I wished there had been a way for me to become human."
Adam turned to look at the woman, and for the first time in a long time, he wished he had the power to help her. But he was seventy years too late to help her, and six thousand years too ruined to change.
"Shall we go have some tea and snacks?"
But it was never too late to do something different, to bond with someone who would live for just as long and without end.
Tsukiko turned to face the man whose face she was seeing for the first time, and with a smile that would not reach her eyes for a few months, she nodded, accepting his invitation.