Characters: Renka, Yuki
Summary: This is what you count dear above all else. This is what you can't have.
Pairings: Renka x Yuki
Disclaimer: I don't own Record of a Fallen Vampire.
These things are what you count dear: the weapons you call your own, and her smile, fixed to her face, with her eyes sparkling above and her skin stretching smoothly across her cheekbones.
This is what you hold dear: your swords, and her. The path of war, and her.
But you can only have one.
And you can't have her.
Renka knows what he's ready for when he wakes up. Damn… The bastard wasn't playing this time.
Yuki's not playing anymore either, and even though she has nothing to work on combat-wise except Renka and Bridget's lessons and the flesh memories of the other hosts of the Black Swan, she is a formidable opponent to anyone she comes across. Renka smirks a little, clutching at his arm. He has a good idea of what he'll find.
With any luck, Strauss will be dead, scattered across the landscape, and Yuki will be perched in a tree triumphantly, smirking, smoking a cigarette with her eyes sparkling in triumph. She'll be talking about the winter and wondering if it will snow this year so she can make snowmen and have snowball fights and dump snow down the back of his shirt when he's not looking. She'll remark that Bridget might, just might smile when she hears the news, not a nasty smirk like what she usually pulls but a real, genuine smile. She'll talk about how great it feels to be free and maybe, just maybe, she'll have an answer to his question.
That's the crux; that's where it all comes together. That's what Renka wants and desires more than anything he ever has in his short life (For his life, even if it spans centuries is short compared to dhampires such as Bridget).
Renka sees the world through different eyes if he looks at it through Yuki's perspective. How she manages to look at it like that, after everything, is a fascinating mystery.
And she's just—
—Everything.
That's why the realization of her life being shorn is like a blade severing the cords of his own life.
What Renka expects has not happened. What he hoped would never occur gains life in the reality of pools of black blood in his hands, and Yuki's eyes shut, the lids screwed shut never to open naturally again, her lips starting to blue and her hands slack.
His swords. It's his swords.
And Akabara is nowhere to be found.
These black seconds pass like stones being thrown into water. They sink slowly, but leave no doubt of where they have fallen.
This is as far as Yuki goes, and in a way, it's as far as Renka will go to. His body will move on from the place but there is some part of him that will always stay, stuck and frozen at the place where twin sword carve crosses into Yuki's corpse, where the still-smoldering cigarette sends sickly waves of smoke from her mouth.
He'll always be here, but he won't be.
When love has been extinguished, the only road that can sate Renka is that of war and hatred.
It will be his life now, and the only eyes he sees the world through.