I did not want to die.
This was the sole thought that drove him in those chaotic times in which he and his siblings were born. As a noble child born in the time of war he was not permitted weakness, and as soon as he could walk his father had taught him that if he wanted a place for himself in the world, he had to hack his way through its brambles and forests with no mercy. His father detested any form of weakness, hardened man that he was, and enforced his discipline with an iron hand.
He had always had this idea that his father did not see him as a son, but some kind of plant or a pet perhaps, trained to get rid of any and all threats that their masters deemed dangerous.
His mother was the illegitimate daughter of the queen with another lover, and the royal children did not put it past them to make life harder for her, and in consequence, for them her children. The Princess Ilya, later Queen Ilya, did not miss any opportunity to embarrass his mother in court, or insult her, or spawn the most hideous rumors about her, so much so that she had given court life entirely and was content to run her little household in the estates that her husband, his father, had managed to scrap up for them.
He was the middle child. His eldest brother was never the perfect soldier his father imagined, having been felled early on in the wars and never managing to go beyond his captain's rank. His younger brother was too frail for war, and his father had drowned him himself in the nearby river some fifteen miles west of their home. His mother miscarried twin girls in their sixth month and never recovered from the ordeal; she died three days later.
It was at that time when the thought rang firmly in his head.
He did not want to die.
---
He was introduced to court at the age of 15, young, very young, his father's last remaining hope of regaining face in the crowd. By then he was already an accomplished fighter, capable of taking down five of the detested human bleeders at the same time. As his father's son he was under the protection of the Hiou family, the pioneers of the great noble ideal that vampires should rule the land and conquer their livestock neighbor, the humans. His lord the great Uruki, the founder of the Hiou family, treated him kindly in his first soiree and even permitted him to pour the wine.
He never liked those soirees, as he found the formal tunics uncomfortable and choking. He belonged in the battlefield, clad in armor, wielding a Bidenhänder in each hand, felling bleeder upon bleeder under the standards of the Hiou family and the ruling Kuran family. He felt at home in the field, reveling in the warmth and the rush of adrenaline, in the explosion of fire as bleeder clashed with vampire.
He met the Father during one of those ceremonies in which his superiors would pin medals onto his bloodied tunic. The Father had long stopped caring regarding the affairs of his children the vampires after he had executed his own queen, and to have him emerge at such an occasion was considered very rare. He could remember standing stiff, for the first time afraid again that death might come for him.
The Father's unusual, three-ringed crimson irises regarded him with little, melancholic interest.
"You are young, are you not?"
He would never forget those words, even though the Father did not wait for an answer after pinning the medal onto his tunic.
---
There had been many girls and boys, human and vampire, offered to him by his subordinates. By 28 winters he was already one of the most formidable vampire generals that advanced the war against the bleeders, the youngest one in history. He refused captives, refused to drink their blood or even look at them. He hunted alone, hunted for stragglers in the wintry woods and little abandoned hamlets, not wanting his prey to stink of the fires and fumes of the war.
He kept to himself, the stoic leader, playing a flute or a violin under the pale sunlight as the encampment slept around him.
He was at war when he received the news that his father had committed suicide. He offered no prayers and let the wind scatter his father's ashes.
---
He supposed it was the pride of a warrior, but he never understood how the human bleeders managed to turn the tides of the battle at them, even after the Father had suddenly abandoned them all. They had more than twelve pure families even then, and his lord Uruki had been a genius of war for as long as anyone could remember.
But for all of their power, the vampire race lost the wars.
The last futile days of combat were bleak and desperate, and his last waking moments were trying to hold the Ultrecht stronghold for his lord Uruki who had disappeared 8 days before, when the horn sounded their defeat. He could hear the bleeders all around him, closing in, before he deemed that he would not surrender.
The histories recorded that he had died in battle, that his ashes were scattered in the Ultrecth lake.
---
It would be ages before he would wake, and the family crypt had long been reclaimed by nature's vines and trees when this happened. His sarcophagus had been cracked open by a young bleeder trainee, a girl with pale hair and purple eyes, who could not have been more than 8 winters.
Sleep was crucial and important for vampires – not just a means of rejuvenation but also a form of escape and rest, when their long lives would become too burdensome for them to bear. So it was that the young bleeder girl earned his wrath, and his first thought was to eat her and leave no trace of her behind.
But she was much too small to satisfy his hunger, and instead he exacted upon her an oath that if and when she was old enough, she would replace his destroyed resting place. In the meanwhile she would aid him with adapting to the times when he needed it. The little girl was too frightened to refuse anyway, and he left her in the remains of his former home.
---
The vampires had indeed lost, and were now forced into secret lives.
He watched the 'modern' world with confusion and a bit of anger. Why did the vampires so easily give up their supremacy? Now they lived pitiful lives masquerading around as humans, engaged in their little politic games, trying to best each other to gain favor from the remaining weak purebloods who danced around in silks and jewels.
He tried to learn what he could of the new world after finding that his former estates and properties were still with him and left him considerable wealth, ridiculous wealth even, in modern reckoning.
That was when he sought out the little bleeder girl from the years before. Bleeders now called themselves hunters, and existed as a formidable force in the modern world with their organization. Still, he held them in silent disdain. All they knew were to hunt rogue Profugus, level E's, and he doubted that they would be able to take down the likes of his lord Uruki.
The girl, now a woman, was already a hunter. She was a Kiryuu, a direct descendant of the despicable human who had consumed Honkyouchi Inase, a pureblood, before the wars had started, before he was even born.
She had a name, she said, when he kept addressing her as 'child', and that he should use it. Elisien, she said, and he thought the name strange. Nonetheless he gave his own name – Athanase.
---
He came to her in inconvenient times – in the dead of the night, at 3 in the morning, during lunch, or when she was taking a bath. In those little visits he insisted that she explained how the world now worked, and he inquired as to how and why the vampires ever lost. He hounded her like the plague, obsessed with the status of his race. She held her ground as he raged and threw his fits, explaining calmly what had happened.
He observed her quaint human life as quietly as he could. She was married to another hunter, as the Kiryuu family had remained strictly patriarchal and refused to recognize her as their clan leader unless she married. Her husband was an accomplished hunter in his own right, an uninteresting specimen of a man with a shock of brown hair and green eyes. She had been married to him when she was 16, and now for five years they were still childless.
It was during one of his unusually-timed visits that he met her uninteresting husband, and as the man drew his weapon, he had remarked nonchalantly that he smelled of another female.
He had unwittingly uncovered her terrible sorrow.
---
When he came upon her again she was alone and a mess herself, but she kept her oath – she researched for him, and informed him that his sarcophagus replacement was well under way – she just had to gather herself up, and she would contact the masons as soon as she had enough money.
She was trying to be strong when it was obvious she couldn't, and it baffled him. Still she stood strong even when he expected her to shatter into a million broken pieces.
In his next visit, she informed him that her uninteresting husband had come for her, and that they were trying to patch their marriage up as best as they could.
---
Five years and he visited her again, to discover that she had once again been cheated on by her uninteresting mate. He did not know how the idea occurred to him, just that he had suddenly decided that her strength would not hold long this time. He extended to her an offer, a sanctuary in an estate of his isolated in Spain.
He did not expect her to come, but she was at the airport waiting for him, pale but resolutely decided.
---
He left the house to her management, and she was exceedingly cheered by the seemingly endless tulip fields that filled his estate with color. She kept the hearth warm and ablaze with fire, and everytime he went home there was food on the table, and she was singing as she cleaned or washed her clothes. He watched her in silence. He was amazed at how fast she had recovered.
As for himself, he was slowly came to accept the way the vampires had come to after the war. Perhaps they did deserve it. He had slowly realized that they never really understood why the Father had never approved of any wars; that the Hiou family had taken things on their own hands.
They lived together in peaceful quiet for two years until her uninteresting husband found her. He had gathered her to him after flinging him away, and took her beyond his reach, this time for good. It was to his estate in Nova Scotia that they had moved next, and would settle for a long while.
---
He supposed this was the reason why the Father had always said that vampires owed what they were to humans. He supposed that this was the reason why the Honkyouchi family had never participated in the war despite their great loss. He had never felt this kind of peace in his existence, never, as he lay holding her in his arms, their mingled scents still hanging heavy in the air.
He had asked her if it was all right for them, a vampire and a hunter, to be this way.
She said that they would make it right, and that was good enough for him.
The next day, he gave her a handmade bracelet, on which was a beautiful red stone that looked very much like a ruby. She had exclaimed that it was very pretty, and she smiled up at him happily, the stone solidified from his own heart blood had glowed a warm, tender red.
---
He had never known relief so great in his life, until he assured her that their twin boys were alive. She had been weakened by the ordeal, ever since from the first month of the dangerous pregnancy, and he was so relieved, so happy, that she and his – his! – sons had made it out alive.
She named them Zero and Ichiru, and he had silently vowed to himself that he would look after them to the best of his abilities. He was happy for his sons – to be born in a time that knew no war, they would hence know peace, and happiness, something that he had not known early in his life.
That to even have a family with a woman he loved – it was an ideal that had been nothing but a faint thought in his head. She had smiled at him as he carried their firstborn, and he had smiled back.
His wife.
His children.
His family.
---
They worked hard to keep their boys happy. Zero was of course the more stronger and resilient of the two, taking after his temperament rather acutely. Ichiru was often sickly, but he and Elisien sought to assure him that he would be all right, giving him the care that condition required.
He taught them many things, to name a few, some of his passions – music and art, while their mother taught them manners and how to make themselves useful at home. He had tried giving his blood to Ichiru, but his second son's health had never greatly improved, and it was something of a disappointment in him that he could not take both boys on the fishing trips, hiking trips and kayaking that he had developed a liking for.
And then the warm days came to an end.
---
His sons were thirteen when a descendant of his Lord Uruki, Shizuka Hiou, had managed to track him down. She wanted his aid in exacting vengeance for her human lover, whom her pureblood fiancé Kuran Ridou had set-up and murdered. His family in his mind he had refused her, saying that he had served only one Hiou, and that was Uruki, and that a 'pureblood' such as herself had no right to order him around. He had said that she lost her lover out of her own clumsiness and inability to protect him. That she should take responsibility for her actions. He had turned his back upon her and left her his disdain.
Even the purebloods have degraded into such low lives, he had thought as he went home.
He supposed he should have found something strange when Ichiru insisted that he wanted to experience kayaking for the first time. Later, rack his brains as much as he did, he could not see where he and Elisien lacked in Ichiru.
Ichiru had most of their care, and Zero never once complained about it.
When they had returned home, he had found his wife dead, too weak to handle the toxicity of Shizuka's bite, where his elder son was shivering by the corner, reaching out to him, alive despite the vicious bite, but he knew then that he would have a future that he could not alter.
Ichiru was gone. The bracelet Elisien had always worn had long been reduced to ashes, the blood ruby dull and dead.
---
The ashes fell like snow.
Four years he had followed the bloody trail of that massacre, after he had left Zero in the care of one of Elisien's oldest friends – Kaien Cross. The ashes of Shizuka Hiou stuck to the blade coated with his treacherous son's blood.
It was done.
The journey to Kaien Cross's school was a short one, and he waited for an equally short period too. His son, now a grown man, had joined him soon after, silent. Behind him stood a friend, another vampire clad in the Night Class white. In the brief period that he had laid eyes on Kaname Kuran, Athanase was sure that he was no ordinary pureblood, not the kind of low life that had now walked around parading themselves.
He knew that crimson gaze anywhere, even if Kuran's irises were no longer ringed, like before.
Zero had left the school with him without further questions.
---
My father hung on for a total of eighty long years.
He turned to music again, one of his life-long passions, and worked as a renowned composer for various artists, both vampire and human. We moved from place to place as the hunter's organization and the council hounded us. In the sixtieth year, Kaname and Lyric had managed to earn us the council's pardon, and my father and I settled in our old home in Nova Scotia.
He never recovered from my mother's loss. In his final days he lapsed into silence, and two days before his death, he had asked me if he could borrow my gun, Bloody Rose. I refused. I thought that a family member killing another was enough. I didn't understand the significance of mother's old bracelet, especially the beautiful ruby that I remembered upon it.
I came home from the local fish market when I found his note. There was no trace of him; the sea breeze had long swept his remnants away. I packed my things and stayed with the Kuran family since.