AN:

**part of the summary shamelessly taken from a quote by John Mark Green**

Disclaimer: I do not own VK! That belongs to Matsuri Hino~

Sooo, this is a very different kind of fic. It will center around Ai, Ren, and Ichijou-this prologue is told from Ichijou's POV (mostly him reflecting over the past 166 years, since the end of the events in the original manga)-as well as the children of Aidou, Kain, etc. This means that there will be quite a few original characters...which makes me very nervous, because I prefer to keep the cast to known and established characters...however, I thought this would be interesting to try out. I haven't decided on any romances (No AixRen- sorry) or anything like that, and I'm very open to suggestions, so we'll see where it goes. I guess this is my take on a sequel to VK that's not Memories? Hmmmm... Also, this story does not follow the canon.

Anyway, there have been quite a few people asking for Ai, so I decided to give this a shot. If there is a single protagonist to this story, it's probably her, although there are a lot of characters.

Don't be confused by the layout of this prologue. The lines are there to separate what is happening at the present moment from Ichijou's thoughts. The rest of the story won't be laid out like this (it will be normal, promise!).

On to the prologue!

Saudade (n.): A nostalgic longing to be near again to something or someone that is distant, or that has been loved and then lost; "the love that remains."

"I miss you already...Mom..."

One hundred sixty-six years. One hundred sixty-six roses. One hundred sixty-six tears as they rolled down Ren Kiryuu's cheeks. Beside him, his half-sister Ai Kuran stood somber and tight-cheeked, a beauty in black, her hair so dark that Takuma couldn't tell where it stopped and her dress began. Both stood before a simple marble plaque that marked their mother's name and the abrupt span of her life. One hundred sixty-six goodbyes... There was nothing to bury and nothing to keep. Yuki Kiryuu's body had disintegrated into the wind, nothing more than fine ash.

Then-

Yuki had been a headstrong girl, full of spirit and life, and abruptly she had been dragged into a blood-stained world of sin. It was no wonder that Kaname had eroded her smile, or that it had taken her seventy years to regain it...

Now-

Without Zero by her side, she had simply become ash. Drained by a thirst that would have lasted eternally...

For a vampire, what were one hundred and sixty-six years? He himself had only lived for a few more than that scant number, and he was still very young. The others criticized him for having become too human, but they were the ones who lived more human-like existences. Short lives, quick marriages, quicker children... As strange as it seemed, the children of his friends were now almost as old as he was. In some ways, perhaps they were older, more mature and ready to accept the changes the future brought. As for himself, he was left in a confusion, rooted in the past, finding the people around him slowly replaced one by one. Seiya and Hoshiko Aidou, tiny children he'd once held in his arms, had been closer companions than many of his former friends for over a century. That was the reality of a vampire such as himself... That was the reality of someone who stayed underground and regretted nearly every decision he'd ever made...

Takuma's gaze slowly swept around the funeral procession. Behind Ai and Ren stretched a long assembly of others, himself included. There, on the other side of the crowd, were Akatsuki and Ruka Kain with their three daughters, both former friends now solemn and standing far away from him. Come to think of it, he'd never once visited them since their days in the academy...

Then-

Kain and Ruka were old friends, cousins, companions, but the love between them wasn't equal. Ruka, like so many, like himself, loved Kaname. And Kain loved Ruka and she might have known that but neither of them breathed a word about it for a long, long time.

Now-

They're shamelessly in love. They flirt in public and the romance is still very much alive even after 148 yrs of marriage and three children. And Takuma hasn't spoken to them in years except at the occasional soiree he's forced to attend.

Watching them, seeing how far they'd come compared to him, clenched his fingers unconsciously into a fist. So he moved on, looking instead at Seiren Touga and her twin sons, hunter-vampires after Zero's legacy, their father many years buried after choosing to remain human until the end, much like Sayori...

Then-

Seiren never spoke. Never acknowledged any sort of friendship or camaraderie between herself and the others of Kaname's inner circle. She was always present, though, always watchful. He understood that she owed Kaname her life.

Now-

Seiren still rarely speaks. But the severity of her features have gentled over time. Takuma thinks she looks happy. Perhaps happier than she ever had been serving Kaname.

Green eyes flicked sideways now, to Hanabusa Aidou, standing between his children, and he grimaced in sympathy. For Yagari, the decision had been obvious. A man dedicated to slaying vampires did not simply become one. For Yori, on the other hand... He shook his head. Her death had left a deep scar on that family.

Then-

He had never been particularly close to Hanabusa in school. Maybe he'd seen too much of himself in him. Maybe he'd been jealous of anyone who would have competed for Kaname's attention.

Now-

Hanabusa is his closest friend. His smile dimmed after Yori's death, although his determination to find a cure for vampirism has not. He is the father of two wonderful children, who his family brushes off because they aren't nobility. They hadn't objected to his marriage to Yori, because if he was going to "fool around" as they'd called it, better when he was young than after he married a vampire of quality and truly settled down. And he is almost perpetually holed up in his lab these days, the way Takuma is holed up in the old Association headquarters' basement, and come to think of it the pair of them are pretty pathetic nowadays...

Hanabusa had a good heart, a pure heart. He'd been able to move on, like Ruka, to settle down and have a family and be happy, at least for a while. And Takuma...he didn't deserve those things. He'd rarely visited Hanabusa's children, Seiya or Hoshiko, as small children because he didn't want his tainted hands to come into contact with such pure innocence. Those were hands that had murdered his own grandfather, turned against the man he'd once loved, unwillingly helped a pureblood possess and hold hostage one of his closest friends, and more...

He'd done a lot of things he could never be forgiven for. So it made sense that Hanabusa had everything, at least for a little while, and Takuma had nothing. Nothing but a significant manga collection, a few antique tea sets, and his now-dusty katana. Hoshiko hadn't asked him to practice with her for a while now, which was for the best, really. It was best if he stayed away from everyone, from the world itself. The basement belonged to him, and that's where he'd stay. With the frozen corpse of the former best friend who'd betrayed him and broken his heart, who he'd then betrayed in return.

Forcing his thoughts away from his grim, stagnant reality, he turned his gaze away from the Aidous. To his other side were Senri and Rima Shiki, the slight swell of Rima's stomach revealing the small accident that the model had begrudgingly accepted. Shiki had confided that he hoped it was a girl; he didn't want any child of his to resemble him in any way. Rima told him the opposite. A boy, she said, in hopes to prove to her husband that there was nothing inherently wrong with him, nothing dark lurking in his genetic code, stamped there by Rido.

Then-

Rima and Shiki were his closest friends. they spent most of their limited energy on modeling and they were rarely separated. Being together for them had never been declared or qualified, they just had been for as long as anyone knew them.

Now-

They're still together, although they've finally made it official by getting married. They're acting, finally living Rima's dream. And the closeness they once shared with Takuma grows thinner with every year.

His eyes moved up now, taking in the dozens of guests. So many had come here to mourn Yuki's loss...even Maria Kurenai was in attendance, standing arm-in-arm with a vampire he didn't recognize. Out of all of them, all the friends he'd once attended classes with and sworn to defend, only he was left alone. Only he had never moved on from those bright days at the academy... Instead, he'd pledged himself to guard the last scrap of that time, to guard the frozen body of Kaname Kuran, whose heart powered the hunter's furnace... He desperately hoped to live to see the day when his old friend could be revived, even as he feared that such a day would never arrive.

He knew he was still holding on to something long gone, but even here he was reminded of it. He was reminded of old love and older friendship, of secrets that perhaps no longer mattered, of days both more complicated and simpler all at once. As the guests moved up one by one to say their farewells to Yuki, Takuma remembered...

Then-

Kaname was transfixed by Yuki's radiant smile, so Takuma started smiling at everything, even the things that, inside, he wasn't really smiling about, in hopes that Kaname might look at him the same way, even just once.

Now-

The falsely blinding smile is so practiced and comes with such ease to him that he himself can't remember how to tell the difference between it and a genuine one.

Then-

He thirsted. Lost in a hazy utopia between crisp sheets, he dreamed of Kaname's dark blood on a cool summer's night.

Now-

That thirst had intensified until it burned a hot hole down through the pit of his stomach and all his insides. A thirst he dared not name, changed over the course of a century, until he didn't recognize it anymore. He still dreamed of Kaname, but in the fond, blurry sense of old friendship...lost like so much else, dulled with time. He wondered when he'd stopped loving Kaname Kuran the way he had before, but he only knew that it was long ago. Very long ago...

Then-

When Kaname was frustrated or angry or dying of thirst, particularly when they were teenagers and fits of bloodlust came on unexpectedly, and when Yuki was a tiny wisp of a girl that the pureblood could easily break, sometimes Kaname would bite him. Deep and hard and needy, it was enough to make Takuma weak at the knees. He had to hold himself back from making a sound or moving a muscle; he wasn't good at taking things quietly. Under different circumstances he would have bit back even harder or pushed Kaname Kuran against the wall and pinned his pale hands against the wall-of course he never did.

Then-

Sara never drank from him. Never gave him any reason to be confused. She liked women exclusively; she'd made that clear from the beginning, although she let him drink from her to stimulate the master-servant bond between them. So when his twisted heart grew to love her, or at least to desire her, he couldn't understand himself. He questioned himself, questioned everything, because he thought what he felt for Kaname was real, but then he felt it again with Sara and suddenly he wasn't so sure.

Now-

Ai dredges up those slumbering feelings. He can smell Kaname in her blood, driving him mad. Her pureblood is like a lure to him and he begins to truly hate himself because, experiencing that pull for a third time, he knows it can't be real. It's his curse, something purebloods bring out in him that he can't escape from. There's someone else who makes him feel things, too, and she isn't a pureblood...but he shuts down those thoughts before they can come because they're most definitely a sin for which he could not be forgiven.

Then-

Takuma was a shameless skirt-chaser in his academy days, almost as infamous as Hanabusa Aidou, although he always maintained a flawless mask of charm and politeness that Hanabusa usually didn't bother with. The heart of the matter was that, for him and Hanabusa and maybe Ruka as well, they were hopelessly in love with someone who was entirely consumed by another, so they tried to fill that void with other attentions. At first Takuma had looked down on Hanabusa; after all, between the two of them, Takuma had known Kaname longer, had more reasons to love him. In the end, however, they perhaps understood each other better than anyone. Kaname was special. The pureblood had a dark aura that drew everyone around him into its orbit, and perhaps it was actually when he realized he wasn't the only one affected in such a manner by Kaname that he began to doubt his own feelings.

Now-

Those long misplaced feelings have dimmed down and he'll be alright. Maybe he can fight through this helpless addiction to being needed, to purebloods, but there's still Ai. Ai Kuran, no less, and she smells like her father and it's at times hard to breathe around.

Then-

Everyone called him a happy child even when he was lonely and sad inside. And then Kaname was flung into his life. Kaname who loved the same books and the same art and the same music, and Takuma finally became the happy person everyone thought he was...for a time.

Now-

The mask is stronger, tougher, but still a mask nonetheless, and deep down he's still the sad and lonely boy he was before. Perhaps he always will be. Even if there's someone else now who shares all his interests...but he won't admit that, not even in the privacy of his mind.

Then-

He watched Kaname sleeping in the dim and dusty afternoon light that filtered through the curtains despite their best efforts to shut it out and felt that worn out place in his chest ache again. The two of them were there, together, in the same space, and that should be enough. He told himself to make it enough, even while his desperate thirst warned him otherwise and the thick, viscous glove of envy clenched tighter around his heart.

Now-

He watches Kaname sleeping still, every day, but the feeling is gone. Dissolved and blown away, it's the only thing that's changed in over a century and half. He himself still hasn't moved from the same place he was before. He's still watching Kaname sleep, alone in the dark. He wonders if Kaname dreams. If he dreams of him, though he knows he doesn't.

He blinked, coming out of a fog of memories, and wondered: how would Kaname see the world when he awoke? The woman he'd loved had turned to ash, so broken by the loss of her husband that she'd faded away within a few short years of his tragic and unexpected death. The daughter he didn't know he had was grown, a pureblood queen with such a resemblance to her father that sometimes it was painful to look at her and remember. Even the existence of vampires was very slowly becoming public knowledge. New organizations had formed, some in support of his kind, others against. In another hundred years, who knew how much the world would have changed? In another thousand, he couldn't even begin to imagine.

Worse was the knowledge that he might live to see such a day... Increasingly so, lately, it filled him with a kind of grainy despair. To think that he could be doomed to live thousands of years, alone and purposeless... And meanwhile, his friends continued to move further from him. Maybe, one day, he'd simply turn to ash as well, lost to an unfulfilled and terrible thirst that he'd hidden deep within himself...

It was his turn now. He stepped up beside Ai and Ren, bowed his head, and murmured simply, "Farewell, Yuki-chan. You will never be forgotten."

Those words trigged something twisted and selfish that wrapped suddenly around his heart. Dead, and she would never be forgotten. Yet... Alive, and he was already becoming...forgotten.

If he was being honest with himself, maybe he was okay with that.

AN: Thoughts? This is just the prologue, but still, let me know what you think! Any feedback is much appreciated! -heart-