Prologue
It is March of 1921.
The events of the first "Vampire Knight" had just concluded.
The events of "Guilty" never existed.
The events of "The Great Gatsby" had not yet taken place.
After drinking the blood of Kuran, Zero Kiryu was disgusted with the whole vampire world and all the ordeals that he'd encountered with it. He was sick of everything: the academy, the headmaster, the aristocrats, even his sweet stepsister Yuuki. He wanted to run away from it all; to run away and never return to this world that to so many was in fact, fictional. He only wished it were so, and it was his goal to run so far away from it that he would never have to live in this sickening reality again.
Having drunk the blood of Kuran, he was no longer one classified as "human turned vampire", one who would perish in the most awful ways and divulge to the dreaded Level E status. No, now he was a common vampire, without the worry he'd carried for four years of divulging to a senseless beast otherwise known as the Level E. Biting a pureblood is a powerful thing. No one truly can ever know the power of that sacred fluid within a pureblood's veins. For him, the combined powers of the blood of Kuran and Hio, both purebloods, took away the human part of him so that he could live as a vampire.
This may have seemed alright to the average onlooker: no more worrying about the future, and a much longer lifespan than a human. But the average onlooker was never able to understand what was going through the mind of the Kiryu boy as he decided to just run away from it all.
Kiryu, the one who hated vampires.
Kiryu, the one who despised what he was so much that he wished to end his life for many years.
Kiryu, the one who wished to run away and escape completely from the world of vampires and their heinous affairs.
Kiryu, who was unable to see what would become of his future, and now has many centuries left to make use of his life.
Kiryu, who is all of these aforementioned things, is still, and will always be, a vampire. A vampire with all of its limitations, including hunger. How could someone like this, a beast in human form who must leech the blood of other living beings to survive, just run away and successfully evade the world that he'd so recently become entangled with? To pretend that it doesn't exist, that a bloodsucking creature like himself never once walked the earth? That is a question that Zero Kiryu, being ill-equipped to give an answer to, decided to leave alone and not answer at all as he ignored all the needs or wants of any typical vampire and embark on a tremendous voyage that he hoped would change him forever and make him forget about the past.
He had figured that he'd deal with his inner demon when it came time to cross that bridge. That was the type of person he was. Ignore this side of you, it's all you can do. Live now, resolve actions later, was the thing he told himself before diminishing the importance of the vampire academy and abandoning all his duties there, in a hope of completely re-creating himself.