A/N : The name of the railway and the station are real, but everything else - the name of the inn, the comforts provided,the geography of the area, are entirely fictitious. Enjoy!
The Golden Cup Inn was a large and comfortably furnished establishment, strategically situated along the Chita station of the Trans-Siberian Railway. It was famous for its roaring fires, strong liquor, hearty meals and clean, pan heated beds – such old style comforts were necessities now, during frigid winter in heart of Siberia.
Hanabusa Aido paid little attention to the snow which would have had lesser men (or vampires) trapped to their knees. The wind did not rip all feeling from his extremities, for Hanabusa Aido was quite – in fact, perfectly – adapted to winter. Ice was in his bloodline.
There was another person in close proximity who took such unforgivable winter as lightly as Hanabusa Aido did, and he had entered the Golden Cup Inn a short time ago. His name was Kaname Kuran, and Hanabusa Aido had been tracking him for the better part of an hour.
Following a pureblood in secret was a foolish thing to do, even if Hanabusa had made absolutely sure to shield his bloodscent. He'd felt slightly mortified for trailing Kaname Kuran, as though he was tracking a criminal suspect, but the surprise of catching Kaname's silhouette during one of Hanabusa's afternoon romps through the forest had overwhelmed what little caution Hanabusa had. It hadn't been all that hard for Hanabusa to take the decidedly risky action of going after Kaname in secret.
Hanabusa ran up to the doorstep of the Golden Cup and tried to peer through the thick glass. It was too fogged up on the other side for him to see anything. Checking once more that his bloodscent was masked, Hanabusa pushed the door open.
The Golden Cup greeted him with a billow of warmth and food-smells. There was spiced bread baking, a rich lamb stew simmering, whiskey and vodka flowing. Hanabusa hastened to the nearest flight of stairs, climbing up into a shadowed alcove. From there, he discreetly observed the inhabitants of the common room.
Kaname Kuran had taken a seat towards the back, distanced from the fire and removed from the others. He was looking at a group of teenagers seated at the next table, and Hanabusa realized that they were vampires of minor nobility. He sniffed disapprovingly at their loud and boisterous revelry, just feet away from Kaname. Had they but sensed the presence of a vampire noble, they would have never behaved with such abandonment.
The young noble vampires drank, shouted, and slammed cards down in some Russian (or so Hanabusa assumed) game. The forfeit seemed to involve drinking.
For a part of an hour, the noble vampires' game continued in its coarse manner. Kaname tilted his chair back on two legs, looking contemplative. The vampires gave him no attention - until he unmasked his bloodscent. The nobles quietened almost as one and looked at the doorway, expecting a pureblood to enter, but there was none. When they located the source of Kaname's bloodscent, their eyes darted to Kaname, then dropped hurriedly, completely unsure of how they should act now.
One vampire, a boy with brown hair and brown eyes, looked straight at Kaname. From there he was unable to look away and he stared, caught like a deer in headlights, into Kaname's red eyes. The cards he held fell from nerveless fingers. Beside him, all his friends seemed silently, statue-still, riveted on their cards.
Very elegantly, Kaname let his chair fall back onto four legs – the thump loud in the sudden silence – then he tilted his head in a gesture for the other vampire to follow. The vampire swallowed, blinked, and nodded blankly at his friends. Pale with anxiety, he followed Kaname towards the exit with wide eyes and a stiff gait.
After the door swung close behind the vampire, Hanabusa waited ten minutes. Then he went back out.
The lesser vampire was doing all he could to keep up with Kaname. He wore two layers of clothing, no gloves, and the skin on his face and hands were quickly reddening in the cold. Hanabusa ran at an angle to both of them, keeping both in sight but making sure not to let them look his way, such that they were spread in a triangle.
They walked for close to an hour. Farther into the forest, the bare trees were solemn skeletons half buried in white. The snow drifts got higher, and the vampire stumbled into one almost waist high, struggling to get out while Kaname strode further and further away. If the vampire wanted a rest, wanted a slower pace, he never asked. Of course he didn't. He just continued to gasp and plough through the snow as fast as he could.
They came to an abandoned junkyard ringed in by a steel fence. Decaying cars were snowed in to the tops of their wheels, and their discarded black shells sloped gently over the snow. Even under snow, the smell of rust and leaked petrol was detectable. Hanabusa ducked behind an old shed, then thought the better of it and jumped up onto the roof. He ran so lightly that he barely left imprints in the snow.
Kaname leaned against a car, swept snow off its windows, and waited for the vampire to appear. In a few minutes the vampire stumbled up, his hands tucked in his armpits and his brown hair speckled with white.
The vampire cast a forlorn glance at his cool, uncaring surroundings. It was not an unusual sight, to see abandoned structures like these looking eerie and timeless in the snow. Whether it was from instinct or fatigue, the vampire fell to his knees in front of Kaname. Hanabusa saw the vampire from the right, and it occurred to him that Kaname only had to look to the left to see him. Hanabusa kept as low as he could behind the summit of the roof, hoping that his light hair and skin was an advantage in camouflage. So silent was the forest that he could hear the vampire's heavy panting.
"Do you know what to do?"
After a moment's hesitation, the other vampire shook his head. The back of Kaname's hand cracked him across his cheek. Aido jerked at the sharpness of that crack. Kaname asked again, calmly, gently,
"Do you know what to do?"
The vampire flinched. Trembling, he raised a numbed hand and touched his ear. It came away red and sticky. His bloodscent spiked violently, his fear transparent. The vampire like he was in a slow motion film. Just shy of Kaname's belt, his fingers curled in on themselves. He forced them to open and undo the buckle. When Kaname was waiting, the vampire's eyes flicked up, softly, for the briefest of pleas. He must have seen no mercy, because he leaned forward and took Kaname into his mouth.
Kaname gave him about two seconds before he wrenched him up by his hair. There was a muffled protest as the vampire jerked away instinctively. His fingers scratched against the car's side in distress and his body convulsed this way and that. Kaname held him tightly, gagging him. Hanabusa could see and hear the boy's escalating panic as he struggled for breath.
After some time Kaname yanked the vampire off and came on his face. There was a dazed, frozen look on the vampire's face as he blinked the liquid clear of his eyes. An arm came up to dash his face and hair clean.
For a few minutes, their exhalations steamed in the sub-zero temperatures. Kaname bent down and the boy whimpered, only to be collared, dragged up and thrown against the side of the car. The vampire stumbled, stomach first, into the blood-freezing metal.
The vampire's pants were pulled down, baring the back of his legs to Siberia's merciless winds. The boy's eyes went impossibly white and wide, and Hanabusa saw the car's metal body crumpling slightly under the vampire's fingers as his entire framed tensed.
Kaname took his time, letting the boy's fear be sharpened by mounting anticipation. Hanabusa saw Kaname bend to put his mouth against the boy's ear, and the pureblood hissed, "open."
The boy shook his head, biting his lip, biting back a cry, his fingers curling tighter and tighter, pushing his body away from the car, backward into Kaname.
Until Kaname sheathed himself in the vampire, too hard and too fast. Then the vampire was trapped in front and behind, not that Kaname let him choose much. Kaname slapped his buttocks hard, forcing the vampire flat against the car, making him take the worst of the pain and the cold.
The vampire could not feel his feet as his pants went taut at the knees. The frenzy of movement made tiny drops of red splash, onto the car's door, onto white snow. Gradually, the red circles grew in size and number. There was occasionally a hoarse coughing kind of gasp, but otherwise the vampire seemed to have lost his voice.
Kaname came away dripping, coated in the vampire's blood. The vampire's head dropped forward, his chin hit the roof of the car. He brought his hands, now red and stiff with cold, near his mouth and breathed on them, rubbing them together. The sounds quickly became low, panicked groans, and it took Hanabusa a few seconds to realize that the vampire's bare skin had frozen to the car. He tried to scream when Kaname pulled him away by one shoulder, and hunched over almost immediately. Parts of his abdomen, groin and the front of his thighs were raw colour of flesh.
"Hanabusa Aido," Kaname called. Up on the roof with his body inches deep in snow, Hanabusa's blood turned to water in his veins.
There was nothing for it. Hanabusa slid off the roof with much less grace than usual and went towards the pair. Stars above, but the snow was playing tricks on him…the distance seemed much shorter than he'd thought.
The vampire's head had turned at the footsteps and though he did not recognize the name, he knew that Aido was his superior.
"It is not enough to hide from a pureblood by masking your bloodscent," Kaname said gently to Aido.
Aido swallowed, his gaze low. "I…I'm sorry."
Kaname gave a low, quiet snort. He illustrated his following words by kicking the vampire's head into the ground.
"Fuck this one."
For a long moment Hanabusa's world narrowed to those three words, and it took him awhile to grasp their meaning. When he did he looked up at Kaname in horror, an automatic protest forming.
"…I…b-but…I – p…please…"
The pureblood tilted his head questioningly, a cool, half lidded red eyes daring Aido to object.
"Kuran-s-sama...please, I don't...don't want..."
Those impervious dark eyes, icy and ruthless.
Aido trailed off, swallowed, swallowed, swallowed again, all the while thinking, be glad it isn't the other way around.
He found himself on his knees, thigh deep in the snow, behind the vampire. What parts of his skin Hanabusa could see were red and chapped, and his entrance was slick and bleeding. The vampire was up to his shoulders in snow, breathing noisily into the ground.
No. Oh…no…no…
It was his first time. Hanabusa brought himself out and slid in, very slowly. It was hot and wet, and very frightening, to feel another thing sliding over him like…it was like pushing into a flesh wound. Hanabusa pulled out before he had entered halfway and paused, his heart hammering. It was so, so alien. The vampire, struggling to breathe, convulsed around him. Kaname was watching. Hanabusa positioned himself again, but stopped, sickened, disgusted.
Kaname took his foot off the vampire and planted it on Hanabusa's back. He shoved hard, and Hanabusa fell forward; the vampire flung his head up, but it was Hanabusa, suddenly plunged into a thick, sticky grasp, who shouted in shock.
While Hanabusa heaved, traumatized and nauseated, Kaname, always nonchalantly brutal, nearly clipped Aido's cheek with his shoe as his foot slammed down onto the back of the vampire's neck. The vampire's face hit the ground, again, the muffled crack horrendously near Aido. A red stain seeped over the snow. When the vampire's body spasmed around Aido, it was the latter who cried out.
If the vampire was shuddering or whimpering, Hanabusa couldn't hear. He moved faster and faster, in a frenzy, and he came too quickly. He came because he was afraid of Kaname, not because the vampire's body pleased him. A part of him did not know how to explain that he came because Kaname was there, observing him, making him submit, making him scared and obedient and desperate to please, ready to punish him if he did not. He released the vampire and pulled out, stumbling back and leaning against the car's wheel, panting shallowly. Now he was covered in the vampire's blood too.
Kaname took his foot away and the vampire pushed himself up, gasping for breath. He was bleeding from his mouth and nose and one ear. What they could see of his lips were slightly blue.
It took a long time for Hanabusa to see clearly again, and longer to think straight. The first thing he was aware of was how hot his face was, how tight and dry his throat was – and how the bloodied vampire quaked, terrified, in the bloodied snow. He tidied himself up and did his pants under Kaname's amused appraisal, all the while staring straight ahead into the wintry whiteness. Kaname's eyes travelled to the vampire.
Slowly, the vampire lowered his eyes and put his head down, back into the snow.
"Question, Aido?" Kaname asked. Hanabusa was reminded of the time Kaname had asked the same thing while in his study, because he knew that Aido knew who Shizuka Hiou's real murderer was.
"N-no. Kuran-s-sama."
Same answer. Good Aido.
Kaname smiled a lop-sided smile and kicked the kneeling vampire almost gently. His body jerked but remained silent as Kaname passed him, his steps long and graceful, until the pureblood had receded into the forest, leaving Aido behind with the vampire.
"Get up," Aido tried to tell him. "He's gone, you can get up now. I want you to tell me everything - everything - what it was like for you. I should be sorry for you - I should pity you - but I'm not. I'm jealous. Jealous!"
END
I have been away for years, years. I have been trying to string my Kaname/Aido stories into a coherent series, but there, I've given up, and so here are the one shots! Review, please, and tell me what you think!
Yours, Cockerel.
