Disclaimer – Vampire Knight belongs to Matsuri Hino.
Prologue - 000 – Bleaching Stains
Once upon a time, there was a family of three.
A father, a mother and a child lived happily together and the three of them were merry as long as they had food on the table, a roof over their heads and one another.
-THC-
A child's fingers traced those words on the first page of the tiny notebook she called her diary. Across the room, a meal tray lay untouched. She sat quietly on her bed, waiting and dreading.
As usual, exactly fifteen minutes after the allotted time for breakfast, the entrance to her prison slid open. Two adults slipped silently into the room, one holding a narrow feeding tube and the other, a packet containing a thick whitish-brown liquid. A third man stormed into the room, his steps extraordinarily loud in the tiny spartan space. He held restrains in his hands which he immediately secured to the steel head-frame of the bed before roughly reaching for her arm.
When the girl dodged, his face twisted into a nasty sneer and started shouting, "Listen you brat, we Hunters have other things to do. Like protecting your scrawny ass from those bloodsucking fuckers…"
The man blathered on and on, spittle and bigotry flying from his lips. The girl impassively wiped her face with her sleeve and retreated further away to the other side of the bed. The buffoon paused in his ugly harangue, then glared harder and snapped the cuffs to her wrists. At the sight of the feeding tube approaching her face, she tried to cheer herself up with what some of the books she had read called 'positive thoughts'.
The clock above the door signalled '8:03' in a harsh red.
If I can make it last for twenty-seven more minutes, they might postpone the morning experiments.
Jerking away from the man trying to cuff her other wrist, she swung her leg up and kicked him viciously right on his Adam's apple. The move was so sudden; it took all three adults by surprise. When he choked and stumbled back, she punted him in his face. There was a telling crack as the Hunter's curses became garbled words.
At least they are pushing the tube through my mouth instead of my nose. Feeding tubes are disgusting!
A second Hunter, this time a female, grabbed the girl by the scruff from behind and pinned her onto the mattress. The girl bucked wildly at once, falling off the bed with the Huntress.
I wonder how long will it take for them to force open my mouth this time?
The girl landed on the Huntress, knocking the breath out of the woman. The third Hunter took his chance and jumped onto her. The girl made sure to elbow the woman under her brutally in the gut before attempting to wrestle with the man.
Force feeding is uncomfortable but I can handle it.
A punch from him made her vision go awry. Snarling savagely, the girl ruthlessly kneed him in his groin in return.
After all, it is nothing compared to the experiments.
The girl glanced at the clock again.
Nineteen more minutes.
-THC-
Jun Shimizu, transferee from Japan, was bewildered over all the secrecy in the American branch. They were more paranoid than the Japanese Association and that was saying something, considering that the main Ancestor Vat was hidden there.
So he investigated, charmed his superiors, sneaked around classified areas, racked up an impressive kill count, had a few close calls, awed his juniors, played up his hatred for Vampires, flirted with cute researchers- you know, the works.
Twenty-six months later, his hard work paid off and Jun got a promotion which entitled him to certain files with the stamp 'Very Sensitive Information'.
Turns out, the American Hunters Association was experimenting on children. At least one fifth of them were privy to the secret and all of the higher-ups knew the gist of it.
Jun understood that the Hunters were getting more desperate. With every generation, the Hunters have grown weaker as their blood gets more diluted. Hunters could have relationships with one another of course, but many of them prefer to separate their personal and work lives as much as possible.
Weaker children of Vampire Hunters usually grow up to be scientists and researchers for the Associations. Frustrated over their own helplessness, they must have had eventually decided to that ethics and morals were not in the plans for saving the world.
But one cannot just throw away guilt that easily, so they tried to make the children comfortable and healthy. Scientists insisted that they were helping the children- "They were lost or homeless before. We're giving them a shelter, education, healthcare and food!"
Healthcare. Jun snorted in derision. Like healthcare includes traumatic experiments that draw gut-wrenching screams from their so-called patients.
He did nothing for a hundred and twenty-three days; to placate suspicion and wariness. Four months after Jun learned of the experiments, he picked up a phone to call home. Jun waited for the call to connect and then spoke in Japanese, "This is Shimizu calling from the US. I am requesting bleach for a Grade S stain."
5th March 2016
Tada!
A new story! The Wanderer is so hard to write that I procrastinated by writing plots for other stories.