The thing about vampires, is that you never know if someone's a vampire until they have their teeth in your neck and your casual hookup from the club becomes a bi-weekly habit of supplying them with fresh blood. But once you find out that the boys you've played volleyball with for four years in high school are all vampires at an ill-advised team sleepover the last month before graduation, well, at that point it's hard to change friend groups, especially when you all move on to the same university.

The other thing about vampires, and it's really such a small thing, is that they are extremely territorial about their human friends. Which is how Sugawara Koushi found himself living in a house with five vampires and two other humans at university.

His mother worries, a lot.

"You need some."

"No, Suga I'm fine I promise."

"Hon, you're very pale and you look like you have two black eyes, you need blood." Koushi reaches over and runs his fingers under Daichi's eyes, tracing the dark circles present from too much exertion and not enough blood.

"Didn't you feed Asahi like, yesterday?"

"Barely, you know he's afraid of taking too much at once and besides, he and Noya have that oddly codependent thing going on that only works for them." Koushi shifts on the couch where they're sitting and turns to face Daichi directly.

"Oddly codependent…Suga you realize that's every vampire and human familiar relationship ever right?"

"Okay but Noya is also a vampire so explain that."

"It's different for them okay?"

"And don't even get me started on Kageyama and Hinata."

Daichi leans towards him, staring at him, at his neck, intently. "Are you going to let me feed or…?"

"Oh right, sorry hon." Koushi pulls away the collar of his shirt, and only shudders slightly at the press of lips against his neck. He takes a breath. Even after all these years of being the main familiar for this group of vampires, he has never quite gotten over the anticipation of the bite. "Anytime now, it's not like we have a class in an hour or anything." He yelps slightly as fangs sink into his neck. The pain is only temporary though, before the warmth floods through his body.

He distantly feels as his body is pulled snugly onto a lap. He feels a strong arm wrap around his back and another thread into the strands of his hair. Secretly, this is his favorite part, the dreamlike awareness that comes from being bitten by a vampire. The bite does different things to different people, but to Koushi it makes him feel disconnected from his body, floating in a warm place of semi-awareness. He's only halfway aware of how he moves to straddle Daichi's lap to make himself more comfortable, his arms naturally draping around his neck. These are all familiar things, done more out of habit than anything else. They've done this hundreds of times over the years, after all.

"Oi! You gonna feed all day or go to class with the rest of us?"

Koushi gains a level of awareness when Daichi growls against his neck at Kageyama's abrupt interruption, moving slightly and sighing sleepily as he leans into Daichi's chest. "How much time do we have before class starts?" He murmurs softly into Daichi's shoulder.

"Twenty minutes, and we have to walk there." Koushi can't see Kageyama's face, but by the tone of voice he knew he was wearing that expression that makes small children cry on the spot.

"Okay, okay." Koushi says, tugging softly on Daichi's hair at the back of his neck. "Come on Dai, we've got class. You can have more later."

He feels it when Daichi's fangs retract back into his gums, incisors returning to their normal length. Daichi takes a second, kissing the marks he left in order to seal them quickly. Koushi has never asked why exactly they do that. He once heard Kageyama impatiently explaining to Hinata that "I'm not kissing you because I like you I'm doing it because my saliva heals the wounds faster and it also gets rid of excess blood so just sit still and stop fighting it."

He moves slowly, wary of standing up too quickly and passing out—it only happened twice, okay—as he slides off of Daichi's lap and onto the couch, pausing for a moment before standing up. The rush of blood to the head that he gets is not the worst he's ever had after a feeding, so he continues to move towards his room down the hall. In the ground rules he established when he moved in with this particular coven, one of the first was that under no circumstances was any one of them allowed into his room unless he gave them permission to do so. His room is his sanctuary, the place where he can relax and be human without fear of being attacked by a starved-for-blood vampire, not that he'd ever let any of his vampires get that hungry, but you could never account for the vampires outside of this house.

He quickly grabs his books, clothes, and shoes, shoves them into his favorite satchel, before putting on a scarf and a soft sweater. Moving in with a coven of vampires to be their familiar has greatly expanded his collection of scarves and neck-covering sweaters. The bite marks never lasted more than several hours, but hiding them was much easier in the cooler months as compared to the summers.

As he walks back into the main room Daichi is coming up from his basement room, towing a very sleepy Tsukishima behind him. The dark circles are all but vanished from under his eyes and color has flooded back into his cheeks. Daichi pulls a sports drink out of his bag and hands it wordlessly to Koushi, the silent command to "drink it all don't you dare fight me on this" clearly conveyed through his expression. He looks up as he distinctly hears two sets of footsteps hurriedly rushing about, following them as they thunder down the stairs to manifest as Hinata and Noya, the former only stopping when he collided into Kageyama's still frowning form.

Daichi nods towards the door, and they all follow him out silently with the kind of coordination that only comes after playing volleyball together for years. The walk to campus is uneventful, if you count Hinata talking incessantly to Kageyama and Tsukishima glaring at the pair of them normal, which it was. By the time they get to campus Koushi has a calming hand on Tsukishima to keep him from imploding and Daichi is busy being a physical buffer between Hinata and Kageyama. They all separate for their classes; Daichi, Hinata and Kageyama walking together to the gym complex for team practice, Tsukishima in the direction of the engineering buildings, and himself to the arts building.

He walks into the main studio and moves immediately towards his usual corner where he sits down and begins to stretch. Akaashi is already moving through his first stretches, looking cozy in his black leggings, oversized cream sweater, and matching cream legwarmers. He acknowledges Koushi with a sideways glance and a slow blink.

Akaashi doesn't do mornings very well, and considering the eyeliner still smudged around his eyes, Koushi imagines he must have had a late night. He waits a minute before breaking the silence between them, letting his muscles warm up and relax into the stretches. When he can feel the blood thrumming pleasantly through his muscles he turns to Akaashi. "So," he begins, "late night?"

The glare he gets is nothing short of deadly, and would probably intimidate anyone else in the room, but this isn't the first time he's been on the receiving end of a glare. When he finally speaks it's through slightly elongated canines at the annoyance that is Koushi specifically, but mornings generally. "Could you keep your voice low you know I don't function before ten in the morning as a rule." He hisses, eyes narrowing as he slinks from a butterfly stretch to a straddle, laying his chest down on the floor with his head propped up on his folded arms. Koushi slides along the floor and bends until he's mirroring Akaashi.

"So I know you don't function etcetera in the morning, but can I ask you a question?"

Akaashi's dark eyes flick up from the spot he'd been staring at blankly on the ground, into Koushi's eyes, just inches away. He nods minutely, dark eyes steady and unwavering.

"How often do you need to feed?" The words tumble out of his mouth almost before he can form them, and across from him Akaashi's eyes widen just a fraction in shock or surprise, Koushi isn't sure.

His eyes flick up for a second, thinking, before returning to meet Koushi's gaze. "About once a week or so. Koutarou, like many other athletes at this school, has the energy and constitution of a small herd of zebras, so if I ever needed more, he would gladly be willing and able to give it." His eyes narrow. "Why, you aren't being bled dry are you?"

Koushi shakes his head absently, doing mental math and calculations correctly, if not a little slowly. He tries to ignore the way that Akaashi is studying him, focusing on the logistics of the life he's currently living. He's pulled out of his thoughts as Akaashi lifts a hand and runs it lightly through the strands of Koushi's hair.

"Kou-chan," the familiarity of his name paired with that deceptively calm tone that only preludes the kind of rage that is felt rather than heard sends a shiver racing across the length of his spine. "how long has your hair been slowly turning grey?" Koushi glances to the side, where the floor to ceiling mirrors of the studio line the wall and he can see how Akaashi is fingering one of the many strands of grey in his otherwise black hair.

"I got one or two when I first moved into the house with Daichi, and the rest have appeared over this last summer."

Akaashi's eyes narrow slightly before asking, "how many are you feeding, Kou?" His voice has gone impossibly quieter.

Koushi swallows apprehensively. "Uh, on average? Three of them a week." Koushi swears he can feel the chill that rolls off of Akaashi at the answer. Akaashi sits up abruptly and starts to unwind the scarf from around his neck. He sits up, trying to distance himself from Akaashi's hands, but that only results in Akaashi pulling him forward by his scarf. Koushi slides forward until he is nearly chest to chest with Akaashi, their legs still spread in a straddle stretch, and he feels Akaashi's hand brush against the fresh bite marks that Daichi had left barely half an hour ago before trailing over to the still barely-there marks from Asahi last night.

"You can't dance with these, were you planning on wearing a scarf all class?" His hands stay resting on the sides of his neck, thumbs brushing along his jaw soothingly.

"I mean, I'd have made it work." He tries not to giggle too loudly at the look of incredulity that Akaashi give him.

"Let me take care of these." Akaashi asks in the way that's really more a declaration of intent, but Koushi is still feeling a little lightheaded and tingly from feeding Daichi, so he doesn't really have it in him to protest anyway. He bends his legs, relieving them from the stretch, draping them over Akaashi's thighs and scooting even closer, nodding his consent to Akaashi.

He feels it when Akaashi places an openmouthed kiss to his neck, tongue moving over the small wounds gently and slowly. Koushi notices, through the mirrors, that most of the class is staring at the display that is Akaashi Keiji like, always. And Koushi knows, he knows, that Akaashi is aware of the eyes, because he wraps the arm not cradling Koushi's neck and face around the small of his back and presses him against his chest so languidly it's filthy in the implications. Koushi tries to be embarrassed, he really does, but this isn't the worst position he's been seen in in public and that thought is enough to make him blush slightly. He's distracted from his embarrassment by Akaashi's mouth, which is making steady progress up the side of his neck, having long moved past the now-healed bite marks from Daichi, to nip playfully at his ear. His breathing hitches in his throat, and he barely manages to get a "Keiji, the other marks…" out before Akaashi's mouth is sliding over his own, swallowing up any other words he may have said in the slow, burning pace of the kiss. Koushi isn't sure what horrifies him more; the fact that his only friends are vampires who literally don't care about what anyone else thinks and therefore find it perfectly acceptable to do whatever the hell they want, or the fact that he has reached a point where making out before dance class with all of your classmates in the room is nothing new.

Akaashi pulls away from the kiss just slightly, tilts his head, and latches on to Koushi's neck, working on the other bite marks from last night. He licks up the length of his neck slowly, causing shivers to run down Koushi's spine and that weird tingly feeling to settle in the pit of his stomach. Akaashi presses a series of hot, open-mouthed kisses to the side of his neck, elongating his canines just enough to scrape them gently along his skin, and Koushi wonders, not for the first time, why that feeling causes warmth to pool in his stomach and his hands to clench into the soft material of the sweater covering Akaashi's back. He moves his legs, still draped over Akaashi's thighs, and wraps them tightly around his waist, squeezing slightly. The gentle moan that slips out of Akaashi's mouth and against his skin sets him on fire. "Kou-chan," Akaashi murmurs, lips moving along the line of his jaw, "you should come dancing with me and Bo tonight."

Koushi's laugh comes out breathy, more a gasp than anything else, as Akaashi places soft kisses at the corners of his mouth. "Keiji we do so much dancing already." He whispers, in between the soft kisses Akaashi keeps pressing against his lips.

"Mmmm...yes but this kind of dancing is less academic and more..." He interrupts himself to deepen the kiss into something that is indecent in private, so Koushi doesn't want to even think about how it looks in the quiet corner of their studio. Lewd, probably. He follows the lead that Akaashi sets with the kiss, responding with quiet enthusiasm and threading his fingers into the soft midnight strands of his hair. "More fun." Akaashi finishes, breaking the kiss. It takes him longer than he is willing to admit to try and recall what they had been talking about.

The studio doors snap open as their instructor walks into the room, nearly fifteen minutes after class was supposed to start. Koushi jumps, quickly untangling himself from Akaashi's grasp. He slides over to his bag, preferring to slink across the floor than trust his legs just yet, and pulls his dance shoes out of his bag, slipping them onto his bare feet. He slips off his scarf, barely even tied around his neck anymore, and is pleased to see that the marks are completely gone. He glances back at Akaashi, who is now up and stretching the long lines of his body at the barre along the wall. His catches Akaashi's eye and gets up to stand next to him as Shimizu begins class. "Let's go dancing." He says quietly, before turning to learn the warm-up routine.

He doesn't miss the look in those dark, lined eyes as they watch him through the mirror.