Human Nature
By Chibi Hime
His father was a Plumber and his mother was a housewife.
He never thought anything of it.
His father died mysteriously when he was six. He doesn't remember him much. It isn't in his nature to. His species doesn't form bonds like that. If a family member dies, they move on. They don't mean to be cruel, it is just their nature.
Likewise, his mother taught him to hunt so her offspring would be able to fend for itself should something happen to her. He was an apt pupil. She knew he would be. He favored her heavily, so heavily, that she saw no need to treat him as anything less than a purebreed. Little Michael was sneaky and stealthy. He smiled and said "please" and "thank you." No one was ever the wiser when strange bites would appear on their arms. It was harmless then, when he was small. They might itch for a few days, but they eventually dried up and faded away, no harm done.
It was no longer that simple.
He was a withered husk now...a grotesque monstrosity...he looked like a rotted corpse and he knew it.
When it first started, he limped home and licked his wounds.
He shut himself away in the guest house.
His mother rarely came to see him as she had her own feeding to do and her own life to lead. Mike didn't have to worry about her finding him, at least not for a few days. He had hoped he would be better by then.
He wasn't. Something was wrong. He could feel it.
He pulled all the curtains shut, unplugged all the lights, and snuffed every candle. The darkness made it harder to see what he knew was happening....what he felt happening. He had curled up in a corner and grabbed fist fulls of his hair...only to have it fall out in his hands and flutter down in a nightmarish cascade. There wasn't much left...a few small sprigs here and there on his scalp.
He never shaved his head. It would have probably looked better if he did...but he couldn't bring himself to do it. It was his hair...what if it didn't grow back? He was only seventeen. Thinking about it made his head hurt.
His species didn't care what it looks like, not really.
At least they were not supposed to.
They only used their appearances to lure in food. They would have mourned the loss of their ability to attract high quality sustenance...not the looks themselves. Mike wasn't like that. He found himself worrying about his future, how he can't stand looking in the mirror...or any reflective surface for that matter. He broke all the mirrors in the guest house out of despair. That's not something a purebreed would ever do.
He realized that as soon as he did it.
He was afraid, then, of those implications.
His mother had cast him out upon discovering him, of course. He was a threat to her in his corrupted state. He jeopardized her secret identity and her ability to feed. Her actions were not out of cruelty, but out of self preservation. She was still young by her species' standards. She could still have another, untainted child. She probably would.
He didn't hate her for that. He knew she only did what was in her nature...but part of him hated her for blindly following her nature, for not being human...being compassionate....but she wasn't human, so why had he expected it?
Because part of him was human.
Only now did he see that and only now did he curse it.
If he didn't have his father's humanity, he wouldn't understand the horrible nature of what had happened to him. He wouldn't think about the long, lonely road ahead of him. No one would have him now. He was hideous. Hideous people were ostracized. He was terribly vain, another human trait. Mike was ashamed of the cadaverous pallor he had...the way he felt...all of it. His skin now burned easily in sunlight and he had to relegate his activities to the darkness. The irony was not lost on him. It made him want to curl into a ball and die. For weeks, he had hidden in his father's old Plumber's base.
His mother felt no shame, no embarrassment. He did. It was a crippling set of emotions. Emotions he had never been taught to understand or comprehend because his remaining parent didn't have them.
There's something else about human nature he discovered.
Humans were vengeful to the point of sadism, given the right circumstances.
It gave a ruined, worthless being something to do...something to look forward to. He lost himself in the consuming darkness of it..only to have his hunger return with a vengeance. Mike needed more than ever just to walk. His appearance no longer changed when he did. He was stuck a fetid living dead man. No one wanted to get close to something that looks like death itself, but infinitely worse as it was alive.
His life was gone...any hopes he had for the future were all dashed.
When he was six, the last thing he had said to his father was that he wanted to be like him.
He never said he wanted to be a vampiric homunculus.
Fate had a way of turning dreams into nightmares.
But that was just in its nature.