Dear Internet: Sorry this took so long. Yeah, that's about it. I love everyone who reviews and everyone who story alerts and favorites but, let's be honest, the reviewers get special treatment. Now to get on with it.

If that would change his actions. Soma buried his broadsword in the creature and again it was a monster, it wasn't her, and he could kill it. The blood he tasted when the monster finally fell might have once been human, and that frightened him more than anything else.

Soma searched the corpse for spoils. "Genya?"

"Hmm?" He couldn't bring himself to approach the creature, instead, pocketed a candle that had burned in his illusion, strangely sat, still warm, on the table.

"What did you see?"

"Someone I once called love."

Soma laughed. "I can't see you loving someone."

"I have loved before, with everything that I was, I have loved." He didn't turn to look at the boy, didn't want him to see the tears that pooled in the corners of his eyes. Soma didn't need to know about them. He didn't need to know about Maria, encounters bringing the pain fresh to him as though it had not been hundreds of years since. He fooled himself when he thought it might grow dull with time, he hadn't loved since.

"Right," Soma mumbled, put his arm around his shoulder in a gesture of comfort. He stiffened, still painfully unused to touch. Soma let his hand trail down his arm. "You okay to do this?"

"Yes, yes of course." He pulled away. He didn't want to, no, he had to. Brushed himself off, ran both gloved hands through his hair, unused to the feeling of the long, pale mess he had hidden for so long. He cursed himself for still being shaken by the creature that had taken her form. Took his anger out on an orb of ectoplasm that dared to get in his way as they left the library. Ran, only to collapse in a saferoom and hold himself.

Soma sat across from him, reached out to push a hand through his hair. "Genya, something's wrong."

"This place brings forth memories. Seeing," he wouldn't tell him, "seeing what I saw brought back memories. "My love once walked this castle as we do now."

"She was a monster?"

"No, painfully human. She came here to save someone."

"Oh." Soma pushed himself to sit beside him, try and find his face with piercing pale eyes. "Is that why you're on our side now?"

He wanted to laugh, "I was on your side, as you word it, long before that."

Soma put one arm around him, "I'm sorry for whatever it was you saw."

"So am I."

"Y'wanna' know what I saw?" Soma didn't move his arm.

"I believe I may." For once, he watched the boy's face, his pale eyes.

"I saw you, and you wanted me. Not like in an 'oh yes, take me, take me' sort of way, but in a quiet way, the way, I guess, you'd want someone."

"Want?"

"Like sex, Jesus, how long have you been wherever you are?"

"I am sorry I do not upkeep with the language of the times, Soma."

"Yeah, whatever, it's kinda' hot anyways." Soma mumbled, he probably thought he went unheard. What he didn't know was the preternatural hearing of the damned.

"You… Want me?" He looked up, to find Soma trying not to look at him. He moved a gloved hand through Soma's hair. "No one has wanted this in more than a hundred years."

"Obviously you haven't seen the way Yoko looks at you." Soma snorted.

"A girlish crush, nothing more." He let his hand fall, pushed to his feet. "We waste time here, time which may be of the essence." Swept out of the room and back into the fray. Creatures of horror he didn't rightly acknowledge fell to his blade, he lept from outcropping to staircase, through a broken elevator shaft, holding out his hand to help Soma as he tried to follow someone who knew this castle and it's mutations too well. He hoped the throne room would lend something to the castle's reappearance. And he hoped against hope that something was not the man who had raised him. The creature he couldn't bring himself to hate, even after all the man had done. Because, really, he had never turned a harsh hand against his own son, once called him 'the only thing he had left'.

He watched Soma search the room outside the throne chamber, hit walls in a futile attempt to find something useful.

"There's nothing here."

"Trying never hurt. What's on the other side of the door?"

"For that I do not have a good answer."

"Then open it."

He had no good reason not too. He had a million reasons, each better than the last, to never touch that door, leave the castle and never return.