interlude: Sakamaki Brothers

or

Impressions of Kisaragi Saya

The drug's effects kicked in, and Ayato crumpled his face.

"You bastard," he hissed, clutching at his stomach, where the takoyaki laced with his latest creation was likely sending his insides on a rampage.

Reiji eyed his half-brother dispassionately. "I would recommend you hurry," he suggested in a mild tone of voice. "Otherwise you'll make quite the mess."

Ayato left, cursing him the entire way. He would probably try for retribution later on, but Reiji considered this experiment to be payback for the time he broke his third-favorite cup.

Personal vengeance aside, the experiment was a success, and that was what irked Reiji. His drug had worked the way it was supposed to.

The way it hadn't on the newest resident of the manor was odd, but it was hardly the first drug to fail exerting its effects on Kisaragi Saya. Every meal she consumed since her second day was laced with his drugs, and yet showed absolutely no signs of being affected despite an increase in dosage. She spent most of her time in her room, but some of the concoctions brought out symptoms that couldn't be hid.

Either she was very good at not showing signs of pain on her face . . .

. . . or his drugs had no effect on her at all.

Reiji thought of the coldly tranquil face, beautiful but devoid of emotions most of the time like a maiden carved out of ice from the legends of old. She was strong, more than enough to retaliate against Laito and Ayato, but he sensed no magic stirring within her. Her eyes flashed red, and switched her demeanor from maiden of snow to predator, but Reiji doubted that was her fullest capacity. She drank blood from the supply delivered for her consumption, but only those set aside for her specifically, ones that tasted of non-human origins when he had checked. Ghouls, probably, based on the lack of inherent magic, but non-human nonetheless.

His lips curled up. If he was to specifically define his view of her, he would label it as somewhat positive. Anyone that beat the good-for-nothing senseless or punished the crude language of his redheaded brothers would inevitably earn points in his books, regardless of their mysteriousness.

Just enough for him to not press her regarding her place in the household and her lack of a significant contribution yet. In the meantime, he would continue trying different drugs on her, testing what might have an effect. Tasteless poisons were coming up on the list soon enough.

Out of all his brothers, Laito liked to think of himself as the smartest. Not book-smart – that was Reiji, with all his meticulous methods, or Shu, despite his laziness. What Laito meant was the smarts that came with interactions – reading others. Any idiot with eyes and a half-functioning brain could read letters and make sense of their meaning, but it took a true master to realize the unwritten and unsaid, the subtle ticks and the body language and read what was hidden behind the windows of the soul.

It was why despite the pain she inflicted on him Laito kept prodding at Kisaragi Saya. She was a pretty little thing, yes, practically built to fall into someone's arms and charm their pants off if she only endeared herself a little more, but she held herself in the way those who were confident and born to step on others did. Something innate that gave her a superiority she breathed and exuded naturally because it was just obvious, a fact that she could destroy the world without batting her pretty dark lashes. A je ne sais quoi, so to speak, something that could not easily be described by mere words alone.

And yet there was a death of the spirit, in a way.

If her strength gave her the air of a natural predator at the top of the food chain, then her eyes were that of a person climbing to the top of a mountain so she could throw herself off the cliff.

He saw how Saya hesitated – not out of moral obligation or anything as petty and hypocritical like that, no, but because she was calculating something. He saw no enjoyment, no pleasure derived from inflicting pain upon others, as if the entire thing was nothing but a chore for her. Laito, from all the times he poked at her for her reactions, figured it was because she wanted to scare them. Prove herself as superior to them.

He licked his wrist to speed up the healing. Saya preferred the method of crushing his wrist or kicking his leg. Sometimes she would land a blow on his abdomen and knock the wind out of his lungs. Simple and effective ways to keep him from doing something, at least for a short period of time.

No torture, no pleasure derived from pain, no serious harm. Eyes that didn't care, deliberately exerting her strength as a show, and a very boring habit of mostly staying hidden in her room as if she was Subaru or something. No efforts to endear herself to any of them.

"Bitch-san," Laito said aloud, though no one was in hearing distance. He let his fingers flutter lightly against his stomach, as if they were playing the piano. "Are you trying to make yourself our enemy?"

Vampires always had enemies. Demons ruled by strength, and the power balances were things to be toppled and overthrown, challenged and defended. Enemies were nothing new, and the protocol to which they were treated with did not change either. Enemies were to be dealt with. It was how the vampires had become the strongest of the demons, how they had maintained their standing as such.

But an enemy like Kisaragi Saya, whose goals didn't make sense and didn't align with her emotions were rare. Suicide by cop – a way to prod them into eventually labelling her as something to get rid of. If he approached it from that angle, then everything fit.

Except no, it didn't. She knew their father, and Karlheinz was the god of the realm in which demons lived. She could have always asked him, instead of his weaker sons. Which meant their father was up to something, and she was the tool he was using.

Laito ran over what he knew of her physical attributes, the ones that caused him pain rather than visual pleasure, and drew the conclusion that there were still questions unanswered. No changes in his future behavior, then. He still needed to push her buttons, see what made the doll-like woman react.

He drew his lips up into a smirk. It was always so fun, watching her eyes for the brief flare of irritation to set things into motion. The resulting pain was a minor price to pay for that sight.

In this household, just about the only kindness and consideration the brothers showed was sometimes respecting each other's habits, at least in action since words were fair play. Reiji called Shu a 'good-for-nothing', probably more times than he ever called him by his actual name but made no attempt to destroy his MP3 player and rob him of his musical escape. No one touched Kanato's dolls – mostly because they were creepy as fuck, but they didn't because they were Kanato's thing. Laito could go around being a pervert and no one stopped him, just told him to stop doing it in public because no one wanted to see that, you colossal pervert.

Subaru could stay in his coffin and most of the time, they wouldn't disturb him. They would make fun of him, of that there was no doubt, and it pissed him off when they did because they always did, but they mostly left him alone to stay in his coffin, maybe understanding that he needed his time in a trance to keep himself somewhat sane.

In one of the moments that he wasn't deep in contemplation while in the safety of his coffin, just on his way to return to the enclosed space from the rose garden, Subaru first ran into Kisaragi Saya, methodically beating the shit out of Laito and Ayato on her first day at the manor.

She was a tiny thing that looked like she couldn't hurt a fly, and while his brothers weren't bodybuilders they were also far taller than she was – and they were getting their asses kicked by her. Ayato lunged, fist ready to swing, and she would merely twist out of the way before swinging her body fully around in a turn and using the momentum to drop an ax-kick down on his shoulder, hard enough to send Ayato onto his knees like that was where he belonged. Then she threw herself to the side just as Laito leapt at her, and raised her arm to block the surprise blow Ayato aimed at her face before grabbing the leg that missed her head and throwing him like a hammer right at Laito.

It was almost like watching a well-choreographed fight, with how smoothly she moved, not even breaking a sweat or showing signs of strain. Every movement was swift and efficient, a dance to the sound of punches and kicks.

They didn't get along well, most of the time. There was too much between them, not all of it started from them but rather inherited from their mothers, and while most of them liked to disavow themselves of the expectations that had been pressed to them from a young age by women who were now dead or about as good as dead, the ghosts were still there influencing the way they acted, the way they were. Too many sharp edges to fit together well.

They didn't get along well, most of the time. But at the end of the day they did – sometimes rather unfortunately – share blood, and they were brothers.

Besides, having an invader in the house was a problem for all of them, especially if said invader could hold her own against two pure-blooded vampires.

Subaru joined the fight to tip the scales in their favor – and was properly trounced as well. Two or three, it didn't make a difference except in the number of bodies that hit the ground. She didn't even bat an eye at his joining, just greeted him with a swift kick to his abdomen after throwing her head back to avoid his fist before jumping, using his face as a springboard and flipping her body in a mid-air somersault to land a double kick on his back.

The impression he received from the small woman as she took all three of them on and smashed them into the ground with enough force to create craters where they landed was that she didn't care. It wasn't just her face that was tranquil and blank as she waited for them to charge at her again – it was her eyes, round and dark grey and heedless to everything. Like they were nothing. Like she held no attachment to anything, herself included.

And yet she had the nerve, when he asked days later, to pretend that she cared about fairness, or about how he was treated. When her eyes were so nihilistic and indifferent to it all.

That she had a connection to Karlheinz also infuriated him. That man, the one responsible for leaving his mother a broken woman was always up to something. Karlheinz involving himself with another girl, broken in a different way –

Whatever that man was up to, it couldn't be good. Subaru made his feelings clear to Saya.

Saya said nothing to his warning, only gazed upon Subaru with those dark indifferent eyes that left him feeling small and powerless and furious, though he wasn't sure if his emotions was directed to her or himself.

Kanato considered himself a sensitive soul. Out of all his brothers, he was the most open to the spiritual aspect of the Demon Realm, more in-tune with the presence of spirits. Shades of the dead or the demonic couldn't usually dare to exert themselves around pureblooded vampires like them, but Kanato could read them fairly easily, and occasionally called them out to do his bidding.

Kisaragi Saya, as she was introduced, wore a long legacy of something. Countless dead, like she had created a mountain of corpses and rivers of blood just so she could sit upon it like it was a throne and enjoy the view.

It was not what he read, but what he didn't that told him this. The lack of anything, the silence that fell around her. Even around them there were the occasional whispers, in awe of the scions of the vampire god and feeding off the magical aura they exuded like scavengers, feasting on that which was left from the meal of predators.

Around her there was only terrified silence, for even the traces of the dead had fled from her.

He'd only seen that kind of silence reserved for one person, and even for Karlheinz the sheer terror hadn't been there.

Whatever she was, Kisaragi Saya was dangerous. No matter how she acted like she wasn't.

Kanato kept his guard up around her, instinctively recognizing a kind of superiority he could not challenge. It grated at him, and sometimes he toed the line – the blood of recklessness and pride passed down by Cordelia, while thicker in the other triplets, was also still present in him as well – in defiance of his instincts, but when the weight of her gaze fell upon him he could not stop the chill that ran up his spine.

Even when he was younger, playing with Edgar secretly, Shu had always been a predator at heart, confident in his ability to fight off anything. Though that confidence was long-since shattered at the loss of his first and only friend and he was now lethargic, unwilling to emotionally invest himself in anything, he was fundamentally a creature meant to prey upon the weak with his inherent strength and knew no other way of being.

Having always been a predator, Shu did not particularly find the sensation of finding a predator above him in the same vicinity to be particularly pleasant. The only thing that kept him from doing anything – whatever that might have been – was the fact that Saya was as unwilling to do anything, almost as much as he was.

Yes, she did punish his brothers when they annoyed her too much, and to that Shu could only think those arrogant idiots kind of deserved it, but otherwise she was fairly set in her routine. Sometimes move to the kitchen to grab coffee, join them for mealtime, deal with Laito when he said something perverted and gave Ayato a half-hearted glare but didn't bother chasing after him when he fled.

Shu might have almost believed her to be harmless.

But sometimes, Saya looked at them all thoughtfully, eyes deep and dark, and Shu remembered them red and glowing. Remembered what it felt like, faced with undeniable strength like a mountain, recalled the taste of absolute defeat with his blood and sweat on his tongue as he was pushed closer to death than he ever had been.

Saya was a storm wearing pretty, human-shaped skin, and the monster inside, on par with the strength of the god of vampires himself, was just waiting for something.

Shu kept out of her way. Experiencing her strength, really experiencing it instead of the small love taps Ayato and Laito received once was more than enough for him. He had no desire for a repeat performance.

As a man who looked first at a woman's most important assets when introduced, Ayato liked to consider himself as a bit of a connoisseur in the matter of female breasts. By his assessment, in terms of breast size, Kisaragi Saya did have the ideal pair of breasts and the body to match. She was slim and curvy in body, yet her breasts were full in size, ample and large enough to spill through his hands were he to cup them.

Not that he had or would. Rocket Boobs was just too violent. She didn't bother pursuing him, but Ayato began to weigh the consequences. The only reason she didn't chase him after he called her the nickname was because she figured his running away was punishment enough to make up for the lack of violence.

It was incredibly lazy, but also an effective method. And Laito, who was arguably worse, stuck by and braved the punishment.

If Laito could take it, so could he. And what was more – he could confront her directly. The fight from the first day was a fluke, only ending as it did because they had been caught off-guard. If Laito and Subaru hadn't gotten in the way, he could have handled her perfectly well on his own.

Ayato grabbed the sword from his room. He hadn't used it in a while, but it was still in working shape. Saya, on her first day at the manor, had been carrying swords. If she could use it, cool. If not, whatever.

He had a fight to pick with her.