Chapter 14: All is fair in Love and War

I woke up the next morning in the room Laito and I used to share with a massive headache. I felt like my head was going to explode. There was a glass of water and some painkillers on the bedside table and I consumed both with absolute necessity. Laito poked his head around the door with a tray of food and some strong-smelling coffee in his hands.

"I figured you could do with this," he said quietly, trying not to make my obvious headache worse.

"Thanks," I muttered, taking the food from him.

He watched me while I ate and I felt a lot better afterwards.

"We should get ready," he commented, "Graduation is today."

"Yeah…" I muttered, padding towards the bathroom to freshen up.

Once I was dressed I teleported to the school. I walked down towards the main hall where the ceremony was to be held. The other Sakamaki brothers and Mukami brothers who were also graduating were already there. Laito showed up a few minutes later. The ceremony proceeded, we all received our paper, posed for the photo and I left. Laito ran after me.

"I know, what your planning, Tori," he called, "I'm coming with you. You know we can't be too far apart. It'll kill both of us."

I turned to look at him, tears falling down my face, "Maybe at this point that's what I want! Maybe I'm sick of life!"

"Trust me it's not what you want," he said coming closer, backing me into a wall, "and even if it was, I'd never let you. A life without you is no life at all, Tori."

I stared up at him in shock before pushing him away. And turning to leave. He followed behind me. He helped pack up or things and even carried the bags to the airport.

"How about Paris? A bit cliché, but it's lovely this time of year," he suggested, "Or Rome, we've got ties over there that'll make it easier to do things at night."

"I'm leaving to get away from my life here, not embroil in it for longer," I sighed.

"I know just the place then," he smiled, "wait here, I'll be back."

20 minutes later he came back with two plane tickets to the Caribbean Island, Tortuga. He grabbed my hand and led me to our flight. I fell asleep on his shoulder during the flight as I watched him do his crossword puzzle. I woke up a few hours later as he started to watch one of the in-flight movies. I sighed and he flashed me a tired smile, handing me an earbud and we browsed the movies together and decided upon a movie that had been released in Japan a month ago 'Blue Moon Paradise'- a romantic action movie that won awards for the unusual genre combination and special effects.

I rested back in my seat and watched the movie with him. He laughed at the scene where the heroine punches the hero in the face and said, "That reminds me of how we met."

I chuckled and rolled my eyes and continued watching the movie.

When we landed in Tortuga, Laito rented a secluded cabin for us to live in by the beach and we passed out in our separate beds until the next night. I woke up and found Laito resting in the soft sand in his shorts, an unbuttoned shirt and his usual hat looking out over the clear blue water. I walked over to him and sat down in the sand next to him, wrapping my kimono style nightgown around me and pressed my knees up to my chin and stared out with him. The wind rustled the trees above us before he spoke.

"I originally liked you because you reminded me of my mother," he admitted, "but I realised there was more to you than that woman."

I looked at him and he continued, "My mother and I were…intimate…in a way a mother and son should never have been. It messed me up. I never understood why it was me, and not Ayato or Kanato, and when he found out, I was locked away in the dungeon. She didn't care. She told me I was nothing special. That what she got from me she could get from any other man on the planet. Then she had sex with my Uncle Richter right in front of me."

I paused to process what he just told me, before saying, "You protected your siblings from something they should never have experienced Laito. As sad as it sounds, if it hadn't have been you, it would have been them, and you could have been subjected to something worse instead."

He looked at me and I continued, "Your childhood may not have been ideal, but you shouldn't let it define you now."

"What about you?" he asked, "I know bits and pieces of your story, but not the whole thing. How do you not let what happened to you get to you?"

"I embrace it and wear it like armour," I replied, "I use what I learned from it and try not to let it overcome me. It's my past. It doesn't define the person I am today."

"What actually happened to you?" he asked.

I looked away for a moment in thought, then I looked at him and told him the full story of what I remembered.

"My parents, who also happened to be brother and sister, were aristocrats ruling over a small city. When food became short and their true nature revealed, the mob attacked our home and burnt it to the ground. I ran away with the help of a servant but I was found by a stranger and sold to The Laughing Clown circus. Each day the ring master would barter my body off to the highest bidder for sex, beatings or torture. Whatever the humans could think of. Each month under a full moon, when my thirst was at its peak, they'd hold a ritual where they'd sacrifice a child to open a portal to the other side so he could speak to his dead wife, that was lured in by my 'ability' to search those with mediumship ties. They'd drain the blood and feed it to me while they hooked me up to tubes with a mysterious liquid with traces of silver in that would burn my insides. The torture and rape was a daily, sometimes hourly thing. I became pretty numb to it. When I was 13 I met the Mukami's. I ended up sharing a cage with them briefly and I helped them escape the clutches of the ring master temporarily. I wasn't so lucky. They increased the concentration of silver in my tubes from that point on. At 14 the disappearances of the children at the circus caught police attention, and they raided the circus grounds. I'd been starved for 3 weeks at this point, and when they found me hooked up to the machine, I'd killed over 50 people in sating my thirst. I woke up in the hospital after that on those meds and I was adopted by Jin. The hunter's society defended my case and everything that happened that night was pardoned. The rest is history."

"Wow…you really are more fucked up than I am," was all he said.

I shoved him and he fell over in the sand. He scrambled up and we wrestled each other in the sand, laughing away. Eventually we ended up in the sea, laughing like maniacs at each other. We collapsed out of breath in the sand, thoroughly soaked through.

"Will you marry me, Viktoria?" he asked, turning serious, holding out the ring from before.

"What?!" I cried in shock.

"Marry me, and you'll never suffer again in your life," he said, expression still serious.

Before I could reply I got the sense something was wrong. I saw Yui and the brothers under attack from the founder wolves. They were dying. The Mukami's too.

He gave me a knowing look; he saw that too. I replied, "If we survive this war, I will."

The next day we packed up and returned to Japan. The founders were coming, and we needed to fight.