A/N: Longer note at the end, but for now: Sorry it's been so long since I updated this. This is unfortunately not a new chapter, well, not entirely new anyway. This is a rewritten and expanded version of the flashback from Chapter 33. It's almost twice as long now, and has something very important added to it...

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~Five Years Earlier~

I woke up feeling simultaneously groggy and better than I'd felt in years. All of the pain from the car accident was gone, and while I may have been disoriented, it was not morphine or an opioid that was making me feel that way; I could tell that there were no pain medications in my system. It may have been relieving to finally be out of pain, but it was also worrying. There was a new dull ache in my neck, but the burning sensation in my left arm and the constant throbbing in my face were both gone. I brought my right hand to my face to try to determine what was going on, but instead of bandages, what I felt was a fully healed scar cutting across my cheek.

I immediately panicked. I had been thinking that it had only been a few hours since Uncle Neah had taken me home from the hospital, yet, I had clearly been unconscious for long enough that my injuries had completely healed while I was asleep. It was a rather terrifying thought when I vividly remembered the doctors saying that it was going to take a minimum of six months for that to happen.

My eyes flew open as I began to push myself into a seated position, but as soon as the light from the open window hit me, I groaned and collapsed backwards, clamping my eyes shut and burying myself deeper under the blankets. The sunlight burned. It physically hurt where the light from the sun had touched my skin. I may not have been in the most coherent state, but I still knew exactly what that meant. And ironically, something that should have made me panic more actually helped me calm down.

I was still in the back bedroom of Uncle Neah's condo — the room that was unofficially mine whenever Mana and I stayed over. It hadn't been six months since he'd brought me here, it had only been a couple of days. The ache in my neck was residual pain from the bite that had turned me. I was a vampire.

Before I could begin to truly process that fact, I heard someone come running into the room. If I believed what my newly heightened senses were telling me, the man in the room with me was an incredibly old and powerful vampire. But while that may have been a reason to be afraid, I didn't feel any fear. Whoever he was, his scent was comforting and soothing; it felt like I knew it, but I had just never smelled it that deeply when I was human. I knew the vampire in my room.

The man immediately hurried to the window and closed the blinds, plunging the room into darkness and blocking out the poisonous sun. Rather than leaving when he was done, he sat in a chair beside the bed and tenderly brushed a lock of hair out of my face. The soft touch confused me, as none of the vampires I knew would have touched me like that, but the moment the man spoke, I knew exactly who he was. "Sorry about that. I left the curtains open last night, but I forgot to close them when the sun rose. I hope my carelessness didn't cause you too much pain, Allen."

Uncle Neah sighed and absently stroked my hair. He continued to talk to me in that soothing way, clearly thinking that I was still unconscious. I lay there and let him babble while I tried to get a grip on everything that had happened in the last minute. Honestly, it was far more difficult to process the fact that he was a vampire than it was to adjust to the idea that I was no longer human.

I was pulled from my thoughts when Uncle Neah sighed heavily and traced a finger along the scar on my face. "I hope you don't blame me for turning you."

The barely audible comment clearly wasn't meant for me to hear, but I caught it. And I could no longer pretend to be asleep after hearing that. "Why would I do that?"

Rather than responding to my question, Uncle Neah just blinked down at me, his confusion written all over his face. "How long have you been awake?"

I shrugged, trying to act nonchalant so that he wouldn't accuse me of pretending to be asleep on purpose. "Since just before you came into the room."

"Huh. By my calculations, you should have been out for a couple more days." The serious look on his face faded as he laughed in embarrassment. "Then again, it's been quite a long time since I last turned someone, so I probably just miscounted."

When he was done laughing at himself, he smiled awkwardly at me. "How are you feeling?"

That was a very complicated question given everything that had happened to me in the last few weeks. "Confused. If you're a vampire, then how was Mana-?" I couldn't finish the question; it hurt so much just to say his name.

Uncle Neah sighed and returned to stroking my hair. "He was a vampire too. But that wasn't what I meant. How are you doing with having just woken up as a vampire?"

The question made me shrug. "I don't know. I guess I'm fine with it. I just don't understand what happened."

"When I brought you here from the hospital-"

The moment I realized where he was going with his explanation, I cut him off. "No, not that. I understand how turning works. I just don't get how you can be vampires. Why didn't Mana ever tell me? Why didn't you? Was I-?"

"Allen..." Neah sighed heavily and ran a hand through his hair. "I'm sorry. I know you want answers, but now is not the time for that. You're a newborn vampire. There are lots of things that you need to learn before you can handle hearing the truth, ok?"

His words did not sit well with me, but I knew that he was right. I would have to wait until I was more adjusted to being a vampire to find out what was really going on. For now, it would have to be enough to know that Neah wouldn't have turned me if I weren't important to him.

.x.x.

Five days later, Uncle Neah had finally deemed me adjusted enough to allow me to leave my room, but I still couldn't leave the apartment. I was sitting on a stool in the kitchen, enjoying the relative freedom that came from the change in scenery. He was standing across the island from me, pouring blood into a glass.

This was an exercise that I truly hated. Uncle Neah was trying to help me figure out which blood types I liked, and while that was a great idea in theory, it didn't work so well in practice. I hadn't been a vampire for that long, and while I may have accepted that I now had to drink blood to survive, it took a lot of self-control to not immediately pounce on the blood in the room when that smell hit me. But the biggest problem was that Uncle Neah didn't believe that I couldn't taste any difference between the various bloods he offered to me. He also didn't believe that I could taste the chemicals that were used to preserve the blood, and having to continually repeat myself on that front made for a rather frustrating experience.

However, today was going to go much differently than the day before.

Uncle Neah handed me the latest glass, but the moment our fingers touched, everything went black. There was a surreal out of body experience and the feeling of free-falling, but it only lasted for a fraction of a second. When I blinked my eyes open, I was back in the kitchen, but everything was now in black and white. I began to panic, but that was when I noticed a very familiar man in the room.

He wore a suit jacket that wasn't in the greatest condition — I had never been able to convince him that it was worth the money to get a new one — but his jeans and shoes were clean and well kept. Strands of his short black hair fell into his face, and his chin was covered in scruff from his usual lack of regular shaving. It was an image of him that was etched into my memory, and seeing him like that made me want to cry.

I could only stand there in shock as I stared at Mana. I knew that he was dead, but there he was, right in front of me, looking just like he had the last time I had seen him. I ached to run over and embrace him, to feel his arms around me once again, but I found that I couldn't move. Whatever I was seeing was some sort of hallucination, and that meant that I couldn't interact with him.

However, as I watched him walk towards the kitchen door, my body suddenly moved on its own, grabbing his arm and forcing him to turn around and face me. "You can't just walk away, Mana. We have to talk about this."

It was incredibly disorienting. My lips had moved, but I wasn't the one who had spoken — the words weren't even in a language I could speak, yet I somehow understood them. That voice was Uncle Neah's. Whatever it was that was going on, I was somehow seeing it from his perspective, something that certainly explained the intense frustration that I was suddenly feeling towards Mana.

Mana scowled fiercely at me/Neah in response to his words. "We have talked about this! My answer is still no! I'm not going to tell him and that's final!"

"And I'm telling you that he'll be fine with it!" Neah met Mana's angry tone with anger of his own, but then he sighed and let go of his brother. When he spoke again, his voice was gentle and he had switched to talking in English. "Things have changed in the last fifty years. Allen has vampire friends. He's not going to care that you're not human. He loves you too much."

I wanted to react to learning that they were arguing about me, but I couldn't; I was stuck watching the scene play out.

"It's still not a risk I'm willing to take." Mana crossed his arms and turned his back on his brother.

Uncle Neah sighed and shook his head, and I could feel his exasperation as he searched for a new argument to make. "You do realize that it's not normal for kids his age to skip out on social activities at school to spend time with their fathers, right?"

Mana looked severely offended by the fact that Neah had implied that there was something wrong with me. He was not a violent man, but he was clearly ready to hit his brother for the comment. "So? Allen has already told me that nothing is happening at school this weekend. He's not missing anything by going with me."

Neah crossed his arms over his chest, smirking smugly at having Mana fall for his trap. "He lied to you. There's a dance on Saturday."

Mana was quick to counter the observation, even though he was clearly unsettled by it. "I'm sure Allen doesn't want to go because he doesn't have a date."

"He has a girlfriend." The retort gave Mana a moment of pause, and Neah used the opportunity to continue to talk. "And that just proves my point. He'd rather spend time with you than with her. I'd be willing to bet that not only will he have no problems with you being a vampire, but he'll actually ask you to turn him."

Mana huffed and turned away once more. "Neah, stop. Even if he did somehow manage to accept me as a vampire, there's no way he would actually want to become one himself. So stop with the optimism. You're worse than he is."

The comparison made Neah snort in derision, and I was both offended and flattered by his amusement at my expense. "Allen is the most hopeless optimist I've ever met. And I won't stop. He's eighteen. You're going to lose him in a few months whether or not you tell him the truth. Even if it hurts him, you're going to have to do it."

It was with those words that I finally realized what was really going on: I was seeing something that had already happened. I remembered hearing Uncle Neah say that sentence before. On the day before the car accident.

As if confirming my suspicions, I watched myself walk into the kitchen. I vividly remembered what I was thinking in that moment, having taken Uncle Neah's last comment out of context. It was very different from what I was thinking right now, having heard the whole conversation.

Everything suddenly went black again, and when I opened my eyes, I was back in the world of color. The only difference was that instead of sitting on my stool, I was lying on the kitchen floor. I was back in reality.

When I noticed Uncle Neah in my personal space, hovering over me with an incredibly worried look on his face, I was so startled that I nearly shrieked. Instead, that look reminded me of what I had just seen, and I started sobbing — something that I would later recall felt incredibly bizarre now that my body could no longer cry. "I thought you didn't like me. But you were—... you were on my side the whole time. All those times I overheard you two fighting... You weren't trying to convince Mana to get rid of me, you were trying to convince him to turn me."

My distraught babbling was cut off by a tight hug as Neah pulled me onto his lap. "I was. Tell me, what exactly did you see, Allen?"

When I told him that I had seen the fight he and Mana had had the day before the car accident, Uncle Neah stiffened. His reaction scared me in my emotionally unstable state, and the words he spoke only made that feeling worse. "I don't want to upset you, but it's not possible for you to have seen that."

"But—!"

Neah cut me off before I could argue with him. "I'm not accusing you of lying, Allen. I believe everything you told me. This is something else entirely that's worrying me, so please let me finish, ok?"

The words did little to console me, but I still nodded and waited for him to continue. "Seeing the past like you just did? That was Mana's power."

I gaped at him in complete disbelief. While it was comforting to learn that I shared an ability with my father, I now had enough information to know why my vision of the past had freaked Neah out, and it was hard not to start panicking. I knew how vampire powers worked, and it was impossible for me to have inherited a power from a vampire that wasn't my sire.

Even though I understood, Uncle Neah still continued to explain it to me. "And since it's far too much of a coincidence for you to have naturally developed the exact same power as him, that can only mean that you were somehow able to inherit his abilities from him when he died. That's impossible for many reasons, not the least of which is the fact that he died three weeks before you were turned. However, right now, the thing that concerns me most is that when I turned you, I gave you my power, and that's supposed to override the other possibilities. So, the big question is: do you actually have my power?"

I could only shrug at the expectant way he stared at me. He clearly expected me to answer him, but he should have been well aware that I didn't know what my power was yet. "I thought you said that it was going to be a few weeks before we'd be able to tell."

He frowned in thought. "I did, but you used Mana's power just a few minutes ago, which means that if you do have mine, you should be able to use it too."

The logic made sense, but I was still missing too many pieces of the puzzle. "And what exactly is your power? You still haven't told me what it can do."

Instead of responding, Neah started humming. I was confused as to what the song had to do with the current subject, but when he reached out and touched the broken glass on the floor beside him, I instantly understood. The moment his fingers made contact with the shards of glass, they reformed themselves back into a cup. Rather than telling me about his abilities, he was showing them to me.

While I examined the repaired glass in awe and confusion, Uncle Neah stared seriously at me. "It's complicated, and now is not the time for me to try to explain it all to you, but rest assured, if you did inherit that ability, I will teach you how to use it. For now, I want you to concentrate on that cup, and use the sound of your voice to manipulate the glass into something else. Understand?"

I could only shrug, still so bewildered by what he had just done that I had barely heard his explanation. "I'm not sure that I do, but I may as well give it a shot."

I floundered for a moment, wondering what I was expected to change the cup into, but I quickly decided to wing it and turned all of my concentration on the glass in my hands. I had no clue what Uncle Neah had meant by, "use the sound of my voice," but I remembered that he had been humming while he did it, so that was where I started. I began to hum the same tune that he had, but as I shifted my thoughts to the glass and manipulating its shape, the simple melody morphed on its own until it was something completely different. I had no idea where the new tune was coming from, but it felt right, so I didn't question it.

When the tune reached its natural end and I opened my eyes, there was no longer a cup in my hands. Instead, I found myself holding a glass replica of the very first toy Mana had ever given me. The object itself was nothing special, but the meaning behind it weighed heavily on me, and I had to struggle to not break down again.

Uncle Neah ignored the glass toy in my hands, but then, he probably had no idea that it held sentimental value. "Well, that created more questions than it answered."

I blinked at the unexpected reaction. "What do you mean?"

He just sighed and shook his head. "For now, will you just accept that you have both Mana's power and my own? I know it's confusing and impossible, but I don't have any answers for you as to why or how it happened, and given that you've only been a vampire for a few days, there are much more important things that we need to focus on. I'll do some research, and we can revisit this later, ok?"

When I nodded, Uncle Neah helped me to my feet and guided me to a chair. He knelt in front of me so that we were at the same eye level, placed his hands on my knees, and fixed me with a very serious expression. I had thought we were done talking, but he apparently had more that he wanted to say. "Before we go any further, there are some things you need to know about Mana."

Those words made my heart stop. I didn't want to talk about Mana, not after everything that I had just seen, and certainly not so soon after his death. But from the tone of Uncle Neah's voice, I could tell that he was going to say his piece whether or not I wanted to hear it. "I don't know if you already know this or not, but you weren't the first kid my brother adopted."

He paused to let me react, but I was too confused to interrupt. Part of me had always known that Mana had taken in other kids before me, but I didn't understand what this had to do with any of the things that had happened that day.

When I didn't say anything, Neah squeezed my knee comfortingly and continued to talk. "Mana had a hard time with being a vampire and, I hate to say this about him, but he wasn't exactly mentally stable. I tried to help him the best I could, but it never did much good. The thing that did work, however, was adopting orphaned and abandoned children. Raising stray human children gave meaning to his life, and it did wonders for his mental health. But it never worked out. It always went the same way: after a few years together, he would finally trust them with the fact that he was a vampire, they would freak out and reject him, and then he would never see them again. Losing the children he had cared so deeply for really weighed on him and he never coped well with it, which only made his mental health worse. It reached the point where he gave up being honest with them because he couldn't stand the rejection."

My heart ached for Mana, feeling the pain of being abandoned and wondering how on earth anyone could have rejected that man for something so petty. He had been my entire world growing up and the fact that he was a vampire didn't change a damn thing.

Neah smiled knowingly at me, undoubtedly having guessed my train of thought. "And then you came along. I don't know where he found you, but you were different from the other kids. Special somehow. I've never seen him connect with anyone like he did with you. The bond you two had... it's probably stronger than the bond he and I had. I knew from the first time I saw you two together that you were the one. You were the one who wouldn't break his heart. I tried to convince him of that. I did everything I could think of to convince him that you wouldn't reject him. Even now, I can see it in your eyes: you would have let him turn you." Neah sighed. "But he wouldn't listen. He was too hurt by the past. Too scared that he'd lose you. And that was always his greatest fear."

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A/N #2: I have reached a point with this story (which I started writing more than 5 years ago and is currently 135,000 words spread over 49 chapters) where I need to figure out how it ends before I can go much further with it. There are some other smaller things I need to figure out too (like Lenalee's vampire power), which are making it hard to write the upcoming chapters. Rest assured that while future updates on this story are going to be sporadic, it still has a very high priority spot on my list of ongoing stories.

Also, I welcome suggestions and feedback, as well as constructive criticism. If you have ideas or tips, feel free to send me a message.