A/N: Here's the second chapter of Southside Vampires. I hope you all enjoy it as much as you enjoyed the first chapter. Now we introduce Koushirou into the story, and we learn about him and how he is tied to Matt, Tai, and Dai.

Disclaimer: I don't own Digimon or any of the characters except for Sirius, Rufus, and Cyrus.

Visiting Mental Institutions

Matt awoke from a wonderful, deep sleep and sighed happily. He turned his head to look at the other body in his bed and wondered to himself when he had gotten there. He sat up in bed and looked at the other boy on the floor, curled up and hugging a pillow. He left Tai on the bed and stepped over Daisuke to go to the bathroom, shuffling his feet and yawning.

He took a quick shower and then combed his hair, staring at the blank mirror, and then went back into his room to find Tai sitting up and rubbing the sleep out of his eyes. Matt smiled at him and Tai smiled back. Daisuke stirred on the floor and groaned, curling into himself and slowly getting onto his knees. He rose to his feet and let the blanket fall off of him and onto the floor, stretching his arms out to the ceiling.

"What're we doing tonight?" he asked, leaning against the wall and trying to pull his pants on.

"Let's go visit Koushirou," Matt suggested, his blue eyes shimmering when he turned the light on.

Tai rolled out of bed and landed on his feet, standing up and moving towards the closet. When they were all dressed and ready, they began walking towards Claymoore. Claymoore was the local mental hospital.

They walked in and went to the front desk. The nurse there smiled at them. "Here to see Koushirou again?" she asked.

"Yeah," Matt responded. "Is he in his room?"

The nurse nodded and told them to go right ahead. They walked down the hall, passing by a few patients that looked at them warily and moved towards the walls to give them plenty of space to walk. Tai turned to leer at one of them and he gave this sort of yelping sound and slid down the wall.

Matt turned to get after Tai and then turned around again to open Koushirou's door. They stepped in one-by-one and closed the door behind them. Koushirou was sitting up in bed and staring forward with blank black eyes, his lips parted slightly. Matt sat on the edge of his bed and looked at him closely. He could barely hear the sound of Koushirou breathing through his mouth.

"Kou?" he asked gently.

The redheaded boy slowly turned to look at him and the corner of his mouth twitched upwards. "Matt."

"Yeah. Tai and Daisuke are here, too."

Koushirou turned his head slightly and looked at the other two out of the corner of his eye. "Hey," he whispered.

They whispered back greetings and Daisuke took Koushirou's hand into his own. "How have you been doing?" Dai asked carefully.

"Fine," Koushirou responded, giving the same answer that he gave every time they came to visit him, regardless of what had really been happening in his life at the ward.

"How is your arm?" Matt asked, looking down briefly at the arm on his side.

Koushirou slowly turned it upwards to allow them to see it and he gave a very small smile again. "It's still healing. It looks better than the last time you came, I think."

"Yeah, it does," Tai answered him, gently running a finger down his other arm because Kou refused to let anyone touch the arm that was damaged.

The reason Koushirou was in the mental institution was because one night he had been reading too many darkfics on the internet and was in a very dark mood. He read one where the main character sliced his arm open and pulled apart his own flesh and muscle until he could reach into the wound and touch his own bone, because the character had always wanted to see what a bone looks like when it's still inside of a person. For reasons unknown to even Kou himself, he suddenly wanted to try it, and he found a knife in the kitchen and began cutting into his arm. He had torn apart a piece of his arm and made it through the flesh and slightly past the muscle when he collapsed from the pain and bleeding. His mother found him right afterwards, having followed his painful screaming, and reacted quickly, calling an ambulance and closing the wound as best as she could as she tried the pressure point technique.

They found out later on that Koushirou had been insane even before this, but he had kept it all inside of his mind and had blocked out everyone and everything so often that no one ever saw him often enough to realize that he wasn't right in his mind. Not even his parents saw him come out of his room very often. Matt, Tai, and Daisuke had hung out with him sometimes, but they were so messed up themselves that they didn't see anything odd in Koushirou's behavior.

Koushirou looked at Tai and smiled slightly. "Thanks for coming to visit me so often, you guys. You know, no one else does."

"Your parents must visit you," Daisuke said reasonably.

Koushirou shook his head slowly and they all looked at him in concern. "No, they don't. They're scared of me. They're scared that I might do something else, so they don't want to hear about me anymore," he said softly. "They don't even want to know if I'm still alive or not."

"I'm sure that's not true," Matt said, stroking Koushirou's hair and feeling a deep anger at Kou's parents.

Koushirou glanced at the blonde and smiled again, this time looking a lot less forced. "Yeah it is. They told the nurses themselves, when they left me here. I heard them, because I was sitting in a chair in the room. They didn't look at me once and acted like I wasn't in the room, but I was there. So you see, I know that they said it. But it's okay," he added quickly, seeing the sorrow and anger in all three pairs of eyes, "I know it's true. Why would they still want me as their son, after everything I did?"

Matt leaned over and hugged the boy, who didn't make a move to hug him back, and merely sat there stiffly and stared forward, as if he wasn't even aware of the display of affection.

"After everything you did, all of us still want to be your friends, and all of us still care about you just as much as before, and maybe even more," Matt assured him.

He pulled back from the hug and looked into Koushirou's bleak eyes. The boy's eyes still wore their dead expression, but he thought he saw them shine a little, as if he was holding back tears.

"Thanks," he said again, and looked down at the blanket.

Just then the nurse opened the door. "Your time is up. You have to leave now. He needs some rest. It is eleven, you know," she said.

Matt turned to look over his shoulder at the nurse in the doorway. She wasn't the nice nurse that worked at the front desk. This one was the nurse that disapproved of their night visits and thought that they woke up the patients whenever they came. She probably knew about how they frightened a lot of the patients there, just by being there.

"We'll be right out," he assured her coldly. He stayed looking at her for a while as she remained standing there, watching them. "Can you please shut the fucking door? I said we'll be right out. Can't we say goodbye?"

The nurse glared at him, but she went out and shut the door behind her anyways. "Bitch," he heard Daisuke mutter, and turned to look at Koushirou again.

"I feel sorry for you, having to be in here and take crap from people like her," Matt told him truthfully. Koushirou smiled again. Matt leaned forward and hugged him, kissing the side of his head. "Stay out of trouble," he said, and stood up.

Tai kissed the other side of his head, saying goodbye, and Daisuke threw his arms around the boy and nuzzled his shoulder. Daisuke kissed his forehead gently and pulled back to smile at him. "We'll see you around, Kou," he said, and stood up to follow the other two out of the room.

Matt glanced back into the room while he was closing the door behind him, and he thought he saw a tear sliding down Koushirou's cheek as he stared forward again. He closed the door fully and turned to walk forward out of the psych ward. He passed the disapproving nurse, who clucked her tongue at him, and growled at her, enjoying the way she jumped back a little at the noise, and then passed the nurse at the front desk, who waved at him, and he waved back.

They went down the street, not really going anywhere but not wanting to stay in one place. Daisuke finally suggested they go visit Takeru, and they began walking towards his house in silence.

~ ~ ~ ~

Takeru sat on his couch, his arms wrapped around Ken's waist. He was pleading with him to stay home with him instead of going to work at the club.

"I told you, I can't," Ken said for what had to be the tenth time. "The club is my responsibility and I have to be there to work."

"Why can't you get somebody to fill in for you?" Takeru asked sweetly, stroking his boyfriend's stomach. Ken sighed and tilted his head to rest on the blonde's shoulder.

"I need the money, Takeru. I still need about a thousand more to have enough for that number one issue of-"

"Blah blah, a comic book, yeah," Takeru cut in, always having been bored by any talk of comic books with Ken in the past. "Why are they so expensive?"

"Humans think that they're collectible items that may be worth millions someday, and maybe a few already are," Ken explained, his voice sounding as if he had said this many times before, which he had.

"I still think you could take one night off to spend with me," Takeru said, pouting, and Ken laughed.

"You're too cute for words."

"So cute that I might convince you to stay home?"

Ken sighed and Takeru leaned forward and began kissing his neck. Ken didn't protest and tilted his head to the side, allowing his boyfriend more access. "I just want to go in to work, you know. They always give me a lot of money because they don't know how much it's worth..." he trailed off as he moaned slightly as Takeru began sucking on his collarbone.

"And...I just need the money. Uh, I might get a lot tonight, and then I'll have enough for the comic book, and I can spend more time with you then. Takeru, it's hard to think with you doing that."

Takeru grinned and began trailing his hands up and down Ken's body under his shirt. Ken squirmed slightly against the couch. "So anyways, as I was saying...uh...I was saying...ah, hell. I could get someone to fill in for me."

Ken grabbed Takeru's wrists and pinned them against the couch as he slid onto Takeru's waist and began kissing him back. Takeru made a sound of delight and opened his mouth as Ken's tongue licked at his upper lip.

Ken slowly dragged Takeru down the couch until he was laying on top of him and began to remove his shirt when the doorbell rang. Takeru cursed and gently pushed Ken off of him. "I'll get it."

Ken groaned in annoyance and tried to fix his shirt and his hair and Takeru walked to the door and slowly opened it. He saw who it was and pulled the door fully open, sighing. "Oh, it's you guys."

Tai grinned from his place leaning against the door, the ever-present almost predatory gleam in his eyes. "You sound so happy to see us, Takeru. Spare us the emotion."

Matt and Daisuke stood a little behind him, Matt with his arms crossed and his hair in his face and Daisuke with his arms around Matt's waist and smiling brightly.

"Can we come in or are we going to stand out here all night?" Tai asked impatiently.

Takeru moved to the side and sighed, lifting his arm slightly. "Yeah, come in."

Tai moved past him into the house and grinned at Ken, moving towards the couch. "Hello there, Kenny-boy."

Ken rolled his eyes at him. Matt and Daisuke plopped down on the other couch and Daisuke crawled onto Matt's lap, setting himself there and leaning back against the blonde's chest. Matt rested a hand on Daisuke's knee and curled one arm around his back. Tai leapt over the back of the couch and landed next to them, pulling his legs up onto the couch and settling back against a pillow. Takeru slowly went back to his place on the other couch and sat beside Ken.

"Did we interrupt something?" Matt asked, smirking.

Takeru raised an eyebrow at him. "Why?"

"Your hair is awfully messy, dear brother."

Takeru muttered, "Shit," and tried to comb his hair with his fingers. Ken narrowed his eyes at Matt and Matt laughed.

"I couldn't help it," he said, shrugging.

"Why are you here?" Ken asked, showing that he didn't appreciate them interrupting his and Takeru's night together.

"We came to inform you that Koushirou is doing good, and we managed to get a little emotion out of him today, so he might be getting a little better," Matt said, in a tone of voice not unlike Ken's.

Ken's eyes softened and his looked down, as if apologizing. Matt sighed and rubbed his head. Takeru smiled at the good news. "What do you mean 'emotion'?"

"Well, as we were leaving, I glanced back at him and saw a tear on his face," Matt said, smiling at Ken to show that he accepted the apology. Ken smiled back.

"Koushirou hasn't cried in ten years," Takeru said in amazement.

"Not since he lost that puppy of his. He was seven years old then," Tai said, smiling as if in memory.

They had been vampires for nearly ninety years, but they appeared as young as teenagers. Tai was turned into a vampire at age seventeen, so he looked that age, and Daisuke had been fifteen. Ken appeared to be around fifteen, also. Matt and TK were full vampires, having both their mother and their father as vampires. Their parents had been killed by a rival clan twenty years ago, but they had stopped aging when Matt was seventeen and TK was fourteen.

Koushirou was a normal boy. He had no vampire blood in him, and though they asked him if he would like to become one, he had refused, saying he didn't care to live for as long as they already had. He honestly didn't mind them being vampires, and he was the only human they ever treated with respect and even liked.

"We ought to go visit him tonight," Ken said to TK, and the blonde nodded at him.

"Well, we should be going, too," Matt said, standing up. Tai and Daisuke slowly rose to their feet on either side of him.

Ken and TK stood to walk with them to the door. Tai hugged Ken and kissed TK, then walked out the door. Daisuke kissed both Ken and TK on the lips before bounding out the door, skipping the step and landing just behind Tai. Matt rolled his eyes at them both, hugged Ken and TK, and followed them out, closing the door behind him.

He shoved his hands into his pockets and stared at the night sky. Tai went off into the darkness for awhile, and Matt and Daisuke followed him at a much slower pace, enjoying the sweet night air.

"What do you think is going to happen to him?" Daisuke asked quietly, almost afraid to ruin the moment.

Matt glanced at him, knowing what he was talking about without having to ask. "I don't know. Maybe he really is getting better. Maybe it's good that he cried."

"Or maybe he's just getting sadder," Daisuke whispered, and Matt cringed.

He had been thinking that same thing, but he didn't want to say it out loud. Suddenly, Tai came running back to them, with something in his hand. Matt raised an eyebrow at him, then hissed when he watched as Tai lifted a bottle of some kind of alcoholic drink to his lips.

"Where did you get that?" he asked angrily.

Tai smirked at him. "I stole it from a drunk."

"Before or after you killed him?"

Tai made a face of mock disgust. "Shut up, Matt. I don't kill, you know that. He was passed out already. No harm done."

Daisuke eagerly reached towards Tai and the brunette handed the bottle over. Matt glared at Dai as he too took a swig and then grinned to himself as he passed it back to Tai. He caught Matt's eye and flinched.

"What?"

Matt shook his head at them and walked on ahead of them.

"What?" Dai called again after him.

Tai slipped an arm around his shoulders, whispering something to him, and the smaller boy giggled. Tai led him down the street in the opposite direction of where Matt was walking. Matt continued on, grumbling about them revealing themselves and getting killed one day.

When he finally looked up from where he was walking, he realized he was at the elder vampires' place. He wondered briefly if they would mind him dropping by, but then his stomach rumbled and he rested his hand over it thoughtfully. It had been awhile since he had fed last. He made his decision and went up to the steps of the building.

The same red-haired kid with one blue eye and one green from before hissed at him, so he turned and looked the boy right in the eye and hissed back, as fiercely as he could. He smiled to himself when the boy backed off, his eyes narrowing in suspicion, and continued on into the building.

He passed an office and gently tapped on the door of the second office, waiting a while before he heard Sirius call his usual, "Come in."

He slowly stepped into the room and smiled slightly at Sirius, who was writing something on some papers. Sirius glanced up and smiled at him.

"Hello, Matt. More trouble? I surely hope not. Today's been a good day. Cyrus only dropped the coffee once, and it was on Rufus, not on me, and the plants are actually showing signs of living."

Matt laughed a little and shifted from one foot to the other. Sirius stopped smiling and looked him over carefully. "Is there something wrong? Would you like to sit down?"

Matt dropped the fake smile and sighed, plopping down on a chair and running a hand through his hair. "They're getting even more wild. I don't know how much longer I can put up with them. Right now they're off somewhere drinking, and I'm beginning to think they're forgetting the acts of respect they've shown me in the past."

Sirius nodded slowly. "You want to do a renewal of the acknowledging of your being leader."

Matt took a second to decide that was a statement, not a question, and he nodded. Sirius lowered his pen and folded his arms on top of his desk, leaning towards Matt a bit. "Do you really think this is necessary?"

Matt looked him in the eye. "I saw a feral gleam in Tai's eye tonight. I haven't seen that gleam in eighty years, and I can tell you, it's the same as before. I don't want Tai to turn wild again. You remember what happened last time."

Sirius sighed and ran his hand through his hair. "If you're sure about this, then I can arrange a ceremony, no problem. I will make sure that Rufus and Cyrus attend, and I will surely be there, and maybe I can get some more higher vampires to watch, but I'm not making any promises."

Matt nodded gratefully. "That's more than enough."

He reached over Sirius's desk and shook the elder's hand, then stood from his seat and stayed obediently still. He waited until Sirius could tell him he could leave before moving out of his spot and towards the door.

As he reached the door, Sirius called his name, and he turned to look at him. Sirius smiled at him, folding his hands on the desk.

"You do still want to be the leader, don't you?"

"Yes, I do."

Sirius nodded and waved his hand. "Well, go on. Go and find them, and report back here with them tomorrow. We'll take you to where the procession will be held. If they don't want to attend, tell me, and I'll send Rufus after them."

Matt nodded. "Thank you."

"No problemo," Sirius smirked, looking more like a teenage boy than a respected elder vampire.

Matt turned and walked out the door, closing it behind him.

~ ~ ~ ~

A/N: Well, I've got that done. Good thing, too. It was getting on my nerves that I hadn't even started it. Anyways, now we have some questions to answer. What did Tai do eighty years ago that was so bad? What is this procession that Sirius and Matt were talking about? How will Tai and Dai respond to it? Find out in the next chapter. Review, please.