A/N-Um, yeah, a note about Ronin referring to his mentor as "Master"…well, think that as in "master/apprentice" relationship. It's only the effect of too many Rurouni Kenshin fanfics, I assure you. Anyway it's merely a respectful term for "teacher"—don't take it the wrong way, like Toklata.

Chapter Eight: Failed Student

"Ro! Run, Ro!"

"I can't…I can't leave you! That's downright disloyalty-"

Bang!

"Master!"

Random, disconnected thoughts.

Her blood looks black in the darkness—Don't let her die, please gods—Then what will I do—Jaden, master, mentor, sire, they all mean the same thing to me—they're all the same person—she can't die—that man, he has a stake—what, shattering her wrist wasn't good enough—he's going to kill her—

Blackness.

0o0o0

Then, there was Toklata.

She leaned into Ronin's face, her hair tickling his nose. She looked concerned, maybe even a bit scared, but her eyes were calm, mature pools of cerulean. Just the sight was reassuring.

"Tell me," she said, sitting almost comically upon his chest. "Do you have nightmares?

Ronin guessed that Toklata was already well aware of the true answer, and was simply testing him to find out how truthful he was. He decided not to bother with the answer, and to instead interrogate her right back, pushing her off of his chest.

"What did I say?" he asked. There wasn't any immediate answer, so he asked again, sternly this time. "It's really important that I know what I said, Toklata. What did I say?"

She looked into his amber eyes, biting her bottom lip as if she were trying to remember something that happened years before. Finally she opened her mouth to speak, but her words came out confused and jumbled.

"I don't understand it, Ronin. You're no slave. So why in the world do you—no—why in the world did you have a master?"

It took Ronin a minute to figure out what she was gibbering on about, before locking onto the fact that "master" was a fairly old term. It was easy to interpret the wrong way. Hell, a lot of vampires hadn't even understood why Jaden had insisted her call her that, so why would he have expected Toklata to understand?

Of course he hadn't even known what he had said, so it's not as if he could have planned a lesson ahead. He hadn't had these dreams—these nightmares—in quite a while. A decade, at the very least.

Wait, Ronin's mind snapped at him. You've managed to keep these away for…a decade! Where have you been, buddy? I'm surprised you didn't commit suicide. What brought you back?

He focused on Toklata, who had dropped her gaze and had apparently found something very interesting on her flip-flops to stare at.

Ah. I see. You let her sleep on your cloak, though?

Huh?

Your cloak, she's using it as a blanket.

"Hey, you brat! Get off that, you're getting it all dirty!"

"Answer me then!" Her willful eyes once again locked onto his own. They had an almost skeptical look.

"Um…I said something about Master, then? Rest her soul."

"Her?"

Now she was just being annoying again. "Yes," Ronin sighed. "And she wasn't a slave driver, she was my mentor, my teacher. Her name was Jaden Takoda."

"Takoda," Toklata echoed, still clutching Ronin's dirtied cloak so hard that her knuckles were white. "That's your last name, too."

"That's right. I took her last name and changed my name from Roden to Ronin when she…died."

She looked puzzled, as if Ronin had suddenly declared he was the Queen of Switzerland and had began river dancing. "Only two letters changed! What's the point of changing it at all!"

"There's a hell of a lot more to a name than you'd know," he replied calmly. "Roden simply means 'red valley'. That doesn't say a thing about me."

"Then…what does Ronin mean?"

He looked away from her, unsheathing his sword and examining it carefully. Toklata was about to give up and drop the whole subject of the nightmares when he muttered his name's meaning.

"Ronin: masterless samurai; failed student."

There was a long, very uncomfortable silence. The air was so thick with tension; you could almost cut it with a knife. Toklata finally decided she just couldn't stand it anymore and bunched up Ronin's cloak in her arms.

"I'm going to go wash it, in that one stream. I'm missing school, so I think I'll feel better if I do some work."

"Yeah," was Ronin's half-hearted, weak-sounding reply. Now he knew. It did hurt to get your long-lost emotions back.