I remember the moment I first laid eyes on him. At first, I believed him to be an angel, as no earthly being or demonic creature could ever possess his ethereal beauty. Yet, as the butterknife sank into the flesh of my arm, I came to realize that this boy, if he was an angel, was one who had fallen out of the grace of God. Abandoned by his own kind due to circumstances he had no control of and hated by a brother he had done nothing but loved. As the years passed, my gaze continued to linger on the boy longer than what was appropriate for someone who was supposed to hate him. Through my observations, I had soon discovered that despite the horrors of his past, this boy possessed a raging fire in his eyes that would never be tamed and that would never go out. That fire alone told me that this disgraced angel would never be broken, regardless of what hunters and vampires alike believed he could be.
He was barely sixteen when the first seeds of desire for more than his blood were planted within me. He had just returned from a mission still smelling like blood, and I could feel the thirst radiating off him, making the process of getting him to drink my blood to relieve his pain much smoother than previous attempts. He had been undressing in his bathroom and had stripped down to just his pants when I walked in. All it took was a moment for him to go from staring at my neck in hunger to burying his fangs in my neck. As he pressed his torso harder against mine, I was able to feel the defined muscles of his abdomen and biceps. All it took was a breathy sigh of relief for me to lift him up onto the counter. He immediately retracted his fangs from my neck and pulled back to look me in the eyes, resting his forehead against mine and wrapping his legs around my waist. I discovered that evening that nothing felt more right than his lips on mine.
It was not even a year later, in the early moments of twilight after his seventeenth birthday, that he lay breathlessly on top of me in an unmade bed as I traced mindless patterns onto his naked back. I felt his fingertips gently graze my cheek, his lips pressing into the area directly below my ear as he whispered the three words that would seal my fate.
He is a fallen angel. He is the one who does not fear the monster but instead loves it as much as he loves the man it guards. He is the one that allows me to indulge in every primal, pureblood desire that I harbor towards him. He listens to my thoughts, the ones that I would never dare utter to another soul. He is the only one who can put me in place, the one who could not care less the status I was born. He is the one that allows me to embrace him, permits me to show vulnerability, and not use it against me. He is my home, my safe place to return when the world tries to rid itself of me. He is the one I love most, the one I hold dear above all else. He is my everything, my fierce hunter. He is my Zero Kiryu.
My Salvation.