A/N: Sorry, I thought I had posted this chapter like a week ago. I had a lot of trouble bridging the gap between ch. 7 and ch. 9 in terms of plot structure, so it took me a while to figure out what I wanted to reveal and how I was going to start pulling all the loose ends back together. Hopefully I can get back on track with the next chapter. And thanks for being so patient; grad school is both exhausting and time-consuming!

~Nique

Ch. 08: A New Hypothesis

After the incident in the lab, Masumi caught Reiji staring at her more and more. He always had a strange expression on his face, the same one he wore when trying to determine what his experiment would reveal. It deeply unsettled Masumi. Her chest ached when he turned away, and she couldn't understand her own attraction to him. The way she always wanted him to look at her, to pay attention to only her, to correct her or engage with her in some way. What did his cryptic look mean?

In the meantime, Reiji continued to have Masumi assist him in the lab as he carried out a new experiment. "This one cannot move forward without your assistance, so I expect prompt and proper attendance to this matter whenever you are not in class or studying. It will consume every leisure moment I have allowed you so far, so prepare yourself," he told Masumi, who had to resist the urge to roll her eyes. Leisure moments? Since when do I have those?

Feeling so emotionally off-balance, Masumi had returned to her former behavior. The snark and obvious defiance she showed Reiji was less than she'd displayed before the incident with Suki, but effective enough to irritate the young head-of-household. But uncharacteristically, he'd let her disrespect slide on several occasions. When he appeared outside the door to her room while she dressed one morning, he merely paused as she kicked the door shut in his face, before he calmly knocked and then opened it again. And the next day, when she cut him off in the middle of a lecture with a sarcastic comment, he merely pushed his glasses up his nose, said "Indeed," and strode out of the room. It was... beyond strange.

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Masumi was severely trying his patience. Reiji regretted the incident with her in the lab, as it left her unable to complete the delicate experiments for that week, but at the same time, she had afforded him a new project to explore, which he was taking on with extreme interest.

He is not an idiot. He did this to her so she would prove herself to me, prove herself worthy of becoming my bride, I'm certain of it, Reiji thought to himself as he lectured her about misarranging the dinner settings. When she interrupted him to fire back a snarky retort, he forgot himself for a moment, and said the thing in his mind aloud: "Indeed." Slightly taken aback at this development, he left her without finishing his oration, and went to find a quieter place to think (Ayato was shouting out Yui's name throughout the house as he sought her for an after-dinner snack, and the noise was intolerable to the older brother).

Once in his study, Reiji sat in his large armchair, deep in thought. It is difficult to imagine such an unruly and bothersome woman as MY mate, but if His pattern holds, that is what she is undoubtedly meant to be... He sent her to me with specific instructions. But I cannot fathom this course of action. What does it behoove Him to recommend her to me already broken? He is too far above insults for this to merely be one... Strange, indeed.

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Masumi didn't understand what Reiji was working on with his most recent experiments, which was odd, considering she assisted him in every facet and should be able to gather, by matter of observation and connection, what hypothesis he had. Yet this new project was so different from all of the ones he'd begun since Masumi had arrived. Not really chemistry, their current course of study involved... human biology. Why would Reiji be interested in something like how a human's brain responds to specific stimuli?

She didn't get it, but she was fascinated nonetheless, and despite her complicated feelings about her lab "partner," she found herself looking forward to learning from his exploration. They began by collecting data concerning what scientists and doctors knew so far about sensory receptors in the brain, and how they could be altered by external forces. Sometimes something ingested caused the neuropathways to malfunction, and fail to send signals to the brain. Sometimes it was a traumatic injury, like a severing of the spinal cord and subsequent total or partial paralysis. In that case, though, there were many other contributing factors (it wasn't just the patient's senses which were altered or damaged, but also a skeletomuscular inability to move those remaining, unresponsive parts of their bodies), so Reiji ruled that out as largely unhelpful. They finally settled on the latest news, concerning certain rare diseases which might have the effect of "turning off" a person's senses because of prolonged exposure to that stimuli. But the research had not yet been done on how that occurred physiologically and/or psychologically. So they were stuck. And without any test subjects she knew of, they couldn't move forward any further.

"Ne, Reiji-san, do you have a bunch of human hostages you're hiding in the dungeon? Are you going to use them like lab rats? 'Cause otherwise I don't think we-" Masumi began, her tone teasingly mutinous.

"What I have asked you to do does not require you to think, Miss Masumi, merely to obey," Reiji answered, never looking up from the article he was reading. She pouted (It isn't any fun when he doesn't respond, she thought) and went back to cataloguing the articles they'd pulled off the internet... mostly from private and high-ranking government sites, too. This way, they could find them again should they need to reference anything. Silence reigned in the lab again.

Masumi heard his glasses hit the table a fraction of a second before he stood behind her, looming with an almost suffocating presence. Masumi spun around to face the vampire prince, who was looking down at her intently. Leaning forward, he used his arms to cage her in against the table. His face drew nearer and nearer to hers, and Masumi felt her heart begin to beat a bit faster. She was keenly aware of the sense of deja vu, and wondered if this interaction would again result in her injury. His voice was low when he spoke, but there was something almost hypnotic about how his red eyes held hers, and she only vaguely heard herself respond.

"Masumi-san, you never finished your story, and I insist you do so now. What did He do when he came to visit you in the hospital? What did he say? I need every detail..." he asked.

"W-why? I don't-" she stammered, her breath coming in short gasps. It was like her brain was short circuiting, blocking out everything that wasn't his eyes and his voice and his body, so close to hers. His sharp cheekbones, his lips, the way his black hair fell over his face like a dark curtain...

"Answer me, Masumi," he commanded, his voice deep and somehow thrilling. Masumi noted the lack of an honorific and a shiver ran down her spine. Her name coming from his lips felt so... familiar. Personal. Intimate. Her cheeks flamed with a bright blush. She swallowed.

"He-he just... asked me how I felt. I already knew who he was, so we skipped the pleasantries. He said... he said he had been a friend of my father's, and that he wanted to do something for me as a token of that friendship..." she trailed off as her pupils dilated. Reiji had leaned in even further, and his face was so close to hers she was positive they were just exchanging the air in that small space.

"Go on," he prompted. She licked her lips and spoke again:

"He said I hadn't seen the best scientists in the world, and that medicine was often behind the cutting-edge science. He would 'give me a chance' if I agreed to live here, to work with you... But I also made him promise me my safety. If I was going to live in a house full of vampires, I needed some sort of reassurance..." At this, Reiji smiled.

"Smart girl," he murmured. Masumi's blush spread down her chest and up to the tips of her ears. He made a mental note. Mmm, so praise does it for her? What a lewd woman. "Did he give you anything? Touch you?" Reiji asked, his eyes narrowing.

"Uhm... He k-kissed my hand when we first met, and he shook it when we'd made a deal. He left a card in that hand and disappeared. After that I fell back asleep from exhaustion and the next morning I was... cured," she finished. Her eyes moved warily over his face as he absorbed all this information. She didn't like that her body was betraying her so obviously, and she didn't know what Reiji was thinking, what he was going to do to her. She felt like a cornered cat, hackles raised. Yeah but what kind of cat gets off on being cornered? she asked herself sardonically.

Reiji straightened and dropped his arms. "I see." He moved back to where he'd been reading, put his glasses back on, and resumed his study.

"You may go, for now, Miss Masumi," he told her with disinterest. Flustered and more than a little annoyed, Masumi bowed and excused herself from the room, heading toward the bathroom. Time for a nice cold shower.

As she stood under the spray, she wondered (finally), Why did he want to know about how I met his father? If he'd touched me? Strange...

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Reiji closed the journal he'd been reading when he heard the door shut. Taking out a plain notebook from among the many lining his shelves, he made a few notes and then started a new line. In all caps, he wrote,

HYPOTHESIS: HE (Ugh, he couldn't even write that man's name) used skin to skin contact to introduce a regenerative substance into the subject's body, which cured her of her illness but induced loss of sense of pain. No other side effects indicated.

Then, beneath it,

UNKNOWN: Extent of sensory loss, chemical composition of substance introduced, motive.

"The next logical step is to devise an experiment which will divulge the extent to which she can or cannot experience pain," Reiji said aloud, smirking. He pushed his glasses up the bridge of his nose, with a devious grin.

This should be... quite enjoyable.

He couldn't have known then that it would ultimately be Suki who solved that mystery for him, or the price he'd have to pay for the information.