Kaname stood and turned to face the new torment his subconscious had decided to visit upon him hoping that he was wrong about her identity: he wasn't. Standing there was the woman that he had loved and had sacrificed herself in his place all those years ago. Of all the people from his past that his mind could conjure why had it chosen her: she to whom he owed his very existence? The injustice of it made him want to scream his frustration to the heavens. Instead he took a deep breath and tried to sound as though he wasn't haunted by the memory of her death.
"I disagree," Kaname said calmly. "I know love and I know the sacrifices it sometimes requires us to make."
"What do you know of sacrifice?" She demanded bitterly. "I gave my life so that you might live and help protect the humans from us. And what have you done with the life that I gave you? Have you actually lived it? No. The first chance you got, you went into hibernation."
"Because I missed you!" he argued. "I couldn't stand to live in a world that didn't have you in it. Did you ever consider that!? Did it occur to you that I would have rather died that lived without you? Did you even think to ask me?"
"Why would I have?" she asked her pale eyes cold. "We both know that you are too much of a coward to give your life for another. Especially another than you had never met. One of us needed to do it and I knew that you were too weak to."
"I would have done it," he whispered emotion filling is voice again. Her words hurt him. Even though he knew that he was a coward the fact that anyone else did was too much. "I never meant for you to do it. If I had known that you would have . . . I never would have done all those experiments in the first place."
"See," she scoffed, "that is exactly what I am talking about. You are too weak to make the hard choices. If you were actually strong you would have followed me when you were tired of living rather than hibernating as you did. You should have walked right into the association and offered to make more hunters before throwing your heart in to join mine."
"Perhaps," Kaname agreed. "But I felt that it would lessen your sacrifice if I did."
"You have always had an answer for everything. Have you not?" she sneered.
"Yes," his mother agreed. Kaname looked between the two women he had loved before they died and felt his heart sink. He now understood a little of how Rido had felt being ganged up on by two purebloods. Though these two were not attempting to kill him physically, the way they brought all his darkest fears about himself to light made him wish they were.
"Even when he was a child," his mother continued, "If anything ever went wrong he had a way to explain it that made him look like he was not at fault. I should have known then what he was."
"A vampire?" the Ancestress suggested.
"No," a third voice—this one male—said. "A sociopath. Just like me."
ooOO88OOoo
After Zero and Seiren had left the clearing, they had wandered in the woods for a while with Seiren simply following where Zero led. He wanted to ask her why she was behaving like she was. This subservient and opinion-less Seiren was not what Zero was used to seeing—even when she was deferring to Kaname she still took decisive action at times without waiting for instructions.
"Let's go this way," he suggested preparing to take a random turn. He knew that he should have started searching in a grid pattern of some kind, but his worry for Yuuki—and by extension Kaname—drove all thoughts of a logical pattern from his head and lead to the kind of searching he knew was likely to fail, but he couldn't bring himself to retrace his steps and lose time that way.
Seiren nodded so Zero started off in the way he had suggested. He sighed wishing that she would help him somehow. Blundering around in the woods was something he could do alone. He figured that as a higher ranking vampire, her senses were probably sharper than his own. There had to be something else she could do to help other than just following him around in his blind search. When her hand grabbed his arm, he had a flash of fear that she had somehow heard his inner tirade and turned to face her with his violet eyes wide in shock and an apology ready on his tongue.
But she wasn't looking at him. Her eyes were closed and she had her head raised as though she were attempting to smell something on the still air. Apparently she found whatever scent she was looking for because when she looked back at him her eyes had lost the flat look they had had in exchange for their usual life and there was a smile on her face.
"This way," she said before jogging off in the opposite direction he had suggested without releasing his arm causing Zero to have to run to keep up with her.
"Are you sure?" Zero asked a little breathlessly as he attempted to keep pace with her rather than allow her to dislocate his shoulder.
She glanced over her shoulder at him, her smile smug. "I'm sure," she replied. Seeing his discomfort at the way she was pulling him along, she released his arm and slowed her pace a bit. It surprised her that she could run faster than he could when he could keep up with her—and was actually a little faster than her—at combat maneuvers. But I suppose hunters don't run from anything, do they, she thought with a bitter laugh.
"What's funny?" Zero asked. While he was glad that she was behaving more normally again, he was worried that it wouldn't take much to push her back to the withdrawn state she had been in moments before.
"Absolutely nothing," she replied with a smile. His face showed the confusion he was feeling. That was one thing she liked about Zero, once you got to know him the emotions he felt were right there for you to see. You never really had to guess what he was feeling. Why he was feeling it was another matter, but he would usually tell her if she asked.
"Then why were you laughing?" he asked. Seiren sighed. She didn't want to tell him the truth and she didn't want to lie, not about something so small. Thankfully she was spared from doing either since they had broken through the forest and into a clearing. And there, leaning against a tree, were the sleeping forms of Kaname and Yuuki.
ooOO88OOoo
"I am nothing like you," Kaname snarled turning to face the newest addition to the pick-on-Kaname convention. "How dare you say that? You, who torture others for your own amusement, even your own family."
"And you don't?" Rido demanded. "I seem to recall a little incident where you and Sara tortured me."
"That was not the same thing," Kaname spat. "And you know it. That was retribution, not amusement."
"really?" Rido asked examining his fingernails as though the conversation bored him. "You seemed to take a lot of enjoyment from something that was "retribution." I'll let you in on a little secret, Kaname. Deep down, you and me, we're a lot alike. Even she sees it. It wasn't your appearance she was reacting to today: It was your soul."
"You're wrong," Kaname said, though his words lacked conviction since he had thought the same thing earlier when Yuuki had pointed out his callousness towards the deaths of the senate. "I would never kill her if she decided that she loved another more than she loved me. Unlike you."
"I never intended to kill Juuri," Rido snapped his mismatched eyes blazing. "I just wanted to eliminate the competition for her love."
"Your brother and your niece?" Kaname scoffed. It was easier for him to remain normal when he was attacking the poor choices of others rather than being attacked for his own. "Because that is much nobler thing that killing her. How did you expect her to love you after you killed her husband and children?"
"At least I was willing to get my hands dirty," Rido sneered. "I didn't expect someone else to kill the man that was in my way and in the process harm the woman I loved."
"No, you killed her," Kaname replied sadness washing through him anew from the death of Juuri and Haruka.
"Not I, Kaname. You," Rido accused. "You knew what she planned to do and you didn't stop her. Even though you were in the body of a child your powers had awoken, as evidenced by the fact that you destroyed me. But instead you allowed Haruka to face me and be killed and for Juuri to sacrifice herself for Yuuki; effectively eliminating all the competition for her love and allowing you to take it all. You could have prevented all of this from happening if you weren't a purely selfish being."
"You're wrong," Kaname said feeling the color drain from his face at the accusation that he had tortured himself with the night of their death. "I couldn't have killed you."
"Who said you needed to kill me?" Rido retorted. "In the end you effectively destroyed me. It took me ten years to come back. If you had done that in the first place, you and Juuri and Haruka and Yuuki would be a happy family right now. Hell, you might even have another sibling by now.
"But instead, it is just you and Yuuki, the last of the Kurans, poised to take the throne of the vampire world. That is, if there's a vampire world left once the hunters get through with it. But population control and all of that. Anyway, now the two of you are alone and she needs you. How can you tell me that you didn't orchestrate it that way?"
"I would never have done that to her," Kaname said. "I love her, I have ever since she was born. Everything I have done since then was for her. I have tried to make our world safe enough for her to live in it rather than be locked up her entire life."
"And you've done it through the sacrifices of others," the Ancestress accused. "Others like me. What have you ever given up to accomplish your goals?"
"I gave up you," he replied.
"You are wrong. I gave up myself," she said. "And you truly lost nothing. You replaced me. And I can understand that, she is pretty."
"I did not replace you," Kaname breathed. "Yes, I moved on. But I did not replace you. What would you have had me do? Spend the rest of my life miserable because you were gone. I did that for 10,000 years! Are you really so petty that you will fault me for finding happiness after that much time."
"It just shows that you never cared," she replied. "I was just another pawn in your schemes. If you had really loved me you would have died rather than live without me."
"That's not love. It's obsession," Kaname replied shaking his head sadly.
"Much like your obsession with Yuuki?" Rido added snidely. "What was it you said? Something about everything you've done being for her. Sounds like an obsession to me."
"It's not," Kaname declared. "this is different."
"Everything is always "different" because it's you is it not?" his mother asked. "It was the same when you were a child. Things that most people know are wrong were fine for you to do: like sucking the life out of your siblings for your own sustinacne. How did you justify that?"
"They weren't actually harmed," Kaname said, his voice and eyes begging her to understand. "I had to do it to live."
"Then you should have died," his mother yelled. "The fact that you could not live without taking from others should have been your first sign that you were not meant to live. But you selfishly clung to life and you have done it for ages. You still continue to live at the expense of others. Do you honestly think that the hunters would continue the war if you were dead? Through your death you would save many lives, including Yuuki's. Should you not give yourself to them? Is your life worth all the deaths that will happen in a vain attempt to salvage it? I know what my son would do. But you, Kaname, what will you do?" When she had finished speaking, she began to fade before she disappeared into nothingness, though the feel of her eyes remained on Kaname.
"I know what I would do, as do you," the Ancestress said before she too disappeared."But what will you chose, Kaname?"
"Don't listen to them," Rido replied. "They're different from us. You and me, we're survivors." With a final smile at Kaname, Rido disappeared like the women before him.
Once they were gone, Kaname sunk to his knees with his head in his hands. They can't be right about me. I'm not the way they say I am. I'm not weak or a coward. I have many flaws but that is not one of them, he thought desperately. They can't be right. No matter how many times he repeated it, he could seem to convince himself of it. Hearing things like that from people that had looked up to, like his mother and his first love, made them sting worse than he had though it possible for words to hurt. And hearing Rido, the man he hated above all others, agreeing with them about him. He just couldn't process it. But despite all his thoughts otherwise, one though was louder than the others and refusing to be silenced: what if they were right?
ooOO88OOoo
Well, there we are Ya'll another chapter down :). I hope you enjoyed it. And as usually, don't worry all will eventually be explained. As always thank you for reading this chapter and thank you in advance for your reviews.
Thank you to everyone who read the last chapter or added this story or me to your favorites or alerts :) It really does make my day.
And a special thank you to:
Fredombutterfly: I'm sorry it was so short, but I do have a longer one up this week :) and thank you for being review 200. There should be a PM in your box now.
Sy: Here we are, a new update for you. I'm sorry this one doesn't answer all the questions yet.
BookWormMissy: You're welcome and thank you for reviewing again. And you'll just have to keep reading to find out muhahahahahhahahaha! And thank you very much! I love hearing that people like my writing.
Akira91: Thank you and don't worry, you can always be number 300 (maybe, I'm not sure it'll get that many)
God of all: Thank you, and here's a continuation.
Happygolucky: Thank you so much! I always love hearing that people enjoy my efforts. Hopefully you like the rest of the story as much as you have liked it so far.
Wow: Thank you! I'm glad that you enjoy it.
ShioriBunny: I'm sorry I don't update faster. I do try to get a new one out every Friday before $ but that doesn't always happen (this is US central time). But I am glad that you love the story :)
Elliot Rose: Wow you are a prolific reviewer! I love it! Thank you so much. I love to see what people think at the end of each chapter. I try to keep people in character, at least at the beginning of a story because the events of the story may make that impossible in the end. And I'm glad that you liked the sword idea :). Kaname is one of my favorites as well . . . or at least in the anime and early manga, the latest chapters he's kinda meh. And I tried to make it realistic. I hate reading stories (even about supernatural things) where there are moments of "there is no way that could happen" that shock you out of the story. And I'm sorry that it is keeping you from sleeping that was never my intent :( other than that, I am glad that you are enjoying my take on characters and situations. I really do love hearing that people have enjoyed my writing.
KUAKIxAMU: thank you :)