Disclaimer: Not mine.

A/n: Look--it lives!

DREAM OF FOREVER

soumanyon

Chapter 13

"Haido, you're such a little angel…" Tetsu purred happily, closing the door behind himself softly. I didn't move, didn't do anything to acknowledge his presence, but he smiled warmly at me nonetheless. I hadn't moved from where he'd left me several hours ago, which he seemed to like. He grinned at his own joke—after all; he'd been the one to suggest the wings on my back, and I had gotten them willingly, for him.

"I brought you food." He offered, inclining his head towards the closed door. "It's a little cold, but you must be hungry."

He frowned when I blinked blankly, "Haido, you can't keep doing this." He reasoned, the tiniest bit of impatience slipping into his voice.

The hell I can't. I did last time, until I passed out and they had had to sedate me to keep an IV in me, otherwise I kept pulling it out. Vampires can go a while without feeding, but we weaken like any animal. Unlike animals, though, we don't die. At least, I had never heard of it. Whenever I was weak enough to pass out, Tetsu would have them funnel blood into me intravenously. He kept delaying what appeared now to be inevitable.

I don't know how long it had been since I had first fallen for Tetsu's trick in the bar and gotten taken by his gang to be bled for the idiots who wanted to vampires. But because of the lack of any noticeable change in their status, at least from where I stood, it was obvious that their greed had come back to bite them in the ass. You'd think it'd be obvious to them that vampires aren't all powerful if they could catch one and keep it as a pet.

They had stopped bleeding me some time ago. I'd be more sure of time if I even knew how long I had been captured for, but with passing out and the lack of any sort of windows in Tetsu's rooms, I had no way to judge time.

"Haido. Haido? Are you listening to me?" he called impatiently. My gaze refocused on him expressionlessly.

"It's been almost two weeks again, Haido. You can't keep doing this." He sighed at my stubbornness. "What do you want, Haido? I want you to be happy, you know that." Happiness of the kind that he approved, of course.

What did I want? To live? I didn't really care anymore. It didn't look as if I'd be ever getting out of the situation I'd gotten myself into. And to be perfectly honest with myself, there wasn't anything left for me in my old life?

Shinji hated me. Son hated me. Yi-Che was terrified of me. Toshi was dead.

And Sho. Sho hated me. He'd probably be terrified of me, too.

The fragile, beautiful thing that we had had for the shortest time was irretrievably lost, and having loved, I didn't think I'd be able to survive returning and seeing for myself the depth of Sho's hate. It was better not to know. It was better not ever to know.

Death seemed like the best option. But even that was denied me. Tetsu couldn't understand why I wanted to die, and damned if I'd tell him everything that had happened since I had chosen Luka over him, all those years ago.

Luka, who had been my best friend.

Tetsu and I had grown up together. We had been typical best friends; we cheated in school together, started a garage rock band, and checked out girls. We were perfectly comfortable with each other, so I guess it shouldn't have been a surprise when we realized that neither of us really enjoyed the checking-out-girls part of our time together.

What followed was a strange, awkward relationship. We were best friends, then we were lovers, but the comfortable companionship from one didn't carry over to the other. Everything was always so dramatic between us. Nothing was ever peaceful, even though Tetsu had always been regarded as a level-headed, soft-spoken good boy.

Everything was always attributed to me, the outcast, moody boy who sketched his time away, dreaming of becoming an artist. I was the one they frowned upon, and Tetsu's parents were sure I had something to do with his disappearance. No one believed that I was just as stunned as everyone else when Tetsu just didn't go home one night.

Later, I had found out the vague story: that Tetsu had bumped into a vampire, who had turned him into a vampire. I never found out the details of just what happened, or of the years when he just disappeared. Everyone thought he had died. Or run away. Eventually, we moved past it, but it left me more of a recluse, and completely lost and broken-hearted.

My last year of school, there was a transfer student. He was quiet, level-headed, and soft-spoken, just as Tetsu had been, and even more shy. Eventually, as the two loners, we ended up becoming friends.

Luka reminded me so much of Tetsu, but he was even more closed off, which worked out, because after Tetsu disappeared, I had never really opened up to anyone else.

Luka and I were never anything more than friends. The tension was there, but I held back, still dwelling on Tetsu.

Then, that summer, my concerns were answered in a backwards kind of way. Tetsu returned.

It was the strangest thing, to walk into my room and have my best friend who had been missing for years, perched on my bed, sorting through my CD collection as if nothing had happened.

And that's what he tried to do. He tried to pretend, as hard as he could, that everything was as it had been before he had disappeared. But it wasn't. He was a vampire.

But even more than that, it was the change in his personality that threw me the most off balance. My shy, sweet Tetsu was gone, and in his place was someone who looked and sounded like him, but how he acted, everything about it, wasn't quite right. He was suddenly loud, and outgoing, and making plans for us to do the same things we'd done as kids.

He didn't take into account that my life hadn't been suspended by his disappearance. I hadn't gotten over it, but I was starting to move on. I had a new friend—Luka.

For the longest time, my own wrenching guilt that I had somewhat accepted his disappearance as permanent made me play along. I went along with whatever he said.

In those few months, I was thankful a thousand times over for my long hair. It covered up most of the puncture wounds on my neck. At first, it had only been a few accidental tastes that had built up his obsession with my blood, and I couldn't deny him after that. After all, I had plenty of it, and he was a vampire. It was his nature, and it beat the alternative of the risks of making him hunt other people.

Not everyone took his changes as well as me. My parents finally saw through our "friendship," and declared him a bad influence. They forbid me to see him anymore. Two days later, they were dead.

It was only then that I had realized just how much Tetsu had changed. I kept making excuses for his behavior, but walking into my kitchen and finding the slumped bodies of my parents at the breakfast table, murdered just after I left for school, was a relentless, horrible nightmare.

After that, I disappeared, too. He wanted me to go with him, so I did—left everything behind, including Luka, and took a new name. We left before my parents' funeral. But before we left, he did one more thing that convinced me that my Tetsu was completely gone from this shell of him: he damned me.

He asked me if I wanted to be like him, to be with him forever. I agreed without thinking. Tetsu was the only thing in my world. I hadn't seen Luka except for at school in the months of Tetsu's return. Tetsu was all I had left, and I clung to him. At least he accepted me knowing everything about me, and I would've done anything to keep him.

Looking back, loneliness seems like a pretty pathetic reason to damn your soul to hell for eternity. But at the time, it seemed like a good idea; the only choice.

So I spent my life with Tetsu. We moved around all the time, visiting the vampire friends he'd acquired in his missing years, introducing me to vampire culture. The more I saw of it, the more I hated it—they were cruel, they were evil. Or maybe those were just Tetsu's selected company.

After years of living as the toy Tetsu dragged along behind him, I grew tired of it. What love there had once been between us was long gone. He took a different lover every night, and I had lost interest in life. I tried to leave him so many times, but could never make myself do it until finally, we returned home.

I didn't even pack a bag, just looked up Luka, who amazingly still lived there, and stumbled my way to his apartment.

It was about three in the morning when I pushed his doorbell, ringing it impatiently, checking behind me every few seconds, in case Tetsu had already realized what I had done. I didn't think he would, though—he had seemed very concentrated on seducing his flavor of the night. I never understood why he liked to play with his prey beforehand.

After what seemed like an eternity, I finally heard shuffling behind the door before it creaked open a few inches, stopped by the chain. Luka, hair tousled from sleep and blinking owlishly, inquired politely who I was, but he was only about half-way through the question before his eyes suddenly lost all their sleepiness and snapped open wide.

He had choked out my name, not believing that this was real after all this time. I was having plenty of trouble coming to terms with it myself. I had spent more than a decade with Tetsu already? It must have been. Luka looked much the worse for wear, at whatever age he had reached since I had been gone.

I had intended to crash with him, but it wasn't as if either of us could've really gone to sleep, so the entire story spilled out over coffee. He refused to give me anything alcoholic. Even though he knew logically that I was just as old as he was, one of the things with being a vampire is that I still looked exactly like I did when he had last seen me, back when we were in school.

It was amazing, but he accepted me back without question. With Luka, I rediscovered true friendship and realized how my life with Tetsu was nothing more than existence.

But then everything went downhill again when Tetsu hunted me down and almost killed Luka. I hadn't escaped unscathed either. When I tried to defend Luka, Tetsu had driven his knife to the hilt into my back, right in the middle of a wing. Years later, that was exactly where he had shot me when he had tracked me down again, this time with Sho. I hadn't believed it was him then; I had always been fond of denial.

It was a terrible fight, but in the end, I finally broke things off with Tetsu, but nothing was clean and tidy. Luka, my only friend, was dying, and faced with the danger of being alone again, I repeated my ultimate mistake, except this time, the horror was inflicted on my best friend.

I turned Luka into a vampire.

But he couldn't deal with it. He lasted barely a few months before he couldn't stand the self-loathing anymore. This time, rift that my selfishness had created between us was irreparable.

"Luka, what will I do without you?"

"Find another 'friend.'"

Those words echoed in my mind ironically. Luka was never bitter about it, but it was clear that he expected that I would, in my selfishness, turn any friend that I made into a vampire, for fear of losing them to mortality. Luka wasn't bitter, but his disappointment and resigned acceptance of my failings boiled the guilt in me, and I vowed to him that I would never make that mistake again. He just chuckled, turning away from me towards the tide line, leaving me in the overshadowing, sheltering rocks, alone again.

The memory of his back as he slowly walked away from me abruptly cut away to the present as I was shaken roughly by a bruising grip on my shoulders.

"Stop it!" Tetsu hissed, "you're thinking about him again, aren't you? Even after he left you?" he cocked his head with a mocking, knowing smirk, "Even after he chose death rather than life with you? Poor Haido, there's hell to pay for our choices, you see?"

I looked away, trying desperately to block out his words, but it was useless. He was right. It is hell to pay for our choices.

tbc...

More A/n: Well now, that there's my whole invented backstory for Kei. If you tilt your head sideways and squint a little, it could almost make sense. I changed my original plans a bit... I was going to make it more as if Hyde were realperson-Hyde, and Tetsu was realpersonbutslightlybastardized-Tetsu, but for caution's sake (cuz I don't want to get booted) their pre-Moon Child lives now bear very little resemblance to real-Hyde and real-Tetsu. So now the whole name-change thing is kinda pointless... Damn rules.

Aaaaaand, wow...there were a lot of reviewers! Hopefully you haven't all given up on me yet!!

YaoiKitty, Sparky the Yaoi Fairy, Emiri-chan, MinuMiro, Esuka, Aoi.Shu (to whom I still owe a fic), Essenity, Phaenilix, Rikke Leonhart, Empathic Life, Rid, The Kaizeress, amakasu toko, Kitsuri-chan, rubics, Cyndi Black, goldfishlover73, maiastar, lovergirl, Kadaj Souba, emikoxchan, Wilya, Riku Hikari Neo, nejitenlee13, gray.blob, Yami Maleci, Daggergal