Part 2 - Unreasonable Reasons

Kaname stood.

"We should keep going. The night is half over, and we still have a ways to travel."

He paced down the road with Yuki trailing after him.

"So what's this plan you keep talking about?" said Yuki, when she had finally caught up to him.

"I'm afraid to tell you."

"Why?"

"You might hurt yourself trying to stop me."

"It's true."

"And I don't need your help. You've already played your part. This last stage is too risky. I can't let you get involved."

"I don't want you to leave me like Mother and Father did. Is that so wrong?"

"After all I've done to protect you, I couldn't allow you to put yourself at any further risk. I promised to protect you."

"And you have. I'm still alive. I'm still me. I came out without being eaten, or going mad. I came out almost the same Yuki I was before, if not a little stronger."

"I know what I'm doing. I won't let anything happen to you. Don't pry, and don't try to stop me."

"Or…?"

"Or you'll end up in danger. You don't need to sacrifice yourself. You are one of the people I intend to sacrifice my life to protect. You have to live on without me, or there would be very little reason for any of this."

"Okay," she said, "but can you at least tell me how much time we have before you…"

"Only a couple more centuries," he sighed.

"But that's… that's a lot of years! You said 'a couple more centuries' like you only have a few months to live."

"To our kind, it isn't very much time at all."

Yuki slowed her pace to contemplate this, and Kaname walked on ahead.

"If," she said, "If we were both human, we would probably get less than a century together before we grew old and died."

"But we're not human. I never have been. Technically, neither have you."

"That's true. But if we were."

"If we were human, we never would have met. I would have been dust ten times over before your great-great-grandparents were born."

"I'm sorry. I'm not used to this infinity of time stuff yet."

"As the years pass, you'll get accustomed to the idea. That, or you'll go insane like some vampires do. It's not really something I can explain to someone who hasn't lived the years."

"Try. Maybe I'm smarter than you think."

"It's not about intelligence, Yuki, it's about experience."

"So you're back to shutting me out, then, are you?" she huffed, stopping in her tracks.

Kaname stopped, and walked back to the place where she stood.

"We need to get to the house in time to sleep before we have to move on. I can tell you more tomorrow, after we rest."

"Kaname? How many years have you hidden the truth from me? All that time, you could have been telling me some of these things I would eventually need to know, feeding them to me slowly so they wouldn't come across as gibberish or implausible lies. Instead, you shut me out any time I asked the right questions. Other times, you purposefully led me on, so I wouldn't guess at the truth. You took advantage of my trust in you. You manipulated me. You punished me and others whenever I inadvertently tempted you to deviate from this plan of yours, even when I didn't have the slightest idea what I'd done wrong."

"Yes," he said. "I did all of those things. I've been terribly cruel to you, Yuki. I intend to spend every moment until my last atoning for my many, many sins."

"I'm not taking another step until you finish answering my questions!"

When he didn't respond, she stomped her foot and added, "We're not done talking, here! We're not done talking until I say we're done! You owe me the answers to years of questions!"

Kaname's eyes flickered, a dim red glowing somewhere down deep inside. Slowly, he stepped closer.

"They're just excuses," he finally said, his voice almost a whisper.

"What are just excuses?"

"The explanations and answers you think you desire, all of them, they are only rationalizations set up to hide something else, something that's so deep and dark, there are no words that can ever bring it into the light of reason. I could talk for the rest of my life, and still, the only way you can understand the horror of infinity is to experience it. Nox Perpetua. 'To know the truth, you must go mad like all the other monsters.'"

"What are you talking about? It sounds like a quote from some kind of lunatic religious book!"

"We call it the Nox Perpetua."

"Great. What is this Perpetua thing?"

"I'm glad you don't recognize it. The Nox Perpetua is a text misused by vampire society and The Association alike to justify this ongoing conflict between the races."

"Have you read it?"

"Of course. I helped to write parts of it."

"Has Headmaster Cross read it?"

"I believe it's still required reading for Association Hunters in training."

"Do… Do I have to read it?"

"No. Not unless you want to. My copy was stolen centuries ago, though, so you'll have to find another one."

"So what does this book have to do with the answers to my questions?"

"Partially, it is a highly inaccurate account of Vampire and Hunter history. I didn't write that part. That was already written and simply included in the text along with the works of several long-forgotten authors. A man named Abasticus wrote or at least compiled the first half of it.

I read what he had compiled. Then, I tracked him down, and I..."

"And you… did what?"

"I killed him."

"What?! Why?"

"I didn't want him to write any more inflammatory texts. I saw the potential the things he had written had for creating unnecessary fear and hatred between the races. And, I was young and stupid… and hungry. Before anyone realized Abasticus was dead, I wrote what became the second half of The Nox Perpetua. I had intended to turn it into a text that stood alone, and publish it under Abasticus's name, but that didn't happen. Someone discovered his body before I finished it. His papers were eventually compiled, and the two manuscripts were inadvertently combined and edited as a single piece. It still seems funny to me that the resulting text become sacred to both vampire and hunter societies."

"What was in the second half?"

"It was a short but telling synopsis of vampire behavior. As accurate a depiction I could create of what it's like to live and think and remember forever. It was meant to create understanding between the races," he sighed. "Like I said. I was stupid and young.

It is yet another sin that I must atone for," he sighed.

"I'm sorry. There is a reason these things were kept from you until now. You are still basically a baby by Pureblood vampire standards, even though you're a young adult by human standards. No matter what any of us said to you to explain our actions, the things we know and understand are the kind of things a person can only learn through thousands of years of living. They make no sense until you've lived the years. To younger, newer beings, our behavior resembles that of the insane, deathless gods of ancient Rome. We move so slowly, sometimes accomplishing just one small thing in what would be an entire human lifetime, locked in place by thousands of years of experience, pain, madness, with an endless nightmare of death the only visible future, the only past we have known. At other times, driven by desire, prompted by circumstance, we move faster than the human eye can detect."

"I hate being treated like a pawn!" she said, turning away from him.

"You are so young. So. Young," said Kaname, as he took her by the shoulders and began to walk her down the road. She didn't resist. Instead, she was like a stone in his arms.

"Do you really understand what it is like, living tens of thousands of years, watching not just individual people but whole civilizations be born and die, seemingly in the blink of an eye?" He paused, and pushed his face into her stringy, tear damped hair. "Please don't cry. We are not humans, neither one of us. Neither you nor I should be held to human standards. This is the way of our kind, Yuki. We are monsters in human form. We do things and understand things that the humans could not bear to even know. We prey upon the innocent. We live forever. We devour our own kind, sometimes just for lack of anything better to do with all the time we have been given.

Some of us take this farther than others, like our Uncle Rido, and go completely insane. I tried to sleep forever when the same madness came for me, but I was wrenched forth once more by Rido's selfish plotting. I would have returned to my slumber, or let this eternally repeating nightmare of blood and death take my mind if it wasn't for the unusual circumstances that forced me to spend time observing your parents."

"I just…" said Yuki, "I just don't understand any of that! The whole thing is just an excuse for hurting people!"

"I'm sorry, Yuki. I don't expect you to understand," Kaname sighed. "I have lived so long, I have experienced just about every kind of life you can imagine. Some of them, I fell into by accident, while many of them I chose to live for the novel experience, moving on once I had learned what I wanted to know. Eventually, though, if a vampire lives long enough, they find that there are no more novel experiences to have. They find that no matter how they try, the people around them always say the same kinds of things, and do the same things. Very rarely, after this state sets in, will a vampire find himself surprised or even honestly interested in what is happening around him. He will feed, kill, take, give, stand, sit, rest and run, a heartless, mindless, hopeless being, made of nightmare, madness, death and worse than any of that, utter boredom.

Boredom, more than any other thing, is what eventually leads an ancient vampire like me, like the others I knew before, into the realms of pain, madness and death. We try, for a while, to encourage people around us to interact and react in novel ways. We experiment with good and evil. We sabotage. In our growing frustration with the world, we destroy needlessly, reveling as the world burns. We become monsters without even really meaning to, regular minds grown unseemly and evil with too much power. We go insane in the unrelenting passage of time.

This is the reason I slept and had to be resurrected in the first place. I had become a monster. When I was finally put down, I chose to stay down, because I honestly desired to take that one last great adventure I had yet to experience, my own death. But death didn't come for me as quickly as I had hoped. Time passed. Things changed in my absence. Vampires mixed and warred with humans. Eventually, the generation of purebloods that was destined to resurrect me was born. One day, I opened my eyes, and the world was changed. And yet, it was still the same. Still the same!"

"I still don't understand, Kaname," she said, allowing him to hold her tighter still as he walked her toward their destination.

"Here is a piece of ancient wisdom that probably won't make sense to you until you've lived as long as I have. Nothing, absolutely nothing, is as simple as words make it seem to be. When something happens, it physically happens only once, in a certain way. The truth is the truth. If there are witnesses, each witness sees something slightly different, thinks different things about what they saw, and describes it differently, as well. A predator sees a meal, and his prey sees a murderer. Consciousness acts like a distorting echo on reality, distorting the truth by adding past experiences, point of view, prejudice, judgment and emotion to what was a simple thing that happened a certain way. There is no avoiding this, though. We all see the same world, and yet we don't experience the same world at all. This is especially true for immortal beings like ourselves. Our long experience of the past distorts our view of the present so much, to less experienced beings like humans, our behavior is unfathomable. When we try to use words to explain this, there are never enough of them to make our view totally clear to any other being. Never. Most vampires learn to act without explaining, because words never do any good."

"I…"

"You don't understand?"

"Not really, Kaname."

"Exactly, Yuki," he sighed. "I did not kill your brother, but I was the reason for his death. I chose not to kill your parents because their relationship interested me, because I fell in love with them. I am a monster, but Yuki, all vampires are monsters, as I have been saying all along. That is one thing I never lied about to you.

You ask me if I am your brother. You ask me if I am your brother's murderer. You ask if you are my pawn, or if we are our parents' pawns. You try, and fail out of fear, to ask if I love you. The words I have to answer you are inadequate. Yes? No? Neither? Maybe?

It doesn't matter how much I explain. My point of view is unique, complex, inexplicable. I am a monster of ancient nightmare. Can I be tamed with such a fragile whip as love? Am I only toying with all of you, pretending to be interested so that I can wreak maximum havoc when I reveal my true intentions? Only through experience will you come to understand me, Yuki, if you even want to. Someday, you will have to choose. Do you choose to hope for the future or fear the past? Do you choose to trust the monster? Can you ever forgive me enough to truly love me?

Your parents showed me that even monsters of ancient nightmare can love other beings, can be redeemed by that love, forgiven for all of the atrocities they have committed, become a source of light in the world. The longer the list of sins, though, the more difficult the quest for redemption will be. We must pay for each and every one of our sins, no matter how many there might be, before we can enter the light. Sometimes, for some of us, the only way we can obtain redemption is to forfeit our life. Our sins are too great to offer anything less.

In human legend, there is a place called Hell, where human souls go to be cleansed and redeemed of a lifetime of sins. There is no hell for vampires, no demon thirsting for our souls, no fire that can cleanse our souls. Our lives are our hell, and we are the demons. Unless we choose otherwise, our sins are never-ending, and never forgiven. Can you forgive me? Can I love you? Will any of this redeem me, or you?

Your brother's essence lives on within me, but since he was so young when Rido performed the ritual of resurrection upon him, your brother cannot speak or act on his own. Sometimes, I feel him watching through our eyes. Sometimes, I sense his emotions rising within me. We are one, he and I, in mind and body and will. There is no question. The two souls, the nightmare monster and the infant that inhabit this body as one have long since reached a consensus. Even if you hate us, WE love you, Yuki. When he loves you, I love you."

Kaname leaned back, releasing her so that she could look up at him. Fear, confusion and anger roiled in her expression. Gently, he stroked Yuki's hair, and then pulled her close. He hooked a finger beneath her chin and tilted her face upward. Her lip trembled, but she didn't seem to be able to move away from him.

"When he desires you…" he said, his eyes glowing violently red in the dusky shadows.

Yuki had grown to expect that he would bite her now, drink her blood. She knew that there would be nothing she could do if she chose to resist him feeding upon her. The red, glowing eyes were a visible sign of overwhelming bloodlust in every vampire Yuki had ever encountered. Even Lord Kaname, the most powerful vampire she knew of, didn't seem to be able to fully control himself when the thirst for blood had brought him to this point. Yuki braced herself.

Instead, he kissed her. There was no blood. No bite. No pain. Kaname held her gently, and he kissed her.

Inside, Yuki was an avalanche of confusion. She hadn't had the time to fully assimilate all of what Kaname had told her. Her mind vaguely registered that she was being kissed, but it almost seemed as if it was happening to someone else, another Yuki. Phrases floated around inside her mind. She felt her body responding to his, kissing him back without even consulting her.

'I wish he didn't tell me the truth,' she thought.

She was still lost in thought when he pulled away, his eyes already returning to their usual color.

"Yuki…" he said.

She didn't respond.

"Yuki, do you understand why I didn't tell you everything at the very first?" he said, stroking her face.

"Yes," she said, finally, as tears began to leak from the corners of her eyes. "I do, Kaname."

"Are you still coming with me? It is, as always, your choice. I will never force you, even if I need you."

"I…" Yuki stood up, her face suddenly resolute. "I am. I'm coming with you. Who else would be better to teach me how to be a vampire? You talk about living thousands of years as a vampire, knowing things and doing things that humans and lesser vampires cannot even tolerate knowing or doing. So, I have to come with you. And, I want to know more. I don't care if it takes hundreds of years, I need to understand."