Ineffably, he was going to have to visit the clinic. It was all a matter of hiding just when he did and where he went. For reasons he couldn't quite figure, he just didn't want Kaname interfering, this time. It seemed a reasonable request, but try telling that to the hand pounding on your locked bedroom door at seven in the morning, after what could be called the second worst night of sleep you'd ever had.

Having the door unlock, Kaname entered the room without looking up from his gloves, pulling them on and pulling from them specks of lint until they were an immaculate London grey.

"You need to get up. I don't like being awake at this hour any more than you do, but the clinic's just opened, and I want to get there before the rush." Zero drew the sheets over his head, hiding from the window as the sunglass-clad pureblood pulled back the curtains, "Get up, Zero." He said, squinting through the light and turning back to the bed. When the hunter pulled the thin blankets tighter around himself, murmuring a sleepy

"Fuck off," the brunette twitched, then sprung into action, lifting clothes and shoes from drawers and closets to assemble at his friend's bedside. Taking no time, he ripped the sheets from the tightly-curled body, comfortable enough with his partner's intriguing nudity to not cringe when the several gashes jumped out at him. Trying to ignore the naked beast clutching a pair of cotton socks, he busied himself with which suspenders he would have the man wear. A great crash echoed through the room, and he turned around to see a half-conscious twenty year-old groping a nightstand like a new blind man does a door handle.

"Piece of work," he muttered angrily as he readjusted his readying friend, cringing when the man leaned on him in his birthday suit. Tentatively, a message echoed in the younger's mind,

"You're doing this on purpose, aren't you?" Slipping an arm from man's shoulder to pull on some underwear, Zero smirked slyly, gunk crackling lowly from the corners of his eyes as they gradually wrinkled. Hands just about to encircle the man's throat, Kaname restrained himself, still feeling the disgustingly sensuous drag of the other male's thigh against his hip. Almost loathe in giving the hunter any sense of privacy or comfort, he kept inside his head the theoretic action of his smacking the other man in a place that would count, or at least sting for a few minutes. Fantasizing about such things had become a hobby which he regularly indulged in, and did not evaporate the thin spray of social lubricant over their faulty relationship.

"How drunk did you get last night?"

"I slept."

He asked the dressing man, causally rearranging the pillows on the couch so Yuki wouldn't get in a tizzy, because the smell of alcohol saturated the pillows and poisoned their threads, making them unbearably tempting as wanton advertisements for drunken fun. And, as a man with the blood of a drinker, Kaname could hold his weight and several others. If it hadn't been for his father and Ichiou, he might not have stood for the taste of whiskey until, in any case, a despairingly more mature later age. Behind him, Zero had finished dressing, and had walked toward the mirror,

"How much time do I have before we get our ride?" He asked, getting out his razor for a cursory shave. The brunette drawled with diminishing patience,

"I'm driving." Which his friend saw in the mirror and, with a pause, turned around to comment, shaving cream covering his five-o'-clock shadow,

"Uh-huh. And how much did you drink last night?" Very close to grumbling, the pureblood waited for his partner to turn around before walking out of view to crack or mutilate something. When the hunter had wiped his face and gotten his coat, they left the house for the pristine Bentley sitting in the driveway. The driver bowed to them and opened the doors as Kaname slid on his sunglasses, their perfect round blackness mirroring the road and the disserving expression on the younger male's face. Then, they shuffled in, and the doors were closed.

Cool air pumped in from the console, the weather conflicting with the brunette's choice in clothes. Though Zero enjoyed looking mildly professional on, at most, formal occasions, he was chagrined by the ridiculously upscale rags his friends had bought him: suspenders should not cost a man four hundred dollars, cheaply, nor should a shirt be any more than two hundred, let alone two thousand. He was aggravated by the fact that they ere too comfortable to give up, and so accepted them as calmly as he could, abominating the idea that he might have succumbed to whatever seductions their ludicrous fortune had set before him. And with the creep sitting next to him, dressed up like some Romanian hit-man, he was less than propitiated.

"Who takes a fucking Bentley to a check-up?" He whispered to the window, not caring in the slightest if his irked friend heard him.

"Mind your tongue; I didn't sleep well last night and I'm not about to take another of your tantrums well." Truth be told, Yuki'd had a Hell of a time extracting him from their bedroom floor when she'd woken and found him, passed out at the foot of her side. Picking him up, she'd tried to put him back in bed around five, but he rose on his own and slurred something they couldn't understand. Sniffing him, she'd sent him out in the hall. Ironic that the princess who owned a bloody winery would have to excommunicate her husband from her bed after he'd had 'only a few sips' of whiskey. Having blacked out long before the couple's tiff, Zero had no idea what had been said, but without a doubt, he knew that Kaname had brought him up, and couldn't help but fear what the man had said of their travels. For, if he had divulged to his wife the intimacies and workings of their dynamic, the hunter was unsure she would be able to accept it; every word her husband spewed about peace and protection would seem a cover for a morbid cause glamorised only by the flair and inarguable perfection in which they succeeded each hit. Her head wasn't little anymore, and she know what went down on the bloody front lines, but to know in detail their very primitive inhibitions and primal lusts would be an iron cross on her conscience, and God knew she could shoulder as much guilt as either one of them in her blossomed maturity.

They pulled up to a square, grey building, its front façade slashed with thin strips of windows that spoke of the darkness inside.

"It looks like a dentist's." Zero remarked as he shut the car door. Kaname touched the rim of his glasses, pulling them down to look at the well-kept, but less than stylish joint,

"Dentists are more prone to suicide than any other doctor, you know." He said when the fidgeting hunter looked up. Then, pulling up the dark glass, he began walking toward the institution with a determined, prideful gait, the other walking with wider steps and frustrated hands, revealing his distaste for the grim-looking establishment.

"Hurry up or you'll be stuck in there for longer." Twitching, Zero glared at Kaname, who stared straight ahead with an unknown expression. Then, grimacing in his rancorous, introverted tantrum, he slammed his hand on the elevator button, and waited for the contraption to reach them. It flickered for a moment, at last staying on as some bell rung out each passed floor, the tiny vibrations travelling up his fingers and lodging in his brain. As he looked around, distracting himself from his boredom and the otherwise motionless pureblood standing some feet from him, he found there was little decorating the ground floor lobby. A few dingy couches were packed tightly in the southeast corner, a painfully dreary painting invoking a lacklustre lifelessness with its depiction of some scrubby, jagged moor.

The vibrations stopped abruptly, his pores aching as he shook his fingers of the constant, inconsiderable buzz. Kaname stepped into the bare elevator, a single light struggling to illuminate his piqued flesh, casting down upon his face as if they were stuck in some bad horror movie. As Zero entered, he saw to his right a balding, Lilliputian man. In a wheezing, toilsome voice, he spoke, looking ahead of himself as the doors patiently stayed open.

"I see Mr. Kuran has come in for a check-up?"

"Not until the wife demands it." The round little man checked his fingernails,

"So I am to be concerned about this young man?" Zero felt Kaname's aura constrict, and then loosen wantonly in a stressed attempt at restraint.

"Room 908, please." The brunette said in a voice much deeper than usual. The little man sniffed, tapping a long blank plaque on the wall,

"As you wish."

When they exited the elevator, they found themselves in another spacious room, this time decorated in a theme of beiges and burgundy. A long line of chairs sat against the far wall in military perfection, before them a few small coffee tables coated with, not outdated magazines, but small vases, some with flowers, others barren. To the right of the wall was a single door, plain and beige as the floor, sporting an iron knob and a few nasty scratches at the very bottom. Kaname tugged on the hunter's arm to get him moving,

"You don't have any friends here. I don't want to stay too long." Zero looked up at the receptionist's desk, a slim redheaded woman sitting behind it. She looked up at him, specifically, scrutinising him emotionlessly as Kaname handed her a small slip, to which she turned her eagle-like attentions.

"There's a forty-second wait. Once you're in, they'll give you a green form to fill out while he goes into the office," she looked pointedly at the silver-haired man, grey eyes distrustful and unwavering, "please wait here until then." The pureblood seemed strained, and looked up at the clock, which seemed to move incredibly slowly, until Zero noticed it didn't appear to be moving at all.

"What does she mean, 'there's a forty-second wait'?" He asked in annoyed confusion. Kaname took off his gloves in the well-heated room, dabbing at his forehead hastily and infliction,

"This is a hospital for vampires. It runs on the lifespan of nobles. She really means about forty-five minutes." Feeling the growl in his head, the hunter sat back with a bit of a headache while Kaname occupied himself with routinely crushing his handkerchief.

Almost an hour later, the door clicked and he stood up, gripping his companion's wrist dolorously tightly, and pulled him briskly into what was nothing more than a small, sterile waiting room. Mint paint coated the walls, spindly wires seeping from the ceiling, from which hung large iron cylinders: the light bulbs that might be inside having been removed what seemed like ages before. The rusting metal was still in suspension, only occasionally creaking as if to assert its existence, casting long, thin shadows on the few metal chairs on the right wall. Beyond them were several white doors, all with brass knobs, and all cleaned so as to make them sparkle in the morning light.

A black-haired orderly bowed to them in respect, then beckoned Zero into a room whilst asking Kaname, respectfully, to come with him.

"Computers these days are so unreliable, so I'm afraid all forms must be filled out manually." Walking down a tiny corridor, he led the pureblood to a secluded alcove, secure in its privacy, and sat him down at a small desk where some papers were neatly collected in the centre. "By the time you are done, Mr. Kiriyu should be out and fine." The brunette muttered a 'thank you', and with that, the smaller man left.

The papers were strange; on each of them, the only question was 'Patient's Name' and, while he might have admitted to needing help, after having waved off the orderly, he felt stupid to ask. So, dutifully, he printed Zero's name in the box, and moved to the next paper. But as he relieved the pile of the previous one, he looked down at it to find another box, inked neatly below the name he'd written, showing 'Age'. Slowing down, he replaced the paper, and set to filling in the empty box. After that, 'Sex' appeared beneath his hand, and he wrote a curvy 'M' square in the centre.

At this pace, each box appeared and was filled in succession, until it came to a few questions he was less than comfortable answering: 'Has the patient engaged in sexual intercourse within the past three months?' Remembering discontentedly a night about a month ago, upon which he had discovered reddish, waxen smears on his partner's white shirt, he hastily put a 'yes' in the box, and waited for the next. There was a pause, as if the paper had to rethink the direction of its questions. The somewhat skittish Kaname fidgeted in his seat, glancing at the third-story window beside him as if to check for peeping toms. When he looked down again, in plain black letters stood the monolithic phrase, 'Preference'. Genuinely, he did not know how do answer, and so squirmed again, scooting his chair in closer to the desk until the girth of his coat scratched against the metallic surface of the old desk. The thing creaked impatiently, as if saying, "Well? Get on with it,"

So, as discreetly and naturally as he could, he scrawled in the square a hard 'M/F', and removed his coat with the conspicuous shuffle of grey wool.

-

They were in Reno, in a small, indistinguishable motel on some side street not far from the highway. The edges of the windows were opaque with a thick layer of greenish grime, and the porcelain bowl of the toilet was irreparably cracked. Zero was sitting on the side of his bed, elbows on his knees as he stared through the empty space below Kaname's cot. The thin mattresses creaked aloud easily, they found, and the scanty brass bed posts rattled from loose, rusted screws. Kaname sat in the tall shower, arms, too, on his knees, head bent down in little more than evasive reverie. Their bodies ached and the thick rain battering the windows caused their bones to whine and scrape in the discomforting silence. The brunette shifted and the hunter's ears peaked, head turning toward the door almost behind him. A soft head plummeted to loosely folded knees as clothes rumpled on dry tile,

Well, now what?

-

He looked down as the next question emerged from the blue paper, 'Class'.

-

The bedroom was a mess: the coffee table had been chucked through the window, and the splintered wood had crashed into a courtyard below. The mattress was ripped to shreds, springs piercing feathers, embedded in the wall. The door kicked down, the room was silent but for a few grunts as Kaname struggled to hold the hunter down, several bullets pushing from his flesh in slow ejaculation. The younger grunted as he whispered to him, the red fire in his eyes corroding the luminescent amethyst. Words thrummed through his body with the force of some degenerating power as burgundy eyes glared through the blaze. Claws out, he ripped a white-clothed arms and scarred hands, eager with wet lips as bloody tissue sprayed across his face in long, false gashes. The brunette closed his eyes, turning his hands down and wincing as he heard wrists crack backward, a dismembered howl ripping through a tattooed throat. He didn't face the hostile man beneath him, hiding behind his growing hair and breathing as evenly as he could as skin practically dripped from his muscle, through the burst veins staining silvered, slivered bone.

Regrettably, he had known what he was doing, and choked on the resolve that bubbled from his gut in a steady loss of confidence and self-righteousness as he tortured himself for his taunts and misgivings. Provoking something like this was far less than his appraised quality of character, and the liquid fear coating Zero's squirming, animalistic chest streamed obdurately from his fractured jaw, a listless lag proving through the bloody foam on what was left of his lips that his jaw had been broken in their primal tussle. When the body had stilled, he looked up to find a heaving chest and the dangerous smile of a demon hiding in a beautiful boy, and choked when, through the reddish haze, a vibrant spring of purple brewed mockingly, aerated with those dastardly crimson dots until they faded and he found himself too drawn in to keep those shattered wrists down any longer. He struggled again as the beast fought for his mouth, and touched down on the chewed flesh with a triumphant, ghastly grin, as always, savouring the disgusted, frightful cries of the man of whom they had dominated most easily.

-

When he finished the papers, he leaned back in the chair, staring up at the pastel ceiling. The orderly, as if acting on instinct, came instantly and collected the papers with glowing interest, scanning the simple, short answers as if they had been cut from the brain of the greatest man on earth and, in a sense, they might have been. Though, certainly, he was not the most fearsome.

Zero emerged some minutes later, knocking his palm at his head fervently, hearing that horrible swishing sound sway luxuriously in the shells of his ears. Kaname stood, and shook hands with the doctor, who told him the trauma was close to irreversibility, and that certain hunter weapons, which he identified with an indignant turn of the chin, were tremendously hazardous, meant to be handled with delicacy and utmost respect. Jaw tight, the hunter quickly made for the door, brushing the stunned doctor's shoulder. But then, his feet stopped, heels clicking as he turned around automatically, bowing low. His teeth grit in humiliation as the doctor looked down at him,

"You really should keep a tighter grip on your allies, Sir. It is unthinkable that someone of his level might disrespect you." Visibly pissed, Kaname tightened at the comment and had his friend released, who stumbled for a moment before planting himself on the ground. Slowly, he looked up, and though the doctor dismissed him with a sniff, he continued to glare, as if that helped an ex human in the presence of a Noble.

When they returned to the elevator, it opened for them instantaneously, and within stood the small man from before, hat and coat in arms. The brunette stopped for a moment, pupils shrinking at the sight of his tidy little form. Zero did not hesitate in entering, pulling his companion in alongside him as the man wobbled through a little trance. Then, with grumbling care and attention, he slung the grey coat over lax shoulders, and when the pureblood did awake from his daydream, he handed him his glasses and gloves, which were received with tentative hands. Pausing when he was fully dressed, the elder looked toward the man in the corner, who looked straight back at him with a tiny, toothy smile,

"It is a very busy day for doctors, to-day." When the ride ended, he walked out, turning to the left as the two went to the right and the Bentley beyond the tinted glass entrance. Kaname sat down, and for a time did not speak, head slumped so as to appear unconscious. Unnerved by this trusting, uncharacteristic display, the hunter tucked safely against the window, face marred by streams of sunlight as they made their way through the heavy curtains a doctor needn't prescribe.