The first part takes place in the past, and the second in the present of the story. Honestly, I've never been to Reno, but friends have, and it doesn't seem like a lovely place. Also, if some things in this story appear atrociously outdated, as the slightly seventies/eighties elements subtly put, they were necessary for my own enjoyment. Modern-day conveniences are too... 'convenient'.
It had been months since he'd seen Yuki, and his head ached from the bulges of the words he wished to say to her. He paced through the room, hands shaking behind his back as he caught sight of Zero's whiskey flask. Grimacing, he looked down at his trembling fingers, seconds after, walking briskly to it and tipping it nearly to sixty degrees before releasing it from his puckered mouth and wiping the runoff from his chin. Shaking worse than before, he took another chug before screwing on the cap and tossing it on the other man's bed, falling on it with his arm across his face. God, he missed her.
He missed the way her eyes would light up when he brought home a new pet, or how her hair would fall between his fingers like sand when she asked him to braid it. Now, he wondered with vague jealousy whether Zero missed the same. His look troubled, he stared at the door when the hunter emerged from the bathroom, brow up when the towel came from his face,
"What're you staring at?" He sized the man up, from the dishevelled clothes to the brownish stains on an otherwise pristine collar. He groaned at the sight, "Oh, are you serious?!" He continued to wipe off his dripping hair, outside the window the clouds curdling the sky with a yellow, grey glow. "That shit isn't cheap, Kuran! Why couldn't you have walked down to the market, or the convenience store, at least?!" Snatching the bottle from the bed, where it rested next to a limp hand, he proceeded to check the contents. Unsatisfied, he grunted, then closed his eyes and poured the remainder down his throat with much more ease than the pureblood, taking the towel to swipe at his lips afterward. Glaring at the brunette, who stared at him almost curiously, and certainly drunkenly, from the bed, he said, "Well you're a bloody mess."
He grappled the soiled collar and tried to yank the shirt from the wilted figure's body, but fingers wrapped around his arm, and tugged him down beside the man, a move to which he responded with a sharp reprimand, and then a grumbling promise not to up and leave once he was set free as the insecure man gazed worriedly at ceiling. The purse on those lips was disconcerting, and though obviously drunk, the man appeared to be in a deep focus. Tentatively, the hunter inched from the body so as to make some comfortable space between them, but the pureblood dug under his back and held his hip in place with such speed, he younger might have feared he claws would come out next. Well, he might have, but he was getting a little tipsy, too, now. Then, from the pursed lips came a halting, scratchy noise greatly unsuited to the dignified man's usual liquid tone,
"D'you think Yuki misses us when we leave?" Zero squinted at the small stain on the ceiling he figured the other was gazing at in such boggling intrigue.
"That's an odd way of putting it, I don't think 'friends' are usually grouped in with 'husbands'." Kaname's frown deepened, and he turned his head to look at his roommate in a conspicuously concentrated look, the concern and envy etched in his encompassing, glossy pupils. He looked as painfully beautiful as his sister, and in his withered loneliness, the hunter couldn't help but envision her face, placed so easily over the brunette male's own. And in this, he found a surreal comfort, which enwrapped him with warmth that even his careful reason could not permeate. However strange, this feeling pulsed familiarly inside of him, and before he knew it, his hand was on the pureblood's cheek, and he saw the man freeze, hearing a lowly humming heart skip a beat before those glass eyes looked to him in bizarre, lonely kinship, and he had little choice but to get up before his impulses took him too far from reality.
But again, his arm was caught, a pair of still-curious, dark eyes gazing up at him as the hand released him, dripping down his sleeve like molten chocolate. Oh God, he smelled her, now; the sweet scents of lemon bars and cocoa seeping into the sheets as Kaname slowly rose from the bed, meeting Zero's faraway eyes with a blur of expectant, brotherly excitement. The hunter's hand came to the side of his skull, and pulled gently at his hair, weaving it with unreal caresses. He dipped his head and came up close to the other man, breaths heavy and weighted with the warm scent of liquor. Forehead resting on a bare shoulder, he listened with utmost care to the quickening pace of his comrade's heart, and decided in a haze that this way or that, the evening would be one of remembrance, and that the mere suggestion of the intimacy he had shared with his wife after those long months was far too much to bear.
The silver-haired man's hand got clumsier as he went further into nostalgia, locked behind the soft flow of drying white sheets, a sunflower hat bobbing humble between their coursing angelic masses. He remembered picking her up on autumn days and tossing her in leaf piles, and felt at his back the gush of the crisp dead foliage, made malleable by the thick barrier of canvas bags. At his collarbone was the lick of a dog he'd known had died, but he gripped its broad shoulders all the same, and pulled it closer with a dazed look, the image conjured before him that of an ill, exhausted, desperate man. A pressure spread over his body, and he saw that the man had laid upon him the length of his supple body, so much like hers, head resting on his breast, hands lost in the sheet.
"I don't think I can take many more trips," he said in that grainy little voice, feeling Zero's cool arms come around his back. They were certainly well-muscled, and through their mass Kaname had a difficult time picturing his wife, though the thing he may have missed most was this closeness with someone. Because after so many months of hunting and killing and hunting and killing and acting as some supreme, unidentifiable being, the intimacy which he had shared with his wife had begun to condense, like bad milk, into particular things that could only be distinguished by physical sensation; the softness of her bejewelled neck; the sharpness of her small hips. In this position atop his friend, he struggled desperately to conjure her image, the futility of this act apparent as masculine arms constricted like an anaconda his, yet, boyish body.
With burgundy eyes he lifted his head and set sight on the hunter, who looked dreamily down at him. He smiled crookedly, a fang prodding his lip whilst the other slipped past. And then the hand that firmly gripped his sides hauled him up the other man's body, pupils tiny and incredibly focused as finger wrapped around his head and he was pulled into a somewhat sloppy, somewhat slow kiss. Unknowing of how to react, he just stopped moving for a second, feeling the alien motions of a large tongue in his mouth, finding it impossible to see his wife in this man. About to call the hunter on his moves, when their lips separated, he opened his mouth and tried to speak, only to feel the sudden jerk as a firm body lifted him up, rubbing against him in a strange fashion. Stalling again, he was shocked to feel those large hands quickly work on his shirt, kissing his neck distractedly, toiling as fast as he could as he felt her image leave him. This moment of shock and dreaming deepened as the brunette felt his shirt unravel at last, a puff of surprise pressed from his chest when the hunter fell upon him. Even though the body atop him was large, heavy, and firm, it was warm, and he closed his eyes as the man burrowed into his hair, fumbling with a thick buckle.
Generally, the clinking would have woken him, or at least stirred the vacuous space in which his scruples might have been. He lifted his hips dazedly, wrapping his arms around a straining neck and thumbing the grim tattoo at its side. The belt flew from his hips in Zero's frustration, making an angry clang on the hardwood. His back arched and his head folded deep into the sheet as his slacks flew off next, the silver-haired man grunting in primeval triumph. Kaname slurred something he couldn't understand, maybe a refusal, maybe just a groan, as he felt his body curl the other way, hips coming off the bed to meet tense thighs. Looking blearily through whatever was clouding his eyes, he met the hunter with a half-grimace, apprehensive as he felt a hand pull him apart, prying with apart with all five fingers the older male's pale buttocks, and leaning back so as to survey his 'prize'. If anything were to end, the moment of truth had already passed, and the most Kaname could now do to remove the other man would be hurtful, and while he was not at all opposed to that, he loathed incredibly the detestable possibility of fracturing the illusion he had set up. A mask for reality so powerful, it was something he could use to distract himself from any horror, even if, when he first started using it, he felt indescribably guilty for having 'tainted' the few precious memories of his wife. Now, it was beginning to become a second language to the devastation he cause, or rather, the realisation that his actions were no better than those who hunted his kind, or worse, that of Zero's bloody stigma. Truthfully, it might be said that he feared tainting his pride more than anything, although he would die for Yuki.
Zero was tender. With women. He was adoring and flexible, and even when he paid them, he didn't force them into anything demeaning. But he knew very well that men could take much, much more, and having not had as much to drink as his friend, was still highly aware of the fact that Kaname was indeed male, and not the beauty he'd painted over that anxious face. So, without much warning, he pried a little further, very concentrated, and very mechanical, a stern look on his face as he focused, lips hard against his teeth as he scowled,
To have it too tight won't do…
Not that he cared much if the bastard couldn't walk for a few seconds; he just didn't want to get certain parts of him chewed off in the process of making it so. So he flexed his fingers and reached in, delighting in a way he knew was perversely intimate for their relationship in the fact that the brunette's arms had crept over his eyes, a thin mouth showing teeth, opening wide as it dared. Until the man who would claim him couldn't take the once-subtle, but still oblivious seductions the pureblood was using against him, and threw apart the legs clenching him with such force that Kaname cried out. The sound flocculated as he began to fuck the whiny little cunt, growing steadily from a growling bass to halting, tenor gasps, and then stilling in perhaps pain, perhaps confusion, as Zero changed courses and shifted positions. They had an unmitigated desire to keep quiet, though once every few thrusts came the onslaught of the threatening climax, a moment in which Kaname would cover his mouth with his arm, biting the nearly hairless flesh so as to gulp down his volume. And, as he was fucked, he realised that he liked it very much, and when his friend came on his stomach, he thought he didn't.
The hunter didn't give him much room on the bed, so as he got up, yet unfulfilled, to get his clothes, a silver-haired head groaned into the pillow as its body stretched out, the pureblood sticky and stuck in fearsome deliberation. He opened the door to the bathroom and, stalling for a moment, stepped in, closed it, and got in the shower, a little stunned to do anything but turn on the knob, whose correlating flow managed to rouse the sleepy hunter. As the man slowly rose, he slipped on some clothing, sparse on the dilapidated scantling, and sat on the bed with a grim expression. By then, the shower had turned off, and the other male was doing, practically and shockingly, the same thing.
-
Her pretty nails clacked on the desk as she handled the phone, breathing evenly and glancing at the drawn blinds with every passing minute. When the pause broke, she answered what would otherwise be silence.
"Hello… Yes, I'm asking after a Mr. Aidou… I'm a close family friend." The receptionist on the other line responded tidily, but as if she truly had to sift through folders to find the name, and not just click a mouse. Listening to the transfer ring, Yuki sniffled; rubbing her nose with a slim finger, the bone almost ready to catch on her nostril. It stopped remarkably suddenly, and the other line became scratchy and unclear, like a grainy picture of something she couldn't recognise.
"Are you there?" It buzzed laboriously,
"It's Yuki Kuran." A pause,
"Oh. One moment, please." Then came the true scuffle of manila folders and worn paper. A vicious creak alerted her that the man was most likely rotund, and she clenched her fist, knocking on the sideboard as she waited again. Hissing, the line burst to life with another unearthly unclear confession. "Hanabusa Aidou, aged twenty-three years, passed away on the twenty-ninth of September." Her blood stopped in her veins and the world outside stilled and was silenced as she willed it in her stun. In a clear, unbelieving voice, she called out to the man on the line,
"'Passed away'?" The grainy crackle was surreal and left loud in the vacuous silence, her bewilderment echoed by this lucid, dreamlike sound.
"An undisclosed hunter exterminated him on grounds of suspicion of murder and unfair play. He resisted when offered co-operation, and was shot several times in defence on part of the human." The voice, like a great messenger come from some strange place, spoke down through her bones until they rattled with panic and she nearly collapsed. The very Metatron speaking to her in this bizarre little universe they had created, and she closed her hand over her mouth in horror,
"Oh my God…" She said quietly, face loose in terror and wonder as her eyes stuck to the lead peaking out above the sill.
"The report is yet unfinished, but I can connect you to the headquarters of the Hunters' Association for further information on the hunter." She shook terribly, ready to sob, though too shocked to do much anything but ask and talk and struggle voraciously to get her foot on whatever crevice of sanity and comfort was left to her.
"Were any of his family harmed? How many bullets were found?" papers shuffled once more, and in the same businesslike tone, the man answered,
"His daughter was maimed, but not mortally. His sister, Tsukiko Aidou, however, resisted restraint, and when brought into custody, attacked another hunter. She was also killed in defence. Nineteen bullets were found in her autopsy," he halted and she felt his squint vicariously, hanging from his every word. "There was speculation in Mr. Aidou's case, as he was sitting in his study. Once again, the full report is yet unreleased, but when first interviewed, his hunter confessed to having been unsure under pressure whether his target was a mortal danger." He paused again, and she listened, "…Forty-three military grade bullets were found in total." She was silent. "… Have a good day, madam." And with that, he hung up.