It was almost comical, because here he had always loved the feeling of Zero inside him as deeply as could be, and now he'd finally gotten what he wanted.

He kept walking at the roadside, bathed in dust and light, barely able to see as he squinted and looked toward the empty, yellow horizon. A labyrinth of dunes, mirages, and abandoned buildings, the desert ached and shifted, ancient and tired of the secrets people carelessly entrusted to it. Waves of sand poured over the hills and sloped over brush, which peeked through the dust futilely as it suffocated. Wherever he looked, he was hopelessly entrapped in the memory (or lack thereof) of Zero's murder. The pain in his gut numbed all other feeling. Trapped inside the desert, and confined to his dismal mind, he wandered a phantom over the rolling, anxious dust, footprints drawn chaotically across the landscape before disappearing in the wind.

Still stunned by the previous evening, he'd run on auto-pilot for the majority of the day. Only when a car came and alerted him had he scrounged up the shame to use one of the many choked bushes to hide his nakedness and the blood and dirt struggling to conceal it. Unyieldingly, he'd thought of Zero's death and how he might have enacted the basest desire he'd had since intermediary school. All he'd done in his entire life had been so obsessively orchestrated. The idea he'd willingly sacrificed his plans—that he had been thrust into a state of no control—meant only that he had wanted to lose it, right? He'd had fantasies about losing control over himself and consequently gaining it over others. He'd often fantasized about busting the hunter's bedroom door off the hinge. Sitting up from his desk, the man would ask with alarm something like, "What the fuck's your problem?" and reach for his gun. Kaname would appear next to him, grab his wrists, and hold them behind his back, pressing their bodies together as he slowly bent him back into the chair and twisted his wrists until they cracked. He'd savour whatever came out of the bastard's mouth, then, and rip a gash in his neck because he'd eventually tire of the screaming. Tossing the choking, gushing mass into the wall, he'd grip that blood soaked wretch's collar and rip him up the wall, give his little spiel on how badly the hunter's presence had stained his very soul, and try to convince him that the whole ordeal was his fault. Holding him by his neck, he'd add pressure every second until the eyes turned up and a final, satisfying crack met his eager ears. Then, he'd drop the body and walk out, more fulfilled and drunk off his own success and freedom than ever.

Not since his captivity by Rido and Ichiou had he envisioned such things, though these men certainly deserved it for what they did to him. But he allowed Zero to do to him the same as they had. He permitted the touches and even gotten used to them. He had his moments of regret and mental terror, (mainly when his wife seemed close to discovering the truth, or when he'd walk into Zero's room in his home to find the naked man asleep with a woman strung across his chest like a bloody chain of gun rounds).

He would imagine what he felt during the worst of time, but never had he thought of unshackling his raw strength. Unguarded, uncontrolled, he must've been a true fury. There wasn't a body. Indecision and confusion ruled him: he was nervous to look at a living thing for fear he might relapse, and deeply feared returning to his wife and explaining to her what had happened, especially when he didn't know. He didn't fucking know. How could he not? Had he wholly devoured one of the only people he'd trusted in his life? The taste was thick on his tongue and his imagination conjured bone fragments lodged in his throat, eking their way through his skin or down to his dragon belly. He climbed over the sand bank and vomited on all fours.

A thick red and black ooze dripped from his mouth onto the sand. Something shone under a blackish, wet glob. Gazing at it with the entire night weighing on his back he slowly lifted his hand, then hastily, shakily retrieved the smudged white piece. Brushing off the gunk, he thumbed it carefully: a smooth, silvery link. Part of a wristwatch.

He remembered none of it.

Not running away from the car, or tearing it apart, or consuming Zero. Not a second. His befuddlement stopped him from making further conclusions, and as he grew tentative about whether or not he was losing his control over his primal nature, he further distanced himself from reality and the people about him. Honestly, for the first few hours, he didn't remember much of the incidents at White Sands (and there were many to be told), same as what had happened at the rest stop. These events paralleled each other as he recalled throughout the rest of his life, until his dying breath, each atrocity and unforgivable action he'd committed. It made him a bit more introspective as he agonised over his lack of self-control, and feared he might lose it again at any moment. Ahead of him lay an almost eternal sentence of self-loathing, distrust, and emotional distress. And Yuki, let God and she forgive him.

Nearing the end of the first day, filthy and parched, he approached a roadside shack with a couple of annexes. He inspected it from afar: the small, slanted compartment attached to the back of the main building promised a generator, and he slowly came alive as he thought of the people inside. Humans, flesh, blood: his stomach churned with revulsion at the thought, but when he brought his hand to his mouth to keep from vomiting, a ravenously extending claw caught his cheek and ripped it. His eyes grew wide and he shook, mouth open, sensing some of his own blood bead on his cheek before the wound closed. His body itched everywhere and his head felt pressured, as if pumped with water. Choking on his breath, he tried to scent out a rabbit or a prairie dog, but the waste was quiet. Pleading with himself to run away, he shook in terror before his own weakness. Looking around, he found no other buildings or cars. The prospect of any food disgusted and excited him; he was repulsed by the thought of eating anything, but starved and wailed inside with gluttony and unfulfilled rage. The scents stimulated him further, causing him to look about wildly, begging for some control and decency, struggling to not fall prey to his own instincts.

But he wanted it. God, did he want it bad. And soon he stopped shaking, walking toward the shack and sounds of voices without a tremble or a thought in his head.

The car was encased in ice. Zero dropped his satchel and cursed,

"Oh, fuck me."

He slammed one fist on the window, pounded it like a roofing nail, and swore again as the ice sheet refused to crack and let him in. Eyeing his pack, he contemplated the pros and cons of simply shooting the window, mainly falling on the conclusions that he'd be nagged straight out of the ninth layer of Hell, but have a hopefully operational getaway car.

The gunfire echoed in the woods, and as his ears readjusted, he caught the sounds of bodies moving through brush and trees. He started panicking, yanked another gun out of his bag, cocked it, busted in the rest of the glass with his elbow, and saw he didn't have the time to crawl in. So he waited. He didn't close his eyes once, breaths steady, deep, and so loud he had to stop breathing if he wanted to hear exactly what was happening. He wiggled his boots, making sure they weren't too deep in the snow to restrict much movement. He could move like a phantom if he needed to, but he was definitely out of his element, trapped in nothing but a white vacuum with three very lonely guns and a possibly bum car.

Then he heard them. His breathing spiked; a deceptive and cleverly cracked branch in one direction, hurried footsteps in the other; baiting him; fuckin' ambushing him like wild dogs surrounding a gazelle. Far behind him, beyond the clearing, he sensed one of them moving, and stayed his ground, ready to whip around but knowing what might happen if he did so. He could see the other in the trees about twenty yards ahead of him. A young female (why did it always have to be a girl?) with sandy blonde hair and wicked brown eyes. She watched him soullessly, face stoic yet contorted and twisted with gluttony. Her aura was downright insane, but she, too, was standing her ground. Was she the alpha? He aimed the gun at her experimentally, body angled and ready to turn. The one behind him barrelled toward him with a shriek, and he turned, firing a couple of shots into its chest.

Oh yeah,

She was the alpha.

He woke up standing. His throat and mouth burned and bled, bone fragments listing through tissue like tiny unmanned boats. When he looked up, his eyes watered. Across the walls and ceilings, trailing out the front and back doors were streaks and puddles of blood. Again, he became sick to his stomach, and fell to the ground ready to retch, when he landed on the body of a Latino woman, her long dark hair coiled and wet, soaking in the stream seeping from her throat, if it could still be called a throat. The warmth on his lips and amount of blood everywhere suggested there had been others. He'd woken up just after he' bitten her. He had been sated just after he'd bitten her. White shirt pink and red with blood, she lay bent and strangely angled on the dusty floorboards, eyes bloodshot and a few fingernails missing. A small clatter startled him and he looked down, hands numb and fumbling for what had fallen.

With a shriek, he jumped back, scooting from her body with a ferocious terror. One of the nails had fallen from his hair. She must've tried to fight him when he attacked her; embedded her nails in his skull; tried to run away. His throat burned. He curled up in the corner, thinking of Yuki and Zero and home and Zero's room, Zero's unmade bed, Zero's nonexistent body groaning under the sheets as he would move in to lay beside him.

He wanted to go home.

He pulled his knees to his chest defensively, hands at the back of his head.

He wanted to go home, now.

The stupid one tumbled toward the car and Zero jumped on the hood, aiming at its head with his left hand and firing a dum-dum into its temple, wincing when the spray flecked his cheeks. A second came at him from his left, and from then on it was carnage. He blasted two or three dum-dums by accident, blowing off limbs and chunks of torso. Two others dashed toward him like real wild dogs, mouths open, all limbs in use, and he blew through them, getting sprayed again and again. The female darted between the two underlings and slammed him into the windshield, cracking it as she checked if her comrades were still alive. As Zero aimed the gun at her, she grabbed the weapon and screamed as he shot her, but managed to get it away from him. She threw it behind her, where it landed upon one of the corpses. Her look was feral, no longer calculating, but her grip was powerful and she tore into his unprotected chest with glee. He got a hold of her, screaming as he threw her off and searched for the third gun. She ran toward him and struck a long gash down his arm. In a swift movement, he flipped her on the ground, pounced her as she shrieked, and growled at her. His teeth extended beyond his lips and his back hunched, shutting her up. His growl was low but flocculating. When she made any attempt to move, he bent closer to her, and her hands would stop and uncurl from his bloodied, freezing chest. She stared up at him, threatened, cornered, looking for a way to kill him but finding none. She was too far gone to have her life flash before her eyes. She just kept glaring at him, the hunted beast. So he shot her.

She flopped down, legs twitching and stilling. He licked his teeth and clacked them together so as to lure out others. The cold slowly began to wake him up, though it made him sluggish, and he knocked away the rest of the glass in the broken window of the car, undid the lock, and hopped in. He started it, and the hum reverberated in the thicket, penetrating every burrow and every den. When he'd started out of the clearing, he heard more quick rustling, shifted gears, and hit the gas.

The wheels spun in the snow for a few seconds as the sounds came closer. He whipped out of the clearing and around a curve, hearing a nasty crack as the axle gave in and he flew through a small snow bank. His head bounced off the wheel, disorienting him, and the seatbelt ripped into his chest wounds until his skin folded around it through his tank. The scurrying came closer until he heard footsteps approaching the car. Undoing the belt, he reached blearily for the shotgun on the passenger seat, cocked it, and fired out of the window without a glance.

What a horrible update record. My word, I'm surprised I haven't been lynched.