The next days passed painfully for the Night Class. Almost twice as painfully as the week leading up to Yomoriko's arrival had been. None of the vampires, save for Shiki, knew her very well but even so it was exceptionally difficult for them to watch Yomoriko slowly waste away. Every day that passed made her look a little paler, a little weaker, and the students – remembering of course that vampires or not, they were still just children for the most part – watched her furtively, as though she were an elderly human in hospital somewhere, waiting on her last breath.
They were afraid. Most of them had never witnessed the death of a comrade before. Oh, they'd killed Level E's sure enough, but Yomoriko was no Level E. She wasn't even an enemy vampire, from what they could tell – she was nothing like Hiou Shizuka. She was part of their class, a potential friend, and they had no other choice but to watch her die, unable to stop it.
Some tried to talk with her – to make her see what a fool she was being – but she brushed their attempts aside as if they were nothing. The awful truth was, for as much as they wanted to help her, she didn't want to be helped. Not by them. In fact, whenever someone was brave enough to approach her she became distant and icy, speaking only in answer to the questions they asked or to certain things they said. No matter how nice they tried to be – and some had tried very hard to be nice – there was always that undercurrent of hatred to her tone.
Aidou Hanabusa in particular had thrown himself into an effort to reach out to Yomoriko in friendship. He'd showed her around – granted it was on Kaname's orders but he still did it – and he'd chatted to her with that devil-may-care, playboy charm of his; the one that had melted many girls' hearts over time. He would never admit it but talking to her was a task in and of itself for him; he wasn't used to girls' who were completely oblivious to his suave attitude. But he kept trying. Because like everyone else, there was an integral part of him that didn't want to see her die. It was what the humans might call a form of 'compassion' but what the vampires would claim was more like 'camaraderie'.
Kuran Kaname too had spoken with Yomoriko in an attempt to boycott her suicidal hunger strike, though on his part it was more from an understanding of Shiki's point of view rather than through any real concern over the girl herself. In many ways Yomoriko reminded him of Yuuki; defiant to the point of recklessness, strong willed enough to be frightening at times and, though he had yet to actually see it, the potential to be a bright, bubbly young girl with the world at her feet. Many times he'd imagined – reluctantly – how he'd feel if this were Yuuki before him and the thought was so terrifying to him, so utterly beyond the realms of his most horrifying nightmares, that he couldn't help but want to stop her. But although she showed an infinitesimal amount of respect more for him than the others, his words still fell on deaf ears.
In fact the only ones in the class who hadn't even tried to talk to Yomoriko were, surprisingly enough, Shiki and Rima. The pair had been somewhat quiet – more so than usual – since that night and neither had gone anywhere near her – Shiki, because he was hyper aware that he was the last person she wanted to talk to, and Rima because she wasn't the type to worry over someone else's stupidity. But more drastically (and most noticeably) they hadn't spoken to each other since then.
Rima was... confused by the recent events. She had never before thought it possible for her to dislike Shiki or to be contemptuous of him in any way, but that was exactly how she currently felt. She knew it was probably selfish of her – after all it was his life – but she felt incredibly betrayed by his negligence to tell her about any of this. They were friends... more than that even. They were closer to each other than they were anyone else in the world. Why, then, had he kept such a massive secret all to himself? She would never do the same to him. It made her wonder if perhaps she'd overestimated the strength of their bond.
Shiki on the other hand, was desperate to talk – both to Rima and to his little sister. It didn't show on his exterior but he was afraid of losing them both. He was afraid that Yomoriko was going to die before his very eyes; afraid that Rima would decide she didn't want to be near him anymore; afraid of being alone again. If watching Yomo kill herself was difficult for the likes of Aidou and Kaname-sama, it was almost impossible for Shiki. But he didn't know how to stop her.
For Yomoriko herself, each day spent at the ridiculous sin against nature that called itself Cross Academy was a day closer to her death – a time she waited for with bated breath for she knew that time would bring her the peace she'd so longed for since the day of her brother's treachery. She wasn't entirely sure what being at the Academy could achieve, if anything at all, but the chairman had requested it of her – had practically begged her. So she would do this one small favour for her figurative saviour since she could repay him no other way. Besides, it soothed her to see the vampires so discomforted by her situation; especially that Senri.
Those monsters... those despicable, vile, deplorable beasts in human form... how she hated them. How she loathed them – and herself – for just living . Vampires were an evolutionary backlog; a race that had no buisness being in this world which was rightfully the humans'. They drunk the blood of the innocent, maimed and killed through no other reason than they were hungry. They were demons. And she hated it. Even the monsters at Cross Academy who claimed to want peace with humans weren't worthy of the gift of life. They should take a leaf out of her book and repent, before they did something they regretted. Like she had...
How long had it been since that day, she wondered? How long since that horrible night that overshadowed even the eve of her kidnap by that no good waste of space, Rusuke? It was hard to say for sure. She'd been serious when she said her nights blended into each other these days. She honestly wouldn't know any different between being in a coma for a day or being in a coma for a year. It was all one; and she'd stopped asking how long she'd been out for a long time ago.
When Rusuke had taken her away from Senri and her surrogate mother, Yomoriko had been forced to live a tough life. She'd been locked away in a room somewhere – to this day she had no clue where, exactly – for a very long time, receiving only enough to keep her alive by a hair's breadth. As she grew older she questioned more and more why there was any reason for them to keep her there; she wondered why they kept her alive. Most importantly, she started to question why she should just sit around obediently and let them keep her there. Apart from a few random, unpredictable visits to her father – who, for reasons she was never filled in on, was so close to his own death it was almost funny – there hadn't been much to break up her long imprisonment...
Until she escaped that is...
How she managed it was still unclear but at long last, after seven long years of misery, Yomoriko had broken free of the shackles of fear her father bound her in. Her memories of that time were vague and fuzzy at best; the only thing she recalled with any sort of clarity was that it had been sometime in her twelfth year, although even that she couldn't confirm certainly because she'd forgotten her birthday years before.
She'd fled the room for good that fateful day. The building too. Heck, she might even have fled the country for all she knew! But she'd never stopped – no matter how far she got it hadn't been enough. She kept going, day after day, month after month, until at last she'd fainted in the bosom of some godforsaken human city, dead to the world as the rain pounded her thin back like bullets.
Then he'd come. A boy of fifteen, human, with dark brown hair and bright green eyes... and a smile that could charm an executioner. When she'd come around he'd been there, smiling at her as if he were truly thankful for her existence – as though by being alive she had given him something precious. He'd reminded her, painfully, of her elder brother Senri (who despite all that had happened, she still loved with all her being deep down) and for a time she had seriously considered drinking him dry and moving on. But the feeling he gave her in her soul – the feeling of being needed by someone again after so long spent as nothing more than an ornament in her father's collection – was too sweet for her to relinquish so easily.
For some time after that, Yomoriko made that little city her home. She lived with the boy – Taijo, was his name – and his family for about a year and a half, breaking bread with them, joining in their games and sharing in their happiness. For them she'd willingly walked in the daylight hours, putting up with the sunburn and the headaches because it made her feel like she was one of them – like she could really live together with them for as long as their meagre lives would allow. For them she had starved herself of blood for insane periods at a time – for to drink within the city felt like a treason to the good people who had taken her in. When she'd absolutely had to feed she'd left the village in the dead of night to find a meal elsewhere; but always she came back before morning to greet her makeshift family at breakfast.
She should have known it could never last. Vampires were cursed beings; monsters that should have died out long ago or better yet, never existed at all. Once a monster, always a monster.
It had been a beautiful sunny day when it happened, right in the middle of June. Hot and bright just as summer should be. Yomoriko had been enjoying a book loaned to her by Taijo some days before, reading it under the shade of a large, sprawling maple in the family garden. Her head was pounding – something she'd long since grown accustomed to – and the sun was slowly frying through the layers and layers of sun cream she'd lathered on that morning, but she was content. Even the thirst clawing at her belly was mere background noise on such a day.
Taijo had come out to show her something or tell her something – she forgets which because in the end he never got the chance to tell her – and he'd tripped over his shoe laces, cutting himself nastily on some sharp stones.
The blood hadn't been particularly plentiful; it was just a shallow scrape after all. But it had sent her into a frenzy of madness and blood-lust; at that time she'd been every bit as wild and untameable as a level E. Even now she could still hear Taijo's horror-struck screams and his mother's helpless wails as she entered the garden to see Yomoriko bearing down on her son, sucking his blood with that demonic look all vampires possessed during feeding...
He'd died that day. Killed by the girl he'd rescued and had come to think of as his sister and friend, a fate he'd neither asked for nor deserved. And Yomoriko hated herself more every day for it. She hated that she was alive while someone as wonderful as Taijo had been forever erased from this world. Hated that vampires existed at all. And hated that she was one of them.
Obviously she'd had to leave that city – that one place she'd managed to find happiness again – behind. She'd travelled wherever the wind took her, crossing miles and miles without ever looking back. Because to look back brought only pain and like the cowardly beast she was, she was too scared to suffer anymore of it than she already had. That very day she'd vowed never to drink blood again, not ever, and from then to now she'd kept to that promise vigilantly. Even when chairman Cross had found her wandering, even when he'd taken her into his Academy, she refused to drink. She wouldn't even take the blood pills...
...Because an abomination like her didn't deserve pity or reprieve.