Disclaimer: I'll give you one of those silly standardized test problems. I'm still not Matsuri Hino. Matsuri Hino still owns Vampire Knight. Therefore?...Answer: I still do not own Vampire Knight.

Blood

As soon as Zero returned to the room, he grabbed the weeping Yuuki by the shoulders and drilled holes in her eyes with his stare. "What's going on, Yuuki?" His angry, demanding voice only made Yuuki cry harder. "Come on, tell me! Has this happened before?"

Yuuki hiccupped her pain. "I-I-I—oh, God!" she sobbed.

Exasperated, Zero bared his fangs and let his nails dig into her shoulders. "I'm not fucking playing around! Tell me! Now!"

Yuuki's eyes grew wide, her face still with shock and fear, and then her blubbering returned with a vengeance. She fell from Zero's grasp onto the bed and lay on her side, her whole body shaking.

Shit. He'd screwed up again. He rested his forehead in his palm and watched floaters dance behind his closed eyelids. "Jesus," he muttered. Trying to calm his fright, he reached over and took Yuuki's hand in his.

"I'm sorry, Yuuki," he whispered. "I didn't mean to yell. But I'm worried! I need to know what's going on, now."

Even as he slowly pulled her back into a sitting position and lovingly brushed a lock of hair from her eyes, she sniveled and whimpered and seemed completely beyond control.

"Christ, Yuuki, please don't cry so much," Zero begged, licking the salty tears from her cheeks and eyelids. "It's really distressing to hear you carry on like this."

"Y-you h-h-hate me, don't you?" she bawled instead. "Y-y-you hate me f-for t-taking s-so much blood from you. And you hate me for getting pregnant and ruining your life."

Not this. Please, not this. He didn't have the patience for her petty insecurities. Not here, not now. He released an exasperated sigh and kissed her gently, silencing her tears for the tiniest thread of a second. "Yuuki. If you think, after all we've been through together, I could ever hate you, you've lost the very last shred of your sanity. So please. Stop whimpering and talk to me."

"I'm s-so ash-sh-shamed. I c-completely l-lost control and I-I-I hurt you."

"That doesn't matter now! What matters is why you lost control!"

Yuuki sniveled for a few more minutes, finally ending it with a deep, shaky breath. "It hasn't happened before. But I…I…"

"You what?"

"My thirst. It's been getting more and more intense since last winter. And the tablets don't help very much."

"The baby," Zero muttered.

"Ye"—sniff—"yeah." She carefully rubbed her hand over her belly. "I-I'm scared. My thirst—it wasn't too bad when it first came. I thought, you know, pregnant women get hungry more often and I'm a vampire, so it seemed natural enough but…but…" She buried her face in her hands. "I took more blood tablets, I mean a lot more, but the thirst always came back sooner and worse. I get attacks twice a day now, sometimes more, and the tablets aren't even satisfying it temporarily, and I'm staring to feel weak and dizzy a lot, and tonight I just…just…"

"Lost yourself." Zero closed his eyes in agony, remembering the dreadful night he'd been unable to hold off his bloodlust any longer and had sunk his hellish fangs into the throat of an innocent, fifteen-year-old Yuuki. If anyone understood how gut-wrenching it was to lose control, he did.

"What am I gonna do?" Yuuki wept. "I don't know if this is normal, and even if it is, I can't just drink blood all the time…!"

"It's all right, Yuuki. You can drink my blood. I'll be okay."

Yuuki stared at him imploringly. "Do you really think that'll take care of it?"

"It should. You look a lot better now than you did earlier today."

"I feel better than I have in a long time," she murmured. Yet she wondered if Zero would be able to provide enough blood for her until she gave birth.

He reached up to stroke her cheeks, which were warm and pink with new life. Her eyes glittered with a spirit he realized he hadn't seen since Christmastime. She lifted a hand and clasped it around his outstretched arm. "I love you," she said tenderly.

Zero smiled sadly and kissed her forehead. "We'll figure it out. Just try to sleep, okay? It'll be all right."

Yuuki wrapped her arms around his shoulders and pulled them down to their pillows. She knew he wasn't as confident on the inside, but at the same time, she didn't care, because right now, his words were enough to put her heart at ease. "I love you, Zero," she sighed, letting her heavy eyelids fall.

Zero rubbed the back of her head gently. "I love you too."

Long after her fatigue had carried her off, he lay awake, watching her back rise and fall with her gentle breaths. Her breathing seemed a lot easier now that it had in a long time. Reaching up, he scraped the small bit of dried blood from his neck. He hoped he could give her enough. He prayed he could give her enough. He wasn't sure how he'd be able to live if anything happened, and he wasn't sure where else to get blood for her. She couldn't attack strangers, and if, eventually, he wasn't enough, how long could Chairman Cross sustain her? Would anyone else be willing to? Yori? Aidou? Or what about…

Ugh. He didn't want to think about it. He would look for anyone, anyone else, before going to him. The very Idea of Yuuki sharing with that man the intimacy belonging solely between her and Zero made his stomach turn over. That was finished. He wanted it to be finished. He needed it to be finished. He would let Yuuki due it as a last resort, but seeing it would destroy him.

Because, especially with her pregnancy, he needed to be the only man allowed to touch her.

--

After she'd been asleep for a while, Zero slipped out of the room and down the stairs, across the house and past the Chairman's closed door, through the hall to the study. Reaching to his right, he flipped a switch that illuminated floor-to-ceiling bookcases that hid every wall, except where a computer desk piled high with open books and disorderly papers sat shyly in the corner. Zero knew he would be able to find every answer under the sun online, but that was the very problem; he wanted the right ones. So he thought the best place to start would be the Chairman's books, since anything about vampires the Chairman actually kept was likely accurate.

It didn't take him half a second to find the right section—books on vampires took up the entire east wall. He approached slowly, at a loss for where to start. There were at least five ten-volume encyclopedias devoted entirely to vampires and folklore, as well as many books separating fact from fiction, a few about science and sociology, and at least thirty devoted to vampires in history. Zero thought a book on vampire anatomy and biology was the best place to start, so, standing on tip-toe to reach the top shelf, he yanked a few likely candidates out and sat in a leather chair in the center of the room to begin is search.

--

Yuuki could feel the blinding rays of the morning sun burn on her retinas before she even woke. "Uh," she groaned in pain, shielding her eyes with a hand. Merciless rays streamed in through the open window, and birds chirped a little too happily in the sakura trees outside. She turned over to hug Zero.

"Good morning," she whispered sleepily.

"Yuuki," he said, clasping her hand between his.

"Yeah?"

"Do you want to know why the blood tablets aren't working?"

She frowned in confusion. "You know?"

"It was in one of the Chairman's books," he answered. "There was an entire section on vampire reproduction."

"So? What did you find?"

Zero squeezed his eyes shut for a moment, trying to erase the disturbing images from his mind. "Well, you know that blood tablets aren't made from real blood. They're a solidified mixture with two parts. One has a chemical makeup identical to that of blood, to quench the thirst. The other causes the bone marrow to produce more red cells. But…" He turned his head and their eyes locked. "What's so satisfying about real blood is it has life in it. There is no life in the tablets, and there never was. And right now, you need the life for our baby. If you don't drink blood, it'll just keep getting worse. No one has survived a pregnancy solely on blood tablets."

Yuuki's eyes widened in terror, but Zero pressed onward. He needed to brand this into her brain until he was sure she wouldn't refuse his blood. "I read an awful story about a woman who didn't get enough blood for her baby, and she miscarried and bled to death, right there in the ambulance."

"Oh!" Yuuki's face grew snow white, and she clutched her stomach as if she were going to be ill.

"But Yuuki, I read that if the mother drinks blood whenever she gets thirsty, the frequency and intensity of her cravings decrease. You should be fine if you just do it when you feel the need. So here." He pulled the bandage from his throat, exposing the wound from the night before. "So you don't lose control again."

Yuuki stared for a moment, hesitant as always, but decided not to question it. She placed a hand over his chest and gently pushed him back on the bed, kissed his neck lightly, and carefully reopened the wounds.

Zero let his mind drift as the ecstasy of Yuuki's feed carried him off. He'd used the story of the miscarriage to convince her to drink his blood for the duration of her term. But he hadn't given her the details. He hadn't told her that the young woman had lived long before blood tablets were invented. He hadn't told her that she'd starved herself because she couldn't bring herself to take so much blood from anyone. And he hadn't told her that after the stillbirth, the blood had spurted relentlessly from her womb, rendering her unconscious before her husband could even get her into the car.

And she would never find out, because no matter what, he would never let that happen.

--

Well, that chapter was difficult. It was really hard to keep Zero in-character, I hope I did all right. : / People like Zero are always hard to write about because they are so multi-faceted. I sure hope Kaname doesn't give me this much trouble. :X

So, if it is a while before chapter six comes up, I'm sorry. School is starting tomorrow, I have to get a new novel of mine off to a publisher sooner rather than later, and I'm not really sure hot to approach this story from here on out. I know where it's going, but I don't know exactly how to take it there, if you know what I mean. I'll try to have it up within a week, though, two weeks tops. Ja ne!

P.S. "Breathe No More" by Evanescence is Yuuki's unofficial theme song. Look up the lyrics, but don't try to defy me. You can't do it. MWAHA!