Kokoa yawned again, her arms stretching out high above her head as she looked at the classroom clock for the fourth time in half as many minutes, not even bothering to actually take note of the time. She couldn't look out the window, because she had been forced to move her desk. The teacher had chosen to let the class split off into their project teams, and bring their desk along with them, for the last half-hour of class; a move that had left the classroom divided between those who were trying to cram as much work into their projects as they could in the time they had, and the group that was just waiting for the day to be over already.
"Are you even listening to me?!" said one of the girls in Kokoa's team.
Kokoa didn't even adjust from her stretching position, instead only flicking her eyes down towards the girl as she said, "No."
The girl growled in annoyance, but Kokoa had stopped paying attention to her. As Kokoa tried to find a way to amuse herself for the last few minutes of class, she found her attention unwillingly returning to the foreigner, as it had been for the entire day. Ever since she had gotten to class that day, her brain had been tearing itself apart with frustration. It seemed fundamentally wrong to her, so much raw youkai in a body that refused to even attempt the most token of defense against such abuse.
At this moment, the abuse was coming from his teammates, two guys and a girl. She didn't turn to look at them, knowing it would simply be unseemly for a vampire such as herself to seem to be taking so much interest in the affairs of lesser beings. Instead, she focused her vampiric hearing on the group, allowing her to make out the conversation.
"Oh, come on, Gaijin!" said one of the guys, speaking unnecessarily fast. "It's not so difficult, you just need to move the factors from that trinomial over here!" There was a quiet thump that Kokoa assumed came from one of the guys poking a paper on his desk.
"I… sorry, what was that word?" said the foreigner, reciting his most practiced sentence.
The other guy let out an exaggerated sigh. "He said, 'Iiiiit iiiis nooooot'," he said, dragging out every syllable as he repeated the words of his comrade in bullying. It took him several seconds to repeat the sixteen words, after which the foreigner spoke again.
"One second, please." Kokoa heard the flipping of pages, she assumed they were coming from his notebook as he looked up the words that were said.
"Hey!" said the first guy again. Kokoa heard a sharp tap. "Eyes up, Gaijin, we're talking to you!" The foreigner's breathing got considerably more ragged.
"Really, disrespecting us in our own country." The other guy tsked.
"Hey," said the girl, "Don't be too hard on him. I bet it's hard for him, being away from his home country. What happened," she said, her voice dripping with false sympathy. "Your own people didn't want you so they paid the Academy to take you off their hands?"
Kokoa, along with the rest of the class, flinched as they heard a loud slam echo throughout the room. They all turned as one to look at what was happening. Kokoa turned fast enough to watch the guy in the center of the group of harassers flinch and quickly recover as the foreigner stood up and lifted his recently-slammed hand off of his desk.
The bully turned to his friends. "Oh, watch out!" he said, "The gaijin is angry." He turned back to the foreigner. "What are you gonna do about it?" He flicked his pen at the foreigner's forehead, where there was already a small red welt. The foreigner grabbed the pen out of the air. One of his fists started to clench as he took long, slow breaths through his teeth. After a few seconds, his hand relaxed. He dropped the pen onto the bully's desk before turning around and walking to the teacher's at the front of the classroom. As he walked up the room, the rest of the class went back to doing what they were before, disappointed at the anti-climax.
Kokoa leaned back in her chair and closed her eyes, much to the annoyance of her team. As she did this, she just so happened to hear the conversation between the teacher and the foreigner.
"I would leave my group," said the foreigner. "I feel they no do well with I."
Kokoa heard the teacher's papers jostle as he looked up, surprised at being acknowledged before it was time for the class to be dismissed. Any surprise that he felt failed to reach his voice, as he spoke in the same dead monotone as always. "I apologize that you think you are holding the group back, but I am afraid that I can not place you in another. It is likely that you will drag them down the same as the group you are currently in, so either way a group is left with a disadvantage."
Kokoa heard the soft rustle of fabric that she assumed to be the foreigner patting his own chest. "I work with myself."
Kokoa nearly fell out her chair as the teacher's voice managed to convey an emotion. "Are you sure?" he said with a note of curiosity. "I will still have to grade your project as though it were being worked on by a full group of four."
"Yes," the foreigner said confidently. Kokoa took this opportunity to get out of her chair and walk to the teacher's desk.
"Well, if you are certain," said the teacher, "I suppose I can fit you in on presentation day. Yes, Ms. Shuzen?"
Kokoa stood before the teacher, elbowing the foreigner out of her way. "Wait, if he gets to work alone, then I want to too!" she said. "Those idiots you placed me with are only a burden on me. I'd rather be working alone than having to carry them."
The teacher responded, his voice back to a monotone. "Ms. Shuzen, it is inappropriate for you to refer to your classmates in such a way," Kokoa rolled her eyes, "and I am afraid that as punishment you will be the one cleaning the classroom today. Anyways, regardless of your personal feelings towards them, we do not have enough time for another solo presentation. So," the teacher gestured at the foreigner, "Unless you wish to work with Mr.-"
"Fine," Kokoa said, turning to look the foreigner up and down. "He's got to be better than them." She jerked her head back at her old group.
"Very well."
The foreigner looked back and forth between the two of them with a confused look on his face. He opened his mouth, only to be cut off by the teacher.
"In fact, as her new partner, it is only right that you aid her in cleaning the room today after dismissal."
"Wha-"
"Class dismissed!" the teacher said, cutting off the foreigner as he stood up and got out of the class just fast enough to avoid being trampled by the outpouring wave of fifteen-year olds; leaving the class devoid of all life except for a mildly annoyed vampire, a slightly confused foreigner, and the joyous magical bat that sprung out of the vampire's backpack to flap around the room.
Kokoa's attention turned to Kou, waving him over to her until she was reminded of why she was so eager to stay even longer in class.
"Um," said the foreigner, "What did he ju-"
"What's wrong with you?" Kokoa asked, turning to look at him like he was a dollar that refused to flatten enough to be accepted by a vending machine.
"Uh, one second, please." The foreigner reached into his pocket and started to pull something out.
Kokoa rolled her eyes in as wide of a circle as she could force while she sighed in exasperation. "What is wrong with you?" she said in flawless, annoyed, english.
The foreigner almost dropped the thing he was pulling out of his pocket. Once he was done scrambling to grab it before it fell to the ground, he looked up at Kokoa, eye's wide and mouth open. "Y- You speak english?" he said in his home tongue.
Kokoa smiled smugly. "Of course I can. Did you really a proud vampire like myself would have issues speaking such a simple, base language?" Kokoa left out the fact that it took years of sadistic drilling and several forceful prompts from her mother to become as fluent as she was.
"Oh," he said lamely. "Okay." The foreigner hastily straightened up and coughed to cover his embarrassment. "So, uh, what was Mr. Akawa talking about?"
Is that his name? Kokoa thought. "He said that you have been awarded the honor and the privilege of working under me for the duration of the assignment."
"I could've sworn he said something about cleaning," the foreigner said as he headed back to his desk.
"Oh yeah, we're also supposed to clean up the classroom." Kokoa looked at the ground next to her and saw a sheet of paper. She picked it up, crumpled it in her hands, and threw it out the window. "There, the class has officially been cleaned. Now, back to more important matters; what is wrong with you? What kind of monster just sits there and takes that kind of abuse?!"
"What do you mean." The foreigner was half-listening to her as he packed things into his backpack.
Kokoa was starting to get frustrated. "I mean, what they were doing to you in class! I don't care how badly you speak Japanese, there is no way you didn't understand them talking to you with that tone, or hitting you on the forehead! Why didn't you strike back at them?"
"Oh," the foreigner said in a tone that suggested he knew damn well what she meant, but had hoped it was something else. "I can't." He started rooting around in his desk.
"What!?" Kokoa couldn't believe her ears. "What do you mean you can't! Why not, are you too weak or just a cow-"
"I just can't, ok!" the foreigner yelled, looking up from his desk to glare at her. "Now drop it." He returned his attention back to his desk. "Please."
Kokoa stunned for half a second. Then, her face morphed into a mask of rage. That does it! she thought as she extended her arm and turned Kou into a baseball bat. I don't care how much youkai you have, you will learn to never speak to a vampire like that ever aga-
"OW!" The foreigner's hand shot out of his desk and straight to his mouth. "Mother Fu- Agh!" His hand was bleeding. He took it away from his face and looked into his desk. "Oh, those little bastards!" He kept speaking, but Kokoa didn't hear any of it.
It started when she saw the red of free-flowing blood, stopping her in her tracks. Then, the smell hit her. Her grip on the bat loosened until it slipped out of her hand, just barely managing to turn back into a bat and flap away before it hit the ground. All her faculties were focused on that smell. The most mouth-watering thing she had ever smelt in all her fifteen years.
Her mouth hung open and began to fill with saliva as her thoughts emptied themselves of words and instead became a swirling vortex of desire.
Meanwhile, the foreigner was cursing up a storm. "Those slimy, mother fucking, sons of bitch-pussies!" He pulled a long strip of metal out of his desk. "They must have stuck this thing in while I was talking to Mr. Akawa! Gah!" There was a brief, intense flare of youkai as he twisted and crumbled the blade into a crude sphere. The shock was enough to snap Kokoa mostly out of her reverie, enough to respond to him. Kind of.
"Hey," he said. "Could you toss me that box of tissues?"
"Uhh?" Kokoa said. She realized what kind of state she was in and quickly snapped back to form, turning her face away from the foreigner so he didn't see her blush in embarrassment.
Following the bizarre display, the foreigner snapped out, "Nevermind, I'll get them myself." He proceeded to do that, bringing the smell closer to Kokoa, and began mopping up the blood with the tissues.
"I don't care!" Kokoa said, trying to save face. "I'm leaving!" She tried to flee the classroom before her stomach growled, quickly collecting her books and bag.
"Hey! We still need to work on the project!" the foreigner called after her. "You wanna just head to the library now?"
Kokoa didn't even risk glancing over her shoulder, afraid that he might see the drool. "What! No! I actually have a life, and things to do! Try going to the library at eight, I might be there and honor you with my assistance on this stupid thing!" She said all this in a rush as she threw everything into her bag and ran out the door, leaving a very annoyed, bleeding American alone in the classroom. "Don't hold your breath, I am very busy!"
-Later, in the Newspaper Club-
Kokoa was very bored. Her big plan for the day, trying to get her big sister's curse off of her by turning Kou into a crowbar and prying the chain apart, had failed, and now she was forced to sit at a desk and watch the pink-haired thing stare longingly into the eyes of a human. It was enough to make herself sick, just listening to them. She could recite it from memory. First the boy...
"Moka…"
Then the girl…
"Tsukune…"
Repeat three more times, never changing your tone of voice.
"Moka…"
"Tsukune…"
"Moka…"
"Tsukune…"
"Moka…"
"Tsukune…"
Then three different things could happen. The pinkette could dive for his neck, the succubus could come in and try to prove her love for him by driving him to the brink of death via oxygen deprivation, or-
*Thunk* Or, option three, an ice kunai to the forehead.
"Hey!" said the succubus. "It's bad enough that Moka takes Tsukune's blood, you don't need to make him lose more Mizore!"
"I- I'm sorry, Tsukune." *Capu chuu*
Kokoa sighed and buried her head in her arms. Than, something happened. Tsukune's blood drifted over to her. As the smell filled her nostrils, she found she didn't have to try nearly as hard as usual to not attach herself to the other side of his neck as she normally did. It went from smelling fantastic and pure, to smelling as sterile as the blood packs she forced herself to drink in the morning. This line of thought brought her mind back a couple of hours, to the dripping red essence leaking from the foreigner. Just thinking about the spicy, savory-sweet smell nearly made her stomach growl. It had been consistently in her head since she had left the classroom; She couldn't get it out as it taunted her and made her tastebuds cry and beg to be engulfed by it. Kokoa knew there was only one thing that could make it stop, and was willing to do anything to make it happen.
She grabbed her bag stood up from her desk. The pinkette stopped trying to wrench the human away from the other girls for a few seconds when she heard the door open.
"Where are you going, Kokoa?" asked Moka.
"To the library." I need that blood!