CHAPTER TWENTY TWO

A Streak in the Sky (II)

"So nothing, huh?" Hanabusa asked, disappointment clear as he ran his fingers back through his light hair. I smiled at him, and felt as if I failed somehow by letting him down.

"Sorry," I said as I looked back down at the tin box. "But thanks for trying," I added, trying to sound sincere as possible despite the fact that I genuinely was sincere. "That alone means a lot, you know."

He sighed dejectedly anyway, looking very tired once again. "At least let me walk you back to the dorm —"

"— I don't think that's the best idea," I interrupted. My eyes wandered around the library lit solely by the moon and stars pouring through the tall windows. I wonder if anyone was watching. I wouldn't put it past crazy fangirls. "Someone heard you the last time and there are rumours."

He frowned at that. "No one is harassing you or anything, are they?"

"No," I assured him trying to resist the urge to my roll my eyes. The idea of Hanabusa stepping in like a hero to tell them to stop was laughable. My hands wrapped around the straps of my bag. "But I don't want to give a reason for the girls of this school to turn on me with only couple months left here."

He stared at me for a moment, before shrugging. "If you say so. But I'll walk you past the bridge anyway."

"In that case..." I dropped my bag in front of me and pulled out the heaviest textbook — English — and zipped my bag back up before handing it to him. The weight taken off was noticeable. He took it with a blink and a small smile as he read the title.

"This is children's play for you, isn't it?" he guessed.

"Now I feel like you in math," I said as we walked out the library. He strode alongside me, trying to slow down his natural pace as he flicked through the pages.

"I think it's cheating when English is your second language," he commented.

"Technically, it's my third." I had picked it up when I had stayed in the States for experimental treatment when I was still young and able to soak up languages. I highly doubt that I could pick up a fourth language now. "And this is coming from a guy who already has honorary degrees in god knows what field." I paused. "Why are you even in high school?" I asked curiously.

We stopped right outside campus nearing towards the forest that would in a mile open up the bridge to the dormitories. It was empty and silent with a slight chill in the air, but most of the snow had receded and left only a thin layer of snow over the dead grass. For early February, it was rather warm. Perfect weather, by my definition.

"I have to stay with the boss," was his only answer. He wasn't paying much attention to me. Something about that English grammar textbook must be fascinating. Realizing that this made no sense to me, he continued, "Kuran Kaname. The president of the Night Class. He's a pretty big deal in the vampire world."

There was that word again — vampire. And yet he said it so casually and I received it so casually that he could have said an ethnicity or age group or club and I would have reacted the same. "There's a hierarchy?" I asked, more for the sake of talking than interest. I was pretty sure that the less I know, the safer I would be. That was how it usually went in the books and movies after all, but Hanabusa answered me without a care in the world.

"You got it. Purebloods like him, aristocrats like me, the commoners, and then...well, the not so nice."

I laughed. "Commoners?" I echoed as I rubbed my eyes. "That doesn't sound condescending or anything."

The side of his mouth tugged higher than the other with his easy smile. "Level C," he corrected.

"And what's the difference?" I asked as we entered the forest. The trees hid the moon, and although it was easier for my eyes, everything darkened and I could just barely make out the lines. It felt like I was trying too hard to see, putting too much effort to be partially blinded.

"It's the concentration of pure vampire blood. Purebloods have...well, obviously, all vampire blood. I have a little human. Level Cs have more."

"And this last level?"

"They used to be human," he answered but this time it was without the same carefree attitude. He closed the textbook and moved to hand it back to me until he remembered that I had given it to him to hold. Even when I reached back out, he returned it to his side and looked straight ahead. "There hasn't been a human in my family since the Roman Empire fell."

I stared at him. "Seriously?"

"Seriously," he repeated, smiling again.

"So are there, like any perks? Aside from being wealthy and smart and relatively good looking, that is."

He laughed at that. "Relatively?" He threw his free arm over me. "I am stunningly good looking."

I would have removed his arm until I remembered that first, I agreed to try out the relationship and two, it felt nice. Instead I found myself walking a little closer and the inclination did not go unnoticed. I squinted in front of me, careful to not trip over any roots. I had never realized this before, but it was a bit confusing to try to walk at your own pace while you were so close to someone else. I had to focus more on usual, and everything was dim. "Modesty, thy name is Hanabusa," I said as I looked up at him.

"I love it when you speak Shakespeare to me," he said with his trademark smile. "And to answer your question — which you have plenty tonight — yes, there are perks." He looked back in front of him and I followed his gaze to see snow...turn into ice.

"Holy shit."

I hurried ahead and tapped my foot. "Holy shit. You can make ice?" What the hell? Since when was that a thing? Vampires were one thing, but this was magic. Dear God. "What the hell, what the hell..." I kept on muttering. "Is this a trick?"

He looked too entertained as he approached me. "Nope, I can freeze things. One of my cousins control fire, the other manipulation."

"So what is this pureblood then, a god?" I asked rhetorically as I stepped on the ice and cracked it. The moment I did, it came alive and I yelped like Akira as the ice raced towards a trunk and encapsulated it in a shiny, frosty layer of ice. "That is cool," I said dumbly but in definite awe struck.

Hanabusa threw his arm back around me. "I'm starting to look a lot more attractive now, I bet," he teased. "Maybe I should have told you this stuff sooner. It would have sped along the process much easier."

When I looked back up at him, I could barely see him. He frowned. "What's wrong?"

"It's just really dark," I said as I rubbed my eyes. My eyes felt exhausted and sore, and I was ready to put the blame on my extensive studying. I had been in the library for five hours, and that was five hours more than my usual study time of zero. When I couldn't get relief, I rubbed both my palms against my eyes until it became a massage. "Sorry," I muttered again.

"Kaede?" He began to sound worried. I felt his hand on my arms. "Kaede — let me see."

"I'm just tired," I explained. He gently pulled my hands away and disorientated with dots and spasms of light and darkness dancing wildly across my vision, I slowly opened my eyes back to him.

And I saw Hanabusa. I saw him completely.

xxx

"Kaede?" She didn't respond, and Hanabusa touched her arm hesitantly. "Kaede, let me see," he continued. She responded with a soft excuse but he felt worried. Did it have anything to do with the concentrated blood in her system? If he harmed her...

She squinted and blinked her eyes furiously before her eyelids even fully broke apart. But the moment she did — they shot open. Her lips parted and she went still in front of him. "Han..." She trailed off until finally, quietly — "Holy fucking shit." She jumped and her hands thrust out to touch his face. They were cold, but it was still her finger tips and Hanabusa could not complain. Her eyes raked his face and he just knew that she could see. She didn't look happy or excited or curious, she just looked...

She looked at him as if he was an angel, something divine and God-given and although he always joked about his worth, he suddenly felt like his heart was going to beat out of his chest from the way she was looking at him. She looked at him in the exact way he had thought he always looked at her with — with disbelief but...struck. Struck with something. He knew what that something was — the something that made his chest ache, that made him realize that something was running and rushing beneath his skin, heating him up in places he had not known was cold until now.

Her hand dropped from his face to cover her mouth and she stayed like that for a moment, silent, before she looked up past him and then up at the sky. Dots of white and yellow scattered across the black skies, warmed with the pale glow of a crescent moon and it was looking at that did Hanabusa realize that she was going to cry.

But Kaede didn't. She just stared at the sky, and then eventually she came back to him.

Hanabusa thought she would say thank you, or ask him how he did it, or just ask him about colours or scream. But instead, she reached out to him and touched his hair. "So, this is blond?"

He laughed at that. He couldn't help but to laugh at that. Everything she said, as simple as it was, made him smile but it was the timing and the ease that she said it in that made him want to grab her and kiss her.

And she was surprising him again. Before he got a reply out, she grabbed him. She kissed him. Her hands had pulled his face to her, and it was her lips that pressed against his. Her lips that drew his open. Her warmth that engulfed him, her scent that overwhelmed him. This girl...

And Hanabusa was more than ready to yield to everything, to hold her tight, and to kiss her for the rest of the night even if it meant that when she finally opened her eyes again, it would be to black and white. Yet despite how little he wanted to let her go, he did. He pulled back just slightly — he leaned back just enough to say, "I love you."

He could see the very moment where she stopped breathing, but he hurried on anyway. "Kaede —" He loved the sound of her name. He loved the way it felt on his tongue, the way it sounded to his ears, the way it sparked the attention in her hazel eyes. "Kaede, I love you. I am in love with you." She opened her mouth. "I love you...je t'aime, ti amo, te amo* — I could say it in all the languages you want but it would still mean the same thing, Kaede." He stopped only to breathe. "You must know, you had to have known, didn't you?"

She was staring at him as if she did not understand which made no sense to him because she had to understand at least three of those. For a moment, his heart stopped. Had it been too early? He didn't remember how long had he had known this girl for, but he couldn't quite remember what he had been doing before her. There had been other girls, awards, school, family, blood...but none was as defining as that very moment. He had come to love her some time ago, but now he was so definitely in love with this one human girl that he could not possibly fathom any answer from her that was not an echo of his.

An echo it was. A distant, quite echo. "Hanabusa..." That's it, he thought, you said my name...now the other three words.

But he felt her hesitance in her tone and just like that, his heart fell back down and he collapsed back into the present: the present where it was cold and dark and her shoulders curved inwards from the weight of her bag and the look of amazement was from the sudden world of colour and not because of him. He stopped her right there.

"Don't say anything back," he said quickly. He didn't want to hear it. She was looking at him so earnestly that he knew that it was there — she would one day be so completely in love with him that it drove her crazy and gave him time to do whatever he wish but that was not today. Let her enjoy her sight, it's more important than your ego, Hanabusa mentally scolded to himself. "Never mind that. Come on, it's getting late and you need to sleep."

He bent down to pick up the book that he had dropped somewhere between the time she asked him about the colour of his hair and the time he told her he loved her. Without waiting to see if she followed after him, he walked ahead. He was so consumed with his thoughts that the silence did not bother him and when he was finally in full exposure of the natural white light and the eerie yellow one of the lamp, he turned back around.

Kaede was looking everywhere. She was trying to take in everything and he only wished that he had brought her somewhere truly beautiful. He wished that he got his family's jet to take her to all the places she did not fully enjoy. Go somewhere, she had said and he could still hear the way her heart poured into the words she had spoken so long ago to him. Somewhere huge without buildings. Maybe the Savannah? Just the ground and sky and stars.

He looked back at her. She didn't see him. She was staring straight up at the sky yet again. Her eyes flickered across it, trying to seek out every star she had followed ever since she was young. I could have at least brought the telescope, he thought. It was as if I was preparing to fail. "Kaede?"

She snapped back and looked at him and smiled shyly. "Right. Sorry. It's just...everything's so new and...and if I don't concentrate on one thing, I feel like it's too much — but it's so amazing. I mean, there's so many and I..." Her thoughts were scrambled, and yet none of them was about him. "Everything's getting darker and I don't know how long it will last."

"There are four other tablets," he told her. It was all he could make. He had been so faint by the end of it; it was such a strange sensation to get blood drawn from him. He knew from others that if it was a vampire who had taken his blood, a vampire he cared for, it would be equal to sex and yet the way the machine had pulled at his blood...it was draining. But it needed it in large quantities to get a high enough concentrate. A litre of his blood, and despite his almost pure lineage, less than a tenth of it was useable. The rest of it had too many free-floating molecules and bonds that would have been impossible to squeeze into a tablet, even if it contained the very vampire genetics that he needed. Still, it was worth it. It was all worth it.

"Four." She took a deep breath and nodded. "Four," she said again. She walked up to the bridge and then stopped when she realized that he was not following her. "Right, you have to get to class." Wrapping herself with her arms, she walked back to him slowly. "Thank you for...this. Really. Truly and honestly and sincerely and all those other words — thank you. I...you succeeded in something that no one has ever before and..." She was looking at everywhere but him, trying to pull out the right words but none of it seemed to be what she wanted to convey. "You are so smart, Hanabusa, and it's astounding..." Again, she failed. She sounded more like a teacher and she knew it. "For the first time ever I..." She stopped and this time, gave up trying. "Just thank you."

She leaned up to kiss him quickly; a brief touch of her lips to his before she went back down. She kept her hands in his. "If there's anything I could do to pay you back for this..."

He spoke before he thought. "Come with me. To my room."

She stared at him, one eye smaller than the other.

"Just when I thought you got over the whole sexual predator thing," she said. But then she smiled, but he could still see the blush in her cheeks. It was so faint, but it was there. And it was the fact that her body betrayed her teasing words that he found so...endearing. "How about I," she dragged the last word as she tried to think of another proposal, "get you a gift. A really cool gift. My blood." She laughed nervously. "You're a vampire, right? Get it? No, I'm kidding. Sorry. I can't give you my blood — that was so stupid. I'm just nervous. Sorry. Because, you know, you asked if I can come to your room and well...you know. I'm sorry. I'm nervous. I'm overwhelmed because of all this colour and I'm nervous. Sorry."

And he was so, so in love with her.

Hi!

So I get a double update streak, awesome. It was so fun to write this chapter but in a couple days, I'm probably going to think it's too cheesy and make edits but for now...it's been two weeks, so here it is! Thank you so much for reading the previous chapter (after the hiatus) and this as well.

I hope you enjoyed this chapter! Reviews would be lovely :)

* - The translation is first in "English" (Assuming that VK takes place in Japan therefore they are speaking in Japanese), French, Italian then Spanish