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The Scent Of Enchanted Blood

Summary:

In Taisho-era Japan, vampires stalk the night and kill people for their blood. They are mercilessly hunted down by the Demon Hunters - it is every vampire's worst nightmare to come face-to-face with one of these fanatical swordsmen and their mysterious black blades. Vampires live in complete fear and secrecy; they lead cowardly existences and refrain from overhunting for food. Many have entered non-aggression pacts with their neighbors and agree to hunt within their own set territories, although many loathe the need for cooperation. Despite all of this, their numbers continue to thin to the point where the people of Japan as a whole do not fear them, with murmurs that they are becoming an endangered species.

Hidden in a box, beneath the floorboards in some forgotten corner of a certain old house, is a book. This book, part journal and part confessional account, details one young man's transformation into a vampire and the treachery therein. These are the contents of that book.

This work is inspired by 'Overhunter Hunter', the oneshot by Koyoharu Gotouge which served as the prototype for Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba.

Notes:

This fic has two major inspirations.

The first is Gotouge’s first ever oneshot, ‘Overhunter Hunter’, which is the prototype that Demon Slayer was based on. It was initially going to be set within the same continuity as that oneshot, but there were too many things I wanted to change so I spun it into its own AU. It takes heavily from OH, but I’m still tagging it as DS fic because it uses some characters and concepts, some of which weren’t present in OH.

The second major inspiration is The Reader by Bernard Schlink. That may seem like a strange source of inspiration considering its plot and content, but I mainly refer to its style. I read it after I had come up with the idea for this story in my head, because I was looking for novels/media with adjacent subject matter for research purposes. The Reader is a first-person account of a fifteen-year-old boy’s love affair with an older woman, at least for the first eighty pages, with the later revelation that she was a guard at a concentration/extermination camp during the Holocaust. It was that very novel that made me want to write this as a first-person retrospective account from Yushiro’s perspective (I also feel comfortable in spoiling here that yes, this will deal with a sexual/romantic pairing, if the tags didn't give it away for you). Initially, it was going to be written a lot like my other fics, but I thought fixing the perspective like that would make the story more interesting. I'm sorry if first-person isn't your thing and it's something I don't typically write, but I feel it works with this story in particular.

You don't need to read The Reader for this fic (it’s a heavy book in terms of subject matter, and it left me feeling cold and depressed), but I would seriously recommend reading the Overhunter Hunter manga. It’s only forty-ish pages and has a lot of action, so it goes by quickly. It should also get you used to the overall vibe I want to strike with this fic.

This work is going to have extremely mature themes and subject matters depicted/explored such as psychological trauma, abandonment/neglect, emotional manipulation, unconfortably wide age gaps, grooming, addictive behavior, sexual degeneracy, extreme violence and culpability/guilt. The Dead Dove: Do Not Eat tag and the archive warnings have not been used lightly, so I beseech you to take a moment to consider if this is something you would be comfortable with reading. I'm hoping this is obvious, but the subject matter is not a reflection of my personal tastes or beliefs, it simply exists for the purposes of story. Also please keep in mind that since this is a first-person narrative, there will be viewpoints and opinions expressed by the narration that aren't necessarily shared by myself.

I will use the author's notes of each chapter to elaborate on the creative decisions I made for the story and characters, what my inspirations are and so on.

In case you are wondering, the use of 'vampire' and 'demon' (to refer to the Demon Hunters) in the description is not a mistake.

Chapter 1: First Entry

Summary:

My transformation.

Notes:

(See the end of the chapter for notes.)

Chapter Text

When I was sixteen years old, I became a vampire.

I lived a normal life with my parents and younger brothers in some semi-remote village on the banks of the river, just half a day’s walk from the nearest large settlement. The smell of grass and mud were a constant presence, they became a part of the fabric of living there. It was something of a boring life, but it was peaceful.

I developed what one might call a bad habit, however. Ever since I had started becoming a man at that tender old age of twelve, I became interested in women. Not just any women, for none of the girls in my village particularly appealed to me. I was courteous and friendly with a few, but most I never talked to, and I never really had fantasies of any of them. No, my eye was saved for the mature women, the houswives and mothers. I would always fantasize about seeing them undress in front of me and my thoughts would be filled with sleeping with all of the mothers and housewives of the village. 

There was this woman in the village. She was a mother of four and was very kind to me and my family. By accident, I found out that she liked to wash herself in the river completely nude early in the morning a certain day every week. I was always there, hidden in the bushes, and I would watch her wash herself and I couldn’t stop staring at her naked body. It was like she had enchanted me.

It didn’t last long. I was caught one day and since she recognized me, she then told my father. Once I admitted to him that it was far from a one-time offense, he beat me within an inch of my life (or at least, that’s how it felt) and yelled at me for being a perverted degenerate. He was ashamed that I was his own son.

After that, he kicked me out of the house. “You’re a man now and you’re going to take responsibility for your behavior.” That’s what he said. My mother didn’t raise a finger in my favor, she seemed to approve me being kicked out. I couldn’t comprehend such a thing at the time, it was like being told something you’ve believed your whole life has been a lie. My brothers were only eight and six, so they couldn’t really understand what was happening. I was angry and I was lost. I cursed my family from the depths of my heart for being so cruel to me, for punishing me so severely for merely being curious. My father was always something of a harsh man, and I always felt that he disapproved of me somehow, or that he was disappointed in me.

I was all alone, so I walked, I walked and I walked. I followed the river and ended up in the nearest city, a very large settlement only possible due to the modernizations made in the past fifty years. Completely unlike my old, traditional home, this place was an odd mixture of local and western architecture. The traditional rowboats and tiled ceilings contrasted strangely with the chimneys, the electrical pylons and the steamboats and carriages and automobiles. It was odd, my parents had taken me and my brothers to that place before, but it all felt so new to me still.

I became a beggar. I groveled in the dirt and gravel, raised my hands up high and pleaded for money, for food, for water, for anything. Most people passed me by, they didn’t seem terribly interested in helping me. Some would leave me a small pittance, but they would always look at me with something close to pity without actually doing anything substantial to help me – they felt sorry but not sorry enough to take action.

I would sleep on the streets at night. As the weeks progressed, my cheeks hollowed, my ribcage jutted out from my torso, my clothes tore and dirtied and my body attracted an extremely foul stench. I imagine that I became increasingly unsightly to the people. I wandered randomly around the city and I easily got lost within its labyrinthine streets.

One day, I started to fall ill. My chest hurt, I had a bad cough and a fever, and all my muscles ached with an unbearable agony. It was most likely something I caught from the food I ate or the water I drank, but my condition deteriorated, and quickly at that. The sight of me became even more wretched, for the people gave an even wider berth to me. Most looked at me in disgust and refused to even approach me, so I wasn’t even managing to eat on top of succumbing to my illness. I lost track of time, to the point that I can’t even say how long I was like that. But in due time, I was lingering outside death’s door.

One evening, after the sun had set, I decided to rest my back against the wall on some random street, next to a pair of open gates that led to a property I did not have the energy to decipher the nature of, though I could see that it was large, western and two-story. I sunk down and I wanted to close my eyes. I was hungry, thirsty, tired and sick, and I thought that if I closed my eyes I might die, but I wanted to close them anyway. I remembered the family that kicked me out, my mind fixated on my mother - how she didn't even lift a single finger in my favor, how she refused to save me. I tucked my knees up to my chest and I curled into a ball as a few heaved sobs escaped my throat.

Eventually, I heard the door of the building behind the wall I was resting on creak open. A few deep, pronounced footsteps signalled the arrival of someone else. Whoever it was, they were most likely going to close the gates. At first, I wanted to not be disturbed, but I betrayed my presence by coughing uncontrollably. A head peered out from the open gateway beside me, it looked to its left and to its right, and it beheld the sight of me slumped over, delirious and in great pain – both physical and emotional.

It was a woman’s face. Large, purple eyes. Red lips on a canvas of pale, white skin. Her hair was bound and kempt, a flower-patterned hairpin with a pearl embedded in the center rested on the side of her head. I couldn’t really guess her age at the time. When the rest of her body emerged, I saw her kimono. It had an elaborate, bizarre but beautiful floral pattern of reds and greens and blues and whites on a backdrop of purple. Her obi was cream-white and she wore tabi and geta, so she looked taller than she really was. I even thought at that time that she looked indescribably pretty, almost like the perfect housewife or the spirit of a household deity.

She walked over to me, her feet moved slowly and in short strides. Her geta crunched the gravel she walked on; I watched her as she descended to a squat in front of me and put her palm against my forehead. She must have guessed I was seriously ill, yet even at the time I found it curious that she made no real attempt to distance herself from me.

She whispered something to me; I think she called me a ‘poor thing’. She slung my arm over her shoulders and she slowly carried me to the building behind us – every part of my body was hurting so much that I just wanted someone to slit my throat. I noticed that she was actually smaller than me, so I was amazed at how easily she took hold of and escorted me. We walked past what could only be described as a front garden, though there was nothing but gravel and the occasional shrub, and we walked through the front door.

It was instantly apparent to me that this was a building powered by that modern miracle of electricity. The smell of anesthetics and the sight of cabinets and medicines that passed us by as we walked through the bottom floor’s corridor made me realize that this was a clinic. In that case, this woman must have been a doctor. That might have explained why she didn’t seem to flinch at my condition, but it was still very strange to me. And I couldn’t help lament the irony, if maybe I had found this place sooner…

The first thing she did was take me to what I can only describe as her office, and she gave me some sort of medicinal drink. I don’t know what it was, but it tasted disgusting – like the bitterest of oranges squeezed together with locusts. I assume it was some sort of medicine, since it slightly relieved the pain I felt, though it did not stop my coughing much. She then disrobed me, discarded my worn, tattered and putrid garments. And I was ashamed, for I was a young man exposed indecently to a lady, but I also noticed all the dirt and grazes that were all over my body. She then took me to the room opposite, to a modern, western-style bathtub, complete with running water and boiler storage tank. She ran the hot water, coursed her arm through the water to check the temperature, and then lowered me in to bathe me; she cleaned me of both my accumulated grime and foul odor with her surprisingly cool hands. I shivered, convulsed, coughed as she washed my body. It was deeply embarrassing, I couldn’t really process what was happening: One minute I was at death’s door, and the next minute I was being saved by this woman. The hot water at least made me feel a bit better, but my body still ached with intensity.

After she was done, she helped me out of the bath, took a towel and dried me off. She looked completely calm and collected as she did it, and I didn’t really have the energy to muster as much as a blush. When I was dried, she cladded me in a new, fresh, snow-white yukata gown and escorted me to a room with a clinical bed. Her clinic was a humble one, so the room wasn’t that big and this was the only bed for patients. All the curtains were shut. She took me to one of the beds at the very end of the room in the corner, took my hand and shoulder and helped lower me into it.

The bed was comfortable. Growing up, we never had beds. My family always used futons, so sleeping on the floor was normal to us, and I had never rested on something like a bed. But when I laid down in it, I thought it would be impossible for me to use a futon again... if I were to live to see one again, that is. As my head rested on that cloud-white pillow, she pulled a stool next to my bed and sat on it, then she put her hand to my forehead again. Her touch was surprisingly cold. After examining my temperature, she left and then quickly came back with a stethoscope, put it around her ears and pressed the scope itself to my chest. She turned her ear to my direction, as if listening carefully to my beating heart.

“How long have you been like this?” The woman asked.

I said I couldn’t remember.

She frowned and then sighed, then took my hand with both of hers. She asked me my name. For some reason, that question struck me as profound. Not that it’s unnatural for a doctor to want to know the names of their patients, but it was the way she said it. She wasn’t really speaking like a professional.

I told her my name. “Yushiro.”

“I am Tamayo,” she said, “I’m a doctor.”

I thought it was a very pretty name, but I didn’t tell her that. I nodded, and thought it strange she clarified her position as a doctor, since it was already quite apparent. I dismissed it as her being courteous. I coughed up some yellow-brown mucus, it landed just below my collarbone.

Her hands squeezed mine slightly and she looked at me with what I believe was sadness in her eyes. She rubbed my palm quite tenderly. Thinking back on it, I think she was trying to comfort me. It reminded me of how my mother used to hold my hand and keep me close, that was one of my favorite memories from when I was a little boy.

Tamayo furrowed her brow and her lips crumpled. The awful, bitter aftertaste of my own phlegm and nasal mucus mixed curiously with the strong fragrance of her perfume. I could call the mixture of scents and tastes neither too pleasing nor too disagreeable. But it was weird, it was like eating sweet dumplings after throwing up.

She then told me in no uncertain terms about how dire my situation was. She regretted to tell me that there wasn’t much else she could do, but that she would try her utmost. She said that my condition had been worsened considerably, as I had not eaten much and I had been harshly exposed to the elements. She seemed to recognize the disease I had purely based on my symptoms alone, but she didn’t elaborate on what it was that was taking my life. She just called it an infection.

And then Tamayo stared at me, stared into my eyes. Her eyes stared into mine, and I could see her narrow them strangely, as if she was looking at someone or something she had known for a long time. I coughed again, I found it nearly impossible to speak. But then I realized I was staring at her, staring into her eyes, and I shamefully looked away and up to the ceiling. I stared at the electrical light at the ceiling for so long that my eyes started to hurt, and when I closed them, I could see the outline of the bulb.

But then I looked back to her, because I thought the sight of her so was so easy on my eyes that I wanted to behold something nice in my time of suffering. And then I noticed something odd about her. I couldn’t put my finger on it, but it was like she was too perfect, and not in the flattering sense. But maybe it was something else. Her breathing was really quiet and unpronounced, it’s like she was trying to hide herself. Her hands were nice and cool, but she just bathed me, so I thought they should have been warm. They came into contact with the hot water, she was testing it for the temperature before she put me in the bath, so I couldn’t explain why they were cool.

We stayed like that for a long time. It was mostly silent, though the sounds of my aggressive coughing and my ragged breathing would sometimes break that silence. Tamayo eventually nodded at me, then got up and turned around. She said she would prepare me something to eat, and that she would try to make me feel as comfortable as possible.

But after she walked away from me, I realized that I had started to fall in love with Tamayo. It might be bizarre to consider such things when one is on their death bed, but that was how I felt. I knew this to be the case, because when she disappeared from my sight, my thoughts were only consumed by when she would return. I even tried to mentally undress Tamayo – what her body would look like, beneath all those layers of clothes. One might consider a young man becoming infatuated with a beautiful woman the natural course of action. This doubly applies to me, what with my previous fixation on admiring and indulging in the thoughts of middle-aged housewives, the very same fixation that expelled me from the comfort of my old life.

I didn’t have much time to contemplate that, since she was back sooner than I expected. She had a tray in her hands, and on top of it was a spoon in a wooden bowl that had steam coming off it, and next to that was a drinking cup – the same used for my medicinal drink. I grimaced at the mere thought of drinking that horrible stuff again. She placed the tray atop the bedside desk, and she took the cup to my lips. With great effort, I forced down that terrible and bitter drink, telling myself that it would help with the pain.

After I finished the drink, coughing and retching at its texture and taste all the while, she put the cup back onto the tray. She then took the bowl and the spoon next to it, sat down on the stool and started feeding me. My eyes could make out that she was bringing a spoonful of soup to my mouth, but I could not smell it properly. Upon consuming it, I realized that it was miso soup. Although my sense of taste was also dulled, it was delicious, and I wondered if she had made it herself. Presumably she did, since there seemed to be nobody else in the clinic. She kept feeding me the soup, and I remembered a time when my mother would feed me soup when I was a young child, on winter days when I was cold and sick and had to stay indoors.

When I finished the soup, I began to breathe heavily. My chest felt tight. I coughed so much, so loudly. I found it hard to focus on anything at all, even that beautiful woman Tamayo. She put her hand to my forehead again, and I flinched at how cool it was.

She then took hold of my hand again. She seemed insistent on holding my hand. In that moment of silence, I imagined us holding hands as we walked through a field of daisies. But then I noticed the way she looked at me, it was even more intense than before. She looked like she was contemplating something, something that had been on her mind since she laid her eyes on me outside after the sun had set.

This cycle continued for a couple more days. I would lay in bed, writhing and struggling at my fate, and she would either feed me or give me medicine (usually both). Sometimes it was soup, other times it was rice and fish, but it all tasted amazing and my heart warmed at the idea that she cooked it all herself. I even thought that it was almost like my mother’s cooking, each meal crafted with love.

When I needed to expel waste, she would bring a bucket to my bedside and hold it beneath me, then she would clean me up after I was done - even then, I thought her hands were very cool. As a professional, she was probably used to administering such aid, but I couldn’t help but find the idea of helping a patient like that unsettling at the time.

She couldn’t see me every hour of the day as she had other patients to attend to, they typically came to her with mild ailments, but she saw me as often as she could. She never left the clinic either, and I noticed that she was always sure to get the gates open before sunrise. I also noticed that sunlight never penetrated the room, and I don’t think it got in at any part of the clinic. From what I could tell by looking out of the window, this building faced the west, and the sun rose behind it.

My symptoms didn’t improve much. I was still in intense pain; I could barely move. I coughed a lot, produced a lot of mucus. My chest and lungs and stomach and throat hurt, like they were all doused in fire and ash. During the night, I would descend into dreaming delirious and feverish dreams. I was aware that I was sleeping, that I was dreaming, but I couldn’t do anything about it. My mind kept replaying the brutal beating I suffered at the hand of my father, the scene of my exile from my familial home, the cold indifference of my own mother, me succumbing to my disease, but also images of the doctor Tamayo in all her beauty. My mind would drift in its unconscious states to indulgent fantasies of me lying beside her beneath the sheets of that very bed, our legs entwined and our chests and lips close as we made love. I tried to masturbate to her once, but I found the act too tiring for my weak body and it made me remember the bitter chain of events that put me in that situation in the first place.

After those couple of days had passed, she sat next to me again on the stool next to my bed – this was sometime close to midnight, and I was in so much pain that I couldn’t sleep. She tried to soothe me with more of her medicinal drink, which didn’t taste as awful as it used to, probably because I had grown used to it, but it didn’t seem to be as effective as it was before. Either way, it was clear I was in the midst of my death throes. I was shivering and shaking while panting with great exertion, my hand trembled as she held onto it.

“You will die soon, like this.”

It was something I already knew in my gut. I nodded. “I know.”

“Medicine can’t help you anymore.”

“Not your fault.” I reminded her of that, I didn’t want her feeling guilty for a life she could have never saved.

She shook her head, then she tightened her hold on my hand, almost to the point where it hurt. It sent a jolt of energy through my core, and I felt my heart skip a beat.

“There is another way I could help you.”

“How?” I asked.

And then she said something that defied all sense and expectation.

“Because I am a vampire.”

The statement was so ridiculous, so outrageous, that I almost wanted to scoff at it the moment I had processed it. But as I began contemplating my retort to her words, she willingly and deliberately opened her mouth to expose her teeth. Her already-pronounced canines then grew in front of me as they morphed into tiny daggers. When I saw that, goosebumps grew on the back of my neck and I froze in place. My eyes agape, I could not stop staring at her teeth.

And then everything began to make sense. How she pulled me so easily up off the ground and through to the house. Her cool hands. The unusual sensation she gave off, the one I couldn’t put my finger on. How she breathed so calmly and quietly, no matter the exertion she put on her own body. Why she never went outside during the day, why she opened the gates before sunrise and closed them after sunset. Why the building faced the west, why sunlight never got inside. How her grip on me then hurt slightly. All of that made sense.

But even I knew that vampires were just the stuff of fables, of folktales. I couldn’t believe it, because out of the years of my existence I had never seen a god, a Buddha, a demon, a ghost or a vampire. None of those things. And a vampire as a doctor was strange; in essence, she would have been treating her own foodstuff, maintaining the cleanliness of her livestock.

She closed her mouth, hid her fangs and teeth. I shivered in place, my body momentarily forgot its urge to cough, the very urge that had plagued me so. I felt, in that moment, that she might actually kill me for sustenance. I thought she would offer to give me a quick and painless death.

But she elaborated. “Vampires are immortal and immune to disease. We have strong bodies and nothing can kill us apart from sunlight and decapitation. I can turn you into a vampire and save your life, but I wont do it unless you want me to.”

I was confused, because I couldn’t comprehend why a vampire would willingly try to help someone like me. She was implying it was something she could do of her own free will. That was odd. I thought that if I were her, I would just kill me, so I wondered what would compel a vampire to save someone like me, rather than just off me and drink my blood.

My lips quivered; I didn’t know how to respond. Her hold on my hand gentled, one of them let go, and then she raked it through the patch of black hair on the top of my head. She caressed me fondly, tried to comfort me like a mother their child, or a lover their better half. I was stunned.

But still, I didn’t speak. So she continued.

“Would this truly be something you want? I can’t save you with traditional medicine, your illness will definitely take your life if you're left like this. But know that becoming a vampire is irreversible, you cannot walk back from it. You will lose your humanity."

She then warned me that many transformations are traumatic and expend a lot of energy. Upon the completion of my transfiguration, I would likely immediately be rabid and hungry for human blood. I raised my eyebrows, both at her gestures and words. She seemed to speak from experience, from a place deep within her heart, for she looked quite sad as she gave me her warnings. Tamayo’s eyes narrowed, looked like they were about to expel tears. I thought she might be remembering something specific.

It was hard for me to consider the full ramifications of becoming a vampire; intellectually, I knew that to be one of her kind would be to view normal people as forever my prey and source of food, but I couldn’t quite understand what that would to do me emotionally.

Unfortunately, I didn’t exactly have much time to consider her offer, for I knew my life was balanced precariously on the edge. I didn’t know when my disease would claim me, but it was evident that I had not long to live.

I narrowed my eyes and beheld the sight of her. Even with the knowledge that she was a vampire, that she was a bloodsucking parasite which feasted on humans, I couldn’t help but admire her beauty. A lump formed in my throat; I wanted this moment to last forever – sans the pain.

Before I made my decision, I had to know something. “Have you done this with anybody else?”

“No.”

It shocked me, but I trusted her. She had no reason to lie, and I didn’t think deceit was in her nature at the time. So, I was the first. That made things even more strange. She had been looking at me in both deep contemplation and profound sorrow since I had arrived. I had trouble believing that a vampire could even feel pity or sympathy for humans, their source of food. But the way she had been looking at me, I was clearly different in some way.

Considering all this, I hesitated. This might have been a trick, somehow. Additionally, my family had cruelly kicked me out, so I had no reason to live. The disease was claiming my life, but I didn’t really have a good reason to live on. If I died with dignity, my humanity would remain intact. In many ways, it made sense to decline her offer and die. All of this I considered as a matter of rationale.

But then, I beheld her beautiful face, and I noticed that the mere sight of her was enough to dull my terminal pain, that my heart was falling evermore for her. It might be odd, but I think a part of me only wanted to live on to continue to see the sight of that woman, now that I think on it. In that moment, I felt compelled to survive. That is not to mention that the thought of dying itself terrified me to no end, my fear proved more than able to overpower any flicker of doubt held by my own conscience. The world had mistreated me, it was very keen to not help me and it had left me cold with resentment. But this woman, vampire or not, was offering me a way out.

I had to ask one more question. “Can we… live together?”

Tamayo seemed taken aback by my question, but then she smiled and nodded.

“Of course. I’ll take care of you. You can trust me, Yushiro.”

That was the first time I ever saw her smile, and I loved it so much that it hurt. For the whole time she took care of me, she always looked either sad or in deep thought, but I fell in love with her smiling face so much that my chest actually started to ache. The thought of us living together seemed almost emotionally fulfilling. I was truly alone in the world, but if I joined her, then I wouldn’t be. It felt like she was giving me a new reason to live, that she was giving me a chance to start anew.

So, I accepted. I requested her to do it under my breath. She remained silent for a few moments, but then said yes. She extended ocean-blue claws with her left hand, then scratched the index finger of the right so she drew blood. She leaned over slightly and raised this hand to my face, her bleeding digit lingering right in front of my lips. I understood what it was that I needed to do: I opened my lips, she slowly inserted the finger into my mouth, and then I sucked on it. As I drank her blood, I felt power surging through my body, which made me suck with greater and greater enthusiasm. The more I drank, the more strength returned to me, the more I wanted more. I couldn't stop myself.

And then, the next thing I remember, I was standing amidst the mutilated corpses of my family with blood staining my robe and dripping from my hands and mouth.

Notes:

Yushiro and Tamayo are modelled mostly on their counterparts from Overhunter Hunter..

In the KnY manga, Yushiro's age is never disclosed – though, if his placement within the gakuen is to be taken as a reliable source, he could be somewhere around fourteen/fifteen (‘appparent’ age that is, his actual age is thirty-five, which means he could have been living with Tamayo for up to twenty years). Yushiro seemed a bit older in the oneshot partly because of artstyle differences, but he also seemed to act a bit more mature (emphasis on 'a bit' though). I decided to work within the spirit of that and age him up that slightest bit. For the purpoes of the story, I still wanted him to be a young man/not even or barely an adult. He isn’t that much different between the oneshot and KnY manga in terms of personality, although the latter exaggerates more of his traits for comedic reasons. It is said by Tokikawa that he was a beggar before becoming a vampire and living with Tamayo, and this line informed his backstory in this work. Why exactly he was living with Tamayo is left unanswered, and is one of the oneshot's many open questions - just what exactly was going on there. The notion of vampires living together seemed to be quite rare.

Tamayo is said in the fanbook to have been nineteen in terms of biological age. Her exact biological age in this work will be stated later on. Her personality is directly modelled on her OH counterpart; the way she behaves between the one-shot and the manga is, again, quite similar, with the notable exception that she outwardly displays no emotion in the former. Nothing about her backstory/past is divulged in the one-shot, so everything that will appear later in the story is partly formed by the KnY manga, but my own original thought too. In both OH and KnY, Tamayo is very obviously Yushiro's superior/senior and behaves as such, so that has been maintained.

The presentation of their relationship in OH is interesting. Aside from the fact that they are evil vampires (as opposed to 'good’ demons), the dynamic shown is I would say a more adult approximation of their relationship seen in DS, at least from what little we see of it. If you read between the lines, you can infer that there is something possibly intimate about it. This fact is actually the main inspiration of the piece, and their relationship (alongside the problematic things it brings in) forms the emotional and psychological crux of the story.

There is also nothing about their occupations in the oneshot, so Tamayo being a doctor (and Yushiro her assistant) comes directly from KnY. This also has plot relevance.

About the illustrations: When coming with the idea for this story, it was suggested by my partner that the art should be diagetic - that they should be sketches drawn in the book/journal by Yushiro. I appreciated this idea a lot and ultimately decided that it was a good way to distinguish the fic, so this is why the illustrations are sketched on lined paper. The design of Tamayo here uses her oneshot counterpart as the direct model, including the strange pattern of her kimono and the position of her hairpin.

Chapter 2: Second Entry

Summary:

On vampires.

Notes:

(See the end of the chapter for notes.)

Chapter Text

My father always told me that it’s difficult for a lot of people to feel truly sorry for something they’ve done wrong. I couldn’t comprehend the meaning behind his words before, but as the years have passed me by, I can see the wisdom behind them. He did not necessarily mean that people were incapable of feeling guilt at their misdeeds. My father meant remorse. The guilt we typically feel is self-centered and more focused on the negative external consequences. Remorse, that deep feeling of pain at doing something morally wrong and knowing it, is much rarer. That’s what he meant.

I say this because as I stared down at the mutilated, bloodied carcasses of my family, at their freshly-drawn blood dripping from my hands, I felt something which I now understand to be remorse.

My mind was wracked with shock and confusion; I couldn’t remember a thing about going back home, nor how long it took me. It must not have taken very long, which meant that I must have been unbelievably fast. As my sanity was returning to me, I felt light-footed and couldn’t stop staring at their corpses.

I felt their blood around my lips, the taste of iron fresh on my tongue. It did not take me long to decipher what had happened: I had slaughtered them all and drank their blood. My presumption was confirmed when I examined the futons they had been sleeping in, they were stained deep-red and there were tears in the cloth.

I thought about the mere idea that my own family had provided me with carnal nourishment and it made me feel violently sick. I began to pant and hyperventilate, as my mind bounced between thoughts of having committed a serious crime and having avenged myself and my awful treatment.

I didn’t think for much longer, because I noticed a presence from behind. I looked over my shoulder to see Tamayo and figured that she must have followed me. She appeared apprehensive and confused. She then asked me why I went there.

I turned my head back around to look at the bodies of my family, the paleness of their skin and the terror in their faces. I saw the blood continuing to pool out beneath them, staining futon and matting both. I brought my hand to my face and looked at my claws, and I noticed how they were stained with deep red.

Her question focused me mentally, because my exile from that place cemented itself at the front of my mind in that moment. I recall the pain of the beating, the disowning, the abandonment from my own parents. I trembled and twitched with raw anger; I looked back at Tamayo and bore my fangs as I pointed a single finger at all of their corpses. The taste of blood was still fresh in my throat. I told her, shouted, that they had kicked me out, and rather impotently at that – the pitch of my voice got higher towards the end of my sentence. And then Tamayo gasped, like she was surprised to hear that. She must have guessed almost instantly that they were my family. I saw her blinking and covering her mouth with her hand.

Her reaction made me think about the scene in front of me and how everything had ended. My eyes began to sting, so I began to rub them with the bloodied sleeve of my yukata. My teeth were chattering and I whimpered. I was completely paralyzed; I couldn’t do a single thing else but stand there and think about what I had done. Flashes of my mother and brother’s warm smiles went through my head. And then I looked down at their mangled faces blemished with fright and horror. Their eyes were completely open and they gave a disturbing death-stare.

I looked back at Tamayo in desperation. I didn’t say a word, but I was staring at her like I was expecting her to do or say something, perhaps even validate me. And then, she did something incredible. She extended out her right arm, pulled back the sleeve of her kimono, dug her nails into the flesh of her forearm and pulled them through her skin. Her claws produced deep, long cuts in her arm and I saw the blood pooling out of it and form into something like a misty, pinkish vapor, which quickly engulfed the room and entered my nostrils. As I inhaled the scent of her enchanted blood, which smelled of flowers on a warm spring’s day, I felt my mind calming down and my body becoming drowsy and languid. And then I lost consciousness.

Time passed. The next thing I remember, I awoke in a bed. Not the same bed that she had looked after me in, this one was more elaborate and had a frame made of carved oak. I turned my head and a bright, bedside lamp shone on a cabinet next to me. I noticed that the white curtains beyond the cabinet were drawn together. Not that it mattered, since the sun still hadn’t risen yet.

I then noticed Tamayo sitting on a chair at the edge of the bed. When I noticed this, I immediately sat upright and realized that my bloodstained robe had been discarded and that I was completely nude beneath the brown sheet. I may have been embarrassed by this in any other circumstance, but not then. I didn’t even really care about the fact that she could see my bare chest. There was a pile of what looked like clothes – I could see black hakama and a white yukata – on Tamayo’s lap, she held them in place with her forearm.

“How are you feeling?” She asked.

I didn’t answer her question immediately; I remained silent for a few seconds. When I think back on these moments, it can be quite hard for me to accurately summarize how it was that I felt. Firstly, I felt incredibly strong. The disease that had been destroying me had completely left me and I possessed a vitality that I could have only dreamed of before. Even though I had just woken up, I was almost fully awake and alert. Even though I chose to remain in the bed, I felt like I could have jumped out of it at any minute and go sprinting for hours.

But aside from that, it was almost like my mind was trying to dissociate itself from all that had recently happened to me. Perhaps I was still under the influence of whatever it was that Tamayo’s blood did to me (I couldn’t know for sure at the time), but I didn't feel anything but a slight discomforting sensation in my chest, which was in stark contrast to what I felt when I stood amongst the bodies of my family.

I decided to focus on Tamayo, and looking at her made me feel lightheaded and helped to alleviate my burden, despite all that had happened. I could faintly smell her perfume; it was like a weaker version of the blood that had lulled me into sleep. Even in that moment, I thought she was extremely beautiful. It was as if I had been intoxicated, and I had this very intense and sudden fantasy of leaning over and kissing her on the lips. It was strange, the thoughts of my family and the crime I had committed almost completely went away as soon as my mind went to her.

After being absorbed in my own thoughts for a few moments, I asked her where I was.

She explained to me that I was in the upper floor of her clinic, which had been converted entirely to be her own personal apartment. We were in a spare bedroom. There was the bed, the cabinet to the side, a desk and a few drawers where clothes were meant to go. On the opposite side of the room was a mirror that was taller than either of us. All of it, much like the clinic downstairs, was distinctly western. She later told me that the wood of my bed had been carved in France, whilst her own bed had come from England.

I cleared my throat. “What… happened?”

“You went feral and ran out of the clinic when I turned you, so I followed. By the time I caught up to you…”

She then lowered her head and looked at the pile of clothes on her lap. I could hear a quiet but lengthy exhale from her mouth and her eyes narrowed. She stayed completely still and looked to be in something of a meditation. I let her stay like that for a while, mainly because I was afraid of interrupting her, but I found the sight of her like that strangely pleasing.

I figured that the vitality and strength I felt at that time must be felt by her as well. That was probably how she was able to catch up with me so effortlessly. I was amazed; it seemed that our kind were so supernaturally fast, that we could cover so much distance in such a short amount of time. It took me half a day to walk from my village to this city, and I had just done that journey in the blink of an eye. I had problems coming to terms with all of that.

She raised her head and looked back to me. What she said next still haunts me to this day.

“I cleaned up the bodies and took you home about an hour ago. An isolated incident like that shouldn’t arouse much suspicion.”

I never asked her what exactly she did with the bodies. I was silent and looked to my side.

“Do you want to talk about it…?” Tamayo’s voice contained embedded within it a certain squeak, a high-pitched inflection that signified a subtly-breaking voice. Be it sympathy, sorrow or something else, I could sense a deep emotion there.

I thought about my family and what I had done to them again, it emerged into my mind like an intrusive thought. My mouth started trembling, but then I suddenly remembered how I was beaten so brutally and kicked out and all the pain that followed suit. I remembered all the indignity and shame that I went through, how I ate trash and filth and how I drank dirty water and skulked about the streets in misery. I felt a vein twitch in my forehead for a moment, but it soon settled. It seemed that remembering my mistreatment helped alleviate any other feelings that emerged.

I shook my head, but I didn’t say anything.

“I understand,” she replied, “but if you ever wanted to talk about it…”

She stopped speaking. Talking about my family was something that prompted noticeable emotion in her. I was beginning to think that Tamayo used to have her own family who had long-since died. Maybe she outlived them, maybe she ran away from them after turning into a vampire, maybe she killed them in the same way I had. If she was remembering her family, then I guessed that she missed them dearly.

I even wondered if she took pity on me because she saw something like a son in me. Perhaps I reminded her of one of her own children, or perhaps she wanted to connect with someone in that way again. This was all inference and guesswork on my behalf and I didn’t ask her directly about this at the time, I thought it would be insensitive of me to do so. But it would explain why she always looked at me in that way and why she was so eager to help me, despite me being a stranger to her.

Not knowing how to ask my next question, I slowly raised my right arm and trawled my fingernails across the length of it. She spent a few seconds processing my movements, but she then flinched in her seat and gave a little smile which hurt me that tiny bit on the inside. Her smiles are always so beautiful.

“I’ll explain soon,” she then stood up and placed the pile of clothes on top of the sheets of the bed below my feet, “I have some clothes for you. Please, put them on and get used to them. When you are ready, come see me in the room opposite.”

Sheepishly, I nodded at her request. Her weak smile then disappeared and she stood. Slowly waking to and closing the door behind her, my eyes remained focused on her nape until I could see her no more. And then I was left with my own thoughts. Thoughts which I was desperate to distract myself from, so I almost immediately flung the sheet away from me, got up from the bed and took the clothes with me to the mirror on the opposite side of the bedroom.

I inspected my naked body in the mirror. Despite having all of that strength, I still very much had the body of a boy my age. Not only that, I still looked just as thin as I did when I was a human, my muscles hadn’t visibly become engorged in any way and I appeared to be someone of average or below-average strength. I no longer looked malnourished or ravaged by disease, but I was not a shining example of aesthetic strength.

It took me longer than it should have to notice that my hair had changed color to a strange mix of black and lime-green. My eyes had also turned light purple like Tamayo's, and my slits had changed to almost look like those of a cat. I pulled my lips apart with my finger and saw four pronounced canines – again, much like Tamayo. It then started to dawn on me that I had irreversibly changed, that I was something not human. I can’t adequately explain what it’s like to realize that you’ve lost your humanity.

Tamayo gave me a black hakama and a white yukata alongside tabi and a fundoshi, but also a gray western-style shirt. When I put the clothes on, I inspected myself in the mirror again and thought that I looked strange. I was far more refined than I was used to being, always used to wearing rags and hand-me-downs. However, the clothes were very comfortable and also quite warm. I became curious as to why Tamayo had them to begin with.

As I stared at myself in the mirror, I thought about how I had murdered and drank the blood of my kin, and I clenched my teeth and fists tightly. That discomfort from before reared its ugly head, but all I let myself think in that moment was that they deserved it. I remembered all my rage and hate and indignation, and so I buried all those annoying flickers of remorse back into the corner of my mind and snarled and growled and stormed out of the bedroom. Unlike Tamayo, who still had the presence of a ghost, I slammed the door behind me.

I went to the room she told me about; she was seated on one of two armchairs surrounding a knee-high table, in the corner in front of the entrance to that place. The room was dimly-lit by a ceiling light and a lamp on the other side of the room, where there was a desk with a pile of books and a globe of the world atop. The only noise that I could hear was the tick tick tick of the clock on the wall behind her. Again, the white curtains of the window between those chairs and the desk were drawn shut.

When she saw me, she beckoned me to sit down opposite her.

I blushed and pulled at the collar of my shirt, maybe because interacting with her in a normal context brought into focus how I felt about her at the time. I was extremely compelled to do what she requested, so it took me perhaps a second to rush to the black leather armchair opposite hers and sit down in it. Tamayo looked at me for a moment, surveyed me like she was looking for or at something in particular. Then she gave me another one of her little smiles, the ones I loved so much to the point that I felt myself falling further in love with her every time she made one.

“Those clothes suit you.” She remarked.

I felt a small bit of pride, but also embarrassment, as I put my arms along the armrests. “Th-thank you…”

“I kept them and set up that bedroom in case I wanted to hire an assistant, but I never did. Even though I’m good at hiding my nature, I was always worried any human I would hire might come to know something about me… but it doesn’t matter now, because you’re here.”

“Me?” I pointed to myself and raised one of my eyebrows.

“Yes, Yushiro. I think it would be best if you become my assistant. Don’t worry, it won’t be difficult – you are an intelligent boy, so you will pick things up quickly.”

I asked her what she meant by all of that. I had my suspicions as to why she had chosen to pose as a human doctor, but I wanted to hear it from her own lips. I saw her lean forward slightly as she explained.

“Nobody suspects someone like us to treat humans. And I have easy access to blood transfusions.”

It was as I suspected, but I just nodded. She looked up to the ceiling light, then back at me.

“I think,” Tamayo said, “it’s time to explain some things.”

“Explain?” I asked

“You’re one of us now. There are a lot of things you need to know.”

“Like what?”

She then explained many things to me.

She told me that a vampire is created when the 'substance' of one is transferred into the bloodstream of a human, which is exactly what she had done to me. She said that vampires are typically created in the aftermath of vampire attacks. If vampires aren’t sure to kill their prey quickly, then the wounds they create may cause a transformation. 

She explained our main source of sustenance: Human blood. She explained that it is preferable that it be freshly killed, since aged blood imparts far less nutritional value. This is why vampires who try to feed solely on corpses always give up that prospect. Vampires who don’t feed for too long will revert back into a rabid, animalistic state, like the one which I was in after my transformation. We can consume human food, but it provides no nutritional value and we cannot digest it – if we eat too much, our bodies regurgitate it like vomit after a few hours. We can also consume the blood of other animals, but this gives us far less nourishment and imparts precious little nutrition. No matter how may animals we would drink the blood of, we would eventually have to go back to humans.

Vampires are unbelievably fast and strong; we are able to outrun and overpower even the most proficient of athletes with ease and we can kill people with a single swipe of our claws. We do not age, we are immune to all disease, and our injuries regenerate with startling speed. We are able to regrow limbs and regenerate bodily organs. We also have incredible memory, and are able to recall very specific details from even hundreds of years ago (this is the main reason why I can recall so much so easily with this account). She said all of this to me, and I was amazed.

“As for you,” she said, “I expected you to turn feral and attack or kill someone after you turned into a vampire. That is why I turned you so late at night, so you would attack someone when there were very few or no people outside. But I didn’t expect you to go so far…”

Even in that feral state, vampires still have some semblance of free will. I couldn’t remember that time immediately after my transformation, but I thought it was likely that I had conscious thoughts of avenging myself with my newly-found strength. That was the only thing that made sense, since thoughts of resentment had been building up ever since I ended up on the streets.

She continued.

“Vampires also have special powers.”

“What do you mean?”

“I suppose humans might call it sorcery. I’ve never seen two vampires with the same powers. We all have different capabilities, but one’s power and abilities will grow with the amount of blood they consume. Male… male vampires tend to manifest more lethal and predatory abilities. I once knew a vampire who owned a special sword which he could control the length and shape of and also sucked the blood out of any wounds it made. But female vampires… well, we are a bit different… it’s difficult to explain, but we’re not so straightforward.”

I asked her if that had anything to do with how she turned her blood into a vapor.

“Yes. What I did to you was calm you down and send you to sleep, but I can do other things with my spells. I also heard about another vampire who could change the orientation of buildings with a strum of her biwa.”

I found all of this utterly fascinating. I distinctly remember wondering at the time what sort of powers I would go on to manifest. I had no fascination or love for the sword, so I wasn’t particularly impressed with what Tamayo told me about that.

According to her, vampires have two main weaknesses. The first is sunlight. Any amount of exposure to direct sunlight is considerably dangerous to any vampire, as it breaks us down into ash in very short order. Because of this, we are only free to move around between dusk and dawn, and must restrict our movements during the day (unless it is overcast/raining/snowing). Incidentally, this means it is much easier to move around during the winter.

Our second great weakness is decapitation. Like all living beings, a connection between our brain and the rest of our body is crucial for our bodies to function. If that connection is severed, then not even regeneration can help us. We can regenerate parts of our head and brain, but that connection between the head and rest of the body being severed signals death.

She then said something utterly amazing yet terrifying to me.

“The humans… the human population of this country don’t actively fear us these days, as you are probably aware. We’re not much more than a superstition. It’s because of the Demon Hunters, you see. They keep us in check.”

When she said that phrase, Demon Hunters, I felt a fear that I had never thought to be capable of. It was like an instinctual dread, one I was not really in control of yet possessed all the while. It’s comparable to a normal person’s feelings whenever they contemplate the fact that they will die one day.

She said that the Demon Hunters are also called the Black Swords, on account of the obsidian-black katana that they wield. Demon Hunters tend to be recruited from either orphans or survivors of vampire attacks. They undergo cruel, unforgiving training regiments and become expertly trained in combat arts designed with the sole purpose of executing us. They spread messages and follow leads via sentient, talking crows. They can either work alone or as teams. Vampires fear the Demon Hunters.

I asked why they are called Demon Hunters.

“Because that’s what they call us. They think we’re evil demons who need to be exterminated. And they’re very skilled at that.”

“But aren’t they just human?”

Tamayo was silent for a few seconds.

“Yes, but they use special breathing techniques which match their bodily strength with ours. During combat, they can become as strong and fast as us. They are disciplined and trained in proper use of martial arts. They are meticulous, cunning, and they commonly use unconventional methods to draw out and kill vampires. There was a time when people feared us, but the Demon Hunters emerged during the Warring States to exterminate us.

“The original survivors of these times would go on to pass on their fear to those they turned, and they went on to pass down their fear, too. Due to the nature of accidental transformations, new vampires will always appear, but they’ll almost always be executed or used as fodder for their awful training regiments. They use live specimens for their exams, you see. They are utterly ruthless.”

So that was all why, when Tamayo told me of them, I felt such a sharp sense of fear.

“So… a Demon Hunter could kill any one of us.”

“Indeed. Those of us who have a modicum of intelligence have taken to cunning and subtlety to stay alive. We have a tendency to stick to our own territories, we try not to bother each other and we feed as little as possible. Ever since our borders opened, some vampires have tried to leave this place for other parts of the world, but most come to the conclusion that such a task is too daunting and difficult. I have… heard stories of Demon Hunters tracking down vampires who try to flee. This is why we must be careful, Yushiro. Because if we’re not, the Demon Hunters will…”

The rest of her sentence escaped her. I leaned forward in my chair and rubbed my chin. “Territories?”

Seemingly pleased by my changing of the topic, she nodded. “Yes. There are other vampires relatively nearby, and we have all agreed to stick to our own hunting grounds. It makes it easier to hide our presence, see. Too many of us hunting for food in a single area would be – well, it would give things away. I’ll show you later what constitutes our own territory. As long as we stick to that – I’d hardly call them pleasant company, but the others shouldn’t bother us. Shouldn’t.”

It looked like she was about to say something else, but then she stopped herself. I contemplated the possibility that she was hiding something from me, or refusing to elaborate on something. Whatever it was, I was too afraid to enquire at the time.

I was incredibly curious as to the nature of other vampires. After all, I had never knowingly seen one besides Tamayo, though if her words about the need for care and subtlety were true, then I could have seen numerous vampires throughout my life without knowing it.

“So that – is this all why you’re a doctor?”

“Yes. It’s unavoidable, we need to consume human blood for survival. But if we pay people for blood transfusions… we can avoid killing as many people for their blood. It’s far safer this way, Yushiro, trust me.”

I noted the way she worded that. I brought this up to her, although I was quiet and mumbling.

Quite sternly, she reminded me that I was a vampire and no longer a human. We couldn’t afford to feel sympathy for them, as everyone was a potential source of food. She could get transfusions from people, but she said there emphatically will be times where the donations dry up and we have to take to the streets for nourishment.

“But it’s okay, because you have me now. You can trust me, Yushiro, you can trust me. I’ll take care of you. We’ll take care of each other.”

She said that, and to my amazement I found myself accepting that. It might be because of my new nature, but it didn’t disturb me. It made sense. Besides, I had already resolved such a possibility when I was on my deathbed; I remembered my anguish at a world that didn’t want to help me.

And when I thought about it that way, what happened with my family didn’t seem so bad. Not only did I need food to survive, but they had mistreated and forsaken me like the world itself. The part of me that felt guilt was the human side of me that remained, that had other connections with other humans. If I wanted to embrace this new lifestyle, then I had to focus on the now. On Tamayo.

Tamayo.

Whenever she talked, I was utterly transfixed by her. I couldn’t stop looking at her, delighting in the sound of her voice, watching her little movements as she explained all these things about living as a vampire to me. As we talked more and more, I felt my grip on the arms of chair tightening more and more.

The way she spoke to and treated me was so kind. She gave me clothes, shelter, an occupation and a role in life. I thought about how miserable and hopeless my time on the streets was and it scared me. I never wanted to experience anything like that ever again, the thought of it terrified me so much that it could easily make me panic. But then I remembered how she took me in and treated me so compassionately. I may not have known her motivations, but that display of kindness made me want to run into her arms and stay there. Mentally, I was surrendering myself to her more and more. No human had ever shown me that compassion in my time of need, so it wasn’t worth justifying myself to them. She was right, we only had each other.

Saying and thinking all that to myself made me feel better about things. I still didn't know why she saved me, why she chose to help a human such as me despite telling me of the dangers of harboring sympathy for them just a few moments ago. Maybe it really was because I reminded her of family and she wanted to fill a void, or maybe it was something else. Nevertheless, I thought of nothing but being with the woman whom I adored more and more with each passing minute. I always wanted to be in her presence. She made my heart thump and my stomach twist in knots, and thinking about her like that elicited a feeling close to ecstasy, or perhaps privilege.

All of this is to say that I slid into my new life with relative ease.

By day, I was her assistant. I would help her with odd jobs and certain tasks around the clinic which made her work easier and faster. She explained to her patients that I was some poor street beggar whom she had taken in, nursed back to health and offered a role as her assistant and apprentice (technically none of it was false). Many of the humans complimented her kindness, although most people did not think much of me.

Not that I thought much of them, either. I typically gave people a look of subtle disgust, as if I was looking at something or someone dirty. Particularly with the men, I would get slightly jealous and irritable when they spent too much time or got too close with Tamayo. Even though such interactions were always that of a doctor and their patient, I felt like shouting at the top of my lungs and telling them all to get back.

By night, we mostly stayed inside. The blood transfusions, while not bountiful, went a long way to help. She also encouraged me to use the time at night to sleep, even if only for an hour or two, so that we could conserve our energy and reduce the need for blood even more than normal. In that regard, our day-night cycles weren’t so different from that of humans. But make no mistake, vampires do not need to sleep.

But then there were times when we ran out of transfusions (in addition to our own needs, she sometimes used it for her patients), so we simply had to take to the streets. The first instance of this happening was exactly a week after becoming a vampire. Tamayo and I went outside together, and she taught me the finer points of killing a human.

As mentioned before, we had to stick to a specific ‘territory’. This was the area in which Tamayo could safely hunt for food without drawing the ire of the other nearby vampires. This territory included about a quarter of the city – the areas surrounding her clinic – but also some of the areas outside the urban metropolis as part of the greater area. The village I grew up in was technically within her own boundaries.

That first kill was a homeless man. She explained that people such as the homeless and vagrants were the best targets, since nobody or very few people would miss them. Drunks and criminals can also suffice. Of course, it is not always possible for a vampire to get their ideal prey and not everyone has the same line of thinking, but the important part is making sure the deaths are random, unsuspicious and sparse. The less people miss our target, the better.

She taught me that we must always start by slitting their throat or some other means to ensure the death is quiet and fast. This also means that the chance of an accidental transformation is close to zero, since they would bleed out before it could properly occur. After that, we needed to take the body to a quiet and secluded place (if it wasn't already in one), so anybody else wandering the streets at night wouldn't see. We took his corpse in some back alley with no lighting, a stray cat saw us but nothing else.

And then we shared what blood coursed through his veins – the wound was big enough that we could both purse our lips around the opposite sides of his neck. As I sucked in his blood, I once looked into his stone-cold dead eyes and found myself feeling something close to nothing. Perhaps a bit of irony at the fact that it could have been my fate, but I didn't dwell on that thought much.

The taste of the blood was extremely pleasing to me, I would compare it to honey, not because blood is sweet but because it makes you want more even after merely sampling the taste. Controlling appetite can be difficult, even as a vampire. Especially as a vampire. That is why our kind still manage to get themselves killed by the Demon Hunters.

During this first feeding with her, I noticed that Tamayo kept her eyes shut when she drank the blood, like she was focusing on the act itself and not on her surroundings. Over time, I would take this habit. And over time I would come to kill my fair share of people as well. We always went out together, but we would essentially take it in turns killing our targets. Maybe she just thought it fair.

After we had fed, there was precious little blood left in that man's body. She then taught me how to hide bodies. Sometimes, it is possible to arrange corpses in a way where their deaths are the result of something else, like a drunken fight or an attack by wild animals. Other times, we needed to hide the bodies so nobody could find them. 

Shortly after that first kill, things began to change. Seemingly out of nowhere and on instinct, I was able to summon a curious-looking paper talisman from my hand. I noticed that I was able to stick it onto any surface and, most curiously, that I was able to see through it like an extension of my own vision (I could also hear through them). Not long after that, I found myself being able to highjack the senses of petty creatures – cats, dogs, rats, birds, etc. – that were close by.

When I told and showed Tamayo all this, she was both pleased and surprised. Pleased because it was obviously a very valuable ability which let us monitor locations or situations with ease. Surprised because, in her opinion, it was an ability that you wouldn’t typically see in a male vampire.

Life went on like this until  a few weeks after she turned me into a vampire. I was downstairs cleaning the floor of her clinic with a broom one night, while she was upstairs reading in her study. She likes reading.

I found myself daydreaming about Tamayo. Part of me even wondered what I was doing there, that I should have found an excuse to spend time with her. But then I remembered that she would find me doing that task very pleasing, so I went back to it.

And then I heard a knock on the door.

At that time of night, it was so startling that it made me jump. I leaned the broom against the wall and walked out to the corridor, slightly worried that it might be someone in need of emergency treatment. But then my heart skipped a beat because, as I was unfastening the locks of and opening the door, I realized that Tamayo always kept the gates locked after closing the clinic for the day.

And then when the door swung open, I was cursed by the sight of a tall, sickly-pale man who seemed to overflow with violent intent. He was dressed entirely in black and had eyes as red as plums. He wore a scowl that morphed into fury when he laid his eyes on me, which widened madly as his cheek twitched.

In a voice that grated against my ear, he demanded I tell him who I was.

Notes:

If you read the original oneshot, you may notice that the hunters refer to vampires as demons – their swords have ‘akkimessatsu’ engraved on them like in KnY, and they are referred to such by the man conducting that universe’s equivalent of final selection. This is all despite the fact that Gotouge refers to them as ‘vampires’ in the notes for the piece. At least, this is the case for the official translation. I can’t remember how the fan-translation handles it.

Regardless, this little detail was something I became interested in and decided to elaborate on. Of course, demons in KnY are almost exactly like what is the common stereotypical ‘vampire’, with the main differences being the eating of flesh instead of the drinking of blood and that the wisteria flower harms them instead of garlic. Despite that, there are a lot of similarities. This makes sense, since the oneshot is the prototype for KnY and it seems some of its concepts were changed in order to be more recognizable/digestible for a Japanese audience.

To what degree demons could be considered human and how they should be judged for their crimes was, from my perspective, a core theme of KnY. As the story progressed, rather than imposing a straightforward dichotomy between man and demon, it blended them together and treated them in a similar vein. This is something I would like to explore here too, which is the reasoning for a lot of these phrases being thrown around – vampire, demon, etc.

In terms of the vampire/demon hunters, the biggest discrepancy between the oneshot and the manga is the balance of power. In KnY, the demon hunters were very obviously the underdog and suffered a lot of losses to the demons, but the vampire hunters were a source of genuine dread for the vampires in the oneshot. They seemed to be a force that kept them ‘in check’, instead of a group of underdog swordsmen striving to defeat beings more powerful than them. I thought this was incredibly interesting, so I maintained it.

The vampire hunters wielding black swords was entirely my own invention as they did not feature in the oneshot, but it mainly comes from Tanjiro and Yoriichi’s black niichirin swords which I really like. I thought a whole outfit of warriors wielding these black swords would be intimidating and strange. More about the vampire hunters will be revealed later on.

This whole idea of ‘territories’, again, comes from the oneshot. The idea seemed to be that vampires respected each other’s boundaries and didn’t cause problems for each other, most likely in an effort to remain low-profile and not be caught out by the vampire hunters.

Chapter 3: Third Entry

Summary:

Meeting an evil soul.

Notes:

(See the end of the chapter for notes.)

Chapter Text

Some vampires are worse than others. A human would scoff at such a statement, since all of us kill and feed on their kind. I cannot rebut that. But the truth is that many of us merely feed to satiate ourselves in the same way people eat food to survive; while I personally took to killing people for nourishment quite easily, I have never taken a specific enjoyment out of it. But then there are those who come to revel in inflicting death and suffering on humans before drinking their blood like some savage beast, those who live for the thrill of the slaughter. I have seen a few vampires like this, and even I have been shocked at the depths of their depravity.

The man in front of me at the moment I opened the door to Tamayo’s clinic, however, was none of the things I just described. Rather than taking sadistic delight in causing pain and misery, it’s more accurate to say that it was just in his nature. He saw it no differently to how a normal human would see breathing. He overflew with violent intent and closely resembled the magma of a volcano – riotous, uncontrollable and all-consuming.

As soon as I laid my eyes on him, I almost immediately recognized him to be just like me. He was a vampire. I knew that I wouldn’t be able to view him as such when I was a human, so I figured that our kind must have been able to subconsciously recognize each other. His skin was so pale that it almost shined in the moonlight, and he was dressed entirely in black apart from his white shirt – wearing his black coat on his shoulders like a cape, sleeves flowing freely behind him. He had black hair that reached out to produce curled and elongated strands on either side of his head.

And he glared at me, gave a stare that signaled he wanted my immediate death. His first words to me were less of a request and more of a demand:

“Tell me who the fuck you are.”

I froze. That man terrified so much that I felt a strange shiver down my spine, I could see my shoulders trembling in the corners of my vision and I suddenly felt very cold. He continued to stare at me with palpable disgust and anger, to the point where I felt him capable of killing me with just his plum-red eyes. He then walked into the building, passed the doorframe, and I took a couple of steps back. I almost tripped over myself and I could feel my legs shaking.

“You’re not Tamayo. I’ll say it again; tell me who you are right now.”

The sound of his voice flowing from his lips was like some demented violin string, it made my skin crawl.

I opened my mouth and exposed my fangs to him, but nothing came out. Before I could even say anything, I heard a rapid and pronounced thumping come from behind. My heart racing, I turned my head to see Tamayo quickly walking through the corridor and standing by my side before wrapping her arm around my front and putting me a bit behind her. Her movements surprised me a little, I had seldom seen her move with such energy, and I was admittedly a little bit embarrassed by the close contact. With the way she reacted, she must have known this person and maybe what he wanted.

The man spoke again. “Tamayo. Explain.”

He then narrowed his eyes and looked at her, with less of a death-stare and more with deep suspicion. I looked behind him and saw that the gate was still firmly shut, so he must have vaulted himself over the wall. Tamayo kept me close to her side and I might have appreciated how she held me... were it not for the situation at hand.

“Tokikawa,” she said with a thoroughness and certainty that contrasted with my fright, “this is Yushiro. He is one of us. I took him in. You don’t have to be so hostile towards him.”

He raised his eyebrow, then reached for the handle behind him and slammed the door shut. It felt like the whole clinic had trembled, like in the midst of an earthquake. He didn’t say anything for a few moments, but neither did Tamayo. We both remained silent, awaiting this Tokikawa’s response.

Liar. You didn’t take him in, you turned him. I can smell you on him. You can’t hide these things from me. You can’t hide these things from anyone.”

He then pointed his finger at me, and I could see an ocean-blue claw at the tip of it. Tamayo still held me close and though her perfume was clearly starting to wane this late into the day, it was quite pungent at this short distance. It even made me feel slightly lightheaded.

“Yes, I did turn him. But what I do in my territory is my business, it has nothing to do with you anymore. Or have you forgotten that?”

The man, Tokikawa, already looked incredibly displeased. But when she said that, he bit the corner of his lip and his head began to tremble.

“Stupid fucking bitch,” he whispered that first part with an acute sense of seething, “I would rather not have the Black Swords snooping around our doorsteps because you got carried away and decided you wanted some company. What the hell is wrong with you?! Have you forgotten the last time one of us pulled something like this? A few months later, he and his lady friend’s heads were taken.”

“Oh, please,” her voice became that bit harsher – I had never heard her take such a tone, “don’t think such tactics will work on me. You and I both know that Mukago had become a careless and arrogant fool. He got greedy. He killed too many humans and got himself killed by the Demon Hunters. The fact he got some company had nothing to do with it, so take your pathetic lies and throw them into the dirt where they belong.”

I could hear him grind his teeth together at her statement. It didn’t take him long to retort.

“You know as well as I do that once they get even a single whiff of our activities, they can become hard to shake off. You know what it was like when Mukago died, we had to lie low for weeks until they decided that there were no other vampires to worry about. I had to eat cats and dogs and rats, and so did you. You were practically dying to taste human blood again, I remember. The more vampires within a certain space, the more likely we are to draw attention. You turning this shitty brat into a vampire has put us in more danger.”

“Tokikawa, you hypocrite-”

I’m the hypocrite?!”

The way they spoke of each other unsettled me immensely, because there was a certain intimacy in their language. My mother once told me that hate comes from love, that they are only separated by a thread even thinner than air. Not that I thought this man was capable of love per se, but they spoke of each other in the way one would speak about someone they once were close to. Evidently, they were still allies and saw the need to cooperate, but it seemed to be more a begrudging partnership. And they were referring to events which both clearly knew of, but I lacked the context for.

My mind went on to presume that they used to be intimate somehow. And then, for some reason, I became jealous of that. I know it was exceedingly irrational, because I had both already guessed that Tamayo used to have her own family in her human life and considered the idea of us being together to be ludicrous. Yet still, I felt it all the same.

And then I properly processed what he said of her and accused her of, and I grew a little bit angry. Not enough to take any meaningful action, but the thought of somebody insulting Tamayo like that, calling her such awful names and dragging her name through the mud enraged me. Nobody had said anything like that to her face, so I couldn’t know how angry I would get until now. My hands balled into fists so hard I could feel my nails pierce skin. My anger somewhat dulled my own fear.

But Tamayo remained calm. She didn’t answer or confront him directly. Instead, she looked to me with a concerned look on her face, then let me go.

“Yushiro, this is… this is Tokikawa. He is one of the other vampires of this area. We have known each other for a while, now.”

I didn’t open my mouth. My mind focused on the implications of what she had just said and done in contrast with her behavior so far. She moved to defend me and spoke in a way that she knew this man well, which meant that she anticipated such a volatile encounter if he were to appear here. Or at least, that is what I gathered.

So, I was puzzled that she had never mentioned this man to me in the weeks we had spent together so far. Tamayo had indeed talked about other vampires as unpleasant company, but she had failed to mention this Tokikawa and his poisonous attitude in particular. To my mind, there was a stark difference between being unpleasant and exuding such malicious energy that it came off like he wanted everyone to die painfully.

Maybe Tamayo was afraid. Maybe Tamayo didn’t know how to bring that up – perhaps some of their prior baggage made it difficult. Maybe she wasn’t expecting Tokikawa to come to her any time soon, and was instead planning on taking me to see him. I thought of all these things and then some, most likely in a vain attempt to justify her actions to my mind. But even then, these explanations did not sit right with me. Something was wrong.

Tamayo turned to look back at Tokikawa. She plainly and bluntly asked why he was here. So she really wasn’t expecting him, at least not any time soon.

That man stared at me, looked at me like he hated me and thought me repulsive. It was like he would reach out his hands to strangle or snap my neck. Not that any of that would do anything, seeing as I was a vampire. Unless, of course, he was daring enough to cut off my head.

His voice came out like charcoal scraping against rusty iron.

“I came to ask why you failed to send me any blood samples for the past two weeks.”

Hearing him say that surprised me. Initially, I thought she was giving him blood as sustenance as well. However, I noticed that word he used. Samples.

Tamayo cleared her throat and maintained her composure. I thought it amazing that she could remain so controlled in such a tense environment. But then, if she had known this man for a while already, then she would have been used to such interactions with him.

“Well, I needed some of that blood, on account of having an extra mouth to feed. Don’t look so sour and petulant, Tokikawa, I already told you that I would give you whatever blood I could spare. I don’t care if you’re feeling bored in that little lab of yours, looking over the same samples and tests over and over and over again with no breakthroughs or results. If you’re so desperate for blood, get it yourself.”

“Don’t play smart with me, Tamayo. Your insistence on taking this brat under your wing is costing me valuable research materials, on top of putting us all at risk. Do the others know of this, by the way? Ieso? Doma? I doubt they would take too kindly to it.”

“No, they don’t. But it’s none of their business. You remember the rules we all agreed to, right? We’re all responsible for what happens in our territories. We’re not meant to interfere. What we have is an external agreement, Tokikawa. You are not responsible nor should you interfere in what I do in my own territory. We’ve already talked about this. Honestly, do you think-”

He interrupted her by stamping his foot forcefully into the floor, which made both of us flinch. If he had put any more power into it, he would have broken the floorboards. He then walked forward a couple of steps and clenched his fists. To my mind, he looked to be withholding some sort of power that would have been dangerous if unleashed.

“Give me one good reason why I shouldn’t just sever this shitty little brat’s head from his neck and be done with it.”

Tamayo moved slightly to cover me again. She didn’t touch me this time, but she put about half of her body directly in front of me.

“If you kill him, I will never help you again.”

“As if you’ve been much help to me recently.”

“Besides,” she quickly changed the subject like she had just remembered something, “Yushiro could actually help you.”

If there was ever a moment where Tokikawa would laugh, this would have been it. But nothing of the sort happened.

“And tell me, Tamayo, how it is he could possibly help me.”

She turned around to look me in the eyes – she gave me a look that told me to trust her, that she would protect and vouch for me. But it also said to not say anything to contradict her narrative, to remain silent and let her say her piece. Putting my complete faith in her and worried about Tokikawa’s spite and power, I nodded.

She then turned her head back to face Tokikawa. She seemed to collect herself for a moment or two, then proceeded onward.

“You kept complaining to me in your letters that your research was going nowhere. You said that you were producing no results by testing the blood of just us two and humans. Face it Tokikawa, you’ve been just as useless as I have. At least I have upheld my end of the bargain.”

His nostrils flared, a vein bulged on his forehead and his eye twitched. “You dare-”

“Furthermore,” she interrupted him, “we want to hide this arrangement from the others. If they heard about our research into the development of a serum to withstand sunlight, then they would be all over us and make demands, requests, even blackmail us. It would be much more difficult. We can’t ask them for their blood. And as you know, killing even more people for research purposes or creating our own vampires indiscriminately would be extremely foolish. However, perhaps Yushiro’s blood will be that final piece of the puzzle that allows the creation of this serum. Maybe you will discover something new by examining his blood.”

That was a lot of information to handle. Tamayo had never ever mentioned anything about all of that to me, I had only discovered this supposed plan to develop such a serum that very night. I began to ponder on the fact that all of that was the true reason she turned me into one of them, and not what I had previously imagined to be the case. But then I thought it unlikely, because this idea seemed to come to her as we were both staring down the barrel of his own wrath.

Tokikawa clearly thought this to be the case, because he shook his head as he folded his arms. Amazingly, some of that overwhelming violent energy was leaving him. A subconscious admission that, perhaps, she had a point.

“That is not why you made him one of us, Tamayo. I know how your mind works. You clearly just made that all up in an attempt to gain favor with me, our little ongoing ‘project’ was the furthest thing from your mind when you decided to make him into one of us.”

“It doesn’t have to be like that at all. Why is your outlook so narrow, Tokikawa? Although, you always had trouble understanding things like nuance. Regardless, what’s done is done and despite what you’ve said, I don’t think you’re going to so casually kill either of us right now. It would draw too much attention for your liking and in spite of how much you seem to hate me, you still want me to cooperate. You need me. And as much as I hate to admit it, I need you if we are to see this through.”

When Tamayo finished speaking, I felt a weird shiver go down my spine again – it was comparable to when I first laid my eyes upon him. It was also comparable to whenever I remembered the time where I was thrown out of my home and I was forced to wander the streets. Back then, I didn’t know what it was, but I’ve come to form a theory after feeling such strange sensations numerous times since then. It is hard to put into words, but I think that when she turned me into a vampire, she gave me something more than just her blood. Recall how I mentioned that vampires have inherited the fear of the Demon Hunters from those who turned them for hundreds of years, as if we are capable of inheriting certain instinctual memories and feelings.

I think I was feeling Tamayo’s fear. Or hatred. Or maybe both. She never passed down any actual memories to me, I couldn’t glimpse into Tamayo’s past with my own mind at all. Yet Tamayo was able to pass down what I can only describe as the memories of the emotions that she associates with Tokikawa.

Once all of that dawned on me, any foolish and petulant jealousy I harbored towards their dynamic was gone. Instead, I grew subtly terrified at the past the two of them could have shared. My mind was ablaze with countless questions which I never went out of my way to pursue the answers for. Considering that she had never mentioned Tokikawa prior to this meeting, I thought it best to not mention him at all. I knew that she wouldn’t want me to. Everything I did was done to either please or not upset Tamayo.

I might be getting ahead of myself, but I would come to receive my answers in the future anyway. And when I did find out the truth, I wished that I had never known.

Tokikawa didn’t immediately respond to all that she had said, he instead remained still and stared at her. I could see him constantly clenching his fists and his muscles spasming as if he wanted to hurt someone. Eventually, he let out a low, guttural growl as his scowl intensified and his eyes narrowed again. It was like I could see the cogs moving in his brain in real time, he seemed to seize up as he processed all the information and went to make a decision.

And then Tokikawa stared at me again, he eyed me with the same sort of suspicion my father used to harbor for me. The suspicion and disapproval that morphed into violent retribution.

Because of that, from that moment on, I despised Tokikawa. Maybe it was also the feelings I had inherited from Tamayo, maybe it was also the way he insulted and demeaned her, but I hated him nonetheless. I never wanted to see him again and even thought myself capable of trying to hurt him.

Tokikawa stopped looking at me and back to Tamayo. He combed his hand through the fringe of his hair as he maintained eye contact with her.

“I’ll accept it,” he spat out, “for now. If your little brat gets you in trouble, then I won’t be coming to help you. You can die in a fire for all I care.”

“Fine by me.”

“You could give me a sample of his blood right now if you want to prove your sincerity.”

“I will give you a sample of Yushiro’s blood when I am ready. In the meantime, you will have to wait.”

Tokikawa’s nose scrunched up like he had caught the scent of something horrible. “Are you really going to be like this?”

“This will only be as difficult as you want it to be.”

Tokikawa clearly had the capacity to crush us both like gnats, but he abstained. The need for logic and rational cooperation, not to mention the fact that our deaths would likely draw unwanted attention, stayed his need to unleash violence and that fact infuriated him. In spite of his nature, he could be made to see reason in some way.

He then murmured with a seething screech in his voice.

Why, Tamayo? Why did you do it?”

Tamayo didn’t say anything back to him, she chose to remain silent. She looked at him, blinked, but remained still nonetheless. She wore a face that told him he knew where the door was, and that he could see himself out.

He spat on the floor and then turned around, the sleeves of his coat were so long that one of them cut an arc in the air immediately in front of Tamayo and almost hit her in the face. Tokikawa walked to the door and opened it, he held the door handle so tightly that it seemed like he could have ripped it off the frame. He put his hands in his pockets and walked diagonally to the wall next to the gate, his shoes crunching against the gravel.

As I saw Tokikawa jump over the wall without so much as an inkling of effort, Tamayo walked towards the door and took hold of its handle. She then shook her head and looked at me.

“What a pathetic man.” She said quietly, but with a degree of venomous spite that surprised me.

I then opened my mouth and spoke for the first time since laying my eyes on him. “What?”

“He’s gone by so many names over the years… Tokikawa, Tsukihiko, Toshikuni… all in some vain and stupid effort to run away from his real name. I think he is the way he is because he just can’t accept himself in some way. Awful, really.”

Her statement amazed me. Firstly, because it betrayed what I thought to be an extremely keen understanding of how his mind worked, even more so than I had initially inferred from the way they talked to each other – if she knew his real name, then she likely knew absolutely everything there was to know about him. Secondly, because I was surprised to learn that Tokikawa wasn’t even his original name. I wondered what exactly would motivate someone like him to use a false name. As far as I was aware at the time, Tamayo wasn’t using a false name (and I now know for a fact that it was her name as a human). I certainly wasn’t using a false name.

I asked Tamayo what his real name was.

She looked to the floor. She then shook her head, more-or-less in direct response to that question – she was indirectly telling me that she wasn’t going to give me the answer. At the time I didn’t realize that, but I’ve come to understand the ways in which she nonverbally communicates after living with her for so long.

I thought about why she didn’t answer me. Was that man’s true name enough to upset her? I thought there was little true power in one’s name, but perhaps Tamayo was cut from a far more superstitious cloth. Or maybe she simply hated remembering that name and all that she associated with it. I supposed it was similar to how the mere thought of my family kicking me out, despite them being dead, was enough to make me lose control of my emotions and for my anger to rise within my stomach.

She then shut the front door so hard that I felt the entire building shake.

Notes:

Tokikawa/Muzan is the only one based moreso on his manga counterpart than his oneshot counterpart (in both appearance and personality). This is partly because the original Tokikawa character does not really fit into the planned story, but also because the narrative itself needed a character with a more violent energy to him. The best way I can describe it is that while Tokikawa is merely unpleasant (I once affectionately called him a ‘rat man’), Muzan is depraved. As he existed in the oneshot, he would not have been suitable to the story.

Believe it or not, one of my surface-level goals with the character is to make him more evil than the original Muzan. That certainly does seem like a tall order, considering Muzan more-or-less lived to either kill or corrupt people, but it was something I wanted to try. It’s a bit difficult due to the nature of this story, the Tokikawa here does not have the scale of power or evil that Muzan did, so he cannot do as much.

There is also the implication of a shared history with Tamayo. This was another reason why I modeled the character off Muzan more than Tokikawa: In the oneshot, Tokikawa did not really have any discernible history with Tamayo, but Muzan most certainly did in KnY. I chose to take that hatred between them and run with it, making it go both ways as opposed to the mostly one-sided (and justified) hatred Tamayo held for Muzan.

I wasn’t sure what to name him at first, since he has an entirely different name in the oneshot. After thinking on it, I guess I thought I could have my cake and eat it too, hence the different names this version of the characters takes. This is partly a reference to how Muzan in the manga seemed to take on different aliases depending on who he was posing as. His reasoning here is different from that.

His visual design is also mostly based on the KnY counterpart because I much prefer it. Specifically, I had in mind his appearance at the Ubuyashiki estate when he talks to Kagaya. That is when he looks most like a stereotypical vampire. And this is the part where I admit that I’m not actually very fond of his hat in either the oneshot or manga/anime.

Chapter 4: Fourth Entry

Summary:

An unexpected devlopment.

Notes:

Please be warned that there will be disturbing sexual content starting this chapter (please look at the tags/content warnings, but also please be aware of quasi-incestuous themes).

(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)

Chapter Text

After Tokikawa’s visit, we went to bed. My mind lingered on the implications of that meeting and all I had learned since then, but things soon went back to normal. By day, we worked in the clinic. By night, we typically spent time resting. Sometimes, we had to go outside to feed, but we were mostly able to consume the blood we had gotten from transfusions, so were able to keep the number of dead to a minimum. There was almost a dullness to it all.

Except for one thing, of course. I was in love.

I already said before that I began to fall in love with Tamayo as early as when she was taking care of me, and that my thoughts would drift to her whenever she left my side. I was always wondering when she would come back to take care of me, when it was that I could see her face again. My dreams and fantasies would be filled with her, I would dream of us making love on my deathbed. Even when I knew about her inhuman nature, I was still in love. Living with her did nothing to temper these feelings, they only intensified. I thought about her more and more as we lived together.

Even though I was officially her assistant, I was more like her servant. She would tell me to do things, and I would obey. She instructed me to fetch items or equipment, to personally tend to certain patients, to tidy up the clinic and our apartments upstairs, and sometimes to even cook food for our patients. I would always obey, since I was always very eager to please her. I always worked the hardest I could, always pointed out to her that I had done what it was she instructed. She would thank me, praise me for my job, and my heart would always fill with joy. When parted from her, my thoughts would always drift to her. When she got physically close to some (male) patients, my gut would always twist with jealously, and I would always treat them with a slight hint of disgust. I was always desperate to know every little thing about her – every piece of new information about her was always very interesting to hear, and I always savored every little fact about her. Always.

She was also something of a teacher to me. Being from a rural village, my literacy was quite poor, so she taught me to read and write. She was always within a close proximity to me in those moments, and I only tried as hard as I did because it pleased her. According to her, I learned at a pace much quicker than she expected and she praised me for it.

During times of rest, my mind was cursed to think of nothing but her. I indulged in thoughts of lying next to her on the sheets of my bed as we made love to each other. My erections were almost unbearable, but whenever I tried to masturbate, unpleasant memories of my family and my abandonment would come back and haunt me, so I found it hard to even relieve myself in this way.

First, I felt privileged to be able to think about her in such a way, that I could think about her like that. But that could turned into a must, and as the months of our life together went on, that must devoured me. I was simply cursed to think of nothing but her, I had no other choice but to think about her. I didn’t want to even entertain the thought of forgetting my feelings for her, even though it plagued me during almost every single waking hour of my existence. And I couldn’t see it fading with time, either. Maybe if I ran away, then my unbearably hot passion would cool. But I didn’t want to run away, simply because I didn’t want to be away from her.

I remember when Tamayo once asked me to bring a notepad from the other room. I complied, and when I presented it to her, she thanked me and took it from me. But as our hands brushed, I could feel how pleasingly cool they were, and I stared at her as her touch lingered awkwardly. I didn’t move, I just watched her. She looked at me and raised her eyebrow, asked me if something was wrong. There was a strange glint in her eyes. I blushed, explained that I was distracted by something, and walked out feeling ashamed.

One evening, as I was practicing my handwriting on the desk of the drawing room, I looked over my shoulder and saw her reading a book. She was seated on one of the large armchairs and she was immersed completely in her tome (I forget what exactly she read, but Tamayo reads a lot of novels translated from English and sometimes other languages from countries I can’t even pronounce). I thought the sight was incredible, and I admired it for a while. I saw how intently her eyes focused on the book, and I thought I could fall in love with her all over again from that sight alone. Eventually she noticed this and looked up to me, smiled and asked me if I wanted something. I quickly shook my head and went back to writing.

I knew that she probably suspected something. Tamayo is very smart, and I was very blunt and obvious. She of all people must have known the position I was in at the time. I think it was easy to decipher such a thing.

But I was afraid of confessing my feelings to her. I was young and inexperienced, while Tamayo was an older woman and my senior. And if my intuition was correct, she used to have her own family. She even possibly had some sort of relationship with Tokikawa in the past, and I didn’t think she had room in her heart for someone else in that way. She was clearly fond of me in her own way, but it came off more so to me like a mother’s love for her son. I have said that I thought at the time that the reason she turned me into one of her own was because she saw a son in me, and she wanted to pretend that I was family, or just wanted to feel that sort of connection with someone again. I never thought that she would want to lay beside me in that way.

Even though I had what could only be described as romantic feelings for Tamayo, and despite my attempts to not see in her such a light, I also saw a mother in her. In many ways, she reminded me of the way my own mother used to treat me with so much more affection when I was a young child, before my brothers were born and I bore the burden of being the eldest sibling. I would frequently be torn between my desire for her and the guilt of viewing her in that way.

There was a time where I thought writing out all my frustrations in a book (not this one) might have helped. One night, next to the dim lamplight on the desk of my room, I scribbled down everything I felt about Tamayo in an effort to release all my pent-up feelings. I became so ashamed of all that I had written that I ripped the book to shreds, put my head on the desk and silently wept to myself.

It was extremely painful. To do justice to how I felt is difficult. It was like she had consumed me in spirit, and that I was doomed to suffer this awful fate for as long as we were together. And yet the pain was almost comforting in a way, because I loved her so much. Every smile she gave was one that said that this new life was worth living, that leading such an inhumane existence was worth it. I didn’t need other people, I had her.

After at least a few months of living together, I was at the desk of our drawing room one night, trying to take my mind off her by spinning the globe of the world – my passion had grown almost insufferable. To my surprise, Tamayo came into the room with her typically-subdued presence. She softly called my name in the tone which tightened my chest, and I stood up and turned around.

“Yes, Lady Tamayo?” I asked.

“Could you please come see me in my room in five minutes? It’s important.”

She was already gone before I could even respond.

Her room. Where she sleeps. I couldn’t figure out why at the time. Surely, if she wanted a conversation, she could have had it in the drawing room. Unless, of course, there was something she wanted to show me in her private quarters – something she couldn’t take out... or something like that. I tried to contemplate the reasoning for a while, but my mind eventually pushed it aside. After all, I couldn’t refuse any request from her.

I walked forth to go into the corridor once the five minutes had passed. I went to the door and knocked, then announced my presence.

“Come in.” She told me.

As I opened the door, I then realized that I had never been in there prior – it was maybe almost double the size of my room and her furniture had more of the baroque touch to it. Tamayo was in front of her desk situated some distance beyond the foot of her four-poster bed. The chair she was sitting on was trimmed with gold and had red cushions, and she was looking into her silver-lined mirror intently. She was cleaning off her makeup. I had never seen her do that before, she always wore her makeup whenever I saw her, so seeing her plain-faced was quite the sight to behold, but just as beautiful.

I closed the door behind me, then took a few steps forward. She then noticed my presence, stood from her desk and walked towards me. I was situated squarely in the middle of the chamber; the curtained window was to my left, her four-poster bed was to my right, and she and the desk were directly in front of me, the room itself was illuminated by the bright electrical light on the ceiling.

Tamayo approached me slowly; every step she made was deliberate yet weightless. As she got closer and closer, I noticed that the scent of her perfume had waned considerably and her natural smell was completely laid bare. I would say that she had a very womanly and mature scent; she smelled a lot like my mother and many of the housewives in my old village, except without that faintest hint of soil and dirt.

“I just wanted to thank you for all your help,” she said, “you’ve been doing well for the past few months.”

I nodded. “Of course...”

She smiled.

“I don’t really know how to adequately express my thanks to you.”

I told her that she didn’t need to think such things, that I was willing and eager to help her. It made sense after all, it helped both of us survive.

She nodded and her eyes narrowed. After looking at my face for a few moments, Tamayo then reached up to caress my cheek with her right hand. I think I audibly gasped, and I felt an odd twang in my stomach and groin. Her nails scratched my skin lightly, but it was a pleasing sensation.

A grunt leaped out of my throat. “Uhhhhh-”

She cut me off by putting her finger to her lips. I stopped speaking and I gulped, I didn’t know what was happening. My eyes fixated on the pearled hairpin in her hair, and I started to feel drowsy.

“Can I be honest with you, Yushiro?”

“I’m… I’m sorry?” I asked. I was bewildered, then I realized I hadn’t actually answered her question, so I cursed myself bitterly in my own mind, then nodded.

She told me she felt lonely. The muscles in my thighs and buttocks tensed when she said that. She then asked me if I felt lonely in turn, which made me flare my nostrils.

I shouted, without much thought as to what I was admitting to her. “Yes?!”

“Are you… attracted to me? You don’t have to be ashamed. You can admit that to me, Yushiro. I won’t judge you.”

So, she knew. Of course she knew. It was so blatantly obvious that I was enamored with her. Though I was thoroughly ashamed to admit it, and was in utter disbelief at our circumstances, I thought no reason to hide the truth from her.

I slammed my eyes shut and nodded. “Yes!”

When I opened my eyes, I saw Tamayo still smiling. She brought her fingernails down and trailed my lips. At first, it made me flinch and my skin went cold, but I resolved to just focus on her. I didn’t notice this straight away, but her other hand had started to caress my hip. When I did pick up on this, I shuddered.

Tamayo then said that she thought I was a very handsome boy.

It was a statement I did not expect, the latest in a string of statements that were wholly unanticipated. Her answer made me shiver, and it lingered in the air for some time due to my inability to speak. My heartbeat was fast and without consistent rhythm and, to my eyes, the world looked like it was swirling in on itself. Save my mother when I was a young boy, nobody had ever called me handsome. It was the first time I received such a compliment, and it was from her of all people.

“Th-thank you!” I eventually sputtered, bowing my head in an effort to veil my magnificent blush. I clenched my fists, and I felt the beginnings of an erection. She then cupped my chin, before titling my head back up. She no longer smiled, appearing rather solemn and serious instead.

She pulled herself in closer, so her chest was soon pressed up against mine. I could feel the outline of her breasts, the smell and warmth of her breath against my face more prominently, and I felt a twitch in my groin.

She narrowed her eyes, intensified her gaze on me, like she was inspecting me. She was still caressing my hip – she was even squeezing me. I froze in place, unable to process her movements and unwilling to believe what was happening. Or maybe I was scared.

“I… I would like to show you my appreciation, if that’s all right? For everything you’ve done for me.”

My heartbeat was uncomfortable at this point, and I felt like I was about to fall over. She stared into my eyes with that strange glint that was sometimes seen whenever she looked at me, even during our first days together when I was human and at the door of death.

“Wha-what?” I asked before awkwardly uhhh-ing – I wanted to ask why she had gotten so close to me, but nothing came of that.

“Have you ever kissed a woman before?” Tamayo asked.

Before I could even say anything more to her, she let go of my hip, took both of my cheeks in her hands, then pressed her lips against mine. I widened my eyes and my mind went empty; she used her jaw to open my lips before putting her tongue inside my mouth. My arms and hands flailed impotently; I wanted to hold her, but I also wanted to break free and run away, but it would have been of no use, for she had me in her grip. She moaned lightly into my mouth as she softly kissed me. I had no idea what to do with my tongue, so it awkwardly bumped against hers as I drank in her peculiar taste and the moist warmth of her mouth. As a virgin who had never experienced a kiss, it was strange and even somewhat frightening. She viewed me with the very same focused stare from before. I whined as she kissed me. It was a very embarrassing and undignified noise, but it was one I couldn’t really control. Not that it deterred her in any way.

She left me with a squelch. As she withdrew from my lips, my eyes blinked and my face twitched. I couldn’t even speak, couldn’t even begin to contemplate the feeling I had just experienced. My erection was now uncomfortably prominent, and I figured she could feel it poking against her. Her face appeared lightly flushed and it carried a level of satisfaction, with a little smirk in the corners of her lips and the narrowing of her eyelids – she seemed to enjoy that kiss immensely. But she quickly dispelled such a countenance.

“I have a proposal for you, Yushiro. Would you like to hear it?”

I didn’t really give much of a verbal response; I communicated my confirmation by nodding and letting out something close to a base, guttural yelp that vaguely sounded like confirmation. I didn’t have the strength or courage to compose anything resembling speech, and I didn’t really stop to think about the nature of such a proposal until after I had agreed. By the time I was beginning to consider the ramifications of what I was walking into, she began to speak again.

“You say you are attracted to me… you want to sleep with me. And I… am also feeling lonely,” she then started to caress my hip again, “and I think that, maybe, we can both provide for each other. What do you say to that? How do you feel about us helping each other with this? We’ve known each other for a while, now… and I trust you. Do you trust me, Yushiro?”

I couldn’t answer that question, not with the amount of shock I was going through, so I just stared at her. Tamayo narrowed her eyes, and the hand on her hip moved to my thigh as the other laid flat against my chest. And then that hand on my thigh moved to that little gap on the side of my hakama, she slid it in and her fingers trawled across the bare skin of my thigh, and then…

As soon as Tamayo touched me there, I immediately broke away from her and turned around to look at the door. I was beginning to hyperventilate; I tugged at my collar and thought it uncomfortably stiff. I didn’t turn around to look at her; my eyes failed to focus on anything at all, not even the door. The erection was embarrassingly big. I then began to sweat against my own expectations. I could still taste her lips and tongue on my mouth, which pulsated.

She then uttered my name, bringing me back to reality. Her voice had a strange quality to it in that moment, it was like it reverberated through my mind like when a person shouts in a large, empty space.

“Y-yes…?” Still refusing to turn around, my eyes wandered to look at the doorknob as I fended off the urge to panic.

“This is what I am going to do,” Tamayo’s words came out quietly, but with emphasis, “I am going to take my clothes off, then I am going to lie down in my bed. If you would like for this to continue, then you are more than welcome to join me. If, however, this is something you are uncomfortable with, if this is something you truly do not want to do, then you are free to walk out of the door. If you do this, then I will respect your decision, and I will not speak of this again. Is that acceptable?”

I didn’t respond to that. But I didn’t need to, for Tamayo took my silence as approval enough and began to disrobe. My shins and ankles grew weaker and weaker as I could hear the subtle sounds of silk falling to the floor. I didn’t turn around, I understood that to look at her would only be permissible if I dedicated myself to her proposition. The sound of her lowering herself onto the sheets and mattress of that four-poster bed felt like a sting.

And then I found myself in a strange paralysis.

Since that day Tamayo had found me begging and dying on the streets with incurable disease, she had become many things to me: A new mother to replace the one that had abandoned me, the one I had killed with my own hands; a guiding hand, a mentor that educated me in the fields of medicine and modern science; a ward that taught me the ways of my new, nonhuman existence; my savior who breathed the breath of life into the flickering ember of my own bosom. But most importantly, she was the sole subject of my adoration and desire. I had been alive for sixteen years up until that point, yet my soul had never harbored such a wellspring of passion than it did with Tamayo; practically every waking and dreaming moment of my existence centered around her, somehow. And she had just kissed and fondled me, then promised to lay with me in her bed… so long as I accepted.

I was terrified. The door was tempting; I could have walked straight on and things would return to normal. My cowardly side wanted that. I would be condemning myself to forever chase her shadow, but I wouldn’t have to worry about crossing a threshold. I was a virgin, I had never had sex, hadn’t even been in anything resembling a romantic relationship – the extent of my experience amounted to staring at an older woman washing herself in the river. I felt I wasn’t ready. And I still had problems reconciling Tamayo’s parental role with my sexual desire for her, like there was some path or avenue that I couldn’t traverse, a door I was forbidden from opening to protect me from the truths that dwelled within. When my fantasies threatened to become reality, I was growing fearful and wanted things to go back to normal.

But that was all something of a delusion, because I also knew that if I did walk out of that door, things wouldn’t really go back to as they were before that night. That latent awkwardness would forever linger in the air. Tamayo claimed she would never speak of it again, but that wouldn’t be enough. The fact that she offered to have sex with me would always be present, in a way.

Which also made me think that this was her plan all along. Recall me initially considering the idea that she turned me into a vampire to fill a void. I thought that she saw something of a son in me, one from her distant human life. This was why, I thought, she took pity on and saved me, why she took me under her tutelage, why she treated me as she had done up until that point. All of that was thrown into disarray. I could have been wrong, but I could also have been right; she may have seen in me a son and a lover, in the same way that I saw her as both as a mother figure and the subject of my intense passion. I thought that maybe it was her goal this whole time. And if that was always her goal, then that meant she might have deliberately constructed a situation wherein things would never go back to normal, further persuading me into accepting her proposal.

In other words: Tamayo may have been offering me the illusion of a choice, but there was no choice at all. And thinking about all of that in that way disgusted me.

And then a terrible question came to my mind: Did Tamayo use her sorcery to seduce me? The very fact I asked myself such a question suggested that she most likely did not use her spells to sway my mind, but that I asked myself such a question to begin with was deeply disturbing. I still had memories of the time she used her technique to calm me down and render me unconscious – but I only had her word for what the spell did to me. And maybe… I thought that maybe she had used the spell on other occasions, and I had forgotten because that was merely one of its effects.

I didn’t know the true answer to any of these thoughts. I continued to stare at the doorknob. She didn’t speak once during this fleeting moment in time, yet I could sense her gaze fixated on my back, I audibly inhaled and exhaled, then closed my eyes to the point that pressure piled on my forehead; I slammed them shut, and my entire form trembled. My fists tightly clenched, I involuntarily released a suppressed whimper.

Sense told me to leave, to not take advantage of the situation. But no matter how much I denied it to myself or how much my conscious mind swayed me away from it, I still desperately wanted it. Since the day we met, I wanted nothing more than to make love with her. I had already condemned myself to Hell anyway, as had she, so the time had long-since passed to consider things like human morals or boundaries. She was much older than me, and I could only barely be considered a man, but it’s foolish for a vampire to worry about such taboos.

And she said she was lonely. The thought of her in pain hurt, and I wanted to do anything I could to help ease it. Her heart clearly yearned for this, too. I couldn’t decipher if her feelings were new or longstanding, whether this was always her plan or not, but the result was the same. She was in need. She saw me as someone who could fulfill that need. I was also in need.

I consciously stopped my own foot from moving forward. I then slumped my shoulders and looked to the floor.

Surrendering myself to fate, my fumbling hands reached for the knot below my stomach, before pulling it apart and letting my hakama fall to my ankles. I stepped over them as I flung off my yukata and quickly started to undo the buttons of my shirt. It took a few seconds, but with a crumpled and haphazard pile of clothes scattered about my feet, I quickly yanked down my own fundoshi – leaving me bare save for my tabi – and then turned my entire body to run to the four-poster bed.

Running over her own clothes and barely having the time to register her naked form (I was surprised to see that she still wore her hairpin and her tabi also), I practically leaped onto the bed and landed on my stomach. The sheets were folded to be beneath our feet and the pillows were purple and silken, and the mattress provided comfort in spite of my aching erection. I then flipped myself over and rested my head on the pillow. I couldn’t even bring myself to look over to Tamayo, who was a vague blur in the corner of my vision. I couldn’t stop panting; I breathed heavily and my chest moved up and down. My now-bare erection jutted out from my waist, the sight was quite shameful to behold.

Tamayo then rolled on top of and straddled me, held my waist with her hands and stared directly into my eyes. My erection rested against her groin and stomach. To put it mildly, I was startled by the sight of her nudity. I saw all the tiny particulars and imperfections on her body: The loose skin on her upper arms and the rolls of skin on her sides, the hip and collar bones that jutted out vaguely from her form, the way her stomach protruded ever-so-slightly (but not much), the mole just above her navel, her unshaven armpit hair, the cloud-shaped birthmark on her thigh, the thick curls on her vagina that brushed almost painfully against my penis. She wasn’t quite the model of youthful beauty many men dream about, but she was extremely beautiful – in fact, even more so.

“You’re so handsome.” She said that with tenderness.

I nodded. “Yes.”

She then held my cheek again.

“Are you scared?"

I repeated myself. “Yes.”

“Is that all you can say?”

“…Yes.” That really was all I could say.

She smiled, then began to stroke my cheek with her fingernails. She tilted her head and seemed to behold me fondly, like she was looking at someone that she hadn’t seen in years. I think she was trying to comfort me. She then leaned down and whispered into my ear.

“You’re a very good boy, Yushiro.”

“Th… thank you…”

“Don’t worry about a thing. I’ll take care of you. You can trust me.”

Tamayo was quick to put her lips on mine and lick them with her licked tongue, as her hands moved to cradle my head whilst she stared directly into my eyes. Figuring this was meant to prompt me to take action, I fully opened my lips – her tongue moved and she kissed me softly. Her hands caressed my cheeks while her eyes narrowed, apparently drinking in the sight of my face. Not knowing what else to do, I awkwardly wrapped my arms around her waist and my fingertips could feel the looseness of her skin – my heart was palpitating painfully, and it was like I could feel it try to escape my chest.

What followed is actually something of blur to my mind. But she showed complete mastery over me and my body. She raised her hips and carefully lowered herself on my erect penis as one of her hands kept it in place – I was overwhelmed by how hot and tight she was. Her hands traversed and explored the entirety of my thin torso, she moaned and groaned into my mouth whenever she kissed me, rocked her body against mine while she panted and heaved and hummed. Tamayo would expel hot, damp air directly into my face, the smell of her breath lingered on my nose all while her ecstasy deepened.

I felt assaulted from all directions by one-too-many sensations: The feel of her skin against mine, the warmth of her breath on my face, the pungency of her innate scent, her gasping mouth and starry eyes, her body glimmering beneath the electrical light, her lips pressing and kissing against all sorts of areas, how she would stare directly into my eyes – her gaze focused on me as she twisted and contorted in pleasure.

I kept opening and closing my eyes as we had sex; I was completely consumed by that indescribable feeling of being inside her. She showered with me tender love, and my chest and groin got tighter and tighter and tighter and tighter until I came. I sobbed and whimpered so dramatically that Tamayo had to cover my mouth with her hand to muffle my cries.

She didn’t climax that night. I saw her flushed and contended face, but she didn’t reach orgasm. As I was panting and sobbing, my senses overwhelmed from the stimuli, Tamayo rolled over next to me. She obviously noticed me swelling with great and unprecedented emotion, for she held me by my shoulders, turned me to my side and pulled me into a loving embrace. She brought my face to her chest – between her two breasts – and combed her fingers through the hair on the top of my head as she rubbed my back.

“It’s okay,” she whispered to me, “it’s okay, it’s okay. I’m here, Yushiro, I’m here.”

In that moment, I relived a locked away memory of my mother holding and soothing me as a little child as she nursed me back to health. It was an awful winter and she spoke to me in the same soothing whisper as I was sick with something I didn’t understand, but it was the most ill I had been at the time. It was a life where I had no brothers yet, so I had her full attention.

It's embarrassing to admit this, but I then began to cry. Tamayo whispered soothing love into my ear and warmed my body with hers as I did nothing but expel tears. Eventually, she took the folded sheets below our tabi-covered feet and pulled them up to cover the both of us.

I wrapped my arm around Tamayo’s waist and held onto her as if my life depended on it, all while she continued to caress and comfort me. Her smell completely engulfed me, and I could feel the striking contrast between the warmth of her breath and the coolness of her own skin. I didn’t think, didn’t permit myself to think, all I could do was hold onto her and let out all my feelings.

That is the memory of my very first time.

Notes:

What Yushiro goes through here is partly based on a psychological state known as 'limerence'. Yushiro's feelings for Tamayo in KnY ultimately did end up being those of genuine love than merely of this sort of obsession and I would struggle to say that their relationship has any sort of dark dimension to it, but I always felt like it had the potential to become very sinister in another context. I wanted to twist Yushiro’s infatuation with Tamayo into something darker and put it at the core of the story, so this is how it ended up the way it is. I’m of the opinion that formative love experiences are psychologically important and shouldn’t be dismissed, the original story seems to agree with this idea since Yushiro’s feelings for Tamayo are actually taken quite seriously (at least by the ending parts of the story where he is a much more prominent character).

When it came to depicting this part of the story, it required a lot of bravery and tact on my behalf, especially because it’s not something I’ve ever done before. I thought about the best way to actually depict the events for a while, a difficult question to answer considering the perspective character. In the end, I figured it would be best to depict it as both uncomfortable and something of a traumatic event for Yushiro, despite him wanting it. That was where the depiction of the sexual relationship in The Reader became vital.

I remember someone once describing Tamayo as having the face of a Buddha but the soul of a demon. This was undoubtedly true in the manga – I think you have to be at least somewhat of a disturbed person (like Kokushibo and Kaigaku) to willingly become a demon like she did, even with the context. But this is something that can be seen in the oneshot too, as she is shown to wield something of a quiet yet terrifying power. So these aspects of her influence the sinister nature of her portrayal here and during other parts of the story. That being said, it is still in my interest to make her intentions ambiguous.

If you have read this far (which I would just like to say – thank you!) you may be wondering why this is all happening, why the story has taken this turn, what actually is going on etc. Of course, it’s not exactly what you would call a tasteful story so far and it as you’ve probably guessed, it only gets worse. A lot of the beauty of art comes from what the beholder takes away from it, although I think it impossible to entirely separate an artist from their art. When this story is finished, I was planning on uploading an extra chapter as a sort of appendix, which will be full of information that I couldn’t fit into the fic proper as well as something of an essay on the assemblage of ideas, themes and content in the fic.

The sketch of this chapter is based on this painting. It used to be thought that the phenomenon of young women reading novels would perpetuate intellectual and moral degeneracy within them. Obviously it's ridiculous, but it’s something that always comes to my mind whenever I observe this painting in particular and is probably the reason why I decided to base the sketch off it. From my perspective, it also serves to contrast against the actual contents of the chapter.

Chapter 5: Fifth Entry

Summary:

Our relationship.

Notes:

(See the end of the chapter for notes.)

Chapter Text

We slept together that night. It was the first time I slept in her bed with her, and it was my first time sleeping with a woman that wasn’t my own mother. Though I was thinking about a lot of things, I do remember thinking her bed to be much more comfortable than my own. I later found out that the wooden bedframe was carved in England, while the one in my room was from France.

I fell asleep in her arms. If I dreamed that night, I don’t remember what it was about. My mother used to tell me that dreamless sleep comes from exhaustion. Perhaps I was so overwhelmed by all that had happened, that I did not have the will to dream. Or maybe because that which I had been dreaming of both in and out of sleep had just come true, so I had nothing to dream for anymore. I sometimes wonder the worth of a life which doesn’t aspire to anything, the value of a person who doesn’t dream.

When I woke up, I felt a little bit of shock as I looked at Tamayo next to me. She was fast asleep, her face gentle and little gusts of air coming out of her mouth. The sheets were wrapped adequately around her that I could not even see her chest. Her hair was disheveled and unraveled – clearly, she had taken her hairpin out at some point. I then realized that it was the first time I saw her with her hair like that, I was amazed by its length.

But then I very quickly felt shame and embarrassment. I remembered all that had happened the night before and how I handled the situation, how I cried like a little boy. I thought it completely unbefitting someone like myself, someone who had only just become a man and should have started acting his age. At that time, I didn’t even think about any of the other thoughts I had – the implications behind Tamayo’s actions and her possible motivations – just that I had appeared to her as a spineless whelp. And of course, I was aware that I was completely naked.

Tamayo then woke up. She looked at me and smiled and wished me a good morning. I didn’t say anything, I flipped around to look away from her. I felt something strange in my stomach, like the sense of shame I had talked about earlier but something deeper than that. It was like... pain.

She then draped her arm around me and pulled me in; I could feel her chest touch my back and I blushed as she put her fingers through my hair. Even before our encounter from the previous night, my intuition told me that Tamayo was a tender lover. Call it bias or what have you, but I took a little bit of joy in being proven right.

All of those annoying feelings had been washed away when she had pulled me in like that, so I just surrendered to her in my entirety. We didn’t speak, we just stayed in bed like that for maybe half an hour, the sun had just risen and the clinic would need to be opened soon. I tried to focus on the feeling of Tamayo holding me close and comforting me; my mind would sometimes stray to how I remembered my mother the night before, but I tried desperately to push that aside and focus on my present.

After that half hour had expired, she simply let go and got out of bed. She told me to get ready for the day as she walked over completely naked to her crumpled kimono on the floor. I nodded and got out of the bed myself.

I was somewhat mentally distracted throughout the day, which Tamayo seemed to acknowledge by making my duties lighter than normal. What was at first a confusing swirl of emotions morphed into something I can only call pride. I had slept with a woman for the first time, she had willingly given herself to me and I bedded her. And most importantly, it was the very woman I had desired for as long as I had known her. I felt I had truly become a man, to put it simply. I kept an extremely upright posture; I moved with confidence and a little part of me wanted to tell all of our patients that I had slept with Tamayo. Not that I would or indeed ever did, such a thing would be too personal.

But as the day progressed, that pride receded and more complicated feelings took its place – all that had I had dwelled on before found its way back to me. For instance, I still couldn’t determine what her intentions were this whole time, if this had all been planned or not. I didn’t know the answer to whether she had actively tried to manipulate me, or worse, that she had swayed my mind with her magic. I didn’t want to think the worst of her in that way and I kept trying to find ways to justify it all to myself. The most compelling reason I ever came to was that if she was capable of using magic to hypnotize me in any way, then I probably wouldn’t get uncomfortable at or even entertain the notion of such a thing, because she would use her magic to make it seem like she had done nothing. But she was also very careful to build a sense of trust with me; if I was nothing but her corporeal servant, then I doubt she would treat me as she had up until that point.

My mind was still fractured by how I felt about her deep down as well, I still couldn’t help but see a maternal figure in Tamayo – someone my senior and attempting to guide me. I remembered how I was assaulted by memories of my own mother when she held me close the night before and it made me uncomfortable. Of course, I knew that she was never really my mother, but it was difficult to shake that sense of unease. I didn’t know how to reconcile the fact that I was seeing her as a sort of surrogate family-figure and the subject of my passion and desire. I didn’t know if that was something I could even resolve at the time.

I’ve had a lot of time to think about all of that, of course. It makes sense that my mind anchored myself to Tamayo after my family basically disowned me and untethered me from their lives. I was at a curious stage of my own mental development; I was a man but only just and still immature in many ways. I loved my mother, even though she had become somewhat distant towards me due to my age and the fact I had two younger brothers. And this might be bias, but Tamayo has always had that motherly quality to her – the softness and tone of her voice, her polite yet firm nature, her surface-level maturity and wisdom. She is someone who you could take comfort in, even if you were grieving something as drastic as the world itself.

And then I thought about it the other way too, how she saw me. How she treated me like I was one of her own, yet was willing to bed me. Was she seeing me as a family and an object of sexual desire? Maybe she had a different line of thought from me, but maybe not. I didn’t know a single thing for certain about Tamayo’s old life or even if she had a family, just that I thought it to be very likely. The more I thought about it, the more it unsettled me, so I was always trying to push it out of my mind but it would keep coming back.

After she closed the clinic that day, she set me aside in her room and established some rules with me. We sat on the edge of her bed side-by-side. I was surprised that we weren’t having this conversation in the drawing room at first, but I quickly realized what it was she intended to do with me that night.

She did make me feel comfortable by asking me how I was and if I was prepared to talk about everything. Of course, much like the night before, I knew that to decline her wouldn’t be permissible, so I nodded and implored her to go on with what she wanted to say.

Firstly, she told me it was of utmost importance that we kept our arrangement secret. I was a bit deflated by that for some reason, but I understood completely: Tamayo had an image to uphold, a reputation to preserve. That she was sleeping around with her much younger assistant, if that knowledge were to ever break out, would be scandalous at best and toxic at worst. Anything that could compromise our cover, even matters such as this, needed to be avoided at all costs. She explained that if we kept these sorts of activities to the privacy of our little home above the clinic, it would be safer for both of us. It also meant that we needed to be quiet as possible; though the neighborhood wasn’t especially busy, we sometimes needed to relegate patients to overnight care in the clinic below us.

Secondly, she said that we could only be together at her behest. She said that she would extend me an invitation by tapping on the door of my bedroom or the drawing room (wherever I was) exactly two times. From memory of that time, she would give me such invitations once perhaps every two or three nights. I never turned down an invitation.

Thirdly, it would always be in her bed. This made a lot of sense to me as well. Tamayo’s bed is not only bigger than mine, but more comfortable. This is somewhat irrelevant, but I have always liked the drapery around the posters, as they allow for more intimacy when fully drawn together. We’ve moved around numerous times since those days, but she always kept the bed.

Finally, that it would be like what had happened that morning. I could sleep with her in the bed for the night, but once morning came, we had to leave and act like nothing had happened. This is related to the first rule, but we couldn’t betray in any way what we had just done. For all intents and purposes, we would only become lovers within the confines of her bedroom.

Admittedly, I found it quite bizarre for her to be taking a formal tone with me over such matters. Her delivery didn’t exactly match the substance of her speech, to my mind. And as soon as last night, I never would have thought we’d be having a conversation like that, so for it to be thrust upon me was…  I can’t describe it adequately, like so many other things. But it was strange. I took note at the time of how she treated such a relationship almost like a formality, with clear guidelines and boundaries and rules to follow. In the time I’ve known her, Tamayo has always liked cleanliness and order, and while it is partly a masquerade, I always felt she genuinely believed in such things to a degree. Perhaps years upon years of veiling her true identity had changed her mentally to be like this, or maybe it was always a part of her personality. I didn’t know at the time.

As she talked, I became slightly unsettled. Not at her rules, I thought those to be fair and reasonable. No, I remembered all that had gone through my head both the night before and throughout the day, all the countless questions I had about Tamayo and myself that never got answered. It was like a mental puzzle to me; I knew it to be something I wanted but also something inherently dangerous. It did certainly feel as if we were committing some very serious taboos, that we were breaking rules with such an arrangement.

But none of that changed the fact that, as she talked to me, I couldn’t help but notice how beautiful she was. Every word and syllable that came from her sweet voice almost enchanted me, like she was weaving an intricate spell on my heart. My complicated feelings aside, my heart still raced whenever I thought about her – especially at the thoughts of us making love. Though my predicament was not as torturous as it had been, I still couldn’t stop thinking about her and how wonderful she was. I had never truly experienced love before, but I was beginning to truly understand what it was like to want to live for the sake of a single person. I had chosen to live and lose my humanity because I wanted to be with her, my instinctual fear of death aside.

When she finished listing off her terms, she asked if I agreed with them. Because I was distracted by her, it took me a moment to appreciate the fact that she was addressing me. I gave a hasty blush as I nodded.

I then stuttered and tried to say something to her.

“Is something the matter?” She asked me.

I then asked her if I could have a kiss. Perhaps I was too eager.

But Tamayo smiled. She leaned over, took my cheeks in her hands and gave me a deep kiss. Her mouth tasted like the tea we had shared beforehand, as she likes to drink tea throughout the day.

Suffice to say, Tamayo and I became lovers.

It is worth mentioning that though my thoughts may appear somewhat disorganized, I am able to write all of this with the benefit of hindsight and a certain detachment you get from the passage of time. If I were attempting to write all of this within the heat of the moment, then I probably wouldn’t be able to write a single paragraph before descending into incoherence.

As I write this, I am awash with fond memories of our first days together, when I was awkward and inexperienced yet full of eagerness and want for her. I remember the times where I would crawl onto the bed, hold Tamayo and kiss her as my hands caressed her body and slowly unraveled that bizarrely-patterned kimono that she loves wearing. I remember kissing and nibbling her neck as I pulled her in and savored her feel and taste. She would lightly hum in approval and urge me to continue. She talked to me quite frequently during sex, guiding me with her voice and telling me how best to pleasure her.

At first, Tamayo saw it fit to keep taking the lead due to my lack of experience. Shaking off the shock and fear from my very first time, it didn’t take me too long to get used to and even savor it. As she rode me, my hands would traverse and explore her body, I quickly realized where her most sensitive spots were and where she likes to be touched. Tamayo is a woman who relishes in physical contact during lovemaking, she loves to caress and hold me as much I like to do it to her. Watching her face contort with pleasure as I held her and we made love was a sight like no other. It truly made me feel like a man.

As my confidence grew, the roles would reverse: I would be the one to be on top of Tamayo, exploring her body as she threw her head back and cooed with pleasure. In fact, this would become the overwhelmingly common position. I took this to mean that Tamayo much preferred being in a submissive role beneath me.

However, I was quite ashamed at my inability to give her orgasms. I brought it up with her numerous times, but she always told me not to worry about it. In her own words, women just like to be intimate and don’t necessarily mind if they can’t reach the same peak as men. I wasn’t sure if she meant that or was just trying to make me feel better, but I thought about it more and more and resolved to one day give her the same pleasure as she had given me.

Any sort of physical exertion tires us far less than humans, and this also applies to sex. This meant that lovemaking could last anywhere between thirty minutes to several hours, depending on both Tamayo’s and my own mood. Muscle don’t strain and limbs don’t ache outside of extreme circumstances either. We still need to expel sweat, so it’s not entirely without problems, but it’s still far cleaner and simpler than sex between humans.

And vampires can’t procreate, so she never became pregnant.

I feel that in some cases, our physical intimacy seemed more a pretense to just merely be able to lie in bed together. I started noticing this when I picked up on how closely Tamayo would hold me when we slept. This proved to me that Tamayo always saw me as something more than just a means to satiate her sexual desires. She told me she was lonely, which I understand to mean that she yearned for something like an emotional connection and not a purely physical one. She wasn’t in it just for sex.

Back then, I entertained the notion of asking her what exactly I meant to her. I myself couldn’t really pinpoint what it was she saw in me. I didn’t think she was ‘in love’ with me, as much I wanted to believe that, that idea seemed farfetched to me. I wondered if she saw me as some sort of replacement for somebody else she was intimate with, in the same way that I thought she saw me as a replacement son. I never asked her about the extent of her feelings for me because I didn’t know how to word it, but I was afraid of the answer as well. In a way, Tamayo makes more sense the less you know about her.

There was a certain carefreeness to this time where we first became lovers and nothing else seemed to bother us. Our only reminders of other concerns were when we fed on humans and when she would take samples of my blood for Tokikawa, whom we heard nothing from. It seemed he despised interacting with Tamayo as much as she did with him. That suited me just fine. I became increasingly preoccupied with when I would be able to make love with Tamayo, anticipating when she should invite me to do so. It was to the extent that I may have partly neglected my own duties and studies, but you can hardly blame me.

To your average person, no suspicious play was afoot. Our interactions in the clinic were formal, dignified and didn’t carry any implication of intimacy. I did my best to maintain something of a distance from her, but even I couldn’t help but look at her with admiration. She worked so hard, was so diligent and carried herself so elegantly. And she was mine. And I was hers, I suppose.

But it wasn’t all carefree. As I mentioned before, I still had a lot of questions and disturbing thoughts swirling in my head. And as kind and passionate Tamayo was during that time, I was still able to perceive that she was hiding many things from me somehow. I could just tell. And I’m not just talking about her past with Tokikawa, either.

One thing I have noticed is that, since becoming a vampire, I have gained a keen sense of perception. I must mention here that, sometime during these formative days of our relationship, my body had mutated as Tamayo had put it, and my talismans were now capable of casting a concealment spell – I could hide objects and people from sight. I couldn’t erase their existence, but I could hide their appearance. This has proven to be unimaginably useful. The ability to ‘see’ with these talismans also improved – I could see further and through more of them at a time. By this time, I had actually hidden some of these talismans in small corners and nooks throughout the city – places I was sure humans wouldn’t look. I also continued to be able to highjack the sight of small petty animals like rats, cats and birds, I was even able to subtly influence their movements by that point. Because of all this, I had a good idea of the movements of people during both the day and night. In case it’s not obvious, this is invaluable to vampires such as us, as it means we always have the upper hand in case the Demon Hunters happen to get suspicious or decide to patrol the area (not that we had any encounters at that point). That, and situational awareness is always a good thing.

But when I say my perception improved, I don’t just mean my supernatural abilities. I seemed to get a keener ‘sixth sense’, a better innate understanding of people and their behaviors. This was, to my mind, how I was able to decipher the things I had about Tamayo up until that point by going on nothing but implication. I don’t think it was anything to do with inherited memories or instincts, but I concede that it’s a possibility. Regardless, I just knew that despite both of us agreeing to and taking delight in this arrangement, something was deeply wrong.

One night, something happened that exposed me more to what I can only describe as her true nature.

Let me remind you that Tamayo is a woman of culture, for she enjoys reading and listening to music. You might be surprised to learn that most of the books she reads are in fact novels, some of them are even collections of poetry. She has a refined taste palate. I am not personally a fan of the types of books she reads, but I don’t really read for leisure anyway.

I’m not exactly sure why, but at some point, she got the idea of us two going out together. She wanted to take me to an opera house in the city’s high-end entertainment quarter, it was somewhat recently built and based on western design. I wanted to protest that I would not have been able to appreciate or even understand such a thing, for I’ve never been one for the high arts even after my education, but I still complied if only to please her and to spend the time with her.

We also forewent our traditional garbs. I wore a western-style suit with braces and a shirt that had become fashionable with many of the men in the city. I must admit that I found the suit to be quite uncomfortable in comparison to what I typically wear, but Tamayo bought it for me and I couldn’t really refuse. And she wore this mysterious, almost bewitching lapis lazuli blue dress with a pattern worn by women across the Pacific. She looked so breathtakingly incredible and the deep blue color only accentuated her beauty.

Standing in line waiting to go to inside was strange because I hadn’t been in such a concentrated population of humans since becoming a vampire, anything we needed (like supplies) was arranged to come to the clinic via delivery or Tamayo and I would see to retrieval during overcast/rainy afternoons or in the early evening. I had never really been exposed to this type of nightlife yet. Of course, I had a cursory glance of the activities of people after dark from my dank corners of the streets when I crawled through the city as a disease-ridden beggar. The lights were so bright that they were almost like that of the sun. In fact, they triggered something like a fight-or-flight response in me once or twice. I wondered if Tamayo felt the same.

I felt that we didn’t appear like a romantic couple or anything of the sort, which was probably for the best. Some people seemed to recognize us and treated us accordingly, otherwise Tamayo would explain that she was a doctor and that I was her assistant. She told people in the queue, perhaps as a joke, that her taking me to the opera was like a reward for all my hard work. I didn’t find the joke funny personally, but I appreciated the sentiment.

To my shame, I don’t remember the full details of the opera we saw. Tamayo told me it was an Italian opera by a man by the name of Mozart, it was called something like The Marriage of Figaro. The venue had a lot of printed programs, translations of songs and guides to explain the plot. But I didn’t read any of that.

We were so far up and away that, apparently, it was difficult to see what was happening on the stage. I never had this problem, most likely due to my enhanced perception compared even to normal vampires. Tamayo had to use a small pair of binoculars, as with many of the other patrons in the same seating arrangements as us, to get a good view. She seemed to be enjoying herself. I didn’t care much for it and felt a bit bored, least because I didn’t understand the language and couldn’t follow along, but Tamayo did. She is actually reasonably well-versed in a number of languages, including English, German and Italian. She says she cannot speak them, but can read and understand them.

I found it to be unbearably hot in my own suit and I was mentally distracted by it, I even found myself daydreaming about having sex with Tamayo right then and there, in full view of the audience. I wanted to part that western dress she was wearing and pin her down against the railing. It was mental torture, but thinking back on it, the whole situation was almost funny. She seemed to be hot as well, because she took a fan with her and would sometimes use it to cool herself down, ironic considering vampiric physiology; but overall, things were normal if a bit dull.

That is until something happened. You see, Tamayo seemed to become more and more immersed in the opera the further it went along. By the time of the closing act, I could swear she appeared somewhat angry – be it at the events of the opera or at something else, I didn’t know. But all of a sudden, as the opera was finishing up, she sat back on her chair and began to squeeze my thigh with her hand. I was shocked when that happened and considered asking her to stop, but nobody else had noticed and I didn’t want to make a scene.

Her hold was tight, it almost hurt. It reminded me once again that, in spite of her appearance, she was an immensely powerful vampire capable of inflicting great amounts of damage. She didn’t look at me and kept her eyes on the stage. I almost immediately realized that she was becoming excited, possibly by the events of the opera, and I felt a quite embarrassing erection coming along at the time. Her hand never moved from my thigh.

But once the opera had ended, we left like nothing happened. She walked extremely quickly back to the clinic and I almost had trouble keeping up with her (that is without exposing our supernatural speed). Some people gave us a strange look, as if they were wondering where we were going and why we were in such a hurry.

We didn’t really speak until we got home, it seems there was that unspoken understanding between us. I knew what she wanted. When we did get home, we went upstairs and before we could even enter her bedroom, she grabbed me by the shoulders and pinned me against the door. She then took both of my cheeks in her hands and smacked her lips against mine. Unlike what I was used to, the kiss was rough and extremely passionate; she even scraped her teeth against my lips and I could feel her ragged and uneven breath.

We went into her room and she physically pushed me down onto the bed before straddling herself atop me. To my utmost shock, she used her own strength to rip my shirt apart and scratch her nails against my chest. Then she took my hand and put my fingers in her mouth. Well, we did all sorts of things that night. Or rather, she did a lot of things to me. None of it hurt, but it was shocking.

At the time I was completely bewildered, I didn’t know how to react. Tamayo and I regularly made love, that is true, but I had never seen her like that before, so… for the lack of a better term, I would say carnal. She went at a pace I couldn’t keep up with, she seemed to have little concern for my own comfort or consent. She took my wanting to take part as a given. I was more than happy to, of course, and I tried my best.

And yet I still didn’t make her orgasm. I saw an ember of disappointment on her face at that, but she quickly washed it away as I was recovering from my own climax. Everything around me was spinning and I was trying to process all that had just happened. Meanwhile, she took the opportunity to finish herself off, which I just about noticed and made me feel embarrassed. And then it was like nothing had happened. She took me in her arms and held me close like she usually did. She stroked my hair and whispered sweetness to me.

I woke up in the middle of the night and watched her sleep. She appeared so calm and collected when she slept, like nothing in the world could trouble her – it was just like our first time together. At the time, I was trying to rationalize it all by the way of the opera making her feel passionate, that she wanted to relieve how she felt with me. After all, I understand the nature of spontaneous passion.

But much time has passed since then, and I have gotten to know Tamayo on an unfathomably deep level. Secrets that only I now know. The thing I have come to understand about people is that we all, in some way, are living a lie. We present ourselves in different ways to different people, we change our personalities in order to fit in. Sometimes it’s subtle, other times it’s explicit. Us vampires are constantly living lies, we have to pretend we’re something that we’re not.

Tamayo is an extremely old vampire; she is hundreds of years old. In truth, those repressed parts of her personality were beginning to emerge as soon as our initial encounter with Tokikawa, but at the time I brushed that off as her being hateful of that man in particular. I think that was wrong. What Tamayo showed me that night after the opera was a flicker of something deep within her, a part of herself that she consciously hides away.

 

Notes:

I don’t personally think there is much to say this chapter. This is just meant to be something of a stopgap to establish their relationship and the upcoming developments. I think the chapter mainly just speaks for itself.

There was originally meant to be an extra chapter between this one and the next one, but I decided to cut it due to minimal story relevance and it not really conveying or developing any of the themes/ideas that have been established. Aspects of it have been incorporated into this chapter and will be put into the next one, which I expect to be both the longest so far and the most important.

Their wearing western dress comes from the numerous depictions wearing such clothes by Ufotable (the main one in mind is their Valentine’s/White Day illustrations). Tamayo’s dress was inspired by American women’s fashion of the 1910s and 1920s, and I personally think she looks very good in it. Also, the clashing of western and eastern sensibilities was a recurring theme of the original manga. The premise of the whole 'opera house' episode might be slightly (or even very) anachronistic for Taisho-period Japan, so I'm sorry if that is important to you and I hope you can overlook it if that is the case.

The sketch, again, is based on a painting. There’s no particular reason this one was chosen other than it looks nice, to be honest. Sometimes it’s as simple as that.

Chapter 6: Sixth Entry

Summary:

Bastard.

Notes:

Please be warned that this chapter specifically has a t/w for implied non-con/dub-con.

(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)

Chapter Text

Last time I wrote, I detailed how I was gradually beginning to see a different side to Tamayo, one seeped in degeneracy and unfiltered passion. She was starting to show a side of herself that ran completely contrary to her own cultivated image, that of a professional and sympathetic intellectual. Whether she was consciously doing this or if she did it unintentionally, I didn’t know at the time. In the back of my mind, I was always thinking about Tamayo and what she was hiding about herself, all those dirty little secrets from her past. I remember when she was looking after me and offered to turn me into a vampire, she looked to be in remembrance of something and showed palpable regret and grief over it. I said some time ago that I wondered about her history, especially with Tokikawa, and that the time would come where I would learn of it and even regret it. What I’m about to write down is all I remember from that time.

It began in her room at night. Many things began in her room. Both of us were on the edge of her bed, next to the slightly-flickering lamplight. We were kissing each other on the lips and mouths as she was unbuttoning my shirt. Unlike what I described last time, she was calm and tender – clearly in the mood for intimate lovemaking. I was more than willing to go along; in spite of that episode after the opera, this was still how the majority of our time went and I loved it. I remember sliding my hand between the collar of her kimono and groping her breast as we kissed, she flatted her hand on my crotch and made me erect even through all the clothes I was wearing. She tasted so sweet, hers is a taste I will always remember and crave.

I could hear her little moans as we kissed and I saw the way she closed her eyes, and I could smell her perfume and her own arousal and I could sense how much she wanted me. I loved it, I truly loved it in every single way. I wanted to claim her as mine and mine only, everything she did only made me want to make love to her even more. And I could tell she felt the same way.

In many ways, that single moment felt almost like a culmination to that initial period of our relationship, one that still graced with the light of recency as it were. Everything was new and exciting, carefree to a degree. I think we both would have liked if that moment lasted forever.

But then there was a pronounced knock on the door downstairs, it was so loud that it made us both flinch and stop what we were doing. I immediately recognized it to be the same way Tokikawa knocked on the door when we first met, so I figured he had come around to our place again. I could feel my stomach churning; what was going to be a joyful night was slowly being taken away from me, and it was going to descend into something much worse.

Tamayo took a hold of my shoulders and told me to wait in her room – she must have deduced the very same thing as I had. I pointed to her lips and remarked, whispered to her that her lipstick was lightly smudged, so she went to the mirror and wiped it off her face before going downstairs.

I sat on the edge of the bed, the room around me was beginning to spin and I felt lightheaded. Even though I hadn’t seen him in person for quite some time, I still both hated and feared Tokikawa immensely. Hated, primarily due to how he treated Tamayo and I like dirt; feared, because even with all that in consideration, I knew that he had the power to crush both of us.

I heard the door open. I could hear some muffled speaking, but couldn’t really make anything out. Unless my ears were deceiving me, Tokikawa seemed to be taking a slightly diplomatic tone, the inflection of his voice was softer than last time and he spoke in more hushed tones. I thought at the time that maybe, like Tamayo, he was an expert in hiding his true nature and what happened last time was the slipping of the mask. Or perhaps something else was afoot. I then heard the ruffling of footsteps; she was taking him into another room. Most likely her office, I figured.

Against my better judgment, I grew curious. I considered concealing my body with one of my talismans and eavesdropping on them, but I thought that too dangerous as my presence wouldn’t be entirely eliminated. I guessed that Tokikawa or Tamayo would somehow sense me, and that it would probably make at least the former angry. And I couldn’t just place a talisman to act as an "eye" as I had nowhere to put it without being detected.

That is when I had the idea to use that other gift in my possession. I focused my mind and sensed a raven nearby outside, circling above the clinic. I then remembered that Tamayo usually kept the window of her office open to let cool air in whenever she was using it as the room faces the north and the sunlight doesn’t touch it, so I then almost immediately got the idea to highjack its vision and influence it. I sifted through its mental world and grasped its mind like plucking a flower from a field, and I made it land on the fence surrounding the clinic, on the segment directly in front of the window to her office. As I had guessed, the window was open and the light was on, so I could see and listen perfectly.

Tamayo looked to be sitting on the seat by her desk, but the chair was turned around to look at Tokikawa, who was pacing around the circumference her office with his hands in his pockets. He was wearing the exact same clothes he wore the night I met him, the ink-blackness of his coat contrasted with the gentle light of her office. I focused entirely on the raven’s vision and hearing; you would be amazed at what can be heard even from such a distance. Even when high up in the sky, the ravens whose minds I highjack can listen in to random chatter on the ground.

I had missed the initial part of their conversation, but Tokikawa spoke of his growing frustration. “This is going nowhere,” he said, “I’ve made precious little progress since you started giving me that boy’s blood.”

She folded her arms, and she took something of a dismissive but not altogether antagonistic tone. “I don’t know what else to say to you. I’ve done all you’ve requested of me. What’s holding you back?”

Tokikawa’s fang scraped his lower lip as his cheek twitched; he snapped back that he didn’t know why all his research and resources couldn’t take him any further. He said something about how my blood mutated far too quickly for him to be able to isolate any substantive differences between it and human (as well as his and Tamayo’s) blood.

I sometimes think about what he said about my blood, he seemed to be quite surprised by it and he implied that it wasn’t the case with either his or Tamayo’s blood. It makes me think about how Tamayo, once or twice, has remarked on the speed of my development as a vampire. What all this, in addition to the fact my innate abilities were so unlike other male vampires, all meant, I cannot say.

And then there was the matter of this serum. I’ve sidestepped putting my own thoughts on this to paper, but I’ll reveal that though it would be advantageous to be able to walk under the sun, I always thought it to be a flight of fancy. To me at least, it would be like creating a serum for fish to be able to breathe air and not have to use their gills underwater, or even for a human to grow wings. I just thought it to be impossible. I can’t decide whether Tokikawa’s insistence on developing such a drug came from his ambition or his stubbornness.

From what I understand, Tokikawa posed as a successful local businessman and ran a commercial lab during the day. He hired humans to help him analyze samples and conduct research on behalf of other companies. His lab contained a lot of different chemicals, many of which were flammable like alcohols and ketones. Tamayo did teach me some rudimentary chemistry, but neither of our knowledge ever matched Tokikawa’s and it still doesn’t to this day.

Tamayo also told me at a later date that while she had been a doctor even in her human life, his acquired habit for chemistry originated from the outpouring of western science and knowledge that entered the country during the Meiji period. When he delved into it all (as according to her, he always had a fondness for developing technologies and the sciences), it gave Tokikawa the idea of developing this serum, and so he more rigidly devoted himself to chemistry in order to achieve his goal.

Still, the fact he was there to begin with made me apprehensive, because I wasn’t sure why he went out of his way to visit Tamayo about it. From what I could gather, they typically communicated by writing letters and he only visited during matters he considered important, like when she had failed to send him any samples for two weeks. In that context, his appearance was brought on by a desire to berate and punish her, or at least to demand answers. When I realized that it may just be the case here as well, my heart rate got a bit faster. I contemplated rushing down the stairs at a moment’s notice to confront him, but I was afraid, I just listened on. My legs were shaking at just his mere presence, that perceived not even by my own eyes at that.

Tamayo had the same question; I could tell she was slightly concerned but she mostly showed him disdain or disapproval. “Why are you here? This isn’t exactly a new situation for you to be in. I never promised that Yushiro’s blood would give you what you needed, merely that he might be instrumental in your research. This isn’t the first time it’s happened, so why now of all times to come to me and bemoan about it all to me in person? It’ll take however long it takes. We can’t rush these things, and I’m sure you would like to make the ultimate serum that absolutely does its job perfectly. So please, do not bother me and Yushiro unless it is absolutely important.”

I felt a change in the direction of the wind in that very moment; Tokikawa had his back facing her but then he looked over his shoulder – his plum-red eyes shined like blood beneath the moonlight and they possessed that characteristic hint of madness. It was like he intended to do something, and Tamayo noticed this too because she flinched in her chair.

Then, in the blink of an eye, Tokikawa dashed over to her, grabbed her by the collar of her kimono and pulled her out of her chair. She yelped and berated him, demanded him to stop and explain himself, but he gripped tighter on her kimono – almost ripping the bizarre floral pattern with his fingernails – and yanked her closer. It’s an image I still remember to this day.

Tamayo looked startled, bewildered, and even a little bit furious. She wore a face that wished misfortune upon the one who invaded her personal space. It was like she was looking at something putrid.

He then did something I don’t think either of us expected him to do: Tokikawa buried his face in between the collar of her kimono, directly on her chest, and inhaled. She gasped and shouted, demanding he let go and slapping him on the cheek and the top of his head with the flats of her hands.

But he ignored her. And just as quickly as he had taken her in his hand, he growled and used the force of his entire body to throw her back into her chair when he was done. She flew back with such force that the back of her head hit the desk and it made a loud thud. If she was human, it probably would have been enough to give her a concussion or knock her out. It didn’t, yet she still cried out in pain.

When that happened, I could feel an odd mix of terror and indignation coiling in my gut as I clenched my fist. Tamayo massaged the back of her head as she looked up at Tokikawa, who was towering over with what I can only describe as destructive vitality – it was the same sort of feeling I got from him when I first met him, that sense he wanted to destroy everything and everyone.

His voice came out low, lower than I had ever heard. If the abyss at the bottom of the sea was a sound, it would be the tone his voice took. “I knew it.

I then remembered that moment when I first met him, where he managed to deduce that she had turned me into a vampire by merely smelling me. Because I had her scent.

Her scent.

“No.” I whispered to myself, as I realized what he had just deduced. I then found myself fearing for my life in the exact same way as when I was on the streets and dying, or when I had first met him. I genuinely felt like in that moment I was going to die. I was starting to panic. I even thought about jumping out of the window and running away.

Now is the part where I admit something. With my previous theories about Tamayo and Tokikawa in mind, a part of me was always afraid of the possibility that Tokikawa would discover the nature of our relationship and that, perhaps out of anger or jealousy, he would do something awful to us. I subtly expressed my anxieties to Tamayo by asking if he would ever come visit us again, she always insisted that he was far too busy and self-concerned to make regular visits. But I read through the subtext: They simply hated each other too much to regularly make contact. Regardless, that fear was always there, granted it was never enough for me to consider the prospect of us ceasing our relationship.

Tamayo, seeming a little bit afraid but mostly angry, stood up from her chair, of her own free will this time, and tried to remind him that, as agreed upon when they split apart, what they did in their own territories was their own private business and that he had no right to be so upset or angry at whatever she did or didn’t do. Her voice was laced with the same qualities she exhibited when he visited us for the first time, the same mixture of hatred and fear that I thought she had passed on to me. It was a fear that spoke of her knowledge that he could kill either of us at any moment in the blink of an eye, and there would be nothing we could do about it.

And Tokikawa certainly wasn’t interested in hearing whatever it was she had to say, she silenced her through intimidation by raising a finger and drawing out his nail. The skin beneath his hand writhed and shifted, like something was crawling beneath it. Tamayo took a step back, conscious of the fact that moving any further would mean her falling back into the chair.

“I had a hunch. It was bothering me for weeks. You know, I noticed something was wrong as soon as I stepped foot in this place. It’s the smell Tamayo, the smell. Now I know everything. You can’t hide these things from me.”

Admittedly, I don’t think Tamayo expected him to deduce that she was sleeping with me through scent. I certainly never thought about it. Even compared to other vampires, Tokikawa had a very keen sense of smell.

“I’m not trying to hide-!” Tamayo was loud, she was shouting in a way I had never heard her shout before.

Tokikawa cut her off with spittle-coated venom that vaguely resembled speech. “Tamayo, you salacious whore. You’ve taken a taste for young boys now, have you? That’s why you turned him, isn’t it? You saw him and wanted him to jump into bed with you… you wanted a little pet, your own little stripling who would take his clothes off when you told him to, to do whatever you wanted. Vile strumpet!”

But Tamayo rolled her eyes and snarled, she tutted her lips then pointed accusingly at his chest. “You’re such a hypocrite,” she hissed with a trembling voice, “as if you just didn’t want exactly the same thing when you turned me. You admitted it to me, didn’t you? You don’t remember? Is that another thing that’s failing you? Your own memory? First you can’t even do the one thing you want to do, now you can’t even remember correctly?”

So that was it. I had just learned that Tokikawa was the one to turn Tamayo into a vampire, and ostensibly for… those reasons. The revelation sort of shook my world, Tamayo had failed to mention this at all. In fact, by the way she had spoken of him, I was always under the impression both had met when they were already vampires.

Tokikawa quite aggressively pushed back. He lambasted her for even making the comparison, pointing out that he gave her a clear choice and that she agreed. Tamayo said that it was the same with me. He then grew silent for a few moments, it gave me time to properly appreciate the fact that the secret shared history I’ve alluded to before was starting to unravel before my very eyes (or rather, the raven’s).

“Disgusting,” he uttered under his breath, “utterly disgusting. I never thought you would debase yourself like this. You’ve always been a twisted woman, but I never took you as one who’d want to sleep around with little boys. You enchanted him, didn’t you? Gave him a little convincing with your spells? I bet he became very docile and agreeable after that, eager and willing to please his mistress in any way she deems fit.”

When he suggested that she might have brainwashed or enchanted me, his voice grew noticeably hoarse, like he was offended by the mere suggestion. The fact that Tokikawa was pondering on similar ideas as I unsettled me, if someone who knew Tamayo for so long thought it plausible for her to do such a thing, then that was surely confirmation enough.

“I’d… I’d never do such a thing!” Tamayo was insistent, she put her foot down and stared him in the eyes. Her denial raised my spirits momentarily, instilled in me some level of confidence regarding her virtue.

But Tokikawa swiftly denied her.

“Oh, really? Did you forget all those times you ‘persuaded’ your clientele, after weeks and months of getting to know them, to kill themselves? It was easy food, wasn’t it? Granted, I’m surprised it took you this long to crack and start hypnotizing people into laying with you… and boys, too! You hate me so much that you’re trying so desperately to forget me? Is that it? Or… perhaps it’s not me, but…”

“Don’t you dare bring that up!”

He didn’t finish that sentence, his countenance darkened and he shook his head.

It was all starting to upset and disgust me, not the least of which because I was intruding upon a conversation I clearly wasn’t meant to be listening to. Granted, they were raising their voices so much that I could have probably heard passing fragments from upstairs, but that didn’t change what I was doing. Yet something compelled me to stay, I think my curiosity far outweighed my fear and disgust at this point.

The mention of the sorts of things she did in the past unnerved me, it was like someone had punched me violently in my gut. I knew that, as a vampire, she most definitely had a troublesome past. However, I couldn’t imagine anything so wicked as posing as a doctor and telling people to commit suicide for their blood. This must have been before the time of blood transfusions, or at least before they were brought over to Japan. It struck me as very sordid; even though I had no great love for people, I would at least want to kill them upfront and quickly.

Tokikawa continued to insult her. “Afraid? You ought to be, you nasty woman. He’s young enough to be your son. Even I find that sickening to my very core, and very little moves me in this world.”

Tamayo grew visibly irritated, her shoulders were starting to tremble and she looked to the floor. Her cheeks inflated as she pressed her own lips together, she clenched her fists to the point where her knuckles turned white. I thought for a moment that she might draw blood with her own fingernails, but that never happened.

“At least he treats me with respect! At least he knows how to treat a woman! At least he doesn’t treat me like some slab of meat that he can use without my consent!”

My chest collapsed in on itself by what she was insinuating. Tamayo was panting and her fangs were exposed by her open mouth; tears were beginning to pool below her eyes and she rubbed them with the sleeve of her kimono in order to try to soothe her own mind. Her expression and breathing calmed, an open admission that they were starting to cross a figurative line and that they had best stop.

Tokikawa stayed silent for a few more moments, he wore an expression that suggested he was taken aback at her words. He then gave her an evil little smirk, one that drew attention away from his glistening eyes and one that basically called her bluff. One that denied everything she was saying.

“Oh, this old line again? That’s not how I remember it at all. I don’t remember you complaining once. In fact, I distinctly remember us having lots of fun-”

“Stop.” She shook her head and reason finally began to take her, the pitch of her voice lowered and she became more composed – that flicker of passion she had shown was gone. “Please stop. Stop this at once, Tokikawa. Let’s not argue anymore, lest we get too loud and someone overhears us.”

There is a world in which the conversation stopped there and then, both Tamayo and Tokikawa calmed down and parted gracefully. In many ways, it would have been much more preferable. But this is not that world.

No,” he stepped closer and spoke directly into her ear, “let me speak. You want to spout lies? Very well. You said my memory was failing me, but let me remind you how much of a liar you are.”

“Get away from me…”

But then Tokikawa gripped her by the shoulder and dug into it with his fingers. The inflection of his voice then took a higher pitch and had a distinctly feminine touch to it, like he was mocking Tamayo’s speech.

Oh, oh Tsukihiko,” he said, “you saved me, I owe my life to you. Oh please, please don’t stop. I owe you everything, I’m all yours. Oh, ohhhh, please make me forget them and make me yours. Oh please use me and fuck me senseless, ohhhh I’m all yours, ohhh I’m nothing but your obedient little plaything who’ll do anything to please you.”

What I heard made me want to vomit. Tamayo yelled for him to get away from her, then put the flats of her hands on his chest and violently pushed him away. It took him by complete surprise, so he almost lost his footing as he was pushed back. It was a display of strength she seldom used, far exceeding that which she had shown to me during the opera as detailed in my previous entry.

“Don’t mock me!” Tamayo shouted as she looked up to him. “That’s an oversimplification and you know it!”

That lit a fuse in his mind, because he stepped right back to her and clasped her chin to force her to look him in the eyes.

“Don’t fucking mock me, Tamayo. Do you think you can just suddenly wipe away the past or something? Everything we did together? All the people we killed, together? We took a lot of joy in killing in all those humans, didn’t we? Our fun only had to stop because the Black Swords were starting to get a little too good at hunting us down. But those were the good times, weren’t they? You loved drinking the blood of all those people, you told me yourself. It tasted so, so good, never had you tasted anything sweeter.”

What he said made me think about all those times I saw Tamayo close her eyes when we partook in the blood of the dead together, and how she subtly shivered during the act. I realized then that all those instances were of her suppressing her own innate desires, fighting back the urge to revel and indulge in that which gave her delight. She always talked to me about the consuming of blood as something of a necessary evil, not exactly tragic but something that we as vampires simply needed to accept. I thought her to be of the mindset that, though drinking the blood of others was undesirable, was just a fact of life.

“People change,” she tapped the side of his forearm to try and get him to let go, “I changed. That’s the real reason why I said we should split apart! That the Demon Hunters would be able to find us more easily if we kept on staying together was just an excuse. I changed and you haven’t!”

Tokikawa then laughed a wicked and evil laugh, the sort of thing you hear in your nightmares. His was a laugh that cut through the skin and bone to pierce your very heart with its cruelty. He continued to hold Tamayo by the chin; his nails were starting to draw a small amount of blood as he tilted her head and stared at her almost in fondness.

People? That’s hilarious. We’re vampires, Tamayo. We’ll never change, never be human. You haven’t changed a single bit; you’re just burying it all away in the hopes of seeming normal. You say you’ve changed, that somehow you view your past life with disgust, yet you still kill people. You still feed your needs. You even sleep around with young boys now! At least the old you didn’t try so hard to hide her true nature, didn’t try to convince herself that she was somehow better, wasn’t… whatever the fuck you’re meant to be now. If you truly view your own previous life in disgust, then why haven’t you just killed yourself? How dare you?! You act like you’re so much better than me, it drives me insane! You’re still the same person I found all those years ago, still sick in the head and unworthy of this self-pity!”

Tamayo didn’t answer, she tried to look away from him and she slumped her shoulders, she then looked out to the window and saw the raven, and peered directly into its eyes and her own widened in astonishment – that was the exact moment she was aware that I was listening in.

She muttered. “Let me go.”

“You’re such a liar,” he ignored her, “you’re lying so much that you don’t even fully appreciate that you’re lying to yourself. This charade of yours is absolutely pathetic, Tamayo. You’ve been living like this for so long that you’ve become the mask, and for what? To preserve some false sense of respectability? Yet you’re sleeping with young boys, now?”

Let me go.” She repeated.

“You wanted nothing more to do with me because you couldn’t help but blame me for what happened to your fucking family, right? Don’t hide it from me. You know it’s wrong to blame me entirely but you just can’t help it, can you? Well, it’s just as much, you wouldn’t believe how sick I got of you pining after that fucking husband of yours in your sleep or when you thought you were alone. Your incessant whining revolted me to my very core; you murdered them all and bemoaned that fact constantly.”

Tamayo was beginning to sob; she turned her face to look at him and stare down his wrath. “I didn’t mean to kill them! I didn’t want to kill them! I didn’t want to kill them! I didn’t want to kill them!”

Tokikawa then spat on her face.

“So have you just forgotten when I found you filthy and dying on the streets, coughing up blood and vomit while cursing your husband for kicking you out due to your disease? Was not what you did to them vengeance? Have you forgotten that?! Nothing you say or do makes sense, Tamayo! You couldn’t get over what you did to your family, yet you were happy to defile their memory by staying with me. I even thought you turned the brat into a vampire so you could have a son again, but you just took off his clothes and began to bed him! You’re just a walking assortment of defects! You’re broken! Broken to your very core!”

So, what I had guessed had been confirmed. Tamayo killed her family. The best way I can describe how I felt is that I felt the world around me was swirling into an ever-smaller spiral, I became more lightheaded and felt I would lost my balance at any moment. I felt so upset at the circumstances surrounding her transformation; if I was angry and lost because I had been kicked out for something that I was admittedly partly responsible for, I can’t imagine what I’d feel if it had been over something emphatically not my own doing. Tamayo must have been mentally damaged and vulnerable to accept Tokikawa’s offer to become a vampire.

And she went out of her way to kill them, too. I always attributed what I did to a form of revenge, how even in my frenzied bloodlust I had the sense to punish my family for the sin they had committed against me. So I could relate to Tamayo’s feelings, that complicated mixture of love and guilt and hatred and self-loathing.

But Tamayo’s eyes narrowed and she stopped crying. Above the claws of Tokikawa’s hand that were on her chin, her lips stretched to form a smile – something of a cruel smile, the sort of smile you might associate with blood-crazed warriors or sexual deviants. She then started to a kind of evil laugh herself, one that was just as (if not more) unnerving than Tokikawa’s. Surprisingly, this prompted him to let go of her and take a few steps backwards, he was obviously quite unsettled.

“So… Tokikawa… you want to talk about being broken? Walking assortments of defects? Oh sorry, ‘Tokikawa’, I forget that’s not even your real name, right? Forgive me, I forget all those ridiculous aliases you’ve gone by over the years, all those stupid fake names you gave out.”

Tokikawa raised an eyebrow. “Don’t deflect from-”

“You’re the man,” she interrupted, “you’re seriously the man who comes crawling to me… whenever he can’t even do what it is he sets out to do. You can’t even do research right. You seriously can’t isolate any substantial differences with Yushiro’s blood? Seriously? That would be hilarious if it weren’t so pathetic. You’re supposed to be this self-made genius, and yet you can’t even do that?”

She then started to laugh maniacally, like a cruel and evil child who takes pleasure in harming insects.

“You…” his bottom eyelids began to twitch and he pointed a finger accusingly at her face, “you dare?! I’m basically doing all the work in this partnership and you dare to fucking criticize me?!”

“It’s not the first time, is it? Remember when I saved you from a Demon Hunter? He practically had you dead to rights, cornered in that little alley with nowhere to run or hide. He had cut off your arms multiple times and you couldn’t even use a single one of your techniques. Good thing he didn’t notice that I was right behind him and ready to detach his head from his spine. Or what about that time long before we met where you left behind all of your old associates, when your master’s castle was attacked by the Demon Hunters? You slithered into the shadows and left them all to their deaths. You could have done something, you know, but you didn’t. What a pathetic coward you are.”

Tokikawa visibly gritted his teeth and he looked both furious and strained. He could only muster a labored retort. “Shut up, you disgusting witch. Why would I care about any of them?! We’re all in this for ourselves, I saw the opportunity to escape with my life and took it! Damn everyone else!”

Tamayo then took the initiative; she stepped forward and poked his chest with her finger. He continued to look at her bewildered; the two of them may have had their disagreements in the past, but it was clear that she had never really taken such a tone with him before.

“Even not being able to walk beneath the sun has humiliated and embarrassed you for hundreds of years, hasn’t it? You claim we’re not human, that we should embrace our lack of humanity, yet why are you currently getting so worked up and jealous over the fact that I’ve taken another lover? And why are you so insistent on recovering that little part of your humanity by walking under the sun? But the funniest part? When the opportunity to solve that actually came, you couldn’t do a thing about it. You’re just flailing helplessly into the void, you idiot.”

“Watch your tone,” he growled in husky tones, “I can squash you like a bug.”

Tamayo giggled, then pointed at him mockingly. “But you won’t do it,” she shook her head, “will you? You don’t want to harm or kill me, not seriously, because in spite of all the awful things you’ve said to me, you still think I’m useful. And I am useful. If you’re nowhere currently, you’d be somewhere less than nowhere without me. You’ll always come crawling back to me, to get a woman to help you with the job you couldn’t do for yourself. How emasculating that must be! Even though, I’m openly sleeping with somebody else and humiliating you, and you won’t do a damn thing about it.”

He raised his right hand and extended his claws, something appeared to be shifting beneath the skin again. “You have a chance to stop this right now!”

“Hah! Where was this when I asked you to stop before? Oh, you’re excellent at giving out insults but you can scarcely take them. That’s so typical of you, such an inflated ego yet so insecure of yourself. I faked many of my orgasms, you know that? I made you think you had done a good enough job, in reality you would always end too soon and I’d have to finish myself off when you weren’t looking, safely under the impression your manhood was intact. You can’t seem to do anything right, can you?!”

“Tam-!”

“Do you know who I feel sorry for? Your mother. She went through all of that pain and hardship, and even lost her own life, to bring such a miserable and spineless wretch as yourself into this world, someone who couldn’t clothe or wash himself without help, someone who couldn’t even go to the bathroom without the assistance of his retainers on the account of him being a dirty little weakling who was the black sheep of his own family. If I were your mother, I’d be watching down on you with regret. Because that’s all you are, you’re an embarrassment. An incompetent, miserable, putrid embarrassment. Why were you ever born, Muzan, you pathetic little failed ab-”

The very instant she said that name, something snapped in Tokikawa’s mind. His eyes flared up maddeningly and he pulled his lips back to reveal a twisted grimace; he grunted a terrible rage-induced howl and smacked Tamayo across her lower jaw with his right hand. I gasped at the sound of breaking skin and flesh echoing throughout the room, Tokikawa’s bloodstained hand left in its wake an arc of tissue and a scattering of teeth that landed all across the floor like caltrops.

Tamayo stood staring at her assailant, not a word or sound from her as the remnants of her broken and mutilated jaw hung by precious few sinewy threads from the rest of her face, her tongue flickered unnaturally as a gargling noise came from her throat and blood pooled out from the hole created by Tokikawa’s hand, it splattered over her neck and the collar of her kimono.

Tamayo blinked, then blinked again, as Tokikawa glared at her with exposed fangs and a trembling hand. Tears began to pool in her eyes again as she clumsily reached for her mangled jaw, she didn’t cease eye contact for a single moment as she locked her jaw back in place with a bony click – the teeth that had been so easily dislodged were already starting to grow back and the jagged rips and tears on her flesh were healing rapidly. The blood on her skin began to dissolve, as if her body were absorbing it back into her bloodstream.

I then noticed that I was feeling a very specific kind of shock and pain, one that was similar to my remembrance of my most traumatic moments. In short, Tamayo associated what had just happened with a particularly scarring event. I’ve thought about that moment many times, how she associated what happened with a certain memory and how Tamayo knows all of Tokikawa’s dark and embarrassing secrets, the sort of ones he would have never admitted to anybody. I sincerely doubt Tokikawa would have imparted such secrets willingly. And there is how he spoke with particular scorn about her ability to enchant people.

This is all just conjecture, but I have a theory regarding them, one which I’ve never confirmed with Tamayo partly out of fear but also out of respect for her. I believe she must have, at some point, enchanted Tokikawa and tricked him into giving away all this information – his name, his human life, his regrets and moments of shame and so on. And I believe that, once he had come to and realized what she had done to him, he savagely punished her for it.

That name. I’ve never been a particularly superstitious person even after becoming a vampire, but Tamayo is far older than I and seems to be more bound to tradition. I know many believe there to be great power in a name, that giving it away to someone is akin to surrendering control to them. I suppose that's where the common childhood lesson of never trusting strangers came from, as my mother would constantly tell me and my siblings. Muzan struck me as a particularly cruel name, perhaps given to the man known as Tokikawa by his family as a way to decry the fate his birth dealt to his mother, or perhaps they foresaw a life of great weakness and suffering. Either way, it is an exceedingly ill-omened name, and I can see why Tokikawa hated it so much and wanted to try and throw it away. That she managed to steal his name was undoubtedly a great source of humiliation for him. And, based on her mannerisms, she probably grew to hate the name as well.

Tamayo was looking away from him, it was clear she was terribly upset and on the verge of bursting into tears. Tokikawa looked startled, almost ashamed at what he had done – an admission that he had acted too rashly and might have made a mistake, though not necessarily out of any concern for her. He looked at his own hand and how her blood was being absorbed into his skin, and I guess he probably wondered if he had exceeded a boundary and rendered all future help from her inaccessible.

Evidently, both were realizing that they had gone too far; but neither admitted as such, especially Tokikawa, who looked out of the window into the pitch-black night outside. He noticed the raven perched atop the fence, and that was the moment it finally dawned on him that he had an eavesdropper listening in. How he deciphered it I cannot really say, he didn’t verbally confirm that he knew, it was just the way he looked into the bird’s eyes. He looked genuinely shocked, even offended. I figured Tokikawa, due to him being a very old vampire, must have had a talent in detecting vampiric spells or techniques. Either way, he was most definitely displeased that at least one other person in this world knew his horrible secrets.

As Tamayo put her face in her hands and sobbed, Tokikawa extended out his left arm and pointed it towards the raven. A flash of black came from his hand, and in the very next instant, I could no longer see through the bird’s eyes. He had killed it. It must have been his innate vampiric powers, but it came so fast that I couldn’t even register it as anything other than a blur.

I then heard the clinic door slam shut downstairs even more violently than the night he first came over, I even felt a bit of rumbling and trembling from upstairs in Tamayo’s bedroom, it was not unlike that of an earthquake.

I didn’t even have time to process what had just happened any further, because almost immediately after that, I could hear the pitter-patter of someone running up the stairs. I didn’t need to speculate who it was, and my instincts were confirmed when the bedroom door flung open and Tamayo presented herself with a face soaked with tears and blemished from little droplets of blood and her own smudged makeup. She ran into me and threw her arms around my shoulders, then pulled herself into me and wept into my chest like a baby to their mother.

“I hate him!” A very muffled shout would escape her lips and vibrate against my yukata and shirt. “I hate him! I hate him! I hate him!”

And she cried what felt like all night. I awkwardly tried to embrace her, but all I could do otherwise was stare at the wall and think about all that I had learnt and seen.

 

 

Notes:

I can only speak for myself, but I always thought the fact that Tamayo and Muzan were in such close proximity in chapter 187 was quite interesting and implied something deeper than what we were beholden to. There are a number of theories as to what actually went on there (the fanbook seems to go with this vague line of "she stayed close to him because she was always trying to find a way to kill him"), and I’ve held this sort of headcanon for a while that she was essentially posing as his wife or retainer/handmaid at his behest due to her humanlike appearance.

I don’t believe Muzan was interested in sex itself in any way, more so as a means to an end, hence his disguising himself as a geisha in order to obtain information from men about the BSL, or posing as wealthy businessmen with established families. I consider Muzan himself to be asexual. That being said, I do actually think you can read a lot of sexual subtexts into the presentation of his character and his actions (I have a lot of thoughts about this so I won’t divulge them here, maybe another time). So, though I never really believed them being together in the manga had any actual sexual dimension to it, I actually became quite interested in that idea and it gave way to many aspects of this story.

The running idea of a lot of things brought over from the manga was to corrupt them and make them worse, and the same can be said here. Tamayo in the original manga was insinuated to be a deeply twisted and evil person in the past, which served as the basis of her depiction here. I’ve thought for ages the kind of life her and Tokikawa led, and I’m sure you agree that the glimpses in this chapter make it all sound very unpleasant. The way her story plays out and how it ties to both Yushiro and Tokikawa’s is really at the core of the story, how all these characters are different but also alike. How echoes of the same running themes materialize into each of their internal psychologies and how they deal with it all is just as important, too.

One thing I wanted to emphasize in regards to Tokikawa is his humiliation. At this point, it’s basically inarguable that the trajectory of Muzan’s character in the manga towards the end revolved entirely around his slow and painful humiliation/degradation. The concept of his embarrassing/humiliating life and past became extremely important to me as a result.

When planning out this story, I realized that a lot of the information I had on Tokikawa’s backstory wouldn't be easily presentable due to the nature of the narration, so I had to be careful and pick and choose which parts of it would make it into the story, so that the reader could get the general idea of his history without it being excessive. I would like to put a bigger writeup on his backstory in the planned appendix at the end of the story, because I planned out quite a bit and would like to share it.

The art was originally going to be Yushiro’s depiction, or rather his interpretation, of Tamayo and Tokikawa during the Edo period when they lived together (and they would have resembled their appearances from chapter 187 of the manga). However, my partner suggested the scene of Tokikawa grabbing Tamayo by the collar of her kimono would be a more striking image, which I agreed with and was happy to be put to paper.

Chapter 7: Seventh Entry

Summary:

To covet life.

Notes:

(See the end of the chapter for notes.)

Chapter Text

Believe it or not, Tamayo was eventually able to stop her tears. After what felt like all night, she stopped crying and let me go, then she took me by the hand and led me into the drawing room. To say my mind was still a bit scattershot would be putting it mildly, but I complied and followed her. We sat in the same chairs that night I first became a vampire, when she was introducing me to this new world and all the ways life would be different to me. I thought it fitting we went back there.

Because Tamayo, seeming to believe that I was owed an explanation of some kind, proceeded to explain her side of the story – she told me everything she remembered, chose to remember, in as much detail as she could. When she recalled her own past to me, she looked calm and spoke in a soft, slightly monotone voice. The whole thing appeared to be quite comforting to her, even therapeutic. Perhaps she felt relief at being able to unload her baggage with someone else. Someone not like Tokikawa, that is.

I’ll try my best to record all that is important and relevant here. She went into excruciating detail – the conversation lasted over an hour – and she went on lengthy tangents, but I will impart with the important details.

A couple hundred years ago, Tamayo lived with her family in some semi-urban town and worked as a doctor. She had a husband, a son, whom she says was only a few years younger than me when he died, and two infant daughters. She said life with them was happy, if a bit boring and uneventful. I could tell she really loved her family, what with the way she spoke of them.

Life was normal and went on as such. That is, until she caught disease one day. It seemed there was illness spreading across the country during that time, what with multiple outbreaks of diseases such as cholera – the symptoms of which mostly align with what Tamayo went through during that period. Though, according to her, it couldn’t have been cholera since there was no outbreak of it in her village. Regardless, she took to sickness and spent many days in her bedroom, slowly ebbing away as she clung desperately onto her life. Apparently, her children would frequently ask for her and she could hear them cry out for their mother. Even her eldest son was gravely concerned for her.

Then shortly after, her husband kicked her out – nay, threw her out of the house. Apparently, he was paranoid and superstitious, worried that Tamayo would spread her sickness to the rest of the family. So not only was she sick, she was abandoned. If she was struggling to cling to life within the comfort of her own home, then the open streets would prove to fare much worse.

Like me, she spent a couple of nights on the streets, turned away by anyone and everyone who she dared to get close to. Nobody was interested in helping a visibly-ill beggar. Her symptoms only got worse over those handful of days – and only a handful, because it wouldn’t be long until salvation came to her.

That salvation came in the form of Tokikawa; though back then, he was calling himself Tsukihiko, but I’ll call him Tokikawa for simplicity’s sake. He saw her slumped against some wall in a back alley, forgotten and alone and on the verge of death. What Tokikawa was doing there, I am uncertain; Tamayo did imply that the area was somehow a part of his old territory as a vampire. This was a period where the Demon Hunters were a present threat, but had not hunted down our kind so ruthlessly to near-extinction as is the case today.

Tokikawa took pity on Tamayo and offered to save her life by turning her into a vampire, but he warned her that she would "lust for the blood of man" as soon as her rebirth was complete. With that in mind, she accepted. She was thirty-two at the time.

And that is when she rushed back to her old household and killed her entire family, she told me that she savagely ripped them all apart and sucked them dry of their blood. When she had come to and realized what she had done, Tokikawa had caught up with her and bore witness to the carnage she had unleashed. Tamayo was screaming and crying hysterically, but Tokikawa tried to shut her up and calm her down, saying that she was a vampire and shouldn’t care so much for humans.

So, was it vengeance? Like what Tokikawa insinuated? I cannot say. Tamayo seemed to feel very wronged by what had been done to her, she told me that she both hated her husband for what he did but couldn’t bring herself to stop loving him. And regardless of any of that, the children had done nothing to her. Regardless, she had nowhere else to go. She had become a vampire, which was irreversible. And like myself, she had severed the only human connections she really had. With nowhere else to go, she went with Tokikawa.

According to Tamayo, Tokikawa had admitted to her quite early on in their time together that he had transformed her because he wanted company. He was quick in coercing her into sexual acts which she otherwise wasn’t very enthusiastic for, or otherwise had no wish to perform. She told me she never had a deep connection with him, it mostly existed because she felt she had nothing else, but the arrangement was good enough. She gave him pleasures of the flesh, and he protected her and provided her with sustenance that she so desperately needed. And eventually, craved.

You see, and I must stress this is all according to Tamayo, she only got worse the more time she spent with Tokikawa. She started taking pleasure in the killing, the feeding – copious amounts of it. She told me she killed a lot of people with him, just so she could feel something. And she took something of a twisted pleasure in the sex as well. Although, based on some subtle clues and my own inference, it is probably more accurate to say that she forced herself into accepting and liking it, that she was lying to herself when she suggested that she developed a taste for it.

That arrangement lasted for over a hundred years. In that time, they were constantly moving around and assuming new aliases and identities, they would kill other vampires and steal their territory. Tamayo claims that this apparently wasn’t so rare back then, it’s just that our kind is much more careful to act these days due to the increasing pressure from the Demon Hunters. But the way she put it, things simply got too dangerous for them to remain together, the hunters were getting too good and were beginning to develop even better investigational skills. To minimize the danger they faced, they split apart. Or at least, that’s the surface reasoning. Based on my writings thus far, you will think it obvious that Tamayo and Tokikawa grew to loathe each other, and this rift between them is possibly the most important reason as to why they separated.

When she finished her account, she simply narrowed her eyes and looked to the floor, like out of some great sense of shame. The room was silent for a moment, until I hastily got up and excused myself. I went back to my own room and spent the whole time laying on my bed and staring up at the ceiling, thinking about nothing but all that I had learned and what it made me feel. And what I felt stayed with me for at least a week or so. During the day, I was distant and unemotive, I would do what Tamayo would ask of me but that was it. During the night, I kept my distance from her – perhaps she recognized the mental troubles I was having or couldn’t bring herself to sleep with me, because she never invited me to be intimate with her during this time. It was like everything had frozen, that time had stopped moving for me... for both of us.

What I did feel is difficult to put into words. Shock. Disgust. Despair. Sorrow. I never thought Tamayo was completely sinless or solely of virtue, but hearing all of that information was difficult. Above all else, however, I would say that I felt unease. It’s a little bit like the remorse I felt when I killed my own family, that horrible feeling that I struggled to recognize as such in the midst of the act itself. I think hearing all that Tokikawa had to say helped my sense of perspective. As I’ve chronicled in these entries, I spent a lot of my mental energy convincing myself that I wasn’t to blame for my own crimes, that it was the world and my family’s fault for what happened, that people as a whole had abandoned me to die and so I shouldn’t feel bad for feeding on them. But back then, as I let my thoughts stir, I was starting to consciously doubt all that. It’s like the human part of me had been awakened and was judging me for my actions.

There was something in particular that Tokikawa said, something said quite offhandedly, but it was the thing that stuck with me the most. He had asked that if Tamayo was somehow so ashamed of her life and her sins, why hadn’t she simply killed herself? I thought about that more and more as the days progressed, and tried applying it to myself. If I felt remorse about the family I killed and the people I preyed upon, then surely, I should have atoned for my crimes by taking my own life. Really, my only out from this scenario was to kill myself. Yet, no matter the discomfort I felt at Tamayo and indeed myself, I never followed through.

These thoughts festered and festered; they threatened to consume me. That is, until something happened after that week had passed. During the night, as I was cleaning downstairs, I noticed that the bath was left running. I was confused at first, because I wasn’t aware of any patients that we had to keep overnight. I thought maybe it was somebody who came to Tamayo due to an emergency, much like me the night I met her, and I just hadn’t noticed. I went to the bathroom to see what was happening. So imagine my surprise upon seeing Tamayo by her lonesome, her kimono sleeves rolled and tied up behind her and her arm mixing the water in the bath. She looked over her shoulder at me and gave me something of a slight smile, but it was one that spoke to a certain sense of embarrassment.

Tamayo never took baths. I didn’t, either. Vampires don’t need to bathe, and according to her doing so would be a waste of hot water (though we do not need to buy food, we still need to pay for the usage of gas and electricity), so I was confused by what she was doing. I didn’t say anything at first, I just stared at her and what she was doing, how attentively she mixed the water in the bath. I didn’t really notice how she did it when she saved me, but I imagine she showed as much care back then as she was in that moment.

But eventually, I broke the silence. I asked her what she was doing.

She didn’t answer me straight away, instead she focused on mixing the water a little bit longer. But eventually, she was done and turned the taps to stop the water from running. She then turned to me and smiled again.

“Yushiro,” she said, “would you like to join me?”

I didn’t bother asking what she meant by that, because my mind reached the obvious conclusion once she started unfastening the obi of her kimono. It’s almost funny, I don’t recall feeling any sort of fluster back then. I was so used to the sight of her naked body that it almost wasn’t worth mentioning. She flung the obi to the side, then rolled the kimono off her shoulders and threw it in the same direction. I then noticed that she had already discarded her tabi. The lack of care she showed for her clothes was noteworthy. Much like the first time we made love, she kept her hair bound with the hairpin. I watched her as she slowly climbed into the bathtub, and I saw every little part of her body be submerged by the water. She looked relaxed, her eyes were closed once she had fully settled in and she seemed to sigh from relief. After a few more seconds, she opened her eyes and looked at me quite expectantly.

I knew then that it was always her plan to have me go into the bath with her; this wasn’t some spontaneous thing where she felt like having a soak to relieve her tension. On the contrary, it was all premeditated. I tried to consider what her motivations might have been; we had just spent a week figuratively apart, so estranged that we may as well have been strangers, only for her to suddenly pull this stunt. I thought that this was maybe her way of building a bridge back to me. Either way, I could sense that when she asked me to join her, it was less of a request and slightly more of a command. I was hesitant, but I couldn’t deny that I was beginning to miss Tamayo’s company by that point.

That is to say, it didn’t take much for me to agree. After I had resolved to accept her invitation, I took all of my clothes off and discarded them in the exact same way she had – again, it’s worth noting that I wasn’t particularly ashamed to expose my own nudity to her. But as I approached the bathtub, ready to sit opposite her, she sat up and widened her legs before waving her hand around the area between them.

“Sit here.” Tamayo said as she pushed herself further back to make more space in front of her.

I understood what she meant. She was asking me to sit in front of her with my back to her. She was asking me to let her embrace me.

I was reminded of that time after we had first made love, where she held me close and I cried like a little child. I recalled the way she showed initiative and how I showed weakness and infantility, and it embarrassed me so much that I could feel my face warming up. The fact that Tamayo was asking me to go into such a compromising position with her only made that embarrassment more intense. Surely, I thought, it would be unbecoming of me to be so exposed to her like that.

But I didn’t want to keep her waiting, so I complied and climbed in to sit in front of her. I went between her legs and leaned my upper body back somewhat as to rest against hers, the top of my head was skirting around her neck and jaw. And I looked straight ahead, stared into the wall of the bathroom as I let my skin soak the hot water. I could feel Tamayo’s breath, it was vaguely warm and moist.

She put her arms around my chest, then tickled my pectorals with her nails. I fidgeted in place and I experienced a strange cocktail of emotions that comprised of arousal and agitation. Tamayo must have sensed this, because she brought her nails to her arm and scratched the skin. Much like the night I slaughtered my own family, the blood that she drew turned into a strange vapor-like substance and filled the room with a fragrant scent of flowers. For a split second, I thought of what Tokikawa had mentioned about her using her spells to persuade people into committing suicide and I grew afraid. Not that I thought she would seriously tell me to decapitate myself or walk out into the sun, but the more time I spent with Tamayo the more I understood and grew terrified of the depths of her power.

But her enchanted blood calmed me down instinctively; my heartbeat lessened and I felt more comfortable, so the tension in my shoulders disappeared and I let myself relax in Tamayo’s embrace. All of my anxiety was dissipated but not forgotten – indeed, this has always been the case when she has used her spells on me.

She went back to trailing my pectorals with her fingers. Her touch was soft and light, not quite ticklish but almost. Her hands were wet and they left stains of water on my skin, they rubbed against my flesh with a dull but moist slide.

Tamayo then asked me if I was comfortable. I nodded of course, for I truly was comfortable in that moment. But then she spoke.

“… You must be afraid of me, I suppose.” Tamayo sounded sad, her voice was like a croaky whisper – present, but touched with trouble.

“Tamayo…?” I whispered her name back with an upwards inflection.

“You must think that I’m… some sort of disgusting witch, as Tokikawa put it. You must be afraid of how twisted I am.”

“Ah… no... no,” I tried to reassure her halfheartedly, “it’s… not that.”

“Then what is it, Yushiro?”

I had to take a moment or two to process what she had just said, because there was genuine wisdom in her words. I can’t even properly explain my unwillingness to be with her. I certainly never feared her, merely what she did and what she is capable of. I knew, or at least I wanted to believe, that she would never bring herself to willingly harm me. And I didn’t hate her either; while what I learned about Tamayo was shocking, I can’t say I hated her over it.

So I confessed. “I… I don’t know.”

She then wrapped her arms around me, holding me gently but with noticeable effort. I felt the warmth of her arms subtly squeezing me, somewhat suffocating me with their understated power. I could feel her breasts poking my back and her inner thighs locked against me. Again, I stared out into the wall in front of me.

“You can tell me, Yushiro,” one of Tamayo’s hands then went stroke the hair atop my head in exactly the same way she had the night I became a vampire, “even if you don’t know how to explain it, you can tell me. You can trust me.”

I still wasn’t sure how to answer her question. I formed some shallow, surface level thoughts, and I considered speaking them, but I shook my head and sunk further into the bathtub. Tamayo continued to stroke my hair.

Her other hand then reached down to my groin, her fingernails trailing and lightly scratching the finely-groomed pubic hairs above my genitals. It made me wince and I felt a bit of excitement stir, but that was it.

I said that what I had learned about her scared me. I admitted to her that I had my thoughts and theories about her beforehand; that even before all those revelations, I was wondering to myself the nature of her past. I said that, though I understood her to be a vampire and thus a killer of men, I didn’t imagine her history to be like what it was in reality. I admitted my fear of Tokikawa, how they were able to stay together for so long. I then admitted to my own complicated feelings about all that I had done, the people we had killed and the blood we had consumed. I said that I thought I was ready to walk that path, but though I felt something close to nothing for a while, I was beginning to have something resembling doubts form in my mind.

Tamayo massaged my groin, she was very careful to not let her hand go down any further. It felt very comfortable; she applied a little bit of pressure but not much. Despite her proximity to my genitals, any perverted thoughts I may have been inclined to possess did not really manifest. And she continued to stroke my hair, sometimes bunching clumps of it between her fingers and almost playing with it. It reminded me of how my mother ran her fingers through my hair when I was a child – a memory I did not want to manifest, so it made me slightly squirm in place. She seemed to notice this, for she subtly tightened her grip as to hold me by the scalp. It didn’t hurt, but it was enough to make me stop moving. I didn’t stop looking straight ahead at the wall, but Tamayo’s presence was so suffocating that it seldom mattered.

She spoke. “I… I understand, Yushiro. I imagine it must have been a lot to take in all at once. I’m… I should have told you sooner, so that you didn’t have to learn it all from him. Please forgive me. And please don’t be scared of me, I would never do anything to harm you. I want to take care of you, Yushiro.”

The way she said all that at the time was not only reassuring, but utterly convincing; either she had mastered the art of deception so completely and was using it on me, or she was being genuine. By then, I appreciated the capacity of her ability to employ subterfuge, but I didn’t think she was using it on me at the time. After all, she had treated me so well and so fairly up until that point, so I struggle to see why she would lie and actually wanted to hurt me instead.

So when I thought about it like that, and considered the irrationality of my own apprehensions, my whole body released all its pent-up stress. I leaned further back into Tamayo’s embrace; she stopped playing with my hair and simply wrapped her arm around my shoulders. The other continued to massage my groin, but it still didn’t go any lower. I could feel her fingers and nails trailing and nudging my hairs, my mouth went slightly open and I was probably exposing my fangs.

I was then assaulted by another unwanted memory. What Tamayo was doing to me reminded me of how my mother used to bathe me when I was younger, how she would scrub my hair and back and douse with me freshly-heated water in that little tub at the back of the house. I remember one particular occasion, it was during a warm spring’s evening and I had stayed out to play with some of the other boys. I came home drenched in mud; my father berated me for getting so dirty but my mother laughed and washed me until I was completely clean. Then we ate dinner.

I saw the smiling faces of my mother, my father, my brothers. They had intruded upon my thoughts once more, after I had expended so much mental energy in trying to forget and justify their deaths. It seems no matter what I did, they found ways of coming back to me – even in the aftermath of the night I lost my virginity. I was unable to hide my animosity that time, I bit down on my lip and my shoulders trembled. I let out a light grumble, like I was annoyed at something someone had said to me.

“Is… something wrong, Yushiro?”

Her question made light of the display I had caused, which prompted me to relax my shoulders and try to calm myself down.

“It’s… nothing.” I tried to push it all aside, deflect her prying question away. I didn’t want to expose my vulnerability.

However, she pushed back. “Yushiro, there is something wrong isn’t there? There’s always been something wrong. You don’t need to hide it from me, it’s all right.”

I inhaled more of that vapor-like blood, the enchanted fragrance that carried the scent of flowers. I felt my chest rise and my mind clear. That spell was acting like some kind of truth serum. She wasn’t coercing me or forcing me to reveal the truth per se, but her sorcery acted in such a way that it cleared all my doubts and made me receptive to the idea of divulging secrets. I could feel it was like she was slowly twisting a key in the lock of my own mind, opening a door that was desperately bolted shut.

Tamayo was using her magic to make me reveal the truth about myself, that is why I found it so easy to voice my thoughts about her and everything I had learned earlier. I consider it likely that she wanted me to be her equal; because I had intruded upon her past, then she likely felt that it was her turn to do the same to me. I was aware it was happening at the time, and I did not care about it, I did not want it to stop. And when I think about it now, I do not care about it.

“I….” a lump formed in my throat, but I swallowed and pressed on, “why… did they abandon me?”

“Abandon you? I remember now… you said they threw you out, didn’t you? Your family.” Tamayo’s voice went softer as she continued to hold me close, I could still feel the outline of her breasts on my back, I could still make out the distinct scent of her breath, I could still feel her still massaging my groin. The warmth I felt when she held me was like the warmth of my mother’s body against mine, when she held me close beneath the sheets of the futon during cold winter nights when I was a little boy.

My chest went tight at the recollection of those days, that time when I was young and naïve and my mother and father were the sole presences of my life. I saw their smiling faces flash through my mind again, I recalled faint echoes of the lullabies she would sing to help me sleep during restless and nightmare-haunted nights.

“They threw me out… they threw me out. I… that’s why I… the streets… the clinic-”

I stopped for a moment.

“Please,” Tamayo said as she stopped massaging my groin, “please continue.”

I nodded and closed my eyes. I told her all about what had happened to me, my preoccupation with… older women. How my voyeuristic tendencies got me in serious trouble, how my father saw me as a disgrace and kicked me out of the house for daring to be such a pervert and for debasing the family name, how my mother watched on and didn’t lift a single finger to help me. I told her how all of that hurt, how the people I thought I cared about weren’t there to help me in my time of need.

After all, I said, I was only curious! What young man wouldn’t be curious! At least I wasn’t going around defiling and assaulting women! At least I wasn’t like one of those scumbags that solicits prostitutes and gets his hands on any piece of flesh he can! I just watched someone!

Tamayo sighed. “And you say your father… threw you out of the house for this…”

My father. How my blood boiled when she mentioned him. My father, the man who never seemed to approve of me, who forced me to work as soon as I was old enough to do so, the man who grabbed me by the collar and threw me out of the household as soon as I became an inconvenience to him.

“That’s right!” I began to shout, my voice oscillating between being a screech and a whimper. “As soon as I was old enough to hold a hoe, he stopped seeing me as his son and made me work and work and work and work! Back and legs aching from working in the fields all day! Sunburn on my neck and arms! He expected me to take it all like a man and be tough! To be responsible as the eldest sibling! As soon as I got into trouble, he got rid of me altogether!”

“And your mother…?”

When she mentioned my mother, I was hit with an even more unprecedented wave of emotion than before as I remembered her smiling face, that soothing voice which would nurse me back to health and lull me into the sweetest and gentlest of sleeps. The very mother who treated me as her pride and joy, yet seemed to all but forget me as soon as my brothers came into the world. All of her affection went to them, and thrust upon me was that most unenviable role of being the eldest.

I yelled, almost screamed. “Damn her! As soon as my brother was born, the instant he came into this world, she stopped treating me like a son and just another mouth to feed! Like my father! No more sleeping in the same futon as her! No more nightly cuddles! That was all for my brothers and not me! Never thanked for anything that I did! I hate them all! I hate them! I hate them! Why didn’t she help me?!”

I considered how my life might have been different if she stood up for me and prevented my father from throwing me out. Maybe I would have been back home, perhaps harshly disciplined by my father but still living my life with them. Maybe they would’ve still been alive and life would have gone on as it always had. I may have still carried the burden of being the eldest, but life would still be somewhat peaceful. In all honesty, I cannot even say a return to that life particularly appealed to me. The labor was intensive and everyone expected me to be strong at all times. I just wanted my mother to stand up for me.

I have commented on my feelings of discomfort on viewing Tamayo as something of a surrogate mother, as a replacement for the one I had slain, in conjunction with my interest in her from a sexual or romantic perspective. But after I admitted all of those things to her, I realized that I viewed her in such a way because she provided me with the comfort and warmth I had so desperately craved from my real mother, the very same she denied to me after my youngest brothers came into the world and they became the sole recipient of her maternal care. After I became the second man of the house. My mother failed to be there for me in my time of need, but Tamayo was there for me. She was there for me when nobody else was, she saved me from my predicament, she looked after me and educated me and provided for me, showing me love and care and affection. She held me close and comforted me physically and emotionally, she was the person that held me together.

After a few moments of uncanny silence, I turned around, laid my cheek against her bosom and cried in a similar way to the first time we made love. My sobs were loud and hysterical, but I didn’t care. Tamayo stroked my hair and wrapped her other arm around me as I wailed and wept.

She whispered as I continued to cry. “I’m so sorry, Yushiro. I’m so sorry. You didn’t deserve that; you didn’t deserve to be treated like that. It seems… the world has wronged us both. We were both abandoned by those we cared about, by those we wanted to be beside at all times… everyone turned their backs on us, to leave us to fend for ourselves. Nobody should be able to judge us, right?”

I didn’t speak, I just nodded as I kept close to her and cried. I wanted her to shelter me from the world itself. I lost track of time and I didn’t really notice what she was doing to me, I can only say that she embraced me. She continued to whisper to me, but she would also reach down to kiss the top of my head and wipe the tears from my cheek.

“I would never treat you that way,” she said as I shuddered from my own grief, “I will always look after you. So hardworking, so sweet, so devoted. You will be always be safe with me, and I will always give you what you want most. You… do want this, right? You want to stay with me, now and forever? You’re not thinking of leaving my side?”

I could detect a hint of desperation in her voice, as if she was fearing me potentially abandoning her. Even in my state back then, I understood that by asking confirmation of my stay, she was asking me to cross another threshold. All of my complicated, pent-up feelings – the ones I alluded to earlier concerning guilt and culpability – I would be throwing it all away and cementing my place with her if I accepted. I could atone for my sins by taking my own life, or I could stay forever a coward and remain by her side, ignoring and not caring about the people I hurt and killed, doing nothing but taking. Coveting life itself.

Because we’re cowards, you see. I think vampires are naturally cowards, we feel sorry for ourselves and maybe flickers of remorse for our wrongdoings, like I and Tamayo have felt, but rarely does that transform into a desire to seek atonement – I have never heard a story of a vampire that has killed themselves over their sins, and neither has Tamayo. And when I think about it that way, I understand the tenacity of the Demon Hunters. We are foul creatures that covet life itself, we take and take and take, we give absolutely nothing to the world. We are so afraid of dying that we resort to sucking the blood out of people. Even that, to us, is preferable to restoring our dignity, to taking responsibility for ourselves.

And there I was, feeling sorry for myself yet not sorry enough to end my own life. I still wanted to live. And there Tamayo was, too. Self-pity, as Tokikawa would put it.

I think about the way she held me and how she ran into my arms and wept after her furious exchange with Tokikawa. I think about all the ways she has treated me with kindness and patience. I think about the way she offered to stand between me and the world, shielding me from all its darkness and hate. Most importantly, I always think about how she implicitly sees me as a replacement for her son, something I’ve alluded to a couple of times. If I was drawn to Tamayo due to wanting someone to look after me when nobody else would, then perhaps she was drawn to me for similar reasons. I think that Tamayo has had a massive hole in her heart for a very long time, a hole caused by the death of her family and possibly the years upon years of being Tokikawa’s companion. I think she wanted someone who adored her, someone who depended upon her, someone who viewed her not with suspicion or an object to fulfill their sexual cravings, but someone who genuinely loved her and wanted to be by her side. She wanted to remember what it feels like to be loved.

And if she had to use magic to achieve such a thing, then so be it. Maybe it was her plan this whole time to compel me into becoming so emotionally dependent on her, that I would find it impossible to leave her side. Perhaps she artificed it all, perhaps she was only preying on existing feelings and amplifying them, or perhaps I was wrong and she had done absolutely nothing to me. And truly, honestly, with my entire conviction, I no longer care. What she may or may not have done to my mind matters so little me, that it is the reason why am I able to make so much impassionate commentary about it. It has long-since stopped haunting me; even if she did do something to me, not only could I not change anything about it, but I would actually be grateful for it.

I know that my obsession and admiration for Tamayo is wrong. Not only due to the difference in age and seniority, but also in how she is the lynchpin of my existence. I know that how she lives at the center of my very mind and heart is unhealthy, but I cannot bring myself to be bothered by it. The truth is that Tamayo was always there for me, and I love her, and she looks after me. Why would I run away from that? She is all I know or care about in this world now, I don’t believe in any God or Buddha or anything other than Tamayo. A world without Tamayo is one I’m not interested in.

So, it was time to bury the past. Bury the guilt, bury the remorse, destroy it all and let it fade away unto faint whisps at the edges of my soul. If I did not even feel the correct capacity of guilt to act on it, then why let it inhibit me? Tamayo was all I cared for, still care for, and she would never ever judge me for who I was or what I did. That was all that mattered.

Therefore, I utterly surrendered myself to her. I hastily nodded, turned my upper body and looked up to her. “I’ll never leave you! I’m alive because of you! I can’t imagine a life without you! I need you! Make me whole, Tamayo! I’m yours and yours alone!”

She smiled at me, then leaned in to kiss the top of my head. “Thank you, Yushiro. Thank you so much. I’ll always look after you.”

But I had to know something, so I blurted out as a half-thought-out follow-up. “Do you love me, Tamayo?”

“Hmm?”

Do you love me?!”

She narrowed her eyes, half-shook her head.

“What a silly question,” she said, “of course I love you.”

Then she kissed me on the lips.

Shortly after that, we left the bath and retreated upstairs. We didn’t even bother to get dressed, because we both knew what was about to happen. We made love on her bed. And this wasn’t the slightly meek, soft and tender love of the first days of our relationship, nor was it the degenerative indulgences from that night after the opera; Tamayo and I made ferocious, passionate love, the same kind two lovers make when they reunite after being apart for too long. It was the most intense love we had ever made together, have ever made together. I cannot recall a time before or since that contained as much raw passion.

I focused on nothing but her as I held her by the shoulders, she wrapped her legs around my waist and craned her head back. And I could see that I was building up the intense passion within her more and more, I had become so invigorated that I made her face contort with a pleasure I had never seen before. And I was finally able to make her orgasm, after so many weeks and months of not being able to. She looked so immensely pleased by that. After we were done, she kept me locked in her arms and wouldn’t let me go. We fell asleep in each other’s arms.

After that night, we became almost inseparable. I no longer even slept in my own bed, which became neglected as I began to permanently sleep in Tamayo’s bed. What began as a sort of tryst between two lovers that occurred every few nights morphed into a continuous, constant affair. We had sex almost every night, the times where we didn’t we were content with holding each other and going peacefully to sleep.

And many times, I would awaken before her and see her sleep peacefully, I would then instinctively hold her close with a might that signaled that I would never let go. I started to become so obsessive and protective of Tamayo that merely being apart from her for even a second would upset me.

Any and all regrets or feelings of guilt that I held had all been swept away, I resolved that my and Tamayo’s lives were and always will be more important than the fleeting thoughts of the dead crushed beneath our heels. Call me a villain if you must, but I do not care. I have no regrets anymore.

 

Notes:

Throughout the story, Yushiro crosses three thresholds: The first is agreeing to be turned into a vampire by Tamayo, the second is his willingness to sleep with her. This chapter represents the third and final line he crosses, where he decides to stay with Tamayo and surrender himself entirely to her regardless of the consequences, casting aside his reservations and feelings of guilt etc in the process. The degree to which Yushiro has had true agency in these decisions, the extent to which he has been pressured by external forces or even outright had his free will robbed, is an important running theme of the three lines that he crosses.

Yushiro’s decision to stay by Tamayo’s side and surrender himself to her is a sort of dark contrast to the original manga, where Yushiro accepted Tamayo’s request and decided to leave her side in order to help the Demon Slayers (and thus never see her again). Yushiro’s fear of abandonment and his parental issues are things I honed in on here and throughout the story for numerous reasons, but most importantly is that I think there is great potential for them to be explored for him. Though Yushiro clearly harbored romantic feelings for Tamayo, it’s not out of the question to suggest that she was also something of a maternal figure to him.

A lot of the rhetoric surrounding Yushiro’s mindset is directly inspired by a lot of the demons from the manga, I’m mainly talking ones like Muzan, Hantengu, Gyutaro/Daki and Kaigaku. This idea of taking and taking, being paid back their due, obfuscating themselves from responsibility were very important ideas I wanted to incorporate. This also actually completely runs contrary to Yushiro in canon, who espoused the importance of giving to others and not just taking (when you look at it objectively, Yushiro is one of the most selfless characters in the original story).

This chapter was quite difficult to complete, both the actual process of writing and me mustering up the conviction/courage to actually write some of the things in it. In fact, I would say it was the most difficult chapter to write of them all, at least so far. To say that parts of this chapter made me uncomfortable would be putting it mildly.

The art is a photo for a few reasons. Firstly, I wanted something a bit different to the sketches that have been in the story so far. Secondly, I wanted the reader to be able to see Yushiro’s face, as I don’t think he is the kind of person to draw himself – he would probably find it awkward or uncomfortable. Finally, tying into some of the things I said above, I essentially wanted there to be an ‘evil’ counterpart to the volume 21 cover. The oneshot designs were adapted into the art as much as possible, hence Yushiro’s more mature appearance.

By the way this is completely unrelated but if you happen to be playing Hinokami Chronicles 2, get Yushiro and Tamayo to level 5 mastery and listen to what they say or if need be, replay it in the mastery menus. I don’t think I’ve ever laughed so hard at the delivery of Yushiro’s lines, at least in the Japanese lol.

Chapter 8: Eighth Entry

Summary:

Witching Hour.

Notes:

(See the end of the chapter for notes.)

Chapter Text

As I said last time, Tamayo and I became even more intimate than before after that night in the bath. We began to hold each other closer and behaved more like genuine lovers, rather than two people looking for a casual relationship. She would watch and behold me with a flicker of adoration in her eyes; we spoke in hushed cadences that typically reflect a strong and unbroken bond. We spent every moment we could together, even if they just consisted of sitting in silence or reading.

Of course, we never betrayed this to the outside world. It still needed to be a secret. It didn’t matter to me anymore; the outside world itself may as well have only existed to be my food. All I cared about was what Tamayo felt, and by extension myself.

It was during this time that we developed one of our favorite little preoccupations: Giving each other massages. There was nothing sexual about it, we would literally just strip off all our clothes and let each other be taken care of. Vampires have seldom needed for things like such as this, but they can still be comforting and relieving.

I have fond memories of the first massage Tamayo ever gave me. It was actually during some rainy afternoon, the clinic was shut due to some contrived reason (I believe Tamayo used the excuse of having relatives coming over to visit). I laid down on my back, on top of her bed, and she massaged my leg which had been lifted onto her shoulder. She was careful to press and knead the calf, maintaining eye contact with me as she did it. Quite cheekily, she kept her hairpin on – she always kept it on, only taking it out when going to sleep. I remember grinning and bearing my fangs.

“Such pretty fangs on such a pretty face.” Tamayo can be playful at times.

Time passed both slowly and quickly, it was remarkable. If there was a carefree vibe from before the episode with the bath, then the general atmosphere after can only be described as transcendental. An illusion was starting to form of us being some sort of married couple. I even entertained the idea of proposing to her and having a wedding arranged, but I eventually realized the futility of it and refrained from entertaining the idea further.

In the background, we continued to treat patients, take people’s blood for ourselves and take to the streets to kill for food when necessary. I became an even better killer, taking the lead most of the time and letting Tamayo enjoy in the fruits of my labor. I spared less and less thoughts of the dead, increasingly seeing our prey less with indifference and more with a sort of arrogant dismissal. They were ours. And I still feel that way about humans.

Research into Tokikawa’s serum continued. Despite the argument that I bore witness to driving even more of a wedge between them, they still agreed to cooperate with the added detail that they would never speak to each other again once the job was done. I think that suited them both just fine. Tamayo kept sending samples of my and her blood to him, he supposedly kept synthesizing experimental drugs and conducting research into vampire and human physiology. I never really thought it would work, and to be honest I’m not entirely sure if Tamayo believed in it either. She appeared invested, but many things about her are deceiving.

All this is to say life was generally quite good for us, perhaps an unexpected outcome given what I had talked about before, but it rang true nonetheless. We ate, enjoyed each other’s company and stayed incognito. A vampire probably couldn’t ask for much else. In retrospect, it was all a little too good.

One evening, sometime in the late autumn, Tamayo and I were in the drawing room sharing some tea. It was her favorite kind of tea, Earl Grey (I even thought the sight of her drinking the tea was amazing in of itself, she looked so beautiful just savoring it). We had just closed in the clinic, the sun was beginning to set and we indulged in our typical evening relaxation routines. Indeed, if that night had gone like any other night, I would have expected her to read or listen to music with me.

Unfortunately for us, just as we were finishing our tea, there was a ferocious knock on the door below. I instantly knew who it was. I shivered in my own chair at the thought of Tokikawa’s mere presence – I couldn’t even begin to explain why he would be here. He had already discovered our little secret, after all.

Tamayo almost immediately got up from her chair, but this time she beckoned me to follow. She didn’t seem particularly worried this time, maybe she no longer cared for Tokikawa’s antics or maybe she realized something else was bothering him. Considering that she didn’t appear to be afraid, I steeled my nerves and followed her downstairs.

When she opened the door and we were greeted by the sight of Tokikawa, I was surprised. He looked furious, as he typically did whenever I saw him, but he also looked slightly afraid himself. Under his arm was a newspaper.

He said that he needed to speak to us about something that was extremely urgent.

Tamayo beckoned him in, and I followed behind him as we travelled up the stairs to the drawing room. Though Tamayo and I sat down in our chairs again, admittedly a means of showcasing our disapproval of our guest, he hardly seemed to care. Instead, he just threw the newspaper into Tamayo’s lap.

She picked it up and began to read the front page. It was some local city newspaper, I only saw the back at first, which had an obituary for some Japanese railway specialist who studied those of the Russian Empire back in the Meiji period. But I soon forgot that as I noticed Tamayo’s gradually-widening pupils and creasing forehead.

“Tamayo?” I asked. “What’s wrong?”

Instead of answering me directly, she flipped over the newspaper so I could see the front page. It read:

SIX WOMEN FOUND DEAD AND MUTLIATED, KILLER ON LOOSE

I gasped. Not because I felt particularly afraid of the fact that there was a killer on the loose, but more so the implications behind the headline and why Tokikawa had presented it to us. Six people, women no less, found dead in a short amount of time, killer on the loose, mutilated bodies. My heartbeat hastened and I felt my mind beginning to dissociate from my body. I stared at the headline’s big, bold, black font, and I felt a feeling that was frustratingly close to agony.

“A vampire,” Tokikawa seemed to echo my thoughts as I was forming them, “I think another vampire is killing people in my territory.”

Tokikawa’s district was the industrial heartland of the city, it was also where his lab was located. Tamayo and I inhabited a part of the city more immersed in culture and tradition, the entertainment district was incorporated into it.

Tamayo folded the newspaper and put it on the table between us, next to the tray of tea. I had never seen her at such a loss of words. She was struggling to form a sentence – a statement, a question, a proclamation, nothing came out for a while. I could sense a slight shiver of the fear she felt, but it wasn’t fear over this intruder. And I knew that Tokikawa himself held no real fear for this other vampire, either.

“… When did the killings start…?” Tamayo asked.

Tokikawa snapped that they began the previous night, the bodies were found in the morning and the story broke to the local newspapers soon thereafter. Tokikawa mentioned how he had the daily paper delivered to him every morning and he read through it before beginning work, and that as soon as he received that day’s copy, he knew what was going on. He had to wait until the sun had set to see Tamayo about it, but he had apparently spent the whole day in some semi-hysterical state.

Perhaps Tamayo was delusional, or in denial. In all likelihood, she was just attempting to offer something in the way of reassurance, but she said something that I considered to be quite foolish.

“It may not necessarily be a vampire,” she said half-heartedly, “it could be a human. People… some people have a preoccupation with brutal methods of murder. It could be a human… with an odd fixation on killing women.”

Tokikawa didn’t look particularly impressed with that statement. In fact, he snatched the newspaper from Tamayo’s hands and read out extracts from the leading article.

Mutilated bodies, great loss of blood, no link between the victims. Tamayo, don’t be so ignorant and naive! It’s a vampire, you know it’s a vampire.”

Not that Tokikawa could be certain either, for all anyone had to go on was a newspaper report. It is fair to say that, considering his age and experience, it’s reasonable to state that he had something of a sixth sense or instinctual awareness for detecting the work of his own kin. And it seems Tamayo was well aware of this, because any suggestion that it may have been a human disappeared as quickly as she had made it. Rather, she insulted him.

“You… did you get careless, Tokikawa? Did you not make sure to kill your food properly? Don’t actually tell me that this is all your fault, that you let someone in your territory transform by accident?”

He threw the newspaper straight at her, but Tamayo swatted it away with her forearm and it landed on the floor.

“Don’t mock me, Tamayo! This is serious!”

I have to admit, what Tokikawa said rang true to me. Even I thought at the time that such a thing would be extremely unlikely, considering how many years he had lived for and how careful he had supposedly been. On top of that, a new vampire may not be so adept at hiding and erasing their scent as this intruder had. More likely, it was someone with experience.

I had never heard Tokikawa so angry before. That may be difficult to believe, but the anger I had been exposed to before came from a place of genuine wrath, whilst the anger he felt in that moment came from fear as much as frustration. In a way that made it worse, because Tokikawa seemed even less likely to be able to control himself and prevent himself from doing something he ought not to.

“Tokikawa, I would advise you to calm-”

But then Tokikawa slammed his hand down onto the table, the porcelain tea set clinked and rumbled and even nearly fell to the floor. It made me flinch in my seat, but Tamayo didn’t really move.

Tokikawa shouted. “Don’t tell me what to do, Tamayo! There’s another vampire in my fucking territory and they’re drawing attention to themselves! Six women in one night! That’s going to draw the attention of the Black Swords! We need to put a stop to him right now!”

“We?” Tamayo raised her eyebrow and wore a face of subtle displeasure. “You just told me he’s in your territory. It’s your problem and not mine, Tokikawa.”

He growled. “You stupid bitch, Tamayo. You clearly didn’t read it properly, because you completely missed out the fact that one of those victims was found on the doorstep of your territory. He’ll get bolder, begin to hunt around different parts of the city. Then those bastards will be all around, looking for us and trying to kill us. We need to stop him now. Tonight.”

“You… you could,” Tamayo straightened her back and shifted in her chair, “you could hide and stay out of sight until the Demon Hunters come. It might be too late, they could have sent a swordsman to investigate the murders. Maybe you can just wait it out, let the Demon Hunters find and kill this stranger - if he even is a vampire - then emerge safely once the coast is clear and they’ve assessed that there are no more of us. We cover our tracks well, so-”

But Tokikawa scoffed and swatted one of our teacups off the table, it landed and smashed against the wall – it shattered into what seemed like hundreds of tiny little pieces. He then leaned down and looked her directly in the eyes. Again, Tamayo didn’t even flinch or blink.

He spat in her face. “No. Whoever this intruder is, they’re good at hiding. I want to send a message to the other vampires to not pull this shit in my turf. And if the killings stop so soon after they began, the Black Swords may not bother sending anyone. Face it Tamayo, this is the only course of action that will prevent a disaster from happening. And you’re going to help me.”

Tamayo was silent, she looked to her own feet and narrowed her eyes. I could sense the palpable fear exuding from her, and then it began to swirl in my chest too. A terrible situation had arisen, we had been compromised by proxy due to the foolish actions of this vampire, someone who seemed to lack the intelligence or common sense to lay low, to carve out his own feeding ground and draw as little attention to himself as possible. We’d find out the cause sooner or later, anyway.

I heard Tamayo sigh under her breath, a sigh that was very weary and burdened with worry.

“Very well,” she said, “we shall help you. Especially if it’s someone foolish enough to hunt too many humans.”

Tokikawa snarled and put his hand in his pocket. “Good. You should have just agreed to begin with, you stupid woman. If we hadn’t wasted this time arguing, we could be out on the streets trying to find them right now.”

How Tokikawa talked about Tamayo had always infuriated and disgusted me, but I had not done anything about it due to my fear persevering and emerging stronger than my distaste. However, I think in that moment, my anger was finally beginning to bubble and boil over – especially because he was continuing to insult her even after she had agreed to help.

So for the first time, I spoke back to Tokikawa. I directly addressed him. Come to think of it, it was the first time he ever heard my voice.

“Who do you think you are?!” I shouted. “This intruder isn’t even encroaching on our territory, yet Lady Tamayo is still willing to cooperate. But yet still you insult her! How dare you! Why should we help an idiot such as yourself who can’t even secure his own territory?!”

Tamayo looked at me with wide-open eyes and a mouth that pursed its lips in clear shock, most definitely out of amazement. And then I saw Tokikawa glaring at me with death, my death, in his eyes, the same kind of visage he wore on the very night we first met, when he wanted to see me not only dead but utterly destroyed. I could see his forehead lightly trembling, again like from that time.

“Rich talk,” he whispered, “coming from a shitty little child such as yourself. Why don’t I crack open that soft little skull of yours?”

When I think back on it, I wonder how much of his spite came from displeasure of me and how much came from jealousy. He could try to hide it as much he wanted, but Tamayo and I had discerned that he felt something like humiliation or embarrassment at our arrangement. Maybe somewhere deep down, a part of him missed Tamayo somehow – or missed having her.

Regardless, Tamayo then intervened.

“Stop. I won’t stand for you disrespecting Yushiro like that.”

Tokikawa was about to protest, but she cut him off and continued to speak.

“Besides, Tokikawa, we will be able to find this stranger who seems so good at hiding with Yushiro’s gift. Isn’t that right, Yushiro?”

She looked at me and nodded in expectation. I felt a bit of joy at how she stood up for me, but also slight discomfort at the task that she was implicitly giving me. She meant my "eyes". I already knew what the plan would be the moment she said that: I would place my talismans throughout Tokikawa’s district, in as many nooks and corners as I could (possibly in conjunction with my power to highjack the sight of petty creatures) and constantly survey the area until I detected this vampire. It seemed to be the best cause of action to me even back then; with my gifted sense of sight, luck permitting we would be able to find the trespasser in very little time compared to if Tokikawa or Tamayo were to just aimlessly wander the streets and follow the trail of victims. We could put a stop to him as soon as we could, then he may not even have to claim any more victims. And maybe, just maybe, we could elude the invasive eyes of the Demon Hunters. Maybe.

Even so, I was deeply concerned, as was Tamayo. The plan, while probably the best course of action given the circumstances, was incredibly risky. We didn’t know what this intruder was capable of, for all we knew he could be an even more powerful vampire than Tokikawa. One of us could easily lose our lives. And that’s not to mention the Demon Hunters. Tokikawa was admittedly taking a big gamble with the plan.

But I’ve thought about it some more, and while Tokikawa himself was afraid of the possibility of being caught, I think his plan came just as much from anger at his own circumstances. He seemed to feel a sense of pathetic impotence at the lackluster developments pertaining to his serum project, but also at Tamayo’s admission that she had started a relationship with me. Perhaps an intruder so brazenly waltzing into his territory and putting him in danger had been the final straw for him, it compelled him to take back a semblance of control.

Tokikawa was always a petty man. Still, I agreed to the plan.

It was still early in the evening, and I spent some time wandering throughout Tokikawa’s district to place my talismans pretty much anywhere I could (including one on a building on the street opposite Tokikawa’s lab). I had already placed a few there, but not too many as I knew it to be another vampire’s territory… especially because it was Tokikawa’s. I had not detected the murders the night before, as I did not look into my talismans much during that time. I must admit that my preoccupation with Tamayo and perhaps a false sense of security led to me getting slightly careless. So I observed and acted with an almost frantic desperation, I was definitely motivated by my own fear.

We knew that the murderer had killed in and around the industrial heart of the city, so I did my best to survey that area. I switched through the vision of all of my ‘eyes’ as best I could, trying my best to find anything remotely suspicious. For the most part, I just saw people going about their evenings, talking and walking and laughing and all the other things humans do at night. Though it was the center of the city’s industrial output, it was still a district with many houses, which is probably how he was able to kill so many women.

I wondered for a moment why he only targeted women that night. I think I now know. I couldn’t have known it at the time, but after years of me drinking blood, you begin to notice and appreciate other people’s distinct tastes. One thing I can say with certainty is that though the taste of women’s blood is lighter than men’s, it has a sweeter scent. I suppose I would compare it to a cream soup or some kind of light fruit-based dish in comparison to stew or salted pork. It’s possible that this intruder savored in particular the taste of women, and went out of their way for it. I could not personally imagine such a thing, I did not care where specifically my food came from.

After the night had progressed and the presence of humans had waned, in one of the random dank back-alley streets across the district, I saw a large, black hound skulk out of the shadows. His eyes were bright red and he wore a spiked collar, and it was huge – far bigger than any dog I had even seen before.

But in that moment, the hound’s skin was beginning to bulge, its limbs warped and I could hear the sound of bone and flesh snapping. It was like something was trying to protrude out of its body, or like something inside of it was trying to escape. Its four legs then shapeshifted into human appendages, the fur around its body transfigured into snow-white skin and its head mangled into a humanoid shape.

And then I saw a dark black suit forming over the ever-mutating figure, a long black coat materialized over its upper half and went down to its legs, followed by black pants and black shoes. The face had finally finished changing – it resembled a human’s, but not quite. He had a pale face, almost looking like that of a drowned corpse, catlike pupils and fanged teeth. I knew then that it was a vampire. Yet, unlike any of the vampires I had seen (which only consisted of Tamayo, Tokikawa and myself anyway), his ears were pointed, and his hair was a strange color that I had never seen before.  Tamayo explained to me that the color was blonde.

A shapeshifter. That explained why nobody was able to catch him. After all, who would suspect a dog to be able to kill so many women so far apart from each other in a single night? Not only that, he looked different. He didn’t even look like a normal vampire. He didn’t even look Japanese.

Nevertheless, I alerted Tokikawa and Tamayo, who were standing with me the whole time, as we were all just outside Tokikawa’s lab. I told them that I had found someone. At the same time, I kept my eye on the stranger who was still in the back alley, he simply stood in place and looked up to the starless sky.

“Where is he?!” Tokikawa asked hastily.

I was about to tell him, but the intruder walked out of the back alley. He was beginning to move.

“He’s heading… he’s heading southeast,” I said as I constantly monitored his movements through my talismans, “oh… he’s moving to the bridge over the river.”

Tokikawa grunted. “Tch, that’s on the other side of this district. Let’s move!”

Rather than approach the vampire head on, we circled around and approached him from the south, we were on the other side of the bridge that separated the industrial district from another quarter of the city, one refined for its trees and other greenery. I had placed a talisman on the other side of the river close to where we were hiding, so I had a good view on its movements.

Unfortunately, he had just killed a random passerby – he seemed like a middle-aged man who was going home from work, since he was carrying a bundle on a sling. The vampire was perched over his corpse and sucking the blood from a wound inflicted on the man’s neck, but the rest of his body was horribly mutilated as if attacked by a wild animal. It was good luck that none of his other victims had transformed into vampires. As for the fact he had killed a man, perhaps he was hungry and desired an easy source of food. No doubt, he would have proceeded to find and kill more women.

The three of us were hidden around the corner of some building right next to the bridge, which the vampire was close to on the other side. I told both Tokikawa and Tamayo of what I saw, and they both peeked around the corner to get visual clarification.

Tokikawa turned to us both and walked us through the plan.

“Tamayo. Go around and approach this trespasser from behind. I will walk across the bridge and confront him directly. I will distract him long enough for you to get into position. You know what to do. I’ll go in for the kill.”

“And me?” I asked.

Tokikawa rolled his eyes before gesturing towards a bush next to the bridge. “Just hide in there and… keep an eye out for anything.”

So I didn’t participate in the battle, most likely because Tokikawa thought I would get in the way. It made sense, I was still a relatively new vampire and my physical power couldn’t match his or even Tamayo’s. Having said that, I didn’t want to leave Tamayo’s side for a moment and I grew fearful of the thought of her getting hurt, or worse killed, by that strange vampire.

Or worse yet, the fear that a Demon Hunter could appear at any minute and take our heads.

But I had no time to reflect further or act on those feelings, I simply nodded and moved to the bush while the other two took their positions: Tokikawa walked to the bridge while Tamayo disappeared in the other direction, I assume she went to a bridge further along the river and walked back down to where the vampire was.

Speaking of, the vampire raised his head and looked to the starless sky after it had finished feeding. He pulled a face as if he was displeased with the taste, perhaps related to what I alluded to earlier with his potential preoccupation with the taste of women. He appeared to be mumbling to himself, but then Tokikawa then called out to him.

“Hey!”

The vampire turned his head, blood dripping from his mouth. He raised an eyebrow, as if confused. He looked genuinely surprised to see another one of his kind.

Then Tokikawa continued. “I see. It all makes sense now. You’re a foreigner, aren’t you? Not from this island. That’s why you’re so… odd. Is that why you think you can just pull this shit in my territory?!"

I could see Tamayo in the distance, whose kimono sleeves were rolled up to above her forearms. She brought her arms over her head and scratched her nails through them – she was releasing her blood as a magical vapor like substance that I had seen her do numerous times. Blood dripped from the streaks of cut flesh that ran along her limbs as she walked; despite the circumstances, she appeared calm and emotionless.

The vampire then stood and grinned, like he was delighted or overjoyed to see another of his kind. He laughed and then said something in a language I couldn’t comprehend, but it was directed at Tokikawa. So it was true, he really was a foreigner. I had suspected as such as soon as I laid my eyes on him when he transformed in the back alley. Later on, Tamayo confirmed to me that the foreign vampire was speaking Hungarian, a language from a country in central Europe. He had come all the way from there to Japan.

Tokikawa eyed Tamayo approaching from behind, then he smirked.

“I don’t know what the fuck you’re even saying.”

As soon as he said that, Tamayo outstretched her arms and the vapor of her blood encircled the foreign vampire almost perfectly. I do not know what he saw or what he felt, but he seemed confused and disoriented – like he could barely stand. He covered his nose and mouth with his hand and tried to keep his footing. Tamayo would go on to tell me that she had cast something of a sensory illusion on him; from his perspective, he was trapped in a sort of prison, every single one of his senses engulfed and dulled by the flowerlike scent of her blood.

After the illusion had been fully cast, Tokikawa extended out his right arm. The clothes and skin beneath broke as something seemed to writhe underneath them, then several orifices appeared on his arm before a mass of black, tendril-like brambles shot out of them. They were so fast that they appeared like a black flash to my eyes, he must have constructed at least five chains and they were all aimed at the vampire’s face.

So that was his power. I could tell that the cutting ability of his brambles must have been immense, as if they were made of diamond. This was the very same technique that had been used to kill that raven the night I spied on him and Tamayo. I wondered how many people, and indeed other vampires, had been felled by those wires.

The foreigner tried to swat some of them away, but a couple of them grazed his face as he was forced to dodge. Tokikawa then closed in as another set of black chains emerged from his left arm. He swung them like sharpened, bladed whips that cut the air almost perfectly, while the other vampire was forced to continuously dodge his attacks. Tokikawa was clearly not trained in martial arts in any substantive way, as he almost waved his arms about in a haphazard way, but the speed and strength of his brambles assured that he didn’t need to expertly trained.

This foreign vampire seemed to become increasingly disoriented due to the effects of Tamayo’s spell; his movements slowed and dulled more and more, as more of Tokikawa’s brambles cut through his skin. He tried to resist, even lunge forward and attack his assailant with claw and fang, but Tokikawa was able to effortlessly evade those futile attacks and continue his assault.

And I watched on. To me at the time, the battle would likely be finished soon, Tokikawa would promptly dispatch this intruder and we could go home and hopefully avoid trouble. But as the fight pressed on, I grew more and more anxious at the amount of time it was taking to cut this beast down. I felt a sudden instinctual nervousness, my mind lingered to the possibility that we would be caught. The thought of swordsmen raining down on our little skirmish and taking all our heads filled me with dread, the same kind of instinctual dread every vampire from this country is naturally born with.

I shuddered, retreated a little bit more into the bush. I cursed under my breath and thought that Tokikawa needed to hurry up and kill him.

My prayers seemed to be answered shortly thereafter, because Tokikawa eventually managed to catch the vampire on his leg. He cut through it with his wires so much that the leg itself snapped in an awkward direction and the intruder fell. But as this stranger was trying to get back up, Tokikawa ran behind him and kept him pinned down by putting his foot on his back, then bunched three of the brambles from his arm together like some sort of garrote wire before wrapping them around his neck.

At first, I wondered what he was doing, since I thought it pointless to try and suffocate or choke a vampire, as we cannot die from asphyxiation, but I quickly realized that those wires were actually digging into the vampire’s throat. He wasn’t trying to strangle him, he was trying to decapitate him. According to Tamayo, this was Tokikawa’s preferred method of killing another vampire, it was much easier than having to take their heads off with his own claws, even accounting for the difference in durability and toughness for each individual vampire’s neck.

I could see the stranger trying to pry the wires away from his neck and break free from Tokikawa’s hold, who pressed down so hard on his back that I could see him physically trembling from the effort. He exposed his fangs and bit down on his lip, his eyes were wide open and he looked furious.

And Tamayo just watched on, appearing detached and impartial. It was a sight she had likely seen a few too many times. Maybe not those exact circumstances, but she was definitely accustomed to all of his killing in some way. I sometimes wonder if he had done anything like that to the Demon Hunters of the past, in one of those instances where a vampire either has to kill or be killed.

Regardless, it seemed likely to all end soon. The vampire would be dead, we would skulk back to our homes and the Demon Hunters would be none the wiser. Of course, the sudden disappearance of a killer would be an issue, but we would be in a far better position than we were at the time.

That is, until the foreign vampire sprouted six whip-like tendrils from his back – they appeared to be made from his own flesh and bone. All six tendrils pierced Tokikawa’s leg, chest and abdomen and he immediately started to bleed from his mouth. The stranger’s left arm then morphed to sprout something like a bladed talon, again made from his flesh and bone, and he tried to swing it in an arc toward Tokikawa’s head. He reacted just in time, retracted the brambles back into the skin and used his foot, leg still mangled and covered in protrusions from the tendrils, to kick himself off and land some distance away. He was safe.

Tamayo saw all of this happening in a split second and she gasped, and I gasped too. We realized that this man was a master shapeshifter of some kind – if you began to think he had a fixed form, he would attack in an unexpected way. Tamayo has since told me that she has never seen a vampire with such abilities before. It makes me wonder if there is something inherently different about vampires from that part of the world... or in other parts of the world, for that matter.

As if that wasn’t bad enough, a gust of wind swept through the riverside, which actually had the effect of dispersing Tamayo’s blood and dispelling the sensory illusion she had trapped the stranger in. Regrettably, this actually exposed her to his position, for he turned and the talon-clad arm then morphed into a long whip like tentacle covered in strange red blotches of biomass and teeth. The instant he shot it out - which was an incredible feat on its own, since Tamayo was at least ten meters away - she jumped up onto the roof of the low building beside them. It appeared to be some kind of storage shed.

I gasped and my chest felt like it was about to explode at the fact that Tamayo just barely managed to evade that attack. She was crouching and gritting her teeth while clutching the side of her head, for her hair had come slightly loose and blood was trickling down at an alarming rate. That’s when I looked back to her former position and saw not only her hairpin snapped in two, but her own ear that had been detached and bloodied. Tamayo had almost been that creature’s prey.

I suddenly felt extremely nervous, for things had not exactly gone according to plan and every minute spent outside was a risk to us; nobody was nearby at that time of night, but any reports of strange activity such as that would be like painting targets on our backs.

And Tamayo! I wanted to rush over to her and defend her from that vile monster, this odd foreigner who just barged into our word and brought disaster with him. I wanted to run across that bridge and help out, but I knew that I would only be a hindrance to them both. Though my power had grown, I was still not experienced enough to deal with such a scenario. If Tamayo and Tokikawa were having problems with this man, then he would easily crush me.

The foreigner looked up at Tamayo, licked his lips (that part disturbed me, like he had every ntention of devouring her), then back to Tokikawa, who was clutching the area around his abdomen and chest where the tendrils had penetrated him. Blood was still dripping from his mouth, but now more slowly. The blood on his chest had also stopped soaking through is shirt, and he was able to stand upright despite being heavily injured in his own leg. He was healing.

And Tamayo was healing too, from the looks of it. She continued to clutch the side of her head, even as the stranger began to taunt them both. Again, he spoke a language none of us understood, so I have no idea what he actually said. Regardless, he seemed to take a mocking tone, possibly making light of the fact that two vampires weren’t strong enough to take him out in an instant. I wondered how many people he had killed, how much blood he had drank, how many years he had lived. It’s entirely possible that he was an extremely old vampire who had come to our country for fresh hunting grounds, completely oblivious to the dangers.

I could see Tokikawa deep in thought, his coat fluttered against the wind as he looked to the side and down into the river. He then gritted his teeth.

“Tamayo,” he said sternly, “we’ll finish him in one strike. Together.”

Tamayo nodded. “All right.”

“… Your wound seems to be taking a while to heal.”

But she dismissed him, saying it was fine.

Tokikawa’s eyes went completely black and veins bulged all across the visible parts of his skin, and then I saw Tamayo’s own pupils turn deep blood-red before she exposed her pointed canine fangs, she took her hand away from the side of her head and I could see that her ear had regrown. They appeared to be ready to perform some sort of synchronized attack, a last-ditch attempt to take this intruder down, who was evidently more powerful than both of them had anticipated.

But then I saw a flash of something through one of my talismans that made my skin crawl. You see, as this fight was happening, I was always keeping an eye on the myriad of talismans I had placed around the area, in case of any… disturbances. It is difficult to describe what it is like to alternate between seeing through them and my own eyes, it would be too challenging to try and explain it to someone who has no experience with such a thing. But in that moment, in some dark, dank street nearby, a person dressed in white carrying some sort of large bundle sprinted past my talisman. And then I saw him again through another one of those papers. The worst thing imaginable had actually happened.

I didn’t even have time to think, I knew what was happening anyway. When I think on it, perhaps my ability to recognize that a Demon Hunter had found was linked to the inherited memory I’ve talked about before. I believe I was able to instinctively recognize this threat due to my memory of Tamayo’s past experiences.

I frantically called out and waved to Tamayo, who looked at me with eyes that transformed back to their standard hue the instant I called out to her. I shouted, screamed at her.

“Hunter!” I yelled “Hunter!”

The stranger turned and noticed me, but he was completely oblivious to what was happening. He looked confused and bewildered, potentially puzzled as to why I was hiding away instead of helping out with the fight.

But Tamayo, Tokikawa and I stared petrified at the emergence of that very hunter from behind. He stood tall and proud on that little pathway beside the river. Before even a second had passed, I moved like lightning and left that bush on the opposite side of the river. I ran past the three on the ground, up to the roof and grabbed hold of Tamayo. Carrying her bridal-style, I jumped off to the roof on the other street before she could process a thing. I was getting us as far away from there as possible.

As I ran, I placed a talisman on the collar of her kimono and it worked to conceal us both from sight. I didn’t think as I jumped from rooftop to rooftop, sometimes making sure to randomly change my direction and trajectory. I ran and leapt so much that I was losing track of what I was doing, and I eventually saw reason and came to a stop. I found a quiet, dark but otherwise agreeable alleyway where I put Tamayo down. She looked up at me, breathless and slightly shaking from the fright of what had just happened. Things had gone disastrously.

I peered through the paper eyes I had left in that area; Tokikawa was nowhere to be seen, but the stranger was running away from the hunter that pursued him, he was missing both of his arms and was panting and screaming as a trail of blood followed behind him. That hunter seemed emotionless and ruthless as he caught up to his target, who had reached another bridge further along the river and was trying to topple over the railing.

And the hunter wore a simple yukata and shirt (much like me, really), his hair was black and slightly disheveled, a scar covered both his eyes and he wielded a deep-obsidian katana which had ‘demon slaughterer’ engraved at the base of the blade. But most incredibly, and I promise that I do not lie when I say this incredible fact: That man had but a single arm.

His left arm was missing, as if it had been amputated or cut off, and so he wielded his blade entirely with the right. Not that this hindered him in any way, for he had soundly caught up to the vampire, jumped onto the railing to the side of him and attacked. I watched as the hunter unleashed his blade in a single brilliant arc of obsidian, followed by the vampire’s head tumbling down – wide eyed, terrified and even that faintest bit confused – into the river below the bridge. His armless body propped up against the wooden railing, the hunter looked up to the starless sky and paid no attention to his victim’s remains.

Notes:

This chapter is an adaptation of the Overhunter Hunter oneshot itself, as you can probably tell. The oneshot had a lot of ambiguities and open questions attached to it that had to be taken out of this version. For instance: Tokikawa and Tamayo talk about an unnamed character they only refer to as 'he' or 'him' who in my opinion could be that story's closest equivalent to Muzan (aka some kind of elder vampire that somehow rules over all vampires in Japan), and is the main reason as to why both of them aren't using their full power at first. It wasn't too difficult to make the plot of the oneshot fit in the context of this fic more, but it was fun to do regardless.

Tokikawa's power was directly taken from Muzan's Black Blood Brambles, the technique he uses in the manga on Himejima when wounded and pinned down by Tamayo. Not much is really known about this ability in particular, it really just came off like a glorified trick he could do because it didn’t seem to be all that effective compared to his normal method of attacking (Muzan was also considerably weakened by the explosion and Tamayo’s drug as well which is possibly a factor). Regardless, I always kind of liked the idea of that ability in particular and thought it especially beautiful in the anime adaptation, so I decided extremely early on that I wanted it to be the basis of Tokikawa’s power. I did try to put hints to it throughout the story, such as something appearing to be writhing under his skin and the nature by which he killed the bird which Yushiro used to eavesdrop with in chapter 6.

(By the way, I found out when writing this chapter that the suit version of Muzan is being included as a free playable character to HC2. I wonder how that will work… will he use the Black Blood Brambles? Also I got Yushiro and Tamayo to level 99 mastery… the grind was painful but the mastery quote you get at the end kind of makes it worth it lol. I sometimes wonder how people react to me using them online, everybody seems to use either the Pillars or the Upper Ranks.)

The foreign vampire is an interesting character in the original, because there are a lot of implications that are put forward by his mere existence and his design. For instance, he looks quite different to the Japanese vampires, he has pointed ears and generally looks less human. It’s also implied that he comes from a country where humans actively fear his kind, which alongside his clothing and general design is further proof to me that he is meant to be something of a reference to Dracula, who leaves Transylvania and moves to England for fresh hunting grounds where people don’t actively know about or fear him. The idea that he prefers women is not in the oneshot, but it comes from a line where he laments the taste of the blood of Japanese men and figures he ought to try and find a woman’s blood. I couldn't include what he said in the chapter, since he spoke in a language none of them understood. If you want an idea of what his dialogue actually consists of, just read the oneshot again.

His abilities in this fic are not exactly the same as the oneshot, but they are similar. Actually, the way he changes his body here is based on Muzan’s own powers in the KnY manga, because I actually believe that his general powers and way of fighting are at least somewhat based on this foreign vampire from the oneshot (except on steroids). Gotouge always had a fixation with transformation and bodily horror as it pertained to Muzan. There are actually a lot of aspects of the oneshots that bleed over to KnY, and it's interesting to see how parts of the writing become influenced by those original works. I could do a whole writeup about that, but I'll spare you all.

I didn’t really change anything about Tamayo, her power works almost exactly the same way here as it does in the oneshot. The scene of her walking up to the foreign vampire and scattering her blood about is exactly the same, as is the part where the wind sweeps it away (unfortunate timing!). To be truthful I really like her depiction in the oneshot, how silent and withdrawn yet deadly she is. You got the sense that there was something incredibly powerful and dangerous about her, in spite of her unassuming nature.

As for the art: Tamayo’s pose is taken pretty much wholesale from a panel in the oneshot where she disperses her blood. Tokikawa’s pose is directly based on a Muzan pose used on the cover page for chapter 183 of the KnY manga (aka, where the battle against Muzan actually begins). And the foreign vampire’s pose is just kind of… well it’s not based on anything in particular lol. My partner says this is her favorite art out of the bunch she’s done for this fic so far.

Chapter 9: Ninth Entry

Summary:

Bane of the Black Sword.

Notes:

(See the end of the chapter for notes.)

Chapter Text

After witnessing the sight of that foreign vampire being so effortlessly slaughtered, I was at a loss for words. A creature ostensibly hundreds of years old, a predator at the peak of his own physical strength – all that had been wiped away in an instant, the light of his life had been ruthlessly stamped out by a mere human.

I spoke. “The intruder’s dead.”

Huddled over Tamayo, I saw her widen her eyes and open her mouth slightly. She held that look for a few seconds, then narrowed her eyes and nodded.

“Yes.”

I chattered my teeth together. “That man… is he even human?!”

“Without a doubt,” Tamayo rubbed the side of her head that had been wounded, “he is human. He is trained, and he is one of the chosen.”

The chosen. I suppose that was further evidence of Tamayo’s superstitious predisposition. The way she had said that, it was like a chill was running down her spine at the time, like there was a supernatural quality to her words. It’s as if she believed, still believes, that there is some kind of transcendental force that determines all of our potential…

She then looked directly at me, into my eyes. Her voice was so sharp and tense that it could cut through the air like a reaper or sickle. It was the very first time she took something akin to a cross or displeased tone with me.

“Yushiro… this is what happens when you get careless. Hunt too many humans in a short span of time, and you become the hunted.”

It felt like her words lingered in the space between us, and my mind fixated on what I had just seen. Tamayo had told me numerous times of the strength and tenacity of the Demon Hunters, of their expert training in martial arts, of their cunning and unrelenting cruelty. But to see all of it for myself was another thing entirely, for that innate fear which all our kind possesses sharply manifested a sharp pain in my very spine. I even felt like I wanted to throw up.

That swordsman showed such brutal efficiency in his movements and sword forms that he felled the intruder within a fraction of the time we had all spent fighting him. I began to think that Tamayo’s words about their breathing techniques matching their strength to ours was, if anything, underselling the truth. Though perhaps, as Tamayo’s ever-sagely words seemed to suggest, he was somehow a chosen warrior. Maybe he was a cut above the rest.

Which brought me the terrifying presumption that others like him existed. Worse still, those even more powerful than him existed. I increasingly had the feeling that, had Tamayo and I come face-to-face with one of these hunters, we would easily be killed. The prospect of a hunter coming out of nowhere and into our small hiding place to take our heads was a very real one at the time, our only hope was to be as quiet as possible. Even though I never sensed any presences coming out way, I could barely function.

Tamayo brought me out of my half-terrified stupor by asking me a question.

“Where is Tokikawa?”

In that moment, she focused me by giving me a task. I sifted through all of my paper eyes around the area, incidentally finding no trace of the hunter we had just encountered, my heartbeat growing increasingly erratic the longer I couldn’t find him. Not by his lab, not in any of the numerous dark alleyways, not on any of the main streets, nowhere. I was beginning to think that he had been killed.

But then, through one of the talismans I had placed further along the river, I saw Tokikawa emerge from the water and climb up over the riverbank. Soaked in water, he seemed to have disposed of his coat and jacket, so he only wore his shirt and tie on his upper torso. He crawled out like some spineless sea-thing, and took in his mouth a random stray cat that just happened to be passing by. It screamed and gargled as he clamped down on its side with his teeth and sucked its blood, standing in place with the cat still in his mouth. As I mentioned before, vampires are capable of attaining small sustenance from devouring the blood of petty animals such as rodents and small mammals, so Tokikawa was most likely trying to rejuvenate himself after expending a lot of energy in the battle. Granted, it wouldn’t have been much, but it’s not like there were any humans around.

Sucking the last of its available blood, the cat’s carcass fell limply from his mouth and to his feet. His head and eyes darted around wildly, clearly looking out for something or someone. Like before, he appeared to be an embodiment of fear – his subtle movements so twitchy and hectic that it was like unbridled terror coursed through his body.

“I see him,” I said, “he’s coming out of the river.”

Tamayo nodded, and I continued to observe him through my paper eyes. He began to run in the direction of his lab, sticking as much as he could to the shadows. Most definitely, he aimed to get back as fast as possible and remain utterly incognito. Unfortunately, I soon noticed a curious flicker as he ran past one of the random alleyways. Through my paper eye, I saw someone emerge. This time it was a woman, but the general aura she gave made me almost fall to my knees as she began to pursue Tokikawa.

I was about to shout, but I hushed myself at the last minute. “Tamayo, he’s being followed.”

“… What?” Her face went still, she clearly had problems comprehending what I had just said.

A second hunter! That very thought filled me with dread, for who knew how many more there could have been skulking in the shadows. It made the prospect of emerging from our hiding place even more treacherous, not to mention that I still couldn’t locate the first hunter.

The woman herself was small, smaller than Tamayo even. She wore a light-pink kimono and didn’t carry any of the telltale signs of a warrior that had engaged in countless battles, but she clearly wore something resembling a sword on her hip, unlike her accomplice, who carried his blade in a bag. What the piece was, I couldn’t say at the time. All I knew was that it didn’t resemble a Japanese katana. In fact, it seemed to be two smaller sheathes bunched together, the equivalent would be a Japanese warrior carrying two kodachi or wakizashi.

But she was following and keeping pace with him. However, she was so quiet and her presence was so muted that Tokikawa didn’t even notice. Maybe he was distracted by other thoughts, but he was being followed and he didn’t even know it. But I knew. And I knew what that meant. He would be cornered easily, he would be attacked by surprise, and if the strength of the previous hunter was anything to go by… then he was in unbelievable danger.

I looked to Tamayo, we were both still hiding very desperately in that dank, dark little corner of the city. We almost spoke in whispers.

“Should we… should we help him?” I asked, being quite aware what the answer would probably be.

Tamayo didn’t say anything for a few seconds, until she shook her head and answered me.

“No. We have to look out for ourselves. He’ll just have to fend for himself. That’s just… the way things are for our kind.”

I completely understood her rationale; I even thought it wise. There was no reason for us to risk our own lives for his sake. As far as we were concerned, he was practically a dead man walking. Such a disaster even a single hunter pursuing a vampire was, we both knew he would probably die soon. But I do wonder what Tamayo was thinking in that moment when she verbally condemned Tokikawa to his fate. Relief, vindication, satisfaction, maybe the faintest bit of regret? After all, in spite of all the darkness of their shared past, he was still the only other person she had properly known for hundreds of years. Even the most rotten of long-term connections can be hard to let go of.

So I did nothing but watch on through my eyes as they navigated the streets, as Tokikawa ran with all the fury and fervor of the sea-bound wind, and how this female hunter stalked him so effortlessly and silently. They soon both emerged into the street which housed his lab; through the talisman on the opposite side of the street, I saw Tokikawa jump over the wall  surrounding the compound and rush through the front door, still completely unaware that he was being followed.

The female hunter didn’t follow him inside, against my expectations. She simply stood outside and inspected the premises for a few moments, before jumping high in the air. It was difficult to see, but she then reached into the fold of her kimono in midair and took something out. In her hand was some kind of long, rectangular package, it was somewhat bulky yet compact enough to fit in her kimono.

And as soon as she took it out, she threw it through one of the glass windows at the front of the building. As the glass crashed and smashed, she landed back on the ground – although, it might be more accurate to say she floated back down, with the grace of a bird or butterfly.

I didn’t even have time to wonder what she had done or why, because about four seconds after she threw the projectile, a loud bang came from the area where she had thrown it. And a few seconds after that, the entire lab was set ablaze. The building violently exploded with the force of what felt like a military-grade explosives device. So great was the force of the explosion, that the paper eye I had placed on the opposite side was knocked from its place, and so I lost my vision of the scene. My immediate bearings returned to me and I could see Tamayo look upwards – she most likely heard the explosion from where we were in that alley. I looked in the direction she was and could start to see smoke, while the starless sky was struck with a streak of amber.

“Yushiro… what was that?”

In all honesty, I was almost humored by what I had just seen – so bizarre and had the spectacle had been, I can’t find another way to describe it. That device was a bomb, or otherwise some kind of explosive. Considering the size of the package, I don’t believe the device by itself would have been enough to destroy the entire lab and reduce it to a burning ruin. Most likely, the initial explosion must have begun a chain reaction with the myriad of flammable and explosive chemicals kept in Tokikawa’s lab, thereby resulting in the massive destruction I just described.

Firstly, it’s quite amazing that the Demon Hunters are outfitted with such ordnance. Maybe it was always inevitable that they would incorporate modern technologies, but many vampires saw them first and foremost as swordsmen. Secondly – did the hunter know this would happen? Was the massive explosion an unintended side effect or the end goal? I couldn’t decide what was worse, that she had willingly or unwillingly caused such destruction and put her own life at risk in the process. This is the true tenacity of the Demon Hunters, they will stop at absolutely nothing to achieve their goals.

I hurriedly tried to explain to Tamayo what had happened, that Tokikawa had been pursued to his lab and that the hunter had destroyed it with an explosive. She looked stupefied, bewildered at my explanation. Even I had trouble comprehending what was coming out of my mouth.

She asked me what else was happening. I furrowed my brow, my talisman had been knocked off its vantage point and I couldn’t see anything clearly. However, I noticed that a nearby raven was trying to flee the scene, so I hijacked its mind and forced it to turn around – it was hesitant, but my own mind won out and I was able to land it far enough away so that it wasn’t in any immediate danger. With the raven perched safely atop one of the adjacent roofs, I was able to peer down at the unfolding chaos.

That section of the district had no housing, so there was a lack of people out on the street wandering about or fleeing from the chaos. I knew that it wouldn’t last and that both the residents of the city and emergency services would be drawn to the scene soon enough. All that stood where Tokikawa’s lab used to be was but a blazing wreck, the entire structure of the building had utterly collapsed into a pile of bent steel and broken concrete – chunks of the wall around lab had been destroyed by random bits of debris. The fire was beginning to spread through the compound, but it was mostly contained. Though I was witnessing this all through the sight of a raven, I could feel the oppressive heat and heavy, ashy air caused by the fire. The bird itself seemed to be acting on its own instincts and attempted to flee the area, it would struggle to move its limbs and cawed out of fright, but my mental sway kept it in place.

There was no sign of the hunter, neither the woman nor the man with one arm. Pieces of the flaming rubble soon began to shift, until a great pile of it was flung and scattered in all directions. Bits of burning wood and concrete were strewn across the compound. A figure cloaked in flame emerged from the middle of the wreckage and I realized it was Tokikawa.

“He’s alive,” I whispered, “Tokikawa’s alive.”

“He’s still alive?”

But I observed him closer and almost gagged in horror at what I saw. Most of Tokikawa’s clothes had been burned off except for the top of his pants. HIs flesh was  searing and scorched by flame, with some parts seeming to be dripping and melting off. Half of his torso, his face and the front of his right arm had all been burnt so severely that damaged tissue and bone from beneath the skin was visible. His lips had been completely seared off, so I could see his chattering and clenched teeth. His left eye was completely gone, as was a massive chunk of flesh, face and bone on that part of his head. The claws of his right hand were dug deeply into the side of his skull, he most likely realized what was happening and did this so his head would remain attached to his body after the explosion. His left forearm had been violently ripped off and nothing but a flaming stump remained. I could see his body slowly and agonizingly regenerate itself from its wounds in real time.

“He’s badly wounded.” I said.

I knew beyond a shadow of a doubt then that he was already dead. Even though the explosion hadn’t killed him, he would’ve easily been picked off by the Demon Hunters. He had accumulated so much damage on top of the energy he expended in order to fight off that intruder, that the prospect of him defeating a hunter seemed basically impossible.

He looked wildly around him as the burns across his body healed, as charred, dead flesh morphed slowly back to normal, and his left arm started to grow back even. I lack the vocabulary to adequately describe the process of regeneration, but it was like his skin was pushing itself up and covering the parts of his body that were damaged. He removed his claw from the side of his skull as his left arm finished regrowing itself, and then he flexed his hands like he was trying to verify he still had sensation in them. Just as the flesh on the left side of his head was beginning to fully regenerate, and his face was starting to take its general shape again, he looked straight out in front of him and flinched.

Because the hunter that had caused the explosion dashed through one of the openings caused by the debris and lunged towards him with both of her swords drawn. Before he had time to react, she brought her swords to his chest and performed six uniform thrusts around his heart before flipping backwards. He didn’t even have time to react.

I was just as confused as presumably he was by what had just happened; she did not attempt to slash any of his body parts off, let alone aim for his neck. When she landed, I saw in full view the blades she was carrying: Though they were also black, they did not have the design of any kind of Japanese sword I had ever seen. They were long, thin and slender, seemingly possessing little in the way of any sort of cutting edge. Though small and feint, on the length of each blade was the same ‘demon-slaughterer’ engraving as the sword of the one-armed hunter. The hilts and guards were clearly not of Asian make in any sense, instead carrying the sensibilities of a more Western kind. I discovered later on that this hunter was in fact wielding two swords known as rapiers, a kind of Spanish thrusting sword. Though many possess a cutting edge, they are primarily thrusting weapons.

A Demon Hunter using a thrusting weapon seems preposterous, and two of them at that, which was indeed what I thought at the time. It was folly to not even attempt to cut the neck. Even the hunter who killed the intruder, that one-armed prodigy, went for the neck as soon as he could. While it is true that piercing attacks can render the regeneration of our internal organs more difficult, it is generally a good idea to slash the neck as soon as the opportunity presents itself.

My confusion was addressed quite swiftly however, because Tokikawa grasped the area where her swords had pierced him six times and started to violently cough up blood. He fell to his knee as he retched, spewing up so much blood that it would be enough to kill an ordinary human.

I didn’t really want to acknowledge the obvious, but the violent nature of his reaction instilled in me a very simple fact. Something so basic yet terrifying.

“He’s been poisoned.” I said.

Tamayo immediatel told me that it was impossible, because poison does not work on vampires.

Well, she could deny it all she wanted, but it is what I saw with my own eyes (or rather, the raven’s). Since that time, I have managed to convince Tamayo about what I saw and she has come around to it… I think she denied it at first due to an inability to process what was happening, likely born out of fear. But nothing could change the fact that the Demon Hunters had ostensibly developed a poison that specifically works on vampires.

In other words: They had found a way to kill us without cutting off our heads!

Of course, I still have many questions about this, questions I cannot answer as I have not encountered any Demon Hunters since that time, as evidenced by my ability to produce these writings: Was this young woman some kind of field tester? Had she developed it herself? Had she developed the poison as a means to circumvent her small frame, thus her relative lack of strength? Was she an expert pharmacist, botanist, chemist? What was the poison made from? Is that why she used such slender weapons in favour of a wide-bladed sword?

The implications are terrifying. The other hunter did not use poison, but I find it perfectly believable that the Demon Hunters have since issued poison to other swordsmen, or have devised even better ways of killing us. Vampires cannot so easily share information of this nature, so we are all left in the dark as they devise new means of exterminating us. We only discover these new methods when it is far too late, it seems.

As was the case with Tokikawa. The skin on his face began to crumble and melt, and he let out a terrible high-pitched cry like he was choking on a mixture of acid and his own blood. It sounded like he couldn’t even breathe. If I had to guess, the poison had been injected into the arteries connected to his heart, so his circulatory system was spreading it to his organs extremely quickly. As for what the poison actually did… I can only guess, but perhaps it was dissolving his innards.

The woman dashed in and aimed the tip of one of her swords at his eye, and looked as dispassionate as the other hunter had when he killed the foreigner. But as the tip of her sword was just an inch away from his eye, Tokikawa managed to swat it away and out of her grip with his arm as the other clutched the area around his heart. The hunter backflipped away and observed Tokikawa quickly rising to his feet and looking straight at her. Blood poured out of his mouth while his face crackled and oozed an angry, poisonous red.

Then he hastily raised both his arms – momentarily unclutching his chest – and shot out a volley of black brambles from them. I couldn’t count exactly, but there appeared to be about ten thick wires per arm, all protruding from random areas across the surface. They shot out with great speed as before, but they lacked in precision, for the hunter effortlessly dodged most of them and parried the ones that followed her trajectory. Tokikawa then stumbled, he legitimately almost fell over. It was an unbelievably sorry sight, I disliked him intensely but could not fathom the agony he underwent at the time. He had to focus on regenerating his wounds, defending himself from this threat and the poison that was rapidly dissolving his body.

The hunter jumped up and towards him again, descending to launch the other blade through his skull. She was trying to finish him off quickly. Seeing death right in front of him, Tokikawa quickly drew the brambles back into his skin, crossed his forearms together and held them up to shield himself. The woman’s rapier pierced the skin of his arms, but met resistance and stopped just shy of his forehead. Her shock (she must not have expected him to be able to move so rapidly in response to such swift movements) provided him with the opportunity to shoot out a small bundle of brambles from his hand and slash her across her face the very instant she tried to move away from him – definitely quite a shallow cut, but enough for her to fall to her knee after her backflip away from him. She covered her face and stayed in place, the other sword she had dropped was still a distance away and she was effectively disarmed.

This told me that this hunter was particularly inexperienced, maybe that explained the lack of scars and visible damage on her features in comparison to the other hunter. It was entirely possible that this was her first field operation, and that the man we had seen earlier was her superior. With that being said, that someone potentially no better than a novice was able to do such a magnitude of damage to one of us can only be described as demoralizing.

Tokikawa immediately parted his arms so that one slid off the tip of the sword, which he then grabbed and yanked out of his arm before throwing it aside. As it clinked on the floor, Tokikawa didn’t even try to finish off the hunter that he had caught with a lucky strike. Instead, he actually tried to pathetically limp past her, blood running from his mouth and his eyeballs reddening and bulging due to the effects of the poison. As he limped away, he nearly tripped over himself again and he panted and heaved like he was a human who had been forced to run a hundred miles.

And then I watched as the one-armed hunter leapt down, seemingly from nowhere, onto the street from behind the very building my raven was perched on. As the woman got up and covered the gash cross her cheek and upper lip, the one-armed swordsman brandished his katana and rushed through the wall and into the compound. Most likely, he had heard and seen the explosion from his position in the city and rushed over as soon as he could to investigate. The fact no other hunters that convened on the location pointed to them being the only two in the city at that time.

It was definitely over. If Tokikawa couldn’t even properly defend himself against a inexperienced swordsman much smaller than him, he had no chance against him. As was proven when he immediately cut off his arms and kicked him back, sending him tumbling to the ground.

Tokikawa fell to the ground with a thud and a grunt, one last great spurt of blood left his mouth as his left eye fell out of its socket. He whimpered and tried to crawl away, reaching the stumps of his arms out to something imaginary and his remaining eye possessing a curious glimmer, like he was staring out to something that wasn’t there… as if he was hallucinating something. Or somebody. Tamayo?

It didn’t matter, because the one-armed hunter unceremoniously brought his life to an end by raising his sword and descending it down on his neck – almost resembling one of those old Shogunate-era sword testers. And with that, Tokikawa was no more, his head rolled faintly to the side as his body spasmed before finally releasing all of its energy. And then it was still.

I watched all of this, every moment. I had seen it with my eyes, how he had been killed. I mercifully freed the raven from my control and looked at Tamayo, who stared at me with expectation. I hadn’t noticed it until that point, but she had actually put her hand on my chest.

“Tokikawa’s dead.”

Tamayo raised her eyebrow and her lip twitched from shock, before she simply frowned and shook her head.

“So, that’s how it ended for him,” she said, “after all this time. Dying alone sure is pathetic.”

Her words took me aback at the time, more so than anything else she had ever said to me. I perceived a whirlwind of competing emotions in her at the time: Anger, fear, resentment, even a tinge of regret and sadness. It was as I suspected.

What she said stayed with me as I placed concealed talismans over both of our bodies, as I slowly and silently picked her up in the same bridal-carry style as before, as I took the both of us home in a journey that lasted far longer than it would have normally. It stayed with me as I heard the scurrying and activities of the local fire brigade dousing the flames of the lab, as I heard the random panicking of cityfolk awoken by all the commotion. It stayed with me as the pounding of our hearts rose in unison at the mere prospect that a Demon Hunter could drop down from up high and take our heads at any moment. It stayed with me as I sheepishly opened the door of our clinic and we tiptoed upstairs to the bedroom quieter than mice.

Neither of us slept that night, instead we chose to hover close to the window, both of us slightly paranoid that we were somehow followed back her by the two hunters. The atmosphere was so tense and silent that noises you usually wouldn’t hear or register hearing came through starkly, like your own breathing or the sound your throat makes when you swallow. We didn’t talk either, not that we had anything in specific to say to each other.

But what she said stayed with me during that time as well. I couldn’t stop thinking about it, not even as the sun rose and gave way to a brand new day, as we went back to our seemingly normal lives, as I went comfortably back into the role of Tamayo’s loyal assistant. I just couldn’t stop thinking about it.

And I couldn’t stop thinking about it, because even back then I knew she had just revealed something important about herself.

Notes:

So yeah, he’s dead. His death was what I alluded to with the major character death archive warning… not that I imagine many people would miss him, but it still applied. I actually tried my best to put in a lot of foreshadowing for his death: Yushiro always refers to him in the past tense, his line about ‘dying in a fire’, the mention of his lab filled with flammable/explosive chemicals, and so on. So congratulations if you were able to figure it out, but it might have been way too obvious...

When I was initially planning this story, the very first draft actually had Yushiro and Tamayo being killed by the vampire hunters. This became impossible and was discarded once it became a perspective piece from Yushiro’s POV. Instead, I decided that Tokikawa/Muzan would be the one to die, so the story was built to lead up to that moment. I probably don’t even need to mention this, but the basis of this chapter is inspired by Muzan getting blown up by Kagaya Ubuyashiki in KnY, partly because that is one of my favorite moments in the entire series (seriously it’s so funny but awesome lmao), but also I kind of figured Muzan just really needs to be blown up in every continuity/universe he appears in. Of course, it’s far more brutal and lethal in this context due to Tokikawa’s weaker nature.

The one-armed vampire hunter (I believe his name is meant to be Nagare, but he is never named in the oneshot itself) is taken pretty much wholesale from the original. The only difference is that the missing arm has been swapped from his right to his left, this is actually something of a subtle nod or recognition to Tanjiro, who lost functionality in his left arm in KnY. You can see how the character acts as the progenitor or prototype to not only Giyu, but also to a lesser extent Yoriichi. I think he’s a really fun character and it’s cool that he only has a single line of dialogue in the whole oneshot.

The second hunter was a bit more difficult. At first, I wanted this person to be modelled on another of the oneshot characters, like one of the Monjushiro brothers or Zigzag, but I figured that the most fun thing to do would be to try and do a counterpart to Shinobu. Her clothing as depicted in the illustration is actually based on Kanao’s design during final selection, it was the only sort of appearance I thought would work for her in that context. Her weapons being rapiers comes from the slender nature of her katana in KnY which lacks any significant cutting edge. Also, to be honest, I just thought the idea of a vampire hunter using western-style swords in this context was interesting.

Also: I’m aware that the scenario depicted here probably isn’t terribly realistic. Please just suspend your disbelief!