by K.A. Rose
Gensomaden Saiyuki characters et cetera © and ™ Kazuya Minekura, ENIX and TV Tokyo, 1997. Used without permission, for nonprofit fan appreciation.
Hazel/Sanzo. This was an informal piece posted exclusively to livejournal in January 2005. It was subsequently reposted on Echoes from the West and karose.com at the request of various parties.
For some odd reason, it slipped into first person and refused to get out of it. Strange. I haven't done first-person willingly since I was about 12, and I never professed much skill at it even then. On top of that, I've never written a vampire fic that wasn't funny. First time for everything, though, I suppose.
Proper warnings: this fanfic is rated T:VS, meaning it is rated Teen (content suitable for ages 14 and up) for violence and sexual content. Plus squickiness because, so sorry, I'm not much of a fan of vampirism really. Even if this plotbunny's been having me reconsider.
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"Past these woods an evil lies. Fresh to these lands, in residence at the old palace of Chishiomaoh of the Mist. A creature of night.
"Please. We implore you. Defeat this demon."
I am not your dragonslayer.
I am not your runner or your savior. I do nothing but on my own regard. Your problems are not my concern. I do not care for your dead.
I come only on my own intentions. Intuition, some instinct, dark sense that goes beyond pure aural power. It is not my training that leads me here; it is only a natural gravity. Drawing force that pulls to its moon-soaked grounds, the dark halls and towers. Sick pale white, pallid blue, still and stale air.
Told the others to wait at the gates. This creature did not have henchmen. What actors he held in his arsenal were vermin, plague-carriers, rodents and insects that made the walls alive with their movement. But here in deepest quarters the castle bears nothing but its founding stones. Ancient carvings worn away with passage line the path.
This was a temple to the night-demons before this creature, and would be forever after. Something holds it that is not natural to the soil, not native to the winds. Dark and swarming to the mind's eye even without a sharp focus of meditation. Power coils here, as a snake might coil, wrapping sharp ley lines around its center. This hall of the Blood-King that had come from nowhere and seized the old throne.
I should not be involving myself. I do not involve myself but for a need for confirmation. Rumors there was no ready answer to, whose solution I had to seek.
He had left with the summer sun and all word after had been the quality of hearsay. The sort of words that could not readily be believed, first for the sheer illogic and then for all else that lay inconsistent. It was the sort of thing he could never fall prey to, shouldn't fall prey to. I wouldn't let him fall prey to.
And yet there it was.
He lay upon the lid of his coffin, in classic sinning mockery of the paintings of princesses lying in wait for appropriate suitors. Under the low candlelight his skin was a dying yellow, the color of his gloves that still held on laced fingers, over a chest that had no need to rise and fall with breath. His eyes were closed, a solid finality to the look never seen upon any but the freshly dead of a battlefield.
No movement as I kneel beside his casket, watch for signs of life that aren't there on an interminably frozen face. So close, the tinge of candle light hasn't the same effect and it becomes clear his skin is as white as his garments, as the white gloves motionless clasped over his chest.
The pendant does not gleam around his neck. There is no pendant. The pendant was lost.
A lot is lost.
Touch of lips with a kiss that comes unwarranted, but his flesh is cold as the stone underneath us, and doesn't respond to the embrace.
Something happens then, something that explains why I'd ordered the others to stay behind. The uncontrollable tug and wash of burning in the lungs that sends me pushing forward, touch a hand to a stiff shoulder when touch itself was so long forbidden. Press into a kiss that isn't met and won't be met and not able to care. Not until lips scrape against sharp teeth and excite the thing that lurks.
And then it comes alive, the creature under me, moving into a familiar expression and warming to this touch it used to know. Coaxing deeper, pulling in, a silent beg to be restored with the heat that it's lost. Eyelashes brush against a cheek. His body moves, slides and twists with this welcome return to sensation, the thing that I awoke in him, in the summer before our roads diverged.
It can only be gratitude on his face. The faint smile hardly there, the weak eyes that showed it better. He brushes a cheek with his, like an animal nuzzling. Wraps hand around mine.
It is a tight grip. He's strong, for as small as he appears. But stronger now, for what lives where a human once did. Holds fast because it knows, somehow, on the same instinct that led me to this room, that if released my hand will go to the stake secreted in the fold of a sleeve.
Soft lips graze a jawline, trail down to the side of the throat. Nose nudges down the line of the leather, for mouth to suckle the softer skin there. An old pattern. An indiscretion I'd allowed him, to let him have one pleasurable sight no other would be allowed to see. The red marks that would burn along the neck for days as a reminder, that would feed an addiction to lead me back to his room when all rationality said to stop.
It stings sharp now when he releases, letting the pale air hit it and its darkening skin. But here the pause in reprieve is shorter than it was. And it isn't lips that brush tendered flesh.
I can't think. I can't speak. Everything locks.
If I said no, he would withdraw. His sense of self remains. He knows and recognizes what I am, who I am, what I mean, but the breath is dead and dormant. Not even a whisper comes to aid a protest that isn't there.
I don't know why this is so.
Hard, dull, numbed pain. No pain. Sweet, soft pain. Cooling, soothing anesthesia as the heat leaves and vision grays around the edges.
I feel his hand.
Darkness.
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finished at: 21:07, 27 January 2005