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Doctor Saotome,
First off, thank you for taking care of my stitches! I’ve been doing everything you told me. I remember all the signs of infection too. I don’t pick at the steri-strips, and I’m waiting for them to fall off on their own. Sorry to bother you, I know how busy you must be, but I haven’t heard from Mika since he’s been in your care. Is his illness getting any better? He was pretty shaken up when I took him there, but I had hoped he’d be well enough to write by now. I’m worried something happened to him. Something he doesn’t want me to know about. He has a bad habit of shouldering all his burdens alone. I won’t ask for all the details, but can you spare a few words on how he’s doing?
Thanks,
Hyakuya Yuuichirou
Yoichi read the letter two, three times, digesting its every word, before feeding it to the gas flame on his stove. Reduced to a corner inches from his fingertip, the sudsy slush in his sink became its final resting place. His rice porridge’s steam had long-since dissipated. The remains of what provided its life inherited a new, destructive purpose. Like all his other letters, he couldn’t answer. To respond would betray the one who captured his heart.
And so, he trapped the answer within. As he garnished his dish, he spilled his secret to no one:
‘Dear Hyakuya…’
He unfastened a jar of pickled plums and doused one in pepper.
‘I wish I could offer a more ceremonious introduction, but this is all I can give. Your request isn’t one I can fulfill. Not because of some Hippocratic oath. In my battle against ethics, I’ve taken a hazardous number of wins. It’s because the person you’re asking about no longer exists.’
His taste test burned the side of his tongue, but such pain attested to his existence. The metallic zing of his spoon, wafts of burnt paper, the hum of his song: every sensation ought to be cherished.
So long as it nourished his flesh and blood, all food had equal value.
‘The childhood friend you met in an orphanage,’ he continued, ‘with whom you shared the tragedy of becoming livestock, the emptiness of losing your family, and a desire burning enough to join the resistance… no one with that story lives here.’
A gleaming tray cradled his home-cooked meal, and he left no corner untouched with plastic wrap.
But he wouldn’t eat it. No one would.
‘Please forgive me for indulging in this lie. I would’ve continued if you hadn’t visited me. The moment I saw you, I understood the infatuation. The undying love and loyalty. His overwhelming terror should you discover what we’ve done. I wanted you to trust me, too. To like me. More disgustingly, desire me. When I saw the hurt in your eyes, and I realized how much I contributed to that hurt, that was my breaking point.’
He abandoned the kitchen for a looming staircase. Did he make his guest nervous? The sounds of cooking couldn’t have escaped those keen ears of his.
‘The first time you sent him a letter, I spent the whole day crossing a line I shouldn’t have.’
They didn’t enter each other’s worlds with that intention. Yoichi was his physician, he a patient (the flimsiness of those labels notwithstanding).
Yet their bodies intertwined.
‘I couldn’t help it. He was in so much pain. He searched out for someone, and I convinced him it was all right to run away. I’m to blame for this. Because of me, Hyakuya Mikaela doesn’t exist anymore.’
Amidst the second-story corridor basking in sunlight was a chamber aglow with the artificiality of a lamp.
‘The second time he received your letter, he didn’t break down. Your words no longer tormented him. He just placed them on the nightstand as if he waited to meet their recipient. Like they had nothing to do with him.’
He didn’t give himself a new name, nor did he assume a different voice. A shift in identity was an identity all the same.
He simply changed from someone to no one.
The dreariness of a ghost town plagued the hall. Patients were scarce since he transferred to the village of Himeshima. Vampire attacks were such a rarity they bordered on myth, so much so Mikaela’s must have been a calculated remnant of war. Stories of force-feedings, to turn the enemy into what it despised most and kill them soon afterward, brought a dimension of sorrow to the rain washing vampire ash off the battlefield.
‘I could never say what’s tormenting him. The secret he holds from you is one he holds from himself.’
To Mikaela, he had an illness, one that justified a life of self-exile. Besides the occasional trip to the study, Mikaela never stepped one foot out of his room. Once, he caught him walking to the restroom for reasons that eluded him, but he found the mirror’s shattered remains on the counter. He’d spent that night extracting the glass Mikaela didn’t notice from his feet.
‘Paleness, lack of appetite, little sleep… those symptoms aren’t out of the ordinary per se.’
A three-tap knock in his familiar style earned him a meek, “Come in.”
‘But anemia doesn’t cause blood cravings.’
The moment he entered, Mikaela clutched his mouth and nose.
He must’ve smelled his blood, but the rice porridge in Yoichi’s hands was a rather convenient scapegoat.
“What is that…? It’s making me nauseous.”
His pseudo-irritant traveled to the bookshelf. “I had to take a late lunch today. I’ll eat once we finish up.”
“… All right.”
He expunged the fear of consumption in his exhale, and his posture deflated.
Yoichi’s eyes swept across the room. Barricaded with a tarp, the sunlight couldn’t prick and prod his skin, his very essence of being. To rearrange his sleeping quarters would betray the strength his disease had ‘taken.’ He’d swept the shards of a broken mirror beneath the bed for the same reason. For the past few days, he assumed the life of a bedridden individual.
Reclined against the pillows, he appeared so weak and delicate, as though a single touch would break him. The hair atop his scalp was a frightening white, his pallor ghostly.
Vampirism gave him the perfect mask.
In reality, he was more powerful than he’d ever been. More beautiful than he ever was.
‘Please understand. To fight side-by-side in the war, you must’ve seen it all first-hand, too. The atrocities of bloodsuckers. Surrounded by your oaths to make them suffer, to wipe the mistake of their existence off the earth, what a devastating circumstance he’s found himself in!’
Mikaela met his gaze and, with a slow smile, reaffirmed his impending relief.
“May I…” He briefly bowed his head. “Will I have another transfusion today?”
‘Because he’s not Mikaela, it’s okay not to know you. Because he’s not Mikaela, it’s okay to rely on me. Part of me, the inner-me I never liked to talk about, accepted these lies because they made me happy.’
Yoichi pulled up a chair beside him. The way Mikaela leaned into his touch tingled his palm and drove him mad.
‘But it’s wrong to let Mikaela rot away just because I’ve fallen for who he isn’t. I’m sorry I never admitted that until now.’
There were many people to whom he owed an apology since he indulged in this game: the blood bank, who shipped a supply to an undeserving physician, the donors of said blood who imagined the people they’d save, the refrigerator that stored it, even the blood bag itself, whose biocompatibility worked hard to diffuse the needed gases to permit cell preservation.
How useless. It wouldn’t rescue the living.
‘Our ritual may seem disgusting to an outsider. But please. I cannot tell you how cleansing it is to vent my sins.’
“Name?”
“Saotome Yoichi.”
“Date of birth?”
“November 23rd, 1996.”
‘He rejected his name as if his body developed an allergy. Since then, I replaced his identification questions with my own.’
As the thermometer slipped under Mikaela’s tongue, he caressed his shoulder without a word.
‘A full vampire’s body is in a suspended state of algor mortis. For one in a partial state, however, the death chill has yet to complete. He’s halfway to room temperature.’
Before Mikaela could steal a glimpse of the results, it made a hasty return to his pocket.
‘We never talk during this. He asks nothing. I inform him of nothing.’
Upon offering his inner elbow, his lips welcomed it before his first and second fingertips.
‘I press firmly on the arteries and never feel a pulse. I don’t wait until the clock’s second hand is on twelve, but I can’t help but feel I’m not holding up my end of the bargain if I don’t count for 60 seconds.’
His blood pressure device was old, a contraption of mercury, and he always skipped the respiration rate. One glance at Mikaela’s chest confirmed it didn’t rise and fall. The longer Yoichi stared, the more he’d draw attention to its death-like stillness, and without mercy, he’d gouge at his deepest wound.
Only the truth was dead here.
‘It may seem unbearable to you, but there was safety in silence. We communicated with our bodies because our words were too dangerous.’
Pretense complete, his precious blood bag waited long enough. Mikaela inched forward, a glimmer of hope nestled in his eye, as it found its home next to a saline bag.
‘From there is the usual. I spike bags. Tubes are primed, clamped, and unclamped when necessary. They connect to an IV that his skin heals around at once. My hospital used a 20 gauge, and one must never forget to transfuse through a filter. Clots and other foreign materials may live in the sample. All this is a reflex to me now, a result of following the rules. The vile side of me enjoyed playing the part.’
Before, Mikaela attempted to withhold the fleeting ecstasy that the rush of hemoglobin granted him. His mouth trembled; the occasional moan escaped. He’d conflate this lust for blood, in theory, with a lust for Yoichi and goaded him toward his embrace, his lips.
Whether he truly felt love was a question too dreadful to investigate.
But the blissful relief that once bathed his body devolved to a trickle. It drip-fed enough of what he desired to inflame him with loss.
‘The first 15 minutes always tortured him, but there’s no skipping the procedure. I must check for adverse reactions. It’d be bad if he were incompatible. Sorry. Even in my head, I can’t relinquish the role.’
When everything had emptied into his system, Yoichi, choosing his next words with care, flushed the remaining hemoglobin out the tubing and withdrew his administration set.
“I… It still hurts, Yoichi.”
‘But unlike me, his body couldn’t withstand our charade forever.’
He tried. He really did.
“I think I’m getting worse. It’s not helping as much.”
‘Which is why I had to end it.’
He’d never know the number of apologies Yoichi had to swallow before he spoke. If he hadn’t anchored his hands to his meal’s plastic wrap, they’d stray to Mikaela’s, squeeze them as he dropped to his knees and promised to rebuild the world that orbited his denial.
“It’s natural you don’t feel better. When was the last time you ate something?”
‘I’ll never forget his face for as long as I live. Have you seen it before?’
Mikaela waited for the correction, the apology, for Yoichi to cover his eyes again. When it didn’t come, and the tray moved closer, he couldn’t stop shaking his head, gasping for air he didn’t need.
‘That cold realization of imminent betrayal?’
“I’m not hungry…”
“You don’t have to eat the whole thing,” Yoichi continued. The tray rested at the foot of his bed when he couldn’t bring himself to cover his lap. Mikaela blocked his nose and mouth again, but it lacked the sincerity of when he first entered.
He could only pretend so much.
Forcing a smile, and after a few swallows, Mikaela whimpered, “N-No, it’s fine. I just need some rest—”
“One bite. Just one.”
‘I confess—whatever good that does—his right to bewilderment, anger, and heartbreak when I had supported his lie from the very beginning.’
“I don’t want it!” His grip on the sheets could have torn them. His voice held all his weight when his frame, his expression, everything else fell apart. “I’m asking you to take it away!”
Yoichi exited the room and grieved whatever false hope bloomed under the light of his absence .
‘I stored a special elixir after I first met you. So long as it remained downstairs, anything could escape Mikaela’s awareness.’
In the cellar stood another bifurcated system with an infusion warmer attached. Yoichi had cried when he set it up that morning. His inner elbow throbbed with each bend of his arm. Warmed to body temperature, its tubing emptied not into veins but a tall, ceramic mug.
‘I kept it here for the day I’d bring him back.’
For Yoichi to re-enter his room no longer held a promise of relief, of a passing game of being human. He existed as something he never wanted to be but should’ve been all along. The chamber renewed with his scent, and Mikaela groaned as if his stomach and throat twisted. The warmed blood placed in arm’s length, without warning, captivated his focus.
“When I gave you transfusions, they were never whole blood,” He began.
A single component wasn’t enough. Red blood cells, fresh plasma, platelets—vampires needed them all, and they needed them in their stomachs.
“They won’t help you like this will.”
“Please… stop.”
“I’m sorry I haven’t been a real doctor to you. But I’m fixing that. Right now—”
“Yoichi!”
Despite calling his name, his eyes dropped to his lap, and whatever Mikaela said left his mouth as an incomprehensible muttering. He had no rebuttal. His shock imploded, and all he could do was grab Yoichi’s hand.
‘He reached out to me. The one I fell in love with sought me out.’
“I thought…”
‘But if I indulged Mikaela now, you never would have seen him again.’
“You’re all I…”
‘He told me I was all he had. But that wasn’t true. Never was. Because Hyakuya Mikaela had you.’
“Help me…”
He beckoned him lower, holding his face as though it had the frailty of porcelain, like he knew he possessed the power to snap his neck with scant effort.
“You need to come back, Mikaela.”
‘And that’s when he realized it…’
“But… if I drink that, then I’ll—”
‘That I wasn’t interested in saving the human he wanted to be.’
“I won’t be forgiven… I’ll become a monster. Not even you will—!”
He repeated this mantra and held his body like a rotting boat.
‘Trying to help him forget everything wasn’t just a makeshift solution, I was erasing the person he had the right to be. Out of all the mistakes I’d made, this wasn’t one of them.’
Then, something within him snapped.
That is to say, Mikaela woke up.
He grabbed fistfuls of hair at the side of his head, and with a scream that collapsed into two weeks’ worth of sobs, the tears finally ruptured forth.
The moment his fingers dragged downward, however, and blood caked under his nails, Yoichi fled into action. He grabbed his wrists, and Mikaela brought his weight down with him.
“Get away from me! I hate you! I’ll never forgive you!”
That he held down a vampire was the mere consequence of his blood’s alluring scent. He tortured Mikaela with its presence, blinded and dizzied him, his teeth throbbed. The urge to destroy him flared alongside the despair for having felt it. To escape his own body took higher priority than the one straddling his movements from above.
“I don’t care! I’m staying here, and so are you!”
‘I didn’t want to throw him off the edge. His panic broke my heart. But I just couldn’t believe him.’
“You still exist! You haven’t forgotten! Those letters, they’re not for anyone else but you!”
“You’re wrong!”
“Then who are they for!?”
“I’m not…!”
‘I wanted to soothe him, to affirm the existence of the Mikaela right in front of me. What happened next wasn’t to prove a point.’
It was inevitable.
‘I didn’t do it on purpose. Mikaela shoved my arm in one direction. I forced it in the opposite.’
And his teeth sunk into his flesh. The moment they drew blood, his body relaxed so pitifully.
He fed off Yoichi like a child and sobbed between swallows.
‘I’ve seen bloodsuckers feeding on humans. They’d yank necks, bruise legs, and sometimes lop off limbs. They feast from their prey like any apex predator. You could’ve described those horrors better than me. But the precious vampire before me… I’d never seen one drink with such gentleness before.’
As time passed, that’s where they remained.
Mikaela met Yoichi’s gaze with scarlet eyes, guarded yet soft, and lowered him by his side on a bed not made for two.
He broke their silence with a shaky laugh.
“Whenever you’d become one with me, I never felt anything.”
‘His first words as a full vampire baffled me, but I wasn’t insulted. I’d opened his wound, and when the initial shock wore off, we started digging out the rot.’
“I didn’t mean to lie… I’m sorry.”
‘The more I considered his thought-process, the more it burned me with anger. Why did someone like him have to suffer alone? Just because of a conversion that wasn’t his fault? How many other victims spiraled into their expected roles because they thought their true ‘selves’ didn’t belong to them anymore?’
“I don’t want him to hate me,” He sighed, snuggling into Yoichi’s chest. “But the more I think about it, the more hopeless it gets.”
‘I dabbled in the books of an old psychologist acquaintance I’d lost. At one point, the author states to never reject the premise of what the distressed subject says.’
“I can’t live up to anyone’s trust in me…”
‘As much as possible, maintain an attitude of sympathy and understanding. But rephrase and shift their thoughts toward the future.’
“So I should just run—”
“That’s not true!”
‘But I’ve been disregarding the rules too long to care about them now.’
He warmed Mikaela’s face with his palms, fixed their gazes so he couldn’t look away.
“The only you I’ve ever known is a vampire! The only you I’ve ever loved is one!”
‘I refused to humor it. This Mikaela deserved to know the love of someone else.’
As he mulled over his words, Yoichi continued without restraint. Asserted his presence with no room for contradiction.
“I’m not asking you to accept this… but at the very least, you deserve that name!”
Mikaela tried a glance over his shoulder, to the letters stacked on the nightstand, and Yoichi returned him to his eyes.
“I’m not writing to Yuuichirou. Nor will I make you. Stay with me. We’ll take our time! And when you’re ready, you’ll come up with a good response.”
“And if he rejects me…?”
‘You wouldn’t abandon him, that much I knew. But he’d cast my assurance off as mere lip service. So, I promised only what I could. He’d drank my blood, and I hadn’t left.’
He raised a large piece of glass from the floor and showed Mikaela his reflection.
“Then you’ll still be Hyakuya Mikaela. Maybe not the one he knew, but the one who drank my blood is just as good.”
For a while, he studied his face. Those eyes… he desperately tried to look past them, past every vampire they reflected who’s ever hurt his family. Segregated he and Yuuichirou. Stole his personhood.
He hid his face in his hands.
After a prolonged silence, trembling and with fresh tears spilling down his cheeks, he asked:
“Yoichi…?”
“Yes?”
“Is it really okay for me to be here…?”
‘I understood what he saw, but it applied to him at its most superficial. Allow me to split hairs. They were a vampire’s eyes, but not the eyes of a vampire.’
The glass returned to the floor, and he pulled him into an embrace.
“What do you mean ‘is it?’ You don’t need my permission.”
‘I’m sure he’ll want to tell you everything himself. Perhaps he’ll recall it differently than me. I’ll let him spin his own tale, fill in his own blanks, contradict whatever lies I may have told, and supplement them with his own. And I’ll concede until the day you reunite. That’s why this, like all your other letters, cannot be answered.’