A lot of stuff happened, and then afterwards I forgot. No excuses, though. I'll be confining myself to the RP Section out of shame afterwards, but here's the first part of something I've owed some people for a long time.
*****
“I can’t believe this...”
Satsuki took a look at herself – she was happy to learn that being a vampire did not, in fact, mean that you couldn’t admire your reflection in the mirror. A cracked one. In the back of an alley.
She missed being home.
Living on the streets had taught Satsuki a lot of things. She was a lot stronger than she thought she was, for one. For another, it turned out that she didn’t, like, need blood. She wanted it, wanted it so terribly that sometimes she would hunch over clutching at her stomach, nails scraping the concrete. And in those times, sometimes she would fool herself into thinking that she did need it, and would begin to claw herself upright, limping, then walking, driven by a desire that was so deep inside of her it didn’t have a name...
But she didn’t need it. There were other things that she could do, things that Satsuki had been a little disappointed to find in Misaki, before she gave in because the alternative was that much worse. She brushed out her hair with her fingers, trying to get it just right; not having a brush was getting on her nerves, and bathing in the river was a little too much even for her. At least when someone took her up to their hotel room – there was only one big one in Misaki, and all the staff knew her name by now even though she pretended they weren’t judging her – there was always a shower there. It seemed to be expected of her, so she humoured them. She’d said she didn’t need it once. Only once.
He hadn’t liked that very much, and had pushed her, and she wasn’t human anymore, and had pushed back, and that had escalated into what her mom had called a ‘bad spiral, dear, so put your chin up and keep going’.
The moon was just starting to rise when Satsuki emerged from the back alley box that had become her home. Her cell phone plan had run out after her parents had assumed the worst. The man she was going to meet tonight had renewed it for her, so she couldn’t just go “Oh, Mr. Kaitou, I’m sorry, I’m not feeling too well..”
It wasn’t that the hunger ever went away, just that she got sick of it went back to sit in her box. Those fits only ever lasted an hour or so, the hunger driving her back out onto the main streets, forcing her to stop feeling sorry for herself. Normal teenagers could shove their whining up their asses, Satsuki thought, almost crushing her battered pink phone with a sudden rush of hate.
“None of them have to bother with this shit.”
In the back of her mind she knew that she’d changed, but she couldn’t exactly put her finger on how. Becoming a vampire hadn’t been too bad, after the initial terror and confusion – it was only going out at night. Not seeing her parents or friends. Not even seeing Shi-
She cut herself off. The Amakusa Hotel was right in front of her, and Satsuki had promised, promised herself that she wouldn’t get distracted. Kaitou was easiest because he never even bothered with all of the strutting around that others tried, or even buying her expensive gifts so they could pretend they weren’t struggling salarymen. The cell phone plan had only been so he could contact her, and probably so that she owed him. It had been a little foolish of her at the time, but Satsuki just didn’t care anymore.
She was almost at the front door now, and took a deep breath, eyes closed. One in and one out, then again, just to make sure she remembered to breathe in front of him. Everyone kept praising her, saying they’d never felt like that before; not breathing made things pretty easy when you got down to it. She’d never tried before she, well, died. Not even once.
Her feet treaded familiar paths, past the receptionist who pretended not to notice her, past the guests who assumed that she was on a class field trip, or if they did know, kept it to themselves. At least it was just her in the elevator this time, so she could check her reflection again in the polished doors. Satsuki frowned. A bit grungy, but it would do. She was saving up for new clothes, but every time she went to change out of her school uniform, something stopped her. It would be like finally admitting that times had changed, months after she’d been attacked. Months after this whole thing had started.
She knocked on 304, two quick raps that echoed in the Western-styled hall. The door opened a minute later, revealing Mr. Kaitou, and her nose wrinkled. He still wore a suit, different from last time, but the tall man she’d grown used to seeing every week wasn’t his usual self. There was a bit of stubble on his chin, and a bottle of Yamazaki on the table nearby. A fourth of it was already gone. The corner of her mouth twitching down, Satsuki entered the room at his gesture. Unlike the rest of her clients, he didn’t talk very much, which was fine with her.
She started to hum as she walked into the middle of the room. It looked like always, apart from the bottle – desk, bed in the center, TV that was never turned on, and Satsuki took a deep breath, more to make sure she was still doing it than anything. She’d stopped breathing on instinct for a while now.
“Stop that.”
She turned to face Kaitou.
“What?”
“Stop... humming. Just get down.”
This was unlike him, not in the least because he discretely paid her half in advance.
“We’d always-” She began, then saw the look in his eyes. She wasn’t afraid of him – Satsuki didn’t think she’d have to be afraid of a man ever again – but she still stopped talking and slowly sunk to her knees. She didn’t want to cause another mess, not after the first time. If she had her way, the only time.
She briefly closed her eyes as he began to quickly unbuckle. Too quickly. The man she knew was a little smoother, and when she opened her eyes she narrowly avoided being hit my the belt as he cast it off. Something was wrong, so she figured she’d do her job, feed herself, and get out of here. That was all.
Grimacing inside at his expectant look, Satsuki reached up and firmly cupped her hand around him, immediately beginning to pull back and forth. It wasn’t until he began to talk that she realized how far gone things were.
“You know, it’s not really my wife’s fault,” He began, and Satsuki put all of the pieces together. Inwardly she groaned, because if she had to listen to someone’s life story again she might very well just start attacking people in the streets. She didn’t pause to consider how callous she sounded, or how much it would have bothered her before. Instead her hand began to slowly rotate around him, pulling and pushing as she tried to tune out what he was saying. She would have gone for two hands but his dick really wasn’t impressive enough to need it.
“I don’t really blame you either,” he said, and Satsuki felt one of his hands grip the back of her head, felt his knees tense against her forearms.
“It’s really both of our faults, isn’t it? Me for being weak. You for taking advantage of it. Taking advantage of me.”
Kaitou sprung up onto his legs, shoving himself into Satsuki’s mouth. If she was a human she might have started choking from the unexpectedness of it, but she opened her mouth and pretended she was somewhere else. It was a pity – she’d gotten used to having a cellphone again.
He was thrusting into her mouth, and she opened a little wider, extending her tongue. She figured that the payment didn’t really matter as longue as she got what she came for. As long as she stopped being desperately, fiercely hungry for just a minute, even if the only source of alleviating it was kneeling in front of some angry little man. Some angry little man that was starting to scream at her, grabbing her head harder. It was like he didn’t even realize that all she had to do was lower her teeth a little and his life wouldn’t be worth living.
As he gripped her hair hard enough to tear, Satsuki began to wonder why she didn’t do exactly that. Even when Kaitou let out a sharp, sudden sound, and filled her mouth with the slimy, salty taste that she pretended she loved, she was considering it. It would be so easy... she’d just have to bite down, hard, twisting her mouth as she moved away from him. Her jaw was stronger than anything his dick could stand, soft as it was. It wouldn’t be that hard at all.
Instead Satsuki got up and left him there. She wiped the corner of her mouth and slammed the door on him, halfway to the elevator before she heard him move. She didn’t look at her reflection until the bronze doors sealed her inside. She was tired of having to pretend to like them, suit-wearing, red-tie workers, and even more tired of not being able to reach out her hand and put them in her place. She had claws, and fangs, and she was so much faster and stronger than any of them.
Satsuki blinked. Her feet had carried her back to the alleyway before she’d noticed, the routine burned into her skull.
And she had to live here, unable to see her parents, unable to go to school, sitting around fulfilling a promise to a boy who was halfway around the world with a beautiful woman that didn’t give a damn if Satsuki even existed.
“No killing, right?” She said, sitting against the wall next to her box.
“I’m tired, Shiki.”
*****
In order to stave off her vampiric madness, a homeless Yumizuka Satsuki seeks "alternative" sources of human DNA, but the temptation of the liberating insanity of bloodlust is never far behind.
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