The Watcher

By Soyokaze

Kurogane froze as he heard the sharp metallic melody of the opening door handle. The ninja was hidden in a shadow, and with Fay’s deficiency in magic power and, Kurogane was certain, energy as well, he would be less likely to detect an intruder in the shadows of their borrowed rooms. The door handle turned, the moonlight gleaming off its polished surface as it did so, and the door swung open, just enough to allow room for a ridiculously thin wizard-turned-vampire to be granted entrance. His clothes were black as the shadows around him, but his hands, his face, his hair, they were all washed white in the lunar light, golden eyes gleaming, but not as brightly as the polished gold handle. Kurogane watched, and was struck abruptly, almost violently, with the drastic differences between the Fay that had begun this journey and the man into which unfortunate circumstances had turned him. No more luminescent pallor; instead, the complexion of a cadaver. His blue eyes, too bright, full of light and life, were now only a single dull shard of gold. Feathery blonde hair had grown long, shaggy, and white. He was like an apparition; it was as if Fay had died in the acidic rain of apocalyptic Tokyo, as if Kurogane had been unable to save him, and now his ghost was reluctantly following them, obligatorily attached to their quest in some ironic way.

Fay closed the door slowly, leaning against it as he did so. He breathed in deeply, methodically, and Kurogane watched. He let out the breath in a heaved, difficult sigh, his breath hitching as he tried again. Bone-thin hands pushed away from the door, and he stood unsteadily, every step requiring more and more effort. Upon reaching the mattress, he relinquished himself to gravity, collapsing, his arms stretched out across the sheets and his legs limp on the floor. His breathing was laborious, each breath a feat. Kurogane watched his struggle, and as Fay seemed to settle where he was, he stepped forward.

“Fay.”

The magician jumped away from his bed, startlement evident, and his one wide gold eye regarded the ninja with a flat fear, and a subtle hostility, veiled by his duplicitous smile. Kurogane growled in the back of his throat with disapproval.

“Kurogane. I was just about to–”

“Shut up,” the ninja interjected. He took the paring knife he had obtained at dinner from his pocket and drew it across his wrist, not even flinching at the slight sting. Fay’s smile faltered. “You think the kids aren’t going to notice?” Fay pressed his lips together as blood, syrupy and crimson, began to drip onto his chamber’s carpet. Kurogane held out his wrist. Fay stood up, feigning capability, and took three steps backward. Kurogane took a step forward. “Drink.”

“Kurogane, I–”

“Shut up.”

“Kurogane, let me–”

“You are being an idiot. This was my choice.”

“And this is mine.”

Kurogane paused, not at all surprised by the quiet, pathetic, and self-deprecating reply.

“You are not allowed to make this choice, Fay, at least not while the kids are here. Stop being a selfish bastard and drink.”

Kurogane was advancing, and Fay was retreating, but there was only so far to retreat. Kurogane was now shoving his wrist, each pulse beat pumping more blood out onto the carpet, into Fay’s face, so close a tiny spray of the red liquid was dampening the vampire’s chin. Fay licked his lips unconsciously, and then closed his eyes and looked away from Kurogane, disgusted.

“Stop it.”

“No.”

“Stop it!”

"Drink. Now."

"Kurogane, please-"

"No. Do it."

"Stop!"

“No! I will bleed to death on your bedroom floor unless you drink and be done with it!”

“Fine, you stubborn ass!”

He seized Kurogane’s wrist and dug his teeth into it with a force that made the ninja wince. In his reply of surrender Kurogane had heard an anger, a desperation, and a sorrow that he had never heard on the lips of the wizard before, and though it perturbed him, he was just satisfied that Fay would be alive for at least another week. After which they would again perform this same ritual, of reluctance and insistence and aggravation and capitulation. Fay drank only until he had relinquished his anger and regained his self-control, as he always did, after which he wrapped Kurogane’s wound with a clean bit of cloth, as he also always did. This time the bandage came from his shirt hem. It was, at least it seemed to Kurogane, a melancholy apology.

Fay finished his dressing, blood still coloring his lips and smudging around the corners of his mouth. He refused to look at Kurogane, and as a consequence his eye was caught by something behind Kurogane, across the room. The golden eye widened in a sudden alarm, and Kurogane turned, his battle sense piqued, only to find a glass hanging in an ornate frame on the opposite wall. Fay’s reflection was caught in it. Kurogane turned back to him.

“What? Is your make-up smudged?” he mocked, trying in his own awkward way to lighten a suddenly oddly heavy moment. Fay took a few steps across the room to the mirror, one golden, thinly-slit eye staring back at him. Kurogane watched. A pale hand reached up, still shaking from weakness, and touched the placed on the mirror where his eyepatch covered an eye that was no longer there. It moved to the blood-reddened lips, leaving streaks of red in its path. The hand fell back to the magician’s side. Something was released in him, something fell from him, and almost tangibly, for it seemed that Fay suddenly relaxed, immobile, accepting, and sad. Kurogane watched.

“It seems with each day of this journey I look more and more . . . like me.” With a small, despairing, but real, smile, Fay said this. His eye drifted from the mirror down to his still red hands, turning brown as the blood dried. With a simple contraction, Fay extended his ten claw-like fingernails. Still wearing that small smile, he lifted his hands, and drew one across his face and one down his neck and collarbone, clean and neat gashes bleeding thick over his pale skin. Kurogane started, horrified, and leapt on him, grabbing one of the magician’s hands in each of his own and pulling them away from his face and shoulders.

“What are you doing, you crazy wizard?! I just–”

And he stopped as his saw each neat laceration heal, without leaving so much as a trace.

Fay’s smile widened, very slightly. His one gold eye focused on Kurogane’s image behind him in the mirror, still holding back his own hands, preventing him from harming himself.

“No marks at all.”

He withdrew his vampire’s claws and pulled his hands very gently from Kurogane’s grasp. Without saying another word, Fay let himself collapse onto the bed, on his side, facing the wall. Kurogane’s eyes wandered from the streaks of blood he left on the bed sheets to the pools of blood on the bedroom floor, to his carefully bandaged wound and the red-striped surface of the mirror. He pulled one of the chairs from the sitting-table of the room to the bedside, and as Fay’s breathing settled into the rhythm of one held fast by sleep, Kurogane watched.

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