"That's how we die, if we're left alone."

Something inside of Kain shuddered at those words—not 'they', but 'we'—and a dreadful new image painted itself in his mind, overtop of the canvas of Kiryuu being mauled by ravenous, red-eyed fiends. The new portrait was of a skeletally gaunt Kiryuu, his skin as pale and translucent as the thinnest vellum, clawing feebly at a bed of bones as his fingers turned to dust.

Kain thrust the image away with a violent mental spasm, but he couldn't unsee what he had seen and he couldn't unhear what he had heard. Was that really how Kiryuu thought of himself—as some crawling horror that should never have been alive?

Already, Kiryuu had returned his gun to its holster and was brushing the flakes of desiccated corpse from his silver hair with a calm indifference that chilled Kain. Before the noble could even begin piecing together the shards of his thoughts, the hunter was striding off down the tunnel, leaving the grisly scene in his wake the way he must have left so many others. But Kain was stuck in place. The physical distance between them seemed infinitesimal in comparison the vast mental gulf.

At the bend in the tunnel that would take him out of sight, Kiryuu paused and glanced back at the noble over his shoulder. "Just go home, if you can't handle it."

Kain jolted, remembering why he was there, and hastened after his hunter. Whatever else happened, so long as Kiryuu was alive, Kain's doubts and worries could wait.

Six sweeps later, and Kain had become inured to the sight and stink of the wretches infesting the tunnels.

"Last one," Kaito called out, referring a stretch of tunnel that, as he had explained, connected to an auxiliary drainage system that had been superannuated for decades. "I'll take point this time," the older hunter informed Kiryuu. The false note of casualness in his voice was painfully apparent, and Kain exchanged a tense look with Ruka. This tunnel must be where Kiryuu had been injured, nearly killed.

"I can do it," Kiryuu objected.

"Then I'll go with you," Kaito said after a pause. "Kain, you stay here."

"No," Kiryuu disagreed sharply with his friend. "I don't need you."

Kaito's hands were on his hips. "I'm not asking," he barked authoritatively.

"Neither am I," Kiryuu shot back, eyes blazing with sudden violet fire.

Kaito fumed, glaring around the damp and dirty basement chamber, and rumpled his ash-colored hair irritably. Kiryuu glared fixedly at the hunter. "I know what you're thinking," Kaito accused suddenly, pointing a finger at Kiryuu. "And it's ridiculous. You know that?"

"Shut up!" Kiryuu snapped. "You don't know anything!" His cheeks were flushed with emotion.

Kain frankly stared. He had rarely seen this sort of heated response from the silver-haired hunter. Kiryuu's usual mode of anger was frosty—glacial, even. Kain was fascinated. Ruka, on the other hand, was gazing fixedly at her manicured nails with a mixture of disdain and embarrassment.

"Oh, really?" Kaito demanded. "So you're not thinking that only an ex-human should put down ex-humans?"

Kiryuu's eyes flashed. "I'm going," he growled. "You're not."

Kaito's nostrils flared and his shoulders lifted as he drew a deep, steadying breath. He turned his scowl suddenly on Kain, who had been doing an excellent impression of a wall. Despite their temporary alliance, it was still disquieting, the noble realized, to be singled out by a hunter's gaze like that.

"I smell so much as a drop of his blood," the older hunter informed Kain in a low, menacing tone, "and I'll be wearing your hide for a hat and your guts for garters."

There was a slight choking noise, and Kain saw Ruka cover her mouth to stifle her laughter. It was the last time that day that any of them felt like laughing.

At first Kain thought the scent of Kiryuu's blood, exotic and tantalizing, was only a figment of his depraved imagination, but as they slipped silently down the tunnel, the scent became overwhelming, and mixed nauseatingly with the rank stench of Stage III disease and decay. Kain had already come to associate the latter with a primal dread and loathing that originated from deep in his belly.

Just when the odor had grown so visceral that Kain's meager breakfast of blood substitute was threatening to revisit him, Kiryuu drew to a halt.

"Don't interfere," the hunter began, meeting Kain's eyes guardedly.

A dozen protests bubbled at Kain's lips, but he swallowed them back and nodded. He agreed with Kaito's attitude, privately, and certainly there was no question that Kain would do whatever was necessary to protect Kiryuu, whether he liked it or not, but this was hardly the moment to argue about it.

The hunter nodded in reply, and then, to Kain's dismay, crouched and began crawling into a drainage pipe set into the wall. The pipe was made of corrugated metal, spotted with orange rust, and it was no more than two feet in diameter, which forced Kiryuu to make his way as much by wriggling as by crawling.

Kain's heart began jumping in his throat at the very sight of the claustrophobic cylinder. It had been a long time since he'd suffered a panic attack from his phobia, but if there was ever a time to relapse, it was now. Yet there was no help for it. Kain bent, shuddering, and began pulling himself after Kiryuu on limbs made rubbery by stifled panic.

For a dozen yards, they crept like rats through the stifling, moist, fetid darkness, while Kain's heart thumped so loudly that he was sure Kiryuu heard it. In the erratic illumination of the flashlight, Kain saw disarticulated bones scattered here and there, most of them from small mammals, none of them fresh. The scent of Kiryuu's days-old blood was the only hint that there might be anything living in that hellhole, and Kain seized on it as a lifeline, letting himself grow intoxicated by the aroma to distract himself from his phobia.

At last, there was an end to the hateful pipe, and Kain scrambled out unsteadily into an earthen chamber. The rocky ceiling was too low for him to stand, and so he kneeled beside Kiryuu, staring at the grisly tableau spotlighted by the hunter's beam.

Two tiny, gaunt figures were crouched at the other end of the chamber. Ratted clumps of muddy hair clung to their heads, obscuring reddened eyes. Their skin, hanging loosely over their bones, was caked with dirt and filth. They were children, or once had been.

Kain hissed in revulsion at the very idea of their creation, and turned his eyes away. Kiryuu, however, gazed at them steadily.

The smaller of the figures moved suddenly, like a spider skittering, toward Kiryuu, and Kain reacted instinctively to counter the attack, but an iron bar struck his chest, knocking him backward. It was Kiryuu's arm, holding him back, and in the split-second of that delay, the smaller creature had attached itself to Kiryuu's other arm and was gnawing hungrily at the hunter's wrist.

Kain lunged forward, only to freeze at the last instant at the sound of Kiryuu's voice.

"You promised!" Those flashing violet eyes were accusing and disappointed. "You promised not to interfere. Did you lie?"

Kain opened his mouth to respond, and then closed it again. Mute, disbelieving, impotent, he watched as the wretched little fiend savaged his lover's flesh. Yet there was no scent of fresh blood. The creature was too feeble, Kain realized, its fangs too rotted and its claws too flimsy, to so much as scratch the hunter's skin.

The tiny creature worked its way up Kiryuu's arm, clinging to the hunter with bird-like talons, trying in vain to reach the blood that pulsed just beneath the skin. Kiryuu rested his hand on its head, lightly, and when it reached the hunter's throat, Kiryuu gathered the small creature into his arms and held it tightly, pressing his cheek to its filthy hair, and stroking its head and its back with his hands. Presently, the other, slightly larger creature began to creep across the chamber, and, as Kain continued to watch in frozen incredulity, Kiryuu pulled them both into his lap and embraced them with a soft affection the noble had never dared to hope the sober version of Kiryuu possessed.

In Kain's dazed mind, two facts snapped together like pieces in a puzzle. These creatures were incapable of rending Kiryuu's flesh with the ferocity that had produced Kiryuu's wounds. On the day in question, there had only been one person present who was strong enough to threaten Kiryuu's life—Kiryuu himself. But why would Kiryuu spill his own blood? He would know better than anyone the futility of that action.

The noble cast further afield for the missing pieces. In his mind, he saw again the scene in the warehouse, where he had found Kiryuu mid-coitus with a group of E's. Several pieces clicked together in rapid succession, before Kain could stop them. The noble had tried his best to avoid dwelling on all the implications of that incident—the fact that Kiryuu must have gone there when he was sober, that he would have stayed there after he was sober, for hours, perhaps sleeping in a bed of bones not unlike this one, back-to-back with the very creatures he had dedicated his life to exterminating.

There were still pieces missing, but the picture was becoming clearer, and Kain could no longer turn his eyes from it. Kiryuu had been rejected by both hunters and vampires, and, in turn, he had rejected them, claiming ex-humans alone as his brethren. They were his tribe, his people. Kain had wondered why Kiryuu fought so hard to protect humans despite having no apparent affection for them. Now he understood. It was not humans Kiryuu wanted to protect, but rather ex-humans. He no longer hunted because he was a hunter, but, as Kaito had said, because he believed these creatures should be killed by one of their own, as a kind of final mercy.

Kain's heart sank deeper and deeper as this picture revealed itself to him. He felt helpless and bereft in the wake of the revelation. The understanding that should have brought him closer to Kiryuu seemed to have carried him away instead.

A sudden shot echoed through the chamber, and a cloud of dust billowed through the small space. Kain squeezed his eyes shut. When he opened them again a moment later, the dust was falling to the ground like a gruesome mockery of snow, and Kiryuu's arms were empty. The hunter's face was a brittle mask on the verge of breaking.

"I thought they might be hers," Kiryuu muttered.

"Hers?" Kain repeated blankly.

"Shizuka's," Kiryuu clarified. The name seemed to pain him. Kain felt foolish and guilty for forcing it from him. "She—liked children. So I thought there was a chance…since I ate her life…" He shrugged awkwardly. "It didn't work, obviously."

Kain reached for Kiryuu and did the only thing he could. He did for Kiryuu what the hunter had done for the children. But the hunter's body was as hard and unyielding in his arms as the rusty pipes around them. Kain held on until gradually, by degrees, Kiryuu softened, his shape molding to Kain's. The noble could only hope that his actions were less futile than the hunter's.

The ride back to the academy was silent. All four of them were brooding—Kaito behind the wheel, Ruka beside him, with Kain and Zero in the backseat. Eventually, despite his usual state of vigilance, Zero surrendered to his exhaustion and allowed the gentle vibration of the car to lull him into slumber.

When he woke, his head was in Kain's lap, and the noble's fingers were stroking his hair gently. For a moment, Zero stayed still, permitting the gesture. Then he sensed someone else watching, and sat up stiffly, refusing to return Ruka's gaze.

Kaito brought the car to a halt before the academy's gates, and Ruka exited the car with her usual elegant grace, melting into the velvet twilight like a mirage. Kain took a little longer to leave, and remained waiting politely just beyond hearing distance.

"I'm sorry," Kaito said stiffly. "I shouldn't have asked you to go."

"It's nothing," Zero replied. An obvious lie of the sort they always told themselves.

"Are you going to be all right? Do you need—"

"I'm fine," Zero cut the older hunter off.

Kaito glared in Kain's direction. "I'll be around."

Zero grunted in acknowledgement and jumped out of the car before Kaito could offer anything else. He fell into stride easily beside Kain. There was no need for words between them.

At his door, however, an unexpected visitor was waiting. It was Aidou. Zero scowled at the small blonde, and reached for the nearest weapon instinctively.

"Ah, my dear sweet—" the foolish noble began in a grandiose tone.

The look on his face when Zero's knife thunked into the door jamb next to him did a little to lift the hunter's spirits. "Get lost, leech," Zero growled.

"There's no wish I'd rather grant you," the blonde answered, looking sideways at the quivering blade. "But Kaname-sama requests the pleasure of your company."

Kain drew his breath in sharply, and an indecipherable look passed between the cousins. Zero felt a prickle of unease, but shook it off.

"I'll see him tomorrow," he answered, putting his key into the lock.

"It's about the, uh, you know," Aidou hinted nervously.

Zero glanced at the obnoxious waste of space in spite of himself.

"We might have an idea. I mean, we do have an idea. I mean, I have an idea. But it wasn't my idea! I mean…" The blonde sighed and hung his head. "I mean, I really just need you to come with me."

"Tomorrow," Zero repeated, opening his door.

"Wait, Kiryuu!" Aidou tried to interject, but it was too late. Zero had stepped inside, and the door had slammed shut behind him of its own accord.

Complex arrays of symbols, foreign to Zero's eye, flared to life in the walls, floor, and ceiling, but Zero scarcely saw them. His gaze was held captive by the man sitting in the desk chair, who calmly dog-eared the page of the book he was reading, before turning to face Zero.

"Hello, brother," Ichiru said.

Author's Notes: This is a little short and could maybe use some polishing, but I figured I should just go ahead with it rather than make you wait any longer. I think I rewrote the final scene in the tunnels about 10 times, and I'm still not completely satisfied with it. I really don't know when I might post next, but now that I've finally ended one arc of the story and started the next, I'm feeling a bit more motivated to write. Reviews help, too. :)