Hey all! I had read this story in a book of amazing vampire stories that I purchased, and I instantly fell in love with it; it really did call to me to be re-written for Riku and Sora. There's no real reason why I chose Marluxia, he just fit the character well.

Valentine For A Vampire

Original Story By: Daniel Ransom

KH Revision By: Tysonkaiexperiment

Disclaimer: The plot and everything is owned by Daniel Ransom, please go read his works they are amazing (as you'll soon see). The characters are owned by Disney and Square Enix. This means I own nothing.

Parts I-V

I

There was only one way to do it, twenty-six-year-old Riku Umino told himself that gray February afternoon, and that was to plain and simple do it: Pick him up in his Checker cab as he usually did at six o'clock and then, after he'd been riding a few blocks, say casually as possible, "You know, Mr. Kaze, there's something I think you should know about the man you're going out with. He's a vampire."

So all afternoon, transporting fat old ladies and skinny old men and rude businessmen and fickle suburban housewives, Riku rehearsed his lines pretty much the way he'd memorized his part in the eighth grade play nearly fourteen years earlier (he'd played a Pilgrim)—by saying them over and over again until they'd lost all meaning. He tried variations on them, of course, trying to minimize the shock they would have on him—"Say, have you noticed your boyfriend's teeth?" or "Is this the first vampire you've ever gone out with?" or "Was that catsup all over your friend's mouth last night?"—so he wouldn't hate him for saying it. (Because hating him was the exact opposite of what he wanted him to do.)

But really, when you came right down to it, there wasn't any graceful way to say it. Because when you came right down to it, calling somebody a vampire was a pretty serious accusation.

Riku sighed and kept driving, thinking over his lonely lover-less life and what an odd business life was, the older you got. Riku, six foot, slender, still gangly despite a deep voice and a need to shave twice a day, had come to the city five years ago after finishing junior college with an associate degree in retail. Unfortunately, his arrival coincided with the recession and so he'd drifted into hacking, working for a man who'd had his larynx removed and who now had to talk through one of those buzzer jobbies that sounded like bad sci-fi sound effects. The hack owner spoke just clearly enough for Riku to know he was a cheapskate.

The vampire, a man handsome as a screen star of the forties (complete with hair sleek as black ice), was named Marluxia Katori.

Riku had met him four years ago while hauling a young woman named Larxene out to Katori's Dracula-like estate. He'd seen the way Larxene had gone into the place—a real live American girl given to lots of chitchat and some flirtiness—and how she'd come out. Larxene, pale, soft-spoken now, was never the same again. He took her out there several times afterward and then one day she stayed permanently, or at least she didn't call in for a ride back to the city. He had no idea what had happened to her. Not then, anyway. All he knew for sure was that on Valentine's Day of that year her personality underwent a most curious transformation.

Then came the next two Valentine's Days and two more women—one named Namine, who had eyes soft as a young animal's, and one named Kairi, who had remarkable legs—went in one way and came out the other.

But even then Riku hadn't allowed himself to use the word. He just said to himself that there were some weird doings involving drugs or hypnotism or maybe even UFOs going on inside the vast walled estate. Because even alien creatures with pop-eyes and

no voice boxes were easier to believe than—

—than vampires.

Then one night, cruising past the estate late with a drunken fare, Riku had glimpsed something truly eerie at the gate of the place.

One moment Marluxia Katori had been standing there and the next moment… Marluxia Katori was gone.

Riku didn't know if he'd turned into a bat or a slug or an Avon lady, but he sure went somewhere and there was only one semihuman creature who could do anything like that and that was—a vampire.

Riku spent the next month sitting up nights recording all this material on his Sony recorder. He had vague notions of maybe going to the police but every morning that he got up with that thought on his mind, he started thinking of the cops he'd met through hacking and what hard cynical bastards they were and how they'd respond to somebody who told them there was a vampire living in the mansion on the southeastern edge of this Midwestern city.

Right.

Then this year, three weeks before Valentine's, Sora Kaze got in his cab and asked to be taken to the mansion, and just like that, Riku fell in love. He was a glowing brunet model who was known for working with his twin brother, Roxas, however it was only Sora who got in his cab. The brunet was given to deep (and, he imagined, poetic) sighing and long blue gazes out the cab window at wintry trees and snow-capped waves slamming the concrete piers.

Every twenty minutes since meeting him he had mentally proposed. Every thirty minutes he thought about their adopting a child (he wanted a kid even if he wasn't quite sure what the hell he was going to do with the little bugger). And every forty minutes he faced up to the terrible fact that on this Valentine's Day, tonight, sleazy Marluxia Katori was going to convert one more unwitting American person into a creature of eternal darkness (or whatever they always said on those great Hammer films WTBS always ran at 2:00 a.m. every Friday night).

He was going to turn Sora Kaze into a vampire.

Or he thought he was, anyway.

But a hack driver named Riku Umino had different ideas.

II

"Hi, Riku."

"Hi, Mr. Kaze."

"Gosh."

"What?"

"You think you'll ever stop?"

"Stop what?"

"Calling me 'Mr. Kaze.' "

He flushed. "Oh. Right. I forgot. Sora. I'm supposed to call you 'Sora.' "

"Please."

So he sat back and he aimed the Checker into traffic, making the ride smooth as he could for him.

"Boy."

"What?" he asked.

"Long day. Whoever says modeling is a glamorous profession just doesn't know."

"Tired, huh?"

"Exhausted."

"Great."

"What?"

"I said, 'Late.' "

"Late?"

"I meant—after a long day, it's late. Maybe you shouldn't go to the mansion tonight. Maybe I should turn the cab around and take you to your apartment house. Maybe you're coming down with something, Sora, and should go straight to bed." He said all this in a rush. He was hopeful he'd agree and he'd flip the cab around and race to his apartment and then stand guard all night to make sure that Katori didn't get in.

But now he laughed. "Oh, no. I'd never be too tired for tonight."

"Tonight?"

"Valentine's Day. Marluxia has promised me a very special gift."

Riku gulped. "You have any idea what it is?"

He laughed again, more softly this time. "No, but you can bet when Marluxia Katori says a gift is going to be special, it's going to be very special."

He watched him in the rearview. Outside, gray night had fallen, the only lights red and blue and green neon reflected in dirty city snow. But in the rearview his face positively radiated. For a moment he did a dangerous thing—closed his eyes to say a silent prayer for courage.

The time had come.

He'd left him no choice.

He had to tell him the truth about Marluxia Katori.

"Gosh, Riku, look out!"

Snapping his eyes open, he saw that he was about to sideswipe a city bus that moved through the gloom like a giant electric caterpillar.

"Riku, are you all right?"

"Yes," he said. "But you're not."

"What?"

"I said you're not all right."

"Well, that's not a very nice thing to say."

"Oh, I didn't mean you're not all right OK. I meant you're not all right—you're in danger."

"Danger?"

"Sora, would you let me buy you a cup of coffee?"

"But, Riku, I told Marluxia—"

He turned around and said, "Sora, there's something you should know about Marluxia."

"Oh, Riku, I know what you're going to say." He sounded young and disappointed. "That he's a playboy. That he'll drop me as soon as he's bored and it won't be long before that happens." He touched him on the shoulder and a wonderful warmth spread through his entire body. He'd never touched him this way before. "It's just a storybook fling, the only one I've ever allowed myself. Really. In high school I didn't have time because I was always a yearbook photographer and was on assignment. In college I didn't have time because my parents were poor and I had to work my way through. And during my first five years of modeling I didn't have time because I had to take every job that was offered me. Don't you see, Riku, this is my one chance at really having a good time. That's all."

Riku pulled into the parking lot of a McDonald's. Against the gray night it looked like a big colorful toy box filled with tiny people walking around inside.

"Sora, there's something I've got to tell you and I guess I have to do it right here, without even waiting to go inside, right in front of Ronald McDonald and everything."

"Gosh, Riku, what's so urgent?"

"Marluxia."

"Marluxia's urgent?"

"No," Riku said, "Marluxia's a vampire."

III

They got Cokes and Riku got french fries and they took the most isolated table they could find, right on a plastic outsize Egg McMuffin who had two red eyes and kept winking at Riku.

"Vampire," Sora said. "Gosh, Riku, that's really the most original one I've heard yet."

"Original what?"

"Oh," he said, "line, I guess you'd call it. I mean, I'm flattered." He startled him by putting his hand over his and gazing blue into his eyes. "You're a very nice guy, Riku, and over the past few weeks, we've really gotten to know each other in a strange way. And if Marluxia wasn't in the picture—" He withdrew his hand and shook his adorable brunet head and laughed. "But to be honest, Riku, calling him a vampire is going overboard, don't you think? How about a drug dealer? Or Communist spy? Or even a pornographer? But a vampire?" Then the smile faded from his eyes. "Riku, you don't really believe in vampires, do you?"

"I didn't."

"Didn't?"

"Till I took Larxene and Namine and Kairi out to his mansion on Valentine's Day and they changed."

"Changed?"

"Yes," Riku said, "changed."

So he told him, in detail, how they'd changed. The chalky skin. The dead eyes. The sullen silence. "Vampires," Riku said.

He took one of his french fries and nibbled at it. He'd explained to him once that he always nibbled at food. To keep his weight for the camera, that was the most pleasure he could allow herself—nibbling. Riku wanted to be frustrated at Sora's brother Roxas for allowing such a thing, but maybe the blond had done it also, maybe it was a model thing and Riku just didn't know.

"Have you ever been heartbroken, Riku? Wanted somebody you couldn't have?"

He stared at him. "Uh, yes."

"Do you remember how you acted?"

"Acted?"

"The depression, the weight loss, the long silences? That's what you're describing here, Riku, nothing more. Marluxia decided it was time to get rid of these people and move on to new ones, so he dropped them and that was how they reacted."

"Then why would they keep going back to the mansion?"

"Why, to plead their cases. Beg him to reconsider." He had another french fry. "You've been heartbroken before, haven't you, Riku? You do know what I'm talking about?"

Without hesitation, he said it, "Sora, I'm heartbroken right now."

"You are?"

"Yes. Over you."

He blushed. For all his beauty and sophistication, Riku had found Sora to be not only modest about his looks but just as socially vulnerable as he was himself. "Oh, Riku." He put his hand back on his. "That's really sweet and I really appreciate it but—right now there's Marluxia."

"Please let me take you back to your apartment tonight, Sora. Just till after Valentine's Day passes. He's got something about Valentine's Day."

"Riku, listen, please." He sat back in the seat. "As I've tried to explain, I know this is just a fling and nothing more. But I'm enjoying it. I like being in a grand house where there are servants out of the nineteenth century and where classical music is always playing and where you sit on Louis XVI furniture and where you sip French wine from huge goblets in front of a roaring fireplace and where your tall, dark, handsome lover wears a red silk dinner jacket and speaks to you in a voice that gives you goose bumps."

He laughed. "For a boy whose father ran a corner grocery store, Riku, that's pretty heady stuff."

So Riku, seeing the odds he had to overcome, said it: "He disappeared."

"What?"

"Vanished. Did you ever see the original Dracula?"

He sighed. "Oh, Riku, please. It isn't fun anymore. This vampire thing, I mean. It really isn't."

"He did, Sora." He raised his hand like a Boy Scout. "On my love for you, I swear it. One second, he was in my rearview and then he just disappeared. Vanished. The only people who can do that are vampires."

A certain pity had come into his eyes now. "Riku, would you take me out to the mansion—and would you do me a favor?"

"Anything. You know that."

"Just don't talk about this anymore, please. Because I am starting to get scared—but not for myself—for you. I hope you're just saying all this because you love me and want to start seeing me. I hope you're not saying it because—." And here, for the first time, he looked uncomfortable. "Because you truly believe it, because then—..."

"Then what?"

"Then I'd say you needed to see a shrink or something."

IV

Gates of black iron covered the entrance to the mansion. Ground fog shone silver in the light of a half-moon. Beyond the massive stone walls light from mullioned windows spread yellow across the snow.

"I guess I should go in now."

They'd been sitting in his cab for twenty minutes now—the radio tuned low to an FM station playing some soft Stanley Clarke songs—and really not talking much at all.

It was just that every time he started to put his hand on the door handle, he turned around and said, "Please, Sora, please don't go."

He's said it four times now and four times he had complied.

But he knew this time—hand on the door, a kind of pity in his eyes—that he would go.

"Sora, I—"

"I really do have to go."

"He's a vampire, Sora. Honest and truly."

"You're sweet, Riku. You really are. You care about me so much and—."

Then he startled him by leaning forward and kissing him gently on the lips.

His mind literally spun; his heart was a wild animal.

"Sora, please—"

But then the back door opened and the dome light went on, exposing the shabby insides of the cab, the battered dash and the smudged seat covers and the big red, white, and blue thermos he carried coffee in. This was his life—the life of a shabby hack in a shabby cab. He guessed he couldn't blame him (his eyes rising to see the imposing mansion against the gray night sky) for wanting the type of life Marluxia Katori offered.

Except Marluxia Katori was a vampire.

"Sora—."

This time he touched a finger to his lips and then touched that same finger to his lips and then he was gone, lost in fog, the gates opening automatically now that he'd inserted the access card Katori provided all his victims.

Larxene.

Namine.

Kairi.

Gone.

"Sora!" he cried but already the gates were creaking open and then creaking closed and he was lost to him forever.

V

His were the particular pleasures of the lonely. He could eat what he wanted (Snickers, Fritos, Good 'N Plentys) and watch what he wanted. (Tonight, unable to sleep, thinking of what was happening to Sora, he started watching Twins of Evil but switched channels as soon as the vampire theme started getting oppressive, and then tuned into the Home Shoppers Channel, a subculture even more fascinating than professional wrestling or professional religion. Who waned to buy a George Washington clock that recited the names of the first thirteen colonies over and over again? Apparently thousands of people did, and at $48.31 apiece. He had purchased only one thing from the Shoppers Channel, a genuine longbow with quiver and arrows. Over the past six months the bow had become his sole hobby. He was reasonably good with it.) Finally, fitfully, he slept on the couch of his drab efficiency apartment.

Then it was morning, the sky a light shade of gray. He shaved, showered, ate his bran, did his sit-ups, and then said an Our Father and three Hail Marys for Sora. This was around 7:30. Around 8:30 he called the modeling agency where he worked, and said he was his brother (was Roxas even there?) and asked if he could find out where he was working today and, after only a teensy bit of hesitation, the woman gave him the address and even the phone number where Sora could be found so his brother (in from Egypt; what the hell—if you lie, lie big. Had Roxas even been to Egypt?) could surprise him.

So he promptly called the photography studio where he was on location today and was surprised to learn that he was there.

He hadn't called in sick.

He hadn't just mysteriously vanished.

He was there.

Working.

Could he possibly speak to him?

"Afraid not. We're in the middle of a bitch of a production problem here and he's really tied up. If you'd care to leave your number, though, we could have him call you back."

Baffled, Riku said, "No thanks. Thank you." And hung up.

The rest of the morning, before he had to start hacking (you had to average seventy hours a week behind the wheel if you wanted to reach even the official poverty level of income), he went to the laundromat and to the supermarket and to the video rental store and then to the submarine place where he got this salami hogie that could have fed a Third World nation.

Somewhere in the middle of all this, he had started to whistle and the rest of the day he whistled his ass off because he'd proved him wrong and there was nothing he'd wanted more than to be proved wrong.

Marluxia Katori might be a jerk-off but he wasn't a vampire.

And eventually he'd dump him and then he'd go through a period of heartbreak and then he'd entrust the rest of his life to Riku.

At least, that was the notion that got Riku to whistling and kept him whistling all day.

Around two he went down to the cab company, to the underground garage that always stank of wet concrete, and said a few words to the man without a voice box and then got in his cab and started his workday.

The first two hours went slowly. There was a chatty plump woman going to the hospital to see her herniated husband. There was a somber priest who made a magnificent sign of the cross whenever they passed a Catholic church. And there was a very tiny woman who smoked those 100 mm. cigarettes and coughed so hard she jumped around on the backseat.

Then came February dusk, lights up in stores, people slanting into the bitter wind running to garages and bus stops, and then he thought of a wonderful idea.

He knew just where Sora was.

Knew roughly what time he'd get off.

Why not go wait for him there?

Which is what he did, still whistling all the time, shaping the words of his apology, getting ready to laugh a lot about his stupid notion that Marluxia Katori was a vampire.

The studio was on the northwest part of town, in a forlorn section of the city. He was parked at the curb for nearly an hour before he began to think that maybe the session had ended early and he'd gone home.

Ten minutes later he sat up and was all ready to go when he saw him in the rearview coming out of the door with his twin. Apparently they were separating, as Roxas was beginning to turn the nearby corner and Sora continued to walk forwards towards the street.

Behind him, suddenly a yellow cab pulled up.

He'd phoned for somebody else.

He jumped from the car and over the roof and yelled, "Sora! Tell him to go on and let me give you a ride!"

He saw him, of course, and recognized him. But he started to get into the yellow cab anyway.

He ran over to him, grabbed his slender wrist before he could close the door.

"I'll take him," Riku said to the angry-looking cabbie. Riku flung a ten-dollar bill at the man. Then he tugged on Sora's arm and said, "Come on. Please. All right?"

He sighed, looked embarrassed that the cabman was watching them, and then said softly, "All right."

So he got out of one cab and got in another, and then Riku ran around and got behind the wheel and had them in traffic in moments.

"You going home or to the mansion tonight?"

"The mansion."

He shook his head and said, laughing at himself as they reached a red light, "I don't want you to hold it against me."

"Hold what against you?"

His foot on the gas as soon as the light was green, Riku very slowly began to slide into the intersection. "Come on, Sora. You know—my theory about Marluxia being a vampire."

"That's the trouble," Sora said and began suddenly and madly to sob. "You were right. He is a vampire."

And Riku slammed on the break, right in the middle of the intersection.

Tke-I hope you guys enjoyed part one of three, the next two should be coming extremely soon, I adore Daniel's story. Hopefully I'm getting you willing to read more of his works. Review please!