The room was still dark when Zero woke, head spinning and lungs gasping for air that didn't exist. Sweat soaked his sheets and flames ate at his skin, his body thrashing uselessly away from an intangible attacker. He spasmed and jerked, his head thrust back into the pillows, hands reaching for his throat. It burned like someone had slit it with a knife. Cramps locked his limbs rigid, back arching unnaturally as the pain built. His fangs dug into his bottom lip, filling his mouth with blood. He choked, struggling to take in a deep breath. Inhaling copper, Zero closed his eyes and scrambled to focus on something, anything, other than his traitorous body. He couldn't bring himself to care about what, so long as the burning stopped.

It went on like that for maybe a quarter of an hour. Finally, the pain receded, flowing back from whence it came in waves. Minute by minute, he managed to wrangle his body back from what had possessed him. Sucking in deep breaths through his nose, Zero let the air slip past his lips, slow, wincing in discomfort when the air caught in his throat. His chest moved in conservative, controlled increments. He opened his mouth, spitting out the blood in coughs and moans. His eyes (his red eyes, he was willing to bet) slipped shut from the weariness—the deadness—he felt in his aching limbs. Exhaustion ate at his body and his mind.

And it wasn't even that bad this time, Zero thought, rueful. Chuckling, he tossed an arm over his face and shifted so that he could see the glowing numbers on his alarm clock. 5:42 AM. Fuck.

Deciding that moving wasn't all that prudent—he had a few minutes until his alarm started blaring—Zero quirked his lips. He stared up at the ceiling, content to watch the pre-dawn light paint everything in eerie blue. Zero relished the peace. Peace was rare, nowadays.

The last few months had been a new kind of Hell for Kiryuu Zero. He had absorbed himself with rebuilding Cross Academy, but with the reconstruction slowly finishing Zero was more often left without distraction. The attacks had come as though to fill his spare time. They appeared randomly, searing him with physical pain unlike anything Zero had ever felt, locking his body stiff with agony. Somewhere in the midst, his eyes turned red and his fangs sprung forth like he was in the grip of bloodlust. But bloodlust was something he didn't experience, anymore. Just pain. Blinding, breath-stealing pain.

You win some, you lose some. Zero understood that. He wouldn't even be that concerned if the attacks didn't make his seal behave weirdly. Zero could cope with pain—he was practically designed for it. But the pulsing, crackling, straining against his skin, the not-exactly painful pulling, like the ink wanted to jump off his neck if not shatter entirely, made Zero's heart stand still. It was like something was straining against the binds of the seal's magic but not quite breaking it. It was different from the tearing, rending sensation he felt when his sanity slipped.

Zero liked to think that the attacks were residual from whatever freaky vampire shit he'd encountered fighting Rido. Since he'd done his damnedest to keep everyone from finding out about the attacks, no one had been given the chance to burst his bubble. He tried not to think about the attacks much, himself. Hence, Zero only had one other theory: either Rido had cursed him, or Kuran Kaname had finally grown the balls to work some freaky vampire shit of his own. Perhaps they both had—a final Kuran family bonding activity? —if Zero's luck was in truly fine form.

A vision of Kuran Jr. wearing a blue wizard's hat covered with silver moons and stars, standing over a black cauldron, swam into his mind. There were Mickey Mouse ears involved: dancing dishes, nursery rhymes, and a wooden wand. It took all of Zero's willpower to keep from bursting out into a completely inappropriate giggle.

Snickering, Zero slowly hauled himself up from his soft blue sheets. They were gross with blood and sweat, and needed to be changed. First, though, Zero needed to stand. He managed to on shaking legs, his humour lost to the lingering muscle aches. Yet, slowly, he did manage to rise to his full six-foot height. He winced as his body rebelled against the action, his stomach rolling, before slamming his hand down on the alarm, three minutes away from ringing.

Sighing, Zero let himself have one last, long breath. Then, he hit the lights, balled up the sheets for the laundry, and consigned himself to preparing for another day. The process was easier than many would have expected. Unlike Yuuki's room, back when she'd lived in the Day Class dorms, Zero's room was tidy. Some—Cross—had said to the point of obsession. Not actually, Zero would maintain.

Zero was, perhaps, slightly obsessive—his most memorable childhood moment was stabbing a Pureblood with a butter knife in an admittedly flawed, pre-mature attempt at revenge-fuelled genocide—but not with neatness. You just had to look at the way he dressed (or his life) to realize that. Rather, Zero just didn't have a lot of stuff. You didn't need a lot of stuff, when you figured you were going to die before you finished high school.

Hunters were trained to be spartan, even nihilistic, anyway. Pessimism was maybe the most normal personality quirk Zero possessed.

Regardless of the reason, his uniforms were all neatly folded and tucked away in his closet. A dark cherry desk sat beside the closet and played host to his school stuff. A portable music player lived on the bedside table beside Zero's cellphone, which almost never left the room. They were neighbors to the digital alarm clock, though he rarely ever used it anymore between his insomnia and the attacks. His secret pride and joy, a slightly beaten-up guitar, rested against the window seat. Pressed against of the only available wall space was a shelving unit full of books, from Natural Geographic to the Godchild manga series. Not sleeping much left Zero with more free time than most people.

Anything of his that was irreplaceable was in a black backpack under his bed. He displayed none of those things. They were too precious and—too much. He couldn't look at those things everyday. His parents' wedding photo, still in the original frame; Ichiru's first knife, carefully maintained; Yuuki's last Christmas present to him, a photo collage of happy memories. A few other bits that Zero couldn't make himself throw away. Those items were tucked between a change of clothes and accompanied by close to three thousand dollars in cash. A minor armory of weaponry filled the rest of the pockets, with ration bars and the bare minimum of medical supplies. A passport and papers with his face and a different name were sewn in under the lining.

(It was a go-bag. It was everything he needed to disappear. It wasn't a part of his hunter training. Hunters were trained to rely on the Association. A hunter who disappeared was a dead hunter, one way or the other. The bag was all Zero, one way or another. Not that Yagari would have disapproved, Zero imagined. But then, most hunter masters weren't like Yagari. They weren't as suspicious of the Association. They didn't have Kiryuu Zero, hunter prodigy and Level D vampire, as a student.

Zero recognized that he was probably responsible for most of Yagari's paranoia. That didn't mean that he wasn't grateful for it. Or guilty about it. But that wasn't something Zero liked to think about. So, he didn't.)

Yet, years of living with Kaien Cross meant that Zero didn't have much of a choice: the room had some personality. There were a couple pictures of himself, Cross, and Yuuki from Before; one of himself and Yagari, wearing matching glares; Kaito and Zero, eleven and smiling—Ichiru had taken the photo. Cross hadn't known that when he'd snuck in and hung it up. Even he wasn't that socially inept. But Zero hadn't taken it down. He didn't examine why. Less explosively, there was also a film poster for Vampires Suck—Kaito's fault.

Zero's lip quirked, looking around his room. There was evidence here that he had a life outside of Cross Academy, vampires, and killing vampires. Not a big life, but some kind of life. What would the Night Class say if they found out about that? Zero snorted. There would be heart attacks abound, probably. With that amusing thought to entertain him, Zero showered and dressed. He checked the mirror to confirm that his eyes weren't still red and left his room with his tie undone and his vest left behind.

Moving silently, Zero made his way up to the roof of the Day Class boys' dorm. He had an hour until class and the roof was one of the few places he could find some quiet when his room felt too small. That was because, Zero reasoned, that the door to the roof was supposed to be locked and no one had yet figured out that someone might have used his vampire strength to snap the lock in half. The Rido Incident (as everyone was "cleverly" calling it, capitals and all) had left chaos in its wake. Zero was prepared to do much more difficult things than break locks to find some quiet in that chaos.

Zero pursed his lips, mind immediately going to his list of problems. Priority one was the Hunter Association—it was still in an uproar over the President, increasingly obvious vampiric corruption, and the conflicts associated therewith. There was an election coming up, but until then Cross and Yagari were only just keeping the hunters from going on a world-wide killing spree. There were also rumours of a schism between the older generation and Zero's floating around. It was up for debate whether there would be a revolution, a coup d'état, or a complete implosion. Kiryuu Zero: hero or vermin? Was apparently a polarizing point of division.

Zero had received one hundred thirty-seven death threats in the three months since the attack. He didn't know about any positive attention. Against Cross's advice, he had asked only to be made aware of viable threats against his life. That was the important part, he'd figured.

If the hunters were exploding, then vampire society was already in ashes. More than a hundred human deaths had accrued in Rido's attack, not including the hundreds of Level Ds Rido had created. There could be even more than that; what was left of the Association that was still functioning theorized that at least thirty percent of his Ds had escaped. All of those deaths and missing persons had to be covered up. That alone would have been enough to keep the Senate busy for months while it bullied the human governments into turning a blind eye. But the Kurans hadn't been done screwing up the world, apparently.

After the bleeding had begun to slow on the Rido Incident, Kuran Kaname had decided to prove just how powerful he was. According to the reports, Kuran had walked into the Senate chambers unhindered by the Senate's elite security force. The entire assembly had been gathered to debate what to do with the future. They hadn't gotten very far when Kuran blew them up in a flurry of sparks and ash. So. Now there was no ruling vampire authority except for Kuran and a handful of competing Pureblood courts. No central authority meant that there was also a sea of piranha-like nobles who thought that they now had carte blanche to do whatever the fuck they wanted. The hunters, already scrambling, were once again the only line standing between humanity's vulnerable neck and the vampires' fangs.

Zero had gleaned that the most popular theory on both sides of the hunter schism was that Kuran was on a warpath against all of the major organizations in the "Vampire World," including—gasp!—the Association. The panic was immense.

Zero, upon hearing this theory, had actually laughed out loud. He had laughed, for the first time in months, right at the official oak table Cross, Yagari, and the rest of the Association notables had been gathered around. He hadn't been able to help it. Their fears were just ridiculous. Like Kuran gave a flying fuck what the Association did. So long as they didn't interfere with Kuran's plans, the Pureblood prick would pretend that they didn't exist.

Zero had tried to explain that to the Hunter Council. He really, really had. But, unfortunately, no one on the Council seemed to have half a brain outside of Yagari, himself, and Cross. So, panic it was.

Oh, the joy.

The Association, in all its brilliance, had even gone so far as to order Kuran Kaname to return to Cross Academy. Zero had watched Cross and Yagari try to dissuade the other councillors. Zero, who only had a spot at the table because killing Kuran Rido was something of an achievement, hadn't tried at all. He knew that no one could order Kuran to do anything that he didn't want to. He had, very obviously, killed the last people who had tried. For a moment, Zero had considered that the Council had just gone from ignorable to signing their own death warrants. From Cross and Yagari's expressions, they had thought so. But Zero had quickly dismissed the idea.

Kuran wasn't impulsive. He wasn't stupid. He was reckless, but not with his own life or the lives of his court—especially his precious sister. He wouldn't slaughter the Association, because they were useful; they did the grunt work of hunting down Rido's Ds and keeping the idiot nobles (mostly) in line. So long as the Association was needed for those duties, they would be tolerated. However, that didn't mean that Kuran would listen to the Council's edicts. What did secure that obedience, Zero suspected, was Kuran Yuuki.

According to the rumours, the Kuran Princess was unhappy in her castle. Kuran, apparently, was also in an exceedingly bad mood. Zero suspected that the dream couple was going through some rocky waters. Waters that, Zero theorized, Kuran Yuuki thought could be fixed by returning to the couple's original nesting grounds, as it were.

Once upon a time, thoughts about the Kurans would have hurt Zero. There had been so much anger. At the brother, for using him, and the sister, for choosing her brother anyway. But in the months since the attack, those emotions had faded. Yuuki had chosen Kuran. Of course, she had. They were a pair. She was Kuran's princess. Zero had never had any place with her but for what her brother had allowed. With her Pureblood body and mind released, the girl Zero knew had been devoured like candy floss.

And Zero was fine with that, now. He had to be. The school was more important than his bullshit. With the Night Class coming back under Kuran's command, Cross Academy was once more the only institution worldwide hosting both vampires and humans. It was a bastion of politics, drama, and occasionally violence, but it was also a crucial example of peace in a world barely clinging to the concept. It was Cross's legacy and his child as much as Zero and Yuuki had ever been. Zero had devoted months to fixing it after Rido had wrecked it. He wasn't going to let that effort be fucked up.

He had that power, now, too. Ever since killing Rido, few had dared to question Zero and all had backed down when he'd chosen to push his point. Sure, he received death threats, but they were only threats—the anonymous ramblings of frightened idiots. Level D or not, Zero was now officially the most powerful hunter since the rebellion that had ended the Monarchy. People whispered about him as much as the Kurans. No one had the guts to tell him to do anything he didn't want to do. Even the Night Class, those members who had already returned or hadn't ever left, looked at him with a new kind of respect. It was useful. Not that Zero really, truly cared.

Zero didn't care about much. Not for a while. Ever since the Kuran nonsense, the world had just… dulled. Emotions weren't as sharp. His usual irritants now seemed inconsequential. Problems—normal problems, not society-destroying ones—just didn't seem that important. Zero's personal world had descended into a fog that only cleared to let the pain-attacks in. He was functioning on automatic pilot with just a few guiding directives, and not much else. That's what happened, Zero guessed, when you made it to your senior year unexpectedly alive.

Sighing, Zero rested his hands on his knees. The sun was rising, growing warmer and firmer in its insistence. Zero's eyes itched. The part of him that was vampire, a part that seemed to grow everyday, flinched at the light. For a long moment, he focused on pushing the deep, throbbing ache in his bones off to a dark corner in his mind. Then, when he felt he had as strong a grip on himself as he could manage, he focused on summoning enough energy to leave the roof and drag his ass to class.

It was not easy, but he managed. Nothing was ever easy, anymore. But somehow, Zero always managed.

He had no reason to break his record, now.