A/N: scrapped my last OC story, trying again with this haha. Zero needs some love. this occurs after the completion of the manga. i don't own Vampire Knight or Zero Kiryu, i only own Miu Itami.

Her very name meant pain, and that lone fact spoke to him. He saw her often in Headmaster's office, being scolded for this or for that, but he never addressed her. Her eyes ghosted over him. That was good. He wouldn't know what to do if she acknowledged him.

Yuki Cross had been gone for six months. The Night Class and Day Class at Cross Academy had separated completely following Kaname Kuran's departure. The Academy was being held together by a thread—and that thread was ex-human Zero Kiryu.

Day Class students feared the eighteen-year-old. They avoided him at all costs, doing everything they could to keep from getting him angry. It helped that they were also now afraid of the borderline-out-of-control Night Class students.

The Night Class vampires barely listened to Kaien Cross' rules anymore. Zero's methods of keeping them in check, and his unrestricted use of Bloody Rose, curbed them sometimes, but…

The Day no longer loved and revered the Night. The Night no longer had any connection with the Day.

It was exactly how Zero had always knew it would be. Except…Except he hadn't anticipated that Yuki would leave with Kaname. He hadn't anticipated that she would become…He hadn't anticipated ever bothering with anyone else. He was a monster.

"Itami-san, why must you always test my patience?" Kaien Cross asked with a sigh. The Headmaster, usually cheery and smiling, had not been that way with this girl in a long time.

Zero stood in the corner behind the Headmaster's desk, concealed in the dark. He watched her, his eyes narrowed, but her name—Itami—almost caused a sigh to escape his mouth. Itami. Pain.

She said nothing, eyes hidden by the shadow of her bangs.

"Miu," tried the Headmaster now. "Please. Stop this. I don't want to have to expel you."

Her fists clenched momentarily on her lap. "I understand, Headmaster."

"You say that every time, Miu, but your rule-breaking has only escalated—"

"I apologize, Headmaster. I don't know what else you want me to say." Her voice was hard.

The Headmaster sighed, his spirit broken, as it often was with this one. "Go back to your dorm, Itami-san. I need time to think of an appropriate punishment."

She stood so quickly that her chair nearly toppled backwards, breezing through the door with a sort of angry grace. Zero couldn't help but follow her every move. She was riveting—her manner, her resentment, her selfishness. Purely for the fact that she reminded him nothing of Yuki, she fascinated him.

Her dark, uncombed curls were piled on top of her head and secured with a ribbon, which was tied in a knot rather than the neat bow he saw other girls sporting. She refused to wear her uniform as dictated, and when it came to the Night Class, that was the area where she often found herself in the Headmaster's office.

Her rebellion had begun small. She argued with Headmaster Cross about the Night Class students constantly in the early stages. She'd known their secret, known they were vampires—Zero had never asked how, because Kaien hadn't seemed surprised. Since those early days, however, her acts had indeed escalated. She had repeatedly snuck into the Night Class dorms late at night, planning to entice a vampire to drink her blood just so Headmaster Cross would remove them from the campus. She had stolen the Artemis Rod from the Headmaster's office and tried to use it on a group of them when they surrounded her outside the Moon Dormitory. This most recent time, she had stepped it up yet another notch, by attempting to switch out their supply of blood tablets with sugar pills.

When asked her motives, her only response had been dripping with disgust and contempt: "I don't want to look at them anymore."

Miu Itami didn't have friends. She kept to herself, seemingly glad that other Day Class students shunned her. Zero heard the students of both classes discussing her on few occasions, usually following one of her visits with the Headmaster, and he remembered distinctly hearing one Night Class girl call her ugly.

As he observed her slip out of the room and let the door slam shut behind her, Zero saw how she could be ugly. Her eyes were a dull, listless grey, hair tangled and unruly, and though her figure was proportional and rather nice, the school uniform revealed her body was covered in scars. They zig-zagged across her legs, disappearing under her skirt, only to appear again on the backs of her hands and her neck. They continued up the left side of her face, merging into one delicate, curving crescent moon that stopped just short of the corner of her eye.

Zero hardly noticed them now. He had to train his eye to find them, but he knew that the others at Cross Academy were looking for them, looking for the scars, and therefore would always see them as clear as day.

The scars weren't the cause of her chosen isolation—in actuality, she had always been like this, as Kaien pointed out once. The scars were recent, obtained within the last year. No one knew about the origin of her scars, or at least if they knew, they weren't talking about it.

"What am I going to do with her, Zero?" asked Headmaster Cross, heaving another sigh as he leaned back in his chair.

"Expel her." Zero's eyes were closed, his tone casual and apathetic.

"I can't do that. The girl doesn't have anywhere to go, and at least here I can keep an eye on her, monitor her activities…"

"Put her on the Disciplinary Committee."

At first, Kaien Cross had laughed boisterously at this suggestion, but not long before Zero stalked out of the room, the headmaster began to look thoughtful.

Zero kept his window closed at night, partially out of superstition, and partially the very reasonable, logical concern of vampires sneaking into his room while he slept. Not that he slept very much these days anyway. So, despite his eyes being closed as he laid on his bed with his arms behind his head, when he felt the breeze against his face he knew that something was wrong.

He sensed another person in his room, but it wasn't a vampire. He opened his eyes, and there, on his window sill, sat Miu Itami. Zero said nothing to her, waiting for her to address him or notice that he was awake. She had opened the window from the outside, but stayed perfectly still, a statuette on his sill. There, drenched in moonlight, she looked almost serene. Her face was a cold mask, staring up at the sky, one foot on the floor of his room while her other knee was pulled up to her chest. He shifted to the edge of his bed, sitting upright.

Neither of them spoke. He felt no desire to break the silence, and after a while he began to realize she wasn't going to break it either. She never even looked at him.

That's good, he thought again. He wouldn't know what to do if she spoke. What would they talk about? He wasn't a normal teenage boy—he was an ex-human, a vampire, the very thing she had professed to hate on numerous occasions. Even just watching her, the way the black choker around her neck made her ivory skin stand out, reminded him that he was a monster. He wanted to press her against the wall, sink his fangs into her neck. He was thirsty just thinking about it, and now with his mind on that subject, he could smell her blood, flowing just underneath that scarred, marked skin.

He knew that if she looked at him now, she'd see that his lavender eyes had undoubtedly gone red with bloodlust. He reigned it in, just kept it bottled up, and after half an hour of clenching his fists against his impulses, the girl jumped out of his window and was gone—not before he realized, however, that she was wearing the armband of the Disciplinary Committee.

The next night was the same. Kaien had given them specific hours to patrol around the Moon Dorm, and he instructed Zero to never leave her unattended.

"I think this could be a good way to keep her in check, but I still don't trust her, rash girl," he had said.

Zero didn't much appreciate being the girl's babysitter, but at least observing her was never boring. She viewed humans and vampires with the same look of steely disgust in her slate-grey eyes. He found it increasingly fascinating to watch the way her gaze would switch to cold indifference and back again. Her face was an open book of emotion, yet still mysterious. As if he was reading a footnote, unable to put it into context. There was still no known reason for her hatred.

One of the vampires, walking along the outside hall of Moon Dorm late at night while Itami-san perched behind a pillar, thanked her for her service. She seemed surprised, her entire body twitching, and for a moment she just stared at the female Night Class student. It took her quite a bit to recover, after which she shot them a glare and zipped away, but as Zero stood alongside her, he noticed that from that point on she seemed to be…off. As if the vampire's harmless and seemingly nice comment had shaken her.

She trailed behind him during patrols, never straying, like the dutiful student she was supposed to be. It seemed strange to him that she would so adamantly go against every rule Headmaster Cross made yet follow it to the letter on this occasion only.

Then, when he would walk her to her own dorm room and parted for his, he would find her sitting on his window before he even closed his door.

Even when she was on patrol with him, the pair never made eye contact. It was…oddly comfortable for him.

The third night, every dynamic changed. She was sitting, the same as always, but when his eyes changed and his breathing began to stagger, she finally turned to look at him. The expression in her face stunned him for a moment. Cool indifference and…a hint of intrigue. She slipped smoothly off of the sill, stepping to where he was perched on the edge of his bed. His tattoo glowed, and he flinched, struggling with the bloodlust. His hand reached up, tangled in his hair as he dug the heel of his palm into his forehead.

"Get out," he growled: the first words he had ever said to her.

She didn't move.

"Get out, get—" He lunged at her before he was even finished speaking, pinning her to the wall. His hands trapped her, but despite his animalistic, predator movements, she didn't move. She didn't struggle, didn't scream. She stared defiantly back at him, meeting his eyes for the first time. His self-control slipping, he leaned forward and inhaled the scent of her skin, her pulse audible to his ear. As his fangs scraped across her neck, across her pulse point, he felt her tense as if steeling herself.

Interesting. Why?

"I don't want to," he hissed. "I'm a monster, I know I'm a monster, I don't want to drink from you." She was human, precious, untainted, pure—he had promised himself, he had promised that he wouldn't, not after Yuki, not after Kuran—

But she smelled tantalizingly sweet, decadent, and she still had not moved. In fact, she may have even craned her head back to give him better access. Except that was crazy. That would mean she was accepting it, that she was actually okay with the fact that he was just moments away from feeding on her—

He growled again lowly, his body trembling with effort and exertion, and he tried to back away from her at least enough to where she could duck away from him and reach the window. She didn't take the opening. Maybe she just didn't see it.

Then his control broke clean in two, and his vampire fangs sank deep into the girl's neck. Her blood flowed freely, unheeded, and coated his tongue deliciously. He felt her body stiffen against his own lithe frame, but she remained frozen in place. Fear? He couldn't taste it. He had tasted Yuki's feelings, her love for Kuran, her fright for Zero. He had tasted Kuran's obsession for Yuki, his disgust at what Zero had become. In this girl, all he could taste was emptiness and…something sweet he couldn't identify. It was that sweetness that had drawn him to her neck in the first place.

When his thirst was sated, he pulled back from her, licking his lips of her blood and wiping it from his chin with the back of his hand. It had dripped onto her school uniform. She gave it a grimace of disdain before unhesitatingly peeling it off and dropping it onto the floor. This left her in only a bra, something she seemed utterly unashamed and unembarrassed of, and he was reminded again of how different she was from Yuki. Itami-san may as well have been Yuki's negative. Her opposite in every way.

Zero raked his eyes over the newly exposed scars. They crossed over her side, dancing toward her navel, snaking upward under her bra, across much of her left shoulder and—as he noticed when she turned around—all of her back. Each scar was a line, only about two to three inches in length, as if she had been sliced with shards of broken glass. The only scar with some kind of abstract shape was the one on her cheek, beginning from her jaw line.

She stepped towards the window, and he suddenly felt the urge to say something to her. The air was thick with heat, the small breeze from the open window doing nothing to cool him.

"It's too cool out to just wear that," he said.

She didn't respond.

"I imagine you're going to try and get Cross to expel me." He tried bitterness instead.

Her gaze met his again. She held no emotion. "It would be no use. We both know that."

"You hate vampires. Why allow me to…" He couldn't finish his sentence, disgust and self-loathing leaking into his tone.

"You hate vampires as well," she murmured. "I wonder why Headmaster thinks it's wise to allow the two people in this academy who hate all vampires to be his so-called 'Disciplinary Committee'." She scoffed. "It's a farce."

She was eyeing the window again, as if she'd like nothing more than to leave, but Zero's heightened senses easily made him aware of the goosebumps on her skin. He stood, making his way to the dresser at the opposite end of the room. He opened the top drawer and threw her a wadded ball of fabric.

"One of Yuki's old uniform shirts," he said. "Should fit you."

He still remembered when she, Yuki, had pleaded with him to let her use some of his free drawer space. "You're not using it anyway, Zero, and there isn't enough room in mine! Please?"

She slid her arms into the sleeves and buttoned it at the middle. It flapped open slightly in the wind, revealing her midriff and some cleavage, but he supposed it was functional enough that she wasn't going into the night air completely exposed. She paused on the sill, nodding at him—probably some kind of thank you for the shirt—and jumped, leaving him alone.

The first thing he did was shut and lock the window.

A/N: well? i'd like some feedback please! reviews are love.