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i.
“Are you in need of blood, my lord?”
No.
“Any will do I assume?”
Not yours.
“Will the neck do?”
“You aren’t Yuu.”
“Yuu?” The healer looks to the tatami mat, where the vampire has hovered faithfully near for the past day and a half, where he’s whispered promises of safety to the resting body on it, delicately brushed away pasted strands of hair from the scorched plane of the swordsman's forehead, stroking his scarred eye.
“Does my lord mean the scarred swordsman?”
Mikaela doesn’t confirm or deny. Reluctantly, he snatches the medicine man’s wrist when it is within arm’s reach. Parched lips press to the pulse.
ii.
His lips are dry, so dry, cracking in the wind, but the lord rides horseback through the forest and the hills, his cloak swathed around the swordsman who shivered like a child from the cold. Overhead a bird’s cry, his falcon having long abandoned her master a promise to reunite after the silver storm quells. But the lord presses on, urges the horse faster, farther. And when the horse’s gallop slows from exhaustion, he spills to the ground from the saddle in a sloppy land, and runs the rest of the way himself.
Sickness kills many here. Fever had nearly taken his youngest sibling. So Mikaela had all but kicked down the first and only hut he’d come across in the mountains.
A healer, of all people. Blessing or luck, he won’t question it.
The baffled human falls to the floor in a delayed bow, but far too frantic over Yuu’s health to be concerned with triflings like formalities, Mikaela yanks him up by the elbow, howling out a plea:
“Save him! Please!”
iii.
“Yuu is…”
“Yuuichirou.”
“Yuuichirou,” the healer corrects sheepishly, whittling under the vampire’s sharpened gaze. He scratches at his cheek before bending over a bowl of crushed medicinal herbs between his knees. “Is Yuuichirou my Lord’s partner?” He looks at him with curiosity that urges an answer, obtrusiveness thinly veiled under the respected title.
Brazenness aside, Mikaela considers telling the truth. That Yuuichirou is more than just a partner: he is Home. The idea of anyone other than Yuu as his lifeline is impossible. Implies the lord to extend his bonds when he has yet to even grapple with what he’s become. To become a leech that lives off the blood of any human feels sinful, as though he’s one of them, and suggests a strange sense of infidelity that screams in defiance: But I belong only to Yuu.
Mikaela satisfies himself with a distant and nebulous answer that’s only half-successful in the delivery: red eyes lock onto the still body of his guard, betraying a softness not usual of his supernatural kind. A softness exclusive to just one on this forsaken earth. “There is no use in putting it to words. Do your job, healer, and don’t pry into matters that don’t concern you.”
“With all due respect, my lord, the sick are my concern.”
The softness melts. Eyes burn the healer where he stands. “Dare I say it again?”
“Dare I ask again?" A challenging tone but still tranquil gaze meets the lord's. "My job is to ensure every life under this roof is well. Am I to assume Yuuichirou is with you not of his own will? A blood sla—”
The healer gurgles unpleasantly, choking on his words trapped in his throat by the hand crushing his larynx. Lifted from the ground by the neck, staring at pools of red pupils that only a second ago were across the room.
So close, he can trace the pinpricks in the blown eyes, dilated and bestial.
“He is nothing like that.”
Exposed fangs wrinkle the vampire’s nose. Gags spills from the healer’s thin throat, and the sight of the human's small fingers scrambling for purchase on the offender's wrist reminds the vampire of an insect dangled by its wings. The vampire drops the human, who crumbles to his knees and massaging his swollen neck through a fit of coughs.
Wordlessly, the vampire returns to the swordsman’s side in two long strides, a natural pull. Mikaela feels quite satisfied to think he’s established his dominance and power. Alternatively, he shudders to think of the monster he’s become to feel any sense of triumph from strangling.
“Yuu is my servant, from when I was still human,” he hears himself say, doesn’t know why, what brings him to try to explain. “We swore oaths to each other. There are no other words to explain it, as I said before.”
The healer peeks up from his recovery.
“Merely your servant?” he croaks at length, entirely unconvinced this was all the vampire had to give.
A silent stretches between them. Remembering Yuu’s oath, their new names granted by the stars, the vampire grits out at last, pure admission.
“...He may also be my husband.”
“I see,” the healer croaks again, slightly more convinced.
iv.
The swordsman isn't just his home; he is also his sun, the warm morning sun just as it peeks from the horizon by daybreak.
But this warmth Mikaela feels against Yuuichirou, it is abnormally hot to the touch, burns of fever. The vampire absently traces a scorching maze of battle scars on his guard’s chest with a long finger. The need for blood tingles his throat, but what falls from his lips is always one hoarse plea: “Wake up, Yuu.”
He needs to hear his voice. Yuu’s constant presence, constant oaths of loyalty are charming, warm.
Except when his presence is gone.
v.
Except when his utterance of loyalty are replaced with coughs and boiled blood that burns Mikaela's tongue when he drinks, too hot to consume and smacking with fever. Spat out immediately.
Yuu, ever the optimistic fool. And the lord, the plain fool for listening to the ronin’s instant protests that he shouldn’t fall so easily to sickness.
So he’d said, before the coughs overwhelmed his body violently.
So he’d said, right before he crumbled to the snow.
(It’s vivid, inked permanently in his consciousness even on the precipice of sleep.)
The horse ride through the white mountains. Silver snow kicked up by hooves. The swordsman deliriously cursing the falling rain, and the lord hushing him, correcting him tenderly: It’s snow, Yuu. See? Snow.
Frost clings to the swordsman’s hair, black fringes tipped with ice and brows twist in agony. A small whisper almost swallowed by the horse’s gallops.
“Mika.”
Swathed in the vampire’s cloak like a newborn, yet the lord felt the swordsman's shivers through the cloth as though they were his own. Mikaela once again hushes the man half taken into the realm of the dead, but green eyes look up at him. Wide, trembling with fear.
“Mika. What if you catch it?”
vi.
“I,” Mikaela corrects with the partial air of an aristocrat and partial air of a creature above humanity, morality, “don’t get ill.”
“From human diseases, of course.” The healer relents, shifting on his knees. “Starvation happens to anyone. You can't subsist on just my wrist alone, not with how little you take. You need more.”
“I’m fine.”
The healer continues, wholly ignores the haughty declaration, and the air of formality crumbles as he regards the vampire accusingly. “You’re also ill-prepared. What would you have done if Yuuichirou had died? You need an emergency choice. Vials, maybe.”
Mikaela begrudgingly files this brilliant and painfully obvious idea away for when Yuu wakes. He persists, childishly, threateningly. “Yuu will not die.”
“Not today, no. Not while I’m here, no. It was sheer luck you found me. You would be running blind otherwise. There’s not a village for miles.”
By now Mikaela had all but given up listening to the healer, who only went on:
“You’re malnourished. I know what you’re doing. You won’t take as much as you need, you refuse to hurt either me or Yuuichirou. But you’re killing yourself. When was the last time you fed and felt satisfied?“
vii.
The first time he drinks from the Yuuichirou, he nearly kills him. The swordsman had pleaded for him to drink. He gave himself up to Mikaela, and the vampire had snatched and plundered. It was damnably enticing feeling, the swordsman’s drumming heart pounding from the blood loss, and the carnal part of the vampire wanted it to thrum faster, louder. Yuuichirou didn't stop him, only groaned out faintly.
Music to his ears.
viii.
“Do you play?”
The healer had caught the longing in the vampire’s side-glance. In one corner of the room, a lone kokyu lay, accumulating dust. Mikaela pulls his gaze away from the instrument and says nothing.
“Your hands,” the healer continues, a knowing smile gracing his lips. “May I look at them?”
A downward pull of the vampire’s lips, No, but a heartbeat later the lord makes a rare move away from the mat and towards the healer, pulling up his sleeves to reveal his bandaged arms. The human takes them gladly and delicately. Slowly spins the cloth unloose, lips thinning when the scarred skin is revealed.
“You are a lord through and through. You keep your hands tucked in your sleeves. I only saw the bandages when you choked me,” he says bluntly. Naturally, Mikaela wants to mutter an apology, but says nothing. “I’m amazed you were even able to carry Yuuichirou through the snow. Does it hurt?”
“No,” the lord lies, because he’s still too proud to admit that he has a permanent feeling of weakness in his hands. They are almost numb. “These burns happened months ago. We usually travel by night, but he… it attacked while we were resting, when I was foolish enough to let my guard down.” Mikaela sucks in a breath, aware that the string of passive words were the most he’d uttered to the healer.
The medicine man hums in confirmation, sets down Mikaela’s hands, then walks to the far end of the hut and opens a cabin. He selects a cream and makes a move to massage the hands. His eyes flash up to the vampire in the silent question. Mikaela remains stoic. The healer grabs his hand, and finds that the vampire does not choke him. He rubs the cream over the royal’s arm.
Perhaps it’s the intimacy of the touch. The silence where the healer’s heart throbs like an ominously alluring chant for Mika to come closer, only just ignored when the healer’s voice earns back his complete attention.
“You whisper lovely things to Yuuichirou every night. I hear it.” The healer, perhaps also gone flighty and taken by the fragile moment, says a strange thing after: “If it is a home you search for, my lord and his swordsman are always welcome here.”
Five heartbeats from the human pass before the lord realizes the other is completely serious. Mikaela gives a delayed blink, then inquires, bewildered, “Are you a fool?”
The healer laughs a breezy laugh and doesn’t ever bring it up again.
ix.
“Why do you insist on calling me that?”
“My lord?”
“That.” Mikaela sneers. “You aren’t so removed. News had to have spread, no?”
“I still have connections to the imperial army from my service there. I am intimate with a priest who frequents my cabin for his sister’s healing, and in exchange he tells me information. My lord, I know everything.”
“My castle, burned. My family, killed. My humanity, taken. A lord? I’m anything but. Do you mock me?”
“Never, my lord.”
“Then you mean to insult me. My father was referred to like that. I hated my father.”
“I say it out of respect, my lord. The last thing I wish to do is insult you to your face.” The healer’s eyes crinkle with the clever smile.
“You are testing your life, healer. Answer me to prove you still deserve it: Why are you helping me? Why didn’t you try to kill me when I first stepped foot here? You at least knew I was a vampire.”
"Of course, I did.”
Passive responses only spun Mikaela in circles, and the lord hated to be toyed with like a fool. “I don’t trust you.”
“And it’s a shame you don’t, Mikaela; I’m not your enemy. I only want your trust,” the healer says, because he is still too guarded to confess that he only wants the vampire to look at him the way he looks at the swordsman. “Your trust. That is all.”
x.
The wall fortifying his soul crumbles.
The night Mikaela leans into the healer’s neck, it’s at the end of a sigh, at the end of the healer’s soft chatter that the vampire had only been half-listening to. It ceases entirely when the vampire takes a sudden stand and crosses the room towards the medicine man with quiet resolve.
The lord thinks: Is this what Yuu felt, all those years? Prior to announcing his loyalty to the young lord, did he, too, fight and refuse to connect on an emotional level with another? Was he just as afraid?
For the first time, Mikaela understands why the stray swordsman took so long to come to his extended hand.
“Yes, come here,” the knowing healer laughs quietly, warmly; beckons with an open palm. An extended hand. “Come.”
He crumbles. Mikaela does not find it strange when he obeys the human, who rises to meet the vampire with open arms. Doesn’t find it strange that, when the healer collects him, he wraps his arms around Mikaela’s neck to urge him closer, restless fingers combing and pressing into the unwashed, blond hair.
And to his abhorrent pleasure, he does not find the feeling of infidelity that panged at his heart and weakened his resolve earlier.
“Drink, Mikaela.”
Robes loosen and fall away, and freckle-peppered skin is exposed. The healer presents his neck and bare shoulder. The lord gently the healer closer by the waist until there’s not an inch of space between them, nuzzles greedily into the juncture of the neck and shoulder, and bites.
The healer’s body is small in his arms. He smells of earth and herbs. The understanding that he could break this human stirs a starved and fearful something in him that has since been reserved for Yuu. He hears the pained gasp. Craves more of the sweet sound. Teeth dig deeper. His grip locks steady, coils around the healer like a snake trapping a mouse, a feat incapable under normal circumstances that aren’t brought by desperation and hunger. The healer doesn't even try to resist.
The swordsman has a terrible tendency to let the lord drink without thinking of his own safety first. The healer is also the same. Almost swallowed whole by that starved monster within, Mikaela has to unlock himself from the heat, and only just catches the healer in his arms as the human's knees quake. Mikaela's own arms grow fragile again, and he himself sinks to his knees with the healer in his hold.
“Am I...” the limp body pants. The human can barely lift his head from Mikaela’s shoulders. The vampire only just controls himself from taking the human's small chin into his hand, tilting it up. “...Am I still my lord’s enemy?”
“Healer—”
“Yoichi.” A finger touches Mikaela’s bloodied lips, and the head lifts, brown hair casting a partial veil over the man's face. Mikaela notes what a vibrant green his eyes are, they remind him of his swordsman. “My name is Saotome Yoichi. Call me by name, and I shall call you by yours.”
xi.
Consciousness comes to the swordsman in pieces, slowly but surely collecting into some semblance of reality.
“Hello, Yuu,” greets a soft voice from the fog.
“Hell… oh...”
No, he isn’t dead. No, this isn’t Hell.
The swordsman doesn’t need to open his eye. He can hear the smile in the lilting tone, knows it well. Intimately. He’s still in the Land of the Living. Somehow.
“Even Hades damns me,” comes the groan tinged with offense. His throat is parched, and he feels absolutely weak.
A wary chuckle answers back. Trembling fingers card through his tousled hair, down the nape of his neck in rhythmic cycles. Yuuichirou leans into Mikaela’s touch with an exhausted groan.
“Of course, because I'm not done with you yet. You're still sworn to me, after all.” The lord leans towards the swordsman ear with a possessive leer, and Yuuichirou shivers from lingering fever and the huff that tickling his lobe. “Only I can have you.”
“Enough, fool," Unimpressed by the display, the swordsman groans, unable to find the strength to summon his usual embarrassment towards such possessive commentary from his lord. Yuuichirou can only manage a few words, and they only hold his greatest concerns:
“You hurt?”
“I’m not the one who fainted in the snow.”
“Your hands?”
“Fine.”
“Where...?”
“Safe.”
“My sword?”
“Hasn’t left my side.”
“The bird?”
“Never too far. She never flees, you know.”
“And the horse?”
“Gone.”
Yuuichirou opens an eye at that.
The lord shrugs carelessly. “It wasn’t fast enough. I carried you the rest of the way.”
“Mika...”
“I see no problem. Steal another horse.”
“Likely. The healer?”
Mikaela reels back as though he’s been burned. “Who?”
“Ah.” Yuuichirou tips his chin towards Mikaela in slow degrees. “My handsome savior you were devouring yesterday. Want to thank him.”
“You know about that," the lord observes passively, lips thin.
“Heard everything. Was ill, Mika. Not dead.”
“Then you must know that he’s far from an angel. He’s an imp,” the lord sighs, still running a hand through the swordsman’s hair. ”...Next time, we keep vials.”
“Definitely keep vials.”
A pause. Yuu speaks again.
“Done it yet?”
“Made vials?”
“No. Cried.”
The lord frowns. Opens his mouth to tease, the corners lift in a brittle smile, but the tears have already fallen and he crumbles into his palms. Everything else collapses with it. The lord falls forward, buries his nose into the swordsman’s chest, and sobs.
“Three days, Yuu," he chokes out at last, in between hiccups and shuddering breathes against his guard's robes. "It’s been three days and I… I thought I’d lost you—”
Fingers reach up to brush through blond hair. Not to silence, but to caress, console, encourage the wails that have begun to pour. Mikaela needs this. Yuuichirou sighs. His lord was able to rely on someone else to survive without him, when his blood wasn't enough. He'll have to thank the healer.
When at last Mikaela's sobs quiet to small sniffs, Yuuichirou whispers, “Fond of him?”
Mikaela sits up in a long huff, then mutters against his sleeves as he wipes his tears. “I hate him,” he announces, slit, red eyes glaring at the door. The healer had made a brief exit for more supplies, and his promise of a quick return leaves the vampire wanting to sweep Yuuichirou away before that should happen. “I hate him...”
“You say that,” Yuuichirou laughs, fingers entangling weakly with Mikaela’s, “but I’m convinced I have a rival.”
"Don't be. I made it very clear to him you and I are wed."
The lord's tear stained cheeks lift in a small smile that hides his uncertainty. Wanting to see if his guard should protest, should scold him. Wanting to know, for certain, if what was muttered that night under the stars was real, or just words of fantasy whispered under the euphoric thrill of adopting new identities.
"Oh." The swordsman looks mildly disappointed, then mutters, "Fine, fine. Fellow partner, then?"
Mikaela sputters, and he isn't so sure what it's about: That the swordsman doesn't challenge the claim they are married, or that his guard (either through jest or honesty and, oh, judging by that warm smile, Mikaela fears the latter) suggests a third person to be included in their exclusive intimacy.
And perhaps Yuuichirou senses that the lord, too, isn’t too opposed to another entering their small world as his frown lets on. But through words alone, Mikaela refuses to confirm or deny the swordsman's curiosity. Only the lord will know the whole truth: He has already let down his guard once around the healer, Yoichi. If it should happen again, Mikaela knows he'll fall completely.
This budding attraction will remain unspoken.