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He’d forgotten.
He remembered sea green eyes of glass. They’d pierced him, splashed color into the ravaged world, always saving him, always loving him.
Mika could still feel a distant anguish from a thousand years ago as he crouched before his lover, trembling from hunger and delirium. He had refused to drink, then. He could not summon up enough willpower to refuse now.
He remembered their first kiss: the beach, blue green waves that had crashed and pulled at the sand, mocking the earth for its impermanence, but whose color and power faded to nothing next to his lover’s eyes. And when they kissed: the boy that held Mika’s broken body up, who loved him in spite of the acrid blood on his hands and burning on his fangs, had made his still, ice cold heart throb, made him feel overflowing with warmth, made him alive again.
The boy had lit a fire, thousands of years ago. But Mika could not feel it any longer.
Mika couldn’t feel anything now, for he had lost him. Mika had lost him before he’d ever loved him, when they were still children, when the blood had been forced down his throat as he lay dying, and he was a fool for trying to bridge the yawning oblivion of differences stretching between them.
When the boy with brilliant green eyes that reflected the sky died, Mika died too. Only Mika was a vampire while the boy was infinitely human, so Mika had turned to ice instead. It was the only way left that he could grieve.
And he was a vampire anyway; what use was there to hold on to memories, to emotions, to anything? What use was there to keep moving, to keep living, when he could not love? When the only boy he’d ever love had left him through the blind, inexorable rush of death, this time cutting them apart between life and death?
Mika had tried. He had tried to forget. It was the only way he could move on when he had the days stretching on forever, infinite before him.
He had forgotten the boy’s name.
He’d lost everything. And now he could not feel anything at all.
Only hunger drove the boy of ice; only senseless hunger worked his frozen limbs and forced him to move. He drank blood without looking at the victims. He drank until he couldn’t move to drown out the only emotion left to him: guilt. He drank, tasting both salt and blood, until the limp body in his hands stopped crying out, dry and lifeless, and only Mika’s tears were left.
When he closed his eyes he sought first sleep, then death, even though it wasn’t possible. Mika’s heart had become a barren wasteland where nothing could grow, empty and abandoned. Some isolated part of him still wept for the boy he’d once loved, but as the years accumulated like sand in his hands, the other overwhelming part could not recall why the boy ever mattered at all.
Mika was a thousand years old when he closed his eyes, wanting never to see again. He’d spent a thousand years walking the scarred face of the world. In the beginning, he’d searched for the battered paradise he and the friends he’d once had had dreamed of, but now that he finally found it, he was alone.
Mika was a thousand years old when he lay down to sleep forever, to starve to death, to become a demon, whatever fate awaited an immortal who had lost the will to live. He threw himself into the embrace of death only to be rejected, barred from rejoining the only one he had ever lived for. Mika cried when he woke up to find only himself left, still living, when he was the last person who deserved to.
Mika lay down again because he was exhausted and couldn’t find the energy to do anything else. But he had only closed his eyes for a second before he heard a startlingly familiar voice in his ear. “Hey, Mika!”
Mika jolted up, searching desperately for the voice he’d waited for for centuries. He was met by darkness, but when he strained to see again, his eyes found forest green ones, the same ones that had stolen the color from the ocean and his heart.
“Mika,” the boy whispered, eyes unblinking, asking him to remember, urging him, because they both knew that the boy had never given up on him.
Mika tried. He tried harder than he had at running away from his grief and he was crying now, silent tears streaking down his cheeks. He was shuddering, and the boy reached out to hug him tight, not saying anything. The boy was crying, too.
“Yuu-chan…” he breathed, opening his eyes. His gaze met green, soft and still loving him, even after all those years when Mika had forgotten him. The tears on Yuu’s face were of joy, and Mika hiccuped against him, suddenly finding laughter in a buried place inside him, laughing for the first time since Yuu had died.
“I love you,” Yuu whispered to him, and Mika remembered.
They held each other for a long time.
When Mika woke, Yuu was gone. Yuu was gone, but he could still feel the warmth of Yuu’s body in his arms and his voice, promising eternity. Yuu was dead, but Mika loved him, and when he opened his eyes, he felt the sun on his face like he hadn’t for a long time.