"Bloody hell?" He asked, "Interesting phrase for a vampire to use. Aren't you in the least sensitive to the word 'blood'?"
"Well, boy, when someone is 1050 years old, they get desensitised to a few things, comprende?"
"Eh."
There was a long, embarrassed pause in the room.
"Hey, kid, you have a bathroom in here?"
"Through the-" He checked himself in mid-gesture towards the door of the stairwell.
"What?"
"I don't think you should go up there."
"Why not?"
"There are some things you and anyone else might not like up there."
"What the hell, when you gotta go, you gotta go, and I'm sure at my age, no bogey monster's gonna wipe me out that easy." Lys walked up to the door and before Gray could grab her by the arm, she dissolved into a fine, shimmering mist that swept through the door, it seemed.
Shocked, Gray collapsed on a pillow just inside his room, but then got up and opened the door with hands paler than usual. The air in the dark stairwell was freezing, even colder than the wintry Kyoto air outside. A solitary lightbulb illuminated the closed door of the bathroom, slightly to the right at the top of the flight of stairs. He could hear running water trickling through the pipes and an overwhelming sense of foreboding came over him.
He took one step up and the icy air chilled his already cold body to the bone. He sank down on the step, teeth chattering, red-brown lashes frosted by the unearthly temperature. He blinked and looked up, fearful of what he would see.
Just in front of the bathroom door stood a long-haired girl in a dress so drenched with blood its original colour could not be determined. She lifted a white hand as if to knock on the door.
"No!" Gray cried, "Nariko! She is not one you want!"
The girl turned and he saw her eyes, as pale as the first time he had seen them a year ago, a blue-grey so pale that she didn't seem to have irises.
In a voice high and sad, she asked in Japanese, "But would you be one I want?"
He literally froze at the sound of her voice, and it was only partly due to the cold. He couldn't speak because breathing in itself had become an effort.
She looked at him with those pale, haunting eyes, eyes that would appear in your mind just as you fell asleep and just as you woke, and spoke aain, "No? Then give me a chance to find someone who can make death a little easier to bear.
"Someone who is already dead but yet alive. Someone like you, but who does not know me for what I am, a wraith, a mere echo of what I used to be."
As though rejecting this fact, Nariko turned suddenly towards the door and sank into it. The air became less icy and Gray now stood, fearing the worst for the vampire within the room. Stumbling up the stairs, he found, at the very spot where the apparition had been, something which he had been too afraid to see all the time he had lived there.
A pool of crimson.
:: dream1050 ::
Chapter 1 - Waiting
Chapter 2 - Inside
Chapter 4a - Visions
Chapter 4b - Metaphors
Chapter 5 - Awake