6. Hunter Hunting (1/2)
title: of the darkness||chapter: hunter huntingcharacters: ryou, shou, camulachapters: 6-25||words: 1,129||total: 6,950genre: family, supernatural||rated: pg-13challenge: diversity writing challenge, ygo gx, j6, multi-chapter with 15-25 chaptersnotes: it's an au. it involves vampires.summary: shou invites his
other in after ryou returns from a long trip away. that is his first mistake. it only gets worse from there.
he hunted. there was no other word for what he was doing. there were pretty euphemisms but he refused to let himself be lulled by them. he was a hunter. a killer. whether he wanted to be or not wasn't the point. he was.
that's right, camula cooed in the back of his thoughts. a lovely killer you are indeed. so very good at it.
ryou tried even harder to ignore her. doing so wasn't at all easy, but he practiced. he could feel her amusement at his doing so and ignored that, too.
it took only a handful of moments for him to arrive in the village. no one who didn't know of a vampire's presence would even suspect him. a normal human would've taken at least two hours to get there on foot alone, and the land wasn't yet dry enough for a horse to gallop all out. yet he arrived on a misty gust of wind, reshaping himself into a human with a thought alone.
there were a few perks to being a vampire, he thought. not enough for him to want to stay one if he could change it. but swift travel was swift travel.
it was roughly early evening, the sun already setting behind the mountains, with long shadows stretching out over the land. he slid into those shadows, looking around for any source of food.
he didn't like to think of them as people. he knew they were, but if he thought they were human, then he couldn't do it.
all of his senses worked at a higher level now. he could hear footsteps from much farther away than before, catch and identify scents on the wind, see in the dark even clearer than a human could at high noon on a clear day. all of that worked to
ing him what he needed to know: there was a human not that far away, young and healthy, and most importantly, alone.
the entire population of this village couldn't take him down if they tried to, but he didn't want them to try in the first place. instead, he moved carefully toward the one he'd located, keeping to the shadows and watching as he drew closer.
it was a young man, one that he'd seen before during other trips down this way, apprentice to the local tailor. his eyesight wasn't the best, either, which meant even if he got a look at ryou, he might not recognize him until it was too late. all to the good.
ryou didn't have the layout of the village memorized. he made a note to do that as soon as he could. one never knew what might come in handy. at the moment, that simply meant that he didn't know if his chosen target had a given destination in mind or if he were just ambling around stretching his legs. either way offered risks and dangers.
it wasn't himself he worried about so much as shou. he knew what he was. he knew he could defend himself. but people had been known to lose control when touched by fear and shou could get blamed for things he'd had nothing to do with.
shou wasn't the kind of warrior that he was. he never had been. he could handle himself more or less on a battlefield, but ryou made a point to see that he never saw them. it wasn't necessary. it wouldn't be necessary.
you could make him one of us, camula mused as he kept on stalking toward his chosen prey. then no matter what, he would be safe.