Dragon Knights Fan Fiction ❯ My Immortal ❯ Beautiful ( Chapter 1 )

Disclaimer: Mine, mine, mine! Bwuhaha! (person comes up and whispers in ear) O.O What, not mine? (sniffle)

 

AN: This fic is my dearest darling child, and it is hereby dedicated to the almighty B-chan :) Even though it's way more then I originally promised, so neh. After about two years (at least it feels that long, I can't actually remember, heh) of hard work (well, I worked on it on and off, anyway, heh), it's finally done - but yes, I'm only going to be posting every four, five, seven-ish days, because I'm an evil pig. Actually, it's not really because I'm a review addict (though I am that!), but because I'll probably be perfecting the story as I go, and if anyone happens to catch a horrible plot hole or irritating inconsistency or anything, I'd love to know about it as soon as possible. Agh, my poor little brain can't handle this much plot o.o;; In other news, this story has nothing to do with the song My Immortal, and was not in fact even inspired by it. I just thought the phrase was appropriate; if anything, large chunks of it might have been inspired by old Rolling Stones songs. But mostly it was something I came up with after watching Van Hellsing and staying up 'til four in the morning :) Enjoy, all!

 

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Chapter One: Beautiful

 

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They hadn't been calling for snow. But then again, in these parts you could never be too sure. There was actually a saying about it - if you don't like the weather, just stick around... or something like that. It had started as light flurries around third period, causing all the younger female students to `ooh' and `ah' and press their faces against the windows, but now it was a bit heavier than that. More than a bit, perhaps. Perhaps it came tumbling out of the sky like a smoke-colored avalanche and transformed the bare, cold ground into whitewater rapids. Perhaps.

 

Rath stared unblinkingly up at the sky for a moment, before getting in to the waiting limousine.

 

He hated snow. Bad things happened when it snowed...

 

For instance, he could see Thatz and Rune waving at him from where they waited for the bus. But there was another group of kids who were sneering and laughing behind their hands. Fedelta flipped him off, to the acute amusement of the rest of the group. Rath just ignored him and waved to his friends as the limo drove past.

 

"How was school, sir?" the chauffeur asked dutifully.

 

"Fine." Silence descended.

 

It was better than where he was going, anyway. Gods, he was this close to actually jumping out of a moving vehicle, if only he didn't know how much trouble he would get in later. Well, it wasn't so much getting in trouble, really, because that tended to involve yelling, and getting grounded, and stuff like that. More frightening was if they fussed and cried and whined and asked him are you okay? and why would you do such a thing? How sickening. This was the whole reason why the kids at school hated him. And to think, he'd had a chance at being normal...

 

Well, maybe. He'd never met his real parents, so for all he knew maybe they were just as bad as Lykouleon and Raseleane. Those were the kind of parents that adopted children, though; not the kind that put them up for adoption.

 

Officially, on paper, he was very lucky. Lykouleon owned a very large and more importantly very lucrative company, so he had enough money to support twenty children. Unfortunately, Raseleane was incapable of having any, so they'd adopted him. He had everything he could possibly want - servants, a thousand video games, tutors, top-of-the-line computers, a bath the size of a swimming pool, everything. Everything except freedom.

 

He hated it.

 

All too soon they reached the house. The mansion, the castle. The prison. The front gates swung open on their own, gently, as if they were being pushed by the snow-laden wind. Rath managed to remain completely expressionless, right up until he saw the new car in the drive-way.

 

"Who's here?" he asked quietly, as the limo pulled up in front of the main building.

 

"Ah, you refer to the car. I believe it belongs to your new tutor, sir," the chauffeur said, bowing as he held the car door open.

 

Rath nodded, and quite calmly went inside. He did not, however, stop to let the butler relieve him of his jacket. He didn't bother to take off his shoes, either. He shrugged the servant off and went silently but quickly to the room where Lykouleon and Raseleane usually took guests, and threw the door open.

 

The first thing he noticed about the man was that his hair was almost white, and for a moment Rath thought he must be another batty old fart. But then he realized the hair was deliberately spiked in a fashion that no old man would dare attempt, to say nothing of the fact that it had purple highlights. Actually, he had the face of someone in their late twenties, though his eyes looked maybe just a bit older than that...

 

Raseleane jumped, and Rath remembered to exhale. "Rath! You startled me! I'd think you'd know better than to go around slamming doors-"

 

"I thought I told you I didn't need another tutor," he hissed.

 

Lykouleon coughed politely. "Ah, yes, well. We felt that, since you just spend all afternoon locked in your room anyway, you might as well use that time to improve you studies." The way he smiled suggested that perhaps it wasn't that Rath spent a lot of time locked in his room that bothered him, but that he might actually spend a lot of time pretending to be locked in his room, while he was really... elsewhere. Rath scowled. "We thought that it would be especially important right now, since Raseleane will be spending some time at her mother's in Spain for her health and I'll probably be working late a lot soon, on the merger with... Rath?"

 

Rath was already too far off to hear. Damn it...

 

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It was hard work, being a 'modern' vampire. For one thing, pig's blood just wasn't completely satisfactory. But the fact of the matter was that the old-fashioned vampires, the type that went around draining innocent humans left and right, were looked down upon these days. And then of course he had to keep his true nature hidden, because if the humans found out that vampires were still around after all then no one would be safe. So that meant no plotting world domination - he had to do his best to live an ordinary life, at least during the daytime. He really couldn't say where the myth that vampires slept during the day because the light would kill them came from; he wished it were true. Vampires took no sleep, and during the day they were just... ordinary people, more or less.

 

In short all this meant, alas, getting a job.

 

He had found that he had quite a knack for teaching. He had been around long enough to know what he was talking about, after all. But he didn't really enjoy the classroom atmosphere that much; getting a whole bunch of teenagers together in a small room was a rather like saying 'What's the worst that could happen?', and tended to result in spontaneous combustion. No, he preferred a one-on-one teaching arrangement; children seemed to learn better that way anyway. And thus he had discovered the profession of the home tutor.

 

This seemed like a truly ideal job, too. The family was so rich that they were paying him the same amount he'd get for a regular six-days-a-week job for coming in just three days a week. It was a beautiful house, too, and they even gave him the valuable resource known as full access to the fridge. Then he heard about the kid.

 

Gods. Apparently he was actually very smart, so technically the whole teaching part of the job shouldn't be that hard. But it was getting him to actually sit down and do his homework that would be the trick. It seemed that he was often missing classes and getting in fights, and he had even been caught doing drugs on occasion. The boy was your basic Student from Hell. He personally felt that he would have given him a good hard smack, rather than kept getting him new tutors when he scared the old ones off, but he kept that to himself.

 

All and all, he felt he could probably handle it. It was hard to turn down that much money, and anyway, he had developed a great deal of patience over the years.

 

And then, the boy came in. For a moment they just stared at each other; for his part, he would have to admit he was surprised. He had been expecting some tattooed, nose-ringed, mohawk-ed nightmare, especially with a name like Rath, but the boy was actually quite... beautiful. The only unnatural thing about his simply-cut black hair was a white streak on the side. He was completely devoid of any tattoos or piercing, at least where he could see them. He had to wonder about the eyes, though. They might have been able to get away with calling them brown or hazel or something on official documents, but the fact of the matter was that they were really red, especially when the light hit them just right. Must be contacts...

 

"I thought I told you I didn't need another tutor!" Rath was saying. Oh dear.

 

The husband coughed politely, or perhaps nervously. "Ah, yes, well..." He tried to explain the situation, mostly by lying the vampire noted, but before he finished Rath had run out, slamming the door again behind him just like his adopted mother had told him not to.

 

There was a moment of highly unpleasant silence. Lykouleon sighed, massaging his temples as if he had suddenly discovered a migraine. Raseleane glanced at her husband, and stood. "So sorry about that; he probably just had a bad day..." She floundered for a moment, but rallied brightly. "Well, you'll be able to come out next Tuesday, won't you? Good, good..."

 

He said his fair-wells, and was shown out of the house by one of the many interchangeable family servants. He stared up at the snow for a moment, marveling at how heavily it was falling now. Beautiful. Then Kharl shivered slightly, and sighed as he continued to his car. Next week was going to be a very long week indeed...

 

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AN: Aw, poor Kharl, he has such a hard afterlife. Heh. Did anyone notice how cleverly I avoiding actually using his name right up until the very end? No? O.O Argh... (grin) Okay, so it's pretty short, but it's really just a little introductory chappy. In the next chapter, Rath and Kharl... have their first conversation! Bwuha... Er, R&R?