Weiss Kreuz Fan Fiction ❯ Crazy Sunday Mornings ❯ It's Dancing Bela Lugosis in His Head ( Chapter 11 )

Night has come to Tokyo, and the early evening wind has taken to cooler temperatures. One by one, the stars seem to fade into (not out) the sky of different shades of darkness. The stars are beautiful to behold, and they know it, being vain creatures themselves. But down below, two figures sitting on the cold hard cement floor of a rooftop perch were hardly noticing them, partly because it's a city and all that smog, and partly because they were too absorbed in something else.

 

“Aya, I think I caught it from the bite.” Yohji had said, as his had rubbed that part of his arm.

 

“Caught?”

 

“I don't know…” Yohji replied, still rubbing that part of his arm, a look of confusion now on his face as he struggled to explain the myriads of thoughts in his head. “Perhaps. Something. From the doctor- he bit me, yeah?”

 

The redhead frowned. He didn't like where this conversation was going. He searched for the odd word he read earlier in the mission folder. “Caught Lycanthropy, you mean? You think the doctor was making a serum that warps the DNA to include lycanthropy?”

 

He nodded his head, slowly at first, then furiously. Here was Aya saying exactly what he thought but just couldn't make sentences of. “Yeah, he was studying it right? Pretty obsessed about it… and he seems like the type of guy that would try to make a serum out of a myth…”

 

“For what, pray tell?”

 

“Oh…” Yohji gestured around with his hands, “… the usual stuff. Immortality. Youth. Proof they're not as bonkers as the other scientists say he is.” He was beginning to feel a vague sense of relief, at least here was someone he could talk with. When he looked to Aya's face, however, he quickly rectified that sense of relief. The man had utter disbelief all over his face, not the kind of disbelief that's like “oh gosh!”, rather the one that goes “you're kidding me right?” for the nth time, Yohji's hopes fell. Aya was unforgiving though, he wouldn't lessen the look on his face even after he saw Yohji slump back in dejection.

 

“You do realize what you're talking about?”

 

Flinging the cigarette impetuously, he rubbed his face with his hands in a very irritated manner. He could just feel the first gnawing sensations of despair from the pit of the stomach, and he didn't need Aya to urge it further. “You know what, if you could just stop being so fucking skeptical for a moment and try to help me out here…” he cried out, exasperated, “… maybe I wouldn't sound so goddamned stupid and then we could solve all this… this… SHIT…” he spat out the last word, disgusted. “And it's not as if this is the first incredibly unreal villain's plot line we've dealt with, you know! I mean,” his arms gesture wildly about him,”the fucking prime minister's son turned into some fucking monster! Tell me that's not weird. And our arch enemies, for fuck's sake, levitate this and that…” and he went on, rambling about the other enemies they've fought, still gesturing wildly, “… and would you believe the prime minister's mutton chops? He looks like a fucking koala!...”

 

Aya had to accede that Yohji had a point there. It wasn't as if some scientist discovering the serum that turns people, when injected with it, into the mythical, undead of the night was the worst of the shocking, out of this world, villains they had to deal with in the past. And he must admit that that Takatori spawn really took the cake. So maybe Yohji had a point here. He decided to be less cruel to the frustrated man before him.

 

“All right…” Aya interrupted, “I'll suspend my disbelief, “a pause, “for a moment.”

 

Yohji stopped in the middle of ranting about some freak-ass chick with some parasol, surprised that Aya admitted that he had a point. “Oh? Well. Okay, great.”

 

“So tell me all about whatever this…” Aya paused again for a moment, tried looking for another word, then gave up, “…shit is all about.”

 

So Yohji did. But not all of it, of course. He skipped the part where he heard the voice. And the mirror thing. It could seriously discredit the whole story, and it's not even that credible in the first place. Besides, even though it was the middle of the week, and the voice was surely too weakened that he wasn't visited by it, he still felt it could hear him, know that he told someone else about it. So he told the other man about the weird black outs instead, the way he tried to remedy it, the way he broke out of his own remedy, and -he was forced to say it- the dried blood on him (at this point of his story he couldn't hold back the shudder) when he came to on Sunday mornings. Yohji suppressed a grimace, knowing that in the end Aya would still think its all bollocks.

 

“…but in the end, I'm really not sure about everything, because well, black-outs do that to you, you know.”

 

Silence crept back, and the two regarded each other again, weighing words and revising opinions.

 

“So…?”

 

“Hmm?”

 

“What do you think?”

 

“Bullshit is what I think. You seriously believe yourself?”

 

Fuck it there's no getting through with this guy! Yohji is very nearly blowing his top off, hugely irritated towards his goddamned predicament, towards oh-so-fucking-skeptical Aya, and Life in general. “WELL. YES, NO… I DON'T KNOW, OKAY?!...” he flustered. “Maybe! I mean, what the hey, you know?”

 

“I do?”

 

Yohji threw him an angry glare, but only a short one as he gave into quiet exasperation (and besides, it wasn't as mean as Aya's). “Come on, man, don't be so literal.”

 

Well, you're asking me to look at this predicament literally. I mean, really, lycanthropy is a myth. You're asking me to believe in a myth that's manipulated scientifically. And to believe in one is to take it literally you goddamned half-wit. But Aya didn't want to exasperate Yohji further than the man already was, so he kept it to himself. Instead, he volunteered a guess. “Maybe you're just having hallucinations?”

 

Yohji scoffed. “Right. Maybe I'm turning into the Hulk?” Aya gave him a puzzled look, “You know, the Hulk? Meek scientist turns into big green man who's perpetually angry?” When no enlightened look replaced the one on Aya's face, Yohji gave up. “Forget about it. What I meant to say is this is a really coincidental hallucination here. Oh, it just so happened that I was began having hallucinations right after I got bitten on the arm by a crazed, superbly strong scientist, one Saturday night, when someone else came into my room, smashed my window, flung off the dresser, ripped off a bed post, then doused me with blood-like substance and left me feeling really sixes and sevens the next morning, memory completely buggered. And, to really confuse me, that someone timed their murders the same nights I've been having my hallucinations. Gee, it all makes sense now.”

 

“Okay.” Aya said curtly, a bit put off by Yohji's biting sarcasm, “So it might not be a hallucination.”

 

“Might not? Might NOT? Aya, it's not a hallucination.”

 

“But it all seems so farfetched.”

 

“Then explain to me the wrecked room, the black outs, the many coincidences then… no, you don't have to explain them. Just explain to me the blood.”

 

Aya thought about it. The blood clinched it. Where would Yohji get it in his room? It all fits now, he thought. And I bet if I told him about the shadow… then he'd be convinced that that isn't any coincidence either.

 

“I think I see it. Can't you? I've turned into… something else. Whatever that scientist was experimenting on, I caught it, and this time…” he looked back to Aya, a bit mournful, “…this time it worked.”

 

“You mean… you think you're what… a vampire?”

 

Right now, pictures of Bela Lugosi and other black and white dozen a dime Draculas (that he recalled from his mumsy's Halloween movie marathons, along with Frankenstein) danced around his head.

 

In Aya's head however, the name Bram Stoker came to mind. Then words like `silly', `childish' and the likes came to mind. Aya is a skeptic, he knew that, but he'd rather call himself a realist. He didn't know if he was a pessimist because he was a realist or the other way around. No matter. He is well read, and is familiar with the vampire mythos. He thinks they're just sexual metaphors for a repressed age, recalling Bram Stoker's novel. Now they're just fetish creatures. Then he thought of the peasants, those obscure eastern European people who really believed in vampires. Did they think vampires as sexual metaphors? He mentally raised his eyebrows, and thought perhaps not. There is something more sinister, more basic evil about the peasant's bloodsucker, as opposed to the romantic's. But please. A vampire? Yohji? In Japan? Is it possible? He shook his head, as Yohji shook his own.

 

“No, I think I'm turning into something else… lycan… that's werewolf right?”

 

Oh by the love of…of all things orange! He really believes all this! “Not necessarily. Vampires are part of the lycan lore. They metamorphose too, you see.”

 

“Ah, you mean the business with bats and all that?”

 

“Hn.”

 

“Yeah well either way…”

 

They mulled their thoughts and silence came back, a bit annoyed that he had to go back and forth to this place when they can just talk straight and then let him come and stay put. Then Yohji came back from wherever he had been in his head.

 

“I guess it'd be vampire. I mean, what with the blood and all that. And the… I mean that if it was really me, you know, the bite marks on those poor buggers.”

 

“Right… a vampire.”

 

Yohji nodded his head gravely; he's so serious that Aya had to double check. Yup, still serious. And one flew over the cuckoo's nest, Aya thought.

 

“Right.”

 

“You don't believe me.” This was said more of a statement than a question, and had so annoyed Aya he was moved to say something sarcastic.

 

“Oh, no. I believe you. In fact, I myself am a werewolf. Roooawrrr.” And he made clawing movements with his hand to accompany this. Yohji was staring at him, barely holding in a gape, letting his bewilderment to pass before he commented on it.

 

“You know, in some other context, time, and maybe planet that,” he mimicked Aya's werewolf impression, “…would've been insanely erotic, delivered in some other fashion.”

 

Aya rolled his lavender eyes and muttered, “Bite me.”

 

And he thought he had this all figured out. He groaned inwardly. He had come up to the roof for some proof to the little theory he's got in his head. And he thought shocking Yohji would make the older man confess the truth readily than otherwise. But he was wrong, oh was he wrong. Now what he got is some crazy confessions of a case of mistaken specie, conspiracy theories and snowballing facts. He only thought Yohji would have picked up the fact that the manner of death of the four bodies were akin to that of the last victim of Jeumans, and maybe the older man knew something else he didn't. It's not as if he could just take Yohji's story at face value. It's not as if he's seen the dried blood that Yohji recounted. So they're extremely coincidental, that happens… well maybe not. Well, there was that mess in Yohji's room the other Saturday… surely the blond is strong, but not that strong. And that had evidences. Aya rubbed his left temple as he felt the oncoming headache he's sure to have from all these. Okay, sure, he had his suspicions, and that gut feeling he'd been avoiding that somehow told him Yohji would also know of his nightly unwelcome visitor. Something tells him this all ties up together. But that doesn't give credit to this cock and bull story…

 

…does it?

 

 

 

 

 

 

This whole chap is just by way of an explanation. This is where the fic all goes downhill.

 

Bela Lugosi--- the quintessential Dracula actor.

The Incredible Hulk--- you know, the Marvel comics' answer to the Green Giant mascot (hehe, just a joke, no offense to The Hulk fans out there).

Lycanthropy--- uh, you can look this one up. I mean, it's lore. It'd be a bit heavy to explain.

Peasant vs. Romantic Notion of the Vampire--- got that from a book I used for research on this fic. Yeah, I mean, compare the European folk tales (before the novel Dracula) to Anne Rice's vampires. Worlds apart.

Stoker's Dracula as sexual metaphor--- got that in another book. Well, he did get away with all these amorous trysts with women during the repressed Victorian era setting. I mean, what else would he stand for?

Bram Stoker--- the Irish writer famous for the novel “Dracula” which spawned a whole new genre in fiction.

One flew over the cuckoo's nest- is a rhyme, and is a title of a Jack Nicholson movie and maybe a novel or something.

 

Well, Asia has it's fair share of vampires, bloodsuckers, and nightly undead, but in folktales they differ greatly from the now universally accepted notion of the Vampire- which has European origins (somewhere near Russia, or a place that has been once part of Imperial Russia, at least), popularized by a terrible Transylvanian (well, so they say) ruler (that's Vlad the Impaler), then by a novel based on Vlad, carried to America, standardized by Bela Lugosi as some cloak-clad Count that has that obscure, eastern European accent. That's where Aya's having a difficulty, just which vampire type did Yohji thinks he became? Is he: Asian folktale-ish, peasant, American movie type, Dracula stereotype or romantic, gothic kind? I ask that same question myself.

 

 

Yes, I know, this chapter sucks. Not a pun.