奥村

She saw his shoulders tense in the slightest, giving away the fact that the myth was indeed just a myth. Cue more redness in her cheeks. She bit her lip and regretted opening her mouth. She was just… clueless! And she hated to admit it, too. Eden offered an apologetic smile and took the bag from him. 

"Sorry… I haven’t really spent much of my time around any vampires, so I wouldn’t know…" All she did know was that they could be cold, calculated, and ruthless. As well as that most, according to Greed, were rich, smug assholes. 

With a curious glance back up at him from the floor, she peeked into the bag, eyes widening at the gift. “What the hell, are you a mind reader? Or have you just been stalking me way closer than I thought you were?” She pulled out the chocolate with a genuine smile, handing the wine over to him. “I bought some wine too, but I don’t know how good it is. Expensive as hell though.” She spoke as she walked over towards the kitchen to find a vase. By the time she returned, she already had a piece of chocolate in her mouth as she arranged the flowers on the windowsill.

He laughed a bit. "Don't worry about it. I'll tell you what's real and what's not. It'll be fun to surprise you with that's real and what's not. Here's one: we don't sparkle. I don't know where she got that one from," he muttered under his breath. 

He turned away to hide his smile. "No, I figured you were like most people and like chocolate." That was part of it; the other part was while he was snooping through her rooms the night they met, he found the box of chocolates in her night stand. The box was half empty, and he could put two and two together.

Well, that’s … okay, so Taz really shouldn’t be surprised to learn that exorcists are actual things — she watches movies, okay? Not to mention her life is full of werewolves, for Christ’s sake — but she is, because this isn’t a movie.

     People don’t train to be exorcists.

          Especially not easily flustered Asian kids.

               So there’s really only one explanation —

     ❝Is this a joke? Did Stiles and Scott put you up to this? This is so something they would do, the idiots. I can’t believe dad agreed to it, though — this is the room they use for the really scary guys. There’s nothing scary about you. You’re like a baby.❞

She scoffs, crossing her arms.

He laughed. "Y-Yeah! This was all jus' a joke! T-They thought it might make you laugh." O-or somethin'...

He scrambled out of his seat and pulled on his jacket. There was only one thing on his mind and that was get out, get out. There was something missing, though...

She paused and bit her lip, looking to the side for a moment before back at him. “Unless that old legend is true about vampires being unable to enter unless you invite them in…” Eden honestly wouldn’t know; her knowledge of vampire was bigoted and prejudice thanks to Greed, who was obsessed with the notion that vampires were smug and rich assholes who didn’t deserve all their money,especially since they had no powers. At least none like witches.

She held the door open for him, blushing slightly at the compliment. “Thanks… you don’t look half bad yourself. Though, you’re always dressed like you’re gonna meet the president of something, so I’m not really that surprised…” She looked down and realized she was barefoot, her cheeks turning three new shades of red as she slammed the door and leaned against it. Another deep breath, and the witch tried to move the topic train along.

As soon as he stepped through the door, his smiled cooled. Yep, there it was. Vampire myths. He'd be lying if he said he didn't expect her to say anything about it. 

"Just so you know," he spoke up, "that's a myth. It would just be rude if I barged in." Looks like he's going to have to do something about those stereotypes...

But it’s a little concerning when she arrives to find no small children in need of being kept calm and occupied.

                              Because if that’s not why she’s here, then why?

It’s then that the Sheriff finds her, and he looks so done that Taz would have laughed if he wasn’t suddenly dragging her towards the back of the building, muttering something about blue fire and swords and a few other equally terrifying things that have her chest tightening in panic.

     ❝Hey, dad?❞ she squeaks. ❝You know I’m not Stiles, right?❞

But the only answer she gets is a frustrated sigh of yeah, he’s busy before being led into a room and — left.

Alone.

With a boy who apparently makes blue fire and stabs people to death with swords.

                              She’s going to die.

     ❝I — oh my god — I think I’m supposed to ask who you are and what the hell you’re doing, but I think it would be more appropriate to beg you not to gut me in the middle of my dad’s station, so, um.❞

Yukio's gonna kill him. And if he didn't, then Eden would. And if she didn't then the Order would.

He was so dead. The Order would have his head after this. They'd have Arthur do it. Hell no! That's not gonna happen! He can talk himself out of this!

"I'm not gonna gut you, I promise! I don't really have a reason to--" Wait, no that's a bad thing to say. Shit!

Eden was suspiciously (but rightfully) nervous tonite. She’d been preparing for the evening since nearly three o’clock in the afternoon, having even left the Bodleian earlier than planned to start picking up food and wine.

Honestly, she didn’t think planning a dinner would be so difficult.

Back home, she would have just had Ling rustle up some stirfry, pull out the good china, and make the dinner table look less cluttered by shoving off the Bishop Family Magic Mess into a cupboard. But here in Oxford, she had to actually put in some effort to this date.

No, she reminded herself, it’s not a date.

She’d started out by calling the Zoology department, asking about the grey wolves’ diet. They were in that paper Rin had written a few years back. Eden assumed he’d have to feel some kinship with the predators to have made such a precise conclusion on their habits, why not eating preferences? After all, he was a predator. 

It didn’t help that the vampire liked to be infuriatingly vauge when she asked him questions. Instead of giving a normal answer when she asked what he ate, he just stated he was ‘omnivorous’ and laughed. It was frustrating, and led to the purchase of salmon, rabbit, and venison, all with raw recipes thanks to good old UK Google. Then the man at the wine store had shoved her with wine that would cause a debt not even her tenure could pay, and she’d headed home to start preparing even more.

Now it was nearly 7 P.M., and she was pacing around her apartment in just a pair of pants and a bra, shoving a brush through her hair and hoping it didn’t catch on her earrings. She heard a knock at the door and groaned. “Y-Yeah! Hold up a second, alright?”

She grabbed one of the only clean blouses she had left, shoved it off, and ran to the door. She took a deep breath, ignored her frizzy mess of hay colored bangs, and opened the door, mustering up a smile through all her anxiety of inviting a vampire who was stalking into her home behind her uncles’ back.

Not a date. Not a date. Not a date. Not a date…

Was this a date?

...Nah, it couldn't be. People can have dinner together without romantic ties. But it was hard to convince himself of that when he had a bag that held a bouquet of flowers, a bottle of wine, and a small bag of chocolate he had decided to pick up as a gift.

And if that wasn't bad enough, his son kept on messaging him, sending him encouragements. As if. Nothing would happen; he would make sure of that.

When he reached her door, he knocked gently and heard a 'Hold on a moment!' as his response. He took the moment to look at the time and found that it was exactly seven. He supposed he could have waited a few more minutes.

The maid couldn’t be a ghost, she could see her. She worked for them. Her brother and father saw her. She touched objects and cleaned and left. “Y-You’re lying. There’s no way you’re dead. It doesn’t make sense. I hate you for thinking this is funny. For thinking you could pull a sick joke like this!”

She moved a few steps away from him, her entire being seemingly slipping towards the black void were bad ideas were good ones. She had trusted Rin. She liked him. Hell she could go out on a limb and say she loved him. But this… this lie was too much. A blatant one to cover up something else, something deep he wouldn’t tell her. 

Haunted houses were for children. For the gullible. Ghost stories were the same. She wouldn’t believe them. No matter how sensible it seemed at 3 A.M when Rin brought up their weird occurrences.

"T-that time, you’d jused come in the back door! You said so yourself a-and you don’t go to school because you’re lazy! T-The school counselor said you never liked it…" Desperation leaked in her voice and she felt disgusted as she tried to justify something that wasn’t making sense anymore, not with everything coming into view. 

With a determined huff of breath, she waltzed to the other side of the room and pulled out the drawer to her desk. She shoved a hand under the bottom part between the hinges, rummaging until she felt sharp slices. Only a wince betrayed her as Eden pulled on old tape, three metal razor blades in her palms as she walked towards Rin. “If you’re dead and you cut yourself it wont matter, right? You’re dead it won’t do anything. You asked what you could do to prove it.” Her voice shook but she didn’t stutter.

She watched with morbid anticipation and curiosity as he took one of the blades from her hands. She felt guilt and anxiety bubble. Her teeth caught her lower lip as she watched him. It felt wrong. Wrong, wrong wrong. There must be another way.

Eden threw the other blades on the floor, reaching her cut and bloodied fingers out to stop Rin’s hand. “N-No! Don’t!” But she had taken too long…

"Do you honestly think I would joke about being dead? Really? There are so many other excuses I could have made, honestly. I'm being serious. I look the same in those photos they put up of me! I haven't aged; I'm dead!"

He let out a disgruntled sigh as he watched her walk around her room and look through her dresser. He became tense when she turned around with the small blades in her hands (and here he had been thinking that he had gotten rid of the last of them).

He pushed himself off of the bed to take one of the blades. He stared down at it. It was true that if he was hurt, the pain and the wound would vanish without a trace. Only the blood remained afterwards.

You want me to prove it? "Fine."

Before she could stop him, he had sliced his throat. Blood flowed from the opening, dripping down his neck and staining his shirt and the floor. He kept his head held high despite the screaming pain. He scrunched up his eyes and held his breath and counted in his head. One, two, three...

By the time he got to seven, the pain was gone. He felt at his neck and the wound had managed to seal itself. He looked down at his fingers and saw that the red remained. He breathed out shakily. 

But his explanation did no good. It fell on her flatly and without logic. It made no sense.

The school counselor told her Rin Okumura had lived in this house before her, yes. He’d also told her that Rin wasn’t the smartest student, and that he lived with his father and brother. He’d told her Rin had gone missing a few years back before the holiday break, his father having filed a report. In her own research online, she’d found the missing child reports on Rin, eventually labeling him as a runaway and had never been found. No trace of a body or where he’d gone. His father answered questions in woe and his brother refused to comment. It led to either two conclusions:

Rin Okumura had either run away and stayed missing, or he was dead. 

Eden knew the second option wasn’t possible. She’d known because Rin was with her. They held hands and kissed and slept in the same bed and he helped brush her hair and they shared cigarettes and stories. He was around and she’d touched him and she knew he wasn’t dead, so he’d have to be a runaway.

So why was he saying now that he wasn’t?

When he mentioned the last part, a fight with his father that ended with him falling onto the patio she gasped, her hands clenching. Again, that was impossible…

"That’s… that’s not possible. If you’d broken your neck you’d be dead at worst. At least you’d have some sort of paralysis somewhere. People don’t break their necks and survive without a scratch!" Her mind drifted to the notches and cracks on the patio and she faltered before regaining her logical hold. Eden shook her head. "And this talk of ghosts, it’s bullshit. Ghosts aren’t real, they’re just a scary story… just.." They were fake. Spooky things for halloween nights.

Eden squared her shoulders and her face fell into a deep-set frown. Without hesitation, her hand reached out and smacked him hard against the face, the small blonde jumping off the bed to stand in front of him. “Do you think this is a goddamned joke?! Another..Another stupid story you can tell me to distract me?!”

Her fists balled up. “Stop it! Stop lying to me you asshole! I’ve had enough of people lying to me all the damned time! I thought you were different! Now tell me the fuckin’ truth! Tell me the truth!” With each exclamation and question, her voice rose until she was shouting at him in the dark, teeth clenched and knuckles white, searing anger drowning out the earlier dread and concern for him. Now all she was was livid.

"How dare you try and tell me some bullshit lie like this?! For what? What is it accomplishing?! Tell me the truth!" She wouldn’t take this. She wouldn’t stand by while one of the few decent people in her life tried to pull the wool over her eyes. 

He was, after all, finally telling the truth.

"I'm being serious, Eden," he said, rubbing his cheek. "I'm dead. I died on the property, and now I'm stuck here with the rests of the ghosts that lived here before us. You've met some of the ghosts. The maid is one, an' that lady that shows up only to talk about her baby is a ghost. I think she was the original owner of the house.

"Come on, you have to believe me," he said after a few moments. "Think about it: for as long as we've known each other, you've never seen me in school. We've always talked at your house. The only time we went out on a date was on Halloween, an' that was only because ghosts can walk anywhere they want on that day. That time those robbers broke in and tried to kill you: I just appeared in front of you when I saw that there was danger. Didn't you find it weird that I had just waltz in without a problem?"

They wee heavy, sad, and regretful. Why? What was he regretting? Why did Rin look all the more vulnerable now than he had before? What had he been guarding so much? Eden had so many questions, but she could feel the wariness of the answers.

There were lies here, but somewhere, deep down, she knew they went way further than helping a friend settle into a house in Oregon. It had to do with the abandoned house next door, with his refusal to go to school, and with the story the school counselor told her. 

He removed Eden from his stomach and he sat upright, crossing his legs. "I can't keep lying to you," he said. "Like, not only are you suspicious of me, but it's all getting to me, an' I can't keep everything straight..." He rubbed at his forehead and laughed meekly. "Oh, man, I thought this would be easier...

"I don't live next door." Well, here goes nothing... "I think you've done some research, so no, I'm not a runaway, and I'm not homeless, and I don't actually have any friends, so there goes that story. I do have a brother, though, and a shit-for-brains dad, and a mom that died when my brother and I were young.

"I don't know if you know this or not, but before you lived here, my family and I lived here. About five or six years ago, I think. The ghosts in the house talked to us, an' we didn't really know that they were ghosts. I don't think Yukio ever noticed that they were ghosts. I didn't when I lived here; I thought that people in the neighborhood just liked to waltz into the house unannounced." When he saw her blank stare, he added: "Well, it is a haunted house. I'm not that bright.

"Uh... Anyways, my dad and I did fight a lot, and one night there was a fight we had where it ended with me breaking my neck on the patio outside." The last part was rushed out.

With a quiet huff she removed her hands from his and turned in his arms, reaching up to push down on his shoulder. In a few moments, Rin was flat against his back on her bed with her sitting on his stomach, both her hands on either side of his head on the mattress. She tried not to look as if she suspected something, hoping the dark would obsucre her narrowed eyes and slight frown.

"It only takes about half a day to drive to Oregon from California. One day driving, two days to help your friend move unless he was moving into a mansion, and another day to drive back. That’s only covering four days out of the almost 8 you’ve been avoiding me. Why didn’t you tell me you were leaving when I left for school. You said you’d be home when I got back." Her eyes narrowed further, finding holes in his story.

What was the point of talking anymore? She didn't believe him. He could hear the suspicion in her voice. It was dark in her room, but he could imagine her eyes narrowed, studying him, trying to find the chinks in his lies and break them apart.

He didn't bother with responding to her last set of statements. He didn't have anything to say-- if he said that the door had been left unlocked, she would know that he's hiding something. You have me cornered, he thought. He knew something like this might have happened. Not in this exact circumstance, with them cuddling and being in love, but her realizing that he hadn't been truthful all of the time. He couldn't really come out with the truth before; he still couldn't, but he felt that time drawing near.

He closed his eyes and let out a sigh. He felt the walls protecting the truth crumble. He felt the urge to hide melt away. He felt his heart give in, accepting defeat. He opened his eyes and reached for her, his fingers caressing her cheek.

This was most likely the last time he would see her. The chance of her cursing him and telling him to go away was out there, and he would, and he would stay away until she called him back.

Her heart gave a loud thump as she settled into him, a feeling of…rightness when Rin kissed her neck and held her hands and buried into her hair. It felt nice and welcomed. She’d missed it. She hated feeling dependency on anyone, but it wasn’t a crime to admit she enjoyed being cared about, right? 

"The back door was left open," he said, hoping that the shakiness was kept out of his voice. "S-Someone must have forgotten to check it." He laughed a bit at an attempt to ease the tension between them.

It had been nearly a week since she’d seen Rin. Since she’d left him curled up in her bed under her pillow when he refused to go to school with her, again. Curiosity had led her to the counselor, who had tipped her off on some…interesting information, and before she realized it, she was smoking a cigarette outside her neighbors house, prepared for the worst.

She still wasn’t really all that prepared for it.

After assessing that Rin’s house next door was in fact, not his house, thanks to the fact that it was abandoned and filled with girl’s toys, clothing, and decor, she came to the conclusion that Rin was undoubtedly lying to her. She wasn’t sure what he was covering up; his disappearance? His family past? Did he not trust her enough to tell her he was a runaway? She wouldn’t tell her father or brother… it actually stung a little…

Of course, after realizing Rin was lying, he had become a phantom and hadn’t shown his face to her since that morning. That was also frustrating, and hit her with a pang of loneliness that almost made her break from her laziness to search for her toolbox. The sudden constant loneliness had led to some awful nightmares about pasts and futures and first nights in the house, and without Rin, it all kind of…sucked. So when she half woke up and her vision gave way to a blurred outline of a familiar silhouette, all frustration, anger, and calculating dissolved for a few moments. Rin ought to thank his lucky stars for sleep muddles.

He gazed at her hand. There was an internal tug of war between his desire and his fear. He wanted to hold onto her hand and feel her warmth, but something told him that it would be a horrible idea to leave that spot on the desk. He stayed at that spot for a few seconds before he pushed himself off of the desk and crawled into bed next to her. He lay down, wrapped his arms around her, and pulled her into his chest. He held onto her hands and intertwined their fingers, and then buried his face in her hair. 

If this was the last time she'd be okay with him holding her like this, then he'd make sure to enjoy every moment.