Goldrose looked, Fuyumi thought, far more the classic vampire than Fuyumi ever managed. Not even an adult yet, and she was already armed with ornate, battle-worn daggers hooked onto her belt and more no doubt hidden on her person, slipped into shoes or between the folds of her ornate, many-ribboned outfit. Her fangs, underdeveloped, glinted razor-sharp nevertheless in the light when she smiled, sharp amber cats-eyes following the friendly tilt of her blood-flushed cheeks, shimmering with the faintest of telling holographic reds in a show that endeared her to allies and promised a swift death to her enemies. She kept her hair tied above her neck in twin gold knots, exposing paired puncture-scars over the delicate lines of her throat, and she moved like a bird, flitting and dancing around without a care in the world. Pretty, confident, and effortlessly deadly - everything Fuyumi, with her thick glasses and shrinking figure and pained heart, could never naturally be.
Her countenance, of course, was far too childish and - dare Fuyumi say it - human to pass without breaking the image. A certain degree of decorum was expected from vampires, after all, certain trappings of class and formality and the nauseating myth of the noble predator. Still, Goldrose's image, even marred by her ever-present bubbly joy, was more than Fuyumi had ever managed. Her father would have disapproved, of course; but her father disapproved of everything he couldn't keep within his grasp.
He might have had the powerful dynasty he'd always craved, Fuyumi thought, with a regretful wistfulness, if he could have put his pride aside. If he could have loosened his grip, for their sake, just for the temporal blink of an eye that it took for a woman's humanity to be eaten away to nothing. But he hadn't, no matter what had happened; no matter how Tōya had run and raged, how Fuyumi had begged and pleaded, how Natsuo had gone cold and steely, how Shōto had followed his eldest brother, first unconscious, then all too conscious, attempting to tear himself apart.
Shōto, recently christened Flashfire, just a baby. Fifteen years, Fuyumi reflected, was a terribly short time to live, but a long time to grow up. She forgot it, sometimes, lost in her century-and-a-half of experience and the monotony of a life lived in a single town; forgot what it felt to live in a world where everything was new and fresh and terrifying, and the days still felt long and lingering. But she remembered, now, as she looked down at her elder brother's favoured, barely older than her youngest and already nearly-fledged.
"She's my sister," Tōya - or perhaps Dabi - had told her, the night after that disastrous party. She'd wanted to spend time with the boy who'd already been a man from the moment his absence haunted her birth; he'd acquiesced with a familiar lack of grace born of love twined with resentment. "But nobody else's, because I won't let her belong to Him. Okay? You can like her, if you want. But you can't have her."
Fuyumi had wondered if she was meant to be upset, to be denied a sister of her own. But then again, she'd never craved one, really. Or maybe she had, long ago, when her cheeks were still round with baby-fat and her eyes still glanced unknowingly over even the simplest of kanji; but any such dreams had long since died, walked into a plain, empty room by familiar hands and pierced through with silver until it stopped moving. A tiny baby girl cradled in her heart, killed by runaway ambition, burned out of inhuman memory.
Her chest ached, bone grinding on bone, and she sighed, fiddling with her corset until her ribcage was pushed back into place again. "I really appreciate your help with this, Goldrose," she said, and carefully ignored the girl's curious tilt of the head at the unpleasant series of noises. "It really is difficult to get people who are properly trained and safe to be around children to come around, even just for a day. I can teach them myself, but extra hands are so nice to have."
"No problem!" Goldrose chirped, and made a cute face, poking her own cheek with her index finger. The nails were painted a rich reddish-pink; it was the sort of colour that didn't exactly hide blood so much as make it look pretty. "I get it, Miss Glassflower - you need someone who's cute and competent. Like me!"
"And someone who doesn't take basic self-defence lessons as an excuse to swear in front of five-year-olds," Fuyumi said, dryly, and caught a delighted giggle from Goldrose.
"Well, I'm definitely better than Dabi or Summer in that case," she grinned. "You know Cloud got a swear jar, when they picked me up?" She twirled, her skirts flaring. "That's what bought me this! Isn't it cute?"
Fuyumi had to admit that, between the finely embroidered camellias and lotuses blooming across the lower body of the skirts, and the vibrant red of the base fabric, it was a striking piece of clothing. She wasn't sure cute was quite the right word for it, though. "That must have been a lot of swearing," she said, instead, and Goldrose smirked.
"It was. I think some of the last ones were on purpose," she said, confidingly, and Fuyumi sighed. Saying curse words when he wasn't meant to instead of just putting some money away; it felt so in-character, for her precious memories of her only older sibling, that it hurt.
Perhaps, she thought, she wasn't meant to long for a little sister. Perhaps the correct emotion to feel was a deep, deprived, envy. She had, after all, gotten away with meeting Natsuo for the first time with none at all; it figured, then, that the monster would rear its ugly, emerald-hued head right when it was least welcome.
"I expect you're quite well educated in those," she said, instead of voicing her inner turmoil, and the young vampire before her giggled, patting the hilts of her daggers like they were living creatures.
"Yep!" she said. "I'd say I'm good with them! Spinner says I'm pretty great, after all, and he's a dragon, so he'd know!"
"Lovely," Fuyumi said, smiling. It was a real smile, but also the one she used for her younger students; she missed, dearly, the days when she had that sort of pep in her step, that sort of faith in powers stronger than herself. "Tell me then, Goldrose, have you ever killed a vampire before?"
Her head tilted like the little bird she was, adorably inquisitive. "A vampire?"
"Yes," Fuyumi said. "One of the mainline ones, not an elf or dhampyr or something like that."
Something familiar and red-hued flashed in Goldrose's eyes, her odd pupils narrowing to slivers of onyx, and Fuyumi was sharply reminded, again, of her brother, the way his own pupils would shrink to pinpricks at the mere mention of their father. A heat, sharp and sickly, began to spread up the smaller girl's neck, the white scars suddenly stark and threatening to burst with their contained ichor, and Fuyumi wondered if maybe there was more to Tōya's wayward adoption than a simple toss of the dice.
Echoes, Fuyumi knew, couldn't see their reflections. Goldrose, she suspected, was in no way an Echo, despite her underdeveloped fangs and terrible lack of years on the plane they shared; but she had been when she'd first met Tōya-Dabi, that much was certain. Goldrose seemed the sort to make reckless eye-contact; perhaps, then, she'd seen the same things Fuyumi had.
Sire-hate was a terrible, terrible affliction, one that burned you from the inside out like the sun had found its way into your heart. It was an ailment Fuyumi was familiar with far more than she would have liked, or that she would have liked to admit to herself. It was also one that was rarely unearned; it wasn't as if a vampire couldn't simply choose to die. No, sire-hate was not born of those with nothing to lose. Rather, it was born of those with everything to claw back.
"Oh, yes," Goldrose said, brightly. "My first kill with these was a vampire. I'm quite proud of how pretty it was." She paused. "You could say I built up a bit of an appetite, after that."
"Excellent," Fuyumi said, meaning it; because her kind could be terribly squeamish about murder, for the predators they were. "I shan't have to catch you up on anything before this class, then. Will you mind at all if I throw a heavy book at your head?"
"Will I get to fight you, after?" Goldrose asked. "I like blood an awful lot, you know. Dabi says I'm stereotypical."
Fuyumi thought for a moment. She'd need to put down a tarp; but it would do the children some good to see what vampiric power looked like, without it being pointed at them. "I suppose," she said. "Don't do anything that we'll need to call Summer for, though. He's just as bad as Dabi, sometimes, when it comes to behaving in front of children."
"I won't! Pinky promise," Goldrose chirped happily, and crossed her heart. It was a dangerous movement; or maybe not, if the vampiress knew enough about holy weapons to use them without harming herself in the process. "I think I'd like you better alive than dead, anyway."
Fuyumi hummed. "We're both already dead, you know."
"...yeah," Goldrose agreed. "But I can dream about being alive, can't I?" She shifted, suddenly uncomfortable; Fuyumi was granted a vision of a dove, ruffling its wings from within its wire enclosure.
"I suppose," she relented, after a moment. "So long as you remember to wake up."
"And if I want to be alive forever?" Goldrose asked.
Fuyumi paused; wondered if Goldrose realised how dead Glassflower really was, trapped in a leaden coffin six feet under in the family burial plot. "I think," she said softly, "That Tōya would miss you."
"Yeah?" Goldrose fiddled with her knives, the razor-thin blades glancing off her skin with nary a scratch.
"Yeah," Fuyumi said. "After all, I miss him, and Summer, and Flashfire. Why should he be different with you?"
"Oh," Goldrose said. "Will you show me what to do, when the kids arrive? I don't want to scare them."
"I'm not sure you could," Fuyumi said, honestly, but took her hand and pulled her towards the door, like she did with every child who entered her school, and took solace in the fact Goldrose's hand was still warm.