vojvode | [oom] A cellar, reprised

Rae's knuckles are white against the silvery metal of the thermos as she enters, her grip keeping her hands from shaking too visibly.

She can't look at him right now. Instead, she takes the thermos over to the counter graced with the gouge-marks. Hurt and anger are all that's keeping her warm, all that's keeping her moving, keeping her from turning back to the fear and uncertainty of this... experiment.

"I don't know," she says, voice rough. "I think so."

She hopes so, or else her friend thinks even less of her than Sunshine knows.

His eyes fix on the strange jar she's carrying and he can smell the familiar metallic tang. It does not make his mouth water, but his veins sing for it.

"No matter. Is this -- ?"

He points, looking up at her, and for a moment, she might see how far off the map he is. His eyes are burning coals in his sunken eye sockets and his mouth is a dark red slash across his pale face. Even in the shadows, she can see the dagger fine points of his fangs descending.

His question recalls her to why she's there, why she went to get the thermos in the first place. Rae glances at him, the natural evening shadows as bright as day to her. She sees, yes. Too well.

It just brings back everything Thirteen had said to her.

"Yes," she says, looking away again.

It takes great effort to unscrew the lid of the thermos and reach out to hand the thermos to him.

She doesn't look, though. What member of the herd wants to watch the predator making his choice?

The lid off, the full force of the aroma hits his senses and he goes rigid. When she turns away, his hand flies to her wrist, not an iron grip, but not gentle either. His voice bears the weight one might expect from a man who has commanded thousands, but it is still a human voice.

"The stench of your fear is not appetising to me, Rae. Do not forget, I have placed myself under your hospitality. Those rules are very old, and cover both host and guest. So still your heart. Frightened hare is not a look that becomes you."

It is not just fear that makes her look away. Hurt and anger and the sick-making sight and smell and thought of the blood are contenders enough for fear. Rae tries to focus on the calming scents of the kitchen, the sweet and spicy smells of cinnamon, sugar and yeasty dough, the sharper smell of the dark chocolate. Familiar, grounding, human scents.

"Drink," she says, her voice steady but still rough from her earlier conversation. "Just please don't expect me to watch."

The fact that she refuses to look at him both infuriates and shames him. But for some reason, he cannot bring himself to compel her. Again, he tells himself, it doesn't matter.

"As you wish."

He releases his grip on her and reaches for the vessl, his hand closing around the foreign material. No, it's not foreign at all. It is steel. Forged steel.

So fitting that something so absolutely familiar should be the vessel that brings him nourishment now.

He brings the vessel to his lips and drinks. There is no wash of pleasure from his prey, no heart beat to listen to as it coats his tongue and finally his throat. But that hardly matters. It is still the primordial essence, the fluid that fills the cathedral of the heart, the life blood he needs to subsist another day.

As he drinks, his head tips back and the vessel lifts. He does not spill a single drop, and he does not exhale as a human might when he is done.

Edited 2010-03-30 04:12 (UTC)

There is no sigh, no need of breath while drinking, but it not absolutely silent - she can still hear it. Hear him drinking. Someone's blood. A person, a human (when did those become no longer exactly synonymous?) gave that blood, and likely don't even know what it was to be used for. They probably thought it was going to be used to save another human who needed blood. Not -

- This.

This, it's the moment of truth, isn't it? To determine whether her trip to the bar on his behalf was not completely in vain ("And why didn't you fucking ask him, then, if he knows the rules, since you're so fucking buddy-buddy with him."), or if she will be the alternative.

As he finishes, she can't help but look.

He meets and holds her gaze, almost as if he was waiting for her to turn back to him.

The transformation is slow, but clearly visible. He actually relaxes a bit as his youthful visage reasserts itself. Silver hair turns dark again, and the flesh of his cheeks fills, grows more firm. Age spots fade, his lips grow full again, and he seems immediately more comfortable in his own skin.

He draws a deep breath, and lets it out again, feeling the blood coursing through his veins again. One eyebrow quirks at her and he actually smirks.

She watches the transformation without falter. Rae seems about to say something, but seeing his smirk, her face darkens slightly and her lips thin.

Oh don't even-

But of course he would.

"Well," she says after a moment. "You don't look like you're about to keel over any more."

Of course, he hadn't looked like he was going to keel over to begin with, and she knows it. Despite the sunken cheeks and hollow eyes, the seemingly fragile skin stretched over his knuckles, even she was able to see the strength and... vitality, for lack of better word, beneath the surface. He'd be fine once he'd had supper.

Which he'd just had. And he does look better.

Pity about the attitude, though. It makes her wonder just a little bit if she should have done as Thirteen had suggested.

He sees the disapproval in her look, and for all the world, he looks confused. He reaches for her again, unconsciously, resting his now warm hand on the back of her fingers.

"Have you not just fed me, Rae? Would you look at me thusly had I eaten the sweet bread you prepared and similarly enjoyed it?"

She doesn't like thinking of the difference in the warmth of his hand.

"It's not the same thing at all. Wheat and sugar and cinnamon..." Are not someone's blood. You have someone's blood, you have power over them. Even non-magic-handlers know that. Taking someone's blood is taking their power. Nearly all the strongest of dark magics require blood (hair at the very least); not that anyone needed another reason to have bad connotations with blood, in addition to the suckers overrunning the world.

"I get the shakes over seeing plain pink hamburger. Blood's just... worse." She hadn't needed the reminder of what he is; she tries not to think about it and he smirks about it.

He will never lie to her about what he is. He has his reasons, and in his eyes, they were the only path he could take and maintain his soul.

He is God's creature as surely as she is, in his eyes.

For all she invites his rage, his voice grows even more gentle.

"Does not the same life flow in the stalk of wheat and the cane of sugar, even the bark of the cinnamon tree? You feast on life, just as surely as I do. You just choose not to think about it."

"Plants... aren't aware in the same way; they don't have to see it coming," Rae says, trying not to think of her doe, the one whose blood was taken for her, given to her.

(... she can remember the way her delicate hooves dug into the soft ground, the sun-dappled leaf-shadows on her brown back, her wide ears, her cool, liquid brown eyes as she lifted her head, acknowledging the oncoming death without fear. And Sunshine still wondered sometimes, had she known what her death had beenfor?)

"I can't see a piece of meat without seeing something that has had to die. I've been a vegetarian since I was small."

"Everything dies, Rae. Everything dies and falls to rot in the earth, only to feed the next generation of life that springs up in its place."

He lifts a hand to touch her face, lifting her chin to study her eyes.

"Forgive me if I have yet to find my place in that cycle of nature."

Her eyes are the grey-blue of a hazy summer's sky, the overhead light of the kitchen reflecting like the shine of sunlight. "Everything dies?" Rae repeats, questioningly. "Including you?"

Had he not given up his place in that cycle? Vampire drink the life of others, but that is where it stops. Vampires have no natural predators, only those who take it upon themselves to go up against them. They do not die by natural causes. They do not breed. Nothing feeds itself on them. There is no cycle when vampires are involved.

("Sunshine, there can be no clean death between one of your kind and one of mine, for all of my kind were once of yours."

"Then, it must go both ways. The death of that vampire at my hands was no cleaner than the death he was offering that girl.")

She shakes her head as if trying to rid herself of the thought, feeling his fingers against her chin. "To die is one thing; to be killed, another. The how of it matters. The why of it matters."

She can hear Con's words in her head, of how humans are the only creatures to draw that sort of distinction. But he cannot see that it is that distinction which makes them human.

His head tilts slowly to one side as he listens to her thoughts. For such a beautiful woman, she is startlingly naive. They are all grist for the mill, eventually. And there is no why or how that will change that.

"Everything," he repeats softly. "Even -- myself."

She watches him, her face clouded, her thoughts returning to his story of the deception by the sultan, the anguish of the princess, the grief and rage of the prince.

"Death may be inevitable," she says, quietly. She knows it. There will come a time when she would welcome it, as long as she would be assured never to rise again afterward. "But the how matters. The why matters, or else why would we grieve?"

Why would we fear?

He returns with her to thoughts of his sweet Elizabeta, and that fateful day.

His hand falls away from her face, and for a single moment, the lines of grief return to his elegant features, and he looks very human.

"Perhaps because it is our very nature to rage against it. Without that defiance, we would be no different than the wheat before the scythe."

The ghost of a smile tugs at the corners of Rae's lips, but it is not a happy smile. There is sadness there, and compassion.

"We rage, we fight, we fear, we struggle. Anything to keep from giving in. And those that fall, we grieve, for we know one day we'll fall, too."

To know that what you are eating struggled, raged against the death that was waiting for it, and yet succumbed as everything eventually does... it turns her stomach. The wheat of the field does not fight the reaper; it does not fear; it does not grieve. Indeed, it has modified itself over the eons to produce more grain, for those strains are likeliest to continue being planted. Cocoa trees do not fear the harvesting of their beans. Cattle are made healthier by milking. Eggs of chickens that are laid unfertilized will not bear young, yet are nutritious and good.

Sunshine could not eat something that was aware enough to see and want to defy its fate.

(Her doe stands at the edge of the wood, half-in and half-out of the dappled leaf-shadows, on the brink of the wide, golden field, fragrant with summer grasses. She lifts her head, her liquid brown eyes acknowledging her oncoming death-)

Not willingly, at least.

And for his part, he will revel in their struggle, and their life force will be used to sustain his body. It was the same with the meat he ate when he was human, and so it is thus with his prey now.

That much has not changed.

"You are far too pretty to grieve, my dear Sunshine. Save your tears for another day. One long hence."

Sunshine's smile twists slightly into something a bit more wry.

"Not too long," she modifies.

She can't stay in Milliways forever; she knows what she will eventually have to face.

"If there is one thing I might impart to you, my dear, please take a lesson from my own fate. There is no path that destiny can set you upon that you must adhere to. Your fate is always your own, just as surely as your death is your own."

"I've never believed in destiny," she says, still slightly wry, trying to back away from thoughts of Bo.

Of course, that doesn't count for much when destiny believes in you.

"Do you have to believe in something to defy it?"

His lips curl in the hint of a smirk.

"I believe that question is an answer in itself."

He glances back at the strange metal vessel, the rim now coated with a thin layer of coagulated blood.

"What will you tell her? The woman who berated you for assisting me."

Sunshine's gaze follows his glance, but she looks away again almost immediately.

"I don't know."

She can't... really imagine her next conversation with Thirteen.

"I guess it depends on you, though, wouldn't it? What you... do," another glance at the thermos, and away, "in the future."

Whether he chooses to seek his meals from patrons, or seeks his meals from the Bar.

A thought strikes Rae, though, and she looks up at him. Damn, he's tall. "Has anyone mentioned the rules of this place to you?"

He slits his eyes, looking down into her face. His head tilts to one side as he regards her, studying the lines around her eyes and her mouth. Her thoughts are all on the surface, easy as gazing at clouds passing in front of the moon; just as fascinating and just as incomprehensible.

"Rae. You are the only one I have spoken to at such length. And you are the only one to whom I have revealed so much."

She wonders what she did to deserve that honor. She says, glancing away towards the sink, "Well, now I know that." She should do dishes before she leaves, tonight.

"The only reason Security is" hunting "trying to find you is that you've broken the bar's rules. There're only three, but they're supposedly enough to keep things peaceful here, since there're so many different kinds of people. No violence against other patrons, no business - but, 'business' meaning outside rivalries and such. If your arch-enemy came here, he mustn't do anything to you, and vice-versa. I've been told it's okay for selling things."

Or else she'd not be able to afford to stay here.

"And the last rule is that neither sex nor nudity is allowed in the bar proper."

The corners of his mouth draw down sharply at the last, a repressed smirk.

"I suppose that they consider what I have done -- an act of violence."

Yeah, she's not looking at him as she says that last rule.

La. Dishes. She turns on the water, reaching for the scrubber sponge and the dishwashing soap.

"...Yeah." She says, attacking the baked-on bits of chocolate cake on the first pan she comes to. "There were signs up, warning people of a rash of attacks on patrons by a vampire."

Attacks. Violence, yes.

He moves to stand behind her, and perhaps for a moment, he dips his head and inhales the scent of her hair.

"No one was injured," he murmurs.

"Apart from puncture wounds and a lasting inability to feel safe when alone, afterward," she amends, in tones as gentle as her scrubbing of the baking pan is not.

"Do you feel unsafe when you're alone with me?"

His tone is quiet, pitched low.

"Not nearly as much as I did when we first met," she says, holding the pan under the running water until the suds are washed away, "which possibly speaks to the growing probability that I am insane, or am a bad-blood-cross and will eventually go insane." (See her attack that next pan.)

Or, as she can't quite keep the possibility from occurring to her, he really doesn't mean her any harm.

Despite being a vampire. Two situations that the culture in which Sunshine was raised tells her are mutually exclusive. Sunshine's experience in the last few months, however, have done much to make her doubt a lot of what she's been taught.

Her ferocity amuses him no end. One finger draws her hair back behind her ear, and he places a soft, chaste kiss at the side of her neck.

"Thank you again, my lady. As before, I find myself in your debt."

She stiffens, her hands pausing in their task. More comfortable (what a horrible thought) around him she might be, but having a vampire's mouth against her neck is a little too much.

Intending her no harm or not.

"Yes," she says, after a moment, and maybe there is something akin to wryness tinting her tone of voice, along with the stiffness. "I'll admit it's rather amazing of me that despite you doing stuff like that, I agree to get you food."

Maybe she is insane. Helping vampires takes care of quite a bit of a psychopath's quota for antisocial behavior, after all. And she doesn't want to think about his lips against her neck.

"You need merely to ask, and I shall not impose on you again."

His breath his soft against her pulse, his mind a comforting warmth just beyond the realm of sensation. If she were only to reach for it, it would enfold her, swathe her in calm and soothe away all her fears. But he will not force it upon her.

"Much as it would pain me, I would stay away, if you asked me to."

The awareness of that artificial calm, the possibility of it, may scare her more than he does.

But she would not ask him to leave, simply because he hasn't forced that calm upon her.

"Do you know what you'll do?" she asks, wiping the scrubber across the pan to make sure it's clean. "For food, I mean."

There's a sigh next to her ear, and then the coolness of the air behind her. He steps away, towards the door to the lower cellars again.

His back is to her, or else she would see the hard look that comes over his face. Perhaps she can hear a hint of it in his voice.

"Best that you look to your own needs, before you lose sleep worrying over mine."

Rae can hear it. It makes her turn, and look at him over her shoulder.

"My needs are easily met," she says. And they don't carry the risk of incensing Security.

She can't really bring herself to say it, but she is quite aware that if he came to her again, needing food, she would offer to go to the bar for him again.

She feeds the hungry. It's what she does.

He is already fading into darkness as the shadows embrace him. Somewhere in the gloaming, she sees both visages, the ancient withered face, and the youthful, vital one, overlaid one upon the other, until it's impossible to tell which is real and which is a memory. And then the shadows swallow him, leaving only his eyes visible, burning with that same unholy fire.

"Perhaps someday, you will do me the honour of -- allowing me to reciprocate."

Rae's gaze follows his eyes, seeing the rest of him fade into the unnatural shadows that even her Dark Sight couldn't pierce. What could she ask of a vampire? This vampire, in particular.

"How about we keep it simple," she says, hesitating slightly. "You owe me dinner some time."

She gets the impression that he dips his chin, and his eyes close for a long moment.

"Call for me. And I shall endeavour to repay your kindness."

Even as he recedes into darkness, it feels as if he is speaking right against her ear.

"All right," she says, hesitantly, her voice barely more than a whisper. All she can see of him are his eyes, burning in the darkness he has wrapped around himself, before even they fade.

Why the hell is she doing this? Bad-blood-cross or whatever, she must be insane.

She can feel his absence, like the feeling of the sun peeking out from behind a cloud. She is alone in the kitchen.

The thermos is still there on the counter, coagulated blood on the rim. It'll need to be washed.

[oom] A cellar, reprised

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