[oom] A cellar, reprised
[ cont'd from here and here ]
He waits, motionless, listening to the conversation she's having with the female doctor.
He's become a master of waiting.
His breath stills, his heart stills, his entire body grows still. He tries not to think about the host of bodies thrumming through this place. Tries not to think about the anguish he has caused her, merely by existing.
Elizabeta, my sweet Elizabeta. If only there had been another way.
Time is meaningless in the moments like this. Pain and hunger and the sorrow of his human heart, all meaningless.
When she returns, he has settled in one of the few chairs here, straight backed as if he is sitting in a throne. His hands are tucked into his sleeves, and his eyes fix on her face the moment she crosses the threshold.
"Will she keep her word?"
He cannot keep the edge from his voice, though whether it is fear or rage, it is difficult to tell.
He waits, motionless, listening to the conversation she's having with the female doctor.
He's become a master of waiting.
His breath stills, his heart stills, his entire body grows still. He tries not to think about the host of bodies thrumming through this place. Tries not to think about the anguish he has caused her, merely by existing.
Elizabeta, my sweet Elizabeta. If only there had been another way.
Time is meaningless in the moments like this. Pain and hunger and the sorrow of his human heart, all meaningless.
When she returns, he has settled in one of the few chairs here, straight backed as if he is sitting in a throne. His hands are tucked into his sleeves, and his eyes fix on her face the moment she crosses the threshold.
"Will she keep her word?"
He cannot keep the edge from his voice, though whether it is fear or rage, it is difficult to tell.
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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.
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"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.
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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?
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"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."
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"Drink," she says, her voice steady but still rough from her earlier conversation. "Just please don't expect me to watch."
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"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.
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- 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.
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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.
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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.
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"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?"
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"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.
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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."
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(... 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."
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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."
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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.
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"Everything," he repeats softly. "Even -- myself."
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"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?
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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."
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"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.
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That much has not changed.
"You are far too pretty to grieve, my dear Sunshine. Save your tears for another day. One long hence."
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"Not too long," she modifies.
She can't stay in Milliways forever; she knows what she will eventually have to face.
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Of course, that doesn't count for much when destiny believes in you.
"Do you have to believe in something to defy it?"
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"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."
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"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?"
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"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."
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"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."
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"I suppose that they consider what I have done -- an act of violence."
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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.
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"No one was injured," he murmurs.
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His tone is quiet, pitched low.
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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.
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"Thank you again, my lady. As before, I find myself in your debt."
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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.
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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."
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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."
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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."
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"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.
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"Perhaps someday, you will do me the honour of -- allowing me to reciprocate."
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"How about we keep it simple," she says, hesitating slightly. "You owe me dinner some time."
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"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.
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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.