Roleplay City
Infusco => DOMICILES => INFUSCO: Enter The Shadows => 3106 Alcott Road => Topic started by: Saiketsu on March 14, 2011, 04:13:20 PM
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Reserved for CK
The dream which woke him took several moments to resurface once his silver eyes found the ceiling. Long moments kept the vividness of the dream from him, and the immortal kept his brain as quiet as he could muster, his ears focused on the mortal heartbeat of the young woman downstairs, his eyes remaining on their original spot. He lay still within his bed, alone, dressed in sleepwear.
She was running again, but this time he saw her running, her almost bare legs moving as fast as any human\'s could. The girl smelled horrible, like men who had not given her a chance to be. He remembered wrinkling his nose at the scent of the men, the make-up and the sweat. But there was something about that look in her eyes that made him not turn from her. There was something desperate that he couldn\'t abandon as easily as one would some piece of trash. She wasn\'t something he could so easily discard to the gutters, or hand back to Laurent with an indifferent nature.
Rachel ran; he could hear her lungs wheezing and her feet skidding and her heart hammering in her bosom as she came closer to him. He was alone again, the same way he had been for several scattered nights since the actual girl had so ungracefully fallen into his care, and she came to a stop in front of him, not two feet before his chest. And they simply looked at each other with the deepest of looks that he could not describe. And, as always followed, two men grabbed her and pushed her hard against a wall, running over her with intolerable grasps. His blood, hot with anger, found its ability to flow once more as he tore the intolerable hands off of Rachel and off of their stubby wrists.
He there he was with the girl again, face to face. Something had connected him to her without physically touching her. And in the moments that they stared at each other, in that un-physical connection, he felt his hand calmly reach up to her small, round face and brush against it with the backs of his fingers, with nothing of Lucretia rising in his mind.
Damien awoke just as his hand brushed the cheek of the mortal girl and while it escaped him for a few moments, as it always did, the dream returned to his memory fresh and with lingering importance. Below him he could still hear the purring of the small cat, the steady rhythm of his Delilah, and the quiet flipping of pages of the same girl of his dreams. Yet now she smelled infinitely better than before, her blood, skin, and hair two and a half years delayed from returning to the control of that man whom he despised with everything that made him a man. Her eyes had gained a happiness that he had become quite used to, her smile finding more truth than lie.
It was nearing dark when he willed himself out of bed. For nearly hours he laid silent, un-breathing and listening to the house around him react, his animals eat and his ward move about. More often than not she pulled at the vampire’s attention as he lay there, the warmth of her blood and the rhythm of her heart calling to his immortal senses. Upon waking he couldn’t find it in himself to be tired and sleep more. So after these hours the vampire woke and showered quickly, dressing himself in normal attire; a pair of jeans and a cream-colored turtleneck. With damp hair which remained in his eyes, Damien descended the stairs at a human’s pace so as not to startle Rachel, whom recognized his purposeful creaking steps of alert. She didn’t move, but flashed a smile at him when he entered the kitchen to retrieve the newspaper.
“Good morning,” he said reflexively in clear English, flicking open the immortal paper with white ink to read about the happenings of the city of immortals.
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It was the second all-niter the human had pulled since last she slept. Even though she felt tired and was almost constantly yawning, she was planning on going at least another day without sleeping. By now, Damien would have been used to her routine - though he still told her that she needed to sleep eventually. He had seen her at least twice going five days without sleep, and that was certainly enough to make him concerned as long as she lived. She was content with being perpetually tired if it meant less unconscious time wandering through memories.
The nightmares had been bad.
After living with Damien for what she considered to be \'awhile\', she was pretty content. For the first time in a long time she felt safe and comfortable. While the two had their share of tiffs, it was nothing that they hadn\'t shrugged off or gotten over. She considered him a good friend and was infinitely grateful for everything he had done for her since that night they had ran into each other on the streets. But that was something they didn\'t really talk about that much.
About three hours ago she had showered, dressing in jeans and a long sleeved black shirt that hug her body. Yesterday she had spent an entire twenty-four-hours in her pajamas, and she had no intention of doing so again - it made her feel extremely lazy. Lestat had waited outside of the bathroom door the entire time, mewing quietly but frequently enough to make the girl worry that he was going to wake Damien early. If he had though, she didn\'t know, and the early evening progressed as usual. She picked up a book from her shelf at random and made her way to the family room where she spent the remainder of her evening until Damien woke up and came downstairs.
"Good morning," Rachel smiled, her voice light and airy - though she was clearly tired. Lestat, who was nestled in her lap, turned his head to watch the vampire walk into the kitchen. For the last few hours she had kept her head buried in one of the Jane Austin novels that she had managed to collect during the time she had spent living with Damien. Slowly, he had allowed her to build a small library of select favorites to keep her company when he could not. The human wasn\'t exactly interested in television shows, so she needed all the books she could get her hands on. She read slow enough to make the time pass by quickly when he was sleeping and she was the only one awake besides the animals.
"How\'d you sleep?" she asked, glancing up from her book and into the kitchen where he stood reading the white newsprint - ink that her eyes couldn\'t read. The first time he had showed her the \'newspaper\', she thought that he was just being an asshole. But by now, after she watched him read the \'blank\' paper every evening and after he had given her a different story every night about something that the paper reported, she believed him.
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"Good," the vampire reported pleasantly. The response didn\'t sit right with him however so he changed it to the much more proper "Well," before he spoke again. English had always been difficult for him, so unlike the Romantic languages of his youth in Toulouse. He had been speaking it for many years but Rachel still had to remind him of his grammar, or explain to him a meaning of a slang word every so often. Though he was without much accent unlike some of his fledglings, he would have still preferred to forget about English as a language altogether and speak to everyone in one of the other dozen or more languages which were much simpler and straightforward. Rachel, unfortuately, would be the only one left out completely as she was the only person he knew that spoke perfect English and not a word of another language. It was unfortunate as well, in this regard, that she was the one person he saw and spoke to face-to-face on a nightly basis. So until he had the time to teach her other means of verbal communication they would work together through misunderstandings and explainations of ideas; she would explain the meaning of words he couldn\'t understand and he would give her the pleasure of understanding him and his thoughts.
He heard the girl smile, his ears picking up the movement of her lips stretching over her teeth to reveal a small smile as he corrected himself. Damien smiled slightly as well. He quite liked when things were easy with her.
The small arguments and misunderstandings that were common for the first year of living with the girl were nearly a thing of the past. Certainly, sometimes the girl and he disagreed on many things -- she was young and he was old afterall. But there maintained within the past year a sort of calm understanding in the house. There was a tie between them, one that prevented them from fighting about little, useless things which were just the occurances of the other person. Nothing was too irritating anymore, nothing too intrusive. There were, of course, things that they refused together to talk aloud about and subjects which were painful to brush over, but the two mostly maintained a relatively close friendship.
"I assume you haven\'t slept today?" He asked leafing through the paper to the article he wanted to read.
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She laughed awkwardly. "No, not yet," Rachel paused, scratching Lestat behind the ear. This was a very routine topic for the two to discuss: whether or not she had slept. It used to be a heavy question for her to answer. Now she responded to him as though he had made a comment about the weather.
"I probably will tomorrow night," she offered, as if that would make him worry less. She knew he worried about her, along with the other million-and-a-half things that occupied the vampire\'s mind.
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"I don\'t know about that one," Damien said, reading the same sentence twice. "You seem to be falling asleep much more frequently lately. You might fall asleep tonight if you\'re not careful. You seem rather tired."
Delilah yawned and stretched as she rose from her bed near the television in the family room in order to trot over to Damien\'s side and smile at him with a pant and lop-sided tongue. Mentally the vampire reached out to the dog and stroked her. The beautiful husky woofed in affection. "You feed them already, yes?"
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"Yeah," she didn\'t look up from her book again until he asked her if they were running out of anything and were in need for a trip to the store. The girl shook her head.
"No, we\'re pretty much all set. I haven\'t been very hungry lately so there\'s still enough food for me."
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From above his paper the vampire cast the human a quizical look. Food was always an awkward conversation to have. Many times he forgot that others had to eat at all -- afterall he had surrounded himself with vampires for the better part of nine hundred years. Even so, eating and sleeping were constant battles with Rachel. He may not have been human in nearly a millenia, but he still knew that humans had to eat and sleep, neither of which Rachel did very well or regularly.
"Really?" he said, catching her eye as he made his way into the family room. Her face flushed a little at the intensity of his contact. "You know, I don\'t think you eat right, Rach. You should probably be eating more." With his silver eyes still on her, he sat down in a comfortable brown chair that was known to be his next to the couch that Rachel reclined on.
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"I\'m fine. I don\'t feel hungry. It\'s not that big of a deal." She shrugged. The girl was picky. Lately, she hadn\'t had much of an appetite. She wasn\'t sick, it just happened sometimes. She snacked here and there, but didn\'t make any extra effort to eat planned meals. Rachel didn\'t see what the big deal was.
"Stop worrying so much, it\'s not like I\'m sick. You know that." She smirked.
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Damien\'s eyes lingered on her in a stern look, to which he recieved a "what?" from the human before flicking open the paper again and letting Delilah adjust herself on his lap as she sat with the immortal. The vampire then disappeared behind the newspaper with a brief sigh.
Tonight the paper was filled with bad news for Damien. Kerr, the Luminary for two years, was loved and not much else. No new developments with McCloud or Vomas. Usual news of usual things, the location of blood bars, the rise in price of packaged blood, small protests of the secrecy of immortals downtown. Nothing which showed him much opportunity to get eyes or ears in the Oligarchy. Both Jack and Elias were out of the country, checking on Damien\'s foreign fledges and accounts. Pierre was in a much more flexible place for Damien, able to do just about anything with his sizable burn on his abdomen, but still not in top shape. Laurent hadn\'t shown his face in more than a year and Damien was beginning to think that the hunter had given up the hunt for Rachel. Yet the vampire was still at a standstill, his hands tied behind his back.
He had been waiting in the wings, so to speak, for a long time now, fittering away with small and manial tasks while those much younger than he entertained their own desires to be King. It was insulting to be governed such by young ones, forbidden to fledge within city limits unless Kerr, Jake, or Vomas were allowed to stick their noses into his business, into his family. But with things the way they were, there was still nothing that Damien could do to change the shape of things. Except wait.
Damien put the paper down with a sigh without bothering to finish the article he was on. The immortal leaned his head back on the chair and closed his eyes. Suddenly his pleasant mood was ruined; the paper was always able to do that. The young man ran a hand through his drying hair in frustration. Delilah took her head off of her paws on Damien\'s lap and looked up in concern at her master before putting her head back down and sighing herself.
"I swear, I am cursed with the worst of luck."
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"What is it this time?" her tone was void of all sarcasm. She could tell that he was moderately upset. Her book went onto the table in front of her as she sat up, giving the vampire her complete attention. Lestat hopped off of her lap in protest, and trotted off to the kitchen - undoubtedly in the direction of his food.
"Something new happening?" Most of the time, it wasn\'t something new. It was the same usual things renewing themselves in the vampire\'s eyes. Usually it was something that he had no control over, and she told him that because she hated seeing him fret over things that he couldn\'t change. But most of the time he worried anyway.
If he were human, he would have terrible blood pressure.
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"No, that\'s the problem. There are no problems. Not with Kerr, not with Jake, not with Vomas, nothing." He paused for a moment, making eye contact with her. "At least with Lazarus in power, there were problems. At least with Lazarus there was the opportunity to seize power from these... these... ces enfants idiots et égoïstes!" Damien took an unneeded breath and continued in English, ignoring his own outburst. "Kerr does not have half of my age and yet he governs us all and eveyone loves him for it? And yet he has more say over my children than I do?" Again he sighed. "Ignore me. I\'m simply frustrated."
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"No, it\'s okay," a concerned look easily moved across her face.
"You don\'t have any control over it," she offered, hesitantly, "Over any of it. I mean, things are the way they are. You can\'t really do anything about it." She shifted in her seat.
"Worrying about it, as much as you do, especially isn\'t helpful," she muttered, as if to herself, but she knew that he could hear her plainly enough. Not that she was trying to hide anything that she was saying. Or thinking, for that matter. They discussed things like this easily enough and this wasn\'t the first time that the vampire had heard her saying something like this.
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"I know," he said rubbing at his eyes as if to clear something from them. "Yet I can\'t help but concern myself. I should really stop reading that damn thing until I\'ve decided on some kind of course of action." Damien sighed and then added with a slight smirk, "I\'m going to give myself wrinkles or something."
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She laughed - light again, and amused causing her cheeks to glow slightly.
"Really, though. You\'re going to end up giving both of us wrinkles. So cut it out, \'cause I\'m way too young for any of that." She smiled easily, eager to keep the subject (and his mind) away from current events of the immortal city.
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Damien put one finger up to his eye and pulled down the sack of skin just beneath it to show Rachel the dull pink flesh of the internal socket. "Ouais, ouais, ouais, mon oeil." And he smirked at the girl as one of the seat cushions came flying at his head. Delilah yipped and skittered off of him in just enough time to avoid any attacks from the girl. But Damien, being as fast as he was, caught the thing no problem, even at such a close distance.
"What do you mean \'I\'ll give you wrinkles\'? I\'m younger than you are, you know. I\'m only nineteen." He loved the warmth in her cheeks as she smiled at him.
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She stuck her tongue out at him.
"If you\'re \'only nineteen\'," she said - momentarily with a deeper voice, trying her best to immitate him, "Then you shouldn\'t be worrying that much about anything."
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"If only that were the case." He responded with a sheepish grin. From the sun room Delilah woofed twice, and looked at the door to the terrace with a whine. Putting aside his thoughts, Damien rose and crossed to the pantry where he kept her rawhide bones, slid open the back door and hummed it halfway across the back yard with the greatest of ease. Delilah bounded out the door with a howl after it, her eyes alight with excitement. "Allez!" He called after the dog, who picked up the bone, narrowly avoiding a tall pine in her haste. Damien laughed as she trotted around the yard with the bone proudly displayed in her mouth, chewing as she went. He slid the door shut and watched her for a few minutes as she played with the bone, then abandoned it for chasing a squirrel up a tree.
It wasn\'t long before his thoughts caught up with him and the dreaded idea of the Oligarchy filled his mind with pestilence again. Casting one more glance out the sliding glass door, Damien went back into the family to face Rachel, who kept her eyes on him as he entered. "Is it bad that sometimes I just want to overthrow the Oligarchy myself just as everyone assumes I will? It is good then that I have other things to occupy myself with. I would be mad by now if I hadn\'t." And then he smirked to himself and said a bit more quietly, but still within earshot of Rachel, "I\'d probably turn out much like Sonya."
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"Ugh," she grimaced. Damien had told her enough of Sonya to make her not want to know that woman personally at all. The thought of Damien, one of her only friends right now, becoming anything like the ancient hag that he had described to her, made Rachel queezy.
"You\'ll never ever end up like her. Not if I can help it," she glared in warning.
"Besides, even if you did overthrow the Oligarchy, I doubt you would stop worrying about everything. You\'d probably be a hundred times more miserable than you are now." Her tone was a mixture of pity and dry humor. I\'d never want to see you like that.
"And for that reason, yes, I am glad that you have things to occupy yourself with." Even if that did mean that she was one of those \'things\' taking up the vampire\'s time, perhaps hindering his plans. But it didn\'t really seem like he was all that excited to try to take over the world. At least Rachel didn\'t think so. She kept this to herself. For now, anyway.
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The vampire sat down on the couch, the opposite end to Rachel, who wiggled over a bit to separate the two friends. "Yes, well, I was thinking about such grim thoughts as one would expect from Sonya right before you came along." He smirked wearily at her. It was something that was completely true that he had never spoken to her until that moment about.
Two and a half years ago, he and Pierre had been out feeding in an attempt to maintain normalcy, motivation, and to ward off the crippling madness that Damien had been feeling for the better part of four hundred or so years. He had felt disconnected to his fledglings, to his purpose, and to the time in which he lived. It was a feeling not unlike drifting in the ocean with no land near his feet. Thoughts of death, of returning to his family or to Lucretia in the after life had plagued him for hours of the day. It prevented him from sleeping and made the sun-lit landscape seem a very friendly place to live rather than the dead of night. More than once he contemplated walking out there at dawn and finding a nice place to enjoy the sunrise.
And then he ran into Rachel, or rather, she had run into him. From that point on he had found something to occupy himself, something to give him a temporary purpose -- to protect that girl from anymore horrors of rape, slavery, or nightmares. She was something that made him focus and put land beneath his reaching legs, and while it wasn\'t much it was something to remain in the night for.
The first year after finding Rachel had been frightening, a challenge to his abilities. They were both haunted by the appearance of the prick in her dreams, in her wakeful mind. The threat of being found and having everything he had worked for destroyed had kept him going for that year. And then Laurent seemed to drop off the face of the city after his fight with Pierre. Things slowly became easier, very slowly. Pierre\'s stomach began to heal and he could move without too much crippling pain. Rachel began to sleep and worry less about being found. Damien hadn\'t heard a single word about Laurent\'s whereabouts in the city.
But things weren\'t perfect enough for his horrifying thoughts to return. Rachel would still wake up frightened after the one night of sleep that she took every three or four days, crying, clinging to Damien, who had become accustomed to her torrential reactions to her dreams of things that had too suddenly ended. Every night she awoke now and looked around for Damien like a haunted fledgling who first realized that they had left mortality behind, who instantly found himself at her bedside. Once in a great while she bled like a woman, her horrid crying of pain from more than a year as a slave of Laurent\'s and the foul feelings she produced emotionally kept him from sleeping days. And in an odd sense, it all brought them closer. She needed him and he was willing to say that without her being there things would have been drastically different for him as well. So, in a sense, they needed each other, if only for a short time. And for whatever reason, Damien was alright with that thought.
"Had we never met, I believe things would have been much different. For the both of us." He smirked at her, a statement spiked with an undercurrent he knew she would understand, one meant to be a line of connection between the two of them.
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“Yeah…” She knew exactly the weight of what he was referring to. Not often did they make reference to what happened two and a half years ago, not unless there was something they needed to talk about—which wasn’t very often at all. Rachel still felt extremely self-conscious about the state in which she was found, and every detail that Damien knew—through what she was comfortable sharing only with Janella at the time—about what had happened to her. While Rachel knew some things about Damien’s past life up until the modern era, she felt like he knew far more personal things about her. So it was easier just not to think about it, and she got by doing just that.
That wasn’t to say that she was totally ungrateful for everything he had done for her. Because god only knows what would have become of her had she stayed in that fucking place for another few years. If she even survived that long.
It was strange, though, to think that she had any sort of affect on his life—aside from the obvious being-another-expense-to-care-for thing. His words made her smile, cheeks coloring slightly. She was glad that all of her attempts at friendship and at caring about him seemed to reach him—somewhere beyond that cold exterior.
“I wouldn’t have been around to tell you that you don’t have to worry so friggin’ much.” She laughed awkwardly. “I don’t think Pierre tells you enough. And if he does, it doesn’t seem like you listen to his advice all that much.” Maybe the fact that she could even tell when something was bothering him, without having the benefit of immortal senses or the fledgling-to-sire connection. It made her feel sort of special.
“Gabe would’ve had a field day trying to get you to loosen up…” she reflected offhandedly. "He was always better at it than I was."
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His smirk lingered a bit longer. "Oh, he tells me enough. I simply don\'t listen well."
It was so much easier now than it had ever been before to talk to Rachel. Things between them had opened up slowly and though they each had their privacy, their hidden moments, it was a sigh of relief to think that asking her to do something, to explain something wasn\'t as difficult as pulling teeth. It was nice, really, to know that he could have someone to talk to on a nightly basis that wasn\'t forced to listen due to the blood tie, that someone besides his fledglings existed and was actually around to speak to him about something other than business as usual.
And then she mentioned Gabriel again. Damien\'s expression softened a bit, turning somewhat sad.
He knew only bits and pieces about this Gabriel person, someone from her past that he assumed she had once loved. Damien knew that he was at the very least a friend that lived near her before she had been taken by Laurent. And from the way that she spoke about him, he was a good friend. He was the only one she ever spoke of from her old life. After she was taken, she had lost contact with the boy, a year passing before Damien and Pierre had saved her.
"You really miss him, don\'t you?" Damien asked quietly, watching her. "You\'ve been mentioning him a lot lately."
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"Yeah," she replied softly, thoughtfully. Her cheeks tinged with red, though she didn\'t notice. To tell the truth, Rachel hadn\'t noticed that she was talking about Gabriel so much. But sitting down and thinking about it now... It almost hurt. She wasn\'t the type to just take off and not contact a close friend for as long as she had been out of touch with him. She couldn\'t remember his phone number, even if it had remained the same, and even if she did she wasn\'t sure if she would have wanted to call him.
Too much time had passed. Everything then had happened so suddenly. She would have been embarrassed to face him after everything. Having to explain it all over again to someone else that wasn\'t Damien.
"He was like my best friend. We were really close." she smiled sadly.
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"So why don\'t you try to contact him again?" He asked her honestly. Three years wasn\'t exactly a long time. Most humans her age would still be living around the same area, would still remember things like faces and facts about another human. It wasn\'t as though she had been gone for decades and the faces and features of her friends would have so drastically changed. Her apartment would most likely still be standing, her friends would still remember her name, her diner would probably still be in business. "Surely you still remember the address at which he lived?"
Honestly he would have loved to put her back in Wisconsin, to put her back where she belonged so that he didn\'t have to take her out of a possible life for one that Damien himself had chosen for her. He didn\'t want her living in Lucretia\'s shadow, now that he understood what he did about Rachel. The last thing that he wanted to do was pick her up and chose a life for her to lead, like Laurent had done to her. That wasn\'t something that he was willing to do. Two years ago when he had barely known her, when he was confused enough to think that something like that mattered, that a human girl could fix anything, perhaps he would have tried harder.
But Storm -- Rachel, he corrected himself -- was different now that she wasn\'t that scared little girl running from a hustler. She was trying to return to normal, trying to remember what it was like to be a young woman and not a slave to a monster. And Damien felt as though he had no right to interrupt that process now that she had started to heal.
Sure, some part of him wanted her to stay and be around him -- afterall he had gotten used to her company when he couldn\'t sleep or when he had to go and run errands for the house. Rachel was a living, breathing addition to his home and he felt more at home in a large house in which there was a constant companion who talked to him willingly. He liked having something to take care of, something to keep his mind busy and off of things that involved his army. His former madness had deepened the longer he considered finding Lucretia or something about her to keep him going, because Damien had started to realize over these past few years that there was nothing left of her. Only memory.
But Rachel was that small and simple reminder that he was alive -- sort of -- and that he was needed in this life time, even if it were temporarily. Someselfish, greedy thing in him didn\'t want to see Rachel go, even though he knew that after the life she had lived, she deserved it.
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"I..." she stopped. She hadn\'t really thought about those things ever since that night she had been taken. Whenever she tried it felt like she was hitting a wall. Everything else kept getting in the way, and it was almost like the memory from being trapped in that place was intertwined with everything else. Surely she remembered where she used to live, people just don\'t forget things like that in three years. And it wasn\'t like she had just come out of a coma or something.
The things that Rachel could remember now were few: mostly images of good memories. It felt like trying to remember things that happened in your childhood fifteen years ago, it was just fuzzy. The fact that it was this difficult, and had been this difficult to remember for quite some time, was frustrating. Usually she just pushed it away and tried thinking about something else, but that was when she wasn\'t being asked about it. That was when she was thinking alone.
She looked to Damien, almost for help, and felt foolish.
"All I can remember right now," she spoke softly, fixing her gaze away from her friend, "is that he lived a floor above me."
If it didn\'t sound so silly to leave at that remark, she wouldn\'t have continued.
"I mean, I\'m sure if I were to go back to the area and just go through the neighborhoods I would remember." She paused.
"At least I think I would." You sound like an idiot.
"Anyways, I don\'t know if I would really want to get back in touch with him. Not after this long. I mean, I left so suddenly, I think it would be kind of awkward."
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Damien tilted his head and furrowed his brow. "Why would it be awkward? You were friends, yes? If it were me, I would want to know what happened to you."
There was a time, hundreds of years ago, when Damien had gone back to France, back to Toulouse in order to find out what had become of his family. When he last left his human family before the first Crusade, he had been an uncle to his eldest brother\'s children, Charlotte was about to be married to a Provençal, and his other siblings were growing up without him. He had at least three nephews and a niece when he had left with his own uncle to fight. Once he left when he was human, he had never returned until he was over two hundred years old. He had stolen a horse from the encampment in an attempt to separate himself from Lucretia at a time when he was struggling with her opressive control over him and the rest of the army. His sire had left him for fledgling with whom she bedded despite her promise to Damien that she wouldn\'t. And after a number of mistakes, he walked out of their tent, took a horse and crossed through modern-day Croatia and Italy, back the way he had first arrived with Lucretia. Back then the trip had cost him months, but he arrived in Toulouse to see his family living as peasants, his home inhabited by a new count and his family. He found his descendents, and they told him of what became of his family the best they could: Charlotte married into nobility and had nearly a dozen children in Aquitaine, Michel had met an early death in battle, his nephews grew up to have their own children in Provençe and other parts of France, his only surviving younger brother died the year after Guillaume had left for the Crusades. Damien could remember leaving his old house with his eyes full of water. It was outside his old dwelling that Lucretia, who had been on his tail for months, held him and brought him back to the only family he had left.
But Rachel\'s situation was different. Her time gone was much shorter, much harder for those who didn\'t know what happened to her to swallow. And if this Gabriel truly cared for her, then perhaps Damien could deliver her back to her rightful place, back in Madison. That was what was right, wasn\'t it?
"I\'m sure he wonders what happened to you nearly every day. Your mother as well. After all, you might be able to just go back to your life in Madison if you wanted."
For some reason, Damien felt an odd feeling in his face, something, he supposed, that would have been similar to a blushing human. Only his blood didn\'t move like that anymore.
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That was what she had wanted eventually though, wasn\'t it? The girl was silent for a moment and she did not look at him. It hurt, really, to think about all of this. To tell the truth, she didn\'t exactly want to talk about it.
"Well, I never called my mother back then anyway. So I don\'t think she\'d worry as much as you think she would." her smile was bitter. Sure, she probably worried in the same way that mothers do, but she had her own life. She had always made that clear. Rachel didn\'t miss her. Not right now anyway. And she didn\'t have any intention of contacting her. There wasn\'t any point. Besides, what would she say?
\'Hi mom, I just wanted to let you know that three years ago I got picked up by some sleaze-bag and taken to a brothel against my will. I was trapped for a year there but I\'m okay now!\'
No.
Gabriel was a different story. That apartment building that they both lived in was almost a dump. Gabriel was always talking about finding a better job and moving up in the world. He had a decent job back then, enough to support himself and help her out when she needed it. The last conversation she remembered having with him, he was trying to get an internship with some big company. At least he had finished school, she never did. He told her that the only reason why he was living in such a shitty place was so that he could save up money. He would always say "Besides, it really isn\'t that bad!"
Yeah, she missed him.
"I can\'t just pick things up back there," her voice was very quiet. "My apartment was probably rented out to someone else and Gabriel probably moved out of that place ages ago." And I don\'t want to leave.
-
"But you could still try if you wanted to. I mean, what would the harm be in trying? What do you have to lose?" He looked at her with hope, but noticed that her attention was directed downwards. It was a sign he had come to understand as Rachel\'s way of showing discomfort with a particular topic.
"I mean, if he is still out there, in that same apartment, you could call him and find him and talk to him. Or something." And he instantly felt out of place. It was a feeling not unlike awkwardness, like he had crossed some kind of line with Rachel. He found himself looking for a way to smoothly drop the topic on a good note, listening to any response from the girl with open ears.
-
"What, you trying to get rid of me or something?" she smiled, sort of, and looked up at him. She could tell he was fumbling because he could tell that she was uncomfortable. This happened to them often, more now than it used to. Conversation would become awkward, she would misinterpret his intentions because he was so old, English wasn\'t his first language. Blah, blah, blah.
Sarcasm usually helped.
Somewhere in the back of her mind she couldn\'t help feeling like he was trying to get rid of her. If it wasn\'t for the fact that he had (or at least it seemed like he had) spent so much time trying to work up some kind of a friendship, she would have been more suspicious.
-
"No, it\'s not that," he said defensively and then exhaled. "It\'s more that..." Damien trailed off, not knowing exactly how to phrase what he wanted to say in order to express the idea in his head.
"It\'s just that you didn\'t chose this lifestyle. I know that it\'s better than the one you had had before in the..." Damien looked at her as her cheeks tinted, then decided to skip over the exact wording, "...you know. But still I feel as though this life, here with me," and he paused again, that same awkward feeling of blood trying to move to his face occuring, "I feel like this isn\'t how you should be living.
"I mean that I feel like you should be out being a human, doing things that a human girl should do, not following around a group of vampires because you\'re not safe on your own in the city." Even after he had stumbled through his words, the feeling in his face didn\'t disappear.
"I wish often times that I could give you back the life you had before you left Madison. Is that wrong for me to say?" And then he added quickly, "It\'s not that I don\'t enjoy you being here, it\'s just that I feel like you should be a human somewhere unaffected by all this, Laurent, the Oligarchy, Pierre, me..."
-
She couldn\'t help but laugh. A lot. And it was kind of embarrassing but it lifted some of the awkward pressure that was beginning to build while she watched him trying to fumble through the meanings of his words.
"Let me get this straight, you\'d rather put me back in that shit-hole over-priced apartment than let me stay here," at home, she blushed for reasons unclear to herself.
"God, you\'re not trapping me, Damien." She rolled her eyes, face still burning with blood. "We do \'human things\' all the time. I don\'t think you realize that. Its not like you\'re keeping me from being myself." Sometimes she even forgot that he wasn\'t human. Just in every-day life with him seemed so...normal. Of course every now and then things happened, business had to be taken care of and so on. But generally, things were pretty slow. It was almost relaxing.
"I like it here," she began with a more serious tone. "The last thing that I want to do is move away from
you
my friends, from my home, and this city, just to try to catch up with an old friend who might not even be around there anymore." Rachel was extremely conscious of how hot her face was, but could do nothing to change it. The feeling made her want to talk more, as if it would cover it up, but it only made things worse.
"No matter where I am, things are going to happen that I don\'t chose to have happen. That doesn\'t mean that they are bad. Sometimes they\'re good. Like right now." She looked at his face for a second before looking, self-consciously, in another direction.
"What I\'m trying to say is, I don\'t want to go back. Not right now. There\'s more for me here than there is for me back there. Yeah I miss Gabe but I don\'t want to have to miss this place instead."
-
"Oh," Damien said in response.
He had been through numerous battles, met thousands of men, encountered too many supernaturals to count of several different species. He could speak nearly two dozen different languages. He could balance all of his own bank accounts, his credit cards, his bills. He could use the internet satisfactorally. Yet when it came to women, he never could quite understand them. Even when he was the nephew of Raymond, Count of Toulouse and he lived with his mother and his sister, he could not comprehend why they did half of the things they did.
Rachel was no different. Blood filled her cheeks in surges throwing her scent into the air for Damien to smell. Yet he still couldn\'t figure out why she was blushing, saying what she was saying -- or why he couldn\'t rid himself of that feeling. He guessed -- for that was all he could do, was guess -- that it was something to do with the idea that she called him and his children her friends. Like Gabriel had been her friend. Something about the thought struck him funny. He had never really announced their friendship to her, never really made a point to show her that she was his friend.
"Well, I\'m glad that you don\'t want to leave just yet," he said glancing up at her. They looked at each other funny, something that very briefly reminded him of Lucretia, made that feeling fill his chest and face again before he tore his eyes away quickly, moving faster than a human could.
What is wrong with me? Despite his efforts, the feeling in his face wouldn\'t fade. It made him fidgit in his seat next to her. He couldn\'t find anymore words, in any language.
-
Um...Ok?
She tried not to stare at him, confused, which was how she felt. Rachel had half the mind to pick up her book again. Not because she was angry, but more because she needed to put something between herself and him. For some reason.
"What do you mean, \'just yet\'? Are you expecting me to just take off one day?" she felt a little hurt if that was the case. But knowing him, it was just some misplaced words or something.
"Cuz I\'m not. Not unless you want me to go. I mean, I don\'t have anywhere else to go." Shut up, you don\'t even know if that was how he meant it.
-
"Well, I mean one day you\'ll look much older than me and you\'ll probably want different things than you do now." God damn it! For whatever reason his mouth kept going despite all attempts to stop it. "I mean, one day you might want to have friends and grow older, have a family..." and he paused rather awkwardly, averting his gaze from her.
As if to sooth away the pain of his own awkwardness, he rose and crossed to the door to the veranda, where Delilah sat whining at him to open the door and let her back in. She woofed at him once and trotted on by to her food bowl in the other room. Damien almost wished she would stay and occupy him.
"I mean to say," he began again, standing in the kitchen. He felt more grounded now that there was more than two feet of distance between them, though his voice not completely under his control like he would have liked it to be, "that besides our ability to provide immortal protection from danger, vampires aren\'t better to live among. You\'re a human and I expect one day you\'ll want to be a human and do... human things."
-
The comment about a family brought a painful memory to surface, and she pushed it gruffly away. That was something that she was ninety-nine percent positive that she couldn\'t have. She had stopped trying to imagine herself as a mother two and a half years ago.
"Then I\'ll deal with that if the time comes." She shifted awkwardly, and added under her breath "Not that it ever will."
She hated sometimes how he always had to bring her back down to earth. The last thing she wanted to think about was time passing. That wasn\'t what she liked to do. It made her feel uncomfortable. That was why she could never really plan for the future. Like going to college or finding a job that wasn\'t a dead-end.
-
He had heard what she muttered under her breath and naturally misinterpreted it to something relating to her lack of desire for intercourse, rather than any other possible situation. Damien chose to ignore her muttered comment and focus on what she intended him to hear.
"Well, that\'s what I am saying," Damien said. "Eventually you\'ll want to love someone and maybe marry them, or have normal friends that can go out into the sun during the day, that way you can go to the beach, or go to the store, or do simple things that humans do.
"You can\'t hope to do that with us."
-
"You make it seem like you\'re trying to get me to leave now." she laughed softly, shaking her head. Rachel was getting irritated with the direction this conversation was taking, not that she could point to a direct reason for it. All she knew was that she really wasn\'t in the mood to be annoyed. She didn\'t want to tell him that she didn\'t think that she was physically able to have children anymore, that she didn\'t want to think about getting married this young, that she burned really badly whenever she went to the beach, and that all of the human things that he was talking about she was perfectly content (and used to doing) at night. But she knew enough not to argue any point with the vampire. He would always have something to say.
But it didn\'t matter! Why the fuck were they talking about her future again? He wasn\'t her father, and she wasn\'t exactly worried about it anyway. But that was Damien, worrying about everything and everyone except for himself.
"Hey, why are we trying to plan my future right now?" Her tone was suddenly lighter, almost with laughter.
"I\'m not worried about that stuff. I\'m way too young for that. And you shouldn\'t be worrying about it either. Worry about yourself for once." The girl stuck out her tongue.
-
"I\'m not trying to plan for anything!" He deflected lightly. "I\'m simply keeping it in mind! And I don\'t think that it would be wise for you not to, that\'s all." It wasn\'t the first time he felt himself scrambling to explain himself around her. There was still that annoying human feeling in his face that he hadn\'t actually felt since he was nineteen in the encampment near Constantinople.
"Besides, you can\'t do anything until we know for sure that Laurent is out of the picture to say the least." It was more or less him thinking to himself out loud, reconfirming things he already knew. It was only after he had already said it did he think about how Rachel may have reacted to it. So he added quickly, with a tad too much awkwardness, "so you\'re stuck here anyway, for now. So there.
"And by the way," he added as an after thought, turning and on his voice again, "I take pride in the fact that I can balance everything all at once, thank you very much. I can make sure that all of my children are safe and everything is moving forward. When you\'re as old as I am, that is thinking about yourself. " And the vampire smirked at her, the uncomfortable human feeling fading a bit.
-
The girl rolled her eyes.
"Yeah, alright," she muttered, smiling softly. "Balance. Sure. If that\'s what you want to call it." She leaned forward, picking her book up off of the table again and placing it into her lap. Rachel eyed him for a moment before parting the pages.
"I still say that you worry too much."
-
"Yes, well, you\'ve always thought that." Damien responded, crossing bravely back into the open room to retrieve his newspaper and take a seat on the arm of the couch where Rachel still sat. That feeling of having blood fill in his cheeks was persistant, even as he resumed his page in looking at the paper. His mind churned with his thought, feeling unable to leave her last comment unchallenged.
"And that is precisely the reason why this house hasn\'t burned down over the past few years," the vampire responded with a crooked smirk. His words were flavored with a pungent bit of accusatory truth, reminded the human quietly of her clumsy and forgetful nature. "Especially with all the teapots you\'ve almost ruined." The vampire smiled behind his paper, his cheeks and throat still feeling full.
-
She scowled.
"God, that was only once and you still won\'t let me live that down!" Granted, it was one mistake that she couldn\'t afford to make again. But still. The girl smiled, keeping her eyes on the pages of the book in front of her without actually reading.
"I\'m sorry already," she muttered, still smiling, "I never really used the stove. Just the microwave. And if you forget stuff is in there, it just gets cold."
-
Damien simply sighed at the girl, his eyes never leaving the paper. "And this is why I\'ve tried to child-proof all of the dangerous objects in the house. You would just get yourself into a mess of trouble if you were left to your own devices all day." He was joking, of course. She was allowed to do as she pleased all day long -- as long as she turned the fire-producing appliances off when she was done using them. Typically there weren\'t any problems, with the exception of soggy laundry, streaky windows, or cabinets left open after she had volunteered her help cleaning or organizing during the day. To the vampire, who had been taking care of himself and others for centuries, it was simply entertaining to watch as she washed laundry with too much soap, or dropped half of the contents of the pantry on herself while reaching for crackers.
"It just makes me wonder how you ever got along when you lived by yourself." He sounded like a parent again, and he knew that Rachel would pick up on it. She always did.
-
"Barely." She laughed. That was something she had wondered herself. She survived on her own just fine. Granted, she didn\'t eat regularly and her rent was usually late, but she survived. When she met Gabriel, he helped her pick up the slack when she fell behind. There were only so many months in a row that she could pay the bills late before she really got screwed, and she made sure to never take advantage of how well off he was in comparison to her. But it was nice. He was too nice.
"If it wasn\'t for Gabe I probably wouldn\'t have gotten along at all."
-
"I believe it," he said teasingly. He flipped the page, noting silently to himself that he hadn\'t actually been reading the words on the page at all. His eyes lingered on a phrase for a few seconds before jumping onto another set of symbols, never really absorbing them. There was a moment of long silence before Damien said anything else.
"You know, I\'ve been thinking lately," he started off cautiously, forming the thought fully as he spoke. "We haven\'t been able to find Laurent in the city yet. We\'ve been without his presence for the better part of a few years. I don\'t know how likely it is that we\'ll encounter him again here." Another bout of silence before the vampire moved on with his words, stepping carefully into what he felt was a field of mines. "And... you\'ve been mentioning Gabriel and your home in Wisconsin for a long time now. And... I don\'t know. I was just thinking about..." The vampire paused again before continuing. "What if it were possible for us to bring you back to Madison? To deliver you back into your home life. Would you like that? Even if it was just to reconnect for a little while and then go where you want?
"I was only thinking," he said slowly and with a quietness that not even he could place, "that way you could chose whether it was really too much for you to go back to. But maybe you could find Gabriel, and your mother, and some of your old friends, and... you know... reconnect. Feel normal again?"
The vampire looked at the girl for her reaction. "I mean that there isn\'t a huge amount of time between when you were taken and now. You may still find people there in the same places as you left them..."
-
The girl sighed quietly through her nose. This wasn\'t where she wanted the conversation to turn.
"You\'re doing it again." she muttered, shaking her head. If it wasn\'t for the fact that she knew him so well, she would have definitely thought that he was trying to get rid of her now.
"Things move fast now. Gabriel is probably living somewhere else and I wasn\'t close enough to anyone else to care." She purposely didn\'t comment on her mother. She wasn\'t attached to her at all. Even if Gabriel was still living in the same apartment, Rachel wasn\'t so sure that she wanted to see him again. Things would be awkward. She would have to explain what had happened, why she hadn\'t called. And what would happen after that?
"Even if I did find him," she began slowly, "It\'s not like everything would just be the same again." The girl looked up at him, meeting his eyes and feeling self-conscious about it. She turned back to her book.
"It would just be awkward. He probably has a family or something by now and I can\'t just stick myself back in his life." she laughed lightly.
-
"But you speak of him so often," Damien rebuttled. "And it\'s only been three years or so. What if he has been searching for you? You speak of him like he were your brother. I doubt someone would forget their sister very easily after three years. I was still searching for my sister after three hundred years!" He tried to smile for her but it came out weaker than he intended.
"I just mean that I don\'t think he\'d think that you were a nusance or something if you decided to try to find him. And I\'d be willing to help you find him.
"It\'s depressing," he stated a bit more humorously, "to see you interacting with only vampires, having no human friends. I want you to have human friends. I\'m not trying to tell you what to do or run your life. I\'m trying to help you and offer you the chance to go back and see your best friend. Because it is horrible to pass up on the chance and then wonder what happened in your absence. Trust me."
Looking back on it all, he would have given anything to return to Toulouse after he had won the battle at Jerusalem, to return as a man and live with his family and have a family of his own. So the idea of Rachel refusing the offer for the sake of awkwardness was very odd indeed to him.
-
"You are so pushy. If you want me to move out why don\'t you just tell me straight out." She stuck out her tongue at him. She hoped this wasn\'t his round-about way of saying it, but it didn\'t seem that way.
"We were just friends. We spent a lot of time together, but we weren\'t quite as close as family. It\'s not like we lived together or anything." Rachel looked back to her book, still smiling. Of course, she did want to be closer to Gabe at one point, but that was awhile ago. He never seemed to take an interest in her - not that she outright asked him. After dropping a few subtle, unanswered hints she gave up trying to trek down that road. She wasn\'t going to try and waste her time making something work at the risk of damaging her friendship. That would have been awkward.
"And I don\'t think it\'s depressing to hang out with you guys." She looked up at him as she spoke, a playfully \'angry\' expression on her face. "You\'re more interesting than most of the humans I\'ve hung out with."
-
He rolled his eyes at her in disbelief. He had known her long enough to know that this was actually bothering her, this being away from everything she had known before. Damien didn\'t like to think about the things that had taken her away from her home, and he was positive that she didn\'t either, and there was an almost overwhelming urge to help her return back to normalcy. Maybe because he knew that she still had the choice to do so -- unlike he had -- that he was so persistant with this. He would have given anything just to see his sister again.
"That\'s simply because we\'re dead and tend to shrivel up in the sun," he said quite darkly, leaving a bad taste even in his own mouth. Quickly changing the subject for his own mental stability, he said, "I do have every intention of bringing you somewhere else for you to live when we can resolve this Laurent situation." If we resolve this Laurent situation, he almost added. "I just don\'t want anyone connected there to ever find you again. Though if you really think you could stand it, I suppose you could get old and wrinkly around us and we would continue to offer you support and aid. Just saying." And the vampire turned back to his newspaper with a small crooked grin on his face.
Through ther corner of his eyes he watched the human roll her eyes and turn her attention back to her book, the cat in her lap eyeing him with his usual ferocity as Rachel\'s hand stroked him lovingly. He waited a long moment, trying to determine the proper way to express the thoughts in his head. "What was he like? Gabriel? You alwasy speak of him but then you brush right over him whenever anyone asks more about him."
-
"You are the only one who ever brings him up and I am not trying to brush over anything." Was she? The girl\'s cheeks colored slightly, but she laughed it off. By now she was used to his seemingly-random sessions of questioning - even though sometimes they made her feel self-conscious. He didn\'t know any better.
"What else is there to say? He lived in the same building as I did, was a really nice guy and helped me out when I needed it, cheered me up when I was feeling shitty and he made really corny jokes like he wouldn\'t ever grow up." Rachel smiled. Of course she was leaving out the part about her having any sort of feelings for him because that was all over with. No sense dwelling on the things that could have - but most likely would have never been.
"What else did you want to know?" she looked up at him and noticed that he was watching her. It was something she knew wasn\'t really odd for him to do, but the color flushed into her face again. There really wasn\'t any reason for her to be getting flustered about it at all. God.
"Its not like you ever ask me anything specific."
-
"No, I know that I don\'t," he reflected easily, folding up his paper and putting it down on the coffee table in front of the couch. The vampire stood to fetch a pen and paper to jot down a short note or two with. He returned from the kitchen faster than any human could have hoped to do and sat down next to the girl on the couch, purposely leaving a good foot or so of space between them. Damien then bent over the table and scribbled down a few notes onto the pad of paper in front of him as he spoke. "It\'s just, I don\'t know, you act like you\'ve had feelings for him and I was wondering if that was the case, more or less."
He knew that she had been blushing before -- she was always blushing -- but he could smell the blood flush into her pale face, making him feel a bit bad. That was confirmation enough of her feelings. "Not that it matters," he began feeling rather horrible about her humiliation filling her cheeks one beat at a time. "I mean I just figured that it was part of the reason why you talk about him all the time. I mean I sort of figured that you did, seeing how you blush everytime anyone really mentions his name. I mean, nevermind." And Damien murmured something in another language that vaguely sounded like a complaint about himself as his head bent a little closer to the paper in front of him and the note he was writing.
-
She couldn\'t really respond for a minute - she didn\'t know how to. The air filled with the sound of her partially started sentences before falling to silence again. She felt ridiculous. Of course she knew by now that he could smell her blushing, not that she could have helped it anyway. But she knew that it was useless to try to deny it. It felt like the Pierre situation all over again. Except this time, Damien wasn\'t getting all bothered about it.
She still didn\'t understand what the hell was up with that. Whatever.
"Well, yeah I did. But it doesn\'t matter." It came out sounding more defensive than she intended it to be. To cover it up, she continued talking.
"I mean, we were just friends. It would have never been anything more than that." She stared down into her book awkwardly again, trying to think of some way to talk herself out of this conversation because she must have sounded stupid.
"Its not like he had feelings for me. Nothing ever happened. We were just really good friends." That was all.
-
"Well, did you ever ask him? I mean maybe he did have feelings for you like you had for him." He felt that human awkwardness creeping up on his skin again, like he needed to move and be far away from her. "Maybe he felt that way when you left and he was wondering every day you were gone. I mean I know I would have been."
That uncomfortable human feeling crept into his skin and into his blood again and he fiddled with the pain, not daring to look up at her. Why did he feel so strange all of a sudden? It wasn\'t like he was telling her something he shouldn\'t have. They were just talking.
-
What did he just say?
"No, I never told him." she laughed, almost nervously. Why should she have? Its not like it would have ever gone anywhere anyway. She had given up on that silly wish a long time ago.
"I seriously doubt that he had feeling for me. I think I would have been able to tell anyway." The color didn\'t leave her cheeks even though she was convinced that there was no reason for her to be feeling this uncomfortable with the conversation. They were just talking.
"Besides," she continued suddenly, trying to cover up the awkwardness that had seeped into the air yet again. "I wasn\'t his type." The comment was dismissive and she went back to reading her book - or trying to anyway. Not that she could have focused on the words in front of her if she had tried.
-
His mouth moved against his will and he couldn\'t shake that aweful flushing feeling nor move his legs to work with his mind to get up and put distance between them. He suddenly began to regret sitting down next to her, but especially turning his head to talk to her. "What do you mean you\'re not his type? His type of girl? That sounds ridiculous. Why wouldn\'t you be?" His tongue felt thick in his mouth and there was a sudden and inconceivable thirst in his throat for blood -- as if it would make the human feelings go away.
Something in his chest was tight and tense and he had never really experienced anything like it before -- or at least in a very, very long time. His focus shifted to his hands, which had abandoned the pen and paper for wriggling around nearly uncontrolled. The feeling in his mouth was distracting enough to not make him realize that he was still staring at her dumbly and she was blushing brightly, her pale skin on fire so close to him.
"I mean it\'s not like you\'re some weird girl, Rachel," he said, his tongue stumbling a bit as he went on speaking his thoughts without edit. "I\'m sure that he could have had feelings for you. There\'d be no reason not to..." There was a very quick but lop-sided moment of tension sitting in the air before Damien spoke again attempting to balance it. "I mean, if you two were that close..."
-
It was hard not to notice how strange he was seeming all of a sudden, but it was easy enough to attribute to him not being able to think of what he wanted to say in English. And he was always weird and sucked at explaining his thoughts on most days. Most of the time she was used to it, but now it just seemed unusually difficult for him to get out. What the hell was he trying to get at anyway? That she should want to go back and reconnect with Gabe and spill her guts and start a family? Yeah right.
Besides, she just didn\'t feel that way for him anymore. She stopped it as soon as it started.
"Well yeah, we were close." He had absolutely no relationship sense. "But that doesn\'t automatically mean anything." She shifted awkwardly on the couch, making Lestat jump from her lap and trot into the kitchen to find food.
"I just wasn\'t the type of girl for him." She sighed. God, explaining this kind of thing to some nine-hundred-something-year-old guy was impossible.
"What I mean is, there weren\'t enough things about me that would have made him want to start a relationship with me." Now that just made her sound like a whiny teenager. Whatever.
-
Somewhere along the lines of history, love had developed types. Women were no longer nice, or pretty, or good, or honest, or home-makers, or mothers, or ignorant. Now they were types. The change must have slipped right by him in his age, because even Pierre had taken part of the selection of women. He had never concerned himself with whether a woman was blonde or brunette, tall or short, fat or skinny or anything in between. He never particularly noticed how this or that any woman was and the notion that Rachel was not anyone\'s type was simply odd to him.
The thought of Rachel made that human sensation of the tightness in his chest and the odd desire to sweat linger. What was happening? He had never felt this way around anyone before, not even Lucretia.
He had always thought the Rachel was a beautiful young woman, sweet and innocent beyond anything he had ever known. She was fiery and defensive, much like his sister had been. He always secretly liked that about her, but he had never said anything towards it. Lately however, he had noticed how much he had enjoyed her company and the ability to communicate easily with her. It was something that he would have never expected to happen.
Now she sat beside him with a thick awkward tension pacing between them, partially because he thought she was completely wrong. "Yes, but I don\'t understand why you think anyone would think that," he said quietly, fighting through the feeling in his chest not to look away from her. "I mean you\'re attractive, nice, funny, and I don\'t see why anyone would have not thought so."
If he were human his skin would have turned nearly as bright as hers did at that exact moment. Instead he sat next to her with a very peculiar look on his pale face.
A thought flashed across his mind that made his eyes dart back down to his hands, the pen and paper on the table and the picture of Jake McCloud on the newspaper. A proposterous thought, one that he would never let happen, one that he couldn\'t understand where it could have possibly come from, a thought that made him hate himself and wonder at the same time.
-
The girl laughed nervously, unbearably aware of the strange tension that had filled the space between them. She too looked away from him, down into the words blurring on the pages in her lap. What was she even reading anyway? Rachel couldn\'t even remember the last three pages that she had flipped through, the sentences that her eyes passed over. None of it registered, so she flipped the book closed and fiddled with it in her hands.
Why the fuck is he always so awkward?
Culture gap?
"Yeah, you would say that," she paused, biting the inside of her lip, "You have to deal with me on a daily basis." She giggled, the tone strained but airy. Somewhere she was hoping that the humor and sarcasm would relax the atmosphere. It did not. Right now, at this second, she hoped that Lestat would come back and provide some kind of hissing distraction, but for once he was in the other room, away from her.
Figures.
"Besides," she perked up suddenly and looked at Damien, hoping in vain that it would change the tone of the conversation. "He couldn\'t have liked me. The girls he was into...They were just..." She trailed off awkwardly, trying not to stare blatantly at the vampire but nothing seemed to work.
What the fuck...
He was going to change the subject soon, right? Yeah, that\'s how things usually went.
-
Damien opened his mouth as if to speak to her about something of great importance, as if he were going to catch his breath and speak again with a solidness that was unwavering. Yet once he looked back at the girl again, her eyes fixed on his and her face bright pink, his thoughts wandered back to the forbidden thought once more, his silvery eyes landing ever so briefly on her lips.
It had been more than two years since he had met the girl in that dark alleyway in the middle of some unknown city. More than two years since he couldn\'t stand the scent of her lingering in his car the night that he and his son had rescued her, since she had run away and ran straight into him. It had been more than four hundred years since Lucretia had died, more than four hundred years he had allowed himself to touch a female in any way more than cold friendship. But more importantly, it had been more than nine hundred years since the first time he had kissed a human, a warm cheek that could feel sickness, death, and the rays of the sun.
He moved faster than he could recognize that he was in motion. The tension in his chest seized him as he felt the girl\'s breath on his lips, a gentle, almost calming roll of hunger in the back of his throat reminding him of what he was and what he was doing. Her breath had caught in her throat when she finally realized he had moved. There he hesitated only a moment, too late to turn back now that he had moved. No thoughts of his sire pushed into his head as the vampire put his lips against the human\'s, his silver eyes closed as if it were the most natural thing in the world, even after four hundred years.
-
Holy shit he moves fast; was the thought that came before any realization of what exactly he was doing, was planning on doing, or had done. But in the instant that their mouths touched, the tension that had been harbored in the air moved into her chest all at once. She couldn\'t breathe, and in that second she wasn\'t sure that she felt like trying. The feeling of his unnaturally cool lips against hers - hot with embarrassed blood - absorbed all of her concentration.
Before anything had time to register in her mind, she moved her lips against his in the smallest of motions. Only for a second, or what seemed like a second to her - something that must have been longer for him. And to her further surprise and confusion, she was the first to pull away from him. And then the thoughts came to her mind all at once, after it was over almost as quickly as it had happened.
What. The. Fuck?
She opened her mouth, gaping dumbly at him for what seemed like a painful eternity before looking firmly at the floor. Rachel could feel the blood in her face and the sudden rush was making her lightheaded. Eyes wide, she glanced quickly up at the vampire again before the feeling of self-consciousness overtook her ability to look at him in the face.
It all made sense now. But she wasn\'t in the right state of mind to piece together the puzzle that had become their interactions - past and present. The desire to speak and fill the even more awkward silence overwhelmed her, but there was nothing that she could say when she couldn\'t even process what had just happened.
"I..." It felt like all of the blood in her body was in her face. God, she sounded so stupid. Well, why the fuck would that matter right now?
What the fuck?
-
He could remember that feeling, what this was supposed to feel like. Her lips were soft and warm, warmer than he thought humans could be. A tightness gathered in his chest and held onto his lungs and stomach as his lips enjoyed hers. A sense of panic set in and almost tore his lips away from hers until there was was a small human movement of her lips against his. She kissed him back, her lips moving nearly as much as his were, responding to him. That heaviness in his chest grew weightier and weightier until at last she moved away from him, parting their lips. Damien looked at Rachel for a long moment before the realization of what he had just done set in.
Nearly as soon as her lips opened to mouth something incoherent, the heaviness finally dropped deep into his stomach, making him instantly nauseous. The vampire knew that he shouldn\'t have done that, not to her, not to any woman. He tried to offer her an apology, but his breath seemed caught in his stomach with the nauseous weight of what he had just done to her. Without managing to speak, Damien stood suddenly and left the room at a human pace and climbed the stairs to the master bedroom, unable to contend with himself and what he had just done, leaving Rachel with her thoughts below.
-
She watched him leave, a sense of dread and guilt filling her. But why? It\'s not like she had done anything. There was no reason for her to feel guilty. It wasn\'t like she had done anything bad or said anything mean. He was the one who kissed her.
He kissed her.
She watched the direction that he walked in for a long time before closing her eyes and leaning back into the couch. Things made sense now. Why he had reacted the way he did when he found out that she had a little crush on Pierre, it was because he was jealous. All of the awkward moments that they had just had. How long was he planning on kissing her? What part of the conversation pushed him to do that? Or was he thinking about this for a long time? All that talk about how she should have told Gabriel how she felt about him...
No. That didn\'t make sense. He just couldn\'t have had any sort of...feelings or otherwise. Not Damien. It didn\'t add up. He was way too wrapped up in his own existence, his own problems, his own past, to possibly leave room for anything else. He hadn\'t even felt anything for anyone since everything happened way-back-when. No, this had to be some kind of "see, you\'re attractive and you should have told Gabriel. I\'m right, you\'re wrong" thing. Had to be. Of course. He just didn\'t know how to express it the right way, or he forgot to say some kind of stupid sarcastic comment that would have changed the mood of everything that had just happened and now he feels stupid so he ran away?
No, that doesn\'t make any sense either.
The girl sighed out a heavy "what the fuck" that she knew that he could have heard from upstairs but wasn\'t too concerned about at the present moment. \'What the fuck\' was exactly how she felt right now. She didn\'t know what to think. She wanted to crawl into her bed and not come out for a few weeks until this whole thing blew over and they could go back to being the way they always were.
Friends.
Would that even work? Rachel didn\'t even know how she felt about anything anymore. She had kissed him back, yes, but why? Just because that was the thing to do? Of course she found him attractive, and he was extremely caring and they had pleasant time together. But she had never tried to entertain the idea of any sort of feelings blooming between the two of them. Not with Damien. Damien was still that unreachable, cold person deep down. They both had their darkened pasts and they both knew that. She wouldn\'t dare to even think that he could move on from that, much less for her.
Now she was thinking too much.
The girl groaned aloud, moving into a laying-down position on the couch. Lestat\'s mew drew her attention to the floor and she smiled at him.
"Where were you five minutes ago?" she laughed softly, forgetting that she could be easily heard. "You could have protected me from this mess." She picked the cat up and flipped over onto her back, allowing Lestat to settle contently on her stomach.
"Now what." She sighed again.