Roleplay City
Infusco => DOMICILES => INFUSCO: Enter The Shadows => John H. Wagner Heights => Topic started by: Saiketsu on April 08, 2019, 12:16:08 PM
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Her brown hair was floating all around her and bubbles of air clung to her eyelashes. She touched his face gently, but he couldn't feel it. He ached to feel it. The sun was coming and they were only a few hundred feet from shore. There was no escape, but there they floated. Her face, sharp and beautiful, looked blue now surrounded by so much water. Darkness was ebbing and the sun would touch the water. Would they burn if they were in the water? He tried to ask her, but the bubbles that came out of his mouth without the sound. Drowning now. The sun rose higher. He could feel it prickle on his skin, ache in his abdomen. Fear and the need to vomit rose in his throat. Warm, no, hot now as the sun touched the water. Drowning. Boiling. He watched her with panic. She dissolved before his very eyes.
Nikolai Armani awoke with a start, gasping for air that his body didn't need. Disoriented, he looked around for her with clouded eyes - but she was nowhere to be found. There was no water here, no sun. Nikolai laid back into the couch, trying to fight the panic of confusion that surfaced in him as his eyes picked up clues to his whereabouts.
His living room. On the couch. When the fuck did he get there? He tried to rub at his eyes to clear them of their heaviness only to find pain and swelling that hadn't been there before he fell asleep. He shifted and groaned, feeling the pain in his ribs, his shoulders, his back. It felt like someone had kicked the shit out of him. But his face was concerning. What the fuck happened to his face? Lips tender, nose crushed, and dried blood all over him. He picked off in flakes - old blood.
His head ached like it had been put in a vise and crushed. Bile - or something like it - was lingering in the bottom of his esophagus. His stomach was cramped like someone was trying to make tye dye with his organs. Little whispers made themselves known in his ear and he shook his head to clear them without much luck. A growing sense of panic was filling his chest needlessly. None of these things had made sense to him.
Nikolai tried to remember what happened last night. He could remember feeding from someone after snorting coke off a table in a dimly lit kitchen. Mike? Yeah, he remembered Mike. Mike was the last thing that made sense. Everything else was that familiar, aggravating sense of gray. He had blacked out, lost control again. Nikolai swore under his breath and leaned back into the couch, trying his hardest to remember why he was so fucked up. There were images stuck in random places in his head, but nothing else - getting head in a bathroom, a punch to his face that broke his nose, blood in his throat. There was a human there somewhere but he couldn't remember.
Judas slept without a worry, deep asleep now that he was safe and - for the most part - sober. Judas never felt the withdrawal, the irritation, the tremors, the nausea, the running nose. That was all Nikolai now. He held his head as the headache pulsed painfully, curling in on himself to ward off the cramping. It was only then that he realized that there was a body on his couch.
Some young kid was passed out, strung out was on his couch. Anger and panic gripped him. He must have been dreaming. There was not some fucking kid on his couch! Nikolai never took people home - there were too many things that could go wrong with that considering the amount of drugs he had stashed away in the house, the amount of cash. He was smarter than that. Roughly, Nikolai put his hand on the kid's leg that was closest to him - still warm. Thank fuck. The kid smelled of Nikolai's cum and his dope and was definitely missing a lot of blood. As long as this little brat wasn't dead, things might actually be fine.
The headache pulsed again, turning very rapidly into a splintering migraine in the back of his head. He knew that this happened when he fucked with smack. Why the hell did he keep going back to it? Every morning was the same, full of pain and withdrawal, shaking, and aggravation. The skin itching would come in a few hours. It always did. His face felt like taffy and he couldn't remember a single thing about why it had gotten that way. He needed more blood - maybe then he would remember.
The vampire stood and found his cigarettes across the table, beyond three lines of snow - the kid must have been snorting it then. With a shaking hand Nikolai pulled out and lit a cigarette, getting angry with himself for his physical weaknesses and want of more drugs. He was turning into a fucking junkie again. He had been clean off skag for at least forty years. For some reason, the last two years had him craving something extra and he had fallen into old habits, especially now that those habits would never kill him. But with face and ribs in the shape they were, he had his doubts. Nikolai took a long drag off his cigarette, hating how his hand was shaking.
How long had he slept? What part of his night was spent awake and active? He clearly had smack in his system so he had clearly fed from that little idiot asleep on the couch. It frustrated him that he had no answers, that he just had to trust that everything was alright. Clearly, it was not. A point of contention as always.
Nikolai went about his routine - showering, cleaning the blood from his face, putting his nose back in place. When he had finished, the boy had changed positions on the couch slightly - a very good sign. His breathing was shallow and Nikolai glowered at him, lighting another cigarette. The vampire took up his phone - noting that it was almost sunset - and ordered a pizza from the closest place. It would arrive within a half hour. By then the kid on his couch would be awake, even if Nikolai had to shake him awake himself.
-
Trey dreamt of nothing... until finally, his eyelids fluttered open.
He didn't recognise where he'd woken up, but that happened from time to time. Crashing on couches was one of his pastimes. He yawned and pulled a face in the middle of it, giving voice to a sound of pain. His whole body was aching, like he'd been doing exercises or something. He rarely worked out, but he'd done it enough times to recognise that his body felt extremely fatigued.
And ravenously hungry.
His stomach made its own grumble, loud and clear. He moaned at it, mentally telling it off. With a hand on the couch seat in front of him, he pushed himself up to a sitting position (slightly angled) and rubbed his eyes. Bad mistake. They felt bruised and tender. Why did his eyes feel bruised and tender? With icy fingertips he pressed the skin around his eye sockets and changed his mind about what part of his face was tender. All of the skin parts.
Why was he so cold? He shivered just thinking about it. He folded his arms across his chest, shoving his hands into his armpits to warm them up. Another moan/grunt/sigh and he doubled over to shut his rumbling stomach up. From this new vantage point he could see a coffee table with three neat lines of white powder on it. Oooh.
Even as his interest went up, his body spasmed quite suddenly that told him maybe he shouldn't press his luck. He'd taken too much last night. They both had.
...wait.
Hot Guy! What was his name again? Wags or something. No, what? He thought about it for a second. John! John Wags! No. Close enough, though.
Trey looked about as pale as the man his gaze connected with, and he smiled blearily at him. Hot Guy (John) looked so much better now. Not as good as when Trey had blown him, but not anywhere near as bad as when he'd found him in the alley. And there was that other thing, too!
"You're a vampire," he said.
-
By the time the kid on the couch woke up, Nikolai was on his fourth cigarette, having chain smoked them all succinctly in an attempt to ease his shaking hands and nausea. From the kitchen counter were he leaned flicking ashes into an ashtray, he watched the human he didn't know begin to stir in earnest and caught eyes with him as he figured out his own consciousness. The vampire remained scowling from his side of the counter island, suspicious of the boy and angry with himself for allowing this mess to happen.
At least this one was moderately attractive. Certainly not his type, though.
There was a knock at the door that Nikolai had been waiting for. He put his cigarette between his lips and squinted his eyes against the smoke as he pulled his wallet out of a back pocket. When he got to the door, a pimply pizza boy held the pizza in front of him and tried to make the usual pleasantries. Nikolai simply ignored them and handed over the cash - along with a ten dollar tip - before he slammed the door in the other's face.
He took a final drag and threw the cigarette butt into the sink and dropped the pizza unceremoniously in front of the human on his couch. He refused to acknowledge the kid's declaration of the most obvious elephant in the room, unsure of how much of the game he had given away last night.
"Eat." He ordered coldly and pushed the pizza towards him as he took a seat in front of him on the coffee table. The vampire then did his best to scoop up the heroin off the table and into a baggie, dusting whatever powder that lingered on his fingers off on his jeans. There was always plenty more where that came from.
"Do you even know what the fuck this is?" The vampire held up the little baggie he filled, anger and annoyance at himself projecting out onto the kid. "You're fucking lucky to be alive right now." The kid looked really bad, sunken, drained. It made him want to know exactly what he had gotten himself into with this kid last night. They had obviously gotten high together - Nikolai's body could tell him that much. He suspected that the human had sucked him off, mostly due to the lack of any other human smell on him. But anything beyond that could only be guessed. He doubted this little shit had tried to get violent with him. No, it was definitely someone else who knew they could successfully kick the shit out of him. The thought made him want to tear Judas out of whatever hole he was hiding in and shake him for answers.
-
John was looking sexier than ever, scowling and dark. Trey couldn't help but smile at him. The knock confused him until eventually a pizza box landed on the table before him like magic. Pizza! His stomach did one last convincing growl and Trey flipped the lid, mashing a slice into his mouth, not really paying attention to the flavour and unable to determine it - he was gulping it down too fast.
He watched John clean up with a sinking heart. No more party. John looked cross with him, and moments later Trey was scolded. He stopped chewing, looking up at John with big, green, frightened eyes. John didn't make to hit him or anything, so he went back to eating. In the middle of his smaller mouthfuls, he responded.
"Smack or blow," Trey said, not quite sure which one it was because he didn't have a lot of experience with either. "Whatever it is I liked it! Thanks for sharing." A piece of chewed capsicum flew out of his mouth and onto the table, attracting his gaze before he looked back at John. He smiled again; mercifully a closed-mouth smile.
-
Nikolai became acutely aware that he was not talking to an intelligent human. He watched the food fly and land on his table; Nikolai's jaw hardened as he bit down on the urge to smash the kid's face down on the table. If this kid was any farther from the edge of death, he would have probably done it. As it stood, the action would probably kill him and Nikolai would be stuck in the same damn place he was now. No, the best option was to keep this kid alive and get him the fuck out of the building. His hand curled into a fist as the kid smiled at him.
"It's heroin, you moron," Nikolai spat, unable to hold onto his verbal and physical aggravation at the same time. "You almost died on my fucking couch and you didn't even know what the fuck you were snorting? The fuck is wrong with you?"
-
Trey's expression became crestfallen. John had promised to be nice to him if he came back home with him. They'd partied a little and Trey remembered being really horny and then really sleepy. Had he almost died? He didn't feel too good right now - still a little tired. Okay, maybe he'd almost died, but it wasn't like he had actually died. This guy was acting like he'd done it! Everything had turned out okay.
He swallowed his mouthful and put the rest of the pizza down, wiping greasy fingers on the front of his shirt.
The fuck is wrong with you? He got asked that question way too much for it not to have impact.
Resentment and anger bubbled to the surface, overtaking his fear. "You promised to be nice to me if I took you back to your home," he reminded. "You wanted me to party last night. You wanted me to drink from and fuck. It's not my fault."
-
Nikolai stared hard at the kid - whose name he didn't even know - biting his tongue. There was nothing he could even say to that retort. For all he knew this kid was right. It sounded like something he would do and there was no reason to not believe him - this kid probably couldn't even figure out how to lie even if he wanted to. But it didn't make sense. Why was he all bruised up? Why had they come back here? Nikolai knew enough to always keep his shit away from where he ate.
"Yeah, well," Nikolai resided, his head aching as he tried to figure out the puzzle of what happened last night. He stood up and walked away from the kid, aiming for another cigarette to smoke in his kitchen. "We fucked and I fed, so as soon as you can walk, get the fuck out of my house."
-
Trey was mad and upset. He could feel strong emotions rising high in his chest and getting caught in his throat. He had an idea of what to say; Anyway, we didn't fuck, not that I remember. And... and...
And it petered out. He didn't have the courage to talk back to John again. He wanted to leave as soon as possible. He shoved his half-finished pizza slice back into his mouth and chomped it down, swallowing with difficulty because the food and his unhappiness were both stuck in his throat.
He closed the pizza box and picked it up when he stood. The room was a bit spinny. He stumbled a half-step and got his balance. Good. Trey picked his way around the sofa and headed straight for the door - if straight was diagonal. He wondered why the door was going to his right. He corrected but his legs were trembling and the pizza box slipped out of one of his hands.
Pizza slipped out of it and fell onto the floor. He made a noise of dismay and crouched down to pick it all up and put it back in the box. He didn't care if it had fallen, but he didn't think John would be happy about the mess. Actually, fuck John. With mutinous thoughts, Trey still carefully picked up every scrap of food he could find and put it back in the box.
He stood up again and his balance went way off. Damnit, he was going to drop the pizza again! He held onto it grimly as he hit the floor, hard.
And passed out.
-
He had only just lit another cigarette and taken a drag when he saw the kid first stumble and then drop the food on his floor. Heat filled his head and he was about to go beat the kid senseless as he picked pepperoni up off the floor, smearing sauce and grease on the porcelain. That was until the kid took a nosedive and dropped like a rock near the mess he had just made. And stayed there.
"You've got to be fucking kidding me," he growled to himself, staring at the mess of a human on his floor. If he were in a better mood it would have been funny. But as it was, Nikolai was considering more and more throwing this waste of space out the fucking window for the birds to enjoy. If he could get away with it, he would have. Nikolai clenched his jaw and sighed angrily.
Instead he was babysitter again.
Nikolai crossed to Trey's body and crouched down next to him, finding a weak pulse when he bent and pressed a hand to the flat of the kid's neck. At least he didn't fucking die on his floor. The vampire cursed again. The feeling of claustrophobia cloyed at his throat as panic threatened. He didn't want some human in his house. He needed to go out. He needed to feed. This little fuck was of no use to him now - mostly drained and passed out on the tile. He couldn't even offer the vampire a sip, not if Nikolai wanted this kid to walk out of the building on his own and not draw attention to himself.
Still crouched, Nikolai took a drag of smoke and blew it in the brat's direction, flicking ashes on top of him in disgust. The vampire shifted his weight on the balls of his feet and began rummaging through the human's pockets for something interesting - or at least something that told him who this kid was. In the back pockets Nikolai found a wallet, complete with a Driver's license, some gift cards and half-faded receipts for nothing at all - fast food, some skateboard part - and a whopping fifteen dollars cash. Nikolai took out the ID and looked it over, throwing the wallet besides the kid.
"Trey Gooding, huh?" Twenty years old (Nikolai rolled his eyes), a native of the city. He memorized the address before discarding it near the wallet and dug around in the kid's pockets some more. Wrappers, an opened piece of candy, some lint. Nothing very interesting at all. Some scraps of paper -- wait.
He turned the paper over in his hands, reading it over and over again, finally getting some inkling of what happened last night.
Lisa-Joe. The name was familiar, but his brain was foggy and his head was aching. Lisa-Joe. Who the fuck was Lisa-Joe? Did he even know a Lisa-Joe or was it just a trick that his tired brain was playing, imagining that he knew things. This was her number. He could call it and ask what the hell was going on, right?
There was a growl from the depths, a surge of pain that flashed in front of his eyes, forcing a tic that swivelled his head to the side quickly. Nikolai stood and looked down upon the human before toeing him roughly over onto his back. Trey's face was fat with gravity pulling ingloriously down on the flesh, the mouth slackened and displaying the front teeth. It made Nikolai hate him. He wanted to take out his frustration the human's face, to tear open his neck and let him truly bleed to death in his mouth, to kick his face in until it was unrecognizable. The only thing that stopped him was the precarious position that would put him in. Would someone come looking for this brat? Did anyone know that he had him in his condo? Not knowing was torture and made his headache worse.
Nikolai bent down with a sigh and hauled the human up from the floor with as much care as he would a sack of potatoes. His dead weight was annoyingly awkward, Trey's limbs falling all over the place as Nikolai nearly threw him back on the couch in his irritation. The boy bounced a bit and the couch groaned under the sudden flex. He moved the kid's feet onto the couch and turned him on his side, just in case the little bastard decided to toss up that pizza - an idea that made Nikolai restless. Best to leave Trey to his own devices for now. He slipped the piece of paper with Lisa-Joe's number on it into his pocket.
Now, the waiting game.
-
Trey came to after only an hour, the taste of pizza on his tongue. It gave his mouth such a greasy feeling that he smacked his lips, trying to dispel it. He wouldn't mind some soda to wash it away with. He opened his eyes and blurry vision showed him a familiar coffee table. He couldn't remember who it belonged to, though.
He could hear a strange whispery sound nearby, but didn't know what it was. With some effort, he moved to a sitting position. His head hurt. His whole right side hurt, especially his elbow. He didn't remember what he'd knocked it up against. Trey rotated it this way and that but he couldn't see the damage, and it hurt his shoulder doing it so he stopped that after a while too.
The swishing noise continued and he looked towards where he thought it came from. A guy -
Hot Guy
John Wagner
the vampire
- was crouched down wiping the floor. Trey recognised the back of him.
"Oh, hey, did I come home with you again?" he huffed, disappointed in himself. Hot Guy (John), had been so mean to him kicking him out after they'd had such an awesome time together. The bathroom blow (in more ways than one, ha ha) had been so hot, and then finding out John was a vampire had been pretty sick, and he'd got all horny when John had drunk from him. He didn't know if they'd had sex or not. Wait, was that the second time or the first time?
The first time he'd left here he'd been carrying a pizza box. He could still taste the pizza, man his memory was strong.
-
It was tedious work trying to keep the hallucinatory monsters away from the mess that Trey had left on his floor. At first he had tried to ignore them - there were only a few, and it wasn't like they were actually there - but the slop on the porcelain quickly became an eyesore for him. He had no space for human mess in his life anymore. As he went about his business, killing time before the sun properly set, his eyes kept finding that mess - and the amorphous monsters that multiplied, giggling over the feast. The hair on the back of his neck prickled, despite knowing they were only figments of his twisted brain. Finally, Nikolai gathered his cleaning supplies - three scrubbing brushes, some paper towels, spray bleach, disinfecting wipes, and a pail of soapy water. He spent close to twenty minutes scrubbing meticulously - obsessively - the spot on the floor where the human fell, fighting the urge to pick the little mongrels up and drown them in the water, settling instead on simply squashing, scrubbing, and wiping.
He had not even been paying attention when he heard Trey's voice from the couch, looking wildly up at him as if he had been caught doing something he would rather have kept private. Nikolai stood, trying to hide his surprise, and taking his supplies back to the kitchen counter.
"You haven't fucking left yet," he corrected with annoyance. "You've lost too much blood and you're clearly too weak to leave on your own. So when the sun goes down in another hour or so, I'm dumping your dumb ass off somewhere far from here." He considered the possibility of calling the kid a cab, but thought again. Considering this little shit couldn't even make it to the door without falling, he doubted he'd be able to reasonably get him into the elevator alone without attracting too much attention. Nikolai had also considered calling up a few of the Disciples to come get this kid and drop him somewhere, but didn't know how much he could trust that Trey would get where he needed to unharmed. It wasn't something he typically worried about, but Nikolai had no idea who had seen him with the human and what this kid was worth to anyone. Best to play it safe.
"Where can I leave you?" There wasn't an ounce of warmth in the demand.
-
Trey's head was pounding again along with his new aches. He thought about not having left this house. What, for a whole night and day? Huh, he'd never slept that long before. He wondered what his sleep record was. How many hours had he slept, then? There were twenty four hours in a day, and then there was the night, too. Man, he must've been asleep nearly forty eight hours! If the sun was going down in an hour, he had to shave forty eight to forty seven. Still an amazing accomplishment.
He grinned at John, pleased with the new story he was going to have to tell his mates as soon as he saw them. Forty seven hours asleep!
"Um, you can take me home," he said. "Can I have a soda or something?" Did vampires drink soda? "Or water?"
-
Nikolai licked the backs of his teeth behind closed lips, spinning his lip ring as he kept his temper. Angrily he turned to the mostly empty cabinets to the left of the stove and reached into the back, pulling out the pack of plastic disposable cups. He had no glassware, no plates or silverware; there was very rarely a need of them. These cups he only kept around for the human members of the Disciples who brought liquor and hadn't thought ahead enough to bring cups as they cut coke on the counter. They were wrapped in their original packaging, covered in a thin layer of dust. Nikolai tried not to pay attention to the goblins who danced on the edges of the rim, wiping his hands on his pants before digging around in another cabinet for something. He withdrew a half-empty, ten pound bag of powdered table sugar, and slammed it down unceremoniously on the counter within Trey's view.
Without consulting the human, Nikolai poured about sixty grams of sugar into the red plastic cup and filled the rest of the cup with warm water. He flicked his wrist around as the water and sugar combined in the filling cup. Once full, he closed the tap and brought the beverage over to Trey with a glare firmly in place. "Drink this." His tone gave the human no choice in the matter, his arm extended and the cup hanging from his fingers as if touching the cup gave him the plague.
-
Trey was happy about the sugar. He'd learnt a while back that putting sugar into water made it taste like can-lemonade. He took a sip and was startled by the temperature of the water. He wanted to complain but John didn't look in the mood for it so he gulped it all down in big swallows then unleashed a burp at the end.
Then he laughed about it.
"That was a good one!" he said, not talking about the drink. He held out the cup to John, for him to take it back. "So are we going now?" he asked, not really wanting to hang around anymore. Sleeping for forty-seven hours meant he'd probably overstayed his welcome.
Probably. How much shit could a sleeping guest get up to? He wouldn't have been a hassle at all!