Breaking Dawn

[Saiketsu]

continued from Coming Undone

The cab ride had been a tense one: the cabbie looked as though he were falling asleep at the wheel as he wound through alleyways and bumped over sewer grates, and the young woman at his side chose not to utter more than a few words strung together throughout the entire ride. Damien William Evans had concentrated on nothing more than flickering his steely eyes between the girl, the cabbie and the passing lights outside the window. And as he stepped out of the back door, the vampire decided to himself to get one of his cars up and running, so at least he wouldn\'t have to worry about a sleeping driver next time. Paying the cab driver his fare through the window, Damien finalized his decision as the cabbie\'s head nodded slowly in slumber.

Ace, on the other hand, was fully awake at nearly four thirty in the morning, his only worry being the approaching sun in the eastern sky. His eyes glanced in that direction before he noticed Storm onthe other side of the cab, standing on the curb already and staring around at the buildings. Damien found himself wondering when the last time she had been in the city was as the taxi drove off, leaving Damien standing in the near-middle of the street.

Few people were actually out and about at this time of the morning. The bars were already closed, most of the dance clubs across town locked up tight. Birds in distant trees and hiding in distant structures chirped with the anticipation of sunrise. Damien groaned as hiseyes flickered towards the east yet again.

The two of them stood out front of the Capital Building, it\'s lobby alight with yellow radiance. It wasn\'t exactly the Brazilian Quarter as he was telling her, as the front entrance faced a well-lit main street, but beyond it was the infamous Quarter he loved to dwell in; the back door lead straight into its heart. "Shall we?" And he led the way, pulling the door open for her curteiously, trying his best not to be anymore of a prick than he had to be.

Both Damien and Storm entered the lobby. Before even judging Storm\'s reaction or even giving an acknowledging glance at the deskhand, Damien headed straight for the elevator. After so many years of living there, the vampire\'s feet had memorized the familiar pattern of finding the elevator. Feeling her quiet presense close to him, Damien pressed the number two button and the doors closed around them. The elevator shifted and lifted, then stopped roughly at the second floor. The silver doors opened and a long, cheaply carpetted hallway appeared in view, the pattern of old make and worn to the cement in many places. Down three doors, Damien strolled, grabbing the keys from his pocket. He turned left and then right, stopping at the sixth door of the hallway -- one on the edge of the building. He twisted his key in the door wordlessly and entered the dark room.

"It\'s nothing spectacular." The vampire flicked on the light he barely used, igniting the deep green room in a flood of yellow.

[The Cedar Witch]

Storm winced at the cabby\'s careless driving, feeling his slumber and mild irritation pulling at her mind. She didn\'t like the way his presence felt and made a point to stare out at the passing scenery the entire ride. The Akari wasn\'t used to cars, nor did she particularly enjoy riding in them. She preferred to have most if not all control over her traveling situations. And with every bump in the road that made her intake air quickly, the more she wanted to get out.

The girl hardly took in anything she was looking at. She\'d known the sight of the city from passing through once or twice for food, clothing, or trying to get a job. But she didn\'t enjoy the cluttered feeling of masses of stinking humans projecting their emotions everywhere without any thought to what they were doing. But thankfully, this early in the morning, there was barely anyone out and about.

She stepped gratefully out of the cab and onto the curb, taking a good look around for the first time. Unfortunately for her, lack of people didn\'t necessarily mean a complete lack of emotional pressure. She could feel last night\'s energy still drifting uncomfortably about, and she shifted her weight while throwing an unsure glance at the vampire.

Her feet followed the vampire through the door and the lobby, and she was too distracted to take in anything at all until she was in the elevator. Relax, she told herself, mostly because she wasn\'t all too comfortable being in a small room that moved by itself. And to tell the truth, she had only been in an elevator once before. She didn\'t like it then and she didn\'t like it now. When the cursed thing came to a stop she almost ran out into the hallway.

When she first took a look at Damien\'s apartment, she was compelled to start cleaning. Not that it was terribly filthy, just noticeably. To her anyway. But the only thing that kept her from commenting rudely about it was the thought of a shower.

"Can I borrow a shirt? and use your shower?" yes, it was uncharacteristically forward for her to ask, but her muscles were practically jumping for joy. She\'d been bathing in streams for god knows how long, and the aspect of taking a nice, hot shower made her extremely impatient. She moved through the apartment, skipping the pleasantries, to find a bathroom, not really waiting for Damien to answer.

[Saiketsu]

Her forwardness took Damien completely by surprise. He eyed her suspiciously as she walked through his apartment without any form of grace or respect. It wasn\'t as if he had anything to hide --the only thing worth hiding was hanging around his neck--yet out of all the people he had ever brought home from wherever, he just assumed she would be the only one to actually wait to be showed around. Guess not.

The contents of his pockets had barely touched the coffee table in the living room, wedged between two massive couches, before he heard the bathroom door shut, with Storm inside. He didn\'t exactly know what to make of the situation at all. It had been a while since he brought a woman back here, and even longer since that woman was mortal. The vampire scratched at his hair, shifted it in his nervous manner.

He hated being uncomfortable in his home. But he also hated when people rumaged through his house. Damien sighed and manuevered his way past the living room couches and opened the door to his bedroom where the carpet floor turned to hard wood. Sighing as he pulled open a drawer of long, black tees, Damien sorted through them, finding at last one that wasn\'t as well-fitted as he typically wore.

[The Cedar Witch]

The door clicked behind her and she didn\'t even bother to lock it. Storm exhaled deeply, taking in the sight of the small bathroom with something like vague distaste. She began to strip slowly, letting her pants fall to the floor as she pulled off her shirt and haphazardly threw it onto the sink. I\'ll fix it later, was her mental note, and she neatly placed her undergarments and pants on top of the closed toilet.

Glancing in the mirror briefly, she studied her reflection. As peculiar as it sounded, the girl hadn\'t seen a mirror since the last time she set foot in a building. Wandering around outside between the beach and the forests without sleeping for days didn\'t help her appearance much. Her eyes were sunken in and her expression was weary. Storm frowned, as if disappointed in herself, that she let herself go. Her skin looked more pale then usual (from what she was used to).

She pulled open the glass door and turned on the shower, her heart skipping a beat with the sound of water and the smell of steam. The Akari quickly stepped inside, sighing maybe a little too loudly, and closed the door behind her. Hot water plastered her hair to her back and coated her ivory skin with a steamy slickness. Soap, god when was the last time she had new soap! The girl could feel her skin tingling with delight as she worked at scrubbing tension away.

What started off as a soft humming grew into a  quiet song. No way Damien would be listening, right? "I can\'t see your star," large inhale, short pause "I can\'t see your star," she smiled, wondering when the last time she actually sang was.

"Though I patiently waited, bedside, for the death of today. I can\'t see your star..." A brief flash of purple in her eyes and she levitated a shampoo bottle into her hand.

"And I\'m alone now, me and all I stood for, we\'re wandering now, all in parts in pieces, swim lonely, find your own way out." time seemed to blur to her as she let the water take her to a place where the city vanished, where nothing existed. No Isabella. No Damien. No Storm. Just heat and water.

"I can\'t see your star, I can\'t see your star, how can the darkness feel so wrong?" she didn\'t realize how loud her voice had grown, not that it grew unbearable, but it was louder then she had intended it to be.

"So far away, it\'s growing colder without your love, why can\'t you feel me calling your name? Can\'t break the silence, it\'s breaking me." And her singing lowered to humming and then ceased as the turned off the shower.

[Saiketsu]

The awkwardness he felt melted slowly as her voice drifted from the shower. At first Damien had no idea what was going on: a low lulling voice echoing somewhere. Then hit got louder and louder until the vampire could actually make out the words of the song. Without meaning to Damien turned his head towards the bathroom door where steam was seen floating under the door. He didn\'t exactly know what to expect to see besides this and shrugged it off.

Closing the drawer with an easy shove that shook the mirror above it, Damien held the black shirt in his hand. He approached the bathroom door, noticing the towel hanging from the back of it, something she must have forgotten in her haste to rush through his home. He sighed under his breath with the faintest tinge of irritation, which was easily subdued by the melody of her words and the tone of her song.

Without thinking too much about it, Damien twisted the handle of the door silently and pushed the door in the slightest amount at a time until a wall of steam slapped him in the face and the sounds inside became much louder. But as the steam cleared, his breath caught in his lungs at what he briefly saw before he tore his eyes away in shame.

Through the warped glass door and steam, Damien could see the figure of the girl who so resembled Isabella moving about in his shower. His blood rushed faster in the veins for a number of reasons. She was facing away from him at an angle, giving Damien a moderately good glimpse of her profile and skin tone. Her words were much louder now and the steam was overwhelming his sensitive senses. Yet Damien couldn\'t move as fast as he wanted to.

Quickly, he shifted his eyes sideways to the sink and the fogged mirror. The vampire set the two objects down on the sink soundlessly, just in case she could hear anything over the sound of the water and her own singing. Damien withdrew from the occupied bathroom as swiftly as his body could, but not without glancing once more at the figure in the shower and the curves of her body.

Soundlessly Damien closed the door and let go of the handle. Pausing a moment longer, he carried his thoughts, memories and internal confrontations with him into the living room, angry with himself as a certain feeling built up inside of him.

[The Cedar Witch]

Storm let the shower drip for a few seconds before she soundlessly stepped from the shroud of steam and glass. She inhaled deeply and took a few short steps to the sink. The girl froze as her eye caught a towel and T-shirt that she did not remember bringing with her into the bathroom. The thought occurred to her that Damien must have slipped in and may have, most definitely, seen her. Showering. Naked. Her face immediately flushed as she wiped the condensation from the mirror with the towel in a hurried manner.

Peering critically at her face, she decided that the shower helped her immensely. Even though she wasn\'t in for longer then fifteen minutes, her face already seemed flusher (nothing to do with the blushing) and her eyes more awake. Her smile didn\'t even bother her and she could almost say that she was pretty. Almost out of habit, she drew a heart in the fog that had already begun to reform. It meant nothing, a mere doodle that she used to do all the time. On the right side of the heart she traced the outline of a single wing before feeling guilty for marking up the vampire\'s mirror.

But before she began to wipe the design off, Damien\'s shirt caught her attention. After drying her hair and body with the fluffy towel, she folded it neatly and placed it on the edge of the sink. Looking cautiously about the room as if expecting to see someone catch her, she lifted the black shirt to her nose and inhaled softly. A musky scent, his scent, overwhelmed her; causing her to flush even more so before she pulled it over her head after donning a few other things. The black fabric hung down just enough to cover everything important.

After another quick glance in the mirror, briefly shaking out her hair and checking again, Storm hesitantly poked her head out of the bathroom. Her body soon followed; pants, shirt and towel hanging over one arm. Noticing that Damien wasn\'t in the bedroom, she ventured further into the apartment, into the living room. The girl worked to extinguish the red in her face as she saw him sitting on a couch, not succeeding much.

"What do you want me to do with this?" she asked, eyes flashing between red, silver, and blue. She held the damp towel out, and shifting her clothes to her other arm.

[Saiketsu]

He heard her come out of the bathroom before he had seen her and the result was his breath caught in his lungs half-way through an intake of air. But Damien pushed the knot in his throat, chest, stomach, wherever, down, leaving his face with a completely unreadable expression.

She smelled like him. She was wearing his shirt. She wasn\'t wearing much with it, either. Still his face remained placid, focused on the moving images of the television in the center of the room. "There\'s a hamper in the corner of my room, next to the bureau." He didn\'t remark on the fact that he had even entered the bathroom, let alone saw her through the glass.

Thoughts of many nights next to a particular woman surfaced irritably. He wasn\'t exactly in the mood to remember the sensual adventures he ad taken part in once upon a time, and the young woman who looked so much like his "wife" wasn\'t helping the situation as she held out her dirty clothes, asking him what he wanted to do with them. Damien was experiencing a strange combination of feelings in his abdomen; one being the slightest tinge of arousal over the profile of a young woman and the other being disgust and shame for even thinking about feeling that way towards another woman who wasn\'t his deceased lover.

He mentally stabbed at himself, reminding himself of the differences between Storm and Isabella which should have been painfully obvious, justifying the reason of his faint enjoyment at seeing Storm naked for his pain contributed by the lack of Isabella.

[The Cedar Witch]

Storm made no comment as she discarded everything into the hamper but her shirt, after emptying her pockets, assuming her things would be cleaned sooner or later. It felt strange to her, to be walking around in someone else\'s apartment as though she had always dwelt within it. But she tried to shrug it off, given that the shower had relaxed her nerves much like alcohol did to some people.

"I\'m sorry for barging in without waiting." she laughed nervously, taking a seat opposite the vampire in a couch across the room. Folding her legs under her, she went about threading a needle while trying to read Damien without him noticing (which wasn\'t difficult). The girl could feel several strong emotions, which only confused her more, and she forced herself to shut him out.

"Thanks for...the shirt," her voice was low, timid, almost anticipating some violent outburst. In order to avoid eye contact, she focused entirely on sewing the holes in her shirt. Where her eyes should have been purple, they flickered between red and brown in a familiarly nervous pattern.

[Saiketsu]

Still battling with himself --which at this point was turning more into him severely scolding himself for feeling anything-- Damien didn\'t dare look up from the television, finding infomercials in Spanish safer to hold onto his attention. "It\'s fine. Pierre and his guests do it all the time. I just figured you were going to be different about it, that\'s all."

His voice was sounding worse than how he meant the statement. It was supposed to cause the slightest bit of humor in the atmosphere of this room, but he assumed it would be taken the wrong way, yet again, and the two of them would return to the silent game. He could hear her pressing the needle through the cloth and without looking, Damien found himself off the subject of Storm\'s body and onto the subject of where she had gotten that needle from.

The vampire ventured a glance up at Storm, but regretted it immediately as the cold blood inhabiting his veins pulsed around the image of her behind a warped glass door again. Damien looked back to the television and was silently thankful that the glass had texture and hadn\'t allowed him to see anymore than he already had.

[The Cedar Witch]

Damien\'s tone caused her to swallow hard and she accidentally pricked her finger. Cursing, she stuck the wounded thing into her mouth before realizing that she didn\'t have to. Awkwardly, she pulled the blood into her mouth before closing the wound up with her energy. Finding the needle and thread shaking mildly in her hand, she resumed a steady rhythm and was finished in little time. The girl needed new clothes more then she needed repairs. She didn\'t even remember how old this particular shirt was. Without a second thought, she guided the shirt through the air into the hamper without moving a muscle.

"So," she barely whispered, voice seemingly caught in her throat, making her sound like a frightened animal, "When are you going to sleep?" The question was simply meant for pleasant conversation. Well. Conversation, nonetheless. Storm could already feel a sort of awkward silence growing between them yet again, and it was making her increasingly more uncomfortable.

And as much as it was killing her to know what he was thinking about, she refrained from asking. The girl realized that it was probably something to do with her. God, she already caused enough discomfort, why not cause some more? Her eyes moved to the floor, finding the television uninteresting.

[Saiketsu]

"Honestly, I haven\'t decided yet. I typically go to bed when the sun pulls at me, but a better question is what are you going to do?" He swallowed the lump in his throat and looked up at her, ignoring the familiar pulse the scent of her blood gave him. At least that was something he was more accustomed to, something he could control better. "You\'d be in here all alone for a few hours. I can stay up as long as I need to, but eventually I\'ll have to go down for the day. What do you think you\'d do here?"

She looked odd to him in his shirt. Content, for whatever reason. He rather enjoyed it once he got past the naked part. It was a pleasant surprise to see her something other than completely frustrated, angry, cold, etc. He even managed to show a slight hint of the enjoyment he felt.

[The Cedar Witch]

Storm glanced at him, trying to digest his tone of voice and finding it to be rather easy. She allowed herself to relax a bit, uncurling her legs and settling into the soft cushion of the couch. She thought for a moment before speaking, trying to decide what she could possibly do to pass the time since watching a glowing box really wasn\'t her thing.

The girl had half the mind to try and escape, but then remembered that she wasn\'t really wearing pants. So venturing out into the city was more or less out of the question. But she really didn\'t want to sit around and waste the day. She could try to clean the god-forsaken dump, but she wasn\'t feeling quite that inspired. Inspired... Suddenly a thought occurred to her.

"Do you have any paper? and a pencil or something?" she looked at him easily with blue slowly flowing into her eyes. The Akari hadn\'t drawn in the longest time either, but cooped up indoors would leave her no choice. And if he didn\'t have anything she didn\'t know what she would do with herself otherwise. Sleep? No. Anything but that.

[Saiketsu]

The vampire was only vaguely distracted by the girl\'s shifting legs. And yes, he even had to force himself not to watch them as she adjusted herself, but that was nothing new: he had always loved girls\' legs. At least this portion of the night was something he was used to, something he knew exactly how to react to: just not watch.

Otherwise his countence shifted into a notion of defeat. "I\'m not exactly sure of what, but I\'m sure there\'s something around." He stood, as the dutiful host of the party, and searched thebureau in his bedroom for any form of paper. Typically all the paperwork was kept at a different location than in Damien\'s house, but anything he needed in the meantime between trips was kept in the third drawer of his bureau.

Sliding the drawer out, Damien retracted a blue notebook, the only form of clean paper he had. He\'d obviously have to get more, but hopefully it would do. The vampire closed the drawer with his foot as he stood up straight and walked out of the room again. "How\'s this? There are pens on the kitchen counter."

[The Cedar Witch]

Storm significantly brightened when he returned with the paper. So she wouldn\'t have to formulate any escape plans for the upcoming day. The girl was only half disappointed.

"Thanks," and she did mean it, even though her eyes were glued on the notebook as she took it a little too eagerly from the vampire. Quickly standing, the Akari straightened out the shirt she was wearing and took a last glance at Damien.

"I\'ll be in the kitchen," she didn\'t expect him to need her, so the statement wasn\'t followed up with a \'holler if you need me\'. Storm briskly made her way to the kitchen and pulled out a chair for her to sit on. After adjusting the shirt beneath her and settling in as comfortably as she could manage, the girl found a black ink pen waiting for her.

Memories flooded back to her as dark ink soiled the virgin paper, and she began to draw a series of frantic lines. At first the picture resembled nothing but vague scribbles, but eventually it became something that looked like an intricate spider web. She leaned forward, closer to the paper, probably something she shouldn\'t have done considering how short the shirt was. But the Akari made no move to fix such things as clothing.

With a loud rip she set the paper down on the table, frowning at her work. New paper caught her attention as she discarded the recent \'artwork\' with a turn of her head. The next began as spider webs again, but formed into a stunningly dark portrait of a man. A fiercely detailed man. Frightening and mean. His eyes were soulless and as soon as she realized what she was drawing, Storm threw the paper to the floor and began anew once again.

Fervently the pen scratched the paper, and the Akari was unaware of all of her surroundings that excluded the white square in front of her. Spider webs became fire, then ice. And a face began to take shape, someone with a hard expression. The eyes, however, were soft, something sharply contrasting the dark tone she had already sketched out. And as the details of the mouth came in, with fangs barely pushing against his bottom lip, the paper fluttered gently to the floor.

[Saiketsu]

Damien sort of just stared at her for a moment, dumbfounded; she was doing that well to him this night. He must have stood there for perhaps ten minutes before she flicked the first piece of paper down to the floor. His steely eyes never left her, but she didn\'t exactly seem to notice. Her aura reeked of concentration and withdrawal.

Slowly Damien pulled away from his spot, deciding to replace himself on the couch to watch the shitty documentaries which cluttered the airwaves after four o\'clock in the morning. He glanced at the clock of the cable box: 5:18 with the AM button lit up.

"You know most mortals or sane persons would be enjoying their last couple of hours of sleep at this point of the morning." It was a simple, off-handed comment from which he didn\'t expect an answer, but hoped for some sly comment from the girl. To be completely honest he rather enjoyed the exchange of sarcastic wit between them.