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.
