The Elephant in the Room

[Saiketsu]

"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.

[The Cedar Witch]

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.

[Saiketsu]

"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 Cedar Witch]

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.  

[Saiketsu]

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."

[The Cedar Witch]

"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.

[Saiketsu]

"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 Cedar Witch]

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."

[Saiketsu]

"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.

[The Cedar Witch]

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."

[Saiketsu]

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.

[The Cedar Witch]

"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."

[Saiketsu]

"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 Cedar Witch]

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.

[Saiketsu]

"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.