After watching the display of debauchery that seemed so prevailing within the Oligarchy, Damien found himself a bit tired of holding his tongue for the sake of others. With his teeth set tightly together, he gave his polite yet tight-lipped invitation to Odessa and Nadia to return back to Damien's house for a bit of relaxation and conversation. Despite Pierre's silent protests - because Damien would not allow his son to drive back and avoid the problem of Nadia that was at hand - Nadia and Odessa had agreed, and around the same time that Kerr had made an idiot of himself in front of the entire immortal population and had decided to leave, Damien had formed the same idea in his head. This party was not the kind where he wanted to linger around for the sake of partying - Kerr had partied hard enough for the rest of the room and it was time to bid this place adieu.
If nothing else, the masquerade had solidified his ambition for office. Damien dwelled on this as he drove back with with Pierre safely in the passenger seat, the car silent except for the momentary groans of Pierre's discomfort at sitting in a position that wrinkled his burn. Upon arriving back at Damien's house - thankfully Nadia had volunteered to take an otherwise indignant Odessa so that she wouldn't suffer through sitting in the back seat of Damien's sedan - he had taken up Pierre from the passenger seat and supported him as he found his feet beneath his knees, beneath his weight. Nadia hadn't been following closely upon Damien's tail, Odessa having been to the house when he had first bought it and directing her fledgling (or whatever else the women decided to do), so he had little idea when to be expecting the two. In the meantime he entered the house with Pierre.
The night was thankfully clear and the hour still early enough for everyone to be lively - especially Delilah - upon Damien and Pierre's entrance. He greeted the dog lovingly and gave her a treat as he walked into the kitchen. He had called Jenella to remind her that he would be coming back with Pierre, and he could hear Rachel in the background of the phone. That human feeling crept annoyingly into his face again as he ended the call. Now, he could hear her in the house and that human feeling needed to be once again shoved down to the depths of his mind - something that had been getting increasingly hard to do since their talk more than two weeks ago. When he had walked in, his greeting was brief to the both of them as he played with Delilah, trying to wear her out for the time that Odessa and her fledge came over. He became very much aware of Rachel's presence in the room, though it was something that he was trying not to remember. Odessa would be coming over soon and there couldn't be any hint of the past three weeks, so he suppressed it and ignored it. He supposed that it was just one of those things that needed to get harder before it got better, so he paid it no mind. He opened the door and sent Delilah flying through the back door after her tennis ball.
There was something about the way that Jenella looked that made Pierre glad that he wasn't going to be facing Nadia and Odessa alone. Her red hair was tied up messily in an elastic which, when she heard that Odessa and Nadia were coming, she instantly took down but did nothing about the wrinkley wave that lingered. She was wearing very little make-up, like usual, and her features were lined with that easiness that he had always admired in her. His fledgling was wearing a simple black tank top beneath a dark-purple cardigan, dark gray jeans and tall leather boots. When he had entered the house, she was sitting in the Family Room with Rachel, watching television. She had greeted Damien casually and continued staring are the flashing images with a boredness that was very characteristic of his oldest living fledgling. But when her eyes had fallen on him, she stood immediately, knowing that something was wrong. She walked over to him and put her hand on his shoulder with a tenderness he had once received from his wife, Janine. It was still funny and strange to him that her name was so similar to hers. "I'm fine," he said immediately, lying through his teeth.
"What happened?" She said with concern, looking to Damien as well as he closed the door after throwing the ball.
"Mr. Galvin decided to make a complete ass of himself in front of the entire immortal population of the city by knocking over half of the guests at the party in a deliberate drunken state," Damien answered casually as if he were telling her about the score of the soccer game. Jenella sighed under her breath, as if she were expecting as much. "Oh, and Odessa and Nadia are on their way for a bit of unravelling and relaxation."
"If that's what you want to call it," Pierre said with a glare at his sire and a glance down at Jenella, who looked at him finally understanding the gravity of what had happened.
He and Jenella had been lovers for a long time. He had been interested in the girl when he had first met her, the firey daughter of a inn-keeper. They had met in England, almost two hundred years ago, and she had captured him from that very night. They started as lovers, but something clicked. After about a month, he told her what he was and she became enrapt in the idea of being with him forever, if not as a lover than at least as a friend. After four months of knowing her, he had claimed her while they were still lovers. It was only a year or so afterwards that they fell into a position of friends. She was the first thing that he had actually felt akinship to after Nadia had refused him. That burning spot that was spurned by Nadia was eased by Jenella, and it still was. His fledge understood the dimension of his relationship with Odessa's daughter as well, if not better than Damien did. For that he was grateful.
But that didn't matter. All that mattered was that he needed to change his bandaging immediately, to soak it now that it had faced a Luminary's foot to the stomach - just what he needed to finish off his night.
"Come with me," he said to Jenella and squeezed her hand. She nodded and the two of them went down into the blood room in the basement, a room that Pierre was becoming used to more and more.
The steel-plated basement was a sort of vampire hospital for which he was glad existed at this moment in his immortal life.
"Lie down," Jenella said to him after he had stripped himself from the waist up. His slacks were unbuttoned and pushed down to his plough of dark blonde pubic hair, something that still made Pierre self-conscious around his former lover - especially with the inability to tell what she was thinking. Despite the pain of his kicked, burned flesh, a boyish smile found his lips as his former lover attended to him with a barely-visable smirk. There was still something simple between them still.
"It looks better, anyway," she said, pulling the bandage off of him as he groaned. The burn, which had singed some of his pubic hair and ended just below the bottom-most part of his ribcage, was a blistered, bubbling thing. The first few months after the attack, he kept dreaming that his stomach had turned to ash, and that he would have to keep brushing bits of his ashened flesh away to keep it from spreading to the rest of it. Some dreams he would watch himself turn into a pile of ash. But Jenella was right, it must have looked better than that first night, thanks to all of the blood that he had been drinking since. Never before in his immortal life did he ever not want to drink blood as much as now.
Jenella turned away from him to break out a few packets of blood to pour over him and soak a cloth in. He watched her, softly, watching her move in her methodical way. Upstairs he could hear the door opening and a couple of heeled shoes click across the tiled floor.
