Early Winter.
There had been hints, surely, throughout their history together. She knew certain things, simple things. She knew he was nobility, that he died young, his Sire was a woman named Lucretia and that she had been killed somehow. But he was quite surprised at the things she didn't know, things that would have long ago explained his melancholy, his resistance to modern things, his bureaucratic structures and tendencies.
"Tell me something about you," she would ask, and he would comply, certain times grudgingly. What was there to say? There was a very long, somber life behind him and, for once, he had finally started to carve out a bit of peace with her. Why recap what had brought him to her?
He always hesitated, not knowing what words to say, what tales to discuss. His siblings first, his noble blood. Recanting stories of childhood follies like chasing geese or falling from horses was easy enough, things he had never discussed or bothered to remember in English. They felt strange on his tongue, as if he were half-remembering someone else's life. Yet they felt more pleasant to recall, even if faces blurred and blended into each other from time to time. It was sad for him to not remember his sister's face or his uncle's drunken laugh. After living for so long he shouldn't have expected to be able to remember them clearly. He told her of his brothers Michel and Julien, Raymond and Vincent, his sisters Charlotte and Armelle, their names now as unfamiliar on his tongue as their faces were in his mind. Had they really existed at some point?
He told her of Julien's death, drowned in a river nearby when young Guillaume was only six, of Raymond and Armelle's feverish passing at four, before he could actually know them. He told her of his mother's sorrow of losing her children, all that he could remember of it, his father's drunken outbursts. And he said it all lightly, as if it had all happened to someone else, in someone else's story.
Damien told Rachel about his love for God, his righteousness and need for salvation. His fervor at age twelve which allowed him to go study God, become a holy man, a monk. That was until the war was declared and he was sent to the Holy Lands. The beauty of Italy, his love for language, his travels through Toulouse, Lyon, Switzerland, Milan, Bari, Durres, Tirana, Resen, Serrai, Corlu, to Constantinople, and on and on, down into Turkey, Damascus, Jordan, Antioch, Jerusalem. The victories, the places in passing. He was seventeen, more than old enough to be treated as a man in those days.
He showed her his old wounds - from weapons, from impact, from his own childish stupidity in war. They were part of him, long faded and many of them barely visible on his pale skin, healed well before his Claiming. He showed her the wound that should have killed him had fate been kind, a deep, pinkish jagged stab wound in the basin of his shoulder. These he felt no shame in now that she was his lover.
But he made the mistake of explaining that this last one hadn't been allowed to fully heal because... he grew silent, thoughtful. It felt disrespectful to speak ill of his Sire. It felt even worse to explain this to his lover, who would never understand the relationship that he had with Lucretia. She was violent, greedy, and self-centered, of course. But she was also his Sire and she was dead now. He couldn't bring himself to say what he wanted to.
Instead he let the image slip to her of the day he had awoken to see her caring for the wound, with a feeling of human fright that he could remember clearly even now. Damien's lips stayed locked as he showed Lucretia pinning a naked Guillaume down, taking her pleasure from him as she ripped through the flesh on his back, bleeding onto the cushions beneath them. Her weight on his hips. Blond hair dangling on his chest with the rhythm of her pleasure. Paralyzed with anger that peeked through his forced arousal, her seductive magic infiltrating his bones. Orgasm came for him before she sank her mouth forcefully into the side of his neck. His paralysis lifted and the blood leaked out of him as he fought hard against her, unable to throw her off. Drifting off into blackness only to reawaken again and again to the same event...
"Hey," he heard and snapped back. "Come back to me," she said, stroking the side of his face, his hair, searching his eyes for his attention.
"Sorry," he said with a hollow smirk that Rachel caught immediately.
"Don't be sorry, it's ok. You just don't have to go back to that place; it's ok." Concern in her voice.
Damien smirked again in the same way, feeling guilt nonetheless. He turned over to put his shirt on, no longer feeling comfortable laying on the bed without it. His progress with being shirtless around her was spotty; his occasional self-consciousness getting the better of him more often than not. It was just something that he had begun to accept about himself, that being shirtless would be difficult, if not impossible. He could live with that, seeing as how he had never expected himself to have an opportunity to be topless around anyone ever again since Lucretia had died.
He pulled his shirt off the floor and rolled it up in his hands, putting it over his head quickly, as casually as he could. As soon as the cotton touched his skin, he felt okay again. Rachel, sensing this, slipped her arms around him and held onto him from behind, securing his place in her arms. The human placed her face against his back and made him feel warm again for a few brief moments. Damien smiled, sadly but at the very least, more genuinely.
