Goodnight Daylight
Title: Goodnight Daylight (1/1)
Fandoms - Crossover: The Vampire Diaries, Chicago Fire
Pairing: Katherine Pierce/Kelly Severide
Rating: R+
Word count: 3680
Disclaimer Here
Summary: The moon is two days from full, bright and silver, shining across the bed where he’s sleeping, bathing his body in its light. She sits in a chair by the window and waits, watches over him. Tells herself she owes him, for her carelessness, a period of orientation before she leaves; that this glitch is the only reason she's still here. Set in a future several months on from Chicago Fire episode 1.13.
Written for waltzmatildah's prompt at the Katherine Pierce Ficathon: You got lost, lost to the night, It's no loss, you'll be alright, Tell me you feel better when you're sleeping through the day, And I'll tell you how you missed it when you wake.
The moon is two days from full, bright and silver, shining across the bed where he’s sleeping, bathing his body in its light. She sits in a chair by the window and waits, watches over him. Tells herself she owes him, for her carelessness, a period of orientation before she leaves; that this glitch is the only reason she’s still here.
She’s already stayed too long.
The fascination began with a memory, a ghost, his uncanny resemblance to someone else whose supernatural transformation she had a hand in (although, with Mason, it was far from a mistake), then took on a life, an obsession of its own.
She likes him.
It’s her worst weakness where he’s concerned.
Likes the sex, the taste of his blood, the quiet in bed while he sleeps and she watches him. Likes his fragile, shattered essence that only his job as a certified hero papers and strings from splintering into a billion shards of pain (at least, it did, before today). Likes his complexity, his sweetness, the withheld bluntness it hides beneath. Maybe most of all she likes that he hasn’t yet bored her, that sometimes she entertains fantasies that she wants . . . something from him. She finds she can’t get enough of him, always wants one last day, hour, moment, one last delicious climax - which is how they got to this point, because he was exhausted and she wasn’t, and it was too easy to compel him to take a few sips of her blood.
“Katherine,” his voice drawls sleepily from the bed, and he slowly sits up, stretches, yawns, smiles at her.
Her breath catches in her throat. He was always hot. Now, fed, rested, remade beyond humanity, he’s beautiful.
“Hello,” she purrs.
He rubs a hand across his face. “I was having a weird dream,” he says.
“Oh?” She has a distinct feeling she knows what’s coming next, but adjournment, procrastination, basking in delay is her second worst weakness in this relationship. Anyway, she needs to give him time to adjust.
“I was in a morgue,” he says. “Dead. Except I kinda wasn’t. Then you showed up.” He smiles again and she smiles back. “You gave me . . . fuck,” he snorts softly, “you gave me a blood bag, like it was a juice box, and told me to drink it.”
She nods. “And did you?”
“Yeah,” he says, disconcerted.
She shifts sinuously in her chair, turned-on against her better judgment - her third worst weakness around him. “Did you like it?” she probes.
He inhales. “Yeah . . .” He shakes his head, as though he’s trying to clear it. “Told you it was weird. You think it means something?”
She breathes in, holds the breath while she considers, then seizes the opportunity. “It means you’re a vampire,” she says.
He lets out a quiet laugh. “Except then I would’ve woken up in a coffin.”
“Well, not necessarily.” She gets up, walks slowly across the room and sits down on the bed next to him, trails her fingers along his thigh. “They’re quite passé.” She looks steadily into his eyes. “You’re a vampire,” she repeats, and briefly strokes his face.
He laughs again, catches her hand and kisses it. “Very funny,” he says. “I’m starving. Let’s eat.”
- - - - -
She watches him work his way through half the contents of the fridge. At the back, he finds some garlic, playfully holds it against his face, grinning. “So if I was a vampire, wouldn’t this burn me?”
“That would be vervain,” she instructs patiently. “Garlic is totally harmless to us . . . unless,” she smiles sweetly, “you eat it and then want to put your tongue in my mouth.”
“Oh, us, now?” he teases her
She’s pleased. He’s alert (well, of course he is). The us was intentional, another little clue to tease out his denial.
“Yes.”
“Right,” he says absently, fridge door open again, until he closes it, frustrated. “God, I’m hungry!” An edge creeps into his good humor. “Nothing I eat seems to -”
“You need blood,” she interrupts. “I brought more from the hospital.”
“Okay, can we just stop now?” he says, irritated. A cold sweat is breaking out on his forehead as he opens and closes, with increasing force, all the cupboards in the kitchen. “Fuck, I need to eat something else,” he snaps. From across the room she can sense his energy dropping, his ears ringing, the weakness taking over his muscles and organs. “I don't get it. I just ate a ton of food and the shift wasn’t anything -”
He breaks off, stares at her, mystified and scared. “I can’t remember the shift ending,” he says. “We were at a house fire, I was right there and then . . . ” He moves slowly towards her and sits down at the kitchen island. “I was here with you. I woke up and told you about -” He stops and goes rigid. “Capp shouted something. My name. Shit, Severide! Look. . .” He shakes his head. “Out!” he completes the sentence quietly. “That’s the last thing I remember.”
She waits, leaving a space between his words and hers for him to process a little, then, quietly, “You died.”
He sucks in air hard, steadying himself and angry with her. “Okay, could you maybe take this seriously, because I’m losing --”
“You were killed when part of the roof caved in,” she persists. “ A beam crushed you. They told me when I went to the station.” She smirks gently. “We were going to have dirty, steamy sex in the equipment room, remember?” He nods, shakes his head, sighs, and she gets back to the important part, her attempt at distracting him for moment's respite, or connection, or whatever having failed. “I pretended to cry and found out the name of the hospital they’d taken your body to, and I went to the morgue and . . . well, you remember the rest, you just thought it was a dream.”
He closes his eyes tight, his forehead furrowed as he tries and fails to work out what she’s saying and relate it to the reality he understands. “You’re telling me I died,” he finally says.
“Yes.”
“But I’m sitting here talking to you and that’s because,” he opens his eyes, “I’m a vampire.”
He gets up, paces around the room, then comes back, sits down again and stares intently at her. “I’m hallucinating, right? Or . . . it’s like I can hear you but my brain’s not processing what you’re saying.” There are tears in his eyes and he swallows. “I did a lot of drugs,” he says. “Painkillers. I had a broken neck, and . . . I’m fine and I’m clean. But the surgeons kept talking about complications. You think . . .?” He trails off, searching her eyes desperately for help.
“You’re not crazy. There are no complications.” She speaks deliberately, slightly louder than strictly necessary. “You died in the fire this morning and now you’re a vampire.”
“Not funny,” he growls. “Not helping.”
“You’re right.” She stands up. “It’s not funny, and I am trying to help you, so shut up and listen. You’re --”
There’s an explosion of movement and she’s up against the wall, lifted off her feet, barely breathing as his ridiculously strong newborn hand presses against her neck. She collects herself, rallies her strength and, with everything she has, forces him away from her and sends him flying back across the room.
He falls, looks up from where he’s crumpled on the floor. “I’m sorry,” he says, pushing himself up. “I don’t know what . . .” Then he stops apologizing, gives into bewilderment. “What the hell was that?” he asks her.
“That was you being a vampire, baby,” she says quietly, dusting herself off. “And now you need to drink some blood.”
- - - - -
She’s on the couch, curled up, feet tucked under her, while he has the panic attack (now vampire-sized and all-consuming) he’s probably been suppressing most of his life. She would help, but he goes insane when she touches him: Stay the fuck away from me! So she just watches as he tries to gulp in air that won’t reach his lungs, chokes with futile, angry tears, and finally slumps forward, head in his hands.
“You need to feed,” she offers levelly.
He looks up at her, hatred and unwilling trust mingled in his eyes. “Why would you do that?" he demands. “I thought you . . ." He trails off, giving up.
There are things she could say; things that, under normal circumstances, she would. In the first place, tell him he thought wrong - she was playing with him; in the second, because it’s her nature; in the third, that he’s way beyond lucky she’s helping him at all. Somehow, she can’t. He has always been as candid with her as he knows how to be and so, now, she returns the favor.
“I wasn’t thinking,” she says. “I wanted to fuck again and you were tired, so . . .” She shrugs, she’s already explained the process quite clearly.
“You made me drink your blood,” he supplies, resentful, bitter.
She lifts her chin, daring him, defending herself. “Yes,” she says clearly. “Deal with it.” She gets up, goes to the area by the front door where she left the blood bags, brings back one bag and hands it to him. “Drink,” she says.
After a long standoff, he snatches the bag from her hand, punctures it and drinks, at first with disgust, then in big, ravenous draughts, squeezing the plastic to get the last drops. When he’s finished, he closes his eyes, swallows a couple of times, wipes his mouth with the back of his hand, then, without looking at her, “You got any more?”
- - - - -
He falls asleep on the couch, glutted with blood.
Again, she watches him.
Her eyes flicker on and off to the spiral staircase, thinking of the bedroom at the top, the closet where her clothes are kept, her bag in the corner of his room. In her mind, she goes through the entire process of packing, leaving, getting the hell out, and yet she doesn’t move more than a twitching reflex of intention, stays exactly where she is.
He’ll have to leave soon himself, anyway. His roommate moved out a few weeks ago, after Katherine moved in, which gives him a few hours grace. But he was a fire department lieutenant and his body just disappeared from a hospital morgue. People will come: he needs to be gone by then.
- - - - -
“I remember dying,” he says quietly. ““There was a second, less maybe, when I knew what was happening, but . . .” He looks into her eyes. “I was okay with it,” he says. “I made peace with it.” He shakes his head, struggling to grasp the evanescent memory, the sensation of his own death with such seriousness, she feels something like a swell, an ache in the place inside her that won’t let her leave him. “I wouldn’t have wanted this,” he says, almost inaudible, as though he were talking about a deceased friend (which, in some ways, she supposes, he is).
“I know,” she says. “I’m sorry.”
He nods half-heartedly, not really listening.
She wonders if it would make a difference to him if he knew this is one of the very few occasions in her very long existence she’s apologized; one of the fewer times she’s ever really meant it.
- - - - -
He drinks some more blood, then makes some coffee to wash it down. He’s a fast learner, highly adaptable to the quirks of vampire reality distinct from the myths of popular entertainment.
Waiting for the coffee maker, he picks up the garlic again, with less humor than last time and more curiosity, smells it cautiously, then checks out his reflection in the door of the microwave. He examines the blood bag, drains it, and says,
“So we don’t have to kill people?”
She shrugs. “It’s not required. It can be amusing.” He raises an eyebrow and she wonders how he’d react if she’d told him the truth. It’s ecstasy. “Fresh blood is better,” she says. “But you don’t have to kill them to drink it. And then, of course, there are animals, but I leave that peculiarity to my ex.” She wrinkles her nose, all the while wrestling with whether to celebrate or be terrified that she can now refer to Stefan without feeling much of anything and that the reason for this is Kelly Severide.
His nose wrinkles too. “Like, cats and dogs?” he asks.
“Oh, yes, Fluffy and Fido! And a creepy remorse ritual with their collars and the little bells to follow!” She laughs. Understandably, he’s completely baffled. “Private joke,” she says. “And no. Wild ones. He lives in the middle of nowhere.” She gets up, walks over to him and takes the risk of kissing him on the cheek. He doesn’t respond, but doesn’t recoil. “Rabbits, squirrels . . . skunks, for all I know or, honestly, care. I wouldn’t recommend it.”
The coffee maker beeps and he pulls down mugs and pours coffee, thinking so hard she can almost hear his brain working. He hands her a mug.
“Katherine?” he starts tentatively. “How would you drink a person’s blood without killing them? That is,” he swallows, “if you wanted to.”
She sips coffee while she catches up with the changes inherent in his question: he’s accepting himself, he’s accepting her.
“Are you still hungry?” she asks.
He nods.
“Order a pizza,” she says, “and I’ll show you.”
- - - - -
“Now you compel him,” she says.
He’s wired on human blood, every molecule tingling, and barely concentrating. “That was amazing! Shit, that was . . . !” He grins at her. “Hey.”
He wants to fuck her.
She smiles sweetly at the pizza delivery guy, locking eyes. “Excuse us, please,” she says and, naturally, he does, waiting with the expected eerie patience.
“First things first.” She wants him too, he’s gorgeous, but she’s conscious of being responsible, the only thing that stands between him and screwing up disastrously. And then, she always liked the undertone of sadness, the sense of desperate escape as he gave himself up to her. Horny new vampires are generally like Labrador puppies -- over-enthusiastic and all over you. It seems as though he’s no exception, and she can wait a few minutes for that experience. “We have to clean up dinner before we can go play.”
“Katherine . . .” he coaxes, and pulls her against his hip.
“Look in his eyes,” she commands. Grudgingly, he does what he’s told, and they begin the three-way process of altering the deliveryman’s memories to something that preserves all of them.
“You delivered pizza to a young couple. They were in love and gave you a huge tip. On the way back to the car, a guy came out of nowhere and pulled a knife . . .”
- - - -
One twist of the spiral staircase below her, he reaches up and takes her hand. “Are we?” he asks.
“Are we what?”
“In love?” He’s openly hopeful.
It was always there in him, hidden under self-protection and despondency, now it’s coming out unconstrained in the euphoria of his first feed. It’s not surprising, and he’ll probably hate her again in a couple of hours. What surprises her, disturbs her, is the fact that she (a girl who once played mind games with Sigmund Freud in his own consulting room) failed to notice when she slipped this telling detail into the compulsion story
“Let’s fuck,” she says, avoiding, and leads him up the staircase.
- - - - -
She underestimated him.
Perhaps she always has.
But she underestimated him this time in one specific regard: he is nothing like a Labrador puppy.
He is the knife-edge of brutal and gentle, hard beyond possibility, knowing all the right places to stroke and finger and tease. He holds her down with force she can’t, doesn’t want to resist; hands pinned above her head, then by her sides, lips trailing across her breasts, her her stomach, the insides of her thighs. He releases her and she’s a bitch in heat, raises her legs on command and gives herself up to his tongue inside her until she comes, breathing hard and hot, reaches for him, takes his dick in her hands and guides him inside her.
He drives, all pristine power, pure and sheer aliveness coursing through her so violent, exquisite, as good as it gets, she thinks, until the skin around his eyes puckers, and his fangs emerge and, fleeting, a sharp whisper of pain, he takes just enough blood, her blood, willingly, as though he’s the expert in this, has been doing it a thousand years, to make her body pulse, compress, then unfurl with pleasure. He shudders inside her, collapses over her, cradling her head in his warm hands.
This time there is nothing left over, nothing left to want, except his fingers in her hair as she curls herself towards him and into sleep.
- - - - -
She wakes to sunlight streaming through the bedroom window and the sound of a man’s screams.
By the time she’s shut the blinds, lead him to the bed,
“Sssh, it’s okay. I’ll explain . . .”
he’s so strong, he’s already started healing.
He’s freaked out, shocked back to revulsion and fear at himself, a massive come-down after the high of feeding, sex, the magnificent hum of his own perfect body.
“You said the stories were all bullshit,” he mutters, then crawls under the blankets, lifts them over the rapidly fading scalds, and hides.
“Unfortunately, not that one,” she says, slides down next to him, drapes an arm across his stomach.
He turns around to face her, questioning his memories. “You go out during the day.”
“I have protection,” she says, lifts her hand and shows him the ring, teases, “If you happen to know a witch, we could get one for you too.”
“A witch?” he repeats, weariness masking another spike of panic. “Why the fuck would I --?”
“Sshh.” She places a finger against his lips. “There’s always a witch, and there’s always a way to get to them. We’ll figure it out, okay?” She smiles. “You shouldn’t go out too much anyway. Not in Chicago. Not right now. You might scare your friends.”
Pain fills his eyes. "I'm never gonna see them again." He swallows. "I'm never gonna be a firefighter again."
She refrains from pointing out the obvious logic that this particular outcome was always going to happen the moment the roof caved in on top of him, he just gets to be sentient, well-fucked and immortally hot now, rather than six feet under. He is possibly the only person she would refrain from goading like this; he is definitely the only person she would, instead, stroke, call baby, and more or less genuinely care about. It disturbs her slightly less than a few hours ago, but it's still unsettling.
“I have no idea how to do this,” he whispers.
“Then it’s a good thing I do, isn’t it?” she says, as though it’s nothing, and kisses him, wraps her arms around him, persuades him back to sleep.
Except she’s lying, and not in the way she would have predicted or chosen. She’s going against all her instincts, and she has no idea how to do this either.
- - - - -
This time she wakes in semi-darkness, blinds still shutting out the light, alone. For a moment, she luxuriates in the bed, the warmth, the sense of comfortable solitude, idly wondering where he is.
Then suddenly, she knows. Checks her finger, the emptiness where the ring should be. Cries out aloud -- a strangled sound that she can't quite place as coming from herself, like a wounded animal in a trap.
He betrayed her. It hits her like a stake through the heart.
Until.
Well, of course he did.
It’s what she deserves for letting her guard down, and she’ll find him, she’ll rip him apart, slowly, painfully, apply vervain, and watch him beg and plead for death, hold his fate in the crook of one elegant, sadistic finger and enjoy squeezing out each last drop.
Or maybe just snap his neck. In a few days, he won’t be so strong, so stealthy. That would be more fitting. She’s already wasted enough time on him.
Are we what? In love? She digs her fingernails into her palms, hating her unquenchable vulnerability, punishing herself for it, conjuring images of the cleansing atrocities she plans.
The door opens. No warning. Or at least none that she heard. Another thing she’ll add to her list of grievances, if she ever gets out of this ruin she’s made for herself.
Except, it’s him.
Radiant. Smiling. Dressed in sweats. A trace of blood in the corner of his mouth.
He sits down on the bed, takes the ring off the end of his little finger and gives it back to her. “I’m sorry,” he says. “I had to go out. I was going insane. I must’ve run twenty miles! It was incredible! And then,” he grins smugly, “I drank some blood! A girl. And I did the mind-control thing and told her she’d had a really wild night. She even seemed happy about it! There are good parts to this, huh?”
She nods dumbly. She can barely speak. “I thought . . .” You left. She has a horrible feeling that her eyes are awash with Elena-like tear-welling. She can’t suppress it as her mind reels through other betrayals, comparing, but he’s not casting her out, or leaving her to rot in an old tomb, and it’s palpable, through every aspect of him, there’s no vengeance here, only exuberance. “I thought you hated being a vampire,” she finally manages.
“I’m dealing with it,” he says, then plants a kiss on her bare shoulder. “You’re one of the good parts.”
She stares at him, battling with herself. Maybe it isn’t a weakness to like him, stay with him, be endlessly turned on by him. Maybe it’s a strength.
“What?” he asks.
She twists her body deftly, straddles him and pushes him down against the pillows. Close to his lips, breath warm between his skin and hers, she murmurs, “I was just thinking , , , this could be fun.”
(Unspoken, in her mind, she adds the hidden answer to a sentimental question: Yes.)
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Fandoms - Crossover: The Vampire Diaries, Chicago Fire
Pairing: Katherine Pierce/Kelly Severide
Rating: R+
Word count: 3680
Disclaimer Here
Summary: The moon is two days from full, bright and silver, shining across the bed where he’s sleeping, bathing his body in its light. She sits in a chair by the window and waits, watches over him. Tells herself she owes him, for her carelessness, a period of orientation before she leaves; that this glitch is the only reason she's still here. Set in a future several months on from Chicago Fire episode 1.13.
Written for waltzmatildah's prompt at the Katherine Pierce Ficathon: You got lost, lost to the night, It's no loss, you'll be alright, Tell me you feel better when you're sleeping through the day, And I'll tell you how you missed it when you wake.
The moon is two days from full, bright and silver, shining across the bed where he’s sleeping, bathing his body in its light. She sits in a chair by the window and waits, watches over him. Tells herself she owes him, for her carelessness, a period of orientation before she leaves; that this glitch is the only reason she’s still here.
She’s already stayed too long.
The fascination began with a memory, a ghost, his uncanny resemblance to someone else whose supernatural transformation she had a hand in (although, with Mason, it was far from a mistake), then took on a life, an obsession of its own.
She likes him.
It’s her worst weakness where he’s concerned.
Likes the sex, the taste of his blood, the quiet in bed while he sleeps and she watches him. Likes his fragile, shattered essence that only his job as a certified hero papers and strings from splintering into a billion shards of pain (at least, it did, before today). Likes his complexity, his sweetness, the withheld bluntness it hides beneath. Maybe most of all she likes that he hasn’t yet bored her, that sometimes she entertains fantasies that she wants . . . something from him. She finds she can’t get enough of him, always wants one last day, hour, moment, one last delicious climax - which is how they got to this point, because he was exhausted and she wasn’t, and it was too easy to compel him to take a few sips of her blood.
“Katherine,” his voice drawls sleepily from the bed, and he slowly sits up, stretches, yawns, smiles at her.
Her breath catches in her throat. He was always hot. Now, fed, rested, remade beyond humanity, he’s beautiful.
“Hello,” she purrs.
He rubs a hand across his face. “I was having a weird dream,” he says.
“Oh?” She has a distinct feeling she knows what’s coming next, but adjournment, procrastination, basking in delay is her second worst weakness in this relationship. Anyway, she needs to give him time to adjust.
“I was in a morgue,” he says. “Dead. Except I kinda wasn’t. Then you showed up.” He smiles again and she smiles back. “You gave me . . . fuck,” he snorts softly, “you gave me a blood bag, like it was a juice box, and told me to drink it.”
She nods. “And did you?”
“Yeah,” he says, disconcerted.
She shifts sinuously in her chair, turned-on against her better judgment - her third worst weakness around him. “Did you like it?” she probes.
He inhales. “Yeah . . .” He shakes his head, as though he’s trying to clear it. “Told you it was weird. You think it means something?”
She breathes in, holds the breath while she considers, then seizes the opportunity. “It means you’re a vampire,” she says.
He lets out a quiet laugh. “Except then I would’ve woken up in a coffin.”
“Well, not necessarily.” She gets up, walks slowly across the room and sits down on the bed next to him, trails her fingers along his thigh. “They’re quite passé.” She looks steadily into his eyes. “You’re a vampire,” she repeats, and briefly strokes his face.
He laughs again, catches her hand and kisses it. “Very funny,” he says. “I’m starving. Let’s eat.”
- - - - -
She watches him work his way through half the contents of the fridge. At the back, he finds some garlic, playfully holds it against his face, grinning. “So if I was a vampire, wouldn’t this burn me?”
“That would be vervain,” she instructs patiently. “Garlic is totally harmless to us . . . unless,” she smiles sweetly, “you eat it and then want to put your tongue in my mouth.”
“Oh, us, now?” he teases her
She’s pleased. He’s alert (well, of course he is). The us was intentional, another little clue to tease out his denial.
“Yes.”
“Right,” he says absently, fridge door open again, until he closes it, frustrated. “God, I’m hungry!” An edge creeps into his good humor. “Nothing I eat seems to -”
“You need blood,” she interrupts. “I brought more from the hospital.”
“Okay, can we just stop now?” he says, irritated. A cold sweat is breaking out on his forehead as he opens and closes, with increasing force, all the cupboards in the kitchen. “Fuck, I need to eat something else,” he snaps. From across the room she can sense his energy dropping, his ears ringing, the weakness taking over his muscles and organs. “I don't get it. I just ate a ton of food and the shift wasn’t anything -”
He breaks off, stares at her, mystified and scared. “I can’t remember the shift ending,” he says. “We were at a house fire, I was right there and then . . . ” He moves slowly towards her and sits down at the kitchen island. “I was here with you. I woke up and told you about -” He stops and goes rigid. “Capp shouted something. My name. Shit, Severide! Look. . .” He shakes his head. “Out!” he completes the sentence quietly. “That’s the last thing I remember.”
She waits, leaving a space between his words and hers for him to process a little, then, quietly, “You died.”
He sucks in air hard, steadying himself and angry with her. “Okay, could you maybe take this seriously, because I’m losing --”
“You were killed when part of the roof caved in,” she persists. “ A beam crushed you. They told me when I went to the station.” She smirks gently. “We were going to have dirty, steamy sex in the equipment room, remember?” He nods, shakes his head, sighs, and she gets back to the important part, her attempt at distracting him for moment's respite, or connection, or whatever having failed. “I pretended to cry and found out the name of the hospital they’d taken your body to, and I went to the morgue and . . . well, you remember the rest, you just thought it was a dream.”
He closes his eyes tight, his forehead furrowed as he tries and fails to work out what she’s saying and relate it to the reality he understands. “You’re telling me I died,” he finally says.
“Yes.”
“But I’m sitting here talking to you and that’s because,” he opens his eyes, “I’m a vampire.”
He gets up, paces around the room, then comes back, sits down again and stares intently at her. “I’m hallucinating, right? Or . . . it’s like I can hear you but my brain’s not processing what you’re saying.” There are tears in his eyes and he swallows. “I did a lot of drugs,” he says. “Painkillers. I had a broken neck, and . . . I’m fine and I’m clean. But the surgeons kept talking about complications. You think . . .?” He trails off, searching her eyes desperately for help.
“You’re not crazy. There are no complications.” She speaks deliberately, slightly louder than strictly necessary. “You died in the fire this morning and now you’re a vampire.”
“Not funny,” he growls. “Not helping.”
“You’re right.” She stands up. “It’s not funny, and I am trying to help you, so shut up and listen. You’re --”
There’s an explosion of movement and she’s up against the wall, lifted off her feet, barely breathing as his ridiculously strong newborn hand presses against her neck. She collects herself, rallies her strength and, with everything she has, forces him away from her and sends him flying back across the room.
He falls, looks up from where he’s crumpled on the floor. “I’m sorry,” he says, pushing himself up. “I don’t know what . . .” Then he stops apologizing, gives into bewilderment. “What the hell was that?” he asks her.
“That was you being a vampire, baby,” she says quietly, dusting herself off. “And now you need to drink some blood.”
- - - - -
She’s on the couch, curled up, feet tucked under her, while he has the panic attack (now vampire-sized and all-consuming) he’s probably been suppressing most of his life. She would help, but he goes insane when she touches him: Stay the fuck away from me! So she just watches as he tries to gulp in air that won’t reach his lungs, chokes with futile, angry tears, and finally slumps forward, head in his hands.
“You need to feed,” she offers levelly.
He looks up at her, hatred and unwilling trust mingled in his eyes. “Why would you do that?" he demands. “I thought you . . ." He trails off, giving up.
There are things she could say; things that, under normal circumstances, she would. In the first place, tell him he thought wrong - she was playing with him; in the second, because it’s her nature; in the third, that he’s way beyond lucky she’s helping him at all. Somehow, she can’t. He has always been as candid with her as he knows how to be and so, now, she returns the favor.
“I wasn’t thinking,” she says. “I wanted to fuck again and you were tired, so . . .” She shrugs, she’s already explained the process quite clearly.
“You made me drink your blood,” he supplies, resentful, bitter.
She lifts her chin, daring him, defending herself. “Yes,” she says clearly. “Deal with it.” She gets up, goes to the area by the front door where she left the blood bags, brings back one bag and hands it to him. “Drink,” she says.
After a long standoff, he snatches the bag from her hand, punctures it and drinks, at first with disgust, then in big, ravenous draughts, squeezing the plastic to get the last drops. When he’s finished, he closes his eyes, swallows a couple of times, wipes his mouth with the back of his hand, then, without looking at her, “You got any more?”
- - - - -
He falls asleep on the couch, glutted with blood.
Again, she watches him.
Her eyes flicker on and off to the spiral staircase, thinking of the bedroom at the top, the closet where her clothes are kept, her bag in the corner of his room. In her mind, she goes through the entire process of packing, leaving, getting the hell out, and yet she doesn’t move more than a twitching reflex of intention, stays exactly where she is.
He’ll have to leave soon himself, anyway. His roommate moved out a few weeks ago, after Katherine moved in, which gives him a few hours grace. But he was a fire department lieutenant and his body just disappeared from a hospital morgue. People will come: he needs to be gone by then.
- - - - -
“I remember dying,” he says quietly. ““There was a second, less maybe, when I knew what was happening, but . . .” He looks into her eyes. “I was okay with it,” he says. “I made peace with it.” He shakes his head, struggling to grasp the evanescent memory, the sensation of his own death with such seriousness, she feels something like a swell, an ache in the place inside her that won’t let her leave him. “I wouldn’t have wanted this,” he says, almost inaudible, as though he were talking about a deceased friend (which, in some ways, she supposes, he is).
“I know,” she says. “I’m sorry.”
He nods half-heartedly, not really listening.
She wonders if it would make a difference to him if he knew this is one of the very few occasions in her very long existence she’s apologized; one of the fewer times she’s ever really meant it.
- - - - -
He drinks some more blood, then makes some coffee to wash it down. He’s a fast learner, highly adaptable to the quirks of vampire reality distinct from the myths of popular entertainment.
Waiting for the coffee maker, he picks up the garlic again, with less humor than last time and more curiosity, smells it cautiously, then checks out his reflection in the door of the microwave. He examines the blood bag, drains it, and says,
“So we don’t have to kill people?”
She shrugs. “It’s not required. It can be amusing.” He raises an eyebrow and she wonders how he’d react if she’d told him the truth. It’s ecstasy. “Fresh blood is better,” she says. “But you don’t have to kill them to drink it. And then, of course, there are animals, but I leave that peculiarity to my ex.” She wrinkles her nose, all the while wrestling with whether to celebrate or be terrified that she can now refer to Stefan without feeling much of anything and that the reason for this is Kelly Severide.
His nose wrinkles too. “Like, cats and dogs?” he asks.
“Oh, yes, Fluffy and Fido! And a creepy remorse ritual with their collars and the little bells to follow!” She laughs. Understandably, he’s completely baffled. “Private joke,” she says. “And no. Wild ones. He lives in the middle of nowhere.” She gets up, walks over to him and takes the risk of kissing him on the cheek. He doesn’t respond, but doesn’t recoil. “Rabbits, squirrels . . . skunks, for all I know or, honestly, care. I wouldn’t recommend it.”
The coffee maker beeps and he pulls down mugs and pours coffee, thinking so hard she can almost hear his brain working. He hands her a mug.
“Katherine?” he starts tentatively. “How would you drink a person’s blood without killing them? That is,” he swallows, “if you wanted to.”
She sips coffee while she catches up with the changes inherent in his question: he’s accepting himself, he’s accepting her.
“Are you still hungry?” she asks.
He nods.
“Order a pizza,” she says, “and I’ll show you.”
- - - - -
“Now you compel him,” she says.
He’s wired on human blood, every molecule tingling, and barely concentrating. “That was amazing! Shit, that was . . . !” He grins at her. “Hey.”
He wants to fuck her.
She smiles sweetly at the pizza delivery guy, locking eyes. “Excuse us, please,” she says and, naturally, he does, waiting with the expected eerie patience.
“First things first.” She wants him too, he’s gorgeous, but she’s conscious of being responsible, the only thing that stands between him and screwing up disastrously. And then, she always liked the undertone of sadness, the sense of desperate escape as he gave himself up to her. Horny new vampires are generally like Labrador puppies -- over-enthusiastic and all over you. It seems as though he’s no exception, and she can wait a few minutes for that experience. “We have to clean up dinner before we can go play.”
“Katherine . . .” he coaxes, and pulls her against his hip.
“Look in his eyes,” she commands. Grudgingly, he does what he’s told, and they begin the three-way process of altering the deliveryman’s memories to something that preserves all of them.
“You delivered pizza to a young couple. They were in love and gave you a huge tip. On the way back to the car, a guy came out of nowhere and pulled a knife . . .”
- - - -
One twist of the spiral staircase below her, he reaches up and takes her hand. “Are we?” he asks.
“Are we what?”
“In love?” He’s openly hopeful.
It was always there in him, hidden under self-protection and despondency, now it’s coming out unconstrained in the euphoria of his first feed. It’s not surprising, and he’ll probably hate her again in a couple of hours. What surprises her, disturbs her, is the fact that she (a girl who once played mind games with Sigmund Freud in his own consulting room) failed to notice when she slipped this telling detail into the compulsion story
“Let’s fuck,” she says, avoiding, and leads him up the staircase.
- - - - -
She underestimated him.
Perhaps she always has.
But she underestimated him this time in one specific regard: he is nothing like a Labrador puppy.
He is the knife-edge of brutal and gentle, hard beyond possibility, knowing all the right places to stroke and finger and tease. He holds her down with force she can’t, doesn’t want to resist; hands pinned above her head, then by her sides, lips trailing across her breasts, her her stomach, the insides of her thighs. He releases her and she’s a bitch in heat, raises her legs on command and gives herself up to his tongue inside her until she comes, breathing hard and hot, reaches for him, takes his dick in her hands and guides him inside her.
He drives, all pristine power, pure and sheer aliveness coursing through her so violent, exquisite, as good as it gets, she thinks, until the skin around his eyes puckers, and his fangs emerge and, fleeting, a sharp whisper of pain, he takes just enough blood, her blood, willingly, as though he’s the expert in this, has been doing it a thousand years, to make her body pulse, compress, then unfurl with pleasure. He shudders inside her, collapses over her, cradling her head in his warm hands.
This time there is nothing left over, nothing left to want, except his fingers in her hair as she curls herself towards him and into sleep.
- - - - -
She wakes to sunlight streaming through the bedroom window and the sound of a man’s screams.
By the time she’s shut the blinds, lead him to the bed,
“Sssh, it’s okay. I’ll explain . . .”
he’s so strong, he’s already started healing.
He’s freaked out, shocked back to revulsion and fear at himself, a massive come-down after the high of feeding, sex, the magnificent hum of his own perfect body.
“You said the stories were all bullshit,” he mutters, then crawls under the blankets, lifts them over the rapidly fading scalds, and hides.
“Unfortunately, not that one,” she says, slides down next to him, drapes an arm across his stomach.
He turns around to face her, questioning his memories. “You go out during the day.”
“I have protection,” she says, lifts her hand and shows him the ring, teases, “If you happen to know a witch, we could get one for you too.”
“A witch?” he repeats, weariness masking another spike of panic. “Why the fuck would I --?”
“Sshh.” She places a finger against his lips. “There’s always a witch, and there’s always a way to get to them. We’ll figure it out, okay?” She smiles. “You shouldn’t go out too much anyway. Not in Chicago. Not right now. You might scare your friends.”
Pain fills his eyes. "I'm never gonna see them again." He swallows. "I'm never gonna be a firefighter again."
She refrains from pointing out the obvious logic that this particular outcome was always going to happen the moment the roof caved in on top of him, he just gets to be sentient, well-fucked and immortally hot now, rather than six feet under. He is possibly the only person she would refrain from goading like this; he is definitely the only person she would, instead, stroke, call baby, and more or less genuinely care about. It disturbs her slightly less than a few hours ago, but it's still unsettling.
“I have no idea how to do this,” he whispers.
“Then it’s a good thing I do, isn’t it?” she says, as though it’s nothing, and kisses him, wraps her arms around him, persuades him back to sleep.
Except she’s lying, and not in the way she would have predicted or chosen. She’s going against all her instincts, and she has no idea how to do this either.
- - - - -
This time she wakes in semi-darkness, blinds still shutting out the light, alone. For a moment, she luxuriates in the bed, the warmth, the sense of comfortable solitude, idly wondering where he is.
Then suddenly, she knows. Checks her finger, the emptiness where the ring should be. Cries out aloud -- a strangled sound that she can't quite place as coming from herself, like a wounded animal in a trap.
He betrayed her. It hits her like a stake through the heart.
Until.
Well, of course he did.
It’s what she deserves for letting her guard down, and she’ll find him, she’ll rip him apart, slowly, painfully, apply vervain, and watch him beg and plead for death, hold his fate in the crook of one elegant, sadistic finger and enjoy squeezing out each last drop.
Or maybe just snap his neck. In a few days, he won’t be so strong, so stealthy. That would be more fitting. She’s already wasted enough time on him.
Are we what? In love? She digs her fingernails into her palms, hating her unquenchable vulnerability, punishing herself for it, conjuring images of the cleansing atrocities she plans.
The door opens. No warning. Or at least none that she heard. Another thing she’ll add to her list of grievances, if she ever gets out of this ruin she’s made for herself.
Except, it’s him.
Radiant. Smiling. Dressed in sweats. A trace of blood in the corner of his mouth.
He sits down on the bed, takes the ring off the end of his little finger and gives it back to her. “I’m sorry,” he says. “I had to go out. I was going insane. I must’ve run twenty miles! It was incredible! And then,” he grins smugly, “I drank some blood! A girl. And I did the mind-control thing and told her she’d had a really wild night. She even seemed happy about it! There are good parts to this, huh?”
She nods dumbly. She can barely speak. “I thought . . .” You left. She has a horrible feeling that her eyes are awash with Elena-like tear-welling. She can’t suppress it as her mind reels through other betrayals, comparing, but he’s not casting her out, or leaving her to rot in an old tomb, and it’s palpable, through every aspect of him, there’s no vengeance here, only exuberance. “I thought you hated being a vampire,” she finally manages.
“I’m dealing with it,” he says, then plants a kiss on her bare shoulder. “You’re one of the good parts.”
She stares at him, battling with herself. Maybe it isn’t a weakness to like him, stay with him, be endlessly turned on by him. Maybe it’s a strength.
“What?” he asks.
She twists her body deftly, straddles him and pushes him down against the pillows. Close to his lips, breath warm between his skin and hers, she murmurs, “I was just thinking , , , this could be fun.”
(Unspoken, in her mind, she adds the hidden answer to a sentimental question: Yes.)
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