NaNoWriMo 2010 - True Love's Kiss [ 5b / 10 ]
----> Part A
There was a shift in the weight of the bed that made it dip as Decimus got closer and the slight tug on his hand told him that the other man wanted him to scoot closer. He wanted to scoot away. He wanted to get away from the hand that was holding him but he was fucking chained like an animal. He had little choice but to do what was asked of him. He did as he was told, keeping his head down and his eyes on the bed as he tried to think of a way to free himself.
But even once he was moved, the hand that held his didn’t let go. A second gently tilted his chin upward so that he was looking the other man in the eye. He raised a dark eyebrow at the move and tried to stay very still. He got the impression he didn’t want to test this one’s temperament. “Jon, you’ll be fine. I will take care of you. Paeonius will too. The chains you have on you are just temporary to make sure you don’t go feral on us before we’ve helped you figure out how to manipulate your nature.”
He gritted his human teeth against one another but said nothing. He still had his hand caught and he couldn’t speak. He knew the other could feel this small movement. It wasn’t that hard to feel and the hand, while not cupping his jaw, was putting enough pressure on the mandible that the slight vibration of teeth meeting each other might have been felt. Jon knew he would feel it if he was touching another person. Whether this man had sensitive enough hands and fingers for that he didn’t know but he certainly was attentive enough to notice small things.
The man let him go and stood, picking up the bottle of red liquid that Jon had set aside earlier and took a long drink from it. It was still a little more than a fourth full when he finished with the drink and recapped it. Jon half expected him to take the bottle with him but instead he set it back where he had found it and turned around so that Jon could see his face. The deaf man turned about, remaining on all fours as always, watching him while trying to ignore the feeling of the heavy metal chains that rested against his back and bit lightly into his feet. It proved difficult but doable. They were not as heavy as he expected them to be.
“For tonight, Paeonius and I are going to let you rest here while we go out and fetch you some of your old clothes,” Decimus told him, squaring his broad, strong shoulders and stuffing his hands into the pockets of his comfortable and relatively modern jeans, “Now that I know where you lived, I can go back and get some of them for you to wear when we take you out tomorrow night.” His smirk was playful and made those pouty lips stretch a bit. “As much as I am sure the ladies and gentlemen would glad appreciate your handsome naked form, there might be a few jealous people who would protest for modesty’s sake.”
Jonathan’s dark eyebrows shot up and he looked down at his own body, embarrassment flushing through him when he saw that he was indeed lacking a single stitch of clothing on his skin. He covered up with the blankets he was sitting on more out a feeling that he had to instead of any real shame of being so exposed. For all intents and purposes, the shame that came with being naked by itself had been beaten out of him long ago. Any embarrassment he had felt, until now, was the embarrassment of showing his scarred and half starved form to the man who enjoyed seeing it so ugly because it gave credence to the idea that this broken soul wasn’t good enough for anyone else.
If Decimus noticed any aspect of this in his movements, he didn’t say anything as he turned on his heel to leave the room, the torches around the place flickering badly as he walked. Jonathan stayed where he sat, just watching the other man leave, trying to understand from the way he walked and the words he used when he talked, what his angle was. Neither of them was human. Jonathan knew that much. A human didn’t have overlapping teeth that could grow out to eerily unnatural lengths and were sharp enough to shred flesh easily. His sharper senses when his teeth were long like that lent to the theory that he had become an unnatural predator of some kind for the damned but his still human figure told him that he was far from a Hellhound. The more he thought about the possibilities, the more he felt like laughing. Now things were getting too weird for his tastes.
Without warning a yawn forced its way out of his system and with it went all of the energy he had just gained from drinking whatever that liquid was. He shifted around on the bed, trying to find a comfortable position to lay down on with all the chains and heavy metal he was wearing. With the soft firelight in the room, he knew he would be comfortably warm without the presence of another body and the blanket was the softest he had felt against his skin in a long time. It didn’t take very long to find a spot and a way of lying down that would accommodate for the extra metal and still leave him feeling comfortable. Once he was settled down and properly bundled in the blanket, with his head resting on a comfortable pillow, the deaf waiter couldn’t help but sigh and thank whatever deity it was that had decided to grant him this small mercy. It had been several years since he had slept in decent bed.
While Jonathan feel asleep in his warm bed, even as restrained as he was, Decimus couldn’t help the mixed feelings of guilt and anger at himself for what he had done to the young man he had just watched awaken in chains. He tried to tell himself over and over again that he had no choice: if he had wanted to save Jonathan the only choice he had would have been to change him. He had promised to Jonathan’s co-worker, a man who had wept for him in a bar out of helplessness, that he would do everything in his power to rescue him and rescue him he did, technically. Jonathan was free now, or he would be as of tomorrow night. The question was: at what cost?
He had known before he had even tried to track Jonathan Grant to his small home in the suburbs, that there was a possibility that this might be the outcome. The story he had heard not moments before he had begun the hunt had give him more than a little insight into the mind of the haunted eyed young man he had seen in the diner that night. He understood then why it was he was able to work through his pain better than most and even why it was he worked so hard when it was clear he was pushing himself a little beyond his safe limit. He understood the fear he had seen in those eyes that night better and knew the reason why he stilled so quickly. Nearly a lifetime of being abused like that would break the spirit of even the strongest men.
But when he had arrived at Jonathan’s house and seen for himself the kind of home he lived in, Decimus couldn’t help the wave of disgust that had overcome him. He could smell the mixture of semen and blood staining the stairs and saw the trail as clearly as one would have seen paint on the same wood during the day. He could hear the sound of the monster that had done this to the young man sleeping soundly upstairs and, when he listened a little more closely to the house itself, the weak, rattling breath of the monster’s victim in the basement. He had raced downstairs as fast as he could but he hadn’t been fast enough. The sight he had seen was one he knew that would haunt him for days.
He had never, in all his centuries of life, seen a single human being so broken and lost as Jonathan had been. He had been so thin, even thinner than he had been that day in the diner and even then he looked just to the right side of healthy, and looked so pale as he lay against the wall across from the window, his body struggling for breath as his blood formed a disturbingly large pool beneath him. His black hair had been a mess, falling around his gaunt face and the bruises around his neck and those that mottled his body spoke of more than just rape having happened that night. The bruises that showed through the makeup that had initially been done on his cheeks showed that not all of his wounds were recent. He had endured a similar punishment before and still continued to suffer from it.
Decimus had rushed to Jonathan’s side and gathered the dying young man in his arms, ignoring the way the blood had begun to soak into his pants and how frail the body he held felt beneath his hands. He saw the way Jon instinctively turned his head toward him, as if searching for warmth unconsciously, and he had known what he had had to do. No one, regardless of species, race or creed, deserved to die like that after a life like the one Jon had endured alone for so long. So he decided to give Jon a chance at a life he never had… at the cost of the humanity he had never really known.
He had changed Jonathan right there in that basement, while kneeling in a pool of the young man’s blood as he suffered through the pain of his body struggling for just one more breath. He had torn open his own wrist and allowed his tainted blood to pour down Jonathan’s weak throat, watching and praying that he had enough strength left to actively swallow it and allow it to work its magic on his mangled body. It had taken no more than five minutes to take effect according to real time but in the ancient roman’s mind it had seemed like five hours. He had just been glad that Jonathan’s bastard of a lover was dead to the world and too far away to hear Jon’s agonized screams as his body morphed and changed its very nature in the basement of his home.
The pain was too much for the already exhausted body and mind of the deaf man so by the time everything had finished shifting he had blacked out and resumed his labored breathing, though the labor then came from a physically exhausting transformation that the slow bleeding of life from the body. Decimus had then secreted the newly born vampire here, to the duplex he was sharing with Paeonius, so he could properly care for the young man when he awoke. Paeonius had not been pleased when he had heard what he had done but had chosen to help. He had aided Decimus in gathering the bottles of dog’s blood to be used in the initial satiation of the newborn’s hunger and had even done a gentle but thorough physical inspection to ensure that Jonathan’s wounds were completely healed. Everything except the hearing loss was accounted for.
But now he had to deal with the consequences of his rash decision and that was to deal with the immediate care of a newborn vampire who could not hear. He cursed the Fates above.