(no subject)
Fic #4: Death Wish
Request: FIG: Five times Rylee wanted to kill somebody and one time he wanted to kill himself
Requested by: tomoyodaidouji
Length: 1,500
Rating: PG-13
Notes: This one wound up with way more humor in it than I had anticipated. Maybe because Rylee is so laid-back that you could put a carpet on him, so he really doesn’t get homicidal very much. An additional warning for out-of-date dialogue since at least one of these scenes would have taken place about a thousand years ago. Oh, and apologies to any Twilight fans.
I.
Rylee considered himself a fairly laid-back person. Hell, even a laid-back parent, when it came right down to it. He’d done an okay job with Nikolaos, all things considered. I mean, he had survived, which was pretty impressive given the odds against both of them on that score.
Now Nikolaos was glaring him down, or at least trying to.
“No,” he said.
Rylee sighed. “Why not?” he asked, edging towards a whine.
“Because Ian is twelve, not six, and just because some two-bit bully thinks he can shake him down is no reason for us to go kill the little shit.”
“But the little shit deserves it,” Rylee said.
“Think about how much more satisfying it’s going to be when he figures out that Ian knows enough martial arts to break every bone between his neck and his knees, and that the only reason he didn’t do it yesterday was because he was still recovering from the flu.”
Rylee sulked, but he later had to admit - it was pretty damn satisfying.
II.
As demons went, Rylee was unusual. He was laid-back, relaxed, rarely went on the offensive and was not at all territorial. For reasons unknown to perhaps anyone except their Creator, Rylee had a natural live-and-let-live philosophy that made him much less dangerous than most demons. As long as you didn’t get between him and his food - and even if you did, as long as he could find other food - Rylee simply didn’t much care for fights.
He would defend himself if necessary - what happened with Salvatore was proof of that - but had never hated anyone enough to actually want them dead before Rosalie.
And even with Rosalie, it wasn’t really hatred that motivated him. It was concern for his future and fear for Nikolaos. When he arranged Rosalie’s death, it was out of self-defense, and though there was some anger involved, that wasn’t the real reason.
Then she came back.
Rylee stood and watched her hold a knife to Nikolaos’ throat, knowing that he could kill her - knowing that he could end her. It would have been easy. Rosalie had always underestimated both of them. He could possess Nikolaos’ body and flip a knife out of one of the wrist sheaths that Nikolaos had in abundance, thrust it into her heart and drive his own power down the blade. And even if she did cut Nikolaos’ throat, well, that was one of the easier wounds to deal with. If she’d had it to his heart or his gut he would have been more worried, but the principle problem with a slit throat was bleeding to death - and Rylee could keep Nikolaos from doing that until they got to Grayson or Benjamin.
But he knew if he did that, it would be telling Nikolaos that he thought he wasn’t capable of it. So even though Nikolaos wasn’t capable of it, Rylee resisted the urge. He called Ian and he let Rosalie escape, thought it went again every nerve in his body that told him they would pay for it later.
And later when he was agitated and shaking, Ian mistook it for fear, but Rylee knew what it really was, even though he had never felt it before. An anger so deep it was almost elemental.
III.
It was an immutable fact that no one ever needed to be taught.
All demons woke up hungry.
When they first opened their eyes and felt their bodies coalesce around them, first felt the sense of existence that came to most humans gradually but to demons in a snap, the first sensation they had was not touch or sight or sound. It was hunger. A gnawing, empty place deep inside them that would always, always need filling.
Rylee had been born in the midst of a ceremony fueled by blood sorcery. Unlike most demons, his genesis was at least partially intentional. The sorcerers had actually been trying to summon a demon that they could bind to their will, using blood and magic and darkness.
And when the last of the sorcerers was dead and the hunger finally sated for the moment, Rylee grinned and spoke his first words.
“Be careful what you wish for.”
IV.
“I touched his face,” Mika said, his eyes trained on the book and the strain in his voice to keep from laughing quite evident. “‘Look,’ I said. ‘I love you more than everything else in the world combined. Isn’t that enough?’ ‘Yes, it is enough,’ he answered, smiling. ‘Enough for forever.’”
“Mika, I am trying to work,” Rylee said, between gritted teeth. “Will you stop reading that damned book?”
Mika clutched his stomach, practically howling. “This is the best book ever!”
“Vampires don’t sparkle!”
“Maybe he’s born with it,” Mika gasped out between gales of laughter. “Maybe it’s Maybelline!”
Rylee pinched the bridge of his nose, and made an absent mental note to find this Stephanie Meyer person and kill her dead.
And then beat Mika to death with her body.
V.
Rylee had never liked Salvatore, but it was an abstract dislike rather than a focused one. He disliked Salvatore in much the same way that a gazelle disliked a cheetah, and for the same reasons.
When Salvatore kicked him around the bar and tried to recruit him and was generally a huge pain in the ass, Rylee decided to help the other demons put him away, largely as a matter of self-defense and with the added benefit of getting some much-needed help with Rosalie. When he showed up again, Rylee simply didn’t want to get involved. With Zachariah taking so much more of an active role in the events of the world, he no longer worried that Salvatore would be able to enact his plan.
Even when he did get involved - how could he help it, what with Ian being friends with Benjamin and Edmund on the prowl? - he tried to keep himself cool about things. Salvatore was a mad dog and he needed to be put down. There was no point in investing emotional energy in it.
So why, Rylee wondered, as he quietly closed the door to Mika’s hotel room behind himself, did he suddenly want to rip the demon’s head off and feed it to him? There was no reason to be so angry. He barely knew Mika, and they certainly weren’t friends. And if Mika had a bit of an edge to him that was so much like Nikolaos, he wasn’t Nikolaos. He wasn’t Rylee’s responsibility.
Rylee heard a crash behind him as Mika threw something, and winced.
This did not bode well for his future.
VI.
Rylee had a hangover so bad that he wanted to roll over and die.
“Mmmmpgrh,” said the person next to him, whose head was resting on Rylee’s thigh. Rylee opened one eye, and when his vision was assaulted by the horror that was sunlight, quickly shut it again. “Mmmphhhaauuugh.”
“Shuddup,” Rylee muttered, trying to remember what he had done the last night. Or the night before that. Or any of the nights during the last week.
“’m hungry,” the person said.
“Eat somethin’,” was Rylee’s stellar reply.
“’m hungry,” the voice repeated.
Rylee pushed vaguely at the other man’s face, recognizing the voice as Everett’s even as his head pounded so badly that he felt nauseous. Why did going on a bender with Everett always seem like a good idea until after it was over? “Just shuddup, ‘m trying to go back to sleep ‘til my head falls off.”
“Hungry,” Everett said again, and bit down hard on Rylee’s wrist.
That made Rylee’s eyes open all the way, at which point light that seemed ultra violet made suns explode in his head. The pain wasn’t all that bad, but the drain he could feel on his power was a little bit worrisome. Was Everett actually drinking his blood? Everett wasn’t a demon. Everett was just a sorcerer.
“Wha?” Rylee managed, trying to swallow past the cottony feeling in his mouth. He felt like something had died in there.
“Wha - ” Everett stopped. Slowly, so slowly that it was almost comical, light seemed to dawn on him, and he seemed to realize that drinking Rylee’s blood was not exactly normal.
They stared at each other for a few minutes.
“What - uh, what happened last night?” Rylee asked carefully.
Everett’s face had drained of all color - or perhaps it had already been that way - making the little trail of red on his mouth look all the more gruesome. “Uh,” he said. “Uh. Did you, uh, kill me or something?”
“I don’t remember,” Rylee said, desperately scraping through the past week of alcohol-filled haze. Had he done something like that? He’d been hungry the night before. Everett had offered to let him drink, but his memories after that became decidedly more fuzzy.
“You son of a bitch,” Everett said.
Rylee flopped backwards and wished that his hangover would just kill him and get it over with.