100% Freshie Chapter 8 --PG-13

[librarian_7]

Disclaimer: The characters from Moonlight are copyrighted by CBS, and no infringement is intended.

Special note: This work takes place in the world of Moonlight, but your favorite vamps are not the main focus. Sorry about that; try to enjoy the story anyway. You might be surprised.

100% Freshie

Chapter 8


Will watched the taxi pull away, taking his girls home for the night, and as it disappeared he allowed his mask to fall away, no longer caring if anyone could see the burning temper he was in, the rage of frustration. It was one of those times when he wished he would run across some mortal foolish enough to try and give him some trouble. Some loser whose throat he could happily tear out, whose heart’s blood he could happily drain. What a disaster. What a complete fucking disaster it had been. The absolute kicker of the whole evening was, of course, that Kostan had been right.

He’d been careless with that girl, with all his girls, and he wasn’t sure whether it was the fact of his carelessness, or the idea that it had been thrown so very thoroughly in his face, that made him more angry. When he encouraged them to explore options, when he encouraged them to find other vamps, he meant it only so they would not get too close to him, develop too much of an attachment to him personally. He knew Danger was attracted to him, that was no surprise, and certainly the way he wanted it. But he also knew she had a crush on him, that she’d been far more caught by his personality, by his vampire appeal, than was safe for either of them. He’d always found adoration to be a powerful aphrodisiac, and he could sense it in her, growing and coiling like a beautiful, deadly serpent around her heart.

Still, when he thought it would be a good idea for her to experience the fangs of another vamp, he hadn’t intended for it to be that smarmy son of a bitch Josef Kostan. Will kicked savagely at a bit of litter in his path. He stalked on, but the hoped-for mugger was failing to materialize. He tried to tell himself that Danger would be no great loss, if another vamp seduced her away. She was another freshie, one of hundreds he’d tasted over the years. They came and went, and they were all much the same. Sometimes you found a human you could talk to a little, stand to be around for longer than it took to feed, but that was rare. Whatever that indefinable something was that made a girl more than a casual freshie, he was pretty sure Danger did not possess it. Oh, of course, her blood was sweet and pure and, as far as he could tell, pulsing with the natural vitality of a healthy young human. But she had nothing of the allure needed to catch a piece of a vampire heart. Will allowed himself a short, bitter comparison of his three freshies with those three exclusives Kostan always seemed to have in tow at Pulse! He had no idea why the old vamp would have even been interested in stealing Danger away from him. She just didn’t seem worthy of the attention. The only thing he could think was that Kostan was simply out to humiliate him, to make him look like a fool. And he’d succeeded brilliantly, as far as Will was concerned.

Will had been paying little attention to his surroundings as he walked, fuming, but now he noticed he was passing a small, unlighted park, and stopped in his tracks. He turned in, spotted a park bench, and threw himself down, still angry, still wanting an escape from his thoughts. It was no good. Every time he got close, every time he let a human into his head at all, it simply brought the memories back. He’d thought it might fade, over the years, but so far, so far, no luck. Will looked up at the city lights, obscure in the haze, twinkling before his eyes like fireflies.

San Francisco, 1967

Will woke to the slanting light of late afternoon, and a house that was dead still. He thought at first that Firefly had gone out, but as he listened closer he heard her heartbeat, slow and somehow sad, he thought. He pulled on jeans and went to find her. She was in bed, exactly where he’d left her at dawn, her face to the wall, motionless. He could tell she was awake, but she gave no sign of realizing he was there. He stood looking down at her for several minutes, feeling a strange, unaccustomed helplessness. His hands flexed in frustration. If only there were something here he could fight. Finally he sighed and did the only thing he could think to do. He slipped into the bed behind her, spooning his body against hers and gathering her unresisting form into his arms.

He’d thought it might last, that first gossamer light feeling that love was possible and proof against the vagaries of the night. Firefly, like her name, had proved a creature of light and shadow, and she had drawn him away from his routine in ways he found inexplicably enticing. For the most part, that was good. She had highs that were higher, and lows that were lower, than anyone he’d known since he turned. One of the disadvantages of immortality, he thought, was that once you started taking the very long view, things got boring. With Firefly, every moment was something different, something to hold lightly and throw into the stream of time like a paper boat floating down to the sea. Precious and transitory.

Looking back, he had an odd disconnect between the long nights they’d spent talking, touching, holding each other, and the realization that it had only been a few months. It seemed as though she had always been with him, that she would always be with him. He wanted this summer frozen in time, never changing, never ending.

He’d been warned, well enough, that it didn’t work like that. In his years with Serena, she’d told him many times about the risks involved with human-vampire relationships. “Why do you think I turned you, darling?” she’d said. And she’d drummed into him over and over: freshies are food. Freshies are food. For over 40 years, that philosophy had served him well, with minor lapses. She’d also told him that sooner or later he’d fall in love with a human. It was, she said, as inevitable as the night. When he asked her what to do about it, she’d shrugged. “Some you turn, some you tell goodbye.”

He’d known early on, that Firefly would not want to be turned. He listened to her speak, softly and with an abiding passion, of the cycles of nature, of the great turning circles of life and death and rebirth. And he knew, with sadness for the first time, that he stood outside that circle, the stranger on the threshold between the worlds who never partook fully of either one. One of his strongest memories of their early days together was of her working in the dirt of a collective garden, happy in the late afternoon sun, in her connection to the earth, while he stood to one side, shading his eyes, watching.

For three weeks, three weeks of happiness laced with despair, Will had kept his secret. He fed at his hotel, a very private establishment that catered to traveling members of the vampire nation, and evaded Firefly’s curiosity about his diet. He found he hated deceiving her, but feared telling her even more.

Will knew that she had expectations of him, expectations of a normal life. And on his part, it was more and more difficult to be around her. He smelled the sweet aroma of her skin, and he hungered to draw her blood within him, to taste the strength and beauty and passion of her beating heart. It was torture for him either to be with her, masking his nature, or without her.

Maybe it was cowardice, maybe it was some remnant of a human desire to be everything she wanted him to be, but he couldn’t bring himself to shatter the illusion he had created for them, that perfect little world where they were young lovers, and that was all that mattered. Then one evening they were strolling through Golden Gate Park, just walking, holding hands, when events and the earth herself conspired to force his hand. He’d not been in California much, these past twenty years and more, and had forgotten about the tremors. As earthquakes went, it wasn’t much. Just a single insane lurch of the ground. But it was enough to catch the unwary off balance, and as it happened, Will and Firefly were walking down the steps of the art museum when it hit, and Will slipped and stumbled. On his way down, he clipped his head a glancing blow against the corner of a low granite wall. The pain and the sudden scent of blood, even his own, caused him to snarl, showing his fangs and a flash of inhuman silver eyes. Even in the deep twilight, Firefly couldn’t miss the transformation, or fail to notice the bleeding gash closing and knitting back into whole skin within seconds.

They stared at each other without moving, the shock in her eyes matched by the sorrow in his own. “Please,” he’d said, “Fire’, please try to understand.”

That had been three months ago, and she had tried. Tried to accept that he was more different than she could have known, that his needs were more complex than the needs of other men. When she allowed him to drink from her, he held himself to the slightest sips, to the least damage he could do.

But all too soon, even that restraint was not enough. She learned that he required more blood than she could give him, and his attempts to explain the difference between the ecstatic transcendence he gained from her blood as they made love, and the bare sustenance provided by the freshies on his room service menu fell flat. In the end, she simply could not accept it.

She tried, more than once as the summer wore on, to end it between them, but somehow each time they found themselves back, locked in each other’s arms, trying again to forget the unexpected realities of the world. And failing. Will cursed himself for lacking the strength to leave. He found he was unable to tear her heart out, or his own, by running away.

With everything he could do to hold her, though, she had drifted further and further from the girl she had been. Her joyous connection to life had eroded and Will knew bitterly that he was to blame for it. Perhaps the memory of those first days, the memory that would hold his heart transfixed with a vision of mortal love, perhaps that made him cling to her tighter.

He had held to a hope that, in time, she would find a way to accept everything he was, that she would come to see him not as outside nature but as another hidden face of it. And tonight he knew with weary desolation that it would never happen. He sensed now no light from within her, and the tiny flickering hope within him died.

It was hard not to move as his heart broke, with her so quiet in his useless arms.

She slept then, for a while, but sometime after the night had fallen well, she turned softly in his arms and rested her head on his shoulder. He stroked her hair, trying to make things right with the force of his concern. “Can you talk to me, Fire’?’ he asked.

Firefly burrowed even closer. “I don’t know what to say, Will. We can’t go on like this.”

Will closed his eyes against the pain. “Do you want me to go? I can’t stand to see you like this, Fire’. I want you to be happy.”

He could feel her shaking against his chest, feel the agitation within her. “I don’t—I can’t---Will, I—I can’t live with you like this, and I don’t want to live without you. I only see one answer,” she said.

Will stiffened. He’d known this would come sooner or later. “You want me to turn you?” He paused, considering the possibility. “You want me to turn you,” he repeated, flatly.

That got more of a reaction than he’d expected, and a different one. She turned her face up to look him in the eyes. “No,” she said. “I never even considered it. And I don’t think I want to consider it.” She paused and took a deep breath. “Will, what I want—what I think is the only way to stop this pain—I want you to kill me. I want you to take my blood, all of it. Let me live in you that way.”

It was Will’s turn to bury his face against her hair, breathing in the beloved scent of it, of her. “How can you ask me to do that?”

Her voice was steadier than his had been. “Because I know you. You’ll take my blood the same way you always have. With love.” She put a hand to his cheek. “I don’t want it wasted.”

“And what if I refuse? What if I don’t want this on my conscience?” His voice had gone hoarse, harsh.

“Will,” she said very softly, “I’ve made up my mind. It’s going to happen. I want it to be with you, in your arms, but I can do it alone if I have to. I can go off by myself like any other wounded animal, and you’ll never need to know until I’m gone.”

There was a long pause. He couldn’t ask her why she felt this way. He knew. And he knew as well that he could not resist her soft and relentless logic, the force of her conviction. “You know I couldn’t let you face this by yourself,” he said, not even trying to disguise the despair in his voice. “Just like you know that if you really ask this terrible thing of me, I’ll do it for you. But does it have to be now? Tonight?’ he asked, hoping she would back down, hoping against the resolve he could sense within her that she would change her mind.

She swallowed, hard. “I’m ready,” she said, and her voice held no hesitation, no tremor of fear.

“Dammit, Fire’,” Will said suddenly, desperately, “what if I don’t want to go on without you? What then? What if I won’t go on without you? I can walk into the desert. Hell, I can just go down to the shore, and let the sun take me out there.”

She laughed at him, a faint ghost of the laugh he’d loved since the night they met. “You’re too strong for that, Will. The life in you is too strong, and my blood won’t let you die that way.”

Firefly shifted again in his arms, reaching up to cover his mouth with hers. “Will, you have to let me go,” she breathed into him, “you have to help me on the journey.” He kissed her fiercely, then, as though he could push his own will to live into her through the force of his love, and she responded, with her own determined fierceness.

They made love, then, with a passion Will would never forget, a heartbreaking desire that left her face wet with his tears. He tried to lose himself within that space of time, to make it the whole of the universe for them. He tried to show her through his touch how much he needed her. He tried to hold the beast within him in check, to keep the vampire at bay and be the human, the man, that Firefly needed to hold her in this world with him.

For all that he could do, though, it wasn’t enough. It wasn’t enough for either of them, and at the last, when she silently turned her head to offer him her throat, he closed his silver eyes as the beast rose from within him, and slipped his fangs once more through her fine silken skin, to drink the sweet lifeblood of her down to the bitter dregs. With each long pull, he felt her heart working harder, beating more slowly. He knew when she had passed the point of no return, and he knew he could have stopped then, to simply hold her in his arms until she died, but he also knew that if he did that, the temptation to rip open his own vein and feed her his own blood—their shared blood—and turn her might be too great. She wanted to die with his lips on her neck, and for all the hell he would suffer for it, he would do as she asked. Perhaps it was only seconds, but it seemed like hours before her heart slowed, slowed, and finally with one last faint beat, died. For the first time since Serena had brought him into her world, blood tasted like ashes in his mouth.

By the time the dawn found him, his eyes were dry. He still held her body close in his arms, although he knew she had gone. Her brilliant spirit had taken wing, and left him behind. She was right, he thought bitterly. He wasn’t ready to follow her wherever this new path she had taken would lead. In that pale and delicate light, he knew that he would live on. He cursed himself then for the first time for having done as she wished, knowing this action, and his regret, would taint his nights forever. And with the regret burning inside him, he made himself a promise that no woman would ever slip inside his guard again.

Outside, he heard the wind blowing in the trees, and the dry dead leaves begin to fall. The Summer of Love was over.


Los Angeles, 2008

Will pulled himself out of the past to find the sky growing lighter, even as his mood darkened. He was tired, not just from the night and his memories, but tired of his situation. There needed to be changes made. He ran his fingers through his blond hair, pulling it back from his face. He’d been following what reason told him was the safer course of action for too many years. Maybe he needed to follow his heart.

He gave one last thought to Danger. He’d named her well, he decided. She might not have whatever it was that would make him fall in love, but he’d had it demonstrated vividly that she had some quality that would bring in every vamp for miles around, fangs out and ready for a taste.

He pulled his phone out of pocket and stared at it thoughtfully for a few moments. Then he placed a call.

[francis]

Will has a temper. And fang envy. And probably commitment issues galore. And now he tries to convince himself that Danger is nothing special. He can’t fool himself.

With Firefly, every moment was something different, something to hold lightly and throw into the stream of time like a paper boat floating down to the sea. Precious and transitory.

I love this description.

He’d known early on, that Firefly would not want to be turned. He listened to her speak, softly and with an abiding passion, of the cycles of nature, of the great turning circles of life and death and rebirth. And he knew, with sadness for the first time, that he stood outside that circle, the stranger on the threshold between the worlds who never partook fully of either one.

This is really profound. Vampires are frozen in time, and that’s what Mick loathes, not being able to grow and become older, have children and give back. Immortality is not that fancy.
I so feel for Firefly and Will. It was a doomed relationship, she could never live with what he was, and he couldn’t give her what she needed. Her wish to be with him through her blood would make sense for a flower child, but how can she load this on his conscience?