Private Tales A hunter in the streets

[Wren]

Another drink, she eyed his progress across the kitchen and watched with a narrowing gaze as he produced two mugs. Set in front of her on the counter, Wren placed the wine down next to them and locked her gaze with his own. Then without blinking or breaking eye contact she smacked them off the counter and across the room. They clattered down a set of shelves and onto the floor in a cacophony of stubborn denial.

Wren took one more long, defiant drink, glaring at him as she did so.

 

[Rainer]

He exhaled loudly as he watched the cups bounce against the floor. It struck him how loud it was, though they weren't exactly talking. In fact, the only other noise in the whole farmhouse was the sound of rain against the rooftop and the crackling of the fire.

Without even looking back towards her, his hand jumped out from the robe and snatched the bottle from her hand. And then he took a drink of his own, pressing upon her a hefty order of side eye.

Two could play at this game.

 

[Wren]

He was granted just long enough while Wren's eyes bugged out to get a few chugging gulps in before -

SMACK!

the bottle went flying out of his hand and across the kitchen.

 

[Rainer]

He let out a growl as the thing went traipsing aerially through the kitchen. It didn't quite break against a wall but it did this sort of rhythmic wobble, spewing out wine that could have been consumed.

A few gulps wasn't enough to move the dial.

"God damnit Wren..." He growled again as he stood up straight, taking a step towards Wren. "Our coin is shared, as is the bounty! At this rate, all half of my share's gonna be on the floor or coursing through your..." He stopped just shy of barring his teeth, his gaze fixed on her. Her eyes, appearing almost as deep mahogany in the low light of the fire, and how rebellious they seemed.

He exhaled slowly, furrowing his brow, as the smell of apple wine and cinder filled the air.

 

[Wren]

"You were dying!" all sense of cozy contentment suddenly exited her body over words that had boiled within for hours. For days. They came out hot like a dragon's inferno, the anger flashing over an equally heated gaze, "I had to bury you and I didn't fucking know WHY. That goddamn BOOK of yours couldn't tell me if you'd come back!" Something else went flying across the kitchen, thrown off the counter. Wren had no idea what it was.

She didn't stop herself from baring her teeth and made no effort to hold back simply because she couldn't.

"Do you have ANY idea how awful, how painful-" hands balled into fists, face flushed with emotion, she shoved at his chest to get the point across, "I THOUGHT I LOST YOU!"

 

[Rainer]

He didn't know what to say. He had felt the things she had felt, spread over the distance of a decade as the loss of a sire became more and more permanent. But since he had been changed, he had never known someone at a personal level. He wasn't really sure he had any idea of what she was going through. The one time he had come this close to death, he crawled into a crypt, gasping for air, and shared a coffin with the bones of a long deceased member of an esteemed family in Alliria.

"No." He stated quietly as she pressed against his chest, his own hands lifting to catch her wrists. Just enough to get her to stop before she pushed him into something. Beyond any logic, his concern rested with the house and not his own well being. "No, I don't know how awful that felt..." He admitted. "I was dying. And earlier than expected. I think...because I brought you back."

His grip loosened on our wrist. "Because I lost you. I...I failed you. I couldn't keep you from being...this." He was so rarely prone to such moods of self-hate. But this topic was starting to remind him of why the loss of drink seemed so bothersome.

 

[Wren]

There was a strange dichotomy Wren had discovered in being angry with him. It often came so easily, so beyond her own control at times that she wondered if it was her own anger at all or fed by something else. Some part of her didn't want to be - perhaps a part that still feebly clung to the belief that he'd saved her. He'd brought her back.

But that anger clung to the belief that he'd damned her, and that there was much more to the story he wasn't telling her. The part that desperately wanted to know just what exactly it was she couldn't remember. She wasn't an angry person at heart, not really, and though she reveled in her defiance against him at times, Wren often came to hate herself for it.

That's not who you are.

Then who was she really?

No answers for that question, just that feeling of warmth and familiarity and home radiating from his hands. She didn't know who she was but she knew those hands, part of her wanted to know them more.

"I'm sorry," the wave of fury had passed and she was spent of fuel and felt no better for it. That was the trouble with anger - she just felt tired to be rid of the weight, not lighter. Wren desperately wanted to get back to her feeling of contentment. No movement was made to pull her wrists free from his own though her hands came to rest again at the center of his chest, fingers curling over felt and skin, "I don't remember where I hid the last bottle."

 

[Rainer]

He felt a certain heartache writhe around beneath her fingers. He moved her hands so that there was no more felt beneath her palms. Only scar riddled flesh against her calloused finger tips. He wanted nothing more than for her to understand the torment of his choice, his inability to rid her world of the evil that excised her from her family. He wanted to burden her with the guilt of that change, to acknowledge the sacrifice of that choice, so that she could understand the gravity of his choice.

He had spent decades moving from one part of the continent to the other. Climbing into boats, crossing oceans that shook him to the core, and back. All that time, he had dealt with loss and vowed to never curse someone with this sort of existence. It was hungry and lonely, cruel and without virtue. The guise of help was simply a veneer, shielding the world from the truth of his strain. Hunger came before all else. And he had forced that upon her.

The selfishness would have been crippling for his conscious if he had not found ways, many years ago, to pull from the mind such terrible sentiments and cast them aside. It was another notch against the totem of his guilt, reminding him that he was nothing more than a monster.

Except to her.

"You have nothing to be sorry about..." His hand lifted from her wrist, tracing a thumb across the scar on her jaw. "I'm not sure I need the wine anymore."

 

[Wren]

She remembered, faintly, moments from Elbion and the hotsprings. Though recalled through the haze of heavy drinking both then and now, it replayed within her mind as her fingertips spread across the flesh of sternum. The feeling of warmth and belonging sent jolts along her own skin that prickled into gooseflesh between splotches of scar tissue.

The once-raging Wren cowed to the sensation, and as then - so now, drew into it with the single, simple desire to be enveloped by it. Eyes closing, head leaning into his touch, she felt the echo of words from before repeat themselves again.

"Don't stop."

Her fingers coiled upwards into his neck, plying silently. Please don't.

 

[Rainer]

He had no intent to stop. But he also had no idea where this was going. He was exhausted, likely still recovering from the burial. And she was bouncing in and out of drunken belligerence, spanned by angry outbursts and punctuated by these moments of tenderness.

Since his change, he had never known a touch as intimate as this. Of course, he had shared his time with countless bar wenches. The sort who felt grateful for his acts of heroism or who were aroused by the mystery of his presence. Nothing more than a passing fancy, perhaps repeated on return trips to the smaller towns where the options for companionship were limited. But never for long, never for anything that mattered.

Because they couldn't know what he was, lest he be run out on the spear end of a fire pitchfork line.

Bringing his other hand to her waist, he pulled her close enough for skin to skin contact. Close enough that he needn't stretch his neck to press his nose against the peak of her hairline, running his other finger against the scar and up towards the edge of her jaw, where her ear began.

The smell of fresh rain and apple wine was intoxicating.

 

[Wren]

She could spent the whole night nestled into his chest in an embrace that felt as secure and welcoming as being greeted by loved ones. Felt like home there, breathing in his scent and hearing the beat of his heart. Felt right - and Wren truly could not understand why. Spending the effort thinking about it too much wasn't really in her interest nor in her ability. Far too drunk ... or perhaps just drunk enough to really appreciate his presence.

It suddenly hit her that he simply couldn't enjoy it the same way she was ... where the fuck had she hidden that last bottle? A sleepy glance was given to the one on the floor a few feet away, still drip-dripping its contents into the floorboards. It was going to smell like apple wine in here for months. Half a bottle wasted, the other two and a half saturating her veins like-

Wren made a thoughtful noise, smirk twisting her lips, "I can still share." The fingers at his neck uncurled, lightly tracing his carotid artery on the one side, "You said we can drink from other Vedymin to ... clear out side effects. What about sharing them?"

Two and a half bottles of wine in her system had to account for something. Plenty to go around, right?

 

[Rainer]

The commonly held lore of blood and the relationship to a vampire was muddled, as far from the truth as it was from falsehood. Mired in the shit of gossip and story telling, in oral traditions passed down from generations, it was transformed and molested to fit the whims of the teller.

For some vampires, it was nothing more than the combination of food and water. Common vampires, the sort that prowled the dark alley ways of Elbion and huddled around privy pits and cesspools, followed it with no more thought than a tick opening its arms and lunging in the wind at first sense of exhalation. For other vampires, it was said to be more akin to a drug or alcohol. While it wasn't needed, it was a part of the culture in social norms. To not drink blood in these circles, where the affects could vary from intoxication to outright arousal, was the same as being a teetotaler in a Nordic society formed upon honey wine and carnage.

But for all the vampires that Rainer had encountered, including himself, it had never been considered sacred. It was vitality, nothing more. And yet, he couldn't seem to shake the feeling that there was something more in the simple request of shared imbibing.

His hand, formerly wrapped around her waist, lifted to her wrist and pulled her fingers away from his neck. "And here I thought you hadn't been listening..." He moved her wrist, gently, as he pressed it against his cheek bone. He could feel her pulse there, slow and relaxed, as it thumped against his skin. "You can share...but only if you are willing." That wasn't entirely true. But it was in this moment.

Oddly enough, he found no scruples in the act. Only in the clear requirement to understand the proposition.

 

[Wren]

"I always listen to you," an assurance that spilled warm, apple-wine scented breath across his chest, "even when I don't want to hear you."

Which, if she was honest, was at least half the time. His underhanded comments, his stupid wry humorisms. His daft approximations of various things. Wren smirked to herself, half-lidded gaze shifting upwards with a lazy glance, "Not there." He'd taken up her right wrist, coiled by scar tissue.

She should have been dead - even still, survival as her past-self would have meant lost use of her right arm and leg. Her right eye should have melted out of the socket. She shouldn't be able to hear out of that side of her head. The hair shouldn't have grown back. But she wasn't her past-self, so the eye had healed and her sight and hearing returned, the hair grew back, even a good deal of her burns had formed back to flesh. The scar tissue that remained covered limbs that had taken time to re-strengthen. Nerves continued to regrow, but much of that pale skin could not feel anything.

Yet she'd found that new wounds to scars were stubborn to heal and twice as painful once they'd cut through.

"Here," wheaten blond shifted as she tipped her head to expose the left, unmarred side of her neck.

 

[Rainer]

His gaze narrowed, his hands following her command. He paid no mind to the repercussions that this meager feeding would stave off his hunger only to potentially expedite hers. It wasn't selfishness that clouded his mind, though he would have been keen to place the blame on that. It was simply an extinct.

The hand holding her wrist moved up her robe, in turn, pressing a palm against the curve of her neck. The other dropped to her side, held against her back. Burnt brass descended from her eyes, to her lips, down the edge of her jaw and towards her neck.

The Vedymin strain, perhaps more than any other strain of vampirism, relied on blood for survival. Even the more feral of the vampires could go weeks without drinking. But for them, a week could draw even the strongest into a blind fury. And even when taking that into account, he would be lying to say the hunger currently drove him. At least, hunger for blood.

Leaning forward, he pressed his lips against the unmarred and offered skin. Taking a moments pause to feel her and that warmth, that unmistakable and unexplained warmth, he bared his teeth and applied just enough pressure. Enough to break the skin.

 

[Wren]

It wasn't fear that set her pulse fluttering beneath his lips. Wren still had a hold of him by the collar of his robe, fingers clenching the material in preparation. She couldn't remember the bite that had changed her, but she'd been bitten by wild animals and her own prey before. Pain was a given and expected, but curiously welcome in this instance. She was doing this for him, willingly, almost as if out of instinct - she just didn't know it.

Still didn't keep the whimper from escaping her throat or her other hand from seeking the nearby counter to steady herself against. Once the initial sting of his fangs wore off and he began to drink, the tingle of numbness set in against the pain and allowed her to wallow in everything else.

Like the scent of earth and rain and wine.
The heady warmth of his closeness.
The strength of the arm that held her in place.
Memories from the catacombs of Elbion and the man commenting on her thighs.
Visions of the man in various states of undress along their travels.
Catching his lingering gaze just as many times as she caught her own lingering on him.
The drawing of her in his journal.

A jolt of arousal shot from her neck and into her spine, an electric current of want that spread through every limb. Wren bit into a moan of pleasure, the hand at his robe collar climbing into his hair to tangle her fingers through it. Murmured words in elvish followed, husked into the man's ear.

 

[Rainer]

There was a subtle, almost imperceptible, tense in her muscles that made him question his choice to drink from her. The reflex of her neck was punctuated by the whimper and grip of the counter, followed by the eventual relaxation that careened almost predictably after the initial jolt of pain. His uncertainty subsided amidst a moan and murmured elvish.

He couldn't recall what it was like to be bitten by his sire. But he could recall the time he had bitten Wren, in that dark place after all the terrible torment had been enacted against her. She tasted of death and said nothing, only rasped in pain. Though he wasn't certain if the pain was the result of the bite or the result of her fatal wounds. When he had drawn her lips to his wrist, forced her to feed on him, he recalled something approaching elation. He wasn't sure she would live. Even without her wounds, the lore suggested that very few survived the change of this strain.

Relief drown out any form of pain that came with her teeth, enthusiastically draining his veins and breathing in of her new life.

Now, there was no death. There was no disease, as was common of their food. There was no indication of drug abuse or a life lived harshly. There was no hurt or anguish, quite the opposite. There was only warmth, apple wine, and that metallic umami he could only surmise was the result of a blossoming form of veneration. One born in a dark and desperate place, given breath by recent events.

He gulped and he gulped again, the immediate euphoria and intoxication coursed through him and warmed him to the core. He gripped her tighter, feeling her life and emotions press against him. Feelings of surprise, of closeness, of admiration, and of something else entirely.

His teeth retracted from the wound, lips still forming a tight seal against her flesh. The blood had been persuaded and now he was content for it to come to him.

 

[Wren]

If ever there was a gateway to euphoria in this miserable, haunted, cursed life they lived, Wren was certain they'd found it. She swam in and out of brilliant ecstasy enveloped by the scintillation of his closeness and embrace. Giving to him the sweet taste of inebriation, sharing the scent of apple, wallowing in the taste of blood - all his to experience and yet she felt it too. Somehow the tang of copper sat on her tongue and made her hunger for salt and flesh.

Wren recalled her hands, now gripping and grabbing at his cloak, a flush of need, a rising sensation of light-headedness while he drank. She turned her head into the side of his own, forcing a hot breath down his neck and words into his ear.

Take all of me.

 

[Rainer]

A fire crackled in the hearth, made of coarse sandstone that spanned from the floor to the lofted ceiling. Formed in an uneven column, it gave the illusion of structural necessity as it pinned the roughhewn beams of the ceiling to the peak. The house was small but well lit, given illumination by a large set of windows that stood above a kitchen counter top. It was stone as well though it had not been cleaned in some time, still caked with fish scales that flickered brilliant in the loose rays of the sun, piercing through a strafing cloud.

There was snow on the ground but bare spots revealed jagged slate and anthracite, doused occasionally by an up-welling of ocean spray. The house set near a rocky bluff, many paces removed from a carved set of stairs that zig-zagged down the cliff. At the bottom, a small boat and pier rocked with the tide, protected by a primitive wooden shelter.

"You have to go now?"
"I do." The young man responded. Rainer sat in a chair, rocking in front of the fire. The piece of furniture was clearly hand built but done in proper fashion, prone to bouts of creaking against the slatted floor.

"Never been much for convincing you. Imagine that's your mother in you." His words were murky, like a memory funneled through the depths of the ocean.

The boy didn't respond.

"It's poor timing." He admitted, cupping a polished smoking pipe in his hand. The bowl was lacquered wood and the tip turned to ivory a quarter of the way down. "I could really use your help with the trade."
"It can't be helped. I don't choose the timing."
"No, I guess you don't." Sadness crept into his voice, reverberated through the ocean waves. "I'll help you pack."
"No. I've already packed. I'm leaving now."

He didn't respond. The door shut and silence ensued as the man rocked, alone, against the sound of crashing waves and embers.

"No." He uttered as his lips pulled away from her skin. His gaze was vacant, overtaken by the alien form of a lucid memory and the intoxication of her blood. The apple wine, the metallic after taste, the warmth and connection, and the gut wrenching feeling that whatever just happened, it was entirely true. And that whatever connection they shared, Wren could have felt it too. The memory, the sadness, the loss, the utterly pathetic life that was just shown under a thousand leagues of fog and haze. He mentally clinched down, casting the thought loose and worked with every ounce of energy not poured into this moment and to her, to rid himself of that woeful remembrance.

"No, I can't. I...I won't." He stumbled over his thoughts and over the words. It was hard enough to take all of her last time, it was hard enough to strike that final nail and hope, against his better judgement, that she would punch free of the pine. He pulled away but still held her tight, dizzy from the experience and dizzy from the consumption. If she wasn't looking towards him, he would force her to with a hand pressed against her neck. "I can't..." He uttered again as he shook his head, hating the feeling of being weak and being vulnerable, lips still stained with her blood.

 

[Wren]

Wren didn't know what this feeling of morose was now filtering in across the bond. Came on so suddenly, so strongly, that it felt to her as though she were relapsing to her manic depression after burying the man. Made her suddenly afraid that his unexpected no was his way of leaving. Nevermind the context of the situation or the last hour.

The hand at her neck didn't have to force her to look up at him, she already was with an expression of mixed and mulled emotions. Wren's clinging grip didn't loosen but instead tightened with a flare of desperation.

She didn't want to go back to that state of mind and being. It terrified her.

"Rain?" she frowned, bleary eyes blinking at him, "What do you mean? What's wrong? Is it...is it my scars?"

 

[Rainer]

The fire hissed and popped from a bit of rain rolling down the chimney. But for a moment, it broke the silence of his pause that followed her question. The question, in his mind, was foolish. It was formed in a realm that didn't exist. Her scars weren't something that pushed his gaze away but, instead, something that called it. Demanded it. In her arms, his mind was replete with a sensation that he assumed would be absent for the rest of his days. But these were her wounds, worn more openly than his own, so he understood. He empathized. And while he could empathize with how she felt, he could not share those feelings.

He simply didn't see the scars as she did.

"No, Wren. No." He shook his head and smiled sadly. The hand holding her neck moved along those scars, the feint hue of lux forming in the palm of his hands. "Your...blood..." His eyes, dimly lit brass in the darkness, moved to the two holes in her neck. A trail of blood was hardening down her collar bone, the wound was already healing. "It gave me a memory. One I wasn't ready for. And for a moment, I was back in that dark place and you were dying."

His expression tilted and he found his way back to her eyes. "Forgive me." He whispered the request, though whether it was for this misstep or the act of cursing her with this life, he wasn't sure. Perhaps both.

 

[Wren]

Death. Such a complex state of being. Knowing what she was, how she came to be, Wren had difficulty grasping the idea of death now more than ever. They, creatures of the dark, were of undeath - but what did that really mean? That they persisted in defiance of death?

That against all odds and threat, they stubbornly remained. A ghost of their former selves, corporeal still but changed. Themselves but not. Only half of what they once were, and yet so much more.

Death still frightened her though. Many times they had both come close in the past two months and the terror she'd felt at the thought of Rainer's death still lingered, seared into her psyche. His closeness now made it all the more real. Wren could not explain how or why she felt so strongly over it, only that it was an absolute. Some innate instinct coiled within the fabric of her new being that drew her to him in spite of everything. An unshakable magnetism, made all the stronger by his touch.

"Mm," the smile that grew on her lips was faint, hazel slipping away from brass to close against the feel of fingertips over scars, a staccato dance between sensation and numbness over marred flesh. Wren's fingers loosened from his robe, scarred hand lifting along the length of his arm to the hand at her neck. She gripped it loosely, guiding his palm beneath the hem of her neckline to rest just above her left breast over her heartbeat. Steady, strong, if not a hint lethargic from a night of drinking.

"I'm not dead, I'm here," a slow breath, "right here."

Wren's eyes opened again, looking up at him, "How many times will we do this dance before you kiss me?"

 

[Rainer]

Wenches and coins and blood. Those were the only things he had ever known in this life. Perhaps it was a matter of secrecy or maybe it was just the lie he told himself to help ease the guilt of rolling out of bed in the twilight hours. Or leaving without saying a word. But those were the terms he had set up in this life, one he was sure he had spent more in than in the life that preceded The Shallows.

Were he a betting man, which he was on occasion, he would have never bet on the odds of this. That dragging Wren into his world, betrayed by the brutality of hers, would catalyze a connection he had thought no longer an option. The revelation frightened him. It put him in a place he wasn't accustomed. The sort of place where two people might find something with one another that far surpassed the exchange of coin.

It as an alien thing for a seasoned Vedymin.

"Right here..." He repeated sotto voce, tapping his fingers against her skin to some rhythm related to her heartbeat. Perhaps it was a song he once knew, or a song he was suddenly discovering.

They had, indeed, done this dance before. But even off the dance floor, everything felt as if it spiraled around this unspoken connection. He couldn't understand it. And he was almost certain he didn't need to. He simply needed to lean in to it. And this time, there was no one here to interrupt them.

Without taking the time to answer her, he leaned forward and kissed her.

 

[Wren]

There wasn't one single word Wren could think of to describe the sensation that pooled across her in that moment. Not sparks nor a rush, but a heightened sense of contentment. Warm sunlight spilling over a cold winter morning. A heavy pelt settling over tired shoulders. Aching limbs coming to repose upon a bed of moss. The first scent of nectar in the early spring. The quiet of a snow-covered valley beneath the moonlight. The vision of home after years spent abroad.

Felt like the place she never knew she always wanted to be.

That same steady rhythm continued beneath his palm, a slow and quiet breath drawn in through her nose. Wren broke from the kiss, forehead still lightly pressed against his, hands now shifted along his front at his collar, "Come to bed with me."

 

[Rainer]

The sweet viez and the taste of her blood had, so far, been nothing more than comforting and warm. It hadn't affected him in any way, despite his expectations. That was the case from the point of his teeth leaving her skin all the way to her pulling away from the kiss. And then it all changed.

He felt a warm wave, similar yet removed from the comforting touch of her skin, course through his body. It started at his toes and like a gentle fog, coiled up around his ankles and pulled up towards his knees. Then his waist, his chest, and his arms. He suddenly felt very woozy and heavy in Wrens arms. His mind dulled and his thoughts grew murky.

He rarely felt such impact from alcohol or from blood. In the days that followed, he might surmise that it had been far too soon after his burial to consume so ravenously. Of alcohol or of blood saturated in alcohol. It evidently didn't matter which and the combination may have intensified the effect. He couldn't explain it and as the euphoria crept along his skin, sizzling out the lux, he decided he didn't much care.

"But I'm not tired…" He pursed his lips in a grin, eyes drifting down and along the finer edges of her skin, now only partially hidden beneath robes. His hands played at the contours of her jaw and throat, teasing at locks of loose blonde hair. "Not...sleepy." He stated with more confidence than he had any right to have. Tilting her head back with a thumb, he looked her in the eyes and drunkenly searched for the implication he had failed to initially grasp. "Maybe just a bit tired…"

 

[Wren]

Amusement plied at her as much as his hands, eyes closing at the feeling of fingertips along her neck and jaw. The smell of wine had saturated the space between them and out of them both she couldn't be certain who carried it more heavily. Though she'd been drinking all afternoon, he'd had it sloshed across his front. Now it seemed, at his apple-ladened words, he was catching up to her in that sweet viez stupor.

"Then," hazel gaze slivered open as he tipped her chin up, "let's go to bed and..." one of her hands had traveled south on his figure and made an open and very bold claim of something down there through his robe, "...not sleep."

She smirked.