AN: this is a Sam/Amelie oneshot for Flying Penguinz for her birthday.
I don't own anything.
Set: after Carpe Corpus.
He begins to haunt her dreams.
Well, that's a lie, really; he's haunted her dreams since she turned and left him, just over fifty years ago, but she's managed to block them out with the knowledge she can always 'check up' on him if she really needs to confirm that her pushing him away has saved his life. It's just now, now he's truly deceased, that he's plaguing her every thought—and she can't get him out of her mind. Sam Glass refuses to leave her conscious or sub-conscious mind, no matter what she thinks of, no matter how she tries to distract herself…it's just worse at night.
During the day, Amelie can force herself to concentrate on something else—she says to herself, "he died for you, Amelie; you can at least get on with your normal everyday routine. He didn't want you to change for him"—and so work still gets completed, no matter how much she would rather be letting go of the emotions which threaten to consume her, and she manages to convince even Myrnin that she's feeling fine. It's almost amusement, to insist to Myrnin that she's fine—"Yes, Myrnin, I am fine. No, I don't want to go into the sunlight and burn myself to be with my true love. I'm perfectly fine"—because he's supposed to know her the best in the world, now that Sam's gone, and yet he can't read her thoughts, not at all.
She thinks he suspects sometimes, though, when the mask drops for just a moment and the agony breaks out onto her face, and her insides threaten to crumble into piles of ash, but he never says anything.
That's the daytime; it's difficult enough to get through when the sun's high in the sky and there's ample opportunity to distract herself…it's just when she finds herself alone does Amelie find herself truly falling apart.
In the hours she slumbers—as few as she can now, because it's too painful to allow herself to be in this dream-world, at least in the morning—she's tormented with him, with Sam. Most of the time, he's standing on the other side of a field to her, the sun beating down on him, yet when she runs out to take him into her arms, she can never reach him. The sun's rays burn her the instant she steps from the dark shadows, and even as she fights through the pain to reach him (pain would never keep her from Sam) he just seems to move further and further away from her. She finds most nights a never-ending battle to try and keep him in sight of her tear-filled eyes, to continue screaming his name even though he never seems to hear her, and it's in these times that she tries to understand what he's been going through this last half century. She sees the parallels with her actions and his, sees how he's felt when his words have fell on deaf ears (that's a lie, she always struggled to keep him away, but that's not the point of the lesson she's learning) and all it does is make her realise that keeping him safe away from her was pointless.
He was always going to fight to get to her side; she just put him in the greatest danger of all by attempting to hide his importance to her for so long.
(Keeping him so alone for fifty years didn't stop her father destroying him; it merely weakened the two of them and left Amelie with her greatest weakness.)
And yet there are times when she's got the chance to touch him—she can feel his breath on her skin as she traces the planes of his face with her fingertips, and that should be the most beautiful gift she could ever receive from a dream: it's not, for two reasons. One, it's a dream world and this isn't happening in real time—it's phantom feelings, because neither of them are corporeal in this world...and secondly, all it does is remind her that she could have had this for years, but she chose against it.
But it's so real when he presses his lips to hers, so real when his breath tickles her skin when he whispers "I love you" and it's certainly real when she tells him she's his for eternity, and for the duration of these dreams (the ones that're so few and far between) she's ecstatically happy…it's just when she returns to her bedchamber that the wracking pains begin to shoot through her. The hysteria rules then, because she's never going to be able to dance in the meadow with him again, never going to even know he's heard her whispered confessions of love; he's dead, lost to her forever, and he's never going to move from beneath the stone in the graveyard again.
These dreams are always the more painful of the two, because Amelie can see everything she once had before it's snatched away from her slowly, the image of Sam fading first, then the setting, before finally, his voice—he always manages to say her name, and "I" but then he's ripped from her as everything goes black. It's at this moment her eyes fly open, filled with tears, and the nightmarish cycle recommences.
~x~
She's not sure how long she keeps this up for, this mad inability to do anything but realise that she's been wrong, oh so wrong, for all these years, and to regret every action she's ever took that has resulted in her separation from Sam. Even when she tries not to think about him, it doesn't work, and so she begins to crave something to take the pain away—nobody notices this, not her old friend Myrnin, not Oliver who's vying for the town again…nobody.
Nobody notices as she begins to read up on the legends of the vampire, digest the stories (that's all she's believed them to be, anyway) about how donating an Elder's blood can return a recently dead vampire to its life, because they've all got their own lives and goals to meet. She's nothing but the Founder who, tragically, lost her lover, but that's all she's become. Privacy has always been Amelie's guard, and now she begins to regret it, because nobody tries to pry into her life to see that she's fine—not even Myrnin.
And that hurts.
Her mind is so wracked with pain, so filled with wild, outlandish, impossible (or so she said before; Sam made her realise that impossible isn't a word that exists) ideas to bring him back, that it makes her act without really thinking. She takes a purse of silver and slips it into her pocket, using the last of her sanity to summon a portal to the graveyard and stumble over to Sam's grave.
It's beautiful here at twilight, but Amelie doesn't care; all she sees is the marble tombstone, the one with Sam's name, date of birth…and date of death. She sees the mound of earth before it onto which she falls, sees the coins in her hand which are soon inserted into the cuts in her wrists, and then somehow manages to glimpse the stream of thick blood dripping onto the earth.
Her mind is consumed by him, recalling their memories together, and the scenes she's seen in her mind, a mishmash of reality and fantasy, and she imagines that each tear that drips down her cheek is a memory, that as she grows colder, he grows warmer; he's always been the sun to warm her ice, she knows, and all she wants is for him to light up her sky for one more day. She wants one day with him, to spend one day memorising the planes of his face as he laughs, to press her lips to his, to tell him she loves him over and over again, until the words no longer make sense.
She wants one day to be human.
(Pity she can't have it, right?)
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