Disclaimer: I do not own anything except my own characters and plot.
Rating T for language and violence
Complete summary: After being drained and left for dead in an alley, Lydia awoke to find herself in the hospital with no recollection of what happened and a strange disembodied voice talking to her inside her head. At first the connection seems harmless, but it soon starts drawing all sorts of unwanted, supernatural attention to her. But things seem to take a turn for the better when she meets a certain 2,000 year-old vampire, which makes her think that maybe hearing a strange voice in her head isn't so bad after all. Eventual Godric/OC
Author Note: This is my "for fun" story and my first stab at writing a fan fic outside the realm of anime and manga. And it's another OC story. Will there be romance? Most likely, though I like to develop things slowly and I'm pretty big on character development. Will there be vampires, were wolves, shape shifters, and other "supes" a plenty? Oh, definitely yes. I've also just started reading the book series (recently finished Living Dead in Dallas) so I'll most likely be taking some elements from that and putting them into this story. Constructive criticism is always welcome. Also, this is a slight AU so Godric's still alive. Suck it, Alan Ball.
Chapter 1 of Indebted: Prologue
Lydia didn't particularly like being held captive in the psychiatrist's office. The ugly piss yellow couch she was forced to sit on was too firm and uncomfortable. She kept squirming around until she found a position that she was relatively comfortable staying put in, her legs swung over the armrest, dangling over the side of the couch, with her head and torso resting on the seat cushions.
The doctor was in her early sixties, her greying hair was hidden under a colorful bandana wrapped around her head and her bright eyes behind black boxy framed glasses. Her plump figure sat on a leather cushioned chair a few feet away from the couch. Her legs were crossed with her notepad resting on her knee. She certainly looked professional, Lydia decided.
She could hear the psychiatrist's fine point pen scratch against the sheet of paper she was scrawling notes on, as if the uneasy silence in the room held any significance and was worth jotting down. Lydia's eyes warily followed the pen out of the corner of her eye as if it were a spider crawling along a kitchen counter top that she would very much like to take a rolled up newspaper and whack. Not that she personally had anything against spiders, she just didn't like having any eight-legged anthropod in her kitchen.
She glanced up at the wall clock. Forty minutes left. Damn.
"You say you've been hearing voices?"
"Not voices," Lydia replied curtly. "I've only been hearing one voice. Singular. Distinctly male and annoying as hell."
The doctor look up with a inquisitive gaze. "Male?"
"Mhmm."
Lydia could hear the pen scratching against the notepad again. She sighed.
"Can you tell me more about this voice? What does it say?"
"In the beginning it was just ramblings. Loud, lengthy ramblings. Like someone's thoughts who wasn't aware that I could listen in on them, not that I was trying to anyway. And then I finally told it to 'shut up'. It didn't like that."
The doctor flipped the sheet of her notepad over to the other side, taking a brief break from slashing and poking of her pen against the paper before resuming her feverish note taking.
"Does this voice tell you to do things?" the burly women asked as she stared at Lydia over the brims of lenses with curiosity, her pen hovering over the paper eagerly.
Lydia's face hardened. "Like to torture and murder people?"
A short pause. "Well?"
"No," Lydia said loudly and sternly.
"Do you converse with it?"
"Well, I told it to 'shut up', didn't I?"
"How did the voice react?"
"It told me that I should watch my language and respect my elders." Lydia chewed on her bottom lip. Her eyes slipped back to the wall clock. Thirty-five more minutes until freedom.
"It...said that?"
Lydia bobbed her head up and down as she folder her arms over her stomach. She was beginning to feel restless laying in his position. She could feel the springs in the couch pressing up against her back muscles.
"Do you remember exactly when this began?"
The corners of Lydia's lips curved downward into a frown. "Two months ago. When the incident happened." Lydia rubbed the left side of her neck, the palm of her hand sliding back and forth over two small, distinct puncture wounds that still hadn't healed.
The doctor turned over her notes. "Ah, yes. I remember reading that you made a note of that on your intake and medical forms." The doctor pushed her glasses back up the bridge of her nose and leaned back in her chair. "Do you want to talk about what happened?"
"Not really."
"Well, vampire attacks aren't too uncommon. They happen from time to time, but it can result in PTSD, so we'll have to watch out for that."
Lydia almost rolled her eyes. How reassuring.
It was not that she didn't want to talk about what happened, it was more a case that she hardly remembered what had actually occurred that night. Once in a while hazy images would pop in her mind; the face of a handsome man, having a few drinks, staring into his dreamy eyes...and then the next thing she knew she was awake and groggy in a hospital bed with an IV drip in her arm.
It certainly had been a surreal experience.
"Let's discuss this voice some more."
"Alright."
"You mentioned that you interact with it. Have you ever argued with it"
"Sometimes. Like, when I'm watching TV it tells me to watch the History Channel or Animal Planet. It likes Discovery too, but who doesn't like Discovery? We're both pretty fond of MythBusters."
The doctor raised an eyebrow. "Are there any other instances of disagreement?"
"It tells me I should read more. Educate myself, I guess. But I hardly have time to read the Odyssey when I'm drowning in term papers and studying to pass organic chemistry."
"It told you to read the Odyssey?"
"Yeah."
"Are you Greek?"
"On my mother's side."
The doctor wrote down some more notes while jiggling her foot.
Lydia scrunched her nose. Was this really all that interesting?
"You don't think it's significant that it told you to read the Odyssey?" the doctor probed, perplexed by the young woman's ability to take this all with a grain of salt.
Lydia shrugged. "My mother's Greek, she's been harping at me for years to get 'more in touch' with my roots. I've more or less been hearing the same things from her along with other unkind words most of my life."
"None of this alarms you?"
"What? That the voice knows I'm Greek?"
The doctor inclined her head to the side. "Has this voice told you if it has a name?"
Lydia inhaled a deep breath. Oh great, the doctor was going to think she was really crazy now. Hearing voices in your head was one thing, but actually admitting the voice had a name, and therefore it's own persona, seemed like plunging off the deep end into utter insanity.
An uneasy silence filled the room.
Lydia finally cleared her throat. "It said I should call him Memnon."