Title: Love and Gingerbread Cookies
Rating: PG
Author: Specks
Disclamer: Lakeshore, Len Wiseman, and all those other honchos (sony?) own Underworld. I'm just borrowing the characters, please don't shoot or sue.
Synopsis: More of a reflective piece about Selene and change.
Pairings: M/S
Spoilers: First movie, but that's about it. I didn't like the second so much, so all of this occurs after the first movie ends and disregards everything that happened in UE.
Author's Notes: I would like to thank my beta reader Princess Gicky a.k.a. Nicky for being an awesome beta and being so very patient with me throughout all of my changes. You have much wisdom and I am so very very glad that you have decided to impart it to me. Thanks!
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Selene trailed a finger down the foggy window with slow deliberation, watching in fascination as the sudden clarity was quickly clouded over by the heat from her lips. Outside, rain fell in sleets across wide windows with only the occasional splatter disturbing the liquid curtain. She leaned forward, placing her full palm against the glass, feeling the cold onrush of the storm.
Life frightened her sometimes.
For so many years, she had gotten used to the illusion of stillness, of calm, the feel of the air as it paused in anticipation just before a hunt. It had been all that she'd lived for.
Yet life did not stand still. Did not stop, did not pause even in the wake of death. It surged forward; fire and fury and obsession raging in its perfect desire to be. Even the most desperate grasp of human and immortal alike could not freeze its motion. The greater fool she had been, to have believed otherwise for so long.
Selene leaned closer to the glass as lightning arced through the night sky, casting the room in a swirl of azure-white light. In the ghostly glow, she could almost see the individual rain drops as they hit the window pane; each impact distorting the portrait of her own reflection. It always surprised her to see how she looked nowadays. Her appearance was still the same. Same white pallor, same death dealer's garb, same raven-dark hair, but her eyes had changed. She remembered when they used to be killer-hard, frozen, like she'd once thought time. Now they flickered with indecision.
In a single fortnight, her world had tilted upon its axis, and it was all she could do to hang onto her own version of sanity. The one man whom she had always felt she could trust had betrayed her. The other, whom by all rights she should have hated, she…cared for. She was besieged by doubt and uncertainties and some small part of her could not help wishing it would all make sense once again. To return to the simplicity of bullets tearing through flesh, targets instead of men, and respect instead of love. So many centuries of living apart from the glitter and sparkle of both human and vampire alike had taught her nothing: Had almost made her forget what life really meant. Yet now, leaning so very still against the window, looking over at the sparsely furnished apartment, she was reminded.
It had been two weeks. Two weeks since the advent of their perilous journey from the center of Budapest out to the little private airport in the middle of the alps. Pre-natural speed and stamina had aided in their escape. Near limitless funds had paid for it, and the power she wielded had ensured that their clandestine flight to the Continent was kept secret: At least for a while.
She knew the calm would not last though, that she was only standing within the eye of an ever growing storm. Had it just been her, she might very well have disregarded it all. Life, after all, had long ago lost its meaning: Existence, merely a respectable alternative to death. In any other situation, she knew, she would have left, scoffed at those she had once foolishly considered family, and disappeared. The knowledge that they would eventually find her would have been a comfort rather than a fear. Something expected in a world of uncertainties. Eventually, she would have died as she had lived, holding anger and honor as her shield, cutting down as many enemies as she could on her descent into oblivion. But she was not that girl, and she was not alone. That in itself was also a comfort and a fear.
Michael was the very epitome of life and change and revelation.
Michael, who even now slept on the bed within the steel and concrete walls of the apartment she had brought them to. Michael, whose sun kissed hair was tousled, whose breath broke in soft flutters as he slept. Sweet, ferocious, unquestioning Michael.
Strange, how fear could grip you in your very soul once you realized you had something to lose.
Her fingers itched to tuck away those loose strands of damaged gold, to feel the texture of his skin, to cradle that powerful, muscular frame and offer—if only for a moment—some illusion of safety. Such a silly wish. Something no more likely to come about than fairy tales of spinning straw into gold. Yet the notion persisted, this need to comfort—its existence like something newly kindled within a child's imagination. Fresh, warm, and fragile, like thoughts of love and gingerbread cookies.
Strange, how fate swung just so, with the pendulum of time.
A millennium later, it is not he who guarded her, but she, a vampire, who guarded her lycan so diligently whilst he slumbered. Oh, how Viktor would have disapproved. The scent of spilt blood and the angry surprise on her surrogate father's face still haunted her dreams. Even now, the thought of his death made her grieve despite her own actions at causing his passing.
It might have been pure folly that had allowed her to take up Viktor's sword and swing it with such surety. But she liked to think that it was something more. Knew that it had to have been something more. Through such uncertainties in life, that surety is all she could hope to hold on to.
They would come after her soon, with all of the resources of the vampire nation at their fingertips. Selene knew there were many battles that laid ahead. Life, no matter how much one wished it to, did not stand still, even for immortals. Yet, for these few precious minutes and seconds, sitting there, watching Michael and listening to the pitter patter of the rain, she would be free to indulge.
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