A/N: Written for the Kurtbastian Hiatus Project prompt 'other' around Halloween. I didn't initially like it, so I didn't upload it, even though it started to become a full fic. Warning for mention of blood and killing. Also, this is meant to be a little campy and over-the-top with regard to style.
The day dissipated with the last rays of the sun stretching like golden fingers to caress a tired Earth. Everything good and pure had long since scampered away, hiding from the oncoming night, retiring to the safety of their burrows and homes. As an eerie calm settled over the city, only Sebastian remained. He slithered from the boundless dark to bathe beneath the mother moon – a fearsome beast prowling the streets beneath its luminous glow. Over a century he had spent like this - the lust for blood forcing him to live alone, the loneliness driving him slowly mad. Time had ceased to have any meaning for him. Days and nights blurred together, spans of time divided by the passing of the full moon.
He lifted his head and took a deep breath in of the cool night air. His lips parted in a sinister combination of a growl and a smile. His fur, thick and dark brown, almost black, bristled, standing in a stiff mane along his curved spine. He bared his teeth – sharp and bone white, preparing for the feast, ready to satisfy his desire for blood.
Sebastian had just eaten, felt the warmth of his prey's blood fill his veins, each drop of it fueling his fury, and though satiated, the smell of him was too overpowering, too impossible to resist. This unfortunate pedestrian, walking the streets too late after hours, unfortunately crossed the monster's path. The beast emerged from an alley, leaving the corpse of its previous meal to follow him, stalk him down the sidewalk as the man hurried alone, completely unaware of the dangerous presence lurking behind. He squeezed his arms tightly around him, drawing together the edges of his tailored wool peacoat, shielding himself from the cold. His artfully faded designer denim jeans clung to his legs, a chain belt hugging the subtle curve of his hips, jingling faintly as it bounced. Sebastian smelled him, capturing hints of him with every breath in. The man was young, twenty-two at the most, innocent - touched intimately by only two other men, didn't drink to excess and had never done any hard drugs. Sebastian read his mind as easily as he read his scent - college student, studying fashion and design, modest, shy but with an undeniable magnetism. He also had a secret.
A precious secret.
Something that had to do with a leather bound journal he kept tucked safely under his arm beneath his coat.
Sebastian pressed into his mind further and smiled.
A poet. The man was a poet - continually in love with being in love.
That explained the utter mistake of a lover he had now, the one he was rushing home to. And yet, as eager as he was to get home to this douche, he stopped and lingered, taking a moment to gaze up at the moon shining brightly down on both of them – the one thing they shared. Sebastian touched his mind again and glimpsed a hidden fantasy – this man wrapped in his lover's arms. They were both naked, making love out in the open, in a dewy field of lilac beneath this same generous moon. In his dream, the man moaned shamelessly, arching his back as his lover kissed him and bit down his chest. His dream lover growled with the hunger this man's body invoked within him, and amazingly enough, he had eyes just like Sebastian's.
From the depths of his cursed soul, Sebastian felt himself smile, felt the long, forgotten shreds of his human desires rise to his mind. He imagined himself in his human form, cradling this man in his arms, head bowed over his, lips running tenderly along his neck, down to the hollow of his throat, over the firm planes of his chest. He searched the man's mind for his name. He got as far as the letter K, but then the beast rose within him, and the dream turned bloody, Sebastian's swollen lips covered in the man's rich, nourishing blood, his face twisted in a grimace of intense agony.
Some remnant of Sebastian's humanity that lingered a hair longer to memorize the man's – K's - beautiful face sighed sadly before it disappeared. Sebastian's human desires no longer mattered. K would be a meal before the night was over. Sebastian felt the familiar buzzing in his ears as the clouds parted to uncover the full potency of the moon, and his hunger overtook him. He inched closer and closer, smelling the man, all of him, from his clothes to his skin, his cologne to his shoes, and finally the lush seductive scent of his blood. Hunger flowed like air into Sebastian's lungs with every breath of him. The street was empty, the night patient, but the closer Sebastian came to the man staring star crossed at the moon above, Sebastian could not keep his control reigned. Sebastian crouched on muscular haunches and leapt to the man's side, the pads of his feet making not a single sound on the hard concrete. As still as he stood, canine eyes glaring up at the man, glowing with an inner flame, he didn't seem to notice him.
The heat of Sebastian's breath on the man's hand stirred him from his dreaming. He turned and looked straight into the eyes of the devil. Sebastian growled, the sound a bloodcurdling warning. The man jumped at the sight of Sebastian, lips curled over exposed fangs as he continued to snarl. The man gasped and took an instinctive step back. His heel caught on the sidewalk and he fell, landing on his tailbone, the wind knocked from his lungs. Sebastian loomed over him like a vulgar nightmare beneath the arc sodium lights, the orange of the street lamps adding an unearthly glow to his white fangs. But as Sebastian approached closer, the hunger within him subsided, his green-gray eyes widening at the sight of the angel fallen at his feet.
The man stared at Sebastian with eyes soft and blue, the color of the sea as the sun sets along the horizon. Those eyes stared unblinking into Sebastian's own, no longer stricken with horror, but an unexpected sense of awe. Within those eyes, amid that awe, Sebastian's human side felt his deliverance. Sebastian barely needed to invade his thoughts to know what the man was thinking. It was evident in those guileless eyes. He was a hopeless romantic, this one. He sighed, the hand that he had thrown over his mouth lowered revealing his rose-colored lips – plump and inviting, and so close to Sebastian's mouth that the demon could almost taste them. In the quiet, Sebastian heard words in his head as though they were being spoken to him, in a voice that was tremulous and otherworldly.
'Come to me, tired soul,' it beckoned to him. 'Find rest with me. Find solace. I will shelter you...'
They were the words of a poem, one this man had written. They shone clearly on his face as though they were written on his pale skin in his own flowery hand. Those words lured Sebastian to him. Sebastian looked him over slowly and saw the slim leather-bound volume peeking out from underneath his coat where it had fallen open. The man followed Sebastian's gaze, saw where his eyes were fixed, and odd as it seemed, the man pushed the book behind him protectively.
'The book for his life?' Sebastian mused curiously. 'But why?' Then Sebastian's eyes glowed with realization. 'The poem. The rest of it is written in there.' For some reason, the thought of that poem filled Sebastian with fire. He wanted it. He needed it. His hunger be damned, this was the trophy of his long desire - words of love written about him, or an imagined one of his kind.
He needed to know the rest.
Sebastian lowered his head and leapt on the man, and for the first time the man became afraid. Sebastian tasted his fear on his tongue, and instead of sparking a frenzy in Sebastian's brain, the thought of the man's fear saddened Sebastian, crippling him till he almost turned tail and ran away. But he couldn't, not without the book and its precious poem. Sebastian huffed menacingly and the man scampered backward, losing his on the book in his haste as Sebastian had hoped. Sebastian picked the book up carefully in his teeth, and before the man could make a move or protest, Sebastian bounded away into the night.
When the sun's rays returned to stretch across the lush green grass of Central Park, Sebastian opened his eyes to greet the day as a man. A cool mist had settled quietly around his sleeping body, and Sebastian shivered. He blinked, his feral eyes returning to normal, his sight readjusting to view the world in flat human images. Sebastian located his secret stash of clothes and dressed before the oncoming slew of A.M. joggers could see him – not that he cared. He had nothing to hide.
Well, not nothing exactly.
Full from a night's ravishment, he found an accommodating park bench where he could sit down and watch the sun rise. The morning after was his favorite time. Though a strong and fairly ancient werewolf who could invoke the change at any time, the pull of the full moon made the instinct within him to change stronger.
Sebastian watched the lucent mist transform - the thick fog that had blanketed him as he slept turning into a thin silvery wisp stretching toward the sky, dissolving as it rose closer to the sun. The sun touched him, too, and he absorbed its purity - its cleansing light. As the light returned to him so did his humanity…and his memory. His stomach churned with revulsion at the image of the vagrant whose remains now lent themselves to his feeling full. He tried to console himself as he had many times before with the knowledge that at least his animal hunger seemed to always lead him to those with evil intentions. Evil begets evil, he mused. Last night's detestable feast had himself brutally attacked a young woman.
Sebastian had, in a way, enacted justice.
But the demon had crossed paths with an innocent, hadn't he? Sebastian could barely remember because the eyes of that filthy asshole, overflowing with terror, monopolized Sebastian's thoughts. The constant indulging of his hunger for mortal blood year after year, no matter how villainous, had taken its toll. His soul suffered. He no longer saw good in the world, only the evil in men's hearts. Even children that he passed, playing in the park or running to their mothers' outstretched arms, possessed traces of this evil. Sebastian could sense the depths of their true spirits, how far the evil might spread, who they would become in the future - and whether or not he might end up hunting them as well.
Sebastian heard his stomach groan. He laughed bitterly at the idea of being hungry. He shook his head, erasing the irony from his thoughts. He rose to leave, to start the long trek back to his apartment and return to his façade of a life. As he turned, he caught sight of a thin leather book lying on the ground at his feet, as though it were simply waiting for him to discover it. He bent slowly, still feeling the ache of muscles shortening to fit their human bones, and touched the soft cover. He slid his fingers beneath it and lifted it, the feeling of it in his hand filling him with comfort, a strange sense of security. He brought the journal to his nose and inhaled. The aroma of it sent his mind swirling with thoughts of him - his angel. How could Sebastian have forgotten?
He opened the book, savoring the clean scent of the man that clung lightly to the paper. He smiled as he flipped through it, each unlined page filled with words, emotions that reached out at him from the writing before his eyes could even focus on an individual sentence. The man's penmanship flowed fluidly across each page, words unhurried, each sentiment carefully chosen. Sebastian was surprised at how few corrections the man had made, the entire book penned in flawlessly scribed ink. Sebastian imagined that this book carried the only copy of these works, and Sebastian understood why the man was so willing to defend it with his life.
Thumbing through the pages, he found what he was searching for - his poem, the words of love that, even while facing the certainty of his own death, the man thought about him.
Come to me, tired soul,
Find rest with me.
Find solace.
I will shelter you.
Come to me,
Tired master of the night,
Weary wanderer of darkness,
Warrior bred of the damned.
Let me warm you with my soul.
See the joys of ecstasy in my arms.
I give you what is mine willingly.
Take what you need.
Let it transform you.
I invite you to be my own.
Traveler.
Lover.
Killer.
Wolf.
The last word, though a severe understatement, was the most poignant of all. Wolves, at least, were noble and loyal – pairs living together as one, mating for life. Werewolves were lone killers - terrible and damned. But the man last night had written this about one like him. Is that what he had seen when he looked at Sebastian last night? The curiosity welling within him was a mixture of nervous anticipation and intrigue. Sebastian's heart slammed in his chest. Never had he seen such a creature as that man - such a passionate beauty.
Even though Sebastian had forced the book from his hand, Sebastian remembered vividly the sound of the man's exhilaration when he left him. The man wanted his book back.
He wanted Sebastian to return it.
Sebastian flipped through the pages again till he found what he was hoping for. Inscribed on the back cover had been written If found, please return to Kurt Hummel along with an address. But Sebastian couldn't just arrive at his house. Sebastian knew what his body wanted. He meant with his wicked heart to claim Kurt, but if he showed up out of the blue, Sebastian might frighten him off. No, he would need to find Kurt in the city. He would use the lure of Kurt's scent imprinted on his brain to follow him and approach him somewhere neutral – somewhere he would feel safe, unthreatened.
Sebastian smiled as he held the book tightly in his grasp. Kurt, Kurt... He let the name roll through his mind. It was like a spell - an enchantment returning a sliver of light to his soul.
Yes, but spells can be broken...turn bad...ugly. The ancient voice of The First sounded as loud in his head as if it had been speaking somewhere behind him. But The First was long gone, and Sebastian was alone. For over 120 years he had lived with his demon curse.
But now it was time to search out his angel of light.