Yeah, this isn't the fluffy fic I said I was gonna write a few days ago. But I finished watching Season 3 on Sunday and so the quote from the flashback that's in the summary just got stuck in my head and so I wrote this during school.

It's technically written in second person but also not really because the whole thing is like an unidentified first person speaking directly to Aidan. The first person could be a voice in Aidan's head talking to him or him talking to himself or some omniscient, omnipresent being watching over him, whatever. Choose one or come up with something else, I really don't care. Other than the possibility of Aidan talking to himself, it's just not an actual person.

You looked the Devil in the eyes and didn't run away. You ran towards him.

Some would consider that an act of bravery—chasing after what posed a threat to your fellow soldiers so as to save them even at the possible cost of your own life. Truly admirable. Bishop considered it bravery, even. That's why he chose you. You were the perfect man for him.

Others might say that it was nothing more than stupid and reckless. The Devil ran away to give you a chance at life—a very clear choice: To save yourself or be "heroic." You risked yourself merely for the honor of men who were already dead, men whom you barely knew. What was the point? Did it even achieve anything? You could have gone on to help win the war as a human and then go home without being accused of being a demon or your wife of witchcraft. Or you could have died honorably in battle.

Bishop probably would have found your body amongst the ruin and turned you anyway, though. You already thought about this and came to that conclusion. Not because there would have been any real reason, since you would have run away and thus not been brave, but simply because you felt that your fates would have been intertwined regardless. You would have woken up in a different clearing surrounded by different bodies, surely, and Bishop would have told you "It was a long time waiting for you, my friend. You were always meant to end up here, with me."

He was always a devoted fan of destiny, Bishop. Not in the sense that he believed there was a set course the future would take, but in that he believed it would always end up in the same place, one way or another. He believed that whatever happened was meant to happen. And he believed that your destiny was intimately connected with his. That much was always obvious.

You fought against it. You ran back to your men even when Bishop told you, "You won't find friends; you'll find lunch." He was right and you think that you knew that as much as you tried to believe otherwise. Then again, you didn't expect that hunger at the first sight of human blood.

After your friend fell completely limp in your arms, you weren't sure whether you even felt sorry. If anything, you were sorry that you weren't sorry. That hunger and power was the best thing that ever happened to you, in a way. Even if you hate it. Did you hate it, really?

Sure, it was vampirism that caused the problems in the first place, but it also allowed you to fix it. You were able to get revenge. You lost your wife and child, but the revenge felt amazing. You still remember the feel of a neck snapping under your hand for the first time, and you remember how you felt like you had been reborn a god.

You tried so hard not to be a monster when you didn't need to be. But can you really define the time that you need and don't need to be? Is it only when you're hungry that it's acceptable to be a monster? Or do you have to be hungry beyond belief? Is anger enough to justify it?

But you were never really a monster. Bishop told you that. You're a shark, so be a shark. You took what you needed. And sometimes more than that, but that's just a shark's nature. There was never any getting around it. No matter how much you despised it, no matter how long you lasted on the disgusting substitutes you found, you would always go back to it, and you always will. It wasn't natural, you said. You'd have been better off dead. But you also wouldn't have been. You wouldn't have spent all those years with Bishop.

You suppose, now, that you got used to it. Began to enjoy it, even. Instinct took over and your morals got blurry at the edges until you might have lost sight of them almost completely, only to regain them in flashes at random times.

Susanna and Isaac became your past, and your life became Bishop and blood and violence. And you won't lie to yourself now; you liked it. You did leave at times, but you always came back. You accepted that your family was gone and allowed Bishop to be a constant. You let him kiss you without shame or disgust, and you returned the touches with nearly as much enthusiasm, blood-drunk or not.

Even when he became murderously possessive, you liked it. It may have scared you a little, but you did like it. You don't let yourself remember those days anymore. You tell yourself that you weren't in your right mind and that you simply want to erase Bishop from your life in order to be free from his memory. But really, you want to forget him because you don't want guilt looming over you.

He does loom over you, though, and you still feel guilt. Sometimes you can feel his fingertips brushing your cheek from right before you cut his head off.

In those moments of clarity when you realized how many people you had killed alongside Bishop, you would attempt to abstain and avoid your maker for several days. You never lasted very long. Clarity wasn't made for monsters. Not for sharks like you.

You would always tell yourself that this hadn't been a choice. That it was between eternal life and never seeing your family again and so of course you chose to be able to see your family. Bishop forced you out of some weird, instant attachment to you. He killed you and then rebuilt you.

He shouldn't have, though. Even now you sometimes think that this all should never have happened. If it weren't for Josh and Sally, you might wish that you had never met Bishop. Hell, you probably would even kill yourself. There's no home amongst the vampires for you anymore. You're not even free in the way that you tried to be—Bishop is dead, but he's still there in your head. You feel that you deserve to die—if not because of the countless people you've drained and killed, then because of Bishop. Perhaps not as a heart for a heart, but because your lives have been too intertwined in the past couple hundred years for you to go on while he doesn't.

Look at you, identifying and sympathizing with a man who essentially ruined your life.

He was your maker, though.

He wanted to build something with you.

He gave you everything.

He loved you more than anything. You've known that for a while.

It didn't have to end the way it did. You're a monster among monsters for killing him.

But you tell yourself that it was Bishop's fault. Which it was, arguably. It was he who turned you and thus him at fault that you did what you did, and became what you became. You didn't just live in the dark; he dragged you into it.

When you think about it, it all boils down to the fact that you decided to run towards him.

You were attracted to the darkness from the very start, weren't you?

Why I like writing about characters' mental deterioration, I don't know. But it seems to be the only thing I can do with Bishop and Aidan. At least I managed to write about someone other than Aidan.

Also I may or may not have been influenced a bit by Mark Pellegrino's character in Supernatural, Lucifer, alongside the actual quote and context from Being Human.

If you have any thoughts about this, please review!