TITLE: The Other Side of Waking
AUTHOR: Mari
EMAIL: Ficangel@yahoo.com
SUMMARY: Here there be monsters.
RATING: I'm squeaking this into PG-13 because, other than 'Fuck' being bandied about once, there's not anything real intense going on. There's violence and fade-to-black sex, but we get that on network television every night. There is, however, male/male kissing and eroticism. If this offends you in any way, please turn back now. I suffer neither fools nor flames gladly.
DISCLAIMER: All the characters within belong to a whole lot of people who are not me. The author claims ownership over nothing but the plot.
PAIRINGS: Michael/Selene, Michael/Lucian.
The Other Side of Waking
He dreamed in blood and death, Technicolor gore. Itching fang and rending jaw and arterial spray warm and wet beneath the moon. This time, rabbit. The next, perhaps a deer. And after that...
"No," Michael whispered, as a sly voice within whispered that he ought not to make promises he couldn't keep. The possibility that 'no' might someday transform into 'yes' drew a line of ice down his spine and threw a coil of anticipation into his gut.
And on that day, he was terrified that he would welcome it.
He jolted awake, swearing that he was able to taste his own heart as it crawled up his throat, slick with sweat that immediately turned arctic in the over air-conditioned motel room. Worse still, he was harder than he could remember being since the sticky, confusing teenage years. A wave of gooseflesh rippled across his skin.
"Michael?" There was a curious, concerned lilt to her voice that made it all the worse. Selene was propped onto her elbows, her hair even more tousled than usual and her eyes shading into a vivid electric blue-not even a second's disorientation for this girl-as she studied him. Her lower lip was sucked into her mouth in a way that would have been cute if it weren't for the hint of pearly fang that it exposed. Even with horror still settling over his skin like a cloak, she was one of the sexiest things that Michael had ever seen. "Are you all right?"
His heart had taken back its rightful place within his chest cavity, but was celebrating its return by doing an exaggerated pitter-pat dance that Michael heard with the force of a freight train in his ears. If it were this audible to him, then to Selene it must be a series of explosions. Michael breathed slowly through his nose. "Fine," he said, wondering if he was really as transparent as he felt. "A dream." Only a dream. By saying it, he would will himself to believe it.
Selene's eyes leapt delicately downwards, then returned to his face. "Oh." A light rose hue had appeared on her china complexion.
Michael's lips twitched into a smile. The dream continued its journey into the realm of phantoms, banished back under the bed with all the over nighttime horrors. "Wanna know what I was dreaming about?"
Selene arched her eyebrows. Her second downward glance lingered longer. "How many chances do I get?" Her voice was stilted and hesitant, still new to teasing as an art form. Michael kissed her because she tried.
Slow and careful to begin with, warming the chill interior of her mouth with long sweeps of his tongue; harder as something howled from deep inside him. One of Selene's fangs nicked his lip, drawing a bead of crimson that she licked away, cat-like, before sliding her hand beneath the sheets and taking him in her palm. She ran her fingers down his length, applying the sweetest amount of pressure.
Michael groaned and Selene nipped at his lip again, emboldened. "I think you have the right idea."
The blue in Selene's eyes had dwindled back into rich chestnut, dark and large-pupilled. The smile that she favored him with was so sweet and pure that Michael imagined he could see the woman that Selene must have been before Viktor turned her. He kissed her again as he lay his body on top of hers, parting alabaster thighs with his knee, ignoring the rising howl that echoed through his skull.
A calf. Young, its horns just beginning to peek through the fuzzy cap of fur on its head. Its entrails still steamed across snow so white that the blood seemed a defilement.
'I did this.' Michael stared down at the pitiful remains and tried to prod his sluggish brain into action. 'This was me.' His breath steamed in the air and blood droplets froze in his hair, on his skin. Later it would seem odd that ice had the power to burn.
"Yes." Lucian's cultured tones came out as a hiss better suited to a snake than a wolf. It made the hair on the back of Michael's neck rise, drew a cold finger down his spine. His teeth itched as he turned around. "Go away." The words felt like a plea rather than a command.
"I'm afraid I can't do that." A step closer as large, dark eyes scanned Michael's face with a casual cruelty that they had only hinted at in life. Lucian's gaze flicked over Michael's shoulder to the half-eaten calf. He clucked his tongue. "Making a mess of things, aren't we?" Lucian moved around him to crouch beside the fallen animal, his sleeve brushing against Michael's arm as he passed. Michael jerked back as if the touch had been made of silver, and Lucian's eyes were mocking and amused. "I'm impressed," Lucian said, stretching out his hand to touch the blood cast across the snow. It stained his fingers and he rubbed them together slowly. "It's usually a human by now."
Bile rose in Michael's throat; to his horror, it was tinged with blood. He leaned over barely in time to vomit across the snow rather than his own feet. Lucian remained silent until Michael was through, resting on his heels and looking every inch the Big Bad Wolf.
"I didn't want this," Michael said, trying and failing to spit the sour taste out of his mouth.
Tiniest lift of those elegant shoulders. Otherwise, Lucian could have been carved from marble. "No one does." He rose to his feet in a move graceful enough to make Selene envious and flicked his eyes back towards the corpse in the snow. They were far too placid and dark to harbor anything good. "We deal with our natures in the best way that we know how, while trying to draw as little blood or attention as we can manage. It's hardly a cause for alarm." Lucian took a closer look at Michael and his expression shifted. Michael was reminded that 'Lucian' wasn't far removed from 'Lucifer'. "Unless," and Lucian's voice took on a lilting quality that was begging for somebody to hit him, "it is not a human that you fear would be the victim of your...overindulgence."
'Selene, sprawled across the snow as gracelessly as a marionette whose strings had been tossed aside by a careless child. The elegant column of her throat laid open, exposing muscle and bone and esophagus. Michael cannot see if her eyes are blue or brown, because the top half of her face has been entirely ripped away.'
The gorge was rising again. Michael curled his hands into fists, aware that his nails were lengthening themselves into claws, cutting deep canyons into his palms. The pain served as simultaneous anchor and spur. If he were to look at his arms, he knew that there would be a metallic blue-grey sheen rising to the surface. "Shut up."
Lucian's lips parted; the glitter of his fangs could be mistaken for diamonds. "My, we have grown into a confident young thing."
Michael's teeth itched as his canines lowered. Twin sets of instincts, both of them demanding blood, rose in his mind. Only a dim certainty that he would be somehow giving Lucian what he wanted held him back. "Somehow I don't see myself getting my ass kicked my a dream," he said, an unmistakable bitter taunt entering his voice.
A flicker of...something crossed Lucian's face, there and gone so quickly that pursuing it would have been like trying to chase a rabbit down its hole. "A dream," Lucian echoed, his voice tinged with an equally indefinable something. "Yes, that's all." Lucian stepped closer. Michael allowed himself to neither attack nor give Lucian the satisfaction of seeing him step back, so that within three paces they were nose to nose. Lucian was several inches shorter than Michael, but in spite of his smaller stature he gave off a sense of bone-shattering strength. Heat rolled off of him so intensely that it was a wonder the snow wasn't melting in a wide circle around his feet. "Do yourself a favor, Michael. Don't ever die."
Michael stared. "Sweet Christ Al-"
Lucian kissed him.
It wasn't like Selene's cool mouth and slow, oddly innocent explorations. Lucian was angles and rage and quickly sweeping tongue, parting Michael's lips and taking entrance before he had time or mind to protest. After centuries of life Lucian knew what he was doing, and Michael found himself allowing his first chance to pull away go by, and then his second, and his third.
But there was blood on Lucian's tongue.
The terrible vision of Selene bloodied and broken passed through Michael's mind and he gagged hard, wrenching back and stumbling away with his hand over his lips. They felt swollen and warm to the touch. "The fuck?" A shrill note of panic rose in his voice and lodged in his throat like a stone.
Lucian panted and turned the corners of his mouth turned upwards in what might have been a smile. Wolves often flashed smiles like that, when in reality they were readying themselves for attack. Michael wondered why he wasn't stepping back further. He wondered why he wasn't waking himself up right now and ending this.
He wondered why Lucian wasn't kissing him again.
Lucian didn't approach again, though he was panting slightly and his eyes were very bright. He dragged his tongue quickly across his teeth, a move far more reptilian than lupine, and Michael saw that they were sharp as knives. "Different world, Michael, " Lucian said, voice honey-sweet, blasphemous with the blood that mouth had shed. "Whole new set of rules." Lucian made the smallest of motions to the side, allowing Michael a glimpse of the carnage painted over his shoulder. His smile was the devil itself.
Selene. Of course. Michael's throat constricted and his stomach clenched, suspending the remaining food in his belly into a dangerous, painful limbo. And beside her lay himself, his mouth still painted with her dark blood even as his eyes were open and staring. "Not real," Michael muttered.
Lucian shrugged: a bored, indifferent prince. The fact that he was supposed to be dead was apparently the least of his concerns. "What is?" He didn't wait for an answer before he stepped close to Michael again, allowing less than a millimeter's space between them. He threw off heat like a furnace, or a raving fever. "You may as well indulge it," Lucian murmured, his voice tickling Michael's ear. Dead men weren't supposed to breathe. "Or it will eat you alive." The slow in-and-out of his breathing created a warm, moist trail as it crawled across Michael's cheek. When it finally reached his mouth, Michael welcomed it.
He was dreaming again. He did that a lot. Selene didn't know if it was a human thing, or a part of the werewolf side of his nature. She herself had been a vampire for so long that memories of anything else-other than of course that final, terrible night-dwindled into a haze of could-have-beens and might-have-happeneds. But Michael dreamed every night, sometimes so violently that Selene would have to grab his wrists to stop him from striking her. Upon waking he would claim no memory.
Selene had lived with lies for well over a century. She knew one when it tickled her ears now.
She watched him sleep for a long time, the line between her eyes drawn deep enough to drive a bullet down.
End.