I woke up screaming, more loudly than I ever had before. I had thought, when I had my first nightmare about Vampires, that nothing could be more frightening. This was. Time…the single most frightening element of my nightmares. How long did he have? No way of knowing.
How long did I have?
When I woke, Eric's arms were already around me, his fingers smoothing my hair, sending tingles across my shoulders. I was curled up against his chest. Though he didn't sleep as I slept, through the night when the dreams came naturally, he stayed in the bed with me, to be there when I woke up.
He shushed me softly, kissing the top of my head, waiting for me sobs to subside. I could feel how tense he was. He knew it must have been bad. It wasn't usually like this. He never asked me what I'd seen anymore. When I'd first been brought to Fangtasia, that was all he'd cared about. No one held me when I woke in a cold sweat, no one told me it would all be okay. I was forced to sleep, drugged, the dreams more vivid and harder to wake up from.
Once he had seen me as more than his own personal oracle, Eric had been unbelievably easy to love. Firm, authoritative, damaged, ashamed to love but full to brim with his emotion. I never wanted to dream a future without him in it, and not I had.
Even after my sobs had faded away and I was left only to catch my breath and slow my pulse, I still clung to him with rigid tension. He couldn't feel it, not against his indestructible skin, but I held him so tightly he could sense the strain on my muscles.
"I'm not going anywhere." He said gruffly, but I still held him close, as though I could restrain him, or keep him from bursting apart as he had in my dream.
Still patient, he waited some time in silence for me to ease up, to unravel myself and sit back. Still, my hands rested on his forearms. I still needed to know he was there, to touch him. Finally, he said thoughtfully, "Well that's never happened before."
As though I needed to be reminded.
The image, the sound of his wail when they drove the stake into his chest washed over me again, and I panicked, reestablishing my grip.
"What isit, _?"
Though I could tell he was frustrated with not knowing, and I was well aware he could break me if I made him mad enough, he just placed his hands on my hips and shook me gently.
"I don't want to say it out loud," I whispered, squeezing my eyes shut. "I just want to forget I saw it..."
"You know you can't. Your nightmares never lie, so the sooner you tell me, the sooner I can help."
The words stung, because he was right. The nightmares didn't lie. They tricked us sometimes, but what I saw came about in one way or another without fail.
"You know I would never let anything hurt you." He said, moving a hand up my side seductively, and then placing it on my moist cheek. "So fragile..." He mused.
He didn't understand. I'd almost come to believe that Eric knew everything. But he'd yet to experience love, real love. The kind of love that made it impossible to fear anything except losing him.
"You don't understand." I finally spoke, voice rasping from screaming and crying. "You can't protect me from this. You won't...be here."
"I would never leave you." he interjected, firmly and quickly. 'Not an option,' his eyes seemed to say.
"No..." I whispered, and with a wavering voice, "Not leave, but..."
I couldn't say it, my lip trembled even thinking about it.
Something dawned in his eyes, a comprehension. "Oh."
"...oh?" That's all you have to say?" I implored. "I saw you die!" I turned my head, the tears returning.
He paused, then said "Dying does not seem so bad when you've lived for a thousand years, and lost."
"But what about me?" I exclaimed. "You stole my life from me, you changed everything, and you would just die and expect me to walk out of Fangtasia and just go back?"
"You are not being held here against your will anymore. You haven't been for a long time. You can leave whenever you wish." He said all of this low and fast, angry.
"Don't turn this against me." I was timid and shy, but I would not allow him to make me the person in the wrong. "For months, this place was torture and you know it. After you started caring, after you -"
He stared at me, waiting for the sentence to continue. Finally, after a moment or two, he offered: "After I loved you?"
I was stunned for a moment. He'd never actually said the word before. The word. He was only saying it now to distract me, so I shook it off and plowed on.
"If that's what you want to call it...after that, I didn't want to leave. But you know very well that your little minions stole me. They dragged me out of my life and you watched me have nightmares, drug induced visions, for months." I hissed the last word. I wanted him to know those had been the worst four months of my life, if he didn't already.
Eric had this remarkable ability to look completely innocent and indifferent. I supposed that, compared to all of the other things he'd done over the years, what he'd done to me didn't seem like such a crime.
I backed away from him, removing all contact for the first time since I'd woken up. "God, why do you try to make me hate you?" I looked away, pulling my knees to my chest and resting my head on them, staring at the wall. There was a moment of silence.
"And this is your way of convincing me that you don't want me dead?" was his answer.
I turned back and glared at him angrily.
"What I'm trying to convince you of is that even though you made my life miserable, you changed it. I'm not miserable anymore, and I don't want to leave." I once again crawled across the twisted sheets to him, sitting on my knees to be at eye level with him. Placing my hands on his cheeks tenderly, I whispered "Despite everything, I don't hate you. And I won't. It's strange..." I moved a hand through his hair, then down to his shoulder. "I don't put anything past you. I have no doubt that if you wanted to know the future badly enough, you'd drug me again without a thought."
He opened his mouth to argue, eyes fiery. Daringly, I placed finger on his lips. More amazingly, he was quiet.
"You would. I know you would." I took a breath slowly. "And that hurts. But I love you not for your actions, but you. I don't know...you are so full of emotion, but you're more afraid of showing it than of anything. And you want to seem horrible, when you're really wonderful. I hadn't figured out why yet, but...I'm trying." I looked straight into his eyes, and then pressed my forehead to his, closing my own eyes. "I don't understand why, if you love me, you could die and expect me to just be okay. Or how you could let it happen, knowing I won't be..."
I moved my head down to the crook of his neck, wrapping my arms around his torso. I suddenly longed for a heartbeat...for a heart to be there at all.
He returned the embrace, but coldly. He was already distancing himself, I had already lost.
"If your life takes its natural course, and it will, you will never have to understand what it is to live to see your family, your friends, your way of life, and yourself deteriorate before your eyes." He paused, letting the words sink in, even though I was trying my best to ignore them, to not think about the difficulties of Eric's existence. He already felt like my whole life, it was hard to admit to myself that I was only the blink of an eye to him. A split second in a thousand years.
I closed my eyes, trying not to cry again even though I was still hidden in the crook of his neck. He smelled a little like earth, like nature...and like the energy and hodgepodge of smells in Fangtasia.
"You don't really love me, _"
My heart stopped for a second, or so it seemed. "How can you say that..." I whispered desperately. "How can you think-"
"I'm just the person who's here to hold you when you wake up. I'm the one who took away the drugs, to save you. It's impossible for you not to see me as a sort of savior. That's all it is."
I pulled away, looking up at him again. "You're wrong. I know how I feel."
"You don't." He put his hands on my forearms, pushing me away gently. "If you knew anything about me, you'd see it differently."
I stared into his eyes, trying to see any sort of way his words made sense, but I couldn't. All I could think about was how wrong he was, how badly I wanted him to live, to love me, to want me badly enough to stay alive. To find a way around the nightmare.
But it was impossible to convince him, and I had no energy to try. I sank away from him, back into the soft blankets and pillows around us. I wanted to kiss him, so I closed my eyes. It was easier when I couldn't see his cold eyes, his calm smirk, the face of a man who had not been happy for half a century. Maybe more.
"You give up? So easily?"
It was strange, the tone of his voice. Although I had every certainty that he believed I didn't love him, it also seemed that he desperately wanted me to. I didn't know what it would take to prove to him that I did love him, but I would find a way, once I saved his life.
Steeped in stoicism, he stood, heading for the door that led back into his other world, one of the pulsing energy of Fangtasia, and of hiding from the light.
"I haven't given up." I said it softly, but he heard anyway, as I'd meant him to. He didn't stop walking, so I spoke quickly, casually. "There was something else I saw, I didn't tell you before."
"What is it?" He stopped abruptly, turning around, seeming so far away from me even though he was just at the door, no more than fifteen feet from the bed.
I angled myself to look directly into his eyes, knowing this would make him completely invested in me, in the future.
"After you died, the same people who killed you came here."
He stared at me, an unspoken 'and…?'
"And then they killed me."
Maybe it was just my insanity, but I swore I saw the change in his face, the rapid re-writing of the past thirty minutes of conversation. His face said it all. Everything was different.
"If you die, Eric, I die."