[Rating: M] [Stefan/Anna] [Companion Fiction to The Villain]
New York, December 1919.
There's a hard, cold wind chasing the snow in the streets and people with no business here aren't around and about this late Monday night.
There's one dead giveaway about vampires and the cold. Vampires don't need to breathe, and even if most decide to keep their breathing reflex - it's one of many that can be turned on and off at will - their breath doesn't crystallize. It makes them really easy to spot if you know what you're looking for, and it will be noticeable even in conversations with normal people after a while.
So, Anna usually wears a scarf - tonight it's red, with white flowers - or something to cover her face when going out in the winter, and male vampires often use knitted balaclava masks or the like.
Not that any of that seems to matter to Stefan Salvatore as he's strolling along the streets a rough fifty yards in front of her, stumbling every five steps or so, clearly massively intoxicated.
She spotted him when she debarked the ship from Bilbao in the harbor, and she's been following him at a safe distance ever since. She's not exactly sure why. It's just that Anna loves to hide; she loves to find out stuff about people without them noticing, and when it comes to Stefan, whom she even doubted would still be alive before she heard the rumors - she didn't exactly peg him for the type to survive long as a vampire - she's doubly curious.
She sees him trying to straighten himself up a little, smoothing out his clothing and opening the door to a tavern.
Stefan doesn't quite remember how he got outside. There was this pub, and there was this girl, and then there was only the throbbing pulse in his veins, and as the screams grew louder and the limbs started to litter the floor he made it out of there, only to be met by two New York policemen a block away.
Only these weren't your average policemen, one of them throwing a pitcher of something in his face, and it hurt, way more than anything had hurt ever, and he felt his skin burning, almost to the point of peeling off his skull, and he heard the sounds of their swords (swords?!) leaving their sheaths, and then the monster inside him took over, and he doesn't remember anything more.
… and now he's standing here, in a dark alley somewhere in Brooklyn, one head in each hand, grinning like a maniac, quite unable to walk and feeling like a perverted Hamlet on a stage. "Ah, Horatio… Once I knew thee well." He looks from the first to the second head, and who is he? Is it me? "To live or not to live… That is no longer the question…" He giggles, coughing hard, trying to spit out the vervain that's made its way down his respiratory tract, feeling the tinge of panic attempting to eat its way up to the surface. "What's your name?", he whispers. "What's your name?"
"Hi, Stefan. Busy trying to earn yourself another Ripper title? Monterrey wasn't enough?" The high-pitched laughter stings in his ears even if most of the surroundings are drowned out by the thick red fog. He tries to focus, tries to make out the owner of the voice, only failing miserably, drunk on blood and partly incapacitated by the slash of the sword which has almost separated his lower left leg from his body.
"Who are you?"
"You know me. Wow, you sure helped yourself to a grand dinner. Two strong boys in the prime of their life."
He stumbles, crashing into the garbage bin beside him and dropping the heads, watching them roll out of sight. The world is spinning and it's getting worse by the second, the vile poison they drenched him in sipping into his wounds.
"If you want to kill me, do it now. I'm in no shape to fight anybody."
She comes to his side, leaning down - It's a she, he realizes, at least from the general shape of her body - and cradling his head in her lap.
"Stefan? Don't you recognize me?"
"Anna?" The maid? But she's dead. Surely she's dead. I'm hallucinating.
"Yes, Stefan, it's me. I'm here." She pulls him halfway up, pushing him into a sitting position against the wall of the abandoned factory building overlooking the alley, taking his horribly twisted leg and snapping it into place, allowing the healing process to start. He growls weakly. Inspecting him and unbuttoning his shirt, she's noticing burn marks from the vervain all over his face and running down his neck and over his chest. He's a mess.
She sees one of the policemen's heads - the fat, blonde one - laying in the gutter beside the garbage bin and quickly fetches it, putting it to his mouth, pleading. "Drink. You've lost a lot of strength. Please, drink."
He seems to have drifted into unconsciousness, and at first she thinks it's useless, but after a bit of nudging, she manages to get a few drops of blood into his mouth. He grabs the head, like a goblet of wine, proceeding to suck out every ounce of blood through its neck. She exhales in relief as she's watching the streams of red liquid make their way down his cheeks.
Looking around her, the entire scene is a bloodbath. The corpses of the two policemen lie some twenty yards away, the other head has fallen into a trash can and the snow is tinted red around them.
For any normal person this would be an atrocious sight, but she's not a normal person, and she loves it. It's the poetry of violence, it's the sweet smell of blood in the air, it's exhilerating, it's a turn-on. She hears Stefan's muscles twitch as the cure-it-all he just ingested does its magic and she sees his leg starting to straiht out, reattaching itself properly to the body. And then she hears a low, guttural sound in his throat.
Looking up to his face, she sees the marks of the vervain disappearing from it, but the expression left isn't that of any sentient creature. Right now, only the animal remains, and it's staring back at her.
He's had too much. It was needed to heal his extensive injuries, and it couldn't be helped, but here she is, with a vampire no more self-aware than a lion.
He leans forward against her, sniffing, drawing in her scent - completely void of any thought, purely going on instinct, reaching out his hand to her neck, and it doesn't matter if it's right or wrong, because she can't help answering his signals, those pesky little hormones sipping through her skin, her panties starting to moist, giving him just the response he wants.
If she's got any excuse, it's that she didn't start it.
He lets out an inhuman growl, intoxicated by the stream of blood running down his throat as his fangs come out. Pulling her down on him, he grabs a hold of her thick black wool coat and rips it apart in one swift motion along with her dress and undergarments, completely exposing her from the waist and up.
She sees how his eyes go completely black as he grabs her arms, slams their bodies together and violently sinks his teeth into her left shoulder, and she could stop it. He's no match for her whatsoever, a mere seventy-year-old child up against a girl who was turned back when people still believed the Earth to be the center of the universe, but she lets it happen. She looks down at him, all torn up, soaked in blood and vervain, his coat burning to her touch, and he is just this perfect monster.
Did she even know this was what she wanted; is that why she followed him all the way through the night, watching him through the window ripping into the jugular vein of the servant girl while the rest of the customers screamed in horror, watching his fight with the policemen, ready to step in if it looked like they'd get close to finishing him off? She doesn't know; she just knows in this moment she wants him, man or animal, and she can't stop herself.
She feels her own blood spill over her chest, trickling down over her stomach inside her wide, black skirt and into her panties, and why does he have to make such a mess of things? There's bloodeverywhere, human and vampire intermingling with each other and she feels herself weaken, Stefan apparently having drained her half dry, and she pushes him back against the wall with a roar. "Enough!"
She knows he can't hear her, looking at her bewildered, hissing through his teeth as she makes short work of his pants, impatiently ripping off her panties - they were destroyed anyway - and forcefully driving herself down over him, burying him inside her all the way to the hilt in one violent thrust, hearing him gasp in primal delight. That actually hurt. He's way, way too big for her without any real foreplay, but it's like she wants to punish herself for what she's doing with him.
She gazes into his eyes, losing herself in that eternal black chasm of the beast beneath her, and as she starts riding him, slowly and delectably slipping up and down his length and feeling him grow even thicker and fuller, squeezing him hard inside her, she thinks back to that young teenager she used to know, all bright and sunshine, and whatever happened to that boy? He'd likely be dead by now anyway.
Losing eye contact, he's biting and scratching her everywhere, dozens of small bite marks all over her body, her arms, her neck and her breasts, her nipples almost frozen from the harsh weather as she picks up the pace. She twists his head up hard against her and kisses him deeply, biting through his lower lip keeping him in place as he reacts with a deep moan and that's it. She can't take this anymore.
She feels the wave of her orgasm splashing over her, screaming like a wounded deer into his mouth as he thrusts himself as deep as he can and then just stops, holding her down while she feels his seed pulsing into her.
They're lying there in the gutter for nearly half an hour, the snow covering them up in the street. Any human being would probably be half dead from the cold already but if tonight's proceedings have proved anything, it's that neither of them are really human.
"Anna. It's you. It's really you." He's turned his head, watching her, and his eyes are back to normal, the same emerald green she used to love.
"It's really me." She blushes in shame, getting to her feet, trying to help him stand upright and then realizing the futility of it all, taking him into her arms and making their way to her room. It would be a strange sight to behold if anyone were there to see it, this tiny, half-naked girl carrying a boy more than twice her size like a feather, and then she picks up the speed, and they're home.
She's dropping him off in the bed. It's not a very fancy place. She's compelled herself this room in the attic - she's never been any good with money, but at least she knows how to survive. There's no electricity, not even running water, and she makes her way down the stairs to fetch a bucket before returning to his side.
She spends the rest of the night cleaning him up with a wet towel, gently removing his clothing to wash away the stains from the night's events, looking at him as he's drifting into sleep, wondering what to make of him, what to make of herself. How do I feel about myself?
When he wakes up, she's gone.