Running Up That Hill
By: Midnight's Angelic Guardian
Rating: K
Summary: Henry POV piece. Involves Detective Celluci and is definitely Henry/Vicki, but I think Vicki/Mike fans should enjoy it as well.
Author's Note: A short, melancholic piece. Don't really know where it came from, but then I'm not certain that really matters much at all. What I do know is for the longest time this fic languished without a title, known only as 'Blood Ties one-off' to my computer. Then I heard a song from Placebo with the same title, and the lyrics spoke to me, and the combination of those and the pensive mood of the music really struck me as something that fit Henry's mood in this piece. So, that's about all the story I can give you. If you can find a copy of the song to listen to while you read, I think it really enhances the reading experience. But that's just my opinion.
The funeral took place three weeks ago, but the granite headstone was fresh, the carving raw, the edges still sharp, not worn as it would be after the passage of time. It had been placed earlier that day; Henry could still smell the workers on the stone.
This was the first time Henry had visited the site: the funeral had been held during the day, something that had angered him when he first heard of it, but after a three hour rage that cost more than five thousand dollars in repairs to his penthouse apartment, he admitted that he understood. After all, much as he only knew her at night, she lived the best parts of her life during the day: the parts she could see clearly. But it hurt, that he couldn't be there to see her lain to rest. And without that, and without a marker, he couldn't make himself believe she was here, that she was really gone.
He had always been a good Catholic; he said his prayers, in English and Latin, thank you very much, and in almost five hundred years, he had never wavered in his faith until she got sick, and none of his prayers could save her. And in the end, she died in someone else's arms, and he knew none of it, until Corinne came to his door, her eyes rimmed in red, and he learned to hate the smell of death.
--
He heard the man's approach long before he spoke.
"Detective Celluci."
The footsteps paused in surprise a moment and Henry smiled faintly. Even after all this time, the detective would never get used to Henry's abilities. The footsteps continued quickly, however, and the bigger man came up beside the vampire.
"I haven't been a detective for a long time, Fitzroy."
"Maybe not on paper," Henry said laughingly, looking askance at the retired detective, taking in the hair that contained more gray than he remembered from their last encounter, and the new lines on his face. Humans aged so quickly, Henry was always surprised. He shook it off, however, and looked back down. "But, it's my experience that no detective ever truly retires. Vicki certainly never did."
"No, Vicki didn't. She was always that way: driven. Never could leave well-enough alone." Everything about Celluci softened with that sentence and Henry knelt to trace the letters in the stone to hide the pain that tightened his jaw and sparkled in his eyes at Celluci's words.
All was silence for long minutes.
"I wish I could have been there."
Henry kept his voice carefully void of emotion. He'd had years of practice, but it was almost impossible.
"She didn't want you to see her that way." Celluci paused thoughtfully. "Or, maybe it's that she didn't want to see you that way. Maybe she didn't want to remember what she used to be, what you always will be."
"What I'll always be is hers," Henry snapped angrily, standing and spinning to stand face-to-face with the other man faster than the human eye can perceive.
"Oh come on, Fitzroy," Celluci sneered, looking the vampire straight in the eye, not the slightest bit intimidated by his black gaze and slightly bared fangs. "I know you better than that. Hell, after a while, you'll hardly remember she ever existed. You'll find another woman to obsess over, you always do, and Vicki will become a hazy memory of a time you pretended you could play the good guy. So don't even try to play the shattered lover card, you aren't capable of it. Hell, you told Vicki yourself, your kind can't even manage to share a city without trying to kill one another, let alone a life."
Henry forced himself to step back from Celluci and walk several steps away, struggling to restrain his fury and desire to rip the other man to shreds for his slurs. He clenched his fists so hard his fingernails gouged half-moons into his palms, blood dripping from his knuckles and soaking into the grass.
It was nearly ten minutes later that he felt calmed enough to turn back around, and he was shocked to see no sign of Celluci, save for slightly flattened grass where the other man had stood. He shook his head, scolding himself for letting himself get so distracted that he didn't notice Celluci walking away.
Still, with the detective gone, he could return to his perusal of Vicki's headstone in peace, so he did just that, sinking down to sit on the grass in front of the polished stone. He worried his bottom lip in his teeth as he read the epitaph over and over, looking more like the seventeen-year-old boy he would always be than he had in four hundred years.
Victoria Anne Nelson-Celluci
1971 – 2024
Beloved
He always told himself that when she was gone, he would follow. He would sit up and greet the dawn, so he didn't have to live without her. But the night Coreen told him, he sat in his apartment and looked out the window until the dawn started to lighten the sky, and then he pressed the button to bring down the shutters, and went to sleep. And the night after the funeral, he again sat staring out those windows, only to close himself away from the sun. And now, three weeks later, he was still here. And he knew he wouldn't be meeting the dawn today, either.
He stood and brushed himself off, looking down at the beautiful chunk of stone. He reached down and traced the lines of her first name, ignoring the rest of it, because it wasn't how he knew her.
"Someday, Vicki," he said, nodding decisively. "Maybe not today, maybe not this year, maybe not in ten years, or fifty, but someday, I'll be ready. And then, I'll come here, and see the sun rise for the last time. This I vow to you."
With that, he tucked his coat firmly around him against the night's breeze and strode out of the graveyard toward his apartment building.
fin