Disclaimer: I don't own 'Underworld'; you know the drill

Feedback: Always appreciated

AN: I was always surprised that nobody gave this storyline a shot before now, so I thought I'd try and write it myself; one-shot for now, but that may expand if I receive enough interest

The Vampire Leader

It had been almost a thousand years since his death, and she still remembered every moment as though it had been only yesterday.

The initial plan had been so straightforward; he would escape, he would wait for her, and then she would join him as they made a new life for themselves, away from the political and racial suppression that had frustrated them for so long.

She should have expected that he would attempt to free his brethren at the same time as he tried to escape himself, but she had long since resigned herself to the fact that Lucian would not have been the man she loved if he had done anything else. Even after her father learned the truth about their liaisons, they might still have been able to escape, but she had underestimated the intensity of her father's contempt for Lucian. As they fled through the fortress's underground passages, the other Death Dealers had dropped oil barrels into the passages as an attempted delaying tactic, and one such barrel had hit Lucian when he ran under an opening slightly too quickly, the blow stunning him long enough for the vampires above to start the fire before she could get him to safety.

Even an immortal could not have survived the damage he sustained in those moments- regardless of his rapid ability to heal, the fire had simply consumed him too quickly- but Lucian's fundamental nobility had shone through regardless. His body burning in agony, Lucian had launched himself through the hole leading to the courtyard, before engaging the vampires around him as a fighter more ferocious than the berserker warriors she had heard about in tales of the Vikings. The flames had continued to consume his fur as he transformed, but he had still continued his assault on their enemies, the Death Dealers unprepared for his power and precision strikes as opposed to the feral assault they had come to expect from the surviving werewolves.

He had still died in the end, but the visibility of the threat he posed had been enough to draw attention away from her as she made her own escape. She had managed to grab a crossbow from another Death Dealer to try and help him escape- people had been so focused on his more visible threat that they barely even noticed her attempts to flee- but it had swiftly proven useless; she didn't need her long experience with death to know that he wasn't going to make it. When her father had emerged to try and capture them both, Lucian's agonised roar at her to run had made it clear that escape was all that she could do to honour him; he was far too injured to survive what had been done to him, and her remaining would accomplish nothing.

If anything, she only wished that she had left a few seconds earlier; another Death Dealer had managed to strike her in the chest with a mace before she could reach the castle walls, the same fight leaving her with a nasty scar on the left side of her face that had nearly claimed her eye. While neither wound had hindered her efforts to escape, the damage sustained had caused her to suffer a miscarriage once she had made it out of the fortress. With that casual blow, she had lost the child that she had only recently realised the existence of, along with the last part of her love that she would have ever been able to hold.

When she reached the rendezvous location, the lycans that Lucian had assembled to his cause had been devastated to learn of his death, but the blood of the child she had carried had been enough to convince even the strongest doubters of the sincerity of her feelings for him. The one called Raze in particular had made it clear that he would follow her leadership, which had been more than enough for her to establish her authority over them as she prepared to launch her counter-attack.

The werewolves might have been animals, but the lycans deserved better than to be treated as second-class citizens; besides, on a personal level, the lycans had accepted her because of her child, where the vampires had automatically rejected her for the same reason.

As far as she was concerned, if her family would suppress an entire race because of what their forebears had been, she would prefer not to even consider herself a vampire any more.

That night, in the memory of her lost love, she had dedicated herself to both the destruction of the vampires who had condemned them for nothing more than loving each other, and the salvation of the lycans who had been consigned to slavery merely because of the circumstances of their birth. Raze might have been a newly-turned lycan, but his strength of will had been more than enough to compensate for that as he rallied the werewolves to join them in their attack on the fortress, particularly when all that was needed was to ensure that the werewolves targeted the enemies they would have gone after anyway. Combined with her own tactical knowledge, it hadn't taken long for them to mount an assault on the fortress a couple of nights after Lucian's demise, werewolves and lycans alike attacking the fortress close to dawn, with her fighting alongside Raze. When the sun rose as the battle continued, Raze had provided her with the skin of a slain werewolf to provide cover for any lycans who might make mistakes in the heat of battle; no vampire would willingly have donned such a disguise, and the scent it still carried was strong enough to trick any of the more feral werewolves still present into thinking that she was one of them.

The Elders and Tanis had escaped the massacre that night, but what really galled her about the memory was that, in their last face-to-face encounter, her father had still dared to act as though he had been the wronged party. She had done nothing more than choose a partner he did not approve of- regardless of what Lucian had done for them in the past and whose only 'sin' had been committed in her defence- and yet he had treated her as though she had rejected everything he had sought to build when all she wanted was to be allowed to live in peace with the man she loved and their child.

Even with their child and Lucian dead during their escape, Viktor had continued to act as though she was some kind of plague victim, unwilling to even consider her side in favour of his own fixation on the purity of his bloodlines; she wouldn't have been surprised if he had decided to execute her if he had managed to capture her. It had almost been a pleasure to stab him in the head during their final confrontation that day in the fortress, even if she had been uncertain that such a blow would have killed him for good even as she delivered it. She would have followed his fallen body to make sure, but her priority had to be Lucian's people rather than her own desires for revenge.

It hadn't taken long for her to hear reports that Viktor had survived, along with Tanis and the other two Elders, but she had decided to avoid pressing that issue at the time; her father might have had high expectations for her, but she wasn't arrogant enough to think that she was a match for an Elder. During a later skirmish, she had used her armour and the corpse of another female Death Dealer to fake her death to lull her father into a false sense of security, and Raze's subsequent plan to fake his own demise with the aid of opportunistic vampire Kraven had been just the additional edge they needed.

Raze…

He was not a substitute for Lucian in her heart, of course- she had long resolved herself to commit to Lucian's memory, and Raze held too much respect for her lost love to even consider taking their relationship further himself- but she had come to consider him a brother as well as a brother-in-arms over the centuries, and she felt that Raze saw her the same way. As far as most lycans were concerned, Raze was the true symbol of their rebellion against the vampires, and he had developed his own skills and understanding of tactics and combat over the centuries, but he still deferred to her command when they were planning a particularly powerful offensive assault. Having already witnessed him in action when he was human, she had been impressed at Raze's skills even before he was turned into a lycan, and the evident respect he had for Lucian's memory had further ensured her high opinion of him. For his part, while Raze had initially accepted her only in Lucian's memory, she had proven herself in his eyes over the years, and he had more than once stated that he considered her a true lycan in every way that mattered.

It was a point of frustration to her that she was unable to serve as a 'true' lycan by contributing to the cause as more than a single warrior, but even Raze's high opinion of her couldn't change the fact that anyone she bit would become a vampire rather than a lycan. While she had come to accept her fate, she refused to turn anyone she might encounter, relying on Raze to rally new recruits to their cause in her name; she could cope with being an outcast from the rest of her species, but she wasn't about to force anyone else into her position who didn't have to be there.

She had remained hidden for centuries, working to find some means of turning the tables on her father as her adopted people were hunted to the point of extinction, forced into an alliance with a vampire she would have ignored as dangerous to the Coven back when she still thought them worth defending…

But it would all be worth it in the end.

Now, almost eight hundred years since the death of her lover and child, Sonja was almost ready to punish her father for what he had done to her so many centuries ago.