Title: Dreams
Author: Kytten
Pairing: Dracula/Van Helsing
Rating: PG
Disclaimer: Don't own.
Summary: Gabriel dreams. For a moment, he remembers.
Author's Note: Yup. Another one. I'm feeling inspired.
"Hello, Gabriel."
An inky, all encompassing darkness. Van Helsing turns, but sees nothing.
"It's not like you to be so silent, Gabriel."
As he moves, he wonders if it's true. He's forgotten himself, forgotten everything. Once upon a time, perhaps he did not feel so dead… or so enslaved.
"Who's there?" He didn't mean to snap, but his voice comes out rough, angry.
His only answer is laughter, and the soft sound of footsteps nearing him. That laugh… he remembers it— a wisp of a dream on the edge of his consciousness. It reminds him of something he knows he's forgotten. Van Helsing swears, despising that all too familiar itch in the back of his mind.
"Look, I don't know who you are, but—"
"Oh, you don't, Gabriel?" The words whisper over his lips, the other man's breath a cool caress. He didn't realize this stranger had come so close…
But the sound of his name, nearly forgotten and twisted so beautifully by that clever tongue triggers something. He remembers, but only just— a fragmented bit of silver in the sun.
"Dracula."
A soft, questioning noise and the vampire has glided off, presumably in search of something to cast a bit of light.
"Where am I?" Gabriel tries, feeling oddly safe and wary in the same.
"Sleeping, I'd imagine." Dracula laughs and it's a clean, infectious sound. Gabriel wants to smile— would have, had he not been so nervous, so owned by the church.
Son of the devil, whispers in his head and he bows to it.
"Sleeping?" he asks instead, attempting to ignore himself for the greater good.
A soft shifting of cloth, a shrug perhaps, and a wall torch flares into life. Dracula smiles, turns. He looks younger than Gabriel remembers, and just a little smaller.
"We share dreams often, you and I." He smiles again and Gabriel can see his teeth are dull. "Always have. They're hardly ever productive, however. You had such a horrible memory."
Gabriel relaxes just a little. It feels like a dream. Or at least how a dream should feel, he supposes, as he cannot remember having dreamed at all.
"When you say always…?"
Dracula only waves the question off and moves past him to sit on the windowsill.
"I refuse to go into our past with you. I may love you still, Gabriel, but you are not the man I knew."
It feels just a little like his world has split apart.
"You… You what?"
Dracula sighs, a little laugh escaping. It is not so infectious now, only tired. He looks young, but there are four hundred lonely years drifting in his eyes.
"Won't you sit down?" he says by way of answer, gesturing to the half of the window he's not already occupying.
Gabriel doesn't move. He feels frozen, tired, infinite in a single terrifying instant.
"I want to remember." And he does, desperately. Dracula turns away to keep from seeing the pain in his eyes.
"I'm tired of your prodding at old wounds, Gabriel."
Gabriel lurches forward then, gaining command of his body at last, and catches Dracula by the shoulders. At the look in the vampire's eyes, he knows no other man would have survived such foolishness. But he cannot, will not let this go.
"Tell me," he demands. "You can't just leave it at that! Tell me what it is I've forgotten."
Gently, Dracula pries himself free and with a long-suffering look, rises.
"I will not. Come find me if you are truly so desperate."
Gabriel did not expect to feel such panic at the sight of his retreating back.
"Where are you going?"
Dracula runs his fingers through his hair, knocking the silver clasp loose. Gabriel watches it arc to the ground and almost, almost remembers. When he looks up, Dracula is scowling at him.
"Why do you do this?" he snaps, gesturing to the spreading crimson marring the stomach of his dove-gray shirt. "Always so dramatic, Gabriel."
And then he's gone, the only sign of his passing the silver clasp abandoned on the floor.
Gabriel wakes up feeling desperate, though he can't remember why, and on a whim decides to visit Anna's grave. And as he stands there on the edge of the cliff, staring out at a storm-ridden sea, something long forgotten makes him want to jump.
Is he watching, he wonders, would he catch me? Though he can't remember why.