Author's Note: My recently unearthed first fan fiction ever! It's like a case study for everything pop culture and pop psychology in the year 2000. Oh, eighth grade. Heart you.


Death To Chivalry

1

"Penny for your thoughts?" Hannah asked her soulmate gently as she came through the huge, wooden doors of the library.

"Huh?" he said, snapping out of his trance. Hannah came over to the plush, red couch on which Thierry was brooding and sat down beside him.

"Whatcha thinkin'?"

"Oh, I was just wondering how Poppy's vision will effect our search for the fourth Wild Power." He heaved a long sigh and rested his head against the back of the couch, staring up at the mahogany ceiling.

"Well, tell me about her vision and I'll help you figure it out," Hannah offered helpfully.

Pulling her into an embrace so her head rested on his shoulder and his cheek on her hair, he started explaining. "In Poppy's vision she saw a small group of the most powerful Circle Midnight witches doing a forbidden spell in a large, sacred building. All she could get from it was that it was extremely powerful and extremely dangerous and the only thing she has to go on is a phrase or two of the chanting. Thea asked Blaise to look through some of Grandma Harman's old records. It's probably going to take a while to find a match, and until then we're stuck." He heaved another long sigh.

"Well, if it's Circle Midnight obviously it means the Night World is finally going to retaliate. The spells got to be big or else they wouldn't risk it, not with more and more Night People joining Circle Daybreak every day," she reasoned.

"It's about time they did something. I was beginning to wonder if the Night World had found the fourth Wild Power after all. I mean, it's almost been a full year since the third Wild Power was found."

"They're either desperate or it's a practically full-proof spell. Either way, it means trouble for Circle Daybreak."

"You got that right. At least we know the Wild Powers we do have are safe. They're not happy, but they're safe. There's no way the Night World could find out where they are. Only the most trusted of the Daybreakers are guarding them and there's no way anyone could talk them out of giving up the locations. If I hadn't picked the places out myself I probably wouldn't even know."

Hannah gave a little laugh then decided to move on to more pleasant things. "Have you started telling everyone about the Christmas party?" she inquired.

Thierry didn't even blink at the change of subject. "Yep. So far I've called Ash and James and Thea and Thea called Gillian. Everyone's suppose to start coming the twenty-first."

Hannah frowned. "That doesn't leave much time to get ready. It's already the eleventh. School gets out the twentieth and I don't have to go back to school until the twelfth, but it still only leaves four days to get all the decorations up."

"You have no faith in me. I've been throwing parties for centuries. I once threw one for Marie Antwonett. Do you know how hard it was to please that woman?"

"You so did not throw a party for royalty, you're lying," Hannah accused, only half-serious. Thierry rarely ever lied.

"I don't know what you're talkin' about, I am royalty," he said, faking indignantly.

Hannah looked at him and rolled her eyes. "Anyway, my mom is coming up tomorrow, remember?"

"How could I forget? Whenever I called you at school that's all you would talk about," Thierry replied, mimicking her expression.

"I have to make sure you're going to be on you best behavior. No undead jokes, got it?" Hannah waved a finger in his face.

"Undead jokes? C'mon. I've entertained the President, I think I can charm your mom." He snatched her finger from the air and kissed it. "Don't wave that thing around, you could poke someone's eye out."

She pulled it back and laughed. "I'm the dangerous one? Yeah, right Vampire Boy."

"You are too dangerous, Miss Kick Boxer." In the last nineteen months Hannah had mastered the art of Muy Thia and other such skills and could now beat even Rashel in one on one combat. Past lives as warriors helped too. "You were Xena in another life."

"Was not. I think your getting me confused with Rashel."

"No, she was Buffy the Vampire Slayer."

"Oh, that's right." Hannah said seriously.

They sat in silence for a moment and then they burst out laughing, a thing that was getting to be more of a regular occurrence in the Descouedres mansion now that Hannah was back in town.

"I think that qualifies as our stupidest conversation of the past," Hannah glanced at her watch. "hour."

"It's been that long? We're loosing our edge."

She turned so she was facing him. "I have another question for you."

"Is it serious?"

She pretended to ponder that question. "No, not really," she confessed.

"Okay, shoot."

"What is with you and Xena? Got a thing for black-haired, blue-eyed, Warrior Princesses?" she quipped.

"Nah," he smiled, fingering Hannah's soft blonde hair, "I like blondes better." He lifted her chin, "And I find myself completely infatuated with gray-eyed Old Souls, Lady Hannah of Circle Daybreak." He leaned in for a kiss.

"Excuse me Lord Thierry," a hesitant voice called from the doorway, efficiently stopping their kiss.

~ I'm going to kill Nilsson. Then I'm going to fire him. ~ Thierry informed his soulmate cheerfully, using the telepathic link all soulmates have.

~ Now Thierry, you are an Elder. You have to keep your responsibilities, even if I'm here. ~ Hannah chided. "Go," She ordered aloud, patting him on the knee and standing. "Goodnight Nilsson." She smiled fondly at the made vampire. He had taken on a noticeably larger and more personal roll in the dealings of Circle Daybreak in the past year and he and Thierry had become good friends. But he still couldn't seem to stop himself from addressing Thierry formally when he was on the job.

"Goodnight La – " He stopped at Hannah's disapproving look. She was an eighteen-year-old sophomore in college, not some medieval princess-type. "Goodnight Hannah," he amended. She smiled again and left Nilsson and Thierry to talk.

Walking up the winding stairway of Thierry's Las Vegas estate, she headed towards her room. Her room was the second largest in the house and had an adjoining door to the first largest –Thierry's room, a balcony, and a private bathroom. She stayed here when she visited Thierry from college in Utah State. She usually visited him on the weekends twice a month. The rest of the time she visited Chess at her dorm in UCLA or stayed with her mom. This weekend, however, her mom was finally going to meet Thierry face-to-face.

Her mom didn't know much about Thierry. All she knew was that Thierry was her boyfriend, he lived in Las Vegas and they met a little over a year ago. Hannah hadn't told her mom about the Night World, just Chess, who had dragged it out of her.

And did Hannah plan on telling her mom about the Night World? Hell no.

She could hear herself now, "Mom, it's so great to see you! Yeah I've missed you too. Um...there's something I have to tell you. Remember last year? When I had to go to therapy because of my weird dreams? Yeah, well it wasn't just dreams. I had been getting premonitions of the oncoming apocalypse, which is set to happen on 12:01 in the year 2000, actually. I'm trying to help but we need to find the four Wild Powers, who are the only people in the world with enough power to stand face the oncoming darkness.

"Wait, I'm getting off subject. So yeah, anyway, I had also been writing myself notes warning myself about Thierry. My subconscious was afraid of him and it had good reason to. See, Thierry is the first ever made vampire. He was alive in the cave-man days. Go figure." (Pause for hysterical yelling and denial and whispered question.)

"Yeah, like in Buffy. Well, only way better looking when in vamp mode and he can go out in the sun, etc. Oh and he has a soul. So, like, then I was all like, sweet, this guy is a major hottie and he's my soulmate. But then when I was kissing him on the front porch –" (Another break for lecture about kissing strange men then back to story.)

"Anyway, during that I saw him killing me in a past life. Yeah, I've had a bunch of them. I'm an Old Soul." (General screaming about dating ten-thousand-year-old murders.) "But see, it wasn't him. It was the first Lamia vampire, the kind that can have kids and grow old, who pretended to be Thierry and killed me so that I would hate him forever and so she could go out with him. But Thierry hated her because she was evil and he spent forever searching for me. He knew it was me because of the birthmark on my cheek, thus the reason we could never get rid of it. Finally, he found me last year and Maya didn't get a chance to kill me because, uh, I killed her first. The

end."

Her mom, who loved and trusted her deeply, would have her committed to Bellevue within the hour. Ergo, her mom was going to meet Thierry and that was it. Even that in it's self was pretty major. Whether it was a good major or a bad major, Hannah still hadn't figured out.

You see, all was not hunky-dory en la casa de Descoudres.

Let's get something straight, Hannah loved Thierry more than anything in the world, more than her entire life, even more than Snickers bars, which – as you can tell – all added up to a lot of love. She'd give all those things up for him. That's how much he meant to her.

But.

Thierry was not the easiest person to get along with. Know why? Because he was too damn altruistic. Altruistic-ness is a fine quality in a boyfriend but if he has too much of it, it gets so you just want to beat your (or his) brains out.

Ever since they had started dating, he had showered her with gifts and decorations for her dorm-room and credit cards and cars and anything else money could buy. It wasn't until he offered her a yacht on the south of France that she put her foot down. Hannah was an independent women. She liked spending her own money – which she had plenty of thanks to the trust fund she had not been able to access until she turned eighteen her deceased stock-broker father had left for her in his will. (He died when Hannah was eleven and that's when her mom had decided to quit her museum job in Manhattan and move back to where she and Hannah's dad had grown up, Medicine Rock, Montana, so she could pursue her first love: paleontology.)

For the sake of argument, Hannah had to admit that, yes, Thierry had also showered her with love, respect, trust, and even reverence. Which was incredibly nice. But still he wouldn't give her the one thing she truly wanted. It wasn't a big thing. It would only take him two, three days at the most to give it to her. To top it all off, he had already offered it. Given, she had refused it but at the time she hadn't been thinking clearly. Now she was and he couldn't just un-offer it.

Hannah wanted to be a vampire, dammit.

The year before, when she was sitting with Thierry looking at the sun rise on her eighteenth birthday she had felt like no matter what they would be together, for the rest of this and other lives. She even thought that she wouldn't mind getting old while Thierry stayed nineteen forever. Then one day Hannah filled in the gaps she had missed in that particular future corridor of time…

Thierry and Hannah would hold hands and walk down a reclusive, sunny beach in the Bahamas talking about their long and lustrous life together. They'd pick a spot on the beach, just close enough to the water to get sprayed with a refreshing mist of dew every time the waves hit the sand in that perfect spot, and set up an umbrella and towel. Hannah would lay down and Thierry would rub oil all over her wizened, wrinkled skin. Then her arthritis would flare up and he would give her a glorious full-body massage, making sure not to put too much pressure on her thrice-replaced hip. Other couples would walk by and comment on how nice Thierry was to his grandma and he would smile tolerantly – he got that one a lot – and say that no, the beautiful women lying there was not his grandmother but his soulmate. Then he would remove her dentures, place them lovingly in a glass of water, and give her a passionate kiss. The couple would hurriedly move on and they would again be alone. A few minuets later, Thierry would take her up the beach to help her change into a new pair of Depends and later…

The sickness factor of that image alone overrode the combined grossness of drinking pig's blood and having blood-lust for the rest of her incredibly long life.

But when Hannah had tried to explain that very thing to Thierry, his eyes just got all bruised and tender and he said that he'd never, ever wish the curse of being a vampire on anyone, least of all the women he loved before all others.

Do you see now why chivalry is dead?

Sometimes, Hannah just wanted to stand in a dark alley with a sign that said, "Limited offer, 500 dollars to turn me into a vampire," around her neck. She had talked about it with Ash and he offered to do it but she couldn't bring herself to allow anyone but Thierry put their mouth on her neck. Ash understood completely and told her to talk to Thierry again and reason with him.

So, about three weeks ago, she tried again. Thierry got all broody and sullen and told her that she couldn't ask that of him and he said she was acting selfishly. Maybe she was but, then again, so was he. They discussed the issue for about twenty minuets. Despite the fact that Thierry never once raised his voice, it was the closet thing to fight that they'd ever had. And it scared the hell out of her.

Afterwards, they had developed a silent "it never happened" pact and hadn't talked about it since. The thing that was driving her completely up the wall was the ever-plaguing thought that if their relationship couldn't handle a simple fight, how could it withstand an eternity?

Hannah decided to think about less conflicting problems. Circle Daybreak immediately popped into her head.

Circle Daybreak had started out as a circle of witches before the Burning Times who tried to teach humans magic. It was stopped when humans began to burn witches at the stake and the two laws of the Night World, 1) Never tell a human about the Night World and 2) Never fall in love with one, were created. Now Circle Daybreak was a group for anyone who knew about the Night World and wanted humans, vampires, shapeshifters, and witches to coexist. There were a lot more people in Circle Daybreak then Hannah had originally thought. There was one on every campus and Hannah belonged to one at Utah State, although no one new she was Thierry Descoudres' soulmate for safety's sake.

There was also a smaller group of people inside that Circle. A group of people who had all found their soulmates in the first run of human-Night World relations. Hannah smiled the thought of them, her friends, and fell asleep fully clothed, on top of the covers.