He leaned against the side of the building. The rain beat down on the sidewalk of the streets of Philadelphia with an angry force. Most everyone stayed inside today, as the bell in a church ten blocks away chimed the time. Even with the distance and the howling wind and rain in his ear, he heard the chiming echo in his ear as if he were standing right at the foot of the church. The bells marked the hour. It was noon. It was twelve in the daytime, and he was standing in plain sight on the sidewalk. This was such a strange phenomenon. For the better part of a century, all he had known was the night. The land was covered in a dark veil, and everything is the same color. One needed only to adjust their eyes to see clearly. But then the sun would rise, and its pure light would set the world with a dark image behind every lighted surface and object. The rays cast so many shadows that the day created more illusion than all the veiled truth of the night. For all the time that he had existed, he had grown to understand the night. He knew her as well as he thought he had known himself. Intimately, like a lover. He had framed his entire second existence around her. He was sure of her.
He wasn't sure of anything anymore.
A family rushed past him, all crowding under a single umbrella. If there were people on the streets, they were acting similarly. Running, splashing puddles as they went, and not caring – they wanted only to get out of the cold and wet. He wondered briefly if it were going to snow. He had lived in the south all of his life, and the century of mere existence afterward. He had never seen the snow in person, only what they showed in the theater. He wondered if it was all it was cracked up to be. In a similar fashion, he had never seen himself or another of his kind in the sunlight. He heard rumors that his skin would gleam like diamonds in the light, but he'd never witnessed it for himself. In Monterrey, his only other companion besides his maker was the nighttime. Even when he'd left her and traveled with his friends Peter and Charlotte, they'd never really ventured out into the daylight, even when far from any civilization, which they rarely ever were. Old habits die hard, I suppose. He mused to himself as a mother ran out onto the stoop of her building, clinging to an umbrella. She called a boy's name, and peered out into the sheets of rainfall. He watched as her eyes searched the street, and eventually landed on him, standing across the street from her. He felt her worry fade and surprise take its place. He clearly saw his inhuman beauty reflected in her eyes, despite the distance between them. There was a faint pressure in his chest as she registered his features, and suddenly her emotions became scattered. He was sure he must have looked just the same when cornered by Maria, Nettie, and Lucy about a century ago.
He furrowed his brow as the desolation that was his existence for the past hundred years all flashed before his eyes. Every moment since he'd been reborn registered in his memory, and played behind his eyes, and it was over and done within a hundredth of a second. His obsidian eyes hardened, like onyx stones, and the woman seemed to sense his change, the edge to his features. She must have realized she was staring because she quickly looked away and called the name again. A small boy ran up the street, his clothes soaked. Her worry faded away at the sight of him, and she reached her hand out to the boy. He took it, and they went inside together. But the woman gave him one last glance before she closed the door. But the obstruction did not make her yearning fade from his memory. It happened so often when he came across mortals. When he tried to take the frightening edge off of his features, there was always this yearning as they looked at his immortal face. The girls wished that he would come to them in the night, wished that he would look into their eyes and see their soul, and fall in love with them. The men would look at him and feel envy. If only their weak human eyes could see his body riddled with crescent shaped scars. Would they find the monster so beautiful then? But these longing emotions were always followed by the appropriate feelings when they saw his strange crimson eyes, or perhaps witnessed the impossibility of his abnormally sharp teeth. They noticed the odd grace with which he moved, and despite their secret yearning, first and foremost they began to feel fear. This was appropriate, and it usually always saved their lives, unless he was especially thirsty. Because of his strange power, he was able to feel their fear as his own, and it repulsed him. He would move away from their fear, but there was nothing he could do to put distance between himself and the monster he saw reflected in their eyes. But that doesn't mean he didn't try.
He'd left Peter and Charlotte so long ago. He couldn't handle the killing anymore. All of his existence as a vampire was surrounded on destruction. He was created to kill. It was all he knew, it built his world. Peter showed him that there was more to being an immortal, that he could find love and exist in a peaceful happiness. But even Peter and Charlotte killed to stay alive. He was sick of it. There had to be another way to exist without taking any more human lives. He'd built up his resolve, and he left his friends in Richmond to be on his own. He traveled the length of the east coast, heading north. He would go weeks without killing, but after awhile he'd get too thirsty. Of all the things he learned during his time with Maria, self-control was not one of them. If anything, she taught him to abandon all control. Without control, there was only raw power for him to use, and with her benefit. He'd lose his will, and kill again. He couldn't stay strong in his resolve if he was thirsty, and the only way he could cure that thirst was to break his resolve. It was a vicious circle, and one he saw no way out of. He made his way from Richmond to Baltimore, from there to New York City, from there to Boston, and from there across to Philly, where he now stood in the rain. Would he forever wander had he had for the last couple of decades? Lost and hopeless, telling himself not to kill only to later succumb to the beast inside of him? How long could he stand to live this way?
There was a flicker of light above him. He glanced up through the rain to the sixth floor of the building. A curtain was slightly askew, revealing the warm lamplight of the room within. It was the woman who had been on the stoop. She was looking down at him, admiring from a distance again. He reached in his mind to feel her emotion. The yearning again. And, as he lifted his chin to look at her, embarrassment for being caught staring. She closed the curtain with some new kind of resolve. He leveled his head, and his eyes scanned the streets. It was only misting now, and more people were emerging from the buildings where they had taken cover. Cars passed and splashed puddles up onto the sidewalks. His straight-legged jeans were soaked at the bottoms where they met his black boots. His simple black t-shirt was damp as well, and clung to the hard lines of his torso. He had no jacket, though the chill in the air had a bite that hinted at the coming winter. His choppy, wet, blond hair stuck to his stone skin, a shade darker than it would have been if dry. He didn't feel the cold, though, and the wet was only a minor annoyance. But he was sure he must have been attracting too much attention standing there, unaffected by either element. He glanced around, searching for a place to go, a place where he wouldn't be noticed and could pass the time without any stares or questions asked. He then eyed the perfect place, just down at the corner of the block. It was a bar. Not the kind that the businessmen went into for their lunch hour martini. No, this was a bar for the blue-collar worker. A place where the average man could go for a shot of whiskey and a beer. This was a place where he could walk in and be just another man, and no one in particular. He decided he would go in, ask for a beer that he would not drink, and there he could be left in piece for at least a couple of hours. There was surely to be no one in there that would notice another lost soul.
He pushed off the wall and made his way down the street, keeping his eyes on the pavement as he did so. The less attention he could draw, the better. He moved with the currents of people, and finally got to the corner. He walked up the steps and pushed open the great wooden doors. Finally out of the misting rain, he took the opportunity to fan out his shirt and shake the loose water droplets from his hair. While he did so, he reached out again with his mind, sensing the feel of the mood of the bar. Mostly there were only tired old men and workers on their lunch break in this early in the afternoon. The place felt pretty numb and detached. Most of the bodies in the room matched this feeling. All except for one.
Jasper furrowed his brow. From one high chair at the bar, there came this radiating feeling of happiness. It felt out of place in the fairly dreary bar. He lifted his head to look at the source of the unusual happiness, and his unnecessary breath hitched in his throat at what he saw.