Chapter 9
Seeing Yugi unconscious and naked on his bathroom floor, save for a towel over her hips, reminded him of how disconnected from humanity he had become. When he saw her humble, firm breasts, white skin, and fairy like proportions, all he could feel was that of a man looking down at a steak after a week of greens and bread. But even 300 years wouldn't be enough for Atem to forget what he would have once thought as a man, when a woman had elicited awe and want of a human nature and not one of an animal after food.
But she wouldn't know that, so he threw the towel over her before easing up her legs and bringing her head towards them, hoping to assist the circulation of oxygen laden blood to her head.
When she woke up and promptly started to cry, something rent in his chest. But it wasn't an entirely new feeling. It was one that had plagued him from the beginning, and never failed to remind him that his existence was that of a disease, and the only way to make it anything more than that was by taking efforts to stem that disease from off the rest of humanity.
And yet, even as he thought that, even as he bathed in the shame and pity, he found himself drinking in her words like an elixir to his soul. There had always been a part of him he had never been able to fully numb against his own loneliness. As she asked him frank questions, her thoughts and emotions displayed in her large, doe-like eyes like her slender body had been on the floor, he found those decades upon decades worth of protections on his sensitivity torn away. Sure, he talked to his patients and customers. Sure, he talked to enough humans to stem their suspicion, as well as to ask questions that could lead to possible targets. But those had never allowed for such openness, only available to other diseased creatures like himself.
Talking to her, he felt almost…human. Maybe even normal, if he could ever remember what that had been like.
So when he checked his mental list and saw the plan to turn the doorknob around so that he would have a way to lock her in his house, while his conscience faltered, the starving, crazed-lonely part of him screamed at the thought of the day when he would have to give her away—or if she should flee and vanish far farther than the other side of the city.
But he couldn't explain that to her, just as he couldn't explain that he couldn't get aroused from the female body anymore, because his warped senses only registered meat.
Still, it was physical pain when he met her eyes and saw the confusion in them. In attempts to alleviate it, he asked her if she wanted to come with him on his deliveries. But the jump of excitement and desperation for sunlight he saw next was almost as bad.
He at least convinced her to wear a head scarf, or a hijab, that he still had from his homeland, as well as some sunglasses. She didn't ask, and he didn't explain. They both knew he didn't want her description getting out before he had had time to do his business with her.
"And the exercise will do you good," he told her. "It will help stimulate the production of blood cells faster than sitting around would. Even so, let me know if you need to rest."
When her eyes looked up at him, waiting for the sunglasses, he hesitated. She really did have such a pretty face. It reminded him of cherubim, or the round faces of angels he had once viewed in the chapels of Europe. Had that really been so long ago?
Then he donned his own, heavy tinted sunglasses (his eyes were made for the night after all), took his basket of goods and headed out.
He hadn't really thought to wonder what she would think of his way of business until his first patient, a young single mother with stress in the creases of her eyes, opened a door two floor beneath his apartment and broke into a sunny smile.
"Atem! I'm so happy to see you."
Instantly he became worried. "Has she gotten worse?"
"Oh, no, her fever broke two days ago, just like you said it would, and even her cough has gotten better! I can't thank you enough. There's no way I could—" she broke off with a heavy, nasty cough.
"Just as I thought." He held out the little plastic bag of herbs. "You've caught it too. Best you serve this for yourself for the next week too. Same rules. Two cups a day, boiled five minutes. And your son?"
"Not even a sniffle," she said, once she cleared her throat. "Same price as before, right?"
"If you can. No pressure."
"No, you're worth ten times more, I'm not a thief. Wait here."
She took the bag from him, then returned with a twenty dollar bill and a half clothed six year old girl at her heels. She threw up gummy hands for Atem to see.
"Look! I'm all better!"
He felt himself soften, eased from just a bit of the stress and pain he had felt from before. "Nice work. Not skipping your veggies, right?"
"No sir! I ate every nasty bit!"
They had a little bit of a laugh at that before her attention turned to Yugi more or less trying to hide behind him.
"Who's that you got with you? A girlfriend?" Even beyond the smile, he could almost smell the tinge of jealousy.
Inwardly, he sighed. Yet another reminder. He could smell the hormones from girls interested in him and it did nothing but give him a slight, queasy feeling. The hormones didn't smell exactly good to an uninterested vampire.
"A cousin, come to help me with my deliveries. We're having to take it slow, so we best be going if I'm to deliver all these."
The easing of the tension in the woman's gaze didn't comfort him. "Of course! Thanks so much again."
They stopped by three more units in his apartment complex, all just as cramped, old, and with a sunbleached patio just like his, before Yugi said something.
"So…you're like a visiting doctor?"
"Herbalist," he said, mind still ticking through the symptoms his last patient had prescribed to him. While the patient had been pleased with the result of his pills, he didn't know if that meant she was getting better or the placebo effect. She was 78, after all, and had known him for quite some time.
"Alright. But, I'm sorry if this comes off as rude, but what business does a vampire have making medicine for people?
"Plenty, I'd think, since my existence has ended lives. This doesn't even scratch the surface, but at least it helps me stay sane. Besides, I was into this before I was changed."
He couldn't help but feel pleased as he sensed more than saw her eyes widen behind the sunglasses at him.
"You mean back three hundred years ago? Were you a doctor then?"
"No. But my father was. And his father." He stopped at the old, heavily graffitied bus stop and looked off to the smoggy skies, relishing in the feel of recollecting memories with company. "I was to continue a reputable line of cure and relief. I even grew up helping my mother deliver babies. She was a highly trusted midwife in the village and was looked to for help even more often than my father."
"That's wonderful," Yugi murmured.
Thinking she might really think that made him want to turn and hug her, perhaps express even an inkling of the gratitude he felt for her. But, knowing he had done enough to unnerve her, he merely continued on with his story.
"Since I didn't age, I had to keep moving. That often meant I couldn't stay long enough to build a reputation as a doctor. Traveling did help me learn a lot, though, again, because of my unnatural youth and my…weakness to blood, I had to stay away from things like surgeries and the like. A lot of my education came from travel, experience, and learning from others." He felt a strange rush of boyish need to impress. "I can speak fifteen languages."
"No kidding," she said, sounding rightly impressed. "Where were you originally from?"
"Egypt." He hesitated. "I was born in the Christian year of 1736. I'm sorry, isn't this weirding you out?"
"Oh, totally," she said, with that same blank honesty he was coming to admire. "But it's also fascinating. You're fascinating. Is that okay?"
He hesitated, shifting from foot to foot as he glanced at her. He was stuck between feeling more stupidly fuzzy and pleased than he had in centuries, and worried she'd become too comfortable with him, and therefore, other vampires.
"Just don't think…" But he was like other vampires. There was no difference between him and they. They had all killed. They all lusted blood. They were all a blight.
"I'm not going to go protesting vampire rights," she said, the laughter in her voice softened by a kind compassion that made his lungs go a little tight. "Could you tell me how you…you know. Got changed? What it was like?"
He could see the city bus coming up around the corner, but knew for a fact that people rarely cared too much about what they heard, as long as it wasn't too alarming. Still, his story could qualify for that, and also…
But the fuzzy sensation of being called fascinated by her drugged him. He had already denied her freedom. How could he deny her anything else? Anything at all?
"I grew up in a village not far from the city of Thebes. How I became what I am today is because I wanted to marry the daughter of a family far richer and of better blood than my own. But because my father had saved the lives of both her parents and siblings from a horrible sickness, they listened to my desires via my father." The bus had come to a stop and it's scratched, worn doors hissed open. "We were to be married only a few months hence. But I was impatient, as many young men are, which brought my end all the much sooner."
Once they had squeezed into the back, eyeballed by a few weary passengers, he went on to tell her, in quiet but clear tones, about how he had been caught up in the beauty of his bride to be and impatient to show her of said admiration. He had managed to convince her to meet him somewhere private, but when he found an excuse to touch her she threw herself on him. As he told Yugi of his horror to find that, it wasn't out of love that she had embraced him with, but blood lust, he got the pleasure of seeing her full sympathetic horror as she took off her sunglasses to wipe the sweat from her nose.
His betrothed drained him nigh to death, and when she pulled back, rather then calling for help, she hid his body in some bulrushes and fled the scene.
The next thing he knew was the thirst. Then waking up to find a stranger dead in his arms and the taste of blood on his lips.
He tried to find his betrothed, to get an explanation, just to find that she had fled the city the night she had hid his body in the bulrushes. He had tentively tried to continue life as usual, but as the blood thirst came upon him, so strong in his newly formed vampiric body, and news of the body of the man he had accidentally killed, he too fled. He planned to find his betrothed, staying alive off of the blood of beggars and eventually whatever animal he could get his hands on. He started a life spent in the night, afraid of his existence, and mourning for what he had lost. The only comfort he found was his seemingly superhuman strength, his ability to fly, and the occasional opportunity he found to treat those too poor to afford the attentions of a doctor.
It was 20 years later when he finally found her again. Alas, she had become a shade of her former self. The beauty was still there, but there was a demon inside, lost in the mindless pursuit of blood. She had been the one to originally start the sickness in her family, and had even returned to quiet them should anyone start to piece together what she was.
She became the first vampire he ever killed.
"She didn't stay dead, though," Atem watched Yugi's eyebrows shoot up with a smile.
No. He ended up having to drag her malformed body around until he learned the proper way to kill a vampire.
"You have to tear out their heart," he told Yugi. "All of it. Aorta, nodes, everything. Then you burn it and the body, but in different fires, and far from any human, as the fumes from the burning bodies is a poison to them. If you don't, the heart will grow back in the body and the vampire will just wake up more ravenous than ever."
"Aren't you—why are you telling me this?"
"What?"
"How to—how to kill a vampire. I mean," she glanced to the side.
He gave her an easy smile, trying to convey the warmth he felt. "Vampirism is just a disease, Yugi. So far, death is the only cure I have come up for it. It just hurts people."
"But you don't just hurt people," she said. "Who knows how many lives you've saved just because you've existed."
He flinched. He had already told her it didn't matter, that he had still been the cause of premature death, but decided to continue on with his story anyways.
He had gone to Europe and throughout Asia and learned what he could there about herbs. It had taken a lot less longer than he had hoped, and by the time he was heading back to his homeland, news of the new world had reached him. He had grown weary of human company, tired of hurting and waking up from episodes with bodies in his hands, so he went to the new world in hopes of finding a stretch of land where he could be alone. He found that out west, far past the Indian tribes, in a beautiful canyon that could have been carved out by the very hand of man.
And, well, she knew the rest. He lived there quite happily, occasionally getting a visit from a native seeking his cures or expertise, but otherwise alone, until some Mormon pioneers settled in the canyon. While the natives had been wise enough to stay away from the flash-flood prone canyon and the mysterious foreign man with blood red eyes and the ability to fly, the Mormon pioneers had been a fearless, as well as harmless lot.
It had worked until a particularly dry season scattered the wild game, and therefore Atem's line of non-human blood.
By the time he rounded up to the end of his story, they had delivered eight more packages, had lunch (or rather, Yugi had lunch and medicine and Atem made sure she did so), and Yugi had ended up being carried on his back, due to exhaustion and light-headedness. Dredging up the past had given him something to distract himself from the feel of her arms next to his neck and her soft cheek in his hair.
His last customer was the one to tell him that Yugi had fallen asleep. Atem had an awkward time accepting the money and wriggling it into his pants pocket.
"I hope you don't have any more to do today," said the older man, who looked up at the darkening sky pointedly.
"Everything else can be mailed," said Atem, adjusting her weight on his back. "You don't happen to have any baking cocoa on you, per chance?"
"Not sure how you're going to carry it like that, but yeah. Just give me a moment."
Atem put the baking cocoa in his now empty basket, thanked the man, and headed off to the bus stop. She didn't even stir as he sat down, tickling the edge of his ear with her sleepy sighs.
It was then, sitting in the little bus stop booth, watching the cars hush by and listening to the sound of kids playing a game in the park a block over that he realized something both wondrous and heart-rendingly awful.
He didn't want this day to end.
Author's Note: Yo! What are you guys thinking? I've hardly heard anything. Is it alright or is it awful? I'm good with either or. Hearing thoughts in general delight me. They let me know if I'm doing something wrong or right or weird or boring or whatever.
Please send a thought/review my way. :