Chapter Seven, it's alright, I'm only bleeding
Temptation's page flies out the door
You follow, find yourself at war
Watch waterfalls of pity roar
You feel to moan but unlike before
You discover that you'd just be
One more person crying
Bob Dylan, It's Alright, Ma, I'm only Bleeding
Jamie shuffled back into her shorts, bralette straps hanging loosely off her sides, skin gone gold in the half light of a motel room that was not her own. Red lips, raw and bruised from kisses and the whispered words of a lover, parted softly with the want of a cigarette. Long, seemingly never ending legs elongated and tight over the bone as she stretched, arms outreached and hips jutting out.
He watched her, the covers pulled up to his bare stomach and congealing in waves around his waist. White linen over pale skin and a lean figure riddled with muscle. Blue eyes clouded over with lust and satisfaction, a childish delight warming his sunny smile and bedridden hair.
She thought he was plenty handsome, this strange boy she'd met at a bar outside the Indianapolis. The boy she'd spent the night with, an exchange of sweet words and a tryst under the bedsheets, whose skin burned against hers and hands that entangled and ensnared her own in knots.
"Don't look too pleased with yourself." She quipped, amused. "You couldn't even manage to order a drink at the bar, just last night. Or don't you remember?"
Kaleb's arm shot out, catching her by the waist and drawing her in close. "Says you. I bet I could of gotten a drink without your help- You didn't even let me try!"
"I took pity on you." She shrugged, half hooded eyes scanning his impressive chest lazily.
He snaked another arm around her, pulling her back onto the bed and settling his chin against the crook of her neck. They fit together like puzzle pieces, the complicated ones that depicted a youthful scene of beautiful people doing mundane things. "It must have worked, anyway, because you came along."
She liked the way his jaw jumped as he spoke and how his lips ghosted her cheek when he spoke, and she didn't bother moving away, sitting between his blanket clad legs only half dressed. The curtains were cracked open to let the open window air in, his body was like a natural furnace, and the light streamed in prison bar beams across the pair of them, stuck in their own domestic and hedonist playset. Neither of them had slept much, too caught up in each other and lazing about, taking in the pleasure of companionship and sex like the lonely creatures they were.
The world outside went on, unbeknownst to them, with birds chirping in the parking lot trees and the sun rising steadily as dawn broke and day set. Cars began to frequent once more, the guilty hid in their rooms behind their shame in the shade of shutters, families peeled out of their rooms in boisterous swarms as they worked to pick up all belongings. It was another day on the road, but time didn't seem to exist in the privacy of their room, with a double bed that seemed too big and too small all at once and grubby little hands needless in their touch. They explored their skin like the road maps, drawing lines and raising gooseflesh in its wake, swimming in sheets and easing themselves into the sweet nothings of words and pleasantries.
Still, motionless in his clutches, his hands toyed with loose curls that settled about the tops of her shoulders and dusted against his forehead. "When are you leaving?"
"I don't know. Soon, though. Today or tomorrow." She murmured, tilting her head a little further to the side as his teeth scraped against an especially tender spot in the hollow of her neck.
When she looked in the mirror, eyes fluttering and dusting against warm cheeks, she sought out the familiar curves and lines- and to her delight, bruises. Love bites.
Most of the bruises faded, it was tough to face, her old life washed away with mended blood vessels and perfected skin. There was soon enough no evidence of her roots and where she came from, just perfected flesh. Jamie sometimes got into fights at those bars Nik took them to, to feel the familiar ache of broken skin and blood again. It wasn't always enough to curb her, and she liked the days where the sky turned a horrible shade of ugly bruises. She welcomed sunburn and cigarette burns, paper cuts and split skin- Nik looked concerned, Stefan understood.
Incidental bleeding made her alive, a strangers fist favoured over one night stands- except for Kaleb, only Kaleb. She knew Nik would peel her body from the sidewalk once more, that he'd sit on her bed and look at her ugly skin, she liked the bruises on her face the most. She wore them like jewelry, like marker lines on her hands and wrists. He spent many nights staring at her in her muddled state, eyes muddy with inebriation and airy, the only time they dulled.
Sobriety was tough, Nik kept them away from bars and liquor stores and back alley escapades, and Jamie had no more trysts with strange men and empty bottles. He ignored leads that led to bars, he did it for her, she was hindering the search through his own conscience. Every now and then she got her hands on something, she was too quick sometimes. Those little bottles you got at the Gas stations and hotel gift shops, a hooded man looking to sell while she went out for a cigarette break, she came to life as the opportunities arose, and Nik couldn't hold out much longer.
Last night had been somewhat of a breaking point.
Looking in the mirror, though, she thought that maybe love bites were better. With a pair of strong arms wrapped around her middle and threaded through her hair rather than fists and the fleeting ache of being struck. With Kaleb's good looks hidden in the crook of her neck and the soft words that escaped his lips in an oddly refreshing vulnerability, not threats of violence and the spew of vulgarity she had resigned herself to.
"I've gotta go, Kaleb."
He groaned, veering his head around, hair tickling her bare skin as he rolled off the side to her shoulder blades. Blue eyes on grey, smouldering and the faint sense of burning up.
"Do you really have to?"
"Yeah, yeah I do." She sighed, but despite her words she eased into his hold further.
His lips darted against her own in quick succession, gentle against her own, teasing. "Hopefully I'll be seeing you, Jay."
"Not if I see you first."
Maybe the families shot her disgruntled looks as she shuffled along the curb, her skin on show and Nik's shirt falling off her, but she didn't care. The light was sharp, like one of those overexposed polaroids that somehow took a crystal clear shot, distinctly a blinding white with a yellowish tinge every now and then.
Jamie returned to her own room, looking suitably disheveled and her own age for once.
The tension in the room was palpable, Nik sitting ramrod straight on the bed and Stefan looking smug. It felt overbearing, first thing in the morning, but she grinned as Roscoe bounded over with his tongue and tail wagging. Someone was happy to see her, at least, and she doubled over to greet him almost childishly.
"Nice of you to join us, sweetheart. I got a call last night." He greeted tersely. "We've got a lead in the next town over, a man named Richard Adelson."
She nodded, "Wolf, I assume? What's the plan?"
Nik visibly relaxed all of a sudden, eyes darting across her skin and taking in the way she was unharmed and unmarked- with the exception of what looked like hickeys, that is. It was stupid, how much he valued her well being. He didn't know why he'd been so quick to take up a bad mood, not when she seemed so ready to be involved and her eyes ate up the information with raw intelligence and pure hunger.
"He's a lone wolf, recently estranged with his pack. I want to know why." His voice softened, he leaned back in his seat as he took control, resting against the headboard and secretly pleased to have her input. "Stefan will take you to the bar he frequents, he's an avid daytime drinker- or so my informant would have me believe. I want you to work your magic, Stefan will make sure nothing goes awry. We'll be staying here for two more days, I need you to get answers tonight, I'll strike tomorrow evening."
Nik didn't dish out commands to her the same way he did with Stefan, it was a whole new dynamic between the pair of them when he addressed her. It was new territory for him, to be excited and eagerly forthcoming with information, but he'd been deprived of an audience to bask in his schemes for so long that he almost welcomed the reprieve. And what did he have to worry about, anyway? Stefan was under his thumb and Jay had no memory, as far as he was concerned the two of them had no choice but to comply.
Except, he sought out more than compliance in her, he knew. He wanted her opinion, her keen involvement and witty comments. She wasn't bound to him by familial ties or leverage hanging over her head with every turn of the corner, she was loyal by choice. Nik had never had anyone choose to be by his side before, not even his family stuck around.
Finn had been in a casket for nine centuries, now, and sometimes he forgot what his brother sounded like when he was left alone to his thoughts. And he'd had a lot of time to think about things like that over the centuries, he was always alone in the end.
A thousand years was a long time, and nothing seemed as clear as it used to in his mind anymore. Memories of boyhood glazed over, sometimes even entirely so, and landmarks of history muddied up by the insignificant. His life, for what felt like forever, had been centered around breaking the hybrid curse, and he could hardly believe it was done- had it really only taken a teenage girl's blood spilled at an alter?
Elijah had turned on him just like everyone else, and Rebekah had chosen his little Ripper, unbeknownst to the vampire in the room, over her own flesh and blood- something he had feared Jay might do when she failed to come back last night, the thought scaring him more than finding her hurt again. It was almost as if the people closest to him in this life had been hell bent on failing him at least once, taking it in turns to hurt him over and over again. But he'd won, in the end, like he always said he would. Except… the doubt was still there, and he wasn't sure if he'd felt the same in boyhood or not, but he couldn't remember it ever not being there.
Wickedly, his brain conjured up the image of Kol.
His youngest brother, an inherited title in the light of Henrik's untimely death, had stood at his side when it suited him best. But he'd been an unruly thing, always going off on his own and returning quite suddenly, leaving a long winding trail of carnage in his path- and hadn't Nik applauded him for it on occasion? Joined in when he felt the urge, and that doubt he felt would swindle with each neck he'd tear open and every knowing look the brothers shared.
Kol- who hated the wolves for taking Henrik from them. Kol, who resented him for a lot but never for being of wolf himself.
"That can easily be arranged." Jamie agreed, a wild smile brightening her face, doing nothing to banish Kol from his mind. "I'll have everything worked out before your grand entrance, I promise."
It would have been a lie to say Nik didn't have a theatrical bone in his body, he loved to make a scene, much to her amusement. It could have reminded her of Kai, if she wasn't so damn forgetful.
"I knew I could count on you. Now, get to it, little-miss-bed-hopper."
A smug smile stretched at his cheeks, blue eyes fond and crinkled with mirth.
The almighty and fearsome Original Hybrid was met with a pillow to the face courtesy of that offhand comment, left to splutter feathers and cotton in the wake of a teenage girl and her pet dog.
Stefan couldn't help but laugh.
"Asshole." She muttered.
"Supernatural hearing, love!"
Jamie was relieved to get away from the bar. What she had done had worked a treat, and she'd had Richard Abeson wrapped around her little finger from the moment she'd walked in. It didn't make her feel any less dirty by the end of the day, having his eyes rake over her periodically and his wandering prone hands on her knee, trickling further up as the conversation progressed.
She was tired, but she'd gotten the information she'd been after. She always did.
Her and Stefan had fallen into step wordlessly, and she thought the vampire almost looked relieved when she'd slipped out the entrance of the bar.
It was a precarious partnership, but it worked. She'd reel the victims in and he'd be set upon them like a dog, otherwise his job consisted of guarding her like a rottweiler. Someone else might have gotten cocky with a vampire at their disposal, but she trusted herself more than she trusted Stefan Salvatore's blood lust. There was something fake about it all, he was hiding something, and every time they so much as neared Virginia he'd get antsy- more so than usual.
They'd opted to walk back to the motel in relative silence, she'd done enough talking in the bar and she'd be fooling herself if she believed he hadn't been listening in for nothing more than a sign of trouble. He tried to hide it, but he was invested in the whole ordeal as much as she was, for his own reasons, whatever they may be.
Coming to a stop, she watched an old man flip an opening sign to closed as a bell rang out. It was a pet store, and the display had caught her eye.
They were siamese fighting fish, every colour of a summer's day and sunsets- the warm kind, not the violent ones that ripped the sky into pieces and burst into bruises and gray water. Jamie didn't know how she knew them, but she couldn't look away.
It wasn't anything special, the fish weren't fighting they just kinda swam and sat pretty in their tanks built up like block towers. The puppies were in the other window in a pen, a parakeet on its perch, but for some reason beyond her she couldn't look away from those fish.
Maybe, subconsciously, it reminded her of her homelife and family. One for Grayson and her, the others rainbow fish and river trout; the ones in the lake beneath the bridge- they'd swim on by, but herself and her Dad had fought, hadn't they? Him with his elbows to the window and her with the seatbelt. Had there been a winner? She didn't think so, but she had held out the longest, like always. Forever enduring without complaint, like the clinical creature her Dad had been and unwittingly crafted her to be.
Consciously, however, she still couldn't look away.
"What are we, uh, looking at?" Stefan wondered, and he almost managed to sound amused for a minute there. A grueling feat for him, surely.
"They're betta's, siamese fighting fish. Highly territorial, if they're kept in the same tank they'll fight to death."
He was looking then, too.
They both just stood there, in the busy street full of bustling people; each one with a life as unique and complex as their own. Dead still and quiet.
There was something beautiful about those fish, like all things sad and deadly. They both considered them with apprehension and wistfulness, able to relate on a certain level, to understand what it was all about. It was the same kind of look people wore when they saw Jamie, with her sad smile and death-dealing eyes as granite as gravestones and malleable as upturned soil.
"It's like my brother and me, my brother Damon." He said all of a sudden, "There were times where… Like the fish, always fighting, and there were times when I thought we'd kill each other."
Stefan had never talked about his brother before, not to Jaime. Nik did, though, like a plaything to toy with and hold over his head. She wondered if she had a brother, the same way Stefan and Nik and Elijah did, and if they would have been like the betta's, too. Or perhaps a sister, or both or a whole load of siblings. It sounded nice, she decided, and she liked the sound of having a brother or a sister. The idea of someone out there, with the same blood and the same parents, made her feel just a little bit less lonely for a while.
She couldn't remember. The girl who flashed through her mind she didn't know from sam, a boy smiling at her without a name. Elena and Jeremy were as dead to her as she was to them, but they'd had their memories at the very least, she had nothing.
"You didn't though," she reminded him, "and now you're not in the same tank."
"Yeah. I guess so."
"If you put a mirror up, so that they could see each other, they'd kill themselves trying to get to the other." She went on, and it felt important to say it.
It had been Elena to stand between them, unknowingly for both of them. The pair of them, peering into the window at the unsuspecting fish had something more in common than they had accounted for. A girl, and hadn't it always come down to a girl? Elena, who stood in the tangled web of family relations, as eager to step into a brother's tiff as she had been reluctant to stand in her own ring.
It wasn't fair. That Jamie had to fight to sink or swim, that Lainey kept her blissful ignorance intact only to take a liking to family drama and fixing brothers- It wasn't fair. She had been in the basement, too. Why was it that she hadn't had nightmares or heard the voice, that Jamie had been left to the horrors of what went on behind closed doors while Elena had a full night's sleep and a Father that loved her without question. Maybe, if Jamie could have remembered it all, she wouldn't have been able to stand looking at those fish. Because while they swam she had been well and truly sunk.
He nodded, gaze hardened but scarily elegiac. "Let's go. As much as I like to keep him waiting, somehow I don't think it's worth the earache."
Jamie smiled, "There'll be no living with him, after this, you know."
They didn't need to get to the room, Nik was waiting impatiently by the car, arms crossed and a bored look on his face. The dog, as he referred to him more often than not, sitting by his side.
She thought about telling him about the fish, but ultimately she decided not to.
"His name is Richard Abeson, twenty nine years old, and he's just got out of a five year long relationship. He's got an aptitude of drinking and driving, lives alone in an apartment complex not too far from the town center, and can't seem to keep company for long. Guy's practically the poster child for commitment issues, really." Jamie listed off seamlessly.
"And?" Nik prompted expectantly.
She had copped on early that he always wanted more than he was initially given, something that Stefan had either missed out on or simply didn't care enough to adjust to. Jamie, though, always counted on it.
"Got a recent looking scar running down his chest, definitely not a medical incision- he's been clawed at by something. I couldn't see how far down it goes, but it runs pretty deep. Looks like his parting from the pack wasn't so sweet of a departure. He's incredibly bitter about it, too."
Nik looked pretty impressed, even though he shouldn't have been, but she took it as a good sign. "I'm going to go find dinner. Jay, would you care to join us?"
If Stefan objected to being included in those plans he was smart enough not to voice it, but she shook her to the negative anyway. "Go on without me, I had dinner with your Lon Chaney Jr."
Kaleb saw her, that evening, perched on the hood of a car with a dog intertwined with her legs. She was smoking a cigarette, watching the clouds part for the wavering sun, face brazen against the fierce light.
"I wasn't expecting to see you again." He admitted as he took his place to her left, letting his own gaze sweep the parking lot.
"We decided to stay a few more days, something came up. An old friend of Nik's." She spoke softly, almost mindlessly as she formed the words around the smoke. "We've got no place to be, anyhow. What's a few more days?"
They stayed still, letting the silence ease in with some sense of comfort and familiarity. Jamie thought a lot about those fish, about her summer and the vagueness of what she thought might form memories. There was also a matter of dreams- ones that had staved off when she spent the night with Kaleb.
There was something about him, she noticed, a familiar security of something washing over her that she couldn't identify. She found herself settling into his companionship without complaint, and it was nice to have someone other than Nik and Stefan to talk to- the simplicity of it was something that didn't go amiss, and sometimes it was the most simple of things that made life worthwhile.
Spending a night with a boy she'd met over the summer and didn't have a hope of meeting again just seemed so normal. Isn't that what typical teenage girls did on vacation? Filled their time with summer romance and the notion of desire? She thought that's what they did, and it was easy to fall into, despite not having done it before to her memory.
"Do you want to go to the bar with me?" Kaleb asked her in earnest.
"Sure."
Compelled staff didn't bat an eyelid at the pair of them and a dog trailing into the establishment, and children cooed at ole Roscoe and he ate the attention right up.
He watched her, the bare skin stretched tight over bone and the dark hair brushing against her cheeks and falling into her eyes. The girl, whose name he'd mustered the courage to ask for on a whim, folded herself across the bar, a waning crescent smile and freckle dotted cheeks spluttering like stars in the constellations.
"I'm sixteen going on thirty, if you know what I mean."
He looked at her, "no, I don't think I do."
"Well, one day you might. When you're older, maybe, or when you feel older."
She seemed absent, but she felt so damn tired that she couldn't help it. Part of her knew Kaleb would understand, whatever she was saying was something that would resonate with the boy with the blue eyes in a motel outside Indianapolis- it had to.
"Do you always talk in paradoxes?"
"I don't quite know myself, but to me it makes perfect sense." She admitted, seemingly amused at herself- because hasn't Jamie's entire life been a paradox anyway?
(AN: I couldn't help myself.
Jamie sleeping with Kol's future vessel comes across as highly amusing to me. It also serves a purpose, it's not just pointless sex for the sake of it, but it did make me chuckle anyway.
Also… I'm going to drop a little teaser here, so don't bother if you don't want it spoiled.
Kol may make an appearance in, let's say, chapter nine.
If that's not the exact chapter then don't have my head for it, okay? It's what I have planned, but sometimes writing it doesn't work out the way I planned and scenes get cut and impromptu moments happen, okay? Sue me!
Kaleb's appearance, for example, was literally figured out the day before I published chapter six. It just popped into my head and I had the chapter half written and next thing I knew I had it all done.
And now I have an actual plan for why he showed up and I am DYING to write a Kaleb Westphall one/two-shot.
This poor boy is going to further the plot and fix out a lot of shit I was struggling to explain all in one hit, anyone who doesn't think he's a godsend is wrong I tell you!)