Author's Notes:

(Edit for chapter 24)

Firstly, there are no actual raccoons on any of the British Isles. While they were introduced Continental Europe some unaccounted number of years by explorers from northern America, it was never on the British Isles. Thank you Phorcys for bringing that to my attention. Sorry for any confusion.

Also, correction about the year of the World's Fair in Paris. The year was 1878. Again, sorry. Shame on me for guessing dates (but you have to admit, a decade or two off isn't all that bad).

On another note, this story will be coming to a close soon. Just thought I'd give you guys a heads up since the last time I ended something abruptly I got death threats…

And now for your regularly scheduled programming.

Chapter 25: Moon Madness

Present Day
London, England
19XX

So, was it really true? Had he really forgotten everything? How could his memories be nothing more than figments of his imagination, something planted there and sprouted out of madness?

Was the woman-turned-monsteress he recalled really his mother? Had her genes of irrevocable strangeness actually fallen from her blood to his, or was he the first generation madman? Was he even born a werewolf? Could he had been human years ago but not remember it?

Was his name really Rothen at all? How old was he, where was he from, why was he forgetting reality for a dream world?

Vladimir had been lurking outside his door for days now, but he still refused to let him inside, even going so far as to put up a holy barrier to keep him from phasing through the walls. He ignored the prying of the vampire's worried mind into his own, wretched in his confusion.

Only when that stinking human woman, Integra pounded on the door and ordered him to open it under threat of imprisonment in the tower again, did he open the door. He looked older now, tired from frenzied nightmares of his fake world, more gray strands in the hair at his temples than before. He could see his own darkened eyes in the reflection of her glasses. Vladimir hovered just behind her, plucking at the folds of his coat as if he were about to leap inside the sliver of opened door.

"We need to talk," the woman said, her breath smelling faintly of cigar smoke even two feet away. She smoked too much. She must've had a death wish.

Rothen just looked at her.

"What am I?" he finally asked, unmoving.

"Come out and we'll figure this whole affair out," she said, also uncompromising in her demands.

He sighed and stepped out, ignoring the slightest of relieved breaths from the vampire's dry lungs, holding his gray clothes close around his body with his thin hands, bare feet slapping on the stone floor as he moved. He glared at Integra, silently ordering her to tell him immediately what was going on, if she presumed to know anything, which was assumed by all that she did.

"Do you recall the experiments thirty years ago?" Integra asked, and Rothen immediately nodded.

"What do you remember exactly?"

He stopped nodding and frowned at her…

His mind swam, his head hurt a little from hunger. He tried to remember…

"The specifics are hazy," he finally allotted.

"So you can't remember anything? A conversation, a face, anything?"

"I remember pain," he hissed, curling around himself as if in protection from the memories of the sharpest, most intrusive of tortures…

He realized for the first time that they were there, in a vague sort of way. Like a dream, they only existed when thought upon and then forgotten.

His eyes widened slightly and he realized he'd been following her as she walked down the hall and opened a door. She flipped a switch and he leapt back with a shriek, straight into Vladimir's arms. He struggled against the vampire, clawing and cursing as he tried to get away, but nothing could help him escape. Vladimir carried the struggling werewolf inside and Integra shut and locked the door behind them.

"You remember this room," she observed unnecessarily.

He let out a long, mournful 'No' and slipped out of Vladimir's arms, ran for the door. The vampire was there in an instant, blocking it with a sorrowful look.

"Why do you remember this room?" Integra demanded, shouting at him. Rothen huddled deeper against his chest, backing against a wall so nothing could appear behind him. His eyes were wild, but unseeing.

He could barely breathe, it was terrifying and he didn't know why.

"Why do you remember this room, Rothen!"

He could see it now, feel the bite of leather straps around his wrists, ankles, chest, forehead, the bright light jabbing him in the eyes when he tried to open them. There was the clank of metal, the stink of silver and humans and antiseptic, a wad of cotton in his teeth to keep him silent.

And there, a face masked and backlit with the overhead lamp, but those eyes, those evil eyes, green-hazel and filled with devious glee. He wielded a long silver scalpel and the werewolf's eyes widened, he tried to run. His hunger ate at his gut, and the smell of silver burned his throat.

He couldn't breathe…

"Let's see what exactly makes this monster tick, eh?" the human said to his cohort, who chuckled.

"He looks so scared," the other man laughed, "No brave faces like that damned vampire."

"Well he should be scared, he's about to get a huge dose of payback." The doctor leaned in, inches from the werewolf's face, "This is for all those humans you killed, you freak."

"NO!" Rothen screamed, clutching his head and crumpling to the floor. He fought the kind arms that tried to contain his shaking, fangs bared in a snarl in pure animalistic terror, all sense lost for the sake of self-preservation.

"That's enough, Integra," Vladimir's voice cut through the noise Rothen was making. He could see her nodding somewhere in the dimmer areas of the room.

"Calm him down, talk to him, feed him. We'll work on this more later." And she left.

Vladimir cradled the werewolf's head against his chest, the both of them still on the floor of the operation room. Rothen's eyes were focused on an elderly bloodstain, so dark it was black now. It could've been his own, from then…

He was breathing easier now, his gasps shallower and more frequent. His tears had stopped minutes ago, his shoulders gone lax.

"My name isn't Rothen, is it?" he asked, his voice surprisingly even after his fit.

"It wasn't, but it is now. It changed then. Like mine."

"The humans did it…it's all their fault. I never killed a human until then…They were wrong to blame me for that."

"You remember that much?"

"Remember, no. But I know."

Vladimir couldn't figure out how the werewolf could know anything without remembering it, but there were always some parts of the other's mind he could never penetrate or understand.

"Let's get out of this place, it isn't a place for this talk." Vladimir said softly into the werewolf's ear. The other nodded and they rose together, supporting one another easily.

"My room. I want you to tell me everything. I need to know who I was."

"Are," the vampire corrected. Rothen shook his head.

"No. Was. Whoever I was then is dead now. I want to know who that creature was."

Vladimir studied Rothen's face for a few moments, then sighed and nodded.

"After we get you some food. I'll have Walter bring something down. Any requests?"

"Interga's head on a platter?" Rothen asked without hesitation. Vladimir laughed and led them out.

"Maybe some other day."

NS

"Let's start with something simple," Rothen began as he sipped weakly at his cup of tea, eyes staring into the fireplace where the flames had just licked the first black marks across the freshly built logs. He had sucked down the newly killed chicken that had been presented to him within minutes of its arrival and was now curled up in an armchair set up with its twin before the fireplace that heated the room.

Vladimir looked up at him, apparently satisfied that he'd eaten and calmed down, ready to answer questions.

"What was my name?"

Vladimir blinked, and his lips curled in a slight smile.

"Well, it obviously wasn't Rothen von Thorne."

"Obviously," Rothen snorted.

"Lukas Keller, from Berlin."

"Berlin? Berlin didn't exist when-"

"You were born in 1859, eleven years after it was officially named Capital of the German Empire. Your father was a merchant and your mother dead when I met you."

"I was human?"

"Yes, human, but with a certain preternatural state. I suppose it's what attracted you to me and me to you…and the wolves to you as well."

"Go on? How did we meet?"

"Your father had decided to visit the world's fair and make some sales and you had come with him, apparently his apprentice, but you had little interest in a merchant's life."

Rothen spoke before he realized it, "I wanted to be a scientist…"

Vladimir gave a relieved laugh. "Indeed you did!"

"But you…you were…"

"Living in Paris at the time, seeing the sights, visiting the fair, picking off the foreigners, leading quite the good life, actually," Vladimir lilted, "You were gawking at the telephone and its inventor, trying to talk to him in very terrible English when I saw you. Mr. Bell had looked quite confused listening to you and I offered to translate. Do you remember?"

Rothen tapped his chin gently, "I remember the crowds…and the electric lights. Those were amazing…"

"Yes, a novelty that took right off, didn't it?"

"I was nineteen?"

"Yes. You offered to buy me a drink in thanks. I declined the drink after the fact, but we did go and eat out that evening. I think I showed you around the more tourist-friendly places of Paris, which amused you."

"You wanted to drink my blood," Rothen growled, recognizing it as a hunting tactic. How stupid he'd been as a human, believing the monsters weren't real, weren't at his very doorstep.

"You let me out of curiosity."

"Then why didn't I turn into a vampire or ghoul?"

"I didn't take it directly," Vladimir said, hackled rising at the tone of voice the werewolf was speaking in out of habit, "You cut your wrist and told me not to bite down."

Cursed curiosity…

"I sent you home with the promise not to speak of me and maybe a slight twist of memory, not hard done. I had rather enjoyed your company. You weren't afraid of me, perhaps too young to know better and too old to fear legends."

"What about the werewolves?" Rothen asked, impatient.

"I don't know exactly, just that you came back a couple days later, tracked down my apartment even though I forced you to forget the address. You just appeared on my doorstep, bleeding and exhausted as if you'd been running. You asked me to help you."

He remembered now, the past, the real past. He remembered his mother's soft face, exactly the one he knew, but human, blue eyes instead of gold. She had died young, he remembered, in childbirth of his sister…they'd both died. His father had never recovered and had traveled Europe since, dragging the twelve-year-old version of him until seven years later, in Paris.

He remembered now, Vladimir's easy translation between boy and inventor, his hand on his shoulder as he led him through the streets of the city, him eating nothing at the restaurant, but watching him with a certain hunger he hadn't realized until much later. When the vampire had told him what he was, what he wanted, he had willing given up his blood, dying of curiosity, the lust for knowledge of any kind enough to make him tempt certain death.

The vampire had been a perfect gentleman the whole time, and had sent him off later that night with a kind goodbye and an offer to take him touring again at some later date. On the way home, he was grabbed by some shadowy form and stolen away. He had woken in the presence of strange humanoids with ears and tails and wolfish features, licking their chops and clicking their claws along the stone walls, their tattered clothing suggesting they were of the outcasted lots that lived beneath the city. They had spoken to him in French, but he couldn't understand them, demanded to know where he was and then to be taken back to his father.

They had fed on him, torn through his weak human flesh and abandoned him in the sewers to die. But he didn't die. He'd crawled out of that hellish place and all the way to the vampire's home, although he hadn't known at the time where he had been going. He had stayed awake long enough to make sure he was safe, and then collapsed into the vampire's awaiting arms.

Fin Chapter 25

Please Review

Author's Note: Classes are finally starting tomorrow. Finally, I'll have something else to do but write!

Wait, is that a good thing?

Also, my job as Library Security starts tomorrow…

How in the hell did I get that job? I'm not really all that intimidating. Ah well, I'm getting paid more than my last job to do less than my last job, so this is a great thing anyway. Besides, I like libraries. They're filled with my favorite things, books!

To My Readers:

Phorcys: Thanks for pointing that out! I've learned something that isn't entirely valuable, will certainly save me the trouble of raccoon-proofing my trash cans when I move to England.

And yes, fancy that, Alucard is actually telling the truth.

Morality: Uh…Rothen was the one with memory loss…not Alucard…Mistype?

Red-on-Black: "Or they could be both right and you cooked up a marvelous plan to explain it."

That would be pretty marvelous, wouldn't it? But alas, I can't possibly think of something that would work out that well…Well, this is cooler anyway.

And I love cliffhangers, don't you? I love pushing my readers off in unexpected directions. Thanks for the review!