A/N: Happy new year! I'm sorry this update isn't especially long, but I'm back to writing every day now, so hopefully monthly updates are back on the table.

Tara wasn't sure how long she'd been sitting at her desk, staring blankly at the empty work-space before her, when she noticed Dwayne's reflection in one of her framed photographs. She gave no indication that she'd spotted him - nor was she startled. Maybe she'd even hoped for this when she left her window open past sunset. She knew her own mind too well to pretend otherwise...and she was too tired for such games. Playing coy was a luxury she didn't have the energy to afford. His face sat there, faded, between her own and Emma's, its stern expression a stark contrast to the big grins they'd fixed the camera with.

Did the 'no reflection' thing only apply to mirrors then, she wondered? Or perhaps the open window was all the invitation he'd needed in this case, given how many times she'd welcomed him into her company before. It was only when their eyes met in said reflection that he spoke, apparently too impatient to wait for a greeting.

"Y'know, before I just thought we were both victims of circumstance - some god with a shitty sense of humour, I dunno - but now? After the last few days? Now I know you're actively trying to fuckin' kill me."

Tara didn't budge an inch as he railed against her. Well, his version of it, at least.

"I didn't even know if you were coming back!" He pushed at her lack of response.

Now probably wasn't the time to admit that she hadn't known either, she suspected. She also wondered, albeit somewhat numbly, if the thought worried him more because he'd miss her, or because he was worried about his secret getting out. It wasn't that she revelled in cynicism, but he was so damn difficult to read - how else did he maintain that 'dark and mysterious' aura of his? It was just her luck that the thing that made him so attractive also made him infuriating.

"I had to think," she offered after a moment of heavy silence, turning slightly in her chair so she at least half-faced him.

It also wasn't the time to admit just how happy she was to see him again (infuriating or not), especially after what the previous day had wrought. No, that admission could wait until he was just a tad less pissed. Assuming that time would ever come.

"And you couldn't have said that in a note? Shit, doll, that would've fit on a goddamn post-it!"

His rant seemed more aimed at the situation than at herself, and she watched silently as he paced in her peripherals.

He had a point. She knew he did. All things considered, she was probably lucky that she hadn't returned to the full group in her room, fangs bared, ready to protect their secret with blood. Her blood. What did one call a group of vampires? A flock? A murder, maybe - like crows. That was fitting enough.

"I went to New York with Jason - he had a convention. It was a good chance for me to go back, play catch up, see what's been going on in my absence."

"To see your sister?"

Despite herself, she smiled - although it didn't feel genuine. More like somebody had attached hooks to either side of her mouth and pulled upwards. How many guys had she known in the past whose minds would've immediately jumped to the exes before they did family?

Seeming to sense he'd found the issue, he probed a little further.

"How is she?"

"I wouldn't know. They moved."

How long had she sat in the McDonalds across the street from their apartment block? Hours, easily. She wanted to encompass all of the times she knew they'd be coming and going - to and from school, the ballet classes, all of it. And she hadn't spotted a single one of them. Not even a single hair of Alison's shitty bleach job. Her mind had spiralled from there. Was Emma sick, maybe? It was the only reason she could think of that would've kept them indoors all day on a weekday. So she did what any reasonable person would do - she climbed on top of the dumpsters out back, and scaled the fire escape from there. Only to see, once reaching their old floor, that an old woman was sleeping in the room that was once her sister's.

The whole place had been fully redecorated. It was so unrecognisable that she'd even checked a few floors above and below, convinced that it couldn't have been true - that she'd gotten the floors mixed up. But no. The neighbours above and below were the ones she remembered. It was no mistake. No accident. They were gone, and they'd taken her sister with them.

Immediately following she'd been so inconsolable that people had deliberately swerved to avoid her in the street - a stretch from the usual New Yorker's ability to completely ignore anything inconvenient in their path. When she found Jason in the airport she knew her face must've been a picture because of how much of an effort he made not to look at her at all. Not that she blamed him - they weren't quite on the level of comforting one another through emotional turmoil. Shit, were she and Dwayne even on that level? This see-sawing they were doing between insisting they were casual and then inching toward something more was more tiresome than entertaining in her current mindset. Tara was tired, and more than that, she felt defeated.

How many years had she bitten her tongue against all the things she'd have loved to say to her father? Too many. Sure, she'd never exactly pretended to be thrilled about the presence of that woman, but she'd never voiced the true thoughts constantly whirling around in her head. How many times had she picked up a paint brush because she couldn't open her mouth? Or a bottle. Too many. A thousand days in a row, if not more. But none of them mattered or meant anything in comparison to the one day she could no longer do so. And now she'd paid the price for it.

But she wasn't under any sort of illusion that not saying anything would've been much better. If she'd sat in silence and allowed that asshole to berate her without saying a word, she'd still be mad at herself for it now, replaying the moment in her head over and over while thinking about what she should've said. It was a lose/lose situation, but at least if she'd kept her mouth shut she would've still had her sister. That argument would've been all Alison needed to push the move she'd always been longing for. Probably to some picket-fenced monstrosity in the suburbs. The hustle and bustle in the city had always been more her mom's speed.

A lump lodged itself firmly in her throat, and try as she might to fight it, soon her eyes were burning too. She had no idea how Dwayne would react to her little display. The cynic in her thought he'd awkwardly excuse himself 'til she could pull herself together - maybe while uttering a half-assed "I'm sure it'll be fine". And who could blame him if he did? He always had the technicality of their casualness to fall back on. Rising from her chair to grab a tissue, keeping her head bowed in spite of the tears beginning to cloud her vision. Making a fool of herself here and now would just be the cherry on top of everything.

But then Dwayne surprised her. It seemed to be a hobby of his; at this point she'd be more surprised if he behaved how she predicted he might. Reaching a hand out tentatively, his fingertips brushed her upper arm, and when she showed no sign of jerking away he gently pulled her towards him. When she was close enough, he released his grip and wrapped his arms around her instead, chin resting atop her head. This was all it took. After the first sob escaped, the snow-ball effect from there was real. If he ever wore a shirt, she was sure it would've been drenched pretty quickly. Only managing to remain upright because of his tight hold, she allowed him to manoeuvre them backwards onto her bed, and then she let it all out.

She cried over losing her mom, over losing her sister, over the shock and the stress of Dwayne's own revelation (which now felt like an entire age ago), over how absolutely shitty everything felt, and over how tired she was. She cried to let it all out, and she cried because she finally could. None of the embarrassment she expected to hit reared its head, and Dwayne said nothing. No fake-cheery words of comfort, or assurances that her dad would come round when they both knew he wouldn't. Instead, he threaded his fingers through her hair, held her against him, and allowed her to cry, sitting with her legs sprawled across his lap and her face in his neck.

By the time she was done her chest ached, her eyes burned, and she felt like she could fall asleep then and there. Dwayne didn't release his hold, although his hand did still in her hair, the thumb of the other tracing circles where her shirt had ridden up. If she were looking down at this scene as an objective observer, she might've laughed. Evil, bloodsucking creature of the night indeed. But as things were, she simply felt numb. The silence enveloped them for so long that when he did finally speak, a good while after she'd calmed, she wasn't sure she'd heard him at all.

"Cholera," he said softly.

"What?" Her voice was scratchy and weak.

He loosened his grasp on her just a little so that she could shift and look at him properly in the dim light. His eyes remained fixed on the hand that was on her hip.

"Cholera," he repeated "There was a pandemic. One of the outbreaks was too close to home - literally. That's how I lost my sister."

Her mind stopped and started at the turn in the conversation, but slowly the pieces began to fit together. The last cholera pandemic in the states had to have been over a hundred years ago, easily.

"That had to have been...the nineteenth century," she reasoned aloud.

"Eighteen fifty-four," he nodded, eyes finally meeting her own "Now you know why I couldn't tell you."

Two things hit her then; first embarrassment at remembering her annoyance, feelings of rejection, and just how damn personally she'd taken his refusal to tell her back when they'd first broached the topic. And he'd just allowed it. No vague references to her not understanding the circumstances, or even irritation at her short temper. Sure, it wouldn't have made a difference at the time, but were she in his shoes, she wouldn't have been able to resist the temptation to completely lose her rag in response. The man had self control made of steel.

Then, the full extent of the meaning of his words sank in - the technicalities behind the story. Dwayne had been alive almost a hundred and fifty years ago. They watched each other in the darkness for a moment. She had no idea what she was looking for - lines to magically appear on his face? His hair to turn grey? She dreaded to think what he looked for as he stared back. Whatever it was, it didn't show on his face. But she knew well enough that still waters ran deep (in his case, at least), and she'd underestimated him enough for one lifetime.

"I'm sorry," she said softly.

Tara wanted to laugh at herself for saying it. It was something she'd grown to loathe hearing after her mom. But what else could she say? It was something people said when nothing that could be said would fix it. A less eloquent version of 'I know I can't fix it, but I wish I could'.

Sheepishly wiping a few undried tears from his chest, she planted a gentle kiss in the hollow of his collarbone before dropping her head back to where it had rested before. It was done with the aim of initiating anything more. Then, after she did it, it struck her that this might've been the first time she'd expressed any romantic affection without an "endgame" in sight. Not just to him, but to anybody.

"It was a long time ago," he murmured.

It was a phrase that was familiar to her. She often said it herself when the topic of her mom was raised - a way of making it sound okay when it wasn't.

"I'm still sorry," she replied.

He held her tighter.

When Dwayne arrived back at the cave everybody was sprawled around the closest thing they had to a living room. Cat even must've been having a good night, for she was half-heartedly flicking through a book rather than staring into space. It was probably the best chance he'd get. Using the adrenaline he'd built up on the ride over, he hovered by the fountain and then spoke up.

"I don't wanna freeze her out."

The reaction wasn't quite as dramatic as he expected. Nobody jumped to their feet, there was no explosive outburst, not even any derisive snorts. Paul, for his part, seemed entirely unsurprised, stopping mid-sentence in his conversation with Marko before leaning back and draping an arm around Cat's shoulders, watching him expectantly. Cat closed her book slowly, but otherwise didn't react much at all, while David...well, David had the look of a predator that smelled blood. But none of them spoke.

Leaning forward, David turned the boombox off and the cave had suddenly never felt so silent. Dwayne looked at them all in turn, waiting for something - anything.

"Well?" David asked.

"Well what?"

"I assumed there'd be more to it than that. Y'know, a reason. Something like that," he lit a cigarette as he spoke.

Dwayne resisted the urge to nervously fidget. He'd be damned if he showed a sign of discomfort.

"Her family moved - her dad, her sister. She's got nobody now."

"Are you trying to say she's Lost?" David tilted his head.

Dwayne knew what he was getting at. He was asking if he wanted to turn her.

"No," he said quickly, and even mostly honestly (but not for the reasons they'd think) "I'm saying it'd be shitty of us to make her lose her friends in the same week. I'm...worried about what it'd do to her."

That was the grain of truth that he was relying on to sell his story. Maybe if he showed just a small amount of caring towards Tara, his brothers would take that as the extent of it...mostly because they trusted him to be as honest with them as he was with them. He tried not to dwell on that. This tightrope act he was doing was bad enough, he didn't need the guilt to topple him over.

"And you care about that? What it might do?" David continued to grill him.

The others' eyes moved between himself and David with each exchange, like they were witnessing the world's most solemn tennis match.

"It doesn't have to be all or nothing," Dwayne pushed "'One of us' or 'dead to us'. Haven't we already proved that since we started hanging out with her? Hiccups aside?"

"It was that kind of thinking that got Max killed."

"No it wasn't, it was this kind of thinking that did. That he couldn't be involved with that Emerson woman or her family in any way unless they joined us. What are we gonna do next? Never go to the boardwalk because it's too full of mortals? No bars, too, I guess - can't deal with a mortal bartender. C'mon, man. I'm not asking for anything crazy."

Just a chance to smooth things over and time figure out his next move.

The way David's lips thinned told Dwayne he'd clamped him.

"All right, here's what we're going to do - if we vote on it and you get a majority. We'll go back to hanging out with her like we used to, and we'll keep hanging out with her til the novelty wears off and you lose whatever this interest of yours is, because it's bound to happen. Then, when that happens, it falls on you to break the news to her that she's out. I'd be happy to drop her here and now after all that awkwardness with her accusations about Paul. You can have fun thinking up some new, feasible excuse since you're so determined to give up this chance," he rattled off his conditions surprisingly quickly and concisely, gaze never wavering.

"Deal," Dwayne said immediately - it was a better one than he could've hoped for.

"I vote no," David shrugged "No hard feelings, man."

"I vote yes," Dwayne countered calmly "None taken."

The two of them turned to Paul. Dwayne watched him carefully. He'd heeded his advice, and now he was counting on his brother looking out for him because of it.

"Yeah," he said eventually.

David looked at him in disbelief.

"What?" The blond sighed, pinching the bridge of his nose "Like you said. He'll get bored of her sooner or later. Letting him do it on his own terms gets us the same result, but with no hard feelings or in-fighting. Takes longer, but it's better in the long run."

Marko was next, in order of age.

"No," he shook his head "Sorry, bro. I think it's too risky. I don't hate the chick, but the longer we hang with her the more chance there is that she'll realise somethin's afoot here."

Then, finally, all eyes were on Cat. Fiddling with the worn corner of the paperback in her hands, she bit her lip and then locked eyes with Dwayne.

"She still think Paul's secretly some sort of lassie-basher?"

"No," he shook his head "She believed you when you told her otherwise."

Nodding slowly, she looked at David, then at Paul, and then back to him. He tried his best to strike a balance between pleading with his eyes and seeming unbothered, but that much was an impossible task. Nevertheless, she returned his gaze unflinchingly. While he knew it was what she saw in his eyes that would make the difference, it was what he saw in hers that troubled him. The light that was usually there - when they joked around, were out riding, pretty much whenever - was fading fast, only emphasised by the dark circles that told him the nightmares were returning too. By the time December hit it would be more of a blank stare, before the spark would be back sometime around mid-January. The fact that it did return like clockwork was probably the only thing that made the rough two or three months bearable for Paul. It was difficult enough for Dwayne to see and he hadn't even caused it; not directly, at least. Sure he'd had a hand in it, but not in the same way he'd have a hand in the same happening to Tara if they were to turn her and she wound up regretting it.

What if she changed and then her sister showed up in ten years time, desperate to move away and start a new life together? She'd never forgive herself. Shit, half the time the only things keeping Cat anchored on days like this were the bonds she'd formed with all of them, not just Paul. Tara couldn't say the same. He wasn't sure he could handle the responsibility of that if it came down to it, either. The girl would take it as a cop-out if - and it was a big if - she was truly serious about wanting to be turned and he explained his reasoning. That he had everybody's best interest at heart. But it was true. She wasn't Lost in the same way Cat hadn't been, not really, and while they were far from the same person, all of the ways Tara was different from Cat just guaranteed that the transition would be even harder, and much more doomed to fail, for the mortal. Hopefully he'd be able to show her that the grass wasn't always greener if they agreed to hang out with her just a little more. Doing the opposite would just cement her certainty that she was missing out on something that she was well-suited to. Then, once his point was proven, she'd move on and he'd….well, he'd get over it. Eventually.

Whatever Cat was looking for as she scrutinised him, he hoped she found it when she ducked her head, took a deep breath in and then spoke.

"All right. I trust your judgement. I vote yes."

So much for avoiding guilt - at least he'd won, though. Part of him had expected (and feared) that David would be furious with the result. But while he obviously wasn't pleased, he simply shrugged and leaned back with the expression of somebody who knew they'd be saying a few 'I told you so's later down the line.

"Never let it be said that we're not a democracy," he leaned forward to switch the boom box back on "But don't come crying to me when she sees somethin' she shouldn't and pays the price."

A/N: As always, thank you guys for your loveliness and your patience, it's always highly appreciated.