Title: The Curse of Daylight
Author: AsianScaper
Disclaimer: I am borrowing only.
Rating: PG
Category: Drama/Angst
Spoilers: None
Feedback: Friends, enemies: review. Advice is highly sought after.
Summary: Selene POV. Her guilt and herself have a little conversation.
Archiving: N/A
Dedication: To the fans, to the fans.
A Very Long Author's Note: This is my first fic in the Underworld category and flames are fine with me, for as long as they remain constructive. I fused the first two chapters, thinking that they were much too short to stand alone; they also bite into the same banana: immortality and pain. This remains, for now, an inquiry on both. I may continue this at some later date or when the right mood settles but really, I just need to know what you think and if possible, of the improvements I must render. The story also mentions 'events of the day before'. I should think it refers to the last scenes in the movie involving Viktor's death and those after it. In truth, I'm just using this story as a vent so forgive me if it becomes too long and dreary. An experiment, to say the least.
"Ah, Domine! Si vis, potes me mundare!" means "My lord! If you will it, you can make me clean!" or something along those lines. I just had to wax Latin. After all, Selene must have grown up in an age where Latin was still taught and spoken.
Review watch:
Lady K- Thank you for the kind words. The writing style still makes me cringe but thank you!
Padme1- It is confusing? Would you care to elaborate? I'd be truly grateful if you do! We're on the same boat, honey: I don't know where this story is going, either. Or if it will ever end. =D
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The night howled for remedy, as if it waited for the moon's round pill to heal it. Everything brooded; the wooden boards were dark and rotting, sighing with every footstep, protesting like old men robbed of their voices, groaning.
The concrete walls of the underworld crept up in shadow, hiding the sky and the city with tree-like grayness, bending inward with the menace of lechers. They arched into darkness, off and away to sleep, or to that permanent manifestation of it that was death. There were times that the moon smote the murky water, attracted the senses and instantly repelled the attentions of those walking dead.
Light had no place here but those living in its opposite found reason to weep for it, to crawl to it, to be hewn to ashes for it, as love was.
Indeed, the pulse of reality did not reside in this place, sprouted from dreams and nightmares that neither killed nor woke.
Oh, but Selene felt sleep more intensely in her veins; she desired to rouse from slumber. It coursed like a stream through the gorges of her body. One that sought the sea, when sun goes loving the twilight and night wages war with the day.
Soon, soon the day would bleed and she, like the horizon, would drink of blood that melted at sunset and on, until stars smothered her appetite and halted her rampage.
Hunger pulls and thrashes and makes me weep. Oh me! Who never wakes at the sun's calling!
The blue of her eyes deepened, stealing the hue of heaven and emptying it for hell. Her lips felt the protrusion of teeth and the taste that lingered, because it was always memory – brought back by mere hunger and delight.
"I am thirsty," she heard herself whisper through her teeth, through that foretaste of blood. She was hungry, she knew. That empty flavor was there, willing to be added on, sharpened by the feel of fangs on her own lips.
Yet again, the necklace she forever held marked the inside of her palm with the quivering grip of upended wrath.
I am thirsty!
Then she woke to screams and weeping and the gnashing of teeth.
----
Light that tasted natural to the firmament was her doom.
The one that rises and sets; the other, which moves with the tide and urges with flesh and teeth. The moon, however damned it was these days, had more use for a pill than she. If it found her, its bloodlust would readily eclipse her will to survive. She believed that, and swallowed the rock at her throat.
There was no remedy. She was hunted and in that thought, her senses were wakened. Time slipped too easily, she knew, and she smelled the air for it.
Ten o'clock, ante meridian.
Ten o'clock; five hours after sunrise.
The sun would be more welcome. If it should pierce her skin, it would do so 'til she was less than what she first started with: ash. Perhaps then, they could sift her remains and build her anew.
Ah, Domine! Si vis potes me mundare!
Silence. Domine?
She woke to a feeling that she had not possessed in all her numberless years: not after pale nights awash in red, not after she had tossed the color over them. All holiness had fled from her but that, only to give her this heaviness, as if the bulwark she had settled in was not at all around her but within her. Gritting her teeth and at once, wounding her lips, she stifled a cry. Oh, not a sound! Silence was guilt's sentry!
Wiping the blood that nonetheless trickled on her chin, Selene stared up at the dark. And stared with as much complacence as when she witnessed the passage of souls to and from the flesh with which they dwelled in the world. Sometimes she herself arranged such passage; often, she was in the fray. Now, she wondered if she truly was old, a withered Charon on his boat.
Unlike Charon, her sight was her refuge, for she had no lack in it, no matter how bereft of radiance the world was. Dark and its opposite melded and formed; she knew their hues but saw things just as well in each. At times, too, it was a curse; for though she sought comfort when she closed her eyes, in opening them, none could assuage her pain.
Light and dark were the same. Always. Though real light would have killed her.
The sound of distant civilization visited then and not gently. It jolted her to wakefulness: the gratings of metal against metal, of trains carrying one burden and exchanging it for another. She sat up languidly, feeling every movement as though it was her first and pain, that reminded her of their acquaintance. Fast friends through years that spanned Resistance, Rebellion, Revolution, Republics, and even Rebirth.
Knowing now that sleep, or that phantom of it to one as sleepless as she, could not hear her, she sat heavily on the small cot, listening to the whir of exhaust fans and wondering at smells that none but nature could remove.
She felt the cracks in stone as she placed a booted foot on the floor. The water there murmured a steady chorus of drip, drip, drip, whispering of wells that had been dug to this place.
Her hands were heavy, heavier than when she carried things twice her weight or threw those corpses to their tombs. The flight in her legs seemed cut of their wings; the burden of emptiness occupied the straying movement of her arms. She wanted to weep and yet could not.
Why was it that emotion held so much sway? Why was it that in a week's time, century-old numbness had blossomed to full, awakened sensation? Feelings now were strong enough to break memory's monotonous web. Pain and anger, which she thought was the staple and had tasted stale for centuries, suddenly stung all the way to her throat like distilled beverages.
Pausing for posterity's sake, she pulled at a switch and a lamp flickered reluctantly to life. To the human eye, everything was revealed. To her immortal ones, whatever lay before her was as it always had been.
A computer monitor facing away from the bed threw light at the opposite wall. It stood humming with four eyes, digitally rendering information from cameras outside. She envied its haste even when it stood listless, immobile, machine-like and calculating.
They –and sensors she hoped would never be tripped –surveyed four levels of sewerage and canals. Microfilm was strewn over the standing CPU; examinations of various compounds and castles, a legacy to her thoroughness and efficiency when surveying the domain. They had been thrown there in frustration and the fruit of it was a disorderly function of images, mixed and mismatched, blatant disclosures of what she had lost. She was Viktor's daughter no longer. No more gates to go forth from; no more repetitive yet respectful ogling at her, the Dealer of Death; no more jaunty sprawls of blood-laden banquets to be displayed in.
Music, which would have agitated her, thankfully rang silent from the pair of multimedia speakers. She felt like sinking a pair of fangs into anything that was joyful.
There were folders on a shelf above a metal desk, ammunition that glinted like silver snakes crawling across and carefully stacked wads of money held down by a hefty piece of weaponry. The gun had the weary look of being used too often. Another shotgun rested idly against the side of the desk, its muzzle pointed at a map, which the room's occupant had hastily stuck with duck tape. Papers had strayed to the floor, where mud brought in from the night before had hardened and joined the earth lying there. A camera stared, haunted, from an open drawer while a chair sat in the light as shyly as though it was borrowing its color.
To her left was an entrance barely twice her width, a guide to a modest niche with nothing but a refrigerator silently whining about its bundle of cloned blood.
The four walls –barely three strides in width and eight in length –were dressed in bare concrete. Blocks of cement posed as glum roofs, ready to squelch even the most enthusiastic of eyes. This safe house known only to herself, had been patched up like an unworthy house of sticks over the weeks following Viktor's death. What precious little time was given, was spent on buying sanctuary. Through the pandemonium that had followed it, she scoured the market, both black and not, without being carefully watched, seizing every asset and floundering in a mass of money.
In effect, this small retreat was perpetually cool, properly dank and smelling comfortably like a sepulcher. It also stank of functionality. Her cold-blooded purpose could do nothing but applaud it.
Dust had little time to gather and would not intentionally, unexposed as this little alcove was from the fumes of the world above. But dust did come. Clothes harbored them, boots brought them. Selene and the war fetched a great deal, in fact.
Electricity hummed and she winced at the sound. To her heightened senses, it sounded too much like the sporadic whir of when she walked with Death.
"Get the bloody hell up before you turn to stone," she muttered to herself, her hands curling to pale fists.
Her boots screeched as she stood, shouting their protest. She stumbled doggedly to where liquid could sate her hunger and the refrigerator offered no resistance. She opened the fridge with a little too much force and the waft of cool air halted her progress. Visions flashed across her mind.
The mountains are but a hand's breadth away, said the mutinous thought.
She took a bag of Ziodex blood and stared at it. It swirled like wine aged, perhaps, for thirty years? Seven? Two? A man's age? A child's? A babe's?
"I am ill all over again," she whispered and marveled that she had not uttered those words, or the like of it, in over five hundred years.