Title: I, Immortal
Author: AsianScaper
Disclaimer: I am borrowing only.
Rating: PG
Category: Drama/Angst
Spoilers: None
Feedback: Friends, enemies: review. Advice is a commodity highly sought after.
Summary: Michael POV. Michael does his rounds, visits old haunts, and invades new ones.
Archiving: N/A
Dedication: N/A
Author's Note: I wanted to know what Michael would feel like after gaining eternity from a single...bite. Well, inquiry again. This is all just a big experiment. Humor me. "Rendezvous" was written in a more contemporary style. I thought that a long Underworld story would need the reprieve. Flowery English just wouldn't do the job. I absolutely need feedback on my characterization of Michael. Here are a few questions: Does it work? In what ways does it not? Well, do feel free to flame constructively. Again, I merged chapters as I figured it would be too short.

----

He had heard her scream as her bellow hitched on a wind and brought it to his lycan ears. Neither song nor pealing voice halted his race over rooftop and chimney though at the prompting of hers, he rested his arms and legs onto a gargoyle and sneered at the very face of the city. The empty building throbbed for him to leave.

She dreams again. And wakes during the day.

His head raised, his hair falling back against his neck, he glanced at a sun too tired to wipe the clouds from its face. Rain poured perpetually; it had not stopped since the events of days before and only the concrete of buildings, of sewers, of dark alleyways, brought comfort from its ice. Blinking as if to force some realism to his sight, he found no real light, only artificial dawns that men brought with them.

Such cold, however, did not seem far from the temperature of his own. His strange skin was reveled at by living and the unanimated alike. Rain that should have been cold to him was lukewarm. Rats stiffened; crows dared not deliver their message of death. Concrete that should have heralded him, did not speak. His treading became a silent parade that none thought to look at. Always, he caught mortals unaware and wondering if he had been a dream or a trick of the eyes, or a shadow of their own corpses.

He was too new in this world and at the same time, too old a product of it.

The gargoyle, its eyes peering through a swirl of marble, had no real words to impart, except an expression fixated on robbing any onlooker of his smile. His had long since withered to voiceless contemplation since the day began. He smiled. What day? While one looked to the heavens, the sky had ceased to exist. Boiling tendrils of smoldering rain hovered instead.

Michael, for his part, shared the gargoyle's gaze, his eyes so late into the night that its color shunned all daylight. The blue of his skin melted into the city's shade until even the gray of buildings hid his form.

He had realized that those walking dots below him, some in umbrellas, some bare-headed and hunched into their coats, could not possibly know the itch. The itch of harrowing death, the itch for conclusions, the longing for an end to relentless years of existence. Though this was only the beginning, the word 'immortal' had a new, frightening ring to it. A ring, which was tolled only when the shoe finally fit. He was damned because his blue feet fit all too well.

This city he had adopted on a mission of peace and servitude, had swallowed him into myth, into its legend, its irrational violence that hid below veins of underground tunnels and in citadels of stone. He howled for reprieve and closed his eyes at the futility of it.

You've lingered too long, animal.

The thirty floors below him was too eager a wish, he knew.

He leapt anyway. And lived.

----

Rendezvous

He fell through a city avenue and landed quietly behind a hooded man in sneakers. The fellow quickly turned and Michael, on all fours, crouched to be hidden from view. The day had darkened to the point of almost twilight obscurity and the singular light from the lamp post did nothing to chase the gloom. Droplets that ran off the man's umbrella spattered on Michael's exposed back; cool rain that did nothing to move him. Still and barely breathing, Michael waited.

"The West End just keeps getting better," the human muttered sardonically, clearly shaken.

The man shrugged his nervousness off, looked at his timepiece and finally, boarded a bus heading downtown. As the person disappeared behind doors hissing closed, Michael emerged gradually from shadow. The rest of the street remained empty of people and a glance at another avenue beyond the one he stood in, offered some reprieve from seclusion.

Newspapers had begun to disintegrate into the gutters and the dirt of the road gathered at the drainage. The lit post beside the bus stop had put a spotlight on the fact.

Michael, his naked torso glistening and his pants still intact, quickly surveyed the street. He found no smell, no profound insight into the wet gloom of it, only the shifting aroma of a man who had stumbled and brushed against a heavily perfumed woman here; another who had eaten a bagel there, a third who had spilled coffee onto his own lap.

What a mess.

The jacket Michael had thrown aside while cruising the rooftops lay untouched behind a newspaper stand. He donned it, zipping up the front and cowering inside like a novice in a convent.

He walked through the narrow streets and found definition there; some bit of meaning to the strange rhythm that was his life. These trips were always painful: that in walking, he instead slithered and crawled in this new body. That he sniffed and tasted the air as if his tongue were for touching and the wind textured with explanations.

He suffered more from exhaustion eventually. The zest of the next boulevard served to deplete his caution.

He came by a familiar intersection and leaned on a pole as the traffic rushed by, throwing water against all that passed. The light told him to come hither to the other street as traffic slowed for pedestrians. He crossed with two other men in trench-coats and a rush of hidden crisp shirts bumping against his wet jacket, steadying an old lady with her cane as he helped her walk the short distance between sidewalks.

"Thank you," the old lady muttered, gathering a plethora of artificial teeth. "You young men are always helpful."

"Always?" Michael asked softly.

The lady looked at him with peculiar disgust. "Well, you're cynical for one so young." But before he could reply, she lumbered steadily enough on her own. "And get yourself some shoes!" she hollered in afterthought.

He looked at his feet and managed a smile. And the old still retain some bit of wisdom. Definitely a good sign.

Rounding a corner, he found no real summons from the smell of food that finally came to his nostrils. Only a hardening in his gut.

The old haunts. The steady, old haunts that he could no longer visit. The diner with its elongated body, dropped on a lot with no grass, sitting there as if it was the only place it could have been built on. Rain soaked it; a metal rod washed and waxed. It was painted on colors of blue and red. Inside, he could see a variety of people. Businessmen on short breaks, waitresses waiting on lusty young men, salesmen in glaring new coats, construction men on coffee break, a whole squad of traffic enforcers munching on donuts. And doctors in faces heavy with bags for their eyes.

Doctors. Interns. Nurses. Laughing, complaining, sleeping beside their coffee and their breakfast. Making notes, brandishing stethoscopes around busy necks. Listless with twelve hours of continuous consciousness.

Old, old haunts. He sniffed, as if to gather the aroma to himself. To live it, at least. Though the time left to him was cut short. It was always so short, no matter what his body whispered to him of eternity.

His view turned sharply and his torso whipped from over his feet.

"Hey! Watch where you're going!" someone in front of him yelled.

"Yeah, sorry."

"Homeless old git," came the muttered reply.

Gotta get going. Move, move, move, Michael. No need to attract too much attention. And you haven't got any shoes on.

Past the old diner and into a shop, he quickly slipped through a back door and found himself alone in an alley, waiting for the silence to trip. He expectedly did the tripping, inciting the echo of a manhole cover to bite the ground as he silently slipped inside. A new surplus of smells threatened to strain his already sensitive nose. In an attempt to distract himself, he concentrated on his hearing.

A car had rushed by through a side street just above, the sound of its engines swallowed by the concrete around. Then came the august drip of water and an even more merry December to the weather of the place. He rubbed his arms.

"Don't dally, Michael," he told himself and made his way, however reluctantly, through the grime of the underworld.

Mills had not expected the animal so early in the day. But it should have been expected, with the way the rains had toppled routines and built new ones. The darkness outside had somehow contradicted the motions of nature, deepening when the light should have brightened. The sun ought to rise from the gloom of rain clouds some time this afternoon, no matter how much it hid this morning. Well, at least that was what the television had said and what his own vile experience had imparted in the last one hundred years under the tempests of the city.

"You come unannounced. Again." The creature opened its mouth to say something but Mills raised a hand to stop him. "I'm not one to latch onto the business of those above. So please, keep your mouth shut."

Those simpering fools! Those meddlesome critics of the exiled! And this thing was included in that horrible disarray!

"I know," the animal said. "Just deliver the blood I need."

He owned a quiet sort of voice; as quiet as a black mamba slinking on its way to the grocer.

Mills had the nerve to poke it. He sneered. "You need? For all I know, you've taken a vampiress for your wife!" He spat the sentence, a black knot of mystery and half-truths that landed on the floor. Though he admitted that his spittle did not deserve to deal such a blow.

The creature barely winced. "Careful with your words," it said.

"It's none of my business," Mills cut in complacently. He did nothing to test the mood. "But I've heard my share of rumors and truth."

And the creature knew he could not come back. Not ever. "No real need to listen to that rubbish, now is there?"

Mills blinked, his eyes suddenly blue, grabbing the color of the sky from where all demons had fallen. "No, not at all, unless I wished it." He pointed at a space behind him. "The blood's in the cooler. Get them and get out. Please."

That bit of courtesy hurried the creature's actions. It carried the cooler without so much as a grunt, heaving it against its oddly colored skin. The flesh had peeked from under its jacket.

Mills' eyes glinted, the display of syringes beside him suddenly screaming to be touched.

"I know what you're thinking," it said. "You don't want to know what I am. It would only tempt you to kill me to try."

"Don't judge me so easily," Mills scoffed.

"I'm not. But I can judge a scientist from one who isn't. Don't step any closer." The creature's eyes turned a worse shade of black and whatever fanciful imaginings Mills had concocted for his hypotheses, suddenly became very, very real.

"Abomination," was the dictate of reason.

"Yeah, if that's what you want to call it." The creature almost seemed abject in its response.

Mills immediately found abandoned norms surfacing to take the front seat. "You're not suppose to exist," he said matter-of-factly, his voice lilting to higher degrees.

"Simply put, yes." The creature turned to face him squarely and Mills, for all his inquiry, only felt the familiar surge of anger and abhorrence towards something that had always been thought to be a threat to his species.

Just as his own species were constantly a threat to himself. And that consideration brought the blue in his eye back to the green that was truly his from the beginning.

"Well, what did I say?" Mills growled, urging both of them to be fully aware of the other. "Get your stuff and get out!"

The creature stood dumb for a moment, wondering at what had passed between himself and the other man. Then, unexpectedly, as was its wont, it said, "Thanks", leaving the door behind him open as his shadow ceased to linger at its frame.