Title: Flight
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: Plans to flee, plans to go looking for some lycan friends: plans to solve a very, very big problem...security.
Archiving: N/A
Dedication: To my mother, who is such a prick, and to the young ones, who really ought to know that mothers know best...most of the time.
Author's Note: Well, I do realize that this isn't your usual ff.net reader's cup of tea, as it is very serious reading. I did some explaining on the background of events. Apparently, Selene knew all along that they'd be needing the lycans' help, thus her choice to stay put in the city. I have this nagging feeling that I'm going to come across a HUGE loop-hole in all this. Nonetheless, the story primarily serves as a character study and not really an attempt on plot. We'll save that aspect of the short story for the next few chapters.
Review Watch:
Lady K: Thanks you for the reviews once more. I hope the story below would do some more explaining and lift some of the mysteriousness from the first two chapters.
Padme1: Well, let's all keep our fingers crossed and hope this is worth the read! The revamping of the writing style was entirely because of you though of course, it isn't too changed. Many thanks for the honest reviews!

----

She could smell the portent in him, like freshly thatched roofs on a spring day.

She raised an eyebrow. Spring day? Had she finally lost her mind? Those thoughts had abandoned her long before eternity settled like a second skin; when she saw the twins in a hapless mode of collapse, bleeding at the neck, with eyes turned upward, as though they had drowned. She had forgotten spring and all the cycles of the world, had shunned daylight even as that necessity had been bestowed upon her by Viktor.

Viktor. Her lord. Her erstwhile master. Her great love amidst the centuries! Long centuries with longer decades which spanned the new thoughts of the Renaissance, the genius of Bonaparte, the impertinent rites of the Holocaust and even then, were so little compared to him. So little!

Her thoughts were interrupted by a violent rapping at the door and she opened it, only to stumble backwards.

Michael burst through, dropping his load and frowning with the same bland expression she adopted when she had first been turned. It frightened her, that look; it marred any sensibilities. She always imagined him to be pure, untouchable. Now, he had lost some of his softness, his restlessness more apparent, more familiar with frequent slips in his human demeanor. He was older, she knew; older with the knowledge of his own immortality and suddenly, too impatient to remember that he counted as one of the undead.

"You're awake again," he admonished, his concerned tone imparting that he had caught her awake during daylight more often than not.

She fancied that the human had used the same tone on his patients.

"I have been awake for five centuries, Michael," was her cold reply.

"Fair enough." He raised his head, his hair perpetually moist, pasted to his face as though adoring the lines there, however young and naive.

He had always been gentle, in manner and in voice. It was as though he had forgotten how it was to rage against the darkness; when at the urging of his affection for her, he had lost both temper and demeanor. He paced through this newly found gloom as though he was made of it and shunned it as though it would –in the end –kill him.

Days in her coven had been more than different to his company. Everyone had a tendency to remember the hushed calm of apathy, whether things were going awry or not.

Michael, after confirming his suspicions about her insomnia, stepped around her and ignored her stare as he piled the blood packs into the refrigerator. Quietly, he told her, "Mills isn't to be trusted any more. He's heard news from over ground. " He paused as he wiped some grime from one of the packs. "All hell's going to break loose, Selene. I have this feeling, you know, like a…like a storm coming."

"A storm coming?" she repeated, tasting the words to see if they were strange.  Oddly enough, they were not.

Portents. I feel it too.

She continued, "Then it is decided."

"Since I was never part of your plans to begin with," he said, grinning so easily. "May I ask what you're talking about?"

"We search for your lycan friends." She sat on the only desk they shared, sifting through the photographs there and picking out one for him to look at.

Wiping his hands on his already sodden jeans, he took the picture and inspected the image there.

"Look familiar?" Selene asked.

"Lucian?"

"Go deeper, Michael."

His eyes turned inward and they glazed over, lost in another plane. There was a hint of a smile on his lips, then later, a frown deeper than the travails of a lifetime. Finally, he closed his eyes and rubbed his temple, cringing. A tear unexpectedly rolled down his cheek and he hastily wiped it with his arm, sniffing silently.

"Oh, that. What about my memories?"

"We could use those," she said, taking the photograph from him and studying the anxious set to his shoulders. "And get out of those filthy clothes. We'll walk the streets tonight but for now, you must rest."

"I don't feel like resting."

"You never do, Michael and I don't expect you ever will," Selene said sardonically, standing and then leaning on the door frame, her hands on her hips. "Rest. Your body ought to remember sleep."

He chuckled then, touching the shotgun with his fingers as he edged closer to her and leaned on the desk. He asked her gently, "And you? Where are you going?"

"Hunting."

Staring at her, his expression softened and the soothing calm of his voice told her softly, "I'll come with you."

"No need. Just rest; get your strength back."

She stepped out the door, closed it, and paused at the entrance.

She heard him change, a bit of shuffling as he looked for the pillow she had inadvertently threw under the cot, a curse as he stumbled out of his pants, the locker at the foot of the bed banging as he shut it closed. A sigh as he the bed squeaked under his weight, when he lay down and gathered what blankets there were to himself.

"Selene, you slob," she heard him mutter as he realized that he was lying on some newspapers and other articles of clothing.

He coughed for a moment, and must have looked at the ceiling in contemplation of the day and in trembling dread of the night. Then he would have closed his eyes, remembering daylight, warmth and joy and dreaming of all the opposites.

She started to walk away. He had snored not long after and he reminded her -oh, so very often! -that he was like a child.

----

He woke up to familiar noises, to the weak drumbeat of leaking pipes, to the sorting of papers, to cold breaths and frustrated scribbling on paper. There was the tickety-tick, tick of the keyboards, the movements hurried at one time, at another executed slowly.

Then he could hear her clearing her throat and through mere habit, he knew she was leaning against an elbow, scanning the information on her desk, gathering data through the computer. In all, she would have looked uncaringly serene. However, if he was to say anything, she would have snapped at his comment, revealing more than just fatigue and frustration.

Her fingers drummed at the desk, darting after photographs, caressing weaponry, dealing quick touches to the keys.

Michael knew that as her head gradually leaned sideways, her hair would fall to her line of view and the movement would wake her. Too concentrated on her task, she would only continue without brushing it away from her face.

He would have expected a yawn but found none, not even the soft thrum, thrum of a heart or the overbearing heat of something alive. Shuddering, he turned to the wall and stared at it, the colors changing from grey to black as Selene shifted from one screen to the next against the computer's light, a silhouette of vast alterations in flesh and modes of being.

"We move in an hour and a half," he heard Selene say.  "I should think that the impression you had on the rooftops is finally coming to realization."

"Did you call the movers?" he said, half-smiling and congratulating that part of him which desperately clung to humor. He sounded condescending but with the way he had been treated by fate so far, the greater joke was being played, ultimately, on him.

She did not miss a beat, "If you have anything precious in the hard drive, you'd better inform me now; I'm purging the computer. We won't be visiting here again for quite some time. Photographs are with me, camera included. I suggest you take the shotgun, despite the fact you won't be needing it."

"We're visiting the arms dealers?"

"Yes, before anything else."

"Food? Supplies?"

"Let me worry about those."

"Can I do anything?" He had not bothered to sit up from the bed.

"Other than sleep? No. Not for now." She pointed at the pile of bags stacked against the door and he noticed that the place had been stripped bare but for the map and the shotgun by the table. "You'll do much of the carrying however," she added.

The cooler was stacked to the brim, gagging with its contents of blood. With the memory of how hefty the thing was earlier, he sighed.

She turned away from him and he could hear the smile in her voice. "Don't be so glum, Michael."

"I should be. I don't even know where we're going," he said.

"The outskirts. We've dallied too long. In two weeks' time, Death Dealers will have scoured this place and put our heads on a pole." She typed a command into the keyboard, turning the monitor to face him. "See this? I had a little look-see into a friend's inbox. Dead, to say the least." Her face seemed to sag as sadness seeped through her cheeks. Just as readily, it assembled the beaten mask of coldness and her face was whole once more.

She said, "You would never have believed that they've sent a vast amount of information all over the continent, both through electronic mail and word of mouth, as well as runners in every direction. The covens are looking for us, delving ever deeper into places never touched by the sun. Mills, despite his self-imposed exile, would have found out sooner or later and spilled his beans; luckily, he spilled it on you."

"When was it sent?" Michael asked, getting up and lumbering towards her, his limbs remembering sleep, just as Selene had advised they do. Slow and gradually enjoying his slowness, he read the entry at a leisurely pace -if not to delight in his proximity to her -and made his way back to the bed.

"Just over a week ago, enough time to mobilize a large enough force around this city and the ones surrounding it."

"Sent by whom? Last I knew, Ordoghaz was a den of pandemonium."

Selene paused a moment, as though remembering something. "Marcus, apparently," she said. "Do not expect him to strike quickly; none of the Elders are alive, slaughtered to nondescript hollows of memory. I doubt anyone intelligent enough would have volunteered to wake him or any of the remaining two." She almost choked on her last words. "Nonetheless, the bastard's trying to bait us."

"Into doing what?"

Selene glared at him, her impatience lending her some annoyance. Somehow, the leather and latex she wore made her seem more sinister, like a pillar in a crypt, hiding a malicious figure or merely sitting there, a sentinel to death. A fang peeped through her lips, stark against their redness. "You ask too many questions. He's baiting us into leaving, into flight. Anyone with the proper eyes would know what you are. Mills, too blind by hatred for his own kind, only discovered the truth too late."

"Why? Why would leaving be so dangerous?" Michael asked.

"Think, Michael. With covens spanning the continents, sight and surveillance would be easier if your target was out in the open and moving across your territory. They have agents everywhere, scouts at every corner: they can acquire airline schedules, the names and backgrounds of any who would go overseas. The docks are being watched and every ship would have a sleeper in it."

"Why didn't we leave earlier? When all hell had broken loose?"

"Because Michael, your lycans live here, the bulk of them anyway. Nowhere else. We cannot leave the city without some measure of safety -at least, not without enlisting their help." Her own words served to disable her; the implications hidden there had the ring of novelty and more, of the most terrible betrayal to her kind.

Her expression dared him to ask more questions. Michael knew, that behind the tight set of her lips and the rigidness of her jaws, there was doubt.

The same doubt he had wanted no part of during his last days with humanity.

Michael, affording himself the intelligence of an intern and the courage of a victim, exclaimed, "What are we going to do when we find them? Lead? Is that what you want us to do?"

The words rang like a bell in a cistern, hollow and shrill.

Selene frowned, her face imitating the rigor of the Greek goddess of the hunt, and also, matching it in immortal beauty and severity.

"We? You are Lucian. And I a memory, a shadow of the woman who wore all the auguries of doom." She lifted a pendant from her pocket, a sight he rarely relished.

The token had once been found around the lycan leader's neck. Now, it shimmered in her hand, polished by the numerous times her hands had stroked it, in memory and in pain. In many ways, it belonged to her more readily than it did to Michael.

His memories of it only served to give Lucian's voice more influence, and he found the lycan's memories running after him like a tide, pushing against the sands of time and unto his shores, ramming and often violently insistent. If Michael were to be given the thing, he would refuse. He did not take leashes and that particular one, was too heavy.

"Tonight, we look for refuge," she said, as she leaned on the chair and looked at the ceiling, as though the answers lay in brick and stone. Those answers had to be pried from the past, from a wall that none wanted to break.

Her hand around Lucian's pendant curled into a fist; she put it against her forehead, her eyes squeezed shut, as though some comfort could be coaxed from it, some bit of redemption. After a moment, before he could offer his own words to placate her, she placed it in her pocket with a gentleness even Michael envied.

"Go to sleep, Michael," she said, breathing deeply. "Go to sleep. There is much to be done tonight."

And in her ability to forget, she continued to systematically multi-task on the computer, ignoring the world around her through the shrewd ministrations of vigilance. With that, he remembered just how vast the difference between their ages was. In the measure of immortality, he was a child.

He drifted off to sleep again. To remember the day and to forget because he really was young, younger than the walk of long ages, which hardened a man's -or for this matter, a woman's -heart to stone.