I dream of barren spaces, and cold wind in the twilight; a single tree atop a hill, bare and gnarled and reaching for a slate gray sky. I dream of dead grass, of metal, of voices screaming into still air. I dream of blood in a spring from the rocks; blood on snow, the wind through the tree beneath a low-slung half-moon and liquid brown eyes as big as saucers. I dream the way no human dreams. I feel the wind. I smell the blood. The cold gathers in my chest like a tightly balled fist, spreads it's spidery fingers through my veins. The voices press against my ears.
"...told you... ...underestimate... ...check them..."
"...look fucking dead do you?"
"...other rooms... ...two at a time.... ...the first place, like I said."
Fragments of Cantonese dance though my dream like spinning shards of glass, slicing pictures against the inside of my head - and though I cannot immediately identify my whereabouts, I do know this; there is blood, too much blood. The dream is fading, but the blood-scent lingers thick as honey in the air. I can feel the boards beneath my back, now, and the shattered remnants of something beneath my hips, but these things are vague and somehow intangible. Only the blood and the cold are immediate, and the fragmented voices.
I become aware of my body in stages. My head is twisted at an awkward angle, wedged against something solid and unmovable. One of my arms is above my head, and the other is wrenched at an odd angle beneath me. My hips are twisted sideways. My legs are pinned beneath the card table. Their is a cold, sharp pain in my chest, like a corset laced around my very lungs. My eyes are open, as they have been all along - but I cannot blink. I cannot swallow. I cannot even flex my fingers; I know this instinctively, and so I do not try to a single one of these things. This stasis is as common for a wounded vampire as a scab is to a wounded human. My preternatural body is stitching itself back together by the second; cells splitting, bonding, rearranging themselves in a complex dance of blood and bone and tissue to fill in the missing pieces. I have been healing since the second that I lost consciousness. In another five minutes or so, I will be able to stand. In another ten, I will be able to run.
None of this matters right now. I'm trying to piece together the words, separate the voices, follow the rapid flow of conversation that ricochets between them like sharp, quick gunfire.
"He's got it."
"All of it?"
"I think so - hold on, I'm checking."
"Son of a bitch. Tear him apart, if you have to. Every cent accounted for, or it's our asses, you hear me?"
The sounds of a struggle - shuffling feet and bones hitting floorboards, a loud clatter, a muttered curse - someone passes very near to me on the left, moving toward the sound of the commotion. I struggle to make sense of it, to fit the pieces of consciousness that I've gathered thus far back together and form the bigger picture.
Then Sho curses, and gasps in pain.
The world snaps and sharpens around me; my senses click back into place like the setting of a combination lock, and quite suddenly everything is crystal clear. I'm lying twisted on my back against the far wall of the dirty little hideout we'd been raiding when all hell had broken loose with a snap-crack-pop and a split-second daydream, sporting a broken shoulder and three bullets in my chest. There is blood on my clothes, blood in my mouth, and blood on the wall above me. I still cannot move, and my vision is blurry, but I can pinpoint Sho quite precisely by the sound of his voice and the scent of his blood. He's not so very far to my left - maybe four meters away from my foot, perhaps less - and there is no downward angle to his voice. The sound waves are coming dead at me, rolling across the very floorboards and sliding right into my ears; but there is human tissue in the way. Legs? They have to be legs, these things that sound like a forest. He's on the floor, surrounded by exactly ten legs; only five people, though I am sure there are more in other rooms. He's bleeding. He's angry. He's fighting them with a bullet in his shoulder - fighting a losing battle against eight hands that won't let him get up. And he's starting to get just a little bit scared.
The fact is that, most likely, I can move if I try. I can probably blink, and swallow, and flex my fingers. I might even be able to shift my weight - but I probably can't stand up, and I don't have the luxury of trial and error. I don't have the time, either. When I move, I have to be sure. When I move, I have to be confident. When I move, I have to move fast and strong and straight at them. I cannot risk drawing attention to myself before I am ready to kill them. Right now, I am dead in their eyes. It gives me an advantage. When I do get up, I'll be the last thing in the world that they expect.
For Sho's sake, I wait.
I lie static in the carnage of the overturned card table, with blood cooling on my lips and in my throat. I do not blink. I do not swallow. Instead, I talk to Sho; silently, steadily, in a low cadenced chant within my own head. When he is listening, he can hear me; not always my words, but the quiet hum of their message behind his ears. Now I attempt to force myself upon him as I have never done before. I press silent, soothing words at him - and all the while, I will myself to remain still. The fact that I have to do so, now, is a solid indicator of my returning strength.
It's working. He's not fighting quite so hard, now; he's catching his breath while they go through his pockets and count up the money. He's breathing his way through the pain in his shoulder. Whether he knows it or not, he is listening to me. And I am listening to them.
"Five... six... seven... this ain't all of it. Did you check the corpse?"
"Yep. Nothin'"
"Give it up, pretty boy. Money don't disappear."
"Go fuck yourself." That's Sho, sounding very calm for a man who's seriously injured and absolutely furious.
"I'm about to fuck that pretty little mouth of yours raw, unless I get the rest of that fucking money!!"
Steel on bone and bone on wood. I can feel the gun barrel connect with Sho's cheekbone. I can feel his head snap sideways, feel his face hit the floorboards. I can feel the thick, rough hands patting him down, tearing his long coat off in a fury, sliding down his pants to search between his legs...
And then Sho screams; a furious, indignant snarl that crescendos into an outraged shriek. Wordless and guttural, it tears from his throat in a short-clipped burst of desperate fury, rips straight through my ears and sears like a laser into the very foundation of my cognoscence. That voice is ghost-printed upon my very eardrums; pitch, pattern, timbre - every subtle nuance is encoded somewhere deep within the infrastructure of my psyche. I can pick out frequencies in it that human ears could never catch - the low hiss of bitter amusement, the faint tinge of fear that laces the higher registers. Though wordless, that scream speaks volumes to me.
I can't help it. I look.
His hips buck. His back twists. He's fighting them with every ounce of strength he has left, as they tear his clothes off piece by piece, rifling through them and tossing them aside. One of them pries his mouth open. Another pulls his legs apart. They'll search every inch of him, inside and out - and when they don't find the wad of cash hidden in the bottom of my boot, they will rape him out of sheer spite before they finally kill him.
There is no more time for healing, for thinking, for planning a reach for the knife in my boot. There is no more time for waiting. The perfect moment isn't going to come, and I'm never going to be ready, and I don't have another split second to figure this thing out before I do it, for better or for worse.
Ready or not, here I go.
An infamous creature of the night once said that "the trick is not to think about it," - and never has a single statement held true under more circumstances than this one. Thinking leaves room for doubt - for all of the what-ifs and maybes that set you up for failure before you even begin. If I worry, they will rape him. If I panic, he will die. If I lose my nerve for half a moment, the past twelve years of my preternatural life bleed dry on the dirty floor of a Mallepa tenement.
And so I don't think about it. It happens without me. One second I'm dead on the floor - the next my knife is in a back, then a throat. The room explodes in a kaleidoscope of emotions; shock and superstition override most basic instincts, terror rises - and somewhere in the midst of it all is a rush of blessed relief. The guns don't come out until the first one hits the floor, and the vanguard doesn't rush in from the back rooms until I'm already halfway through my next jugular. Running. Screaming. Praying. Cursing. Whatever else they're doing, they're all shooting at me. This time, I take the guns before I drop the bastard.
After that, it is easy.
It doesn't take long at all to exterminate them. I may be out of practice, but I'm faster than any three humans put together, and I have a hell of a lot more to lose. It's a simple thing to squeeze the trigger again and again, to aim death this way and that with a simple swing of my fully functional shoulder. The other is still knitting, still stiff, but it doesn't matter. They drop like flies, and the place is clear before I have to reload the gun. The waiting took forever. The killing takes mere minutes. Somehow, the irony of it all is almost comforting.
A rustle. A whimper. I turn around.
Sho has managed to drag himself upright. There's blood on his hands, blood on his chest, blood streaked down his right arm in jagged rivulets and pooling in the crook of his elbow. All the fury has drained from him, and only now are the fear and weakness starting to catch up. Sho is never truly afraid when he is angry - he only succumbs to it after the fact, when the dust has settled and some instinct in him knows that it is safe to do so. His eyes are dilated and distracted, darting from dead body to dead body with the wide-eyed detachment of one who's never seen death up close and personal. There is a scattered uncertainty to his movements. He reaches out with his good arm and draws his coat into his lap, tries to wrap it around himself - haltingly, clumsily, with the numb imprecision of someone wearing mittens - but it's not something that he can do one-handed and injured.
I crouch down next to him in the carnage, pull the coat snug around him and whisper soothingly. Sho is more than willing to relinquish the job to me; he lets me guide his hands away, releases the fabric when I stroke his fingers gently. I can almost hear his nerves humming, drawn tight as piano strings, but all the fight is gone from him, now. He doesn't let me take control - he gives it to me willingly, gratefully, relieved to be free of choices and decisions and trusting me to do what's right. All he has to do is breathe. He knows that I will take care of the rest.
And I do.
I bind his wounded shoulder with a dead man's shirt. I wrap his bleeding fingers up. I wipe the blood from his face and chest, while Sho leans passive and compliant against me. His eyes are still wide and his breath his still short, and he's shaking right down to his bones - but his muscles are beginning to uncoil just a little. Now that he's left things to me, he's finding time to make sense of the past fifteen minutes; breaking the overwhelming series of events into manageable pieces and trying to process them one at a time. He lets me guide good arm into his coat, cries out only a little when I shift his bad arm into a makeshift sling. Tears threaten him a few times, but he swallows them down before they can amass any try force, and stares straight ahead at the graffiti-stained wall as I button his pants, lace up his boots. Sho rarely cries when we're out on the streets.
He waits until we're home safe and sound; until the torturous cab ride to the clinic is over, and the back-alley doctor is paid through the nose, and the sedatives are well at work in his system. The money in my boot is more than enough to pay for decent antibiotics, x-rays, and ninety-two stitches to soundly close the hole in his shoulder. There are no broken bones, no permanent nerve damage. The doctor says that he will recover in full. For once, I would like to trust the opinion of the medical world, however questionable its quality may be. Sho is silent as a mouse through and through. I can barely hear the soft white noise of his thoughts, at times. When the doctor asks him questions - and he doesn't ask him many - I answer vaguely and confidently, while Sho stares at both of us with wary, tired eyes. It's easier to get a cab back to the apartment - we're in a better part of town, now, and they're spread thicker through these smokey neon streets. Sho sits on the curb while we wait, leaning against my leg.
It happens almost as soon as we're through the door. He's fine until I sit him down on my day bed - but as soon as I touch him, the tears spill over, and soon enough he's sobbing silently but steadily against my shoulder. Even now, he is easy to hold; he's grown taller than me, but his head still fits perfectly in the crook of my neck, and my hand still fits perfectly over the sharp of his hip. I rub his back. I stroke his hair. I smooth the backs of my fingers over the places he likes best - along his jaw, and the soft part of his sides. It doesn't matter that he's barely said a word to me since the tenement - I speak to him in a soft, soothing voice, and he soaks it up like oxygen.
Eventually, he cries himself out. It always happens that way. When Sho allows himself to really, truly cry, there is no simple off switch. He drains out the fear and the pain with tears, until there's nothing left and he's running on empty. He's always exhausted when he finally quiets, but the better for it in the morning. There's nothing I need to do besides hold him, steady him, follow all the little signals from his body and act accordingly. For twelve long years, I have soothed him while he cries. It is all second nature.
"Are you okay?" he whimpers into my neck. I smooth his hair back, stroke his jaw.
"I'm fine. Sore, but fine. Everything's okay now - we're home, we're safe, and we're both going to be all right. It's all over, baby," I press a gentle kiss to his forehead, and Sho lifts his face to me. I see twelve long years of comfort and hope in those liquid brown eyes, twelve long years of shared hardships and joys and most of all, love.
"I love you," he says, for the very first time.
"I love you too," I say.
And just so he knows that it's true, I kiss him.
A/N : Sorry about the wait - this chapter didn't want to end. I'll dedicate chapter four to the first person who can tell me to which infamous literary vampire really did say, "The trick... is not to think about it." :)