The Fallen Interlude
By: Dark Draconain
Rated: PG - 13
Feedback: Is a happy place
Disclaimer: David, etc, are not mine, but everyone else is. Title courtesy of Blink-182.
Summery: Before he lived death, life killed him.
Author's Note: Story was written in the spring of 2004. AKA: it's old. Oh, and there are a whopping three chapters to this story. Yay.

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The Fallen Interlude

Chapter Two: The Length of Daylight

...Twelve Years Later...

The air was sweet, smelling of sea salts and ashes. As the bonfire died, a few glimmering embers danced off into the night and fluttered onto the black ocean water like fallen angels. The bodies, two lovers gazing at the stars with unseeing eyes, were left in grotesque poses, their dead flesh sucked almost dry of blood.

David stared at them, resentful of their happiness; of the life he'd stolen from them. The corpses brought back nothing but cutting memories, yet he was transfixed. He stayed there, standing over the mangled carcasses until the first shades of gray began to tint the horizon.

He hung his head low and pulled the lapels of his coat up to dispel the early morning light as he ambled back towards the derelict building he called home. It was about ten stories high, standing in glorious ruin over a cowering ally of decimated waste, a bitter testament to better times. David pushed through the rotting mass of fallen beams and faded furniture, up the tarnished stairs and into Room Nine on the seventh floor.

The hotel was his. Indeed, almost the entire city block was deserted. Rumor had it that it was haunted by the vengeful ghosts; victims in a series of shady homicides. A few skeptics came by now and then, and occasionally David would have to stake a firm claim to his territory, but for the most part nothing happened; just a continuance of time marked only by the rise and fall of the sun.

The murders, said to have been a particularly gruesome affair, were also to have been carried out primarily in Room Nine on the seventh floor of David's ruined hotel. And while the exact truth was convoluted beyond recognition, macabre occurrences had without a doubt taken place there: David could smell the stale bleach-ridden blood every time he walked in. Perhaps that was why he stayed there.

Lying on the sagging mattress, staring at the chipped ceiling paint that had long since been stained a mottled brown, David's thoughts strayed back to the dead lovers on the beach. Memories of a past life, buried under layers of callous, began to resurface in his mind, causing his body to shudder.

David had had several lives. This most recent a length of nothingness between what had happened then, and what could happen next. What had happened then was the death of persona, a loss of kin, and a bleeding heart left in shattered shards to wither alone. He'd been young and invincible, the brooding leader of a group of vampires. Everything was for the taking, and there was no call for sacrifice or choice. Then she had come along. A glimmer of beauty in a deceitful place, her graceful pallor radiating like her namesake: Star. David had wanted her, and so he had taken her. But she wouldn't accept her fate, choosing instead to remain a starving half-vampire rather than feed.

Michael was David's own fault: his blinding and undoing; her saving grace. Star had taken an interest in him, and so David had sought to destroy him, cursing him to live a life of darkness. He too resisted though, seeking to gain back his mortality, and in so doing he drew Star closer, and together they ended the vampire rein of the Lost Boys of Santa Carla. The two of them thought David was dead, impaled on the horn of some misbegotten animal scull. Dead bones could not kill him. It was the simple truth of emptiness that had been the cause for forfeit.

Forfeit, but not defeat. Not death. Just a wound that would never heal. Burned deep in sorrow, scarred in bitterness.

There were some hurts though that cut deeper; the price of immortality, the first death of the last life when breathing still had meaning.

Her.

She came to mind sometimes. Like a snowflake fluttering against midnight, her ageless beauty undimmed by time. Star was nothing compared to her. No one was. Nothing was. But she was gone, and he was dead. Slayed at sixteen by her rejection.

That was over now. It was history. As it slowly slipped away, so did the sun. And as dusk grew deeper, all that remained was a lingering shadow of unrest, and a nagging urge to speak to the grave.