You wanted to know more about Ariane? Here it is!


Alright, so, my experiment was successful: with a simple "'COMMENT, PLEASE' in a whining voice" - twice as many comments/reviews between here and AO3, considering I usually have 2 or three comments on news chapters. This time, there were 5. Deduce what you must, but I won't forget.

Maybe I should kill off a character as a revenge. Hum...


One world apart, part 8: Death seemed not to know of us

Ariane took her scythe out of the hunter's body, and massaged her temples. With some luck, no one had called the police yet, and so she wouldn't have to answer any question about the fact that she had an enormous black scythe with her. And that she had just killed someone with it. Really, it'd be great.

She listened for a minute, not really willing to look at those who had already witnessed the scythe. Damon wasn't really a problem, considering he had always known she wasn't a normal person, even if she had never told him what she was exactly. The children, on the other hand... And there was also that other one... Not that he'd be able to snitch to anyone, but still.

As she heard no police siren, Ariane allowed herself a sigh, and then she made her scythe disappear into a black cloud that she absorbed. Now, there was no murder weapon left, she mused warily.

It was at this precise moment that the only teenage girl in the building let out a terrified shriek.

The young blond man next to her rushed to try and calm her down, but it was Damon who finally got to the girl and compulsed her fears and her knowledge of the events out of her. The girl then fell unsconcious, and the vampire sighed in exasperation.

Damon handed the girl to Jeremy, who caught her in his arms, a bit bemused with the situation, his eyes flickering ever so discreetly to Alaric, who only shrugged. Now, there was no danger left, and anyway, the teacher couldn't do anything. The teenager'd better just play along.

"Alright, Little Gilbert. You and Wonder Boy get the Spring Girl back to her house, explain that she fainted, and make sure she doesn't ask disturbing things again. Meanwhile, I'll take care of the Bible salesman's body."

The vampire looked aroung, and glared at the floor, where a little pool of blood had already started to spread.

"...And I'll take care of cleaning up too. Great. My afternoon just became perfect."

Ric snorted, and motionned for Jeremy to do just what "Pissy Pants Damon" had told him to. Ariane frowned when she saw the boy react without apparent reason, and she squinted at him as the three teenagers made their way out of the Mystic Grill.

As the three and a half peop... – beings were finally alone, Damon started to do his job. Even if one could argue that, Connor Jordan being sadly deceased and Alaric Saltzman being nothing more than a ghost, both of them could be counted as only one half of a person, then making the count of three and a half wrong. It should be three... supposing that their "presence" could even be counted.

No matter.

Ariane helped the vampire to clean up the blood, and they quickly went and disposed of the incriminating body.

It was as Damon was driving back to the boarding house that he finally got the courage to ask.

"A grim reaper, so?"

Ariane gave him the look, the one that told she really wasn't impressed by his pretending to be merely curious.

"Yes."

"And...?"

"For Jupiter's sake, Damon, just ask."

The vampire said nothing for a minute, intent on appearing as if he was focusing on his driving, which could have worked if he hadn't been, as usual, driving without a care in the world the minute before. Ariane wasn't fooled.

"Damon."

"Right. Erm, so, I know you can't bleed like all of us because your blood is downright solid, even if I have no idea how you move with it being the case, I know that said blood is black, and I known you don't heal particularly fast, though still faster than a human being. I don't think you are particularly fast or strong, but you can summon some kind of death scythe. And you said you are a grim reaper."

Said grim reaper nodded, looking slightly bored.

"So, what does it entail exactly, to be a grim reaper?"

"I was born not long after the Christ was crucified."

The car lurched violently, but Damon managed to go past his surprise and get back onto the right side of the road. A bit nonplussed, the vampire still did what he did the best: speak out of turn, and out of civility.

"Old hag."

The car lurched again, startling a pair of squirrels in the nearest tree. When everything was normal again, Damon's shirt was suspiciously red with blood... but it could have been tomato juice, squinting hard.

"I'll ask of you to keep your mouth shut, Damon, unless you want to have a car accident. Besides, I do believe vampires can burn to death, whereas I cannot. If the car explode, you're in it for an unpleasant moment... and then I'll see you on the Other Side, obviously."

Damon grunted something, then realized what his friend had just said.

He just knew there was no way Ariane would get killed just like that.

At the Augustine, the scientists had known how to get rid of vampires, they had just been searching for a better way to do it, more efficiently, maybe a way that would work on its own, without them even needing to do anything. The Augustine was a secret society against vampires, after all. That was why Damon and Enzo had been there, used as test samples.

But Ariane had also been there, and the two vampires had just known she wasn't like them. Even if they hadn't seen her being brought back to the cell, with cuts all over her body, but not a drop of blood anywhere, they would have known. It wasn't difficult to know for a vampire, really: Ariane had no heartbeat. As if her blood had been frozen in her veins, in her arteries, in her very heart.

She hadn't been strong enough to escape, despite that, because she wasn't stronger or faster than a human. Yes, she was strong and fast for a human, but not so out of human limits. Now that he thought about it, Ariane was probably the same as a Falkenbach on that point.

The scientists had restrained her, and Damon could now guess it had to do with her scythe. If she could summon it, but was unable to use it, it was plainly useless.

Still, no matter what those scientists of the Augustine did to Ariane, the woman never died. They had tried everything. Her blood wouldn't flow. Even when they tried to take out some of her flesh, her whole flesh even, it did not work, because each time the knife would meet a vein, no matter the size – even capillaries – the knife would be stopped, as if it had encountered something that would not break, no matter what. Once, there had been the disgusting noise of a chainsaw, and screams.

But Ariane had come back to the cell next to Enzo's. With not one inch of her skin not ripped into shreads, but alive nonetheless. Her blood seemed to be harder than diamond.

Ariane had been there because she wasn't human. She had been there because the scientists were afraid of what she was. Because they didn't know how to kill her.

And they had never found the ghost of a way.

The point was, Ariane had said she'd see him on the Other Side. A place where she was unlikely to go anytime soon, even if there surely was one way or two to kill her and her kind, just as it was possible to get rid of the Originals. Incredible difficult, but possible.

"Are you telling me you can see the dead?!"

Ariane gave the vampire a stern look.

"Keep your eyes on the road, Damon. And yes, I can see the dead. Not all of them, of course, because those who have really passed on, humans and lucky supernatural beings in other words, they are just gone. But all those who remain out of Death's realm, yet who are not amongst the living, I can see them. I'm a freaking grim reaper."

Damon opened his mouth to ask something, but the look he got in return made him shut up.

"Now, if you'd just let me speak."

The vampire nodded, still wide-eyed – looking at the road, of course.

"I lived in Roma. The roman witches had heard about some Greeks who had managed to achieve immortality and tremendous powers, and, out of jealousy as well as out of fear, they tried to make their own immortals. Twelve of us, men and women, were chosen to be these immortals. We hadn't been told what would happen to us, and we were all terrified when the ritual started. In the end, it was successful, but we all agreed that we'd keep the witches from ever doing that to anyone again. We protected the city until they were all dead, destroying each of their attempts. Then we disappeared, and went to live our immortal lives out of the roman empire."

Well, it explained the accent, then.

"The ritual didn't make us stronger or faster, though it was performed when we were all in our prime of youth, and after an intensive training, so that we'd be eternally at our best. It did not give us any strange power. But it made us undying, it gave us our scythes, and it made our blood solid enough to withstand anything. Our veins are our armor, and as long as they exist, the rest of our body will get back to its original existence, even if it takes hours."

"How can you just summon these scythes, anyway?"

Ariane laughed darkly, but answered anyway.

"It was the whole point of the ritual, actually. The witches had made twelves small scythes in a magical metal that I know not to exist naturally. At some point, they melted each scythe, and it gave them exactly three liters of metal for each of us."

Ariane's face was dark as she went on, but of course, Damon saw none of this. He was too busy staring diligently at the road, as he had been ordered to. So, obviously, there was no way he could have seen the murderous glint in his friend's eyes. It was definitely not because of that glint that he felt a disturbing shiver crawl up his spine.

Not at all.

Keep your eyes on the road, Damon.

"That's when they restrained us. They cut our wrists, to let the blood out on the right one, and to pour the burning metal into our veins on the left one. They were chanting something I couldn't understand, be it because it was in a foreign language, or because of the screams that were escaping from our mouths, or simply because of the pain."

Keep. Your. Damn. Eyes. On. The. Freaking. Road. Damon!

"Eventually it stopped. The cuts healed by themselves. What was left of our blood and the metal had merged."

Damon allowed himself to breath at that point, because Ariane's voice had gone down a scale, and it sounded less terrible now.

"You mean your scythe is in fact made of your blood?"

Ariane snorted, and confirmed.

"We were called the grim reapers after a few years. Our blades would cut through anything, and would not be cut by anything. Death seemed not to know of us. And the most important point was that we could 'see' people pass on, and their mind disappear in an ocean of peace."

Damon parked the car, and they got out of the vehicle, heading for the living room of the boarding house. The vampire felt he owed her a good bottle of alcohol for having shared her story. Even turning into a vampire couldn't compare, as to the pain, he guessed.

But Ariane hadn't completely finished her story, and Damon soon noticed he had forgotten something in his bedroom that he wanted to show her. They made their way upstairs as the reaper ended what she had to say.

"But soon, we noticed supernatural beings didn't disappear like normal people. A few of them would, after a time, but they always got stuck in a dead dimension before that. It was fairly new, this dimension; we understood that because there weren't many people in it yet, but it was becoming more crowded with time. That dead dimension is something artificial, something that wasn't meant to be. It's not a real afterlife, but an anomaly. And so we can see and interact with it, because it's about death, but it isn't truly death. It's the Other Side."

Damon opened the door to his bedroom, curious as to the exact extent of the grim reapers' interactions with the Other Side. Not that he had an ulterior motive or anything.

Ariane, not to think about her dreadful change, nearly two thousands years ago, asked her vampire of a friend what he had been up to since the Augustine, that he had had to deal with one of the Five and with a psychopathic immortal in less than one month.

But her question never ended, as she stared at Damon's bed. After a time, she stated, rather blankly:

"There's a vampire pouting on your bed. A dead vampire. And by that I don't mean undead."