Dreams Chapter 4, a companions of the night fanfic

Dreams

Chapter 4

Kerry sat in front of her computer, jotting off a quick note to Michel. She guiltily looked over her shoulder, feeling as though eyes were on her. She met the eyes of one of her fellow grunts, and she frowned as she stared him down, wondering if she had any reasons to be paranoid. She didn't have that much to report to Michel, but she thought the best way to make sure they didn't start duplicating each other's work was to keep in contact. She didn't think the constant emails and phone calls she exchanged with Dave and Lucy counted. For one, it seemed Michel preferred getting his information straight from her instead of second hand from Dave, if the email she had received from him that morning was any indication.

Dave was easy to hold conversations with: their awkwardness and long soundless pauses had less to do with remembering one another naked than they did having absolutely nothing to talk about because they were complete strangers.

"Hello?" she said distractedly into her phone as she angrily erased the "Love Kerry," from the end of the email, disgusted with herself for being so thoughtless.

"Hey babe." Luke's voice was distinct over the line. Unlike some people, he always sounded like himself over the phone. Kerry jumped, feeling even more guilty for the email she was writing, especially her gaff of an ending. She then frowned and held her back straight and head high, realizing she had no reason to be ashamed. The email was only a few terse lines, and none of it mattered more than the feelings behind it, and she certainly was not in love with Ethan Bryne or Michel. Luke was the one who held her heart.

"Hi," she said, pressing the send button on the email and grabbing a pen from her desk, tapping it against the keyboard. "Did you just wake up?"

"Where's the toaster?" he asked, sounding befuddled even across the distance between the two of them.

"It broke last week, remember?" Kerry reminded him, her eyes wandering around the pen. Nelle was glaring at her computer, jiggling the mouse across the mousepad as though that would solve all her problems. 'Frozen?' Kerry mouthed to her, grinning as Nelle gave her the finger and pressed the reboot button on the tower.

"No," Luke responded mournfully. "But how do I make toast?"

"You could bake it in the oven." Kerry pursed her lips to keep from laughing outright at her boyfriend. "Or you could have one of the croissants I left in the fridge. They're fresh."

"They're fattening." He was coming perilously close to whining now.

"We all have our crosses to bear," Kerry informed him with an outright smile. "Look, hun, I have about an hour's worth more work to do here. Do you want me to pick you up something on my way home?"

"A toaster?"

"I was thinking more along the lines of a burger and fries, or maybe a fruit cup if you're so concerned with your figure these days."

"The croissant will be fine. Later babe." He pronounced croissant "crescent" and Kerry had to grit her teeth to stop herself from correcting him as she said her goodbyes.

x.x.x

I was sitting on the worn-down futon in my apartment, my European Medieval history book open in front of me. My midterm was in two days, but I anticipated a visit from him the night before and knew that no studying would get done then. He thought he was so unpredictable, but like clockwork he showed up every three months or so and I had noticed a pattern in the dates. I couldn't say what it was, but I somehow knew when he was thinking of dropping by. He'd hate that, if he knew.

I looked up from my book as a shadow fell between the lamp and the book I was trying to read. "Hey, studying here," I muttered, gesturing for the person to move. Despite my surety that he would be around soon, my heart beat still skipped when I looked up and saw him smirking down at me.

"Not anymore," he told me, taking the book off my lap and placing it beside me on the couch. He leaned over, both hands braced on the back of the couch on either side of my head. I could see the unending patterns of eternal blue in his eyes as he blinked, lowering his face towards mine for a kiss. I was already breathing heavily in anticipation and he hadn't even touched me yet. His demanding lips shot electric currents through my body, and I cursed him for a moment, wishing he had come a day later than I had predicted instead of a day before.

It was difficult to study when basking in the afterglow of Michel.

x.x.x

Kerry awoke to her cell phone ringing in the charger. She blinked at the time, seeing the display read 10 pm. She had only been asleep for an hour, and she felt like she was waking up with an insanely bad hangover. She listened to the phone for a second, hoping whoever was on the other end would just give up and hang up. Whoever thought that dreams really do come true must have been on crack. She crawled out of bed, hearing ShakeTramp play out for a second time from the living room.

"What?" she barked, opening the phone if only to get rid of the infernal song.

"Oh?" Michel's voice asked on the other end with obvious amusement. "Were you sleeping? I thought you might just be taking another shower."

"Eugh," Kerry responded wittily.

"Wakey wakey. We have work to do."

"I'm going back to bed," she grunted. "I spent the day doing footwork for you. I forwarded it all in an email."

"I got it," he informed her. "It was lovely. So personal. Are you going to leave me out here all night, staring at your living room window? Nice nightie by the way."

Kerry gasped, pulling down the short t-shirt she was wearing. When she had first moved in she had checked from all angles of the street and had never found a position where she could see in the windows. He had to be lying. Just in case, she gave the window her middle finger.

"Very hostile, Kerry. You need to work out your anger management problems."

"You can't see me," she yelled into the phone. "I checked myself. There is no possible way someone can see into my apartment from the street." The moments the words were out of her mouth she wanted to crack herself over the head with the cell. Way to not only prove him right about the anger management thing, she chided herself, but also show glaring stupidity. Of course he could see her. He was a vampire. He probably had better vision than infrared binoculars. Kerry could practically hear his smile over the phone.

"Well," he told her, "either I can see you, or I know you so well I can predict everything down to what you're wearing. I guess it depends on which scenario you prefer. I like Hello Kitty by the way. It makes you seem younger."

Kerry gritted her teeth. "What do you want?" she asked.

"Why don't you come down and see?"

"Why don't you tell me," Kerry retorted. "Then I'll see if I want to come down." She was steadily making her way towards the window, peeking out through the sheer curtains. There was definitely someone down there leaning against the driver's side of a dark coloured car. The figure gave her a mock salute.

"Well Kerry, if I can't drag you away from bed, I'll just join you."

Kerry glared at him, letting her curtains fall back to cover the windows. She stayed standing for a moment, bathed in the soft glow of the street light, and wondering if he was watching. She sighed through her nose, recognising that he had her in check and likely soon checkmate. Kerry turned her body away from the window, pausing with her back against the wall next to it. She considered his ultimatum for a moment, wondering if she wanted to antagonize him into coming up or if she should give into his demands.

"I'm tired, Michel," Kerry explained with another sigh. "Luke will be coming home at six, and he's woke me up every day this week." It seemed so strange to be explaining this to him, as though those four years had never happened and she still dropped everything – school, friends, family – for an hour of his time. He had pushed his limits then, and she had always caved to his demands, so it seemed almost wrong for her now to be explaining why she couldn't leave the apartment.

"So? Just rearrange your schedule so he doesn't disrupt your sleep." As always, Michel was sympathetic in the way that he was not. Every time, he would be the voice of unreason like the little devil on her shoulder, influencing her decisions in the polar opposite direction of what she should be doing. Well, he wasn't getting away with it this time.

"I'm trying to!" Kerry exclaimed with aggravation, gritting her teeth. "Why do you think I was in bed by nine?"

"What I meant," Michel explained, "is that you start sleeping when he sleeps."

"I have a job. I can't just start going to sleep at six when I'm usually in the office by ten." She was about to tell him that she wasn't a vampire and couldn't just stay up all night like he did, but she bit her tongue. He didn't exactly need to be told that. It was his fault she wasn't, after all, and she was kind of grateful for it now.

"That is an excellent point," he told her, but the sound of his voice wasn't carried over the phone line. He was standing before her, inside the living room. Again, she hadn't heard the door open or close. Kerry didn't jump, or eep, or give any outward signs of shock, but it was close. She was glad she hadn't responded with anything other than a kick of her heart rate. Her pride was at risk almost always when it came to Michel and she had already made a fool of herself tonight.

"No point for this, then," she said with a humorous smile as she closed her phone. She moved closer to him, sitting on the chair he had sat in when she saw him last. This time his hair was in a shorter style, spiked preppy-chic instead of the usual straight look he went for. It matched the rectangular black framed glasses he had covering his startling eyes, and the clean-cut collared shirt to create an older image than what she was used to.

Even behind the glasses, she could tell his eyes were still laughing at her.

"I'm tired and I want to go back to bed." Kerry said bluntly, hoping he didn't invite himself along this time.

"I know," he said, still smirking at her. She so desperately wanted to wipe that smirk right off his face. He sat on the couch, deliberately mimicking the position she had been sitting in during his last visit. Kerry narrowed her eyes as he widened his leg span in a way which would have been highly indecent if she had done it in a robe. She wanted to indignantly protest, but she thought she might be reading too much into it. There was many a-time that she had done that in his presence.

"So," Kerry said, pointing to her open bedroom door to imply where she was heading. "I'll talk to you later? At least send me a quick email if you find anything out tonight so I won't waste time retracing your steps."

"I'm breaking into the city morgue." Michel said casually.

Kerry stopped dead on her way to the bedroom, pausing with practically one foot still in the air. She wavered for a moment and then regained her balance, turning towards him. "I'll get a pair of pants."

It was for the best that she missed the smug smile on his face.

x.x.x

"Most places have their morgue in the basement of the hospital," Michel griped, one knee braced against the frosted grass as he leaned over and glared at the small bicycle lock chaining the basement window closed. "Not on Main Street where everyone can see the front door. Most also don't have those back doors that can only be open from the inside."

Kerry grinned at his discomfort, knowing that he was mostly worried about getting caught. He'd have no trouble picking the small lock, though she could barely see the keyhole on the back of the padlock herself, and he was impervious to the cold. She was leaning over his shoulder, watching intently as he took the lock pick set out of his back pocket. She was very much in his personal space, and she was just waiting for him to get impatient and ask her to back up. "You lived here 'all your life,'" she said with finger quotes. "Surely you've had to break in to the morgue before."

"Of course. Why do you think this window is locked?" Michel asked, shooting her a quick grin as the chain fell away. He pulled the window back and peeked in, only to find a large cabinet barring his way. "Shit," he swore under his breath.

Kerry kept grinning.

"You knew this was here," he accused with narrowed eyes.

"Maybe," Kerry agreed, "but mostly I just enjoyed watching you go through hoops unnecessarily."

"What do you suggest I do?" he asked scathingly. "Go through the front door?"

"I'll get the key," she responded, still grinning as she stood on tiptoe in order to reach a windowsill just beyond her reach. Michel shook his head ruefully as she hopped up, but still could not grasp the hidden key.

"Here," he offered finally, stepping behind her. She turned her head to watch as his hands slid around her waist and he easily lifted her into the air. The key was where she expected it to be, the sill around it covered in scratches from years of people removing it and placing it back. His grasp held her incredibly steady and he kept her in place as though she weighed nothing. Part of her wanted to kick him for it. As she grabbed the key, Michel finally put her down and stepped away. Kerry wasn't completely convinced he couldn't have reached the key himself, but she knew that Luke would have had no problem.

"Do you think the M.E. wakes up in the middle of the night if old Mrs. Whoever kicked it during Letterman?" Kerry asked rhetorically, brushing down her jacket and quickly moving away from him and towards the front door. "No. He lets the paramedics and attendants and other menial staff take care of it."

Michel shook his head. "I've been away from small-town life for too long. It's a wonder you don't have bodies going missing all the time."

"Who would take them?" She asked. "Besides freshmen involved in hazing rituals and the like? I only knew the key was there because the medical examiner and I are like this." Kerry crossed her fingers.

"Like this like how you and I are like this?" Michel asked, taking the key from her and opening the front door like he belonged there, and wasn't in the process of breaking and entering. Kerry had to resist the urge to look guiltily over her shoulder.

"You and I are not like that," she pointed out sternly.

"But you and Dr." Michel broke off as he read the name on the door plate. "Roberts are?"

"He and I are just friends," she said coldly, moving past him to open the door into the examination area.

"We're not friends?" Michel asked in a wounded voice, trailing behind her. "Or do you mean that we're more than friends?"

Kerry turned around, frostily facing him. "It has been a long time since we've been anything more than friends." She glared at him, her own anger chilling herself to the core.

Michel looked her straight in the eye and said, "not to me, it hasn't. Four years isn't that long to a vampire."

Kerry left that statement alone. She wanted to tell him that four years was plenty of time for a human to recover from the devastation of losing him, enough time to find love again and to allow her overwhelming hate to die down into ambivalence. She thought he might know all that, but if she said it he would accuse her of still being bitter, or of protesting too much. "What is it you're looking for," she asked, finally dragging her eyes away from his.

"Coward," she thought she heard him mutter beneath his breath. "I need to see the bite radius, and see how much blood your good friend Dr. Roberts thinks is missing."

"About six pints," she answered smoothly, following him as he opened one of the refrigerated body storage units. In the dark, the light-coloured bones gleamed up from the dark metal of the tray and they both stared down at the remains in silence. "Meet Ethan Bryne," she told him finally. "It's no mystery who killed this guy."

"Marsala did," Michel said easily. "That man was crazy." He closed the unit, moving forward to the next in the row of five. He pulled this one opened to find it empty. "Doesn't good friend Roberts label these things?"

"To what end?" Kerry asked. "So he doesn't mix up the two bodies that always seem to rotate through here? And we both know Marsala was far less crazy than people remember him."

"He was a quack," Michel responded, pulling open the third unit and finding the body of an old woman. "Even before we framed him for Ethan's death, he was bonkers. He locked your baby brother in the trunk of your car. Who knows when he would have been found if your dad wasn't there with him."

"And whose fault was all that?"

Michel looked up at her just before opening the forth unit, one eyebrow raised. "Are you insinuating that the entire thing was my fault? Because, technically, it was Ian's for leaving his stuffed koala in a laundry mart."

Kerry was slightly impressed he had remembered Footy. However, she was less than impressed he was blaming Ian. "If you want to get technical, it was mom's fault for running off with Scotty and the family laundry machines."

"Scotty? You're calling him by name now? It used to be 'the homewrecker' and 'mom's manwhore'. What happened to those, they were amusing?" Michel finally opened the drawer, finding the corpse he was looking for. He immediately bent closer to the neck wound, staring at it intensely. Kerry almost offered him a light, but then she remembered that he didn't need it. He could actually see better without one on.

"I keep getting those two songs mixed up. You know 'Scotty Doesn't Know' and 'Stacy's Mom.'"

"I try not to." Michel straightened, casting his eye critically over the rest of the body. "There's nothing here," he said, as though he expected the entire thing to be solved with a single clue like on Murder She Wrote.

"The doctor keeps his medical charts on his desk. Maybe there's something in there."

Michel moved towards the office, dodging around the scalpel tray Kerry always seemed to knock into, even in the daylight, and began sorting through the papers on the heavy wooden desk. "Why did you come back here?" he asked, flipping through the notes at a speed that appeared as though he didn't have time to actually read the first sentence, but she knew he was skimming through the entire page at an alarmingly quick pace.

"Because you practically dragged me out of my warm bed," Kerry answered with a frown, sitting in the old, wool covered seat in front of the desk. The doctor obviously didn't have company very often, and if he did he didn't waste any of his limited funding on making people comfortable. It reminded her a lot of the furniture in some of the less common areas of her dorm. Great to study on, but rather uncomfortable. The night she lost her virginity, the padding gave her a bad case of rug-burn on her knees.

"First," Michel said, not even looking up from his reading, "I did not drag you. It took very little to convince you once you found out breaking and entering was involved. You need more excitement in your life," he told her, raising his eyes over his glasses frames for a moment to shoot her a quick grin. "Second, you know that wasn't what I meant. Why come back to Brockport?"

"There are far less options opened to college graduates than they lead you to believe. Where else was I supposed to go? I had practically no experience and—"

"Bull. Shit." Michel cut her off sharply. "You were the one with the byline outing one of the tenured profs for sexual harassment."

"He grabbed my ass."

"And the article on where the conservation society obtained its grant."

"It was ironic that they were so concerned with the environment and yet took money from a company commonly known to dump waste."

"You were practically the paper's star reporter. Don't even try to tell me that newspaper scouts weren't hounding you to work for them when you graduated."

Kerry went silent, crossing her arms over her chest and looking at the floor. "Dad asked me to come home for a while. Ian was getting in trouble at school and he told me how the newspaper here was practically begging for reporters who could write a sentence."

"And you came," he said simply, now looking at her with an odd expression on his face. "You had the chance to take the world by the balls, to achieve all those dreams you had of being an international correspondent, to win a Pulitzer – and don't tell me you don't want that, I know you – and you just threw it all away because your father couldn't get his own life together?"

"I'm happy," she told him, though the quaver in her voice belied her statement. "I have a good job. A good life."

"Are you?" he asked critically. "I don't think you are."

How can I be happy? She wanted to scream at him. You did this! This is your fault, Michel. Instead, she smiled at him, that fake smile she had practiced in the mirror so that it looked better than her genuine one. "Of course I am. I have Luke."