You haven't figured out a whole hell of a lot about being a vampire quite yet, but at the very least, you know that, technically speaking, you're kind of going to live forever. Until somebody kills you, at least, and at this point it doesn't really look like anybody's really too keen on being your (second) murderer. There was that Abner guy, but he hasn't really been that much of a threat ever since Hanna got to him with the Power of Friendship and all that shit. And there's your fellow vampires, but frankly you seem to amuse them way too much for them to want actively want to end your (admittedly pathetic) existence.

So, basically, you're looking pretty damn immortal at this point.

Except, well, shit, you don't really want to be. You read (that stupid book with that stupid frog that ruined everything) "Tuck Everlasting"in school as a kid; you know that living forever isn't all it's cracked up to be. Hell, recently it's not even cracked up to be much anymore. On TV, only the evil psychopaths want to be immortal—either that or the tragic hero has the gift of Eternal Life thrust upon them.

And frankly, you don't really see yourself as a psychopath (despite what your mother seems to think) and you don't exactly fancy yourself a hero.

So where does that leave you? You're self-aware enough to admit that, yeah, if your whole immortality thing had come to you without you having to meet Hanna (and subsequently the rest of those sorta fantastic nut jobs) then maybe you would have been kind of okay with it. Because it's not like you had any friends before, not like there was anybody you would be particularly horrified to outlive before. Hell, you would have been psyched to never have to miss any of the awesome technology that would come out a hundred years from your lifetime.

But, shit—now you do have friends (which, yeah, are cooler than any new Apple product). People you fucking care about, people you can't really imagine not existing anymore. People you don't want to leave behind.

And it's with that train of thought that you realize that you don't really plan on living forever, or even all that much longer than the last of your friends to die. It's stupid, and maybe a little melodramatic, but you feel like at some point or another, you're going to find a way to die too. Because, if you're being honest (and let's face it, you're actually usually pretty honest, most of the time) you know that you still feel more like a human than a vampire. Sure, you drink blood (most of the time from a plastic bag but sometimes from a grungy fake doctor's veins) and you can't go outside in the daylight, but you still go about the motions of a human life. You work on your art commissions, you go shopping (for Hanna's food, new Apple products, new clothes, since all of your outfits seem to get ripped apart lately), you still call your mother every few weeks so she doesn't worry. A pretty normal human life, if you just discount the hours upon hours that you spend running around with redheads that smell like death, zombies, werewolves, half-selkies, and who knows what else.

And human lives end. It's just that simple to you, really.

Okay, so you're not exactly jumping at the idea of dying (for keeps this time), but it's just sort of this assumption that you have that you will die, way deep down in your brain where you can't really get too good a grasp on it. And it's not like you think about it much, anyway.

But it does come back to you, eventually. As years pass, you start to see new lines on your friends' faces. Lamont starts to casually complain about back pains when he's carrying his boxes. Worth's deadly sharp joints start to give him problems and he starts to take pills because he actually needs them. Hanna…well, Hanna doesn't start to move more cautiously exactly, but he does start to move a little slower. Bodies get bonier and voices change. Strides get shorter and hands start to shake. Your friends age.

And then after a while it's kind of just you and the zombie who haven't really gone through any major changes. Your bite wounds are gone (see above, namely the bit about eating out of a doctor's neck) and your second fang has grown in, but nothing else. The zombie (Roger, Augustus, Wyatt, Ashley, whatever the hell Hanna called him last time) hasn't really changed either, whether from magic or formaldehyde or whatever. So it's sort of just you and him watching all of your friends shrink and slow, and it kind of sucks.

But then you remember you've got a way out, at least. You can deal with being stuck as a twenty-seven-year-old while all your friends (and the guy who's somehow managed to turn out to be the love of your life, fuck how lame is that) get steadily older, because you've still got this vague idea that you're only going to live out a natural human lifespan, anyhow. Maybe you won't even have to go antagonize a vampire slayer or anything. Maybe after everyone you care about is dead, you'll leave your blackout curtains open one night and just sit in front of the window as the sun rises.

Or something overdramatic and sappy like that.

You don't know what the zombie will do, and that makes you feel a little bad, but really what can you do. He's in worse shape than you, as far as the unwanted immortality thing goes. You know he won't want to keep going a second longer after Hanna's gone, but you don't know how he'll make that happen. Ways to kill vampires are pretty well-known, but the only way you know of to kill a zombie that is to blast their head off with a shotgun or completely destroy their bodies, and, uh, eww.

The two of you start to spend more time with each other as years pass into decades. Somehow, Hanna's little gang of misfits (Hanna included) are living pretty long, full lives, which is nice but also a little lonely. You and the zombie don't exactly have heart-to-non-beating-heart chats, but it's nice to be around somebody who understands your despondency when you come back from picking up arthritis pills for Worth or something. Nice to be able to tell somebody about your little open-window idea and have them just nod in agreement (or is it just acknowledgment?) rather than try to talk you out of it.

And once you realize that the two of you get along pretty well, for a minute or two you think that maybe you and the zombie could live for each other once everyone else was…gone…But you know that that wouldn't fly. The zombie (the man) already has no real life of his own beyond Hanna; his very existence revolves around the ever-energetic redhead, and you can accept that. Admire it, even. So you sort of take it for granted that he won't last forever either, that he's going to be gone someday too. It's what the guy wants, anyhow.

And, actually, it's not all that sad. You're not exactly the most religious guy in the world, but you've got this really vague belief in souls and whatnot. After all, hello, ghosts are real, so why not souls, why not a final resting place? You think that that kind of thing sounds pretty nice. A lot nicer than eternal parasitic life, at least. (After all, once Worth is gone, where will you get blood? You're not about to go and kill somebody, not after you've lasted so long without doing so.)

So, once it's all thought through, you put the entire problem away again and simply try to enjoy your life, however long it may last. You take care of your friends, as does the zombie. You still bicker with Worth and get dragged into adventures with Hanna (who won't quit his business until the day he dies) and you still work on your art. And everything's pretty okay. Things will work out one way or another, you know. Things will end up how they should. So you let your immortality problem slide for a bit (because God knows you don't need anything else to stress about) and just try to keep everybody from doing anything so stupid that it might put them in their graves too prematurely.

(A/N)

This was really more of an experiment/study than anything else. I don't know how seriously I take it, myself.
It's just, with HiNaBN, there isn't a whole lot of looking forward going on. Hanna instrinsically lives in the moment. So I wanted to write this out because, omg, turning a guy into a vampire has consequences, who knew?

Much love for all you guys putting up with my crap,
Miyazaki A2