Just something I fancied writing. There isn't much on Ryan and I thought it would be interesting to explore his perspective. Hope you enjoy it! Please R&R xo
Ingrid Dracula was the centre of his world. It was a bold but simple statement. It summed up his entire existence. With every sunset, memories and feelings from his old life slipped ever further away. They weren't what mattered now.
Standing in the shadows at the Halloween Ball, hiding from the Grand High Vampire's gaze, Ryan watched Ingrid dance. Silky masses of black hair swept her milky white shoulders, her perfect red mouth pouting at her dance partner but most of all her eyes. Her glittering eyes framed exquisitely with eyelashes blacker than midnight. Eyes which never really saw him. The other vampires may get to dance with her but he was the one who would be standing watch over her coffin. He was her constant shadow. It had been that way since the night he had returned to Garside Grange to warn her of the slayer attack. For years now he had faithfully followed her every footstep. He didn't care where he had to go as long as he could be near her. He didn't care what he had to do to hear her say his name. He certainly didn't care who he had to kill to make her happy.
He resented being forced to lurk in the darkness. He longed to walk out onto the ballroom floor and take Ingrid's hand in his. Just to dance with her once, to feel her matching coldness against his skin. But to do so would be to attract the wrath of the Grand High Vampire. Vladimir Dracula was mostly peripheral to Ryan's existence. He often thought that the world was focusing on the wrong sibling – didn't they understand that Ingrid was so much more beautiful and powerful than their supposed Chosen One? Yet Vlad was the one in power and it was Vlad who had banished Ryan from his sight. "It's your eyes," Ingrid had said with a cruel laugh, "They remind him of Erin."
Erin was becoming a faded memory. He struggled to remember her, to remember their shared childhood. Her sweet smile was now replaced in his mind by the sharpness of Ingrid's fangs. Her face was harder and harder to recall. She made him think of sunshine, bright, beautiful and warm. But he had turned his face away from the sunlight a long time ago. If there was a sun in his new world of night and blood then it was Ingrid. When Erin left the Dracula residence he hadn't followed her because that would mean leaving Ingrid.
A part of himself, a tiny flicker of the old Ryan, hated himself for not following. That tiny remnant hated Ingrid even more for what she had done to him.
But it was what? Perhaps one drop of blood in his entire body that still held onto his humanity? What was one drop compared to everything else? Yet all it had taken was one drop of Ingrid's blood to destroy everything he used to be. Brother. Slayer. Breather. Yes, he should hate her but instead his unbeating heart ached for her.