The End Is Where We Start From
Disclaimer: The angst-whore muse is all mine. Everything you recognise from Sanctuary is not. The title is a quote from the last episode of Torchwood season 2.
A/N: Sorry it took so long to get this up. I had to wait for my beta, T-man626, to send me back the first and latest chapters before I put it up.
This one is not nearly as violent, and would be rated at a K+ level only for a bit of violence. It also addresses the original prompt that I was working off of, which was about connecting Helen and Nikola needing to feed.
Please enjoy this rather less visually hard-to-take though still (in my mind) nearly as heart-breaking scene.
Chapter Two (1511 words)
He hears a wall slide back, the impenetrable prison suddenly exposed to the world. He can't move. They know what he is, and if they have found a way to kill him, he will welcome it. He will not put up the slightest fight if they come to hurt him, but he will not let them take the body in his arms.
"I need a med team to my location STAT!" hisses a somewhat-familiar voice. He shakes his head, even as he hears the crackling response of an affirmative over the radio.
Whoever has opened the door to his prison hurries over to the crouching, half-mad vampire. When she is well within human hearing distance, he tells her, annunciating clearly, "No."
"Nikola?" she asks softly. Unable to bear it any longer, he looks up to see who this intrusive presence is.
It's one of the children.
His mind struggles for a moment to remember her name.
"Kate," he whispers. The absolute shock at the vampire's state is clearly evident on her face, which is, to his surprised, filled with genuine concern. He didn't think they cared. "She's gone."
The tears, he notices, are much quicker to come to her face than they were to either his or Helen's. They're spilling down her cheeks as she impulsively hugs him around the neck, taking care not to displace the woman in his arms. She picks up his coat from the floor, and wraps it around her boss's body, which she manages to pry from his grip with a small bit of coaxing.
While she is supporting the remarkable weight of the woman part of her refuses to acknowledge is dead, Nikola pulls on the rest of his clothes. They are blood-stained, from her back, but they had already been torn and stained and written off, in his head, as a total loss.
The med team Kate had desperately called for arrives as he is taking back his love. Kate shakes her head sadly at them, but they still – foolishly – provoke the vampire into a minor tiff about who will bring her body out of the hellhole where she saw her last moments. He bares his fangs and snaps at them, then falters; it seems what little strength he gained so long ago from her blood is leaving him. Thankfully, the movement is too small for the weak eyes of the humans in front of him to pick up on, and he brushes past them and down the corridor running next to the cell.
He doesn't want to know what horrors are hidden behind each of these further doors they pass, what heart-breaking acts of violence his captors have subjected others to. He simply walks forward, up, out. Away from the hell and the death and people who will ask questions.
He walks without asking directions, his internal magnet feeling the steel structure of the building, providing a more accurate map than any of Wolf-boy's scanning equipment could. In the back of his mind, where he's not paying attention to it, he can hear someone calling, "Hey, Vlad, wait, we haven't secured that exit yet!"
He gets so far through the maze of corridors that he almost forgets that the exit isn't "secure" until a bullet whizzes past his ear. And then another. His magnetism is telling him that, in order to get out, he must cross through a large lobby, with an upper balcony perfect for raining gunfire down on him. Weak as he is, he cannot press on through the pain of a gunshot wound, even though it won't kill him.
After retracing his steps for a few metres, he lays Helen's body in a small alcove. The tears roll down his cheeks again as he whispers to her lifeless form, "Forgive me."
Then, he slips his fangs into the bared expanse of her neck, and drinks. He is so delirious with need that he imagines her blood is still warm, a belief that comes only secondarily as he's relishing the sweet, strong, overwhelmingly intoxicating taste of her blood.
He comes nowhere close to draining her, but feels far stronger for the restrained amount of blood he has taken. It's given him the strength that he needs to kill every murdering bastard that took away his only reason for living.
He lets himself slide into his full vampire power, eyes, ears, nose, and magnetism alert for every movement. There are stairs through a door to the right of where he was nearly shot, stairs that lead to the balcony and the shooters. He slips silently through the door, up the stairs, through a short expanse of corridor, and behind the first man positioned to take him down.
He slides up behind the man and pulls him deep into the shadows, breaking his neck before he can make a sound. So he continues through the next two men, but his fourth victim makes a cry before his death, and the others lock in on his location and begin firing blindly.
Nikola can barely feel the bullets as his immortal body instinctively pushes the ones that have lodged inside him back out. He continues killing men: slicing with his claws, bearing his fangs for effect, brushing off the shots as if they were nothing. The onslaught of attack lasts far longer than he would like it to. None of these men are smart enough to flee the sight of an enraged vampire.
He makes quick work of them, and then returns to the hidden alcove for Helen's body. With his coat hiding most of the horrible wounds that mar her appearance, her expression makes it almost appear that she is peacefully sleeping. He scoops her into his arms, something he has always wanted to do but never even dared to fear would ever be in this situation. He holds her close, and keeps walking, across the lobby which became a bloodbath, through a few more corridors, and out into the daylight for the first time in an immeasurable while.
When his eyes adjust to the sunlight, he sinks down on his knees and the tears stream down his cheeks in torrents. So many cars, so many people, so much help to save them. To save her, the woman in his arms, who they were too late to save.
Suddenly, a huge, hairy hand is pulling on his shoulder. "Up," grunts a familiar voice. "We're going home."
The vampire nods and follows blindly, mentally reduced to a child. He is led to a van, and he curls up in one of the seats with Helen in his arms. Bigfoot gets in the driver's seat and takes them back to the Old City Sanctuary. It's a few hours' drive, but Nikola isn't thinking, and the time doesn't feel like anything. He simply lets himself be led, lets himself be told to put Helen on a hospital bed in the infirmary, lets himself be given a shot of his medication, lets himself be fed the cocktail of animal blood that tastes nothing like the sweet bouquet of Helen's blood. He doesn't let go of Helen's hand until he is shoed out of the room altogether, and then he simply wanders the corridors of the Sanctuary aimlessly.
With a mind of their own, his feet take him to a door he knows well. He steps into the room he has seen a few times before, the room that is waiting for a return it will never see.
He lies down on her bed, his clothes sticky with dried blood and tears and sweat, and closes the curtains around him. His eyelids, too, drift shut, and he begins to contemplate ways he might die.
His mind keeps going back to the blasted De-Vamper, which is in his lab, and of course has been re-configured so that he could never again accidentally use it on himself. But he can change that, undo the safety measure, return to the torment of a mortal soul and end his life as a weakling. Or, perhaps, he could alter it altogether: use its targeting already honed in on his own DNA to rip apart the very structure of his cells, implant a poison in his genetic makeup that even the powerful effects of the Source Blood couldn't protect him from. Yes, it might work, but it would be difficult to make on completely fool-proof. Difficult, but not impossible – he is, after all, Nikola Tesla.
When Bigfoot comes to Helen's room to get the dress she had made him promise to bury her in, he immediately picks up on the curtains that have been drawn about her bed. Finding evidence of Nikola's presence in the room does not surprise him, nor does the fact that the vampire makes no acknowledgement of the other's presence. What does surprise him – and he only notices it on the way out, as he is quietly closing the door behind him – is the soft, relaxed sounds of the immortal man's breathing as he sleeps.