"What was it like? Seeing it all?"
"… You really don't want to know Robin," Vlad replied, sipping at the coffee with a small scowl. Robin had insisted on dragging them to a recently opened trendy coffee bar, to 'catch up'. From the look on Vlad's face, it was as though he would prefer to be anywhere than there at that particular moment in time. He found the coffee to bland for his tastes, if he were to be perfectly honest. "And it's not exactly something I'm in the habit of speaking of," he added quickly, noticing Robin opening his mouth to ask another question on the subject.
Robin kept noticing how harsh Vlad's voice sounded now. It was like he was a different person entirely. Which was quite possibly the best analogy he could come up with, his mind reasoned quickly. After all, the vampire merging experience gave all those born vampires their true state, if you liked. He wondered if it was a painful experience.
"More painful than you could imagine," Vlad's new harsh voice cut through his thoughts, causing Robin to jump slightly.
"… I thought vampires can't read minds?" He asked eyes wide as he stared at Vlad with something akin to fear - an emotion which he would have never connected with his friend before.
"We can't," Vlad replied simply, a smirk crawling on to his face slowly,
"Then how …?" he asked, blinking in confusion. Though he had once considered himself an expert on all vampiric knowledge, knowing Vlad and his family had changed all of that all too quickly for his own liking, but it was decidedly fun at the same time.
"It's just far too easy to work out what you're thinking," Vlad explained. Robin took this in, nodding slightly, before chucking a small packet of sugar at the vampire - which, of course, he dodged. Damn vampire reflexes. You really couldn't mess with someone who'd mastered them. "Robin," Vlad said slowly, looking up from his coffee, his face oddly blank. "I don't think we should …"
"Don't say it," Robin cut in quickly, somehow knowing what Vlad wanted to say. "Don't say you don't think we should be friends anymore because you don't know what it's like." Vlad stared at him. "When you first did that mind wipe, you made me forget I ever had a friend in the first place, at least on the surface. But my subconscious could remember, and I felt more lonely than I'd ever felt before. It's one thing to go through life never having a friend, you don't know what your missing, but to have one and then be forced to live life, knowing what it was like but knowing you'll never have one again?" Robin looked up at Vlad, his eyes suddenly hard, and just terrifying enough to make the Grand High Vampire squirm in his seat.
"You can't understand what it feels like Vlad, and you won't, not in your state. So please, don't say you don't think we can still have our friendship anymore because maybe vampires can live with that awful feeling, but I don't think brea … I don't think humans can."
Vlad stared silently at Robin after the outburst, dimly noting that he had become far more eloquent in the seven year he'd been away. He then wondered if that's what Robin was referring too, his new tendency to simply shrug off anything emotional, looking at everything with the same cold eye. In his own opinion, he'd seen far too much death, caused far too many deaths, to let anything affect him anymore.
Maybe he needed some help trying to rebuild some emotion.
"You're right," he said simply, leaning back in his seat. And that was that, nothing more was said on the subject. "What did you want to know?"
"Everything," Robin replied quickly
And so, Vlad told him.
Everything.