Sorry for the slow update! I hope you enjoy this chapter! Inspired by the lovely LadyJoaDeRobinson's review on the last chapter. You are wonderful!

Count your age by friends, not years. Count your life by smiles, not tears.
-John Lennon

Chapter 14
February 15th 1498

Jane swallowed deeply, her eyebrows drawing together. For the fourth time, she raised her hand to knock on the door in front of her, but then lowered it again. The Pope had summoned her and she didn't even need to guess why; how could she be so stupid? She had revealed her powers, her true self, in front of a human.

She sighed deeply, raised her hand and touched it to the wood of the door. Then, taking another meaningless, but calming breath, she lifted her hand from the wood and knocked it to the door. After knocking precisely five times, she stepped back.

It took the Pope a few moments to get to the door. When he opened the door for her, he just stood there without speaking before stepping aside wordlessly, letting her in. She muttered a 'thank you'.

The room that she entered was Machiavelli's dining room. The Papal family had been allowed to stay overnight in his house. Rodrigo walked over to sit at one of the ends of the table where he'd obviously been sitting before Jane came; there was a glass of wine and some paperwork placed on top of the mahogany.

She sat down awkwardly at the right hand of where the Pope sat. She looked down at her hands, which were folded in front of her on the table, once more going through any possible way of explaining this without mentioning vampires.

"Would you like some wine?"

Jane was shook out of her thoughts abruptly, not expecting him to say such a trivial thing. "No, thank you." He poured himself some. "I believe you have some questions." She decided that if she was going to have to do this, she would do it with dignity; so, she straightened her back and looked him in the eyes.

"Only if you are willing to give the answers."

It was a clever answer, Jane realized as he drank some of his wine. A nice one, too, an answer that allowed her to back out if she wanted to do so. "I am. But I believe I know what you will ask already, so I have already prepared the answer."

The Pope nodded approvingly, not too surprised, though, and urged her to continue.

"I know that my display of powers yesterday when the roof fell may have seemed… unnatural," Jane began.

"Celestial, I would say," he cut in. She shook her head quickly.

"No, celestial would imply something godlike, something good and gifted. And this is not." She was fighting the urge to look away from his searing eyes, the urge to cry even. "This is a curse, damnation, the biggest of all sins. And yet it is still heavenly, a gift that can be used for so much good." She could tell that Rodrigo didn't see the sense in it yet. She licked her lips before continuing. "The only way I could describe it is that I am a mixture of good and evil, sinner and saint. God has given me a gift that explains my continued youth. I suppose you know the legend of the Fountain of Youth?"

He nodded, smiling a bit at the reference. "A silly sailor's tale, yes."

Jane nodded – there was no truth to it whatsoever, but it would make it easier to explain. "If it was true, you would have to find the fountain and drink from its water to obtain eternal life. You would, however, need a sacrifice, a human's life in return for yours." She was fighting so, so hard to not look down now. She paused and collected herself before continuing. "It is like this, in a way. When I was twelve summers of age, I met a man name Aro, the man whom you have also met, I believe. Back then I thought he could be in his late twenties at the most, back then one aged quickly, you see-" He frowned at her use of 'back then. "-but really, he was much older than that.

He told me of his gift, his curse and asked me if I wished to share it. He believed that I would have special powers in this form. And I, in my weakness, found myself unable to say no, no matter his warnings. What you would call it is vampirism."

He stared at her, shocked, gripping his cross in astonishment. Jane shook her head.

"That will no keep me away, Holy Father. I have faced crosses many times and never gotten burned." He seemed to calm when her voice was still the same and she didn't turn into a monster.

"But you are… so very normal."

She nodded. "I am quite trained at hiding my identity. I have done so for many centuries now." He gasped slightly, a noise that could only be caught by Jane's vampire senses. "But there are other gifts than life; there is strength, speed and in some cases special abilities as the most obvious ones. But there is also the gift of knowledge, wisdom as you become older, and power when you realize how to use it."

Rodrigo shook his head as if to remove his shock. "But I have never seen you kill. Do you do… that?"

Jane sighed and she could tell that he knew the answer already; that he'd read in her face. "Yes. I drink blood. That is the other part, the cursed part. I must kill; after some time, you learn how to keep that to a minimum, but you also learn that you do not really wish to. You are no longer what you used to be; you are changed by the first few months of your new life, a couple of months where you have no control over your thirst and urges. The memories of that, or the lack of the same, the sins you have committed – they destroy a part of you."

He had leant forward, intrigued by her tale. "After that, there is the emptiness. After killing so much, reveling in your power, you realize that some things cannot be controlled. Death is easy; it is a question of snapping one's neck. But life, that is harder. You cannot control who lives, only who dies. And that is what makes it the worst; the fact that you are like created to do evil, been given all the power in the world to do exactly that. But when it comes to doing good, you are not much better prepared than a simple human."

The man across from her seemed at loss for words. She wished she was him, able to show this weakness. She couldn't, not now or ever. "But during those months that I told you about, not all is crushed. There is still a small voice, a fragment of your humanity that screams every time you kill, a fragment that becomes smaller and more desperate for every crime that you commit. And you keep hoping that it would disappear, knowing you would be happier without it, but still you fear the day it's gone, what you'll become.

Yesterday, in the church, I felt that part of me. I thought it was dead for a long time before meeting you and your family but yesterday, it resurrected. I couldn't let that boy die – I may have been able to let the mother die, but a newborn, a young and innocent life only just landed upon earth, with all its possibilities ahead of it? For the sake of what? The integrity of an old, dead woman whose only purpose is to kill? I couldn't do that."

They sat in stunned silence for a while; the Pope at loss of words from Jane's story and Jane from how much she had turned out to be willing to reveal. "That little fragment of yours?" Jane looked at him, nodded. "If it is truly the rest of your humanity, then it is only a child. A twelve-year-old girl who had life taken from her."

Jane smiled and shook her head sadly. "No. There was never a twelve-year-old girl. When I was that age, my mom was deadly sick. None of the methods of the doctors worked and I began fiddling with other ways of healing. While at first I helped Alec in his herbal ways, later I found myself sacrificing others in an attempt to use magic. It wasn't on purpose at first; bad things just seemed to happen when I wished for it. Later, I did it more on purpose. After a while it was impossible to call it coincidence and my brother and I were sentenced to be burned at the stake."

He nodded his head. "All the more a child, then."

"I was never a child," she clarified, looking at him to make sure that he understood. She had never had the opportunity to be that.

He just nodded again. "If you were never a child, how could you ever be a grown-up?"

MMMMM

Jane walked through the hallway of Machiavelli's house, still thinking about the Pope's last words for her. He was right, in a way. Her steps slowed when she saw a figure sitting in one of the windowsills, face turned to the window observing the outside and his legs bent in front of him.

"Cesare?" He wasn't wearing his usual red robes; instead, he was wearing typical upper class clothes consisting of a leather west on top of a once white tunic and a pair of dark leather pants.

"Giovanna." He nodded politely. "Just returned from a meeting with my father, I assume?"

"Yes. He told you?"

"Only that he was meeting you."

Jane nodded as she observed him closely. "How is Lucrezia?"

His gaze focused on her face. "What do you mean?"

Jane smiled at him. "I saw you riding off last night, and returning this morning. I assumed that you would be visiting a certain convent."

He nodded. "You see too much for your own good, Giovanna." He leaned his head bag against the wall. "But you are right; I paid her convent a visit last night. It is my responsibility as a cardinal to check on it from time to time and I wanted to be the one to tell my younger sister about the cathedral. I wanted to tell her that we all survived."

"I am glad. I can only imagine what she would have gone through had she not heard it from you and had she been forced to worry about who had survived and who had not." Cesare smiled at her for a moment before letting his gaze return to the world outside of window. "When will she give birth do you believe?"

"It is not far away."

"What will you call him?"

Cesare shrugged. "Lucrezia wants to name him Perotto, after his father, but I told her that that would not be a good idea. While I do not want to hurt her anymore, some in our family might wish to punish the man for what he did. Giving away his name would be stupid."

Jane nodded, letting out a small sigh. She just wished that Lucrezia could get her old self back. Jane looked up when Cesare spoke again. "What did you and my father talk about?"

"Yesterday," Jane lied. "About what we can do to help after the tragedy."

Cesare seemed to like her answer. "We definitely do need to help, do we not?" Jane agreed silently. "Father believes that he is to blame," Cesare mused out loud.

"How so?"

"He believes that he did something to upset God. He has been searching his mind for some sort of penance but with his luxurious habits, finding something that he can actually stick to will probably prove hard." Jane snickered a bit when he referred to one of the Pope's many weaknesses.

"What do you believe happened?" Jane tilted her head while awaiting his answer.

"You are asking me?" he said jokingly. "Well, I believe the ceiling was simply old and weak. It has probably been about to break for years now."

"It is just such a large coincidence that it happened the exact day that the Pope visited." Jane looked at him suggestively. She knew that Cesare wasn't the most faithful person and she wondered what his actual thoughts were.

He smirked. "You are going to try that. Well, I believe that coincidences do exist, and that even if they are large, they are coincidences nonetheless."

Jane beamed. "I thought you would say that. I must leave you now but I hope to see you at dinner at the very least."

Cesare said his polite goodbyes before Jane allowed herself to leave. The hall wasn't too long with only five doors to her right, windows to her left. Her room was situated at the very end of the hall and she was just about to enter it when she heard sounds from the other side of the door to her right.

Cesare, she noticed, had left the hall, probably to seek out his father so no one would see her eavesdropping. She silently moved closer to the door, which was opened a bit, and looked in through the creek.

Ascanio was sitting in one of the couches of the small living room. He was smiling brightly, half laughing. In the chair across from him sat, surprisingly, a servant. Jane recognized the traditional Italian looks of the young woman from a night not too long ago. Maria, she believed her name was. Jane didn't have the habit of getting help from others in undressing, so she had only seen the servant on few occasions since then.

Now Jane found her in the strangest situation, sitting in one of her employer's chairs, laughing at one of his guest's jokes. In spite of the impropriety of it all, Jane found herself smiling. She realized that Maria deserved that laugh and that Ascanio deserved that woman's attention. They were both people that Jane had somehow used or abandoned, Ascanio by using his affections and Maria by spending the night with the man that she secretly adored. They deserved to be happy much more than Jane did.