Archive of Our Own ^beta

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She was your neighbor, your other half, your eternal opposite. She sat on your lap so full of light that you felt like you were drowning in it. Her light, her essence, touched your lips and slipped into your soul without a second's hesitation. You could barely see as dripping brightness filled your lungs and stole your breath away.

She was so bright that you wanted to hate her for it. No one ever told you that hate was impossible if every speck of your dark-stained existence insisted on feeling pity.

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The words trapped inside your head spill out and stain the paper like blood on the ground. Every dirty secret and simple emotion spills out into pages insistent on trapping you within your own insanity. Your anger manifests into a demon on the paper gifted to you, pure and white before you dared to taint it with your essence, and you see yourself formed into a swirling red cloud of platonic hate that aches to rip the ones who wronged you into indistinguishable shreds.

When you finish writing, you hand it to him. Your heart catches in your chest as you wait for him to read it, ruby eyes scanning your soul as ruthlessly as they scanned everything else. You shift from side to side, shame painting your cheeks as you try so hard to keep the cold, detached demeanor you've held onto all these sweeps. Your control, especially over those small and vulnerable pieces heartless men will hurt with a smile, means everything to you.

He looks up to you and, for once, does not say a word. His eyes reflect some odd sort of guilt before a determination you can't truly place overtakes his gaze. A small, soft hand lands on your head and the anger still lingering inside you and not in the open starts to evaporate.

"Shoosh now," he says softly. It's halting and awkward, like he's never truly said the words before and meant them, but they still work too well.
Under his care, your control means nothing.

You don't need it anyway.

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You live in a cold world full of failed flirtations and unlit cigarettes twirled between your fingers as you desperately pretend that you're cool. The world is full of colors but all you see is grey. None of those colors were worth seeing, anyway. None of them would bring back the wigglerhood you've lost.

Except for his.

When he laughs, a smile rises out of the see of self-depreciation that he'd made his home and you stop breathing. For a moment, a simple, beautiful moment, the air seems to sparkle and the color that bled out of your life and turned it into moralless monotony return to you again. The storms that brew in the corners of your mind clear away until not even a single cloud mars the sky's smooth face and a peace you haven't known since you were a wiggler sets into your soul.

If never breathing again would keep this colorful world and too-rare smile unshattered then suffocation doesn't seem so bad.

You have manipulated and twisted people around your fingers with false words and pain you don't even feel, sunk in a world of science and logic where there is no room to escape. Cold eyes stare you down in your mind for all of eternity and you find that you can't believe in magic again even if you tried.

But then he laughs again and he looks at you with a look, fully knowing of the twisted and awful troll you've become and every friend you've lost with your awful words and deeds, so full of pity that you think the lack of air has made you see things again. Because, otherwise, you'd have to say he smiles like magic.

Maybe you can't believe in magic. Maybe you shouldn't.

But you don't have to.

Tavros is magic enough, and you sure as hell believe in him.

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In your arms lay the smallest baby you had ever seen. He wheezed, such a pitiful sound that you swore your heart started beating for him. He was living perfection, a little angel grasping on the last strands of life with everything he had, but you could tell he wouldn't be living much longer. Your eyes slid up to meet Roxanne's too-pink ones that pleaded with you help him and then down to her mouth which was frowned at you in scolding.

"If I bite him," you warned carefully, "then he is mine."

The man didn't seem to understand what you meant. His eyebrows drew together tightly as he tried to comprehend the statement dropped at his feet. Roxanne frowned daintily and glanced down at the beautiful baby girl wrapped inside her scarf. She looked like she thought she knew, but didn't want to understand at all.

You didn't blame her.

"What does that mean?" the man asked in his too-deep, too-smooth voice. "That he's yours I mean."

You look at Roxanne, not the man you didn't know and couldn't trust to make the right decision. "He stays here when you leave."

Roxanne, your prettily-painted old friend, flinched harshly at your words that were not said with even a shred of mercy. Her pain almost disturbing the larger baby clutched tightly in her arms. It didn't, however, and the blonde infant didn't so much as open her eyes as the three of you stood together. The man whipped to face you, so protective after your words and his lover's flinch. His blue eyes met yours and stared you down in an unspoken challenge.

You didn't back down for a moment.

"You mean that we will not see Raphael after this," the man said slowly. His breath stunk of pipe tobacco and strawberries. It took everything you had not to gag as he exhaled.

"Don't know." You put your hands in your pockets and tried to look nonchalant. Telling the truth never came easy to you, so the words burned your throat as you said them. "When he's older and can contain himself, maybe. If he wants to."

"You'll just teach him not to want to see us," Roxanne said coldly, her pain turned into anger so she didn't have to face it. How ironic it was that she used to yell at you for doing exactly that.

You sighed and ran one hand through your hair as if that would soothe the tension running through his muscles like electricity through a wire. "If you want to believe that, fine. Little man don't got much time left. There aren't exactly an overflow of friendly, baby-biting vampires around here. At least, last time I checked."

Roxanne flicked her gaze from the boy in your arms to you yourself, her expression flipping from fond to murderous with every flip. You stared without changing your expression, which more than likely made you seem smugger than you felt. You couldn't even spare the energy to be smug when the stench of death poisoned the air and filled your lungs until you suffocated. You hated yourself for taking him away from her, from depriving him of a life filled with Roxanne's rambunctious energy and infectious smiled.

You'd hate yourself for more letting him die.

Finally, Roxanne collected herself. "Fine," she said primly, as if she should have been sticking up her nose and cradling one of those poodles the nobles were so fond of at that time. "I will see him again when he is older."

It sounded like a threat. The man beside her looked as if he thought that's what it was. But you knew. She always was subtle with her prophecies.

Without a second more wasted, you leaned forward and bit into the boy's soft flesh.

He breathed for the last time and it felt like dying again.

His eyes opened, no longer a watery violet but a bright ruby, and it felt like coming back to life.

Sometime later, you sat in a dusty room on a rocking chair you'd never used and look down at the boy in your arms. Raven black hair had faded into snowy white after the bite and peachy-warm skin paled until there was almost no color at all. This was the first time you had seen a person's appearance change so drastically after receiving the bite. You had seen vampires of all shades before, from the darkest chocolate brown to the pasty white sported by the baby you held. You had seen hair colors of all hues, from dusty blonde to fiery red to the deepest black and fairest white. None of those people had been changed as dramatically as that baby.

Then again, Cal had told you once that you looked nothing like the babe you were born as.

"You sure are something special, kid," you said with a sigh. "Then again, maybe it's just my powers fucking up shit. You know, I'm hardly your run of the mill vampire. When I got bit, some major shit got fucked up."

The baby looked up at you, his wide ruby eyes hidden behind shades of his very own, and giggled. He didn't understand you, but he definitely loved hearing your voice. The thought alone was enough to shake a laugh out of you. It was the first genuine show of mirth you'd had since Cal disappeared to who-knew-where.

"Well, kid, we've got to figure out a name for you," you said to the giggling babe. "I am not calling you Raphael, no matter how ironic that would be. We need to call you something else now before that name actually starts to stick."

The baby, an absolute embodiment of helpfulness, just giggled again.

"Yeah, okay, I see how it is," you said with mock-offense. "But real talk, we have got to get you a name."

You stopped talking for a moment and listened around you. The wind whistled through the trees and children argued with each other as they ran over logs and under branches. Birds sang their thoughts out to the world and you rocked the baby in your arms back and forth until he finally calmed down.

The image of a boy your age with snow-white hair and red eyes just a shade lighter came to your mind. You tried to shove the thoughts back into the darkest recesses of your mind, but to no avail. Every movement brought another memory of the boy who drew stories and whispered his plans of becoming famous in your ear as you tried to sleep. He was the only person you had, before Cal, and damn the baby looked just like him after the bite.

"Well, fuck. Guess your name's Dave now, lil man. That's a big shadow to fill. But, hey. You're Roxanne's brat. You'll grow into it."