fangednconfused (fangednconfused) wrote in birthrightrpg, @ 2021-02-02 20:08:00 |
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Entry tags: | brianna winters, derek mitchell |
Let It Go
Who: Brianna/Derek
What: Dinner
Where: Searchlight
When: Present
Ratings/Warnings: Low
Before Ronnie had up and run off, he had taught -- or tried to teach -- Derek how to cook a few standard dishes. One that was easier to make but seemed impressive was also the name of the cartoon movie that the chef enjoyed: ratatouille. He had spent the better part of an evening slicing the vegetables in some borrowed appliance called a mandoline and managed to not sever anything. The eggplant, zucchini, tomatoes, and bell pepper took forever to layer in the cast iron pot. He used a photo his friend had texted him for visual reference. The heavy sauce-filled pot was placed extra carefully in the blazing hot oven.
He had bought a bottle of red from a wine store in Vegas, and two wine glasses especially for the occasion. The table had been set with a white cloth, candles lit. The vampire erred on the side of corniness by making and printing out his own menus, which listed the meal he had made, and set it before his and Brianna’s places at the table. Just before the timer was set to go off and the food removed from the oven, Derek changed his clothes and checked himself in the mirror.
Fortunately it was one of the quieter nights at le Breeze, which is why Brianna had suggested it, and the head maitre de was shooing her out the door, reassuring her that yes he had her mobile number etched into his brain, and on speed dial, if anything was requiring her attention. As the door closed on the Uber she blew him a kiss and gave him a wink, at which he simply rolled his eyes and waved the car off, returning inside to oversee the well-oiled team that ran the dining areas.
Brianna sat back in the seat, eyeing the bottle of water the driver had provided and finally reaching out and opening it, taking a long sip as the street lights of Henderson flicked past. Eventually they lessened, the glow of light pollution fading as the car made its way down Route 95 toward Searchlight. Her thoughts were filled with the pending arrival of her employer and mentor, and the list of applicants they would be interviewing for the role of assistant manager. They were still to decide on the potential division of responsibilities, given the growth in the operations, and she had been going over the figures and staffing numbers for each of the areas, including the restaurant, cafe bar, microbrewery, hotel, and kitchens.
But as the stars started to claim back the night sky she let her head rest back and her mind drift away from the ever-present press of responsibilities of running the business. Instead she smiled to herself as she thought of Derek’s invitation to dinner. After his party he’d called to make sure she’d enjoyed herself, and that her journey home had been safe. She hadn’t been sure how much he’d recall of their conversation that night, given the state he’d been in by the time she and Gabe had departed. She had guessed she was probably back in her suite before Derek had made it back inside his trailer.
When he had offered to cook her dinner she’d been a little surprised, his culinary skills having been the subject of his own jokes from time to time. She’d accepted, suggested which night at his request, and was now speeding toward something she wasn’t sure she was fully prepared for, but was looking forward to regardless. Even if it was take away from the diner, she knew that Derek would make it fun, it was what she really like about being with him.
As the car pulled up she gave the driver a tip, and a return time, knowing there was very little chance of a car just happening to be in the town later on. As the car drove away she walked up the steps to the door and knocked.
Derek heard the car’s wheels over the pavement outside long before the knock on the door. He exited the bathroom, switching the light off and crossed the trailer to the front. He swung open the white painted door and grinned when he saw it was Brianna. “Hey, you’re right on time.” He gestured for her to come inside, trailing after her as she crossed the threshold. “So, the dining room is over here…” He had set up a table in the space between the kitchen and living area.
Smiling widely Brianna followed him toward the dining setting, slipping her jacket from her shoulders and hanging it on the back of the armchair. "Very nice," she commented, the printed menu in each place catching her eye and broadening her smile.
“Let me pull out your chair for you.” The vampire pulled out one of the dark wooden chairs out enough for her to sit. “How was the trip here?”
"Rather pleasant," she answered truthfully, realising it had been good, the music the driver had selected having set the tone for a lovely relaxing ride. "And this all looks rather lovely!" she continued as she sat down, looking from the laid table up to the rather well-dressed host. "As do you," she added with an elegant twitch of her eyebrow. "And whatever you are cooking smells wonderful!"
“You look even better, obviously,” Derek remarked, that grin still on his face. “I mean, you always do.” He grabbed the bottle of wine and a corkscrew, twisting the stopper off with a flourish. “Would you like some wine? It’s deliciously mid-priced.” He held the bottle aloft, waiting for her to answer before pouring.
She managed to stop herself from laughing at his description of the wine, instead inclining her head and replying, “that would be lovely!” Her elbows propped lightly on the edge of the table, fingers interlaced beneath her chin as she watched him pour.
Derek carefully filled her glass a little past the halfway point and then set the bottle down within reach in case she wanted more. “I’ll go get the food, and then we can eat.” He flashed Brianna a warm smile before retreating to the kitchen. The first items he brought to the table were a salad and some French bread, then the main dish and serving utensils. He filled her plate with the amount of food he guessed most humans ate in one sitting, and then his before sitting down across from her.
“So, I grew up in a pretty solidly middle class home in San Jose,” he told her, picking up his fork. “I don’t really know about, like, fancy dinner etiquette or different forks or whatever. I hope that’s okay. Oh, and I hope you like the food. My friend Ronnie, the one who’s a chef, taught me how to make this.”
Brianna watched as Derek served the meal, the delicious aroma making her inhale deeply, and appreciatively. She also picked up her fork and smiled as he talked. She always enjoyed being with him, his easy way of talking, his enthusiasm and attention. So often she would actually forget he was not only a vampire, but also had been for a good 10 years.
"Well Ronnie has done a good job of passing on this, and you have been a great pupil!" she told him after finishing a second fork-full of the aromatic dish. "It's delicious, and except that I don't want to upset Chef I would almost suggest he should meet your friend Ronnie to compare notes."
Derek smiled, visibly pleased. “Thank you. And Ronnie is great. I’m pretty sure he can make anything taste good.” He speared a piece of eggplant with the tines of his fork and brought it to his mouth. It was good, as far as he could tell. Relieved, he relaxed a bit in his hair and took a sip of wine. Most wines tasted the same to him, so he was glad he had help in picking this one out. “There’s something I wanted to talk to you about.”
He wiped his mouth with his napkin before setting it down carefully, glancing up at her, then away almost shyly. “I think about you a lot. And if you weren’t completely against it, I um…” The vampire fiddled with his fork. “I’d like to be more than friends.”
The pause in the travel of her fork to her mouth was imperceptible, and her eyes lifted from it to Derek's face as she closed her lips around it. After a moment of chewing she swallowed the mouthful, her free hand raising her napkin to her lips to lightly press against them.
"I am not completely against it," she responded, holding his eyes with a steady gaze. She reached for her glass and took a sip of the wine, swallowing it without really noticing the flavour.
Replacing the glass on the table, her fingers remained on the stem and slowly turned it. Her eyes moved to the bowl of the glass, the red of the wine reflecting the light overhead despite the slow turning.
"But I am wondering what that means to you," she finally continued, "more than friends?"
“Oh, umm…” Derek rubbed the back of his neck nervously. “I guess it means doing the things we do now, you know, spending time together.” The vampire paused to carefully consider his words. He didn’t want to offend Brianna, or seem pushy.
“But also adding in things like kissing you, and going to sleep knowing you’re next to me and hearing your heartbeat, and watching you get ready for work, and all the hundreds of little things that people take for granted until...well.” He smiled. “Until you don’t have it anymore.”
While that sounded strange at first, she thought some more about it and nodded slowly. “I see.” And she did, but she also felt a real twinge of sadness suddenly well up. She lowered her eyes, resting them momentarily on his chest, unwittingly where his heart lay, motionless, before closing her eyes and lowering her head. When she lifted it again her eyes were bright with unshed tears, and widened as she tried to prevent them from falling before draining away again.
“I’ve never told you of my family, have I?” she said, the mere thought of her mother enough to steel her for anything. A few quick blinks and she was in control again. “Bear with me, I hope this makes sense eventually. And I think once you know you might understand.”
“My mother was a social climber, the worst kind, one who used other for furthering their own goals, and discarding them once they were of no further use.” She reached for her wine, took a look at it and pulled her hand away again, instead resting it in her lap.
“She set her sights on my father, the son of a very wealthy family, and a brilliant scientist. They were everything she wanted, and one thing about her, once she sets her sights on something there’s very little that will stop her. It was after they were married that she told him if he wanted children he would have to find a surrogate as she wasn’t going to ruin her body with all that pregnancy rubbish.” She looked down at her hands again, taking a deep breath and tamping down the tears again. Being regarded as not worth their mother’s time, had been one of the things both she and Juliet had found hardest to understand when they first learned the truth about their conception. She continued after a few seconds.
“The only saving grace?” she said, looking at Derek, smiling. “Our father decided that if she wasn’t prepared to carry a child, then he didn’t see much point in continuing her bloodline. So he not only found a surrogate for carrying us, he found a woman whose bloodline he considered worthy of continuing, but who couldn’t raise children.” She shook her head lightly, realising it was a lot to be dumping on Derek, but she wanted him to know, and understand. “The one thing I’ve always wanted? More than anything? Is to have children, my own, that I’ve created with a man I love, and carried, and given birth to.” She reached over and took his hand, the cool skin under her fingers adding to the weight in her heart. “We… can’t… do that, can we?”
Derek had listened closely to everything Brianna was saying, even as his heart sank a little bit more with each sentence. There was a part of him that was glad to learn more about her. He wanted to know everything about her. But there was also a black hole of loss that opened up, one he was usually able to keep closed and hide beneath jokes and trivial things. He felt her hand, warm, could feel the pulse if he concentrated enough.
“No, we can’t. I can’t.” The vampire stared at their hands entwined, his tongue running along the back of his teeth as he tried to push that feeling away. It had started the night Veronica had taken everything from him. It lived beyond her, and he realized it would always be there. “I wish things were different.”
“So do I.” His expression, the tone in his voice, the sadness she could see in his eyes broke her heart. She realised then just how much she cared for him, and now she couldn’t stop the tears from falling. “Derek… I’m so sorry,” she whispered, her fingers tightening on his hand. “You… I can’t begin to imagine how hard it must be for you,” she continued. It wasn’t something they’d ever talked about, and she figured now was as good a time as any. She wanted to know more about him, about the really important things to him, and how he saw things. “Tell me about your family,” she asked.
He wanted to reach out and brush her tears away, but he didn’t know how to ask and also didn’t want to touch her without her permission. Instead, he handed her a clean napkin. “I get it,” Derek told her, trying to push the sadness out of his voice. He knew where she was coming from, but there was still a sting of rejection and the dredging up of old feelings. “I wanted to have a family, too.”
The vampire thought about her question, glad for the distraction. “My dad was really hard on me. I guess he thought it would be good for me, but the more strict he got, the more I’d act out. My mom is nicer, but I think I secretly disappointed her.” Derek paused, looking down at his plate. “She wasn’t expecting to have me. My sister was born when they were in their early 20s, and the doctor said they wouldn’t be able to have any more kids. Twelve years later, they had me.”
He laughed bitterly. “Okay, yeah, I can see now how it would be disappointing to get a surprise baby and have it turn into me.”
She took the napkin and patted at her cheeks, dabbing lightly at the corners of her eyes as he spoke, all the while keeping her eyes on him. She didn’t need to lower her shields to see the pain in his face, hear it in the derisive, bitter laugh. Her thumb rubbed lightly, reassuringly along his as he talked. “Why? How could they be disappointed?” she asked automatically. “You’re kind, generous, caring, funny. All traits any parent would be happy to see in their child, surely?”
“My older sister is a pediatrician. It’s kind of hard to top that. But hey, I’m gonna live forever, so I guess the joke is on her,” Derek joked, his coping mechanism alive and well. His tone turned serious as he looked back up at her.
“I still want to be your friend,” the vampire told Brianna sincerely. “That won’t change. Ever. I think you’re amazing.”
“Derek, you are my friend, my very good and wonderful, dear, close friend, and I never want to lose that, ever, ”she returned earnestly, her eyes again holding his. She was managing to keep the tears from welling up again, just, and it was only because of her years of learning how to control her voice and stop emotions from making it quiver and break that she managed to speak. “Promise me that?” she asked, almost pleadingly, “that I will always have you to talk to, and have dinner with, share things with, and… and… watch movies with, and all the things that close friends do for each other?”
He looked down at the quickly cooling food on his plate. His mind couldn’t help but be tugged into a certain direction. The vampire felt like he was play-acting at being human. Derek was hungry for the blood sitting in his fridge, and even that was a cold substitute for what he really, deep down, wanted. It was hard to think of himself as anything else at moments like these.
Gaze dragged back up to her’s, he nodded and forced his mouth into a smile. “Of course,” he told her, giving her hand a gentle squeeze. “Our tour isn’t finished yet. This is just a stop along the way.”
And her heart broke, seeing that look in his face, the forced smile, and allowing herself to feel what he was feeling. His urges, needs, things he fought against constantly, were bubbling there. But watching him gather himself, fight the natural urge, put on a brave face for her gave her strength to rebuild her own composure. She returned the smile with her own, genuine, warm, wondering if things were going to be uncomfortable, or whether they would instead find a way into a deeper life long friendship. She seriously hoped for the latter.
Giving his hand a squeeze in return she swallowed down her worry and picked up her fork. “And I can’t let this go to waste! It wouldn’t be doing it justice,” she said, loading her fork then looking at him. Taking a deep breath she looked from his plate up to his face. “It really is great, but if there’s something else you’d… prefer?” she said, hoping it would be clear to him, “then you should have it?” It was a side of him he’d never shown her, and she understood now why, but she wanted him to know she wanted to know him. Know who Derek really was, not just the Derek he felt he needed to be for her.
He was about to tell her not to be silly, that the food was enough for him, but he didn’t want to lie to her. And not just because she would see right through it. Derek had promised her he wouldn’t. “I can’t,” he told her, shaking his head apologetically. “Not now.” The vampire grabbed his wine glass and drained the contents.
“Do you want to, um, watch a movie or something after this?”
“Yes I do,” she told him, nodding, once she’d swallowed the mouthful. It really was very good, even if only lukewarm now. Fortunately it was a dish that could survive that. She took a sip of the wine and looked at him. “What’re your favourite movies?” she asked. “And I say plural because everyone has more than one, depending on the mood, right?”
“Umm, I like all kinds of stuff. Star Wars, Harry Potter, dumb comedies.” Derek flashed her a grin, almost looking like his usual self again. “I’ll give almost everything a chance, though. You never know what you’ll like until you see it.” He topped her glass off before refilling his.
“What about you?”
She nodded as he named his favourites, smiling and her eyes lighting up at the mention of Harry Potter. "Oh that's a secret guilty pleasure!" she admitted about the franchise, looking a little coy. “Juliet would give me grief about it, but I always loved the idea of being able to go away to a place with all your friends, and learn to do magic! Especially somewhere as wonderful as Hogwarts!” She hoped he wouldn’t tease her like her sister did, but figured she was pretty safe as he’d mentioned it first. Instead she lifted her chin and caught his eye, angling her head slightly. “And I’m going to give you a chance to guess what my, or should I say our, meaning me and Juliet, favourite movie is?”
Derek held up a finger. “Hold on,” he said, “let me think.” He squinted his eyes as if doing a few mental calculations. “You’re twins...Juliet was a tomboy and you were the quiet one…” The vampire was quiet for a long moment, nodding slowly to himself before finally…
“Is it the Parent Trap?”
She looked at him, recalling that movie, and shook her head. “No!” she heard herself saying when she remembered the plotline. “I mean, no, though I can see why you went there,” she admitted after giving it a little more thought.
“Want another try?”
“Nooo, I really wanted to get it right on the first try.” Derek smiled, chagrined. “You know, this is very one-sided. I can’t read minds,” he teased. He exhaled unnecessarily, casting around for a movie title that might be relevant to Brianna and Juliet.
“Is it something really left field?” He leaned in, giving her a shrewd look. “Is it the Terminator?”
Brianna was rather glad she had just swallowed the mouthful of ratatouille in her mouth or there would have been a high risk of her embarrassing herself when he suggested that. Instead she just lightly choked. “You have no idea how funny that is!” she managed to get out eventually from behind her hand, covering her mouth as she coughed then reached for her wine to take a sip before explaining.
“We had a butler, his name was Bartholomew, but I called him Jeeves, after the old TV show, ‘Wooster and Jeeves’? Anyway, he would answer when I called him that, but one day Juliet was out in the tree, I was in the window seat, and he came into the room, told us Mother was asking us to attend her, and left us to ‘get dressed’. Juliet said he reminded her of Terminator, and started to act like it, being all robotic and nearly fell out of the tree!” She laughed as she shook her head at the memory, then added, “but no, it isn’t Terminator.”
“Wow, I am so not good at this,” Derek remarked, then held up his napkin like a white flag. “Okay, I give up. Does that lose me a lot of points?”
“If we’re keeping score, I guess so,” she teased. “It’s Frozen,” she added, to put him out of his misery with a soft sigh. “It was the last movie we watched together,” she continued, looking down at her food as she recalled her sister meeting her at the cinema and them watching it their hands finding each other in the dark as the story unfolded in front of them on the screen. “I’d just finished my studies, Juliet had been gone for years, after we graduated high school, but always kept in touch, letting me know where she was, what she was doing, sometimes coming by to see me. We saw it together, and after that would send each other pictures of us singing our song, Juliet’s was ‘Do you wanna build a snowman?’ and you can probably guess mine…?” She stopped, the realisation of just how much her song had come true in ways she hadn’t imagined hitting her.
Derek hadn’t seen Frozen, but he knew internet memes pretty well. He gave her a smile, listening to her story about her sister and feeling empathy for Brianma. He knew what it was like to have his family drift away from him. He couldn’t imagine what it would be like to have it happen with one’s twin.
“Is it ‘Let It Go’?”
She nodded, a forkful of food poised ready. “Yes, it is,” she told him, her eyes narrowing slightly as she studied him. “Have you seen it?” she asked.
“Nope,” he replied cheerfully, then set his fork down on his half-empty plate. “But we can change that.” With a grin, Derek pushed back from the table and walked the few paces over to the living room, which was a seperate room in name only. He found the remote and turned on the TV and fired up the Disney+ app.
“Let us descend into a magical land of ice and snow.”
Finishing the forkful of food she’d just loaded Brianna dabbed quickly at the corners of her mouth, and nodded, a smile spreading across her face. Picking up both their glasses she crossed over to the couch, tucking one leg beneath her as she sat down and drawing the other one up as she leaned back. “I hope you don’t mind me singing along - I’ve been practicing with Gabe and Izzy at karaoke!”
“Duh, of course.” Derek rolled his eyes at her playfully as they settled into the couch. The space between them was minimal but still present, and he tried to push his feelings about that to the back of his mind and just enjoy the movie with her. The vampire watched as a title card for the film appeared on screen, bright blue with patterns etched in ice.
As Derek sat down Brianna passed him his glass of wine, smiling as he took it.
The music filled the small room and he flashed her a smile before turning his attention back to the TV. There was only so much wishing one could do for a night.