fangednconfused (fangednconfused) wrote in birthrightrpg, @ 2020-10-18 15:43:00 |
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Entry tags: | derek mitchell, penny norton |
Not Goodbye, More Like...
Who: Penny/Derek
What: Something Difficult
Where: Las Vegas, Penny's Apartment
When: Present
Ratings/Warnings: S for Sad
It was 2:00 AM. The mostly decorative clock on the wall ticked out this fact. This was like mid-evening for the vampire. He thought of all the ones like him, roaming the city, reducing humanity down to a series of exposed necks and bumping pulses. Did he miss it? Derek couldn’t decide. It had been simpler.
He waited for Penny to come home from work. He had sprawled out on the couch, mindlessly watching the Office to the point that Netflix had to check in on him. The vampire sighed and clicked the TV off, and was greeted with a single dot of red at the bottom of the screen. Electronics had to remind you that they were still alive and waiting to be used.
Derek stared up at the ceiling. He could hear footsteps from the tenants above, chairs scraped across the floor. The noise could become overwhelming if he let it, especially having to sleep during the day when everyone else was robust and alive and the sun’s bright little children. The nerve of those assholes.
He closed his eyes. He wasn’t happy. A pit of dread coiled in his stomach like a snake waiting to strike.
Her heels clicked against the sidewalk.
A night of music, dancing, festivity. She never grew tired of the energy. Penny had been all over the world playing music for humans and non-humans alike - it was one thing everyone could agree on, it seemed. Music.
The hem of her short dress brushed against her thighs.
Purse hanging in the crook of an elbow the siren sashayed up to the door of their apartment. Buzzing in her ear from an ear bud was a song she had heard somewhere but couldn’t place. Overall she was coasting on the coattails of a good time and was vibrant in the mood with it.
She unlocked the door, slipped inside and set down the large handbag. Keys would clatter into the bowl by the door and she found herself gliding over to where Derek was.
“Hey!” Penny greeted. She flopped down on the couch next to him, turning to look up at him. A motion of her hand and the music playing in her ear stopped.
He sat up a little straighter, offering her a smile. She looked good all the time, but she looked especially good like this. Happy. The color in her cheeks almost matched the shade on her lips, and her eyes were big, bright, green and open. Derek wondered then if he was shallow, to enjoy looking at her so much. It almost made him want to not talk. But not talking had become the status quo and it needed to break.
The vampire leaned in to kiss her cheek. “Good night at work?” he asked, setting the remote on the coffee table.
“Yeah! I had a lot of fun,” she murmured, brighter with the feeling of his lips lingering on her cheek. She leaned over to unbuckle the straps of her shoes, easing out of the heels. They thudded against the carpeted floor in two separate piles. And then Penny turned to throw her arms around Derek. She loved him endlessly and coming home to him there made the night worth getting through.
“How was your night?” She drew back, pausing only to kiss him, and then retreated so he could talk freely.
He closed his eyes when she wrapped her arms around him. It was easy to forget that either of them were predators when they were like this. It was like normal couple stuff. But just because she made him feel safe and special and noticed...Well, it wasn’t exactly fair to the dead bodies left in their wake. Derek couldn’t stop thinking about them.
“Honestly? Not great,” the vampire answered, his gaze dropped to the couch. His fingers tapped against his knee. “I wanted to talk to you about something.”
Her face fell a bit. “Okay,” she nodded, hands falling into her lap. There was an odd energy floating between them, similar to the one she had experienced before when something was bothering Derek. Something was bothering Derek.
“What happened?” A few things began to float through her mind - the lady or Veronica had returned, Ronnie was in trouble again, something was trying to eat people that nobody could explain.
He took her hand in his, held it tightly as he tried to find the words. Derek hated his mind, sometimes. It was a vivid picture of the inside of his brain, the words he wanted floating, hovering, all kinds of words, but it was up to him to pluck them down and form them into something coherent, and it was so hard. “I don’t think I’ve been fair to you, Penny,” the vampire began, looking up to meet her eye.
Derek brushed some loose hairs back from her smooth face, let his other hand linger there. “I told you that I accepted you no matter what, but I...I didn’t realize how much I would change.” His voice became thick and he blinked rapidly a few times. “I can’t stop thinking about the things we did together. The lives we ended, because it was fun.” Specifically, at Tao. That had been a dark moment.
She hoped everything was alright with his parents, too. Until that moment she realized she’d forgotten to ask about them, but she held the question back as he took her hand. As he searched for words she waited, eyebrows lifting a bit. But as the confession came her expression took on a bit of confusion.
As he spoke she kept silent, waiting for the conclusion. “What are you talking about?” She inquired softly. He had to eat to live, and she had to eat to live. The people they had killed together had been on a shared bond. Sure, she had a bit of fun with it, but to her it was survival.
“I’m sorry you feel that way, but we can’t change it.” There wasn’t taking any of it back. When he came to her with the promise to not kill she had accepted that, and had also vowed to alter her own voracity for taking life to do such only when it was needed.
“I know we can’t change it,” he said. “That’s the worst part. I can’t take any of it back. All I can do is try my best to never hurt anyone again, but...every time you’re not here, I think that you’re killing someone. And I know that you need it to survive, and I know you’re not human.” Derek didn’t need to breathe, but he paused anyway.
“I feel so shitty about it. I love you, I just…” Derek gave her hand another squeeze. “I’m not happy like this, and that’s not fair to you, either.”
“But I’m at work…” she started, making herself stop so she could process what he was saying. Her eyes dropped to her lap. Penny studied the weave pattern of her dress, searching the lines and dips as if they held the answers she needed to fix whatever problem was present and she found nothing there other than stitching.
When he mentioned she wasn’t human her eyes lifted and she offered him a look. “Is that what you want? A human?” The tone of her voice would drop, nearly to a whisper and she couldn’t hide or fight the moisture welling up in her eyes.
“How can I fix this?” She didn’t see a resolution to this issue; Derek wasn’t happy, she wanted him to be happy and would do anything to make him happy, yet it didn’t seem there was anything she could do that would.
“Penny, you don’t need to be fixed or to fix anything,” he told her. He could see that she was on the verge of crying, and he felt truly horrible then. “And it’s not me wanting someone else. You have made me feel so good about myself, and special, and like I matter.”
Derek cupped her cheek, his thumb stroking over her skin. “I’m not any good to you right now. You’ll think you have to change to keep me, but I can’t do that to you. I think…”
And this was the thing that had been bouncing around his thoughts, chipping away at him until there was an empty little void inside. “I think we should not be...together, for a while.”
His words weren’t making any sense; he had a problem that couldn’t be fixed, and space would be needed to come to a resolution. She didn’t quite know how distance fixed anything that couldn’t be worked out between two people.
“I can’t change,” she admitted. She had to kill to survive. There wasn’t changing it, only wishing she were made differently so he could be satisfied that no lives were lost.
Penny lifted her free hand. She pressed her wrist to the underside of Derek’s wrist, pushing away the hand that he’d set on her face. It was a gentle motion, but a firm one. “I don’t know how that fixes your problem, our problem, but if that’s what you need I can’t stop you.”
Her voice wavered, the words fell out choked and laden with emotion. She didn’t realize she was crying either. Penny simply removed her hand from his and put distance between them on the couch, the arm pressing into the small of her back.
That small motion, that drifting backward, cut into Derek and he wiped his eyes harshly with the back of his hand. “I don’t want you to change. I want you to keep being Penny.” As for fixing their problem, his problem, he wasn’t sure, either. He just knew that he wasn’t any good to her moping around unhappily, tethering her to him.
“I won’t stay here,” the vampire told her. “I’ll get out of your way.” He stood up shakily from the couch.
She looked as cut into as he felt. Her skin paled visibly, those green eyes large and dotted with moisture. How this would resolve itself, she didn’t know. Changing seemed to be what was needed, and yet he didn’t want her to change at all.
Without saying anything, the siren turned to look down at the floor. She couldn’t watch him leave. It had been wrenching watching it when he’d gone to take care of Veronica, the way he’d left his ring there and set off into the night.