Doors Masquerade (doorsmasquerade) wrote in doorslogs, @ 2012-03-27 22:40:00 |
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Entry tags: | plot: masquerade |
Who: Dhampir
What: Reveal
Where: In the hotel.
When: Just after sunrise.
Warnings/Rating: None.
It had been a long night for the Dhampir. He'd been bitten, and he'd bitten. He'd torn, and been torn into.
As he moved into the Parisian Opera House in which he'd spent his strange night, he watched, always, for the Wolf. Though he'd been bested by him, he felt sure that if they came up against one another again, he could take him down. He'd let the Wolf get him on the ground, and get his weight on him, and that had been his mistake. The next time they tangled, the creature wouldn't be so lucky.
His mind drifted to the masked girl as he walked down a corridor that was starting to look more and more familiar as the sky through the windows lightened. Who was she under those layered masks? All she'd really been beyond them was a pair of bright red lips, a friendly smile, and copper-red blood on his tongue. She'd saved him from doing something he would have truly regretted, and he genuinely hoped, as much as he was ashamed of what he'd done, that he would be able to speak with her again. His near-assault on her, out of desperation and the bestial survival instinct he could no more shake than he could change his parentage, hadn't been purposeful, or malicious, or anything he would have done under any other circumstance. Still, it haunted him. It stood out in his mind, as stark and vivid as the taste of her blood had been. It was a livid example of what he might be capable of, how he might yet slip.
The sun peeped over the horizon, and the corridor was starting to look really, really familiar now. The opera house looked more like a hotel, and like a hotel he knew. He looked up and down the corridor. Empty. Where was everybody, anyway? Somehow he'd ended up far, far from the rest of the party. A few minutes ago, that had seemed like the natural thing to do, to find an isolated place and rest for the day. He was still as tired now as he'd been then, but the urgency to get into the shade and away from the oncoming sun had faded.
He ran a hand through his hair, long in the middle and shaved low on the sides.
Well. Fuck.
He looked down at himself. His clothes had gone back to normal at some point during his wandering journey down the hallway, the change passing beneath his notice as he'd watched the sky lighten through the windows. He ran his tongue over his teeth, and he actually felt his canines shrinking. Weird. A quick shudder, and his body flushed with warmth, a healthy heartbeat stuttering to life again.
He checked his ears, pressing his thumb against his gauges. Yep, they were right back where they should be. Tattoos, check, all where they'd been before. His shoulder was unbelievably sore, and he had a wicked fucking crick in the back of his neck, but at least he wasn't still torn open.
He hunched his shoulders, and stared at the floor.
So, to recap. He'd attacked a werewolf, bled half to death, and almost eaten a perfectly nice girl. What did that say about him? What did ending up as a half-vampire, half-human being express?
He tapped the toe of his boot against the floor, studying the pile of the carpet. It made sense, actually, the more he thought about it. Mom had, apparently, been a perfectly nice lady by all accounts, sweet as hell, though much too trusting. Dad had been a lying, murdering, parasitic sack of shit. Vampirism actually fit the guy pretty well as a metaphor, he could see that. He was charming, and he could pretend to be nice and human enough to draw you in, and he'd used that on his mom, pulling her close before chewing her up and spitting her out.
Whatever weird force had chosen who he was forced to be for the night knew him in a way that made him uncomfortable. They knew that he had made the decision a long time ago to not be what his parents had been, and that learning about who his real parents were had only reaffirmed that. They knew he'd sworn off drinking pretty much solidly because of the alcoholic shits his parents had been, sure.
But, digging deeper down, they knew about his real dad, his biological one, and the deadly, hidden darkest fear in his heart - that he would end up like him. That being a murdering psychotic was in his blood, an infection he'd never get out, that coming from his stock said something about him, declared a destiny for him that he wanted no part in. He'd spent his whole life beating the shit out of people who went after the smaller guy. To end up as a cold-blooded killer, a self-satisfied wolf in sheep's clothing, that was a real fear. That was real terror. That was really something to be scared of.
When it came down to it, he guessed, he'd seen too much of the fucked up side of things to be afraid of people hurting him, natural disaster, or attack from the outside. In the end, Simon was much, much more afraid of what he might be capable of than what anyone else might do.