Music Store: Daniel & Claire
Daniel stared at his door for so long that he could make out the grain in the wood. He could stretch his senses past the door, of course, down below the floors, listen for the scurry of little things living under the floors and in the walls and make out a heartbeat if there was one, but it was all empty, and he knew it was empty. The girls were gone, and his sense of connection to anyone living was gone too, and now it was just the walls around him to keep him grounded in the increasingly alien future that unfurled around him, unstoppable and insurmountable.
Daniel quailed not in the face of empty skies, but in the reality they represented, a coldness from which he had little shelter. The idea of barging down the stairs and right out the front door literally made him break out into a cold sweat--no small accomplishment for a vampire. What if he got out there and he couldn't find his way back in? Or someone followed in after him?
He had the same thought whenever he decided to visit someone. What if he got halfway there, and decided to go back, but couldn't? He tried to clearly envision Louis' doorstep, Destiny's trailer, or Sam's art store, and he couldn't clearly see the exterior or the path there. He became increasingly convinced that should he wander, it would be permanent, and the emptiness would drive his mind right out of his skull. And then he would kill anything in reach. He might even empty the whole town before someone like Claire stopped him. It would be a bloodbath, and he wouldn't be fucking conscious to see it.
The knock made Daniel jerk out of the stone mould of his skin. The movement was so violent he almost fell over, and when he blinked his eyes watered. The surprise of it shocked him into reaching for the door and automatically pulling it open, and the moment he did that the white cat--Mimi, the one alive, not the ghost of one he saw sometimes when his mind was playing tricks on him--was down the stairs in a flash. The path downward was gloomy and close, and yet familiar. He smelled the dusty records and Sasha's lemon dust polish, even a trace of Harper's burnt incense and Ceil's sugar perfume. Daniel descended, and he got to the exterior door eventually.
When he pulled it open he was a shadow in a sliver of light, peering outward. "Is it you?" he asked in Italian, uncertain.