31_days | [November 9th] [Original] Always Asking the Same Questions

Title: Always Asking the Same Questions
Day/Theme: 9. furious at my refusal, jealous of my freedom
Series: My post-apocalyptic vampire story
Character/Pairing: Aamu
Rating: NC-17

There are those who have come to me, begging for me to kill them.

They do not understand what it means to me what I am. It's laughable, the way they think that having read the books and seen the movies and heard they stories, that they do. But fiction makes it all so glamorous. Although, for a while, I enjoyed in being able to play with the image of the child of night, roaming the dark streets and mingling with the goth community, my life was not always so. Even when the man who killed me wore sating, silk stockings and high heeled shoes and a wig, taking me with him through Europe brimming with vampire panic, taking me from low to high and introducing me to languages I had not even heard of as a mortal. All of that happened to me, yes, but it was far from glamour.

The creature which changed my very self, through a metamorphosis initiated by the sharing of the blood of my kin, long ago, made me into someone I am still not sure I like very much. The person I was born as was not always the best of people, but she was familiar to me. I grew into being her. But this... monster inside of me, it's unreal.

It took me years to be her in a way which did not make me want to take my life. My vampire self was like a newborn, cruel and selfish, only looking after her own good, not caring if what she did hurt others. She hunted and killed, was not reined in by her maker, and left a trail of sorrow and blood in her wake, cavorting with those of her kind in the sites of massacre, the beast within going crazed by the blood. There is no denying the gruesome fact that I have done things which I still regret deeply, which I would do almost anything to take back, and some of them happened hundreds of years ago. Even when my life span so far has been so long, I still carry the quilt over my actions with me to this very day, every single horror cannot be recalled anymore, but I know the weight of my shame all the same.

The stupidity of mortals often galls me. Knowing full when what I have done, what I am, the monster which slumbers within my mortal-like appearance, my face from long ago, they still come to me and beg. Some have even approached me as I've been spattered with blood, my hair matted with the crimson life fluid of humans, my eyes wild, fangs long and mouth wide, an unstoppable manic laughter bubbling from within. How a human can come and embrace me then, wind their arms around me and look up into my blood red eyes and not run away, it is madness. Some met the same fate as those whose blood was already with me. Others I grabbed, kissed to bruise, bit their lips to drink and forced myself upon them so hard that some broke beyond repair, their bodies forever crippled because they approached a blood-lusted vampire.

Yet the ones who remained the most unscathed, only bruised and bleeding a little, aroused beyond anything by my hungry fanged kisses and our bodies grinding and writhing in maddened ecstasy, meeting the oblivion of orgasm alongside me... they were always so spiteful, after. Because when my blood had cooled down and our bodies had writhed, moaned, moistened and come enough, they always, always asked.

“Take me with you, make me one of your own, together forever...”

No matter how satisfied I had been, or how many times the same scene had played itself out... I was always sad and disappointed when I heard those words in all their permutations, uttered with many different languages, dialects, modes of speech, by people of all ages and genders and all of those in between.

Raised up leaning on my arms above what lucky lover who had survived my blood lust, I always stared. I must have been a sight to behold, mostly nude, clothes ripped and barely hanging on my pale skinned body, a gash or maybe two here and there, hickeys everywhere, my body spattered with various other bodily fluids. My pale green eyes filmed over with the bloody tears of disappointment.

The beast within jubilant, screaming to be let out and spread the virus of my affliction.

They would never be disheartened by my clear look of disapproval screaming clear refusal at them. They'd be coy, smile, move and try and allure me, going into a lengthy monologue over why they would be the best companion for me and how their life was utter misery the way it was, how they feared for death. They told me they were sick, weary, disillusioned, or then they simply wanted to belong to the part of the world which lay just out of reach, but which my blood would give them some access to: the realm of the non-humans, Mythos, Others, Supernaturals, and what many names some of us use of our kind, or what humans use of us. These types of requests were laughably common especially after the Shift, numerous in the first few decades since the great re-birthing chasm our very own world went through, making life harsh and uncertain, sometimes cruel and brief. Famine, unrest and sickness were the biggest killer then, as they have always been. Nothing new there.

Not that I went into a frenzy much, those days. By then I was already half a millenia old and over, and had decided, as I had lain on the floor of my apartment during the Shift, my mind being forced to forget, but retaining my memory of the world as it had once been through a struggle of wills, a world and history lost forever for most mortals, to keep hold of the memory, in honor of those who had died. The experience of feeling someone reaching into my mind and trying to forcefully change who I was in a fundamental way had left it's invisible mark on me. Even more so as I roamed the streets of the city of my birth during the rest of that very night, seeing the devastation left behind, and after, when I ventured out into other continents and saw the destruction, the death: and became painfully aware of the fact that humanity had been robbed of so many of it's memories that there was no counting them.

So these confused humans, who still saw the skeletons of a modern age now beyond their reach all around them, but had no memory of how such things were used or how they could be repaired all the while having the nagging feeling that they had remembered... Those people threw themselves at me, if they ever happened to cross my path.

There were those of use who simply could not keep quiet, who reveled in telling mortals all about which kinds of mythic creatures there were in the world. Before the Shift descended on the world, humans had lived their lives, for the most part, not believing that the creatures depicted in folklore and the legends and myths of old were real or had ever been. In that age of reason and science, there were still those who believed, who had met some of use, by accident or by design on either side. Not all of the humans I met realized who I was, or if they found out, cared that much... or cared too much. But the Shift changed all that. We walked out of the closet, so to speak, and lived among the humans we had wronged. Because magic was the driving force behind the Shift, yet after nigh tw hundred years, I still have not found out who was behind it. There is bad blood among my fellow Myth-kind towards those responsible, the price paid in human suffering was too high, even when our beloved earth might be better off on account.

Too much was lost to ever forgive.

Someone, a group of those who thought that they knew best, knew what was to be done to save the world, even when it meant losing it, had had the gall to think that they had the freedom to do it, simply because no-one knew of it to stop them and there was probably nobody or even a group strong enough to do so. Freedom has defined the human experience, society more often than not trying to restrain those freedoms, chaining the freedom of expression of individuals, no matter what kind it is. Loss of freedom has led and it's regaining has been the goal and reason of many wars.

After their tirade over the wonderful amazingness of becoming a vampire is over, my more lucky than they deserve one time lovers usually get to their second point, while I just stare at them, hoping that they would not say what I know they will.

“You are free to do as you will, live life the way you see fit!”

More than ever before, the second reasoning that is thrown upon me when mortals ask for my immortals kiss, is that I am, as a vampire, somehow more free than others. Of morals, perhaps, but many other things restrain my existence. Morals are not something you can switch on and off, and while I am no paragon of morality, I still have some rules I adhere by, at least now with my self-made identity as the remembrance of the world.

My life, such as it is, is governed by strict rules. I cannot have the freedom to choose my daily, now weekly, sustenance, having to get by with blood alone. As the world grew more prosperous and food was produced to overflowing, I looked aghast at those foolish selfish mortals who threw away food in countries where it was not a scarcity, while some people still starved and some died of it across the globe. I would have given anything for a taste of food, I still would, and the practice of producing more than what people can eat in some parts of the world, robbing the less fortunate of adequate daily sustenance... it always galled me. Now all are pretty much on the same line. There is no modern agriculture and all crops need to be cultivated like they had been before technology stepped in. Nothing is wasted anymore, because there is nothing to waste.

As for other restrictions, vampires are really the worst off of all of Mythos. Some things are defendant on the level of religion, I, for one, can get burned by a cross because I was a devout catholic at the time of my mortal death and carried the reverence and awe of holy objects into my unlife. Silver and holy water are also on my not-to-do list. I am bound into a life in shadows, I can gaze outside and see the sun but cannot have it touching my skin lest I burn. There have been times when I have cursed my limitations. Sunlight and my reaction to it have made me lose more than one mortal close to me.

So they ask it of me, watching as I try and put myself in order, having moved as far away as I can once they have started talking about freedom. They overlook the look of disgust in my eyes. Refuse to hear me yelling 'NO!' at them. I often need to pour my life's story to them, give them the reasons why they should never want to be like me. Beat them to an inch of their life, make them afraid. Be the monster that I am inside, yet holding back and not robbing them of the very mortal life I envy them over.

I kneel by them, near the end, the many times this scene has been done, me and a mortal who thinks they know better than I what it is to be me, I reach out and pat them. Feel them shake as they are finally, gloriously afraid. Terrified of me.

“Do you still want this? Do you want to be like this, for as long as it lasts? All of you lost in the passing of years until you are left, an empty husk weeping after a mortality lost...”

I growl the worlds, aiming to be as bad as I can. To make them see what they will lose, what they have.

The final answer is invariably no. I dread the night when someone will say yes. For I know not, if I would be able to not do it.