COLD COMFORT

by Apache

Content:
Het
Vachon/Urs
Implied or Graphic Sexual Situations
No Violence

My story is a book written entirely by men's desires.

I had one desire of my own once.  For one moment, I thought I had received my gift from life at last, the one comfort I wanted and dared not give myself.  But cowardice is always punished, and I woke in the arms of a vampire with the same life I had before, plus a curse:  now I would have to murder to maintain my cowardice.

I dreamed of a kindly world and never found it.  When I sang for men, I would feel their dreams of such a world rising into the air, clouding it along with their lusts.  A generous world, a dream-place of love and fulfillment.  Paradise.

As a girl, I looked for that world in men's arms.  One after another, I looked for my heart's desires in men's warmth, their generosity, their need to spill themselves into me, to become one.  As a woman grown, what I looked for in men's arms was pain, and again I found it.

Pain is what you hunt for if it is the only thing you can feel. Whatever shred of your heart has survived until then will cry out to take the pain, just to know that it still feels.  Just to know that it still exists.

So I recognized it when Javier Vachon came into the Raven a few hours ago looking for pain.  And I gave it to him:  tangled my fingers into his beautiful long hair, wrapped myself around him, took him to a room in back and made love to him with a sad passion.

~ ~ ~

After the years of pain, finally I had looked for death, and found it.  But death was selfish too, and gave me only what it wanted to give. An eternity, but not the one I asked for.

Javier Vachon is my death, my master.  He never questions his right to me, and he also doesn't want it.  He meant to make me strong and happy.  My misery has baffled him ever since.  He gave me strength, yet has never cast me off for failing to use it; gave me what to him is a source of pleasure, but neither debates nor rejects my unhappiness.  He doesn't love me, not as a man loves a woman or a creature loves its mate.  Not even as a creator loves that little mirror of itself, the created one. But I am his, and in the century that I have been his, it has never crossed his mind not to care for me.  And we go to each other, and give and take, as we have done for a hundred years, because there is no other solace.

Javier is generous in this.  What he could take, he waits to accept.  The passivity makes me pour myself into the void, like trying to fill a bottomless well.  Yet that's the only place his heart ever shows itself, in the sex-- a heart that is even lonelier than mine, for it doesn't want shelter and kindness, as I do.  It wants a high fire it has only learned to conceive of in the course of five centuries.

And he's dreaming of it now as he has never done before, with the mortal girl whose courage he likes so much.  The resister he should have killed.

And though he doesn't say it to me, he wants her to come to him more than he has wanted anything since I met him.  Maybe more than anything since he was born into this world.

~ ~ ~

When he came in, I was dancing.  I don't work for Lacroix, but I dance for him, and the others at the Raven, almost every night.  I feel the hungers in the air, the mortal ones looking for easy sex, the immortals with their feverish blood thirst and invisible laughter watching, wondering if they dare to choose a victim here.  My dancing is part of the hunger, part of the dark spell of existence we all weave there in that loud shadowy room.  It is as if I gather those hunting emotions into my body and translate them, and release them back to their owners clarified, stronger, more real...

Javier doesn't understand the pleasure I get from dancing for men. He believes me when I tell him it's so; yet I know in his own experience, he has never imagined a woman who dangles herself before men like that to be acting for her own pleasure. Such dancing as mine raises his lust and his wonder at the otherness of women, but he takes that as a pleasure known only to the man.

He could make me stop, but doesn't, won't.  He'd just as soon kill all the mortals who cluster near me with salacious eyes for the ugliness of their looking, but lets that crime go unpunished because I wish it so. When he kills from among their number, it is simply to feed, though he has chosen some he particularly despised to find his kiss where they might have expected mine.

And in all our years together, neither mortal nor vampire has raised a hand to me and escaped his teeth -- not even the ones I begged him to let go.  He won't stop my dancing; he has contempt for it and contempt for those who like it; he has used it as a convenience in arranging his murders for over a century, and he'd be unruffled and glad if tomorrow I told him I would never dance that way again.  That's Javier, as he is to me.

To Screed, he's simply cruel, though again what threatens Screed is likely to die at Javier's hands.  To Bourbon he was friendly and negligent -- right up to the moment he tore him apart and left the pieces for the sun.

I am his lover.  His lover, but never his love, and he accepted easily that he was not my love either.  I continue to seek that with mortal men, older men than I seem to be, an endless succession of punishing fathers -- and one by one, I kill them.  Perhaps Javier is not cruel enough by nature to draw my utmost love.

Yet each time he had to run, I found myself following.

~ ~ ~

Something has happened in the past week; I heard from others that he and Lacroix went off together one night, though for what I can't imagine, and there has been neither sight nor mention of Tracy Vetter since then, until she came here today.  Javier led her out quickly, but later he came into the Raven wearing his bitterness like a flag.

Vampire lovers go deeper into each other than mortals do in many ways, for we drink -- that matters the most, there is no restraining that desire, that passion, that need.  You may, though many don't, possess each others' bodies in the mortal way as well, though the great surrender has come before.  Javier and I both retain the mortal pleasure in bodies, maybe because we each have retained so much of the mortal isolation from others.

When his mood is wild, Javier can be a harsh lover, can bite as if to go through the neck entirely, can take my woman's body like a bull. But tonight his misery was so thorough he came to me slowly, bit by bit.

I took him to a room Lacroix keeps for our kind, wrapped myself around him like a paid woman as we walked.  When we got there, he held me away from him for a moment, arm's length, studying me as if I were strange and new to him.

"Urs.  Urs."  A small voice, for this man so full of braggadocio and humorous swagger; how can that mortal girl have done this to him, reduced him?  Immortal as I am, I have no power to hurt him so.  He leaned his head toward me, and breathed me in, the fragrance of my hair, my skin, all the blood-tinged scents of our kind.  And his hair fell forward around my face, shrouding it, a black, soft curtain.  I waited for him to touch me, waited to follow his lead.

It came with a kiss, a kiss such as mortals share, all lips and tongues and softness.  He murmured wordlessly into my cheek, brushed kisses across my eyes, forehead, cheeks, the ear.  Still as mortals do, he kissed the ear and tongued it, sucked at the earlobe, brought his hands to my face, my hair, my shoulders, gathered me close into him, leaned my head to his shoulder and tilted me against the line of his hip and chest with a gesture both our bodies know so well...

He sank his teeth into my neck and drank slowly -- a swallow, then allowing the blood to run out onto the skin and licking at it on the surface of my throat -- something he knows I like -- nestling his teeth into the wound again to keep it open, kissing, lapping more, bathing my skin with his tongue, drinking deeply again--

--he could drain me, I like it so much; he knows I would let him take all of me, leave the husk, let the master have back all but the dregs of the immortal life -- so he has always stopped himself for me, he listens to my heart, watches--

--gives me his throat

--oh god the heat of that, to drink from your master again--

~ ~ ~

I know now that he didn't have to give me his blood that first night.  It could have been anyone's, a mortal's: it just had to be that first feeding.  But when that birthing hunger hit me in the mirrored room where I first woke to the new life, he caught my shoulders and turned me toward himself, then undid his collar, opened his vest and his shirt-- At the sight of his skin, pale and flawless as the throat curved down to the chest, a new instinct taught me my desire.  I became a true vampire and his lover in the same hour.

Now, as I drank, he moved us both to the sofa off to one side of the room, settled us half sitting half lying into it so that I was half stretched across him, and all the while still drinking undisturbed.

He teases me for my way of it, for the small sips I take, has told me to tear, that I won't hurt him... and he refuses to say what I know is true, that he has come to love it.  The langour in him when I drink is like no other expression in his life; it is a small, sleepy, erotic pleasure he cherishes and will not admit to.  Strength giving itself to weakness for love...  Javier is a man who has discovered surrender, and he will never say it.

He will never tell a woman to take him; how could he?  He takes, he rules; acts of possession and control are unthinking first nature with him.  Over the years, the number of things he can be bothered to have has diminished to excruciatingly few; now, even Screed and I are on our own, though I know I at least can run under his wing if I need to.  To be a vampire was in part a complex extension of his desires as a man.  But to discover the pleasures of being taken... that came to him once with his master, and after that, never until me.

And I heard his body rumble with the pleasure of it, heard a small happy moan in his throat as I drew those small sips of him into my mouth. He opened our clothing and entered me as a man does a woman, the tiniest frown of concentration flickering across his face as he began to move inside me.  I answered with motion of my own, drawing him deep, pushing him shallow, arcing my back away from him then pressing forward.  I slid his shirt up his body.  He knows I like the feel of skin on skin-- our strange cool white skin-- and he paused for a moment to open my halter, brushing his hands around my breasts, cupping them, caressing...  and all the while I drank from him, tiny, intermittent demands on his immortal life, and all the while he allowed that hot, vital flow into me, his mouth a little open with pleasure, his eyes closed, closed...

I like that too.  I like to watch him.  I like to watch all men, even the ones who will have only minutes of intimacy before my need becomes unbearable and I turn them to pallid corpses in my arms.  Until I have to drop them and leave, or find a place to hide them, or think to cut their throats for a disguise, like a thieving whore, when my eternal wish is to be the loved one.  From my hold on his throat, I look up the planes of Javier's cheeks, see the vampire fangs in the slackened, sated mouth, and the hair lying loose along his forehead, falling over the closed eyes... and suck and swallow again, and hear the little noise of yielding in his body.

But now his desire began to assert itself it again.  His eyes opened, fiercely yellow-green, with almost no expression but hunger itself.  His arms came around me like steel bands and he whirled me beneath him on our couch, pushing into me hard and fast, his throat taken away from me, his neck arcing over mine, the heartless eyes measuring... his teeth scraped at my skin and took the blood it released, on my face, my neck, my shoulder, ducking down to the breast and biting hard, finding blood even in those small veins, demanding, taking, stealing...  And his body beat against mine with a crushing rhythm, and I fought and obeyed its demands all at once...

He came as a mortal man does who has had no lover for years, with a great cry of pain and pleasure, and then sank his head down to my neck, the black hair falling over my face, and drank from me... again, with that terrible softness, with the immortal spirit in him barely alive, grieving and bitterly lonely.

We lay together afterwards, our pale, cool bodies, so long familiar with each other, completely relaxed as we traveled into our separate thoughts.  At such times, Javier strokes me like a pet or a child as he wanders among his imaginings; I don't think he even knows his hand is moving.  Yet if I move, he pays attention instantly -- do I have a discomfort?  A desire?

His pain tempts me to give him what he won't take:  Tracy, the little blonde girl.  But I think she would do immediately what I cannot do at all:  use the sun.  As a mortal, I held a knife in my hands many times but never made the fatal cut; as an immortal, I find the blackest depths to hide in even while I am cursing this endless life.  What Javier said first about this girl was that he'd been arrested, laughing with the absurdity of it.  He doesn't know it, but I do:  that laughter was the first act of a surrender he has waited to offer for centuries.

So she has that way with her fears, where I am simply the toy of mine.  Such a woman, if she found herself wakening to the night as I once did, might well walk out into the morning and have done with it.  Whereas I will never do what a man will not do to me, will never have what a man won't give me.

Of all the men I've ever known, and for all the jewels and furs and perfumes I've been showered with, Javier Vachon was the only man who ever tried to give me myself-- however thoughtless or offhand the giving may have been.  And only Javier believes I will ever live long enough to find the gift bearable.  

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