Caffeine and Magix

(Inspired by that one tumblr post I saw years ago suggesting that Twilight wouldn’t have ended the way it did if Bella were conscious of the type of story she was in.)

It could be a love story. It could be the dark, mysterious boy in her class setting his eyes on her. It could be her looking back. It could be the pounding of hearts, sweaty palms, secrets in all the dark corners this town has to offer.

It could be a lot of things, but it’s never going to be more than a “story.” Dressed up and sanitized so that people can parse it, learn from it, take from it. It will never be her history or her dreams, never be her life or her purpose. It will always be a tale, tall or small, and she can’t forget that.

No matter how much he wants her to.

He laces their fingers together, his cold palm to her human heat. “I love you.”

She wishes she could exist in her body and believe that. She’s still a teenager and she wants love, connection, and intimacy. Growing pains and bleeding hearts with the promise of happy endings and worthwhile lessons.

Her mind, however, is a little too old to let the surface appearance pass for reality.

“I’d spend forever with you if I could,” she tells him. She means it. She would spend forever in the cold embrace of his arms, in the sphere of his love, if it really existed all for her. He takes it differently than she means.

“Maybe that will be possible,” he says slowly. He lets go of her hand to slide his arm over her shoulders, pulling her against his strong chest. “One day.”

She can practically taste how the thought excites him. He wants to change her to be like him—immortal and timeless.

After two months, she still doesn’t know if this is a story she’s willing to let play out.

—————————-

Her mother names her Adelaide.

It could fit into the plot, if she let it. She could say that he’s comforted by the age of her name when he meets her in high school. An old soul and an old name in the modern era. She could say that that’s what attracts her to him—the inevitable draw of the vintage, the long past, the history. She could say that she was marked for this from birth, her name a signal for all to see.

Her mother names her Adelaide because it means nobility. It means not giving in, not letting your head bow, not letting the tide of the world push you where it wants to. It means that, as the past, present and future press in from all sides, she stands. She stands.

Her name isn’t meant for something that will never be more than a story, so, when he whispers it into her ear, she doesn’t listen to the way his tongue curls around the syllables. She won’t let him change the meaning of her name.

————————————

“My…parents are coming to town,” Michael says. Michael is his modern name. Parents is his modern term for his maker and her mate. Michael spends a lot of time finding words that make what he is seem normal. “They want to meet you.”

She’s let this go on too long, she knows. They graduated high school and he followed her to her college, just like the story said he would. She loves the romance of it in the moments she lets herself give in, loves how he holds her hand during orientation, carefully sitting out of reach of the sun filtering into the lecture hall.

She’s human, that’s her downfall, and she wants it. She wants him. It’s a conscious effort most days to keep what she wants separate from what she needs.

His maker wants to meet her because Michael’s allowed himself to fall in love with a human. The story probably goes that there’s a rule against that,that there’s some sort of Ancient Vampire Council who won’t allow it, that Michael’s existence is too precious to waste on a mortal.

She knows that her role in this story isn’t important, not really. It’s about his choice, how he decides to live and love, and her part will only continue provided he chooses the ending where she exists by his side.

She knows, like she knows a lot of things, but it’s been two years and she wants to let herself keep loving him so badly. Adelaide feels the press of the future looming ahead and decides to ignore it. One last time.

“Okay.”

He smiles in that way that’s meant to keep her from seeing the trepidation behind his eyes. She smiles back to disguise her own.

————————

His maker doesn’t look much older than Adelaide, a young woman in her mid-twenties with raven-black hair and dark glasses. She’s petite but strong with powerful legs and shoulders. She reeks of centuries gone by and Adelaide fights not to wrinkle her nose.

“Nanette,” the woman introduces herself, holding out her hand to shake. “And my mate, Jan.” The man behind Nanette—two feet taller, flaxen-haired, and carved with the same sober air as the Easter Island statues—murmurs his own greetings.

Adelaide shakes the woman’s hand and hates the way her mind conjures images of bodies in rigor mortis. She’s never met a vampire more than a century old before. “It’s really lovely to meet you, Nanette. I’m Adelaide.”

The sun is low in the sky, just low enough that Nanette risks taking off her glasses. Vampires are sensitive to the sun, but not excessively so as many might think. “What a wonderfully antiquated name.”

“Thank you,” Adelaide says. Maybe she’s supposed to be offended, maybe she’s supposed to be knocked off balance by the intensity in the other woman’s eyes. Adelaide isn’t sure how the story is unfolding right now and, to be honest, she wishes it weren’t at all. She wants to go back to her dorm room with Michael and rest in the circle of his arms. “My mother was a fan of French literature.”

“Was?” Nanette asks delicately.

Michael steps up and answers on her behalf, fingers twining through hers. “Adelaide’s mother died when she was young.”

Nanette presses a hand to her lips as if to take back the question. There’s no remorse in her eyes. “I’m so sorry. Michael never mentioned.”

Adelaide murmurs her assurance that it’s perfectly alright. Her mother died to further the plot of her father’s story, just like her grandmother died to further the plot of her grandfather’s. It’s tragedy as far back as she can see, a legacy of dead women and grieving men who never seem to get it right until they’ve lost everything.

As she said, this could be a love story.

But it was never meant to be more than a story.

————————————

Nanette and Jan stick around past the initial meet and greet. They’re fun when Adelaide lets herself be a part of the narrative. Nanette loves Adelaide’s collection of skeletons, carefully pieced together with glue and twine. Jan loves to go to the movies.

Both of them, despite their cold exteriors, love Michael very much.

It’s hard not to like them just for that. It’s a story, it’s a story, but she loves him too. She loves the way the moon puts silver in his hair, the way his mouth softens into a smile when he looks at her, the way he says the word palm. Like the L is the most important letter. She’s been making fun of him for it for years and, when Nanette finds out, they laugh and laugh and laugh together. Just one big happy family.

Still, when the vampire attacks start, she knows that the story is progressing despite the closeness she can feel growing between them all. It’s going to progress with or without her because it’s gone beyond them all now.

The victims are in their low twenties, brunette, like her, and maybe a little too oblivious, like her.

Michael hides the first three from her, growing pensive as he goes to patrol campus like a vigilante. He has long talks with Nanette and Jan and goes silent when Adelaide enters the room.

Adelaide isn’t supposed to know about the attacks, so she pretends like she hasn’t put the pieces together. Instead, she excuses herself from the room and makes a few calls. She goes to the women’s resource center and she offers to teach a self-defense class.

She’s helpless to stop this story, but she’s against letting other women die for it. This is about Michael and, if she lets it, about her.

She whispers secrets she shouldn’t be telling to those open to hear them and slips bits of silver into too many book bags to count.

It’s not enough and, after the fourth attack, Michael finally tells her. A rogue vampire has gone on a killing spree. Nanette and Jan are checking it out. He’ll keep her safe.

The story marches on.

———————————

“They said I have to turn you or kill you,” Michael confesses a month later. He’s wringing his hands, anger and distress and despair on his face in her little, single dorm room. “The vampire attacks that I told you about aren’t a coincidence—the council followed my parents into town. I thought it was a rogue but it was the council all along. If I don’t turn you by the full moon they said they’d take care of it themselves.”

Adelaide is silent. She thought she could do this—play the story out. Be in love with Michael and let that be all there is. She thought she could make the decision for him without ever having to make one for herself.

She found the last body, a girl she taught to throw a punch correctly. Her hair had been red, but that hadn’t protected her; she died with a silver heart burning against her palm. Somewhere out there, there’s a vampire with a heart permanently scarred into their flesh and it’s not enough because another girl is dead.

Michael reaches out and lays a cold hand over hers, mistaking her silence for fear. “I won’t let them hurt you. I’ll find a way to stop them.”

The next step in the story—can he protect her? Will he fail? Will she betray him, somehow, or die with his name on her lips? Will they survive and she dies later? In an accident? In childbirth?

She thinks about the red-haired woman with her heart burned into her hands, knuckles bloody, and doesn’t feel like waiting it out anymore. Can’t wait it out anymore. It’d been selfish of her to ignore the looming future just so she could hold onto Michael for a moment longer.

“Can we stop pretending?” Adelaide asks around her aching throat. She holds Michael’s hand between both of hers and meets his eyes. “Please?”

He goes still. She knows that he’s seen parts of her she hasn’t meant to show. It’s part of being in love, story or no. He’s seen her when she’s not pretending, he’s seen the way her brow furrows, he’s seen the way she’s stepped out of the line of fire a beat before the whistle of the cannon. “If you’re ready.” The earnestness in his voice when he promised to protect her is gone. He’s talking to her as an equal now, someone who’s a little too much for his protection.

She exhales slowly. “So you do know.”

“A little,” he says. He doesn’t pull away, but he doesn’t lay his other hand over hers like he would have before. “I don’t know how much you see before it happens, or even if that’s what it is. Maybe you just know things? I didn’t know how to ask.”

He didn’t want to ask, she can see the thought fluttering over his head like silk in a breeze. He’s nearly 100 years old and so used to being in control that he’s afraid to think that she’s had a choice in all this. He wants to take the guilt of his actions on alone, wants to take her for himself and pay the consequences behind closed doors, wants to be the one who saves the day in the end. He knows, just like she does, that that can’t happen when they’re not acting out their fairytale.

She loves him but doesn’t love the way he wants to love her. He wants to love her like an innocent, keeping her away from the realities of his world. He wants to love her with conviction and control.

Conviction, he has plenty of. Control, not so much.

“It doesn’t matter,” she says instead of any of that. She pulls away, pulls back, raises her chin because nobility doesn’t lower their head even when they’re finally made to let go. “What matters is what happens next. I won’t let another woman die for me, Michael. I can’t.”

“You haven’t let anyone die for you,” he says. “If you could have saved them, you would have. That, at least, is who you are.”

She doesn’t argue with him. He might be right, but he doesn’t really know enough to be right. She’s young even with her legacy and she’s made mistakes in this too. “Your maker is working for the council, isn’t she?”

His eyes are dark on her face. He might have lied to her before, hidden the truth, but he won’t now. “I didn’t know, I swear. She’s trying to get a council position. She thinks by forcing this decision on us, she’s helping me and gaining their favor.”

“She might be right. The council probably needs an easy win if what I’ve heard about them is true,” Adelaide says. She gets up from the bed and stands in front of him. “We can’t let us be their win.”

His eyes are dark with pain, jaw hard. “I guess not.”

She looks at him and, for the first time, lets herself be everything she is when she does. She lets herself be in love with him. She lets herself hate him. She lets herself carry the weight of the years yawning ahead of him, some of them with her, some of them without. He’s dark-haired and so, so beautiful. She wants to run her hands over the tense knots in his shoulders. She wants to feel the sharp cut of his cheekbones against hers. She wants to lose herself in the warmth he emanates, the strength, the kindness. “I love you.”

“I’d spend forever with you if I could,” he says, echoing her from all those years ago. He’s already grieving and he doesn’t mean it like she did. This, in a way, is a parting. He’s letting this tear them apart.

She swallows, hard. She fought for them. She did. Against her instincts, she followed every step of this story. She let herself be in danger so he might save her, she opened herself to the narrative and she believed. Belief made it real, made it mean something, made it last. She fought.

He isn’t fighting at all. Bitterly, she wonders what all this has even be for if he’s so willing to give up on them just because of this. Just because she’s not buying into his narrative, letting his love story play out how he wants it to. For the first time, she wonders about what her love story would have looked like. She’ll never get a chance to see.

Now’s not the time to cry about it.

“Take me to the council,” she says.

———————————

Michael leads her across campus to the abandoned dorm. It makes sense that they’re there, in that dilapidated, listing building, because it’s the only place she’d never think to search on her own. Who knew ancient vampires would be so bold to hide in plain sight? Who knew they’d be so willing to fit the stereotypes of rotting statues, wasting away in dust-covered rooms, lounging against broken student desks?

Certainly not her.

Nanette is waiting for them in the hall, strategically stepping over plaster chunks and mounds of rotting trash. She’s wearing something more appropriate for her age—a black dress with a white collar that pinches in tightly around her throat. Jan is a quiet shadow behind her, jeans and a tucked in shirt, hands clasped in front of himself.

“Mikhail,” Nanette says, some sort of accent curling around the syllables with a facsimile of motherly affection. “Son, I did not mean for you to bring her to them. You were supposed to make the choice on your own.”

“This works just as well,” Jan reminds her. It doesn’t matter, in the end, what Michael—Mikhail—decides. So long as the council looks like it has power in the matter, that’s what counts.

“I decided to fight you,” Michael tells his maker. His lip curls. “My life is my own now. You agreed to that when you left me to wander the world alone.”

Adelaide’s eyebrows rise. She hadn’t known that he was cast out of his maker’s presence. She’d thought he’d decided to explore on his own, like most young vampires did after the first half century. It goes to show that she’s not infallible—she hadn’t guessed abandonment issues were part of his story. It makes her feel worse that he’s so willing to abandon her now.

“It was necessary for your development,” Nanette says, unconcerned with the venom in his voice. “As is this.”

“It would have been wiser to run,” Jan observes. “You might have gotten away with not turning her for a few weeks at least. Coming right to them…they’re much stronger than any of us, Mikhail.”

“Maybe.” The word costs him, she can tell. He’s stuck in the part of the story where he thinks that he’s secretly the strongest, the most capable, even if his instincts tell him he’s wrong. “I would have played it differently.”

Nanette’s brow furrows. “If you would have, then…” She turns to look at Adelaide for the first time. “You?”

“Me,” Adelaide says. She’s not afraid right now. Nanette won’t kill her. Not this early in the story, at least. “I asked Mikhail to bring me to the council.” A self-deprecating smile curls across her face as she says his real name. He hadn’t even given her that. They’d both held so much of themselves back.

“You’ll regret that,” Nanette promises her. She means it in a lot of ways. She means Adelaide will regret getting so directly involved with the council who wants her turned or killed. She’ll regret putting Mikhail through this process of losing her. She’ll regret taking control of this situation when she should have let Mikhail decide for them both.

Adelaide smiles. “Did you kill that woman they found by the river?”

She doesn’t need to ask. Adelaide can see the way it happened now with the culprits in front of her. She can see how Jan stalked the red haired woman from the shadows and the way Nanette stepped out from behind a tree to distract her. She can see the glowing clash of silver against vampiric flesh and she knows—she knows—that there’s a heart burned into Jan’s arms and into Nanette’s neck.

Nanette’s eyes gleam. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“We don’t kill,” Michael tells Adelaide. “I swear, we don’t even if the council does.”

Maybe that was true, but Nanette wants to be part of the council. Adelaide can taste the need on her tongue like her own. The council kills whenever it wants. To feed. For fun. To make a point.

“You’ll regret that,” Adelaide tells Nanette. It’s a promise, just like Nanette made to her.

“But she didn’t,” Mikhail says. He looks at his maker. “Right?”

Jan pushes the door to his right open. “The council will see you now.”

“Right?” Michael’s heart is breaking for the second time today as he asks again.

Adelaide reaches back to take his hand, heart aching with the need to stand with him as his world crumbles around his ears. He jerks his hand away and stands back silently, indicating that she should go through the door first. His guard comes up as he stares silently back at her.

The rejection stings her eyes, but there’s nothing for it. She can’t confront him about this, not when she’s been lying to him the whole time, now when she’s the one who made them stop pretending. She’s not the love interest anymore and she doesn’t get to take comfort from his touch now.

She walks through the door, not looking Jan’s solemn face or the small grin twitching on Nanette’s.

There are only three vampires in the room. It’s too many. Each one takes up more space than should be possible. They’re in front of a cracked and crumbling chalkboard, the remnants of some sort of RA message scribbled across the middle. The lounge chairs and couches have been pushed to the sides of the room, unnecessary. The vampires could have been standing there for the past month and a half, no issue.

Their years—centuries and centuries—taste like ash on Adelaide’s tongue.

“Adelaide,” the vampire on the right says. He’s tall, wraith thin, with thin, black hair pressed flat against his skull. His widow’s peak plunges low over his forehead, highlighting the weight of his brow bone and his deep set, black eyes. He’s dressed, incongruously, in jeans and a t-shirt.  “My, you’ll make a fine vampire.”

“Just the right age,” the one on the left says. Her voice is very bitter, thin arms crossed over her tiny chest. She looks about twelve-years-old, but there’s something wrong. She’s carrying too much past in her eyes, along the curve of her jaw, and it makes her body look wrong. Too big and too small. “Lucky girl.”

Adelaide doesn’t respond to either of them. Her eyes are on the vampire in the middle. He looks around her age, copper hair and narrow eyes. They look like they should be blue, but they’re vampire black. He’s dressed in a button down shirt that’s tucked tidily into black slacks.

“You,” he says, “look just like your grandmother.”

It doesn’t fit the story that he’s here. She didn’t plan for this. Her mind races. Adelaide didn’t know, couldn’t have guessed, but she has to deal with it now.

“Grandfather,” she says. She pauses, looking for the right words. She can feel Michael’s confusion and Nanette’s shock like butterflies at her back. “I…thought you were still in Europe.”

His eyes are burning on her face, drinking in the way her hair twists away from her face. “The council wants to expand across the ocean. I was asked to lead the charge.”

“So you came back for your kind,” Adelaide says. There’s blood-anger in her, whispers of the past rearing up and poisoning her words. “Not for grandmother. You promised you’d come back to her. You promised.”

Verne’s lips thin. “I read her obituary nearly two decades ago. I didn’t think it prudent to return when I was already too late.”

“But my mom was waiting for you,” Adelaide tells him. The narrative is one she knows well. It’s the story she fell asleep to every night. “Grandma always told her you’d come back for her at least. Mom waited her whole life for you to even send a letter and couldn’t do it. But, somehow, you manage to fly across the ocean because some vampire had the audacity to fall in love with a human?”

Pain flashes through Verne’s eyes. “I have made many mistakes in my long life, Adelaide. I promised myself that I would never fail my kind like I failed your grandmother.”

She stares at him.

Adelaide’s grandmother was a beautiful, kind woman who loved one man her whole life. She knew that he would run from her and the blood that kept her from turning into one of his kind. He told her he could be with her for as long as she lived. She chose to believe him. She bore him a daughter, the first of her kind, half-vampire, half-human.

When Adelaide’s mom was six, Verne ran away from their mortality, leaving them with nothing. Adelaide’s grandmother told her young daughter that he had lessons to learn. She knew it. She’d seen it. She never hated him for it.

Adelaide’s mom never hated him for it. She had her own love story to tend to and her heart was just as warm as Grandma’s. She fell in love with a vampire hunter, one who managed to look past her half-alive condition to marry her.

Adelaide was born from them and she was so happy in the warmth of their story. Her Dad was generous and strong, her mother kind and lovely. They didn’t need grandfather, didn’t want a vampire in their lives because they were enough. Together, they were enough.

Then Mom got sick. Her blood fought to keep her alive, but her hybrid nature kept the treatments from working and the cancer kept her natural healing from kicking in. Then Dad forbade her from Turning, his hatred for the undead too strong to keep his family alive.

Then she died.

Then he left.

Then Adelaide was alone.

Then and then and then—

And then Adelaide had her own love story to see to.

It’s clear to her now that she’s been wrong this whole time. She thought that her role in Michael's’ life was to fix him, to make him more compassionate, more whole. Like her grandmother, she thought she could teach the man she loved that he was worthy of family, deserving of it. She thought that, when she succeeded, he would do the same for her.

She thought, like her mother, that sacrificing parts of herself just meant that she was building something in him. A home, maybe.

It’s such a pointless cycle of never-learned lessons and dead women. She realizes that she’s been waiting her whole life to become one herself, laid at the altar of Michael’s love story, hoping that it would all be worth it.

“You’re just a story,” she tells her grandfather. “My grandmother gave you the chance to be something. She looked at your past and your future and she—she gave it all up so that you could be better. To be a person. But you didn’t learn. You’re just a story and I—“ she laughs “—I’m embarrassed that I ever wanted to meet you.”

The little girl vampire hisses, baring long fangs. “You dare—“

“Silence,” Verne barks. His eyes are steady on Adelaide’s face. “Tulip used to call our life a love story.” There’s a question in his words, one he can’t seem to find words for. “Did she—did she really tell you about us?”

Adelaide spreads her arms, encompassing the room, Michael, his parents. “It’s all just a fucking story, grandpa. None of you—not you, not my father, not Michael— have ever finished the fucking plot. You’ve never reached the happily ever after. Every single one of you has run when the story started to fade and real life seeped in. We’ve bled for you and you—you couldn’t even make it to the epilogue.”

Michael makes a wounded noise behind her. “We—we could still make it.” His voice is really small. “If we keep trying.”

She wants to believe him like she wants to be in love. She wants to stop the seething ocean of anger in her chest from pouring out, but this isn’t a story anymore. She doesn’t get to tuck it all away and hope she hasn’t damaged the plot.

Neither does he. She remembers the expression on his face when she asked him to stop pretending.

“I’m calling it,” she says after a long moment. The other vampires are looking at her like she’s insane, frozen in their uncertainty. Only Michael and her grandfather have any idea of what she’s talking about. She doesn’t care. “No more rising actions. No more climaxes. We’re real people now and this isn’t a fairytale. We’re real people.” Her voice cracks on the word.

“What,” Verne says carefully, “are you going to do?”

She wipes at her face. She doesn’t know when she started crying. “I’ve got hunters surrounding the school. About a hundred of them.” Her mouth quirks bitterly. “Dad kind of owed me one, I guess.”

“Adelaide,” Michael breathes. “You didn’t.”

“I did,” she says. “You might be old enough to take out a couple dozen, but a hundred? They’ll wipe this little council from the face of the planet.”

The dark-haired vampire takes a slow step forward. “We could kill you now.”

Adelaide snorts. “Were you not listening? I’m a loose character now. It doesn’t matter if you kill me.”

“He would be dead if he tried,” Michael starts to stay.

“I’ll kill you where you stand if you try,” Verne tells his fellow council member at the same time. He keeps an eye on the dark-haired vampire, but asks Adelaide, “What do you want us to do?”

“I want you to stop killing people,” Adelaide says. “I want you to leave. I want you to remember that my grandmother wished you were so much more than you are.”

Heartbreak flashes across Verne’s face. “I have wished the same thing the past twenty years.” He presses a hand to his chest as if it hurts him. “Adelaide, I never meant to stay away for so long—“

“It’s not a fucking story,” Adelaide snarls at him, interrupts him. She jabs a finger at the door. “Get out. You’ve got ten minutes before they start staking.”

“I—I’m sorry,” Verne says. “Story or no, please believe me, Adelaide.” He finally looks away. “We’re leaving.”

“But—“ the little girl vampire starts to say. She gasps when Verne snakes out an arm to grab hers, yanking her forward with unimaginable strength. He’s very, very old. She hangs her head, showing the bigger vampire that she won’t argue again. “Yes.”

“We’re leaving,” Verne tells Adelaide. He uses his vampiric speed to flee from the room. With identical hisses, the other two vampires follow suit.

“Damnit,” Nanette says. “Mikhail, what have you brought upon us?” Her teeth click over each word.

“I—“ Michael starts to say, but Adelaide interrupts him.

“The hunters,” Adelaide says, “will not wait ten minutes for you, Nanette. Or you, Jan.”

Nanette stills as the meaning of that sinks in. “Mikhail won’t thank you for this.”

“No,” Adelaide says, still not turning to look at the other woman fully. “But the dead girls will.”

She feels the wind shift as Nanette and Jan leave, weighing their survival against seeing Adelaide dead and deciding that she’s not worth it right now.  They’ll be back. She still doesn’t let herself shake, doesn’t let her tears fall, doesn’t let herself whisper her apologies to the ghosts she’s brought to this room.

There’s one vampire left.

“Adelaide,” Michael starts. He hesitates, mere steps from her back. “Are you okay?”

Yes. “No,” she says. Then she shakes the narrative out of her head, struggling to drop it even after all this time. “It doesn’t matter how I am, Michael. You need to leave.”

“I don’t want to leave you,” he says. It might even be the truth.

“But you need to.” She turns at last, lets him see the exhaustion lining under her eyes. Their future dances above his head, taunting her. She could have that if she lets herself. If she gives away what she just won, she could go back to being the woman laughing with him in so many years.

It’s not part of her story.

He sees it on her face and his own falls, handsome mouth turning down at the corners. “I—I’ll call you. I’ll—“ He shakes his head, letting the words trail off. Then he turns and runs out of the room.

She watches him go and sees images of his maker chasing him. She doesn’t know what it means for his story that he’s going back to Nanette when he’s this vulnerable.

It’s not her job to care, no matter how much she might feel like it is.

Adelaide stares at the wall, letting the silence build around her. The world is a blank book now, each page ominously plain, each chapter untitled. It’s up to her to write the first line.

The weight of choice falls on her for the first time in her life. She’d chosen to follow Michael, yes, but that’s the only one. She’d chosen to be the person she saw above his head, the one who led him to a bigger heart and a warmer home. She’d sacrificed her role for a supporting act in his story.

She realizes that that’s why their love was never going to be more than just that; a story.

Too late to change it, but not too late to mourn.

Her footsteps echo across the room as she advances to the chalkboard. There’s a spiderweb crack from the top left all the way to the middle. The right is nearly untouched, a rude drawing of the human body ghosting across the surface.

Outside, the hunters will be closing in on the vampires, her grandfather and father clashing for the first time. Maybe her grandfather will die. Maybe her father will. Maybe they both will.

That’s their narrative. Not hers.

She picks up the small bit of chalk left on the metal rail beneath the board. It’s bright yellow, even under the dust, and it feels heavier than it should. She brings it to the chalkboard and begins to write. She goes over and over each letter, fingers cramping as her grip gets tighter and tighter with each iteration. The chalk disappears before she stops and her fingers smudge the lines as she impulsively finishes the sentence with bare skin.

Then, without pause, she turns on her heel and marches out of the room. She’s never had her own story, but she knows that, once it starts, it doesn’t stop.

She leaves her first sentence blaring on the board behind her.

There will be no more dead women.

It’s a promising beginning.

——-END———-

Hey guys! So this was a fun little story to write and a little bit of a challenge! I did post it on my Patreon first about a week ago– I think that’s going to set the trend! There’ll be another short story there tomorrow that won’t be posted on here until next week. Thank you to everyone who supports me, I appreciate it so so much and I’m excited to share some of my progress on my next project with you!

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