Thar Shaddin

Julen blinked, startled by Jenica’s revelation. The things she said seemed so blunt, so obviously unintended to please...he’d just assumed that she always spoke the truth. But apparently not. Now, Julen couldn’t help wondering if she’d ever lied to him. When she said she would be loyal? When she promised to kill him before leaving? She’d given him so few reassurances, so few clues to go on. The possibility that some of them might not even be true made him feel like the ground had vanished under his feet.

And yet, here she was. Chained, hungry, and scared. Because of him. Surely that couldn’t be a lie. Surely it meant something.

Being poked in the chest jolted Julen from his thoughts. Part of him wanted to catch Jenica’s hand, to cover it in affectionate kisses. But such gestures only seemed to confuse her. So, instead, he focused on her question. It was one that she’d asked before. But apparently he still hadn’t given a satisfactory answer.

“Sometimes...sometimes people change. We move beyond the place where we used to be. Even if we loved that place, we can’t go back to it.” Struggling to give Jenica a concrete example, Julen furrowed his brow, which brought his eyebrows together like two kissing caterpillars. “When I was a little boy, I had a special room in my parent’s house. It had all my toys, and my own bed -- a small bed, made for a child. Whenever I was in that bed, I knew I was a safe. My parents wouldn’t let anything hurt me. Not storms, not wolves, not hunger or disease.”

Julen drew a deep breath, forcibly dragging his mind back from the past. “But I’m no longer a child. My parents are dead. And I’m too big to fit in that small bed. As much as I loved it, I can’t go back.”

“Do you understand?” This was not spoken as a demand, just a gentle query. He wanted to know if this answer pleased her more than any of the others he’d given. “You had a family once, didn’t you? Would you go back to them now? Even if you could?”

The idea of a childhood home as a type of sanctuary flowed over the vampire without making an impression. She didn't understand the concept, though she recognized that many mortals associated "home" with "safe." Her eyes drifted to the assorted shadows within the wagon, their whispers preventing her from ever having a private moment. There was always something else present in her mind besides herself.

He asked if she understood and she looked back to him with a confused expression and raked her eyes from the top of his head to the tips of his toes and back.

"Adult can't fit in a child's bed - child has to grow."

The question about her family generated no more than a tilted head. She did not want him to know about them but was unsure how to avoid the topic. And so, she didn't.

"No. I ran away."

She brushed past clarification with a wave of one hand. Now she paused a long moment as she gathered a sentence together. She was never certain what she meant to say would actually emerge from her lips, but she was getting better.

"You should rejoin the soldiers. You said..."

A pause as her eyes grew distant to call forth the memory.

"...that you couldn't pretend. To be good. But that doesn't matter."

Her eyes refocused and she stared hard at him.

"Not about you - what you are, what you pretend. You should because it's...right."

Her chest rose and fell in two deliberate breaths; she hadn't tried to convey opinions such as these in months, years. She wasn't sure if she was making sense but she pressed on. She tapped his chest again to let him know she meant him directly.

"Heroes kill the monsters to protect. You stop, someone isn't protected."

The implications of the statement hung in the air a moment before she shuttered her eyes, letting her irises fill with the red she normally held back.

"Then the monsters come play."

Clearly, Jenica had taken him too literally. Julen was about to launch a rambling explanation of allegory and metaphor, of parallels and parables, when her answer about her family cut him off. I ran away. Another clue. Another tiny piece of her past. Julen would have gladly pursued the subject, but she silenced him with a wave of her hand. So, he simply tucked the bit of information away in his mind. He would go back to it later and try to fit it together with the other fragments...try build some sort of understanding about her history.

Then, Jenica started speaking with an intensity and focus that Julen didn’t usually hear from her. A single idea actually carried on for several sentences. Knowing that this must be quite important to her, if it had inspired such an expenditure of concentration, Julen listened very carefully. Another man might have been insulted to hear a vampire lecturing them about their duty to do what was right. But Julen just felt a little amused, and then a little sad. And, when her eyes went red, a little frightened. He knew the hunger represented by that color change. And he knew he wasn’t entirely safe from it. However, he didn’t flinch or draw back. Instead, he attempted to respond to what she’d told him.

“When I was a Lightsword, I didn’t kill monsters. I killed men.” Evil men, certainly -- Julen doubted that the world would weep for either mercenary bullies or Snyde’s thugs. But they were men nonetheless.

“I’ve only met two monsters in my entire life. The first one, I encountered in the thick of battle. Eight feet tall, rough green hide, tusks like bone daggers. An orc. When I saw him charging toward me, I raised my spear and prepared go down fighting. But he didn’t attack. Instead, he slew the mercenary who was trying to drag off my wife. Since then, he joined the Lightswords, and we’ve become good friends.”

“And the second monster...oh, I was sure about this one. She fed on the blood of innocents. She mocked me by exposing my most secret shame. So, like a good hero, I tried to kill her.” Julen shrugged, acknowledging his embarrassing lack of success. “I failed. Spectacularly. But she spared me, even though she had no reason to. The next time we met, she saved my life. Finally, somewhere between the third time and now, I fell in love with her.”

Julen reached across the space between them, taking Jenica’s hand in his. He knew that the gesture meant very little to her. But it meant something to him. And, right then, he was the one who craved the reassurance of her touch. “Aorle can see monsters. Not me. I see them when they’re not there, and probably miss them when they are. It will be better for everyone if I don’t run around trying to slay them.”

Tilting his head, Julen tried to stare past the red that clouded her irises. “Why?” Again, the question was only asked with gentle curiosity. “Why do you care if I try to protect people? Why do you care if I do what’s right?”

Then, as if bringing things back to the game they were pretending to play, he poked her gently in the chest. “Truth."

She perked up with interest hearing him describe her in such terms. He'd insisted so vehemently before that she wasn't a monster, argued the point with her until he'd given up. She'd accepted his delusions of what she was and wasn't. After seeing the illusion he'd cast of herself in the daylight, she'd realized he had a fantastical image of her inside of his head, rather than the reality she represented.

But it wasn't true. He remembered; he knew and he acknowledged. Her eyes widened with the revelation as he took her hand, flickering over his face for signs of a lie. But he was as earnest as ever. He mentioned his commander and his own inability to see evil. And then he asked her why.

She looked down at the finger prodding her chest, creasing her brow as she tried to think of the answer. She did feel strongly about this but she could not find why when she searched for the answer. She gave up and shrugged, looking at him.

"Don't know."

She curled her fingers around his hand, grasping it as gently as she was able. This gesture meant so much to him, and she saw no reason not to indulge his need. Her eyes dwindled to brown again, and she lifted his hand to begin inspecting his fingers one by one. She threw back his own question as she ran her fingers along the skin of his palm, curious to see what he would have to say.

"Why?"

Jenica’s answer disappointed Julen a little, because he had wanted to know. But he couldn’t deny that an honest confession of ignorance fell well within the rules laid out by Truth or Dare. So he accepted it without protest.

When Jenica began to examine his fingers, Julen couldn’t keep from smiling. It was as if she’d never seen such things before. As if she herself didn’t possess ten nearly identical digits. Bemused, Julen lifted his other hand and turned it in the dim light, searching for the marvels she appeared to glimpse. It was a large hand, masculine, calloused and marked with faded blisters. Dirt had gotten so worked into some of the crevices that no amount of washing seemed able to completely clean them. The hand of someone who had made his living with a plow, and then with a sword.

The feel of Jenica’s caress gliding across his skin awakened a familiar warmth in Julen’s heart...and other places. But he stifled it. Partially because it would be embarrassingly apparent to all their traveling companions exactly what was going on inside the cart. But mostly because he wanted this chance to talk to her.

“Why?” Her question confused him. Why what? Why did he crave her touch? Why did he have five fingers? Why did he want to know why she cared? Deciding on the latter, Julen attempted to explain. “I want to get to know you. To understand you better. I mean, that’s sort of the point of the game...except, I guess, the ‘dare’ part isn’t so much. Other than letting me find out what you would and wouldn’t do. Some of which could be quite enlightening, I suppose. But mostly it’s just things like ‘climb to the top of that tree’ or ‘eat a worm’ -- and really, what does being willing to eat a worm truly tell you about a person? The ‘truth’ part is what really matters. That’s what I’m getting at.” As he brought his speech to its shaky conclusion, Julen fervently wished that they’d decided to play Rock-Paper-Scissors instead.

She raised her eyes to his when his heart quickened its pace and smiled, widening the space between her lips just enough for the tips of her fangs to show. Her nostrils flared as she inhaled hard through her nose to take in his scent. She turned the hand she held to face palm up and began lightly tracing the deeper crevices running across the flesh. His curled fingers twitched reflexively in response and this made her smile wider.

He continued speaking and she half-listened, letting the whispers in her head sort out the parts she didn't hear. They wanted to play, as she herself did. They wanted to pull him up and bind him to the wall, let the vampire have its fun and then burst outside in a writhing frenzy to overcome the other mortals. Feast and rend and tear, create a chaotic blend of gore and mutilation which would satiate the craving rolling along her arms. Her grip on his hand began to tighten and her eyes shuttered against the images flashing through her mind. She sucked in a breath to focus herself and released his hand entirely to remove the temptation. It didn't help.

She ripped her thoughts back to his words, spoken several minutes before and left unanswered while she pushed aside the visions. She reached to grasp her upper arms and clench her nails into her skin to distract herself from her cravings further and looked at him. It was sheer force of will keeping the red from her eyes.

"What do you want to know?"

She unclenched one hand and tapped her finger against her temple.

"Truth. Ask."

She didn't remember the rules of the game in the face of the other thoughts she pushed away. But he never seemed to mind that she got so many things wrong. He patiently explained and laid out what she was missing, repeating the information ad nauseam until the ideas clicked. If they ever did at all.

As Jenica’s lips pulled back to reveal her fangs, Julen caught his breath. Frantic attempts to curb his arousal couldn’t block out the memory of them sinking into his throat -- a sensation now permanently associated with the moment of his climax, an intoxicating mix of pleasure and pain. Julen’s fingers twitched. He wanted to grab her, to pull her down on top of him, to feel the insides of her thighs pressing against his hips as she straddled him. He wanted her to bind him with shadows and take whatever she desired. Body, blood, life. It all belonged to her. And he would give it up gladly, just to satiate her for a single moment.

The feel of her grip tightening on his hand wrenched Julen from his reverie. At first, he didn’t understand. Was she asking for his reassurance? Was she responding to his yearning? Then, he saw her expression, and he realized that she’d been hungering for darker things.

Her hand released his, and Julen scooted back a little, forcing himself to take slow, deep breaths. He wasn’t afraid. But passion was too dangerous for her right now, its lust too closely linked to the bloodlust she was struggling against. He couldn’t risk arousing one without arousing the other. “I’m sorry,” he whispered to her. “I shouldn’t have...I’m sorry.”

He was supposed to be the one with control, the one teaching her restraint. He shouldn’t be surrendering to his baser instincts.

When Jenica asked him what he wanted to know, two questions immediately occurred to Julen, spurred by her earlier confession. Have you ever lied to me? About what? But those might have dangerous answers. This was going to be a hard journey for her. She needed him strong and upbeat, not weepy and depressed. Once they reached the church, once the angel made her human again, once he’d done all he could for her...then she could tell him the truth. Tell him anything. But until then, there were certain fantasies that he simply couldn’t afford to have shattered.

So, Julen chose something else that he’d been wondering about. “You said you ran away. From your family. Why?”

"No sorry. You didn't do anything."

She sounded baffled by the mere thought of such a thing, but said nothing further. He hadn't done anything wrong but she wouldn't insist. She didn't want to push the issue because it might lead to more conversation, and her throat ached from her earlier efforts to express her opinion.

His question made her eyes drop and her hand return to her arm to grind her nails into her skin again. She clenched her jaw and shifted where she sat, staring blankly at the ground as she tried to think of what to say. She was overcome with the desire for him not to know, and she didn't understand why. She'd never cared before. But she was afraid of where the conversation might go. If she told him, and he dismissed her...

She shook her head. It shouldn't matter to her. It didn't. He was just another human. Who'd been kind to her, and brought her gifts. Who'd killed his old life for her, begged her to stay. Told her he loved her and was trying to make the body live again in the only way he knew how.

She shuttered her eyes and shifted again, but left her hands where they were. The chains clinked lightly as she moved, following the links along their path until they reached the screw which bound her directly to the cart. She was being irrational. She could see it as clearly as she could see the chains which held her here. But the emotions still came, and she did not know how to handle them. Strong and pervasive, they flooded her mind with human worries and thoughts, and she flinched and ducked her head further to try and ride out the wave.

It passed. She looked at him. He had asked a question; the monster gave its reply because the human could not push the words forth. The voice lost its intonation and grated a little harder. She had regressed.

"Brother pushed inside. He hurt the body. Ran away because it never stopped."

She detached one of her hands and laid it over her abdomen, to indicate where the pain had been.

At first, Julen didn’t understand -- or maybe he just wasn’t prepared to let himself understand. Brother pushed inside. Inside what? Their home? Her room? He hurt the body. Had he hit her? Then, Jenica placed her hand over her abdomen, and Julen could not longer cling to ambiguity.

“Your brother...forced himself on you? Gods. How old were you? Didn’t your parents...didn’t they stop it...?”

Julen’s questions stuttered to a stop as words shriveled and died inside him. He’d seen horrible things since leaving his farm. He’d seen people living in their own filth, sick and starving. He’d seen defenseless women chained and beaten. But this perversion of the bond between siblings nearly pushed him past his ability to cope. Family was sacred. Family was all. How could someone do that to their own blood? How could they inflict such pain, and shame, and terror?

Reaching across the space that he’d only recently put between them, Julen laid a hand on Jenica’s leg. All desire had fled from his touch. Now, there was only tenderness and sympathy. He would have wrapped her in his arms, pulled her close, if he wasn’t afraid that she might react badly to such an overwhelming embrace while still in the throes of horrible memories.

“That’s terrible, Jenica. I’m so sorry that happened to you.”

Anger would come later. Later, Julen would indulge in fantasies about what he’d do to her brother, should their paths ever cross. All the ways he’d make the bastard pay for harming her. But right now, he was more concerned with the victim than her victimizer.

“If there’s anything I can do...?” It was a stupid question. What could he possibly do? It had all happened years ago, and he couldn’t go back in time. Couldn’t be there to protect her, to save her, no matter how much he wanted to. He was helpless. Useless. But he couldn’t keep from asking anyway.

She shrugged in response to his stumbled questions. The answers screamed in her mind, desperate to be let free and be heard. Yes. Young. They didn't care.

She clenched her jaw tighter and shook her head, dismissing both his comfort and the topic. She did not know how to accept his comfort or his kindness. And so she didn't.

"Doesn't matter."

She reached to take the hand lying against her leg, face as blank and placid as it had ever been. The grip was firm, and his offer of reassurance lay by the wayside as she pressed his palm against her cheek. She stared into his face, flaring her nostrils again as she took a forced breath.

"This body is yours."

She had given it to him those nights before, and his it remained. He wanted the body to live.

Her perception swirled, unable to separate his requests from her own inclinations. She could not have told whether she was here for him or his fantasy, but her own desires were discarded in the face of his.

She herself did not think the venture would come to anything. She did not expect to become human, though now at least there was a chance she would live. But even so, she had come along, because it was what he wanted for her. Any hope or personal opinion she might feel were secondary to what he wanted for the body he'd been gifted.

Although Jenica didn’t answer his questions, Julen could make some good guesses. Her brother had indeed raped her. She’d been too young to fight him. And her parents hadn’t stopped it, or she wouldn’t have needed to run away. Julen remembered the way she used to flinch away from his touch. He remembered what Lucian had said about the monster being born long ago, before the turning, before the live burial. All of that traced back to this.

Her insistence that it didn’t matter earned her a shake of his head. He knew she wouldn’t believe him. They’d been over that ground before, back and forth, without either side gaining an inch. But he refused to let the statement pass unchallenged. Not even once. “Yes. Yes, it does matter.”

Julen met Jenica’s eyes as she lifted his hand and pressed it against her cheek. He didn’t care if she knew how to acknowledge his sympathy. It was flowing from him anyway, whether she accepted it or spat it back in his face. “You suffered, and that matters to me. It makes me sad.”

Do you want this body? How many times had she asked him that? At first, he’d denied it. Then, finally, he’d admitted the affirmative. But both answers were wrong. He knew that now. “No. The body is yours. And no one has the right to touch you against your will. Not your brother...not me. Your parents should have taught you that. They should have stood up for you.”

"They didn't care."

Her tone was dismissive as she looked down at herself with a creased brow, taking in the cleaner wardrobe along with the scope of her own physicality. The plain truth was that if the body were hers, she did not want it. It had been used as a weapon against her often enough that she felt no love lost on its intrinsic value. The only purpose it served for her was to house her within and keep her from dissociating entirely.

Which was not something she wanted, but had to accept.

Of the two of them, he was the better owner. He would treat the body with kindness instead of hurting it, and his payment lay between her thighs for the taking. She did not understand why this arrangement seemed to distress him, especially when she made direct reference to it. It made complete sense to her; it was how she had come to understand how they interacted, and why he no longer wanted to try and kill her. Love was something ephemeral and distant, well beyond her capability to comprehend its implications. Lust and sex were not.

"It's just a body."

“They should have cared.” Julen wanted to add: And you should care. But he was less sure of that. What did he know about the things she’d suffered? What had he ever endured that could come even close? Maybe this indifference, this numbness, was the way she’d kept herself from going crazy. If she wasn’t already crazy. Sometimes, he really couldn’t tell.

“They should have protected you. I would have protected you.” Wonderful. Now he was her hero in hindsight, her retroactive champion, making promises about all the mighty deeds he would have done...if he’d known, if he’d been there, if his mother had even given birth to him back then. Why was there always so little he could really offer her? Why didn’t it amount to more than a few sips of blood, the occasional illusion, and a handful of promises which she couldn’t even believe?

As his hand continued to rest against Jenica’s cheek, Julen became acutely aware of her temperature -- slightly cool, to match the night air. Just a body? Yes. And no longer even a living body. A body not so different from the bloody corpses which lay at his feet after a battle. Except that something was still trapped inside this husk. A glimmer, a mirage, a will-o'-wisp constantly leading him deeper inside her. Perhaps guiding him toward some hidden treasure, perhaps only luring him into a bog where he would falter and drown. It didn’t matter. Either way, he would keep following.

“Jenica...I know that right now, your body is just a prison. A source of little more than pain and hunger. But after Amaranda helps you, when you’re human again and you’ve had time to heal, it can be so much more. You’ll be able to taste food. Feel sunlight against your skin. And when we make love...when we make love, I’ll be able to give you the same pleasure that you give me.”

“All those experiences will belong to you. Yours to pick, yours to choose. If you like something, you can have more. If you don’t like something...it’s your right to refuse it.”

The chains clinked noisily as she rubbed her manacles together, uncertain of what to say or how to react to the male's emotional outburst. He spoke of her body as a prison, and then the dream of what it could be. He spoke of what he thought could happen once the heart began beating again. He imagined giving her some sort of pleasure having to do with sex. She did not understand what this could be - she'd never felt any kind of positive sensations during sex, though she did admit to herself that she enjoyed the act with her male. His enthusiasm was contagious.

His words were pretty, and could've been convincing were she the type of person who needed to understand. Instead, she took them at surface value. A sort of impending we shall see hung over her thoughts, preventing her from leaping into his pretty ideas and letting them overcome her own certainties of how the world worked. His ideals meant that there was more to existence than pain and being used or manipulated. She regarded this view with speculation and uncertainty, though she didn't wish to reject it outright. Her own minute drop of hope, still residing within her spine where she could only just feel its pinprick, would not let her abandon the maybe of it all.

She pulled his hand from her cheek and splayed his fingers once more, gazing intently at each digit in turn and scrutinizing every detail she could make out. The dirt and callouses added character and time to his existence. The hands of someone who'd made a difference in some section of the world. And now they were trying to make a difference in hers.

She could say something to express gratitude. He'd reminded her of words and phrases which carried this emotion through implication, but they meant nothing in the end. Simple vocal manipulations and sounds which the other people could interject their own expectations onto. In a way, they felt like a lie. And she did not want to lie to this one.

She raised his hand to her lips and kissed his index knuckle. A gesture of his that she was mimicking - though she understood that when he did so, it carried emotions and intentions behind it. She meant these in the gesture, and hoped he took the meaning as intended.

The simple gesture touched Julen’s heart. It was a sign that some of the affection he tried so hard to convey had actually gotten through. And, more importantly, it was a sign that she returned some small measure of his feelings. Once Jenica’s lips had left his knuckle, Julen turned her hand in his, reciprocating the kiss. Part of him knew that he should just leave it at that. Knew that she’d chosen an act instead of words because words meant so little to her. But then, he wouldn’t be the man that he was if he could actually shut up when it mattered.

“Thank you. For believing. I know belief doesn’t come easily to you. You’ve been disappointed so many times before. I know...I know that, at a certain point, it’s easier to just give up.” He’d reached that point during the four months he spent in Marn, before meeting Aorle. The point when life becomes an endless path, repeating the same ugly scenery day after day, stretching out forever beneath a grey sky. The point when the air tastes like something old and dead. And yet, even that was better than feeling the pain which came with seizing hold of hope, only to have it burn your fingers to the bone. “Thank you for risking being disappointed one more time.”

Gently, Julen pushed apart her fingers, giving them the same attention she’d lavished on him. Her fingernails were still jagged and torn, stained with the bits of skin and dried blood that she’d ripped from her own body. But otherwise, she was considerably cleaner than when he’d first met her. Jenica’s new attention to hygiene hadn’t escaped Julen, and he appreciated the effort, which clearly came from a desire to please him. However, it wasn’t something he would have ever demanded from her. Even covered in dirt and rags, she was still beautiful to him. Finishing his inspection, Julen capped each fingertip with a kiss, before reluctantly releasing her hand.

For the first time in awhile, Julen remembered the game of Truth or Dare which hadn’t yet come to any formal end. Another light tap against Jenica’s chest signaled that it was now her turn. “Truth. After you ran away from your family, where did you go? What did you do?”