Work Text:
-Day 5-
It feels like the pull of nicotine three days after the last drag on the last cigarette, the siren call of blood singing through her. When Tana and Pauline were fifteen, they flirted with the cultivation of true addiction, ultimately cut short not by better judgement, but a shortage of funds. Bumming cigarettes at parties left the body long longing in the long meanwhile and Tana did not enjoy the forced suspension of need. Though Pauline said she liked the anticipation, she stopped when Tana stopped.
“I am not the kind of girl who likes to wait,” Tana says, contemplatively, remembering the feel of the cigarette poised between her fore and middle finger, the rasp of the lighter and faint crackle of paper as it flashes to ash and smoke. The full body thrill as the drug rushes in, bringing joy and relief and a manic energy. It is fortunate then that she is locked away from temptation in this cold, empty room. Mostly empty.
Her delivery boy sets his burden before her and settles crosslegged beside it in a single, impossibly graceful motion. He tilts his head a little and watches her with a little smile on his pretty lips. His cheeks are pink;he never comes to her hungry. She stares at his mouth with jealous longing.
But she isn’t going to ask. She reaches into the picnic basket (a fucking picnic basket!) and retrieves a paper wrapped square that unfolds to reveal egg salad on think cut whole grain bread. Red lips of tomato protrude though the diagonal slash bisecting the sandwich. When she scoops up a half, egg, golden and thick with mayonnaise, gushes past the crusts and curling edges of fancy lettuce. A pungent smell of raw onion wafts from the sandwich. She looks up. Finds him watching her.
She eyes him slyly back and waits for whatever he’s thinking about her non sequitur to spill out in crazy poetry. Or blunt directness. You never know with Gavriel, but it’s always fun to find out. Gavriel says nothing, however, watching her out of eyes like the wine dark sea.
Of which beverage, there is a sad lack, she notes suddenly, fishing around in the picnic basket of delights, to find a 24 oz bottle of ginger beer, two bars of dark chocolate, four oranges, potato chips, and a steel thermos, warm against her hand, but no wine, and no beer of the standard inebriating variety.
Shouldn’t there be beer at a picnic? Even a picnic under the pale glare of a fluorescent lightbulb? Surely it must be an unwritten rule. And now that she has thought of it, she would very much like to be on her way to too drunk to think or stand. She could use a little chemical assist with the not caring. A nice long bender ending in a long dreamless sleep and another tally mark on the wall.
He lifts an eyebrow at her.
“Perhaps, on your next supply run, you could ask Jameson if he could get ahold of some of his namesake or his friend Johnny Walker. And a pack of American Spirits,” she add. “If you don’t mind. I’ll even share.” She grins at him.
Gavriel plucks an orange from the basket and rolls if over the back of his right hand, catching it out of the air before it can drop and flipping it into the air, then catching it deftly on the back of his left hand.
“Liquor will only make you more thirsty,” he says. “I’ll fetch you the fruit of the opium, anything you wish, but it will not quench the fire.” He somehow catches the orange on the peak of his nose and balances it there.Then lets it drop and looks back at her seriously. “It may quench that fire in you that makes you so eager to fight fate, and remain the person that you are.”
Perhaps he is a juggler. Perhaps he can teach me to juggle, she thinks, with pointed irrelevance. In this room, she indulges and encourages every mental digression away from her body’s singular obsession. When I emerge from this room I’ll be loony as Gavriel, she thinks. Company fit for no one but other caged things.
Gavriel bites into the orange, straight through the peel. Juice bursts out and runs down his arm. His eyes never leave her face as he catches the juice in a long, slow sweep of his tongue.
With a sigh she picks up the thermos and twists it open, releasing a burst of coffee fragrance, hot and rich. She forces down the threat of nausea with every good memory of coffee counters, the shabby comfort of worn armchairs, and familiar joy of caffeine blooming in her blood. She drinks from the the lid, gulps, and it is hot against the cold lining of her stomach.
She bites hugely into her sandwich and concentrates on the slippery feel of the egg whites, the rich flavor of yolk and fat, the bite of onion, and soft abrasion of the bread. Thinks about smoke burning in her throat and nicotine rushing through her veins.
Later, when he kisses her, he tastes of sweet orange, the sharp flash of citrus, and the harsh bitter tang of peel. His body is comfortably warm, like laundry fresh from the drier, and she presses up against him from lips to knee, gripping his black curls and licking into his mouth. Her tongue brushes a sharp sharp tooth and she pulls back, breathing hard. She looks into his ruby eyes, running her tongue over her own sharp canines. she thinks. Or, rather, tries not to think.
“Where the hell did you find a picnic basket?” she asks.
-Day 8-
The Bohemian Polka, in Gavriel’s interpretation involves a lot of hopping, turning, lifting, and tossing of the lady partner,.
“Did Jameson just give you the key?” she asked, when he unlocked her handcuff from the stout iron pipe she had chained herself to a week ago. It is a reassuringly stout iron pipe, running from the concrete floor to meet another running along the ceiling, twelve feet above. She is trying for outrage at this casual upset of her personal Tana-containment precautions. But it is too great a relief to move.
“I could break the cuff open,” Gavriel offered politely, “If the key offends you.” He had a plan, he said, to sap the nervous energy from her blood, but it could not be accomplished on a four foot leash.
In the small room, they turn and turn in tight circles until Tana is pleasantly dizzy and even Gavriel is panting softly.
“This is ridiculous and beneath my dignity,” she says. “I not a folk dancing kind of girl.” But she doesn’t say stop. Gavriel has a matching twinkle in his eye. She wants to lean forward through the scarce inches separating them and suck his lower lip into her mouth, bite it until it bleeds. She wants to spin and jump until she is too tired to move or crave or contemplate breaking and begging to sink her newly sharp teeth into his neck and draw out exquisite joy, ambrosiac power. She really does not want to think about the impossible eighty days ahead.
“I am ridiculous. You are a wild spirit,” he says, definitely laughing at her. “Again?”
“Il’l toss you this time,” she says. He laughs and restarts the music. They turn and turn and he laughs with wild delight when, still superhuman with vampire blood, she throws him so high his hair brushes the exposed pipes along the high ceiling. She catches him against her body and slides him slowly down, cupping the cheeks of his ass in her hands. His chest rubs deliciously against her breasts. His cock nestles against her lower belly as his weight touches down and he releases a satisfying a gasp.
She gently parts his cheeks and slides the tips of her fingers between to graze against the hidden furl of his hole and press the seam of his jeans into the soft skin behind his balls. Gavriel moans and his breath catches.
She leans forward but his hand catches her face before her lips can touch, wrapping around her cheeks and holding her fast. His tongue flicks out and licks into the corner of her mouth and away before she can catch it, then against the skin just under her lip, and his mouth presses a closed kiss to the other corner. He kisses over her cheekbones, her closed eyes, her nose, her chin, the point of her jaw, just under her ear. His lips trace down her neck, over her collarbone. She shivers as she feels the graze of teeth over her throat. She feels immense and immortal.
-Day 10-
Gavriel arrives with sandwiches and coffee and a box full of paint and brushes. The paints are oil and watercolor, some caked with overspill and half empty, others pristinely unopened.
“Pauline said you should remake this room into a more Tana-like environment. Or at least simulate one.” He sounds like he might be quoting. He locks the door and then unlocks the cuff around her ankle.
“How the hell did Pauline send me paints in Coldtown?” When the hell did he talk to Pauline?
“Valentina,” he says, and she just nods. Sure. She picks up a pint can of high-gloss acrylic latex house paint labeled “butter citron” and pries off the lid, chooses a fat, stiff brush and dips it straight into the can. In a great arcing sweep of her arm from the shoulder, she inscribes a perfect yellow circle on the wall.
-Day 14-
Aidan comes to visit while Gavriel is out. Tana is sitting agains the wall reading a comic book and making editorial comments in purple pen, her legs stretched out before her. He sits against the wall opposite, in the center of the yellow sun, mirroring her. Out of reach of her chain, she notices.
“Gavriel had to go crack heads and slap a few vampires around,” Aidan says.
“You going to keep me company?” She lays on an absurdly sultry voice to cover for the real lust that she isn’t sure she can hide. “Come a little closer.”
He laughs but looks distinctly uncomfortable. Gavriel has left him with instructions on how to behave, no doubt. But Aidan is not good at telling anyone no. He likes to say yes. He likes to be bullied about. She turns her mind away from how she could persuade him into breaking her will for her. Were his body full of warm blood, heart beating and live temptation pulsing and throbbing through his veins, she couldn’t have done it, and might, a secret thought whispered, have still had enough borrowed vampire strength to break her self imposed bonds. But fortunaly, Aidan was a vampire and smelled cold, like stone. Fortunately, she thought, wryly, my friend is a vampire now.
“So who is making trouble in vampire paradise,” she asks, relenting. He visibly relaxes. There is quite the list of people who would like to make trouble in the power vacuum left by the death of the undisputed king of Coldtown. Aidan can be aways be counted on to deliver the gossip.
-Day 15-
The hunger doesn’t feel like longing anymore. It is fire, burning in her belly, sending all her muscles twitching. She cannot rest and stares at the wall in the dim lit room.
“I think I am starting to lose it,” she says. “When Aidan visited I thought—perhaps it would not be so terrible. To give in. I thought that.”
“Within a week I had lost myself to the hunger and done unspeakable things. Your will is fierce unlike anyone I have ever known,” he says.
“I think I am just not as hungry. Yet. You did not drink the blood of the most powerful vampire in the world while you were infected and Cold,” she says. He hmmms and rubs his face against her neck, cat-like, and thoughtful.
“You have brushed up against death twice before and walked away from it,” he says, finally, stroking his fingertips over the topography of scar tissue on her arm.
“You think my mother exposed me? Like the scratch at the farmhouse? That I’ve built up a tolerance to vampirism, like…like immunity to icocane poison?”
“Like a vaccine,” he says. “Who knows?”
“Somebody knows. If vaccination works, somebody would know,” she says. Hope is just another hunger she doesn’t need right now.
“Talk to me about anything but blood and hunger,” she says, a little desperately.
He hums and pulls her hand to clasp each other gentle in the curve of her lower back.
“Leave them there,” he murmurs, grazing the shell of her ear with his lips. He traces the fingers of his right hand down under the edge of her jeans. They tickle through her hair and slide into the fold of her sex and, although she expected their arrival, she convulses on a startled gasp as they graze the tip of her clitoris. She clenches her own fingers together. His fingers circle the cleft lightly, brushing through her pubic hair but pulling back, even as she bucks against him. They circle, slowly dip into the well of wetness, and pull back as she moans frustration. He concedes to brush wet fingers over her clitoris once, twice, then the hand defects, runs up her body to cup her breast. She wriggles when his thumb teases her nipple, but she won’t beg.
He draws it out, he makes her wait, anticipation and lust merges with the burning call in her blood. When she finally approaches climax she thinks she might be begging, crying out for it, yes, yes, there…she tips over the edge and he holds her tight.
-Day 21-
The strength that filled her for their dancing is gone and she is empty. She is draped limp and noodley across the mattress on the floor, lethargic and cold, staring at the pipes and the big yellow sun perpetually rising on the concrete wall. The sun has expanded as she added hazy red and orange rings around it, and a scattering of glittery star stickers that she found in the bottom of the box. She waits for Gavriel to return and thinks that she can’t possibly move and may never move again.
But when Aidan walks through the door she is up and has launched herself across the room at him before she fully registers his identity. Gavriel intercepts her, appearing by magic between her and glorious relief and she shrieks in despair as he seizes her around the middle and drags her back to the mattress. Aidan looks shocked and more than a little horrified, but he leans against the wall and proceeds to tell her a story about a celebrity who had come to Coldtown to “report” on the death of Lucean Moreau for E! Gavriel seats Tana in the lap of his crossed legs, holding her close with arms wrapped tightly over around her belly and pinning her arms to her sides. He kisses her cold temple and murmurs in her ear, rocking her like a baby while she cries silently.
Aidan recounts the many absurd stories Coldtown’s residents had conspired to tell the eager news celebrity until she had a very public and very hilariously self centered breakdown on camera. The account features himself in ever more elaborate detail.
It’s a pretty good story.
-Day 25-
Gavriel tells her a story. It seems to be the Snow Queen, but in Gavriel’s telling Gerda has been fortified with vampire blood for her journey to rescue Kai from wintery bondage. The garden of eternal summer was a night garden, and its sorceress had sharp teeth.
After she rescues Kai, they go away together, Tana tells Gavriel. Because Kai is a vampire and she is a strange girl with sharp teeth and they can’t go home again. They have adventures together and conquer many wicked kings and queens with their cleverness.
Gavriel may be crazy, and strong, and have a century of practice listening to the sweet sound of girls screaming, but she suspects that Gavriel has a weakness too.
-Day 27-
[I could tie you like so, just for a little while. So you wouldn’t have to resist so hard. I’ll hold you so you won’t have to.And then I could touch you all over. Would you like that? Do you want it? .Yes, yes yes.]
-Day 29-
Tana pounds on the wall and screams when Gavriel leaves her alone in the cold room. When her returns he licks her hands clean of blood, tisking sadly as he bandages them. Then he wraps her wrists in fleece and cuffs her to an overhead pipe with her arms stretched until she can only just balance on the balls of her feet. She stares at him resentfully.
“Do you want me to free you?” She presses her lips together. He pulls her shoes off and unbuttons her jeans.
“Should I stop?” He pulls down her jeans and underwear slowly and kneels before her, hands loosely grasping the backs of her thighs below her buttocks.
“I don’t think I’m the kind of girl who likes to be tied up,” she says. “I like doing, not receiving.” Gavriel smiles up at her.
“I am.” his voice is gravelly and she clings to the sudden surge of lust, imagining him bound and at her mercy. “But that will have to wait.”
He looks thoughtfully at the thick black hair hiding the opening of her body. Tana catches herself holding her breath and forces a nonchalant inhale. Then gasps as he abruptly slides his hands around and lifts her labia apart with his thumbs, plunging his face forward to curl his tongue around the tip of her clitoris. She shouts as he sucks hard. He leans back and looks up at her.
“I should gag you,” he says, sending a pulse of pleasure tearing through her. “Tuck those dangerous teeth safely away. But I can’t bear to hear your silence.”
-Day 32-
“Behave,” says Gavriel, invisible behind her right ear. “No biting, or I’ll gag you.” But he isn’t talking to Tana. Aidan is before her, chest bare, sharp hipbones peaking out of his open pants. Aidan likes to live free of the constraints of underwear. His cock curls upward, waggling slightly and pointing at her. The yellow sun is rising behind his back.
Her arms are chained over her head and Gavriel is wrapped around her, steading and stroking and licking at the sweat tricking down behind her ear. She is cold and flaming hot.
“Kiss him,” she orders Aidan. “For me.”
Fifty-six days, she thinks. It might as well be forever.