I am a crooked man

[vacabdication]

[ Yuma sends a message that she's left him a gift, and the first thing he checks is whether Ajay answers his phone.

There isn't a second thing. It's not as if they've never been out of contact, or as if Ajay's never failed to respond to his calls – he's a busy boy, after all – but it's enough to make Pagan feel as if his veins are filled with ice. The search is frantic and conclusive. When Pagan finds Ajay he's still breathing, though he won't be for long.

Pagan knows this because he can see Ajay's lungs, straining and exposed after what Yuma has done to him.

There isn't time to have a moral dilemma about it. Pagan uses his own fangs to open a vein in his wrist – one of the few ways to open him up that won't heal in mere moments – and presses it to Ajay's mouth. It makes a messy, desperate circuit when he bites deep into Ajay's throat, letting the rich taste of his lover flow over his tongue and drinking him down, and it's – it's terrible. There's no pleasure in the act when it's like this, no intimacy, no joy. He drinks and he drinks, and the little spark in living creatures that whispers survive when everything else in them says to give up kicks in, and Ajay drinks from him, too.

He feels the moment when Ajay dies. Feels the flutter of life leave him, tastes the blood in his mouth turn empty and dull. His scream is a howl, animal and raw, but it's brief. He closes the shutter Yuma has made of Ajay's ribs, folds flayed skin back into place, wipes the blood from Ajay's mouth as best he can and takes him home to the palace, to wait and see if a corpse will become the man he loves again.

~

He's there, of course, when Ajay first stirs. It takes days, but they're not quite as tense as that might imply – it's clear that it's worked in at least some capacity when Ajay doesn't begin to rot into the sheets of Pagan's bed. Gary had fussed at him while blacking over the windows, saying a room full of fine furnishings is no place for either a brand new vampire or a decomposing corpse, and it's the closest Pagan has ever come to firing the man. Ajay can wake and destroy the whole room and Pagan will count every ruin a blessing. And if he dies -

he doesn't, though, and robs Pagan of the poignant drama of wasting away alongside his cadaver. It's folly to think he'll understand any of what's said to him before he wakes fully, and so it's the only time Pagan will allow himself the futile gesture of asking Ajay to forgive him. He is a selfish old creature, but even he can see that forgiveness is something he doesn't deserve.

I couldn't bear it, he whispers. I couldn't lose you.

He cries, but without blood in his system there's no reddening of his skin, no tears to fall. He hasn't taken a drop since Ajay's, and has made up his mind that if Ajay doesn't wake he never will again.

~

He sleeps, eventually. It's been a long time since he's had to, though it's still nice to do. This isn't that lazy pleasure – it's exhaustion, pure and simple. He sleeps, and he dreams of Ajay in a frozen lake, pounding at the ice from below as Pagan scrabbles to get to him. He dreams of Ishwari on wings of fire, coming to cut his head off with a blazing sword for what he's done. Less dramatically but more terrifyingly, he dreams of Ajay getting on a plane and leaving, never to return.

He thinks it's that which wakes him, the pain of it, until he lifts his head and hears it. A groan, faint and disgruntled, in a sweetly familiar voice. His hands are on Ajay's face before he can think. ]

My boy. My beautiful boy.

Comments

[vaaris]

[ when ajay wakes, the thirst is all he knows.

it's like nothing he's ever known -- it's a ravenous animal that lives inside him, howling and clawing at his insides, so desperate to be fed that it's willing to tear him open from the inside. it's impossible to force himself to think past it; there's no room for the startled realization that he's still alive, to wonder how the fuck he even got here. there isn't even enough presence of mind to question the thirst itself, all he knows is this terrible needneedneed; it's the terrible, all-consuming star throned in the center of his new universe. ]

Please --

[ his hands are trembling when he reaches out to clutch at the lapels of the other man's jacket, eyes wild and voice rasping. ] I need --