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[lordoftheozarks]

When the ringing stops, all you'll hear is a cold voice that says one simple word, "Speak."

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[lordoftheozarks]

From the way she says it, it seems to be a rhetorical question or something she's asked herself too many times before. So he doesn't answer it right away.

"Of course. Wait there, I'll get some."

He brings a glass back to her and looks her right in the eyes as he passes it over. "It means, Fever, that every day I will have to prove to everyone over and over that I am not the same man I was. The burden will always be on me to show my best self to the world."

[abhorrently]

"That sounds utterly exhausting."

She doesn't hold his gaze for long at all. Ostensibly, this is to fish out a small box from one of her pockets, flicking it open for the medicine inside. Swallowing it with the water, she's glad for the excuse to look elsewhere.

[lordoftheozarks]

"It is." Utterly. But, that's the point he supposes. His punishment is that he will always have to work for this.

"What is that medicine for? If I may ask?"

[abhorrently]

"I get headaches nigh daily. I can usually tell when they're going to come, and this will stop it from becoming something that splits my head open, and instead be something manageable, if not erase it entirely."

Life-changing, really. It's incredible to be without pain, to not just have to accept it as part and parcel of existence.

[lordoftheozarks]

"I'm sorry you have to suffer so. It must be such a burden to bear that daily. Is that medicine something you had in your home world or did you acquire it here?"

[abhorrently]

"Here. Sally makes it - I didn't really have time to seek such things out, before. They were just something to live with."

She shrugs - there's no bitterness in it. Only the fact that there was pain, and now there doesn't have to be. This isn't the sort she appreciates.

"I keep waiting for them to stop working or something else to happen, but no, she's sorted it."

[lordoftheozarks]

"That's an awful burden to live with," he remarks, more a statement of fact than a sympathetic overture.

"What else could happen?"

[abhorrently]

"Don't know. The headache to bounce back twice as hard or something."

She knows it's a foolish concern, but it's been there. If they started ever getting worse...

"Can some people just have this happen forever? Or does it usually heal?"

He's the immortal, surely he knows something? This is her logic, full of as many holes as a lace shawl.

[lordoftheozarks]

"I don't think I blame you for having that fear. It must take a lot of energy to endure such a thing day in and day out." He may not have to worry about illness or pain very much in his undead life but he can sympathize with there being an ever-present distraction eating away at her focus.

"I really don't know. I have heard of cases called migraines that can plague a person for all of their life. But, from what I gather, each case is unique. I regret that this is something I cannot use my blood healing to correct for you. I would if it were possible."

[abhorrently]

"What does your blood healing do? And how are you so sure it's impossible?"

She's tried stranger things, and probably will keep doing so in her life. Migraines, though, Sally's mentioned that word before. That might be the word for it.

[lordoftheozarks]

"Any wound my blood touches will be restored. I can go so far as to remove old scars, in fact. But my blood must come into physical contact with the wound. For example, when River's leg was broken, it was necessary to surgically expose the fracture and apply my blood to the bone directly. Do you see? I can't very well crack your skull open, can I?"

[abhorrently]

"You could, don't sell your strength short."

But still, at the mention of old scars, her hand reflexively twitches. He doesn't need to be a mind reader to know that her thoughts fled to the scar on her midsection, the one that healed twisted and haphazard.

[lordoftheozarks]

"I could, but you wouldn't survive it." Which would defeat the purpose.

He notices that twitch, and can very easily guess which scar she's thinking of. Would it be rude to offer? He supposes the worst she can do is turn him away.

"Fever, if there is a scar you would like me to heal, you can ask. It will cost me very little to help you."

[abhorrently]

"It's something I'd need to think on."

She exhales, trying to figure out how to phrase it right.

"I'm...not enamored of all my scars. But they are my scars. And with my memories as scant as they are, I feel reluctant to let go of what's mine. If that makes any sense at all?"

[lordoftheozarks]

"It makes perfect sense. Those marks are clues to who you were. They speak of your past even if you do not know how to translate them. The offer will always stand, but they belong to you and I will respect whatever choice you make."

He lifts his own hand in front of her, immaculate and untouched by blemishes, as they always are. "So many people choose to become like me for vanity's sake. Vampires carry no wrinkles, no scars. If we had them in life, they are wiped away in death-- and with them, all proof we ever lived." His hand goes to rest on his shoulder, fingers stroking the edge of where the scars on his back begin. "It makes me wish I could be proud of the ones I do have."

[abhorrently]

"You survived what brought them upon you. Is that not enough reason to be proud?"

Her voice is soft, but sincere. Somewhere in the conversation she's put her elbows on her knees, chin resting in her hands, leaning forward.

"You lived long enough past it to have them heal. And further still, to make it here."

[lordoftheozarks]

"No," he says flatly. She doesn't know, so he can't fault her for thinking so. It's logical, in theory. Maybe she is right, but he can't stop the way shame burns inside him when he thinks of what those scars represent.

"They didn't heal. That is why they are my shame."

Maxly, noticing Erik's distress, floats to him and burbles softly at his side. Erik reaches down absently to pet the ghost's head or the equivalent of that which is to run his fingers through the ghost's gaseous outline.

"Vampires of my breed are born bloodthirsty beyond all reason. A fledgling could eat an entire village in one sitting and still crave more. That is why it is vitally important that a sire monitor them in their earliest years of undeath, to guide them through that particularly dangerous time. It is rare for any freshly turned vampire to resist the call of blood."

He stops brushing his hand through Maxly's ghost trail and turns his eyes to her. Even so, the look in them is so distant he may as well not actually be seeing her.

"There is something else to know about my kind. We cannot starve to death. If we are not fed, we wither, but we cannot die. Instead, the wounds we sustain do not heal, our bodies deteriorate and yet still the suffering will not conclude in death, only endless torment and madness."

He looks away again. "And if a vampire is left this way for too long, some wounds may never heal at all. To be a vampire blemished with scars is to reveal that you were starved to such lengths. Just by looking, any vampire could tell as much."

[abhorrently]

"...Someone tortured you. Someone hurt you, and kept you from blood, and drove you to the depths."

Cool, calm, as she doesn't move a single inch. She's listening, still as a sculpture might be, only blinking when needed, barely breathing.

"Do you believe you deserved their treatment? Is that why their cruelty is your shame?"

cw: self harm

[lordoftheozarks]

"No," he croaks. "I did this to myself."

He twists his fingers in his lap as he speaks, looking more agitated than he has ever allowed himself to before.

"I did not want to be a vampire. I was not given a choice. When I woke, full of bloodlust, I resisted. I... tried. But he threw a peasant woman at my feet and I..." his hands clench tightly around each other. "She was dead before I came back to my senses. She was the first I ever killed and I do not even know her name." For that, he deserves the pain.

He takes a deep breath and musters his resolve to keep going. "I was more stubborn than my master gave me credit for. After that, I refused to drink again. I wished for death. My master locked me in a dungeon and tried many ways of convincing me. He whipped me, thinking the pain of those endlessly festering wounds would be enough to convince me. They weren't. But when he turned my sister..."

He closes his eyes and hunches over himself, "She begged me not to leave her. I broke."

[abhorrently]

Before he'll see it, he'll hear her quietly moving before him. And then a warm hand over his own, a gentle pressure there. If he opens his eyes then, Fever is crouched down before him, looking into his face from her position.

There are many things she thinks about him - she hasn't lost any of the dissatisfaction that comes from his actions, from imprisoning someone so. But even her ruined skull can see that it's far more complicated than black and white, messier than anything she ever heard about Cazador, than her circumstances before. He carries none of it with pride. He carries it because it is his. And he is showing her his wounds that fester still, that have not been able to knit themselves back together after all this time.

"Listen to me, Erik. Unless there were two of you - one to sentence the woman to her death, to wield the lash, to bestow upon you impossible compulsion, to create circumstances designed to perfectly destroy you, and the other to endure all that torture - you did not do this to yourself. There is no way that is so, in this entire plane or any other."

If he looks, there is an intensity in Fever's eyes - not a sorrow, but a flickering empathy. Something that understands.

"That death you dealt is yours. To pretend otherwise would be disgraceful. But equally so, I do not believe any power could have stopped it."

So, one carries it. One remembers.

[lordoftheozarks]

He can hear the movement, and sense her in front of him, but it takes a few extra moments to find the courage to look. When he does, he's taken aback by the empathy he finds in her. She has every right not to grant it to him. Especially given what she came here to discuss. Part of him expected to be told it served him right. Part of him agrees. That part grows smaller by the day. Today, especially. He cannot deny the intensity of her gaze, or how the words seem to come from a place deep in her soul. A kindred place.

"I do not deny it is mine," he says with returning resolve. "That I had no power to stop it makes her no less dead. Nor any of the other poor victims whose throats my master cut right in front of me. Even as a vampire, I was still nothing more than his toy. I just happened to be far less breakable." He can't bring himself to elaborate on that but he's sure Fever has no trouble imagining what it could mean.

"He never let me forget it."

[abhorrently]

"No, I don't imagine he would."

Her thumbs stroke the backs of his hands where they rest.

"You can still hear his voice, can't you?"

[lordoftheozarks]

"Always." His fingers curl into fists under her touch. "Not even a thousand years is enough to expunge it."

He never escaped the mocking. How many times did he hear that he was a failure? Oh, how his master delighted in reminding him that those scars would always hold him back. Who would love a marred creature like him? Who would respect a vampire who couldn't stand to eat?

"It shames me that I became like him, even a fraction. I told myself I wouldn't." He failed there, too.

[abhorrently]

There's something of a huff, a tiny shake of her head.

"Hence what you said about being better, every day."

That's his to carry along with the dead. There's no idealistic outcome where he didn't become what he did. Where circumstances are to blame. The parts of it that are his are his. She does not offer forgiveness, only understanding in the most bitter, blood soaked sense. But still, her hands are warm.

[lordoftheozarks]

"Yes. That is all I can do."

It's better that she doesn't try to dissuade him of that. He must carry this load to make sure that he never lets himself slip again. If arrogance was his downfall, then humility must be his uprising.

He gives her hand a squeeze, and then withdraws. "Thank you, Fever, for hearing me out. I do not take it lightly that you came to talk rather than to avenge. You can stay as long as you are comfortable but I think I might like some time to sit alone with my thoughts."