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“Kanae?” the vampire asked, his eyes affixed to the starry night sky.
“Yeah?”
“I think I love you.”
The priest turns his head to look at his companion, whose mysterious crimson eyes remain thrown towards the heavens. They lay sprawled in the grass, clothes bloodstained and filthy, the ground below them muddy and the scent of petrichor and gunpowder pungent.
The confession is almost humorously blasé.
Kanae lifts a hand to shift one of the silver strands away from Aleksandr’s face, fondness seeping into the motion, so much so Kanae feels his fingers weighted down by it to rest just beneath his eye.
Aleksandr turns to look at him. His expression was serene and calm as it so often was, his lashes fluttering when Kanae thumbed the mole beneath his eye.
“That’s a pretty big confession,” Kanae whispers softly. “Aren’t you scared about what I’ll say?”
“If I love you, then I’m prepared for anything you say. The good or the bad,” Aleksandr says simply, “I think my love for you is eternal. Even if it’s not shared, I will be yours forever.”
Kanae feels his throat constrict at his words. It’s… poetic, to say the least. It's unlike his vampire to say such saccharine things… maybe that’s how he knows it’s real- though part of him still wonders if he’s already asleep and dreaming a fantasy.
“I’m a mortal, Aleksandr.”
The vampire rolls onto his side to look at him. He’s regal, even posed casually like this, Kanae thinks. “Then I shall love you now like I would for an infinity.”
“Were you always such a sap?”
“Your library is filled with books like this, their words are disgustingly fond. I was under the impression that this would be something you like so I improvised. Did I do well?”
The priest flushed scarlet at the mention of his private library. Having any other books other than the bible as a priest was strictly forbidden… for it to be discovered...
“I can hear your heartbeat,” Aleksandr offered him a coy smile, with his fangs peeking over his pale lips.
“Oh, shut up.” He says, promptly slapping them on the arm and looking back up at the night sky.
The vampire leaned over him, looking too cocky for his own good. “You like it though, don’t you?”
It was true. He did. He liked it too much in fact.
Kanae says nothing when he loops a hand behind their neck and pulls him in for a kiss. It’s firm and demanding.
Aleksandr is stiff for a moment as he registers the action. Then he relaxes, and his body goes soft against his chest.
Kanae pulls back, letting his eyes flutter open to see the spoils of his efforts painted across Aleksandr’s pale skin. Scarlet like his eyes. Kanae can’t help but kiss him again. And again. And again.
The vampire jitters beneath his touch but offers little resistance when Kanae flips their positions. The human hovers above him, a predatory glint occupying his eyes when he watches as Aleksandr pants beneath him.
“I thought you said you didn’t need to breathe,” he teases.
“I don’t…” Aleksandr mumbles, placing a hand over his rising chest. It trembles where it lays.
The confession lays heavy in the air, something tender, best left unsaid. To instead have the memory weaved by their respective minds and to never be sullied by the other's own introspection.
Kanae cups Aleksandr’s cold cheeks in both palms, and marvels at how smooth his skin is against his lips with each kiss he graces him with. He presses in, closer still, moulding himself between their legs, along their chest, trying desperately to mesh their very souls together beneath the heavens with God as their witness. Kanae has no right of mind to ask his God if this is the correct thing to do- and if his vows of chastity were still honoured whilst he ravaged a monster in tender kisses.
Aleksandr grips him with a gentleness they both know he works hard to maintain, belying the strength capable of bending steel to cater to Kanae’s soft mortal form. It’s humorous, the soft puppy act the vampire poses so perfectly for him, the lie he’d embodied to simply please; and thus, slowly over time became, instead, the truth.
Warm, was the vampire, to none but his priest.
Soft, was the priest, to none but his vampire.
It was like this, beneath the stars on a dark and moonlit night the world came to know the first ever vampire; whose heart had miraculously learned to beat.
──⇌••⇋──
The foreign feeling beneath the weave of his ribcage was unsettling at first to the creature who had known nothing but its silence- a mock impersonation for no other purpose but an internal decoration for those who viciously go searching. But gradually over time, he learned of its merits.
Merits gained by the priest, whose hand would linger across his ashen skin. Whose eyes would wander to none but him. And so, slowly, with each precious moment he saved, his heart learned to beat on its own.
Till eventually, it learned to beat for things other than his priest.
The first time he experienced it, it was for a fledgling of a white dove. He’d found it laying on the ground, quivering, fallen from its nest.
In the past, perhaps he’d have spared the thing a glance and moved it; it was just a bird after all. And such a decision on the vampire’s part would not be borne of cruelty… but instead of innocence.
This time, however, the immortal found himself examining its behaviour curiously when suddenly it struck him… it was injured. An injury led to death. And death led to… the unknown.
The priest had been surprised when his vampire appeared with his cloak bundled in his arms, housing an injured baby dove.
Aleksandr had passed it to him with such gentleness unfitting for a monster and watched nervously as Kanae examined the pitiful thing, whose peeps grew quieter and quieter with each passing hour.
Time was not relative to a creature who was not bound to it, and yet for the first time in Aleksandr’s life, he felt a sense of urgency.
“Is it going to be… okay?” Aleksandr asked jerkily, the words… the concept of the situation was entirely unfamiliar to him.
Kanae looked up from the little baby bird and offered him a very small smile, “I’m afraid there’s nothing we can do for it. It will likely not last the night.”
Aleksandr isn’t sure what to say to that. And his throat can’t find the words to answer when Kanae softly asks him if he’d prefer to be the one to dispatch it and cut it's suffering short.
The sound of the shovel echoes throughout the church, and Aleksandr is left with a strange string in his chest as he watches through the stained windows as Kanae dutifully buries it beneath the earth.
He watches as the seasons change, and the little rock that marked its resting place became entombed beneath a swad of white lilies.
──⇌••⇋──
Aleksandr learns the thing in his chest is tiresome to bear.
After hours of swinging a sword, bathing himself in the viscera of his enemies and expending his mana all night, he feels it weigh heavily and beat relentlessly.
When Aleksandr admits to his strange breathlessness, Kanae tells him it's adrenaline. He says it brings strength and enshrouds the mind from horrors, and with it exhaustion.
The mere ownership of such a ridiculous organ seems like such a hassle.
Even still it does not cease its chatter, even in the silence of the peaceful church grounds. Idly it thrums to a tuneless tune.
It's annoying he thinks one night as he lays sleepless, kept awake by the insistent rap-a-tap-tap on his bones. The thin satin sheet clings to him where he lays in a hard coffin below the church.
It’s quiet down there, a place Kanae had offered and allowed him to occupy. The darkness swathed the room, the coffin was simply something in storage, ready to be occupied by an unfortunate mortal, but instead became ironically occupied by an immortal.
Kanae had said nothing when Aleksandr had wordlessly climbed into it for the first time and shut the lid. Aleksandr found it funny to watch the way Kanae let his aloof expression drop into astonishment through the cracks in the wood when he thought he wasn’t looking.
A quiet, dark place was really all a vampire needed to be happy. A place to let their senses rest from the bustle of the mortal world; and a coffin was perfect for that.
Or at least it was.
Ba-dum. Ba-dum. Ba-dum.
Aleksandr lifts the lid off his coffin and sighs. Abandoning hope to sleep for the night and instead he rises to find something new to do.
He flitters through the shadows of the cellar like a ghost, and up the stairs to the wooden latch, and opens it silently. Like water he slips through and creeps through the church, satisfied by the shroud he holds; the innate satisfaction of fulfilling his instincts of playfully hunting in the dark.
He leaps through the rafters of the church, clinging to the marble walls and letting his wings stretch to their full freedom. He plays like a young and vivacious vampir, in the dead of the night.
Somewhere below, he is foolishly mirrored by a feline, who runs rampant and skitters after dust bunnies and mice. Aleksandr even at times chases the mice just to best the cat, watching smugly as it flicked its tail irritated when he caught them before it.
It is sometime later he eventually tires himself out. Where he descends to the alter, crouched there for a moment before slinking off to a place he prefers to be. The door here is locked, but he merely uses a key, not paying heed to the dark shape of a cat that darts through the door by his feet.
“Have fun?” a sleep-drowsy voice echoes through the chamber. Aleksandr isn’t surprised he was spotted, but the voice makes him jump regardless.
The vampire says nothing as he approaches the bedside of the mortal. Who refuses to rouse despite the danger he is in.
The vampire sighs, sinking to the floor beside the bed. His head rested on his arms; he uses a talon to play idly with a loose thread in Kanae’s blanket. Being immortal was boring, when your partner was stagnant nearly half the time, either asleep, eating or doing… human things.
A hand reaches across and pats his hair. He neither denies the affection nor accepts it, just lets the human do as he pleases. Kanae’s had an obsession with his hair since the beginning, and Aleksandr would sooner than be caught dead than admitting he enjoyed the fussing.
“Do you want to lay down with me?” Kanae asked his voice scarcely a whisper, threatening to be swallowed by the softness of his pillow.
Aleksandr blinked lazily at him. “Aren’t you scared?”
The saying 'Keep your friends close, and enemies closer' felt like it applied here, to a vampire hunter inviting a vampire to his bed... didn't it?
Kanae snorts but doesn’t elaborate on what he finds funny. Instead, he lifts the cover invitingly.
He thinks arguing is moot, and so he wordlessly clambers in, cramming himself onto the already small bed. He wriggles for a moment to find a comfortable position so his wings can splay over the edge, the other coming to wrap around his priest.
Kanae opens an eye to look at the limb in the gloom. Aleksandr knows from experience his eyesight cannot pierce the gloom but finds himself amused as Kanae tries his best to squint to try to see it regardless.
A hand smooths over the thin inner membrane of the wing, the fingertips tracing the joints in the bones with featherlight curiosity. “They’re cold,” Kanae says quietly, “I always expect you to be warm.”
“Does it bother you I'm not?”
Kanae is quiet for a moment, tracing abstract shapes in his wing. “No. No, not really. Cold is the wrong word anyway, you’re just… lukewarm.”
Aleksandr huffs in amusement, “Lukewarm, huh?”
The priest nods, rolling back over to his side to look him in the eye. A hand brushes against his chest, “You retain warmth, it’s not like you’re made of snow or anything.” He pauses before adding, "Like the story of Goldilocks. You're just right."
Aleksandr hums, enjoying the feeling of Kanae’s fingers pressed to his chest, where beneath a heartbeat startles- fluttering akin to a butterfly held between clasped hands; desperate to escape.
“The longer I hold you, the more warmth you gain. It’s not so bad,” Kanae says with a coy smile, “it gives me an excuse to touch you.”
“You are gross,” the vampire says, thankful for the shadows that mask him from the mortal’s eye, for the embarrassing blush he encompassed was unfit for a prince.
His human eventually returns to the unknown depths of sleep, like a sailor called to the sea.
And Aleksandr waits on the shore of the waking, like he will one day so often do, for him to return.
He waits to see their eyes flutter open come dawn, and the pleasant baritone of his voice husky from disuse. He waits for their hands to stretch for him, and lips to make themselves known to his own and whisper the soft secrets of his otherwordly dreams of angels and black cats.
His life may never be quiet again, with this terrible beat in his chest. But perhaps, he thinks wistfully as he feels Kanae’s heartbeat in tune with his own, that maybe it’s not so bad.