RP:Hounds
Apartment in Vailkrin
Haakon could recall, vividly, the night his sire had beat the idea of control into him. Haakon had been young, green yet in his undeath, and had grown clumsy in a spar with a bout of wild temper. He’d taken a vicious blow to his chest for the trouble of it. There was hardly a better way than the pain of a blade running clean through a man, even a vampiric one, to teach such a valuable lesson. Even still, pain was just as convincing an argument against it. It was pain, and perhaps a healthy bit of deeply buried embarrassment, that had the man storming through the streets of the Dark Land in a path that he’d familiarized himself with in a matter of days, bleeding his own godforsaken blood in the dirty streets as he went. He neared the pet shop, the scents of oddities and animals distant and ignored, and charged right to the little room for rent above it. There was a trill of dark satisfaction riding the steady wave of his anger even as Cesaria drowned his senses. Behind walls and doors, still the sound of her heartbeat filled his head. In an attempt to silence it, he beat his bloody hand on her door forcefully. If and when she opened, Haakon would be filling her doorway with the lines of his face drawn in temper and marked with blood. While he waited, the vampire leaned against the frame, hipshot with a thumb looped into the black belt of his handsome trousers.
Prior to the banging on her door, Cesaria, who had spent days searching for another remedy to her curse and become frustrated to the point of despair, had resolved to give in to old habits no matter how ill-advised. She shut the heavy black curtains, locked her door and put the cauldron on the hearth. From her knapsack she withdrew a round stone no bigger than a jewelry box, and decorated just as ornately. On the lid of the box were a pair of sexless lips. She whispered to the stone her desire and soon a beautiful song, complete with a backing band, poured forth from the trinket. Cesaria, in a black silk nightgown cinched loose and low on the hips and cascading to her bare feet in lacey detail, began to dance. As she danced, her lips peeled back to expose broken and missing teeth, her eyes grew sunken and pale, her lucious black hair thinned into stringy yellow-green patches. The rot spread down her limbs, defining varicose veins, boils, rashes, split skin. Her spine curved unnaturally and one foot became clubbed. She danced anyway, singing along with the voicebox, stirring her fragrant brew (tomato, beets, celery, and carrots, for the keenly-nosed), letting herself feel the faded joys that were forbidden to her years ago. Then the bang came. Cesaria drew up short, her eyes wide in terror at the thought she may yet be discovered. “I said I’ll have the rent by the end of the week!” she shouted at the presumed landlady as she clamored over to her bedside table to grab her black veil and at least cover her face. Her alarm quickly replaced her mirth and she returned, almost instantly, to her soft curves, her straight back, her thick curls, her long trembling lashes. “I’m busy!” she shouted again. The music continued to play.
Haakon felt, underneath the haze of anger that currently drove him to continue his assault on the door, surprise. He hadn’t expected music, of all things, to be coming from within the room. He didn’t imagine, as his hearing was quite keen despite the racket he was currently making, that she was the one creating it. Infact, if he hadn’t been so angry, he might have even heard her dancing as he approached. The vampire wanted, not for the first time, to step inside her world and discover whatever secrets she kept beyond the damned unanswered door that stood in his way. “Cesaria,” He barks her name once, rolling his eyes as she calls out, filing away that she was currently behind her dues for the shoddy little space. His hand drops away again, to listen to her move about the room. “I’m not your bloody landlady,” Then a smile came as the door finally swung open. On a normal man, or perhaps even on a vampire, it might have been charming. But the blood that had dotted and dried brown gave the angles of his face a darker, more sinister tone. Reaching out with one arm, the vampire leaned over Cesaria and angles himself just so the door would have considerable difficulty closing and, unless she moved away, put his face near the veil that covered her own. The coppery tang of blood, and the earthier scents of sandalwood and pine, clung to him as he shifted his weight and leaned further onto the doorjamb. “Be a dear and invite me in,” He says gently, his tone and demeanor of unhurried friendliness a juxtaposition to the cold rage behind clear blue eyes.
Cesaria’s heart skipped at the sound of his voice, exactly as she had remembered it these past few days when it crept into her mind unbidden. She pulled a dark red sheet off the standing mirror beside the door, which she had obscured for her own vanity, and to help her forget. Haakon’s timing proved impeccable for a second time, as he burst through the door just as she adjusted her thin gown which had slipped indecently. His face hovered inches away from her veil as she adjusted the spaghetti strap just under his chin. Only the fear he inspired in her kept her curse at bay, but beneath that fear was the same satisfaction she read in his hungry stare. She should have sent him away for his presence was risky to her in ways both simple and complex, but instead she nodded for him to come in. “Go on.” The room was so cramped that Haakon could not lie flat on the floor without touching some furniture or two, and the vampire retro-chic decor was made all the more gaudy by the low ceiling and cheap wood. The bed provided the only seating. “The hex hound?” she guessed as she lit two lanterns to better see his wounds.
Haakon waited for her nod and the words. It was interesting, annoying even, that all the sharpness of the anger that had been clawing inside of him eased even as her fear surrounded him. He watched her adjust her nightgown unflinchingly, only moving beyond her when she’d finished. He took a quick glance around the room, noted the regrettable lack of space and even more despairing decor. And he moved as if he knew the room as well as his own. In front of the bed he began undressing. He slipped off the fine suit jacket, now ruined with his own blood, and draped it neatly over the footboard. He loosened the amber tie, pulled it over his head to place it on the jacket. With ease he pulled the torn black shirt from his pants and unbuttoned it with nimble fingers. There were healing wounds covering the skin beneath the tattered shirt, bloody and raw rips deep into his skin. Even with his vampiric healing, what covered his chest and stomach could have ended a living man. “Imagine my surprise,” He says in his affable and calm tone, “As I’m standing in the middle of my own library with a very prominent and lucrative client,” Haakon shrugs out of the shirt and tosses it over the rest of his clothing. He turned to her then. There was an onyx serpent coiled into an intricate knot, it’s eyes of gold that mirrored the amber that hung from his ear, inked onto the pale skin inside of his right forearm. “When suddenly a god’s damned hound is suddenly ruining one of my favorite suits and getting my own blood on a handwoven rug that cost more than the whole of this apartment and everything in it ten times over.” The temper returns and this oddly comforts him. Shirtless and bleeding, the vampire crosses the room with considerable speed. “Now, whatever you’ve done to me, I’d suggest you remedy the situation.” He pauses, smiling again. “And I’ll consider leaving that pretty throat of yours intact for another night.”
Cesaria watched him undress unflinchingly, intuiting with some amusement that he wished to disturb her and keen not to let him succeed so easily. She loathed herself a little for being so thrilled by his performance, for bending the rules of her policy of solitude. Her veil obscured her gaze as it leapt not to his wounds but upon other lines cut deep under perfect skin. She noted the tattoo, the earring, the boasting of wealth and made her own secret file on him. “I didn’t do anything to you,” she said simply as she fetched a pewter wash bin from behind her bedside table and crushed rosehip into the water before soaking a clean rag. With her shoulder to him, she gazed down upon her hands in the water, kneading the rag, and hesitated, doubting herself. Her heart pounded as her lips disobeyed her better judgment. “May I?” she asked, her chin tucked slightly away from him. Without awaiting an answer, she wrung the rag and gently mopped the blood away from his torn flesh. Unknowingly she held her breath, her focus split between the gashes on his body and the gashes yet to appear on her face. Her hand shook a little as she felt herself lose control of the perfect balance. Suddenly, she pushed away from him and stepped back into the shadows beside the glowing hearth. “I can’t help you. You can’t stay,” she said, a tremble in her voice.
Haakon watched her. Even as he had undressed he watched her. The veil annoyed him. The fact that it annoyed him annoyed him. He could see her well enough, keen as his undead eyes were, and still he wanted an unobscured look at her face. It amused him that she didn’t flinch, didn’t protest as he undressed. But he was closer now, and he studied what he could make of her eyes. And the veil continued to annoy him. His eyes narrow when she claims, not for the first time, that she had nothing to do with the hound that would surely be annoying him until he found a solution. “Witches,” He says, his eyes rolling toward the low ceiling, with all the ire and emphasis of a particularly nasty curse when she moves to crush the rosehip into water. But he doesn’t move. Haakon doesn’t flinch when she presses it against the wounds, the pain searing and real but somehow commanding less of his attention than the shaking of her hand. He raises his own, a hair from touching her before she moves away abruptly. “Take care,” He warns, his voice suddenly cold enough to chill the air, “If you convince me you’re useless in ridding me of the damn hound, I might decide to tap into all of that blood just beneath your skin. Small as you are, I’m sure it would do just the trick to stop this bleeding.”
Cesaria wrung her own hands, tugging at her fingers in an anxious tic. His insult of ‘witch’ grated, but she said nothing. Her lively music played in the backdrop at odds with the frigid tension in the air. The song evoked memories that made her reckless. Gazing upon his rent body, she wet her lips as once more she disobeyed her reason. “I’ll tell you what I know,” she said quickly as she moved past him, her bare shoulder brushing his arm. From her knapsack she retrieved her journal. “The hex hound can be summoned by following this ritual,” she said as she opened the journal to a specific page. “There is a poultice required that only rare witches can brew. Unfortunately for you, I am no witch. And it costs a fortune, though…” She eyed his suit and said nothing further on the subject of money. Their ideas of what constitutes a ‘fortune’ were probably leagues apart. “Most witches summon hex hounds to subjugate them and force them to hound their enemies, and eventually kill them. But if the witch fails to take control of the hound after summoning it, it will kill her. However...I had read a legend that…” She paused, unsure of herself, reluctant to share so much detail. She continued before her reluctance angered him, as everything was wont to do. Flipping to a new page with notes on the legend, she continued, “People of a certain gift can lure the hex hound to places where The Veil is thin. There, the hound eats the afflicted’s curse instead of their flesh. Or so the legend goes.” Remembering his sullen mood the last time she referred to his curse, she added with an abundance of sympathy, “The hound does not eat all curses.” She glanced suggestively at his lips which obscured his fangs. “That has been tried and has failed… But others have succeeded with other curses, and I was hoping to be among those lucky few.”
Haakon’s lip twitched as she moved, the ghost of a smile coming to his lips as her eyes turned to his suit in her explanation. It was true enough that he cloaked himself in his wealth as much as he did his power. And why shouldn’t he? He’d spent his long, never ending existence accumulating a great deal of both. He should have focused on how her explanation would rid him of the annoyance that now plagued him, but instead she reminded him of her own supposed curse and instantaneously his mind was back to turning it over in his head. Puzzling her together. He knew she was human, could sense that much easily with her scent on him… And around him, filling the small room and burning the back of his throat. What curse? His mind whispered, not for the first time. He followed her then, standing close, daring her to move away from him as he lifted a hand to the veil that he wouldn’t remove. Beyond it, he watched her eyes raise to his lips and smiled easily again. “Funny thing about curses and perspective,” He murmurs, his voice suddenly soft, his eyes suddenly dark. But he steps away from her before he finishes. The vampire moves to the journal, touches the page. “None of this tells me how to rid myself of it.” He points out dryly. Haakon traces a word with his finger. “Why do you wear that veil?” He asks, turning back to her. He doesn’t wait for an answer. “If you don’t have any answers for me, you’ll go with me to another witch until we find them.” He didn’t pose this as a question and continues to ignore her insistence that she was not, in fact, a witch. “We’ll find a more capable witch, find a way to rid myself of this thing you’ve set upon me and maybe your good fortune and life will continue.” It fascinated him that in a dark, hidden corner of his mind he entertained the idea of aiding her in the pursuit of lifting whatever curse she thought plagued her. He was reminded again of her smile, the one that had slipped into something dark and ugly in the black night. Pieces of the puzzle he mentally worked to click into place. “Was it a witch that cursed you then? What is it, a vanity curse that steals your beauty with a touch of the moon's light?” He would have no way of knowing how close he might come with a guess. But if he had his way, and Haakon was a man accustomed to having just that, he would work on it until he saw the whole of the picture. It was really such a rare thing that could interrupt the boredom that came with eternal life.
Haakon’s hand on her veil made her freeze like a deer who caught the scent of a wolf. In her mind, a reckless voice egged him on, ‘Do it. Do it. Do it. Do it.’ But she froze, her better judgment winning this round in the battle between desire and reason. As he demanded that she accompany him on his quest to terrorize witches under the pretense of curse-busting, she couldn’t help but smile, and thus lose her balance on the tightrope she had been walking since he invaded her room and made walking tightropes worth it again. She turned away from him abruptly and busied herself with something in her knapsack as she recalled unpleasant memories that tipped the scales back towards the forlorn and beautiful. She regarded him again as he came close to piecing together her curse, an act of curiosity on his part that revealed him and moved her. In his line of questioning she discovered what he had not yet admitted to himself: that within him a seed of commitment had begun to take root, a commitment to helping her escape her affliction. This pleased her dangerously off balance, and so she focused on her mother to steady herself again. “Yes, a witch cursed me. And it isn’t the moon’s touch that I fear.” Suddenly a brazen idea — or more frankly put, a stupid idea — form in the crucible of lust. “Come here…” she guided him to sit on the bed so he would not tower over her. She stood before him and glanced down at his wounds to see if his wretchedness would dissuade her from her recklessness. It did not. She lifted her hands to her veil as if to lift it, but paused before exposing her face. “Close your eyes.”
Haakon might have been displeased that she’d gotten such an easy read on him, her own quick mind putting together what he hadn’t even admitted to himself. Instead, as he wasn’t privy to her innermost thoughts, he was only confused and intrigued when she turned away. Not when he’d neared, not when he dared to suggest removing the veil… But when she smiled. His thoughts crowded him and moved across the lines of his face. She reveals more of herself to him and he files that away too, crossing off moonlight on his shortening list of possibilities. It nearly moved him to laugh then, when she instructed him to her bed as easily and surely as he had with his own demands of hers… And then, to his own amazement, he did just that. Answer her summons, drawn into the gravity of her feeling more helpless to resist it that he’d felt in many lifetimes. He watched her look down at the mess the hex hound had created of him, even now more healed than when he’d first started beating down her door, and wondered if he’d see revulsion cross her. He sits, finally laughing when she hesitates to lift the veil and orders him to first close his eyes. “Suddenly shy, little witch?” He hesitates, the music and her scent wreathing around him, stirring an ache inside of his throat.
Cesaria pushed her hand forcefully over her mouth as he laughed, digging her nails into her own cheeks a little to distract herself from the joy of his laughter. She should have left just then. She was losing control, but too committed was she to her foolish idea to abandon it now. Why had this never occurred to her before? Perhaps she lacked the inspiration, until him. “Close your eyes and threaten me. Make it convincing. Make me fear you again.”
Haakon leaned forward then, nearly hearing a click as more of those little pieces fell into place and reached for the veil again. This time he doesn’t stop himself, he pulls on it. “Is it laughter then? A smile?” The accent that played across his words thickens. He murmurs again, whispering something in a foreign tongue. He’s close again. So close. His eyes watch her with cold intensity. “If I threaten you Cesaria, I won’t have a problem convincing you.” But now, perhaps he would have trouble convincing himself. He moves his hand, intent on removing on the veil. The air was tense between them, rolling and charged like a storm. “Smile for me and I might close my eyes.” He tilts his head, teasing.
Cesaria didn’t withdraw from him nor thwart his hand away from her veil. She gazed back into his pale blue eyes darkened by his handsome brow and felt her lips begin to wither, the transformation visible to him for a split second, as it has been in the forest. She ripped out from under the veil, leaving the cloth in his hand, and leaned forward so that her face was alongside his, her chin over his shoulder, her face angled so that he cannot see it past the thick mess of her curls. “Threaten me right now!” she barked in an urgent tone that grew hoarse as the curse took her throat.
Haakon watched the change blink over her without flinching. The pretty softness of her face withering so quickly he might have missed it underneath a veil or the skull of the deer. The picture in his mind started to clear. And how cruel, how bitter it must be to have her happiness stolen with a curse so ugly. Something like sympathy crossed him, just a flash, as quick as fish darting through water. The vampire dropped the veil, threaded the soft, dark curls through his fingers instead. “And if I don’t?” He dares. He waited, watched her while he counted each beat of her racing heart.
“Please, Haakon,” Cesaria begged as she leaned onto his shoulder, hungry for physical touch after six years bereft of anything more intimate than a handshake. He pulled back her curls to satisfy his curiosity and discovered a gaunt cheek, drooping lids, misshapen nose, rotted teeth, a fractured jaw. She turned her face away from him as much as she could to preserve what little dignity she had left. Her hair slipped away from his fingers in bleached, stringy, patches. As she felt the limp hair detach in clumps, the anguish of being so hideous and exposed before Haakon, of all people, made her suffering overwhelming. He would know by the life and color that springs back into her cheek, by the volume that returns to her hair, and by the fullness of her lips that she was truly unhappy. She pulled away from him, embarrassed and ashamed. Her back to him, she buried her face in her hands to catch stray tears she had not shed in many months. She had carefully avoided exactly this humiliation. And she had been stupid, brazen, over confident with the heady thought that she could control it. A significant part of her wanted to be angry with him for prizing his curiosity above her dignity, for sating his appetite for the ghoulish like circus go-ers visit the freaks. But that’s just it. The ghoulish curiosity was only natural. It was she who was unnatural. “Go,” she said meekly.
Haakon felt something stir within him, something broken and long buried when his name came from her pleadingly. He felt the warmth of her, all of that rushing life and blood beneath tawny skin as surely as she would have felt the chill of the grave from him. And the curtain of her hair parts, reveals a cruel and horrid manipulation of reality. The music continues to play as his cold eyes take her in unflinchingly, only his mouth moving into a line of sudden anger. It struck through him again, as hot and reckless as it had when he’d made the decision to push his way into his home and demand the answers he’d needed from the moment he first heard her running through the black forest. It burned through the shadows of his long dead heart, even through the secret sliver of pity that had grown there as she pulled away from him. And it struck him then as her tears came and brought beauty with it, how selfish it might have been to demand this of her. She commanded him to go and he almost listened. He stood. He hesitated. Annoyance flashed through him again as his eyes moved down and found the damned veil she’d covered herself in. And then he moved but not toward the door. He crashed into her without gentleness, lifting her as if she weighed nothing, pushing her toward a wall or bed or chair. He didn’t know. Riding on his impatience he moved to devour her lips, to push his hands through her hair greedily again. Needy, hungry in ways that even blood couldn’t satisfy. And as quickly as he’d moved on her he would move back, away. It was in self preservation, in a desperate attempt at control. If she looked toward the vampire she might see a great deal of emotion play darkly across his face but none of them would be disgust. “We will find a witch.” His voice was rough, thick with anger and tangled with his lilting accent. He collected his clothes quickly. Looking at her, surrounded by her, Haakon felt his white knuckled control slip dangerously. He turned quickly, looked back only once as he reached the door. There was a war in his eyes. “I see you, Cesaria.”
Cesaria yielded to him, her beauty lingering longer now that her humiliation had gripped her so fiercely. But he persisted, and the ardor of his kiss broke through her agony and made her ugly again, starting at the mouth which rotted against his eternally perfect lips. Cruel, the word Haakon settled on when considering her curse, was the most accurate. He pulled away quickly and she was grateful for that too, even as her hideous lips ached to be beautiful and entwined in his. As she broke free from the spell of his kiss, her humiliation returned and with it her beauty. She dared not look at him for fear of finding pity there, when all she wanted to see in his gaze was desire. That had been denied to her too, she was sure of it. She would not look to confirm it, and thus missed the anger and resolve in his stare, though likely it would have made no difference. Is there much difference between his righteous anger and pity? She would think not. His promise of finding a witch fell on ears deafened my pride. After Haakon left, Cesaria replayed the evening in her mind, unable to sleep and reliving her humiliation over and over again. Before dawn, she would have fled the city, intent to put Vailkrin far behind her, and let the memory of Haakon fade.