Order amid Chaos: Kindred is a saga.

When I opened my eyes, Jarrod was staring at me. I jerked to a sitting position, startled and confused. The sleep I didn’t remember starting took a few blinks to leave my eyes, as I came to see I was curled at the head of my bed, where I did remember keeping vigil over Jarrod’s feverish, unconscious form for many, many hours. Jarrod now sat at the opposite corner of the bed, staring at me steadily.

"Jarrod! Are you all right?" I asked.

"I am."

His tone was as flat as his expression.

"What’s the matter?" His eyes were bloodshot depthless voids; I hated seeing his wonderful eyes that way.

"I think you should answer that question, Serai. What happened to me?" he asked. The question was like a rapier into my gut, more because he stabbed it into me, than for my pre-existing fear of answering it.

"You, Jarrod, you have to understand, you were going to die." He cut me off.

"I know that. I believe you."

"Okay," I paused. His demeanor was so strange, he was cold. As time passed, I became steadily less comfortable under his glare. "Well. He was a vampire. He came for me, he thought I was weakened. I was, I suppose, but not enough for the likes of him to make a meal of me. Not after I saw you. So, well . . ."

"Get to the point."

"He stabbed you."

"I remember that," he said. I took a deep breath, wincing a little at his words.

"You were going to die. I had to save you. Somehow." I remembered the way the young vampire died, the crack of bones- a sound I hadn’t heard in a long time. I remembered how dark Jarrod’s blood was on the carpet. Not as dark as mine.

"So I saved you. I made you like me. You couldn’t die, Jarrod. I couldn’t let you die." I admitted.

A long time passed, or at least it seemed long, until he actually replied. His eyes didn’t move, they rested calmly, icily, on me and held me in their crystalline freeze. I am not entirely sure that he was actually seeing me, though, because after a few moments, he blinked, and seemed to refocus on me.

"I believe you, you know," he said. "I can feel it." He raised his arm and flexed his fist as he spoke. "There is something completely different in me. I can feel it. Heat, or something. I am stronger. I can hear things I shouldn’t be able to hear. I can smell you sitting right there. I can hear your heartbeat, I know how nervous you are right now. I can see the sweat beginning to rise in your pores even as I say this."

All true.

"Vampire’s blood is a strong gift," I ventured.

"Gift? An interesting word for what you have done. Taking away my mortality, the one thing I was sure of in life, now gone. Maybe. Maybe you’re right. Maybe it is a gift." He paused. "I suppose I should find out."

He stood up, and walked towards the door. I half stood, entirely unsure as what he was going to do. I could not read him at all, he was a cold stone.

He left.

The door slammed a little behind him, and I was enveloped in an excruciating silence. I melted back onto my bed, dazed, staring at the walls around me blankly. Gone? Where was he going? How could I let him go? Why am I just sitting here asking stupid questions? What am I supposed to do now?

Nothing came to me.

I can barely bring myself to write, right now, as bored as I am feeling. As insipid. As stretched and distracted by a thousand things, which can only hold my attention for the barest fraction of a second before I get fed up and shove it to the side and once again bemoan my boredom. And now I’m doing it on the Internet. What a wonderful time we live in.

I’m surprised at myself and a little disappointed really. I can’t have the last 2 hours back. They’re gone. And forever, I will have to remember that I wasted them. I really couldn’t find anything that I felt deserved to use up that time, so it went squandered. Finally, I came to understand what was making tonight seem so colourless.

Its because I want dawn to come tomorrow, so much.

that was making love. this is fucking.

come and take it you desperate prick, if you can. i hold all the fucking cards here.

his eyes work over her bones and flesh like a pair of starving jackals: starting at her naked shoulder.

tell me what you want, little bitch.
i want you to beg for me.
say it again. please. bitch.
you will take it how i give it to you today. maybe never again.
deal.

tell me your fantasy.
i want you, and her, and her at the same time.

that is a lie. he can only want her. he owns her in his mind, she belongs to him. her body is an extension of his right arm to be used at his own discretion.

she controls him that way. she needs the control, her mind wanders, but she knows no guilt while he possesses her flesh. what happens in the mind is only fantasy and not adultry.

fluids begin to pour out of her. she’s slick like that.

you are so right. you are so perfect. whatever i say, always sounds that way.

tell me you hate me that you only want my cock.
you are pathetic and your dick is puny.

hardened flesh penentrates to the bone.

you are mine. you’ll never be anyone else’s. say it.
i am yours forever. her mind is being fucked by someone else. i only want you.

you want me to use you.

she laughs.

i am using you like a whore.
i am using you, like a whore.

he reaches inside her and rips an orgasm from the back of her throat.

now open your mouth, bitch, and see what love tastes like.

My quivering nervous energy overcomes me. I stand, not two feet from her, mute and stupid. So caught up in the electric high wracking my body and mind that I can’t seem to connect my mind to my mouth.

Just say it for Christ’s sake!

Where the fuck are you going to get if you’re still acting like a timid, terrified teenager all your life? Jax would not be impressed. As a matter of fact, here he is, fucking livid because you sat there and chatted, you at her slice of mandarin, and then walked away. What the hell happened to carpe diem?

For being such a self-confidant, self-assured SOB, you seem awfully quiet. How do you get anything you want? Do you ever get what you want, or do you just take whatever is on offer?

Well, so far, yeah, the offered stuff – it was pretty good.

Imagine then how good the special reserve shit might be. That special dark roast you actually have to ask for. Just imagine.

“Don’t you hate it when you go somewhere, planning to do something, and somehow manage to avoid getting it done?”

“Sounds rather wasteful.”

“It is. Massive, frustrating waste of time. Which is why I am asking you right now if you want to grab some gelato or something after work, like I planned to ask yesterday.”

“Sure, sounds good.”

Now stop imagining shit, you jaundiced little fuck. Make it happen. I’m sick of hearing your pining and lonesome whining.

I realized yesterday that what would have been my 4 year anniversary with my ex came and went without me even noticing. You must understand, I predicted that day would have been a hard one, all that reminiscing and painful loneliness. I didn’t even notice.

I want to thank every one of you people for being here, in this place I call home more often than not, for keeping me distracted with a real life, rather than the fantasy I really thought I was going to be missing.

Thanks.

Nightwalker, I who walk alone. Nightwaker, darkness calls me home. The descent of evening breathes my life, I am released from daylight’s captivity to become what I will. So enslaved to the travails of the sun that I cannot bear those wakeful hours, I wait for nightfall to become myself. Letting go the obliged restraints, open up my starving eyes, I move through time and space, life and place.

The etheral whisper of my presence glides unnoticed through the air, I wonder if I am really there. Leaving no trace of my passing, can I truly assert existance? No matter now, I am within my own thrall. To myself I turn, and let everything else fall.

North my spirit flits, to she there whose soul claimed to fit. A kindred wanderer I find gripped by the unmerciful reality she cannot break. Left alone by her maker, weak deciever choosing to forsake her. I reach out, fearful of my power, arrogant intuition serving as wisdom that time has yet to prove. What more can I give than what I have taken? I fear the damage I could cause her innocence, I fear my own terrible flaws, but fear hath no strength against desire’s hungry claws.

South my avatar walks, into a place fortold as my home. Here rests the heart of a lion, in the body of a sparrow, given to philosophical foreplay and lusty afterglow. Her weakness for words that are also her strength, they do not slake her need. Never will the self be as pleasant as the idyllic partner, while the fantasy is all too perfect. Only my own imaginary me could ever fulfill those fantastic requirements. Only he could stand before the sharp-eyed barbarian and cock a jaunty eyebrow. Only he already has.

Toying with what ears have heard and eyes have seen, reconstructing what her jibes might mean, the walker visits memories of the flesh. The arabican scent wafts through the mind as her figure takes its invisible shape. A familiar jaunted brow calls distinctly to the walker, who is buried, somewhere, within me during the day. To be unanswered, or at least underwhelmed in reply. Letting opportunty fly and the hot iron decay.

Where is this willful walker when the sun comes up? Where is the vitality he seems possessed of? Where is is courage, his wit, his fire? Why can I not summon up that which is unquestionably an intrinsic part of myself… why does he run away?

So good to see you. I missed you so much.

Sometimes being taken out of your normal routine helps to make that routine seem less commonplace.

Fleecy electric heat finally calms my shuddering body with its soothing embrace. I haven’t been this (that) cold in quite a while, not indoors at least. Solitude lies beside me, with an arm draped lovingly around my shoulders and her delicate fingers teasing the back of my neck for the first time in two days, and I find that I have missed her. She comes to me now on my second and second last night away from home, where in this secluded quiet oasis by the river I would have thought we would have spent more quality time up to now. Here, in this fingernail of human occupancy, I have found fewer reflective moments than are typically available in my more metro-suburban lifestyle. To demand solitude from groups of people is less difficult than requesting it from only one.

Do not read this as complaint. Herein lies simply the record of unexpected experience of this place, this time. Never before have I been invited by a single person to join them singly in their (parent’s) private retreat away from it all. Never before have I been singled out as he who should come along. Touched, I am, by this distinction. For although I do know the absence of my solitude, I need this, I need people to whom I mean something. This contradiction: removed from my (our) network, to be disconnected here by the water, and yet never quite alone. Less physically alone than before, but none of you important ones are physical bodies yet. The ephemeral, etheral, electronic personalities are distant ascii echoes that call to me from across the reflective surface of the river, heard and viewed from a different angle.

Begged, I have, pleaded I did, for companionship, for company, for partnership, and in being cut off, I finally notice not only do I already have it, but in more abundance than I could have guessed before now. Being struck by one of those realizations that truly makes me feel stupid, I apologise to those that it affects. Loneliness is a fine thing to complain about, but it can’t be done. Complaints cannot be made by anyone, to anyone, about being lonely. Think about it. I didn’t.

I guess I’m learning, I must be warmer now. I’ll soon be turning, round the corner now. And as things begin to change, I thank those of you who have been players here a while already, and welcome those who are just getting in on the act. On with the show.

Order amid Chaos: Kindred is a saga.

Love is an act of Blood
      and I’m bleeding
Pool in the shape of a heart

I crossed out the last line I’d written. My frustration manifested in black zigzags across the page. I looked away at nothing in particular. My mind swung around in circles, the same points coming up again and again. I wanted her, I realized. After being thrown out of her rooms, I knew it. Or at least it seemed like I knew it, seemed like I wanted her. The hundreds of repeated circles hand’t made anything clearer. She scared me a little. She was enigmatic, veiled, and I liked the challenge. But it seemed like… felt like something she didn’t enjoy doing. There was something odd in her voice, as I replayed the last things she said to me.

But her words were quite clear. Get out. Run. From her? She was torn. She held me so tenderly for a moment. I’d felt her heart beat out an excited cadence into my ear. She was sorry, she was hurting.

I snapped.

My pen flew across the room, and my coat whirled out behind me.

"Fuck it. Fuck this," a slamming door punctuated my words.

*****

I didn’t leave my apartment for two days. I didn’t feed, I didn’t sleep. Mostly, I sat on the balcony, staring across the water, begging for strength, or guidance, or a swift end to it all. I despaired because of my despair. The mere fact that there was yet something left in the world that touched me had shaken my stasis. Then I had ruined it by losing control. So quickly I succumbed to base hunger, that I force him to flee for his life.

I had thought myself hardened, strong, disciplined enough to control my urges. Truthfully, I was none of these. Truthfully I had not felt an urge worth supressing, or fulfilling, for decades. I was not controlled- I was disconnected. Now, though, there would be no second time- seeing my failure, I would not bear it again. To come so close to destroying him; I was a child teased by candy. My selfishness had cost me him in my life, and nearly cost him his life in its entirety. I was fated to destroy what I loved. I was a plague, a curse, a blackness that love could not endure. I stared at the gathering clouds, forlorn.

I was still sitting, draped flaccidly across the frame of a garden chair when I sensed him approach. My head was groggy, sore from lack of nourishment. I could go a long time without, but the first few days were an agonizing withdrawal. After that, I pondered, a long hibernative sleep.

He drew closer. I could almost smell him by now. He would be inside soon, and I found I didn’t care. Hot tears pooled at the corners of my weary eyes.

A crack and a crash told me he’d actually broken the door open in his haste. His smell preceeded him: he was young, bold and hungry. Perhaps the worsening weather encouraged him to be out so early.

A moment later, he stood above me. His approach had been quiet, but not so that I could not mark his progress. He looked as young as he smelled, still revelling in his infancy- obviously mingling with mortals who claimed to be our kin. Over-dressed in leather and chrome, with piercings and a mohawk, his human-inspired goth stylings made me smile weakly.

"Like what you see?" he said. Originally, he’d learnt to speak in England. He smiled, and reached down to pull my robe- the same I’d worn for days now -wide open. I didn’t bother resisting. I’d been begging for an end for hours.

"I am going to enjoy this more than I’d expected," he said, raking his eyes across my body. A vague, distant revulusion creapt into my stomach.

"Why, can’t you get laid often enough looking like that?" I said flatly. His nostrils flared, making me think more of a bull than the nose ring already had. My head snapped sideways as he backhanded me. Then he reached down and took me by the neck, lifting me quite comfortably out of my chair. He half-carried, half-dragged me inside, not concerning himself with my inability to breathe. I did not resist.

I watched my apartment slide by: couch, kitchen, bedroom door. Then my vision spun until I landed on my back, staring up at the ceiling above my bed. Leather creaked and metal clinked, and my uninvited guest appeared shirtless atop me. His weight was hard and cold. A colder, more metallic hardness went around my wrists as he bound my hands above my head. I looked into his eyes calmly, waiting.

He reached down, and tore my underwear aside, then off entirely. Revulsion spread lethargically through my body. The young one shifted and I felt a fleshy hardness press against me, unsuccessfully. He shifted back and forth a few times, then put his fingers to his tongue.

"Sorry," I said, "I guess you’ll just have to keep trying."

"Fuck you," he growled, and slapped me hard enough to draw blood from my lip. He forced his already wet fingers inside my mouth, covering them in saliva and blood. Then he reached down again.

I closed my eyes, figuring I’d not have long to wait for him to finish.

"Serai?" came the call from the front door. I gasped, not for the reason my young attacker had thought initially, and my eyes flew open as I tried to sit up. His shackles held me to the bedframe. He himself paused, with a murderous anger in his eyes.

"Serai?" again, much closer, and Jarrod’s black-cloaked figure appeared in the bedroom doorway. "What the fuck?" His eyes widened as he took in the scene.

"God Jarrod, run!" I screamed in terror. My attacker whirled to his feet, growling in fury, and trying to fasten his pants.

Jarrod did not hesitate, taking two light steps into the room, and lashing out with a side-kick to the goth-punk’s stomach. He connected solidly, but Jarrod was well over-matched. Only a handful of mortals in history would have won a hand-to-hand fight with an angry vampire.

My attacker accepted the hit, and locked his forearms against Jarrod’s boot. As he fell backwards, he twisted his strong arms, and snapped Jarrod’s lower leg. His scream drowned out the sickening nosie of cracking bone. Jarrod toppled over, almost immediately going into shock.

I cried out in agony, summoning my strength to rip at the chains around my hands. They held fast.

"Who the hell is this then?" asked the vampire, approaching Jarrod. "Your own little play-thing or somefin?"

"Don’t touch him. You want me, just take what you want," I pleaded. Fury and fear combined as an icy fire in my gut.

"Oh don’t you worry about that bit. It’ll come soon enough. But a little fun wi’ this one will surely help," he reached down and lifted a groggy Jarrod up by the neck, as he’d done me before. The young vampire drew a knife from his leather pants.

"No! Don’t you little shit!" I screamed at him. The hate for this insolent little infant I felt was overwhelming. Jarrod had just come back…

And suddenly, his eyes were a little less glazed, and one of Jarrod’s arms hooked around incredibly quickly to crash into the young vampire’s eye. Not fast enough though; a long knife gash split Jarrod’s arm, even as the vampire’s head snapped back, and Jarrod crashed again to the floor. He cried out, and I heaved again on the restraints. My helplessness was enraging. My head pounded in blinding pain and my limbs were like jelly from starved exhaustion, but my heart raced. I pulled again and again on the chain. The vampire was looming over Jarrod, knife in hand, bleeding from his nose.

"I can’t say you’ll enjoy this much mate, but I knew I will," he said, and crouched over Jarrod, out of my field of view. I struggled to escape, to save Jarrod, to at least see what was happening. I could hear: a scuffle, and a surprised grunt, and then a thin gasp of sharp pain.

"Stupid little cunt," muttered the vampire. "Over, just like that." And he stood.

Lightning exploded inside me, clenching my every muscle in silent, unified purpose. The chain snapped like thread, and before he could turn, I had the remaining links wrapped around the vampire’s throat. I wrenched his head to one side, breaking bones and severing nerves: not enough. My lips curled back in fury, and my sharper than usual cuspid teeth pierced his dark arteries, and I bled him dry.
I dropped the limp corpse and darted to Jarrod’s side, tears streaming down my face. I could smell it, familiar, intoxicating, sickening, fatal: fresh, crimson blood pumping straight from his heart, and spreading a pool on the floor.

"Oh God," I whispered hoarsely. I knelt, and cradled his head between my hands. "Oh God, oh God, oh God oh God." I couldn’t think. He was dying, even as his dark eyes, his wonderful eyes fixed themselves on me, he was leaving me.

"Did you really…" He said, struggling to speak as his throat filled with blood, "really think that I wouldn’t come back?"

I couldn’t reply, my throat was a solid thing. I stroked the side of his face desperately.

"I am… glad, to be here with you, now."

No. No. "No!" I said. "No, no no!" I bent down and pressed my mouth to his, lifting him closer and harder, kissing him, tasting his blood and letting my own rush into him. My head spun wildly, my vision grew hazy and explosions of colours danced before me, but I held on to him. Losing myself in the feeling of being inside him, more and more. As his own human blood flowed out, my dark, immortal blood replaced it.

I hadn’t fed in days, I was weak and delirious by the time it was finished. I should have died. We both should have.

I was discussing, or at least commenting on, stream of consciousness writing with a few bloggers around the traps here, and expressing my distaste for the style simply because of the style of expression used by writers of the time. Woolf for example, or Joyce, or a few others, are just too old-school for me. Too stuffy and pretentious (you hear that Kim, I’m calling their styles pretentious, not my own mwah!). I just don’t find it interesting. And then I found myself writing my own stream, sitting at a coffee shop near where I work. I was sipping a caramelatte that had just been served me by a girl who I’m… duelling with? I’m not sure what I’m doing with her. Anyway, you’ll get the point by the end of this:

She’s absolutely wicked, she makes me feel dull and slow. I am never dull or slow, but her razor wit cuts me every time. In my masochist competitive whirlwind, I go back for more. I want to take her, lock horns with an adversary worth engaging, worth losing to, worth aligning with. To face off with her would only be bettered by being one with her. To oppose, then complement. To attack, then protect. To battle, and to love.

The strange familiarity within the foreign. That comfortable sense of knowing wafting amid the unknown invites me. Calls to me to explore, to challenge, to learn, to accept, to treasure. To finally discover something better than what I had before, something more complete. I agonize over being just one of them, the countless nameless ones who desire less than what I want, but with whom I share that which they do manage to comprehend. To find a way to stand alone, to be myself and be remembered. To be the one that matters, and the one that lasts. And hating every moment of insecurity and fear. I am not just a starving addict, but that’s there. I am not just biologic, but that’s there too. I am not just desperation, but can’t deny it.

I could take you somewhere you’ve never been. I have great confidence in that. But I am terrified of loosing the ephemeral dream I have now. Frozen. Atrophied by disuse. The only sign of life is this silent, hidden plea on this helpless piece of paper. Something is going to snap soon, if it tightens any more.