Thread: On the Rooftop (atn: Calhoun only)

Calhoun's voice comes out of the silent shadows behind her as he appears from nowhere. "Why are you doing this Miranda?" He's sitting on the corner of an air conditioning unit for the building. One foot is on the rooftop and the other is on the corner of the metal box with his bottom. His head tilts to the side as if he's considering her carefully.

He holds up a hand to stop her from coming towards him. He looks over the side of the building. "It's a long ways down. Not sure it would kill you but it would definately do a number on that pretty face of yours. Might put you into torpor again... is that really what you want?"

She turns and regards his indifferent posture and words with a quiet sadness. "Pretty..." she whispers, "Il est parfois une malédiction, et non pas une bénédiction." She stands looking down at him; her wet hair blowing in her face and murmurs, "Would my love be easier for you if I were ugly?"

Her face draws together momentarily with hurt before she waves her hand and shakes her head, "I cannot change who I am Nate, I'm sorry." Miranda wraps her arms around her torso and turns again to face away from him so that she doesn't have to see how little he cares.

"I remember a time when I could always feel your presence at my back. When I knew you were there, watching me I felt safe... and happy. That's why I came up here, Nate. I wanted to feel you again."

"I have never asked you to be anyone but who you are, Miranda... just simply said that I am not who you thought me to be." He quotes a book he has read to her many times before* in a whispered voice, "I am greatly changed. I wonder you knew me."

"Why is it so hard for you to understand that I do not believe myself capable of love - that my heart mourns for a loss more deep than for any single lover but, instead grieves for the loss for love and life itself? Why do you find it hateful of me, that I feel you are so far above what I deserve that I don't care to soil you with what I am?"

He walks to the edge of the roof and motions out across the city. "This is your world, a world of pretty faces and clothing and cars... of busy men and woman drapped in their lies of comfort and right. No one here is happy and that I am any comfort to you at all speaks only of how unworthy I am of your grace and perfections."

"I am loathsome thing... and should stay hidden in my tunnels and holes far beneath your feet. Should angels wish to dip their wings into the soil and refuse around me for any time at all, I am blessed. I do not object to your claims of love for me, Miranda. Only grieve that I can not say the same of you. You do deserve the love of a good man. You deserve the love of a mortal man... something good and alive and pure. You do not deserve your curse. That I could free you from it, even above myself, I would."

He whispers, "You saw what I truly am when you saw what I did to Peyton. If it offends your eyes then you know you must cut me off from their blessed gaze and return to the things of beauty that you know." He looks to Miranda. "I will not regret what I have done. I will not be alone again."

((oc: book is great expectations, line is from the last chapter))

Miranda face crumples and she hugs herself tighter, "Stop it! Please...I hate that you think and speak of yourself that way. You have always been my hero, Nate. Where would I be if you hadn't saved my life, if you hadn't been selfless and caring for so long while I slept?"

She turns to him and steps lightly down from the ledge. "This curse you speak of effects us equally, I am no better than you! What sick humor is it that you who are so strong, brave and caring on the inside must live with an image that others find hateful? And I?" She waves a self-deprecating hand and shrugs, "I have beauty and little else. Inside I'm a vapid, weak waste of a gift."

"You do not offend my eyes, nor the things you do. I wanted to stay with you that night so badly. I would have, but I left for her. Don't you understand? You made me think that the first thing she would see is me and hate me for what I cannot change. I am so afraid that she will hate me," Miranda swallows, her throat tight.

"I don't want to be alone either, Nate. If you push me away all I will know is loneliness."

"Do you think so little of me to think I would pick only a pretty flower with no substance to spend my nights with?" He shakes his head. "It is you who is too harsh, precious rose. Vapid? Hardly. Weak... tell me, what courage did it require not to slip into torpor again when you were in their hands? What courage does it take to feel afraid of losing everything and not just walkiing into the sun?"

Calhoun shakes his head. "I can't make you see your own worth Miranda ... I can hardly make myself see my own. Perhaps in that way we are not right for one another, if you can not accept our nature as a reason for not being united."

He stands up off the air conditioner. "What is it you want of us, Miranda? I can see that you want love - you want some grand thing which was denied to you in your mortal life ... that is your toreador nature shining brightly through. However, what of that dream can we have?"

"Should we live together as Bill and Maddie and scream at one another as our macinations conflict with each other endlessly? Should we become engaged like Constantino and Emma Fitzpatrick and deal with the same accusations from our clans as to where our loyalities lay - to the point we spend every night preparing for our own deaths and the loss of one another? Or perhaps we should marry like Kendov and Mackenzie and slowly learn that eternity is much longer than it sounded at the start and eventually come to hate each other as Helena and Menelus?"

He seems sad to say what he says, he takes no pride and lacks any feelings of righteousness. "Kindred relationships are a joke, Miranda. A farce. A lie. Two people can take comfort together for a time, perhaps be allies for hundreds of years at a time but it is our curse to not be able to languish in love for long. Kindred are not meant to be happy. Everything we do is death and destruction in the end. We ... are... cursed."

"I don't say these things to injure your heart, I would stand before the sun than desire a world without you or even one in which I've hurt you... but, I can not believe that in time I won't make you hate me. I can't believe that in time I won't come to loathe you. Or that before we can come to that, death will find us both. It is what we are." He reaches inside his coat and pulls out a well worn leather bound book.

"Read it. It's one of the most treasured in my collection. It's rare beyond words. Perhaps you'll understand something more of my point of view once you're done... just... promise me you won't jump."

Miranda slips the book from his grasp and takes his hand before he can withdraw it, placing it palm up over her chest where her mortal heart would be. She looks at him, raindrops clinging to her eyelashes like human tears. "I understand," she whispers.

With a half-smile she begins to speak, holding pressure on his hand. "I am not jumping Nate, I am in no danger. I came here feel, to think. The truth is you will be there for me when I need you, you always are." She swallows, wearing her heart on her sleeve for him to see, "What frightens me is, can I be there for you? When we are so distant how will I know when you need me the most?"

"We are right for each other," she asserts. She exhales sharply in a mocking laugh, "I'm not very good at it but I'm here trying to be strong, fighting for you and for us. So you're wrong," she says again "we are right together." The pressure on his hand increases.

"I'll take those hundred years and treasure them, Nate." Miranda looks up into his eyes, her own full of need, love and determination. "I am not them, and neither are you. You are worth it to me to try."

Calhoun will pull Miranda into his arms, his potent strength nearly bone crushing. He stares down into her eyes as his body presses tight into her own. His eyes bore into her, like some sort of animal considering how best t latch onto his prey and kill it.

He says nothing but he holds her in a possessive embrace. He speaks with something of a growl, "You don't give up, do you?" He inhales the scent of her perfume, her lip stick, and the faint hint of her dinner on her breath. The blood scent urges him to greater heights, he squeezes her a bit tighter... mercilessly so.

"How far..." He hesitates, unsure of his own intentions. "...how far would you go for this illusion? You'd really risk the pain, willingly?"

Miranda's beast rises dangerously close to the surface. She craves this possessive dominance. Since that night when she watched him feed before embracing, when she heard the moans of pleasure for the first time from his throat; a hot, secret desire had burned inside her. They fit, she and him. His darkest passions matched the deepest levels of her own.

Her eyes glitter with intensity, her fangs begin to emerge from their sheathes and all the living blood in Miranda's body heats with her excitement making her exquisitely warm to touch. She offers no resistance to his hold, but yields to it, looking up at him with slightly parted lips. "Anything," she breathes, forcing the single word past a throat tightly clenched with desire.

Calhoun pushes her down to the roof, to his feet and bites into his own wrist. He wills his blood to rise to the surface of his undead flesh and his mask drops away revealing a man whose remaining skin is blackened and charred, scarred from the fires that may have killed him or never been recovered from after the wounds were made in his unlife.

Cartilige of his nose is melted, his eyes all but lidless, unblinking as he looks down on her. The illusion of his sandy brown hair gone, his ears... melted like his nose, as if they had been wax. Those beautiful soft lips, cracked and burned, flaking and oozing some sort of substance that might be natural or could be from something he's been into under the city streets. His smell, death and burnt meat... rotten charred flesh.

His blood oozes from the wound and he stares at it, willing it into the palm of his hand even as the rain still comes down on them both, his other hand on the top of her head firmly. He cranes it back to look into her eyes. "If this is what you want, my rose... I will not deny you." He moves his hand towards her, offering her the chance to take hold and feed from his wrist while still being held at his feet. Something of lust filling his eyes as he watches, waiting to see what she will do.