Post-Mortality 1: For I Have Sinned

Be careful what you wish for...

--- I ---

He's dying.

He's dying, and it's all my fault.

I can still remember his face, when he stood in the daylight and stared into the light of the sun in utter fearlessness. The joy, the rapture etched into his expression. The laughter that bubbled forth, pure sound of delight, as he blinked the sun-dazzle from his newly mortal eyes, and swept me up into his arms.

And now, here he is, so still and pale -- paler than he ever was as a vampire, the pallor of true death creeping up to engulf him.

Oh, God, he was so happy. Every moment was so incredible, so perfect. The party at Schanke's; barbecue sauce smeared across his face, and Don looking so triumphant because Nick couldn't get enough of his cooking. Watching the game with his buddies from work, devouring pretzels and beer and looking for all the world like 'just one of the guys'. Spending the night with him at his place, not just sleeping over on the couch but spending the night, a reality so much sweeter than my fantasies had ever been -- and the long day we spent together afterwards, strolling through the park and being two ordinary people in love: a luxury we'd never had before.

Two days. Two stinking days.

His first ever day-shift, pursuing an armed suspect. Schanke says that Nick never even tried to get out of the line of fire -- and why should he have, with eight hundred years of instincts to tell him that it was unnecessary? But his instincts were wrong, fatally wrong.

Three bullets, chewing up most of his insides as they ripped through him.

He hasn't regained consciousness since it happened, nor is he expected to. I watch the monitors, watch his face, knowing that it's just a matter of time. Wishing that my cure hadn't been so damned effective. Wishing I'd never found the cure at all.

If tears were a magic elixir, Nick would be just fine; I haven't stopped crying since I got the call.

Two days. Eight hundred years of searching, in exchange for two days of mortality. How could I have been so stupid? How could I have been so blind?

How could I have failed to realize that letting Nick stroll blithely into work was a certain death sentence? Anyone would have the sense to try to dodge a bullet -- anyone except an immortal. Or a mortal who'd once been invulnerable.

This morning, we'd been lying in bed together, our naked bodies entwined with each other and tangled up in the sheets, and I'd wrapped my legs around his waist and urged him to call in sick and spend the day in bed with me. He'd been so eager to go, to work his first ever day shift -- but my offer had tempted him, I could tell.

I should have tempted him more. Dammit, I should have chained him to the bed! Instead, I cooked him breakfast and sent him off to work, never dreaming that it would be the last time -- the only time -- I'd ever do so.

It isn't fair. It just isn't fair.

I hear a sound at the door, a rustle of inhuman movement, and I look up, knowing who it must be. Who else would it be? I'm just surprised he hasn't shown up before now.

His face is as severe and intimidating as I remember it, yet his expression banishes any trace of fear I might have felt. It is the look of a man in agony, a parent watching his child die. It is a reflection of my own pain, and all I can feel for him is empathy, and deep sorrow.

He barely glances at me, merely moves to Nick's other side and stares down at the too-pale face. "He's dying," I hear myself say, although surely this man is all too aware of that.

"Your doing." The words are barely audible, and there is fury in his tone.

I look up, meet his eyes: ice-blue laser beams, impaling me. "Yes," I say, too filled with misery to entertain the thought of terror. "Yes, it is."

And in a single moment, the meeting of eyes becomes a meeting of minds, and I know that he can see everything inside me, feel everything I feel. Unnerving, this intimacy with this venomous stranger, but I don't resist. He does, after all, have the right to know.

I did it for Nick, because I love him -- and I am so sorry I did it, so very, very sorry.

The hard stare softens, just a little. "I can bring him back," he says, in a velvety-soft voice.

I am stunned. But why not? Nick was brought over once, from mortality to eternal life; why not again?

Because Nick wouldn't want it, that's why not.

But he's dying. Not after a decade of humanity, not after a year or even a week. After two days, two days...

The rhythm of the monitor falters, and my heart stops beating along with it. He doesn't have long, now.

"Are you going to try to stop me?" the other inquires, so softly, so very politely.

I look at Nick. Dear, sweet Nick, pale and bruised and dying. Nick, who finally found his long-lost mortality -- more swiftly and cruelly than either of us could have imagined.

It isn't fair. It just isn't fair.

My lips part, and I hear sound emerge. "No." What have I said? What have I done? Distant horror grips me, causes me to tremble fiercely. But I cannot undo what I've said, what my treacherous heart has decided. "Go ahead," I say, "do it."

He studies me, and the approval in his eyes fills me with self-loathing. I have betrayed Nick, betrayed everything he believes in.

But this premature death is just as much a betrayal, and I cannot allow it.

"He need not know of your choice." The compassion in the elder vampire's voice startles me, and I look up and see an unexpected warmth in the pale eyes. "I have always been the villain of Nicholas' personal fairy tale," he says gently. "I can bear the brunt of the storm for both of us."

"Thank you." It is a generous offer, meant to spare me anguish, and possibly to spare Nick as well. After years of Nick's bitter reminiscences, the gesture is a revelation -- I know that I will never see this man in the same light again. "But he must know," I say simply. "I can't deny him that." He deserves the truth... and I'll face his wrath, his condemnation, if I must.

He may never forgive me for this, may never speak to me again, but at least I'll know that he's alive.

LaCroix nods once, and we share one last moment of silent understanding. Then the ice in his eyes turns to incandescent fire, and I see the sharp gleam of his emerging fangs.

I turn away as it is done; I cannot bear to watch.

When it's over, only the occasional flutter of the monitor betrays the fact that life lurks in his still form. I reach out to touch his face, wondering if it's the last time I'll have the opportunity to do so. "I'll handle it," I tell the vampire, now safely cloaked once more within his mortal guise of blue eyes and even white teeth. "I've... done it before."

"I'll be in touch." A strong hand clamps down on my shoulder, oddly reassuring. I look up, and see his equanimity restored: the pain has vanished, for his child is his once more.

And in some strange way, there is a connection between LaCroix and me as well. Our love for Nick has bound us together somehow. I can feel the link, intangible but undeniable.

It's not something I particularly want to think about at the moment, though.

When LaCroix is gone, I go through the motions, requisition a driver and vehicle to get Nick's body back to the morgue, where it will be switched with another. The tears flow quite convincingly. Unlike the time with Richie, when it was all I could do to repress my joy that he lived, Nick's salvation brings me nothing but misery -- for I know that it isn't salvation at all, but damnation.

But I couldn't let him die, I just couldn't. Two days... it just wasn't fair.

I love him so much... and he will hate me for it.

Forgive me, Nick.

--- II ---

The funeral was dignified and solemn. I think the whole Metro force was there; I don't remember any faces but Schanke's, expressionless but with tears streaming down his face the entire time.

I tried to tell Nick about it, but he just stares into space, refusing to acknowledge my presence.

From the moment he awoke in Janette's cellar, with LaCroix at his side and me hovering in the background, he knew what had happened. Never said a word to me. Just looked at me, stared at me with wounded eyes filled with disbelief -- then his expression hardened, and he turned away to silently accept the bottle LaCroix offered.

Ever since then, I've been invisible.

The others, Janette and LaCroix, he acknowledges with his eyes, although he speaks to no one. But me... he will not look at me, will not take a bottle from my hand even if he is starving. He's shut me out, completely.

My heart aches, but it doesn't matter. I'd rather gaze at his sullen, resentful -- living -- face than remember the pale, still, almost-corpse in that hospital room.

Even though it is a life Nick despises. Selfish of me, and I know it, and still I can't help how I feel. So many people I love have died... but not Nick. Not Nick.

He must relocate, of course. And since his two days of mortality have left him as weak and powerless as any newborn fledgling, LaCroix will accompany him. Nick seems to be accepting the necessity of this; at least, he barely flinched when LaCroix told him.

I won't be going with them. I wish I could... but I have the feeling my presence would only make things worse. And though LaCroix has promised to 'keep in touch' once they depart, he has most pointedly not invited me to go along. Why should he? I'm only human, after all; I'd just be in the way.

I think Nick will be glad to see the last of me.

Only a few short days ago, his eyes were filled with love when they gazed into mine, and now I do not exist in his world. I don't even try to penetrate the walls around him anymore, just sit quietly in the room with him and watch him, savor the sight of his living, breathing form, trying to memorize every detail against the awful emptiness that will haunt my life when he is gone.

They're leaving tonight, I think.

He will never forgive me. I know that now. And though it was a possibility I'd believed I was prepared for, I am now aware that the pain of his loathing will forever haunt me.

I realize now that, unfair as it was for his humanity to have lasted only two days, he would have preferred that cruel demise to the life he has now.

And I still can't bring myself to regret what I've done. He's alive, dammit, alive!

But I do hate myself for it.

Nick, I'm sorry. I'm so, so sorry.

--- III ---

LaCroix meets me at the airport in El Paso. His immortal face has lost its imperturbable strength; he looks harrowed and weary. The brief message he'd sent with the plane ticket gave me only a hint of his difficulty: his expression tells me much more.

"We must hurry," he says to me, escorting me through the terminal. "I don't dare leave him unattended for long."

It has been a hard several months. I go through the motions of work and life, dully, listlessly, without caring. Schanke drops by frequently with his new partner, and every single time I find myself surprised all over again that Nick isn't with him. Grace and the others keep their distance, sensing the invisible shroud of mourning I wear around me like a cloak. My thoughts are always with Nick, always.

And I work the night shift, always. I can't bear to see the sun anymore; it's just too damned painful.

LaCroix's driving is enough to make an Indy racecar driver nervous; fast and reckless, weaving around traffic with a lead foot on the accelerator. Yet I can understand his urgency. "You said that he was... becoming unmanageable," I say at last, hesitant to disturb the driver's concentration whilst moving at over a hundred miles per hour.

"Unmanageable," LaCroix says grimly. "He is a wild creature, Natalie. Left to his own devices, he kills indiscriminately, carelessly... even I am having difficulty controlling him. It is my hope that seeing you again will bring him to his senses."

Or drive him right over the edge, I think, but do not have the courage to say.

Their residence is an underground chamber hidden in an inhospitable stretch of desert. I am taken through lengths of twisty corridors, and through several heavy doors locked with mammoth steel bars. "Is all this really necessary?" I query.

"It is," says LaCroix.

My first glimpse of Nick is a shock that shudders all through me, jarring me to the roots of my hair and the tips of my toes. LaCroix has confined him in a cell, walled in with thick bars that even a vampire would have trouble breaking -- but Nick has tried, that much is evident by the twisted metal and many repairs. As I enter the room, he is clawing at the bars, throwing himself at them. His hair is long and matted, and his eyes are bright with bloodfever; his clothes are rags. He looks more like an animal than a man, and it hurts me to see him this way.

From the moment I enter, his attention is fixed on me. "You," he seethes, his voice a hoarse growl. "You did this to me."

"Nick," I hear myself moan.

His eyes fasten on LaCroix. "Give her to me!" he demands. "I want vengeance! I want her blood!"

"Nicholas..." To my ears, LaCroix's voice sounds shaken. "Don't you remember your mortal love?" he says, and it seems as if he's pleading.

"Love?" Nick laughs, and the sound is frightening, appalling. "You betrayed me," he growls at me. "You made me into a monster again!"

Not true! I want to cry out. LaCroix would have brought you back over even if I'd tried to stop him...

But I hadn't tried, that was the thing.

"Is this what you wanted?" His voice was softer, though still hoarse -- his tone was an eerie perversion of his old gentleness toward me, and it cut into me like a blade. "I'm a killer, now," he hissed at me. "What else is there for me?"

"Civilized behavior!" LaCroix spoke up urgently. "What about your treasured humanity?"

"She showed me just what that was really worth." His eyes focused on me again, and there was no fondness there, no affection, nothing but searing fury and raging hunger. "Come to me," he says, in a low intense voice. "Come..."

His attempt to hypnotize me slides away, as always, but my guilt is so severe and so agonizing that I actually begin to respond, taking one step toward the barred cell and then another.

"No!" LaCroix lashes out, sweeps me aside with a harsh movement of his arm. "What's happened to you?!" No pretense now: he is openly pleading, desperate. "Have you lost all reason? Nicholas..."

"I want her blood!" His hands clench against the bars, rattling them; there is a creaking sound, as they begin to come loose from their anchoring.

"Get out of here, Natalie!" LaCroix shouts, and I scuttle from the room, with only one last glance back to see him struggling to restrain Nick before he can escape.

I go into the tiny room beyond, fall onto the small threadbare couch, curl up into a tight ball and burst into tears.

After hours of raging, Nick is finally quiet. LaCroix has been in and out of the cell room several times, every time bearing some new wound that Nick has inflicted; he brings bottle after bottle of human blood to his charge, and still Nick demands more.

The last time, I cleaned and treated LaCroix's wounds, not because he needed the medical attention, but because it was some small thing that I could do -- and LaCroix seemed to welcome the care. He looks truly awful, fatigued beyond mere human weariness, worn down to a thread from the constant stress.

"I don't know what to do," he said bleakly, just before settling into a deep slumber on the cot at the other end of our small room.

There is a two-way glass, and I stand just to one side, taking no chances that Nick might sense me and become violent again. He is sleeping as well, sprawled out on the floor haphazardly. When he was Nick Knight, I'd often watched him sleep, treasuring the gentle innocence I would find on his face -- now, his slumber is the restless doze of a jungle cat, twitching in sleep with desire for his prey.

His eyes open and he sits up, staring directly at me, seeing me through the mirrored glass.

"Natalie," he says, and his voice is calm. "Nat, come here."

I hesitate, for only an instant -- but it is the closest he's come to sanity since my arrival, and I can't refuse his summons.

The door closes behind me, leaving only the metal bars separating me from Nick. Fear surges through me; Nick Knight would never have hurt me, but this isn't that Nick anymore, and I am deeply afraid.

"Nick?" I say softly, praying that the return of sanity is permanent.

His eyes are blue again, human-blue. "It's good to see you again," he says, very sincerely, and the breath leaves my chest in a long sigh.

"Oh, Nick," I moan, and come to stand beside the bars. I don't dare reach out to him, but I am close enough for him to reach if he wants, close enough for him to grab me through the bars and snap my neck... but Nick doesn't; merely edges a little closer to me, gazing at me warmly.

"Everything happened so quickly... I guess I just lost it for a while," he confesses. "I'm so sorry, Nat."

"Nick... it's all right. Everything's all right." I'm virtually delirious with relief; it's my Nick again, my nearly-human Nick, the man I love.

"Come here," he urges, "come here, Nat," and I don't even consider refusing, nearly stumbling in my haste to unlock the door.

I step into the cell and into his embrace; his arms close around me, and for a few heavenly seconds I'm being held in his strength, enfolded in his love, in the comfort of his forgiveness.

Then his arms tighten, painfully, and I look up, into his eyes...

They are silver-gold, hazed over with bright lust, and the madness, oh dear Lord, the madness is back in his face. It was all a ruse, nothing more; my heart turns to lead and sinks to the ground.

"Nick," I whisper, still not quite believing.

"Now I've got you," he growls triumphantly, a hot snarl of vicious vengeance.

"Nick, please, no..." But why am I pleading? It is, after all, no more than I deserve.

"You gave me back this curse. Revived the beast in me." Every word gouges out another piece of my soul. "Now you will feed its hunger."

"No..." I beg him, but to no avail.

He lets out a howl, a sound that chills me all through, and the feel of his fangs sinking into my neck is a sharp flame of agony that sets me ablaze with pain. In the far distance, I hear a cry, LaCroix's protest, but it is too late, far too late.

I descend into the darkness, knowing that my life is being extinguished to feed Nick's dark desires, knowing too that it is the price I must pay for my intervention. My love had been his damnation; now my death would be his triumph over that betrayal.

I slide into nothingness with Nick's name on my lips, singing a haunting dirge in my mind.

--- IV ---

Consciousness brings with it a dull ache in my midsection, and a rasping noise. Someone is crying, sobbing helplessly, the plaintive sound of a child in pain.

I open my eyes, and find Nick by my side.

His arms are wrapped around me, cradling me tenderly. His hair is combed, and his clothes are relatively clean and fresh. His eyes... his eyes are bloodshot, red and swollen, streaming pink-tinged tears. He looks as if he's been crying for so long that he's forgotten how to stop.

Those eyes meet mine, and along with the tears I see his pain, and his guilt. "Nat," he manages hoarsely, through the shuddering sobs. "Nat, I'm sorry, I'm so sorry..."

In that instant, I know what has happened. I can feel it in me: what Nick started, what LaCroix finished -- what I have become. The hunger gnaws inside me, demanding sustenance.

But that doesn't matter. None of it matters. Nick is beside me, holding me -- not the demented creature ravaged by hatred and hunger, but my Nick -- and nothing matters but that.

I reach out and slide my arms around him, pull him even closer with brand-new strength; his face, watching me anxiously, crumples into an expression of sheer relief, and he crushes me against him and sobs into my shoulder.

So good to hold him again. So damn good to be together.

My fangs are piercing his neck almost before I'm aware of what I'm doing. Reflexive reaction, instinctive -- the hunger inside me is fierce, and Nick smells good, appealing to senses I've never had before. Realization almost makes me pull back, but there is no denying the hunger, or the desire; and Nick doesn't struggle, doesn't resist, just tilts his head a little further sideways to give me better access to the vein.

Maybe he figures, turnabout's fair play.

Feeding becomes lovemaking, then feeding again; later, I have no recollection of removing my clothes or his, but there they are, shredded tufts of fabric adorning the bed and the floor. So intense, so electric -- more so than our brief interlude of mortal love had been -- but there is something missing, a sweetness and innocence, that we will never again share.

But what we will share, now, is eternity.

There are worse fates, surely.

A hand tugs the thin sheet more securely over my bare shoulder, moves to cover Nick as well, before placing a familiar-looking bottle on the table beside the bed. "Intimacy is a wonderful thing," says the familiar voice lightly, indulgently, "but my children need proper nutrition as well."

"Thank you," I say tentatively, trying out the unfamiliar word on my tongue, "father," and LaCroix smiles and goes back to his task: packing up the few belongings we will be taking with us when we go. There is no need for us to remain in this dismal isolation cell, not any longer.

Nicholas is back with us; I can sense the pattern of his thoughts as he sleeps. Smooth, untroubled, steadied by calm reason. The guilt is there, oh yes, the guilt and the pain endures -- will be worse now than ever, when he awakens from his slumber and realizes anew what his vengeance has done to me -- but it is guilt balanced by sanity, and that's good enough.

The way I see it, there's a curious symmetry to all of this. My cure gave Nick his fondest dream, and his worst nightmare; and now it's come full circle, now I am the one to suffer. Will it be suffering? I don't know. At the moment, I am blissfully happy, lying here curled up with Nick, who is alive and rational once more. A year from now, a decade, a century? I don't know. None of us knows what will come to pass. Perhaps this is damnation, and I just don't have the sense to realize it yet.

But right now, I'm happy. And that's good enough.

It has to be. What other choice do any of us have?

--- V ---

The winter nights are long, just the way I like them. Cold, but that doesn't matter anymore. The letter I just got from Schanke bemoans the icy Toronto deep-freeze -- and sports pictures of Jennie, so grown-up now that I can hardly believe it. Nick swiped one of the photos from me; he keeps it in his wallet, along with the print Schanke gave me of that barbecue, of the short time we were mortal together.

We own a little shop, a used record store and coffee bar where young mortals gather to hang out in the evenings. Our jobs there are nice and safe and boring. No contact with crime and death, no tantalization of spilled blood to torment our fledgling hunger; the scent of our human customers is hard enough to bear. Sometimes I have to lock myself into the office until the urge to sink my teeth into some tender young neck fades away.

Nick is having a harder time of it than me: he's used to being able to control his hunger, and is dismayed that he doesn't have that same strength anymore.

LaCroix does a nightly radio show on a Boston station, comes by the shop every night afterwards. Nick was nervous, at first, about what our life would be like, but in fact it's been going very smoothly. LaCroix has been gentle, solicitous, allowing us to make our own decisions; he procures the bottled human blood that our newborn vampire bodies require, without urging us into the violence we both abhor. It's as if his near-loss of Nick (twice) has given him a new perspective, and a new patience. Nick doesn't like to talk about it, but I have eyes: I see the way his face brightens when LaCroix walks in, the way the rest of the room is left waiting while LaCroix's personal coffee mug is filled from the flask kept for our 'special' customers. The sparkle that lights up his entire being on the nights when an impromptu 'jam session' occurs, violin and piano blending into sweet rapture as the mortals sit spellbound, watching Nick and LaCroix play. We are, for the moment at least, a happy family.

Janette visited last month, just for a night; she and Nick disappeared into the back room and didn't emerge until nearly sunrise. I didn't say a word, and I didn't ask about it afterwards. The fact that LaCroix didn't go to work that night, so that he could keep me company during their absence -- and the fact that Nick couldn't meet my eyes when it was over -- tells me more than I really want to know.

There are facts of our existence that I still haven't grown accustomed to.

Yesterday, there was an auto accident, right outside our shop. Old instincts aroused, I ran outside to help -- and was a hairsbreadth from drinking the blood of the young woman I'd been trying to save, when Nick stopped me. His own hunger was fierce, glowing in his eyes; only his iron will kept him from succumbing to the same desire that had consumed me. "Come inside, Natalie," he said to me softly, compassionately. "There's nothing you can do here."

And I went inside with him, my heart aching for the doctor I'd once been, the Hippocratic Oath that was now meaningless beside the shattering strength of my vampiric hunger.

Sometimes I see him looking at the uniformed police officers we occasionally happen across, yearning written plainly across his face. But it will be centuries before he has that sort of strength again, the control needed to function in that world once more. Knowing as I do now the intensity of our bodies' demands, I have trouble believing that Nick ever managed to resist -- and a deep respect and admiration, that he fought that battle and won, so many times.Schanke still talks about Nick in his letters. About how he misses his partner and friend, about what a good cop Nick was. Speculating on the life Nick would have had: would he and I have been married, with a family? Grieving for his own loss, and for mine. And every time I read one of those letters, I cry -- hot blood-tears of mourning, for those two days that should have been an eternity.

Nick locks himself into his room, sometimes, to read Schanke's old letters to me, and when he comes out, his eyes look as awful as mine.

LaCroix tells us often that this is a fact of vampiric life, that we must learn to leave our previous lifetimes behind us -- but there is no rancor in him; he realizes, I think, just how impossible that is. After all, none of this should have happened. If I hadn't found the cure, Nick wouldn't have had to die and be reborn at a fraction of his old strength; he could have easily spent another decade in Toronto, savoring the existence he'd built there. Instead, that comforting pseudo-mortal reality was stripped from him -- and from me.

We have each other, Nick and I, but not much else.

Tonight, after we close the shop, we're going sledding. LaCroix, on one of his late-night hunts, has found this steep, steep hill that no mortal dares attempt; I've bought one of those plastic frisbee-type things guaranteed to slide like wildfire down any reasonably slippery slope, and the two of us are planning to drag Nick with us no matter how hard he resists. He's prone to fits of melancholy, as always, and worse now than ever, but sometimes, if we do it just right, we can lighten his mood. Like the time we all went ice-skating on the pond. Like the Guns & Roses concert last summer in the park. Like when we 'kidnapped' him to Mardi Gras in New Orleans last year.

Let me tell you, trying to keep Nick from slipping into despair is a full-time job, even for immortals.

But so far, it's working. So far, we're keeping our lives, and Nick, relatively intact. LaCroix and I -- never thought that we'd be working together this way, nor that we'd make such a good team.

Nor that I'd find so much comfort in his presence, in knowing that he'll always be there, looking out for us -- for me.

It's not what I imagined, being a vampire. There is less violence in it (mostly because of Nick's attitudes, and LaCroix's unwillingness to push his so-fragile child into changing them), less glamour, and less danger. In fact, the worst peril we face is that of boredom. Hence the sledding expedition tonight -- and our adoption of the puppy that stumbled into the alley behind the shop during the last storm. He isn't yet housebroken, and he slobbers and drools all over everything, and wakes us up from our daily slumber with big slurpy dog kisses -- but for all that Nick gripes about the barking and the puddles on the floor, he loves that dog; which is why LaCroix didn't throttle the pup when he discovered it teething on his violin.

Nick has named the dog after ol' Donny, and every time I hear, 'Fetch the donut, Schanke!' I burst into laughter.

A night of tobogganing and snowball fights won't erase his guilt and pain, nor my own. A playtime session with an unruly mongrel pup won't change the dark realities of our world -- but these things bring light, and any light is unutterably precious to beings who exist in eternal night.

Keeps us going for another day, another week; helps us face the impending decade with something like equanimity.

And maybe someday, I'll have the heart, and the courage, to seek another cure -- for the last remedy won't work, now; the drugs that brought remission to Nick's eight-hundred- year-old vampiric body would destroy our young and fragile forms. Besides... after the disaster that occurred last time, neither of us is ready to contemplate throwing ourselves headlong into another fiasco. Humanity will have to wait, at least for a while.

For now, we have each other. Not much else -- but we do have each other. Damnation? Perhaps.

But if I can coax a smile onto Nick's face, just for a moment, if I can even briefly hear the sweet sound of his merry laughter... that's my salvation.

I made a mistake; I can't change that.

But isn't there always a chance for redemption?

Love. A curse... and a promise, for the centuries to come.

I just hope that we can endure.

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