It's that time of year again. Tell me a story
sorry it took me so long to answer this! i really do appreciate these i am simply. forgetful.
this is something i put together in a bit of a fugue state but i might explore it more, we will have to see
He woke up with the taste of old blood in his mouth.
Eyes squeezed shut against the memory of burning sun he felt the ragged gums where his fangs used to be.
He breathed a sigh of relief, feeling the almost familiar sensation of air in his lungs. The pulse at his throat, his wrist, the warmth under his skin new, and yet an old ghost.
He fumbled for the false set of teeth on his nightstand. As wretched as it felt to have that sharp memory in his mouth against his tongue and lips, it stopped the dryness at the back of his throat, the way he felt like screaming in pain he hasn’t truly felt in centuries.
Opening his eyes, he still jumps at the sight of sun spilling onto the sheets, onto his skin. Wearily, he sat up, feeling an unfamiliar ache at the nape of his neck. Sleeping was something he had forgotten over the years, never indulging in the rest he had in life. Previous life. Undeath always had that strange phrasing to it, never quite distinct enough to discuss, blurrier still now that he had removed himself from it. Or removed it bodily from himself, if he were to be honest.
Honesty still hurt.
Lying had come naturally, like a compulsion he couldn’t help but wrap himself in and let it seep into his skin. It was so much easier to drink of and mangle the body of truth when it came knocking. And though he had never heard it spoken, as so many of the rules of his undeath had been quietly learned, he was never quite sure if the lies were part of him, some joke meant to plague those who reveled in it less, or if he had just always been that way, and it had been exaggerated in the transformation.
Humanity had not always been so strange to him. Once he had been a child, as most things have been, and he had bled and breathed and bounded across the stages of life. He was sure there had been an old family, though he no longer remembered the name they had given him. They had mattered so little after he had been bitten.
Where the memories of youth and life shine so bright, the time before he had fully transformed had always been gray and hazy. Just the pain of being drained but the unnatural fulfillment brought by the trance he had been under.
He had never taken thralls. It was a cruelty he couldn’t quite stomach. Or perhaps it had been the threat of responsibility.
And the sharpness of transmogrification. The way the world itself had become more angled, more vicious to even look at. The comfort in the dark and the biting fire of attempts to exist under the sun. The pain so great and terrible anything he had ever felt and would ever feel would pale in comparison.
He wasn’t sure if undoing the change had hurt more, or if the act had simply reminded him what suffering was.
The wall ahead of him blank, he reeled his thoughts away from the memories. Stopped himself from the same spiral he fought every morning. Slowly, he climbed out of the bed, bones groaning without the old strength holding them up and muscles straining without supernatural aid. He sipped the water he had left for himself the night before, swishing the taste of copper out of his mouth.
He turned, glancing at the window, curtains shoddily drawn across. The bookshelves, less dusty than they had been in innumerable decades, almost new bedsheets despite their age, carpet from centuries prior only now seeing foot traffic.
And the door, still locked from the other side.
He closed his eyes again, feeling his weight on his feet. Letting his shoulders slump and his chin fall against his chest, he breathed. In, out, air still the stranger in his lungs as it had been when he had woken up every day since he tore the fangs from his mouth and the bloodlessness from his veins.
He readied himself for the wailing at his door come dusk, for the books he would more likely than not read time and time again until mortality at long last claimed him.
For now, he felt the sun on his skin, and reveled in the aches and pains in his body, and opened his eyes, unflinching in the light.
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