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The soft focus nuzzles in against Scott’s nose, counts his eyelashes closed shut. The haze curls around his haircut. His head is pressed close, ear to the side, against a shoulder, fabric of a coat counting hairs. This is what safety means. He’s come to learn. Trust, relaxing on others’ hands moving with him, in a rhythm that’s steady and hilariously simplistic. In the warmth, Scott is smiling.
Counts the steps from one side of the ballroom to the other, without opening eyes to see so he’ll never stumble. They both lead, and Scott relies on his partner to continue this dance as much as they do on him.
It’s pleasant, he voices inside. “I’m glad… we finally put this place to use,” he murmurs out loud.
The room is just spacious enough there are smothered echoes of footsteps of theirs to be picked up, as they move. It’s quiet, otherwise. In a perfect dream there was a chatter huddling just at the edge of his hearing, familiar and enthusiastic, movements of non-strangers. Names recalled. Figures to roll eyes at, for their mere presence. It would be a party, for sake’s sake.
If a glass shattered here, the scream of it would leave everyone shuddering in the silence.
He continues to be carried, steps further, and carries in turn. They don’t answer to him. They know the steps, and move with a certain confidence that has a tint of recklessness to him.
Scott opens his eyes wide. The candlelight still makes the round of dancing on his eyelashes.
The instinctual reaction to grasp at the other’s wrist leaves his hand only returning an iron grip. Ah, that’s right, he thinks scatterbrainedly. We do not get happy endings.
Scott has the bright blood jacket thrown over his shoulders, blouse whimsically chosen, exactly just a tad too old-fashioned and too modern for the 00s, for gramps to sigh in lament at. The fabric is new. The coat that was scratching the curls at the edge of his hair is just slightly, annoyingly, worn, and is not his. The shirt that caught on a slip of his cheek skin, is.
They did not grow beautifully into vampirism. That was the extent of it. There was nothing shameful about it, really. Scott was a monster, by choice, and he was beautiful, by birth’s right, by blood, by the way he consciously carried himself because it was what he deserved. They were a monster, and they were ugly. By birth’s right. If you will.
Subconsciously, Scott wants to raise a palm to that rashing, sickness-ridden skin, but once again, his hand is gripping another instead, unable to let go. He’s not letting them go and they’re not letting him, that’s it.
Pyro still doesn’t talk.
Scott’s eyelashes twitch in discontent.
They do not get happy endings. Scott had been hoping for it to be somebody else, had been expecting it, really. But no matter.
The two of them had gone off-course, continuing to circle, chest-to-chest, without letting go; an abominable mistake.
“So it’s you,” Scott slips, voice still unraising. “You haunt me still.”
Pyro watches him in red from under half-closed eyelids.
“Haunt you?” he responds, mimicking, and corners of his eyes crinkle in halfmoons in faux amusement. Their low voice sounds all octaves the same as hundreds of years ago, and it’s the first time he heard it in the same hundreds. The way it dances off the floorboards is muted, quiet, repressed. Scott watches. “…Ah. Don’t make me laugh.” Rich, Scott thinks, is how it is. Like Pyro is speaking with their whole chest, when he is like that.
Scott crinkles his eyes and laughs instead. I am not happy, he thinks loudly with it. I am not happy. The chatter rattles like blood drops falling chaotically to all sides, high and light. He confides in the echo of his long-lost to death fledgling: “Isn’t it so?”
The hand that is Pyro’s with its claws bared in the press on his spine lets go.
“You keep making me realise things,” Scott says. The lightness and the freedom allows him to spin Pyro in a blind freefalling mockery of a proper dance. That last thing, isn’t something he would want to do with them, anyway. “That was really just the beginning, when you did first.” When they killed him.
Pyro’s eyes have fallen open, mouth cracking slightly to show their fangs. They let out a nothing of a sound. Subconsciously, Scott still expects him to start flailing. “That shouldn’t be,” they say minorly. That sounds so unlike them, flat and unexpressive. “It wouldn’t happen like that.”
Scott raises an eyebrow. “Really? At all?” Curiosity overrides pain.
“At the end of the day…” Pyro stops in their tracks. His head is tilted just barely sideways, making Scott feel as if he were truly, consciously observed. “…I wouldn’t be missed. Not by him. Not at all.”
Scott lets out a faint, uncontrolled chuckle. “You were truly that terrible, huh?” The manner in which Pyro refers to him in third person is thought on, and slips through his fingers in a matter of immaterial.
The let free palm of Pyro’s left hand is the one that catches on Scott’s locks instead. Huh. He didn’t realise he could do that.
“I’ve made my choice to become the beast. Beasts aren’t mourned when they’re culled,” Pyro says. “Relatives, lovers are.”
Scott leans his head to the side too, suddenly fascinated. “And so what was I to you?”
“Family,” Pyro easily responds. Scott remembers that.
“Relatives and lovers are family,” he muses. The words tickle the root of his tongue and are warm within his mouth. He wishes to sound mocking. “So what, was I neither Sire nor lover?”
“You were terrible,” Pyro says raspily.
Ah. There it is. The part of the nightmare where Pyro stops saying what he wants them to speak. As if this scene has ever happened before.
“I was,” Scott agrees. Pyro looks surprised for all it’s worth. What? He was aware of that in the first place!
“…it was part of what made you… what you became,” Scott admits.
Pyro’s hand, which had fallen onto Scott’s wrist, seizes.
“I became powerful,” they say. Scott looks up from where he becomes aware he’d been looking away from him. “Vampirism, gave me power.”
“Of course,” Scott flatly agrees. There is no world where he says no to that fact, Doctor be or not be put to rest.
Pyro’s hands unclasp themselves with force, and he moves, with a sullen lightness, offering Scott to go along. “You gave me a purpose,” he says. “Scott Goldsmith was my Sire.”
Scott moves with him.
His canines peek. “I’m glad we cleared that up,” he replies. He thinks, I am not amused. He thinks, I am in pain, a little bit.
“Goldsmith, was…” Pyro’s eyes run. Scott stops, and they step into him. His throat is a little constricted, which means he cannot breathe, where he doesn’t need to.
“You don’t,” it makes him say, choking out, “you don’t need to.”
It doesn’t particularly matter. One could say Scott Goldsmith was a horrible romantic, at some point in time, back when he had been a barely feathering fledgling himself. It took Scott seventy years to consider Pyro’s involvement in Avid’s death- to really consider. It took forever longer with whatever this was. He could’ve been better but so could have been myself.
Scott finds himself biting his lips.
Pyro’s eyebrows are raised. They’ve let go just enough to be holding on to his fingers.
“My Sire was…” he says, easily, conversationally, looking upfront, chin tilted downwards to compensate for his inch up on Scott – Scott’s attention seizes these details up now. Pyro repeats, “…he was…” and he blinks, and closes his mouth to swallow. His head tilts to the side. “He was magnificent,” they end up saying. That’s not what they wanted to, though. Scott knows that. He feels like he’s being analyzed now, by this sharp line of eyes.
“Let’s not kid ourselves,” Scott responds to that, small. “We both know you were scared of me.”
“Oh, I was,” Pyro agrees easily. “But, there was a fascination, too.”
Scott stops looking at him. The hands, he expects to let go easily, grasp them together with a clap of applause. His palms are gripped. With human-like hands. Though he would not mistake them for human ones.
“My loyalty,” Pyro says, “was to the… vampiric brood.”
Scott hums. He tries to push his hands free. This isn’t a dream though, this is a nightmare, which means he cannot.
“And that’s why- that’s why I don’t understand-” they continue, and they choke – there is a mildest of pains that goes off indistinctive inside of Scott’s head and he orders himself to forget it and he does. There is no circulation to be cut, “I do… but… was there really nothing that could’ve been done? Was it… destined to be like this?”
Scott stays in silence, mingling on his lip.
Pyro’s eyes, that had crawled downwards to their hands, eyelashes closing, flicker up for a moment. “And I never regret it,” he says, conversational. “Don’t get me wrong. Killing him should have been done. But was there… truly… no other way?”
His hands are let go of, when he looks down to the side and he doesn’t speak.
“No,” Scott says. “Nothing could’ve been done.”
“Mhm.”
“It ended how it did because you were simply… you.” And Scott had been Scott. Shelby had been Shelby, and Avid was… gone.
“Ah,” Pyro says, “yes.”
‘He had to go,’ Shelby had bared her teeth mirthlessly. They could have been better. Scott Goldsmith could have been so, so much better.
Scott stops that train of thought.
“It always inevitably ends like this, doesn’t it,” Pyro tells him. Scott looks tiredly.
“I’m… sorry,” he says. Pyro shakes their head.
“What for?”
Treating them cruel. Scaring him into seeking help from the town. Not paying attention, not showing his affection. Making him a weapon, not anything else but a weapon. Turning them that day, murking their clothes in the cold water.
Perhaps that’s too dramatic.
“Being… me,” Scott says. Pyro’s palm swipes by, brushing the fabric of the sleeve by his shoulder. He seems, briefly, vaguely fascinated.
“Ah, I see.” They stare past. “That has nothing to do with me being me, though. If we were to be pedantic. You… siring me, didn’t change me as a person.”
“No, it’s…” Scott cringes.
He thinks, starkly, briefly, that Pyro as he was, really wouldn’t accept his apology. His… guilt, the strange feeling. The ‘moral understanding’ that’s so similar to human emotion.
Scott grasps the sides of their face. Pyro looks like a caught starving animal at him.
“You were missed,” Scott says snappily. “You are- missed.”
“Oh,” Pyro’s mouth forms the words at him. “That’s- that’d be nice.”