folkooc | July TFLN Time

Nightmare fuel time it is.

Yeah, that would make more sense. [ Sharon jumps into the water without ever bothering to check the depth. He's right. She's grateful he considers these types of things. He reminds her it's okay to slow down.

The mention of the bond has her smile down at her Relic and it barely dims at the mention of his corruption or her death. They got through that all right. ] Does that mean you'd turn me down if I asked to bond right now?

I would be most honored to get to see your nightmare fuel.

I— [ Mayerling stares at the screen as his heart beats mightily in his chest at those few short words. Yet Sharon does not ask to form a bond. Tis a question about asking. A step removed. ]

I would wish us to have a conversation before answering one way or the other.

Is that a conversation you're interested in having now? [ It's not as if she hadn't considered asking in Trench. The moment she'd seen how the corruption had affected him, she was willing to do whatever it took to ease that. She's less worried about Beasthood and corruption here but now that she considers the possibility...

Sure, the bond would be preventative in some way but it would be just as meaningful. ]

[ Mayerling stares at the screen a long time, the blinking line in an empty response box in its way a fair representation of his mind. Yet his heart bursts at the seams with emotions he barely knows how to contain. Surely they would be evident were this conversation face to face, rather than through letters. ]

I would be interested and willing to have that conversation whenever you desire.

[ He knows how he feels about her. That tis not the question at hand, the worry which shadows over this most glorious idea that makes his soul sing. It's a great deal for someone to handle, his emotions. It would mean more than the bond that she could sense his feelings. He considered the 'enemy' bond in Trench, that his power might help her defend herself and never be killed again, but emotional? That one seemed too pushy, to forward. Yet that's what avails them here, that's what she asks after. ]

Let's do that after I cool off. [ In truth, just talking with him over the Relic has helped her come down from a boiling rage to a quiet simmer. He's one of the few people she's ever met capable of such a feat. ]

That sounds wise. [ Mayerling appreciates having a little time to mentally and emotionally prepare for the conversation himself. He mentioned bonds, yes, but he hadn't expected Sharon to leap at something so clearly a part of Thirteen's magic. He hasn't seen her shift yet, which is far more common magic. ]

You are welcome home whenever, even before you cool off. Should you want it alone, I would gladly leave.

[ The last text has her stop dead in her tracks and it's this moment where she forgets, far too briefly, that she was ever upset at all. The excess of her rage peters out and leaves behind hot, damp ashes; dangerous unattended. Even cold ash can start a housefire. She takes a little longer to respond this time. ]

I've always liked moving when I'm upset. Long walks. Patrols. Anger is energy. It's either burned out or smothered.

But thank you.

Yes, but you could have painted. Movement while staying, relatively, still.

You are welcome. I look forward to your return.

I won't be gone much longer.

What do you do when you get angry? [ It might have just occurred to her that she's never really seen him angry. ]

I'll have some tea ready.

Usually, there is already violence when that occurs, so it is easily handled in combat. I am ashamed to say that sometimes they are merely on the precipice of violence, and I commit to it. Or, as happened early in my time here, I challenged someone to a duel. Fortunately their partner was able to calm things down or we very well might have fought.

[ Ashamed, he says. Her smile is soft and small and immediate. It's funny what sorts of things you find endearing in the person you love. If someone has angered him enough to violence then they get what they deserve. ]

You never struggle with it? [ Calmed even after trying to duel someone. What an odd thing to find attractive in a man. ]

Compared to bloodlust, anger is easy to handle, so much so that it is difficult even to compare them. However much would a broken nose bother you when you are eviscerated with your organs spread around you in bloody wreaths? It takes but a moment to set your nose, and the rest is a battle for your life.

[ Mayerling struggles every day, every moment of every day. Anger, though, it be not. ]

What do you do in those moments when you feel like you're about to give in to it?

[ She was asking the right sort of questions but she'd focused on what she struggled with the most, not what he did. Not that she would ever compare their struggles, bloodlust and rage are two different beasts but she could see some similarities. ]

When it's someone I know, I consider what I want for them, my hopes and dreams, my desire for them to remain the person I love. It need not be enough to quell my thirst. I only need to survive the moment, then the moment after that, the one after that, and so on until it is greater under my control. When necessary, though time in Folkmore and in Trench have greatly increased my stamina, I remove myself from others.

Back in Trench, D and I had an agreement. He would kill me if I drank from someone. That reminder of mortality helped serve as one more reason to resist the urge.

[ Usually, Mayerling does not speak of these issues with people. He does not wish everyone to fear him at all times, the way that would be natural upon hearing that he always longed for their blood. Mayerling remembers the ball, last fall, where Baba Yaga offered human blood in goblets. He had fled and hidden in a room away from everyone, terrified that he would lose control.

He hadn't bitten anyone. His greatest accomplishment to date in both Trench and Folkmore. It helps that Trench had easy access to blood and Folkmore can provide him synthetic blood at a moment's notice. The urge remains, but it helps. ]

It's a way of life that strikes her as draining. A daily fight against a hunger he can never fully satisfy. She doesn't send another text but gently holds what she wants to say in her mouth until she makes it home; until the door is shut with a soft click and she finds her way to him to loop her arms around him, pulling him toward her whether he's sitting or standing. She smells like the summer heat.

"You are amazing," There's a firmness to her statement as if it were an undeniable truth. Mayerling walks a hard path in life, one he's chosen to commit to, and he's worked hard to succeed. There is something deeply admirable about that, especially for someone who is prone to taking a leap based on her emotions and current desires. He is so consciously aware of everything he does. Her hold on him tightens, "Have you had any issues here?"

She remembers the agreement he had with D. Although she's never once worried that he would lose control (his self-control will astound her into infinity), she knows it's something he worries over. It's something she should have asked after sooner.

Sharon does not answer, and Mayerling forces himself to turn his gaze from his relic. She said that she would return, so he pushes himself into the routine of readying something for her. Water is set to boil. A tea set laid out. Small cakes filled with jam. Everything is fussed with and made just so, despite the fact that he knows Sharon will not. He takes some synthetic blood, something that dulls some of his bloodlust, sits, and waits.

Though Sharon loves him, Mayerling cannot help but worry. She didn't grow up with an understanding of vampiric bloodlust and what a bite can do. She hasn't known that deep in her bones and accepted it intrinsically as part of being with him. Perhaps D taught her at length about what vampires can do in their worlds, yet he knows not and cannot ask the man. For all these worries, Mayerling can only wait and brood and attempt to believe in the best, despite the existential question that has haunted him for millennia: who will mourn vampires' passing?

Sharon opens the door, and in a moment, Mayerling stands—only to be hugged and fold himself around her in return. It eases something deep in his soul that Sharon at least accepts him with open arms, even after the poetic description of bloodlust.

"I love you, Sharon," Mayerling declares. It must be said, for the feeling swells so large in his breast.

"Only one time came hauntingly close, the time Baba Yaga served blood, human blood, at her ball. The smell of it fresh and warm was not only enticing in its own regard but brought to the forefront the smell and flow of warm blood in the veins of all those around me. I fled to a private room," one meant for sex, he could tell, "for there was no escape from the party itself in full, and there I cowered for some time."

Until another vampire ran into the room with similar reaction to the blood. Neither of them aimed for farther private rooms, needing only to be away with the illusory barrier of walls and a door between them. Mayerling takes long breaths and focuses on the smell of the world on Sharon, the warmth of the sun heating her skin, and not that which flows in her, though he knows from D that drinking Coldblood is... not the best experience.

"It is much easier than Trench with its blood pollution and blood magic wherein people spillt their blood daily for whatever purposes they needed."

He's set everything out so nicely. Thoughtfully. And none of it goes unnoticed, not even as she pulls him into her, arms looped around him in more of a hold than a hug. She notices he's even pulled out her current favorite tea, a fruity white, and set out the little cakes she enjoys with it. Her heart flutters in her chest with warmth and appreciation.

She presses her lips against his cheek in a silent show of that gratitude and in direct response to his declaration of love.

Her teeth grind together briefly when he mentions Baba Yaga and how she served blood. Anger rises up her throat like stomach acid. The only real sign of her rage is the slow way she exhales out her nose, carefully controlled, as her hold on him tightens. No escape, he'd said. Cowered. She breathes him in to keep her thoughts from straying far.

The horrors she would inflict upon this world for him.

"Remind me not to accept her next invitation then," She tries to sound light-hearted. Unbothered. As long as she is here, she will turn blood into ash if it lessens his stress and suffering. Even if he's handled worse, even if Trench was worse, she wants nothing more for him than peace of mind. She pulls back from him, her cool palm against the nape of his neck, blue gaze thoughtful.

"If there's anything I can do to help you out, you'll let me know, right?" No matter what it might require of her. Even if he needs her to stop him one day, "You don't have to deal with it alone. Ever."

Mayerling brushes one hand through Sharon's hair, an act so wild and forward when they have but conversation between them, yet he allows himself that much as gift and latitude. It eases that knot that threatens his feeding teeth to descend. Yet through it all, his hand avoids the side of her neck and the veins within, so as not to feed temptation. His control remains, yet when speaking of nearly losing that control, Mayerling cannot help but wish to take extra measure for her safety.

"I regret that experience not at all, love," Mayerling says softly, "for it led me to another of my kind. A much younger vampire, experiencing the very same issue, came into the room, shutting the door, and pressing himself against it. I was able to help him, so newly turned, when we had previously been unaware of each other. Robin has returned home, has long since departed Folkmore, yet I remember fondly each vampire I have helped in my time here. I would gladly submit to be tempted, for the sake of helping another."

There is no promise he will resist temptation every time, no hubris that Mayerling need not worry about it. Nay, as he described to Sharon over the relic, it is a constant struggle that must always be fought and never fully won.

Sharon's statement makes his heart soar far beyond the conversation they are having, so high that it overshadows the whole conversation about bloodlust and its eternal damnation to live in his breast. Ever. Ever. Ever. Such strong words. They remind him of what conversation they agreed to partake.

"As greatly as it pains me to burden you so terribly, I would ask the same of you as I did of D," Mayerling says seriously, "Should I bite someone, I need you to kill me. As in Trench, I should return, but whether I return or not, it is the only way to free them from a vampire's curse. I would rather die than live with someone cursed on my account."

It was easier with D, whom he knew less well, who had tried to kill him before, whom he didn't love. They grew closer over time, so much as D let anyone grow closer to him. Yet it cannot compare with how he feels for Sharon.

Mayerling takes multiple deep breaths, smelling the sun off her skin and the anger simmering in her blood. Her hand against his neck, her azure gaze meeting his eyes, the heated space between them... the other conversation vibrates deep in his bones.

"Familiars help Legends and Myths," Mayerling says, "your very presence eases the turmoil within. Though my emotions continue strong, they have an anchor, a lighthouse, a tether. I have been told that the bond amplifies such effects, a part of the greater whole that forms the bond. It sounds, I admit, much like the empathic bond that permits one to feel each other's emotions. The exact effect is not identical from bond to bond, which drives me to believe its nature depends also upon those entering the bond.

"I would not have you form a bond with me solely for my sake. It would weigh too heavily upon me that you would yoke yourself to me. It must—it must or I cannot bear it—also help you."

He gazes down at her, intense, and it feels as though his heart may burst in his chest. "I love thee, Sharon, and I promised you this conversation, yet I know not what will result of it."

A large, tender heart pounds away in his chest. It's the thing that drew her to him in the first place. It's his nature to find the positive in even his most harrowing moments. The light in the dark. A direct contrast to her own habits of searching for the worst parts of even the best situations. He may not regret the temptations Baba Yaga imposed upon him (knowingly, she thinks sharply) but Sharon won't let it happen again, not if it's in her power to change it.

"If you ever bite someone," the words are a promise on her lips as she presses her other hand against his chest, above the heart. She knows what it takes to kill a vampire: heart, head, fire, "I will kill you." Saying it out loud makes her heart sink. The very idea breaks it. "But I will do whatever it takes to make certain it never comes to that."

By any means necessary. For every doubt she has stuffed away in her, she doesn't lack for confidence in at least one area of her life.

There is something daunting about the connection a bond would create between them, though whatever wariness she feels has little to do with the intensity and depth of his emotions. She would have no problem drowning in him. But what of the things she'll gift to him in return? Would he see the monsters she does when the stress gets to be too much? Feel the rage and violent impulses?

She drops her hand from his chest to rest it on his hip and her gaze drops with it, lips pursed. Idly, with her other hand, she plays with the hairs at the nape of his neck.

"You know what a bond might help me with?" She asks him seriously, attention pulled back up to his face, "It might give me a heads up when shit gets bad for you... and vice versa." She doesn't have to worry about bloodlust but she does have a rage that can twist the world.

"It might give me an extra moment to help you or stop you." This is just as much for her as it is him. "But killing you," she laughs suddenly, eyes damp, "I would rather kill every single person I've ever met here." Wide-eyed and serious. Her promise stands: she will kill him if it comes down to that but that doesn't mean she wouldn't rather do anything else.

"The only thing about a bond that puts me on edge," a moments hesitation as she tries to build up her courage, "is what you will feel from me. I don't think you know just how awful I am."

And still, she's willing to risk it for him.

For a single moment, Mayerling relaxes with Sharon's promise. As chilling as the words are, the guarantee that stopping such horrors lay not only on his shoulders eases something within him. Sharon's next words raises his suspicions, and his eyes focus intensely on Sharon over all those words could mean. Mayerling has witnessed them and the actions that follow too many times. Rarely is the outcome pretty, whether the words are successfully kept or not. Atrocities have littered the world in such a name, and people have died needlessly too. Mayerling would not have Sharon die to prevent herself from needing to kill him. Nor—

His concern stays with him, a companion, as he listens to her reasons for the bond—a simple explanation with potentially meaningful consequences. Had Sharon left it at being concern for him, Mayerling would have rejected it for the reason he had already said. Mayerling will not yoke her because of the burden he was born with. He has born it millennia. He can bear it further, without adding burdens to her (beyond the promise he already exacted due to her love for him). Vice versa. Such little words, yet Sharon wandered Folkmore without him handling her anger, the basis of this conversation. The idea Sharon could use his help—that he could help her to any meaningful degree the way she helps him by her very presence—makes his heart sing beneath the heaviness of the topics they discuss.

"Please do not kill people here, Sharon," Mayerling says, "certainly not on my behalf, for that would weigh down my heart far more than my own death. Should someone threaten my life, I would understand. Yet killing someone to prevent me from feeding upon them defeats the purpose of the promise I asked of you. I asked it for their sake, for their safety, if it is I that has placed them in danger.

"I ask not from some moral high ground. I assure you, Sharon da Silva, that no matter how many people you have killed, I have killed more. Some I have killed for good reason, some merely to survive, and some I am honor bound to admit rooted in selfish reasons. I have walked your Otherworld, and I know your ambitions to kill Pthumerians and would not be surprised should you wish the same toward Thirteen."

His lips quirk into a smile. "I know not what awfulness you believe me ignorant of that would turn me away from you," Mayerling says, "so how about you tell me the worst of it, something which you think would turn my stomach and my soul. Should it fail to do that, you can remember I see the good you so readily forget or turn a blind eye to."

He has not forgotten D trained her to be a vampire hunter, what that must require of her for him to see such potential and the training besides.

Sharon takes his face between her hands, amusement gleaming in her eyes at the misunderstanding, "I will not kill people on your behalf, no matter how much I'd prefer it to killing you." She would not show love to him in such an awful way. She knows him better than that. She leans up to kiss the tip of his nose.

"I know you asked it for their sake. I'd drag you into my Otherworld to stop you," To say it, though, makes her expression flicker. The last time isn't so easily forgotten. She drops her hands to his shoulders, smoothing a crease in the fabric of his cape as if it were suddenly the most important thing for her fingers to be doing. "Separate you from everyone else."

It's a possibility that's only available if they form a bond, though, or if he's capable in that mental state to send her a warning. Granted, she doesn't know exactly how the Otherworld works in this place.

She finally pulls away from him to busy herself with a cup of tea, more to hide the minute expressions as she speaks and to busy her hands, "I took their children, Mayerling. I took their children and I did to them what their parents did to me. I burned them alive."

Her voice is carefully controlled, chilled despite the subject matter, "And then I gave them back twisted. Mindless and desperate and always searching for someone to help them. But their touch burns," something dark and pleased leaks into her voice there, "They were my first monsters because I wanted their parents to feel even an ounce of what they'd put Dahlia through."

Mayerling kisses the top of Sharon's head, feeling warm and known and loved, when Sharon, like so many people, would rather harm others than those she loves. Than him. Her Otherworld is perfectly suited for the task, a place where he's isolated from everyone and cannot bite anyone (save Sharon, though he knows first hand that he will be busily occupied by his own demons and not an immediate threat to her). It's a blessing, a relief, even as it burdens her further because her power would torment him. Only because they love each other so much, because Sharon truly cares for him and what he wants, will she do it. Mayerling wishes he need not burden her, yet there's no other he trusts more to handle the issue in Folkmore.

He lets her go, though he wants to offer her comfort the way she gave it to him, because Sharon fears rejection and his turning away from her. Easier, it likely seems, if he cannot remove himself from her touch in recoil and horror at whatever she might say. Easier to turn away and not meet his eye. Easier— whatever makes it easier for her to share, though Mayerling doubts it truly makes much of a difference. Instead, he admires her bravery in sharing it willingly despite the difficulty and listens carefully and, as best he can, without judgment—without immediate judgment.

His stomach turns at the plain statement of fact, not only of what Sharon did but what was done to her. Burned alive. She's yet so young, even now, but to have lived through that? He knows the pain well, for he has burned alive many a time. He could burn alive if he simply stepped foot outside their door without his wings protecting him. The thought of that happening to children, not for their own foolhardiness and desire to see a butterfly, pains him terribly, yet Mayerling cannot claim it be the first time he has heard of terrible deeds done to children, nor even such done by the hand of someone he loves. The pain flashes through him as raw as ever, yet he's used to feeling such pain. He doesn't recoil but watches her.

Mayerling ponders what Sharon says and the way she says it, yet he senses what pleases her is not the harm to the children but the harm to their parents—the harm to the people who hurt her. That certainly eases the sense around it all, yet Sharon's correct that it isn't something he simply accepts without second thought, that he ignores because he loves her, that can be any more or less accepted in her than in someone he does not know.

When he ponders the words, the last sentence makes his brows furrow. "You separate yourself from your own trauma when you speak of it," Mayerling notes, "Those adults not only put Dahlia through something, they put you through it. They burned you. They hurt you. Did you not want revenge for yourself, for your own sake?" He reaches for her hand as he considers an answer. "Did you not value yourself, your pain, your own experience and see it worthy of vengeance, of punishment, of justice? You are as worth protecting and meting out punishment for as her. Even in this dark, terrible moment, you cared about another. Love motivated you as strongly as hate.

"I cannot be glad that it happened, for children are children, whatever the sins of their fathers and mothers, yet I can understand." As much as it saddens him that he understands, he does.

The moment his fingers brush against her hand, her own fingers twitch as she resists the urge to rip away and curl in upon herself, but she allows him to take it. This is one conversation she's never wanted to have with him. There have been nights where she's considered laying it all out in the open but the thought always chilled her and crippled her tongue.

"I hated those kids. They weren't children to me. They were monsters before I ever got a hold of them," Sharon tells him fiercely, intent on disrupting his attempt to see her actions as anything other than selfish and cruel, "Their parents would whisper about me but their children would act. I always left school with new bruises—Fuck, they were just as big a part of my burning as the rest of the town."

She has to take a moment to center herself. Even just thinking back to those moments is like reliving them, the memories clear as ever, "Burn the witch," the words come out thick on her tongue as if they had literal weight to them, "That's what they'd chant as they threw their books at me. Some days I'd just take it but the day of the burning, I hid in the girl's bathroom. Lockable stalls," she explains with a shrug but her grip on his hand tightens, "When I got in there, though, the janitor was already in there and all the girls knew not to be alone with him. He made sure to lock the door behind him." The words come out stiffer and stiffer until she chokes them out and her eyes burn. There's no reason to go into details.

"They burned me alive that night and my mother let them," Sharon does not believe she acted out of love when she killed those children, "I remember the sounds she made when I was pulled off the altar. Beyond the sound of the fire and the screaming, I heard the sounds she made. I wanted their parents to make the same sounds for the things I was going to do."

Finally, she pulls her attention away from the tea to look at him, cheeks damp. Whatever grief is still wound up around her heart is nothing in comparison to the rage she still feels, "I hate Dahlia but she was still my mother. So, no," and this sucks to say because it would be much easier to let him believe that; allow him to believe there was some small bit of goodness in all that destruction and horror but she loves him too much for that, "love was not a part of what motivated me."

Alessa had been blind to everything but her own pain. "I was nine." It sounds like an excuse to her own ears and she flinches at it. "And I spent the next forty years of my life exacting my revenge."

Exactly what passed that night, what cruelties Sharon suffered, are laid out for Mayerling in far more detail, enough detail that his first instinct is to kill the janitor and the adults who taught their children such hate. He wants to extend his cloak around her back in time to prevent any of these traumas from happening despite knowing that is not the manner in which time works, at least not for him. The conversation happens because it happened, yet Mayerling with all his experience and ethics feels that instinct all the same. Sharon's ethics have always been more assertive about protecting herself, and it is clear why. It saddens him deeply within his soul that she knows all this sadness, that she had no one else to stand up for her, not even her mother.

"You stood up for yourself when no one else would," Mayerling says. "You were hurt over and over and over, and when they burned you alive"—he cannot help the anger that comes out with those words—"you had enough: enough pain, enough abuse, enough excuses. Do you think so many people would do differently? Do you think I do not defend myself?

"I did not come to my philosophy overnight, nor do I expect I would have reached it at all had I gone through what you went through, Sharon."

He searches her face to meet her wet blue gaze. "You are allowed to love and to protect yourself, Sharon da Silva, even should and especially should no one else do so," Mayerling declares. "I cannot claim that your actions sit easily with me, nor that I eagerly enjoy the pleasure in your voice as you reflect on those deeds. Yet you have survived when no one ought to have expected it, and I do not hold those actions against you. They reaped the pain and suffering they sewed. You feel what you feel, and I know well that feelings alone should not be judged but with actions. While I know not what all you have done in Trench and now in Folkmore, removed from those circumstances, in all I do know, I believe you have acted as a moral person.

"I do not see a conflict between us on that matter, not one that should tear us asunder."

Her past is her past, and he understands why she would act as she had. Mayerling lifts a heavy brow, as though asking whether there be other aspects of those forty years of revenge that Sharon worries will make him lose faith in and abandon her.

The tendons in her neck tighten as she worries her lower lip between her teeth, more thoughtful than anxious. Sharon is not certain what she expected from Mayerling during this conversation, if anything at all, but his response has her inhale sharply. The questions force her to reconceptualize her past; to ponder however momentarily upon them and wonder. Her actions will never feel like they were done in defense of herself or even in protection but they'd felt necessary. A response to cruelty with cruelty.

"I didn't think this would tear us asunder," she emphasizes his phrasing, the words almost a tease despite the heaviness of the conversation but it's gone the moment she continues, "I just... I just didn't want you to be caught off-guard by what you might be privy to if we do form a bond. There are days when I am more hate and rage than anything else. All those years have left a rot inside of me." There is a reason her Otherworld takes the form it does.

She entwines their hands together and the racing of her heart slows. She even breathes a little easier as if just touching him provided her with enough comfort to ease her woes. Love is such a strange fucking emotion.

"Sometimes, I fear that whatever good there is inside of me will be eaten by it one day."

July TFLN Time

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cw; talk of child murder

cw; talk of child murder

cw; talk of child murder & implied csa

Re: cw; talk of child murder & implied csa

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