Bad Blood Part IV

Title: Bad Blood Part IV
Author: hannah_chapter
Pairing: Belldom
Rating: R
Summary: AU. Matt and Dom are vampires with a complicated relationship. "I love him and I hate him, I need him and I need to get away from him."
Feedback: Oh yeah, right there, don't stop......
Disclaimer: This never happened. This isn't real. Nothing is real. The Matrix has you all.
Warning: Violence.


I ache for the touch of your lips, dear,
But much more for the touch of your whips, dear.
You can raise welts
Like nobody else,
As we dance to the masochism tango.

Say our love be a flame, not an ember,
Say it's me that you want to dismember.
Blacken my eye,
Set fire to my tie,
As we dance to the masochism tango.

Tom Lehrer -  "The Masochism Tango."


And there you have it, the story of my birth. Some vampires try to dress it up and talk about being "born into darkness" but that doesn't make it romantic, it just marks them out as pretentious arseholes with a line in really shitty poetry. There was nothing beautiful or romantic about my birth. It was quick and messy: beaten half to death by some thugs in an alley, then saved and turned by a vampire who didn't know what he was doing. I don't even know what he did to me. Did he really kill me and bring me back to life, or did he just infect me with some kind of strange virus?

He changed me, that's all I know. He made me stronger, made me faster. I'll never age and I'll never die. Fire and sunlight are the only things that can kill me, everything else will heal. And, naturally, I have to have blood, which means Dom also turned me into a killer. I don't glory in slaughter the way he does but I'm no innocent. I've probably killed enough people to fill a small city by now.

But I'm not going to sit here and complain about how awful it is to be a vampire, to be so strong and quick and never age. Why complain? I can end it anytime I want; all I have to do is walk out into the sunlight and get myself a tan. The truth is, I like being this way. In human years I'm seventy-six, an old man. But, by vampire standards, I've only just learned how to walk, which means I haven't forgotten everything about being human. That last attack was the worst one, but it wasn't the first. I was a natural target for bullies, on both sides of the Atlantic: I was small, I was quiet, I played piano and, of course, being homosexual didn't help. I haven't forgotten how it feels to be helpless. I never want to feel that way again.

I don't hate this life and I don't hate Dom for bringing me into it. He saved me; if I'd lived through that beating, not very likely but it could have happened, I'd have spent the last fifty years in a wheelchair. I probably would have wound up pissing through a tube as well. I have many reasons to hate Dom but that isn't one of them. That first week, I was all his. I clung to him, my only anchor in this strange new world, as he explained it all, what I was, what I could do. He showed me how to use my new strength and, more importantly, how to control it. Punching a hole in a door isn't hard - what's hard is opening a door without ripping it right off its hinges or having the handle break off in your hand. Picking up a cup or a glass without cracking it, that's another tricky one. With Dom's help, I soon learned to control myself.

But even then, right at the beginning, he had to be a bastard. He took the broken end of a bottle and cut my arm with it, just to show me how quickly the wound would heal. When I asked him why we had to stay out of the sun, he pulled the curtain aside and let one shaft of light touch my skin. It was only for a second but it still felt like he'd thrown boiling water right in my face.

That was all nothing, though, compared to my first kill. Dom let me drink from him at first. But, after a week of that, he wouldn't do it anymore. He said I'd have to start feeding myself. I didn't think I could do it and I told him so. He didn't argue the point, he just starved me for three nights instead. He wouldn't give me his blood and he pushed me away when I tried to take it from him. Crying and begging him for it just made him laugh. At the end of those three nights, when I was almost insane with hunger, he brought me something. I can't even remember if it was a man or a woman: all I could see and smell was food and I didn't hesitate. I was as deaf to their pleas as Dom had been to mine.

Dom stood over me as I fed, jeering and clapping sarcastically until I couldn't take it anymore. I pulled him to the ground and started punching him. This was our first brawl, but it certainly wasn't our last. It set a pattern for the years to come: a fight, a violent reconciliation, a split and then another fight and another reconciliation. Repeat to fade. We can never stay apart. If he doesn't come and get me, I eventually crack and go back to him. I can't help myself, I love him. I love him when he's rough, when he's a prick, when he plays games with me and fucks with my head. And I love him when he's kind, loving, generous - because he can be all these things too. But - and this is a question I've been asking myself for fifty years and I still don't have an answer - which side of him do I prefer? The bitter or the sweet? Do I want the rose, or do I want the thorns?