ash

Jun kisses Angelica and tastes ash.

Her skin is smooth and flawless, alabaster in colour; her eyes twin pools of midnight. Her hair is the colour of her eyes, tumbling down her shoulders in wavy locks. Her fingers are slender and her hands are soft in Jun's.

Jun kisses Angelica and tastes ash and blood.

Angelica is cold; the freezing cold of a dead woman, and her youth is the undead youth of eight decades. Angelica is cold and she clutches desperately at Jun, trying to thaw her eternal winter with the warmth of Jun's hands.

"Jun." There is a voice that comes from the doorway and Jun knows whom it is.

Angelica turns to see who it is, but Jun doesn't even bother to look. "Damien," he says softly, near-black brown eyes following his hand as he rubs Angelica's cold fingers absently, trying to work some heat into the freezing digits. Once, a long time ago, he would talk while he did so, whispering to Angelica how one day he'd find something to make her warm, how one day she'd never be cold again. But now he doesn't speak; he just kisses her briefly and lets her hold his hands or cup his cheek, watching her cry shining red tracks of blood.

Angelica stands abruptly, pulling her hands away from Jun's and shuddering slightly at the renewed cold. "I should be going."

Jun nods, not looking Angelica in the eye. "I'm sorry," he says quietly, as he always does.

Angelica smiles bitterly. "Thank you, Jun." She goes to the window and opens it wide, and Jun sees a soundless owl flapping its way out into the eternal night of the Hypogeum.

Damien watches her too, long after the owl disappears and there is only an open window, curtains flapping in the chill wind. His green eyes glitter in the semi-darkness of the room; faint light and shadow play across his face, pale and devoid of colour. His hair, white-blonde, is a shroud that renders his expression unreadable to Jun. His wings, soft and pure white and quivering with suppressed strength, are wrapped around his narrow frame, stemming from his angular shoulder blades.

Jun reaches out with his right hand and strokes the soft feathers, weaving his fingers into the warmth of Damien's wings. As he does so, he can feel the faint tingling in his own shoulder blades, where twin cruel scars are the only things that reminds Jun of what he once had but lost.

Jun can remember that very night, ten years ago, when a young human, face hidden in shadows, had dragged him off the street and thrown him into a cold metal cage. Jun can remember how he cried, how he howled in agony and fear and anger and beat his midnight-black wings futilely in frustration, when he realized that this stranger was taking him aboveground, to the surface, where only humans were allowed to live.

Jun can remember so clearly and so vividly, with his fingers running through the soft feathers of Damien's wing, how they pinned him to the operating table facedown and drugged him with anaesthesia, before they took out the scalpel and cut his wings, right at where the stems joined with his skin. Jun can remember feeling the pain even in his fitful, forced drugged sleep, screaming muffled by the sweet cloud that kept him from consciousness, as they cut the stems of his wings millimetre by millimetre. He remembers after the operation, when he finally shook off the last of the drug-induced sleep and sat bolt upright in his bed, screaming his lungs out. He remembers the profuse bleeding that no amount of bandages could stem, and his tears that soaked the pillow.

He remembers the night he escaped through the window by tying bed sheets into a rope; he was barely ten at that time, and very light without the added weight of his wings. He remembers running and running until he could not run any more, until he stumbled and fell flat on the asphalt of the ground, sobbing uncontrollably, the pain in his heart as empty and searing as the pain in his shoulder blades.
He remembers how he was picked up and cradled gently in the slender but uncannily strong arms of a female vampire, as beautiful as the moonlit night, but skin freezing cold to the touch.

Jun looks up at Damien, and realizes that his own cheeks are wet with tears. Damien reaches out with a white-gloved hand and cups Jun's cheek in it, thumbing the tears away. The first time Damien had heard about Jun's story, he had wept for the entire night, and when he'd stopped, he had sworn revenge on those people who had severed Jun's wings.

Jun knows that Damien meant what he'd said, and he knows that Damien will do what he'd promised, but Jun knows that if those humans are going to die, it will be by Jun's hands, and not Damien's.