Fan Fiction ❯ Past and Present ❯ Chapter 2 ( Chapter 2 )

"I don't like to think of the world." Raziel glanced over at Tanim who lay on her back and stared up at the arching dome of stars. A peaceful breeze played with his black bangs and ruffled her plain dress. He returned his eyes to the heavens.

"Why not?"

"It's too big and there's too many bad things in it." He laughed softly in response. From the corner of his eye he saw her watching him in questioning silence.

"I like it that way. I have a purpose and space to complete it in."

"As you say. If you could change one thing in your life what would you change?" she asked propping herself up on one elbow to get a better look at him. He kept his gaze locked on the coruscating flecks of light and tried to organize his wildly flying thoughts.

"I don't know. Maybe…less vampires and…more time to spend with you."

"That didn't sound definite," she laughed tapping his nose. He snapped playfully at her finger and she pulled it out of reach with a startled squeak.

"I would like to spend more time with you, though." The breeze stilled and her soft breathing filled the silence between them. He saw her try to smile and fail. Again a sharp dagger sliced into the meat of his heart and dug deeper as he waited for her reply.

"That would…would be nice. But then there's reality…and vampires. You have to hunt them. That is your fate and I will stay here and help the injured. I doubt either of us will see the end of this conflict." Her pale face became clouded with troubled thoughts and a veil of apprehension covered her eyes.

"Tanim, don't be pessimistic. That's my job."

"And you do a fine enough job of that for all of Nosgoth," she laughed. The ringing cadence of her own voice dispelled the worries from her face. He liked her better that way. She shouldn't have to look sorrowful if he had any say in the matter.

~ ~ ~

"Who…Raziel? No, you have his voice, but you are not him," Tanim told me with determined firmness as she slowly inched back through the door behind her. How could I explain it to her? I still existed as a Sarafan zealot in this time and as my own ravaged, blue body.

My memory of her, her tired smile and gently mischievous eyes, had fled upon my resurrection as a vampire, but now it returned with bitter vengeance. The familiar pain assailed the silent organ that hung still in my chest for my heart beat no more. I couldn't believe I had forgotten her. Apart from my duty as a Sarafan warrior she had been my sole anchor to the world. She had been the light that drove the shadows from my heart and troubled thoughts from my mind. And now she stood, breathing and vibrant, before me and cringed every time she met my eyes.

I saw myself as she must and the horror my appearance truly drove deep into my consciousness. I loved her in life and I still felt a vestige of that emotion in my un-death. Yet the loathing and terror etching cruel lines into her beautiful face stoked the writhing inferno of my barely satiated rage. How dare she regard me with such revulsion? Was I not her love?

No, I no longer held that privilege. It had died along with my mortal life. She belonged to my Sarafan self. The self that I planned on killing if he didn't yield Janos' heart. I had promised long ago never to put sorrow in her eyes, but I would be breaking that promise. Would she cry for her dead lover? I was sure she would.

I wanted nothing more than to erase Tanim from my conscious memory and finish this wending course fate seemed determined to put me on. Unfortunately she stood in the doorway that I desired passage through. Like so many aspects of my past she would not fade away quietly.

"Stand aside, wench"-Gods how my voice quavered-"I need to pass through that door." She glanced over her shoulder and then back at me. As if reading the direction of my murderous thoughts, she planted herself firmly, despite the fine trembling I detected in her body, in the door's threshold.

"You can't. I won't allow you to," she stated. "Please, go back. I understand why you're doing this. We, the Sarafan, have ki-"

"No. You have no idea why I'm doing this. You don't understand." She flinched and the tiny movement ripped into me.

"Stop it."

"What?" Now what did she want? She had always hated the war between vampires and Sarafan. Even now she tried to forestall the loss of more life by attempting to convince me to turn back.

"Stop using his voice. If I wasn't looking at you I would swear you were him." She could have said a hundred things, made a hundred pleadings, yet she merely asked me to employ another voice. Little did she know that that was my true voice.

"I'm afraid I cannot accommodate you, my dear. This is the only voice I shall ever have."

"What would you have of this place? Obviously you have murdered these valiant men and…?"

"I seek the heart of Janos Audron and the stolen Soul Reaver." I held the Reaver out to show her that one of my goals had been accomplished.

"And these items are worth all this…blood?" She gestured towards the spreading pools of crimson surrounding the corpses of my former brethren. I knew her powers of persuasion and I knew how dangerous her very vivacity could be. Once I had easily drowned in the rolling cadence of her words and even now I could feel them reviving long dead emotions.

"You can't change the past or your life." Her eyes swept up and pinned me with a piercing look. Those same far-seeing eyes swept over my ravaged visage, avoiding my abnormally glowing eyes, and down my body with a degree of attention she had not showed upon first meeting.

"How? This cannot be true. You…Raziel?" Her shoulders slumped, as defeat weighed her down. I witnessed the beginning of the end of her noble spirit. I had done something far worse than bring sorrow to her eyes. I had broken her spirit. But it was she who had realized the truth and so I couldn't take complete blame. Could I?

~ ~ ~

"I want you to lie to me," Tanim whispered as she pressed her face against Raziel's broad chest. He stared at her dark head in surprise.

"What do you mean?"

"Tell me you'll never leave me. Tell me that we'll be together forever." She looked up, tears shimmering among her sooty lashes, and wrapped her arms tighter about his shoulders.

"I won't lie to you. We will be together and I will never let you go," he told her fervently. She laughed at him sadly.

"Don't say that. Don't say it like it's the truth. Death is waiting patiently in the shadows for us with every breath. I just want a lie to feel safe in. A little lie to keep the nightmares away for tonight." He kissed her forehead, her nose and eyelids. He kissed away the worry knitting her brows and then paid homage to her trembling mouth.

"Forever, Tanim. I swear it."

"I'll love you no matter what. Whatever happens I'll love you. Don't forget that." She said that as if she knew something was coming to irrevocably change their lives.

~ ~ ~

Tanim, a horrible shuddering passing through her body, staggered forward, one arm outstretched in a manner that was supplicant and agonized. Trembling, she reached towards me and I cringed away. Hurt flickered in her eyes and she withdrew her hand. In that moment I came to a truly horrifying realization; now that she knew the Sarafan Raziel and I were the same being her love now transferred to encompass my grotesque self.

She had promised, long ago, to love him, me, no matter what and she, unlike myself, rarely broke a promise. And now because of that promise she regarded me with a mixture of love and anguish.

"What happened? You aren't a vampire, I don't think," she murmured tracing my features with sorrowful eyes and then moving on to my deformed, three clawed hands and cloven feet.

"I was. Now I am something…different."

"Don't do it, Raziel. Please don't take yourself away from me," she cried before throwing her slender arms about me and burying her face against my emaciated chest. She knew, by the gods she knew my intentions better than I did. I stared down at her quivering form, felt her desperately tight embrace, and longed for things to be different. I had been wrong so many centuries past. I would change the one thing that I had no power to.

"I'm sorry," I told her lamely. Her grip on my dead flesh tightened and her soft sobbing pierced my ears.

"This is suicide. I…I don't want you to die. I want you to stay with me." Suicide, I hadn't thought of it in quite that light. I knew I would be murdering myself, but suicide? I knew she wasn't speaking of myself as I stood in her arms. She meant myself as a Sarafan. Yet fate, no matter how I struggled against its inevitable tides, had pulled us into a situation from which there was only one outcome.

She turned her face to mine, meeting my glowing eyes without hesitation or fear. I couldn't help it as I lifted my hand and traced the shimmering path of her tears with a single claw. I expected her to wince, to move away, but she proved me wrong like so many times before.

I thought only anger and hatred could last an eternity. Only they could surmount all odds and obstacles. I know mine had. Apparently her unreasoning love could surpass all conceivable limitations and fall upon such a wretched creature as myself simply because she had loved my other self.

"There's nothing I can do, is there?" She held my clawed hand against her face and bestowed a light kiss upon my palm. "You will enter the chamber yonder and kill him, yourself."

"If he doesn't give me the heart," I replied stiffly. She looked away and nodded sorrowfully.

"You are to be your own damnation. You hate him, I can see that, and everything he stands for. Do you hate me now?" Her earnest purple eyes searched my face and her grip upon my hand tightened.

"No…"

"But you no longer love me either," she said with resigned finality. Then she raised herself on her tiptoes and sprinkled airy kisses upon whatever part of my face she could reach. She even kissed the edge of my cloak where it hid the true horror of my monstrous deformity. With each touch I remembered a thousand pleasures and intimacies with her from centuries, millennia, past that, for her, might have occurred last night.

"Go, Raziel, and fulfill your vile mission. I cannot stop you and I won't." She pulled away from me and stared at the ground as if it held the answers she sought.

"Tanim…"

"Don't say anything. I knew someone or something would take him, you, away from me." She laughed coldly. "I always knew that. It's just that…I never thought it would be yourself." I reached for her in a moment of blind desperation. My mind reeled with the potent memories of our time together and the unadulterated desire to just hold her in my arms and be held by her in return.

"No." She screamed that one word and froze my body in a moment of perfect awareness. Dashing tears from her eyes, she raced past me and I made no move to stop her. She had renounced me as surely as I planned on renouncing my Sarafan self. The funny thing was she never stopped loving me even after her rejection.

~ ~ ~

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