Donor House: Nick: Autumn

[k_a_webb]

Written for Livejournal user ysabetwordsmith’s prompt: How vampires feel about autumn. This is just one vampire’s point of view, so it’s definitely a prompt I can write more stories for.

When Nick was alone he couldn’t help thinking. He found himself dwelling on all the mistakes he’d made, whether there was something he could have done to change the outcome or not. As the nights got longer he always found himself finding reasons to be alone, because the autumn was his least favourite time of year, so he could remember. It was the season he’d been turned into a vampire, the season he’d been forced to turn Alice into a vampire, and nothing he did helped to get rid of the bad memories. Sighing, he walked through the donor house, trying not to look out of the windows.

Being in the house didn’t help, because Nick knew that almost all the vampires who chose to visit had been changed against their will and just hadn’t allowed their creator’s beliefs to turn them into a creature who didn’t care about humans. It did give them a chance to be happy, to feed from people who had volunteered, to enjoy the nights as they got longer instead of hating them. He wished he could feel the same. The longer nights gave him more time to interview prospective donors, spend time with vampires he hadn’t seen in decades, and get to know the donors, but that didn’t change the way he felt every moment of every night.

Glancing out of the window Nick saw the leaves falling from the tree, to the ground where children would play with them. Sometimes he wondered, unable to stop himself, what had happened to his children, to the children his children may have had, but he’d never allowed himself to research it. No one knew about the family he’d been forced to give up, not even Alice, because he knew someone would try to convince him to find out what had happened to them after that fateful autumn, and he wasn’t ready for that. It had been centuries, but he didn’t know if he’d ever be ready for that.

Fear was something that had paralysed Nick more times that he was happy to admit. He’d almost not been in time to save Alice because he was terrified that something might have happened to her when he’d heard her scream. It had taken him months to gather up the courage to talk to Issac about the donor house, because he couldn’t help thinking that Issac would just laugh at the idea. Every time Nick gave a new donor their arrival date he was certain they wouldn’t turn up. Sometimes he wished he was someone else, but that was never going to happen, so what he had to do was learn to deal with his fear.

That was probably why Nick found himself walking towards his favourite donor’s room. He’d never fed from Penny, having promised himself he would never got as close to a donor as he’d once got to Alice, but it had been impossible not to spend time with her. She was someone he could talk to the way he had once been able to talk to Alice and that was something he’d needed more than anything, even though he hadn’t realised it until he met her.

Mirrored from K. A. Jones Writing.