The Donor House: Advent Story (part 5)

[k_a_webb]

Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4

Morgan blushed at the compliment. “Issac, I only applied to come to the House because my parents needed the money. Coming here, no matter how scared I was, seemed like the only choice, because no one else was going to help us, and my whole family would have ended up on the streets. Neither Mum or Dad have family who could help them, with money or shelter, finding somewhere to rent at an affordable price for such a large family seemed impossible, and the waiting list for housing is so long now that even in the position we were in the help wasn’t going to be in time. Thankfully, when I mentioned on my application that time was of the essence, Nick did everything he could to get me into the House as quickly as he could, even though I kept wishing that the process could be longer, that I’d have more time to prepare myself for living in a house full of vampires.”

“That doesn’t matter. What does is how quickly you’ve become a part of the community, because you didn’t let you fear get the better of you. Even now we still have donors who apply, meet Nick, continue through the rest of the process, and then decide when they get here that this isn’t for them.” Issac sighed. “It’s disappointing when that happens, as it seems much more of a waste of time if they don’t give us a chance first. They let their fear make a decision for them without getting to know any of us and you know how much that can change a donor’s mind.”

“Yes, it was being able to spend time chatting to Nadia before we got to the difficult part, even though we were actually talking about feeding, made me much calmer and I started to understand more why you’d set up the House. Nick did explain it all to me, but it’s different when you’re out there. It’s harder to understand why you need us, because we don’t know what any of you have been through, we don’t really know what to expect, and, unfortunately, it’s really easy to terrify yourself by thinking of everything that could go wrong.” Morgan bit her lip. “What might help is sending a donor with Nick to help explain the process. Actually talking to a human who’s giving blood could make things easier.”

“We had thought of that,” Alice replied, smiling, glad that even the donors were coming up with ideas to make the House a better place. “I think we were just a little wary of putting too much of the weight of running the House on the donors’ shoulders. This is our creation and we need to be doing the hard work.”

“Ally, we want to help you.” Morgan shook her head. “The longer I’m in the House the more I want to do to help make it a success and I know a lot of the other long term donors feel the same way. None of us expected it when we first stepped in the door, but this is our home. You’ve become our family.” She sighed. “We all know that there will come a time when we have to leave the House, even though we do our best not to think about that, and that you’ll have become close to a group of mortals who will all end up dying, which is something I have a feeling you try not to think about, but until that time we’re going to do everything we can to make people understand why places like the Donor House should exist. Vampires and humans need to learn how to live together in a way that works for both of us.”

“There will always be vampires who view humans as little more than tissue paper that they can use and discard and humans who think the world would be a much better place if they found some way to destroy us all, but our hope is that the longer we keep the House open, the more Houses Lewis manages to help create, the better the relationship is going to get between our two races.” Issac smiled. “It was never going to be easy, we knew that from the beginning, but nothing that’s really worth doing is. Thanks to the auction vampires there’s so much work for us to do to make humans realise that we aren’t all the same, that we didn’t create the House for the same reason that the auctions were started, but there are always going to be those out there who think that you’ve all been brainwashed by the evil creatures who gave you money to donate your blood to them.”

“I know.” Morgan glanced over at the tree. “They’ll just never have a chance to know what it’s like to live in such a wonderful mixed community and I feel sorry for them, that their closed minds mean they’ll always see vampires as nothing more than creatures who give in to their base desires. At the same time I’m glad that I’ll never have to deal with them, because it’s hard enough to see some of the things they write on the Internet, so if they did it to my face… I dread to think how I’d react. With the Internet I can simply close the tab, so I don’t have to read it any longer. When they’re right there…” She gestured with a hand, showing she meant someone standing in front of her. “I have a feeling I’d probably slap them.”

“Facing our detractors isn’t easy,” Alice admitted. “I remember sitting in a planning meeting, before we were given permission to make our adaptations to the hotel, having to listen to a group of humans tell the entire room exactly why we shouldn’t be allowed to create the ‘Death House’.”

Issac laughed. “Then Alice showed the entire room exactly why we should. She was calmer than I ever could be, she explained the reasoning behind the idea, and exactly why she believed that creating the House would make the area much safer. Back then there were lots of things we didn’t know about how this would affect either group, but she is the whole reason we got permission. Her speech was perfect, full of what are aims were both with the community and how it would help the world to learn more about vampires, especially as we always hoped that living with a group of humans would give us information we’d never had before about how our saliva actually works, why certain vampires can’t feed from certain people, and having Jack here has been absolutely fascinating. We were really lucky to have him arrive here.”

Alice looked over at Jack, who was slowly settling in, and smiled, because it was good to see him becoming more comfortable. He’d found it so hard in the beginning, thanks to his creator, but they were showing him that his asexuality didn’t matter to them. Who he was mattered, not what. Luckily he’d found a couple of donors he felt really happy with, as they viewed his as a friend they really liked to spend time with, and Nick was in the middle of interviewing a new possible donor who had, on his application form, written down the same words they’d often heard Jack speaking, about how he didn’t feel like he fit in at all, so was looking for somewhere he could be himself rather than pretending to be normal.

“Why?” Morgan asked.

“Nadia, when you first arrived, talked to you about how your sexuality can affect who you can feed from. We still haven’t worked out why, but Lewis thinks it might have something to do with how your brain chemistry affects the change, and having an asexual vampire here has given us a chance to see how that can affect who they can feed from, which, so far, appears to be just about anyone. There doesn’t seem to be any human that Jack can’t feed from if he wishes,” Issac explained.

“I thought it might be the other way round,” Alice admitted. “I wondered if he might have trouble feeding from anyone, because we don’t have any asexual donors here, but it appears that it worked the other way round. There’s a chance that might mean an asexual donor could be fed from by anyone, but until we have one we won’t know.”

“Bisexual vampires can feed from males or females too, so I’m not entirely surprised by how things worked for Jack.” Issac shrugged. “For Jack it was difficult to feed because his creator made him feel like he was wrong for not being attracted to her and I know that’s happened to gay and lesbian vampires as well. They get told that they were made wrong and it takes finding someone who accepts them for who they are to change that, but for someone like him it’s made harder because asexuals are either very rare or they have trouble admitting what they are, as the world we live in makes it seem like everyone should be sexually attracted to someone.”

“When Jack first arrived I talked to him about what it was like to be asexual.” Morgan smiled. “The moment he told me how he’d always thought there was something wrong with him I knew that we were going to have a lot of work to do to make him realise that there’s nothing wrong with him being who he is. I spent some of my time pointing out to him the vampires I knew who’d all had trouble with their sexuality over the years, for one reason or another, and he seemed to find that helpful, knowing that he wasn’t the only one to have felt that he shouldn’t exist. At the same time he was sad that they were all sexually attracted to someone, as it made him feel both more and less alone.”

“The sooner we get someone like Jack into the House the better.” Alice sighed. “He needs more than we can give him right now, because we don’t have anyone who is asexual, and I think knowing he really isn’t alone would do him a lot of good.” She shook her head. “I’m not saying that what we’re already doing isn’t helping, as it’s obvious that is is, but at the same time he’s still isolating himself more than I’d like, so I really hope that Nick’s new donor works out. Giving him the boost of having someone who really does understand him here I hope will change his life for the better.”

“Until I came here I always thought vampires were so sure of themselves and their place in the world. They were the predators who fed from the lesser humans.” Morgan laughed. “Meeting vampires like Jack, Sullivan, Magda, and Kisten was a real surprised, because none of them are sure of themselves. Jack has always thought he shouldn’t exist, even before he was changed; Sullivan had his life changed for him by a human, which was something he never expected; Magda lost the man she loved and had to see him being changed into someone who never actually existed by people who wanted to use him to create a religion; and Kisten made mistakes that made him think he’d never be accepted at the House, because he so wanted to be accepted as a vampire.”

“Very few people want to be changed. It does happen, but being given the choice is a rare occurrence. They’re either chosen by a vampire who wants them for some reason, like I was, or, as in Alice’s case, someone loves them too much to let them go. Maybe, if we were given the option, we would have chosen it for ourselves, although I don’t think it would happen very often. Alice, who was silly enough to fall in love with a vampire, is the only one I can think of in the House.” Issac grinned at Alice and she smiled back, because he’d always thought she was the right person for Nick. “It might well be another one of the things we change with the creation of the House.”

Mirrored from K. A. Webb Writing.

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[ysabetwordsmith.livejournal.com]

>>Luckily he’d found a couple of donors he felt really happy with, as they viewed his as a friend they really liked to spend time with<<

That should say "viewed him" above.

>>There’s a chance that might mean an asexual donor could be fed from by anyone, but until we have one we won’t know.”<<

That would be so cool, and a perfect person to train for emergency work once they're settled in.