Donor House: Jean-Luc: First Visit to the Donor House (part 4)

[k_a_webb]

Part 1
Part 2
Part 3

“Nick never told me about that.” Alice shrugged, but Jean-Luc could see the hurt in her eyes. “I’m beginning to think Nick kept more secrets from me than I ever could have known about, but I…” She sighed. “I understand why he kept them and he has known me for such a short time. Even after spending thirty years as a vampire I’m still thinking like a human.”

“There are a lot of things Nick doesn’t tell anyone, but there are times when he will open up and you have to make sure you’re there then if you want to hear stories that he never thought he would tell. I only heard about Issac because whenever I spent time with Nick he’d get drunk… and for a while it did get worse when he first changed you. He knew how angry you were with the choice he made when he changed you, which made him even more unhappy than he normally was, so he’d do his best to release all of the emotions he was feeling by drinking way more than he should do.”

Jean-Luc knew how much alcohol it took Nick to get drunk and was grateful that when he was drinking to get drunk it didn’t matter if he could taste it or not. Spending an evening with a drunk and morose Nick was never fun, but he needed someone to talk to, someone who wasn’t Alice, someone he trusted, and Jean-Luc had become that person, even though he wasn’t certain how. The first time they met he was so certain that Nick was going to hurt him simply for having the bad luck of being related to someone in their family, so it was a relief when the anger finally left his eyes. Of course that had meant Jean-Luc had opened up more to a stranger than he ever thought he would – although the stranger wasn’t really a stranger: he was family, apparently.

“It doesn’t really matter now, Luc. Being here, I hope, will make things easier for Nick, because if it doesn’t…” Alice shrugged. “I have no idea how he managed to live for as long as he has.”

“Depressed vampires know how difficult suicide would be. You have to find a hunter who can actually do the job or starve yourself and starving yourself is quite easily the hardest thing for a vampire to do.”

“You’ve tried it.”

“Not having someone there to teach me meant I did all sorts of stupid things when I was young, Ally, and try to starve myself was one of them, because I didn’t want to be a vampire. I couldn’t do it in the end, but that didn’t make anything any easier. In some ways it made everything harder, as I knew for certain that I had no way out, unless I did try to find a hunter.” Jean-Luc shrugged. “When I first met Nick I was seriously thinking of attempting that method of suicide and he talked me out of it. Telling someone stories of the sort of damage a bad hunter can do will do that.”

Mirrored from K. A. Webb Writing.