FIC: Two Forms, One Soul (4/9)
Title: Two Forms, One Soul (Chapter Four)
Pairing/Characters: Bruce/Clark
Continuity: Animated series, a few years after B:TAS. (The reference to Crucifer is from the comics, stolen for use here).
Rating: PG-13
Summary: Bruce's vampiric sire pays him a visit and meets Clark.
Word Count: 2000
Warnings: None necessary
Notes: Written for the 20_inkspots challenge with
rai_daydreamer (you can look forward to her art in later chapters!). Prompt #18: "Under the glass moon." (see the full table here).
Clark Kent surfaced from a confused dream of blood and mirrors to the sound of voices. The black satin sheets of Wayne Manor shifted slightly around him, caressing, as he focused: Bruce's voice, and a woman's, light and delicate.
"Pfah!" the woman's voice spat. "To find you drinking this synthetic swill--it disgusts me." Her voice lilted with a slight Italian accent. "Bruce, my child. Why have you not yet drunk of the true life? Do you still resist your destiny?"
"I do and I will, Fiorella."
"Such informal address for one's sire! The proper term should be 'mistress.'" Silence. "Bruce. You cannot resist forever. You grow weaker by the day. How it pains me to see your handsome face so lean, so haggard, when you should be sweetly sated." An exasperated sigh. "Come here and kneel to your mistress and creator."
There was a long pause. In the silence Clark shifted quietly to slip the thorny cross around his neck once more. Then Fiorella's silvery voice spoke again, sounding both surprised and almost weary.
"I did not expect such resistance, such willpower, from you when I made you one of us, Bruce Wayne. You are apparently more than you seem."
Bruce's laugh grated through the Manor, raising the hair on the back of Clark's neck. He began to make his way cautiously toward the stairs.
"It is of no matter," Fiorella continued carelessly. "If you do not sup, eventually you will become weak enough that your will shall bend to mine. I cannot make you drink--that choice must be yours alone. But I can make you my thrall. Soon you will kneel to me, child. And one day you will freely choose to dine on human blood." Her voice was dreamy. "Oh Bruce, the ecstasy you are missing. The sweetness, the all-consuming rapture as life flows between you and your prey, as you feel their struggles weakening, as they submit to your strength. As you drink deep and feel the heat in your body, suffusing your flesh, filling you with strength and power as you take what you want."
"Stop it." Bruce's voice was flat. Clark could hear the faint tremor in it.
Fiorella's laugh was a sweet carillon. "Already you yearn to experience it, to taste the fresh blood and thrill to the pulse fluttering under your mouth like a trapped bird, unable to free itself. I see the hunger in your eyes, young and stubborn one. Your thirst is bitter and nearly undoes you. Your thirst...for the one skulking at the top of the stairs, perhaps?"
Clark froze in shock and Fiorella went on merrily, "Come out, little sparrow. Reveal yourself to your betters."
She clapped her hands sharply and Clark found himself descending the staircase. At the bottom was a young woman, almost a girl, with silvery-gold hair piled in ringlets on top of her head, gray eyes alight with laughter. She was slender, tiny, and yet power emanated from her in waves. As he reached the bottom of the stairs, she stepped forward. "Oh Bruce, I can understand why you wouldn't want to share this morsel. The life in him is so strong, so--"
The vampire recoiled as she came close enough to sense the cross around his neck, her lips drawing up over her teeth to reveal the delicate pointed fangs. She hissed, a purely feral sound of rage, bestial. Clark felt dread and terror clench around him but was unable to move. Fear, anger, hatred--and nothing more, no attraction, no allure. Fiorella could compel his body, but she seemed to have no hold on his will. Bruce stood next to the woman, his eyes fixed on her, his posture wary.
She pointed at Clark's neck, the cross hanging there. "Curse you, why do you allow that in your house?"
"You know we cannot compel a human to remove a holy symbol, Fiorella."
As quickly as the rage had swept her face, it was gone again; the monster transmuted into the beauty once more. Fiorella smiled sweetly and cupped Bruce's face in her hand. "One day, my child, you'll embrace the pleasure of the feast, the delight of fresh life surging into you. You cannot resist your need forever. You will truly be a magnificent addition to our number, rich in power and wisdom. I look forward to the day we can share a meal together." She leaned forward and touched her pale lips to his lightly; Clark raged against his compulsion but couldn't move a muscle. The female vampire turned and smiled at him, her lips curving mockingly, then turned and slipped from the Manor.
Clark's locked limbs released and he stumbled forward, gasping, a red haze of fury across his vision. For a sickening moment he wanted nothing in the world so much as to see the delicate vampire's body wrapped in cleansing flame, convulsing and blackening...he staggered to the sofa and clung to its back, panting for breath. "You just let her go!" he snarled at Bruce.
For a moment, an answering anger snapped in Bruce's eyes. "She's centuries old, confident in her power. I'm young, untried, and--and she's right, I'm weak." His shoulders slumped. "Weak, and growing weaker every day. I can't fight her." Bruce's fists clenched. "One day she'll come to me and find me too enfeebled to resist her. I'll become her thrall, a slave, my spirit bound to her whim." He growled, deep in his throat, a nearly animal sound. "Don't think for a moment it's not that I don't yearn to fight her, that I don't hate her with my entire soul." He laughed, low and bitter. "Not that I have one any longer."
"Don't," Clark said. "Don't say such things."
Bruce scrubbed the back of his hand across his mouth as if to wipe away a bad taste, grimacing. "When she saw the cross," Clark said after a time. "She snarled. I saw...I saw her fangs." He looked up at Bruce. "You don't seem to have fangs."
Bruce seemed to seize on the change of subject almost eagerly. "They only become prominent when angered or...or ready to feed," he said. "Otherwise they're close to normal." He bared his teeth, the canines only slightly longer than a human's.
Clark stepped closer, stopping when Bruce's eyes slitted with pain. He slipped off the cross, ignoring Bruce's protest, and put it on an end table. "I want to see," he said, drawing closer.
Slowly, almost reluctantly, Bruce opened his mouth again. Clark reached out and touched the teeth gently, running his finger along the edge of ivory, from canine to canine. Bruce closed his eyes and made a small noise deep in his throat; Clark could feel him trembling. Were those canines ever so slightly longer, were they curving just a bit more? His finger passed along the cool smoothness and Bruce whispered "Clark," his tongue darting out at the "l" to touch Clark's skin so briefly.
"You need to be stronger," Clark said as he drew his hand back. "We have to fight her, and you need to be stronger." He felt like he was in a very small boat, approaching some vast fall of water; he could hear it roaring in his ears. "You need to drink."
Bruce's eyes snapped open. "No."
"Just a little--"
"--There is no just a little for a vampire," snarled Bruce. "Even one bite will kill a human."
The drop was closer, dizzying vertigo rushing through Clark's body. "I'm not a human. It probably won't kill me." He touched his neck, pulling aside his collar. Fear and resolve and something else, something deeper and more exhilarating, dragged him ahead inexorably. "Drink from me, Bruce."
The world dropped away, leaving him suspended as he waited for Bruce's answer.
: : :
Bruce stared at Clark, watching terror and determination chase across those clear-cut features. Clark feared him. He could take away that fear, he knew, replace it with dreamy, narcotic resignation that bordered on bliss. But he couldn't take away the pain, the burning, the anguish of the feeding. "Never," he heard himself whisper, but it sounded weak and pale in his own ears. He swallowed in a dry throat. "Never," he repeated, more strongly.
"The sun will heal me after you're done," Clark said as if they were discussing battle strategy, as if they weren't talking about Bruce consuming his friend's blood.
"I will not feed from you! Ever!"
Anger snapped in Clark's eyes. "Then you'll be enslaved to that...creature. We'll lose you!" He flinched and added, more softly, "I'll--I'll lose you." He shook his head, his voice resolute and businesslike again. "The JLA can't afford to have you enthralled to a vampire, Bruce. It's the only reasonable decision."
Reasonable... Bruce felt anything but reasonable, listening to Clark's blood thunder in the space between them. Clark was the sweet voice of pragmatism now, cool and collected, dispassionate. It would be so easy to use his ignorant, blind resolve against him, to finally drink deeply...
And Clark would hate and fear him forever after that, would never be able to forget the agony Bruce had knowingly inflicted on him.
It was too high a price.
"I won't do it," Bruce said.
Something flickered in Clark's eyes. "I...I know that it would probably be...distasteful to you, but--"
"Distasteful?" The word was shocked from Bruce. "What?"
The azure of Clark's eyes was shadowed. "When the vampire lord Crucifer controlled me...when he tried to drink my blood he--he spat it out, said my alien blood was impossible to drink, repugnant. But Bruce...you need to drink, no matter how foul and disgusting--"
Bruce hadn't realized he was moving until he found Clark's hand in his. The Kryptonian flinched slightly but held his ground as Bruce turned the hand over gently, resting his fingers against the fluttering pulse at the wrist. Bruce felt the thirst leap in him, stronger than ever. "Crucifer was either a fool, or mad, or both. I tell you, Kal-El, that the sound of your blood is a song that drowns out all others, the scent of it more tantalizing that anything I've ever experienced." His voice sounded distant, faraway. He shouldn't be saying such things, and yet the words he'd kept himself from saying so long kept tumbling out. "Ever since I sensed the life in you, all others have been as tempting as...drinking muddy water when one yearns for the brightest, most glorious wine. Your blood...it sings. I hear it in my sleep, golden and alluring as the sunlight that shuns me now."
Clark rested his hands on Bruce's shoulders, met his eyes. "I don't shun you, Bruce," he said, his gaze level. "I never will."
Bruce recoiled. "Don't make promises you can't keep," he muttered. Somehow he managed to turn his back, to walk away from the warmth, the life freely offered. He felt colder with every step.
At the top of the stairs, he looked down. Clark was still standing, looking up at him, his face pale and resolute. "Wear that cross, Clark," Bruce called down. "Fiorella knows I...that you're a friend of mine now. She'll be happy to kill you just to make a point." The image of Fiorella delicately bending Clark's head back, sinking her needle-sharp fangs into that shining flesh, struck him like a physical pain, stirring emotions he couldn't bear to look at too closely.
As he retreated into his bedroom, the heavy curtains drawn against the morning sun's arrival, he heard the cross being drawn off the table and drew a sigh of relief. Fiorella couldn't touch Clark now. No one should ever caress that bright alien skin, taste that sunlit blood, drink the life that sang so intoxicatingly.
None but me, a voice whispered from the dark corners of his mind, but he pushed it aside and tried to sleep.
The memory of Clark's pulse was a lullaby and a lure, haunting his dreams.
Chapter Five
Pairing/Characters: Bruce/Clark
Continuity: Animated series, a few years after B:TAS. (The reference to Crucifer is from the comics, stolen for use here).
Rating: PG-13
Summary: Bruce's vampiric sire pays him a visit and meets Clark.
Word Count: 2000
Warnings: None necessary
Notes: Written for the 20_inkspots challenge with
rai_daydreamer (you can look forward to her art in later chapters!). Prompt #18: "Under the glass moon." (see the full table here).
Clark Kent surfaced from a confused dream of blood and mirrors to the sound of voices. The black satin sheets of Wayne Manor shifted slightly around him, caressing, as he focused: Bruce's voice, and a woman's, light and delicate.
"Pfah!" the woman's voice spat. "To find you drinking this synthetic swill--it disgusts me." Her voice lilted with a slight Italian accent. "Bruce, my child. Why have you not yet drunk of the true life? Do you still resist your destiny?"
"I do and I will, Fiorella."
"Such informal address for one's sire! The proper term should be 'mistress.'" Silence. "Bruce. You cannot resist forever. You grow weaker by the day. How it pains me to see your handsome face so lean, so haggard, when you should be sweetly sated." An exasperated sigh. "Come here and kneel to your mistress and creator."
There was a long pause. In the silence Clark shifted quietly to slip the thorny cross around his neck once more. Then Fiorella's silvery voice spoke again, sounding both surprised and almost weary.
"I did not expect such resistance, such willpower, from you when I made you one of us, Bruce Wayne. You are apparently more than you seem."
Bruce's laugh grated through the Manor, raising the hair on the back of Clark's neck. He began to make his way cautiously toward the stairs.
"It is of no matter," Fiorella continued carelessly. "If you do not sup, eventually you will become weak enough that your will shall bend to mine. I cannot make you drink--that choice must be yours alone. But I can make you my thrall. Soon you will kneel to me, child. And one day you will freely choose to dine on human blood." Her voice was dreamy. "Oh Bruce, the ecstasy you are missing. The sweetness, the all-consuming rapture as life flows between you and your prey, as you feel their struggles weakening, as they submit to your strength. As you drink deep and feel the heat in your body, suffusing your flesh, filling you with strength and power as you take what you want."
"Stop it." Bruce's voice was flat. Clark could hear the faint tremor in it.
Fiorella's laugh was a sweet carillon. "Already you yearn to experience it, to taste the fresh blood and thrill to the pulse fluttering under your mouth like a trapped bird, unable to free itself. I see the hunger in your eyes, young and stubborn one. Your thirst is bitter and nearly undoes you. Your thirst...for the one skulking at the top of the stairs, perhaps?"
Clark froze in shock and Fiorella went on merrily, "Come out, little sparrow. Reveal yourself to your betters."
She clapped her hands sharply and Clark found himself descending the staircase. At the bottom was a young woman, almost a girl, with silvery-gold hair piled in ringlets on top of her head, gray eyes alight with laughter. She was slender, tiny, and yet power emanated from her in waves. As he reached the bottom of the stairs, she stepped forward. "Oh Bruce, I can understand why you wouldn't want to share this morsel. The life in him is so strong, so--"
The vampire recoiled as she came close enough to sense the cross around his neck, her lips drawing up over her teeth to reveal the delicate pointed fangs. She hissed, a purely feral sound of rage, bestial. Clark felt dread and terror clench around him but was unable to move. Fear, anger, hatred--and nothing more, no attraction, no allure. Fiorella could compel his body, but she seemed to have no hold on his will. Bruce stood next to the woman, his eyes fixed on her, his posture wary.
She pointed at Clark's neck, the cross hanging there. "Curse you, why do you allow that in your house?"
"You know we cannot compel a human to remove a holy symbol, Fiorella."
As quickly as the rage had swept her face, it was gone again; the monster transmuted into the beauty once more. Fiorella smiled sweetly and cupped Bruce's face in her hand. "One day, my child, you'll embrace the pleasure of the feast, the delight of fresh life surging into you. You cannot resist your need forever. You will truly be a magnificent addition to our number, rich in power and wisdom. I look forward to the day we can share a meal together." She leaned forward and touched her pale lips to his lightly; Clark raged against his compulsion but couldn't move a muscle. The female vampire turned and smiled at him, her lips curving mockingly, then turned and slipped from the Manor.
Clark's locked limbs released and he stumbled forward, gasping, a red haze of fury across his vision. For a sickening moment he wanted nothing in the world so much as to see the delicate vampire's body wrapped in cleansing flame, convulsing and blackening...he staggered to the sofa and clung to its back, panting for breath. "You just let her go!" he snarled at Bruce.
For a moment, an answering anger snapped in Bruce's eyes. "She's centuries old, confident in her power. I'm young, untried, and--and she's right, I'm weak." His shoulders slumped. "Weak, and growing weaker every day. I can't fight her." Bruce's fists clenched. "One day she'll come to me and find me too enfeebled to resist her. I'll become her thrall, a slave, my spirit bound to her whim." He growled, deep in his throat, a nearly animal sound. "Don't think for a moment it's not that I don't yearn to fight her, that I don't hate her with my entire soul." He laughed, low and bitter. "Not that I have one any longer."
"Don't," Clark said. "Don't say such things."
Bruce scrubbed the back of his hand across his mouth as if to wipe away a bad taste, grimacing. "When she saw the cross," Clark said after a time. "She snarled. I saw...I saw her fangs." He looked up at Bruce. "You don't seem to have fangs."
Bruce seemed to seize on the change of subject almost eagerly. "They only become prominent when angered or...or ready to feed," he said. "Otherwise they're close to normal." He bared his teeth, the canines only slightly longer than a human's.
Clark stepped closer, stopping when Bruce's eyes slitted with pain. He slipped off the cross, ignoring Bruce's protest, and put it on an end table. "I want to see," he said, drawing closer.
Slowly, almost reluctantly, Bruce opened his mouth again. Clark reached out and touched the teeth gently, running his finger along the edge of ivory, from canine to canine. Bruce closed his eyes and made a small noise deep in his throat; Clark could feel him trembling. Were those canines ever so slightly longer, were they curving just a bit more? His finger passed along the cool smoothness and Bruce whispered "Clark," his tongue darting out at the "l" to touch Clark's skin so briefly.
"You need to be stronger," Clark said as he drew his hand back. "We have to fight her, and you need to be stronger." He felt like he was in a very small boat, approaching some vast fall of water; he could hear it roaring in his ears. "You need to drink."
Bruce's eyes snapped open. "No."
"Just a little--"
"--There is no just a little for a vampire," snarled Bruce. "Even one bite will kill a human."
The drop was closer, dizzying vertigo rushing through Clark's body. "I'm not a human. It probably won't kill me." He touched his neck, pulling aside his collar. Fear and resolve and something else, something deeper and more exhilarating, dragged him ahead inexorably. "Drink from me, Bruce."
The world dropped away, leaving him suspended as he waited for Bruce's answer.
: : :
Bruce stared at Clark, watching terror and determination chase across those clear-cut features. Clark feared him. He could take away that fear, he knew, replace it with dreamy, narcotic resignation that bordered on bliss. But he couldn't take away the pain, the burning, the anguish of the feeding. "Never," he heard himself whisper, but it sounded weak and pale in his own ears. He swallowed in a dry throat. "Never," he repeated, more strongly.
"The sun will heal me after you're done," Clark said as if they were discussing battle strategy, as if they weren't talking about Bruce consuming his friend's blood.
"I will not feed from you! Ever!"
Anger snapped in Clark's eyes. "Then you'll be enslaved to that...creature. We'll lose you!" He flinched and added, more softly, "I'll--I'll lose you." He shook his head, his voice resolute and businesslike again. "The JLA can't afford to have you enthralled to a vampire, Bruce. It's the only reasonable decision."
Reasonable... Bruce felt anything but reasonable, listening to Clark's blood thunder in the space between them. Clark was the sweet voice of pragmatism now, cool and collected, dispassionate. It would be so easy to use his ignorant, blind resolve against him, to finally drink deeply...
And Clark would hate and fear him forever after that, would never be able to forget the agony Bruce had knowingly inflicted on him.
It was too high a price.
"I won't do it," Bruce said.
Something flickered in Clark's eyes. "I...I know that it would probably be...distasteful to you, but--"
"Distasteful?" The word was shocked from Bruce. "What?"
The azure of Clark's eyes was shadowed. "When the vampire lord Crucifer controlled me...when he tried to drink my blood he--he spat it out, said my alien blood was impossible to drink, repugnant. But Bruce...you need to drink, no matter how foul and disgusting--"
Bruce hadn't realized he was moving until he found Clark's hand in his. The Kryptonian flinched slightly but held his ground as Bruce turned the hand over gently, resting his fingers against the fluttering pulse at the wrist. Bruce felt the thirst leap in him, stronger than ever. "Crucifer was either a fool, or mad, or both. I tell you, Kal-El, that the sound of your blood is a song that drowns out all others, the scent of it more tantalizing that anything I've ever experienced." His voice sounded distant, faraway. He shouldn't be saying such things, and yet the words he'd kept himself from saying so long kept tumbling out. "Ever since I sensed the life in you, all others have been as tempting as...drinking muddy water when one yearns for the brightest, most glorious wine. Your blood...it sings. I hear it in my sleep, golden and alluring as the sunlight that shuns me now."
Clark rested his hands on Bruce's shoulders, met his eyes. "I don't shun you, Bruce," he said, his gaze level. "I never will."
Bruce recoiled. "Don't make promises you can't keep," he muttered. Somehow he managed to turn his back, to walk away from the warmth, the life freely offered. He felt colder with every step.
At the top of the stairs, he looked down. Clark was still standing, looking up at him, his face pale and resolute. "Wear that cross, Clark," Bruce called down. "Fiorella knows I...that you're a friend of mine now. She'll be happy to kill you just to make a point." The image of Fiorella delicately bending Clark's head back, sinking her needle-sharp fangs into that shining flesh, struck him like a physical pain, stirring emotions he couldn't bear to look at too closely.
As he retreated into his bedroom, the heavy curtains drawn against the morning sun's arrival, he heard the cross being drawn off the table and drew a sigh of relief. Fiorella couldn't touch Clark now. No one should ever caress that bright alien skin, taste that sunlit blood, drink the life that sang so intoxicatingly.
None but me, a voice whispered from the dark corners of his mind, but he pushed it aside and tried to sleep.
The memory of Clark's pulse was a lullaby and a lure, haunting his dreams.
Chapter Five