The night was unusually quiet. Normally, one could expect at least a few lowly mortals wallowing around in a drinking pit such as this one. But alas, a tavern massacre wasn't on the cards, and for the sake of diplomacy and desire for something a little more intoxicating than blood, she didn't even feel like killing the bartender off.
Curious, she thought; it wasn't normal for her to look upon any mortal without at least three slow, agonising deaths flashing through her mind. She guessed it was just that he was providing a service she needed.

Hood still up, she proceeded first to the bar, to order a double vodka, and to dump a ten-dollar note on the countertop in payment. The joy of being a vampire was that cash supplies were as vast as one's hunger, and depending on who you killed, you could find yourself sitting on quite a stash. Hell, it beat working the night-shift for a living.

She made her way from there to a corner table, sitting down before nursing the already-empty glass. She'd downed it before she'd even sat down, feeling the warmth burn her throat and her chest. It wouldn't make her drunk, but it was nice to relax and possibly escape reality through this magic potion known as alcohol.

Her head turned slightly as she heard the tavern door creak open, seeing a new patron.

Dominic had been walking. He'd lain apathetically about his apartment all day, sleeping and scanning through some of his books, but not actually reading. He'd read the same page of Machiavelli twelve times without a word sinking in before he'd given it up. Then at six o'clock, he'd had the sudden urge to get out. Anxiety attack, he thought, reflecting back on it. One moment he'd been slouched on his couch, the next it felt like the walls were closing in – like he was entombed in his own home. A horrible feeling of suffocation had driven him to grab his boots and jacket and run out into the street, if only to escape the stuffy air of his apartment for the polluted fumes of the city. For the last several hours he'd simply walked around the city. Sulking.

Night had fallen on the city, and he was still out, wandering aimlessly. Everything he did was aimless nowadays – purposeless, and without direction. Why do I need direction? I'm not going anywhere. The funds in his wallet would normally be conserved for buying food and books for the upcoming semester. But, he reminded himself, I'm not gonna be around next semester. Where better to waste all of one's money than a strange bar?

He walked up to the bar and slid into one of the stools, slapping several bills on the bar-top. "A shot of whatever. Long as it's strong," he mumbled.

((ooc: Yay someone tagged me :heh: ))

Now the visions set in. Already her mind had him strung to the ceiling rafters by his own sinew. Or maybe his aortal channel. Either way her body itself tingled with the very thought of killing him in the most inhumane way possible.

But there was something different about him. A smell. A feeling...no, not just the dismal atmosphere he'd dragged into the tavern with him...but something else. An ailment, perhaps?
Yes, that was it. An ailment.

The barman presented him with his drink, not questioning his age, or even making any sort of conversation. It was a scotch.
"Barman," Malise called, the Russian twang influencing the 'r', rolling it around like a purr, "another double."
The barman was about to object that it wasn't a waitress service, but her hood had rolled back ever so slightly, revealing her pupilless eyes, and this freaked him enough to keep his yap shut, and deliver the drink without question. He didn't even ask for payment. Good job, too. Her mind's sudden bloodlust-frenzy could have prompted her to do something quiet acutely painful to him had he dared even speak.

Malise's eyes locked firmly upon Dominic, trying to read his every move. She wondered why he suffered even before she'd gouged her talons into his internal parts. It would almost be no sport, for she couldn't even make him suffer any more than he already was. Or so it seemed.

Scotch – he downed it in a gulp and swallowed, though with slight difficulty. Reaching back, he massaged the swollen lymph glands on the sides of his neck with the first two fingers of each hand. The swelling made him always feel like he had a cold, and made his throat feel constricted. He stopped rubbing the skin behind his jaw and pulled his jacket a bit tighter around his bony frame. Middle of summer and I'm cold anyways. He was about to order another when a voice across the room purred the words out before he did.

"Barman, another double."

Dominic looked over his shoulder at the woman sitting in the corner table as the bartender brought her the drink. Dark clothes and a dark hood concealed most of her features, but what little skin he could see was deathly white. She looks about as dead as I feel, he thought, gesturing to the returning bartender for another drink. I want to get drunk out of my mind so I can bend over in some gutter coughing up something other than blood. 'Lack of platelets,' the doctor had explained when Dom had told him about his constant brusiing and bleeding. Bleeding nose, bleeding gums... 'Your bone marrow isn't producing enough cells for your bloodstream.' Twenty years old, and he was gonna die of goddamn cancer. It wasn't fair. But since when is life fair? He downed the second drink and could feel himself getting buzzed. He'd been losing so much weight that it took alcohol a lot less time to permeate his system. "Another," he croaked, propping his elbow in the bartop and supporting his head with his hand. The Tavern was nearly empty at this hour, and he kept finding himself looking at the woman in the corner out of his peripheral vision.

"What is this?" the barman grunted, "drown-yer-sorrows and slavedrive-Lucas night?"

"Just pour the man his drink...or else it won't be sorrow that is drowning." Malise rasped, before downing her vodka. The barman's very voice polluted her silence, infected her very ears like some pug-ugly plague. Rather like the barman's face.

Grudgingly, but still without a word of rebuttal, he poured the scotch and slid it across the bar to Dominic. The barman feared her enough that he dared not even kick her out, nor argue. She could probably walk up and steal a keg and he wouldn't flinch.

There's an idea, she thought. No. Maybe later.. She wanted to watch this hapless, sorrowful little wretch propping the bar up.

She put her hands together in a prayer position, and pushed her fingertips against eachother, while simulaneously repelling the heels of her hands from one another, cracking each and every knuckle in one sickening ensemble.

((OOC: Edit: corrected a typo))

"What is this? Drown-yer-sorrows and slavedrive-Lucas night?"

"Just pour the man his drink... or else it won't be sorrow that is drowning."

Dom watched with pursed lips as the bartender obeyed the raspy-voiced woman, allowing himself to be bullied and cowed by her. It was a little odd, but she did have a sharply commanding voice, and Dom supposed that he'd probably do the same thing in the barman's position. He turned to nod his thanks to the woman, but as he pivoted on the stool, she cracked all her knuckles simultaneously, causing every muscle and tendon in his shoulders to knot up in sympathy. He jerked his head in a brief nod to her, then turned back to his drink, swilling the amber contents around the glass, watching the sheen of liquid clinging to the sides of the container and slowly seeping down in miniscule droplets. The coppery taste of his own blood seeping from sores in his gums tainted his mouth, and he hoped to overpower it with the strong flavor of alcohol.

Why couldn't I be a happy drunk? He'd gone out once or twice with some of his college buddies to parties, and while everyone else always got wildly rambunctious and danced on tabled, Dom inevitably wound up morosely spewing unintelligible philosophy and butchered phrases of Nietzsche to some poor soul in the corner. So here I am, getting even more depressed and more morose. I have – what, two months? – and I’m spending it getting smashed, by myself, moping and feeling sorry for myself. It was pathetic, but he felt slightly justified that he had a rather good reason to be feeling sorry for himself. He finished off his drink and debated going over to the woman in the corner and striking up a conversation. He was mildly drunk and unusually morbid, but he didn’t have anything to lose, right?

The nod barely even registered in her mind. Although some would class it as a good deed, as mercy, one might forget that the alcoholic content of one's food could also intoxicate one. And Malise was never one to pass up a free drink.
Smiling inwardly at the thought, she had had another, less sadistic motive. She just wanted to relax with a drink herself, and this imagination of hers was now getting in the way of relaxation. Already she felt adrenaline in her fingertips, and in every extremity of her body, as if she knew a kill was afoot. And frankly, right now, she wasn't hungry.
Can I not relax just once without imagining a bloodbath to be? She cursed her own demeanour. It wasn't that killing was tiresome...more that it had become a bit too much of an addiction.

Nevertheless, even though she didn't go for the physical attack, she did, in her heartlessness throw a barbed comment to Dominic as he sat there as well, perhaps hoping to intimidate him or provoke some other sort of response. A response she might be able to deem a valid pretext for dishing out pain.

Again her irritation with herself swelled, but she gave the remark anyway. Coincidentally, it seemed tailored around his self-pity.

"Drink and be merry," she said, in possibly the most sarcastic tone it was possible to form with human/vampire lips. She let out a raspy chortle, barely audible as she once more brought the shot-glass to her lips and downed her double. The fire-water once more basked her throat in loving warmth, almost like an inner caress that seemed to spread out like a raging blaze before subsiding just as fast. The worst part of a vodka shot; the end of the glass.

"Drink and be merry."

Her voice was unpleasant, and quickly crushed any intention of his to socialize. Drink, he'd most certainly do. Be merry? He laughed, but the mirthless sound was a hoarse bark and alien to his ears. He polished off the scoth and turned to her, steadying himself with one hand on the bar-top so he didn't fall from the stool.

"Man, being reasonable, must get drunk; the best of life is but intoxication," he quoted in reply. See? You have a few shots and you're off spouting crazy shit from books, the still sober part of his reprimanded, but he ignored it. What did he care? He'd never see her after tonight. Hundreds of thousands in this city, and he might meet all of a dozen of them within the next two months. After that, what did he have to worry about?

Malise gave a look of 'touche', that characteristic flicking of the neck, and raising of one's eyebrows for a brief, fleeting moment.

"It doesn't look to me like you're having the best of life...even though you're quite clearly intoxicated."

Malise smirked. She herself didn't even feel tipsy, but Dominic was clearly slurry and on his way down the gutter.
She swung her legs up onto the table. Once again, the barman dared not even utter a word of resistance.
"Unlike you, though, I don't have the luxury of being a lightweight."

She meant the word in both its literal and its connoted meaning. His body didn't have a pick of meat on it. But then, she was a vampire, not a vulture. He had the bog-standard human eight pints, and that was all that really mattered. In fact, to look at him, he looked like death as it was. As if he hadn't been eating right...or maybe that ailment.

"Still. C'est la vie."
Such is life. A callous remark even if it were uttered to someone who wasn't on his last legs. How was it that the ignorant were always the ones who gave the most scathing remarks? Then again, Malise could be a whole lot more scathing, and she was about to prove it. "Look at you. Why don't you just go down the road..."
She clasped her three lesser fingers to a fist to form a pointer, and ran it all the way up the length of her inner forearm. "And get it over with?"
Or maybe I should do it for you...hmm.
Again she mocked his solemnity. She didn't know, much less care, why he was down. She just derived a sick sort of pleasure from putting him down. Just like the schoolyard bully. But most bullies didn't have a string of killings that numbered squarely inside the realms of genocide.

"It doesn't look to me like you're having the best of life... even though you're quite clearly intoxicated. Unlike you, though, I don't have the luxury of being a lightweight."

Lightweight... yes, he certainly was that. He'd lost his appetite in the last several months and had lost weight just as quickly. He refused to step on a scale, though he had a vague idea of what numbers might register. Not that it mattered. Less of me to stuff into a coffin.

"Still. C'est la vie."

He didn't answer out loud, not trusting himself not to slur his speech past comprehension. La vie n'est pas quelque chose que je devrai soucier de plus long, he thought of saying, but decided he made little enough sense in English. The alcohol was making him feel a little warmer, though he knew this was only an illusion and that his capillaries were just dilating and rising to the surface.

"Look at you." He turned to the woman, who apparently wasn't done taunting him. He wondered if she was deliberately baiting him, or just dense. "Why don't you just go down the road..." She mimed the slitting of a wrist. "And get it over with?"

Dom blinked at her, not quite sure if he was imagining it, or if she'd really just said what he'd thought she'd said. Most of the time, when people could tell he was sick, they either avoided him as if the plague were still a problem, or they gave him sympathetic looks. Cruel as her words were, he wondered if they were worse than the sympathy, which made him feel like he was already dead and wandering some sick parallel of Dante's limbo.

To be honest, he had considered just jumping off a bridge, or some similar course of action. Soon after the results of his scans had come in, he'd gone to see the cancer ward of the hospital and couldn't stand to think of spending the rest of his brutally short life there. He'd walked straight to the pharmacy and bought two bottles of sleeping pills, but wound up dropping them in the gutter and spent the rest of the night sleeping on a pew in some church, whispering exhausted prayers to himself in a butchered mix of french, english and german.

”While the hell I’d be plunged into if I did so wouldn’t be much different from the one I’m in now, this one has the benefit of booze.” He raised his near-empty glass to her in a mock toast.

"Ahh, so my suspicion was correct," she replied, flatly, her voice cold, raspy and devoid of any compassion. That was not an emotion she possessed, nor would she be able to define it if one asked her. She continued to speak, her voice hissing like that of a cobra, "that the Almighty you all love so much has given you the kiss of death."

Although she didn't know of his religious conviction, it differed greatly from her own. It had long been a certainty in her mind that God did not exist. If He did, and He loved His creations, He would surely have had mercy upon Malise a long, long time ago, and allowed her heart to gently stop beating, rather than forcing it to continue relentlessly and tirelessly for over four centuries. No deity would create something and then forsake it in its hour of dire need.
Her resolution that He didn't exist meant that crosses did not faze her. To her, they had no meaning. In her mind she regressed back to the times she used to storm the congregation and give a grotesque bloodbath.

She shook her head ever so slightly to banish the flashback back to the recesses of her mind.

"Not to dampen the evening, but the price I would pay to trade places with you is greater than you would believe."
Many a day had passed where she had been kept awake, just wishing she could bring herself to walk out into the bright light. But alas, her bind was such that she could not.
Was it possible that she envied his mortality? Possibly. Her visions of stringing him up by his spinal cord had subsided, replaced by reality; of him propping up the bar mere yards away from what could so easily be an instant demise. Two months could become two seconds, but yet she did not. This was either a moment of self-pity for Malise, or it was some sort of mind-sport, the likes of which she were not accustomed to playing.

"Ahh, so my suspicion was correct... the Almighty you all love so much has given you the kiss of death."

It was as if she'd stabbed a knife in his back, and was now twisting it. Dominic's depression and self-pity were overrun with a wave of anger and resentment. His knuckles grew whitee around the glass he held in his hand. In that instant he hated Malise more than he could remember hating anyone. He hated her for voicing his own doubts and fears – God didn't have a plan. God didn't give a damn about him or anyone else. Divinity turned a deaf eye to his whispered prayers and would leave him forsaken in some hospital ward...

"Not to dampen the evening, but the price I would pay to trade places with you is greater than you would believe."

The possibility of her further 'dampening the mood' was as ludicrous as the idea of wanting to trade places with him. He scoffed. "Oh yes – because everyone wants terminal illness. Cancer's just a big old party! You want Leukemia? Yours for the taking! You can see how much I'm revelling in it!"

The insolence in his voice brought up a swell of anger in her, and unconsciously her fist clenched around the shot-glass within it, her supreme physical strength causing it to implode and give way. As her fist clenched tighter, shards of the glass drove their way through her skin, but her momentary rage was enough to prevent her from noticing. Other splinters made a tinkling sound as they descended to the table, but Malise's rasp drowned out their small voices.

"Better that," she spat, jerking upper body forward and down, curling up a little like a panther waiting to pounce, "than what I have to live with each day!"

In the haste and force of her movement, she caught a gust of air strong enough to force her loose-fitting hood back over her head, revealing her garish pupilless eyes. They say eyes are the gateway to the soul, and Malises were truly twisted, as corrupted as her mind.
She cursed her temper for destroying her anonymity, but then she'd never particularly cared what reaction she got. At any rate, it might spell out to him her own plight...that is, if he even knew what a vampire was. Either way, she would remember Dominic's face. Before his time was up, she'd hunt him down. But she wouldn't kill him, oh no...she'd watch as nature took its course.

Dom stared for several seconds at her un-human face, twisted in a feral snarl that reminded him of one of the gargoyles on the cathedral, their sightless stone eyes mirroring her strangely pupilless ones. He shivered, and the ever-present cold he felt seeped into his bones. What the hell?

Hell indeed. He was drinking with a deviant of nature... something perverse and decidedly unholy. He pressed his lips and watched her silently, time ticking by on the clock over the bar that counted down the minutes to closing time. Behind him, the bartender sucked in his breath, then went about the business of washing out glasses, turning his back to the two customers in the fatal hope that they might both disappear if he ignored them long enough.

"And what is it that you live with?" Dominic finally asked, his hoarse voice just above a whisper.

Her eyes pierced the rather mouthy young man at the bar, staring him out just as he seemed to be her. Inwardly, she gave him the small credit that he hadn't run away in fear. He was a rarity. But she supposed that he, indeed, didn't have a lot to lose.

"I cannot die. I merely wish I could." she said at last, standing up from her seat, which scraped loudly as she shoved it back hard. She finally blinked, the act barely detectable due to the almost unnoticeable colour change. "We are opposites. Mortals wish to live, immortals to die. Ironic." As she spoke, one could clearly see the fangs hanging down lower than the other teeth. She never bothered to retract them. Why should she? That only made it harder to take a bite when she wanted to.

She made her way to the bar, the barman still busying himself with glass-washing. She hoisted her way onto the bar, and over.

"H-hey!" the barman finally uttered a word of protest, quickly silenced by a glare from those dead eyes, a glare that seemed to pierce his soul, stabbing it with a shard of ice.
Her hand formed a C-shape, preparing for a power grip. But instead of reaching for the barman's throat, she reached instead for an Imperial Vodka bottle on the back wall. "The service was dreadful. You should have brought this to me." She said scornfully as she hopped back over the bar.

"Be grateful that I haven't torn the both of you apart. And you..."
She pointed her other index talon at Dominic. "Know that I envy you." And with that, she took a swig from the bottle, and made for the door. Why she'd left them alive, she wasn't totally sure. For Dominic, it was a sick taunt. Sort of like putting the candy in the top shelf of the cupboard. The kid knows it's there. He wants it, but he can't quite reach it, and Mommy won't get it down for him.

As for the barkeep...she knew she could count on drinks on the house from him from here on in. And probably clear a table for her. Oh, and to prove a point to herself, that she could enter a room without eviscerating all the occupants.

Dominic stared after her retreating form in shock. I'm drunk and sick. It's making me hallucinate, he told himself, but the low whistle of the barman finally exhaling confirmed the reality of it all. The theories of the occult spawned of ancient myth were not all age-old writings and fancies. He'd just had a conversation with an immortal.

"Crazy shit you see this time of night," the bartender mumbled, still visibly shaken.

Dominic nodded and slapped another bill down on the bar-top, not knowing or caring what its value was. "Thanks for the drinks."

"Know that I envy you." Her words echoed in his mind. To some people, it may have been a comfort, though he doubted she meant to ease his woes. Dominic considered himself a Philosopher, for he could never cease to wonder and question things. Ideas and scenarios flitted through his mind. In her position – if he could live forever – would he regret it? The infinite embrace of death, or never-ending life? The only thing wrong with my life is the fact that it IS ending. If he had a choice, would he pick death? 'That undiscovered county from whose bourne no traveler returns puzzles the will, and makes us rather bear those ills we have than fly to others we know not of.' How rightly Shakespeare had put it. I'm afraid of dying... but not of living.

He zipped his jacket up to his chin and buried his hands in his pockets, walking out of the bar with his head down into the open night air. Stars, tiny pinpricks in the sky's flesh bled light above him, though they were muted by the man-made illumination of the city. I don't want to die... but have I got a choice?

He wondered.

Although Malise was nowhere in sight, she was by no means gone. In fact, she had taken to the rooftops in order to keep an eye on him. She knew that this would not be their last meeting. She knew he prayed for life. That was, in part, why she'd left him alive. Because he was going to die anyway. She could watch his slow, agonised departure from this world, with each passing day she could see him grow weaker.

From a rooftop ahead, she dropped a little note for him. Something to remember her by.
The note said only one word. Vampire.
Why should she be afraid to tell him what she was? He was mortal, even more so than most. Nobody would believe him, anyway. Humans were too fickle to believe what they hadn't seen with their own two eyes. Unless it was God, in which case, for some inexplicable reason, it was bad not to believe in Him in the eyes of those who did. The duality of man.

But if he were to look, he wouldn't find her.

Cold. He felt so cold, even in the summertime. A light breeze blew past him, making his shudder. It carried a whispering sound as a piece of paper fluttered past his ear. Dom's bony hand reached forward and snapped it out of the air, unfolding the tiny scrap. He couldn't later explain why he'd grabbed it – it was just a piece of trash as far as he'd been concerned. Yet, somehow, everything this night seemed to have a purpose – driven by fate, though whether it was guided by divine forces or diabolical ones, he wasn't sure.

In the faint light of the neon bar sign behind him, he made out a single, scrawled word. He dropped the paper and whirled around, but all that met his gaze was darkness and an empty street.

The wind caught and carried away Malise's calling card.