I Aspire To Write Like This - Tumblr Posts

may I request a snippet of a vampire visiting his arch nemesis (vampire slayer) who’s terminally ill and taunting her that he could turn her if he wanted to and she wouldn’t be able to stop him? preferably 1800s setting. if you don’t have time or you just don’t want to that is completely fine!

"I haven't invited you in." Even now, despite everything, she didn't have to open her eyes to sense him there. To feel the chill of him like death itself had finally come.

"Your servant did," the vampire replied. "When I asked after you. I was most concerned for your welfare."

She cracked open her eyes, even if it would do no good, even when it took far more effort than it should have to fix her blurry vision upon him. She was too weak to fight. It was better to pretend to be careless than to confront the fact that she couldn't stop him even if she saw him coming. Her hand still fumbled for the wooden stake at her bedside - old instinct.

"You smell like death." His head tilted as he approached her bedside with uncanny grace, examining her. "Are you frightened?"

"I do not fear death."

"No." He sat down on the edge of mattress, and took her frail hand in his, preventing her from seizing the weapon with a damning ease. She tried to jerk away from the touch to no avail. He held her fist on his knee and patted it in an obscene parody of comfort. "You fear becoming like me. You fear living, and all that living will demand of you."

She swallowed, eyeing him. "You are not alive."

He looked it though. Certainly, out of the two of them, nobody could be blamed for thinking her the walking corpse rather than the reverse. He was as radiant and beautiful as he had been the day they met, when she had only been a foolish young girl, all those years ago. For a moment, just the briefest moment, she had thought him an angel.

No one knew, exactly, what was wrong with her. They only knew they couldn't help her. She only knew she did not have long left.

"Is that why you hid yourself?" he asked. "So I would not save you?"

"You are nobody's salvation either, least of all mine."

"You would not be able to stop me." He turned her hand over in his, exposing the startling blue of her veins. She had become pallid. Thin. A paper hunter, to be blown away with a breath. He traced a nail gently over the line, threatening to break skin. "I could turn you. You would despite that, wouldn't you, Miss Harper?"

Panic thundered in her chest, exhausted though her heart may have been. A wave of dizziness washed over her.

She could scream for help, but no one in the house would be able to stop him either. They didn't know him. She made another lunge for the stake.

He caught her other wrist, plucking it from the air and settling it back down at her side. He smiled.

She refused to beg. She refused to let tears prickle her eyes.

"If you damn me, you will die," she hissed, instead. "I will have all eternity to finish you-"

"Assuming you even want to."

"Of course I would want to!"

"Why would you want to?" His smile grew. "You would be a soulless monster, as you claim me to be. What care would you have for my actions, then? You may even be grateful for the new existence I have granted you. Aren't you the first to preach that a vampire is not the same creature as they were in life?"

She was. She did.

"By that reckoning, you cannot guarantee that your salvation," she spat the word like it was poison, hoarse though her voice was, "will be the torment you wish it to be either. If I am so changed as to spare you then I imagine I would be so changed as to welcome your curse as a gift. And." She tried for a smile of her own, twisted though it was. "I cannot imagine you would want any happiness for me, let alone an eternal pleasure." She let the smile drop for contempt. "Your sly attempts at cruelty only reveal your own deception."

He laughed. "I see this ill health of yours has not yet clouded your mind, Miss Harper."

She heard the words only distantly; the impassioned speech had inflamed something in her ruined body, bringing about a sharp coughing fit that had her writhing and gasping wracked for air. The tears prickled to her eyes all the same as the seconds passed and she couldn't get it to stop.

His laughter stopped. He made a soothing murmur, nonsensical, and no less mocking for its pretence at easing her pain, easing her to sit up in his arms as if she weighed nothing. When she finally managed to catch her breath again, there was an odd expression on his unreadable countenance, if only for a mere heartbeat before it was gone.

She didn't think the two of them had ever been in this close proximity. She flinched back.

"How the mighty fall." He was cold now, disdainful of her mortality exposed in all its vulnerability. "This is quite pitiful."

Still, he did not let go of her hands, even as he set her back down upon the bed.

"You are correct," he said, more briskly. "Turning you would not be a satisfying victory if it did not torture you so exquisitely. What else, then?" He hummed, thoughtful, and his eyes, too, were cold. All the truths of him revealed. "Perhaps I will parade your servants and helpers before you? Spill their blood across your deathbed as a farewell gift?"

She shivered and glared. She could not stop him from that course of action either; not without dying, and fast, so as to take away all motivation.

"I will have to think on it, won't I? For now..." He let go of her hand, furthest from the stake, and bit down into his own wrist.

"Mmph." She didn't haven't opportunity to protest before he'd forced the spilled blood to her lips, with all of their terrible healing and awful promise.

"I think." He shifted position, looming over her like the illustrations in an old fairytale, and flashed her the same smile as when they first met. "I will give you a few more weeks. This is only too entertaining."

Her death, to him, had always been his to take.