shatterverse | (no subject)

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One moment, Jesse is in Des Moines, alone in the attic of a condemned townhouse. She'd heard of a supposed haunting and made her way over to investigate before the building was torn down. She's standing there in the attic, trying to reach out to something, anything, and suddenly there's a loud bang, a flash of white light that hurts her preternaturally sensitive eyes, and she falls some thirty feet to the ground to land amid a heap of rubble.

For a moment, she thinks that the demolition has happened ahead of schedule, but the other ruined buildings around her quickly put the lie to that idea. She frowns, and puts her head to one side, listening intently. There's no real sound of any human activity - certainly nothing like enough signs of life for what should be a bustling metropolis. Something is very, very wrong. And - she's hungry, for perhaps the third time in her entire existence as a vampire. She shouldn't be, she fed perhaps two months ago - but there is a pain in her gut as if her body is trying to eat itself. She must feed - and soon.

She focuses, and picks out the nearest human sounds, heading towards the person as quickly as she can. No-one will see her, she can move as fast as she needs to. She'll pump the person for information first, and then for blood.

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Luckily for the second nearest person, the nearest is Anna Reeve, who has a motorcycle and still hasn't gotten tired of that fact.

Vroom vroom.

It is entirely possible that person is lucky. Then again, they might have smelled bad, and Jesse has yet to get used to her sensitive nose nor lose her human squeamishness about such things.

She catches up with the motorbike, overtakes it - on the other side of some convenient rubble, well out of sight - and steps into the road ahead of the rider, waving an arm. Not near enough, it should be added, to be squished.

Anna stops (and you'll excuse the slight showing-off when she coasts to a halt just in front of Jesse).

C'mon, what else was she going to do?

"Hey. You okay?"

"After a fashion," Jesse says, projecting her best air of confused innocence - which, considering she is in fact confused is a pretty good impression. Someone like Anna of course might not quite buy the innocence part. Jesse is a very young vampire.

"I'm. . . lost."

"Yeah, ain't we all. I'm headed back to Metropolis at the moment. Want a ride?"

Friendly dead girl is friendly!

And she only had fifty years of training at the Crescent. Hardly enough to give her a sense of who's faking and who isn't.

Jesse can move faster than that (admittedly, rather nice) motorcycle, but she's not going to pass up a friendly offer and a chance to find out what's going on. Feeding can happen later - as long as it's not too much later. It hurts.

"I'd appreciate it," she says with a nod. "If it's not too much trouble."

Politeness might be unnecessary, but it is habitual.

"No trouble at all. Hop on. I'm-- Anna."

She almost said Dreamer. What about this stranger brings back Downside so strongly?

Jesse catches the near-pause, but doesn't say anything - she's really not interested.

"Jesse," she says with a friendly smile, and hops neatly onto the back of the bike. She's ridden pillion before, but that's not really why she's such a perfect passenger - her balance is scarily perfect. She's the sort of person it's too easy to forget is there, and risk sending flying off the back by accelerating too hard.

(Trust the mun. It happens. Ow.)

Off they go!

Did we mention Anna rides without a helmet?

Well, she does.

There really wouldn't be any point.

Well, Jesse doesn't have one. Which, at least, makes conversation easier. She has her arms loosely around Anna's waist, which puts her mouth conveniently near the other woman's ear.

"How far are we going?" She asks.

"Not far. A few hours maybe."

Because Anna speeds like a... well, like a dead girl who doesn't care what kind of rubble she runs into.

Ah. Problem. Jesse isn't sure she can make it that long, especially with a warm body pressed against her, pulse virtually throbbing against her cheek. she can smell the blood running just under the other woman's skin.

"I see," she says, and considers her options.

"...what, you have to use the bathroom or something?"

Watch Anna jump to reasonable but incorrect conclusions!

That'll do.

"Yes," she says, jumping on the excuse.

"Can we pull over?"

"Well, shit." Let no one accuse her of being polite about these things.

"Sure."

Witness the deus ex rest stop. Isn't it lovely? (...And very destroyed?)

At least Anna knows (from experience, thank you, on the trip out) that the bathrooms still work.

"Thanks," she says. Then, awkwardly, "and, um. Sorry." Hey, she's only had to do this three times and those other times, Maharet had provided the victims.

"No problem."

She thinks Jesse's talking about the stop, but amusingly enough the answer works just as well for the true meaning of the comment.

Jesse doesn't know this, so it's with a rather apologetic air that she latches onto the woman from behind, and opens the big vein in her throat with sharp teeth. The blood is hot, and rich, and good, and the pain in her belly coils the tendrils that had been making their fiery inroads into her own veins back into itself and disappears.

...well that was unexpected.

Jesse is probably used to fear and/or screaming from people under these circumstances.

What she's getting, for the record, is mild confusion and a certain rueful amusement.

~~And okay, that's also kind of hot. --no dammit, Eden, think of Eden.~~

The lack of struggling is certainly a refreshing change.

And hot. . . Well. Let's just say this. The bite itself is a sharp sting - swift, sudden, gone almost instantly. But every gentle suck is like a thread tugging directly on the heart, a sensation that shoots straight to the groin and stays there, the thread snapping again and again, over and over and over. . .

(Please to forgive the purpleness of this description - it's misquoted from 'The Vampire Armand')

Okay.

Now she's struggling.

Where by struggling we mean letting out an impressive growl, for a human, and doing her damnedest to shove Jesse away.

There will be elbows next. You forget how not to fight dirty, Downside.

Alas, struggling against Jesse is about as much use as trying to make an impression a marble statue. She doesn't even really seem to register the struggling, and she does keep drinking - albeit slightly more ruefulyy than before. And she had hoped this would be easy.

It's not her fault, after all.

"Goddammit," Anna grumbles, halfheartedly elbowing Jesse in the stomach. "First werewolves, now this. If a zombie shows up and rips my head off, I swear I'm going to move to fucking Canada."

That is more likely to hurt Anna's elbow than Jesse's stomach. But Jesse's appetite has never been big, and she's done. Carefully, she disentangles herself from the woman - who seems, bizarrely, inclined to be reasonable.

"I did say I was sorry," she says miserably, ready to give this up as a disaster and run if necessary.

"Yeah, whatever."

She seems more inclined to be slightly irritated than anything.

"Better me than somebody else, I guess."

Offering no explanation for this slightly peculiar comment, Anna shrugs the whole experience off.

"You still need a ride?"