the rest of part one
Jan. 23rd, 2005 01:50 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
maderr*~*~*~*
"I just want to make it clear that I am here under heavy protest and you're going to pay dearly for making me suffer."
Sally beamed, "Darling, don't worry. I always give my victims a last meal."
"You mean the last thing you do is make them your meal."
"Semantics, darling" Sally replied airily. Glass beads winked in the profusion of candlelight carefully arranged throughout their house, a dark rainbow of color against her oddly restrained black silk blouse. More of the beads were woven into her elaborately French-braided hair. Beckoning them inside, she gave Lowell a peck on the cheek and then bared her fangs at Peter.
Peter sneered back, the candlelight reflecting off his glasses and giving him the look of the 'Mad Scientist' that Sally maintained he was.
Jordan motioned for Lowell to follow him, dropping a companionable arm across his shoulders. "I think I'd be jealous of the way she gives him so much attention," he winked. "But I know for a fact ol' Petey has no such interest and my wife is more than content to keep me around. My only real concern is that one day they're going to kill all of us trying to do each other in."
Looked twisted his head to look back over his shoulder, where Sally and Peter were already launching into a heated argument complete with hang gestures. "Why do they do that?"
Jordan grinned, "I think when they saw each other they each found the sibling they never had and always wanted. Or something equally sappy but true. Sal's sister is pretty straight laced so they're not terribly close. And Petey's brother…" he trailed off, clearly not certain what he should say.
"He left right? After what happened to their cousin."
A raised eyebrow, "He told you?"
"Only a little bit."
Their conversation was cut short as the other two finally joined them.
"I hope you cooked the meat this time," Peter glared at Sally. "And didn't clean the grocery store out of garlic."
Sally sniffed, offended. "If you can't say something nice, then be quiet."
"Going to be a quite meal for once, then! Since I'm assuming that goes for you as well, sweetheart." He snickered as they glared at him, and turned to Lowell. "How are you on wine? Zifandel all right?"
"Umm…I'll try anything once?"
Peter rolled his eyes, "Please don't say that sort of thing around them. Are you old enough to drink wine?"
"I think so," Lowell said, trying to look nonchalant.
Sally paused in the process of fetching the wine, looking at the werewolf. "You don't know when you were born?"
"Oh, do be quiet Sally." Peter's eyes flashed. "You're upsetting him."
"How cute, you're getting possessive already."
"Sally!"
Laughing, Sally vanished into the kitchen. She returned a moment later, precariously balancing a bottle of wine and four wine glasses.
"Here, sweetheart. Let me help you."
Sally waved her husband off, "I've got it, I've got it." She motioned them to the living room, making the guests take the leather loveseat while she and Jordan took the couch. "Here, darling" she handed the wine to Jordan. "You can open it."
Lowell's face scrunched after his first sip, and he frowned warily at the tall, skinny glass half full of wine. This was what people made such a fuss over? He took another cautious sip. It wasn't too bad - but it wasn't too good either.
"Don't worry. We can have beer later and forget this sissy stuff the bloodsuckers favor."
"Philistine," Sally sniffed.
"What does that mean?" Lowell asked, feeling stupid.
Peter rolled his eyes, smiling. "It means not only is she a bloodsucker, she's a snotty bloodsucker."
"It means I have taste and you don't, Mad Scientist."
Lowell looked from one to the other and then at Jordan. "I thought married couples were supposed to bicker."
His words were enough that Jordan nearly spilled his wine laughing, "Oh, good lord. The very thought terrifies me!"
"Can we eat so I can go home?" Peter asked, finishing his wine in one gulp and grimacing.
Sally looked disgusted, "That's no way to treat a good wine!"
"There's no such thing as a good wine."
A short chiming ring called to them from the kitchen, and Jordan rose to his feet. "Dinner time." He held out his arm to Sally, who took it and led the way to the dining room.
Peter trailed behind with Lowell, "Having any fun so far?"
"It's funny watching you two go at each other. The wine is okay."
"Beer is better, trust me." He winked, indicating Lowell should precede him into the dining room. "But I do admit her food is very, very good."
"Of course it is," Sally agreed, but beamed at the compliment all the same. She grinned, baring her fangs again. "And we're having more wine with it." The bickering and chatting continued as she served the spaghetti and they passed around a bowl of salad.
Lowell had to admit it was lots better than even the stuff Peter bought for them, and that rated pretty high on his Good Food list. He ate with relish, more than content to eat while the other three nibbled and talked, only half listening. And ignoring the gravy bowl full of red stuff that Sally and Jordan poured into their own spaghetti sauce.
"So how are you experiments going? He doesn't look like he's suffering as much as Stacey sometimes did…"
Peter frowned and shook his head, "I'm not doing those anymore. I never should have started them to begin with. Weren't you the one who said it all the chance of turning lead to gold?"
"I was…" Sally frowned, genuinely unhappy. "That was just me teasing you, Petey. There's no reason for you to give up."
Jordan nodded, agreeing with his wife. "Isn't that why you've kept him?"
"No," Peter said sharply. "It's not. I don't let people live with me just so I can coerce them into being lab rats."
Lowell lost interest in his spaghetti, "What experiments? Do you mean…" he trailed off. Thinking about it was still hard to do without getting upset.
"Yes, that's what they're talking about." All of Peter's good humor had vanished. "And they'd better stop."
"We're sorry, Peter." Jordan spoke quietly, toying with the stem of his wine glass. "We made an assumption that we shouldn't have."
Peter sighed, "It's all right. The subject is ever a sore point with me."
Playing with a piece of lettuce, Lowell worked up the nerve to speak. "Why did you stop working on it?"
"Jeez, those eyes pack a wallop" Jordan muttered, pouring himself and Sally more wine. They waited for Peter to answer.
Sighing in defeat, shooting a quick, nasty glare at Sally - who pretended not to see it - Peter shoved his plate aside and looked at Lowell. "Because it's impossible to work on, for various reasons. The most important being that I of course need a werewolf to experiment on. To test the tinctures I come up with. It isn't fun to be a lab rat, nor is it fun for me to make friends…and lovers…suffer only for my efforts to fail over and over again."
Lowell started to speak, but Peter cut him off. "And don't get any crazy notions. You have no idea what you're saying."
"It's time for dessert, I think." Sally stood, "I think you two will like it, being the coffee addicts that you are."
Peter visibly brightened. "Tiramasu?" He narrowed his eyes, "What did you do to it?"
"Not a single thing," Sally said with a smile that was all sweetness. "Just one moment and I'll bring it out. Help me with the dishes, muffin?"
Jordan immediately rose to help his wife.
The rest of the night was carefully void of any discussion of Peter's experiments, filled instead with anecdotes about what was going on between the mayor and the ghost on Mulberry street.
Early sunlight was turning the sky a hazy gray when they finally left. Lowell yawned.
"Did you have fun?" Peter asked quietly.
Lowell smiled and then promptly yawned again. "Yes, I did. Though I'm sorry we upset you…"
"You didn't," Peter reassured him. "I'm only upset with myself." He grabbed Lowell's arm, stopping him at the roadside as a car full of teenagers and loud music zoomed past. He was slow to let go as they continued walking. "I don't like accepting defeat, even when I know that I never had a chance of succeeding."
"So…if you never thought it would work, why did you bother trying?"
Peter laughed, sad and faintly bitter. "There's a question with a complicated answer." He opened the door and led the way inside. "I was hoping that solving the perceived werewolf problem would fix a problem of my own."
"Oh." Lowell wasn’t sure what else to say.
"It doesn't really matter, anyway," Peter said tiredly. "It's all but impossible to resume the work."
"Because you don't have a werewolf to test things on?"
Peter nodded, "In part. But I also can't afford the single most important ingredient - the one thing that I know is crucial to the whole thing."
A beat of silence, as Lowell stared at him in confusion. Peter acted like he should know what he was talking about. The pieces of information he'd collected shifted in his head, then abruptly fell into place. Lowell let out a hiss of distress. "You mean silver."
"Yes. Silver. I need silver that's as pure as possible - the kind they use to make bullion and coins. It isn't cheap, and I don't make enough to afford the quantities I need to conduct an indeterminate number of experiments."
Lowell couldn’t help a shiver. Silver was awful. Worse than being cold and wet. Worse than being lost. Worse than having to go from place to place. Worse than almost anything. It hurt. A lot. Like…he didn't know what it was like. Silver was silver and it was Bad. Just being too close gave him a headache and some woman had once tripped and fallen into him and her necklace had touched him and it had burned for weeks.
And he'd have to drink the stuff? It made him ill just thinking about it.
Peter had moved away to get something to drink. Lowell watched him, trying not to think about how much it would suck to drink it.
But he wanted to, suddenly. Well, he wasn't looking forward to getting sick, which is what the silver would do to him. No, that he didn't want to do at all.
What he wanted was to see Peter stop looking so sad every time the subject came up. Lowell was the happiest he'd ever been, living with someone who thought he was normal and being invited to dinner and given wine. Like a real person.
"Would…would you do it again if I helped?"
Peter frowned and adamantly shook his head, "I told you not to get any crazy notions. It made the others sick and drove them away. And it's a moot point anyway - I don't have the silver."
"But I could buy it, couldn't I? Or give you the money, since I don't know how to buy silver."
"No."
"Why not!" Lowell protested, determined now that he'd decided what he wanted to do.
Peter set his glass of water down with deliberate care, stalking across the kitchen to stand over him. "Because you have no idea what you're talking about. It's stupid and fruitless and I won't keep hurting people trying to create something that will never exist!"
"You mean like Stacey?" Lowell regretted the words the minute he said, wishing he'd known he was going to say them so that he could tell himself to not say them. 'Stupid Werewolf Couldn't Keep Mouth Shut.'
"No, not like Stacey." Peter's eyes were dark, and he stepped back and away. "Stacey was…" he struggled with his words. "He was part of it, for a time. I had boarders from time to time, a few of them werewolves. They often agreed to help me with my experiments, eager for the cure. But when they realized it wasn't forthcoming any time soon, they left. The ones that lasted that long anyway. Most simply couldn’t handle the silver." He made a vague waving motion with his hand. "Who can blame them? It's not unlike making a human drink arsenic over and over again."
He crossed the kitchen and lifted his glass of water, draining the contents in a single gulp and refilling it at the sink. "Stacey was different," he said quietly. "He lived with me…" he shook his head. "He was my lover for five years, as well as my assistant. But eventually he too got fed up with endless tests and zero results. I went into town one day to do some shopping…even bought him some new clothes because he'd torn his favorite ones transforming early one night…when I got back, not a trace of him remained. Except a note." His fingers tightened on the glass he held, and Lowell was afraid he'd break it.
"It wasn't just the experiments that made him hate me. But they were most of it. Now, near as I can tell, he goes around telling werewolves I found a cure. Just so I have to let them down when they come to ask me about it."
Lowell decided he really hated Stacey. The stupid werewolf was a moron and a jerk. Giving all of them a bad name. Like they didn't have enough problems already. "But if I could help - and promised not to get mad and wuss out and leave - and you had silver…would you do it again?"
A long silence. "It's tempting," Peter said at last, his voice barely audible. He seemed to shake himself. "But it's impossible. You can't promise something like that, because you don't know. I won't knowingly inflict that sort of torment upon you."
Acting before he thought - something he was doing more often of late and wasn't sure he entirely liked - Lowell crossed the kitchen and stood staring straight up at Peter. "In three days I'll turn into a wolf. Does that scare you?"
"Of course not," Peter said, confused.
"The transformation won't horrify you? A werewolf in your house and yard doesn't terrify you?"
"No."
Lowell's hands held tightly to the front of Peter's shirt; he wasn't even aware of it, attention focused entirely on the doctor. "You don't think I'll bite you?"
"No," and this time Peter seemed briefly amused.
It faded as Lowell continued to press him, "And when I change back you'll still look at me like I'm normal. And like me? And not kick me out?"
"Of course I will. What about you isn't normal?"
Lowell blinked back tears, eyes burning. "You're the only one I can remember to treat me like I'm not a monster, knowing what I really am. You just said I'm normal even though really I'm just a pathetic, freeloading werewolf. Do you know how much that means to me? It's even better than finding a cure, even if one day you want me to leave."
Soft fingers stroked his cheek, "That becomes a bit more impossible every day, Low."
He'd never been called that before. And his cheek was doing that tingly and warm thing again. "I know you want the cure - let me help. I want to help."
"I wish my brother was more like you," Peter said, fingers straying from his cheek to his hair. "He's the reason I want to find a cure." Gently he pried Lowell's fingers from his shirt. "We'll discuss this more after the full moon, all right?"
Lowell nodded and wearily closed his eyes, suddenly tired now that the conversation seemed to be ending.
A soft laugh, "You should get some rest. Vampire hours are not natural for the rest of us. Come on." Peter grasped Lowell's hand in his and guided the werewolf up the stairs, leaving him at the door to his bedroom.
"Good night," Lowell said with a yawn.
Peter 'tsked' softly and laughed again. "Good morning. You're as bad as the bloodsuckers." Reacting automatically, he dipped his head and kissed Lowell softly on the cheek - realizing what he'd done only as he stood up straight again. He froze in shock, then abruptly stalked toward his own bedroom, muttering quietly to himself before the closing of his door cut off all sounds.
"Bedtime," Lowell decided. But it was a long time before he fell asleep.
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Date: 2005-01-23 09:53 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-01-23 04:31 pm (UTC)Light brown. It was pointed out to me he lacked a good description, so I added one of him somewhere in the first several pages. I think when he's getting a shower?
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Date: 2005-01-23 12:17 pm (UTC)http://artpad.art.com/?iarrabqvx28
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Date: 2005-01-23 02:12 pm (UTC)that is awesome
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Date: 2005-01-23 12:33 pm (UTC)On the other side, that was so nice to wake up to. Seeing as I've not much more than more moving of furniture to look forward to today.
blah
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Date: 2005-01-23 12:49 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-01-23 02:08 pm (UTC)I absolutely love this story. I like how you keep doling out what happened in the past in bits and pieces. Lowell is sweet and naive for all that he's very world wise, and Peter... Peter is perfect. Yeah for sexy mad scientists!
GACK
Date: 2005-01-23 03:11 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-01-23 03:55 pm (UTC)o(0.~)b
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Date: 2005-01-23 03:58 pm (UTC)*love, love, love*
It is very cold here, and the wind outside is so strong, it's leeching the heat from the walls. But your story made me all warm and happy. Thank you!
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Date: 2005-01-23 04:25 pm (UTC)I love this story so, so much. I love you characters and I love how they interact. Peter and Lowell are such distinct and interesting guys. And I love how they both have historys and I love, love, love the way that you've slowly shown us parts of what they've been through in their conversations and thoughts. I love Peter's easy acceptance of Lowell and what Lowell is, and I love how shocked and amazed Lowell is by that acceptance.
I also love the Vamps. ;3 The whole Peter/Sally brother/sister vibe is just too, too funny. And I love that Jordan kind of takes Lowell under his wing to explain a few of the things that Peter can't/won't.
And just cause it was in my cliche dictionary ^_^:
Don't Look a Gift Horse in the Mouth. Take what's given to you without examining it too critcally. You tell the age of a horse by looking at its teeth; you would be impolite in doing that if someone gave you a horse. The saying is ancient (a Latin version of it appeared in a work by St. Jerome in A.D. 240) and exists in many languages. An early English version (1510) appears in John Stanbridge's Vulgaria Standbrigi: "A gyuen hors may not [be] loked in the tethe."
*tackle glomps* You rock. :3
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Date: 2005-01-23 05:03 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-01-23 05:12 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-01-23 05:57 pm (UTC)O.o... making humans drink arsenic over and over again... no wonder the other werewolves left. That must hurt.
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Date: 2005-01-23 06:52 pm (UTC)It's actually not that bad, over a short period of time. Arsenic was what women used to take to make their skin pale and stuff. It only killed them if they did it for years and years. Or something. I supposed I should actually double check the accuracy of that.
And they didn't drink it constantly. But that'll be clarified later. But yeah, Petey doesn't resent them for leaving. He just angsts ^_~
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Date: 2005-01-23 07:39 pm (UTC)Oh the things you learn from books and TV...
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Date: 2005-01-23 08:55 pm (UTC)Cool. Who needs research when I've got you to harass ^_~ I never knew. Thanks for the explanation!
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Date: 2005-01-23 06:56 pm (UTC)So eventually Peter's gonna cave and Lowell's going to help with the research, hm? I'll be interested to see how that goes.
I also wonder about Stacey - any chance of a reappearance, or is he gone for good? And Peter's brother, too...
This is very intriguing... I definitely want to see where you take it.
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Date: 2005-05-07 06:26 pm (UTC)Looked twisted his head to look back over his shoulder, where Sally and Peter were already launching into a heated argument complete with hang gestures. "Why do they do that?"
"hand", not "hang".
And there was a punctuation mark missing somewhere... Lemme see if I can find it...
"Jeez, those eyes pack a wallop" Jordan muttered, pouring himself and Sally more wine. They waited for Peter to answer.
There, at the end of the dialogue. I was just skimming, so I wasn't really looking for points of contention. ^^;;;
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Date: 2005-05-07 06:27 pm (UTC)