Prelude (Underworld Lucian Fanfiction)

99 - Chapter XCVIX: A Romp in the Woods

Twenty minutes later.

Fuck...

...fuck, fuck, he thought.

Trying to stop it.

The memory from being burned into his mind.

Only it kept moving forward again.

Like a pendulum.

One moment, feeling her.

Tasting her.

And the next, he was on a cliff side.

And there was ash...

...and it was suddenly...not Reinette.

But...Sonja...only...after the twelve hours.

The pendulum swung.

And fuck.

It looked like Reinette again.

Only she had...looked...and smelled suddenly like...burning.

Like he was...about to...do things to...the ash-covered corpse of his dead wife.

Which had not happened.

Ever.

But it was like his mind could not longer...keep...things separate. Unable to see her face, unable to reconcile the two images without his drug...causing his instincts...as one could expect...to immediately recoil. One moment in the bed, and the next, feeling like he was hanging from the side of a cliff, trying to get a chain off his leg before it dragged him over the edge.

Only then seeing Reinette.

The expression on her face.

No longer joyful.

Shock.

Hurt.

As he meandered in a haze, trying to simultaneously back away, wishing he could fix her scent, but unable to explain...why...precisely it was not her fault. Something he had...never...explained to any of his lovers. Not even Bess. That he was not fine. And there was a reason he had stayed celibate for the first two hundred years of the war. Every fuck in the sixteenth century requiring an obscene amount of alcohol after it became apparent that he could not...start let alone finish...without seeing something...awful.

Until he found...

...opium.

Sweet...heavenly...opium.

Opening doors again.

Giving him that release.

His first...proper...orgasm in almost five hundred years occurring on the morning of July 18th, 1855 in the arms of none other than Elizabeth Fulligan. A mortal scullery maid with whom he subsequently fell in love...because after half a millennium of thirst...all he wanted to do was spend a lifetime in her arms. Drinking insatiably from her juices. Making her writhe. The Rumour, as it were, being entirely correct, because yes, even in times before when he struggled to come himself, he could...always...

...smell when people were about to come. He could smell it. He could slow it down. He could speed it up. He could tell when to keep going...or stop...because he had a scent to guide him.

Whereas...

...without his drugs, he was a fucking mess.

Like an unsheltered cat twitching in a rainstorm.

And he had known this would happen.

The moment she broke his stash.

He had dreaded it.