Prelude (Underworld Lucian Fanfiction)

64 - Chapter LXIV: The Loss of New Beginnings

The room exploded. 

Like a clock shattering into a dozen pieces. Burying them. His last sight of her eyes, fearful and trapped. Cowering beneath stones and falling timber. The certainty of death.

And yet he woke to find dust coating his tongue. Dust in the air, his breathing thick enough to suggest that not only had the ceiling collapsed, but part of his ribcage as well. His eyes burning, but the blood, the mere taste of blood she had given him, still working in his veins.

Old blood.

The worst of his wounds drawing from its strength, while his need—his choice to keep breathing—forced his torso to heal before he was ready. Every rib causing him to cringe, his jaw pulling back into a silent scream as the bones started to contort, cracking and snapping into place.

The next moments filled with a grotesque agony as the tendons reformed. The crushed bones knitting themselves together through marrow and bone, like roots torn from the soil. So by the end of it, he was once again aware of his humanity...crying on his back, sobbing in silence and sweating in the dark.

Breathe.

He just had to stay conscious. Conscious and calm. Twenty-eight...twenty-nine...thirty seconds...and then another ten minutes before he could move. How many times had he done this in his life... In a daze, pulling himself, step by painful step towards the far end of the debris, unable to concern himself with decorum when walking was the bare minimum of what he was trying to achieve. Refusing to focus on the right side of his vision.

Most of the room had been decimated, save for the corner in which she was sitting. Her arms wrapped around her knees. A sniffling sound emitting from the small gap above where her face was buried into her arms.

It had a forlorn, rumpled appearance, the coat spread across the ground with the pockets turned out and the lining torn. Carefully, she had laid everything out: a rough-spun bag, a small bottle of paraffin, fourteen coins of silver...

...but no flask.

Even with his sight struggling, he could see it. He could smell it. The hopelessness. The weight of her despair. Knowing that there was no blood. That even if she had dropped it, the fires would have changed it to cinders...

...and there was no changing what had been done to her.

Not now. Not ever, as far as she was concerned. Enough that at the sound of his approach, she raised her jaw aggressively. Red eyes. Tear-stricken cheeks covered in dust. As though she would rather suffocate than bear him seeing her in that moment. The tears eventually resolving into a sniff. And then another.

She sniffed...

...and sniffed...and then unwrapped her arm, holding out a stiff piece of paper. Its corner folded from where she'd been clutching it in her hand. "It's..." The sniffling turned into a faded whisper. "...it's me," she said finally.

The fuck it was.

He gave her a sinister eye. The room suddenly feeling a mite dangerous. And yet, knowing he would regret what he saw, he took the paper from her hand and held it up to the shadows. It was a photograph. Water-stained, no date, but the formal dress suggesting the mid-nineteenth century.