Somebody in Boots

[dirtywhiteboy]

Years ago, Ruben had wondered how long it would take for the sun to burn him into ashes. It had been a random notion, one he hadn't seriously entertained, but he thought of that time every now and then. For a man who couldn't see himself in a mirror, he was strangely reflective.

It was three a.m. The bars had announced last call an hour ago. Even in Las Vegas, some laws still held. If you wanted to drink after two in the morning, you had to go home or somewhere else.

He was stepping over the legs of the dead man in the alley, heading towards the sidewalk. He'd learned to eat quietly. Someone would probably find the body eventually, most likely an unlucky garbageman. Nevada was warming up, careening towards summer.

There was a pale moon trying to shine down through the light pollution, and Ruben turned his face up towards it. The moon was cold, remote, but it was also kind. It wouldn't burn him.

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[dirtywhiteboy]

"Yup."

He'd heard small footsteps approaching, but he'd kept his attention on the sky. At three in the morning, anyone wandering the sidewalks was either not a threat or a threat that could be dealt with. And Ruben had been dead for too long to give a care to what anyone thought.

He was mildly annoyed because she'd distracted hm from remember the words to 'Rock of Ages', though. Some things, you never forgot.

"Awful late for you to be out, little Missus. You ain't worried you might see the boogeyman?"

[dori_bell]

The muscles alongside her mouth hesitated to work at first, and it made for a strange expression. But then Dori smiled and it was actually becoming on her, if a rarity and, like the tin-man in Oz, once things were well-oiled the muscles worked quite well. “I’m not afraid of death,” she said.

The girl reached out to wipe a speck of blood from his chin. “Messy.”

Dori was intrigued by vampires. It was like watching herself walk and talk in a funhouse mirror. The vampires were not living but they were not Death itself, either. No, that was her (at least, she was one of its forms), yet she was alive in every clinical sense. Two sides of a very macabre coin.

[dirtywhiteboy]

Ruben would have drawn away from her, but the smell of flowers made him stop. The vampire's sensitive nose twitched like a rabbit's. A lifetime ago, his human mother had liked orchids. He looked down at the girl, and it was like meeting someone he knew and simultaneously had never seen before.

"Yer a warm-blood," he said, but he was smiling. His coat flapped open when he spread his arms out, as though he might try to take flight. He was wearing a white button down shirt underneath it. He leaned down farther, looked at her eyes.

"Thought you was a angel," he twanged, straightening up. "But none of them would come near me, for fear I'd clip their wings."

[dori_bell]

“You couldn’t clip mine,” said Dori, a small challenge in the raised chin, and she found that she rather liked him knowing what she was, that he had made that connection of an angel come to human form. He didn’t recoil from her like people, and he wasn’t confounded by her. But he was comical in the way he spoke and so she played. “I could make you dance like a cartoon frog on a log. Hop on one foot and scratch your head. I could do that, if I wanted.” The words were petulant, but there wasn’t any trace of that in her face.

[dirtywhiteboy]

"Puppet master. Huh."

It was a statement, despite the ever-so-slight turning up of the end of the sentence, and Ruben laced his fingers together on the back of his neck. If he could smell her, could she smell him? Did he smell dead?

"God's a trickster," he told her, still smiling. His weight eased backwards towards the heels of his boots. "They say that when you die, you fly free of your body and go to paradise. But I got dragged back. Touched the divine for an instant, and got cast out like Cain. Guess that means heaven don't want me."

[dori_bell]

“Were you such an awful person?” she asked, her head tilting. “That God wouldn’t want your soul?” The question was born of intense curiosity and not sympathy. Dori knew that her soul would never reach heaven, not so long as it kept being reborn, at least, and she was not sure it was meant for the place. Was she bad? She certainly wasn’t good.

[dirtywhiteboy]

"I was a thief," the vampire said with a shrug. "The law dogs said I was wrong, clapped me in chains." The shackle was long gone, removed and cast aside, but he still had the scars around his ankle to remind him he'd once worn it. "But I never killed nobody or nothin'. Not until after."

He looked inward, as if at a memory, then shrugged again. His fingers closed around her wrist, not gently but not rough either, and he pressed them to the pulse that beat there. It was strong. Healthy.

"You might not be a angel, but you ain't no devil neither."

[dori_bell]

“No,” she agreed. “I’m even kind.”

But Dori regretted arriving late to the alley, after he had already done what he did. “I wish I had seen,” she said with a regretful look past his shoulder again. Then her eyes brightened. “Could you show me sometime? I’ve never seen a vampire bite anyone.” Death to Dori wasn’t a spectator sport; she did what she did to others, and often she saw accidents, or sicknesses coming to their natural conclusions, but to watch another drain life was a novelty.

[dirtywhiteboy]

Ruben's smile widened, and his eyes flashed yellow before returning to their normal blue. If she hadn't been so clearly Other, he'd have taken it as a sign. Abomination or not, he believed in something.

He took the liberty of touching her hair fleetingly, found the blonde strands clean and silky. She'd touched his face first, after all. He stretched his long arms above his head, as if he was reaching for the moon he'd been staring at earlier, then settled his weight back on his heels.

"Little Missus, I wouldn't mind that at all."

[dori_bell]

“Dorothy.” Although she didn’t mind the nickname, it was polite to trade names with a person, especially if you intended to spend time. That was what James told her when she pestered him about why he insisted upon making friends with everyone. If he knew she was keeping company with vampires, he would throw a fit.

“When would you show me? Where were you going just now?” Dori turned towards the open street. “I interrupted.”