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Just a little James and Nikola, following the revelations that John is the Ripper
Title: Predatory Manoeuvers
Rating: PG-13
Fandom: Sanctuary
Characters/Pairings: James, Nikola, gen, some hints maybe for James/Nikola at the end. Mentions of John/Helen, various UST
Summary: The first Nikola knew of Johnnie's little nighttime escapades was when James, badly drunk and not at all well, stuck a gun in his face and plaintively asked why it couldn't have been him.
Wordcount: 2828
Notes: For the sake of the fic, I'm presuming Nikola was in London for the Ripper murders
Disclaimer: Not mine
Title: Predatory Manoeuvers
Rating: PG-13
Fandom: Sanctuary
Characters/Pairings: James, Nikola, gen, some hints maybe for James/Nikola at the end. Mentions of John/Helen, various UST
Summary: The first Nikola knew of Johnnie's little nighttime escapades was when James, badly drunk and not at all well, stuck a gun in his face and plaintively asked why it couldn't have been him.
Wordcount: 2828
Notes: For the sake of the fic, I'm presuming Nikola was in London for the Ripper murders
Disclaimer: Not mine
Predatory Manoeuvers
The first Nikola knew of Johnnie's little nighttime escapades was when James, badly drunk and not at all well, stuck a gun in his face and plaintively asked why it couldn't have been him. It wasn't that he hadn't been paying attention, as such, more than he'd been extraordinarily busy (world changing technologies did not invent themselves), and that watching another man successfully court Helen Magnus hadn't exactly been his idea of a good time, so he'd turned as much of a blind eye to her and John as he could bear.
And with the advances to the polyphase system, and the tantalising glimpses of wireless energy transmission, he'd gotten perhaps a little caught up ...
Then James turned up one night, bedraggled and as rumpled as Nikola had ever seen him, with a gun in one hand and an expression so desperately bleak that for a moment the vampire was sure someone had died. Which, of course, they had. Just not the way he'd expected.
"Why isn't it you?" the detective asked him softly. So soft-spoken, James. So hard to move to anger, and so deadly when moved past it. He'd left his coat at the door, palming the gun somewhere between there and the fireplace, holding the weapon so negligently that it had taken Nikola a minute to realise what it was. He'd stiffened, felt the slow curl of the vampire in his blood, behind his teeth. Felt the new, ancient instincts drift towards the surface, and ruthlessly wrestled them back.
"And greetings to you too, James," he drawled, letting his eyes flick past the weapon, and a slow grin curl across his features. "Wonderful to see you."
"Be quiet," James said. More a plea than anything, though there was anger flickering beneath it, distant and strange. "Was it you?"
Nikola blinked warily at him, honestly baffled. Like he'd said. He'd gotten a little caught up, had perhaps missed a few things. Like someone breaking James' heart out from under him ... "Was what me?" he wondered, fiddling idly with his shirtsleeves while watching the gun warily. "I do apologise, James, I haven't really been paying attention to current events ..."
"Did you kill them!" James snapped, the gun coming up properly now, jerking up to point at Nikola's chest, the knuckles white and shaking around it. The vampire flashed involuntarily into Nikola's eyes, his teeth lengthening entirely of their own accord, and a brief flash of black, bitter triumph, of desperate hope, flickered in James' eyes. Nikola snarled at him.
"Kill who?" he snapped, the words slurring a little around his teeth, which he realised was not helping his case, but then he rather thought his case shouldn't need helping, as he had no idea ... No. No, wait. That wasn't so ... "The Ripper? This is about your little killer, James?"
The detective twitched, the gun jumping a little in his hand, and Nikola half-lunged on pure instinct, James equally involuntarily falling back a step, the pair of them only stopping when James pressed the gun directly to his chest, eyes hard and desperate. Nikola froze, claws out and ready, trembling violently, and felt himself silently snarl at the man before him. At the friend.
"It has to be you," James whispered, very quietly, his hand shaking. "Of all of us ... it has to be you. The vampire ... It has to be you ..."
Nikola stared at him. Stared down at the pistol pressed between them, and back at James. At the shaking desperation in his eyes, and the bleakness lurking so close beneath it. And perhaps he hadn't been paying attention lately, perhaps he didn't know what had happened, but he'd never been stupid ...
"It's one of us," he said softly, letting his hands fall to his sides, watching James carefully. Watching the tiny flinch. "You think it's one of us. You know it's one of us." He paused, tilted his head as panic, then pain, flowed over the detective's tight features. Paused, and thought, and then softly said: "So. Johnnie's the Ripper, is he?"
James flinched back, staggered away, and Nikola moved. With all the much-vaunted strength of the vampire, with the strength that yes, could rip man or woman limb from limb, he caught the detective's arm, caught the hand holding the weapon, pulling the pistol from numb fingers and tugging James close, pulling him up and in to snarl directly into his face. James didn't fight him. Shaking, suddenly limp, James didn't fight.
"It should have been you," he said, pale and quiet once more, meeting Nikola's eyes. Something in his eyes that looked almost like relief, something that looked on the monster straining beneath Nikola's skin like an alcoholic looked on gin. "Of all of us. Why wasn't it you?"
Nikola stared at him for a minute. Smelling the alcohol on his breath, feeling the limp, exhausted lassitude in his limbs, seeing the bleakness in his eyes. James had just pointed a gun at a vampire, just been caught and pinned by something that could kill him in a heartbeat. And James didn't care. More than that. James was relieved.
Snarling softly, feeling the anger drain out of him, at least at James, feeling the vampire slip back beneath his skin, Nikola swung them around and pushed James away from him, knocking him back into the faded monstrosity that served as an armchair. James fell back like his strings had been cut, staggering and blinking up at him in amazement, and Nikola huffed in stabbing annoyance.
"Stay there!" he snapped, pointing one clawed finger at the bewildered detective, before stalking off to the armoire to find the alcohol. Not that it would affect him all that much (one of the grave downsides to vampirism, he was discovering), and not that James should be allowed any more, in his condition, but there were simply some occasions that required libation.
James stared up at him as he handed down the tumbler, turning the heavy crystal around in his hands like he didn't quite understand what he was supposed to do with it, looking from the brandy to Nikola and back again until the vampire had to snap in sheer exasperation.
"For god's sake, James! Justified though it may be at this juncture, poisoning you is hardly the first option that springs to mind!" A decent throttling, now, was another story, for disrupting his experiment if nothing else, but he was attempting to be the bigger man, here ...
"Why?" James asked him, as honestly confused as Nikola himself had been earlier. Nikola rolled his eyes in response.
"Because to be perfectly frank, James, I've no interest at all in being your excuse for suicide." He smiled at the flinch, a dark flash of teeth, and nodded. "Oh yes. For future reference? The next time you try to provoke a vampire by falsely accusing him of murder?" He lifted a hand, showing James' pistol, and grinned blackly. "You might at least load your gun, first ..."
James flushed. The brilliant detective, a man as proud as Nikola in his own way, and the colour stained his cheeks wine-dark, for the shame of being caught. Nikola felt his cheeks stretch into a grin at the sight, a faint flash of vindication and predatory instinct.
"I didn't ..." the detective started, his hand fluttering in Nikola's direction, before he seemed to give up, and slumped back. "I ... I'm sorry ..."
"You should be," Nikola growled, but softly. "One of your friends may have turned out to be a murderous killer, but that's no excuse for taking it out on the rest of us! If you want to get yourself killed, go for a walk in Whitechapel like everyone else!" A second later, he reconsidered the wisdom of that sentance, but it was too late. What little colour was left in James' cheeks had already fled.
"Yes," he said, very quietly. "Perhaps I should ..."
"Don't be dramatic," Nikola snapped, and was slightly gratified when James shot him an incredulous look. Not all gone, then. "Much as I'd like to be rid of your idiocy, Helen would kill me if she ever found out I'd let you, and then where would we be?"
James' mouth twitched faintly. "Where indeed?" Nikola huffed at him for a second, secretly rather delighted, then sobered.
"So," he said, softly. "Johnnie, then?" James flinched, and curled back into himself.
"How did you know?" the detective asked, staring down into his brandy, ignoring the white of his knuckles against the glass. Pale as his cheeks, with a hint of vague humour as he tried to smile. "I thought you weren't keeping up on current events?"
Nikola shrugged. "I wasn't. But you believed it was one of us, and I'd have known if it was Helen. And no offense to him, but if it were Nigel, you wouldn't be so heartbroken as to try and commit suicide by angry vampire." He raised an eyebrow, to reiterate his opinion of that particular manoeuver, and James looked away. "That leaves Johnnie boy, does it not?"
"... Yes," James said, at last. "Yes, it does." His hand tightened, skin sliding across the glass, and all the bleakness that had been lurking beneath his bravado crept fully to the surface. "John is ..."
"Do the others know?" Nikola asked, because he didn't want to see what would happen if James actually forced himself to say it. "Does Helen?"
James laughed. A black, bleak sound, that made Nikola flinch. "Helen told me," he said, the humour curling black and vicious as he looked up at Nikola. "I've spent the past year sitting at his side, telling him all my tales, explaining my foolish deductions to the very criminal himself, and in the end I prove so blind that Helen must tell me that ... that her fiance is ... that John is ..."
He stopped, raising the hand holding the glass as if to fling it from him in mute despair, only pausing at the last moment to bring it to his lips instead, to sink blindly into the brandy's searing comfort. Nikola watched him, silent since there was nothing to say, and let the knowledge settle over him.
That Helen had found out. That she had seen. That she had told James.
That the Five were done. No matter what happened now. The Five were broken, and could never be again. That James was heartbroken to the point of despair, and he could only imagine Helen to be worse, and Nigel off who knew where on one of his little 'errands' ... and Nikola himself. Lost in technology, and the dream of science that waited for him here and across the sea, oblivious while Druitt shattered his friends around him. The Five were done, and only their shattered pieces remaining.
Silently, moving at last, he reached over and rested the bottle questioningly over the rim of James' glass. The detective looked up at him, blind and pale, and smiled softly.
"Why?" he asked, very quietly. "Why would he ...? Why couldn't I see it? Why didn't I see?"
Nikola grimaced, fought back a number of uncharitable opinions on one Montague John Druitt that even he realised were not called for here. No matter how justified. He straightened, and eventually said: "Why is it ever the ones we trust who betray us?" He smiled, ignoring James' faint flinch, instinctive denial, and looked into the fire. Tasting the weight of old betrayals all his own. "Because they are the only ones who can."
Because they were the only ones who could. Because it was only once you'd given them your trust that they could trample on it. Only once you'd given them your friendship that they could use it, and cast it aside as it pleased them.
Love. Friendship. Trust. The most dangerous of self-delusions. He'd always known that.
"I wanted it to be you," James said at last. Not looking at him, eyes fixed on the swirl of liquid in his glass. "I knew it wasn't, but I wanted it to be. I ... am sorry, for that ..."
Nikola smiled. The old, familiar grin. "Well," he said, lightly. "Maybe in the future I should prove you right, then. Make things easier for all of us?"
"No," James told him. Looked up, tired and bleak and oddly, softly compassionate. "You should never live down to people's expectations, Nikola." That strange, faint smile of his, the knowing look in those oh-so-intelligent eyes. He was not completely lost just yet, James. "Certainly not those of fools like me, who can't tell friend from foe ..."
"He betrayed you. The fault is Druitt's, not yours," Nikola offered quietly. Awkwardly. He wasn't good at this comfort thing. James smiled darkly.
"Isn't it?" he shook his head. "How do I know that? With everything I've become since the Source Blood ... I should have seen it. Perhaps I did see it, and deliberately blinded myself to it." A quirk of his lip, and a rueful look at Nikola, genuine apology. "Perhaps I even went so far as to falsely accuse a friend, simply to pretend to myself that it wasn't true ..."
Nikola laughed, letting his claws slip out for a moment to wave them at the detective. "My dear James," he grinned. "Trust me, I have enough faith in your faculties not to count that as a genuine attempt to accuse me. For a start, if you'd been in earnest, you would have at least loaded the gun." He smiled, raised an eyebrow. "Which is not to give you any ideas for future attempts, mind you ..."
James laughed. Fully, properly, the bleakness receding slightly and colour coming back a little to his cheeks. "Rest easy, Nikola," he managed, "I won't be making any more attempts of assault on your person, I assure you."
Nikola grinned, letting it slip into salacious a little, and watched the colour climb that little higher. "Oh, I don't know," he purred. "I can be surprisingly amenable to assaults on my person, if you catch me in the right humour ..."
"Nikola!" James snapped, for a second eerily like Helen, shocked and annoyed and reluctantly amused. The detective shook his head, smiling almost against his will. "That is not why I came here ..."
"Yes, but why you came was hardly the most salubrious of reasons," Nikola pointed out. "By comparison, this is a much better idea." Not that he really thought James would take him up on it, or even wanted it all that much himself. But it served admirably to pull the detective out of his funk, and Nikola did so hate to watch other people sulk.
"Nikola!" James repeated, and shook his head, dropping his forehead into his palm. His voice cracked a little, exhaustion and exasperation, though the smile still curled faintly through his fingers. "Please, not now ..."
Nikola let the smile slip, now that James was no longer watching him, and looked down at him softly. Pensively. Taking in the slumped, exhausted sprawl of that usually oh-so-neat frame, the tremble in pale hands, the lines carved in sharp relief in his brow. He looked down at James, and wondered was Helen the same way, or even Nigel. Wondered how far they had fallen, and how so quickly. All for John Druitt.
"Not now," he agreed, gently, reaching out to untangle James' hand from glass, pulling it carefully away. James lowered his other hand, looked up at him blearily, pain and exhaustion staring up at him, and Nikola rested his hand on the man's shoulder in what was probably the closest he'd ever come to reassurance, the closest he'd ever come to sympathy.
"You can rest here tonight," he said, looking away at the expression in James' eyes. "Helen really will kill me if I let you go home alone in this state, and my experiments are in much too critical a stage for me to take time out to deal with that."
"Naturally," James said, and to his credit did his best to hide his smile. "Thank you, Nikola."
"Yes, well," the vampire huffed, standing back and letting the man pull himself to his feet, pointing him in the direction of the bed. The only bed, since Nikola wasn't exactly affluent, but he hadn't planned to sleep with the wireless experiment at this stage anyway. "Don't touch anything live. And don't leave anything lying on the floor. Unless you want to trip me into bed with you ..."
"Not tonight," James smiled. And then reached up, touched his fingers softly to the back of Nikola's hand while the vampire stared at him, and curled his lip in what almost looked like a promise. "Not tonight ..."
Nikola blinked at him, and then felt the grin creep inexorably across his face. "Some other time, then?" he asked, and laughed. "You shouldn't make promises to a vampire, James. I will remember that."
And James smiled. "I'm sure you will," he said softly, with a little darkling glimmer all his own. A hint of predator, perhaps, in the wake of John's betrayal. Nikola couldn't say he didn't appreciate it.
"I'm sure you will."
The first Nikola knew of Johnnie's little nighttime escapades was when James, badly drunk and not at all well, stuck a gun in his face and plaintively asked why it couldn't have been him. It wasn't that he hadn't been paying attention, as such, more than he'd been extraordinarily busy (world changing technologies did not invent themselves), and that watching another man successfully court Helen Magnus hadn't exactly been his idea of a good time, so he'd turned as much of a blind eye to her and John as he could bear.
And with the advances to the polyphase system, and the tantalising glimpses of wireless energy transmission, he'd gotten perhaps a little caught up ...
Then James turned up one night, bedraggled and as rumpled as Nikola had ever seen him, with a gun in one hand and an expression so desperately bleak that for a moment the vampire was sure someone had died. Which, of course, they had. Just not the way he'd expected.
"Why isn't it you?" the detective asked him softly. So soft-spoken, James. So hard to move to anger, and so deadly when moved past it. He'd left his coat at the door, palming the gun somewhere between there and the fireplace, holding the weapon so negligently that it had taken Nikola a minute to realise what it was. He'd stiffened, felt the slow curl of the vampire in his blood, behind his teeth. Felt the new, ancient instincts drift towards the surface, and ruthlessly wrestled them back.
"And greetings to you too, James," he drawled, letting his eyes flick past the weapon, and a slow grin curl across his features. "Wonderful to see you."
"Be quiet," James said. More a plea than anything, though there was anger flickering beneath it, distant and strange. "Was it you?"
Nikola blinked warily at him, honestly baffled. Like he'd said. He'd gotten a little caught up, had perhaps missed a few things. Like someone breaking James' heart out from under him ... "Was what me?" he wondered, fiddling idly with his shirtsleeves while watching the gun warily. "I do apologise, James, I haven't really been paying attention to current events ..."
"Did you kill them!" James snapped, the gun coming up properly now, jerking up to point at Nikola's chest, the knuckles white and shaking around it. The vampire flashed involuntarily into Nikola's eyes, his teeth lengthening entirely of their own accord, and a brief flash of black, bitter triumph, of desperate hope, flickered in James' eyes. Nikola snarled at him.
"Kill who?" he snapped, the words slurring a little around his teeth, which he realised was not helping his case, but then he rather thought his case shouldn't need helping, as he had no idea ... No. No, wait. That wasn't so ... "The Ripper? This is about your little killer, James?"
The detective twitched, the gun jumping a little in his hand, and Nikola half-lunged on pure instinct, James equally involuntarily falling back a step, the pair of them only stopping when James pressed the gun directly to his chest, eyes hard and desperate. Nikola froze, claws out and ready, trembling violently, and felt himself silently snarl at the man before him. At the friend.
"It has to be you," James whispered, very quietly, his hand shaking. "Of all of us ... it has to be you. The vampire ... It has to be you ..."
Nikola stared at him. Stared down at the pistol pressed between them, and back at James. At the shaking desperation in his eyes, and the bleakness lurking so close beneath it. And perhaps he hadn't been paying attention lately, perhaps he didn't know what had happened, but he'd never been stupid ...
"It's one of us," he said softly, letting his hands fall to his sides, watching James carefully. Watching the tiny flinch. "You think it's one of us. You know it's one of us." He paused, tilted his head as panic, then pain, flowed over the detective's tight features. Paused, and thought, and then softly said: "So. Johnnie's the Ripper, is he?"
James flinched back, staggered away, and Nikola moved. With all the much-vaunted strength of the vampire, with the strength that yes, could rip man or woman limb from limb, he caught the detective's arm, caught the hand holding the weapon, pulling the pistol from numb fingers and tugging James close, pulling him up and in to snarl directly into his face. James didn't fight him. Shaking, suddenly limp, James didn't fight.
"It should have been you," he said, pale and quiet once more, meeting Nikola's eyes. Something in his eyes that looked almost like relief, something that looked on the monster straining beneath Nikola's skin like an alcoholic looked on gin. "Of all of us. Why wasn't it you?"
Nikola stared at him for a minute. Smelling the alcohol on his breath, feeling the limp, exhausted lassitude in his limbs, seeing the bleakness in his eyes. James had just pointed a gun at a vampire, just been caught and pinned by something that could kill him in a heartbeat. And James didn't care. More than that. James was relieved.
Snarling softly, feeling the anger drain out of him, at least at James, feeling the vampire slip back beneath his skin, Nikola swung them around and pushed James away from him, knocking him back into the faded monstrosity that served as an armchair. James fell back like his strings had been cut, staggering and blinking up at him in amazement, and Nikola huffed in stabbing annoyance.
"Stay there!" he snapped, pointing one clawed finger at the bewildered detective, before stalking off to the armoire to find the alcohol. Not that it would affect him all that much (one of the grave downsides to vampirism, he was discovering), and not that James should be allowed any more, in his condition, but there were simply some occasions that required libation.
James stared up at him as he handed down the tumbler, turning the heavy crystal around in his hands like he didn't quite understand what he was supposed to do with it, looking from the brandy to Nikola and back again until the vampire had to snap in sheer exasperation.
"For god's sake, James! Justified though it may be at this juncture, poisoning you is hardly the first option that springs to mind!" A decent throttling, now, was another story, for disrupting his experiment if nothing else, but he was attempting to be the bigger man, here ...
"Why?" James asked him, as honestly confused as Nikola himself had been earlier. Nikola rolled his eyes in response.
"Because to be perfectly frank, James, I've no interest at all in being your excuse for suicide." He smiled at the flinch, a dark flash of teeth, and nodded. "Oh yes. For future reference? The next time you try to provoke a vampire by falsely accusing him of murder?" He lifted a hand, showing James' pistol, and grinned blackly. "You might at least load your gun, first ..."
James flushed. The brilliant detective, a man as proud as Nikola in his own way, and the colour stained his cheeks wine-dark, for the shame of being caught. Nikola felt his cheeks stretch into a grin at the sight, a faint flash of vindication and predatory instinct.
"I didn't ..." the detective started, his hand fluttering in Nikola's direction, before he seemed to give up, and slumped back. "I ... I'm sorry ..."
"You should be," Nikola growled, but softly. "One of your friends may have turned out to be a murderous killer, but that's no excuse for taking it out on the rest of us! If you want to get yourself killed, go for a walk in Whitechapel like everyone else!" A second later, he reconsidered the wisdom of that sentance, but it was too late. What little colour was left in James' cheeks had already fled.
"Yes," he said, very quietly. "Perhaps I should ..."
"Don't be dramatic," Nikola snapped, and was slightly gratified when James shot him an incredulous look. Not all gone, then. "Much as I'd like to be rid of your idiocy, Helen would kill me if she ever found out I'd let you, and then where would we be?"
James' mouth twitched faintly. "Where indeed?" Nikola huffed at him for a second, secretly rather delighted, then sobered.
"So," he said, softly. "Johnnie, then?" James flinched, and curled back into himself.
"How did you know?" the detective asked, staring down into his brandy, ignoring the white of his knuckles against the glass. Pale as his cheeks, with a hint of vague humour as he tried to smile. "I thought you weren't keeping up on current events?"
Nikola shrugged. "I wasn't. But you believed it was one of us, and I'd have known if it was Helen. And no offense to him, but if it were Nigel, you wouldn't be so heartbroken as to try and commit suicide by angry vampire." He raised an eyebrow, to reiterate his opinion of that particular manoeuver, and James looked away. "That leaves Johnnie boy, does it not?"
"... Yes," James said, at last. "Yes, it does." His hand tightened, skin sliding across the glass, and all the bleakness that had been lurking beneath his bravado crept fully to the surface. "John is ..."
"Do the others know?" Nikola asked, because he didn't want to see what would happen if James actually forced himself to say it. "Does Helen?"
James laughed. A black, bleak sound, that made Nikola flinch. "Helen told me," he said, the humour curling black and vicious as he looked up at Nikola. "I've spent the past year sitting at his side, telling him all my tales, explaining my foolish deductions to the very criminal himself, and in the end I prove so blind that Helen must tell me that ... that her fiance is ... that John is ..."
He stopped, raising the hand holding the glass as if to fling it from him in mute despair, only pausing at the last moment to bring it to his lips instead, to sink blindly into the brandy's searing comfort. Nikola watched him, silent since there was nothing to say, and let the knowledge settle over him.
That Helen had found out. That she had seen. That she had told James.
That the Five were done. No matter what happened now. The Five were broken, and could never be again. That James was heartbroken to the point of despair, and he could only imagine Helen to be worse, and Nigel off who knew where on one of his little 'errands' ... and Nikola himself. Lost in technology, and the dream of science that waited for him here and across the sea, oblivious while Druitt shattered his friends around him. The Five were done, and only their shattered pieces remaining.
Silently, moving at last, he reached over and rested the bottle questioningly over the rim of James' glass. The detective looked up at him, blind and pale, and smiled softly.
"Why?" he asked, very quietly. "Why would he ...? Why couldn't I see it? Why didn't I see?"
Nikola grimaced, fought back a number of uncharitable opinions on one Montague John Druitt that even he realised were not called for here. No matter how justified. He straightened, and eventually said: "Why is it ever the ones we trust who betray us?" He smiled, ignoring James' faint flinch, instinctive denial, and looked into the fire. Tasting the weight of old betrayals all his own. "Because they are the only ones who can."
Because they were the only ones who could. Because it was only once you'd given them your trust that they could trample on it. Only once you'd given them your friendship that they could use it, and cast it aside as it pleased them.
Love. Friendship. Trust. The most dangerous of self-delusions. He'd always known that.
"I wanted it to be you," James said at last. Not looking at him, eyes fixed on the swirl of liquid in his glass. "I knew it wasn't, but I wanted it to be. I ... am sorry, for that ..."
Nikola smiled. The old, familiar grin. "Well," he said, lightly. "Maybe in the future I should prove you right, then. Make things easier for all of us?"
"No," James told him. Looked up, tired and bleak and oddly, softly compassionate. "You should never live down to people's expectations, Nikola." That strange, faint smile of his, the knowing look in those oh-so-intelligent eyes. He was not completely lost just yet, James. "Certainly not those of fools like me, who can't tell friend from foe ..."
"He betrayed you. The fault is Druitt's, not yours," Nikola offered quietly. Awkwardly. He wasn't good at this comfort thing. James smiled darkly.
"Isn't it?" he shook his head. "How do I know that? With everything I've become since the Source Blood ... I should have seen it. Perhaps I did see it, and deliberately blinded myself to it." A quirk of his lip, and a rueful look at Nikola, genuine apology. "Perhaps I even went so far as to falsely accuse a friend, simply to pretend to myself that it wasn't true ..."
Nikola laughed, letting his claws slip out for a moment to wave them at the detective. "My dear James," he grinned. "Trust me, I have enough faith in your faculties not to count that as a genuine attempt to accuse me. For a start, if you'd been in earnest, you would have at least loaded the gun." He smiled, raised an eyebrow. "Which is not to give you any ideas for future attempts, mind you ..."
James laughed. Fully, properly, the bleakness receding slightly and colour coming back a little to his cheeks. "Rest easy, Nikola," he managed, "I won't be making any more attempts of assault on your person, I assure you."
Nikola grinned, letting it slip into salacious a little, and watched the colour climb that little higher. "Oh, I don't know," he purred. "I can be surprisingly amenable to assaults on my person, if you catch me in the right humour ..."
"Nikola!" James snapped, for a second eerily like Helen, shocked and annoyed and reluctantly amused. The detective shook his head, smiling almost against his will. "That is not why I came here ..."
"Yes, but why you came was hardly the most salubrious of reasons," Nikola pointed out. "By comparison, this is a much better idea." Not that he really thought James would take him up on it, or even wanted it all that much himself. But it served admirably to pull the detective out of his funk, and Nikola did so hate to watch other people sulk.
"Nikola!" James repeated, and shook his head, dropping his forehead into his palm. His voice cracked a little, exhaustion and exasperation, though the smile still curled faintly through his fingers. "Please, not now ..."
Nikola let the smile slip, now that James was no longer watching him, and looked down at him softly. Pensively. Taking in the slumped, exhausted sprawl of that usually oh-so-neat frame, the tremble in pale hands, the lines carved in sharp relief in his brow. He looked down at James, and wondered was Helen the same way, or even Nigel. Wondered how far they had fallen, and how so quickly. All for John Druitt.
"Not now," he agreed, gently, reaching out to untangle James' hand from glass, pulling it carefully away. James lowered his other hand, looked up at him blearily, pain and exhaustion staring up at him, and Nikola rested his hand on the man's shoulder in what was probably the closest he'd ever come to reassurance, the closest he'd ever come to sympathy.
"You can rest here tonight," he said, looking away at the expression in James' eyes. "Helen really will kill me if I let you go home alone in this state, and my experiments are in much too critical a stage for me to take time out to deal with that."
"Naturally," James said, and to his credit did his best to hide his smile. "Thank you, Nikola."
"Yes, well," the vampire huffed, standing back and letting the man pull himself to his feet, pointing him in the direction of the bed. The only bed, since Nikola wasn't exactly affluent, but he hadn't planned to sleep with the wireless experiment at this stage anyway. "Don't touch anything live. And don't leave anything lying on the floor. Unless you want to trip me into bed with you ..."
"Not tonight," James smiled. And then reached up, touched his fingers softly to the back of Nikola's hand while the vampire stared at him, and curled his lip in what almost looked like a promise. "Not tonight ..."
Nikola blinked at him, and then felt the grin creep inexorably across his face. "Some other time, then?" he asked, and laughed. "You shouldn't make promises to a vampire, James. I will remember that."
And James smiled. "I'm sure you will," he said softly, with a little darkling glimmer all his own. A hint of predator, perhaps, in the wake of John's betrayal. Nikola couldn't say he didn't appreciate it.
"I'm sure you will."
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