Asher Fic

[icarus_chained]

Much belated. For owleyes_arisen, for the five sentences meme.

Title: Brightness Dwells
Rating: R
Fandom: James Asher series (Barbara Hambly)
Characters/Pairings: Simon Ysidro, James Asher, Lydia Asher. Simon/James/Lydia
Summary: Simon Ysidro, considering life, death, souls, mortals, companions and lovers
Wordcount: 1803
Warnings/Notes: Vampires, predators, life, death, mortality, souls, character deaths
Disclaimer: Not mine

Brightness Dwells

Dragon

Simon remembered little enough from the battle with Blaydon, a series of blurred impressions, heightened and confused by blood-loss and unfamiliar emotions. Fear, shocking, depthless fear. Fear such as he had not felt in centuries, the sensation of being not predator but prey, the knowledge that there was a monster out in the darkness, and it was coming for him. Feeling teeth and hands tear at his flesh, feeling another feast from him as a thousand times he had feasted from others. Knowing the wrongness of it, even as he was helpless against it.

And then, equally foreign and equally powerful, an odd sense of ... camaraderie? The humans, the Ashers. Darting figures to either side of him, outmatched twice over when their enemy hunted vampires with impunity, striking out nonetheless. Silver in their hands, the bludgeon and the blade that protected him. Striking a retaliation for every wound struck against him.

Twin knights, he thought fancifully, protecting their lord from the dragon. Heroes such as lived in the old tales.

Nonsense, of course. Fantasies such as he might sow inside a victim's dreams, to make them see heroes where there were only monsters, to make them have faith where there should only be fear. Hnh. Yes. An apt comparison, and as dangerous. Faith where none should be, and deadly in its way as fear.

And yet, he thought. Yet they had promised him their service, knowing full well the nature of the lord thus pledged to, and when it came down to it ...

When it came down to it, there had stood two knights at his side, and together they had faced the dragon.


Needle

It had used to be that a vampire might hide in the throng of humanity as a needle in a haystack: close enough in size and shape that none would see the steel amongst the chaff. They had hunted with near impunity, protected by the twin forces of time and population, fading in and out of visibility as reliably as the touch of their minds against lesser ones.

Watching the Ashers hunt, Simon felt the slowly dawning realisation that perhaps this was no longer true. Not bereaved hunters, these two, as many who'd come against them, but spies and scholars, sifting through records and witnesses and the logical reconstructions of a vampire's requirements, and stealing so silently close that he could wake to find Mrs Asher napping beside his bed, silver nitrate in the curl of her hand. At every step of their acquaintance, they revealed to him alarming vulnerabilities in his own habits, those of his peers. At every step, they revealed just how fragile a vampire's existence might truly be, in this rapidly changing world.

And yet, and yet. They revealed these vulnerabilities to him. As much from necessity as anything, but they did not hunt him, not in truth, and neither did they deny him the knowledge they had gleaned. They stole into his bedchamber not as a threat but as a plea. They winnowed away fragments of information, circled ever closer about him, but never once since the beginning had it been in threat. They did not desire to destroy him, and they did not desire to see him revealed to the world.

He'd gone to them, he remembered, out of fear. From the very first moment he contacted them, he had felt hunted, felt preyed upon. It was ... very odd to him, to realise that they were, even still, more the solution to that sensation than its cause.


Novel

"Everything has been tried," he'd said to James once. He'd meant it, at least at the time. Time pressed against vampires mentally even if it did not physically any longer, and there were only so many deaths that could be amusing, only so many nights when the hunt would be enough to satisfy the boredom of centuries. So they had tried ... everything.

Why then, he wondered, did so much of what he experienced now seem new? Why did it seem so novel, almost a story?

They challenged him. Awoke in him new sensations, or ones so long forgotten that they seemed new again. He found himself measuring himself in their honour, found himself judging fears based on what they might endure as much as he. Found himself nursing longings that should have been purged from him long since, wrung from his soul as blood had been wrung from his veins. Almost a man, they made him feel. Almost something that had been dead long centuries, made new again.

It was dangerous, he thought. So dangerous, more so than any threat to him had been before. For them, he had risked his existence. For them, he had promised his honour, and to keep it he had been wounded more in ten years than he had been in two hundred before. For them, he challenged masters, he challenged monsters, he resurrected ancient ones and put down new fledglings. For them, he starved himself. For them, he sacrificed the same honour he had offered them, so as not to lure them down after him. So as not to make them like him, so as not to destroy their fragile newness with ancient sin. For them, the tired spy and his steely wife, Simon might well have ceased to exist, a final death more novel than any before.

And what most alarmed him, he knew, was that the thought was not near so repugnant as once it would have been.


Eclipse

"Did I say, once, that you were a weapon fashioned from teak, with which to preserve myself?" He smiled, a wealth of pained humour, a sensation of age crushing down upon him. "I was wrong, I think. A weapon, yes, and fashioned in part by my hand. But you were whitethorn if you were anything, and more fool I for thinking I would not be burned by you."

They smiled at him, a smile shared between them, their hands clasped together and all age fled from their features. Monstrous, it should have been. Terrible in what it meant, in what he had condemned them to.

But this was not as it appeared. This moment, this pale parting. Their souls sang inside his, their minds his to hold as any fledglings, the first fledglings he had made. But these two, these new vampires, had been made on a different promise. Not he to them, to spare their lives. But they to him, to grant him one last touch, one last taste of souls that did not belong to him.

"Fire from living hearts," Lydia murmured softly, reaching out to trace her hand across his cheek, leaning close to press a soft kiss to his lips. "Perhaps it will sustain you rather than burn you up."

"So we can hope, anyway," James said, a wry smile tucked in the corner of his now-youthful mouth. "Simon ..." He paused, unable for a moment to articulate himself, to make known what his soul had already whispered to the vampire who held them close, dear as anything he had ever known.

"Yes," Simon forestalled him, gently enough. "I will not pretend I understand, or that I will not grieve. But it is more of a gift than I thought to receive. I ... I thank you. For this gift, and all that you have been to me."

They kissed him again before they left, before they walked out into an open courtyard to await the dawn, pure and unbloodied as they'd been living. And though their fire burned inside him for that moment as strongly as the fire that consumed them with the sun's rising ...

Still he felt, as the sleep stole across him and their souls winked out inside him, that he had been eclipsed. At the last, he had been eclipsed.


Reincarnation

There were vampires, he knew, that believed there were certain humans who followed them down through the ages. Reincarnation, it was called. One of the names. There were some of his fellows who believed it, who clung to the thought of old family members or old enemies reappearing through the decades, the centuries. A sense of continuity in the ceaseless change, an armour against the relentless flow of time. For some of them, it wore against them as heavily as it did against humans, if in different ways.

Simon himself had never believed it. A soul once passed was consigned to god or to hell, and there could be no point in searching unfamiliar faces for the glimpses of personalities long lost. Ghosts there may be, damned souls to haunt the living, and vampires too, damned souls to hunt them. But never again a living face to bear old likenesses. Never again a living soul to remember lives once lost.

Now, though, he found himself looking. He found himself searching, as never had he before, for some glimpse of familiarity in those around him. He found himself looking for auburn hair, for a scholar's eyes, for a stride as silent as his own. He found himself seeking courage, seeking honour, seeking stained hands and proud eyes. He found himself looking for them, for James and for Lydia, in all the faces that passed him by.

He did not find them. Not in all the decades after their death, not in all the years from the moment they had placed their souls inside his as their lives drew to a natural close, and walked out into the sun together.

It was only many decades later, long years, as he felt a warmth inside his veins that he had never noticed before, as he felt souls inside his that should have been long lost, that it occurred to him that it might be because their souls were not among the living, nor the dead. It was only later, long after he had lost the will to feed and yet, for some reason, had not died, that he realised that their last gift had been greater than he knew.

"May it sustain you rather than burn you up," Lydia whispered softly through him. "I had wondered, you know. You gain life from deaths given unwittingly. You gain mastery from souls offered up unwilling. I did wonder what you might gain from souls and lives ... offered freely."

And it was madness, Simon thought. Listening to James chuckle softly inside his soul. It was the madness of grief and of age, come upon him at last. They were not real, and neither was he, withering away from lack of feeding. This was the fantasy of a dying mind, as Anthony had heard the whispers of ghosts in the catacombs, waiting for judgment day.

But their souls were warm inside his, fire from living hearts, and in the end, he thought he might not care.