Archive of Our Own ^beta

If you asked Richard, vampires were almost completely mischaracterized by the media.

No, he doesn't hate the sun because he is afraid of burning up in it. He hates it because even though his own existence predates the UK being called the UK he still considers himself British. 

No, a stake through the heart won't kill him, although the mental anguish of having someone you thought you were courting stab you through the heart and then lock you in the Parisian catacombs where you spend the next three decades trying to escape while feeding on rats sure is enough to make you think you'll forever hate the French.

 No, garlic doesn't have some repelling effect on him in a magical sense. His taste buds are now a thousand times stronger than that of a mortal human.

 No, he can't mesmerize hapless virgins with a glance nor does he have a desire to do so. That sounds like a fetish thing.

 And finally, no, being a thousand year old immortal vampire isn't glamorous, it's actually really lonely. 

Except of course, nobody actually thinks to ask the thousand year old vampire what his opinion on being a vampire is, so Richard just tries to pretend to be normal. This is especially hard on Saint Marie. Maybe part of this would be because the name of the last woman he thought he loved, the one who attempted to murder him upon learning he was a vampire, was Marie. There's also the sun, which is hot and annoying.

However, he's smart enough to know that this isn't the only thing that makes him irritable about the fact that his current persona is forced to be on Saint Marie. No, unfortunately he can recognize that Camille Bordey is absolutely stunning and intelligent too and he is smitten. However, he can also see enough of Marie in her personality that he knows that if she ever learns that he is a 'bloodsucking freak' she won't take kindly to it. 

So instead of pouring his heart out to her like he once believed he could do with a beautiful woman, he remains aloof and lets her think he is only grumpy. At least she will entertain the presence of a grumpy man without feeling her life is in danger.

So this is how he lives his life, or undeath, or whatever you'd call it and it seems fine until one day it isn't. They are bickering while she is driving, as this is the only sort of "relationship indulgence" he feels he can comfortably expect from her and he likes intellectual sparring. Maybe this isn't the best road for that as it borders the mountain on one side and a steep ravine on the other, but he trusts her driving. Except today a rock crumbles down from the cliffside and in a panic Camille overcorrects and then suddenly they are not on the road anymore. They are rolling and falling down into the ravine, which he calculates must be at least a kilometer below.

When they finally crash through a canopy of trees and land on solid ground, Richard finds himself somehow surprised, despite his own immortality, that he is still alive. Camille is too. Well, no, Camille is bleeding and gasping and her body is contorted at an odd angle that tells him her spine is probably broken, and she looks terrified. She's going to die scared and in pain and it's honestly all his fault.

So Richard does something that his logical brain knows he shouldn't do, but believe it or not he actually does have emotions and they take over. He first pulls her out of the Land Rover, which is already something he knows you're not supposed to do when somebody has a broken spine, but the next part is easier if he has a hold of her, and then he sinks his teeth into her throat because that is the only way to deliver the venom. And yes, sure he wasn't able to ask for her consent and she'll be doomed to be exactly like him, but at least it means she won't suffer a terrible painful death.

Except she immediately goes limp in his arms and he realizes that he only hastened her death and he feels horrible. She'd spent the final seconds of her life knowing only that when she was most vulnerable, someone she was supposed to be able to trust had violated her. Worse yet, Richard doesn't even like hurting people. He knows it sounds like a regular old vampire cliche but he doesn't drink human blood because you can't feed on something that has the same capacity for hopes and dreams and ambitions that you do and call yourself a moral being. It doesn't matter if you're immortal and they aren't. It's just completely wrong.

The least he can do is make sure he finds a way to get her body back to Catherine and then never shows his face on Saint Marie again. And he knows that a thousand years from now, today and this failure will still haunt him.

The moment he closes his eyes, unable to look at the body of the woman who once gleefully delighted in playfully tormenting him, something else happens. Camille's body spasms in his arms. Richard opens his eyes to try to figure out what is going on. If he believed in demons, he'd think she had suddenly become possessed, but there is a sickening sound accompanying it all and he realizes that her body is actually repairing itself. 

The whole process is a lot more noisy and dramatic than he'd expected, but then again he's never turned someone before.

Then suddenly Camille lets out a moan before sitting up and pulling away from him to lean against the land rover. She also immediately pats the side of her neck. "You bit me!" Camille yells with far too much indignation and Richard briefly wonders how she knows this only to remember she had been conscious when he'd bitten her and he probably does have blood oozing from his mouth.

"You would have died if I hadn't!" He hears himself yell back even though he knows this probably isn't the most appropriate time to start a fight or a very comforting thing to say in this situation.

His screwup is only further exemplified when Camille goes wide eyed for a moment before curling herself into a ball and beginning to full on sob.

Maybe he should take this moment to run far away, but in another ironic vampire cliche, Richard can't stand to see people upset even if he doesn't really have the social skills to easily comfort them. So instead, he sits haplessly for a moment before tentatively moving close enough that he can reach out a hand. If Camille decides to tear him limb from limb, he probably deserves it for getting her trapped at the bottom of a ravine and transformed into a monster.

She doesn't tear him limb from limb though. Instead she grabs his hand and holds it for a moment while continuing to sob. And then comes the garbled mix of English and French which yes he does understand because although he swears he hates the French he did spend time in Paris. Camille is upset. Upset because tumbling thousands of feet down a cliff is traumatic. Upset because breaking your spine and almost dying is also traumatic. And upset because knowing your mother would never being able to find your corpse is also traumatic. Surprisingly, what Camille does not find traumatic is that Richard is a vampire or that he bit her because she understands that he in fact saved her. In fact, although she uses the French term for "person of the night" she insists that from the moment she met him she knew.

Frankly this last little bit leaves Richard so gobsmacked that he almost forgets everything about what is going on. "What do you mean you always knew I was a vampire?!" Richard hisses.

Camille blinks and suddenly stops crying and just looks at him and Richard feels like a bug under a microscope. "Why would I not know what you are?"

"Because I'm not a vampiric stereotype!" Richard hisses back "And you never tried to kill me or trap me in some sort of underground tomb!"

It takes five days to reach Honore again, and during that time Richard learns many things. For starters, if he'd actually bothered to try to integrate himself he'd have known that the culture of Saint Marie is very accepting of vampires even if this little open secret is hidden from tourists. Richard has always been horrible at reading the subtext surrounding open secrets.

Yet there are laws surrounding them. It is illegal to engage in malice feeding against a human. It is also illegal to use one's fangs to intimidate tourists while engaging in criminal acts. Perhaps most shockingly, there are also laws to protect vampires. Specifically ones that in non-exact terms say that here it would be illegal to lock him in some sort of underground tomb.

Even more shockingly, he learns that the "community" on Saint Marie includes some faces he would never have taken for being fellow vampires like Selwynn Patterson and Officer Dwayne Myers.

As if the idea of Dwayne being a fellow blood drinker isn't dizzying enough, there is something that happens on the fourth day that really makes his head spin.

That morning him and Camille had hunted and after feeding, like regular old vampiric contrarians they'd stopped to sunbathe. This wasn't the shocking part. As mentioned before, the sun is just a ball of gas that happens to be annoying when you're British and besides even if he is in a dirty jungle he can have some taste of luxury.

What is shocking is that the moment he closes his eyes he hears Camille stomping around and mumbling under her breath.

Richard opens his eyes to chastise her, but then he realizes something. Even in torn clothing and covered in dirt and her own blood she is amazingly beautiful. Of course he'd always thought she was, but before now he'd never believed the claim that the so-called venom of vampirism made someone more attractive. It certainly hadn't worked on him, but then again if you're a subpar looking guy to begin with, how much can immortalizing venom do. On the other hand, if you look like Camille did before well…Richard is reminded that despite her new immortality, he will never be worthy of being with her in the way he so desperately wishes he could.

Then suddenly Camille realizes he is watching her and she freezes and looks indecisive before suddenly starting to speak. "Richard, I know you probably turned me only because you felt obligated to do so and you find me very childish and immature, which is understandable because I am not centuries old like you are, but I, as you will most Britishly put it, fancy you."

Richard sits up and blinks stunned. "You what?"

"Is that not the term?" She steps closer and for a moment she looks almost predatory and he is afraid until he remembers that he is also an immortal being. Camille however, takes another step forward and continues speaking. "Fine, because you will not answer me I will assume it is the wrong term. I believe Erzulie has decided that I will be in love with you."

"Shouldn't you have higher standards?" Richard squeaks out and then immediately regrets it. A beautiful woman who does not want to murder him has told him loud and clear that she is in love with him and he had responded like that.

Camille tilts her head for a moment and then simply responds, "No." And then she is upon him in almost the same way she had earlier ambushed the deer. 

Except instead of trying to feed on him she is kissing him and for a moment Richard kisses back only to remember that they are both gross and dirty in the middle of the jungle. "Would you be willing to continue this in the shower when we reach the beach shack?"

Surprisingly, Camille doesn't call him a strange pervert and she also refuses to let go of his hand until they reach Honore the following day.

Richard won't claim that everything suddenly becomes perfect the moment he turns Camille. They still fight. In fact, he's come to realize they both actually enjoy fighting, except now the fights often end with…well, a considerable lack of clothing and because they both have inhuman stamina it's not something he'd discuss in respectable company.

And then there was the day Camille comes to him in quiet mortification after one of her morning surfs and practically hiss whispers that she had accidentally killed a protected and much loved "tame" shark named Fleur that lived in the waters off Saint Marie's coast when it had come up to sniff her surfboard. So Richard finds himself helping bury a corpse on a beach in secret, and well if his partner can sever a shark's jaw with a single accidental kick, he makes a note to never startle her.

Worst of all, nearly a decade after her own transformation she insists on turning Catherine because she won't accept immortality if she has to watch her own mother die and okay, fine he actually understands this sentiment. By the time he'd been turned, by an unscrupulous hungry yet rather clumsy vampire who apparently only had one fang, his own parents had been dead so he hadn't gotten that chance. Still, Catherine is Catherine and he assumed she would be extremely annoying. 

Except that all changes when Camille catches the travel bug many, many years after Camille Bordey the mortal human would have logically passed away, and Catherine does not. So suddenly Richard is forced to travel from place, uprooting himself again every few years so that he can "have experiences" and this probably isn't something he would have considered if he was still alone. Yet it's much better than spending decades in the Parisian catacombs and not having even one person whom he can tell about his inhumanness without judgement even if there are still many, many things that he wished weren't believed about vampires.