Alterations [1/1]
Author:Tammy
Email:tammy@tam175.freeserve.co.uk
Distribution:Permission for Mel Moser to archive at the fkfanfic archive.
If you want to.
Disclaimer: None of the Forever Knight characters belong to me.  They belong
to Sony and I am making no money from this fic.
Feedback:  Please don't hurt me.  Blame it on Last Knight

"Why is it so easy for you to consider bringing her over and so impossible
for me?"

Natalie asks the question, staring at me with those trusting, accepting eyes
that had haunted me for years, and I can't answer her.  I defied my sire for
her, I abandoned a woman I'd loved for eight hundred years and I brought her
brother across against all wisdom and my own desires.  I did all this for
her, didn't I?  For the love I felt for her, the mortal love that I hoped we
could share.  Yet she asks me that question and I feel nothing.  All the
love, all the hopes and dreams that I had once associated with Natalie, are
dust in my mouth.

When did things change?  I can't pinpoint the moment, not exactly.  Was it
that Valentines Day?  When I realized that LaCroix would never let me be
with her whilst his will animated his undead body?  I think that perhaps
that was the beginning of the end, when what had a hopeful love became a
doomed one.  Even when courtly love had been in fashion, hordes of minstrels
composing odes to their untouched ladies, I was more the hands on type.

It didn't die right away, it lingered on in feelings of friendship and
responsibility and my ever dwindling hope that I could ever shed this
immortal existence and regain my Immortal soul.  Still, it shrank and
withered over the months that passed and it was gradually replaced by
something else.

Eventually Natalie leaves, her soul and heart still in turmoil over our
static relationship and her friend's death, and I return to sit by partner's
side.  Taking her hand in mine, still warm with life but as limp as that of
any corpse I'd held over the years, I reach out and brush a strand of pale
gold hair away from her face.  My fingers linger in the soft tresses perhaps
longer than they should but there is no here to witness my slip, no one to
realize who has taken Natalie's place in my heart, so I permit myself this
small caress.

I was so resentful when Stonetree told me that I'd have to babysit
Commissioner Vetter's precious, and doubtless spoilt, baby girl.  Odd that,
when you come to think of it, that the two partners whom I'd been forced to
reluctantly accept would have come to occupy such a huge place in my dead
heart.  Schanke, my brash and often irritating partner whose coarse exterior
hid an incisive mind and a heart of gold, who was my first mortal friend in
centuries.  I don't count Natalie, we were never friends, both of us were
too aware of the chemistry between us for that.  I still miss Schanke, he
made me feel like I belonged, but I think he would have liked Tracy.  They
would have had nothing in common, except of course for their mutual
exasperation with my quirks, but they would have been friends.

Tracy. I squeeze her hand gently as I look down at her, wondering if she'd
find my cold flesh comforting if she could feel it, and wonder as always at
her beauty.  I remember my visceral reaction when I saw her for the first
time, stemming from the Crusader I thought long dead,  the urge to wrap this
delicate looking blonde beauty in gauze and put her on a pedestal.

I actually manage a laugh at that thought, weak and shaky but surprisingly
genuine, as I tried to imagine Tracy's reaction if I'd ever tried to follow
up on that instinct.  She'd probably have handed me my head on a platter,
nicely garnished with parsley, without even breaking out in a sweat. The
last thing anyone would describe Tracy as was a frail hothouse floor,
especially after seeing her take on that child molester, my partner was more
than capable of taking care of herself.

Despite the shock of that first impression it wasn't any one thing that made
me fall for Tracy.  It was arguing with her over paperwork or listening to
the Nightcrawler on the radio, working together on difficult cases and
trying to persuade her that heavy metal was not classical music.  It was
sitting up on those nights that Natalie didn t come over worrying about what
Tracy and Vachon were doing, it was the almost crippling jealousy I began to
feel for her mysterious 'informant' whenever she talked about him.  It was
Tracy.

Natalie offered me a way to see the sun again one day, Tracy brought the sun
to my eternal night.

Leaning forward over her still body, carefully avoiding the tubes and
machines that lay across the bed, and pressed a gently kiss against Tracy's
cheek.  Would she have ever come to care for me the way I cared for her?
Without Natalie and Vachon and the vampire that haunted me would there ever
have been a chance for us?  I don't know.  My own fault, one more regret to
add to the myriad that burden me, that I never told her the option was
there.

   *  *  *  *

"I trust you."

Natalie's speaking to me again, trying to persuade me to take the chance of
loving her, but I can't hear her.  The words she'd spoken when I entered the
room, Tracy Vetter is dead, still echo through my mind.  She was so cold, so
dismissive of Tracy's death, and now minutes later she wants me to make love
to her?  Does she imagine that the news of my partner's death will act as
some sort of aphrodisiac?  That I will be consumed with desire for her now
that she has brought me news of it.

I'll never know now, never know what might have been.  I should have brought
her across in the hospital, Natalie's misgivings aside, and faced whatever
repercussions I must.  Instead I took the coward's path, wait and see for I
had plenty of time, and now I'd lost everything.

"I trust you."

How can she trust me?  Can't she see in my eyes that what I once felt for
her is dead?  Can't she see the devastation that she's brought to my life
with her news?  Is she really so blind or is she just denying what she sees?

I take her hand, pressing my lips to her wrist and feeling the blood rushing
through her skin under the frail barrier of her skin, and feel my fangs
extend in an instinctive reaction to the temptation that she is offering so
willingly.  Would it really be so bad?  Would it truly be a sin to accept
what is freely given in love.

I do not know, perhaps I don't care, all I know is that I can't fight the
hunger that gnaws at my body and soul both any longer.  I don't love
Natalie, not in the way she wants me to, though she has my eternal respect
and gratitude.  Yet she gave me so much without asking for anything back,
her time, her love, her caring, and the one I did love is gone.  I don't
love her but I do owe her.  I owe her the right to make her own choice, the
right that I denied Tracy, and this is what she has chosen.  What she has
ever chosen.

   *   *  *   *

"Damn you, Nicholas!"

I already am.  Tracy is lying in a morgue somewhere, her body cold and
lifeless in death's passionless embrace, and Natalie looks set on following
her into death posthaste.  Everyone I loved has died or left me over the
years, only LaCroix and Janette stable in my life, and I can no longer life
with the pain that loss brings me.

I welcome the pain as I would a lover, the burning embrace delivering me
from my loneliness, and open my arms to the soothing darkness.

    *  *  *  *

My return to consciousness is unexpected and unwanted, though typical of
LaCroix now that I have time to think of it, and I growl in protest as I
struggle back to awareness.

"You said that you'd kill me."  LaCroix' icy blue eyes watch me with the
expression of tolerant amusement that used to drive me to distraction.  In
silence he steepled his fingers in front of his mouth and stared silently at
me.  "You said you'd end this!"

His chest rises and falls in a melodramatic, and physiologically unnecessary
sigh as he leans forwards, handing me a large glass of blood wine as he does
so.  Resisting the infantile, but amazingly strong, urge to stick my tongue
out at him I take the glass from him.  For a moment I hesitate, remembering
Natalie's long lectures on the importance of refraining from all human blood
even it was freely given, then I shrug fatalistically to myself.  It's not
as if it matters anymore, does it?

"I said nothing of the sort, Nick."  LaCroix murmurs in that low, riveting
voice, almost hypnotic even to a vampire, that he used on me so many times.
"I merely chose not to argue with you when you were indulging in your usual
tendencies towards the dramatic."

I suppose it's a sign of my bone deep exhaustion that the only emotion I can
muster at this point is a sort of weary amusement at LaCroix' dismissal of
my suicidal depression.  Instead of flinging myself at him in inchoate rage
I just lean back in my chair and sip the glass of blood wine.  I'll have to
remember this tactic in future, LaCroix looks like he's swallowed a clot, if
I had a future that is.

"It doesn't really matter."  I point out with a faint smile.  "It's not as
if you can stop me?  What are you going to do, LaCroix?  Lock me in my room
for all eternity?"

"I was hoping your headlong rush towards self-immolation would come to a
halt when you realize that neither of your ladyloves are dead."  I suppose I
can't really resent LaCroix smug expression as he said that, doubtless I had
worn a similar one a few moments before, but I still do.  "In fact, both of
them are recovering nicely at our local hospital.  Although I have to say
that I can't imagine where your blond partner learned the sort of language
you used when she saw me."

It was the prissy expression on LaCroix's face as he said that that really
convinced me he was telling the truth.  I don't think that he could have
manufactured that expression, I know that I couldn't have faked the one I
wore.

"She was she was dead!"  I stammer the words, my mind unable to process what
I'd just been told, and stare at him pleadingly.  "They both are!  Natalie
told me .and I saw her body "

"Natalie lied."  LaCroix savored the words as they left his lips, the
closest he would get to anything as an 'I told you so.'  "Detective Vetter
is doubtless feeling terrible at this very moment and wishing she were dead
but she is very much alive."

"And Natalie?"

"The mortals have made marvelous advancements in medical science over the
last few years, Nicholas.  Dr. Lambert is a tad anemic but like Tracy, and
you, she's going to be fine."

   *  *  *  *

A second chance.  Not at life perhaps but at happiness.  And this time I
intend to make the most of it, the most of every blessed minute.  Even it
does involve one of Tracy's patented tongue lashings on my failures as a
partner.

"Hi, Tracy."