Mortality: A Forever Knight Story

Author's Note: My 1995 entry in Susan M. Garrett's "Forever Not" fanfic challenge on FKFIC-L: What would happen if Nick Knight ever achieved the mortality he sought? Dark.

Nick knew the news was good when Natalie entered his loft bearing a bouquet of flowers and a plastic grocery bag containing a quart of gourmet chocolate ice cream.  He turned off the television with a single impatient flick of the remote, then rose from the black leather sofa to face her expectantly.

The smile on her face answered his unvoiced question.  When she spoke, it was only a confirmation of what her expression had already told him:  "The final test results came back.  It looks like the gene-splicing treatment worked, Nick.  You're cured!"

His answering smile was sunlight, pure in its warmth and intensity.  "No more drugs?  No more injections?  I'm.... free?"

Natalie thrust the flowers towards him, nodding.  "You're free-- and you're mortal again.  What are you going to do n--"  Her words were cut off abruptly as Nick's arms came around her and swung her around.  The flowers fell unheeded to the floor, the bouquet's bright tissue paper wrapping breaking open to scatter roses and yellow daisies across the Persian carpet.

Later, over tiramisu and coffee at Toronto's finest Italian restaurant, Natalie asked him again, "So, what now, Nick?  What are you going to do with your life?"

Nick stirred the foamy dregs of his cappucino idly with a silver-plated teaspoon.  "I don't know yet, Nat.  I still can't believe-- can't let myself believe-- that I'm really cured this time.  There have been so many false hopes, so many disappointments...."  His voice trailed off as he put down the spoon and covered her hand with his own.  "And there are some other issues I need to deal with."

Natalie interlaced his fingers with her own. "The other-- vampires?"

Nick nodded solemnly, and gazed off in the distance with his familiar haunted stare.  Natalie knew he was blind to the expensive rice-paper collages hanging on the restaurant walls, seeing instead faces and places from his long past, friends and enemies both long-dead and undead. But when he finally spoke again, it was of his immediate mortal concerns:  "I think I'll stay a detective for now.  I'm still paying my debt, you know, and Schanke-- well, Schank's grown on me.  I'd miss him if I...went away."

If he went away... Natalie's fingers tightened around his.

Nick, with a tender smile, raised her hand to his lips. His mouth was warm and soft against her knuckles. "But I've decided to stay put for a while.  So, do I get to treat you to dinner tomorrow night, Dr. Lambert?"

She grinned impishly.  "Let me check my calender, Detective Knight.  I'll have my voicemail contact your voicemail."

* * *

The warehouse was old, abandoned, most of its windowpanes shattered years ago.  Nick and Schanke edged cautiously around the back of the building, searching for a robbery suspect who had fled in this direction.  There was a flash of movement about hundred meters away, and Nick instinctively lunged forward.

"Nick-- don't!"  Schanke yelled, just before a young man brought his gun up and fired.

It was a stupid mistake. Stupid, stupid, stupid! was the refrain chanting in Nick's ears as something hit him, hard, and sent him crumpling to the ground. His ribs were numb, but he could feel a sticky warmth cover his shirt and the tops of his jeans.

It didn't hurt.

* * *

Hours passed in the hospital waiting room, marked by the imperceptible movement of clock hands on an orange-painted wall.  Natalie and Schanke sat numbly waiting, barely exchanging words, but linked by joined hands.  A constantly shifting honor guard of detectives and officers drifted in and out of the waiting room, taking a few minutes before a shift started or after it ended, or a lunch hour, to ensure that they were not alone.  To ensure that Nick was not alone, though he might be sealed away behind metal doors and white-painted walls, draped with sterile green sheets under the merciless glow of a halogen lamp, while the surgeon, armed with a knife, needle, and thread, did his best to repair the bullet's damage.

After an eternity of entombment in air thick with the smells of burnt coffee and stale cigarettes, the doors of Life and Death opened.  A fatigued doctor, clad in pale blue surgical scrubs marked with the dark spatters of Nick's blood, took a hesitant step into the waiting room.

Natalie rose stiffly, but found herself unable to speak.

"He'll live,"  the surgeon said wearily, answering her unspoken question. "But the bullet severed his spinal cord.  I'm afraid that Detective Knight will likely be paralyzed from the waist down."

* * *

After the doctor had made her final rounds, and the nurses had dimmed the lights, Nick lay in the narrow bed that reminded him of a monk's pallet, and stared at the random patterns on the white ceiling tiles.  The hospital smells of disinfectant and despair mingled with the sweet perfume of the roses that Natalie had brought him.

Red roses, from a true heart.  She had spoken to him in her direct, unsentimental way, mapping out the unexpectedly altered landscape of his mortal life.  Physical therapy and exercise programs. Computer keyboards and desk jobs. Wheelchairs and a blue-painted parking space for his beloved Caddy.

Then she had kissed him,  her lips pressing against his in an unspoken promise to make everything all right.  She had left him alone in the bed, listening to the rapid, confident tapping of her heeled shoes receding down the tiled corridor.  And he had been helpless to prevent her departure.

His eyes were stinging, the dotted patterns on the ceiling tiles blurring into almost-recognizable faces and shapes. In another moment, he might disgrace himself by weeping, all of his sorrow and despair and anger running from him in a trickle of warm salt, seawater-clear, and as bitter as aloes.

There was the faintest of footfalls in his room; a hint of sandalwood-scented air stirred by motion, and the scrape of the plastic visitor's chair as it was drawn closer to his bed. Nick did not need to look at his visitor.

"What are you doing here?" Nick rasped, the involuntary tensing of his hands causing the IV needles in his wrists to bite sharply.

"Considering the woes of mortality, my son."  There was a faint dusting of gold veiling LaCroix's eyes.  But his attitude was one of studied indifference.  He lounged in the ugly chair like a panther, long booted legs crossed casually at the ankles. "Is there something you want to ask of me?"

No. But Nick did want it back, the invulnerability, the immortality.  He had wanted mortality, but a mortality filled with laughter, and light, and children.  Not this painful confinement to tubes and needles; not the prospect of spending the rest of his all-too-brief years unable to walk, impotent, an object of pity. He opened his mouth, intending to say no. "Please."

"Please-- what?" LaCroix smiled, his eyes glacial above the humorless baring of teeth. "Are you begging me to save you, or to abandon you?"

Nick was silent, his fingers knotting themselves around limp bedclothes.

LaCroix sighed, stood up, and looked down at his protege with an expression that might have been pity.  "You must choose, mon Nicolas," LaCroix said.  "I will not choose for you. You must decide whether you want once more the gift that you rejected. Or should I abandon you to face the consequences of your folly?"

After a pause that lasted an eternity, in which he bid farewell to Natalie's wry smile, to the smell of Schanke's midnight coffee, and to Cohen's brisk ways and dry humor, Nick whispered:  "Save me, LaCroix."

LaCroix touched Nick's hair in a triumphant caress as his eyes turned gold then deepened into scarlet.

Nick gasped as LaCroix's teeth ripped into the tender skin of his throat, overwhelmed with relief that his request would be granted, overcome with revulsion at the thought of returning to the parade of endless nights, endless years, endless darkness. He wondered how long it would be before LaCroix gave him some measure of freedom.  He wondered what price LaCroix would demand for his favor. 

He wondered what Natalie would think, to find him vanished from the hospital. She would know.

Somewhere in the red-black haze that clouded his return voyage from mortality to vampirism, he heard Janette's voice echoing in the memory of eight hundred years past, sweet and infinitely regretful:

Say goodbye to the Light, Nicolas.

The End.