A/N: Finally, what you've all been waiting for: the end. Sorry for the long delay, but hopefully you'll accept this extra-long final chapter as part of my condolences. And once again, you all have my eternal gratitude for your support and your unfaltering patience―this is for you.

chapter eight

She dreamt of the stars, but they weren't the stars, not as she knew them. They were too big, too bright, and intoxicating. She felt the harsh, constricting burn of smoke in her throat, and she dreamt of flames devouring the sky. And Ash. Always Ash.

"You know, somebody told me this would happen."

"That you'd come to a hick town and chase a goat killer?"

"That someday I'd care for someone―and it would hurt."

°°°

She entered consciousness slowly, cautiously, like a swimmer adjusting to a frigid pool one section of her body at a time. She wiggled her toes. She lifted one knee. She shifted her hips, easing out a discomfort in her back. Her awareness settled on an unprecedented heaviness in her chest. The space around her heart was oddly swollen, full and at the same time alarmingly raw; it wasn't the most objectionable feeling in the world, but neither was it the most comfortable. She squirmed, trying to dislodge the sensation, but it wedged more stubbornly into place.

She recalled the face her mind had so recently been projecting on the backs of her eyelids and, unnervingly, she wondered what he had done to her over a mere handful of days that she was so vulnerable, so susceptible to all his charms, even in his absence.

So you love him. The declaration was unpredictably frank and terrifyingly obvious. What now?

Good question. She took a long, still moment to ponder it. Ultimately, it came down to a fifty-fifty toss up between kissing him and staking him.

Her stomach rumbled in protest, driving her to distraction, and she decided to leave heavy thoughts for after breakfast. She sat up in a leisurely fashion, in no hurry to go anywhere. She opened her eyes, blinked sluggishly. And then she stopped. The excessively spacious room was illuminated with golden light spilling from the window facing the desert, but at the same time it was filled stars. Galaxies, nebulas, dwarfs, giants, solar systems, maps, charts, posters, photographs.

Nothing had been touched in this room in two decades. A shrine, a temple, an offering. A testament to a love that had once been real, living, breathing, beating.

Gathering her balance, Marianne gingerly stood on the bed, reaching up to brush her fingers against a poster plastered over the headboard. It was cool to the touch, glossy and sleek. She had always loved the night, for as long as she could remember. She had admired it from the last streaks of sunset to the first gray-blue tones of dawn, the way it enveloped her in its cool embrace, the way it shielded and covered and revealed at the same time, its freedom and danger, its calm introspection. But she knew next to nothing about the stars. She was a city girl, after all.

She had entertained all sorts of outlandish fantasies last night in the dark and the desert. Her future had been one of opportunities. But she realized with a sinking feeling that they were dissipating now in the daylight, narrowing her options significantly.

There was an old desk beside the bed boasting a framed photograph, and there were even more snapshots scattered in odd corners of the room. All, in some way or another, showed the same man and young woman. Two people she knew well, and that she didn't know at all.

You only had to look around the bedroom to know it. Someone had loved Mary-Lynnette very much once. Still did. And Marianne hoped that one day someone would love her just as much.

But that day wasn't today.

Food would wait, she resolved as she tugged on a pair of jeans that were, and at the same time were not, hers. She hurriedly brushed her teeth and ran a hand through her hopelessly tangled hair. She took a deep breath and a long look at herself in the mirror, desperate to separate herself from the girl whose presence pervaded this place. Her, but not her, an imperfect reflection. Yet she could find nothing in the mirror that showed any distinction between the two, and a bolt of fear and panic sliced through her.

Marianne, it had become a chant. Marianne. She gathered her identity around her as much as she could, her dignity, armor and shelter. It was a long, long walk to the opposite end of the residential wing, and she had to stop several times to ask directions from passing strangers. She wondered, belatedly, if first she should have gone to someone with perspective on these kinds of things, maybe a friendly chat with Hannah. But she didn't want consolation, she wanted confrontation.

She finally found his door, paused in front of it, steeling herself to knock. And then she chose not to. She simply put her hand on the door handle and turned, startled a little to feel it actually open at her touch. She stepped inside and closed the door behind her. She had expected Ash, with all of his hyper-senses, to detect the moment she entered his room, but he was still slumbering blissfully unaware as she approached the bed. She sat tentatively on the edge of the mattress, and being wholly unacquainted with the methods of waking a sleeper, particularly one of the vampire persuasion, she acted on her first impulse: she stuck out a finger and poked him once, hard, in the calf.

For all his feline grace, he did not, in fact, land on his feet. He cascaded off the bed in a tangle of comforter, sheets, and limbs to land with a very solid thump on the cold floor. To his credit, however, he was poised in fighting stance in the next breath, eyes an unnatural silver, elongated teeth indenting his lower lip, muscles rigid.

She should have been horrified. Terrified. Instead, she was fascinated. She had never seen his fangs before.

She could almost see the thoughts clicking in his head, the procession of them parading across his face, through those eyes. The instant alertness was replaced by wariness as he analyzed the situation, then swamped by confusion and a short period of contemplation as he recognized his surroundings, where and who he was with. The tension eased out of his body all at once, leaving behind a lazy, indolent housecat.

"Oh." He slumped, bonelessly graceful, into the bedraggled pile of blankets that had accompanied him in his tumble. "It's you." His eyelids drooped closed. "Should've known," he muttered, barely audible.

"Um, good morning," she mumbled, now more than slightly embarrassed. She allowed the moment to lapse into silence as she concentrated on rediscovering her resolve of a few minutes before. "Ash," she whispered. No answer. "Ash, we need to have a serious conversation."

A mild curse. "No, we don't." His voice was firmer than one would expect from someone most of the way asleep. "We had a late night. We will be more agreeable to the idea in a few hours."

"All right, then." It was not, despite all appearances, an admission of defeat. She drew her knees to her chest, hugging them closely in the cradle of her arms. "I need to have a serious conversation."

One eye popped open. It was an astounding sage color. "Well, I suppose that's different."

She bit her lip, rolling words around in her mouth, but none of them were right, none of them would ever be right for this situation. "I'm going home."

The other eye opened. There was enough light edging between a break in the curtains that she could see his jaw clench. He wanted to tell her no, but he wouldn't because he was too proud for that…and possibly because he understood.

She choked on that. His understanding made these things even harder to vocalize. It would have made a world of difference if he had been stubborn or obstinate or defiant, if she could have felt righteous indignation. Instead, his silent acceptance drained the steel out of her; she felt frighteningly limp and pliable. She was reminded inexplicably of the first night she met him. The look in his eyes. Hungry and fearful and unspeakably fragile. Please don't leave. He wouldn't dare say that to her now, not with the week's worth of barriers he'd constructed. It was almost heartbreaking to admit to herself that he wouldn't show his pain again so easily; he would rather let her go than humble himself a second time.

She had the urge to throw herself into his arms, to allow him to make her over into what he needed her to be. She would have surrendered her sense of self to ease that ache in the wounded hang of his head. But, no, she couldn't live with herself in that kind of deception, not even to make him happy. She was intent on doing exactly what he had begged her not to do: leaving him―for now. And the very most she could do was soften the blow.

She slid off the bed, onto her knees, kneeling not so far away from him, close enough to reach out and touch him if she only had the nerve. "Ash," she said, and the syllable was so tender it tore her throat. "Ash. This is going to sound so stupid―it already does―but I don't know any other way. I'm not worried anymore that we weren't meant for each other, but that doesn't magically erase everything else. I―I feel like I'm actually falling to pieces, like I'm fractured into a million little bits. I need some time to straighten out what parts of me are me and which are her, Mary-Lynnette. I need to figure out how to make us one person again. And you. You, too. You can't treat us as separate people, either. You can't love her like that and…and still have room for me."

Denial blazed swiftly in his eyes. "But I―" She clamped a hand a little savagely over his mouth, desperate to stop the flow of words there. But I love you.

"Don't. Just don't. I don't want you to regret saying it when I'm gone."

He shook his head fiercely free of her hand. "I wouldn't." The statement was a challenge, tempting her to test him. "I couldn't ever."

"Alright," she sighed, somewhat uneasy at how effortlessly he exposed her. "I don't want to regret it when I'm gone." She cast her eyes up, searching out his in the semi-darkness. "You have to believe this isn't easy."

"Trust me, I know." He sat back, his shoulders scraping against the wall she had inadvertently backed him up against. There was a charged silence, and then he said, "You're leaving me," as if it had only just occurred to him.

"Yeah," she answered hollowly. "I think that's what I said."

He made a noncommittal sound. "I don't suppose you'd want me to drive you back to San Francisco, would you?"

There was a small bubble of panic in her chest. She could just picture it: hours cooped up in the car with Ash, then standing on the front step of her house struggling to find the words that meant goodbye. There was too much risk that she might just change her mind. "No. No, we can't."

"That's what I thought." He rose nimble as ever to his feet, and by the time she had scrambled to her own, he had already crossed behind her to the bed. She stood uncertainly where she was, locked in place, as he dug around his nightstand. She heard the distinctive chink of metal on metal. "You're going to want these, then." He turned, and dangling in his hand was a set of keys.

"Your keys?" she whispered with a small twinge of anxiety.

He glanced at them as if they might have transformed in his grip. "Yes," he reaffirmed. "Those would be my car keys."

"But, Ash―"

He held up a hand to block her protest. "You have to take the Porshe. You have to. It wouldn't be right to let you leave without doing anything―even if it means I'm helping you get away from me."

"I can't―"

"Think of it," he interrupted impetuously, "as seventeen years' worth of overdue birthday presents." He extended his hand, keys laying in his open palm in offering.

She laid her own hand over his, her fingers curling around the chilly metal and around the warm flesh of his palm, and the accustomed shiver ran through her as they touched. "You idiot," she said, but there was nothing harsh about the word; it was almost an endearment. "You're not listening to me. I'm trying to tell you I don't know how to drive a stick shift."

He blinked, and a devilish half-smile played on the corners of his mouth after a brief moment. "Well," he proposed smoothly, as if he had been prepared for this eventuality all along, "I guess that means you'll be staying another day so I can teach you."

She looked at their intertwined hands, looked at the expression on his features. Perhaps it was the encouragement of the soulmate bond. Perhaps it was the selfless nature of his gift. Perhaps she just wanted to knock that pleased look off his face. She hooked her free arm around his neck and caught him squarely on the mouth with a kiss. She felt him reflexively tense in shock, and she couldn't help the heady rush of power that came with the knowledge that she had the ability to surprise the infamous Ash Redfern.

She was going to miss that.

ººº

One day is by no means an adequate amount of time to learn how to drive a stick shift, but Ash wouldn't have ventured to suggest she stay any longer. Marianne's saving grace was that she had a previous life's experience with manual cars, which provided her with a greater aptitude for it than the average teenager. A slightly greater aptitude. A fact that did little to put Ash at ease, and he had nearly clawed through the dashboard in terror and frustration during their lessons. He cursed whatever rash spirit had goaded him to give up both his great loves in one fell swoop, and he blamed Marianne for ambushing him at such an ungodly early hour. He said a lot of foul things she knew he didn't mean in the least.

Standing in the circular drive of the mansion the following morning, he looked restlessly down on the brunette head of his soulmate. Her suitcase lay between them at their feet. "You're sure about this?" he prodded one final time.

"Not in the least," she assured him in all confidence.

"Then why are you doing it?" He couldn't find it within himself to be annoyed, only tired and resigned.

"I don't know." She shook her head, avoiding his eyes. "Because. Because I don't know what else to do."

"Well," the sarcasm in his voice fell effortlessly into place, "I for one feel infinitely better knowing we've got this all straightened out."

She refused to fall for his diversion. Scary how fast she'd come to know his defensive tactics. "I am coming back, Ash."

His tone drew back away from that bitter edge. "Yeah, but that doesn't do me much good in the interim."

"It'll be good. For both us." She finally glanced up and was ensnared in the bellflower blue gaze already fixed on her. "I promise."

"I guess I'll have to take your word for it." It wasn't exactly a sincere endorsement, but it was the best she could hope for.

Marianne heaved her shoulders in an unthinking shrug, as if she were struggling to lift some weight off them. "I think…this might be the part where we say goodbye." She stuck out a hand in his direction, stiff and business-like.

He stared at the offered handshake, and he had the distinct and wholly unforeseen urge to laugh. His own hand darted out to seize her by the wrist, drawing her nearer without a protest as he bent his head to confer on her the kind of farewell she'd never received before. After some immeasurable passage of time, he stepped back and noted with no small amount of satisfaction the glazed appearance of Marianne's eyes.

"Ash," she said in a distant voice, as if she were laboring to return to herself from a long way off, "you have to let go."

Which was not at all what he had expected to hear. "What?"

"You have to let me go," she repeated more firmly.

Her arm twisted a little in his grip, drawing his glance downwards. "Oh." He regarded his own hand still clutching at her wrist as if it belonged to a stranger. "Um." His fingers relaxed their hold, his arms falling away uselessly at his sides. "Goodbye, then."

She shifted uncertainly on her feet, looking up at him, then back over her shoulder at the mansion rising over them, before finally stooping to seize her suitcase. He realized belatedly that it would have been gentlemanly of him to offer his assistance with such things, but he could only watch helplessly rooted in place as she swung her luggage into the passenger-side seat. She crossed to her own door and settled herself inside, adjusting seatbelts and mirrors busily, too busy to succumb to the desire to look back at the vampire standing motionless in the driveway. She paused to check the position of her hands and feet, clutch and brake, steering wheel and gearshift, and to catch her breath. Slowly she started up the car, and even more slowly she shifted from neutral into first gear, but for all her caution she didn't cover much distance before the engine stalled and the Porsche ground to a violent halt. She jumped a little with embarrassment and more hurriedly repeated her earlier motions. She glanced once into her rearview mirror to gauge Ash's reaction to her misstep, and she held onto that vision of him as she drove away, his face twisted curiously with a mixture of anguish and exasperation that only she seemed capable of evoking.

She was going to miss that, too.

ººº

Cindy was leaning against her kitchen sink washing dishes when she heard the front door open to her San Francisco home. For one breath, she stood very still and let go of a silent, relieved sigh, before picking up another plate and dousing it in soapy water. Perhaps a different kind of parent or guardian would have flown into hysterics or a fit of rage, but she comforted herself with the rhythmic, mindless motions of household chores. She had, after all, been expecting this for several years now, ever since she first heard Marianne talking in her sleep. Cindy had the advantage of age over her niece, and a sound enough memory to recall a time towards the end of the War when a captured Circle Daybreak vampire named Ash Redfern had dominated the nightly headlines. Whereas Marianne had once attributed him to an overactive imagination, Cindy had known all along that Ash had truly existed and that one day he might return to sweep away her surrogate daughter. Her one concern was that this had all happened far too soon.

There were several thumping noises in the hallway, then the pattering sound of hesitant footsteps on the kitchen tile. Cindy took her time in turning away from her work, leisurely wiping her hands dry on a dishtowel. She took in her niece from head to toe in one swift, appraising glance, not missing the expression in the girl's blue eyes.

"A vampire, huh?" was all she said, sympathetically, and she opened her arms to the child she had raised as her own.

It was the compassionate tone that undid Marianne, its implicit promise of understanding and comfort. She flew to the shelter her aunt offered, throwing her arms tightly around the older woman, her anchor in this world that was so suddenly incomprehensible and full of sorrow. And if she cried over an arrogant, problematic blond bloodsucker who was foolish enough to allow her to get away, then no one knew that but Cindy.

ººº

Ash was doing eighty-five on the highway, but he felt as if he were standing still. Everything in his life was standing still, waiting on something to jolt it back into motion. He had come to impasse. He had nothing, no emotion, no clue, no sense of direction. He didn't know where he was driving to, only that it was away, away from this place. He hadn't even bothered to pack a bag―he had all the necessitates stashed in houses all across the continental United States―or to say goodbye to any of the Circle Daybreakers visiting the Descourdes mansion―there were too many of them and so little left of his patience. The only thing he carried with him was a memory, a girl telling him he had stop seeing her as if she were two different people.

He'd been wrestling with that accusation for quite a while. It just didn't seem fair; he'd been at his very best, his most optimistic, in accepting the differences between Mary-Lynnette and Marianne, but it hadn't been good enough. Now she was demanding that he do the exact opposite, expunge them all from his mind as if they didn't exist, as if the past had never happened.

She was infuriating. Incomprehensible. Intolerable.

Funny, he mused, how much things change and how much they still manage to stay the same. There are just some patterns in this universe that show up over and over again, like that puppy that follows you home from school one day. She still drove him mad, in all the bad ways―and the good, too. She kicked his shins and called him names; she quoted him Shakespeare and Austen; she held him warily at arms' length, and then she drew him close when he least expected it; she made his blood boil and his reason foggy and his heart race; and he was helplessly in love with her in spite of everything.

In fact, he supposed he might have had some doubts that she was truly the reincarnation his soulmate if she hadn't asked him to let her go yet again. If she hadn't have pushed him away just as they'd finally had a breakthrough in their relationship, if she hadn't needed her space, her time to grow into understanding―well, then, she just wouldn't have been herself.

Herself. The idea stuck.

He jabbed the breaks abruptly, maneuvering the car in to the gravel path which transversed the grass median dividing the two side of the highway. He ground to a full stop, craning his neck to see traffic coming from the opposite direction. Performing a U-turn on a busy interstate―it was a stupid move, reckless and irresponsible, not to mention illegal, but that had never stopped him before.

And none of that mattered because it was obvious that he wasn't going to get anywhere headed in the direction he had been. He wasn't going to make any progress forward until first he had gone back. Back to Las Vegas, and even further than that.

ººº

The school year opened as it always did, and Marianne tried to pretend that nothing had happened between the end of the last and the beginning of this one, but it was a constant struggle to fit back into her old skin. She was not the same person, but neither was she the only one to notice this. Whatever else had followed her home from Las Vegas, she had gained a new, mysterious aura of someone with a secret which lured others to her, and the once shy, reclusive Marianne Pierce now found herself at the center of a new troupe of friends. She never sat up alone on Saturday nights pining over a certain vampire because she never lacked for invitations to escape her house and her thoughts.

Christmas break rushed in faster than could be expected, and the season found her unexpectedly on the opposite coast. To both their genuine astonishment, Marianne had accepted Mark's offer to visit with his family on a whim, and Mark had been overjoyed to welcome her into his home. To avoid any undue confusion with his wife, however, the two agreed to introduce Marianne as a long-lost cousin, some distant relative of his mother's who was conducting research on the family history. And two days after Christmas, Mark and his family loaded Marianne into the car with a heap of presents, an abundance of warm good cheer, hugs from the children, and an open invitation from Kari to return anytime she wanted.

On the ride to the airport, the former siblings sat still and quiet, not so much awkward as at a loss for words in this peculiar situation. As the road brought them closer to the airport, though, Mark cleared his throat, trumpeting his words. "There's something else. Something that I couldn't give you in front of the family. It's there, on the back seat."

Marianne directed a quizzical glance at him before she twisted in her seatbelt, stretching for the simply wrapped package, and pulled it into her lap. She traced the path of the ribbon, savoring the moment, before she tore it open. There was an old family picture album inside, but more than that, there was piled on top a small twisted, partially-melted piece of metal that had been salvaged from an old station wagon.

"It's stupid." Mark kept his eyes set on the bumper of the car in front of him, and his words were short and clipped, just how they always were when he was uncomfortable. "Who wants a piece of old junk, right? But I kept for a long time. It was kinda a good luck charm. Superstitious, I know. But I almost lost my sister―I almost lost you that night. I needed to commemorate that. And when I really did lose you…well, it was a reminder to carry with me. Now that you're back, I figure you need it more than I do."

"Not stupid," she countered softly, a slight smile transforming her features. She turned the metal over in her hands, appreciating its texture, its weight, and the love it represented. After a long stretch of time, she brought herself to ask the question that had been dogging her the past week. "Mark…how much does Kari really know?"

"Enough." The question had if anything made him more uncomfortable, but there were just some stones she could not leave unturned. "As much I could tell her. She knows about Jade. About you and Ash―and how you died. About Rowan and Kestral, too. But those other things that happened that summer, the murder and soulmates and dead goats and all that crap, I don't even think the six of us will ever understand it."

"Does it ever bother you?"

His eyebrows drew together in confusion. "What, the dead goat?"

"No." She shook her head. "I don't know. I don't know what I mean. Me, I guess. You've created this wonderful new, normal life for yourself, and here I am. An anomaly of nature, something that shouldn't exist. And I've brought back all these terrible things with me."

"No, Mare. There's nothing to regret." He reached over to give her hand a quick squeeze. "You're my sister."

If anything, the encouraging statement made her heart sink lower. "I'm not, really. I'm not the same, I won't ever be." She turned in her seat, fixing her eyes on his profile, eyes that felt suspiciously damp. "Mark…when you look at me, do you miss Mary-Lynette?"

He glanced sideways, a bit taken aback. "Well, sure. But I miss a lot of things. I miss Jade. I miss the house in Briar Creek and the hill. I miss the old high school. I miss that kid I was. Jade, that house, me, we all still exist, but I can't touch those things we were in the past. I miss the way they are in my memory, but that doesn't stop me from moving on. I like who I've become, and I love you, Mare. I don't expect you to be the same or to pick up right where we left off, not with all that's happened, but you're still my sister―you've just grown up a little, that's all." He grinned, and the mood in the car shifted away from the serious. "Or maybe you've grown down. I'm not sure which."

They hugged before he saw her off at the airport, and they both pretended there weren't tears in their eyes while they made promises about regular e-mails and plans for next year's vacation. She had high hopes for what the future would bring.

At home, Marianne uncovered an abundance of letters and packages awaiting her arrival. Christmas cards from all over the country, and gifts, too, small mementos she had left behind over the years with Thierry's inner circle that were being returned to her in the same fashion as Mark's present, all of which she added to the growing knowledge of her past life. She had been amazed by how many new friends she had acquired over the span of a few months, but she was completely staggered by the number of old friends she had suddenly acquired as well.

Ash, it seemed, understood her need to distance herself from their situation better than she could herself. There was no word from him, no card or letter or phone call. He didn't materialize on her doorstep to whisk her away as she sometimes allowed herself to imagine.

But then again, maybe her Christmas present was a little late in arriving. The papers for the Porsche arrived in January, signed over to her as the official new owner. She thought more than once about selling the car and buying something more her style; the Porsche was flashy and impractical and occasionally temperamental. But it reminded her inexplicably of its former owner, and she couldn't bear to part with it.

ººº

The door opened and a slim female inched cautiously around it while steadying her burden. "I thought you could use this." Hannah deposited another cardboard box on the bed. She hadn't exactly been invited to help him in packing up Mary-Lynette's things, but she figured Ash had never un-invited her either. This was simply one of things that as his friend she couldn't allow him to suffer through alone.

"Uh, thanks," he replied, somewhat distracted by maintaining his balance on a chair as he pulled down yet another poster. Task completed, he descended back down to the earth, and his gray eyes regarded her expectantly as she wavered from foot to foot, waiting for her to exit the way she had entered.

Something which she was not about to do. To make this more apparent, she took up a position on the bed, shoving aside some boxes of clothes and knickknacks to make herself more comfortable. A picture on the bedside table that had not yet been packed away caught her attention, and she bent forward to snatch it up. She silently traced the figures in the photo with her fingers as Ash heaved a sigh at her intrusion before folding the poster into the empty box.

"It's kind of unnerving," her voice interrupted the quiet, almost too loudly after the hush. "She looks exactly the same as she used to. If you left this picture here, I doubt she would even notice."

Wordlessly, Ash procured the picture frame from her hands, and Hannah made room beside her for him to sit on the bed as well. She watched him as he stared at the picture, and she got the distinct impression that he was no longer mentally in the room with her, but she spoke regardless. "But you'd know the difference, wouldn't you?"

Wouldn't he? The answer was still yes, but not for the same reasons it used to be.

In those years after the War, when he was at his worst, he would picture Mary-Lynette as he remembered her, tough and resilient, poking a finger between his ribs and chiding him to grow up and get over himself. He'd left his image of her just as untouched as her room, cherished and sacred, but what he'd never grasped is that those events that changed his life would have transformed her just as much if she had lived. And they had changed her. Marianne was everything that Mary-Lynette would have been had she the chance: she was more insightful, more sensitive, she knew when to respect his silences and when to offer comfort. Mary-Lynette would never have punished him for his pain, and Marianne was proof of that.

Ash leaned across Hannah and set the photograph back in its rightful place of the nightstand. This was not a parting with his past, but a coming to peace with it. It was essential that he cease to separate his life into two distinct periods, separated by a single experience; instead, his life had been a gradual progression that had produced the man he had become. He did not have to give Mary-Lynette up any more than he had to let go of the memory of the person he had been when he first met her. He only had to recognize that the transition from Mary-Lynette to Marianne, too, had been a natural development.

He could memorialize the version of the woman he had loved in his youth, but Marianne was the only version of that woman he could love in the present. And that was all Marianne could have wanted him to discover in their time apart.

Her room would be finished within the next hour, put into storage or donated to Goodwill, and soon enough it would be time to pack up his own belongings.

ººº

Spring break found Marianne lying on her back in the scraggly grass of a hill in Briar Creek, Oregon, in the company of a barefoot vampire. She was more interested in scratching at a bug bite on her leg, though, than she was in gazing at the stars, and her thoughts were too heavy to allow for anything else, anyway. She and Rowan had just finished reconstructing the events here during a summer some two decades ago, from both Rowan's recollections and her own slivers of memory, and now she turned the tale over in her mind, filling in the gaps in her consciousness that had haunted her for so long.

Rowan was absorbed in her thoughts at the same moment, quietly contemplating her departure from Briar Creek. Either she would have to allow herself to start aging again, or she would have to inconspicuously disappear from Burdock Farm as her sisters had in years past, before the locals became suspicious of their eternally youthful neighbor. She thought perhaps she might find a small place in Idaho, or maybe Wisconsin. She would miss Briar Creek, but the new scenery would undoubtedly be exciting. She imagined herself chasing a quarry through the stalks of a cornfield, and a private, feral smile lit up her features.

"Rowan?" Marianne's voice spiraled out into the darkness. The other woman made an encouraging sound. "Would it have been better if I had allowed him to turn me into a vampire?"

The question was unanticipated, and Rowan paused thoughtfully to formulate her answer. "Maybe," she said at last. "Maybe not. Maybe you both would have died at the hands of the resistance fighters. Maybe you would never have ended up in that cell at all. I can't say anything for certain." The vampire rose gracefully to her feet and extended a hand to her companion. "The true question is would you have been happy? As a vampire? For better or for worse, all he ever wanted was for you to be happy."

Marianne accepted the slender fingers and they aided her to stand herself. "I can't be sure, either." Her mind was at that instant conjuring the images of another night of stars with a completely different vampire. "But I think I'm happy now. Does that count?"

"Yes, it does." Rowan smiled, peaceful. "And I'm glad to hear it." She slipped a lean, sinewy arm around the shoulders of her once and present blood-sister. "Do you want to go see the house now?" The Carters had moved to Florida nearly twelve years previous, and the new residents spent half the year away in Arizona, so for the most part Rowan was the caretaker of Mary-Lynette's childhood home. "There's a box of stuff in the basement you never got the chance to come back for. Perhaps you'd like to take it with you?"

ººº

Marianne shut the passenger-side door of the Porsche firmly as she rested a box on the curve of her hip. She took the steps leading up to the townhouse in Old San Francisco with extreme care, conscious all the time of her precious load. Reaching the door, she leaned the weight partly against the house as she fumbled with Ash's keys, one of which she was sure opened the front door of Thierry's house. She caught a hold of it and jiggled it into the lock, awkwardly juggling her burden as she swung the door open.

A pair of hands relieved her of box. Marianne didn't jump in shock, nor did she utter a sound. It was almost as if she had been expecting him the whole time. He hadn't been among the procession of Circle Daybreakers mingling with her human friends at her graduation ceremony or at the party afterwards; no, it was almost as if he had been waiting here for her, away from the crowd, to give her his private congratulations, in this the place where it had all begun.

She swiveled slowly to face him, and even prepared as she was, the sight of him compressed her lungs, tightening the sore spot around her heart. She had missed him, of course. Everyday, everywhere. He was part of her, after all. But she was proud of him for having the courage to set her free to her own devices. She had discovered the arduous trials of a knight-errant―or really, a lady-errant―out in the world, but she knew from experience that sometimes it was more daunting to be the one left behind, the one left waiting with no guarantees.

He dropped the box as their eyes locked, the box of tokens from her past life that she had been so painstakingly accumulating over the past school year. The box ruptured on impact, the contents spilling over the porch, some of them caught up by the wind. But none of that seemed to matter very much in this moment. There were other places she carried Mary-Lynette with her.

He caught her up in his arms, and she buried her nose in his collarbone. The normal 'hellos' and 'how-are-yous' were lost in the intensity of another greeting as he drew her face to his. She had deconstructed everything she had ever assumed true about herself, and she had spent the past year reconstructing a new identity for herself, but she had never felt so whole as she did engulfed in his embrace. Another revelation to add to all those others she had discovered in the space between the first time she had entered this townhouse and this time.

She released his lips, but she was hardly ready to release him. "I can't believe you dropped my box." She hadn't really intended the first words out of her mouth to be a scolding, but it seemed only natural once she had spoken.

He shook his head, blond hair splaying across his forehead. "Doesn't matter. I'll buy you a better box."

"What if I don't want another box?"

He laughed out loud and cradled her a little closer. "Marianne," he said a bit breathlessly, as if he were on the verge of some great breakthrough. "Do you know what this means?"

She was certain he was no longer talking about the box, but about them, here, standing entangled on the threshold of the townhouse, and she glanced up at him under her eyelashes, perplexed. "I have no idea."

A smile carved its way across his face, and it was the kind of smile she would be glad to spend years examining the nuances of. "Good―'cause neither do I."

END.