Disclaimer: DN Angel goes to Sugisaki, Twilight goes to Stephenie Meyer.

Author natterings: Hi, so sorry for the wait. I'm not sure if anyone has bothered to keep up with this, but I'll keep posting chapters anyway. This one's a Riku POV.

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DUSK TO DAWN

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"Alice? Dear, it's nearly closing time."

I looked up from the copy of A History of the Advancement of Medicine propped up on my knees, up to where Sarah, the librarian, stood. "Alright, Sarah. Thank you. Could I check this out?"

She clucked her tongue good-naturedly, plucking the hardcover from my fingers, holding my place with the pencil she always had tucked behind her ear. I got up from my spot on the carpet and walked next to her.

"Do you really think that they'll find a cure for polio, Sarah?" I asked, looking seriously ahead. Though my visions had become more powerful and focused over the years, I could not forsee this treatment yet.

"I think they will," she answered. Where most people would say "I don't know" or "Maybe", Sarah always gave me a more concrete answer, and I loved her for it. "I can't imagine how you haven't seen it already, though."

I grinned at her. Sarah was one of the few vampires I had come into contact with in my travels, and the only other who had chosen to live among humans as well. Only she knew of my visions thus far. It was a comfort to be able to confide in her - her motherly tendencies sometimes had her tilting her head at me fondly, or clucking after the mess I left in fiction A-G.

She stamped the date on the back cover of the book, then initialed it in validation. "Due back in a week," she said.

"Goodnight, Sarah," I sung, then stepped outside, the book clutched to my chest like a jewel.

Only when I stepped out from under the awning did I realize it was misting. I covered the book with one flap of my jacket.

It was 1939, and wars were happening everywhere. Civil and international, all over the globe. America had declared itself neutral in the war overseas, and so it seemed like there wasn't even a war happening. But there was. My inital reaction was that it was selfish to keep to overselves when we had an army. But practicality made its way into my thoughts, and I saw certain things. For example, our fighting machines were archaic in comparison to the European fleets. And our economy wasn't fully recovered yet - I wasn't sure it could stand up to a war.

I pushed through the doors of the diner known as The Last Chance, a place I frequented lately. Everyone had come to know me by name. Or at least by my proxy-name.

"Alice! What're you doing, stopping in so late?" exclaimed Faye from her position behind the counter. "Not that you aren't welcome, of course."

"Just passing by," I smiled, drawing the book out from under my coat.

"The library again? I swear, you scholarly types. I just don't get ya." Now, her smile - her whole face, actually - took on a devious quality. "Thinking you'll meet your man tonight?"

I flushed. Or at least I felt like I did. With vampire skin, you didn't really vary in colour. "Oh, gosh. I'm not sure, Faye."

"He's bound to stop in sometime," she declared, seeming to decide this for me. And for him, for that matter. "And when he does, I'll be sure to recognize him."

"Faye, you haven't even seen him."

"Neither have you!" chortled Faye. "At least not really."

"Yes, well, thank you, Faye. You better keep an eye out," I said, falsely stern. "'Night."

"See you tomorrow." She waved.

As the door shut behind me with the rattle of glass, I felt the teeniest bit tired. Five years I'd combed the country for that place. One year I'd been living here in Philadelphia, having to change my last name from Greene to Brandon before I applied for any jobs. I'd been snapped up by the university as a teaching assistant and was getting paid considerably better than at any waitressing job I'd ever had. And still, still, he hadn't come.

My first vision of him - 18 years ago as the tall fighter - was not the last. In fact, I was peppered with visions of him so often that I began to daydream about him! As if I didn't see him enough.

My next visions of him were equally violent: him setting fire to the remains of a vampire, him decapitating a foe with his bare hands. At this point I had grown tedious of the sights - what relevance did this vampire have to me? Was I to become a part of this war as well?

I could not exactly consult human texts for this information. It wasn't until 7 years after my first vision of him that I got details from a vampire nomad - that there was a territory war in the south, that it had been going on for decades. Vampires fought for the control of the most desely populated land, and thus, the food source that lived on it. Their range was said to extend as high up as Texas and New Mexico, and I shuddered, thinking of my early days, how lucky I was to brush by so close and not be recruited.

So he was a soldier. By then, I'd already had other visions of him, not nearly as violent.

He was lonely. I could not say for sure how far ahead my sight was but I felt sorrow for him all the same, knowing he would experience such pain. It was clear from my visions that he was a top notch fighter, but it seemed that fighting wasn't enough to fill his days, and he sometimes wept, quietly, in the privacy of what seemed to be his room.

My heart - if vampires had them - softened. I became concerned for this stranger, so much so that I had coaxed visions of him out so that I could see him. (I could now control what I wanted to see much better.) His days were up and down. Sometimes, I saw him in a completely different place, but then it'd go right back to him in the warzone, brooding.

Nearly twenty years with my visions had taught me about their reliability. Or, to be more accurate, their unreliability. So long as a person or vampire decided on heading down a path, I could see them on it. But make a different choice, and my vision shifted. So the visions I had of this stranger running free in Kansas or Washington were only true as long as he stuck to his choice. Obviously, something was keeping him in the South.

But then, five years ago, my visions took an abrupt turn. It was a gray day from what I could see of the little twin circle windows of the doors of the diner. I was seated on a tall stool, the plastic seat a sea foam green underneath my bottom. The floor was a solid black, flecked with sparkles of white. But the giveaway, the thing I looked for in every diner I stepped into, was the painting.

I learned that it was called "Brink of Falls Moon River", by Arthur Lismer, a Canadian artist of the Group of Seven. The one that hung in the diner was either a reproduction or a poster, but it was amazing. Completely unlike anything I'd ever seen, in a diner or not. It was that painting that I looked for.

But yes, anyway. Back to my vision. Everything in place. The twin windows, the floor, the painting, me on my stool. And in he walked.

Me. Him. In the exact same place. And I stepped across the room to him, and that was it.

At first, I dismissed this as a short-lived vision, one that would not come to pass.

Clearly, some forces in the universe thought differently. The same vision plagued me, the same weather, the same stool, the same step across the floor to him. As close as I was to him in this vision, I noticed little things: a series of scars, the black of his eyes, his long fingers, more suited to an artist than an assassin.

He was beautiful. And not just in the way that all of our kind were, with exquisite symmetry, pale skin and a dancer's grace. There was something more to him, a look in his eye, wise, intense and knowledgeable. But the sadness was there, too, in the way his head hung, in the slow flutter of his breath. Maybe it was wrong to think, but all of it, culminated in his lean, muscular frame, was incredibly beautiful to me. I knew, then, that I had to find him. That I had these visions at all was amazing - I should not ignore what they were telling me.

I scoured the country for that diner. My former quest - the quest for the family - fell to the wayside. I asked anyone I came into contact with. Finally, a man in Jefferson City on business gave me a lead. He was from Philly, and instantly recognized my description of the green seats and black-and-white floor. He gave me an address and wished me luck.

The plane ticket was astronomical. But I had to get there as quickly as possible. There was no telling when the stranger from my visions would arrive, and I had to be in that diner at every possible moment. Or at least every gray day.

When my trips to the diner had become frequent enough to be noticed, the waitresses and waiters asked why. So I fibbed slightly, telling them that a fortune-teller had predicted that I'd meet a very important man here, but could give me no date, no time.

So they knew. And teased, as was evident. But I supposed it was my absolute belief in his arrival that held off any further questions. They thought me a complete romantic (they assumed the role he would play in my life would be as a boyfriend, I guessed). But then they saw how hard I studied, the volume and difficulty of books I brought for my waits, and concluded that I was both a hopeless romantic and heavyweight intellectual. "You're the whole package!" proclaimed Ben - an admiring waiter - one day. (I managed to reply with a thank you, then bolted.)

To be honest, I didn't know what I was. I had built myself an identity with my books, with my grace, with my visions. My hunger for knowledge was real; I loved to learn. But was I smart? I somehow got the feeling that a love for knowledge and understanding didn't exactly sum up to equal being truly smart. My grace was real; I loved to move. I danced, I ran, I swam. But this grace seemed more a gift in the package deal of being a vampire. True, I was a great deal more graceful than the other handful of vampires I'd encountered, but perhaps they were simply on the clumsy end of things. Knowing where I wanted to go and how to get there didn't exactly class me as the best mover.

Now I was led to the tricky part: my visions. My visions weren't even always real. Yet, they somehow were an important part of me. Were they simply a sharp sense of intuition? Perhaps even a wild imagination? Did this make me instinctive or creative?

What was I?

I had no answers. All I knew was that the visions came and I went along with them, doing whatever I could under the circumstances. Like so much in life, you made do with what you had, and rode it out.

-

"The basic concept of immunization is introducing a weakened form of the virus or bacteria into the body," Professor Lambert was saying, "and letting the immune system fight it. Now, read the chapter on the immune system, and don't just take the textbook's word for it. The text is written from a traditional point of view, remember! Try to give your own slant to it. Dismissed."

After the occasional student clapped for the Professor, the class filed out of the hall.

"Professor!" I leapt down the stairs towards the blackboard.

"Alice, goodness! Slow down, you'll break your legs," he warned.

I just smiled because he said this everyday after lecture when I bounded down towards him. "Professor, do you think that'd work?"

"Work for what?"

"Do you think... that introducing a weakened form of whatever causes polio... do you think it would result in a vaccine for polio?"

"That may very well be the case," he responded, face thoughtful. "We've determined that polio is caused by a virus. But we can't develop this vaccine so easily. I have colleagues across the country, at several universities, working on a vaccine. And, of course, we have several who are working on a cure."

"Will a treatment ever be discovered? It affects the nerves..."

His face darkened, a bad sign from the professor. He was usually so optimistic. "It's doubtful. Nerves are very fussy things," he gave a hopeless smile.

A silence fell between us, this dark information a heavy weight on our shoulders.

But then he was speaking again. "That's why we have to focus on prevention. We can't just react, you see. We've advanced so far in the past fifty years that it makes me believe that we can advance even further. We can do it, Alice." He smiled then, proto-laugh lines at the corners of his eyes. Still, I saw the despair in his eyes.

I bit my lip, unsure of what to do next. I fought my instincts to refrain from touching any human, placing my palm overtop of his forearm. "We can. If not a cure, then something else. Something that eases the pain."

He nodded. "Thank you."

I paused a moment, then picked up my bag, slung it over my shoulder, and left.

On the way out, I thought of what the professor's niece must look like. She must be adorable, perhaps with the same auburn hair and honest blue eyes. He had told me two days ago that she'd been diagnosed with polio, joining the thousands of children already affected.

As a vampire, I was not susceptible to the myriad of diseases and infections that humans were. But still, I felt the desire to help. To do something.

I took a left, making my way towards the professor's office. I slipped a note under his door. On it, I proposed that scientists should examine the bodies of survivors, see what it was that had made them strong enough to survive. I left the note unsigned.

As much as I would have loved to work in a lab, cracking mysteries and discovering cures, I knew that that was not where my fate lay. No, my future seemed strongly tied to the man from my visions, and that was where I would go. Besides, I had seen a breakthrough was to come - focused as I was on the issue, my visions finally relented and shown me a colleague of the professor's coming closer than ever before to a vaccine.

So now I headed to the diner, watching the sky above. A wonderful cloak of gray was brewing. Today may be the day.

For the past few years, I'd seen him alone, not with the companions he used to have. I couldn't guess why he'd leave them, but he'd left without incident. He did not move like he was being pursued. In fact, he seemed almost lethargic, his sadness from the war unimproved upon. He was miserable. Everytime I thought of this, a lump rose in my throat. I had to help him.

But could I? Set a vaccine for polio into motion, sure. But help a vampire bogged down by years of sadness? I didn't know if I could tackle that. I still felt uncomplete myself. Could I help another being on such a level?

I pushed the door to the diner open and took a seat on the very stool I sat upon in my vision. When Ben asked me what I wanted, I told him I'd decide later.

I sat there for the better part of the afternoon, just sitting and asking myself: could I help him? Could I? Could I?

Distantly, the door swung shut, the glass rattling as usual. But then the smell hit me like a brick wall: the scent of a vampire.

I whirled on the stool, seeing him there. Not a vision. The real thing.

And when I saw his face I knew the answer - could I help him?

Yes.