I pray that D my fears to break.

It's funny. You're supposed to reflect on your life when you're about to lose it, aren't ya? I remember my mom and dad, o' course, but... It's D that stands out most clearly in my memory. Perhaps it's that I never did..."

The old man's ramblings ceased. His breathing was still steady, but light, and getting lighter every minute.

"Well, I hung on to the end of the story. Cursed blindness robbed me of the chance to see the sun one last time, and, well, there's just no chance I could've gotten to see him once more. Twice in one lifetime, to see one such as him, I 'spose that's considered blessing enough. D, of course. I would have liked to see that face that time never touches, and those eyes as deep and unfathomable as the midnight sky itself – one more time."

Polk's hand reached out blindly toward his quiet visitor. A strong hand clasped it carefully.

"Thanks for listening to an old man's rambling memories, and easing the time 'til my passin', stranger. If you've the time and inclination, heck, even if you don't, just say you'll do it and give me one last bit o' peace in this harsh life afore I leave it, and do me one favor."

"I'll do it." The reply was quiet, deep, and carried the conviction of a vow behind it.

"Yeah, that's it. Ease my mind for me." Polk coughed, trying to open his lungs wide enough, for long enough, to state his final request. "Stranger, it's not an easy task... You'll understand when you see him... Under my pillow – what's there, give it to him. And... Find the right words... I tried once, but didn't manage to say it right... I always admired him, and thanked him with all that I ever was, that he saved me and the others back then. It horrified me, even worse than what that vampire bitch wanted ta do with us, how my townsfolk treated him, and..." Polk's voice became weaker and weaker as he spoke. He drew a shallow breath and all but whispered. "Heck. There ain't any words grand enough for what I feel. Just tell him... 'Thank you'." The rest of Polk's breath eased silently from his lungs. His chest didn't rise again.

D placed the now-limp hand carefully at the old man's side, and smoothed the covers gently over his dead body. Though D's face was as placid and impassive as ever, a sort of solemn sorrow, perhaps a shade deeper than his customary air of suffering, clung to him.

In his mind's eye, D saw the courageous child who conquered his fear enough to help him, some hundred years ago. "Forgive me that I wasn't able to spare you the memories."

"You can't beat yourself up for that," Left Hand noted quietly.

"But, I do. If we had been quicker..."

"If!" The parasite snapped out disdainfully. "This isn't like you, D! If the world were different, it would be a different place. You'll never get anywhere chasing yer own tail with 'if'. Look, yeah, a horrible thing happened to him when he was a kid. You weren't able to take that memory away from him, and yeah, he suffered from it for the rest of his life. But, didn't you listen to him? He used a larger-than-life memory of you to tame and chase those nightmares. He just died of old age – not suicide, or vampirism, or reckless stupidity. Put this one in the 'win' column, put a period on it, and move on. 'If' we stand here angsting and arguing about it, we might be too late to save the next kid from the next horrible memory and start the cycle all over again."

D considered for a long moment, then reached toward his sword to retrieve it from its spot leaning against the wall.

"Now who's the slave driver?"

"Hey, aren't you forgettin' something?"

D paused.

"There's somethin' under his pillow you're supposed to deliver, along with his last words, to the 'great' Vampire Hunter D!" Left Hand scoffed.

With a steady inevitability that betrayed neither reluctance nor eagerness, D slid his hand beneath the pillow supporting the old man's head. Even though Polk was beyond the reach of being disturbed by anything affecting his mortal body, D's action was so smooth that not a single hair moved out of place as he retrieved the item hidden under the pillow.

His eyebrows moved the merest millimeter, but even that was unusual enough that Left Hand spoke up.

"What? What is it?"

"Paper," D replied.

"Wow. It's been decades since I last saw paper. Let me see," Left Hand demanded. Since D needed Left Hand's help to handle it, he could hardly deny the parasite a look.

The piece of paper wasn't large, and it had been folded. It was ancient, at least as far as paper goes, and had turned yellow with age. The feel of it in his hand was fragile. He could tell that it was severely weakened along the fold lines. D gently coaxed the folds apart once, then again, as it had been folded into quarters. Opened fully, he was able to read what was written there.

The indrawing and release of D's next breath was much too gentle to be called a sigh for anyone else, but the sound of it, coming from D, dropped like a bomb in the tomb-silent room. Perhaps it was some measure of psychometry bequeathed by his vampire heritage and triggered by the item in his hands, since, in his mind's eye D saw Polk, not as the old man he was now, or even the brave ten-year-old who helped him save the children those years ago, but as a child frightened awake by his dreams. Except – this child knew these were no mere dreams. Touched by vampires, seized by them, old enough to comprehend what they wanted to do to him, and the others, too old for D to give him the amnesia for those events as he'd been able to for the others – nothing as simple as dreams tormented this little boy.

Cautioned by D, by actions, as well as by words, to keep secret what he'd experienced, unable to unburden his spirit by talking with anyone about it, those memories, locked in the deepest vault of his being while he was conscious, broke free and tormented him with the memories of what had happened, his dread of events that had not quite come to pass, and the promise, whispered across his soul with the voice of an irresistible, dark nightmare that one such as he, taken by vampires, could not ever be fully free of the taint of their touch. Someday, someday, vampires might come again, when he least expected it, when he had let his guard down against them, and take him again. Once taken by vampires, one always belonged to them. It was – the way it was. Common knowledge, painfully learned in many harsh lessons by humans every time a vampire found a human pleasing. It was why those taken by vampires were exiled – or worse.

But, he'd been rescued, redeemed, by one of vampire blood. Didn't that counteract – well – everything? Couldn't that event break the dark, obsessive hold the nightmares and vampires thought they had on his soul? Couldn't he shed the darkness of his memories, at least enough to sleep without nightmares, if he just – somehow – remembered that fact?

A precious object, his most precious object, a book of fairy tales handed down generation after generation in his family, surrendered one of its blank preface pages. It seemed only fitting to make his 'pen' out of a shaft of wood – a small piece of one of the very needles of wood D used to drive off the vampires that he kept as a souvenir. He practiced his letters in the dirt in secret so that they would be his very best when he dared to put them on his precious piece of paper in ink. It also helped him to adapt the poem-prayer his mother used to tell him at night into the talisman against the darkness that he needed – oh so much – now.

The images flashed swiftly across D's mind now, Polk, at various ages, progressing through his life from that ten year old child to the man of over a hundred he was when he died as he unfolded and folded this very piece of paper thousands of times to read the words he'd written here. As a child he had hidden his talisman in a split in the bed-frame that his parents didn't know about. He could just touch the edge of his it if he reached his hand out and that sensation, the folded edge of the paper under his fingertips, reminded him of the words written on it so that even in the darkest hours of the night, when he couldn't unfold it and read it, the talisman could still comfort him. Once his parents passed on, he moved the folded paper to under his pillow. It was easier to reach, whenever he needed the comfort of knowing it was there.

"Don't be selfish! Let me see!"

D obliged, holding the paper along the right edge and lifting his left hand up, so that Left Hand could read.

"'Now I lay me down to sleep,'... Aww, I've heard this one before!" Left Hand groused.

"Continue reading," D suggested.

"The vampires my soul could not keep.' Well, that line's different. 'If I should dream before I wake, I pray that D my fears to break.' Aww, you have – had – a fan, D!"

D carefully folding the fragile paper again, and slipped it into a compartment in his utility belt. He reached his right hand out to smooth an errant strand of hair from the old man's face. That his hand lingered a moment to gently cup the aged and sunken cheek was wisely not remarked upon by Left Hand.

"Dying, in bed, of old age... It is a win, of sorts. For humans, anyway," Left Hand commented.

D would never acknowledge aloud that Left Hand was right. He stood, shook out the folds of his cloak, reclaimed his sword, and retrieved his hat, placing it on his head. He walked to the doorway, on his way to notify the sheriff that Polk had died before leaving the town. He turned for one last look at the man sleeping in his eternal slumber that would never be troubled by nightmares. Polk's life might not have been anything special to the people of his town, but to someone like D, who had seen so much, and who knew the burden Polk suffered under, it was remarkable. Not that he would ever share that fact with any one. Still, to have been a hero, even on paper as it were, to the brave child Polk was and the tenacious man he had become, held a sort of honor to it. A smile appeared upon D's face – rare, fleeting, and filled with a fragile, transcendent beauty the likes of which mortals rarely see. If Polk had been able to see that smile, and had known that he had even a tiny part in causing it to appear, he would have been filled with a sense of great accomplishment. It was just such a smile.

Only a shadow of that unimaginably luminous smile remained on his face as D reached for the knob of the door to pull it closed behind him. As the door closed, even more impossibly rare than the incredible smile were the words that floated softly into the room as if a ghost had uttered them.

"Sweet dreams."

-the end-