Characters: Strauss, Bridget
Summary: It wasn't love, and they will not speak of it.
Pairings: Strauss x Bridget, Strauss x Stella
Author's Note: Okay. Really, really, really short one, but I couldn't get it to be longer. Don't complain about the length.
Disclaimer: I don't own Record of a Fallen Vampire.
It's six months following his wife's death that he first tastes of her flesh. It happens in such a way that teeth never touch supple skin but hands do instead, finding flesh pliant and willing and cold as the grave.
Strauss tastes the bitter white light of the moon and tastes oblivion in the arms of another to try and drown Stella's laughing ghost. He can still see her in the moon so he suns even that gentle light, formerly his blessing, and takes shelter in the long shadows again.
Bridget is darkness. Neither moon nor stars nor even the unkind sun, only shadows and night darkness. So there is oblivion here, and if Strauss can find it, he'll find it in her.
This is never love. It is never hot and it burns out and fizzles into death all too quickly. Strauss never speaks of it and Bridget doesn't dare, but having been cast off once, she gathers her bitterly wounded pride to her and never approaches him again. She is sickened by the circumstances, insulted at being used as a replacement.
The others, later, the dhampires under her, exchange the rumor that she was once Strauss's lover.
Though she was, for just a little while, Bridget denies it with her usual blasé calm when the whispers reach her ears, as though the information that impacts her skin like hailstones is just gentle water passing over her.
The circumstances under which bitter white light was poured on her body for the first time are still to her as the death of her heart.
It wasn't love.
And she will not speak of it.