Title: See Me

Author: rijane

Rating: PG-13

Disclaimer: If I owned them, Mick would be home by now.

Summary: Mick can't make himself stay away from her and he's not sure he wants to. Sequel to "Stronger"

Author's Note: I'm so rocking out the reviews from "Stronger" that I decided to write a sequel. Thanks so much to everyone who took the time to drop me a line :)

Part One

It wasn't healthy. Mick knew that. He knew it the same way smokers knew with every puff their lungs were blackening, their breaths shortened, but the promise of the rush, of completing a need in his head and his lungs, made it all meaningless.

He had to stop coming back here. He had to let that little girl live her life without him in it. She'd forgotten, he was pretty sure of that. But he didn't think he ever could.

That was why he was crouched outside her window. Watching her. He tried to resist the pull to her room. The lights stayed on much longer than they would have in any other six-year-old's bedroom.

Mick saw her arms thrown into the air in some strange make-believe dance. She whirled back and forth in front of the window. The lightness of her being calmed the storm in him.

That night, the first night, Beth's mother, choking back sobs, kept brushing at her daughter's hair, rubbing her arms as though to check that the girl was really there.

"She's okay isn't she?" the woman cut in, her voice dropped to a scared whisper, imagining all the hurts a mother couldn't see.

"She's fine. Just ... tired and scared," Mick said. "She wanted her mommy."

Even locked around her mother's waist, Beth had turned to study him. She didn't say a word, a knowing and placated smile playing at her lips.

If he was a worse man or a better vampire, he'd have let Coraline do what she'd planned. He could stand having this soul to take care of for eternity, considering this person family forever.

But he knew she expected better from him. So he turned to leave.

"Thank you," Beth's mother had called out as the door swung shut. He heard the click of a phone being lifted, calls being made.

And Mick had thought that would be the end of it. That he could walk away with just the memory of her light in his life.

Mick had tried to go back to his life, but nothing seemed to fit again. He'd gone back to Josef's, but for the first time in a long time had been completely uninterested in the harem of freshies wandering the mansion. He'd been uninterested in lots of things.

Josef blamed the death of his wife and sire. Mick knew better – it was the presence of something, not just the absence that had changed him.

The first letter from Beth's mother, with a stack of photos from Beth's welcome home party, arrived and Mick locked them in his desk for the longest nights.

But one night, the pictures weren't enough. He'd taken a consulting job with the LAPD, thanks to Bobby. His worsening vision had stuck him in a desk job, but those bad eyes had kept Mick on the department's list.

"It's a bad one, Mick," Bobby's pronouncement when he'd called had been an omen. A woman, just past girlhood, was gone. Last seen in the territory of the La Cruz gang and every spare officer was out looking.

Mick had dutifully gone after her, smelling the filth baking into the pavement of the neighborhood at dusk. Finally, he'd caught a whiff. Faint, scared.

When he finally tracked the blood, down the block, through a withered yard, inside a boarded-up house, the terror was overwhelming. He heard the clink of belt buckles and the slid of leather through denim before he could smell the blood and sex. One tiny, thready pulse was on the verge of stopping.

Mick burst through, angry and the beast unrestrained. He'd reached out to snap the neck of nearest man, his tattooed arms tangled in his falling pants. The others were pumping bullets into him as Mick changed his mind and flung the first one into the wall, breaking off pieces of plaster and crunching some of his bones as well.

The girl, staring up at him from the floor, had Beth's eyes. Her bloody hand was holding in parts of her never meant to see the light of day or the dark of night.

Mick turned his ice blue eyes on the remaining two, just boys but as dead in the eyes as him. One made a dash for the door and the other shot him in the back.

"We go down fighting, mijo," the remaining fighter had said. His gun was out of bullets. He stepped toward Mick and drew a switchblade from his pocket.

Mick snarled. He dodged the wild swings meant to cut some important body part from him. His cold hand lifted the gang member into the air and Mick leaned in to rip the human's throat out. A gurgling breath interrupted him.

The girl. Her tired grip had slipped and the blood poured out. Mick growled, he threw the man against the wall and on top of his friend.

Too much blood, Mick knew. He couldn't fix her, doctors probably couldn't fix her, but he loaded her into his arms, pressing down on the knife wounds, the little carvings they had made in her flesh and into the deep of her.

With every bit of speed he had, he dashed through the neighborhood and to the doors of the nearest hospital. As nurses poured from the ER, hauling a gurney and supplies, he set the girl down.

"Fix her," Mick ordered. He had to get away from the blood. He headed for the door, ignoring the woman trying to push paperwork into his hands. Out the door and into the night. Mick pulled himself into the pay phone in front of the hospital and called Bobby to tell him where the gang members were, where the girl was.

His voice caught in mid-sentence. That desperate pulse hiccuped. He paused. It beat one sudden violent time. And it was gone.

"I'm sorry, Bobby," Mick murmured into the phone. "I've just .. I have to go. Get checked out."

He needed blood, he needed... he needed her.

That was the first night he headed to Beth's house. Covered in the girl's blood, bullet holes ripped through his clothes and full of lead, he sat down in the Turners' back yard and watched the windows. Her mother plunged her arms into soapy water, her attention on the little TV in the kitchen.

Looking just as he remembered, Beth sat at the table, coloring, the crayons drawing curves of black and endless blue eyes. Her heart song played across him like a lullaby.

Mick's eyes closed as he concentrated on the rhythm, the steady thud and dulcet tone. When his eyes opened, Beth was staring out the picture window, seemingly straight at him.

Mick tensed, trying to convince his predatory nature to pick flight over fight. But she didn't move, just looked out the window into the pitch black yard. Beth gave a small smile and went back to her picture.

That night, he'd only stayed a few minutes, just enough to reassure himself she was still in the world, even if she wasn't in his.

Once he started going, though, he couldn't stop. He found out about things like Strawberry Shortcake and Gem and the Holograms, about "Where the Wild Things Are" and "Encyclopedia Brown." He learned the pitch her voice took when she threw a full-blown temper tantrum and how she danced her way into a room.

He discovered that somehow she'd become a child of the night. A few minutes after her mother left the room, she snapped the lights back on and pulled out a book or a coloring book. Sometimes she would just go to the window and look out into the night like she had that first time.

Those were the nights he both feared and hoped for. In her letters, Beth's mother told him that the girl never talked about her kidnapping. That counselors had tried, that she had tried, but for all they could tell, the memory was buried. The thought that she could so easily forget him bit him deep, but Mick consoled himself with the fact that meant Coraline was gone from her memory, too.

When she came to the window, though, it was like she was waiting for him. It was his own little moment in the sun to see her and to think that maybe she saw him, too.