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Note: Not a tone I thought I'd ever use for SVN but I decided to write something eRic-centric and somehow this came out... enjoy?

Collected Sins

The wind that blows out of the east is velvet and wild, it smells of the soft places on maps and empires yet to be. There is something about a night wind that makes the eyes wander. Its force can't be confirmed by branches bowing in the corners of vision.

His eyes wander across Fangtasia's parking lot (Fangtasia: the spot on the map marked 'Mine') to settle on the gleaming paint of his car. The color is deep enough to excite even the cones of the eyes that strain in low-light. It brushes off the dull spectrum of the hardier rods and screams RED defiantly to the moon.

When humans get past fang length and dietary preferences, if they get down to the serious business of trying to grasp the long reality of him, change is the thing they want to measure. Lifespans, wealth, politics, love, language, legacies. They want to know how all these things stand against time.

No one ever asks about color. Though if the Trickster ever manages to turn time about so it spins out the other way, and the world is plunged back into pre-Eddison dark, it's color that he will miss the most. Color drinks light so for most of the long night of his life, the world was painted in shades of gray, with only sips of daylight-remembered radiance cast in candlelight.

His eyes take in their fill of red and he decides to go see her. He thought for such a long time that she could be anybody....

As far as lifespans go- he ran out of borrowed time at six and twenty. He should have lived on another dozen years or so, fading with the color of his hair until a slow muscle betrayed him to whetted steel, dying with the knowledge of a grandson or two securely born. That was the way things should have gone. But if life is the miracle so many claim it to be, if miracles are so rare as to be indistinguishable from mistakes, then his mistake was caught early, before his thirtieth year, and corrected with the much more permanent gift of death.

That he was dead but not gone might have been a mistake more rare than even life had been. But as a young creature born of blood instead of ash, he had been un-alive and drunk on existence, too preoccupied with new knowledge to have time for philosophy.

Now he had all the time in the world and that knowledge amazed him. It was not an especially well guarded secret of his that his own existence still awed him, that he was thrilled at the idea of taking on the world laid open at his feet. But, he thought, humans and vampires alike so expected aloof world-weariness that that its opposite baffled then utterly. He smiled knowingly and they shook in their skins.

He'd had time for self-reflection in a dozen dead languages. He'd dissected himself and counted up the lifetimes like the rings of a tree. He'd had life enough for fifty men but what sets him apart from those fifty is that he has life enough to fill those years and more. His existence was always supposed to be short and brutal. Die of climate or die in battle. He'd hoodwinked life and death with Option C.

His car glides over the pavement, smooth as silk. It eats up the road, a descendent of the legions' empire-building pathways. They were Rome's life-blood. Now their overseas kin are the same for him, opening the world for him so that he's hemmed in only by oceans and flashing lights of red-and-blue. And her.

The night wind swirls about the inside of his car like a living thing, reminding him that when lighted dashes and broad windshield pass away, it will remain. As will he. He'll remain to watch human progress become human history. He'll wave the horsemen of the apocalypse on, placing bets on the winner, because he is not one of theirs. He'll walk in the last sunrise on the last day of a dying sun and remember that he wasn't meant to make it past forty.

But maybe, by then, even the Earth will have passed into the long march of things before and he'll be out amongst the milky spills of the universe, living forever at the speed of light. He pauses a moment, at 115 miles per hour, to laugh at vampires in space.

The small town pulls him off the interstate, reigning him in, such an odd center of gravity. It could be any town. It should be any town. But it's always this one.

The small town roads, dutifully but inexpertly maintained, slow the minutes to a crawl. His goal is the backyard of the backwoods and a woman the color of heartache and sunshine. He takes a detour because, he reminds himself, he has all the time in the world.

He stops at one of the places between things. A spot human eyes do their best to slide over while breath hitches in throats. His boots stir up a thin layer of loam with clay underneath. He wonders that they bury bodies here where the underground torrents are contained by such a thin skin of earth.

The Earth is full of death. As the only known world that harbors life, it is the only one that harbors death too. A handful of deaths are represented here. People tied to the land and each other, buried with the familiar as if that might bring comfort in the inevitable eons of not living.

He can see her name on a stone already. Year of birth then a dash capped off almost immediately by a second date. Her dash is a bare inch of engraved granite. His extends into eternity until it bends back on itself.

Her life was always going to be short and brutal. His presence in it only speeds the inevitable.

He shakes his head in the night wind, clearing away the specter of the future. He has lived long enough to learn to catch the present as its passing and in this present she's alive. And so is he.

End