Reprieve [Lorelai]

[Robin Little]

Life was different. Life was weird. All normality had fled, headed for the hills, never to come back. And Robin had no idea, really, how he’d ended up in the position that he was in. He had become a night owl, to suit those he ‘worked’ for. The day time was spent sleeping and recovering from the shenanigans that he got up to with Jameson – getting high so that the vampire could get high, and drinking because that’s what you do when you get high. You drink. At least, that’s what Robin liked to do. It was habit. It was what he was accustomed to.

The weed, he wine, and the loss of blood, however, had him looking like a cancer patient, escaped from the hospital when he should be resting and medicated. His eyes were too bright, and wide; his skin was pallid, like death warmed up. Like that of the corpses he fed. Except that his body radiated warmth, and there was a red tinge to his cheeks.

The café was warm, however. Robin bundled up in one of the booths, a big, thick jacket bundled up around his shoulders. In front of him was his laptop, and a spread of notes. Steam billowed from his cup of black coffee, and from the pumpkin soup that he ordered. For all his illness – which he refused to acknowledge, or pay any attention to, he really didn’t think it was a thing – he was making a good amount of cash. Vampires paid good money for fresh blood. Fresh, willing blood, that wouldn’t turn them in or cause them trouble.

But here was Robin, trying to make sense of it all. To them, he was just a blood bag. To him, however, they were a whole new world. And there were zombies. And the **** knew what else?! There was blood and gore and violence. There was a whole underbelly that he had only touched upon – he stood on the edges of it, and he felt that at any moment, someone was going to come up behind him and shove him head first into the chaos.

But for now? He could pretend to be normal. For a few hours he could sit in this ordinary café with his ordinary food, with his ordinary laptop. He could try to write some ordinary things – though of course, what he ended up writing was completely… not ordinary. It was like something out of a fantasy novel. A badly written one. How did one truthfully write about vampires and zombies, without sounding like a lunatic?

He slumped back in the booth, right into the corner. The coffee was cradles between his fingers, and in the end he satisfied himself with just watching. Sitting, and watching people as they came and went. Ordinary people, who had no ******* clue. And he tried to figure out – would he prefer to be them? Or would he prefer to be exactly where he is?

[Lorelai]

Standing outside of the cafe, Lorelai couldn't help but wonder how she got there. She'd been walking for some time and the streets had all begun to bleed together. The only reason she had to stop was to speak to the child that was weeping outside. Only it wasn't really a child, it was the ghost of one, and as happened from time to time, Lorelai could not tell the spectral from the real.

"Are you okay?" she asked the small boy as she stooped down to his height.

The small boy looked up her, his surprise at being addressed stopping his tears. He blinked and rubbed at his eyes, trying his best to dry them while the stranger looked at him. The child didn't know how long he'd been crying or why everyone was ignoring him, all he knew was that his mummy was upset with him. The poor boy didn't realise that his mummy was sad because he was no longer with her.

Once Lorelai would came to understand the situation, she would of course feel for both the child and the mother in equal measure, as the loss of a child was something she could all too easily sympathise with.

It wasn't until Lorelai reached out to take the boy's hand that she realised what he was and then her heart grew heavy. She spoke to him softly, straightening herself up, so as not to look quite as stupid as she had done a moment before when she'd apparently been speaking to thin air. The boy told her his mother was inside and so she peered in through the cafe window, searching for a woman that looked like she might be in mourning. Her eyes scanned the staff and the customers and tit was then that she saw the broken soul, only it was not the one she'd been hoping to see; it was Robin.

It would have been easy for her eyes to wander past him, what with his sickly appearance. He did not look like she remembered him and all she could imagine was that life had not been so kind to him since he arrived in the city. Not that it had been particularly kind to her either, but she couldn't say she was fairing worse than him. Not really.

Pushing open the door to the cafe, she walked in and made her way straight over to his table, ghost in tow.

"Robin?"

She didn't sit herself down, choosing to stand until she was invited and/or certain that he was who she thought he was.

[Robin Little]

The caffeine was doing its job. It hit the blood stream and woke Robin up, just a little. Only a little. But at least the cobwebs were wiped from his brain, and he felt like he could function just that tiny bit better. It didn’t stop his stomach from turning, however; growling at him to remind him of its hunger. Sometimes he forgot his own hunger while sating the hunger of others.

When the coffee was finished, Robin turned his attention to the soup. It was good soup. It was thick, and had chunks. It was the kind of pumpkin soup you knew was made with real pumpkins, and not with some imitation flavouring crap. There was just enough salt and pepper, too – and little bits of onion. As well as a dollop of sour cream, which Robin stirred through. It was comfort food, at its best.

He was staring at the screen in front of him, and the little straight line on the Word screen, flashing expectantly. Robin stretched out his fingers over the keyboard; he found that he wanted to write about Jameson. He wondered if it was some kind of vampire hoodoo, this connection that he felt to the androgynous male. Robin reached into his pocket and pulled out his phone, wondering if he’d missed the trill of a recent message. But there were no messages. Robin sighed, and slumped again.

At first, he assumed the shadow out of the corner of his eye was the waitress, come to collect his empty plate and cup. He turned, to order another coffee – but at the same time he turned, he heard his name, and his gaze alighted upon a familiar face. He immediately smiled – though not too wide. His lower lip was close to cracking.

”Lorelai!” he exclaimed. He was about to ask why she hadn’t replied to his last letter – but then his face fell.

”Oh ****. I changed addresses and I never told you… my girlfriend kicked me out,” he said. As if it were an every day occurrence, and he felt nothing about the incident at all. Truth was, he didn’t. Nicola was a figment of the past, and given all the new things that he had learned, she hardly registered, anymore, as something he had cared about.

”I’m so sorry. Sit down, sit down, let me order you something…” he said, gesturing to the other side of the booth and lifting a hand to grab the waitress’s attention.

[Lorelai]

She wasn't mad at him for not replying to the last letter she sent him, or the last few letters, as the case had been. She assumed he was busy getting on with her life and while she had continued to write to him and told him about all the comings and goings back at home, which was never very much, she soon began not to expect any reply. She may have wanted to him confront him at one point, to ask him why he no longer wrote to her but now, with him standing before, it couldn't have been the furthest thought from her mind. She liked Robin, loved him even, in her own unique way; she fell easily for those around her and was already crushing on at least two other people in the city. With Robin before that number quickly increased by one, as ill as he appeared to me, the moment she saw him, she felt like they'd never been apart.

Instead of taking as seat, however, when she was invited to do so, she pulled Robin to her, wrapping her arms tightly around him. She used perhaps a little more of her strength than was necessary but then she wasn't as strong as most of her kind as her strength wasn't an attribute she paid much attention to. She pulled him to her and kept him close, his head resting on her less than modest cleavage.

"Oh Robin. Oh how I've missed you."

She was cold to the touch but then that was to be expected, not due to what she was, but due to the fact that she had been outside in the cold night air. Her cheeks had taken on a wind kissed glow and while Robin may have been familiar with her kind, it was unlikely that he would recognise for what she was as she didn't carry the usual markings either in her aura or on her skin.

"I cannot begin to tell you how happy I am to see you."

Of course she wanted to ask him about his sickness, what it was that had made him become so emaciated in appearance but she felt that to do so, so soon after seeing him would be impolite. She would ask him, in time, but for now she just wanted to revel in the fact that her friend was here. Lorelai didn't exactly have a lot of friends to speak of, so finding Robin, to her, was a monumental occasion.

[Robin Little]

The hug was unexpected; though the action was warm, and the sentiment was obvious, Lorelai seemed cold and hard to the touch. Although she looked and acted like the same old Lorelai, there was something different about her. Something that Robin couldn’t immediately place, and might never place, if not given the chance. He wanted to look again at her hair, or her eyes. At her clothes, maybe? A haircut, or a change in style could be all that the difference could be attributed to. Maybe it was just a strange thing to see an old acquaintance in such a new setting. Her face seemed out of place in this world of vampires and monsters.

A low chuckle reverberated in Robin’s chest and though the embrace was awkward, with him sitting in his corner and Lorelai half standing, he still managed to get his arms around her shoulders and to return the hug in due fashion. Robin was not shy when it came to personal contact. He never really had any qualms getting close to people he knew. And Lorelai was someone he knew.

”I’m happy to see you, too! I’m happy to see you got out,” Robin said. It wasn’t hard for him to revert to the same old Robin that Lorelai had known. He was the same Robin, really, except for the fact that he probably knew more than he should, and that he had a few more addictions that could prove to be fatal. But that was besides the point. He had forgotten nothing about his stay with Lorelai and her family, and her fears about leaving Hoshkosh. He had pushed her to leave, and now here she was. And yes, he said got out as if it were some kind of prison that she had managed to break free of. That’s how he had seen her situation. Not so much that the commune itself was a prison with locked doors to keep her in, but that her own psyche was a prison that she had navigate free of.

”Where are you staying? What are you doing? Are you working? What are you up to?” Robin asked. He was curious, of course—but it was also a ploy. Get Lorelai talking, so that she wouldn’t ask about him. Not that it would matter. Robin didn’t want her to think he’d turned into some kind of cocaine addict who suffered vivid hallucinations. He wouldn’t tell her a damned thing.

[Lorelai]

Got out. The words reverberated in her brain. Yes, she'd gotten out of Hoshkosh but it had quite literally cost her, her life. The smile remained on her lips but the brightness of her eyes dulled just a little. She couldn't exactly tell her friend what had, had happened to her, not without endangering his life, and yet despite knowing this, she wanted to tell him her entire story. Robin, being a writer, would be able to appreciate the sad tale on a level that most others would be unable to do.

Lorelai took her seat opposite her friend, but only after a brief pause and some sort of awkward ushering movement. She was of course trying to get the child to take his seat first but without giving him any verbal cue, what with Robin being right there. This was yet another new development her friend would have to be informed of, and unlike the other one, this particular gift/affliction occurred before her turning so she would be happier speaking of it.

"I have my own apartment here," she told him quite proudly. "And my job is a little difficult to explain. It might be fairer to say that I have a calling, as opposed to a job. I'm currently living off my savings. Which I do have."

Money wasn't something the people of Hoshkosh had a lot of and Robin would have known this. When they needed cash, they would sell something they produced, but internally, there was no need of it. The majority of Lorelai's money had come from less than honest means, though she had worked in a boutique for a few months and earned some of her savings legitimately.

"And you? How are you? Where are you now? What are you writing?"

The question as to whether or not he had a girlfriend would have to wait, though it was one that Lorelai was rather interested in. Again, it seemed a little soon to be asking him such a question. Though Robin likely wouldn't have blinked to have been asked that question, given the fact he'd already mentioned his girlfriend kicking him out.

As the waitress came over, the young boy next to her cried out happily. This was his mother and as he spoke, Lorelai couldn't help but turn her head to look at him. The poor thing seemed excited to see his mother and though the others couldn't see, he soon began trying to pull at Lorelai's arm. He wanted his new friend to speak to his mother but she just simply wasn't able to do so. Diligent in her work, the woman attempted to take their orders, though Lorelai was adamant that she didn't require anything; even after she'd been told the specials and been given a personal recommendation as to what was good to eat.

[Robin Little]

Robin, though he could be a bit air-headed sometimes, and a bit to inwardly inclined to notice others around him, did notice Lorelai—the odd twitches she had. The way she looked down at the seat next to her as if there was something or something there, though Robin could see nothing. Even though he arched his head just a little, to see over the lip of the table—there was nothing there. He shrugged it away.

”A calling?” he asked, after the waitress had left them alone – he himself had ordered a piece of the banana bread now that his soup had been finished. The soup had tasted good, but he felt like he needed something solid to finish the meal off. A nice warm piece of banana bread would do just the trick. Not too sweet. Not too savoury. And he could pretend he was being healthy. It was fruit, right?

”I’m crashing with a friend. I was living with my girlfriend but she kicked me out. I was in a motel for a while, but now I’m on a couch,” he said. He then reached out and closed the lid of his laptop. It was a new laptop. Brand spanking new. He could afford it, with his new job. He could pretty much say Jameson had bought it for him, but there was a catch, of course. At least this one didn’t kill all his work whenever the lid was closed. ”It’s nothing great,” he said in response to the question of what he was writing. He wasn’t sure he could show it to her and tell her that it was fiction.

”What kind of calling?” he asked, returning to the previous enquiry that he had made. It seemed a curious kind of thing to say. To say that one had a calling. He wondered if it was some kind of Hoshkoshian ******** that had been engrained into Lorelai’s brain, but his curiosity was real. He wasn’t seeking to make fun of her. Each to their own, and all that. To Robin, it didn’t matter what she was doing – so long as she was carving her own path in the world, rather than letting someone else dictate what she could or could not do.

[Lorelai]

Without meaning too, Lorelai connected to Robin's laptop and was able to access some of his files before he closed the lid. The action didn't stop the connection but it did alert Lorelai to the fact that she was poking around in things that didn't concern her. Usually she would have had to purposely pluck at the information but being so close to it, and having been in need of a distraction from the child next to her, she had inadvertently tapped into its signal. Of course she hadn't even begun to digest the information it contained.

No.
Yes? What did I think now?
You were going to invite him to stay with you, us.
I was? I was. So what's wrong with that? I like Robin.
You can't invite him to live with you without him figuring out what you are Lorelai. For once, will you please just listen to me, you. Whatever. What's the point of having a conscience if you constantly ignore it?

"I help people. Though I'm sure that comes as no surprise to you," she smiled kindly at him. "I would love to explain to you just how I help people but I'm worried that you'd think I've lost my mind. I haven't. I'm pretty sure I haven't. I'm not even sure how it all came about if I'm honest."

There were two ways in which Lorelai helped people. She helped her fellow vampires by hacking into random systems and deleting any evidence she found of vampire exploits. Of course when she found sufficient evidence pointing to a specific vampire, she submitted it to the Crownet system so that people would learn to be more careful; at least this was what she thought she was doing. She wasn't entirely sure how they learned their lesson from it but she was positive that she was doing the right thing. None of this was going to be told to Robin, when she spoke of her calling to him, she was speaking of her spiritual burden; the one that gave her the ability to communicate with those that had already passed on. With a little coaxing, this was one aspect of her life that she would readily talk about.

[Robin Little]

At first Robin misheard. The synapses in his brain were overtired and underfed. Not that Robin himself was starving, but there wasn’t enough blood in his system to pump sufficiently. Not enough to be fatal just yet, but there was enough of a loss for his body to work overtime trying to replace the red blood cells. Enough for fatigue to settle over all his limbs, and to make him look like some kind of vampire. Which made him laugh, naturally, given that he wasn’t a vampire. He only fed them.

Anyway. Robin misheard. And he laughed—a very short laugh that he disguised as a cough—because he thought he heard Lorelai say that she hated people, which was not like Lorelai at all. At first he began to wonder what exactly the city had done to her; until his brain rewired and reminded him what she actually said, and his face resumed its mask of seriousness.

Generally, Robin was never too serious. And the more time that he spent with Jameson, the more careless his attitude got. It’s what happened when a person spent a lot of their time around another person, as if the two personalities twist and twine, and if they aren’t stubborn personalities, they begin to morph. Begin to take on each other’s attributes. Or, maybe Robin was always just a little bit like Jameson, and Jameson was bringing out the worst in him.

He took a deep breath and nodded.

”Well. You either want to tell me or you don’t. If you know me at all, you know that I’m an open-minded person and seem to be… well, I know I’m attracted to the crazies. I think no less of them,” he said. In fact, he preferred those whose world-views were slightly off-kilter. He hated the humdrum ordinary. Those people got on his nerves, with their robotic lives and their picket-fence expectations.

The program that he used on his computer was directly linked to his phone. With technology the way it was these days, he knew he would never lose any of his writing ever again—at least, not until the grid went down and the world was doused in darkness, as most apocalyptic stories liked to predict the end of the world. Right at that moment, as the computer quit its thrumming and shut down completely, an auto-saved copy of his document went flinging through the air and lodged itself, safely saved, in the ‘cloud’. Accessible via his phone.

A journal, almost. If he managed to keep up with it.

[Lorelai]

He's attracted to crazies huh? Well you're kinda perfect for him now then aren't you? People don't come much more crazy than you.
Hey. That's not nice.
But it's true. I mean look at you. You're talking to yourself.
I've always done that.
I know... but just between us two...that's not normal.

She wanted to tell Robin all about her strange ability, how it all started with Leo, before she lost her son (of the same name) and how things seemed to go from bad to worse from there on out. In fact as she thought of it, she realised that she wanted to tell him everything, every little secret she had. He'd accept it. At least she thought he would. That's when she caught a hold of his journal entry. Her mind had latched onto it and she would have immediately released but for the fact that it contained a word she spent all too much time searching the internet for; vampire.

"Oh Robin."

Without really meaning to invade his privacy she digested the text and was moving around to his side of the booth for seemingly no reason at all. The small child was still yammering on his side of the seat but for now she was ignoring him. Robin's journal seemed laced with pain, it was a story she knew all too well and one she needed to change the ending of for her friend. If there was ever a cautionary tale for just how wrong things could go it was Lorelai.

She knelt on the edge of the booth and gathered her friend into her arms, her actions causing one or two of the patrons nearby to turn and look at them but she didn't care. She held Robin as if her life depended on it, though perhaps with even more urgency than that as it was his life that she believed that hung in the balance.

"I wish you could unseen those things. I do. I truly do. If I could take the nightmares from you I promise I would do it."

She lowered her head behind his as she clung to him, tears beginning to well up in her eyes. Lorelai wasn't one for holding back her emotions, not these days, and she still cried on a daily basis for the life that had been denied her son due to her poor choices. There was nothing she could do to save him, but Robin, Robin she could protect. It was perhaps a little strange to feel so protective of someone you hadn't seen in years, but that was Lorelai and as much as she might try to deny those mothering instincts had failed to fade with the passing of her child. It was these instincts that drew her back to reality as she tried to comfort her friend; a friend that was probably more certain now of her insanity than he had been moments before.

"Shh child. You do not need to cry. I will talk to mummy for you. I promise. Well write down everything you want her to know, so she can keep it once you leave. Okay?"

She was talking to the empty side of the booth, her hand stretched across the table patting at the air. Only she wasn't, she was patting a tiny spectral hand. Trying to fake a human connection with the child so that he would settle down. With Lorelai's attention on the sickly looking man, the small boy had begun to think that she'd forgotten about him and for a moment perhaps she had but she wouldn't abandon him. She had a job to do.

Standing back up, she re-wrapped her heavy cardigan about her and scooted herself back into her side of the booth, next to her spectral friend. Her hair was wild, as always and so she careful ran her slender fingers through the unruly mess and slowly ushered some of it behind her right ear with fingertips. The look on her face being one that was difficult to read as she was awash with so many emotions. The only thing that was certain about her looks was that she was drawing from the negative end of the wide spectrum of emotions.