Out, Damned Spot [Keara]

[Peter Parkman]

The blood clung to Peter’s clothes, a sticky, violent, vibrant remnant of his own failure. The reminder didn’t stick just to his clothes, but to his skin as well. It was lodged beneath his fingernails, and stuck in wrinkles of skin between his fingers. He hadn’t gone anywhere near water to watch himself off, not yet. His head was still reeling and he couldn’t comprehend what had gone wrong.

The scent of the blood filled his nostrils and his head swam. The darkness threatened at the corners of his eyes, and stars danced in his vision as he forced his eyes to stay open. He’d used the tome to get back to the Asylum, and was now in the middle of the attic floor – his body fell with a thud, onto his hands and knees as he wretched. The bile crawled up his throat and spilled over his tongue; it didn’t taste acidic, as it might have done once upon a time. Instead, it tasted like the blood he had consumed earlier. It tasted like the blood that was stuck to his clothes and skin, and smeared over his chin and cheek. The taste of it initiated the gag reflex and he wretched again, the pile of liquid on the floor red and gloopy. He shuddered, and crawled away from it, only to collapse at a distance where he wouldn’t have to see or smell it.

But of course he could still smell it. And it only reminded him of what had happened. He closed his eyes as he tried to remember in full detail; as he tried to figure out exactly what he had done wrong.

Shawn was one of the young men who worked at the animal shelter before Peter had taken over. They got along well; the kid understood Peter’s preference for cleanliness and was one of the only ones that reached Peter’s expectations, in regards to his standards. He might have been a shy person, but that didn’t matter – when you were dealing with animals, shyness didn’t matter. You didn’t have to be a people person to work at the shelter.

Peter had been at the Asylum when he’d got the phone call. He hadn’t understood – the voice on the other end was panicked and pain-ridden. But the caller ID led straight to the shelter, and Peter had wasted no time attending to the emergency.

Shawn shouldn’t have been there. It was too late. The animals should all have been put in their cages with their fresh water and their clean bedding ready for the morning person to attend to when opening. It wasn’t morning yet. Peter had no idea why the boy was there. When Peter found him, there was no time for explanation.

Shawn had tried to wrap a towel around his neck to stop the bleeding. The kid’s face was blanched, and his eye was swollen shut – maybe his eye wasn’t there, but there was a gash across the upper left half of his face. He was in the corner of one of the surgery rooms, shaking like a leaf, near dead. Blood pooled around him. Peter only found him, due to the path of blood that led to him.

Peter blamed himself, and his own aversion to blood. That could be the only possible explanation, right? Had to be. It hadn’t worked. Where it had worked with Whit and Ivan, it had not worked with Shawn.

He held his breath and tried to still himself; he didn’t need to breathe, he told himself. Don’t breathe, and you won’t smell it. Stay awake. Figure it out. He had to figure it out. Had to. What if it happened again? He should have called the ambulance. He should have called someone, rather than believing he could save the kid himself. Again, Peter shuddered. He started to wipe at his hands to try to rid himself of the blood. It only managed to smear the blood into his skin, but he continued to scrub anyway, desperate to get it off.

[Keara Aithne]

It was a night like any other and while Keara pushed on through the caves she began to wonder just what to do with her husband. His bad mood made him less than receptive to her and while she kept trying, she was beginning to wonder if her strategy of being patient with him needed a little reworking. She didn't want to argue with Enver, not with what he was going through, but she half believed that, that was exactly what he wanted. She kept trying to pull him in and he kept trying to pull her away. Neither exactly sought their own space but the silence between them was highly unnatural for the pair. Killing creatures, culling them, it was about the only release she had on days like this and so she spent a little longer than usual dancing with each of her opponents. Ultimately she knew that Enver would come around. His mood had very little to do with her herself and everything to do with the stress he was under. She loved him and she didn't doubt that he was still every bit as much in love with her as always. She simply had to wait it out.

Keara cut down one last creature, wiped her blade across her skirt and knew it was time to go home. Her head was clear once more and she was ready to go back and face whatever version of her husband she found there. As she appeared in the attic, she cast her eyes about the room. It was normal these days to see a couple of family members tinkering, chatting or resting around the place. Tonight however she was horrified by the sight that greeted her. Peter, her pride and joy, was crumpled on the floor scrubbing his hands together as if trying to get them clean. She needed but a moment to take in the full sight of him, his usual lanky frame coiled up, covered in blood that was not his own. Her heart caught in her chest, though the feeling lasted less than a second, as upon seeing him, the natural reaction was to assume the blood was in fact his. The scent and the colour soon assured her more rational mind that this was not the case. For one the colour was wrong. Peter's blood was black, as was hers, as was the blood of every shadow. The scent too was all wrong. It was human.

She immediately discarded her sword upon the altar and ran to assist him. She half slid across the floor before she fell to her knees and took his hands in her own. Her movements made very little sound as she did this as, unlike her husband, she was full of grace and balance; when she was in her right mind that was.

"Peter?" One hand moved to gently raise his chin so that he would be forced to look her in the eye. "What happened has?"

Her voice was soft and comforting in tone. She could see that something was wrong and she knew that her son disliked violence, so the scene before her was quite unprecedented. She could not fathom what had happened to him to get him into such a state and if she stood any chance of finding out, she had to stay calm. He needed her to be gentle and patient. Thankfully she'd had a lot of practice in this of late.

[Peter Parkman]

The arrival of his sire should have calmed Peter down. The fact that it did not, only sent him into a heightened panic. The panic was not only due to the blood on his hands that he couldn’t seem to get off, or the fact that he’d tried to save someone and had failed – and there was now a dead body in the clinic of the Animal Rescue. No, he began to panic because he knew what would happen if he lost control. Nothing had happened to him; no one had harmed him, or wilfully thrown his delicate mental eco-system off balance. But he panicked anyway.

When Keara placed her hands over his, he violently tried to pull them away, to keep rubbing. It was almost like the blood was a poison, searing his skin. Burning it, like the guilt that burned his soul. Keara’s forced movement of his chin caused a wave of fear to crash against his ribs; if he couldn’t see the blood, what would it do? It could multiply. It could get darker. The longer it stayed there, the more chance of a stain that would never come out.

Peter’s voice unlocked from his throat with a swallow and a wheezed suck of air.

”I tried to save him but I couldn’t,” he said, his green eyes wide. ”Shawn was attacked by… by it had to be a bear. Or a mountain lion,” he cringed. He should have known which it was. He should have been able to tell by the depth of the wounds, by the size of them. But he hadn’t stopped to assess.

”I tried to feed him my blood – like you fed me yours, like I fed mine to Whit and Ivan – but it didn’t work! It didn’t… he swallowed, he did drink it! But he died anyway. Why did he die?!” he asked Keara suddenly, with a curiosity so violent that it wasn’t curiosity, but a desperate need to know. He needed the reason.

The talking had forced Peter to breath, to suck in short breaths to form the words. The scent of blood sent him reeling; not physically so much, but he felt like he was being hurled, with the way the world spun around him. Blood-stained fingers gripped Keara’s arm in a vice-like grip as the world threatened to crush him and send him under, into the blackness of unconsciousness. But he forced his eyes open, blinked, even though the stars danced in his vision.

[Keara Aithne]

She touched her hand to his cheek as he finished speaking. There was something in his eyes. Sadness, pain, fear even. There were perhaps too many emotions for her to pick just one. It worried her. Seeing him like this. Peter was so calm. So reliable. This was not the son she knew, even if this aspect of him was perfectly well known to the woman that had claimed his heart.

His explanation was clear, his words perfectly understandable as he tried to explain all that he’d been through to her. He’d tried to save someone he knew and failed. He’d tried to gift them, as she had gifted him only the process had been unsuccessful. She placed her lips to his forehead and allowed herself to see into his mind. She had long ago given up on the act of rummaging through people’s memories, so this was not what she was doing. She was looking at him. At who he was. His strengths and weaknesses. All that, that made him who he was. And herein she found her answer. Peter had four childer already bound to him.

“Worry not darkling. All will become clear. You your best did. Of this certain you can be. This your fault was not.”

Her mind was already busying plotting other things. Peter needed an explanation, but more than that he needed to rid himself of the stains of his endeavour. The scent of blood was all too appealing to one such as her but to her son, to Peter, it was neither pleasant, nor alluring. She knew he, like another of her childer, had issues with the life sustaining substance and so she knew he would need to clean himself off and change his clothes before he could be restful. She knew too that if he had tried to save someone, that there was evidence out there of what had transpired. Shawn was not someone she was familiar with, and so she would first have to learn the location of the corpse. Once she had acquired that particular piece of information, she would be able to survey the scene and make a plan. The body would most likely need to be disposed of, but she did not wish to tell her son that. Certainly not in the state he was currently in. A part of her wished for Enver and she caught herself just short of summoning him to them. Once she had more information, she would be able to decide if she needed his help in this matter. If she did not, it would be best to deal with it alone, as Enver, much like Peter, was a sensitive, irrational soul. Both men lacked her instincts when it came to such situations.

“Come.” Keara pulled back from Peter, stood and offered him her hands. “Clean you up we shall. Then talk further we may.”

If Peter was unable to stand under his own power, which she half suspected would be the case, she was more than willing to carry him. He was taller than her and a little awkward to hold in such a manner, as she had indeed carried him before, but that would not stop her from doing what had to done. She would not see him as weak. Could not see him as weak. As was Enver, he was perfect, faults and all.

[Peter Parkman]

Peter wasn’t sure what he was more worried about in that moment; the blood on his hands, or the fact that he had failed. One was a perpetuation of the other, he assumed, anyway. It all combined to overwhelm him, to make his vision swim and his throat to convulse. The image was etched into his brain; the way the skin was slice so precisely that he could see the ligaments of the muscles that should have held it all in place. The way the blood wasn’t bright, not like they like to show it in the movies. But dark. Alive, somehow, in the way it bubbled and writhed. So keen to leave the body that had kept it safe for so long, only to coagulate and clog. But not quick enough. Not enough to save the body it covered.

Peter of course knew that Shawn’s death wasn’t his fault. It was Shawn’s own fault, for wandering out in the wilderness alone at night. It was the fault of the animal that attacked him. And, if they wanted to go further back, it was the fault of humanity, that these noble creatures should feel the need to attack humans to begin with. If humans didn’t encroach upon their territory, their habitat – if they were not hunted – the animals would leave humanity alone.

It wasn’t so much fault that had Peter reeling, so much as failure. Peter’s rational mind could not comprehend. It had worked before, so why hadn’t it worked now? Was it trial and error? Was one in three bound to fail? One in four? One in five? Would he have to keep trying to figure it out? Would he keep trying?

In all honesty, Shawn wasn’t someone that Peter knew all too well. They were acquaintances, and Peter would grieve the boy’s passing. But Peter knew it was the blood that had him acting like he was. He wasn’t in his right mind. So when Keara suggested he go get cleaned up, it struck a chord. His rational mind knew that she was right. There was no way he could possibly focus and find answers if he was covered in blood. It just would not work. He reached out to take Keara’s hand; could feel the redness of the blood smear, and stain her skin.

”I’m sorry,” he said, as if it were the greatest offense. As if the blood would have as much of an effect on her as it had on him. He swallowed, then, gulped heavily as he teetered. He had to clutch at Keara’s arm to keep himself up right; he to lean on her shoulder as the world spun around him. He released his breath and stopped breathing again.

Yes, he needed to get rid of the blood. It became a desperation. So desperate, that he didn’t wait until they got into the bathroom. Instead, he started to whisk away his clothes, right there in the middle of the attic. Clawing them off, as if they were full of fire ants, biting at his skin. As if they would strangle him otherwise.

[Keara Aithne]

Seeing Peter in such a state tore at Keara's heart. She wasn't the most affectionate person on the planet, had begun siring purely for selfish reasons and was still learning what it meant to be the source of so many but she was patient, patient and understanding. As he began tearing at his clothing, she tried once more to still his hands. The sight of his naked form would do nothing to excite or offend her but Enver had taught her that there was a time and place for such things and the middle of the public floor was not one of them.

"Still darkling. Still. Calm yourself you must," she cooed. "Have we do not far to travel."

Doing her best to keep him clothed, she guided him towards the elevator. It didn't matter to her that he had stained her hand and arm with blood. It was something she would or rather could relish if the circumstances were right. This situation however was not such a circumstance. She pressed the button for the elevator, her eyes moving to the altar as she hoped for the first time not to see anyone arrive home. In a moment of panic she even moved to place herself between him and the altar in case his luck did not hold, which was possible given the state she had found him in. If Enver were to arrive and see him so dishevelled with her, she feared for what might happen. Enver had a kinder heart than her but in some ways a quicker temper, at least when it came to her. Neither of them was entirely in their right mind when it came to the other.

"Clean you soon shall be. Till then worry not. Upon me you should focus. Yes? Can you that for me do."

She said this and made sure to stay in his visual range, her hands on either arm, as much to get his attention as to help him stand. She wanted nothing more than to take his madness from him. To be able to say or do something that would fix him. It struck her then that more than one member of her own family must have felt the same way about her at one time or another. Not that she would ever let another shoulder her burdens. Not if she could help it. While she was happy to share her thoughts and feeling from those she loved, she would never wish them to stand in her place. The fact that she longed to take away his pains, mental as they might be, only served to prove to her how far she'd come in those last few years. While before she would have been equally as controlled in what she did, she would not have suffered on his account. Not as she did now.

[Peter Parkman]

Peter managed to get the jacket off, at least; it fell to the floor with a thwunp, heavy with grime and blood. He was wearing a tie, and a button down shirt, as per usual. The shirt had been tucked it, but had long since come loose, all crumpled at the bottom. The tie was loose and crooked – Peter was on the process of trying to wrench over his head when Keara got to him, when she did her utmost to calm him. It was hard to keep disrobing when someone was trying to get you to move elsewhere.

And of course he saw the reason of it, deep down. In normal circumstances, there was no way he’d allow himself to be naked in the middle of this floor, this hub of activity. Any member of the family could walk through or drop in at any moment. It became a nagging thought at the back of his mind as soon as Keara told him to still. Because there had to have been a reason for it.

Worry not, she had said, and Peter wanted to whine. Like one of the dogs, he wanted to complain. It was stupid. He knew that. He knew there wasn’t anything that he could worry about right now. There wasn’t anything that the spilled blood could do to him to hurt him. Underneath it all, he was aware that his fear and his hate of the liquid was completely unreasonable. And he hated it, because it was unreasonable. He hated that he was home to something irrational and uncontrollable. He wanted to get rid of it.

But for now, in order to get rid of that unreasonable fear, he had to get rid of the blood. It was bright red against the white of his shirt, and he could see it out of the corner of his eye. He could feel it, too, as the cloth stuck to his skin. And he could smell it, with every movement that he took.

He stopped breathing. He tried to focus on Keara. He laid a heavy hand on her shoulder, holding on to her for balance. Until the elevator ‘dinged’ behind him, and he stumbled backward and into it. His long-limbed form tried its best to curl up into the corner. As if that corner could save him from his insanity. There were hand rails along the edges of the elevator, and Peter clung to them, his knuckles white. His eyes were screwed shut, and he still refused to breathe – he even hummed under his breath. Out of tune. Desperate to distract himself with a melody. Any melody.

[Keara Aithne]

It was obvious that he was doing his best to distract himself and so Keara did what she could to keep him calm. She followed him into the elevator and when he began to hum, she joined in; only unlike Peter, Keara had some musical ability and was able to carry a tune. Instead of trying to figure out his tune however, she began to hum a melody she knew from when she was child. Melodies of that time were more calming to her and while she loved the music of this time and listened to it daily, the old song was the first one to come to mind in that moment.

The one main decision Keara had to make was where to take Peter. She knew he had a cell on one of the lower floors but hers was closer. She also knew there was a room free on Peter’s floor in which she could allow him access. In the state he was in she wasn’t sure Peter would remember to invite her into his place and she didn’t want to presume to ask. It had been a while since she had used the shadow ability to enter uninvited too, and half suspected that she had recently lost when she felt a shift in her power base. That left the cell she shared with her husband or the, as yet, unused room. As much as she loved Peter, and she did, she could not bring him into her cell. Not as he was. Not knowing that he would need to shower there. If Enver came in it would be more of a betrayal simply due to the fact that their cell was their sanctuary. So the unused room it would have to be.

When the elevator doors opened on the lower floor, Keara having decided and pressed the button a minute or so before, she took a hold of Peter’s hands and led him from it.

“Come darkling. In here go we may. Clean soon you shall be.”

The spare room was fully furnished, had bed linen, towels etc. The only thing that it would be missing that he would require would be a set of clean clothes but even that could be easily remedied. Keara reasoned that Enver likely wouldn’t mind her lending Peter an outfit of his, not if she explained what had happened to him and how bad a shape he had been in, mentally. Failing that, there were a couple of new robes hanging on the back of the bathroom door that would allow Peter to maintain his modesty so that they could speak once he had showered. All that Keara would have to do then would be to hide his clothing from his sight so that they would not distract him. She was even happy to wash them for him, as the blood did not bother her in the slightest.

[Peter Parkman]

The humming only helped so much. The more that Peter remembered the blood that covered his clothes, the more that his skin itched and he had the urge not only to tear off his clothes, but his outer dermis too. It wasn’t just the blood that he couldn’t handle; it was the way in which the blood had ended up covering him. The things that had failed. The entire ordeal was eating at him from the inside.

It was a good thing that Keara took his hands to lead him out of the elevator; he had not been aware of the conveyor’s movement and would not have been aware that it had stopped, were he by himself. He would have huddled there in the corner in the still box until someone else happened to stumble across him. As it was, he kept his eyes closed as he followed Keara; as he counted the footsteps from the elevator to wherever it was that she taken him.

And even after they’d entered the room, he did not open his eyes. Now, rationally concluding that they were in a private place wherein he was quite able to take off all his clothes without being witnessed by unwary family members, Peter continued to do what he had started to do in the attic; to shed his body of all the clothes that were covered in blood. Buttons popped from his shirt as he tore it from his torso and his fingers shook as they reached for the buckle of his belt. Maybe if the circumstances were ordinary he’d have waited for Keara to leave the room. But he didn’t care too much in that moment. Although Keara’s presence was a comfort, it was one that sat at the back of consciousness. For all that he noticed it, she may as well have not been there. It’s not that he didn’t appreciate her help – he just hadn’t the wits about him yet to vocalise it.

Regardless of whether Keara chose to stay or go, it was only after Peter could feel the cold kiss of air against every inch of his bare skin that he opened his eyes again. Had to, otherwise he wouldn’t be able to find his way to the bathroom. He left his clothes behind him on the floor of the spare room, almost sprinting, naked as the day he was born toward the bathroom. He stepped into the shower and wrenched on the taps – a gargled shout of surprise erupted from him as soon as the ice-cold water blasted his skin. It would take a few minutes to heat up.

But even when it did heat up, Peter wasn’t much use to himself. He was still in a semi-state of shock; the water had set his body to shivering uncontrollably, and even as the room started to steam with the following heat of the blast, he still couldn’t stop shivering. The soap that he had grabbed dropped from his grasp, and when he bent to retrieve it he slipped. When he landed, he couldn’t get up again. So he sat there, beneath the blast of water, with his knees hugged to his chest and his head buried between them, violently shuddering and mumbling incoherently.

He was trying to count the drops of water as they hit the tile – an impossible task, if ever there was one.

[Keara Aithne]

Peter did not waste any time in stripping down to his birthday suit and while Keara had no issue observing the human form, a small part of her told her not to look at him. Not that she listened. Her eyes were only observing the scene though, there was nothing more than that in her motivation. Once he was in the shower, she set about the task of gathering his clothing up; clothing that was now in need of some repairs as well as laundering. She considered riding the elevator up one level and depositing the items in their hamper but then dismissed the idea out of hand, as while she wasn’t doing anything to be ashamed of, Enver probably wouldn’t like finding another man’s clothes in his bathroom. After all, wasn’t that the reason she’d chosen to bring them here? Clothes in hand, she entered the bathroom and deposited them in the hamper in there. This was about the time she heard him fall over.

She didn’t rush to him, as she perhaps ought to have. She waited a moment and merely listened. Peter was a big boy and perfectly capable of getting himself to his feet. Only he didn’t. Once down, he apparently stayed down, as Keara could hear no movement coming from within the shower. Worried for him now physically as well as mentally, due to his mumbling, she moved to see what the issue might be. She saw him curled up in a ball, shivering under the warm water. She knew it was warm not through the temperature though, as through the smell. Warm water had a different scent. The air felt different. Normally she didn’t observe these details but tonight she had no choice as she focused in on her childe.

“Oh darkling. What wrong is?”

Without much thought, and fully clothed, Keara quickly climbed into the shower with him. She didn’t attempt to right him and force him to stand, choosing rather to join him on the floor, wrapping her arms around him. She held him tight enough that he would know she was there and gently enough that if he chose to pull away that he would be able to do so.

“Come now Peter. Well you are. Cleansed shortly you shall be.”

She ran one hand through his hair and gently pressed her lips to his temple. While Keara was no stranger to this kind of affection, it wasn’t something she practiced often. There were but a few in the family that were capable of eliciting any strong maternal affection from her, but of those few Peter was arguably the one with whom it was more commonly used upon and came the most natural with. She loved her son and after Enver, he was the one she was likely closest to.