Chapter Text
Comfort Food: Part 3
Shane felt—broken.
Something safe and certain inside of him had broken.
He had to get away. He had to hide.
He had to find someplace safe where he could put the pieces back together.
But where could he go? He didn’t know where he was and he didn’t have a car.
Back to the bedroom was out of the question, but he barely knew the landscape of the house around him. Anger had propelled him from the livingroom, but his body was starting to slow down.
After Ilya had made him—No, he couldn’t think about it– it was like he had been sedated.
He felt heavy, like he had taken too much benadryl. The world felt fuzzy around the edges.
He didn’t know where he was going, but he found himself in the den he had passed earlier in his exploration of the cottage. He was drawn to the grey coziness of the overstuffed sofa. Maybe he could just rest here for a moment. Fold himself into the soft pillows and hide himself away until he could make sense of things again. Until he could make a plan of what he would do.
He curled into the corner of the sofa so he could see the doorway, so he could protect himself if Ilya tried to make him feed again. His stomach flipped at the thought, but Shane was surprised at the feeling of warmth and pleasure that accompanied it.
He shook his head, pushing the disturbing feeling away. Anxiety bubbled up from his stomach. He was again reminded that his body had become something alien, something monstrous, and now he understood with great fear that it was betraying him. His body was no longer his own and it was working against him. If his body was the traitor, then no place was safe.
Tears slid down his face. He pushed deeper into the sofa, willing his body to disappear, seeking a cocoon to hold his grief and his fear as something not yet real, asking the universe to shield him from the reality he had been thrust into. His breath dissolved and collapsed into the panic taking over. The world had shifted.
----
The world stopped the moment the fledgling had run from the room.
Ilya set his body into motion, his mind non-functional, as he mopped up the sick from the porcelain kitchen tile and threw the traitorous box of pop tarts in the trash.
It was better if Shane did not see them again.
Ilya moved deliberately, methodically through the tasks, as if completing a ritual, paying mind to each step and assigning it an emotion.
A swipe of paper towel smearing red. Guilt.
The sharp chemical smell of cleaner. Regret.
The wet sound of soiled paper hitting the trash. Hurt.
He moved through each task until the ritual was complete.
He continued the process of straightening, resetting the stools that had been pushed askew and fluffing the couch pillows, forcing his mind to resettle and his thoughts to be sorted.
He knew that the fledgling hadn’t gone far. No noise of outside doors opening. No whine of dust stuck windows pried open. And he could feel the steady thrum of the bond humming in his periphery.
He waited until he had fixed both rooms. Until his mind had settled and his emotions were less burning. The room was spotless. Like nothing had happened.
Like his fledgling hadn’t looked at him with hatred and told him he was a monster.
Like Ilya doesn’t know he is a monster because although the look in Shane’s eyes had burned him, he knows it wouldn’t have changed his decision to save him. That this boy, his boy, was scared and in pain, but given the opportunity to release the boy from this fate, he would not, knowing that the alternative would have been death.
He finds Shane in the den. The fledgling's anger, now dissipated to something quiet and sad. It has been about half an hour since he fled. The room is illuminated dimly with the artificial glow of the TV, shadows flickering across the room in the cross-cut of a hockey game playing on the screen. Shane is wedged into the far corner of the sofa, body angled between the door and the game, not acknowledging Ilya’s presence in the doorway, but Ilya knows that he knows he’s there by the way his body tenses.
Ilya takes a cautious seat at the other end of the sofa, focusing his attention on the game rather than his fledgling. Waiting for him to resettle. They watch the game in silence for a few minutes before Ilya risks a glance at Shane. He no longer looks angry. Just utterly exhausted and drained. A sad feeling pinged in his chest. He is reminded that 48 hours ago, this boy had a completely different life and that now the world has shifted and everything has become so new and so scary.
Not for the first time, Ilya wondered about the boy’s life before. What of his family? His job? Was he in school? A girlfriend maybe? Was the boy thinking about these things? In that moment, he was sad for all of the things the boy’s life could have been and without knowing him, he mourned all of the possibilities, both supposed or imagined, of what it must feel like for Shane to have lost everything.
He grappled with the knowledge of the enormity of this loss against the knowledge that he would make the same decision to turn him a thousand times over, knowing that this loss would be a part of it. A big feeling started in his chest and before he could reconsider, words came tumbling out into the dead air.
“I would not have let you die. Was not an option.” He swallowed, the next words finding him before the silence stretched on.
“I know this is hard for you, but I do not regret saving you.” But I regret your pain. Shane was looking at him now.
“If I had been able to, I would have asked.” But it wouldn’t have mattered.
“But now we are stuck,” He met Shane’s wet eyes which quickly flicked away. He continued.
“And I do not think you want to die. So I can only ask you this. Can you trust me to help you, Malysh?”
Silence stretched between them and Ilya began to worry that perhaps the feeding had broken something in the boy’s sanity, but suddenly Shane was looking into his eyes.
“ Please— ”
Help me. Leave me alone. Let me die. Ilya didn’t know.
He softened, trying to acclimate to whatever shape Shane was asking him to be. Meeting the fledgling’s weary eyes, he waited. Unsure if he was being invited closer, if he could go to him, tuck him into his arms and soothe him or, if he should leave, fight the pull of the bond that desired their closeness, settling for half offerings, keeping watch from doorways and across rooms, until he was required. It would kill him, but he would do it for Shane.
He would do it if it meant that the shipwrecked look would melt from his eyes.
The bond would demand more and Shane’s insides would demand blood again soon, accelerated now that it had begun its work of transitioning, the first true feed, like a match to fuel, requiring more before it burned out. It would demand more and more until the second part of the blood bonding became inevitable.
The transition was greedy. His body would beg for blood from all directions, not satiated until he was completely surrounded by the bond. Ilya wouldn’t be able to deny him the blood, not without death.
Shane’s body would rot from the inside out, a slow agonizing decay as his body fed from itself, pulling life from his own blood vessels and muscle tissue, gorging itself on the wet vitality of his fragile human organs.
Excruciating living death.
No.
Ilya would not let that happen.
He would do whatever he could do make the bond as bearable as possible for the poor scared Fledgling in front of him. He would do what he had to do to keep him alive and leave him alone the rest of the time if that was what Shane needed of him.
His heart ached with a fresh wound at the thought.
But I will do it.
Still he knew that the bond would ask for more. Maybe more than what Shane was willing to give. It demanded blood, but also closeness, intimacy, vulnerability. Life in blood and life in soul. But Ilya would find a way to make it clinical if that was what the boy required.
He could pare the completion of the blood bond down to the bare steps.
Preparation. Insertion. Stimulation. Injection.
The thought made his body run cold. Sanitizing the ritual down to a science experiment, when what he truly longed for was the warmth of existence in synch.
But this was not about him.
Shane was still looking at him, bleary-eyed, his face asking a question he didn’t have an answer to.
Shane wasn’t sure if he was asking for something to hold him together or take him apart.
Ilya sensed the uncertainty and waded blindly towards a decision. They were drowning in this half-space, wandering, following the ache in the bond that seemed to tell him what way would bring them up to the surface.
He softened back against the sofa opening his arms in a silent invitation.
Then Shane was there.
Tucked into his side, face pressed into the soft roundness of his pectoral muscle, taking the first relaxed breath since he had been pulled from the water.
Ilya’s fingers found the boys midnight soft hair and stroked, pressing awe-softened lips to the dark crown. Mine. Safe. A dark protectiveness spread over him, a blanket of security, a shroud of possession.
Shane shuddered against him. A shiver running down his body.
Ilya’s eyes drew down the boys settled form, stopping at the blood stained smears across his shirt. Without a second thought, he was shuffling Shane from his arms, pulling the shirt over his head, wiping the blood and tear tracked paths from his face, and tossing it from their space.
Shane looked at him questioningly, but Ilya didn’t stop until he had his own t-shirt off and pulled over the boys tanned chest, before pulling him back into his chest.
Understanding and something that looked like appreciation dawned across Shane’s face.
He had forgotten about the blood, but Ilya–Ilya knew he would come to and rather than let him spiral off into oblivion, he removed the disturbing reminder before it could hurt him. Ilya had tossed the shirt away, with the care of someone ready to burn the offending garment at a later time, releasing it of its power. It no longer mattered anymore. Ilya said it didn’t exist, and so it did not.
Shane was surprised to find that he felt— safe. For the first time since he had opened his eyes after he had gone over the cliffside. Even with the uncertainty that now permeated his existence. Even with the blood and the pain. Even with the grief. Here, face pressed into Ilya’s bare chest, Ilya’s arm slung over his back, a strong hand cradling the back of his head, and the soft breath falling over his hair, Shane felt–safe.
He didn’t know what would come next. He didn’t know how he would make sense of— this. All of this. But for this brief moment, it didn’t matter. Ilya would help him. Ilya would take care of him. For the first time since his parent’s death, he wasn't alone.
Ilya swallowed. He felt— needed. Years without a fledgling to care for. Years without a coven to belong to. Years without a— family. He had Svetlana of course. She was family. But she was the only one. It was different. There had been– Rose– but that was gone now. His home, the people he loved, devastated by grief, a repeated tragedy blurring the space between this timeline and a past one. The one where he had a mother. A most beautiful mother. The one where he had a brother. Kin. All gone now.
But here, with the boys body held to his chest, soft breath sighing life across his chest, a content smile curving across the boys lips, involuntarily, Ilya felt— needed. More than just a fixture in other people’s lives. More than just a man driven by selfish whims shaped by years of solitude and a lack of obligation. For the first time in centuries, he felt like he had a purpose. Something bigger he owed himself to, not by command, but by an all consuming need to give himself to something bigger than just him. Something divine.
They sat in quiet comfort, absorbing the calm of symbiosis, arriving at equilibrium after the tumultuous storm that had seen them shipwrecked. It was time that stretched infinitely in its clarity. Each second was too little and the entire universe at once.
Ilya swallowed hard. This could not wait.
“Shane– There is more.”