Bitter Goodbyes

This article is a part of Spooktober 2024 and is still a work in progress.
Written for the Tongue prompt.

Daman Ó Conaill stood for a long time, still as stone, staring at the now empty spaces in his small family home. Yen Xiang Jun had weasled her way into his life and heart with a wicked, teasing tongue, spending seven years drawing him into her web. He'd been a fool boy, thinking that he meant something to her.
All it had taken was him refusing to bend to her will, to not let that wicked mouth lead him along, and she was gone. She had been there when he had woken up that morning, lying naked and languid in the bed that they had made their own over the past few years. Daman had kissed her bare shoulder, trailing kissing down her spine, and then promised her a night of passion when he returned from town with more supplies. She had kissed him so sweetly and told him goodbye.
He had thought it was for the day.
She had apparently meant it as forever.
Daman had known he wasn't enough for her from the moment she had turned him, that something was missing in him. At least she had stayed for two years to teach him what he needed to know as a f vampire and hadn't just abandoned him. Still, even with that knowledge, her absence hurt.
Dropping his bag by the door, he slowly made his way into the main room of the house. There was a folded peice of parchment on the table - an expensive rarity that she kept around that he found frivolous as a farmer's son - with his name scrawled across it. Apology, perhaps? Or more misleading turns of her tongue, trying to lead him forward like a leashed hound?
Lifting the parchment, Daman flipped it open and found sharply clean English greeting him. There was a smattering of her own language at the top, the intricate intertwined lines that made the words of her native tongue. She had called him tiánmì de shìqíng - "A sweet name for a sweet man," she had said - but he didn't know what the words looked like in her native writing.

Forgive me, my sweet.
I will not lie to you, Daman, that I am bored. There are things that I expected of you, things that have by far been proven wrong. And I need more than this domesticity you seem to enjoy in my life.
You are a man I would have perhaps loved to wed when I was still mortal but not now. And, if I do not leave, I will no doubt slowly poison you. I want your sweetness to live, Daman, and not be snuffed out by me wishing you to be something against your nature. It is what I would do if I remained. While you refused now to follow me deeper into the dark, I know I could compel you. That I could spin together words that would have you at my very beck and call, eager to follow. And I do not want to be the one to cause you that harm.
Call on me if you have need, Daman. You are still my son through blood and your battles will be mine if you but ask. I did love you, do not think I did not.

Sighing, Daman folded the letter and sat it back down on the table before walking into what had been their room. This room was the only secondary room in the house, everything else being in the main room. When his father had built the house for his mother, she had specifically wanted them to have a room of their own.
After her death, Uilliam Ó Conaill had given the room to his sons. Until his own death, their father had slept in a corner of the main room of the house and Daman had burned that bed the day after the burial. With the house his after that, Daman had lashed the two childhood beds he and his brother had shared together, cut wooden slats to run across both, and simply placed a large mattress on top. Now he wanted to burn that mattress but getting a new one stuffed would be too expensive.
He had always been the son who mostly followed the rote and rule, never the one who was impulsive or the rebel. The good son, he had often heard when his brother was still alive from their neighbors when they didn't think he was listening. Suddenly he wanted to be impulsive as his heart broke, to burn the mattres or maybe even the house itself down to its foundations. All this house that Uilliam Ó Conaill had built had ever wrought was death and misery. First his mother and the baby, then his brother, then his father. Now his own heart, smashed against the stones of it, as the first woman he had dared love left him to an immortal life alone.
Clenching his hands into fists, Daman moved forward and laid down on the bed, staring at the ceiling and just breathing.
He would not burn the house or the mattress.
Even if he was the only one left, he would not be the impulsive son. He would wait and he would plan and he would leave Ireland before their neighbors began to look too closely at him. Before they began to question his staying twenty-three years of age.
And then he would go out. He would see the world and find his place in it. Perhaps...another love. Or find new things to love to fill in the cracks in his heart.
Closing his eyes, Daman slowly let himself relax and sighed.
But first...he would finally purchase the stone for his father's grave. And even though he did not have a body, one for his brother as well. So that even if he was the only Ó Conaill left, something of his family would remain.

---

tiánmì de shìqíng - sweet thing (via Google Translate)

Timeframe: 1674
Location: County Kerry, Ireland
Event: Daman Ó Conaill returns to his family home to find that his sire and lover, Yen Xiang Jun, has taken all of her possessions and left him alone.
Consquences: Daman Ó Conaill, previously content with his life, begins making the decisions that will lead to him exploring the world over the next centuries of his life.

Related Historical Events

• 1674
  Daman Ó Conaill Returns to Find His Sire Gone

Daman Ó Conaill / Damon O'Connell

Eight years junior to his brother, Daman was still a child when his brother suddenly disappeared without a trace. After losing their father to illness, he managed on his own until meeting Yen Xiang Jun who would eventually become his sire in the 1670s. When she returned to her own sire, Malloy, he began to wander the world, becoming an archaeologist in the 1920s amongst other odd jobs.

Yen Xiang Jun

The only child of Malloy, she at first feared him as the strange man stalking her in the 1570s. After confronting him, fear became desire as he wooed her, eventually leading to her giving herself to him in order to save her brothers' lives after they tried to attack him. The only time after that that she has left her lover's side was to briefly return to Ireland, where she groomed and eventually turned Daman Ó Conaill, hoping to gain another version of his brother. When he did not, she returned to her sire's side as she knew that she would ruin the sweet man that he was.

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