More Man Than Beast
Contains one mild reference to sexual content.
Darragh had had a suspicion that his bloodsister's arrival was more than just some family reunion like Mother had tried to frame it. Oh, it had worked as an explanation for a while until he had realized that Gnaea was watching him. Wherever he went in their home and she was present, her dark eyes followed him and set his senses alight.
It was becoming infuriating enough that he was debating going against Mother's rule and killing the man that had come with Gnaea. That she lived with a mortal - loved one according to her - was enough to make him choke on disgust. Mortals were nothing to them, just amusements to pass the time across the ever lengthening years. Her lover was just going to die within thirty or so years anyway given the general age range of men, so why both to take the time?
Why was Mother pretending that this mortal was worth anything more to them than his blood?
Scoffing, he stalked through the house until he reached the front doors, his stomach suddenly clenching and his fangs itching. He needed to hunt. Needed to kill to stop himself from disobeying Mother. He was twenty-one years into this life now, a fact that he knew even though he remembered nothing of his life before.
A lie. There were faces that swam in his dreams - a redheaded girl, a woman of dark hair, a younger dark haired boy, a man going gray in tawny hair - but he had no names for them. Which made them shadows and worthless.
There was no need for his brother and Xiang to accompany him anymore on hunts.
And yet...there was someone in front of the door as he entered the entrance hall.
His bloodsister, Gnaea Abella, stood sedately in front of the doors that led to freedom, to blood, to the hunt, with her hands folded ever so politely in front of him. Her eyes met his and as she smiled, his lips drew back into a snarl.
"Little brother," she greeted politely. "I was just looking for you. Mother wishes for us to have a conversation."
"Fine. We can talk after I eat," he flatly replied and made to shoulder past her. Only he stopped dead as her arm was suddenly extended out in front of him, a snap of motion that even he had a hard time following. Turning to look at her, Darragh found not the kind, gentle eyes that had been looking at him. They had been mortal eyes.
No, now his bloodsister was looking at him with the hard eyes of a killer and one who was far older than him.
"We will speak now," she stated, a touch of a growl in the undertone of her voice. "If it pleases you, brother. After, I will accompany you on a hunt myself."
He stiffened and drew himself up to his full height, though it was only a mere inch difference between the two of them. Gnaea was of the exact same height as their brother as well as Mother but he would take the inch that he had and make use of it. She was also slightly, her frame more like Xiang's slight form. Darragh was not built like his brother, with heavy muscle, but he wasn't lacking in the department. Even with the enhanced strength given to them, surely he could outmatch his sister.
As his lip curled upward into a sneer, he hissed, "After," while reaching up to grasp her arm and pull it down. Only...he didn't. Instead, in a blur of motion, Gnaea took a step back on her heel, spun, and then slammed the heel of her hand into the middle of his chest in a blow that knocked him backwards. Darragh stumbled as something cracked in his chest and felt his traitorous body inhale automatically in a stutter, still too close to his own mortality to not panic and react.
Regaining his balance but remaining leaning over to lessen the ache in his chest, he pressed a palm to his chest while glaring at her and snarled, "What do you want from me?!"
Gnaea, already settled back into her sedate stance, merely cocked her head at him slightly. "What do I want?" she asked politely. "I wish to be home, naked, in my villa with my lover worshipped the crux of my thighs. Instead, I am here because Mother asked me to be here." She then tilted her chin down and stared at him, her dark eyes suddenly as fathomless as Mother's and seemingly just as dangerous.
"I am here to help teach you manners and patience, little brother," she said, her voice sharp and low, "before you become a danger to us all."
Darragh bristled at that and then snarled as the bone in his chest popped back into place. Finally able to straighten up again, he hissed, "Speak plainly. I don't appreciate you dancing around whatever you're trying to say."
She sighed, her shoulders rising and falling, and then her form blurred. A slim arm suddenly latched around his neck and Darragh snarled as his sister wrenched his body backwards, the flexing bones of her arm very nearly crushing his delicate throat. He flailed, trying to his her, but the way she held him still would require him to entirely give up his balance to get back at her. As it was, his head was resting on her shoulder and she had turned her head to look at him with a emotionless stare.
"You are a danger to us, little brother," she said, her tone as flat as stone. "A beast that if allowed to remain so off the leash, you may end all of us."
"I am not an animal!" he snarled, seriously debating letting his feet fall out from under him to send them both crashing to the floor. That might be a fool error, however, now that he was in her grip. As strong as he was, she was stronger. Was it age that lended her the strength to bend him so?
Gnaea tutted at that like a mother scolding an errant child. "You," she stated, "are nothing but a thinking beast in human form."
Then she cocked her head slightly to the side and continued speaking, his head still cradled on her shoulder where she had him bent backwards.
"I have watched you over the few nights and days that I have been here so far," she began. "There have been many of them that I stalked you and our brother on your hunts, to no notice of either of you. Xiang, clever thing that she is, she noticed me while you too were too embroiled in feeding your lusts."
Then Gnaea leaned in and breathed in his ear, "Our kind are not meant to hunger for blood so often, little brother. Not even when we are so young to this life as you are. On my own rebirth, I felt the need rise every week or so and could take my fill from a single mortal. How much do you crave? How often does it burn in your belly and make your teeth ache?"
Darragh froze at the question, which wasn't one that even Malloy or Mother had asked. Not once, not ever. He simply said he was hungry and they took him, as if it was...normal. Then, he realized...only Malloy ever hunted with him on those nights. Xiang kept to herself except for an occasional indulgence. Mother...he didn't know when she hunted, she kept her habits to herself.
"How often, Darragh Ó Conaill?" Gnaea demanded, her voice suddenly a snarl in his ear.
Swallowing, he choked out past her arm, "Always."
It was always and forever. Since he had felt like he clawed his way to consciousness with nothing in his head but what felt like ash and shadows. The hunger was a constant burn in his belly, that made his fangs ache and his hands curl into claws. His most frequent companion. And one was never enough to slake his thirst for more than moments at a time, though three could hold him through until the next day.
The only reason he hadn't gone out on his own was his fear of what Mother would do if he did.
Her exhale puffed across his cheek and then she sighed before kissing him on the temple. "Good boy," she murmured, and while part of him snarled at the words, another was...pleased. He did, in some part, want to be a good son. "If I release you, will you run?"
Darragh debated his options for a moment before deciding it wasn't worth it. She had proven herself capable of wrangling him. So, shaking his head slightly, he replied, "No, sister. I won't run."
The vise-like grip of the arm around his throat released him and he coughed as he was finally allowed to straighten up, stiffening a little as his sister's hands flattened again his back. Then she stepped closer, rising up on her toes to whisper into his ear, "They will not tell you what I will tell you, little brother. Not of the danger you pose to yourself or to them. Mother did not want me to tell you such things but, as she has placed you into my hands, I am choosing to do as I will."
Dis...disobeying their mother?
Turning slowly around to face her, Darragh quietly asked, "What's wrong with me?"
Gnaea smiled gently and lifted a hand to cup his cheek, a gentleness that seemed so familiar and yet foreign. Mother touched him so but it felt...different. Like love but also...not.
"You dance on the knife edge between being one of us and being a Rogue, little brother," she replied, her voice also pitched low. "Between control and utterly losing yourself to the bloodlust. If you do...we will be forced to kill you."
Then, her eyes caught his and he froze at the seriousness in them.
"If you last longer than these two decades in this life, they will be forced to kill Mother as well. Because she shielded you. Hid you. Do you understand?"
Darragh nodded slightly, then said, "I...I am what she made me. If something is wrong with me, she made me this way." If his tone sounded slightly defensive, it was because he was. He couldn't even recall his mortal life, all he was was what Ebio had made him.
"Technically," Gnaea pointed out, "the Primal part of your mortal soul is to blame for it but Mother should have known what you were the moment you woke. With at risk as you are, you never should have left your Irish shores. But...now we are here."
He frowned at that. "Then why help her?" Darragh asked curiously.
His sister just smiled kindly at that and replied, "Because, for all of our disagreements, I do still love our mother. As she who saved me from slavery. As she who was once my lover." Then Gnaea lowered her hand from his face, stepping back to stand sedate and proper before him with her hands folded in front of her.
"Now," she stated flatly, looking at him with clear expectation, "are you going to allow me to help you, little brother?"
"Help me what?" asked Darragh a little helplessly, the hunger gnawing at his belly as if to taunt him.
"To be more the man and not the beast?"
He stared at her for a long moment before he sighed, closing his eyes and bowing his hunt. As the hunger clawed at him, he replied with a simple, "Yes."
"Good," Gnaea said. Then she moved to the front doors and threw them open, adding, "First, we hunt. Then, we begin."
Darragh turned to look at her, her form shadowed by the dark outside and only lit from the candles flickering in their scones in the entrance hall, and realized that she was holding her hand out towards him in invitation. Stepping forward, he slid his fingers cautiously into hers and felt...a connection. Something new and fragile but somehow stronger than what he had with Malloy.
"Lead, sister," he replied with a smile that was all too savage. "And I will follow." And he was rewarded with an equally savage smile in return.
He had been wrong. His sister was nowhere near soft. And, like their mother, he would be proud to follow her lead.
Timeframe: 1684
Location: London, England
Event: Darragh Ó Conaill contemplates many things about his newly arrived bloodsister before he decides that he is going to go on hunt on his own...until he arrives at the front of the house to find her waiting for him. At first he believes he can bully Gnaea Abella, only to be proven wrong when she subdues him and gives him a truth that everyone else has been dancing around.
Consquences: After telling her little brother what will happen to him if he continues as he is, Gnaea Abella earns his trust and he allows her to begin the process of tempering him into something that eventually will be more than just a bloodthirsty beast.
The third child of the vampire Ebio, he lost his memory of who he had been when he was turned in the 1660s and became little more than a killer driven by intense bloodlust. By the 1780s, he regained his memory and has since struggled to control the aftermath of his years of bloodthirsty killing and figure out a place to belong. Taking a myriad number of jobs since then, he's spent his long life trying to make up for who he was for more than a century, including taking up the position as a consultant to the FBI that led him to moving to the town of Bigby Fork.
The daughter of a Roman senator, she and her mother were forced to sell themselves into slavery after her father was killed and his reputation ruined. That was where Ebio found her, buying her and eventually turning her into her first child. Though the pair were lovers for years, they eventually grew apart due to Ebio's bloodthirsty nature. Gnaea continued to aid her sire, however, both helping to temper her younger bloodbrother and taking him in after he regained his memories.
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