Protect You From the Dark
"Mother, what is happening?" Gnaea demanded as she stormed into the house, following the pressure of Ebio's ancient presence through the house to reach her side. She reached into the coat that she was wearing and pulled out the carefully folded letter, holding it up between two fingers. "You sent this to me, asking me to come and take Darragh with me? Mother, I am capable of many things but I am not capable of keeping our little brother in check for long on my own."
Ebio sighed where she was seated by the lowly burning fire in the small parlor, one hand pressed tightly over her mouth. After a long moment, she reached out her free hand without looking, palm up as an entreaty. "Sit with me, daughter," she murmured. "There is much that we need to speak of."
Gnaea stared at her for a long moment befofe she acquiesced to the request, stepping forward to slide her hand into her mother's. Ebio didn't so much lead her to the other chair sitting in front of the fire as merely hold on tightly, fingers pressing painfully into Gnaea's palm. The grip held for a moment before it relaxed and released her across the space between the chairs.
And Ebio's dark eyes never strayed from the fire, seemingly lost in the meager flickering of the flames.
Concerned, Gnaea delicately seated herself into the plush chair and asked gently, "What's wrong?" When Ebio didn't immediately reply, she softened her tone even further and added, "Mother, you are frightening me."
That seemed to startle the older woman out of her too deep focus and she inhaled sharply, posture straightening with the depth of it. She finally dropped her hand away from her mouth, revealing the sharp, worried slant to it that Gnaea had never once seen before. And she had lived a very long life now since her second mother had rescued her from slavery.
After a moment, Ebio stated, "I am asking you to take your brother because you are perhaps the only one that he shall be able to stand. There...there was something of an understanding between you before, and I hoped to see that continue during this time."
"Mother, please, speak plainly," she said with sharpness to her tone that rang with the authority of the life she had been torn from centuries ago. "What has happened to Darragh?"
"He remembers, my star," came the answer, spoken in a bare whisper. "I allowed him his rage and he...the wounds he dealt were grievous and could very well have killed me if he had not been stopped."
Gnaea froze, her entire body going still as stone. "He knows what became of his life before?" she asked. "How you turned him? As well as all that came after in these years?"
"Yes."
They sat in silence for a long moment, only the low crackle of the fire between them, until Gnaea commented, "I am...not surprised. Even before there was some...disquiet in him where you were involved. Perhaps one could even call it latent rage, buried so deep that even he was unaware of its origins."
Frowning, she asked, "What happened?"
Her mother sighed and then Ebio launched into the tale, telling a abridged version of the events that had occurred. Of Darragh's declaration, her invitation to cause her harm, the grievous wounds he had inficked upon her until Malloy had tried to coax him away...until her own son had struck out at him. Gnaea closed her eyes at the mention of Trjónn inn Hǫggvinkinni, her first successful attempt at a child and a half-hearted attempt at that. She had respected his actions the day that she had found him but had come to regret her own after, as he had proven to be a willful bastard of a child who only brought trouble to her doorstep most of the time.
Trjónn had shown up on her doorstep just ahead of Mother's letter, rattled yet trying not to show her that he was. He had lingered in her villa for the day it took her to prepare to travel and then was gone again with a messy kiss to her cheek and a muttered, Sorry, Mother. Gnaea hadn't pondered too deeply on what that was about, her concerns more focused on the contents of the letter as she gave instructions for a room to be prepared for Darragh - just in case - and set off for a long trip on her own to France. It had been lonely to make such a long trip alone, especially since it had not been that long since her dear Pietro's death, but it had been good for her in the end. Travelling the Italian countryside made her remember what made her love her home as well as what had made her fall in with the young man who had come to work for her.
"I should hope," she registered Ebio saying quietly, "that Trjónn is not to be there when you return home."
Shaking her head, Gnaea replied, "He left as I did but was clearly rattled by something. I do see now why he apologized to me before he left."
Mother scoffed at that. "Your brother threatened to kill him," she noted.
As she expected of him given the tale that she had just been told. Ever since she had done the work to temper Darragh's bloodthirsty tendencies, Malloy had proven himself to be a good and loyal brother to him. Despite the mistakes previously made, he had done as she had told him and learned how to push and pull their little brother into the positions he needed to be in at one time or another. There was a true affection there between the two of them, this was a truth she knew. So Gnaea shrugged one shoulder and simply stated, "I am not surprised."
Her eldest child knew that he was not her favorite and it had never seemed to bother him. Trjónn existed by his own rules and always had, this was a thing that she had learned in the first years with him while teaching him the rules of what they were. He and his own survival were always first. It was a truth that she respected and had disdain for in equal turn, but returned with her own lack of care of his health and well-being.
Then she closed her eyes and asked, "And where are Malloy and Xiang?"
Ebio's shoulders twitched and her eyes shut in pain as she replied, "Xiang is seeking Issuru. Your brother is pursuing the First." Then she looked up at her and Gnaea could see the agony clear in her eyes. "They will bring them here to learn what has happened and then...then we will come to you or you shall come to us. And they shall judge him."
Gnaea felt her eye twitch and she hissed, "Mother...you invited him to attack you."
"I did...and he did not have to."
Bitter rage curled in her chest like one of the draconic creatures of ancient legends but she quelled it, pulling back on its muzzle as she would with a horse to control the direction of its ire. Gnaea let out a low breath to release some of the tension and managed to not snarl out her next words.
"You offered your hand to both myself and Itztli when we were in amongst the lowest points of our lives," she stated flatly, very careful to keep her tone level. If she allowed herself to rage, she might very well end up up relying upon the mercy of their bloodlines Elder and the First herself. "We willingly accepted what you had to offer as an escape from the lives we had before. You stole Darragh from his life without warning, Mother, and you think that he would be able to thank you once he remembered?"
"No," Ebio replied. "But I believed that he might have enough self-preservation to remember the laws we taught him to obey."
Gnaea sighed at that and asked, "Where is he? I would like to speak to him to get his perspective of all of this."
Ebio gestured vaguely and replied, "One of the guest rooms off of the entrance hall. He...he has refused to return to his rooms. Not even for clothes. Nor has he come out to feed."
The news that her little brother, upon returning to who he was before, was starving himself while grappling with the years between was not surprising. Gnaea could only guess that, to him, he felt as if he had been asleep for more than a century. His entire world had been upended...and he had awoken as if from a dream to discover that he was a killer.
Rising from her chair, she quietly said, "I will go speak to him." As she moved to leave the parlor, Gnaea heard Ebio shift in her chair, and stopped with a sigh. "What is it, Mother?"
There was a long pause and then Ebio quietly said, "I would have let him kill me, my star. There is no doubt that how he was turned was...a poor choice."
"Does he know what his mother was?" Gnaea asked. "What he is by the nature of his blood? Does he know of the deal she made with you?"
"No."
Gnaea pressed her lips together until they burned with the pressure and then asked in a hissed voice, "Are you going to tell him?"
"One day," Ebio replied sadly. "When he is perhaps willing to listen. Please...do not tell him. What he is going through now is enough pain for him to suffer."
For all of her faults, Gnaea knew that their mother loved her children. And Darragh - brash, bloodthirsty, brutal, century old Darragh - was certainly her favorite. She had been so long away from her sire's side that this truth no longer mattered to her. Gnaea was far too old to be seeking the acceptance and love of her sire, even though she still loved her deeply.
"I won't," she promised and then left the room. The heels of her boots clicked across the floor as she made her way towards the usually unused guest rooms, spying that one of them had its door wide open to the hall. Stepping up to it, Gnaea peered in and found Darragh standing on one side of the room, his back to her.
Bare-chested with only trousers loosely buttoned around his narrow hips, he was standing in front of a full mirror. Turned towards his right side, he was looking at the thick, ugly scar that now ran down his arm from shoulder to wrist. Hearing about it was gruesome enough but seeing the evidence of it was another.
It had been just over a month and a half since she had received Mother's letter and left her home, travelling hard and fast on horseback to get here. A normal wound to them would have been long gone, their healing vanishing it within the night. On anyone else, the cut of the hunter's blade would have scarred but by now it would have healed and faded, the scabs gone and the skin fully regrown.
This wound was still thick with heavy scabbing all along its length and she saw tears in his eyes in his reflection.
Gently tapping her knuckles against the door frame, Gnaea eased into the room and softly greeted him with, "Hello, little brother."
Darragh turned away from the mirror then, one hand impulsively gripping at his wounded arm before he winced and released it. Like this, she could see the pattern of how his life had gone, mortal and otherwise. There were the oldest scars there on his body, remnants of what Malloy had described as a frequent drunken brawler. And then there were the other ones, wounds made by other hunter blades from the several that he had killed over his century of life as Ebio's child.
While he looked like the brother she had left behind years ago, when she and Pietro had left to return home, this obviously was not. That Darragh had been a hunting hound, all lean lines and savagery just underneath the surface. This was all too obviously a boy who had awoken to a nightmare.
Yet his expression when he saw her was one of relief - even though she knew that the Darragh that had been had known what she was doing, had known that she was training him. They had spoken of it and he had allowed it out of respect for her. She didn't know this version of him enough to truly know what he saw but the fact that it was relief first and not anger made something gentle in her heart.
He gasped her name in that way people did at their most desperate and then suddenly he was in front of her, dropping to his knees in a blur to throw his arms around her waist. Darragh's nose - that razor sharp nose that screamed the truth of his hunter blood, as it was a strong feature in any hunter of true Smith blood - buried itself against her belly. A brief sob burst out of him and then his shoulders were shaking.
Gnaea carefully lowered her hands to his bare skin, briefly touching the scab before she moved that hand to the back of his neck. She curled her fingers into the short hair at the base of his neck as if to secure him to this moment in time and gently squeezed his left shoulder before gently saying, "Shh. Shh, it's alright."
"It's not," he insisted, breath hitching in that way that it did when someone was fighting tears. Darragh's entire body shuddered and then he breathed into her shirt, "How did you stand me, sister? I was a monster."
She bent briefly at that, pressing a kiss into the top of his head as she whispered, "Yes, but you were our monster." Gnaea straightened up as that answer drove a broken sob from him and gently shook him using the grip she had in his hair. "Shh, listen to me. Listen. Are you listening, Darragh?"
His head tipped back, chin resting uncomfortably at the bottom of her ribs, and he murmured, "I'm listening."
"I need to know what happened."
There was no futher need for elaboration than that. He would know what she meant.
A shudder rippled through Darragh's form, but he nodded and quickly began to speak. He told of the girl that he had tried to attack in the streets who had looked like the poor Irish girl he had been honestly a little besotted with and how that had triggered the crushing cascade of his memory. How he had made the decision to confront Ebio and that she had let him do it. His hitting their brother with a chair. Her son's attack and the pain that had come after. Of waking, still alive and feeling like the skin on his arm was going to fall off in those first days.
Gnaea nodded, gently stroking her thumb across the back of his neck. Then she breathed, "Do you still wish to die, little brother?" At his flinch in response to that question, she knew that she had read his intentions correctly.
"No," he replied with a shake of his head. Then, voice trembling, he mumbled, "I don't want to be here anymore. Here, in this place. Not...not in the other way. I want to live, Gnaea."
"You might not have a choice, Darragh," she said soothingly.
"I know," he said, shutting his eyes as if in pain. Then Darragh leaned away from her and rose with a grunt, his shoulders slumping slightly as he rose to his full height. Though he was an inch or so taller than her, the slouch to his shoulders kept him more on an even keel to her. Her hand still curled into the hair at the back of his neck also probably had something to do with that, his head turned slightly so he wrist wasn't beant at an awkward angle. "But if I only have so long left, I don't want to spend it here where I caused so much hurt. I want...I want to be somewhere that maybe I can find something...beautiful...again. That isn't here."
Gnaea gently released her grip and slid her hand around to cup his stubbled cheek, making him look her in the eye. "Do you want your things?" she asked. "Or do you want to leave now, as you are? If you wish to leave now, I will take you like this in your bare skin and trousers."
His throat worked soundlessly for several moment and his eyes darted everywhere except at her until she brought her other hand up to cup his other cheek. Only then did Darragh's green eyes focus on her and, oh, the agony she saw in them broke her heart. Part of her wanted to storm back into the parlor and just scream at their mother for doing this to him but that would not help. It would not help her nor Ebio, but most of all it would not help her little brother. And she had a true fondness for him that would not allow her to wound him so.
"I don't want any of it," he hissed finally, tone vehement. "Not from her. Not...not now."
That statement implied a great many things but Gnaea wasn't going to press him about it at this moment. He was too fragile, all broken edges gathered into a semblance of a man barely holding himself together, and doing so would fracture him even further. "Do you wish to leave tonight?" she asked, dropping her hands from his face.
Darragh swallowed and then asked, "I...you just got here. Do you want to see her more? I know...I know you don't see her often and that you do love her. So, if you wanted to stay until tomorrow...we could do that. I could do that."
"Perhaps not to speak to Mother again but certainly to rest before I begin the journey anew." Gnaea then reached out to pluck at the loose, nearly threadbare trousers hanging off of his hips and tutted softly. "And perhaps," she added, "enough time to see you outfitted in something better for the journey. Are these Malloy's?"
"I...I couldn't wear mine."
Not because they didn't fit, she guessed, but because he likely knew that he had killed someone while wearing them. Well, even if in a few months she would lose him, Gnaea would make his time comfortable. And if that included paying for an entire new wardrobe for her little brother, so be it.
As her hand moved to pull away, Darragh's hand closed gently around her wrist. "Sister, I," he began and then trailed off with a shudder. Then he looked at her with desperation suffusing his entire beging and whispered, "Would you...would you stay? I hate being alone."
Alone with his thoughts and memories, Gnaea guessed. Very well.
Lifting her free hand to gently touch his chin, she murmured, "Of course, little brother. Don't worry, I'll protect you from the dark."
He leaned into the touch like a poor, touch-starved hound, eyes wide and sad. "How can you protect me," he asked in a trembling breath, "if it's inside of me?"
Gnaea grasped his chin more firmly, forcing him to look directly at her as she replied, "I can protect you from yourself just the same as I kept you from becoming something worse years ago. You did not doubt me then, do not doubt me now." She then tilted her head towards the bed and added, "Lay down. Rest. I'll guard your sleep."
Darragh's exhausted eyes looked at her for a long moment before he began moving, lying down half curled up on his left side on one side of the bed. Gnaea slowly approach the other side and seated herself, leaning back into the headboard as she swung her feet up onto the bed without taking off her boots. He chuckled as he shifted closer as she was settled, the top of his head putting pressure into her thigh at that same time as long, slender fingers wrapped around her ankle.
"My mother would have hit you with the kitchen ladle for having your shoes on on the bed," he commented idly. Then she felt him tremble and moved to rest her hand gently on top of his injured arm. Despite her touch, the shivers only increased until Darragh was softly sobbing into his fist. "Gods, my mother. Mine, not Ebio. I forgot her," he cried. "I loved her and I forgot her."
"Shhh," Gnaea soothed, rubbing circles into his upper back. "It wasn't your fault, little brother. You're the victim in this."
"I killed so many people," he argued, pushing himself closer to her. As his head settled into laying across her thigh, she sighed and began to gently rake her fingers through his hair. That seemed to relax him a little, even if his spine did remain overly tense. "That makes me the monster in the story, sister."
"I think I shall decide who is the monster in the story," she declared. "Especially since you will be living in my house. And if I decide you are not a monster, you are going to attempt to abide by it, yes? To trust my judgment?"
There was a moment of hesitation then he replied, "Yes, sister." And there - oh, yes, there - was an echo of that hunting hound of a man who had followed her every beck and call that she let forth simply because he respected her.
Smiling, Gnaea curled her fingers against the back of his neck and murmured, "Good boy. Now sleep. I have you." This time, Darragh trusted her word because she felt him let out a deep sigh and his body relaxed into the bed, breath all too quickly evening out into sleep. And so she settled her back as comfortably as she could against the headboard and plotted how the morning would go.
She would take Darragh back to her home and would get him things that would make him smile. If he only had a little while longer to live should the judgment of Issuru and Nazar go badly, then she would see him some semblance of happy. As she knew all too well from her mortal lovers over the years, happiness was fleeting and rare and should be grabbed with both hands.
Timeframe: 1781
Location: Paris, France
Event: Roughly a month and a half after receiving a letter asking her to come, Gnaea Abella returns to her mother's home to find that her little brother had managed to get himself into the worst sort of trouble that he can. Of course, she also deeply understands why it happens when she learns that it all happened because he got the memories of his life from before back.
Consquences: Darragh Ó Conaill and Gnaea Abella return to her Italian villa to wait until Issuru and Nazar can be brought together to make judgment upon him for attacking his sire. She also makes the decision to do whatever she can to make the time a happy one in case that it will end up eventually being his last.
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.
The favorite of the Elder Issuru's children, it is known that she was born in Egypt and that she and her sister, Abana, were turned at the same time. In her life, she has garnered a brutal reputation that makes hunters usually whisper her name and has sired three children, loving them as if they were her own by birth.
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.
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