goth-mabel:

I, uh. Haven’t posted any drabble offers or memes for probably about a year, so I’ve no idea what challenge you’re referring to. I’m sorry, but I hope that you like this little bit anyway!

Louis always took longer than Armand did to wake. Armand could have used that time, spent it, but for what?
What purpose, when the being by whom he marked his place in the world still lay dead?
Instead he would lie nearby, almost immobile himself, and observe.
Little things intrigued him, at first. The fan of jet lashes across a sheened cheek, the shadow cast wavering with the gas-lamp’s flame. The warm light and that movement all combining to make Louis look something other than a corpse.
In Paris, he’d believed so dreadfully that Louis was not dead.
By weeks and months, he began to learn the signs, and the lack thereof. To differentiate a twitch of eyelid from a wayward air current, a move to wakefulness from wishful imagining.
And then he began to learn more.
A fly’s weight was not enough to disturb the torpor their kind remained in during their personal day-lengths. An insect could buzz about Louis’s ear or crawl over his skin, tolerated and unnoticed. Insignificant.
The curling hair was deader than dead, soft and smooth between Armand’s fingers, utterly unbothered when he stroked it or twisted it into fine plaits to puzzle his love upon waking.
The cold flesh…
Cold, cold, soft cheeks and chest and lips he could touch for only a moment.
Their kind could defend themselves, if need be. A deep, reptilian thread of self-preservation ran through their back brains, keeping them alive even when they seemed empty and lost to all, and it was…
Violent.
Fascinating.
When Louis’ claws slashed Armand’s wrists, when his white hands crushed his throat, when his lovely ivory fangs rent Armand’s trespassing mouth, it all felt like hope.