seeker: (103.)

[personal profile] seeker 2023-10-29 08:22 am (UTC)(link)
Once her hand drops and her head lolls to one side, Allison isn't aware of much. The warmth of Rose's embrace is felt as if across a great distance — this body heat failing to warm her blue-tinged skin. She smells nice, Allison at least can gauge this much. Like... perfume, and something heady and coppery. It's a sweet iron sharpness that settles pleasantly around the two of them like a fine mist. When she opens her dry eyes, the scene in front of her is uncanny, hard to make sense of in her addled state. Black shadows and white shrouds, with thin shafts of silver-tinted light pouring in through the dusty old windows. There is the shape on the hardwood floor that resolves itself into the prone form of a man lying on his side. In the moonlight she sees the dark, spreading stain beneath him, and again that intoxicating scent washes over her senses, is like the dimmest spark of light in an impossibly dark room. What the woman says is more unusual still. Allison's head bobs slowly. She tries to untangle the words, to think past the constant hum of pain and horrible, isolating coldness. The woman says that she will hate her later (after what?) and she can't imagine why — she holds her so gently, and it's a comfort when she's so confused and weak in a way she's never been before.

The brush of damp warmth against her mouth makes some life return to her: she shifts in Rose's arms, a sigh issuing from her throat like the rustle of dried leaves. When her tongue flicks out to wet her parched lips, she tastes blood, still warm. A pained murmur escapes her, and she manages to tilt her head up again. It's not much. But it's a start.
seeker: (99.)

[personal profile] seeker 2023-12-04 05:03 am (UTC)(link)
Her mouth is warm and soft is Allison's immediate thought, which comes as slowly and painfully as something forced out from under a sheet of ice coating a lake. Tingling heat and wetness that tastes of — well, bitter metal, at first — before it takes on the sweetness of berries crushed and left to ferment in sticky summer heat. Allison opens her mouth into it without resisting. It tastes good. It feels better.

It makes something stir in her: the faintest whisper of the hunger that had wracked her body in the days before... before this sickness that had made her feel so weak and frail. Unbeknownst to her, the stolen blood fills her veins, and gradually, warmth begins to flood her pallid skin and give it life again.
seeker: (147.)

[personal profile] seeker 2023-12-10 11:37 pm (UTC)(link)
She wonders if she's dreaming, a blurry half-thought as her head rests cushioned in the woman's lap. This and the blood loss (was it blood loss?) feel like some bizarre delusion built out of leftover scraps of memory. Her head thumping against the floorboards brings her back to reality. Starbursts behind her eyelids. A dull and radiating pain that was unlike the cold pain she was beginning to get used to. She opens her eyes and sees the ghostlike figure of the woman standing above the dark shape that she has begun to realize is another person. Dark liquid drips from the fringes of the pale woman's dress. Blood on snow, thinks Allison, deliriously. The figure on the ground screams when Rose leans over them, and Allison feels something that is not simply cold misery: she is cognizant enough to wonder, though not awake enough to be afraid.

She's too weak to resist and too grateful for the warmth when Rose straddles her. She tries to say something, but the murmur is indistinct, and at the first drop of blood into her mouth, she realizes at last what it is. But it's strange, alarming: the repulsion she expects at the taste of blood, sticky and clinging to her lips and teeth, is absent. Instead she is so hungry that she would weep at the sustenance after being deprived. The effects are slow but dramatic: color filling her cheeks, life returning to her desiccated skin and withered muscles. Finally, her eyes open, her eyes unnaturally bright and distant in the shadows, still not all there. She feels fuzzy, feverish.

She knew this woman she realizes. Had met her... before. Before what? Before whatever this was had happened, this horrible change. This disease eating away at her.