This time, he promised himself, this time would be different. He wouldn't let her blood call to him so strongly that he couldn't hold back. He would force himself to remain calm and think about every action beforehand.

He would not lose this chance to learn about this girl, this amazing creature that was being reborn again and again, somehow remembering him in each lifetime.

Watching her walk about with her short brown hair spiked up on top like the many girls she hung around with after school, he began wondering at what part of her life she began to remember him. Was it right away? Was it only after she saw him? Did the memories come as she lay dying, flashing before her eyes as the stories say in all those books? Or was it a gradual remembrance, slowly recalling things a piece at a time, like some kind of forgotten memory slowly coming back to her?

Either way, this time he swore to himself that she would not die by his hands. This time he would watch her, learn about her, enjoy the time he had with her as he figured her out during the course of her lifetime.

He watched her turn, waving to her friends as she began to make her way home, the sun catching on her bright leaf-green eyes as she smiled so happily at them. It was only a moment later that he was watching her blood pool beneath her, the car speeding away from her broken body as he stood there in shock.

It broke his heart when she turned her head towards him like she knew he was hiding in the alleyway across the street, reading her lips as she mouthed out her goodbye. It was only the words on her lips that kept him from destroying the whole town in revenge for stealing her away from him.

"Next time. Next time we will be together. I promise"

--------

He spent the next thirty years preparing for her return, planning how to keep her safe and making a home for them to live in together. The day he found her, he couldn't help himself from running up to her and pulling her into his arms. When she didn't struggle, when he felt her arms wrap around him in return, he'd felt the warmth in his chest fill him. It was like fire was running through his veins, but instead of calling it pain like many would have, he simply considered it a symbol of how much he'd come to 'love' her.

It was thus that his obsession grew to new heights, his beloved failing to take note of how serious it was becoming. It was almost like she encouraged it, unknowingly fanning the fire that burned in his chest until it could cover the world in flames, her presence in his life the only thing keeping his madness caged.

For decades she was kept at his side in the darkness of the their home, shutting out the world that lay just beyond the front door and filling their lives with each other, his heart giving a shuddering jolt at each brush of her lips on his cheek and each caress of her hand on his back as they walked through a moonlit garden he'd grown painstakingly behind the towering hedges that surrounded their home. They worked hard to make their life together meaningful, but time was a cruel mistress to her human frame.

Not once during those long years did she see ever the sun, her dark blonde hair slowly turning grey as her skin grew more pale and wrinkled with each passing year, her warm hazel eyes beginning to dull as she longed to see the world she'd turned away from so long ago. But even so, she loved him too much to leave him, too much to hurt him by letting him see her painful yearning for that which he kept her from. And so she hid everything behind a smile, filling it with as much love as she could, for as long as she was able to remain by his side.

It was only when she lay dying in his arms, her skin wrinkled with age and her eyes blinded by time, that he realized he still couldn't keep her safe from death. She would still be stolen from him by time itself. He'd always lose her, no matter what he did, because she was still just a human. No matter how many times he'd tried to change her, to make her as immortal as he was, she'd still remained a simple human. Merely human, no matter how impossible it should be.

She was just a human, right?

--------

I'd spent years following her latest death caught between the madness of mourning my lost love and questioning her continued humanity. After all, how could a human remain so when they should have gone through the change, transitioning to the immortal being that humans called a vampire. Never before had a human been able to resist the change or shown signs of having some kind of immunity to it.

The change wasn't some kind of virus that rampaged through the body. It was far beyond such a simple thing, changing the being on a level far beyond their understanding, breaking down their body and recreating it into something that humans couldn't seem to grasp, even with all their modern sciences. It didn't matter how advanced they got, they would never be able to figure out what made an immortal into an immortal.

But maybe they could tell me what made my love something more than a simple human, something that could resist the many attempts to make her as immortal as I.

--------

It had been three years and still nothing. They'd told me her flesh had been too rotten to get proper samples from, seeming to give up almost as soon as they had started. Frustrated and enraged, I'd killed them and taken their equipment away with me, spending the next twenty-five years learning everything I could about their science and how the machines worked.

Every so often I would update a machine or add new books to the library, keeping up on the advances the humans made as I began making subtle pushes in the medical field to ensure they kept taking the routes that would lead me closer to attaining my goal. I couldn't let my love down again.

There had to be something that would give me the answers I needed. Something that would tell me how to keep her alive next time.

I would do anything to save her, even if it meant tearing the world apart in the process.