It was now completely dark outside, far later than Naomi had ever been in Rose House before, another item on the long list of things her parents would freak out about. She had called them earlier from Celyn's phone. It had been less of a conversation and more a lecture, Naomi pacing around the Redferns' living area, trying to interrupt her mother's frantic tirade. Didn't she know how worried they had been, what if she had gotten hurt and nobody knew where she was? And what was she doing with that Redfern boy anyway? Hadn't she come to her senses and seen that he was an undisciplined rich boy who wasn't right for her?

She had a decent lie prepared for them, corroborated by Celyn who had more success in actually getting a word in over the phone. Arran had come to check on her but had a severe allergic reaction and had been at risk of going into shock. Naomi had driven him straight home to his EpiPen and physician uncle.

It did something to calm the situation down, but the argument had soon started again when Naomi said that she was staying at Rose House until Arran came around, even if took all night. Eventually she had had to hang up on her mother mid-sentence. She did not look forward to going home to face the consequences of that.

The rest of the day had passed strangely; after the trauma of the morning and a few more soothing cups of the strange tea her body felt completely bereft of energy. Celyn had made camp at the foot of the sofa, working her way through a massive stack of papers, making corrections and notes as she went. The TV was on, tuned to the 24 hour news channel, though sometimes Celyn would switch over to another station that seemed to cover vampire news. Naomi tried to follow the events covered on the latter, but eventually fell asleep to the scratching sound of Celyn's pen on paper and the reassuring cadence of a newsreader talking about events that Naomi had no context for.

Celyn had woken her once at around dusk for dinner, a rich parmigiana that Naomi had tucked into, grateful for the normalcy. Naomi was very uncertain about how she felt around Celyn, this was by far the longest stretch of time that they had ever spent together and she began to notice that Celyn had to play at imperfection; spilling a little water from the kettle and frowning at it like it had been an accident.

Naomi was reminded of the virtual assistant on her tablet, binary code that had been told to talk in idioms. A natural-language user interface, designed for ease and comfort.

"Whoops, the wifi router and I had an argument last night, he's not talking to me but I'll search that for you as soon as we work things out."

"Whoops, I've made a human error, just like any human might make. I am not so much a threat to you."

Celyn did not make any such forced mistake with the food though, that was unmasked perfection.

After that, she had accepted defeat. Her body wanted to sleep off the stress and with a full stomach she was in no position to fight. She fetched Arran's bedding from the floor of his room and cocooned herself in it back in the seat in the living room. This time she had fallen into a much deeper sleep, the faint smell of Arran all around her.

Now she woke into a darkened room, lit only by the light bleeding from the kitchen and a lamp in the corner of the room. A murmured conversation had roused her half awake, but now the voices were rising the veil of sleep was lifting fast.

"You seem to forget that the rest of your life is a very, very long time," came the voice of Celyn, an unspoken warning behind the tone.

"So what? I'm supposed to care about a few blemishes more than someone I care about getting hurt?" Arran snapped back.

His voice rang in Naomi's head. It was the same as it always had been, slightly brassy with a lazy vibrato that was most apparent when he was teasing her, but it was still in there now, under a new edge of anger. Now that she heard it again she realised she had been waiting for a snarl, or perhaps a hiss, or perhaps nothing at all. She could not say which possibility scared her more.

She pushed herself up slightly in the chair, for no other reason than to make herself known. Both vampires snapped their heads to look at her, but Arran's eyes averted just as quickly as they had found her. He was sat upright on the sofa, leaning back as if collapsed, head rested on the top of the backrest, staring at the ceiling. His mother was knelt on the floor, his injured, or at least previously injured, hand in her own.

Neither of them spoke to Naomi. The only words were Celyn tersely instructing Arran to touch each finger to his thumb as she studied the movement of his tendons. The following silence felt like it was swelling, pushing down on Naomi with increasing pressure.

Eventually, Arran spoke, still looking directly up, away from either of the women.

"I can make my own mistakes. If it had been one of the others, if it had been you-" he was not allowed to finish this sentence.

"If it had been me, things would have been different. I would have spent the last few years trying to understand how to control my powers, so I would have had more information from the vision. I would also have tested my physical limits and learned how to understand my body, so I would have been able to stop any danger without hurting myself," she was speaking fast now, her words coming out as a hiss. "A few scars may not seem like a lot but your next act of self-sacrifice could cost you a lot more. You are weak. And foolhardy."

There was a pause, Arran's breath hitched slightly either in pain from the continued stretching of his fingers or else his mother's words.

"I'm sorry that I'm such a disappointment compared to the rest of your children," Arran did not sound angry anymore, just tired.

Celyn shook her head and released his hand, apparently satisfied with the healing but not his response. She stood up and turned her attention to the coffee table, on which sat a crutch and a small black zip-up case. She turned her attention to the former, opening it but not yet taking anything out.

"What was I to do, Arran?" Now that she spoke again he voice was soft but tinged with sadness. "I brought you back to England because I didn't want you to grow up in a society where wolves would snarl at you and witches would pull their children to the other side of the road because you were a vampire. But that sentiment has permeated, it has followed us here and you have grown up surrounded by twisted facts and prejudices presented as news. It breaks my heart to see how it has shaped you, how much you hate the life that you have but I just do not know how I could have better protected you against it."

She finally reached inside in the case and bought out a syringe, attaching the needle with practiced accuracy, before continuing.

"You are not a disappointment to me because you are weaker than your siblings, or because you act without thinking. You could be completely unremarkable and I would not care. But you are not unremarkable, you are brilliant, you have three very distinct and powerful gifts but you reject who you are and fight your own potential. You are not like my other children simply because you do not want to be. And today that self-loathing meant that you were not able to protect yourself against an easily avoided threat. Even that does not disappoint me, but I cannot help but be scared by it."

Arran did not respond but he was watching her now as she crossed the short distance back to him and he lifted his arm as she gestured to him with the needle.

"This is diamorphine," she explained injecting the drug into the crease of his elbow. "It will help with the pain, now try to rest. I love you."

She kissed his forehead and went up the stairs, Arran calling out his goodnight hoarsely after her. Naomi felt very much as if she should not have been privy to the whole exchange. She had sat very still for the last few minutes and her limbs felt stiff, she straightened up some more, bones creaking slightly, and wished for Arran to be the first to break the silence.

He did not turn to face her, but it felt overtly deliberate. She was being ignored, not because he was too occupied or in too much pain but because he was actively avoiding interacting with her. She would call out to him if only she knew what to say.

Arran stood up, leaning most of his weight on his left foot but even though he was turned away from her Naomi could tell from the way his shoulders tensed that it hurt.

"Do you need some help?" Came her voice, out of her mouth but with very little input from her brain.

"No, I'll be fine," he said, but he had to grip onto the sofa to steady himself and could not reach the crutch without first letting go.

Naomi stood with the intention of fetching the crutch for him but instead, she found herself carefully positioning herself under his right arm, gently helping him to stand up. He pursed his lips but thanked her quietly and the two made their way slowly, awkwardly toward Arran's bedroom.

Navigating the stairs up to his bed was the hardest part, but they got there, Arran untangling himself from Naomi on the very last step and hopping awkwardly before collapsing onto the mattress clumsily. Naomi felt the pain from the impact shoot up her own bones as if it were her skeleton that was slowly, painfully reattaching itself, but Arran did not flinch as his body sank into the material.

She wanted to crawl in next to him and go back to sleep, to feel the warmth of his body and think of nothing else. But he had barely said a word to her and, anyway, she had slept all day so now her mind was restless. So she stood at the top of the stairs, holding on to the glass half-wall. She was at risk of staying there all night.

Arran stretched out his hand toward her in invitation and she took it instantly, pouncing onto the bed as quickly as she dared without jostling him too much. She took his hand in hers and then in the same moment her lips were on his lips. She kissed him quickly, as if gorging herself, the desperation she had felt in the weeks since she had left him surfaced within her. Kissing him was solid, a connection that bypassed the need for thought. Action without thinking was bliss.

Up close she could see his eyes dilating but she did not know if it was because of her or the painkillers. She pulled away slightly, sitting against the headboard and looking down at him. He kept hold of her hand.

"What the fuck, Naomi?" He asked, rubbing his thumb against her finger.

It was what she had said to him the first time that he had kissed her. She had been waiting for it for what seemed like an eon, each day that passed that he had not done it sliced off a significant countdown of her short projected lifespan. By the night of the party she had wanted to scream at him. Or else force the issue herself. But she had been uncertain, maybe he did not like her the way she liked him.

It had been a fantasy in a lot of ways. A normal relationship, the potential to grow into something serious, even though it never could, she could not be permanent for him, but she had enjoyed pretending. Now reality was filled with immortal, blood-drinking vampires and who knows what else, but the normal, stable relationship was still a dream.

"What are you still doing here?" He asked in a whisper.

She should have responded to his first question, that would have been much easier.

"I don't know, I wanted to make sure that you were alright," she admitted, lamely. "Thanks for maybe saving my life."

"Any time I guess," he replied, "thanks for maybe helping to save mine."

He turned his attention to her wrist, upturned where their hands were still intertwined. Naomi could not stop herself from remembering the pain and fear that she had felt when he had bitten her. Despite herself, she loosened her grip from his, ready to withdraw.

"I scare you," he stated as he broke the now loose connection between their hands and resumed staring straight up.

"No, no you-"

"You can't lie to me Naomi, not right now. I've got so much energy buzzing around my body I can feel it all. I can hear your heartbeat speed up and feel your muscles tense through the bed. I can hear your thoughts and feel your fear. So..." he trailed off, searching for words in the air above Naomi's head, "I pushed you out of the way of a hunk of falling metal, you drove me home and let me drink your blood. It's all neat and tied up and we're both going to be okay. So why don't you go home and we'll go back to the original plan of avoiding each other until we go to different universities and never see one another again."

"Is that what you want?" She asked, only then realising that it absolutely was not what she wanted.

"No, of course not. But I don't want any of this. I don't want to live forever and never age. I don't want you to be scared of me. I don't want you to be ill. And I don't want you to leave."

"Well I don't want to leave, so surely the right thing is for me to stay right here, with you."

"But how can we possibly move on from this?"

Naomi sighed and brought her knees up to her chest, trying to think of how to articulate what she was thinking.

"I had been imagining this kind of dream world," she admitted, she had not planned on telling him this, but it all seemed linked now, "where we would end up at the same university and as we learnt and grew our relationship would get stronger. And, some way, somehow, there would be some miraculous new discovery and I would get to live longer and you and I would get married. We would make it into our forties, you would take time out from work to raise the kids and I would come home and maybe my job would be stressful or I'd have an ache or a pain or whatever but it wouldn't matter because I would be alive. With you."

How small her fantasies must seem to someone who would live forever. Or even to another human. Now that she had given them validation in the form of being voiced they seemed somehow perverse. The minutia of a life that she would never have.

"But," she pressed on, "I think that maybe you've done the same to me. That to you I am an escape route, a way to be human and pretend that you can grow old and change. We have made each other something that is not real."

"Then none of this has been real."

"That doesn't really matter," she said, and she leaned in to kiss him lightly again and whisper the next part. "Because none of that changes the fact that you still want me here and I still want to be here. Ultimately none of that changes the fact that I think I love you."

This time he was the one to kiss her, his recently broken hand flying to her hair, rooting itself in her braids to bring her closer to him. In other circumstances she would have ripped his clothes off, but she could feel his hand trembling slightly against her skin and the painkiller was clearly starting to work its way into his system.

She broke the embrace with considerable reluctance.

"I need to know everything," she told him, somewhat breathless, "we need to reexamine this. But I do still want it if you do."

"Let's go somewhere," he said almost instantly. "A supernatural community, it'll be like a holiday and I can show you it all. There's the indoor city in London, the council headquarters in Italy, Pendle Hill is less than an hour away."

Naomi did not know how exactly she would convince her parents to let her go away with the boy they deemed so unsuitable. Least of all when she was meant to be revising and worse still after she stayed out all night tonight. Still, she said yes.

Much of the weight that she had been carrying lifted, she felt like she was flying. It was giddying. They grinned at each other and kissed some more, greedily, like they were starving. Then Arran kissed her hand, not quite glancing away from her wrist before she caught him looking.

"It's okay, really," she said, turning her arm so that he could see the extent of the scarring.

"I guess," he said, bringing his lips to the damaged skin and kissing it. "That was so not how I imagined biting you for the first time."

"You imagined biting me?"

"Oh my god," he moaned, "why did I say that? That's so weird."

"Probably because your mum just shot you full of Heroin," she told him. "Answer the question, Redfern."

"Yes, I imagined biting you, almost every night I've spent alone in bed for the last six months."

This did not scare her as much as she thought it should. Arran was the first person that had ever made her feel desirable and she still felt a little stunned whenever she realised that he really, genuinely wanted her. The way that she wanted him.

"I tell you what," he continued, "if there was ever a time you wanted to know what it was like to read my mind and level the playing field, this would probably be it. Because there is no way I would ever admit to that sober."

Naomi grinned at him, she could think of plenty of things that she wanted to ask.

By the time she had exhausted her questions, they had covered all sorts of ground from the mundane to the ridiculous. They talked about the basics about the underground world of vampires and werewolves and magic, whether she was actually any good in bed compared to the more experienced women he had been with before, his powers, if he had looked at the revision schedule she had written him.

Eventually, their conversation thinned, the gaps between responses growing with each new question. Arran pulled her closer and within a few minutes was asleep, his arms wrapped around her body tightly. Somehow, after all the chaos, they had found some peace.

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I am sorry that this part is a little late, I didn't get home from work until very late last night and went straight to bed. Here it is now instead! <3