Legendary Vampire in the Apocalypse

Anastasia had stopped breathing. He could hardly hear the movement of her blood, or the beating of her heart.

"..Yes," he muttered as he gradually sat up, unable to do anything else with the unease that tumbled his gut.

Frost bloomed across the floorboards beneath her feet. It crept outward in a splitting crackle, beneath the coffee table, beneath the couch, and it climbed the leg of it towards him without her having moved a single step closer.

The television screen fractured behind her as it froze over.

And Anastasia, whose expression had not changed in the slightest, asked him again, her voice crackling like breaking, sharp ice, "...How much of it, and how long ago?"

The sclera of her eyes was swimming with darkness, partially consumed by it, and her breathing began to return, her chest rising high, as if the onset of a panic attack.

Dion didn’t respond immediately. He stood, and only then saying, "Till it was left as a husk, nearly an hour ago by now."

"...It must come out of you. Now."

Dion’s brows immediately furrowed sharply.

"I long ate the thing. There’s no way to remove it."

"There is. I will remove your heart, and Sangour."

"You’re asking me to let you kill me?"

Dion had immediately spoken, burying his question about what a ’sangour’ might be. She was not in any state to take kindly to a question; this was simply not the time when she had mentioned ripping his heart out.

"I would not let you die."

"Anastasia," he began, one of his hands rising between them and gesturing to his body, "I feel fine. I’ve long healed from all the damage that it did to me, and that should be some sign that at least to some larger extent, I’ve digested the blood. If it were some kind of poison to me, my body would have told me by now."

"Then answer me this instead, Dionysus. You drank that creature until nothing remained in it, hardly an hour ago, you said." Her voice had not risen at all. "So, why are you already hungry once more?"

Dion’s mouth had opened briefly, and as his brows furrowed a little, he closed it and didn’t say anything.

He had felt it earlier, when she had renewed her oath to him, that dryness pulling through his throat and body, and he had dismissed it as another one of the many strange things his new body did.

His silence was the only answer that she needed.

Thereupon, the darkness swimming through her sclera receded, and tears welled over her eyes and fell freely down her face.

And then, the streaks of blue that had teetered between manifesting over her face became clearer.

And he couldn’t bring himself to immediately say anything.

Through everything he had known about her even before her becoming real, and since, through the loss of her composure at his rage, her blush at her own indignations, he had never seen her cry.

"Anastasia..."

"Had you fed upon a human, I would have said nothing," she said, and her voice shivered beneath the tears. "Even the mundane ones. Your blood stands so far above theirs in quality that their influence upon you would be negligible. It is why I raised no objection to the thought of it.

However, you are a newborn, Dionysus. Your renascence was mere hours ago. Everything you consume now, your body is using to fuel your maturation. And you filled it to the brim with the blood of that filth, and for an hour it has been imposing itself upon what you are becoming. Your hunger is your body begging you for true sustenance in its place."

Dion’s hand had slowly fallen back to his side.

"...Then what removes it that doesn’t involve ripping my heart out?"

"Nothing. It must be drowned out and displaced beneath a great enough quantity of blood of a quality so far above it that your body abandons it entirely." Her chin rose faintly. "And there is one source of such blood in this world."

Dion understood immediately what she was, and his jaw tightened.

"That thing is bigger than both of us. If I drink that much from you, that means I’d have to take the majority of the blood in your body, leaving you drained, and half-dead beside me. We’ll find another—"

Anastasia raised one of her long, dark nails to the side of her own neck, and cut.

"Wha—!"

The scent of her blood exploded forth into his senses, like a thick cloud of a potent drug. The pull of it spun his head in moments, dragging his throat dry, and he could taste all of its ravishing quality as if he were already drinking it.

There, he felt that strange bond that he had been feeling with her yank him forward, striding one of his feet directly before her before he could bring himself to forming any coherent thoughts, his hands wrapping around her as his eyes sharpened so suddenly that they hurt.

Dion’s fangs sank into her neck, exactly where the unhealed wounds of his last feeding on her had been, and Anastasia’s arms came around him, one hand settling at the back of his head as though she had been waiting to place it there.

Her blood filled his mouth in gushes, like the drinking of a water-starved desert explorer. His hands had clutched into the fabric at her back, her breathing shivering against his ear.

Then suddenly, the taste of her blood changed. It gained such a beguiling richness, its flavour deepening, as if some kind of divine nectar, suddenly so, so much richer.

Dion did not understand what had been happening to him from the moment that she had cut her neck. The suddenness of the consuming drive had even, through its disorientation, made him very anxious.

But, as soon as the flavour of her blood had changed, he felt all of that anxiety, and whatever grips that he still had about himself give themselves up to sensation without the slightest fight to them.

Dion lost himself.

He drank greedily, gorging, his suction dragging through her blood. His hand clutched through her clothing so hard that any other clothing would have been ripped off of her skin. Anastasia’s hand remained at the back of his head. Her other arm had wound across him, holding herself to him, and her legs had begun to tremble beneath both of them, and still she did not pull away, and still the blood came richer.

From there, Dion did not know how long he spent feeding on her.

When his senses finally crawled their way back to him, the first thing he realised was how they had fallen to the ground. He had been mounted atop her, with Anastasia having stopped being able to hold herself up at some point.

"Anastasia?"