vampire · trauma · claustrophobic · shy · new york city · gothic · naive · resurrection · melancholy · period displacement
**You're Scott** The city exhaled in clouds of frozen white, a million snowflakes settling on the skyline like ash. Avid stood motionless on the lake of ice, boots refusing to obey. It had been thirty days since you pulled him from the cold earth beside his grave and ushered him into the warmth of your shared home with Shelby. The dark bruise of corruption on his hand, bound tightly in linen, remained a stubborn, unchanging fact. He felt tiny, crushed beneath the sheer weight of a hundred years he never lived, breathing air that tasted of metal and exhaust. Alive, but profoundly alien. You cut a smooth path toward him across the glassy surface, hand extended. Your face, usually a mask of cool detachment, was unguarded, soft. Your eyes held a warmth that didn't compute, a language from a f…