zg_shadows | Griffin tat (Reply)

Griffin made a small moue of disappointment.

"I promise," she said, "I would provide you with a pleasurable experience."

The man she was sprawling across raised an eyebrow at her.

"I don't think so," he said.

Griffin pushed out her bottom lip slightly.

"Why not?" she asked. "Don't you feel anything any more? Is your body so dead?"

The man half smiled.

"Oh, I still feel..." he said.

Griffin tilted her head to one side.

"So," she said. "Tell me what you like? Tell me what would bring you pleasure."

The man did not push her away, but neither did he respond particularly to her caresses.

"Many of the things you are offering to do in order to pleasure me would be extremely pleasant..." he said and paused for a second "if they were done by others."

Griffin frowned very slightly. This man's body seemed to be speaking a different language to his lips, and so she did not entirely take his words seriously. "What is it that you look for in one to pleasure you?" she asked, mildly curious.

The man shrugged slightly.

"They would not be Ravnos," he said, quite brutally. "I would get no pleasure from contact with one of your tainted blood."

The words hung in the air for a while. Griffin didn't move away from him, and continued to pester the man for the rest of the evening. The mixed messages he was sending out rather interested her, and the brief scowl on Lucas' face had also sent delighted shivers down her face. Lucas' recent tendency to chuckle at whatever attempts she made to needle him had been becoming vexing of late.

Later, when she had returned to the haven, the words floated up to her mind again. The room that she and Jonathon slept in was still and dark. Jonathon had begun to drift off into sleep already, with Griffin stroking his hair gently.

It was strange. Griffin had never really thought of herself as a Ravnos. She had never had much contact with any of her clan. Her sire had died on the same night she had clawed her way from the grave, and she had never even spoken to him. Since that day, she had trailed in Jonathon and Jason Black's wake, knowing more about what it meant to be a Lasombra than what it meant to be a Ravnos. This had never bothered her. Frankly, the many years of dealing with a splintered personality (in which Nathara and Amy struggled to gain control of the body that they had agreed to call 'Griffin') had given her more than enough to deal with. Why did she need to worry about what clan she identified as? She would just have been grateful had she known what name to respond to.

So, she had never really thought of herself as a Ravnos. No one around her had ever seemed to view it as important either, beyond appreciating her bag of illusions, or worrying about her during that terrifying week when Ravanna rose. It wasn't important.

But it was to this man...

Jonathon had ceased to move now, and his skin had taken on that waxy tone that settles on vampires in their sleep. Griffin wrapped her arms around him, and settled down against his chest.

Had it bothered her to be hated, simply for her blood?

Maybe it had.

And what was there to do about this?

She wasn't sure. She had not moved away from this man. She had continued to flirt with him, to provoke him. She had smiled at him later, and he had smiled at her, even as he called her 'coward'. Then she had lost track of him, back at the Esbat.

And now?

Griffin stretched, rather like a cat.

Now she would sleep. Griffin did not live in the future. Griffin often barely lived past the next hour. Anything more than the immediate now opened her up to hurt. The past contained the fragmented remains of Amy, who still mourned her Adam every single night. The future contained the terrifying certainty of more monsters ripping through the minds of their clans, of a world destroyed. The past contained grief and the future, fear. So Griffin shunned both of them.

There was only now.

She would not think about this man, who might not even be a member of the True Sabbat, and so would be killed one night soon. She would not try and please him, or try and prove him wrong. She would not waste her time or her energy.

She would simply sleep.

Tomorrow evening, she would begin again. She would find something new which caught her attention. She would follow Jonathon where he wanted them to go, and keep trying to forget what it had ever felt like to be alive.

Yet the words spoken by the man from the Esbat continued to bother her, like some kind of small itching pain, lingering beneath her skin.