Scent - Anna / Ryan

[shadows-sun.livejournal.com]

So it started out unexpectedly; innocently enough. First of all, Ryan had only been intending to come around to Anna's house to pick her up for the open mic night at Chances Are.

The front door was unlocked, she'd been expecting him, and with music on in the kitchen while she did washing up, she hadn't been certain she'd hear him when he arrived.

"Are you ready to go?" he asked, striding as far as the kitchen doorway, and leaning there. His clothing smelt of the cigarette he had had before walking in, a scent that was completely at odds with the clean smell of the kitchen.

"Just a minute," Anna said, then laughed softly to herself. "See, cause we can't forget Charlie while she's away. Now, instead of waiting for her, you're waiting for me." Peeling wet, yellow and plastic gloves from her fingers, she turned a looked at him. "Can I get you something to drink?"

"No, I had something before I came here," he said. "I'll be fine till we get to the bar."

Anna nodded her head to that. Her pale hair was tied back in a haphazard manner for her cleaning, a manner that by now had multiple strands framing her face. "I really will only be a minute. Just finishing up in here. I don't even need to change."

Ryan feigned shock. "And you said that you were like Charlie," he said, as though aghast.

Anna walked past him, leaving the kitchen and ducking her head in her amusement as she walked.

Waiting patiently, he didn't move to follow her as she bustled around, hardly paying attention to her, or getting in her way until she stopped by him.

"Do you smell that?" she paused to ask him, taking another sniff for good measure.

Raising his eyebrows, Ryan already had a good idea of what she was smelling. "I had a cigarette just before I came inside. Didn't smoke it inside. Promise."

Anna looked at him skeptically, then her expression cleared. "Oh, I'm not calling you a liar. That's just not what I smelled. Not all I smelled." She tried again to identify the scent.

Now Ryan was confused. "I give up," he said, with what could only be termed as an unhelpful shrug.

Seeming about to discount it as well, if only so that they wouldn't be stuck waiting around for her as long as they had sometimes been stuck waiting for Charlie, Anna nodded. And then her eyes caught a dark patch on his sleeve.

"Oh my god, you're bleeding," she said, reaching for his arm before Ryan could pull back, and lifting the sleeve so that she could see from what wound he was bleeding.

At the first sound of the word 'bleeding', Ryan stiffened. There was no wound on the arm she was looking at. He would have felt the sting of pain had there been any injury sustained, but that was not the only reason he knew she had guessed erroneously. He had said that he'd had something to drink before he'd come here. He just hadn't been specific as to what.

"Here, come into the better light. Can you take your jacket off without hurting anything?" Anna went on to question, at which point, Ryan stopped her.

"I haven't hurt myself." He didn't roughly pull away from her. He didn't allow her to keep on holding his arm, either. As he recoiled, Anna looked at him questioningly. This was the second time he had been not careful around her.

Anna met his eyes. It didn't take a lot for her to see that there was evasion going on there.

"What's going on?" she asked him slowly, when she didn't make any move to recapture his arm again.

A very good question. Ryan could immediately think of several ways with which to answer. Most of them concerned it being someone else's blood. Which it was. But if he explained it in a way concerning some amount of violence, he would then have to explain that. The longer she stared at him, the worse he felt his ability to create a story she would believe ebb from him. In many respects, he suspected that he had spent the most of that creation on the story she had believed the last time she had caught him in some possession of not his own blood.

"Ryan?" His silence extended over moments, causing Anna to prompt him again.

Ryan licked his lips. "There isn't really an easy answer that you are going to believe," he evaded, wondering if that would be answer enough.

Of course not. "Try me." Of course, she had no idea what was to come, but between them, they had had many interesting conversations on the nature of occult, on vampires, on philosophy, on fairy lore. Maybe this was just the opening to another interesting conversation between them.

"Okay..." Ryan raised both of his eyebrows, as he tilted his head to look at the still 70s looking carpet on the floor beneath their feet. He felt as though at any moment that carpet was about to be ripped out from Anna's feet. Actually, he wished for a more literal happening of that. It would actually give him a very good reason to not complete this conversation.

Anna stood opposite him, watching him patiently.

He broke eye contact with her. "Okay, well, there was that blood you saw me with a couple of months ago..." he started, considering the idea that she might actually make her own assumptions from there and complete the story for him. Now that the moment when it had been opened up for him to share his sordid tale, he wasn't sure he could deal with the lack of belief, or just the simple telling of it after all. He told himself to get over it. If she was going to believe it, wasn't that exactly what he had wanted?

"The blood for your... science project...?" Anna completed, with audible skepticism in her tone.

"Yes," Ryan answered. "That." She didn't supply any more words for him to run with. "I've still got some..."

"Ah." Anna mulled on that for a little while. Before the silence could stretch out as long as the last time, she mulled further. "How come?"

"How come?" Ryan repeated.

"It's been holidays for a while now. And you haven't seemed to have any extra curricular science activities on." Anna pinned her gaze on him, denying the joint urges to look away, or to drop the subject.

With her eyes so firmly on him, it made it difficult for Ryan to look away. "There's something about that science project I've been meaning to tell you," he said, unknowing of how he would actually finish that sentence.

"That it doesn't actually exist?" Anna asked, supplying the conclusion of the sentence for him. Ryan looked shocked, but he realised, he shouldn't have been. Anna was intelligent. Very much so. It was one of the reasons he enjoyed her company. "So the question then remains, why have you still got blood, that you lied about?"

Ryan chewed the side of his tongue before stating slowly, "I guess that does become the question."

Anna shifted. Her gaze on him was different now, speculative where before it had been intent. "Vampire, though? Can't be. I've seen you in daylight a lot. So you use blood in your magic practice and you just happened to get some on your sleeve without noticing today?"

Her blithe rationalising of this forced a not too tight laugh out of Ryan. "That's an interesting leap," he allowed.

"But not the right one." He would have said if it was. Anna lowered her brows, confused now at the relative unreality conversation was tending towards. "Is it something that's really so bad that you can't say?" she asked, trying to bring it back into the realms of possibility.

"I don't know if it's bad..." The laughter was gone again now. "It's big, though."

Anna nodded her head, inwardly trying to prepare herself for whatever 'big' thing Ryan was about to tell her. "Go on," she said, then again, "Try me."

"Vampire..." Ryan said the word very softly, very slowly, testing the two syllables out in his mouth before he even ventured to try any of the rest of the words in a sentence that could follow. It took a while to even get that far, and he wasn't looking at Anna for the whole time that he tested. For some of it he did. She was looking just as confused and tensed for resolve as he felt. Maybe it was that that pushed him onto the next syllable. "Vampire is more right... though not in the way you've been thinking..."

Anna's mouth opened in a silent 'O' shape. Now it was Ryan's gaze, reaching her from under a lowered head, that stopped her from looking away. "Not in the way I've been... thinking," she said, managing the entire sentence a large amount faster than he had managed the first word. "And how, exactly, have I been thinking?"

"Daylight," Ryan said, quickly taking the most recent example. He lifted his hand towards the window she had tried drawing him towards for better light. Sunlight, although it was the end dregs of twilight, touched his hand... and did nothing. "Doesn't burn."

"I see that..." Anna said, with eyes following the hand motion that he made.

"And there's pretty much everything in Buffy the Vampire Slayer that's just off." Ryan looked from his hand to Anna again. He was an actor, with an instinctive flair for the dramatic. But these weren't lines he was just spouting off, and her lines weren't pre-written for him to anticipate either. "Is it too much, too quickly?" he asked her.

"I'm still battling with the 'he's not playing a practical joke' on me first," Anna admitted.

He noted the way that her eyes went back to the stain on his jacket, and moved his arm behind his back. That caused her eyes to return to his. He gave a sad, lop-sided smile. "It can be a practical joke, if you want."

Anna narrowed her eyes. "Are you telling me the truth?" she asked, wanting to hear that much out of him at least.

"About it being a practical joke? Of course," Ryan said, with ill-timed humor.

"No..."

"About the rest." Ryan didn't make her wait. It wasn't fair, after what he'd just dropped. He nodded slightly. "I'm telling the truth."

Anna lifted her head, then lowered it again, in what could only be called a shaky nod. Ryan watched her carefully. Deirdre had informed him of how much of a burden the telling could be, and in that moment, he felt every pound of it. He thought of the lead up he'd had before Stephie had told him. Strange occurrences to a point where it almost hadn't come as a surprise to hear, that first time. And then he thought of it again after the amnesia. He hadn't expected to do it like this. If he had, he would have put more immediate thought into which end of the spectrum her reaction was likely to be.

"I know you're waiting for a reaction. I just..." Anna lifted a hand up to him, not to keep him away, exactly, just to announce an unspoken need for some space. She looked at him again after a while. "If everything in Buffy is off, how did you get made?" There was a purely academic interest that flashed through her eyes as she questioned that, as though that was the way she was compartmentalising it for the sake of this conversation right now.

"That's a lot more information than just what I am," Ryan warned gently. He inclined his head to her. "Maybe for another conversation... if you want it?"

Anna nodded her head, a couple of times this time, and more steadily than the last. She didn't seem to notice that the time was still marching on, and that they had now waited longer for her than they sometimes waited for Charlie, if they were still planning on going out tonight. But then, Ryan didn't really notice it either.

"I won't say no to another conversation," she said carefully. "But not right now. I need to..."

"Think." Ryan understood that. Thinking was a very empowering thing. He had been going to leave it at that, not wanting to influence her more than that. But before he silenced himself, a small amount more came out from him. "Just don't... turn away from me, okay? Don't believe it, if you don't want to, but..."

Ryan's words drew her out of herself long enough to view him once again. For a moment, she was surprised. And then the wounded look in his eyes penetrated. He looked like a younger boy, hurt before by this confidence that he was giving her. A part of her ached to see it. "What? No, oh no, I'm not going to... No. I won't." She made sure to make those last three words very intent. She could promise that much to him, at the very least.

At the sound of the words, Ryan relaxed visibly. He thought, if she could come to any conclusion that wouldn't push him away, from here, he could be pleased with that.