Reflections In A Two-Way Mirror By Chris Rosmini After WAR: NNP - The Only Thing Missing (2/2) The Roof of the Loft Everybody used with permission Everybody was hanging around the Loft, doing not much except a little packing and waiting for Nick, and hoping to hear about the Dinner with Nat at the Nick and Natpack HQ, and hoping it would cheer Nick up a bit. After the first wild elation of being in his own body had passed, Nick had seemed strangely subdued for a guy whose faction had solved the premise and got everybody back in the right bodies by fighting fanfic with fanfic and nonsense with nonsense. So most of the Knighties were just casually hanging around, so they'd sort of accidentally be there when he got home. Except Roz, who was clearing up the potting bench she had used for the Schanke's Anniversary cactus, and admiring the tidy flats of seedlings, that were every bit as neat as their owner's living space. *Who would have thought he'd actually get to_like_ fooling around with plants, when we built this thing.* she thought. She smiled, imagining an eight hundred year old vampire gently setting out each little plant as though caring for their tiny lives would somehow be counted for him in some universal reckoning. She hoisted the container of fertilizer down from a shelf and turned to the sink, only to find herself nose to collar button with that same vampire (who was, thankfully, completely that same vampire once again). "Getting in a little nurturing in the aftermath of War?" he stepped back with a little smile, and took the bag she had just slammed into his chest and put it on the counter. Okay, vampires sneak up on you, that's what they do. "Gardening? Nurturing? No, actually for me it's all about control."she said when the shortness of breath she generally felt in his presence, even when he wasn't scaring the daylights out of her, had subsided. "Ah then. Well, there is a Dark Side to everything, isn't there." he said, and the smile was gone. "Control. My specialty. Although I haven't demonstrated a whole lot of it lately have I?" *Well you sure know the right thing to say.* she thought while she mentally scrambled for an answer. "Oh, that's not what Vachon said" was the result. "He can't have been talking to his groupies" Nick murmured. "You have been discussing me with the Spaniard?" Nicholas de Brabant asked. "It was a natural subject under the circumstances" Roz, who was getting a bit test herself, replied. "But actually, I just asked him how it felt to live in somebody else's body." she paused, "Out of sheer vulgar curiosity, if you want to know." "And?" Nicholas was relentless. "Well, it took him hours to come up with an answer, 'cause most of the time he seemed to think he was Sam Spade or somebody, but he finally stopped dancing and told me he owed me an answer." She tried to concentrate retroactively through the hubbub of the party and a few glasses of the good champagne Janette had brought from the Raven's non-vampire cellar, "He said you are so much older than he, and have so much power in vampire things that he couldn't see how you could live like this" she gestured in the general direction of the loft, "... like us." And now Nick was really concentrating on her words, or rather Vachon's words, "He said it was like riding a horse that was almost too much for you." "I think that might be why he ... lost touch with reality sometimes. " Nick had that familiar far away look, but only for a moment. "Yes, It was like that when I was in LaCroix's body, he was so filled with power in some ways, and anger. I felt it was like living on a volcano and you might open a tap to brush your teeth and have lava come out. The vampire in him was so strong." He closed his eyes with the intensity of the remembered experience. "When he was there too, when Q'raa came ... I did things, vampire things, I have never wanted to do." Nick opened his eyes on the absolutely frozen look on Roz's face, and thinking back over his last words, began to smile and then to laugh. When the frozen look had morphed into annoyance he finally choked out "No, not those sorts of things, they were NA posts, not the UF!" When the Knightie had begun to blush and chuckle too, he went on. "I could pick up feelings, form a link with him on a kind of sub-vocal level .. I'm sorry it doesn't really have any mortal equivalent. And it was so easy when I was him." "Did you envy that, want to keep it?" Roz asked, her curiosity restored. It was Nick's turn to freeze for a moment. "No." He finally said with a hint of surprise. "No," he went on, "I care about him, you understand that." He paused to be sure she really did and she pretended to. "But there is nothing about him I want to be." "And Schanke? Nat?" She rushed on to the mortals, not wanting to venture any further on the quicksand of vampire relations at right this moment, when a loftfull of Knighties wanted to have their time with Nick. It had been a short commodity in this war. "What was it like being them?" He smiled a different kind of smile from before, "It was like being alive, Roz." He took her hand and led her out of the lighted greenhouse to a bench by the sound of water. "I tried to tell you once before, last time, and I realized I can't. Because you are alive, it just blazes through you, and it's in every breath you take and every heartbeat and every thought, and you can't feel it because you have never known it's absence." Somehow it was easier to say this in the dimness of the garden with the lights and sound of traffic just over the wall, and easier to listen too. "My partner Schanke, is overweight and undereducated, and past his first youth." Nick said, "He has never been a beauty, or for all his real intelligence, a wit. But he walks in the sunlight and loves his friends and family with a passion. I would trade places with him without a thought, except I would not trap him in my darkness." And that was the voice of the vampire that the Knighties followed, Roz thought, the spirit that had always inhabited him, that they had known was there from the beginning, and known when it was gone. She made one more try, around the lump that had formed in her throat, "And when you were in Nat's body?" This was what they all wanted to know of course. He sat quiet for so long she wondered if he was going to answer at all, and then said softly "You know about the memories in blood? Of course you do, I've read the fanfic too. So you know I have felt what it is to have a female form before, to have a woman's longings and her lusts." *A nice distinction* she thought and held her breath at where this seemed to be taking them. "But if I had never lived in Natalie's body I never would have known what it is to never, ever be able to ..." Roz caught her breath at his words, "... to reach the top shelf." And she let it out. Okay, a line had been drawn in the sand. He was looking at her from the corners of his eyes when she glanced over at him, and she nodded . "You must have picked up a loose mean streak from somebody." she said. "I've had it from childhood" he said, "it's one of my nicer traits." But what do you think I should have learned from all of this? "Well, if you ever thought the Knighties just loved you for your money and your pretty blue eyes, you should be reassured." the Knightie co-leader said. "And that we will accept no substitutes, and will do damned near anything to get you back. Actually we will do absolutely anything", she said, thinking of the fanfic they had read. Nick put his arm along the back of the bench, not quite around her shoulders, but nearly. "Well, I've learned a lot, and maybe by the next War I'll figure out what it means" the vampire said, "but the one thing that is perfectly clear is ..." he put his lips close to her ear and said in a stage whisper in case anyone else was listening, "I have the best faction in the world!" She giggled as he sat back and said expansively "I've seen the others in action know and I'm sure! I know this War hasn't given us all much time together, but I think I know how to fix all that." He pulled her to her feet and gave her a little shove toward the stairs. "Go join the others and tell them I have a plan, and it's about time I got to plan something in this War!." End Chris Rosmini Knightie co-leader War11