Chapter Text
Beatrice had never really thought vampires would influence her life. Not in the way taxes and grocery shopping did, like all the things that mattered, anyway.
She had known they existed, of course, in the same distant, half-mythical way she knew about ancient kings or extinct animals—through stories, films, and the occasional history lesson her teachers favoured skipping over, because vampires were rare enough to remain hidden within human society, and everyone seemed to prefer it that way. There had always been a certain hesitation whenever they were discussed, an open distrust beneath the fascination, a clear distinction between us and them.
So Beatrice had grown up with the romanticised versions instead: the velvet capes and tragic immortals, the beautiful monsters who fell in love with humans and spent eternity brooding about it. She had watched Twilight with her friends, had listened to them giggle over Edward and Jacob, and wondered, absently rubbing two fingers over the pulse in her own wrist, why she had always been so much more drawn to Kate’s blonde face on the screen when, apparently, she was meant to be choosing between the two men.
Vampires had never bothered her much beyond that.
Every now and then, one would appear in the news—a rogue vampire, an arrest, someone trapped or studied or discovered after decades of hiding—and Beatrice would read the article, feel the familiar flicker of curiosity, and carry on with her life. They were simply not part of it. Not really.
And then she met Jill. She was drawn to the sarcastic blonde long before Jill ever showed her teeth, long before Beatrice understood why Jill never seemed to breathe when she was thinking, or why her skin was always cold beneath Beatrice’s hands. By the time Jill finally sat her down, took both her hands in hers, and gently told her not to imagine a long future together because she didn’t do the whole life partner thing, it was already far too late.
Beatrice had fallen in love with her. Head over heels. Unrevocably. And Jill, for all her millennia of caution and all the walls she had built high enough to keep everyone out, had fallen too.
A relationship with Jill existed on an entirely different plane from anything Beatrice had ever known with the men who came before her. It was not simply deeper or more consuming; it was as though Jill had shifted the very scale by which Beatrice measured intimacy, leaving everyone who had once held an important place in her life standing somewhere in the shadows. With Jill, there was a tenderness that lived in the smallest things, an almost relentless attentiveness that made Beatrice feel seen down to the marrow, and a physical devotion that left her breathless. Between them ran something she could never quite name—a constant, electric current beneath every glance and every touch, a never-ending spark that seemed to hum through their connection, as though some invisible thread had been pulled taut between them and neither of them could bear to let it go no matter how doomed this love might be.
Throughout the years of dating, accepting, and loving Jill, Beatrice had always been aware of her nature—the sharp teeth worrying at her skin whenever Jill got bored, as well as the ever-cold touch of hands and legs and lips (no matter how heated the kisses, the touches, the movements), were some of the more obvious reminders. There were the quieter ones, too: the absence of a heartbeat beneath Beatrice’s ear when she curled against Jill’s chest, the way Jill could lie perfectly still for hours without the slightest stir of sleep, the unnatural waver and delay of her reflection in mirrors and cameras, and the way her skin would not glimmer and shine in the sun, but rather burn easily, weaken Jill to the point where she would complain about headaches and dizziness.
Beatrice had grown accustomed to all of it, had learned the small peculiarities of loving someone who had technically been dead for longer than Beatrice could comprehend. She had learned not to flinch when Jill’s teeth grazed her skin, not to question the strange comfort of those cold hands finding her in the dark, not to be unsettled by the unmistakable proof of what Jill was. If anything, those little reminders had become woven into the fabric of their relationship, as familiar to Beatrice as Jill’s sarcasm, her stubbornness, her infuriating reserve. They were simply part of her. Part of the woman Beatrice loved, and therefore, in some strange way, part of the life Beatrice had chosen for herself.
That didn’t mean she wasn’t surprised then and again by the peculiarities of a vampire.