HouseMates (m. werewolf x m. vampire) - Chapter Two (sfw) (Patreon)

I asked on Discord if there was interest in seeing more of this, and you answered! Thank you! I have now got this chapter and half of the next one written, and I know exactly what the whole story's main beats will be, so that's promising!! I also heard you loud and clear (also on Tumblr) about more Laces for a Lady, so I'll be making that one a priority, as well as working on June's Patreon exclusive story.

As I've got to know Valentine while I'm writing him, I feel I need to bring up some content warning labels. He's also become extremely dear to me; in the same category as Lein from Footsteps in the Snow, which is a category not occupied by very many of my OCs. Do heed the content warnings, even if they're not the main focus of the story, and decide for yourself if exploring his story (and his backstory later) is for you. Like I said it's not going to be the main focus of the story, but it's part of his character so I thought it was worth mentioning.

Future content warning (slight spoilers too, sorry). Though not necessarily explicit in this chapter, this will all come up later in the course of the story, and you can see the beginnings of it here already if you read between the lines: PTSD, depression, anxiety, social isolation, touch starvation, disordered eating (feeding?), lack of self-worth, and past abuse. Also content warnings for some healthy and consenting D/s play in the nsfw bits.

Specific warnings will be given at the start of relevant chapters in the future. I didn't want to make it seem like the story is going super dark or anything (it's me after all), but I also didn't want anyone to be taken by surprise. Hope I haven't nuked the vibes by starting with all this here... There's a lot of softness and growth and affection ahead too, I promise. And some protecc werewolf, because I love that too :).

Chapter wordcount: 4165

<-- previous chapter

 Valentine had been right about one thing. For the first week, Adam and he barely even crossed paths.

The most Adam sensed of his presence was the faint waft of clinical disinfectant when he glided in around dawn like the night’s shadows retreating from the rising sun, and the lightest of treads on the hardwood floor as he made for his room and then fell completely silent. Adam presumed he showered at work because the bathroom was always untouched too. He ghosted through the apartment from front door to bedroom like a drifting breeze, and since the autumn days were shrinking with the fading year, and the hours of darkness were stretching longer and longer, Valentine had usually gone to work in the late afternoon before Adam was even back from the building site.

For a man who had wanted companionship, he didn’t go out of his way to seek it out.

After that first week and a half of ships passing in the night, Adam rose late and curled himself up on the sofa on Saturday morning, wearing his threadbare grey sweatpants and a tight black t-shirt. He had assumed Valentine was already back from work, though he’d not checked his room, and since the vampire had no audible heartbeat it was impossible to tell. As such, he jumped when the scrape and rattle of a key sounded in the lock, and Valentine came back to the apartment around ten — after sunrise, even if the daylight was weak and watery. Adam glanced out of the living room window to see that the clouds were little more than a greasy, grey smear across the sky behind the tall conifers that adorned the borders of the old Victorian manor’s grounds.

As he looked up and offered a smile, Adam noticed a marked difference in his house mate.

Since he’d first known him, Valentine’s cheeks had been a drained, marble white, but now a distinct flush bloomed across his cheekbones, and his black eyes were bright with a new shine. The incense smell of ‘vampire’ was stronger too, and almost sweet, like the hint of a beautiful, alluring cologne that preceded him into the room on the currents of air that flowed naturally around the building’s interior as doors opened and people moved.

Valentine halted on the threshold from the dimly lit hallway and regarded the spot where Adam was lounging in the light, airy, open-plan living and kitchen area. His gaze darted along Adam’s relaxed figure, nestled barefoot amid the cushions, and over the abandoned plate of toast crumbs on the coffee table and the phone dangling half-forgotten from Adam’s left hand on the sofa arm.

Valentine’s sharp face took on an oddly soft expression, though his dark eyes looked a little sad, and Adam tilted his head in a question. “Everything alright?”

“Yes,” Valentine replied evenly, looking down at the hardwood floor before regarding him across the room through his long, dark lashes. “I… I wanted to apologise in case I have come across as… standoffish, or… unwelcoming… to you this week.”

“I’ve hardly seen you,” Adam smiled, un-pretzelling his legs from where he’d folded them up beneath his body on the sofa and reclining even further in a werewolf’s subconscious attempt to telegraph his ease and lack of stress at the situation.

Observant as any wolf, the vampire hitched a tiny smile in return. “Exactly,” he said, running a pale hand through his dark hair to leave it just perfectly ruffled.

Somehow, Adam didn’t think he was aware of how attractive he was. For someone who had to be over a hundred years old — he’d said, after all, that his birth year began with an ‘eighteen’ — he must have realised the effect his looks had on people, surely? Then again he could barely string a sentence together without sounding like an Edwardian stereotype, so perhaps not.

Valentine drew in a breath and sighed half of it out before adding, “Well, it was pointed out to me by a colleague that it is customary to get to know one’s new… flatmate… beyond a first name basis, and when I was unable to tell them anything about you beyond your name and what you do for work, I was met with a strange look and a rather exasperated laugh.” After a beat, he added, “I doubt you’ll be surprised to hear that that’s hardly an uncommon occurrence for me.”

Adam chuckled. He wasn’t. “Valentine, you’re fine. Obviously I’d love to get to know you, but you seem kind of… private. I don’t want to force you to hang out.”

The vampire’s breath caught in his throat and he made an aborted attempt at answering. Clearly rallying himself, he swallowed, licked his lips, and said, “I would very much like to get to know you better, Adam. But I think… it is painfully obvious that I… I have not spent… any amount time around people in a setting which is not an operating theatre for the past… fifty years. And there is not a great deal of opportunity for chitchat either when one is up to one’s wrists in a human’s desperately fragile insides.”

“You’ve worked there for fifty years?”

“No,” he replied quickly with a small shake of his head. He remained where he was in the doorway, as if waiting for an invitation into his own home. “Vampires cannot inhabit one dwelling or maintain one place of work for more than about a decade without arousing suspicion. I have been here in this flat for almost five.”

Adam nodded. That didn’t give Valentine particularly long left there, he realised. “Well, you’re probably super tired after your shift, but I was just about to start looking for a movie if you want to watch something with me? I felt like having a lazy morning…”

Valentine blinked slowly.

“You do know what a movie is, right?”

The vampire’s reserved expression cracked minutely and he snorted a tiny, delicate laugh that made Adam’s insides twist and flip over strangely. “Yes, Adam.” He adopted a self-deprecating sarcasm that drew a mirrored smile on Adam’s face, and added, “I am aware of what a ‘moving picture’ is. They’ve been around for about as long as I have, and I’d very much enjoy joining you in watching one.” The sarcasm fell away like old paint a moment later however to reveal uncertainty underneath. “Provided you don’t feel obliged? I don’t want to intrude on your weekend.”

“No way. Wouldn’t have offered if I wasn’t cool with it. I’ll wait if you want to get changed out of your work stuff first.”

Valentine looked abruptly down at his perfectly-pressed black trousers and pristine white shirt, and then turned a baleful look on Adam. “I…” he faltered.

Adam’s lips twitched. “Don’t tell me you don’t actually have casual clothes…”

A rather pathetic little smile was all the answer he got. At least his sleeves were cuffed up to the elbow to expose his slender forearms. Probably by his standards, that was practically uncouth.

“You’re about half my size, so my sweatpants would just fall right off your hips,” Adam muttered, suddenly finding it immensely difficult not to picture Valentine wearing his clothing and drowning in it. His cock stirred unbidden too, and he tried to think about anything else.

Valentine exhaled.

“You, uh… you wanna get a drink or something first?” Adam asked awkwardly, eyeing his mug of tea gently steaming away on a nearby coaster.

“I don't keep blood in the house,” the vampire replied. “I go elsewhere to feed, as I did last night. Better not to have any evidence at all of what I am here. Just in case.”

That explained the healthy glow to his skin then. In a playfully-theatrical voice Adam gasped, “You mean you haven’t got a bunch of coffins and a whole flock of bats in your room? Damn, I’m disappointed.”

A low, whickering laugh escaped Valentine and he shook his head, black hair tossing about artfully before settling into place again. Adam half-expected a quip back about chew toys or animal carcasses in his own room, but the repartee he got remained self-effacing. “Sorry to disappoint, Adam. No vats of blood or sacrificial maidens either.” As he crossed to the sofa and sat down on it like he was expecting to begin High Tea at Buckingham Palace, he added with a sigh, “Aside from the fact that I am a vampire, I’m afraid I’m otherwise painfully ordinary.”

“I beg to differ,” Adam said quietly, but he left the matter there, shuffling to allow Valentine some more space if he wanted it.

The vampire just sat there with his back ramrod straight and his knees and his ankles pressed together, hands in his lap like they didn’t know what to do with themselves now they weren't holding a scalpel.

“What do you want to watch?”

Valentine shrugged minutely. “I’ll watch anything, but preferably not a war film, if it’s all the same to you.”

“I was gonna try that trashy new dating show on Netflix for a bit,” Adam admitted with a guilty little grin.

“I’m not familiar with it.” Valentine paused and then asked with a playful lilt to his voice, “Do you suppose it might help me adapt my speech patterns to something a little more… contemporary?”

“I think you’ll need a translation for everything that’s said, but I’m happy to provide,” Adam grinned in answer to his tone as he grabbed the remote. “C’mon. Let’s try it. If you don’t like it, we can watch a nature doc or something.”

To Valentine, the dating show might as well have been a nature documentary.

He studied the interactions between the disparate group of contestants like a scientist studying specimens in an enclosure, and Adam kept sneaking glances to his right to find the vampire squinting and repeating some new turn of phrase under his breath with fascination. How on earth he’d escaped picking up on even some of the linguistic shifts over the past fifty years was a mystery to Adam, who had figured out by now that Valentine literally did not socialise at all. He wondered if he spent any time with others of his kind either. He’d not met a vampire in person before; perhaps they all talked like Valentine did.

After about an hour, the muted, autumn daylight had moved across the room and had started to creep more towards the sofa. Although the apartment was on the northern side of the old Victorian mansion, and the daylight was weak at best, Adam noticed how Valentine un-cuffed his sleeves and let them fall to cover his delicate wrists, and he turned his face slightly away from the nearby window, narrowing his eyes.

“Should we close the curtains?” Adam ventured, and Valentine cast his dark eyes up to meet Adam’s.

“Would you mind terribly?”

“Course not. Don’t want my landlord turning into a pile of ash on the sofa after all. Huge mess. Awkward to get rid of too…” he smirked as he pushed himself to his feet and crossed to drag the heavy, subtly damasked material across the window.

He could feel Valentine’s eyes on him like a physical presence before they drifted back to the TV screen and the absence of his attention left Adam’s skin prickling all over. “It takes a couple of hours, even in strong sunlight,” he murmured without returning his gaze to Adam, and the werewolf paused. He didn’t like that Valentine was offering up a way to get rid of himself, even perhaps in jest.

Although it hardly presented a problem to the werewolf, drawing the curtains plunged the room into near darkness, leaving only the light of the television screen to illuminate the sharp lines of Valentine’s face.

He looked like an engraved gemstone cameo from Roman antiquity, brightly illuminated on a museum or art gallery pedestal to be admired while the rest of the room remained swathed in dusk-like shadow.

Adam’s bare footsteps faltered for just a heartbeat before he stooped to flick on a standard lamp in the corner and a couple of other lights — one of which he’d had to purchase bulbs for because apparently vampires don’t need any help to see in the dark either. Or, more likely, Valentine had never bothered with creating any ‘ambiance’ in the place where he only came back to pass out during daylight hours before beginning all over again.

Again it struck Adam just how achingly lonely Valentine’s existence must be, and when the vampire turned his endless, black gaze upwards to see what had given Adam cause to halt so suddenly, he wore a look of quiet confusion on his alabaster face.

Adam’s smile sputtered back to life, like a spark having trouble catching around the damp mire of his empathy for the creature, and he hit ‘play’ without answering Valentine’s silent question.

Valentine had no heartbeat, obviously, and he had no need to breathe when he wasn’t talking, so he sat next to Adam on the sofa as silent as the furnishings around them. As such, it took Adam a lot longer than it might otherwise have done to realise Valentine had slipped into a sleep-like state of unconsciousness beside him.

When episode four’s credits flickered up and the ‘next episode’ icon zipped by quickly enough to fuel any binge-watcher’s inertia-driven need for more, Adam paused it and glanced to his right to ask if Valentine wanted to keep watching, only to find him lying back against the sofa cushions with his eyes closed and his pink lips ever so slightly parted. Every instinct in the werewolf’s body told him to recoil from what appeared to be a lifeless corpse, but a heartbeat later Adam went still and inhaled the sepulchral scent of incense that drifted, faint as a whispered prayer, around the vampire which told him this was not true death, but un-life.

Valentine looked like an effigy all the same, and Adam ached with curiosity to touch him; to touch his marble cheek and see if he was as cold as he looked.

Instead, he reached for the vampire’s shoulder and closed his hand carefully around the joint. He was much slimmer underneath the crisp folds of the shirt than Adam had first realised; almost fragile beneath his fingers.

“Valentine?” he murmured, shaking him ever so slightly.

When he got no response, he lifted his hand away, unsure of what to do. He didn’t feel as though it would be appropriate, after only a week and a half in the apartment, for him to carry the vampire in his arms like they were boyfriends, but he didn’t want to leave him there in what looked like a fairly uncomfortable position with his head tilted back like that.

Carefully, Adam stood and looked around for the decorative blanket he’d chucked onto a nearby Ottoman stool earlier. With it draped handily over the arm of the sofa, he tried to wake Valentine one more time, but he was quite literally dead to the world. So Adam slid one arm under his knees and one arm around his shoulders, and eased him around so that he was lying on his back along the length of the sofa.

There was something incredibly vulnerable about the way his delicate ankles looked in his perfect black socks, feet dangling as he adjusted his position for him. Valentine lolled helplessly in Adam’s arms like a perfect, porcelain doll, his head rolling to one side so that his cool cheek pressed against Adam’s bare bicep as he lowered the sleeping vampire down onto the sofa, and as he extracted his arm from under Valentine’s head, he cradled the back of it in his palm for just a moment.

Apart from the unnatural chill of his body, his slight weight and slender frame felt the same in his arms as a human would have done, or even a werewolf for that matter. The ages-long hostility between vampire and werewolf seemed utterly irrelevant just then as he realised that Valentine had probably felt comfortable enough to doze off in the presence of a supposedly enemy species.

He settled a cushion behind Valentine’s head, and as he laid the vampire’s arms quietly down by his sides, he brushed his touch along the length of Valentine’s fingers. They were a surgeon’s hands, he mused, or perhaps a pianist’s, with long, elegant fingers, neatly trimmed nails, and smoothly cared-for skin. His own hands were dry and tanned from the sun, scarred, and about as rough as 200 grit sandpaper, and he withdrew his touch in case he marred the perfection somehow.

With the blanket settled over Valentine’s recumbent form, Adam stepped back and picked up his empty plate and mug.

Making sure the curtains truly were drawn, and that the weak sun wouldn’t sneak in later and burn Valentine while he lay unconscious, he headed to his own room, changed into his running gear, and took himself off for a run that lasted three hours.

When he returned, sweating and just nicely tired, Valentine was exactly where Adam had left him, and he didn’t stir for the remainder of the day.

It should have felt strange to have a living corpse lying out in the apartment, but the strangest thing was when Valentine finally woke up, just as the autumn sun winked down behind the horizon and a velvet kind of dusk pooled in the corners of the cosy flat.

Adam had just made himself yet another cup of tea to accompany his latest ‘trashy’ novel, adding to the small and soggy heap of Earl Grey teabags on a saucer near the kettle, when he startled at the unexpected sound. Slopping hot tea all over the back of his hand and dropping the teaspoon with a clatter as an unholy, rasping, sucking inhale sounded from the sofa behind him, he swore in surprise and spun on the spot.

Two gulping breaths later, Valentine went still again, his eyes wide as he stared at the ceiling, looking panicky and skittish.

Adam set his mug down and shook the drops of tea off his skin as he walked slowly round the back of the sofa from the kitchen area, murmuring Valentine’s name.

As Adam slid into his field of vision, the vampire’s black eyes locked onto him and he regarded him with open fear for just a second before he let out a shaky breath and the expression dissolved away. He sat up in a fluid motion, and as the blanket rippled down around his hips, he looked at it in surprise before turning his eyes back to Adam and swinging his legs off the sofa and onto the floor.

“I — That’s —” he faltered, his warm, aristocratic baritone unusually dry and crackly. “That’s never happened before.”

“What, falling asleep on the sofa?” Adam asked with a relieved smile. “Gave me a fucking scare when you woke up just now,” he added with a chuckle. He refrained from making any zombie or Nosferatu jokes, but only just.

“Apologies,” Valentine chirped. “But judging by the slowing speed of your heart, I’m quite sure it’s nothing to the scare I gave myself on waking to find an unfamiliar ceiling above me.”

Adam glanced at it instinctively and then back at Valentine. “You didn’t recognise your own home?”

“As you so correctly deduced on your first visit here, I do not spend much time in any part of this house besides my own room.”

“Fair point. You went out like a light,” he added, going back for his mug now he knew everything was alright. “I couldn’t wake you at all.”

“Not much besides pressing silver to our skin or dousing us in holy water — neither of which I would appreciate except in the direst of circumstances, I should add — would wake a vampire from their trance.”

“We share a common allergy to silver,” Adam said wryly, “And I’m not much of a one for God…”

“All the same, you should probably know how to rouse me if there’s a fire or something, I suppose,” he said, leaning forward to rest his elbows on his thighs for a moment before combing both hands back through his hair to push it off his face. He still looked shaken.

Adam’s fingers were suddenly glad to be holding the mug, or else they might have twitched with the desire to feel that silk-soft hair again. The memory of the weight of Valentine’s head in his palm surfaced and sank again though, and he cleared his throat. “You ok?”

“Mn,” he nodded. “Thank you for —” he cut off, and Adam suspected he might have blushed if he’d had a heartbeat “— for adjusting my position.”

“Figured you’d probably not want to spend seven hours in rigor mortis with your head tipped back,” he said, miming the same position Valentine’s head had been in with only a little exaggeration.

“Actually, rigor only sets in after about four hours, and only in humans. It occurs due to chemical changes in the muscles and —” he cut off instantly and looked mortified. “Forgive me. You were joking.”

“I was, but that’s what you get for hanging around with interesting and educated people,” Adam said, tapping his own temple ostentatiously. “You get smarts by osmosis.”

A tiny, delicate snort left Valentine’s lovely nose and he dipped his head to hide the smirk of amusement.

“What do you usually do on your weekends off?” Adam asked. A little warmth had kindled properly in his chest at making his new friend smile despite his apparently reserved nature.

Valentine regarded him with a curious tilt to his head. He was sitting once again like he had when he’d first sunk onto the sofa to join Adam that morning; ramrod straight and tense all over. “I… walk,” he shrugged.

“Anywhere in particular?” Adam asked, trying and failing to picture him in some kind of hiking gear. Perhaps some plus fours and a deerstalker though. The image made his smile grow and he tried to hide it behind the rim of his mug in case Valentine thought he was laughing at him.

“No,” Valentine said almost glumly, letting his gaze become distant and unfocused. It drifted away to some uncertain point across the room near the television. Adam followed it and noticed a cobweb lifting and drifting in an unseen draft. “This town has a lot of history for such a little place. I like to read it in the buildings, and… and watch… people as they come and go.” He sighed, shoulders dropping. “Doesn’t that just sound desperately pathetic?”

“No,” Adam replied quietly. “You fancy showing me some of this history?”

Valentine blinked, and then a slow-dawning smile spread across his beautiful face. “Yes,” he said simply.

Adam grinned, downed half the tea in a too-hot gulp then chucked the remainder down the drain, and as he skipped towards his bedroom door he said, “Lemme just grab a hoodie! I’ll be two seconds!”

“Take your time,” came the barely-there response.

It sounded like it came out around a smile, and Adam was grinning too by the time he returned, hopping on one foot while he tried to cram his trainers on while still on the move.

He drew up short and dropped his foot back down though when he saw Valentine standing in the hallway in a fitted, black wool overcoat. He hadn’t heard him moving around over the noise of his own bustle, but there he stood, ready to go out all the same.

Adam’s mouth went dry. He felt suddenly too hot, his skin too tight in a way that reminded him of the quivering seconds before a full shift swept through him.

“Is… something the matter?” Valentine asked, clearly wrong-footed by Adam’s abrupt reaction.

“No,” he croaked back immediately, and then smiled. “No, I just feel… under-dressed.”

Valentine dipped his head again in an action Adam now recognised as self-consciousness, and swallowed. “I can forgo the overcoat if you would prefer? I shall hardly perish of exposure…”

“No, absolutely not!” Adam said, waving his hands in a comedic attempt to stop Valentine’s pretty hands from undoing the buttons of his long coat. “You’re fine.”

Gosh darn it, was he fine. It made his narrow shoulders look a little wider, and it snugged in around his slender waist to skim down over his hips in a way that made the werewolf want to grab and hold. It accentuated the jet black colouring of his hair and the paper-white pallor of his face too, drawing attention to the calligraphic arches of his brows and the deep intensity of his eyes.

It was at that moment, with Valentine standing stock-still in the dim light of the hallway like a model come to (un)life from the pages of a magazine, that it properly hit him.

Valentine was gorgeous, and Adam was completely fucked.

_

Thank you for reading, and thank you for your comments on the previous part! I hope you enjoyed this one, and as ever, I look forward to your reactions and comments immensely!

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