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i.

“Would you ever turn me?” 

Harry tenses where he rests. His head was cuddled against her stomach, after pleading and pouting an entire car ride for her to play with his hair for a little while when they returned home. He had his arms fixed around her waist, holding her closely as they watched Twilight. Y/N found it a right of passage that he saw the series then explain to her if they’d gotten anything right at all and after some coaxing (and a pinky swear that she would play with his curls the whole time), he’d agreed. It feels different watching it now, knowing what she did -- it means that there are a lot of questions that she asks.

“Does it really hurt that bad when you’re thirsty?” 

“Does your kind have any special powers like mind reading, and visions?” 

“Is there some vampire royalty policing what you do? That’s not in this movie, no Babe, it’s the next one but I’m curious now.”

“Is animal blood even an option for you?” 

It’s refreshing to be picking Harry’s mind for once. He was always probing at hers, wondering things aloud that he’s told her he’s gone centuries without knowing. Harry remembers very, very little of his life before he was changed, but he does remember a farm -- he’s told her this. He believes it is why he is so drawn to cattle, horses, and sheep; many times he’s pulled them over on a backroad so that he could appreciate the size of them, the sheen of their hair, the plumpness of their bellies. If she’s really lucky, while they’re at a picnic and they’re having a picnic, he may touch the soil beneath them to see if it’s fertile and give her a beautiful thirty-minute lecture about agriculture. 

So she likes it when he explains further and doesn’t seem to be getting irritated with her questions. He described to her how it was incredibly painful when they were thirsty -- she had seen first hand what it could do to him. His throat felt as if fire scorched through his esophagus, his stomach felt hollow, vacant as a swimming pool without water. If he went too long, then he would get ill, akin to that of a fever a human might feel, and that’s why Y/N had found him that way in the woods. He was delirious from the thirst, allowed her to cart him to her home, and bit her without thought or consideration of the repercussions at that moment. 

“You tasted so sweet it was almost too much to bear. Had I not impeccable self-control I would have sucked you dry.” 

“Would you have felt guilty?” 

“I would have begged one of my closest friends to do away with me. I do not wish to live in a world without you in it.” 

He tells her that there are certain things that some of his kind can do, different elements that they could manipulate, and reading minds is not very hard, nor significant -- he could if wanted but he rarely cares what humans are thinking. Or at least it isn’t as far as Harry’s concerned. He tells her that there is a set of elders that deal with. . .something or other, Harry isn’t sure, he doesn’t bother with them much anymore. He’d spent three decades with them because the oldest of them found him amusing, but he sought off for new experiences and they let him go on his way, as long as he would answer their letters when they sent them. 

And he tells her that animal blood could be an option, but it is certainly not as fulfilling. He compared it to starving for three days and attempting to satiate that hunger with half a granola bar. Harry had found himself much more dangerous the days that he had to feed off an animal because being around humans afterward was much more tempting. To eat half the granola bar and then be placed in the center of a buffet -- it would take a man with resolve as strong as tungsten not to snap and make a plate. That’s why there is a network of feeders in place, who enjoy the arousal that seeps through their veins when the teeth of his kind slip into the tender skin of their neck. 

Harry had many feeders before he had met Y/N, but he claims that none of them have tasted as sweet as she does. Y/N finds it odd that she bristles at the compliment, but she doesn’t dwell on it. 

“Why would you ask a silly thing like that?” Harry had turned his body, then his head to face her, his brow pinched in confusion.

She shrugs, nodding toward the screen, “He’s so adverse about changing her until she’s like, dead. Then he’s fine to do it. Just wanted to know your thoughts.” 

“There is no need to change you,” he answers easily, his arms tightening around her body, “You’ve taken on my lifespan, and you stay warm, soft and full of blood. It would be silly to make you like me.” 

Y/N places her hands back in his hair, scratching gently at his scalp and she watches as his stony exterior melts to reveal his softened core, “I know, Sweetheart, I was just asking. It was hypothetical.” 

Harry eyes her for a moment before he slid his arms from around her and worms his way further up the bed from where he had been originally. Y/N shifts with his body, watching him carefully as he reaches toward her face, his hand cradling her cheek, “If it were the only way to preserve your life, I would do so in a second if that is what you wanted.” He looped her hair behind the shell of her ear, “If you put considerate thought into it -- and I mean years, upon years of thought -- and it was the life that you chose you wished to live, then I would bend at your will. However, it is not a matter I take lightly to discuss hypotheticals about. The man who made me immortal only did so because he no longer wished to live a lonely, companionless life. I have never wished to commit such a selfish act.”

Nodding, she says, “I understand,” before turning her face in his palm, pressing a chaste kiss to the skin before nestling back against it, “I didn’t mean to trivialize it, so I’m sorry.”  

“Do not apologize for asking questions. I enjoy that you want to know about my life beyond that of immortality, and hearing your theories is amusing.” He presses a kiss to her mouth, nudging against her nose gently with his own, “Do know that I believe the man on the screen to be a coward.” 

Y/N gasps as he settles back against the mountain of pillows he’d created with her in mind, her brows raised, “Why?”

Harry looks at her like the answer should be as clear as the expression on his face, “You do not think so?” He motions toward the movie, “All this, that and the other about how he wishes her to be safe but he thrusts her into a world where he is uncertain he could keep her away from harm.” He finds her hand, lacing their fingers together and holding her -- he had confessed to her he liked the warmth of her palm against his own, as he liked the warmth of her anything against him, “If I were not certain I could protect you, or restrain myself from feeding too much from you, then I would have not allowed myself in your life at all. No matter how terribly it hurt.” 

She jutted her bottom lip out, and Harry must have found it inviting because he leans in to take a cautious nip at it, “When you met me, you disliked me right?” 

“Couldn’t stand you,” he answers honestly, “But only because your blood appealed to me so strongly and you spoke to me familiarly. I’d lost interest in humans a century ago, yet you stumbled upon me in one of my hungriest moments, and it took every ounce of self-restraint not to tilt your little neck to the side and feed on you right there. I knew you were safe though, with me -- I knew I would do nothing, but the fact that I wanted to feed from you but was so repulsed by the thought of harming you was more than aggravating.” 

Y/N remembers it vividly; she remembers stumbling upon him, being intimidated but ridiculously intrigued by the man in the woods in the middle of the night. He didn’t play a cat and mouse game with her. . .didn’t take the predator/prey approach and made her so uncomfortable that she fled of her own will. No, he had demanded that she leave the area. And when she met him again, he questioned her fiercely on whether or not she was a woodland nymph. 

She asks him now,  his reasoning for the accusation, and he shrugs his shoulders, “I met you in the woods and afterward I could think of nothing but. Of course, it was our bond, however, at the time I had concluded that you were a magical being trying to interfere with my way of life. And I was concerned about the way you softened me. Why should I let such a tiny little thing make me feel as if I could blush?” He mocked himself at the end and it drags a smile at her mouth as she shakes her head, “I couldn’t feed without thinking of you. No blood was satisfying, and I had unknowingly followed your scent back to where I had met you in the woods. That’s where I laid down — I dreamt of you. When you came to get me I was sure I was hallucinating.”

Y/N shuffles now, her interest in the movie waning as Harry exposed this anecdote, “Really? And you just let me take you home?” She shakes her head, “Y’know the whole time I was so scared because I thought once you woke up you’d be angry with me.” 

“I was,” he admits, helping her as she lifted her knee and straddled his lap, “I was livid with you, not because you helped me, but because I knew had I been anyone else, you still would have helped me, and you would’ve been in so much danger. You know what I was thinking? After I fed from you?” Y/N hums, encouraging him to continue, “Silly little human! How could she just take me home? Is she not aware of all the criminal people in this world? Mind you, these are the thoughts of a monster.”

“You aren’t a monster,” she nestled closer to him, playing and fiddling with the seam on his clothes at his shoulder, “Reckon if you were you would have killed me then.”

He hums at her, rubbing his fingers up the length of her back, “I am glad you were a silly little thing. You gave me no chance to deny the connection I held with you.” Harry puckers his lips for her and Y/N presses her own to them softly. Once they part, Harry coaxes her so she presses the front of her body against him, “I don’t understand his fixation with the human girl either.” 

Y/N huffs a laugh through her nose, “Now you’re being hypocritical.” 

He shakes his head assuredly, “Not at all. She is unremarkable, why put his whole life at risk?” 

“I always assumed they had some bond like thing. . .like how we do. She’s a lot different in the books too.” 

Harry appears to be unsatisfied with the answer, instead holding her closer to his body, “No, they are unlike us,” he tilts his face against her head, “We are better.” He gives no further explanation, but like most things, Harry utters this with so much conviction it sounds like it is fact. 

So she snuggles nearer to him. 

“We are better.” She agrees.