Spirit Away
(A look into something a bit unique to Dwayne in the vampiric banes department. Vampires are fae-like, and that means old human desires like wanting children get a little fucked up when you become something that can't actually make a biological child, and also old magic. TW: implication of child kidnapping, somewhat unsettling focus on observing young children in public)
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Dwayne likes children.
The pack knows it. Dwayne knows it. Knows it intimately.
On the Boardwalk in summer, when families bring their little ones with them past sunset, hands sticky with candy, hair under hats to protect them from a sun that's left the sky, little feet stumbling under their own exhaustion and overstimulated fun, Dwayne will sit and. Watch.
He hears their little heartbeats, their short breaths as they try to keep up with the adults around them. Sometimes, if they wander close by enough, he imagines he could reach out and touch.
He never does. But he could.
It's not because he wants to do something to harm them. The thought alone makes his stomach revolt and hands curl into claws. He's eaten those that do.
But there is something inside of him that wants. It wants to hold those little bodies close. It wants them in his arms. To have. To see sleeping peacefully and watch all night. To hear laughing and dry away tears. To feed, and run with, and show them things, and tell them things so that he himself might never forget because the memory is no longer his alone.
Dwayne knows at one point, he wanted to be a father. It had seemed like something of a still-distant goal at the time, but achievable.
The wrong place, the wrong time. Max took that away from him.
Now, the old, human desire mixes with something else, this inhuman mind and inhuman need taking that and building itself a new perspective, and a new want.
Humans had things they considered having ownership over.
But vampires had mine.
Dwayne knows that to him, if he would allow himself to give into the impulse, the child would be his.
Never to harm. Never to treat with anything but the most careful, warmest of love.
Dwayne likes children.
He must never be allowed near them.
