15! Tell me things! I want to know!
15! Yes! So, this started as a Hannibal fanfic but I liked the concept and decided I'd rather try to approach it from an origfic perspective. It's a wlw (and other relationships, but they're the focus) story about a psychologist who meets a vampire (also a psychologist) at a work conference (yes, seriously) and they start up a torrid affair. I probably won't wind up keeping the title, if I ever do wind up finishing the story.
Thank you so much for the ask!
Here's a little snippet, to give you a taste:
“How do you not know Dr. Achard?”
Lena lifted one shoulder in a shrug. While specialty fields of academia like psychology were—often rightly—lambasted for being insular by nature, theirs wasn’t so incestuous a community that one could be reasonably expected to keep track of any and every rarified member who had ever left their mark on it in some way or another.
Pravina heaved a deep, wounded sigh and squeezed Lena’s arm before she let it go. “Okay,” she said, flapping her hands in front of her face like an overwrought mother in a period drama. She pressed her lips into a thoughtful line and shook her head, asking mournfully, “Where do I even start?”
“I generally recommend the beginning.”
Pravina rolled her eyes, reaching over to swat at Lena again, though this time she barely made contact, the tips of her fingers only just skimming Lena’s bicep. “You’re hilarious.”
“Seriously,” Pravina pressed on, twisting in her seat until she was facing Lena dead on, “I can’t believe you’ve never heard of Iphigenia Achard. She’s like, the consummate lecturer on exanguidine offenders. She’s been speaking on the topic since - ” Pravina paused, sighing out a breath that made her cheeks puff and her lips flap. “I don’t know. The early nineteen hundreds at least.”
Lena’s eyebrows jumped toward her hair. “She’s a vampire?”
“One of the more famous ones,” Pravina confirmed. “She was also one of the first women awarded a Doctorate of Psychology from the Sorbonne, back in 1883. Followed that up with a medical degree from the Royal College of Surgeons in 1895. I know she practiced for a few years after she came to America, but she gave it up for academia pretty early on.” Pravina crossed her arms on the table and drummed her fingers against its surface. “She stopped taking patients sometime in the 1960s, and I don’t think she’s given a talk in a decade or more. I don’t know what brought her out of retirement, but - ” Pravina trailed off again, shaking her head and gazing, mystified into the middle distance as she plucked her wineglass by the stem and took a long, slow sip. “That she’s speaking at all is a big deal. A very big deal. I didn’t want to miss my chance.”
“Wow,” Lena said, fiddling with the decorative sprig of rosemary sticking up out of her glass. She felt fairly bowled over. “I had no idea.”
She and Pravina turned in unison to smile at West as he dropped his beer unceremoniously onto the table. He had a tiny cocktail napkin folded unevenly in one hand and was using it to dab at a wet stain on his tie.
“Iphigenia Achard,” Lena offered with a frown. “What happened?”
West’s jaw tightened and his nostrils flared, eyes flicking to the side like there might be someone hovering over his shoulder, as he huffed, “Nothing. Some jackass decided he wanted to cut the bloodless in line and knocked another guy’s scotch over on his way past me.”
Lena flinched, and Pravina sucked a pained breath through her teeth. As derogatory comments went, there were worse things a vampire could be called than ‘bloodless,’ but it certainly wasn’t polite.
“You need me to go set him straight?” Pravina asked, raising her hand and curling it into a fist.
“No,” West murmured, and turned a shy smile in her direction. “Thanks. I took care of it.”