"Will you tell me a story?" Daniel asked, at the end of a long night, at what was the second anniversary of his turning that Daniel and Marius had spent together.
The last year had been... rather more difficult. Marius had made both of them the silent promise that this year would not again be the same.
"Whatever you wish, young one," Marius said softly. "What would please you? A ghost story? One of a necromancer, perhaps?"
"Will you tell me about when you became a vampire?" Daniel asked softly, still not meeting his eye. "There was a druid involved, wasn't there?"
"A God of the Grove," Marius uttered, his voice still soft but now for a different reason. Marius did not like to think of his beginnings.
He supposed he was a little like Daniel in that way. The past still had such power to cause such pain.
"That's right." Daniel frowned, as though he was trying to remember something, then he let it pass as though accepting his brain still wouldn't work the way he wanted it to. The way he still sometimes expected it to nonetheless. "Would you tell me about that?"
"Will that help?" Marius asked him, lifting one fair brow.
Daniel gave a shrug, retreating back into quiet. Marius didn't know if it was because he'd lost his words to answer, or whether it was simply just Daniel did not know the answer to Marius' question.
And so Marius moved into granting to Daniel what he had asked for. With his soft, even cadence, Marius articulated the story of how one called Mael brought an aging scholar of the age of forty into the wood where the burned and crippled vampire known only as the God of the Grove could no longer inspire the devotion his followers required of him.
"I was to replace him," Marius murmured in his carefully measured tone. "I did not know that at the time. I did not even yet know of such immortals existed."
"Apart from the Greek Gods," Daniel acerbically inserted, having found his voice again for a moment, to Marius' delight.
He smiled. Daniel's engagement made unpacking this story for him all the more worthwhile.
"Apart from them," he agreed. Not Gods of the Grove those. A god of the sky, and lightning. Another of the sea and all its creatures. Still one more of darkness and underworld. And so, so many of their siblings and lovers and offspring.
Marius wondered how much his life would have been changed had even just Hades proven demonstrably real; capable of overcoming the druids who had kept Marius until his escape.
Alas, it had been many long centuries since Marius had believed in any god.
Marius learned the language of the druids, he told Daniel. The language that would enable him to converse with those of a world Marius had been unable to previously imagine.
Nobody had ever told him that a human couldn't hope to live with the knowledge of what they were without going insane.
Marius hadn't remained human long enough for that to become any real issue.
And then on the night of the Feast of Samhain, Marius was walked to the great oak tree, where the blood drinker in that place taught him what lessons he could of their kind before bringing him into the blood. It was he who gave Marius the purpose that turned into him becoming the caretaker to the Mother and Father of them all, long before Akasha's bloody rise.
Daniel was silent a long time while Marius was locked in his own thoughts. "Feast of Samhain," he said, breaking into Marius' darker thoughts. "That's... Halloween, yeah?"
Marius ensured that he could speak without his voice breaking before he ever opened his mouth. "It is. Yes."
Daniel smiled, his eyes seeming to go far away for a moment. But not too far. He didn't seem to struggle to come back. But, finally, Daniel observed softly, "You became a vampire at the same time of year as me."
Marius stared at this one so young in the blood, the fledgling of his own fledgling. He felt a softness rise in him for the first time, then, for a very long time. How simple Daniel made it. Bypassing entirely the shared trauma all blood drinkers seemed to carry, just that of being brought into the blood.
It had been something he tried to spare Armand many centuries before and, perhaps, in that one aim Marius had succeeded. But there were so many other ways he had failed him, and Marius keenly held onto each.
Ways that, centuries later, Daniel had somehow gone on to paying for on Marius' behalf.
There were times Marius could barely look at Daniel wouldn't feeling the guilt of ages washing over him. Was endless pain and suffering their only legacy?
And then Daniel, in a momentary reprieve, would say something so utterly genuine and simple that the reframing could bring beauty to something Marius had only seen as ugly before. He managed to bring Marius back to himself when he struggled to find his own purpose in this too modern world.
"I did," Marius said, unable to find the words to articulate the gravity of feelings Daniel had unwittingly stirred in him. "Yes."
Daniel nodded and smiled gently as his eyes began to flutter shut. It would not be dawn for some time yet, but Daniel still felt its coming far sooner than Marius.
Marius only watched the young one as he slept, this boy who contained multitudes that may have gone overlooked if if another lost vampire hadn't decided to offer him an interview.
