Manon gives you a second chance at life, sharing the gift of eternity with you. But is that really what you wanted?
✧ An: DO NOT SKIP THE TAGS, i'm back in my angst era temporarily wooo
✧ Wc: 4k ✧ Status: Completed
✧ Tags: Angst, Vampire!Manon, Vampire Bites, References to Death and Suicide, whole thing is an allegory for SA so proceed w caution, DO NOT read if not comfortable
♫ Now Playing: Instead of Here ♫
You had imagined death many times before.
Not exactly because you wanted it, though there indeed had been days when even that thought had crossed your mind, but because it had always seemed simpler than the life laid out before you. Your future had already been written by other people. Excellent grades. A respectable university. A respectable career. Marriage, if and only if your parents approved. Every hour of every day had been scheduled so meticulously that you sometimes wondered if you had ever truly made a decision entirely on your own.
Your parents called it protection. Everyone agreed you should listen to your parents.
The world was dangerous. Every news broadcast seemed to carry another story about disappearances around town or warnings to avoid travelling after sunset. Humanity knew vampires existed, but they remained hidden enough to become something between myth and reality. They were feared precisely becuse so little was understood about them.
Your parents believed fear was the only sensible response to such demonic beings. They installed heavier locks than anyone else on your road. Cameras watched every entrance to the house. Not only that.. there were cameras inside the home too. They refused to let you walk to school alone, even after you became an adult. University was attended remotely because they insisted campuses weren't safe enough (all that free-mixing between species or something something..) Friends stopped inviting you anywhere because the answer was always the same.
"No."
It was easier not to ask. You learned to accept your room as your entire world. Your desk sat beneath the window. Textbooks towered around you like walls inside walls. Every morning began with study. The only way toward freedom seemed to be getting a good enough degree to support yourself. Thus, every evening ended with study too. If you looked outside long enough, you could almost convince yourself the people laughing in the streets belonged to another species entirely.
Sometimes, late at night, you imagined climbing out of that window. Not to run away forever but just to walk without someone knowing where you were. Just once feel complete and utter peace.
Then you met Manon.
She had been standing beneath the old oak tree just beyond your garden wall one rainy evening, watching the sky as though she had nowhere else to be. She looked ordinary enough that you almost hadn't noticed her. Almost.
She smiled when she caught you staring. You should have shut the curtains, turned around and losy yourself back into the textbooks. Instead, you couldn’t help it, you opened the window.
That single decision became the first choice that had ever truly felt like yours.
The conversations started cautiously. You remained on your side of the wall while she stood beneath the branches outside. You spoke about books first because books were all you really knew, then music, then places neither of you had visited. You never asked why she usually only appeared after sunset, and she never asked why you never left the house.
Eventually, neither question needed answering.
She understood your loneliness before you ever admitted it. She understood you in a way no one else ever had and you hadn’t even needed to explain yourself. Unlike everyone else, she never spoke to you as though you were fragile. She listened, she laughed at your terrible jokes, she teased you for how seriously you took everything.
And you understood her “condition” before she had even named it explicitly. Some nights you forgot entirely that she wasn't human. When she finally confessed she was a vampire, you weren't afraid at all. Perhaps you should have been. Instead, you laughed. It all just seemed a little surreal. She was your friend, you knew you could trust her.
"My parents would faint."
"They'd probably try to kill me."
"Oh they most definitely would."
---
The last thing you remembered was running. Not from Manon but rather toward her. Your parents had found out. You still didn't know how. A neighbour maybe, perhaps theyd seen you climb over the wall or was it one of the cameras? Whatever, it hardly mattered now.
The shouting had started before breakfast and hadn't stopped until after sunset. Your mother had cried. Your father had looked horrified like you’d just cursed the bloodline for eternity.
"You've been talking to one of them."
"She's not-"
"Don't defend that monster."
You attempted to defend Manon but you were shut up immediately. The slap stunned you more than it hurt. It was an odd feeling, it wasn't the sting of the contact that got you, your father had never hit you before.
"You are never leaving this house again."
"As if I ever did."
“After all we’ve done for you? I gave up everything to care for you and raise you. We wanted to protect you and this is how you repay us? You ungrateful b-“
You left and returned to your room before you could hear your mother’s god awful voice complete that sentence. That night you climbed out of the window anyway. You found Manon exactly where she always waited. The relief on her face disappeared the moment she saw yours as you ran straight into her arms.
"What happened?"
"They know."
She didn't ask how. Instead, she wrapped her arms around you while you cried harder than you ever had in years.
"I can't do this anymore," you whispered against her shoulder. "They'll never let me leave. They watch me every second. They decide everything. I have no life of my own, I have never been allowed to live, and I envy those who have."
You expected comfort. Perhaps a silly promise of a plan to run away together that you knew would never happen in actuality. Perhaps simply someone to listen. nstead Manon's expression changed, something settled inside her eyes: a decision. You didn't recognize it until much later.
"I'm going to get you out," she said quietly.
You looked up. "What?"
"They don't own you."
"I know."
"They'll never stop until they’re dead."
"I know."
"You deserve a life."
You managed a tired smile. "I'd settle for an afternoon."
She smiled sadly. "No." Her thumb brushed the tears from your cheek. "I'm going to give you so so so much more than that."
You thought she meant escape, you thought she meant another city or another country, you thought she meant freedom. She kissed your forehead first. Then your lips as you smiled against her mouth.
"I love you Manon." you whispered and she whispered it back.
"I'm sorry."
Before you could ask why she’d say that, pain exploded through your neck. You felt it all as her teeth sunk deeper into your flesh. You tried to grab at her shirt, her hair, anything that was in reach and push her back. You tried, you really did, it wasn’t your fault you couldn’t get her to stop. A sudden weakness overtook your body; you could no longer hold yourself up.
When you woke, your heart was gone, npt metaphorically but literally gone. The silence inside your chest was unbearable. Instinctively, your hand flew to your sternum, searching for the familiar rhythm that had accompanied every moment of your life but there was nothing. No pulse or beat but just an uncomfortable stillness.
Cold panic spread through you. You sat upright so suddenly that the old wooden bed groaned beneath your weight. The room swam with impossible detail. It felt as though all of your senses had been sharpened greatly. It was so overwhelming you felt sick. You could see every crack in the stone walls. Hear somewhere outside as rain struck leaves one drop at a time, each impact distinct enough to count. The world was infinitely louder, you couldn't bare it.
Across the room sat Manon. You felt her presence before you evern saw her. She had clearly been waiting for your awakening. The moment your eyes met hers, relief washed across her face so completely that she smiled.
"You woke up."
You stared at her for a second and then down at your hands, they didn’t feel like your own. Your skin was unnaturally pale. Every old scar had vanished. The tiny burn from spilling tea over your wrist. The paper cuts from years of textbooks. Even the calluses on the side of your fingers from writing so much were gone.
But there was a mark that still remained on your body: the two small punctures at your neck. Memory of it returned all at once, causing your stomach twist horribly, letting that overwhelming grasp of panic take a hold of you once again. Your voice came out sounding unfamiliar.
"W-What did you do?"
Manon stood slowly, as though approaching a frightened animal.
"I saved you."
The words echoed inside your head. Saved. You touched the wounds on your neck again, flinching at the ache of contact.
"No."
"I freed you."
"No. No. No. NO!"
"They'll never control you again."
Your hand fell away from your throat.
"What the fuck did you do to me? You turned me."
She nodded once.
"I had to. I wanted to free you."
You simply stared while the room became impossibly quiet. Then you laughed, not because anything was funny, but because it was the only sound your body seemed capable of making. It came out cracked and breathy. This whole situation was just so incredulous you couldn’t believe it.
"You...youve taken me from one prison and thrown me in another. The only way you could’ve freed me was to give me autonomy." The laugh dissolved into something closer to a sob. "You should’ve let me make my own choice but no! you had to go and be selfish and decide what I required yourself."
“I did it for you, isn’t this what you wanted?”
“You aren’t some fucking saviour, stop acting so righteous.”
“Be grateful that I gave you a second chance to change your life.” Manon’s eyebrows furrowed. You’d never seen her with such an expression full of hate before.
“What do you not understand? I never wanted this. You’ll get to move on with your life and I’ll be stuck with this mark forever. I will never get out.”
---
After that day, time stopped behaving like something you could measure. At first, there is still shock. An expanding disbelief that perhaps this was all an illusion, some type of fever dream, you begged that you would wake up any second now. You wait for the body to correct itself, for reality to admit there has been a mistake. That is how it has always worked before, in every illness, every injury, every moment of pain; there is always an ending no matter how long it takes to get there. There is always a point where things resolve back into normal. But nothing resolves; instead the world continues and you remain stuck
You recall Manon talking and talking though her voice sounds distant, she spoke of excuse and reasoning. She said words like gift and freedom and eternity, as if rearranging them in a correct order might eventually make them mean something useful. You hear her, but comprehension keeps slipping through your fingers.
You step backward without meaning to, until your shoulders meet the wall. The stone is cold through your clothes, grounding you in a way your own body no longer can. You press your hand to your chest again, harder this time, as though pressure might force something to return.
Nothing does.
Manon reaches for you but you flinch away so sharply that even she hesitates. “Don’t,” you say, but it comes out fractured. “Don’t touch me.”
Her hand freezes in midair. “I thought you would understand.”
Something inside you cracks at that. “I don’t understand anything.” you whisper.
The truth of it lands heavier than fear. You realize you are no longer standing inside the life you knew. You are standing in the aftermath of someone else’s certainty.
You do not fully understand what you are doing at first. It begins as as a need to escape air that feels too tight and too permanent. The world outside the window looks normal enough: trees moving in the wind, birds chirping, kids playing. It was a place where life continued exactly as it always had with no regard for how your own had stopped.
The sun was shining full brightness, from your prior knowledge of how vampires worked this seemed like a way out. You go toward it because you have always been told that leaving means freedom.
What happens is not some immediate cartoonish burn to a crisp. It is not clean. It is not anything like the stories humans tell themselves about endings.
It is instead a long, agonising and disorienting collapse into pain that does not resolve, followed by an impossible return to awareness you never asked for. The worst part is not the pain itself, but the realization that pain no longer carries meaning, your body restored itself even after the damage from the sun. Pain no longer warns you of anything, pain no longer leads to an end, it simply exists.
After it passes, you are still there.. Whole and unchanged and waiting. Manon finds you afterward without needing to search.
---
Manon watches you carefully, she tries to explain the rules of what you are now. You listen sometimes other times you don’t. Because beneath everything she says is the same assumption: that this is still something you can learn to live with.
But you begin to understand something else entirely.; you are not learning a new life. You are learning the permanence of one you never agreed to.
The hunger arrives like a thought that does not belong to you. It is not dramatic at first but rather it is subtle, invasive, persistent in a way that makes everything else feel slightly out of focus. Just a gnawing sensation at the depth of your stomach but it was still manageable.
But eventually, like most things people attempt to throw a blanket over, it becomes impossible to ignore. You try not to act on it but the body you now inhabit does not negotiate. It does not understand refusal in the way you once did. It does not understand morality, it understands only the need.
“You need to feed.” Manon speaks carefully to you through the door.
“I don’t.” you answer immediately.
“You do.” she says again, softer this time.
You press your forehead against your knees, “I’d rather starve.” you whisper.
She does not respond right away. When she does her voice is lower. “You can’t.”
That is when you realise she is not trying to convince you anymore, she is trying to tell you a fact. You cannot starve because you cannot control the body you are in. When it needs to feed. It. Will. Feed.
Time loses shape after that. Maybe days or weeks passed you cannot say how long you remained there attemping to supress the ravaging feeling of hunger. The hunger intensified not just the pain in your stomach but every other sense, until even your sense of self feels secondary to it. You begin to understand, that this is not something you are choosing to resist but is something you are temporarily delaying.
It leaves you in a state of deliriousness. The world is too vivid in a way that feels wrong. Every surface is too defined and every sound too distinct. You can hear life in layers you were never meant to perceive. Somewhere nearby someone breathes, somewhere farther someone laughs, somewhere closer than either of those you can hear hearts beating and blood flowing, pulsing and calling out your name. Something in you responds before thought can form.
You try to stop walking but your body moves with a certainty that does not leave any room for hesitation. There is no struggle in your muscles. No outwardly visible war which may have reflectedthe chaos in your mind. There is only forward motion like your body has already accepted the outcome and is simply carrying you toward it.
When you see them, it is not dramatic, ut is worse than that because it is completly ordinary. An ordinary person in an ordinary place doing an ordinary thing, completely unaware that they have become the centre of your collapsing world. Your perception narrows without permission as the rest of reality falls away. Your body refuses to process anything else but the smell of their blood and the sound of it pulsing through their body.
There is a moment where something in you tries to resist, but its attempts negligible in the face of theinstinct which had taken a hold of you. When you finally give in, a sense of relief is immediate. The way the taste of their blood calms you, it fills you, from head to toe you have become a new letting strength returns to your body at once. Yet with that rational thinking returns too.
It is shame, it is horror, it is the sickening realization that even your resistance is no longer fully yours. You cry afterward as though you are watching yourself from somewhere slightly above and behind your body. Manon tries to comfort you but you cannot bear the sound of her voice in those moments.
Because every kindness she offers feels like a continuation of her same mistake. You begin to avoid her because being near her makes it harder to hold onto the one truth you are still certain of. That your life did not end and restart, it was taken mid-sentence and rewritten by someone who believed they knew the ending better than you did.
At some point in the long uncountable amount of days that follow, you stop thinking of yourself as someone who can be harmed in any final way as the concept of any sort of “final” consequence stops applying.
You only truly understand it when your awareness returns without warning, as though consciousness itself has been forced back into place. There is no soft transition, slow wake up ando drifting back into being. One moment there is nothing and the next you are inside your body again.
But “inside” is not the right word to describe it anymore. It feels more like being inserted. As if something external has taken the scattered pieces of you and pressed them back into shape whether you agreed or not.
You learn quickly that damage does not behave the way it used to. Cuts do not remain cuts. They open and they insist on staying in their temporary reality and then they close again. But its not like the usual human healing, your body changes to its past “perfect” state like time tself is being reversed.
After even pain becomes unreliable, nothing in the world seems reliable anymore. You wake where you fell. You wake as you were. Strangulation does not seem to work as you do not require oxygen in the human way. You wake without wounds. You wake perfect once more.
The worst part is not the moment leading up to any action you take but it is the waiting for the inevitable moment when your body decides you are finished being altered and begins undoing it all.
It does not matter what state you are in when that process begins. And so you are returned, always returned, the state of “not existing” has been removed from your options entirely. Because no matter how far you push, no matter how absolute your intent was your body always answers the same way: correction.
You conclude that immortality is not the absence of death but itt is the absence of authority over it.
You try to treat this as a problem to solve. Like everything else in your life, you approach it the way you were taught to approach difficulty: through logic, through persistence, through the belief that somewhere if you reallyyy think hard enough there is a correct answer waiting to be found. But there is no correct answer to something that refuses the entire premise of finality.
Manon stops speaking to you about it after time. There is guilt in her silence now, though she never names it. You can see it in the way she hesitates before entering places she knows youre in, in the way she no longer reaches for you. She gave you eternity as if it were a gift and now neither of you knows how to unwrap it.
---
Years passed and you learnt the rhythms of hunger. You learnt the weight of strength that does not belong to you. You learnt how to speak less and how to move through spaces without drawing attention. You stopped trying to find a way to one-up death.
Manon notices how you’ve changed. “You’ve stopped trying,” she says one evening. Her voice is cautious afraid of what answer she might receive.
You look at her for a long time before replying. “I’ve stopped believing the stupid lie that I can decide anything.”
Her expression tightens “Hey you know that’s not true.”
You almost laugh. “It is the only consistent truth I’ve ever lived with.”
She steps closer but stops short of touching you. “You’re still here,” she says. “That means something.”
You shake your head slowly.
“It doesn’t mean what you think it means.” And then, more quietly: “It just means I continue but I’m no longer here behind my eyes. You stole who i was. This isn’t me.”
“How many times do we have to go over thi-”
“Enough times for you to fucking understand I never wanted this! I can’t take it. I tried to end it but that didn’t work. I tried to adapt but that didnt work either. So what must I do now?”
The world outside is unchanged in ways that feel almost insulting. Your parents must've thought of you as dead by now considering you never returned after that night. They probably thought you ran away. They would probably think you deserved what had happened to you for not listening to them. You couldn't bare to go back to them either so it was better this way.
You had been thinking of them a lot recently. It didn’t really hurt anymore in the way you’d expect. You had become too detached, they felt more like facts in a history book. But at least thinking about them gave you one last idea.
The church was extremely old, you wondered if Manon was older or younger than the structure. You realised you had never actually asked her her age.
You do not belong there and that is precisely why you go. Its stone was worn smooth by centuries of believers. The priest notices you immediately. There is too much stillness in you.
He asks if you are lost znd you did almost answer honestly. Instead, you step closer and you let him see what you are. You let him see the monster you had been turned into as you knew fear worked faster than understanding.
The reaction is immediate. He reaches for what he believes is necessary and you do not stop him. Holy water. The Bible. A Crucifix. A Silver Stake. Whatever other random object he picked up, you stopped paying attention and closed your eyes.
There is a moment (small and almost imperceptible) where everything narrows into something similar to relief. But even that is not yours to keep because even now, even here, even at the edge of what you have been searching for since the moment your life was rewritten.
It is not you who decides when it ends, it is only the world and the world has never once asked you for permission.
Manon misses her ex and is determined to win her back. But first, she must know how her ex is feeling. This is when she decides to hire her younger friend Megan to do some spy work and scope out if there's still a chance. What begins as harmless plan soon backfires, unravelling into uncovered emotions, shifting loyalties and new relationships.
Manon misses her ex and is determined to win her back. But first, she must know how her ex is feeling. This is when she decides to hire her younger friend Megan to do some spy work and scope out if there's still a chance. What begins as harmless plan soon backfires, unravelling into uncovered emotions, shifting loyalties and new relationships.
i wouldnt say im a fan of f1 but i had SOME interest.. thinking emoji.. i know quite a bit of the drivers by name which is more than i can say for other sports (besides big names like messi or curry) and i keep up w it a little through friends and update accs on twt hehe
v!!!! ty for the rendezvous updates!!! I’ve been waiting to see how it’d continue and I loveeee the path it’s taking :) I hope all has been well with you
AWWWWW this is so sweet omg 🥹🥹 THANKYOU FOR READING MORE COMING SOON!! I hope you are well too have a wonderful day <3
Manon misses her ex and is determined to win her back. But first, she must know how her ex is feeling. This is when she decides to hire her younger friend Megan to do some spy work and scope out if there's still a chance. What begins as harmless plan soon backfires, unravelling into uncovered emotions, shifting loyalties and new relationships.
