Death Bite (Peterick)

Epilogue

Patrick's POV:

She lived a short life, and sometimes I felt a bit more grateful of my own whenever I came to visit. I liked to think she could hear me, though I knew not much of the afterlife. My flowers were strewn across her grave with the scent of rain bouncing off the grass around it. I placed a hand on the cool stone and read the inscription in my mind.

Elisa Yao: The sun rises over a dark world. She lives forever in the light.

I had walked by our high school the other night and saw the kids dressed in their dresses and suits for prom, and I imagined what it would've been like had the war not happened. Perhaps I would've changed my mind and accompanied her. She would've worn the most beautiful gown and danced with a smile on her face, a smile I seemed to have forgotten now. All I had left were the pictures stored away in my closet with the rest of my memories of a life I could barely recall sometimes. The blood was all I ever craved the first few days, and my strength was beyond my own control.

I couldn't remember my name or who I was when all I cared about was feeding. That was over, now a nightmare of my early transitioning phase. The memories pieced themselves together, and I no longer saw the threatening eyes of stranger watching my every move, but rather, the gentle, caring gaze of a man who promised to guide me through his world. I glanced up at the grey sky and breathed in the fragrances of nature as it unfolded before me. It was a world drastically different from the one I had been used to.

An entire decade's worth of learning and growing embedded itself into our culture, and though we lived among each other now, there was still a lot more to accomplish and sort through when it came to our misunderstandings with each other. The humans rebuilt themselves and became determined to find a permanent cure for us even with a modified sun serum on the market for us to use. Perhaps the most revolutionary thing was the plasma program the hospitals had developed for us, where both human and animal donations were being offered to keep us sustained without resorting to violence. It was the advances and leaps as a society that I wished Elisa was around to see and witness. Her body was never recovered, but I decided a proper grave site would honor her memory the most.

I needed closure in some way because after the rush of controlling who I had become I started to feel how empty I was inside. Our one-sided talks slowly healed me.

"I know I don't visit you often anymore, but I think you'd want me to move on sometime," I said.
The wind blew harder then, and a rain of orange blossoms from the tree above me trickled down. It was strange, almost, how I had the planted the seed for it when I first made her a grave, and it grew to full size within a year's time.

"Don't worry. I didn't forget your 27th birthday," I told her, rubbing the petals between my fingers, "I brought you something I think you'll like."
I laid the small box out in front of me, and the wind picked up, lifting the top off. The Polaroid picture of us she had hung on her Christmas tree was inside. I kissed it and placed it on the headstone.

"Your parents gave it to me. I want you to have it, so you won't miss me if I forget to come around. I won't do it on purpose. It's just...I've got someone now. I never told you about him. Maybe I should've."
The wind was softer now, blowing across my cheeks gently, as I struggled to hold back my emotions.

"He's the one who made me like this, and I admit I was angry with him at first. I thought he was being selfish by making me suffer through this, the exact thing he hated about himself. I realized, though, after about a year of learning that Pete did the most unselfish thing in the world. He was sacrificing his life in that burning building to give me another shot, and...and when Brendon pulled us out before something worse could've happened an echo of "I love you" guided me back. He makes me happy beyond belief. There's not a day that goes by that I'm not grateful for being what I am because I get to be with him for as long as the world keeps spinning."