singillatim | open / and I've been putting out the fire with gasoline

As Dorian attempts to wriggle out of Thomas's grasp, two things are obvious. 1: he looks like shit in the sunlight. There are bags under his eyes, he looks tired, this is the air of a man who looks like he hasn't gotten a good night's sleep in a week. 2: he's got skinny little noodle arms and can't push Jopson off of him.

Dorian absolutely knows that he killed that woman. Dorian is also going to lie like a bitch about it. He's a decent enough liar—let's see how well it will go.

"Kill who? Look, get off me! What are you talking about?"

And Thomas rears back to hit him square across his pale, terrible face. How did he ever think that he was so handsome?

He's a pretentious little shit, just like Thomas had predicted. And he's not going to let him get away with fucking murder.

Dorian lets out a yelp of pain as Thomas hits him. He moves his hand up to his nose, which he knows must be bleeding. As he does so, he looks over at the woman on the ground.

Time to put his acting skills to the test.

"Wait. She's dead? That...you've got to understand, I didn't try to kill her."

The punch lands and Thomas glares down at him, his hands pinning the other man by the shoulders.

"Of course she is. What were you doing?"

He's not anywhere close to believing him, but at least he's stopped hitting.

"It's complicated," Dorian frowns. There's no point denying that he killed that woman. She's there, she's dead, better take responsibility. But if he can spin it as 'this was an honest mistake' or 'this is the fault of my new odd gifts,' maybe he'll get out of this without being punched again.

"And it's never happened like that. I just...look, can we talk about this inside? I don't do well in the sunlight."

Case in point, he looks terrible at the moment. No lying there, he looks like shit.

"No," he says but stands up. "You're going to bury her."

Because he looks terrible, because he looks awful, Thomas wants to make his life worse. "It's the least you can do while you tell me your reasons for killing her."

Dorian looks up at Thomas. He rolls his eyes a little before pointing out, "We're going to talk about this inside. Otherwise, I'm going to pass out halfway through burying her, and you'll have to finish the job yourself."

Which he's sure Thomas will be fine with. He seems like he'll be perfectly fine letting Dorian collapse. But now that he's fed, now that he's drained that woman, he's noticing something about his body. The hunger inside is satiated. He'll be fine for a while, like he was beforehand. But he still feels like absolute dogshit in the sunlight. And considering that he's been in the sunlight for a while...yeah. He's going to pass out.

"Like I said. I don't do well in the sunlight. And part of the reasons why I accidentally killed her involve that."

"Then go," he says and trudges over to the poor woman himself. "Wait inside."

He's not going to let her sit and freeze out here. She's not going to be a body frozen in the arctic for the elements. He's not going to let another person be forgotten like that. He picks her up and holds her close, grunting a bit with the effort.

Dorian gives Thomas a little nod. Pushing himself up, he makes his way to the house. Door open, go inside, find a chair. And the moment he's sitting down, inside, not in the sun, a little bit of color starts to come back to his face. He still doesn't look great. There are far too many windows in this place and he's still getting some ambient light. But when Thomas comes back inside, he'll find Dorian, not having moved from the chair that he slumped down in, taking deep breaths as if to calm and re-center himself. And hey, he is looking a bit better!

He does look better. He looks so much better that Thomas crosses the room towards him to hit him across the face again.

Fuck.

Dorian can't help it: he lets out a yelp of pain as Thomas smacks him across the face. Still sitting in his chair, he looks up to sass,

"Done yet? If you beat me up too much, doubt I'll be able to answer any questions you may have."

He stands there in front of him, arms crossed, and stares.

"That depends entirely on what your story is."

Dorian remains seated, keeping still. He doesn't want to make any moves or give Thomas any excuses. This is a perfectly normal, calm, useful conversation that will end with nobody else getting hit.

"I assume you've had one of those odd dreams where you wake up changed? You wake up the next morning and you can broadcast your thoughts or shoot fire from your hands or whatever other nonsense this place has. I had one of them a few months ago. The Darkwalker showed up in the middle of that dream. And when I woke up, I was...different."

He folds his arms across his chest. The dreams aren't new. None of this is new. But he waits anyway.

"Go on."

"I suppose the closest thing you could describe me as now is a vampire," Dorian dryly remarks, knowing how insane this sounds. "But I don't drain blood. With the gift that the Darkwalker gave me, I drain their...essence, maybe? Their soul? I don't know. And I don't want to do this," he quickly interjects. "And I've been trying to keep this under control. But it just makes me so hungry and after a while, I just...I can't take it anymore."

And that part, at least, he's telling the truth. There's a little hint of desperation in Dorian's voice. That hunger burns inside him, pushing him forward to do things that most people would view as monstrous (but though he doesn't want to admit it, Dorian just views as survival. He'll burn through everyone here if it means he stays alive.)

He sounds like Hickey and Thomas feels his stomach drop, his chest contract, his entire body go cold.

But he can't be angry. There's something in him that can't - take it.

He wrinkles his nose. "The Darkwalker did this to you?"

Dorian nods. There's a moment before he continues to talk.

"I had a dream, back in March. The Aurora was buzzing, shining bright as everything in the town hummed with life. That Enola woman was there. She seemed...overwhelmed. She apologized that she couldn't be there and said we were doing good. I don't know why I didn't ask her any questions—maybe I knew I was dreaming? Or maybe everything happened so fast."

Dorian continues to talk. His voice is calm, as if he's narrating a story instead of talking about something that happened to him. "Everything went black. Enola was terrified. I didn't know then what that meant and when I turned to her, something dragged her away. It pulled her into the earth, as if to entomb her. And then there was only me. In the darkness."

Best to tell Thomas all of this. He's started this story, he's got to finish it. Besides, there's something...nice about vocalizing this, about telling someone about that horrible dream. Other people must have had it too, Dorian's learned enough to know that by now. But as he has no idea who has this same gift...well, it's nice to get a scrap of empathy, even if he's pretty sure this conversation is going to end with Thomas punching him again.

"I know what the Darkwalker looks like now. It has three glowing skulls, like some kind of dog. The jaws dripped what I thought was drool, but I know can't be regular saliva. Spit isn't...thick like that was. It lunged at me, snapped at me, for a moment I was in the world's wort pain, more pain that I thought I could possibly endure...and then I woke up. I was so wrecked that I slept nonstop for the next day. But the day after that, when I got up, I noticed that when I was out in the sun, I felt like shit. I can't stay out too long, otherwise I'll outright collapse—I timed my travel here so that I could spend the sunniest parts of the day in the mines. I also noticed the hunger then. And it's grown ever since."

Thomas narrows his eyes again, but it's not at Dorian this time. It's at the Darkwalker, at the creature that has plagued them over and over again for over a year. He can't escape these creatures, it seems.

Instead of saying anything, he turns his back and walks into the kitchen, coming back with a small block of ice wrapped in a towel.

"For your face," he says softly.

Dorian remains seated, not wanting to move or do anything until Thomas returns. When he does...this is unexpected. Dorian blinks slightly, obviously not surprising the ice.

"Thank you." With a little nod, he puts the ice up to his nose—hopefully this will reduce the swelling.

He wants to ask 'what do you plan to do with me next'—after all, Thomas can easily rat him out to the entire community. But he keeps that thought to himself. Instead, Dorian looks over at Thomas, waiting to see what the man does next.

Thomas folds his arms across his chest. "You have to tell them what you did. If others are like you, then you need to - determine another plan." He shakes his head. "I'm not going to kill you."

He wasn't sure if Dorian understood that was a possibility.

But consider this: he doesn't want to do that. He'd rather they push all this under the rug and not deal with things? We can forgive a little murder.

Dorian nods, a little frown on his face, before he points out, "I'll tell people in person. But there's not Facebook or Twitter or anything like that here—and I highly doubt that many people read the bulletin board. It's entirely possible that a few people will miss the memo about what someone like me can do. Hell, I didn't learn about the Forest Talkers until a few days ago and I've been here months."

A round-about way of saying 'don't come for his ass if people don't hear about this.'

Those sure are gibberish words, but Thomas nods along as if he understands.

"You can call a meeting. You can post it. But that woman was a person, Mr. Gray, and you took her life from her. That may not mean anything to you, but many people do care about others."

But he doesn't want to.......

Jopson is absolutely going to have to get onto Dorian's ass about this because he will be dragging his feet like nobody's business.

But there's something about Jopson's words that irritate Dorian. He frowns for a moment before pointing out, "I'm not callous. The fact that someone has died does mean something to me." Just not as much as his own existence does.

He doesn't believe him at all and shoots him a dark look.

"And if I hadn't come along? What would you have done?"

"I don't know."

And that, at least, is an honest answer. Dorian's got a plan for dealing with corpses back in Milton. He doesn't really have a plan for dealing with them in Lakeside.

"All I know is I'm not the heartless monster you want me to be."

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