The destruction of the Old City Sanctuary has been hard on everyone. Fortunately, the city officials haven't kicked up too much fuss about it, given that it had been a private property and there was no lasting damage to anything else besides, but there'd still been a truckload of abnormals to see rehomed to say nothing of the sheer amount of wreckage that had been left behind.
Nor is he too proud to admit that he spent what has been very nearly an embarrassing amount of time searching through the rubble for even the slightest sign of Helen, not just for his sake, but for Henry's too.
(He has never been meant for this, he thinks, in his darker moments. Never meant to be the last of them; never meant to be host to a desperation that feels as if it's very nearly going to pull him apart, and the day he excavates what was once the wine cellar it very nearly breaks him.)
But life must go on, and so he stays long enough to make sure the last few bits and pieces are seen to the way Helen would have wanted, and never mind all the times he wants to just yell at the sky with the unfairness of it. Instead, he spends his time being pricklier than usual even with the few people he knows, and when the abnormals have all been suitably housed, he simply... vanishes. Not completely, of course, but he wants nothing more to do with Old City for a good long while.
He doesn't resurface until several days later, in a hotel in New York. Under an assumed name of course - the last thing he wants to do is be found by anyone looking him up by name - but that makes it all the more interesting when he comes back for the night to find that there's a package waiting for him. One that is very suspiciously shaped like a wine bottle, and when he finds it's a '46 besides it's all he can do to smile and thank the person at the front desk instead of reacting how he wants to.
It's not until after he gets to his room that it occurs to him that it's empty (he goes back down to the front desk, feeling terribly foolish the whole way, to ask if there were anything else, only to find - rather as he'd suspected - that there isn't). He doesn't realize that there's something neatly folded up and slid into the bottle until it's hidden behind the label until the next morning; he spends a mildly frustrating couple of hours working out a way to get it out without breaking the bottle. (Empty it might be, but he'd still feel terrible about smashing the bottle, out of respect for the former contents.)
He laughs, too, when he gets the little slip of paper out and unfolded, because really, that or cry and he'd rather not do the latter. It's a note, written in the one thing almost no other person on earth would have been able to read: the ancient language of the vampires.
no subject
Nor is he too proud to admit that he spent what has been very nearly an embarrassing amount of time searching through the rubble for even the slightest sign of Helen, not just for his sake, but for Henry's too.
(He has never been meant for this, he thinks, in his darker moments. Never meant to be the last of them; never meant to be host to a desperation that feels as if it's very nearly going to pull him apart, and the day he excavates what was once the wine cellar it very nearly breaks him.)
But life must go on, and so he stays long enough to make sure the last few bits and pieces are seen to the way Helen would have wanted, and never mind all the times he wants to just yell at the sky with the unfairness of it. Instead, he spends his time being pricklier than usual even with the few people he knows, and when the abnormals have all been suitably housed, he simply... vanishes. Not completely, of course, but he wants nothing more to do with Old City for a good long while.
He doesn't resurface until several days later, in a hotel in New York. Under an assumed name of course - the last thing he wants to do is be found by anyone looking him up by name - but that makes it all the more interesting when he comes back for the night to find that there's a package waiting for him. One that is very suspiciously shaped like a wine bottle, and when he finds it's a '46 besides it's all he can do to smile and thank the person at the front desk instead of reacting how he wants to.
It's not until after he gets to his room that it occurs to him that it's empty (he goes back down to the front desk, feeling terribly foolish the whole way, to ask if there were anything else, only to find - rather as he'd suspected - that there isn't). He doesn't realize that there's something neatly folded up and slid into the bottle until it's hidden behind the label until the next morning; he spends a mildly frustrating couple of hours working out a way to get it out without breaking the bottle. (Empty it might be, but he'd still feel terrible about smashing the bottle, out of respect for the former contents.)
He laughs, too, when he gets the little slip of paper out and unfolded, because really, that or cry and he'd rather not do the latter. It's a note, written in the one thing almost no other person on earth would have been able to read: the ancient language of the vampires.