Not how I imagined you

The brunette small human breathed out a sigh of relief as soon as he agreed upon her request. She would probably be able to get by with many excuses on what had went down. Many that would make it seem that she hadn’t willingly presented the siphoner with her wrist and been all like; have a drink! Free of charge. But she also wanted to avoid the overall worry that it would cause if she walked in with clear signs on her having been bitten. It was just easier to calm the crowd if they thought she had exhausted her weak bones and joints. “Yep. It’ll be our little secret,” she half-heartedly chuckled, only afterwards getting hit with the feeling of just how inappropriate it was to be bantering on such a friendly level with a proclaimed ‘monster’. And yet, the soft smile that the chuckle had brought forth, remained on her lips, as she sat down and looked down at her hands.
Bitten. It was really strange thinking of how natural it suddenly sounded. Like being bitten like this was just a new norm. Especially when the one to bite had been anything else than an animal. At least she hadn’t found out about a hidden kink where she actually had liked it. Pain had never been her thing..

“Hm?” Surprised, she lifted her head to look back towards Joseph. The unexpectancy of him starting to tell her about himself so genuinely pulled a rug from under her feet. She could so clearly hear the different in his voice. It wasn’t a tone someone arrogant used when purposefully trying to make someone feel bad for them. Pity them in exchange of mercy until they could regain their energy. And probably stab someone in the back. She had felt the same difference when he had told her ’please’. As if the dumb decision to slap him across the face really had slapped something right in him that had been hanging loose.
“I can understand how your parents might have felt. The thought of losing a child is very scary, indeed,” she decided to open up, even though she got the feeling, that he wasn’t much for wanting to talk about it. Not from the smile on his face. “Even more so if there turns out to be an actual threat under pregnancy, I can imagine.” There had, luckily, not been complications when she had been pregnant those 6 years ago, and still she had feared the possibility of them all out through the 9 months.

Carefully she held out her arm for him to bandage her up. But she still kept her other hand around the wrist as she did, subconsciously scared that she’d end up bleeding out if she removed it prematurely. And also not looking forward to letting oxygen get to the open wounds. She was already grimacing just thinking about the stinging that would lead to. Whatever numbing effect his salvia when the bite had been fresh and … dares she say ‘euphoric’, was sure to be gone by now. “It’s a bit of a shame. If you’d still just been Joshua Lightwood then we could’ve gone out for one someday. You know, to let me make up my seemingly always dishevelled appearances a bit,” she jokingly commented, her eyes averting back and forth between his face and her wrist. She had been properly dress this time around - not sporting the worn-down rope from their last encounter - but she had ruined it with blood and what not…

He reply left her muted. Not lost for words, per se - there were thing she wanted to say to it, to show her disagreement, yet she couldn’t quite get herself to say them. Of course, she wouldn’t agree that he should have been left to die, it simply wasn’t in her to think that way about anyone. Death was too permanent a thing, and she didn’t even wish it upon Joseph. She wasn’t completely delusional, although her little comment about going out could be taken as a genuine hint that she had imagined going on such a date with him even now. Joseph still deserved to pay for what he had done. He deserved to be put behind bars for life where he couldn’t hurt anyone else.
She looked at him as her head leaned slightly to the side. It was a pitiful look that dominated in her eye, and she could almost fear, that he couldn’t like it if it wasn’t that his own attention and gaze was directed down to her hand as he bandaged it up. Her other hand having laid own into her lab. She wasn’t sure how long she had just looked at his face but when she finally looked down at her hand, he was finishing up. The wrapping was experienced. The pressure just right for it to be supportive as if he had injured her wrist and still tight enough for the actual injury - the bite wounds - had enough pressure to stop the bleeding. Holding her hand still while the wrapping it, he had been so …delicate she noticed.

Her cousin. Cecilia! Yes! That was right. She needed her! Maeve’s expression snapped back to the alarming features of concern. “Right!” It could only go too slow… However she had time to let her glance hover on his hand, which she in the end didn’t end up taking as she stood up from the bathtub and strode passed him and further out of the bath room. She would never admit to it but it had tightened around her chest when he had dismissed her, reverting right back to the acted role of the annoying and hoggish man. Having seen another real side of him… it was very obvious that the other side was fake.

Not looking back at him, she quickly moved back into the living room, accidently looking towards the blood soaked spot, where she had found the Siphoner laying. The bloody chair leg was still there too. And then she found her jacket and picked it up from the floor, again, removing her attention from the spot again and making sure to turn around the way which wouldn’t have to fronting it for a second time. Her eyes instead sought out Joseph. “How are we going to get to the hospital? The taxi driver you.. enchanted to get me here drove off even before I could get probably out of the car. And even if you had any magical powers left in you, teleporting wouldn’t work. Isn’t that right?” She had received a vague understanding of her… powers, if one could even call them that, so she still had to put a question mark to things from time to time.

You have heard about a car, right? Had she heard of a ca-… Oh, he was cheeky! Of course she knew about cars. She usually drove one herself. But had she had time to notice the car in his drive way? No. Of course not. She had been focused on basically everything. Maybe she should’ve looked more around before just going inside a stranger’s house. She could’ve found the car, smashed the window and hoped that she had learn enough about hotwiring a car from movies. She knitted her brows at him, sending him a slight displeased look as she walked back into the entrance where she met back up with the maniac. “You know, if you had actually been working properly for my insurance company, I’d have a car myself,” she yapped at him, suddenly thinking even further back than just the day of his home visit. All the way back to the accident where her car had been totalled. To think it was now so long ago and yet she had kept off the driving. Unintentionally, really. A subconscious fear of driving, maybe? She sure hoped not. She had liked driving before. Like the freedom and even gotten used to driving through the big city central.

Maeve followed more or less automatically after Joseph, as he ventured out of the house. She couldn’t help but be amazed by how seemingly effortlessly he walked considering he had had multiple bones in his body broken and his leg impaled not even half an hour ago. Walking a bit in her own world for a short while, she looked down at her bandaged hand and thought of just how effective something so simple as blood was on someone. Someone supernatural. It was truly amazing. But looking at her hand also reminded her of how she had been in a cast for months and then a support brace for some more months before now not needing something like that. Had she been a vampire, she’d been healed in a matter of minutes…
She suddenly got ripped out of her train of thought by the sound of his calling voice. She barely heard what he had been said hadn’t her reflexes been as good as they were - thanks to many years of embarrassing fight or flight moments - she’d have caught the flying car keys with her face and not cupped in both her hands. She did, however, stumble slightly and looked rather baffled at him with big eyes. Something he probably didn’t even noticed, as he was already halfway into the passenger’s seat by then. “Wha-…” She didn’t really get any more sound before she realized that she had been too slow to win any races with him and clapped her lips shut, looking at him with a furrowed expression, through his window, before empathizing her dimples in a tightening of her cheeks and walked around the car to the driver’s side and got in. First thing first; she moved the seat forward. A lot forward due to the clear difference in her length of legs and the previous driver’s. She ended up almost all the way up by the steering wheel. Then the seat belt before she put the keys in and turned around to start the engine. She gulped. She hadn’t driven for some time. But wasn’t it much like bicycling? You never really forgot completely?
She put the car in reverse and got the car safely out of the drive way and onto the road before she drive off in the direction of the hospital.

She had been silent for the first few turns off the smaller roads. But then.. “What actually happened to Mr Morley? And his son?” she asked, eyes mostly turned to the road and small delegate hands gripping the steering wheel with an iron grip. She only just about glanced to her side towards Joseph before whipping back forward, not really feeling comfortable looking away too long. “Did… did you kill those too? Just so you could deceive me even more?” She looked to a sign on the road. She could just drive him to the police station. She had that power right now. Let justice take care of him..

You act as if being safe is real… In all honestly, it shocked her to hear it. Hear everything he was talking about. Spewing nonsense, surely. There was a thing as ‘safe’. It was a feeling much like ‘happy’ and ‘angry and ‘sad’. It was a comfort. A blanket that held around you, kept you warm and… safe. Worries laid so heavily on the mind and some, if not most people just weren’t strong enough to uphold that pressure for long periods of time when more and more stacked on top. She wanted to say all that out loud to him, but for some reason, she just… couldn’t. There was some truth to it. At least, she could see a bit of the reasoning behind his words, although she wasn’t much for acknowledging it. She was open for impressions, she had thought. She was still young and she still had a lot to learn but something about learning it from a guy like Joseph, didn’t sit right with her. He wasn’t, after all, any trustworthy person. He had said it himself. He wasn’t a good person.

She was looking straight forward, clearly too stubborn to give him the light of the day by looking at him or even answering to any thing he said. Her cheeks had tensed up and as she pressed the corner of her mouth keep into the two plump muscles, her hidden dimples showed through. But then as he had barely mentioned her brothers, she tramped down on the breaks, making the car squeal and stop very abruptly. So much so that, hadn’t she had her seat belt on, she might very well have gone through the window. That was how it had felt.
The sudden flashback to the car accident, still edged into a smaller part of her brain, immediately got thrown away from the front focus of her mind, as she put the car in off-guard to let her feet off the pedals without the engine stopping. Then she fully turned to Joseph and thanks to him sitting right there next to her, she didn’t have to lunge herself too much over the middle section to place a hand over his mouth. Pressing firmly in to make it very apparent that she wanted him to; “Stop talking.” At the surface level, that was a demand. But underneath there was hints of a plead, which was faintly visible in her eyes. “Right now, I have too much to be concern about. And frankly, I’m not in the mood for an existential crisis. I’m aware of what I’m doing, keeping my family - and brothers out of knowing what’s going on beyond the veil. Or whatever you’re calling it. Do not judge me for that. You do not have the right.” Maeve was actually rather surprised of how well she kept her tone calm out through that. Or how she didn’t look away from his eyes. It was the same surprise she had felt after slapping him across the face. She was scared of him. Of what he could do. And yet… She felt somewhat like a fraud.

Carefully she withdrew her hand from him and sat properly back down in her seat. Placed her feet back on the pedals and put the car back in gear before driving off. It had done the trick, the thing he’d said, because she didn’t say anything else for the rest of the drive to the hospital frontal parking lot. Her hands felt clammy on the leather but she did her best to practically ignoring the siphoner. It had been exactly what she didn’t want to hear. She cut the engine, clicked the seat belt off and stepped out of the car without glancing at him. Even as she stood outside, the car door still open, she only focused on pulling the too-large sweater over her head and basically just throw it like a dirty cloth into the car and reached for her jacket instead. Made sure to zip it all the way up so the blood on her own sweater wouldn’t be visible. No one would notice anything…
Only then did she find herself looking up at Joseph.