[WP] In all your time as a vampire, nobody has ever asked to become your thrall before.

I'd never used my powers on her. Not once.

I didn't know why she'd captured my attention the way she had when we'd first met, but something in me kept the beating hunger behind my eyes from touching her.

She'd had her arms folded in front of her, standing stock still at the end of the bar. I still remembered the way her dark eyes had scanned the room, watching for something she wouldn't find, cradling a drink as though the frosted glass might provide some warmth against the cold.

We got to know each other well that winter, both entranced by one another. I learned her wonders, her fears, her hopes and dreams. She told me all the ways the world had been so unkind to her, and something in that stark contrast between her pain and the beauty of her fragile soul gnawed at me.

Eventually, I told her what I was. She had simply given a half smile, said "I know," and curled closer to me on her couch. I had never known a feeling like that, especially not from a human. Her warmth was... comforting, never calling to my thirst stronger than it called to something deeper in me.

Over time, we began to see each other for what we really were. I think we'd both expected it to scare the other - broken things, creatures of the night in our own ways, robbed of our light by the cruelty of the world around us.

But we never scared each other. Not when she saw me feed for the first time, drinking out the life of one of her fellow humans. Not when I saw her first really bad night, curled up on the bathroom floor until she drifted off into her own nightmares.

I don't know if either of us knew what it was we had. Maybe we did, and what it meant to admit that was far too much for either of us to handle. Maybe we were too hurt to think either of us could even love at all.

When she asked me to make her my thrall, though, then I knew. And that awful, desperate "Please?" shattered me into a million pieces.

She looked up at me, those beautiful dark eyes broken and begging. She knew what I could give her - an end. A way out into the dark that she didn't have to choose herself. A bliss-soaked death before death, her fading will lost and replaced with mine.

Was it selfish to keep her here, crying against my chest? Was I holding her hostage in her own pain, if it was only my decision leaving her stranded and suffering. I did not know, and it filled me with anguish such that I couldn't even respond.

But she knew when I hugged her close that my answer was no.

Awful sobs wracked her body, pain too great to do anything but pour out, soaking my shirt and running in cold rivers down my chest. I rocked us back and forth, lowered to the ground until we sat cradling one another on the floor.

And I couldn't do anything. Couldn't slide my fingers up her neck and bare her life to me. Couldn't caress her mind with my own to soothe her. Couldn't help her at all, except to say,

"I love you."

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