A/N: I'm about halfway through with "The Vampire Lestat" by Ann Rice, and I've been visualizing Phi as a vamp for quite some time. So I decided to get all those blood-sucking-bassist thoughts out of my head and onto paper (page? monitor? URL?) so I can focus on life. This is not so much about Phi being a vampire, as what he does while he's being a vampire and/or what it does to him as a person (and, of course, what it does to his "consort").

Kind of dark, wasn't sure if I should have listed this under horror or angst, but the rating's pretty appropriate, so ABANDON HOPE ALL YE WHO ENTER. Questions, comments, and constructive criticism are appreciated, because this is the first time I've tried something like this and really crave opinions.

So, enjoy. :3

The two of you don't much argue anymore. It's mostly just a fuss. You reach out into the darkness and pull him by his sleeve, pull at him and rip him from everything else and everyone who loves him. He tugs back gently, so softly you almost can't feel it. But it's there and it makes you angry to know that he's still resisting. He's still looking for a way out this hole you've dug personally for him, lacquered the walls and sealed off the top in hopes of him rotting away inside.

It wasn't always like this. Before, you two were indifferent towards each other. He didn't care much about you, and you didn't care that he didn't care.

You weren't sure what you really cared about back then. You were a stupid kid, you think, but then you shake your head. Stupid's such a strong word... Carefree. That's what you were. You were carefree and happy and and interested in nothing more than whatever thrill you could get.

One of those thrills almost killed you. One of them ended with you seeing brilliant red colours and horrifying silhouettes, arching your back in pain and pleasure and fear while cold hands pressed your head to the side. It's hard to remember exactly what happened, but when you woke up you were incredibly thirsty and couldn't move for the life of you. You weren't sure how long you were there, staring up into the sky and and dying of dehydration, but eventually you felt more hands on your body, warm instead of frozen and inhuman like earlier, and you were being carried off somewhere. A hospital, a diagnoses, a few supplements and you were out.

The realization came slowly over time. It was subtle at first, a gentle sensation that passed through your body whenever you came in contact with someone. It made your lips tremble and your heart race. You found yourself lost in the overwhelming scent that seemed to linger around everyone you walked passed. You caught yourself more than once angling your head down toward someone, inhaling deeply and pressing yourself hard into their body.

It was the thrill again. It was that same damned thrill that got you trapped in the cold arms of a stranger as he forced you into submission. The same damned thrill that made you hold the people around you with such force they could never hope to escape until your satisfaction was reached.

He was one of those thrills. He was one of those things you could achieve, add to your checklist, take advantage of again and again until you felt it had been sucked dry of all the excitement and danger. He was the only one you couldn't have to yourself.

Constantly being in different countries made things easy to accomplish, gave you an endless supply of smells and flavours. The others complied at some point, they all gave you a piece of what you wanted. They pushed and pulled where you wanted it the most, bit tenderly, allowed you to tear at their delicate areas while they tossed their heads and rocked their hips back and forth. You sighed with a sense of accomplishment and remorse when they finished, stretching and rubbing their eyes because draining them was the only way to get what you wanted. What you needed.

Sometimes it was sex, sometimes it was something drastically less, but it fed your desire. When you finished they would leave, ribs sore and eyes glazed over, and the next time you saw them, nothing would change. Things would be normal again and chances are you'd never have to do that to them again. You'd walk past them, your mouth red and moist and warm, and they would know. They'd think, "Oh look, he's found another one," and that was that.

He didn't care, though. That's where you stumbled. He didn't care about your necessities. He wouldn't give in so easily, wouldn't allow himself to be taken on a whim. So you had to work, pulling at his little strings, ripping him apart fiber by fiber until he had to care. Or in the least to worry, or hate, or fear. You cut at every curve and corner, making him jagged at the edges, sharp and deadly. You cut and cut and cut, but he still didn't give you what you wanted. He wouldn't do things right, wouldn't jump when you trapped him at the edge of the cliff, wouldn't duck when you fired at his head.

I'm hurting him more than I intend to, you thought. You didn't want him dead, you wanted him broken. But then you realized, it wasn't enough. You were raising hell on the outside, but no matter how destroyed the outside is, the inside always remains intact. You had to do more than hurt him, you realized. You had to destroy him. You didn't want to, but he brought this upon himself.

You stopped the snipping and started the stabbing, puncturing him endlessly, filling him with holes. It hurt you, too. It hurt you to see him shredded to pieces, to see the look on his face when your weapons - words, fists, manipulation - hit him, twisting his body unnaturally and making him stop functioning whenever you were near.

The others noticed what you were doing, too. They tended to crowd around him when you were near, running their hands along his shoulders and his face, masking his pain from you and your actions. It got to the point where Joe pulled you aside one day and hissed in your ear, "Aren't you finished with him yet?"

You looked into his eyes for a moment, remembered when those eyes were full of lust and fear for you, when his skin was flushed with your desire and his pulse doubled as you pressed your mouth against his skin. You smirked, revealing those teeth and watching him shiver slightly in memory of what they could do, and responded simply, "I haven't even started."

The others couldn't stick to him forever, though, and every opportunity was taken advantage of. When he was alone and unsuspecting, you were there, your arms around him and your tongue traveling down his neck. It was always your favourite place, the neck. It had an easy access point, could be approached from any angle, and once you had bitten down hard into the tender flesh, you had automatic access to the rest of the body. He, however, wasn't giving up any of his body to you. He would tense up and struggle and shout until you were forced to let him go.

He hates me, you thought. Oh, he hates me so much and he can't do anything about it. He hates me and he's afraid of me but he's so strong. You wanted his strength - you wanted all of him.

You could overhear the others telling him to just give himself up. That's all they were to you - the others. He was the real prize, they were nothing compared to him. They showered him with quotes like "It feels like a sexual experience" and "The mark goes away after a while" and "He won't hurt you anymore if you just let him bite you" and "You'll still be normal when it's all over" but he just shook his head, said something stupid about pride and walked away.

He was doing this to himself. You couldn't even be the one to blame at this point. It was him and his stubborn pride. Hurting him was a necessity. So many excuses flashed through your mind. So many reasons to continue torturing him and breaking him. You became more and more infuriated with him as time passed, so you hurt him more and more, condemning him from the others, from everyone around him. He took everything you threw at him, even if it was physical, he took it and stood tall and looked proud and you hated him for it. But you loved him all the same.

My God, I really do love him, you thought to yourself while you watched him. He was sketching or doodling something you didn't care about - you were much too preoccupied with the rise and fall of his chest, the concentration in his eyes, the quick movement of his hands. I love him so much it hurts. Why can't he just give up and come to me? I could make him so happy.

But that was a lie. You could never make him happy. You could never repay him for all the crap you've put him through at this point. You can't make him happy, you can't bring him joy, he won't love you. It hit you suddenly - you failed. He would never love you. Every time he saw you from that point on he'd remember pain and anger and not love. You cursed yourself mentally. There was no other choice.

You gave up...

At the same time he gave in.

It scared and confused you at first. You noticed the changes in him, he stopped tensing up around you. He stopped avoiding your eyes. He stopped turning and walking in the opposite direction. He stopped smiling and joking around with everyone else like he used to. You actually saw him and he was broken. Completely and utterly broken. Destroyed. Lifeless.

You won.

It happened one night, but not the way you expected it to, or even wanted it to. You happened upon him standing in the middle of the aisle between the bunks. The others were nowhere to be found because they had seen him, too. They had seen how broken he was and they silently hated you for doing this. But you kept reminding yourself: it's his fault. Everything was his fault. You wanted him to know that. You wanted to tell him that he brought everything upon himself.

But you didn't, because he was busy giving himself up to you. He was busy not running from you.

It started subtle, you brushed you lips against his cheek, nipping the flesh lightly. He tensed up in response, but you barely notice because the smell of his skin and the taste of his beautiful face was enough to drive you mad. You effortlessly shoved him into a nearby bunk - not yours or his; Chester's bunk, but you didn't think he'd care if the two of you got his sheets covered in blood. It's not like you hadn't before.

You vaguely remember the action of climbing in on top of him. The details are distorted, amazingly fuzzy because he was so hot and so alive, but crystal clear because you never want to forget.

There was groping, sighing, kissing, and scratching, some from you, others from he. But that was unimportant, you decided. What really mattered was the end result, the actual prize that you had to go through so much to get - that he had to go through so much to get.

The action was simple: you pressed your left hand against his cheek, tilted his head, and bit into the tender flesh that pumped everything you desired through his body.

He tasted like everything you had ever hoped he would, like sex and liquid ecstasy and when he started bleeding down your throat you felt every muscle in his body shiver violently. He half-gasped half-choked and arched his back up into your body, pushing you in places that only fueled your lust.

"Dave," he moaned out your name, making it sound angelic and sweet in contrast to what you were doing to him now. "Fuck, this is..."

You smiled against his perfect skin, releasing a bit of the flow and allowing a trickle of his scarlet passion to drip down and onto the sheets, staining them brilliantly. It was an automatic reflex, smiling when you heard the pleasure soaking their voices. You knew what he was feeling, from overhearing the others speaking about it amongst themselves, hushed, hoping you didn't hear, but you always do. Rob had claimed it was like and explosion of epic proportions, like feeling the smallest increment of pain when he first broke the skin but having it being replaced with a euphoria almost immediately.

"I haven't experienced anything better," he reminisced and you grinned to yourself when you knew it was you he was thinking about. "Everywhere he touched me, even if he did it hard and it should have hurt, it just felt like...like..."

"Like sex?" Brad had tried. There was no response after that, so you could infer that Rob had started blushing like an idiot.

Kind of like Mike was doing right at that moment.

You pulled your mouth from his neck and the blood ran freely, staining the sheets even more than before. He trembled, his lips quivering and his breath shaky. You hadn't been drinking from him long enough to make his skin much paler, but he still looked shaken, fragile. You pressed your lips hard against his and in return he rolled his hips against yours. A wave of realization hit you as you broke the kiss and sat up, straddling him. He looked up at you with those eyes, the lust still there but slowly diminishing. You had to act fast, you knew how he would feel when everything was over, the same way everyone else first did. You wanted this to last, so you ran your thumb over the wound, sending tremors of excitement through his body, making him push up against you harder.

You could feel him, hard and aching, straining for release. So you did. You lowered your hands to his waist and watched his expression as you freed him from his pants. He made the appropriate sounds of physical delight and you ran your hands over him, stroking him gently. He tossed his head back and moaned in pure bliss. You watched him and you moved your hands, surrounding him, hard, hot, throbbing. Feeling his pulse double and listening to the intoxicating sounds coming from his throat. You wanted to taste him again. You wanted to feel him arch himself into your mouth as you consumed him. So, naturally, you lowered your head to his weeping member and pressed your teeth to it.

Blood flowed almost immediately from the incision and he gasped out loud, first in pain. But the pain was quickly replaced by an intense feeling of orgasmic proportions. His voice grew louder as he cried out obscenities, his hands grasped furiously at the sheets as your tongue lashed out and stole the vermilion drops from him. You lapped up the red fragments for only a few moments, before you surrounded the head of his hard sex with your mouth and slid your lips further down, encasing it completely, loving the taste and the hot, continuous pulsations.

"Shit, Phoenix," he gasped out, repeating your name over and over, turning you on even more. "Ahh... please, Phi... God, I want you so much..."

These words rang out in your head furiously. You knew it was just the lust talking, that this wasn't really Mike begging for you but a being who's mind was clouded with the drug that was your bite. But it was his body, the thing you had always wanted from him. His body loved this, loved you. And this is what got you angry at him again.

He wants me, you thought. He wants me so bad and he thinks I'm just going to give this to him. Thinks I'm just going to give into him so easily when he couldn't even do that for me. You were not going to let that happen, not going to let him think he had the slightest bit of power over you, that he could get what he wanted from you.

You said it yourself, he would never love you. So you decided to make sure of that.

You scraped your teeth against his shaft again, evoking more blood, sucking it down harder, until Mike was a squirming, writhing mass of heat and pleasure above you. That's it, you decided. It was his heat, his pulsing warmth and life that you wanted, that drove you insane. And his smell, the hot, seductive smell of pure Mike getting stronger as beads of sweat formed all over his body and his chest heaved faster. It was all of this that made you crave him more than you had anyone else ever before.

"It's all this, Mikey," you proclaimed angrily, pulling your mouth from him and sitting up, staring him down. His eyes had been shut tightly, his eyebrows raised in almost a painful expression, but now they were wide, watching you now kneeling over his body. He looked confused for a bit, unbelieving that you would leave him here, severely untouched and unsatisfied and so fucking hot you wanted to rip out his heart. "It's all you, everything about you. Every last thing about your hot little body that's making me do this."

You leaned forward into him, moved so quick and deadly the lust in his eyes was replaced with shock, fear, terror. You pushed yourself against him, still hard, still begging for you to touch him, and in response his stomach quivered and trembled in a way that fueled your psychotic hatred of loving him. Pressing your lips against his again, you made sure he tasted himself on you, tasted his blood and his sweat and stimulation on your lips, your teeth, your tongue.

"But guess what?" you whispered against him, refusing to release his mouth or his body from your possession. "Guess what, Mike? Guess what's gonna happen now..."

You could feel it then. Your sanity was slipping, being replaced with his body, his blood, his everything. It was his fault. His fault that you were losing it, his fault that he was afraid of you, that he hated you, his fault that you both wanted each other so desperately someone was going to get destroyed in the process. It wouldn't be you, of course. You had done nothing but crave his perfection. He, however, was the cause of all of this, the cause of everything that was happening between the two of you. He was the one destroying everything. You wanted him to hate you, then. You wanted it more than you wanted him to love you.

Punishment, you said.

What happened next was driven on pure emotion. Hatred, love, insanity, lust. It happened violently and without mercy - could have been called rape if it weren't for the drug that was your bite. He loved it, of course, loved every last part of it, screamed your name and clawed at your arms, begged for things he would be ashamed of later. You said things you weren't exactly proud of either, but it was all in the heat of the moment, the heat of that one, delicious, bloody, moment that changed the two of you for what felt like forever.

Remembering hurts. Remembering every last detail, every act, every cut and bruise, every bad thing whispered through torn skin and veins - it burns you horribly and you sometimes try to pretend it never happened. But then he comes near you and you crave his heat and blood and passion once more, desperately want him to hate you and love you again, to tremble violently and reach out for every last sexy part of your body, to feel him press his fingernails into your back, push you deeper into him, beg you to bite him harder, fuck him faster, to stop time and keep him in your arms forever. He comes near you and you feel your sanity slipping and you forget who you are again.

Or maybe this is who you really are.

Endless hours later, when you had regained your sanity, you awoke to him crying next to you, lying with his back to you, facing the wall, curled up, praying you wouldn't be there when he pulled himself together. You watched him for a moment, his now-pale shoulders trembling in complete despair, before hooking your arm around his waist , feeling every muscle in his body tense up in fear and disgust and hearing him stall his cries. Pulling him closer, you pressed your mouth against his back, gently because it was covered with angry, red welts. He kept his head down, pulled away from you a bit, but he was empty and you were full of his blood, you were strong now, whereas he could barely hold his eyes open. You pulled him as close as possible, then lifted your head and kissed his neck, the deep wound still raw and hypnotizing, hiding under his dark, soft hair. He started crying again, which irritated you, and you turned him over to face you.

You couldn't, for the life of you, meet his eyes.

You could feel the fear in them. You could feel terror and disgust and hatred - everything that could never mean love.

You'll never love me, will you? you thought. The answer was obvious, so you didn't bother asking out loud. But you did love me. You loved me so much you that you have to hate me now. You loved me when I wanted your hatred... and now that I'm desperate for your compassion you can't stand the sight of me.

It was still his fault. It was his fault things would be this way. It was his fault the only way to make him love you was to hate him. It was his fault you wouldn't be able to stop hurting him, you wouldn't be able to stop wanting him. It almost brought tears to your eyes, but only because you loved him at the moment - you knew that you would want him to bleed and ache again later.

"I'm sorry," you managed to whisper, though you felt your voice cracking at the words. His eyebrows lowered and before he could speak you brushed your lips against his, delicately, a light peck. He didn't pull away, but his face didn't change either, so you choked out a soft, "I love you."

"Don't," he said, his voice dry and weak. In one way you didn't know exactly what he meant, but in another you understood completely. He turned his head away from you, refused to meet your eyes, but you inched closer, pulled him into your body while you were still full of his warmth.

"Don't what?" you demanded, your voice so low you almost hoped he didn't hear you. You lowered your head and buried it in the crook of his neck, brushing the burning bite mark and making his body tremble again. You smiled at the action, knowing you would probably have to reopen that wound in the near future, make him cry and moan and hate and love again. "Say it, Mike. Go ahead. I want to hear it."

He shook his head and you could hear his cries again. Don't cry, you wanted to say. Don't cry, just turn around and look me in the eyes and tell me you love me so I never have to hurt you again and we'll be so happy. Please, say you love me, Mikey, just say you love me.

"Say it," you repeated, and you kept your body rigged, you knew what was coming, you didn't want it to hurt you as much as you knew it would.

"Don't touch me," you heard him say and you slid your arm out from around his waist. Maybe, you thought. Maybe what you didn't know, but the word itself brought you hope. It brought you hope that maybe he... maybe he...maybe he didn't...

"I hate you."

And with those three words all your "maybes" shattered. They shattered and and fell like glittering jewels to the floor, showered his cold, quiet body and your warm, sobbing one. They left shards on everything, jagged and deadly shards that weren't unlike him, weren't unlike what you had forced him to become. It was his fault again, his fault that he was the one sharp one, that he was the one that was deadly. You tried desperately to control your cries, tried not to let yourself break as much as you wanted to.

"Okay," was all you could say before you felt your throat choke up.

It's not okay! your mind screamed, horrible blood-curdling screams that just broke you even more. Don't do this to me! Don't leave me here, don't hurt me like this!

"Okay," you repeated.

And you hated yourself with every last shred of humanity because you just couldn't, for the life of you, hate him back.

-e.n.d-