Chapter Text
The brass contraption's needle-like point on its metal arm touches the disc-thing, and then music - soft and melodious – croons from its trumpet, a symphony of many instruments without instruments or players. At the moment, that's about the gist of what Lisa understands. Vlad called the device a “gramophone”. What a strange word. She will press him for details later. For now, she listens.
She's always loved music, so rarely able to indulge, and this – relaxed, in the great Count's study while a fire burns heartily, the moon twinkles in the pitch canvas of sky outside the arched window, and hot mulled wine and rich food settle in her belly – is as indulgent as it gets. Everyone should be able to experience peace and delight this way. One day, they will. When she has learned, when she has taught them how to live and prosper with science instead of superstition, when she has begun to spread the seeds of the future. That's a long way off, though. So for now, she'll partake. She'll be just a little selfish. He won't judge her for it. He doesn't judge her for anything.
“Oh, it's beautiful,” she whispers, eyes half-closed. The piece is enchanting, both sombre and sweet, heartfelt and haunting. Lisa doesn't believe in real magic, because everything can be explained by science eventually, but if she did, and if it had a sound, this might be it. She sways like a branch in the summer breeze. She can't help it. What she’s hearing is lovely.
“Yes,” the Count agrees, his voice low, and raspy. He's looking at her, watching her from where he sits in his huge decadent chair. Always, always watching her. The eyes of a hungry predator, and a starving man. A creature unaware of how deep its appetite ran until a tasty morsel crawled into its lair and awoke its yearning. Her skin prickles. His expression of late, when he looks at her this way, stirs things hot and primal and very, very female in Lisa, in a way that no other man has ever achieved.
At first, her attraction to him was academic, an appreciation for his astonishing intelligence and pragmatic, if maudlin, approach to the world. Now, she dreams of him, when she is both asleep and awake. Of those eyes unblinking, focus immeasurable, staring through her soul as he takes her apart and brings her to ecstasy. She stares at his huge clawed hands as he teaches her chemistry and medicine, hands that have brought a brutal end to so many now giving her the tools for a new beginning, and she thinks about having them all over her body. Would he be as methodical, as detached and yet so precise, if he touched her? She stares at his handsome, beautiful, barely-human features when he lectures on theorem and logic, and she thinks about how she wants to put her mouth on him, to kiss the sharp cuts of his cheekbones, to suckle colour into his lips, to bite his jaw and the corners of his smug smile. She wonders if biting is considered foreplay for vampires. She wonders what he would do if she bit him. She wonders if he'd let her. She wonders if she's had too much wine.
"Would you like to dance, Lisa from Lupu?" He asks.
Startled, Lisa blinks at him. “Ah…I'm afraid I don't know how to dance, Count. I suspect I wouldn't be very good at it.”
“I'll teach you,” he says.
“I…” Where is your boldness, Lisa? Where is the woman who fearlessly walked into the monster's castle and demanded education? Demanded from him exactly what she wanted? Why is it different now? She's never been that girl with a fancy who blushes and giggles and hides herself away when the boy she likes is near, and he is definitely, definitely not a boy. He is not even a man, not really – but he makes her feel like a woman, makes her ache between the thighs and flutter in the chest, and she likes him very much. “Alright. Yes, please. I'll apologise in advance for my clumsiness.”
He makes no comment on that, merely rising to his full, frankly ridiculous height, satisfied with her answer. Lisa's heart beats like a drum as he approaches. She knows he can hear it. He bends slightly to offer his arm, courteous and dignified as ever.
“Madam. If you would.”
She'd laugh at his theatrics, were she not so charmed. He is as witty as he is brooding. She settles her hand into the crook of his elbow and he leads them to the centre of the room.
“I did not take you for a man who enjoyed dance, Count,” she admits.
“Only when the mood strikes,” is his reply. Lisa suspects the mood hasn't struck for many, many years. “Besides, I thought you wanted me to teach you all the things you don't know, that I do?”
“Well, yes. But I'm on the path to doctoring, not becoming the wife of some dusty old noble. What use would I have for dance?”
“And what about when the miserable little sycophants whose lives you better hold balls and banquets in your honour? Surely you'll need to know how to dance, then.” Dracula's vitriol when he makes quips like that has eased some, since they met. Not because he's changed his mind about humanity, but because he knows it upsets her when he speaks of them that way. Sometimes – like now – that knowledge is enough to soothe Lisa, to have her playing along, to make the butterflies in her belly take flight.
“Oh, no. I couldn't think of anything more egotistical or embarrassing than attending my own ball or banquet of honour.”
“I have attended many held in my name.”
“I remain entirely unsurprised.”
Laughter blurts out of him in a husky bark, the kind she only hears when she's caught him off guard. She is flush with girlish pride, grinning. His red, red eyes hold something ancient, some unknowable want, when he smiles back – wide, unguarded, and utterly genuine. Lisa has never felt so thrilled, so shaken and yet so rooted. All the stories about the Devil and his terrible temptations failed to mention this part: that it would be so easy to fall in love with him.
She's definitely had too much to drink.
“Well, if you're quite finished making mockery of my heritage, shall we begin?” He guides her arms, where to place them, how to fit into his embrace (and she thinks she fits extremely well, in her unbiased opinion). “Here, like this. One hand here -” on his waist, “- and the other here.” He's too tall to comfortably rest her hand on his shoulder, so they settle for the space above his heart that does not beat; not like the wild thunder hers is stirring up in its cage of bone.
He is cool and pliant beneath her touch. He smells like smoke and wine and old books and, faintly, blood. Lisa's head spins. This is the closest she has ever been to him, the closest he has ever allowed her. There are so many things she wants to know about his physiology; he doesn't breathe, yet when he talks, air puffs gently across her face as if he held breath. Lisa shudders. Just a little thing. A near-imperceptible twitch at the corner of his mouth in response draws her eyes there for a searing moment. His deep, deep voice when he speaks again is rougher, and it sends a rush of prickling heat from her crown to her toes, all ten digits curling in her boots, before that heat blooms in her sex.
“Now you must move with your partner, and with the music itself. A good lead will know how to strike the perfect balance, and that is essential to the art of dance. When I step, you step. When I bend, you bend. Trust me to guide you, and trust yourself to follow.”
Lisa is not naturally a clumsy woman, but right now she feels like one; feels like a newborn foal stumbling around on legs that don't yet understand how to work. Dracula is composed and perfect, leading her through each movement with precision and care, but he won't stop looking at her like that, like she's the only thing in the world that's worth existing and he wants to consume her and keep her and belong to her in equal measure.
“I don't know how you expect me to – to do this right when you keep distracting me,” she snaps after she steps on his foot for the umpteenth time, almost at her wit's end. She’s both embarrassed and flustered, a terrible combination.
“And how, exactly,” he drawls, bringing them to a standstill, “am I distracting you?” One of his huge hands rests in the small of her back. The other loosely cups her much smaller, dainty fist where it sits on his chest. He is cold as true death, flesh like marble, but it isn't unpleasant at all. Quite the opposite, in fact.
“I think you know how,” she mutters. They've leant so close she has to tilt her neck to look him in the face. His half-lidded gaze lingers on the point where her pulse throbs against fragile skin. Lisa knows that he would release her if she wanted, no hesitation. She is the furthest thing from afraid. Perhaps he is a monster, spoken of in legends as carnage incarnate, but here, with her, he is just a man.
“I would hear you say it.”
“I want you to kiss me,” is what she gives him instead, always bold. Her fingers at his waist grip his coat tight. “Please. Please, Count.”
“To you, I am Vlad,” he whispers, and then he's doing as she asked, pressing his thin and almost-tepid, silky-soft lips against hers. It's tame, gentlemanly, very nice, but it does nothing to quell the raging tempest of her desire. She grunts, frustrated.
“I said, kiss me.”
Lisa circles her arms around his neck and pushes up on her toes to kiss him hard, passionate, the only way she knows how to be. His composure shatters, a veneer of glass destroyed by the hurtling stone of her enthusiasm, her careless want.
She will remember the sound he makes forever. It's somewhere between a desperate groan and a rumbling growl, like a pilgrim given salvation after years of suffering. The hand on her back pulls her closer. His other holds the base of her skull, long fingers sliding through her hair as if it's been something he's always wanted to do. He doesn't kiss her; he devours her, supping on her swollen lips, the wet seam of her mouth, her trembling chin. It's like nothing she's ever experienced.
“Do you understand what you are asking for?” He gasps when they separate, the scarlet of his irises swallowed by eclipsing pupils. It’s more accurate to say he wrenches himself away from her kiss, her temptation. He shakes with the effort of – something. “Do you understand what I am?”
She can barely speak, breathless, burning like a wick in a wildfire. She clasps his face between her palms. This feels like a point of no return, the first and only line in the sand he will draw for her. It's a line she already crossed when she walked through his field of impaled corpses and did not turn back.
“Teach me. Teach me, Vlad.” His eyes close for a brief moment when she says his name, his expression of beautific torment. She thinks he might have even shivered, but she’s trembling too hard to tell. When was the last time someone said his name like this? “I want to learn you. Let me understand.”
He is fighting it, fighting himself, fighting her, but the way he presses into her touch, soaking it up like a withered sponge – he even covers her hands with his own to keep them there, palms flat on his cheeks – speaks louder than any words he could have said. When he does finally respond, it’s a hoarse murmur.
“As you wish.”