Round One

Background

Hmm, personal history lesson, eh? Hold on, “if you have a spouse how did you meet?” Ouch... erm, okay, I'll play it by ear and see how it goes...

It started when my brother Andy and I were thirteen. Don't laugh, but a single bed was having trouble holding me at night, and I often fell out of it – I just couldn't sleep still. Poor Andy got so sick of it keeping him up at night we eventually discussed trading our singles for a double. Being able to spread out in bed was heaven, and as an added bonus we ended up doing something we thought at the time we'd grown out of – as kids he'd often crawl into my bed and sleep on top of me. He never did grow out of that, neither did I of enjoying the company. We've always been close, and he'd often bury his head in my chest on the school bus coming home – the bullying started with him at an early age, and someone needed to be there for him.

It was in the school shower after PE that it started with me too. A communal shower isn't the best of places to find out you're gay, because the guys around you notice the way you look about yourself. We got outed in the changing room when we were barely coming to terms with the idea ourselves, and things went downhill that very day. Those kids kept making remarks about how “disgusting” it is and how parents disown their gay children... bad enough with normal parents, but ours are vampires which are telepathic... It wouldn't be so much of a problem if we didn't have quad sisters who needed looking after. With us at school they needed to be awake, and neither of us were looking forward to facing them.

We ended up feeling stupid for forgetting we'd visited Mummy's brother, Adrian, when we were little – he's gay and lives with his boyfriend. Still, it was of little comfort knowing what we now had to face at school, and we were fast realising that a mixture of us liking guys and the related bullying we now both received was to change our lives forever... I can't go into too much detail, but let's just say it drove us closer together than either of us could have imagined. Boyfriend who prefers to not be named? No co-incidence, I can assure you...

This carried on for several months before we got found out. It was the night I'd torn a ligament in my arm while working out, and the confrontation we had with our parents was ugly to say the least.

Mummy nearly lost it, to the point where Daddy had to send her to her punch bag – how it's still in one piece given a vampire's strength I have no idea. Daddy was fine at first, calmly dragging the sordid details from us, but before long his mask slipped... I've always bonded more closely with him and a lot of it's down to how similar our minds work. He's very sensitive and intense with it, which means he's prone to thinking too much and ending up crying. I inherited that from him, and that proved to be the downfall for us both. When Daddy started crying I felt as though my heart had been ripped from my chest – we'd hurt him badly. I'd hurt him, something I'd hoped to never do, and I quickly began to hate myself. I spent that night trying to drift off with tears stinging my eyes, and even then began to wish I could just die. How much easier that would be than to have to face them both, people who had brought us into the world who we now had hurt so much through our actions. It was bad enough facing Andy after that – I wanted to hold him but at the same time I couldn't bear to touch him.

With my only outlet now beyond my reach, I quickly found myself on a slippery slope. Help was offered, in the form of our teenage vampire Uncle Evan, but how the hell do you talk over something like this? What Andy and I had done was illegal, there was no way I could confide in anyone about that for fear of the reaction I'd get. As days became weeks however, I found a release in an unexpected way.

It seemed to work at first. I'd held the analogy for a while of my blood becoming tainted by all the pain I harboured inside, and now flowing through my veins in a poisoned river. My only hope by now was to bleed the pain from my body, in the hope that if I kept it up long enough I'd be clean once again. All I wanted was to be happy again, but that blissful state of mind spitefully eluded my grasp for about another month before I'd finally had enough. The strangest feeling washed over me at that moment before I had a chance to do anything...

I had no idea then why I felt so ill. At the time I was concerned with only one thing – I hadn't intended for it to be anything more than another “fix” as it was becoming, but as I studied the scars on my arm and looked at the knife, I found myself asking “What's the point?” I'd bled not only the pain from my arm, but every other emotion I used to feel along with it – I'd become nothing more than a shell. I wasn't living – wouldn't it be better to just put an end to it all?

I very nearly succeeded in taking my own life, but my experience of death - or at least being so close to it – was the strangest I'd ever known. You hear tales of floating, a white light and hearing voices, surrounded by people you knew who had died... how about that voice being your own, the light closing up behind another figure as he approaches you, that figure being yourself? Angel and devil paradox had nothing on this.

I'd heard Andy telling me how much people were really missing me, and he'd mentioned Mummy saving my life... I couldn't understand what he meant by that at first. All I knew was, this gothic looking creature was standing in front of me, laying his cards on the table... or should that be my cards? He represented my heart, that part of me that gets so big I often trip over it. It had driven me to Andy, and my equally strong mind had been fighting against the move for over a year, keeping me from truly enjoying my life and instead trying to end it. He was urging me to join with him instead of pushing him away... I wanted so much to just be happy again I couldn't accept fast enough.

It wasn't long after I woke, back again in my now weakened body, that I discovered what Andy meant when he said Mummy had saved my life – she'd bitten me. It was the very next day Andy bought me a cure, not wanting to see me turning out like Evan and spending the rest of eternity trapped in this hellish adolescence. I only had to ponder his predicament for a moment for me to realise staying this way would be a bad idea, more for my own sanity's sake than anything else. I wanted to be shot of my teenage years as soon as possible, not stay there forever.

Neither of us were to know how big a mistake that would be. If we could foresee the future Andy would never have bought that cure, let alone ask me to drink it.