maurice toussant

I am your family. I will always be with you. Promise? Promise.

Ft. Maurice Toussant ( @2kyears ), Anya Calwyn-Toussant ( @monsterxmade ), Celeste Toussant ( @milleansxmort ), & Danny Fenton-Toussant ( @halfaghst )!

She loosens her grip slightly on herself as he touches her arm, looking at him. “Fun… you and I have two very different definitions of it.”

"Ophelia, come on." His blood is working fast to remove the drugs from his system so by the time she works her arm free from his grip (which had been tighter than he meant it to be), the effect of them was mostly gone.

Celeste watches him for a moment, trying to decide if he caught the joke in her words or if he thought her offer entirely serious. In the end, she decides it doesn’t matter either way and her shoulders lift in a shrug that says, ‘whatever you say.’

“You know,” she adds a moment later, as she lowers herself down to sit beside him, another half-joking suggestion on her tongue, “you could have Reginald glamour him into resigning.”

Reginald himself might not remember the full extent of what he’d already done with his unprecedentedly abundant mental gifts, but Celeste herself could never forget what he’d done. Not just the way he glamoured Maurice into forgetting the recipe for Thrill, or the way he glamoured himself into forgetting any of it happened in the first place, but also the way he crept into her blood, past her blood, to awaken that of not just Daisy, but Anna and Penelope too. Their presences had gone dormant again, of course, it’d been months since then but she won’t forget the gift he’d given her, the time she got to have with them in her dreams even if it wasn’t really them.

They’d agreed to let him rediscover the abilities naturally ( telling him would only undo everything he’d done to protect himself and protecting Reginald was the ultimate goal here ) but that doesn’t stop his latent power from creeping into her list of options when she finds herself mulling over her own strategies to handle the problems before them.

“It may shock the Nation but they’d have to believe it. They know there’s nothing you can offer to make him stand down and of course, you can’t glamour vampires, so they wouldn’t even imagine that. They’d have to believe it was his idea.”

She shrugs again, brushing off the idea on her own even though under slightly different circumstances she might actually have stooped to such manipulations, no problem. Celeste may be sweet as sugar ninety-nine percent of the time, but there’s a cut-throat side of her he knows well. She may not have to deal with Charles personally but there’s enough transferred animosity that he could bring it out of her nonetheless.

Wrapping an arm around her, he nuzzles against her neck, closing his eyes for a moment. Charles was indeed annoying, annoying enough that he was almost tempted to agree to Celeste's suggestion, playful as it might be.

"I suppose that you're right. The Vampire Nation might have to believe it. But it also poses a risk for Reginald because there's always a chance that someone MIGHT find out that he was the reason that Charles had left the Vampire Council and that he had the ability to mess with vampire's minds. It was why Maurice was so dismissive of the thought to Reginald, waving off his abilities even though he very well knew what his progeny was capable of. Had he not erased the presence of Thrill from his mind?

Had he not been able to activate the dormant memories within Celeste, allowing her a few moments with her sisters for a few nights? He would never forget what Reginald had allowed his wife to experience, he would never be able to repay him. Perhaps thats why he was SO protective over the man.

“I suppose we all have to have our flaws.”

Seeing the way his dark lashes flutter, stilling on the curves of his cheeks longer than they might otherwise, her free hand moves to his hair, coming through his curls. The tone voice quiets, becoming something soothing. Something meant to lull despite the way she still seeks to tease him.

The smile that takes over his face is tired.

Another giggle rises from the teen as his hand displaces already messy curls and her eyes catch the scrunch of his nose. The sound is punctuated by the shrug she gives next. Anya truthfully doesn’t feel like she knows how any of this works — phones, Claire, vampires — but it doesn’t bother her like it seems to bother him. She may be curious by nature, volleying a number of questions his way as she discovers more and more of the world around her, but she is also used to not knowing. Aris had never told her anything more than what he deemed necessary for her to know, keeping her ignorant to keep her under his thumb. What he did tell her, she didn’t always understand but she had also learned that too many questions were a quick way to earn his ire. Now, under Maurice’s guidance, she knows and understands more than ever but she’s learned to be content with the fact that sometimes there are no answers to her questions all the same.

“I think you gotta know science,” she says, as though she hadn’t learned all she knew of science from him. “But Claire doesn’t think anyone’s gonna get it even if they do know science because she’s the only one.”

A lingering smile shifts into a thoughtful frown then. Anya doesn’t like that phrase. The only one. She used to be ‘the only one’, told she was fundamentally different from everyone else, and that had been one of the worst feelings in the world. She hadn’t know any better then but she knew it now. There is even a word for it. Lonely.

He gently pulls her into a tight side-hug. He truly loved her compassion, the concern she felt for others. When Maurice had first turned Anya, he hadn't known what to expect. Celeste had clung to him like glue those first few years, relying on his thousand years of experience. Daisy had distanced herself under the effects of the thrillogoblin which was not her fault but was what happened regardless. Reginald had been similar to Daisy, but without the influence of thrillogoblin. A friend, truly. Anya was similar to Celeste, but more skittish, even more clingy. As time began to pass, she was becoming more independent, willing to spend time with Claire.

"I think the best thing we can do for Claire is to be there for her. To support her if she wants to find more people like her." If they exist. He sincerely doubts that they do. The angels had surely looked for similar people after the death of the person named "Merlin."

Celeste won’t ask him when he’ll be home. There’s a part of her that wants to — it’s been more than long enough for her anger to fade, replaced by a longing she won’t yet fully admit to — but she won’t. She knows his patterns all too well and though she wishes he didn’t, though she wishes he could work through this with her, Celeste knows he needs this. It’s the only thing that makes kicking him out so easy for a woman so scared of loss. Beyond her own anger and her own need for a little break to decompress, there’s the knowledge that it will do him good. That he will return to her and that he will return as himself, not whatever person his cyclic restlessness and ever-present self-loathing turn him into when they get together.

She won’t outright ask him what he’s been up to either. It’s the kind of thing she would normally want to know, the kind of thing she might pester him about if he didn’t tell her of his own accord, but Celeste doesn’t want to hear how much he’s enjoying the distance while she herself is so ready for it to end. She doesn’t want to hear, while she’s stuck bored and alone in their too-big mansion, about the fun he’s having without her. With other people. There’s no concern about disloyalty or infidelity, Celeste trusts her husband wholeheartedly, but no intimacy is needed to kick up a little jealousy in her after so long apart. Whatever he’s doing now, he’ll tell her what she needs to know and then give her the rest later when they’re together again and she can appreciate the benefits of their separation.

So instead, Celeste lets the line fill with silence, eyes wandering the empty room around her, trying to feel for the familiar presence the phone pretends to lend her. A presence still only palpable to her in its weakest, most inaccessible form. The telephone line feeds her his voice but it doesn’t make him feel any closer than he felt before she’d picked it up. The sigh that passes through her lips is so quiet.

“It’s good to hear from you,” she says when the silence lingers too long, and despite how telling the pause was, her voice holds the same gentle, cheerful lilt as always, if perhaps a touch less natural. “Though it would be nice if someone could invent a way to see each other too. I pulled out my old painting stuff and I’ve been working on a few things. I know I want to hang the one I finished last night somewhere but I haven’t decided where yet. I thought about the foyer but…”

That room — with its gothic sconces and blood-red draperies, its fountain of dyed-black water and his dumb optical illusion — was decorated more to his tastes. The colorful nature of her latest painting felt wrong in the midst of it.

The last time this had happened was in the early 1600s and he'd gone to the region that would eventually become Russia. Those days were more difficult, communicating for months by lettters and waiting for a response when she chose to respond ( there had been so few letters in those days when she was angry with him ). The worst part of him leaving was being away, not knowing what was happening with Celeste and not really being able to reach her if something went wrong. Now, at least, he could reach her in a matter of twenty minutes if he felt her in danger. Now, she was safe in their mansion, not attracting the attention of the Vampire Council as he was right now. The thought turned his stomach.

He rests his forehead against the glass of the phonebooth, letting out a small laugh. His wife was redecorating the house, surely. He wonders what will be changed when he returns and the thought makes him hesitate in responding.

"It's so good to hear your voice too." His voice is strained for a second. God, he misses her. "That will be the day. When we can see each other across the world." The thought makes him laugh. He had thought TELEPHONES were advanced, only starting to use them within the past decade.

She doesn’t want to go to the Council room. Anya hadn’t heard much about it, Maurice shielding her from the problem of it and the angels as he does, but what little she had picked up was enough to satiate any curiosity she may have one day developed about it and what exactly went on there. It was enough to know she’d be happier right here at home, asleep in her bed. Until it dawned on her that Maurice is still going, and that means he won’t be here when it is time for her to go to sleep. He won’t be here to reassure her, to read her their stories, to make sure she’s calm and comfortable before she drifts off. He won’t be here to comfort her if the nightmares come anyway. And not only would he just not be here, but he would not be here during the day. He would not be here at a time when they would both be trapped right where they were.

Anya's fourteen years old, and most kids her age would be fine with their parent leaving overnight — overjoyed even when the freedom of it sets in — but she clings to Maurice like her very life depends on it, desperate and relentless. And maybe somewhere in her mind, it does. After all, what would she even begin to do if something happened without him here? If the nightmares come again and she can’t calm herself down? What would she even begin to do if something happened and he never came home? Their short time together was already more than she expected to be allowed. She doesn’t get to keep the things she loves, let alone this long. Celeste may be staying behind too, and Anya truly loves her vampire mother so much, but it’s not the same and it does nothing to assuage the worst of her sudden fears.

"What if I need you?" she whimpers into his shirt. "What if I need you or you need me and you're not here and I'm not there?”

As much as she has learned to rely on Maurice as her protector, Anya considers herself his as well, no matter how many years of accumulated strength separate them. To fight is all she knows, and she’s determined to hold onto this — him and Celeste and the little family the three of them make — as long as she can.

That's not the point that she's making and he knows it. But if he addresses the real point....if he addresses what Anya is really worried about, he knows he cannot soothe the true fear. Because Celeste is NOT Maurice and when he is in the Council chambers, he is in constant danger and no one can really protect him there. Reginald is nowhere near powerful enough to protect him if he needs backup if things went south. But neither is Anya. And the thought of his daughter, his PROGENY, being in danger is enough to frighten him, to send fear nearly flooding through his blood.

He would sooner face a stake in the heart than to endanger the lives of Celeste or of Anya, especially Anya. His wife was able to protect herself, to ensure that she could escape a situation and had some experience with fighting other vampires. Anya though? The only people she had killed were humans and she had no experience with fighting vampires.

It was safer for her to stay at home.

No.

If Anya is completely truthful, she doesn’t understand it — the concept of unconditional love. Maybe she had it once, in the arms of a mother who could do nothing to protect her daughter but who had sought to ease pain and fear as best she could all the same, but that was a long time ago and her only remaining memory of it was vague impressions of the night she lost it. Love, if she had ever had it at all after that the way she spent fourteen years hoping she could, was something hard to earn and so easy to lose.

Almost reluctantly, her head tips back, gaze rising to his face where her eyes again spend moments searching, analyzing details with each little flickering movement of amber-colored irises. And once again, she finds nothing in Maurice but his usual gentleness, his usual love. In the way he holds her close, cradled in his arms like the little girl she never got to be. In the way he presses that kiss to her hair, just like every day he spent soothing fears and coaxing her to sleep. In the tone of his voice as he promises her this, and in his blood as she reaches out just enough to be sure. But most of all in the way she isn’t hurting. She feels scared, yes, to the point that her hand shakes as she reaches up to scrub away the sudden welling of tears in her eyes, but she feels no pain and that is still something that continues to take her by surprise every time he doesn’t deal it when she expects him to.

“You’re not lying…” she mutters, voicing not a question but rather the observation she makes now.

For a moment, he pulls her a bit tighter against his small frame, pressing a kiss to the top of her head. She might not understand the concept of unconditional love now, but one day she might and he would never STOP showing her exactly what it looked like every single day. One day, she might look at him and realize exactly what she was to him. Exactly just how much he loved her.

He had loved Daisy, their first daughter. Daisy though had been a grown woman when he had turned her, she had not needed a parental figure the way that Anya did. And yet, Maurice had tried so hard to be her parent. He had tried so HARD to be what she had needed but he hadn't been ENOUGH.

Was he enough now?

He didn't quite know. Sometimes, when Anya was having a really bad day, when he couldn't leave her bed to join his wife in theirs, he wondered whether he was enough. One time, when Anya was playing with Claire, he expressed this to Celeste.

The weight of his hand on her shoulder, the strength of a grip she knows can be made so much stronger, has her still. Until he urges her forward. For half a second, she has a mind to resist. Claude is a big man, but Anya is confident in her abilities as well. She died because she had let her guard down, but she had fought grown men before and won. Maybe none as large or strong as Claude Toussant but she'd bet that she could run at least. But then she remembers that things aren't the same as before. She may have been strong and fast and agile for a fourteen year old girl, and she may be strong and fast and agile compared to some of the other vampires as new as herself, but vampire bodies weren't as telling as human ones. So much strength hid unseen beneath their polished surface. And if Maurice was powerful — Maurice, who looked like the kind of person she had bested time and time again — how powerful was his brother? His older brother?

It's only now that she remembers the words Maurice spoke to her once, the promise she made him that day. If she met Claude, she was supposed to call for him. But how much stronger was he than Maurice? He had done his best to hide it, but Anya had seen some worry in him then and that unnerved her more than she could say. If she called him, would Claude kill him? Would Claude take him from her? That thought scares her more than anything. Even more than the idea of what Claude could do to her.

Instead of calling out, Anya works to bury her fear before Maurice can sense it, to still her blood into something calm and unnoticeable. But it is truly so hard. Claude's words cut deeper than she wants to let on, reawakening old fears she had thought she had moved past.

Or is he just using you for his own purposes?

Some part of her rejects the sentiment though. It had been months since Maurice had turned her and not once had he asked her for anything. Not once had he forced her into anything she didn't want to do. If anything, he sacrificed for her. He took more time off of work than before simply because she wanted him to. Because a bad day had bled into a bad night and she didn't want him to let her go yet, or because there was something she wanted to do and she wanted him to do it with her. For almost any reason really. He spent more nights in her bed consoling her and coaxing her back to sleep than he did in his own, and how many times had they never gone back to sleep at all? It couldn't all be a lie, right? It couldn't possibly be some farce to win her trust and devotion? Not after so long...

"He doesn't love you, Anya. Not truly."

Claude knows how to use his words instead of his strength, he knows when to manipulate and when to brute force his way through. In another universe, he would be the Vice President of the Vampire Nation. He could run diplomacy fairly well, being the force behind chaos installed in the worldwide Vampire World.

Celeste’s gaze drops, instantly finding the band of metal encircling her finger. It’s a simple thing. A poor woman’s wedding band, its design limited not just by a lack of riches but by the age in which it had been made. She doesn’t know yet how old it really is, far older than her meager decades, but it doesn’t matter. None of the details matter. To her, it is the most beautiful thing she has ever owned simply because he had given it to her, and the weight of the cool metal ( something that suddenly makes this feel so much more real ) brings on another wave of tears. Her other hand lifts to brush them away, but she doesn’t dare pull this one from his.

“Alright then,” she says, eyes rising again to meet his.

It strikes her in that moment, though certainly not for the first time, how beautiful he is to her. Maybe not in any traditional way — thin, pale, and boyish, he’s not the sort of man women would go out of their way to seek — but in her eyes, there could be no one she could want more and every “flawed” feature was just one more beautiful thing that makes him who he is. How could she not love each one?

"I love you, Celeste. I love you."

Celeste’s gaze hadn’t left her husband since she opened her eyes to see him standing before her, and in those first few moments that signature smile of hers had lit up her face in a way even she hadn’t been capable of for a while now. It had only been hours since she had watched Claude lunge through his eyes, since she had felt the pain of the stake shoved through his chest as if it were her own ( or rather in tandem with her own as her heart shattered in an instant ), since she felt the severing of their blood-tie and his presence in her mind and their shared bond fell silent in a way that seemed to echo through every last inch of her. The overwhelming grief, the haunting silence she was left with….they made those mere hours feel longer than her whole lifetime. The rising of the sun, the brief burning of it on her skin, had felt like mercy compared to the torture of them.

It wasn’t a rash decision. Celeste had made it known decades ago, and she’d reiterated it recently as their problem took their turns towards the worst. It wasn’t because she wasn’t strong enough to live her life without him. She was a strong woman. She might have done it if she wanted to. But she didn’t. No matter the cause and no matter her strength, Celeste Toussant just would not live in a world without Maurice. It felt unnatural. It felt wrong. And she wouldn’t have chosen this life without him anyways. She had known it would come to this, and truthfully she had known the moment Maurice had taken off to face his brother and save his progeny that this was how she would be ending her night. What she hadn’t known was what would await her in death. Would there be an afterlife like the Heaven she had grown up listening to stories about, or would there just be nothingness?

The sight of him before her, the knowledge of knowing they could be together even in death, had been such a relief. But she couldn’t forget the sun above them or the voices below, the ruins of their home surrounding the two ghostly forms. She couldn’t ignore the sorrow and resignation she could too easily find in the familiar green of her husband’s eyes.

Her fingers tighten around his, giving them a gentle squeeze. Her initial joy, that bright smile, had shifted into something softer. Gentler. Something almost apologetic. Not for her choice, she didn’t regret the one thing that brought her back to him, but for the fact that things had turned out this way. For the way she was sure Maurice felt like he failed them all. For the progeny they’d left behind in a burning world, fighting to save a crumbling infrastructure and the people who were dying in the wake of its destruction.

Celeste brings his hand to her lips, presses a kiss to his fingers. God, the way she had missed him…

"What's going to happen now?" His death had all been in VAIN. There was not tablet, there was no SOLUTION to stop this. "The war is over. Vampires have won." Despite their best attempts at least. "My brother has won." The thought made his stomach, although he could no longer eat, churn in disgust. For a moment, he looks out at the sunrise, voice softening in the light of a sunrise he hasn't seen in so long.

It's almost a marvel, feeling the heat wash upon his ghostly image. He couldn't feel it directly, just the passage of rays through his ghostly frame. Maurice likes to think that he's given Reginald enough information, that Reginald (who had only been a vampire for a year now) was ready to be without his maker. But he's not sure. Reginald has Nikki now and Brian but...the Council was gone. Everything was gone in the wake of destruction, governments toppling and humans being razed to the ground in vampiric panic. Where was the end? What more could be done to stop it? They'd tried everything.