Previously: The Rose of Whitby – Chapter 51
Gregory plops his behind on the floor of the corridor, and blinks in surprise. “…I was only kidding,” he assures Arthur.
Arthur isn’t feeling reassured. Gregory’s said before that he has some cat instincts when he’s in that form. “Well, stay away from them! Especially if you’re going to run around as a cat! They’re sick and I’m healing them and they’re Darcy’s friends!”
“Okay, okay, sure,” Gregory says… and walks closer.
Arthur narrows his eyes at him and pointedly takes a large step back. That makes Gregory pout. “I just want to say hi!”
“You’ll scare them!” Arthur snaps at him- he can feel the tension in their bodies under his palm and against his shoulder. Of course, maybe that’s because they sense him being upset, but somehow, he can’t help it. “I said stay away!”
“But…”
“Stay away!”
Gregory pouts again, and then slinks off with a “Fiiiiine…”
Arthur watches until he’s turned the corner of the corridor, and then continues on to his own room.
However, relief won’t really settle in. He sleeps badly, wakes up frequently from confused dreams of Gregory popping into his room as a cat and chasing the rats, or waking up and finding one or more of them gone.
On the plus side, that means he doesn’t even need his alarm clock to heal them every two hours, and by the time morning comes, the three rats look lively, their cute little black button eyes bright and their noses and whiskers busy twitching over the rim of the little basket with a folded towel inside on his nightstand that the house provided him with for them to sleep in..
They still scramble onto his shoulder happily, which makes him smile. He wouldn’t have wanted to scare them by trying to catch them in his room. Or waking Darcy this early. Or have them run around the castle. Cute as they are, he’d rather not have rats in their kitchen.
It’s probably because being near him made them feel better when they were sick that makes them so happy to be in his company, but Arthur likes it anyway. But, see “rats in the kitchen”, it’s time to return them to their place in the hospital, so he makes his way out there.
Only for Gregory, this time in human form, to attach himself to him when he walks through the kitchen to take the door out to the back.
Arthur is surprised, then wonders why he’s surprised- Gregory is usually in the kitchen this time of day, insisting on making him breakfast, isn’t he? Of course he’d be curious. And apparently he didn’t know about Darcy’s hospital, either, because he’s all surprised and enthusiastic about it.
Arthur coaxes the rats back into their cage, smiles at them scrambling over to the food and water still in their bowls. He does a round of healing on the larger poisoned animals, three cats and two dogs, and on Katharina, who stirs from her nap to croak out a hoarse meow and bumps his fingers with her nose. Then she goes back to sleep, which is probably for the best- she has a lot of weight to put on, and Arthur’s healing can’t do anything about that.
Gregory snickers when he sees her and quips about how she’s the ugliest cat he’s ever seen, and Arthur scowls at him and tells him it’s not her fault she was sick- reminded of how Darcy told him the same. He doesn’t think he would’ve said something, anyway, and the fact that Gregory has scratches at him, makes him uncomfortable.
Of course, Gregory then assures him he was only joking- though since he’s a part-time cat, he’d know, he adds, and laughs.
Arthur knows he’s supposed to find it funny and not take everything so seriously, but he can’t muster more than a grimace, and then tells Gregory to come on, he’s done here and he’s hungry, he wants breakfast.
That succeeds in distracting Gregory from the animals, and they head back inside.
Oddly, Gregory sticks around for the next few hours, and it’s only then that Arthur realizes how he doesn’t do that anymore, usually. At some point, he got bored with Arthur’s morning routine of reading in the library. But this time, he only leaves shortly before it’s Darcy’s breakfast time, Arthur assumes to be with her.
He’s not sure what to make of it, so, with a shrug, he focuses back on his book on poisons and cures for them.
~~~~
These endless wedding planning errands in and of themselves would be bad enough, but there are other people involved and Darcy is convinced by now, people are the worst. The very worst when they take the form of women who dare talk to John. Yes, she probably wouldn’t be able to hear what is said if she weren’t a dhampir, but she is and she just about can manage to put her fan in front of her mouth as she finds herself snarling and showing fangs. What does that harlot think she’s doing, flirting at John like that?! He immediately shoots her down though. Good, good!
Still, it takes her some willpower when she’s back on John’s arm to not give in to the very familiar feeling of jealousy. She’d love nothing more than to growl that he’s hers, but she can’t do that, now can she?
Still, she can’t help the feeling that her drac is prowling possessively around him, yes, like with Gregory, so she just whispers that he’s with her and she heard him believe in that. Seeing him grin, slightly embarrassed, she shakes her head and whispers that she very much appreciates that loyalty, she really should give him a reason for it later. Now that grin looks much nicer on him, she likes when he’s so eager about her.
She likes it even better that he never pushes.
Sure, he follows her into her private rooms, but only because she’s dragging him by the hand. Sure, she’s on his lap and they are kissing deeply, but that’s all he does, no immediate trying to get under her clothes or to get her to do something he wants.
She could sit there and just get lost in the rhythm of their kisses for hours.
Well, she could if Gregory didn’t find them and immediately shove both of them over to the bed. But she guesses that’s just his right as the husband, so she doesn’t speak up. Maybe she was bad that she dared kiss John when Gregory wasn’t there. He… somehow always seems to be there, and she… she really doesn’t know why, but her drac has shoved her repeatedly to interpose herself, to try to stay in the middle between them.
~~~~
For fuck’s sake! Does Gregory have some kind of sixth sense for when he can talk Darcy into dragging him into another threesome he doesn’t want? At fucking least Darcy looks out for him so that those fucking wandering hands don’t end up on him… too often. Of course Gregory never means it. No harm done, right? Right, sure, fuck no!
Ugh, John wishes he could once, just once maybe spend some time with Darcy in private that isn’t work. Gregory is nowhere to be seen when they are working through piles of errands and paperwork, but the second he could maybe talk to her and ask some questions he’s worried about, nope, he gets too busy trying to make sure Darcy gets treated at least somewhat right.
John feels so fucking dirty, so close to punching Gregory so many times. He’s not stupid… or naïve like Darcy. He can fucking very well notice that Gregory uses Darcy as an excuse, that Gregory would not mind one bit if Darcy would ever agree to his question if she doesn’t want a break.
But she never does, she never lets Gregory fully get at him, she seems so given up, so unsure what to do about the situation, but she still protects him, so he will always protect her, even if that means he has to do things in the company of a clearly cheating arse of a useless husband.
~~~~
Darcy doesn’t know why she often feels even more protective of John than normal after the three of them are intimate, but only a few days later the feeling of her drac pacing possessively about John is at the point where she snarls at Gregory. Yes, Gregory, who doesn’t see anything wrong with John taking so long in town.
John’s reliable, he wouldn’t normally be late! It has to be those blasted flirty harlots that always run after him! If they have their fingers on her John, they’ll learn the hard way that they are on her territory!
The snarl and hissing must sound like an invitation to Gregory, at least he’s cooing and laughing at her. So she stomps her foot with another fanged growl and marches off, slams the door in front of his nose.
That must have been inviting again, because he ignores her protest when he opens the door and walks right after her, asking all innocently, still chuckling, what’s wrong.
“Why don’t you tell me with your empathy?!”
That, at least, finally gets a reaction other than amusement at how upset she is, and he tells her that okay, that feels very inhuman.
Still pacing, she tells him that she knows she’s being silly. She wants John to be happy. After some more growling and having to press it out through clenched teeth, she even goes so far as to say she wants him to marry but at the same time… Pacing several times all across the room, up the wall, across the ceiling and down again just so she can speak without spitting with fury, she adds that the very thought makes her so angry that she can’t keep her fangs in… oh, and her claws, she finally notices.
Gregory’s opinion on that is that it’s no wonder she’s a jealous disaster with the way her father brought her up. All overprotective and isolated.
At least that snarl Darcy thinks hit a nerve, because he goes quiet when she tells him she won’t have him talk about her papa like that! And it’s not that… It’s her drac and she doesn’t understand!
After several rounds of him trying to tell her it’s fine, he doesn’t care, he still loves her even like that, which don’t calm her down at all, he sighs and says he’ll go talk to Lucy, maybe she has any idea.
Turns out, her mother absolutely knows! When Gregory returns and declares he solved everything, Darcy is so relieved at first. Being told that she’s obsessed shocks her, of course it does, that sounds as if she’s being really bad for John, and she never wanted to be. He’s too important to her! So she forces herself to sit down rather than pace and listen to the solution Gregory must have.
Apparently, her mother said that she’ll have to drink from vials, which are really gross, or drink from more people, that’s even worse! Biting is so intimate! She very much enjoys the reactions she gets from John, the way he feels so close to her when she kisses his neck.
That discomfort gets shoved immediately to the side, because the next thing Gregory tells her drives a cold dagger into her chest and turns it over and over. She has to stop biting John! But… Gregory just shakes his head, that’s what her mother said, no more drinking from John to deal with the obsession.
But that’s like breaking up with him to her! That’s like never kissing him again. That’s like telling him she doesn’t care about him anymore. She does! She… thinks she does and isn’t just obsessed. Please, she can’t have lied to herself about her own feelings like that, can she?
Maybe… she doesn’t like that thought, either, but if drinking from more people helps, she could bring herself to drink from people closer to her. Or at least people she knows. Arthur, he probably would understand, he did in the cabin. Even Llew! She’s been better around him, he seems to even sort of like her, she thinks. And she’d never see biting them as intimate! She… she could do it if she has to! She can’t be that bad for John!
Gregory just shrugs. Hey, maybe John won’t mind her being obsessed with him, but didn’t she say something about him wanting to marry and have kids?
That’s too much for Darcy, she starts crying. Yes, of course John does, she knows that. Who wouldn’t? And she can’t be that good for him. She can’t even be that good for her own husband. Gregory holding her does nothing, it’s not as if he’s telling her anything meaningful, not as if any of his words go deeper than trying to make her calm down. That’s no solution. But maybe there’s no solution.
All she knows is that she cares too much for John to chain him to her, drac howling and not wanting to let go at all notwithstanding. She thought she could trust her drac, but she has to be better than this. She has to be good for John. And she knows, she knows she can’t be good enough. So all she’s doing is make him suffer longer, give him false hope, lead him on, she’s just another harlot and John wants a good woman, a wife, so if she’s just obsessed, if she can never bite him again, then she’ll live with that.
Can Gregory please tell him for her. She doesn’t trust her drac right now, not with how she can feel it growl inside of her. Not with how much everything in her is poised to run and find John, bite him and never let go again.
Gregory nods, sure he’ll tell John, he’s got this and hey, it’s all okay, she can just keep biting only him. They’re in love after all, so she can’t be obsessed, or if she is, he’s stronger anyway, so if she berserks and attacks him he can just fight her off! No problem at all. With another grin, he runs off to do as asked while Darcy remains sitting right where she is, curling herself into a tiny ball and only gets back up from her crying fit when she grows too worried for the bats flying against the window to try to comfort her.
~~~~
John keeps looking up, that’s a lot of bats, he expects Darcy to swoop down on him any moment now. That fucking errand took far longer than he thought, she’s probably pouting at him already for being late. But he could take it off her plate so he’s happy with it, headache from not having eaten in too long and all. It feels good to be there for her like that.
It’s a cat, not a bat, intercepting him in the driveway though. Ugh, he’s way too hangry to deal with Gregory right now, so he tries to brush him off. But when Gregory tells him, still as a cat, that it’s about Darcy and what she needs from him, John stops to listen. He doesn’t really feel up to another task but sure, for his girl he’ll do it. It’s urgent enough that she sent Gregory, so he leans himself against the nearest tree. That turns out to be necessary when Gregory’s next words rip his heart right out of his chest.
“Darcy can’t be with you. You’re giving her dhampir issues, your blood is bad for her, so she can’t bite you anymore and is staying away from you. But hey, you want a wife and kids anyway, so she’s not good for you as she said.”
The world tips sideways, or at least John wishes it did, he could do with a disaster just about now. He could do with being swallowed up by the earth because he already feels as if he’s dead. Darcy is breaking up with him? He… causes her issues? His very blood is bad for her? But… but she seemed to like biting him? He remembers the warmth of her body so close to him, the way she cuddled in, the way her bites always make him feel strong and able to hold her, give her something she needs.
Next: The Rose of Whitby – Chapter 53
