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Darkness. So deep he couldn't see the end of it, even if he strained, and straining seemed such a wasted effort. Just letting himself lie there on a sunless, lightless, feeling less void was so easy. He could barely feel his body any more.

* * *

"I'm going to check on Victor... maybe he's woken up on his own by now... or something..." Shaper sighed, and headed up into the room again. He sat on the edge of the bed, and traced his clawed hand over the hot patch. Then he sighed.

"Damnit. We're going to be miserable if you don't pull out if this, Victor... damn miserable... don't die on us... please... not after all this... it'd be the worst damn way you could go. C'mon. Please..." the rizen whispered, again looking over the spot with his mask on, and seeing nothing new at all.

Just Victor lying there on his side, not moving, barely breathing.

"You said it yourself Victor, so often, you've lived through so much, is this really the way to want to die?"

* * *

No pain, no emotions. It was so easy to just be. There was nothing to worry about, no responsibilities.

* * *

"No change Amy," Shaper said, as she came out of the alchemist's. She sighed softly.

"I wasn't really expecting one, but I couldn't help but hope..."

The alchemist, a Goth like woman with black hair, streaked with bleached blonde and red streaks stepped out of the shop.

"All right, all right... I'll take the job. Even for such a paltry sum. Besides, I just LOVE a challenge!"

Amy scribbled in her little notebook.

"That's a change of tune," the note read. "What happened to 'I don't borrow trouble!'?"

Shaper snatched the notebook out of the vampire's hands, and smiled charmingly at the Alchemist.

"Thank you so much!" he said sweetly. "Why don't you just come with me?"

The alchemist blinked at Shaper, and sighed.

"All right... let's get the over with," she sighed, bringing along her bag of tools and elixirs. Maybe she could help, maybe she couldn't. "Maybe if I'd been there when he'd collapsed..." sighed the Alchemist, swirling the small sample of blood she'd drawn in the bottom of a glass.

"WE weren't there when he collapsed," Shaper said earnestly. Amy hung back and let him flirt. "Mistress Rosethorn, can you tell what made him unconscious like this?"

"With a little more time, I might be able to," she said thoughtfully, looking back down at Victor, who lay still beneath the sheet that covered him up to the chin. "It's not often I get a good look at a corpse with a pulse, however faint."

Shaper sighed. "Well... I need a rest... been a long day."

And the rizen easily slid into a chair, leaned back, shut his eyes, and drifted off.

Luna Rosethorn sighed, and pulled out some more of her things. The blood smelt funny, and she thought it might be due to whatever was in Victor's body. But she had to run more tests and that'd take time. Time Victor might have precious little of.

Amy sat up, holding Victor's hand until dawn, when she had to retreat to the closet to sleep.

Luna wasn't tired, she was busy and determined to beat this. Whatever it was.

It was noon before she started to wear down. She had stopped with the obvious things and then went on to the exotics. One drop of blood, one drop of poison, see what reacted.

Somewhere deep in her ancestry, Luna had a true Alchemist. The kind that invented the art and made it possible for normal people to practice it. Very little of that remained in her, except for an incredible ability for hunches. And she knew if she just kept trying she would figure this out.

* * *

Somehow, it was getting deeper, like he was falling away. Now he could see images in the darkness, things he'd done, things he couldn't remember doing. And now there was sensation too, the painless dark was gone. Now he burned.

* * *

Shaper padded in later, and offered her a cup of coffee.

"Here, you need to either drink this, or go grab some rest... you look worse than I do first thing in the morning."

"Thank you," she smiled at him prettily. "But I'm fine, really." She pointed to a pot on a Bunsen burner on the table behind her. "Hot Chocolate," she explained. Shaper smiled back at her, and took a seat. She tried to work, but kept dropping things. "Pardon me, Shaper was it?"

"Yes?"

"You're terribly distracting - is there something else you could be doing? Somewhere else?"

Shaper sighed and got up.

"Yeah, I suppose. But... I'm worried is all. He's always been around for us and well, everything feels all empty now."

She smiled gently at him. "Good friends huh?"

"He's the best friend I have, really."

"Well, you aren't helping him by making me drop vials. Why don't you... take one more look at the place you found him. Try up in trees. They might have hired a ranger or tree-elf."

Shaper sighed, and got up.

"Let me get dressed, and I'll go try again... any clue as to what I might be looking for then?"

She shook her head.

"None at all. I'm going to look in on him again in a few minutes."

"If you think you can come up with anything we missed feel free." Shaper shrugged and left to clean up.

* * *

Wrapped in fishnet, vinyl, and leather, Shaper searched the darkening woods carefully, poking around not just on the ground, but in the trees surrounding the area as well, hoping to scrape up some kind of clue.

Amy on the other hand, moved back into Victor's room as soon as it was dark enough, and cradled his head in her lap, lightly running her fingers over his cheeks, across his forehead, and through his hair.

'Don't leave me,' she thought over and over. 'You're the first man who's ever cared even a little.' When Luna entered the room, she jerked her chin up in surprise and hissed.

"Oh do leave off," snapped the alchemist. "You called me, remember?" She flicked her fingers at the pale vampire, like one would a naughty cat. "Back off for a moment. I think I may have something." Eagerly Amy stepped a few paces back, as Rosethorn looked over Victor again, lingering on the long smooth scarring that covered most of his chest. "It can't be..." she murmured. "Saints be praised - it was real..."

Amy looked at her warily, wondering what she was talking about. She made a half-agitated guttural sound in the back of her throat, and motioned to the lady, then to Victor, asking wordlessly what she was talking about.

Ignoring Amy's mute agitation, she reexamined Victor more carefully.

"If that's true," she muttered, pulling a small hardbound book from her pocket, "then... then... medicine is up a creek without a paddle! Then Magic has a new subgroup! Then... it could be Socal."

Amy blinked, and Shaper, covered in dirt, came in, holding something tiny between his fingers. It looked like a needle, with bright green and black fletching on it. "Is THIS what I was looking for?"

"Could be!" Rosethorn plucked it from his fingers and ran a piece of paper over the tip. She sat down on the floor and began running tests, eyes never leaving the vials and dishes. "Why didn't you tell me he wasn't human?"

"What?" Shaper asked shocked.

"Or vampire, or werewolf"

"Well... Uhm... he uhm..." Shaper stumbled, staring at the golden and crimson streaked black hair that covered the top of the Alchemist's head. "I mean... he never talks about it, so I thought it didn't matter."

"Being changed by magic or science affects you in deep down ways," Rosethorn said.

"And what does that have to do with him? I'm not... 'human' either. And neither is Amy."

"You and Amy aren't the question! My Aunt's SON is the question here!" Rosethorn spat! "It doesn't matter if you were made of clay like Adam, but it does matter that he was born dead!"

Both of them gasped, and both of them mouthed the same words, but only one of them had sound behind it.

"Wait. AUNT'S son?" Shaper said, blinking. "You KNOW who Victor IS?"

"Who what, and how many cookies." The alchemist nodded. "I thought it was the ravings of a deluded mind - but - he's here. He's real!"

Amy and Shaper looked at each other with equal expressions of shock.

"Look, we don't know what he is," Shaper said, scratching his head. "We just follow him."

Rosethorn sighed, and shrugged.

"At any rate, this makes things a bit easier to puzzle out... I think." She looked up, after dropping a careful bead of liquid onto the paper. "But none of that will matter, unless you find out one small thing."

"What?" Shaper demanded eager to help.

"Why."

"Why what?"

"Why he was poisoned in the first place. Trace his movements before this happened, what has he done recently..."

"Amy."

SMACK! THUNK! Rosethorn added her own two cents.

"OWWW!" yelped Shaper.

"You know what I meant! I don't know how, that's your business. My business is to see if I can counteract the poison."

"Right."

So Shaper went out again, asking around, and in the worst of places at times, scraping up what he could.

He rounded a corner, and two armed men stopped him.

Shaper hissed and backed up.

"What do YOU want?" he growled.

They smiled.

"It isn't what WE want. It's what YOU want. You've been asking into a matter we'd rather you stayed out of," said the first.

The second placed a hand on his sword hilt.

"Yes, and if you DON'T stop looking, there will be dire consequences." Shaper stepped back, and put his mask on. Something about how these two moved bugged him. It was familiar, but he needed time to place it.

"Hey, look," he said calmly. "I'm just doing a favor for a friend. But if you have to do with it, then it makes you my business." He narrowed his eyes, and tried to look dangerous.

A third man moved up behind the first two.

"Hold up boys... that's the creepy guy with the mojo who hangs with the vampire bitch and the target."

"So?" said one of the others.

"SO..." added the guy in the back. "He can rip you to shreds in less time than it'd take you to draw that weapon of yours."

Shaper perked up and turned away slightly, donning his mask.

"That's right, I can..." he chortled as evilly as possible. "And I don't like the way you're looking at me." He took a step back suddenly. "That only figures in for YOU two though. I'm fast enough to take him... and I got some things to do it with." Shaper tried not to gulp noticeably as the third man drew out a dagger.

A VERY eerily familiar one.

Last he'd seen it, Victor had been carrying them... or ones like them.

"Un-fucking-real!" he muttered, eyes darting from one side to the other. Victor had sworn up and down blue and sideways that no one knew about them. The thing to do, Shaper decided was to take the third man out - in a way he didn't expect.

"Peek-a-boo!" he cackled, and used his eerie speed to draw Victor's gun from its holster, and put a neat round hole in the third man's head. "Hah... didn't think I'd carry a gun, dijya?" The rizen cackled again, and grinned in the most disturbing way the mask had when he wore it. The other two turned and ran. With a sigh, Shaper searched the third man's body before the local law enforcement showed up. There was no identifying insignia, at all.

"So if you're the head guy, and you have no identity, then they didn't think you'd live to get back. That we'd win. Sorry sucker," Shaper said, with a faint smirk. He did pick up the silver three edged dagger, and toss it into the air a few times. "I'm taking this though."

Then with a creepy smile, he walked away, sure there was more to this than just those three men. And somehow, it freaked him out.

"Damnit Victor," he muttered. "Don't leave me to deal with this shit alone. Wake up."

He sighed, and stepped back into the rooms they'd gotten, and saw pretty much the same thing as before, Victor looking like a corpse laid out for burial on the bed, and Amy with his head in her lap while the alchemist fiddled about with the dart.

"I've had a really crummy night. And indeed, somebody wants Victor either out of it, or dead. I ran into a few of them trying to convince me violently that Victor didn't need saving."

"It's possible..." Rosethorn mused, "that he doesn't..."

* * *

Darkness, Darkness Darkness, while it was soothing, it was also getting boring real fast.

Darkness, Darkness, Darkness.

Was that a light? Well then... pain or no pain, it was better than boredom.