Daria lets herself in through the Casa Lane front door. She's been out hunting earlier than usual tonight, to try and beat the rain, and the first drizzle of it has caught her, leaving an overture of droplets in her auburn hair, like sparkles in unpolished gemstone, Jane thinks, because she's fairly well besotted with her undead best friend.
"You ever eat nutria?" Daria asks. "Big rodents. Big, big rodents. Invasive species. Got so many in Louisiana they can't cook them into gumbo fast enough. You know that marshy spot by the unstable landfill? I got three tonight. I did Lawndale a public service tonight."
"I think nutria blood makes you giddy, my love."
"Just a lot of it, and fast... I got an Audubon Society booklet on invasive species. I want to go to Florida and try Burmese python."
"I can't believe you just said that you want to go to Florida."
"They can grow to sixteen feet long, Jane. Sixteen feet. That's, like, three and a half Darias. Think about it: a summer night, orange juice, orchids in the trees outside the waffle diner, and a girlfriend who can say she caught a snake thiiiis big." She spreads her arms wide and then brings them in to wrap around Jane. "Maybe I am a little giddy," she allows. "Meanwhile, you..." She sniffs. "Personal pan pizza, with mushrooms and bell peppers. And, hmm, not cheesy breadsticks, but garlic knots with marinara dipping sauce."
Jane returns the embrace. "I'm gonna miss garlic knots."
"You do know that garlic isn't actually one of my, well, personal issues, right?"
"I know that you still have a little mud on you from the swamp. Come on, let's get you showered and into another identical copy of your outfit."
"My shirts are subtly different colors, Jane. As an artist, you should recognize these things."
Jane leads her slightly blood-tipsy girlfriend up the stairs. If Daria's experience is any guide, Jane's turning will involve eating a much narrower variety of human foods, just due to sensory issues, and a much greater familiarity with local fauna. They'll roll the dice on the levitation, pyrokinesis, ability to survive sunlight....
"Your hair is cute tonight," Jane says. "It brings back memories."
They're back in Lawndale for the beginning chunk of summer vacation, after one semester in college for Jane and two for Daria. The latter had spent much of their time apart acclimating to the unexpected receipt of the dark gift. She'd then spent a significant amount of their time back together learning how to drink Jane's blood as frequently as was feasible. And letting hypnotic inductions loose in Jane's mind. And doing various other things to Jane, all of which even added together didn't happen often enough in Jane's opinion, but that's college life for you.
The showers in Casa Lane are not luxurious multiperson experiences. Jane lets Daria have one to herself and retires to her bedroom to give a critical evaluation to a painting of bioluminescent deep-sea creatures that, for a reason she can't yet pin down, isn't working properly.
Daria floats in from the shower about ten minutes later. She's considerably more on-the-level than before, but that level is about a head higher than normal, with her legs casually bent back at the knees, resting on nothing. Jane thinks she gets a little show-off-y when they have the house to themselves. Her hair is up—really up, like she's been gripping a van de Graaff generator at a science museum. She stretches out her arms and lets her hair fall, a bit tousled, a bit damp from the rain and now the shower spray. She has changed into one of Jane's shirts, actually merch from the Harpies, the band fronted by Trent Lane's ex Monique, which after exploding in band drama has reformed with a better drummer and a bass player who, though perhaps not more talented, plays better off Monique, as well as having red-orange hair in a pixie cut and being possibly a little sweet on Jane. In an aspiring rock star/potential groupie kind of way, not an emotionally serious one.
"You bothered to put your boots back on?" Jane inquires.
"You like the look."
It's true, she does.
It's taken Daria's undeath for them to admit these little things to each other, but now they do.
Jane says, "It was the night we met in that diner on the way to Swedesville. Your hair, I mean."
"I kind of guessed." Daria flomps onto Jane's bed, dangling her feet over the edge, and watches Jane at her easel, as they had done so many times together in the years before college, undeath, admitting love, the whole lot.
"You told me I was the person you trusted most. More than your boyfriend."
"I can recall a time when you definitely did not find Tom trustworthy," Daria points out.
"I felt your arms around me and learned what your hair smells like after rain, and I discovered I'm the person you trust the most. I thought about that night a lot when you were away. I tried not to notice just how much."
"You still are. The person I trust the most. I mean," she waves a hand over herself to indicate the, well, everything. "In case that wasn't obvious."
Jane gives up on trying to revise her painting in her head and flomps down beside Daria. "Likewise," she says.
She's stretched out flat, looking away from Daria, when Daria speaks. "Bearing all that in mind, then, are you planning on fucking Nadine?"
NOT QUITE A WEEK EARLIER
Daria, fresh from surviving her sister Quinn's high-school graduation ceremony, is brewing herself a pot of strong tea in the Morgendorffer kitchen. Spending time at Jane's has, among its other decided advantages, the chance of avoiding having to force human food down her gullet and the risk of showing too much reluctance and thus prompting parental concerns about conditions she doesn't have. She's brought from Boston a jar of a Thai oolong that she's rather fond of, and a strategic reserve of single-origin dark chocolate bars.
"Daria, sweetie," says her mother, popping her head around the corner in the studiedly casual way that is so very her, "have you heard if Quinn has been invited to any... graduation parties?"
"Quinn? Roughly all of them, I should think."
"Could I persuade you to go with her and keep her out of trouble?"
There's a bit more genuine concern in her mother's tone than Daria would have expected—subtly so, but after this many years Daria can identify it—and she wonders if Quinn has gotten up to or into a few things this past year that she hasn't heard about yet. Or maybe the fact of her littlest one graduating high school has just provoked Helen Morgendorffer into a slightly heightened emotional regime.
Daria decides to keep the conversation on familiar ground. "Fifty," she offers.
"Twenty," her mother counters.
"Forty."
"Thirty."
"Thirty-five, and no questions about the time Quinn gets back, as long as she's safe."
"Done."
Daria sips her tea. "Mmm. Pour you a cup?" she offers.
* * *
The sun is setting, and Daria tries to keep her mood from being obviously elevated. She puts the SUV into reverse and guides it out of their driveway.
"We're collecting Stacy and Tiffany but not Sandi?" she asks Quinn.
"Sandi is intending to arrive fashionably late in the company of her beau," Quinn says.
"And there's my co-chaperone," Daria announces, and pulls the SUV to the curb where Jane is waiting. In, Daria notes, her "conventional girl" costume: hair done up, lipstick a more natural shade, clothes in coordinated pastels, and a teddy-bear backpack that makes clinking sounds when she climbs in the vehicle and unzips it.
"I talked Mom out of a curfew for you," Daria tells Quinn. "If we have to drive your friends home, we can still stay out later. You three each get one bottle of hard cider," Daria says. "It's better than whatever piss beer that high-school students buy, and you're not accepting any drink poured by a boy."
It's blunt, which Quinn expected, and free booze from Daria, which she had not.
Jane chortles. "How's it feel to have a cool sister?"
* * *
The world of a high-school party is a world of small concerns, Jane thinks. How had she failed to recognize how insular their environment had been?
Most of the crowd is Quinn's year. They have only a vague notion at best of Daria's erstwhile reputation as the greatest brain in Lawndale High history, and they don't see a lot to connect the stories with the quietly confident stranger, a little bit goth, a little bit punk, doing the party trick where she waves her hand over a shot of vodka and it catches fire. None of them guess that the very simple explanation for the trick is that she can start fires with her mind.
Jane revolves about the house party, from the kitchen to the makeshift dance floor to the pool out back. She's on her second hard cider—it's up to her to finish the pack—and lounging poolside when she drops her eyes from the sky and sees a weed deal going down. The buyer is probably a Lawndale High graduate as of this week. The seller looks a little older. She's got more arm ink than a high-schooler could get away with, anyway.
"Lifesaver," the girl doing the buying says. They bump fists. "See ya." And, turning around as she leaves, she makes a kind of salute by spreading three fingers on each hand and touching the tips of the middle ones. "Harpies rock!"
The older-looking girl grins and salutes back.
"Harpies," Jane calls over. "Monique's band?"
"You know her?"
Jane realizes that she looks like someone who probably wouldn't. She laughs. "Monique was almost family. Several times. Jane," she introduces herself, holding out the last bottle of hard cider as a long-distance handshake. "You drinking tonight?"
"Nadine. And sure."
"Bearing all that in mind, then, are you planning on fucking Nadine?"
Her voice is Daria-neutral.
Jane looks over quickly, guiltily, and sees that there is just a bit of playfulness in Daria's features. This comes out in her voice, too, when she continues, "It's a simple question. She is the actually-gayest member of the band with all the punk-butch vibes." Jane still doesn't know what to say. There's a short answer, but it's not a simple one.
Daria brings her hand to rest upon Jane's back, between her shoulderblades. Her voice moves from subtly playful to gently sincere. "You're the one I trust the most," she reminds Jane.
Finally, Jane manages to swallow the lump in her throat long enough to say, "If she asked me—and she's gotten pretty close—I'd find it harder than I should to say no." The lump comes back with the feeling of betrayal, and now her stomach feels like it's about to implode.
Daria doesn't move her hand. "And what if I let you say yes?"
Jane is too bewildered to feel much relief that Daria is not angry. "Is that supposed to be a simple question?"
The gleam rises in Daria's eyes as she says, "Let's discuss." She pushes herself up and catches Jane by the shoulder, flipping Jane onto her back and ending with Jane underneath her, waist straddled by the bare thighs under her skirt. She brushes one hand slowly through Jane's hair and rubs the thumb of the other, just as slowly, over Jane's lips.
"Daria, where are you going with this? It's... not like you."
"Discussion," Daria says, and this is very much like her. "You know that what we do, we do for love. I enjoy summoning pleasure from your body because it is the body of the woman I adore on every level. But is that all you want? If I went down on you twice as often, would you be more satisfied?"
"Daria, I'm not desperate for more, I'm—"
"Oh, I think a bit of you is. I think there's a part inside you that wants to be touched and taken for reasons that have nothing to do with love." Daria's hands migrate to Jane's shoulders, then make a circuit of the most delicate pressure beside and below and between her breasts. "Part of you accused yourself of dressing like a call girl, and part of you liked the accusation. Part of you enjoyed feeling like you were so pretty you earned your living by making men pay for it. Don't you think that same thing inside you wants to be the girl a rock star picks, the slut among sluts, chosen from a room of the willing because your cheerful depravity means you'll throw yourself into every moment of being used and discarded?" Daria's hands are pushing Jane's shirt up now, baring the tautness of her abdomen. "What if Nathan had been honest? What if he'd admitted all along that he wanted an ornament for his arm, a doll who would dress herself? Would you have stayed and been that for him?" They don't often talk about Jane's past crushes and flings. Who among them could compare? But now Daria is using them as tools of her own confidence. Her voice drops to a whisper as she asks what Jane knows she will ask. "What if Alison had been honest? What if she'd told you from the start that she was running a mercenary fuck on Dotson for her own advancement, and she wanted you for her own gratification? You were nothing for her career. You were the deliciously leggy art chick that she could wrap around her fingers. Can you tell me that her curves wouldn't have won the argument?"
Jane doesn't want to think about that incident, about the taste of betrayal and manipulation it had left on the mere thought of holding another woman. But Daria is here now, and suddenly Daria is lowering herself to bring her whole body in contact with Jane's, and everything is softness and Daria's auburn hair upon them both.
"You're the one I trust the most," Daria says again. She's carried Jane through the worst of it, the toughest part of what Jane had to admit.
"I love you," Jane says, because she needs to say it and she fumbles at saying anything more.
"I trust you with my secret," Daria says. "I would trust you with... having a little fun."
"It is a part of me," Jane admits. "All that. I don't need to indulge it, if..."
"Would it make for good memories?"
"Daria, I can't believe you'd be OK with me screwing someone else."
"And I can't believe you weren't listening when I said I enjoy summoning pleasure from your body."
Jane works through the implications. "You'd let me do it... because they'd just be a tool of yours?"
"I'd allow you to do it if you convinced me that you'd know the whole time that they were a tool of mine. I'd allow you to do it if you convinced me you knew I was allowing you to do it."
Somehow Jane's worry that her eyes still seeking out handsome guys and scanning over pretty girls was a problem for them... somehow that worry has flipped around into being another way for Daria to dominate her.
"Jane, your heart is racing."
"You like that?"
"Oh, it sounds delicious."
"Hey, Janey, have you seen Jesse's scented candles?"
Trent has, apparently, returned home while they were intensely occupied. His question from the other side of the door breaks the mood.
"Basement, giant box by the stairs," Jane yells back. She holds back a giggle.
Daria rolls off of her. "So glad you fixed the lock on your door."
"I'm very handy."
"Uh-huh."
"Wanna watch TV?"
"O negative and O-M-G positive—bisexual vampire coeds, next on Sick, Sad World."
They stumble half an hour late into a direct-to-video Universal Soldier sequel that they've never heard of before, which seems to be aiming at Saying Things and Having a Mood without the budget or basic competence to do so. They riff their way through it, and then find themselves sincerely enjoying a Columbo rerun where the shambling detective solves a murder in a high-end Italian restaurant.
After they watch Columbo unmask the killer and cook scaloppine, Jane notices Daria noticing the contemplative look on her face.
"I know I'm giving my life to you one of these nights," Jane says, not looking at the TV or at Daria or at anything, really. "There are things that I want to try first. Before I start experiencing the world the way you do. Shit, we don't even know if I'll have your luck and be able to go out in the sun. But I know I'm giving my life to you, regardless."
"What's on your list?"
"Maybe a pizza with, like, goat cheese and wild-foraged chanterelles," Jane jokes.
"Maybe sex with a human girl?"
"... Yeah."
This time, Jane places her hand on Daria's back. "What can I do to convince my Maîtresse that I understand what's involved?"
"What, right now?"
Jane is a little wide-eyed as she nods.
"Note to self," says Daria. "When I lose my anxieties, I get confident. When Jane loses hers, she gets horny."
"It's like you know me."
"All right. Give me a minute to think." Daria rolls to rest on her back and interlaces her hands behind her head. "And do it while kneeling on the floor."
"Oui, Maîtresse." Jane is atypically clumsy in her eagerness. She finds herself tugging at her collar to expose the skin where her neck meets her shoulder.
"You think you're anywhere close to earning that tonight?" Daria is now sitting up, perched on the edge of Jane's bed. She crosses one booted leg over the other. She is on now. "Show me your wrist."
Jane lets her eyes devour Daria just a moment longer before dutifully lowering her gaze to the floor and holding out her arm, veins up.
"Now, convince me you want me to drink from it."
She makes Jane beg. She's never demanded that Jane speak so much during a session before. Always before now, she'd taken Jane under or otherwise reduced her to incoherence, so that Jane was capable only of fragments. Tonight she asks for whole sentences, abasement in monologue, forcing Jane to hold onto consciousness with her fingernails as she desperately wants to answer her lust and let go.
"I'd never known a release like the first time you drank from me, Maîtresse. The reason I have blood is for you to take it, my love, Maîtresse..."
Jane hears Daria shift position, and then she feels a steady support under her wavering and weakening arm. "Satisfactory," Daria says. "Eyes up, chérie."
Somehow she makes baring her fangs look like an act of devotion.
Daria drinks long and slow from Jane's wrist.
Jane shudders and feels the shuddering build to a gasp. The gasp then turns into a joyful sob. She wants Daria to take it all like this—
And then Daria slides herself loose. Jane feels the punctures close as Daria's thumb caresses over them.
Now, my love, Daria's voice echoes in her mind. Convince me that you want to be groupie slut trash.
Jane pulls out all the stops to degrading herself, admits to every random lust, confesses every weakness. Every reason she's had to doubt her worth flows out of her, while Daria only grows closer.
Daria encloses her from behind and whispers, "Good girl."
Jane had been curious if Daria could implant a hypnotic trigger as a reward in their sessions. It turns out that being curious about it was a long way towards wanting it to work, which was the key step in making it work. That, and Daria's ability to speak inside Jane's head.
Jane's head slumps forward as the relaxation hits her body. Daria catches her and, one hand in her hair, guides her head sideways to give her neck the stretch that Jane has been craving. "Now," Daria says, "all the way under... And then we'll see."
The pain is glorious, inseparable from joy, woven tightly with the peerless sensation of providing herself for her love. She cherishes each landmark as Daria brings her past it—the warm paralysis in her fingers and toes, then hands and feet, ascending, moving inward, the sound and feel and insistent force of Daria's heart in her ears and through her vessels.
Good girl, Daria projects into her mind.
Jane would climax if her body still had the strength. Instead she rides the steady bliss of Daria's acceptance into unconsciousness.
And then, in a rush of something more than oxygen, she is awake again.
"Did you think we were done tonight?" There is cajoling in Daria's voice and adoration in her eyes, and her own wrist is clamped around Jane's neck.
Blood is flowing into Jane now.
"You weren't nearly so far gone that this could turn you. But you're going to like it."
Holy fucking shit, yes she does. It's like liquid truth and well-being. It feels the way that telling Daria I love you feels, only condensed into the stuff of life itself.
"How does that feel?"
"Delightful, Maîtresse."
"Would you like more?"
"Oui, Maîtresse."
"Then up we go."
Daria lifts Jane to her feet. Jane can feel Daria's boots gently pressing against her legs, just a little off the ground.
"Now," Daria instructs. "Everything below the waist, off."
Jane wasn't expecting this, but she doesn't hesitate. It's the sort of thing she had imagined that Daria would say in bed, back in the days when she was studiously not wondering why she was thinking so much about what Daria would do in bed.
"Not to belabor the obvious, Jane, but you have lovely legs."
Jane had never dared to imagine Daria saying that.
Daria eases Jane upon her back in her bed. Arranging herself between Jane's just-admired legs, she says, "Everyone is built a little differently. I've noticed that your great saphenous vein—that's its name, not my value judgment—is particularly accessible near your fossa ovalis, right about here." She brings out her fangs, slides herself down and back, and bites Jane's thigh at her groin.
"Jesus fucking Christ, Daria!" Jane feels her entire body open in welcome.
Daria sips, just a taste that she can't deny herself under the circumstances, and then lifts herself up again. She quickly slides her own thigh against the wound, nicking herself with a fingernail, bringing her other leg over Jane's so that they are scissor-locked.
"Squeeze your legs together on that for me, OK?"
Daria's blood and all the dark truths it contains are flowing into Jane again, and Jane is arching upwards under her and moaning "Undeath has fucked you in the head, Daria, Maîtresse," and now Jane's body has the strength to do anything.
* * *
Later, Jane asks, "How long will your blood last in me?"
"Four to six weeks," Daria says, "in diminishing quantities."
"You spent a lot of time considering vein combinations, didn't you?"
"I almost went with my saphenous pouring into your jugular."
"Oh. Oh."
"Think I made the wrong choice?"
"Daria my love, nothing feels wrong right now."
The Zon has a bigger crowd and more energy than they remember. The Harpies haven't settled on a single sound, but the act seems to benefit from this. There's angry girl thrash tracks—Music to staplegun your clit by, Daria thinks into Jane—and then weirdly prog turns, like Roger Dean is doing their album art, and a slow number that sounds like Siouxie Sioux selling bug powder in Cronenberg's Naked Lunch.
If Lawndale had offered more nights like this, it would have been harder to leave.
The drummer counts them into another fast song, and Daria wishes she could see what's going on. There used to be nights when they could stand and watch and be apart from even Lawndale's alternative scene, whatever that was and went for. Misfits among the outcasts. Now there's a crowd having a real-for-fuck's-sake good time, and only one level of outcast doesn't seem too bad, only Daria has to drink blood in order to survive.
Jane is gulping water from a bottle. There's a world here in which she could belong, Daria thinks, keeping the thought in her own head. I am taking her away from pizza and hard cider and bass players with pixie cuts and maybe sunlight, all because I am too selfish to bear the consequences of an accident alone. I have a gift, and maybe responsibilities that come with it, and I eat rodents in a swamp, and I love her, and the most benign thing I do to her is trap her brain in the fetish dimension, and she deserves a lover who can share goddamn garlic knots with her, maybe even a lover who can be everything she needs without having to make weird fucking deals about side pieces. We were friends, once. Why have I done all this to my friend?
Monique starts keytar-ing a weirdly pure series of sine waves, like they're about to declare themselves Jem and the Holograms, and Jane whoops loud and jumps high.
She's been crawling the walls ever since you put two pints into her, Daria thinks. Could barely sit still at our picnic lunch in the park. Beyond amped for the show tonight. Ran down the sidewalk the last three blocks—couldn't have kept up when I was human—spun around a lamp-pole like she was Gene Kelly.
"You give me your blessing?" Jane is yelling in her ear.
"What—yes. Yeah, sure." The meaning of the question registers with Daria just after she finishes answering. Jane springs forward at the same moment, finding the spaces between bodies, riding the energy of the crowd.
Her perfect legs carry her onto the stage, and she pulls Nadine into a kiss.
Whoops and applause go up from the crowd as Nadine definitely kisses back. It's not all riot grrrl celebration of queerness—Daria hears some subharmonics she doesn't like, men who are thrilled to see their porn live on stage.
Jane takes a step back for air, and Daria still can't see where her right hand is, but her left arm is up and reaching for something to steady herself, and it's a live mike with shitty Zon wiring—
The pain cuts through Daria's soul and pins her in place like a moth to a board.
Half the lights in the Zon die as a breaker goes.
Jane's heart stops.
And something else makes it start again.
She pushes away a helping hand, lifts her head back up, and with the attitude of a girl who knows she'll only get to do this once, shoots the devil-horn gesture with both hands and belts out, "Punk's not dead!"
Holding herself to a merely human speed as she runs forward is the hardest thing Daria has ever done. She springs onto the stage with more strength than her legs ever had before the dark gift.
And now Jane is the one pulled into a kiss.
Nadine sees what Jane looks like when the kiss involves love, and Daria feels the chances of anything happening there are dying in a firework of jealousy, and she would have some emotion one way or the other about that except that everything in the world is narrowing to Jane now, and what no one sees and only the two of them feel is the blood flowing from the cut Daria had made on her own palm into the one her fingernail had drawn on Jane's neck, the dark stories and the dark truths flowing to join the stuff of life and love that Daria had already given.
Jane doesn't exactly remember how Daria gets her home. One of the first things was definitely Daria under her arm and deadpanning to Monique "The show must go on," which makes Jane feel like they really are two halves of a whole. And it must also have been early in the process when Daria had propped her against a car door and said, "This? This is nothing. I once came home from the Zon with hives."
She's out flat on her bedroom floor at Casa Lane. (Maybe in between there had been streetlights moving past, looking too bright.) She's feeling chills, rough ones that hit her whole body and settle heavy in her chest. "I made it through this," Daria says. "Your body is reconfiguring itself to be like mine."
"That's good," Jane croaks. "I like your body."
"You're full of my blood. It carried you through to the other side. Your old life was pushed out of the way. Now you get to be you. We just need to ride out the change together, OK?"
"You got this by reading a fucking book."
"It still hurt, my love."
"My last fucking pizza," Jane realizes, "was cold out of the fridge this morning."
"I'm sorry, my love. I wanted you to have more time. I was planning all the ways I could to make this easier for you. But you're on your way, OK? Just let the changes happen, my love."
The cold takes her memories for a while, and then Daria is telling her something like "this is gonna get a little weird", and she's biting something with feathers and letting the blood pour into Jane's mouth.
"You're hungry but can't feed on your own just yet," Daria explains. This happens at least once more, and then Jane figures the exhaustion can win for a little while.
* * *
"Nightfall, my love."
"Daria?"
Jane discovers that she had been sleeping like Daria had gotten into the habit of: bundled tight in a sleeping bag, which was in turn under blankets. They'd put blackout curtains in the windows for Daria's comfort....
Daria snaps her fingers, and a single candle lights. Jane sees Daria with undead eyes for the first time.
She can't form words.
Daria takes her hand. Without hurrying, making each motion last, she leans over Jane and gently presses their lips together.
It's only after Daria pulls back, still interlocking her fingers with Jane's, that Jane finally manages to speak. "Is this how you've been seeing me... and feeling me... all these months?"
Daria nods. "All of it, my love."
Jane half-worms her way out of her lightproof sleeping nest and lets Daria help to pull her the rest of the way to a standing position.
"I have to try," Jane says.
"Go ahead."
Jane runs a fingertip over her front teeth. They feel normal. Then she finds within herself a faculty for a kind of movement she has not done before, and—
Fangs.
She leans upon Daria, rocked with amazement, going giddy herself.
"Let's share the night," Daria suggests.