Perfectly Wrong

God, she was beautiful. Her curled, black eyelashes rested in delicate crescents along her plump cheeks. Her face was rounded, childish almost, and her lips rested permanently in a puckered pout, the damnable temptation of a childish beauty. She reminded him of a doll, a fragile child’s doll with its dainty china hands and fine porcelain features. She had a dark head of hair, streaks of a lighter auburn highlighting its length, and her pale, china skin contrasted sharply with the dark, silken threads.

The moon made her skin glow white in the darkness, and her hair spread out beyond her like the night sky. She truly was a beautiful creature with her skin glowing in the beams of moonlight and delicate features schooled into an innocent expression. Tracks of dried silver ran in shimmering beds down her cheeks, but with her lids lowered, it was impossible to see the clear, crystal blue that leaked the silver drops.

The night birds had taken up an instrumental chorus while the crickets provided the softly lilting lyrics. She lay stretched along the grass, face relaxed as though in slumber with her hands pillowing her cheek.

He smiled down at the girl, pale thin lips stretching across white teeth.

"My masterpiece," he whispered softly, long, elegant hand trailing down her smooth cheek in the mockery of a caress. "My beautiful little doll." The smile morphed into an expression of pride, an expression not unlike a violin maker who draws the bow across the newly strung instrument and is the first to hear its sweet melody.

His fingers ran smoothly down her face, finding no mar or otherwise disfigurement along her china skin. For a long period of time, he contented himself to merely stroking the rounded edge of her jaw, smiling a saccharine smile at the symmetry and beauty of her smooth curves and rounded lines. Then his hand dipped, running hungrily along her neck and down her throat. A low, delighted hum emanated from his own mouth. His hands skimmed lightly along the exposed skin, always delicate and never probing beneath the restricting layers of clothing, but with an air of invasiveness despite the seeming familiarity with her features. His was a gentle lover's touch, but with so still and childishly beautiful a girl, the caress seemed depraved and defiling, her body violated in sleep.

He tensed suddenly, posture rigid and muscles flexed, as though a rabbit startled by a noise. His fingers stopped their gentle ministrations at her neck and pressed against two small punctures there. They were small, delicate wounds, nothing that would seem to account for her stillness, and yet, he felt the taint of their existence. They were red and puckered about the edges, swollen and bruised like lips too often kissed. And yet her body was surprisingly free of any other wounds or marks, as though she had submitted freely to her slumber, sinking into His arms.

"Who?" He cried desperately, his entire being centered within the one word. "Who has done this to my Beauty, my Perfection?" His gentle strokes sped up, becoming maddening in their intensity and fervor. "My Beautiful Little Doll, who has disfigured you so?"

Despite the rapid movements of his hands, trying desperately to warm her neck and face, bring color once again into the pale cheeks, no blood appeared in the wounds. As a cloud temporarily blocked the stark white of the moonlight, the contrast now gone from the shadows, she appeared no more than a dried, withered husk, empty and devoid of all human emotion, a doll and nothing more.

"My Perfect Creation," he cried out again, as though in pain while his hands no longer ghosted, but pressed more firmly against the two small flaws in her skin.

A crack echoed suddenly around the glen, like the shattering of fine china or porcelain, and he stopped his ministrations long enough to pick the doll-like girl up in his arms. He moved then from the clearing, away from the field of nocturnal flowers and shafts of moonlight, away from nature's seeming perfection and into the darkness that hid the flaws.

"A waste," he said with a tormented sigh, dropping her body despondently within the muddy loam. The leaves crackled noisily beneath her body's weight, her head and neck bent in an unnatural angle, eyes still closed in slumber.

He brushed his hands against a nearby leaf, wiping the taint of her imperfection from his flawless skin.

"A pity," he sighed again sadly, white fangs gleaming in the once again revealed moonlight. He absentmindedly ran his tongue along the too perfect teeth, cleaning the last of the blood away and savoring the youthful sweetness of his latest meal. "A pity she was not the one. I was so sure... She was almost perfect... almost... so close, I could taste it..." His eyes darted briefly to the unmoving figure of the young girl, a demented light glowing just beneath the surface. "Pity," he whispered again mournfully, tone and expression showing regret for his own loss, not hers. He turned and began to walk deeper into the forest, not once looking back.

A second pair of eyes watched his progress through the trees, smiling ironically at the last comment.

"Almost perfect Old One," the second figure muttered defeatedly, "Almost up to your immortal standards, but not quite." He smiled bitterly at the swiftly retreating back, eyes unfocused and haunted, knowing and understanding the creature that lay before him, the future that lay ahead of him. "Immortality's curse... and its gift." He whispered softly, movements stunted and gestures broken compared to the smooth ageless grace of the older one.

"Ageless time to perfect oneself... No death, no life, and only so much time before you've made all your mistakes... learned from all your mistakes..."

The bitter smile was gone, replaced with a eerie calmness and neutral countenance. "Too much time for us... not nearly enough for them. The perfect predator grows tired of flawed prey."

He turned then to the moon, the constant companion of the night walkers. The timeless satellite who had been born before the first vampire and who would die long after the last. Then in a voice rising with the same desperate cry of the elder vampire, an ageless, timeless being of innumerable years, the young creature cried out his question.

"Why does it have to be like this? Why must Time hold us tighter the more we try and escape her? Is this our punishment? Our penance for eternal unlife? Are we all doomed with infinite bodies and finite minds... are we all doomed?"

The stars twinkled benignly from above in their halo around the white moon. Ageless bodies of endless light that burned eternal in the sky, at least in a human's limited mind. Nature improved on her design, fixing the body, but not the mind, and human flesh, turned into a frozen vampire, its body died for the immortal unlife as did its soul, though the mind digs a much slower grave.

And Time twisted more painfully about the vampire's human mind, its human perceptions unable to comprehend the eternal future that loomed unendingly before it.

A drop of blood fell from the green leaf, two crimson hand prints marring its natural beauty. The young vampire licked his lips unconsciously, his mind dutifully supplying the remembered taste of youthful blood to his senses, and to so young a vampire, the imagined taste and scent was sweet and seductive and oh so perfect.

A perfectly broken body taken by a perfectly broken mind.