~It was about this time of year that he and Ghost had dragged Nori to the graveyard of the Church of Eternal Life in Rome to watch Faith crawl out of her grave and let her feed for the first time. Unlike most vampires, Faith had two undead birthdays (lucky bitch). One on that fateful night when she had crawled from the grave Cassius put her into and the other a few months later when Azrael had cleaved her soul back into her chest on the battlefields outside a military base where she had been held captive.~
~Settling on a date somewhere in between he figured her at about five years dead by now. Not being normally captive to sentimentality he thought a small token would be a nice way to ring in her first half decade. The picture which he put into a gilt edged frame was set on the nightstand beside her bed. It was a shot that Jessie had taken of them in Rome, a small keepsake that he had carried through their travels together. There was a small eggshell white card placed beneath the photo written in his scrawlingly cryptic handwriting.~
"Faith,
Happy undead-day pet. Who says the damned can't take a good photo. May the time fly and leave us laughing as the centuries pass.
When human, Faith was never big on birthdays. Frivolous reasons to give someone gifts and celebrate the day of their emergence into the world. The mothers rarely got gifts on that day, and they were the ones who did all the hard...labor. So at age 25 Faith pretty much told her family, friends, and co-workers that she was never having another birthday ever again. A couple of years later, she died and was re-born as a vampire. Ain't irony a bitch?
So when she swept into her bedroom expecting to find absolutely nothing, since she was expecting exactly that, Faith was surprised to find the picture on her nightstand. Maybe it said something about the pick-and-choose-your-moments memory settings of a vampire's mind but she did not remember when the photo was taken. Smiling though, Faith slid her fingers along the edges of the frame and then grinned at the image inside of it. That night she remembered well however. Funny how it was the littlest of details the either stuck around forever, or fell away by the wayside.
The card was the sweetest touch.
Like a girl of good manners and whose mother had made sure Faith had her own monogrammed stationary since age 10, Faith pulled out a sheet of pale gray paper with a gilded F embossed on the top left corner, and her more modern script simply wrote.
"Thank you for the gift. If it's good photos you're into, I have a few ideas and a camera.
Do the damned blush?
Yours,
Faith."
After finishing her signature with a flourish, Faith spritzed a bit of perfume she never wore on the paper, and left the folded note on Azrael's favorite, one and only La-Z-Boy.
-- Edited by FAITH on Wednesday 14th of December 2011 08:42:58 PM
