Vampirical -- Lauren Jauregui x Reader

Distant

[I know I said I was going to change this but I thought my other idea would be easier to write. Turns out, it's not so we're going to just continue like this! Sorry for messing you all about]

That's how a lot of our interactions went for a while. I'd try to get to know her a little more, think that I was getting somewhere, and then she'd snap or leave suddenly. She was distant, but the more time I did get to spend with her, the more I realised I was falling for her, as twisted as it may be.

"Am I doing something wrong?" I asked her as she sat in one of the trees outside the cottage one day.

She looked down at me with a strange sadness in her eyes and rolled her hunched up shoulders to stretch them.

"No." She finally replied, "No, it's me who's doing something wrong."

She jumped from the branch and landed in front of me with a soft thud, looking into my eyes with a pleading expression. Slowly, her slightly shaking hands came to rest on either side of my face as she looked from one of my eyes to the other like she was searching for something. I was so hypnotised by the colours swirling around in her eyes that the coldness of her skin did not affect me.

"A-are you okay?" I whispered when she tilted her head and parted her lips, letting out a long, quiet breath.

"Will you walk with me?" She questioned, and I immediately nodded. A smile danced along her oh-so-soft-looking lips as she moved to my side and stuck her arm out for me, so I looped my own around her elbow and giggled a little.

...

"I want to apologise." She spoke up once we were on a small dirt path along the outskirts of the woods, still arm in arm.

"For what?" I asked and she waited until we moved around the corner before stopping us both in our path and turning to face me.

"For everything. For, by the way I can tell that you're feeling, leading you on. Listen, whatever you think can come from you 'getting to know' me, it can't happen. Not while you're ali-"

"What are you talking about, Laur?" I stopped her and she pursed her lips as she looked to the side, down, and then back at me.

"I'm..." She took a deep breath, "Spending time with me with me is risky - life-threatening, even."

"Lauren, I-"

"No." She husked, her eyes flickering to their other, more golden shade, "Every time I see you I want to kill you. Don't you get that?"

She was pacing now, gesturing wildly with her hands, "Everything that you feel when you're around me, I control. I can make you do whatever I want, Y/n, and I still can't shut that off. Not always."

"Not always, but you can. You couldn't ever before."

"I still can't."

"I can feel when you're doing it, Laur. I know when you're doing it because it doesn't feel right and I haven't felt like that in a long time." I argued, but she just sped up and started shaking her head.

"That's because it feels normal to you, now. I- I can paralyse you so you can't fight back, not that you'd be strong enough anyway. I can make you scared, or I can make you brave enough to offer yourself up to me. I-"

"Then do it." I snapped despite the anxiety now running through me, and she looked up at me with a fire in her eyes, "If you're so bad, Lauren, then do it."

Silence. Stillness. Nothing.

Just as I thought... or at least hoped.

"If you're so dangerous, so bad, Lauren, you'd have killed me down in the cellar." I pointed out and she tensed up and started walking away from me until there were a good five feet between us. Then, without turning, she raised one hand until it was level with her head.

"A click of my fingers and I could be gone, you could be dead, or..." she stopped, clicked her fingers, and I felt as stiff as a board, the only things that still moved were my eyes and my heaving chest.

"You think I'm not like this, Y/n. You think that this... this fantasy that I've been feeding you is what I'm like. You forget that I'm a vampire, the very thing that children have nightmares about and adults deny the existence of because they are so afraid of the truth being a possibility." She slowly turned her head to look over her shoulder, though not directly at me, "You've fallen into the trap, Y/n. My trap."

I tried to shake my head, to argue against her, but of course, that didn't work. All it did was cause a chuckle from her.

"You want to know why all of this happened? Why the wolves put you under their protection? Why they came looking for you when I took you?" She sped around to be just inches in front of me, and waited a moment as though allowing me time to respond, "I heard what Mani said. She was right. I would've given up everything to have you. You see, I wrote another contract before I ever took you. I offered to give up half of our land and control to have you. Normani talked me out of it. She told me that humans are weak and we are strong. You are cowardly and we are what you fear; we are the monsters that haunt your dreams. She told me not to go get lost in the fact that you see me as anything other than that because you will find out and I'd only have to take your life at that point instead of back then. You know what I did?" I took a deep breath and looked down from her light eyes, a tear pricking my own as my heart seemed to break at how she could talk about herself like that, "I went and got lost in the way you see me. I forgot who I was because I felt 'normal' again."

Then all of a sudden, I could move again and I instantly bent over to rest my hands on my knees and take deep breaths, my chest feeling abnormally tight.

"Lauren-" I tried but she clasped her cold hand under my jaw and lifted me back up to face her, and then tipped my head back so my neck was exposed to her. As she pushed two pale, slender fingers against my pulse point, I felt my heart rate quicken and looked down at her.

"You have to leave... and not come back." She instructed, starting to walk away from me at a pace relatively fast for a human but still slow for her, as though she didn't want to be walking away at all, and I realised I didn't want her to, either.