Post by spazzyprincess on Jun 3, 2011 1:20:52 GMT -5
Paris Eve was born the youngest to a family of four children in Chicago, Illinois, United States. Except back then he wasn’t Paris, he was just Peter, which was often mangled to Peety or pipsqueak. He had two older brothers and one older sister who all lived to dump chores on him. He whined about it at first, but he soon realized it wasn’t worth putting up a fight. This realization was helped along when his brother Nicholas stole his favorite book and threw it in a mud puddle, when his sister Mary moaned to their mother about how she had too much homework to do, and when his brother Joseph ‘accidentally’ totaled his brand new bike. So, knowing being a tattletale would just get more of his prized possessions destroyed, he stopped complaining and just did the work.
He liked to escape his status as a much-abused youngest child by reading and writing poetry. He had to hide this last fixation from his father and brothers, but mostly his father. His father had certain ideas of what a young boy should be interested in, and writing poetry was definitely not one of those things. No matter how many times Peter explained that Robert Frost was a man and one of the greatest poets ever, his father resolutely believed that poetry should be handled sparingly by boys. So he hid his poetry books from all but his sister, who sometimes liked to read them.
In high school, Peter was the timid geek who wore glasses and could recite entire passages of Edgar Allen Poe. But geeks have friends too. He and his best friend Samuel disagreed on many points of interest, but it was his best friend who managed to drag him out of the house for the parties. Peter’s first kiss came after he wrote and spoke a love poem to his high school crush while at one such party. But the next day she acted as though she had no idea who he was.
One day during his senior year, Peter was reading Beowulf in English class when a secretary came to retrieve him. The car belonging to his brother Nicholas had been found with a gaping hole in the windshield and the front end smashed into a wall. And there was blood. Peter rushed home to comfort his parents and siblings and to be comforted.
They never heard from Nicholas again. He was presumed dead, possibly killed by a gang. The family did the best they could to move on with their lives. Time passed. Peter moved to an apartment with Samuel, but decided to move again because his friend kept having girls stay the night. He worked as a librarian for some time, writing at night or going to a bar with his friends.
At one such bar visit, he met a lovely young maiden from England named Helen. Her hair was dark blonde, but she said it had once been lighter. He said it was beautiful just the way it was. He recited Emily Dickinson to her, and by night’s end they were enamored of each other. But she was only visiting, and was going home at the end of the week.
The week’s end drew nearer and nearer. They spent a couple of days together. She was nothing like that high society girl he’d kissed when he was in high school. She loved the classics just as much as he did. They spent happy hours discussing their favorite books and reciting poetry together. When she left, she gave him a kiss on the cheek and promised to write.
That letter writing lasted for two years. His mother was getting worried that he hadn’t found a pretty girl to settle down with. She invited him and his sister over for dinner one night, and together with the help of Mary, she managed to coax out of him that he was in love with an English girl. It was his sister who suggested he visit her. At first he refused, fearing it would be presumptuous. But his mother laughed. She told him that it was his job to be presumptuous, for however were they to get married otherwise?
And married Peter and Helen did become, but not until another year had passed after his initial visit. It was Helen who suggested he change his name to Paris so that they could be Helen and Paris. Never having liked his name much, Peter gave it up without much of a fight. Helen had a more difficult time convincing him that the last name Eve was perfectly romantic. Eventually he acceded to her wishes. And so he became Paris Eve.
The winter after their marriage, Helen gave birth to a daughter named Star. Paris dotted on her and read to her every night. For twelve years, they were relatively content and happy. Helen was a literature teacher, Paris was a librarian. And Star was their budding scholar.
Late one night, Paris was driving home from a local bar. He had been assigned the job of driver by his English friends because he was a reliable moderate drinker. He had dropped everyone off by then, it was just him alone in the car. Out of nowhere, a woman appeared in his headlights. She lay in the middle of the road. That was all Paris managed to register before he slammed on the brakes. The car skidded to a stop barely inches from her. He leaped out and hurried to her side, planning to check for a pulse. But as his hand reached for her neck, her silver eyes flew open and her fangs stabbed into his wrist.
This was a ploy Rhiannon Challice had played many times before, the helpless maiden apparently drunk or dead or hurt. Although she usually did it for a meal, this time she meant to keep him. She had been watching the man for a while, and liked what she saw of him. He seemed to truly care about others. This was perfect for her needs. She had recently bitten her little sister, Candace, who now thought herself cursed by the devil. Candace kept trying to commit suicide, so Rhiannon thought that if she could find someone like Paris who would be able to convince her that not all vampires are evil, that maybe Candace would calm down. It would help that Paris was handsome.
After biting her target, Rhiannon dragged him off the road and into some bushes. He’d left the key in the ignition, so all she had to do was hop in. She drove the car until it ran out of gas somewhere in the middle of nowhere. Then she ran back to Paris to take him to her loft in London.
However, when Paris awoke, he was none too cooperative. At first he thought he had gotten drunk and had wound up sharing a bed with her. He proceeded to beat himself up mentally. She pointed out that he was fully dressed, which calmed him down. But he wouldn’t believe she and now he were vampires. So she ran out, caught a stray cat, and proceeded to drink its blood before his eyes. He snatched the cat from her before she’d drunk much and finished it off himself. After that he was convinced. However, he couldn’t believe that he was not cursed by the devil.
But Rhiannon changed his mind. She showed him that she could walk into a church without trouble. She touched a rosary. And most impressive, she demonstrated that she didn’t have to drink from humans. This planted a seed of doubt in his mind, which eventually transformed into almost-certainty that vampires weren’t necessarily evil. He convinced Candace of this too.
But most of the time he spent missing his wife and daughter. Early on, he left a letter explaining nothing except that he would be gone for a while, and that he loved them. He watched his wife grow steadily angrier, believing that he’d run off with another woman. He watched Star’s normally happy expressions become colder. And he had no one to blame but himself.
One day Candace asked him why he didn’t simply rejoin his family. He stared at her as though she’d gone mad. How could he put them in danger like that? Except…What danger? He’d never hurt a single human. Hadn’t Rhiannon convinced him that no vampyr had to drink human blood? That they weren’t necessarily monsters? Candace’s arguments won him over in the end, but it took him a couple more months before he could work up the courage to walk up to his old house.
Nothing could have prepared him for the expression on Helen’s face. She simply refused to believe it was him. It didn’t help that in his absence, he had let his hair grow long and wild, and he now had a rather impressive beard. This was the first time in his life that he’d had anything more than stubble.
But he came back the next day, beardless and with shorter hair. And she knew it was him. But she still wasn’t convinced that he hadn’t run off with a woman. According to Helen, it was the only logical explanation for why he would leave so suddenly. He had to admit that his disappearance was pretty suspicious. And honestly, he had in a manner of speaking. But really, the women had run off with him.
So he told her he was a vampire. She didn’t believe him, obviously. Neither did Star. But eventually his girls allowed him to resume living with them. It helped that they had all missed each other very much and were willing to forgive and forget.
And so the next few years progressed in somewhat the same way as they had before Paris had vanished. The difference was that now he had to deal with a teenage daughter who at times couldn’t believe that her parents really loved her and that they were not out to get her. And also, there was that whole thirsting for blood thing, but he managed it pretty well.
Then Helen found out she was pregnant. Craaaaaash! The world came down around their ears. The only reason Helen didn’t waste away early in her pregnancy was because she bit Paris and discovered that the baby wanted blood. It didn’t seem to particularly care whether it was animal, human, or vampyr blood, but Helen couldn’t bring herself to drink from her husband again after that first time. Paris drained animal blood into containers for her to drink from, and always told her it was punch to keep her smiling.
That was some of the very little smiling any of them did. Helen was always in pain, and there wasn’t much they could do about it. Paris brought Candace and Rhiannon in, but neither had seen such a pregnancy before and neither were doctors. Somehow Helen managed to make it three months with only over the counter medication to keep her sane.
One night, Paris went out for a hunt, leaving Star to watch Helen. He forgot his cell phone, but didn’t think of it. When he returned, he found his wife’s mutilated corpse in their bed, a bloody baby girl curled up to her mother’s side, and his eldest daughter standing slack-jawed in the doorway. The family dog was howling. Paris howled himself.
What followed were a couple of months of sheer madness in which they couldn’t quite believe Helen was gone, but had to own up to it at the same time. They buried her in their backyard and planted her favorite flowers around her headstone. Paris could often be found lying or sitting beside the grave, staring at it as though hoping Helen would rise up like Lazarus. It was often Angel who would find him there. She would curl up beside him, and he would absent-mindedly stroke her hair and sometimes reminisce. Star began keeping her distance from the both of them, but Paris never seemed to notice.
One day, Star had had enough. She yelled at her father about how it was all his fault, how he should never have come back, what were her parents thinking, why didn’t they get an abortion as soon as they knew? Paris seemed like he was ignoring her, but when she’d finally run out of steam, he got up and walked into the house.
Over the next week, he did a lot of thinking. Helen wasn’t here anymore. But maybe she was still at their old haunts. He just knew that she was out there somewhere, waiting for him to find her. He thought he heard her talking to him, telling him to move on, to stop sitting around like a sluggard because she wasn’t there in that body anymore. He was basically bonkers, but he didn’t realize that, or rather, didn’t want to realize it.
He sat down with his lawyer and signed over the house and bank account to Star. He couldn’t stay there anymore. Perhaps he would come back some day, if Helen led him there, but at the moment all he wanted to do was find her. He entertained the thought of taking Angel with him, but he was going to do a lot of wandering wherever Helen led him, and he didn’t think that was a life for a little girl. Plus, Helen told him she wanted Angel to stay home. And he did tend to listen to Helen.
His goodbye to his daughters was tearful on Angel’s part and stony on Star’s. As for Paris, he felt a strange kind of intensity. He was going to find his Helen, wherever she was, and bring her home so they could parent their daughters together. He owed it to them all. He kissed his daughters’ cheeks, kissed Helen’s headstone, and was gone.
For two years he searched. At first he tried every place he and Helen had ever been together. He even flew to America to look at the bar where they’d first met. Once he’d exhausted all those locations, he tried to ask their church’s pastor to bring Helen back. That went over well. He went to places Helen had been without him. He went to places he’d been. He even tried at Star’s school. But no matter where he looked, he could not find his Helen.
In the meantime, his friends Rhiannon and Candace were conducting a search of their own, although one that had more to do with children than with anything else. Their reasoning was that if a male vampyr could have a child, then surely female vampyrs could too. They eventually tracked down Simon, Rhiannon’s creator. Simon was more than happy to ‘experiment’, as he liked to call it, with Rhiannon. And she got pregnant. Candace fell in love with a widowed human man living in the same town. She all but adopted his sons as her own.
Paris happened to run across their trail while hunting for a meal. Thinking they might be able to help him find Helen, he followed it until he arrived on Rhiannon’s doorstep. When she opened the door, he found his gaze drawn downwards to the eyes of a small girl clinging to her mother’s leg. And though this girl looked nothing like Angel apart from her youth, he was suddenly slammed with a desire to see his own daughter again, to hold her, to read to her, to be her father. Helen said one name very clearly to him then. She said, “Angel.”
That was when he knew where to find his Helen.
After explaining all this to Rhiannon, much to her confusion, he set back off towards London. But when he arrived at his old house, it was to find it empty, abandoned. Star was long gone, living with her boyfriend across town. And Angel had been taken to live with the Night Coven by Sid Santos. But that was no trouble. Sid had left a note on the kitchen counter, a note explaining where to find his Angel.