Take This Blood Chapter 1: it's an addiction, a mortal instruments fanfic

Inspiration| well, books and the TMI series and every time Simon and Raphael talk to each other is music.

"I'm hooked on you, I need a fix, I can't take it—
Just one more hit, I promise I can do it—"

—"Addicted" by Kelly Clarkson

Simon crumbles to his knees on the pavement, eyes blown wide and mouth agape and ringed red like a child trying on his mother's lipstick. The rouge smudged hue coloring his lips and tongue and passing down his throat like thick cherry syrup, so addictive and sweet, you're not sure whether you want to drink more or never touch the stuff again. It keeps him alive, it keeps him slatted, but this is wrong, this is different, he wants more.

More, more, such glorious more.

All the better to quench the Thirst.

All the better to fill his belly.

All the better to sustain his nature.

Simon pauses, his thoughts startling him. Then again, his new thoughts have been doing that a lot lately. With very feeding, every fresh tapped vein, and pulsing wound he presses his greedy mouth to his mind begins to bend and bend like a twig ready to snap.

Blood bags, animal blood, it doesn't help. He needs fresh blood—he needs the vein.

It started a few weeks ago, after his change he'd be curled up in his bed, sound asleep, clutching a bottle of microwave warm blood to his chest and inhaled the stale scent he'd nip at all through the night to keep nightmares of killing his mother at bay. He drank, but something was missing. He starved, but food was waved before his face. He resisted, but the Thirst was too strong.

One thing you should understand, the Thirst was not primal hunger, but suffocation—needing of blood in his veins that would live and thrive through for more than a few days, boiling in his belly and making him feel oh so alive. He needed to feel alive.

It was a simple equation of the human body: blood + veins = movement.

The more blood he had the further from rigor mortis he was and the better off he would be. It was survival.

His mind is racing like morning traffic when they high of the warmth begins to wear and he's left staring at a bloody corpse lying not two feet from him. He instantly sobers and lunges at the body once again.

It's a girl this time—which surprises him since most his victims have been male—she's video star pretty with platinum blonde curls and crescent eyelashes that curl over her delicate cheekbones like waning moons. She's as white as a lily.

"Oh—" His throat chokes around the word and tear begin to salt his eyes as the burning in his throat begins again.

There is nothing more beautiful than a white woman with her breath all gone; Simon recalls a line from an old poem and his dead heart crawl up his throat.

"I'm sorry,"

A noise echoes to his left.

"Good, good," The shape steps from the darkness like a metamorphosis, shadows slowly crawling away from Raphael's angelic features that credited more his name, not his nature. The white collar of his shirt is clean and crisp, not a stain to tarnish his perfection.

Simon begins to shake and Raphael's lips begin to curl upward at the ends, fangs gleaming at deliciously full bottom lip. "Oh, cariño, don't be that way, you didn't make too much of a mess this time." He sounds almost delighted while Simon is still trying to grasp.

"I—I hurt someone . . . I killed her, I . . ." he stammers.

"She would have died anyway, more gently perhaps but I cannot see the future." Raphael says tersely, eyes sweeping over the girl distastefully and raises a brow. "Now she doesn't look nearly half the morsel you made her out to be. Was she any good?"

"I—I—" Simon can hardly comprehend what Raphael is saying now, much less think to the blood he'd drank down like a glass of water in the desert.

Gentle hands slip under his chin, slowly raising his head to an incline, Raphael kneels before him on one knee with a crown of inky black curls and a curious smirk—no one else has ever seen this side of him; not Clary, not Jace, no one. He looks so much like a dark angel right now, fallen from heaven's grace and preying upon the weak.

"Come now," His hand his hard on his jaw, fingers pushing hard enough to bruise and Simon whimpers when Raphael leans over him with his soft, pink tongue lapping at the corner of his mouth in one clean drag and moans, low and deep in his throat—it's enough to drive Simon mad. "You do indeed have the taste for blood—hers was so pure."

"It didn't want to kill her." He groans and the other vampire laughs.

"The girl still lives," he says dryly. His dark eyes glitter under the smoggy moonlight. "Here, listen to her heart."

Simon's eyes crawl across the pavement towards the girl, limbs contorted like a ragdoll's but beneath her creamy white skin, and her torn throat, her heart still beat—faintly—like a flashlight flickering, flickering, flickering before it went out.

Relief began to flood him until Raphael stands, hauling him up and throwing him across the girl. Simon scrambles up, glancing over his shoulder, and is pinned by Raphael's intense dark stare.

"Finish her," he whispers hollowly and Simon could feel her gentle heartbeat under her skin—pushing through her wrists and neck to prove life. "Now. Do it."

Simon finds his voice just as quickly, "No," he says.

"No? You would rather have the precious human suffer through her last moments of life?"

Simon winces. "No, I've had my fill. I'm done."

Raphael's small chin tilts upward and his eyes are dissecting him slowly—starting with his clothes—and his expression seems to say ah, mutiny, but nothing more. He's opting for the challenge though and Simon leans fully over the girl's body to protect her, instead of hurt.

"You will do it." Raphael's eyes flash. "You know you will, I know you will. It's not that hard, put your hands on her neck—just like before—give it a good grip and twist. It's just like breaking a chicken's neck."

"I've never broken a chicken's neck." Simon mumbles, feeling nauseous.

"Fine. It's like snapping a twig, now kill her."

He feels the pull, the great tidal wave that yanks him out of the bay and into the ocean, stumbling into deep dank waters where he'll drown.

"No . . . no, please . . ." His fingers prickle and crawl and suddenly they're on the girl's neck and suddenly he's gasping from breath. "No . . ."

"My patience is wearing thin, Daylighter." The words come searing hot like the crack of a whip against his skin and his voice tears at his skin and bone, injecting poison into his system. Simon feels light headed.

He felt the venom behind each word—driving into his skin like a meat clever, slowly peeling at his ears. He could not stop it, this pain, this hollowness. He did not want to kill the girl, he did not want to take a life—it wasn't in his nature. He didn't want to be a vampire! He wanted to be human! He didn't want to drink blood, or serve this psychotic freak! Sometimes he wishes he could walk into the sun and burn, fry like a forgotten pancake—bubble into the frying pan and burn a hardy dark brown before a charcoal black in crumbs, in pieces.

It could end; it could all end, if—.

"Kill her."

Snap.

And it's all gone.

The gentle heartbeat behind the moonlight skin, the thriving pulse, the color, the humanity—the girl's a shell of skin and bones and no soul lingers in her remains. And it's all his fault.

He took a life, blood on his hands. Gone.

The body under him is cool and still, beyond help, only fit now for a coffin. She was young, and bird-boned delicate, a bit like Clary, but sweeter somehow, perhaps in the face and doe-like brown eyes.

Her eyes are shut forever now, but Simon's fingers brush over his lids, leaving to smears of red that run vertically over her pale face like war paint down to her jaw. She hadn't even fought me.

"Well, now that that dramatic is over with—"

Screaming in rage, Simon lunges at him knocking the other boy to the ground and wrestling to quickly pin him under him. Thighs pressing into his, hands clasping at wrists—Raphael looks hardly amused, but Simon is raging.

"I hate this!" he screams and he means it, with every fiber of his being, with every ounce of new blood in his veins, he means it. His nails lengthen and dig into the other boy's wrists, making deep gouges through the skin. He raises a claw to Raphael's sight, showing him his blood. "I hate what you made me!"

"Simon—" Raphael's free hand begins to slip towards him, bloodstained fingers and all, and Simon is quick to pin him again. Teeth bearing down, he tells himself no. No, no, no. No, he does not need the blood. No, he is not hungry. No, this doesn't change anything. No, he doesn't want—

"Simon—"

There's something about Raphael—his looks, his nature, his voice. His voice is the worst. Where his glittering dark eyes might catch his and sneak them away, holding him prisoner somewhere dark and secret where no one could find them, it was his sire's voice that called to him the most, the strongest. It was an indescribable pull that made him want to go to him, please him, do whatever it took too make him happy.

"Simon—"

But he hated him. He hated what he'd become, he hated lying, he hated the blood. He hated how good it tasted. He hated how every flavor and type was different. He hated that he wanted to be near Raphael, like a loyal puppy dog. He hated wanting him at all. He hated the taste of his lips, the touch of his hands, the feeling of bliss when fangs broke skin and they were too far gone to turn back. He hated knowing those things felt good at all.

"Cariño —" Raphael's wrist unshackles itself and he presses his blooded fingers to Simon's cheek in a mock of affection, Simon leans into the gentle touch. Fingers brush a bloody trail along his cheek and a thumb presses adamantly at his lip. "Taste,"

And he does, slowly. His lips part and allows Raphael's thumb into his mouth. His tongue lathers the digit affectionately and teasingly drags his fangs across it—and he's lost in the lust once again. When he withdrew his finger, Raphael presents his wrist, allowing Simon to lap at the once thriving pulse point and drying blood—numbing it to pain—and digging his teeth into the perfect unmarred skin.

Raphael smiles and eases himself up, curling his fingers into Simon's dark hair draw him close to his chest. "There, yes, there. Drink."

And Simon did, deeply as Raphael would allow because—even with the fangs turned, so to speak—Raphael was in control. Always in control. He held the reigns and drove Simon where he wanted him, when, and at what time.

He was putty in his hands.

Drugged by his blood.

Entranced by his touch.

"All mine, my Simon."

There will be more to this piece of hell. Anyway, half-asleep, I'm still the good kid in class so I didn't tell my teacher that if we had to read/write poetry could we at least read E.E. Cummings because if I have to do this I think I would want to read beautifully written porn rather than read about the mother effing Puritans. So I went off on my own after I got home and wrote this for an hour and decided to make this a three-shot.

Dreamland take me away, and review please.