Given the Chance


 * AnthonWellsjo.jpgAesolon Neil Blackburn - 28 years old {physically}/Vampire/Doctor at St. Mungo's/Play by: Anthon Wellsjo
 * Newton Bradley Greengrass - 26 years old/Nurse at St. Mungo's/ Play by: Garrett Neff

Given the chance, he would have done a number of things that could have ruined his career, that could have found him tied to some splintered post, burned alive. People had feared him for the last seventy years of his life. They hadn't trusted him, liked him, or given him the chance to prove that he wasn't what they expected. Aesolon Blackburn stared down at his own cold hands.

Was it his fault that he had become like this? A vampire? He hadn't asked for it. The trip to his parents' villa in Tuscany had been meant as an escape. When his fiance had left him for someone else, his mother had seen what it'd done to him. She'd sent him to stay at his father's old villa--the one with the withering vineyard that had long since gone untouched when his parents moved to London. But the vampire coven there hadn't forgotten his mother--an ex-ministry employee that had worked in Vampire/Muggle Relations--one of the main people responsible for the disposal of the coven's previous leader, who had lunched a little too much and too openly on human blood. They had known he was there, known his relation to Cynthia Blackburn, and they had come for him.

Aesolon had been left to piece his life back together, piece by broken piece, with no one to explain to him how horrible the hunger could be. The thirst was bad enough. He hadn't needed anyone to tell him about how he would become an outcast, though. Forced to register with the ministry, it wasn't a secret he could keep. He'd decided to prove them all wrong--all those people that thought him nothing more than a criminal. They hadn't wanted to let him into St. Mungo's, even though the schooling he'd had to back him up made him almost overqualified.

They'd looked at him as if he was crazy--wanting to be a doctor on the fourth floor, working with the spell damaged. He was less likely to see blood, but who actually believed that he could control himself with all of those mortal bodies around him anyway? He'd threatened them with filing discrimination though, and then what choice had they had? None. He worked at St. Mungo's now. He was a respected doctor, if not held at a cautious distance. He had his own office. He healed people. He was not a killer.

If he made a meal of the bags of blood people had donated, who cared? At least he wasn't killing anyone.

Aesolon sat in his office at St. Mungo's, a blood-flavored lollipop crammed into his mouth, held hard against his teeth. No one had told him what it would be like, being a vampire, though. No one had told him that the bagged blood would sustain him for awhile, but that the thirst for it straight from the neck--for fresh blood--would return, and even his carefully constructed control on his needs wouldn't be able to contain it forever.

And what would happen when he broke? Who would he kill? His thoughts shifted to Newton Greengrass, the only friend he'd managed to make on the St. Mungo staff. He should never have allowed himself the chance to become familiar with Newton's scent or his habits. He should have never went to Newton's home on the weekends for the poker games. He could practically taste Newt's blood now.

Aesolon closed his eyes and bit down on the lollipop, crunching it in two. People thought the red plague was bad? Compared to a hungry vampire...