In The Absence of the Sun ((Tag: Gabriel))

[maddisonlynncarpen]

An old familiar crease found its way in the middle of the delicate olive brow. It was a sign of frustration, of a misunderstanding. This crease appeared only in moments when the brain behind its locked corridors could not seem to wrap around knowledge being presented. It was a crease that seemed to be more frequent in recent days and one she often found herself rubbing at the end of a long night. The crease was something subconsciously adopted from her mother, except this was not a worry line, but a line of determination.

A pair of stormy hazel eyes settled right beneath it, focused intently on the strange phrases and illustration on the page in front of her. She had come in search of some deeper understand of the unexplained deaths that seemed to surround her. ‘Man found dead behind The International House of Pancakes, cause of death unknown,’ and ‘Another unexplained death occurs…what is happening in our town?’ these were the headlines trudged like elephants her thoughts. How could there be so many unknown deaths? Wasn’t it the detective and coroner’s soul purpose to investigate these deaths and release it to the public? Or at least release it to the media so she could report the information? But every time she approached these all knowing entities for a comment on the subject matter, she was rushed away with a quick ‘no comment’.

It had required a bit of shameless flirting with a techie at the coroner’s office and a hint at possibly more once his shift was done to even get some information about the conditions the victims were found in. He thought he was impressing her with the frightening details (probably because of the doe-eyed expression she dawned to make him think so) but instead, she had a tape recorder in her pocket. She leaned closer to him as he spoke, which worked as a double whammy to the young and acne prone teen techie's ego, causing him to spill the details of the gruesome manner in which the victims were found.

Though he was young, he wasn’t naive enough to forget to ask for her number, so Maddie created a name quickly and jotted down a number she’d memorized for the local Chinese place. She even signed with a cheesy and overdrawn heart to match the name “DAWN” and winked playfully as she swayed out of the front doors to her car. Dawn? Really… gross… she had lectured at herself.

Her arm ached as she lifted herself from the position against the bookcase, though she kept her eyes glued to the pages. “There are not many reasons for a body to be pre drained of blood prior to the coroner releasing the main artery vein during autopsy. Most traumatic injury cases may allow a majority of the body to be drained but usually the there is residual blood that must be flushed from the system. Only in extreme cases such a main artery vein(s) being sliced open or possible decapitation can cause complete blood drainage from the victim….”. The crease on her silky brow deepened and she let out a silent groan. This was going to be a long night.

((Hope this is okay, it's been a long while and I'm a little rusty!))

[Gabriel Black]

Gabriel often surrounded himself with things that he adored.
He went to the museum frequently; The Louvre was always his favorite, and he drank in the colors of the art and the feel of his fingertips against cool steel sculptures even though he wasn’t supposed to and lingered among a world he only pretended to be apart of for just a few brief moments.
He lived and breathed new and unfamiliar things; places. The demon wandered through that shadowy echo of the earth he called the Twilight until he found himself in locations bright with sunlight and warm; enveloped by things wonderful and curious and gratis of the constant wickedness that reached out for him.
That unvarying evil; his master. The higher demon that had brought him into existence as this empty and soulless and clueless thing. Gabriel loathed being moved by such a monster; the puppet master who held his strings and made him do horrible, unspeakable things; things that kept the guileless demon from yearning for more interaction with the humans he surrounded himself with.
Why covet more contact with them when he knew what the outcome would be? It would always be stolen from him. Always.

It was very curious when Gabriel appeared out of the shadows in some dark, new place. Usually he would have chosen somewhere previously mentioned; sun shining and devoid of this grasping, bothersome gloom that clung to him like a pet with separation anxiety. But there was always a reason he ended up where he did. And the naive demon began walking, seeking out what that reason might be.

The building, though swathed in blackness, was quite beautiful. The bricks were old but in good shape, and the demon reached out to whisper his fingertips over the velvety ivy leaves that had begun to wind themselves up and around the structure. It was too bad they were too laced with shadows, so when he pulled his hand away the darkness stuck to his digits like a viscous goo. Gabriel shook them absently, trying to fling the shadow off but to no avail, he tucked it into the pocket of his black slacks along with his hand.

Curious, Gabriel continued around the old library until he came to the glass double doors, and pushing them aside, he drifted in. It was quiet there, and, smelled like old and sunlight and rich, vivid culture; each book had its own particular scent that found its way into the demon’s senses as he stood there and smiled, closing his eyes and letting his head fall back against his neck.
He must have looked like an escaped mental patient because it wasn’t long before a woman wearing a tightly twisted bun came around to gently walk past him, clearing her throat and letting her slender shoulder brush against his.

Gabriel opened his eyes and blinked, completely oblivious to the sneer she hurled backwards at him over her shoulder while she continued on. He moved over to a row of leather bound tomes on a high shelf, inhaling deeply again and imagining the stories within them might come alive if he only peeled back the cover. Plucking one from the row, he ran a light palm over the title of the novel and then turned it over, his obsidian eyes scanning the words etched into the leather.
Just before he cracked open the cover to reveal the adventure inside the demon heard a low sigh, and he lifted his gaze to the space where the tome had just departed. Through that opening he saw the woman; hair of rich chocolate and skin like alabaster. The story on her face was one etched with distress, or horror…the guileless demon found it hard to read faces, especially considering emotions were as much a mystery as humans were.
His curiosity was an invisible thread of the most resilient substance; he replaced the book back on its shelf as he was pulled towards the glowering female.

“They are only words on paper and bound with leather. The monster won’t leap from the pages, I assure you.” He told her simply, now standing before her and watching quietly, head tilted to the side just a bit and his gleaming obsidian eyes warming to near brown.

(( it was perfect sweetipie <3 ))

[maddisonlynncarpen]

Her finely manicured nail followed the sentence as she read it silently to herself, trying to figure out the connection. The crease deepened slightly as her hazel eyes swirled with electrified gray. She didn’t understand how this could be when the description of the body that the naive boy described lacked any of those morbid details. He had been pretty graphic about his description and yet, she did not remember dismemberment being mentions or large incisions through the body. In fact, she recalled he had mentioned his amazement of the lack of exit wounds. It caused her brain to spiral like the painting booths at the fair. The tons of thoughts were like the color on the spinning canvas, no set path or conclusion but mixed and seemingly endless. The causes accepted by the medical community that wrote books like the one she held in her hands, stood firm on the fact that this was not a possibility. It was amid those troublesome thoughts that a low voice spoke out to her from silence.


“They are only words on paper and bound with leather. The monster won’t leap from the pages, I assure you.” For a moment, she wasn’t entirely sure they words weren’t from her own thoughts and this brought a smirk to her lips. Her eyes never lifted from the page, but she responded softly, the smirk taking life in her word. “ That’s assuming that monsters only live pages of books…” Her eyes remained fixed on the page as she attempted to continue on with her research, despite the company that now stood in her presence.


It wasn’t that she was a curt person, but one thing that was undeniable about Madeline Grace Carpenter, was that she was focused. Too focused to socialize most times and entirely too focused to date. In fact, she often seemed detached to the outside world that most thought of her like recluse. Only those who knew her understood that her distance was just an embodiment of her passion and drive. So while to this stranger it may appear she was nothing more than stuck up snob dismissing his very presence, the reality was actually quiet different. She was actually so very immersed on the path to uncovering the secrets that haunted her every waking thought, it was almost as if she never truly was aware of his presence at all.

[Gabriel Black]

Gabriel wasn’t sure the human had heard him. He tilted his head and waited for a reply, russet eyes drifting down to take in the scattered tomes on the table around her. His gaze lingered on a brown leather bound manuscript which was opened, the yellowed, thinning pages moving ever so slightly with a draft of air from somewhere in the room. One corner of his pale lip curved up into the whisper of a smile, and he drank in the beauty of that hushed, secret kiss between paper and the wind.

The sound of her quiet remark drew his gaze up once more, and it lingered on the slight upward bend of her lips; the rumor of a grin. He took in her words and read them like the pages she peered down upon, and for an ephemeral moment the demon thought she must be talking about him.
He was the stuff written about in tales of otherworldly, evil things. Given horns, a pointed tail and a perhaps skin of bright crimson; no doubt he would be equal to the things portrayed on movie screens and whispered about to children as a way to terrify them into Christianity. This didn’t move the guileless demon. He was what he was and felt no repentance for it.

And if she -was- talking about him when she spoke of monsters living amongst them she showed no fear, and so being immune to the common courtesies of man (like asking if she wanted company) Gabriel drifted closer to the woman, sinking down in the seat beside her and leaning over to scan the page she was reading from.

“There are not many reasons for a body to be pre drained of blood prior to the coroner releasing the main artery vein during autopsy. Most traumatic injury cases may allow a majority of the body to be drained but usually the there is residual blood that must be flushed from the system. Only in extreme cases such a main artery vein(s) being sliced open or possible decapitation can cause complete blood drainage from the victim….”

His dark coffee eyes traveled over these words and he tilted his head, wondering if the human that had written this book had ever believed in those tales of creatures of the night. Vampires were not so cliché as the two fanged pale skinned and long fingered monsters of the movies, but they enjoyed tapping the vein of humans and drinking them dry. Not that he had any room to judge them. Not that he felt enough to judge at all.
He was utterly empty, this poor soulless thing.

“Blood loss. What a fascinating subject.” Gabriel murmured and lifted his eyes to her face. Her eyes were pinched in concentration but one corner of her lips was still lifted. Had he said something to amuse her?

[maddisonlynncarpen]

She had been immersed in thought, racing through the different paths of explanations for the mysterious death, going to and fro in her mind like a game of Chutes and Ladders when his presence pulled her away from the pages. Normally, after reading such an eerie and morbid medical account coupled with the events that sparked her curiosity, one would be startled and taken aback by this abrupt company. But Maddie only tensed slightly and stared at the man curiously.

He read from the pages from beyond her shoulder and she couldn’t help but look quizzically at him as he read from the story she had been enthralled with only moments before. She drank in his appearance, noting the long dark hair and the very blank expression he donned as he read. Yet, she wasn’t compelled to speak to him or disrupt his reading. Instead she found herself merely looking at him, wondering what it was that he was searching for. Could it have been the same information perhaps or maybe the company of a stranger? Whatever it was, Maddie was intrigued by it.

She drew her eyes back to the book and began trying to recover her concentration but smiled softly at the turn of the events that now brought her company. Such an odd situation but so intriguing that Maddie could not help the dreamy mind set it put her in. It was as if he appeared out of no-where and was a part of her private moment. There was no assurance that he wasn’t just an illusion created from her exhausted body and wandering mind, but Maddie didn’t mind. Being an older child, she often found herself in the company of imaginary friends. Not to mention the bittersweet curse she had to learn to cope with from an early age. And for now she was dedicated on founding out the answer to her questions about the murder and allow this stranger his shared reading of the text.

His voice broke the strange illusion that was taking place in her head and this brought Maddie back to reality. She turned her curiosity filled hazel orbs to his own, entrancingly darker orbs, trying to decide how to address the stranger who had taken up residence so near her. It wasn’t like Maddie to struggle with a conversation starter or something to break the ice. So she smiled softly and said the only thing that came to mind, “ Yes. Yes it is.” So simple and vague that she wanted to immediately bang her forehead onto the table that the book rested on. She didn’t always have the best introductions and this would go into her book of epic fails. She retrieved her hand from the sentence it lingered on and extended it politely, a substitute for the failure of her initial statement.

“Hi. I’m Madeline. Pleased to meet you”.

[Gabriel Black]

The demon called Gabriel had no agenda. He merely lived from moment to moment; -if- you could call what he did ‘living’, and reacted impassively to the things taking place around him as if his response had no real affect on the world at all. Such was the case now, even as he leaned in too close to the woman; unconcerned for her personal space or desire for peace and quiet while she researched.
When her caramel colored eyes lifted to meet his own Gabriel didn’t just look into them, he clung to them. Clutched them and held onto them and tried to understand the expression in that stare and the blithe smile that stole over her face.
Her hand came up into the air in invitation for his own but the demon was not familiar with the gesture. His dark chocolate gaze lowered to the hand and then drifted back up to her face; his countenance thoroughly empty, yet somehow, completely guileless.

“And what makes it such a pleasure?” The demon asked her, mimicking her hand gesture with his own palm; outstretched and waiting for…he wasn’t really certain.

He blinked absently and the stare that had been seizing hers dropped to the books scattered on the table before them. Tilting his head to the side in the way canine might do when curious, a pale hand reached out to curl digits around one tome, pulling it towards him.
His eyes scanned the book cover, and he flipped it open, his gaze drifting over the words a moment before the light of knowledge illuminated his eyes.

“You are a healer?” Gabriel asked naively, letting the book fall closed and returning the manuscript to its brethren before letting his gaze rise to her face again.
There was so much feeling there. Even hidden behind her polite, absent smile and amiable eyes the demon could see the emotions that filled her; filled most humans, and had he known that the pang that surged through him was envy, he might have apologized out loud to her. He didn’t know recognize it though, and so he ignored the spasm. This human body was still unfamiliar even after all of these years. It still stunned him with all the awkward, unusual things it would do of its own accord.

(( I'm sorry its so lame and short >.< Gabriel has been acting very, very naughty lately ))