All I wanted when I left home was to see the stars. Travel from world to world, meet other people, discover things I couldn’t even imagine.

I didn’t care that the Danaus was a small, beat up ship. She’s home, now. And I even started referring to her as a ‘she’ like Kar does.

I didn’t care either that Kar couldn’t offer me much money. As long as I am in a spaceship, money doesn’t matter all that much. I mean, it’d be nice to be able to buy souvenirs when we stop somewhere, but even if I don’t get trinkets I’ll always have my memories.

And I especially didn’t care that what we did wasn’t always on the legal side of things. It was all part of the adventure.

I thought that, as long as I was in space, I wouldn’t care about anything else. But then I started caring a great deal about someone. More than caring, in fact. Jay wasn’t any of the things I’d have expected I’d want from someone, but I do want him, more than anything – almost more than I want to travel.

And then we did that heist on that moon, and the way I looked at Kar changed, too.

It’s a strange path I’ve taken, and I don’t know where it will lead me – where it will lead us - but that’s all right. It’s the journey that matters, not the destination.

Strictly speaking, the Danaus didn’t need a third crew member. I’ve never had a problem with manual labor, and being the captain just means I get to make the decisions; it doesn’t stop me from loading and unloading cargo. And as far as maintenance is concerned, I’d rather get my hands dirty than trust the Danaus to anyone. She’s temperamental and likes to give me scares at the worst possible moments, but she’s a good ship and she’s mine. If anyone is going to play with her insides, it’s me.

Jay is pretty good at carrying his weight as well. I’ve got to say, when I first hired him I didn’t expect him to last long. He’s a good pilot – he’s a great pilot – but the tattoos around his neck made it clear that he never had to work with his hands. I’m also sure he never suspected that anyone can survive on food squares for weeks at a time. I bet he’s more used to fancy food served fresh from the field. He never complains, though. He has looked at the food with everything from disgust to annoyance, but he has never complained, not about what I feed him and not about being asked to help loading cargo when we have big jobs. I like that about him.

The problem is, it’s not the only thing I like about him, far from it. And I know it’s a bad idea for me to take a close interest in Jay. Not because he’s my pilot and I’m the captain. That doesn’t matter one bit. But what does matter is the tattoo on his neck. One of these days, the Lodge is going to come looking for him, and if he doesn’t go quietly it’s not going to be pretty.

This, ultimately, is why I took on Wil during our last stop – well that and the fact that Wil was ready to work practically for free as long as he got to be on a spaceship. I had a feeling, right from the start, that the two of them would hit it off. I figured that if they got together I would stop looking at Jay too closely. I’ve never been one to hunt another man’s game. Steal things, yes, but not someone’s affections.

What I never expected was that they’d be so open about it. The Danaus isn’t a big ship, sure, but they could still manage to be discreet if they only tried. But they don’t try, or not that hard. And now, not only am I still lusting after Jay, I’m also starting to develop a thing for Wil, too.

That can’t possibly end well.

I can’t remember anymore when I first decided I wouldn’t take my place in the family business the way I was expected to. It seemed so evident, maybe I always knew I’d end up running away.

I know my mother thought I was only going through a ‘phase’ as she called it. She tried everything she could to get me out of it.

Punishments. Those consisted of taking away things and activities I enjoyed; the only time she ever raised her hand on me I was an adult, and that was the day I left.

Bribes. She thought that by giving me more and more things, I’d realize the way to always have what I wanted was to follow the path that had been traced for me. All it did was make me grow tired of possessions that had no meaning.

Threats. She took me to a planet on the outer range, once. We walked through the dusty streets of something that could at best be called a village, and she pointed out all the things that these people didn’t have that I took for granted. All the things I would lose if I continued to rebel. All I could see was how much more alive these people seemed compared to us.

None of it worked. I knew what I wanted, and it wasn’t anything she or anyone in our world could offer me. The tattooed circles around my neck only meant one thing, as far as I was concerned: I had been collared from birth, and I needed to free myself.

So I did.

I’ve had a weird schedule ever since I started dating Chase. He does most of his hunting at night, so we can’t often go on evening dates unless he takes a night off. At first, I found it a little off-putting, and I wasn’t sure I could be in a relationship like that. But I fell for him, hard and fast, and that small inconvenience didn’t seem to matter so much after a while.

Also, I grew used to having him drop by in the morning and wake me with gourmet coffee, fresh bagels or croissants – and all right, maybe I got used to getting naughty, first thing in the morning. I’ve been late at work quite a few times over the past few months, and thankfully my boss doesn’t care as long as I make up for the hours in the evening.

The best days are often on weekends. Chase stays at my place or I go spend the night in his ‘lair,’ as he calls it. Being together for a full day and night is always great. It makes me wonder what it would be like to go one step further and live with him. We’ve only been dating for a few months, but I feel redy to go that far.

Or even further.

He’s nothing like what I had expected the night I first went to The Edge, but he’s everything I ever wanted in a man – and even more.

I just hope he knows how much he means to me. How much I love him.

I used to hate On The Edge. A lot of people go there to find someone. Sometimes all they want is a one night stand, sometimes they want more – sometimes they want blood. It used to make me mad just to think about it.

When I went there that night, I was looking for a prey. I don’t usually hunt in the club; for one thing, the security personnel really don’t take too kindly on my kind ‘harassing’ the customers, as they say. For another, it’s hard to hunt in a moving crowd. But I had been given a tip that someone that had eluded me for a long time was there, and it was as good a place as any to look. It certainly beat haunting graveyards.

I never expected to find someone like Anna at the club. Or rather, I never expected that someone like Anna would find me. And never, not in my wildest dreams, did I imagine anything would come out of that chance encounter. With what I am, dating a ‘normal’ woman can be difficult, and it never was something that troubled me much – not until I met Anna and realized what I had been missing.

And so, I don’t mind the club so much anymore. I still go there, once in a while when I need to find someone, but it now feels like a warmer place; more welcoming, too. This is where I met the woman I love, so it can’t be such a terrible place, can it?

Learning – or re-learning – to live with Blake is a slow and painful process for me, and probably for Marc as well. I guess after the first night, after Blake’s first breakthrough, we both hoped things would get better right away. It can’t be that easy, though. It took decades and decades for the demons to break Blake, to teach him fear and pain; a few days, even a few weeks or months won’t be enough for him to do more than start healing.

His body is better. His voice, too. At times, it’s all but impossible to tell there’s still something wrong with him. But at other times…

He won’t touch me, for one thing. If I take his hand and set it on me, he leaves it there but only until I let go, then he pulls back again. It makes me want to rage every time, makes me want to ask why and how they trained him, conditioned him not to touch me. Because yes, it’s only me. He doesn’t seem to have a problem touching Marc anymore, at least not usually, and as much as I try not to think anything of it, it still hurts. I promised myself not to be jealous, but I can’t always hold on to that promise.

Sometimes, and those are the hardest moments I ever lived – harder even that fights against demons during which I wasn’t sure I’d survive – Blake just… breaks down. Curls up into a ball, makes himself as small as he can, and shakes even as he tries not to cry. That’s already bad enough, but to make things even worse my intervention, in those moments, only upsets him even more. The best I can do at times like these is to stay back and let Marc try to calm him. I’ve never been very good at staying back and letting others do everything. The fact that it’s Blake doesn’t make it any easier, far from it.

I guess if we knew what triggers these episodes we could try to avoid those stimuli, but Blake is stubborn as all hell about it. He never wants to talk about what happened. We ask him, after he stumbles, when he’s calm again. Ask what we did or said to send his mind back to that place. He always refuses to answer, always says it was nothing, and he’s fine now, and it won’t happen again.

He’s trying to protect us, I understand that, but how can we protect him when we don’t know what we’re doing wrong in the first place?

Marc says we have to give him time, and that he’ll get better, little by little. And he is getting better, I can’t deny that. But at this rate, it’ll take him years, or even more than that before he can go weeks or months without stumbling on one of his nightmares again. That might be fine for Marc, he has centuries in front of him, he can afford to let Blake go at his own pace. But I don’t have the luxury of time. Is it too much to hope that Blake will get better before I grow too old to ask him to turn me?

I’ve never felt so lonely in my life.

Just weeks ago, I was happier than I thought possible. I had my Childe and I had Kate. I was good friend with Daniel, and I had a purpose with his squad, helping to close breaches. And now… It feels like I lost everyone and everything that matters to me.

Blake was taken from us first. I’ve lost a Childe before, I know the pain of that broken bond and I could have endured that. But what happened is worse than simple death. The link between us simply vanished, like it had never existed. Like Blake had never existed.

Then Daniel refused my guidance. I thought he understood, when he asked me to turn him, what being Sire and Childe would mean. I thought I made it clear to him that he would need his Sire there to learn what it means to be a vampire, but he completely shut me out.

And Kate… Losing her might be what hurt the most, because it was my own fault if I lost her. We could have strengthened each other, supported each other, taken comfort in each other. And instead… We pulled away. We locked ourselves to the other and we drifted away.

I had everything.

What do I have now?