Berlin - Two (Overtime)
The night after their first conversation, Patricia DeMontfort and Paul Viersan meet in an office building, overlooking the Pariser Platz in central Berlin. Paul’s façade is firmly back in place, the easygoing charismatic Ventrue entertaining a guest, making small talk as they find their way to a vacant office.

Once settled, Paul looks Patricia over, paying some attention to her hands and her aura – the latter action being quite obvious but, in both their minds, quite understandable. Trish is slightly nervous but, when asked about it by Paul, ascribes it to the fact that she's still not sure that this isn't some sort of trap - which is a reason for the nerves, if not all. As so often in the past, a partial truth suffices.

Paul asks Patricia if she has a knife. Of course she does. She has her straight razor, which elicits a sardonic comment or two from Paul - he's amused by the anachronistic choice. Trish bristles at his words, as the razor is one of the few things she's sentimental about.

Paul doffs his jacket, strikes a pose of a man about to put in a long day at the office as he pushes up his sleeves and Trish thinks "Another masochist" with a mental roll of the eyes and – she must admit – a little anticipation. Ventrue are notoriously resilient and, thus, quite a challenge.

But Paul surprises her. He lounges against a desk that’s seen better days and tells Trisha to cut herself with the razor. It’s not an enforced order, but a suggestion – Patricia knows the difference.

Suspicion and curiosity vie for dominance in Trish’s mind, and curiosity wins. Paul is on the other side of the room and not an immediate threat. So, she cuts herself on her left forearm, as requested.

Not good enough, he says. Deeper.

Still curious, Trish places a second cut adjacent to the first. The blood wells out a little thicker, although nothing like it would from a living subject.

They discuss control. How Paul’s putting them into a situation where they're both tempted to lose it. Pain, vulnerability, the sight and smell of blood. But they’re both smug, feeling oh-so-clever and reasonably invulnerable. They’re well-fed, they know their limits – of course they do. Neither of them is going to admit temptation.

Patricia guesses that Paul is testing himself, seeing if he can hurt another person, albeit indirectly. She, in a moment of bravado, offers him the knife. He refuses it. He’s not disgusted or scared, she notices, just uninterested in wounding her directly.

Silence falls. Patricia moves as if to cut herself again, and Paul tells her not to.

It seems that you think you're in charge, she says. It seems so, he replies, which prompts Trish to cut herself once again, the deepest gash, so far. The pain is now significantly distracting, but the Beast isn't a threat - yet. A sidelong glance at Paul shows that the wounds have commanded most of his attention. Well, not quite the wounds.

Trish flexes and tilts her arm a little, sends a little more blood to the wound, and it runs down her arm, into her hand. She toys with Paul, sensing that he's moved closer – reluctantly, as if against his will - and continues to focus on what she's doing with the rivulets of blood now spread across her palm, and trickling down her fingers.

Trish realizes that, indeed, she has placed herself in a situation of avoidable risk, but doesn't occur to her to wonder if she’s a danger junkie.

Wanting to build on her apparent control of the moment, Patricia decides to push matters further. She dons Yvette's face - having paid the Nosferatu for a little more information about this controversial retainer of his and correctly guessed that she's the one that's put him in turmoil.

For a moment, Trish fears that she’s pushed things too far. Paul's pose of ease abruptly fails and he stops just short of a blow that would have put her through the wall. He's angry, because he believes that Trish pulled the image from his mind. She tells him the truth - that she acquired the likeness via other means. Inwardly, she is relieved that she kept her word to stay out of his mind. She remembers their conversation of the night before.

Trish’s worry ebbs, and she takes satisfaction from the fact that she made Paul flinch - and he knows it. Paul admits that, despite that, he doesn't want to 'accelerate his recovery' from Yvette's departure. The changes that she wrought were unexpected and unexpectedly welcome - some of them, at least. He's sure he'll recover his bad habits – as he puts it - on his own time. Trish assumes that he's trying to downplay what just happened but realizes that she should let it go - for now.

Paul asks Patricia if she's hurt herself like this before. Trish considers lying as she rubs the blood between her fingers, but admits that she has - once or twice, during a very stressful period. Before Paul can impose his own interpretation, she concedes that it was a way of asserting control during a chaotic time. Paul makes an offhand comment about the more things change, the more they stay the same. She winces slightly at the word change and Paul quietly wonders at it.

Paul accuses her of being afraid of change. She counters that, on the contrary, she has realized that she needs to be more welcoming of it, lest she stagnate. He accuses her of lying, of hypocrisy - she's courting change only in contexts in which she can retain control.

She points out that change and control are not mutually exclusive. He says she can't truly experience something different if she will insist upon being in control throughout. Without risk - including the risk in giving up control - there's no true opportunity for change.

Trish asks what “risks” he underwent, to have changed. After all, he admitted that there's been chaos in his world, recently. Paul almost blurts out the truth, but stops just in time as he looks at her assumed face - further firing Trish's curiosity, although she has a pretty good idea what he almost said. Paul suddenly tells her to resume her normal face.

She heals the wounds on her arm, wondering if Paul will make some remark about her needing his permission. He doesn't, which surprises her.

The Ventrue facade is showing some very deep cracks and Trish is in her element. She is a little too cocky to yet realize that perhaps Paul will resent all this when looking back on the encounter.

He asks her if she wants to change anything about herself. She replies with the query as to when this became about her. When she walked in the room, he says. The sophistry annoys her - word games do when she's not the one playing with the words. She turns to leave - again, typical behavior for her when she's vexed. Paul grabs her arm and warns her that she's walking away from an opportunity. By leaving, she's choosing to ossify, is that what she wants?

Patricia realizes that Paul is trying to “harden his heart” but he prefers willing participants for whatever he has in mind. Trisha sees the core of his games-of-choice a hell of a lot quicker than some others have. Then again, they're kindred spirits under the skin - controlling and arrogant and much caught up with the notion of public dignity. Patricia knows that those are the most satisfying sort of people to break. Is Paul asking to be broken? In her hesitation to leave, Paul realizes that he's finally scored a meaningful point and engaged her deeper curiosity.

Paul speaks of Trish’s offer of help, wondering if she really has been through hell as she claimed. Did that mean she’d been forced to relinquish her controlling nature – one that he must admit seems to be a close mirror of his own? How did it happen, he wants to know. What did she learn? Paul is intense, driven.

Paul's intensity is infectious and stifling. Patricia simultaneously wants to get away and take advantage of the situation as her needs make themselves manifest. On impulse, she wipes her bloody hand across his face, realizing too late that it's a bad idea. For one moment, she thinks she's safe as he licks her hand in passing – perhaps that’s all he wants - but an instant of Frenzy follows. Patricia’s strong, but not strong enough. She’s shocked by her physical vulnerability as Paul almost tears her throat out. He feeds from her, growling and greedy and taking a dangerous amount of vitae.

When it's over, Patricia badly weakened, and realizes that she must hunt immediately. Paul, suddenly calm again, tells her that she's a danger to the populace and the Masquerade at this point. Her response is a heartfelt - if unsteady - fuck you.

Paul insists that she could feed from him, if she wanted to. But there's no compulsion, he wouldn't presume, he says with the return of his previous smug demeanor. He seems to not care about the blood on his face. Trish remembers an unpleasant moment when Michael compelled her to “choose” to feed from him and teeters on the edge of Frenzy - an equal combination of hunger and anger.

The needling continues. Paul asks her if she enjoyed it - how long since she had been forced to give up control? It didn't feel all that bad, did it? Certain forms of submission are quite pleasant - it's one of the secrets of the ongoing success of creatures like the kindred, of course. Naturally, this provocation frays Trish’s nerves. She knows she should leave, but she also knows that Viersan has at least one point - if she tries to feed from a human now, she's liable to leave them dead.

But she won’t give in. She isn’t the one lamenting a broken heart. Trish approaches Paul quite carefully and deliberately - and ignoring all boundaries of personal space. After all, it's a bit late for such things. She knows he's trying to provoke her, a little tit-for-tat and she refuses to fall for it. She acknowledges that, come the cold hard light of morning, Paul will probably regret what he's done but she won't let her ass get put in the same sling, so sorry. She is proud of her ability to resist temptation, although with her increasing hunger and urge to lash out at the Ventrue, her resistance is a tenuous thing.

On that bloody note, the pair of them part, but Patricia must concede that the encounter not what she expected and, therefore, rather interesting. She thought that theirs was going to be an encounter of simple violence, not this. This mutual exchange of vulnerabilities was - to overuse the word - very interesting indeed.

Paul, meanwhile, wonders how to continue engaging Patricia’s interest - but in such a manner in which the upper hand is unequivocally his. If he can bring himself to treat her abominably then surely he’s found his 'old self' again?