Meredith started Cristian at about two hundred pounds, which he pressed easily, his mouth giving a wry twist. "Come on," he said. "I could press this when I was alive."
There was no one else in the weight room, and so Meredith didn't have to be subtle about loading on the weights. Cristian handled as much as she could give him, his muscled but thin arms moving up and down like pistons.
"I'm so strong," he said giddily, smiling up at her.
Meredith recognized his smile. It was the smile she'd seen in the mirror on her own face when she was suddenly, startlingly happy. When she'd gotten her black belt. The night after Alaric had kissed her for the first time.
Maybe they could get past all this, become a team. Meredith let herself picture hunting with Cristian, fighting beside him. He was a vampire - a good vampire, she told herself fiercely, like Stefan - but he was a hunter, too. A Sulez.
"Your turn," Cristian said, clunking the bar back up into its support. It was so heavily loaded with weight plates now that the bar itself was bending.
Meredith laughed. "You know I can't lift that much. You win, okay?"
"Aw, come on," Cristian said. "I'll cut you some slack since you're human. And, you know, a girl." Meredith looked up to snap at him that being a girl had very little to do with how much she'd be able to press, and caught a teasing glint in his eye. Right then, she could believe he was her brother. Cristian started taking the plates off and putting them back in their racks.
"All right," Meredith said, and fastidiously, showily wiped off the bench, although it wasn't actually sweaty: apparently sweating was one of those things vampires didn't do.
Cristian started her off at a hundred and fifty pounds, heavy but manageable, and watched as Meredith began a set of reps.
"So," she said, keeping her voice casual and focusing on raising and lowering the bar. "What's it like?"
"What's what like?" Cristian asked absently. She could just glimpse him out of the corner of her eye, examining the weights, picking what to put on next.
"Being a vampire."
"Oh." Cristian moved across the room, just out of Meredith's sight, but his voice was clear and thoughtful, a little dreamy. "It's a rush, really," he said. "I can hear everything and smell everything. All my senses are heightened, like, a million percent. They say I'll get more Power, I'll be able to turn into animals and birds, make people do whatever I want."
He sounded excited at the prospect, his tone losing the bitterness it had held when he talked about becoming something he hated, and Meredith wished she could see his face.
"More?" he said brightly when he was right above her, extra weight plates in hand. His smile was bland, giving nothing away.
"Okay," she said, and instead of helping her get the bar back onto its support, he simply steadied it with one hand and slid more weight onto each side. Meredith grunted as he let go: it was heavier than she usually made it now, but still manageable. Almost too much, but she didn't want to let Cristian know that. In a funny way they were still competing despite his vampire strength, and she was going to take as much as she could.
Cristian was still really close, spotting her as she lifted, and Meredith's arms shook and strained after a couple of reps.
"The details are sharper, you know?" Cristian said suddenly. "I can even hear the blood rushing through your veins from here."
Meredith went cold and breathless. There had been something almost hungry about the way he spoke about her blood. "Take the bar," she ordered. "This is too much." She needed to get up.
Cristian reached for the bar, but instead of guiding it back into its support, he carefully added still more weight to each side.
"Stop it," Meredith croaked. It was far too heavy now, and Cristian must know that. She was in trouble here, real trouble, but she needed to stay calm, needed Cristian not to realize that she was scared.
"You forgot something about vampires," Cristian said, and smiled down at her, that same teasing, brotherly smile. "Dad would be so disappointed." He let go of the bar and it crashed down toward Meredith's chest; she was unable to support its weight.
She grunted as it fell, managing to slow it enough to keep it from cracking her rib cage, but with no breath or energy to focus on anything except protecting her chest from the dead weight of the bar. She couldn't breathe, couldn't speak, and she turned her head to look at him, her heart beating hard, and made a muffled, breathless moan. No one would hear her. She could die right here, at the hands of her brother.
Cristian went on. "A vampire, as you should know from our training, Meredith, is completely focused on his or her sire when they're first turned."
Maybe she could shift it, this weight pressing down on her, driving all the breath from her lungs. She couldn't breathe. Black spots swam in front of her eyes.
"All that matters to me is Klaus, what Klaus wants," Cristian told her. "If you were a good hunter, you would have remembered that bond trumps everything else. I don't know how you could have imagined my human family" - his voice curdled on the word, like there was something disgusting in it - "would matter to me more than that."
Meredith pushed at the bar helplessly, dizzy now with pain. She tried to signal Cristian with her eyes, desperately: fine, whatever, be Klaus's if you must, but don't kill me like this. Let me up so we can fight as we've been trained.
Cristian was kneeling beside her now, his face so close to hers. "Klaus wants you dead," he whispered, "you and all your friends. And I'll do whatever I can to make him happy." His gray eyes, just like her mother's eyes, held hers as he took hold of the bar she was clutching and pushed it down onto her chest.