#I changed my url in the middle of the event. sowwy

[notchedwhip]

☥ World of Darkness Meetcute Event ☥

Art by @belthegore, who owns Gabriel. The writing and Belmont can be blamed on @bonecraftprodigy. This was posted on a co-admined sideblog.

Belmont just wants to get through the workweek without his new coworker finding out he's a vampire. But he's not the only one hiding something.

Content warnings: canon-typical violence, brief Christian fanaticism

Nick, night manager at Quik'N'Go Gas, waited in cheerful ambush at the store’s timeclock. “Hey, Kevin, say hi to the new hire!”

Kevin Belmont typed the remaining digits of his employee number with slow. Emphatic. Jabs. Of his forefinger. Deep breathing, he reminded himself. Just like that YouTube video said. In-two-three, out-two-three.

As a vampire, breathing exercises didn’t usually work well for him.

“You said I could trade shifts with Andrew to handle that family business and we both confirmed with you that’s what we were doing. So if I’ve got no call/no shows on my record, it's not my fault, and making me train my own replacement–”

Nick had the decency to look genuinely appalled. “God, no, Gabriel here is replacing Andrew ‘cause Andrew’s the one racking up no call/no shows. Show him how to clock in and open a register, would you? I set up his PIN already.”

Belmont pictured all the tension and anger draining down, down, through his body, down to his feet, dissipating into the floor. When that didn’t help either, he moved on to visualizing a training bonus on his next paystub. Something reasonable - fifty cents an hour? Ooh, maybe seventy-five….

Nick cleared his throat.

“Uh, right. Sorry, third shift sleeping problems. I’ll be fine once the RedBull kicks in.” He finally turned to face the men and size up this Gabriel person. The kid matched his height, give or take an inch. Long face, bad haircut, a scar carved from hairline to jaw. He stared back at Belmont with sullen tension. Well, that was fine. Belmont didn’t plan on getting too friendly either.

He showed Gabriel the nightly cleaning checklist, the supply closet with its broken door lock, how to wiggle the register drawer loose if it jammed. The kid didn’t make small talk and Belmont heard his teeth grinding when they paused beneath a buzzing fluorescent light.

“My old boss hated those things too,” he said, pointing at it. “Almost as much as he hated scented candles and admitting he screwed up. Do you smoke?”

Gabriel nodded.

“So do I. Take your smoke breaks whenever you want, as long as we aren’t busy and it isn’t midnight or three AM. That’s when I take mine and I’ve got seniority.” Belmont watched for any reaction.

The kid nodded again.

“Any other questions? …And you have worked a register job before, right?”

“None right now, and yes, I have.”

“Cool. Once you’re logged in, I’m gonna go restock the coolers. It takes forever even if you know where all the inventory is so you get to stay up front tonight.” That was tonight’s real gift, Belmont decided: someone else to park at the register so he didn’t have to deal with every kine who waltzed in smelling like dinner.

Five nights later Gabe and Belmont still hadn’t said a word to each other that wasn’t directly work-related. The kid kept his mouth shut and head down, although his eyes rarely left Belmont’s back when they were alone.

It made Belmont’s fangs itch. He watched Gabe right back, tracking him out the corner of his eye when Nick wasn’t busybodying around.

Six nights later, Belmont slogged back from his break to an old man a head taller and half again as broad as either of them getting in Gabe’s face about– rising chocolate prices, or something equally stupid. The poor kid was backed against a shelf clutching a pricing gun like it was his only salvation, his whole body so tightly wound that fight or flight would be equally disastrous.

Wuss, sneered Belmont’s nasty little inner thoughts.

Be nice. Poor kid’s about to crap himself, said his second thoughts.

Should probably do something before Nick checks the camera feeds and calls the cops, his common sense pointed out.

“Hey,” Belmont snapped, jogging closer. “Hey, he’s new, let me see if I can–”

The man wheeled around, face red and hand raised, the moment Belmont touched his shoulder. Everything in the vampire’s mind screamed FIGHT. Vitae surged through dead veins. Fangs pricked, threatening to emerge. Cold black malice crystalised the air.

Belmont caught the man’s fist before it was halfway to connecting with his face. Very quiet, very deliberate, he said: “You should leave. Don’t argue,” he added, slowly squeezing his grip tighter. “Just go.”

The man left.

Gabe stared bug-eyed at him. Belmont shrugged away the lingering Presence. “Sorry about that. You want to take your ten now? Clear your head?”

“You don’t look like someone who could do that,” Gabe blurted out, still staring.

Aw, fuck. “I used to do full-contact combat LARP stuff, live action roleplay? Once someone dressed like a dollar store Uruk-hai clobbers you often enough, you figure out how to stop getting hit. Had to quit when I left college but I guess the reflexes are still there, heh.”

“I see.” Gabriel’s tone indicated that he did not.

“The Uruk-hai are a kind of orc,” Belmont offered. “From The Lord of the Rings?”

“Oh.” Gabe faintly shrugged. “I was told that book had witchcraft in it, so I never had a chance to read it.” He turned a dial on the price gun and resumed applying stickers to bags of chocolate-covered pretzels.

“Oh,” Belmont said, because he couldn’t think of anything else.

On the seventh night everything went wrong.

Gabe always let Belmont empty the big outdoor trash bins, which he was in the middle of doing when some jackass with a lifted truck parked at pump 5 decided the guy who pulled up to pump 6 dinged his paint. Six Guy matched Five Guy’s volume while denying the allegations. Five Guy got up in Six Guy’s face. Six Guy stood on tiptoe like a bantam rooster ready to throw hands. Wings? Whatever roosters fought with.

Belmont called over to them, “Hey, sorry, yeah, if you’re going to fight can you do it about twenty-five yards away so it’s not on Quik’N’Go property?”

“Fuck off,” came the response from Six.

“I really do not care if you kill each other as long as you do it somewhere that won’t make me fill out an incident log.”

Six chose to punch Five in the nose. Five retaliated in kind.

Belmont’s teeth ground together so hard the enamel squeaked. He set down the roll of garbage bags. He stalked closer. He warned them, “Break it up. Now.”

They did not break it up.

Well, Belmont decided, they asked for it.

He wrenched them apart by their shirt collars. Five threw himself at Six anyway, fabric tearing free. Belmont dropped Six and shoulder-rammed Five. Old reflexes flared along with his vitae. He snarled in the man’s face, fangs bared, eyes bloodshot. Five went rigid and printer paper white with fear.

Good. He should be afraid. Fucking kine. Belmont wheeled around to tackle Six who was crabcrawling away, also terrified. He pulled a fist back for a bone-cracking fight-ending blow–

“Kevin!” Gabriel yelled, barrelling out the door.

Belmont’s blood flashfroze like a cold Pepsi slammed on a table. Fuck. Oh, goddammit shitfuck. He’d blown it. He’d have to vanish, move cities again, start all over from nothing a-fucking-gin….

He let Gabriel yank him off Six and drag him back inside the store. Mental alarms didn’t start ringing until he realized they were headed for the giant beer cooler in the back. The one with no view of the front windows. And only one security camera because the store owner was too cheap to rework the system.

Uh oh.

“Hey, can we just talk about–”

Gabe shoved him against a wall of Bud Light 36-packs. “Devil. Demon! Unclean thing, tainting the earth wherever your poisoned blood takes you! Our paths were meant to cross so I could save those mortal lives from you,” he spat the final word, “Vampire.”

Belmont kept his hands raised. “Gabriel. Gabriel, you’re not wrong about that, but we need to know how much time we have here. Did you call the cops?”

“‘We’? Your time, stolen from others, is reaching its final moments. You may make your peace now.” Gabriel fumbled a boxcutter out of his back pocket.

“Gabe, respectfully, fuck that.” Belmont grabbed Gabriel’s wrist and yanked. The boxcutter clattered to the floor as they switched places. The kid’s skin was cool under Belmont’s fingers. “Listen. You’re obviously not from one of the organizations, and if my old boss sent you he did a really shit job choosing a hunter to–” He frowned, adjusted his grip to feel for a pulse.

There wasn’t one.

“You’re shitting me. You’re fucking shitting me. You too? Since when?!”

“The whole time, you blind beast!”

“Oh, my god.” Belmont adjusted his glasses with one hand, keeping a squirming Gabriel scruffed with the other. “Okay. Look. I know we probably have about thirty seconds left before the cops show up and bust both our covers, but since this might be the last teachable moment we get, maybe don’t try to kill the Brujah with twenty years of Sabbat experience using a utility knife.”

“I don’t bring my rifle to work,” he snapped, clawing at Belmont’s arm.

“That might work. What is it, a deer gun? AR-15? –Never mind. Christ, this is just my fucking luck.”

“Stop taking the Lord’s name in vain!”

“If I stop, will you tell me what sect you’re with? I’m guessing Anarch.”

Confusion flickered in Gabriel’s zealous eyes, just for a moment.

“...Do you know what the Sabbat is? Camarilla?”

“Vampires are vampires,” hissed Gabe. “All of you will burn in Damnation where you belong.”

“Fucking hell. Your sire ditched you or something, I bet. Okay. Look.” Belmont weighed his directions of conversational attack. “I really don’t want to kill you. I screwed up, I get it. But those two guys are still alive because you stopped me, and now that we know a little about each other I can help you save more people. Twenty years in this rodeo, remember? I know things. Hell, by Sabbat standards I was basically a career academic. The clans, tricks of the blood, legends about where we came from - I’ll teach you. But we have to get through tonight first, okay?”

Gabriel scrutinized him as if deciding whether or not to feed his heart to a crocodile. “Every night that you want to live, you’ll tell me something that will help purge your kind.”

“Our kind, but okay. You got a deal.” Belmont kicked the boxcutter out of reach and released the other Cainite. “So what are we telling the cops?”

“I didn’t call them,” Gabe mumbled. “I was going to kill you, lock the store, and leave.”

“And I think one of those guys pissed himself, so with any luck he’ll be too embarrassed to file a complaint. Well, Gabe, here’s to the start of a beautiful hostageship.”