#i forgot this was the same guy that told a sick and presumably dying old man to get fucked

[heretical-final-boss]

I take back what I said about character development. Ryotaro has gone from "minding my own business" to "if you're gonna shit on the carpet, I'm gonna rub your nose in it."

[justtokeepscrolling]

Fangs

ao3 link: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11858421

Keith hates vampires more then anything. And what do you do when you hate something a lot? You try to get rid of it. So Keith became a vampire hunter.

It’s not an easy job, vampires constantly prey on humans, and being a vampire hunter just puts a bigger target on your back, but Keith made it through every day, and keeps on living, exterminating the pests that ruined so many lives.

Right now, he’s in Romania together with a fellow hunter named Shiro, resting at an inn called the pigeon.

The inn is owned by a young girl named Pidge, she inherited the place from her parents, and often helps out hunters. As long as they have the money.

“Garlic, holy water, bullets, anything else?” Pidge sets the items down in front of them.

“No, that’s everything, thank you,” Shiro hands her the money.

“No problem,” Pidge counts it before putting it away safely. “How about a beer? It’s on the house.“ She sets two foaming pints in front of them, and walks of to other costumers.

“So tomorrow we are going to a nest?” Keith asks Shiro.

“That’s the plan, but I can go alone of you’re too much of a chicken.”

“Come on, I’m pretty sure I killed more vamps than you old man.”

Shiro pats his back, “don’t let it get to your head buddy.”

After a few beers, Keith is pretty drunk, he decides to go outside for a walk. Going outside in the darks with vamps about, really isn’t the smartest thing to do. But Keith has done it before, he’ll be fine. He's not so drunk that he can’t do anything anymore. And there are plenty of people out on the streets.

“Idiots,” he mumbles to himself, “none of them are afraid of the vampires, ordinary people should stay inside at night.”

Some of the girls in the town try to flirt with him, but Keith isn’t interested in them. Girls could never really grab his attention, unless they could fight well, or were a vampire. The first type he wants to befriend, the second he wants to kill.

And none of the guys in the village are interesting either, all dull looking, only going after the girls. Stupid town.

He turns another corner, almost at the outskirt of the town, when someone finally catches his interest.

The boy has a tan skin, with brown hair that is only a few shades darker, he’s dancing with a bunch of other towns people, body moving with grace.

For the first time in his life, Keith wishes he could actually flirt.

The boy spots him, and dances through the crowd.

“Hey, the names lance, want to dance?”

Before Keith can say anything, Lance already drags him into the dancing crowd.

“What’s your name pretty boy?”

“Keith.” He manages to say. He can fearlessly walk through a vamp nest, but this boy has him shaking in fear. Damn his tongue.

“Keith,” Lance repeats, Keith has never heard his own name sound so good, “I like it, it suits you.”

They don’t talk a lot more, they mostly dance. Lance laughs at him whenever he messes something up, but it’s not a cruel laugh, and he always helps him back into the rhythm. It’s well past midnight when Keith realises he should probably head back. Going hunting without any sleep is not something he wants to repeat.

“I need to leave,” he says with regret.

Lance pouts, but he nods in understanding. He grabs Keith’s chin, and kisses him.

“Hopefully we meet again.” And Lance is gone.

Keith touches his lips. “I hope so too,” he says into the night. The other towns people don’t acknowledge him.

The rest of the night, Keith dreams about those blue eyes. The most beautiful eyes he’s ever seen.

____

“No Hunk, you don’t understand. He was out of this world pretty. Like inhuman pretty.”

“Lance, we're inhuman.”

The vampire looks at his best friend. “What if he is! That would be perfect.” “Didn’t you say he kind of looked like a vampire hunter?”

“Well….”

Hunk sighs. “Allura told us to be careful. There are more hunters than ever, you could bring us all in danger by flirting with one.”

Lance groans. “I know, it’s just not fair. I never asked to be turnend into a vampire, I never wanted to drink blood.”

“We were dying, she saved our life.”

Lance groans again.

A couple years ago, Lance and Hunk decided that they wanted to go on a camping trip, they forgot that vampires were a thing, and ended up almost being sucked dry.

A lot of people think that getting bit by a vampire means you become one, but it’s a bit different than that. Getting bit by a vamp only means that they were hungry, and needed some blood. They don’t even need to drink everything. But there are vampires that started sucking people dry.

Luckily Allura and Coran had found them, and scared the vampires away. But Hunk and Lance were left with far less blood than that is healthy.

So Allura did something she never wanted to do, she gave them her blood. Because the only way a human can turn into a vampire, is if they drink a vampire’s blood. She apologised, and gave them a part in their coven, which only consisted of the four of them now.

“Lance!”

And there is their vampire princess.

“What’s wrong Allura?” Lance asks her.

“You went to town again, didn’t you?”

“I didn’t hurt any one. If someone got bitten than it wasn’t me.”

“That’s not the problem, I was worried sick. Coran told me that there are vampire hunters in town.”

Lance pales, was Keith actually a hunter?

“I’m still alive, so stop worrying.”

“Lance, I understand that you’re still angry with me, but I truly care about you.”

Now he feels bad. Allura only helped them, Lance just needs to work through his issues. She could have just left them after giving her blood, or drank what was left.

“I’m sorry, next time I will tell you.”

Allura hugs him tightly.

____

“My head feels like it’s about to explode.” Keith says during breakfast.

“I told you not to drink so much.”

Keith slaps Shiro on the arm. “Are we ready to leave?”

“I think so, did you pack everything?” Shiro wipes his mouth with a napkin.

Keith nods. He’s already done eating. He wants to finish this one quickly, hopefully he’ll see Lance again.

They head out to an old house, it’s big, but abandoned looking. A perfect hide out for vampires. Shiro and Keith silently enter it, luckily the door isn't locked.

They can hear voices from somewhere in the room. Keith grips his stake and garlic laced, soaked in holy water dagger a bit tighter.

A white brown blur flashes past Keith, straight into Shiro. It’s a woman, her teeth are showing. Before Keith can help him, someone is on top of him too.

The vampire is hissing at him, not really fighting him, it’s more like he’s keeping him in place. Keith can’t go anywhere, his hands are pinned to the ground. He lost his weapons in the struggle and his legs are pinned as well.

Keith looks at the vampire, the first thing he can really see are the blood red eyes. The ones that vamps only show when they are either hungry, mad, or both. But something about these eyes seems familiar.

Keith’s eyes scan the vampires face, and his heart stops when he realises the reason this vampire feels so familiar.

It’s Lance.

Lance seems to notice aswel. “Keith?”

“Lance, let him go.” The white haired girl says.

Lance stands up, Keith would like to as well, but his legs just won’t move. What happend to Shiro? Did she kill him?

The girl crouches in front of him.

“My name is Allura, I don’t want to hurt you.”

“Keith,” it’s shiro, thank god, he’s alive, “ I know her, please calm down. I know you hate vampires, but these guys mean no harm.”

“I don’t understand, since when do you know vampires?”

“Not all vampires are bad, Keith, some, like them, only drink a little bit of blood, and they make sure the human they drank from never realises anything.”

“But what about the bodies? They didn’t have a drop of blood left in them.”

“It wasn’t them, please trust me on this Keith.”

Keith looks at Lance, Lance has the same shocked face. His eyes are back to normal, a beautiful blue. Those aren’t the eyes of a killer.

“I trust you.” Keith says after thinking for another moment.

Shiro and Allura’s shoulders sag in relief.

“We aren’t very skilled in creating human food, but I’m sure Coran can make something edible. Please stay for lunch.” Allura leads Shiro through a door, Keith presumes it’s the living room.

“I’m sorry about attacking you,” Lance stretches his hand out to Keith, he takes it, and Lance tugs him up, “we would only try to scare you away.”

“It’s fine,” Keith can’t really say, I only wanted to kill you, now can he.

He can’t really get used to the feeling of being in close proximity with a vampire, and not trying to kill him.

“This way,” Lance says, and he walks the same way as Allura did. Keith follows him.

This will take some getting used too, Keith thinks to himself.

____

Shiro and Keith get introduced to Hunk and Coran soon after. Allura, Shiro and Coran start discussing something, Hunk listens closely and makes a comment here and there. But Keith just can’t keep his mind on the conversation. This is all so different. Being in a room with vampires.

He excuses himself after a while, and decides to take a walk outside. The garden next to the house is actually really well kept.

“Are you sure you’re okay?” Lance had followed him.

“I’m just not used to not killing vampires,” Lance flinches and Keith mentally kicks himself.

“Look, I know this might be hard to belief, but not all vampires are evil. I used to think the same thing. But being a vampire kind of changes that.”

“All villains think that they are heros in their own mind?” Keith raises and eyebrow at Lance.

“No, not like that. Most of us don’t even want to be vampires, but we were forced too, or it was the only thing that could save our life.”

“What happened with you?”

“Some vampires attacked me and Hunk on a camping trip, Allura scared them away, and turnend us to save our lives.”

“I’m sorry.”

Lance shrugs, “it’s not your fault, but please, start looking at us differently, we might be a bit different than humans, but deep down, most of us are the same.”

“I’ll try, but don’t expect miracles.”

Lance smiles, “thank you.”

“I see that you two are getting along,” Shiro interrupts their conversation, and both boys blush, “that’s a good thing, seen as we will probably spend a lot more time here in the future.”

“What are you talking about?” Keith frowns.

“Allura thinks she knows who are killing the towns people, there is a big old clan here, they go by the name of Galra. She promised to help us with getting rid of them. Unless you would rather go on alone.”

Keith looks at Lance, he sees a hopeful spark in his eyes.

“I think staying here might not be that bad.”

The smile Lance sends him after this, tells him he made the right decision.

[nervousinpublic-blog]

The Death Card

My girlfriend’s dog and my struggling band died just a few months apart in the fall of 2014. Barney was kind and warm and easy. You’d get home after work, and he’d shake his old, fluffy, orange dog body all around as if to say, “Hello! Welcome back to the apartment!” If you got down on the floor with him, he’d put his head on your shoulder and press into your chest for a hug. It took so little to make him happy. I wish I could be more like Barney. It was hell to see something that wonderful die.

My band was old, but decidedly less warm and content than Barney. After five years and three different band names, we finally began to receive some acclaim. We found a manager, opened for some respectable national bands, and enjoyed a few enthusiastic write-ups in Denver and around the country. In 2012, we played a music festival in New York City and signed a publishing deal. As the years rolled on, however, creating and producing music as a band became a process fraught with tedious negotiation and a thick tension that we couldn’t seem to dispel. By the end, my band was a machine that toured and wrote press releases. I wanted to be a machine that made music.

At the advice of our manager, we toured the west coast twice in six months with little success. I wanted to stay home and write another album, but the band thought we should keep touring to build our national presence. I hit a breaking point one night when our venue in Oakland forgot we were playing. A guy had to come in on his night off to open the bar and run sound. Save for the venue staff, the other bands, and a friend we invited from Berkeley, no one was there. “I don’t know how much longer I can do this,” I told my girlfriend Ella over the phone on a post-show walk. The last show we played was with a band called Minus The Bear in Denver. It was sold out and the crowd was incredible to us. I turned 30 later that fall, and a week after my birthday, it was all over. Other than a few texts and emails about finances, we haven’t spoken since.

Ella and I spent a tumultuous year planning what to do next. We had no old dog or band to tether us down to Denver anymore. We could go anywhere now. The original plan was to move to New York City, get jobs, and pursue creativity inside one of the world’s greatest cities. After a few months, though, it became obvious that we wouldn’t have enough money to live in New York, so we started looking at apartments in Philadelphia — a tenacious, culture-rich east-coast city where we’d have the best chance of not going broke.

To accommodate my dead band’s demanding tour schedule, I worked for eight years as a freelance guitar and piano teacher, and after the breakup, it dawned on me that I didn’t have to do it anymore. Working for myself allowed me to take weeks off at a time to tour, but it didn’t provide much in the way of income or professional development. The thought of pursuing a new creative life in Philadelphia was a huge relief to me. Ella, an artist, wanted the same thing, more or less. We needed new blood in our lives, and we figured the only way to get it was to machete our way out of the jungles of complacency and routine toward a life that would hopefully match more of what we wanted and who we really were as creative people.

We looked to the burgeoning sharing economy and beyond to fund our move. We signed up with dog-watching websites and rented out our downtown Denver apartment through Airbnb, and I drove for Lyft and wrote blogs for content mills. Businesses have figured out that providing frequent blog content increases the online visibility of their websites. Websites like Blogmutt and iWriter connect writers with businesses that need original content.

Content mill writing, or “working down at the ol’ mill,” as I like to say, is probably the lowest form of writing, but it did show me that people would actually pay me to write. I wrote hundreds of blogs, marketing every sort of company you could imagine: Houston real-estate firms, dumpster rental companies, rehab centers, and even a company that makes tiny silk sacs that help to keep the scrotums of especially sweaty-crotched men dry and odorless. Yes, this exists. Google at your own peril. I also wrote short sex advice blogs in which I inhabited the voice of a kinky, wine-drenched woman in her 50s. The woman advised readers that polygamy and risky public sex were the best ways to save a dying marriage.

As if moving across the country to a strange new city wasn’t enough work, Ella and I also started playing music together under the moniker Straight White Teeth. She hadn’t played drums in a decade, but we worked hard and planned a tour that coincided with our move out east. It was too much. We’d rehearse and talk about our future and argue about money and then I’d lie in bed with my heart slamming up against my chest in a rhythm I wasn’t able to decipher or control.

And suddenly it was November. We drove out of Colorado to play 15 shows and lead new blinding-bright lives on the east coast. The first few shows were near-complete disasters. This wasn’t due to Ella’s drumming, but because of my own lack of experience with live sound. In my old band, everyone had jobs to do and none of my jobs was live sound. After the third show, I figured out a fix to our sound issues and things improved significantly.

I was surprised by how warmly we were received for being a completely unknown band. The shows I played on tour with Straight White Teeth actually reflected the sort of shows my old band played after five years of trying to “make it.” At our show in Stillwater, Oklahoma, an enthusiastic woman greeted us at the venue and informed us that she liked the songs we’d posted online and that we could drink whatever we wanted for free. A drunk man in the 12-person crowd yelled words of encouragement between songs. “You both sound wonderful! Keep going!”

After selling our non-essential material possessions in Denver, we took the remainder of what we owned with us on the trip: computers, clothes, instruments, and Ella’s best drawings and paintings. This was the best of the best of her work, and she’d planned on showing some of it formally at a gallery in Philadelphia. Her pieces were stored in a waterproof luggage bag that was tied to the roof of our Honda Element. On our way to Lawrence, Kansas, for a show that proved to be absolutely worthless, the sky greyed and assaulted the Element with fierce rain and bursts of wind. Trusting that the bag was waterproof, we quietly assumed that the storm was no match for the strong construction of the bag.

Two days later on the morning after our show in Kansas City, we reorganized everything in the car and pulled the bag off the roof. Ella looked into the bag, eyes wide, tear ducts activating. Nearly every piece was destroyed, and the ones that were still recognizable were forever altered by the storm. Ella wept on the ground. All that work; all those thousands of hours; all those sacred images, gone. Barney dying was a painful loss, but he was old and had lived a life in which he was deeply loved. This was a loss devoid of meaning. It was pain for pain’s sake. What does a body of artwork mean if it’s never seen by anyone other than the artist? Does it even exist?

She gathered up the ruined pieces and placed them next to the Dumpster. I felt sick. “No, babe. Please don’t do this. We can save some of these, right?” She responded without looking up. “They’re ruined.”

In the end, about a fourth of Ella’s pieces survived. She was understandably silent for the next couple of days. We were prepared to give up almost everything in pursuit of a new life, but having her work wiped out from existence was inconceivable. How could we have let it happen? How could we have been so careless? What the fuck were we doing with our lives?

We finished the tour in New York City on my 31st birthday, almost exactly a year after the my band’s breakup. The room was packed and kind, and everything seemed to click. We stuck to the Philadelphia plan and found an apartment, new jobs, and surprisingly quiet, focused lives. I haven’t “arrived” as far as creative contentment goes, and Ella tells me I’m probably not ever going to. I’m a machine that’s built to want too many things, I guess. Ella’s new work bleeds with an urgency and resilience that only comes after suffering a loss like she has.

A few months after the tour, Ella received an email explaining that a woman had found her artwork in an alley. A copy of Ella’s resume with her still-legible email address happened to be thrown out with the ruined artwork. She mentioned that her friend had fallen in love with one of the pieces and that she was planning on getting it tattooed.

The things we presume dead can sometimes fracture and rearrange into glorious renewed forms. Is death just another word for change? “I’m going to give you your identity card”, Ella said one day, shuffling her Tarot deck. “What is that?,” I asked. “It’s just a way for you to understand your identity through a different lens, I guess. It’s just for fun.” I pulled a card from the deck. “Oh,” she said. “You got the Death card.”