#i love bex and i love emilio

[ariadnewhitlock]

Yours, Mine, and Ours || Emilio & Ariadne

TIMING: Some time before the mines became Like That LOCATION: The forest, the mines PARTIES: Emilio @mortemoppetere and Ariadne @ariadnewhitlock SUMMARY: Ariadne, having heard from Alan that Emilio is a PI, tries to trail him to see if he'll be good to help her find out what happened to the mare she made. Things go a bit sideways. Congrats, Emilio, you have another child! CONTENT WARNING: Mentions of explosions

Something was following him. He could feel it, the way it made all the hair on the back of his neck stand up straight. It was something undead, for certain, but… The motivations were a little unclear. Emilio had experimented, a little. Stopped in places he wouldn’t have stopped otherwise, made a show of looking down at his phone like he was ten kinds of distracted, given it every chance to hop out and try to kill him, and it hadn’t taken a single one. It was just… watching. Following. 

To say that he was unsettled would be one hell of an understatement, but he couldn’t back out of what he was up to. There was a lot of shit going on in the mines right now, the kind of shit that tied several of his cases together in a way he didn’t really like, so against his own better judgment, he was circling the woods near one of the entrances looking for clues and trying to ignore the feeling of eyes on the back of his head. He wasn’t sure how great a job he was doing, all things considered.

Alan had said that he wasn’t sure if the local PI was someone she should contact, but for once, Ariadne’s curiosity had gotten the better of her (which was a weird sense of relief in and of itself, given her overall lack of curiosity in recent months. So she’d decided that maybe she should try following him, just to see what sort of work he did. It couldn’t hurt, right?

She wasn’t an especially big fan of the whole going into the forest thing that was happening right now, but Ariadne also wasn’t willing to give up. Even though for whatever reason, the man kept stopping and kept looking down at his phone. She figured that maybe he was getting important investigator-y messages or something. Ariadne certainly didn’t know anything about this sort of job. He’d headed toward the mines, which was not top of Ariadne’s list of things to do, but she was curious, and she didn’t want to squash the feeling - especially given that she didn’t know when she’d feel it again. Another few steps forward and her shoe snapped a tiny branch in half. For a moment, she paused, waiting to see what the man in front of her would do.

A twig snapped. He’d known he was being followed, but the way there was a distinct pause after the sudden noise told him that whatever was following him was aware enough to know it had been caught. Not a spawn, then, or some animalistic kind of undead thing. Something with enough sentience to be wary, but not something that took advantage of his feigned distractedness to move in for a kill. 

Emilio weighed his options. He could keep up the ploy, pretend he didn’t know he was being followed until he could lead them someplace he’d have full control of the situation. That was probably the smartest move, but it required a level of patience that the hunter just didn’t have. So, he turned. “All right,” he called out. “Either fuck off or come out. I’m not doing this shit anymore, and you’re a lousy tail.” The sooner he got whatever they wanted out of the way, the sooner he could get back to taking care of the issue in the mines.

She froze up when he called out to her. “I -” she bit her lip, debating just staying away from his view. Except clearly she’d done something to mess things up and he’d become aware of her presence. Ariadne tapped her fingers against her thigh for a moment before stepping out from behind a tree. “I - I just wanted to see what being a PI involved.” She looked over to him, eyes widened, “I’m sorry for stepping on the tree branch, I didn’t mean to surprise you.”

Fidgeting with her hands, she blew a strand of hair out of her face. “I - you are a PI, right? I’m sorry if I’ve scared you and I’m following the wrong person.” Though Ariadne was fairly sure she was correct, but she supposed that one could never be too certain.

Oh, Christ. It was a fucking kid, because of course it was. This town was crawling with twenty-somethings who looked half-terrified wandering the woods, and while Emilio had come across plenty of them, this was the first one who’d triggered his ‘undead’ senses. There was a strange sinking feeling in his stomach, a quiet nausea that had him feeling unsteady. “You didn’t surprise me,” he said, voice not quite as gruff as it was before but still far from gentle. “I’ve known you were back there for a while. Like I said, you’re a lousy tail.”

So it was targeted, her following him. Not because of his ‘night’ job, which was something of a surprise. When something undead was tracking you specifically, it tended to have something to do with the number of undead things you’d killed. Hesitantly, Emilio nodded. “Yeah,” he confirmed, “I’m a PI. Most people just come to my office to ask about that shit, you know. Following a guy through the woods isn’t the best way to introduce yourself.” 

“You didn’t point it out before.” Ariadne made a face. “Sorry, sorry, that was rude.” She wasn’t sure why she was so on edge, all of a sudden. “I was never too good at guessing the end to mysteries as a kid, so I guess that tracks.”

She glanced down at her feet. “I’m sorry. Again. I guess I just wanted to see you in action - I - I’ve always been a bit more of a visual learner?” Ariadne looked down at the ground again before looking back up. “I’m Ariadne. Are you really super good at tracking people down? How do you do that?”

He snorted, still eyeing the kid suspiciously. He wished, sometimes, that the slayer senses came with a little more… detail. It was impossible to tell if this girl was a vampire or some other kind of undead just by looking at her. It was also impossible to tell if she was actually a kid. The mannerisms seemed right, but plenty of immortals learned how to fake that. They had to, if they wanted to keep from being found out. “Guess so,” he agreed with a curt nod.

She didn’t seem outwardly dangerous. That was a problem, too. Emilio couldn’t be sure how much of this was genuine and how much of it was an act. She could be exactly what she seemed, or she could be plotting to kill him. He’d hate to find out which one was true when it was already too late. “Could’ve asked to follow me, then,” he pointed out, but there was less bite to the words than there might have been if she were older — or if she looked older. He’d always had a weakness for kids. It was the kind of thing that was going to get him killed, one of these days. “Yeah, I guess I am. It’s not as exciting as it sounds. A lot of detective work is just waiting, kid.”

“My cousin would’ve probably been better at that.” She squeezed her eyes shut for a moment, because thinking about Chance right now wasn’t going to do her any good. A sigh, followed by an apologetic look toward him. “I am really sorry. I’m used to being quiet, but I don’t want to startle people or be rude.” Ariadne was acutely aware that there was a high likelihood she was overdoing it, but since she couldn’t go out and apologize to people the way she wanted to (saying ‘hey, sorry I’m a horrible monster’ likely wouldn’t go over well whatsoever), this had to suffice.

“But I -” she fiddled with something - something invisible, clearly, as her fingers knit together, trying to focus on something, center herself on anything. “I didn’t want to bother you, or make you feel like you had to say yes, or - well, I don’t really have a good excuse other than the fact that I don’t like - uh - confrontation.” Ariadne made a face. “Not that - not that I thought you’d be mean or like, rude or whatever - I just…” her voice trailed off. “Then you must be real patient? That’s amazing.” She attempted a smile, knowing that it likely came off far more awkward than she intended for it to.

“I know the feeling,” Emilio mumbled, feeling a sense of connection without really meaning to. He’d always been a little worse at everything than his siblings, too. Part of why his mother preferred them so blatantly to Emilio himself, part of why it was such a goddamn tragedy that he’d been the only one to survive. Things like this only ever seemed to prove it. He couldn’t imagine Rosa feeling a sense of connection to someone undead, even if they were a kid. “It’s fine. You didn’t startle me.” That much was true, at least; for all his faults, Emilio was still a fairly hard man to startle. A benefit of being hyperaware of every movement around him, he figured. 

She seemed nervous, but not the kind of nervous that usually came with someone undead speaking to someone genetically designed to take them out. That probably meant she had no idea the private investigator she’d decided to follow was a slayer, which was good for Emilio, even if it did fill him with an unwanted sense of concern for her. Did she have any idea how fucking risky it was, following him like this? Any other slayer would have killed her by now. “I can be,” he replied. “Sometimes. When I need to be.” Glancing behind him briefly, he sighed. “Look, kid, you followed me because you need a detective. Right? Tell me the case, and I’ll tell you what I can do. But I’m working right now, so I can’t stand around making small talk.”

“Oh. I’m sorry.” She didn’t like the idea that someone else could relate to the newfound feeling she held toward Chance. Especially because it used to be so different. If Ariadne wasn’t following this man for a very specific reason, she might have even asked Chance to come along. Because telling your cousin who saw you as a goody two shoes that you’d murdered someone wasn’t so easy. She was fairly certain that wasn’t a cool thing in his book.

“Okay - that’s good. I wouldn’t want to startle someone.” Ariadne nodded. “Oh - I - that’s good. Thanks for that.” Right. The case. She’d rehearsed some of what she was going to say - except she wasn’t quite sure how to bring up the part of ‘they might still be walking around’. “I’ll get started, sorry. I - a friend of mine was killed, and I - I don’t - know what happened after. There’s no, uh, burial site - grave? For them.” This was a spectacular failure. “And I don’t know how to find out what happened to them, and I really want to.”

“It’s fine,” he replied, waving her off. Thinking of his siblings, in that context, always made Emilio feel an unpleasant stab of guilt. Being jealous of the dead because they’d been more successful than you in life, because they were so much easier than you were to love, wasn’t a good look on anyone. Much less someone who, by all rights, should have died in their place. It was nothing he wanted to let his mind wander to now.

He’d much rather focus on the kid following him.

She was after something, that much was clear. It was the what that was the problem. As she spoke, his eyes narrowed. At first, he thought she might be talking about herself. The old ‘I have this friend’ modifier that people added to the beginning of a sentence that was about themselves was never quite as sly as they likely meant for it to be. But the rest of the story made less sense if she was talking about herself. Emilio narrowed his eyes, a little suspicious. “How’d they die? Your friend.” 

“Okay. If you’re sure.” She practically winced at her own words. “They were killed. In their sleep.” Ariadne felt sick. “The - I don’t know the cause - but it was after a few weeks’ worth of painful sleep. Or that’s what they said.” And because she’d known them and they had said that to her, Ariadne looked down at the ground, then. “It wasn’t, like, bloody or anything.” She paused, “far as I know.”

Wrapping her arms around herself she gave a shrug. “I - that’s all I really know. Is that enough, or do you need more information?” This was likely all a mistake. Especially because it could very well land her in jail - except that part of her had to know. Ariadne took a few steps forward. “I - uh, can I come along with you? I promise I’ll be quiet.”

“Wouldn’t say it if I wasn’t.” A lie, but not one she knew him well enough to call him on. That was the thing about lying — if no one knew you, it got easier. At least… sometimes it did. Some people were still bad at it. He couldn’t decide if she was one of them or not. The story sounded true enough, and Emilio had a pretty good idea of what could cause it, but he’d yet to decide if she was actually talking about a ‘friend’ or if she was trying to make sense of her own death. She was undead, after all; his senses made that pretty damn clear. Mare would make sense. 

But if she was talking about herself, what was she after? What did she expect to find with a private investigator’s help? “What’s your friend’s name?” That was a start, at least. Something to go off of, something to add another piece to the puzzle. Raising his brows at her offer, he glanced back towards the mines. “Kid, I don’t think you want that. This isn’t exactly a ‘tagalong’ kind of case.”

“Some people might, though,” and she was jumpy enough to assume that she’d done something wrong, or that she’d be a bother to people. After all, Ariadne’s whole new existence sort of was a bother to just about everyone.

“Isobel Perkins.” Her breath came out shaky. “I - please, can I?” She shifted back and forth on the balls of her feet. “I won’t say anything, I promise. Or do anything stupid like stepping on another branch.” Ariadne knew she wasn’t too good at standing her ground, but she also knew that actually feeling curious about something wasn’t a feeling that came along too often, and it wasn’t something she wanted to entirely push away. 

“I’m not some people.” She was a nervous one, wasn’t she? It was almost familiar, in a way. Like a funhouse mirror — similar enough to his own reflection to spark something, but not a true representation of what he was. Emilio’s nervousness, after all, came less from the idea that he might offend or upset someone and more from the fear that they were out to get him. It was a nervousness that, for this interaction at least, was fading into the background. He didn’t think this kid wanted to hurt him. He wasn’t sure anyone was a good enough actor to pull off what she was doing now unless it was genuine. There was some relief in that.

Isobel Perkins. He made a note of the name, wholly unfamiliar but easy enough to look into. As for what he’d find… that was hard to say. If Isobel Perkins was a mare now, there was every chance that she’d changed her name to avoid the complications that came from rising from the dead. If she were smart, she’d have gotten out of town, too. But Emilio would look into it anyway. For the nervous, unsettled, undead kid who’d decided following a strange man into a mine was her best bet at answers. Sighing, he pushed his hair back, shrugging a shoulder. “Fine,” he relented. “You can tag along. Just — If you hear anything coming, make a damn run for it. Okay? These mines are no joke.” 

“That’s fair.” She wanted to stop being so jumpy. Practically cursed herself for it, because what kind of a first impression was this to make on somebody? Though, Ariadne supposed, that was better than being terrifying upon first glance. She also wasn’t sure if she should be somewhat offended that even now, coming upon a year of being a nightmare, she didn’t even instill any sort of fear in those around her, and in fact, was often the most fearful person in the room.

“Okay. I will run.” She was doing exactly what Professor Langston had told her not to do. Maybe she was going to have to report on herself, to him. Ariadne shook the thought out of her head, best as she could. “Do you come here often? Can I ask that?” She tapped her fingers against her thighs as they continued to move along. “Or is this just because of your assignment.” She wasn’t sure that she wanted to see the mines. (In fact, she very much didn’t, but maybe she could tell Chance that she had done something wild - leaving out the very obvious parts of the story, such as the reasons why she was doing this). “I’ve lived here my whole life and I don’t think I’ve ever visited them, even back in middle school, or high school.”

He nodded as the kid agreed to run if things got rough, choosing to take the promise at face value. She could very well change her mind when it came down to it, of course. People were fickle things, even when they were undead. But if Emilio spent all his time worrying about her, he wouldn’t be any good to either of them. She said she’d run, and he had to believe her. He didn’t have much choice in the matter. 

“To the mines?” There was a hint of something that was almost amusement in his tone. Did anyone come here often, aside from miners? Did anyone else want to? Even before the mining accident that left the area unstable, Emilio couldn’t imagine that anyone would frequent the area given how much shit went on here. “I’m here because I have to be, kid. Still not sure why you feel like tagging along.” The fact that she’d never been here wasn’t surprising, though maybe it offered some insight into why she was following him now. Curiosity was a hard thing to shake. Out of the corner of his eye, he caught a faint glow. Any other night, he might investigate, but… with the kid in tow, it was probably better to ignore it. Find what he needed and get out. That was the goal now.

“Yeah - to the mines.” She scrunched up her whole face, before shaking her head. Because people did go to the mines, not just miners. Granted, other than miners, people probably weren’t qualified to go there and were just - well, Ariadne wasn’t going to focus on that. “Because I needed to figure something out, and I told a professor I’d -” she pressed her lips together. “Never mind. I just want to see what a Private Investigator does.” 

There was a glowing something coming from somewhere else, and she couldn’t help but look over, head turning curiously. “What are -” she bit down on her lip, shaking her head. She wasn’t supposed to bother him. That was not nice, that was going to get her kicked out of whatever investigation was going on. Ariadne tapped her fingers against her thighs, eyes still not moving from the glowing.

She told a professor she’d what? Were professors telling kids to go into the mines now? That didn’t seem like the sort of thing professors ought to do, though Emilio’s concept of organized schooling was… distorted, to say the least. In any case, it would be far easier to keep an eye on the kid if she was going to the mines with him than it would be if she snuck back around to go by herself later. “You’re going to be disappointed,” he warned her. “It’s not as fun as it looks on TV.” Not that he’d seen much TV. 

Since the kid was undead, Emilio didn’t necessarily need to look at her to know where she was. He could feel her following him, the pit in his stomach digging in deeper the closer she got. Luckily, she seemed to be content to follow silently. Emilio headed towards the mines, paying no attention to the glowing form that had captured her eye. His singular focus on his job could be a blessing or a curse. Which it would be tonight was yet to be determined. 

When she was little, her parents had bought her a whole packet of glowsticks one summer. For her to break open whenever she wanted to have a spark of light in her room in the middle of the night. This was, of course, in addition to the glow-in-the-dark stars that had decorated her ceiling and walls. Which, she figured, looking back, was perhaps her parents’ way to encourage her to not climb out of her window in the middle of the night to see what the sky happened to look like. It had worked, mostly. It had worked even better when Chance stayed over and would complain about the dangers of roof-top hangouts in the middle of the night. So was Ariadne really at fault for wanting to follow the glowing figures relatively near to here and Emilio? She couldn’t have been, right?

She stopped following him for a moment, giving it a few beats before she turned toward the direction of the glowing. Maybe she’d be able to help him with whatever he was working on today. Maybe prove that she was worthy or something - that she wasn’t just some dumb kid who was a nuisance to this whole ordeal. Ariadne did her best to stay as quiet as she could, glancing back to see if Emilio’d noticed that she was gone, yet.

He was silent as he walked, making no attempt at conversation. He didn’t even want the kid here, so why would he waste his time talking to her? He just needed to get this thing over and done with as soon as possible. Then he’d focus on her case so he could properly usher her out the door. Emilio trudged towards the entrance to the mines, shoulders tense as he got closer. The feeling of undead, of wrongness was growing stronger, which wasn’t as surprising as it should have been. There were bound to be all kinds of things in that mine.

Because of that feeling, though, it took him a moment to realize that the kid was getting further away. By the time Emilio looked up, she’d already disappeared somewhere. He cursed quietly under his breath. As much as he’d wanted to get rid of her, this was no place to lose track of a kid. There were plenty of things out here that could kill her no matter how undead she might be. “Kid,” he called out experimentally. “Look, if you wanna go home, that’s fine. Just let me know, so I can…” A branch broke nearby, too heavy to be the kid. Moreso, it was coming from inside the mine. Great. Always a fucking ordeal.

Chance would have been proud of her, she figured. Ariadne wasn’t sure if that was the best route of thinking to take, but it did something to comfort her, which was altogether confusing and welcome, all in one. She liked to try to think of it as comforting, just as his presence had used to be, but she couldn’t help but have her thoughts go to a nicer time. She didn’t know the reasons for that, but she did know that there was probably some expert who could tell her. Which she didn’t want to focus on right now.

She whipped her head around at the sound of a branch breaking. Except she didn’t see the man - Emilio - “um?” Ariadne turned around, taking in a deep breath. “I - what was that?” She wasn’t sure if he could even hear her. “There’s - uh, there’s something glowing.”

If he weren’t a hunter, with ears designed for hearing everything that wanted to kill him in the woods, Emilio probably wouldn’t have picked up on the sound of the kid’s voice. She was quiet, even as she called out to him. He groaned when she said what she saw — something glowing. Something glowing that had pulled her away, distracted her enough to make her break off after he told her not to. Yeah. He could guess what that was.

But whatever was breaking branches as it approached was a little harder to pin down. Undead? Big? He couldn’t both fight whatever was coming and keep an eye out for the kid, but he wasn’t exactly fast enough to outrun it, either. There was another option… he just didn’t particularly like it. Groaning, he rubbed a hand across his face and hoped the kid had decent hearing. “Kid, if you can hear me, get the hell away from whatever you’re following and run into the mines. That’s where I’m headed, and I’ll meet you there.” 

“I can hear you.” It might have been slightly muffled, but she could hear him. Ariadne was, admittedly, starting to question her logic in deciding to essentially stalk a PI - especially because the reason she was following him could very well lead to her getting in trouble and being arrested or whatever it was that would be the solution to all the trouble she’d created, but it wasn’t as though she could back out now without seeming more suspicious.

“Fine, fine,” except that for whatever reason, she could still hear Professor Langston’s warnings about Not Going Into The Mines or whatever. Which meant that she had to report herself to him, didn’t she? Ariadne figured that right now was perhaps not the most optimal time to focus on that, and so instead she took off, running further into the mines. “Is this good?” She looked around, trying to zero-in on Emilio.

At least the kid seemed willing to listen. That wasn’t always the case, with kids in this town. He thought of Alex and Nora and Ren and all the stupid, stubborn kids who were definitely going to get themselves killed and his own desperation to keep that from happening. It was just his luck, wasn’t it, that the one kid who did listen to him was already dead. Undead were typically a lot harder to kill than hunters or bugbears or fae, no matter what kind of undead they were. Still, Emilio figured he shouldn’t look a gift horse in the mouth. The kid was willing to listen to him. That was a good thing.

Or… it might have been, if his plan hadn’t involved leading her into the damn mines. He cursed under his breath as the creature outside the mines followed her, shaking his head in the darkness. “Think we’re gonna need to go deeper,” he called back, half a yell and half a whisper. “And you need to follow my voice and get to me. I need to be able to talk to you where you’re the only one who’ll hear me, otherwise we’re just going to keep leading this thing right to us.”

“I - okay.” Ariadne did her best to hide the confusion in her voice. She wasn’t too sure at all how she was supposed to manage to hear Emilio and keep whatever else was out there from hearing him - them - too. But she figured that she had to trust him (and she did, even despite all her confusion). “I’ll follow you - oh.” She finally understood the idea of how only she’d hear him. If she were closer, then he wouldn’t have to yell to her, because she was practically positive that she had no upper hand when it came to hearing. Except that she’d figured that pointing that out to him would’ve been rude, so she was grateful that she’d been mistaken, that it had been her fault, but that at least this time it was something she could fix. Maybe. Or at least she could try with a greater likelihood of success.

She walked as quickly as she could manage, until she finally spotted Emilio again. “Here.” She said, voice nearly as quiet as she could make it. “Me - I - I’m here.” Ariadne bit down on her tongue. “I’ll shut up now, I promise.”

She was clearly stressed out, and part of him — the part that had had a little girl of his own once, the part that would have done anything and everything to make her feel comfortable and secure — felt guilty for making her that way. But this kid wasn’t Flora. This kid was undead, and no matter how much Emilio tried to remind himself that not everything undead was a monster, thirty odd years of conditioning were so, so hard to break. Part of him thought he might just walk away, leave her here to fend for herself against whatever might be coming. But another, larger part of him knew he wouldn’t. Emilio was still a father, even if there was no one around who remembered. Even if it was only in the confines of his own mind.

She made her way over to him and he relaxed without meaning to, nodding as she got close. She was talking to him because she didn’t think he could see her, because anyone without slayer night vision wouldn’t have. Emilio wondered if she knew what a slayer was, if she knew she was supposed to be afraid of them. “You don’t have to shut up. Just talk quiet. We need to go farther into the mine, okay? But I’ve got your back. Just stick close, don’t wander off again.” 

“Okay, okay - I promise I won’t wander off again.” And I’ll stop being so jumpy, except Ariadne couldn’t say that, because she didn’t want to lie, and saying that felt like it would be a complete lie. Not even a small one. She was a nightmare, she wasn’t supposed to be jumpy and anxious. At least, that was what she figured. “Are - what are you going to do, when you find them?” 

Her fingers found the ends of her hair and she fiddled with those, grateful that even if her chest felt tight, that she couldn’t have her heart racing too much. Dead hearts didn’t race, after all. Ariadne pressed her tongue against the roof of her mouth to prevent herself from sighing, or saying anything else too much right now. “I - thanks for letting me follow - stay with you.” 

A promise. It meant less coming from someone undead than it might have from a fae, who couldn’t break it, but Emilio let himself believe it anyway. She seemed like an honest enough kid. If he had to guess, he’d say she hadn’t been doing this long. There was something sad about it; were the dead still mourned when they got up afterwards and kept walking around? It was hard to say.

At her question, he hesitated. “Depends on what it is,” he decided, speaking carefully, “and what they’re doing. If it’s just someone not trying to hurt anyone, maybe they’re lost. Could show them the way back to town.” Though he doubted that was the case. But he didn’t want to scare the kid, didn’t want her running off because she didn’t trust him. He had no intention of hurting her, but sometimes it was hard to get that message across. He hesitated as she thanked him, grunting in response. “Let’s go,” he said. 

He moved deeper into the mines against his better judgment, the kid behind him. They weren’t safe in here and he knew it, but they weren’t safe out there, either. This was a risk, but he wasn’t sure it was one they could afford not to take. Finally, when they were deep in the mines, he could no longer hear whatever had been following them. Sighing, He leaned against the wall. With his built-in night vision, he could see clearly; he wasn’t sure if she was the same. It depended what flavor of undead she was, he figured. “I think we should hang out for a little while,” he said lowly. “Make sure it’s really gone. Then we can circle back up to the surface. Okay?”

“That makes sense, yeah. I’ve heard of people getting lost down here.” Ariadne did her best to calm her nerves, even if it only worked so much. Which was to say, not entirely at all, but she’d fake it if she had to, because the last thing she wanted was to give him more reason to worry, when she hadn’t even planned on him noticing that she was there in the first place.

“Sorry - I shouldn’t - never mind.” She pressed her lips together, because being quiet was part of the deal of her getting to still follow him around, and even if she was so anxious she felt like she could melt into the ground, Ariadne liked the fact that she actually felt curious, actually curious and wanting to do more than feel bad about herself and what she’d become.

“Let’s go,” she echoed him, balling her hands into fists, taking in a breath that she supposed she didn’t technically need (but that made her feel better), and began to follow him. Soon enough, they were deep into the mines - and she could see perfectly - and it didn’t seem like anybody was there. “I - yeah. Okay.” She whispered. “We can hang out, make sure things are okay.” Somehow, the way that he said it made it seem more possible than just her thoughts alone. Ariadne wasn’t going to question that, and held onto the thanks that threatened to cross her lips firmly. She could thank him once they were out, right?

It was funny, how quickly her presence had gone from irritating to terrifying. When he’d first realized it was an undead kid following him, all he’d wanted was for her to leave. But now? If she broke off from him, she’d be a sitting goddamn duck, mare or no. And that had his heart pounding in his fucking chest. Emilio wasn’t stupid. He knew he had a soft spot that was shaped like a kid, knew he stopped thinking logically the moment someone young enough looked lost enough. Her being here was dangerous, and not just for her. It could spell out an end for him, too.

He clenched his jaw as she apologized for what must have been the ten thousandth time. She was definitely different than other kids he’d met in Wicked’s Rest, different than Nora or Ren or the kid in the woods with the goddamn cheese sludge. Quieter, less certain. He wondered if it was because of her death. People — the nonhunter kind of people — said sometimes that kids thought they were invincible, but undead kids must know they weren’t. They’d already had it proven to them once, after all.

Without responding, he led her deeper into the mines, and he thought it was worrying that she followed. He was doing it for her safety, of course, but why did she trust that? Why did she believe him? It was taking everything he had not to launch into a very dad-shaped lecture about following strangers into mines, but he figured he could save that for after they got out of here. As much as he hated how trusting the kid was, it was working to his advantage for the time being. If she got spooked and ran off, it’d be bad. “Don’t think we need to wait long,” he said. “Just long enough for…” He stopped. That feeling of undead nearby had, of course, been creeping up the back of his neck since he’d first registered her presence. But it felt a little different now. More intense. Like… “Something else is here.” It was all he had time to say before it burst out of the tunnel he was standing next to. 

She would have understood if he’d asked her to leave - either calmly, or with any great deal of frustration – and all of that would have been exceptionally warranted, given everything. Given the fact that Ariadne knew that she was likely far more trouble than she was benefit, but if she focused on that she’d just mess something else up and get Emilio hurt, and then she’d have to live with that, and selfish as it was to think of things that way, she couldn’t help it.

“Something else?” She gulped, the reality of the entire situation sinking in more - as much as it had been real this whole time, Ariadne couldn’t help but feel a rising sense of panic - something that she was sure that she was supposed to take advantage of, if she was a halfway decent mare. Except that she wasn’t even a quarter decent, and at least this time around it kept her from longing to scare someone who’d done nothing but help her. 

All of a sudden there was a loud bang - an explosion almost, before something appeared out of the wall and Ariadne felt herself tense up, shrink into herself. “They - I -” she stammered, only for a moment. “Those - we should run, right? Or - are - yeah?”

He recognized it, albeit only by reputation. Emilio had never seen them in person before — he’d never imagined he would. Maybe that was stupid of him, all things considered. Wicked’s Rest was a town full of undead things — of course its famous mines would be home to celestial roes. He cursed quietly as the thing approached them, slow and menacing.

“No,” he bit out, gritting his teeth. Running only meant leaving the problem for someone else to deal with, and Emilio hated that. He had to look out for the kid… but he had to look out for every other idiot in this town, too. If they didn’t do something about the roe today, someone else would find it in the future. They needed to trap it somewhere. They needed… “This is a mine. Yes? We need dynamite. Explosives. Something to blow a wall down. Then we lead it down to a corridor, and we trap it.”

He paused, considering how to proceed. He had an idea… but he didn’t like it. He couldn’t imagine she would, either. “Cut to the chase,” he said, turning to look at her. The roe was slow moving, so they had some time to talk. Just… not a lot. “You’re a mare. Aren’t you?”

“I’ve never blown up dynamite.” Which was an extraordinarily stupid sort of thing to say, but Ariadne couldn’t help it. “But okay. Okay, that sounds good.” Good was hardly the right word for it, but she didn’t really know what was the right word. What sort of word made sense to approve of exploding something and trapping something, even if it was, like, Bad, or something. But Emilio seemed to know what he was doing, and putting her faith in him was easier than stewing in her own worries, so she let him talk. 

“I.” She paused. How did so many people figure it out that fast. “I am. But I don’t hurt people. Or I don’t try to. I - yeah. I’m a mare. As of last year.” The words came out in a rush, though Ariadne was proud of herself for not crying. “I - I’m not - what’s your plan?”

“Me either,” Emilio admitted. Slayers didn’t typically play with explosives. It struck him as something Rhett might enjoy, but he quickly pushed the thought from his mind. Thinking of his brother, even in passing, while he was trying to save an undead kid… It only served to remind him of what a disappointment Rhett would see him as once he found out. And he couldn’t focus on that now. He needed to focus on this moment, on this kid, on this fucking roe. The existential shit could wait.

He shook his head as she began overexplaining. “That doesn’t matter right now.” Though he found he did believe the claim that she didn’t try to hurt people. He thought of his own experience with a mare, the way the nightmare stayed with him for weeks after. It had never come back, after the fact. Maybe that was a mare’s version of ‘not hurting.’ Maybe it was the only option they had.

“We need to get it in a closed off area, and I need to blow the wall so it’ll have to stay there. But I need someone to stay with it and make sure it doesn’t slip out before the dynamite goes off. You can… move, right? In the —” He grunted, frustrated with the fact that he didn’t know how to convey this in English. “The proyección astral thing that mares do, that lets them get away. You know how to do that, yes? I want you to stay with it and keep it from getting away until I blow the wall. Then you come out with that.”

“That’s good!” Ariadne forced herself to be more chipper than perhaps was appropriate. She made a small face. “I – sorry. Yes, that’s helpful. I’m glad about that. Though I mean, if you did, that’d be fine. It’s all okay.” She just wanted to be out of here. This was why she didn’t go out of her way to have too many adventures. Because that just ended her up in situations like this one, and normally she didn’t have adults like Emilio who could help get her out of said situations. 

“Okay. Okay, sorry. Doesn’t matter. I’ll – you asked me to be quiet and I’m failing at that.” She bit down on her tongue about has hard as she could tolerate. Just over enough to make sure that she actually stopped and listened to what Emilio had to say. At least he wasn’t asking her many more questions about what she’d said. About what she was. 

“I – yes.” Ariadne gulped a breath of air that she didn’t really need. “I – I’m alright at it.” She was actually more than alright, but any sort of bragging about being monstrous or even monster-adjacent was not something that she was going to even sort of attempt right now. “I can do that. I’ll help you. Yes.” 

She was eager to please, wasn’t she? Agreeing with everything he said, insisting that it was good even when nothing about this situation was particularly positive. Optimism was an unfamiliar beast, for Emilio. It wasn’t a thing hunters tended to carry well, wasn’t a weapon any of them learned to wield. As a hunter, you could be a pessimist or you could be a realist. Emilio wasn’t entirely sure there was any kind of a difference between the two. 

“No, it —” He groaned, pinching the bridge of his nose. “It’s fine now. It knows we’re here, too late for quiet.” Sneaking was only feasible if you were trying to get away without the monster knowing you were near. They were past that now.

He nodded, relieved that they at least had all the parts in place for the plan to work. “Okay,” he agreed. “Okay, yeah. I’m going to grab the dynamite. You lead it off. All right? Into some place enclosed, but with enough space that you can be far away from the blast. So you don’t get hurt. I’ll blow the wall down, you get out, then we walk back up to the surface together. Sound good?”

“Still, I don’t want to make things worse.” Though Ariadne wondered, perhaps, if she was making things worse by default through her near-constant commentary on not wanting that. Still, not something to focus on now. Whenever she lay in bed later, she could stare up at the ceiling and ponder what many things she’d done to mess up. 

Right now, though, she could help, and she’d do it, no matter what happened. “Yep, I’ll do it, and I’ll make sure I don’t get hurt, though I dunno if I can, really, uh, because of the whole mare thing. Still. Safe. I’ll be that. I like being that.” Just opposite of her cousin, but Emilio didn’t need to hear about that, and Ariadne didn’t need to focus on that. “I’m - I’ll go, now.” And so she took off, darting into an enclosed crater-like formation in the wall. She could only hope the creature would follow her there.

“Doesn’t get much worse, kid.” They were trapped in a mine with an undead creature Emilio had only heard about, the kind that was impossible to kill without consequence. There were very few scenarios worse than this one, whether she talked or not. But her being quiet wasn’t exactly a bad thing, either; at least it would make it a little easier for Emilio to think. 

Looking at her carefully, he narrowed his eyes. “You can still get hurt,” he told her flatly. “Yes, you can still get hurt. You need to know that.” He didn’t want the kid running around assuming she was invincible; that was going to end poorly. She took off, and he nodded, sighing to himself. Whatever. They could handle the Q&A above ground.

Wandering down a chamber, Emilio searched until he found an area with some equipment. It was dusty and old; he doubted it had been used in quite a while. But there was a stick of dynamite that wasn’t too damp to light, and he grabbed it and headed back towards the mare and the monster as quickly as he was able. “Kid,” he called through the mine, “I’m headed back to you. Are you ready?”

“That’s fair.” Even if Ariadne wanted to refute his statement, because stuff could get worse, but there was also a part of her who wanted to say that life was normally golden and good - which it was, but not in the way that most people would have expected, and her jokes were usually tinged with the slightest bit of sadness, anyhow. Even when she wasn’t intentionally being that way. 

“I - I know.” She looked down at the ground. “I know I can, I can get badly hurt, but I’m still better suited than humans.” Ariadne’s eyes widened at that statement. “I didn’t mean like - I’m not better than anybody, in fact, I’m worse than most, but yeah - I just mean, better me getting stuck with it than a human.”

After what felt like far too long and far too short, she heard his voice again. “Yeah, yeah I am. Just - do it when you’re ready.”

She was clearly new to this, and she clearly wouldn’t have chosen it if she’d been given a choice. That was the kind of thing that Emilio felt made it easier to reform as a slayer than as a ranger or a warden — none of the people Emilio had ever hunted had been born as they were. A good number of them chose to become it, asked someone to turn them for one reason or another. It made it a little easier to shift, to recognize that the ones that hadn’t chose it were set apart.

It also meant there were less kids. The undead didn’t typically turn children, for a lot of reasons. Even twenty-somethings like this kid were rarer than older ones. He thought if he’d been born a ranger or a warden, if he’d been dealing with kids like this all his life, he might have turned heel sooner. He liked to think that. He wasn’t sure if it was true.

He left without saying anything else, didn’t speak again until he was asking her if she was ready and she was saying she was. “All right,” he agreed, following the sound of her voice to a narrow opening. Sharp eyes peered through the darkness, seeing that she’d led the monster inside and that the only escape was the one he was standing in front of. Perfect. “Count of three. Okay? Uno, dos…”

The explosion rocked the mines. Rocks fell from the ceiling, and Emilio just barely dodged a sizable one landing on his head. When the dust settled, the opening he’d been standing in front of was gone, replaced by stone and earth. “Okay, kid. Hope you can still hear me. Come on out, through the astral.”

She figured that if she was helping with this sort of thing, maybe – just maybe that meant she was still good - or, not good, but that there was maybe some bit of good still left in her. That she hadn’t totally destroyed who she was. Ariadne sniffled for a moment.

Ariadne let herself take in deep breaths that she really didn’t need as he counted. The explosion was still louder than she would have thought it’d be. So much so, that his voice made her jump, shake her head, re-remind herself that she was supposed to come out of this, and so she took another deep breath and focused on her memory of the space outside of the cave, and before she knew it, she was there, and shook her head, wiping a bit of mine-dust off her nose.

“Here. I’m - did we do it? Did you do it, I mean?”

There was a moment of quiet, a moment where the empty caverns of the mine stood still and, for a second, Emilio worried that he’d fucked up. That something had landed on her and crushed her, that he’d killed the kid in trapping the monster. He shouldn’t feel a panic at that, not with an undead kid, not when he was supposed to be a slayer, but he felt it anyway. That quiet fear, that cold dread.

And then, she was out in the open with him, and he let out a heavy breath of relief. Unharmed, in one piece. He could hear movement from the cavern she’d vacated, the angry sounds of a trapped beast. He didn’t know if it would hold it forever, but it didn’t need to. If he remembered right, these things had no idea how to get out of their respective ‘homes’ unless there was someone to follow. And after Emilio and the kid left, there’d be nothing left to follow.

“Yeah, kid,” he sighed, nodding his head. “We did it. Couldn’t have done it without you.” At least, not nearly as easily. “Come on. Let’s get the hell out of here.”

She’d helped. In some small way, but she’d still helped. Not made things worse, for once. “Let’s go, please. And I promise not to follow you into the woods anymore, without asking.” Ariadne sighed. “But yes. I think I need a shower, or - well, not a nap, but just to lie down. Thanks for not leaving me down there.” She offered him a small smile. “And thanks for saying I helped, too.”

[banisheed]

TIMING: Some time ago LOCATION: Regis Coleslaw's Apartment PARTIES: Siobhan and Emilio SUMMARY: In 2018, Regis Coleslaw posed for a new employee at Shift Space, Inc. Overworked, underpaid and underappreciated, Regis forced herself to smile as widely as she could. She was looking forward to a quiet night in her apartment, curled up with her cat and her succulents. She cut across the Wormwoods, hoping for a shortcut. In 2023, Siobhan Dolan hires Emilio Cortez to help locate the woman she thinks she's looking for. They discover the outcome of Regis's shortcut and the reality of living half-lives.

—

The piss-boy, Emilio Cortez, could not be trusted. What sort of man didn’t know how to potty train a dog, was poor, had an office that looked either like a bad noir film or a high-budget porno? And what was PI if not the first two letters in ‘piss’? No, Siobhan had to make sure this was done yet. If Regis Coleslaw was her banshee, she needed to be there. Regis would like to see a friendly and beautiful face, she thought. Instead of the unfriendly, but still beautiful, face of Emilio. Yes, one thing the piss-boy did have going for him was his looks. It was tragic they were wasted on someone so poor and stupid. “I doubt Regis Coleslaw would live in a hovel such as this,” Siobhan commented loudly, waving at the dilapidated building they were approaching. When she’d gotten word that Emilio was hot on the trail of Regis, she’d come along without invitation or notice or apology. Which was typically how she went anywhere. “Are you sure your information is correct? I expected less…” She pointed to the small pile of trash bags by the door, buzzing with an orchestra of flies. “…let’s just say I expected it to look less like your office did.” 

—

Most of his clients weren’t particularly involved in the cases they gave him. That was to be expected. People hired a PI to find information they couldn’t or didn’t want to obtain themselves, and part of that fee covered the convenience of not having to do any of the dirty work. Emilio liked it that way. Only having to speak to the client once or twice before getting paid worked for him. But… This latest client was different. 

She was definitely weird. Emilio wasn’t entirely sure what brand of weird she was — he was learning that ‘supernatural’ weird and ‘normal person’ weird had a lot of unexpected overlap — but there was no denying the strangeness. When she’d shown up at his door just before he headed out to the address he’d found listed for Regis Coleslaw, he wasn’t even particularly surprised. Annoyed, sure, but not surprised. At least the case would be over soon. They’d find this Regis person, he’d get the rest of his fee, and that would be that. He was really looking forward to it.

“This is the address on file,” he replied gruffly, wondering how pissed she’d be if he pulled out his flask. Talking to her was making the idea of drinking more and more tempting. “I’m sure. Look, maybe they’re just hiding out. Sometimes, people don’t want to be found. Hiding out in a place you wouldn’t expect them to be just makes them smart.” She seemed to think highly of Regis, so playing on that might be the best way to quell her complaints here. Or he could stab her. He was really starting to like the idea of stabbing her. “If they’re not here, they’re not here. And you didn’t have to come, by the way. Actually, I think I remember specifically telling you not to.”

—

Siobhan’s face crinkled together. “When you hide away for enough years, you start to realize that living in squalor is the last thing you want.” At least, by the first decade for Siobhan, she’d started to hate radiators and squeaky floorboards and making her bed out of suspiciously stained pillows she’d taken from the dumpster. She was still miserable but at least she was miserable in style. Emilio might learn that lesson one day, though he’d probably die before he got there. A shame. Siobhan turned her attention to the building again. The roof seemed to be caved in and the windows shattered--the jagged glass that remained made her think they’d been broken by impact rather than scream. “One day, Emilio,” she spoke idly, her eyes still focused on the windows, “you’re going to realize that the best cure for sadness is a lot of money; run your next business out of a penthouse.” 

Siobhan’s attention returned to the piss-boy again. “Oh?” She grinned at him. “But then how would we bond? If I hadn’t come, think of all the silence you’d be having right now! How dreadful.” She clicked her tongue against teeth, tutting. “My charm and likeability are saving you from a boring experience; you’re welcome, by the way. I accept payment in bones.” And finally, her attention snapped to the door. It was falling off its hinges, with one push--she was sure--it would topple over. It didn’t look locked. It didn’t look like it had been locked in years. “Do we…knock?”

—

“Some people would call it safer,” he pointed out. Having money, from what he could tell, meant having eyes on you. People noticed the rich in ways they didn’t notice guys like Emilio, who lived in run-down apartments. When things were hard to look at, the natural result was that people looked at them less. For someone in hiding, that was a very tempting thing. This building would be a good place for someone who didn’t want to be found. If Regis fit that bill, it made sense that they’d chosen it to hide out in. “There are plenty of things money can’t get you. A penthouse wouldn’t solve much for me.” It would still be empty of the people he’d want to fill it. He had no desire for that. People would also have a lot more expectations of a PI firm run from a penthouse, and even if he did somehow come into the kind of money Siobhan seemed to think he needed in order to escape ‘squalor,’ his personality still wouldn’t be one that could provide that. 

At Siobhan’s instruction, Emilio did, in fact, think of the silence he would have been experiencing in this moment had she not tagged along. It would have been a wonderful thing. Certainly preferable to this conversation. He sighed, mourning its loss. “What is it with you and bones?” This was the second time she’d mentioned them. Specifically, wanting them. He wasn’t sure he saw the appeal. Looking to the door, he weighed his options. “Depends,” he decided, glancing back to her, “is Regis Coleslaw going to make a break for it if they see you?”

—

“Who cares about safety?” Siobhan replied softly, staring at the woodgrain of the broken door. She had done her part being smart and safe, flinching at every flutter of grass or rustle of leaves--thinking some gaggle of pixies would think she was the next fun target. A traitor could never be safe. What was worse then? That she realized in time that with nothing to lose, she had nothing to fear, or that no one had ever come for her? She was forgotten and all her fear was a strange, self-important desire. Regis might have thought she was forgotten too and what was worse? That the woman who had everything chose to leave or that Siobhan envied her? Perverse as it was, she wished someone would knock her door down and remind her that she mattered at all to someone at some point. If they came, they’d find she didn’t care about losing her shiny car or decades worth of baubles. Her back burned with the memory of her mother’s vicious hands pulling at her wings. She rolled her shoulders. “We’re all going to die one day, you might as well let it come in style.”

Emilio’s words snapped her out of her mind and she turned to face him. “We all have our things; yours is piss and mine is bones,” she smiled easily, finding the rhythm of hurting someone else easy under the talon-grip of her own sadness. Emilio was nothing more than a therapeutic punching bag and Regis was nothing more than a means to an end. She’d have a life with purpose and family again, and that would be that. “Regis Coleslaw doesn’t know what I look like,” Siobhan sighed. “She has no idea who I am, even, and I have no idea how she might feel about me.” Siobhan didn’t care either. If Regis was in a place like this, she must have been afraid of the banshees of saol elie; Siobhan had already lost the battle of a good impression. “What does it matter? I want her. I don’t care how I get her, I just need her alive.” She sighed again, pinching the bridge of her nose. “Now are we knocking or can we stop pretending like this door is even locked?”

—

“You’d be surprised.” Emilio might not put a lot of stock in his own safety these days but if being a detective had taught him anything, it was that other people did. He’d had plenty of cases that took the form of someone just trying to ensure they were safe in one way or another. Sometimes, they needed leverage on someone else, dirt that they could use to cover their own back and ensure mutually assured destruction if they needed it. Other times, that desire for safety came in the form of asking him to find someone whose location was unknown, either because they would feel safer knowing where they were or because they needed them close in order to feel all right. Most people were only trying to be safe, whatever that looked like. Siobhan, it seemed, was the exception to that. It was a little refreshing, even if she was annoying. “Doesn’t matter if you die in style or not. You’re just as dead either way.”

He rolled his eyes at her statement, gritting his teeth just a little. “That isn’t my thing.” Not that he knew what his thing was. Something depressing, most likely. A bottle of whiskey, a dirty knife. Nothing worth having, but still better than whatever it was she had going on with bones. The Regis Coleslaw mystery seemed to be growing more and more with each stone he uncovered. Siobhan was looking for someone who didn’t know who she was or how she might feel. She needed this person alive. She didn’t know what she looked like, but she thought the idea that she’d live in a crumbling apartment was preposterous. There was definitely something odd about the whole situation, but… Emilio wasn’t getting paid for those questions. He was getting paid for this. 

Deciding knocking was a risk, he shrugged. “All right, all right. We can just…” The hair on the back of his neck stood up. That familiar almost-nausea tugged at his gut, persistent and loud. He heard footsteps on the other side of the door, but the only heartbeats he could hear were his and Siobhan’s. There was a low noise, like an animal growling. Cursing, Emilio grabbed Siobhan by the arm and yanked her out of the way just as the door burst open to reveal twisted features and red eyes. Christ. Not only was Siobhan’s Regis Coleslaw a fucking vampire, she was a feral one. Letting out a mangled cry, the vampire leaped forward, going straight for his client’s throat. “¡Puta madre! Maldita cosa estúpida…” He couldn’t exactly get paid if his client was eaten, and Regis Coleslaw seemed too far gone to reason with, so Emilio yanked out his stake, grabbing the vampire by the shoulder and yanking it backwards, throwing it back into the apartment and rushing after it. 

Maybe it was good that Siobhan had come with him after all. He got the feeling that this one would have been hard to explain otherwise.

—

Siobhan did not enjoy being yanked, but she could forgive the act when the cause was a starved vampire. The creature streaked across her vision, closing into her. She smiled in its face--her face, though gender was a construct very far from the mind of the creature. Once upon a time, maybe, it might have been a ‘her’. Siobhan could see the tattered remains of a pastel floral skirt and a sensible white blouse; the pieces of a personality that were lost. “Can I interest you in a mint or…?” But before the creature could meet her neck in a not-so-sexy bite, it was off of her and focused on Emilio. “No! Not Emilio! He’s too sexy to die now!” Not that he was, she would’ve screamed if he was, but Fate could still change and Siobhan had no preferences either way. As long as it wasn’t her sweet blood being made a meal of. “If you eat him, leave me his bones!” She called out into the murky depths of the dilapidated apartment. “Emilio, I realize you have a stake and that means you know how to use it but I just think if I’m going into business with a slayer I should be warned beforehand so I can prepare my wood jokes.”

She followed the sounds of struggle, watching Emilio with the thin body of someone who once loved sensible-office-lady fashions. “You’re doing a wood job right now.” She paused, running a hand through her hair as a frustrated sigh slipped through her lips. “See? I would be doing so much better if you just let me prepare.” She leaned up against the broken door frame, arms crossed over her chest. “If it makes you feel more confident,” she called out over the sounds of their struggle, “you’re not actually going to die. Not yet, at least. Oh, but you are dying whittle by whittle every day.” Maybe when Emilio was done fighting, he would admit that one was a good joke.

—

At this point, Emilio could fight a feral vampire in his sleep. He’d been doing shit like this since he was a child, had been tossed in rooms with feral beasts before he had a sound grasp on what those beasts were. It was almost a comfort, having something as familiar as a vampire to fight. What was less familiar was Siobhan’s commentary. “Not helping,” he called back in her direction, ducking to avoid the vampire’s attempt to bite his neck. She wouldn’t have liked what she found there, of course — slayer blood wasn’t a very tasty snack — but he’d still like to avoid having his throat torn out if at all possible. Although, if the alternative was hearing Siobhan’s best ‘wood jokes,’ maybe bleeding out in Regis Coleslaw’s shitty apartment wouldn’t be so bad. “You’re not getting my pinche bones. Stop asking.” 

Feral vampires were strong, but stupid. There wasn’t much difference between this and a spawn, when you got down to it. Sure, maybe with enough blood, this one could get back to something resembling human eventually, but right now? That just wasn’t an option. If it was kill or be killed here, Emilio would take the former if only to avoid the embarrassment of being murdered by a fairly killable vampire in front of someone who would almost certainly pick apart his corpse and make off with his femur after. He glanced back curiously as Siobhan assured him that he wasn’t going to die with all the confidence of someone who knew it for a fact, narrowing his eyes momentarily. The suspicion couldn’t last, of course; not with Regis Coleslaw doing her damndest to make a meal out of his throat. 

Turning back to the fight, Emilio grunted and shoved the vampire off of him and into a coffee table which shattered with the force of the impact. It didn’t do much to slow the vampire down, but it did put Siobhan back into its line of sight. It moved for the professor again, and Emilio barely managed to grab it by the hair and yank it back again, turning it and pulling it onto his stake. There was a moment of quiet then, a heartbeat where it seemed the vampire was registering its own death before it collapsed into a pile of dust all over the front of Emilio’s shirt. Great. “All right,” he said, dusting off his shirt as best he could, “there you go. Regis Coleslaw. Sorry there’s no bones, but have some dust.”

—

Siobhan wasn’t sure why ‘slayer battles vampire’ wasn’t a national broadcast sport but she was, at that moment, convinced it would make for wonderful TV. Not only was Emilio sufficiently stressed, annoyed and still bursting with that hunter determination, but the former Regis Coleslaw made a beautifully tragic case. Being in the ‘splash zone’—as it was now known in the sport of slayer watching—Siobhan enjoyed a level of personal thrill. When the vampire came for her again, Siobhan remained smiling. And as Emilio predictably pulled the creature away from her, leaving Siobhan unharmed and only a little disappointed, she wondered if she could sell this experience for a few hundred dollars. 

As Emilio rose, dusting the remains of Regis Coleslaw off of him, Siobhan frowned. “You couldn’t have extended this a little? I was having a grand time over here.” Of course, ‘slayer battles vampire’ wouldn’t be so profitable if the vampires were done too quickly. It was a conundrum that she wouldn’t ponder again outside of this moment as she would inevitably forget to. She frowned again. “No thank you on the dust, it clogs my pores.” She gestured to her face as if to demonstrate that her having clogged pores would be an extreme tragedy. “I still have a few wood jokes in me, but I guess you have to leaf now.” Did that count? Siobhan was counting it. She stepped closer, staring down at the spot the vampire had once been. She held no sympathy for the undead, the abominations that they were, but there was always something strange in seeing someone here one moment and then knowing that they were gone forever in the next. Death, even when it happened to those already dead, was an emptying feeling—being upturned and shaken out over an endless pit. She reached down and picked up the ID card that had snapped off her shirt when her body exploded into dust. It was the clip-on sort of work ID and sure enough the woman had been named Regis Coleslaw and one day in 2018 she had posed for a photo with a big smile on her face. She had brown eyes and brown hair and a small arrangement of freckles across her nose. 

Siobhan turned to Emilio, who had finished the job she’d hired him to do by all accounts. She flipped the ID around towards him. “Do you ever think about this? Or are they all just monsters to you? All the way through?” Siobhan didn’t ask because she cared, but it was a curiosity that played in her mind. Her fingers tightened around the clip. “You’re free to leave, by the way, I think I’ll stay to see if Regis ate someone whose bones I can pilfer—Hm, is it pilfering if they’re dead? Repurpose. Whose bones I can repurpose.” She smiled. “You’ll have your money by the end of the day, I’ll deliver it to your piss office. But before you go, if you could…” She rattled the ID. “I’m curious; indulge me.” And no, she would not be thanking him though he did objectively save her life—it didn’t count if she wasn’t really going to die anyway. 

—

Christ, Siobhan looked so smug about the whole thing. Like it was a game, like it was something funny that was happening on a television screen and not a potentially deadly fight right in front of her. It wasn’t hard to guess that she knew something was ‘different’ about Wicked’s Rest, but Emilio was beginning to wonder if she might actually have a few screws loose to go along with the knowledge. Most people were at least a little concerned when a vampire went for their throat. Siobhan was smiling. 

“Didn’t feel like letting her take a bite out of you. You might not have paid me if she had,” he replied dryly, though his expression betrayed some interest in the cavalier way she walked into the apartment. “Guess we’ll leave it for the maid, then.” Another joke; it was clear from the state of the apartment that Regis Coleslaw hadn’t had a maid. From the looks of things, she might not have even owned a vacuum. At least Siobhan’s pre-existing knowledge of the undead meant Emilio wouldn’t have to stay around to explain things to her.

Though it did not, apparently, save him from all explanations.

He looked down at the ID badge, at the smiling photograph of the person who’d once been inside the creature he’d just turned to dust. The smile didn’t quite reach her eyes, something he’d noticed was common with staged photos. If you wanted to really capture someone, it couldn’t be by telling them to smile. In the photo, Regis Coleslaw looked a little tired. Like working at Shift Space, Inc. had exhausted her even before her badge was printed. There were more hints of her lost humanity scattered around the apartment than there were in that picture, of course. The shoes tucked under the sofa. The wilting plants hanging by the window. The fan whirring from the bedroom. She’d been a person, once.

But not anymore.

“She was too far gone,” he said, looking to Siobhan with a shrug. “In a state like that… If she hadn’t killed someone already, she was going to. And maybe she would have come back to herself, after, but it would have been too late. Some people you can save. Some people you can’t. Being able to recognize that is the only thing that’ll stop somebody from losing their goddamn mind.” He plucked the name badge from between her fingers, tossing it over to the coffee table. Eventually, someone would come looking for Regis Coleslaw and find an empty apartment and a name badge. Maybe they’d tell themselves she’d gone off somewhere, found a better life. Maybe that’d be better for everyone. 

Deciding not to question the bone thing — there was some shit that Emilio really didn’t want to know about — the detective turned to walk towards the door. He paused under the archway, tapping his knuckles against the doorframe absently. “I’m charging an extra fee,” he informed her. “Stabbing’s not included in the base price. Good luck with your bones.” And then, he was gone.

—

Siobhan had been raised on rights and wrongs: right to be a banshee, wrong to be a human, right to be a devout servant, wrong to have any emotion. Hunters sometimes shared the same blacks and whites that she could comprehend: all vampires bad, all fae evil, humans good. Emilio’s response sucked the amusement right from her. It was a sensible answer, of course, but Siobhan lived in the gray that he had set out. Some people could be saved. Some couldn’t. It seemed like another black and white but one so strange in its idea; some people could be saved. Some people could be saved. Some. People. Could. Be. Saved. 

Siobhan watched the ID sail through the air. She didn’t know what Emilio meant. For the first time in her life, she had encountered a sentiment so bizarre that she couldn’t parse it. The individual words she understood: some meaning not all. People meaning people. Could meaning possible to happen. Be meaning can be done. Saved meaning… 

Siobhan swallowed. Behind her, the dull thudding of Emilio’s receding footsteps echoed through the room. His voice went off, something about charging more; it was funny, Emilio could be funny when he wanted, she realized. His voice was a little deeper than Siobhan thought it would be for his face, she noticed that before but the hollowness of Regis’s apartment accentuated it. He wished her good luck. He was gone. Some people, he said, could be saved. Siobhan burst out at once, bubbling over with questions: what did he mean? Saved from what? Who counted? How could he tell them apart? Did this make him an arbitrator of salvation? Saved meaning what? How could someone be saved? 

Siobhan picked up the tattered remains of Regis’s clothes, folding each article and setting it aside neatly on the cushion of the sofa. She pulled the shoes that were underneath until they sat out like they were ready to be worn. She grabbed the ID Emilio had thrown and laid it to rest on Regis’s sensible blouse. Her dust went in the nicest Tupperware container Siobhan could find from the kitchen and she put that out on the coffee table. For the next hour, Siobhan sat beside everything that remained of Regis and pretended she knew what salvation felt like. 

[ohwynne]

TIMING: 22 July PARTIES: Emilio @mortemoppetere & Wynne @ohwynne@ohwynne LOCATION: WRGH SUMMARY: Emilio is there when Wynne wakes up in the hospital. They return his necklace and ask who the ring on it belonged to. CONTENT WARNINGS: Abuse (cult and child), suicide ideation, child death (heavily present), sibling death (mention), parental death (mention)

Someone was screaming in the hallway.

It wasn’t the dangerous kind of scream, wasn’t the kind of scream that meant there was trouble, but it was familiar all the same. His voice was loud and anguished, repeating words over and over again as someone tried desperately to calm him. No, he was saying, no, there’s a mistake. Please, you’ve made a mistake. This isn’t — This can’t be happening. Please, keep trying, please. She can’t be gone, please, that’s my baby. That’s my baby, please — 

It felt predatory, somehow, being a part of it from behind the wall that separated Wynne’s room from the hallway outside. Like he was part of a moment he didn’t belong in, like he was eavesdropping on the worst day of someone’s life. 

Emilio hadn’t spent a lot of time in hospitals. His family had never frequented them, even when they likely should have. His brother had bled out on the ground somewhere out in the woods, his uncle the only witness. The massacre of his hometown had ended with bodies buried in the dirt, not loaded into black bags and carted to the hospital morgue. No doctor had asked him to identify the corpses of his wife or daughter; he’d done it all on his own in the living room floor, their blood staining his hands even now. 

Hospitals were a relatively new experience. But already, he’d decided he hated them.

It was overwhelming, all the things going on. The man outside was beginning a journey of grief that would never leave him, and he was so far from the only one. Down the hall, a monitor stuttered in its steady beeping, shifted into a flat tone instead, and people rushed towards it. In the room next door, someone was crying beside a bed that he knew probably looked exactly like the one he was sitting beside now. The air smelled sharp, with something familiar underneath it. No amount of chemicals could really cover up the smell of blood when you were as familiar with it as Emilio was.

Hospitals, he thought, were not unlike museums. Each room was a new tragedy on display, and Emilio had seen enough of those already.

He tried to focus on Wynne on the bed, on the way their chest rose and fell. If he didn’t, he’d become too distracted by the man outside, whose screams had turned to quiet sobbing. He’d focus too much on the nauseating buzzing under his skin of undead, undead, undead as the newly turned who hadn’t yet realized their situation turned to doctors for answers. He’d slip back into the corner of his mind that had never left that living room floor, where the blood on his hands belonged to everyone he’d ever loved and himself, too. 

None of it mattered now. None of it could matter now. Not when there was a kid on a hospital bed, bandages packed against their throat. Not when their blood was still under his nails, their name added to the ever-growing list of people he’d failed, people who were hurt because he wasn’t fast enough, strong enough, good enough. If he’d gotten there earlier, Wynne wouldn’t be in a hospital bed. If he’d done his job better, there’d be no bandage around their throat. If he were what he was supposed to be, they’d have a little less trauma to add to their already impressive pile of it.

Outside in the hall, a hand smacked against the wall. The grieving father sniffled, his prayers turning sour. Please shifted into why. Anger always snuck in the place of grief eventually. Emilio would know.

—

In sleep, they dreamed of flames. Siors was dancing around them with a knife in hand and Wynne could do nothing but watch, caged and tied, feeling the heat sear their skin as the Protherian’s patriarch neared closer and closer. Look left, Zack and Arden dead. Look right, Metzli dancing around the flames with heads in their hand. Look ahead: Siors, in front of them, knife glinting but teeth glinting more. He sunk them in their throat and laid them on the altar.

Look left, and their parents were watching with proud smiles. Look right, and so were all the people they had met and grown to love here.

In sleep, they screamed too. 

There were flashes of wakefulness, Wynne awaking with sweat on their back and gasping for air, hands scrambling as if they were trying to get loose. They didn’t like it here. Protherians didn’t tend to go to hospitals, took care of each other by themselves. The demon was supposed to keep them all healthy, and often he did. And sometimes death came, through failure of organs or other disease and that was how it was. When Eirwen had broken her arm, Wynne’s aunt had taken her to the hospital despite the rules. Their entire family had felt the consequences when they’d come back.

And now here they were, waking in a bright and sterile room every time their sleep was interrupted. The sheets were cold. They were cold. The bandage around their throat was constricting. The room lacked Arden and Zack. But the room wasn’t dark and damp, wasn’t lined with bars, and their hands were free to move as they wished.

There was another dream. Crawling up stairs. Reaching the exit as behind them screams echoed. Crawling on all fours. Coming up, bursting outside and being right back in the cage, but this time lined with Protherian decorations. Corwyn Prothero smiling down — this was a recurring dream, him leaning down from his painting and expressing feelings of pride to them. Teeth dripping blood. Wynne was crawling away again, but weren’t moving forward.

When they awoke, they shot up in bed, pulling along the drip that had been slid into their hand. It was to rehydrate, apparently. Their chest moved up and down with rapid breaths, eyes flicking around the room before landing on Emilio. He was here. 

For a moment, they remembered the panic that had taken a hold of them when he’d caught them, and then the instant relief. It spread through them again at the sight of him. “Hi.” With their raw throat, it was more a whisper than a proper sentence. They cleared it. “Hey.” That was better.

Wynne wasn’t sure what to do. They just looked at him, with wide eyes and lips somewhat parted. Trying to calm themselves from the dream. Trying to find the right words to express how much it meant, that he had come and that he was here. They let themself sink back into their pillows, breathing in deeply. They opened their mouth, but all they could seem to do was cry. And so tears leaked out their eyes and they exhaled shakily and wiped at their eyes, wrists raw and ugly from the rope that had bound them for days. “Hi.” 

—

The figure in the bed in front of him shifted sometimes. Emilio wasn’t sure how long he sat there, couldn’t keep track of the ticking clock or the buzzing of his phone. People sending messages, continuing conversations that didn’t seem to matter anymore. The only real concept he had for how much time had passed came from that father out in the hall, came from denial turning to bargaining turning to anger. 

He’d read up on it, after Mexico. In some city in Texas, in a grocery store he’d tracked a target to. He’d picked up a book to keep himself from being seen, and it had talked about stages. Five of them like a checklist, like a cycle you could track. But it didn’t seem to fit for him. Denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance. That hadn’t been his experience. It didn’t go in order, didn’t exist in a way that was linear. Denial came back every time he closed his eyes, bargaining reared its head with each vampire he ground into dust, depression hung like a cloak off his shoulders, anger was ever-present. And acceptance never came. 

He didn’t think it would come for the father in the hall, either, didn’t think it existed in situations like this. You held a baby in your arms, cradled their head with so much care that you had none left to offer yourself. When the world tore them away from you, when it dug a hole in the ground and placed them inside of it and left you holding to the empty space they used to take up, how could you ever hope to accept it? How could you breathe in when their lungs were still, when their heart stopped beating? How could you ever? 

The figure shifted again and, this time, Emilio snapped out of his head. The father in the hall had gone quiet, and he was glad for it. Any more screaming, he thought, and he would have joined in. Would have added his voice to the chaos until he was hoarse and aching, until his throat was raw and his whole body ached. It was all he felt like doing right now, anyway. 

But that tiny shape on the bed shifted, and their eyes opened, and Emilio had known, logically, that they would, but the relief still felt palpable. It was hard, sometimes, to be in the presence of someone else’s grief and not take it on as your own even if you were only present in a tangential sense, even if your only connection to their situation was in hearing them curse God in the hospital hallway. It was hard not to want to curse God right along with them, not to adopt that anguish for your own. But Wynne’s eyes opened, and Emilio’s grief was two years back. Still raw, still present, still non-linear, but far away from the hospital hallway. 

“Hey,” he said quietly, the word a quiet exhale. “Good to see you awake, kid.”

—

Though there had always been death at the commune, there hadn’t been a whole lot of grief in Wynne’s life. There had been loss, certainly, but never in a manner that was earth-shattering or undoing. Their grandmother had passed of old age and Jac had died on the altar as he was supposed to and all the others that had ceased to live at the commune had simply met death. There had been no grief, right?

But then there was their mother, who had put them on the earth and had soon been visited by the community’s patriarch. Siors had sat down at her bed and told her that the babe in her arms was destined for something glorious, something important, something definite. Two decades, Zahra was to get with her little darling, and then it’d be done. And as her husband beamed with pride and her in-laws beamed even more, she fell into grief. 

Early grief. Prepared grief. Impatient grief. Wynne had never suffered a massive loss, but they had been ten when they’d been told that they were destined to die. They had grown up watched by the eyes of a mother who thought them already dead and a father who thought them the greatest gift that he’d gladly return to its origin. Wynne had never suffered a massive loss and thus, they didn’t believe they knew grief — but they had mourned their own life before it could even start, had been mourned before loved and now lay here, dreaming of dying over and over.

Would those five stages apply here, too? They’d been stuck in forced acceptance for most of their time, their anger like a sickly limb they’d cut off and their bargains silenced with a hard hand. In the months of the start of their second life, there had been depression and denial. But it had been misplaced grief, hadn’t it? Because Wynne had lived. No demon had devoured them. No vampire had turned them. They had lived. They ached with it, but they lived.

They looked at Emilio and wondered what kind of grief he had gone through. There had to be some, right? There had to be injuries there. Their cheeks stung as more salt mingled in raw skin and they inhaled sharply at the salt on their wrists. “It’s good to see you, too.” 

Their tears ceased for a moment, their heartbeat slowing now that their body had caught up with the fact that there was no threat in the room with them. Their mind was catching up too, it seemed, albeit on different things. The right thing to say. The reality of the situation. The hospital room, the way the sheets felt under them, the look on the other’s face. For a moment they were back in that basement, Emilio looking at them with an altogether different look on his face. He’d put something around their neck — they recalled, now.

“Oh,” they said. “Your necklace. It’s …” They sat up a little more, head heavy with fatigue as they tried to open the drawer of their side table. The movement was slow but determined. Wynne was not very good at owing people things, even in this state. “They put it here.” Fingers closed around the metal, holding it out to Emilio. The iv had gotten all twisted, but it mattered little. “Thank you.”

—

They were crying. He almost missed it at first, almost didn’t recognize it. Grief looked so different on different people, he’d learned; the same shirt stretched out across different skin in so many ways that no two people had ever worn it the same. Wynne’s grief seemed a quiet thing, like they were afraid to let it be seen, like they didn’t want to hurt anyone with their aching. And Emilio’s had always been the opposite.

His grief was loud. It was like that father in the hallway whose wails had split the silence, like a hurricane tearing through bricks and trees and fences and turning the ocean into a whirlwind of water and salt. His grief wanted to be known but, more than that, it wanted to be felt by someone other than Emilio himself. Emilio’s grief strove to make itself everyone’s problem. It bloodied his hands and sharpened his knife. It thought itself too big for one man alone, thought itself deserving of a whole world of mourners. There were people who had lived and died inside his chest, and his grief screamed their names even when his mouth stayed silent.

Mostly, he thought, his grief didn’t look much like grief to anyone who wasn’t paying enough attention. His grief looked like rage, like violence, like an explosion big enough to engulf the whole world in flames. His grief wore different masks, played dress up in someone else’s clothes.

But Wynne’s grief was quiet and, right now, Emilio’s was too.

There was enough wailing being done by that father in the hall. The violence had come and gone with those vampire’s in the barn. There was blood on his hands and dust on the soles of his shoes, and the loud part was over now. The loud part had already screamed itself hoarse, already beaten itself into silence. All that was left now was to sit in the aftermath, to inspect the damage left behind. Walk the fenceline and see what parts were torn away by that hurricane’s winds, stroll the beach and remind yourself that the ocean was still there. Check the tree limbs, inspect the house’s foundation. Rebuild, maybe, if you had the time.

He wanted to ask Wynne if they were feeling okay, but he was so afraid his voice would crack or that theirs would. He didn’t know which would hurt more, so he stayed silent to avoid figuring it out. They said it was good to see him, and he wondered how that could possibly be true. How could they look at him and find relief? Didn’t they know he’d failed? They shouldn’t be in a hospital bed, shouldn’t be hooked to a bag with uncomfortable sheets beneath them. They should be at home in their own bed, with Arden and Zack in the next room. If Emilio had been faster, they would be.

“Hm?” Their voice broke through the static in his mind, and he glanced up to see them fumbling with the drawer beside their bed. He moved to help them, to do something, but they managed it on their own and his hand hovered in the air between them like a puppet suspended from an uncertain string.

Your necklace. They pressed it into his hand and he swallowed. He looked down at it for a moment, rubbing absently against Juliana’s ring that hung beside the cross. This better not turn my finger green, Cortez, she’d joked the day he put it on her, eyes sparkling with a secret he wouldn’t learn until the wedding was over and she pulled him away into their bedroom, whispering the wonder of fatherhood into his ear. It felt heavy in his hand now, like a weight he wasn’t quite strong enough to lift. 

He closed his hand around the necklace, shoving it into the pocket of his jeans and pretending his hands weren’t shaking when he folded them together in his lap. “Thanks for keeping an eye on it for me,” he said hoarsely, thumb finding his own wedding band on his finger and twisting it in that familiar old habit. 

—

Even in this space, in this room and this situation, their emotions felt too loud. The tears were spilled with quiet silence, rubbed into their skin to make them disappear and not vocalizing the way it even hurt to cry. Throat constricted, stitches pulling, their raw wrists burning with the salt and their cheeks feeling like they were going to crack. Wynne was quiet, wishing themself small enough to disappear while they were wrapped up in their sadness. Where this couldn’t be perceived. Where even this silent suffering went unnoticed.

What room for loudness had there been, before? What room for anger? They had been chastised for ill-fitting emotions and that had been most of them. Not just chastised — but punished, placed in the areas made for reflection (closed rooms, like the cellar, dark and silent) or met with squeezing hands around wrists. There was no room for anger, because there had been nothing to be angry about: Alys had told them as much, once, in the rooms reserved for solitary contemplation. 

Do you want us to seem ungrateful to It, Wynne? Are you not glad that you can do this for us? You should be grateful, the way we are grateful of us. You have a purpose, the kind we only dream of having in our lives. Look at me, look at me when I speak to you — they all look to you now, and if you falter we all will. It’s not only unfair to be angry, but it is dangerous. You wish to risk us? After all we’ve done? We’ve given you? We’ve given your family? Think on it. There is no purpose to this anger, no direction, nothing. Purge it from your body. You can come back when you feel calmer. 

Alys had been forceful, awe-inspiring, the elder Wynne thought perhaps wisest of them all. Who else was a fifteen year old to turn to, anyway? The cold mother? The proud father? The brother, who never wished to speak of what was to come? They had sat with those words in dark silence until the door had opened again and from then on, their emotions had burrowed deep into their body, digging holes and burying themself and they had become quiet. 

Your calmness is a gift to us all, Wynne.

Alys had been proud and there had been no more stints by themself. Silence was safest, wasn’t it? Rage was selfish. Crying was weak, but being weak wasn’t the worst thing to be — martyrs were allowed to be weak, but never forceful. 

Even in the basement they’d been quiet. Even then, they’d come easily. No screaming or scrambling, just a plea and a bleat and a cry. Even now, when thinking of Zane, they couldn’t find any anger — just a hollow fatigue. Even now, they were not angry with their parents, nor Alys or Siors or Padrig. 

But Emilio got angry, didn’t he? He had been angry in the basement. He was angry often, even when he wasn’t — it was something that was hard to miss, when looking at him a little longer. It wasn’t in a way that scared Wynne, though: they thought it something else that might be right, where their own ways were wrong. Was that strength, then, contrasting their own silent weakness? 

He didn’t seem strong as he took the necklace, though. Not weak either, just — human. Haunted, maybe. They looked at him. “Thank you for entrusting me with it.” Wynne managed to get the twist out of the IV and got up a little, trying to position their pillows so they wouldn’t just be lying there. 

“Is the cross … can vampires not stand it? Do you believe in God?” They wanted the timber of his voice. Some kind of wisdom, or story, or anything. They wouldn’t mind if he just went on and on about Perro, or perhaps something else even less consequential. But they also wanted to ask questions, the ones that had nothing to do with the basement or their present situation. Ones that defied their quietness. “Does the ring belong to someone?”

—

Emilio wasn’t raised in a cult. Not the way he saw it, in any case. The sacrifices his family made were so different than the ones Wynne had run from, the martyrs so separate. His father died fighting, he’d been told, strong and brave until the very end, and that was the memory Emilio assigned to him. He had no face to give the man responsible for his existence, so he thought of him in concepts instead. His father was brave, his father was strong, his father was valiant. His father was also dead, was gone, was absent. Those things, in hunter families, always seemed to go hand-in-hand. The best hunter was a dead one, one who had fulfilled their purpose. 

And yet, Victor’s death had felt so different. Maybe it was because, unlike his father, Emilio remembered his brother. He remembered training with him, looking up to him, admiring him. Victor was the oldest and Emilio was the youngest and there’d been some kind of a bond based on that. At twelve, his oldest brother had seemed so invincible, so untouchable. But when Lucio returned to their home after a hunt that had started with several men and ended with just one, Emilio had been reminded that no one was untouchable. Not the father he’d never known, not the brother he’d lost. Everyone was fallible. 

His mother had talked often of the sacrifices his father and brother had made, but there’d always been a strange contrast between the two. His father was what a martyr should be, he thought; remembered only for his death, a story that began and ended with an epitaph. But Victor was different. Victor was a strange contradiction, an example of what to be and a warning of what not to become. Your brother was foolish, your brother wasn’t strong enough, your brother was good, your brother did what he was supposed to do. In death, Victor became putty in their mother’s hands; carefully molded into whatever she needed him to be in order to properly motivate the children she had left. 

Emilio thought that might have been closer to what Wynne’s people had wanted them to be. If his father was what a martyr ought to be, Victor was what a martyr actually was. A carefully constructed concept, someone who became whatever people needed them to be after death. He felt sick with the idea that Wynne had almost suffered such a fate, felt uneasy knowing that they could have ended up just like Victor — an example for mothers to use when scolding their children, either as a guide on what to become or a warning of what would happen if they were unruly. Wynne, he thought, deserved more than that. Maybe Victor had, too.

But he’d never been given the chance to think on it much. His mother had never had much room for grief. He thought she might have loved his father, hoped she’d loved Victor, but their deaths had never affected her the way Juliana or Flora’s had affected Emilio. Part of him wondered, sometimes, if that meant he was the one doing things wrong. His mother lost a spouse and a child, just as Emilio had, but that grief hadn’t broken her. Mourning hadn’t turned her inside out, hadn’t carved an empty space into her chest that nothing ever seemed to fill. It hadn’t given her a crisis of faith, hadn’t made her give up the ideals she’d been raised with. 

Was it Emilio, then, who was broken? It seemed so much easier to believe. After all, hadn’t he been scolded for his reaction to Victor’s death? Hadn’t he been told, at twelve years old, that grief was a weakness he needed to do away with? Maybe all of this was proof that he’d never deserved what was given to him to begin with. Maybe this thing his grief had become, this angry deity that understood nothing and was understood by no one was proof that he’d lost what he’d lost because he’d never deserved to have it to begin with. If that was the case, was Wynne just as doomed? Was he condemning them with this thing in his chest, with his hand resting on the mattress of their hospital bed? 

He thought of Metzli, of their departure. Maybe they had the right idea. Maybe the only good thing a monster could ever do was lock themselves away. Maybe Emilio should find somewhere to rot.

But Lord, he was bad at leaving. He knew that. He was so bad at the departure, so bad at letting go. If he were better at it, he would have taken Flora out of Mexico before the massacre. He would have saved her when there was something left to save. This felt the same now, felt like packing his bags but never leaving. And weren’t there stories about that? Weren’t there tales of men who tried the same thing over and over again, always finding themselves shocked with the end result was the same? Didn’t those stories paint men like him as fumbling idiots, villains made villainous not by poor intentions but by stupid pride? He was weak, just as he always had been. The same stupid kid who’d needed to be locked in a mausoleum with hungry beasts because his grief made him stupid, made him sloppy. 

You’ll win or you’ll die. And if you’re too weak to win, there’s no place for you here, anyway. His mother had never had room for sniveling children. He knew that.

He also knew she’d be ashamed of him now. Sitting vigil at the hospital bed of someone who wouldn’t have been there to begin with if he’d done his job better, if he’d been faster. He should have taken out Zane’s clan the moment he became aware of its existence, and he hadn’t. He hadn’t, and look at where it had gotten him. Look at how blinding his failure had become.

And in spite of all of it, Wynne was thanking him. As if he’d done something good, as if he hadn’t fucked up so badly that they were nearly as pale as the thin white sheet on top of them. The necklace felt heavy in his pocket, Juliana’s ring a well-deserved accusation. The guilt would eat him alive one day. He knew that. He thought it would be one day very soon.

“Holy objects,” he offered in quiet explanation. “Crosses, rosaries, the Star of David. Holy water, too. Religion doesn’t work on the dead. Or it works too well. I don’t know.” He swallowed, limbs feeling heavy. They asked if he believed in God, and he didn’t know how to answer. He never did, these days. “I used to.” It was a whisper, a quiet confession that he hated himself for. “I don’t know if I do anymore. I don’t know much of anything these days.” He’d tried to go to confession, not long after the massacre. He’d sat in the booth in silence, staring at the wall until the priest tried to prompt him into speaking. It felt more like a coffin than salvation. Everything did, these days.

Wynne’s question did, too. He’d known it was coming. How could he not? He’d given them a necklace with a ring too small to fit his hand, shoved it into his pocket like it hurt to look at. He put his hand back in that pocket now, twisted the chain around his finger until it hurt. “It did,” he said, closing his eyes. “It doesn’t anymore. It’s — It was my wife’s. Her wedding band.”

—

Perhaps the scariest thing about almost losing their life once more was the pointlessness of it in that basement. The vampires there had spoken of purpose, glorious and higher, but it hadn’t been — it would just have been monstrous transformation to become a murderous footsoldier in a twisted woman’s fantasy. Wynne had thought of home a lot during those days, about the death they had escaped and how that would have been glorious purpose. 

Dying (and being reborn) at the hands of a cult leader wouldn’t have been glorious, though. It would not have saved anyone, would not have ensured the safety of their people for the next decennium, would not have meant anything in the name of a greater good. It would just have led to more of the same — more violence, more fear, more death. It was a terrifying thought, but they had thought it aplenty in that cellar, behind those bars with their hands restricted and their life looking like it was, once more, coming to an end.

There were deaths worth dying, just like there were sacrifices worth making. And though Wynne had rejected that one opportunity to having purpose, they still knew as much. In the darkest hours in that cellar, they had wished they’d never ran, they had wished they could have died the death they had been destined for — the one where they’d join the long list of former sacrifices, of the people that the commune spoke of highly. The one where they would have treated so kindly, hair and body decorated with oils and dried flowers and bones, body draped in a cotton dress. The one where they would have made their parents proud, where Siors would have been kind even as he slit their throat, where they would finally get to meet that demon who kept them all safe.

The death no one would save them from.

Now they knew what was better. Now they understood that their life being endangered in Wicked’s Rest was better than it could have ever been on the shores of Moosehead lake. Now they knew, that here there were people willing to go down into the murky depths of a basement filled with vampires for them, willing to catch them as they fell.

(But was it? Was it, truly? At home it would have been just them. In that basement people had died. Not just the vampires, but people, like them and Zack and Arden. Plucked off the street. People who had been afraid, who had not wanted to die and who had died regardless. One of them who had turned into that monster, that monster that had almost killed them but had been someone human in stead. Was it better? Wouldn’t it have been been better if they had been dead? If they had died that honorable death, then they wouldn’t have seen any of this. They would have had purpose, besides being this useless thing that needed saving.) 

Here was Emilio, though, who cared. Who had come and came again, now, sitting at their bedside so they wouldn’t wake up alone. Here was the ache of their chest and neck, the burn of their wrists and cheeks — and Wynne knew one thing above all: they were glad to be alive. Still. Even if it hurt in a multitude of ways.

They were glad to know Emilio. That he was here. That they were here.

For a moment they closed their eyes, overcome with fatigue, and when they opened them they were looking at that broken man, who they thought so whole. They wanted to ask him if it ever stopped, being tired, or if life was just this exhausting. 

“Oh. Okay. Maybe I should get something of my own then. I don’t …” They swallowed, considering the fact that the other had just confessed to having believed in God, once. Wynne didn’t want to be insensitive, after all. In a sense, they had believed in him too — but only his existence. Not in a way that meant anything, not in the way other people tended to. Protherians acknowledged the existence of God, but they did not answer to him. It was the demon, in stead. A fallen angel, perhaps. They weren’t sure where gythraul came from.

But there had been bible texts. They’d talk about Abraham and Isaac a lot, them and their mentor. How it had been the ultimate act of faith and devotion, that Abraham had been willing to tie down his son for his God. That this was not altogether dissimilar to what was waiting for them. Of course, no God was going to stop anyone from actually tying Wynne to the altar the way God had for Isaac. Gythraul did demand that the sacrifices to be fulfilled.

What parts of the bible had formed Emilio? What had happened to make him not believe any more? Wynne still believed in the demon, because there was no way not to — what they had ran from, what they had abandoned it had to be real. It was, considering the three demons they had come across who had confirmed the existence of creatures like gythraul. But God … now that was a question unanswered for seemingly both of them.

Sometimes they did crave a higher power like that. Higher than the demon. Higher than any of it..Something to answer to, something to blame.

Sometimes they spat on the idea altogether.

“I don’t know either. Would it be okay, if I wore a cross? Or something like that, even if …” They bit their lips. “Well, demons, and all. It seems blasphemous.” To them, the idea of wearing a holy object was blasphemous, but that was a line of thinking they tried to let go of. They had stopped answering to Protherian believes the moment they’d abandoned them. “And, I’m sorry. That you’re not sure. I guess maybe that’s part of things.” Life. Or being alive amidst all these ugly things.

As the other continued with the truth of the ring, Wynne thought maybe they understood. What else was going to trigger a crisis of faith besides loss? (Would it have, for their parents? Would their beliefs have shaken once they’d bled out? Or would they have clung to it harder?) 

They tried to handle the revelation with great care, as if it was a baby bird fallen from the nest, being held in their hands. Maybe it was good, that they were injured and fatigued, because otherwise they might have drowned in overthinking right about now. In stead they just looked at him, quietly, before pushing their hand forward, palm up. They couldn’t quite reach Emilio’s to take it, but the offer was there. “I’m sorry.” They frowned. “I guess that she … is no longer with us?” Dead felt like an ugly word. 

They swallowed, but continued on. “Did it happen long ago?” Regardless, they were glad that the necklace had been returned. Regardless, they suddenly felt heavy with the weight of what he’d given them, what he’d entrusted them with. The only reason they didn’t cry again was because it would feel selfish, now. 

—

It was funny — there’d been no doubt in his chest when he’d gone into that basement. He’d descended down those stairs knowing, as he always did, that he might die in that barn, and he’d never once thought to question it. Even when he’d seen Wynne, Arden, and Zack in the middle of it all, even when the people he was saving stopped being nameless and faceless and turned instead into friends that he cared about, people that he wanted to protect, Emilio had carried no hesitation. He would have died in that basement if he’d had to. He probably would have if Zack hadn’t shoved him out, if Zane hadn’t told the spellcaster that Emilio wasn’t there even as his body continued the slaughter. 

There hadn’t been a shred of uncertainty, not a hint of unsureness. He was there, he fought, he killed. He did what he was built to do, did everything his mother had told him to do except for die. And he knew he’d do that, too, someday. He’d die bloody and alone, the way martyrs always did. But unlike a good martyr, Emilio would always carry with him the awful, unforgivable sin of dying too late. He’d outlived everyone he’d ever loved, and maybe he’d outlived more than that, too. Maybe he’d outlived his purpose already. Maybe it was too late for him to die as anything more useful than a warning sign. 

And that was where the uncertainty always began. Not in the battle, but in the aftermath. Emilio hadn’t carried any doubt in his chest when he’d gone into that basement, but it was all he could feel now. It weighed heavy on his chest, held his heart in a vice grip. For Emilio, it was the end of war that was terrifying. The fight itself, that was easy. You exchanged blows, you bled and made others bleed in return. You lived or you died, and it didn’t matter which. 

Violence was the first language he’d ever known; it made sense to him in a way words never could. Even the quiet Spanish he’d once used to lull his daughter to sleep sometimes felt foreign in comparison, felt just as complicated as wrapping his tongue around English seemed to be most days. 

The violence was easy. It was the parts that came after that never seemed to click. The standing in a grocery store comparing two boxes of cereal, the rocking a crying baby to sleep, the listening to someone tell him about their day, the sitting by a hospital bed with a trembling figure lying prone against white sheets… this was the part Emilio didn’t understand. He knew how to fight. He knew how to keep someone from being killed, sometimes. He didn’t know how to save them after, when the fighting was done. He didn’t know how to sit in the quiet aftermath of the loud thing. He only knew how to deal with the screaming.

At least there were some parts he still understood. He nodded at Wynne’s question, said “I’ll get you something,” because that made as much sense as the violence did. It was a preamble to it, a prologue. Vampires and their strengths and their weaknesses sang a song whose lyrics he knew by heart, hummed the only lullabye anyone had ever sung to him. A stake to the heart. Holy water. A rosary. Sunlight. Decapitation. He’d known every manner of death before he’d known his own name, thought of himself as a pair of hands with something sharp gripped between them long before he’d ever thought of himself as a person.

This was what he was, after all. Not a man, but a weapon. He liked to call himself a martyr sometimes, liked to aspire to be one, but he knew that even that wasn’t an apt description. No one built statues of the sword that delivered the killing blow, no one wrote hymns about the blade that broke in battle. He was the knife, the killing thing. He was not meant to be remembered, was never built to be loved. 

Was it any wonder he felt out of place here? No one set a blade by a hospital bed. Everyone knew better than to try to grip hands that would cut them with their sharpness.

Everyone but Wynne, it seemed. Because Wynne still looked at him like he was a person, like throwing a ratty t-shirt and a dirty pair of blue jeans on the handle of a knife could make it sit tall like a man, like there was still a soul inside his chest, like there ever had been. Wynne looked at him the way Flora used to, sometimes, and that was the most dangerous part. That was the thing that would get them killed. He thought back to that basement, to their blood on his hands. His fingers trembled. They weren’t supposed to.

“God doesn’t care,” he said quietly. “Someone told me that once. God doesn’t care if you believe in Him or not. God is just God.” It was supposed to be a comfort when his uncle had said it, was meant as a firm hand against his back to walk him through his first crisis of faith. Will the rosary still work if I don’t believe in it, he’d asked, and Lucio had smiled the way Emilio always imagined a father might, had clapped him on the shoulder. God doesn’t care. If you protect what’s His, He’ll protect you. Use your rosary, mijo. Let Him save you. 

It didn’t feel like a comfort anymore, this divine apathy. God didn’t care, and it wasn’t a good thing. God didn’t care, and it was a curse instead of a blessing because Emilio had lost everything. Emilio had scrubbed his daughter’s blood from beneath his fingernails, Emilio had choked on his wife’s name only in dreams, Emilio had watched Wynne stumble and fall with more blood outside of their body than was in it, and God didn’t care. God didn’t save Emilio, the way his uncle had promised He would. God didn’t stop the terrible things from happening. Emilio was dead on a living room floor a thousand miles away, and God didn’t care. No one ever seemed to.

So let Wynne wear a cross, he thought. Let them have that protection, even if it came from something that didn’t give a shit what happened. They deserved to be looked after, even if only by a piece of jewelry around their neck. “I’ll get you one,” he said again. It felt like a promise, and he’d always been told not to make those. Rhett drilled it into him with the closest thing to love that he’d ever felt back then, the closest approximation to worry that anyone had ever shown him. He wasn’t supposed to make promises, but he was making one anyway. To Wynne, to himself, to that God that didn’t care. He would keep them safe. He would die to do it, if he had to.

He shrugged off their apology, wanted to say it doesn’t matter anyway but didn’t want to lie. It shouldn’t matter was closer to the truth. It shouldn’t matter, but it did. He ached with it. He wanted to believe in God again, wanted to think that there was something out there that might save him if he asked. He wanted to think that something somewhere thought he was worth that. It seemed just as stupid as believing in fairytales now.

His fingers closed against that necklace in his pocket, the ring adding a sharp and uncomfortable pressure against the palm of his hand. He thought of Juliana, of how this ring used to sit on her finger for years and seemed too empty without it. He thought of how it burned, sometimes, when it sat against his chest. He thought about how grief was its own kind of curse, and how nothing you could do would ever really break it. It would suffocate you, in the end. Every time.

“Yeah,” he confirmed. “Yeah, she’s gone now. It’s been two years. Two years and a little over a month.” It had been centuries. It had been seconds. It happened in another lifetime. It happened a heartbeat ago. Grief did funny things to time, didn’t it? It stretched seconds into lifetimes, shrunk years into minutes. He couldn’t remember what Juliana’s laugh sounded like, but he heard her screams every night. “I didn’t save her,” he said, and it felt like a confession even though it was an obvious thing. If he’d saved her, she wouldn’t be gone. “I was supposed to.”

—

This thing Emilio said, it stirred something within Wynne. The idea that his God wouldn’t care if you believed in him or not — that he just existed, just was, like a permanent fixture in the sky. It had never been like that with the demon, had it? It had demanded worship, reverence, an endless cycle of sacrifice. Bled out animals, bled out young-adults, the best cut of meat, the juiciest apples. It had demanded it all, and when the Protherians had tried fleeing it once, some hundred years ago, it had demanded more.

Siors had always compared it to that story of the deluge, or the one of the plague. Sometimes an omnipotent, authoritative being had to bring the hammer down and take souls with it, to reset the status quo. To remember Its followers what was the order of things. The demon was the person holding the magnifying glass, and Its followers were the ants, crawling around in the sun and hoping not to get burned. We live in spite of It, yes, but because of It, too. There are no places out there any more like here, where we can do what we want, where we are free to live as we please. The demon was the keeper of the gates, making sure they were all safe in their luscious garden. We must, above everything, be grateful.

But God didn’t care, Emilio said. Could it be, then, that God still cared? Or that he was just out there, not minding if they were to wear that cross for selfish reasons. They weren’t sure if Emilio was suggesting apathy or a kind ambivalence, but either way it was better than what they had been raised with, wasn’t it? A demon willing to split a community, take a cut of its living members and leave the rest reeling in fear. 

“Thank you,” they said. “Maybe that’s … good. That he doesn’t care. Maybe that’s the best way for a higher being to be.” Because then it all came down to them, didn’t it? Then there was no higher power demanding Wynne lay down on an altar. Then, maybe, their decision of running wasn’t that selfish.

It was hard for Wynne to get outside of their own head. To look further than their own experience. On a surface level they could, of course, wanting to be selfless and empathetic — but at the end of the day their own heart was so heavy, their mind so filled with memories, their conscience so distracted that it always came back to what they knew. That small world. That small, limited life that now seemed so bountiful. Too bountiful.

This world held not only vampires and fae, not only that. It held people. Caricatures. It was hard, sometimes, to think that they had histories of their own. That there might be a past there that was larger and scarier than their own. That Ariadne was not just a beautiful girl with a heart of gold and a few too many insecurities, that Luis was not just their kindly colleague who worked on farms sometimes, that Zack was not just a cool graphic designer and Teddy not just a fun person to be around. As the latter two had divulged their pasts, it had startled Wynne, who had felt selfish that they hadn’t ever searched further than what they’d been offered. Too fatigued, perhaps, to want to consider that there were horrors everywhere.

So take Emilio. There was something haunted about him. Something about his upbringing that made Wynne slightly uncomfortable, even if explaining why took a level of reflection they didn’t possess. Who seemed to lean into guilt so easily, as if it was an old coat he couldn’t get rid of. But even with him, they hadn’t really thought about it. That he might have had a wife, once. That he could have lost that wife. That besides that brother of his, there might be more family. A home-country, that he left, for a reason they hadn’t asked.

Now they pulled on that coat of guilt too, sitting in it snugly, wondering why they had never asked him more of his past. They had grown comfortable in relying on him, asking him for a favor and now even having been saved by him. They should have asked sooner, shouldn’t they have? He knew all about them. 

There they went again, getting lost in the maze that was their mind — internalizing their guilt and shame over not having asked and, thus, forgetting to focus on the conversation at hand. Padrig would snap his fingers in front of their eyes whenever they’d gloss over, demand their attention back. Sometimes Wynne wondered if he wanted to keep them from thinking, as if he thought it a dangerous for them to consider all that was happening around them. It had been easier not to think back at home. To be led around like a meek sheep.

They refocused, looking at him with eyes they refused to let cry again. That they were good at, at least — to save their tears for a more appropriate time, or to simply not shed them at all. 

Two years. What was time? Two years to Wynne had been everything — nearly a tenth of their planned life. For them, every day was valuable and so, if they got to live two more years they’d think it an eternity. And yet, these past nine months had passed by so quickly. Besides, Emilio was older than them, and this was different, wasn’t it? He must have been with her for a period of time and now he no longer was. Now there was no woman to return to. 

For a moment they wanted to ask if you could ever move past it, losing someone. Because their longing for home was so painful at times, so breathtaking, that they couldn’t imagine it ever getting better. But this was not like that.

Because his wife was dead and his wife hadn’t been saved. Wynne wasn’t sure how to connect the dots exactly, but they knew this: they had been saved. Someone had wanted them dead, or at least changed into something not-alive, and Emilio had caught them as they had fallen. There was a path there, a logical conclusion — something must have come for his wife, something Emilio could have saved her from, but here he sat now. Her wedding ring no longer around her finger, and his voice something different altogether.

They almost didn’t recognize him. On another hand, they thought this was the most true they had ever seen him. Maybe they were both bleeding from metaphorical wounds today.

Part of them wanted to ask what happened, and yet another was entirely unsure if such a thing would be warranted. They felt themself sink under that coat, the one made out of guilt, and they wanted to wrap themself up in it as it would be easier to drown in self-pity than to confront this large grief in the room with them. But Wynne – despite the way they thought of themself as a selfish being – was at the end of the day not that.

“I’m sorry.” They had said that already, hadn’t they? But they were. They sat up a little, not sure what to do as the other seemed weighed down by his own coat of guilt. Guilt they didn’t think was warranted, probably, but that was a hard thing to convey. Self-condemnation seemed a permanent state of being, as if once the judgment had been made there was no going back. Once you ruled yourself guilty, there was nothing else to be.

They just kept looking at him, mute for a moment. “Sometimes …” They swallowed. “I think sometimes we can’t control or do everything even if we want to. And that isn’t on us.” 

They did believe it, even if they said it in a way where their voice felt all twisted. They pressed their lips together, mind forming an image of Emilio with his wife. It was hard to. It made sense that it was hard to, as it seemed that the grief of it all might have changed him. They had been right to assume that there was grief in him, then, but it was not a fun thing to be right about.

Their hand remained on the bed, the offer continuing to stand. Wynne looked at it for a moment before asking, “What was her name?” 

—

Was it better? Was an apathetic God preferable to a vengeful one? As a child, when the Bible had felt like a safety net beneath him instead of a noose around his throat, he’d often marveled at the wording. There were passages about loving God, of course. It was the foundation upon which the house was built, the thing that everything was meant to boil down to. But there were so many more about fearing him. 

Your mother is a God-fearing woman, his uncle told him once, and Emilio had wondered if fear and love were some strange kind of synonyms. It seemed as though they must have been, made sense in his mind. After all, his mother’s voice often left his palms sweaty and his heart pounding, and didn’t he love her? Wasn’t the fear that kept him awake at night or the panic that gripped him each time he made a mistake he knew she would punish him for the same thing as the love he’d always been taught to bury? 

Maybe he would have liked apathy more, back then. Maybe a mother who thought nothing of him would have been better than one that thought him weak. He remembered the shed where she’d often locked him, the creatures she’d put him with. You kill or you die and either way the family is stronger for it, she’d said. There was no room in their lineage for someone who couldn’t do what needed to be done, and his mother’s way of correcting that had been a stiff guiding hand. But what if it had been different? Would he be better now if he’d been cast out? If his family had abandoned him through choice instead of through death, would it hurt the same?

He didn’t know. He didn’t know, and he hated not knowing. He was a man who yearned for answers, who needed them. A detective, a vengeful spirit, a grieving father. They were all the same sometimes, weren’t they? They were the same thing in different coats, the same concepts stacked on top of one another like building blocks. Emilio was here, by Wynne’s bed, but he was everywhere else, too. At that desk in his apartment, in the hall with the screaming father, on the floor of his old house in Mexico. Maybe grief and God were the same in their omnipresence. Maybe grief was all God really was.

Maybe grief was all Emilio was, too. 

There were days when it felt like it. There were days where he began and ended with that pit in his chest, days where his daughter’s name was the only word his mind could muster. Over and over again, like a broken radio. There were days when every corner housed her body, where his wife’s blood wouldn’t come off his hands. He wondered if everyone felt this way, or if there was something broken inside of him. Everyone grieved, he knew. In different ways, with different methods, but everyone grieved. But did everyone become it? Was everyone consumed by it the way he was, or was it a flaw in his system, some broken gear that had come off track and couldn’t be pushed back on? 

Maybe his grief was like that old pain in his knee — always there, and impossible to fix. Able to be masked at times, with Teddy’s runes or the whiskey that always settled in the back of his throat, but never able to be removed entirely. A part of him. The biggest part, sometimes. Overwhelming one day, manageable the next, but still there. Always still there.

He wondered if Wynne saw it. When he looked at himself, it seemed so obvious. He didn’t used to be like this, after all, didn’t used to be so heavy. There’d been a time where he was lighter, where he’d lifted a child onto his shoulders and tried everything he could try to make her laugh. But Wynne had never known him then. They’d never known the husband, the father, the brother, the son. The only Emilio Wynne had ever seen was the one he was now. This quiet echo, this broken shadow, this man who existed not as something tangible but as the absence of it. Wasn’t it better that way? He thought of Rhett, of the way he looked at him. Being known was the scariest thing there was, and Emilio had never been as brave as he pretended to be.

And still, he gave them that necklace. Still, he clasped his wife’s ring around their throat to save them. Still, he answered their question when they asked it. 

They said I’m sorry, and the words were too big to fit in that hospital room and too small to make any kind of a difference. What words were there for what he’d lost? For what they had? Everything was cheap. He could apologize for the bandage around their throat, but he couldn’t take away the things that had put it there. They’d leave the hospital in a few days, a little wobbly but so painfully alive, and everything would still be shit. The physical healed, but what about the rest of it? They’d never leave that barn basement. He’d never leave that living room floor.

So what was left for them? To carve tombstones into their chests, to carry with them corpses of the people they’d lost, the people they used to be? Was that all life was, in the end?

Emilio swallowed, and everything felt heavy but when didn’t it? How long had it been since he’d existed without this weight on his shoulders? Who was he if not just a collection of things he had to carry?

“Juliana,” he said quietly. “Her name was Juliana.” And there was another name, too. The one that was the only word his mind could form some days, the one that was carved into every inch of him, the one that made him who he was. The tattoo under the leather band on his wrist burned, aching to be spoken aloud, but his mouth wouldn’t form the words. He wasn’t ready for Wynne to know. Not yet. Maybe he never would be.

Behind him, the door to the hospital room opened. At some point, that grieving father must have left, because Emilio couldn’t hear him anymore. A nurse entered, a tight smile on her lips and a wary look in her eyes. “Visiting hours are wrapping up,” she announced. Looking to Wynne, she softened. “I’m sure your dad will come back in the morning, though.”

The word hit him harder than that rod that had gone through his shoulder, suffocated him. It took a moment for him to resurface, to remember how to tread water. He coughed to cover it up, trying to pretend like he hadn’t just drowned in front of everyone, trying to pretend that there wasn’t still water in his lungs. “Yeah,” he confirmed. “Yeah. I’ll come back tomorrow.”

There was no place else he needed to be right now. Not if Wynne was here. 

[stainedglasstruth]

TIMING: Early April LOCATION: Axis Investigations PARTIES: Emilio @mortemoppetere & Arden @stainedglasstruth SUMMARY: After hearing about the PI in town, Arden pays a visit to Axis Investigations and offers a proposal to Emilio. CONTENT WARNINGS: None

Arden walked into the apartment building, glancing around warily. Nathaniel, her boss at the paper, had mentioned in passing that there was a PI in town, and after some googling and asking around she found her way to the run-down residence in Worm’s Row. Slowly, she made her way down the hallway, checking each door she passed until she found herself standing in front of a door at the end of the hall. It bore a sign– a messy scrawl of letters on a piece of paper that seemed to have been torn out of a notebook of some sort– taped to the door. Axis Investigations. 

The door was slightly ajar, but she still gave it a knock before making her way inside. She looked around, taking in the office. It was a bit bare, and it had clearly been converted to an office space from a regular apartment, but it looked professional enough that it calmed her nerves slightly. Being directed to a random apartment in what was commonly considered the sketchy area of town definitely had her on the alert. 

“Hello?” she called, eyeing the door that led further into the apartment. “I’m looking for an Emilio Cortez.”

—

It had been a long night. A couple hours of pretending he had some intention of sleeping before his restlessness got the better of him and sent him out into the night, stake in hand to take on whatever Wicked’s Rest had to throw at him. The hunt itself had been tame — nothing substantial worth mentioning — and the empty feeling that lived in his chest had taken hold once again before he’d even hung his jacket by the door. He’d been on the couch for a while now, just sitting, wanting a distraction but not knowing where to turn. 

Luckily, it seemed, he’d have one delivered to him.

He heard the footsteps in the hall long before the knock sounded on the door, listened absently as they made their way hesitantly towards his apartment with the occasional pause. He’d gotten good at picking up when someone in the hall might be a client and when they were just a person in the hall. Typically, someone who stopped at multiple doors did so because they were looking for a specific one. And in this building? That usually meant they were looking for Emilio. So the knock on the door didn’t come as much of a surprise. Nor did the person who entered. He gave her an obligatory once-over, trying to determine whether or not she was a threat. She wasn’t undead, at least. “What for?” He asked, neither confirming nor denying that he was the person she was looking for.

—

She gave the man a once over. He was handsome, though quite disheveled; he couldn’t be much older than her– mid 30s maybe. It seemed his Yelp reviews weren’t lying; he didn’t strike her as much of a people person, even less so as he spoke. She had her fair amount of interactions with similar men. No bullshit, then. 

“I’m Arden Han,” she said, pulling a business card out of her shoulder bag and offering it to him, “I’m a journalist at Something Wicked News. I’m trying to build some more connections in town, and I heard you’re someone who can get shit done.”

-

A journalist? Emilio had to admit, he hadn’t been expecting that. He’d had clients from all walks of life throughout his short career in Wicked’s Rest, but this was a first. He eyed her carefully, as if trying to deduce what she might be after through suspicious looks alone. Surely there was some ulterior motive here, right? There had to be.

“I don’t make a very good connection,” he said dryly. “Whoever told you to come here was probably fucking with you. I only get shit done when someone’s paying me to do it, and you don’t look like you brought cash. So, why should I do anything for you?”

-

Arden shifted uncomfortably as the man stared at her, and after a moment, she placed the card down on a nearby table. He didn’t immediately seem to intend her any harm, and, granted, if he was trying to run a business, killing a potential customer probably wouldn’t be the most sound strategy. Not that she was a business major or anything of the sort. 

Regardless, she wasn’t about to let her guard down quite yet, and she found some comfort in the weight of her knife in her jacket pocket. Even if it was a false sense of security.

“You wound me, Mr. Cortez,” she replied flatly. “I did my research before coming here. From what I’ve heard, you’re a man who’s good at your job. You have your ear to the ground, you’re discreet, you maybe don’t mind getting your hands dirty now and then. However, you’re not the people type.” She didn’t bother putting it lightly. 

“As a journalist, I need to be good with people. It’s the only way I can get my hands on information while being above board and maintaining my reputation. But, I need to have solid evidence to back my findings, and, sometimes, my digging can only get me so far, especially in a town like Wicked’s Rest where it seems everyone has secrets,” she throws it out as casually as the rest of it, but Arden focuses intently on the man’s reaction to these words.

—

“If I want to wound you, you’ll know it,” Emilio replied, tone still remarkably dry. He wasn’t entirely sure how to navigate this situation, which wasn’t an unfamiliar feeling. He was good at thinking on his feet when something was trying to kill him, but when someone was trying to talk to him? It became so much harder to know what his next move ought to be. 

He let out a small, amused sound as she commented on his reputation. He knew there were reviews online — Javi had told him about it with an expression that said they weren’t particularly good reviews — but he’d never read them himself. He could only imagine what they said. Good detective, terrible person. It certainly made sense that they’d spell out plainly that he wasn’t ‘the people type,’ as the journalist put it.

Her dilemma made sense. Reputation probably mattered to a journalist more than it did to someone like Emilio, after all. And there was a certain level of danger to it, too; dig too much without knowing how to watch your own back and you’d wind up another corpse in the pile, another case on the desk of some overworked cop. Emilio leaned forward, a little intrigued in spite of himself. “And what is it you want from me, exactly?” 

—

Arden smirked at the comment. “Noted.”

Her lips pursed slightly at his non-reaction. If he was a good investigator, he would have to have at least some idea that this town was not a normal town, right? She could only do so much before losing all sense of subtlety. She ran a hand through her hair, she could find out more later, he would be a good contact regardless. 

“Look, I think we could have a beneficial partnership here,” Arden replied. “I would, of course, pay you if I needed you to look into something specific for me, but maybe we could help each other out here and there; we do both deal in the market of information.

“My job requires that I keep my finger on the pulse of what’s going on in town so, I can keep you updated on anything that might be relevant to any case you might be working on. I could also help out with the people side of things. I can be rather charming and persuasive, and, when the situation calls for it, I have been told I can be quite persistent.” Annoying had been the word the police officer used, but-

–

It was an interesting offer. She seemed less annoying than his usual clients, to be sure, but… Emilio hesitated. He might not know a lot about journalism, but he knew the people who pursued it tended to be nosey individuals. People who wanted to uncover every stone, people who wanted answers to every question. And for him, where he was concerned… that wasn’t the best thought. People digging too much into Emilio’s past wouldn’t end well for anyone involved. He knew that.

But saying no would look suspicious, too. Saying no might pique her curiosity even further, might make her want to dig to find out why a detective living in an apartment that was just this side of ‘crumbling’ would turn down an offer for easy money. It was one of those ‘no right answer’ situations, one of those questions with no good outcome. Emilio had always hated those.

After a few moments of silence as he considered the offer, Emilio decided that it would be better to keep an eye on her. If she was as persistent as she claimed, she wasn’t going to give up easily. So he pursed his lips, nodding his head. “Yeah, all right,” he agreed. “That sounds like it could be…” What was the word she’d used? Oh, right. “Beneficial. But what exactly would you want me to look into?”

—

A thrill of triumph ran through her as the man agreed to her proposition. She honestly hadn’t expected him to concede that easily. Noticing his initial hesitation, Arden decided to take some pity on him. She had just barged in and kinda pushed him into a partnership, and he gave her the impression of someone who liked to work alone. He was giving very “darkness, no parents” Lego Batman vibes. 

She dropped the excessively confident facade somewhat and gave him a slightly more genuine smile, ignoring his question for the moment. “I can sense your hesitation, so how about we give it a bit of a trial run? I can show you how much of an asset I can be, I can see if you’re really as good as people say you are, and we can see if we can put up working with one another.

“If you decide it’s not worth it, you can tell me to fuck off, and I’ll only come bother you when there’s cash involved. How’s that sound?”

–

A trial run. That sounded a lot better than committing to anything long term. If worse came to worse, Emilio could always leave town — he was good at disappearing — but he’d like to avoid that. A trial run seemed to be a good option to offer him an easy out without arising any suspicion that might encourage this reporter to look into the surly detective with the standoffish attitude. 

“Okay,” he agreed, a little more at ease now. “But if I say it’s off, it’s off. No questions, no asking why. When I say to fuck off, you have to fuck off.” And he was pretty sure it would be a ‘when’ situation instead of an ‘if’ one. Emilio wasn’t the type to keep anyone around long-term these days.

–

Arden nodded, mind already racing. She would need to be cautious with this; she didn’t have many contacts in town yet, and Emilio had the potential to be a huge help. She couldn’t fuck this up. 

“Deal,” she said, holding out her hand. 

“Now, as for your earlier question,” she raised an eyebrow, “what do you know about Erebus Extractions and Refineries?”

–

He looked at her outstretched hand for a moment before sighing and taking it, giving it a firm shake. “Deal,” he agreed. Christ, he hoped this one wasn’t going to come back to bite him in the ass. He had enough trouble in this town without adding to the pile.

She was quick to cash in on the deal. In a way, that was almost a relief. It meant less time wondering what the first question she’d ask might be, less anxious mystery. Unfortunately, the question wasn’t one he had much of an answer to. Emilio clicked his tongue, shrugging a shoulder. “Not much,” he admitted, “but you give me a day or two, and I can figure some shit out. What are you after, specifically?” 

–

The journalist wasn’t exactly surprised by his answer, but it just served to make her more perturbed by the situation. “Honestly? Fucking anything would be nice.” She gave a humorless smile, her frustration seeping through slightly. “I can’t find any information on leadership, and everyone I’ve spoken to– or tried to speak to, at least– has either refused to comment or seems to be kept entirely in the dark. Not to mention, everyone is still clueless about what’s been happening since the accident.” 

“It’s suspicious, to say the least, and it’s certainly got my interest piqued. I’m going to keep looking, but I’m hoping you might have some more luck investigating through your channels.” 

Arden paused, debating on if she should say her next words, but, after a moment, she sighed and turned to look Emilio in the eyes, facade dropping a bit more. “You’re a smart man, I’m sure I don’t need to tell you this, but just… be careful.” I can’t have anyone else get hurt– or worse– because of me. 

—

Oh. So she was looking for that kind of information. Things seemed a little more complicated, all of the sudden. Emilio wasn’t just a private investigator — he was a hunter, too. And while he’d never quite bought into the idea that humans ought to be kept in the dark about absolutely everything (he’d always been open enough with Vida, after all), he did know that things could get messy pretty quickly when people dug into things outside their comprehension. The last thing he needed was for the journalist to run around telling people he was nuts if he told her the truth of things that went on behind the scenes in Wicked’s Rest. 

He’d tread lightly, then. Test the waters before revealing anything too deep, figure out what she thought was happening and either confirm or deny those theories. 

“I’ll look into it,” he promised, making up his mind with a curt nod. “But I can’t promise I’ll find what you’re looking for. I’m not about to go digging through those mines myself.” Not without a better reason than money, in any case. Emilio might not care about his life as much as some people thought he ought to, but he wasn’t looking to get himself killed by something as stupid as a haunted mine. That wasn’t how he wanted things to go. “And, hey, you don’t have to worry about me. I’m good at making it out of shit.” Whether he wanted to or not.

—

Even the thought of him going down into the mines made her stomach turn. Arden was not a fan of enclosed spaces to begin with, but going into the mines of Wicked’s Rest seemed like the kind of thing that would absolutely get you killed. “That’s entirely fair, not that I would ever ask you to do that, for the record. Even on a good day, there’s weird shit in those mines, and currently there’s a leakage of some unknown inky substance.”

”I figure it might be a long shot, but maybe you can find something I’m missing. I just-” She paused, realizing she was maybe about to be a little too honest with this man she just met. As a journalist, she felt the need to maintain an air of professionalism in her public interactions, and especially to never air her theories or worries to people. People were already panicking over the incident with the mines, her being honest and telling them that she had a bad feeling about the entire situation would not be a wise decision. Granted, this conversation wasn’t exactly public, but it still felt wrong nearly letting her worries slip out. 

However, she was attempting to form a sort of partnership with the man, and while he told her not to worry, Arden still felt guilty asking him to do something that could potentially be dangerous when she wasn’t even sure he knew the full extent of dangers that lurked in town– especially not without being upfront about her concerns. 

“I just don’t feel great about this whole situation,” she said, after a moment, “and I’d feel better if I were armed with some more information.” She looked up at him with a small smile. “So, I will likely continue to be somewhat worried, but I’m glad to hear it.”

Shaking herself out of the mess of emotions bubbling in her chest, she backed up slightly, her smile turning confident once more. “Anyway, I’ve taken up a good chunk of your time. My card’s on the table if you need to contact me, and I’d be happy to help if you need me to look into something or someone for you. Thanks for hearing me out.”

–

At least there was that. Plenty of people came to a detective and figured there was no real limit to what they were allowed to ask that detective to do, figuring that Emilio was a puppet whose strings they could hold for the right price. He’d never liked clients like that, even if he couldn’t quite afford to turn them away. This concern, while irritating, was preferable to that. “I wouldn’t do it if you did,” he told her, but the tone wasn’t quite as harsh as the words might imply. She wasn’t the worst person who’d ever walked through his door, at least.

He raised a brow as she continued, making note of her voice. She was passionate about this, and Emilio understood that. That need to find answers, that unquenchable thirst for the truth. Part of why he’d gotten into the PI gig was because he wanted the truth, too. He never wanted to be in another situation where he was caught entirely off guard by something that had been happening under his nose for months, never wanted a repeat of the betrayal he’d suffered from his uncle. He wondered if she, too, had a story like that, some awful thing that made her need the truth no matter what it cost her. He wouldn’t be surprised if she did. Everyone, he’d found, had something in their past making them the way they were.

“I get it,” he offered, shrugging a shoulder. “You want answers. I get that.” And maybe he could give them to her, and maybe he couldn’t. It was hard to say for sure, hard to be certain. He nodded his head as she smiled, not returning the expression but not looking quite as irritable as he had when she’d walked in, either. “Yeah,” he agreed, “sure. I’ll let you know if I need an assist, and I’ll keep an eye out for your shit, too.” 

It might be the beginning of a decent partnership… or the worst idea either of them had ever indulged in. Time would tell.

[wickedmilo]

YOU MADE ME LOVE YOU | MILO & SILAS

PLACE: Emilio’s apartment TIMING: 8:12 PM SUMMARY: Milo’s delivers a pie to Silas, and gets a whole bunch of heartbreak in return (oops) WRITING PARTNER: @fermataheart​ ​ CONTENT WARNINGS: Suicide Ideation, suicide, depression, lots of heavy subjects so definitely avoid if you’re not feeling up to it

Milo wasn’t sure he should be anywhere near Emilio’s apartment. But he also wasn’t sure where else he was supposed to go. Emilio had errands to run, so after inviting him inside, and handing over the charm Bex imbued with a tracking spell, the slayer proceeded to leave him alone in what could only be described as a heavy, uncomfortable silence. Until the door closed behind him he had been making a pointed effort to avoid his boyfriend’s gaze. But now he couldn’t, now Silas was all he was able to look at. The man really was annoyingly beautiful. Inside, and out. Yet that did nothing to quell his anger. He knew he looked ridiculous, standing in the entryway holding a pie, a pie he had made with Ariana in a strange bid to both avoid the situation, and address it with spite. He definitely felt ridiculous. Who brought a pie to the person responsible for betraying them? Who spent hours creating something with so much love, and attention when all they wanted to do was scream at the person it was for? But he feigned confidence, attempting to appear at least somewhat sure of his decision. All of the satisfaction he thought he might gain from the act was absent, leaving a void inside his chest he tried desperately to ignore. So he raised the gift with a shrug of one shoulder, brushing it off as unimportant. “I made you a pie.” He muttered. “Ariana knows a recipe that uses brains… seemed like a good idea at the time. Now… not so much.”  

Moving to throw it down onto the coffee table in front of Silas, he crossed his arms over his chest, taking in the view with a miserable curiosity. Emilio still wouldn’t tell him the details, something that he found utterly infuriating, but just the look on Silas’ face showed him how far things had escalated, how badly the zombie’s mental health had been allowed to spiral. That, alongside the mittens and duct tape currently securing his hands, made him wish more than anything that they were two normal people, in a normal relationship, with normal problems, having normal arguments. Normal reunions. He still struggled to view the situation objectively, still struggled to convince himself none of this was personal. But the truth hung in the air between them, and he couldn’t ignore it. Silas knew how hard he found coming to terms with being abandoned by his Sire. He could forgive him once, could even understand to a degree why he had begged Emilio for death after losing Andreas. But a second time? Being abandoned for a second time after making a promise to return? His eyes stung with tears, and before he could stop himself they were breaking free, running down his cheeks and giving away just how overwhelmed he felt by what was happening. “Twice.” He said finally, his voice short, and sharp. “Emilio won’t tell me shit, he’s trying to protect me. But I know… you’ve put me through this twice, Silas. And I can’t let it go this time. I can’t.”  

When Emilio told him he had errands to take care of, Silas had been hopeful. It was a little surprising, honestly, considering he’d tried to sneak out the first night. That was why the damn mittens were still firmly in place, hands still bound together to stop him from making any real escape attempt progress.. and to keep the rings on his fingers that kept Sylvain out. But maybe Emilio figured there wasn’t much he could do, tied up like this? It was his best guess, and he was determined to prove the hunter wrong, despite how much it hurt to think about. 

But of course there was a caveat. He wasn’t being left alone, of course he wasn’t. While the elation had risen as Emilio grabbed his keys, it fell twice as far when he heard a knock at the door. Glancing up from his spot on the couch where he’d been trying to appear as inconspicuous as possible, the zombie felt fear wash over him. Milo was standing in the doorway, avoiding his gaze, holding something in his hands. Shit, shit, this wasn’t— 

He was speaking. The thing he was holding, it was... a pie? For him? Silas was taken aback, staring at the food as it was dropped unceremoniously to the coffee table. “Oh.” It was all he could manage, his gaze fixed on the gift as he realized he couldn’t bear to look back at Milo. The part of him that wondered what his boyfriend was thinking, what he was going through, well… it got its answer pretty quickly. 

“I know.” He lowered his gaze to his hands, hating the way that they trembled. “You shouldn’t.” He wasn’t going to make excuses, he knew no one wanted to hear them. And he couldn’t apologize, not after seeing how Emilio had reacted to it. Besides, he wasn’t really sorry. He still thought it was what was best for everyone. It was curious that Emilio wouldn’t tell him what happened—or perhaps not, the hunter was pretty visibly shaken by the whole ordeal. Which was the whole reason he’d wanted them all to just fucking stay put and not get involved— 

“I meant it when I said you deserve someone better.” 

Milo noticed the way Silas was trying to avoid his gaze, and he couldn’t exactly blame him. Looking at him didn’t bring the usual comfort of safety, and affection. He couldn’t imagine what Silas must be feeling in response to his presence. Hopefully guilt. As much as he wanted to pretend he didn’t care, he did. He cared a lot. “Yeah… oh.” He echoed, his voice laced with bitterness. “I’m not feeding it to you. Mittens or no mittens.” He added, though he knew Silas was probably too stubborn to allow it. “What are they for?” He gestured towards the restraints, unable to imagine they were for Emilio’s safety. Clearly Sylvain wasn’t inhabiting his body, and Silas wasn’t the type to become violent, even when he was upset. I know. He set his jaw. Knowing wasn’t going to fix things, but what else had he expected his boyfriend to say. Realistically, what else could he say? At least he was acknowledging the issue, admitting how badly things had gone wrong instead of playing the victim, or insisting he should be grateful he had tried to remove himself from his life. “What do I do then?” He fought to keep his voice steady. “If I don’t let go of this, what am I supposed to do?” Brushing away his tears, he took a hesitant step closer, the zombie’s familiar scent washing over him. He smelled like home in the same way Metzli did, and it hurt. It hurt more than he would ever be able to say. 

A spark of anger reigniting within his chest, he focused on it. Anger was far less complicated, far less difficult to process. “I don’t want someone better.” He exhaled a huff of breath, exasperation evident in the way he ran his fingers through his hair, grabbing fistfuls of it as though the pain might offer him clarity. “Don’t you get that? I want you! You- you fucking idiot-” Lowering his arms, he took another step closer, and found himself entirely unable to hold back. Closing the distance between them in a matter of seconds, he fell into the seat beside Silas, pulling him into an embrace without warning. Holding his head against his chest, he buried his face in his hair, as though maybe he could protect him from the world. As though maybe he could be the one to hold the fractured pieces of him together. “You can’t keep doing this to me.” He murmured, his voice cracking as he spoke. He closed his eyes, holding Silas as tightly as he dared. The frames of his glasses were cutting into his cheek but he didn’t move, he wasn’t sure he could find the strength to withdraw. For a moment he simply indulged in the contact, proving to himself that Silas was okay. He was alive, and here, and he really needed him to be okay.  

“Can’t get out if I can’t use my hands,” Silas answered honestly, deciding to leave out the bit about the rings. It would require too much explanation, and this was already more than he’d spoken all day. The question posed to him was one he didn’t have an answer for, so all he could do was shrug while still averting his eyes. He didn’t know what Milo was supposed to do. He hadn’t considered that things would ever get to this point. If it had gone according to plan, Milo would have been able to move on, guilt free. Now it was more complicated. 

It was almost funny, actually, that Milo was the one getting angry while Emilio had been scared and soft spoken. Those first few days, at least. Things changed after he caught Silas slinking for the front door, and he let his more typical grouchiness shine through after that. Silas couldn’t blame him. Wincing at the harshness of Milo’s tone, Silas straightened his spine a little when the vampire sat down next to him—only to pull him into a hug. A soft, surprised sound tumbled from his lips but he didn’t pull away, allowing the embrace and finding it… welcome. 

“I don’t… I don’t want to,” the zombie muttered. If things had gone his way, neither of them would have to worry about him hurting Milo again. Just tryin’ to protect you. The thought died on his tongue. “This was supposed to be the last one.” 

Milo’s frown deepened. It was one thing to know Silas had probably been dragged back to White Crest against his will. But to know he was still making active efforts to escape was a genuine concern. Part of him began to wonder whether holding him captive was selfish. If he didn’t want to be near his friends then was it right to force their company upon him? But he was sick. Mental health was as valid, and as fragile as physical health. He had been groomed by a cult, and the ghost of his brother for so many years without rest. That kind of influence couldn’t possibly be undone in a matter of days. It could be undone, though. With time, and persistence. He had to believe that. Metzli was walking proof. Taking a degree of comfort in the fact that Silas didn’t pull away from him, he stayed where he was, running a gentle hand up and down the length of his spine. “If you don’t want to then why are you doing it?” He pleaded with his boyfriend for an explanation. Tears left fresh track marks on his cheeks, as he failed to suppress a sob. Shifting so that he could pull Silas closer, he thought he might never let him go. 

“I’m trying to understand, Silas… help me understand.” The anger and frustration still burning inside him only strengthened its hold as he registered the quiet admission. Silas was so ready to say goodbye to him, to leave him without even giving him the opportunity to say goodbye in return. It was fucked up. It was so fucked up. Even now, he couldn’t decide whether he wanted to shout, or break things, or cry, or whisper assurances into his ear. If he could do everything at the same time, he would. Without hesitation. “You think you’re protecting me, I know you do, but it’s such bullshit, Silas. I don’t need protecting, not from you. Am I not allowed a say in what I want? Are you really going to make my decisions for me? Do you see how screwed that is? All anybody wants to do is tell me I’m making bad choices, and you’re- you’re doing the same to me now. I don’t care whether you get why I want you, I don’t give a shit- I just do, okay? And if you leave, you’re going to hurt me. That isn’t protection. That’s the opposite. That’s pain for- for no fucking reason. You don’t know what that would do to me.” 

He didn’t have the answers Milo wanted. Nothing was clear in his head anymore; the last week was nothing but a blur. “It ain’t for no reason,” he sighed weakly, throat constricting like he might cry. “I’m—I ain’t strong enough. For this. For…” Silas drew a shuddering breath, begging the panic to settle, preferring the numbness that had reigned prior to Milo’s arrival.  

He’d killed another innocent person. He’d been made to face his parents again, who now thought he was insane on top of being a disappointment. He’d told Caliste about Andreas, and now she hated him. They’d all hate him. They’d come for him. And worst of all, Sylvain needed him. Needed him in a way he couldn’t provide, not while he walked between life and death the way he did.  

“Sylv wants me to… he deserves better, too” he finally mumbled, pressing his covered fingers down atop Milo’s thigh. “I’d’ve given my life for him when we was kids, n’ that ain’t changed.” He whimpered softly, feeling the crushing weight of his brother’s presence as it hovered over the top of them, invisible but tangible. “I got a lot of reasons, Milo. I know it ain’t fair t’you, but I do. I wish I could just… decide none of it mattered, but I can’t. I can’t. I ain’t strong enough.” 

Milo faltered, his hand falling still when Silas insisted his death wouldn’t have no meaning. He didn’t want to hear it, but he couldn’t bring himself to leave, not when he was so close to being given answers. “For what?” He prompted. “For me? For life in general? Because that’s not true, I know it’s not because you wouldn’t have run from Andreas. You wouldn’t have asked Emilio to help you. There are so many things you would never have even attempted, Silas, if you didn’t have some kind of hope.” His muscles tensed at the mention of Sylvain, and he realised nothing could have prepared him for his boyfriend’s following statement. It felt like a punch to the stomach, felt as though all of the air had been forced from his lungs. As quickly as he was struck by the desire to hold Silas against him, he suddenly wanted to be as far away from him as possible. Recoiling, moving until he was no longer within reach, he stared at his boyfriend in horror. 

“Sylvain doesn’t deserve shit. You tried with him- even I gave him a chance. He wants you dead because he’s a child. He’s cruel, he enjoys making you suffer. If he’s told you anything different then he’s lying to get what he wants, and- and it’s working.” He pushed himself to his feet, staring at the pie on the coffee table, resisting the urge to pick it up, and throw it. This was still Emilio’s apartment. He didn’t need to come home and clean brains from the ceiling. “You have people who care about you, people who want to help you, and protect you and build a life with you… and you’re letting yourself be manipulated because it’s easy, right? It’s easier than actually making an effort? You told me you were going to come back, you text me, and you told me that. I can’t believe after everything you’re going to let him win. You’re giving up. Not just on yourself either. If you give up, you’re giving up on Emilio, Silas. You’re giving up on me.” 

“Only reason I’ve made it this long’s ‘cuz I’m a coward,” Silas said softly, trailing after Milo as he pulled away before folding in on himself once more. He was right, of course. Giving up was easier than trying to deal with… everything that had happened. Giving up was something he’d returned to his entire life, but never before had he had the option of giving control to someone else and letting them do what he couldn’t. 

“Sylv’s the way he is ‘cuz of me. If I hadn’t… he’d still be alive. It’s my fault, s’all my fuckin’ fault. I can’t do nothin’ to make up for it ‘cept let him do the same to me.” Silas’ gaze was angled down at the floor, shoulders hunched forward as his bound hands dangled between his knees. “N’ the people who care about me… you, you’re in danger.” He lifted his head to look at Milo and the guilt was written plainly in his terrified expression. “Ain’t nothin’ good comin’ from me bein’ alive, ‘cept maybe makin’ you smile. But I’d rather you be sad for a while than dead. Real dead.”

“No, this isn’t about Sylvain- don’t you fucking dare. You can’t take back what happened, but it was an accident, Silas. Sylvain is the way that he is because he let himself be consumed by rage, and this- this toxic blame. He chose to be this way, and you know he did. With the amount of shit you’ve been through… there’s a choice between letting it destroy you, and being a decent person in spite of it all… you understand that.” He trailed off, realising as he spoke that his words meant nothing to the shell of a man sitting on the couch, bound by mittens so that he couldn’t escape the apartment and find a way to end his own life. It made his stomach churn, as though his body was reacting to an immediate threat. But this wasn’t something he could fight, it wasn’t something tangible. The threat was Silas. How did you protect somebody from themself? “Yeah, spoiler alert, Silas, I’m always in danger. In case you hadn’t noticed, I was literally murdered like, a year ago. That’s part of life, and it sucks, and this town can be a fucking nightmare, but you’re in it. And I thought we were in it together. I thought we were going to face it together.”  

Feeling something inside him break when Silas raised his head, there was almost nothing in the zombie that he recognised now. He could stand before him and try to make his case, he could list every reason he wanted Silas to live, every danger he was willing to face if it only meant that they could be together. But Silas had to be the one to break free of the fog, Silas had to step into the light and decide to start living his life again. He hadn’t expected to feel just as powerless in his presence as he had when he was missing. He hated it. “I told you once that I was scared I wasn’t worth sticking around for… do you remember that?” Swallowing his emotion, he clenched his fists in a vain attempt to hide his trembling hands. “My Sire left me… took one look at me, and decided to leave. He didn’t know me, but he saw something in me that he obviously didn’t want. This is worse… you got to know me- you loved me, and now you’re making the same decision.” Reaching behind his glasses to scrub at his eyes, the brief darkness provided a welcome distraction, but he couldn’t avoid the conversation for long so he begrudgingly lowered his arms. Looking at Silas, refusing to break eye contact, he made no effort to mask what he was feeling. He hoped the heartbreak, and spite, and anger, and hurt were all plain in his expression. He wanted him to face the damage he had caused. “You know the part of this that’s just outright cruel? The part that I will never forgive you for?” He laughed at his own stupidity, at how foolish he had been to think somebody could ever see him for what he was, and want to stay. “You made me love you back.”  

It wasn’t just that Milo was in danger, it was that he was in danger because of Silas. The thought of the vampire dying a second time because of his past mistakes, his cowardice and his ineptitude… it was more than he could bear. But they’d never understand that, they’d always remind him how dangerous the world already was and how his impact was insignificant. 

They were right, he supposed, but it didn’t make him feel any better. 

He wanted to tell Milo that it wasn’t about him, that he’d done nothing wrong and nothing about the way Silas felt for him had changed, but to what end? If he didn’t want to leave Milo, then why was he? It was insurmountable, this ache, and the more he struggled to fight it the deeper he seemed to sink. It was easier to mute everything, tamp it all down and not allow himself to feel anything too strongly. As he listened, his head slowly nodded, a silent confirmation of Milo’s feelings. It would be best for Milo to hate him. This deep hurt, this unforgivable pain, it would eventually turn to hate. Or as close to hate as the sweet, innocent Milo could manage. Still, if there was anything he could say to spare Milo that self-loathing he’d grown so familiar with…

“It ain’t your fault. I know… that don’t mean much comin’ from me anymore, but it’s… I don’t want you stuck feelin’ like you’re the reason this is happenin’ to me. I don’t want to leave you, Milo, I—I don’t got a choice.” True or not, it was what he felt in his heart. “N’ you should hate me for that, I get it. You should never forgive me. I’m stuck, I don’t think I can climb back out. That ain’t on you. I been treadin’ water too long, n’ I’m tired.” The distant look in his dark eyes seemed to support this, gaze wandering toward the ceiling as he leaned back. “Too tired… shouldn’t still be here. Not broken like this. Ain’t fair to nobody. Shoulda died years ago. Shoulda been braver.” He was almost speaking to himself at this point, voice impossibly soft as he stared at the ceiling. 

“It’s not my fault?” Milo echoed. “Is that supposed to make me feel better?” He narrowed his eyes at the mention of not having a choice. He found it incredibly ironic considering Silas was making a decision that would affect not only him, but the people closest to him. Those who supported him, who had showed him love, patience, and understanding. They were the ones who were truly going to pay. “There is always a choice.” He bit out. “The choice you’re making is to take mine away from me.” Feeling a desire to give in and allow himself to hate Silas, if even for a moment, the urge was in stark contrast with his desire to refuse. To push away the sentiment and give him the exact opposite of what he was asking for. But like Silas was claiming to be lacking in strength, he wasn’t sure he would be able to maintain such an exhausting perspective. Defiance often came naturally to him, but not this time. Not now that it meant trying to forgive, and forget, and move on from something that ran so deep. That had become such a solid foundation.

“What you’re talking about right now, what you’re talking about doing… that’s weak, Silas. If you were brave we could be happy, and I think that really fucking scares you.” Watching as the zombie tilted his head back to stare up at the ceiling, he felt the last of his resolve beginning to waver. He could spend the entire day with Silas, he could sit and make sure he didn’t try to leave. Argue with him. Exacerbate the pain. But why should he when his boyfriend had made it abundantly clear he didn’t want to be with him anymore? He wasn’t worth the more difficult aspects of life, maybe he never had been. Maybe this entire time he had been lying to himself, convincing himself that his relationship was stable, and strong because that’s what he wanted it to be. “You know what? You want to kill yourself? Fine. Do it.” His voice was cutting, and his words were sharp enough for him to feel their sting. “Just don’t pretend you’re doing it for anybody other than yourself.” Walking towards the door, he stood with one hand poised to turn the handle, then thought better of leaving so abruptly. Letting out a huff of breath, he turned back to face Silas, his expression stony. To anybody who didn’t know him, it would be unreadable. Anyone who did would be capable of seeing through the mask, would witness his heart shattering inside his chest. “If you have anything you want to say to me, say it now. You aren’t going to see me again.” 

It did scare him. It was a stupid thing to be afraid of, but the unknown was the scariest thing of all. The idea that he could try and build a life with someone who might tire of him, alongside someone else that would judge his every move. That one day, his only friend would die long before he should, potentially at the hands of the people he’d once cared for. The truth was that at the end of the day, Silas feared being alone. He feared it so deeply that he was willing to remove himself from the equation in a preemptive move, because Sylvain was the only one that he knew wouldn’t leave him. Sylvain was the only certain thing in his life, and he could either move on with his brother, or watch his friends try to destroy him. 

As he’d said, he didn’t have a choice. He was too much of a coward. 

Tilting his head back down to watch Milo as he left, his words rattling around in the zombie’s brain, his blank expression finally showed some remorse.  

“I’m sorry that I put you through this.” His chest ached, but he just kept trying to remind himself that this was for the best. Milo would be better off. It was a painful kindness, but a kindness nonetheless, even if it felt like the worst thing he’d ever experienced. “Goodbye, Milo.”  

[brightwoodhq]

mw moc?

Another great question. I know you asked for most wanted man of color, but I do want to mention that we currently have zero nonbinary characters. We also don’t have any trans characters on the masterlist. We’re also lacking severely in the body diversity category, so we’d love to see some plus size, Deaf, blind, or otherwise more diverse than the stick thin, white, hearing and fully-abled status quo for fcs. So we’d definitely like to see a few nonbinary fcs, a few trans fcs, a few Deaf fcs, a few plus sized fcs, and more diversity around campus. 

As far as men of color are concerned, I’d love to see Craig Robinson, Glen Davis, Anthony Anderson,  Charles Michael Davis, Daveed Diggs, Omar Ayuso, Nathan Stewart-Jarrett, John Boyega, Dev Patel, Harry Shum Jr., Wentworth Miller, Jacob Artist, Takamasa Ishihara (Miyavi), Michael B. Jordan, Alfred Enoch,  Dyllon Burnside, Jamaal Swain, John Cho, Henry Golding, Nico Santos, Remi Hii, Shuhei Kinoshita, Charles Melton, Jake Choi, Ross Butler, Godfrey Gao, Manny Jacinto, William Jackson Harper, Masi Oka, Sendhil Ramamurthy, Leonard Roberts, Santiago Cabrera, and Bruno Fabre. 

While we’re here, some nonbinary celebrities include: Reece King,  Pidgeon Pagonis (intersex), Rain Dove, Angel Haze, Tyler Ford, Elly Jackson, Janelle Monae, Indya Moore, Ruby Rose, Sam Smith, Shamir Bailey, Bex Taylor-Klaus, and Nico Tortorella.

While we’re here, some transgender celebrities include: Skylar Kergil, Laverne Cox, Elliott Fletcher,  Amiyah Scott,  Maya Taylor, Kitana "Kiki" Rodriguez, Brian Michael Smith, Angelica Ross, MJ Rodriguez, Dominique Jackson, Kingston Faraday, Janet Mock, Carmen Carrera, Zach Barack, Chaz Bono, Erika Ervin, Gigi Gorgeous, Trace Lysette, Alexis Arquette, Isis King, Jamie Clayton, Hari Nef, Andreja Pejic, Jen Richards, Jake Graf, Harmony Santana, Arisce Wanzer, Laith Ashley, Aydian Dowling, Jenna Talackova, Munroe Bergdorf, and Hailie Sahar.

While we’re here, some Deaf celebrities include: Sean Berdy, Treshelle Edmond, Marlee Matlin, Deanne Bray, Ryan Lane, Chella Man, Austin P, Mackenzie, Nyle DiMarco, Emilio Insolera, Whitney Meyer, Ace Mahbaz, Shoshannah Stern, Andrea Ferrell, Terrylene Sacchetti, Ashley Fiolek, Russell Harvard, Anthony Natale, Daniel Durrant, Robert Demayo, T.L. Forsberg, and Katie Leclerc.

[totallycorrecticos]

Boyd: Yes, I love you, so of course, I'm going to wanna know what's going on why this mission needs to be so secretive, why you need so many guns - but I'm willing to put that aside.

Hsin: Really?

Emilio: Really?

Bex: Really?

Boyd: You're not helping.