#natusvincere

[deathsplaything]

Location: The Good Keep Timing: Right after Part 1 Parties: Alistair (@deathsplaything), Daiyu (@bountyhaunter) Emilio (@mortemoppetere), Vic (@natusvincere) Mack (@realmackross) FT: Zane, Winnifred, Kirk, & Aleksander Summary: The Keep breaks out into chaos, cue the epic fighting montage! Content Warnings: gun use, suicide (act of, not emotional), head trauma (zombie death), medical blood (artery/vein mentions)

“It should have never come to this, but —” She would never finish the sentence.

The relief of being reunited was short-lived. Daiyu stopped in her tracks when the alarms started blaring and if it wasn’t for the fact that her hands were busy and bloodied, she would have slammed the palms of them against her ears. All had seemed to be going so well and she’d believed, at the sight of her fellow ‘team members’ that it would continue to go well.

It was a good plan, wasn’t it? It was a good plan. They had vetted those deserving. They had sprayed down every room with lighter fluid, rigged explosives where they had needed to. Daiyu trusted the others to have done the same, mostly because Emilio had been with them. What was left now was to enter the last few rooms and clear them, finish their destruction by ruining the records and head out, light a match and drive as far away as they could as the Keep burned. But —

The alarms were blaring. Lights rotated threateningly. It didn’t take long for the sound of more bodies moving to join the cacophony. Daiyu’s heightened senses were overloading but at least doing their job. “The cells,” she said, something about her first day at the Keep echoing in her mind. There was a button that opened them all, one that should not be touched by her, ever. A big red, do-not-touch button that should be hard to reach — but they had just released a bunch of powerful supernatural creatures, and there was a big chance the button had not been designed with super strength taken into account. “Fuck!” 

No more explanation came just yet as she checked her pistol’s magazine, clicking it in and flicking off the safety and echoing the number ten in her head, for the number of bullets. Daiyu turned around to where the sounds were coming from — ready to aim and shoot when necessary. Then, over her shoulder: “They’re coming.” The ones not dead yet, the ones not freed yet who didn’t even know they were going to be freed and could be just as furious. Footsteps echoed through the caves, a siren sang their song and she held her breath in the shortest calm before the storm she’d ever known.

—

Even as they met up with Daiyu and Alistair (and Mack, who Emilio had expected to leave instead of sticking around), the slayer couldn’t shake the paranoid certainty that something was going to go wrong. It was crawling up his spine like a thousand insects beneath his skin, itching and biting and sending a perpetual shiver down his spine. The hard part was supposed to be over. All that was supposed to be left was clearing the remainder of the cells and going home.

But nothing like this ever went off without a hitch, no matter how well you planned it.

The sound of the alarm cutting through the air wasn’t even a surprise, really; Emilio barely flinched as it cut through the quiet, ever so muffled against the dull ringing that had lived in his ears since the banshee who deemed him a celebrity had decided to scream in his face to show her admiration. The alarm wasn’t the only thing to make note of; lights were flashing, and people were moving outside of their little group of six. 

Emilio blew a frustrated huff of air through his nose, pulled a stake from his pocket and gripped it tightly. With his other hand, he yanked out a vial of holy water and thrust it towards Mack. Zane couldn’t touch the stuff, nor could he make use of the cross Emilio pulled out from under his shirt, and Daiyu and Alistair had their own defenses. After a moment, he yanked out a second vial and held it out towards Vic. “We’re going to fight our way out of here,” he said lowly, glancing around the group. “Won’t be hard.” That was a lie. He was pretty sure they were fucked. “You get separated, meet up out front, in the trees. Understand?”

There was little time for further conversation. From the hall, an angry, red-eyed vampire burst free. Behind it, a shambling zombie. More followed. Vampires, zombies, lamia, sirens. Emilio spotted what he thought might have been a fury, though they were tackled by a zombie with their head burst open before he could decide for certain. The captives were killing each other and, in a flash, were moving towards them, too. Something came up in the middle of the group, shoving Emilio to the side. Something else grabbed at him and earned a splash of holy water that found it flinching backwards, followed by a stake to the chest when that flinch confirmed it as a vampire. He tried not to lose sight of the group, but it was difficult. Amidst the chaos, he could only hope that most of them knew how to throw a damn punch.

—

Knowing that something was bound to go wrong, Alistair wasn’t at all surprised when the alarm sounded. “Dia a dhiteadh,” the spellcaster swore under their breath before he began to channel the energy of the undead around them, pulling them under their control and bending to their will. One moment, they were running straight for Alistair, screaming obscenities, the next? They were surrounding the necromancer and fighting off anyone who came close, all with a look of fear in their eyes. 

As the undead surrounding Alistair fought, they had their arms raised above their head, a pale green smoke swirling around their feet as well as surrounding the undead under their control. “cha deanar amadan mi,” they snarled in their native tongue, their voice sounding doubled as they spoke. One vampire to their right fought to break free of the control, their head turning of their own free will towards them. “You’re the monster, not us!” She screamed to Alistair, who took it in stride. 

“I’m a necromancer. I’ve always been a necromancer,” they told the vampire as they swiped their hand across the air, forcing the vampire back into submission. “I’m just finally learning to embrace it.” Alistair’s voice took on a darker tone, thinking of their family that they fought for so long not to be like, only to end up exactly like them in the end. They denied their heritage for so long, telling themselves they could amount to something other than what they’d always been, and how wrong they had been. 

“If that alarm was sounded, then the rest of the Good Neighbors aren’t far behind,” Alistair told the group as they extended their spell forward, refusing to acknowledge the exhaustion that was starting to creep into them from the sheer magnitude of the spell they were casting. It wasn’t a well-prepared spell, it was something off the cuff that would give them several minutes at most. Sure enough, their phone started to go off, the text-to-speech alerting them that it was Winnifred calling. “She knows,” was all they said before they pulled out a wooden stake from his belt and plunged it into the vampire that had managed to fight for control. 

As the group began to become more separated, Alistair shouted over the roar of the angry prisoners fighting their way out. “Get out of the building, and beware of members arriving!” More prisoners rushed towards Alistair, vengeance the only thing on their minds as they were torn apart by the undead that stood between them and the necromancer. The spell was waning.

__

Somehow, this just made so much more sense. The noise, the chaos - of course it had been inevitable. They’d known it, had they not? Zane was acutely aware how technically easy it was for half of this little group to die, bleed out or just hit their head too hard. They weren’t helpless but they were definitely vulnerable. All of them probably were when the threat was this grand, all snarling teeth and crazed eyes, scales and claws and pure anger. Zane had never seen a skull cracked open with just two bare hands but there wasn’t space to register it, bodies being flung into walls, vampires latching onto running prisoners like parasites and limbs getting torn off as the living amalgamation of prisoners closed in from every direction. He felt an eerie sense of calm, could almost hear the faint sound of a monitor flatlining mixed in with the screeching of the alarm. 

Emilio’s voice snapped him out of it, the lie that this would be easy. For a moment, their little group held control before it shattered, familiar faces getting quickly lost in the crowd of supernatural creatures. As quickly as he could, Zane dumped what remained in his duffle of ‘food’ onto the ground, trying to get some distance between himself and the group that immediately jumped for the easy meal. Something heavy and rough slammed against his chest, knocking him backwards - a bloodied and scaly tail, the creature to whom it belonged now zeroing in on Zane with yellow eyes. He wasn’t sure if ‘vampire’ was particularly tasty to shifters but he didn’t want to find out. 

His hands scrabbled for anything to grab onto as the reptilian creature growled, fingers finding purchase around something sturdy - a pipe. A worn one, luckily, as it came loose with a dedicated tug, just in time for the lamia to pounce and for Zane to brandish the makeshift weapon. The force of the attack was enough to make the jagged edges of the pipe sink through scales and skin, blood spurting out. The creature’s dying wail didn’t particularly register amidst the noise. One less threat, only a few dozen left, not to mention the people running this place that were apparently on their way here. 

—

At some point, Mackenzie had met back up with Daiyu and Alistair, but who she didn’t expect to see was Zane, Vic, and…Emilio, who was shoving a bottle of Holy Water in her direction. Not that she really knew what it was or what to do with it, but it didn’t matter. She wasn’t here to argue, as much as she wanted to rip the slayer’s throat out at the moment. In fact, there were a few people currently on the ever growing Arya Stark inspired hit list that she was currently keeping in her mind. But that thought was cut short when a loud blaring rang out through the keep and suddenly and simultaneously all the doors to the cells had flung open, setting the contained and still thriving imprisoned creatures free.

It was like being on the set of a Steven Spielberg movie. What was somewhat controlled had become pure and utter chaos at the call of the famous director upon the word “Action!” But this was no movie. In fact, this was more of a nightmare, and it was taking Mackenzie time to process it, while her fellow “team members” were already fighting for their lives.  However, when she felt the yanking of her hair and the sudden bite of a feral zombie ripping a chunk of flesh out of her neck, she realized processing was something that could be done later, “MOTHER FUCKER!”

In that moment, survival instincts began to kick in. All the fighting around her seemed to disappear as she turned and set her sights on the zombie who had attacked her, only to find it had been the girl she had thought she had put down. And as much as she didn’t want to hurt her, she wanted to make it out of the keep more, “Forgive me, Brody.” So without any hesitation, Mackenzie let her own feral side take over, as she lept on top of her enemy, sending them both to the ground. And with a growl, she pulled the gnashing zombie up by the head, before repeatedly slamming it into the ground, much like she had done in the past, even though she knew the food wouldn’t be viable this time around, but at least she’d still be unalive.

—

Fuck.  Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck.  Nothing was easy, nothing was simple, not ever, not in Vic’s whole entire fucking wasted 3 centuries could anything just be easy.  She wanted it to end, to fold into a ball and give up, because why couldn’t anything just be easy?  But no one else in the group was wallowing, not even the celebrity prisoner.  No one else was giving up just because things became inconvenient.  As Emilio shoved weapons to deal with the undead into people’s hands, she realized that these people still didn’t exactly know she was a vampire herself, and that might be a problem, especially if-

“Hey!”she shouted, jumping backwards as he tossed the vial to her.  Holy water, surely, but her reflexes had thankfully been quick enough that she was able to watch it fall to the ground in front of her.  “Sorry, I’m… an atheist.”  Thankfully, the chaos was too great for anyone to really notice her odd behavior.

Angry, vicious, former prisoners were coming at them from left and right, and it was all Vic could do to keep them at bay.  Punching someone coming from her right, kicking someone that came from her left, even using the dagger that had been tucked away in her jacket to jab someone that tried to come at her from behind.  Weren’t these assholes supposed to be grateful?  They were not the ones who had imprisoned them.  And sure, maybe abandonment was just as bad, but these people needed to get a grip and wait for the real enemies, who were certainly on their way.  “Save it for your prison guards”, she grunted as she kicked another away.  

She tried scanning the area, just to see how outnumbered they were and maybe to even spot a secret way out.  Instead, in the chaos, a familiar figure was walking toward her specifically, seemingly unharmed amongst the chaos.  It was the vampire she had spared earlier, the one who wasn’t supposed to be saved.  She would have looked like a sexy Moses parting the red sea of death and destruction if she hadn’t been so terrifying.  That food Vic gave her must have been a godsend.  

She came closer to Vic, and spoke when she was in earshot.  “Oh look, it’s our savior”, she said, but the tone sounded more mocking than grateful.  Vic didn’t quite understand, since she had really only saved her… this chaos was not her fault. “Thanks to you, doll, I was able to press that nasty little red button, the one that was keeping us locked in.”  Vic, for her part, looked around at the ‘us’ in question, at the volume of harm they’d already tried to commit on just 6 people that were trying to save their fellow prisoners… nevermind what would happen once they found their way out toward the town.  She felt a rock in the pit of her stomach, and worry growing with every passing second.  But Vic didn’t have a chance to form an answer, because before she could, the other vampire reared back and punched her square in the face, catching her off guard and sending her backwards to the floor.

—

Daiyu had been bred for this, hadn’t she? In a way all hunters were, matches made between a pair of them only to procreate, to put more hunters on this earth and raise them for the flurry of violence. She always functioned best in the chaos of a battlefield. She was perhaps most herself when she could just give into the urge for destruction. And so with a weapon in each hand, she met her fate time and time again. She brawled, glad that there was no need for stealth or strategy — just taking out as many as she could while staying alive. 

First order of business was silencing that siren, whose melody was like a red throughline in the fight. Daiyu set her sights on the shifter and fought with all her might. The creature was outmatched, underfed as she was, and so the struggle on the ground didn’t last long. Soon enough a bullet was lodged through her mouth into the rest of her skull, the song silenced forever as blood pooled on the floor. Her boots were sticky with it. 

She wasn’t fully aware of all that was happening, instinct and impulse taking over. These were no longer people with names or crimes attached to them — they were targets, same as the stuffed animals she’d once shot with her brother and sister for practice. Those times were long gone, though, as was the once-had desire to do good. Right now there was only one desire, and that was primal survival and victory. Why should there be anything else, when coated in blood and gore? If she were to die now, what would it all be for?

It was while she was reloading her gun (knife held tightly between her teeth) that someone set their sights on her. And maybe she deserved to be attacked from behind by these people, these creatures she had imprisoned or watched behind bars. So Daiyu crashed against the ground, gun clattering away and knife nicking a corner of her mouth as the vampire on top of her turned her around and bared its fangs. This was personal, it seemed.

—-

He wasn’t here, not really. Maybe it was the adrenaline or the smell of blood. Maybe Emilio’s training was actually kicking in. Most likely, Zane was disassociating with a mixture of all three of those because last time had just been vampires vanishing into dust while this was gory and bloody and bodies were starting to cover the ground. He kept expecting one of them to be from their ragtag rescue group but so far, only monsters - his skin crawled at the denotation, the hypocrisy of it - but that seemed very close to changing. Daiyu was staring down a fanged gullet and if any of the others had noticed, they weren’t close enough to do anything about it. 

The good thing about not properly being there; Zane didn’t have to fully register how he was again charging at someone like himself, and not even the scenario of doing it to save a hunter was a first. No, all Zane had to think about now was pulling out the stake Emilio had wordlessly handed him earlier this evening, get the vampire off Daiyu, clumsily slot the sharpened wood into place until nothing remained but dust. A red eyed creature exterminating a red eyed monster, then offering a hand to the bloody executioner on the ground. “Come on-”

It still managed to be loud over all of the noise, a tiny explosion lodging a bullet in Zane’s shoulder, Daiyu’s gun being put to good use. It hurt, a lot, enough to make the blood covered Daiyu look tantalizingly palatable for a moment of white noise pain. He stormed at whatever was holding the gun instead - better to let the hunter pick herself up the floor than bring her any closer to his fangs. Another searing round lodged itself into his torso before teeth found flesh, gulped down the off-tasting blood and then tore through veins and arteries. Whatever it was, it bled out quickly. 

__

As chaos erupted around them, Alistair kept the undead in their thrall, focused and breathing heavily as they kept the spell concentration up. They were doing this for Tommy. They were keeping themselves alive for Tommy. Nothing else mattered by Tommy, the guiding light through this whole hellish experience that they were going through. As prisoners fought their way toward the necromancer, the zombies and vampires under their control tore at their aggressors with a look of horror in their eyes. This isn’t what they wanted, but this is what they had to do by order of the one who controlled their movements.

“Get by me if you have to,” Alistair told the others, bringing the undead into a tighter circle to allow less and less to get through. “We need to get out of here, we cannae hold this forever!” They added, knowing that this was a do-or-die situation that they were in the midst of.  As moments of “I could see Mikael again” flew through their mind, they had to continuously remind themselves why they were fighting. Tommy. No one else. They’d stay alive for their son. For Melody. 

__

The chaos around him might have been overwhelming had chaos not been the only constant thing in the slayer’s life. He was built for situations like this one, was made to take on impossible odds time and time again. One day, he knew, there would be a fight he couldn’t win. It might even be this one. But until the moment the life was snuffed out of him, he’d continue pushing forward. It wasn’t a will to survive that drove him. He’d left that behind in Mexico to be buried with his daughter’s corpse. No, if anything, Emilio fought out of habit. He fought because he didn’t want to make it easy on whatever killed him, because the only person or thing meant to destroy him was him. 

He was aware, on some level, of the fight around him. He knew Vic turned down the holy water, and though her mouth had moved around some excuse for it, the words were lost to the sirens and the screaming. He couldn’t differentiate between one sound and the next, caught only flashes of what was happening around the room. Mack tackled some other undead thing to the ground, and Emilio kept half an eye on her for Kaden’s sake. Zane took out a lamia with a pipe, and he felt a swell of quiet pride that he’d never admit to. Alistair was weaponizing the undead prisoners in a way Emilio didn’t like but wouldn’t object to. Vic was talking to some vampire in words lost to the chaos. Daiyu was —

Daiyu was going down.

He started towards her, but the crowd was thick and impossible and he knew he’d never reach her in time. Something settled in the pit of his stomach, some quiet dread. It was hard, for a moment, not to think of Mexico. It was hard not to remember the last time there’d been this much chaos, with another hunter falling in the middle of it. He shoved at the nearest person to him — a stranger with red hands and a vicious snarl — but there was no give. Daiyu went down, and Emilio couldn’t reach her. Daiyu went down, and she was going to die.

And then came Zane. Swooping in with a stake Emilio had handed him, exploding another vampire into dust. Relief rushed him, though the reason for it felt strange. Did he even like Daiyu? Before this moment, he’d been sure the answer was no. Now, he thought it must be different. Funny, the things you could discover in the midst of battle.

Something slammed into his back, his momentary distraction being immediately taken advantage of. His mother, if she could see him now, would have scoffed at his incompetence. Of course, if his mother could see him now, fighting alongside a vampire and a zombie, she probably would have put a knife in his throat long before the incompetence had its moment in the sun, so it was probably moot, anyway. 

A lot of things were going to be moot very soon, come to think of it, because that stranger with the red hands and the vicious snarl was on top of him now, and it took all the strength he had to keep her teeth a safe distance from his throat. “Is this really what you want to be doing now? You’re free. You could run.”

“I can run after I kill you,” she said, snapping her jaw closer. He didn’t really have an argument for that.

With both hands busy holding her back, he couldn’t reach the blade to kill her. Not without being bitten, and there were few things Emilio wanted less than to die and return as something undead. Dying and staying dead was preferable. He grunted, trying to hold her at bay. This really wasn’t his day.

—

Mackenzie’s chest was heaving up and down despite not needing to breathe, but the parasite that raged inside her. The thing that forced her to do the things she now did had needed soothing. And when she wasn’t seeing red anymore, the young woman realized what she had done. An unrecognizable figure lay just beneath her, no longer moving or out to destroy her, “This…is…this is all bullshit.”

Climbing to her feet, she looked around at the chaos surrounding her. There was bloodshed everywhere. Living and undead alike. It seemed no one was innocent in all of this, but the one thing she did know was that she was done. She wasn’t joining in on this fight anymore. She didn’t want to. She was tired. And so she ran.

Forced her way through anyone and everyone shoving them as hard as she could. She had even thrown in a few kicks for good measure putting her black belt to use as best she could. And even though her leg didn’t quite offer her as much grace as it once had pre-chop, she still managed to duck and roll as needed, and she was just about to the door, when she saw him…Emilio. Pinned down by a vampire and unable to get to his weapon to take her out.

It was like the universe was throwing a big fuck you at him, but a nearly impossible decision at her. Leave him and let him die at the hand of the undead he despised so much or be the bigger person and save his life, despite the fact that he had threatened and scared her several months back. It was weighing on her. This town had changed Mackenzie a lot. It had made her more heartless in ways, but still somehow more compassionate. Braver, but also left her oftentimes paranoid and watching her back. And even though she so badly wanted to leave him as a meal to the vampire that lingered just above his neck, she couldn’t. He was still a person, and somewhere deep down inside, even if it was the tiniest bit, she still cared.

Turning on her heels, the zombie shook her head as she let out a huff of frustration, “Fuck me.” And without waiting any longer, she found herself pushing her way back through the crowd, and over to where Emilio lay helpless; a moment Mackenzie could at least take some pleasure in for a brief moment, before she said something, “No you can’t…”

The vampire looked upward, “Huh?”

“You said, ‘I can run after I kill you’, and I said, ‘no, you can’t.”

“Oh, yeah, and why’s that, Bitch?”

“Because you can’t run if you’re dust.” And without hesitating Mackenzie spun around and aimed for the vampire's head as hard as she could, connecting her foot to the woman’s cheek sending her rolling off of Emilio, before snatching up a nearby metal chair and mercilessly beating the downed vampire with it repeatedly, “Are you just gonna lay there, Mr. Hot Shot Hunter, or are you going to do your job?” She glared over at Emilio as she continued to beat the vampire down.

—

For a moment, the sounds of the chaos were gone.  Vic wasn’t actually sure she was even within the chaos anymore, because a blur of colors around her had taken its place.  There was a figure in the distance, a woman, maybe, holding hands with a child.  And though she could not make out either of them, she was sure the smaller figure was Rosie.  Rosie, being whisked away by someone else.  Someone who could protect her and raise her without getting into dangerous, life-threatening situations.  She reached forward, trying desperately to grab at her daughter and cling to her, before a sharp pain at her side stopped her.  When she cried out, she wasn’t sure if it was from a desperation to reach Rosie, or the sting of pain at her side once again.

But at the third strike to her side, the string of colors transformed back into the damp darkness of the keep, and the real world around her filled her senses, almost as quickly as the dread did.  The situation, once again, was becoming abundantly clear.  The vampire she saved was kicking at her side, yelling for her to wake up and finish this fight.  Around her, swarms of undead, those that she had been bargaining for days on end for everyone to save, were thrashing at her and her companions with no mercy.   Daiyu and Emilio, it seemed, were both in dire situations, and it was because of her.  Vic had set free the vampire who pressed the button that released the chaos.  Vic was about to be responsible for them being released toward the innocent townspeople.

She shot up, the realization of all of this hitting her at once.  The other vampire seemed satisfied with this, and a smirk danced across her features as Vic narrowly dodged another kick, this time aimed at her head.  “What the fuck is wrong with you?”, she asked, her hands up in defense.  Her dagger had been lost somewhere in the fight- had she stabbed someone with it?  “I was trying to help you!  I saved your fucking life!  Why are you doing this?”

“You think you’re so much better than us, Sweetheart?  You think we needed saving?”  She jabbed at Vic’s shoulder with impressive precision and strength, especially for someone who’d been locked up and hungry for an indefinite amount of time. “I’m not your fucking puppet.” Then, she pushed forward toward Vic, forearm against her neck, effectively pinning her against a wall.  “Did you seriously think we’d grovel at your feet after we watched you pass the rest of us over?  For those weaklings?” She made a gesture with her free arm toward the direction of the celebrity prisoner helping Emilio.  

Vic might have made a comment about the melodrama, or even defended the celebrity prisoner against accusations of weakness when she was currently beating someone up with a chair like one of those big, beefy wrestlers you’d see on television, but the vampire’s gesture had caught Vic’s eye on something else entirely.  Almost directly behind the vampire, the door to one of the cages lay open, jagged edges sticking out due to the bedlam.  Quickly, an idea wormed its way into Vic’s mind.  

Her eyes found the other vampire’s, who was still ranting about revenge, and Vic wanted to cry out in frustration.  It was not supposed to be like this.  The whole point in joining the Good Neighbors was to save vampires, to make up for her past, to finally work toward being good, but now…

No matter how many times Vic found life unfair, she was still surprised by it.  But as her eyes left the vampire’s and scoured the fighting around them, there was a sudden clarity that washed through her.  Zane, helping Daiyu.  The celebrity prisoner, stepping in to save Emilio.  Alistair, doing their best to help all of them.  These people, with varying dynamics among them, were coming together in each other’s times of need because it was the right thing to do.  Not because they were or weren’t a certain species, but because they were all trying to do what they thought was right.  Maybe morality would never be as simple as Vic wanted it to be, but perhaps it didn’t have to be as complicated as she once thought.  

For only a moment more, she held her breath, right before looking back into the other vampire’s eyes.  “I’m sorry”, was all she muttered before she mustered her strength, wriggled her arms free, and shoved her backwards, sending her plowing into the jagged edges of a door that once held her prisoner. 

—

She took Zane’s hand and his rescue without complaint, even if in a far introspective distance, her ego was bruised at needing help. Daiyu watched the other rush away from her, to the thief of her gun and watched as her rescuer opened his jaws wide and sank his teeth into the former prisoner. There was not a lot of time to register the fact that Emilio – a slayer – had brought a vampire to this fight, but the thought still hit her in the face as she spat out her knife and picked it up again. 

The fight found her again, or maybe she found it again – how those things worked, she never knew – but she was back in the fray without considering how death had and would come close. There was no room for thought and besides, Daiyu was a woman of few thoughts in general. So she sunk her knife into a shifting wolf, cutting through vital arteries and leaving it to bleed out, half-monstrous and half-man. 

Her mind was only partially dedicated to her partners in crime. She had not been made for team fights, after all, and her father’s lessons had taught her that a knife in the back should always be expected. After all, Emilio had brought a vampire — and even if that vampire had saved her life and even if a zombie she’d kidnapped were fighting alongside, there was still room for them to turn on her. She was aware of all of them, both because she did not want them to die and because she knew they might as well take her out, here. Paranoia and concern made for a confusing mix of stark awareness.

But it all faded when a voice rang through the building. As the six of them had inched closer to the exit, they’d unconsciously all moved towards another ambush. Winnifred’s voice was demanding, the way a teacher’s was to children. “No! Halt!” The scene was like one of a shitty action movie, if you were to ask Daiyu — a horizontal line of people with weapons accosted them. Winnifred was flanked by those of the inner circle not here today, her own fingers wrapped around a small handgun while others carried weapons of various sizes, though they were all very much fatal if used well. And these people knew how to use them well.

The world held its breath. “We found dear Blanche here trying to escape,” said Aleksander, whose magic was restraining a vampire mid-air, limbs stretched out and her face a bloody, furious mess. 

“What were you thinking?” This, from Winnifred, whose face was almost as red as the vampire’s but not from blood — only from anger. The weapon looked wrong in her hand, but it was impossible to say if the tremor in her arm was from anxiety or anger. As she continued to speak, it was clear it was the latter. Her eyes rested on Alistair. “We made this place to keep them safe, to keep us safe — they are —” As the group moved further into the building and more of the carnage became clear to her, more emotion seemed to grasp her. A dead siren at her feet looked up at her with blank eyes and for a moment it seemed like Winnifred forgot how to breathe, air stuck in her throat and water gathering in her eyes. “We do not kill them — not even when they kill those like us, and now, now look at what you’ve done, what you have all done that cannot be undone!” 

She was raising her gun, aiming it at the actress she’d enjoyed in so many films she’d watched with family, the zombie who had killed members of her beloved community. Who was once more covered in blood. Winnifred thought murder the largest crime of all and had not yet debased herself to that level, but perhaps would be the day she’d have to start. She glanced at the people flanking her, those she thought she could still trust. She’d let them be lethal, today. “It should have never come to this, but —”

She would never finish the sentence.

—

Of all people to swoop in and keep those teeth from finding his throat, it was Mack Ross who did it. In many ways, and perhaps a little foolishly, Emilio wished it had been someone else. It wasn’t that he disliked the idea of being saved by someone undead — he’d brought Zane as his backup, after all, had taken Metzli when he’d needed another set of eyes at the barn — it was that it was this specific undead person. He found Mack reckless, found her irresponsible, and there were few worse things for someone undead to be. (Besides, perhaps, self-righteous. There were worse people who could have rescued him here. He was lucky it wasn’t Monty.) 

She wasn’t the sort of person he wanted to owe his life to, though it was based more in petty reasons than anything substantial. For a moment, he almost wished those teeth had found his throat after all, but he pushed the thought away. There was still a fight to be won here. Emilio didn’t want to check out before he knew that the people he’d come in with made it out.

Offering her a stiff nod, he fumbled to his feet. The action wasn’t graceful, the way it might have been when his leg was a functional thing and not a mass of discomfort. He pushed the pain aside as easily as he ever did, picking up his weapon and making quick work of the assailant Mack had pulled off him. There was little time for small talk when the act was done, and Emilio was glad for it. He was better in a fight than he was in a conversation.

He turned his attention easily back to the altercation at hand. He fell into an easy rhythm of blades to throats and stakes to chests. For a moment, a heartbeat, he thought they might all make it out alive.

And then an unfamiliar voice cut through the chaos, and everything stopped.

This, he thought, must have been Winnifred. She didn’t look much like he’d expected, though he hadn’t known what to expect at all. She seemed clean-cut, seemed like the sort of woman who would bring cookies to a new neighbor. Which, consequently, meant she seemed like the sort of woman Emilio would hate to have as a neighbor. If he made it out of here alive, he thought, perhaps he’d use Winnifred to justify this prejudice. 

With his eyes locked onto the weapons Winnifred’s people clutched, he thought that was a fairly big if to hang expectations upon. 

She was speaking, though Emilio had a hard time making the words fit neatly in his ears. He was too wired up for conversation, covered in dust and blood and still yearning to add to it. Winnifred was speaking, Winnifred was pointing her gun. It found Mack and, unconsciously, the slayer took a step towards the zombie, some half-formed intention of placing himself between her and the danger. He wasn’t sure if it was repayment for her saving his life moments before or something else, but it didn’t matter. One of Winnifred’s men swung his weapon towards Emilio in warning, and the slayer froze.

Of course, the ragtag group of makeshift rescuers weren’t the only ones frozen at the new additions to the chaos. Winnifred had always had a commanding presence; none of the things she’d built within the Keep would have worked if she hadn’t. When she spoke, the people around her tended to listen. There was something about those long, impassioned rants, something about the righteous anger. She had a way of gripping her audience by the throat, holding them in place as a barrage of words assaulted their senses endlessly. 

Some had been listening longer than others. Kirk had been her unwilling audience for half a decade now. He’d sat caged while she rambled on and on, speaking of the dangers he posed while dragging more and more people like him to live lives behind bars, starving and losing pieces of themselves day in and day out. It was enough to turn any beast rabid, wasn’t it? It was enough to make wolves of chihuahuas. 

And Kirk was anything but a pup.

Winnifred and her people were so focused on the group that had infiltrated the Keep. Guns trained on people with heaving chests and wide eyes, numbers smaller than those of the ex-prisoners around them. Was it her ego, or the outrage of the betrayal? Kirk recognized two of them, after all, knew enough to know that this was at least in part an inside job. 

But the reason for Winnifred’s arrogant inattentiveness didn’t matter nearly as much as the inattentiveness itself. For six years, Kirk had listened to every word out of Winnifred’s mouth as a literal captive audience. 

He would hear no more.

The shift came easily to him, rippling through him all at once with his willingness to turn as its vessel. Teeth lengthened, nails sharpened into claws. He was already sailing through the air as the final details of the shift took hold, skin still settling over new bones as he landed on his captor. Teeth found her throat before another word could leave it, digging in and ripping. 

The spray of blood, arching up to the high ceilings and painting the walls around it, was the most beautiful thing Kirk had seen in half a decade.

—

It all happened rather quickly, didn’t it? One moment Winnifred was doing what she did best, talking endlessly, and the next she was gurgling and then the sound of a body falling to the ground filled the air. It was a strange mix of emotions that filled the necromancer. For one, Winnifred had been the person that had stuck by Alistair the longest when they first arrived to town. But also, she was quite an annoying woman, wasn’t she? It left Alistair with a mix of emotions that they couldn’t quite put a name to. They weren’t very sure they wanted to, either.

As the chaos unfolded around them, Alistair held onto the spell they cast to control the undead that kept them protected. But Aleksander, try as he may, had always been jealous of Alistair. Of their abilities. While Aleksander worked so hard to get to where he was, Alistair was always a step above him. The practical right hand to Winnifred when Aleksander had always bent over backwards to be noticed by the woman he considered a dear friend. 

And now? Now Winnifred was dead on the ground by Kirk, the longest standing member of the keep, dead because of the actions of a necromancer who got too big for their britches. “You’ve always been the thorn in my side,” Aleksander snarled at Alistair, stepping toward the redhead with murder clear in his eyes. “You’ve always been the one standing in my way no matter how hard I work. And now you’re the reason Winnie is dead.” Anger and venom spat from the younger necromancer’s mouth, the spell that held the vampire he had under his control waning enough for the woman to run as fast as she could away from the scene. 

Emotions and necromancy didn’t mix well. Something always went wrong, didn’t it? Ah, well. Aleksander could easily remedy the cocktail of emotions that stormed inside of him. He raised the gun and aimed it right for Alistair’s chest. He wanted it to draw out. He didn’t want Alistair to know mercy. Mercy that he had never been shown by the scotsman. “Burn in hell, McKenzie,” Aleksander spoke before pulling the trigger of the gun. 

The shot rang through the keep, and Alistair felt pain blooming in their chest. No. Dammit, they’d made it this far only to be shot by the man who had been jealous of Alistair’s power since the day they met. Alistair’s spell dropped, and the undead swarmed Aleksander like bees defending their hive. But Alistair didn’t care what happened to that man. Because they’d been shot. 

Alistair sunk to their knees as they felt them give out from underneath them. This was it? This is what it felt like to die. Falling fully to the ground, Alistair stared up at the ceiling with their unseeing gaze. This was it. They’d been shot and they had to hope and pray to anyone who would listen that their resurrection spell would work. 

__

The air was already heavy with panic and blood when a voice demanded attention and actually received, making discomfort seep into the thick atmosphere as well. A woman, the woman responsible for all of this, in some ways indirectly but responsible all the same. For the creatures, the people littering the floor, for the almost death of two hunters, for the blood in Zane’s mouth that tasted wrong and violent. Winnifred was speaking and no one interjected, perhaps for fear of the weapons her lackeys wielded or they were just using this moment of quiet to gather their thoughts. Zane wasn’t even sure he had thoughts to gather other than getting out, getting their whole team out, an unrealistic thought at this point. 

But then chaos erupted again as it was wont to do, more blood permeated the air, bodies were pushing and shoving once again as Winnifred was dead. That didn’t stop a good chunk of the prisoners from rushing in the direction of her corpse, rushing at those who had wronged them. Wanting a piece of the woman responsible for their imprisonment, even if it was just a piece of her corpse. Zane smelled smoke at the same time a gunshot rang out, instinct whipping his focus to Emilio who was thankfully only responsible for the fire starting to crackle and not sporting a bullet wound. Someone was but there was no telling who - the fire incited a new level of panic as those acting on thought instead of instinct (Zane found himself teetering on the edge of the latter) realized that the time for escaping here alive was running out. 

And they didn’t even know about the explosives. 

Zane knew that wasn’t his purpose for being brought here, that Emilio would probably give him shit about it later on but he still found himself forging a path to the slayer, needing to make sure he made it out, too. If anyone was likely to try to sacrifice themselves by staying behind, making sure less of the dangerous prisoners escaped, it was Emilio. 

—

It was like all time stood still when the vaguely familiar voice of a woman Mack had seen every now and then had spoken up loudly. It was as if she commanded the room like something holy descending from the sky, but to Mackenzie, she was the soccer mom from Hell. One of the Real Housewives of Wicked’s Rest trying to have her 15 minutes of fame. And so many other horrific analogies all rolled into one. But when her holier-than-thou speech had started to come to a close, the twenty-six year old could only see the barrel of a gun pointed directly at her, and if her dead heart could have started and then stopped beating in that moment it would have.

But she couldn’t be killed by a bullet right? Winnifred could try, but if Mackenzie couldn’t kill her fellow zombie with a stab through the brain, the woman’s gun wouldn’t do shit. It’d hurt like hell probably, but she had been through worse. At least that’s what she continued to tell herself over and over as she thought about Brody, who had been with her since the day she had killed him, her family, Bixby, Taylor, Winter, and all the people that mattered most in her life. That was, until she watched as the woman suddenly was ripped to shreds by a werewolf, only for all hell to break loose once more.

Deciding Emilio could defend himself, Mackenzie knew it was time to flee, but if things couldn’t get any worse, the faint smell of something burning seeped into her dulled nostrils and before long, it was as if people were stampeding trying to make their way to safety. And without any choice, the zombie was forced to go along with the crowd, until she felt her feet go out from under her as she tripped on something.

With her head and face covered by her arms, she tried her best to avoid getting trampled as she lay on top of something, and when it seemed most of the horde had found an escape from the room she was in, she slowly opened her eyes and rolled off of the thing she had been laying on, until she realized it was Alistair. Alistair who wasn’t moving and was covered in blood, “Alistair?” It was like the breath was catching in her throat and her mind suddenly went back to the night she had last been with Brody. And despite knowing that the man she loved had become a ghost, Mackenzie couldn’t help but let her mind go back in time, until she noticed someone else, one of Winnifred’s men, leave the room, snapping her out of the near panic attack that felt like it was coming on.

“Alistair, you gotta get up, okay? This place is on fire. It’s burning, and we have to go!” Mackenzie shifted to her knees and nudged them, first softly, and then with more effort, “Alistair, please…please wake up…please…” With no response, she wanted to cry out for help, but realized there had been no one who could help her, and without waiting any longer, she climbed to her feet, “I-I’m not leaving you here.” Latching onto him in a firefighter’s drag position, she slowly, and with all her strength, began pulling him out as the fire began to inch closer and closer to the room they were both in. The effort it took to move them was almost more than she had, but she was determined, and when she finally managed to reach an exit, she pushed the door open and continued to move him, until she realized they were both safe collapsing to the ground, but also grateful for the seclusion of the door she had come out of.

And when she had regathered her strength, she climbed to her feet once more, “I can’t - I can’t have another PR nightmare on my hands. I’m sorry. But…you’ve got a chance out here, okay? I’ll try and send someone your way to help you…” At this point, she wasn’t sure if Alistair had been alive or had died, and despite what he had been a part of, Mackenzie had chosen to see him as the person he had been before, she knew he was a key player in all that and transpired.

—

Luck didn’t exist.  Vic had been sure of it from nearly the moment she was conscious, for luck could not have evaded a single person so frequently.  What was it then, that caused the jagged edges of the door to strike through just the right part of the vampire’s chest as Vic pushed her down?  Was it spite?  Was it centuries of practiced aim?  She had spent years convincing herself she wasn’t a violent person, so what was all the training for?  Why had she made herself adept at fighting if she hadn’t planned on using those skills? Had she been lying to herself this whole time?

Vic wasn’t sure, not even as the vampire turned to dust in her hands, disappearing from consciousness before she had a moment to even comprehend what had happened.  And for a moment, Vic actually tried to push her back together. This vampire who was once a person, who once had a family and people who loved her, who was probably turned against her will, as Vic herself was.   “No, no, no, no…” She sank to her knees, gathering the earth beneath her into frantic piles as if it might reverse all the mistakes she’d made that very night.  If she had left well enough alone, the other vampire would still be alive.  If she had listened to her companions, the carnage around her wouldn’t exist.  

Faintly, from behind her, she heard a commotion that she couldn’t recognize.  Gunshots, fire, and death couldn’t beat the ringing that her ears were producing, no matter how prominent they were.  What had she done?  In her haste to do the right thing, to save a soul that she assumed was good, she’d destroyed nearly everything.  She looked up, around at her companions (she could only see three of them now) and the rest of what was left of the keep.  If they stayed here any longer, they all might be lost too.

“We need to go”, she yelled, watching as the fire grew and the prisoners fought each other to tear their captor apart.  “We need to go now”.  As they ushered each other out to safety, there wasn’t much to say, or think about, other than the chaos that they were leaving behind.  There were plenty of questions running through her mind, ones that wouldn’t ever leave, not even when Vic was in the deepest, calmest of states of relaxation.

Did the others know that she was the cause of the carnage?  Would they forgive her, if they had?  Would the carnage have happened anyway, if she had set another prisoner free instead?  But the question that rang the loudest, that nearly never left her mind was this- How could she ever call herself a good person if her first real attempt at forgiveness ended in destruction?

[magmahearts]

@natusvincere from here:

Are you not worried about openly insulting multiple residents of the town you live in?

​The good news is that they won't yell at me for it!

[nartouthere]

Navi iM Dust 2 Mid to B Smoke

[nightmaretist]

TIMING: Current PARTIES: Vic @natusvincere & Inge @nightmaretist LOCATION: Masque of the Red Eye SUMMARY: Two immortals cross paths again and speak of current events, among which mostly daughters. CONTENT WARNINGS: Child death.

The meeting at the Good Neighbors had ended early.  There had been a tenseness in the air that Vic couldn’t quite place, but, being a new member, she figured it wasn’t her place to question it.  People in Wicked’s Rest were odd, and the do-gooder Good Neighbors must not have been any different.  Regardless, Rosie was asleep at home with the nanny who had already been pre-paid, so Vic took it upon herself to saunter over to the Masque of the Red Eye, a place she had hadn’t ventured to since her days of betraying vampires.  It might have been stupid to come back to the Masque- there was probably an unknown number of friends of those she’d betrayed, waiting to enact their revenge.  But Vic, ever stubborn and ever so determined, was desperate to make amends in any way she could, even if the mere thought left a pang of anxiety in her stomach that felt too deep to quell.

300 years of hatred was hard to overcome in just 3.

A familiar face from across the way interrupted her nerves almost the moment she walked in, filling her with a strange sense of familiarity.  It was a face she hadn’t seen in years, not besides about six months when she swore she jogged past her in the park.  But Vic was always seeing flashes of faces she once knew in strangers, so she barely gave it a second thought.  “Inge?”, she called out, feeling uncharacteristically brave as she approached the other.  There was always something comforting about the other woman, even if they had only passed through each other’s social circles once or twice in the past few decades. Vic couldn’t even remember first meeting her, only that it was at an art museum in god knows where  “It’s uh… Vic.  Um, Victoria, maybe.  I can’t remember which name I gave you.”  She gestured to the seat beside Inge, wondering if it was okay to sit down.  “Since when do you spend your time in a seedy town like Wicked’s Rest?”  This would turn out to be utterly humiliating if Inge didn’t remember her, and Vic was already turning red at the thought of it.  

—

It was an embarrassing thing to her, to feel unsafe. Inge didn’t tend to let herself feel unsafe — she tended to run, to turn on her heel and go to a different place where there would be no room for such a feeling. And yet, she was still here, in this town where a man had threatened to scoop out her insides, where a ghost had made the earth split, where the sky trembled and something else horrible was bound to happen any  second. She found it hard to explain to herself why she stayed – it certainly wasn’t for her job (though she did enjoy that). Maybe it was because her art was better than it had been in years, the town like a never-ending muse. Or maybe it was because of something more embarrassing than feeling unsafe — because she found herself tied to the people inhabiting this space.

Regardless, the feeling of being unsafe persisted, and so she stuck to the places she felt safest in. The corners where the undead gathered. The astral, her studio, her home, the casino. Masque was another on the list, a nice place to grade papers and sip her coffee and feel like she was surrounded by her own kind. And she was doing a good job at focusing on said papers (something that she’d been struggling with due to the aforementioned causes of dismay), at least until her name was called. She looked up, pen floating above the page in mid-action. (She printed out the papers — she’d never gotten the hand of grading digitally.) “Vic,” she said, eyes widening with surprise. “Hi!” Inge got up, placing the paper on the tiny table and giving the other a quick embrace. “Come, come, sit.” She laughed. “Since when do you?” She sat down, wondering how to explain the magnetism of this horrid town. “I guess there’s something inspiring about a place like this to the likes of me, hm? I teach here, too. It’s nice.” It was the first time she’d been employed in at least a decade. “Tell me, how’ve you been?”

—

Vic was not used to the feeling of being embraced.   Not by arms that weren’t child-sized, anyway.  And not since…  Well, not since a lot of things, she supposed.  She tried not to let her body harden at the act, fighting past every instinct that told her to fight affection for the last 300 years instead of relaxing into it.  It was over before she knew it, and Inge didn’t seem to notice her aversion, and Vic herself was embarrassed that her mind was making such a big deal of a little hug.  She really needed to get a grip.

She sat as requested, again comforted by the magnetism that Inge seemed to hold.  “Oh, I’ve been here for around 13 years, actually.  Not at the Masque, of course.  But living in town.  I didn’t get out much until around three years ago, though.  And who can blame me?”, she asked, trying to make a joke of the town’s reputation in an attempt to quell any questions Inge might have about what she had been doing while so recluse.  What would Inge think of her if she knew how many people she had betrayed?  “Teaching!”, she said with surprise, her eyes traveling down to the papers scattered around the table.  Clearly, she had interrupted some hard work.  “That’s a reputable job if I’ve ever heard of one.  Are you teaching children?”

Vic thoughts flashed to Rosie, wondering what type of student she might be as she grew older.  A confident one, surely, but well-behaved and demure.  Inge would certainly be a wonderful teacher for her.  “I’ve been… well, better lately than I had been in a while, if I’m being honest.  I’m living over in Deer Springs in this beautiful home I’m restoring, and I have a small business going painting storefront windows.  It’s not much, of course, nor is it incredibly mature, but I find myself quite enjoying it.”  She smiled at the thought, remembering the adorable yellow minion men she’d painted out in front of a bookstore just last week.  The owner had seemed shocked at her choice of character, but she would come to see the vision of it soon, Vic was sure.

“What about you, Inge?  How has life been treating you as of late?”

—

Thirteen years, Vic said she’d been here for thirteen years. Inge found it impossible to imagine. Where had she been, thirteen years ago? Somewhere in Europe, gorging on people’s dreams and struck with grief, that must have been it. She had flown back to America something over a decade ago, but she’d flit around plenty of states even then. To stay in one place for that long – especially a place like this – she found inconceivable.

But then Vic had said she’d been inside for a lot of it. She didn’t know why, but she could imagine. She found herself avoiding the streets too, especially after her latest encounter with Emilio. She had the luxury of astral projecting, though, and still going out even without walking around an awful lot. “No one can,” she said definitively, not particularly interested in asking why Vic had stayed in all those years. “It tends to either smell horrid here or there’s puddles or goo, or all at ones.” 

She smiled a little at the other’s reverence for her career of choice. “It’s nice, I never thought I’d enjoy it. And yes, in a way — college. They don’t think they’re kids any more but they certainly are.”

Inge took a sip from her coffee, wondering how she’d never encountered Vic in all the years she had been here. Different circles, perhaps. If only she could avoid certain types like that. “I live in the same neighborhood — it’s nice there, isn’t it? Painting storefronts … that’s wonderful!” Certainly not the kind of creative expression she preferred, but she couldn’t judge too harshly if someone was picking up a paintbrush. “I’d love to see some of it. And you would be welcome in my studio, if you want to change it up.” 

The question about her life seemed a little futile. She’d told Vic, hadn’t she? She was a teacher. “Oh, you know — I’ve been between towns a lot the past few years. Was in New York before this, so this is quite the change of pace. But I don’t mind it. I never thought I’d return to a small town.”

—

Vic felt herself smiling, relieved that chatter with an old acquaintance seemed to be feeling more natural than not.  There was so much about Vic and her past that Inge was never told- especially about who Vic truly was and what she was doing to those like her until Rosie came into the picture.  The two of them had always seemed to dance around their shared status as undead (at least Vic assumed, due to her lack of a heartbeat) … (maybe it was rude to assume).  This mostly happened on Vic’s end, as it did with all the undead she ended up having a fondness for, so she could ignore the repercussions of longing for friendship with someone who was a monster just like her.  But now that she was done betraying vampires and hating those who had the unfortunate circumstance to be like her… perhaps the two of them would have a chance to delve more into each other.  “Or, the people are just horrid in general.  Stinky or not.  Sometimes I find myself avoiding them altogether”.

Vic would deny she was desperate for adult interaction.  She loved Ms. Rachel, and those yellow minion men, and the cute little cartoon girl who sang the phonics song on youtube.  And Rosie was enough interaction- she was all Vic needed, especially now that her vocabulary was thriving in both English and Swedish.  But she would have been lying if she said she didn’t intentionally pick fights with her nasty neighbor Tracy or the mailman who kept delivering packages to the wrong house, just to have a meaningful interaction with someone who could drive.  Maybe a real friend might do her some good.

“I don’t think I’d have the patience for teaching”, she said earnestly.  She never thought she’d have the patience for motherhood, either.  Maybe another 10 years in Wicked’s Rest would soften her up even more.  She shook her head at the thought of Inge seeing her ‘professional work’, almost regretting telling her.  “It’s nothing incredible, if I’m being frank.  Just cartoons, mostly inspired by my daughter.”  Her elephant in the room, the one Inge wouldn’t have even realized existed, blurted out faster than Vic had expected it too.  She picked an imaginary piece of dust off her pants after the pseudo-admission, pressing her lips together.  

Would Inge be ashamed of her?  Would she think it odd that someone like her suddenly had a child?  Should she have kept it private?  Vic couldn’t change the subject fast enough, it felt like the entire building were looking her way.  “You know, in all my years traveling around, I never ended up in New York city.  I was in Boston two separate times.  But never New York.  Did you enjoy yourself there?”

—

It seemed for a moment as something in the air paused. As if a collective breath was held, as if the invisible flow of air halted. Vic said something incredulous. My daughter. Inge blinked her eyes at her, this woman who had not aged a day since the last time she had seen her. A face unmarred by the signs of aging, not a gray hair growing from her head. A woman who was frozen in time just like her, and she had a child. 

So there were two horrifying options — either the child was like them and would not age, which would be a small mercy for Vic but otherwise something so unethical it made Inge squirm as well. And then there was the other option, the one that made her unbeating heart skip a beat. Vic was the mother to a human child, one way or another, and that child would age and age and age, and in four or five decades time look older than her mother. Vera’s hair had not gone gray at the end, but there had been a few random silver hairs among the brown. Vera —

She closed her mind off for memories of her own daughter, of the hospital, of the end. She looked at Vic, disregarding most of the other things she’d said. “A daughter? Since when — how old is she?” She wanted to leave. She didn’t want to speak of the dead. There was probably a whole slew of dead people between herself and Vic, considering the nature of their unlives. “How – Is she like us?” This was said in a lower tone and with a level of shame, a level of quietness. Inge didn’t feed off children. She had, a few times, but they were too easy to scare. If she were a vampire she wouldn’t even consider it, but there were some out there that might.

She reached for a coffee like it was an anchor. “You – You should go to New York, sometime. It’s great. The museums are wonderful, and every child should visit good museums — everyone, actually, regardless of age.”

—

Vic tried to look down at the table, to occupy herself with anything other than the emotions that were processing on Inge’s face.  If the situation had been reversed, she wasn’t sure how she would have reacted.  There was something unspoken between them- they always seemed to dance around the fact that the other was undead, the Vic of the past never wanting to sit on the subject too long just incase Inge turned out to be a vampire, too (it was why she shouldn’t have been making friends).  And she knew that unspoken secret was exactly what had caused Inge’s questioning look now.  The silence between them was palpable, and Vic practically had to hold herself to the chair to stop from running away.

“She just turned three”, she said, trying to sound matter-of-fact.  She wondered if Inge would put together her earlier words, or if they had seemed as throw-away as Vic had tried to make them sound at the time.  I didn’t get out much until around three years ago, though.  At the thought that Rosie could be anything like them, Vic moved back in her seat, clutching her chest in surprise.  Her face morphed into one of distress before she answered.  “She’s, no…no.  She’s nothing like me… like us.  She’s perfect.  She’s… she’s human.”  After she was sired, Vic was told horror stories of children turned, and the thought, now more so than ever, made her stomach turn.  If being turned as an adult felt like torture, she couldn’t imagine the anguish and despair that must have come with eternal childhood.  

Three years had already gone by in a blink.  She couldn’t bring herself to think what their lives would look like in 30… or 60… or 100.  

“She’s perfect”, she said again, as if to reiterate.  Vic truly believed she was.  “And I would never… I won’t… nothing like that will ever happen to her, Inge.  I won’t let it.”  She felt she should explain more, but she didn’t know how.  When she thought back to her first night with Rosie, it still didn’t make sense why she was picked.  “Her parents were slayers.  Friends of mine”.  She tugged at her cloaking bracelet, unsure if Rosie’s birth parents ever actually knew the truth.  “They had betrayed someone, or something…there was a bounty on their heads, and their families had already been killed…there was no one else.”  Vic hated herself for the times she felt grateful that there had been no one else.  She couldn’t look at Inge, not after all the revelations.

“I haven’t been to New York in… decades”, she admitted, clearing her throat of the emotion that threatened to rest there.  “Rosie loves museums.  Maybe we should travel there on a small vacation.”  

—

Vera had been three once — just as she had been four, five, ten, twenty, thirty, thirty-six. Inge thought back to that blur of the early years of childhood, the years before her transformation, the years she sometimes, very quietly and very guiltily, yearned for in a way she’d lost. She tried to blink the memories from her head, those thoughts of a toddler that had her eyes moving around the world while her mother’s eyes were growing more and more sunken, less and less similar. She tried to imagine Vic with her human child, her perfect human child, who would look older than her in a couple of decades and then die before Vic would.

Her coffee wasn’t strong enough and severely lacking in a shot of whiskey, and yet she clung to it, taking another sip. “A great age,” she said, because that was what people said in situations like these. She wasn’t sure what to say or do besides that, though, as there was no etiquette when it came to undead parenthood. Vic spoke about their natures as if it was something ugly and perhaps it was, if you thought about imposing it on your child. And how could she judge? Inge had never even thought changing Vera into something undying to save her from her coming death. She would have hated it. So no matter how much she thought herself and other undead better than human, some sort of upgrade, she understood not wanting to give it to ones own child.

But — the child would have to die. Rosie – she had a name – would die if she wasn’t turned and Inge wanted to warn Vic of it, this sword of Damocles hanging over her neck. And Vic kept talking, kept making it worse. The child was the result of two slayers procreating and was now hers. She kept drinking her coffee, the bitterness not bitter enough, her throat speechless.

She had to say something, though. “She’s … she’s … well, you won’t raise her as a slayer at the very least, right?” How could Rosie be perfect if she were to be a slayer? How could Inge condemn a toddler for something she couldn’t control? Why was Vic someone slayers trusted enough to give their child to? “I am happy – yes, Vic, I’m happy for you. It can be a wonderful thing— magical, motherhood. I do … well, I wonder. But as long as you’re happy. And I think…” She placed her saucer down. “For what it’s worth, you seem like a gentle parent.” 

It was easier to talk of New York, even if it was in context of the child. “You should go, then. The natural history museum will probably also be fun for her, hm?”

—

Vic pressed her lips together and nodded, because she didn’t know what else to say.  Or to do, for that matter.  This conversation was bringing up far too many ‘what-ifs’ that Vic spent her time ignoring because they were too horrifying to think about.  Now, under Inge’s unsure gaze, they raced to the forefront of her mind.  As Rosie grew older, as she grew to understand what the world around her and what she was, there was an inevitable consequence hanging in the air, one that sucked the air from Vic’s lungs and forced her back to feelings she’d been attempting to bury away for 300 years.  Surely their diametrically opposed natures would one day be the downfall of their relationship.  She couldn’t hide who she was from Rosie, not anymore than she could force her to deny who she was-... but what did that mean for their future?  Ever stubborn, Vic made it seem that there wasn’t a problem.  Only a slight twitch in her brow might have implied otherwise, to someone paying close attention.

“I can’t very well deny her of her nature, Inge.  That would be…unethical.  It would be wrong.  And it would leave her questioning things that she shouldn’t have to worry about.”  She tucked a hair behind her ear and blinked, willing the tears that threatened not to fill her eyes.  “I have my ways of… hiding myself from those that threaten me.  I’ll find someone to teach her what she needs to know, but I’ll teach her about the rest of the world, too.  It doesn’t need to be as black and white as you’re implying it’ll be.”  But it would be, wouldn’t it?  Letting Rosie learn about hunting and slayers… about the truth of the monstrosity of what she was, it would be the beginning of the end.  

“I don’t know that I’ve ever been much happier”, she replied quietly, knowing that alone was where her juxtaposition stemmed from.  Still, she found herself chuckling at Inge’s next comment.  She wasn’t sure anyone had ever referred to her as ‘gentle’.  “You speak of motherhood like you know something about it”, she commented, letting her unasked question fill the space around them.  

“I assumed it would be, yes.”   There was a far-off look in her eyes as Vic wondered just what a trip to New York might look like.  Rosie had never left Wicked’s Rest before.  “And the art museum, too.  She’s quite taken with art, as of late.  This week, anyway.  Perhaps next week she’ll be interested in horses again.”  

—

What a strange reunion this was. Inge had experienced plenty of reunions in her time (that was how an undead life went – lots of coming and going of relations) but none were quite so tense so fast. She wanted to be nothing but happy for Vic, but she spoke of the ethics of keeping a child from being a slayer. As if it wasn’t a gift to not indoctrinate them into indiscriminate murder. And who was she, to judge a mother on how she was raising a child? Vera had been gone before she was dead, the wedge that had grown between mother and daughter a constantly evolving thing until finally they had been definitively severed.

“Her nature? Do you suggest it is nature and not nurture that makes slayers go after us?” She tried to keep her tone to a lower volume but she felt a wave of indignation pass through her. “Maybe you shouldn’t leave her in ignorance, but come now — another slayer? We’ve plenty.” But it had been slayers who’d given Vic the child, so maybe there was more that. She bristled at the notion that it wasn’t as black and white, “Slayers never consider shades of gray in my experience, either. But — I do trust … your judgment.” Did she? How well did she really know Vic?

She wanted it to be so simple, to be happy for a friend who found happiness in motherhood. But Inge was bitter and ruined and felt like she’d flayed herself in front of the other. Did she wear it on her sleeve so obviously, then? Leila had pricked through it too. “I do. Did. It’s in the past now.” She didn’t want to talk of it, of children that grew older than their mothers and died before them. 

“Good,” she said, “A child interested in art is a promising one. But the changing interests…” She did remember that, too. Vera had been a girl of many passions. “It’d be nice, to go. I’m sure.”

—

Vic picked at the tablecloth beneath her fingernails, feeling a small spot unravel as she dug into the fabric.  She didn’t know what to say, because she felt at an impasse. She respected Inge a great deal, but it seemed like her opinion on this matter would do more to upset her than anything.  “I suggest that hunters have senses, abilities, and culture.  Culture which includes protecting the secret of supernatural existence, not just eliminating it.  Do you suggest I should have her ignore these senses, instead?”  There were plenty of hunters who weren’t killing machines, Vic knew this first hand.  A decade ago she would have called them weak.  

If truth were to be told, she didn’t know what the best route was when it came to Rosie being a slayer.  She did not ask for her parents to die, nor did she ask to be raised by the very creature that she was born to kill.  “I will sit in on her training.  I will not allow anyone to traumatize her.  But it will be up to her to decide who she wants to be in life.”  Which meant one day Rosie might hate her, or… or worse.  A kind of worse she wouldn’t let herself imagine.  

She felt the urge to reach forward and squeeze Inge’s hand, wondering how much more of the story there was here.  There really had been not much substance to their relationship in the past, but now, it felt like everything was tumbling out. “I’m sorry.  For whoever you might have lost.”  She looked down at her watch, noting that time was passing faster than she had expected it to.  

“I didn’t realize it had gotten so late”, she muttered, worried that this might be the end and that their friendship would never spark.  “I don’t want you to…You should know that I’ve thought about this situation long and hard, Inge.  I’m just trying to do right by her.  Because she deserves it, more than anyone.”

—

“You can protect the secrecy of the supernatural without calling yourself a hunter. It is in the name, Vic. They hunt. Their existence is built on murder,” Inge said icily. To her, it was different from the predatory existence of the undead — they needed to prey on others in other to survive, could not live without nightmares, blood or flesh. Hunters didn’t need to maim, chase and murder in order to breathe their mortal breaths, though. “I don’t — you can raise her aware of her senses, of what she comes from but why would you rear her to be that?”

The scars on her body would have throbbed dully if there was any blood in her system, so in stead there was a mental itch. She was overstepping, she knew. It was bad praxis to criticize a mother, but it was easy to do from the side. She swallowed. “It’s — I’m sure you’ll do well by her.” Just do right by our kind too, she wanted to add. 

She felt exhausted, which was a strange thing to feel as a creature of the night who didn’t need sleep. Memories of Vera were sharp, however, as was the knowledge that Vic would watch her child grow old and die. She wanted to say that the undead were not supposed to have children, that such a thing was reserved for the living — but what good would it do? Inge had been a human when Vera had been born. Vic had happened upon a child. Life happened and more importantly, death did. “Me too,” she said, voice somewhat small. She swallowed her warnings. Grieving someone who wasn’t dead yet wasn’t something she wanted to make Vic do.

She frowned at the comment, “I suppose it did,” she said. “I — I know.” At least, she figured she did. She felt bitter and ugly, like a pessimist and a bad friend. If Vic and her were still friends, or could rekindle it now. “I didn’t – don’t mean to be harsh. If you’d like, maybe we can … She can come to my studio with you, if you’d like. We could see each other again.” 

—

“It’s not up to you or me what she chooses to call herself. It’s up to her guardian to give her all the information possible, to nurture and guide until she’s old enough to decide for herself.  Until then, she’ll be raised as she would have had tragedy not befallen her family.”  It was enough that Rosie was ripped from someone who would have a natural maternal bond with her, worse that she’d been given to someone she was born to kill.  Vic didn’t often think about this, because the consequences of raising her how nature intended were innumerable.  Thinking about it only made her second guess her choices.  In an effort to quell the tension, Vic hadn’t been holding eye contact with Inge, but her companion’s comment about murder changed that.  “And how is that any different from our existence?”, she asked sharply and defensively, staring daggers into Inge.  

But there was the catch 22.  It was the problem with her whole change of heart.  How could she still find value in what hunters did while befriending vampires and trying to rescue them?  How could she ethically raise a daughter while teaching her it was okay to kill her mother’s friends, just for existing? Conversations like this brought too much to light- it was too hard to question how things were going when she was already so unsure of their outcome.

But there, again, was a spark of kindness from Inge.  A permission, even, to make the choices she thought was best.  She didn’t know if she would have granted someone else that grace had the situation been reversed.  Vic sat back in her chair, letting out a low breath.  

“I think she’d like that”, Vic said, although her voice was smaller than earlier.  Her eyebrows were furrowed in contemplation, like they so often were.  “I think she’d like to meet you, too.”  She stood up, pulling her bag over her shoulder with a shaky breath.  Reaching in, she pulled out a business card with her phone number and business instagram plastered in bright, bold letters.  “Will you send me your information?  We can set up a time to make this all happen.”  Inge would meet Rosie, Vic was sure, and understand how important raising her was.  She’d understand that no one could mother her without putting meticulous thought into every decision that was made about her life.  She’d understand, and give Vic her blessing, and then Vic could stop worrying that she was making a huge mistake.  

[bountyhaunter]

TIMING: Current LOCATION: Daiyu's house PARTIES: Alistair @deathsplaything, Emilio @mortemoppetere, Vic @natusvincere, Zane & Daiyu @bountyhaunter SUMMARY: A conspiracy meets to plan an ambush. CONTENT WARNINGS: N/A

She had never had this many people in her house. Scratch that: Daiyu had never had people in her house, ever. Not this one, anyway, this small cabin that she’d been able to rent through hunter connections and had been living in for about half a year. It was kind of overwhelming, if she was honest, but she never was to herself and so she didn’t pay it any mind. 

She returned to the living room with a stack of mismatched cups and a bottle of soda, placing them on the table where a few other key ingredients for a strategy meeting already resided. A package of grocery store chocolate chip cookies and a bowl of potato chips, for one, and then all the bits and bobs of paper like the blueprints and guard schedules Alistair had provided. She looked around the strange combination of people — from Emilio to Vic (who she’d just thought a very sweet suburban mom up until recently) to a guy named Zane (whoever that was) to Alistair. Brutus and Nugget were hopefully entertaining each other in corner. She’d be very sad if they didn’t get on.

“Alright,” she said, ignoring the cups and soda now that she’d placed them on the table. These people were capable of pouring themselves a drink and she wasn’t very good at hosting, anyway. To the dismay of her father — but well, that wouldn’t be the main thing that’d bother him about this ordeal. “Where were we? Us …” She gestured at Alistair and herself. “On the inside. We’ll make sure there’s not a lot of peeps on schedule.” Daiyu tucked her legs underneath herself as she got comfortable on the floor. She didn’t have enough chairs. She barely had enough forks for one person. “Whatever. Getting in’s not the issue.” She was down to brush over those details, because something else was nagging at her. Daiyu wasn’t very good at boring planning details. She pulled a messy list of captives toward her. She’d worked on that over the past week. “What do we do about the people?”

—

Tension turned his body into a coiled spring, ready to leap up at the slightest irritation. Emilio stood in the kitchen with his back against the wall, eyes darting periodically between Alistair and the woman he didn’t know with the occasional uncertain glance towards Daiyu. The only person in this room he trusted fully was the one he’d brought himself, and he was already feeling a little guilty for dragging Zane along. 

He looked to the table, to the blueprints and papers and things he probably wouldn’t understand. This level of planning was new to Emilio. Most of the time, his plans consisted of ‘go in, kill what needs killing, try not to die.’ (Except for the ones that omitted the last point — he tried not to let himself think of those for the moment.) This kind of strategizing was foreign to him. He wasn’t entirely sure what he was doing here. Part of him wanted to protest, wanted to point out that it wasn’t necessary for the blade to know what the hand was planning. Point him in the direction where he needed to slice, and he’d do it. Everything else seemed wasted on him. 

But… he wasn’t sure he trusted any of them, even Daiyu, enough not to know the plan. If he was going to put Zane’s stupid life on the line, he was going to make sure the plan was a decent one. He owed the vampire that, at least. Reaching into his pocket, he retrieved a flask and took a swig, ignoring the soda and snacks Daiyu had set out. This was more his style. “Case by case, I think,” he piped in, glancing at the list Daiyu had provided. “Some of them might not be the kind we want to put back into the world.” But Emilio wouldn’t leave anyone locked up. A quick death was kinder, he thought; he’d give them that. It was what he’d want for himself, when the time came. “Okay. So, we need to… look into this. Right? See why they were brought in, decide what to do with who. We don’t want to send serial killers loose on the town.”

—

It had taken a lot from Alistair to leave Tommy at the apartment to come to this meeting. The two had become dependent on each other since the loss of Melody and both of their worlds crumbled from under them. The only thing that propelled Alistair forward on this mission was that his life was on the line, and there was no way they would leave Tommy alone. They owed everything they could to make this out alive. And if that meant going against The Good Neighbors and Winnifred herself? Then so be it. Brutus had been playing with Nugget in the corner, but Alistair gave the command, and Brutus ceased his playtime and made his way over to his owner, eager to work. 

A case-by-case basis was necessary. Alistair remembered a lot of the names that went into those cages and remembered the atrocities that were committed. “Winnifred has a better-kept log that has names, dates of imprisonment, and reasoning,” Alistair spoke up, arms crossed over their chest as they stared blankly forward. “Daiyu and I could call her to the keep to discuss overcrowding,” Alistair suggested, knowing that the keep was getting seriously overcrowded. It was something they’d have to talk about eventually, whether Winnifred wanted to or not. “She’d bring her book with her and make decisions for ‘the good of the town.’ or whatever she tells herself.” 

“Listen, this mission is not going to be easy,” Alistair warned, hand gripping around the hold of Brutus’s harness. “People are going to get hurt, people are going to die. Not everyone you release will be happy to see you.” Alistair knew from experience how wily they could be. They knew they had to prepare for the worst, a spell that they’d already begun to prepare for. Alistair was going to die there, they knew they were. But they didn’t want anyone else to get killed along with them. If they could warn them of the dangers, they’d at least have done their part.

__

Vic had turned back home three times before she finally convinced herself to join this meeting.  This was why she’d joined the Good Neighbors in the first place, right?  To protect the vampires she’d suspected were being targeted and start the path toward righting the wrongs of her past.  Sure, she may have gotten a little distracted by the delicious little taste of neighborhood power joining the group had provided her (she’d made more citizen’s arrests in the last month than probably her entire time in Wicked’s Rest, but littering was down a good 10%). But after finally overhearing the truth from Alistair and Daiyu a few days ago, it felt like something substantial was finally about to happen.

As she sat straight-backed in the chair that had been offered to her, pursing her lips at the menu offered to them, a punch of guilt invaded her stomach, scolding her for even thinking of freeing monsters from their cages.  She had known for nearly 300 years that they deserved to die, and if she were in this meeting three years earlier, she would have elected to kill them all on sight.  What kind of world was she leaving for Rosie-... for humanity… if she let monsters like herself walk free?  But then her mind flipped again, to all the work she’d done to be better, to all the ‘monsters’ that had proved her wrong… Why couldn’t this have been easier?

“Why do we get to decide which of them deserves death?” Vic chirped from her corner, the first thing she’d uttered the whole meeting.  “Is that not just as reprehensible as what Winnifred is doing?  Who’s deciding morality here?”

__

Zane had rarely felt as out of place as he did here, working very hard to piece together the bits of information Emilio had provided with the people in the room and the words they were exchanging. It probably didn’t help that he’d chosen to stand, wanting to fade into the background with his ill-defined role here but realizing it probably made him look like Emilio’s bodyguard or something equally silly. How the slayer would have seethed at that notion. Moving to sit now seemed worse but he did uncross his arms, trying to match names and what they were to the faces in the room. 

It didn’t take long for the conversation to turn grim - who gets to live. He’d had this conversation with Emilio, about how locking up things like Zane wasn’t a viable option. Not humane, either, especially for something that would practically live forever. It still made his skin crawl but the naivety he’d possessed last year existed no more, gone up in flames when that barn did. “Someone has to do it,” he found himself speaking up, not sure how much of it was his own opinion and how much was simply support for Emilio, which seemed his only true role here. “At least this way it’s… informed.” Was he even supposed to take part in the conversation? Well, too late now. 

—

This was why she shouldn’t get caught up in affairs. Not human affairs, not supernatural affairs — none. Daiyu functioned best on her own. If she had never joined up, she would have never known about this and she would have been able to spend this night watching Buffy. But here she was. Hosting the revolution for a place that should perhaps not be overthrown, hearing people talk about what she preferred to avoid. Morals. She tended to let herself be led by the bounty board, not by what felt good.

She started stuffing a cookie into her mouth so she had an excuse not to talk (which was nonsensical, considering she talked with a full mouth all the time) and felt herself grow agitated. “Yeah, we could totally get the book off her, no doubt,” she said, “Whatever, but — even those are — you know.” Vic was making good points. All of them were. She wanted to slam her head into the table.

“Way I see it, Winnifred isn’t … she’s just a human. Trying to do what she reckons is best, but she doesn’t … she’s clueless, yeah?” She glanced at Emilio. “Cortez and I, we’re hunters. We know this shit. We’ve been raised for this. We know what’s a risk, what’s not.  What beast to take out in the woods and which to let run its course, ya know? So it’s the same as that. Just … more …” She wiped a crumb off the table. “Premeditated. Whatever. Most important is that it ends here. And yeah, for many that’s gonna mean it ends-ends.” Daiyu’s job was to figure out who in town should be targeted, hadn’t it? She knew in some cases why some of the prisoners had been put there. She’d made that judgment. None of them were innocent. (None of them at this table were either. Well, maybe Zane and Vic, she wasn’t sure.) “I’ll make sure there’s plenty of weapons around for when push comes to shove.”

—

Zane had his back, though Emilio wondered how much of what he was saying was what he really believed and how much came from his perception that he still owed Emilio for what happened in that barn a year ago now. He didn’t bring Zane along to have a yes man in his corner, didn’t want someone who would agree with everything he said. He needed Zane for the same reason he needed Teddy, or Wynne, or Xó: because sometimes, Emilio led with something that wasn’t his head. Sometimes, the past got muddled in with the present, and nothing was quite right. If he was making the wrong choice here, he needed someone to tell him that. He needed it to be someone he trusted, someone who understood him. He had to hope that Zane was speaking his mind and not saying what he thought Emilio wanted to hear. He spared the vampire a quick glance, hoping to communicate all of this in a simple look. It was a lot of pressure to put on an expression that really wasn’t much different than his usual.

He glanced to the necromancer, scoffing quietly. “I don’t think anyone here walked in that door thinking this would be easy,” he replied flatly, crossing his arms over his chest. “If it were easy, we wouldn’t need this meeting.” This was going to be rough. It was going to be hard and it was going to be dangerous and people were probably going to die. People at this table were probably going to die. Emilio felt a surge of guilt for the fact that he hadn’t shared his plan to participate in this with any of the important people in his life. If he died doing this, none of them would know until after. They’d probably be upset about that. 

He nodded as Daiyu spoke, glancing around the table. “Look, I think… These people got into this shit thinking they were doing something good.” He let his eyes go from Daiyu to the clean-cut looking woman beside her to the necromancer. Maybe all of them had gotten into the Good Neighbors with good intentions, and maybe they hadn’t. Emilio wasn’t sure it mattered. What mattered more was their intentions now. “Some of the people locked up there are bad. There’s no denying that. But some of them aren’t. Some of them are just people who have made mistakes, maybe, and they can learn from this. And the ones who can’t…” He trailed off, clenching his jaw. “I would rather die,” he said simply. “If I had to choose between being locked away for as long as these people live or dying for what I’ve done, I would rather die. It’s better. It’s faster for them. It’s safer for everyone else. It’s better. So this is what I’m doing. If someone has a problem with it, you can try to stop me, but something tells me we’re all here because we’re on the same page, yes? So we figure out who gets what, and we figure out how to give it to them. That’s what we do. Anyone who wants to leave can leave, but I’m all in.”

—

When it came to killing, Alistair was no saint. They’d done it before, they’d probably do it again. They’d done it for the sake of saving Tommy, they’d done it to save countless others. But they’d never killed someone without someone else benefitting from it. They’d never killed on a scale such as this. And that’s what they were doing, wasn’t it? All those people who couldn’t be set free were going to die. It caused Alistair to shift their weight from foot to foot, head downcast as they thought about the implications of taking more lives. They wanted no part of it anymore. Still, if it had to be done to keep people safe, then the benefits outweighed the costs in their minds. 

“There are alarms.” Alistair piped up, looking through Brutus’s eyes to point in the correct placements. “Once when the front gate is breached, once when the button on the cages is hit.” Alistair pointed to the center control panel with a frown. “If you want to set them all free, that’s where you want to go.” He tapped his finger against the paper before removing it.

Alistair pulled out a set of keys that Daiyu had. “This one opens cages.” They explained, pulling out a rather large key and laying it on the table, then pulling out a passkey. “That’ll get you in the building without detection. We’ve made sure that security is lighter that day by putting ourselves on duty.” Alistair put the pass key down on the table alongside the large ring of keys. “Daiyu and I will stick together, so we don’t need both of us to have this on us.” 

“As for who lives and who dies, we’ll deal with that when the time comes when we have that book from Winnifred. What are we going to do about her?” They implored, knowing that Winnifred would go down kicking and screaming if it came to it. “She’s a human, but she’s a human that thinks what she’s doing is justified and within reason.” 

__

Vic had known some of them were hunters before she arrived.  Of course there’d be hunters in a situation like this.  For years, hunters were probably the people she felt most comfortable with, as long as her bracelet was functioning properly.  She was practically surrounded by them, whether at her old bartending job where they frequented or her more nefarious meetings where she was trading information about vampires for cash.  But now, with everything between Rosie and her change of heart, she found herself actively avoiding them.  She felt herself toying with the cloaking bracelet as they argued.  

As Emilio spoke, Vic couldn’t deny the familiar feeling that fluttered through her stomach, the one she felt after she was presumably betrayed by her first love, and again after she was sired.  “I’m still not comfortable with us being so egotistical as to think we get to be the deciding factor, but…”  People were still important.  Humanity was still important, as much as it sucked.  There had to be a nuance between the belief that all vampires were monsters and all vampires were saints.  Her sire was no saint.  Neither was she.  She sighed before she continued.  “It seems with the time crunch, it’s our only option.”  She wasn’t happy with it, because morality in general felt so gray these days, but she couldn’t sit by and watch them all be prisoners.  Not with everything she knew now.

The group that they had gathered seemed valuable, and willing to work together, and for a moment, she doubted her place amongst them.  Would she be much help?  “There won’t be much use in us trying to get through to her”, Vic said.  She was the newest member of the group, the one who knew Winnifred the least, but she knew more than her fair share about having the wrong idea about supernaturals and using it to try to rid them of the world.  “Perhaps she needs a taste of her own medicine.  At least until we figure out what to do with the others.”

__

It would be even more difficult when the time came. This discussion was one thing, even looking over names on paper might be easy but when the time came… Zane wondered briefly if rehabilitation was an option. Where was the line? For humans, those who would eventually perish during a life sentence, there were cases of atrocities bad enough that redemption wasn’t in the cards, would never be on the cards. Was this scenario that much different? They did lack a judge and jury but if murder, especially repeat offenses, meant a life sentence, wasn’t that what they were executing in a way? At least for the ones like him, hadn’t they already used up all their allotted time and simply cheated death? The brief ethics course in nursing school hadn’t exactly prepared him for this. 

Emilio was staring him down, face unreadable as always. Did he not want him to talk? Or maybe not agree? Who knew, honestly. At least it seemed settled that not everyone would be released into the wild from their prison, the older man with the dog moving on to plans that made Zane feel eerily like this was a heist movie. The odds for an end scene showing how they pulled everything off smoothly with no casualties didn’t feel great, though. “What are we dealing with in terms of the people… running this? Are they all… human?” Zane found himself asking as they discussed the fate of the ring leader - it was hypocritical in some ways but the idea of harming humans didn’t sit well with him at all. It had been over a year but he still felt more of a kinship with them than his fellow undead. 

—

All of this went against all Daiyu had made herself know for the past years. She was a bounty hunter, plain and simple. The Good Neighbors had been a gig, a lucrative one at that — but she’d joined with that stupid notion of doing something good and it seemed she hadn’t given up on that. “We don’t touch that button, then. The one that opens everything at once. That’s disaster.” She looked at the keys, then at the would-be intruders. “Just get in with those, don’t raise any fucking alarms, and the first bit should be smooth. It’s when start opening the cages that we should be more alert.”

She took her list back. It had names, species, some transgressions on it. It wasn’t Winnifred’s color coded book, but it was something. “Let’s get through some, at fucking least. We’re here now.” She didn’t want many more of these meetings. Daiyu splayed it on the table, pointed at the name Mack Ross. “Like, I can tell you now what and how. She killed a buncha people, isn’t in control, which is …” She made a motion. “Ludacris, ‘cause it’s Mack fucking Ross. Then, Johnny no surname, he’s a vampire. You know, I think he’s alright, he loves Snicker Snackers, he could totally do an animal based diet, maybe.” She pointed to another name, “Svetlana, serial student killer. Stake.” Daiyu motioned staking a vampire, wooshing sound and all. She pointed at another name. “Chang, dunno his first name. Kept the bones of all his kills after he ate ‘em whole. Probs best to not release him into the world again.”

To speak about killing undead and shapeshifters was something she did with an eerie ease, as it was who she was brought up to be. Later that night, she’d reflect on her lackadaisical attitude with distaste, but for now it was something to hold onto. She felt something stir in her stomach at the mention of Winnifred, though, and her eyes moved to Emilio. Hunters were supposed to protect humans. Winnifred had tried to do the same, foolishly and cruelly, but she had. “We destroy the keep. We make sure they don’t make one again. And yeah, all human. Or like, human with some zest, like Al and I.” She wasn’t going to kill them. “So yeah. We destroy their means and that’s that.”

—

“Agreed,” Emilio said, nodding towards Daiyu. “Setting everyone free at once would be a bloodbath.” The more violent offenders would kill each other, the ones offended by the time they’d lost behind bars would kill anyone who got close. And that was to say nothing of the ones who might just be hungry. That wasn’t the sort of chaos any of them could afford. They needed to do it slowly. It would be risky, sure, but… less risky than setting loose a whole slew of problems. “Whose cage gets opened first, then?” The ones with the best shot of actually getting out would be the ones freed in the very beginning. But beyond that… “Any prisoners who might help us out? Without killing any of us, ideally.” His eyes darted towards Alistair and Daiyu, who’d both had some kind of a hand in the… acquisitions. 

Daiyu, at least, seemed to be on the same page. She was already pointing to her book, and Emilio felt a little uneasy at the first name she pointed out. Mack Ross. Kaden and Monty were both fond of her, weren’t they? “We should spring her early on.” He pointed to Mack’s name. “At the beginning.” He offered no explanation as to why. “Johnny no-name, too. Get the ones out who we think will need the… least amount of help staying honest. The ones we know we’re going to kill, we should get to last. That way if something happens and we can’t get to everyone…” At least they could free the ones who needed freeing before going out in a blaze of glory. He let the thought hang unfinished. Looking at the list, he pointed at another name. “That’s my client’s friend. We free her early, too.” After all, that was why he’d gotten dragged into this whole mess to begin with.

Winnifred, though… That was more complicated. He met Daiyu’s eye, then glanced to Zane. Did it matter if a human didn’t think they were doing harm, as long as harm was done? How much did good intentions matter, in a case like this? Emilio had to believe they meant something. After all the bad shit he’d done with good intentions, he wasn’t sure he was the best one to judge. “We don’t have to kill any of them.” But would he stop any of the prisoners, if they tried? He wasn’t sure. “We destroy the place,” he agreed. “How… detailed are their records? We should destroy those, too. Make it impossible for them to start up again next week or something.”

—

Staying silent as the others deliberated who lived and who died, it was like he was healing people all over again. The wellbeing and life for one, was the only way to help another. Some of the people who were locked up in those cages were less monsters than Alistair was, and they knew it. They stayed silent as they deliberated, then perked up at the name of Mack Ross. “Yes, definitely free Mack,” Alistair spoke up finally, knowing that she was a sweet girl who had already been through enough. What she did to land her in the Good Neighbor’s in the first place be damned. They, like Emilio, also offered no further comment. 

“I’m all for destroying the place.” They muttered, knowing that their opinion on matters held little sway. “Winnifred will fight for this place, it’s her baby, it’s been her sole purpose for so long,” Alistair explained, tapping a finger against their other arm as they thought. “The records are kept here,” Alistair spoke, tapping the map to a back room. “It’s got fireproofing, so you’ll need to go in there first.” Alistair frowned, realizing the problem with that. “Only Winnifred has access to that room, not even I can get in there.” 

Winnifred had good intentions, but she didn’t know what the real world was really like. She saw what she wanted to see, and turned a blind eye to all the rest that made the rosy picture anything else. They’d learned that after being close to her after all these years. “There will be after-effects of this we should think about as well. Just because the keep is gone doesn’t mean they won’t try to reform somehow. People will always find a way. The top hitters are the ones you’ll want to keep an eye on, like Winnifred if you decide to leave her in the ruins of her keep.”

__

Vic shifted in her seat, uncomfortable as the names down the list were being read.  None of them sounded familiar, even the first one that Daiyu seemed to imply would be well known, but the talk surrounding them didn’t make her any less uncomfortable.  What had kept her from the same fate as these vampires?  What if they were freshly sired, or hadn’t had a chance to learn yet?  What if an old, grumpy bitch of a vampire had betrayed her own kind and caused them on a path of destruction, somehow?  She stood up from her chair suddenly, crossing her arms over her chest.  “You don’t have to speak of this so crassly.  It’s almost as if you’ll enjoy killing them.  If that’s the case, you’re no better than them.”

She was no better than her old self, if she was allowing this to happen.  Perhaps she could find a way to rescue those they were intending to harm.  She could buy a property in the outskirts of town, far away from Rosie, and teach them to be less monstrous, somehow.  It felt wholly cruel to take someone’s second chance away.  What would these people say about her if she had found herself in the keep? Their words sounded muffled around her as she concocted it. Victoria Larsson, reformed vampire hater and only feeds from what she calls ‘ethically sourced’.  Currently brainwashing a slayer child.  Monster. Stake. 

She sat back down with a huff.  “So our moral code includes deciding that some prisoners die for their crimes, but all of the people who locked them up just get to roam free with some property damage?  Alistair is right.  They’re just going to find a way to do this again.  Maybe with more permanent consequences, as a backlash to our success.  Letting them walk without consequence would be as foolish as not doing anything at all.

__

The one with the notes, Daiyu, started moving down the list in a way that so clearly established her as a hunter. It was crass but not necessarily… wrong. There seemed to be a distinction made between pure malevolence and mistakes, a lack of control. Zane felt relief, realized that if his own transgressions were being judged, he would have stood a chance at this proposed reform. “Is it safe to assume no one’s been… feeding them?” he wondered as Emilio suggested letting the previously captive help. “Because I can… provide blood.” He didn’t offer any explanation as to how - skimming from the hospital seemed like a necessary evil in this scenario. 

—--

Daiyu felt her stomach sink as Vic chastised her, eyes blazing as she looked at her, “You don’t know shit about shit, lady,” she bit, before trying to turn to other matters. A headache was forming behind her eyes and she looked at the list before pulling it towards her again. With a pen she found somewhere on the table she added some asterisks next to names they’d discussed and X’s next to others. “This isn’t about being better or worse than ‘em, it’s about ending it. So. What the fuck do you suggest we do about the rest of the good neighbors? Should we punish ‘em all? Hang ‘em from their thumbs or something? What about you? Me? Alistair? Should we throw ourselves under the rubble to repent?” She was mostly talking to Vic now, even if she spoke to all of them. They were humans. Daiyu might not really keep to a code, but hurting humans? You didn’t do that. That was the main hunter rule. 

She tried to refocus. “The cages are split in different rooms. We can make a plan, an order of operations. I can … Alistair and I can list who seem aggressive.” Daiyu considered suggesting they just kill them all, but that was too crass, even for her. “We just light all the shit on fire. Getting a flamethrower shouldn’t be hard.” She would like to have one on hand, anyway, for totally legal reasons. 

She glanced at Zane. “Sometimes. When there’s stuff. I give them some of the … leftovers from my regular hunts sometimes. But if you’ve got proper shit, sure. Smuggling stuff in isn’t too hard.” Getting it out was what was harder. “Might be better if the vamps aren’t starved. Can you get brains too?”

—

“I don’t think trying to keep serial killers off the streets makes us shitty people,” Emilio added, nostrils flaring with brief irritation. “We’re not talking about killing the people who were tossed in cages for fucking up. We’re talking about the ones who carve people’s fucking hearts out for fun. You really want people like that running around this town?” The thing was, he understood where the Good Neighbors must have been coming from, in the beginning. Their philosophy wasn’t that far off his own. The only real difference was that Emilio killed the people he deemed worthy of his judgment, while the Good Neighbors locked theirs away. In Emilio’s opinion, killing was kinder. In the opinion of others… Well. There were different schools of thought.

He glanced to Daiyu, nodding his head. “Good idea,” he agreed. “Go in with a plan for the order, get it done as quick as possible. And destroy everything we can. Maybe they try to pick up again later,” he looked to Vic, acknowledging her concern, “but it won’t be easy. We take away their base. We show them that their plans can go wrong. We put the fear in them. If they’re smart, they go underground, try to put distance between themselves and the people they locked up. If they’re not smart…” He trailed off, letting it hang. Odds were, they wouldn’t have to kill any of the people involved with the Good Neighbors. If they didn’t disappear… someone else would take care of that part. Emilio found he didn’t have any real desire to stop that. He wondered if he ought to feel guilty.

He nodded at Zane’s question, looking at Daiyu again. Her smuggling shit in was part of what had clued him in that she might be willing to join his side of this shit. “They’re probably not well fed,” he replied, “so more blood is better. I… might know someone who can get us brains.” He grimaced, unsure he wanted to ask Monty for a favor. But if the zombie was really as into peace as he claimed, he’d probably be on board. And Emilio figured he owed it to him to let him know what was going on with Mack, anyway. He’d want someone to tell him, if it were Nora or Wynne. 

—

For a while, Alistair stayed silent, listening as people listed off what to do, about what they would do with what. For a moment, they found themselves completely detaching from the conversation, dissociating as they thought about the very real possibility of dying here. Some people were locked up who wanted them dead, they’d been too close to Winnifred for too long. They were responsible for their cellmates disappearing and never returning. If anything, Alistair was just as much a monster as those who were locked behind those cell doors. It’s something they’d been wrestling with for quite some time, but now? Now they had to finally address it. 

They couldn’t let themselves simply die, they had to continue preparing for the worst-case scenario. While everyone else planned who to set free and what to do, Alistair was making a mental checklist of what they needed to gather for a spell. “There’s no world where Winnifred wouldn’t come after us if she was allowed to walk away unscathed.” They finally spoke up after some time, still distant, still somewhere else in their mind. 

“I say we let the prisoners deal with her.” It was harsh, it was crass, but it’s what they thought. “I’m sure the prisoners will take care of Daiyu and me if we’re not careful,” Alistair added, crossing their arms over their chest. “We’ve been to the keep countless times, they know our faces.” They spoke to Daiyu, though they didn’t look over to her. “It’s something to keep in mind, that’s all.” They nervously scratched at the side of their nose, knowing that they were opening a can of worms with their words.

__

Vic felt her grip tighten around the arm of the chair, staring Daiyu in the eyes as her sharp words echoed around the room.  For her part, her expression remained stoic and still, but inside, she was seething.  “Those who wish to take down positions of power inherently have to be better.  It’s the whole goddamn point of what we’re doing.”  This was a bad idea, she should have never agreed to join this overtaking- never eavesdropped on Daiyu and Alistair in the first place.  “I suggest that we do anything other than stick our thumbs up our asses and hope for the best.”  Perhaps she should be one of the ones to be punished.  Not for crimes involving the Good Neighbors, but for all she’d done to vampires for centuries.   

But Emilio had a point.  Some of the people in the cages were bad.  That was the long and short of it.  The problem, to her, came with who got to decide what bad was.  “No”, she said quietly, and she stood up again, walking to the other side of the room in a huff.  She wasn’t used to having to work with people, or having to compromise on her beliefs to make  someone else’s plan work for someone else.  But she wasn’t naive to the fact that she was the newbie in all of this, and that everyone here thought they were doing the right thing.  No matter how ignorant some of them sounded.

She glanced at Emilio, then at Daiyu, and then at the others, feeling calmer than she had a moment ago.  “Then I think it’s worth discussing continuing to meet up after everything.  Periodically, to make sure she doesn’t try this again.”

She raised her eyebrows at Alistair’s suggestion, not hating it in the slightest.  It would be the truest justice to let those that were scorned by Winnifred be the ones to decide her fate.  Even if it were just the supposed ‘good’ ones.  She looked between the rest of the group, eager to hear their thoughts.

__

All of the arguing wasn’t exactly inspiring hope. This was a group of people clearly not accustomed to working in a team, basically a bunch of Emilios struggling to find ways to make this collaboration work. Zane wondered if he was the only one in here with actual experience of working in a team - granted, a team focused on saving lives and not… whatever this was. “We’re not gonna get far if the four of you tear each other’s heads off, first,” he muttered, finally moving from the perceived safety of his position backed against the wall. “It’s a shit situation and there’s obviously not going to be a conclusion everyone is comfortable with. So we’re all going to be uncomfortable and really morally compromised and we either deal with it or actual, good people are going to continue to rot away in cells.” It had come out a bit more… scolding than intended and he backed down again, arms once more crossing over his chest. “Up to you, I guess,” he added, withdrawn and hoping he hadn’t overstepped any boundaries as the ‘random fifth addition’. 

Maybe all of this would work. Maybe it wouldn’t. Honestly, it probably wouldn’t and something would go wrong. Zane thought about the last ‘jail break’ he’d been a part of. It had definitely gone wrong but… overall, it had been worth it. All he could hope was that this would be worth it, too. And he needed to remember to ask Emilio later where in the world he was procuring brains from.

—

It was easy to keep looking at Vic. To stare her down and take her words and consider throwing the soda bottle at her head. “Then you can fuck off if you want. There’s no better. There’s just ending it. And we are better, for ending their suffering, rather than keeping them there to rot.” Daiyu’s eyes glared darkly at Zane, another person she barely knew who was suddenly mounting a moral high horse as if there was any morality to be found here. Violence begot violence. This would ripple out. It was just another punch thrown in a never ending brawl. “Fine.”

Speaking of brawls, she’d prefer one of those rather than planning this. “M’fine with meeting up after this.” Then, to Alistair: “She can try to come after me. I wish her a ton of luck fighting her hired muscle.” Daiyu didn’t think herself above harm, but there was no way that Winnifred would win in a fight against her. “Best to keep her away from the Keep when we destroy it, if you ask me. Not alert her and all that shit. Just more trouble.” She rubbed her forehead. “And yeah, people will be pissed. I can deal. I’ve dealt with pissed off supernaturals before.” Kind of part of the job description. “Will watch your back though.” 

She wanted to beckon Nugget over and bury her face in his fur before rushing out and going for a run (where she punched trees). In stead she exhaled. “Alright. Emilio and Zane, blood and brains duty. Alistair, spells. Me? Weapons.” She glared at Vic. “Explosives?” 

—

“If the people she’s fucked over want to go after her, that’s between her and them. I’m not risking my ass to save her from shit she brought onto herself,” Emilio added, crossing his arms over his chest. He wouldn’t kill Winnifred, but he wouldn’t stop anyone she’d wronged from doing so if they chose to. After all, he’d hope that anyone who came across him on his never ending quest for vengeance would offer the same courtesy. People got what they deserved, sometimes; Emilio had no intention of standing in the way of that. “If you two want to get out before we start freeing the ones who might be a little angrier at you than others, that’s fine, too,” he added, looking to Alistair and Daiyu. The latter, he figured, would turn down the offer. The former was more likely to take it.

Zane spoke up, and Emilio was reminded why he brought him in the first place. Having someone he knew he could trust was good, but having someone he knew he could trust who could also wrangle people in a way Emilio himself was incapable of? It was a good thing. It made Zane kind of perfect for this shit. He offered the vampire a curt nod. To the rest of the group, he said, “We shouldn’t wait long. They’re likely to figure out someone’s planning something soon. We need to act before then. Catch them off guard. If everyone knows what they’re doing… I say we move in sooner than later. Good with everyone?”

—

The slayer was giving Alistair an out, an out that they very well thought about taking before frowning and shaking their head. “I’m seeing this through.” They spoke, voice harsh and determined. There was so much that they still had to get done, and now was the time to expedite everything they’d worked so hard to accomplish. They were going to do this. They were doing it for Tommy, no one else. Not even themselves.  The plan was set into motion, and there was nothing to do but go ahead with it. From helping to create the Keep and the Good Neighbors to taking it down, Alistair knew they were nothing more than a hypocrite and a traitor. But if this is what it took to keep themselves alive, then so be it. They gripped Brutus’s lead tightly, then nodded their head. “Then so be it. As soon as we’re ready to go, we go. Not a moment later.” Alistair waved a hand, and the papers in the middle of the table began to move around until they were in a neat pile. “Then next we meet, we burn it all to the ground.”

[gossipsnake]

TIMING: Current LOCATION: Vic's House PARTIES:  Anita (@gossipsnake) & Vic (@natusvincere) CONTENT: n/a SUMMARY: Anita put's her knowledge of insects to use and tries to help Vic deal with a curious pest.

Vic was a very clean person.  Even for those who slept, she vehemently believed there was no excuse for not keeping an orderly, tidy home, especially where there were children involved.  This expectation, unlike her recent indecisiveness on the moral grayness of vampires, was not up for interpretation, nor did it allow for any mistakes on her part.  Her tidiness was meticulous, almost to a fault, which is why she knew she wasn’t to blame when the bug problem arose. 

At first, she thought it was a yellow apple, which was a bit odd, considering the only ones she and Rosie had picked at the orchard were bright red.  It had gone rotten, she was sure, like things in Wicked’s Rest had a nasty habit of doing, so it was in her hand on the way to the compost bin when it sprouted legs.  Vic, in such a state of shock (but totally not flustered like some ignoramus), practically screamed, and she tossed the apple into the air as if it were poison and as if she were a pale princess living with 7 very short men.  As if.  The apple-bug had crawled away, and for days after, the only place Vic could manage to catch a glimpse was in her conservatory.

Ugh, her conservatory.  Years and years of careful tending to fabulous flora and fauna were apparently gone to waste thanks to the apple-fuck.  Apple-bug.  All of the plants in her conservatory were dying, but everytime she got close to the goddamn thing, it rolled away.  Winnie had even had her turn at it, chasing the apple-bug around the room for hours and amusing Rosie immensely, but it was all for naught.  The exterminators were a bust too, even if she paid an arm and a leg for them, half of them looked at her as if she were insane when she suggested the pest looked like an apple.  The other half spent even longer chasing the beast around her house than Winnie did.  Fools, all of them.

The entomologist was her last choice to solve the matter, but Vic was nothing if not stubborn.  She wasn’t one for mincing words, either, so while her guest was right on time, she barely wasted time on exchanging pleasantries once she opened the door to greet her.  “Hello, Ms. Nieves, right?  It’s a pleasure to meet you.  Are you here to help me murder my fruit shaped enemy?”

___ 

It wasn’t exceptionally common for random people to reach out to Anita about persistent pests that were either bothering them or infesting their homes but it did happen on occasion. Whenever it did she would try to get a sense of what the problem was - especially since entomologists aren’t usually people’s first contact in these kinds of situations. She found that often she was a last resort and even more often the insects people were seeking help about weren’t the kind your regular exterminator knew how to handle. 

So when a strikingly beautiful woman had come to her for help with something she was calling an “apple-bug” that sprouted legs and ran around her home, well Anita simply couldn’t say no. “Dr. Nieves, actually,” she clarified with a coy smirk, “but you can just call me Anita.” She looked around the space, not immediately noticing anything out of the ordinary. “I am fully prepared for some insect murder in the event that capturing isn’t a viable option, which, from how you described this creature it sure sounds like capturing isn’t a strong option. Where did you see it last?” 

___ 

Vic felt herself redden at the faux-pas.  Doctor, of course.  How could she have insulted a woman of such esteem so soon into their meeting?  Would the good doctor simply refuse to help her now?  She might have, if the situation were reversed.  “I apologize, Doctor.  … Anita.  You may call me Vic.  Can I get you anything to drink?”  How fantastical it must have been to be able to demand someone address you as doctor as soon as they started to insult you.  Perhaps when Rosie was a bit older, she would get her doctorate.

At Anita’s question, Vic gestured to her conservatory, walking toward it and showing her the inside. “I apologize, these plants are usually in tip-top condition, but…” She looked back toward the woman, embarrassed.  “That devil fruit bug has been destroying all the plants in sight.  It’s insatiable, and has a particular affinity for hard to grow plant life”, she said, looking forlornly at her poor, dead orchids.

“I’ve had three different exterminators here and all of them were buffoons.  I should have known from the start that only a woman could fix this mess.”  

___ 

“No need for an apology,” Anita said with a gentle flick of her wrist, as though she was physically waiving it off. She set one of her bags down near the front door, keeping the other bag with some supplies on her shoulder. “Don’t need anything to drink now, but maybe we can share a celebratory drink after if we’re able to nab this pest.” Her eyes followed towards the conservatory, which was admittedly in rather sad shape. 

“I’ve seen plenty of plants in far worse condition. Part of my studies involved an overlap in entomology and plant pathology, observing how invasive species can create chaos in an otherwise balanced environment.” While the description of this devil fruit bug was somewhat vague, Anita had spent enough time outside over her past four years in this town observing the local oddities. She had come across this apple-like supernatural bug before. A nuisance for sure, but not one that couldn’t be handled. 

“Exterminators are only useful when they know what they are exterminating. Their job is brute force, not necessarily keen observation.” Anita elected to leave out any mention of her family’s extermination business, for the time being, not wanting to open the door to questions about her personal life. “I certainly hope I’m the woman for the job. I think together the odds are in our favor.” 

Heading further into the conservatory, Anita looked around for any obvious signs of the creature. “Do you have any fruit bearing plants?” 

_

 “I’ll hold you to that”, Vic said with a grin thinking of the bottle of wine that was waiting in the cabinet for such an occasion.  The death of the apple-fuck would be a momentous occasion, albeit one that might make Rosie and Winnie a bit sad.  They did seem to love their new, silly toy after all.  There was a sense of pride that came from Anita’s words, although Vic wondered if she might be just being polite.  “So… you’ve seen this thing before, then?  Is it an easy fix?”  There was a glimmer of hope that flashed across Vic’s features, before a scowl reappeared at her next words.

“That became obvious rather quickly”, Vic said, rolling her eyes at the thought.  “And you wouldn’t believe the nerve of them, arguing with me the way that they did.  It was almost as if they thought I was stupid.”  She had been strangely defensive to their arguments too, more so than normal,  but she refused to be treated like an idiot in her own home.  Thank goodness Rosie hadn’t been there to witness their rudeness.  

“None inside”, she said, stepping aside to give Anita a better view to observe their surroundings.  Her conservatory was a large room on the side of her home, the rounded walls covered with windows.  Framed drawings of flowers done by a child surrounded the doorframe, a small R in the corner of each growing less rudimentary with each one.  “I have a vegetable garden growing outside in the summer that I’ve yet to plant, and some raspberry bushes along the outside of the property, but nothing of the sort in here.  I will note that the ugly thing appeared here after a trip to the orchard, though.  The first time I saw it, I had assumed it was an apple.”  Vic didn’t know if she was rambling or if any of this information would even help, she just wanted the bug gone as soon as possible.  

_

“Please do,” Anita quipped back, not missing a beat. If she could flirt a bit and catch a strange supernatural insect? Well that was just a win-win kind of situation. “Never seen one infesting any place inside before, admittedly. First time I ever saw one was a few years back, in the spring and summer they can be found out in the woods wherever there are wild berry patches.” In her experience with these things, which was somewhat limited but undoubtedly more than any of the exterminators who had been through so far, they weren’t any real significant threat to anything other than plants. 

The arguing comment seemed interesting, she had heard stories of orchards infested with these critters having an correlative increase in arguments. But that was natural, wasn’t it? For arguments to follow stressful circumstances? Anita’s eyes surveyed the conservatory - it was a beautiful collection of plants. Windows let in natural sunlight that danced across the flowers and the leaves. “I can see why you’d want to protect these beauties from any infestations.” Her eyes landed on the drawings, clearly - or, well, hopefully - made by a child. “Who made these?” She asked, not wanting to make any presumptions. 

“It may have followed you in from the orchard,” Anita commented as she continued to try and spot the supernatural insect or at least any indication of where it had recently been. Her focus was on the plants that looked like they were dying, a sign it had been or was being drained of its nutrients. “You ever seen any strange bugs like this before?” Anita had seen these creatures before, there was not much about them that looked normal. This woman seemed unphased by the concept of a bug that looked like an apple with the ability to evade several exterminators. “Always some, unusual things in this town, huh?” 

_ 

Vic wasn’t used to whatever reciprocal energy was passing between her and Anita, but she couldn’t deny that she didn’t hate whatever feeling it produced.  Was this playful banter?  She wasn’t sure.  “I think it’s less of an infestation and more of a… home invasion.  Whatever it is, clearly didn’t intend on ending up here, but now it’s too stupid to let us catch it so we can put it back outside.”  She paused, turning from the conservatory to look at Anita.  “I’m not new to being a pioneer, though.  If you end up writing a book about this bug, you should include photos of my poor indoor plants, so people understand the risks.”

If Vic showed any hint of pride at her plants, she practically beamed when Rosie’s drawings were pointed out.  She never wanted to bring too much attention to her daughter, and her interaction with Jade in the park told her exactly why that was important, but it was so hard not to practically burst the moment someone asked about her.  “They’re my daughter’s”, she said, stopping herself from showing Anita every picture that’s ever been taken of her.  “She’s, well, she just turned three.  But I think they’re quite advanced.  She’s at school right now, but she might be devastated if we rid our home of the bug.  She finds it charming.”

Vic crossed her arms over her chest, shaking her head.  “Bugs?  No.  But I’ve seen a ton of unbelievable creatures in town since I moved here about a decade ago.  Heard tell of even more.  I’m just surprised no researcher has ever come over and declared a whole new ecosystem, since clearly that’s the only way so many strange and unusual species are produced.”  Anita must have known the truth about the town, especially with her leading question, but Vic was ever so cautious about the matter.  Gloating about her own knowledge on the supernatural wasn’t worth the risk it posed to her and Rosie.  In the distance she heard a faint rolling, her heightened hearing picking up the sound almost as instantly as it started.  She peaked over to the living room, where Winnie was sound asleep.  “I…”, she swallowed, looking back toward Anita.  “Something tells me it’s going to make an appearance soon.  Do we have any sort of game plan?”

_  

“Oh yeah? What kind of pioneering are you used to doing?” It was something Anita had considered before, writing a comprehensive guide to the supernatural world of insects. She would either be touted as the mother of modern entomology or, more likely, laughed out of the profession she loved “You seem like you’ve got a green thumb, quite the loving touch, I’m sure you’ll be able to get these plants back to their former glory once we get rid of this pest.” 

It was hard not to smile when Vic talked about her daughter. Anita never quite understood the desire for offspring herself, however, but she never questioned the important bond of family. “And what about your partner?” She managed to casually sneak the question in, “Will they be sad if we’re victorious in our mission today to catch this bug?” Anita hadn’t noticed a wedding band but that didn’t mean anything, she had learned. 

Ten years was a long time to live anywhere. It was too long to live in this town and not know about certain things that went bump in the night. There was an intentional vagueness in Vic’s response that told Anita all she needed to know. Her comment, however, made Anita wonder just how familiar the other woman was with the supernatural world. While Anita was tempted to partially shift, allowing herself to use her thermal vision, she felt it was too much of a risk in the off chance that Vic was a hunter. She didn’t need to expose herself like that. Instead, she let her lame human senses attempt to seek out the insect. 

Reaching into her backpack, Anita pulled out two devices that had a long sticky pad on attached to a sturdy retractable pole. “So, unfortunately for your plants, I think the best option is to wait for it to settle in for a snack and then quickly try to trap it down on one of these pads. It’s basically like a fly trap on steroids.” She handed one of the contraptions to Vic, then reached back into her bag and pulled out a makeshift trap that used an apple as bait and set it down by the door of the conservatory they had walked through. “If we can’t catch it… maybe it’ll trap itself as it runs away,” she said with a bit of a shrug as she tried to listen for any soft noises that might give away the critter’s location. 

_ 

“Oh, um, just…”  Vic wasn’t used to people actually asking her follow-up questions.  She could usually just bullshit through conversations without having to worry about providing explanations.  What had she pioneered?  She wasn’t sure.  “I was the first artist in town to paint a minion on a storefront in a santa hat.  I believe I was almost nominated for an award and everything.”  Thankfully, Anita changed the subject rather quickly in favor of her gardening skills.  She smiled shyly.  “It’s an easy hobby-  I suppose I don’t hate that you see all your work come to fruition with plants, you know?  It’s not something that’s worth forgetting about.”

Vic felt her eyebrows raise higher than humanly possible (was that a new vampire trait she wasn’t aware of?) at the mention of her partner.  It’s not like it was a question she hadn’t heard before… and it was so refreshing compared to the constant inquiries about a ‘husband’ even as close as thirty years earlier, but thinking about a partner in raising Rosie had never even crossed her mind.  It made sense that Anita would assume- most families had two-parent households, but Vic was more than a little proud to admit she was doing it all on her own.  “Oh, there’s no partner.  There’s just me.  I’m alone….-single!  By myself, with her, and me.”  Winnie huffed from the other room, too deep in her nap to get upset about being forgotten in this small family makeup.

Vic reached out for the trap, grabbing it gingerly with her fingers so as to not get trapped herself.  She examined it carefully. Wondering why she or none of the exterminators had come up with this idea earlier.  “I knew you were the right woman for the job”, she said as Anita placed the trap down.  “So…we leave it there, then…could it stay out for a few days?  Am I meant to give you another call if it does end up trapping itself so you can examine it further?”

_ 

Even though she had an immense amount of questions about this award-nominated santa minion painting, Anita didn’t want to derail the conversation about plants to delve into that topic. “Don’t sell yourself short. A lot of people think plants are easy to care for, an easy hobby, until they really start getting into it. Especially this many plants. They all have their own needs and you clearly know how to satisfy them.” 

Five. That was the number of different ways Vic emphasized how single she was and that was not lost on Anita. She nodded, a coy grin spread across her face, “Got it. I love that. Single is quite empowering… or at least I find it to be.” The question wasn’t asked but she wanted to pepper in the fact that she, too, was without any partner. 

“I often am,” Antia responded to the compliment with a smile. “The trap can definitely be left out for a few days, as long as you aren’t worried about your daughter or any pets messing with it and accidentally engaging it. If the trap’s closed without the critter inside it doesn’t do us much good.” Her eyes moved around to the different plants in the room, wondering if they would be so lucky to have the malapple appear while they were actively looking for it. “I’d never say no to a call from you. Would certainly be happy to swing by and collect it if it ends up trapping itself at a later date. After all, I can't leave a customer … unsatisfied.”  Anita let the pause between her words linger slightly, letting her flirtation be slightly more obvious now that she knew Vic was very single. 

Just then, however, a pot fell nearby and Anita quickly turned to look. “Do you see anything?” 

_

Vic smirked proudly at the continued compliments, tucking a hair behind her ear.  Perhaps she should keep this Dr. Anita around more often, she clearly had a good mind about her.  “You flatter me, Anita.  You’ll have to let me shower you with compliments one day, too.”  Maybe after she finally found the demon-apple.  Which, by the way things were going, didn’t look like it would be today.

Yes, it was incredibly empowering being single and raising a child.  And that was exactly why Vic was doing it that way, right?  Loneliness never crept into her heart, not in 300 years and certainly not with any type of longing, either.  Nope, it was all about empowerment for Vic.  Thank god for that feminist movement.  “Have you been… single for long?”  It was an awkward question, Vic knew as soon as she asked it.  She hoped it wouldn’t hang in the air for any longer than it needed to.  

“I can keep them away from the conservatory”, she said with confidence, knowing all the deterrence either of them needed was some supervision and a baby gate (although either of them were liable to try and climb over it).   Okay, she had thought Anita might have been flirting before, with the comments about a celebratory and the compliments, but now, Vic was absolutely sure of it.  When was the last time she’d slept with anyone?  It had been at least three years, probably longer, considering the spiral she was on before Rosie came along.  Was it like riding a bike, or did she forget how?

She cleared her throat and chuckled, trying to sound nonchalant.  “I’m sure your bosses appreciate the professionalism”, she teased, letting a smirk play on her lips.  In the past, the only flirting she’d done was to pull secrets from vampires to betray them or hunters to get them to trust her.  This felt entirely different.

She was about to say something about the lack of customer satisfaction in this town when she, too, heard one of the plants topple over near them.  She looked over at Winnie, still fast asleep in the living room.  Some guard dog she was.  She glanced around the conservatory, trying to find anything amiss, when she noticed one of her Christmas Cacti had fallen to the ground from a top shelf.  “There!”, she shouted with a point, just as the apple rolled behind another plant on the shelf.  “How the hell did it even get up there?!”

_

Anita shrugged at the question, not taking it personally but knowing that her response had somewhat of a tendency to strike a divide between her and others. But there wasn’t an air of judgment in the question that she often noted from people when it was asked. “Yes, I have. By choice.” 

Hearing the other woman clear her throat, watching her try to act completely unaffected, it was rather amusing to Anita. It reminded her just how natural she was at this. “Thankfully this isn’t actually part of my real job. No bosses to answer to. They can be so stuffy and boring. Never want people to have any lick of fun on the job.” For a moment she had nearly forgotten the real reason she was in the conservatory with Vic, only pulled back to the task at hand by the incitement of chaos the insect was causing. 

The fact that the plant fell from a top shelf made things difficult given Anita’s short stature in her current form. Had she been a rattlesnake right now she could have easily seen up top, easily spotted and likely caught the critter in her makeshift trap. “They’re resourceful,” she noted in response to the question as she looked around for a step stool or ladder. “It’ll be hard to catch on the move. Might end up accidentally hurting more plants in our efforts.” 

Most work with insects, other than extermination, required patience. “I don’t wanna swing for it and trap a plant by accident.” It didn’t take long for the critter to manage to scurry off on its little legs and out of Anita’s eye line. “I know wait and see isn’t the solution you were probably hoping for, but might be the least destructive option here.” 

_ 

By choice.  Vic nodded, unsure of what to say.  Except, her mouth spoke for her, before she even realized what she was saying.  “Me too, actually.  I suppose we have a lot more in common than we realize.”  Maybe it would be nice having a friend like Anita to relate to.  A classy doctor, one who might have been burned by someone she cared about long ago, just like she was.  Was this the kind of camaraderie she’d been missing when she closed herself off to the world?

Vic hated working for a boss.  When she was working at the slayer bar all those years ago, having to answer to someone who had an IQ about 20 points lower than hers felt like the truest form or torture there was, but she’d always been good at manipulating people.  When she wanted to.  “It’s nice you can venture off on your own.  Perhaps a small business capturing pests is in your future, Anita.  Then you could be your own boss.  And other people’s.”  How deliciously fun it must have been to tell other people what to do.

“I’ll say.  Someone should study these things and harness their prowess for good.  Do you know how many secret assignments one could complete if they could train one?”  It would have been fascinating if it weren’t so annoying.  Vic decided that Anita was right, it was better to wait than to risk losing more plants.  So, reluctantly, she nodded.  “I’m a patient woman.  And not an expert.”  It was much easier to admit that to Anita than the bumbling oaf exterminators the other day.  “You can set the trap, and I’ll call you when it’s captured… But I’m holding you to that celebratory drink once it is!”

_ 

Anita smiled, wondering how much else the two women might have in common and hoping that she might get to find out some day. “This time of year, when classes are out at the university for the summer, I have an exceptional amount of time for my own ventures. Though, even during the year, I always manage to find time for my own pursuits.” As much as Anita loved bossing others around, being assertive and taking charge, had she wanted to spend her life running a pest control business she would have been better suited staying in Mexico. After all, that was exactly what her father did and was exactly what he hoped she would have taken over from him. 

Enterprise was never what inspired Anita, however. She had seen the stresses of business ownership weigh on her father, and her grandfather before him, and never longed for a life of being ‘the boss.’ It was the observation, the curious intrigue, the study that got her out of bed in the morning. “I like being the boss of my classrooms but I don’t think I’d much enjoy being a boss if it involved budgets and customer service. Not all customers would be as lovely as you, I’m sure.”

The comment about secret assignments was so curious, and Anita raised an eyebrow slightly at it, curiosity eating away at her to know more. “Maybe we’ll have to see if we can train one. If we manage to catch it. I’ll get the trap set up, once it does it’s job, you and I will most certainly celebrate.”

[nicsalazar]

@natusvincere replied to your post “What’s your favorite exhibit at the zoo?”:

I'm pretty fond of the big cat exhibits myself. I always found those creatures fascinating. I hope they don't mind being locked up.

​How do you Is this Didn't uh know... they had them. Tigers and shit? Sure they mind it Would you want t Never been to a zoo. Don't plan on it either. What's so fascinating about it?

[natusvincere]

Lois Lane Reporting Live|| Felix and Vic

Timing: About a week ago Location: The Grit Pit Partings: @recoveringdreamer and @natusvincere Summary: Vic has somehow come up with the idea that the Grit Pit is operating as a secret underground ring to harm vampires, Felix becomes the unfortunate victim of her investigation. Warnings: N/A

Felix had been… employed by the Grit Pit for some time now. They’d fallen into the routine of it, even if they wanted, more than anything, to get out. They knew the people who were there regularly, from the frequent spectators with their loud voices and angry words to the upper management and their cruel games. More than anything, though, Felix was familiar with the other fighters. They’d faced most of them in the Pit at one point or another, and the ones they hadn’t fought, they’d seen in the locker room often enough to recognize them on sight. Most of them didn’t bother with small talk or getting to know one another — it made things a lot easier if you weren’t friendly with the people who you might be asked to brutally beat at any given moment — but Felix recognized them all pretty well. Even newer fighters were typically paraded around by someone proud of having trapped someone new, even if the fighter in question was still unaware of how binding their contract was. 

So it was a little weird that Felix didn’t recognize the woman standing in the locker room tonight. 

She wore thick-rimmed glasses, though Felix wasn’t sure if there was actually a lens in them. She held a notebook and was dressed in a smart suit. She looked like a cartoon of a stereotypical journalist, and it put them on edge just a little. Strangers in the locker room were never great, but strangers who looked like they might start asking questions were worse. Ducking their head, Felix did their best to slide by the stranger without attracting any attention.

Victoria was not a stranger to violence.  In her over three centuries on the Earth, she had seen more than her fair share of it, even before she was undead.  Her own death and turning (and subsequent years after as a baby vampire) were full of particularly violent memories as well, despite how much she wished to forget them.  But violence, and all that came with it, were never something she enjoyed.  She couldn’t understand why people would come to a place like the Grit Pit, where fighters were paid to be screamed at and beat the shit out of one another.  It seemed extremely barbaric and inhumane.  Over time, she had convinced herself that there had to be something more going on there.  Somehow, she now believed that it must have been a front for something even more nefarious than just overt violence- was this part of a larger trick to destroy vampires?  One that she had missed back when she was on the wrong side of morality when it came to the beasts?

She wasn’t sure.  If she were more of an objective person, she might have been able to step back and see that this sort of conclusion was not a logical one to jump to.  But her determination to be a better person had been having its way of superseding logic altogether lately, which is how she had ended up at the Grit Pit with a fake journalist pass and a mission to out them for their ways altogether.

“Hey you!”, she called to the person seemingly avoiding her eye contact.  She had watched them hesitate in their fight multiple times mere moments before- maybe they were just the person she needed to get to the bottom of whatever was going on here. She tried her best to hide any hint of Sweden in her accent, which still seemed to peak through despite speaking English for hundreds of years. Her attempt at a ‘journalist’ accent was somewhere between Brooklyn and Australian. “I’m workin’ on a beat for Wicked’s Rest Times.”  Did the town even have a working newspaper?  “About thriving local businesses.  Why don’t you sit down and tell me about how you came to work for this fine establishment?”

They’d never been particularly lucky. Their entire life seemed to be a reflection of that very simple fact, shining through so brightly that it was blinding. From their mother’s death to their father’s overwhelming grief to Leo’s manipulation to the Grit Pit, Felix’s life seemed to be a snowball of bad luck rolling down a hill, growing larger and larger with each inch of ground it gained. So of course they couldn’t avoid the attention of the stranger in the locker room. Of course she’d call out to them specifically in an accent that was… strange and hard to pin down. They shouldn’t have been surprised about it in the slightest.

They tried to pretend not to hear her, tried to hurry the process of shoving their things into their duffel, but the luck that had never been on their side before didn’t seem keen on running to meet them now. They dropped a sock on the ground, leaned down to pick it up only to knock their duffel over and spill the contents on the floor of the locker room, effectively trapping them for the amount of time it would take to clean it all up. That gave the woman — the journalist, because of course she was a journalist — plenty of time to approach them. Felix tried to suppress a groan.

What was she asking about? Thriving local businesses? Was that what the Grit Pit was? The reminder of their contract’s nondisclosure clause churned in their gut, and they shook their head quickly. “Um, no, sorry, I don’t — I mean, I don’t have a lot of time. I have, uh, somewhere else to be right after this, and I’m not very good at talking to people anyway, so you probably don’t want to interview me. Um, there’s a guy over that way who might be able to answer your questions, I bet.” They gestured vaguely to where Wyatt had disappeared, feeling a little guilty for throwing him under the bus but knowing he’d be better at getting rid of the journalist, anyway.

—

This person must have been nervous.  Clothes were tumbling from their bag before they even had a chance to muster a response, and Vic glanced down at them before she stepped closer to her interviewee.  There was a small part of her that felt bad that they were nervous, but a bigger part that reveled in it.  Nerves put people on edge, and Vic knew from experience that people on edge were more prone to spilling their guts.  In the least literal way, of course. Even if the information they gave her was miniscule, Vic was hopeful whatever she got out of them would leave her closer to rescuing vampires from whatever was going on at the Grit Pit.  Ignoring their protests and their gesture to someone unknown behind her, she held out her hand for them to shake. 

“The name’s Missy Spitz.”  Believe it or not, Vic had come up with that alias hours before.  No one would trace anything back to her if this person came up with any good juice.  “You know, an employer isn’t allowed to keep you from talking to the press, nor are they able to retaliate for information released.”  She wondered if her lies would cost this person their job.  Perhaps they’d find something upstanding and nonviolent instead.  Maybe this would work out well for everyone.  

“This won’t take too long.  I just need to know a bit more about your employer and I’ll be on my merry way.”  As if to show how unthreatening she was, Vic leaned down, picking up one of the fallen shirts and helping to fold it.  It was stinky and sweaty, and although she folded it neatly, she pinched two fingers together to hand it over.  “Now, how long have you been working for the Grit Pit?”

—

Her hand was directly in front of him, and Felix was a little too polite not to reach out and shake it, even if they had no real desire to continue the conversation. They glanced back towards where Wyatt had disappeared to, but he’d already exited the locker room and seemed to have no plans of returning. Felix did another quick sweep, hoping to find some familiar face to rescue them, but it was no use. It wasn’t a full moon, which meant Samir wasn’t around, and most of the other fighters didn’t talk to him. Even if they did, it seemed everyone else had already dispersed. No one seemed keen on hanging around the locker room too long when the night was over, especially not when some stranger was there asking questions. Felix was on their own here.

“That’s not your name,” they blurted, then immediately regretted the outburst. “Sorry. I mean, maybe — maybe that is your name. But it doesn’t really sound like a real name. I don’t know anyone named Missy Splitz. I don’t even think Splitz is a name. Missy is a name, maybe, but it’s more of a nickname. Isn’t it? Is, um, is your name something else, and people just call you Missy? Or did you choose the name Missy? It’s not a bad name. I think it’s fine. I just don’t think — I’m not — Um.” 

Maybe this would work in their favor. If Felix couldn’t convince the reporter to leave by asking, maybe they could make conversation so incredibly awkward that she’d choose to go away just to get out of it. It didn’t seem like the kind of thing that would happen quickly, however. She began making claims that an employer couldn’t make you not talk to the press, and Felix let out an awkward, uncomfortable laugh. An employer, he wanted to say, could make you do a lot of things when that employer was something like the Grit Pit. But just thinking the words made their tongue burn, either because of the contract or because of some mental block their mind had created to protect them from it. 

Still stuffing their clothes into their bag, Felix avoided eye contact. “I really, um, I’m sorry, but I don’t — I don’t really have a lot of time to talk. I have to go home to feed my cat. She has to eat at the same time every night, or else she gets mad. And I don’t — I don’t want her to be mad at me, so I’ve gotta… I really can’t stay. Sorry, uh, Miss Splitz. Missy Splitz. Are you sure that’s your name?”

—

Vic put her hand on her chest, feigning shock and offense at the person’s declaration.  “Excuse me?”, she said, accusatory and flushed.  “It’s Missy Spitz.  Not Missy Splitz.  And I sincerely hope you didn’t just insult my reputable mother and my extremely loving and attentive father, who are both alive and well, by insulting the name they gave me when they laid their eyes upon my small, newborn face.”  She worried, for a moment, that she was taking this character too seriously, but that moment was brief.  “Missy. Spitz.”, she said, interrupting them with finality.  “No nicknames, no jokes, just a given name.  It’s generational, actually. Passed down… from my mother’s side.  I’m the 17th Missy Spitz in my family.”

She didn’t need their eye contact to win them over, all she needed was for them to give her the information before someone more important caught her back here.  She adjusted her fake press pass she had made, hoping he realized she meant business.  “Your cat can wait.  It’s important for children and animals to experience age-appropriate uncomfortable emotions, so that they’re better equipped to process them.  It helps with a trusted adult guiding the way, of course, but your cat can wait.  The skinny on the hooey?  It needs to be spilled now.”  Years ago, she read a book about a journalist who used that term.  Thank goodness for her extensive research.  

Again, this person was insulting Vic’s pretend name.  She was starting to get for-real offended, instead of just in-character.  “You cannot seriously be throwing around such raucous accusations when you yourself have yet to even tell me your name.  How am I meant to write a proper report without your name?  Go on, fighting-person.  Tell me your name, so I can mock you as well.”

—

“Oh! I, um, sorry! I thought — I thought you said Splitz.” Felix turned bright red, hands trembling a little as they continued stuffing things into their duffel with a desperate speed. This, of course, caused its own issues; the trembling made it hard to get things into the bag properly, and more items were dropped and picked up and dropped again. “I’m not — I wasn’t, uh, insulting anyone. Especially not your parents! I was just, um, you know, it’s not — I haven’t heard that name before. I just — I was curious if you chose it yourself or not. I know, you know, a few people who have chosen their own names, and I think it’s cool. I don’t think I’d be able to choose my own name. I’d get overwhelmed, because there’s so many names out there. Like, where do you start? Right? But it’s cool, uh, that your parents named you Missy when — when you were a baby. And it’s cool that it’s a family name! Do you, um, did your dad… take your mom’s last name, then? If it’s from your mom’s side? I think that’s cool, too. I think it’s weird how people expect a woman to take her husband’s last name, but not the other way around. Right?” 

They were hoping the cat excuse would get them out of this, but Felix had never been particularly lucky. The journalist — Missy Spitz, not Missy Splitz — was adamant, and Felix was bad at saying no even when they couldn’t say yes. Their eyes darted to the door of the locker room, though they weren’t sure if they were hoping for another fighter to come in and take Missy’s attention or a higher up from the Pit to come yell at her to go. Both options seemed cruel in one way or another. Missy earning a spot on the Grit Pit’s radar was a bad thing, and wishing for another fighter to be put in an uncomfortable position like the one Felix was in now seemed mean spirited. But Felix wasn’t equipped to handle this, and they knew it. “I don’t — I don’t have any… skinny on the hooey. Honest. I just, um, I’m just trying to go home.”

Wincing as she claimed they were insulting her again — they really hadn’t meant to! — Felix kept their gaze trained on the duffel that they’d more or less given up on packing. Their hands were shaking so much now that the bag’s zipper was banging absently against the bench every so often, the hollow thunk seeming to echo through the empty locker room. “I don’t — I don’t really think you should write a report. There’s a lot of cooler things to report on! Have you seen the leg? You should write a report on the leg!”

—

It was almost comical how the clothing kept falling in the bag as the Wildcat was trying to load it up.  If Vic really worked for the newspaper, she might have drawn a silly comic of the sight  Missy Spitz was a professional, though, so she had to find a way to stifle her amusement.  “I’ve never heard anyone call their child ‘Wildcat’ either, but you don’t see me questioning you, now do you?”  She kind of liked this strange, anxious groveling the fighter was doing, and she smirked with a weird sense of power as they continued to fawn.  Yes, she was important.  Yes, this person should be worried about how they made her feel.  Is this how CEOs felt?  Maybe once Rosie was grown up, Vic would try her hand at being a CEO.  She would only hire grovelers of course, and people who didn’t like pineapple on pizza.

Wildcat’s question threw her off, and actually made her drop her smug, satisfied look.  She hadn’t thought of that little detail when she made up the lie about 7 generations.  “Oh, of course!  My very loving, feminist father didn’t dare dream of asking his wife to take his name.  He even made our beds every morning.  I had a lovely childhood.”  Vic was starting to feel sort of jealous of Missy Spitz and this fantastical life she led.  “It’s unequivocally weird.  Society is not as forward thinking as it assumes it is.”

“The leg is not a thriving small business.  What good would that do my reputable article?”, Vic accused, now feeling annoyed.  Wildcat wasn’t giving answers, and their eyes were shifting anywhere but Vic’s, seemingly looking for an out, so she knew it was time to pull out the big guns.  Like the paparazzi did in hollywood.  No more asking if she could ask questions, she just needed to ask them loudly until she got an answer.  “Do you have any comments on the rumor that the Grit Prit is just a front for more nefarious ongoings, including the planned harm and destruction of specific groups of people that occupy this town?”, she asked, holding an invisible microphone near his face. It felt more official, somehow.

—

“Well, that’s a nickname! It’s not on my driver’s license. Which — Which is a valid driver’s license, by the way. It doesn’t expire for another year.” They weren’t sure why that felt important to add. In all honesty, Felix was floundering. They felt like they were in trouble, and they didn’t want to be. “Um, is Missy a nickname? Is it short for — Missandra?” They wanted the conversation to stay away from the reason she’d come here, even if that was probably impossible. Felix wasn’t enough of a wordsmith to properly distract someone from their intended conversation. Felix was barely enough of a wordsmith to carry on any conversation at all. 

At least Missy Spitz, like most people, didn’t mind talking about herself. That was a nice way to distract people, sometimes. Felix liked to think it made them happy, too. People liked sharing little facts about themselves, like the fact that their families had nice fathers who took their mothers’ surnames and made the bed without asking. Felix tried to swallow the envious feeling at the idea of Missy Spitz’s father, who had probably never sent them into the woods with a shovel and a corpse and refused to let them back in the house until the grave was filled in entirely. “That’s cool. Your dad sounds really cool. What, uh, what’s his name?” 

The conversation was spiraling, getting away from Felix in a way they didn’t know how to control. The leg wasn’t what Missy Spitz wanted to talk about. Missy Spitz’s forward-thinking, feminist family wasn’t what Missy Spitz wanted to talk about. Felix’s inability to get their sock to stay in their duffel wasn’t what Missy Spitz wanted to talk about. Missy Spitz wanted to talk about the Grit Pit, and Felix didn’t. Their heart picked up its pace as she asked a particularly hard-hitting question, their stomach churning. They felt sick, felt uneasy, and they didn’t know how much of that was the contract and how much of that was them. These days, that was something that happened a little too often. “I think I left my stove on! I really need to go turn off my stove. I’m sorry I thought your name was Missy Splitz!”

—

Oh.  That made way more sense.  Of course they would use nicknames in a seedy place like this.  Vic should have known.  This just pointed to more nefarious activities at the Grit Pit.  She wrote the word ‘fraud’ with a sad face in her little notebook, the first note she had jotted down since she’d arrived.  “So what’s your real name, then?  Does it worry you to utter your real name in earshot of your controlling boss, or is that anxiety I’m picking up on about something else?”  She paused, though not because she realized the irony that she was faking her own name, just like the wildcat, but to come up with a believable answer to his question.  “It’s short for Misandry, actually”, she deadpanned.  She wanted to smirk so bad, because that was funny, but instead, she just stared at them.

The mention of her father took all the joy out of her mind.  Although, she supposed Wildcat wasn’t asking about her father, they were asking about Missy’s.  Misdandry’s.  “His name?  His name is Franklin Delano Spitz.  Although most people lovingly refer to him as D-man.  He’s very jolly too, you see?  I’m sure he’d disapprove of whatever is going on here too, but I wouldn’t want to worry a sweet, old man with the likes of this.”

Journalists lied all the time, right?  Vic wondered how far of a lie she could tell without the whole situation becoming a bit ethically gray.  Was it wrong to let this person think that wonderful fathers like Franklin Delano Spitz existed in this cruel world?  Wildcat seemed to be going through a sort of moral crisis on their own, too, and Vic was beginning to wonder if she was pushing this too far.  Sure, she hadn’t gotten too much information about the Grit Pit yet, but the confirmation that something else was going on was the definite first step she needed to pursue this further.  “Well that was irresponsible of you.  Don’t you have a neighbor you can call to check it before you get there?”  Even with her harsh words, Vic finally allowed some distance between herself and the fighter, closing her one note notebook in the process.  “Listen.  I’d hate for you to start a fire just because you stuck around for an interview.  I think I have all I need.  Unless… there’s anything else you think might be valuable?”

—

They debated whether or not it was wise to give a journalist their real name, conflict rising in a way they hated. It wasn’t fair not to, was it? Missy Spitz had given Felix her real name, complete with its origin and a brief family history. Wouldn’t it be cruel to deny her the bare minimum in response. “Um, I’m — My name is Felix,” Felix said, stomach churning with doubt the moment the name was out. Did she have a point? Should they be worried about saying their name to a reporter where their bosses might hear? Felix had heard rumors that fae could take someone’s name — what if that was the punishment for this? Their eyes darted towards the door that led to the offices, their palms sweaty. They needed to get out of her before they really messed up. “Oh, Misandry is a beautiful name,” they muttered, afraid to comment anything else.

“D-Man. That’s cool. I like it when people have nicknames.” They felt another wave of guilt at the idea that they were doing something to upset Missy’s father, though they didn’t know the man at all. Disappointing fathers was something Felix had some experience in, but they didn’t think it was the sort of thing made easier by experience. “Oh, I don’t think he should be worried. Everything’s fine!” It wasn’t. Nothing was fine. Felix felt like they might be sick.

They shook their head quickly, deciding to cling to their flimsy excuse of a stove being left on. “No, I — I don’t have any neighbors. I, um, I’m a — a hermit. I live, uh, out in the woods.” Well, not anymore, though they wouldn’t say that to Missy. They needed to remove themself from this conversation before it became too late to do so. “I’m — I’m pretty irresponsible. I’m working on it, I’m trying to be better.” That wasn’t a lie. Felix knew they needed to improve on… more than one aspect of their life. But they wanted to be better. They really did. “No,” they muttered, looking down at their bag again. “I’m — I don’t have anything valuable. I’m sorry.”

—

“Felix”, said Vic, nodding in absolution.  Felix the Wildcat.  It was as solid of a name as any. She pretended to write it down in her notebook, although their name was never what she was after, just the information they could have provided.  She hoped they wouldn’t be too disappointed when they never ended up featured in a newspaper article.  Maybe she could write a fake one and send it to them, just in case.  “Thank you”, she said.  “My ancestors 17 generations ago thought the same thing.”  She wondered what kind of life Rosie might have if she went around with a first name like Misandry.  Either really horrible, or absolutely fantastic, probably.

“Oh, so does he.  He loves anything fun, and indulged in my hobbies as a child.”  Maybe she should write a children’s book about this fictional Misandry and her wonderful parents.  Her life seemed fascinating.  Poor Felix still looked like they were going to pass out, though, so she decided to stop fantasizing and pay more attention to the task at hand.  She knew all the first aid she needed to for a 3-year-old, but she wasn’t sure she’d be able to revive an adult.  Maybe all that fighting was getting to their head after all.

“Go”, she said, shooing them away with one hand and using the other to put her notebook in her pocket. “Before you make your hermit village into a forest fire and cause another travesty in this wild town.”  She reached down to grab a last discarded shirt, placing it in their hand before they had a chance to leave.  “And Felix?  Don’t you worry.  With a little hard work, we can all overcome irresponsibility and solitude.”  Vic was proof of that, if only Felix knew the real her.  “Don’t worry.  Your secrets are safe with me.”  With that, she tipped her makeshift journalist hat, smirking as she watched Felix scurry away.  Maybe she didn’t get a ton of information about the Grit Pit like’d wanted, but she knew Missy Spitz work as a journalist was far, far from over.

[vanoincidence]

Baby Hatchet || Van & Vic

TIMING: mid april. LOCATION: vic's home. PARTIES: @natusvincere & @vanoincidence SUMMARY: van goes to find her missing package, and the post office told her it was at none other than vic's house! CONTENT WARNINGS: none!

Rosie had a beautiful, lush backyard to play in.  Vic had made sure of it when she bought their home- she even designed the landscape herself.  

At first, when Rose had been given to her, everything felt so temporary.  Surely she wouldn’t actually be expected to keep a human child alive, someone must have been coming to take her away to safety with some nice, normal hunters. But things started to almost seem normal- Vic had painted the walls of her guest room with lavish, detailed fairy tail characters from her own childhood, and it wasn’t long before Rosie started reaching for her for comfort instead of self-soothing.  And suddenly, Vic couldn’t imagine life without the small being by her side.  But the modest home she had owned at the time wasn’t big enough by any means, not for a growing little girl.

So, Vic went on the search for something newer and bigger, and, well… she found something bigger.  Bigger was about the only thing it had going for it.  The home was huge, massive, if she were being frank, but it was severely unsafe and outdated (sometimes she wondered if it was older than her). But there wasn’t much that could get between Vic and her plans, and so for the next year or so (she had gotten so much better at keeping track of time now that Rosie was around), Vic did everything she could to make the home look bright, shiny, and new as it ever did.  She spared no expense, because she didn’t have to, and because her daughter deserved everything.  Especially a beautiful, lush backyard to play in.

Except lately, Rosie had absolutely no interest playing in the beautiful backyard, but had instead taken a fascination to the front yard instead.  The front yard, usually home to Vic’s flowerbeds and elaborate landscaping, now had every inch of its driveway covered in chalk.  Vic, despite the circumstances, had accepted this change surprisingly willingly, and was sat upon the driveway with the three-year-old, the two of them creating their own doodles that seemed to interlace with the other’s.  Winnie, for her part, seemed more interested in the pedestrians passing by than their art.  Vic didn’t mind in the slightest, though, since that kept both the strangers and the hyper dog occupied.  

—- 

Van looked down at the piece of paper that had lines of ink scratched overtop of it. Tongue pushed against the roof of her mouth, she squinted into the distance. She wasn’t sure how somebody had screwed up a delivery this badly! How was it that every single time she ordered something, it just so happened to get delivered to the opposite side of town? Maybe it was her fault for online shopping. She should’ve been supporting local instead, not buying miniature statues of Acheron to fill the shelf she bought with the Ikea gift card Regan left behind. 

As she approached the house, she immediately took notice of the toddler, dog, and woman– a myriad of colors canvasing both the ground. She paused just outside of the fence, jumping slightly as the dog seemed to show interest in her. Van looked at the paper in her hands, then to the address that was posted on the wall next to the front door. Yeah, this was the place, but it didn’t look like there were any packages sitting outside of it. She should ask. Yeah, definitely ask. 

Van cleared her throat after a moment, pushing the paper into the space between them, showing the address on the slip of paper from the post office. “Hi, um– I– my figurines got sent here instead of to me? And um, this is the address that the post office gave me.” She wasn’t sure why she was so nervous. Would the woman think she was a scammer? God, all she wanted was her Acheron. 

—- 

Most people that walked by either ignored them or politely complimented the chalk art.  Vic had taken to smiling politely at the compliments, something she wouldn’t have considered a few years ago.  Somehow, Rosie was teaching her that not everyone had to be a threat.  But sometimes a lesson had to be taught a few times before it stuck.

 Winnie and Vic took the throat-clearing stranger in two opposite ways.  Winnie, sure as ever that this new friend was speaking directly to her, couldn’t contain her sudden burst of excited energy.  She zoomed around the front yard, circling back to the stranger with a lick to her hand before repeating the process a few more times.  Vic wasn’t as welcoming.  She stood up, placing herself between Rosie and the stranger.  The toddler, who  didn’t seem to notice anything out of the ordinary, kept on with her drawing. She looked down at the paper, unsure she should grab it without more information.  She had been reading horror stories about phantom contracts on the internet lately, and worried just grabbing such a thing might somehow pass over ownership to her house or something.  She needed more information.

“Online shopping can be incredibly unsafe.  Do you often put the wrong address on your orders, or am I just lucky?”.  The paper she was holding did seem official, but Vic knew she had to keep prying.  She thought back to the small box that had been delivered yesterday, the one she’d meant to bring to the post office before her whole day got thrown off when Rosie scraped her knee.  Injuries with three-year-olds were expected, and Rosie had been so brave, but Vic felt the need to restock her blood supply so there were absolutely no slip-ups.

“Figurines… do you mean toys?  Are you a parent?”  She glanced back at Rosie, thinking about the positive outcomes playdates seemed to have in all the parenting books she’d read in the past three years.  “How old is your child?”

—

Van stumbled back slightly as the dog rounded to her side, hand covered in grass and dirt now from the way it’d surely been digging at something in the ground earlier. Van wiped her hand against the backs of her pants and looked over at the woman who immediately took care to step in front of the kid that was next to her. 

“I mean, yeah, but so can like… going to the store.” Especially here, she thought. The last big shopping trip she’d done, Debbie had ended up dead and she and the others earned stab wounds. “I didn’t put the wrong address! They said it was sorted wrong by the post office or something.” She stuck the piece of paperwork into the space between them, not quite crossing the threshold as the woman didn’t seem overjoyed to be in her presence. Van could at least tell that much. 

At the mention of being a parent, Van coughed, hand to her chest. “Me? Dude, I’m like twenty– well I mean, I’m twenty-one, but that just happened like last month. I don’t look like a mom, do I?” She looked down at herself, the cargo jeans she wore dragging haphazardly against the sidewalk so that the ends of the fabric were lined in dirt and mud. She looked up at the woman who (was clearly a mother) and coughed out an apology. “There’s nothing wrong with being a mom, but like, I’m not one, and I don’t think I could ever be one, because what happens if a kid gets knives, you know? I’m not even allowed to have knives. I’m twenty-one.” Van could feel heat rise to the back of her neck as she stumbled over her words. “I’m the child here, la– ma’am, and um, I’m just here for my figurine which is not a toy, it goes up on a shelf and you look at it because it’s nice to look at.” She couldn’t believe that this woman thought she was a mom. She’d be a terrible parent! She couldn’t even take care of herself! That was like, Erin and Jade’s jobs! 

—

At the girl’s words, Vic hesitated, her mouth opening and closing in thought.  She had a point, and for a brief, rare moment, Vic was at a loss for words.  It was the reason she started having her groceries delivered since her alarming interaction with Baby Bloodworth in the park.  She wouldn’t have been thrilled for this stranger to find out she was a hypocrite.  Again, she stared at the paper placed in front of her for a beat, but this time she grabbed it after a moment, reading through the words with furrowed eyebrows.  Behind her, she heard the gentle scraping of chalk- Rosie apparently having had enough of staring at the stranger.  “Stupid useless government agencies”, she muttered, passing the paper back to the girl.  “Are you planning on filing a complaint about this?  I can help you start the process.”

Vic found herself smirking at the fact that the mere thought that the girl in front of her could be a parent send her into a sort of spiral. She looked down at the girl’s clothing, her eyes raising in judgement and a bit of disgust.  Perhaps she misplaced her washing machine, too. Rosie, as sweet as they made them, heard the coughing and brought over the roll of paper towels Vic had brought out to smudge the chalk, shyly holding them up to the girl. Vic smiled down at her and tucked her wispy curls behind her ears as she spoke to the stranger.   “Both twenty and twenty-one are perfectly reasonable ages to be a parent.  Or they once were, I suppose.  The youth of today is much less mature… I’m thrilled you’ve decided to wait.”  Vic, for her part, was 307 before she became a parent.  “You don’t give them knives until after you’ve trained them”, she said as Rosie ran off to chase Winnie, their favorite game together as of late.  Her giggles echoed behind their conversation.  “My daughter is adept at hatchet throwing, too, but she’s a bit shy around strangers.”

She stared at the girl for a moment longer, and then opened the gate, gesturing for her to come in the yard.  Neither Rosie nor Winnie seemed threatened by her presence, and Vic was working on trusting people rather than hating them right off the bat.  A disorganized, dirty barely adult seemed like a good start.  “So it’s art, in a way?  I can appreciate art.”

—

“Yeah, the government totally sucks and everything, but the post office is like, the least of our worries even if they did mess this up.” Weren’t they severely underfunded? Probably. That sounded right. Van didn’t want to be mad at the post office, but didn’t mind being upset with the government, because the government totally sucked. “I don’t…. think so? A complaint is going to take a lot of time, and I just sort of want my package, you know?” A nervous smile crept across Van’s features as she brought her hands together, thumbs pressing against each other.

Out of the corner of her eye, she saw the toddler holding up something towards her. The roll of paper towels were bigger than her head, and Van, for some reason, was transported back to a time where her dad would look at her through the paper towel hole and then make noises, too. He had done a great elephant impression. Van wondered if this woman did that for her daughter, or if she showed love in other ways. “I’m–” She took the paper towels, unable to find it in herself to be rude to the toddler. “Thanks.” She looked down at them, not quite sure what to do now. She didn’t actually need them. Maybe she’d leave with the paper towels instead of her package. Maybe that would be the way this went. “I don’t know any twenty year olds who should be parents, actually.” Maybe if they really wanted to be? But Van couldn’t fathom it. It just wasn’t for her. 

“Trained…” Yeah, that made sense! She’d never been trained to deal with them, and hadn’t ever been taught how to hold them properly. That made a lot of sense. Van cleared her throat, tucking the paper towels to her chest with her arms crossed over them. “Hatchet… she’s so small though? How does she do that?” That was a surprise, to say the least. Impressive, too. Van could barely hold anything above her head. Her arms were weak. A toddler was stronger than her which was a little belittling. Maybe she should hit the gym. “That’s cool though, um– didn’t mean for it to sound like a bad thing or whatever.” This woman was strange. She reminded her a little bit of Regan, actually. 

The gate opened, and Van padded into the yard, craning her neck to look at the chalk art from the correct angle. “Those are nice, and um– yeah, it’s like art, I guess.” That was a good way to put it, and it seemed to please the woman. Maybe she’d get her package afterall. “Are you an artist?” It was clear that was the case, as it was fairly easy to discern which chalk art was the woman’s and which had been the child’s. If it had been Van, both her attempts and the kid’s would’ve looked the same.  

—

Vic crossed her arms over her chest, barely listening to the girl defending the post office before she practically cut her off.  “But they inconvenienced you.  And me, for that matter.  They risked the integrity of your package with their careless mistake and they need to be held accountable so they understand that the choices they made to lead to this mistake are not acceptable.  Life is about learning, and the post office is not immune to this fact.”  There was no joking tone to her words, nor was there malice.  To Vic, she was just educating this poor, young girl about a fact of life.

As she watched the interaction between Rosie and the stranger, Vic wondered if this girl had ever interacted with a small child before.  “Maybe you’re right.  I mean, you’re practically still a child yourself.”  She couldn’t imagine the girl in front of her rocking a baby to sleep or gently combing tangles out of wet hair.  But then, three years ago, she couldn’t have imagined herself doing any of that, either.  “Is it something you want one day, do you think?  To be a parent?”

“Oh god, n- not real hatchets!”, Vic exclaimed, flummoxed.  “They’re rubber!  Do you think I would trust a preschooler with actual hatchets?  Her motor skills barely allow her a firm grasp on the leash, nevermind a throwing hatchet.”  She shook her head, completely flabbergasted as she looked back toward Rosie, not at all aware that the stranger her mother was talking too had wild ideas about small children.  “No”, she said, shaking her head as she turned back.  “She won’t try the real things until she’s at least 5.”

Vic glanced at their art as the two of them walked by, finding herself a bit embarrassed about being complimented.  For years, she’d been anonymously submitting art to contests around town, never venturing as far as to share her name for fear of being noticed.  She only started painting ‘professionally’ (if you called crude cartoons on storefronts professional) once Rosie came around, because bartending just didn’t seem like a job that a mother should have, but she often avoided feedback about that art, too.  Waiting to be scrutinized for her passion made her feel like a little girl again, being asked loud, harsh questions she didn’t know the answers to.  “I don’t know if one is entitled to call themself an artist.  I think that’s a title that’s meant to be bestowed upon you.”

Vic glanced toward the front door as they reached it, knowing the package the girl was waiting for was just on the other side of it.  She looked at Rosie, who was so covered in chalk dust and concentrating on what she was doing, then at Winnie, who was laying next to her, covered with a few chalk dust handprints herself.  Then, her glance fell to the stranger again.  It was so rare for her to bring people into her home, even less so strangers, but this would be okay, right?  The girl would barely be seeing the inside.  

—

Van stared at the woman as she dug into her opinion about the post office. So she was dealing with a Karen? Was that what this was? She wasn’t sure it was that serious, but what if it had been? What if Van had been waiting on something really important? Well, the Acheron statue was important (to her), but the lady had a point and she knew it, even if she didn’t feel particularly good about taking it out on underpaid government workers. “Um, I’ll… go and talk to them. For sure.” She wasn’t going to, but it wasn’t like this woman would actually know if she went and did, right? 

It wasn’t the first time she’d been called a child, especially by an older woman, and she figured it wouldn’t be the last. Though, in this situation, Van did nothing to fight back against the comment. She was a child who shouldn’t have a child, and that was her opinion. If other twenty year olds, or freshly twenty-one year olds wanted to go and have children, then so be it. She just wasn’t one of them. Choice mattered, even if she made the opposite one. “Yeah, exactly. I’m like, a super child, you know? Almost as tall as one or whatever. I don’t even think a kid would fit on this hip.” Her mom had been her height, but it was getting harder to remember those kinds of details with the years that passed. At the woman’s questions, Van shook her head, waving the paper towel around so that it became slightly unraveled. Now stressed, she began balling it around itself, “no, not at all, I’d be like, a super terrible parent.” Even if that weren’t true, she couldn’t fathom ever being one. “I can like, barely take care of myself. Instead of groceries, I’m buying figurines, you know?” She let out a nervous laugh, the paper towels now tucked to her chest. 

So they weren’t real hatchets, and maybe Van should’ve known that, but she had just figured that if they weren’t, then the woman would’ve noted that. Then again, she just did. “Until she’s… 5? That’s…” She looked towards the toddler that was dotted in different colored chalk. “That makes like, total sense.” Van had realized very quickly that there was probably no reasoning with this woman. She hated inconveniences, and Van was one big one, if she were being honest with herself. 

Yeah, the longer Van sat here with this woman, the more she was reminded of Regan. Maybe they’d even get along. Then again, maybe their opinions would cancel each other out and they’d actually hate each other. Not that Van would ever know, Regan was in Ireland and she was never coming back. “If you um, do art, I think that you can call yourself an artist? Or that you like doing it? It takes up time, right?” She thought of Nora in that moment and her chest tightened. She missed her friend, and she even missed Regan. “Plus it’s like, really good, so I mean…” She shrugged, not sure where else to go. If the woman didn’t want to be called an artist, then Van wouldn’t waste her breath, but it seemed like she was an artist. 

They were closer to the door, and Van was closer to freedom. Her Acheron statue (or in Thea’s words, Grimace), would be in her possession, and she’d be free to display it however she wanted after putting the delicate pieces into place. They stalled outside of the door and Van cleared her throat. “Um, I can… wait out here? While you grab it? These shoes are like, kind of hard to take off and everything.” They were double laced converse that were tied around each other at the top. Half the time, Van just wiggled her feet out, but she figured that might only make this woman (a near certified Karen), more upset. 

—

“Okay.  You can let me know how it went, if you want.  Don’t let them intimidate you.  I know how some people like to take advantage of young women’s perceived naivety.  You’re entitled to get what you want out of this interaction, so don’t take no for an answer.”  Vic considered offering to go with the girl, but it was just as well that this might be a lesson she had to learn on her own.  

She smiled, small and inquisitive, as the you woman demonstrated her lack of hips.  “You’d be surprised the sort of things they sell for infant care these days.  I’d bet your hips would have no issue propping a toddler up with the right equipment.” For a moment, she paused, ignoring the first half of the girl’s statement in favor of the second.  “Wait, but you do have groceries, right?  You’re not experiencing food insecurity for the sake of this statue?”  Knowing the pangs of hunger herself, she couldn’t in good faith let someone go without food, not when she had plenty stashed away inside for Rosie.  

“That would be true if people weren’t duct taping bananas to walls and calling themselves artists because of it.”  She thought on the questions, looking back toward Rosie as she continued to color.  Even the term art was subjective, in it’s own way.  Childhood was art.  So were flowers and music and memories of something she wasn’t sure even existed anymore.  She didn’t know how to respond, so instead, Vic just gave a small nod at the second compliment. 

At the girl’s offer, she hesitated.  She would be inside for barely a moment- would that be enough time for the stranger to snatch her happiness away?  Nothing this young woman had done had indicated that she’d do something like that, though, and Vic had been slowly learning that one of the best methods to quell her distrust for, well… everyone, was to try a little trust.  For a moment, she stared at the stranger, trying to communicate silently what fate might be bestowed upon her if she even thought about hurting her family.  To the young woman, it probably looked like she had to fart.  

Vic ventured inside, leaving the door open just in case, and reached the end of the front hall where the package was safely resting.  All the while, she was pushing thoughts away, the ones that told her all the awful things that could be happening just outside.  But her hearing was impeccable, and all she heard was Rosie humming contentedly.  As she walked back outside, she hoped the girl didn’t notice how embarrassed she was.  “Here it is, um…” she looked down at the package.  “Van.  And it was nice to meet you.  I’m Vic, if you’re wondering. Or if one of my grocery deliveries end up mysteriously at your house.”

—

Van nodded in response, speculating that if she were to further engage in the conversation about the downfall of the post office, the woman might decide that right there and now was the best time to go and have the conversation about their inability to do their jobs. Van didn’t want to offend the post office. They were the least paid, and they really only wanted to help people, right? Get their packages, connect loved ones who hadn’t entered the age of cellphones— all of that. 

While the woman’s comments could be seen as invasive, Van forced herself to imagine Regan in front of her, delightfully unaware of social cues. Maybe that was the same issue here. Van was bad at them, too, so she couldn’t really blame the woman! But still, there was something about her hips, and as she opened her mouth to respond, she was being prodded about her comment regarding groceries. “Oh! Um, that was like, a joke. I actually work at a pizza place, so I get unlimited pizza. It’s an okay deal for the shitty pay.” Oh god, now this woman would be able to parse out where she worked. What if she came looking for verification that she had gone to the post office? It was too late to take back the statement now. “Minimum wage affords me both the statue and pizza. It’s a good gig.” It was a terrible gig, but she wasn’t about to go into the details of why. 

The woman did have a point. A banana taped to a wall didn’t have the same emotion as something that somebody had spent hours on, but wasn’t art still subjective? She didn’t know enough about the politics of art to really get into it, but her mind kept wandering back to Nora and the abandoned paintings in her crypt. “I think that maybe somebody finds that artistic. I think it’s okay if you don’t.” After a brief pause, Van continued, “I mean— I don’t either. Not really.” She didn’t want the woman to get mad at her for possibly thinking a banana taped onto a wall was art, so she made sure to amend, “and like, sometimes art is bad.” Yeah, that was good. 

She was so close to getting her Acheron figurine and leaving. She could practically feel its energy from the other side of the door. Well, not that she actually could, but the lesbian power the figurine radiated was enough to let Van know it was definitely on the other side. Van blinked at the woman as she seemingly hesitated. What was taking her so long? Did she not actually have it? Was this whole thing just a facade? Was the baby even real? She looked behind her at the baby who was definitely real, still enamored with the chalk and the sidewalk. 

Finally, the package was hers. It was the same size as the Black Swan figurine she had gotten off of Depop, and she hoped that inside, she wouldn’t find a bunch of scattered and broken pieces. “Oh, thank god—“ She grabbed the package from the woman— now named Vic, and held it to her chest in exchange for giving Vic back the paper towels that the little girl had handed over. “I hope not. I mean, groceries are a lot harder to like, transport and stuff, you know?” She bit the inside of her cheek as she looked behind her, then back to Vic. “I mean, if that does happen then that’d totally suck, but I definitely would bring them to you. I wouldn’t just eat your groceries.” Van guessed that Vic probably bought the really good yogurt puffs for the kid, and Van might steal those. They were expensive and they were a good snack. She’d put a Red Bull in for replacement. How would Vic know that wasn’t on the shopper? “Thank you for keeping it safe though, I totally like, owe you one.” Did she? Probably not, but she felt like she did. 

—

All things considered, Vic’s fears turned out to be unwarranted.  If she were a petty person, she would be mocking herself from five minutes ago for being so worried about leaving Rosie with this sweet, confused, underdressed stranger.  She grabbed the paper towels with a grin, putting them on the sun table beside them.  “That would be very kind, but unnecessary.  We enjoy our evening walks, we could just venture over to wherever you are with our wagon and take them from there, if the situation should arise.  I doubt it will, though, really.  The odds of that happening are actually quite miniscule.”  Vic said this with her full chest as tourists were lining up to catch a glimpse of the giant leg currently resting in the woods.

“You shouldn’t say that to strangers, you know”, she said.  It was a lesson she’d learned after being burned by more than a few fae in her time.  She was glad to pass on 300 years of wisdom to the youth of today.  When Van had first approached, all of Vic’s apprehension had made her wish she could just imagine her away, but Vic thought perhaps she wasn’t so bad, with her baggie, ripped pants and her strange art.  “You let me know if you need help at the post office, okay?  I’m extremely adept at writing strongly worded letters.”  Maybe she should trust Winnie and Rosie’s judgements of strangers more often.

[littlelycanonky]

My Life Recently... ☠️✨ Ft. The Baka Inc. OG's 💞 | Mini PokèmonGO, Bandra 💕 | Zavzavat Union 💖 #Love #Happy #Cute #Smile #Yolo #InstaGood #InstaDaily #InstaMood #InstaLove #OOTD #Summer #Winter #Filter #Fun #Awesome #Cool #Sexy #Dope #Explore #FYP #ForYou #RealHastaLaMuerte 🖤 | #NatusVincere 💛 #BakaForever 💕 | The Baka Inc. © (at Mumbai - मुंबई) https://www.instagram.com/p/CoIGxM3LJ8K/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=

[thetoxicgamer]

NAVI keeps s1mple leading CS:GO roster amid 3 major international pickups

Natus Vincere (NAVI) has signed Finnish in-game leader Aleksib, the Romanian star rifler Ivan “iM” Mihai, and the Lithuanian player Justinas “jL” Lekavicius on June 22 to play alongside s1mple and b1t ahead of CS2‘s release. These new players arrived to take the place of the in-game leader and star rifler electroNic, Perfecto, and the youngster Andrij “npl” Kukharsjkyj. This marks an unprecedented change in NAVI’s history in CS esports as the Ukrainian organization had never built an international lineup until now. NAVI has been known for making rosters with a majority of Ukrainian players, but now s1mple and b1t will be the only ones to carry the tradition after the pickups of Aleksib, iM, and jL were confirmed. https://twitter.com/natusvincere/status/1674795764349042688 These roster changes come at a time in which NAVI has been struggling to achieve good results in CS:GO. The team had an understandable dip in form since the beginning of the Russian invasion of Ukraine at the end of February 2022, and it got worse after the organization parted ways with its former Russian in-game leader Boombl4 in May 2022. ElectroNic was made the new IGL, but the move didn’t pan out. NAVI only won the BLAST Premier Spring Final in June 2022 with him in charge and were inconsistent in tournaments. The promotion of academy player npl in January 2023 only made things worse, and NAVI has now chosen to take a different path. Russians electroNic and Perfecto are out and so is npl, making room for a new trio. NAVI made some good money with the transfer of m0NESY to G2 in 2022—around $600,000, according to HLTV—and is now putting that money to use with the acquisitions of Aleksib from Ninjas in Pyjamas, iM from GamerLegion, and jL from Apeks. Out of the three signings, iM is the most interesting one. The Romanian was the revelation of the BLAST Paris Major in May as he helped GamerLegion to make a hell of a Cinderella run all the way to the grand finals while finishing the tournament as the second highest-rated player. The signing of jL is also good on paper as he also had a great run in the Paris Major and was Apeks’ best player throughout their semifinal run. The only doubt lies in Aleksib’s capability of leading another starred lineup. The Finn didn’t achieve much success ever since he left ENCE in 2019, and left G2 and NiP without winning a single trophy in July 2022 and June 2023, respectively. The new NAVI roster will debut against Vitality on July 8 in a showmatch. Read the full article

[deathsplaything]

Timing: Current Location: The Good Keep Parties: Alistair (@deathsplaything), Daiyu (@bountyhaunter), Emilio (@mortemoppetere), Vic (@natusvincere), Mack (@realmackross), Zane Summary: Daiyu, Alistair, Vic, Emilio, and Zane enact their plan on the keep, freeing Mack along the way. Content Warnings: gun use, suicide (act of, not emotional), head trauma (zombie death), medical blood (artery/vein mentions)

The Keep was an ugly place. All places with cages were.

The Keep was an ugly place. All places with cages were, Daiyu knew that much — there was no beauty to be found behind or in front of bars. It was a lesson she’d learned as a child, her father’s fingers digging between the vertebrae of her neck as he made her look at the creatures in their own holding cells. Back then she’d been impressionable enough to see them as just that, as creatures in constant losing battle with humanity. But she knew better now. Which was to say, she knew that keeping anything stuck behind a set of bars with no other purpose than to remove them from society was cruel. A swift kill was better. A swift kill was merciful.

She had walked into one of the various rooms inside the Keep with Alistair a while ago. Today was the day they would put their plan to action. The day some of those cell doors would open and release their prisoners, whereas some of the rest would die. She’d pulled up to Mack Ross’ cell with the necromancer, offering a bit of Snicker-Snacker brain through the bars as they’d updated her on the plan.

The thrill of anticipation made Daiyu restless and she glanced between the two of them before looking down at her watch. “Near time,” she said, wanting to just go ahead and take out some of the other creatures in the room and get this bit over with. She flexed her fingers, knowing that it’d be a while before they were free to flex like this. Soon enough they’d be filled with weapons and at work. She stared at Mack for a moment, wondering if the blonde would try to eat her brain to avenge the way Daiyu had bashed hers in. “Just get the fuck out of dodge and don’t mention this shit. ” 

—

Mackenzie had been confined, to what was looking to be her new home, for a week now. Or at least that’s what she thought. In all honesty, the days had mostly been running together. And without human brains to fully sustain her, Mack was just doing her best to hang on to her sanity. It’s why, when Daiyu offered her a piece of the Snicker-Snacker brain, she quickly snatched it out of the woman’s hand and shoved it in her mouth just trying to savor what it provided – which wasn’t much. But her days of begging had passed. There had been no sense in it, especially knowing the longer she was here the more time she had with Brody.

Instead, Mack looked to Daiyu, and Alistair, of all people, someone she thought she could call her friend, for reference of what was about to go down. Sure, there had been whispers and talk throughout her stay, and she tried to relay what she could to Daiyu hoping that it would save her from the possibility of being put down like some of her other cellmates in the keep. But she wasn’t sure how good it was proving to be — at least not until Daiyu had told her to “get the fuck out of dodge”, but to not mention it? Oh, she was going to mention it. At least to people she trusted, which definitely wasn’t the two people standing in front of her.

Swallowing the last of the brain, the blonde, who looked paler than normal, set her dark, dead eyes onto Daiyu. Her glare was cold, and instead of replying vocally, she merely nodded her head.

—

It was hard knowing the name of a prisoner, knowing their life. Knowing Mack, it made everything different for Alistair. It made their blood boil, knowing that they were responsible for this. No matter how they tried to spin it, they were at fault just as much as Winnifred was. They were a monster, plain and simple. Not the people in these cages. All this just to keep up a status quo that their family had insisted was the correct way.

They kept quiet as the conversation between Daiyu and Mack took place, or… instructions from Daiyu and Mack’s silence, anyway. “It’s going to get messy,” Alistair said simply. “You don’t want to be here when shit hits the fan, they’ll kill you if they catch you loose,” the spellcaster explained to Mack. “I…” They stopped themselves. An apology would do nothing, it was nothing because they were nothing. “I’m sorry they got you.” They finally said, the words like acid etching in his throat. 

It wouldn’t make anything better, it would change what happened, but at least they had said it. It felt vulnerable, being without Brutus. But Alistair would rather die a thousand times over than let his companion get hurt because of his actions. “Right, then,” Alistair spoke simply, eyes darting around at various sounds, different clangs and bumps that they couldn’t decipher. “Let’s do this, then.” They muttered, bringing their hand into a tight fist, a pale green smoke curling around their feet, then darting toward the door, forcing it open and near off its hinges. “Come on, then.”

__

Nervous energy thrummed like electricity beneath his skin, ready for a fight. Emilio’s leg bounced where he stood, eyes darting around every so often to scan the perimeter. Alistair and Daiyu had done their part with the information gathering; there was only one guard to take care of out front, and he was easily dispatched and dragged away. (Not dead, but he’d have one hell of a headache when he woke up half naked and tied to a tree. Emilio only found it a little funny.) 

He flipped the keys between his fingers, shifting his grip on the bag he had thrown over his shoulder. Food for the prisoners they were freeing (which would keep them from becoming food for those same prisoners) and weapons for the inevitable fight to come. Naturally, Emilio had elected to carry the latter, feeling a little more at ease with a duffel full of sharp things thrown over his shoulder. 

Slipping the key into the lock, he turned back to his companions. “Anyone who wants out, this might be your last shot,” he warned. “Going to get busy fast in here. So if you’re not all in…” He let it hang, looking to Vic and Zane in turn.

—

The internal conflict had grown considerably over the last few days, while stealing bags of blood from the hospital and helping Emilio pack up an intimidating array of weapons that Zane naively hoped they wouldn’t need to use. There was no avoiding violence though, the first of it rearing his heads before they were even inside. At least it had been quick and Zane had managed to replace his worry with a mildly disapproving look at Emilio, who seemed to be enjoying it. 

Fixing the bag strap digging into his shoulder, a heavy weight of blood, brains and some gauze he’d shoved into the bag in a panic, Zane was confronted with the fact that there was no more time for conflict. He thought about nameless people behind bars, starved, lonely and scared with no one else coming to the rescue. “All in,” he confirmed, meeting Emilio’s gaze and giving a curt nod. It wasn’t just for the slayer, Zane truly was all in now. There were people that needed help and there was a shot that he could help them. 

—

Vic was going to help as many supernaturals as she could.  She had to.  It was the whole point of all of this- of evening joining the good neighbors in the first place.  She so desperately wanted to redeem the awful things she’d done to vampires in the past- the felt like the only strong start she had.  She was even donating some of her own stored blood for the cause (praying, of course, that no one would ask where or why she’d acquired such a stash).  

She looked between Emilio and Zane, nodding in agreement instead of voicing whether or not she was ready.  Her voice like to betray her with emotion, it was best to stay quiet.  She adjusted the backpack on her shoulder, stuffed with explosives and weapons and anything else they might need to distract or deflect,....or to possibly do something worse that she wasn’t keen to think about.  “Let’s make this quick”, she said after a moment, ready to storm in with the two of them as soon as the door was open and ready.  

Her eyes danced between Mack and Alistair, the apology heavy in her mind. She didn’t have one to give to the actress — Daiyu wasn’t equipped for apologies and besides, this was her way of making it up to her. That, and the animal remains she’d been bringing in. “Cool.” There was a moment of hesitation that washed over her but eventually she tugged at a knife strapped to her outer thigh, pulling it out and handing it hilt forward to Mack. Handing your kidnapping victim a weapon was pretty stupid, but this entire ordeal reeked of stupidity. Luckily, that was completely on brand for Daiyu.

She gave one more glance to her watch, threw up an awkward peace-sign and scurried off to the cells on the other side of the room. It was hard to ignore the tension growing in her stomach. Daiyu did not like to hunt with an audience. She did not like to be perceived when she was at her most natural and most true, when her violent side shone brightly and perhaps to some, even beautifully. It was in witnessing her violence that she was most loved and accepted back home, and it was in that aftermath that she was always most alone. And this time it wasn’t even like she was getting down and dirty, like she was fighting an evenly-matched fight. This time she was shooting bolts into cages. For all the big talk she’d had of staking vampires and killing lamia back at her place, she felt an immense weight of dread now.

But she was not a coward. Though Daiyu realized now that she’d prefer to release everyone and just fight tooth and nail, there was a plan. If anything, she owed it to the people of the town — as well as the people on her … what were they? A team? — to stick to said plan. She halted at one of the cages that held a vampire, who eyed her with the thrill of someone who’d be released. She could already see that scenario play out: she’d open the cage and the vicious creature would grin, bare its fangs and sink them into her neck. This vampire was a prisoner now, falling victim to her lack of mercy, but out there he’d been the monster underneath beds, drainer of bodies, the killer of plenty.

So she flipped the mental switch, undid the sling on her crossbow and held it up. In it lay wooden bolts, but with her she’d brought silver and regular bolts as well. The vampire stared at her, then snarled at her, then rattled its bars and Daiyu didn’t hesitate, loosening the bolt and landing it square in the vampire’s chest so its vicious pleas would end. Dust filled the cage seconds later and she turned to face the next undead creature caged away, nimble fingers putting in another bolt and taking aim before another word could be said. And maybe she should be saying something, but there were no words in her mouth. 

—

Mackenzie set her attention on Alistair. The apology, at least in this moment, didn’t mean much to her. She had been held captive like some kind of feral animal. If there was one person she figured would have loved this, it would have been Emilio, but he wasn’t here, and she was grateful for that. But in a plume of smoke and a sudden release of the bars, Mackenzie found herself grateful for her freedom. But was she really completely free? It was a question that quickly raced through her mind as she contemplated running. Running had meant true freedom, but it had also meant there was a greater possibility of being put down. So she stayed, and instead took the knife that was being handed to her.

So they kidnap me. Release me. And then give me a knife? She looked down at the weapon and then up where Daiyu had been standing, only to see her scurrying off. Good. You better run. With everything that had happened recently in her life, Mackenzie Ross wasn’t in a good place mentally, and putting on a show for her adoring fans wasn’t something she was in the mood for.

Shifting her line of sight, she looked back up at Alistair, “So what? I’m just supposed to follow you now? Put down my own kind? Got it.” Her voice was flat and held no emotion as she followed Alistair.

—

They stayed quiet as Mack questioned them, to which she was well within her right to do so. “You’re within your rights to leave, just do so with care,” Alistair spoke as they made their way to the cage of one zombie, who had been a long-time problem in town. “Come here,” Alistair instructed the zombie, who snarled in response, striking at them with speed. “Thank you,” they muttered with a roll of their eyes, their magic suddenly seeping into the zombie, rendering them completely within the necromancer’s control. 

“Well? What’ll it be? Are you leaving or are you staying to take this place down?” Alistair asked Mack as they took out an obsidian blade and forced it through the creature’s neck, all while it had no way of defending itself. “Disgusting,” Alistair muttered under their breath as they wiped the blade clean from the undead’s blood on their pantleg. “Some of who you see have committed grievous crimes, some have not.” Alistair kicked the body in front of them lightly, then stepped over it once they knew where it was. “But the Good Neighbors are anything but good, which you know now. That’s why Daiyu and I are here. We’re taking it down.”

Alistair stopped walking after a moment, then turned in Mack’s direction, frowning. “Tommy lost Melody,” they told her in a hushed tone. “If something happens to me, he has no one, do you understand? I’m doing this for him.”

__

Once the door was open and they were inside, Emilio knew things would move a little more quickly. Neither Zane nor Vic seemed interested in taking the final out, and Emilio himself had decided to stay a while ago and wouldn’t be changing his tune now. With a curt nod to each of them in turn, he pushed the door open and stepped into the Keep.

He wasn’t sure what he’d expected, really, but it looked just as dingy and miserable as it sounded, and there was something almost comforting about that. It was better, Emilio thought, when bad places looked bad. Turning back to his companions, he nodded. “Should be one guard inside,” he stated. “You see them, you take them out. Knock them out, shove them into one of the cages, whatever you think is best. Not here to babysit.” He’d brought zipties to secure anyone they needed to, but he wasn’t going to follow his allies around with them. He trusted Zane enough to do whatever he thought was right. He didn’t have much of a choice but to trust the rest, too.

With that out of the way, Emilio got to work. He made a beeline for one of the cages, pulling some of the zombie food Monty had provided from his bag and shoving it through the bars. A hand took it greedily, and he hung back as the quiet sounds of wet munching filled the space surrounding him.

“Caroline,” he greeted, “right?”

She stepped forward. “Who are you?”

“Name’s Emilio. Raisa hired me to find you.”

The woman snorted. “I hope she paid you well.”

“Could be paying me better,” Emilio responded dryly, “but I guess that only matters if I don’t get killed. Come on. Let’s get you out of there, yeah? I open the door, you run. Anyone who’d stop you should be busy.”

Slipping the keys Daiyu and Alistair had provided into the lock, he hoped Zane and Vic were making quick work of the other cells.

—

Watching Emilio head the other way was daunting - everything smelled of damp rot, blood and pain and Zane couldn’t pretend it didn’t fill him with unease. Still, the quicker they did this, the quicker they could get out of here. Vic was… an enigma but so far, a helpful one. It was an odd thing, going cell by cell, confirming who they were here to rescue as previously agreed upon before Zane procured either blood or brains to revert the victims back to something that more resembled a person. Then Vic got them out, everyone getting the same instructions to hurry on out of there. He tried not to let his gaze linger on the cells they walked past but usually failed, face set but eyes betraying how he actually felt about leaving these people behind. It was harder to see them as pure evil when they’d gone from names on a paper to living (technically) things. 

This was not the place for a moral dilemma, it was distracting - not the right frame of mind for a break in rescue mission. Maybe it would have gotten him on edge enough to remember Emilio’s warning about the guard. As it was, Zane remembered the slayer’s words the moment a knife lodged itself into his back where he recklessly stood facing away from the area they had not yet cleared. Thinking how grateful he was that Emilio had not witnessed this, and also that this guard didn’t seem to know he was dealing with a vampire, Zane turned fast enough to catch the assailant off guard. He looked young. 

It was tempting to give him a chance to run, to simply leave, but he was already reaching for a second weapon and Zane didn’t want to give him a chance to reach for the correct one. When his fist collided with skin and bones, it was odd - he was so used to Emilio dodging or blocking his attacks that actually having them land made Zane immediately guilty. There was no time for that, however, as Zane needed to be the one dodging a hit now, grasping the young man’s arm and shoving him into one of the cells they had just emptied. “Close it!” he called to Vic. The quiet snarling from other, still occupied cells grew a bit louder. 

—

As they entered the keep, Vic prepared herself for the strong stench of blood, but nothing quite could have prepared her for what they found inside.  Despair, pain, devastation… it was literally laid out in front of them, and Vic had to take a moment to still herself before she continued.  Back when she was betraying vampires instead of trying to help them, Vic didn’t do the dirty work.  She manipulated others into killing, and maiming, and life destroying, and she let herself make money from other people’s despair.  Seeing something like this in front of her, it felt like a personification of all the wrong she’d done over the last few centuries.

Facing it now, she wasn’t sure she’d ever do enough to make up for it. 

Emilio and Zane got busy fast, and to the others, it probably seemed she did, too.  Her hesitation was only for a moment, but it seemed too long in her mind.  There was no time to waste.  She got to work, and it felt good.  Guiding those out that had been locked up for so long, offering them food and safety… it felt like something that she should have been doing all along.  But her eyes kept snapping to a cage they had intentionally kept shut, one the group had decided days ago was filled with someone who did not deserve a second chance.  She couldn’t stop picturing herself in there, alone in the world and desperate to prove she could be better.  

Zane, the one without a heartbeat, was distracted with a fight of his own.  She looked down at the ring of keys Emilio had given her, quickly realizing the one that opened the cage that held this woman was in her set.  Quietly, and when no one else was looking, she bit her lip, opening the cage she wasn’t supposed to and granting freedom to someone that other’s felt didn’t deserve it.  She shoved blood in the woman’s hands, and sent her on her way just in time for Zane to call out to her.  

Apparently he’d won his fight, and there was no time to think about what she’d just done.  In a flash, she ran over to the cage he was struggling by, slamming the gate closed just in time to lock the guard in for good.  “Good riddance”, she spat as she locked the door, making sure to maintain eye contact.  See how he liked a taste of his own medicine.  

She looked over to Zane, searching for any visible injuries.  “You okay?”, she asked genuinely, scanning the room for Emilio as well.  “How you doing over there?”

—

One room was done, the prisoners either disposed or run of and the ground covered in lighter fluid. Daiyu did not bother to look over her shoulder as she moved onto the next one. The Keep was well-organized, prisoners separated in different rooms and then divided over different cells. And though it looked medieval, the way the prisoners were placed had been done with great care and perfect administration. Rooms were given letters, cells were given numbers and records went back years recounting who had been where. On a scrap of paper, she had noted down which letter-number combinations were supposed to meet a final end tonight.

Pragmatism was a skill hard-learned and far to find, but today Daiyu moved with a methodical coolness. It helped that she got to fight. That when they went from one room to the second, there was something for her body to do. A crossbow to reload, a gun to cock, a key to turn. She didn’t talk much — that part of her was gone now, that chatty side that was hard to kill.

So the second room was done too, and onto the third they went. The tally of prisoners freed and prisoners killed was ignored, as was the grime that had gathered under her nails, and Daiyu looked at Mack and Alistair for a moment, wondering where their heads were at as she placed down some explosives. “All good?” As if it mattered how they were feeling, how their souls were doing under these strenuous circumstances. 

There was work to do. Onto the third room, where mostly shifters were housed. Daiyu swung open the door of a cell that held two lamia, cocking her gun at one of them as she brandished her knife against another, pressing them up against the wall, iron against their throat. “No funny moves.” She glared at the other, the one at the mercy of her pistol and gestured at the cell door. “Get out. If we hear one bad word, you’re done for.” Yellow eyes flashed at her at the threat and she pulled the hammer, finger dancing on the trigger. The lamia under her knife wiggled and she didn’t think much of it until its knee moved up to connect with her groin. 

She was quick to act, the weapon still in her hand, the other still unarmed and underfed. As a groan passed from her lips, she whipped into the other lamia’s direction, slamming her head against theirs. The impact was immediate, both on her head and that of the other and she watched the creature stumble, taking opportunity of its dazedness to bring her blade down into its throat. Blood bubbled and spurted down and she let go of the knife’s hilt, gun aimed at the other once more. “Run. Or don’t.” A drop of blood trailed down her face. “Your choice.” And after a moment of hesitation, the lamia chose the strongest instinct of all – the instinct to survive – and scurried off, leaving Daiyu with her bleeding out lamia.

__

Navigating the keep without Brutus was difficult, but not impossible. With a few tricks of their sleeves, Alistair used their mobility cane to navigate over to a room that housed vampires, vampires who weren’t well fed, who would be chomping at the bit to see them dead. The idea filled them with dread, but they had prepared for this. They would do something that they’d fought off since they were a child, the ability to do what was demanded of them, their magical right. Necromancy. 

Entering the room was easy, and the vampires all rushed toward them, ready to tear him apart for the atrocities they’d committed to not just them, but everyone in this keep. But they stopped on a dime, Alistair’s hand raised above their head. The vampires’ eyes went wide with fear as they were forced to walk toward the necromancer, their moves jolted and awkward. 

“You can go free, or you can be killed by my hand,” Alistair told them all, brows lofted high, daring them to attack them as they ceased their spellcasting. The vampires now knew what they were capable of, and were smart enough to not try again. To be a necromancer was to be feared by the undead. Something they were once ashamed of, but not in this moment. In this moment, they were powerful. 

The prisoners in the room looked at each other with fear, then nodded their heads in agreement. “We will leave town,” one spoke up with a frown. “We will not act in ways that would have us be under your control or imprisoned again,” another said. Alistair nodded their head slowly, then backed out of the room, allowing the vampires' passage to leave, which they took without so much as a second glance. 

Alistair frowned, then took out the lighter fluid from their pocket and began to squirt it around the room, their face contorting at the smell. The deed had been done, it was time to move to the next room and repeat the process. Once again, the necromancer would control the room of the undead, only to give them a choice. Most took it, but some? Some wanted nothing more than revenge, something Alistair wouldn’t give them the chance to have. Instead, they’d allow the revenge-bent undead to charge toward them, then freeze them in place, a wicked grin spreading across their face as the undead were forced to raise their hands to their heads and pull. The creatures pulled their heads from their body, and then fell over dead. It caused those who chose to run stagger backward, then run for their lives, lest the necromancer get them.

__

Mackenzie didn’t want to follow in Alistair and Daiyu’s path. She didn’t want to kill other zombies, especially knowing Brody, though hidden from sight, was somewhere in the keep. And instead of sticking close by, she made her way forwards to another room occupied with creatures who were coherent and others who weren’t, “Okay, Mackenzie, just do what you’re supposed to, so you can get out of this and go home…”

Going to each cell, she looked everyone over one by one. What was their story? What did their life have to say about them? Everyone here was someone at one point right? Not a monster that survived by harming other people, like herself. It was as if the roles had reversed, and she had become judge, jury, and executioner. Looking in on some people who were chomping at the bit to destroy her out of what? Anger or just a primal instinct to feed that was somehow activated after a bout of unfortunate luck.

It had felt like the roles had been reversed. The part she auditioned for so many times, only to be rejected, had finally become reality. But she didn’t like this reality. When she was zombed out, she couldn’t control her actions. Couldn’t decide who lived and who died. She was simply trying to survive, unless someone was directing her in the path of an intended target. And she knew, from first hand experience, that this was a fact of the zombies in the room. The other undead and shifters, she dared not judge, because she didn’t know their story. And as she walked by each individual cell, she looked into their eyes. Some, sad and heartbroken. Other’s, angry and confused.

“I-I can’t do this…” It wasn’t until she got to the cell of a zombie that the decision she was trying to avoid like hell smacked her hard in the face. Storming the bars and sticking her arms through trying to rip and claw at Mackenzie’s dead flesh, was a young woman around her age, and unfortunately, because she hadn’t been fed in so long, the zombie virus had taken full control leaving her eyes hollow, except with one goal in mind…brains.

It was as if Mackenzie was seeing an alternate version of herself. The version that she imagined she looked like after touching the Flats, but worse. This girl had been starved and deprived of what she had needed to survive. The only way she ever had a chance at continuing to live a normal life had been ripped away from her, and Mackenzie’s heart immediately began to crack. It wasn’t fair. It wasn’t fair to this girl, her family, or even to the former actress and what she was being forced at that moment to do. But she couldn’t prolong this girl’s suffering. And without giving it any more thought, she stepped forward.

Coaxing the other zombie in, who was ready and willing to rip Mackenzie’s head from her shoulders, she slowly pulled the knife up and out of view of the girl within the cell, “I’m so, so sorry…Please forgive me…” And without waiting any longer, Mackenzie rammed the blade as hard as she could through the ear of her fellow undead and twisted it in deep, until she felt the other zombie go slack in her arms.

Air caught in her throat as her breath hitched, and she yanked the hunting knife back out – brain matter and darkened sludge sliding off the blade. And as she stepped back, she watched the girl, whose name she didn’t know; whose story she didn’t know; and whose family would never see her again, fall to the floor. The room fell silent as they waited to see what the actress turned zombie was going to do next.

“I’m not doing this again, so when I let you go just fucking run, okay?”

Her head hung low, before she looked around and decided to let everyone else out with the keys she had been given earlier by Daiyu and Alistair.

—

It was methodical, the way he moved from one room to the next. He let Zane and Vic take most of the cells that would be opened for their inhabitants to go free. Emilio didn’t know Vic, but he knew Zane well enough to know that the nurse would have a multitude of complicated feelings about killing anyone, even if it was someone who needed killing. Those same moral limits didn’t quite exist in Emilio. If he felt anything at all as he shoved a stake through the bars of one of the cells and turned its inhabitant to dust, he didn’t let that feeling linger. There was no time for it, no space. He’d freed who he’d come here to free; if it was better for him to play executioner to spare the others from such a fate, he’d do so.

He slipped into the next room on his list, eyes darting around in a quick sweep. Zane must have taken care of the guard on duty; with Daiyu and Alistair working their side of things, there wasn’t much resistance left. Still, Emilio couldn’t let himself believe that this would go over easily. Something in the back of his mind that had lived there for years now reminded him that things were going to go wrong here. Something bad would happen; people would be hurt. It was better, he thought, to accept that sort of thing upfront. It was the only way to hold on to any semblance of control.

This cell could be opened. Emilio felt relief in it, hated himself a little for that. It shouldn’t matter to him, and he knew it. He didn’t used to be so soft, didn’t used to ache this way. But this cage could be opened, and slipping the key into the lock felt a little like a rescue for him, too. A hand shot out, grabbing his wrist. He looked up, following the arm it was attached to to a face. 

“I know you,” the woman inside rasped. Dread pooled in Emilio’s stomach.

“Don’t think so,” he replied gruffly, yanking his hand back. She tightened her grip, and his free hand tightened on the stake he’d been idly holding.

“I do,” she insisted. “You saved me.”

Confusion furrowed his brow. “Not yet.” The cell was still closed.

“There was — a resort. It wasn’t what it was supposed to go. I went there. I went there with…”

She trailed off, and it all came flooding back. This woman, on the floor of a different concrete room, blood on her mouth and a body in the floor beside her. She’d been one of the fledglings he and Teddy freed from the god-awful spa resort in town, one of the ones he’d dropped off at Zane’s place and forgotten about. She must have left his house eventually; Emilio was sure several of them had. But how long had she been here? How long had she been free before trading one prison for another? 

And what did it say about him, he wondered, that he’d only managed to save her halfway?

He pulled his hand free this time, trying to stop it from trembling as he slid a key into a lock. “Find Zane,” he told her flatly. “He’s got blood.” He’s better at this part than I am. He knows how to talk to people. He’s a better man. 

“Thank you,” she said as she stepped out of the cell. He said nothing, and she disappeared.

With a white-knuckle grip around his stake, the executioner moved to the next room.

—--

Heaving a sigh of relief as the cell slammed shut, Zane was acutely aware that just because he hadn’t fatally injured the man that didn’t mean he was walking out of here alive. Faintly, amidst the smell of damp and rot and fear, he could pick up on gasoline. Being left down here was a death sentence. “I’m fine,” he said dryly, barely registering the pain in his back - it felt miniscule under the weight of how this night would end. “Let’s finish up and find Emilio again.” Emilio found them first, in the form of a released prisoner that looked all too familiar. Jodie, his buzzing mind provided. As if one prison hadn’t been enough, this woman had been locked up again. As she fed and Zane provided detailed instructions on the quickest way back to the house, he found himself wondering that there had to be a non-human psychologist somewhere out there, one that would be capable of helping out with the aftermath of this more than Zane ever could. 

By the time every cell that was supposed to be opened had been opened, incendiary fluid spread around, Zane was filled to the brim with this odd feeling of relief, melancholy and dread. Back at that cabin, amidst all the fighting and deciding who deserved to live, no one had treaded lightly around the fact that this would be dangerous, possibly deadly. Probably deadly, even, and that hadn’t just been Emilio’s pessimism. If all they had left to do now was light this place up and not get caught inside while the flames took care of business, it seemed… Zane barely dared to even think the word but… easy. It was like risking the chance to call a shift at the hospital quiet. 

Just like they’d planned, because things were still going according to plan, Emilio met him and Vic where they’d discussed. The hunter looked detached, dust and dark fluids covering his sleeves and front. Zane pointedly avoided looking at it. “That’s it? We finish the few cells we have left and get out?” He didn’t bother hiding his disbelief, that things might actually be fine despite them so rarely being fine. 

__

The chaos wasn’t going to cease.  No matter how many people Vic set free, there was another beside her being staked or left behind for crimes they might not have been able to control.  She wanted to weep for the loss; for the waste of it all.  She thought back to their meeting in the cabin, to Emilio’s insistence that it was more merciful this way.  And he was right, wasn’t he?  Those that the others were killing weren’t only being released from Winnifred’s prison, but from the entrapment of their cursed afterlife, too.  Before Rosie, this kind of mercy would have tasted so sweet. 

So why, then, did her heart twist with every death she watched?

She didn’t know these people, not a lick, but there was an immediate sense of calm and relief when she and Zane were reunited with Emilio.  And then again, when Daiyu and Alistair appeared, and the celebrity prisoner Mackenzie they had discussed freeing at the meeting.  (Vic would never had admitted to looking her up). The six of them had almost finished their job, as gruesome as some of it was, and they were all alive.   Well… sort of. “Yes… that’s… that’s it!” That was…it?! She wanted to embrace them, to take them in her arms and celebrate their sweet victory.  She almost did, too, but a sudden, blaring siren sound cut her off.  To call it loud was an understatement, and she initially covered her ears because the sound was so shocking. Confused, she looked between her companions, then at the walls that surrounded them. “What the fuck is that?”

[progamer-san]

https://twitter.com/natusvincere/status/1623664148876779521

[nartouthere]

I Tried s1mple's $150 Course And It Was Worse Than I Thought

[chasseurdeloup-retired]

No Exceptions || Vic and Kaden

TIMING: Current LOCATION: The Silver Bullet PARTIES: @natusvincere and @chasseurdeloup SUMMARY: Kaden takes a trip the Bullet and doesn’t get through the door before some of his former friends take matters into their own hands. Vic finds him and offers some help. CONTENT WARNINGS: Depictions of violence that parallel hate crimes

A puff of smoke surrounded Kaden’s face as he leaned against the wall of some shop. The Silver Bullet was about a block down the road. He could see the building from his perch on the corner. The ranger took another drag from his cigarette, clearly not delaying the walk down to the bar, not at all. He had no reason to be nervous to go back inside the hunter bar. Sure, he was questioning just about damn near everything about himself, but some stupid part of him hoped that maybe going back would help. Everyone there was like him in some way. They faced the same questions and challenges. The people in bars and places like the Bullet in all kinds of countries had been his family when he had none. They took him in, were always willing to give a fellow hunter a job or a couch to crash on. Hell, it was how he got the job in this very town. Right, maybe there was something he’d find there tonight, some spark that might help him piece together his shattered view of himself.

All he had to do was go walk inside.

His feet didn’t move for a good few seconds longer. Alright, he couldn’t delay the inevitable forever. He tossed the cigarette on the ground and snuffed it out with his foot before turning to face the music. Hell, if nothing else, he’d probably hear a few bad ABBA sing-alongs. Those were always entertaining.

“Langley?” a voice called out when Kaden was a step or two away from the Bullet. His head shot towards the sound, coming from somewhere along the side of the building.

“Berger?” he answered, recognizing the shape standing in the alleyway. “Been a while. How you been?”

“Is it true?” the other hunter asked, his voice a little sharper than normal, stepping closer towards Kaden.

His brows knit together at the question. The hell was he talking about? “I don’t know, depends on what you’re asking.”

Berger looked a lot less friendly than the last time Kaden had seen him. Was that just poor memory? That seemed less likely as the burly hunter grew closer. “Don’t play dumb, Langley. Is it true what Oscar said?”

Kaden’s heart dropped to his stomach. So he did it. His uncle really did it. He had told the rest of their connections about him. He hoped like hell he didn’t tell them about Ari. Putain, what if he told them about Ari? “I don’t know what he told you but if you have a fucking problem, why don’t you just come out and say so?”

“Yeah, I’ll fucking say so. You’re taking in werewolves now? Cause if so, I’ve got a big fucking problem with that.” Each step that Berger took closer towards him, Kaden could feel his presence growing. Kaden wasn’t exactly short or scrawny, but next to the other man, he was sure starting to feel small. He wasn’t going to let that intimidate him. Not if it meant keeping Ari safe. Not if it meant keeping his last shred of dignity.

He straightened his spine and took a step towards Berger. “I’m doing what we’re supposed to do. I’m protecting people.”

His vision went black as a fist cracked into his jaw, sending him stumbling backwards. Another fist slammed into his face again before he could even think to steady himself. His side slammed into the dumpster nearby as he tried to find something to help him stay vertical. Gritting his teeth at the pain had been a bad idea, it only left more pain shooting through his jaw. A whistle rang through the alley as Kaden tried to push himself up, hoping to get his own swing in.

His fist only swung halfway before another hit clocked him. Kaden tried again, stumbling again, this time losing his balance. Shit. His back crashed onto the pavement and he braced his arms in front of his chest, ready for whatever was next. When Berger dropped down to continue the pummeling, Kaden was able to push him away long enough to deck him. When the other hunter was stunned for a second, Kaden kicked with his legs, trying to throw the larger man off him.

It might have worked if the side door to the Bullet hadn’t swung open, more hunters coming into the alley. “What the hell is going on?” he heard one of them ask.

Relief hesitated in Kaden’s chest, hope that maybe the people who just joined in on this would pull Berger off him and help him.

It was dashed as soon as the word “Langley” left Berger’s lips. The whistle. The fact that Berger was in the alleyway. He didn’t smoke. How quickly they all came. They’d planned this. They were waiting for him.

All Kaden could do now was brace himself for the pain.

It was a slow night, besides a random group of assholes that were refusing to open tabs, choosing instead to whisper around each other like oafs tended to do. Apparently they didn’t plan to be there long.  Vic knew most of them as poor tippers, if they tipped at all, that was.  So she jumped at the chance when her manager asked for someone to leave early.  Lately she had been thinking a lot about quitting, because she didn’t really need the money, anyway.  But she knew it was a ridiculous thought, and one that meant she was becoming weaker and weaker with time.  She never needed the money, the only reason she ever started at the bullet was to get closer to hunters so she could give them intel.  Quitting meant cutting those ties, so it was out of the question.

After she went to the back room to grab her things, she made her way out of the side door. Or at least, she tried to, but it wasn’t easy with the crowd in the alley banging against the door.  “Jävla idioter”, she spat out, slamming the door open.  The group outside was the same as the one that had been sitting inside, and they seemed to have gotten themselves into some sort of bar fight.

Well, it was less of a fight, and more of an execution.  Most people didn’t know it, but such an outward display of violence made her feel sick to her stomach. It reminded her too much of the past, of things and faces and days she didn’t want to think about. It was why she didn’t take out the vampires herself, why she chose these barbarians to do it for her.

“Break it up, assholes!”, she yelled over the scuffle, holding her bag close to her chest.  She doubted she could be heard, but they were going to kill that guy if they didn’t end it soon.  “You had your fun.  Now get the fuck out of here.”

Pain. That was the only thing Kaden could feel. Lots and lots of pain.

He was used to that. He suffered plenty of that. But somehow this stung more than any bite or scratch from any werewolf he fought. This wasn’t a monster attacking him, this wasn’t an animal lashing out in fear, this was his peers – no, his family. At least that’s what he thought they were.

Clearly, he was wrong.

He didn’t hear the door open, but if he had, Kaden would have simply assumed it was another hunter, one who had once helped him out, or another he’d lent a hand to, or one that he’d swapped stories with. Just another layer of betrayal, one more assurance that he was no longer welcome or wanted. One more person to make him feel even more alone.

The world was going black at the edges of his vision, one eye almost swollen shut. It was too much to fight off and there was no way to shield himself anymore. Some of the pain faded or at least spaced out, stalled. Kaden was probably imagining it. There was a voice that sounded familiar, and the volume of hits and kicks started to thin.

Some of the hunters startled at the sight of Vic, some cursing and running off, but a handful were unaware, lost in the moment, and not planning to leave just yet.

The cowards of the group seemed to scatter at the sight of Vic.  They were the same ones who looked at her with puppy dog eyes as she worked; the same ones she knew to wear something just a little too tight or that showed just a bit too much cleavage when she was about to work out a deal with them. They weren’t the problem, despite how annoying they were.  No, the ones that were going to be an issue were those that paid her no mind at all. So focused on their goal of destruction that they didn’t even realize someone was trying to stand in their way.

It was only when the crowd had dispersed a bit that she realized who their victim was.  Kaden. Beaten to a pulp against the alley wall, not even able to defend himself. Her mind flashed back to when he was trying to sell his weapons, and the vague answers to her questions thereafter. Come to think of it, she wasn’t sure when she last had seen him at the Bullet, either.  Though, that was neither here nor there, since she had been working in such a daze lately.  

She cleared her throat, walking closer to the oafish thugs.  “Not only is it rude to ignore someone, but it’s fucking stupid to partake in illegal activity on the property of an establishment that puts up with your bullshit on a nightly basis. You want to beat the shit out of someone?  Find a boxing ring.  Otherwise, I’d get the fuck out of here if you ever want to be served a shitty, overpriced IPA again.”

Kaden couldn’t tell if the pain had stopped or if he had just gone numb to it at this point. He dared to try and open his eyes long enough to see what was happening. He couldn’t see anything but shapes, blurred by the swelling and the splotches of blood. There was the familiar voice again. He clawed through his memory, trying to place it, but his ears were ringing and there was nothing in his mind beyond the pain and deep desire to sleep and shut down. No. Fight it, he had to fight it. Couldn’t go unconscious. He couldn’t remember why he shouldn’t do that, but he knew that would be bad or at least worse.

The stragglers finally noticed Vic, some taking cautious steps away, considering if they should run or stand their ground. “Fuck off, Vic,” Berger called out. “This is none of your business. Go back inside while we take out the trash.” The hunter moved in to continue the beating, but this time he was alone. Though they hadn’t run yet, the others hesitated to continue, weighing their options, trying to figure out which decision would most likely save them from being in Kaden’s position someday. Which was the path to make sure they didn’t lose their family?

“Come on, Berger,” one of them said, placing their hand on the hunter’s shoulder to gently pull him away from his victim. “We made our point, let’s go.” The rage in Berger’s eyes still burned, his fist ready to crash down into Langley’s face again. That rage didn’t fade when he locked eyes with Vic briefly. He paused, looked back at the crumpled mess of man on the ground, delivered one last swift kick to the gut, nodded, and then turned to follow the rest of the hunters, walking, not running.

Vic grit her teeth and stared at Berger, a man whose drink she was tempted to spit in on more than one occasion. They had never worked together, and his seedy, over-masculine demeanor did a great job at pushing out any semblance of manners or kindness his mother must have once taught him.  If vampires were the truest evil, men like Berger were the next in line.  “You do this here, you make it my business.”  She scoffed, raising her eyebrows and looking the oaf up and down. “I’ll talk to Mike since you like handling trash so much- he’s been looking for a new janitor to clean the shit stains you all leave in the bathroom.”

She wanted to comment again, to call him a coward or a pansy, or any sort of thing that might hit a guy like Berger right where it hurt, but the look in his eyes as they stared each other down told her that would be a stupid idea.  She winced when Kaden was delivered one final blow, but she didn’t wait until Berger was very far away before she sprung into action.

“You need a hospital.  Or a healer”, she said matter-of-factly, pulling her sweatshirt off as she knelt down in front of Kaden.  He seemed to be dozing in and out of consciousness, and at this point, she wasn’t even sure if he knew where he was.  She tapped the side of his cheek, lowering her head to make eye contact. “Langley.  You can’t sleep.”  As she spoke, she pressed her sweatshirt to a nasty cut above his eye, applying a good amount of pressure there.  “You must stay awake, Kaden.  Who can I call to come help you?”

Someone was near him, crouching over him; Kaden heard the voice get closer. He winced, curled away at first, unsure if it was just a precursor to another blow. The pain didn’t come. Just a voice. Matter of fact. Helping. Whoever it was they were helping. He heard the word hospital.

He tried to get a better look at who was in front of him. They looked vaguely female-shaped,  dark hair. “Regan?” he asked, trying to push himself up. Bad idea. That had been a bad idea. Every little move he made shot pain through his body, so much that he couldn’t tell where any of it started or ended anymore. Kaden tried to breathe and clenched his jaw as he tried again to sit up, screams slipping out through his teeth. Once he was up, he wanted to slide right back down to the ground. Wall. There was a wall. He remembered slamming into it a few times. Behind him? Kaden leaned back and felt the cold brick along his spine.

Now that he didn’t have to use every bit of strength he had to keep himself up, he was able to force his eyes open a little farther. No. Wasn’t Regan. Of course not. Right. “Vic?” he tried again. He felt the pull of sleep dragging him down again. It was so tempting.

Putain. He forced his head down, sending more shockwaves of pain through him as he tried to shake it, keep himself conscious. “Awake. I’m…. Hospital?” The words came together piece by piece as he tried to form a single thought. “Oscar. Call–” His stomach lurched and churned, threatening to empty itself as he remembered the last time he saw his uncle. It was that or a concussion. “No. Not… I don’t…”

Kaden was disoriented, that was for sure.  Vic couldn't seem to catch his focus, but at least he didn’t seem to be falling asleep anymore.  That much was good.  “They really did a number on you”, she said, trying to support his weight as he sat up. Nothing seemed to alleviate his pain or his disorientation.  “What did you do to piss them off so bad?”  For a moment, Vic wondered if Kaden could have been hiding the same secret that she had.  That he was a beast among men, a villain among heroes, and whatever he had been using to shield his true identity had malfunctioned.  Her eyes fell down to her bracelet, charmed to stop slayers from being able to sense her, and then back to Kaden, where she saw a flash of herself in him.  

There was finally a sense of recognition in Kaden’s eyes, and Vic nodded when he said her name. And then, his eyes seemed to doze off again, so she snapped her fingers in front of his eyes a few times.  “Hey!”, she said, hopefully loud enough to get his attention.  “Stay with me, Langley.”  She reached around in his pocket, fishing for his phone.  When she found it, she already anticipated the cracked screen.  Still usable though.  She let the light shine in his face, showing him the screen.

“Who am I calling, Kaden?  The hospital? Your girlfriend?”  She lifted his chin up gently, looking over his face. “I think it might be better to be seen by a doctor, Honey.”  The term of endearment was a defense mechanism, but one she was sure Kaden wouldn’t remember.  Seeing someone so beaten up brought back memories that Vic would rather forget, but she would have been a worse person than Berger if she just let this happen without intervention.

Kaden was slow to process the words but it was getting easier now that she was keeping his attention, now that the pain was subsiding. “Piss them off?” He tried to pull from his memories, tried to remember what had happened. Why had they beaten him up? Hmmm, he didn’t know, just that there was pain and he could just close his eyes.

His eyelids shot open at her snap. “What did I do? What did I do… I…” He didn’t know how to explain. “I’m not… not a hunter. Not a good one. I… Werewolf. And fae. And others. And… I picked them. Didn’t kill them. Didn’t…” Speaking was too hard. Thinking was too hard. Sleep was easy. Sleep was–

The light in his face burned and he went to swat it away, but his hand barely lifted off the ground. Girlfriend. He couldn’t tell if he was frowning, but that was his intention. “Don’t have a girlfriend anymore.” But who should she call? Who would come? Merde, he was an idiot. An easy answer. “Ari. Call… Ari and… Wait.” Ari was a werewolf. And this was a hunter bar. Right. “Hospital. Then Ari.” He wanted to stand. He tried to stand but without much success. “Sorry… Vic. I’m…” Kaden slid back down the wall before he could finish saying anything.

Kaden’s words didn’t make quite much sense until he was done speaking.  Until Vic was able to piece them all together- the words, and his urge to sell all of his daggers and weapons, and his melancholy response to any inquiries she’d had about that.  Everybody had to make exceptions, right?  Everybody except the likes of Berger.  Like she did when she ignored whatever Morgan or Eilidh were, or even how she managed to ignore that Metzli was a full blown, monstrous, evil vampire.  Everybody made exceptions, she was sure of it.

But it seemed like Kaden made the mistake of making too many.

All she could do was let out a small “tsk”, sucking her teeth because she really didn’t know what else to say.  In hurting Kaden, maybe the other hunters thought they were doing good.  Maybe they thought he deserved it.  But neither of those facts eased the terror of what they had done.  They also solidified what Vic knew all along about them, about all the hunters she’d worked with.  If you weren’t one of them, you were one of them, and one second of her cloaking bracelet malfunctioning and Vic would be in the same position Kaden was now.  Maybe worse.  Seeing through the cracks of their loyalty made Vic question her own, because maybe everybody didn’t make exceptions.  Maybe she was just weaker than the rest of them.  

Or worse, maybe the situation wasn’t as black and white as she wanted it to be.

That idea had been swimming around in her thoughts since everything that had happened with Morgan, and despite trying to push them away with gardening and painting and the like, they always made their way back.  But she wasn’t going to let centuries of thinking change just because of one stupid, fucked up town.

She nodded, using his phone to dial 911, telling the operator that she found a man in need of medical assistance outside her bar, giving them their location, and hanging up once she was assured an ambulance was on it’s way.  Then, she searched through his phone for an “Ari”, dialing the number and speaking immediately when she answered.

“Your friend Kaden is in trouble.  He needs you to meet him at the hospital in 20 minutes.  Emergency department.”  She put the phone back in his pocket, and did what she could to wipe off the excess dirt and cuts around him while they waited for the ambulance.  “Hush”, she said at his apology, shaking her head. “There’s no need to apologize.   This is just a regular Thursday night for me, Langley.”  Maybe it was a bad time for a joke, but the only other option was tears and sympathy, and too much of that meant that she might never come back from it.  “We’ll find a way to get back at those fuckers, okay? Don’t you worry.  But for now, stop trying to stand up, you idiot.”  She pushed him back down, gently placing her hands on his shoulders.  She couldn’t help but try to find his eyes again, tears welling in her own despite the effort to keep them at bay.  “I won’t leave you until they arrive, Kaden.  I won’t leave you alone.”

[rukiax]

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