#para: emilio

[vanoincidence]

Power Creep || Van, Wynne & Emilio

TIMING: current. LOCATION: deersprings. PARTIES: @ohwynne @mortemoppetere & @vanoincidence SUMMARY: wynne and van are on a walk to the store when they get interrupted. luckily, emilio shows up. CONTENT WARNINGS: none!

Van kicked at a loose rock, watching as it skipped over the edge of the sidewalk and into the road. “I miss winter.” She hated slipping on ice and not being able to ride her board, but hated allergy season even more. She looked over at Wynne with a frown, pulling her hat down over her ears. It was a little too small for her, and every time she talked, the fabric wiggled upwards. “We should have a beach day once it’s warmer though… even if we don’t go swimming.” She kicked another rock, squinting into the darkness as it hit the tire of a car. 

“Maybe we can collect seashells.” Van wanted things to be normal so desperately. It was easier to pretend they were if she didn’t think about the magic coursing through her, or the fact that Regan was leaving. Though, she guessed one of those things was normal. People always managed to leave, especially in this town. “Do you really think Dr. Kavanagh is going to stay there? In Ireland, I mean…” Would she be back, or would she love Ireland so much that she stayed put? “I heard they have free healthcare. I think. But she’s a doctor… doesn’t she already have health care?” 

—- 

“I don’t,”  Wynne said, and though the idea of disagreeing with someone didn’t sit well with them, it was the truth. They did prefer summer over winter, thought spring the best season of all. Especially when the days got warmer. Winter made the clouds in their mind seem heavier. “I would really like that, to swim as well. And maybe we can do something fun with the shells we collect. Do you think we could take a surfing class? Or … well do you already know how to do that?” Their eyes followed the rock too and they smiled at the small collision. “If you want, we can also celebrate the spring equinox together. That’s what we used to do at home too, but I do it my own way now. It’s later this month.”

It was nice to walk though. Even if the skin was so cold that it was harsh against their cheeks. Besides, the two of them had a goal — to get a snack! Wynne was glad to have Van’s expertise when it came to treats. They looked sideways at her as she mentioned Dr Kavanagh. “I don’t know.” They looked ahead again, at the way the streetlights were reflected in the icy streets. “Maybe. I hope not, but maybe that’s selfish.” But if Regan’s family was really like their own, they hoped she’d be back. “I don’t know a lot about healthcare, Irish or otherwise.” They were pretty sure they got it through their current job, though. At home, they’d not gone to hospitals. They now understood people had died when maybe they hadn’t had to. “She is a good doctor to have in town.”

—- 

“Surfing?” She shook her head, “no, I’ve never tried that… but I’m sure we could find somewhere around here to do it.” Van was sure that somewhere in Wicked’s Rest, somebody was offering surfing lessons in the summer– she just hadn’t ever looked. “We could try snowboarding, too, if you wanted.” She’d only been a few times, mostly on school class trips, but she always became overwhelmed with the ski lifts and opted to stay closer to the bunny slopes. She wondered silently if things would be different now. “Oh, that’s what–” your cult did – it contains itself before it slips, and Van nods instead, “I think I saw a documentary about that the other day! I think um, that’s what it was.” Nice save, idiot. “It’s too bad I wasn’t born on the equinox… I think that would’ve been cool.” 

“What’s selfish about it?” A part of Van felt relieved that she was leaving, but only because it meant she wouldn’t be thrown out onto the street. Then again, she guessed she could go back to her house, even if she didn’t necessarily want to anymore. Dr. Kavanagh’s apartment was sterile in a way that felt right– it was void of any memories, good, bad– any of it. Though, Thea brought in… different feelings– seeing her every day. She cleared her throat and tightened her arms around her, kicking another rock. They weren’t too far from the corner store now and her stomach grumbled at the promise of hot funyuns. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen her be like, a doctor. Only talk about it.” Dead people needed doctors too, she knew. They needed to be respected, and it really seemed like Dr. Kavanagh did that. “But I hope she likes Ireland, but comes back…” For her sake, for Jade’s– it seemed like Wynne cared about her too with the way that they had shown up at Regan’s apartment, expecting her. “Have you ever been to Ireland? I’ve never been to anywhere abroad except for Toronto, but we like, drove there, and it was super quick.” 

—

“Yes, right? Because there’s beach. We sometimes did some watersports at home, but that was a lake. Mostly a lot of swimming.” Wynne missed the lake, the way the fog formed in the mornings. The squeals that erupted when you dove in in the summer. “Snowboarding? That sounds … cool, but also a bit scary. I’d like to go on the mountains, though. I’d love to do that. Is it still cold enough for this? I bet, right?” They nodded. “It would have been. But your birthday is also special!”

They were quiet for a moment, processing that question as well as why they thought that selfish. Wynne shrugged. “I don’t know. Maybe I should just be happy for her that she’s going to her family. And not be thinking about my own feelings or something. That feels selfish.” It had always been branded selfish to take their own emotions into consideration. They had been more than just a person, at home — they had been sanctified, a future savior, a beacon of hope. Prioritizing that was key. But maybe not wanting Dr Kavanagh to leave just meant they cared about her. “I have been to her office. She has a lot of skeletons there. I never saw the corpses, though. I don’t want to.” They grimaced, kicked the same stone after it had rolled their way. “I hope she does too.” They shook their head. “No. I’ve only been here, in Maine. And New Hampshire, a little. I have never been in another country. The world is so big, am I right? How was Toronto?” 

—

Van silently tried to imagine the life that Wynne had before finding themself in Wicked’s Rest. She’d heard enough to picture it in bits and pieces, but it wasn’t entirely clear. She tried to imagine people who looked like Wynne– siblings, maybe, or cousins, who dove beneath the water to grab at rocks beneath the lake’s surface. “It’s definitely still cold enough for it.” Van offered a smile, brushing past the memories she was re-creating in Wynne’s stead. “I want to, for sure… we should definitely do it.” She was a little nervous at the prospect of falling flat on her face, but she was great at skateboarding! The mechanics were there! “The 21… I’ll remember that, I think.” She nodded, committing the date to memory. It was clear that it was important to them, because this hadn’t been the first time they’d mentioned something about an equinox. 

“I think it’s okay to be…” Van gestured vaguely, “upset..?” She thought for a moment before shaking her head, “maybe that’s not the right word, but..” Van shrugged, mimicking the way that Wynne kicked a rock, sending her own flying to the side, off into somebody’s yard. “I don’t think it’s selfish to feel things. You can be selfish, but I don’t think feeling things has anything to do with it.” She offered Wynne a small smile before shrugging, pulling the sleeves of her coat down so that she was cupping them against her palm. “It was okay. It was for a convention.” She couldn’t remember too much about it. Her anxiety had spiraled tenfold, and now that she looked back at it, she was sure that the melted convention tables had been her fault. 

As they continued to walk, Van saw movement out of the corner of her eye. “Oh, the cemetery is over there… I wonder if Nora is home.” It felt weird, calling the cemetery Nora’s home, but it felt right, too. “Should we go check?” She offered Wynne a smile, before it faltered. “Wait, this isn’t hers, never–” The sound of something scraping against the floor, a body being dragged through mud– there was dirt, too. The sound of gagging. Van’s eyes widened as she grabbed onto Wynne’s arm, dragging them backwards from the fence where the creature stood, taller than either of them. “What is that?” Van asked, breathless, skin now itchy by merely looking at it. As if in some kind of response, the creature dropped the individual by the leg it held onto and leapt over the fence, now standing a foot or so away from either herself or Wynne. “Wynne–” 

—

“Let’s do it! I love trying new things,” Wynne said, glad that there was another possible prospect to look forward to. They had learned that it were those kinds of things they needed to continue to feel like life was valuable, to keep them from sinking into the dark and depressed mood they were always teetering on the edge of. “Especially with friends. And if all goes wrong we’ll at least laugh about it, right?” They smiled at Van. “Sweet. I will let you know where to be when it’s time! I think on the beach near where I live now.”

They were silent as Van spoke, focusing on the pavement. She didn’t think it was selfish to feel things — and it sounded right coming from her mouth, even if the concept in and of itself was wrong. It was selfish to be overrun by emotions, to feel so deeply that it might upset others. Wynne wished there was another stone to kick. “Oh,” they said, as if Van was saying something completely new. In a way, she was. “I think I find it hard to be upset. I was taught it was bad and selfish. But I think you’re right. I wouldn’t think it selfish if you were sad.” And Wynne was no longer someone special or chosen, so why shouldn’t those standards apply to them? They were here now, in this world. “What did you convene about?” They weren’t sure if that was what people did at conventions, but it sounded right. 

They looked at the cemetery, nodding at the suggestion. They hadn’t really been at Nora’s cemetery home a lot, as they’d always met in public or wherever Emilio was living at that time. Wynne was ready to go in, though. Seeing Nora would be nice — but she didn’t live there, Van realized. And there was something else. Their eyes were wide, pushing deep into the darkness to try and see what it was the pair of them were hearing. They too felt an itch running down their skin. “I don’t know.” Wynne took a step backward, felt themself holding onto Van’s hand where she’d grabbed their arm and took them further back with them. It looked monstrous. Their free hand reached inside their jumper, pulling out the necklace Emilio had given them. It seemed to cause some kind of response, the silver cross and Wynne held it out as they kept stumbling back, a moan escaping from their throat. Something fearful, something pathetic, something that wasn’t equipped at all to handle the winged beast closing in on them with a fist full of dirt.

—

If she and Wynne lived anywhere else, they could have continued their conversation. Van would have convinced them that they deserved to feel anger, if they wanted to— that it was alright to exist for themselves now that they were out of their cult. Though, she still wasn’t sure that was the appropriate word to use. Probably not. It didn’t matter that much, though, because the beastly figure that stood in front of them now took over practicality on Van’s behalf. 

It advanced on them, and Van noticed out of the corner of her eye that Wynne was digging into their sweater, pulling something out— the hand that was closed around theirs tightened, and she half expected something to happen at the reveal of whatever Wynne had closed in their hand, but nothing did. There was no magical light that poured from the necklace, but it did, however, deter the monster for a moment. That moment was all Van needed for her magic to push forward. The ground at the monster’s feet began to melt, cement running grey around the creature’s feet. It caused it to slip, almost too comically, and Van was stumbling backwards, pulling Wynne with her. 

“I did that, and we have to go— what is that!” She was shrieking now, admittance for what she’d done ringing through the air. She thought about all of the times she had denied such a thing, and how it felt almost freeing to finally say that yes, she had been on the other end of the magic that temporarily rendered the beast unable to advance on them. “Wynne, what do we do!” The melted asphalt wasn’t enough to keep it at bay for long, and it was trudging towards them, steps too careful for something entirely beast like— this had smarts to it, Van realized. The dirt that it held in its hand spilled from the corners of its large hands, and Van shrunk away as it got closer. Panic rose in her chest and Van outstretched a hand, willing something to happen, but nothing did. 

Wynne knew that strange things existed. There were demons and vampires, fae and mares. There was such a thing as magic as well, but they didn’t fully understand it — but when the ground started melting they figured that might be it. The thing slipped, ugly and made clumsy and they stared with wide eyes. Disbelief still washed over them, an emotion so familiar to them that they might as well no longer register it. The world was full of strange things, but they weren’t used to it yet.

And then Van was shouting that she’d done that and Wynne wanted to ask her what she was going on about, but in stead ran after her. They too were letting out a shriek, “I don’t know! It — maybe — vampire!” It had responded to their cross, hadn’t it? Did Van know about vampires? She had made the ground melt, so maybe she did. They continued to move backwards, fear continuing to strike in their heart and striking twice as heard when their bodies hit what seemed to be a car. “I don’t know! Do that thing again!” Whatever it had been, it had seemed to slow the creature down.

But nothing was happening and the creature was upon them now, taking hold of Van and ripping her from Wynne’s grip. It stuffed a hand of dirt in her mouth and they didn’t even know what to do for a moment, so stunned by this action. “Stop that!” They kicked at the creature, which seemed very intent on finishing his task of making Van eat dirt. 

“A VAMPIRE?! Wynne, that looks nothing like Edward Cullen!” She wasn’t exactly upset by the lack of Edward Cullen-ness, especially because to her, he was the least attractive in the family. If the vampire looked like Alice, on the other hand… Van’s thoughts jumped from one medium to the next, trying to dilute the idea of vampires into one single image. If both magic and bugbears existed, then who was to say something like vampires didn’t?

While she really wanted to have a breakdown about it, she knew that now was not the time. “I can’t just do it, it just happens!” She was panicked enough, but that brought on another fear– that the ground might come up to swallow both herself and Wynne. 

As hard as she tried to concentrate– to follow Wynne’s instructions, she was interrupted by the beast ripping her forward. Had her shoulder just popped out of place? The pain was blinding. She let out a scream, but it was soon muted by the way dirt poured into her mouth. She choked on it, kicking against the creature. Her fingers dug into the arm, but it was no use– he was far too strong for her. The dirt in her mouth was rancid, and she couldn’t breathe. She was going to die here, all because her stupid magic only worked when it wanted to. 

—

There was always something to do in a graveyard. Emilio longed for a busy mind these days, needed the constant distraction that came with pumping adrenaline and hands covered in dust. He was no good on his own, with his thoughts and his feelings, and he couldn’t expect to always be surrounded when the people he cared for had worlds all their own inside their heads. So he fell back on old habits. He stalked graveyards with stakes and blades gripped in his hands so tightly his knuckles hurt, he made himself useful. There was relief to be found in destruction, in the sound of commotion that he knew he could resolve.

There was less relief when the voices causing that commotion were familiar ones.

He recognized Wynne’s voice first, of course. It was the one he heard more often, the one he’d had many a late night conversation with in the hallway of their old apartment building or the quiet living room of Teddy’s house. It took him a second to pinpoint that other voice. Not Nora, not Ariadne. Someone else. He was almost on top of them before it hit him, though given the way he spotted the ground half-melted, he wasn’t sure the revelation meant much. Van was the only person he knew with a habit of melting the ground they stood on as a mechanism of defense.

And defense was a necessary thing here. He spotted the vampire instantly, recognized it as a blutsauger with a quiet string of curses. He didn’t have any garlic on him, and he felt stupid for that. These things were rarer than most other types of vampires — it wasn’t the kind of thing you went out expecting to find. But of course, Wynne and Van had found one anyway. And of course, it was doing its goddamn damndest to turn Van with dirt going for her mouth. “Hey!” He called out, unsure if he was trying to get the kids’ attention or the vampire’s or both. “Get over to me. Okay? Get over here.”

—

Van didn’t know about vampires and Wynne wasn’t sure who Edward Cullen was and it was all a little bit too much to comprehend and explain, so they just tried to focus their energy on what needed doing. The whole vampire and supernatural things exist conversation could come after they’d survived this. Besides, they had questions about what Van had just created! They hoped one day they’d have to stop learning about things that made their head hurt.

For now, they continued to kick at the creature, their anger and fear both growing louder with the sound of Van’s voice. Wynne watched with horror how the dirt got stuck in Van’s throat and they dug for their knife, the one that Emilio had gifted them but that they hadn’t had to use yet, that just sat in their pocket in case of. The knife they hoped to never have to use.

They kicked the creature again, screamed at it to, “Let her GO,” and then tried to hit it with the knife. It wasn’t wood and the skin barely broke, the knife sliding down and leaving a cut that seemed to barely bother the thing. They roared, trying to take Van’s hand to pull her away but Wynne wasn’t strong like that. They didn’t know what to do and they hoped that someone else was here, that —

And that’s when fate seemed to be on their side for once, Emilio’s protective voice calling out and ringing through their body with a feeling of recognition. “I don’t know how!” Their voice was shrill as they called back. How could they just run towards the slayer if their friend was in such trouble? If she might die? The fear struck through their heart and they looked at Emilio. “Van — I can’t — we need to stop it, I don’t know what it’s doing but it needs to stop.” Wynne pushed with their hands at the vampiric monster again, their knife cutting into some of its skin but it was futile in the grand scheme of things. “Van, Van, can you — pull free? We need to run.”

—

There was another voice– although grating, Van felt a wave of relief. She’d recalled the last time she’d gotten into trouble with Emilio, how he’d taken care of it pretty swiftly. Would this be like the last time, or would she die here? Her mouth was full of dirt and she was coughing it up as the monster was shoving it in. She could see Wynne out of the corner of her eye kicking at the creature, but it didn’t seem to care all that much. She tried to, too, but she was growing tired– exhaustion set into her bones the more dirt that filled her mouth. 

Van spluttered, nails digging into the wrist of the creature as she tried desperately to break the hold it had on her. Tears streamed down her face, both from the suffocation and the fear. She was starting to lose feeling in her toes, she thought– was that what that was? Suddenly, one moment she was being held upright, and the next she was being half-tossed, half-thrown to the side. The ground beneath the monster began to disintegrate, liquid asphalt pouring over the creature’s feet. At least her magic was working now. Was she about to die? Was that what this was? 

She hit the ground hard, stars scattering across her vision as she coughed up the dirt, hooking a finger into her mouth to scoop it out. Tears made her face sticky and wet, and she could only imagine what she might have looked like to those around her. But that didn’t matter– not right now. When she looked back towards the beast, it was stuck in the goo she’d created. The divet into the earth looked like a large pothole, and then suddenly– a giant hand, grotesque and feathery grabbed onto the creature’s shoulder, pulling it down beneath the level at which Van could see it. 

—

There wasn’t time for this. The blutsauger had a hold of Van, was already stuffing dirt into her mouth, and it wouldn’t be long before it killed her. Maybe Emilio couldn’t keep it down permanently, but he had to do something, had to find some way to at least save the kid’s life. He yanked his holy water from his pocket, pushing himself as best he could to cross the distance between himself and the kids quickly in spite of the pain in his bad leg, but he could already tell it wasn’t going to be enough. Van was sputtering and coughing and running out of time, and Emilio could push himself as hard as he wanted to but he couldn’t force his useless leg to work. He couldn’t close the distance quickly enough, couldn’t stop what was about to happen. He’d walk away from this with another dead kid on his conscience — or two, if he was too slow to save Wynne, too. The thought was enough to push him a little more, make him move faster but still too slow. He was going to be too late, he was going to fail here the same way he had a thousand times before, he was going to —

The Earth opened up beneath the blutsauger’s wretched feet, close enough that Emilio stumbled back to avoid the gaping canyon that had appeared in the world. It looked like what Van had done back the last time he’d run into her, but… different. Bigger, more intense. Something came out of the hole — a hand? None of it made a whole lot of sense, but it didn’t matter. It didn’t matter, because Emilio was close enough now to dart around that hole, to close the distance between himself and the kids.

He came in as quickly as he could, still clutching that holy water. It had seemed small in comparison to the blutsauger, but it seemed utterly miniscule when held up against the size of the hole that had opened in the ground. Emilio held it anyway, unscrewed the cap with his teeth as he crouched next to Van, between her and the crevice that had swallowed the blutsauger. “You okay? You — Can you breathe? Wynne.” He gestured wildly at them, ushering for them to get behind him, to let him put himself between them and the hole, too. “Here.” He pulled the cross from around his throat, shoving it towards Van. Wynne had the one he’d given them, still; it would be better if Van weren’t entirely unarmed. Although… looking to the hole, Emilio had a feeling Van never quite had that problem.

—

Wynne was moved by pure instinct only, driven by the fear of losing Van, of this ugly creature killing her on a random evening. They had just been on their way to get some snacks — surely that couldn’t be how death went? Death came for old people or happened in grotesque ways, like a sacrifice on an altar or a vampire’s head being torn off. It didn’t just happen like this, did it? Sure, there were stories of things just happening like this, but Van couldn’t just die, right here, on a random evening when they had been going to get some candy. And so they were trying whatever they could, attempting to pull and hit and kick and shriek – but none of it gave.

And then the ground started to move, something strange happening and Wynne jumped back a beat after Van was tossed away. They watched her cough up the dirt and started to pull at the bandana tied around their neck. Their intention to hand it over for Van to wipe the dirt off of was discarded when they looked at what was happening. The ground was transforming, sinking, becoming some kind of hole — and then there was a hand, a tug and it was gone. The feathery hand and the vampiric thing itself. They stared, tasted the salt of tears leaking into their mouth and let out a whimper.

Soon enough they rushed over, pulling off their bandana fully and holding it out to to Van. Their eyes danced viciously from the hole to Emilio to Van, not sure what to focus on. “Is it — is it gone?” They were crouching, hand placed on the ground and an exhale passing from their lips. “Van —” They didn’t know what to say. Should they address it, how afraid they had been? How she’d almost died? No, probably not – it would probably not be sensible, even if it was the thought circling their mind viciously. “Are you okay? What can we do?”

—

Between colliding with asphalt and the dirt in her throat, Van was gasping for air. Chest heaving, she held onto her shirt, pulling it slightly as if it’d allow her more room to breathe. She wasn’t dead, and neither was Wynne. Emilio was still talking, and now Wynne was talking to her, too. She blinked rapidly, tears blurring her vision making it hard to take in her surroundings. Something dropped into her lap and her hand splayed wildly around until she felt the weight of the cross. She held onto it as if some sort of lifeline, reaching up to rub away the dirt on her face.

“I think I’m okay,” Van managed to choke out, wheezing slightly as she tilted her head back, blinking away the now dirty smeared tears. Her mind raced from Diana in the parking lot to recently with Regan’s apartment, and now–? Once her vision became slightly more clear, she found the space where the creature had been, where the ground had swallowed it whole. It was left with an indent just as it had been when Diana disappeared, and as when the man in the ice cream shop had. She felt less guilt, less fear about this one, though. 

“I did that,” Van whispered, confirming what she was sure both her companions were trying to figure out. “I did that.” She had saved her own life, and possibly Wynne’s by proxy, but it’d been too close– what if the creature had dragged either herself or Wynne with it? What if Emilio had been trying to fight it off? “I’m sorry– I–” She choked on the remaining dirt in her throat and shook her head. “It was going to kill me, and maybe you, Wynne, I couldn’t– I had to do it, I had to kill it.” Even if she hadn’t exactly instructed her magic to do such a thing, the fear had pulled up over her like a second skin, leading the way to the creature’s destruction. She wasn’t sure what had come up to take down the vampiric beast, but she was grateful for it. How many more times would she feed her demons (literally)? “I don’t know how it– I– I was scared, and then– this happens when I’m really scared.” She looked at Emilio, “I didn’t want to hurt Wynne, I swear.” Because Emilio hurt things that hurt other people, right? Van had hurt people, plenty of them. Would Emilio retaliate? She stared at him, eyes glossed over with fear and regret. 

—

It all happened pretty quickly. There was a threat, there was a hole, there was a hand, there was nothing. Emilio’s adrenaline was pumping, but there was nowhere for it to go now. Nothing to fight off, nowhere to put the energy buzzing beneath his skin. The paranoia that had taken up a permanent residence in the back of his mind worked overtime as a result, insisting that something else was going to happen, that he’d missed something. Was that tingle on the back of his neck anxiety, or his senses warning him of another approaching undead? He whirled around, glancing off to the side with wild eyes. But the only chaos here was inside his head now; everything else was still.

“It’s gone,” he said, half in answer to Wynne’s question and half in an attempt to reassure himself of as much. There was nothing left to fight. He repeated it to himself a time or two, tried to calm the wild beating of his heart. It was gone. Van was alive and coughing, working on getting that dirt out of her lungs. Wynne was at her side, offering her their handkerchief and making sure she was okay. Emilio was scanning the perimeter like a damn crazy person, half-convinced something else was going to pop out of the woodwork and drag Wynne away next, or Van, or him. Was that something he needed to worry about? It must have been Van who’d caused the hand to appear, just like it had been Van who’d melted the asphalt during the goo shit, but how much control did she have over it? He’d wager that the answer was not much. 

Van’s voice managed to force its way through the haze of paranoia in his head only after she’d admitted to the ordeal, and he tuned in about halfway through. She was apologizing, she was scared. Of him, maybe? Guilt churned alongside the adrenaline in his gut. He felt a little nauseous. “Hey, it’s okay.” It didn’t come out quite as comforting as he’d meant for it to. It wasn’t gentle, wasn’t paternal. It was hoarse and uncertain instead, like a man out of practice with kindness. He grimaced at the sound of his own voice, shaking his head. “Look, you — You did what you had to. That thing was going to kill you. Then Wynne, then more people. You did good, kid. Okay? You did good.”

—

They wiped at their eyes, where tears of their own had fallen in the blind panic that was slowly ebbing from their body. Wynne didn’t know how to cope with these surges of emotions, but it didn’t much matter — there was no time to stress about emotional incapacity when there was something to take care of. And that, at the very least, was someone they had learned at home. Besides, Emilio was there now, and with Emilio they felt safe. Even if the earth had opened up and strange claw had snatched their assailant away, even if Van was still shaking.

And Van was apologizing for killing the thing and they wondered what it said about them that they were taken aback by it. Maybe it was because they hadn’t known a lot of people who apologized for their murders and sacrifices. Blood stuck to all the hands of the protherians, even Wynne. In this case it wasn’t even a matter of sacrifice, this had been self defense. This had been one of the monsters that should be killed, like the vampires in the barn or the demon their people had worshiped. They looked at Van with wide eyes, “It’s okay,” they said. “You did what you had to do. I’m glad you did. Okay? I — but … I don’t know what it was you did. But I’m glad.” If the world was filled with death – which it quite clearly was – Wynne wanted it to be monsters like the one who’d been swallowed whole to die, and not the people like Van. 

Emilio was also saying that Van had done good and they were glad for it. They remembered the vampire falling on their stake and turning into dust. Emilio turning more of them into nothingness, because maybe that was what best. They remembered Padrig, guts spilling. Jac, neck slit. The creature that had just died didn’t tug at their gut the way those last two did. Wynne nodded. “Do you want to go back home?” 

—

You did good. 

Van choked on the apologies as they swarmed her mind. She would need to explain this in further detail to Wynne, would need to figure out how to make them understand that she wasn’t dangerous in the same way that the creature had been. In a different way, sure, but different. Van didn’t want to hurt anyone, much less Wynne. Van blinked back the tears, both from the fear and agony of not having been able to breathe. She reached up to wipe away the few strays that managed to fight their way through with the back of her hand. 

She grabbed onto Wynne’s hand, holding it tightly as if willing them to be an anchor of some kind. If Van could feel something real in this moment, it would make it easier. She could feel Emilio’s gaze on her, too, and so she pushed herself up, exhaustion evident in her movements as she struggled to get to her feet. Her hands and knees were scraped and she could feel the sting with her movements, but that wasn’t important right now. 

Home was an option, but Van didn’t want to be alone. Regan’s apartment, though put back together after what had happened that night, felt a little… wrong. 

“Can I come over?” Van asked, stare blank as she looked down at the asphalt from where the creature had disappeared. “Is that okay?” She tightened her grip on Wynne’s hand, looking between them and Emilio. “I don’t–” She thought it was obvious, but she forced herself to say it, to bend at will to the idea that maybe they didn’t want her to be alone, either. “I don’t think I want to be alone.” 

—

There were tears, though none were from Emilio. He wondered, somewhat absently, if Van had done this before. Not the melting — that was familiar enough that he knew it had happened before — or even the hole that opened up and the hand that thrust its way out of it. Instead, he wondered about the creature he presumed to be dead now, wondered if Van had killed anything before it. How much of the fear on her face or the tears in her eyes were for the suffocation she’d nearly suffered, and how much were for the sensation of taking a ‘life,’ however ugly it had been? He tried to remember the first time he’d killed something, tried to remember what it felt like. But it was hard. It was hard to remember his hands before they were bloodied. Maybe it was better that way. Maybe that was the way things were supposed to be.

Wynne assured Van that she’d done what she’d had to, and it was strange that Emilio had thought that went without saying. He rarely considered things like this to be something a person needed comfort for. No one had comforted him, had they? His mother had praised him if he’d killed something exceptionally well but, beyond that, it had only ever been expected. Van killed the blutsauger, and of course she had to. But Wynne said it like the reassurance was necessary, so Emilio nodded as if he believed it, too. It was hard, teaching an old dog new tricks. None of them ever felt natural.

He glanced to Wynne at Van’s question, though he wasn’t sure if it was for them or himself. Wynne’s house was their own; Teddy had made sure of it. But Emilio nodded, anyway. “You can both come to Teddy’s,” he offered, because he thought Wynne might feel safe there and he thought he might feel better if he could keep an eye on them, on both of them. “You can have… Uh, how old are you again?” Wasn’t the drinking age different in America? In the twenties instead of eighteen. Emilio had been far younger when he’d had his first drink, though, and he’d never cared much for laws, anyway. So he shrugged. “Eh, doesn’t matter. You can have a drink. Helps calm you down. Or… There’s probably food. Uh, whatever you want. Yeah? You can do whatever you want.”

—

Van’s hand was in theirs and Wynne held on tight on her too, her thumb running small circles over the back of her hand. They weren’t sure what to say just yet, but maybe that was okay. There could be conversation about what exactly it was that Van had done and what it meant later, just like they could converse later about the existence of vampires. (And demons, maybe those too, if they were ripping off bandaids anyway.)

For now, though, there was a hand to hold and tears to let dry. As Van quietly asked if she could come over, they were ready to offer their home. Going to Teddy’s (and Emilio’s – even if he didn’t quite see it that way yet) home seemed like a good idea, though. More space, there, and the slayer could remain to linger in their periphery and make sure no other vampires somehow ended up on their trail and attacking them. They wanted to ask if there was a chance that there was more, as there always had been in their previous encounters with vampires. One look at Van made Wynne think twice about bringing up that potential reality, though.

“Sounds good,” they said, nodding. They squeezed Van’s hand. “Are you … did you drive?” They looked up at Emilio, who seemed to be suggesting a favored solution. Liquor. They wouldn’t mind some at this point. “There’s a bunch of stuff there. We’ll just go there and get you cleaned up and relax, okay? Teddy also always has treats. No need for the shop.” They looked at Van, catching her eyes. “We’ll be okay there.”

—

She wasn’t sure why, but she half expected Emilio to tell her no. She felt a little guilty for that– thinking so badly of him when all he was trying to do was help. Van leaned into Wynne as they ventured away from the scene of the crime. At Emilio’s question, her brows furrowed. It occurred to her that Emilio hadn’t even said happy birthday to her. Actually, that seemed normal. “I just turned twenty-one, and I like pink drinks.” Her voice shook slightly as she explained herself. It didn’t really matter what she liked or not, she didn’t think. 

Van attempted a smile, but she could still feel the dirt on her teeth. “Do you think Teddy has an extra toothbrush?” Would they be upset with her for what happened? Especially after getting her the ring that was supposed to help? She wasn’t sure. She bit the inside of her cheek as she stared off into the distance, She had to believe both Wynne and Emilio that it would be alright– that the beast she’d sent off to… wherever, wouldn’t come back to finish the job. 

—

“Oh. Happy birthday.” It was flat, and a little uncertain, but it was genuine, too. Emilio was sure Teddy had the ingredients to make pink drinks (were those just drinks that were pink?) back home, though he had no idea how to go about making one. He’d figure it out, he guessed. Fuck only knew the kid could probably use one, after everything.

He turned to Wynne, shaking his head a little. He hadn’t driven — and if he had, he’d have been on his bike, which he wasn’t sure would comfortably carry three people — but they should be fine to walk. And… stop by a store on the way home to buy a toothbrush. “I’ll get you one. Call it a late birthday gift or something. And Wynne’s right, okay? You’ll be all right.”

Emilio would make sure of it.

[asirenscream]

TIMING: current LOCATION: an alleyway on amity road. PARTIES: @asirenscream & @mortemoppetere SUMMARY: wren stakes her claim on a dumpster and subjects emilio to her crying. CONTENT: mentions of past child death.

Wren knew that class was supposed to be important. While she had signed up for classes and tried not to stumble over her own attempts to blend in, that was made abundantly clear. Yet, Wren definitely hadn’t gone yet. Poppy had left her a bright pink backpack and whatever supplies she would need to get by as a ‘normal human girl’, but the concept of sitting around with a bunch of humans made her entire body break out into a cold sweat. It was still surreal that she was surrounded by humans when all of her life had been spent only around other sirens. Pretending to be human was already becoming rather taxing. She’d much rather be around the seagulls she had befriended already.

Blending in on Amity Road was easy enough with how many people were around, but that in itself had a wave of anxiety crashing down onto Wren violently. It took one person bumping into her to cause her to flock to the nearest alleyway, hiding behind a dumpster to regain some air into her lungs. She swallowed thickly, having taken off her backpack in favor of clutching it to her chest tightly. Not that there was much in it to begin with. There were a few things she had pawed out of the dumpsters she had dug through prior, but that wasn’t much. 

The plan to hide away didn’t last. Wren all but startled out of her own skin when a man seemed to have a similar plan to her in hiding behind a dumpster. Her brown eyes widened, staring up at him with her lips parted. What do you even say to a human in a situation like this? Act cool. She had to be calm. 

“What are you doing?!” Instead, Wren’s voice came out shrill and high pitched as her body shook. “I mean—this is my dumpster.” That didn’t sound good either. “Uh—um—” Wren was floundering and full of utter fear. What was she supposed to do?

—

A lot of P.I. work, as it turned out, was waiting. Waiting, watching, and being in the right place at the right time. Emilio was good at… some parts of it. The watching, he could handle. He spent a lot of his youth watching, after all, keeping tabs on the people around him in ways that ranged from picking out the weaknesses in his fellow ‘campers’ while training to noting what his siblings did wrong so as not to repeat their mistakes. Being in the right place at the right time was largely luck, but you could swing it if you knew what you were doing. Who to follow where, what to say and when… those were all things Emilio could handle.

It was the waiting that tended to give him trouble. And that was bad. He knew it was bad. So much of private investigation came with just waiting for something to happen, and Emilio’s inability to sit still for long periods of time had always been one of his greatest weaknesses. He liked to move, liked action. Often, this made his cases go… less smoothly than they otherwise might have. 

That was certainly the case today. It wasn’t a particularly unexpected outcome. The case had started as a simple attempt to prove infidelity to help a woman divorce her husband a little easier, but it had become clear very quickly that her husband wasn’t quite as clean cut as she’d claimed. While Emilio hadn’t yet gotten proof of the man’s infidelity, the photos he’d captured of the guy’s various illegal activities was sure to help his client’s case a little. 

Unless he was spotted photographing those illegal activities. In which case, he’d probably end up a little more stabbed than he’d like to be. 

The man turned his way just as his camera went off, and Emilio quickly ducked into an alley. He heard feet pounding the ground as they rushed towards him, so he made what he believed to be the smartest move available to him — he ducked behind the dumpster. It would have been a far better idea if he were the only one to have it.

There was a kid there. Tucked between the dumpster and the wall of the alley, staring at him with wide eyes. Emilio blinked at her, eyes wild. She spoke, and it was loud and shrill, and he shushed her quickly. “This is my dumpster,” he argued in a whisper. He had no real claim to the dumpster, but he needed it right now. “What are you doing? Somebody after you?” He glanced towards the mouth of the alley again, tense.

—

Wren immediately shrunk further back against the wall abruptly. Her mouth snapped shut and she bit hard into the meat of her bottom lip. She knew if she didn’t then it’d instantly start trembling. The picture books she read growing up never really said anything about humans being scary. Most of them blended together in the mix of sirens and how eating the hearts of humans came to be. A wariness and deep anxiety often plagued her when she would read the books as a kid. Poppy teased Wren for it endlessly when she’d snap the book shut and refuse to read it anymore. She couldn’t even imagine sinking her teeth into this man’s heart when all she wanted to do was run away as soon as possible

“Your dumpster…?” Wren finally managed, voice coming out in a tentative whisper. She didn’t know people owned dumpsters. Maybe he owned a lot of trash. There was some human saying about a man’s trash being treasure so that made sense for sure. “Sorry. I didn’t—I didn’t know. They don’t tell you—they don’t say when h—people own dumpsters.” Like houses and cars and other possessions. She had a list she was compiling with the one that Poppy left her with some pointers. Dumpsters would have to go on the list next then. Don’t take someone’s bag and definitely don’t take their dumpster it seemed. If Wren could shrink down any further without rousing the man’s suspicions at her adjusted height then she absolutely would. Having someone’s attention on her like this was making her shake, fingers twisting up in the straps of the backpack to grab onto something—anything. What kind of normal explanation could one give at hiding in an alleyway because she had been seconds away from an utter meltdown. 

“I like alleyways. Cozy.” The words were blurted out without a second guess. Wren grimaced a moment after. She didn’t think that was a very reasonable explanation. “I… needed to, you know, scope it out. Find my own dumpster. I strive to be a dumpster owner like you one day. Own lots of trash and stuff. Who doesn’t want to own trash, huh? A man’s trash is treasure like they all say!” Her rushed, whispered words tapered off with a nervous yet quiet laugh. Smooth. She totally was able to save that one.

—

The kid shrunk back and, immediately, Emilio felt a rush of guilt wash over him. Christ, she was jumpy, wasn’t she? Making herself smaller against the dumpster, shying away from his voice even in its whispered state… She struck him as a kid without much of an idea as to what went on in the world. He wondered if she was alone here, if she had someone watching her back. It seemed a ridiculous notion. If she had someone watching her back, would she have been cowering behind a dumpster? 

Craning his neck slightly, Emilio glanced back into the street. His client’s husband was still circling, still searching, which meant he’d have to stay camped out here if he wanted to avoid revealing himself. Absently, he weighed the pros and cons of it. He didn’t mind a fight, felt a little excited by the idea of one, but… Any revelation that the man’s wife had hired an investigator to follow him around would put her in danger. Emilio couldn’t risk that. Not for something as small as ducking out of a situation to try to make a kid he didn’t know a little less on guard. 

Sighing, he settled into a seated position, bad knee already protesting the short stint of squatting in the alley. The kid took his claim to the dumpster seriously, and Emilio felt another stab of guilt at that. Fucking kids. If she’d been a few years older, he wouldn’t have cared whether or not he upset her. But he thought of Nora, of Wynne, of Flora. If anyone found one of them in an alley like this and made them look the way this kid looked now, he’d have been pissed. 

“Sorry,” he said quietly, looking forward instead of at her. He thought it might help, thought that being the center of a stranger’s attention might have been part of what spooked her. “You didn’t do anything wrong. Not really my dumpster, I’m just… an asshole, I guess.” As if guessing was necessary. “Think the city owns them or something, I don’t fuc — I don’t know.” 

He bit his tongue, trying to figure out how to proceed. He wanted to do half a million things — to leave, to stay, to ask if she needed help, to avoid any situation that might require him giving it to her — but he couldn’t settle on one. Absently, he glanced to the front of the alley again, but there was no change. He was here until he could leave, and he couldn’t leave yet. Something told him she didn’t have much of an intention of leaving, either.

“You’re not… sleeping here, are you? In the alley.” Calling it cozy seemed like a red flag. He let his head rest against the cold metal of the dumpster, making a face. “Hell, if you want to own trash, I can get you some trash. Might want to… aim higher, though.” There was something about the way she spoke. Unfamiliar, uncertain. Like she wasn’t quite aware of how things worked. It didn’t take a detective or a hunter to come up with theories about that kind of thing, did it? “You… not from around here?”

—

The man’s head turned away from Wren as he sat in the alleyway near her. Part of her relaxed at no longer being the subject of his direct attention. The other part of her was still seemingly on high alert. It was hard to not want to dissolve into tears or take off in the other direction. He surprised her in the apology that came next. Brown eyes blinked owlishly a few times while Wren processed that. 

Oh. So not a dumpster owner then. Was this something that Wren was supposed to be aware of? People don’t own dumpsters? This was more confusing than she thought it would be—fitting in. It’s not like she did that much in the colony to begin with. “Oh. I see. That’s… that’s okay. Do you not own trash then?” Was that even important? Wren couldn’t help her mild curiosity, even if she cringed at herself a moment later. 

“I don’t—no! I live in a house!” Wren fumbled over her words in her haste to reassure the man. Even if she had considered living in the woods where the birds stayed or on the beach with the seagulls she figured that’d be frowned upon as a human. Besides, it was a gift from Poppy—or that was how she framed it in her offer. Take care of it while she was gone and maybe it’d get this mission from her parents over with faster. “I find lots of nice things in the trash, though. People throw stuff away that still has heart to it. I think there’s some stuff that deserves a second chance before being deemed useless.” Wren remarked softly. 

“No,” Wren shook her head immediately. Her fingers absently played with the ends of her long hair that were a bright, fiery red. It reminded her of her feathers. She hadn’t flown since getting here. She was too scared to. It didn’t help that it seemed like no one was flying now with whatever was going on in the sky. Even without that she probably wouldn’t. Too dangerous. Too close to any humans who could see her. Poppy tried to tell her that the humans would be more scared of her than she should be of them, but Wren had a feeling that’s just what made them so dangerous at times. “I live… lived near the ocean. Far away.” Vague, but it would do. “I’m here by myself now.”

—

He was probably just about the worst person for this kind of thing. Emilio’s understanding of the world was one colored by the violence he’d been raised in. He knew more about how to kill things than he knew about how to talk to them, and while he had raised a child, Flora had been so much younger than this kid when she’d died. She would have learned about things like dumpsters and trash organically, years before seeing one for the first time. But… she probably still would have looked at him with wide eyes all the same, and something in him ached at the thought. He didn’t have time for this. He never had time for this. But he was here anyway, repeating history over and over and over again.

Blowing a puff of air through his nose, he cracked a little smile at her question. Do you not own trash? “Depends on who you ask.” According to a lot of people, half the shit he owned qualified as trash, from the ratty clothes he’d gotten without paying for to the sofa he’d found beside a dumpster not unlike this one. Emilio liked to think there was nothing wrong with any of the things he owned, but the popular consensus went against him there.

At least the kid had a house. He knew if she hadn’t, he’d have ended up dragging her back to Teddy’s, and even if they would have accepted her without a second thought, it would have been a whole thing. They’d have made some joke about Emilio and his habit of bringing home strays, and his face would have burned even if he’d have thought it was funny, too. “That’s good. A nice house?” With running water and working lights? She looked clean enough, for someone sitting behind a dumpster, so he figured she was all right. “Yeah. Yeah, you’re right about that. People throw out all kinds of shit that’s still got life left in it.” Most of his clothes came from dumpsters, too. Nothing was ever as useless as people assumed it was. He’d learned that time and time again. And that was good, too. It was lucky for people like him. It meant he wasn’t entirely useless, either.

Near the ocean. A selkie, maybe? Emilio knew less about them than he did other things, but he knew they existed. While most of his knowledge was tied to the undead, he had been married to a ranger for a few years. This kid wasn’t undead, so that narrowed things down a little. She could have been fae — maybe some kind of water nymph? — or she could have been a shifter. Whatever she was, he had doubts that she was human. He didn’t think those doubts were unfounded. “Why are you by yourself?” Concern ebbed in his chest again; he tried to push it away.

—

‘Depends on who you ask.’ That made Wren blink in mild confusion. Though, the more she thought about it she supposed she understood. She often collected random bits that washed up on shore rather than trying to trade. While the other sirens around her age in her colony wouldn’t tease her to her face it often resulted in snickers behind her back and whispered remarks she ignored. Maybe this man too knew how it felt to have people question why you found value in certain items. “I bet your things are nice,” she offered after a momentary pause.

What exactly was a nice house? Wren didn’t have much to work off of. This was the first house she had ever lived in or seen. “Um, yes. I think so?” That probably wasn’t very convincing. “It is near the beach. I love the beach.” It reminded her of her real home. The nearby waves were partially able to calm any waves of anxiety, but it was still hard to sleep. “The bed is super squishy. I don’t know how people can sleep like that, though. I feel like I’m going to like—” She waved her hands absently, slowly pushing them in a downward motion, “—fall right through it.” Poppy was always better at adjusting to change than Wren was. Most sirens in the colony were better at it, even. 

The question made Wren inhale sharply. Her bottom lip trembled faintly. This was the second time she had burst into tears in front of a stranger. At least she could call Van a… friend? Is that what they were? She was still struggling to navigate the ins and outs of human culture and how to even function without her support system. Many anxiety attacks had been had. Her cheeks and the tips of her ears were hot with her embarrassed blush. Wren’s hand rubbed at her cheek as she glanced away to try to keep the tears at bay. It wasn’t that successful, one managed to escape and trail down her cheek before she could brush it away. 

“Um—my… parents.” There was an audible shake to Wren’s voice that even she couldn’t ignore. “They made me come here by myself. Said it would be better for me or something. I don’t have anyone here. Just me.” 

—

He was a little surprised by the compliment. He got more now than he used to — perks of having a handful of people in town who didn’t want him dead, even if he didn’t quite understand their reasoning — but not usually about the things he owned, and not typically from strangers. “Appreciate it,” he said cautiously. If she were fae, the compliment could be a trap. He’d been warned that some of them did that, tricked you into thanking them so that they could wrap you up in a bind. But… the kid didn’t strike him as malicious. And that was saying something — most things struck Emilio as malicious, after all.

At least it sounded like the house she was staying in was an actual house, with a bed. He huffed a little laugh at her statement that it was too soft, nodding in quiet agreement. He often had the same problem with his mattress at Teddy’s. He was more used to the one he’d slept on in his shitty apartment in Worm Row, hard and dirty. It made it difficult to drift off, sometimes, made him feel like he was sleeping on something that would toss him off the moment he let his guard down. Maybe this kid had grown up in the woods — nymph was feeling more and more likely. It’d make sense. “I get that,” he said belatedly. “The… soft bed. Mine is too soft, too. I sleep on the floor, sometimes. It helps.” It didn’t help the ache in his bones or the way his leg often felt like more pain than limb, but it was something, at least.

Her bottom lip trembled, eyes turning watery, and Emilio was struck by a memory of Flora at just a few months old protesting the loss of his finger resting in the palm of her tiny hand. Her expression had looked similar to this before a meltdown, though those meltdowns became fewer and farther between as she got older. Hunters, after all, couldn’t afford tantrums or terrible twos. His chest ached at the thought, and he looked away from the kid in front of him so he wouldn’t have to be reminded of the one he’d lost. 

“They kicked you out?” It was a quiet murmur, though he couldn’t quite mask the surprise in his voice. The idea of throwing your child out on the street to fend for themself wasn’t one that made much sense to Emilio. Even his mother, who’d never particularly liked him, had wanted him close. To let him go would be to risk him bringing shame to the family name, and that wasn’t a thing she could stand to imagine. She’d rather see him dead than out on his own, and he wondered if that was kinder. He was bothered by the fact that he couldn’t quite decide. “Hey, you — It’s okay. Yeah. It’s — There’s people here who’ll help you. All right? Don’t…” He waved a hand uncertainly. He didn’t want her to cry or anything. He didn’t know how to deal with it. “Look, what’s your name? I’m Emilio.”

—

At least Wren wasn’t alone in not being used to human beds. Was this man human or something else entirely? She figured she would be better at this, but then again, she spent her whole life around sirens only. There wasn’t exactly any advice any of them have given to spot other creatures and humans. She was sort of flying blind here. (The thought made her fight a smile at her own internal joke.) “Oh. Maybe I should try that.” She said, thoughtfully. She had spent a night or two on the beach. Tucked away where no one would see her, she slept on the sand and it was the most restful sleep she had since coming to Wicked’s Rest. It reminded her of home. 

Kicked out. That was such a… blunt way of putting it. Yet, it was the most accurate. That was what they had done to Wren, after all. Told her that she had to be able to stand on her own two feet and stop being so damn afraid. It wasn’t healthy to be so scared of everything, they had said. They all but kicked her off toward the deep end and hoped she could soar over the crashing waves instead of drowning. Her flying had started to improve with how she had to make the long flight to the town, but with the skyquakes and just plain fear, she hadn’t done much more. Fear ruled Wren’s life. She didn’t know how to not be ruled by just how scared she was every day of everything.

Wren let out a shaky breath and scrubbed at her cheek anxiously to wipe the tear that had escaped away. “Yes. They said it was for the best.” This was mortifying. Where could she run to? They were by a dumpster and she had no quick escape route. It seemed the man didn’t know how to handle her tears. She blinked owlishly as she looked at him, staying quiet as he stumbled over his words. Who would help her? Would strangers just help her out of the kindness of their hearts? Well, she did suppose that was exactly what Van did…

“I’m Wren, like the bird,” Wren said softly. “You really think people would help me? I—I don’t know. I kind of… avoid people.” She gestured vaguely, wiping at her eyes once more to try to keep her waterworks at bay for the time being. “Seems like the best plan as of right now. Pretty scary otherwise.”

—

She seemed to accept his advice, and Emilio nodded. He wasn’t sure if it was good advice or not, but a night of sleep on a hard surface was probably better than no sleep at all, wasn’t it? (He said probably, because he was never quite sure. He slept so rarely, and so fitfully when he managed to do so, that he found it difficult to consider what limited rest he received from it to be worth pursuing at all. Other people thought differently, but it wasn’t exactly rare for Emilio’s methods of self care to be met with arguments by whoever was around to witness them. This kid was… a nice change of pace.)

Something flashed across her face, and Emilio wondered if he should try to be a little more sensitive. It wasn’t exactly his strong suit, though he rarely even tried it with anyone who wasn’t a kid. He tried to treat people this age with gentleness, but… it was difficult, considering the fact that he’d never quite known gentleness himself. He didn’t know how to phrase things in a way that wouldn’t make her flinch. Given how jumpy she seemed to be, he wasn’t even certain it was a possibility at all. 

“For the best,” he repeated flatly, trying not to think of his own mother, of all the things she had done ‘for the best.’ She’d been planning his death ‘for the best.’ That one still stung more than he’d care to admit. “Don’t see how you being on your own is what’s best for anyone.” There was a hint of bitterness to his tone; he tried to combat it, to make it less. He didn’t think insulting the people who’d kicked her out would make her feel much better. 

Wren, like the bird. Was that something to read into, that clarification? Emilio struggled, sometimes, to tell the difference between actual suspicion and his built-in paranoia. “Yeah,” he confirmed. “Yeah, people will help you. Just… You know, not just anybody. Going up to strangers and asking for help, that’s not the way to go.” If she was something other than human, hunters were a concern. Hunters that weren’t Emilio, that was. “I’m… a person.” Even on the days he didn’t feel like one. He was trying to remember that. “I could help you. Maybe. I don’t know. Depends what you need, right? But I know other people, too. People you could trust.”

—

Wren was silently, staring at a spot on the dumpster over Emilio’s shoulder rather than at him directly. His words stung, but not in any way that was hurtful coming from him. It was hurtful to know that someone else was shocked at her parents' decision. The betrayal she felt wasn’t something that was unreasonable. She had felt lost in a haze of utter uncertainty since getting to the town. It ached just that bit more seeing someone being indignant on her behalf. It always seemed to hurt worse when the people you trusted the most were the ones that twisted the knife in your back. 

“Yeah, I didn’t think so either,” Wren finally responded. She picked at a stray thread on the sweater she was wearing. She ran so hot that she didn’t have to wear that heavy of a jacket, but maybe she should. Wren didn’t want to stand out more than she already did. There were so many ins and outs to being human, to coming across normal. Wren definitely was going to need a new notebook at the rate of how much she was filling it up with everything she was learning. 

“Okay… Not just anyone or strangers.” They weren’t strangers anymore, were they? Emilio and Wren, friends! Or… friends in a different sense? Friends that could feel like family. Someone to have your back. Someone that wouldn’t kick her out. Maybe Wren was getting ahead of herself, but Emilio had been so kind to her despite how tentative and fearful she was. Maybe friendship could mean leaning on people despite the terror that always was around the corner in your mind. Wren wasn’t sure, but she was sure that Emilio seemed like someone she could go to for help.

A small smile finally tugged at Wren’s lips. “Thank you… I am a person, too. If you—if you want help! That’s what you do, right? Help people you care for? I can do that, also. I don’t know what I can offer, but it is there. I know lots of bird facts.” She offered. “You were hiding, too? Weren’t you? From something or someone, maybe? I can help! Then, um… in turn, you help me walk down the street?” A small thing, but walking by herself around so many people was making her nauseous with unending anxiety. “I just… need to prove something to myself. I can do it. Maybe asking for help with it isn’t such a bad thing, right?”

—

He’d never been particularly tactful. His mother had had no reason to teach him the ins and outs of interacting with people, and Emilio had had little interest of learning it on his own. He knew how to do the important things — get information from people, get people to warm your bed when you don’t want to think for a little while, get people to buy you a drink or pay you a few bucks — but for the most part? Emilio was pretty clueless when it came to human interaction. This seemed like proof of that. The kid was upset, and Emilio’s words had been the catalyst to that. He shifted his weight uncomfortably, unsure how to proceed.

The nosy, detective part of him wanted to ask questions. Why had her family kicked her out, where were they now, why had she come here of all places? But interrogating her was sure to make her feel worse. Even someone as bad with people as Emilio knew that much. He tried to imagine what Teddy might do, in this situation. Teddy was good with people. Everybody liked Teddy. Teddy would probably give the kid a snack, or a blanket, or kidnap her dog and force her to move in with them. Emilio wasn’t sure he was particularly good at any of those things. So… he just shrugged. Better to say nothing than to say the wrong thing; he’d learned that the hard way.

At least he could teach her something, give her some form of defense in a world she seemed to know next to nothing about. “That’s right,” he confirmed with a nod. “People you know. People you know are safe.” Not that she seemed to know anyone just about now. She didn’t even know Emilio, dumpster conversation be damned. It occurred to him that, had someone else found her and given her this talk instead of him, things could have turned out far worse for her. He thought of Parker, who hurt people for his own selfish gain, of other hunters who hurt people just to hurt them. Was she lucky that it was Emilio who’d come across her, or was he just as bad as the rest? Sometimes, even he wasn’t sure.

“Right, yeah. Helping people is… good.” A lot of bird facts. He let out an amused huff, nodding his head. He had no use for bird facts, but he had a feeling he could set her on Teddy and have the two of them trade facts for hours if he ever needed to distract one or both of them. Her question brought him out of the thought, and he glanced to the mouth of the alley again. “Actually…” His client’s husband would almost definitely take a swing at Emilio if he saw him, but he doubted the guy would make any move against a stranger, let alone a kid. “There’s a guy out there looking for me. If you can distract him for a few minutes and then meet me on the next street over, I’ll walk you home. Sound fair?” It was a small request. It wasn’t dangerous, it genuinely would help him, and… it would help her prove to herself that she could be useful. Emilio, of all people, knew how important that was.

—

The amount of safe people in Wren’s life right now was… well. Practically nonexistent. Van seemed safe. She had been kind to her when Wren all but sobbed at the counter of the pizza restaurant. She showed her kindness. Her friend Wynne seemed nice, too. The few people she had talked to online as well. Did that mean they were safe? It was starting to make her head hurt with how many questions and thoughts swirled around in her head. Things hadn’t been this complicated in the colony. Everyone there was safe. Why would her parents throw her into a world where she had to watch her back at every turn? She already did that without even having a reason to! Now she did have a reason! For now at least, it seemed like Emilio could be that safe person, too. 

Wren practically perked up the moment Emilio actually seemed to consider and accept her offer. She could help! She could do this. The mere thought of having to discuss anything with a stranger made Wren’s stomach churn, but she could do it. Maybe she could just cry at him. That could work. Wren nodded her head, determined now. She was going to prove to herself and to Emilio that she could be of help. Especially since Emilio was kind enough to offer to help her. It wouldn’t be so scary walking around people with someone beside her. “Sounds fair. I can do that!” She reassured him. 

Standing up, Wren slid her backpack straps over her arms and settled them on her shoulders. She gripped at them tightly and sucked in a sharp breath. “Okay, okay. I can do this. I’ll meet you on the next street soon!” She headed out onto the street to find the man in question that was looking for Emilio. She did exactly what she did best: burst into tears on the spot. It kept him fully distracted as she sobbed and stumbled over her words, never actually telling him what was wrong. 

After a few minutes, Wren pulled it together to wave off the man’s concern. She made sure he left—although, clearly completely baffled—before heading off to find Emilio the next street down. She didn’t end up going to class that day, but at least it didn’t end up being a bad thing. 

[declinlalune]

Prevention || Andy, Kaden & Emilio

TIMING: current. LOCATION: gatlin fields. PARTIES: @chasseurdeloup @mortemoppetere @declinlalune SUMMARY: andy, kaden, and emilio pay the hunter who attacked alex and alan a visit. CONTENT WARNINGS: sibling death mentions, child death, suicidal ideation.

Andy figured that the hunter whose name she didn’t even know would be expecting them. Or, at the very least, be aware of their arrival. Maybe he would expect Andy to come groveling, to explain that she’d been wrong. But that was not her intention. After he had practically hunted down Alex and Alan, finding out that the former– and her sister was a wolf, Andy had no choice but to do her best to drive him out of town. She couldn’t let what happened with Alex, Leah, or Nicole happen again. She wasn’t willing to chance it. Andy had seen the look in his eye the day she had dropped him off on the opposite side of town. She’d known that look; had seen it in her parents. 

She looked over at her company before giving them a firm nod. She did her best to keep her hand from trembling as she reached up to knock on the door. After Emilio had given her the address in Gatlin Fields, she had made it a point to scope out the premises. He lived alone, and he lived at the far end where there were no other houses. It was lucky for them. Andy waited a moment before knocking again. Finally, she heard shuffling from the other side of the door. It swung open and she stared ahead. The man looked as disheveled as she’d remembered him with a salt and pepper beard, his crows feet more evident without the glasses he usually wore. He opened his mouth to speak, but Andy pushed him back, hand colliding with his shoulder. She hadn’t anticipated it, the anger she felt upon seeing his face. But she remembered Alex’s tears, the way her wound had looked– how it bothered her still. It’d only been a few days since her sister had arrived home in disarray. 

Her hand went from his shoulder to his throat. She stood a few inches shorter than he, but it was obvious she caught him by surprise. He spluttered as his back collided with the wall. Andy tightened her grip. “You are going to leave. Do you understand?” Her voice shook as she spoke and a hatred so deep she hadn’t experienced since before her parents had passed sunk into her. 

—

He didn’t know if the plan was a good one, but he didn’t know what else they could do. Hunters, when they had prey in their sight, were ruthless things. Emilio would know. How many times had his single-minded focus ended with something dead at his hands? He liked to think himself ‘better’ now, with his code and the way he stalked his prey before he killed it to make sure the things he was slaying ‘deserved’ their fate, but he knew he still wasn’t a good man. The only good hunters, he figured, were the ones who gave up the life entirely.

People like Andy. 

He glanced over at her as they stood outside the door, noting the tension in her shoulders. He couldn’t say he blamed her. The way Andy looked at Alex was so much like the way he’d once looked at Flora. And wouldn’t he have done anything to keep her safe? Hadn’t he planned, once, to do exactly what Andy had done, to pull his daughter away from the life that he’d always known would get her killed and raise her outside of it? Andy had succeeded where Emilio had failed. She’d protected her sister in a way he’d been unable to protect his daughter. She’d gotten out of this life.

And the man behind that door had dragged her right back into it. The door opened, and he couldn’t fault Andy for the rage radiating off her. He couldn’t blame her for the way her hands trembled, the hardness in her voice. This man deserved every ounce of it. Emilio entered the house, standing behind her as a silent but intimidating presence. Not the tallest one in the room, but shoulders squared and eyes burning, even as the rest of his face remained a blank mask. His expression said I’ll do what I have to. It always did. He hoped it would be enough to intimidate this man into doing the smart thing and leaving town. He didn’t know what any of them planned to do if the guy said no. He didn’t think he wanted to find out.

—

Kaden didn’t hesitate to join her when Andy said she was going to confront the hunter who shot Alex. As much as he managed to blame himself for what had happened, he wasn’t about to pass up a chance to chase off the actual cause of all this. As far as he knew, that was the plan – to chase the guy off. Emilio was with them so he wasn’t going to be surprised if this all ended in violence but Kaden hoped that this wasn’t going to go anywhere beyond that. 

That hope seemed pretty foolish as soon as the door opened and Andy charged the guy into the wall. He deserved it and Kaden didn’t feel bad about that but… something left him unsettled as he lingered in the doorway, the last to trail in behind Emilio. He’d never seen Andy like this. Sure, he’d seen her fight and train way back when; he’d seen her tap into her anger, but she was never like this, full of pure, seething hatred. She looked more like Keira in that moment than his cousin. 

It didn’t feel right.

Kaden wanted to reach out and pull her away, deescalate things just a little in the beginning. But he knew better. This wasn’t some bullshit hunter tif or even a hunt – this was about Alex. And he couldn’t deny that he had the urge to beat the hunter pinned to the wall into a bloody pulp himself. 

He wasn’t going to question her. Not yet. He clenched his jaw and tightened his hand into a fist, waiting and letting Andy decide how to handle this. This was her sister, it was her call. Kaden just shut the door behind them, looking for any weapons nearby. Shocking – there were knives on the table by the door, a gun lying on the stairs, and probably other things, too. Kaden gave a nod to Emilio and started to grab the weapons in reach, pocketing them to make sure that they didn’t encounter a surprise from the ranger. 

—

With her fingers pressing into the man’s throat, Andy shifted, forearm coming to secure itself against his neck. She hadn’t fought in a long time. She hoped it wouldn’t come back to bite her in the ass. She stayed fit for security, and because it made it easier to bear all of the weight on her shoulders, but there was a difference between being skilled and being strong. She knew that. It had been driven into her at a young age. 

She heard Kaden and Emilio begin to pick up what she could only assume to be the weapons lying around the foyer and the rest of the house. She didn’t dare turn her attention from the man whose face was beginning to turn red. “I told you to leave the last time I saw you.” Andy forced a tone of neutrality; steady and even. If she could convince this asshole that she could keep calm, then maybe she actually could. She and the two behind her could see him out of town, making sure he never returned. But would that be enough? Would he not spread that the Durand children had made it to Wicked’s Rest and that one of them was a werewolf? She couldn’t be sure. 

The man continued to splutter beneath her hold, his own fingers digging into Andy’s arm. She refused to give him reprieve. “You shot my sister.” Saying it out loud and in front of him made it all the more real. “She did nothing to you, and you hunted her down.” The man blinked at her, face bloating from lack of oxygen. 

“De– deser–ved it.” 

—-

Kaden didn’t have to say anything — the nod was enough for Emilio to understand what he was asking. It was funny, almost; back in that magic shop, when Kaden had had no voice with which to speak, the language barrier between them had been too wide to cross. But now? It was simple. Violence, he knew, was a language every hunter spoke fluently. Collecting weapons, tucking them into his pockets, that made sense to him in a way differentiating between two salves never would. 

He kept an eye on Andy as he moved about the living room, trying to determine if she needed backup. She was competent, he knew, but she didn’t hunt regularly. The man she had pinned against the wall did. He was out hunting as recently as a few nights ago, out hunting Alex. The very thought filled Emilio with a bitter anger. Alex didn’t like him much, she’d made no secret of that. But she was still a fucking kid. A kid who hadn’t deserved what she got.

Satisfied that there was nothing else in easy reach, Emilio walked back towards the two hunters against the wall. He saw the man’s face turning red, bordering on purple. “Andy,” he said gently, the first word he’d spoken since the gruff greeting he’d given when they first met up. They couldn’t have a conversation with the hunter if he passed out from lack of oxygen, after all, and a conversation was what they were here for.

—-

With all the weapons they could see pocketed or tucked away, Kaden turned back to the ranger and his cousin. Her anger was palpable, he could have seen it even if it wasn’t spreading across the face of the piece of shit she had pinned against the wall. Emilio had already spoken up, but Kaden reached out and touched her shoulder. “Let up,” he said, eyes fixed on the connard who shot his cousin. They didn’t need to kill him. Probably better if they didn’t. But he had the fucking audacity to say that Alex had deserved it and it was tempting to pull Andy away again, but this time it was so that he could clock the guy in the face himself. “Only a little,” he added.

He didn’t trust this son of a bitch for anything and reached into the man’s pockets to pull out the knives he kept there, unclipped on from his belt, and then reached down to pull up the hem of his jeans to check for any weapons. The hunter had enough oxygen left to kick out at Kaden who managed to twist away just quick enough that the foot caught him in the shoulder and not the face. 

Fuck this. 

Kaden pulled out one of the larger knives he’d just taken off the hunter from its sheath and jammed it down into the man’s foot, blood bubbling up and gushing out through his boot. He didn’t give a shit about the screaming or the pain shooting through the bastard, he dug the knife in deeper, far as it could go until he was pretty sure the blade was close to the floor if not lodged into it. “Bet you’ll stay in place now. You should probably listen to her if you don’t want the other foot pinned down, too.” Some part of him knew he was trying to be better than this, that violence wasn’t what he wanted. But the rest of him knew the truth – Kaden was made for violence, born for it, and then immersed in it. It would always find him. So for now, he might as well embrace it while it could do some good. 

—-

Emilio’s voice cut through the focus she drove into keeping the hunter pinned to the wall, and then it was Kaden’s. Had she not heard his voice first, she might have turned around to shove him away. Andy stared up at the hunter beneath her hold, her own fingers going numb from the anger and fear that burrowed into her. She hadn’t experienced this since she had picked up Alex and ran from the wolves that killed their parents. Reflection was an odd thing. 

Finally, she took a step back. Kaden started to remove the weapons from the man’s belt, the waistband of his jeans, and then– the man’s foot was coming out to connect with her cousin’s shoulder. The hunter looked pleased with himself, but not for long. A blood curdling scream poured into the room as Kaden jabbed a knife into the ranger’s boot. Slowly, his blood began to escape through the seams, streaming towards her own feet.

The hunter continued to gasp, his hand now coming to his throat. He pulled at the neckline of shirt, seemingly looking for some way to take in more air. Andy simply watched as he buckled beneath the pain of both oxygen deprivation and the knife in his boot. He was kneeling now, and Andy half expected him to pass out from the pain. Maybe that was better. They could get him tied to a chair, ask him the questions they needed. 

But his voice, low and guttural, all the while heaving for breath, cut through the silence that had built after Kaden thrust the knife into his foot. 

He looked past both herself and Kaden to Emilio who stood behind them. “You don’t look familiar. You’re just going to let them do this to me?” 

Andy grit her teeth. “Shut up.” Even if she wasn’t sure how much would be too much in Emilio’s book, he had come with her– had promised to have her back. Kaden, too. She had to trust that neither of them would feel pity towards the ranger now pinned to the ground. “I told you to leave, and instead you went after her.” The man blinked, his own teeth chattering presumably due to the pain that swarmed him. “She wasn’t the only one. You and me, we take out monsters– why are you protecting one?” Andy grabbed the collar of his shirt, near his shoulder, holding him upright slightly so that he would need to put more pressure on his injured foot. She knew it hurt like hell.

—

Somehow, Emilio was the level-headed one here. It would have been funny if it weren’t so jarring. Andy was still pinning the ranger to the wall, Kaden was putting a knife through his foot, and Emilio was standing, hands in his pockets, fiddling with the knives he’d collected from around the room. 

He’d been in Andy’s position before. It was seared into his mind with everything else that had happened that day in Mexico, tattooed onto the backs of his eyelids. His uncle hadn’t looked so different than this ranger did now. Most people, when they were begging for their lives, got the same kind of way about them. Eyes wide, lips slightly parted, searching for anyone who might stop what they thought was going to happen to them. Lucio had been met with a knife to the gut for his troubles; this ranger was lucky in comparison. He was lucky it was Andy who got to decide what happened to him. Andy, who’d retired from hunting for a gentler life, who’d given up everything to protect her sister only to have Alex thrust into harm’s way anyway because this man decided she should be. 

He probably thought they were here to kill him; Emilio would let him continue to do so. It was easier to get someone to do what you needed them to do if they thought the alternative was dying. If they offered this man a choice between death and getting out of town, Emilio would bet he’d choose the latter. He didn’t strike the detective as the ‘die for your cause’ kind of hunter. Not if he was here going after fucking kids. 

Those wide eyes met his, and Emilio rose his brows, pursing his lips as if he was considering it. “I’ll let them do a hell of a lot worse, if they want to,” he replied flatly. “I can think of a few better places to stick that knife. You keep running your mouth, maybe I’ll show you.” 

Glancing over, he offered Andy a nod as if to say this is your show. I’ll follow your lead. 

And then, the hunter went and ran his mouth again. It was hard not to think of the vampire he’d killed on Monty’s farm, the one the old farmer tried to save. 

You killed children, he’d said, because maybe a part of him had wanted the vampire to make it make sense. 

No. We killed hunters.

What was the difference between this and that? That vampire was part of an attack that left children dead. This ranger shot a kid in the woods. Both tried to excuse themselves by insisting that the people they’d hurt had been monsters, in one way or another. Emilio’s blood was roaring in his ears and, if Andy hadn’t been holding the man, he probably would have punched him. Instead, he kicked the hilt of the knife Kaden had left in the guy’s foot, eliciting another scream.

Okay. So much for being the level headed one, then.

“Simplemente cállate ya,” he hissed lowly. Just shut up already. 

—

Kaden could feel his blood boiling, rage threatening to consume him at any moment. He inhaled deep as he stood up, standing behind Andy. She was already fueled by anger and she had every right to be. But that meant that he had to try and pull back, bury his emotions for the time being. He wasn’t sure he could think clearly, but he needed to maintain as much perspective as he could while Andy owned this confrontation. 

“You got one thing right. We take out monsters,” Kaden said, eyes boring into the piece of shit pinned against the. “Looking at one right now, too.” Even though his words didn’t falter, he couldn’t help but feel like a fucking hypocrite. The difference between Kaden and the hunter against the wall was nothing more than a few years time, specific circumstances and twists of fate. He knew that. He was just as much of a monster as that man was. 

The hunter grit his teeth and tried to keep from wincing in pain, from showing weakness. Kaden wasn’t srue why he bothered in this company. They all knew pain and they knew it well. There was no point in pretending it didn’t bother him. Though Kaden supposed it was as hardwired into him as it was the rest of them. “You’re a bunch of fucking idiots, the whole lot of you. You can kill me but it’s not going to stop those monsters you’re shielding from killing,” the asshole said before spitting at his current adversaries. Kaden wondered if it was because that was the best he could manage under his current conditions or if he was trying to make a distraction. 

—

Both Emilio and Kaden made a show of what kind of monster this man was – of faux promises to show him the other side of this; of an eternal darkness. But deep down, Andy knew it was for show. She didn’t take Kaden for the kind to kill a hunter, no matter how angry he was, and she didn’t know Emilio well enough yet to determine whether he would out of solidarity, or if the code he followed led its way back to what all of theirs should. She didn’t care, really. The anger that she felt knew no bounds. She thought of Alex’s face, and she tried to conjure up an image of Alan she wasn’t quite sure was right. 

She listened to them as they spoke, spitting insults back and forth, a palpable anger filling the room. It danced along her skin, the electricity from it all. She stared at the man ahead of her, his head lolling to the side as she shook him by the shoulder to get him to look up at her. “You chose this, you know. You could have fucked off after recognizing me, but you chose this.” Because hadn’t he? The only reason he was now in this position was because of the choices he had made when approaching her with Zane. She bit the inside of her cheek, gaze searching for some unfound thing– that perhaps he’d learned his lesson, but his expression darkened in response to her words. Andy felt sick. 

“Only thing you chose was to be on the wrong side of this.” She rolled her eyes, a bitter annoyance coming to creep over the initial anger. This was the same rhetoric that her parents had drilled into her; that she’d learned at the hunting camps. Andy had come away from that sick and twisted devotion with hardly any blood to stain her hands. She didn’t particularly want to ruin her streak now, but the look in the hunter’s eye told her he wouldn’t stop.

“Why couldn’t you just leave it alone? I told you I wasn’t who you thought I was.” The man grinned then, face contorting with a certain kind of pain Andy felt beneath her skin. “You’ll learn soon enough. Only a matter of time before that sister of yours kills somebody you care about, or you.” Andy applied more pressure to his shoulder, reaching up to his neck once again with her opposite hand. She pushed her fingers into his skin. “You don’t know shit about her, shut the fuck up.” She pulled him forward slightly, slamming him against the wall again. In doing so, she brought her foot up to slam down on the knife. It went further into his foot and she felt bile rise in her throat at the sound. Tears wet her eyes as his scream pierced the air.

—

It was familiar, the things he was saying. Emilio suspected he wasn’t the only one in the room who recognized it. Hunters tended to spout the same kind of shit no matter what it was they were hunting; the things they killed were monsters, and the people who went against them for it were just as bad. He remembered his mother gripping the back of his neck, forcing him to look at the vampire she’d caught and chained up for ‘practice’ as a kid, the way her fingers left bruises in his skin. Don’t look away. Don’t give this thing the privilege of fooling you into thinking it is human. Had this ranger had a similar hand gripping his neck? And how much did it matter? He, Andy, and Kaden had all gone through that training, and not a single one of them would have done what this man had to Alex. There was only so much you could excuse.

(It was hard not to think about Rhett, with that thought. It was hard not to think about how much more you could find excuses for when the person you were excusing was someone you loved instead of a stranger, when the hands doing the hurting were the same ones that had lowered your daughter into a hole they’d dug for her in the ground so that she could rest.)

Emilio grit his teeth, and he wished the ranger would take his advice and just shut up. He wished he’d stop talking and listen, wished he’d see the proverbial light and atone for his sins even if only in the tiny way of agreeing to leave town and never come back. But Andy was angry, and he was beginning to wonder if that was even an option anymore. Emilio had felt that anger. He’d built a home in it, locked all the doors. It was such a hard thing to move out of. 

One thing was certain — the conversation wasn’t going anywhere. It was a useless back and forth. The ranger said something to hurt Andy, and Andy responded by hurting him back. How long would they keep doing this? How many more times would he drive this knife home? 

Not moving his cold glare from the ranger’s eyes, Emilio inclined his head. “Andy,” he said, soft tone not quite matching the look in his eyes, “this isn’t why we’re here.” Then, with a harsher tone as he spoke to the ranger, “We’re giving you a chance. Leave town. Don’t come back here. Don’t tell anyone what you know. And you won’t have to see any of us again.”

—

It was clear to Kaden that at this point that this was starting to do more damage to Andy than to the hunter. Anger still coursed through his own veins and he hated to admit it, but he didn’t mind seeing the connard writhing in pain. In that moment, he wasn’t sure he’d mind seeing the man dead. The thought made his stomach churn and shocked some of his anger away. The world was a little clearer – he wasn’t going to be the cause of any more death. Not if he could help it. 

Emilio told his cousin that it was time to back off and he was right, but Kaden knew better than to assume Andy was capable of pulling herself away. This was her sister. This was Alex that he nearly killed. That was her whole world. She wasn’t going to walk away if she was left to her own devices. Gently, Kaden put his hands on her shoulders and started to pull her back from the man. If the son of a bitch tried anything, he knew that the slayer would step in and make sure that didn’t fucking happen. 

“Come on. He’s not worth any more of your time,” he said to her in a hushed voice as he tightened his grip on her, ready to pull her back with more force if she resisted. He knew it didn’t matter how quiet he was, every person in that room could hear him. But he needed Andy to walk away. For her sake. Alex needed her. She couldn’t get lost to this, to the violence and anger, everything she had escaped. It was too late for him. Andy still stood a chance. 

—

Emilio’s voice cut through the man’s scream, and then she felt Kaden’s hands on her shoulders. She could have jumped out of her skin if she hadn’t heard his voice. Andy’s fear swallowed her most nights, but she made no move to show just how bad it had gotten. The nightmares were easier to keep quiet about. She’d gotten good about not screaming into the night. But now that this man was ahead of her, a lazy grin and pinched brows with a promise to come back for what he’d already tried to take from her, she couldn’t just let go. No part of her could just let go. 

She shrugged out of Kaden’s grip, shooting a glance behind her towards him. Momentarily distracted, she felt herself shoved forward as the hunter shot out his hand to push her backwards. A sickening squelch, and then the smell of blood– Andy noticed that the bloodied knife was now in his hands. The hunter stumbled forward, slashing the knife through the air towards herself and Kaden. She stumbled backwards, elbows connecting with Kaden’s chest. The hunter lobbed towards them, his bad foot now dragging behind him. “I’m not going anywhere, and now neither are you.” 

How diabolically villainous of him, Andy thought. She quickly jumped to the side, moving away from his knife as it caught the tail end of her shirt. “Fuck OFF.” She twisted around, grabbing a nearby chair and swinging it at his legs, which caused him to fall to the side, crashing back towards the wall he’d been using to keep himself upright. Another wail left him and this time it contorted with a rage she’d seen in her father. There was some distance between them now, but as she stared across the space, her vision blurred with the tears that brimmed her eyes and his face slowly warped into the man who’d tried to turn her into a monster– against herself, against her sister– 

Andy surged forward, one foot coming out to connect with the knee of his bad foot. He buckled. She grabbed the knife from his hand, struggling to get it out of his grip, slamming his wrist against the wall. The knife clattered to the ground and her hand sought out his throat again, fingers pinching the skin. “You’re going to leave, and I am never going to see you again.” The man’s lips were purplish now and his eyes bugged out of his head, unblinking. He slammed his fist against her ribs, which in the shock, sent Andy stumbling to the side. It’d been awhile since she’d taken a hit, she wasn’t quite used to it the way she was years ago. 

—

Kaden did what Emilio couldn’t quite bring himself to do, touched Andy’s shoulder to help ground her. It was a good move; one he thought was probably far better made by Andy’s cousin than by him. He liked to think he and Andy were friends — she’d asked him here, after all — but there was such a difference between friends and family, wasn’t there? The latter had far more of a right to bring Andy back to herself with a touch than the former ever could. 

But she shrugged out from under that hand, and Emilio wondered if she was too far gone to back off now. If she felt anything like he had in Mexico, with Lucio apologizing and Flora’s blood on his hands, he had no doubt that no amount of soft words or hands on shoulders could pull her back to Earth. And his uncle had been someone he loved, had been apologetic; this ranger was none of that. He was still going, still sticking to his guns, still trying to fight. 

Emilio tensed as he moved forward, readying himself to take the man down again, but Andy beat him to it. That chair crashed against his legs, Andy kicked at his knee, and he was on the ground with her hand around his throat once again. “Ay, pendejo,” the slayer scoffed, rolling his eyes. “What do you think you’re going to do here? You, bleeding, against three of us? Count your losses.”

But hunters were stubborn things, weren’t they? This man was no exception. His fist shot out and slammed against Andy’s ribs with a solid thud, sending her stumbling backwards and freeing the ranger from her grip. His eyes darted around the room before landing on Emilio, rage burning through his expression as he shot forward. It caught the slayer off guard, just a little. It probably shouldn’t have; it wasn’t as if this was the first time Emilio’s big mouth had gotten him into trouble. He had no doubt that the ranger would like to make it the last… but given the guy’s bleeding foot, that just didn’t seem like it was going to happen.

At least, not until the pendejo scooped up that bloody knife again.

“Oh, you’ve gotta be kidding me,” Emilio groaned.

—

Kaden should have expected that Andy would shrug him off. That didn’t make him feel any better about this situation. “Andy, let’s g–” His words were cut off by the force of his cousin slamming into him. When he caught his balance, he saw that the hunter had grabbed the knife and was threatening the rest of them. Pathetic. Not that he could say he wouldn’t have tried the same if the roles were reversed. Kaden pulled out another one of the knives he’d collected from the place earlier, but it looked like Andy had it covered for now. Still, he wasn’t going to let his guard down, even with the piece of shit lying on the ground and his cousin once again cutting off his air supply

“Andy,” he said more forcibly this time, stepping over to her to once again pull her away. He needed her to leave. He needed to get them out of there before she did something she couldn’t take back. Because even if this guy deserved it, she didn’t deserve to carry his blood on her hands for the rest of her life. 

Her body flung to the side, away from Kaden, as fist hit ribs. Kaden watched the ranger’s eyes, saw where he was looking, and knew where he was headed next. The knife. He was too far away and the bastard got to it first, lunging at Emilio with the weapon in hand. 

Kaden pivoted and reached out to grap the man’s collar, yanking him back and slamming his body back to the ground. He stomped his boot onto the guy’s wrist, the one holding the knife. It clattered onto the ground and he kicked it away with his other foot. “We’re leaving,” he said, definitively, eyes darting over to Andy for a second, hoping she heard him just as clear. He paused and almost walked away, but he couldn’t resist. Kaden swung his leg back and punted the hunter’s side. He was tempted to continue, to beat this man to a fucking pulp, but he needed to get Andy out of here. “You’re leaving, too. Got it?” With that, Kaden stepped away and went back to help Andy up. 

—

Once Andy steadied herself against the ground, she turned back to witness the ranger scrape up the knife from the floor and try to charge Emilio. Maybe he saw it easier to get closer to the door. She moved to help, but Kaden stepped in first, hand reaching to the back of his shirt, yanking down, and then– another scream, this time more guttural, more angry. The knife fell away and the man lay on the ground, good hand coming to grip the now broken one. Andy stared at him, imagination running rampant. She knew the look in his eyes, had seen it every time she closed her own. She saw her parents in him. Andy hated him for that, and for what he had done to Leah, Nicole, and Alex. How many others would suffer? Could she just turn her back? 

Kaden was at her side again, guiding her into a standing position. She stood next to him, gaze unmoving from the dark blue of the man who lay on the floor. He grinned up at her, gums and tongue bloody. Spit and rouge ended at her feet as he leaned up. Andy watched him carefully, heart hammering in her chest. Her fingers trembled and her tongue felt numb. She hadn’t felt like this since the night she took Alex and ran. She should leave now, and she knew that. But she couldn’t shake the feeling that this wasn’t done. That once out of town, he would tell everyone he knew in Wicked’s Rest about her and Alex, and any other shifter that they’d been seen by. Anger and contempt had branded her, and there was no escaping it. Not now. 

“You don’t think I won’t send somebody else after you? After her?” The ranger’s voice shook slightly as he blew his nose out onto his sleeve. “You started this. Remember that.” Andy shook her head, working through the number of things she could have done differently. She could have driven him out of town after the situation with Leah and Nicole, but she hadn’t thought he’d come back around. Because of that, Alex now had a bullet wound in her hip. It could have been worse, and it still could be. Andy’s fingers twitched as she looked down at the knife. The glint of it mirrored the man’s chin, and his five o’clock shadow. It was fairly clean, despite his appearance not being so. It lay on the ground a few feet from both herself and the ranger, but that didn’t matter. 

It only took Andy from his threat to the decision of not wanting to bury her sister or any of her friends to dive for the knife. She forced herself to ignore the pleas that would come from either Emilio or Kaden, plunging the knife into the man’s chest. 

As she felt the knife sink into flesh and between bone, Andy saw his face meld into that of her mother’s, the sinking feeling in her gut only spreading as it slowly warped into her father’s. With her blade in this man’s chest, she was killing that part of her that had been connected to her parents. She twisted the knife, any pleas distant to her now. The man’s blood covered her hands, her forearms. She pushed the blade in deeper, tears welling in her eyes. She wanted to be safe, and this man had ruined it. She wanted to live a life disconnected from who she was supposed to be. She hadn’t been given the room to be anything she wanted. “I gave you a chance,” Andy whispered, voice distinctly venomous. She ripped the knife out from between his ribs, blood coming back to splatter over her face. 

He gurgled beneath her weight, his hands desperately reaching for her neck. They fell short, landing at his sides. Andy watched with a sick sense of satisfaction as the light left his eyes. Her insides felt jumbled and the knife felt heavy in her hands. She stayed over top of him for a moment longer than needed, just to make sure he was actually dead. For a moment, she forgot about the other two behind her despite their movement and voices. 

—

Emilio tensed as the ranger came at him, but he knew he wouldn’t have to do much more than that. It was a familiar feeling, walking into a situation with people you knew would have your back if things went south. His siblings might not have always had his best interests at heart, but they’d been willing to fight for him against whatever undead things they’d gone up against together. Rhett, too, had always looked out for Emilio. After two years on his own, he’d never imagined he’d add anyone new to that list, but here was Kaden, yanking the ranger back and throwing him to the ground. Here was Andy, looking furious in a way that was probably mostly for her sister, but might be a little bit for the other people in this room, too. And it was a nice feeling.

It was also a fleeting one.

Because the ranger was on the ground, his chest was heaving, his hand was broken, his foot was bleeding, but he still wasn’t giving up. Wasn’t that how all of them had been taught, after all? To fight and fight and fight even when you knew you’d lost? He could have walked away. He could have gotten the hell out of town and never come back, and they would have let them. The three of them, Andy and Emilio and Kaden, they were people of their word. They gave that ranger a chance, gave him a fucking shot. 

And he didn’t take it.

He was too proud, too stubborn, too stupid to know when he’d been beaten. He was on the floor, and he was still slinging threats. He was still making a goddamn promise to come back for Alex, for Andy, for anyone else who stood in his way. A single-minded focus. And, as it turned out, a deadly one.

Part of him knew what was going to happen just a split second before it did. Part of him saw the way Andy’s expression shifted and recognized it, understood that it must have been the same look that had crossed his face before he’d shoved a knife into his uncle’s gut and left him to bleed out in the streets of a town that used to be safe. He took half a step forward, let out a little gasp that was almost a protest and almost an encouragement, but he was never going to be fast enough to stop it. He didn’t think anything would have been. 

Speeding bullets, he thought, had nothing against someone doing everything they could to protect someone they loved. 

A knife found a chest. The sound was deafening, that little squelch of blade slicing through tissue and organ. Emilio thought they’d probably all hear it for the rest of their lives. The world hung suspended for a moment, and then Andy spoke and broke the spell. The ranger stilled, and his body didn’t turn to dust. There were no horns, no fur, no inhuman parts marking him as something the three of them had been taught to fear. The light left his eyes, he fell silent, and that was it. That was the end of it. 

A silence fell over the room, and Emilio was afraid to break it. He looked from Andy to Kaden to the dead ranger on the floor, and he willed his heart to stop pounding as if there was any hope of that.

—

A flash, that was all it took. A flash and Andy was gone from his side, knife in hand. The moment to stop her came and went like a strike of lightning. Kaden turned back just in time to see the knife sink deep into the man’s chest. It wasn’t for him, it wasn’t his flesh, it wasn’t his blood, but he felt the blade pierce his heart all the same. 

The knife was the lightening, the screams of anguish and the sickening squelch of flesh and blood was the thunder. And just like that, it was over. A life was gone. Where there had been four, there was now only three.

Kaden wanted to feel relief, wanted to feel some sort of security at the very least after all of this, but looking into the ranger’s glassy, dead eyes, he couldn’t find it. All he could see was some sick reflection of himself staring back. A version of him that could have been – no, that was him not that long ago. 

He didn’t know when he’d ended up on the floor, when his knees had buckled out from under him, but they had. “Andy,” he said for what felt like the thousandth time that night, his voice hoarse, disconnected. He couldn’t look at her, couldn’t move, couldn’t tear his eyes away from the body. That could have been him. Maybe that should have been him. How many families would do that to him if they knew he was responsible for the death of their loved ones? How quickly would Andy have driven a knife into his own chest? Into Keira’s?

He could feel his stomach churn. This wasn’t the first time he’d seen death, far from it. He should be used to it by now. But maybe that was what had him reeling: the fact that this was so fucking familar. That even though he tried to escape it, to find some way out of the cycle, death clung to him. He couldn’t help but wonder what might have happened if he never came to town, if all he did was bring more death with him. 

It didn’t matter now, he’d never know. Neither would that ranger lying on the floor. 

—

Andy leaned to the side, eventually dragging herself off of the ranger. There was so much blood. She wondered if the wolves stared over her parents’ bodies like this, or if they’d been too focused on other things. Not that it mattered. To them, she and Alex deserved it. It had been awhile since she recalled that night. Of crashing through the brush with Alex in her arms, hand clasped over her sister’s mouth to thwart the screams. They hadn’t been followed. They’d been allowed to leave. Andy believed that, even now. Because as she sat on the floor next to the man whose life she just took, she would have done the same for him, but he’d become a threat too loud to ignore. She couldn’t let him hurt Alex, or anyone else. Never again. 

There would be more like him, and Andy knew that this could not happen again; their blood on her hands. But she had to do something in this moment, and bleeding the life from him had been the only solution. She heard Kaden’s weight shift, and then her name– it sounded like her cousin was bleating. Andy smoothed her hands against her knees, fingers trembling incessantly. Her legs wobbled as she got up and the only sound that filled the room was the knife clattering to the ground. Droplets of blood hit her shoes and she looked down at them. This could have just as easily been her, or the two behind her. She’d stopped him. He wasn’t going to back down. She had to. 

Andy began to rub her hands against the clean parts of her clothes, before she looked up to catch a glimpse of herself in the mirror. She was covered in the man’s blood. It was not a delicate thing; it was spoken with rage. Andy swallowed back the bile in her throat and she clenched her jaw. She could do this, just for a moment longer. Get through this. One step, grab his arms, pull him towards the back door. They’d have to bury him, or toss him into the brush so that he could become a meal. Andy did nothing at all, however. She stood over the ranger, her heart now a dull thud compared to the beating of Kaden’s and Emilio’s. She didn’t dare turn around. “We have to…” She’d never done this before. She was the only one in the room who had never done this, and suddenly she’d become the worst. It was a human life, after all, and a hunter one at that. “Bury him. We have to bury his–” She sniffled and ran a hand across her nose, more blood coming to mask the smattering of freckles that usually dotted her features. “I need help.” 

—

There was blood on the floor and, for a split second, this living room became another one. For a flash, the part of Emilio’s mind that functioned as a time machine sent him hurtling backwards to another time, another place. The ranger’s body shrank into something smaller, the walls turned another color, Andy and Kaden disappeared. His breath hitched, his hands trembled, He shoved them into his pockets, digging his fingernails into his palms and squeezing his eyes shut. Here, not there. Wicked’s Rest, not Mexico. The blood on the ground was not that of anyone he’d known, wasn’t that of someone he’d been meant to protect. What was more, it wasn’t blood that was on his hands. At least, not physically. Perhaps he deserved some of the weight of the blame for coming here in the first place. Part of him must have known how this would end, after all. Didn’t it always end like this? Didn’t every story Emilio ever told end with someone bleeding out on the living room floor?

But Andy’s voice dragged him back into the present, back into a moment that wasn’t worse than the one his mind so often carried him back to, but might not have been much better, either. Someone was still dead. There was still a knife covered in blood, still a corpse already beginning to cool. Kaden was on the ground, and Emilio hadn’t seen him fall but he understood the inclination to do so. Andy was trembling, and Emilio thought he might have been, too. The ranger was still, was staring at nothing, was long gone. Emilio thought, in a moment of hysterical uncertainty, that he might have been the luckiest one of them all. At least for him, this was over. For the rest of them? This was the beginning.

He checked back in, tried to keep his mind in place. He was needed here, in the now. There was nothing to be done for that other living room floor, nothing that could change that situation. But this one was still unfolding, still growing, still changing with every passing heartbeat. Andy was saying something, though it took Emilio a moment to process it. It was as if her words hung in the air before crawling to his ears, as if they sat in his head for a moment before being translated into something he could understand. They came only in snippets, but it was enough for him to know what needed to be done, anyway. Bury. Help. 

He latched onto it, because it was the only thing he could do, wasn’t it? He couldn’t scoop the ranger’s blood back into his chest, couldn’t mend the wound left by the knife. He couldn’t even wash the stains from Andy’s hands; they’d always be there. Emilio would know, wouldn’t he? He had matching ones, even now, tattooed into him. His hands still felt red, even when they weren’t. He could still feel the blood drying there, even years after he’d washed it all away. He couldn’t save Andy from that, because no one could.

But he could do something about what came next. Couldn’t he?

“I’ll do it.” He was hoarse, unsteady. “Bury it. I’ll bury it.” It instead of him, because wasn’t that how he’d always been taught to separate himself from things? The dead became objects instead of people, even if they were still walking and talking, because if they were anything more, he wouldn’t have been able to function. The ranger was not a ranger — it was a corpse. And wasn’t dealing with corpses the only thing Emilio had ever known how to do well? Wasn’t that what he’d been born for? “I’ll bury it,” he said again. He looked to Kaden. “You — You can take care of any fallback with the police.” Though he doubted there’d be any. Hunters didn’t tend to be the sort of people anyone missed, did they? This ranger’s family, if he had any, would assume he’d died fighting a werewolf or some other kind of shifter. They’d never guess the truth. A hunter killing another hunter was a jarring, unheard of thing. “And…” He turned to look at Andy, eyes darting from the blood on her hands to the blood on her face to the blood on the floor. There was so much of it. He felt his mind faltering again, and he shook his head roughly. “You need to clean up. You need — Burn the clothes. We all have to burn what we are wearing. Don’t take them back to your cabin. I’ll — I’m going to get rid of it.” 

Disposing of the dead. That was his job. Wasn’t it?

—

I need help.

Kaden couldn’t help but laugh. She needed help, huh? She needed help. That’s what he fucking came here to do and the only thing to show for it was a dead fucking body splayed out on the floor in front of them. Fucking rich to claim that now she needed help. Now after he tried to pull her away, tried to help her out before this fucking moment. 

He stood slowly, his body shaking. He was thankful Emilio was there, ready to help. Because Kaden was done helping. “Good. You bury him.” Walking was difficult, but not as difficult as the thought of looking at Andy right now. “Cause I’m not.” 

Kaden braced himself on the doorframe, using it to keep himself upright. All he could do was nod along with what Emilio was saying, eyes pinned to the floor in front of him. The path ahead was clean. For now. Wouldn’t last. “Got it,” was all he said before walking out the door and to his truck. He’d deal with the rest later. But he couldn’t stay there one second longer. 

—

Andy did her best to listen to Emilio. His voice sounded distorted– a version she had heard once, but this time it was beneath something heavy, something she couldn’t lift up. He volunteered to bury the body, but Andy had no intention of letting him do it alone. She almost looked at Kaden for help, but the look on his face– the way he avoided eye contact with her. It reminded her then, too, of a father she’d buried long ago. She bit the inside of her cheek hard enough to draw blood. For what, she wasn’t sure. To keep quiet, maybe. She nodded, letting his statement draw over her. She’d gone too far. 

But he didn’t get it. This was her sister she was protecting. His sister would sooner put a knife through his gut than protect him from anything, or so she assumed. Andy listened to Kaden as he left the cabin. The plea for him to stay built in her lungs, but ultimately dissolved into nothingness. What would the point be? She was good at doing things alone. The one time she thought she didn’t have to, the one time that it wasn’t just her at fourteen with a seven year old against the world, and somebody was still walking away. 

But Emilio was there. Emilio had offered. He had told her to burn her clothes, to clean up. She shook her head. “I’m help– helping you.” Andy struggled to get the words out at a deep icy feeling began to spread throughout her. She looked at the body, at the person who had tried to take everything from her, and no remorse could be found. Shock, sure – at the measures she had taken, but wasn’t it necessary? It was him or Alex. Him or Leah. Him or Nicole. Him or the rest of them in this cabin. It could have been Kaden or Emilio’s body on the ground for them to bury, only perhaps they would have done that properly. She didn’t care what happened to this man in whatever afterlife he had believed in, because though Andy’s anger had driven her forward, she knew that she had given him a chance. 

Andy wrung her hands together, the blood sticky and defiant on the palms of her hands. “Tell me what to do.” It would have been the first time she’d done such a thing, aside from the beasts her mother taught her to put into the ground after she’d refused to end them– the quick strike of her father’s blade, the blood– this was similar, but she was no monster. She had to protect what was dear to her, and she’d done that. If Kaden couldn’t see that, it wasn’t her problem. Still, Andy shook as she approached Emilio. “Tell me what to do.” 

[uncannysam]

PARTIES: @mortemoppetere, @uncannysam TIMING: Sometime in March. SUMMARY: Emilio and Sam meet for the first time! WARNINGS: Alcoholism tw

These days, when he left the bar only moderately buzzed instead of falling over, Emilio thought it probably counted as something of a win. He liked to keep his wits about him where he could, though he’d admit it was getting harder and harder to accept the daunting weight of even momentary sobriety these days. Still, he made an attempt. In the interest of keeping his friends from worrying too much, or avoiding that look they gave him, or making it home alive instead of getting himself killed on the trek between the bar and Teddy’s house because he was too drunk to fight back. He was doing better, he thought. He wasn’t sure if it was the truth or not.

Tonight, the trek felt longer than usual. Maybe it was because he was making it buzzed instead of drunk, the excess energy humming in his chest. His hand rested on the stake in his pocket, mind wandering absently. He didn’t feel ready to go home just yet. He wanted something to do, wanted some action, wanted a fight. 

Luckily, in Wicked’s Rest, you never had to go particularly far to find one. 

He heard a scuffle from a nearby alley, and the familiar tug in his gut as he got close confirmed that whatever was the cause was distinctly undead. A thrill of excitement went through him, hand tightening on the stake in his pocket. This was what he’d needed, he thought. This was a good cure for that nervous energy in his chest. Nothing else ever seemed to hit the spot quite right.

—

It wasn’t that Sam wanted to be out this late. It wasn’t that Sam was looking for a fight with a vampire, but here she was. All her worst nightmares coming true after what she had witnessed with Zach merely months before. And instead of being able to flee this time, she had completely frozen in fear. Anxiety wrapping a chokehold around her mind and body, not allowing her to react. And all she could think about was how Cass had claimed that there were good vampires in the world. Please be good. Please be good. Please be good.

The words were repeated over and over again in her mind as she stood backed against a wall trapped; her body shaking and tears silently running down her face as the large fanged creature slowly moved towards her with an absolute sneer on his face. But instead of immediately attacking Sam, she watched as the vampire played cat and mouse. Made her nothing but a toy instead of quickly devouring her and putting her out of the agony she was already in.

If she moved one way, he gave her just a little to make her think she was free, but then made haste just to block her. This had continued until she had found him right up on her now, slowly running his nose up her neck inhaling the sweet, metallic scent of her blood. And with her body now pinned, Sam let out a slight yelp as she felt his teeth sink deep into her neck; knowing that everything she was experiencing in this moment, had to have been what Zach had felt the night the life had been drained from him by not one vampire, but many vampires.

—

There were a few different ways to go about things. You could burst into a situation, proverbial guns blazing — Emilio’s preferred method — or you could go for stealth. He wasn’t so good at the latter these days, not with the bum leg slowing him down. But he was aware that it was more necessary, sometimes. Take, for example, a situation like this one. Emilio got within sight of the alley to find a vampire with a woman pressed against the wall of the alley, teeth already in her throat. Barging in could lead to the thing ripping her throat out without even meaning to, or giving it enough of a warning to take a hostage. Neither was an option Emilio particularly wanted to explore, so… a clumsy attempt at stealth it was.

Slowly, he edged into the alleyway. If he were more clinical, he might think it fortunate that the vampire was so distracted by its meal. But the woman looked terrified, and Emilio wasn’t the sort of man who enjoyed seeing innocent people afraid. He tried to meet her eye over the vampire’s shoulder, pressed a finger to his lips gently to request silence. He pulled a stake from his pocket, taking a step forward, and then another. And then…

His knee creaked. A quiet thing, bones rubbing together painfully in a way they weren’t supposed to. It wasn’t much, but it was enough. The vampire pulled away from its victim, whirling around to face Emilio with blood dripping down its chin. The slayer grimaced. “Well,” he said flatly, “so much for the surprise party.”

—

Sam could feel the life of her slowly being drained. The hardest part had been the teeth digging into her bare flesh, but the more the vampire took from her, the more euphoric she started to feel. Almost light headed, and the fear was slowly starting to fade away, but then she saw him. The man lingering just out of the corner of her eyes and definitely out of the view from the vampire. And as she watched him slowly remove what appeared to be a large piece of wood from his pocket, she realized it was a stake. A fucking stake like she had seen many times in comics and in movies.

Blinking a few times, she tried to keep her eyes open, but with each passing minute it was becoming harder and harder. But before Sam could pass out, she felt the fangs being ripped from her neck leaving her eyes to shoot back open rather widely as that same pain from earlier tore through her nerves. It was like a jolt to the system, and though she had lost blood, she was starting to become well aware of her surroundings once more.

“Help me…Please…” She wanted to scream, and she was just about to squirm, but she felt the vampire tighten his grip on her, not leaving her any wiggle room to break free. And kneeing him in the crotch was out of the question thanks to the fear that seemed to paralyze her in the moment. Instead, she would put her life in this man’s hands and hope and pray that he knew what he was doing, unlike she had, the night Zach died.

—

The vampire gripped his victim, hissing at Emilio in a way that hardly seemed human. Years ago, when things were simpler, he would have scoffed at the thought. Of course it didn’t seem human — it wasn’t. It was a monster with teeth and claws, a thing that survived only through hurting others. Things used to be black and white, and there were days when he missed that. There were moments where he longed for the simplicity of accepting his fate as a weapon instead of making so many attempts to masquerade as a man. The thing his mother had sharpened against a stone wouldn’t have cared about anything more than it cared about putting this stake through this vampire’s chest. 

But whatever he was now was different. 

This new thing, this strange hybrid between knife and man, thought about Zane. It thought about Metzli. It even thought about Monty a little, though it would probably deny that one. It wondered if this was a normal night for this vampire or if it was a slip in the wrong direction, wondered if it had killed before or if this was a first attempt. It wondered how much any of those things mattered, wondered if they should matter more or less than they did.

And then, the woman trapped in the vampire’s grip spoke, and Emilio forced every other thought from his mind. There was someone, and she needed help. That had to take priority here. “If you go now,” he said slowly, accent curling tightly around the words, “I won’t kill you.” The vampire hissed again, and Emilio nodded. The man faded away, and the blade remained. He surged forward, ignoring the pain in his knee. Time to take care of business.

—

All Sam could think about at the moment was Zach. She could vividly recall the way every single thing had played out that night, but this time, she was finding herself in his position. Seeing what he must have seen and felt play out in slow motion. If this had been her time to die, then so be it. There wasn’t much she could do. The control was in that of the monster gripping her throat and the man with the stake. She could imagine fingers wrapped tightly around Zach’s throat as teeth tore into his neck; his arms; his legs; every part of him, while she stood frozen in fear, but something in that moment changed. The way everything was playing out in her mind shifted, and when she looked up, she noticed the man lunging forward towards her and the creature that held her hostage.

Feeling the grip around her throat loosen slightly had allowed Sam an opportunity to break free. And as she yanked on the vampire's ice cold hand, she put all her strength into her actions taking advantage of the distraction from the slayer.

Sliding down the wall and shifting to her knees, Sam crawled out of the way of the two as quickly as she could. But this time, she wasn’t going to stand by and just let this thing hurt someone else. If this hunter needed help, she was going to be prepared. And that’s when she saw it, a metal pipe laying on the ground near a dumpster just up ahead. It was perfect, however, as she used the nearby brick wall for leverage, she realized her balance was not. The bloodloss had taken its toll, but now was not the time for giving up. Instead, she zigzagged towards the pipe and stumbled into the side of the green metal, before leaning down and gripping it in her hand, and as she looked back up towards the scuffle going on, a look of defeat was one replaced by something of anger and rage.

— 

The woman slipped from the vampire’s grip, and Emilio watched her from the corner of his eye for a moment. She stumbled away, out of reach of the monster who had attacked her, and he gave a satisfied nod. Good. She’d run, he thought, take off down the alley and to the street, and he wouldn’t need to worry about a civilian getting in the middle of things. Satisfied with one less distraction, Emilio dove into the drive forward, knocking the vampire against the wall. It grunted, shoving him back with a twist.

His bad leg hadn’t gone unnoticed; it rarely did. Most opponents were eager to exploit any weaknesses they could get their hands on, and Emilio’s leg was a glaring one with a neon sign in the shape of a prominent limp. The vampire aimed a harsh kick at his knee, and Emilio barely managed to stumble back in time to avoid it. “Pendejo,” he spat, rolling his shoulders. 

The vampire offered no response. It surged towards him, fangs at the ready, and Emilio had half a mind to let it sink its teeth into his skin and taste the acidic blood flowing through him. It would be a nice lesson in karma, but… People always made a thing of it when he came home bleeding, especially when it was clear it was a thing that could have been avoided. So, another step back avoided the fangs, and he plunged his stake forward in the interest of ending things. The vampire turned at the last second, sending the wooden point grazing its ribs instead of sinking between them. Emilio turned with it, towards the sound of someone approaching.

The civilian. With a metal pipe. 

Goddamn it. 

—

The rage that had filled Sam’s heart and mind was like a flood of adrenaline, and without thinking about herself and retreating back to safety, Sam, instead made a mad dash towards the vampire. It had taken everything within her to keep her gait straight. To keep the creature in focus and keep the man out of focus. The last thing she had wanted was to aim at her intended target, but strike down the only source of help she had in stopping this thing.

As she grew closer, Sam narrowed her eyes and focused harder. She was going to whack this motherfucker as hard as she could if it was the last thing she did, and luckily for her, the stake being rammed in its direction had been just the distraction needed for Sam to whack the vampire upside the head as hard as she possibly could. Granted as soon as she did, she felt the reverb back into her body and had to lean back up against a nearby wall. But when she saw the creature go down, even if just temporarily, Sam leaned into her attack and had the pipe at the ready, sending it down over the vampire as hard as she could as she had somehow managed to drop to her knees almost on top of it, “You killed my best friend!!!” Her scream was loud and tears slowly began to trickle down her pink-tinged cheeks. Logically, Sam knew this probably wasn’t doing much to something that was already dead, but he had made for a good target for her anger and distress, especially after being used for dinner.

—

A metal pipe didn’t do much against the undead. It would hurt, sure, but it wasn’t like it would do any permanent kind of damage. Blunt force wasn’t the best weapon against vampires; stabbing them was far more effective, even if you were doing it with something that wasn’t made of wood. It wasn’t as if dead skin could bruise, after all, and it took a lot more force than one might assume to break bones. But there was little time to tell the woman running towards them any of this. It was all Emilio could do to jerk backwards and avoid the risk of getting a taste of that pipe himself. The vampire let out an angry hiss as it made contact, clearly unhappy with the attack despite its ineffectiveness. At least the force of it knocked it down; Emilio could take the upper hand when it was offered to him, even if he’d have much rather done things his own way.

The woman was leaning against the wall, still holding that pipe as she dropped to her knees. She was too close to the vampire, Emilio thought; the risk of it taking advantage and using her as a hostage again was too high. There was little time to waste, and so the slayer dove in. He shoved her back, less gentle than he might have been had the adrenaline not been pumping so intensely through his veins, taking her place on top of the vampire and pressing his stake against its chest. In another situation, there may have been some dry statement here, some smug grasping of the final word, but Emilio was far too concerned about the woman to manage much more than a grimace as he shoved the stake between the vampire’s ribs and let it turn to dust beneath him. His palms hit the concrete as the vampire’s body crumbled away, and he sat there for a moment, still holding the stake.

This was the part he was bad at, he thought. He understood what to do with vampires, knew how to get rid of them and make sure they did no more harm. He didn’t know how to deal with terrified, screaming, bleeding people that were often left in the aftermath. This was the kind of thing Edgar had been far better at. His brother knew how to smooth things over, knew how to comfort. Emilio only ever knew how to kill. “Uh…” He turned towards the woman, shifting backwards into a sitting position. “You… good?”

—

Sam was so intent on destroying this thing, that she barely noticed the man coming in to take her place until she felt herself being shoved backwards. Toppling back to the ground, Sam laid there for a minute gathering herself, before finally using what remaining strength she had to scoot back out of the way. And before she could really process anything else, the vampire was nothing but a cloud of dust.

With relief washing over her tired body, she let out a loud sigh and closed her eyes. Sweat ran down her forehead from the effort made towards trying to beat the dust out of the creature, but this man had come in for the save. Though she had been somewhat annoyed that she hadn’t been able to take it out herself, she was just grateful he had been there knowing that if he hadn’t heard her screams, she would probably be with Zach right now.

“Uh…” Her breathing remained heavy as she let her eyes move from where the vampire once was to the man who had saved her life, “Yeah, I th-think so. Thank you…for saving me.” Sam had debated telling him why she was so hellbent on going after the thing herself, but decided not to. She didn’t know him. She was grateful. Would’ve loved the opportunity to learn from him in case this ever happened again, but her embarrassment that this happened was slowly starting to get the better of her.

—  

Discomfort washed over him like an ocean wave, clinging to his skin and dripping from his hair. The woman was laying on the ground where he’d shoved her, probably sore but not sporting any serious injuries that he could see. His own adrenaline from the fight was quickly fading, heartbeat slowing as his body recognized the fight’s end, and he knew hers must be doing the same. Whatever strength she’d gained from her own anxiety that had allowed her to pick up that pipe and take a swing was surely gone now. Emilio wondered how much she’d been relying on it just to stay upright.

There was some relief, at least, when she responded that she was okay. He never knew what to do with people who weren’t, wasn’t sure how to deal with physical injury any more than he knew how to deal with psychological ones. He’d seen plenty of injuries, sure, but first aid hadn’t been among the lessons learned during his training. The way his mother saw it, if you were stupid enough to get hurt in a fight, you ought to suffer the pain of it until it healed. Emilio didn’t think that way anymore, if he ever really had to begin with, but that didn’t mean he had the faintest idea of how to fix things.

“Good,” he said with a nod. “That’s… yeah. All right.” The discomfort only grew as she thanked him, and he spun the stake absently between his fingers. “Kind of my job. You, uh…” He glanced down to the dust, already being picked up by the wind and swept away. “You said it killed your friend?” Was there a body nearby? He was never quite sure what to do with those, either, or with the guilt that always came along with them.

—

Sam had managed to pull herself up using a nearby brick wall as a backrest, “Yeah, I mean...Vampires did. Not him.” Or what was left of him anyway. She looked down at the ground pausing, that night flashing in her mind. “You may have seen it on the news or on the internet about a guy being murdered behind an auto repair shop several months ago. But the news made it seem like an animal attack. It was a group of vampires. I know because I was there. I watched it happen.” She grew quiet as she mindlessly drew circles in the gravel with a stick she had found laying on the ground.

“It’s why I went crazy on that one earlier. I just wanted to get some kind of revenge for my best friend. But clearly it didn’t do much…” Sam tossed the stick away, before letting out a sigh. There was no sense in hanging around any longer. The vampire was literally dust, and she figured this man had somewhere to be.

Slowly getting back up to her feet, Sam looked over at the other person, “Are you okay? Do you need help getting up? I know that must’ve been a rough fight.” She walked over towards him offering out a hand to help him up if he needed it, “Maybe I can buy you a drink some time.” It wasn’t much in the way of thanks, but she still wanted to repay him, somehow, for saving her life. And if he allowed her to, maybe even pick his brain for pointers on how to handle possible vampire attacks in the future.

—

Being in the presence of someone who had lost a loved one to a vampire attack was… a little strange, in a way. For all the atrocities he’d witnessed and all the people he’d met here in town, Emilio wasn’t sure he knew anyone else who’d lost the people they loved to this specific sort of thing. It made him feel uncomfortable, made him think of the vampire attack that loomed so heavy over his own history. He listened to her speak as if he was underwater and she was above the surface; it was muffled. He nodded anyway.

“Sorry,” he said, and his tongue felt heavy. “For… the loss.” He wasn’t sure why he said it. He hated it when people said it to him, hated the uselessness of it. Sorry was a word that tried to carry more than it was capable of, a scrawny thing making a pathetic attempt to move mountains with its bare hands. 

It took him a moment to register that she was still speaking, still here. Maybe it took him a moment to realize that he was still here, too. He shrugged, taking her hand despite the way he felt like there were bugs crawling up the back of his neck and letting her help him to his feet. “Yeah,” he agreed. “Uh, maybe.” Or maybe not, if this feeling didn’t go away. “I, uh… Probably should get going. You good to walk home on your own?”

—

Sam noticed that the man had gone somewhere else by the quietness and the look in his eyes. She had been there way too many times to know that what she had said had personally affected him, and it made her realize he had been the right one for the job of saving her. She was grateful to be able to still be standing here. Sure, she was worn out and sore. Emotionally and physically drained, but she was going home tonight. Back to her parents. Back to Scout. Back to the people who cared for her.

Helping him off the ground, Sam stepped back to give him some space. If he wanted to get drinks, he’d find her. It wasn’t that hard to find somebody in a town as small as Wicked’s Rest once you knew their face. But he was right. She did need to get back home. It was late, and though she wasn’t fond of the idea, she would be fine to make it back to her apartment. Adrenaline still coursed through her veins, and if she had to run the whole way she would, “Yeah, I’m good. It’s not that far from here.”

Sam looked back at where all the action had just taken place letting the events run through her head one more time. She’d probably be thinking about it for days to come, but it had given her a new goal. The next time this happened, because in Wicked’s Rest there would probably be a next time, she wanted to be prepared. And she would be, “Hey…Thanks again.” And with those final words, Sam took off jogging down the alleyway back out into the safety of the openness with a new appreciation of life and the people like the stranger who had saved her life tonight.

[realmackross]

PARTIES: @mortemoppetere, sir richard iii TIMING: Sometime during the winter months SUMMARY: Emilio meets Sir Richard III. WARNINGS: Alcoholism tw

Life as a reindeer wasn’t too hard. Most days were spent eating all the good things that the fat jolly human and his wife offered up, and when Sir Richard III was really good, he got his favorite thing, carrots. Nothing could beat a carrot, except maybe glazed carrots with a hint of butter and brown sugar, but those only came on Christmas itself after a hard earned day of taking presents to all the good little humans that walked the Earth. Of course, Sir Richard III only enjoyed the good little humans when they spoiled him, and though he didn’t mind hanging out in the North Pole (it’s where he was born after all), sometimes he and his copious amounts of reindeer siblings liked to go exploring other parts of the vast land they lived on. This time, it just happened to be in a small coastal town called Wicked’s Rest, where not only were there humans, but also other things that had fascinated Sir Richard III and his brothers and sisters. And as long as he was back before the fat jolly human needed his assistance, he was free to do whatever he pleased.

Appearing suddenly outside a bar in what appeared to be a dark and not so merry side of town, Sir Richard III took to exploring the land cautiously as he watched people stumble around in the shadows. This had definitely not been the jolliest part of this small, unknown town, but it did make for interesting humans to follow; one in particular that smelled of something both stout and sweet. Keeping to the shadows and lightly letting his hooves hit the payment, he continued to follow the human dressed in what smelled like cowhide waiting for his right moment to approach for the carrots that had to be lingering somewhere in his pockets.

—

Something was following him. He could feel it lurking in the shadows, tracking him as he stumbled home from the bar. It wasn’t undead — his senses would have told him as much — but he had no idea what it could be. Someone living who wanted him dead was just as likely as some vampire out for revenge, these days. Between his detective work and his general personality, Emilio had made plenty of enemies for himself in Wicked’s Rest.

But he had the upper hand so long as the person following him didn’t know that he knew they were there. In a situation like this one, control belonged to whoever had the most information. Right now, Emilio liked to think that was him. He knew he was being followed. He knew whoever it was was alive. He knew who he was and what he could do. That must have counted for something.

Cautiously, he turned a corner. It wasn’t a corner he needed to turn, but there was no way in hell he was leading someone back to the place where he was living. He put his back flat against the wall, dropping a knife into his hand, and he waited. And when his pursuer turned the corner to follow him, Emilio sprung into action.

—

Sir Richard III watched as the man continued forward. With his nose to the air, he continued to trot softly along leaving hoof prints in the snow behind him. But with his many years of experience around humans, he knew when to be cautious, when to be kind, and when to be curious. Right now, something was alerting him to the demeanor of this strange and broken human. And just as he was about to round the corner, his shadow cascading down into the white powder on the ground, Sir Richard III disappeared into the darkness, before reappearing behind the human man dressed like the people he often saw when he would be called down to Miami or Sturgis to help deliver presents to all the good little bikers. Except this man looked rough and like he needed to be on the naughty list.

Watching as the man jumped forward with a knife in his hand, Sir Richard III cocked his head to the side; the weight of his antlers pulling it down more than he would have liked, before he raised it back up. He could still smell what had attracted him to the stranger in the first place and wanted to step forward, but knew not to startle the man with the sharp pointy thing that could hurt him. Humans were some of the most erratic creatures he had learned and one had to be gentle with them – unless they didn’t give you carrots. Then that was a different story.

—

There was nothing there. There’d been a shadow, then nothing. Paranoia slipped its icy fingers around his chest, whispering about mares and reminding him that there was at least one out there who’d probably like to see him very dead, and probably get a kick out of fucking with him before making that happen. His grip tightened on his knife, and he wished he had something bigger, wished he’d thought to carry a damn broadsword along with him to the bar without stopping to consider the logistics of that particular situation. 

Then, there was the unmistakable feeling of something (something alive, he reminded himself; not the mare because it was alive, because his senses weren’t alerting him to anything undead, because he was fine, he was fine—) behind him. Emilio whirled to face it, fist gripping the knife so tightly that his knuckles had gone white around it and his fingers were numb. And he was facing… a fucking deer? What the fuck? 

The detective hesitated, glancing around briefly. A joke, maybe? But there was no one nearby. Emilio made a shooing motion with his hands, trying to get the deer to fuck off. “Get out of here,” he said. “Back to the woods, or whatever.”

—

Sir Richard III noticed the expression on his face, and if reindeer could laugh, he would have. Silly human. Pawing at the ground with his hoof, he started raising his head up and down. Maybe some slight interactions would calm this human’s nerves. However, before he could really take the time to get this man’s attention, he was already getting the dreaded shooing motion. Followed by the same jumbled mess of speech that this human assumed he could understand.

Sir Richard III snorted at the man’s reaction to him, showing his own frustration. He knew these humans were mostly all the same, especially the ones that looked like they needed to go visit a spot behind a tree. And this human just had that look. Poor thing. Maybe Santa would spare him and bring him some prunes. Sir Richard III hated prunes, but carrots. Carrots were his true passion in life, besides Lady Lilabelle; his love back home in the North Pole.

Stepping forward a few steps, he began to sniff the man, still occupied by his scent. Maybe these carrots were the glazed kind that he enjoyed so much. But he knew to keep his eyes low. This creature still had the sharp, pointy thing in his hand, and he didn’t want to be caught off guard.

—

The deer stepped forward, nose against his chest, and Emilio didn’t quite understand the quiet panic that rose up in him but he reacted all the same. He took a stumbling step backwards, pain radiating through his bad leg as it landed a little too hard on the concrete. He stayed on his feet through sheer stubborn will alone, grip tightening on that knife in his hand. Stupid. It was stupid. He’d been jumpy ever since the damn soap factory, and this wasn’t helping. (Nothing was helping; nothing ever did.)

“Get out of here,” he demanded, holding up the knife threateningly. He wouldn’t use it. Emilio wasn’t much for hurting animals unless they outright attacked him, and the deer hadn’t done that no matter how hard his heart was pounding. But it was an instinctive thing, the threat; the animal likely had no concept of what it meant, but Emilio couldn’t help but raise it, anyway. Some things were in your nature, a part of you. For Emilio, violence was one of them.

—

Sir Richard III watched as the man stumbled backwards and for a brief moment, the reindeer showed concern in his eyes; almost ready to step out and give the man something to fall against if need be. But when he noticed that he had stayed upright, the reindeer stayed back. It was the knife being pointed at him that he didn’t enjoy, and he knew he’d have to get around that. Maybe if he just…yep, there we go! With a gentle turn of his head and just the right amount of force, he managed to knock the knife out of the human’s hand with the end of his antlers. No more threat!

Snorting and sniffing, Sir Richard III raised his head back up and stepped somewhat closer. He remained cautious, because humans were sneaky creatures after all, but he started to get a better sniff; hoping to find those brown sugar glazed carrots he so loved. But instead, all he sniffed out in the pocket of the man’s coat had been a glass bottle full of something stout that, with closer inspection, had been the hint of glaze that he had thought he smelled. This, instead, smelled like corn – reminiscent of the reindeer feed that would get wet and make his hooves a little wobbly after he consumed it.

—

There were antlers too close to him, knocking the knife from his grip, and the pounding in Emilio’s chest only grew stronger. He’d been in a fucking state since the shit with Rhett, half present half not, paranoia amped up to a goddamn thousand as his mind flittered between past and present, and the fucking reindeer wasn’t helping. The absence of a weapon in his hand felt like a death sentence. In a heartbeat, he was digging in his jacket pocket for another knife, but he wasn’t the only one interested in what was in his coat. 

The deer’s nose found his pocket, and Emilio let out a curse as he tried to shove it backwards. “What the fuck is wrong with you? I don’t have shit for you here. Go.” Did he really want to stab a reindeer? Not particularly. But he would if he had to.

—

Sir Richard III continued to sniff, until he felt the human try to shove him backwards. Grunting in frustration and stomping his front right hoof, the reindeer charged forward, forcing the human man back into the wall, pinning him between his antlers. The animal had done this plenty of times and knew just how to maneuver to avoid impaling people, and to frighten them just enough. If this man wanted to get feisty with him, Sir Richard III could get feisty right back.

However, after holding the human in place for a few minutes, knowing that he wasn’t going to get anything out of this man, Sir Richard III released him from his grip and slowly stepped back snorting in disgust and giving the man a disgusted and judgy look before disappearing into thin air off to find the next unfortunate being that smelled sweet like brown sugar glazed carrots.

—

The animal charged at him, and for a moment Emilio reflected on how fucking stupid it would be to get killed by a goddamn deer after everything. To survive the massacre of his hometown, Zane’s vampire clan in the barn, the mare and the banshee in that factory, just to get impaled by a fucking reindeer? Someone would bring him back to life just to make sure he’d never live it down. But the antlers didn’t pierce flesh, didn’t go through. Instead, they only pinned him in place. To Emilio, it was almost worse. The very concept of being trapped made his chest ache and his stomach clench, and he immediately began thrashing. 

It didn’t last long. Whether it was the slayer’s uncooperative attitude or something else entirely, the reindeer seemed to lose interest in Emilio. It took a step back, freeing Emilio from his antlers. Immediately, he took a step forward just to prove to himself that he could, just to remind himself that he was okay, he was fine. The reindeer gave him a look he couldn’t comprehend before… vanishing into thin air.

A few wild glances around proved that the thing really was gone, and Emilio slumped back against the wall. “Fuck,” he muttered, pushing back his hair and letting out a long sigh. “Fuck.” He pulled the flask from his pocket, taking a long swig.

Yeah. He was going to need more whiskey.

[lukas-dark-miracles]

Jaws || Lukas & Emilio

TIMING: current.

PARTIES:  @mortemoppetere & @lukas-dark-miracles

SUMMARY: Lukas finds a woman being attacked in an alleyway and steps in. However after he gets the others away he realizes she's bleeding out and he asks a stranger (Emilio) to help save her life.

CONTENT WARNINGS: Parental/ Sibling Death

Lukas hadn’t suspected anything would be unusual that late night as he started to fill the streets with his help group flyers. He had just wanted to get them up before the sun would drive him back to the crumbling mansion he didn’t want to be stuck in but seemed to go back every morning anyway. He hadn’t thought he would be in the middle of a murder attempt - as he couldn’t help but run towards the noises as he heard someone screaming. He’d gotten the other’s away from the person - a young woman who seemed to be shaking on the ground. He couldn’t tell what the others had been - maybe some sort of supernaturals.They weren’t regular humans at the very least, but they seemed frightened enough of Lukas to run. 

All he knew was that what he smelled was human blood coming from behind him as he got the others to scatter. Lukas hadn’t realized they had cut her, and now he wasn’t sure what he could do as his throat started to close and his teeth felt sharper.  Not looking at the woman he shook, trying not to think about it as she was asking if he could help her. “Wait here,” Lukas managed to get out as he sprinted. 

He certainly didn’t know how to get help, but he knew he couldn’t do it alone. Not when she was bleeding and he certainly couldn’t patch her up. Desperate, Lukas  found the first person that seemed to be on the road, although something felt wrong.  “Excuse me - Can you help? There’s someone - down there hurt. I can’t -” Lukas said, trying to convince himself not to think about the blood. “She’s hurt, and bleeding. Can you help?” 

Most nights found Emilio doing one of a few different things. If he didn’t have a case that needed looking into, his ways of filling the time were… limited, to say the least. He didn’t have many hobbies, had never quite learned how to relax. Either he was hunting, out with a stake in his hand and a too-fast heartbeat, or he was drinking. The former was far more common than the latter, but he thought the surly vet at the clinic might actually kill him if he showed up with his stitches ripped out, so the liquor store was, in comparison, the more responsible choice.

But some things seemed to find you, anyway, even when you weren’t looking for them. 

He felt that familiar pit in his stomach, the way the hairs on the back of his neck stood up straight. The feeling washed over him a moment before sharp ears picked up on the thundering footsteps of someone running his way. For a moment, he thought he’d come face to face with someone fleeing a vampire. Instead, it was the vampire himself who met him on the road, frantic and raving.

Emilio took a step back as the man approached, so tense that he ached. “Did you hurt her?” He snapped, almost without meaning to. He wasn’t what he used to be, wasn’t a man who thought all undead were something despicable, but old habits died hard. When a panicked vampire covered in blood told you someone was hurt and bleeding, it was hard not to jump to certain conclusions.

Lukas could smell the blood on him still, as he had tried his best to help the woman in the alleyway. It didn’t feel good - it never did for him - the wanting to take the blood but needing to be disciplined. Still, he had decided that he would save her - whatever that really meant. Even if his fangs felt like they were poking the inside of his cheek. 

He had expected the other to hurriedly call 9-1-1 or maybe freak out with him. He hadn’t expected the other to think that he had done something. With widened eyes Lukas shook his head. “No - there were three people - I think they were people? I don’t know if they were  people?” Lukas blinked trying to get back to the main thought. “She screamed - and I came. They ran away, but she’s bleeding - I can’t.” 

Lukas was shaking, he could fully admit that now.  Although he was stronger than he had been - it was still a lot to stop as he wanted the blood. He also didn’t know how much sense he was making either. The other didn’t seem like a regular person now, as tense as he was, but to be fair he was covered in - something he didn’t want to think about. He didn’t want to think about it. “Help her. I - can keep the others away if they come back, but I can’t help her. I’ll call the cops to make a statement, but she’s bleeding now and I can’t help her.” 

If he was lying, he was good at it. Emilio knew that didn’t mean he was telling the truth. Some vampires got damn good at fooling people, spent centuries honing the skill. They used it the same way animals in the wild used their speed or their jaws — as a way to trap prey. But if that was what this guy was after, he’d chosen the wrong victim. Emilio wasn’t prey. Emilio was anything but.

Part of him wanted to tell the guy to fuck off, sure that he’d follow him back to the darkened alley and find nothing but a corpse and hungry fangs that would turn on him the moment he realized he’d been had. But there was still that chance that the stranger wasn’t lying. There was still that possibility that there really was a woman in trouble. And Emilio couldn’t turn away from that.

Relenting with a sigh, he ran a hand across his face and nodded. He was going to regret this. He knew he was going to regret this. He always regretted it when shit like this went down, when he tried to help people he shouldn’t be helping. “Fine,” he agreed through gritted teeth. “Show me where she is, and I’ll help her.” At the very least, he knew how to stop the bleeding. Something that, if this man was telling the truth, would be far harder for him than it would be for Emilio. Of the two of them, the hunter was the only one who wouldn’t get hungry while holding a stranger’s blood inside their body. “But I’m not talking to any police. If they come, I’m gone before they get here. Okay?”

Lukas didn’t want to be a monster - although now he supposed that was his role in the stories now. If he was to be a part of a bigger plan, he shouldn’t have cared so much for a human who he didn’t know the name of. He should have let her die.  He was supposed to further a new gospel of darkness, and show that there was harmony there. He was supposed to play a role and maybe out of kindness change her - but a part of him couldn’t. He couldn’t do it. He couldn’t make her give up the choice and he couldn’t let her just die without trying. 

Whatever monstrous actions he was supposed to take, Lukas couldn’t seem to fully give up on wanting to help people who were distressed, leading him now to want to get the woman out of here. So while he tried to calm down he nodded and said through teeth he didn’t want in his mouth “She’s - down the alley a bit I can walk you down but - I don’t know how close I can get again. I think she’s still awake if you can hear her - I’ll make sure none of them come back.” 

After all, Lukas didn’t want anyone to get hurt but he was angry that they had attacked the lady. At the idea of the police Lukas nodded as he started towards the Alley. 

“I’ll make sure you don’t have to talk to them. Just - Stop the bleeding and I can call an ambulance for her. I’ll make it sound like not an attack so no police,” As he started talking he felt his teeth come back out and without thinking Lukas bit his lip wincing but trying to force them back down. Christ this was going to hurt. 

Everything instinct in him was screaming at him to stake this man and leave, insisting that there was no chance in hell that he’d get into that alley and find anything but an ambush waiting for him. You couldn’t trust vampires. That was what he’d been taught from an early age, what he’d had shoved into his mind from the moment he knew enough to know what words meant at all. But what was the alternative? Kill this man and potentially let an innocent woman die with him? Emilio knew he could watch his own back well enough to make sure he wouldn’t die at this vampire’s hands, even if he was more of a threat than he appeared to be. If there was any chance at all that someone needed his help, he was going to help them.

Still tense, he followed the man into the alley. “Who attacked her? Are they still nearby?” If some other vampires did this, Emilio had no problem staking them. If they were human, he could find a way to take care of that, too. He wondered if the vampire leading him into the dark now knew them, if they were friends who’d gone a little farther than he’d expected. Not outside the realm of possibilities. Vampires could be stupid enough to fall for the lies they were told, too. Zane was proof enough of that.

When they got further into the alley, he could make out a shape towards the end of it. A moving shape. Not a corpse, then. Emilio turned a suspicious eye towards the vampire. “You can wait here,” he offered. “I’m going to check on her.”

Lukas was trying to calm himself as they walked into the Alley. He was trying to answer the other’s questions knowing now that he must know what he was. The other wasn’t wrong to be suspicious, but he did wish that the questions weren’t so hard to articulate answers too. He really wanted to keep his mouth shut against his teeth. Still, keeping his hand over his mouth, Lukas did respond. “It was three people - they were talking about the smell- I don’t think so. I chased them off - I think. I don’t know what they were.”

Lukas nodded and heard a small groan from the woman and instinctually wanted to go further in. He wanted to pick her up and rush her to somewhere that could help her, but Lukas was already covered in her blood and trying not to lapse into hurting her. He knew he couldn’t help her. So instead he tried to calm down, and pulled out his phone dialing the hospital number instead of 911 and tried to quickly explain the situation - hoping to not turn around. As he waited he called back, “Is she - still alive? The ambulance is on its way. Five minutes.” 

Three people. Driven by the stench around town? Emilio had heard rumors that it was making people violent. They might not have even been supernatural, from what the man was saying — if very well could have been run of the mill humans who were affected by Wicked’s Rest’s newest shitshow. That always made things a little more complicated because at that point? You had to get the human police involved. 

As the stranger busied himself with the phone, Emilio approached the body in the alley. It hurt to crouch next to her with his bad knee, but he pushed the pain into the back of his mind. It wasn’t important now. What mattered now was… there. His fingers found the pulse on her throat, dull but present. He glanced up as the vampire called out to him. “She’s alive,” he confirmed, “but I don’t know if she has five minutes. I might need your help. I need to stop the bleeding, but I’m worried about those guys coming back. You think you can get close enough to play lookout without going in for a bite?”

Listening closely to the other man he wondered why people were acting so strange in this town. It had never been normal, even Lukas blinded by light knew when he was younger that the town was odd, but he had never considered it so cruel. Maybe that was something he needed to know now. 

Still when he confirmed that the woman was alive, Lukas couldn’t help but breathe out in relief knowing that she was. Maybe it wasn’t as bad as all of it. Still, he froze when the other was talking to him about moving closer to her. Lukas was pretty sure he didn’t have a heartbeat anymore, but a phantom beating seemed to be in his ears as he thought about that possibility. The man was right, he would need to keep her safe and if the others came back he would have to stop helping her to do it if Lukas didn’t help. 

For a moment he almost prayed - asking God for strength to keep them both alive. He wanted to pray for the woman, for the kindness he knew people could have, to keep them safe. Although as soon as he thought of that he remembered it. Blood, screaming, begging - a flashing pair of red eyes. No. He didn’t need God for this, he needed to be strong enough to do it without Him. The other two needed him to keep calm and he was going to. With that Lukas said, “Yes. I can,” his teeth clicking in his mouth feeling too crowded but still more in control than he was. He sounded more like himself now, despite it. 

Lukas moved closer keeping his eyes straight not looking at the woman or the man, his eyes back to a bright blue looking down the alley. His hands clenched - the red splotches reminding him that he could be better. “Just keep her stable. If they come I will take care of it. Don’t worry - I won’t bite them. ” He wasn’t going to kill them, Lukas was pretty sure of that but it didn’t mean he couldn’t scare them again. After all, one day they might ask for forgiveness, and he wanted to be able to offer it. 

“Do you know why, people are just doing this,” Lukas said, his eyes still not focused on the other two. “They seemed agitated in a way that’s not usual for robbers and she didn’t seem to know them.” 

This wasn’t what Emilio was good at. Holding his hands over a wound, keeping blood in someone’s body instead of taking it out… he’d never been taught this. His mother hadn’t believed in first aid so much as survival of the fittest. If someone was bleeding out, it was up to them to stop themselves dying. If they failed, it meant they’d never deserved to live at all. Emilio remembered being thirteen, blood pouring out of a wound in his side and Elena Cortez standing over him with a sharp frown on her face as his uncle tried desperately to quell the bleeding. 

If he dies, let him die, she’d scolded, meeting his eyes as she’d said it. We have no room for weak men here, Lucio. He knows that. Lucio hadn’t stopped, and Emilio remembered hating himself and his uncle both, remembered thinking that his mother would never be proud of him if he couldn’t even manage to survive unassisted. But when that massacre had torn through town, he’d tried to hold his sister’s blood inside her body, too. He’d pressed against her wounds until the light was gone from her eyes, done the same for his nephew and his wife and his daughter until his hands were soaked in the blood of so many people he hadn’t saved. 

He tried not to think about it now, tried not to look at the woman’s blood on his hands and see the reflection of two years ago staring back at him. Easier, he thought, with the vampire there to distract him. After all, when the dust settled in Etla, Emilio had been alone. And for better or worse, he wasn’t alone in this moment now.

“What?” He looked up at the man as he spoke, shaking his head to ground himself in the present. “I don’t know. They probably weren’t human. She’s got bite marks on her. Could have been zombies, or sloppy vampires. Smell’s driving everyone nuts.” Emilio, too. He’d been more agitated than usual… which was saying something, given his usual level of agitation. “Probably hungry. Wanted a quick meal. You’d better not be the same.”

Lukas was counting lightly in his head his eyes focused on keeping the two humans safe. Usually, he would have asked for some intervention in this - something from above to make them safe- but instead he focused on being here. 3:32-3:33-3:34 The seconds seem longer than they should. If hell was torture, this was at least purgatory. Maybe it was because he wasn’t being the monster he was casted as at the moment. 

That would be a thought for a different time as he saw moment flicker at the side of his vision. Turning his head he didn’t see anything, but kept his eyes keen. At the other’s response he said softly, “I suppose they could have been vampires.” Lukas didn’t flinch at the accusation. It was a fair one and it should have been true.  “The smell - ah yes that might have been it.” He wondered why he hadn’t been angry, but to be fair he wasn’t sure he hadn’t been. As of late most of his feelings felt - off. He didn’t quite feel - anything strongly. It wasn’t that he was not himself, but he was sure that they were dulled. Something to ask her about he supposed. “No. I’m not going to harm either of you. You can choose to believe it or not. - I think that’s the siren. God they got here quicker than the others could come back.” Lukas eyes flickered to the alleyway’s entrance as he heard an ambulance coming closer. He could hear voices clamoring searching - and without much thought he raised his voice and said, “Over here! We’re over here in a hurry. She's very badly hurt.” He heard commotion and knew they’d be there soon and knowing that the other didn’t want to deal with the outcome he let out a breath and looked over.  

He trembled for a second seeing the woman’s blood again, his hands digging into his arms to stop himself from doing anything awful. Softly so that the commotion would hide it Lukas said softly, “Thank you - I - Owe you. My name is Lukas, and if you need anything please let me know. I’ll - make sure she gets treatment if you have to go.” It was something like showing his hand at cards. He was sure the other was dangerous, and he could find him with that little bit of information. He also knew the man wasn’t going to trust him, but he could at least assure him that if he did hurt the woman that he would know where to come collect. 

It was hard to focus. The babbling vampire (who was bad at this, Emilio thought, how had no one staked him yet?) was doing a little to keep the slayer grounded in the present, albeit unknowingly, but it was an uphill battle. It was harder to distance himself from this situation than it normally might have been; he blamed the smell. It was throwing him off just as much as it was everyone else, after all. 

“Must have been,” he said tightly, though he wasn’t sure he believed it. He’d seen vampires do far worse than this, even without a bad smell driving them. They often didn’t need much of an excuse, often viewed their hunger as something that was above the survival of humans. He reminded himself that this wasn’t true of all of them, even if his jaw clenched as the vampire behind him insisted that he would never do such a thing. Some days, he had to remind himself more often than others. 

The siren flooded him with both intense relief and cold dread. An ambulance, he reminded himself, not the police. The latter had always left him feeling more than a little anxious, for more reasons than one, though any kind of authority that came with sirens made his palms itch. The vampire was calling the paramedics over, and that was good. Emilio knew that was good. They were this woman’s only chance at survival. He was sweating, anyway.

“Come here,” he ordered the vampire — Lukas, apparently — gesturing for him to put his hands in place of the slayer’s on the woman’s wound. “You want to pay me what you owe me, you keep her from bleeding out. That’s all I need from you.” He might have been a shitty slayer, but even he couldn’t stand the thought of cashing in a favor from a vampire. At least, not one he’d just met. Metzli could be an exception, but not this stranger. Straightening into a standing position the moment Lukas’s hands were in place, Emilio glanced to the front of the alley, where voices were getting closer. “And don’t — Don’t tell anybody I was here. Okay? Tell them you did it yourself. I’m leaving.”

Lukas was moved quickly, suddenly now moving to keep the woman alive. It felt more like a flash than anything he could really think about. “Okay.” His voice was trembling, more like the little kid he once was then the man he had been for far too long. The blood now filling his senses even more he closed his eyes for a moment and tried not to think about it. She felt warm - alive- and he needed to keep her that way. “I won’t. She’s going to be safe.  Be careful around the corner. I don’t think I can do this again.” He didn’t mean it to sound clipped but more so a fact. His mouth was so dry and felt burning.  For a moment he sat there his eyes closed as he heard the humans starting to find him, hoping that the other man had left. Exhaling, he opened them and called out again getting them over there. Seeing him they ran coming to move his hands and start helping the woman who was barely stirring.  With that - whoever the man was must have been gone and for a moment, Lukas wondered what this made him shaking in blood he didn’t want to drink. God what did it make him.

[goldmouse]

ITS BUG TIME!!!

All bugs are associated with the Bug Type gang that rivals the Dark Type gang. In order we got:

Emilio and Anghel the Beautifly brothers

Design for 3 identical Beedrill Debby, Libby, and Shelby, Brinley the Paras, Rosalyn the Butterfree

Kohaku and Koharu, the Ninjask and shedinja duo (they/them)

Pashmina the Ribombee, her brother Cashmire the cutiefly, Tallula the scorupi, who all work at the winery

Melvin the Blipbug, Athena the Frosmoth

And the scythe brothers, Phoenix the Scizor, Griffin the Scyther, and Roc the Kleavor

[weirdlookindog]

Testigo para un crimen (1963)

AKA Violated Love

[simustiktok]

lo mejor que vas a ver en tu vida

[plunderwater]

Slayin' Alive, Slayin' Alive

TIMING: Recent, before Emilio got cursed LOCATION: Somewhere Downtown PARTIES: Emilio (@mortemoppetere) & Fang (@ronin-for-hire) SUMMARY: Fang and Emilio cross paths when their respective quarries end up together. CONTENT WARNINGS: None

—

There was a moment, then, when it all came back to her—how it was to be ignorant: to have no knowledge of the shadows that lurked underneath all that she knew; to sleep soundly at night believing light always triumphs over darkness, that love and peace and heroes would always find a way to make sure everyone was safe; to not chase after stupid vamps on what could have been a sensual Friday night. “I could be boning someone by now,” Fang groaned to herself as their chase finally ended.

Her target was trapped. Between her and a dead end. Fang smiled underneath her oni facemask as her fingers wrapped tightly around the hilt of her katana, a borrowed weapon from her late mentor. She narrowed her eyes at the creature, who mostly just resembled an idiot boy if not for the fresh blood around her mouth, almost challenging them to come at her and fight back. Her target looked like he was about to…but then he threw a kick at her, sending her shoe flying toward her face, which the slayer instinctively slashed in half, all while her prey threw themselves over the dead end and continued to run. “Motherfucker!”

Sure, she could have continued to chase after the damned vamp, but maybe she didn’t have to. Fang squinted when she caught a glimpse of a piece of crumpled paper on the ground. She quickly retrieved it, and upon opening it, smirked like she just won against a stupid idiot. “Is this his address? What in the actual fuck?”

—

In the beginning, just after the massacre, it felt like Emilio was tracking down another one of the vampires responsible every week. There’d been so many of them and, just after it happened, they’d been so proud of themselves. Bragging about it in bars and street corners, excited to say that they’d been a part of the group that finally took down the Cortez family of slayers once and for all. Finding them had been easy. Picking them off, slowly and painfully, had been simple. He’d learned a lot, in those first few months, about how much a vampire could take before its body gave out, before it exploded into dust, before it begged for it. He missed that, sometimes.

It was harder now. Word had gotten out, eventually, that someone was tracking down everyone involved. No one knew it was him — as far as both the undead and the hunter community knew, Emilio Cortez had died with the rest of his family in Mexico — but they knew enough to stop their bragging. Tracking down just one vampire who’d been involved now took weeks instead of hours. It took months, sometimes. 

So finding one in Wicked’s Rest felt like a win.

He’d tracked the thing to an apartment building downtown. It was a hell of a lot nicer than Emilio’s apartment, which might have pissed him off if he’d cared anything about where he was living. As it was, it felt about as empty as everything else did. The slayer sighed, making his way towards the building… only to pause when he felt someone nearby. Not someone undead, which seemed odd given why he was here. Just a presence, watching. He turned towards the shadows, slayer vision allowing him to see through them to spot a figure in a mask, holding a katana in one hand and clutching a slip of paper in the other. Huh. That was new. “What are you supposed to be?”

—

It didn’t take long for Fang to track down her prey’s apartment. Despite the way she looked and acted, she was pretty savvy with all the new tech. Well, at least for someone in her line of work. A quick browsing of Google Maps and she was all set. What she found more difficult was to not get annoyed at the fact that the monster she was hunting lived in a better place than she did. Probably some place they stole from its original owner. Probably even murdered the original owner. Yeah, that’s probably it. Fang strengthened her resolve by thinking the worst of the damned vamp, which she believed was what they deserved.

Fang had slinked into the shadows when she realized she was not alone. She raised an eyebrow when the man easily spotted her. The slayer was already on a roll with thinking the worst of others, so in her head, she instinctively thought he was an associate of her prey. How else would he had seen him so easily? Another slayer? Pfft, what were the chances? And even if they were truly another slayer, then they might be after her prey. No way she was sharing her bounty. There’s rent left to pay this month. So she took out her katana and swung at him. Like a complete psychopath. “Your Maker, monster.”

—

Whatever he’d expected, it wasn’t this. Emilio had dealt with plenty over the years, but a woman in a mask leaping out from him wielding a goddamn sword? That was new. He jumped back just in time to avoid getting cut in half, whipping out his stake instinctively. She wasn’t undead — he would have sensed it if she were — but the stake happened to be the most easily accessible weapon he had on him at the moment. And a stake through the heart would kill most things, to be fair. It just happened to work especially well on vampires.

“You practice that line in the mirror at night?” It had been pretty well timed, and he had sort of unintentionally set her up for it, but it sounded like something out of an action movie. Or… what Emilio assumed would come out of an action movie. In all fairness, he supposed, he’d never actually seen one. “You come at everyone like this, or am I a special case?” He wasn’t sure whether to fight her or just walk away. This wasn’t what he was here for, after all.

—

When Fang saw the stake in the man’s hand, she had to take a step back. It wasn’t a weapon a vampire would have, at least not any vampire she’s fought before, though to be fair, the rules here were different from the rules in Japan. Also, not that many vampires in Japan. At least not the ones like in this town. Or maybe even in this part of the world. But she digressed. A vampire didn’t need a stake. Even with just its fangs and claws, it could take down a fellow vampire. A vampire with a stake just seemed as dumb as a Charmander with a bucket of water on its head.

“You’re not a vampire, are you?” That much was fast becoming obvious. Maybe if she took a second to check, this awkward and definitely dangerous moment could have been avoided. But Fang’s quarry had been testing her patience since they first encountered each other all those days ago. She didn’t have the patience to hesitate going into this place, this supposed hideout for the undead vermin, certainly not the patience to trade quips, even though she wasn’t that creative. “A thrall?” With a stake? Maybe a jilted lover, an annoyed servant here to take vengeance on his master through murder? But her quarry looked nothing like Nicolas Cage, and this man was no Nicholas Hoult. “Are you here to… The creature in this place is mine. You should leave.”

—

He felt oddly offended at the question, the very idea that he could be mistaken for something undead, for something like the things that had ruined his life before it began at all feeling more like an insult than a general inquiry. It made him feel a little sick, with a tightness in his chest and an acidic taste on his tongue. “No,” he snapped, a little harsher than was absolutely necessary, “I’m not a pinche vampire.” 

And then she continued, and Emilio found himself impossibly angrier. She wanted him to leave? He had every right to be here, had more of a claim to the vampire in that apartment than she did. What was she after it for? Did it matter? To her, it was probably nothing more than another undead thing. But to him? This was a deeply personal mission. He was far too stubborn to give it up. “Fuck off. I’m not going anywhere. I’ve been looking for this pendejo for months now, and I’m not letting you take it from me. I’m going to go up there, and I’m going to kill it slow. You can go home.”

—

Fang began to lower her weapon when he confirmed the obvious but raised it again when he declined to leave. Fact was, Fang wouldn’t kill an innocent civilian, even if they were wielding a stake, even if they were making her job harder. It wasn’t a wrong vs. right thing either, not a morality issue. To her, it would just be a waste of time. Innocent civilians could never defend themselves against people like her, slayers, hunters, trained from a young age to contend with monsters the former wouldn’t even know existed, wouldn’t even be prepared to fathom.

But Fang was now thinking of making an exception just for this asshole. “Look, dude,” Fang used that word in a derogatory manner, which was barely effective compared to the many other words she could have used. “Someone wants this vamp from down under dead so much, they’re paying top dollar, and I’m not sharing that bounty with you. So you either leave, go home to your video games or whatever, and spend the rest of your miserable, lonely life doing whatever makes you sleep at night…OR you can go up there, die to vampire Hugh Jackman in give or take five seconds, and then I’ll swoop in to get my rent money. Your choice.”

Fang growled at the end to emphasize her point, but she did get a few things wrong: One, the vampire she was after wasn’t Australian; it was from New Zealand, a foreign exchange student who had been alive for much longer than they were in school. Two, top dollar, the bounty wasn’t. It was just double her rent money, which wasn’t really a lot to anyone with a stable job. Fang did not have a stable job, though, so this was all she had. Three, she didn’t have to share that second part with him. Fact was, if she did just let him go at the vampire, believing it would make quick work of him, then she’d still be able to get her rent money after. Now he could just leave, making her lose a would-have-been advantage. Fang was no sly, cunning mind.

—

Ah. So it was money she was after. Emilio had heard of this, the side of the supernatural underbelly that exchanged lives for currency. Even in Mexico, there had been similar organizations. His mother had found it distasteful not because she believed any supernatural creature deserved to live but because she believed hunting to be more a righteous duty than a career option. Emilio’s own distaste for it came from a similar place. You believed what you were taught to believe, regardless of who taught it to you or how. Some things were just hard to shake.

“I don’t care about a bounty,” he snapped. “You want the money, you take it. It means nothing to me. The reasons I’m here are personal. It isn’t going to kill me, because I have been doing this my entire fucking life. I don’t carry this as un accesorio.” He waved the stake adamantly, frustration very clear. “And I don’t play video games.” 

If it were any other vampire, he might have been convinced to just walk away. Emilio was stubborn and possessive to a fault, but he wasn’t going to waste his time arguing with someone he assumed was another slayer over who got to kill a particular vampire. If the vampire was dead, it was dead. But this one was different. It had been there, in Etla. There was very little that would convince Emilio to leave that.

—

Fang raised an eyebrow. She found the guy incredibly rude, but then again, most of them in this line of work, and even those simply aware of the truth of the supernatural, were also incredibly rude. She’s been called incredibly rude herself, and she was, in a way, proud that those people kept their distance because of that perception, maybe even reality. She did find that last part funny for some reason, smirking from behind her facemask as she eased up on him, “Yeah, that much is obvious.”

Another thing that was obvious? Fang realized the other guy wasn’t going to just let this go. He seemed serious enough. About using that weapon in his hand to take out his vampire. Their vampire. Did it really matter if he’d die? He’d at least open some opportunity for her to swoop in while her quarry was busy with his corpse. Or he could be telling the truth and instead do her job for her. He didn’t care about the bounty, and the anguish in his voice, in his eyes, seemed to support that statement. Seemed like a win-win situation for her.

“All right then,” Fang shifted her attention to where their similar prey was supposed to be. “You just want the kill, right? Have at it. I’ll take the bounty when you’re done, so lead the way, Inigo Montoya. Let’s get this son of a bitch.” What better way to utilize the other slayer to his full potential than to use him as bait, or if he was really as good as he made himself sound to be, a weapon. She could at least sympathize with the need for revenge, as it was basically the same reason that brought her to these shores, trapped her in them as well.

—

For a moment, he thought she was going to argue with him. And he would have fought back, of course — Emilio was nothing if not damn stubborn, after all — but he was so goddamn tired. He wanted to get up there, wanted to dust that vampire, wanted to pretend it made him feel a little better, wanted to go home and drink himself into a stupor after and tell himself it was a celebration instead of a fucked up method of coping. He wanted to do all of that without arguing about it first, without having a stranger ask questions he didn’t want to answer.

But then she shrugged, and she didn’t argue after all, and there should have been relief in that but he felt just as empty, just as tired. Nothing ever fixed him. Nothing ever came close. 

He nodded as she spoke. “I just want the kill,” he confirmed. His brow furrowed a little at the name, and he shook his head. “My name’s Emilio. Not Inigo.” Not that it mattered, but he didn’t want to do this whole thing with her calling him the wrong name. That’d be annoying. Head up, he brushed by her to the entrance to the building. No elevator, though he would have refused to take it anyway. His knee would ache for days, he knew, would be so bad that he might not be able to walk once the adrenaline of the fight wore off, but he’d rather be in pain than reveal weakness to a stranger. Given the choice, Emilio would always prefer hanging himself to asking someone he didn’t know to cut the rope. 

The trip upstairs was a quiet one, since neither of them were particularly interested in talking. His heart was pounding in his chest, anticipation of the fight filling him with a pleasant buzz that never lasted long enough to amount to anything. “Just stay out of my way,” he warned the other slayer lowly. “You can have your bounty, but the vampire’s mine.”

—

“Fang,” she growled, back in her unnecessary Batman-esque voice. Back in Japan, it was the norm for the local slayers, deepening their voices so as not to reveal any hints regarding their true identities, their civilian identities. Fang already thought it was strange back then, even when she just started her training with her late mentor, considering they were already wearing the oni facemasks that was meant to scare the monsters, to remind them that they weren’t the only group stalking the night. She didn’t think the voice was, how the kids would say, extra until she got in this town, until it was just here cosplaying a character now played in the movies by the same actor who will never escape that time he played a sparkling vampire. “Have at it, Emilio.”

It didn’t matter, whoever got the kill. At least not with this job. It was just a simple elimination bounty, basically just take the vampire out and take a photo or a souvenir as proof that it was long gone. Come to think of it, one could just fake all that as easily as photoshopping a corpse or bringing back some other guy’s ashes. Didn’t even have to be the ashes of an actual corpse. Could just be ashes from something else, something burnt down. The people who put out these hits, surely most of them knew that. But then again, there was no price great enough for a good night’s rest. Fang would know.

Fang also, even if she would never admit it, harbored a liking for the extra work, the nitty gritty of the job. For most of her life, after her parents’ death and before her mentor’s passing, this had been all that she had, all that made her feel like her life had a purpose, why she was spared instead of her parents. If this was taken from her, the very concept of being out here and hunting down vampires and whatever else goes bump in the night, she wouldn’t know what to do. Maybe repair more VCRs. God, that thought almost made her vomit. “All right,” she let him go first, not even making any effort to watch his back. Worst case scenario? They eat him, which could still be a golden opportunity for her to kill them all while they’re chowing down on an Emilio taco. “No takebacks.” 

Whatever this guy had on this particular vampire, Fang didn’t really care. All she cared about was the money, the bounty. Still, she followed his lead while keeping a safe distance between the two of them. In her mind, she wouldn’t even make the effort to help him fend them off, if there were even more than one or two. It was wishful thinking, though, because when it comes down to it, when the vampires attack? Fang’s instincts would never let her not slice and dice at least one of them. It’s just who she was.

—

No takebacks. He nodded curtly, pleased with the words. The last thing Emilio wanted was someone getting in his way, slayer or no. His vengeance was his, and his alone. The thought of letting someone else do it for him, of allowing a stranger to kill what should have been his… It felt like a betrayal. His family, his daughter deserved more than that. He’d already failed to save her. What kind of father would he be if he failed to make the people who had killed her pay for it, too? What kind of man? 

They stood outside the door to the vampire’s apartment now, and Emilio let the feeling of the undead inside wash over him. That all-too familiar shiver up his spine, the way his stomach clenched in anticipation. He liked the fight but, if he was being honest, he liked this part, too. The part where the adrenaline was just starting to build, where his body’s knowledge of what was coming kick-started its response to it. 

He let himself revel in it for a moment before lining up with the door and delivering a solid kick to the wood with his good leg, the vibrations reverberating through the limb as the lock gave way. Thanks to his superior strength, it only took one kick; no time for the vampire inside to prepare.

Or vampires, rather. Three of them, all staring at the now-open door. Emilio zeroed in on his target single-mindedly, gripping his stake as he surged forward. “Looks like you get to have some fun, too,” he commented to Fang, ducking as one of the vampires recovered from the shock and came at him. He shoved them in Fang’s direction; they weren’t what he was here for, and he wasn’t doing anything else until he’d taken care of his business. 

—

“Fun?” Fang psh’d. She wasn’t here to have fun. More importantly, she wasn’t here to help this suicidal Emilio guy. “Oh, no, this is all you, amigo.” If he wanted so badly to kill the vampire, he’ll have to do this on his own. He’ll have to kill the other vampires, too. Fang was NOT going to lift a finger until they were all dead, him and/or the vampires. Fang was only here for the bounty. Fang was going to do the smart thing and bide her time, swooping in at the last second after everyone else was spent. Fang was—getting a vampire shoved in her face! What the actual fuck?!

In retrospect, Fang should’ve known this was going to happen. A part of her did. When one of the vampires ran toward them, mostly at Emilio, she already had her hand on the hilt of her katana, tightly wrapped around the handle, ready to slash at something that came her way, something undead. It was her instincts. It was her entire being. So, when the vampire was shoved toward her, she had little hesitation to draw her late mentor’s sword, greeting the oncoming idiot with the steel across its chest. “How much are YOU worth, baka?”

The stupid vampire was confused, but not confused enough to realize it was biting off more than it could chew, so it leapt back, away from the half-masked slayer’s range. Another vampire lunged at Fang, the other one that wasn’t Emilio’s target apparently, but she managed to avoid its attack by simply stepping back. Realizing they had the numbers advantage, the first vampire joined in the frenzy, with Fang forced to be on the defensive. Lucky for her, she was still faster than these guys and they were very predictable. Newly spawned? Inexperienced with their new state? Under some sort of distracting influence? Whatever the case, they were going to die if they didn’t stop tempting her blade. “Only here for one of you, but I can do this town a solid by taking you two out as well.”

—

She was stiff, but that was hardly surprising. She reminded Emilio of his sister, just a little. Rosa had been similarly serious, dedicating herself to the cause above all else. It was the reason why their mother had made no secret of preferring her to the rest of them, the reason why she was set up as the heir to the ‘top’ position in the family in a way that was never in question. Rosa had been a far better slayer than Emilio, and Fang probably was, too. But better didn’t always mean as much as people assumed it would. Rosa still died. Emilio still lived. The world still spun on, despite making very little sense. 

He had no doubt that Fang would leave him to die in a heartbeat if it meant furthering her own cause. In a way, there was some relief in that. Knowing where you stood with people was always better than not knowing, even if you didn’t stand anywhere good. He watched as the other two vampires combined their forces to go up against her, but there was little concern in the way he glanced back at her. She seemed like she could handle herself. If she couldn’t, he’d take the sword after she was dead. It was a nice sword.

Turning his full attention to the guy he’d actually come here to kill, he threw up an arm and shoved it against the vampire’s throat, pushing back with all his strength until the creature’s back met the wall hard. “¿Sabes quién soy?” The words were a quiet growl, meant only for this vampire and not for the other two or the slayer refusing to fight them. The vampire’s eyes widened, and he nodded, eyes flickering back to his companions. “I am going to kill them next,” Emilio told him, taking some joy from the way the vampire’s eyes shot back to meet his again. He cared about the other two. Emilio wondered what they were to him. Friends, lovers, family? It didn’t matter. He’d taken all of those from Emilio, back in Etla. 

Deciding he was no longer content with just killing the vampires, Emilio grabbed the one he was holding by the hair and tossed him across the room, sending him sprawling. It caught the attention of the other two, who turned away from Fang. “I changed my mind,” he announced. “I am going to kill them all. He dies last. I still don’t care about the money, but you can help me with these two if you want. If you don’t, that’s fine, too.” 

—

The pair of vampires threw themselves at Fang again, in a desperate bid to take out the woman with the sword. The half-masked slayer managed to dodge the first idiot by simply taking a few steps back, a look of disappointment behind that oni mask. It seemed the two lackeys didn’t appreciate her earlier comment. No matter. Fang didn’t appreciate them either. When the second guy tried to have a go at her, she didn’t pull back this time, slicing off his hand by his wrist in one clean slash. If only she could do the same to non-undead perverts. With a kick, she pushed the newly christened Captain Hook back.

That was when Emilio made his bold announcement. Or stupid, if you’re on the vampires’ side. Fang simply shrugged. “I already gave you a hand,” she delivered that quip dryly, even though she intended it as a snide remark, as if it was just a meaningless fact. To emphasize her point, however, she pointed at the vampire’s floppy hand on the ground. Gross. “You want some head, too?” As if on cue, the first vampire from before tried to attack her from behind, only to get his throat pierced by her katana’s blade.

Fang didn’t even turn to look at the other vampire guy, already knowing he would try the same. All of them did. It wasn’t a bad strategy, really. Sometimes, you have to take all the advantages you can. Shame Fang heard him a mile away with that shuffling and growling. With her eyes glued to Emilio’s, she forced her blade through her victim’s neck, cutting its way to freedom to the side. The vampire’s body plopped to the ground, though half of the neck was still attached to its shoulder. “There,” she heaved a sigh, calmly walking away from the lackeys and toward the couch in the other side of the room. “Have at it.”

—

As she fought, any of that earlier stiffness melted away. Her movements were fluid, easy. She was good. Definitely better than Emilio, something he could confirm now as he really saw her in action, saw her actually trying to fight instead of just sidestepping to avoid one. He had plenty of training, knew all kinds of moves and tricks, but most of his fighting was based on brute force instead of fluid movements like Fang’s. He was a tank — designed to take damage as he dished it out in hopes that he’d give more than he got. It had gotten him this far, but it was certainly less fun to watch than what she had going on.

She busied herself with her two vampires, and Emilio focused on incapacitating his. He wanted the vampire dead, but he wanted him to suffer first. The foot of his good leg came down hard on the vampire’s knee, the resulting crack and scream bringing a feral grin to the slayer’s face. It felt karmatic, in a way, even if this vampire wouldn’t live long enough to develop a limp or suffer in chronic pain from the injury the way Emilio had. This wasn’t the specific vampire who’d caused the slayer’s injury, but that didn’t matter. Specifics rarely did, with Emilio. Not when it came to this.

By the time he turned back to Fang, she’d already ‘disarmed’ one vampire and piercing the neck of them both. Not enough to kill them, but enough to put them to the floor. The vampire whose leg he’d just broken scrambled into a sitting position, attempting to crawl towards the other two. “Please,” he begged, “please just let them go. They weren’t there. I met them after, they’ve never even been to Mexico.” Another day, the pleas might have had some effect on him. He might have softened, might have at least let the vampire’s companions live. But today? Today, he was running on such little sleep after a night of memories playing out like horror films on the backs of his eyelids, and the vampire on the ground behind him had been one of the directors. Emilio had no kindness left to offer today. Maybe he never had.

He stepped towards the two vampires Fang had incapacitated, kneeling down next to the closest. Already one hand short and sputtering from the wound in its neck that wouldn’t kill it, sliding the stake between the vampire’s ribs almost felt like mercy. There was no fanfare to this kill, no words uttered to the vampire before it dissolved into dust. This was not who Emilio was here for. This was collateral damage. The wails of the vampire he’d come to confront were nice all the same. That’s what it feels like, he thought viciously. Now you know. Lifting himself back up, he walked over to the second vampire and repeated the move, making more dust in the floor. It felt as empty as it always did, but there was still that moment of thrill. There was still that split second reprieve. It was all he ever really got these days.

—

Fang had been too busy with her own problems to fully study Emilio’s fighting, though she didn’t really do that, even if she wasn’t busy. The stolen glimpses did tell her that he wasn’t messing around. Dude was a slayer, all right, and he wasn’t a newbie. Might not even be one of those annoying locals she’d encounter once or twice. Those guys are the worst, especially since one of them stole her kill, her attempt to avenge her late mentor, the only reason she risked everything to come to this part of the world. What an asshole.

“Mexico, huh?” Fang raised an eyebrow, still using that gruff fake voice of hers. She took out a small digital camera, previously abandoned at Sara’s repair shop, now fixed (as fixed as she could make do) and working, to take some photographic evidence of the vampires they’ve just slain. Well, Emilio, mostly. But her client wouldn’t know that. Nor would they care. Most clients she had that wanted these damned things dead (again) tended to focus on that part, the part where the damned things were dead (again). Or finally. For the last time? “Glad I’m fast.”

Or at least she thought she was. Fang managed to take a quick shot of the one of the hench-vamps she’d neutralized but she only got the other hench-vamp’s leg, with the rest of that other guy’s body already dissolving into dust. It looked like a half-finished Photoshop attempt at removing the dead undead from the rest of the photo, but blurry as fuck. Oh, well. She had that guy’s other shoe from before anyway. Should work fine for the client. “Eh, should be fine,” she heaved a sigh and shrugged before stowing the camera away again. “So, that seems personal. Should I leave the room? So you guys can fuck?” It didn’t dawn on Fang that she forgot the rest of the phrase: “each other up”. Not that the other guy can do much with that broken leg anyway. Yikes.

—

He’d almost forgotten Fang was in the room at all. So focused on his empty vengeance, he’d let everything but himself and the vampires fade into the background. It was a stupid move, he knew; the kind of thing that got slayers killed. But Emilio didn’t much care about dying anymore, if he ever had at all. Not that it mattered much here. Fang didn’t want him dead. If she did, she would have left the room when they realized they were dealing with three vampires instead of one, would have just let him fend for himself. He still would have come out on top, but she wouldn’t have known it by looking at him.

Glancing back to her now as she seemed to take what one of the vampires said and roll it over in her mind, he shrugged. “Mexico,” he repeated with a nod, offering no further explanation. It wasn’t as if he could hide his country of origin; his accent was heavy enough to give him away. Anyone who knew dialect well enough could probably even pin it to a specific region. But the details of his story, the reason why he did what he did, why Mexico mattered… That was just for him. Him and the bastard whimpering in the floor a few feet away.

Emilio turned back to it, rolling his eyes as Fang spoke. “Stay or leave,” he replied. “I won’t be long.” He didn’t think the vampire knew anything. If it had, it would have said something, would have used it as a bargaining chip to save its friends. “Do you need anything else from this one?” He didn’t care about her bounty, but she had given him a helping hand in that fight. He wouldn’t dust the last vampire until she was ready for it. That’d be enough to repay whatever debt he owed her for her help here.

—

“Nah, I’m good,” Fang simply shrugged after taking a quick photo of the last vamp. She had spent days on this job, though mostly on the tracking part. Fortunately, he slaying was made easier by this guy from Mexico apparently. Real class act. At least according to what Fang had seen with her own eyes after this first encounter. No sexist remarks about her thicc thighs or whatever. Not that anyone has ever had the balls to make those remarks, considering she ran around with half her face masked by a demonic visage and with an actual katana. Ball busting would not have been just a phrase. “I’m good…”

Fang took a look around the apartment as she tried to buy time for her mind to once again become uncluttered. Whatever this Emilio guy had with these vamps, it seemed personal. More importantly, that meant he wouldn’t try to fight her for the bounty, right? He’d said as much, and acted like he wouldn’t, but Fang never did trust these gaijin slayers like she did her old band, even though she was a gaijin herself and most of the time the only gaijin at play. There were a few things that seemed valuable, but her pride prevented her from taking anything of the sort. It wouldn’t have looked cool. Definitely not as cool as this Emilio guy and his personal revenge thing was. “I got the photos. Thanks for those, by the way.”

As she started to walk toward the door, having turned her back on him without any hesitation, Fang kept her wits about her. Just in case he tried to do something funny. Like take her out for the bounty that he wouldn’t even know how to cash in probably. She’d been betrayed by slayers in this town before. It wouldn’t have been surprising if Emilio followed in those assholes’ footsteps. With one foot already out the door, she called out to him one final time, fuck that last vamp if it heard him. It’d be dead anyway soon. “You ever hear of a similar bounty, keep me in mind, all right?” Fang took a business card from her pocket, with nothing on it but three different phone numbers, clearly of burner phones. “A girl’s gotta pay her rent.”

—

She was good, and that was all he needed to know. Ignoring the final desperate pleas of the vampire, Emilio drove the stake home and watched as the monster dissolved into dust beneath his hands. And the world was still dark, even without that vampire in it. He still felt empty, but he’d known he would. He always did. Today, at least, he chose not to let it show. The other slayer had already seen a little more than he would have liked for her to see, already heard more than would have been ideal. He wasn’t going to give her any more than she’d gotten already.

Nodding at her thanks, he straightened up and kicked at the dust gathering in the floor, sending it scattering. “No problem. Glad you got what you needed.” He didn’t care anything about bounties, but it was clear she did. So long as she never got in his way — and so long as none of the bounties she was after were people he gave a shit about — there’d be no problems between them. 

Looking towards the door as she called back to him, he nodded to the now-empty apartment. “Sure thing,” he replied. “I hear of any bounties, you’re my first call.” It probably wasn’t true. If Emilio heard of any bounties, he was more likely to immediately forget it. But it would be a good idea to keep her number on file anyway. If he was going to stay in this town, he’d need to keep track of the slayers in it. For better or worse.

[vanoincidence]

Pot Meet Kettle || Van & Emilio

TIMING: current. LOCATION: worm row, emilio's apartment. PARTIES: @mortemoppetere & @vanoincidence SUMMARY: van does NOT break into emilio's apartment. CONTENT WARNINGS: implied self harm as a form of anxiety relief.

Maybe it was a little dumb, showing up at his apartment unannounced. Really, she wanted nothing to do with the guy, but with the constant back and forth online, she had to admit she was interested to know why he was so bulliable. Maybe Nora had broken him in, or maybe he just didn’t care. It was probably the latter. The only reason she even knew where he lived in the first was because of when she’d gone home with Wynne. But Van was going to make it his problem now. When it came to a select few adults, her social anxiety was nonexistent. Granted, visiting the apartments to insist on being gifted slim  jims wasn’t the only reason she had swung by. Seeing Wynne would have been nice, too. 

The door was ajar when she arrived, and maybe something in her should have told her to turn around, but Emilio was typically sloppy, so she figured this was the norm. Little did she know, she was kind of right. “Emilio?” She pushed the door open with the palm of her hand, peering inside. Instead of a full grown man, she saw a dog whose tail was wagging back and forth. “Hello.” She half-expected it to pounce, to bite, or to start barking, but it didn’t. It sat there kind of stupidly. She wondered if this was how she looked sometimes. “Hi.” She looked around the apartment, confused as to why he wasn’t coming out. “Did he die? I bet he died.” That was a sad thought, but maybe he had succumbed to the slim jim gods. “What’s your name?” She asked the dog, crouching down by the door, sticking her hand out for Perro to sniff as he trotted over. 

—

Jeff had wandered into his apartment again. Ranting and raving, going on about how someone had moved all his furniture around. Normally, Emilio would have just tossed the guy into the hall and shut the door, but he’d been feeling generous that morning. He’d scooped his neighbor up off the floor and practically dragged him across the hall to his own apartment, accepting the smacks the man delivered against his chest and the rampant screaming his ears with a quiet, “Yeah, yeah,” as he opened the door to the other apartment with one hand. It was unlocked; Emilio wasn’t sure if that lock was as broken as his own or if Jeff just never knew where his keys were to lock it. Both options seemed plausible. His own apartment door was left ajar as he dragged Jeff into his actual living room, kicking his neighbor’s door shut behind him. 

It took a few moments to get Jeff settled on the sofa; Emilio held his remote in front of his face. “Do you know what this is?”

“Mind control,” Jeff mumbled. Emilio sighed.

“Sure,” he agreed. He pointed the remote at the TV, switching on some sitcom with an irritating laugh track. Good. Served the guy right. “Stay here. Watch this. Don’t come to my apartment anymore. Dog bites, remember?”

Jeff mumbled something else, but Emilio was no longer listening. He ducked out of the apartment and went back across the hall, shoving his way into his own apartment with a sigh…

…only to stop at the sight of a figure crouching in the floor with Perro.

Immediately, Emilio went for a knife. His hand gripped the handle, though he didn’t remove the weapon from his pocket. The figure shifted, and he caught sight of an unfortunately familiar face. “The hell are you doing in here?” He demanded. Perro, having caught sight of his owner returning, yipped and scampered over to him, unbalanced on his three legs. Emilio crouched to scoop him up. “Why do you know where I live?”

—

Van jumped as Emilio’s voice rang from behind her. She lost her balance and slumped to the side, pushing against the wall opposite of where Emilio now stood. “You scared me. You shouldn’t creep up on people like that.” The confidence she wore was thin, but the ache of exhaustion and desperation buried deep into the core of who she was at this point. It was easier to pretend to be somebody else; somebody who showed up at others’ homes just to annoy them. Emilio seemed like an easy target for that, because if something were to happen, she could always tattle to Nora and she was sure her friend would put him in his place. 

“You live by Wynne.” Van motioned to the hallway by jutting her chin out in a vague direction before getting to her feet. “I know Wynne. I came here to say hi to Wynne.” Not really a lie. “But then I remembered you live here, too.” She grinned at him before her gaze wandered back to the dog that he held in his arms. “Your dog is metal. Three legs. Could probably outrun me. Super cool.” What was she even saying? “Hey, you got any leftover slim jims I can grab?” She needed to leave. She needed to sleep. But she needed to keep busy. 

If she wasn’t busy, then the thoughts came. She’d make somebody else frustrated with her, let them yell, force herself to believe she deserved it (even though in this case, she probably did). Emilio was the right person to go about this with. She already bullied him relentlessly online. “I see you grew your hands back. It must have been really hard, being a worm.” 

—

“You are in my apartment,” Emilio pointed out, raising a brow. “I don’t think it counts as creeping up on you if you broke in.” She looked different than she had the last time he’d seen her, he noted. More tired, more uncertain. It was definitely a far cry from the show she put up online, the one where she was loud and brash and confident. He suspected this version of her was a little closer to the truth, felt a pang of something in his chest at the thought of it. He shouldn’t give a shit. He shouldn’t give anything resembling a shit. She was annoying, she was always bothering him, she didn’t know when to let something go.

But she was a kid.

She was a kid, and she looked a little lost in his apartment like this. It was hard for Emilio to hold on to any anger with kids, especially when she mentioned Wynne’s name. “Didn’t realize you knew them,” he commented. “Guess I shouldn’t be surprised. Small town. Why did you come to my apartment?” He glanced down at Perro in his arms, stroking the dog absently. “His name is Perro. He likes you.” The last part was said with a hint of suspicion. Perro didn’t like people unless there was a little something extra about them. The kid wasn’t undead, and she didn’t seem weird enough to be fae. A shifter, maybe? Certainly not a hunter. “I don’t know. Check the cabinet.” 

There was something familiar, he realized, about the way she was moving. Like she was walking through syrup, like it was hard to get her limbs to cooperate. Tired, he realized. The kid was tired. Bags under her eyes to rival the ones Emilio himself tended to support, voice thick with sleep. Normally, he’d chalk the weird shit she was saying up to exhaustion, too, but… he was pretty sure that part was just who the kid was. “Yeah, sure. Real struggle. Are you done?”

—

“The door was open. There was a dog inside. What was I supposed to do?” Really, the only reason she even remembered where Emilio lived was because of the stains on the carpet outside and the makeshift Axis Investigations sign that was on a piece of paper. Even if the paper looked like it had ripped at some point between the time she’d come around with Wynne and now. Van looked at the dog as it squirmed in Emilio’s grip, but looking otherwise content. She had taken him for more of a bird person. Who would have thought. 

“I do. They’re really nice.” Nicer than Van deserved, probably. Especially now. She wondered what they’d think of her if they knew the truth about her. Would they be scared? Nora hadn’t been, but that was Nora. Nora was the bravest person Van had ever met. “Because the door was broken, plus your sign ripped. Figured you would want to know.” She crossed her arms over her chest and blinked away the exhaustion as her vision began to blur slightly. She needed another red bull. She’d have to get one after she left Emilio. “Perro.” Van knew enough Spanish to know that Emilio had named his dog dog. Not totally surprising. “Of course he’d like me, I’m a delight.” The joke fell flat and she looked over her shoulder towards the cabinets that Emilio mentioned. 

It felt wrong to go through his things, even if there’d been an invitation to do so. Then again, she had kind of broken into his apartment. She pursed her lips and dug her fingers into her forearms. “Done with what? Joking about you being a worm? Did you like the picture I made?” Van wanted some semblance of normalcy, and arguing with the town snitch (or who she assumed was the town snitch given the PI title) would maybe be the best way to do that, she realized. If he didn’t know about what had happened with Debbie now, would he ever? Nora hadn’t told him, and Van wasn’t sure if Cass, Ren, or even Thea knew the guy. She hoped they’d be safe from him snooping around. “But to answer your question, yes, I guess I am.” 

—

“So you walk into any house with a dog inside?” Arguing with Van always felt like arguing with a brick wall. Nothing he said ever seemed to make it through that thick skull of hers. Every statement he offered was met with a prepared retort, like she was waiting for it. A less stubborn man — or a smarter one — probably would have given up trying. But Emilio would rather argue with a literal brick wall for hours than admit he was wrong once, and it tended to show pretty well in situations like this one. He was pretty sure that, this time at least, he was right, anyway. Walking into someone’s apartment without being invited seemed like the kind of thing most people would take offense to.

He might have been angrier about it if she weren’t a kid, or if she weren’t friends with Wynne, Nora, and Ren, or if he had the energy to be angry about anything today. It didn’t look like he was the only one lacking in energy here, though; Van looked about as tired as Emilio felt, and that was saying something. “The door is always broken. And the sign is always ripped. I don’t need you to tell me that.” And he doubted that was why she’d come in. Van wasn’t here to be helpful; he might not know her well, but he knew her well enough to be very aware of that much. He waited for her to say something about the dog’s name, already on the defensive, but she let it drop. Said of course the dog would like her, because she didn’t know what it meant. “He doesn’t usually,” Emilio said, still suspicious. A werewolf, maybe? Gael was proof enough that someone could be one of those without knowing, and Van didn’t seem to act like someone who was aware of the supernatural. 

She looked into the kitchen but didn’t go there, and Emilio grumbled for a moment before limping that way. He set Perro down next to his food bowl, which he happily busied himself with, then began digging through the cabinets. Sure enough, there was a box of slim jims he’d barely touched, though it looked like Rhett had been into it. He pulled a few out of the box and, as an afterthought, started a pot of coffee before going back to Van and thrusting the snacks towards her. “Here.” She was annoying, but she was still a kid and he was still a father, even without anyone left to be a father to. It was hard to see a kid in piss poor shape without it swirling up old feelings. “You look like shit, you know.”

—

“Maybe I do. Maybe the dogs are begging me to take them home with me.” Realistically, Van hadn’t ever done anything like this. Except maybe in the seventh grade when she stole the pet rabbit from her classroom because she insisted the teacher wasn’t feeding it right. The rabbit had been returned to the classroom the next day and lived out a happy and normal life, as a rabbit would. But this wasn’t like seventh grade. This was an adult’s house who she had broken into. Or, apartment, if you wanted to get technical. She did feel a little bad, but the impulsivity that’d began to cloud her judgment, or lack thereof, was more welcome than the reality. 

“You should get it fixed. The sign, too. How are people supposed to take you seriously?” Maybe Emilio didn’t care if he was taken seriously. For a really long time, all Van wanted was to be taken seriously. For people to see her as worth having around. But that wouldn’t ever happen. Even Emilio wanted her out of his hair, but she couldn’t really blame him there. She was purposely being annoying, tugging at loose strings just to see which arm she could get to raise up, or what foot to kick out. She was definitely Jerry in this situation, she realized. The poor bastard across from her was definitely Tom. Unfortunate. “You mean you have a mean dog?” She tilted her head to the side, looking from Emilio to Perro, unconvinced that the dog could hurt a fly. He looked really sweet. “I guess that’d fit for the mean dog, mean man trope.” She needed to stop referencing parts of television that only came through in fanfic. 

Van watched silently as Emilio set the dog down. She had half a mind to ask him to come to her, but he was busy with eating. Yeah, let the little man eat. She’d pet him later, if Emilio didn’t laser beam her hands off with the glare he was wearing. Van’s gaze followed Emilio as he began to rifle through his cabinets. Why he was doing this for her, she had no idea. Maybe so she’d leave faster? Well, that only made her want to stay longer. The slim jims were in front of her now and she had half a mind to tell him that she hadn’t actually wanted them. She should be eating better things, but she knew she wouldn’t get that here. She took them from him, frowning at his insult. “We’re twins, you know? I think I knew you in a past life. We were twins then, too. We’ve always looked like shit, Emilio.” That had been pulled from a show she watched a few years ago, but she didn’t figure that he would get the reference. She peeled the slim jim’s rapper down and took a bite. “But if you have to know, I’ve been fighting demons. A new patch of Candy Crush opened up that has been totally taking my time.” She took another bite and blinked up at him, then looked over to Perro as he continued polishing off his food bowl. “He really doesn’t like people?” The question came out sort of quiet, as if she didn’t want the answer. It meant that yet another being could detest her. 

—

Emilio stiffened a little, shooting her a suspicious glare. “Do not steal my dog.” He held Perro a little more protectively against his chest, as if he was afraid she might come at him right then and there to snatch the dog from his arms. A stupid fear, he knew; whatever she was, he was pretty sure he could still take her in an altercation if it came right down to it. And he was at least seventy-five percent sure she was joking, anyway. Van didn’t really strike him as the ‘pet’ type, no matter what his paranoia might tell him. (And his paranoia, as always, told him a whole lot. Most of it wasn’t quite true. It was hard to remember that sometimes.) 

“I’ve gotten it fixed. Many times. It doesn’t stay that way.” It was a waste of money, really, fixing things in this apartment. Either Emilio rebroke things himself when he was drunk or angry or having one of his ‘there but not there’ episodes or some angry client did the job for him. He couldn’t count how many times his door had been kicked in by someone who felt ‘wronged’ by his work. And then there were the handful of undead who managed to track him back to his apartment, looking to fight him when they thought he might be ill-prepared. Put it all together, and you had a man with no real reason to bother fixing his lock. As for the sign… “I don’t want my landlord to know what I’m doing.” This operation wasn’t exactly legal. “He is not mean. He just doesn’t like people.” He scratched Perro behind the ear absently, and the dog’s tail wagged furiously behind him. “But I am mean. So you should stop trying to talk to me.” 

The statement probably didn’t entirely match his actions, and the fact that she took the slim jims without any kind of hesitation probably served as proof of that. With his hands free now, he crossed his arms over his chest and eyed her, trying to determine… he wasn’t sure what. If she was okay? It wasn’t like Emilio cared about that. She was friends with Ren and Nora and Wynne, sure, but that didn’t mean he had to give a shit about her. Still, there was that stubborn ebb of concern at the bags under her eyes. He shoved it down with a scowl, rolling his eyes. “We are not twins. We’re not even the same age. And I didn’t have any past life. Also, I don’t look like shit. I look great.” He knew it wasn’t true. The bags under his eyes were probably just as bad as the ones under hers, if not worse. But it mattered less, didn’t it? It mattered less when it was him. “Demons?” He tried to determine if she was speaking metaphorically or not, hated that he had to wonder. Before Wynne, Teddy, and Levi, he’d assumed demons were a nonissue. Now, they seemed to be everywhere, in varying states of friendliness. But he doubted there was one named Candy Crush. Glancing to Perro, he shrugged. “Not usually,” he replied. “Took him a long time to warm up to Wynne. Seems to like you well enough, though.” 

—

“Dude, don’t worry. Your dog is cool and all, but I like not having to go outside more than I have to.” It wasn’t a complete lie. Even though she’d probably be the last person that Emilio would ask to watch his dog, she had to admit she was a little inconvenienced by the thought that he might decide to let her take Perro afterall. Like that would ever happen. 

She looked towards the door again, noticing the marks where the hinges met each other. “Uh huh.” She didn’t think he had actually tried to fix it. Van knew the type of man Emilio was, and that was only because of television. She had seen plenty of gruff men who pretended not to care about anything, but secretly care more than anyone else in the room. She knew nothing about him, or his background– knew only what he presented to her. He acted like a dad, but only a little. She had forgotten what having one around felt like. It was an absent, phantom thing– it burrowed itself deep into her most days, and being around somebody who would have been his age now? Or maybe Emilio was a little younger, she couldn’t tell with the dark circles under his eyes. Whatever. “You are mean, but the dog isn’t mean? Got it, got it.” She nodded firmly as if it put all the pieces of the puzzle into place. “Makes a lot of sense. Lucky for you, I don’t get offended easily.” That was a lie. But she had decided upon her first encounter with Emilio to not let him bother her. 

“We are twins, and we could be, who are you to say? Plus you don’t know that, we don’t even remember them if they do exist.” What a terrible way to live, to remember everyone you had lost after years gone past. Then again, she was living those exact moments now, so what would the difference have been? “And we both look like shit. Twins, see?” She snapped off another bite of the slim jim, chewing thoughtfully as her eyes wandered around Emilio’s apartment. It smelled damp, and a little like whiskey. “Demons, yeah.” Van was confused, hadn’t Nora been teaching him how to not be old? Or did she point and laugh that he didn’t know anything at all. Probably the latter. “That’s… weird.” Wynne was great with animals. She had seen them with the rabbit, and with the cats that lived in their apartment. But she didn’t think any more of it, because she had no clue that she was in the presence of a supernatural sniffing dog. “But maybe it’s because I smell like pizza?” Not that she’d gone to her shift in a couple of days, but still. Luckily she had some days off saved up, even if she wasn’t getting paid for them. “I like him though, he’s cool.” She watched as he trotted from his bowl of food to Emilio’s feet, head tilted back. “He looks like he loves you too, so maybe I shouldn’t trust his judgment.” Before he could say anything, she dropped down into a crouched position, holding the slim jim far enough away from Perro as he turned around to address her. She extended her hand, scratching underneath his chin. “That was a joke, B-T-DUBS.” 

—

He relaxed a little as she assured him she had no intention of stealing his dog. He had no reason not to believe her. She did seem like the kind of kid who’d want to avoid going outside as much as she could, after all. And… she probably didn’t have much desire for something she wasn’t able to take care of. Emilio was the only sort of person who yearned for that.

Her eyes went to the door, and she didn’t seem to believe him but Emilio couldn’t bring himself to care. What did it matter if she thought he wasn’t trying to fix his door? The door would stay broken either way, because it always did. You could fix something a thousand times, but you couldn’t stop someone from kicking it until it shattered all over again. And wasn’t it pointless, after a while? Wasn’t it a waste of time to fix something just so someone could break it again? Emilio had no concept of mythology, no familiarity with it, but he had no desire to make himself into Sisyphus, to slave over the same menial and pointless task each morning only to have it mean nothing by evening’s end. “Yes. The dog is just scared.” By less than he used to be, but still more than he should have been. 

“We are not twins. I’m older than you. By a lot. And I know I didn’t have a past life.” He disliked the idea of it, the concept that he’d lived before this and would live after it as well. For a man who wasn’t quite sure he wanted to live at all, the idea of doing it over and over again was its own kind of Hell. “No. You look like shit. I am very handsome.” He dug his proverbial heels in, decided that this was the hill he’d die on. Emilio was very good, as it turned out, at dying on hills. He did it just about every day. “Sure,” he said. “Could be.” Except Wynne brought food right to his door, and Perro still took ages to warm up to them. He only ever liked someone right away if there was something nonhuman about them. Either not human at all, or human with something extra, like hunters. Never someone like Van who, until now, he’d thought was a normal kid. “He is cool.” He glanced down as Perro came to sit at his feet, huffing a quiet laugh. “Yeah, he’s got shit judgment. You’re right about that.” Perro turned to look at Van, tail wagging as she scratched under his chin. “If you have to say something is a joke, maybe you are bad at jokes.” As if Emilio didn’t suck at them, too.

—

“Who said anything about ages? It could be a soul thing.” The idea of being soulmates with Emilio, no matter how mystical and platonic, made her cringe. Gross. Van rolled her eyes at his insistence that they were not the same. He was right, but Van was all for continuing to poke fun at him for the sake of just doing so. “Fine. I do look like shit.” Because she did. She would admit it at any given point on any given day. She thrived on self-deprecation. “At least one of us twins has confidence. Why did it have to go to you?” She shot him a half-hearted glare before turning her attention back to Perro. 

At least they could agree on something. That the little dog with three legs and an ever-moving tail was cool. Van had wanted a dog when she was younger, but her mom had said that she was just like one, and that she didn’t to take care of two. Turns out she hadn’t needed to for much longer. Her grandma had said the same, though, so really who was it that had won that argument? Now, she was thankful. Most days, she couldn’t even muster the energy to brush her hair. Always her teeth, though. Always. 

“No, I’m good at jokes. I just had to tell you it was one because you probably thought I was being serious.” Van got to her feet as Perro trotted over to a cushion beside the couch. She snapped off another piece of her slim jim, watching Emilio carefully. Even from where she stood he was a little blurry. Maybe it wasn’t exhaustion, maybe she needed glasses. With a sigh, she folded the empty wrapper into her pocket. It’d probably come out in the wash days later after she found the energy to do it at all. “What kind of jokes do you like anyway? Or are you always like, serious?” Her tone deepened on serious, but she continued watching him expectantly, waiting for an answer. 

—

“There is no soul thing.” Though he knew souls existed, Levi had made it seem as if they were just… there. Not quite as big as the priests he’d grown up around made it seem, not quite as all-encompassing as he’d been led to believe. Certainly not assigning people ‘twins’ in the form of annoying kids who tried to eat black sludge in the woods and broke into your apartment with bags under their eyes. “I deserve to be confident,” he replied, dry as ever. That wasn’t something he believed. When it came to what he deserved, Emilio knew the bottom of the barrel was a little too good for him. 

Perro seemed content with the company, tail wagging lazily as Van looked at him. He wasn’t much of a guard dog but, then, Emilio supposed that had never been in the cards. With his small stature and three legs, the dog wasn’t going to be scaring much of anyone away. Still, he’d done his best to defend Emilio during the encounter with the mare, and that stood for something. He was a good dog. He was also probably the only thing that got Emilio out of bed most days. 

Snorting, Emilio rolled his eyes. “I’ve never found any of your jokes funny.” It was a lie, though he wouldn’t admit to it. He did find it entertaining to see Van fuck with people online, sometimes, the same way he enjoyed it when Nora did it. “I like funny jokes,” he replied, watching as she tucked the wrapper away. He wondered if he ought to get her another one. “I’m serious when I want to be.” Which was never when he was supposed to be. “Do you want coffee? I do not have a clean mug. You can drink out of the pot.” That was what he usually did.

—

“Why can’t there be?” Because if there wasn’t, then who did she plead to? It wasn’t like she believed in any sort of God, but her grandmother had– in her own way. Had spoken to the sky like there was somebody listening. Van wasn’t sure she believed in that kind of thing, but she liked the idea of there being more, even if it scared her a little. Even if it had everything to do with wanting to know that Diana hadn’t been trapped forever. That she had ascended, somehow; became something else, something better than the corpse Van had made of her. At his comment about deserving to be confident, she simply rolled her eyes. 

Van scrunched her nose, pairing it with another eye roll. “I’m hysterical, and you’re rude.” It was bold of her to call him rude considering she’d been the one to break into his apartment, but it wasn’t like she was about to start apologizing now. “I am funny, and I make funny jokes, Emilio.” Only sometimes, she wanted to add. If she wasn’t trying to be funny, then who even was she? It was kind of nice, Van decided, to not fall into her own desperation like she had been doing with her friends. Emilio didn’t care about her, and she didn’t mind. She liked it better that way, anyway. Because he didn’t tell her to eat good food, only yelled at her for trying to eat the bad kind. He didn’t try to pretend to be somebody who had left her life a long time ago. “Coffee? Why would you offer me coffee when you’ve got like, cake mugs?” She wondered if he even knew what that was. “You know, when you make a cake in a mug…” Van looked behind him, wondering how a slim jim would taste with coffee. Maybe it’d be good. “Only if I can drink the whole pot.” 

—

“Because there isn’t.” He didn’t believe it, even as he said it. Emilio’s relationship with God was a complex one. He didn’t want to believe in religion anymore, wanted to cast the crutch far from his body like a hot coal burning his hands, but such things were so much easier said than done. Religion clung to him like wet clothing, sticking to his skin and weighing him down. Even now, telling Van there was no ‘soul thing’ despite knowing it wasn’t true in some throwaway argument to win their latest bickering match, there was a bitterness on his tongue. 

Raising a brow, Emilio looked her over for a moment, as if assessing. “I am allowed to be rude in my own apartment.” He figured he held a trump card here, considering the fact that she’d kind of broken in. “I have never seen you be funny. Don’t you think you should show me sometime? All the jokes I’ve seen you make are bad.” He wasn’t sure what he was trying to do here. Cheer her up? Distract her? Whatever it was, he didn’t think he was doing a very good job at it. There were probably ways to make someone feel better that didn��t involve making fun of them. “Cake… mugs?” His brow furrowed, confusion clear. “Cake won’t fit in a mug.” Did she mean a cupcake, maybe? Emilio knew about those. “Sure. Take the whole pot. I don’t want to drink after you. You look like you have rabies.” Which he knew wasn’t transmitted through sharing drinks… but he also knew it’d offend her. He thought that might be funny.

—

Van rolled her eyes, deciding that arguing with Emilio about something as arbitrary over whether or not there were souls was getting too far from the point. Because that hadn’t been the point. It’d been about telling him that he looked as much like shit as she did, and because of that, they were twins. Maybe she would surprise him with a matching t-shirt later. Thing one and thing two, like the weird Disney adults wore when they went on trips together. He’d probably burn it. She’d have to get extras, she decided. 

“You’re rude like, everywhere. It’s not just here.” Rude here, rude online, rude out in the woods– which, Van still wasn’t sure why a man had been trying to sell cheese there, but that was beside the point, and not a topic she wanted to bring up again out of fear that Emilio would yell at her again. And he continued displaying that fact like a petulant child. She placed her hands on her hips, half-wondering if this was even worth it at this point. If she should steal Perro and run away. He looked old. He probably wouldn’t be able to keep up with her. “Your life is a joke, dude. That means mine is, too. Because we’re twins. Duh.” She rolled her eyes at him. She felt like a kid again, arguing with her stupid geometry teacher who hadn’t taken the time to explain a problem to her and instead sent her to the office after she started to question his teaching methods. 

“It’s mug cake, not full cake, so that way it can fit into a mug.” It was surprising to her that a man who looked like he ate garbage full time (just like her) hadn’t tried a mug cake. Sure, she’d watched copious amounts of five-minute recipes and that’s where she had learned about them, but did that matter? No! It didn’t! At the mention of her possibly having rabies, she snorted. “If anyone has rabies in this room, it’s you. Or like, tinnitus.” She didn’t correct herself, because she didn’t know it was different from tetanus. “But bring it on, old man. Give me the bean juice.” Maybe he’d yell at her about how it wasn’t juice. That could start another spiral. How many more things could she make Emilio angry about now? She was a little tired, and maybe overstaying her welcome, but he had been the one to offer coffee in the first place. 

—

“Maybe I’m only rude to annoying people.” He could make the argument that, when he spoke to her online, he was still doing so from the comfort of his apartment… but he had a feeling she’d bring up their first encounter in the woods. Which was stupid, really, because he’d saved her ass. If not for him, who knew what might have happened when she ate that damn sludge. It seemed to vary from person to person, with the least fortunate turning into the sludge itself, but Van didn’t believe a word out of his mouth when it came to shit like that. It was part of why, before seeing Perro’s reaction to her, he’d assumed she was very human.

But he was rethinking that now.

It wasn’t a perfect litmus test, Perro’s little sniffer. He still got it wrong sometimes, decided someone supernatural wasn’t so great after all, or decided he liked a human. The dog had a mind all his own, but nine times out of ten? Perro knew when someone was packing a little something extra. And he seemed to think Van was. Emilio was inclined to believe him on that. He’d been right about Ren, right about Alan, right about everyone else they’d come into contact with so far. Why wouldn’t he be right about this, too?

“Why would you want to put a cake in a mug?” None of this made any sense. What would you drink your coffee out of if your mugs were full of cake? He was pretty sure Van was either confused or making shit up just to fuck with him, though he couldn’t quite decide which option was the truth. Knowing this kid, he was pretty sure it could go either way. “I don’t know. You look pretty rabid.” He rolled his eyes, limping back to the kitchen and grabbing the fresh pot of coffee. He shifted it in his grip as he held it towards her so that she could grab it by the handle and avoid burning herself. “Here. It’s hot. You gonna tell me why you actually came into my apartment? Gotta be more than just the door being open. You need something?”

—

“And maybe I’m only annoying to rude and annoying people.” It was a miracle that Van hadn’t stuck her tongue out like some petulant child to back up her point. She thought about her grandmother for a moment and the way that the older woman had begged her to act her age, especially in public. That didn’t matter anymore. Just like the knives she’d been told not to play with, the warnings and calls for obedience had walked out the door with her grandmother. 

Van was too self-involved to really notice the way that Emilio was studying her, like there was something wrong with her. If she would have caught on, she would have agreed. Instead, her eyes continued to wander around his apartment. It seemed like it was sort of falling apart, but she couldn’t really judge him for that. The state of her house was… unsavory, to say the least. It was a miracle that somebody hadn’t called on her about the grass being too high. When her grandma had left, all maintenance had ceased. 

“It’s like, a college thing. When you only have a microwave. It’s good, I swear.” Van wasn’t sure explaining it any further would enlighten Emilio, but she made a point to tuck the knowledge away. Maybe she would send him a subscription box of mug cakes. He’d probably be annoyed by it which would be a win in her book! “What, should I hiss or something?” She watched him as he moved towards the kitchen. She noticed the limp, too. She thought about asking if he’d hurt himself, but would he even tell her? Instead, she took it from him wordlessly, giving him a small nod. It smelled like the stuff she had at home. Just regular brew, nothing fancy. She liked diner coffee. “I don’t need anything. The door was open, I’m being so serious right now.” She looked over her shoulder to the now closed door. “Why would I need anything from you?” A distraction, Van thought. That was what she had needed, and he had provided. He was an old man with a bad knee who didn’t know enough was enough when it came to arguing with her. It was better than a video game. No weird, traumatizing cutscenes.

—

“I am not annoying. You are thinking of yourself.” He was arguing with a kid, and he knew it wasn’t a fight he’d win. Van was stubborn. She’d keep poking and prodding until he got frustrated and gave up, because this wasn’t the kind of ‘fight’ Emilio excelled at. Maybe with an adult, he could manage it — he and Teddy had participated in enough verbal sparring matches to make a mark — but a kid? He didn’t stand much of a chance, and he knew it.

That was all right, though. He wasn’t particularly interested in the bickering. Instead, he was focused on the way she looked like she might fall over any moment, like she was seconds away from passing out on his floor. She was looking at his apartment as he was looking at her, probably coming to the same conclusion everyone else did between these four walls — that Emilio was barely hanging on. That was all right. He could tell that she wasn’t hanging on very well, either.

“But I have more than a microwave.” Not that he ever used his oven. The most action it had gotten since Emilio moved in was when Teddy used it to cook Gabagool’s lamb. Still, if he were going to make a cake, wouldn’t the oven be his first instinct? “Sure. Start hissing.” She probably would. Van was a weird kid, odd in ways that didn’t entirely make sense to him. His eyes went to Perro again, tail wagging absently as he looked at Van. Maybe the ways in which she was odd would make more sense if he had more information. But how could he find out without pushing? Did he want to know? It felt like a burden, sometimes, knowing things. It felt heavier than he knew what to do with. She took the coffee and he watched her, glancing towards the closed door. “Do you walk into every apartment you walk by if the door is open? You should probably stop doing that.” Especially if she wasn’t human. What if he were a ranger or a warden, whichever was able to detect whatever it was she happened to be? What if he were the kind of person who’d stab someone just for being in the wrong place? She barely knew anything about him. Why did she feel safe enough to walk in his door without flinching? “I don’t know.”

—

“But it’s about the time it takes.” Van paused, eyebrows furrowing. “Or doesn’t take, I guess. I don’t know. I’m not a scientist.” She didn’t know how a microwave could cook an egg in a couple of seconds when it felt like she was standing over a stovetop for hours. She figured that down the line, it’d probably just be better to show him what she was talking about than to keep bringing it up without any reference. Knowing him, he’d like them, just like he did the slim jims. It was his loss on the yoohoos. 

When he told her to start hissing, she nearly spilled the pot of coffee. She grabbed it, wincing as the heat licked her fingers, but shook the pain away by pressing her fingers against the back of her ear– something her mom had always done. She wasn’t sure why she still did it. Van shook her head instead of starting to do what he had asked of her, even though she knew he hadn’t meant it. “Not right now. The throat is on cool down. Did too much car karaoke.” More like board karaoke, but she didn’t feel like explaining why she was carless right now. 

At his question, she shrugged. “What if I said I did?” It wasn’t that she didn’t. Van had a weird habit of wandering into places she didn’t necessarily belong in. When she was a kid, her grandma had to practically force her out of somebody’s birthday party just because they had a bouncy house. Then again, that made a little more sense. “Yeah, I don’t know either.” She took a sip of the coffee, the liquid scalding the roof of her mouth. Ow. She flinched slightly, but kept drinking, ignoring the way it hurt the back of her throat. She wasn’t sure why she was chugging it now, but she couldn’t stop. She’d say it was to assert dominance, if Emilio asked. Really, it provided something she needed; reprieve from the jumbled thoughts in her head. “This was a good talk.” She should probably go. She looked around the apartment, then to Perro. “Can I buy him a toy? I don’t– I wasn’t allowed to have pets, so can I buy him one? Not his own pet, but a toy.” She could focus on something normal like a dog. Even if that same dog was supposedly not a fan of people, but had been of her. Maybe she wasn’t all bad, or maybe the dog had shit intuition. 

—

Emilio had never made a mug cake before, but to be fair… he’d never actually made a traditional cake, either. He had no concept of how long either would take. Things did seem to take less time in the microwave, but who was he to say if the same could be said for a cake? Either way, though, he didn’t think it was something worth arguing with Van about. If he kept at it, she’d figure out he’d never done a lot of things, and she’d be annoying about it. He’d like to avoid her being annoying.

She seemed surprised at his ‘suggestion,’ spilling some of that hot coffee on her hand. Emilio raised a brow, looking down to where the liquid had dripped onto the dirty carpet as if he cared about that, as if the stain was even visible among all the other stains down there. “All right. Sure.” It’d probably freak Perro out if she started hissing, anyway… though he’d be more at ease if Perro were freaked out by her. The dog’s calmness set Emilio on edge, in spite of the fact that his views on the supernatural had shifted since Mexico.

“Then you should probably start picking out your favorite holding cell at the police station. Not everyone is nice like me. A gringa would have called the police on you.” There was no chance of Emilio calling them, of course, and even if there were, he doubted they’d respond. WRPD didn’t tend to waste their time responding to every little call from Worm Row. If they did, they’d probably never have time to do anything else. He raised a brow as she began swiftly draining the coffee pot, but didn’t comment. If she wanted to burn her mouth on it, that was fine. He wouldn’t stop her. “Sure,” he agreed. “Good talk.” He thought she’d leave then, but she didn’t. Instead, she looked back to Perro. His expression softened at her question. He understood her, to an extent. He’d never been allowed pets growing up, either, but he’d also never understood that they were a thing enough to want one. Still, he could admit that having Perro around… helped. In its own kind of way. “Yeah,” he told her with a nod. “Yeah, you can buy him a toy. He likes the ones that squeak.” And maybe the dog would help her, too. He was good at that. “Just do me a favor. When you come over to bring it to him… wait for me to answer the door before you come inside.”

[laucha-posting]

Headcanon: Lamponne obligó al resto de los simus a ir a clases de defensa personal después de que a Santos lo secuestraron. Y a su vez él ideó planes de contingencia/enviar una alerta en caso de que uno de los cuatro llegase a estar en peligro de nuevo

[declinlalune]

No Mourners || Andy & Emilio

TIMING: shortly after this. LOCATION: emilio's apartment. PARTIES: @mortemoppetere & @declinlalune SUMMARY: andy goes home with emilio after taking care of the hunter. CONTENT WARNINGS: sibling death mentions, child death, suicidal ideation.

Andy didn’t really remember moving the body or burying it for that matter, but she could still feel the dirt and blood under her fingernails. She could still smell him, too. The sour stench of body odor and the way it mixed with the blood. When she closed her eyes she did not see the ranger’s lifeless body, but the way Kaden looked at her instead. His disappointment clouded anything else she remembered about him. His anger was present, too– bold and bright. Hard to ignore. She wasn’t quite sure she understood it. When he moved here, she thought she had made herself clear; Alex came first. Above all else, Alex was what mattered most. She saw something in the ranger’s gaze that Kaden clearly hadn’t. He was too blinded by the authority of those lessons she’d recoiled from. She wasn’t dumb enough to trust that the ranger would just leave. She did what she had to do, and if Kaden hated her for that, then so be it. She did not follow the same code as he did, that much had been true since she came into taking care of a seven year old werewolf. Before that, even. 

But did any of that matter? Andy couldn’t be sure that Kaden’s disappointment, or Alex’s once she found out what happened, would take precedence over the fact that she’d stopped somebody from coming back to kill them. Emilio was at her side through it all, even if she wasn’t sure he actually wanted to be. What he felt about her driving a knife into the man’s chest, she couldn’t be sure. After cleaning up the mess she had created, along with getting rid of some of the man’s personal items by lighting them on fire far from his cabin, they were quiet during the car ride back home. It wasn’t until they crossed the threshold of his apartment was there any noise. It was Perro, Emilio’s dog, happily staring up at them from his chew toy. Andy stood awkwardly by the door as she watched Emilio. She wasn’t sure what to say first. An apology was probably the best thing. “I’m sorry you had to do that for me. I didn’t…” She bit the inside of her cheek, checking to make sure that his windows were closed and the door was shut. “I didn’t know– I’d do that, I didn’t know until I was doing it, and I…” She cleared her throat and ran a shaky hand through her hair. It was matted only with a little bit of blood now, she had managed to wash out most of it. “I’m sorry you had to do that.” 

—

He’d killed a lot of people. It was something he knew was true, even if nearly everyone his hands had killed hadn’t had a heartbeat. His training would insist that that meant it didn’t count, that people weren’t people unless there was breath in their lungs, but Emilio wasn’t sure he believed that anymore, wasn’t sure he’d believed it for a long time now. He’d seen proof to the contrary, seen undead who were just trying to survive without hurting anyone, seen how it tore at some of them when they had to go against what they wanted to do in order to survive. They were people until they weren’t, until they couldn’t be, until he had to draw that line in the sand to do what he had to do in order to survive. So Emilio had killed a lot of people, more than he could ever hope to count.

But he hadn’t buried very many of them.

Most of the people Emilio killed turned to dust, collapsed in on themselves long before you could even think of digging a grave. He let them blow away with the wind, or kicked the dust up if he was still angry when it settled, or left it in a pile for something else to disperse. He didn’t have to think about how best to dispose of the bodies. Even his family, who’d died without turning to dust and taken part of him with them when they’d done it, weren’t laid to rest in graves Emilio dug for them. Rhett had buried Juliana and Flora, and he figured someone else had probably taken care of the rest even if he’d never gone back to check. So digging graves, for Emilio, was a new sensation. 

He didn’t think it was one he enjoyed very much. But the dirt under his fingernails felt better than the blood, and no one was going to find the body where they’d put it, so it was all right. It was fine. He kept repeating it in his head, over and over and over again. A hunter was dead. He’d helped cover it up. He was protecting the person who’d killed them. And it was fine. 

Andy, he thought, had done what she’d needed to, even if neither Emilio or Kaden would have been able to do the same. It was hard not to think about Lucio, about the way he’d found Emilio on the streets with the battle still raging, about the apologies that Emilio had answered with a blade that he’d let sink into his uncle’s gut. He wondered every day what might have happened if he’d killed Lucio sooner. If he’d known, somehow, that his uncle was a threat, wouldn’t he have done exactly what Andy had? Wouldn’t he have done what was necessary to protect his daughter if he’d been given a chance? Andy had seen her chance, and she’d taken it. Emilio felt sick with the thought of it, felt nauseous at the memory of that ranger laying still on the ground, but it was hard to think Andy had been wrong for it. Her sister was alive in a way his daughter never would be again. If Andy hadn’t done what she had in that cabin, that might not have remained true much longer. It was terrible and it was sickening and it was necessary. The worst things always were.

He didn’t realize she was speaking until she was halfway through a sentence, his mind checking in and out of the situation the way it sometimes did when things became too much. He was good on autopilot. He could do what he needed to do. But conversations were harder. He furrowed his brow, tuning in and trying to unravel the words in his mind. An apology. He shook his head. “Didn’t have to do anything,” he said. “Helped you because I wanted to.” That much was true. He knew that. No one could make Emilio do anything he didn’t want to do. That was part of the problem. He turned to look at Andy, shifting his weight. Perro stood from where he was lying, trotting over to the door to greet them. “What you did in that cabin…” He trailed off. “He would have killed her. We all saw it. He wasn’t going to lay down and give up.”

—

Andy clasped her hands together, thumbs pushing against one another as she tried to avoid glancing over the blood caked beneath her nails. His words meant something to her in that moment, because when it had come to Kaden, he’d offered her nothing but loud disapproval. Maybe it was more than that. It felt more than that. Like in severing the one remaining connection she had to her parents by going in for the kill, she had somehow severed it with Kaden, too. She hoped that wasn’t true, but it was too soon to tell. 

She stayed quiet a moment longer after listening to Emilio’s reassurance. She knew that, and it’d been in her head the moment she sunk the knife between his ribs. Andy clasped her hands fully together now, a nervous twitch beginning to ripple over her knuckles. She’d been so used to keeping it together and pretending it was all okay. It was only a matter of time before she snapped. In the years it took to get to where she was today, she’d never done anything like what had put the hunter beneath the dirt. Petty theft and lies trailed herself and Alex all the way to Wicked’s Rest, but never blood, not unless one considered their past lives. Andy knew she’d done the right thing, but she wasn’t sure anyone other than Emilio would think so. Would that matter? She didn’t need their approval, even if Kaden’s anger had hurt. 

“I know that. I’m not…” Andy felt the words heavy on the tip of her tongue, and could feel the bitterness roll over her. “I’m not sorry I did it. It was her or him, and it’s always going to be her.” There were more faces attached to her reasoning, but she didn’t feel the need to explain. Emilio would understand, as he already seemingly had. “I just– I…” She cleared her throat, shaking her head, eyes glazing over slightly as she stared at the spot Perro had moved from to greet his owner. She wondered if he smelled the blood. “Hoped that it wouldn’t come to this– to that, but I guess..” Andy shrugged, a bitter laugh building in her chest, “I guess I knew it would. I couldn’t–” She looked up at Emilio now, jaw working against the anger that filled her, “I couldn’t let it happen again, not to her, not to anyone else. It might have been us. It could have been you instead, or Kaden, and I couldn’t, Emilio. I couldn’t let it.” 

—

It was him or her, and it’s always going to be her. The words rang in Emilio’s head, bounced around between his ears like a physical thing. Didn’t he understand that, better than anything? Hadn’t he spent every year of his daughter’s too-short life choosing her over everyone, too? Over his mother, over his wife, over his siblings and his nephew. And he wondered, sometimes, what kind of man that made him. He wondered if it was a forgivable thing, to love someone so much that everyone and everything else fell by the wayside. If he’d been in Andy’s shoes and if Flora had been in Alex’s, he would have killed that ranger a thousand times over. He would have burned the goddamn world to the ground without a moment of hesitation. When did love become a bad thing, he wondered? When did it shift someone from the hero of a story to something else? Was it the moment that knife slipped between the ribs, or the moment it didn’t? 

Whatever it said about her, Andy wasn’t sorry for what she’d done. And whatever it said about him, Emilio didn’t blame her for that lack of remorse. It was the ranger, or it was Alex. And how could he possibly think she was wrong for choosing Alex? How could he possibly fault her for doing everything he wished he would have done before it was too late to do anything at all? Andy got her sister out, kept protecting her after the fact. Andy raised her sister with love, made her a priority. Andy did everything Emilio didn’t, and Andy did it right. It was a good thing. It had to be a good thing.

“I know,” he said quietly. “I know.” She was right, of course. That ranger would have killed Alex, but he wouldn’t have stopped there. If he hadn’t killed Kaden, Emilio, and Andy in that cabin, he would have found them and killed them afterwards. Emilio was confident of that, knew that it was the truth even if it was a difficult truth to swallow.

He sat, for a moment, the silence a suffocating thing. He tried not to think of the ranger underground, body stiff and already beginning to decay. He tried not to think of the cabin they’d scrubbed clean, of the blood under his fingernails that belonged to that stranger and his family all at once. He tried not to think of that living room in Mexico, of the way it shifted into the corners of his vision even now, both a room and a ghost, both all-too-tangible and impossible to hold. Andy was shaking, was explaining herself, and she didn’t have to. Not to Emilio. He looked away, focusing on the dirt beneath his nails and not the blood underneath it. “I had a daughter,” he said quietly, stumbling on the words just a little. “I had a kid. I get it. I know you’re not — she’s not yours. But it’s the same, I think. What you’d do for her, what I would have done for mine… It’s the same. You did what you had to do. You don’t have to make excuses. I would have done it, too.” He paused for a moment, feeling heavy. Voice even smaller than it had been before, he added, “I wish I had. I wish I’d done what you did. You saved her, Andy. That’s never going to be a bad thing. Not in my book.”

—

I know. 

There was a weight to those words and Andy wasn’t sure where it’d come from. Emilio spoke with conviction, something that she sorely needed. After watching Kaden turn his back on her in real time, she hadn’t realized just how much this sudden support had meant to her. Emilio had been there, too, after a while– only now beginning to grow a part of her and her history. He had inserted himself into her life in a way she hadn’t expected; he spoke with understanding, even from the moment she had explained herself to him. Then, it’d been to keep a careful distance, to ensure that he didn’t come after Alex. Now, he’d helped her end the thing that had. She had trusted him, and he’d proven himself worthy. Her own blood had disappeared through the door. Though, when it came down to it, did that mean much of anything? That same blood would have killed Alex for what she was had they known. 

Silence warped the space between them, and though there was a certain kind of rage she could not yet shake, there was a softness to it, too. It came in the form of Emilio’s voice cutting the distance from where she stood and he sat on the couch, sinking into the cushions of something as worn as he. 

Andy listened to him, her heart a dull thud to the rapid movement of her thoughts. Her mind swarmed. He understood in more ways than anyone could be expected to, even as a hunter. 

I had a daughter. 

And suddenly, their conversation unraveled; a secret history playing for the confession he made now. Had. Had. Had. Had. Andy felt sick. She sat on the sofa next to him, enough distance to not provide discomfort, but a closeness to prove she was there, living and breathing next to him. She thought of what he’d said then, how he wished he had done what she had. How it was a choice he wanted to have made. How many times had he imparted that knowledge unto her? How many times had she thought he was simply a hunter with too many ghosts? Though, this might have been the biggest one of all. She wondered what else there was, but didn’t dare ask. Who else. It stayed pinned beneath her tongue. 

Apologies died at the back of her throat. What was the point? He’d already lost her, and they all knew hunters were not allowed to mourn. But Andy was no hunter. She mourned and mourned– it colored her a dirty thing, and most of the time, she hated herself for it. But in that moment, she mourned Emilio’s daughter, though she had no face, no name– not yet, not to her. Andy fidgeted with the sleeve of her too-tight flannel, the one from the back of her jeep she kept for emergencies. This was trust, she realized. She was not beside Alex, speaking confessions of the day to the dusty motel room. Instead, she was in Emilio’s dingy apartment hearing of a life that’d gone past; one that he’d lost. She was angry for him. It showed in the tremble of her fingers, in the way she couldn’t focus on one single thing. 

“You saved her, too. Alex. By coming with me, you saved her.” Because though she had trusted Kaden to help her, it’d been Emilio who had stayed by her side. They had buried something together, and maybe not just the body. A secret that unearthed here in the dimly lit room, one they could both see just fine in. “I’m sorry, Emilio. About your daughter.” She could have choked on the words, wanted to, even. Didn’t want it to be a reality; wanted Emilio to have his daughter just as much as she wanted her sister to be alive, to be okay. “What was her name?” She wasn’t sure if it was okay to ask, but she wanted to know– whether it was to keep her in her thoughts, or to create a vision out of her, of this girl that Emilio would have gone to war for but had ultimately lost to the same one, or so Andy assumed. 

—

He couldn’t look at her when he said it, and part of him hated that. When had his daughter become a secret that he kept, he wondered? When had her name become a forbidden word, a thing he kept locked behind his teeth and under his tongue? It wasn’t supposed to be that way. He’d never wanted it that way. Once upon a time, Flora was the only song he’d known all the words to. He used to sing it in his sleep, used to plan his days around the notes. But now?

It was so hard to think of her without thinking of how things ended. That was the tragedy of loss, wasn’t it? All those happy memories were eclipsed by the final one. How close had Andy come to seeing years of time spent with her sister whittled down into one bullet fired in the woods? If she hadn’t done what she had in that cabin, would Alex have become a secret she didn’t remember how to tell, just as Flora was for Emilio? 

The thought felt nauseating, suffocating. It felt like a reminder, like a reassurance. Andy did what she had to do. Andy did what was right. Andy kept a kid from becoming a ghost, kept a name from becoming a beat of silence that hung at the end of every sentence. How could he think her wrong for that? She’d done what Emilio hadn’t, what he’d spend the rest of his life wishing he had. Inaction, he thought, was far worse than action sometimes. When he was still the kind of man who’d locked himself in confessional booths, it was never the things he’d done that he felt the need to apologize for. The things he didn’t do were what always haunted him. So how could anyone blame Andy for delivering herself one less ghost? That ranger’s death was little more than a preemptive exorcism. It’d save them all the poltergeist. 

You saved her, too. The words seemed to cut through the ever-present haunting in his own mind, the constant choir of ghosts that was both quiet and deafening at the same time. He turned them over in his mind, translated them from English to Spanish and back again. You saved her, too. Had he? All he’d offered was his presence, and wasn’t that an easy thing to give? It wasn’t tangible, wasn’t concrete. She could have done it without him, he knew. She would have done it without him, because Andy was so much stronger than Emilio could ever hope to be. She’d been doing what she had to do to keep her sister safe since she was fourteen years old. A kid taking care of a kid, and she’d still done a better job than most. Alex was hurt now, but the sting that came with it was only present because this had never happened before. The failure only felt so big because there had been so many successes before it. Andy had done everything she could, had given everything she was. Whether Emilio had helped her or not, she would have protected her sister in that cabin.

But maybe it still meant something that he had helped her. Maybe the fact that he’d helped dig that hole and burn those clothes meant that he could share in some of the success that followed. He hadn’t saved his daughter. Her name was a weight he didn’t think he’d ever be able to carry fully. But he’d been there for Andy when she’d saved her sister. And maybe he’d even helped a little. If nothing else, he’d help her with the weight of it. He’d take on a share of the guilt, the blame. If there was blood on her hands, he’d let her transfer some of it to his, too. She deserved that much.

“I’d do it again,” he told her. “I want you to know that.” It ended how it ended. The ranger was dead, his body was buried. It ended how it ended, but if he were put back at the start with the full knowledge of how things were going to happen… It was necessary. Emilio was sure of that. It wasn’t pretty, it wasn’t light, but it was necessary. And doing what was necessary was something he’d always been good at. 

He swallowed, letting her apology hang suspended in the air. The words meant both everything and nothing at the same time. They always did, he thought, in situations like this one. A thousand apologies couldn’t ease the sting of what had been lost, couldn’t fill the hole grief dug in the chest. Eventually, the word itself lost all meaning. Sorry became a string of letters and a pair of syllables that people said when they didn’t know what else to say.

But, coming from Andy… They meant more than they did coming from most. The words weren’t empty where they hung, weren’t hollow. Andy said I’m sorry, and Emilio knew she meant it in a way other people couldn’t. He’d lost something, and she’d almost lost something similar. There was a level of companionship there. A level of understanding.

So when she asked, he opened his mouth. He released the ghost from under his tongue, let it flutter into the air. “Flora,” he said quietly. “Her name was Flora.”

—

Andy liked to believe that silence was comfortable. That with silence there was no pain, that there was no sacrifice. But something had been sacrificed from within herself for the sake of her sister and the face of anyone that the ranger might have recognized. She thought of Leah and Nicole in that moment– of Leticia, too. She thought about the knife and the way it felt to push it deeper into the ranger’s chest. Kaden’s expression was a nail in the coffin, a reminder that to some, what she had done was inexcusable. Whether or not he was mourning for the ranger, or for what Andy could have been without that blood on her hands, she couldn’t be sure. She didn’t know if she wanted to find out, not right now at least. 

And all of this because Emilio told her he would have done it again, that he would have helped her pin the man to his shame, help her bury her own. It’d been so long since she’d been able to rely on anyone, and in all honesty, she wasn’t sure she’d ever been able to at all. Alex was different, she was younger– she needed taking care of. Andy did, too, but she didn’t know how to ask for it, and here Emilio was– all scowls and rage built into his bones that’d aged further than the lines on his face, and he was offering her a shoulder born out of violence. But what had happened after the fact had not been violent, it’d been tender. And she had him to thank for sticking around, of seeing her through that moment. 

She nodded, tongue pressed against the roof of her mouth. “I would, too.” Because she would. She’d kill that man a thousand times over if it meant Alex would be safe. If it haunted her for a thousand lifetimes, it didn’t matter– she didn’t care. What mattered was Alex’s safety, and she’d guaranteed it, at least by this act of violence and this particular ranger. There would be others, and she knew that, but none of which followed her for a namesake she’d shed the moment her parents died in those woods. Andy could easily hold onto the fear of the reality of what she’d done, but what would come of it? Disappointment in herself? Anger? Those things were already there; she was a breeding ground for contempt. But at least somebody had believed in her, and in that belief, he had revealed a part of himself that she didn’t think she’d ever get to see. 

There was a softness to the way he said her name that made Andy’s chest tighten. She listened intently, sounding the name out in her head– cherishing the thing that was taken away from her friend. “That’s a beautiful name.” Because it was. Because of course Emilio in all of his wayward bravery would have lost something careful and innocent. Though, Andy had to question whether or not she’d been allowed to live in that innocence. There were questions that Andy had, but she didn’t think now was the time to ask them. After all, there’d been blood spilt tonight and secrets that might as well have been another knife to the heart. 

But Andy wanted him to know that this story of his daughter who had no face to her, that it was important. That it meant something to her that he even dare speak it. Because wasn’t it better to withhold what hurt? So that it couldn’t be turned against you? Andy still had Alex, but Emilio had lost Flora. It made her angry, and she thought that if she’d known Emilio back then, even if she’d been a child, she would have tried to help him, too. Her hands still shook slightly as she leaned into the couch. She stared down at them, her knuckles cracked and bleeding. When she had hurt herself, she didn’t know. “Thank you for trusting me. With this, and with helping me.” It couldn’t have been easy, and it hadn’t been easy to trust him at first, but there was a sadness to him that she felt deeply; almost as if they were born from the same violence, a deep seated understanding of one another despite the reasons not being spoken. But they had now. She understood why Emilio had come with her, and why he had said the things he said, and she was grateful for him. 

The urge to lighten the mood pulled at her, to make the best out of this situation. There would be no mourning the man who’d hurt Alex, but they could mourn Flora together. Andy swallowed the apologies she wished to spill and looked towards his kitchen. “How about that whiskey?” They could both use a drink, she decided. They deserved one, especially Emilio. She would thank him one way or another; either by equal or above measure. She had to. He’d shown her a kindness that many others wouldn’t have; that her own cousin hadn’t. She needed to show him that she was grateful. 

—

Sometimes, it seemed as though grief and regret both lived between his ribs, fighting one another for dominance. There were days where the grief won, there were days when the regret did, there were days where he couldn’t tell the difference between the two. They merged together, sometimes, went from being enemies battling for the top spot in his chest to being a monster with two heads and one heartbeat. Guilt was an overpowering thing, a beast that couldn’t be defeated with holy water or iron or silver. It would consume you if you let it, and Emilio had given in to it years ago, had succumbed to it that very first day on the living room floor when all his senses could register was blood. 

But Andy hadn’t. 

Andy was standing here, blood on her hands and dirt under her fingernails, and she was saying I would, too. She was confessing not to a crime, but to something that wasn’t one. A man was dead, and she had killed him. A man was dead, and Emilio had helped her bury his body in the dirt. A man was dead, and neither one of them had it in them to regret it. That guilt that had consumed him after his daughter’s death, the guilt that strangled him as he shoved a blade into his uncle’s stomach, it wasn’t present here. There was a difference, he thought, between vengeance and prevention. It was easy to hate yourself for one; it was hard to feel guilty about the other.

There were people who would mourn this ranger, he knew. They might never know what happened to him — in fact, Emilio hoped they wouldn’t — but they’d mourn him all the same. They’d plant flowers on his birthday and leave voicemails on his phone until the number was one day disconnected. And maybe that should have meant something, but it didn’t. There were people who would mourn this ranger, but Emilio wasn’t one of them. Andy wasn’t, either. And why should she be? Killing that ranger hadn’t been a source of grief, but a prevention of it. Acts of protection, he thought, could never really be called acts of violence. Not even when they left you with blood on your trembling hands.

Not for the first time, he thought about how much he admired her. About how there was appreciation there — and a hint of jealousy, too. At fourteen, Andy had done what Emilio was unable to accomplish at thirty-two. She got her sister out before it was too late. And today, she’d saved Alex, rescued her from a fate Emilio had been unable to spare his daughter from. Flora was dead. It felt like a sentence that followed him around sometimes, like a noose that hung over his head ready to drop at any moment and strangle him with its cruelty. Flora was dead. Flora was dead. Flora was dead. 

But Alex wasn’t.

And that was allowed to mean something.

He swallowed, the lump in his throat making it feel like a herculean task. That’s a beautiful name, Andy said, and Emilio remembered standing beside the bed where Juliana lay all those years ago, holding that tiny shape in his arms and resting that name on her shoulders like a blanket, like the only thing he knew how to give her. He’d said the name so scarcely since her death. Part of him hated himself for it. She should be remembered. She should be mourned. But all Emilio could do with that name was choke on it, most days. Maybe Andy would do better with it, the same way she’d done better with protecting Alex. Maybe letting someone else carry it, even if only for a moment, would help him feel a little less heavy. 

“Thank you,” he said quietly. They were words he rarely spoke, partially because of the lessons Rhett had drilled into him from the moment he’d come into his life and partially because Emilio had just never been very good at using words that meant something. But, like that name, the phrase was something he knew he could trust Andy with. As she thanked him in return, he shook his head. It felt unearned, undeserved. It always did. “I meant it when I said I had your back,” he told her. “You’ve got me, Bennett. Might not be worth much, but I’m good in a fight. And you’ve got me.”

He let out a watery laugh as she brought up the suggestion of whiskey, because wasn’t that always his go-to? Nodding, he got to his feet. “Whiskey’s a good idea. Hope you like it cheap and from the bottle — that’s all I’ve got for you.” He still ached; he always would. But it was a little less overwhelming as he dragged himself into the kitchen, a little less debilitating as he pulled a bottle down from the shelf. Alex would be all right; Andy had made sure of that. And Andy would be all right, too. Emilio would be the one to ensure that, whatever it took.

[2fast2furyous]

TIMING: One week before Season 1 Finale PARTIES: Gia (@2fast2furyous) and Emilio (@mortemoppetere) SUMMARY: Emilio's on a case that's lead him to Phuong's Auto Repair & More when Gia catches him snooping around. Emilio learns a bit about what the "& More" might be. CONTENT WARNINGS: None

As if her un-life wasn’t fucked enough already, the weird sludge gooping its way around town had finally made it to the Phuong’s garage. It wasn’t as bad as some places had it, fortunately. The back of the building was still accessible and, for now, that meant that Gia could still get in and out of the cellar without coming into contact with the goo. Her mother had sent her to collect some things that were down there she wanted to have at home. Even though she was a bit annoyed to be the errand-runner, Gia went without protest. That’s what you did for family. 

Making her way carefully through the accessible portions of Worm Row, Gia eventually arrived at the garage on foot. As she approached the rear entry of the building, however, she spotted someone else who seemed to be scoping out the place. At first Gia was going to yell at him to get away, but as she approached she felt something strange. It made her skin tingle and her mouth go dry all at once. “We’re closed right now. On account of the fucking goo.” 

__

Thanks to the new office space Teddy had set up for him, Axis Investigations was back in business. Things had picked back up relatively quickly, because Wicked’s Rest had nothing if not an abundance of cases for a nosy P.I. to occupy himself with. People whose friends and family members hadn’t been heard from in a few weeks, people who still wanted answers to petty questions even among the chaos, people who the police were too busy to help. Already, Emilio had delivered unfortunate news on three missing persons cases that had ended in statues throughout Worm Row. He was hoping for a less stony case to distract him.

This one seemed promising.

A woman had come to him claiming her father had disappeared just before the goo shit started. A little investigating had found that he’d bought a car shortly before his disappearance, but it hadn’t been on his property after he’d vanished. Naturally, Emilio assumed this meant the man took off in the vehicle, neglecting to tell his daughter his plans… only, the same car reappeared in the auto garage where he’d purchased it shortly after. No paper trail announcing a repossession, and the daughter knew nothing about it. It might have been nothing. He knew that. But it was the first lead he’d gotten, so he went to the shop.

It wasn’t a surprise to find it abandoned, considering. Half the neighborhood was under goo, and he was pretty sure a mostly inaccessible garage was all but useless. But he didn’t need to talk to the people just yet. In fact, it was probably better that they weren’t here. He peered in through one of the windows, clicking his tongue. Lock would be easy enough to crack. He’d gotten good at picking them. All he needed was a couple minutes to…

A voice called out, interrupting his thoughts. He turned towards it, forcing himself to shift into ‘undercover’ mode. He fucking hated undercover mode. “Hi,” he greeted. “Sorry. Yeah. That makes sense. Actually hoping to talk to someone who works here. My car got stuck under all the fucking goo, and I’m hoping to get a replacement. Heard you guys sell them? Friend of mine bought one from you a while back.”

—

There was something about this man that felt slightly familiar. Gia couldn’t place it but when you lived in the same small town all of your life that tended to be how things went. That didn’t stop her from feeling some strange pull, however. It was an odd sensation - like her mouth was watering and her molecules were buzzing around like a yearning hunger. She walked towards the man and with each step closer she felt that hunger growing. 

Ever since the accident, since her death, Gia had felt similar sensations before as if there was an invisible string tethering her to these other people. Most of the time it was easy enough to ignore but the few times she engaged with those people they just turned out to be bitter and angry and …hopeless. It didn’t make sense why she would be drawn to that. Unless it was somehow part of what she had become, whatever that was. 

This guy seemed different. He didn’t fit with the pattern of other people she had felt this draw towards. “Sorry to hear about your car. Lots of people are in a similar spot. This shit,” she gestured around to the goo, “really has a way of picking on the little guy.” Gia felt a desire to help him, which she often did when she felt these pulls. “Not sure getting another car is the best call. Don’t get me wrong, there’s not much I love more than having four wheels on pavement… but I’ve been finding that two wheels is more efficient right now. Ever consider a motorcycle?” 

—

As she got closer, that familiar feeling tugged at his gut. Half nausea, half something undefinable. That sensation, that warning sign that told a slayer someone undead was approaching… Everyone had different thoughts on it, he knew. His uncle described it as dread; his mother liked to think of it as something more like hunger. It tells you what to kill, she’d told him once, when he was so small that he was a blank canvas she hadn’t yet given up on. When you feel that, mijo, go for the throat. Saw until the head comes off. That’s the best solution for most things. He’d listened to that advice for years, but it wasn’t who he was anymore. Emilio was different now. If he repeated it enough times, he thought it might eventually stop sounding like a bad thing.

He didn’t let the shift in his gut show on his face, didn’t let the new sensation have any effect on the way he was presenting himself. This wasn’t a skill his mother taught him; there were a few things, after all, that Emilio had picked up all on his own. As far as he could tell, this woman — whatever kind of undead she might be — wasn’t hurting anyone. If he found out that wasn’t the case, he’d reevaluate. He’d figure out what she was and what needed to be done about it, but only if it became necessary. For right now… he just wanted to solve his damn case.

“Eh,” he shrugged, looking unbothered. “It’s not a big loss. Didn’t pay for it, anyway.” The car had been a gift from Nora, though he had no idea how she’d gotten it. There was a saying, wasn’t there? Easy come, easy go. Or… easy goo, in this case. (Christ. Maybe Teddy’s bad jokes were rubbing off on him.) “Don’t know if a motorcycle is the best move for me,” he replied, smile a little tight. “Bum leg. Barely walk, most days. Might make it hard to ride something like that. Besides…” he trailed off, deciding on a whim to add to his ‘character,’ to make the undercover work a little more convincing. “My partner would kill me.” He fiddled with his wedding ring a little. For once, he could pretend that wearing it was a strategic thing instead of a monument to grief and guilt. It was a nice thing to pretend. “Already thinks I’m too reckless. I come home with a bike, they’ll have me sleeping outside. My friend says you’ve got nice cars, though. Really liked the one he picked up from you. Talked real highly of the process. Said you might remember him if I dropped his name, but I think he’s just got an ego.”

—

That sensation, the one that felt like it was burning a hole in the pit of her stomach, only intensified as Gia got closer. What was that? She just didn’t know if she felt it because of whatever she had become or if it had something to do with him. As much as she wished that she could ignore it, set it aside and never think about it again, that seemed impossible. This wasn’t a feeling she could outrun, no matter how fast she might try. “Shit? Where’d you get a free car before? Cause… maybe that’s where you should turn to find a replacement.” 

The way he was pushing felt… weird. Sure, her uncle had a few cars out front he was always trying to sell off, but the idea that someone would have talked highly of that process? Fucking hilarious. Uncle Z’s process had been described as a lot of different things but never anything good. “The nice cars we’ve got around here aren’t for sale. They’re either family cars or cars we’re working on for our clients. Really only got a few lemon’s out front. I mean… don’t tell my uncle I called them that, I guess. Or, eh, fuck it - not like I get any commision from the shit he sells. They’re lemons.” 

Gia felt conflicting desires. On one hand, she kinda wanted this guy to get lost so she could grab some shit out of the cellar and get back home. On the other, she so desperately wanted to figure out why she was so drawn to the seeming negativity that bounced around the guy. Inexplicably, she really wanted to relieve that anger. “Who’s the friend? If he’s got an ego he might just be fucking with you. We mostly just fix broken shit people bring in, the used car shit is just like a side hustle or whatever. I can probably call around to some people I know and see about a decent car on the cheap if that’s what you’re looking for.” 

__ 

“Think my assistant scammed someone,” Emilio replied. “Or stole it, no lo sé. Don’t think I can get another the same way.” Not that he was actually looking. The story about his car might have been true, but it wasn’t his motivation for coming here. The more time he spent in the auto shop, the more he got the inclination that there was something here, something tied to his case. It could have just been… bias. His mind taking the fact that the woman in front of him was undead and applying decades of teachings that told him that undead things, more often than not, were responsible for turmoil. He tried to push the bias aside, tried to approach the situation from an objective point of view. Cases didn’t get solved when you went in thinking you already knew all the answers. Emilio learned that the hard way.

He glanced around the shop, trying to determine which cars were considered ‘nice’ and which weren’t. Emilio wasn’t a car guy; it was something that wouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone who knew him at all. “Can’t afford a nice car right now, anyway. Cheap is what I’m after.” He skirted the mention of lemons. He knew the fruit, of course, but he had no concept of what the term meant in relation to cars, and he didn’t particularly want to ask. When you didn’t know something, sometimes the best course of action was to pretend like you did. 

“Guy named Charlie Carver.” He watched her face for any reaction to his client’s father’s name, though not in a way that would make it obvious. “Older white guy, so you might have a point on the ego. Nice enough, though. Lived in town a couple decades now, so he’s weird as hell, but always willing to lend a helping hand.” Most of the information was parroted back from what his client had shared with him. People did that, sometimes, Shared too much information on the person they wanted help finding, things that weren’t helpful at all in the case. Emilio always just let them talk. He didn’t know if the talking helped them much or not — dealing with grief wasn’t something he was good at in spite of the abundance of it he carried in his chest — but he figured letting them go on was kinder than telling them to shut the hell up. 

—

“You got an assistant to do your dirty work for you? Damn, okay. What the fuck kinda job comes with an assistant like that?” Gia almost added a joke about how she had to scam people and steal all her cars herself, but it would have been less of a joke and more of a confession said with a smile and that seemed ill-advised when this guy was effectively a total stranger. She’d dealt with enough of the cops in this town, by that she meant all of the cops in this town, to know that he wasn’t one of them but that alone didn’t mean that she could trust him. 

“I get that. And hey, I’m not trying to jam you up or nothin’ - cheap isn’t bad if you know what you’re doing.” Working basically her entire life in a service industry meant that Gia had dealt with a lot of oddballs in town. So even though she found it weird that the guy started talking about this random white guy who supposedly bought a car from the shop instead of asking her more details about calling around to other places to help him find a cheap car, she just wrote it off. Sometimes people liked to hear the drone of their own voice. 

“Lotta old white guys roll through here, we live in Maine. Can’t say the name rings a bell.” The last name did kinda sound familiar, admittedly, but Gia didn’t know why and didn’t see the point in saying so even if she did know why. Small fucking town, maybe she knew his kids or some shit. “Oh, uh, I’m Gia, by the way. Phuong. Gia Phuong. Like the sign,” she said as she pointed towards the vinyl logo on the door nearby. “But, so, like I said I’m not real sure about your friend buying a car from here but -” before she could even finish the sentence, one of the junkers parked out near the front of the store roared its engine, seeming to turn on all by itself. Gia chuckled nervously, looking around to see if anyone was over by the car or not. 

__ 

“Less about the job, more about who you get as an assistant. Mine would do things like this no matter where she worked.” An easy method of dodging the question. Emilio didn’t need the woman to know that he was a private investigator; if she was a suspect, it was in his best interest to make sure she wasn’t aware of that fact. Better to let people keep their guard down, in cases like this one.

He nodded, genuinely agreeing even if his presence in the shop was under false pretenses. Cheap was how Emilio did most things — his apartment, his whiskey, his soap. Plenty of people had plenty of problems with parts of that — the soap in particular — but what worked worked. There was no need to spend extra money just to say you’d spent it. 

She didn’t seem to recognize the name any more than she claimed to, but it was a family shop. Maybe she wasn’t the one who’d sold the cars. “Em,” he replied, giving the shortened version of his name. But she’d given a last name, too. Giving his would make it a little too easy for her to find out more than he was ready for her to know. It wouldn’t take much digging for her to find Axis, start wondering about it. He hadn’t come with an alias prepared, so he went with the first thing to come to mind: “Jones. So, your whole family works here? Must be nice, having them close. You always the one to sell the cars, or —” An engine came to life, and no amount of undercover practice could keep every muscle in Emilio’s body from tensing up like he was expecting a fight. His eyes darted to the source of the sound. “You got other people working today?”

—

“Never had an assistant, not really the kinda job that warrants one.” Gia didn’t know exactly why but things were starting to feel off. It was more than just the intensity of the anger she felt from this Em Jones. Dodging a few questions is weird, but normal. Dodging a bunch of questions was… weird. “M? Like the letter? That a nickname or somethin’?” She just needed to learn more about this guy, she told herself. If she just stuck with the conversation maybe things would start feeling less off. 

“More or less. Couple’a cousins went off to do their own shit. Family’s not exactly small and this place pretty much is. So like, everyone who works here is family but not all the family works here.” Sometimes Gia forgot how lucky she was to have a family like hers - bound together with an unwavering love in spite of all the bullshit. She felt guilty when she got frustrated with them. And lately she was feeling near constant frustration, near constant guilt. “Rarely the one to sell them. I ain’t got much of a sales pitch, if you haven’t noticed. Do my best work under the hood.” 

The car that had started up was… the car. It was one of those unexplainable things that you didn’t really question when you came from a family of spellcasting necromancers. The car was so old, a fucking Rolls-Royce Phantom from the 40s. The car had been Gia’s great-grandfather’s prized possession. When he finally decided he had lived enough life and passed away it was as though not all of him had gone. Part of him lived on in that damn car. She didn’t know how to explain ‘weird ghost car,’ to this guy so opted for what was basically just as improbable, “Uh, no, nobody else working. Just… that one’s got a remote start. It’s on the fritz. Keeps remote starting without, uh, well without the remote.” 

To be sure nobody was around or messing with it, Gia took a couple of steps towards the Phantom. She looked around a bit but there wasn’t anyone. “Good thing I’m the best mechanic in town, though. I’ll have that thing fixed easy. “Look, we’re still trying to deal with some of this goo shit so we’re not exactly open and running like normal right now. Maybe you could come back another day. I’ll tell my uncle about you and your friend, he’ll be able to help you more I’m sure.” With that, as if it was objecting to her proposition, the Phantom revved and the wheels began to slowly inch forward. 

__ 

“Yeah, well, between you and me, I don’t really need one. Kid kind of hired herself. Don’t think she’d leave if I told her she was fired, and I kind of like having her around.” Having Nora at Axis meant that, for a few hours out of the day, Emilio knew she was safe and warm and not pissing off any hunters other than him. He’d never trade that. He snorted at her question. “Two letters. E-M. It’s a nickname, yeah. Don’t much like the real one. Nobody calls me by it.” A lie. Far fewer people called him Em. Only Teddy used it with any frequency. Maybe that was why Emilio had pulled the ex-demon’s name out for a surname.

If she wasn’t the one who’d sold the car and had contact with Carver, maybe that meant she wasn’t the one he was looking for — in spite of that quiet insistence in his mind that her being undead couldn’t be a coincidence. He wondered if more of her family was like her — there had been some cases, he knew, of siblings turning one another, or parents deciding they didn’t have much interest in an eternal undead life if it meant outliving their children — but there was no way to ask it without letting on that he knew what he knew and that could too easily lead to her wondering how he knew it. So he settled for more innocent questions instead. “Who usually does the selling? Kind of curious what the real sales pitch would sound like.”

It wasn’t the only thing he was ‘curious’ about. That car starting up on its own… He looked at it dubiously. “Didn’t know they did remote start in cars that old.” He wasn’t a car guy, but he knew things like remote start were more recent additions to vehicles. Rhett’s van sure as hell didn’t have anything like it, after all. “How’s that work? Starting without the remote. Seems kind of dangerous, no?”

She took a step towards the car, and Emilio followed instinctively. “Your uncle the guy who usually sells, then? Think I would like to talk to him, if you know when he’ll be…” The car was moving. The car was moving, without anyone behind the driver’s seat. Emilio let out a curse, reaching out and grabbing Gia by the shoulder and yanking her to the side just as the car decided inching wasn’t quite as fun as barrelling forward.

—

Gia felt fairly certain that this Em wasn’t a car guy, which meant she could do a bit of bullshitting since he’d likely never know the truth and wouldn’t be able to call her on the shit. After all, a real car person would have either called bullshit on the remote start thing or asked her when she replaced the original engine with a modern one. “They don’t,” she started, “but the remote starts got nothing to do with the body of the car. All about what she’s running inside. Replace the old clunker of an engine with something new and bam - remote start.” She paused, and nodded in general agreement. “I mean… yeah, dangerous. That’s why it’s at the shop. For fixin’ and shit.” 

For a moment it seemed like promising to talk to her uncle about this guys seeming need to buy a car from their garage was going to be enough to wrap up the conversation. Which was all she wanted to do now that her great-grandpa’s car was acting up. But before she could even respond, the Phantom was moving and this fucking guy was reaching out and grabbing her. Gia shoved Em’s arms away from her with a bit of a huff, feeling insecure about how cold she knew her body must feel.  “I fucking got it, jesus…” 

The wheel of the car spun, and while it wasn’t going exceptionally fast it was certainly moving. She had no idea if it was heading for her, for him, for them or if it was just bored and looking for a joy ride. “Dừng lại!”Gia called out, unsure but hopeful that a command in Vietnamese might catch the car’s attention. Was that even possible? She’d never seen it do anything quite like this before. The car did stop, as she asked it to, but only for a second. Then it revved its engine with a fury that caused a distinct smell of burning rubber from the tires. Now it was her turn to act, as she grabbed hold of his forearm and pulled him closer towards the garage. She didn’t know what was about to happen next but figured being out in the open wasn’t ideal. “So, uh… this has never happened before. Guess I gotta fix more than just the remote start,” if he knew anything about anything there was a strong possibility that he knew there was something supernatural at play here. 

__ 

“Seems like wasting money to put a new engine in something that old,” he commented, curiosity tugging at his gut. He knew next to nothing about cars, but this seemed… interesting, somehow. After all, Emilio liked to know how things worked. That was why he did what he did, why he’d chosen detective for his means of paying the bills instead of something easier that would have brought on a better influx of cash. “Did you put the new engine in? Or someone else?” And if she had done it, why bring the car back to be fixed by the same people who’d messed it up? He wasn’t sure he bought the remote start explanation, even if he didn’t have enough knowledge to confidently call it a lie.

He bought it less when the car came hurtling towards them. Remote start was one thing, but Emilio was pretty sure remote drive wasn’t something people installed in cars. And for good reason — a car without a driver wasn’t exactly something safe. It was instinctive, the way he yanked Gia to the side; he knew it wasn’t necessary. She was already dead. He knew it even before his hands touched her bloodless skin. He pulled back as she shoved him, barely managing to avoid stumbling with that stupid, useless leg. 

“Fucking hell,” he cursed as the car turned back towards them, revving its engine. This was not remote start. Was she still trying to sell this lie? “You need to fix something,” he agreed, letting out another, long string of curses in both Spanish and English as she pulled him towards the door. Something on the ground caught his eye, and he ducked out from under her grip and scooped it up, flipping it over. It must have fallen out when the car shot by them, he realized. It was a small plastic square, photo in the corner… a driver’s license. He flipped it around so that she could see the name. Charles Carver. “Don’t know the name, huh?” His eyes narrowed.

—

Normally Gia was pretty good at lying. It wasn’t that she enjoyed it but it was often a way of protecting herself and her family. As this guy threw questions out about the logistics of this apparent remote start old school car, however, her mind blanked on any decent responses. With each passing second she found herself getting not frustrated but … furious. This was more than just feeling his anger, this was her own and it was deep and intense. She tried to rationalize it but didn’t have time to. 

When he stumbled back she did feel a bit guilty for how firmly she had shoved him, especially since he had just been looking out for her evidently. Gia had hardly even noticed when he reached down for something on the ground, her mind was too preoccupied. The car had sped off, right past them and out onto the road. She had never seen the car do this shit before and all she could think of was the inevitable disappointed looks she was going to get from her family. 

At his comment, she turned towards the ID he was showing her. Gia stopped herself from saying a slightly defeated, Fuck…, but wasn’t so sure that her face had gotten the message. She tried to play it off like she was squinting to read the name on the license. Someone's ID falling out of that car felt ominous as hell. The fact that it was this Carver guys ID felt a bit too convenient. Who the hell was this guy? And why was this other guy here asking questions about him? And why was he looking at her like he knew something she didn’t? 

“Still don’t,” Gia responded finally and truthfully. “Look I’m not sure who you are or why you were looking around here when we’re really clearly closed but something tells me he ain’t exactly a friend of yours. Now unless you’ve got actual business here, I think maybe you should be heading on your way.” 

__ 

The look on her face was almost frightened, and Emilio realized that she might not be a suspect after all. Something supernatural had almost certainly happened to Charlie Carver. It was right there in his ID falling from a car that seemed to be possessed by something. But… He wasn’t sure if it was something undead. Put the bias away, he thought to himself, and look at the facts. Gia seemed a little jumpy, but… that could have just been because she was hiding the fact that she was undead. She might be newly undead; it would explain how she was still working in a place with her last name on the sign, among family members not old enough to have been outliving her for long. 

Still, something had happened, and Emilio was positive now that the auto shop had been involved. Maybe not intentionally, maybe not maliciously, but in some sense or another, the people here were responsible for the worn ID card in his hand and the fact that the man whose picture smiled up from the plastic hadn’t been seen in weeks now.

The detective looked off after the car, grimacing. “Something tells me there’s a lot more going on here than you’re telling me,” he shot back, looking back to Gia instead. “If I leave, this won’t be the last time you see me. I can promise you that.”

—

His promise, which Gia rightly took as a threat, spun the anger inside of her into a frenzy. For a split second Gia thought about what might happen if he didn’t leave, if she took care of the threat right there. It was a thought that made her feel queasy almost instantly. That wasn’t her, that wasn’t how she dealt with problems. This whole experience had just turned into something so awful that she wasn’t even thinking straight. 

“Yeah, whatever. It’s a small town, man, everyone sees everyone.” She’d have to tell her family, she couldn’t risk him coming back around when she wasn’t there and catching someone off guard. And as much as she kinda didn’t want to know the answers… Gia knew she’d have to ask about why this Carver guys’s license was in that fucking car. “And for the record, Mr. Jones, the garage is under surveillance. We’ve got clearly posted no trespassing signs. Might wanna be careful snooping around. As you’ve seen, shit can get dangerous when there’s this much heavy machinery around.” 

Making the not-so-veiled threat felt uncomfortable, felt like something her hot-headed brother would have said. But if there was one thing that the Phuong’s clearly instilled in their children it was that the family came first, always. If her uncle was up to something shady, well, he was still her fucking uncle. Gia flashed on her fakest customer service smile, “Thanks so much for stopping by, though. Hope you have such a great rest of your day.” She sure as fuck wasn’t gonna. 

[realmackross]

PARTIES: @mortemoppetere, @realmackross TIMING: The following morning of September 9th. SUMMARY: A ravenous Mack meets Emilio for the first time. WARNINGS: Unsanitary tw, gore tw, murder mention tw PREVIOUS THREADS: 1 - 2 - Current.

Whatever Serpent’s Flat had done to Mack had left her in a desperate attempt to feed, and unfortunately with that came no sense of a brain cell whatsoever, but an enormous amount of strength and an unwavering need to eat whatever came across her path be it human or not.

Saliva dripped out of her mouth and her eyes had glazed over to a deathly haze that looked as if she had just crawled out of a grave. Her shamble had no formal sense of direction, only in a path that took her to food. And despite walking all the way back to town from the Flats, Mackenzie hadn’t tired out.

Stopped just at the edge of town as the sun was rising, Mackenzie had already found a dead deer in the road that had been smacked by a truck and left for dead, and without hesitation the undead creature dropped to her knees and began feeding on the rotting animal carcass.

—

He felt it before he saw it. That familiar shiver down his spine, that old clench in his stomach. He’d never quite known how to describe the feeling of something undead being near; years ago, he would have labeled it disgust and left it at that. Lately, he wasn’t so sure.

Still, a stake slipped into his hand. It was an old instinct, maybe a bad one; knowing that didn’t stop the stake from fitting in his hand better than anything else ever had. Maybe it was just someone out for a walk. But there was a strange sense of dread overtaking him, an old paranoia that insisted it must be more.

He followed that feeling, trading the stake for a knife when something in his chest twisted. Not a vampire. It didn’t feel like a vampire. It was —

There. A relatively small shape. Young, he thought, but not a child. Twenties, maybe. At least, that was what she looked like. She could have been decades older than him, he knew. However old she was, it was clear that she wasn’t all there. Saliva foaming in her mouth, blood on her hands. Just a deer, but if he didn’t stop her, it’d be something else soon. He knew that.

Cautiously, he approached. Get in, incapacitate, figure out what to do from there. He’d done it a thousand times before. He could do it again now, too.

—

Mackenzie hadn’t heard him come up on her. In fact, her hearing wasn’t all that great, especially when feeding was the only thing on her mind. She was a simple creature made up of a complex virus that had somehow kept her a part of a living world, despite being dead. And as she dug her hands further into the animal carcass and pulled out intestines and other rotting organs, the young zombie only seemed to want more and more.

She grunted and groaned with each bite as she ingested flesh and meat. Maggots squirmed within her grasp and dropped out of her mouth to the ground trying to crawl away before becoming a part of Mackenzie's breakfast.

Finishing one part of the animal, she moved onto the next tossing pieces she couldn’t consume, out of the way. It made for quite the meal, but wasn’t as satisfying as the hiker she had managed to consume hours prior as she slowly made her way towards town. And on a normal day, he would have quenched her craving and brought her back to the land of the living, but the way the Flats had control of her body, left her longing for more food, only making Mackenzie hangrier with each passing step.

—

She didn’t notice him at all, and that was probably proof of how far gone she was. There was a point, Emilio thought, where people were too far gone to save. There was a point where rescue became cruel. He’d long since passed it himself, though it had never stopped anyone from trying. If asked, he would have told them not to. He would have said that his corpse was already rotting, that his mind had gone so long ago that he no longer remembered what it felt like to hold it in his hands. There were people who couldn’t be saved and, a couple years ago, Emilio probably would have counted this girl among them.

But now he wasn’t so sure.

He approached slowly, knife in hand. He’d see. He’d see how far gone she was and, if there was nothing left to save, he’d free her the only way he knew how, the only way he could. It was still a kindness, in its way. It would still keep her from becoming something she’d hate later on, still let her die as something that wasn’t yet a monster. 

“All right,” he muttered, “let’s see. You understand me?”

—

Mackenzie continued to munch on her meal of deer carcass, when she heard a jumbled mess of words and noises behind her. Stopping what she was doing, she raised her head and dropped the piece of intestine that was in her dirty, blood covered hands. With a grunt, the young zombie looked around trying to figure out where the sounds were coming from, but didn’t see anything. Her curiosity peaked though and instead of resuming her meal, she slowly pushed herself up off the ground and started to move past the skinned animal in the opposite direction of where the man was questioning her.

She had no sense of spatial awareness. At least not to the degree she needed to keep herself completely safe. Mackenzie had literally turned into a ravenous walking pile of rotting flesh and bones. She was like a parasite to the living, and anything that crossed her path, she had tried to latch onto. However, she still wasn’t finding the culprit that had disturbed her from her food.

Turning around to go back to the deer, she stumbled forward, until she noticed a pair of feet which belonged to a pair of legs which belonged to what looked like her next meal. And with a guttural growl, Mackenzie stretched out her arms and started moving towards the man standing directly in her path.

—

She didn’t understand him. It was clear the moment she stood, the moment she began to stumble. She looked more like a reanimated corpse than a sentient zombie, shuffling around like something out of a bad movie. The deer she’d been eating was beyond rotted, and while it was hard for Emilio to imagine that such a thing would ever be appealing to someone with sentient thought, he’d also never been a hungry zombie before. 

But it looked like he was about to be the target of one.

The zombie kid was shuffling towards him now, arms outstretched, and the slayer set his jaw. Maybe there was no saving this one, then. Guilt ebbed in his gut, the idea of putting down someone who looked like a kid sitting uncomfortably on his chest, but what choice did he have? He couldn’t let her kill anyone else. He had no plans of letting her kill him. 

He adjusted his knife in his hand. It was difficult to take someone’s head off with a small blade like this one, but for a slayer? Not impossible. And Emilio had had plenty of practice. “All right,” he mumbled, mostly to himself. It wasn’t as if she was listening. “It’s all right.” It was a kindness, at this point, wasn’t it? If he had to choose between being a mindless thing, shuffling around and killing whoever he came across, or just being dead, he’d choose the latter. He hoped this kid, whoever she’d been, would feel the same.

—

Mackenzie continued to inch closer. Going purely off of instinct and nothing else, she didn’t see the knife in his hand. Instead, his legs looked like two delicious meaty ham hocks. His torso, though probably tougher meat, was a nice roast. His arms were like chicken wings glazed and ready for consumption. And his head, that was the delicacy. The brain would be the main course. It would take some effort cracking his skull open like an egg, but she could do it. She had already done it a few times before, it just took patience; well what little patience zombies had.

Growling, Mackenzie’s eyes were firmly set on him, and she ignored the deer completely, even as she stumbled over it. With the man just in reach, she was nearly there. Almost to her prize where she could savor every morsel of him.

— 

She was slow to approach. Even Emilio, with his shitty leg, probably could have outrun her if he’d tried. But a bad leg wasn’t the only thing that damned him in situations like this one — it was his ego, too. His sense of purpose which told him, in no uncertain terms, that it was his job to put his body on the line to prevent someone else’s from breaking. Emilio was expendable; there were a hundred more slayers just like him, a hundred more who were worth more than he was. But the person this zombie might go after if he didn’t stop her? They were far less replaceable. Even without knowing who they were, he knew that.

So he stood. He waited. He let her get close, and then he darted towards her. Not as quick as he used to be, not as graceful, but determined. He kicked at her legs, moving to sweep them out from underneath her as his arm moved to pin her in place. He’d have to avoid those hungry teeth — he had no intention of letting himself be made a meal, even less of an intention of dooming himself to an afterlife of snacking on brains — but he didn’t foresee it being an issue. There was no thought behind her attack, after all. He could take her, easily.

(Ego. What a treacherous thing.) 

—

The swift kick towards her legs sent her crashing to the ground backwards, her head smacking the pavement with a hard thud. However, Mack hadn’t felt it. All the man had done was anger her. But getting back up was going to be the real challenge. If she hadn’t been in full-on mindless zombie mode, Mack would have impressed the man by using some of her martial arts and stunt training. But at the moment, that was a pipe dream, and she didn’t even know her left from her right side.

Growling, she rolled to one side and then to the other like an awkward looking fish out of water struggling to find her way back onto her stomach, but Mackenzie was having way too much trouble, which was definitely leaving her vulnerable at the moment. If he wanted to hop on top of her and try and take her out, now was his chance, unless she bucked him off like an awkward zombie bronco, which at this point, anything was possible.

—

She was on the ground, flopping around like a fish out of water. He wasn’t sure if he’d disoriented her or if she was just too far gone to work her limbs the right way. Either way, Emilio knew this was his chance. If he wanted to take her out quickly — kindly — this was the best way to do it. Here, now. Before she hurt anyone else, or before someone crueler than him came across her and chose another method of disposal. Decapitation was a lot quicker than burning.

With his sharpest blade at the ready, Emilio quickly got on top of her. Christ, he thought, she can’t be much older than Nora or Wynne. A kid, for the most part, who’d already died once. Maybe it’d be less painful this time. Maybe he was doing her a favor. If it were him in such a state, he’d want someone to take him out. He knew that. But he was caught up in how goddamn young she looked and, with his knife hovering over the zombie’s throat, Emilio did the one thing a slayer was never supposed to do: he hesitated. 

—

When she found him sitting on top of her, Mackenzie was no longer concerned about getting up. Her food had come to her. Milky colored eyes looking up and into his for a brief moment, it was as if she had recognized he was a human, and that she wasn’t supposed to hurt humans. With a breathy, stifled gasp, Mackenzie even attempted to speak, but couldn’t, and instead made a squeak, but the moment quickly passed.

Dropping her gaze and dead expression, she looked down to find his arm close by. Like a zombie kitten with grabby hands, Mack reached out for his arm and pulled it towards her with teeth bared and her mouth wide ready to take a bite. If she couldn’t have a leg or his head, she was at least going to start with an appetizer - a chicken wing.

—

There was a moment, a split second where he swore she looked at him with a spark of intelligence behind her eyes. Like there was still someone in there, like she wasn’t gone completely. He figured he was probably imagining it, because the squeak she let out wasn’t exactly human and the spark was gone as quickly as it had arrived. She was dead. She was already dead. He just needed to finish the job before she could take someone else with her.

Especially if the ‘someone’ she was after seemed to be him. In his momentary distraction, she’d managed to grab his arm and yank it towards her, and panic thrummed in Emilio’s chest. His family’s lineage might have granted him immunity from vampirism, but if this zombie bit him? He’d be another kind of thing that didn’t stay dead when it died. And that was the worst thing he could think of. Slayers weren’t supposed to panic. His mother told him that Cortezes especially were meant to be immune from such useless emotions. But panic was exactly what Emilio felt in that moment. He yanked his arm out of her grip, balance thrown off slightly with the desperation of it.

—

Feeling her snack being yanked away from him, Mackenzie let out an angry growl. She hated having to fight for her food, but if that’s what he wanted, that’s what he’d get. So with little effort, she found herself shoving the heels of her hands into his chest as hard as she could, knocking him off. And when she was free from the weight of him bearing down on her, she managed to finally roll to her stomach, so she could climb to her feet once more.

Mackenzie stumbled a bit as she adjusted to being upright again, and when she was good to go, she instinctively started moving towards him once more with her arms outstretched ready for a tasty treat. He might have been giving her a fight, but he was pretty meaty and looked like a stick of beef jerky, which only seemed to make her mouth water a disgusting combination of the deer she had just been eating, a bug here and there, and some blood.

— 

Hands smacked hard against his chest, knocking him off the zombie and stealing the air from his lungs. She was stronger like this, he knew; well-fed, she might not have been much of a match for him, though he would have had no reason to even try to fight her then. But like this? He was pretty sure he felt one of his ribs shift in a way it shouldn’t have with that shove. This could end poorly for him. This could end with her killing him, or worse — biting him and leaving him to a fate no slayer wanted to face upon his death. 

Luckily, she was slow-moving. If she’d been faster to get up, Emilio might not have been able to recover from the shove before she got to her feet. Fortunately, though, he managed to scramble up as she made her way over. His knife had been lost in the scuffle — he could see it laying uselessly a few feet away — so he yanked another from his pocket. Smaller, duller, but it’d do in a pinch. He let her get in close before slicing at her outstretched hands, trying to duck around her to get behind her. That’d put him in a much better position to saw her head off, he figured.

—

Mack’s slow demeanor was the one thing working against her. He had already climbed to his feet and was slicing at her all while she continued to inch closer. The dull blade had cut into her graying flesh, but she could barely feel it. All she had on her mind was food, and that he was. However, his ducking and bobbing around was making it hard for her to grab him, and before she had the chance to snatch him up, he was behind her.

Looking from side to side, Mackenzie let out another growl of anger and frustration. She was determined to eat this man. He was right there, and she wasn’t going to let him get away no matter how much effort it took. But the more energy she used, the hungrier she became. The deer and hiker, she had previously consumed, had already started wearing off after the fall and hard shove she had given to the slayer, and if she didn’t eat sooner or later, it wasn’t going to be good for the next victim that came along.

—

Behind her now, Emilio was in a much better position. If he hadn’t dropped his sharper blade in the scuffle, this would be a very simple matter of slicing her head off and moving on with his day, ignoring the faint hint of guilt that would inevitably follow the whole ordeal. As it was, though, he was stuck with the smaller knife. He could get the blade at her neck, but it’d take time and it’d be risky. Still… it was less risky than sending her off to eat someone else, wasn’t it? 

Mind made up, he came up behind her and put an arm around her throat to hold her in place, bringing the blade up with the other. This would be, unfortunately, painful for the both of them. He was going to have to saw at her throat, and she was going to be thrashing and moving all the while. And he still had those teeth to worry about, still had to avoid being bitten unless he wanted to deal with… things he didn’t even want to think about having to deal with. But he could do this. He was sure he could do this.

—

The tight grip on her neck had surprised her. Mackenzie started thrashing around and gasping for air instinctually despite not needing it. She was chomping downward trying her hardest to reach his arm and sink her teeth into his flesh, but the angle she was at left her no options. Instead, she found herself trapped. Was this going to be the end for her? Was she going to have her head sawed off by a dull blade at the hands of some person she’d never met before?

She continued to buck around like a trapped bull at a rodeo. But couldn’t get him off, eventually falling backwards onto him. Squirming around, Mackenzie growled and grunted. Her legs kicked and flailed, but there was no use. Still she refused to give up. She was trapped like an animal in a cage that couldn’t get free.

—

She was bucking and squirming and making it difficult to get a good angle. His knife found her throat once, twice, three times, but it was knocked aside every time and he was forced to start over. Zombies regenerated so quickly that things like this needed to be done all at once, otherwise they’d heal before you could end them. And it was difficult to do it all at once with the dull knife and her thrashing. And still, Emilio’s ego told him that he could do it. Still, he was convinced he just needed to keep trying.

And then, the world tilted beneath him and he was on the ground with her on top of him. His head smacked against the dirt hard, his bad leg twisting at an uncomfortable angle with the initial force of her fall backwards. The force of it loosened his grip, making it easier for her to break free, and the impact jarred him.

—

Mackenzie squirmed around like a cat being held the wrong way and forced her way out of the man’s grip. With a grunt, she rolled to the side, her elbow unintentionally coming back to knock her attacker in the little Emilio’s  with extra force because of how extreme and exaggerated her movements had become as a hungry, mindless creature of the night. But the thwack to the boys had given her the chance she needed to drag herself forward and then push herself up onto her feet.

Though she had still been hungry, her one functioning brain cell had told her to leave Stranger Danger and find food elsewhere, and that’s what she had decided to do. Shambling forward, wounded and winded by the fight with the slayer, Mackenzie shuffled off the main path and found herself walking aimlessly into the nearby woods, which somehow, eventually would lead her back into town and onto some other unsuspecting victim.

—

Emilio grunted as the zombie’s elbow landed between his legs, the pain incapacitating him momentarily. You could train for a lot of things, but… well, some things hurt a little too much to power through, even if there was no real damage done. His grip on the knife loosened, and the zombie got to its feet. He thought, almost amused, that this being how he died was a little embarrassing. 

But, rather than killing him, the zombie shuffled away. Emilio lay where she left him, looking up at the sky for a moment. His body ached, the various injuries he’d earned throughout the fight making themselves known. He could get up, could run after her, but he doubted he’d be successful. Even a shuffling zombie could outrun him when his leg had had enough. He’d track the zombie down later, he decided. He’d put her out of her misery.

He just needed a minute first.

[primaverea]

bitches get stitches.

trigger warning: domestic violence.

Coppery and salty across his mouth, blood pools and wells in a cut just inside Emilio’s lower lip. The cause; a backhanded slap that had knocked him clean off his feet. It’s not exactly how he’d expected the confrontation of his boyfriend cheating on him to go. If anyone should have been sporting a busted lip, it should have been Stefan, who’d pushed the smaller man outside the hotel room (that Emilio had paid for) with his bag strewn open at his feet.

He'd come to Milan just two days before Stefan was supposed to head back to Dresden, for good. The man’s working visa had finally come to an end after a year of being in and out of Italy, and – well, whatever the hell the two of them had going on.

At first, it’d been sunshine, flowers, secret kisses around corners and stupid pet names like Stefanovski. In the end, black eyes and tears, lots of tears, and derogatory words being thrown around like cunt. The German man wasn’t worth dog food scraps, but he’d been Emilio’s first. His first love, his first boyfriend and someone he had even considered a friend. So, even when he’d been flung into walls and cursed at, he could never find the strength in himself to leave.

Moments before the hit had landed, Emilio had confronted Stefan about him hanging out with a woman that Emilio’s own friends had seen Stefan kissing, in some piazza late one night before he’d arrived in Milan. The news had made him violently ill and even though part of him knew that saying something would end in a brutal screaming match, Emilio wanted to give Stefan the benefit of the doubt. Again, as he always had, without paying mind to his better judgement.

Instead of coming clean, Stefan had decided to settle with ‘if you want to act like a bitch, I’ll treat you like one,’ and dealt one of his harshest blows yet. Not only because the force had rocked his entire body into the ground, but because Emilio finally understood that Stefan had never loved him in the way he so wholly had.

let the light in At your back door yelling 'cause I wanna come in

Sobs wrack his frame as he knocks on the door over and over again, loud and harsh despite the time nearing 2AM. “Please, Stefan, just open the fucking door! It’s so late, just let me in so I can sleep and leave in the fucking morning!” His English is heavily accented but he makes do as his fist comes down on the wood again and again.

turn your light on Look at us, you and I, back at it again

“Qual è il problema? Cos'è tutto questo rumore?” A voice comes from a room the other side of the hall, an Italian woman in a robe pulled tight around her with a frown on her face. Milan was supposedly the city of smiles – you could be fined $100 for frowning –but all Emilio had done since he’d gotten to Milan was cry.

“Sorry, my–” what was he? “…friend won’t open the door and I’ve left some things inside.” He lies, wiping at his face, but he knows how he looks to her. Like a batshit crazy foreigner, with his blonde hair a mess on his head and eyes almost swollen shut from all the crying he’d done.

She takes a contemplative moment before she responds, as if weighing out what scene was unfolding before her, an exasperated sigh coming out as she shoves hair behind her ears. “Cazzo... Call the reception and shut up then, or I’ll call the police.” She huffs, before shutting the door hard behind her.

The slam makes him wince with his shoulders, and the silence that follows is deafening. He’s alone in the hallway again and the tears continue to roll down hot over his cheeks. “Please, Stefan.” He mumbles, trying the doorhandle one last time as the last shred of dignity leaves his body.

Only silence fills the space.

-

“Emilio? Stai bene? Sono le due del mattino...” His mother grumbles through sleep from the other end of the line. Hearing her voice is enough to spark another crying fit as he sits on the curb just outside of the hotel, and he’s suddenly very thankful that it’s a weekday. Not many people are out to witness the lowest point of his life.

He’s silent for a long moment despite the questions on the other end, so his crying can’t be heard, because he doesn’t want to worry her. “I’m okay. I’m sorry for calling so late, but can you…” He swallows down a sob and takes a breath before trying to speak again, “…wake papa and tell him to come and get me? Per favore, mama. Right now. I want to come home.”

-

Emilio loves his parents for many reason but especially because they don’t question him. Not even as his father pulls up to see the bloodied lip and the distraught look on his face some hours later. Not even as his father rubs his back continuously as he cries with his head tucked between his knees for the entire trip back to Monterosso Al Mare.

Pick you up around quarter to two Usually we got nothin' to do

The only thing his dad, Antonio, asks is “Is it over? Whatever it is, is it done, Emilio?”  

A weakened nod is enough to get the message across. It’s over. He doesn’t love me, and he never did. You don’t hurt the people you love. Not like this.

It’s over, it’s over, it’s over.

And the words resonate inside his chest hard enough to make his ribs reverberate to the point he feels like throwing up. There’s no food in his stomach to vomit, so he spends the ride choking around tears that at some point seem to stop coming.

Until they start like clockwork all over again when his mother greets the two of them at the front door, a look of shock settling onto her graceful features as she sees a bruised, bloody mouth. “Emilio, who…” But she doesn’t finish her sentence as her own eyes well with tears, and Antonio gives her a look from over Emilio’s shoulder that translates to something like; ‘I don’t know, he wouldn’t say.’

They expected that much from their son after all; always secretive about the wrong things so not to worry his, supportive, loving parents. This was no exception, seeing as they didn’t know he was gay let alone the fact that he’d had a boyfriend who had been downright abusive for several months.

So, as they normally do, they wait in silence for him to come to them, always kind and encouraging and never overly forceful, yet ready to spring to action. But as the days of being bedridden and force fed slowly out of his heartache, his parents realise he’ll never mention it – and they never ask.

Not even when he’s finally gotten back to being okay, and then suddenly breaks down in the kitchen one morning, a mess of snot and tears. All because Stefan had decided he wanted to get back together, and when Emilio had shut him down – which had taken every ounce of strength he could muster – he’d turned to all of Emilio’s friends and chopped and changed the story to make Emilio the bad guy. The one who’d cheated first.

Look at us, you and me back at it again

He thinks it finally over when he blocks Stefan's number and all the bullshit he’d been spurting, but then a new number texts him. A new email messages him, and no matter how many numbers and email's he churns through, he’s forced to change it time and time again, until he’s almost strangely missing it on the days where Stefan doesn’t message. As though he's been conditioned to expect them, to want them.

They continue to come,

and they never stop.

They won’t stop until I’m dead, Emilio thinks. He won’t stop until he makes me suffer one last time.