Vampire Romance - Blog Posts

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vampire x crime scene cleaner!reader | 16.1k

you're a crime scene cleaner who happens across an advertisement for a mansion housekeeper in exchange for room and board. it's close to work, close to your university, and an easy job. the ultimate package. right away, you notice the owner's beauty as well as his eccentricities, but decide to commit to it. the spiral into depravity and debauchery begins when you're tasked with cleaning the site of a savage murder, solidifying you as a irreplaceable treasure.

warnings; dead dove do not eat; explicit non-con, extreme dubon, sadomasochism, blood play, overstimulation, choking, cigarette burns, smoking, hypnotism, theological themes, exploration of morality, gunshot wounds, extreme & graphic depictions of body horror + gore + grotesque details, graphic depictions of crime scene cleanup, possibly inaccurate depictions of crime scene cleanup (not looking for feedback on it), obsessive & possessive behaviors, heavy prose & details, the entire work is allegorical, murder, vampire is written as a monster bc that's what they are lmao, dividers are used between scenes

reposted from 2kmps; previously proofread by @ceruleansol

I shouldn't have to say it, but I will: nothing in this oneshot is indicative of my personal viewpoints. it is entirely fictitious.

this was a project that took me quite a bit of time to do, so I would be immensely appreciated if you'd please reblog + interact with it!! I'd love to hear your feedback!!

Another internet search bore fruit.

The image bouncing back at you from your phone had been hastily taken with a tremble in your hand, all the while launching a few too many cautious looks across your shoulder to either end of the dim, long hallway making up part of the second floor. There wasn't any particular rationale for your apprehension and busy eyes but the belief the mansion owner wouldn't be too pleased to see you taking pictures of his valuables rather than cleaning them.

That fear hadn't stopped you from reverse image searching a good couple of curiosities over the widening gap of time you had been living there.

Tonight was a Chalmette table vase displayed on a pedestal in the hall; brassy gold gilding cradled a somewhat drab white bloom that reached high and sprouted open to a hollow inside. Similar surviving articles went for thousands.

You totaled the prices of everything so far as enough to outright buy a house on the more modest side of town.

There was a daring thought that loomed in the back of your mind, an ugly little thing that told you one or two missing antiques wasn't any big deal. He wouldn't miss them, let alone even notice they were gone, because he was the strangest man you had ever met.

Four months ago, he had only ever introduced himself by the name Montague, letting an anticipatory stillness hang in the air while you waited for him to finish. He never did, handsome features lifting as his dark eyes thinned and smile inched higher. He had you in a tight handshake.

"I enjoyed reading the resume you sent in with your response to my advertisement." He had traces of an accent intact but had cleverly adapted to one more common to the area. "You're the first person I've come across wanting the room who's done that. It really stood out to me. A crime scene cleaner? Must be a difficult job."

"I know it was probably overkill, but I think this will be perfect for me." You were led to a suede armchair, his hand anchoring onto your shoulder to lower you into the seat. He sat across from you in something similar, one leg crossing. "I recently had to move out of my other place, and the university will be about an hour closer. My work won't be as far of a drive, either. I—I, uh, clean some gross stuff, so taking care of your house won't be anything."

Even after that spiel, Montague never let his smile slip. Rather, it seemed to widen as though delighted by your oversharing. He looked like a man basking in glee over a rare find, an offer he couldn't possibly turn away.

"All amenities in the house are yours." This was after he showed you to one of the rooms on the second floor: a capacious, well-dressed space behind a red door at the end of the hall. "As long as you listen to a few rules and keep things clean, we should have a very amicable... cohabitation."

You thought it was an odd choice of wording. "Okay. Well, what do I need to know?"

"No guests." It was immediate, his tone suddenly a touch edgy, razored, unyielding. "Not unless I give you explicit permission beforehand. I keep many important valuables; they're very dear to me. Also, do not invite anyone in unless I am there."

Again, odd, but it was his house.

"Sure," you said agreeably, having half the thought to write down these peculiarities of his. "What next?"

He was set on your shoulder, reaching out to pull a thin, frayed thread off of your jumper. "The downstairs—as in, the basement—is my personal space. If I need you down there, I will ask you for you to go down. You can go anywhere else in the house, on the property. None of it concerns me."

"Why the basement, though?" It felt damaging to press a question like that so early on, but you figured it was innocent enough. "This house is so big that we could be on the same floor and hardly see each other."

The muscles around his mouth twitched slightly, only once. You still noticed it. Noted: he didn't like to be questioned. "Sorry, I'm not trying to-"

"It's cold downstairs." he injected, shifting to look around the room as though taking in the newness of it as well. "I make sure it stays comfortable all year, all throughout the house, but the cold suits me best."

With how downright frosty his skin felt in that handshake earlier—on a mild day in mid-spring—you thought that explanation checked out. He must have only just come up to greet you at the front entrance.

You tried to forget the feeling. "Alright. Next?"

"Oh," he restrained an unseemly laugh, using one hand to crowd into a pocket on his dark blazer, "there is nothing else, at least nothing pertinent. It's my understanding that we're both quite busy, so this would be the current arrangement unless something changes."

What changes? You wanted to ask, thwarted to silence when he revealed some sort of silver thing pinched between his fingers with a thick handkerchief. It was a dainty-seeming contraption with chains linking several old skeleton keys at the end. The fabric he used to hold the clip concealed all of the elegant tracery that made up its shape.

"Traditionally, this is called a chatelaine. It’s something I’ve modified for you to get around the house. It’ll be easier to clean." Montague said, fast to force the mess of cold silver and chains into your palm, rubbing down his fingers with the handkerchief afterward. "The smallest key is to your room. The largest one opens the doors to go outside, so don't lose that. One of them is meant for doors in the basement—can't recall which."

He could see the wariness behind your eyes, a worrying crease forming in your brow. "This house has been around for a long time. I've just never gotten around to modernizing the locks."

Other questions came to you, but he hardly acted interested in entertaining them. You let him swivel on black soles, stopping him just as he reached the doorway.

"Why haven't other housekeepers worked out?"

Montague let his fingers rest on glazed woodwork framing the threshold, drumming out a soothing rhythm while considering an answer for all of two seconds. "In short? They couldn't follow the rules. Now, let me show you to the yard."

Afterward, the so-called cohabitation had become a seamless blend for you both. You had learned right away that Montague wasn't one for idle chatter and niceties without purpose. He had deviated from it once, on move-in day, to reassure you that the mysterious nature of your life schedule and odd hours you were called to a clean scene wouldn’t be a source of concern.

Shortly after settling your things around the house, the reason for his amenable attitude was a little more apparent. Several times a month, you would be pulled from your forensics projects to the landing at the end of the hall, piqued by fresh voices always indistinguishable at first, and folded your waist over the railing to see down.

The top of his head, hair short, impeccably styled, and ash-brown, was the first thing you noticed, followed by someone on his arm. Sometimes a woman, sometimes a man—always conventionally attractive, always utterly enraptured by him. It struck a nerve with you once or twice, finding your thoughts swimming bitterly: Of course a man who looked like him would go for types like that!

Why did he act so much differently with them than you?

He wasn't nearly as friendly and affable as he was making himself out to be.

You stopped peeking down on him after an instance where his eyes shot straight up, pinning you where you stood. He simpered at you before leading his companion away to the basement, and that was it. You never saw them leave and never bothered to ask.

Tonight was different, however, both in the way you nearly toppled the two-figure Chalmette vase off its pedestal with flighty fingers and a duster, and the echo of a scream piercing the hollow halls to you. It stayed in one spot on the first floor, luring you down the center staircase with your duster clutched to you like a sword. At that point, your heart bursting in your ears was louder than the agonized cries resonating around the corner.

You looked around, spine wrapped in dread as another scream, weak, garbled, and wet, came from the basement, and then nothing at all. It was soundless in the house. Distantly, one of the clocks mounted in the kitchen archway toned onward. You followed its beat with the shuffle of your feet.

Hello, hello? Those words clung tightly in your throat, yet you were too afraid to announce yourself like that. Still, nothing came as you slowly pulled at the basement doorknob, brass and freezing and unlocked. The stairway plunging down inside was filled with inky black, so dark you couldn't get your eyes to adjust to it.

Is everything okay down there? Hello? Hello? You ran the imaginary chatter through your mind, lips sealed but trembling during your slow descent, the path now illuminated by white glow from your phone. At the bottom, the stone stairs turned into seamless gray marble and red wetness crawling toward the soles of your slippers.

"What–" You gasped, taking a step back while flicking the flashlight higher, deeper into the basement. The vivid red puddle glistened in your light, widening around a motionless figure with pale skin—a blonde woman you didn't know. Her face pointed up at the ceiling, twisted in terror, black tracks of mascara curving along her cheeks.

She was naked on the floor, surrounded by her own blood, something you didn't have to look at twice. Your breaths grew harsh, taking in the sight of her neck, or lack thereof; there wasn't much left of it. Only a few stringy bits of sinew and muscle kept it from a full decapitation, and blood still pulsed out in spurts from mangled arteries and veins.

A motion nearby made your nape prickle. It was like feet padding across wet pavement after a fresh rain, except this smell carried the malodor of rust and something sour under your nose.

You settled a pillar of light on the source, capturing the view of Montague standing amid the bloodbath, sickly skin bare and saturated in rich crimson.

Something was wrong with him, came an instantaneous, instinctual reaction the moment his head spun toward you, catching pale eyeshine in the white light.

The bones in his jaw cracked as the length of it began to recede into the semblance of something more man to you, rows of jagged teeth retracting into the depths of his throat until only a pair of long incisors remained.

Montague skimmed the tip of his tongue along his lower lip, smiling at you affectedly, saying as though it were some trife thing, "She started screaming."

You were gone and out of the basement after that, clearing the woman's body and kicking away the slippers on your feet when they squelched with blood. Montague said something after you when shrieks ripped out of your lungs and reverberated through the house. You winced as the basement door let out a hollow rattle when he collided with it, heart matching the rhythm of the skin on your feet slapping against old marble, thoughts disarrayed, frantic the closer you got to the front door.

Almost there. Almost there. Almost there. Oh God! Oh God! Oh God! You were panting in unison with the vicious chants.

The doorknob was in your hand. The door was open—and it was thrown shut with the force of your body thrust against it, fingers wrenched off of the handle and enveloped in Montague's cold fingers as he pushed himself flush into you.

You felt his palm clamp around your mouth, whittling your screams into panicked whimpers, nostrils flaring with your ragged breaths.

"Ah, no, no." He had to stoop his neck to talk into your ears. "Shh, shh, shhh. Far too loud. I don't like screaming. Shh, shh, shhhh."

Tears seared red behind your eyes, making you think you could follow the warmth down your face as they filled the crevices in his hand. "It's really, truly a pity. She was a pretty one but far too smart. I'm usually decent at picking out the ones who wouldn't suspect anything or, at least, catching them before they try to scream.

"You'll have to forgive me. I swear to you I'm not ordinarily that messy. I prefer to keep everything tidy, especially so you don't have to go down there. After all, you're already so busy. You're already doing so much. I can't recall when I last saw you relax."

The weight of his palm softened, a wordless agreement that you honored with continued silence as he used that arm to lean against the door. His voice shifted around your head to your other ear. "That's it. Just wonderful. There's no need for screaming, is there? It's only the two of us."

"Are—are..." You couldn't get it out, lips and throat suddenly sucked dry. "Don't kill me, please. Please. Please."

His chest quaked while a subdued, eerily delighted laugh hissed through his lips. "Kill you? Oh, no, no, no. Never. How could I ever kill you when you're so remarkable? My home has never looked so beautiful and lived in. I'm enjoying how it looks with you in it."

You wilted away from his lips sinking to a spot below your ear, now taking far too much notice of his erection curving up along your lower back. It felt disgustingly wrong to wonder whether the violence and blood turned him on, or it was you and your fear. The man wasn't even human; that much was clear.

"What are you?" There was no shortage of daring questions in your arsenal. Montague was beginning to find the charm in them.

"That's quite difficult for me to answer." He let his chin lay on your shoulder. "I've been called many things over the centuries. I suppose the closest anyone has ever gotten is vampire, but even that's not quite right. You're free to guess as much as you'd like, though."

He was satisfied when you didn't, freeing the weight off of his arm to slide his hand under the hem of your shirt, fingertips still slick with that woman's blood as he explored your navel. You were too aware of the roundness of his fingernails stepping across your flesh, sometimes pressing deep, and other times a light touch you needed to scratch. His throat vibrated against your shoulder.

"What are you thinking? I'd love to hear it." He wanted to devour your fear in more ways than just feeling you wince. "Well? Tell me."

"I want to go." Go? Where could you possibly go that he couldn’t find you? If he ripped out the side of a woman's neck, he could track you down.

He leaned his cheek into your ear again, relishing the warmth that spread into him. "Where would you go? Who would you tell? Humor me, where is the first place you'd go?"

"The police," you said.

Montague let out a pleased hum. "Of course. It only makes sense to report a terrible scene such as that to them. Forensics and the police play together often, don't they?"

Your nod was weak.

"I know how hard you've been studying, how much stress you're under to commit to your degree, your work—to me." His hand crept along to your stomach, fingers splaying wide across the protective layer of skin and fat. "Let's say they were to find something I left behind. Who becomes a suspect in their eyes when they learn that I have someone who tidies up after me? Who knows the dirty insides of cleaning up anything and everything?"

You were starting to panic, fitfully struggling against his body. It's like he was made of stone. "They wouldn't accuse me of murdering anyone."

"Haven't you seen the news lately? Are you so sure?" he said derisively. "No, perhaps you're right. Maybe you'd be fortunate, and they wouldn't have your head for murder, but they would certainly try to peg you with something else. As an accomplice, maybe? And that's assuming that I don't disappear and let rip you apart.

"Can you imagine it? Can you feel your heart break at the very thought of losing it all? Your degree? Your job? Safety? The world is cruel, darling. You'd never have another moment of peace or anonymity. Anywhere you'd go, you'd be found, every alias sullied with your sins. All because you decided to speak up about it."

You knew he meant to send you downstairs to do something about the mess, spend hours scrubbing and mopping until what had once been there was a secret that thickened your tongue and made it hard to swallow. No one would ever find out, but you would carry it in every waking thought until, one morning, the cute barista on Market Street had an eerie semblance to that dead woman, and the light roast in your hand suddenly looked so red.

"Thump. Thump. Thump." Montague mocked the heavy thrum of your heart behind your ribs, his cold fingers skimming your nipples before resting over your sternum. "You can go if you'd like, but I'll find you. I'll hear your little heart until it bursts and drag you right back here. You're mine."

The push of his body gradually faded away, giving your chest the room to expand, leaving you to gulp quivering, greedy breaths that didn't stop even as the pads of his feet grew distant.

He called back to you, "Give me ten minutes or so, and then come down."

You were already partway through the front door with your car keys to pop the trunk when, floating like a spectre's moans in still night air, his voice reached out once more, "You may want to clean up yourself first. You have blood all over your face."

༺ ♰ ༻

A damp towel came before your descent back into the basement. In tow on your shoulders were three bags of absorbent, the fancy stuff hospitals liked to use to throw on puke and piss and anything else they just lazily wanted to sweep around. It worked for blood in smaller quantities, blood that was still wet, anyway.

The woman hadn't been dead long enough for her body fluids to dry, so you didn't anticipate needing anything except the basics stowed in your car trunk.

You weren't sure what you expected to see down there, noticing the lights were turned on high, fully illuminating the gray marble, the furthest reaches of the blood puddle with your slippers saturated dark red and ruined. What came as a shock was the woman's dead eyes and shredded neck being nowhere in sight. Montague had moved her body but to where?

For some reason, you were drawn to ridiculous spots like the walls, ceiling, and tiny cramped corners that he could have feasibly stuffed her in. There was no sickly trail of blood leading any which way, droplets only reaching as far as the stairs and first landing where you had been pursued—nothing else.

Where did he take her? Part of you was ready to turn a blind eye to all of this because you knew you would have to in order to keep everything. If you kept your head low and groveled a little bit, maybe he'd get bored and leave you alone, biding you the time you needed to finish your degree. But, that'd be two years of this.

You weren't sure you could stomach it.

As you moved granules of absorbent through blood with coarse bristles from the kitchen broomstick—shifting the puddle more than the actual absorbent—you wondered if he could hear your heart now from wherever he was.

You thought about a lot of things while letting your eyes roam the space. It was enormous, taking up the entire underside of the house, outfitted impressively with mahogany accents, sprawling bookshelves, armchairs, and loveseats pulled tight in leather and velvet. Across the room was a disheveled bed, creamy sateen sheets in a luscious heap but otherwise undisturbed.

To the adjacent end of this expanse were two doors you didn't notice at first, one a little taller than yourself in height, about as wide as any normal arm span, and looked old, so old that everything else was too new. Even from where you stood, you knew it'd take a skeleton key. The other door was more coherent with the rest of the basement, cleaner but certainly still part of the house's original construction.

By the time Montague had returned, you already had much of the ordeal pitched into a biohazard bag with some trace remnants putting you on your knees to scrub away. You hadn't realized he was even there until the tips of his shoes—brown leather loafers with a scalloped tassel near the toes—appeared in your peripheral, sending you launching back onto your hocks.

"This work is spectacular. I knew I had a good feeling giving that room to you." he said with a beguiling smile. All of the blood was gone; he was clean in a dark dressing robe with black trousers, a look you hated that you saw as alluring. "Don't forget to clean the floors upstairs. We made quite a mess there as well."

"What happened to that woman?" You were asking your pesky questions again. Montague wasn't so sure he found them as charming now, but you were still a prize.

You leaned away as he crouched in front of you, nearly risking the soles of his shoes in the blood and hydrogen peroxide. For the first time since meeting, you kept eye contact and saw that his reached a depth you didn't think could be possible for a human. He wasn't touching you, yet it felt like he had you caged, trapped in a vise that held you tight.

He did touch you then, grazing the side of your face with a thumb. Suddenly, he brought it to his lips and licked it as he rose to full height.

"You still had some blood just there on your cheek." There was an armchair a few feet away that he dropped into, withdrawing a gold compact from a chest pocket on his way down. "Don't worry. I wouldn't ask you to carry away the bodies. I'm not that Roman."

"That's not what I asked." you rejoined.

Montague tucked a cigarette between his lips, igniting it with a match he kept inside the compact. His first few puffs looked like they calmed him as he crossed a leg and settled deeper into the leather. "You shouldn’t expect answers to things you don’t need to know—or want to.”

But he humored you with a slight lean of his head towards the old door far away. "The original owner of this house was ingenious and built tunnels that were used to shuffle people in and out. Mistresses. Servants. More unsavory things—you must remember the era. At any rate, it stretches beyond the house and some ways off. I do not recommend ever going inside."

You understood now why you never saw any of the dates he brought home leave. And you believed every bit of his warning.

It inspired you to move away from the grim reality dwelling beyond that old door. You hovered over the same spot, drenching the floor with more of the disinfectant, grasping for a distraction. "I didn't know vampires could smoke. Isn't blood enough for you?”

Montague flicked his cigarette over an ashtray beside his chair. "Well, we all have our vices. Mine just happens to be five or six of these a day. Keeps enough of the edge off so you get to sleep at night."

Something about that comment made the entire stretch of the basement feel so confining—claustrophobic, even. Your back was wide open to it, to his ravening gaze and leather toe turning fluid circles as though to pace himself before lunging.

"I have class in six hours." You finished the job by tying off the bag. "I'd like to get the upstairs done and take a shower."

"Of course. Try to get some sleep, you've had quite a night." He didn't move to see you out. "Oh, and leave the bag. I'll dispose of it."

༺ ♰ ༻

Meredith Nimu died approximately twenty-three days ago after a stroke left her immobilized in her favorite armchair. Her body wasn't peeled away from the murky-green polyester until day twenty-four, following enough neighbor complaints about a bunch of rats dying in the vents.

Getting rid of the chair was half the battle in this case, something that Meredith's overzealous, recently divorced daughter spouted off as sacrilegious. She insisted that the carpet cleaner she used for her obese dogs with raw patches on their legs could do it all. Your supervisor had been inflectionless when telling her it didn't work like that.

One of your teammates, a middle-aged black man affectionately nicknamed “Hoss” had unceremoniously slammed the apartment door shut and flipped the lock so the daughter's rancorous eruptions were somewhat contained outside. The other half of the duo responsible for pitching the chair, T.J., a white man who could never tan, wheezed out a laugh as he labored a hard bristle brush through the gunk left behind from Meredith's decay.

"Boss ain't gonna be happy about that." T.J. couldn't commit to the act of a brownnoser even if he wanted to. A couple more chortles rattled through his respirator. They were infectious, ridiculous sounds that coaxed similar from Hoss when he rejoined the effort to get the job done and over with.

You could still hear the daughter on the other side of the door, never once allowing your supervisor a word in edgewise. A part of you wanted to pity her, perhaps conjure up a shred of empathy for someone so completely enmeshed in the throes of grief and anger. She was clearly spiraling, her entire life yanked out from under her—and she was free-falling with nothing to catch her, no thin wire she could snag in the bend of her fingers and watch as the velocity of that cruelly, cleanly severed white tendon and bone.

Where would she fall after that? You didn't know. You didn't care. She could regain control over her life even without fingers, but what about you? No one understood how disconcerting it was to know that your survival depended on a vampire's good mood. An old woman was meant to expire, but you were young and had aspirations—yet that could be stolen from you just as quickly as a clot could kill the brain.

It wasn't fucking fair.

Hoss had called out to you repeatedly until the hard brushes stopped scratching the floor, and he and T.J. were settled back on their heels, staring at you. You were used to leveraging your commitments in life as a means to get them off your case, but even they could tell this was different.

"You've been real spacey lately." It was enough to gently reel you back to the moment, eyes unstuck from remnants of putrid matter hidden under a deluge of chemicals and soap. Now you were thinking that the landlord would probably have to replace this entire spot in the flooring. It would be an expensive fix.

"Everything okay at home?" Hoss tried again, emulating fatherly concern in his tone and sidelong stare. It was something he couldn't help since you were so similar in age to his adult kids. "I don't think I've seen you eat today. We oughta finish up here up and grab somethin' quick on the way back.”

"Sorry, yeah, it's just the usual things." They didn't know what that meant to you, but readily accepted with dour expressions masked by their respirators. "I think I saw a gyro truck down the street."

As many times as you had regurgitated the same thing when they pried into your well-being, you were surprised they still asked at all. That made it hard to wave after them as you pulled the lever to the trunk, waiting to be left alone once the job was done to stack half your weight in absorbent until the back bowed to it.

It was just past two in the morning when you were locking the front door of Montague's sprawling estate behind you. Every time you did, a part of you hesitated to seal it the whole way, as though if you did, your final traces of freedom would be stripped away entirely.

"Welcome home!" Montague came out from prowling somewhere in the shadows, seeming to materialize from the darkest parts your eyes couldn't adapt to. He was in a dressing robe again, this one forest green with gold embroidery and a burgundy handkerchief tucked away nicely in his breast pocket.

He already had a cigarette lit between his knuckles, fussing with the little stick as he went to an open window, sucked in, and expelled pungent gray smoke. "I apologize. There's a bit of a mess for you tonight. It's unlike me to be so untidy, but it shouldn't take you too long—oh, darling, don't make that face."

"Why can't you get blood from other sources, like a blood bank?" It's been on your mind for a while, but Montague had a habit of turning petulant if you asked him too much.

He was in good shape tonight, though, despite still puffing away antsily. "Where's the satisfaction in simply being given what I want? Blood banks are a finite supply, but out there"—he gestured through the open window—"there is an infinite supply from any walk of life that I so choose. Did you know that not all blood is equal?"

You sensed him at your back, awash with that same vulnerability as the night on your knees in the basement. He strolled along with you while you collected your things, examined his leftovers, which fortunately wasn't as sensational as before. It looked like a Rorschach inkblot almost, purple-red and pristine, obviously untouched for some time.

Just like that dead blonde woman, there was nothing left behind of the victim except what Montague was too careless to handle himself.

"The worst blood is what you find in hospitals or on the streets. It doesn't matter their type; it all tastes like shit." he continued, even while you worked. Just like before, he sat himself nearby and observed your process with gross fascination. "In a pinch, though, I do what I must. It doesn't matter if a man is homeless or a woman is looking for a night out. When I hear their hearts dance, that thump, thump, thump—oh, I have to have it. I can taste them through their skin, even before I sink my teeth in.

"The fear in their eyes. The ragged breaths I see in their chests, watching their bellies pulse. I like to think in those moments they know exactly what's going to happen, like little flies in a spider's web."

Montague let more smoke slither out from his lips in skinny, swirling wisps that dissipated once it touched the air. The haze of it remained, just traceable to your eye. "I always find it interesting that they all struggle, even as they're writhing in their own blood. Sometimes I'll count how long it takes for them to die."

These weren't confessions of a madman because that would imply he was human. He was treating you akin to the way an old man recounted the fondness of his flawed, flickering memories. There were sensations of joy and affection in the work he did, a true love and visceral desire for carnage and suffering that made it hard for you to stomach. A few times throughout his soliloquy, you needed to bear your weight on the kitchen broom to keep yourself from toppling from nausea.

You shouldn't have been curious. "Has anyone ever survived?"

The surrounding space grew darker, not from loss of light but from the way his lower face sunk behind the hand wielding the cigarette. You saw his smile widen through sickly appendages and faint smoke.

His response pierced straight through you. "I'm looking right at it."

Suddenly, the urge to run rushed forefront in your mind, an instinctual reaction that you had trouble wrestling over with logic. The broomstick was easily pulled from your fingers and discarded onto the floor with a reverberating clatter that made your spine race with cold needles as Montague stepped into your proximity.

You shivered against the hands slowly climbing your neck to the underside of your jaw, cradling your face as he lifted it to meet his eyes. Something was so wrong with how black they were; you didn't see a pupil, nor did your reflection stare back at you in them. It's almost as though there was nothing there at all, the dark of them growing into an abysmal chasm that made your vision cross and blur, eyelids weighing like lead when you felt him kiss you.

His lips were the same kind of cold as the rest of him but full and unrelenting, never granting you the chance to mold the kiss in any other way. Surprisingly, the taste of stale smoke on his breath was just slight, a mediocre vexation you overlooked the moment his hands started groping you under your clothes.

And you didn't think much of it when your back settled into the clean linens on your bed, skin flushed with the crisp evening air and lips mapping their way south across your stomach and navel, delving lower to your core. It was too dark in your room to see down your body at the top of Montague's head, but you felt him with your fingers, coiling pieces of his ash-brown hair to your knuckles while he pushed your thighs wide open for him.

An anxious patter swelled in your chest, a vague understanding that something was horrible about this, but you were too wrapped up in a dreamy fog to think about it. More than the resounding boom of your heart, you heard your own breaths dissolve into lewd moans and slurred pleas for him to do more, more, more.

It didn't sound like you. It didn't feel like you despite knowing that build-up in your abdomen better than most things in your body. The hands in his hair, the back bending off of the mattress like an archway, the shaking limbs, and the cries begging for more were someone else entirely up until the very moment rapture fluttered behind your eyes in searing white, body deluged in hot release that left your scalp tingling and toes curling and spend on your sheets.

"Give me more." You tasted him again, his tongue pushing hard into your mouth where those salty notes of yourself lingered on your cheeks. His silhouette melded with the rest of the room, tangible only in the way he roamed every surface of you.

Montague had shucked the clothes from both your bodies earlier, preferring to lean into the flush of heat you radiated. Everything was only skin-deep away from him; he could feel your pulse throb on his lips when he teased himself against your carotid, your radial, trailing all the way to the powerful beat of your femoral nestled there in your groin.

His teeth came close many times to piercing you, allowing him a sliver of a taste like a parched king waiting for a drop of golden wine. But half the thrill of having you around was denying himself of you, knowing well that if he were to start, then he'd never be able to stop, and he'd fully hamper your dreams of escaping.

The air smelled like you now, heavy and like damp skin and your fluids soaking into the linens. He watched your face bunch and fall apart when he split you open with his cock, hips colliding, your skin sure to bruise as his thrusts turned savage. There wasn't much left in his heart anymore. Most of it had atrophied over the centuries, and yet the sound of yours spurred him on.

He could follow the path of your blood through your body, an extensive subject he had studied and dissected at length in his lifetime. The most vulnerable spots were gorged and worked the hardest, almost glowing red through your skin for him. When he thrust a little bit harder, a little bit faster, and felt your fingertips pushing against his chest, he heard your heart be the loudest it ever had been.

"That's it. That's it. That's it." His own breaths were ragged now. The sheer exhilaration of pushing his lips deeper, hot sweat leaving a slick layer on them, and that one big artery in your neck pounding out was doing everything for him.

Your frantic pants were a close second. He could feel you unraveling, tightening around his cock until you were soundlessly writhing on the mattress, clutching anything you could bunch together. The final few thrusts he made were purposeful; they were forceful and jolted your body, a show to make sure you wouldn't forget the feeling of him inside of you.

The clean linens were sodden with cum, some still dripping out of you while you lay there, legs splayed enough so you wouldn't feel it stick to your thighs. Whatever haze had been hanging over your eyes before lifted away, leaving you ruined and exhausted on the sheets but not alone.

"You've got class in a few hours, don't you?" Montague said from above, shoulders nestled in your headboard while one leg hung off the side of the bed. He was smoking again, acting the calmest you had witnessed him. "I don't really think you're in any shape for that. Why don't you stay home today?"

You were too spent to respond to him, somehow using the occasional breaths he blew out into the vast room to lull you into a dreamless sleep.

༺ ♰ ༻

Shin Nakamura had been a selfish man in life. Mid-fifties, thinning hair, and twice divorced from women who knew better—his tenants did not. He had built a reputation on the north side of town for hidden costs and faulty appliances that were never fixed. Once or twice in the past four years you had cleaned up scenes, they came out of Nakamura's buildings in the summertime, stuck to the floor and infested with maggots and flies in different orifices.

Everyone had asked at one point, yourself included, how he was able to get away with that level of blatant cruelty and disregard—and the answer was as simultaneously simple, complex, and terrible as poverty. The north end was an area notorious for local crime and violence, but more than that, it was forgotten in favor of gentrifying other areas of the city—pretty little boutiques that'd make a splash on social media and a couple of upscale dining spots, all of those meant to change the online scales deeming an area's walkability, and therefore, profitability.

The blind eye most city commissioners turned to the north end made it an easy life for Shin to do as he pleased without many consequences despite living in the area himself. Most of everyone found it an odd sort of justice when he was discovered in his office, unrecognizable from how badly the dozens of stab wounds had disfigured his face and body. One look was enough to know that it was personal, a tenant who had received their condemnation via a neon-pink eviction letter hastily taped to an off-white door.

Only, this time, Shin chose a person backed into a corner at their breaking point. There wasn't much left to lose, yet Shin had ultimately lost it all. Rumor had it that no one sold out the tenant who committed the crime, something even the more moralistic part of yourself could fathom. These were the cases that painted a grim picture of your future in forensics and often speared to the front of your mind at the worst of times—could you really be part of the reason why a person shattered by the powers of society goes to jail?

Shin Nakamura was a terrible man, but were his crimes punishable by that sort of torture? What about the tenants who probably heard Shin screaming for help, crying in agony—were they any better than murderers themselves?

What did that mean for you? An accomplice who quietly scrubbed clean murders at a monster's behest, you allowed those people to be swallowed up by Montague under a guise of fear, or was it selfishness?

That discomfort lasted you your entire shift, like an incredibly nauseating pill with a bad smell that sat in your nose for hours. You couldn't wipe away the thoughts like you could dried blood on smoke-stained walls or lumps of serrated flesh and fat wedged between slabs of wood on the floor.

"Man, he coulda been cleaner about this." T.J. had his feet planted solidly on the middle step of a ladder, well at work with a long-handled brush pushed flat to the ceiling. The splatter had gone that far, earning a few awestruck coos from him and Hoss earlier. "It would've made our lives easier."

It was a normal joke. You'd laughed at the exact same one many times before, even finessed your own commentary in there on occasion because the dead can't sue, and a murderer had no rights—but now, you thought it'd taste bad on your tongue.

The two hulking men noticed, far sharper than you gave them credit for. Or maybe you were just worse at hiding things than you thought. They didn't allude to anything until everyone was packed up in the van, dried from the sweaty protective suits and summer heat by the AC.

"Listen, it ain't my business, and I swear I've been trying my best not to ask." There was a furtive look linked between Hoss and T.J.; it was something they had talked about when you weren't around. "That guy you're living with. He isn't doing anything to you, right? You used to talk about him all the time in the beginning. Haven’t heard a peep about him in ages. God, you're not living in your car, are you?"

From the outside in, you weren't doing much to try to embellish fancy stories and reasons onto your drastic change over the months. You simply let it be and navigated every day with the hope you'd remember where you were going with your head down. It probably didn't look too good to a paternal man like Hoss, and to T.J., who had several younger siblings.

"No, it's not him—" But, of course, it really was and everything surrounding his cruelty, everything he made you do, and what you never refuted. "I'm just perpetually exhausted. I'm sure you've heard that from Sylvie and Deshaun while they've been in uni."

"All the damn time." Hoss beamed, chest perked a little higher with the mention of his children. It wasn't enough to diffuse the tension lingering in the van, however. "Just know, I'd do for you what I'd do for my babies—put the fear of God in that man. If he puts a finger on you, you let me know."

T.J. gave an agreeable hum, fingers sticking to the steering wheel as he moved them around, making a turn down some street. "We'll catch him by surprise and everything. I'll call in a couple favors, grab a few shovels and bags of cement from my dad's place. It's all good."

For some reason, their entire spiel only spiked your uneasiness, and suddenly you were far too aware of your bladder. It was enough initiative for T.J. to floor the gas and get back to headquarters, giving you the chance to break away and race the remnants of daylight all the way home.

༺ ♰ ༻

It had never happened before, but you managed to catch Montague by surprise when he walked through the front door to find you standing there in the foyer. The kitchen broom wrapped in your hands was a nasty ploy, along with the look you cast between him and a young man not any older than yourself. Again, just like all the others, you didn't recognize him. Montague's victims were fast, fleeting fixations for him, none worthy of names or an identity in his eyes. You suspected this guy was much the same.

Montague's bewilderment was swept away by a smile and laxing posture. He had settled back into his element. "You're home early today. I didn't expect to see you until much later. Not much to the scene, I assume?"

"It was pretty bad." A certain stiffness trailed on the end of your words, letting them echo through the hall and hang in the cool evening air. The young man was fast to perceive that tension: the tightness in your shoulders, fingers subtly wringing against the cracked wooden broom. Montague's anticipative smile climbed higher the longer he looked at you.

Would it be such a bad thing to turn around and pretend you had never seen him come home with that other man? You considered doing it, hiding upstairs and using your headphones until everything seeping through turned into an amalgamation of ambient noise that meant nothing to you, and you willed away the guilt like you'd always done.

In that moment, you thought about Meredith Nimu's apoplectic daughter, a woman so embittered by her own suffering that she was foul and relentless to anyone she crossed paths with. You thought about Shin Nakamura, a greedy, pitiless man who'd rather let coroners scrape up his tenant's remains rather than grant them mercy while they were alive and had been left in pieces because of it.

You thought of them and all their wickedness and edged your gaze towards the young man still standing in the doorway with his hand holding it ajar, clean fingernails picking at chipping paint, just steps from outside. "I think you should leave."

Run! Run! You'd better run away as fast as you can! Nothing would stop Montague from keeping his prey there, if that's what he chose to do. He did the opposite of that, and that was, simply, nothing at all. No pretty blandishments, nor a mouthful of teeth. Rather, now, he was particularly piqued by what you were trying to do.

To the young man, he had meddled into something rather egregious, probably convinced it was extramarital. You battled a surge of pride blooming inside you, shifting your chest a little higher, anchoring your spine back into your body.

"Don't come back here." You didn't need to say anything else. He was gone after pinching out a look of disgust towards Montague, tutting at him with his upper teeth showing through a curled lip.

Nothing happened for a while, not until the front door was secured after his departure. You were left to that responsibility, triple-checking the lock, while Montague ambled deeper into the house, but not too far away as you could follow the leisurely path by his heel strike. There was a rhythm in how he moved. It was deliberate, as though mimicking something.

It took you five paces to figure out he was miming your heartbeat, and he only stopped once it quickened in your chest. He appeared from around the corner, still taking his time reaching you, toying with some trinkets displayed on shelves built into alcoves throughout the lower floor.

You couldn't explain what you were feeling at that moment. Of the thousands—maybe millions—of victims Montague had taken in the previous times, you had just deprived him of one. That man would continue living, and he would tell his friends tomorrow about the weird night he had, and he would never have to be grateful that you saved him from a hellish death.

Yes, oh yes. Even as Montague approached you, carried by his deft gait with both halves of his gold compact open in his palm, you couldn't help but be in complete awe of yourself. A life continued outside of this mausoleum, and it was all because of you. You were entirely different from Meredith Nimu's daughter and Shin Nakamura, and, for once, your hands weren't sullied by bleach, blood, and body matter.

All that heaviness you had been carrying was suddenly so much lighter, and you felt like your chest could open up as wide as the room where you stood. The breaths you took were dry and cold in your throat, yet fresh as though you were walking outside in wintertime.

Montague must've seen something he didn't like on your face because he sucked down on his cigarette for a while, winding his wrist with it at his side once he was adequately calm.

"Did it feel good? I've only seen you this happy while I was fucking your brains out." It was jarring to hear him talk like that. He took another quick drag and let it out slowly as he rounded you. "Truthfully, darling, I didn't think you were the type to break the rules—on purpose, anyway. But I suppose we all get a little wound up every now and then, right? I've already forgiven you."

And then, you watched him drop the cigarette to the marble and snuff it underfoot until the weak ember was turned to soot. A black smear was left behind when he took his foot away. His stare into you was unwavering. "Clean it up."

You figured this was how a frightened animal felt when it wanted something within reach of an observant predator because you were trying to think of all the ways to get close without getting too close. It was a pitiful, humorous sight to him, seeing your steps forward so light and on the verge of bolting. But he showed no intention of doing anything more.

Still with the broom in hand, your knuckles turned stark around the handle while sweeping the remains towards you. It would take more elbow grease to get up that smudge, and he knew that just as well.

He reached for the broom and snapped it to a halt, making you jump, jaw clenching. A noiseless gasp lurched in your throat, his fingers wound tight into the hair at your crown as he yanked your head back to show all the fleshiness of your neck.

"What will you do about it, darling?" His lips were already cold and flush to the artery dancing in the curvature built of skin, muscle, and tendon. Your teeth chattered as the wetness of his tongue followed that intricate, breathtaking network inside of you as far as the neckline of your shirt would let him. "A man has to eat. Have you ever seen it? A man near starvation and the sorts of things he'll do to survive? Why, I've heard stories of desperate, little men eating their own lovers—their children—themselves just to claw around for a little longer. It's inspiring, I think."

He dragged you away then, up the stairs and through the hallway on the second floor to your bedroom, fingers still nested your hair until the moment you were shoved down onto fresh linens. There wasn't anywhere for you to go once he joined you on the mattress, feeling it bend towards his weight.

"Don't be afraid." he said this with all the fond familiarity of a lover, blunt fingernails digging crescents into your thigh through your clothes. In the waning moonlight that filtered through the dusty window over your bed, his pale eyeshine snared you like roots bursting from somewhere within your busy sheets to keep you there—keep you tame. "That's right. Come to me. Come to me."

There was a new drowsiness behind your eyes, one you couldn't stave by blinking. Montague's face was closer now, and you were struck with just how beautiful he actually was. The longer your gaze lasted, tips of your fingers exploring every shape and edge of his exquisite features, the less you were convinced he was a threat to you—that he couldn't have possibly been all that you'd feared up until now.

"I want you." His lips inched up like he expected you to say it. He felt your hands rest on the sides of his face, guiding him down into a soft kiss that he returned, that he kept clean and let you command until he was bored with it. You chased after him, lower lip pulled between both of yours and eventually out of reach. "Don't you want me too?"

"I wish you could understand just how much I do." He rummaged his pocket for the gold compact, losing it somewhere in the sheets, and then busied himself with stripping himself and you of clothes. Each piece discarded showed a greater expanse of your skin, a delight in his eyes because he could see that gorgeous webbing of arteries and veins throughout you, even in the darkness, through every defense your body created to protect you from every bacteria, virus, infection—from him.

He didn't need the breath, but he took one and held it anyway. You withered against his touch, those freezing, lithe fingertips traveling down all the areas where he wished his teeth could be, clear down to your groin. His smile stretched, feeling you search eagerly for a fistful of his hair with his lips smoothing across your inner thigh and then going higher.

There was warmth between your legs, a colorless glisten that leaked out onto the thin sheets, darkening a spot on them that tempted his tongue out for a taste. He came close to entertaining the notion of giving you that glimpse of heaven, allured by your hips leaping off the mattress and against his face.

"You really do think this is all about you." Montague kept you still by pressing down into your abdomen as he rose onto his knees, erection fitting tight between your bodies in the moments before he guided himself lower and hitched up into you. The sharp motion knocked a startled gasp out of your throat, where it quickly dissolved into a slew of filth and breathy panting. Your nails clawed into your palms, a sight he thought to make worse by digging himself deeper into you.

Montague had no issues biding his time this way, looming over the sprawl of your body beneath him, manipulating parts of you until he saw your face flinch and the first moans of discomfort shake all the way from your chest, up, and through your teeth. They matched the pace of his hard thrusts, smothered by sharp slaps of skin that carried in the inky air.

Indeed, I can wait. That thought of his unsatiated hunger melted in the back of his mind with the precedence of arranging the course of blood in your body. The drum of your heartbeat was deafening to him, but it wasn't enough. It wasn't loud enough. He wanted to be able to envision the arteries and veins bursting in his teeth, saturating the sheets and walls and both your bodies in hot red. He wanted it to paint his skin while he fucked you to absolution.

"It really, truly, is all about you in the end, isn't it?" He could still speak clearly, despite you being unable to utter noise beyond the air being forced out of your lungs. "You really are magnificent. How could I ever think to let you go? Not after everything you've done for me, how beautiful you look next to all of my things."

His hand shifted away from your abdomen at last, tracking across the soft span of your stomach and the muscles spasming there under his fingertips. All he would have to do is dig through you a little bit, and he could bury himself in those twitching fibers and insides. But he continued on his path to your pert nipples that he rolled against his palm a few times, higher still to fold his fingers together against your sternum where he felt your heart thundering there against your ribs.

"Thump. Thump. Thump. Thump," came his mocking chant that cracked into raspy moans as he lingered there. It had been a long time since something had made him feel this good. He had forgotten what bliss was truly like.

He reached your neck before long, trapping the underside of your jaw against his knuckles, forcing you to see him as his weight bore down on your throat. You both heard the cartilage and muscle in your neck shift, a subtle crack that sent your limbs flailing. You were thrown out of the rhythm of his thrusts in an attempt to grab at him.

"You really are despicable, aren't you?" He let out a gleeful laugh, letting your fingers turn ashen while you wrung his wrist. You weren't able to do much with your legs except use them to plant your heels into the mattress, vaulting your hips in the air to try to wrench yourself free. His cock slipped out of you, but he was hardly bothered by that. "Does it feel good that you chased off my guest? I could get him back, you know. You're aware of this. I know you are. But righteousness just feels so… rewarding, doesn't it? You couldn't resist. Desperation must've been eating you alive."

Strings of saliva glistened in your mouth, breaking apart the further your jaws spread. You were convinced, in that moment, that you would die like that in a silent scream. None of the words that Montague spoke truly reached you, not as your chest quivered and lungs burned as though swallowed in an inferno.

"Every misdeed in life vastly outweighs the good, you know? The scales have never been leaned in our favor—not I, and especially not for you. If that's the sort of thing you believe in. Isn't that what you're taught? Goodness for the sake of salvation at the end of a short life of inhibitions? How miserable." Montague took his hand off of you and let you breathe. You sucked in crisp air, gasping from your side through wet coughs and the sourness of vomit spat out on the floor.

Your respite was brief, weight on the mattress shifting as the hair on your scalp was used to lever you to your knees, body suspended upright only by his fingers tangled at your roots.

"This is all I can see." Montague loosened his hand from your head, moving south along your spine to your ass. He kneaded the bruised parts of your hips for a while after, lips ghosting their way along your neck up to the ear. "All I can see is what's right in front of me. And how it tastes. All that matters is that I have my fill—and that I feel good."

He smeared slick into the heel of his palm, rolling the head of his cock in that mess as he instructed you with every bit of lewdness how he wanted you to bend against the headboard, how far apart for you to spread your legs for him.

Every bit of it was humiliating for you, while he wished he could memorialize that moment of sinking back inside of you as your breaths broke into stifled sobs, face warped by anguish.

"Does it hurt? Tell me, I have to know, what does it feel like?" He enjoyed the suspense of not receiving an answer, listening as your fingernails dug tracks into the wood headboard and the dark room filled with obscene wetness that grew louder as his thrusts turned wild.

"Mmm—" He hinged forward, bracing his weight on top of your hands with his own. You shied from the surge of coolness that came with his cheek pressing yours. "You and I aren't so different. It makes me wonder if you actually like this. Isn't there something so freeing about it?"

"Mer—mercy, please." It was a coarse whisper from your dry throat, so much of your time having been spent with your mouth agape. The idea of having you that way was as tantalizing as all the others he thought up. "Montague, please—mercy."

Oh, now you were begging.

This was more than what he deserved. He managed a few more thrusts, spilling over into you by the third with a moan that he felt no shame to leave ringing in your ear. "Every part of you, every single part—I'll burn myself into your skin and your bones. You'll feel me in your veins, your blood. I'll make for certain that I'm all you remember—forever."

The vastness of your bedroom had grown warmer, permeated with the thickness of sweat and salt that left your palms slick against the headboard. You let your body slump against it, skin sticking to the wood. It didn't offer you the relief you wanted at that moment: a glass of ice water, all the tenderness of a soft bed to lull you into a blank dream—you just wanted to rest.

Montague knew this just as well, fishing his compact out from a muddled heap of linens and clothes. He checked inside to grab one of the two cigarettes left, making a mental note he'd need to replenish again tomorrow before lighting it and savoring it. At this rate, he anticipated he'd be empty before the end of the night.

For a while, he sat there cushioned on his haunches, admiring the way the smoke coiled towards the ceiling in dainty wisps and mingled with the stench of sex.

"It's not enough." he said, barely eliciting more than a glance from you. His current cigarette was already burnt to the filter, forcing him to pull the last and light that one too. "This is my last one. Such a shame."

You smelled the smoke strongly now, just seconds passing before you were yanked across the bed onto your back, the soreness in your scalp near excruciating as you yelped. Montague made a place for himself between your thighs again, leering down the length of his nose at you.

If he wanted to, he could trace the dread etched in your features with a finger, feeling all along your hot skin, into all the cavernous lines he wished he could preserve—right there, just like that. There had never been a more gorgeous visage than the one you wore right now. Only your gleaming, glowing, pink insides were more beautiful.

He watched your lips twitch while he teased a fistful of his hard cock against your sorest spot. You were swollen and bruised, and he could only imagine what it felt like when he bottomed out in you again.

The curve of your spine arched off the mattress, fingers frantically raking the air at him, reaching for any part you could sink into to get him out. Even your body seemed determined for the same, wonderfully stimulating walls squeezing around him.

It made a shiver roll all along his spine to his tailbone, eyes rolling up towards the ceiling, with his first thrusts feeling positively divine. Especially when you jolted, an almost exaggerated response amplified by jagged cries and wet gasps you couldn't seem to swallow back down into your chest.

"I'm sorry, I'm sorry—" You sputtered around the mucus piled in your throat. "Montague, I'm sorry. Please, stop."

He had burned away half of his last cigarette when he leaned over you, his body eclipsing what poor light had managed to illuminate the room for you. You could only follow the dainty mesmerizing glow that worked away from his mouth—his exhale barely masking a moan that he blew away with the smoke—and towards you.

"Keep doing it." His other hand was crawling up your neck, forcing you to suck in a hard breath. "Beg me again. Keep doing it."

All sound but the steady pulse of the headboard striking the wall had deadened, lasting well until the moment the cigarette touched your skin—and you screamed. Your throat vibrated, suddenly stopping when his palm closed around you again, silencing all your noise, his thrusts sloppy and rough while you thrashed under him.

This time, he kept you pinned by his chest, letting your feet dig for traction and slip and slide on the sheets. The bright smolder turned dark as he twisted it into your neck, taking all the remnants of restraint he had not to drill into you as far as it could go. He curled his tongue behind his jaws, keeping them tight.

Montague let go of your throat to allow you the grace of a stifled wail before that same hand sealed your lips. "Ah, ah. You know better than to scream. Shh, shhh, shhh. It's such an ugly sound."

He rubbed the cigarette into your skin until it crumpled, leaving him to lament for a moment once flicking it away to the floor. For him, it left behind a beautiful burn: raw, mad, red, and enticing. As his hand fell off of your mouth, daring you to do more than whimper and cry, his tongue was already flat against your wound.

"Oh, God," you wheezed, voice hoarse and jarring with the force of his hips knocking into you. "I'm sorry. I'm so sorry! Stop, stop, stop! I swear I'll never do it again! I swear. I swear!"

Montague caught the wrist you swung at his head, giving the taste of your seared flesh time to settle on his palate before turning towards the pulse in your thumb. He tried to match how he was fucking you out to how it throbbed on his lips.

"Oh, I'm well aware that you won't do it again. That much is a given." His strokes into you were suddenly languid and intentional, so achingly deep that your eyes rolled back. "I've already said that you're forgiven, haven't I?"

You could barely speak over the depth he reached. It didn't feel right. "Th-then, why?"

A smile flourished across his face, but your eyes couldn't pierce that dark veil to see it. You could feel the damp path he left on your wrist, how the muscle writhed all around the sprawl of your veins, going as far as to wind your fingertips before it receded back behind his lips.

"Because I'm enjoying myself." There was a weight of finality to those words before his mouth engulfed the side of your wrist, away from your fragile network of bluish-purplish channels. And when he bit into you, it was the incisors that sank through.

You didn't know what it was. A clamp seized you by the neck like his fist, steeling itself there and robbing you of a scream. The pain was unlike anything else—paralyzing and deep, like a pair of sharpened, narrow skewers made of molten fire piercing you with such an agonizing ache that you could do nothing but lay there.

But you still felt everything he was doing. His thrusts had grown truly vicious, chasing a high that came as the warmth of your blood seeped from a pair of punctures he had created. The steady flow he fed from was something he lapped on at his leisure. Enough of it streaked the length of your arm and dripped onto your bedding, onto your naked, warm skin when he guided the fall over your neck and chest, south to your stomach and abdomen. He let it fill and pool the seams of his fingers while smearing it with the fluids between your bodies.

At last, breaking the trance to speak, feebly, in between intermittent pockets of pain and numbness rolling through you, you asked with some hopefulness, "Are you going to kill me?"

"You? Kill you?" Montague dropped your wrist. It felt like a limp, dead thing that didn't belong to you. He dove at your neck for those drops he teased himself with, nudging your chin high with his nose to reach it all. "Death would mean letting you go. You're all mine, darling. Whatever other existence waits beyond death will never have you."

His tongue wet a trail to your chin, collecting a watery essence of blood and spit that he pushed into your mouth. Your lips were sealed by his ravenous kiss, relenting to the thickness of his tongue swirling the taste into your cheeks and down your throat, a nauseating intermix of iron and stale smoke that lingered and made you pucker.

And then, you heard him back in your ear, craning his neck only as far as to aggravate the cigarette burn with his breath. It gave several angry throbs. The weight of his body was almost flush on you, spreading the blood around as though your skin together was a single canvas.

To his eyes, it bloomed breathtakingly, seeping into every crevice, pore, and scratch that made up your design, an impermanent stain that he could saturate you in again and again and again. The things he whispered in your ear were vile and wicked, all on unlabored breaths while his strokes turned sluggish and stayed seated deep inside you until the final hitch of his hips left you full of him.

"I don't think you should go to work today."

You were only scarcely coherent of him—or anything for that matter—eyes unmoving from the black void above and unfeeling of how he chose to manipulate your body, still, hours later. All you could think about was the flutter of your lashes weighing down heavily over your eyes and how this world only survived on suffering such as yours.

༺ ♰ ༻

A small pile of things was arranged fussily in a duffle bag Hoss had given the day you returned to work after an impromptu leave of absence. It had only lasted three days, just enough time to acclimate to the pain that seemed to synchronize to every part of your body, throbbing everywhere, all at once, and at times with sharpness so great it toppled you to the ground. You could only lay there—wherever you dropped, on whatever cold slab of marble or concrete until it dissipated, unfurling from your limbs and organs to a rapturous wave of relief that melted the tension out of you.

It had only happened once while at work on a scene amidst a balmy summer night and came out of nowhere like an electric shock surging to your fingertips and toes, a hammer landing on your bones and leveling you on the sidewalk leading back to the company van. And that was all it took to incur a ruinous sort of anger in the two hulking men.

"You're going to take this bag, pack some shit, and you're leaving. Tonight." Hoss had to shake out the dust on the old duffle bag he pulled from somewhere in his car. "You ain't gonna tell me the reason, but I know he did something to you. T.J.'s calling in a favor."

"No. Don't—don't do anything. Don't try to come to the house—" There was a bandage around your wrist that you couldn't stop fiddling with. "I don't know what'll happen if you do. Just fucking don't."

"Nah, not us." T.J. slapped his phone back into the clip on his belt loop, eyeing the motions of your fingers on your wrist uneasily. "One of my old buddies—name's Roscoe—said he wants to handle it. Apparently, he and your guy have a history of some kind. He says to be ready to go by three."

The meaning behind what he said was left nebulous and concerning to you, even after you returned home with the duffle bag and started pulling things from your closet. Some ways across your room, high up on the wall and out of your reach was a clock. Its monotonous ticking brought your eyes over to it.

It was just after one-thirty, still enough time to change your mind if you wanted to. There was something so effortlessly easy about following along to the whims of other people. It felt safe, reassuring—their confidence was infallible. Not once in four years had T.J. or Hoss given you a reason to doubt their intentions, but right now, it boiled over in your mind.

But where will I go? What am I going to do? He'll find me. He'll find me. Montague would find you, but he wouldn't stop you from leaving. You could see it with clarity—him perched on the armrest of a chair, watching you walk through the door. He'd give you a headstart, a few days, maybe a few weeks.

You weren't sure you knew what to do without him. There was nowhere else in the world you could go, no one you could confide in that wouldn't be destroyed. He would keep your heart beating all the while breaking you apart until he had his fill, reminding you that this was how it was meant to be. This was how he showed you how you belonged.

And you—silly little you with your consciousness floating on the fringes of inscrutable ecstasy and some personal purgatory built on agony in your bones and blood—would believe him.

"Going on a trip?" His voice drifted to you from the doorway, far sweeter than it usually was. "I wish you would've told me. I can't imagine what it'll be like without you here in this house. You breathe life into it."

He was lured over by your silence, fitting his fingers between your shoulder blades to push along your spine, easing away the discomfort that had settled there. It was hard not to lean into that relief, a misstep that shattered any lasting hold of willpower when he stooped his neck to sweep you into a kiss.

"Why don't you stay instead?" He knew you wouldn't be coming back, not without dragging you back himself. "Stay with me instead. Right here. In this bed."

"Montague, stop—" He pressed down harder on your lips so those words withered into guttural frustration in your throat.

The duffle bag was flung far away, opening space on your bed for him to lay you out and begin to unravel the bandages around your wrist. Once he had access, his mouth was already full against the two puncture sites.

"Stay." He wasn't playing coy now. "I'll take care of you. It wasn't enough before. I can see that now. What can I do? It'd be too easy to break your legs. What if I chained you to this bed? What if I locked you up in this room? I wouldn't mind keeping you downstairs with me, but it would be too cold for you, I think."

"I want to leave." you said, mustering your composure through tight lips while he teased the infected purple holes with his flatter teeth. "Let me go."

He smiled derisively. "I don't think you know what you want."

"I—" You balked at him, reiterating with a stumble, "I—I just want to leave. Get off."

"How will you ever survive without me?" You didn't know if you'd be able to. "You'll be all alone, all alone in a world that's just ready to tear you open and spit you back out. I've told you before: Society doesn't reward virtue over vice—only those who play along. You won't last, not after you've known and tasted me."

You couldn't bring yourself to say anything, whereas he swelled like a man who had salvaged a victory, lying himself down to kiss you again—

And then, the doorbell rang with an immense melancholic echo that you could feel vibrate up your arms and legs. Nearly a year later, you were hearing it for the first time and grasping onto the lapels of his suit vest, keeping him still when you remembered T.J.'s promise.

"Ignore it." you said.

"We have a guest—" Something in his tone made your stomach clench. "It's not polite to leave them waiting, especially at this hour."

Montague had untangled himself from you and was gone before you could stop him. Another wave of pain put you on the floor when you moved. Drool piled from your mouth. An ache so unreal pounded in the wrist he had played with. The crawl to your duffle bag was far, arduous in that every inch felt like carrying stones on your back.

I'm going to die. I might as well already be dead. You didn't have any more time to wait, so you slung the strap over your shoulder and used the wall to guide you along the quiet hallway, bumping into every pedestal and display where Montague's most treasured things had stayed undisturbed.

You were one of them, something he could keep on the second floor with the rest of his stuff, but unlike brittle porcelain and fraying embroidery—he could break you as much as he wanted, again and again and again, and fit you back whole. He could do it forever while you wasted, longing for an end he would never give you.

But as you crept along the bleak wallpaper and all of his curios, you were so gentle with them, steadying any wobbling base or piece as you went. The central staircase was close, voices at the bottom of it faint and unintelligible, drifting alongside you as though part of the house—

The air exploded. Just once. A single gunshot brought back all the alertness to your body, neck and shoulders at full length, pain dulled to where you could shuffle faster and look off the bannister at the landing below.

Montague was staring back up at you from the floor, entirely still and soundless. His jaw was unhinged, askew, frozen in a position that should've been impossible. A black hole gaped between his eyes, but didn't bleed.

"If you're not ready, that's going to be bad news." Another man stood nearby sheathing a gun, unfamiliar and yet with sameness in the way his gaze felt hollow and reached through you. "I'm repaying my debts. I'd like to make good on this one."

You were slow descending the stairs, even slower while you rounded Montague's body and denied yourself the chance to stop. Something invisible wanted to pull you to him, plow your knees into hard marble and weep over his chest. However, your insides bending in disgust and twinges in your bones kept you onward.

This man, Roscoe, was just as sickly-seeming and gray as the other, every slot of space on his arms and neck filled with images of religious iconography and portraits of saints—Mary being the only one you recognized with just a glance. It was tempting to touch him, something he noticed and stepped out of your reach.

"Is there another way out of here?" He made a weak motion towards the front door just ajar, but his eyes were stuck on the wrist wounded and unusable to you now. "We need to go. Now."

You were racking your brain for an answer, turning half-circles in place before pointing to the archway with a clock. "There's a backdoor, but the yard is fenced in and there's nothing but forest for three miles. There's also—"

Roscoe waited expectantly, ushering you to continue when he went for the gun in its holster. "Start moving, we'll figure it out." He unloaded another round into Montague's head, a near indecipherable twitch in the fingers made the hair on your neck shoot straight out. "Silver only keeps him down. It won't kill him. Go!"

"Th—there's, there's the basement." You smacked your lips, trying to swallow around a bulge in your throat. "There's an old door. He said there are tunnels, but I don't know where they go. I don't know if he was telling the truth. I don't—"

He threw a hand into your back, thrusting you forward at least three feet. You almost didn't catch your footing. "Then that's where we're going."

"Not a friend of yours then, I assume, darling?" Montague's voice from the floor was as much of a relief as it was terrible. The silent gaps of air all around were disturbed by sharp snaps and cracking bones as his jaw moved back into place and he sat upright over his thighs. You were transfixed by the silver bullets being sucked into his skull, holes shrinking until they closed completely. "I'm not surprised you're still fraternizing with the wrong crowds, Roscoe. You and that entire Society have always been a fucking eyesore."

Roscoe readied his aim. "Parasite."

Montague laughed all the way to his feet, tugging at the edge of his vest to make it neat again. He opened his mouth just enough to let his tongue roll out, shards of silver bullets tinkling as they hit marble underfoot. "You can't take what's mine."

He looked to you, stepping closer every time Roscoe moved you back with his arm. "Come here. Come back to me, darling. This is where you belong. This is your home. You belong here with me, here with everything that you know."

"He doesn't mean that." Another gunshot snapped you to attention, blinking out of a stupor you hadn't realized you were in. The bullet landed in Montague's forehead, teetering his balance in such a way that his back curved towards the floor, arms hanging like useless instruments, yet he still somehow kept his soles planted. "Time to go. Get to the basement."

Roscoe didn't fail to reach you this time, running tight on your heels through the house to the basement floor. He stopped partway to the old door to help you scour the duffle bag for a key—one attached to the chatelaine Montague had given you the day you accepted to move in.

Your breaths were ragged, heart ablaze and beating against your ribs. In that moment, as you flipped through the assortment of keys with an unsteady, slippery grip, you wondered if Montague heard your blood racing in your veins, if he could follow the suffocating drumbeat your heart made in your ears.

Just above, fast approaching the locked basement door, came a thunderous roar so inhuman and reverberating that it scared the clip of keys out of your hands into a clattering heap on the floor. Time was up.

"Move!" Roscoe shoved you aside, illuminated by the hectic flare of your phone as he fit his fingers through a gap in the door and ripped the entire thing off its hinges. He pulled you by the scruff of your shirt and heaved you inside the tunnel. "Go! Go! Go!"

The first thing to hit you was a putrid smell intimately known but always through protective equipment and a respirator. And as you went deeper into the tunnel, led by a single route and the light off your phone, the dirt packed under your feet turned soft, sinking to the tops of your shoes.

And then, you saw bodies.

Numerous—countless corpses in varying stages of decay with twisted faces reflected your terror and pain right back at you. Most were intact with missing limbs or dark red chasms in their abdomens that had been scraped hollow and dry under the white light. A few had been fully decapitated, briefly reminding you of the dead blonde woman from that night, but most of what lay stacked against the tunnel walls were emaciated figures with skin pulled so taut to their bones you could still make out their faces.

You were doubled over your knees, sucking in fetid mouthfuls of air and retching them back out on the ground. It burned in your throat, in your nostrils, and behind your eyes, but stifled your sobs as Roscoe dragged you alongside him.

"What did he do? What did he do?" You were crying, wheezing out those words on every shallow breath you took all the way to an end just ahead. The more you thought about it, the more you smelled the rot, tasted the bitterness of your own vomit, the more came out. "I don't want to die! I don't want to die!"

Roscoe had to let you rest in the grass once you both surfaced. One of the exits turned out to be near the house, less than half a mile. But the tunnels kept going and so did the bodies. You suspected that there wouldn't be any reach of that underground labyrinth that didn't have some form of decay along it.

The thought brought the tears back, but now you could relish the sticky summer night humidity and touch dewy tendrils of grass under your hands.

"Can you drive?" Roscoe had a pair of keys hanging from his index finger, giving you a long moment to take them. He saw confusion in your watery stare. "I'll tell you where to go, just drive."

That's how it had been for hours at this point. You kept your hands locked around the steering wheel, one stronger than the other, gnawing the inside of your cheek while ruminating everything—tonight, the night Montague had bitten you, every other night before that, and your decision to have ever trusted him.

"How long ago did he bite you?" Roscoe had the seat reclined, arms over his eyes to shield them from oncoming headlights. "It doesn't look good."

You tested your grip on the steering wheel, but you couldn't do much without a sharp sting in your wrist. "I don't know—a couple weeks ago? I've tried everything short of going to the emergency room."

"That won't help," he said. "Modern medicine can fix a dog bite, antibiotics can kill an infection, a vaccine can protect you from a virus. Those aren't going to do any good."

Solemnly, you asked, "Am I going to die?"

Roscoe didn't sit up but had your wrist in his hands, turning it in little ways that didn't aggravate you. Besides the occasional glare from passing vehicles, there was no light in the car, and the holes in your skin were hardly distinguishable, though they had gotten darker. You weren't able to move it with any ease now.

"What you need to know right now is that he's never going to stop following you." He put your hand back on the steering wheel, careful as he enclosed your fingers around it. "It doesn't matter how long it takes, what you do, where you go—a parasite finds a host, and it latches on. And it doesn't let go."

You glanced between him and the road several times, tongue wetting the dry parts of your lips. "He's a vampire—you're a vampire. There's got to be something—"

Roscoe finally sat up in his seat, now cramped sideways with his shoulders flat to the window. The car veered a bit into the other lane. "You need to understand something. What you're saying would imply he ever had any humanity. Vampires are created." He paused for a beat, waiting for the realization to strike you. "Montague was never created."

"What—what the hell is he, then?" A horn abruptly blared by, prompting you to yank the car back onto the correct side. "He drinks blood. He has teeth. He—he hunts. He doesn't like silver. His eyes are the same as yours."

Roscoe lowered his gaze, but remained in that uncomfortable position. "There's a story I heard about him once. I don't remember the details except for one: ‘If the devil exists, they're one in the same.’"

You kept your eyes on the road, counting every car that flitted on past. They were probably going to work at this hour—green numbers on the dashboard showed it just after four—and they'd be able to have a place to return to at the end of the day. Now, you didn't belong anywhere, and twenty-four hours from now you still wouldn't.

The town where you had lived with Montague for a year was long behind you, backtracking would take hours, and you wouldn't know how to get back from the direction that Roscoe had told you to go. Dim streetlamps and cozy houses with spruced yards had morphed into an endless network of concrete, signs, and off-ramps to places you'd never heard of.

It was scary how everything could change in one night, and how it did. The only semblance of normalcy to you right now were the aches throughout your body, which had returned the moment you fully comprehended that you had escaped that house.

"Why…" Roscoe looked up at you, seeing your lips shake and eyes turn red. "Why do I want to go back to him?"

He fixed himself right in the seat, tousling a hand through his hair while looking out through the windshield. "You shouldn't do that. But you'll never be able to stop running."

You never saw Roscoe again once the car ride ended several thousands of miles later, mentioning something about how he repaid his debt to T.J. and had disappeared from a restaurant you both walked into. When that happened, you sat paralyzed at your little table for most of the day with a soul-crushing realization that you were truly alone with nobody in the world—just like Montague said you would be. And, for the sake of others, you'd never be able to have anyone else in your world.

It stayed that way for close to two years. The hardest part hadn't been the homelessness or constant vigilance, not the door revolving each person to come into your life since, but the fact that you still yearned for what you once had. Everything so awful about what you experienced sometimes looked like heaven when you thought about it, like soft, cloudy nostalgia from a time where the throes of agony were all you had ever known.

You were capable of thinking soberly as well, and with that came the understanding that a part of you would always want that time back—want him back. He had left you with a permanent scar and neurological damage that could never be corrected. It was anticipated you'd lose that wrist at some point in the future, but for now, you could still hold a cup and brush your teeth with enough conscious effort.

The pain never went away either, but you refused to let it impede your work in the field. And your two roommates were a couple of engineering geniuses who'd managed to make the flat more accommodating to your needs. They'd been patient with you during every step of your transition into a new life, calling you an enigma because you had nothing to your name except a dusty duffle bag and a "strange-looking dog bite" on your wrist when you first met them.

Sometimes, especially on the weekends after clinking together enough shot glasses, they tried to probe your brain for some clue as to who you were, who you had been historically. You had decided it was better that they—that no one—knew about it or what actually existed out there in the world.

And when you returned home from the lab late that Saturday night, you were surprised to find the lights off and the flat immersed in the kind of soundlessness that made your ears feel clogged with cotton.

You were slow in lowering your backpack to the floor, keeping the front door slightly ajar so a slither of light from the residential corridor slipped inside. "Jordan? Felix?"

No answer. You didn't hear anything from their bedrooms upstairs either.

"Jordan?" The nearest light switch didn't work, neither did the one after that, or any others you hunted down with the diffused beam from your phone screen. "Jordan? Felix? Are you guys home?"

It was possible they had gone out somewhere for the night and just hadn't mentioned anything to you, as unsound as that logic actually was, considering it simply wasn't their personality. But as you wandered through different rooms checking the switches, you knew you were rationalizing to keep yourself in check.

The light from the hallway still piled inside like a narrow pillar, raising all the hairs on your neck and arms, knowing that it wasn't a building-wide outage. They had never left you in a situation like this before. Something was wrong.

"Jordan! Felix! Whe—" Your foot nearly shot out from under you when you slid through something slick on the laminate. After a moment to fix yourself, bracing the edge of the countertop with a clammy palm, you steadied the white glow of your phone at the floor.

There, glistening back at you, was the vast richness of blood in a tall puddle that spread like long winding tendrils through grout in the flooring. It looked almost black under your light at a certain angle, estimating it had been there for several hours—untouched.

You held in a breath and grit your jaws together as the more you moved, the more you saw. And when the top of a head came into view, silky hair shining like fine thread before clumping together at the base where the blood had pooled the most, it was everything you could to keep yourself from hitting the floor.

Both of them were there, perfectly out of sight of the front door and completely unrecognizable. Their bodies had been left in one piece, though where their faces had once been were cavernous holes with pale, pink ribbons of flesh and fat left behind. The roundness of their skulls let blood fill inside it like a vessel. What little pieces of brain matter remained had floated to the surface.

You staggered back from them, phone loosening from your weak hand and returning them to the maw of darkness, while groping the wall behind you as far as your arm could reach. This wasn't a result of crude knife work or even bludgeoning; no, it was a slow kill, one meant to steep someone in torment so immense that you prayed to whatever was out there that they succumbed immediately.

"Help…" Your voice was trapped in your throat, barely registering as a whisper even to yourself as you sidled along the wall. "Someone—anyone, please help."

The patter of your heartbeat was torturous. Your every step back to the entrance was leaden with fear. You couldn't get your legs to move fast enough, and the light reaching in through the gap seemed to stretch on forever—further, further, and further still.

You thought back to that day you met Montague and shook his hand, noting how unnaturally cold it had been despite it being a nice day in spring. You remembered the dead blonde woman with mascara tears, and the bodies he used to decorate the tunnels, and the young man who was able to walk away that night believing it was all some shallow quarrel—never knowing he had sealed your fate.

You regretted all of it.

The door was in your reach now, and you could get out, call for help, and go back to running. This time, you wouldn't be tricked into false satiety or let anyone too close. You would see mountains and forests and oceans a thousand times over before you stopped again.

Two years hadn't been enough time for you to accumulate many things, you thought. It wouldn't be hard to leave most of it behind, just like you had before. You would unpack that old duffle bag from the back of your closet, fill it to the brink, and that would be enough.

You had your hand over smooth metal, but that cold reached greater depths in you as the door was pushed shut from behind, light shrinking away through the slot until you were swallowed whole in the dark.

"Hello, darling. I've missed you." He sounded the same against your ear. For a split second, you felt relieved. "Don't worry about cleaning up. We're not staying long."

He clamped damp fingers over your mouth before you could scream.

Daddy’s girl 🧛🧛‍♀️

Abigail fan art drawn in Procreate using BigPearLiu’s brushes ❤️

https://archiveofourown.org/works/58121329/chapters/162821269#workskin

Soundtrack:

Still imagining that Abigail epilogue? Yes, I am.

In my mind, this is Joeys’s house. She has a visitor, as you can see 🧛🔍🖤

⬆️ (enjoying the luminance brushes on Procreate a little too much 😂)

📷 Fan art photo collaging using Procreate - photo of MG from ADOW - photo of MB by Luis de la Luz - stock/my own photos of garden furniture, foliage, house, etc. 📷

And there’s an imaginary scenario (for @cecipaez-blog1 ). I don’t own the characters, I haven’t properly studied the film, I have no idea what I’m talking about, really: it’s just for fun 🎡.

——————————————

A Visitor - Part 2 - Ready or Not

— imaginary mini epilogue to Abigail (2024) featuring Joey/Ana and Lazaar —

You often feel like you’re being watched. It’s a hazard of your line of work and the questionable company you keep. But tonight, as you clear away the debris of an evening with friends in your backyard, the feeling is palpable.

You pause to listen and gauge the sensation. The fairy lights strung overhead dance slightly in a warm swirl of summer air, making the shadows below you throb in and out of focus. A wind chime twinkles, with slight menace, from the garden next door.

Get a grip, you tell yourself.

Get inside and lock the door, your body tells itself.

Just as you have composed yourself and are about to continue the clean up job, a clear, luxuriant voice cuts through the warm night air behind you.

“Not interrupting anything, I hope?”

Your movement slows as immediately you identify the speaker. You straighten and speak his name:

“Lazaar.”

You are surprised by the evenness of your tone, when your pulse seems to feel the exact opposite.

You turn and, with another rush of the tepid breeze, he emerges from the shadow of a tree. His hands are in his pockets. His posture is soft. But his stare is far from it. He walks slowly towards you, enquiringly.

“I had friends over for dinner,” you gesture towards the empty pizza boxes piled in your arms and the beer bottles which clink together in your clawed fingers.

He nods and his gaze flickers towards the house.

“Everyone left,” you find yourself needlessly reassuring him.

“I see.”

You can’t quite see if he’s smirking but it feels as though he might be. As he observes the clutter in your arms, the movement of his eyes is languid and appraising. “May I?” he reaches towards the empty bottles to relieve you slightly of your load.

You’re taken aback by the offer, but agree, “Sure.”

As the bottles are transferred, you notice his nostrils flare. You realise he’s trying to ascertain what kind of company you have kept. His brow smoothes and you assume he is satisfied by his investigations; it was, after all, a girls’ night in.

Without being asked, he walks over to the bin store and deposits the bottles in the correct one. Returning to take the pizza boxes from your arms, he repeats the process. You observe that you find this bizarrely incongruous show of domesticity wildly attractive.

As he saunters back towards you, he looks at the open door to the house. You stand there wondering if you are actually going to invite a vampire into your home.

“Why are you here, Lazaar?” The question emerges low and slow into the sultry air. You didn’t mean it to sound so provocative but you’re coming to realise you have little control around this man. Creature. Fantasy figure.

The piercing gaze is on you now. The vampire looks slightly agitated by your question. You watch as he steels himself and sits down upon the garden wall. He shrugs:

“I find that you…” his gaze drops to his hands, “you… are on my mind.”

You take a deep breath to quell the lilting, fizzing sensation rising within you. You note the unassuming nature of his posture as he sits on the wall, deliberately metres away from you. Yet this calculatedly unthreatening stance does nothing to mask his agitation.

Numbed and blurred slightly by the moderate amount of beer you’ve consumed, you probe your instincts more carefully. You find there is no fight or flight here. No threat. You feel the same submissive calm of a few nights ago when you saw him in his garden. The same curiosity. The same heady lurch of your insides when he so much as looks at you.

“Ditto,” you hear yourself say, with a slight smile.

The look that now passes his features is positively devilish and you witness his first genuine smile at you in return.

But the warmth of the moment curdles instantly. You gasp as you notice the uniformity and whiteness of his teeth. They look normal and far from razor-sharp. A wave of nausea resonates with the shock pulsing through your body.

“Your mouth…” you breathe, your fingers finding your own lips by way of explanation.

His smile fades and he moves towards you but stops abruptly when you recoil.

“You’re not…” you breathe and your heart begins to thump as confusion and panic flood your senses, “you’re not in your true form. This - this isn’t you. It’s just an illusion… what are you doing? What game are you playing? Why are you here? I think you should…”

“Ana…” he interrupts, his voice gentle but stricken, “Ana, it’s all right…”

“I must be crazy. What the f*ck was I thinking…,” your mouth is dry and your legs are shaking as you try to back further towards the house.

“Ana, please,” his palms are raised in surrender as he takes two more cautious steps towards you. As the moonlit shadows slide over his features, you watch his face transform into something more familiar. His pupils darken until void of all light, his irises take on an ethereal glow and his fangs become clearly visible beneath a snarling lip.

Your heart stills as you realise that this sight, which should terrify you, has in fact achieved the opposite effect.

“There now…” he soothes, the old-worldly timbre chiming again in his voice. He tilts his face up to catch the moonlight further.

Otherwise he remains very still. Waiting. Watching.

His breath is patchy and you can see the anguish in his eyes.

“Why did you change?” your voice is unsteady, as though you might cry.

“My form… I can... I wanted to be something less alarming… more palatable… more safe.” His brow furrows and his lips close firmly. In the moonlight, you notice a muscle ticking in his jawline.

His vulnerability in this moment is exquisite.

“I did it for you,” he murmurs and this dissolves your doubt as swiftly as it had appeared.

“Well don’t,” you fold your arms but take two steps towards him, “don’t do that again.” your voice softens.

“I shan’t,” he bows his head reverently and relief floods through his tone.

When he lifts his head again, his gaze is searching, “But I want to take the form that you desire.”

The last word rips through you, quite literally, and he speaks again:

“How do you want me to be, Ana?”

Fangs, by Sarah Andersen

(pictures by me)

Esse webcomic publicado no Tapas pela Sarah Andersen, conhecida principalmente por sua websérie Sarah's Scribbles, retrata o relacionamento entre uma vampira e um lobisomem. Diferente de outras mídias que abordam romances sobrenaturais, o quadrinho usa de humor situacional para mostrar o cotidiano quase normal do casal. É uma história fofa, calorosa e surpreendentemente saudável com doses de humor afiado.

Como mencionei, o quadrinho está disponível para leitura gratuita, em inglês, no aplicativo/website Tapas, além de haver uma publicação em português brasileiro sob o título de Mordida. Minha primeira leitura foi virtual, portanto posso afirmar que apesar de a edição física conter alguns quadrinhos a mais, não perde-se nada em experiência de leitura.

A vantagem do formato físico, neste caso, seria acrescentar uma bela edição encadernada em tecido à sua biblioteca. Esse estilo remete às antigas edições de clássicos da literatura, os quais eu costumava ver, mas nunca ter

O papel usado para impressão é branco, o que me incomodaria em um romance, novela ou conto mais extenso, porém a pouca quantidade de texto faz com que essa escolha seja adequada.

A Night for Hunting Ch.15 -A New Home

T/W: Alucard (Ultimate) x F!Reader, soft yandere, romance, Hellsing cast, mild sexual content, somnophilia, ‘blood drinking,’ depressed vampire @alastorhazbin On AO3 Words: 4989

Happy New Year! I have good vibes about this upcoming year already. Looking back, this account is now one year old! Crazy how everything I wrote under this name was done within the last year. I do think there is improvement between now and what I first wrote. Hopefully I will continue to get better as I write more this year!

The manor and its adjacent towers were constructed in the Victorian style. There was only one main building, but it was massive, with hundreds of windows lining a mansion of at least three stories tall. From outside, there may have been another top floor. Perhaps the sole purpose of this upper level was simply to grant greater ceiling height to the foyer or another central room, which seemed an aesthetic the wealthy aspired to. 

You continued to gawp at the scale of the place. It had seemed as if the forest stretched on forever when the manor suddenly came into view from behind a gargantuan fence. The coiffered lawn hugged a paved path on either side, ending elegantly in a line of manicured spruce trees.

You swallowed as you entered the foyer and stepped closer to Alucard. The entrance was every bit as stately as this building’s exterior, but your observations of the decor were cut short by an older gentleman who came to greet you. Silver cuff links adorned a neatly pressed dress shirt and the muted violet vest complimented his slacks well. Wisps of bangs escaped a shaggy ponytail, swaying as he dipped his head.

“Alucard,” he acknowledged the vampire before turning to you and you stiffened as he bent into a slight bow with an arm over his chest. “Young Miss, welcome to Hellsing.” He spoke with a polished lilt.

Your eyes widened and you almost flinched at the clipped words. You were not expecting anyone to bow to you, not even the posh butler. As quick to fluster as you were, you barely managed to squeak out a reply. “Y-yes! Thank you!”

The corners of the old man’s crow feet crinkled around slate grey eyes with the cordial smile. “You may call me ‘Walter.’ I am the Hellsing family’s butler.” He extended an arm towards you with the palm up and you snatched it up to shake.

“Nice to meet you too!” You stammered, clutching the worn hand between both of yours as you introduced yourself.

For a beat, no one spoke, but Walter’s teeth were now showing through the smile.

“Your jacket, Young Miss?” He clarified.

Of course he meant your jacket. This man was clearly a proper member of the English upper society. You nearly buried your burning face in your hands as the other man took your outerwear after you removed it, feeling Alucard mocking you while you decided to ignore him.

“If you would follow me,” the butler said as he turned on his heel and strode through the foyer, disappearing down a hall.

Multiple corridors passed by. This was no ordinary mansion. It was the headquarters of a secret organization that hunted vampires and ghouls for generations. How in the world was this vast organization and the existence of such creatures kept confidential? Perhaps ‘agreeing’ to stay here with Alucard was a mistake. What were you doing here? You had no business poking around with hunts for the undead.

Hold your head high, little one. You belong here as much as anyone.

How that could be was beyond you. You weren’t strong or dangerous like the few guards you glimpsed. Neither were you as sophisticated as the butler or the other members of staff you came across thus far. It was as if even the serving staff were selected for decorum. You looked as uncomfortable and undignified as you felt to be standing where you were. Your steps faltered and you let yourself fall behind, your eyes tracking Alucard’s retreating back up ahead with longing, knowing it would be unwise to seek his touch in the midst of watching eyes.

Rumbling laughter echoed as his touch brushed your mind once again. You are a human within a human organization. It is the police girl and I who are out of place, silly child.

His voice jolted you from your reveries and you rushed to catch up. You prayed Alucard was correct as you were ushered up a grand set of stairs in solid oak and into another room, forcefully straightening your back with the meek hope of projecting poise you did not feel.

--------------------

The stout door fell shut behind you, and with it went the last of your freedom. Your gaze fell on the lone figure by a sprawling wooden desk where a stoic blonde woman sat with her mouth hidden behind intertwined fingers. She wore men’s attire, complete with a cravat and cross at her throat. The outfit suited her demeanor well. The light reflected off her glasses and when the glint passed, you caught the brilliant calculating stare of crystal blue.

You immediately knew you were being evaluated. You let out a breath as the nervous weight returned, coiling heavily in your stomach and your gaze nearly fell from hers. Shifting your weight to your other foot, your fingers twitched as you fought the urge to stick your hands in your pockets. 

You only remembered to keep breathing when Walter put a closed fist to his lips and cleared his throat.

“You are looking at Sir Integra Fairbrook Wingates Hellsing, head of the Hellsing Organization.” Walter swept forward and bent at the hips in a formal bow to address his master, then retreated into the shadows of the room. You could barely see the man once he settled against the wall by Integra’s side.

You didn’t meet Sir Hellsing’s gaze again for fear of appearing overly bold, but lowered your head in greeting. You licked your lips and nibbled the inside of the bottom, still trying desperately not to let out too many indications of your anxiety. It felt like you were being stripped bare. This was Alucard’s master. Her presence was just as commanding and words wouldn’t come to your now parched throat.

Long moments passed in silence as your heart hammered away. There was no slouch in your posture nor restless bounce to your feet. You would not allow yourself to present yourself in such a slovenly manner. Though you were under no physical threat, you may as well have been on trial at a cross examination.

Your silent judge took out a cigar and spoke at last.

“So this is the woman occupying my servant's time. And who inspired him to steal my jet for a night,” the master of the castle uttered casually with a raised brow and an unreadable grin. 

Walter stepped up to her side to light the cigar she dangled between her lips and she exhaled with a plume of smoke. The spicy aromas of tobacco and leather filled your nose. Sir Hellsing took another extended draw with her eyes closed before letting it out. The ghostly fumes trailed into the air in lazy tendrils and gradually vanished.

You too wanted to disappear under the scrutiny of so many intimidating people, but her words caught your attention.

You shot Alucard a dirty look. He stole it? But of course he did. It was exactly like how you came home one night to an empty apartment. The bat bastard had collected all your stuff for 'safekeeping' and announced it was time for you to move in with him. What about your human rights?! The asshole next to you cackled boorishly and appeared much too pleased with himself.

“Shut up about that! It isn’t funny!” You snapped at him before remembering yourself too late as you looked back at Sir Integra with mortification. “I mean–”

Surprise passed fleetingly by the other woman’s face until it was replaced by the faintest hint of a smile. “At ease,” she waved you off as the damn vampire interrupted.

“Delightfully feisty, is she not, Master?” 

"Alucard, the circumstances may be amusing to you, but do not forget that I gave you leave to bring a civilian here. Hellsing’s purpose is no trifling matter.” The woman reprimanded the vampire before her gaze settled on you. “You are his responsibility. However, you will undergo basic training. Do not make me rescind this demonstration of goodwill."

Your heart plummeted at the mention of training, knowing you would struggle under the tutelage of anyone who hunted monsters for a living. But you were permitted to stay with Alucard (even if you complained a lot). Not knowing what response was most appropriate, you stood even straighter at attention with your chin tilted up slightly. This was a military compound afterall. 

“Yes ma’am!” You shouted, though you felt no confidence from the declaration.

Her lips twitched as her expression softened a touch. Steel blue eyes continued to appraise you, yet the severe furrow to her brows eased. Her fingers drummed across the desk. Unexpectedly, she gave you her blessings. 

"Take care of him. He is little more than a sobbing child," she stated. 

Huh? Who was this woman to insult him so? You looked to Alucard, but the said vampire didn’t seem offended. Rather, he was grinning from ear to ear, appearing very pleased he was permitted to keep you. You were utterly confused by their dynamic.

“I expect as much from the woman who earned my wayward servant’s affections. You may leave.” She dismissed you.

Your vampire turned, hiding you from prying eyes and murmuring words only meant for you. "This is now your home, little dove." He caressed the crown of your head as you stared at him with huge eyes filled with uncertainty. His eyes snapped to a younger blonde girl standing by the wall who you did not notice prior and she stumbled awkwardly to attention with a salute.

“Ah, y-yes, Master!”

You left the chamber accompanied by a young changeling and the warmth of her sire’s gaze lingering on your back.

--------------------

Seras, the relatively new fledgling, was your tour guide. A part of you still wanted to dislike her, but she was just too sweet. It was nice to have someone normal to talk to who didn’t make you feel like you were strapped to a dissection table.

“Soooo…you came here with Master?!” She ventured after half an hour of meaningless banter and showing you around the training grounds.

“Yes I did.” You were uncomfortable with the prospects of having to explain your relationship to anyone since you've never had to, but the feeling was particularly intense with Alucard's changeling.

“How did you meet?” She asked while turning back to you with a chipper smile.

Gosh, this was getting so awkward you almost wanted to scratch your own head.

“...We ran into each other one night after I was done at work…” Your thoughts raced. Could she smell the half-truth? Seras seemed naive and kind of cute, but she remained a stranger you just met. How much could you tell her? How much did she already know?

“Oh! I hope you were okay! Master would insult me if I did something like that,” she casted her eyes to the side and pouted, nearly deflating with her attestation. 

You chortled with laughter, empathising with the young girl as you stated with a vacant stare, “He laughs at me all the time.”

At that she cheered up and the tension in your thoughts released as the two of you found some common ground while venting about Alucard’s indiscretions.

You walked side-by-side. The blonde vampiress rambled on as she took you through the main features of the manor. Hall after hall passed as she led you between each room you would need.

Wainscotting, coffered ceilings, gilded crown moulding, crystal chandeliers, plush carpets, rare marble tiles. Every lavish upgrade you could think of, you saw somewhere in the residence without it appearing gaudy. It was stunning, but…strangely gloomy. And just like the way Shangri-la was not you, you were a fish out of water here as well. The feeling only grew stronger the further you went. You scoffed at Alucard’s assertion that you belonged here, sorely missing the warm coziness of a home that was no longer yours.

As you toured the premises with Seras, it became apparent that there were way fewer servants of the kind you expected, the ones who would help run an estate of this size. Sure there were cleaners and workers in the kitchen and the manor was tasteful and clean. But oddly, it was soldiers who made up the bulk of the visible staff.  

You and Seras passed another patrol as she showed you to your bedroom on the second floor. 

--------------------

You bid her goodnight and sighed with relief when you were at last afforded the luxury of privacy.

Your jacket hung in an open closet. All your belongings were there in the room, packed into boxes in a neat corner. That was the entirety of it? Your possessions were certainly humble when juxtaposed into a room as spacious as this. After exploring your storage options, you began the tedious work of unpacking.

A wealth of information was delivered to you today. You were reeling from whiplash. Even if Alucard previously broached the topic of moving in, the abrupt relocation into this organization was overwhelming. 

Your new ‘home’ was beautiful, yet…everything about it was dreadfully formal and you got the sense that this compound operated under a rigid hierarchy and set of rules. 

This was no simple rich person's playground and getting used to this authoritarian setting was going to be beyond difficult. You tossed around in bed as your thoughts wandered. Did your place here depend entirely on Alucard and Integra’s favour? You knew your vampire would not allow you to be mistreated, yet you did not know your standing without Alucard by your side nor what was expected of you. What would become of you? 

They said it would be easier if you slowly transitioned to a nocturnal lifestyle if you were to live here, but you were exhausted by everything you saw. As you rolled into the soft satin sheets to try and sleep, you sighed. The opulence that was present even in your new bedroom was entirely foreign. 

Everywhere you went, the people you encountered were pleasant, but the stares and whispers followed closely on your tails. They knew. Everyone knew you came with Alucard and of the sudden delivery of a stranger’s belongings before you were brought here. And guessing your relationship was no challenge. 

You had barely seen Alucard since you arrived. Instead you were escorted from one oversized room to the next as Seras stuffed your head with random facts you’d need to know. As you were thrown flailing headfirst into the world of the supernatural (which you didn’t wholly ask for), the simmering doubt bubbled into a seething boil.

They said Alucard stayed in the basement. Some familiarity would be much appreciated right now. Would you be in trouble? You wanted to see him more than anything to know that everything will be okay. To sit in his lap and stare into the sunset as he soothed away your fears with the lull in his words and gentle touch.

You stayed on your toes to muffle unnecessary noise as you slipped out of your room and traced your path back to a hidden entrance in an unassuming hallway, which was where Seras told you he stayed during your tour. 

With careful hands, you pulled at the door, which didn’t budge until you put your weight behind it and yanked. You winced at the unoiled creak that groaned louder than thunder in the silence. 

It was a staircase.

You saw only as far as four steps down before it became pitch black. You walked in anyways and closed the door behind you so no one would be privy to you sneaking around. 

You couldn't see anything. There was no moonlight or wall lights. Just the nothingness that swallowed you whole as you shut yourself in. 

Alucard. You called him.

No reply. 

He must be here. His signature was ubiquitous, a welcome oppression that gave density to the air you inhaled. You felt around blindly, and softly, softly, in the shadows, one tentative step at a time, you made it to the bottom of the stairs while remaining close to the wall. Your fingers brushed a plaque and you traced the letters tentatively. 

...T-O-R…TORTURE?

Surely that must be wrong. Unease rippled through your mind as you gulped. You hugged yourself and rubbed your ears. Without the whisper of your steps, the silence became deafening as well. With nothing to see or hear, you stood alone in a void, but he was here. You knew it in your soul. 

You stayed put to try letting your eyes adjust to the lack of light, but even that was hopeless. You couldn’t even differentiate if your eyes were open or closed. This was the kind of place where spidery demons of legend ambush their prey from the shadows. There was an almost imperceptible draft blowing past you and the air felt wet. Your nose curled with revulsion as you imagined what this place must look like. 

The darkness and silence and moldy dampness gave you the creeps, but this was his lair. Monsters and whatnot may lurk in this world, but the scariest of them all…was your lover. You were invincible here. Nothing could harm you. 

You let out an audible breath to remind yourself that you have only temporarily lost your senses. Sightless, you kept shuffling along, staying close to the walls to help guide your way. Whether this place was cramped, you could not tell, not even if it was a hallway or an open cavern. Your flesh prickled into chicken skin from the eeriness. 

While everyone else stayed in the lavish manor above, Alucard lived here? 

Minor interactions from the day welled up and you recounted how uneasy others were around him. Were you once the same? Realization dawned and your chest squeezed tight. He gave his services to this organization, but they treated him like…a monster to be caged, ostracized, and feared. Your lips pressed together in a taut line as you picked up the pace to rush to your vampire.

You ran out of wall to follow. You must have arrived at a turn. Or it could be a wall ending within a spacious room.

Alucard? You reached for him in your mind.

Still he did not answer. You stumbled over your feet and dithered where you were. Perhaps coming here uninvited was a bad idea, but before you could decide which direction to walk next, you heard him. 

This is no place for a sweet human like yourself. Turn back.

"Why bring me all the way here only to turn me away now?" 

Speaking out loud was equivalent to screaming into the abyss, shattering the engulfing silence. It reverberated and your words echoed off into the distance for you to voice your question over and over. "You invited me to live with you. I came to Hellsing for you. I chose to be here with you."

A pregnant pause after your words faded. When there was nothing for several more moments and you were about to march forward blindly anyways, he answered. 

Very well. Come to me, he whispered.

Alucard lit the way. Hundreds of thousands of eyes opened along the stones, guiding the path to him. You now saw you were in a long corridor, the end of which was not visible. 

You followed his macabre lead, feeling his pull more as you neared, a tyrannical energy that grew more potent with each step. The blanket of power was so welcome.

He had such a flair for theatrics. He could just come out and greet you like a good host. Chuckling bounced around your head. 

There is no fun in that, little one.

You snorted, but sobered up as you studied your newly visible surroundings. The basement was not yet finished. It was bleak and indeed dank with mildew. Something dripped in the distance.

Alucard lives here? This was no home. This repugnant hole in the ground was more like…a dungeon.

”How unseemly for a lady to come seeking a monster’s company at night,” the vampire murmured, pressing behind your back with his hands wrapped around your waist. You gasped at the unexpected presence, then sighed in relief and leaned back into him.

"You aren't a monster," you said softly while reaching back to pull him against you by the thighs. It was true that you hadn’t truly thought of him as one in a very long time. His chest rumbled from purring as he nuzzled into the side of your head. “Your home is so lonely.” You pushed your forehead to his as he continued to nudge against you, closing your eyes to breathe him in as a wave of sadness washed over your senses.

As you basked in his solid presence behind you, the darkness lost its foreboding. You were now wrapped in the safe blanket of night. His darkness, which hid and protected you, unweaved the intricate web ensnaring you with fear. He disappeared as you made your way into a clearing, but your fright was already banished. Knowing Alucard was right here with you gave you peace of mind.

Meagre torches came on one by one and you followed the garish light that made you squint. Everywhere your eyes fell, empty blood bags were illuminated by each consecutive lamp alighting, leading to a massive throne that occupied the middle of the room. There Alucard sat in solitude with his chin on a fist. Blood splattered the floor where the drained packets lay. 

“I have been famished lately,” he rumbled, his bangs shielding one gleaming eye from view.

“What’s new? Do you always gorge yourself like this? Such a messy eater.” You replied with a cringe, then looked away from the littered floor. “I couldn't sleep, so I decided to pay you a visit.”

The King smiled a toothy grin and extended a hand to you. “Come here, little one.”

Tiptoeing gingerly around the blood sacks, you reached the King, who pulled you into his lap. As you leaned against him, your tension from the day melted away from the physical contact and you yawned.

You lay your head on Alucard’s shoulder, then peered up at him through lidded eyes.

“A lot of things happened today,” you mumbled.

“...”

“I was shown so many rooms and told so many things, I doubt I’d even remember all of it, especially the arbitrary rules. I’m sure I’d get lost though.”

“...”

“There’s a hallway with these classical paintings, the ones with the fancy gold frames. They look like they might be originals! It was really weird how they were all just a bit tilted though. Is that something rich people just do for rich people's reasons?”

You were rambling. He must already know the random trivia when it came to this mansion, but you continued to blab about the various things you were shown in the Hellsing manor as your lover quietly listened to you unload. Your heart quivered, the stress from the move at last catching up.

"...Why me, Alucard?" You whispered against his chest as you fiddled with the hem of your shirt.

"You are a fool if you must ask."

He plucked you from his lap and took you through another room, where you spotted a palatial bed to the side, fit for a king, but he brought you to his coffin instead. It was an enormous wooden box, glossy black with engraving that you couldn’t discern in the poor lighting. The lid floated off by itself and you peeked inside.

It looked like a velvet mattress padded with cushioning on the sides. If it weren’t for the knowledge that it was a coffin, it wouldn’t be too bizarre at all. You glanced over and saw Alucard looking at you as if he was waiting for you to freak out. You got in instead.

It was surprisingly spacious inside, until Alucard joined and crowded you. Clearly these were made for single occupation! The lid closed and darkness engulfed you. This was supposed to be creepy, but you found yourself remarkably unbothered as the vampire rearranged the two of you until he was under you with the silken fabric of his cravat against your face. 

No heartbeat. The dead silence of his chest was well-known to you. Up so close to the one you wanted most the entire time you were here, you began to drift.

That you braved the dark to seek him for comfort gave Alucard great pleasure. Now locked in with him, there was no way to escape the coffin unless he allowed it. He let his mind wander. A balm to his battered soul, that was what you were.

“My Darling, if there ever comes a time you are in danger and I am absent, hide in this coffin. It will provide you with some measure of protection.”

You mumbled something in reply and burrowed into him, but your vampire wasn’t ready to let you fade away.

His hands roamed your body, his erection pressed taut against your stomach. He dragged you up by the armpits as you squealed until his lips met yours. Smooth lips tugged at you and you groggily let him in, distantly wondering what you would do if copper filled his mouth.

It didn’t. He tasted, as always, of vintage wine, and you melted into him with the yearning of a day spilling over. Suckling his tongue, you shyly brought his hands from your back to your chest and pressed his fingertips into the fat pads there. He was happy to massage you, making you squirm when he rolled and pinched your peaks.

Through a closed-eye grin, you giggled, "You’re freezing, but I'll keep you warm when you sleep from now on."

The vampire's cock twitched. Vibrant orangey-yellow irises narrowed slightly before swirling with affection as he squeezed you to his chest with extra limbs.

You slipped towards sleep with a smile on your face. At last, while you lay in a cramped wooden box underground on top of a living corpse, you were comfortable to be where you were.

--------------------

Pain.

You gasped. The shocking sensation seared your nerves, yet you found it impossible to remove yourself from the terrible feeling. It passed immediately as the pain numbed, then melded into pleasure unlike anything you’d ever experienced. Your mind went blank as another wave rolled through simultaneously with a distant pull at your neck. Have you gone mad? If people abused drugs for ecstasy such as this, you too would go delirious from addiction. 

Blood feeds blood.

Your body jolted feebly under a weight that would not give way, forcing you to remain immobile and endure the electrified sparks up your spine.

Alucard.

His teeth sank deep into your throat as he took that lengthy drag. Your essence funnelled into him while you spun, intoxicated from desire. 

Blood calls blood.

Excruciatingly enticing.

You tilted your head to grant him access to your soul.

Blood is, and blood was,

You didn’t even wince this time as slick pooled from blazing loins and your back arched. More. You needed more.

He was inside you. Thick and delicious and somehow you were accommodating him despite his immense size, the siren-song of his whispers in your ears, rending your existence apart with sultry thoughts and promises of eternity.

And blood shall ever be.

He was pounding you into the plush cushions of a coffin. Making you whole. An angel found her wings.

Daughter of the Night.

Pain and pleasure were the same. Coherent thought escaped as you became one. The only certainty was that this was meant to be–

--------------------

The Bird of Hermes is My Name

Eating My Wings to Keep Me Tame

You woke with a start panting, sweat clinging to your brows and soaking your back. You were indeed lying on plush cushions and still inside the coffin with your crotch soaked in juice. There was suddenly so much room? 

No, you were not alone. Alucard was on top of you as a weighted blanket of shadow. His hand was tight on your mound. 

"Such indelicate fantasies you hold, my Dear." 

You may have been in absolute darkness, but you heard the smirk in his voice. A giant eye opened, hovering where you assumed the coffin’s lid was, examining you with a wild gaze as invisible hands palmed your body. Your sopping pussy throbbed as she recalled the dream.

"Ha! As if! You put those delusions in my head!" 

The vampire chuckled at the retort. 

It felt so real. You could almost feel his phantom teeth in your vein and your lifeblood leaving the warm confines of your vessel to mingle with his. You could almost feel him moving through you, filling you. You shuddered with craving for that completeness again.

But what was that? 

You grasped through the haze searching for something you didn't know. All you had were fragments of a barely remembered dream that made no sense.

The coffin lid lifted and you drank in the new air.

His shadow rippled and slid around you as if he was your sleeping bag. “Perhaps I went too far. Back to sleep, Dear. There are long days ahead of you.”

You chucked it down to Alucard being Alucard and putting strange ideas in your mind. His eye was so red and lustrous, almost like a prized ruby, though it shimmered even without light. You shifted however much you could and relaxed. It really had been a long day and night. You were so drained, you knew you would fall asleep the moment your eyes closed. Your confusion dissipated as you settled and it was apparent you could barely move in his embrace. 

Alucard wrapped you snugly. Reassuringly.

For the first time since coming to Hellsing, you felt a sense of belonging within the claustrophobic confines of a vampire's coffin, something akin to being at home.

You slept like a newborn until midday.

Yours.

~To Be Continued~

Next chapter: Just Another Day in Paradise -------------------- Notes: (Please read)

A modified version of this chapter (with a sort of “happily ever after”) was originally intended to be the end of this story. But after a reader asked about whether Millennium will feature, I think yes, since the relationship between Alucard and his Reader would be incomplete without delving into some of Hellsing’s enemies. And so this fic continues again haha.

Now that we will be covering canon events and the main cast is finally featured, I’m honestly full of trepidation. Whereas when it was only Alu and Reader, I felt I was allowed to do whatever I wanted (to some extent). With Millennium coming into the picture also brings the issue of handling triggering/sensitive content. I am super scared I’ll screw up the story from here on out. There is an outline for most of the upcoming chapters, but the story will not be fully canon-compliant. Rather, it will only be inspired by canon events and I will take some liberties with how vampire things work.

But know that the story gets darker and the rating will change to “Explicit” (possibly even DD:DNE due to the chapters with Millennium). Please heed the tags and warnings when the time comes.

I hope you guys don’t mind the references to other popular media and works, of which there are a number throughout this fanfic. Fantasy is my favourite genre and my favourite author (Brandon Sanderson) loves to incorporate references to his other books within his epic fantasy world, where all of the different planets are linked by common origins, magic principles (even if the magic systems themselves differ), and an unseen war between their gods spanning millennia. The storylines and characters are starting to collide in Sanderson’s “Cosmere.” Whenever I spot some of these ‘Easter eggs,’ I feel so self-satisfied and like I’m such a good fan. I hope you smile too if you see one of my references to a song/movie/novel/play/anime/musical/etc.

P.S. You sweet summer child. You don’t bring up “human rights” with Vlad the Impaler :D

A Night for Hunting Ch.10 -What Makes a Meal?

T/W: Alucard (Ultimate) x F!Reader, sexually suggestive content, but also some fluff. Romance, Riocard, shapeshifting. Smitten human with a crush. Seductive vampire troll, ‘dating.’ Comedy but not really? (things are amusing for Alucard at least).  Words: 5026 On AO3 @alastorhazbin

Thank you all for the birthday wishes! 

This chapter ended up longer than anticipated. Guess I was having fun too! I think it’s needed before the plot gets a bit more serious later.

I received a new shipment of orchids to add to my modest collection and I’ve been obsessed, if you can’t tell with my plant references.

Please read the note at the end of this chapter.

Alucard insisted on taking your number before you left for vacation with your closest friends. It was only a short trip away from home, but it was what you could manage. You ended up travelling to Scotland and visiting all the attractions of interest to your group, including Edinburgh Castle and the Isle of Skye. The landscape at the Isles was truly the stuff of legends. The soft light of late winter painted the sky deep pinks and purples during sunrise, the dusting of frost atop mountains were glittering diamonds in the morning sun before it melted into a shimmery dew, a series of picturesque waterfalls cascaded into the crystal clear Fairy Pools. It was a land of magic and enchantment more suited for a world of fantasy than reality. You almost wished Alucard was there so you could show him the beauty of the land and those spectacular sunrises. You captured countless photos to preserve the memory.

During a hike, your group’s passage disrupted a colony of hibernating bats, sending them fluttering in a noisy, chittering swarm. You scuttered away with your friends, yet you grinned even while squawking as everyone else did. These bats, however, did not possess scarlet eyes. Neither did they want anything to do with roosting in your hands as another bat did. 

He was at the back of your mind the entire time. Ever since you accepted your attraction to your immortal suitor, you thought of him frequently in increasingly fond terms. He was absolutely charming. It was frightening how quickly he came to occupy your conscious faculties. You hoped he’d appreciate the small gift you were bringing back to him. 

The vampire phoned at night on several occasions. Unfortunately, he did not allow you to elude him with only texting, stating that it was no proper way of communication. Once again, you were pleasantly surprised by the conversation with him. He was the most attentive audience as you excitedly recounted the adventures of the day, then he agreed with your hotel roommate as she teased you about ‘your boyfriend’ in the background of your calls. Curse his vampire hearing. You trembled at the deep voice on the other end. Between them, they had you tumbling into a flustered puddle of stutters and you terminated the call, telling him to let you be and that he was being an idiot.

You fell back on the mattress and pulled the sheets over your head so your friend wouldn’t see the stupid grin on your face. The butterflies in your stomach fluttered again as you recalled the smile you heard in Alucard’s voice during the call. --------------------

At last you were home in England. Considering the circumstances on how you met, the eagerness with which you wanted to see Alucard might be astonishing. His dastardly ways were mostly unchanged, yet his hunting of you for sport was long ago. Your current relationship was decidedly warm. 

There was no way you could treat him to a fancy restaurant, so you invited him over for dinner. It seemed like an excellent choice of activity until Alucard expressed his excitement about the prospects of you feeding him, only for you to repeatedly remind him he was not drinking from you again.

Sweet, I have arrived.

You fumbled with the lid to the pot before catching yourself and safely setting it down. You rushed to the entrance with a huge smile and pulled it open, only to stop dead in your tracks.

Huh?

Your smile dropped at the bizarre sight. It was undoubtedly Alucard on the other side of the door. You would never mistake those fiery eyes, the immense stature, and arrogant demeanour for anyone else. Yet he was different. His thick tresses revealed his hairline and fell straight past his rear. He wore a tailored black suit that fit him to perfection and a conceited smirk that matched the enthralling sunset gaze. There was something about his appearance that made him feel more unsettling and dangerous than usual.

You knew the vampire was a shapeshifter, yet you edged backwards when faced with the unfamiliar. His eyes glittered with mirth at your hesitation and his fingertips landed on your cheek with a delicate touch.

“Surely you have not forgotten me in a mere week, Dear?” He jested, rattling you out of your stupor.

As if that was possible. You shut your mouth. Yup, this was certainly Alucard. “I –I could never.” You meekly stepped aside to let in your guest and stared at him as he strode in like he owned your home.

“This is a gift for you,” he pronounced, setting a basket of yellowish, fragrant orchids in your hands. “It is known as ‘The Lady of the Night.’ It suits you.” It was a living arrangement of the whole plant, not just the cut flowers, and you shook your head at the vampire’s double meanings with a sigh. 

“Thank you. They are lovely.” You accepted the gift graciously and took a quick whiff of the citrusy fragrance that was to die for. The door shut and locked behind the vampire.

Alucard was in excellent spirits. He scented your excitement from behind the door and in truth, he was equally eager to see you. It smelled divine, the aromas of home-cooking and your nervousness mingled to tantalize his senses. He took in the sight of you standing awkwardly beside him, wondering if you were supposed to offer to take his coat, and grinned fiendishly. How adorable without even knowing it.

“Sweet, you should know the physical form I assume is meaningless. I may appear as whatever I desire.” 

His handsome countenance suddenly melted into whispering shadows. You gasped as his snakelike tongue lolled before he warped into a bipedal horned monster leaking darkness. His body stretched and broke open to reveal smooth bone, before sinewy muscle fibres formed over skeletal limbs and were encased in fresh skin. Those overly long, disproportionate fingers dripped of the night and you held your breath. You weren’t sure if you were afraid, but you couldn’t tear your eyes away from the grotesquely fascinating transformation. 

The monster dropped onto all fours, the horns elongating into antlers and with a series of crunches, the beast moulded itself into a giant elk that took up all of your living space. The metamorphosis was disturbing, but Alucard remained the most majestic creature, even as the elk sprouted eyes along its snout and down its hide. It stared into you for the longest moment and you didn’t look away, then it shrank into a dog, though the extra eyes remained.

And suddenly he became your Alucard again. 

The jagged shadows lashed about before flowing back and forming his familiar face, the darkness rippling around him with a crimson glow. It seemed the magic show was over and you were both silent. You finally released your bated breath. Instead of feeling terrified by the gnarly sight of Alucard remaking himself as if he was liquid, you giggled, then laughed out loud in wonder. You approached him to caress his hands, inspecting the digits that were reformed without any sign they were any longer mere moments ago. You stroked his cheeks, then went to the top of his head. No remnants of horns either.

Alucard’s brow lifted at your reaction. You were…excited by the prospect of having your own petting zoo? Yet he was not affronted by your debasement of his abilities as a Nosferatu. He made you laugh again and he basked in the sound. Tucking a strand of hair behind your ears, his smile matched your own toothy grin that showed your canines peeking through, so tiny compared to his fangs. 

You kept giggling, tucking a strand of imaginary hair away, unconsciously mirroring his actions and your eyes glittered as you lunged to embrace him. Such an unexpected and gratifying response you welcomed him with. His expression softened.

“Welcome back, little one,” he murmured, wrapping an arm around your waist.

Your lips parted and then closed. And opened again. You buried your face in his chest. “I missed you too, you jerk,” you mumbled, burrowing deeper when you felt the vibrations of his laughter. “I have something for you too, from Scotland.” Holding out something furry with both hands, you presented to your vampire a little stuffed toy bat. 

His brows raised before the orange pools spun and the light caught their golden flecks. He took the bat and studied it with a toothy grin, flicking a fond glance at you before tucking it away in his duster. “Delightful.”

You beamed bashfully and pulled apart. “Come on in, vampire, dinner is ready.”

You led your guest inside and seated him at the table. The seats were set and everything was just about cooked. All that was left to do was to plate the dishes and pour the drinks. You excused yourself briefly to use the bathroom.

Alucard settled into his seat while you used the facilities, listening to the sounds of your bodily functions, enjoying everything that made you human. Everything that was a normal life. His eyes opened as you returned and finished your preparations, materializing beside you to assist with preparing the beverages and floating the entrees over, making you shake your head in glee at his ‘magic tricks.’

He tugged at a chair to slide it across the floor with a hushed whisper, then tucked you back into the table once you were seated. “Dig in!” You proudly announced, quickly layering your bowl with an assortment of goods. 

As you tore into the deer, you peeked up at him in confusion. He made no moves to serve himself. You almost snorted. He may be your guest, but was he so insufferable he was expecting you to serve him like he was a king?

“You aren’t eating? Go ahead.” You pushed a dish at him and dabbed at the escaped sauce from your lips, not missing the way those predatory eyes followed the movement. 

“I will eat,” the vampire replied cryptically.

“You should while it’s hot. It’s venison stew, perfect for this weather! It’ll warm even you up,” you snickered, plopping a sizable serving into his bowl.

He didn’t reply.

This was getting awkward. You tried to chew quietly as your head spun. Was this some archaic vampire ritual where he was supposed to allow you to finish eating before he began? Did you mess up the dish somehow? Perhaps he preferred his meats more undercooked, bloodier? You somehow doubted it was because he didn’t consume meat. There simply didn’t seem to be a hint of a vegetarian in Alucard.

“The meal is perfectly divine, little one.”

The reassurance didn't help. “Then why…” You trailed off. The vampire was enamoured by the process of you eating. You set down the spoon as you finished swallowing.

“Alucard, you’re getting creepy again. You were expected to eat too, you know, not just stare at me.”

He chuckled. "You still wish to feed me?" 

“That was why you were invited.”

“As you wish, little one, but you are not feeding me.” 

You fixed the flattest, blankest stare in his direction. The quietness was nearly deafening. You made him a feast that blanketed every inch of the table. What game was he playing at now?

Sunset eyes got brighter and that grin grew wide. 

“Oh hell no. You’re a grown ass man! I’m not spoon-feeding you like you’re a toddler!”

“That is the only way I will eat human food.” He licked his lips.

“Then don’t eat! See if I care!” You huffed in disbelief, shoving in another bite to chew angrily. All that time spent preparing this plethora of dishes to perfection for this uncivilized beast. More for you, whatever. There will be plentiful food for the week.

The minutes stretched as you ate in silence by yourself. Childishly, you sliced the already tender morsels with more force than necessary to make a point. Several times, your gaze flickered up to check what your infuriating guest was doing, whether he was bluffing or if he truly expected you to demean yourself. An uncanny stare scrutinized every aspect of the way you consumed your food and suddenly you couldn’t remember why you missed him.

Grinding your teeth, you at last threw your hands up in frustration. “You really are insufferable!” You scooped up a slice of deer and shoved it at Alucard’s annoying mug.

The vampire's grin split even wider with his victory and the meat slid into his mouth. He started purring. “Heavenly. Were I still living, I would have appointed you a chef in my castle.”

You rolled your eyes at his grandiose words of praise. Even if he was a Duke or a Count or anyone of enough importance to warrant living in a castle, his manners were clearly plebeian. His appreciation for your efforts would be more apparent if you didn’t need to basically beg him to eat it.

“Come here, sweet one.”

“I am here,” you deadpanned.

“Your obstinate struggles against my will, as entertaining as they are, will always be fruitless, little human. Come here.” He scooted back in his chair and placed a hand on his lap. 

The audacity! This was your home. 

You had half a mind to demand he leave, but what were you going to do? Try shoving him out the door? He’d just phase through and mock you, if he even let you move him. If sitting in an ancient vampire’s lap to feed him dinner was the only way to expedite the process, so be it. Begrudgingly, you grumbled and plodded over to drop onto one of his thighs, only for him to scoop up your legs and drape you sideways over his lap.

You pouted and glared at him to show your displeasure.

“You really are charming when irate,” he purred, sticking his nose to your throat to nuzzle it. He inhaled. “For the aromas.” He chuckled when you tensed. “I am ready to eat, Sweet.”

You leaned away while pushing at his jaw to create distance, feeling the twitch in the corner of an eye as you picked up the fork and lanced the first piece of deer from Alucard’s bowl before lifting it to his lips. They wouldn’t part.

Not like that. His voice appeared in your mind, immediately followed by an image of yourself holding the cut to his lips between your fingertips.

“You really are going too far.”

“Humour me and you will find your freedom sooner.”

Picking up a slice of stew meat, you shoved it at the beast as you blazed with fury. He accepted the offering instantly, cool lips closing around your fingers to suckle. You squeaked in horror and yanked your hand back while he swallowed what you gave him whole.

“What the hell?!”

He smacked his lips and leered at you through lidded eyes. “Next.”

Gulping down your apprehension, you raised the next piece to his mouth and looked aghast as that scandalous tongue made a reappearance. Alucard made a show of licking your hand, beginning at the palm with a tickle and wrapping around your sauce-coated fingers. He lapped slowly at your fingertips as his eyes flashed, before gingerly taking the deer between sharp teeth and sucking it back with a wet slurp.

The hair on your arms stood on end, making your skin tingle. Your eyes met and his hand tightened around your waist. The other stroked up your thigh and squeezed your hip. Something else like appendages rubbed your shoulders and feet and held you tighter to him. He crooned and licked your jaw before capturing your lips to nibble on. The lounging beast sighed happily as your eyes bulged and you squirmed with discomfort on his lap.

“For the added seasoning,” he murmured against your ear.

That was just rude! 

The vampire cackled and flicked at your bottom lip again, making you flinch. “There exists no seasoning superior to your own taste.”

Piece by piece, you fed the old vampire by hand while he held you hostage in his lap. Despite feeling thoroughly harassed, eventually you couldn’t help but feel slightly flattered about your culinary abilities that elicited a response like this. If he liked your food so much, you supposed you could just cook for him again but skip this degenerate’s feeding kink, although being perched on his lap was not too bad. Neither was his touch wholly unwelcome. 

You pet his cheek while he chewed, his expression the face of pleasure. Nuzzling into your palm with a moan, his eyes opened to slits when you brushed up one side to investigate the pointy earlobe. He kept purring as loud as an engine.

Your eyes focused on the dancing shadows that surrounded him. They floated and twirled and seemingly pulsed at times. So mesmerizing.

Your unoccupied hand dipped cautiously into the shadow tendrils flowing around Alucard. He shuddered and growled, so low it was nearly imperceptible. A single wisp wrapped around your hand and you held onto it. Making contact with it was the strangest experience. Alucard's shadows were just that –not really tangible, yet you were able to physically touch his darkness. It buzzed in your hand with arcane energy that rippled through your being and tickled your spirit. Finally, you let him go, unable to bear the sensation any longer, and dropped your head on his broad shoulder to rest.

The heat was probably too high in your apartment after so much cooking. Your shirt clung to musky armpits and you fidgeted on Alucard’s lap as the undead cat finished another bite. He inhaled deeply, heavy purrs rumbling through his chest and vibrating through you. What a pervert. Always too suggestive. Always too attractive.

You absentmindedly gave him another piece, nipping on your lips and staring everywhere except at him when he started licking again. Something hard slid against your finger, catching your attention. The goddamn vampire was dragging the side of a fang against your ring finger. You held your breath, but again, it wasn't fear you felt, only curiosity at where he was going with this when he plainly stated he had no intention of biting you.

You caught the wicked smirk and glint in his eyes, now a deeper shade than at the onset of the meal. Again with the teasing. The air was heavy, the aura of mystery and danger swirled. His hair was longer and the locks fluttered despite the lack of a breeze. The lights dimmed before coming back on, throwing contrasting shadows across the pale profile you enjoyed looking at so much.

This smug vampire knew he was magnificent.

Your body responded aptly. After being subjected to hearing and feeling him purr all night, as well as the sensation of having his hands on you all night, you fell victim to his allure… the devilish monstrosity was simply irresistible. It felt like you were sitting in a furnace when you lowered your gaze from his triumphant one.

There it was, the scent of arousal. Alucard inhaled loudly, nostrils flaring as he absorbed his victory, ensuring you knew he was fully aware of your state of restlessness. Human food may be disgusting, but the taste of your skin was sweet ambrosia. For it to be finally paired with this ravishing perfume? Alucard believed he would never have enough of this gourmet delicacy.

The vampire was rock hard. A stiff shaft prodded your rump, large enough to make an impression even through fine wool and the awkward positioning. Your wide eyes lifted slowly to meet his, your shock at odds with his amusement.

The hands returned, the touch now lewd compared to the gentle exploration earlier. A shadow hand massaged your breast, alternatively kneading the mound between its palm and fingers. He traced circles around the tip to create a pebble before he pinched it. Your guest took your lips, prodding insistently until you yielded to his demands. Cold muscle delved into your mouth and he growled as he slid around to conquer and explore. Something firm held the back of your head when you attempted to escape. Another hand. His hands were everywhere, stroking and grabbing until you writhed in his grasp.

Your musk got heavier as your underwear became saturated with fluid. Even you smelled it. Alucard keened and encouraged you to touch him. A strange energy embraced you, leaving you gasping and he smirked with satisfaction. 

Curiously, you rested a palm on his chest. He had no heartbeat. Your heart was pounding, but there was nothing beating in his, nothing to show that you weren’t the only one hot and bothered. A moment of trepidation flashed by and passed. Resting your forehead to his chin, you trailed down his torso to rest lightly on the front of his pants. It was held up with steel that strained the smooth material into an indecent tent. You cupped it width-wise, its girth taking up most of the curvature your hand created, and tentatively ran your palm down the length. Down and down and down your hand travelled, until the end ran under your leg and disappeared.

Sweet Jesus, how big was this monster?

He hissed in pleasure as he made another show of licking your fingers, sucking them into his maw one by one. The devil held you spellbound through glowing vermilion orbs. No…you searched within your consciousness…the ancient vampire wasn’t hypnotizing you. This was all you. The revelation was more frightening than anything.

You shivered.

“What say you? Shall we search for nirvana this fine evening for dessert?”

“E-excuse me?”

“As I proposed, I will mount y–”

“I know how the mechanics work!” You screamed, your face on fire as you suddenly found yourself free of your prison and you scrambled off of him in an uncoordinated tangle of limbs, tripping over yourself and landing on your rear by his feet.

Alucard threw his head back and roared raucously as he leaned back to watch you. Eyes opened on the ground and curled in laughter to join in. The extra extremities disappeared. As did your desire –in just these few seconds, your libido jumped off a cliff and died, to be replaced by total mortification.

Not knowing how to recover, you picked yourself up from the floor as the vampire shook his head and chuckled. Stomping down the hall, you turned and hollered, “Time for you to leave! I’m going to bed!” Nevermind the fact that you just ate. 

The door slammed behind you and you crumbled to the floor in a panting heap, the mind racing to process what happened. A vampire, you were about to lay with a marauding predator of the night. Sinfully beautiful, but a ruthless murderer nonetheless. You hugged your legs and tried to calm yourself.

It was futile. You too craved his presence.

“...”

You sat alone longer at the edge of a precipice, the distance providing some much-needed clarity, until you finally stood shakily with your fingertips lingering on the door knob, about to flip the switch when you stopped yourself. If you were to be honest with yourself, you didn’t detest this vampire anymore. You would not mind if he stayed the night. 

…The bedroom door was left unlocked.

-----------------------

You stirred, sticking out a leg and kicking over to the other side of the bed, the cotton sheets brushing softly against your naked skin. With an arching back, you stretched the entire length of your body, from the tips of your fingers to the bottoms of your feet, and yawned. The muscles in your legs cramped from being perched in one position last night. Your toes poked out from under the blanket.

“I bid you good morning, little human.”

You sat up abruptly and found the unblinking crimson set of eyes in the corner of the room. For a moment, fear shot up your spine, the terrifying recollection of being at the mercy of a red-eyed monster who wanted to rip into you on another occasion made your blood run cold. 

But there was no need for alarm this time. Your heart raced even as the fright dissipated.

There he was, sitting on the grey loveseat with his legs crossed and a frown marring his features, his fingers loosely intertwined. Shooting a panicked glance over to the window, you saw there was indeed light filtering around the edges of the curtains, illuminating the bedroom with the gentle rays of morning. But the sun! Why wasn’t he going off in flames? Did he just watch you sleep the entire night? 

“Why are you here?” You asked dumbly.

The frown turned upside down and the vampire cackled, two rows of jagged teeth gleaming like a bear trap. “You invited me in, little one.”

“But you stayed the night?”

“Watching you breathe,” he purred, “listening to your heart beat.”

Creepy, psychopathic behaviour, but then again, this was Alucard you were referring to. You held the sheets closer to your chest before remembering to check on your state of undress beneath. You were the same as how you went to bed, crotch still clammy from the devil’s seduction last night.

“I meant the sun. How are you alive? Shouldn’t you be a pile of ashes?” 

He smiled. “Your legends generally do not apply to a true vampire like myself.”

Indeed, Alucard actually looked fresh and well-composed, as if he didn’t spend the night sexually harassing a young woman and then ogled her as she slept. The fog in your mind slowly retreated. A true vampire… There was so much you didn’t know about the supernatural.

You rubbed your eyes and blinked at him. "So the sun doesn't hurt you?"

"No more than it harms you, though I may despise the day."

"Then how about garlic?"

He snorted.

"Crosses? Holy water?"

"Mere irritations."

"Silver?"

"Ah– that may cause injury." The vampire closed his eyes and snickered. "So curious about my existence, little one. You want me dead?" Hellfire bore through your soul.

Dead?

You froze, unsure of how to respond. Did you want him dead? Vampires were a menace to society, a scourge. Wouldn't the world be better off without demons like him wandering it? “You are already dead. But…I can’t say I want you gone for good anymore…”

Silence. The fire burned warmly in those molten pools. "You are such an intriguing creature," he murmured.

You shuffled in bed and propped up a pillow behind your back, being careful to keep the sheets draped over your chest, thoroughly conscious of your nakedness. A million questions bloomed in mind as you sat quietly across from this ancient creature a few paces away, who witnessed the eras come and go. Was it okay to ask now?

“So…how did you become a vampire?”

He sat back and tilted his chin up in thought before staring down his nose at you. “At the end of my human life, I chose vengeance and hate."

You perked up. To be or not to be. "So your sire gave you the option to become a vampire?" You recalled his reaction the last time you inquired about his sire. Hopefully vampirism wasn't a fate that was forced upon him.

Alucard didn't respond immediately. "I have no sire, little human."

You were mildly confused. That was how vampires were born though, wasn't it? Vampires created vampires, as they also gave rise to ghouls. Alucard himself told you so. It seemed the more you learned from him, the less you knew. There was always another secret.

You blurted it out, much more directly than the last time you broached this topic months ago. "...Do you ever regret it?"

He looked sad, wistful, and your heart churned for a demon. What was this feeling? His gaze dimmed, turning downcast as the frown returned.

"Cherish your humanity, child."

Not knowing what to say, you reached for him and he came to you immediately, kneeling by the side of the bed and resting his face in your hand. You ran your fingers through the silky hair you adored and the vampire sighed against your touch.

You pondered Alucard's words as you pet him. So many questions. "Then what about that vampire you shot? Is he like you? Are there other vampires like you who don't bite?"

Alucard tensed before smiling slightly, though it didn’t reach his eyes. “I’m not something so vulgar and cheap. And I do bite.” A hand shot up to grasp your wrist by his face.

You were undeterred. You put your other hand to his chest and once more noted the lack of comforting beats. His touch wasn’t gross like with the other vampire. In fact, physical contact with Alucard no longer made you feel the need to shower. His aura no longer urged you to run and hide, or face mortal peril. Actually, this was quite pleasant.

His face came within inches of yours and you felt his icy breath as he spoke.

“If you can kill me, I would gladly die by your hands.” He purred at you, pressing your hand hard into his chest, leaning heavily into your touch and lowering his head to rub noses.

To be or not to be. You snorted, “As if that’s even in the realm of possibilities.”

“Only a human can kill a monster.”

“You are not making any sense.” You’ve seen what he can do. He had superpowers while you were a normal mortal. Kill him? What a joke.

Alucard chuckled, “No, I suppose not.” A gloved finger bumped softly against the tip of your nose and he closed the gap between you. Luminescent irises whirled, his gaze affectionate. You stared back into the balmy gaze as you let your lips and foreheads touch in a tender meeting.

Minutes had passed when you pulled apart.

“Okay, you got your show. Time for you to leave.” You sighed, brushing a thumb against his cheek one last time before dragging your sheets with you to keep yourself modest as you rose from bed to pull open the curtains.

He was gone from your room when you turned back.

~To be Continued~

Chapter 11: Interlude I Chapter 12: The Feeling of Safety

Notes:  For those of you not familiar with Shakespeare’s work, Hamlet, “To be or not to be, that is the question” is probably the most well-known line from his play. This infamous soliloquy is referring to the decision “to live or not to live,” something Hamlet pondered as he discussed how painful living is and how death may be preferable, if it weren’t for the uncertainty of what came afterwards. Hamlet was suicidal. It is deeper when Alucard said it because he wasn’t merely referring to his ‘cowardly’ decision to turn (“to be a vampire”), but also how by choosing ‘to be,’ he ended up damning himself to an eternity of unlife instead. Alucard wants to die.

While I think Alucard wasn't constantly shagging everyone prior to meeting us, I headcanon that he is normally open to sexual relationships with humans should they be interested (and if they interest him). And if Alucard is sexually interested in someone, he will certainly at least try to seduce them. Alucard is extremely suggestive, very sensual, and the type to take a mile if you give him an inch. If you let him in your pants once, he'll be seeking opportunities to charm them off again. He knows he's attractive, good in bed, and that we’re hot for him. 

So now I feel like I kind of lied when I said "no smut" in this story's initial tags (hey it was supposed to be a oneshot), but I think I actually can't avoid some racy content if we're to get to the point where we want to give Alucard all of ourselves. This fic had mature themes from the beginning, so I believe most readers won’t have too much issue with more sexual content, but explicit smut scenes will be mostly in the interludes from this point on. It is now officially “eventual smut/NSFW." Things will be spicier here and there. The Interludes can be skipped and readers will (probably) not miss too much. Just FYI, they eventually do pretty much everything except fuck “all the way,” ie. P-in-V sex. BTW, next chapter is an interlude. It features period blood and is really not for everyone (but hey, our dear monster is a vampire), in which case I hope you’ll enjoy Ch.12 more!

Above: Brassavola nodosa, The Lady of the Night. Not my orchid, but one I eventually want to add to my collection. I wasn't aware of this, but apparently in some cultures, it represents the connection between the living and the dead. Only at night it is fragrant, releasing a smell that is described as citrusy or like gardenias.

Consider: Spike, Buffy, and Angel having a romantic picnic by the beach at night and stargazing together. They may not be able to go picnicking in the daylight, but the night has charms of its own.

Also consider Angel and Spike getting competitive over who can name more constellations and who tells the stories that go with them better, haha :) 

Image sources: x x x+x;  x;  x x x