psl: immortals vs vampires

[bitethehandthatfeeds]

THIS SPACE FOR CUTE BOYS WITH RED EYES AND BLACK HAIR

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[bitethehandthatfeeds]

[ the raid goes well.

they'd gotten wind of a possible slave situation barely a week ago— disappearing kids, signs of a vampire hiding their presence, rumors of a particularly nasty piece of work having been spotted moving in that direction after being chased out elsewhere. Rinne being Rinne, she'd confirmed everything immediately and had the place scouted out only a day or so later. between him, her, and her coworker hunter, they'd wrecked the bloodsucker's shit.

unfortunately, that leaves five or so kids, freshly freed from active mind control but still left with god knows how many habits and triggers left behind, as well as assorted amounts of plain old trauma. ]

[rebornagain]

[They're all in variable conditions, but four out of five bounce back into full awareness soon enough, even if they're skittish and unsure of their benefactors.

One of the children, however, seems.... absent. His red eyes open but unfocused, not tracking any outside stimulus. He's unresponsive, and if they didn't know better it might almost seem like his soul is outside of his body. Frankly, it's more that it's withdrawn fully, but he's been this way for hours.

He's also chillingly familiar.]

[bitethehandthatfeeds]

[ it's a problem, to be sure. Rinne's organization had already volunteered to take the children; it wouldn't be the first time they've deprogrammed a vampire's thralls, as Rinne herself was a prime example of.

but she'd taken one look at the child and bluntly announced that there was no way they could take someone that badly damaged, they just didn't have the time or expertise for that. May had been a little bit more delicate about it, but she'd agreed. and then they'd both just looked at him. ]

...you both can go to Hell.

[ ...but even without the eerie, upsetting familiarity of his face and unfocused gaze tugging at him, it's really a foregone conclusion that he would take the boy, at the very least to keep an eye on him while more qualified help could be found.

which is how he ends up being carried home in Chris's arms, face tucked against his collar. ]

[rebornagain]

[The boy is light, and familiar as he is, he's visibly healthier than Yves ever was. It's impossible to tell as he is that it's through no choice of his own, but that's how it is.

They're barely across the threshold when the kid stiffens, breathing shifting from unconsciously deep and even breaths to near hyperventilation in a split second.]

[bitethehandthatfeeds]

[ oh, hell, here it comes. keeping his own breathing and posture calm and steady, projecting reassurance as best as he can before pulling back so that the kid can see his face. specifically, who he is not. ]

Hey— you're out, you're safe—

[rebornagain]

[The kid doesn't seem remotely reassured that it isn't his former master carrying him, immediately starts squirming to escape Chris's arms with a deranged sort of fervor.]

Who--

[bitethehandthatfeeds]

[ immediately lets him squirm lose, with no resistance other than what's necessary to keep him from falling and cracking his head open. unfortunately, Chris is between him and the door. ]

My name's Christophe. I helped deal with the person who had you captured.

[ keeping a close eye on his reactions. it wouldn't be unusual if he had loyalty programmed into him; Chris doesn't think his master was the type (generally the ones who went for kids enjoyed terrifying them), but assuming one way or another would be a mistake. ]

[rebornagain]

Christophe? Christophe from when? I don't...

[his eyes start to unfocus again as he backs up, establishing distance and also curling in on himself]

I don't- Who am I?

[bitethehandthatfeeds]

[ ...sitting down, still calm, carefully paying no attention to the way he can feel the hairs on the back of his neck stand up ]

Yael. Your name is Yael— you haven't met me before. It's all right.

[ but haven't they met before? hasn't he known a Christophe? many Christophes? they might have even sounded a lot like this one— ]

[rebornagain]

But you're--

[no

no, he doesn't have to know who he is to know better than this. arguing with someone about whether he knows them... is just stupidity. he crouches, puts his face in his hands and tries to steady his breathing.]

...Yael. Right.

[bitethehandthatfeeds]

I know a little more about you than that. Let me know if it will help; otherwise I'll keep my mouth shut.

[ said like this is all perfectly normal ]

[rebornagain]

[dooon't let on how discombobulated you are, don't show vulnerability, you're Yael, you're Yael, whatever that means. get it together.]

...Can't hurt to fact check.

[bitethehandthatfeeds]

[ ...

starts going through what Rinne had gotten during reconn: family, birthplace, where he'd grown. snippets of a life that he's probably lived different pieces of multiple times before; nothing new or particularly significant.

right up until Christophe mentions getting targeted and kidnapped by a vampire, anyway. ]

[rebornagain]

[Honestly it doesn't take much for Yael to find the opportunity to bail. Chris leaving for a day, or even sleeping for more than a few hours is enough. Yael is efficient and practiced at this, after all. There have been homes he couldn't escape, but he managed to flee a great many of them as well. ...It's not like there are hard feelings. It's just that he feels safe here with Chris, and he can't. He can't live like that. Forgetting the terror of living and letting himself stall out on his goals is unacceptable, will only prolong and deepen his suffering later on. He's made this mistake many times. He won't this time. So whenever Chris comes back, from a trip or just from sleep, Yael is gone. There's no note. Very little is out of place. For someone with duller senses than Chris, it might even seem that he's holed up somewhere reading as usual, but he's well and truly long gone.]

[bitethehandthatfeeds]

[ vampire senses mean he knows Yael is gone before he even steps through the door; there's a relatively fresh scent trail leaving the house that he catches as soon as he gets to the porch. that doesn't stop him from silently combing over the house, trying to figure out what (if anything) had been taken, both to give himself time to think and to get an idea of whether Yael has anything in the means of supplies.

...it isn't that he's surprised, really. something had to give eventually; he'd just been hoping it wouldn't be this. ]

[rebornagain]

[he took water, but only a little. food, but only a little. enough to keep him going for a good while given his gross disregard for his body's needs and limits, but also carefully not more than he can easily carry. he doesn't intend to hang around close. he'd done as much advance planning as possible, but there was only so much he could do while still in Chris's house, so his first decision is to get to a big city, try and lose his scent and impression in a sea of people, keep his head down while he tackles the harder parts of international travel with no money and no legal guardian. no legal anything really. he legally doesn't exist.]

[bitethehandthatfeeds]

[ ... is this what his father had felt like when he'd cut and run?



he doesn't go after Yael immediately. if he's honest with himself, he's exhausted; there had been bright spots, but overall taking care of Yael had been a lot like trying to drag someone who didn't want to move, and that was without going into how depressing it was to look at a person and having no idea how to help them.

in the end, though, it's the very temptation to leave things to someone else that makes him drag himself out of the chair he'd settled into to call Rinne, call his father, call literally everyone he's in frequent contact with to give them a carefully edited notice of what's happened and warn that he'll probably be gone for a while. aside from that, he doesn't really have too many affairs to get in order; it's only a few hours after he'd first found it that he shifts wolf and follows the trail, still unsure what he'll do if— when he actually finds Yael. ]

[rebornagain]

[Yael began by hitchhiking once he got to the closest highway, a journey in and of itself, but one he'd been pretty prepared for. honestly, following his scent makes it clear that Yael had gone to every effort to try and prevent that very method of tracking him. as soon as possible, he tried to lose himself in highly populated areas and crowds. that in itself carries a lot of risk. if he is caught by police as a truant or a runaway that will also be trouble. but he's done this before. not with quite so skilled a pursuer, but he's adept at finding little mostly safe places to stay at night, nooks and crannies and isolated spots to hide himself when he absolutely needs to sleep. there are resources for the homeless he can take advantage of, if indirectly, and libraries for internet access to actually further his goals. for all his efforts to keep his scent mingled with that of other people, even if Chris loses it, there are places in that city he frequents enough to leave an impression. ...it's not that he doesn't consider finding himself a kind benefactor, an adult who would take him in and provide for him, but considering he fled from Chris... he puts his reasons from his mind. it's nothing sentimental. he simply needs some time properly alone.]

[bitethehandthatfeeds]

[ though Yael doesn't know it, his efforts to lose Chris are almost entirely useless. he'd stayed under Chris's roof and eaten his food, after all, and even if the resulting mark doesn't have the proprietary note that would come from being bitten the scent lingers all the same. even when Chris loses Yael's trail, he can still follow his own, and he catches up immediately.

(it also helps that his bat form is one shaped for being tiny and inconspicuous enough to get close to large animals while they sleep without waking them up. it's more than a little nervewracking, but not actually difficult at all to snuggle up with one of Yael's shoes or the very edge of his sleeve while he's asleep long enough to leave fresher and more purposeful scentmarks.)

but doing all that also means doing nothing but watching. Yael isn't doing well, of course, considering his utter disregard for his body's needs— but he's navigating being alone with no trouble. he doesn't need Chris to bundle him up and take him back to what was more or less a glorified prison; he doesn't need Chris at all.

...at least, not until he draws other vampiric attention. the downside to wearing Chris's scent and the downside to trying to get so far away is that they're no longer in Christophe's territory at all— and Yael looks and smells like quite the treat. ]

[rebornagain]

[If nothing else, watching Yael on his own proves that he has self-neglect down to a science. He doesn't get sick, but he's often just on the edge of starvation or passing out. for all his apparent decency at handling himself on his own, there is exactly one limit to his ability to do so: he's still tasty vampire bait, and now with that extra flag of Chris ownership what little chance he had of escaping notice is effectively gone. it's only a few weeks later that it happens. he's only just left the library, and he really needs to sleep again, keeps stumbling over near nothing in the dark as he takes now-familiar alleys at an exhausted trudge. but one stumble ends with him in a stranger's arms, rather than righting himself with balance, and when a soothing voice tells him to sleep his traitorous body and mind give instantly.]

[bitethehandthatfeeds]

[ ...

the ensuing fight is knock-down drag-out vicious, and loud enough that Yael might wake even with the weight of the compulsion and his sleeping problems. whether he does or doesn't, however, the fight ends when Chris slashes the other vampire's throat open, grabs Yael bodily, and runs. ]

[rebornagain]

[the awful racket comes as close to waking him as possible, which is basically sleep paralysis, making everything way worse as he struggles to move, to wake himself up, to remember who he is- anything at all before he slips out of consciousness again, completely helpless and painfully light and small in Chris's arms.]

[bitethehandthatfeeds]

[ sorry, Yael. he recognizes that terror even with the paralysis, but has no time to stop to check on him as he's bleeding quite a bit himself and also. running from what is basically the scene of what will probably be a major diplomatic incident later.

they're too far away to get home, and far too suspicious to get a hotel room the usual way— so he ends up having to use another trickle of his already-low energy to coerce a room out of a motel attendant. it's not great, but it gives him a place to put Yael until he wakes up on his own as well as patch up his own scrapes. they're not as bad as if they'd been inflicted by wood or bone... but vampire teeth and claws still technically counted as something that had been formerly living. ]

[rebornagain]

[when he wakes, it's to the smell of blood. Chris is probably on some level accustomed to how fucked up Yael can be when he wakes up, but it's actually... better than normal, this time? that's a lie, it's worse. it's only quieter. instead of the shouting and occasional screams of his worse wakeups, this time he's terrified and barely moving, just curling up into a shaking ball of existential fear, the ghost of a memory of the sounds of the fight bouncing around in his mind, transmuting into all sorts of other horrible noises.]

[bitethehandthatfeeds]

[ it would be easier to mistake it as "better" if fear didn't have a distinct smell— one which he's currently hungry enough to be completely incapable of missing, even fighting off sleep as he is. he makes an incoherently groggy noise from where he's sitting on the floor next to the bed opposite the window, and sits up to get a look at— ] —Yael? [ wait fuck he's not supposed to interfere when this happens. but with the circumstances—? God fucking damnit. ]