Chapter Text
On the first night, there is nothing save for the murmurs of a thousand wilted leaves. The wind wishes itself a tempest, assailing her body with a gale of frigidity. Like a false lover, it plays harshly with her hair, whispers bitter nothings in her ear and bites it, leaving a freezing sting on the tip.
Above, the moon lies a crescent, a sliver of light in the darkness. But when the clouds around it begin to enclose the world again in their dusky embrace, all hold their breath. All is cloaked in darkness and shadows, the wind abates, and then there truly is nothing.
Suffice to say, no vampire appeared that first night.
On the second night, the moon has waxed slightly larger. The wind, lover that it is, softly kisses her cheeks in an attempt at apology.
She hardly notices, the corners of her lips quirked slightly upwards.
Yesterday after a full night of constant vigilance, the townspeople had been forced to gruffly thank her. According to them, it was thanks to her that for the first time in two weeks, someone hadn’t become gravely ill or deathly pale and weak.
She nearly chuckles, but then the chill of night sends goosebumps suddenly racing up her arms. The stars flicker for a moment, and then all the light in the world seems to be put out in an instant. As if scampering away from danger, the wind blows furiously against her.
Footsteps. Light as the pitter-patter of rain. And she, still as stone, knows that these footsteps are neither hers nor any of the sleeping villagers’.
She tightens her grip on her wooden stake, refusing to flinch when its fiber teeth bite viciously into her palm. Heart drumming, she cautiously surveys the forest and attempts to swallow down her anxiety.
Ten…fifteen meters away and directly in front of her, light emerges: two orbs with the iridescence of fireflies. Their green stare into her blue eyes, but they seem more to be peering deep into her soul. Fiercely bright and chilling, they slink back slowly into the night, never looking away from her.
When she can no longer distinguish their light from the hazy mist of the forest, she releases a breath she didn’t know she had been holding. And when the sunlight envelops the meadow once more during the hours called “day,” when she finally allows her eyes to slip close and her body to rest, her dreams are haunted by piercing green eyes.
The next night, she awakens and meets the moon — no longer a crescent — once more. Again, she assumes her role of ‘Guardian of the Village.’ This time though, as she traipses past the row of cottages towards her wooden stool, she shivers and sighs.
Any excitement she had had those past two nights has been replaced by uncertainty and doubt.
She sits herself down at the threshold of the forest and takes deep breaths: sharp inhales and ragged exhales. The silence is deafening, unnerving. Everything is too quiet, too perfect.
The trees ahead are swathed in night; the stars above are faint in sight. The nervous, muted scritching of knife against wood permeates the darkness as withered leaves again float gently to the ground.
And she sighs, a frosty mist broken by twilight.
Yes, while she’s been here, there hasn’t been a single instance of anything suspicious — supernaturally so. But…it’s also only been two days.
Already two days.
Two days isn’t enough to gauge whether she has made a village safe again, or to determine whether or not there is a vampire. Five days isn’t enough to hunt down a night creature.
Sharp inhales, ragged exhales.
Sky-blue eyes trained to peer through the hours whence the sun never rises, ears primed over the years to pick up the slightest of sounds, but she sees nothing, hears nothing.
The moonlight kisses her skin, shielding her figure from the infinity of shadows. Light bright, quiet night…it should’ve been peaceful. Should’ve…but to her, it’s anything but.
Out of nervous habit, she shifts her weight, causing the chair beneath her to creak.
Then, it’s as if night itself hitches its breath. Somewhere near her, the trees rustle sharply, agitated awake from slumber.
Footsteps again. But this time, they seem less quiet, less nimble. They’re…clumsier, somehow. This time, these footsteps don’t bother to avoid the foliage beneath, which crack under their weight.
This is good, she has to tell herself. This is all according to plan.
She stands up, feet planted firmly apart — one farther in front than the other — to maintain balance. In her left hand is her wooden stake, carved to a fine point over the past two nights. Her right hand is balled up into a fist, ready to defend herself.
She knows that by systematically placing a garland of garlic and a cross on every village door, the vampire would not have been able to enter anyone’s houses. Starving, the vampire would have eventually had to resort to the only person left who hadn’t attempted to deflect the vampire: her, the vampire hunter.
The trees may be frosting, but there are beads of sweat collecting on her temple.
Its footsteps grow louder; once like muffled droplets of rain, they are now heavy as thunder. Moonlight cascades down, shattering into shards of glass on the forest floor. She gasps.
Somewhere from the shadows, he arises — hair as golden as the sun’s gentle rays and eyes greener than the meadows of midsummer.
But his cheeks are sunken in and sallow. The pastures in his eyes have begun to wilt with lack of nourishment. As she stares at his sickly figure beneath the moon, she can only think:
How ironic it is that Apollo was shackled to the night.
But she knows why he’s here. Why she’s here. Raising her stake to him, she forces a smirk on her lips. “So, vampire, we finally meet.”
His lips tremble as if fighting to stay closed. Two of his ivory teeth glint faintly, sharp as daggers.
She expects him to bare his fangs and attack her, grappling with her out of sheer will to live. All the vampires she’s ever dealt with had done exactly that when faced against her. Blood was their life, and blood was the only way to tempt them.
But this vampire merely stares at her, blankly. His breathing is shallow and harsh, but he makes no move forward. His eyes lower, shoulders slump.
“Well…” he rasps. “What are you waiting for?”
Marinette’s hand loosens for a split second. When she realizes that, however, she immediately tightens her grasp on the stake again, pointing it at the vampire’s heart.
She gulps. In the silence, it seems a storm.
“Any last words?”
Again, she expects him to put up a fight, to lunge at her in an effort to pin her down and get an easy grasp at her neck. All vampires were like that; all vampires acted the same.
So when she notices the frail muscles in the vampire’s hand twitch, when she registers that he’s raising his arms to her, taking a step towards her, she ducks and delivers a swift blow to his gut.
There’s a small gasp emitted, but the vampire is otherwise unfazed.
She flinches. Marinette can feel a soft pressure on her arm. Tilting her head upwards, she finds that the vampire’s caught her left wrist with both of his hands. Shaking, he takes the hand and brings it closer to him, until the stake held in it is pressed firmly against his chest.
And then…he releases his grasp on her wrist and closes his eyes. Standing there defenseless, he invites her to plunge her weapon deep into his heart.
Of all the things she had ever expected from vampires, something like this hadnever crossed her mind.
So shocked is she that a few moments pass where she does nothing.
Her hands shaking — she never had learned to control her fear — she slowly…she hesitantly pushes the stake in.
Dots of blood blossom forth on his tattered, ashen tunic.
Dots of blood.
Blood.
Blood.
It’s…it’s…it’s r-
Marinette’s entire body begins to shake. Her eyes widen, pupils narrow. She scrambles to pull the stake away and has to fight the urge not to scream.
She forgot.
She forgot to look away.
R-Re…it’s it’s it’s r-
T-t-the sky is black, she hastily chants to herself. Y-your eyes are blue. The t-trees are brown. And there is nothing in this world that is that color. The sky is b-black. Your eyes are blue.
She wants to run away. Run as far away as she can and sit alone and cry.
How could she have forgotten to look away?
Marinette’s feet drag a trail backwards. Staring blankly into the void of night, she cradles the stake in her arms now, no longer a weapon but a shield.
Across from her, the vampire opens his eyes to the sound of incoherent, agonized babbling. The hunter is backed up against the trunk of tree, the stake now dangling loosely in her arms.
Looking down, he plucks at his tunic, staring at the unfurling blush of blood. He looks up again, then looks down.
The girl is on the verge of tears, and so is he.
Marching towards her, he jerks her forward, pointing the wooden dagger at the bloodstain. “Kill me,” he demands. “Kill me.” His eyes are wide and desperate.
“I-I-I can’t.” Her hand lurches backward, elbow jabbing into the tree behind her. Hundreds of her nerves emit a harsh screech of pain.
The vampire before her struggles with himself, fighting the urge to bite his lip out of sympathy for her. Slowly this time, he lightly takes her wrist and guides her hand to his heart. “Please,” he whispers, voice cracking. “Please.”
“No.” She’s panting now, breathless from anxiety. “I can’t. I can’t do it.” Her gaze is wandering furiously, shifting from his eyes ahead to the sky above to the dirt beneath. They look everywhere but at the stake centered at his chest.
The vampire, however, is losing his patience. It had taken two days of hunger and agony for him to reach his conclusion. And now she wouldn’t allow him his final rest.
“Kill me. Kill me.” He clamps down on her wrist and begins to shake it frenetically. “Why won’t you kill me?”
The hunter doesn’t answer — refuses to; she’s seemingly rendered mute.
“I just…I-I just…why couldn’t I have just stayed dead?” He looks at her, wild and desperate, chest heaving up and down. “One night, I woke up to maggots writhing and crawling over my body. To worms sliding across my face and hands. I panicked, and started clawing at the dirt above me. I could’ve been caved in by own fear, but I didn’t think of that until I managed to get out.
“And when I did get out, I didn’t even realize I was dead at first. I didn’t even realize that I was a human living within a corpse. No…I’m not even remotely human anymore…I was hungry and tried to eat some berries I found. But the second I tried to swallow them, everything in my body locked down and refused them. I coughed them out, and tasted blood pooling in my throat. And I just knew at that moment…I just knew that I wasn’t human anymore.” His voice wavers unsteadily. “I wandered the village then and there was a door slightly ajar. I saw someone inside…someone sleeping and then…and then I…I-” He begins to tremble, as if suddenly realizing what exactly it was he had done that night. “I…drank his blood.”
He snaps his gaze back at her, something in his eyes pleading forgiveness. “I didn’t…I didn’t mean to. I was just hungry. I was just…so, so hungry and I…I…the sun rose. My skin started to bubble and burst in the sunlight and I had to hide in the man’s cellar. I didn’t even understand why. Something in me had known that I wasn’t human anymore…but not that I had become a vampire.
“T-then the next night I woke up hungry again, and when I climbed out of the cellar, the man was waiting there. His eyes were glowing red and his skin was pale, and the moment he saw me, he turned sideways, showing me the bite mark. And again, I…again I drank his blood.
“By the third night, when I woke up, I thought nothing of it. The man looked thinner, more frail, and his skin was ghostly. But again, he offered his neck towards me the second I stepped out of the cellar, and again I drank.
“The next thing I knew, the man was slumped down into my arms. But I was too surprised to catch him, and he tumbled to the floor. He never moved after that.” The vampire begins to furiously run his hands through his hair. “I killed him. I killed a man. I killed him but I didn’t mean to. I really didn’t. I didn’t. I didn’t…I didn’t, I swear.” There are no tears evident in his eyes, but his tone is keening, as if he were mourning for not only the loss of that man, but his loss of innocence as well.
“I ran away. I tried not to drink blood for the next few nights. I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t. There was a man walking by himself at night and I just drank his blood. I was…I was so hungry. I was too hungry. I drank all of it.” He stares at his shaking hands, as if he can still feel the weight of a corpse in them. “I killed two people. I was…I was…no…I am a monster.” Tears stream down his face now in a river. “I destroy everything I touch. Why? Why why why?” He grips her shoulders and frantically shakes them. “Why couldn’t I have been lucky enough to stay dead?”
She doesn’t answer him, but her lips are opening and closing like a fish, as if she wants to say something but doesn’t know how to.
“Please,” he whimpers. “Please just kill me.” He presses the stake in her hand into his chest, wincing at the pain of it against his still open wound. “I-I won’t bite,” he says softly, half-smiling as if he wants to part the world in jest.
She doesn’t move.
“Please.”
Nothing.
“Please.”
A short breath this time, but still nothing.
Suddenly, he rips her back off the trunk of the tree, taking advantage of her dazed state to grapple her to the ground.
“What’s wrong with you?” he screams. “What kind of vampire hunter refuses to hunt a vampire?”
To her though, everything moves in slow motion. She can register the movement of his lips, but his words are blocked out.
She had never met a vampire like him before. They had all been happy to be reborn again, having died with so many regrets. They had all been monsters before, willing to kill anyone just to continue their meaningless second lives.
But this vampire…his desperation simply to die juxtaposed with the fact that he had drunken blood from two different people, connoting that he could have only wanted to live…
For a split second, his gaze falls to the curve of her neck. For a split second, his lips wet with saliva as he stares at the steady pulsing of her veins.
There was something so beautifully, so terribly human about him.
Marinette raises her eyes to truly look at him. “Tell me,” she finally says. There are tear stains splattered down her face like dried paint but there’s a different atmosphere about her now: graceful and almost regal. Her sky-blue eyes shine with clarity. “Do you really want to die?”
“I…I…” He chokes, tears streaming down his face. “I…I…I don’t.” His broken voice resounds in the night. “I don’t want to die…but I can’t keep living like this.”
Still staring up at him, she quietly asks, “If I offer you my blood tonight, will you promise not to take from the villagers?”
Her proposal is met with silence at first.
The vampire slowly licks his lips in hesitation. “R-really?”
He seems all too innocent to be a vampire.
“Really,” she repeats.
When he descends upon her, biting gently into her neck, she has to remind herself not to look.
Nor to think about the color.
The next night — the fourth night — she wakes up feeling significantly weaker. Not enough to be incapable of functioning, but enough to feel as if she were in a constant state of exhaustion.
When she arrives at the threshold of the village again, he is already there. His hands are hidden behind his back.
“Back here so soon?” She shoots him a wry, lazy smile.
“Well, I thought I could at least give a proper thank you to my benefactor.” He grins sheepishly, pulling out a…ro-
He pulls out a flower. “For you,” he murmurs, offering it to her.
She looks away and immediately puts a hand up. “No.” She fights to hide the trembling in her voice. “I don’t need it.”
“No, I insist.” He places the…the flower gently in her hands. “Look. It’s beautiful.”
And against her better judgment, she looks down.
It’s a rose, petals unfurling gently in the midst of night. Magnificent yet resilient; its sharp thorns force her to balance it delicately between her fingertips.
But it has a fault. One singular fault that mars its beauty.
It’s…it’s…
“It’s a beautiful red, isn’t it?”
Red.
She is suddenly pulled back into a room, tiny and square. Her body seems to have gravitated itself closer to the floor, and she realizes that her arms and legs have become stubbier, shorter. Her hair is a messy nest of a bun on top of her head.
She hasn’t worn her hair like that since she was a child.
Not since she was a child…
“Red.”
They used to call her “Little Red” because she used to adore the color red. She used to demand everything in her wardrobe to be red and she used to have only red dolls and red toys…
Red.
Red.
Red.
The walls are dripping red. The wooden floor is gently embraced by the wallpaper slowly trickling down, like wet paint.
No, it’s not wallpaper — the walls are bleeding red.
It’s a never-ending flow of blood, cascading over the room like a velvet curtain falling from its stage. A lonesome eye, connected to a fragment of a face, stares blankly into her soul amidst the sea of red. A pair of claws has shredded jagged lines of flesh from the eyebrow to the jawline on the side of the other eye; an ear is torn off, the blood still oozing dramatically onto the wooden floor beneath, painting her world in red; messily torn off the broad shoulders, the neck has two adjacent pinprick marks.
The body it was once attached to, in comparison, is unscathed. One of its hand is sprawled out on the floor, as if reaching out towards the other body on the floor.
And on the other body, the neck is snapped and twisted — the skin folding together almost like a screw — but attached. The mouth is agape, a pool of blood wading in the cavern. Once peridot eyes have clouded into a dirty green.
They are her parents.
They are dead.
Their corpses are honored by the glass shards haphazardly strewn about the red, red room. The window on the other side of the room has been punched through by the force of a full human body. Fragments of glass drip down onto the floor like clear, glistening rain.
They reflect the red, until the red seems to shine in the moonlight.
There is an ocean of red on the floor. The ceiling is splattered red. The walls are dripping red.
Everything in her world has turned a haunting crimson, and the walls are creeping closer to her, enclosing her.
She falls to the floor, her knees scraping against a million shards of glass.
And she screams. And screams. And screams. Incoherent. Terrified. Grieving. Mourning.
She was just a little girl. Her parents died when she was just a little girl. She saw their mutilated corpses when she was just a little girl.
Red used to be her favorite color. They used to call her “Little Red.”
Everything was red.
The walls were bleeding red.
“Beautiful, isn’t it?” The vampire twirls the blood red rose, which has somehow returned to his hands.
Silence.