Work Text:
Night: 234
In contrast to Christmas, New Year's was a solitary, quiet affair, just the two of them.
As a kid, growing up, Zoldrak had heard human classmates and neighbors talk about staying up late for New Year's eve. He'd gone to human schools the full twelve years—the first moonlighter school started a couple years after he'd graduated. Pozkirk had gone to a moonlighter school the last couple of years, and even met Nick there, finishing up his high school since he'd gotten turned at 15. Tierza had gone to moonlighter schools her whole education, except for university.
Tierza's generation couldn't relate to the experience of hearing human kids talk like staying up until midnight was such an unusual and remarkable experience. It was a strange and alienating experience, because for a moonlighter, staying up all night was not an unusual experience at all, especially on the full moon. The ideal schedule for a moonlighter involved sleeping part of the day and staying up most of the night.
And of course, the same was even more true for vampires. Though pain could awaken a vampire from daysleep, nothing else could, and even if they were awake, they'd feel tired and lethargic, and extremely hungry the following night. It wasn't just like a human or moonlighter staying up for too long. They didn't necessarily fall asleep or wake up exactly at sunset—though usually close to it—but when their body decided to sleep, it slept hard. Nick had told Zoldrak once that it was literally a form of brief hibernation, where a lot of core bodily functions shut down to conserve energy.
Which meant that the whole waiting up to the stroke of midnight thing didn't really have much meaning for Nick and Zoldrak. But Nick had been raised with it, back when he was human, and had insisted on honoring the ritual in memory of his dead parents. So, now that he no longer knew what day it was, it fell to Zoldrak to make sure he kept the ritual going.