Chapter Text
Every skal in the sewers knew how to watch for Jonathan Reid’s approach. He didn’t like to dehumanize them any further, but when the echoing of his footsteps started getting joined by their scurrying, whooping voices, he was acutely reminded of dogs; like how dog-breeders open the pen and dump kibble on the floor to watch them fight over it.
He made his way down the metal stairs from Sean’s office and into the sewers, trying not to let the approach of excited voices worry him. He had done this twice, now. Bridget told him that this might be the last time, or at least one of the last, before every willing Skal in her care was sated for the foreseeable future.
Was it fun to play lunch buffet for these unfortunate people? No, he wouldn’t say so. They smelled bad. They looked bad. Some of them seemed to take a downright erotic pleasure in nibbling his wrist, and frankly, he did not care for that shit at all. He was just glad some of the sewer skals found the idea as uncomfortable as he did, because he didn’t know if he had the moral fibre to feed every creature in this place. A good third-or-so of the skals had politely declined their invitation to a Dr Reid Dinner, and the doctor himself suspected Sean Hampton might have talked to them about it.
Ow. Twinge of guilt. He swung the metalbar door open and stepped into the main sewers, letting the rotting-flesh smell distract his thoughts. Sean had suggested this service to the skals might be Jonathan’s version of penance, with a bit of icy edge folding around his usually empathic voice. “Look, I am sorry,” Jonathan wanted to say, all though he hadn’t. “I’m sorry I force-fed you blood, that was very strange. I’m sorry I brought up your past. I don’t know why I did that. I have no fucking clue why I made you kneel, that was extremely odd of me and I should not have done it.”
He had said none of this. Jonathan Reid had simply nodded in agreement (“You might be right”, he said, because he was born an idiot and would continue being one) and stepped past the sad saint. Behind his bookshelf. Into the morgue and into the sewers.
Bridget greeted him in front of the door that had once belonged to Harriet’s private room, but now belonged to no one in particular. She smiled, and Jonathan smiled back. Sincerely.
Bridget had been his first customer and she was still his favorite. She was kind to him, she smelled a bit better than the rest, and she had lost a lot of her teeth, which was a huge comfort for someone about to get bitten by her. Also, at least Bridget asked him.
“Hello Doctor Reid, it has been very long since I tasted vampiric blood and I fear my will might be waning; could I have a sample of yours to avoid needing to hunt?”
It really was that easy! Of course, he said! No problem! “I am a doctor after all, helping is my instinct,” yadda yadda, Bridget had drank his blood and they had both been happy about it. Then, on his next visit, she had asked in one of her oldest skal friends might partake in the same pleasure, for he was about to lose his mind with hunger but his empathy kept him from hunting.
And what did Doctor Reid, the champion of Myrddin, cleanser of catastrophes, what did he say? “Yes, of course. In fact, why do we not inoculate as many of your friends as I can, while I’m here? I am sure there are many here who could benefit from ridding themselves of hunger for a while.”
And so, Doctor Reid, now officially the stupidest intellectual on earth, had promised his veins and their limited supply to every willing drinker underground. He had been a blood donor before this affliction, and so he tried telling himself that there was no difference. On one hand you gave your blood away to a needle so that a needle could put it into someone else, and on the other hand, you… You, uh, slit your lower arm with your own teeth, so that a filthy and possibly deranged undead could clamp onto the wound and sup. That was totally the same thing.
Bridget lead him into Harriet’s old room. It felt strange to be so vulnerable here; the place had been scrubbed and Harriet was dead, he knew, but there was still some lingering scent of infection in the air. Bridget had insisted on using it because it was the closest thing to “private” one could find in this place, and that only made his discomfort worse. If what he was doing was as innocent as a blood donation, why did he need a private room to do it? He sat down in the very chair Harriet had used some odd month ago and tried not feeling like a lady (lord?) of the night. A blood hooker with Bridget as his pimp. He wondered, would it make him feel better or worse if he started taking payment? Maybe he could ask?
“I have to admit,” he said out loud as Bridget rolled his sleeve up, “this does sometimes make me uncomfortable.”
Bridget nodded and tugged at his shirt to make sure it wouldn’t unroll.
“You are here on your own altruism, doctor Reid. You can leave right now if you wish.”
That helped a little. He mumbled something about duty and oaths and avoided her sly smile.
“Are you ready?”
“As ready as I can be.”
“And you have fed yourself?”
“Yes. I fed this morning, and I brought four serums in my medical bag should I need to speed up the regeneration process.”
“I will keep them in mind. You did a good thing, coming early tonight.”
He did.
He tried treating the skals like his patients. Many of them knelt by his chair in a wholly uncomfortable mirror of Sean Hampton, except they reached for his wrist on their own accord and closed their lips on his wound with delight where Sean had not.
While they fed he was counting seconds - thirty each with five second allowances for slow or quick drinkers, an additional twenty-to-sixty seconds if they needed recovery time afterwards. Some of them kissed his hand after. Some of them cried. Bridget had simply turned away, collected herself, and thanked him when she took his blood; her centuries of isolation and caring had taught her nothing if not composure. Her twisted flock knew nothing of such control.
His first problem patient was a large man whose turning had disfigured his face a bit. He came in and stood by the door with his eyes down. Made no attempt at going to Jonathan.
“Jimmy,” Bridget called, and the gentleness in her voice reminded Dr Reid of the way he talked to dying patients. “Jimmy, come over here. You have been looking forward to the doctor’s visit all week, you told me yourself.”
Jimmy made no motion. His eyes were down, his mouth was open. Petrified and gnarled hands ripping loose threads out of his apron.
Jonathan noticed the bleeding of his arm had stopped coagulating, indicating that the blood loss was affecting his regeneration. After Jimmy, he might need to use a serum. Maybe the smell of blood was unsettling him?
He looked over at Bridget, who looked over at him, and they both looked at Jimmy, who had now looked up. It was a crossroads of looks.
As Jimmy took his first, uneasy step towards the doctor, Bridget leant in an whispered a quick warning that Jimmy was a strong sort, and they might need to work together to get him off. Jonathan was about to reply something along the lines of “maybe you should warn me before letting an actual troll at my body” before his vision was interrupted by large, grey fingers, attached to a large, grey hand, and following the arm with his eyes he was met with a large, grey face. Jimmy was waiting in all his large-greyness. Dr Reid did not like the hunger in the man’s eyes.
“All right then, Jimmy,” he said, putting on his best “I am a physician and that demands respect” voice.
“Let’s get you what you need, hm?”
He tore at the half-formed scabs of his lower arm to reopen the wound, and his “patient” took the opportunity to pull his arm so hard towards his hungry mouth that it nearly left its socket. Jimmy had not knelt, the doctor noticed. Jimmy was also a biter. He could take the pain of gnashing teeth for exactly five seconds before motioning to Bridget for assistance and together the two of them tried to separate Jimmy from the doctor without separating the doctor from his arm, a task that proved impossible. Feeling the energy shift from “blood donation” to “combat”, Dr Reid used his powers to create a small bomb of shadows on the floor between his feet, sending all three people backwards, sprawling.
Bridget scuttled to her feet, cowl blown back to reveal her bald head. The doctor was still standing with his arm gushing. Jimmy, mountainous as he was, had hit the stone floor hard and was still on his back.
“Get him out!” Jonathan commanded, and Bridget made a run for the door. Then she fell, having had a large, grey hand clasp around her ankle.
For the first time, Jimmy spoke.
“I ain’t had my fill, doctor,” he snarled.
“You’ve had quite enough,” Jonathan retorted.
“No,” the large man answered, eyes wild and face bloody, “I don’t think I ‘ave.”
With that he launched himself forward, and Jonathan instinctively folded his arms against his body, serving the dual purpose of cushioning the impact and protecting the source of blood. Jimmy did not make a pass at his bleeding arm, however; Jimmy had the brilliant idea of mashing his face into the good doctor’s neck, unprotected as it was, and two seconds later Jonathan Reid was paralyzed with pain. And fear. And rage? No, not rage, even though it would have been justified, because Jonathan could still see Bridget at the other end of the room, hitting the door open and running for help.
He thought about Sean and William Bishop. He thought about the sad saint letting the madman feed on him, gently talking to him, pleading and coercing even as his life left him through a gaping wound. He thought about patience, and patients.
“Jimmy,” he hissed, knowing the brute could hear him. The slurping noise was starting to get deafening against the ever-paling landscape before him. Jimmy was a quick drinker, but ultimately innocent. Driven mad by hunger and thirst.
Jimmy was a patient, and Jonathan was a doctor.
He tried to find his bedside voice in a sea of pain.
“Jimmy, listen to me. You’re not thinking straight. If you kill me here, you cut off the supply for everyone else, all the people you live with. Don’t you care about them?”
That gave Jimmy pause, and he blocked the wound with his wet, cold tongue to stem the flow of blood, but he did not let go. His grip was vice-like on the doctor’s arms.
“Please, I know it’s hard to stop. I know it from experience. You have to… You have to find your heart, you don’t want to-”
Jimmy let go with a resounding smack which interrupted whatever Jonathan was going to say. They were so close now their noses were touching. For a bizzare, fleeting moment, Jonathan thought the other man was going to kiss him.
“Been waitin’ for my turn…” Jimmy mumbled, barely audible. Flecks of blood flew from his lips with every syllable. “I’ve been waitin’, all right. Told her I needed this. I’m hungry, doctor. I’m hungry all the time. And you… You taste better than those colds at the morgue.”
He leant in again, but did not bite this time. Jonathan shivered as a broad tongue went up his neck. God… Licking, biting, kissing, men on their knees, desperate noises from desperate mouths, lapping up the nectar of life- all this erotic imagery was killing him, and he said a silent prayer for whatever was left of his soul. Once he got back to the hospital, he decided, he was going to figure out a less personal way to get fresh blood to these people.
Still, his patient seemed to have calmed. Blood loss had slowed his regeneration considerably, so doctor Reid did not have to re-open his neck wound to let Jimmy lap at him. The air between them, what little there was, was getting warmer. He let himself lean against the bigger man for support while waiting for help.
Help came in the form of Bridget and three of the largest, meanest-looking skals Jonathan had ever seen. He didn’t have time to explain the situation to them before they wrenched Jimmy away and got him on the ground. Deprived of his support he stumbled back and fell into his chair.
“I am so sorry, doctor,” Bridget whispered in his ear. He hadn’t even noticed her approach.
“‘Tis okay,” he mumbled. “I talked him down. I… I’m tired. I think I have to come back tomorrow.”
She nodded. She understood. He panted, watching as Jimmy, suddenly calm and complacent, was led out of the room.
They sat in silent for a long minute.
“Thank you,” Bridget finally said. She squeezed his hand.
“For what?”
“For not killing him. It is rare that our struggle is understood, even rarer that it is understood by someone like you.”
“... Like me?”
“No offense, doctor Reid, but us skals have had to fight for every scrap of food and shelter since the day we were reborn. I will not deny that you have had your hardships, but you are still a young vampire. You have no idea what decades, centuries of famine does to one’s mind. I was… I was not surprised that Jimmy attacked you. I am pleasantly surprised that you helped him regardless.”
With those encouraging words ringing in his head, Jonathan injected himself with a regeneration serum and started a slow walk back to the asylum.
He would have to find a cleaner way to feed them, no doubt about it. He had originally tried transferring his blood to a cup before giving it to the skals, but something about the second-hand nature of it had lessened its effect. The original five people he had done this with had returned in less than a week complaining about hunger. It could be that oxidation somehow affected the chemistry of the blood, in which case he would need the transference vessel to be air-tight.
However, having just endured Jimmy’s draining compassions, he was starting to suspect there might be a psychological aspect to it as well. As he rested in the morgue below the asylum, he made a list of facts in his head.
- Something about the composition of vampire blood sated skals for much longer than the flesh of humans did.
- The duration of satisfaction varied from skal to skal, but seemed to somehow be linked to willpower. Bridget claimed she could go years between each time she sought out blood, and only needed to eat flesh every two weeks or so. Sean was unwilling to describe his eating patterns, but didn’t seem to have needed any kind of sustenance since his unwilling conversion.
- Blood not taken directly from the body had a significantly lesser effect.
- After drinking vampire blood, skals became gentle, drowsy, almost comatose if they had a lot.
- Bridget had suggested that a skal’s need for ekon blood was somehow linked to the power difference between the two.
- As far as he could gather, a skal’s original purpose was as a puppet or a slave to an ekon.
He couldn’t think of any more facts relevant to his situation at the moment, but, somehow, he felt that he had hit on something important. If the skals were designed to be - and he shuddered at the thought - some kind of biological slaves, it made sense for them to be physically motivated to seek out and appease an ekon. If a skal needed ekon blood to function at top efficiency, they would stick by that ekon. The need for a direct source even fit into this theory; it made sure the skals were motivated to keep their ekon source alive and healthy, and not be tempted to simply kill their way to freedom.
As for the psychological aspect, he had noticed the skals becoming more compliant during and after feeding. He thought about how he had talked Jimmy down, and knew for a damn fact that no one would be able to talk him down if he was fang-deep in a victim. He could still feel the ghostly pressure of Jimmy’s tongue on his neck. Gentle. Lapping. Almost comforting in a twisted way. He recalled his childhood dog using the same body language to say sorry many years ago, and shivered.
Skals became animalistic when they were starving, and seemingly returned to that mindset when they were newly sated. It felt wrong. It also meant that he would be unlikely to find a way to supply them with his blood without being so up-close and personal.
On his way out he passed by Sean in his office, who looked up from his plate of meat with a neutral expression (for he was never obviously hostile) which quickly turned to alarm.
“Why, you’re covered in blood, doctor!”
Reid nodded and tried to not obviously pant.
“I was attacked by one of the patients.”
“... Patients, are they? And why would you be attacked, doctor?”
Reid noticed the passive voice and flinched on the inside, but kept outwardly calm.
“If I am performing a blood transfusion for them, then they are my patients, yes. And I believe my assailant had gone hungry for a long time. It was likely desperation.”
Sean let his watery eyes sink back to the plate, face relaxed and mysterious, as calm as an anchor below storming seas.
“You have an interesting way of looking at the world, doctor. You willingly give of yourself to those less fortunate, and yet you call it by a medical name, so far removed from the act that it might as well be a machine doing it. Forgive me for asking such a personal question of you, but tell me; how do you sustain yourself, doctor? Through blood transfusions?”
If Reid had the blood to spare he would have blushed.
“I… Uh, I…”
God damn it. Sean was looking at him, innocent and open, like a holy father waiting for confession, and Reid could do nothing but stumble and stutter. It was not like him to falter in the face of questions, but he had had one hell of a night.
There was silence, hanging between them like saliva had the night Sean was turned, and the shared memory of injustice made the silence even heavier, and heavier, until Reid was willing to tell the truth just to break it; lord knows Sean would do nothing to spare him.
“Rats, mister Hampton. I… I eat rats.”
It surprised both of them. Sean’s fork clattered to the plate and Reid could finally breathe, but with the following exhale he was talking, spilling this lowly truth to the only man in London who might not judge him.
“I’ve tried to drink from people. I know I can. When the guard of Priwen leave themselves open, or when the patients at Pembroke are knocking on death’s door, or, or… Or one time, when a friend of mine offered his blood to comfort me, completely consensually. I can, but I cannot. I did it once, and I killed once, and the act is forever tainted. So I eat rats, Sean. I sustain myself on rats.”
And that was that. He was ashamed of this truth, yes, but he was also just a little bit satisfied with the momentary compassion that filled Sean’s face. Maybe he had finally become human again in the sad saint’s eyes. Wouldn’t that be something?