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Virgil’s feet pounded across the dirt floor of the forest, dry and dead leaves being kicked up with each step. He flicked off his flashlight, hiding behind a large rock. His heart pounded in his ears, a hand covering his mouth as he attempted to quiet his labored breathing. He knew they would find him soon. They knew his scent better than any of their other prey.
“Oh Virgil~” The sound of a long slithering body grew closer, their smooth voice cooing his name. “Come on out darling.” Virgil had never expected Janus’s voice to instill fear in him, but now a shiver went down his spine, the drumming in his ears growing almost deafening. He couldn’t stay here much longer.
He turned on his flashlight and ran out from behind his boulder, shining the light in Janus’s face. The naga hissed and covered his eyes, the light disorienting him just long enough for Virgil to run. “He’s going that way!” He heard Janus call out.
“Got it!” A voice called back. Shit, Patton. Once out of view of Janus he grabbed ahold of a sturdy tree branch, catching his breath for a moment before pulling himself up. He used to climb trees all the time as a kid; getting up and down would be easy. While it wouldn’t stop Logan, and it definitely wouldn’t stop Patton, it would take two of the four out of the equation.
He stopped roughly thirty feet up when he saw Patton slowly floating up to him, with Logan climbing up branch by branch with inhuman speed. “Hi Virgil!” Patton said cheerily.
Virgil gasped for breath. “Hey Pat.”
“You having fun? This was your idea.”
“Having a grand ol’ time, don’t worry ‘bout it.” He coughed out between breaths.
“If you say so...” The vampire cleared his throat, his eyes glowing a dim red in the darkness as he pulled his glasses down the bridge of his nose.
“So Virgil—” He slammed his hands over his ears, recognizing Patton’s hypnosis immediately. Logan made his way up, looking Virgil up and down—knowing him he was probably checking for any injuries—then making a grab at his legs.
Virgil kicked away and moved to a branch further from the ghoul, his flashlight falling all the way down to the ground below. Adrenaline pumped through his veins as the glowing sets of red and blue eyes came closer.
He knew it took a lot to kill Logan; Logan wasn’t human, as were all the others. Which is why he barely even hesitated when he kicked Logan hard in the chest, causing him to lose his balance and fall from the tree with a startled yell.
Patton yelped and flew down after him, giving Virgil enough time to carefully drop down from the tree, grab his flashlight, and run for it. Logan had landed on the ground with a thud, and Virgil prayed to whatever god was up there that he hadn’t just accidentally killed his nearly unkillable ghoul boyfriend.
He ran for a good five minutes, and had begun to hear a voice shouting his name approaching. “Virgil! I haven’t seen you in half an hour! I’m bored!” And there was Roman. He looked around for somewhere to hide, only seeing the trees surrounding him. He was too tired to climb. He shone around his flashlight for somewhere else to go
But then his light landed on four pairs of black and red eyes. The world seemed to pause for a moment, just for them to stare at each other. An excited grin spread slowly across Roman’s face, and then the world went into times two speed.
The drider scuttled across the forest floor, so fast that a shot of adrenaline went into Virgil’s veins and he scrambled up the tree screaming curses. Roman laughed at his panic, shouting up “Oh now I can scare you!”
“Fuck off!” He shouted back, his voice cracking a bit from his fear. He looked around, debating whether it was a good idea to jump from his tree to another, before deciding the gap was far too big and he would just break something. So he had to go down.
He looked down at Roman, who now had a confident, cocky grin on his face. “You can just climb down if you want to, love! You survived longer than any other human would have!”
Perhaps it was some sort of fatal flaw of his—something that would most definitely be the thing that would kill him—but Virgil refused to lose, especially not to Roman. He pulled his jacket off, the cool fall night air biting at his sweat-covered skin. With adrenaline still in his system he dropped the jacket onto Roman and fell from the tree.
He landed in a roll and jumped to his feet, taking off in a blind run with his flashlight off. Roman yelped as the jacket fell over his head, disorienting him for a moment and leaving him in complete darkness. Unlike the others, Roman had no way of properly navigating in the dark. He groaned, realizing how utterly lost he was, giving up and sitting at the base of the tree, clutching Virgil’s jacket with an annoyed pout.
Janus was the best of them all at spotting prey in the darkness, especially moving prey. While not necessarily being able to see in the dark, the heat coming off prey’s bodies stood out like a lightbulb. Which is why he couldn’t help but stand by for a bit as he watched Virgil nearly run full force into a tree trying to escape Roman. That human really had no idea what he was doing, did he?
With Virgil’s light turned off, it made him an easy target for him, and he had begun to grow bored of their game. He crept up on Virgil as silently as he could, the rustle of the leaves under his tail being the only thing to give him away. Virgil stopped for a moment to gasp for air, and that’s when he struck.
He wrapped his tail around, quickly trapping Virgil’s legs and pinning his arms to his sides. Virgil squeaked in surprise, before recognizing the sensation of Janus lightly squeezing him, nowhere near tight enough to keep him from breathing, and the human let out a sigh of relief, allowing his head to droop down and rest on one of the coils of muscle.
Janus chuckled, running a hand through Virgil’s sweaty hair. “You didn’t have to push yourself so hard, love.” Virgil hummed.
“I had fun.” He mumbled. “You guys were scary as shit, though.”
“Well, we do try.” Janus yelled out into the forest for everyone, and soon out of the darkness came their boyfriends, Patton happily chattering with Roman, Logan seeming perfectly fine after his fall, as Virgil had expected. Janus slowly unraveled himself from Virgil and, after a long-winded argument where Roman refused to give him his jacket back, they began heading home for the night.
Virgil was quiet on the walk back, part of his mind feeling too tired to form thoughts, while part of his mind raced with the memories from their game of cat and mouse. His boyfriends had gone easy on him; he had known that from the start. But how easy they had gone was more evident in how many times they could have killed him, but didn’t to prolong the game.
He counted at least four. And in each of those four situations they would have had the time to kill him multiple times over. He looked over at Logan. Virgil pushed him out of a tree and he fell thirty feet to the ground, and here he was without even a scrape on him, acting as if it was just a normal everyday occurrence.
They weren’t human. None of them were even close to human. They could kill him in the blink of an eye if they wanted to. They all knew he was the weakest. And he couldn’t help but feel a bit fearful of that realization.
Remembering how they all acted compared to how they first met quelled that fear. He had seen how they actually hunt firsthand, in the position of their prey before they knew each other. He saw none of that bloodlust in their game, just excitement when he escaped and concern when he was tired.
The five laid down in bed, Janus’s tail curled over Virgil’s body as Logan held his hand in the darkness. “You did well out there, starlight.” Logan said, a smile on his lips barely noticeable from the dim glow of his eyes. “Pushing me out of the tree was quite clever.” Virgil smirked.
“Were you not scared you were gonna die?”
“Would it make you feel better or worse if I said that I wasn’t?” At that Virgil didn’t really have an answer.
It was a weird relationship he had, one where he had to fear his partners somewhat, but that fear not necessarily being a bad thing. His relationship felt like a constant struggle between logical fear, and raw overpowering love, and he was okay with that.
He was strangely content, happy even, to hold the hands and kiss the lips of those who have killed humans no different from him, knowing full well that—had things been slightly different—he would have been their prey rather than their lover.