Work Text:
Chapter One
France, July 1916
The mud squelched under Martin’s boots. He slipped, but managed to keep his balance and keep running. The smoke and fog hung around him, as thick as a curtain. A few short minutes ago, he had been running alongside his fellow soldiers, but now, he couldn’t even see them. But he could still hear.
The rapid drumming of the machine guns. The whistle of the shells, the thunder of explosions. The yells and shouts and screams of the men around him.
Martin tripped on something and didn’t even dare look at what — who? — it was. He just hefted his rifle tighter and kept running, towards the gunfire. Impossibly, the smoke became even thicker. Someone screamed just to his left. The battlefield cacophony rang in Martin’s ears, and his heart matched the rhythm. Wide-eyed, lungs bursting, devoid of any conscious thought other than onwards, Martin kept running —
Running —
Until —
At first, it wasn’t even pain. At first, it was just something hitting him in the chest with such force that he stumbled and fell on his back. But it wasn’t pain, at first.
The rifle fell out of his hands and splattered in the mud. Dimly, he reached out for it; his fingertips just touched the leather strap.
And then the pain bloomed from his chest.
He screamed.
For an eternity, there was nothing in Martin’s life but pain, horrible, excruciating pain, sharp as a butcher’s knife and shrill like the scrape of nails on a chalkboard. Like an ocean in a hurricane, it swallowed him and Martin drowned.
But eventually, finally, the pain left him with the blood steadily oozing from his wound and Martin was tossed back into his body. He blinked, his eyelids nearly too heavy to move.
Martin was on his back in the mud and looked up at the slightly brighter patch of smoke where the sun must be. Cold spread through him, like every drop of blood leaving him was replaced by ice. He knew, then, suddenly and clearly, that this was how he would die.
Was this how John had felt, Martin wondered? In two halves, one that was too cold to breathe and the other that calmly looked on and bowed its head in resigned acceptance?
What would his parents think? Would they react the same way they’d reacted to John’s death? Would there be a patch in the garden next to the one where they buried John’s uniform? Would his family then, finally, after three decades, love Martin as they had loved John?
Was he really going to have to die to live up to his brother?
Martin suddenly had a vivid image in his mind’s eye of the lad on his bicycle that delivered the telegrams coming to a halt in front of his parents’ door and reaching up to knock and deliver the terrible news that the other Nicholls son, too, had died.
They would be told. They would know.
Sammy would not.
Sammy would stop receiving letters and have to piece it all together by himself.
Martin closed his eyes again. Sammy would be the last thing he ever thought of. He couldn’t believe that the last kiss he ever shared with Sammy was really going to have been between two overflowing rubbish bins in some stinking back alley in Dover. Under any other circumstances, Martin would be beside himself with anger.
But that could not be helped, now. It had been the last kiss they’d ever share, and that alone made it special, Martin decided.
He pictured Sammy before his mind’s eye. His golden hair. His honey-brown eyes. That little mole right next to his mouth that Martin liked to kiss so much. His smile and his laughter, his wit and his tenderness. His beautiful, wonderful Sammy.
A sudden shove to his shoulder ripped him from his reverie, and he cried out, in pain, but more in fury that whoever it was was robbing him of his silent farewell to the man he loved.
He blinked; the smoke hung thicker and hazier than before, and still the light hurt Martin’s eyes. He saw a lieutenant’s uniform. Then he saw the man in it.
The lieutenant, leaning over Martin, pulled the jacket of Martin’s uniform away from the wound; Martin made a cry between a whimper and a groan at the burn of the cloth being torn out of the hole in his chest. The lieutenant looked at the wound, face unmoving. Then he reached for the ID disks around Martin’s neck, read them, and finally looked Martin in the eye.
“Private Nicholls,” said the Lieutenant. His voice was soft but urgent. “You’re dying. Even if I carried you back, it would be too late for you.”
He leaned forwards until all Martin could see was his face. A vein in his temple was throbbing. “But I am a vampire. I can try to turn you. It may not work. It is likely that it won’t. Nine to one, you will die.”
Martin heard the words like he heard inconsequential commentary about the weather. He was going to die. He’d known that the moment the rifle slipped out of his hands.
Then the rest of the meaning of what this sudden apparition of a man was telling him bled into his mind like ink through cheap paper.
Certain death without the vampire’s help. Nine to one odds of death with the vampire’s help.
One chance to see Sammy again. Any chance to see Sammy again.
He was sure he was just imagining his heart beating faster at that. If it was even capable of that. He didn’t know. He didn’t care. All he knew was that he wanted to — had to — see Sammy again.
His hand found the lieutenant’s shoulder and he tightened his fingers in the coarse, mud-stained khaki. “Yes,” he croaked out. “Yes.”
The lieutenant smiled. He pried Martin’s hand off his arm and placed it on Martin’s chest, folding the other over it. “At ease, soldier,” he said quietly.
The last thing Martin remembers is the lieutenant bending over him, Martin sucking in a sharp breath which makes his wound hurt worse which he didn’t even think was possible and then
nothing.