Work Text:
The fangs are new, he thinks distantly as blood (sunset red, cherry red, muscle red) draws a line down his chin.
He is home now, for want of a better word. Or at least, he’s in a location that it is, with a bed he has slept in for many nights, surrounded by boxes full of things that are his own. There is a hospital gown shredded and ripped in the trash down the hall, his own clothing laid out on the counter, and the shower is running, hot and steamy and this side of boiling because the apartment complex has never really been good about things like city statutes and safety measures.
It doesn’t matter anyway. Vlad isn’t entirely sure he’s human, or at least not completely. There is a liminality to him, in the way his hands phase through wood and cement and concrete and plaster. There’s a liminality to him in the graying of his hair, in the flashes of red of his eyes, in the ever-growing pallor of his skin.
There is a reason why all things are what they are, he thinks with no small twitch upwards of his lips, bloodied and flayed raw by the sharpness in his mouth. He is the son of a man not entirely from this country, from this world, for all he has dug in and built into it, for all he fled from a nation starving to another one hungry in a different way. Perhaps it was meant to be that Vlad would follow suit.
“I am all in a sea of wonders. I doubt; I fear; I think strange things, which I dare not confess to my own soul,” he murmurs to his pallid reflection, his own little wonders collected in a book of letters, his own self reflected in the monster and the man long before he found them fused in one within him.
Jack hasn’t called him. Maddie swore she wouldn’t.
Vlad has nothing to apologize for, he thinks, and if it is a lie he will pretend it is not until all things come to an end.
Blood drips to the sink, sharp carmine against off-cream white, and it is another soiled thing.