Chapter Text
The air was dead in Oakhurst.
Every shadow creaked forward like the shabby doors hastily bolted over wooden facades that just barely passed as houses, heavy and long with a weary sigh. Chatter was idle and shallow from those who bothered at all, just white noise to keep the town from feeling as dead as it truly was. The sky hung as a perpetual muted red over the whole ordeal of a place, as if the atmosphere itself couldn't muster up the energy to even be a violent scarlet while in the town's vicinity.
Oakhurst was never meant to feel alive—it was built as a ghost town and was desperate to die as one.
Avid and Ren were talking animatedly, for what it was worth. Avid's stomach was twisted and sick with excitement and fear at someone finally, actually, genuinely believing him for once in this goddamned town—even if Ren seemed a little unstable himself.
As he ranted on about vampire protection methods, Avid's fingers twisted and caressed a garlic bulb in his palm. Short, bitten nails tore into the skin and let it fall to the dead grass in flakes of brittle paper; his fingertips grew sticky from the crushed garlic and the skin stuck to his hands in little shards of translucent tape. He pressed another head into Ren's hands, harrowed eyes interlocked while he instructed Ren on the importance of the plant.
"If you eat one of those pieces of garlic, it'll take a little to kick in, but if a vampire tries to turn you after its kicked in it will backfire on them and they'll die," he said with an intensity and weight in his voice, feet shuffling and just barely resisting the urge to pace around Ren like a dog, keeping him from wandering off into something dangerous, keeping him safe right there, right where he couldn't be hurt.
Ren nodded solemnly, taking the plant and tucking it into his bag. Avid checked Ren's name off his mental list. They talked further in hushed tones of silver and consecrated grounds, ducking into Ren's poor imitation of a house to hang silver bars about the dirt ceiling.
"That's perfect, it's like a chandelier of protection," he whispered softly, watching licks of flame from the small firepit dug into Ren's floor reflect in smudges of light on the metal. "It's wonderful."
Ren turned around, pulling the cloves from his pocket smoothly as he did. "And I've got me garlic, I've got me garlic, Avid," he said with a cursed tongue, supposedly.
"Yes, good!" Avid nodded. "You know what? Let's toast."
"To the death of vampires and all of their kind!" Ren cried with a flourish, raising a peeled clove above the fire and to the ceiling. His glasses caught a flash of the firelight and he looked, for a moment, like he wasn't scared of anything. The moment passed. He lowered the clove to his dry lips.
"Yes! To revenge!"
Avid stuffed his own piece of garlic into his mouth—skin and all—and forced it down, teeth grinding together as he swallowed hard, trying his best to not gag at how the paper stuck to the walls of his throat and the sharp, sour taste that erupted with each crunch. He forced saliva to gather in his mouth and gulped obnoxiously, wincing the last of it down with raised, tense shoulders. His breaths were hollow and shallow, and his eyes burned with the inkling of tears that he wouldn't let fall—not anymore.
The tension of the scene was ripped apart abruptly, a soft knocking sound echoing through the small house as the door shook.
"Avid?" Scott's voice called sweetly, tauntingly, through the door.
"Huh?" Avid squeaked, his voice shaky. "Yes?"
"We were wondering if you wanted to come and join us on a nighttime expedition." His voice crept down Avid's neck like a spider.
Avid glanced over to Ren, who looked mildly surprised, and whispered to him airily.
"Would you come with me? Would you plea—"
"Because, like, Cleo, Pearl, Shelby, and Drift have all gone out as one, and we said we should, and we said we should invite Avid out 'cause Avid would really want to join us," Scott grinned obviously even through the door, talking over Avid's frantic, horrified, shaking pleads towards Ren to come with him. In the firelight, his eyes looked even brighter as tears boiled behind them.
"Yeah— yes!" Avid mustered out, voice far louder than he'd intended. "I would love to!"
"Perfect, okay, meet at the farm," Scott said with a flourish, footsteps quickly dissipating.
"Okay!" his voice shook out, turning to Ren the second Scott stopped talking. "Ren, I'm so screwed."
Ren looked over him with an unreadable look, eyebrows furrowed in a way that didn't quite spell concern but wasn't good by any means. "You've got yer tools?"
"I do, it's just—it's all stone," Avid sighed, steadying himself against a shovel from his bag as he stood to make a point.
Ren passed him a hatchet from his side, a softness to his voice. "Take this weapon with ye, it's made of silver."
"That's gonna help so much," Avid said sincerely, cradling the wooden handle in his arms. He took a breath for a moment, feeling the cold air rush over his teeth and through his body, and sighed. His heart caught in his throat and before he could let himself second-guess anything, he turned on his heel and pressed his way through the door into the night.
"Does everyone have their moving buddy? We all need a buddy to go with," Owen drawled firmly, his monotone, bored voice clashing somewhat with the genuine thoughtfulness of the idea. The men lingered for a moment before making eye contact with their favorite peers, grouping off in duos into their own bubbles that would soon litter the hazy trees. Names were thrown around through the air, the forest for once buzzing with conversation.
Avid made a move towards Ren, his back turned to see who had called his name from the crowd. Owen stepped forward and smiled at him, extending a hand wordlessly, and Ren took it, walking off to stand near a particularly leafless tree together and watch everyone else up flounder to pair up. Avid flinched.
"Hey, Avid," Scott slid next to him, words bouncing with a playfulness that made his heart sink. "You got a partner?"
"Yes! I mean, uh, no, not really," Avid blurted out exasperatedly. "I guess Ren has someone, huh?"
"Yeah, it seems so," Scott said, hand resting on his hip while the other gestured towards the rest of the group. "Looks like everyone else has a buddy too."
Avid's face dropped. "Uh?" He was right. There wasn't a single person left for him to go with.
"I guess we'll have to buddy up."
His world dissolved.
"What? No! Not with you!" Avid shouted, voice shaking and cracking with every syllable. "I know what you're doing! I'm not falling for it!"
"Whatever do you mean?" Scott grinned under the skull mask he'd worn all day. Avid hated how expressive his voice was.
"You're—you have everyone else convinced, but I, I know! I know you're trying to—to—to eat us! Or, something evil! I know you're not human, okay! Why—why can't anyone else see? You're a vampire, huh? Huh? Don't lie to me, Scott! I know!" Avid was just on the verge of sobbing, tears bubbling over and streaking down his face in hot ribbons. His voice warbled and broke with every heaving breath and shout, but he didn't back down.
"And now—and now you're trying to get me alone. You want me gone, right? Right? You said so! Don't say—don't say that was a joke 'cause I know it wasn't! Me, alone with you, in the woods? Yeah—yeah, right! Well, it won't work!
I'm not— I'm not going with you! You're fine in the woods at night alone, yeah? I'm going with Ren and Owen and you—you can just go alone. I'm not—I'm not playing this game with you, you vampire!" Avid spat the last word with a cry and backed away from Scott, who'd barely reacted apart from a small, satisfied smirk. He felt Scott's eyes follow him, even as he wildly looked around for someone, anyone, who had any reaction.
M shoved his hands in his pockets and tried to whistle with little success. Martyn loudly cleared his throat. Some pairs started to slowly step backwards, eyeing paths through the trees behind them. Owen tugged Ren's wrist, nodding over his shoulder in a beckon to follow the rest of the groups. Ren obliged, tossing Avid a sorry glance before turning around again and trotting off into the woods behind him.
Avid felt like he was dying.
"… anyone?" He completely broke, the word coming out as more a sob than anything. The tears were real now, flowing like blood from an open wound down his face and staining him just as brightly.
Whispers sounded like screams at him in his ears as he melted inward, the forest collapsing on itself and onto him. The night had never felt so cold, nor he so small. He felt sick with a gross nostalgia at the feeling, of being powerless and lost and alone and all the things he swore to never be again.
The world was ending, that was the least he knew, because he couldn't save anyone, no matter what he did, no matter how much he sacrificed. His breaths caught on themselves and sputtered out like a dying engine and he wheezed, already on his knees, though he couldn't remember when he'd collapsed.
He let everything out, all his grief, all his guilt and regrets, and all of his fear. He sobbed, fully and violently, his back shaking and heaving and heavy, until there wasn't anything left for him to lose. Until he'd cried out all of his feelings and felt numb. Until the forest stood still.
Avid realized, with much less of a start than he would have liked from himself, that Scott was still standing over him, expression plain and, at most, vaguely amused. Avid wanted to rip that off of his face.
Scott just took a step back and gave him space to breathe, smudging tears and snot across his cheeks as he whimpered breathlessly.
"Get up."
"What?" Avid sputtered out, shoulders raised defensively.
"Get. Up." Scott put his foot down emphatically as a punctuation. "We don't have time for these theatrics."
"What?"
"We've just been standing at the forest entrance for minutes. I'm bored." Scott's voice was condescending. "Now get up."
Avid scrambled to his feet, movements slowing as he stood up to full height, eyes still tracing over the empty sockets that covered Scott's. His hand went to his pocket instinctively, fist curled around the head of garlic hard enough to crush the cloves, just to assure himself it was still there. He hissed a breath out, shaky and seething, and set his shoulders firmly. He didn't have anything left to lose.
"Fine. Lead the way, Scott."
Avid quickly fell into stride side-by-side with Scott, paces nervous and quick and unwilling to stay behind Scott's careful, calculated, agonizingly slow steps. Scott looked over at him, a question lingering in his throat, but he stayed quiet, returning his gaze to the muddy, undefined path.
It was obvious to both of them that the other didn't have any sort of destination during their walk, as they turned arbitrarily at every discernible fork in the road and alternated who chose instinctively. Avid hated how well Scott read him. He didn't want to feel close to him.
Scott was weird, wasn't he? Obviously he was a vampire, but apart from that. Why was he down here, with the people? Was it just a ruse to let him feed on as many as he wished without having to deal with hunting the paranoid? Maybe it was just because he got a sick sense of satisfaction from picking them off one by one. Avid didn't know which was worse—not that there was an answer to that question, obviously, because a vampire with any motivation was evil. They didn't have emotions. They just had hunger. Scott wasn't any different to the rest of them.
Avid realized, with a start, that he'd been staring at Scott. He found the image burned in his mind—curls of turquoise hair twisting into pale purple in the glowing red moonlight, glints of ruby off of the skull tied around his face shifting as he walked. Their eyes locked for a moment—Avid felt it. He whipped his head to stare firmly at the ground in front of him, studying the way his boots stuck and suctioned themselves in the mud. He admired a fallen leaf. He listened to a rustling further to his right. He tried his best to not look to his left. He willed himself into not turning his head. He forced his eyes to follow each shining twig and twisted root that passed.
"What'cha thinkin' about?" Scott's voice shot through the dead night air. Avid jumped and squeaked, clutching at his chest.
"Jeez! Don't—don't scare me like that!"
Scott pouted. "What, I'm not allowed to talk anymore?"
Avid paused. "No, you're—you're allowed to talk, yes, but I know you don't just want to talk! You just want me to—to like, get calm, or let down my guard, then you'll get me!" He waved his hands in emphasis before faltering and dropping them to his sides.
"What now?" Scott sighed at his visible defeat.
"You'll just turn me anyways. It doesn't matter how I feel?"
"Aw, what makes you think that?" Scott smiled, leaning down and slowing his pace, forcing Avid to stare at him face-to-face as they found their way into a stop.
"You're—you're a vampire!" Avid laughed hollowly, resting his hand on the stake he kept on his belt. He started subconsciously rubbing his thumb over the flat side of the thing, only slightly flinching when splinters pierced the soft flesh. He kept wearing circles into the stake as he stared down Scott the best he could. "You don't care about feelings."
"Why are you so insistent on this whole, like, vampire narrative?" Scott sighed. "I mean, what proof do you really have?"
Avid grit his teeth at the patronizing words. "Well, for one, you broke our concecra—"
"That was Cleo."
"Can I speak for one second?" Avid seethed. His fingers twitched on the stake.
"Yeah, go ahead," Scott said with a wave of his hand.
"You—you—I don't know why I even try. You're just a vampire! You interrupted our consecration, you sneak off into the woods at night, I don't know if I've ever even seen you with a torch, for crying out loud, and you've been wearing that skull all day!" Avid ticked things off on his fingers angrily. "If you weren't a vampire, you wouldn't be hiding anything, huh? So do it! Take off that mask if you really are human!"
Scott laughed a little, a little wheeze and a grin to it. He turned to face Avid head-on, standing up to his full height—just a few inches taller than Avid, but it felt like miles.
"Alright, if you insist."
He slowly reached up to his face and undid the thin string which kept the shard of bone across his face up, lingering for a moment with it loose in his hands.
"Don't scream."
Scott dropped the mask in an instant, letting it sink from his fingers and crash into the mud. Avid wasn't even conscious of that, though, because Scott was looking at him with bloodied irises, ones which sparkled with disgusting hunger and amusement and seeped into his own, wide and terrified. Scott laughed again, harder, baring nauseatingly long—and sharp, Avid thought dully—canines that shone white against the grey of his existence. There was screaming, but Scott wasn't doing it, and nobody had followed them, so it must be Avid, he realized as his breath started to give out and his throat dried.
"Aw, you agreed to not scream, right, Avid?" Scott smiled, grabbing Avid's wrist with an iron grip and shoving him backwards, off the trail and against a nearby tree. "Now be quiet, god damn it."
"No! You—you—you're a—a vampire, clear as day!" Avid stammered out defiantly, raising his voice as loud as it could go. "I'll tell everyone! I'll tell Shelby, and Drift, and Ren, and everyone! Everyone's going to know that you are a vampire!"
"And who'll believe you then?" Scott said tauntingly, stepping forward, his wrist still firmly in his hand. "You're the boy who cried wolf. Everyone thinks you're crazy, Avid. Especially after that little scene you pulled earlier? You're the town lunatic. Even if you walked into town with blood dripping right off your neck, nobody would give you the time of day."
Avid swallowed. He could feel a piece of garlic skin still stuck in his throat. He thought about Scott's words.
"If?"
Scott hummed in response. Avid tried again.
"What do you mean by 'if'?"
"Hmm?"
"You said if I walked into town with blood on my neck," he continued, cautious.
"I did say that."
"… Why not when? Are you… are you not planning on killing me?" Avid didn't let the pit in his stomach rise from hell yet.
Scott snickered, shoving Avid's back deeper into the rough bark. "Oh, no, I'm going to kill you," he said with a smile. "But I won't show you the mercy of turning you when I do. After all the trouble you've been causing in the village? I cannot think of a worse fate than being with you for all of eternity, and I was stuck in a casket for six hundred years."
Avid's breaths broke and he started gasping in fear, nauseous and terrified and sick. As much as not being turned was a blessing, if he died that meant he couldn't save anyone in town, that everyone would continue to live and die obliviously to Scott, that he couldn't ever save anyone. He started to shake under Scott's grip, threatening to buckle under his own weight, and was rewarded with Scott shoving his other hand into his shoulder, steadying against the tree but also sending a ricocheting pain through his bones as something shifted and snapped.
Avid gasped. Sobs caught in his throat before flowing freely down his cheeks.
Scott's face hardened, and his round eyes looked more like obsidian—beautiful, dark, and deathly sharp.
"Let me—let me go, let me go!" Avid struggled, shifting back and forth and rolling on his broken shoulder, shouting out in protest between weak cries of agony and choked sobs of fear.
Scott hummed a little. "Um, no."
He released his grip slightly, letting them both slip onto the ground, settling on his knees. Avid's legs collapsed and he fell forward towards Scott, who pushed him back, head lolling for a second before he winced and raised it to look at Scott. He smiled widely, fangs showing viscerally.
Avid tried to talk back, to beg for any sort of mercy, but his breaths were shallow and he just coughed weakly. The pain had become overwhelming, sending throbbing aches through his entire body and mind and making it impossible to think through the fog. Scott barely reacted and just shifted his grip, releasing his wrist and letting him sink forward into his chest. He gripped Avid's jaw, raising it to show off his neck and the dirty gauze tied around it. He clicked his tongue in annoyance.
He released Avid's shoulder, who promptly fell directly into Scott's chest—he'd relaxed into Scott's hands at some point, they both realized—with his full weight. Both men grunted and tensed up, and Avid raised himself so his forehead was resting on Scott's shoulder.
Scott, with his hands now free, started untying the wrap roughly, pulling too hard in places and choking him, who gagged and wheezed for a moment before returning to the natural silence he'd found himself lying in.
He tossed the gauze aside and grinned—Avid couldn't see it but he could feel how pleased he was with himself radiating off his body in waves. Scott's fingers slowly rubbed across his neck and down his spine and Avid felt nauseous at the touch, his skin on fire and breaths shallow.
Leaning forward, Scott bared his teeth into Avid's neck, pressing up against the shaking skin. His breath was warm and steady and Avid's heart started to race with the fear of knowing he was truly going to die. Avid tried to move, tried to get away from his fangs, but Scott held him firmly, his hand gripping the back of his head, running through his hair
"Y'know, I'd say this won't hurt, but I think we both know it will," Scott whispered, and began to unclench his jaw, fangs dragging over his neck. Avid's pulse stopped.
Scott was taking his sweet time, relishing in the first proper kill he'd gotten in centuries. Scott's teeth were razor-sharp and he felt the pinprick of blood droplets pooling as they danced over the exposed flesh of his neck. Avid tried to let his mind go blank, let his last moments be something of peace instead of terror, but the tears that streaked his face and shaking of his breath made it hard to get any sort of calm into his body. He sat, petrified in terror, and Scott finally settled on a spot near the bottom of his neck, pushing down slowly.
His skin was about to break. He could feel Scott's fangs like knives, sending soft pulses of pains through his body. He was going to die.
Desperately, Avid tried to find a last way to fight, some sort of desperate plea for a final way out of his fate. He manically set his eyes on Scott's neck, bare and outstretched to reach into his own, and lunged forward. Briefly, a thought flashed of telling Scott he had just eaten garlic, but the idea quickly passed as Avid shut his jaw over Scott's neck.
The blood spurted out from where his dull canines ripped into flesh, flooding his mouth immediately. The blood, thick and nauseating, coated his tongue with a sweet metallic taste. Avid bit down harder, feeling his teeth slip through muscle and he gagged. He felt warm blood drip down his chin and coat his shirt. It cooled into ice in an instant.
Scott ripped himself away from him, shoving Avid back into the trunk with a scream.
"What the fuck?" Scott bit, clutching his neck and hissing when the raw tissue hit cold air. "You're psychotic, Avid!"
Avid stared through him, eyes wide and blank and face bloodied, crimson dripping off his parted lips and coating his teeth. His breaths were labored and shaking, and the trees followed suit and began to shake in the witching hour's wind. He wiped the back of his hand against his face, smudging bright red across his cheek. It mixed with the half-dried tears that still coated his skin. He dropped his hand back to his side with its full weight, and blood crept down his fingers.
Scott took a cautionary step back, eyes wide with a false, shaky grin. "Avid, buddy?"
He didn't respond. The wind howled louder.
"Yeah, no," Scott laughed warily. "I'm off. Good luck with getting into town looking like that."
He stumbled backwards, slightly, and turned to a cloud of ashy grey dust, ducking out from it as a small bat. He was visibly still disconcerted and his wings fumbled to catch him in the air.
The wind kept Avid company as it chilled him to the bone. The blood on his face dried and turned to flakes, cracking when he blinked and moved, shedding like scales. He was numb. He couldn't feel anything. That would have scared him if he could think, but his mind was blank with shock, leaving him more a corpse than anything. But he'd lived, he'd fought off a vampire yet again and—and he still had a chance. He still, by some miracle, by some desperate clawing back at his fate, had gotten himself more time to save Oakhurst.
Avid broke out of his stupor, heaving in wheezing breaths. The world formed around him again, the sun just barely peeking out over the horizon to his right, sending streaks of glowing amber slicing through the trees. He choked, finally out of tears but still gasping for air like he was sobbing, throat thick with emotion and grief he couldn't touch. His hands felt raw, unclean and dirty, and for once the blood that soaked them was real. He stumbled forward, coming back to himself.
The river. He needed to go wash off at the river. Scott was, infuriatingly, right; He couldn't go back to Oakhurst covered in blood. Avid paused for a moment before picking a direction—the one which felt best—and walking forward, praying he'd end up where he needed to be.