Chapter Text
He’s drunk. And half-mad. Or maybe half-drunk and whole-mad. One struggles to know the difference this deep in the bottle.
Here. Alone in the dark with a fifth less than he started when he sat down to numb the ache of a long day, sitting at a rickety makeshift desk in a tent that doesn’t keep out the damp well enough, camped outside the village proper surrounded by a bunch of merchants in equally damp tents and wagons that think he and his team are just another bunch of weary travelers.
Perhaps traveling. Perhaps weary.
Bread father’s beard Henry is weary.
And cold. And angry.
So fucking angry.
Fuck he hates it.
Hates it all.
Hates Jericho and everything he stands for and hates hunting him.
There’s a big soft bed waiting for him hundreds of miles away, back in his family home in Cruostava in a warm room surrounded by his favorite books stacked up around the mahogany desk his grandfather gifted him when he graduated, but he can’t be there with those luxuries because he has to be here.
Henry takes a long drink from the bottle he has in a death grip by the neck – and he’d like to have Jericho by the neck, to choke the life from him and finally be done with it all so he can rest again. But it has to be him, apparently. So he can’t fucking leave.
Henry finishes the bottle, caught up in swirling, ever-blurring thoughts that the witch hunters he tipped off all those years ago hadn’t managed to kill him back then, that all the assassins he sent to that stupid circus hadn’t come back, that any of the killers he’s paid off –paid handsomely– over the years to bring him Jericho’s stupid freckled head on a pike, or his cold heart on a platter haven’t worked.
If you want something done right, do it yourself.
It has to be him.
And who could be better? Who could know Jericho better than him? Him, who spent almost every day, every waking hour, at his side for fifteen years. Him, who has spent the thirteen after chasing him like a hound after a bone all the way across the continent an untold number of times over?
Henry’s socks are wet.
His hair is dirty.
He needs a shave.
He could count the exact number of times he has circumnavigated the world, the exact number of trips to each nation, the exact cost in gold and sweat and blood spent on each crossing if he checked his notes, but he’s too drunk for that. His head is swimming and he’s tired. Tired of all of it.
Bitterly, he remembers that unlike him, Jericho is locked up in a room at The Drunken Pumpkin Inn in town. Warm. Sated.
His team had watched him carefully all night, from the second he put on the charm and offered his illustrious talent to the inn keeper for the evening –on a trial run, of course. Ever generous, ever manipulative– just waiting for him to step a toe out of place. Henry’s spies, the best in their businesses that he could find, came back from each shift with reports of watching him all night while he danced and played his viol and sang his pretty songs, winking and smiling and stealing wine out of the hands of charmed patrons to drink on stage.
It’s disgusting to know how well the monster –irredeemable, horrible, vile– that puppets the body of Henry’s old friend fits itself into the hearts of the public.
And god doesn’t he know it? Jericho, eternally boyish with an old man’s clever wit, lithe and confident, happy to play any part of any game, so charming. He always was. Of course he didn’t misstep. Jericho doesn’t do that.
Henry had loved it, once.
He laughs, spiteful, at the idiot he had been.
He knows Jericho. As much as he hates it –as much as he hates him for what he did–
So he knows that idiot is curled up in his stupid silk pajamas, konked out on a pillow sleeping like an evil, parasitic baby right now. It makes his blood boil.
His scouts reported never losing sight of him –never giving him the chance to sneak off into any dark corner with anyone to feed off. So he knows Jericho shouldn’t have had the chance. Knows he’s going to bed hungry. That should make him feel better.
But.
Well, somehow Henry doubts it.
Jericho’s probably well-fed and well-fucked for the night while he lays awake spiralling out of his mind into memory. Languishing. Lucky bastard.
Henry’s hungry too. Famished.
His stomach is full enough from supper, but the ache in his chest of a soul unfulfilled begins to itch and unravel a little more of his –already tenuous– sanity tonight. Because the only vision behind his eyelids whenever he closes them to try to ignore the inevitable and get some dreamless sleep himself is Jericho. Stupid traitorous monster Jericho.
Memories flood a weary mind of nights spent curled up on his side in his big, comfortable bed, duvet up to his chin, watching Jercho flip through the pages of a book –slower and slower, blinking longer and longer. His voice, smooth and low and lilting, getting sleepier and sleepier. As intended. A comfort carefully crafted by Henry who invited him over to get a good night’s meal –who set up the pillows on his bed the way his friend liked, got him a special snack from the blood bank that afternoon so he’d be full and happy, and tucks them both in, with his head laid on Jer’s shoulder so he can enjoy his favorite dish, in whatever flavor his best friend dreams up tonight.
Jer’s dreams are delicious. He dreams in vivids, as charismatic in his sleep as he is awake. Ballads and buffets laid out for him, all but intravenous at this distance. Henry longs for the satisfaction of a night spent dozing with his face buried in Jericho’s silky hair, smelling like the smoke from a tavern’s hearth and the vanilla oil he pats on in his neck in the mornings.
Henry can’t take the thirst. It’s driving him mad. Driving him to drinking. Anything to sate it, except that he only wants one thing and only one thing works. He’s starving for it. And he’s disgusted at his own weakness. He shouldn’t want it, much less need it. Any dream will do. Should do.
Too many nights on the road and too much liquor singing in his blood, he can’t I think clear enough to decide between finally ending the long chase and having just one more meal of his friend’s vibrancy before he’s gone for good.
Because Henry will kill him. He has to. He will do it. For the world, for himself, for Jericho.
For who he used to be, the man Henry admired, before it was all taken –ripped out of his hands by Jericho’s bloodstained claws– stolen away and hidden in the dark alongside all the other falsehoods, in the pit with the vipers and monsters and every other awful thing that his best friend hid from him–
Fuck it.
Henry lets the bottle slip out of his cold, stiff fingers onto the floor with a quiet clank. Even drunk, stealth is a habit. A skill he’s honed for years. Can’t be too loud trying to hunt vampires, after all. And he doesn’t need any noses sniffing after him. Let his team assume he’s hidden away inside his tent plotting their next move all night. Let the merchant caravan assume he’s an unfriendly curmudgeon.
He rises from his cot, journal abandoned –knees popping, back aching; he’s beginning to feel his forty-one years these days– and takes off silently, weaving magic to disguise his drunken missteps as leaves in the wind.
The rest he manages through force of will, keeping himself steady, upright, and ostensibly sober, lest he be waylaid on his mission in the street by some well-meaning bystander or cautious guardsman. Henry won’t suffer distractions. He makes a beeline for the inn, knife tucked against his thigh.
It’s been too damn long. He just wants this over with already.
The residual music, tittered out by some other bard plying their version of the craft, echoes down the hall as Henry steps inside the room he knows is Jericho’s for the evening, sliding the lock —which had been pathetically easy to pick, by the way. Just about any other form of security would be more effective, this tavern really needs to invest in better locks— back behind him. He stands as still as the liquor will let him, mindful of his own feet struggling to keep steady and of creaking boards that might give him away while his eyes adjust in the dark.
There’s a single body in the bed when Henry can blink focus back into his blurring vision. Sprawled out on its back, the way Jericho sleeps, half-covered where he’s kicked out of the sheets.
Henry draws his blade –the special one, made just for this, with all the gilding and enchanted bloodstone and ceremony this execution demands– and stumbles forward. His boots land wrong –drunk, clumsy– and he overcorrects as the room spins. He lands –falls– knees first, too heavy, uneven, on the mattress all around Jericho, looming over him, caging him in.
Pretty pink eyes –familair, the color of cheap merlot, of currant jam for sale in market stalls– jolt open, fangs bared for just a second before recognition lights up his face and Jericho sighs, tired, but unbelievably –inexplicably, illogically, impossibly– relieved. Even with Henry holding the dagger that has only known his own and Jericho’s blood between his fourth and fifth rib, one swift motion away–
Henry is frozen. Transfixed. Caught, like a kid in a candy jar.
He’s awake.
Of course he’s awake, he had punched the pillow his head was on. Henry watches, squinting, glaring, mind foggy and too slow to catch up as Jericho’s fingers, always chilly —he had been responsible for warming them on autumn days, had swatted them away a thousand times before his friend could wiggle them under his shirt to make him squeal girlishly, just to embarrass him when he was young— reach up and gently curl under his chin. He can barely feel them through his beard.
But the problem is that Henry is drunk, and Jericho doesn’t change. He’s the same pretty face as Henry’s memories, and he doesn’t hate that Jericho. That Jericho is the one who smiles at him like that –like this, sleepy and indulgent, and cups his face, untangling his beard –the one that wasn’t there the last time he let this happen, when he was a bright eyed kid.
He shouldn’t be frozen like this. Should drive down the blade and end it like he’d meant to, but he can’t bring himself to move. It’s been thirteen years since his heart shattered into shrapnel, cutting him up from the inside. Hardened him into the monster hunter he’s become. He needs to do it… but the face below him is his Jer. He hasn’t changed at all. This man staring up at him with fondness and care and love –his prey, a vile creature that has betrayed him and everything he thought they both stood for– is the Jericho he misses. The one who taught him ballroom dancing, who sung him to sleep, who went through his homework with him. The face he’s staring down at blurs too much with the memory of the one he loved and Henry can’t make himself kill that Jericho. His Jer.
And maybe, if Jericho had jumped into action, pushing and fighting like an animal in a trap ready to kill or gnaw his own leg off, if he had run, had done anything else at all, it might have been enough to break the deathgrip the idealized past has on him, to remind him of the enemy he has at his mercy, of the monster he should put down while he has the chance– but he doesn’t. Henry keeps staring at a memory, searching for anything he could hate –could cling to to pull himself back up above water– and only finding the familiar.
Jericho’s voice is croaky and low and sexy, but fond, when he says. “Hen, honey, you look tired.”
Henry’s face is blank, staring with blurred vision at the face of a man he loved once. Lost between who he used to be –a young man with ambitions for his future, for a future with his best friend by his side, going on adventures together and– and the choice taken from him. Shattered with the rest of him by a man with this face. He moves the knife, clumsy, slicing a pretty red line across Jercho’s ribs and collar bone, up to Jericho’s cheek and digs into the skin there. “Y’should grow a beard.”
“Ah,” A smile, beautiful in the way vampires are, but crooked. It wrinkles his cheeks. Jericho doesn’t bother to clear the sleep from his voice, or move to fight the knife. “Well unfortunately.” Jericho tilts his head away, staring at Henry’s own distraction when he slides the edge of the knife down his neck, sharp, tingling, but not drawing any new blood. He traces bones and muscles, morbidly entertained, until the point hits the pillow and Henry sags, flipping it up into his hand again, leaning over Jericho. “I am forever twenty five and can’t grow one as lovely as yours.”
Henry hums and it rumbles in his forty year old chest, gruff and unused after hours of wallowing and drinking. “M so fuckin’ hungry, Jer.” He lowers himself, too quickly, and smacks their foreheads together –like maybe he could get a little nutrition from just being close to the place the dreams come from.
“Poor thing,” Cool fingers comb through tangled curls, gentle, soothing, just like he used to. Henry closes his eyes and fights the pull of sleep with locked elbows as Jericho pets. “Lovely thing. Let me help you out. I won't even make you ask for it.”
Henry hums, protesting the indignity or considering, no one would be able to tell. Least of all him.
“I’ssshould kill you.” He slurs, chewing on the cotton in his mouth. Reminding himself as much as threatening. “Put us both out’a ‘r mis’ry.”
Jericho doesn’t move against him, still doesn’t fight or squirm, just smooths out the worst of the tangles in the halo of hair that falls around his shoulders, onto Jericho’s face, smiling sadly. He doesn’t meet Henry’s glassy red eyes. He takes so long to speak that Henry almost forgets what he said to prompt it, busy watching the focus in his friend’s face and feeling the knots come undone.
“Maybe,” Jericho’s eyebrows twitch involuntarily, furrowing into something that should be angry but only looks sad, “but not tonight. This isn’t how either of us want it to end, is it?”
It’s not. Henry glares. It’s as good a night as any. He should, but his poor, rabid, bleeding heart isn’t in it. He should hate that Jericho knows it, too, but deep down, he gets it. He’s the best at killing Jericho for all the same reasons that Jericho is the best at seeing right through him.
Fine.
He’s tired anyway. Henry sighs, tosses the dagger onto the far side of the bed, and slumps, caging Jericho in the rest of the way with a hand on the other side of his pillow. “I hate you.” Henry growls.
Jericho nods, fingers already sliding into the back of his hair, scratching away years of tension. “Come to bed. Get some rest.”
A hand, freezing on his overheated side, pulls too gently to move anything, but Henry moves anyway –let’s himself be drawn in. He might wonder –were he in his right mind– if this is what that woman he found Jericho drinking dry that day felt, being charmed and seduced. But he isn’t in his right mind. This mind, the basest part of him that longs for this, moves his body into old patterns, falling and rolling on his own elbow, half on top of Jericho’s legs.
His boots are still on, his socks still wet.
The cover tangles up in them uncomfortably, but Jericho’s arm is cradling his head onto his chest like he did when they were young, and Henry is already breathing deeper.
Maybe, not alone this time, but hidden, here in the dark, out of his mind with drink and grief –maybe just tonight he can have his best friend back.
Henry falls asleep on Jericho’s chest with fingers combing through his unruly mane, petting him to sleep, humming the songs he knows the younger man likes that vibrate perfectly out of his chest, uninterrupted by any heartbeat or breath needed, and ended with a deliberate, mournful kiss on the top of his head before Jericho slips off himself into a dreamless sleep.
Henry wakes up alone, more refreshed than he’s been in months and absolutely disgusted with himself and his own weakness.