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“What part of me makes you believe I deserve saving?”
When Legs looked up at Owen, the vampire wasn’t facing him. Instead, he was watching the dawning sunrise with a glare that seemed almost angry to any outside viewer. Despite this, he saw the careful air of faux carelessness that hung around the vampire, the hard look in his eyes, the slight crease of his brow.
“What?”
Owen scoffed, still not taking his eyes off the sun. “You said you wish to save me. I suppose I’m just… curious about what exactly makes you think I deserve it.”
Even woozy from the fresh bite mark on his neck, steadily and slowly dripping small rivers of blood down his skin, Legs could tell it wasn’t exactly his answer that Owen was looking for.
“What makes you think you don’t?”
Owen sucked an unnecessary breath through his teeth, and Legs immediately knew he had asked the right question. He said nothing as he watched the vampire stalk to the edge of the cliff they’d met upon, avoiding the patches of sunlight beginning to creep among the mossy forest floor. Legs himself didn’t move, half to let Owen have his moment and half due to needing to let himself recover what he’d allowed to be drunk from him. Instead, he sat, half-leaning against a tree for support, and just watched.
“Vampires--” Owen started and then paused, flexing his claws as he searched for his own words. “Vampires are inherently damned creatures.” He turned back, flashing a fanged smile at the doctor, tinted red from Legs’s own blood. “Cursed by all that is holy for our transgressions against the natural order. Condemned to walk the world, plagued by hunger, until our eventual damnation into the pits of Hell itself. Does any aspect of that seem to be something you can fix, Doctor?”
Legs flicked his gaze away from Owen’s fangs to his eyes, crimson themselves. The little hint of blood would have been slightly intimidating if it had not been given freely just minutes prior.
“I am a doctor,” he said. “Not a priest. My intentions are not in what any god has said. I see nothing before me that can be so easily decided as evil by being alone.”
At that Owen laughed, not a lighthearted thing of humor, but dry and cold. “And what are your ‘intentions’, Doctor?”
Legs took a moment to assess the situation. Owen was volatile at the best of moments, deadly at the worst. Meanwhile, he still wasn’t sure he could stand on his own two feet right now. His medical training told him he needed water and food, preferably some red meat, neither of which he had on his person right now. Other than that, the best he could do right now was sit and wait out the dizziness. He didn’t need to pass out standing up in front of a possibly enraged vampire in the empty woods right now.
He must’ve paused too long, as he found Owen scowling down at him. He wasn’t sure when he’d moved closer.
“A cure,” Owen answered his own question, spitting the two words out like poison. “Isn’t that what you offered?”
“I offered help. If a cure is help, then so be it.” Even as the words left his own mouth, he flinched.
But Owen didn’t lash out, didn’t strike with claws sharp enough to rend flesh like paper, didn’t spit out curses or threats. All he did was tilt his head, snow-white curls falling into blood-colored eyes.
“For the meal, Doctor, I will forgive the transgression this once. But this? This was a gift to me. The last gift my love ever had the chance to give. I will not allow it to be taken away from me.” His voice broke slightly at the end. Legs, for both their sakes, chose not to mention it.
“Okay.”
Owen narrowed his eyes. “That’s all? Just… ‘Okay?’”
Legs swallowed, wincing as the movement sparked pain in the side of his neck. “It isn’t my place to force treatment on my patients. As much as I… encourage you to consider the cure, I can’t force it upon you.” Plus, I can’t fight back if you choose to fight right now.
Red eyes scanned his face before Owen scowled and began digging through his satchel. As if reading Legs’s mind, he pulled out a few baked potatoes, pressing them into the doctor’s hands.
“Apologies,” he muttered. “These are all I have that are safe for you to eat. Unless you prefer your meat raw.”
Legs took the offering gracefully, immediately taking a bite out of one. “I prefer cooked meat, actually. But thank you.”
Owen huffed, shuffling further into the shade as sunlight crept a bit too close to his boots. He pointedly refused to sit next to Legs, still staring down the rising sun as if he had a personal vendetta against it (which, Legs supposed, he probably did).
It was Legs who broke the silence this time, pausing his potato meal to do so.
“You called vampirism a ‘gift.’”
“I did.”
“But you also called it a curse.”
Owen went silent for a moment. This time Legs gave him his slight bit of privacy, choosing not to try to figure out what he was thinking by looking at his facial expression.
After a moment, the vampire sighed. “Nuance, I suppose.”
“Nuance,” Legs repeated. He felt he was going to regret speaking up soon, but chose to press on anyway. “I told you I’m no holy man, but… seems a big difference to me.”
“I suppose it would.”
This was going in circles already.
But, before Legs could try to steer the conversation, Owen did so on his own.
“Tell me, Doctor, have you ever loved someone? So much so that you would do anything to be with them?”
At that, the doctor simply looked up at the vampire. He opened his mouth to answer, before closing it just as fast. He didn’t owe Owen the answer to that question. Not right now.
“I did,” Owen continued. “He was everything to me. My friend, my companion, my sire, my love.” Once again, his voice choked on the last word. Neither man acknowledged it. “We were supposed to live forever. Together. And he was ripped away from me.” Once again, he smiled, a cruel expression that didn’t feel quite right among his face, barring his teeth, fangs and all. “Does that mean I am something for you to save, Doctor? Something broken to fix?”
Legs ignored the question. “You chose potential eternal damnation for love.”
“I did.”
“Without hesitation?”
“I was damned anyway, Doctor. Why not add another reason to be condemned?”
To that, Legs had no idea what to say.
Owen met the doctor’s eyes, expression going blank. “I didn’t lie entirely at the town meeting. Oakhurst did see an influx of the church, just not quite for vampire hunting. When they first sought me out, I believed they were simply trying to pray my illness away, much like the town priest had tried years earlier.” He took another unnecessary breath. “Turns out they were trying to pray away an illness. Just not the one which marked my skin in sores and blisters.”
“...I’m sorry.” The words were out of Legs’s mouth before he could truly think about them. He flinched.
Owen didn’t. He stayed perfectly still, except to turn his gaze back to the sunrise. “Louis was my everything. If that damned me to Hell, then so be it.”
“I don’t-- Owen, I don’t think that--”
“And you?”
“What?”
“Is it worth it? To you?”
It took a second for Legs to realize what he was referring to. “I don’t think of it that way.”
“Oh?” He was changing the conversion away from him. For once, Legs simply let him.
“If a loving God made us all in His image, who is he to damn us for love? I never… I never understood that. I’m damned for a lot of reasons, Owen, but they are reasons that involve my own choices, my own conscious misdeeds. Not for who I am or who I love.”
Owen turned to look at him again, processing that. Legs choose to not look away, taking in the vampire to his side, still refusing to sit with him. His lips, he noticed, were still tinted red from the blood he’d drunk.
“By that logic,” Owen said after a moment, “I’m still damned. I chose vampirism. I chose this. I chose to tear down everyone who ever had a hand in Louis’s death. And I choose to look forward to spending our own damnations together.”
You’re so convinced he’s damned too, Legs thought, although he refused to voice it. He knew that that leaving his mouth would be an invitation for violence.
“I never said I thought vampirism was damning,” he said instead.
Owen flinched.
“You said that. Not me. You chose to not turn any fledglings. You chose to drink and not kill or turn me. You chose to stay with me while I sat here. You chose to give me food. You chose to not hurt me for prying. You chose to tell me all this.”
The vampire’s stare was blank.
“You choose to believe you’re damned for who you are.”
Suddenly, that gaze was no longer on him, this time directed at the ground off to the side.
Legs almost laughed. “I don’t think either of us have the qualifications to decide what happens when we die. I think we leave that to whatever holy spirits may be watching over us. And even if it was up to us, I think our actions matter much more than what we are. And maybe we are damned for those, but it’s what we do once we realize that that matters. I think we both have the potential to be better. To do better.”
Because if there’s hope for you, maybe there’s hope for me too.
Owen swallowed hard, seemingly trying to look anywhere but the doctor as he processed the words. Legs knew based on that alone that he was at least considering it.
“Well,” he said, flexing his claws in what Legs recognized was a comforting movement. “I appreciate… the sentiment, I suppose. I should probably-- probably get back to the castle. The coven is probably wondering where I am--” He took a step back as he spoke, skin simmering as he stepped into the morning’s first rays. “Goodbye, Doc--”
“And for the record, the answer is you.”
Owen froze. “What?”
Legs felt up the tree, supporting himself as he made his way to his feet. He was still a bit weak, but the dizziness was gone for the most part. He felt comfortable getting his way back to the town on his own.
“You asked me what I saw in you that is ‘deserving’ of saving,” he explained. “The answer is I see you, Owen. Vampirism and all. That is what I think can be saved. And not what ‘deserves’ to be saved, but what is worthy of saving. I can’t make that decision for you, but if you do make it, just know that who you are is what makes it worth it. Not any part of you, damned or otherwise. But you.”
Owen paused, and Legs’s breath caught in his throat. Where he stood on the cliff’s edge, his head was haloed by the red-tinted moon, illuminating messy curls of snow and starlight. The first rays of sunlight shone streaks on his face through the shadows of leaves above, illuminating wide crimson eyes and sharp features molded by a life of malnutrition and illness. He looked absolutely dumbstruck, brain struggling to keep up with Legs’s words, no sharp comeback on his tongue.
Standing there, caught between the day and the night, he didn’t look damned.
He looked divine.
The clocktower bell in town rang through the forest, breaking Legs’s trance as he glanced in that direction.
“Goodbye, Legundo.”
And when he looked back, Owen was gone.