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She had been the last to acquire her La Manchaland identity from the engine of Mephistopheles: she wishes she had been the first.
A long time ago, before her exile and before her isolation, Sancho had spent her time observing. Seldom speaking, rarely interfering, she watched as her family festered. Now she can't be sure how she missed the signs that they would turn on their Father, or if she did know and the waters of the river washed it away. Perhaps she had always been as naive as she acts deep down.
So Sancho watched, still scraped raw from her trip home, grieving for a family she killed and remembered all at once, as her dear friends don the visages of familiar bloodfiends.
She's never wanted kindred of her own. She would not wish this fate on anyone, even if it is the fate she chose for herself at her lowest point. The deep gnawing hunger that permeates her bones and eats her heart and mind, one that can never be satiated, only stalled… It's something that she would rather keep to herself, tucked under her jovial mask. It's no one's problem but her own.
Occasionally, she finds it difficult to act as Don Quixote. When Dante returns with the very first ID from the bus she is excited. It had been less than two days since she stood tensely in the bath and scrubbed the blood of her family off her skin, suddenly too afraid to take a shower but too distraught to leave herself soaked from the rain.
Then, space distorts around Gregor and the identity manifests itself with the sound of shattering glass. As the world breaks into place again, she meets shining red eyes.
Unable to respond, Sancho spins on her heel and returns to the bus. She does not introduce herself; Don Quixote is not welcome with him. Falling back on centuries old habits she sits silently, observing Curiambro—The Priest—Gregor, from the foggy window seat. He moves the same as she remembers, like he is in agony.
Curiambro harboured so much guilt, so many conflicting feelings about their Father and their family and their nature. At his core he was gentle and kind. Of them all, he was the one most convinced they were monsters, and the one most connected to his past as a human. Unlike Sancho he had not been reborn: only changed. Now that it's been presented to her she cannot unsee his gaunt and haunted face in Gregor.
Some time later, Sancho remains sitting sentinel by the window when Gregor returns early.
He looks harrowed and hollowed out, and he sits beside her silently. As she grabs at the pieces of herself to rebuild Don Quixote he holds up his hand to stop her before she can speak. "You don't have to right now," He mutters before grimacing, "I mean- you can if it helps but you don't need to."
Her mouth closes with a click.
She stares him down in silence for a few moments more, cataloguing the ways he differs and intersects with the identity he just acquired. "I think that you could've been close."
"Who? Me and the priest?"
Running her tongue along her teeth she responds, "Curiambro, yes." turning away from Gregor slightly, she continues: "You are much alike. He was easy to get along with."
He leans back and scratches his stubble, "Can't say I see it; didn't seem the friendliest when we met him."
"Perhaps not, but he was always there for us." As she speaks, he fidgets. It's unusual for him, and Sancho knows that it must be in response to who he was not that long ago. The Priest is sticking to his skin.
Identities don't always hang around, but if any would Sancho is positive it would be those of bloodfiends. It is not an affliction easily ignored, and once acquired it remains as a constant pressure in the body and mind. Curiambro had fidgeted often; when she returned he was still and sallow like a corpse.
In many ways she has grown and improved, but right now she cannot face him, cannot see the echoes of her past in him, so she leaves. Like she has done a thousand times in the past, she leaves her family to their sorrow. She cannot be Don Quixote for him right now, she can only be Sancho, and Sancho would not be helpful here.
It is rather unfortunate that Dante is lucky.
Most days if they returned with multiple high-power identities she would be leaping for joy, cajoling with them and her compatriots about the utility of Mephistopheles's engine, and celebrating their good fortune with a story.
Instead she finds herself unwillingly faced with Outis and Rodya in the guise of her late sisters.
She was not present for the announcement of the new identities, so it comes as a surprise. First, she exits the back of the bus and finds herself frozen, held captive by the sight of a tight red dress and long sewing shears. She looks up slowly, afraid to look this ghost in the eye. Nicolina had died hating her. Her eyes look wrong on Outis's face.
She wills herself not to crumple to the ground as she takes in Outis as the Barber. She fills the role much better than Sancho would've expected, but then again, Nicolina had a harshness to her underneath her dresses. She maintained a military precision and ran the tightest operation of anyone in La Manchaland. There was no room for error, for imperfection, for doubts. There was only her and her steely gaze and her culling shears.
Oft Sancho wondered who she was before: if Nicolina herself had been a soldier when she was found and turned by Dulcinea. If she had been a casualty stolen from a battlefield, or just had the countenance of one. Maybe if she'd tried harder then they would've been closer, if she had communicated better they could have been allies. The resentment Nicolina felt for her, for her apparent dismissal of all attempts to grow close to her, were not intentional or unique to their relationship.
Sancho was a quiet, reserved person. She had never been fond of anything weighing her down, not emotionally nor physically. She spent her fleeting human life trapped, then, when she burned herself up, she watched the embers float into the sky and thought: At least some part of me escaped.
Even now she hardly wears anything she cannot move in. If she had just been forthright she knows Nicolina would have accommodated, taken it as a challenge, even.
Outis never wears dresses; the sinners barely wear anything but their uniforms. It's odd because Don Quixote would've never thought it would suit her so well. It fits her like a second skin. Outis has always been one of the closest to embodying how Sancho was before: before La Manchaland, before the river. Cold and hostile. Reserved and angry. Yearning for something beyond her reach for so long that the end goal fades and only feelings remain.
Outis would make a wonderful bloodfiend.
She supposes they all would. Every single sinner is here because they have more to gain than lose by dying over and over again. They all want for something so strongly they will tear themselves apart for it. Her compatriots would make fantastic bloodfiends and Don Quixote will make sure that they never are for as long as she remains.
Rodya has been pacing.
She's been walking the aisle of the bus for no less than 20 minutes when Don Quixote finally approaches her. The sight of her primly and carefully going up and down the rows of seats, back pin straight and hands gently clasped in front of her is unsettling; not only is it out of character, it is achingly familiar.
She's been avoiding them. Skirting the issue with cheerful grins and gritted teeth. She knows that the next new ID Dante plans to bring them will be hers; it's clear from how the others talk— voices hushed and eyes gleaming red in the low light of the evening— that Sancho is present in the mirror world the other bloodfiends have been ripped from.
It's probably for the best, she doesn't know how much more of this she can stomach before she starts to crack under the weight of her not-family's attention.
When she stumbles across Rodya at the front of the bus she is on her way out for an unsanctioned walk. It's late in the evening, long after the others have retired to their rooms, and she can feel a dull pressure in her gums and her stomach. It isn't hunger, not yet, but it's unpleasant all the same. She needs to get out of her room, away from the gory carousel out her false window and the mixture of childish decor and newly introduced antique furniture. She needs to be free from the pressure without and within, and the easiest way is to move.
She comes across the shadow of her sister doing much the same.
Unlike before it isn't in the winding gilded halls of the manor, or under the gleaming starlit skies in the garden, it's under the buzzing fluorescent bus lights and between cramped seats. It's a parody of a familiar scene: where Sancho and Dulcinea were at their most vulnerable, stripped of their finery and masks, combating a similar restless hunger.
When Rodya turns sharply on her heel to face Don Quixote she hears her pulse jolt even while her face remains impassive.
Rodya had been taking the blowback from their new IDs the best, she had thought. Watching her school her face into a mask of haughty indifference instead of her usual nonchalant lassitude she realizes that she wouldn't have noticed the signs anyways; Rodya always seems like a woman starved.
The thought makes her chest ache. She is not Rodya's Mother, she wasn't Dulcinea's either, but she is the oldest Kindred of Alonso Don Quixote. She is the survivor: the one who remains. Unlike the overwhelming voices of her family she feels no connection to Rodion except for that which she forged herself. Even still, she will not let her suffer when she can do her best to help.
When she had been first turned she'd spent upwards of two months near bedridden, in a constant state of parched restlessness no matter how many people her father brought her to drain dry. As she aged the hunger became less overwhelming, still gnawing, but manageable. Until Bari came and reshaped their world blood was plentiful.
When they stopped drinking blood from humans directly and started rationing their supply she felt like she had returned to being a fledgling. The hunger was unbearable after so short a time she would have considered hunting on her own if she wasn't so mindful of her father's wishes.
Lately, she has taken to warming her synthetic blood before drinking, if only to give some semblance of life to the artificial taste. She can't help by offering any of her own supply, not when Rodya isn't in her ID. Don Quixote would always come to Sancho at her worst and distract her, tell her new and fanciful stories, expound on his newest plans. His cheer helped ease her, and when it wasn't enough he would bring her a drink— not what she craved the most— but something she could trick herself into believing was blood if she tried hard enough.
Thinking back to the ways her father helped her isn't entirely useless. Even if Rodya can’t be sated by blood, she may be comforted by companionship. Putting on the brightest and most jovial smile she can muster she gently grasps her hands and tugs her into the kitchen, chatting all the while.