Chapter Text
It was the hem that did it.
Coco had been kneeling on the workroom floor for the better part of an hour, pins pressed between her lips and a length of blue fabric pooled around her knees. She had been doing beautifully right up until the moment she shifted her weight and her knee found the one floorboard in all of Naakiwan Downs that had a nail sticking up just enough to be annoying.
She hissed in pain as a wobbly, muffled squeak fell from her lips. The pins clinked against each other as she pulled them from her mouth, in a haste.
"Coco?" Her mother's voice came through from the fitting room, as patient and careful as it always had been when it came to Coco's learning. 'After all,' she remembered her mom repeat when a cloth didn'tcome out quite right, 'you are still eight years old, and still learning'.
"Everything alright?"
"Fine!" Coco said, which was almost entirely true. She pressed her thumb to her knee, inspected the thin red line there, and decided it was not important enough to make a fuss over. She had learned, from experience, that making a fuss over small cuts only made her mother stop whatever she was doing to come look at it, and her mother was in the middle of something complicated with Mrs. Orveld's wedding order. She did not need the interruption.
She sucked her thumb clean, pressed the hem of her apron to her knee for a moment, and got back to work.
The hem in question was for a child's dress, pale yellow with ribbon trim. Coco had been working on dresses like this since she was five, when her mother first put a needle in her hand and showed her, patiently and many, many times, how to hold it. She had been terrible at it. Truly, mortifyingly terrible; her first stitches had been enormous and crooked and her mother had taken them out without a word and shown her again.
But that was then. Now, her hands knew what to do almost before she told them to.
She finished the last pin, sat back on her heels, and tilted her head. Even, even, even. She had a good eye for it now.
On the windowsill behind her, sitting in the stripe of late afternoon sun the way it always did at this hour, was the book. She had not looked at it yet today, which felt like a small debt she owed herself. Later, she promised.
"Mama," she called, "I'm done with the pinning. Can I go outside for a bit?"
A pause. Then: "Has the Orveld order been pressed?"
Coco looked at the stack of finished pieces folded neatly on the table. She had done that before the hem. "Yep!"
Another pause. She could picture her mother considering it, with the little line that appeared between her eyebrows when she was making a small decision.
"Be back before dark," her mother said with a fond smile. "Alright?"
Their village sat just at the edge of the Downs, which meant the road out past their house turned quickly into long grass and then, beyond that, into a more-or-less countryside that went on and on until it decided to stop.
Coco quite liked it out here. She liked the way the light changed in the evenings, going orange and then pink and then a beautiful mix of blue and purple that she ha learnt meant it was almost time to come back inside.
This time, she was not exactly outside for the fresh air.
She was outside because of the moth.
She had first noticed it three nights ago, doing its unhurried circles around the old lamppost at the edge of the mill road. It was not a remarkable moth by any measure. Medium-sized. Pale. Not especially pretty. But it showed an undying determination that Coco found deeply interesting, which became aparent when it kept adjusting its approach every few minutes, trying slightly different angles, as if it were working something out.
She had told her mother about it at dinner.
Her mother had said, "Hm," in the tone that meant she was trully listening.
She had told her mother about it again the next day.
Her mother had hunmed, and then wondered. "You know, you could draw it. It would become a physical memory for you."
Which was how Coco ended up sitting in the long grass between two thick roots with her sketchbook balanced on her knees and a piece of charcoal in her fingers, watching the moth work. Her knee had been cleaned and was now mostly forgotten. The scrape was small and already starting to crust at the edges; it only stung a little when she bent her leg.
The sky was going pink, but she didn't move yet. The moth had just tried a new angle, steeper than before, and she wanted to see if it worked.
It didn't. The moth adjusted again.
"You're very stubborn," she told it, with a giggle.
The moth did not respond. This did not surprise her. Most of the things she talked to outside did not respond; she had made her peace with this early on.
She turned back to her sketchbook and started to sketch in earnest, tongue pressed to the corner of her lip, trying to catch the moth's wings in charcoal. It was hard, because it kept moving. She tried anyway. She had learned (from her mother, from the hems, from a hundred things that she had eventually gotten right by not giving up) that "hard" was not the same as "not worth doing."
That was when she heard someone on the road.
She looked up. A man was coming along the mill road at an uneven walk, one hand drifting near the fence posts as if he might need them for support. He was pale in a… weird way, that Coco could not have named if asked about, but that her eyes noticed before the rest of her caught up. The lamplight, when he reached the post, caught his eyes in a way that was a little unsettling. A little too bright.
She watched him the way she watched the moth. Curious.
Years later, she would bitterly laugh about how 'curiosity really had killed the cat'.
He stopped. He stood there for a moment, one hand against the lamppost, and then he turned his head. First toward the road, then toward her.
She raised her hand in a small wave, because that was the polite thing to do when someone looked at you. Was it not?
"Hello," she said, with a bright smile.
He did not say hello back. He was looking at her knee.
She glanced down at it too, because she was not sure what was interesting about it. The scrape had not done anything dramatic. There was just the thin crust of it, and a little redness, and...
"Oh," she said. She felt a flicker of embarrassment, as if she had realized she should have noticed something sooner. Though she would later learn it had been naivety.
"Sorry, is this bothering you? I can cover it, I have my apron, I can-"
He lunged.
He moved so fast that her thought process never finished, just dissolved into something large and frightening and wrong. His hands were on her shoulders and her back hit the root behind her painfully, and she was screaming before she knew she was going to scream.
It was loud and high and frantic, because she was eight years old and something was very wrong. Her body knew it even when her mind was still trying to catch up.
"Let go," she managed, between screams, squirming with everything she had. "Let go, let go, stop it, stop- !!"
He bit down, and she screamed louder.
The bite was not right. She would understand later why it wasn't right; she would read about it later, in books she had to ask her mother three differeng times before she agreed to show her, and she would learn words like "placement" and "angle" and "venom delivery." At eight, in the moment, all she knew was that something sharp bit down at her neck and that it hurt horrendously.
Her world went sideways.
Not dark. Sideways.
She was still there. She didn't quite know how much time had passed, however, because at some point the pain shifted into lethargy.
She could still see the lamppost and the moth still circling it, utterly unconcerned, and she could feel the ground and the root and the cool of the evening air. But between her and all of those things was something thick, soft and strange, like the feeling of being at the bottom of a very warm pond. Like being wrapped in something she didn't have a name for.
The man above her went very still.
She heard him make a panicked sound as he panted.
And then the sounds of his footsteps went away fast. She was then left with a sensation she had even less words for (a thread being pulled out and snapped, a place where something had been and wasn't anymore, an emptiness with edges), and then Coco was lying on the ground looking up at the lamppost.
"Oh," she mumbled, quietly, to no one.
The moth was still circling. She watched it for a moment. She thought, distantly, that she should probably go home.
She got up. Fell back down. Got up again, more carefully this time. Her sketchbook was in the grass somewhere; she picked it up without really seeing it and tucked it under her arm.
The lights in the village were all on… was she late? What time was it?
She started walking home.
The walk was strange. Everything was too loud yet muffled, like a room got when you were running a fever and everything echoed. She could hear a dog barking somewhere on the other side of two fences. Every sound arrived as if it had teeth.
She pressed her hand to the side of her head and kept walking.
She could hear her mother inside before she reached the door. The sharp intake of breath that meant she had looked up from her work, looked out the window, and the specific rythym of her footsteps.
The door opened with more force than usual.
Her mother stood in the warm light from the hall. She looked like she was ready to give her daughter a stern talk, but something stopped her before she even started.
"Mama," Coco whimpered, vision blurring at the edges. She was not sure what she meant to say after that. She wasn't even sure if that was her voice.
Her mother's face twisted in a way that Coco had never seen it do before. She had seen her mother worried (the look with the line between her brows), she had seen her mother sad (quiet and careful and present), she had even seen her mother frightened once, when there had been a bad storm. This was different from all of those.
But it only lasted a moment. And then her mother stepped forward, put both hands on Coco's face, tilted her chin, looked at her neck.
"Let's get inside," she said. "Right now. Come on."
The reprimand Coco feared for being late never came.
She sat Coco on the kitchen's bench, tucking her hair under her ears so her face was clear. The lamplight was very bright and Coco squinted against it - her mother noticed immediately and lowered the flame without being asked.
"Can you tell me what happened?" her mother said, looking at her straight in the eyes. Her voice was calm, Coco realized. It was the voice she used when she was concentrating very hard on something.
Coco told her all she could. Or, well, at least she tried to.
The story came out in pieces, not quite in order, and some of it she was not sure she was describing right, because she did not entirely understand it herself. When she got to the part about the man's eyes being wrong, her mother's hands, which had been cleaning the bite with a cloth, went still for just a moment.
Then they moved again, just as careful as before.
"Was there anyone else around?"
"No. Just the moth."
"Did he say anything to you?"
Coco thought about it. "He didn't say hello," she mumbled. "I said it first. And then he looked at my knee."
"Your knee?" Her mother looked down, the dried blood and its edges, and something moved through her expression. "Okay," she said. "Okay."
"Mama," Coco said, "Why did he bite me? I've never seen a person bite another one like that. Did I do something mean to him and he got angry?"
Her mother set down the cloth with a pained sigh and sat on the bench beside Coco, which was very unusual (after all, she usually stayed standing when she had things to do, which was most of the time), and looked at her daughter in a way Coco rarely ever saw.
It made her stomch flip.
"He was a vampire." her mother said, holding her tiny hands against her own "Do you know that word? I haven't taught you about them yet, have I?"
"Like in the stories other kids tell?" Coco's eyes went wide. "I didn't know they were real."
"They are."
"Are they all like that?"
"No," her mother said, and the word came out very firmly. "No, most of them are nothing like that. What happened tonight was..." She stopped. Started again. "He hurt you. Badly. And that was very wrong, and it wasn't your fault. Do you understand that? Nothing about this is your fault."
Coco nodded, though she was not entirely sure she did understand, because she kept coming back to the thought that… well, if she had come inside when she was supposed to, the way she had been asked, none of this would have happened.
"Am I going to be okay?" she asked instead.
Her mother looked at her for a moment. Then she put her arm around Coco's shoulders and pulled her close, so close their bodies could have merged if it were possible.
"I am going to make sure you will." she promised. "That's different from okay right now. But it's what matters. It's going to be okay."
Coco leaned into her and decided that was a good enough answer.
The next hours were not good hours. Not at all
There was cold, and then a cold much worse than the first. A kind that came from inside and had nothing to do with the temperature of the room. Her mother was there for all of it. At some point, Coco's heart started doing something that felt wrong in a way she couldn't explain. Not painful exactly, more like a word said wrong, a stitch pulled too tight, and her mother pressed her hand flat to Coco's chest and went the color of old linen.
"I thought this had been a feeding." the woman muttered to herself, desperately walking across the room as she searched for something. "A simple feeding."
"It's going to be fine, mommy." Coco told her, because her mother looked frightened and Coco did not like it when her mother was frightened.
Her mother looked closer to tears the more her daugter talked. "Yes, it is. It's okay, my love. Honey, I'm going to- I'm gonna go look for someone, okay? On the village. Don't leave this room. Do you hear me? Don't even get up."
Her mother left before she could even respond. Not walking, but running.
"You- you can't be serious! My baby, my darling daughter, she-"
"Ma'am, you need to calm down-"
"NO! How could I- my reason to live is dyi-"
"…she wi-… different…"
Coco couldn't hear anyting else after that. Nor speak.
Nor open her eyes.
When had they closed?
At some point through it all, her fingers found the edge of the bed, and then the windowsill beside it, and then, somehow, the familiar worn leather of the book. She had not asked for it. She did not remember anyone putting it there. But it was there, and her hand closed around the cover the way it always did, the soft creak of the binding, the particular weight of it settled into her palm, and something that had been very loud inside her went a little quieter.
She could not open it. She could not see. But she held it.
She held it for a long time…
…until she couldn't feel her body, nor move anymore.
She fell into darkness.
There was a big stretch of nothing.
The nothing was not bad, exactly. It just was. She did not dream and she did not feel anything and she was simply not there. And then, after what felt like no time at all and also like a very long time, she was.
Light. Too much of it. Even through her eyelids, even in a room with the curtains drawn.
She made a sound she had not meant to make, something small and involuntary similar to a chirp, and her mother was there before the sound finished, stepping between her and the window, and the relief was so immediate and complete that Coco felt it through her whole body.
She reached for her mother's hand.
"Hi," her mother said softly. "Hi, sweetheart. I'm right here. You're okay."
Coco tried to say something back, but what came out was not a word. It wasn't even close to a word. She tried again and got the same result, a sound that came from the right place but arrived in completely the wrong shape. Her chest seized in fear and frustration.
"It's alright," her mother said quickly, brushing her hair against her fingertips. "It's going to come back. I promise you, it's going to come back. Everything is alright."
She did not know, then, that her mother was right. She only knew that she could not speak, and could not explain, and could not ask any of the questions that were building up inside her.
Coco's hand moved on its own, sliding across the blanket until it found the edge of the windowsill.
The book was, somehow, back there.
She pulled it carefully into her lap and held it with both hands, the way she had at the fair when she was six years old and the witch had pressed it into her hands. She had not entirely known what that would mean for her. She had known, though, with complete and immediate certainty, that the book was hers.
It was still hers. That, at least, had not changed.
Her mother watched her hold it, and said nothing, and did not try to take it away.
She instead held her daughter's hand through all of it, and said "I've got you, I'm right here" until Coco stopped making the frightened sounds and fell asleep once more.
Her mother had a gift for learning things quickly when she needed to.
Coco had seen this before in smaller ways: a new technique for a difficult fabric, an unfamiliar alteration method, or even the particular requirements of a customer's unusual order. Her mother did not panic about things she did not know. She found out. She wrote it down in her small, neat handwriting. She figured it out.
She applied this to Coco with the same precision she applied to everything else.
She learned what a fledgling needed. She got everything she could possibly get to support her daugter in record speed, pulling favors in the process.
She did not tell Coco where it all came from, in those first weeks, and Coco did not ask, because the hunger was a terrible thing (enormous and animal and embarrassing, not like normal hunger at all) and it was easier to just be grateful for it and not think too hard about the logistics.
Except, then, one morning about two weeks in, she held the cup her mother handed her and the smell hit her. Her face did something entirely outside her control.
"I know," her mother mumbled, grabbing one hand against hers. "I know, love."
"What is this?" Coco said, which was the first full sentence she had managed in some time, and they both registered that in the same instant.
"You spoke!" her mother breathed out, relieved to her core.
"What is this?" Coco said again, because the question felt important and also because speaking had been so hard for so long that she wanted to keep doing it.
Her mother sat down across from her. "It's blood," she said. No decoration, not even softening. Just the truth, as she knew that her daughter prefered the truth over anything else.
Coco looked at the cup. Looked at her mother. Looked at the cup again.
"I'm not going to drink blood," she said.
"You're going to need to."
"I'm not," Coco said, with complete certainty. After all, she was a child not yet aware that circumstances are going to override her choices. "That's disgusting! That's the most disgusting thing I have ever heard of. Why would anyone drink-"
"Coco, my dear. Remember the talk we had some weeks ago? You are a vampire now."
The kitchen was very quiet. Outside, she could hear (too clearly, too precisely, every tiny sound arriving complete and distinct) the birds in the garden, the wind in the shutters, the neighbor's horse making a slow circuit of its paddock.
"Oh," Coco said. "Vampires drink… blood?"
"Yes."
She looked at the cup again. "...Does it taste bad?"
"I don't know," her mother admitted. "I've never had it. You've been having it for a while, though. I think you just never realized."
Coco looked at it for a long time. The hunger, which had been a manageable background roar, had picked up substantially just from the smell.
"I'm not happy about this. I don't want this." she breathed out, sounding upset with herself.
"That's completely reasonable," her mother said. "I would be too."
Still, after some thinking, Coco drank it. She kept her eyes fixed on the window and her expression very flat, which was a look she had learned from Mama herself.
It didn't taste bad. That was almost worse.
"I'm still not happy about it." she said, setting the cup down. "I'm disgusted, actually."
"I know," her mother said, voice pained. "I know. Come here." And she opened her arms, and Coco climbed into them and pressed her face into her mother's shoulder, and her mother rocked her a little, the way she hadn't since Coco was very small.
"It's going to be different," her mother said. "A lot of things are going to be different."
"But you'll stay?" Coco asked. The words came out quieter than she meant them to.
"Coco." Her mother held her tighter. "I wouldn't wish to be anywhere else."
The fangs were a problem.
Not only had they been a pain to come (her mother taught her that she was going through something called 'teething'), but they came in wrong.
They were slightly off-angle and blunt, which in practical terms meant they caught on things (her lip, the edge of a cup, once, memorably, a length of thread she had been holding in her mouth the way her mother did), and they would not do the things that teeth were apparently vampire teeth were supposed to be able to do easily.
Like biting.
She showed them to her mother one morning with an expression of profound sadness.
"They're blunt," she said. "The right one is crooked. Look at it."
Her mother looked. "A little," she hummed. "It's barely noticeable. They look more like human teeth, actually."
"But they are supposed to be sharp. They're not sharp at all! Why do I have teeth that are both crooked and not sharp?"
"They'll settle," her mother ruffled her hair, fond. "And honestly," she added, tilting Coco's chin a little to examine them properly, "I think they're charming. They fit you."
"I don't want charming teeth," Coco said.
"And yet."
Coco made a noise of profound indignation and then had to admit, privately and not out loud, that her mother's complete unruffledness about the whole thing was making it easier to not be too upset about it.
She kept her mouth mostly closed when she smiled. Not always. But mostly.
One evening, Coco was sitting in the kitchen watching her mother cook, listening to the neighbor's cat purring peacefully somewhere, when her mother stirred something without looking up.
"I've been thinking," she said, "about how to let you have a normal life."
Coco looked at her.
"There are paths," her mother carefully said. "Official ones. Registration. A formal arrangement, support structures. They exist." She paused. "And there are quieter paths. That ask less of you."
Coco thought about it. The idea of anyone looking at her the way she'd sometimes seen people look at the vampires who passed through their village made her stomach feel hollow.
"The quiet one," she said.
Her mother nodded once. "We'll do it carefully, then. And I take care of what you need. And when you're older, you decide what to tell people. Okay?"
It wasn't perfect. Coco understood, even then, that it wasn't perfect. She would think about it sometimes, later, when she understood more about how the formal systems were supposed to work, about all the ways things might have been easier with proper support.
She would think about it and understand every reason her mother made the choice she made.
She could not say it was wrong.
Because her mother had done everything out of love, with the best information she had, and the result was that Coco grew up.
Not everyone in her situation could say that.
By week ten, she was managing full sentences most of the time. Not only that, but the sounds that arrived from every direction stopped being painful and started being manageable.
She still knocked things over more than she used to. Her awareness of where her own body was in space had apparently needed to be completely rebuilt, and it was a work in progress. Her mother rearranged the workroom without commenting on it, moving the things most likely to be knocked into better positions, and said nothing.
Eight months out, she was herself again. Well, mostly.
The mornings and overcast days were the best times. The hour after sunset was the best hour. She could hear everything (still, always; she had learned to sort it into background and foreground the way she sorted fabric by weight) and she could see in the dark, which in practical terms meant she no longer needed a candle when she worked late.
She was still eight years old, and she could not speak to strangers without being forced to manage her mouth carefully. She drank something she had decided not to name nor think about too hard every morning before breakfast, and she could hear things four houses over.
She had teeth that were slightly crooked and blunt, looking more like human teeth than anything else, and sometimes the light coming through the curtains at the wrong angle was enough to ruin the whole morning.
But she was here. She was working. She was, in her own stubborn, impractical, extremely Coco way, figuring it out.
She was, after all, just Coco. The tailor's daughter.