Chapter Text
Phil's had four jobs since he moved into the city.
He'd tried out being a high-flying executive, but all that'd got him was suits and offices and scary rich men in designer shoes. He'd lasted a month. After that, he'd thought maybe he should've started small – maybe by working in a coffee shop.
Except it quickly emerged he'd misjudged the amount of skill involved in operating a coffee machine with multiple levers and remembering all of the weird names of drinks and if the person had asked for soy milk, and what was that guy's name again?
By his second week he'd broken thirteen mugs – something his unimpressed manager informed him was an all-time record – and inadvertently created a love triangle between two of his coworkers. How was he supposed to know that Brian fancied Stephen? More to the point, how was he supposed to know that Stephen fancied him? All Phil did from the moment he stepped through the door to the moment he hung up his apron in the evening was wish to be at home, there wasn't any time for noticing anything else.
He'd resigned the day after Brian had started squaring up to him in the car park after his shift ended. Not that Brian had been particularly intimidating – being threatened was never fun, of course, but Phil was pretty sure he could win in a fight. More than win, even.
That's why he'd quit, really. Along with everything else, he didn't want to end up accompanying an injured Brian to the hospital. He doubted if the police got involved they'd be too impressed with Phil's weak excuses about his hunter credentials and half a lifetime of training to break bones.
His third job had mostly involved stacking shelves, scanning tins of beans and trying his hardest not to hate customers and their unreasonable, stupid demands. He'd lasted a week.
Working in the library had been an accident, really. He'd seen the position advertised for weeks – Library Night Supervisors Required, Hunting Certification Necessary – but his general avoidance of anything that involved hunting anyone meant he'd overlooked it at first in favour of other things.
It's not a bad job, for lots of reasons. He gets a police-issue radio, which is pretty cool. His uniform's ugly, which isn't so cool. Even so, there's something nice about getting to spend long, quiet hours in the library, surrounded by the sounds of tapping keyboards and pages turning, people stumbling in through the doors and yawning before taking up tables to write essays and papers.
Night school doesn't really mean the same thing as it used to. It's more about the vamps who are lucky enough to get signed up for educational programs. That's the only reason why the library's open all night these days.
It's meant to be a mixed library – humans and vamps – but a lot of people complained, saying that they didn't want to risk using the same building as vampires. Or at least, that's what his scary coworker Di had told him when he'd first started.
“Yeah,” She'd said, fiddling with the buttons on her walkie talkie. “There was a big ruckus. 'Course, none of the breathers complaining bothered to think about how the library's only open to vamps after dark, did they? So unless someone's gran gets confused and wants to get a book out at four am, everyone's safe.”
Not that they just get vampires in the library at night. There are a few humans – mostly students with vampire friends and overdue assignments. Phil watches them sometimes, sitting at the big circular tables by the windows, sharing snacks and laughing behind their hands together.
He remembers his mum, warning him off talking to people if they didn't have a pulse, and it makes him sad that he never had...that. The laughing at 2am with your friends who just so happen to be dead. He never had that ease, he just had...hunting lessons and target practice.
-
Phil meets Dan at a vampire representation demonstration.
He’s not even supposed to be there, but Bryony had needed someone to hand out flyers and sell badges and Phil’s notoriously terrible at saying no to friends. As a result by the time he meets Dan he’s reeled off the same old spiel about parliamentary representatives and education and rights a thousand times, and he’s more than a little tired of the whole thing. He thinks he wouldn't mind so much if he'd actually seen some vampires – as far as he can tell, there are more teenagers with black lipstick and chokers than there are actual undead citizens (which is what someone across the square keeps calling them through a megaphone).
“I don’t understand why they’re running this in the middle of the day,” A girl says to Phil at one point, breathless and fluttery. Her neck's covered in the shimmery lotion that's popular with lots of vampire groupies these days, the stuff that smells like strawberries and makes your skin glimmer from about a mile away. As though hungry vampires need encouragement. “Like, surely there are no actual vamps out at this time?”
“Actually, the daylight thing’s a common misconception,” Phil tells her automatically. “Like, um. Other than some eye irritation, it’s – it’s totally fine for them to walk around during the day.”
Lester Family Vampire Hunting Rule Number 6: don’t let your guard down just because it’s daytime.
Except clearly not everyone’s family gatherings involved a lot of sharp knives and glossy photographs of vamp nests, because the girl starts giving him these worrying, speculative glances, smiling a little, and he backs away quickly, saying, “Not me, I’m not – I’m not – I’m not, sorry!”
The girl’s noise of disappointment follows him as he tries to lose himself in the crowd.
The only reason he goes over to Dan is because he’s trying to approach as many people as possible, but there’s something vaguely likely looking about him and his dark clothes.
As long as he lives Phil will never understand the obsession with wearing black that lots of vampires have. Sometimes it’s just habit, like the ones you see who wander around in the stuff they were buried in. But Phil can tell straight off the bat that this guy’s not one of those people, because he's way too well-dressed - and clean, for that matter.
His hair's too good to have just crawled out of a grave, Phil finds himself thinking, stupidly.
Phil ends up watching him for a second, and the way he’s gnawing on his thumbnail, looking across at a stall that's selling gluten-free blood substitutes. He stands out in the crowd – not so much because of how much black he’s wearing, but his height. Phil thinks that this is first person he’s seen all day who doesn’t make him feel like a giant.
“Hey,” Phil says, plucking up the courage to go and stand next to him. “Can I interest you in a badge?”
The guy blinks, first at Phil and then down at the offered badge. It's black, and the white lettering says, dead people are still people.
“Erm,” The guy says.
“I mean,” Phil says, because sometimes he doesn’t know when to shut up. “It’d match your whole, uh, outfit.”
The guy smiles.
“True,” He says. “Um. Yeah, sure. How much?”
Phil nearly says, it’s free for you. By nearly, he means that he considers saying it for a fraction of a second and then his brain hits him right back with a list of possible consequences and the days of cringing even daring to say something like that would entail.
“A quid?” He says, in the end. When the guy starts going through his jacket pockets, Phil feels the need to add, “Or, like, any sort of donation, it doesn’t really matter.”
The guy drops a pound coin into Phil’s donation tin and takes the badge.
“Thanks,” Phil says.
There's an awkwardly prolonged moment when the guy struggles to fix the badge to the front of his jacket, and then he looks up and smiles.
“There you go,” Phil says, stupidly.
He's only just clocked the fact that the stranger has dimples when the guy says, “I should, er,...” and walks away, moving through the crowd with ease.
Phil doesn't dwell on the thought of him, because that'd be weird. He only thinks now, looking back and knowing Dan, that maybe he should've been struck dumb by that first meeting. He should've been left reeling by his smile, or something.
Real life doesn't work that way, though. Instead, Phil just sighs and carries on trying to sell badges.
-
Contrary to what he sees on the news sometimes, pro-vamp demonstrations aren't really that interesting unless you're, well, a vamp. Or into vampires. Not that Phil's anti-vampire – far from it – he just can't really get all interested in ointment that eases the pain of concealed fangs or stalls shouting about how to market yourself to living employers.
It makes him sad that places like this have to exist – demonstrations where people who had the misfortune of dying can be helped to feel normal again. Then again, he thinks, guiltily, without all of the anti-vampire legislation, he wouldn't have a job at all.
“You shouldn't think of it like that,” One of Bryony's vamp friends had said, once. She'd definitely been high, all sleepy-eyed and wanting to touch him, her skin startlingly cool against his. “You should think of it, like, you're the good guy on the inside of a bad system. You know?”
Phil could think of it like that – or he could think about how he's profiting off an unfair society. It depends on how he's feeling.
“Vampire classifications are unnecessary and oppressive!” Bryony's saying into a megaphone when Phil edges over to her, carefully not meeting anyone's eye. He's been mistaken for a vampire one too many times today. “Internet access should not be a privilege solely for the living!”
“Bry,” He says, quietly, touching her on the shoulder. “I'm gonna head off, alright?”
“Oh,” She says, blinking, surprised out of protest mode. “Oh, ok. Thanks so much for coming.”
She hugs him, and he smiles at her. He's barely walked a metre when she's shouting down the megaphone again. An activist's work is never done, he thinks.
-
It's lonely, living in the city.
Not that Phil would ever admit that to anyone. Admitting that he's lonely feels like admitting that he's made a mistake, that he was too hasty to move far away from home to an unfamiliar place filled with unfamiliar people.
It feels like admitting weakness. If Phil learnt anything during his childhood games of vampire and hunter, it's that admitting weakness is the worst possible thing you can do.
So he doesn't say anything to anyone. He calls his mum and his brother and he talks to the vamps at the library. He forgets to call Louise even though he has a post-it note attached to his laptop screen telling him to use Facebook, use his phone, talk to her somehow. He knows speaking to someone – speaking to her - would instantly make him feel better, but...
Weakness. It's all weakness.
Besides, there's something so soul destroying in contacting old friends and having them talk at length about how great their lives are, and knowing that you can't contribute anything positive in return. Phil feels like he can muddle along the way he is so long as he doesn't have to compare his own long, quiet days with someone else's dazzling, successful existence.
Not that he's unhappy. He has a job that pays well. He gets to spend his nights surrounded by books and studious vampires. He's living in an apartment rent free. By all accounts he should be perfectly content.
It's just the lack of people to talk to, he thinks, heading home on another cold September morning. Summer's well and truly gone for good, and there's a crispness in the air as he walks along, feet brushing the first few fallen leaves. The sky's pink up above, and he turns his face up for a moment, squinting against the hints of sunlight, before burying his face in the collar of his coat and hurrying along down the street.
There's something nice about seeing the world waking up as he walks home, preparing to sleep. He sees the postwoman making her rounds, and people walking their dogs, and the occasional slow moving car. He sees bin trucks and people tentatively opening their curtains, letting the faint daylight in. He sees people in pyjama trousers and coats, hurrying off to the corner shop for milk and bread.
There's something surreal about it all, still, the world waking up while Phil's yawning and trying desperately to stay awake.
And then he gets home, cold fingers fumbling over his key and the door handle, and he lets himself into the dusty hallway, absent mindedly hanging his coat up on the hook by the door before he traipses up the stairs. He's usually asleep within half an hour, curled up in bed with the curtains pulled tightly shut, duvet pulled over his head to escape the slivers of sunlight that creep around anyway.
It's not the kind of life he could bring someone else into, he thinks, sometimes. His sleeping hours are messed up, and there are so many vamp activists around these days with hostile attitudes to hunters and their credentials that speaking to new people's a veritable minefield unless he's at work or at one of Bryony's demonstrations.
Even so, that doesn't stop him wanting someone there. Not even romantically, sometimes, it's just – someone to talk to, that'd be nice.
“You talk to me,” Violet points out, when Phil half-tells her his problem one night.
Violet's one of the vamps who visits the library at night. She'd stopped to help him stack abandoned books on the library trolley during his first week in the job, and they've been sort of friends ever since.
“Oh, I know,” Phil says, hurriedly, in case he's offended her. “I know, and – and it's great talking to you-”
“Well, yeah,” Violet says, and makes a show of flipping her hair, grinning at him when he rolls his eyes. “I know what you mean, though. Like...it makes a big difference just having someone to talk to when you get home.”
Phil doesn't know what to say then, because she's hit the nail on the head with deadly accuracy and he feels almost ashamed that she could pinpoint his problem in such a casual way. Violet's still talking, about her friend Penny and how everything's been different since they started living together, and envy rises like bile in the back of his throat.
“...should just look for a flatmate, maybe,” Violet's saying when he tunes back in, focusing on putting books back on shelves instead of looking her in the eye.
“Maybe,” He says, vaguely.
Violet's quiet for a moment, the two of them edging between the shelves, Phil putting books back in their rightful places and Violet occasionally helping him.
“I'm gonna apply for yellow classification,” She says, after a moment, handing him a dog-eared copy of Jane Eyre.
“What?” Phil gapes at her. “Seriously? You never said you'd -” He stops, awkwardly. “You know, like...I dunno.”
“I didn't,” Violet says. “I mean – whatever the hell that was, I didn't do that, I just – Penny said she'd help me out.”
Phil stares at her.
“Shut up. Shut up, no way, that's some – that's like the exact plot of every vamp romance novel ever.”
Violet laughs at him.
“That's kind of where she got the idea,” She admits, grinning. “It's not so hard, anyway. I mean, I've got the year sober down, I've been, like, clean for three years in December. I used to be a vegan, so...”
“So now you're a vegan again."
“Yeah,” Violet says, evidently pleased with the idea. “Nothing but blood substitutes over here. And then, like – well, I've been living with Pen anyway, so it already looks legit. I'm gonna send my application in tomorrow.”
“Wow,” Phil says.
“I know,” Violet says, pulling a face. “But – I mean, if it goes through I'll be able to apply for jobs again. I'm so sick of owing people money...”
Phil doesn't know an awful lot about the yellow classification process beyond what everyone knows – that you have to be a blue class vampire with no illegal feeds on your record in order to be considered for yellow class. Oh – and you have to prove beyond all doubt that you and your living partner are madly in love.
He knows – mostly from his own job hunting experiences – that yellow class vampires are more likely to be able to successfully apply for jobs. Every other ad when he'd been job hunting had said something about yellow class vampires only, or blue class vamps need not apply, which Phil doesn't understand. He gets the whole thing where being in love with a living person might make you less likely to snack on another living person, but he also knows that yellow class vamps can still hunt in blue zones. It all just seems unnecessary, a bunch of labels specifically designed to make life harder for everyone, dead and living alike.
Phil can't imagine finding someone he'd care about enough to go through the humiliating yellow class interview process with. Maybe if he found someone he was really good friends with, he'd consider going through the rigorous interviews just to help them out.
Then again, he's a terrible liar and an even worse actor. He'd probably get all the important facts confused and they'd know immediately that he was faking.
“I don't think I could do that,” He says to Violet, stacking more books onto the shelf. “The yellow class thing. I mean – not that I wouldn't want to help someone out, don't get me wrong, but – I'd just get really nervous and mess it all up.”
“No you wouldn't,” Violet says, after a moment. She's leaning on the book trolley, looking thoughtful. “Not if you really cared about the person.”
Phil watches her dreamy expression for a moment.
“So Penny really cares about you?”
“I didn't say that,” Violet says. There's another pause, then she adds in a rush, “Phil I swear, she's so adorable and she blushes sometimes and like – Ian says I only like it because of the whole blood thing but Ian's a dick, alright, I just think it's really cute and she's really cute and –“ She covers her face with her hands abruptly. “I don't know.”
Phil's smiling so hard his face hurts.
“Oh my God,” He says. “This is like a vamp romance novel. Vi...”
“Shut up,” Violet says, but she can't look at him for too long before she buries her face in her hands again.
-
Phil knows he's truly messed up when he finds himself dwelling on the thought of Violet and her friend.
It'd be nice to have someone like that, he thinks. Someone who'd go through all of that just because they cared about you. He hikes his bag further up his back and looks up at the monitoring tower of the nearest blue zone, towering over the neighbourhood. At night it has a searchlight, like an old prison movie, but with the onset of daylight it's unlit. He can still see the people sitting up there in it, though, keeping watch over the blue zone.
Phil's only ever been in a blue zone once before.
He's seen them on TV. Everyone has. The huge fences around them, topped with barbed wire. The monitoring towers that you can see from miles and miles away, where they track predators and prey. Aside from that the zones are the same as they were before the fences got put up – residential areas that've become hunting grounds, fighting grounds, places where criminals are unceremoniously dumped, ready to be hunted down like animals by the blue class vampires who live there.
When Phil was growing up, blue zones didn't really exist. Besides, there were only a few cases of vampires where he lived, at first. It wasn't exactly in the countryside, but it wasn't exactly in the middle of the city either, so at first hunting was scarce and his parent's teachings were purely hypothetical. Phil was already at uni by the time they'd started categorising vampires, creating the blue zones in less desirable areas of built-up cities.
He still doesn't know if he agrees with them. On the one hand, he knows that vampire activists see them as a huge victory – designated hunting areas, accepting human blood as a necessity for undead citizens. On the other hand, releasing criminals into an enclosed area where they'll most likely die within days doesn't exactly sit right with Phil, if he's honest. But the blue zones are something they're all complicit in, like it or not. What's the alternative? Every city becoming one big blue zone? Not everyone's been trained to fight like Phil has.
He looks up at the monitoring tower for a second longer, dark against the rapidly lightening morning sky, and shudders.
-
When he finally gets home, he wraps himself in a blanket like a toga and sleepily makes himself a cup of coffee, just so he can drink something warm before he goes to bed. On his way there, the post-it reminding him to contact Louise catches his eye, peeling away from the corner of his laptop screen.
He looks at it for a moment, hot mug cupped in his cold hands, and then he moves and shuts the laptop so he doesn't have to look at it anymore.
-
Phil's pretty sure the attack wouldn't even have happened if he hadn't been feeling so awful.
He's been battling a cold for days, sniffling unhappily in bed and waking up sweaty and uncomfortable, wheezing and groaning. It's one of the rare times that he misses being at home – his mum was always the best when he had a cold, bringing him soup and hot drinks and insisting that he rest until he felt better.
Adult life, it turns out, is much less forgiving when you have a minor illness. Phil has to drag himself out of bed and into the shower anyway, the hot water making his stuffy head feel a million times worse. He puts his work uniform on like he's in a dream, doesn't bother to eat and stumbles out of the house, feeling dazed and half asleep.
The sun hasn't gone down yet, but there's that evening chill in the air that means it's about to, and Phil pulls his coat tighter about himself with an uncomfortable noise. He should've eaten before he left, he thinks, crossing the road and fumbling in his pockets for a tissue. He should've got up earlier and had a warm drink.
He's caught up in a neverending list of all the things he should've done when someone grabs him tightly, strong arms trying to clamp his own arms down by his sides, immobilising him.
He still feels slow and stupid, so it takes him longer than it normally would to fight his way out of the grip of his would-be attacker and grab hold of a wrist. His mum taught him this – the way to twist in just the right way, the sort of way that’d hurt, blood flow or not.
After he’s got the guy shoved face first into the nearest wall, Phil starts talking.
“What's your class?” He asks, trying to sound commanding even though his nose is blocked and he sounds nasal and ridiculous. The guy just writhes and hisses a little, so Phil presses him into the wall harder, twists his wrist a little more. “If I don’t know your class you’re fair game, you know how it works.”
The guy just hisses again for a minute, making a weird pained noise.
“Green,” He says – which is what they all say, so Phil just laughs, the sound surprised out of him. “No, no, I swear, I’m green, I can show you my card if you’ll just – if you’ll just let me go-“
“Nice try,” Phil says. He’s bluffing – he has no idea whether this guy’s a green vamp or not, but green classifications - the all you can eat pass that certain vamps supposedly get gifted on rare occasions - are so unheard of outside of urban myth that the chances are he isn’t. “Real classification, please.”
“That is my real classification, I’m a green,” The guy insists. “I swear, just let me go!“
“Look,” Phil says, trying to sound patient and menacing both at the same time. He’s pretty sure he just sounds awkward and a little wheezy. “I don’t want to kill you, I – I have to get to work pretty soon. Just tell me your class and I can take you to the nearest clinic, alright?”
The guy just hisses again. Phil doesn’t know if it’s meant to be menacing but all it does is make him think of Parseltongue, and he’s pretty sure that’s not what the guy’s going for. There’s a moment when he makes awkward eye contact with Phil over his shoulder, and then he stops hissing and trying to struggle with a sigh.
“Ok,” He says. “Ok – I’m a blue. I shouldn’t have gone for you. Sorry.”
Phil rolls his eyes. “You couldn’t just take the bus to the blue zone? It’s, like, fifteen minutes away.”
“I know,” The guy says. “I just – it’s like when you see a pizza place on the way home, you know?”
“Jesus,” Phil says, and loosens his grip a little, pulling a face. “Come on, then, I’ll take you to –“
He doesn’t even manage to finish his sentence before the guy goes for him again, human features curling into an animalistic snarl. Everything happens very quickly after that – Phil hits the ground with a painful thud that makes him wheeze, knocking the air out of his lungs, and then the guy’s on top of him and his breath’s hot and gross and Phil’s trying his hardest to throw him off-
Except someone else drags the guy off Phil. There’s a flash of bright metal, and the thud of someone being thrown against a wall, and then another pained noise.
“Blue zone,” An unfamiliar voice is saying. “Short walk that way, what the fuck?”
Phil scrambles to his feet. His nose is running again, but whoever it is who dragged the guy off him seems to have everything under control, so he feels safe enough to blow his nose into a tissue.
“Sorry,” He says, when the guy looks back over at him, evidently disbelieving. Phil sees that he actually has a knife pressed to the vamp guy's throat. “Sorry, I just – I have a cold, sorry.”
“Dan,” The vamp's saying. “Come on, I was just – he was just – I'll go to the blue zone now, I'll go, alright?”
"No snacking on the way there," The stranger with the knife says, voice low.
"No, I won't, I - c'mon, Dan-"
There's a moment when Phil thinks the Dan guy might just stab the vamp, even though he's pretty sure the knife he's got isn't strong enough to break though his sternum. He's about to say as much – or suggest that the two of them escort the vampire to the nearest clinic together, when the stranger just steps back and lets the vampire go.
He hurries off down the street, straightening his coat as he goes, looking for all the world like someone who's realised they're late for a train, rather than someone who just tried to kill Phil in the middle of the street.
“Wow,” Phil says, hating how bunged up he sounds when the stranger turns to look at him, attack pose relaxing a little. “Thanks for that. I'm – I'm not feeling so great, or he wouldn't – wouldn't normally have managed to...” He sneezes.
“It's ok.” The guy politely averts his eyes while Phil blows his nose into a fresh tissue. “I, er. I was just headed to, um. I like to - oh, you're the badge guy,” He says, at last.
Phil blinks at him, blearily, not getting it, until the guy pulls his coat to one side to reveal a thin jacket underneath, with the dead people are still people badge attached to it.
“Oh,” Phil says, vaguely remembering this guy, the way he vaguely remembers all of the pretty people he sees around – in the they're out of your league and will never talk to you kind of way. “Oh, yeah, that's me, I'm the badge guy. Er. Phil, I'm Phil.”
“Dan,” Dan says, with a smile.
“So, er,” Phil can feel a sneeze coming on, so he tries to speak as quickly as possible. “Thanks for that, really. Like. Sorry.” He sneezes. This never happened in Buffy, he thinks, stupidly. “Do you have, like, a hunter classification? Because that was – that was pretty cool.”
He sounds weak and pathetic to his own ears. If Dan notices, he doesn't say anything.
“No, no classification,” He says, smile fading a little. “I just – I live near the blue zone, so I try and, um. You never know when you'll...you know.” He gestures, vaguely, in the direction the vampire just left in.
Phil nods.
“Well, I should, I work the night shift at the library,” He says, lamely. “I should, erm. Before I'm late.”
To his surprise, Dan smiles and breathes out something that could be a laugh.
“Sorry,” He says. “I just – I promise I'm not, like, stalking you, but – that's where I was headed.” He swings his bag around and pulls a library book out in evidence.
“Oh,” Phil says, smiling just because Dan is. He can't decide if this means the universe is on his side or dead set against him. “Oh, er. Well. It's this way.”