Work Text:
A vampire.
Anya is…
A vampire.
Becky is sitting on the dark cushioned couch of the Forger apartment, blackout curtains drawn over closed blinds to fully minimize the possibility of sunlight’s entry during this late afternoon—which makes sense, now, which is understandably necessary, now, because Anya is a vampire. Because vampirism was a consequence—primary or secondary, Anya said she wasn’t certain—of the experimentation she endured as a child that also turned her into a telepath.
Currently, Anya—who is a vampire, a vampire—sits in the chair nearest to Becky, on her right, with Damian—who is not a vampire, but with a gaze somehow icier than an undead corpse’s inner temperature—standing behind her. Even indoors, the loose white sleeves of Anya’s dress are long, fluttering past her fingertips, so little skin left uncovered that Becky might have once affectionately called her a “Victorian ghost.” But Becky has read Dracula, a required text in one of her Language Studies classes, which means a “Victorian vampire” seems a sufficient enough description instead, for Anya is a veritable “Bloofer Lady.” Minus the compulsion to prey upon young children, that is.
Or so Becky assumes. Anya didn’t mention what—who?—she feeds upon, but surely someone in Berlint would have noticed a multi-year long spree of exsanguinated children left discarded on the streets.
Eight years, specifically.
Eight years Anya has kept this secret. Eight years Anya has kept this secret from Becky—
“Right. Okay.” Becky rubs her temples, her voice tighter than a violin’s strings. “Right. You’re a vampire. Which explains—so fucking much?” She begins ticking off a list on her fingers. “Sunlight sensitivity. Why we rarely take pictures together. Why you push around and cut up your food on your plate in the lunchroom—to make it seem like you’ve eaten, I’m guessing, so you can dig up the seeds of suspicion before they start to grow.”
And the list is endless. Why Anya’s so agile, so strong, even notwithstanding the fact that she trains with Master Yor. Why Anya gets more tired during the day than most people, though if Becky’s being honest, Anya gives the impression of a person who works better on a later circadian rhythm regardless. Why Anya is—
Why Anya does—
Why…
Why did Anya hide this from her?
“You’re taking this surprisingly well,” Damian says after a pause. One brow quirks upward. “I expected you to be considerably more squeamish.”
Oh he did, did he? Well, it’s not as if Anya is draining the blood out of someone in front of her, even Becky can hold her stomach in the face of a mere hypothetical, shit, her shoulders are shaking, her jaw is clenched, her nails are digging into her palms with enough force they’ll surely leave crescent moons behind—
“How long,” Becky says, voice pitched and tinny and tense, “has Damian known—and not me?”
Anya flinches. Damian doesn’t even try to hide his gloating smirk. “Jealous, Blackbell?”
Anya shoots him a glare, but Becky is on her feet and casting her own fury at Damian before Anya can respond. “Watch your fucking mouth, Desmond—”
“No, you’re the one who needs to watch her damn mouth,” Damian snaps, crossing his arms over his chest. “Why do you think Anya couldn’t tell you, huh? You’ve never in your life been able to keep a secret, especially not when you were fucking six years old. If Anya had told you she was a vampire, you would’ve blabbed it to half of Eden—”
“How dare you,” Becky hisses, seething. “I would never, never endanger Anya like that.”
“I’m not saying you would mean to, I’m saying you still would—”
Is vampirism contagious? Through airborne transmission? Because never before in her life has Becky wanted to tear a man’s throat out more than right now.
“Oh, I get it now. You told Anya not to tell me, didn’t you?” She takes a step toward Damian, pointing at him furiously. “You wanted to keep this secret, keep her, all to yourself—because you were afraid she’d trust me more, weren’t you? You didn’t want to be eliminated as her closest confidant, you’re the jealous motherfucker—”
Damian’s eyes narrow, and Becky knows she’s hit the nail on the head, that selfish asshole—
“Maybe, Blackbell,” he says, voice chillier than frostbite, “Anya just doesn’t trust you as much as you wish she would—”
“Enough!”
Becky’s attention snaps toward Anya, who now stands in the middle of their mutual warpath, arms extended to prevent any further forward closure from herself or Damian. Anya’s lip is curled upward in a snarl, exposing sharp white fangs that extend down between her canines and incisors and glisten with saliva.
“Enough,” she repeats, the command nearly a growl. Green eyes, almost glowing with warning, flit back and forth, back and forth, across two pairs of brown, and Becky wonders if she should be scared—terrified, even—but how could she be?
It’s Anya.
“This is not—” Anya cuts herself off with a frustrated huff, and Becky watches with barely disguised fascination as her friend’s fangs retreat back into her mouth. “No. Not like this.”
Anya turns toward Damian, one hand clenching into a fist before relaxing at her side. “Leave.”
Damian blinks. “What?”
“You heard me. Leave.” Anya points at the front door of the apartment. “I brought you here for support. Instead, all you’re doing is antagonizing my best friend. So leave.”
Becky fights a smirk as Damian’s jaw drops. “But—”
“Leave before I kick you out myself,” Anya snaps, eyes flashing, and Damian’s jaw clacks shut.
“Fine,” he grumbles, and with a final glare cast toward Becky, he exits the apartment, the door closing behind him with a low click.
Within seconds, Anya is next to Becky, and she grabs both of Becky’s hands as she sits down on the couch before pulling Becky down beside her. She releases a shuddering breath. “Shit.”
Becky squeezes her friend’s hands. “Listen, Anya—”
Anya shakes her head, eyes welling with tears, and the dam bursts. “I am so, so sorry, Becky, that I didn’t tell you sooner. I was—I was scared, so scared, that you would hate me, that you’d think I was some kind of monster, that you wouldn’t want to be my friend anymore, but that doesn’t—that doesn’t make not telling you right, I’m sorry, Becky, please, please believe me—”
Becky lets go of Anya’s hands to wrap her arms around Anya, a few tears escaping the corners of her own eyes. “No. I’m the one who should be apologizing. I never meant to—I’m so sorry that you felt like you couldn’t come to me with this—”
And Anya’s arms tighten around Becky. “It wasn’t you. It was never you. It’s always…” Anya exhales a slow, shaky breath. “It’s always me.”
Becky pulls back, releasing Anya only to cup her friend’s face in her hands, using her thumbs to gently wipe away the tears streaking Anya’s cheeks. “Do you remember the night when you told me about your telepathy?”
Anya sniffles, nodding, her face still cradled in Becky’s palms. “You said—”
“—‘So what?’” Becky finishes her sentence, and a weak laugh escapes Anya. “Mhm. Not my finest moment, as I’m sure you recall.” She wipes another tear from Anya’s pale cheek. “But then I said, ‘So what? You think you’re not my best friend anymore? I—’”
“‘I won’t allow that,’” Anya quotes, and now she’s giggling through her tears, and soon Becky is, too.
“Exactly.” Becky closes her eyes and presses their foreheads together. “So what? You’re a vampire. So what? You’re still Anya.”
Once her best friend, always her best friend. No matter what.
“You’re still Anya,” Becky says again, and she feels Anya reaching up to gently squeeze her forearms. “And I still love you.”
They stay like that, for a moment, foreheads together, Becky still cupping Anya’s face in her hands, shared quiet sniffles slowly subsiding as their breathing evens out in unison.
Eventually, Anya pulls away, rubbing away the final stray tears from her eyes. She takes a deep breath. “I… feel so, so much better now that I’ve told you.”
A small smile tugs at Becky’s lips. “I’m glad.” She tilts her head. “Actually, if I can ask… Who else knows?”
Anya shrugs. “Damian. That’s it.”
Becky nods, processing the information. Second place isn’t a bad prize to be bestowed, she supposes, although second to Desmond is rather—
The selfish, envious part of Becky wins out before she realizes it’s demanding a say.
“Why’d you tell Damian?”
Anya stiffens, and Becky winces. “Wait. Sorry, I shouldn’t have—You don’t have to explain—”
“I didn’t tell him.”
Becky’s jaw snaps shut, so sudden and with such force she’s certain the clack of her teeth must be audible far beyond the echo in her skull. “You didn’t?” She hesitates. “Then… How does he—”
“Damian found out.”
There’s a deadness to Anya’s voice, a lifelessness to Anya’s eyes that send a chill down Becky’s spine. Even so, her friend requires no prompting to continue.
“When I escaped from the lab, I was… starving. I devoured any source of blood I could find. I got sick from eating rats on the street, I tried eating my own blood, and—and—worse things.” Anya doesn’t meet Becky’s eyes. “So much worse.”
“Okay,” Becky finally says, voice barely above a whisper. “So Damian… caught you?”
A sharp breath. Anya nods, still avoiding Becky’s gaze. “In Year 1, during one of the Eden camping trips, I… He found me, fangs sunk into a deer, trying to make up for months of malnutrition.” She exhales, slowly. “So… Yeah. I didn’t tell Damian. He found out. And—And don’t get me wrong, it’s been really—really—helpful to have someone who knows, someone who doesn’t mind occasionally being a glorified bloodbag, but I—I didn’t have a choice.”
Anya reaches out, lacing her fingers through Becky’s. “But I’m choosing to tell you.”
A lump rises in the back of Becky’s throat, an ache accompanied by the nauseating guilt of ever feeling jealous of Damian in the first place when it’s clear Anya has been through hell and high water and back again just to be sitting in front of Becky, right here and right now, her friend’s cheeks round and flushed and as alive and thriving as someone steeped in undeath can get.
“I’m so sorry,” Becky whispers, horrified at her own solipsistic vanity, fighting the fresh tears that prick at the corners of her eyes. “I shouldn’t have gotten angry—shouldn’t have yelled at Damian—”
“No, no, it’s okay,” Anya hurriedly interrupts, squeezing Becky’s hand. “He was being a jerk. Which is—”
“—what he does best?” Becky guesses, aware of her friend’s—and frequently her own—common complaint against Damian, and Anya chuckles.
“Among other things.” Another pause. Another slow exhale from Anya. “There’s… There’s one other thing I need to tell you. And, I, ah—” Her voice wobbles, catches, falters. “And I understand if—if after you hear it, you don’t see me the same anymore.”
Each word rises in pitch until Anya finally breaks—shatters—on the final note, and she immediately pulls her hand out of Becky’s. Becky tries to take it again, but Anya shakes her head, pushing herself to the far end of the couch, tears streaming down her face.
“Anya—”
“Becky, I—I fed on you,” Anya chokes out, clutching the white fabric atop her chest with such intensity Becky fears it might tear. “At—At a sleepover, at your house, when we were six, I fed on you while you were sleeping, and I’ve made so many bad choices in my life but that’s—that’s the worst.” She rubs at her eyes, the effort futile, as tears continue to endlessly fall. “I couldn’t stop. I could’ve—I could’ve killed you.”
“But you didn’t,” Becky tries to reassure her, unable to disguise her flinch as Anya pulls back once more when Becky again tries to close the distance between them. “You didn’t. I’m here. I’m alive—”
“But I could’ve,” Anya whispers, desperate, pleading. “Don’t you get it? I could have. I can kill people. I didn’t even know if my bite was contagious, and I still—I still bit you.” Her next breath is barely a gasp, shoulders shaking, hands rising to claw at the sides of her head. “It’s like there’s a—a beast inside of me, and it’s always trying to escape, except I’m the monster, I’m the beast, I’m this thing that can’t control itself—”
“Shut up!” Becky’s voice is shrill. She doesn’t know when she jumped to her feet, standing tall above the still seated Anya. She does know that her fingernails dig into her palms, she does feel—acutely, intensely—how her chest heaves. “Shut up! You don’t—You don’t get to talk about yourself like that. Not in front of me.”
Her strength may lie in language studies, but Becky does this math in seconds. “You said we were six, right? That sleepover—it was before the camping trip. Which means it was before Damian caught you.” Hot tears demand release from her own eyes. “You were fucking starving, Anya. You want me to be mad that you did what you had to do to stay alive?”
As if Becky wouldn’t give up her own life for Anya’s—any day, any how. As if that isn’t what friendship means.
“You want me to be mad?” Becky repeats, distantly aware that she must still be shouting because her voice cracks like a glacier in spring. “Well, sucks! Because I’m happy—happy that I was able to help you, even if I didn’t realize that’s what was happening back then.”
Anya hyperventilates, shaking her head. “No, no, you don’t understand—”
Becky all but lunges forward, grabbing her friend’s hands before Anya’s fingernails can pierce the fragile skin of her temples. “No, you don’t understand.” She keeps Anya’s wrists locked in her hands, aware somewhere in the back of her mind that Anya could easily force her away with vampiric or even regular strength but really and truly not giving a damn. “When I said, ‘I love you,’ there wasn’t a fucking asterisk next to that sentence, Anya Forger. I love you, full stop. Got it?”
And this time, Anya does not pull away. Instead, she leans forward, burying her head into Becky’s chest as hiccuping sobs wrack her body.
“So what if you think you’re a monster?” Becky whispers, releasing Anya’s wrists to wrap her arms around her dearest friend. “You’re still Anya. I still love you. And I’ll say it again, and again, and again, however many times until you believe me.”
Through her sobs, Anya nods—weakly, but it’s a nod nonetheless, it’s affirmation nonetheless—and returns Becky’s hug. And there they stay, clutching each other, embracing the other, holding one another on the small couch until their tears dry into salty tracks upon their faces.
Eventually, they wind their way into Anya’s bedroom, lying down face to face atop the pink covers in her childhood bed as if they’re six years old again, their noses almost touching, and soon their conversation is travelling down branching path after branching path.
“You’re saying you’re immortal?” Becky asks, and Anya makes a so-so gesture with her hand.
“More like functionally immortal. I’m pretty sure anything that would destroy my entire body would kill me. Think like—like incineration or something. Wooden stake to the heart, also not good, although—”
“—although both of those would kill a normal human, too,” Becky says with a chuckle. “Even so, ‘functional immortality’ seems pretty cool. Immune to disease and whatnot. And you can’t drown or be electrocuted or stuff like that.”
Anya shrugs. “I don’t know. No matter what, ‘functional’ isn’t the same as ‘true’ immortality. I’m sure there’s a… a final death, or something, that will eventually find me.”
They shift to talking about when Anya plans to admit her vampirism to her parents, then to Becky making Anya promise that they’ll take a picture together each new moon, then to the subject of how unfortunate it is that Anya is simply allergic to garlic, a matter entirely unrelated to her being a vampire, then to a debate about whether other—as in ancestral, non-experimental—vampires exist out there in Berlint or anywhere else in the world, then to—
“Okay. Tell me if this is a weird question, and we can brush right past it,” Becky says. One of her hands fiddles with the flowy sleeve of Anya’s white dress. “But how do you… feed? I mean, surely Damian by himself doesn’t have enough blood in his body.”
Anya laughs. “He definitely doesn’t. I mean, I do drink his blood, because human blood tastes best, but Damian also sources blood for me from butchers. Mostly cow blood.”
“Huh. Fascinating.” Another question slips from Becky’s tongue before she can stop it. “Wait, so how did my blood taste?”
Anya’s eyes widen, and heat promptly races to Becky’s cheeks.
“I mean—sorry, you said human blood tasted better, I was just curious”—nervous laughter slips out—“I don’t know what’s wrong with me today—”
Anya’s gaze drifts around Becky’s face, falling from her mouth to linger on her neck.
“How your blood tasted? With how hungry I was back then?” Anya’s tongue slowly circles her lips, the tips of white fangs barely peeking out with the hypnotic motion. “Like… ambrosia.”
Becky’s breath hitches to hear her friend’s voice drip with such hunger—with such desire. Her heart is racing, a beat so loud, so fast, she’s confident Anya must be able to hear.
“Want to…” She can’t keep her eyes off Anya’s lips, off Anya’s fangs. “Want to see if it’s still as good?”
Anya stiffens, locking eyes with Becky. For a moment, there is only silence, until Anya slowly reaches out to trace a finger down Becky’s neck—right beside her jugular. The wave of dizziness that swells over Becky almost makes her faint.
“I—I just meant that if you like my blood, or if it’s at least tolerable, then you don’t have to rely on only Damian for human blood,” Becky stammers, and she knows she’s babbling worse than a brook but the spark of Anya’s fingertip against her bare skin made her see dozens of stars from galaxies unknown and—
“Okay,” Anya whispers, voice thick. “If you’re sure.”
For Anya?
“Always,” Becky says, quiet, reaching out with one hand to cup Anya’s face once more. Her thumb lightly strokes her friend’s cheek, just barely brushing the corner of Anya’s lips. “Always.”
Anya slides off the bed to kneel beside it. “Scoot closer to me,” she instructs, “and stay lying on your side.”
As Becky obeys, hesitation flickers in Anya’s eyes. “Also—uh, it can hurt. Or it can be uncomfortable, I guess. So if you want to—if you want to stop, at any point, just let me know. Tell me to stop, grab me and shake me, whatever.”
Becky doesn’t say what she wants to say, which is that if Damian-fucking-Desmond can handle it, then there isn’t a world in which she can’t be bitten, too.
Not that Becky needs to say it, because a laugh escapes Anya regardless.
“I’m ready,” is all Becky says instead. She takes a deep breath. “So… go for it.”
Anya rises up and leans forward, fangs extending to protrude past her upper lip, but soon she pauses once more. “Wait. Where do you want to be bitten?”
Becky frowns. “I kind of assumed neck was the default.”
A strange look flits across Anya’s face, and Becky suspects there’s something Anya isn’t telling her about this chosen location, but she doesn’t have time to ask before Anya resolves her unspoken conflict.
“Good. You have a nice neck.”
Then Anya’s fangs are grazing across her skin, then Anya’s fangs are sinking into her neck, then Anya is—
So this is feeding.
Becky winces at first contact, but the pain of puncture soon dissolves into the pleasure of penetration. The warmth of Anya’s mouth against her skin alone is enough to make Becky see hundreds more stars, but when Anya’s tongue darts out and swirls around her neck, catching and lapping excess blood, she feels fireworks bursting in the pit of her stomach, and a startled—sharp—gasp escapes despite her attempt to withhold it. Becky belongs to Anya, Becky is part of Anya, she swears their hearts beat in unison even as her mind becomes more and more distant, detached, disparate from her own body.
Seconds—minutes, hours, millennia, time has long since lost all meaning to Becky—later, Anya carefully extracts her fangs. She presses a firm kiss to Becky’s neck before pulling away, and next thing Becky knows her eyes meet Anya’s and she’s watching her friend slowly lick crimson droplets off her lips.
“How… was it?” Becky whispers, her voice but an echo to itself, and Anya’s smile is almost seductive.
“Better than ambrosia.”
(Within the minutes that follow, Damian returns to the apartment, and he freezes at the threshold of Anya’s bedroom as his sight lands upon both girls sitting criss-cross atop Anya’s bed, no hint of personal space between them, Anya carefully applying a Spy Wars bandaid to the puncture wounds on Becky’s neck. When his jaw drops, Becky smirks, sticking her tongue out at him.
“Guess you aren’t the only one Anya trusts, huh, Sy-on Boy?”)