Chapter Text
Beyond the sky, the clouds, the sun, and the stars, a creature was sailing through the vastness of space. Her hair was long and silky, colored like a sunset. Her cheeks were plump and soft, rosy to the human eye. A small horn decorated her forehead. It was still short, almost barely protruding, but she took great pride in it.
She wore a long white robe that flowed like water despite the lack of gravity, and she took little leaps as if there were something solid beneath her feet.
The creature moved with purpose. She was going home. Many things awaited her there, since today was her birthday. She knew the way by heart. The stars served as waypoints, the planets as guides, and she collected the little floating rocks she found along the way.
In the distance, she saw it.
Her beloved Mother Earth.
The place where she had been born.
Eight years ago today, the constellations had aligned. The stars had shone brighter than ever, and the wind had carried her name like a hymn of praise as gentle hands held her close beneath a nurturing bosom.
“Katie, you have come to this universe to bring joy.”
“Katie, you have come to this universe to bring peace.”
“Katie, you have come to this universe to care for those who care for you.”
“Katie…”
“Katie…”
…
“Katie!”
The little girl jolted awake, startled by the sudden voice. She turned toward the doorway.
A tall, black-haired boy stood there. Behind him was a smaller boy with purple hair.
Her brothers. Don, the tall one, was the oldest. Ash, the smaller one, the youngest of them.
They weren’t related by blood, but they were more like family than any biological sibling could have been.
“Happy birthday!” they both chimed excitedly. Don was holding a plate of pancakes, while Ash carried a large cup of iced chocolate milk.
“Oh my gosh! Guys, thank you so much! This is amazing. My favorite!”
Don helped Ash climb onto the bed, and the two of them sat beside her. Katie smiled warmly as she eagerly reached for the cutlery.
“You’re eight years old today, Katie. You’re getting old!” Don teased, despite being five years older than her himself.
Ash giggled. “Yeah! Katie is old!”
He always repeated whatever Don said.
As Katie munched, Don looked around, waiting for the perfect moment to reveal the surprise. He tapped his leg excitedly.
“Katie… we have another present for you.”
Katie glanced at him. There was chocolate milk above her lips, which she quickly licked away as she raised an eyebrow. “What?”
“Oh, you’ll see!”
“Ugh, Doooon! You know I hate waiting!”
“Mister Schlatt is coming today!” Ash said, interrupting them both.
Don groaned, the surprise ruined. “Hey!”
Katie froze, the fork halfway to her mouth.
“Mister Schlatt?”
“Ash…”
“What?” Ash asked innocently.
Katie immediately dropped her fork onto the plate and bounced on the bed. “He’s coming? Today?!”
“Yeah,” Don sighed. “He is.”
Katie’s hands flew into the air. “Really?!”
Ash started giggling as Katie began jumping up and down on the mattress, nearly spilling her chocolate milk.
“We’re gonna see him! We’re gonna see him!”
“Katie, careful!” Don reached for the cup before it could tip over. “You’re gonna spill it!”
Katie stopped for half a second.
“Oh.”
She carefully moved the cup aside. Then she started jumping again.
“Are we going with him? Like, actually going?”
Don smiled. “Yeah.”
Katie’s eyes widened. “All of us? Like, the three of us!?”
“All of us.”
She let out a little squeal and threw her arms around both of them, nearly knocking Ash backward.
“We’re gonna have a house!”
“Probably,” Don laughed.
“We are finally leaving this musty fostercare!"
"Yep."
"This is the best day.. ever!"
The car ride was filled with excited chatter. Ash pressed his nose against the window until his breath fogged up the glass, while Katie couldn’t sit still in her seat. Every time the car went over a bump, she bounced a little and giggled.
When the car finally crunched to a halt on a gravel driveway, the engine cut out, leaving a ringing silence in its wake.
"We're here," Schlatt said. His voice lacked its usual bite.
Katie pressed her face to the glass. The house wasn't a castle. It wasn't even particularly pretty. It was a sturdy, two story building that looked like it had seen better days. To anyone else, it might have looked lonely. Horrible, if you must.
But, that only made her more excited. Doing chores? Mopping the floor? So fun!
"It's big," Ash whispered, his eyes wide as he stared at the darkened windows.
"It's huge!" Katie corrected, already unbuckling her seatbelt with frantic energy. "Look at those windows, Don! Do you think we'll have windows like that in our rooms?"
Don climbed out first, stretching his limbs with a long exhausted moan. He looked at the house with a more cautious expression, his protective instincts already scanning the perimeter. He unbuckled Ash’s seatbelt and pulled him out, carrying him on his side.
Schlatt stepped out of the driver’s seat and walked around to the trunk. He pulled out a heavy suitcase with a grunt.
“Alright, quit staring. Come on. We’ve got work to do before it gets dark.”
A pencil eraser tapped against a boy’s head. His fingers skimmed across the pages of his science textbook, as if he could absorb the knowledge through touch. He couldn’t concentrate.
The mitochondria. The mitochondria. What did they do again?
Powerhouse of the cell. Right.
He repeated the words silently, chanting them like a mantra in hopes they would finally stick. They didn't. Instead, his focus fractured. At the edges of his notebook, his pencil began to move on its own, guided by a restless energy.
First, he wrote his name in neat, precise letters. Multi.
Then again, pressing harder until the graphite left dark grooves. MULTI.
Next came a swirl of messy cursive. 𝓜𝓾𝓵𝓽𝓲
He experimented further, carefully curling the first letter until it looked almost fancy. 𝑀𝓊𝓁𝓉𝒾 . He stared at the looping script for a moment, tilting his head.
It looked like ass.
But the pencil wouldn't stay still. Soon, the margins of his notes were overrun by doodles. First, a caricature of himself as a scientist sporting an absurdly oversized white coat, enormous glasses, and an expression of seriousness.
Then, the image shifted. The lab coat became a tricorn hat; the glasses became an eyepatch. A tiny sword appeared at his hip.
Multi stared at the pirate. Could they actually exist? Graf always said pirates were relics, exaggerated stories from a long forgotten era. Most of what people claimed about them was probably scientific nonsense. But what if they weren't? What if there were still pirates out there, somewhere beyond the horizon?
His hand moved faster now, adding a ship beneath the figure, then a coiled sea monster, then a glinting treasure chest and then-
“…Multi.”
The voice cut through his daydream like a blade. His pencil stopped mid stroke.
Slowly, he lifted his gaze. His teacher was standing beside his desk, arms crossed.
“Yes?” he managed.
She pointed at his open textbook. “What is the function of the mitochondria?”
Multi glanced down at the page. He knew this. He definitely knew this. The information was there, buried under the layers of pirates and treasure.
“…They make energy?”
The teacher offered a small, approving smile. “Correct.”
He blinked, and relaxed his shoulders. His gaze turned down once again.
If pirates had really existed, what other things people claimed were real? Multi tapped the pencil against his cheek.
Werewolves?
He drew one beside the pirate, giving it enormous claws and an even bigger head.
He snickered quietly.
What about vampires?
He had heard plenty of stories about them. Pale people with sharp teeth who came out at night and drank blood. Some stories said they could turn into bats. Others said they couldn’t stand sunlight.
Obviously, that was ridiculous.
Vampires weren’t real.
…Probably.
Multi drew one anyway.
He looked at his drawings and smiled, his feet kicking slowly against the floor. He was giddy. He should add something else. Every pirate needs a mermaid!
He gave her a long, shimmering tail and a small seashell necklace. Her hair fell all the way down her back, colored like a sunset. He drew her with a soft smile and round, rosy cheeks.
He tilted his head, studying the drawing. It turned out better than he expected! She was pretty.
“I think she’d be my favorite.”
Multi had grown into exactly the kind of person everyone expected him to become.
He was a university student studying biomedical sciences, with an almost obsessive fascination for how the human body worked. Cells, tissues, diseases, microorganisms. Anything that could be observed, tested, and explained had his attention.
He was especially interested in pathology, though he hadn’t quite decided what he wanted to specialize in yet.
His university was good. Not prestigious enough to make him all snooty and stuck-up about it, but good enough that the workload was demanding and the professors expected him to actually know what he was doing.
Multi didn’t mind, not at all! He liked being busy.
He wasn’t exactly lonely, either. He had classmates he talked to, people he occasionally studied with, and a few acquaintances he could probably call friends if he thought about it long enough. But most of his free time was spent with his books, his notes, or his brothers.
He was a man of habit, which meant he was also a man of isolation. His brothers tried to drag him back to reality, but their voices often felt like distant echoes against the walls of his textbooks.
Graf called him obsessed.
Ewron joked that he would drop dead before 25 if he kept things up like this.
Nexe didn’t cared much. If Multi wanted to bury himself in textbooks, that was his business.
The library was a tomb of fluorescent light and stale air. When Multi finally closed his textbook, the silence felt heavier than usual. His phone screen glowed with the familiar, nagging concern of his family:
graf: Where are you?
nex: eta?????
fat ewron: bro r u kurwa dead
That’s when he noticed the hour. 11:34 PM. Maybe Ewron was right all along.
The walk home should have been routine. The campus was quiet, the street lamps casting long, skeletal shadows across the pavement. But as he crossed into the residential district, the silence began to feel less like peace and more like... expectation.
Tap.
A single footstep behind him. Multi paused. The sound stopped.
He forced himself to keep moving, his thumb scrolling through Nexe's messages to ground himself in something familiar. Then came another sound.
Tap. Tap.
Faster this time.
Multi's pulse spiked. He didn't turn around not at first. He told himself it was a neighbor, a late shift worker, a trick of the acoustics. But when he finally glanced over his shoulder, he saw a shape.
A silhouette standing in the darkness at the far end of the block. Too far to see features, but close enough to feel the weight of that unseen gaze. At first, he thought that it was just a creep.. but he wasn’t exactly confident in his fighting abilities.
"The fuck..?”
Multi didn't wait for a second look. He quickened his pace, his heart hammering against his ribs like a trapped bird. I must be imagining things. he told himself. Auditory hallucinations from exhaustion. Sleep deprivation.
Then the footsteps broke into a sprint.
He bolted just the same. His lungs burned as he tore down the sidewalk, his backpack bouncing violently against his spine. He reached for his phone, fingers fumbling to dial for help, to call Graf, to call anyone, but before he could even unlock the screen, the world tilted.
A hand like iron clamped onto his shoulder.
Multi was wrenched off his feet and slammed into the concrete. The air left his lungs in a strangled wheeze.
"What–" His protest died in his throat as a heavy weight crushed him down, pinning his shoulders to the cold ground.
He thrashed, claws scraping uselessly at the pavement, his mind spiraling into pure, primal panic. "Help! Someone! Get off—"
A palm slammed over his mouth, stifling his scream into a pathetic whimper. The stranger leaned down, it’s breath cold against his ear.
Through the haze of pain and terror, Multi caught a glimpse of a face that shouldn't exist, skin with the color of a bone, eyes that drank in the moonlight, and lips that parted to reveal two gleaming, deadly points.
That wasn’t possible. This was a bad dream.
But no, the bite that followed was very much real.
Pain exploded in his neck. His body convulsed once, his fingers twitching against the grit of the street as his blood began to drain away.
Desperation became a reflex. Blindly, Multi clawed at the asphalt, his fingers scrabbling through the grit until they closed around something hard and jagged, a broken piece of masonry. With a guttural cry that tore at his throat, he swung.
The vampire recoiled with a hiss, a thin crimson line blooming across their hand. A single droplet of it’s blood fell through the air in slow motion before landing directly against the raw puncture wounds on Multi's neck.
The vampire, noticing the mistake. He quickly backed away, as if it had reversed in time, leaving the young man on the floor.
Multi tried to draw a breath. His lungs burned, but no air came. His heart gave one final, stuttering flutter before falling silent.
Then, there was nothing. Just the cold, the dark, and the stillness of the grave.
..
After several minutes, Multi’s eyes shot open, pupils dilating until the world rushed in like a floodgate breaking.
He lurched onto his side, his body convulsing as he gasped for air that his lungs no longer seemed capable of processing. Every nerve ending screamed. His skin felt too tight, his blood felt like liquid fire. He groaned under his breath, then looked at his dirty hands.
Trembling, he reached for his throat. The puncture wounds that should have killed him were gone.
"What..." His voice was a broken rasp. "What is this? What just.. happened?”
When he reached home, he didn’t greet anyone. He barely even noticed the lights were on. He went straight upstairs, shut his bedroom door behind him, and hurried into the bathroom.
Multi leaned over the sink, his knuckles white where they gripped the porcelain. His reflection stared back at him.
He looked awful. His hair was a mess, his clothes were dirty from the pavement, and there was still a faint smear of blood around his neck, but it wasn’t his.
His hands shook as he reached up, touching the spot, quickly wiping the foreign blood. Beneath, the skin was smooth. Unscarred. No pain. No inflammation. No evidence of a puncture wound.
This was impossible. Tissue regeneration at this speed required a cellular mechanism that didn't exist in human biology.
With fingers that felt unnaturally steady despite the terror clawing at his chest, he peeled back his lip.
There, embedded in the gumline where his canines should have been, were two elongated, razor sharp points of ivory.
“No fucking way.” He laughed, but he didn’t find any humor.
Multi needed to test his own neurochemistry.
He struck himself across the face. The sharp sting of pain registered, but it felt distant, as if it were happening to someone else. He did it again, harder this time, waiting to wake up. Nothing.
"Hypoxia," he muttered, his voice flat. "Severe oxygen deprivation causing sensory distortion."
It was the only logical conclusion. His brain was misfiring, constructing a grotesque fantasy to fill the void left by his near death experience.
He forced himself to look away from the mirror, to focus on the tile, the sink, the reality of the bathroom. But the fangs, the memory of them burned behind his eyelids like a retinal afterimage.
Maybe they were real after all.