Chapter Text
You rub the edge of the pen on the apple of your cheek, an impatient tic you use to signify ‘I am so fucking done with this riveting conversation.’ Unfortunately, your dearest brother is a thousand miles away, meaning your subtle charms are lost over a land-line. You can’t just say adieu and hang up, however, because you are on a very important mission tonight and don’t want the boy to rat you out to your roommate.
“- and I’m just sayin’ here, you’re going to get all those Floridian babes with southern twangs and I’m sitting here doing what the Lord intended: living monogamously, heterosexually, and fur-affinitively.”
“Sorry, I must have missed that.” you say, lacing your voice in a happy marriage of monotone and boredom.
He doesn’t catch your little hint, or more likely, just ignores you. “Fur-affinitively, you know, because I’m dating a furry. I’m yiffing a furry.”
You are fairly certain Jade Harley does not own a fursuit and is simply rather enthusiastic about the subculture, but you won’t tell Dave that. It’ll break his heart. Besides, any bedroom activities are between the two of them and the two of them alone, and you won’t bring judgment down upon them. Not one single ounce of it. Not even if Dave is the one with the fursona.
“Ha,” says Dave. “Now you’re thinking about it.”
“Speaking of yiffing,” you say, quickly. “Don’t you have a date to run off to? She drove all the way down to lovely Texas for this night, for her to run fingers through your adorable frosted tipped emo bangs.”
“Oh, shit. Thanks for keeping me on my yiff schedule, Rose. You sure know how to take care of a guy.”
You straighten up. This is it, the climax, the part where you get to hang up and focus on your priorities. “Of course I do.”
“Toodles.”
“Kisses.”
You hear a ‘click’ on the other end, leaving you alone with the joyous song of silence. It’s been three days since you lost... it, and it’s the first night your roommate has left you for the loving embrace of fall break. You just hope, no, pray, that no one else had gotten to it first. Dave’s call was a distraction, a risk you picked up on, and now you fear it might be too late.
You grab your flashlight from under your mattress, throw on the only sweatshirt you own (it’s in the blackest of blacks, of course, the only acceptable shade of comfort clothing), and step out into the honors dorm hallway. No one is out, due to the fact that it’s the first break of freshman year and you’re far too enamored with solitude to fly to Reno with Mother like it’s hip to do, and you sigh with a wonderful relief. There must be no witnesses to your crime, no followers to see what you’ve lost, no rumors generated from the item you’re searching for.
You make your way outside (the cloudy night your cloak, the black sweatshirt your shield, the darkened flashlight your sheathed dagger) and towards the small cluster of trees on the minuscule flat behind the buildings. Once you are safely behind the cover of some particularly rotund shrubbery, you click your flashlight on. You believe it was around here where you dropped it, left them lying on the dirt in drunken neglect, left your shame for all to see.
Well, not all since you’re fairly certain nobody really comes back here, especially not at midnight during break. But if anyone sees this, you will be doomed to the life of a forced social pariah, mocked by your inferiors and ostracized by the faculty.
Your flashlight shines over the buried roots of some tree or another and… ah ha, there they are, just the way you left them.
Your perfectly preserved squiddles panties, with Jelly Jimmy and the word ‘Saturday’ silk-screened on the posterior fabric.
You’re not sure how you managed to lose your underthings in the trees. You think you were fairly inebriated during the big freshman blowout party after classes finished, and went to go urinate outside and… They fell off in a drunken haze, apparently. If anyone were to see these, to know that Rose Lalonde, Queen of the Dammed English Textbooks, left her bloomers in the forest while a drunken mess… Well, you do not want to think of the consequences.
You scoop them up and situate them in your front pocket. Your panties are going to need six OxiCleans before they are wearable again, but you have a soft spot for Jelly Jimmy and want him on your rear every other Saturday. It’s just not a good Saturday without Jelly Jimmy.
You hear a turgid snap behind you, then a muffled, “Oh. Oops.”
It sounds like it’s coming from behind a layer of thick velvet. You’ve seen enough horror films to know where this scenario is heading— virgin co-ed freshman, alone in the woods past midnight as a predator approaches. You will not become a stereotype! You will not stand in terror and scream for a solid minute before getting a ligament violently removed. No, you are an intelligent, strong young lady who could talk her way out of a steel box.
You spin around, smoothly, a sly and confident smirk painted on your face, and say, “Why, hello, what are you doing on this fine— Oh my, what are you wearing?”
You visceral reaction was actually, ‘Oh shit, there is an insane young woman who probably haunts local convent meetings for like-minded obscure sacrificial pagan mythos obsessors standing right in front of me,’ but that managed to come out as the simple yet effective question of why she is wearing that cloak.
Despite your flashlight shining directly at her, the cloth draped around her is so dark that if she stood in a room without any source of light you would still be able to pick her out as clearly as if she were wearing glittery sequins. It’s unnerving— a black chunk of non-existence in an already dark setting. You can only see her wrists and hands and the bottom of her face, her hood casting a nighttime shadow over her expression.
Speaking of which, her skin is a rippling contrast of white and brown, etched in patterns all over what’s visible of her body. Ah, that’s some sort of pigment disorder, although your vocab fails you since the ‘hard science’ medical terms were never your strong point. She is very, very tall and very, very thin, and if the black cloak didn’t tip you off that you have been suddenly thrust into a creepy pasta, those two physical descriptors sure did.
She looks down at herself, her arms raising a bit which ends up splitting the cloak, revealing a rather normal black dress which one would wear to a club.
“It’s fashion.” she says.
You should probably start running. But you are also very curious, and usually that aspect of yourself wins out. Fuck, it’s still winning.
“Good to know.” you reply.
“So, um, look here,” says the woman. “I’m going to do something to you rather necessary for my well being, and it might hurt you. Slightly. But I have band aids in neon colors, and you don’t have to fret about tetanus or any of these other odd human disorders, so it should be okay.”
She has a very thick accent. You’re shamed that you have no idea where it’s from, nor can you take an educated guess. It’s like her voice is trying to jump over all the vowels, but is forced against its will to spend time on unfortunate sounds like long ‘oh’s and short ‘ah’s. “Excuse me?” you say.
She raises her hands, waves them at you. Her mouth gapes like she wants to explain something to you, but can’t summon up the words to describe whatever elaborate scenario led up to this point. She sighs, then your vision goes pitch dark as she swoops down on you in a flurry of impossible midnight robes.
Cloth wraps around you, layers of silk squeeze your arms and you smell the nostalgic aroma of spring evenings and bonfires in the cusp of her shoulder. She bends your knees, dipping you to the ground, her arms strong around your body, and the idea works its way into your distracted brain that you should probably scream.
You unhinge your jaw to work up a fine, maidenly yell, but the woman’s mouth cloaked in shadow twists and she slaps a hand over your own maw. You appear to be firmly under her control, dipped like a swooning bodice ripper, and you find it all rather romantic. You can’t say what you can see of her is hard on the eyes, after all.
You’ve clearly been reading too much vampire fanfiction. This woman is most probably an insane axe murderer with a romance digest fetish. You take the time to imagine Dave speaking at your funeral after she dismembers you, and that thought is more terrifying than what you’re currently facing down.
You can’t dish out some pathetic, measly English major flails at her, so you decide the next best move is to narrow your eyes in a disapproving yet motherly manner. She does not react to this, and you wonder if she can even see out that hood. It looks remarkably inconvenient. She looks around, and you assume she's making a final check for witnesses. How assuring. “I’m sorry, but as I mentioned before, this is rather necessary. I promise there will be no permanent damage to your mortal vessel.”
‘Mortal vessel’ was an interesting choice of words, not one you would have picked yourself. She tilts your head up, using the hand over your lips to do so, and leans down into a very sensitive part of your neck. As you feel her breath pool against your throat, and as you try not to laugh with how very ticklish you feel, a burning question manages to push its way out of your lungs and into the stranger’s hand.
“Mmmphm mmmnmmmp, mppph?”
She tilts your head back down, then removes her hand. “What?” she whispers.
“You wouldn’t happen to be an actual vampire, perchance, would you?” you whisper back. You wouldn’t want to ruin your once in a lifetime chance of running into a vampire of the womanly persuasion by attracting uncouth attention.
“Um… no.”
You open your mouth to scream for help, but your jaw muscles are dreadfully out of shape, so she slaps her hand over your lips before your maw can even open to an acceptable size.
“Never mind, I was. Not telling the truth. Of course, ha ha, you were right. I am absolutely a vampire. There has never been any doubt that I am definitely a vampire. I am a very attractive, mysterious lady vampire who is going to suck your blood and it will be very hot for your human sensibilities.”
A chill air blows into your frightened, painfully agape eyes and you shut them tightly. A childish reaction to fear, you’re ashamed your heart is even beating so fast. Dammit. Rosaline, you should have screamed your little lungs out when you had the chance, what were you even thinking? Now you’re facing your death in the abyss of your eyes closed shut, your body grappled by a young woman who very much needs to see a psychiatrist, and your three day old panties stuffed firmly in your sweatshirt pocket. What will the mortician think? You are going to have the worst funeral ever.
Your neck gets punctured. It feels like ten-thousand needles covered in poison, although that might just be your eldritch horror sensibilities talking. It mostly just hurts. Quite a bit. Ouchie.
When the blood begins to whisk itself out of you, you do something you’d never thought you’d do unironically:
You faint.