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Scott takes him down screaming in the water, but Pyro doesn’t die. Not right away. The breach of Scott’s fangs in his throat sends a shock through him, and as Scott holds fast, his whole body stiffens, then goes limp.
Likewise, the fear and panic leech out of him the same way. What remains is a lovely haze that reassures him everything is fine. Scott drags their useless body to shore and lays them on the ground, and Pyro lacks the strength to do much of anything but lie there, but they aren’t afraid. There’s nothing to fear.
“Can’t say I’ve seen it done like this before,” Owen says, as Scott bends down between Pyro’s legs and busies himself with something there. Pyro can’t feel much of anything, and they don’t have the energy to lift their head for a better angle.
Scott says, “Once he’s out, taste him again. You’ll see.”
Pyro says nothing, but stares up at the red, red sky until the darkness in his vision swallows it all.
—
Someone has their arms around him.
He doesn’t know why, but it’s nice. He feels nice. He feels really, really good right now, even if it also feels like he’s being held underwater and running out of air. Someone’s holding them, closing in on them, someone with a bruising grip and lifelessly cold skin. Yet somehow, he doesn’t feel cold. He doesn’t feel anything.
He should thank them for holding him, whoever it is. Except when he goes to do it, there’s something in the way. Something weighing down his tongue, keeping his words locked in his throat, stretching—
“His eyes are open,” someone says above them.
“I’ll put him back down,” says another voice, a familiar one. Both are familiar, actually. Pyro tries to blink and find that his eyes are, in fact, open. Funny. For some reason, they can’t see much of anything. It’s all just…dark.
The second voice begins talking to him again, but the moment they do, Pyro’s body starts to get very, very heavy. The words slip through his head like rain, and it’s not long before he finds himself falling back under.
—
It’s soft when he dies. Like falling into an endless void of pillows.
He’d be grateful, if he were able to recognize his own death for what it was. Instead, they feel the truth of it as if looking from the other side of a stained-glass window, or perhaps reading it from a book in dim candlelight.
It’s the best way to go they could possibly ask for. They always wondered how it would feel from the dying man’s perspective, ever since—
In any case, death lets him go gently. It whispers to him on the way down, though he can’t make out a single word it says. They get the feeling of it in choppy little pieces. It tells him he’s been good, and even though he knows it’s lying, he soaks it up anyway.
It tells them this is not the end. But before they have time to worry about that, it also tells them they’re better off forgetting all of this. They’ve already forgotten most of it as it was happening, so this isn’t a tall order. It says that what remains won’t do them any favors.
He agrees. He’s never preferred the truth over a more comfortable lie.
—
“Finally back with us?”
When Pyro comes to, his first impression is that someone has reached deep inside him and clawed out his insides, hollowed him out and left only the shell. He is not wounded, as far as he can tell—it’s more that he is the wound, raw and open and aching.
He says, his first words on a dead tongue, “Is it supposed to feel like—”
“There’s some soreness involved, yes,” Scott says. He offers them a hand and pulls them to their feet. Pyro looks down to find that their pants are still on and buttoned. They aren’t sure why their subconscious seemed to think otherwise.
“Was it a dream, then?” he asks, trying not to sound as desperate as he feels.
They expect Scott to ask what they’re talking about, but instead he gives Pyro a wry smile. “Of course it was,” he says. “Dreams during the turning can be…quite vivid.”
It’s the answer Pyro wanted to hear, but it brings them little in the way of relief. Thankfully, the uneasiness is quickly pushed aside by a new feeling, one that comes back to him like an old friend. It’s the combination of two different feelings he’d experienced as a human, combining into something even worse than the sum of its parts.
He says, “I think I need to—”
“You need to feed,” Owen interrupts. He doesn’t look nearly as pleased with himself as Scott does. “Let’s find you something to eat.”
They know logically that they should be upset, but when Pyro reaches for that part of themself, they find nothing but numbness. Perhaps the change has hollowed out that part of them too, leaving them only with bloodlust. This is what it is to be a vampire, then—to lose the part of oneself that worries about human things, human desires, human pain. To exchange it for something else.
Pyro is something else now. He can leave these old things behind, these memories that do not serve him. These two vampires that forced their way into his life and made him one of their own, they could have left his lifeless body in the river, but instead they brought him back. They chose him for this.
He doesn’t yet know what to make of the gift he’s been given, but he is certain of one thing: he cannot afford to let them down.