Steven 'Sharpteeth' Durante (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
fingersandteeth) wrote in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
victory_road2020-07-01 10:50 am
fingersandteeth) wrote in victory_road2020-07-01 10:50 am
TEXT - backdated to the evening of 6/30 (cw: sibling death)
You would think that knowing for sure would make things better but it doesn't really.
It doesn't matter that she's got some good wraith friends or that Old Man Tsukiyomi's original is summoning her shade on the regular or that she doesn't blame me or that she knows now that goddamn piece of shit Fetch wasn't me.
She should be twenty-six twenty-seven something like that goddamn fairy time bullshit the point is that she's never going to be that old she's always going to be twenty-five right now twenty-five and dead.
You would have thought it would be good to see her over the weekend and it was but she's gone now and it's her birthday and everything hurts.
No matter how much I smoke Lydia it still hurts.
Fuck.
[Turns out you don't need an ion storm for what you thought were private messages getting sent to the network if you're intoxicated enough.]
It doesn't matter that she's got some good wraith friends or that Old Man Tsukiyomi's original is summoning her shade on the regular or that she doesn't blame me or that she knows now that goddamn piece of shit Fetch wasn't me.
She should be twenty-six twenty-seven something like that goddamn fairy time bullshit the point is that she's never going to be that old she's always going to be twenty-five right now twenty-five and dead.
You would have thought it would be good to see her over the weekend and it was but she's gone now and it's her birthday and everything hurts.
No matter how much I smoke Lydia it still hurts.
Fuck.
[Turns out you don't need an ion storm for what you thought were private messages getting sent to the network if you're intoxicated enough.]
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[Melissa swirls her shot, clearly thinking about something before shooting it back.]
...I've got a theory about how that might have happened but I don't know if telling you would make it better or worse.
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[Oh boy, Melissa, welcome to Almost No Filter Steven.]
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[And thank god she can picture fire without panicking now.]
I mean, I don't know what your sister is like, but generally if my boss came to me and told me he wanted to turn me into a vampire I wouldn't fucking agree. So unless she is the kind who would be fine being literally killed for her job, he either used bullshit compulsion magic--
[not that she's ever used such a thing herself]--or he bloodbound her first. Vampire blood is addictive and forces a bond between the vampire and whoever drinks it, and it doesn't fucking matter what the relationship was like before it.[She takes another shot to get through this- she's pretty sure this is the right call, but it's still not exactly a thing she ever likes to admit to.]
So even if, say, prior to being turned, which always involves forging a bloodbond, you had been trying to kill the vampire in question, it doesn't matter. You still can't do shit against them and have to watch them run away to Canada.
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Fuck, [he says.] I'm going to have to clean that up now. Or make one of the Handsome Cats do it. Just-- Fuck. It makes. God. It makes too much sense. God, fuck, this is all my fault. If I hadn't been taken... if I hadn't abused my press pass to go where I wasn't supposed to be...
Fuck. Fuck.
[And then the last bit of what she'd said registers and somehow, despite the persim weed and the vodka, he still makes the connection and so he turns to her and says,]
Canada, huh? Shit, Melissa, I'm so sorry.
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I don't think trying not to have gotten kidnapped would have necessarily done you any good. Just because things might have been different if you hadn't doesn't make it your fault.
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And I know for a goddamn fact that Frog Comics on the boardwalk still sells Destroy All Vampires, because I stopped there a couple months ago when I was visiting my parents for Christmas. I could have improvised something.
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[Geeze, Steven. See what she gets for trying to comforting for once.
...Though now she has a concern]
A comic?
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And, uh, yeah. The comic book shop on the boardwalk had been selling them since before my parents moved to Santa Carla in '94 and they still had them every time I stopped there, which was generally every Thanksgiving and Christmas—Dia I spent back in San Diego because Mom's family was there.
They were, well, about hunting down and destroying vampires. I bought a couple over the years. Mostly I guess because they weren't under the comics code? [He shrugs.] Anyway, I could have improvised. Based on the shit I read, I mean.
[Hey, it's probably the drugs and alcohol speaking, but it looks like he trusts you in this moment enough to swear in front of you.]
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Well, either way, there's not much that can be done about it from here.
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[He'll knock back another shot himself.]
So... you had your own run-in too, then.
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[Melissa pauses, eyeing the vodka bottle and deciding against it. She's never been a lightweight, but it's been years since she's actually been able to drink proper alcohol.]
Saw one murder the fuck out of a guy outside a building I was working at. Couldn't get it out of my head, only want to make it fuck me up less was to try and do something about it.
[Which almost certainly wound up fucking her up more in the long wrong.]
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... so you became a vampire hunter, [he guesses. He just looks at her then, for a long moment that stretches into two or three more before he says,] Right. Cool.
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[There's more to it than that- but she's not entirely sure she wants to share all of it.] Mostly our local section, who were all assholes to their core to the point of keeping slaves. [.....the slaves were werewolves so normally she didn't actually care but he doesn't need to know that.] Bastards actually tried to get us to help quash an uprising and when we refused, that's when I got kidnapped and turned.
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[And he does think he actually means it. That it's not just words. Maybe it's only because of finding out what happened to Charley, but he does have some level of investment in Melissa specifically in this moment.
And she is from his world. That would matter here.]
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[Melissa sighs, raking a hand through her hand.] ...I'm not gonna pretend I totally understand what happened with you, but I at least get what kind of position your sister wound up in and why that's fucking with you. It's shit you guys had to go through all that.
[that's about as close to a 'sorry' that melissa can really get to.]
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Yeah. And it's shit that that happened to you too.
[He sighs and shakes his head.]
God. Fuck vampires.
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[Melissa takes the vodka bottle and pours herself another shot, filling one for Steven as well.]
Fuck vampires.
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They suck. [HAH!]