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clickerflight · 4 months

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Esial: Part 11 - Phone Calls and Door Latches

Happy new years, guys! This is the last part of this arc. There will be more of Esial, trust me, but there will be a bit of a time skip between this and the next arc. Things are going to get wild. I have a plot line and everything. Anyways! Enjoy!

Masterlist

Part 10

Content: Vampire whumpee, human whumpee, emotional whump, injury recovery, depressive thoughts (nothing too deep but hinted at) loneliness, emotional angst

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Kyle checked the clock for what had to be the 12th time in the past half hour. He pressed a gentle hand to his side. It was well wrapped in bandages and padding and it was apparently healing well, but it still hurt. He needed to take some meds for it soon. The only issue was Kyle had to take it with food or he would end up throwing up.

He sighed, leaning his head against the back of the couch, barely listening to the cooking competition show he had turned on to distract himself. He needed to get up to make food, which would make the pain worse, which would make the food harder to make. It was an unending loop. In the past he would have been able to ask Joanna for some help but even just thinking about her made his head and side hurt more.

He closed his eyes, trying not to tear up. His life was a complete mess. He didn’t live near any family who could come help him, Joseph and his bondmate were the closest things Kyle had to friends, but he couldn’t bring himself to ask them for anything. Muir was busy all the time, running himself even harder than before now that he was a vampire and Joseph was always at the rehab center. Adding himself as another load onto them was selfish.

He sighed again and leaned forward slowly, wincing. He couldn’t even get off this stupid couch. His education was down the drain, he couldn’t work, he didn’t have any family or friends. He didn’t have anything except for expensive medical bills that would drain his funds for finishing out schooling and lawyers calling him every day trying to get him to change the wording in his testimonies in sneaky ways, trying to get him to make it look less bad that his best friend had kept a vampire in her shed surrounded by silver and then shot him in a desperate attempt to sell the guy.

This was insane. How was this his life?

By the time Kyle got to the counter in the kitchen, he had to lean on it, fighting rising sobs because he knew they would only make his side hurt more. He could cry after the meds had some time to kick in. No crying before then. And maybe he could do it in his bed as well. As a treat.

He slowly gathered himself back together and opened his fridge, pulling out a container of chili. His neighbor, Barbara, had been bringing him some food now and again after he’d gotten back from the hospital. He wished she would stop. She was friendly, of course, but there was a prideful part of him that wished he had more help than his 50 year old neighbor who took pity on him and took the chance to talk to him as a way to feel a little less lonely herself. He put the chili in the microwave, wincing as he heard the first pop of one of the beans. Who knew how long his microwave was going to be chili splattered before he had the energy to clean it.

He leaned on the counter again, waiting for the minute to be up so he could stir it and put it in for another minute when he felt his phone buzz in his pocket.

He closed his eyes against the anguish the sound caused in his soul as he dug it out. He looked at it, dreading to see some unknown number that could be the hospital or another Lawyer who found another phone number to call from, but he had this number saved in his phone.

Joseph.

He didn’t know if that was worse.

He accepted the call and went to lift the phone to his ear, but gave up as pain lanced up his side.

“Nope,” he muttered to himself, putting his arm back down and putting Joseph on speaker.

“Hey,” Kyle said, hoping desperately that he didn’t sound like he’d been crying.

“Hey, Kyle. Good to hear your voice,” Joseph said. Kyle didn’t like how timid the vampire sounded, like he wasn’t sure about how Kyle was going to react to something. “How are you? I meant to come up and check on you this morning but then I figured you were probably still sleeping and I didn’t want to-”

“What is it, Joseph?” Kyle sighed, watching the inside of his microwave get progressively dirtier inside.

“Oh… ah. It’s Esial.”

Kyle closed his eyes as his microwave beeped. He’d wait till after the call to deal with it.

“What about him?”

“He’s doing alright. Ah, a little confused, homesick, that sort of thing. That’s normal. He just asked if he could talk to you sometime. You don’t have to do it now, of course. I’m just seeing if you’d be up to it in the next couple of weeks or… you know… whenever.”

Kyle didn’t open his eyes, focusing on keeping calm steady breathes. There were flashes of light in his mind’s eye, a bleeding vampire hovering over him, Kyle himself open on the table.

A gun to his head, a scared vampire trying to free himself from a woman Kyle had once called his best friend.

A vampire sitting, nearly naked, in a spot surrounded by silver in a shed.

“Kyle? You still there?”

“No.”

“What?”

“No,” Kyle said, more exhausted this time. “Look, no offense to the guy, but I can’t. I can’t anymore. I’m so sick of this.”

“Oh… well, maybe we can talk about this later after you’re heal-”

“NO! Joseph! I don’t want to talk to that stupid vampire. I don’t want to ever see him again, you hear!? I want my life back! And I know it’s not his fault but…. Crap, Joseph. Just….. Just leave me alone.”

Before Joseph could protest, Kyle hung up. He tossed his phone onto the counter, staring at it for a long time before he turned. He left the chili in the microwave, he left the TV and lights on, but he snagged a piece of bread to stuff into his mouth on the way past, made a beeline for the bathroom where he took his meds.

He laid on top of his blankets for a long time, something in his pocket digging into his leg as he stared at the wall. Once he felt the meds start working he buried his face in his pillow and screamed before allowing himself to cry softly for another hour, letting that eventually carry him to sleep.

…………………………………….

Esial had finally figured out the door handle properly. It amused him to no end to open the door and then just pull the handle down to see the catch slide in and out of the door. He was fascinated by the mechanism and a little tempted to take it apart to see if he could replicate it in some way. He didn’t dare, though. When he’d done that to the ‘lamp’ by his bed he couldn’t get it to work again after and he didn’t want to do the same thing to the door latch.

He looked up as he heard someone coming down the hall and was delighted to see it was Joseph. And just like he had asked Joseph every time Esial had seen him since the night walk, he asked, “Can I talk to Kyle?”

Joseph reached the door, looking rather uncomfortable. Esial was getting good at recognizing that emotion, especially on Joseph, but his teachers who had started teaching him body language said he was picking it up pretty well anyways.

“I called Kyle,” Joseph said slowly, but Esial waited patiently for him to get to the point.

Joseph rubbed the back of his neck. “He’s… going through a rough patch right now. He just got really badly hurt and he’s tired and having a kind of bad time. He’s not ready to talk to you right now.”

“Then next week?” Esial asked. He hoped a week meant what he thought it meant. Or was it day? He knew it wasn’t month. A month was a cycle of a moon cause they both started with an M sound.

Joseph sighed. “I don’t know when, Esial.”

Esial frowned. “Why not?”

“Because… look. Kyle’s not ready to really be around people much. We should leave him be.”

Esial wrinkled his nose at that. “Not ready? I just want to talk in the old language. That is all. I am not asking for him to kill hippos while he is injured. I just want to talk.”

Joseph gave Esial a look that the isolated vampire didn’t understand. It looked complicated.

This only frustrated him further.

“Do I ask too much?” Esial asked, bearing his teeth. “Only talk. Does not even have to be long one!” He wanted to apologize for coming to the hospital, he wanted to ask about certain things that he couldn’t grasp because he didn’t know English well. He wanted to talk in a language he was more familiar with instead of fighting with each sentence and each word.

“No,” Joseph said. “He’s just tired. He’ll probably come around to talk to you eventually-”

“‘Come around?’ That is phrase with other meaning. He does… he does not want to talk with me.”

“No, wait, Esial, it’s more complicated than that. It-”

“He does not. I scare him?” Esial did not consider himself scary to anything. Not even to hippos. Hippos do not feel fear. He wasn’t very tall, he was confused most of the time, and he didn’t even mean Kyle harm. Kyle knew that! He defended Esial in the hospital.

Esial growled and Joseph tried to placate the older vampire. “Esial, it’s not that. A lot of things happened, okay? He’s dealing with a lot of bad emotions and he doesn’t know what he wants. This isn’t about you.”

“I do not ask much! I only want to sorry to him! I want to ask thing that do not … not-” Esial snapped his fingers- “In here,” he said, gesturing to his head. “I was hurt! Why bad emotion with me!?”

“Emotions are more complicated than that. It’s, They’re, crap. How do I explain this to you?”

“This why I need talk with Kyle!” Esial said, giving up on following all of the stupid confusing rules of this stupid confusing language.

“He doesn’t want to talk to you,” Joseph blurted, frustrated. “Right now,” he said quickly, but Esial heard the pause.

Esial snarled, bore his teeth again and cussed Joseph out with the language that his parents had taught him before backing up and slamming the door, panting as he stood in the darkness of his room.

He could hear Joseph pacing outside for a moment before he finally walked off, leaving Esial alone.

Esial: @whumpsday @honeycollectswhump @writereleaserepeat @tragedyinblue @hyrules-sleepiest-knight @why-not-ask-me-a-better-question @thecyrulik @gt-daboss

From Dust to Ashes: @whumpsday @writereleaserepeat @currentlyinthesprial @pigeonwhumps

#whump #esial #from dust to ashes #human whumpee #vampire whumpee #angst #injury recovery #depressive thoughts

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