everybody out here with their vampire Barok AUs. listen. I like vampires as much as the rest of y’all. but having the huge spooky guy with the pale skin and goth clothes and bat friends and endless supply of red wine be a vampire is just too on the nose. too obvious. too passé.
my pitch: vampire AU where Barok is just a regular human guy who is Like That.
Albert is the vampire.
(more excessive details under the cut)
Albert wasn’t a vampire yet when they met in college. In fact, their whole college experience and Barok’s entire traumatic post-college experience is identical to canon. But Albert got bitten while in Germany, and when he comes back to London and sees Barok’s new look he’s like “wow! I guess my old friend has ALSO become a vampire! what a spectacular coincidence!” Unaware that these are just Barok’s vibes now that his brother is dead and he’s lost faith in humanity.
No one’s figured it out because Albert has never had many friends, and his class load as a professor was never high in the first place, so what would be strange about him only teaching night classes all of a sudden? Or only venturing out of his research lab after dark? The man is so exuberant and so thoroughly unintimidating that no one would ever suspect him of such a thing. In fact, Albert looks exactly the same as he does in the game, but if you look closely, you’ll see he’s got little fangs when he smiles. The only thing that clues in Barok is when he’s taking Albert to Dover after the trial - that he seems extraordinarily wary of sunlight, and that he always seems hungry no matter how much food Barok buys for the pair of them, and that when Albert hugs him goodbye, he’s terribly cold to the touch.
So how is Albert taking this transformation? Well, truthfully, he’s fascinated, and adds his own nature to his long list of scientific subjects to study; but he despises having to hurt people to feed himself, and keeps trying to invent viable blood substitutes that always end up being rather poor in the departments of both nutrition and taste - just enough to keep him alive. (Theoretically, he could buy blood from the butcher shop, but much like trying to give a newborn baby the milk of another animal, animal blood isn’t great for vampires - and buying large quantities of animal blood is both a strain on the wallet and tends to draw the suspicion of the butcher.). It’s really just a more dramatic version of how he behaves in canon - how much he puts his work and his studies above his own health and well-being.
Of course, once Albert realizes Barok is just a regular human, he doesn’t want to tell him because of the (admittedly rather warranted) stigma against his kind, especially with Barok being from a powerful family that undoubtedly has ties with the Church of England - and Christianity does not exactly have a great relationship with creatures seen as demonic. But of course, Barok ends up discovering the truth anyway - and though it is obviously rather a shock, the man’s fondness for his old friend is far more important to him than the fact that he now survives upon drinking the blood of the living. Afterwards, whenever they go out, Barok holds his cape over Albert when the sun is bright enough to risk burning him - and though Albert has been a vampire for long enough to avoid garlic in his meals (vampires can eat human food, but it’s all of the enjoyment with none of the nutritional value, so they can’t survive on it), Barok always insists on double-checking for him, just to make sure. (And by virtue of Barok looking and dressing the way he does, when they’re together, any suspicion of Albert’s vampirism is very quickly deflected onto Barok. Quite literally everyone thinks Barok is the vampire. They just think Albert only comes out at night because he’s weird.)
As for, er, my less than platonic leanings toward the relationship between these two… well. If Albert’s trying to survive solely on a combination of animal blood and these bad blood substitutes to avoid hurting people, then I imagine he’s not always doing very well - he might have trouble functioning, or sleeping, or feeling faint/having low energy even when he’s excited about something. Barok, worrywart that he is, is incredibly concerned about him, but also knows he can hardly force Albert to start accosting people on the street for their blood just for his own health. So, Barok offers an alternative; he slowly lowers the collar of his shirt, revealing his neck.
Albert protests at first, naturally being even less willing to hurt his dearest friend than a stranger, but Barok insists it’s all right - and a combination of his friend’s visible concern and his own stomach growling manages to convince him at least to try. Frantically, he assures him that it’ll only hurt for a moment - after all, he says, when applied carefully, vampire venom has a numbing agent more advanced than that of mosquitoes or fleas, with none of the itchy after-effects! - before biting him, very, very gently.
It does hurt, for a moment, but that fades fast, and soon it’s replaced by a rather pleasant feeling - for Albert, that of being able to enjoy something he’d always thought monstrous; for Barok, the intimate physical contact he’d forgotten and missed. After Albert is done, having made sure not to take too much, they end up in each other’s arms, just… lying there, for quite a while, and then spend the next week and a half trying to convince themselves that was a very normal and heterosexual thing to do between a vampire and his human bestie. (And then, of course, they do it all over again.)
For the record, Albert figures out his feelings for Barok first, but tries to push them down - until another vampire he meets points out that, well, he’s already a vampire. A creature viewed as demonic. So what if he loves another man? At best, it doesn’t matter anyway, and at worst, what’ll he be, more damned?
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