#this is just the combined and edited vers of the snippets from earlier

[delimeful]

to taste your beating heart (1)

warnings: vampires, blood mention, memory loss, mild violence, captivity 

-  

Anxiety watched his target carefully as he trailed him through the rainy city streets, hood pulled over his eyes. 

The man was carrying a cat-patterned umbrella, the brightness of it contrasting with the grey skies overhead and the dull concrete buildings all around them. He walked with heavy shoulders, eyes down, and mind elsewhere. 

Distracted, tired, alone. For a first time hunt, he was the picture of the perfect prey. Anx felt sort of bad about taking advantage of the guy’s obvious bad day, but it wasn’t like he was planning to kill him. There was plenty of humans in the city, which meant plenty of blood. If he was still hungry, he could probably find someone else. 

His coven would make fun of him for being so soft, but didn’t it just make sense? With how often they impressed on him the dangers and mercilessness of hunters, he thought they’d make more of an effort to avoid killing people and leaving bodies. Of course, if one was dead, they couldn’t blab about being bitten to the aforementioned hunters, but… 

Anx shook his head, trying to refocus. It didn’t matter. He would do what was safest in the moment. 

Ahead of him, his target turned into a shortcut between buildings, and Anx let his lips curl with a smirk, hurrying his pace. An opportunity.  

He walked after him into the alley, footsteps almost soundless, and his body shifted into a more predatory stance. He gained ground with every step, and was only a few yards away when the man stopped. Anx froze in response, brow furrowing curiously. Had the human heard him?

“Um,” the man said, turning to face him without surprise. He had clear blue eyes that looked a little sorrowful. “Please stop following me.” 

Anx drew back a little, surprised, but then mustered up every ounce of menace he had, straightening his spine to loom. 

“Don’t worry.” He said, voice gravelly. “I won’t for much longer.” 

The man opened his mouth to respond, but Anx was already moving with inhuman speed, slamming into him and pinning him against the brick wall. The cat umbrella clattered onto the ground. The man wheezed, eyes wide, and Anx couldn’t blame him. He was the fastest in his coven, so to a human, it had probably looked something like teleportation. 

This close, he could hear the man’s rapid heartbeat, and smell the sweetness of his blood. His mouth watered slightly, and the stranger almost managed to shake him off when he started struggling against his grip. “Let go of me!” 

“Hold still.” Anx hissed, drawing in closer and tugging the man’s shirt collar to expose the juncture of flesh between the neck and the shoulder. With how tense the man was, the bite would hurt like a bitch for a while, but Anx thought he’d probably prefer that over a severed artery, so. “I’m not going to kill you, so quit wriggling already!” 

Apparently too scared to speak, the man shook his head vicariously, making it impossible for Anx to duck down and bite him properly. He growled, pulling back for a moment, and only had a second to see the man glowering at him, no fear in his gaze, before he was slamming his forehead against Anx’s. 

He saw stars, stumbling back, and the man charged him, knocking him to the wet, gravel-covered ground and pinning his shoulders down with strength you wouldn’t find in the average human. A hunter? Anx thrashed, his hood falling back. 

When he managed to focus on the man’s face, however, he was met with a stunned gaze rather than malice or hatred. 

“Virgil?” The man whispered, and Anx felt a sharp pain ricochet in his head. He snarled, mind aching.

“Who the hell is Virgil?”

-

Roman paced back and forth in the hall, glancing through the tinted glass of the double sided mirror with every turn. 

They had the basement room installed with what essentially amounted to a police interrogation room, although designed for much stronger occupants. Even thralls, who were the ones that occupied the room most often, had superhuman strength and endurance granted to them by their ‘masters,’ and thus needed superhuman restraints to hold them while they tried to track down the vamp responsible. 

Of course, the one currently strapped to the chair in that room wasn’t a thrall, as much as Roman wished that was the case. It would have been easier to fix than being turned. 

His heart had skipped a beat when he’d answered the phone to the sound of Patton in distress, nearly incoherent through his sobbing. It had nearly stopped entirely when he got to the alleyway and found Patton sat on the ground with an unconscious Virgil, head resting in his lap. Virgil hadn’t recognized his name, and had struggled viciously against any explanation until Patton had been forced to knock him out, and he was still sniffling now, hours later.

Even Logan, who was always the best at keeping his head between the three of them, was stunned into a painful silence at the sight of Virgil’s eyes. Bright, unnatural purple where they’d once been a dark, soothing brown. 

When they’d sworn to find their missing companion, alive or dead, none of them had expected to find him like this.

A cool hand settled on to his shoulder, and he paused, drawn back to the present. Logan had entered without him even noticing. 

“Roman.” Logan said, a subtle reprimand in his voice. “You aren’t going to help Patton calm down by working yourself up.” 

“Who’s worked up?” Roman said, but his voice came out tense, and the joke fell flat. He bit his tongue, looking at the limp form in the chair before them. Sitting on the wrong side of an interrogation table. “Is there even anything left of him in there?” His question came out soft.

Logan’s hand tightened on his shoulder. “I don’t know. We’ll have to see.” Sensing that this wasn’t enough, he turned to facts instead. “He isn’t feral. He can speak, and he told Patton he wasn’t going to kill him. He may not know us, but studies have shown that memory loss due to disease can theoretically be reversed. Don’t give up.”

“Me? Give up?” Roman took a breath, firming his shoulders with bravado. “There’s no chance of that.”

Logan’s face softened in a manner that would have been a smile on anyone else, but before he could respond, there was a harsh inhale. They both twisted to face the window into the room, watching as Virgil- the vampire came into consciousness with a jolt, struggling to look around and wrestling against the restraints ineffectively. Patton had informed them of his incredible speed, but apparently that didn’t carry over to strength.

“I’m going in.” Roman said, immediately, and Logan sighed. 

“Let me get Patton first. He’ll want to be here.” 

He left, and Roman stood close enough to the glass to fog it slightly, staring at that familiar face. The vampire was breathing heavily, the way Virgil would during a panic attack, and his eyes flickered around to different spots on the mirror as though searching for something. Roman’s heart ached, and he reminded himself to focus on the things that were Not-Virgil, like his glowing eyes and the edges of fangs he could barely see past his lips. 

The purple dye Virgil had maintained so dedicatedly was faded now, the pale strands against his clammy skin making him look washed out. If it weren’t for the brightness of his eyes, he could have been mistaken for a corpse. Roman shuddered. 

“We’re here.” Logan announced, and Patton grabbed Roman’s hand like a lifeline, eyes puffy and rimmed with red. 

“Hey, Pat.” He drew the soft-hearted hunter into a hug, drawing back after a moment. “Don’t worry. I promise to be as careful as our emo nightmare would demand.” 

Patton’s eyes grew even more watery, but he let go of Roman’s hand and nodded. Logan searched Roman’s gaze for a long moment and then nodded as well, tension lining his body. No matter how the nerd proclaimed otherwise, he cared about them. The way he’d worked himself to near-exhaustion after Virgil’s disappearance was a testament to that. 

Roman turned to the door, not letting even a smidge of hesitation leak into his body language. Two steps, and an opened door later, he was there. In the same room as Virgil, or, at the very least, Virgil’s body.

The vampire stared at him for a long moment, eyes wide and scared, and Roman closed the door behind him, walking a few steps closer. He could see the way the vampire’s shoulders tensed up, but he didn’t snarl or even hiss, and hope fluttered in his chest despite himself. 

“Hey there, Dark and Stormy.” He said, exhaustion making the nickname come out less menacing than he’d intended.

The vampire blinked once, twice, and then- 

“Roman?”

Roman’s body froze as though he’d been electrocuted, breath catching in his lungs. The vampire- Virgil searched his face as though recalling the features. 

“You- You’re Roman. You are Roman, aren’t you?” He asked, voice dropping into uncertainty. 

“Yes.” Roman choked out, his throat closing up with the emotion he felt. He remembered. “Yeah, I- Yes.” 

Relief flooded Virgil’s face, but only a moment later it dropped away to fearful uncertainty again. He shifted in the chair, restraints chafing against him. “Are… are you going to kill me?” He asked, voice cracking. 

Roman moved forwards as though drawn by a magnet, turning the chair away from the table and grabbing Virgil’s hands in his own. “No, god no, Virgil, we wouldn’t-” 

He paused as Virgil seemed to cringe in pain, not at his proximity but at his... words? “Virgil?” Another wince, accompanied this time with a snarl, and Roman realized the facade for what it was at the same time that the vampire’s pupils contracted to vicious slits.

He threw himself back, and got a perfect view of sharp fangs snapping shut on air with a click, the vampire having lunged forwards as far as he could in the restraints. Trying for Roman’s throat. There were muffled shouts from the room behind the mirror, and Roman realized that the vampire had faked waking up, had been listening to them talk at least long enough to hear Roman’s name and use it against him. 

He rolled to his feet, facing the vampire with a dark expression. The monster was working his jaw after the failed bite. “Ouch.” He muttered, sinking back against the chair in a slouch. Painfully enough, he looked even more like Virgil that way. 

“Roman!” The door to the room was flung open, and Patton launched himself at Roman, checking him over and hugging him. Logan trailed in after him, resigned to the loss of secrecy, and stood between them and the vampire. 

“Sorry, Pat.” Roman responded, still staring at the vampire with narrowed eyes. “He fooled me.” 

“I thought… He fooled me, too.” Patton admitted, turning to face the familiar stranger in their midst. The vampire tilted his chin up defiantly, but his hands were clenched into trembling fists. “You… you really don’t remember us, huh?” 

The vampire looked surprised at being addressed for a moment, before catching himself and baring his teeth with a hiss. “Whoever you think I am, he’s long gone. And I’m not telling you anything. So just get it over with.” 

Patton buried his face in Roman’s shoulder again, and so Logan was the one to respond. “Get ‘it’ over with? What exactly do you think we’re going to do?”

“The same thing hunters always do to us?” The vampire responded, incredulous. “Whatever you’re going to use to kill me, just do it. Even if I was willing to tell you shit, I don’t know anything important, so torturing me is pointless.”

Patton clung to Roman harder, but all he could think about was the way Virgil had referred to vampires.

Us, he’d said. He thought of himself as a vampire, had no doubt been told how evil and cruel hunters were, didn’t even know that he’d been one only a few weeks ago. Roman felt a boiling hatred in his stomach, not for Virgil, but for the vampires that had stolen him. The vampire that had replaced him.

“How many people have you killed?” He asked, voice low. Patton’s grip became painful, and Logan inhaled sharply through his nose, no doubt irritated with his rashness. 

The vampire squinted at him. “Are you stupid? I just said I’m not answering shit.” 

“How would I use that information against other vampires?” Roman countered, unfaltering. “How about this: if you answer, you get to eat.”

“Roman….” Logan said, frowning. Roman turned to him, eyebrows set stubbornly. 

“What? Are you going to leave him here to starve until he goes feral?” Logan looked away. “I didn’t think so.” 

The vampire ran his tongue over his fangs, staring between the three of them with something like bewilderment. “You won’t believe me.” 

“Try me.” Roman challenged. 

“None. I haven’t killed anyone. He,” Here the vampire looked to Patton, “was my first solo hunt.”  

Patton pulled away from Roman, staring at the vampire with heartbreak written all over his face. “You told me… you weren’t going to kill me. Back in the alley.” 

The vampire stared at him for a long moment, face unreadable. Then, he turned his head to the side and a cruel sneer spread across his face. “Yeah, well, I just wanted my prey to stop struggling. Not my fault you believed it.”

The three of them exchanged shocked gazes of recognition at the tell, making the vampire shift with uncertainty from where he was watching them from the corner of his eye. 

“You’re right.” Roman finally said, his heart twisting painfully as the vampire kept his head tilted away. His eyes flicking to the side in the same tic Virgil always had when he was lying. “I don’t believe you.”

Whatever memories he had lost, Virgil was still in there somewhere. 

Roman had to believe that.

#sanders sides #vamp virge au #vampire #ts virgil #ts roman #this is just the combined and edited vers of the snippets from earlier #ts logan #ts patton #vampire au #writing #my writing #ttybh #to taste your beating heart