That’s a great question, actually! I’d thought a little bit about this before, but I hadn’t really walked through the whole thing in my head in a conscious way.
Okay, so first, what you need to realize about this AU is that becoming a vampire really does alter a person’s mind. This isn’t a case where people get cool superpowers and a sunlight phobia and then just go on their way. Vampirism changes them as a person. Jack and Gabriel are rightfully worried about what’s been done to them because they are going to become monsters. They get nastier. More callous toward other lives. They become okay with preying on humans. And I think becoming a vampire amplifies a person’s core selfishness, whatever form that takes, whether it’s greed or lust or vindictiveness or whatever. It’s already beginning to happen, in fact, by the end of the story.
Gabriel, he gets angry, cruel, as it fuels that righteous wrath he’s always carried inside him and used to keep moving forward. He develops a penchant for making people who cross him suffer. And he also becomes more unable to let Jack go. This is why he enthralls Jack, because 1: he’s furious about Jack backing down and leaving him like this and 2: there is no damn way he
intends to outlive Jack. If this is how he’s got to keep his husband
alive, then it’s what he’ll do, even if it taints Jack with some of the same curse. Even without the effects of the transformation, he would have been furious, maybe even vicious in his sense of betrayal…but his willingness to taint Jack with this curse that the both of them have spent their adult lives fighting, that’s the vampire in him.
Now, Jack as a vampire…
First, what their asshole captor was actually planning to do was to embrace one of them and then leave them to fight and kill each other. That dude was a real dick. And if it had been Jack, like he initially planned, he might’ve gotten his way. Jack’s got plenty of anger of his own, but where Gabriel’s is a kind of burn that seeks vengeance for wrongs, Jack’s is more the ruthless iron kind that drives him through anything that stands between him and his goal.
So if Jack had been turned then, wanting to die, he might’ve forced the issue with Gabriel. And the thing is, Gabriel knew this. Jack accuses him of having dragged the
vampire’s attention to him because he couldn’t bear killing Jack…and he is 100% right about that.
(The question of whether this is a virtue or flaw on either of their parts is one I don’t plan to try to find an easy answer for. It’s both, and neither. It is who they are, and part of what they’ve always loved about each other, for both the good and the ill of it. It’s not like it caught them by surprise. They’ve spent their careers risking their lives. They’ve each gone through scenarios like this in their heads and what they’d do if it came to that too many times to count.)
So anyway, if Jack had been turned, he would have tried to force Gabriel to kill him. He might’ve tried it right there in the cell–in which case he’d probably have failed and ended up with Gabriel dead at his hands, and trapped under the domination of the asshole vampire who turned him. VERY bad scene.
Possibility #2 is a parallel of what actually happened: if Jack managed to hold it together enough to realize who was really at fault here, and he got them both out to chase down the asshole vampire together. But in this scenario, I don’t think Jack would have enthralled Gabriel. Vindictiveness is not so much a flaw of Jack’s, but stubbornness absolutely is. What he would have done instead was turn on people dear to them both, trying to force Gabriel’s hand. Or, if Gabriel kept being stubborn, to drive their fellow vampire hunters to end his life instead.
Jack would have been a bloodier vampire than Gabriel is. Gabriel can be vengeful and possessive, but he is also calculating with a head for the finer details of strategizing. As a vampire, this makes him something of a mastermind. Jack is more of the “unstoppable object” persuasion. He’s capable of planning, but less inclined toward Gabriel’s depth and precision. As a vampire, then, his approach would basically be to cut a swath as wide as necessary to get what he wanted.
This would put Gabriel in a very unpleasant position, because it’s not just that he can’t bear to be the one to personally end Jack’s life. He can’t stand back and let him die. So you would end up with a very angry suicidal vampire, and an equally angry vampire hunter who’s been forced to turn his hand against his fellow hunters to protect his pig-stubborn undead husband until he can beat some sense into him.
You haven’t known the meaning of frustration until you get into a savage physical fight with the man you love
in which you are both trying to do as little actual damage to each other as possible, over the fact that he keeps picking fights to get himself killed/stop the people trying to kill you. Gabriel is really bitter that irony can’t actually kill, because at that moment both of them being struck dead on the spot sounds like a great solution.
from Tumblr http://ift.tt/2fP8vPc