Malevoween Day 15: Hunter & Prey

Malevolent AU where John and Arthur are vampires. Warnings for blood, violence, mind control.

***

“The concert was beautiful, John. Thank you for coming with me.”

They walked toward home shoulder to shoulder, hands brushing as they swung with their steps. The night was lovely, cool with the rain that had broken shortly before they left the concert hall. The city smelled like wet pavement and wood smoke.

“Of course, Arthur.” John’s fingers caught at Arthur’s for a moment and then let go. “I know you miss it.”

He missed it so much. He could still play, of course, and compose, but there was a special thrill to performance. Those days were long behind him, but at least he could enjoy it vicariously.

“What would you like to do for the rest of the night?” Basking in the afterglow of the music, Arthur wasn’t particularly in the mood for a hunt, and he wasn’t hungry anyway. But mellow as he felt, he wasn’t inclined to fuss over whatever John wanted to do.

John hummed. “I may…” He broke off, eyes narrowing. “Do you hear that?”

Arthur cocked his head. All he heard was traffic on the next street over. “The people in the apartment there?”

“No.” John stopped in his tracks and closed his eyes, listening. Then his head snapped around. “There.”

‘There’ was just the street. There was an alleyway before the next cross street. If they went that way, it would dump them out to the rear approach of the harbor.

“There’s nothing, John.”

John had begun fidgeting, almost frantic. “I think…I need to go.”

Arthur’s brow furrowed. “What—”

John gave him a look, desperate. “Arthur. I need to go.” He took two steps, stopped. Twisted suddenly and came back to grab Arthur’s hand. “Come on, Arthur!”

The next thing Arthur knew, he was struggling not to get dragged in John’s wake as they ran, faster than any human could go. John’s legs were longer than his and he had to work to keep up.

Arthur trusted John. If he thought he needed to be somewhere, then he probably did. And yet…those two steps he had taken, away from Arthur. They didn’t leave each other behind. Had he thought about leaving Arthur behind? “Where the fuck are we going, John?”

They spilled out into the rundown yards behind the warehouses that lined the docks. Shouts and clattering sounded from the other side of the buildings. Even at this time of night, the work of the harbor never ceased. “Almost there,” John said, slowing down just enough that Arthur could keep up with him without fear of tripping over his own feet. “Here!”

They rounded a building near the end of the row. Arthur skidded to a halt as he saw what was waiting for them—or he tried to. John only tightened his grip on Arthur’s hand till the bones creaked, pulling him along.

At the far end of the alley between the buildings was a monster. It was a vampire, Arthur knew that, but one so old and ragged it was almost something else. It stood taller than any man, draped in a yellow cloak so stained and torn that the color wasn’t even identifiable on parts of it. Its red eyes stared at them out of the darkness, and Arthur could feel it now, the calling it was using on John.

He knew what this thing had to be. John’s sire. Every inch of his skin, every instinct he had, screamed to not get any closer to it.

“No. John, no!” With his free hand, Arthur grabbed John’s wrist and dug his heels in, trying to stop him. John just dragged him forward. He’d always been bigger and stronger than Arthur.

So Arthur tried throwing himself in front of him instead, shoulder-blocking himself into John with both hands on his chest so hard his claws pricked into John’s skin through his coat.

It at least caught John’s attention. He finally broke the locked gaze with the thing and glanced down at Arthur. “I need to. Arthur. We need to.”

Arthur started swearing. It felt slightly better than crying. John’s eyes were blown out. “John. Don’t you remember? You said you wanted to stay as far away from this fucking thing as you could get. You said you never wanted to go back. John, please!”

Behind him, he heard it laugh. Hastur. A vampire so old he’d been a demon to the Babylonians.

John wavered. To his credit, he wavered, an expression of pained confusion crossing his face. A fleeting look of terror passed through his eyes before he set his hands gently to Arthur’s biceps and began backing him up, step by step, toward Hastur.

“NO.” Arthur’s roar rang through the space as he sank his claws into John’s chest for a good grip and pushed back. The soles of his shoes tore against the pavement with the force as he dug in. “Run, John! We need to run!”

“Bring him to me.”

That voice. A shudder ran through Arthur’s body. It didn’t come through the air, to his ears. He wanted to vomit at the sensation of it against his mind. John looked back up and away from Arthur’s face. Arthur saw him—eyes wide, expression devastated—and then John scooped him up in his arms and simply carried him to the monster.

Arthur wished he had thought of that first.

John stopped right in front of the vampire, in arm’s reach. Arthur could have tried squirming out of his arms, but to what end? He wasn’t going to leave John alone with this thing that had him in thrall.

It reached out with one withered, clawed hand and brushed fingers like black roots down the side of John’s face. “So here you are. You hid from me well, child, but you had to know you couldn’t escape me forever. This meeting was inevitable.”

John squeezed his eyes shut. “Centuries of freedom,” he murmured. “It was worth everything.”

The finality of that was enraging. Arthur lashed out a hand to knock the monster’s away. “Get your hands off him. He’s not yours.”

“Arthur, no,” John breathed.

Hastur laughed and deigned to pay him attention for the first time. The voice in his head was awful with amusement. “Then whose is he, little one? Yours?”

There was nothing human in those cold red eyes when they met Arthur’s. Not even anything bestial. Nothing but hideous curiosity and possession. It felt like being flayed alive to have his bones studied.
“And who is this you’ve brought me?”

John’s arms tightened with ferocious protectiveness around him, like he would have pulled Arthur into his rib cage if he could have. He tried to fight the question, Arthur could feel it in the shaking tension of John’s body.

“His name is Arthur,” John said at last, the words grating in his throat.

Those blackened, twisted fingers seized hold of Arthur’s jaw.

The power in that body pressed sick against his skin, forced its way into his eyes through its gaze. He’d miscalculated, he thought wildly as it forced his face up so it could study him. He should have run. He gagged, writhed, but John was holding him too tight now to twist loose.

“You’ve made him yours. And yet you brought him to me. An offering?”

“No!” John actually took a step back, jerking Arthur away from him.

“Tch. How weak of you.”

Those gnarled hands reached for Arthur again…and then he was falling as John managed to break Hastur’s hold on him enough to spin and throw him back the way they’d come.

“Arthur, run!”

Arthur landed, rolled to his feet, and sprinted to the end of the lane before skidding to a halt and turning back. John!

Even from here, he could hear Hastur’s scoff. “John. Catch him.”

John screamed—pure rage and frustration that rang from the corrugated metal walls of the warehouses. For a second he quivered, claws halfway outstretched toward his sire despite the bond keeping him in thrall. Arthur flinched and hovered, unsure whether to go back or forward.

And then John spun on the ball of his foot and charged for him. “I told you to fucking run!”

Arthur ran.

He sprinted like his life depended on it, hurtling through the winding back alleys, crashing into walls and slapping off them till his palms bled and his tuxedo shirt hung in tatters rather than lose momentum on the turns. He didn’t need to look back to sense John closing on him. Maybe if he could lure him far enough away, Hastur’s grip on him would weaken.

He’d made it a few blocks–not quite to the part of town where the roofs began to join, where he could get out of this rat maze into the space above to move and evade–when John’s step scraped alarmingly close. Arthur threw himself to the side, leapt, caught his fingertips in the cracks between the bricks of the alley wall and hurled himself upward. Fuck the roofs. Fuck his plans.

Fuck his attempt. The alley was too confined. He caught a blur from the corner of his eye as John bounded up and pushed off the opposite wall with his foot, barreling into Arthur to drag him off his handhold and bring them both crashing to the ground in a tangle of snapping bones and pained shouts.

He forced himself up to sitting with a wheeze, ignoring the stabbing edge of a broken rib against his lung. John pushed himself up to his elbows, groaning. One of his shoulders hung wrong.

When Arthur caught his eyes, they were clear and horrified. “Goddammit, Arthur, run. Please. He’s going to make me take you back to him.”

“I’m not fucking leaving you with him,” Arthur snarled. He dug the claws of one hand into the mortar of the bricks for a handhold and dragged himself upright. How fast would that leg heal? They’d have to find out. He leaned down to grab John’s good arm and haul him to his feet. “Come on, we’re getting out of here. We’ll go as far as we have to. The other side of the planet if that’s what it takes.”

To think they’d started the evening at the bloody theater.

Arthur’s hair stirred in a sudden breeze and John flinched back with a startled yelp. Arthur closed his eyes for a heartbeat. “Oh for fuck’s sake—”

When he turned around, he found what he’d known he would find.

Hastur lashed out with an arm longer than it should have been and grabbed him by the throat to drag him close. “Really? You’re so attached to this one that you’d fight me for his sake? But he’s so weak. What could possibly appeal to you about such a pathetic little creature?”

Arthur raised both hands and clawed at that arm as hard as he could.

With a casual swipe, Hastur backhanded him so hard he spun in place. Before he could drop to the ground, he caught him again, this time with those gnarled claws tangled in Arthur’s hair.

Those blood-red eyes narrowed and he leaned down nose to decayed nose with Arthur. He smelled like hundred year old leather left in the sun to mummify. Then he looked up at John again. Disgust dripped from his voice. “You let this one bond you back? I should kill him for that insolence. Perhaps it would remind you of your place.” His hand tightened in Arthur’s hair till Arthur cried out and reached up to grab Hastur’s bony wrist. It was solid as iron. And then Hastur laughed. “But I have a better idea. What’s yours is mine, after all.”

He jammed the fingers of one withered hand in Arthur’s mouth, deliberately slicing himself open on Arthur’s rage-extended fangs.

John lunged forward with a cry. Arthur tried to pull back but he had nowhere to go, caught tight in Hastur’s grip while the monster’s blood trickled into his mouth. Hastur thrust his fingers in deeper and yanked Arthur’s head back till his neck hurt. “Swallow.”

Blood in his mouth, choking. It was a reflex.

Hastur’s blood seared down his throat and set fire to every branching vein in his body as it moved through him. He tried to scream around the fingers in his mouth. Hastur pulled them out dismissively and let him fall, done with him.

He slumped to the ground, burning from the inside. John’s arms caught him.

Hastur stared down at John, kneeling at his feet. “You want your freedom? You think yourself strong enough? Very well, then. Amuse me. Earn it. Take it from me, if you can, child. And if you can’t, then I will take you back along with your little lover.”

There was a breeze that tossed Arthur’s hair, and Hastur was gone. His parting words were a fading echo in their minds. “I will see you again soon.”

In his wake, they knelt in their own blood in the alley and clung to each other while they waited for their bodies to put themselves back together.

“I’m sorry,” John groaned into Arthur’s hair. “I couldn’t stop him. I…oh god, I didn’t remember.”

“What a fucking nightmare,” Arthur gasped against his neck. His body felt filled with acid. “That thing was your sire? No wonder you ran the fuck away and got amnesia.”

John snorted despite himself.

It was such an undignified sound in the wake of their ordeal that Arthur couldn’t stop a fit of giggles. It set John off so that for a bit they sat there and laughed like a pair of idiots, sharing a lovely bout of hysteria.

Once it finally died down, they helped each other to their feet. Arthur took hold of John’s dislocated shoulder and rotated it back into place for him, and they started limping home under each other’s arms. Just two men coming home from the concert in ruined, bloody tuxedos. Fuck.

“What did he mean, ‘earn your freedom?’” Arthur asked.

John shrugged, almost casual enough to hide the fear. “Either he meant I have to prove I’m strong enough to fight him off, or he’s bored and he wants to play with us before he finishes us off.”

Arthur grunted. “Well. We’ll fucking do it, then. Won’t we? We’ll do whatever it takes.”

John glanced at him sidewise. Arthur held his eyes until the doubt turned into determination. “Yeah. We will.”