#chased cameras for a hundred years only to give up before digital cameras were invented

[lowstakesvampires]

einarr and technology

[nekojitachan]

Okay, so this is... IDK what this is. I guess this is the bare bones of my take on The Old Guard with the Monsters/AFTG.

Uhm, warning for people dying/violence, not in very nice ways, some of them (Nicky’s is vaguely tied to canon if you think about it).

*******

Somehow, it didn’t come as a big surprise to Anders when he and his twin came back to life after being killed by the raiders who’d stormed their longhouse, along with everyone else. The strangers had sneered at him and Aron, the ‘living’ vessels of their people’s twin gods, then invoked the name of their own unknown god as they shoved their bronze swords repeatedly into their flesh. Anders had a small knife he’d hidden beneath his robes, but he hadn’t been able to put up much of a fight against trained warriors.

(He’d repeatedly asked to be taught to fight, but Tilda had just laughed and ignored him, too busy soaking up the attention she garnished as the mother of a god’s vessels. Too busy drinking fermented berries and milk to care about how Knut, the elder, mistreated them.)

No, unlike Aron, Anders considered being unable to die (well, to remain dead) a curse instead of another sign of the twin gods’ favor, proof that the Fates took great pleasure in tormenting them. They didn’t age and they healed no matter how badly they were hurt, yet they weren’t immune to starvation, cold temperatures or other things which made life difficult.

They had no choice but to constantly move on, with no family to take them in and strangers suspicious of them if they remained in one place too long. Aron soon grew bitter when he realized that no woman would want him anymore once she continued to age and he didn’t, and it was much the same for Anders if he felt an attraction for another man.

It went on that way for almost eighty years, the two of them isolated from the rest of the world by some terrible curse, until they were driven from sleep one night by the image of a teenaged boy with long, dark auburn hair and pale blue eyes, beaten and bloodied, being held down by two men while an older man with similar pale eyes and red hair cut close to his scalp grinned as he slit the boy’s throat.

Only the boy didn’t remain dead, because the next image showed him alive (and covered in blood) as he stood by a pyre with a woman’s body on it, then as he scavenged through the ransacked sheep farm for anything useful he could find before he took off running. Anders stared at his twin as the images faded away, at the shock in hazel eyes the same color as his own, and knew they shared the same thought as well as appearance; it wasn’t just a dream, and they were no longer alone.

They set out to find the redhead, but the young man proved as elusive as a dream. Anders took to calling him the rabbit, because it felt as if they were chasing such a creature through a forest during the night, fumbling along like a bunch of clumsy fools while it vanished with ease into the thick foliage. The occasional dreams were of little help, because as soon as they figured out the redhead’s location in the dream, he always was gone by the time they finally got there.

Anders was going to cut his tendons a few dozen times when they finally caught up to the flighty bastard.

So six hundred years later, when they had another dream of a tall youth with black hair and green eyes being killed in battle, they wasted no time tracking him down to the island of the Celts. Caoimhín wasn’t a runner like the rabbit and refused to leave until he (along with Anders and Aron) almost ended up as a solstice sacrifice.

Funny how almost being set on fire while alive motivated one to see the world.

Anders began to regret the whole ‘let’s save a fellow immortal’ thing after a decade or two, when Caoimhín proved to be an annoying know-it-all. If the tall bastard wasn’t so good at fighting… he did come in handy whenever Anders managed to ‘upset’ the locals for interfering whenever the assholes were selling slaves (especially children) or mistreating servants – which was often. Aron yelled at him for having the subtlety of a raging bull, but the Persians got on his nerves, as did the Romans, and the Huns and the Franks, and… well, any bastards who thought because they had a bit of land and enough people with pointy weapons that they could boss everyone around.

(Caoimhín said he had a problem with authority. Aron said he was an asshole.)

And through it all, the rabbit. Kept. Running. And. Running.

They finally ran into another immortal who’d been ‘reborn’ a couple decades before when in Damascus, of all places, as Salah ad-Din fought Europe’s Crusaders, and learned that perhaps there was a reason why the rabbit kept his distance. Riko was a viper in human form, and after he did his best to dismember Caoimhín, Anders ‘killed’ him in front of some of Salah ad-Din’s men, leaving them to believe that the other immortal was a djinn when he ‘came back’ to life.

The three of them had no problem abandoning Riko in Damascus, wrapped in iron chains and sealed in a cave.

They kept wandering and fighting what seemed to be hopeless battles, especially with the rise of the Catholic Church. There were times when Anders (now Andrew) wanted to retreat from the world, to find an isolated, empty island and never leave it, but there was Aron (Aaron) and Caoimhín (Kevin), who weren’t quite ready to give up, and a damn rabbit with the clearest blue eyes he’d (sort of) seen who haunted his dreams and taunted him by always being just out of reach.

Then in the 1600s, the three of them dreamed of a new immortal born in the New World, one beaten and starved to death by monks. Unhappy about the thought of the long voyage, Andrew and his fellow ‘monsters’, as he’d come to think of three of them, headed across the Atlantic. It took them almost four years to find Nico, the son of a native woman and a conquistador, who’d been killed because of his attraction to men. The young immortal broke into tears to finally be with his ‘own’ kind, to be safe at last, and was a cheerful presence.

He was even more annoying than Kevin.

They spent a few years wandering the New World, but were drawn back to chasing the rabbit once again; he’d gone to ground in China, leading Andrew to hope that for once he’d stand out and be easy to find, but the damn bastard had developed an almost inhuman skill for learning the local language and blending in wherever he went. Kevin grumbled about him being a damn chameleon, while Aaron wondered if perhaps he’d truly died and they were hunting a ghost.

For some reason… that thought bothered Andrew.

Things carried on as they had before, only it seemed that every time Andrew turned around, the world had changed in some manner. A new country had formed, an old government had been overthrown, a new religion had been invented, yet another senseless war broke out, someone created an invention that upended things in a startling way…. He still remembered how for so long everyone had used bronze swords until someone had figured out how to smelt iron, how there’d only been longhouses and small farms until all of a sudden towns and then cities began to appear.

Change was inevitable, as was the fact that humans would twist some of those changes into something bad.

Still, he never thought that those changes would lead to things that would enable him and his monsters to travel the world in days (and then hours) instead of months or weeks, that wars would break out that spanned continents and could destroy entire cities in minutes. The four of them saved what they could, but soon it became impossible to keep up, not just because there were so many lives in danger and so much being destroyed, but because they could no longer fade into the shadows with ease with things like digital records and cameras in existence.

They learned as much as they could about modern technology; Nico (Nicky) and Aaron took to social media without any problems, while Andrew and Kevin picked up some hacking skills. They bought the best fake IDs possible and did everything they could to leave no trace online.

Yet they couldn’t stay in one place very long, not when they kept working, when they used the skills they’d honed over centuries to help people in need. Which was why they were traveling from France to England via the Chunnel; Andrew refused to give up his customized Maserati just yet, so they’d take the car with them on the train.

They didn’t expect any issue with their papers, especially since they’d used them a few days ago, so it was a surprise when a customs official in Calais frowned when he scanned Aaron’s while the machine beeped several times. Then the same thing happened with Nicky’s. Andrew tensed and tugged the cap on his head further down as he prepared to fight while Kevin did the same; their weapons were hidden in the special compartment in the Maserati, but they were good at improvising.

However, before they could react more than that, a familiar voice called out in French to the customs officials, one Andrew recognized with ease from his dreams over the last three millennia; the rabbit, dressed in a customs uniform, his dark auburn hair pulled back in a ponytail that trailed just past his shoulders, tapped the official who held Aaron’s documents and said he’d check it out, that there was an issue with the scanners. He purposely didn’t look at any of them as he did something to the scanner then ran the passport again, which beeped once in an ‘all clear’. Then he went to do the same for Nicky’s as the fool gaped at him.

As soon as Andrew was cleared, he stalked after his quarry, who to be fair didn’t try to run (for once). He grabbed the other immortal by the wrist and spun him around, part of him noticing that the rabbit was only a couple inches taller (which was a welcome change, considering how for the last few centuries, everyone towered over him). About to curse the bastard out for leading him on a merry chase for over three. Fucking. Millennia, he found himself stunned silent when the rabbit smiled.

(Maybe he should have considered what would happen when he finally caught the redhead.)

*******

Yes, Andrew, what does happen next???

I’ve never taken the Chunnel, so sorry if I messed something up there (I wrote what I did to fit the story). It’s a bit vague, but the twins are Scandinavian Bronze age, Neil is England Bronze Age (around Middle Bronze Age), Kevin is Ireland @ 600 BC, and Nicky is Mexico @ 1600′s. I debated having Andrew and Aaron separated, until I saw the twin gods thing. They were together, but per Tilda’s crappy parenting, they had a very rough childhood with Andrew protecting Aaron.

Mary raised Neil (Ram) to be cautious/wary of strangers. I’m thinking Nathan was a sea raider and... well, he came back years later and that time, he wiped out the farm. Neil heeded his mother’s lesson a little too well, but over time he finally came to learn that Andrew and the others weren’t all bad and finally stepped in to help them (and in a way, protected his own hide).