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nightmaretist · 1 year ago

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TIMING: Pre-goo PARTIES: Emilio @mortemoppetere & Inge @nightmaretist LOCATION: A bar that isn't the Wormhole SUMMARY: A drunk Emilio confronts Inge at a bar, asking if his mother really tried to kill her. A tense conversation follows that exposes both their weaknesses. CONTENT WARNINGS: Parental and child death, abuse, suicide ideation, terminal illness, alcoholism

Everything felt heavy. Everything had felt heavy since the van, since he found Ariadne stuffed in the back and let her out, since he waited for Rhett afterwards. The way his brother had looked at him was still fresh in Emilio’s mind, the anger and the disappointment. The way he’d called him soft, the way the word still made his heart pound and his palms sweat decades after it got him locked in the shed for twelve hours straight with whatever undead things his mother could find and nothing more than a wooden stake in his arsenal.

He wasn’t afraid of Rhett. He wasn’t afraid of Rhett because he wasn’t afraid of his mother, either, because he loved them and they loved him and it wasn’t their fault that he was like this, whatever like this meant. He wasn’t afraid of Rhett, but he couldn’t agree with him here. He wouldn’t stand back and let his brother hurt people who didn’t need hurting, even if that did earn him that look. Even if it did make him soft, even if soft was the worst thing he could possibly be.

But everything still felt heavy.

So he did what he always did when things felt wrong and bad, when he felt wrong and bad. He went to a goddamn bar.

The bartender was already eyeing him warily, and while Emilio didn’t remember any past experiences with the guy, he figured he must have had some. Too drunk to remember it, probably. It was a little funny. He was on his third glass of whiskey now, and still not numb enough. Maybe the fourth would fill the pit in his stomach, or the fifth. Maybe something would.

A familiar shiver crawled up his spine, and he glanced around. Something undead was… there. A familiar face. She’d recognized him, last time. Knew his mother, had a scar to prove it. He hadn’t known what she was until he’d seen her talking about dogs biting her online, but at that point, it wasn’t hard to guess. Undead, chased by dogs… Mare was a safe bet. Like Ariadne.

With less whiskey in his system, he probably would have just left. But he’d had just enough to be bold, so he picked up his glass and he crossed the bar on unsteady legs. He slid into the seat across from her, he propped his chin on his elbow. “Did my mom really try to kill you?”

—

Inge deeply enjoyed being undead for the most part. Downsides were hard to find, if you asked her, and the upsides were everywhere — from the way her body was frozen in time as others grew hunched and gray and wrinkled to her ability to cross the astral plane to wherever she wanted. But this, this inability to get properly intoxicated without spending copious amounts, was grating.

But she could manage, when she wanted to. So many of the glasses of wine consumed were sipped because of the taste, but there were times where she drank more. Where she wanted to feel like her mind was swimming, floating. Body lighter.

Sometimes when she drank, she’d cry. It wasn’t something Inge did often, but there were times where getting herself to a place of intoxication would open the floodgates and make the waterworks work overtime. Most of the time, she didn’t even know why she was crying — she just did. Dramatically weeping as she painted, sometimes faces from her past and sometimes the monsters Sanne had once conjured for her and sometimes just complete abstraction.

Tonight, she was in a sour mood. She wished for giddiness, excitement over the next semester and her upcoming art show — but something in her was swirling darkly. Inge had half a mind to return to the astral, where she had been spending a fair amount of her nights just moving around, removed from her earthly body that had gained yet another wound.

So here she was, glowering as she sipped from a vodka cranberry, the bandages around her arm bothering her. She wanted to be alone, and if not alone, to at least meet someone she could fuck without thinking about it.

In stead, there he was. The Cortez hunter. Hardly sober, from the way he stumbled towards her. Well, neither was she, mind slightly swimming in warm tipsiness. Inge’s muscles tensed, then her face turned into a wince because many things hurt when it came to the arm the zombie had taken a bite out of.

She hoped he didn’t think the wince was at his question, though it might as well have been with the way it made unease spread through her. “Tried to, yes.” Her good arm moved, pulling at the collar of her shirt, showing off the healed, fading scar. “Right there. She should’ve sharpened her fucking axe.” She drained her glass, gave him a look that could be one of annoyance. A defense mechanism to combat her feelings of worry. “So what, you want to try it as well?”

—

There was a scar at her throat. As she pulled her collar down, his eyes were drawn to it. He tried to imagine that he could tell what kind of blade was used, tried to pretend he could see it in his mind’s eye somewhere in his mother’s arsenal of weapons, but a scar was only a scar. He felt no more connection to his mother’s ghost through the scar on the mare’s throat than he did through the ones she’d put onto his own body.

Still, he stared. He traced it carefully with his eyes, the length of it. Did it look more like the one on his stomach, where Elena had slashed him when he was eight and too slow to avoid her blade in a training session? Or was it closer to the one on his chest she’d given him at thirteen, when he asked the wrong question at the wrong time in the wrong way?

Emilio had earned those scars, he knew. He wouldn’t have gotten them if he had been faster, or smarter, or better. But had this mare earned hers? Had Ariadne earned the mental torment Rhett had put her through? It was Emilio’s actions that had littered his body with scars from blades held by both strangers and people he’d loved, but neither Ariadne nor this mare could be blamed for their own deaths, for the way they’d died incorrectly. As a child, he’d believed the unnaturalness was something to be punished. But now? He hadn’t been sure of it in years. The uncertainty would damn him, he thought. The uncertainty and everything else that came with it.

She spoke, and his eyes darted up from her throat to her face, meeting hers carefully. She answered a question he hadn’t asked; it was an ax his mother had used when she’d tried to kill her. (She’d thrown one at him once, too. He still remembered the way it spun in the air, the way he’d ducked just in time. He’d felt the breeze of it as it passed, but she’d known he’d be quick enough, hadn’t she? She must have known.)

His eyes continued to study hers, the question she asked bouncing around in his chest. You want to try it as well? Did he? Was this his mother’s legacy, then? A scar on a stranger’s throat that looked so much like the ones Emilio sported given to him by the same hands? She drained her glass, and he followed suit. He pretended the burn of the whiskey in his throat still made him feel something, pretended it helped the way he’d always tried to convince himself it would. The numbness it provided wasn’t quite enough to fight off the tightness he felt. Nothing ever was.

“I don’t know,” he admitted after a too-long pause, more honest than he usually was. “I don’t think so.” Was she hurting anyone? It was hard to say. Mares had always seemed less harmful to him than other undead. They caused damage, sure, but not usually the physical kind. For a man who had nightmares any time he closed his eyes, it was difficult to condemn a thing for causing them. The nightmares were there anyway. It wasn’t like a vampire, who drained you of blood that wouldn’t have spilled without their fangs breaking the skin. It wasn’t like a zombie, either, who would tear flesh off your body and swallow it whole. Mental anguish, to Emilio, was so much less tangible. He didn’t quite understand it.

Javier was bartending tonight. He came over, refilled Emilio’s glass with a dubious look. Don’t cause any trouble, the look warned. I can’t keep bailing you out of this shit. Emilio only grit his teeth in response. He didn’t know if he wanted to be bailed out. He didn’t know if he ever had. “When did it happen?” Why did it matter? What did the timing matter? What did anything? He didn’t know anymore. There was so much he didn’t know anymore.

—

The last time she had seen the other, it had been her who approached him. She had asked pressing questions, and even though she had hardly won that social interaction (as far was winning them went), she had at least felt a semblance of control. Now, however, Inge felt almost backed into a corner. Staring at those eyes that looked so familiar to the ones who’d looked at her with intention to kill as he admitted to not being sure whether he’d kill her or not.

That response elicited a laugh. It was a ridiculous answer, one that didn’t fit with her idea of what hunters were and what hunters did. Especially slayers. Either they moved to kill without any thought, or they just moved on, more pressed to kill other undead and thinking her not quite as harmless as those who consumed literal parts of others. Inge disagreed with the notion that somehow mares were less dangerous and harmless. What did bodily harm matter, in the long run? Wasn’t it terror, anxiety and trauma that undid people most? It was the memory of that zombie clenching her jaw around her arm that bothered her most, not the pain or the bandages.

The same went for the memory of Elena Cortez. The scar bothered her some days, but most days it was proof of survival, worn proudly like a pearl necklace. But the memory of it, that ice cold feeling of terror that came with thinking death was coming for you, finally and definitively, that had stuck with her. That was the mark on her soul, more than whatever damage her axe swinging (and missing) had done. That was why she was wary now, keeping herself at a distance from the other so he couldn’t move to grab her wrist to ground her. She wondered if he carried a bright light with him. Wondered if his admission of not knowing was just a game.

Everything was a game to her, until it wasn’t. This didn’t feel like it would be fun.

Never mind the fact that this man knew that Rhett, well enough to post a playful poll between himself and the other. His bright lights had caused a head ache to simmer for days, making her feel more weak and mortal than she had in years. Inge was tired of this place and its hunters. Was tired of feeling an emotion she had banished from herself. Even now she continued to tell herself she wasn’t afraid. She was uncomfortable. Healthily wary. Suspicious. Attempting to sound amused, demeaning, volatile. Trying to seem as if she wasn’t thinking about running away, disappearing into the astral with everyone around them there to witness a woman popping into nothingness.

“You don’t know,” she repeated, still sounding amused. But she wasn’t. She wanted a no or even a yes. Not a Cortez sitting across from her who seemed to still be making up his mind about her. “Grandiose. Do let me know when you’ve made up your mind, won’t you?” Her voice was bitter, biting. She wished she was a vampire or zombie, with the jaw-strength or teeth-sharpness to do damage with her mouth not just through words. All she had was imagination and stories, though. And she wasn’t keen on giving this man nightmares.

She gestured to the bartender to refill her own glass as well, saying that he could, “Add it to his tab,” as if she wanted to make him repay for something. Last time she’d bought his drink while accosting him, anyway. Seemed only fair. “Somewhere in the late nineties. You must’ve been a wee, annoying little teen, hm?” Inge took another sip from her drink. “Still young, mummy off to try and kill some big monsters. What a life.”

—

She was laughing, but there was something distinctly hollow to it, and Emilio couldn’t help but wonder if she was afraid of him. Years ago, he would have relished in the thought. Even months ago, he’d liked it more than he did lately. Being able to make other people afraid used to make him feel stronger than he was, like he was still good for something. And it was still the case, for some people. He couldn’t save his daughter, couldn’t bring her back, but he could terrify the monsters that had taken her from him. He could become the monster in someone else’s closet, and it would make him feel better for a little while. It would make him feel like he had some kind of power, even when he knew that he was only ever built to fall.

But lately, he couldn’t stop thinking about Ariadne. About the way she’d looked at him when he’d pulled open that van, about the fear in her eyes. It hadn’t made him feel powerful then, hadn’t made him feel strong. If anything, it made him nauseous. It sent him back to the street outside his apartment in Worm Row, to the vampire Zane had let him kill and to the words it had said before it died. I heard she was terrified. I heard she died screaming.

Being scary didn’t make him feel quite so proud anymore.

He’d long since stopped trying to use his past to excuse his present. Some of what he did was necessary, to be sure. Vampires and zombies and other undead things couldn’t exactly be punished within the laws of a system built by humans who didn’t know they existed at all. If you put a zombie in a jail cell, you’d have a hoard by the time the week was over. If you stuck a vampire in solitary confinement, it’d revert to a spawn and make a meal of the first guard who came too close. If you tried to lock up a mare in a prison built for beating hearts, it’d escape before morning. There were things that needed killing, and Emilio did that.

But there were things that didn’t need killing, and he killed those, too.

He didn’t have it in him to forgive anyone who’d been involved with that massacre in Mexico. He couldn’t let it go, even if some of the people involved regretted it, even if they turned over new leaves. Everyone there had to die. He didn’t even exclude himself from that number. But he knew that this mare had done nothing to earn his mother’s wrath. He knew that Elena hadn’t tried to kill her for some greater good, or even for vengeance. And he didn’t know how he felt about that, even now. Years after his mother was gone, Emilio still didn’t know how to think that she might have been wrong about something without the guilt crawling up the back of his throat and threatening to suffocate him. She was a good person. She had to have been a good person. He couldn’t conceptualize anything else.

The mare was talking, but she was using words Emilio didn’t understand and it was easy to tune her out for a moment. He didn’t know if he wanted to kill her or not, and there was something heavy about the not knowing that he didn’t want to share. Part of him wished she’d attack him and make the decision for him. Come at him with a knife, find him in his dreams, do something to make things black and white the way he liked for them to be. But she just sat there at the bar, just told Javi to put her drink on his tab. The bartender glanced to Emilio in question, and the detective shrugged. Do whatever, he thought, as if Javi might be able to read his mind. Just do whatever.

The bartender hesitated a moment longer before shooting Emilio one last look and leaving to tend to other customers, and Emilio stared at his glass. He wished he hadn’t come over here now, but he was too stubborn to leave. “Wasn’t a teenager,” he said, as if the clarification mattered. “In the nineties. Was born in 1989.” But that wasn’t all, was it? He wasn’t a teenager in the nineties, because to call him a teenager was to imply that he was something human and he wasn’t. He was a tool to be used, a knife in the holster of the same woman who’d left that scar on the mare’s throat. His own scars itched, as if recognizing one put on a stranger by the same hand that had birthed so many of them. Emilio swallowed more whiskey. “I was killing monsters, too. Wasn’t like she left me at home doing nothing.”

—

She wondered what kind of game this was. If he was trying to do what she had failed to last time, show up to try and unnerve and gain the upperhand. If he wanted to just impose his presence onto her, to let her know that he remembered her, that he could find her, that he could speak to her like this but that, perhaps, he could do something worse as well. Inge tried to figure out what motive lied underneath the way he sat here now, looked at her and spoke of the monsters he’d apparently been killing before he even was a teenager.

She also wondered if perhaps there was no game at all, which somehow was all the more disturbing. Here was a man who had been raised to kill what he called monsters, sitting across her from a bar and asking about his mommy while inebriated. It was human, to do such a thing — human in all its awkwardness. Maybe he was the way she tended to be when she’d drank too much, reflective and nostalgic upon a life marred with things like regret and shame. Maybe he wasn’t just here to flex his hunter muscles and make her wary of every movement he made, but just because there wasn’t really anyone else to talk to.

She’d prefer it if he’d whip out some kind of weapon almost, or if he’d inch closer, push her into a physical corner and let her smell the alcohol on his breath. Inge didn’t much care about expressions of the human condition, after all, not in herself and especially not in people she thought should be enemies. She wanted him to fuck off, to drown in his whiskey elsewhere.

Alas. He was there. She was putting her scars on display while she waited for another drink to be brought around. She continued eyeing him, waiting still for some kind of move of action. Maybe he is faking being inebriated, maybe he just wants you to let down your guard before striking, maybe he is playing you, lulling you into a sense of safety by annoying you only to take advantage of it. Inge felt her skin itch, covered her scar up again as she told her mind to behave, to stop circling around itself again and again and again, bringing up maybes and hypotheticals as if it was its hobby.

At last her drink came, and she was quick to take a sip before even bothering to respond. Inge wanted to quell those voices in her mind, who were no clamoring that she shouldn’t be drinking this much with a hunter across from you. Whatever. If he wanted to kill her, he surely wouldn’t do it at a bar where he seemed to know the staff. (Or maybe he knew the staff because he helped them with their undead problems.) (She was growing agitated now, with the way her mind kept tacking on maybes.)

“Oh, you look way older than that.” Spewing an insult was easy enough. “Like you were born in at least the mid-seventies.” This man wasn’t even forty yet? That seemed not entirely realistic. If she was feeling more playful, she’d ask him for ID to proof his supposed youth. She didn’t want to, though. It was ironic, though, that he was around the same age she’d been when she was immortalized in this body.

If anything, she thought she looked better. A mildly soothing thought.

She huffed. “Great. So mommy went off to kill ‘monsters’,” she said this using air quotes, “And you stayed back to kill other, smaller ones? Born with a knife in your hand, huh? Yikes.” Inge didn’t pity hunters, especially those that clung to their ideologies. “Why’d you wanna know, anyway? She’s dead. I’m not. You’re not. So … what now? You’re gonna just sit here, or?” Why are you provoking him. She took another sip from her drink. “I know you know that Rhett guy. Is he here, somewhere?”

—

The silence was suffocating, but maybe it was supposed to be. The whole conversation, after all, was an unnatural thing. The two of them were designed to kill one another, built to rip each other to shreds until one or both of them were dead. They had scars given to them by the same long dead woman, but Emilio swore there was a difference between the thin white line on her throat and the ones crisscrossing every inch of his body. Couldn’t you tell just by looking that the scars his mother had left him with had been carved into him with love? Wasn’t there something about them that made it obvious that the intent behind them had never been to hurt, but to teach? They were lessons. They were supposed to be lessons. Didn’t that make them look different, somehow, than the one on the mare’s throat that had been just a stroke short of finishing the job?

She spoke, but somehow her words felt just as heavy as the silence they filled, like there was always going to be a weight here. Maybe neither of them could exist without it. Maybe things meant to kill one another could never exist in the same space without some kind of consequence. He thought of Ariadne, of Metzli, of Zane. Did it feel this way with all of them, too? Was it her still heart that made the silence heavy, or was it the fact that she’d known his mother? What was weighing them down, exactly — the silence, or the ghost that lurked beneath it?

He huffed a dry laugh at her comment. You look way older than that. He felt older than that, felt weary and world-worn. By human standards, 34 was young. A man at the start of his life, more than half of it stretching out in front of him. But for a hunter? He was already years past the expiration date, already older than he ever should have been. He was 34, but he felt 80. He felt old. He felt dead already.

“Wasn’t,” he said needlessly, the single word hanging from his tongue just as heavily as her statement had been. Maybe he seemed older than he was because he’d skipped childhood, been born half-grown. Hunters didn’t get to be children; he knew that better than anyone. He’d never been a child, and neither had Flora. Neither had Jaime or Victor or Rosa or Edgar or any of them. Had his mother, he wondered? It was almost laughable to ask. He knew the answer. He always had.

“Not smaller,” he replied, and he wasn’t sure why he was indulging her. Maybe it was the alcohol loosening his lips, or maybe he just wanted to say it, somehow. He was still trying to make sense of it himself, most days, and it was so much easier to unpack things by saying them aloud. “Not always. There aren’t… a lot of small undead things. Everything is big.” He smiled wryly. “Everything wants to kill you.” Plenty of his scars hadn’t come from Elena, after all. There were ones he’d earned during the time period they were discussing now, ones that had been carved into him in Wicked’s Rest. His leg was a mess of scar tissue, so much of it that there was barely any unmarred skin to speak of at all. Everything wanted to kill him but, so far, nothing had.

He still wasn’t sure if that was a good thing.

The comment about being born with a knife in his hand ached in a way he couldn’t put his finger on, so he didn’t acknowledge it. His grip tightened on his glass as she mentioned his mother being dead, the cup creaking threateningly until he forced himself to loosen it a little. “Not true,” he replied, voice a quiet mumble. “She’s dead, and so are you. So are we.” The mare’s heart wasn’t beating, and Emilio felt more like a ghost than a man.

And then, she mentioned Rhett, and he tensed. His heart was in his throat, and he tried to separate his brother from the man outside the van who’d looked so angry. “You’re the other mare,” he murmured, the realization settling in. “The one he… In the bunker.” He’d mentioned it, when he’d told Emilio about Ariadne. Emilio had forgotten it, almost, in all the stress of what came after. It was hard to forget it now, with the truth sitting so tangibly beside him. He felt a little sick. “He isn’t here. Not sure he wants to be around me.” Not sure I want to be around him, he added silently, though it felt too wrong to say aloud.

—

Indoctrination was an ugly thing, Inge understood that. She understood too, that plenty of hunters were pushed into their positions out of some twisted ideology that went back generations, that they were born into a role and grew into it — but that didn’t mean she had any patience for it. The way he spoke, sitting across from her as she felt that undeniable feeling of paranoia spread through her undead body, it made her feel not only sick in a way, but angry.

Everything wants to kill you, he said. Her eyes rolled, her body grew a little slack as a feeling of righteousness spread through her. Inge wasn’t innocent, had claimed some lives, though not more than five and never out of maliciousness or a desire to kill. She had little interest in death, after all! It was finite and dull, didn’t offer the opportunities that life did. There had been an accidental killing, in her earlier years as a mare, where she’d gone too far — but luckily her sleeper had remained dead, and not risen again. There had been defensive moves, where it had been her to deliver the final blow rather than the inexperienced hunter on her trail. But never out of maliciousness, never out of some ideology her parents had fed her, never just because.

And the Cortezes? Well, there was a reason they were a notorious slayer family. In the years she’s spent in Mexico, she’d heard that name aplenty and then, eventually, had come across one of the members of that family. How many people had Elena killed, before she had tried to kill Inge? How many more had followed? And more importantly right now, how many people had this Emilio killed? How much undead blood had he shed in Wicked’s Rest?

She wondered if she was next, still. He had not produced a weapon, just spoke the way a sad, old man might — which was probably why she had presumed him to be much older than he was. Inge felt no pity. She had been raised with prejudice, grown up in a time where it was all justified and normalized in the name of God and community. But she had let it go, had she not? She had grown past the beliefs her parents had held until they had died. And maybe it was different, because the ideals she was raised with were more widely challenged, but Inge didn’t care to see any kind of nuance when it came to hunters.

“Is that what she told you? That they’re always out to kill you?” Her eyebrows raised, her tone a little more certain as she continued on. “Because I’m not out there murdering people. Sure, I give some nightmares. Scare people. People get scared anyway, nightmares happen anyway.” At least the nightmares she gave were worthwhile, something of a different and higher level. “Some of them, sure. They kill. Plenty of them just consume what they need to remain alive, the same way every other soul on this planet does.” She gestured to his drink, took a sip of her own. She didn’t say that she found it hard to care, at this point, if her fellow undead did kill. Just because it wasn’t of her personal interest, didn’t mean she deeply disapproved, after all. To say that, was to step off the moral high horse she was enjoying.

She gave him a look, unimpressed. “You’re alive. I’m alive. Maybe not by the standards of … what, modern medicine? Or your mother’s opinions. Just because I don’t have a heartbeat, or don’t age, I’m not alive? I laugh and love and fuck and create, just as others do. I live, even as someone who’s undead. If you were to chop my head off, you’d be killing me. So.” Was that how they justified it? Did they not think it murder because the victim wasn’t alive by their standards. “Drop the edgy bullshit. You’re alive. “

Inge narrowed her eyes at the hunter. So they had talked about her. What had the other hunter told him? How she’d faded in and out of consciousness, for the first time in decades experiencing what it was like to not be awake? The way she’d spat up blood? The look on her face darkened, her anger not just that righteous kind, that could feel so good.

“Ah. You talk to him about it? Real nice.” Had he played any role in what had happened with Ariadne? Her gaze grew darker, somewhat venomous. She wanted to throttle him. “That’s really nice. What, did you have a nice catch-up about the murders and tortures you both did? So nice.” She let out a sound of amusement, but it sounded bitter. “Ah. Trouble in paradise?”

—

The thing was, Emilio knew that not every supernatural being was out to kill. It was why he’d shifted his morality after the massacre, why he’d become this person his own brother no longer recognized. Take out the guilty, and leave the ones who aren’t hurting anyone alone. You made more of a difference that way, saved more people. And wasn’t that what they were supposed to be doing? Wasn’t that the point of hunters?

(His mother would say no. He knew that. She’d talked a lot about their duty as hunters, but the reality of her views had always been clear. The point of hunters was to die. That was what his father had done, what Victor had done, what he was supposed to do. The fact that he hadn’t was probably just another thing she’d add to the list of ways he’d disappointed her if she were still alive.)

Still, even with the knowing, the paranoia still crept up his throat and stole the breath from his lungs. There were days where he swore everyone he passed on the street was planning on sticking a knife in his gut, days where even his neighbors seemed like people who were probably plotting against him. There were mornings where he sat in his apartment with a knife gripped so tightly in his hand that his knuckles ached, just waiting for some unknown force to come through the door and take him out. It consumed him, sometimes. Made his heart beat fast and his eyes dart to every empty corner in anticipation.

It was a stupid fear. Not just because it was irrational, but because Emilio didn’t really care if he died. Most days, he wanted it. But his heart beat too fast, anyway. His hand gripped that knife, anyway. He was angry anyway. He didn’t know how to stop, didn’t know how to swallow it or turn it into anything useful. All he could do was sit with it, wait for the wave to recede so he could try to get a gasp of air before the next one came crashing down on his head.

“I know you’re not,” he snapped, letting the anger warm him again. “Why do you think I haven’t finished the goddamn job?” It was saying too much, maybe. It was dangerously close to a confession, to laying the morality he tended to keep well-hidden among strangers on the table in front of someone who certainly wouldn’t mind if someone took his head off for it. A hunter with a heart was a dangerous thing to be. It put you on the wrong end of a lot of people. Supernatural beings who were all too happy to kill someone for the blood in their veins, regardless of their actions. Other hunters who saw anything less than indiscriminate killing as a betrayal of the code. Remnants of families who’d been close to the Cortezes who might want to protect the legacy of a family who’d once been a giant in the world of hunters.

Saying too much was like pouring blood into a shark tank and taking a swim, but Emilio was tired. Tired of her, of Rhett, of Teagan, of everyone who seemed to think they had a better idea of who Emilio ought to be than Emilio himself.

She pointed to the drink in his hand, and he hated the comparison. It wasn’t the same; she had to know that. Even if the nightmares she created to survive didn’t physically hurt anyone, they still had a negative effect on people. The only person Emilio hurt with his drinking was Emilio, and he thought he probably deserved it. He thought that might be the only thing he and the mare would ever agree about.

“You died,” he pointed out flatly. “In your sleep, fuck knows how long ago. Your heart doesn’t beat, you don’t have a pulse. You’re dead.” Even if he wasn’t sure of much else anymore, he was still certain of that. What was dead was dead, and what was alive was alive. There was no way around it, no way to deny it. She could say that drinking and laughing and fucking made her alive, but it didn’t. Emilio knew, because he did all of those things, too. He drank too much, he told jokes no one else thought were funny, he fucked anyone who’d give him a distraction from the shit in his head, and he still wasn’t alive in any kind of way that mattered. The best parts of both of them died somewhere else, some time ago.

She spoke about Rhett, and Emilio was torn between the old instinct to defend his brother and the harsh knowledge that he couldn’t. He didn’t agree with anything Rhett was doing anymore, couldn’t even bring himself to find his brother in the right for going after this mare. She’d given him nightmares, he told Emilio, and Emilio might have been able to excuse him killing her for that. He remembered the experiences he’d had with mares — too many now, if he was being honest. He knew the way it settled in your skull, left you strangled even if it wasn’t in a way that was physical. He didn’t know what Rhett had seen, but if it was comparable to Emilio’s experiences — Flora’s bloody corpse, Juliana’s sharp disappointment — he could understand wanting to kill someone for causing it.

But he couldn’t justify the methods. Emilio had partaken in torture, had done it plenty, but it seemed different here. He’d tortured vampires who had information he wanted, tortured ones who’d bragged to their undead friends about the bodies they’d left on a street in Mexico, and he didn’t regret that. But he wasn’t sure this was on the same level. If Rhett had just chopped the mare’s head off and called it a day, Emilio would have felt differently. But he hadn’t. The whole fucking problem was that he hadn’t.

“Something like that,” he said tightly, not sure which part he was responding to. He didn’t want to admit that she was right about the ‘trouble’ between Emilio and his brother, didn’t want to give her an inch lest she take a mile. He shouldn’t have come over here at all. He knew that now. It wasn’t doing anything for him, wasn’t even the kind of self destruction that might make him feel better for a moment. It only ached.

—

Why hadn’t he killed her yet? That question circled around her head on a loop, growing louder as he posed it himself. Since their initial meeting, that disastrous event in the Wormhole, she’d been tense with a kind of anticipation to see him again, looking even more like his mother while brandishing some kind of weapon. But he had not shown up, not until now, and all he brandished was the alcohol that he clung to like a lifeline. He hadn’t killed her, but what was stopping him from doing it, still? Was this not just a threat? Inge tilted up her head, a rejection of the worry in her body.

But she felt it still. She was exposed here, in this town. A woman who didn’t just walk into the traps laid for her, but was found in the quiet of the evening. It could not be coincidence, that he was here when she was. Even if he was too inebriated, perhaps, for a fight. He had found her and was speaking of not-killing her as if it was something graceful. A kindness. As if it wasn’t the bare minimum! As if they wouldn’t both be better off with him away from her. No, this was purposeful, driving her into a corner, reminding her that she could and would be found. That though he hadn’t killed her, he still might.

It was no comfort. It was manipulation. A slayer with a conscience was beyond her understanding, a slayer unwilling to kill someone like her was not something that could exist. Especially when his existence was so offensive, his face so familiar to one of those who had nearly ended her. Her scar itched, if it even could, and if it couldn’t, it was just a trick of the mind that she blamed him for, too. He was imposing on her, she thought, waving his presence in this town, in this bar, at this table in her face. Inge downed her drink, to drown the worry, but it lurched. You shouldn’t be drinking.

“I don’t know, you tell me. Why haven’t you? Are you waiting for the right moment? Will you follow me home after this, do it in some alley? In the bathroom, here? Will you wait for it to be day, so you have the upper hand, and I cannot evade you as easily? Why haven’t you? Because you trust me when I say that I don’t kill?” She let out another laugh, still not amused. This wasn’t funny — it was simply ludicrous. It was transparent. He was planning something, had to be. “And I should trust you when you say that you won’t kill me? I’m not so foolish and I don’t think you are, either. Or what, am I just supposed to believe you’re some kind of pacifist? Practicing a personal philosophy of live and let live? Don’t — don’t make me laugh.”

That was how she’d prefer to see it, though. Inge approached life in that way, most of the time, not invading people’s personal business and expecting them to do the same to her. She did what she had to to stay alive and so did others. Hunters, of course, they went against that — built their livelihood on attempting to chase down certain species, as if there wasn’t more to life. As if they didn’t have a choice in the matter, even. She and her fellow undead needed to consume to live, but hunters? Well, they could just walk away, could they not?

She threw her hands in the air, animated in her speech and movements as she tended to do when emotional. Because she was, her worry and paranoia bringing out anything that lived within her. “I died and came back. I died and yet I live. I have seen people die, and that is not what happened to me — we can argue about semantics forever, but the point remains! I am not dead, not the way the actual dead are.” Her mind returned to where it always did, at some point: Vera. Vera was dead. Vera had died, life seeping out of her as disease took over her entire body. Vera was still and stiff and not much more besides bones now, most likely. “To equate my state of being to the corpses in a morgue, to the people you and I have both presumably lost — that’s bullshit. Screw that.” It was offensive.

Inge felt herself grow more and more agitated, the image of Emilio and Rhett huddling together and smirking filling her mind. He refused to let up, just confirmed her words to be true even if he didn’t say which part, which to her meant it was all of it. And though he had said that the other hunter wasn’t here, her eyes still flicked around the bar, wide and white before landing back on the slayer. “Well, I hope you enjoyed his little stories, ‘cause that’s all he’s gonna get, yeah?”

She didn’t want to leave Wicked’s Rest, it was something she had realized and subsequently admitted to herself, but she felt cornered again, overrun by that instinct that she should go. Inge didn’t want to die, not the proper and definitive way. She didn’t want to die at the hands of this man or Rhett, or any other fucker that ran around this town making things more complicated for her kind. But if this entire interaction proved anything, it was that she wasn’t in any shape to fight a hunter — even verbally seemed to be losing the thread. “No follow-up, no second visits to his bunker, none of that shit, he just got lucky that one time.” She was convincing herself now, that she was not afraid. Not of continuation, of repercussion, of the man in front of her. She created fear, didn’t experience it. “I figure you’re better off without him anyway, what a sadist and boring prick. Jesus, like, get a life. Yeah? You and him both.”

—

There was something familiar about the way she spoke, though it was difficult to put his finger on it at first. Blame it on the alcohol thrumming through him, or on the grief that never left him, or on the confusing swirl of feelings that had been building stormclouds in his chest since the day he’d let that kid out of Rhett’s van. Blame it on whatever you like, but it still took him a moment to understand why her words and her tone all felt like some funhouse mirror version of things he’d heard before. When it clicked, he wanted to laugh, just a little. He wanted to point it out to her, even knowing she’d probably kill him for it. Maybe because he knew that. But it was a funny realization to come to, a painfully honest thing to think.

She reminded him of his mother.

Not what she was saying, but how she was saying it. The black and white way of it, the idea that people — hunters for her, undead for his mother — could only ever be one thing, that them being anything outside of it was preposterous and entirely unheard of. The paranoia, the certainty that he was going to kill her and was only biding his time as he waited for the perfect moment to do so… Wasn’t this how his mother had spoken of the undead in all the years she’d spent training him to fight them? It isn’t if, it’s when. Some of them are smart, you know. They’ll wait and kill you later. They’ll tell you pretty words first. But they will kill you. This family has no room for anyone who won’t kill them first. Do you understand? You kill them first, or you let them kill you and we’ll be better off.

He wondered, absently, if this meant that he needed to be worried about her killing him. It was a faint thought, one he viewed with more mild interest than legitimate fear. He’d stared down the barrel of many a gun with the same expression — not fear, but something else. Quiet anticipation, maybe. Faint desire, if he was being more honest. She might kill him. He might want her to. And that was kind of funny, too, wasn’t it?

Yeah, all right. He was drunk.

He waited until she was done speaking, half-listening to the unfamiliar familiarity in her words as he stared down into his glass of whiskey. When she finished, he shrugged. “Don’t trust anyone,” he admitted. “Watch the papers. No mare deaths in town lately. Doesn’t mean you’re not going out with a knife and cutting throats, I guess, but can always… go across that bridge later.” This was how he hunted, these days; he studied people. He found the ones who needed killing, and he killed them. And he left the rest alone, even if his mother’s voice in his head still made him feel like shit about it, sometimes. He knew he’d feel like shit if he listened to that voice, too, so what was the point of it?

“Not a pacifist.” That wasn’t a lie he’d even pretend he wanted to tell. He understood violence better than he understood anything, and she knew that. His mother had, too. That was why she’d done the things she’d done, hadn’t she? Not out of cruelty, but because it was the only thing Emilio understood. How else would she have taught him anything? “Just… Do what needs doing. And don’t do what doesn’t.” She wouldn’t believe it, he knew; had something undead said the same thing to his mother, Elena wouldn’t have believed it, either. But it was still a thing worth saying. For himself, maybe, if no one else.

He considered what she said, shrugging a shoulder. Dead was dead, Emilio thought. A corpse was a corpse, even when it had a voice to insist it was something more. A ghost was a ghost, even with a heartbeat. She’d died in her sleep. He’d died in Mexico. No amount of arguing would change any of that. “Think what you want to think, then. It doesn’t matter.” A dead thing that didn’t know it was dead was a thing that couldn’t be reasoned with. She was someone who couldn’t be reasoned with. Another way she was like Elena. He wondered if she knew.

She insisted Rhett would get nothing more from her and, privately, Emilio hoped she was right. He hoped his brother would… change the way he had changed, hoped they could rebuild this thing between them, but he didn’t think it was a realistic thing to hope for. Maybe the most realistic hope he could carry for Rhett was that he’d leave town and go someplace else, still be a problem, but be a problem far enough away that Emilio no longer had to be afraid of where his blade might land next. There was another option, he knew, a more realistic one, but the thought of burying his brother, even after everything, made his stomach tie itself into knots. Rhett was still the only family he had left. He still had to shoulder the burden of that.

But he found he didn’t have it in him to make excuses for him anymore. Not after the shit in the van, not after Ariadne. He loved Rhett. He did. But you could love someone with everything you had, and still recognize that they weren’t a good person. Emilio knew that. “Won’t tell him that,” he replied. “Figure everyone’s better off if he’s not thinking about you anymore.” Rhett never really moved on, but he got distracted. If he got distracted long enough, this mare would be in the clear even without Emilio begging his brother to make promises the way he had for Ariadne. He shifted as she continued, a sour taste in his mouth. I had a life, he wanted to say. I had one. And it was undead like you who took it from me. But it wasn’t fair to say, and it was more than he wanted to reveal, anyway. He shouldn’t have approached her. He should have just stayed away.

Throwing back the rest of his drink, he stood. “Alright. Hope I never see you again,” he said, and he meant it. For both their sakes, he meant it.

#same scars.#emilio.#threads.

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