#shadow generations was so sick ohhhh my god

[emerynn]

between shadow generations and the new life is strange my productivity levels have been absolutely shot I can think about exactly two things right now and they are shadow the hedgehog and max caulfield and there is no in between just my boy and my girl bouncing around my brain while I try to, like, do the things I actually have to do

[ginger-and-mint]

How about ficlet where a nice vampire and his human boyfriend spend the night in the estate of an Enemy Vampire Hunter to allay his suspicions about them...which includes the poor, underfed vampire having to finish an immense meal of human food. He remains calm, eats everything, gives no sign of discomfort, and walks with his boyfriend back to their room, where he collapses on the bed because his poor belly isn't used to holding solid food and the boyfriend comforts him.

So I’ve decided that this is the same vampire from this thing I wrote before. His name is now Theo(dore).

Here’s some hasty backstory for him:

shortly after being turned, he was taken in by a group called the Coven, who taught him how to survive as a vampire.

the Coven’s schtick is that rather than exsanguinating random innocents, they create hit lists of people who’ve committed crimes and their members prey exclusively from this list as a form of vigilante justice.

eventually something happens which sours Theo to acting as judge, jury, and executioner and he leaves the Coven.

around the same time (possibly relatedly? idk yet) he meets Darren, who becomes his boyfriend

now he’s sort of living in the shadows, hiding from the Coven and other people who want to kill him, ‘cause being a lone vampire is dangerous….

CW: mentions of blood-drinking (implied to be fatal) and nausea.

Theo knew she was a vampire hunter. It was neither ignorance nor stupidity that got him to the point where he was sitting at her dining table with a fake smile plastered on his temporarily-defanged face.

The whole Coven had been terrified of her. After all, she was like something straight out of primetime TV—a successful lawyer living in a beautiful suburban home with her husband and three golden retrievers. She volunteered with underprivileged kids, made generous annual donations to the local animal shelter, and in her spare time, she tracked down vampires and killed them dead.

“If anyone in this city’s gonna kill you, it’s Selena Chang,” one of Theo’s old Coven buddies had once said. “She’s ruthless. She worms her way into your social sphere and flips the lid on your coffin, so to speak. She’s so bad that if she started tracking you tomorrow, you’d be out of the Coven until you could shake her. If you could shake her.”

“Shit, really?” Theo had said. “What would I do?”

“You’d figure something out. Or not.” A toothy grin. “The only thing you can do is convince her you’re not a vampire. Ignore her and she’ll stake you in your sleep. Try to reason with her and she’ll sweetly agree to let you go, and then stake you in your sleep. Basically, one wrong move and you’re dead meat.”

Theo had thought about that a lot since leaving the Coven. One of his small comforts was that he didn’t have much of a social sphere these days, unless you counted the late-night clerk at the corner shop where he regularly went to buy ground beef and aspirin. But he’d forgotten about Darren.

Darren still had a normal life. He didn’t think twice when a friendly new face showed up at his aerobics class and struck up a conversation. One evening, Theo had gone over to Darren’s place and found the face of his nightmares sitting on his boyfriend’s sofa with a glass of blood-red wine.

She had invited them over for dinner a week later. “My husband loves to cook. He’ll be delighted to have guests.”

“That’s kind of you, but um… the buses stop running your way pretty early,” Theo had said nervously. “And we, uh, we don’t have a car.”

“Oh, that’s no trouble,” she’d said with a smile. “You can stay the night in our guest room. We have plenty of space.”

And that’s how Theo had ended up staring down a plate mounded high with vegetarian lasagna, steamed broccoli, and creamy mashed potatoes. There was a big basket of rolls on the table and chocolate cake had been promised for dessert.

It was probably delicious. From the look on Darren’s face, the smell must’ve been irresistible. But Theo’s body reacted to it as though he were looking at a plate of spare car parts. No water in his mouth. No desire in his guts. Just a vague nauseous hunger. He’d sucked as much juice as he could from a packet of cheap ground beef that morning, but that’d been like a drop in an empty, empty bucket.

“Well, everyone,” said Selena Chang with an impenetrable smile, “dig in!”

Theo put a lump of lasagna in his mouth, chewed, and swallowed. It felt like a pebble dropping into his stomach, but he sighed and smiled as though it had been delicious.

Everything was packed with garlic, of course. There were whole cloves of it in the lasagna and the potatoes had been whipped with garlic butter. Garlic wasn’t gonna kill him, but it wasn’t gonna make him feel very good either. He’d learned that very soon after he’d been bitten, when he’d woken up in the middle of the night ravaged by bloodthirst. At the time he’d mistaken it for desperate hunger and so he’d dug some garlic bread out of the freezer and devoured the whole thing. God, he’d never been so sick.

From the way his stomach was starting to feel, he guessed today would probably smash that record. But Selena Chang was staring him down and he wasn’t ready to die yet.

So he smiled and talked and ate and hurt and hurt and hurt.

- - -

As soon as the guest room door shut behind them, Theo collapsed backwards onto the bed, groaning.

“Are you okay?” Darren asked.

“Urghhhh. No.” Theo wrapped an arm over his stomach. “I can’t believe I got everything down, ugh. Feels like I’ve eaten rocks.”

“That was a lot of food. Even I’ve got a bit of a bellyache from it. Those potatoes were heavy. And that cake was—”

“Oh god, shut up. Ughhh. I need—I can’t—can you—?”

“Of course.” Darren pushed Theo’s hands away and unfastened the belt he was struggling with.

Theo groaned as his belly surged outward. It felt more like a nauseous wave rolling through his stomach than a relief. “Ohhhh, god… d’you think she’ll stake me through the heart if I puke all over her guest room?”

“Probably. Just for ruining these fabulous Egyptian cotton sheets.” Darren sat down on the edge of the bed and stroked Theo’s hair. “You did so good back there.”

“Yeah? You think I convinced her?”

“Absolutely. I almost believed you were having the best meal of your life. You didn’t look uncomfortable at all.”

“Huh. Guess I’m better actor than my high school drama teacher gave me credit for…. Oh my god, I feel so sick! Like I’m stuffed full of garbage.” Theo put a hand to the side of his belly. It was swollen. Nothing compared to how full and round it used to look after he’d had a proper feeding, but that was a different kind of swollen than this nauseous, achy misery. That was a wonderful, contented, satiated sort of swollenness….

He dropped his voice to a whisper. “I want blood.”

Darren put his hand over Theo’s, gently rubbing the bloated belly. “You want to put more into this thing?”

“I could fit a couple raw steaks in there. God, I really could.” Theo had to swallow the saliva that had filled his mouth. His stomach gurgled—stuffed full and yet still so, so hungry….

Darren stared down at him, eyes soft. “Theo… if you need to, you know I’d let you—”

“No way. I already took from you last week, I’m not gonna—”

“But I’d let you.”

“No. You need it more than I do.” He paused, taking a quick breath. “I can’t, anyway. My stomach is upset as hell and if I puke blood under this roof, I’m as good as dead.”

Darren’s fingers slipped down from Theo’s belly to one of his jutting hipbones. They slowly traced up to where his ribs were showing through his skin.

“You need a proper meal,” he said quietly. “I can see you wasting away. You can’t survive on beef drippings and a pint or two from me every other week.”

“Yeah, well, what I am supposed to do? Climb through a window and drain the nearest helpless virgin? If I take anyone from the Coven’s hit list, they’ll find me, and you know I don’t want to be like them anymore—”

“I know.” Darren slipped down to lie on the bed next to Theo. “We’ll figure something out.”

“If I murder any more people, I’d deserve a stake through the heart! I can’t let myself—”

“Theo! We’ll figure something out! Okay?”

Theo shut his mouth. He briefly considered the word we and what a beautiful, wonderful word it was.

“But we’re not gonna figure out anything out tonight, are we?” Darren went on.

Theo cleared his throat. “Maybe we could figure out how to settle a stomach that hasn’t handled any solid food in over a year?”

Darren carefully pushed up Theo’s shirt and planted a kiss on the crest of his churning belly. “There. Did that make you feel better?”

Theo let out a short, painful laugh. “Try a hand on my belly and a kiss on my mouth,” he said, and he sighed as Darren obliged.