Title: Edward Cullen Does Not Care About the Weather
Word Count: 4,159
Notes: This is the second fic I've posted here that was originally inspired by a Gaia writing contest. (DUN JUDGE ME.) Beta'd by oceansex, who is awesome. Awesome like a fox.
Edward Cullen Does Not Care About the Weather
You know how everyone used to play with Barbies when they were younger? I always used to wish I had a demon instead. I tried to summon one, once, next to the old swing set in the park*, using green crayon and a handful of glitter. You could say that I have a history with this stuff. At the moment, I - that's me, by the way, the scrawny chick with the polkadot umbrella - am crouching behind a rock and watching a dude drink a bowl of blood. It's quite possibly the most exciting thing that's ever happened to me.
Now would probably be the right time to have a flashback, right?
Right. So it's two days earlier, and I'm at the corner shop, trying to buy groceries - it's a sorry little shop that barely has enough room for three people to queue in a single file - when I'm ambushed by Mad Gran Dalia. You know how it is, every village has one like her. It's like they stockpile them at IKEA or something. They all have matted grey curls and dresses made of bright orange felt - the cats are optional - and if you aren't quick enough, they'll grab you gently but firmly by the arm so that they can nag your ear off about knitting patterns or bowel movements or sometimes both at the same time.
Or, in this case, vampires.
-
* It was sad-looking even then, flaked with rust and peeling paint and the cause of pretty much every case of tetanus in the village.
-
When she's done talking and I've paid for my groceries and smiled and nodded in all the right places, I call my girlfriend.
"Alyssa!" I declare.
"No," she says, because she knows me too well. (Either that or she's psychic. Which would have been awesome.) Anyway, I tell her about the vampire thing.
"Babes," she says when I'm done, "you know vampires aren't real."
"Yeah, yeah, but what if, right? What if this one was real?"
"It's not. Trust me."
"Well, then ... it's a hypothesis. And it needs to be disproved, Alyssa."
Alyssa sighs. That's a good sign - one day she's going to stop sighing and start yelling, (or worse,) and then, then I'll be in trouble, but I'll cross that bridge when I get there - it means she's going to give in, reluctantly.
"Science, Alyssa, c'mon."
"... All right," she says, reluctantly. (See?)
-
Which brings us to me, standing at the edge of a damp field in the middle of the night, clutching my umbrella and watching a vampire drink blood from a bowl*. (Actually, first we spent a few hours camped out at the local library, trying not to breathe in the mouldy air and not really accomplishing anything. It was about as interesting as community service - I'm leaving it out because I care for you.) And that's a bad example of circular storytelling, isn't it, because now I'm just repeating myself.
Anyway, after the pointless library excursion - repetitive, I know, I know, but writing is hard - we figured that the best course of action would be observation. (And by we, I mean I. At this point, Alyssa pinched the bridge of her nose with her pretty, manicured fingers and moaned something about a test in Social Studies, which was a complete and utter lie, because tomorrow is a Saturday, but I let it go because I'm nice like that.)
And, well, here I am. The vampire doesn't look much like one; he's wearing a bright green raincoat - it's the shade right before glow-in-the-dark; if he wanted, he could stand in for the green part of a traffic light - and he's got gold hoop earrings, which is just weird. I've never seen gold hoop earrings on a bloke who wasn't a drag queen or a pirate in a Disney movie before. He's holding on to the Tupperware with both hands, clutching at it like a nineteen-twenties girl might clutch her pearls. I can't see his face from where I'm standing, but that's probably just as well, because that's my blood he's drinking, and it's just, well, it's gross to think about someone enjoying your O positive.
After what feels like a small lifetime, he lowers the bowl. There's a silence like an iceberg, huge and cold and massive.
And then he starts to walk away. I barely stop myself from crying out in disappointment. There's only one thing to do - I get moving, feet skidding on the muddy ground, and manage a whole ten steps before I slip and hit it, face first. (Did I mention that it's muddy out here at this time of year? Because it is. At times it's so wet it's practically a marsh.)
The vampire turns around and looks at me, grinning lazily. (It says, you are so crap at this. Or maybe that's just my subconscious filling in the blanks.) And then, in the long-standing tradition of vampires in pop culture everywhere, the bastard walks away.
-
* Okay, Tupperware. (The word just doesn't have the same feeling to it, you know?)
-
"He was hot."
We're back in the library, trying desperately not to breathe in in the tradition of not-quite-acclimatised-yet smokers everywhere. Alyssa raises a sceptical eyebrow.
"Hot as in Edward Cullen or hot as in Oldman's Dracula?"
I roll my eyes at her. Shun the nonbeliever! "More hot as in Blade, really."
"You are a terrible girlfriend," Alyssa says, but she's laughing.
"Well, I guess you've got terrible taste, then."
She hits me gently over the back of the head.
As much as I like flirting in libraries, there's a time for everything, and now is the time for science.
"Science," I command. Alyssa rolls her eyes so hard they nearly fall out. I can just see it happen - they'd dangle against her cheekbones like golf balls on a string.
"You can't be sure it was a vampire, babes," she says, "what if it was just-"
"Some guy who happened to drink blood and show up at the right time and place?" Oh ye of little faith.
"Well-"
"'If we knew what we were doing, it wouldn't be called research'," I quote. "Einstein."
"Not strictly related, Maddie."
"But relevant."
Alyssa rolls her eyes again, gentler this time. I grin at her, because that usually works.
"He didn't want to talk to me, anyway." I slouch back in the horrible library chair I'm sitting in - it's the sort of chair that gives you splinters just looking at it - and give the meagre stack of books on the table we've hijacked a look. "Must be the lack of lacy undergarments."
"A lack of something, definitely."
"Cheek!"
For the next few minutes, Alyssa turning the pages is the only sound. (She's a really fast reader, so that's not as little as you'd expect - my girlfriend is smart.)
"I've been thinking," I say. It's starting to get dark outside. "Maybe it's like, you know, unicorns."
"... They're attracted to virgins?"
And if you need any proof that she's my soulmate, that's it, right there. "Exactly."
She gives me a look. It's the look that says, You Are Completely Insane; Please Elaborate And Await My Ridicule.
"We'll use my brother."
Alyssa chokes on a laugh. "How can you even know he's a virgin?"
"I read his diary. And, well, I read his diary."
-
My brother is a bespectacled mess of teenage boy. I used to play human sacrifice with his dolls when we were little. These days he's more interested in Tiger Woods and World of Warcraft, but I can still remember the days when he made his Action Men make out.
"What are we doing?"
"Shut up," I mutter. We're back at the field again, hiding behind the rock. (I'm starting to think of it as my rock. I like the way it feels against my back, despite the slightly slimy quality of it. My jacket is probably ruined.) My brother is shivering in his faux-army boots and pyjamas, because apparently I'm the only person around here who realises that jackets are a good idea.
"No, seriously," he says, "seriously. What are we doing?"
"Shut up, Morgue."
"Stop calling me that," Morgue hisses. "What are we doing here?"
"You're bait."
"Bait?"
"Bait. There's a vampire and I want to catch it." Catch it like a Pokémon.
"Are you ins - no, wait, I'm not even gonna ask that question. Of course you are."
"Yes, yes," I say, "now go out there and..."
I flail my hands a bit, indicating "go get him" and "do your thing". Morgue glares at me.
"No!"
"Yes."
"No!"
It's pretty clear that he isn't going to go on his own, so I give him a gentle push in the right direction. (If by "gentle push", you mean, "swift kick in the arse".) He stumbles out into the field and trips over his own feet. Clumsiness is in our genes.
"Hey!" Morgue cries out. "What the fu - uh."
A figure looms in the shadows at the other side of the field. No, seriously. It looms. There's really no other word for it. I can't see its face from where I'm sitting, but the raincoat is unmistakable - it's so bright it's almost glowing. There's a silence like an ice age.
And then - and there's really no other way to say this - the vampire starts to glide. It crosses the field without stumbling once, which is closer to a miracle than anything I've ever seen before.
And then it's standing over my brother.
And then it's bending towards him.
And then it reaches out a hand.
-
-
-
-
-
-
That isn't how it ends.
I can see why you'd think that. I mean, there was a long line of line breaks and everything. And it's the sort of thing that's supposed to happen when a man loves a woman. (Or, in this case, when a vampire loves an adolescent.)
Yeah. That doesn't happen here.
After heaving my brother off the ground, the vampire gives him a long, deep, soulful look - although it's standing with its back to me, so for all I know it might just be looking at him like he's the single most pathetic human being it's ever come across - and then it pats him roughly on the shoulder. Then, without another word, it walks away.
It doesn't even stop to drink from the Tupperware.
Vampires.
-
My brother starts going out in the middle of the night, and I really don't think much about it - he doesn't come home covered in blood or anything, and he was tired and pale in the first place, so I'm fairly sure he isn't turning into a creature of the night. I don't have time to work on my vampire-project, because the winter finals are coming up, and if I want to get government grants for my future science projects, I'm going to need good grades.
So it's, you know, it's understandable that I don't really notice anything before it's too late. You can blame yourself for these kinds of things until you're blue in the face, but in the end you might as well not, because it still doesn't change anything.
This is where I am: it's five in the afternoon, and I haven't seen Morgue since yesterday. I'm staring down at his dirty, second-hand sneakers, the red fabric bleached pink and fraying from the sun.
They're also covered in snow.
They're also at the bottom of a ditch.
-
"Alyssa," I bark. I wrestle with my jacket and try not to drop the phone.
"Maddie," she says, dragging out the "e" into a long, despairing whine, because she's the Burton Guster to my Shawn Spencer. As cute as it is, I don't have the time right now.
"I'm about to embark on a suicide mission," I say.
"Maddie, what-"
"He took my brother." I pick up a canister that used to contain orange spray paint - we used it in an art project last year - and test it, spraying away from me. The spray leaves a faint sheen in the air, light reflecting off it like sequins and glitter. I've got mace, but I figure that this - sneakily obtained from the House of Our Lord - works nicely as a Plan B. "I'm going to waste him."
"Waste - babes, you know murder is an offence punishable by law, right?"
"It's not murder," I say, shoving the canister into my bag. "It's vengeance."
There's a short silence at the other end of the line. "Really, Maddie, what's going on?"
"I just said." I open the door, and the outside world meets me with the unholy quiet that is your average winter night up here. "The thing took my brother."
"Oh God." It sounds like something falls over, and a faint expletive. "Are you going to get yourself killed?"
"Not on purpose!"
"Look, we can do this tomorrow. You can call the, you can call the police-"
"Yeah, I'm sure they'll believe me. My brother was abducted by a bloodsucking, hellish fiend from Hell! Help me, officer!"
Alyssa swallows hard, like maybe she wants to point out that I used a permutation of the word "Hell" twice in the second sentence.
"I've got this," I say, as earnest as I can. "But if I don't, you've got to tell everyone I died for a good cause."
"Mad-"
"Love you," I say, and hang up. The road stretches out in front of me in a long, dark line, glittering with rime. I start walking. Let's do this.
-
The vampire isn't here.
Somehow, I feel like I should have been expecting this, because it's in the middle of winter and the bastard has got my brother, but this leaves me with a pretty gaping flaw in my plan. I don't know where he is.
When in doubt, my mother always tells me, scream your lungs out.
"MOTHERFUCKER!" I yell, "GET THE FUCK OVER HERE!"
"You don't have to shout," a smooth voice says behind me. I yelp, and spin around so fast I nearly fall over.
"You," I hiss. It's really hard to hiss out a word that has no S's, but I manage. "Where's my brother, you pedo?"
The vampire blinks, off balance. "I. What?"
"You heard me. My brother. Where is he?"
"Look, I don't-"
"You pedo."
The vampire does another one of its slow blinks, and it's really hard to think of it as a soulless monster and not a person when it looks so completely clueless, so I reluctantly start referring to it as a "him" in my head.
And then he grins, salaciously. "If you mean Morgan, he was here yesterday."
"Oh my God! What the fuck is wrong with you? Did you molest him?"
"... Mostly we just played Guitar Hero."
I'm not going to just stand here and tolerate these lies. I tell him so. "Lies."
"Sorry to disappoint." The bastard grins, long and drawn out like pancake syrup or death by cyanide. "He left somewhere around two." He stops, frowning a little. "Why?"
"Oh, play the innocent card, really. Why d'you think?"
"He's ... oh, darn it."
I've never heard anyone use the word "darn" in a serious situation before. I'm sure it was a horrible thing to say back in Ancient Whenever, but it does kind of defuse the situation a little. I'm not about to be derailed by outdated vocabulary, though, so I press on, bravely like a mountaineer. "What."
The vampire looks uncomfortable, and it's not the I'm so confused it might actually kill me kind of uncomfortable, either. This is the uncomfortable you get when you realise that something you've done may just have gone horribly, spectacularly wrong. "Are you sure he hasn't just fallen asleep in a ditch somewhere?"
"It's December."
The vampire closes his eyes and tips his head back, frowning.
"I have this ... rival," he says. It comes out awkward, like a puzzle where none of the pieces fit. "Or, well. Imagine a really vindictive ex, and you've got him, except we forewent the relationship and went straight for the vindictive part."
"Elaborate," I say. I think, oh God, there are more of them.
"He likes to mess with me."
"What, like -"
"Yes." He frowns. "Well. Probably worse."
"You're telling me my brother is ... is whatever because some shit for brains idiot is jealous?"
"Believe me, Blondie, no-one wishes I was making this up more than me."
I wish I could kill people by glaring at them hard enough. "Yeah, my brother begs to differ."
The vampire smiles, thin and bitter. "You're probably right."
Snow falls. He watches it like it holds all the secrets of the universe, and if maybe he stares hard enough it will tell him how to get out of this mess.
It won't, and waiting around for it is a waste of time.
"All right, then," I say, rubbing my hands together to get some circulation back, "let's go find him."
-
It's not exactly a vampire's mansion.
Okay, actually, that's an understatement. It's smaller, for one thing. For another, it looks like someone vomited the American Dream all over it. I can almost smell the apple pie from where we're standing.
It's also in the middle of a pretty dense forest. I stare.
"Wow."
"Yeah," the vampire says, staring at the front door. "You know he's probably going to kill you, right?"
"The bastard can try," I say, and pull out my secret weapon. The vampire eyes it, and then arches an eyebrow at me.
"You're going up against this guy with orange spray paint?"
I grin. "I've always liked orange."
He gives me a look like maybe he thinks this is the worst idea in the history of everything*. I take his hand - mostly to keep him from running away - and smile just a little bit brighter.
"Let's do this."
-
*It's not. Trust me.
-
The door is white. It smells like paint, but otherwise it seems pretty harmless.
The vampire rings the buzzer. It plays the opening strains of "Hey Jude".
"What," I say, because really? The Beatles? The vampire shrugs.
It takes a couple of minutes before the door opens - the bloke who pokes his head out is thin as a rail and wearing a frayed, yellow Beatles t-shirt. He's got a mop of hair that's vaguely the colour of dirty dishwater - and I mean a mop. It looks like you could use it to clean the floor with.
"Ed!" he says, all sunshine and rainbows. The vampire - Ed - grins, but there's a nervous edge to it.
"Hey, Jude," he says, and I'm sorry, but you can't not groan at that. Of course. Jude's eyes snap to me, and they're quite probably the scariest eyes I've ever seen. I know how in novels they always say that vampires have old eyes, or maybe that they have eyes that seem to see the bottom of your soul, but this isn't like that. Looking into Jude's eyes ... looking into Jude's eyes is like touching an electricity grid with both hands, or like falling five stories and watching the pavement come at you, hard.
I swallow hard, but the thing in these kinds of situations is that you never, ever back down.
"Who's the monkey?" he asks, pleasantly.
Ed hasn't stopped smiling, but his eyes are focusing weirdly, like maybe he's trying to hypnotise him. "Monkey, Jude?"
Jude shrugs, nodding at me. "You know. Girl."
"No-one important."
Jude gives me another look - it feels like my skin is blistering - and. "Just like all the other ones, yeah?"
Ed snorts. "Hardly."
"Hey!" I say, because self-preservation has never been in my dictionary. Jude gives me another dirty look, and then he hits me on the back of my head with all the force of a Mack truck.
"- course not. I'm just going to destroy you."
It's a good sentence to wake up to. It's dramatic, it's short, it sums up everything you need to know. I blink against the ground; it feels like my skull is in pieces, but I'm going to assume that it isn't, because if I don't, I'll have a panic attack, and then I will die. I frown, and try to figure out a way to turn around without anyone noticing so that I can watch the drama and get my bearings back without being punched out again. Sure, there's a chance of getting myself savagely murdered, but you can't get drama like this on the television, and it's not as if I have anything better to do at the moment.
"I'm sorry," Ed says, and I can sort of hear the violins. "I never meant for you to-"
"Didn't stop you, did it?"
And okay, I might be retracting my television-statement, but this is already turning out to be far more interesting than Vampire Diaries ever was.
"Jude," Ed says, all choked up like maybe he's going to start crying, which, uh, weird. "I can't - I've been apologising for forty darn years. Stop killing my friends."
"Ed," Jude says, mimicking him, "you don't have any friends."
"Because you killed them!"
They go on like this, bickering back and forth like fourth graders or internet trolls. I've got a high tolerance for melodrama, but there's a limit to how much wishy-washy vampire angst a girl can take, and I have pretty much reached it. I push myself off the ground and spin around in one fluid motion that ends with my feet getting tangled in the shoulder-strap on my bag and my arse on the floor. The spray-can falls out of the bag and rolls about half a metre, making sad sounds as it goes. It stops right in front of me, and I don't burst out laughing, but it's close.
Jude has no incentive - i.e. the success of my brilliant, brilliant Plan B - not to laugh, and so he does. He has a pretty laugh - images of silver bells come to mind - but it's hard to appreciate that trait properly when the guy's a sociopath.
I pick the can up and twist the cap off. Jude smiles at me - it's the kind of smile that says, really? Spray paint? - and I grin right back. Viciously, I spray a stripe across his trouser leg, and for a moment, the world seems to hold its breath.
And then -
Nothing happens. There's an embarrassed silence.
"Oh, come on," I say, because if I ever had a filter between my mouth and my brain, it corroded a long, long time ago. Ed makes a small, choked noise I'm pretty sure is a badly suppressed groan. Jude huffs out a laugh.
"Nice try," he says, and I don't think I've ever wanted to punch anyone in the face this bad before, but at least he doesn't hit me again. He turns away from me, and says, like it's the perfectly reasonable thing to say, "Look, Ed, I'm just doing this because I care. You're bad for people."
Ed doesn't say anything. Actually, his eyes seem all misted up, like he's the tortured but handsome antihero from a cheap Harlequin romance. It's not so much tragic as it is sad.
"For f-" I begin, because really, this is getting so ridiculous I might actually prefer being punched out again, but at the same time Jude yells out a curse I haven't even heard before, and bends over to clutch his leg. Which causes him to yell some more.
I think, what.
And then I think, yes.I aim my cannister at his face. "I'd like my brother back, please."
The "or else" is kind of implied.
-
We find Morgue tied up on a couch in Jude's basement. Imagine plays softly on the stereo, and I'm not even going to think about how utterly bizarre that is, and my brother is mostly unhurt.
As far as I can see, anyway. I don't want to think about it.
-
Ed stops at the door.
"I'll take care of him," he says, gesturing vaguely at where Jude is laying. He doesn't say, someone has to. Morgue gives him a shaky little smile.
"Same time next week?" he says, hoarsely. Ed squints at him, like he isn't sure if it's a trick or not.
"Sure," he says.
Morgue nearly doesn't wince at all when I take his hand.
We walk away.