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This is my writing blog for all my fanfic!
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You can call me Lavender or Sasha (I use all pronouns)
Current fandoms:
✨The Long Walk (book/movie)
✨The Hunger Games (books/movies)
The Long Walk Fic Masterlist
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Rating: Mature
Chapter Warnings: Implied stalking, non-consensual turning, very very lightly implied period-typical homophobia
Pairings: Poly Walkers (All of them together lmao), Starkness (Stebbins x Harkness), Parkovitch (Collie x Barkovitch), Barker (Collie x Art), Stollie (Stebbins x Collie)
Word Count: 8247
Summary:
One night, Richard Harkness encounters a man who claims to be a vampire.
Fifteen years later, he encounters the same man, as well as the rest of his coven.
In which famous author Richard Harkness takes the opportunity to interview a coven of vampires.
TLW Fic Masterlist
Chapter Masterlist
Read on AO3
Richard’ hand slapped against the light switch, turning on the table lamp and illuminating the living room.
Four people were sat on his couch, and four more were standing behind said couch, all looking at him. Richard gaped, taking a second to realize where he recognized them from— They were all the people from the signing who had brought in copies of Mourning Chronicles, including the man he still wasn’t quite sure was Stebbins.
“Apologies for dropping in unannounced,” maybe-Stebbins said, standing behind the couch and looking at Richard with a close-mouthed smile, eyes glinting purple in the light. “I wanted you to meet my friends.”
“Your… Friends?” Richard said, eyes looking over said ‘friends’. In the center of the couch were the man and woman in orange, the woman sat on the man’s lap with her arms wrapped around him, like she was trying to completely engulf him in her. His own arms are wrapped around her as well, and he looks like he’s exactly where he wants to be. The woman’s feet are in the lap of the lanky man in the waistcoat, who’s sat there politely with his hands folded atop her feet. On the other side of the couple is the man with long dark hair, who’s leaning back against the couple a little with a leg kicked up over the arm rest of the couch, making himself all the more the comfortable in the space. Behind him and the couch is the man with long blond hair, who’s leaned down with his arms folded over the back of the couch, head resting in his arms. On the other side are the redhead and scarred man duo, who are pressed so close together it’s like they want to be fused into one. Between this duo and the blond man is the man Richard is slowly accepting to be Stebbins, stood tall like he’s meant to be there.
“That’s one way to describe us,” The scarred man said, shooting Stebbins a knowing look paired with a smile.
Richard’s eyes darted to each person, before landing on Stebbins again. “… You’re really a vampire, aren’t you?”
“Of course I am,” Stebbins easily confirmed, stepping out from behind the couch. “I had no reason to lie to you then, and I have no reason to lie to you now.”
“No, no,” Richard pointed his fork at Stebbins, shaking his head slightly. “You have plenty of reason to lie about that. If anything, the fact that you’re just openly admitting it makes it less believable— You should be claiming you’re not a vampire, if you really are one.”
“No offense, but you’re not really the vampire hunter type, so that’s not much of a concern,” The redhead spoke up.
“Regardless, worst case scenario if I do tell you is you think I’m insane and dismiss my claims as nothing more than the ramblings of a madman,” Stebbins continued. He paused for a moment, before a grin grows on his face. “But you don’t think that. Do you, Harkness?”
Richard swallowed hard. “… It’s been fifteen years.”
“You’ve been counting.”
“How did you get in here?”
“You invited me in.”
“Fifteen years ago.”
“And you never revoked the invitation,” Stebbins calmly explained, raising his eyebrows a little. “I came in, and invited everyone else.”
Richard gaped, attention torn between Stebbins and the crowd of people on his couch, who were watching the two of them intently. “How did you find me again? Have you been following me?”
“It’s not like it was hard, Harkness. You never moved,” Stebbins pointed out.
“But you’ve been following me,” Richard reiterated.
Stebbins tilted his head again. “You didn’t seem so bothered by it back then.”
“I was a lot more naive,” Richard said.
“I’m inclined to believe you still are,” Stebbins countered. Before Richard can speak, he continued, “Allow me to introduce the members of my coven.” He motions to each member, listing off their names, “Collie Parker, Gary Barkovitch, Hank Olson, Clementine Olson, Art Baker, Ray Garraty, and Peter McVries. You’ll get to know them all soon enough.”
“Will I?” Richard raised his eyebrows, pushing his glasses up a little.
“Of course. I’m sure you have plenty of questions. I think we’re all willing to answer them.” Stebbins looked over to the others.
“Sure, why the fuck not? Want me to suck his dick too?” The other blond, Barkovitch, said, startling Richard slightly that such a pretty face would sound so crass.
“Not yet,” Stebbins replied.
Richard stuck his fork into the takeout container, “What’re you getting at?”
Stebbins leveled his gaze on Richard. “You have the unique opportunity to interview an entire coven of vampires is what I’m getting at.” He tilted his head. “Unless, of course, you don’t want to do that. If that’s the case, we can just leave—”
“Wait wait wait—” Richard held up a hand, looking over his uninvited guests, then back to Stebbins. “… You’ll all just… Let me interview you? Just like that?”
“It’d be an honor, really,” The woman, Clementine, piped up, still tangled around Hank. “We’re huge fans.”
Richard looked over the group of them, all smiling back at him. “… One moment.” He turned and scrambled out of the living room and to his office. The takeout is momentarily left on his desk as he gathered up his laptop and one of his many spare notebooks and the first pen he could find. Once all are securely tucked under his arm, he snatched the takeout box once more and returned to the living room. “Alright, I— Oh.”
The living room is significantly emptier than it was just a few moments ago. Instead of a whole crowd of people, there remains only one— Collie Parker, if Richard is remembering his name right, is sat on the couch, with a sandy-colored cat in his lap, whose head he’s gently scratching.
“… Where… Where did the cat come from?” Richard asks.
“He’s been here the whole time,” Collie answers.
Richard was fairly certain there hadn’t been a cat when he was last in the room, but perhaps he’d just been distracted by the eight vampires. He shook his head, before nodding towards the dining room. “Come this way—” He quickly sped off to the dining room, setting down his laptop, notebook, and takeout as Collie followed and took a seat across from him, still holding onto the cat.
“Do you mind if I record this, and take some notes?” Richard asked, hand hovering over the mousepad of his laptop.
“Not at all,” Collie replied.
Richard pressed record and began his interview, “Can you state your name and current age, please?”
“Collie Parker, seventy years old,” Collie scratched behind the cat’s ears as he said this.
“And we are interviewing you because?” Richard led.
“Because I’m a vampire.”
Richard clicked open his pen and pulled his notebook closer. “And how exactly did you end up becoming a vampire? Actually, let’s take a step back— Did you meet the coven you’re in before, or after you became a vampire?”
“Before.”
“And how exactly did you meet them?”
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Collie first noticed them because they didn’t need to rent a VHS player.
He worked in the only video rental store in Sioux Falls, the Hollywood Emporium. To be honest, he wasn’t sure how long the store would last, what with VHS still being so new, but it helped pay the bills for the time being and didn’t make him want to bash his head in a wall, so all things considered it was a pretty good gig.
Again, with VHS being so new, most customers didn’t own their own player and would have to rent a VHS player along with whatever movie they wanted to watch.
So it stuck out to him a little when the group didn’t rent a VHS player.
The sun had set by now, and it was getting closer to closing time. He was counting down the minutes to when the last few customers would filter out and then he’d help close shop and go home for the night.
Collie didn’t pay them too much mind as they browsed the store, being too busy restocking the candy up at the counter. His coworker, Zuck, was in the back, and the two blonds were the last two customers in the store tonight. The two were silently browsing, occasionally showing the other a particular title before putting it back on the shelf. Collie was just finishing stocking when the taller one handed a movie over to the shorter one, then turned and walked out of the store.
The shorter blond made his way to the counter, two VHS cases in hand, and a camera hanging from his neck.
Collie slipped behind the counter to the register, “Find everything alright?”
“Mhm,” The man nodded, sliding over the two cases. He didn’t seem terribly talkative today. His eyes were darting around, looking everywhere but at Collie— It was a little suspicious, sure, but Collie didn’t care about his job enough to call out the behavior. If the guy stuck a case down his pants or something, oh well, he wasn’t paid enough to care.
“Where’re your friends?” Collie asked, grabbing the two cases to scan. One was a creature feature about a killer shark, and the other was an older slasher about a murderer in a remote motel. Good options, Collie thought.
“Uh— My friends?” The man sputtered slightly, his eyes finally landing on Collie, brow furrowed.
“Yeah, you usually come in here with your friends, and your other one just left,” Collie replied.
“He, uh, he’s just waiting by the car. The others are at home— Their homes.” His gaze dropped to the candies at the counter. “… Which of these are the most sour?”
“The most sour?” Collie looked at the options, “Probably the Lemonheads.”
“Great. I’ll take one of those.”
Collie grabbed a box of Lemonheads. “That all?”
“Uhm… Yeah,” The man said. He looked like he was trying desperately to act normal and failing. Maybe he was nervous when he was alone, it’d explain why he was always accompanied by someone whenever Collie saw him.
Collie wrote down the two titles. “And your name?”
The man blinked. Collie almost mistook the color of his irises for red. “Huh?”
“For the store membership, what’s your name?”
“Oh— Uh, should be under Gary Barkovitch,” The man— Gary— rubbed a hand against the back of his neck, once again glancing away.
Collie wrote down the name Gary Barkovitch next to the two titles, in order to keep track of how long they were gone and how much the store would be owed once the tapes were returned. “Alright, 25 cents for the Lemonheads, and you’re good to go.”
Gary fished out a quarter from his pocket and set it on the counter. Collie took the quarter and slid the tapes and candy back over to Gary. He expected the man to take his goods and go, but instead he paused for a moment, before blurting out, “Do you do modeling?”
Collie gave Gary a confused look. “… What?”
“Do you do modeling— Like, for photography? Shit like that?” Gary stammered out, once again managing to keep his gaze on Collie. His hand fidgeted with the camera hanging around his neck.
Collie scoffed slightly, holding back a slight smile. “You think I’d be working here if I was a model?”
That drew a nervous smile from Gary, tight-lipped like he was self-conscious of his teeth. “I mean— You never know. You look good enough to be one.”
“… Thanks,” Collie said, taking a moment to decide if Gary was being genuine or not. “You’re not gonna get a discount, though.”
“I was actually wondering if maybe— I mean, just an idea, no big deal if not, but—” Gary started rambling, like the words would escape him if he didn’t get the out fast enough, “Could you do some modeling for me?”
Collie raised his eyebrows. “…You want me to model for you?” He motioned to the camera in Gary’s hand.
Gary nodded, looking apprehensive and eager all at once.
“… If I didn’t know better, I’d think you were either trying to get me on a date, or trying to get me alone so you could kill me,” Collie jokes dryly, watching closely for his reaction.
Gary lets out a nervous, almost panicked laugh, “I— Er— I mean—” He quickly looks around the empty store, swallowing hard before leaning in and whispering, “The first one…? Please?”
A grin crossed Collie’s face. “Name a time and place. Just nowhere remote.”
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“So you started seeing Barkovitch?” Richard asked through a mouth full of chow mein.
“All of them, not just Barkovitch,” Collie answered. “I’d never been taken on so many dates in my life. Granted, we didn’t call them dates, but that’s what they were.”
“Oh…” Richard jotted down a note in his notebook, swallowing before he continued talking, “So you started dating all of them… And when exactly did you find out they were vampires?”
Collie thought for a moment. “… Two weeks into it? Maybe one? Barkovitch spilled the beans pretty quickly.”
“And you believed him?”
“Hell no. I thought he was fucking with me.”
“Surely you noticed something was off about them though, right?”
“Little bit,” Collie responded, repositioning the cat in his lap, who was purring so loudly Richard swore his laptop was going to pick up on the noise. “I mean… It’s a fucking coven of polyamorous vampires. There tends to be signs.”
Richard nodded, “Right…”
“So, I thought about it. A lot. And I started putting together the pieces, realized a lot of the weird things they all did and said just… Made more sense if they were actually fucking vampires. So I think I believed it after a month of being with them.”
“Only a month?”
Collie shrugged, “There were a lot of weird things.”
The cat pawed at Collie’s chin, which made him look at the cat and smile, scrunching his nose and unintentionally flashing his fangs. The light from the one lit lamp glinted off his canines, just a touch too sharp. Richard realized he was staring.
“Did you want to join the coven right away, when you realized it was real?” He asked.
“Not at all.”
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It was sometime after midnight, and the two of them had driven to a park— The closest Collie would get to nature, Art would joke. They were parked in the parking lot, sitting back on the still-warm hood of the car to stargaze.
“Can you actually see more of ‘em? ‘Cus it looks like fuck-all to me,” Collie asked. To Collie, there wasn’t that much to look at in the sky. A few stars here and there, but he knew the night sky was a better sight outside of the city, better than what he could see in a city parking lot, even if it was by a playground and a big patch of grass and trees. Still, it seemed good enough for Art, who was pointing out different constellations.
Art laughed a little, a warm sound that quickened Collie’s heart. “Oh yeah. I think it’s one of my favorite parts of being… Y’know. You see things so much clearer in the dark, and the sky is just full o’ stars…” Art’s eyes looked back up to the sky, and Collie wondered if maybe, if he just looked close enough, if he could see the stars in Art’s eyes.
A comfortable quiet settled between the two of them as Collie turned his gaze back up to the inky sky, squinting a little as he tried to pick out any of the constellations Art had pointed out to him. He could just maybe make out Orion’s Belt— Or was that the Big Dipper’s handle? Or the Little Dipper’s?
“… Have you thought about turning?” Art suddenly asked quietly.
Collie turned again to see a pensive look on Art’s face. His eyes glanced back to Collie, still waiting for an answer. “… Yeah, I have,” Collie said, returning his gaze to the sky.
“And?”
“… I can’t.”
“Why not?” Art’s tone wasn’t accusatory or annoyed, but instead was nonjudgmental. Simply curious.
Collie let out a sigh. “… I can’t do that to my family. Maybe if I knew for certain I’d see them in the after life, but…” He trailed off for a moment, before picking up the thought elsewhere, “The Lakota believe that when you die, your soul has to make a journey before reaching The Spirit World, where they’re reunited with their loved ones. If a soul is unable to complete that journey for whatever reason, they become a trapped spirit, and bring about bad luck and misfortune to those around them… At least, that’s how it is put really simply.”
He could see Art nod from the corner of his vision. “That’s understandable…”
“So yeah. I can’t risk not being able to reunite with my family…” He suddenly turns to look at Art again, sitting up a little this time, “Aren’t you Catholic? How the hell did you come to terms with that?”
Art laughs again, propping himself up on his elbows, “I’ve had a while to think it over, trust me. You don’t gotta worry about me.” Collie smiles slightly, before leaning over and giving Art a brief kiss on the lips. Art leans into the kiss, a grin spreading on his face after Collie pulls away. “I know you don’t wanna join us, but I know I’m not just speaking for myself when I say I’ll miss you when we leave.”
“It’ll be one hell of a story for me to tell. ‘The time I dated—” He paused to count on his fingers, “Seven vampires.’”
“And no one will believe you,” Art laughed again.
Collie joined him in his laughter, leaning back against the hood of the car and looking up to the stars again.
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“Another quick question—” Richard said through a mouthful of noodles.
“What?”
Richard swallowed and repeated himself, “Another quick question— Moving? How often does the coven move?”
Collie waggled his hand a little, “Varies a bit. Longest we’ll stay in a place is five years, but sometimes we only stay in a place for a month or two. I’d say the average is one or two years.”
Richard scribbled this down. “And are you guys just renting places as you go? Do you all share a house?”
“Again, it depends on where we are and what’s available. Stebbins owns a few houses that we can all periodically live in throughout the US, but there’ll be plenty of times where we’ll go somewhere new and all just rent separate places.” Collie stroked his hand over the cat on his lap. “You’re gonna find out a lot of the answers to your questions are ‘it depends’.”
“I mean… Fair, I guess,” Richard paused to take another bite of chow mein. “So, how exactly did you end up turning and joining the coven, if you were so against it?”
Collie gave the cat in his lap a pointed look. “Well it wasn’t exactly fucking planned.”
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It was Collie’s idea to meet up at the motel— That’s where he’d have his other (rare and occasional) hook-ups, so he saw no reason to meet elsewhere.
The second the door to the room closed behind him, Gary was on Collie, wrapping his arms around his neck and kissing him hungrily. Collie wasted no time kissing him back, tangling his hands through Gary’s hair and already pulling him towards the bed. His leg bumped into the edge of the bed, and Gary broke away from the kiss to start tearing off his and Collie’s clothes— Collie would’ve teased Gary about his impatience, but then Gary’s lips were on his neck, peppering him with kisses that traveled down his chest, down his stomach—
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“Question.”
Collie raised his eyebrows a little. “Yeah?”
“How uh… When you have fangs, how exactly do you go about giving a blowjob?”
Collie’s eyebrows raised more. “… Carefully. You go about it very carefully.”
“Right. Of course. Makes sense. Continue.”
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— Down his stomach, and over Collie’s underwear and thighs. Collie’s head was already swimming, his face hot from the blood rush, over the feeling of Gary’s wet lips against his skin.
And then, he felt teeth sink into his thigh.
“Ow—” Collie flinched, whipping his head down to look at Gary. “What the hell?”
He expected Gary to look apologetic, or maybe have a shit-eating grin. But instead, Gary looked horrified, his eyes locked on the bite mark on Collie’s thigh, where two spots of blood were starting to glisten. “Oh fuck— I didn’t mean—”
The sheer terror in Gary’s eyes sidelined the shock and annoyance Collie initially felt towards the action. “Hey, it’s fine—”
“No you don’t understand—”
“It barely even hurts, Gary—”
“Oh god, you need to lie down—”
“I’m fine, Gary,” Collie insisted. Except, he was starting to feel a little light-headed now. Was this from the bite? No, it couldn’t be, it was kinda hard but it barely even drew blood, and Collie never got woozy from the sight of blood. Was it just the energy of the room? The energy had admittedly taken a turn from steamy to anxiously frantic. They probably weren’t going to be fucking tonight anymore at this rate.
Still, Gary shot up to his feet and grabbed Collie by the elbow, pulling him over to the bed and urging him to lie down. Collie let him, especially since now his head was starting to pound. Was he getting a migraine now? Ugh, now was not the time for that.
“Okay, just— Just— Stay here—”
“Fine, fine, whatever you fucking say,” Collie pinched his nose and waved his hand at Gary. As he squeezed his eyes shut, he heard Gary pick up the motel room’s phone and type in a number frantically, quietly cursing under his breath. An ache was starting to creep through his limbs now, but he tried not to focus on that in favor of eavesdropping on Gary (was it eavesdropping if he was right there?).
It was quiet for a moment, Collie could hear Gary tangling the phone cord around his fingers, and finally Gary whispered into the phone, “Stebbins! I— Uh— Okay, listen man, I— I fucked up, you need to come here— Like right fucking now—” Gary went quiet. If he strained his ears enough, Collie thought he could just make out Stebbins’ voice over the phone line, but he can’t tell what he was saying for shit. “… Yeah.. Okay, yeah… Yeah, he’s lying down… I— I don’t know… It’s room five… Okay, okay.” Clunk. He must’ve hung up the phone.
Gary didn’t say anything for a long while, and with the pounding in his head and the ache in his bones Collie didn’t feel much like talking either. Collie must’ve nodded off, as a few moment later there was a knock at the door, prompting him to finally open his eyes again.
Gary leapt to his feet, practically ripping the door off its hinges when he opened it. Stebbins stepped inside, glancing around for a moment before his eyes landed on Collie. He pushed the door closed behind him before walking over to the bedside, his purple eyes scanning Collie up and down. “Where’s the bite?”
“The uh… I’d barely call it a bite,” Collie sat up, motioning to the bite mark on his inner thigh. There was a distinct indentation on his skin where Gary’s teeth were, and two tiny punctures where his fangs were, just deep enough for the two droplets of blood to collect.
Stebbins sat down on the bed in front of Collie, taking a look at the bite mark. He turned his head slightly to speak to Gary, his eyes still focused on Collie’s thigh. “How much blood did you drink?”
“None,” Gary answered, standing next to the bed with his arms crossed over his chest, still dressed in only his underwear.
“None?” Stebbins raised his eyebrows and fully looked at Gary. When Gary shook his head, he continued, “I’m impressed. Your self control is getting better.”
A look of pride momentarily crossed over Gary’s face, before it was once again replaced with shame as he motioned to Collie. “I still bit him, though.”
“It’s fine, no harm done, right?” Collie said.
Gary sucked in a breath through his teeth and Stebbins shook his head, “No. I’m sorry, Collie, but you’re turning into a vampire.”
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“… Damn,” Richard said, “So, all it took was that bite? You barely even bled from it?”
Collie nodded.
“But… There’s more, right?” Richard asked.
“What do you mean ‘more’?”
“I mean… Surely it takes more than just a bite? Like, there’s a venom they inject? Or they have to drink your blood, too? Or they have to be bitten under a full moon? Something more?”
Collie gave Richard a long look. “…Where in my story did you hear the part where I drank Gary’s blood?”
“It can’t be only a bite.”
“All it takes is a bite, with fangs,” Collie confirmed, “I knew that, but... I don’t know, the bite was shallow enough that I thought maybe it wouldn’t take. It took Stebbins telling me what was happening for it to hit me.”
“Right…” Richard jotted down a few notes. “And none of them had ever bitten you at this point, I’m assuming?”
Collie shrugged a little, “A little nipping here and there, but nothing with fangs. It’s the fangs specifically that get you. If you bite someone with your fangs, and you don’t completely drain them, they will turn into a vampire. End of.”
Richard nodded, his eyes glancing away as he thought. “… So unless you want to make another vampire, you have to a kill a person if you drink directly from them.”
“Yes, exactly.”
“Are there any work arounds to that? Can you drink from a blood bag, or from animals?” Richard pauses for a moment. “Do animals become vampires?”
“Animals don’t become fucking vampires, Harkness.” Collie pinched the bridge of his nose for a moment. “We can drink from blood bags as long as they’re preserved well, we actually get a lot of them for Gary.”
Richard nods, jotting this down before taking a bite of chow mein. He mumbles through a mouthful of noodles, “How did the rest of your turning go?”
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Collie was sat at the end of the bed, his head in his hands. He still needed to get dressed. Hell, he needed to figure out what the hell he was going to do now. The longer he sat, the more he could feel the life leaving his body— The ache in his muscles that occasionally made way for a burning in his veins.
Gary had gotten his clothes back on by now, but he hadn’t left. He had quietly argued to stay in the room when Stebbins had originally told him to wait by the car. Now, the two of them were talking to each other in hushed whispers while Collie just sat there.
“Collie.”
Collie couldn’t bring himself to look up just yet, instead letting out a noncommittal noise.
“We’ll make this as easy as possible, Collie,” Stebbins continued, “We’ll find a way to fake your death, of course—”
“No.” Collie finally removed his head from his hands to look at Stebbins, eyes brimming with tears. “We’re not doing that.”
“It’s that, or you just mysteriously disappear. Which do you think will hurt your family more, being able to bury you or always wondering what happened to you? Dying is the kinder option,” Stebbins calmly explained.
Images of his family mourning an empty casket flitted through Collie’s brain. “No, I can’t fucking do that to them—”
“Disappearing will hurt them more, you know that—”
“Let me tell them!”
Stebbins shut his mouth, narrowing his eyes slightly at Collie. Tears had slipped out now, and Collie was well and truly crying, but he still had a determined look in his eyes (if not desperate too).
“Collie—” Gary started.
“Shut up.”
Gary was looking at Collie with so much guilt and shame it made it hard for Collie to look at him. He did this to him. He didn’t mean to do this to him. But he still did it.
Collie sucked in a shaky breath before continuing, “Let me explain it to them. If… If they don’t believe me, than we can fake my death. Just let me fucking try.”
Stebbins gave Collie a long, unreadable look, before saying, “They’ll think you went insane. You know that.”
“I have to try,” Collie insisted.
“You think they’ll believe you?”
“They will.” No they won’t. Who in their right mind would believe vampires are real without proof?
Stebbins looked over Collie, a muscle in his jaw flexing as he thought. “… The turning will be done in a few hours. We can go visit them tomorrow night.”
“I’ll go by myself,” Collie said.
Stebbins shook his head. “No. You’re a newly turned fledgling, I’m not about to let you go into a house full of humans by yourself.”
Collie scowled, “I would never—”
“We’re not taking that chance. I’m going with, or we’re not going at all.”
“… Fine.”
Collie called his mother and asked for her and his sisters to meet him at her house the next night. He didn’t explain what exactly was going on, only that he had something serious to tell them and they needed to hear about it in person.
They probably thought he was going to officially come out. He wished that’s what was going on, that would be easier.
They had left the motel after Collie put his clothes back on and stopped by Hank and Clementine’s place to recuperate. Stebbins and Gary stepped out for a bit while Hank and Clem fussed over Collie, who at that point felt like he’d been hit by a truck.
“You got off easy, man,” Hank said, “My turning took almost a week. You’ve just got one rough night.”
When Stebbins and Gary returned, Gary still had blood dripping down his chin.
The aches and headache were starting to ease by the time the sun started coming up. Not that Collie could see the sun through all the black out curtains the Olsons had. He’d practically glued himself to the chaise lounge (He vaguely recalled Hank saying how Clementine bought it because she liked to dramatically drape herself across it), and was still lying back on it when Gary came up to him, the blood on his chin now wiped away.
“So… How’re you feeling?” Gary asked.
Collie peaked his eyes open a little to look at him, before closing them again. “Like shit.”
“Yeah, that uh, that tracks…” He goes quiet for a moment, before asking, “How’re your teeth?”
Now that Gary mentioned it, Collie’s teeth are sore. He’d been on-and-off clenching them to try and satiate the feeling, but it just wasn’t quite going away. He raised a hand and thumbed over his teeth, feeling how his canines were already sharper than they were before. “Sore.”
“Right, right… You should feed, before you get too hungry.” Gary held out his hand and Collie stared at it. “… Uhm. You can feed from me for now. You can figure out the hunting shit later.”
Collie’s eyes darted up to Gary. “You want me to feed from you?”
“You gotta feed from someone, and I’m your fucking keeper, so.” He shrugged in a motion that was meant to be nonchalant, but Collie could see the tension in his muscles and the twitch to his fingers. It screamed please take my help, please let me fix this fuck up.
Collie blinked. Was that Gary’s voice in his head?
Did you hear me? The voice came again.
“How’re you doing that?” Collie asks.
“Takes practice,” Gary answers aloud, “Remember, keepers and fledglings have a psychic link.”
“Oh, so I couldn’t get rid of you if I tried?” Collie half-joked, though he wasn’t sure if it landed with how tired he sounded. It must not have, as Gary frowns.
He holds his hand further out again, “You wanna fucking go out and kill someone, or are you gonna let me feed you?”
Collie gives Gary a long look, before wrapping a hand around his wrist and pulling his hand closer. He hesitates. “… I just bite?”
“You have some other genius way to do it?”
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“Wait—” Richard quickly swallowed his food before continuing, “Vampires can feed off of each other?”
Collie nods, his attention on the cat in his lap again. “It’s not something we do very often. Kinda saved for feeding Fledglings, for the most part.”
“How does that work?”
“Well, whoever’s getting fed from either has to drink extra blood before-hand, or go hunting afterwards, since they’re… Y’know, drained. But hunting for a new Fledgling can have one hell of a learning curve, especially when they’re hungry, so it’s generally easier to keep them fed that way than it is to try and get them to do hunting right away.”
“So how often exactly do vampires have to feed?”
“Roughly one person a month.”
Richard thought on this for a moment, before grabbing his phone and opening the calculator app. “You’ve been a vampire for about… 50 years?”
“Something like that.”
Richard punched the numbers. “And if that’s twelve people a year…” He looked at Collie with wide eyes. “You’ve killed around 600 people.”
Collie made a face. “A little less than that. Some of us feed off animals, when we can.”
The number, even taking away a few, was still staggering to Richard. 12 people a year added up fast— That was more than even the most prolific serial killers. If Collie was the youngest and he had killed upward of 600 people, how many had the rest of them killed? What wake of bloodshed were they leaving behind them? “How uh… How old is Stebbins again?”
Collie narrowed his eyes, like he knew exactly what was going through Richard’s head right now, but still he answered, “He’s been a vampire for about 250 years.”
250 years. 12 people a year. Stebbins has killed around 3,000 people. And Richard invited him into his house in the middle of the night.
“Staring at the number isn’t gonna make it any smaller,” Collie said, breaking Richard out of his brief trance.
“Sorry—” Richard tucked his phone away, the offensively large number still on the screen. “Where were we? Oh— How did telling your family go?”
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Collie’s mom lived in a neighborhood within the city, along with his younger sisters Bonnie and Wendy. His older sister, Lori, lived in an apartment close to downtown, but Mrs Parker had agreed to get Lori to come over for the so-called ‘meeting’.
Stebbins turned off the car, looking at the small house with a chain-link fence. “Is this the place?”
“Yeah,” Collie answered, leaned forward in his seat with his head in his hands. How was he going to explain any of this to them? He was going to sound insane, there was no avoiding that. He couldn’t think of a single thing he could say that wouldn’t make them think he’d lost his mind.
“It’s not too late to change your mind,” Stebbins said.
“Yes, it is,” Collie shot back, finally pulling his hands away from his face.
“Are you hungry at all?”
“No.”
“Are you ready to go in?”
“No.”
Stebbins let out a sigh through his nose. The light of the street lamp outside illuminated his face, giving it an orangey glow, and his purple eyes reflected the light in an inhuman way. Collie wondered if his eyes, now yellow, looked the same.
Collie looked out onto the street. How the hell am I supposed to do this— Hi mom, I’m dead but not really.
Shit, that might be the best way to say it, Gary’s voice rung out in his head.
Jesus— Can you get out of my head?!
Hey, you reached out first!
I didn’t MEAN to! Collie wasn’t sure how to handle the psychic link yet. Gary could reach out to him easily, but Collie didn’t know what to do on his end to reach out. Stebbins said that was normal, that using the link was like flexing a muscle you didn’t know you had— Difficult to do on purpose, at first, but once you got the hang of it it’d be like second nature.
Whatever. Good luck, meathead.
Collie thought to thank him for a moment, but he wasn’t sure if the thought even reached Gary. He let out a huff and opened the car door. “Alright, let’s go.”
Wordlessly, Stebbins opened the door and stepped out the car, allowing Collie to lead the way to the front door.
Just as they were going up the front steps, the door swung open to reveal Lori, her hair in a braid over her shoulder and still dressed in her grocery-store work uniform. Her eyes landed on Collie, then flitted over to Stebbins, then back to Collie. Oh yeah, she definitely thought this meeting was Collie’s coming out. “We were just about to send a search party out for you,” She said, only a hint of teasing in her voice.
“We’re not even late,” Collie pointed out, rolling his eyes. Lori smiled and stepped aside to let them in.
Collie took a step forward, meaning to walk through the doorway, but then he stopped. He couldn’t explain why he stopped. He wanted to go inside, he was supposed to go inside, but he just couldn’t get his legs to keep moving. He was just stuck.
“Collie?” Lori gave him a confused look.
Stebbins cleared his throat, “Can we come inside?”
Lori looked even more confused, but answered, “… Yes, you can come inside.”
As soon as the words left her mouth, it was like a weight lifted, and suddenly Collie could move forward again. He walked into the familiar house, looking back at Stebbins who had followed him in. When Lori walked ahead of them, Stebbins leaned over Collie’s shoulder and whispered, “Can’t go into a home without an invitation, remember?”
Damn. Collie hadn’t considered that’d apply to his childhood home, too.
Lori led them past the entrance of the kitchen and into the dining room, where Mrs Parker and Wendy were sitting at the table, and Bonnie was pacing near the door to the backyard. Lori went and sat down at the table on the other side of Mrs Parker, subtly taking Mrs Parker’s hand and squeezing it. Mrs Parker smiled at Collie, the crows-feet and laugh lines hiding her worry. “Hi, hun.”
“Hi, Mom,” Collie said, feeling lost for a moment. He gestured back to Stebbins. “This is Stebbins, he’s… He’s a friend of mine.” God, he couldn’t sound more stilted if he tried. Stepping forward, he pulled out a chair and sat down across the table from his mom. Bonnie stopped pacing and stood over Mrs Parker’s shoulder, while Stebbins did the same to Collie.
“So, what’s the big deal?” Wendy asks, her eyes on Stebbins.
Fuck. Guess they were just jumping straight to it. “There’s… Some stuff has happened.”
“What kind of ‘stuff’?” Lori prompts, raising an eyebrow a little.
“… Alright, well. I met a group of people a few months ago and became friends with them. And things were going great and all, but… Shit happened and now I have to leave with them in a bit.”
“Honey…” Mrs. Parker looked at her son with a serious, albeit concerned look. “You aren’t running away to join a cult, are you?”
Collie sputtered, caught off guard, “No, no! I’m not joining a cult!”
Stebbins tilted his head as if contemplating Mrs. Parker’s question. “I suppose by some people’s definition, we would count as a cult—”
“Stebbins you are not helping.”
“Then what the fuck is going on?” Bonnie finally spoke up, crossing her arms. “Are you gay? Because if this is about you being gay, we don’t care, you don’t have to leave—”
Collie let out a bitter laugh, running a hand through his hair, “I wish this was about me being gay. That’d be so much fucking easier.”
“Collie.” His eyes locked on Mrs Parker. “What’s going on?”
… Collie let out a deep sigh. “I’m a vampire now.”
Silence.
"… Okay, what’s really going on?” Lori asks.
“I know that sounds fucking insane, but I’m telling the truth!” Collie exclaimed.
“Vampires aren’t real.”
Wendy leans over to Mrs Parker and whispers, “I think it is a cult, Mom.”
“You know what— Bring me a fucking clove of garlic,” Collie demands.
The women all exchange glances, before Bonnie says, “Fine,” and walks out to the kitchen.
“Collie,” Stebbins says, a warning tone in his voice.
“It’s fine,” Collie insists as Bonnie returns, peeling a clove off a bulb of garlic and setting it down in front of Collie.
Collie picks up the clove and flinches, nearly dropping it. Merely touching it burns, like he’s holding a small lit coal instead of a vegetable. But it’s too late for him to change his mind, he lifted it up to his mouth—
Someone snatched the clove from his hand, and he turned his head just in time to see Stebbins pop the clove into his mouth and bite down.
His reaction is immediate— Stebbins started hacking, slapping a hand over his mouth and rushing to the kitchen. “Billy—!” Collie calls after him, scrambling out of his chair and after him, paying no mind the gasps and yells from his family.
Stebbins was keeled over the sink, hands gripped on the counter as he spat out the garlic and continued hacking and wheezing.
“What the fuck were you thinking?!” Collie rushed to him, putting a hand on his back. Stebbins did’t answer, instead spitting out another remnant of garlic from his mouth, wincing and grimacing.
“He really doesn’t like garlic,” Bonnie said dryly from the doorway of the kitchen, where the rest of the family has gathered to watch the display. Collie was about to bite back, when Stebbins straightened up and turned around, opening his mouth wide to display not only his fangs, but the burning welts on his tongue and gums, traces of smoke lifting off of them, blood filling his mouth. Everyone went silent, save for a faint sizzling that Collie realized was coming from Stebbins’ flesh.
Stebbins closed his mouth after a moment and said, as clearly as he can around the welts and blood, “Proof enough? Or should I bite another?”
“…Oh my god…” Bonnie stared with wide eyes. Lori had a hand over her mouth, and Wendy looked like she was ready to faint at the sight of Stebbins’ mouth.
“… Oh, Collie… Why did you do that?” Mrs Parker looked devastated, more so than Collie was prepared for.
“Mom…” He stepped over, taking her hands in his. “I didn’t— It just kind of happened. But it’s okay, I’ll still be able to see you guys, and I’ll come visit. I’m not really dead.” He wasn’t sure if he quite believed that last part himself.
Mrs Parker took a deep breath. “Will you be okay?”
“He will,” Stebbins reassured, holding a hand over his bleeding mouth. “We’ll make sure of it.”
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“He ate garlic?”
“Technically, he chewed it and spit it out.”
Richard balked for a moment.
Collie leaned forward in his chair. “Stebbins is a protective motherfucker. He acts like he doesn’t have a soft spot for any of us, but we wouldn’t be in his coven if he didn’t. Don’t let him fool you.”
“That… Huh.” Richard thought it over— From what little he knew about Stebbins, protective wasn’t really a word that came to mind. The words that came to mind for him were handsome and cryptic. Then again, he had only met him twice before.
The cat lets out a ‘mrrow!’ and Collie pet him on the head again. “Trust me, you’ll see how he really is.”
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It was quiet when they got back in the car. Stebbins leaned his head back against the headrest, closing his eyes and taking a deep breath. Collie watched him quietly. “… You didn’t have to do that.”
“Yes, I did,” Stebbins said simply.
“I was going to do it myself, you didn’t— I would’ve been fine.”
“You’ve never been burned by garlic before, you didn’t know what to expect.”
“And you would?”
Stebbins scoffed, “I’m over 200 years old, Collie. Of course I’ve been burned by garlic before.”
“But still—”
“But nothing,” Stebbins opened his eyes and turned his head to look at Collie, a stern look in his eyes. “You are part of my coven now. I take care of my coven. End of discussion.” Collie frowned slightly as Stebbins once again leaned his head back and closed his eyes.
“… Does it still hurt?”
“What do you think?” Stebbins winced, so subtly Collie almost missed it. Talking must’ve been irritating the welts in his mouth. He opened his eyes again and straightened himself, turning the key in the ignition.
“Want me to kiss it better?” Collie joked, a weak attempt to lighten the mood.
It landed, and Stebbins scoffs and smirks slightly, glancing at Collie. “I mean… If you’re offering.”
Collie grinned back a little, before leaning over and slotting his lips into Stebbins’. He’s careful about it, too aware of Stebbins’ injuries, and broke away after only a moment. He couldn’t help but lick his lips, tasting Stebbins’ blood on them.
Stebbins’ eyes flitted over Collie, regarding him for a moment before saying, “We’ll stay in town another month or two. Give you some time with your family before we pack and leave.”
Collie nods. “… Thanks.”
“It’s the least we can do.”
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“How long did you stay in Sioux Falls after that?” Richard asked before shoving the last of his chow mein into his mouth.
“I think about three months, then we went to Chicago.”
Richard scribbled this down. “How often were you able to see your family, exactly?”
Collie let out a sigh as he thought. “… I was going to aim for once a year at first, but… After you turn, time gets… It’s hard to explain. You know how when you get older, a year feels shorter and shorter?”
Richard nodded.
“That’s amplified when you become a vampire. It’s why most of us don’t recall our exact age— There gets to a point where a decade feels like a year. I still try to visit often, but it ended up being more like once every two or three years instead.” He scratched the cat behinds the ears. “I got to meet a few nieces and nephews over the years. And I never missed a funeral.”
Richard nodded again, tapping his pen a little as he thought. “So… Who’s left? Out of your immediate family?”
“Bonnie,” Collie answered. “She’s the last one.”
“And you still visit her?”
“Yup. Whenever people ask her who I am, she tells them I’m her nephew.”
Richard nods, folding his hands in front of himself as he thinks. “… Given what you know now, how meeting them all would end, do you think you’d do it again?”
“What, go on a date with Gary?”
“Or any of them. If you knew you’d end up here, and had the chance to go back and make a different choice, would you say no? Never go on a date with him, never befriend the coven, never become a vampire?”
Collie crossed his arms, his jaw flexing slightly as he thinks. “… I don’t know.”
“That’s it? You just don’t know?”
“You’re asking me if I’d erase five decades worth of memories for a hypothetical.”
“Five decades over not having to watch your family die.”
Collie leveled his gaze on Richard. The corners of his mouth twitched and there was a mistiness in his eyes. “… I’ve thought about it.” His voice cracked slightly, he paused and cleared his throat before continuing, “More than I can count. But you know what I realized, Harkness?”
“What?”
“That there was a chance, however small, that even if I never became a vampire, I would’ve had to watch my family die anyways.” The cat stood up in Collie’s lap and rubbed its face against his jaw, and he absently lifted his hand to scratch its chin. “Bonnie had to watch them all die, too. Who’s to say I wouldn’t have outlived her anyways?” Collie leaned his head back a little, looking up towards the ceiling. “And as selfish as it sounds, I didn’t put them through losing me.”
“… And do you still believe your soul is trapped?” Richard asked.
“Yeah. I kinda hope when I die— actually die, my soul will be released and I’ll still get to see them after all. But I won’t know for sure until that happens.” He looked back down at Richard.
Richard nods again, his eyes glancing at his laptop screen as it continued to record. “… I think that’ll conclude our interview.”
Collie nodded. “Alright.”
Richard reached to the laptop and stopped the recording, closing it before looking to Collie again. “When can I expect the next one of you to come?”
“A week, at the latest,” Collie answered, standing up and cradling the cat in his arms, who was once again purring.
“Alright, thank you for your time.”
Collie flashed a fanged smile, “I’ll seeya around, Harkness.”
Rating: Mature
Chapter Warnings: Implied stalking, non-consensual turning, very very lightly implied period-typical homophobia
Pairings: Poly Walkers (All of them together lmao), Starkness (Stebbins x Harkness), Parkovitch (Collie x Barkovitch), Barker (Collie x Art), Stollie (Stebbins x Collie)
Word Count: 8247
Summary:
One night, Richard Harkness encounters a man who claims to be a vampire.
Fifteen years later, he encounters the same man, as well as the rest of his coven.
In which famous author Richard Harkness takes the opportunity to interview a coven of vampires.
TLW Fic Masterlist
Chapter Masterlist
Read on AO3
Richard’ hand slapped against the light switch, turning on the table lamp and illuminating the living room.
Four people were sat on his couch, and four more were standing behind said couch, all looking at him. Richard gaped, taking a second to realize where he recognized them from— They were all the people from the signing who had brought in copies of Mourning Chronicles, including the man he still wasn’t quite sure was Stebbins.
“Apologies for dropping in unannounced,” maybe-Stebbins said, standing behind the couch and looking at Richard with a close-mouthed smile, eyes glinting purple in the light. “I wanted you to meet my friends.”
“Your… Friends?” Richard said, eyes looking over said ‘friends’. In the center of the couch were the man and woman in orange, the woman sat on the man’s lap with her arms wrapped around him, like she was trying to completely engulf him in her. His own arms are wrapped around her as well, and he looks like he’s exactly where he wants to be. The woman’s feet are in the lap of the lanky man in the waistcoat, who’s sat there politely with his hands folded atop her feet. On the other side of the couple is the man with long dark hair, who’s leaning back against the couple a little with a leg kicked up over the arm rest of the couch, making himself all the more the comfortable in the space. Behind him and the couch is the man with long blond hair, who’s leaned down with his arms folded over the back of the couch, head resting in his arms. On the other side are the redhead and scarred man duo, who are pressed so close together it’s like they want to be fused into one. Between this duo and the blond man is the man Richard is slowly accepting to be Stebbins, stood tall like he’s meant to be there.
“That’s one way to describe us,” The scarred man said, shooting Stebbins a knowing look paired with a smile.
Richard’s eyes darted to each person, before landing on Stebbins again. “… You’re really a vampire, aren’t you?”
“Of course I am,” Stebbins easily confirmed, stepping out from behind the couch. “I had no reason to lie to you then, and I have no reason to lie to you now.”
“No, no,” Richard pointed his fork at Stebbins, shaking his head slightly. “You have plenty of reason to lie about that. If anything, the fact that you’re just openly admitting it makes it less believable— You should be claiming you’re not a vampire, if you really are one.”
“No offense, but you’re not really the vampire hunter type, so that’s not much of a concern,” The redhead spoke up.
“Regardless, worst case scenario if I do tell you is you think I’m insane and dismiss my claims as nothing more than the ramblings of a madman,” Stebbins continued. He paused for a moment, before a grin grows on his face. “But you don’t think that. Do you, Harkness?”
Richard swallowed hard. “… It’s been fifteen years.”
“You’ve been counting.”
“How did you get in here?”
“You invited me in.”
“Fifteen years ago.”
“And you never revoked the invitation,” Stebbins calmly explained, raising his eyebrows a little. “I came in, and invited everyone else.”
Richard gaped, attention torn between Stebbins and the crowd of people on his couch, who were watching the two of them intently. “How did you find me again? Have you been following me?”
“It’s not like it was hard, Harkness. You never moved,” Stebbins pointed out.
“But you’ve been following me,” Richard reiterated.
Stebbins tilted his head again. “You didn’t seem so bothered by it back then.”
“I was a lot more naive,” Richard said.
“I’m inclined to believe you still are,” Stebbins countered. Before Richard can speak, he continued, “Allow me to introduce the members of my coven.” He motions to each member, listing off their names, “Collie Parker, Gary Barkovitch, Hank Olson, Clementine Olson, Art Baker, Ray Garraty, and Peter McVries. You’ll get to know them all soon enough.”
“Will I?” Richard raised his eyebrows, pushing his glasses up a little.
“Of course. I’m sure you have plenty of questions. I think we’re all willing to answer them.” Stebbins looked over to the others.
“Sure, why the fuck not? Want me to suck his dick too?” The other blond, Barkovitch, said, startling Richard slightly that such a pretty face would sound so crass.
“Not yet,” Stebbins replied.
Richard stuck his fork into the takeout container, “What’re you getting at?”
Stebbins leveled his gaze on Richard. “You have the unique opportunity to interview an entire coven of vampires is what I’m getting at.” He tilted his head. “Unless, of course, you don’t want to do that. If that’s the case, we can just leave—”
“Wait wait wait—” Richard held up a hand, looking over his uninvited guests, then back to Stebbins. “… You’ll all just… Let me interview you? Just like that?”
“It’d be an honor, really,” The woman, Clementine, piped up, still tangled around Hank. “We’re huge fans.”
Richard looked over the group of them, all smiling back at him. “… One moment.” He turned and scrambled out of the living room and to his office. The takeout is momentarily left on his desk as he gathered up his laptop and one of his many spare notebooks and the first pen he could find. Once all are securely tucked under his arm, he snatched the takeout box once more and returned to the living room. “Alright, I— Oh.”
The living room is significantly emptier than it was just a few moments ago. Instead of a whole crowd of people, there remains only one— Collie Parker, if Richard is remembering his name right, is sat on the couch, with a sandy-colored cat in his lap, whose head he’s gently scratching.
“… Where… Where did the cat come from?” Richard asks.
“He’s been here the whole time,” Collie answers.
Richard was fairly certain there hadn’t been a cat when he was last in the room, but perhaps he’d just been distracted by the eight vampires. He shook his head, before nodding towards the dining room. “Come this way—” He quickly sped off to the dining room, setting down his laptop, notebook, and takeout as Collie followed and took a seat across from him, still holding onto the cat.
“Do you mind if I record this, and take some notes?” Richard asked, hand hovering over the mousepad of his laptop.
“Not at all,” Collie replied.
Richard pressed record and began his interview, “Can you state your name and current age, please?”
“Collie Parker, seventy years old,” Collie scratched behind the cat’s ears as he said this.
“And we are interviewing you because?” Richard led.
“Because I’m a vampire.”
Richard clicked open his pen and pulled his notebook closer. “And how exactly did you end up becoming a vampire? Actually, let’s take a step back— Did you meet the coven you’re in before, or after you became a vampire?”
“Before.”
“And how exactly did you meet them?”
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Collie first noticed them because they didn’t need to rent a VHS player.
He worked in the only video rental store in Sioux Falls, the Hollywood Emporium. To be honest, he wasn’t sure how long the store would last, what with VHS still being so new, but it helped pay the bills for the time being and didn’t make him want to bash his head in a wall, so all things considered it was a pretty good gig.
Again, with VHS being so new, most customers didn’t own their own player and would have to rent a VHS player along with whatever movie they wanted to watch.
So it stuck out to him a little when the group didn’t rent a VHS player.
The sun had set by now, and it was getting closer to closing time. He was counting down the minutes to when the last few customers would filter out and then he’d help close shop and go home for the night.
Collie didn’t pay them too much mind as they browsed the store, being too busy restocking the candy up at the counter. His coworker, Zuck, was in the back, and the two blonds were the last two customers in the store tonight. The two were silently browsing, occasionally showing the other a particular title before putting it back on the shelf. Collie was just finishing stocking when the taller one handed a movie over to the shorter one, then turned and walked out of the store.
The shorter blond made his way to the counter, two VHS cases in hand, and a camera hanging from his neck.
Collie slipped behind the counter to the register, “Find everything alright?”
“Mhm,” The man nodded, sliding over the two cases. He didn’t seem terribly talkative today. His eyes were darting around, looking everywhere but at Collie— It was a little suspicious, sure, but Collie didn’t care about his job enough to call out the behavior. If the guy stuck a case down his pants or something, oh well, he wasn’t paid enough to care.
“Where’re your friends?” Collie asked, grabbing the two cases to scan. One was a creature feature about a killer shark, and the other was an older slasher about a murderer in a remote motel. Good options, Collie thought.
“Uh— My friends?” The man sputtered slightly, his eyes finally landing on Collie, brow furrowed.
“Yeah, you usually come in here with your friends, and your other one just left,” Collie replied.
“He, uh, he’s just waiting by the car. The others are at home— Their homes.” His gaze dropped to the candies at the counter. “… Which of these are the most sour?”
“The most sour?” Collie looked at the options, “Probably the Lemonheads.”
“Great. I’ll take one of those.”
Collie grabbed a box of Lemonheads. “That all?”
“Uhm… Yeah,” The man said. He looked like he was trying desperately to act normal and failing. Maybe he was nervous when he was alone, it’d explain why he was always accompanied by someone whenever Collie saw him.
Collie wrote down the two titles. “And your name?”
The man blinked. Collie almost mistook the color of his irises for red. “Huh?”
“For the store membership, what’s your name?”
“Oh— Uh, should be under Gary Barkovitch,” The man— Gary— rubbed a hand against the back of his neck, once again glancing away.
Collie wrote down the name Gary Barkovitch next to the two titles, in order to keep track of how long they were gone and how much the store would be owed once the tapes were returned. “Alright, 25 cents for the Lemonheads, and you’re good to go.”
Gary fished out a quarter from his pocket and set it on the counter. Collie took the quarter and slid the tapes and candy back over to Gary. He expected the man to take his goods and go, but instead he paused for a moment, before blurting out, “Do you do modeling?”
Collie gave Gary a confused look. “… What?”
“Do you do modeling— Like, for photography? Shit like that?” Gary stammered out, once again managing to keep his gaze on Collie. His hand fidgeted with the camera hanging around his neck.
Collie scoffed slightly, holding back a slight smile. “You think I’d be working here if I was a model?”
That drew a nervous smile from Gary, tight-lipped like he was self-conscious of his teeth. “I mean— You never know. You look good enough to be one.”
“… Thanks,” Collie said, taking a moment to decide if Gary was being genuine or not. “You’re not gonna get a discount, though.”
“I was actually wondering if maybe— I mean, just an idea, no big deal if not, but—” Gary started rambling, like the words would escape him if he didn’t get the out fast enough, “Could you do some modeling for me?”
Collie raised his eyebrows. “…You want me to model for you?” He motioned to the camera in Gary’s hand.
Gary nodded, looking apprehensive and eager all at once.
“… If I didn’t know better, I’d think you were either trying to get me on a date, or trying to get me alone so you could kill me,” Collie jokes dryly, watching closely for his reaction.
Gary lets out a nervous, almost panicked laugh, “I— Er— I mean—” He quickly looks around the empty store, swallowing hard before leaning in and whispering, “The first one…? Please?”
A grin crossed Collie’s face. “Name a time and place. Just nowhere remote.”
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“So you started seeing Barkovitch?” Richard asked through a mouth full of chow mein.
“All of them, not just Barkovitch,” Collie answered. “I’d never been taken on so many dates in my life. Granted, we didn’t call them dates, but that’s what they were.”
“Oh…” Richard jotted down a note in his notebook, swallowing before he continued talking, “So you started dating all of them… And when exactly did you find out they were vampires?”
Collie thought for a moment. “… Two weeks into it? Maybe one? Barkovitch spilled the beans pretty quickly.”
“And you believed him?”
“Hell no. I thought he was fucking with me.”
“Surely you noticed something was off about them though, right?”
“Little bit,” Collie responded, repositioning the cat in his lap, who was purring so loudly Richard swore his laptop was going to pick up on the noise. “I mean… It’s a fucking coven of polyamorous vampires. There tends to be signs.”
Richard nodded, “Right…”
“So, I thought about it. A lot. And I started putting together the pieces, realized a lot of the weird things they all did and said just… Made more sense if they were actually fucking vampires. So I think I believed it after a month of being with them.”
“Only a month?”
Collie shrugged, “There were a lot of weird things.”
The cat pawed at Collie’s chin, which made him look at the cat and smile, scrunching his nose and unintentionally flashing his fangs. The light from the one lit lamp glinted off his canines, just a touch too sharp. Richard realized he was staring.
“Did you want to join the coven right away, when you realized it was real?” He asked.
“Not at all.”
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It was sometime after midnight, and the two of them had driven to a park— The closest Collie would get to nature, Art would joke. They were parked in the parking lot, sitting back on the still-warm hood of the car to stargaze.
“Can you actually see more of ‘em? ‘Cus it looks like fuck-all to me,” Collie asked. To Collie, there wasn’t that much to look at in the sky. A few stars here and there, but he knew the night sky was a better sight outside of the city, better than what he could see in a city parking lot, even if it was by a playground and a big patch of grass and trees. Still, it seemed good enough for Art, who was pointing out different constellations.
Art laughed a little, a warm sound that quickened Collie’s heart. “Oh yeah. I think it’s one of my favorite parts of being… Y’know. You see things so much clearer in the dark, and the sky is just full o’ stars…” Art’s eyes looked back up to the sky, and Collie wondered if maybe, if he just looked close enough, if he could see the stars in Art’s eyes.
A comfortable quiet settled between the two of them as Collie turned his gaze back up to the inky sky, squinting a little as he tried to pick out any of the constellations Art had pointed out to him. He could just maybe make out Orion’s Belt— Or was that the Big Dipper’s handle? Or the Little Dipper’s?
“… Have you thought about turning?” Art suddenly asked quietly.
Collie turned again to see a pensive look on Art’s face. His eyes glanced back to Collie, still waiting for an answer. “… Yeah, I have,” Collie said, returning his gaze to the sky.
“And?”
“… I can’t.”
“Why not?” Art’s tone wasn’t accusatory or annoyed, but instead was nonjudgmental. Simply curious.
Collie let out a sigh. “… I can’t do that to my family. Maybe if I knew for certain I’d see them in the after life, but…” He trailed off for a moment, before picking up the thought elsewhere, “The Lakota believe that when you die, your soul has to make a journey before reaching The Spirit World, where they’re reunited with their loved ones. If a soul is unable to complete that journey for whatever reason, they become a trapped spirit, and bring about bad luck and misfortune to those around them… At least, that’s how it is put really simply.”
He could see Art nod from the corner of his vision. “That’s understandable…”
“So yeah. I can’t risk not being able to reunite with my family…” He suddenly turns to look at Art again, sitting up a little this time, “Aren’t you Catholic? How the hell did you come to terms with that?”
Art laughs again, propping himself up on his elbows, “I’ve had a while to think it over, trust me. You don’t gotta worry about me.” Collie smiles slightly, before leaning over and giving Art a brief kiss on the lips. Art leans into the kiss, a grin spreading on his face after Collie pulls away. “I know you don’t wanna join us, but I know I’m not just speaking for myself when I say I’ll miss you when we leave.”
“It’ll be one hell of a story for me to tell. ‘The time I dated—” He paused to count on his fingers, “Seven vampires.’”
“And no one will believe you,” Art laughed again.
Collie joined him in his laughter, leaning back against the hood of the car and looking up to the stars again.
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“Another quick question—” Richard said through a mouthful of noodles.
“What?”
Richard swallowed and repeated himself, “Another quick question— Moving? How often does the coven move?”
Collie waggled his hand a little, “Varies a bit. Longest we’ll stay in a place is five years, but sometimes we only stay in a place for a month or two. I’d say the average is one or two years.”
Richard scribbled this down. “And are you guys just renting places as you go? Do you all share a house?”
“Again, it depends on where we are and what’s available. Stebbins owns a few houses that we can all periodically live in throughout the US, but there’ll be plenty of times where we’ll go somewhere new and all just rent separate places.” Collie stroked his hand over the cat on his lap. “You’re gonna find out a lot of the answers to your questions are ‘it depends’.”
“I mean… Fair, I guess,” Richard paused to take another bite of chow mein. “So, how exactly did you end up turning and joining the coven, if you were so against it?”
Collie gave the cat in his lap a pointed look. “Well it wasn’t exactly fucking planned.”
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It was Collie’s idea to meet up at the motel— That’s where he’d have his other (rare and occasional) hook-ups, so he saw no reason to meet elsewhere.
The second the door to the room closed behind him, Gary was on Collie, wrapping his arms around his neck and kissing him hungrily. Collie wasted no time kissing him back, tangling his hands through Gary’s hair and already pulling him towards the bed. His leg bumped into the edge of the bed, and Gary broke away from the kiss to start tearing off his and Collie’s clothes— Collie would’ve teased Gary about his impatience, but then Gary’s lips were on his neck, peppering him with kisses that traveled down his chest, down his stomach—
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“Question.”
Collie raised his eyebrows a little. “Yeah?”
“How uh… When you have fangs, how exactly do you go about giving a blowjob?”
Collie’s eyebrows raised more. “… Carefully. You go about it very carefully.”
“Right. Of course. Makes sense. Continue.”
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— Down his stomach, and over Collie’s underwear and thighs. Collie’s head was already swimming, his face hot from the blood rush, over the feeling of Gary’s wet lips against his skin.
And then, he felt teeth sink into his thigh.
“Ow—” Collie flinched, whipping his head down to look at Gary. “What the hell?”
He expected Gary to look apologetic, or maybe have a shit-eating grin. But instead, Gary looked horrified, his eyes locked on the bite mark on Collie’s thigh, where two spots of blood were starting to glisten. “Oh fuck— I didn’t mean—”
The sheer terror in Gary’s eyes sidelined the shock and annoyance Collie initially felt towards the action. “Hey, it’s fine—”
“No you don’t understand—”
“It barely even hurts, Gary—”
“Oh god, you need to lie down—”
“I’m fine, Gary,” Collie insisted. Except, he was starting to feel a little light-headed now. Was this from the bite? No, it couldn’t be, it was kinda hard but it barely even drew blood, and Collie never got woozy from the sight of blood. Was it just the energy of the room? The energy had admittedly taken a turn from steamy to anxiously frantic. They probably weren’t going to be fucking tonight anymore at this rate.
Still, Gary shot up to his feet and grabbed Collie by the elbow, pulling him over to the bed and urging him to lie down. Collie let him, especially since now his head was starting to pound. Was he getting a migraine now? Ugh, now was not the time for that.
“Okay, just— Just— Stay here—”
“Fine, fine, whatever you fucking say,” Collie pinched his nose and waved his hand at Gary. As he squeezed his eyes shut, he heard Gary pick up the motel room’s phone and type in a number frantically, quietly cursing under his breath. An ache was starting to creep through his limbs now, but he tried not to focus on that in favor of eavesdropping on Gary (was it eavesdropping if he was right there?).
It was quiet for a moment, Collie could hear Gary tangling the phone cord around his fingers, and finally Gary whispered into the phone, “Stebbins! I— Uh— Okay, listen man, I— I fucked up, you need to come here— Like right fucking now—” Gary went quiet. If he strained his ears enough, Collie thought he could just make out Stebbins’ voice over the phone line, but he can’t tell what he was saying for shit. “… Yeah.. Okay, yeah… Yeah, he’s lying down… I— I don’t know… It’s room five… Okay, okay.” Clunk. He must’ve hung up the phone.
Gary didn’t say anything for a long while, and with the pounding in his head and the ache in his bones Collie didn’t feel much like talking either. Collie must’ve nodded off, as a few moment later there was a knock at the door, prompting him to finally open his eyes again.
Gary leapt to his feet, practically ripping the door off its hinges when he opened it. Stebbins stepped inside, glancing around for a moment before his eyes landed on Collie. He pushed the door closed behind him before walking over to the bedside, his purple eyes scanning Collie up and down. “Where’s the bite?”
“The uh… I’d barely call it a bite,” Collie sat up, motioning to the bite mark on his inner thigh. There was a distinct indentation on his skin where Gary’s teeth were, and two tiny punctures where his fangs were, just deep enough for the two droplets of blood to collect.
Stebbins sat down on the bed in front of Collie, taking a look at the bite mark. He turned his head slightly to speak to Gary, his eyes still focused on Collie’s thigh. “How much blood did you drink?”
“None,” Gary answered, standing next to the bed with his arms crossed over his chest, still dressed in only his underwear.
“None?” Stebbins raised his eyebrows and fully looked at Gary. When Gary shook his head, he continued, “I’m impressed. Your self control is getting better.”
A look of pride momentarily crossed over Gary’s face, before it was once again replaced with shame as he motioned to Collie. “I still bit him, though.”
“It’s fine, no harm done, right?” Collie said.
Gary sucked in a breath through his teeth and Stebbins shook his head, “No. I’m sorry, Collie, but you’re turning into a vampire.”
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“… Damn,” Richard said, “So, all it took was that bite? You barely even bled from it?”
Collie nodded.
“But… There’s more, right?” Richard asked.
“What do you mean ‘more’?”
“I mean… Surely it takes more than just a bite? Like, there’s a venom they inject? Or they have to drink your blood, too? Or they have to be bitten under a full moon? Something more?”
Collie gave Richard a long look. “…Where in my story did you hear the part where I drank Gary’s blood?”
“It can’t be only a bite.”
“All it takes is a bite, with fangs,” Collie confirmed, “I knew that, but... I don’t know, the bite was shallow enough that I thought maybe it wouldn’t take. It took Stebbins telling me what was happening for it to hit me.”
“Right…” Richard jotted down a few notes. “And none of them had ever bitten you at this point, I’m assuming?”
Collie shrugged a little, “A little nipping here and there, but nothing with fangs. It’s the fangs specifically that get you. If you bite someone with your fangs, and you don’t completely drain them, they will turn into a vampire. End of.”
Richard nodded, his eyes glancing away as he thought. “… So unless you want to make another vampire, you have to a kill a person if you drink directly from them.”
“Yes, exactly.”
“Are there any work arounds to that? Can you drink from a blood bag, or from animals?” Richard pauses for a moment. “Do animals become vampires?”
“Animals don’t become fucking vampires, Harkness.” Collie pinched the bridge of his nose for a moment. “We can drink from blood bags as long as they’re preserved well, we actually get a lot of them for Gary.”
Richard nods, jotting this down before taking a bite of chow mein. He mumbles through a mouthful of noodles, “How did the rest of your turning go?”
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Collie was sat at the end of the bed, his head in his hands. He still needed to get dressed. Hell, he needed to figure out what the hell he was going to do now. The longer he sat, the more he could feel the life leaving his body— The ache in his muscles that occasionally made way for a burning in his veins.
Gary had gotten his clothes back on by now, but he hadn’t left. He had quietly argued to stay in the room when Stebbins had originally told him to wait by the car. Now, the two of them were talking to each other in hushed whispers while Collie just sat there.
“Collie.”
Collie couldn’t bring himself to look up just yet, instead letting out a noncommittal noise.
“We’ll make this as easy as possible, Collie,” Stebbins continued, “We’ll find a way to fake your death, of course—”
“No.” Collie finally removed his head from his hands to look at Stebbins, eyes brimming with tears. “We’re not doing that.”
“It’s that, or you just mysteriously disappear. Which do you think will hurt your family more, being able to bury you or always wondering what happened to you? Dying is the kinder option,” Stebbins calmly explained.
Images of his family mourning an empty casket flitted through Collie’s brain. “No, I can’t fucking do that to them—”
“Disappearing will hurt them more, you know that—”
“Let me tell them!”
Stebbins shut his mouth, narrowing his eyes slightly at Collie. Tears had slipped out now, and Collie was well and truly crying, but he still had a determined look in his eyes (if not desperate too).
“Collie—” Gary started.
“Shut up.”
Gary was looking at Collie with so much guilt and shame it made it hard for Collie to look at him. He did this to him. He didn’t mean to do this to him. But he still did it.
Collie sucked in a shaky breath before continuing, “Let me explain it to them. If… If they don’t believe me, than we can fake my death. Just let me fucking try.”
Stebbins gave Collie a long, unreadable look, before saying, “They’ll think you went insane. You know that.”
“I have to try,” Collie insisted.
“You think they’ll believe you?”
“They will.” No they won’t. Who in their right mind would believe vampires are real without proof?
Stebbins looked over Collie, a muscle in his jaw flexing as he thought. “… The turning will be done in a few hours. We can go visit them tomorrow night.”
“I’ll go by myself,” Collie said.
Stebbins shook his head. “No. You’re a newly turned fledgling, I’m not about to let you go into a house full of humans by yourself.”
Collie scowled, “I would never—”
“We’re not taking that chance. I’m going with, or we’re not going at all.”
“… Fine.”
Collie called his mother and asked for her and his sisters to meet him at her house the next night. He didn’t explain what exactly was going on, only that he had something serious to tell them and they needed to hear about it in person.
They probably thought he was going to officially come out. He wished that’s what was going on, that would be easier.
They had left the motel after Collie put his clothes back on and stopped by Hank and Clementine’s place to recuperate. Stebbins and Gary stepped out for a bit while Hank and Clem fussed over Collie, who at that point felt like he’d been hit by a truck.
“You got off easy, man,” Hank said, “My turning took almost a week. You’ve just got one rough night.”
When Stebbins and Gary returned, Gary still had blood dripping down his chin.
The aches and headache were starting to ease by the time the sun started coming up. Not that Collie could see the sun through all the black out curtains the Olsons had. He’d practically glued himself to the chaise lounge (He vaguely recalled Hank saying how Clementine bought it because she liked to dramatically drape herself across it), and was still lying back on it when Gary came up to him, the blood on his chin now wiped away.
“So… How’re you feeling?” Gary asked.
Collie peaked his eyes open a little to look at him, before closing them again. “Like shit.”
“Yeah, that uh, that tracks…” He goes quiet for a moment, before asking, “How’re your teeth?”
Now that Gary mentioned it, Collie’s teeth are sore. He’d been on-and-off clenching them to try and satiate the feeling, but it just wasn’t quite going away. He raised a hand and thumbed over his teeth, feeling how his canines were already sharper than they were before. “Sore.”
“Right, right… You should feed, before you get too hungry.” Gary held out his hand and Collie stared at it. “… Uhm. You can feed from me for now. You can figure out the hunting shit later.”
Collie’s eyes darted up to Gary. “You want me to feed from you?”
“You gotta feed from someone, and I’m your fucking keeper, so.” He shrugged in a motion that was meant to be nonchalant, but Collie could see the tension in his muscles and the twitch to his fingers. It screamed please take my help, please let me fix this fuck up.
Collie blinked. Was that Gary’s voice in his head?
Did you hear me? The voice came again.
“How’re you doing that?” Collie asks.
“Takes practice,” Gary answers aloud, “Remember, keepers and fledglings have a psychic link.”
“Oh, so I couldn’t get rid of you if I tried?” Collie half-joked, though he wasn’t sure if it landed with how tired he sounded. It must not have, as Gary frowns.
He holds his hand further out again, “You wanna fucking go out and kill someone, or are you gonna let me feed you?”
Collie gives Gary a long look, before wrapping a hand around his wrist and pulling his hand closer. He hesitates. “… I just bite?”
“You have some other genius way to do it?”
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“Wait—” Richard quickly swallowed his food before continuing, “Vampires can feed off of each other?”
Collie nods, his attention on the cat in his lap again. “It’s not something we do very often. Kinda saved for feeding Fledglings, for the most part.”
“How does that work?”
“Well, whoever’s getting fed from either has to drink extra blood before-hand, or go hunting afterwards, since they’re… Y’know, drained. But hunting for a new Fledgling can have one hell of a learning curve, especially when they’re hungry, so it’s generally easier to keep them fed that way than it is to try and get them to do hunting right away.”
“So how often exactly do vampires have to feed?”
“Roughly one person a month.”
Richard thought on this for a moment, before grabbing his phone and opening the calculator app. “You’ve been a vampire for about… 50 years?”
“Something like that.”
Richard punched the numbers. “And if that’s twelve people a year…” He looked at Collie with wide eyes. “You’ve killed around 600 people.”
Collie made a face. “A little less than that. Some of us feed off animals, when we can.”
The number, even taking away a few, was still staggering to Richard. 12 people a year added up fast— That was more than even the most prolific serial killers. If Collie was the youngest and he had killed upward of 600 people, how many had the rest of them killed? What wake of bloodshed were they leaving behind them? “How uh… How old is Stebbins again?”
Collie narrowed his eyes, like he knew exactly what was going through Richard’s head right now, but still he answered, “He’s been a vampire for about 250 years.”
250 years. 12 people a year. Stebbins has killed around 3,000 people. And Richard invited him into his house in the middle of the night.
“Staring at the number isn’t gonna make it any smaller,” Collie said, breaking Richard out of his brief trance.
“Sorry—” Richard tucked his phone away, the offensively large number still on the screen. “Where were we? Oh— How did telling your family go?”
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Collie’s mom lived in a neighborhood within the city, along with his younger sisters Bonnie and Wendy. His older sister, Lori, lived in an apartment close to downtown, but Mrs Parker had agreed to get Lori to come over for the so-called ‘meeting’.
Stebbins turned off the car, looking at the small house with a chain-link fence. “Is this the place?”
“Yeah,” Collie answered, leaned forward in his seat with his head in his hands. How was he going to explain any of this to them? He was going to sound insane, there was no avoiding that. He couldn’t think of a single thing he could say that wouldn’t make them think he’d lost his mind.
“It’s not too late to change your mind,” Stebbins said.
“Yes, it is,” Collie shot back, finally pulling his hands away from his face.
“Are you hungry at all?”
“No.”
“Are you ready to go in?”
“No.”
Stebbins let out a sigh through his nose. The light of the street lamp outside illuminated his face, giving it an orangey glow, and his purple eyes reflected the light in an inhuman way. Collie wondered if his eyes, now yellow, looked the same.
Collie looked out onto the street. How the hell am I supposed to do this— Hi mom, I’m dead but not really.
Shit, that might be the best way to say it, Gary’s voice rung out in his head.
Jesus— Can you get out of my head?!
Hey, you reached out first!
I didn’t MEAN to! Collie wasn’t sure how to handle the psychic link yet. Gary could reach out to him easily, but Collie didn’t know what to do on his end to reach out. Stebbins said that was normal, that using the link was like flexing a muscle you didn’t know you had— Difficult to do on purpose, at first, but once you got the hang of it it’d be like second nature.
Whatever. Good luck, meathead.
Collie thought to thank him for a moment, but he wasn’t sure if the thought even reached Gary. He let out a huff and opened the car door. “Alright, let’s go.”
Wordlessly, Stebbins opened the door and stepped out the car, allowing Collie to lead the way to the front door.
Just as they were going up the front steps, the door swung open to reveal Lori, her hair in a braid over her shoulder and still dressed in her grocery-store work uniform. Her eyes landed on Collie, then flitted over to Stebbins, then back to Collie. Oh yeah, she definitely thought this meeting was Collie’s coming out. “We were just about to send a search party out for you,” She said, only a hint of teasing in her voice.
“We’re not even late,” Collie pointed out, rolling his eyes. Lori smiled and stepped aside to let them in.
Collie took a step forward, meaning to walk through the doorway, but then he stopped. He couldn’t explain why he stopped. He wanted to go inside, he was supposed to go inside, but he just couldn’t get his legs to keep moving. He was just stuck.
“Collie?” Lori gave him a confused look.
Stebbins cleared his throat, “Can we come inside?”
Lori looked even more confused, but answered, “… Yes, you can come inside.”
As soon as the words left her mouth, it was like a weight lifted, and suddenly Collie could move forward again. He walked into the familiar house, looking back at Stebbins who had followed him in. When Lori walked ahead of them, Stebbins leaned over Collie’s shoulder and whispered, “Can’t go into a home without an invitation, remember?”
Damn. Collie hadn’t considered that’d apply to his childhood home, too.
Lori led them past the entrance of the kitchen and into the dining room, where Mrs Parker and Wendy were sitting at the table, and Bonnie was pacing near the door to the backyard. Lori went and sat down at the table on the other side of Mrs Parker, subtly taking Mrs Parker’s hand and squeezing it. Mrs Parker smiled at Collie, the crows-feet and laugh lines hiding her worry. “Hi, hun.”
“Hi, Mom,” Collie said, feeling lost for a moment. He gestured back to Stebbins. “This is Stebbins, he’s… He’s a friend of mine.” God, he couldn’t sound more stilted if he tried. Stepping forward, he pulled out a chair and sat down across the table from his mom. Bonnie stopped pacing and stood over Mrs Parker’s shoulder, while Stebbins did the same to Collie.
“So, what’s the big deal?” Wendy asks, her eyes on Stebbins.
Fuck. Guess they were just jumping straight to it. “There’s… Some stuff has happened.”
“What kind of ‘stuff’?” Lori prompts, raising an eyebrow a little.
“… Alright, well. I met a group of people a few months ago and became friends with them. And things were going great and all, but… Shit happened and now I have to leave with them in a bit.”
“Honey…” Mrs. Parker looked at her son with a serious, albeit concerned look. “You aren’t running away to join a cult, are you?”
Collie sputtered, caught off guard, “No, no! I’m not joining a cult!”
Stebbins tilted his head as if contemplating Mrs. Parker’s question. “I suppose by some people’s definition, we would count as a cult—”
“Stebbins you are not helping.”
“Then what the fuck is going on?” Bonnie finally spoke up, crossing her arms. “Are you gay? Because if this is about you being gay, we don’t care, you don’t have to leave—”
Collie let out a bitter laugh, running a hand through his hair, “I wish this was about me being gay. That’d be so much fucking easier.”
“Collie.” His eyes locked on Mrs Parker. “What’s going on?”
… Collie let out a deep sigh. “I’m a vampire now.”
Silence.
"… Okay, what’s really going on?” Lori asks.
“I know that sounds fucking insane, but I’m telling the truth!” Collie exclaimed.
“Vampires aren’t real.”
Wendy leans over to Mrs Parker and whispers, “I think it is a cult, Mom.”
“You know what— Bring me a fucking clove of garlic,” Collie demands.
The women all exchange glances, before Bonnie says, “Fine,” and walks out to the kitchen.
“Collie,” Stebbins says, a warning tone in his voice.
“It’s fine,” Collie insists as Bonnie returns, peeling a clove off a bulb of garlic and setting it down in front of Collie.
Collie picks up the clove and flinches, nearly dropping it. Merely touching it burns, like he’s holding a small lit coal instead of a vegetable. But it’s too late for him to change his mind, he lifted it up to his mouth—
Someone snatched the clove from his hand, and he turned his head just in time to see Stebbins pop the clove into his mouth and bite down.
His reaction is immediate— Stebbins started hacking, slapping a hand over his mouth and rushing to the kitchen. “Billy—!” Collie calls after him, scrambling out of his chair and after him, paying no mind the gasps and yells from his family.
Stebbins was keeled over the sink, hands gripped on the counter as he spat out the garlic and continued hacking and wheezing.
“What the fuck were you thinking?!” Collie rushed to him, putting a hand on his back. Stebbins did’t answer, instead spitting out another remnant of garlic from his mouth, wincing and grimacing.
“He really doesn’t like garlic,” Bonnie said dryly from the doorway of the kitchen, where the rest of the family has gathered to watch the display. Collie was about to bite back, when Stebbins straightened up and turned around, opening his mouth wide to display not only his fangs, but the burning welts on his tongue and gums, traces of smoke lifting off of them, blood filling his mouth. Everyone went silent, save for a faint sizzling that Collie realized was coming from Stebbins’ flesh.
Stebbins closed his mouth after a moment and said, as clearly as he can around the welts and blood, “Proof enough? Or should I bite another?”
“…Oh my god…” Bonnie stared with wide eyes. Lori had a hand over her mouth, and Wendy looked like she was ready to faint at the sight of Stebbins’ mouth.
“… Oh, Collie… Why did you do that?” Mrs Parker looked devastated, more so than Collie was prepared for.
“Mom…” He stepped over, taking her hands in his. “I didn’t— It just kind of happened. But it’s okay, I’ll still be able to see you guys, and I’ll come visit. I’m not really dead.” He wasn’t sure if he quite believed that last part himself.
Mrs Parker took a deep breath. “Will you be okay?”
“He will,” Stebbins reassured, holding a hand over his bleeding mouth. “We’ll make sure of it.”
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“He ate garlic?”
“Technically, he chewed it and spit it out.”
Richard balked for a moment.
Collie leaned forward in his chair. “Stebbins is a protective motherfucker. He acts like he doesn’t have a soft spot for any of us, but we wouldn’t be in his coven if he didn’t. Don’t let him fool you.”
“That… Huh.” Richard thought it over— From what little he knew about Stebbins, protective wasn’t really a word that came to mind. The words that came to mind for him were handsome and cryptic. Then again, he had only met him twice before.
The cat lets out a ‘mrrow!’ and Collie pet him on the head again. “Trust me, you’ll see how he really is.”
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It was quiet when they got back in the car. Stebbins leaned his head back against the headrest, closing his eyes and taking a deep breath. Collie watched him quietly. “… You didn’t have to do that.”
“Yes, I did,” Stebbins said simply.
“I was going to do it myself, you didn’t— I would’ve been fine.”
“You’ve never been burned by garlic before, you didn’t know what to expect.”
“And you would?”
Stebbins scoffed, “I’m over 200 years old, Collie. Of course I’ve been burned by garlic before.”
“But still—”
“But nothing,” Stebbins opened his eyes and turned his head to look at Collie, a stern look in his eyes. “You are part of my coven now. I take care of my coven. End of discussion.” Collie frowned slightly as Stebbins once again leaned his head back and closed his eyes.
“… Does it still hurt?”
“What do you think?” Stebbins winced, so subtly Collie almost missed it. Talking must’ve been irritating the welts in his mouth. He opened his eyes again and straightened himself, turning the key in the ignition.
“Want me to kiss it better?” Collie joked, a weak attempt to lighten the mood.
It landed, and Stebbins scoffs and smirks slightly, glancing at Collie. “I mean… If you’re offering.”
Collie grinned back a little, before leaning over and slotting his lips into Stebbins’. He’s careful about it, too aware of Stebbins’ injuries, and broke away after only a moment. He couldn’t help but lick his lips, tasting Stebbins’ blood on them.
Stebbins’ eyes flitted over Collie, regarding him for a moment before saying, “We’ll stay in town another month or two. Give you some time with your family before we pack and leave.”
Collie nods. “… Thanks.”
“It’s the least we can do.”
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“How long did you stay in Sioux Falls after that?” Richard asked before shoving the last of his chow mein into his mouth.
“I think about three months, then we went to Chicago.”
Richard scribbled this down. “How often were you able to see your family, exactly?”
Collie let out a sigh as he thought. “… I was going to aim for once a year at first, but… After you turn, time gets… It’s hard to explain. You know how when you get older, a year feels shorter and shorter?”
Richard nodded.
“That’s amplified when you become a vampire. It’s why most of us don’t recall our exact age— There gets to a point where a decade feels like a year. I still try to visit often, but it ended up being more like once every two or three years instead.” He scratched the cat behinds the ears. “I got to meet a few nieces and nephews over the years. And I never missed a funeral.”
Richard nodded again, tapping his pen a little as he thought. “So… Who’s left? Out of your immediate family?”
“Bonnie,” Collie answered. “She’s the last one.”
“And you still visit her?”
“Yup. Whenever people ask her who I am, she tells them I’m her nephew.”
Richard nods, folding his hands in front of himself as he thinks. “… Given what you know now, how meeting them all would end, do you think you’d do it again?”
“What, go on a date with Gary?”
“Or any of them. If you knew you’d end up here, and had the chance to go back and make a different choice, would you say no? Never go on a date with him, never befriend the coven, never become a vampire?”
Collie crossed his arms, his jaw flexing slightly as he thinks. “… I don’t know.”
“That’s it? You just don’t know?”
“You’re asking me if I’d erase five decades worth of memories for a hypothetical.”
“Five decades over not having to watch your family die.”
Collie leveled his gaze on Richard. The corners of his mouth twitched and there was a mistiness in his eyes. “… I’ve thought about it.” His voice cracked slightly, he paused and cleared his throat before continuing, “More than I can count. But you know what I realized, Harkness?”
“What?”
“That there was a chance, however small, that even if I never became a vampire, I would’ve had to watch my family die anyways.” The cat stood up in Collie’s lap and rubbed its face against his jaw, and he absently lifted his hand to scratch its chin. “Bonnie had to watch them all die, too. Who’s to say I wouldn’t have outlived her anyways?” Collie leaned his head back a little, looking up towards the ceiling. “And as selfish as it sounds, I didn’t put them through losing me.”
“… And do you still believe your soul is trapped?” Richard asked.
“Yeah. I kinda hope when I die— actually die, my soul will be released and I’ll still get to see them after all. But I won’t know for sure until that happens.” He looked back down at Richard.
Richard nods again, his eyes glancing at his laptop screen as it continued to record. “… I think that’ll conclude our interview.”
Collie nodded. “Alright.”
Richard reached to the laptop and stopped the recording, closing it before looking to Collie again. “When can I expect the next one of you to come?”
“A week, at the latest,” Collie answered, standing up and cradling the cat in his arms, who was once again purring.
“Alright, thank you for your time.”
Collie flashed a fanged smile, “I’ll seeya around, Harkness.”
Rating: Mature
Chapter Warnings: Implied stalking, non-consensual turning, very very lightly implied period-typical homophobia
Pairings: Poly Walkers (All of them together lmao), Starkness (Stebbins x Harkness), Parkovitch (Collie x Barkovitch), Barker (Collie x Art), Stollie (Stebbins x Collie)
Word Count: 8247
Summary:
One night, Richard Harkness encounters a man who claims to be a vampire.
Fifteen years later, he encounters the same man, as well as the rest of his coven.
In which famous author Richard Harkness takes the opportunity to interview a coven of vampires.
TLW Fic Masterlist
Chapter Masterlist
Read on AO3
Richard’ hand slapped against the light switch, turning on the table lamp and illuminating the living room.
Four people were sat on his couch, and four more were standing behind said couch, all looking at him. Richard gaped, taking a second to realize where he recognized them from— They were all the people from the signing who had brought in copies of Mourning Chronicles, including the man he still wasn’t quite sure was Stebbins.
“Apologies for dropping in unannounced,” maybe-Stebbins said, standing behind the couch and looking at Richard with a close-mouthed smile, eyes glinting purple in the light. “I wanted you to meet my friends.”
“Your… Friends?” Richard said, eyes looking over said ‘friends’. In the center of the couch were the man and woman in orange, the woman sat on the man’s lap with her arms wrapped around him, like she was trying to completely engulf him in her. His own arms are wrapped around her as well, and he looks like he’s exactly where he wants to be. The woman’s feet are in the lap of the lanky man in the waistcoat, who’s sat there politely with his hands folded atop her feet. On the other side of the couple is the man with long dark hair, who’s leaning back against the couple a little with a leg kicked up over the arm rest of the couch, making himself all the more the comfortable in the space. Behind him and the couch is the man with long blond hair, who’s leaned down with his arms folded over the back of the couch, head resting in his arms. On the other side are the redhead and scarred man duo, who are pressed so close together it’s like they want to be fused into one. Between this duo and the blond man is the man Richard is slowly accepting to be Stebbins, stood tall like he’s meant to be there.
“That’s one way to describe us,” The scarred man said, shooting Stebbins a knowing look paired with a smile.
Richard’s eyes darted to each person, before landing on Stebbins again. “… You’re really a vampire, aren’t you?”
“Of course I am,” Stebbins easily confirmed, stepping out from behind the couch. “I had no reason to lie to you then, and I have no reason to lie to you now.”
“No, no,” Richard pointed his fork at Stebbins, shaking his head slightly. “You have plenty of reason to lie about that. If anything, the fact that you’re just openly admitting it makes it less believable— You should be claiming you’re not a vampire, if you really are one.”
“No offense, but you’re not really the vampire hunter type, so that’s not much of a concern,” The redhead spoke up.
“Regardless, worst case scenario if I do tell you is you think I’m insane and dismiss my claims as nothing more than the ramblings of a madman,” Stebbins continued. He paused for a moment, before a grin grows on his face. “But you don’t think that. Do you, Harkness?”
Richard swallowed hard. “… It’s been fifteen years.”
“You’ve been counting.”
“How did you get in here?”
“You invited me in.”
“Fifteen years ago.”
“And you never revoked the invitation,” Stebbins calmly explained, raising his eyebrows a little. “I came in, and invited everyone else.”
Richard gaped, attention torn between Stebbins and the crowd of people on his couch, who were watching the two of them intently. “How did you find me again? Have you been following me?”
“It’s not like it was hard, Harkness. You never moved,” Stebbins pointed out.
“But you’ve been following me,” Richard reiterated.
Stebbins tilted his head again. “You didn’t seem so bothered by it back then.”
“I was a lot more naive,” Richard said.
“I’m inclined to believe you still are,” Stebbins countered. Before Richard can speak, he continued, “Allow me to introduce the members of my coven.” He motions to each member, listing off their names, “Collie Parker, Gary Barkovitch, Hank Olson, Clementine Olson, Art Baker, Ray Garraty, and Peter McVries. You’ll get to know them all soon enough.”
“Will I?” Richard raised his eyebrows, pushing his glasses up a little.
“Of course. I’m sure you have plenty of questions. I think we’re all willing to answer them.” Stebbins looked over to the others.
“Sure, why the fuck not? Want me to suck his dick too?” The other blond, Barkovitch, said, startling Richard slightly that such a pretty face would sound so crass.
“Not yet,” Stebbins replied.
Richard stuck his fork into the takeout container, “What’re you getting at?”
Stebbins leveled his gaze on Richard. “You have the unique opportunity to interview an entire coven of vampires is what I’m getting at.” He tilted his head. “Unless, of course, you don’t want to do that. If that’s the case, we can just leave—”
“Wait wait wait—” Richard held up a hand, looking over his uninvited guests, then back to Stebbins. “… You’ll all just… Let me interview you? Just like that?”
“It’d be an honor, really,” The woman, Clementine, piped up, still tangled around Hank. “We’re huge fans.”
Richard looked over the group of them, all smiling back at him. “… One moment.” He turned and scrambled out of the living room and to his office. The takeout is momentarily left on his desk as he gathered up his laptop and one of his many spare notebooks and the first pen he could find. Once all are securely tucked under his arm, he snatched the takeout box once more and returned to the living room. “Alright, I— Oh.”
The living room is significantly emptier than it was just a few moments ago. Instead of a whole crowd of people, there remains only one— Collie Parker, if Richard is remembering his name right, is sat on the couch, with a sandy-colored cat in his lap, whose head he’s gently scratching.
“… Where… Where did the cat come from?” Richard asks.
“He’s been here the whole time,” Collie answers.
Richard was fairly certain there hadn’t been a cat when he was last in the room, but perhaps he’d just been distracted by the eight vampires. He shook his head, before nodding towards the dining room. “Come this way—” He quickly sped off to the dining room, setting down his laptop, notebook, and takeout as Collie followed and took a seat across from him, still holding onto the cat.
“Do you mind if I record this, and take some notes?” Richard asked, hand hovering over the mousepad of his laptop.
“Not at all,” Collie replied.
Richard pressed record and began his interview, “Can you state your name and current age, please?”
“Collie Parker, seventy years old,” Collie scratched behind the cat’s ears as he said this.
“And we are interviewing you because?” Richard led.
“Because I’m a vampire.”
Richard clicked open his pen and pulled his notebook closer. “And how exactly did you end up becoming a vampire? Actually, let’s take a step back— Did you meet the coven you’re in before, or after you became a vampire?”
“Before.”
“And how exactly did you meet them?”
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Collie first noticed them because they didn’t need to rent a VHS player.
He worked in the only video rental store in Sioux Falls, the Hollywood Emporium. To be honest, he wasn’t sure how long the store would last, what with VHS still being so new, but it helped pay the bills for the time being and didn’t make him want to bash his head in a wall, so all things considered it was a pretty good gig.
Again, with VHS being so new, most customers didn’t own their own player and would have to rent a VHS player along with whatever movie they wanted to watch.
So it stuck out to him a little when the group didn’t rent a VHS player.
The sun had set by now, and it was getting closer to closing time. He was counting down the minutes to when the last few customers would filter out and then he’d help close shop and go home for the night.
Collie didn’t pay them too much mind as they browsed the store, being too busy restocking the candy up at the counter. His coworker, Zuck, was in the back, and the two blonds were the last two customers in the store tonight. The two were silently browsing, occasionally showing the other a particular title before putting it back on the shelf. Collie was just finishing stocking when the taller one handed a movie over to the shorter one, then turned and walked out of the store.
The shorter blond made his way to the counter, two VHS cases in hand, and a camera hanging from his neck.
Collie slipped behind the counter to the register, “Find everything alright?”
“Mhm,” The man nodded, sliding over the two cases. He didn’t seem terribly talkative today. His eyes were darting around, looking everywhere but at Collie— It was a little suspicious, sure, but Collie didn’t care about his job enough to call out the behavior. If the guy stuck a case down his pants or something, oh well, he wasn’t paid enough to care.
“Where’re your friends?” Collie asked, grabbing the two cases to scan. One was a creature feature about a killer shark, and the other was an older slasher about a murderer in a remote motel. Good options, Collie thought.
“Uh— My friends?” The man sputtered slightly, his eyes finally landing on Collie, brow furrowed.
“Yeah, you usually come in here with your friends, and your other one just left,” Collie replied.
“He, uh, he’s just waiting by the car. The others are at home— Their homes.” His gaze dropped to the candies at the counter. “… Which of these are the most sour?”
“The most sour?” Collie looked at the options, “Probably the Lemonheads.”
“Great. I’ll take one of those.”
Collie grabbed a box of Lemonheads. “That all?”
“Uhm… Yeah,” The man said. He looked like he was trying desperately to act normal and failing. Maybe he was nervous when he was alone, it’d explain why he was always accompanied by someone whenever Collie saw him.
Collie wrote down the two titles. “And your name?”
The man blinked. Collie almost mistook the color of his irises for red. “Huh?”
“For the store membership, what’s your name?”
“Oh— Uh, should be under Gary Barkovitch,” The man— Gary— rubbed a hand against the back of his neck, once again glancing away.
Collie wrote down the name Gary Barkovitch next to the two titles, in order to keep track of how long they were gone and how much the store would be owed once the tapes were returned. “Alright, 25 cents for the Lemonheads, and you’re good to go.”
Gary fished out a quarter from his pocket and set it on the counter. Collie took the quarter and slid the tapes and candy back over to Gary. He expected the man to take his goods and go, but instead he paused for a moment, before blurting out, “Do you do modeling?”
Collie gave Gary a confused look. “… What?”
“Do you do modeling— Like, for photography? Shit like that?” Gary stammered out, once again managing to keep his gaze on Collie. His hand fidgeted with the camera hanging around his neck.
Collie scoffed slightly, holding back a slight smile. “You think I’d be working here if I was a model?”
That drew a nervous smile from Gary, tight-lipped like he was self-conscious of his teeth. “I mean— You never know. You look good enough to be one.”
“… Thanks,” Collie said, taking a moment to decide if Gary was being genuine or not. “You’re not gonna get a discount, though.”
“I was actually wondering if maybe— I mean, just an idea, no big deal if not, but—” Gary started rambling, like the words would escape him if he didn’t get the out fast enough, “Could you do some modeling for me?”
Collie raised his eyebrows. “…You want me to model for you?” He motioned to the camera in Gary’s hand.
Gary nodded, looking apprehensive and eager all at once.
“… If I didn’t know better, I’d think you were either trying to get me on a date, or trying to get me alone so you could kill me,” Collie jokes dryly, watching closely for his reaction.
Gary lets out a nervous, almost panicked laugh, “I— Er— I mean—” He quickly looks around the empty store, swallowing hard before leaning in and whispering, “The first one…? Please?”
A grin crossed Collie’s face. “Name a time and place. Just nowhere remote.”
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“So you started seeing Barkovitch?” Richard asked through a mouth full of chow mein.
“All of them, not just Barkovitch,” Collie answered. “I’d never been taken on so many dates in my life. Granted, we didn’t call them dates, but that’s what they were.”
“Oh…” Richard jotted down a note in his notebook, swallowing before he continued talking, “So you started dating all of them… And when exactly did you find out they were vampires?”
Collie thought for a moment. “… Two weeks into it? Maybe one? Barkovitch spilled the beans pretty quickly.”
“And you believed him?”
“Hell no. I thought he was fucking with me.”
“Surely you noticed something was off about them though, right?”
“Little bit,” Collie responded, repositioning the cat in his lap, who was purring so loudly Richard swore his laptop was going to pick up on the noise. “I mean… It’s a fucking coven of polyamorous vampires. There tends to be signs.”
Richard nodded, “Right…”
“So, I thought about it. A lot. And I started putting together the pieces, realized a lot of the weird things they all did and said just… Made more sense if they were actually fucking vampires. So I think I believed it after a month of being with them.”
“Only a month?”
Collie shrugged, “There were a lot of weird things.”
The cat pawed at Collie’s chin, which made him look at the cat and smile, scrunching his nose and unintentionally flashing his fangs. The light from the one lit lamp glinted off his canines, just a touch too sharp. Richard realized he was staring.
“Did you want to join the coven right away, when you realized it was real?” He asked.
“Not at all.”
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It was sometime after midnight, and the two of them had driven to a park— The closest Collie would get to nature, Art would joke. They were parked in the parking lot, sitting back on the still-warm hood of the car to stargaze.
“Can you actually see more of ‘em? ‘Cus it looks like fuck-all to me,” Collie asked. To Collie, there wasn’t that much to look at in the sky. A few stars here and there, but he knew the night sky was a better sight outside of the city, better than what he could see in a city parking lot, even if it was by a playground and a big patch of grass and trees. Still, it seemed good enough for Art, who was pointing out different constellations.
Art laughed a little, a warm sound that quickened Collie’s heart. “Oh yeah. I think it’s one of my favorite parts of being… Y’know. You see things so much clearer in the dark, and the sky is just full o’ stars…” Art’s eyes looked back up to the sky, and Collie wondered if maybe, if he just looked close enough, if he could see the stars in Art’s eyes.
A comfortable quiet settled between the two of them as Collie turned his gaze back up to the inky sky, squinting a little as he tried to pick out any of the constellations Art had pointed out to him. He could just maybe make out Orion’s Belt— Or was that the Big Dipper’s handle? Or the Little Dipper’s?
“… Have you thought about turning?” Art suddenly asked quietly.
Collie turned again to see a pensive look on Art’s face. His eyes glanced back to Collie, still waiting for an answer. “… Yeah, I have,” Collie said, returning his gaze to the sky.
“And?”
“… I can’t.”
“Why not?” Art’s tone wasn’t accusatory or annoyed, but instead was nonjudgmental. Simply curious.
Collie let out a sigh. “… I can’t do that to my family. Maybe if I knew for certain I’d see them in the after life, but…” He trailed off for a moment, before picking up the thought elsewhere, “The Lakota believe that when you die, your soul has to make a journey before reaching The Spirit World, where they’re reunited with their loved ones. If a soul is unable to complete that journey for whatever reason, they become a trapped spirit, and bring about bad luck and misfortune to those around them… At least, that’s how it is put really simply.”
He could see Art nod from the corner of his vision. “That’s understandable…”
“So yeah. I can’t risk not being able to reunite with my family…” He suddenly turns to look at Art again, sitting up a little this time, “Aren’t you Catholic? How the hell did you come to terms with that?”
Art laughs again, propping himself up on his elbows, “I’ve had a while to think it over, trust me. You don’t gotta worry about me.” Collie smiles slightly, before leaning over and giving Art a brief kiss on the lips. Art leans into the kiss, a grin spreading on his face after Collie pulls away. “I know you don’t wanna join us, but I know I’m not just speaking for myself when I say I’ll miss you when we leave.”
“It’ll be one hell of a story for me to tell. ‘The time I dated—” He paused to count on his fingers, “Seven vampires.’”
“And no one will believe you,” Art laughed again.
Collie joined him in his laughter, leaning back against the hood of the car and looking up to the stars again.
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“Another quick question—” Richard said through a mouthful of noodles.
“What?”
Richard swallowed and repeated himself, “Another quick question— Moving? How often does the coven move?”
Collie waggled his hand a little, “Varies a bit. Longest we’ll stay in a place is five years, but sometimes we only stay in a place for a month or two. I’d say the average is one or two years.”
Richard scribbled this down. “And are you guys just renting places as you go? Do you all share a house?”
“Again, it depends on where we are and what’s available. Stebbins owns a few houses that we can all periodically live in throughout the US, but there’ll be plenty of times where we’ll go somewhere new and all just rent separate places.” Collie stroked his hand over the cat on his lap. “You’re gonna find out a lot of the answers to your questions are ‘it depends’.”
“I mean… Fair, I guess,” Richard paused to take another bite of chow mein. “So, how exactly did you end up turning and joining the coven, if you were so against it?”
Collie gave the cat in his lap a pointed look. “Well it wasn’t exactly fucking planned.”
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It was Collie’s idea to meet up at the motel— That’s where he’d have his other (rare and occasional) hook-ups, so he saw no reason to meet elsewhere.
The second the door to the room closed behind him, Gary was on Collie, wrapping his arms around his neck and kissing him hungrily. Collie wasted no time kissing him back, tangling his hands through Gary’s hair and already pulling him towards the bed. His leg bumped into the edge of the bed, and Gary broke away from the kiss to start tearing off his and Collie’s clothes— Collie would’ve teased Gary about his impatience, but then Gary’s lips were on his neck, peppering him with kisses that traveled down his chest, down his stomach—
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“Question.”
Collie raised his eyebrows a little. “Yeah?”
“How uh… When you have fangs, how exactly do you go about giving a blowjob?”
Collie’s eyebrows raised more. “… Carefully. You go about it very carefully.”
“Right. Of course. Makes sense. Continue.”
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— Down his stomach, and over Collie’s underwear and thighs. Collie’s head was already swimming, his face hot from the blood rush, over the feeling of Gary’s wet lips against his skin.
And then, he felt teeth sink into his thigh.
“Ow—” Collie flinched, whipping his head down to look at Gary. “What the hell?”
He expected Gary to look apologetic, or maybe have a shit-eating grin. But instead, Gary looked horrified, his eyes locked on the bite mark on Collie’s thigh, where two spots of blood were starting to glisten. “Oh fuck— I didn’t mean—”
The sheer terror in Gary’s eyes sidelined the shock and annoyance Collie initially felt towards the action. “Hey, it’s fine—”
“No you don’t understand—”
“It barely even hurts, Gary—”
“Oh god, you need to lie down—”
“I’m fine, Gary,” Collie insisted. Except, he was starting to feel a little light-headed now. Was this from the bite? No, it couldn’t be, it was kinda hard but it barely even drew blood, and Collie never got woozy from the sight of blood. Was it just the energy of the room? The energy had admittedly taken a turn from steamy to anxiously frantic. They probably weren’t going to be fucking tonight anymore at this rate.
Still, Gary shot up to his feet and grabbed Collie by the elbow, pulling him over to the bed and urging him to lie down. Collie let him, especially since now his head was starting to pound. Was he getting a migraine now? Ugh, now was not the time for that.
“Okay, just— Just— Stay here—”
“Fine, fine, whatever you fucking say,” Collie pinched his nose and waved his hand at Gary. As he squeezed his eyes shut, he heard Gary pick up the motel room’s phone and type in a number frantically, quietly cursing under his breath. An ache was starting to creep through his limbs now, but he tried not to focus on that in favor of eavesdropping on Gary (was it eavesdropping if he was right there?).
It was quiet for a moment, Collie could hear Gary tangling the phone cord around his fingers, and finally Gary whispered into the phone, “Stebbins! I— Uh— Okay, listen man, I— I fucked up, you need to come here— Like right fucking now—” Gary went quiet. If he strained his ears enough, Collie thought he could just make out Stebbins’ voice over the phone line, but he can’t tell what he was saying for shit. “… Yeah.. Okay, yeah… Yeah, he’s lying down… I— I don’t know… It’s room five… Okay, okay.” Clunk. He must’ve hung up the phone.
Gary didn’t say anything for a long while, and with the pounding in his head and the ache in his bones Collie didn’t feel much like talking either. Collie must’ve nodded off, as a few moment later there was a knock at the door, prompting him to finally open his eyes again.
Gary leapt to his feet, practically ripping the door off its hinges when he opened it. Stebbins stepped inside, glancing around for a moment before his eyes landed on Collie. He pushed the door closed behind him before walking over to the bedside, his purple eyes scanning Collie up and down. “Where’s the bite?”
“The uh… I’d barely call it a bite,” Collie sat up, motioning to the bite mark on his inner thigh. There was a distinct indentation on his skin where Gary’s teeth were, and two tiny punctures where his fangs were, just deep enough for the two droplets of blood to collect.
Stebbins sat down on the bed in front of Collie, taking a look at the bite mark. He turned his head slightly to speak to Gary, his eyes still focused on Collie’s thigh. “How much blood did you drink?”
“None,” Gary answered, standing next to the bed with his arms crossed over his chest, still dressed in only his underwear.
“None?” Stebbins raised his eyebrows and fully looked at Gary. When Gary shook his head, he continued, “I’m impressed. Your self control is getting better.”
A look of pride momentarily crossed over Gary’s face, before it was once again replaced with shame as he motioned to Collie. “I still bit him, though.”
“It’s fine, no harm done, right?” Collie said.
Gary sucked in a breath through his teeth and Stebbins shook his head, “No. I’m sorry, Collie, but you’re turning into a vampire.”
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“… Damn,” Richard said, “So, all it took was that bite? You barely even bled from it?”
Collie nodded.
“But… There’s more, right?” Richard asked.
“What do you mean ‘more’?”
“I mean… Surely it takes more than just a bite? Like, there’s a venom they inject? Or they have to drink your blood, too? Or they have to be bitten under a full moon? Something more?”
Collie gave Richard a long look. “…Where in my story did you hear the part where I drank Gary’s blood?”
“It can’t be only a bite.”
“All it takes is a bite, with fangs,” Collie confirmed, “I knew that, but... I don’t know, the bite was shallow enough that I thought maybe it wouldn’t take. It took Stebbins telling me what was happening for it to hit me.”
“Right…” Richard jotted down a few notes. “And none of them had ever bitten you at this point, I’m assuming?”
Collie shrugged a little, “A little nipping here and there, but nothing with fangs. It’s the fangs specifically that get you. If you bite someone with your fangs, and you don’t completely drain them, they will turn into a vampire. End of.”
Richard nodded, his eyes glancing away as he thought. “… So unless you want to make another vampire, you have to a kill a person if you drink directly from them.”
“Yes, exactly.”
“Are there any work arounds to that? Can you drink from a blood bag, or from animals?” Richard pauses for a moment. “Do animals become vampires?”
“Animals don’t become fucking vampires, Harkness.” Collie pinched the bridge of his nose for a moment. “We can drink from blood bags as long as they’re preserved well, we actually get a lot of them for Gary.”
Richard nods, jotting this down before taking a bite of chow mein. He mumbles through a mouthful of noodles, “How did the rest of your turning go?”
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Collie was sat at the end of the bed, his head in his hands. He still needed to get dressed. Hell, he needed to figure out what the hell he was going to do now. The longer he sat, the more he could feel the life leaving his body— The ache in his muscles that occasionally made way for a burning in his veins.
Gary had gotten his clothes back on by now, but he hadn’t left. He had quietly argued to stay in the room when Stebbins had originally told him to wait by the car. Now, the two of them were talking to each other in hushed whispers while Collie just sat there.
“Collie.”
Collie couldn’t bring himself to look up just yet, instead letting out a noncommittal noise.
“We’ll make this as easy as possible, Collie,” Stebbins continued, “We’ll find a way to fake your death, of course—”
“No.” Collie finally removed his head from his hands to look at Stebbins, eyes brimming with tears. “We’re not doing that.”
“It’s that, or you just mysteriously disappear. Which do you think will hurt your family more, being able to bury you or always wondering what happened to you? Dying is the kinder option,” Stebbins calmly explained.
Images of his family mourning an empty casket flitted through Collie’s brain. “No, I can’t fucking do that to them—”
“Disappearing will hurt them more, you know that—”
“Let me tell them!”
Stebbins shut his mouth, narrowing his eyes slightly at Collie. Tears had slipped out now, and Collie was well and truly crying, but he still had a determined look in his eyes (if not desperate too).
“Collie—” Gary started.
“Shut up.”
Gary was looking at Collie with so much guilt and shame it made it hard for Collie to look at him. He did this to him. He didn’t mean to do this to him. But he still did it.
Collie sucked in a shaky breath before continuing, “Let me explain it to them. If… If they don’t believe me, than we can fake my death. Just let me fucking try.”
Stebbins gave Collie a long, unreadable look, before saying, “They’ll think you went insane. You know that.”
“I have to try,” Collie insisted.
“You think they’ll believe you?”
“They will.” No they won’t. Who in their right mind would believe vampires are real without proof?
Stebbins looked over Collie, a muscle in his jaw flexing as he thought. “… The turning will be done in a few hours. We can go visit them tomorrow night.”
“I’ll go by myself,” Collie said.
Stebbins shook his head. “No. You’re a newly turned fledgling, I’m not about to let you go into a house full of humans by yourself.”
Collie scowled, “I would never—”
“We’re not taking that chance. I’m going with, or we’re not going at all.”
“… Fine.”
Collie called his mother and asked for her and his sisters to meet him at her house the next night. He didn’t explain what exactly was going on, only that he had something serious to tell them and they needed to hear about it in person.
They probably thought he was going to officially come out. He wished that’s what was going on, that would be easier.
They had left the motel after Collie put his clothes back on and stopped by Hank and Clementine’s place to recuperate. Stebbins and Gary stepped out for a bit while Hank and Clem fussed over Collie, who at that point felt like he’d been hit by a truck.
“You got off easy, man,” Hank said, “My turning took almost a week. You’ve just got one rough night.”
When Stebbins and Gary returned, Gary still had blood dripping down his chin.
The aches and headache were starting to ease by the time the sun started coming up. Not that Collie could see the sun through all the black out curtains the Olsons had. He’d practically glued himself to the chaise lounge (He vaguely recalled Hank saying how Clementine bought it because she liked to dramatically drape herself across it), and was still lying back on it when Gary came up to him, the blood on his chin now wiped away.
“So… How’re you feeling?” Gary asked.
Collie peaked his eyes open a little to look at him, before closing them again. “Like shit.”
“Yeah, that uh, that tracks…” He goes quiet for a moment, before asking, “How’re your teeth?”
Now that Gary mentioned it, Collie’s teeth are sore. He’d been on-and-off clenching them to try and satiate the feeling, but it just wasn’t quite going away. He raised a hand and thumbed over his teeth, feeling how his canines were already sharper than they were before. “Sore.”
“Right, right… You should feed, before you get too hungry.” Gary held out his hand and Collie stared at it. “… Uhm. You can feed from me for now. You can figure out the hunting shit later.”
Collie’s eyes darted up to Gary. “You want me to feed from you?”
“You gotta feed from someone, and I’m your fucking keeper, so.” He shrugged in a motion that was meant to be nonchalant, but Collie could see the tension in his muscles and the twitch to his fingers. It screamed please take my help, please let me fix this fuck up.
Collie blinked. Was that Gary’s voice in his head?
Did you hear me? The voice came again.
“How’re you doing that?” Collie asks.
“Takes practice,” Gary answers aloud, “Remember, keepers and fledglings have a psychic link.”
“Oh, so I couldn’t get rid of you if I tried?” Collie half-joked, though he wasn’t sure if it landed with how tired he sounded. It must not have, as Gary frowns.
He holds his hand further out again, “You wanna fucking go out and kill someone, or are you gonna let me feed you?”
Collie gives Gary a long look, before wrapping a hand around his wrist and pulling his hand closer. He hesitates. “… I just bite?”
“You have some other genius way to do it?”
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“Wait—” Richard quickly swallowed his food before continuing, “Vampires can feed off of each other?”
Collie nods, his attention on the cat in his lap again. “It’s not something we do very often. Kinda saved for feeding Fledglings, for the most part.”
“How does that work?”
“Well, whoever’s getting fed from either has to drink extra blood before-hand, or go hunting afterwards, since they’re… Y’know, drained. But hunting for a new Fledgling can have one hell of a learning curve, especially when they’re hungry, so it’s generally easier to keep them fed that way than it is to try and get them to do hunting right away.”
“So how often exactly do vampires have to feed?”
“Roughly one person a month.”
Richard thought on this for a moment, before grabbing his phone and opening the calculator app. “You’ve been a vampire for about… 50 years?”
“Something like that.”
Richard punched the numbers. “And if that’s twelve people a year…” He looked at Collie with wide eyes. “You’ve killed around 600 people.”
Collie made a face. “A little less than that. Some of us feed off animals, when we can.”
The number, even taking away a few, was still staggering to Richard. 12 people a year added up fast— That was more than even the most prolific serial killers. If Collie was the youngest and he had killed upward of 600 people, how many had the rest of them killed? What wake of bloodshed were they leaving behind them? “How uh… How old is Stebbins again?”
Collie narrowed his eyes, like he knew exactly what was going through Richard’s head right now, but still he answered, “He’s been a vampire for about 250 years.”
250 years. 12 people a year. Stebbins has killed around 3,000 people. And Richard invited him into his house in the middle of the night.
“Staring at the number isn’t gonna make it any smaller,” Collie said, breaking Richard out of his brief trance.
“Sorry—” Richard tucked his phone away, the offensively large number still on the screen. “Where were we? Oh— How did telling your family go?”
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Collie’s mom lived in a neighborhood within the city, along with his younger sisters Bonnie and Wendy. His older sister, Lori, lived in an apartment close to downtown, but Mrs Parker had agreed to get Lori to come over for the so-called ‘meeting’.
Stebbins turned off the car, looking at the small house with a chain-link fence. “Is this the place?”
“Yeah,” Collie answered, leaned forward in his seat with his head in his hands. How was he going to explain any of this to them? He was going to sound insane, there was no avoiding that. He couldn’t think of a single thing he could say that wouldn’t make them think he’d lost his mind.
“It’s not too late to change your mind,” Stebbins said.
“Yes, it is,” Collie shot back, finally pulling his hands away from his face.
“Are you hungry at all?”
“No.”
“Are you ready to go in?”
“No.”
Stebbins let out a sigh through his nose. The light of the street lamp outside illuminated his face, giving it an orangey glow, and his purple eyes reflected the light in an inhuman way. Collie wondered if his eyes, now yellow, looked the same.
Collie looked out onto the street. How the hell am I supposed to do this— Hi mom, I’m dead but not really.
Shit, that might be the best way to say it, Gary’s voice rung out in his head.
Jesus— Can you get out of my head?!
Hey, you reached out first!
I didn’t MEAN to! Collie wasn’t sure how to handle the psychic link yet. Gary could reach out to him easily, but Collie didn’t know what to do on his end to reach out. Stebbins said that was normal, that using the link was like flexing a muscle you didn’t know you had— Difficult to do on purpose, at first, but once you got the hang of it it’d be like second nature.
Whatever. Good luck, meathead.
Collie thought to thank him for a moment, but he wasn’t sure if the thought even reached Gary. He let out a huff and opened the car door. “Alright, let’s go.”
Wordlessly, Stebbins opened the door and stepped out the car, allowing Collie to lead the way to the front door.
Just as they were going up the front steps, the door swung open to reveal Lori, her hair in a braid over her shoulder and still dressed in her grocery-store work uniform. Her eyes landed on Collie, then flitted over to Stebbins, then back to Collie. Oh yeah, she definitely thought this meeting was Collie’s coming out. “We were just about to send a search party out for you,” She said, only a hint of teasing in her voice.
“We’re not even late,” Collie pointed out, rolling his eyes. Lori smiled and stepped aside to let them in.
Collie took a step forward, meaning to walk through the doorway, but then he stopped. He couldn’t explain why he stopped. He wanted to go inside, he was supposed to go inside, but he just couldn’t get his legs to keep moving. He was just stuck.
“Collie?” Lori gave him a confused look.
Stebbins cleared his throat, “Can we come inside?”
Lori looked even more confused, but answered, “… Yes, you can come inside.”
As soon as the words left her mouth, it was like a weight lifted, and suddenly Collie could move forward again. He walked into the familiar house, looking back at Stebbins who had followed him in. When Lori walked ahead of them, Stebbins leaned over Collie’s shoulder and whispered, “Can’t go into a home without an invitation, remember?”
Damn. Collie hadn’t considered that’d apply to his childhood home, too.
Lori led them past the entrance of the kitchen and into the dining room, where Mrs Parker and Wendy were sitting at the table, and Bonnie was pacing near the door to the backyard. Lori went and sat down at the table on the other side of Mrs Parker, subtly taking Mrs Parker’s hand and squeezing it. Mrs Parker smiled at Collie, the crows-feet and laugh lines hiding her worry. “Hi, hun.”
“Hi, Mom,” Collie said, feeling lost for a moment. He gestured back to Stebbins. “This is Stebbins, he’s… He’s a friend of mine.” God, he couldn’t sound more stilted if he tried. Stepping forward, he pulled out a chair and sat down across the table from his mom. Bonnie stopped pacing and stood over Mrs Parker’s shoulder, while Stebbins did the same to Collie.
“So, what’s the big deal?” Wendy asks, her eyes on Stebbins.
Fuck. Guess they were just jumping straight to it. “There’s… Some stuff has happened.”
“What kind of ‘stuff’?” Lori prompts, raising an eyebrow a little.
“… Alright, well. I met a group of people a few months ago and became friends with them. And things were going great and all, but… Shit happened and now I have to leave with them in a bit.”
“Honey…” Mrs. Parker looked at her son with a serious, albeit concerned look. “You aren’t running away to join a cult, are you?”
Collie sputtered, caught off guard, “No, no! I’m not joining a cult!”
Stebbins tilted his head as if contemplating Mrs. Parker’s question. “I suppose by some people’s definition, we would count as a cult—”
“Stebbins you are not helping.”
“Then what the fuck is going on?” Bonnie finally spoke up, crossing her arms. “Are you gay? Because if this is about you being gay, we don’t care, you don’t have to leave—”
Collie let out a bitter laugh, running a hand through his hair, “I wish this was about me being gay. That’d be so much fucking easier.”
“Collie.” His eyes locked on Mrs Parker. “What’s going on?”
… Collie let out a deep sigh. “I’m a vampire now.”
Silence.
"… Okay, what’s really going on?” Lori asks.
“I know that sounds fucking insane, but I’m telling the truth!” Collie exclaimed.
“Vampires aren’t real.”
Wendy leans over to Mrs Parker and whispers, “I think it is a cult, Mom.”
“You know what— Bring me a fucking clove of garlic,” Collie demands.
The women all exchange glances, before Bonnie says, “Fine,” and walks out to the kitchen.
“Collie,” Stebbins says, a warning tone in his voice.
“It’s fine,” Collie insists as Bonnie returns, peeling a clove off a bulb of garlic and setting it down in front of Collie.
Collie picks up the clove and flinches, nearly dropping it. Merely touching it burns, like he’s holding a small lit coal instead of a vegetable. But it’s too late for him to change his mind, he lifted it up to his mouth—
Someone snatched the clove from his hand, and he turned his head just in time to see Stebbins pop the clove into his mouth and bite down.
His reaction is immediate— Stebbins started hacking, slapping a hand over his mouth and rushing to the kitchen. “Billy—!” Collie calls after him, scrambling out of his chair and after him, paying no mind the gasps and yells from his family.
Stebbins was keeled over the sink, hands gripped on the counter as he spat out the garlic and continued hacking and wheezing.
“What the fuck were you thinking?!” Collie rushed to him, putting a hand on his back. Stebbins did’t answer, instead spitting out another remnant of garlic from his mouth, wincing and grimacing.
“He really doesn’t like garlic,” Bonnie said dryly from the doorway of the kitchen, where the rest of the family has gathered to watch the display. Collie was about to bite back, when Stebbins straightened up and turned around, opening his mouth wide to display not only his fangs, but the burning welts on his tongue and gums, traces of smoke lifting off of them, blood filling his mouth. Everyone went silent, save for a faint sizzling that Collie realized was coming from Stebbins’ flesh.
Stebbins closed his mouth after a moment and said, as clearly as he can around the welts and blood, “Proof enough? Or should I bite another?”
“…Oh my god…” Bonnie stared with wide eyes. Lori had a hand over her mouth, and Wendy looked like she was ready to faint at the sight of Stebbins’ mouth.
“… Oh, Collie… Why did you do that?” Mrs Parker looked devastated, more so than Collie was prepared for.
“Mom…” He stepped over, taking her hands in his. “I didn’t— It just kind of happened. But it’s okay, I’ll still be able to see you guys, and I’ll come visit. I’m not really dead.” He wasn’t sure if he quite believed that last part himself.
Mrs Parker took a deep breath. “Will you be okay?”
“He will,” Stebbins reassured, holding a hand over his bleeding mouth. “We’ll make sure of it.”
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“He ate garlic?”
“Technically, he chewed it and spit it out.”
Richard balked for a moment.
Collie leaned forward in his chair. “Stebbins is a protective motherfucker. He acts like he doesn’t have a soft spot for any of us, but we wouldn’t be in his coven if he didn’t. Don’t let him fool you.”
“That… Huh.” Richard thought it over— From what little he knew about Stebbins, protective wasn’t really a word that came to mind. The words that came to mind for him were handsome and cryptic. Then again, he had only met him twice before.
The cat lets out a ‘mrrow!’ and Collie pet him on the head again. “Trust me, you’ll see how he really is.”
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It was quiet when they got back in the car. Stebbins leaned his head back against the headrest, closing his eyes and taking a deep breath. Collie watched him quietly. “… You didn’t have to do that.”
“Yes, I did,” Stebbins said simply.
“I was going to do it myself, you didn’t— I would’ve been fine.”
“You’ve never been burned by garlic before, you didn’t know what to expect.”
“And you would?”
Stebbins scoffed, “I’m over 200 years old, Collie. Of course I’ve been burned by garlic before.”
“But still—”
“But nothing,” Stebbins opened his eyes and turned his head to look at Collie, a stern look in his eyes. “You are part of my coven now. I take care of my coven. End of discussion.” Collie frowned slightly as Stebbins once again leaned his head back and closed his eyes.
“… Does it still hurt?”
“What do you think?” Stebbins winced, so subtly Collie almost missed it. Talking must’ve been irritating the welts in his mouth. He opened his eyes again and straightened himself, turning the key in the ignition.
“Want me to kiss it better?” Collie joked, a weak attempt to lighten the mood.
It landed, and Stebbins scoffs and smirks slightly, glancing at Collie. “I mean… If you’re offering.”
Collie grinned back a little, before leaning over and slotting his lips into Stebbins’. He’s careful about it, too aware of Stebbins’ injuries, and broke away after only a moment. He couldn’t help but lick his lips, tasting Stebbins’ blood on them.
Stebbins’ eyes flitted over Collie, regarding him for a moment before saying, “We’ll stay in town another month or two. Give you some time with your family before we pack and leave.”
Collie nods. “… Thanks.”
“It’s the least we can do.”
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“How long did you stay in Sioux Falls after that?” Richard asked before shoving the last of his chow mein into his mouth.
“I think about three months, then we went to Chicago.”
Richard scribbled this down. “How often were you able to see your family, exactly?”
Collie let out a sigh as he thought. “… I was going to aim for once a year at first, but… After you turn, time gets… It’s hard to explain. You know how when you get older, a year feels shorter and shorter?”
Richard nodded.
“That’s amplified when you become a vampire. It’s why most of us don’t recall our exact age— There gets to a point where a decade feels like a year. I still try to visit often, but it ended up being more like once every two or three years instead.” He scratched the cat behinds the ears. “I got to meet a few nieces and nephews over the years. And I never missed a funeral.”
Richard nodded again, tapping his pen a little as he thought. “So… Who’s left? Out of your immediate family?”
“Bonnie,” Collie answered. “She’s the last one.”
“And you still visit her?”
“Yup. Whenever people ask her who I am, she tells them I’m her nephew.”
Richard nods, folding his hands in front of himself as he thinks. “… Given what you know now, how meeting them all would end, do you think you’d do it again?”
“What, go on a date with Gary?”
“Or any of them. If you knew you’d end up here, and had the chance to go back and make a different choice, would you say no? Never go on a date with him, never befriend the coven, never become a vampire?”
Collie crossed his arms, his jaw flexing slightly as he thinks. “… I don’t know.”
“That’s it? You just don’t know?”
“You’re asking me if I’d erase five decades worth of memories for a hypothetical.”
“Five decades over not having to watch your family die.”
Collie leveled his gaze on Richard. The corners of his mouth twitched and there was a mistiness in his eyes. “… I’ve thought about it.” His voice cracked slightly, he paused and cleared his throat before continuing, “More than I can count. But you know what I realized, Harkness?”
“What?”
“That there was a chance, however small, that even if I never became a vampire, I would’ve had to watch my family die anyways.” The cat stood up in Collie’s lap and rubbed its face against his jaw, and he absently lifted his hand to scratch its chin. “Bonnie had to watch them all die, too. Who’s to say I wouldn’t have outlived her anyways?” Collie leaned his head back a little, looking up towards the ceiling. “And as selfish as it sounds, I didn’t put them through losing me.”
“… And do you still believe your soul is trapped?” Richard asked.
“Yeah. I kinda hope when I die— actually die, my soul will be released and I’ll still get to see them after all. But I won’t know for sure until that happens.” He looked back down at Richard.
Richard nods again, his eyes glancing at his laptop screen as it continued to record. “… I think that’ll conclude our interview.”
Collie nodded. “Alright.”
Richard reached to the laptop and stopped the recording, closing it before looking to Collie again. “When can I expect the next one of you to come?”
“A week, at the latest,” Collie answered, standing up and cradling the cat in his arms, who was once again purring.
“Alright, thank you for your time.”
Collie flashed a fanged smile, “I’ll seeya around, Harkness.”
After the disappearances of two of his close friends, Hank Olson's life took a strange turn- One that involves him collecting odd books that once belonged to a Jurgen Leitner.
A meeting with a fellow collector lands him a job he can't refuse, one that will allow him to continue growing his collection and searching for his friends. However, the job turns out to have some unexpected facets, and he begins to learn that there's a lot more to the world and his books than he originally thought.
—
Hank chases Stebbins to Maine to retrieve his stolen books- Only to leave with a new job instead.
Chapter Masterlist
Read on AO3
It took Hank about four days to drive to Maine.
The Major’s Oddity Emporium was located in the city of Freeport— A city that Hank didn’t even know existed up until he looked up The Emporium online (which, by the way, had a pretty archaic looking website that was barely even functional. It had a comment section, and Hank left a comment that read “GIVE ME BACK MY BOOKS YOU MOTHERFUCKER”).
It was drizzling when Hank arrived. The brick building had a small, mostly empty parking lot, around the corner from the front entrance. The front looked somewhat modest, with the name ‘The Major’s Oddity Emporium’ carefully hand-painted in orange on two of the front windows, to the left of the door. On the window immediately to the door’s right, someone has painted the Emporium’s hours of operation, and a phone number for if someone wants to schedule a tour with them.
Hank grabbed the doorknob and gave it a tug. It was an hour before it was open, so of course the door was locked tight and didn’t budge. It was worth a shot anyways.
“Deliveries need to be made at the back door,” A staticky voice suddenly said— Hank hadn’t noticed the speaker next to the door until it crackled to life.
Hank pressed the button with his thumb and answered, “I’m not here for a delivery, one of your guys stole shit from me and I want it back.”
The speaker was quiet for moment, before it said, “Ohhh, you’re the Leitner Collector. Yeah, sorry, you’re gonna have to wait until we’re open for the day.”
He presses the button again. “I’m not fucking waiting for you guys to open, you stole from me!”
“I’m sorry, but you’re just going to have to wait the hour— Wh— Collie don’t— Collie don’t do that—”
Hank heard the front door unlock.
“Dammit— Do not come through that door—” Hank didn’t wait for the speaker to continue, before he pulled open the door and stepped inside.
It was clear not all of the lights were on just yet, giving the interior an eeriness that had goosebumps crawling up Hank’s spine. As the door shut behind him, the speaker’s crackly voice was cut off, leaving him in a silence that started to make his ears ring. The entryway expanded into a hall that turned off to the right, and at the beginning of the hall were two different doorways; an open one that went to the left, and a closed one that went to the right. The left doorway had a sign above it that read “Exhibits”, and the right doorway likewise had a sign that read “Gift Shop”.
For a moment, Hank faltered, before steeling himself and walking through the Exhibit door. The room it led to was long, extending down in the same direction as the hall and wrapping around the right, no doubt eventually leading out into that hall. To the left was an information desk, with a few brochures set out. To the right, where the room extended out, was a variety of exhibits, just as the room advertised.
Hank stepped over to the information desk, grabbing a pamphlet and opening it to look for a map. Sure enough, there was a map of the small museum, though it of course lacked any information on employee’s only sections. That was fine, Hank could work with this—
A floorboard creaks behind him.
He turns just in time to see the baseball bat swing towards him—
Hank lets out a flurry of curses as he jumps back, his back slamming against the information desk and just feeling the whiff of air as the bat narrowly misses him. He’s just able to catch that the person holding the bat is a hefty redheaded man, before the man swings the bat at him again.
“FUCK—” Hank scrambles to the side and around until he’s behind the information desk, once again narrowly missing the bat.
“Get back here—” The redhead says, rushing behind the desk and after Hank, who does not in fact ‘get back here’ and instead books it out from behind the desk and down the exhibit hall. Past glass cases and roped off sections he runs, not needing to look back to know the redhead is hot on his heels. “You fucking—”
“Garraty!” A familiar voice suddenly yells, and the redhead pauses just as he was about to swing the bat again, turning to look back at the information desk behind him. Hank puts himself behind a large display case to give himself a buffer between himself and the redhead, before he too looks to the information desk.
Standing next to the information desk, arms crossed and looking throughly bored, is Stebbins. “That’s the one we’ve been expecting, Garraty.”
“Jesus fuck, you couldn’t say he was coming today?” The redhead— Garraty— lowers his bat.
“You—” Hank points an accusatory finger at Stebbins. “You fucking stole my shit!”
“Did I?” Stebbins tilts his head slightly, an amused glint in his eye.
“You motherfucker—” Hank steps towards Stebbins, but Garraty raises his bat again, making him pause.
“Relax, Garraty,” Stebbins says, before returning his attention to Hank. “My employer would like to have a word with you, Olson.” He nods his head towards the doorway, before walking back through it.
Hank eyes Garraty warily, who lowers his bat but is eying Hank with an equal amount of scrutiny. Hank hesitantly takes a few steps forward, circling around Garraty in an attempt to keep distance, then books it out the door once he’s past Garraty.
Stebbins is waiting in front of the Gift Shop door, his hand on the doorknob. “My apologies for Garraty. In his defense, you are breaking and entering.”
“The door was unlocked,” Hank points out.
“I’ll have a talk with Collie about that.” Just after Stebbins says that, Hank swears he hears a laugh right next to him. But when he turns his head to look, there’s no one there. Stebbins opens the Gift Shop door and walks in. Hank quickly follows, glancing around at the shop full of kitschy souvenirs and overpriced knick-knacks. Stebbins walks to an employee’s only door and unlocks it, before holding it open for Hank. “Second door on the right.”
Hank walks through and follows Stebbins’ simple instruction, stopping in front of the second door on the right. Not bothering to knock, he grabs the doorknob and all but slams the door open.
Behind the door is an office, with deep red walls, wood paneling, a few bookshelves, and a dark wood desk. Behind the desk sits a grizzled old man who looks one set of army fatigues away from being a drill sergeant. He wears a set of mirrored aviators and seems to be looking over some papers, not even glancing up when Hank makes his entrance. For a moment, Hank thinks the man doesn’t even know he’s there, before he says in a gruff voice, “So. You’re the Leitner collector, are you?”
“Uh… Y-Yeah, yeah I am,” Hank stammers out, mentally kicking himself for suddenly losing his gumption. Stebbins pushes him further into the room, before stepping in himself and closing the door behind them.
“Take a seat.”
Hank hesitates for a moment, before going and sitting in the leather chair across from the desk. Stebbins remains standing by the door, like some kind of guard dog. A name plate glinting on the desk reads “The Major.”
“Tell me, son,” The man who Hank assumes to be The Major continues, finally setting down the papers he was reading and looking towards Hank. “How long have you been collecting Leitners?”
“… Around three years now,” Hank answers.
“Three years,” The Major muses, lacing his fingers together on the desk in front of him. “And you managed to get your hands on ten Leitners.”
“Uh… Yeah.”
“That’s about three or four a year.”
Hank had prided himself in the amount of Leitners he had been able to collect, but with the way The Major was breaking down the numbers, it suddenly started to feel like less of an accomplishment. “Look, I just want my books back—”
“What d’you need them for, anyways?”
“What do you need them for?” Hank shot back. He immediately regretted the words as soon as they left his mouth. But to his surprise, The Major lets out a hearty laugh.
“I like your attitude, son,” He said, “Billy was right about you.”
Hank’s brow furrowed. “Who the fuck is Billy?”
Stebbins cleared his throat from behind Hank, “Sir, are we almost done?”
“Almost,” The Major answered. “What do you do for work?”
“I’m a freelancer,” Hank lied.
“And how’s freelancing treating you?”
“It’s… It’s going well.”
“How’d you like something a little more stable?”
What? “… What?”
“Let me lay it out for you,” The Major says, “I’m a collector of items with strange and paranormal properties. This includes Leitners. Billy here,” The Major motions to Stebbins. “Is in charge of searching for and collecting some of these items for me. I have a small team of employees, but most of them stay here at the Emporium.” He leans forward in his chair a little. “So, I’m interested in adding someone else onto my team. Someone who’d be in charge of collecting and maintaining Leitners, and perhaps any other strange books we happen to come across.”
Hank narrowed his eyes. “… And why me?”
“You identified a fake Leitner after handling it for only a minute, you’ve been able to collect ten without anyone providing funding for you to do so, and you had the balls to try and buy it off of someone immediately after they beat you out in an auction.” The Major leaned forward again. “You got guts, son. I want people like that on my team.”
“So what, you want me to steal from people like Billy stole from me?”
“Tell me, did you get all your Leitners legally?”
Hank didn’t answer that.
“That’s what I thought. Look, son, let me hire you and you won’t have to scrape the bottom of the barrel to get by anymore. I’ll be paying you to do what you’ve already been doing.”
He had to admit, it sounded good.
Almost too good. Hank knew what people said about things that were too good to be true.
… But could he afford to say no?
“So what d’you say, Olson?” The Major asks, holding out a hand to shake. “We have a deal?”
—
Hank came to Maine to beat the snot out of Stebbins and get his books back, what the fuck was he doing in the guy’s apartment?
Well, it was stay at Stebbins’ apartment, or stay at some motel, and the apartment was the cheaper of the two options. So that was what the fuck.
Hank stepped inside, carrying a backpack, a suitcase, and a duffel bag. The entryway of the apartment immediately opened up to a living room and kitchen, with two doors ahead that Hank assumed led to a bathroom and a bedroom, and a sliding glass door at the end of the living room that led out to a small balcony.
Stebbins shut the door behind Hank. “The couch is a pullout, I’ll go grab some spare sheets and blankets,” He said as he walked to the right door, opening it and stepping into what Hank could now see was his bedroom.
Hank dropped his bags next to the couch and looked around. The decor was… Eclectic, to say the least. Multi-colored Persian rugs were spread out on the living room floor, old sketches and a few pinned and preserved bugs hung on the walls, and various knick knacks were scattered among the surfaces throughout the apartment— Brass animals, pieces of bone and antler, old books, and who knows what else. It was as if Stebbins had made his own personal museum within his apartment, and it made Hank wonder if Stebbins was at least partially responsible for the decor and layout of The Emporium itself. The space felt like it’d fit right in next to the exhibit hall, except something living happened to reside here. Hank stepped over to a bookcase next to the couch and started glancing through the titles.
Stebbins walked out of his room and over to the couch, setting down some sheets and a blanket that looked like it was meant more for decoration than it was comfort.
“You a history nut?” Hank asked.
“Hm?” Stebbins turned his head to Hank, brow furrowed.
Hank motioned to the bookcase. “You got a lotta history books.”
“History’s an important subject,” Stebbins answers, his gaze going to the books Hank had motioned towards. “Useful to know about in this line of business, too.”
“I was more of an English Literature guy,” Hank commented.
“Also a good subject. They can go hand-in-hand—” Stebbins stops talking suddenly, and Hank can see his back straighten and stiffen from the corner of his eye. When he turns to look at him, Stebbins’ eyes are wide and his face pale.
“Stebbins—?”
Stebbins suddenly books it to the entry-way, grabbing his jacket and fishing out his car keys as he frantically pulls the jacket on. “I have to go— There’s a spare key in the junk drawer, you can have it until you find your own place—” He’s barely finished his sentence when he yanks open the front door and rushes outside.
“Wait— Where the fuck are you going?!” Hank chases after him, following him down the hall and down the steps. Stebbins is all but running, ignoring Hank’s pursuit of him. He unlocks his car the second he gets outside.
“I can’t explain now, but I’ll be back in a few days—” Stebbins’ voice is fast but even, a practiced calm. He wrenches open the car door and climbs inside, turning on the engine before his door has even shut.
“We were supposed to go back to the Emporium together! What the fuck am I supposed to tell them if I come back without you!” Hank yells at him through the closed car door.
Stebbins rolls down the window and says, “Tell them I heard the hounds,” before putting the car in reverse and peeling it out of the apartment parking lot. Hank watches the car speed away, at a loss for words.
—
Hank walked through the entrance into the Emporium, without Stebbins.
The Emporium was open now, so there was nothing to stop him, but returning without Stebbins felt wrong, especially with how quickly Stebbins left. Not to mention how panicked he was— Stebbins hid it well, but something must have scared the shit out of him for him to up and leave out of the blue.
Tell them I heard the hounds. Whatever the hell that meant.
“Olson?”
Hank jumped and looked to the Gift Shop entrance. In the doorway stood a handsome black man with a scar across his cheek. The man smiled warmly at him. “You can call me McVries, I help run tours here.”
“Uh— Nice to meet ya’,” Hank says, eyes glancing behind McVries to see if Garraty was in the shop.
“Stebbins still outside?” McVries asks.
Hank rubs the back of his neck. “He uh… He said he ‘heard the hounds’?”
He expects McVries to laugh it off— No, he hopes McVries will. Instead, a somber looks comes over his face for a moment. “I see… Well, no worries. He’ll be back in a few days.” Hank gives him a baffled look, which prompts him to continue, “Stebbins doesn’t stay in one place for too long. You’ll get used to him disappearing and coming back.”
“Why the fuck does he do that?”
“Not my place to tell.” Before Hank can question further, McVries walks past him and into the Exhibit Hall. “Here, let me give you a tour of the place!”
The tour started off like a normal tour of the exhibit, with McVries regaling tales of each of the artifacts on display— an antique sailor’s whistle, some porcelain clown dolls, a taxidermy polar bear standing on its hind legs, a chess board whose chess pieces were made of bone, and an antique meat grinder, just to name a few. The tales McVries spun about each item sounded outlandish and impossible, but the way he told it made Hank want to believe him.
“How do you guys come up with all that?” Hank asks, as he starts heading up a staircase with McVries to the second floor.
“Well, we usually already know what they do before we get them,” McVries answered. “There’s a little embellishment here and there, but not much.”
Okay, McVries is officially fucking with Hank. There’s no way the taxidermy bear comes to life, or the chess set is from Death itself, or any other fantastical tale he’s spun. It’s just an Emporium full of weird shit that they gave even weirder stories to.
The second story has a second exhibit hall, and also has another employee’s only section, which McVries leads Hank into. He knocks on a door labeled ‘Security Office’. “Harkness, you in there?”
“Door’s unlocked!” A familiar voice answers back, and McVries opens the door and motions for Hank to follow in.
The Security Office is a cramped space, crammed full of old boxy TVs and monitors, most of which are showing security footage of the Emporium. Hank can’t help but notice that some of the screens, however, are showing the surrounding streets, and a few show places he can’t pinpoint but is fairly certain are not within the Emporium. Amidst the screens and their glow sits a man in a swivel chair, wearing a ratty jean jacket over a button-up and tie. His thick glasses make his eyes look a little too big for his face, and he grins when he sees Hank. “If it isn’t our Leitner Collector!”
“I’d introduce you, but I’m sure you already know ‘im,” McVries said. He looks back to Hank. “This is Harkness, he works security for us— From what I’ve heard, you’ve already met him.”
“Yeah, you’re the asshole who wasn’t gonna let me in,” Hank retorts.
Harkness gives a sheepish smile, “In my defense, you came earlier than expected, and Stebbins and The Major were still in a meeting.” Hank notices the desk pushed against the wall has various notebooks spread across any portion of the surface that wasn’t already taken up by a monitor. Harkness leans forward in his chair a little and suddenly asks, “So what makes those Leitners so important to you?”
Hank opens his mouth, and what he means to say is ‘None of your fucking business’. What comes out instead is, “Two of my friends disappeared after finding Leitners, and I think I might be able to find them if I can find the ones they had.”
Harkness grabs a notebook and scribbles something down as Hank stands stunned— Betrayed by his own words— and McVries scolds, “Harkness. At least give the man a day before you start prying into his shit.”
“Hey, you weren’t curious about it too? I just wanted to know!”
What the hell just happened? Hank hadn’t told anyone about Art and Clementine before, and this guy asks one question and he just immediately spills it? What the fuck was going on? “How— How the fuck—”
McVries sighs, “He’s an Avatar of The Eye. Any question he asks you compels you to answer honestly.” McVries shoots Harkness a look. “Which he likes to use very liberally.”
“An Avatar of what?”
McVries looked back at Hank, a concerned look starting to come over his face. “… The Eye?”
“You’re saying that like I’m supposed to know what the fuck that means,” Hank says.
Harkness suddenly lets out a laugh, covering his mouth and looking gleeful, “Holy shit, he doesn’t know what the entities are!”
“No fuckin’ way he doesn’t,” McVries scolds, before once again looking at Hank, “Right? You know the entities?”
“What the fuck are you talking about?”
Harkness laughs more and realization dawns over McVries’ face. “You’ve been collecting Leitners and you don’t even know what makes them like that?”
“Are you gonna keep asking questions or are you gonna tell me what the fuck this is all about?” Hank shoots back, throwing his hands up.
Harkness grabs one of the notebooks from his desk and tosses it to Hank, who manages to catch it. “This’ll explain a bunch— I want that back after you’re done, though.” Hank looks at the cover of the composite notebook to see “Leitner’s 14” scrawled on the front in sharpie.
“Thanks Harkness, I’ll take it from here,” McVries says, putting a hand on Hank’s shoulder and directing him out of the Security Office, slamming the door shut behind him. “Sorry about Harkness, he can be… A bit much, sometimes.”
“What the fuck are the entities?” Hank asks, cutting to the chase.
“… Right, so…” McVries starts leading Hank back down the hall and down the stairs. “There’s these entities that… To put it really simply, they’re fear entities. There’s 14 of them, each one encompasses a different type of fear.” McVries motions to the notebook in Hank’s hand. “Harkness will have written a lot of stuff about them down. It’s kind of his thing— He writes down anything and everything about anything and everything. Pretty sure he has a notebook on each of us here.” McVries scoffs and smiles slightly, but Hank doesn’t quite find the humor in it. “The entities can sort of… Overtake some people, make them another piece of the entity. We call those people Avatars, and they have some unique abilities. Like Harkness and his questions, for example. Make sense?”
Hank nods slowly, trying to absorb the information. “… Do any of them involve cannibalism?”
“Yeah, the Flesh,” McVries instantly answers, before his brow furrows. “Why’d you ask?”
“Just curious,” Hank dismisses.
“Well,” McVries continues, stopping by the front door. “I do tours, Harkness is in charge of security, Collie is technically also security, Ray works the gift shop, Stebbins finds and collects items for the exhibits, and The Major is the boss. And now you’re another collector. Anything I’m missing?”
“We didn’t meet Collie,” Hank points out.
“Oh, you’ll see him eventually. He’s… A bit scarce.” McVries motions to the notebook again. “Read up on that. Your first day’ll be tomorrow.”
After the disappearances of two of his close friends, Hank Olson's life took a strange turn- One that involves him collecting odd books that once belonged to a Jurgen Leitner.
A meeting with a fellow collector lands him a job he can't refuse, one that will allow him to continue growing his collection and searching for his friends. However, the job turns out to have some unexpected facets, and he begins to learn that there's a lot more to the world and his books than he originally thought.
—
Hank chases Stebbins to Maine to retrieve his stolen books- Only to leave with a new job instead.
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It took Hank about four days to drive to Maine.
The Major’s Oddity Emporium was located in the city of Freeport— A city that Hank didn’t even know existed up until he looked up The Emporium online (which, by the way, had a pretty archaic looking website that was barely even functional. It had a comment section, and Hank left a comment that read “GIVE ME BACK MY BOOKS YOU MOTHERFUCKER”).
It was drizzling when Hank arrived. The brick building had a small, mostly empty parking lot, around the corner from the front entrance. The front looked somewhat modest, with the name ‘The Major’s Oddity Emporium’ carefully hand-painted in orange on two of the front windows, to the left of the door. On the window immediately to the door’s right, someone has painted the Emporium’s hours of operation, and a phone number for if someone wants to schedule a tour with them.
Hank grabbed the doorknob and gave it a tug. It was an hour before it was open, so of course the door was locked tight and didn’t budge. It was worth a shot anyways.
“Deliveries need to be made at the back door,” A staticky voice suddenly said— Hank hadn’t noticed the speaker next to the door until it crackled to life.
Hank pressed the button with his thumb and answered, “I’m not here for a delivery, one of your guys stole shit from me and I want it back.”
The speaker was quiet for moment, before it said, “Ohhh, you’re the Leitner Collector. Yeah, sorry, you’re gonna have to wait until we’re open for the day.”
He presses the button again. “I’m not fucking waiting for you guys to open, you stole from me!”
“I’m sorry, but you’re just going to have to wait the hour— Wh— Collie don’t— Collie don’t do that—”
Hank heard the front door unlock.
“Dammit— Do not come through that door—” Hank didn’t wait for the speaker to continue, before he pulled open the door and stepped inside.
It was clear not all of the lights were on just yet, giving the interior an eeriness that had goosebumps crawling up Hank’s spine. As the door shut behind him, the speaker’s crackly voice was cut off, leaving him in a silence that started to make his ears ring. The entryway expanded into a hall that turned off to the right, and at the beginning of the hall were two different doorways; an open one that went to the left, and a closed one that went to the right. The left doorway had a sign above it that read “Exhibits”, and the right doorway likewise had a sign that read “Gift Shop”.
For a moment, Hank faltered, before steeling himself and walking through the Exhibit door. The room it led to was long, extending down in the same direction as the hall and wrapping around the right, no doubt eventually leading out into that hall. To the left was an information desk, with a few brochures set out. To the right, where the room extended out, was a variety of exhibits, just as the room advertised.
Hank stepped over to the information desk, grabbing a pamphlet and opening it to look for a map. Sure enough, there was a map of the small museum, though it of course lacked any information on employee’s only sections. That was fine, Hank could work with this—
A floorboard creaks behind him.
He turns just in time to see the baseball bat swing towards him—
Hank lets out a flurry of curses as he jumps back, his back slamming against the information desk and just feeling the whiff of air as the bat narrowly misses him. He’s just able to catch that the person holding the bat is a hefty redheaded man, before the man swings the bat at him again.
“FUCK—” Hank scrambles to the side and around until he’s behind the information desk, once again narrowly missing the bat.
“Get back here—” The redhead says, rushing behind the desk and after Hank, who does not in fact ‘get back here’ and instead books it out from behind the desk and down the exhibit hall. Past glass cases and roped off sections he runs, not needing to look back to know the redhead is hot on his heels. “You fucking—”
“Garraty!” A familiar voice suddenly yells, and the redhead pauses just as he was about to swing the bat again, turning to look back at the information desk behind him. Hank puts himself behind a large display case to give himself a buffer between himself and the redhead, before he too looks to the information desk.
Standing next to the information desk, arms crossed and looking throughly bored, is Stebbins. “That’s the one we’ve been expecting, Garraty.”
“Jesus fuck, you couldn’t say he was coming today?” The redhead— Garraty— lowers his bat.
“You—” Hank points an accusatory finger at Stebbins. “You fucking stole my shit!”
“Did I?” Stebbins tilts his head slightly, an amused glint in his eye.
“You motherfucker—” Hank steps towards Stebbins, but Garraty raises his bat again, making him pause.
“Relax, Garraty,” Stebbins says, before returning his attention to Hank. “My employer would like to have a word with you, Olson.” He nods his head towards the doorway, before walking back through it.
Hank eyes Garraty warily, who lowers his bat but is eying Hank with an equal amount of scrutiny. Hank hesitantly takes a few steps forward, circling around Garraty in an attempt to keep distance, then books it out the door once he’s past Garraty.
Stebbins is waiting in front of the Gift Shop door, his hand on the doorknob. “My apologies for Garraty. In his defense, you are breaking and entering.”
“The door was unlocked,” Hank points out.
“I’ll have a talk with Collie about that.” Just after Stebbins says that, Hank swears he hears a laugh right next to him. But when he turns his head to look, there’s no one there. Stebbins opens the Gift Shop door and walks in. Hank quickly follows, glancing around at the shop full of kitschy souvenirs and overpriced knick-knacks. Stebbins walks to an employee’s only door and unlocks it, before holding it open for Hank. “Second door on the right.”
Hank walks through and follows Stebbins’ simple instruction, stopping in front of the second door on the right. Not bothering to knock, he grabs the doorknob and all but slams the door open.
Behind the door is an office, with deep red walls, wood paneling, a few bookshelves, and a dark wood desk. Behind the desk sits a grizzled old man who looks one set of army fatigues away from being a drill sergeant. He wears a set of mirrored aviators and seems to be looking over some papers, not even glancing up when Hank makes his entrance. For a moment, Hank thinks the man doesn’t even know he’s there, before he says in a gruff voice, “So. You’re the Leitner collector, are you?”
“Uh… Y-Yeah, yeah I am,” Hank stammers out, mentally kicking himself for suddenly losing his gumption. Stebbins pushes him further into the room, before stepping in himself and closing the door behind them.
“Take a seat.”
Hank hesitates for a moment, before going and sitting in the leather chair across from the desk. Stebbins remains standing by the door, like some kind of guard dog. A name plate glinting on the desk reads “The Major.”
“Tell me, son,” The man who Hank assumes to be The Major continues, finally setting down the papers he was reading and looking towards Hank. “How long have you been collecting Leitners?”
“… Around three years now,” Hank answers.
“Three years,” The Major muses, lacing his fingers together on the desk in front of him. “And you managed to get your hands on ten Leitners.”
“Uh… Yeah.”
“That’s about three or four a year.”
Hank had prided himself in the amount of Leitners he had been able to collect, but with the way The Major was breaking down the numbers, it suddenly started to feel like less of an accomplishment. “Look, I just want my books back—”
“What d’you need them for, anyways?”
“What do you need them for?” Hank shot back. He immediately regretted the words as soon as they left his mouth. But to his surprise, The Major lets out a hearty laugh.
“I like your attitude, son,” He said, “Billy was right about you.”
Hank’s brow furrowed. “Who the fuck is Billy?”
Stebbins cleared his throat from behind Hank, “Sir, are we almost done?”
“Almost,” The Major answered. “What do you do for work?”
“I’m a freelancer,” Hank lied.
“And how’s freelancing treating you?”
“It’s… It’s going well.”
“How’d you like something a little more stable?”
What? “… What?”
“Let me lay it out for you,” The Major says, “I’m a collector of items with strange and paranormal properties. This includes Leitners. Billy here,” The Major motions to Stebbins. “Is in charge of searching for and collecting some of these items for me. I have a small team of employees, but most of them stay here at the Emporium.” He leans forward in his chair a little. “So, I’m interested in adding someone else onto my team. Someone who’d be in charge of collecting and maintaining Leitners, and perhaps any other strange books we happen to come across.”
Hank narrowed his eyes. “… And why me?”
“You identified a fake Leitner after handling it for only a minute, you’ve been able to collect ten without anyone providing funding for you to do so, and you had the balls to try and buy it off of someone immediately after they beat you out in an auction.” The Major leaned forward again. “You got guts, son. I want people like that on my team.”
“So what, you want me to steal from people like Billy stole from me?”
“Tell me, did you get all your Leitners legally?”
Hank didn’t answer that.
“That’s what I thought. Look, son, let me hire you and you won’t have to scrape the bottom of the barrel to get by anymore. I’ll be paying you to do what you’ve already been doing.”
He had to admit, it sounded good.
Almost too good. Hank knew what people said about things that were too good to be true.
… But could he afford to say no?
“So what d’you say, Olson?” The Major asks, holding out a hand to shake. “We have a deal?”
—
Hank came to Maine to beat the snot out of Stebbins and get his books back, what the fuck was he doing in the guy’s apartment?
Well, it was stay at Stebbins’ apartment, or stay at some motel, and the apartment was the cheaper of the two options. So that was what the fuck.
Hank stepped inside, carrying a backpack, a suitcase, and a duffel bag. The entryway of the apartment immediately opened up to a living room and kitchen, with two doors ahead that Hank assumed led to a bathroom and a bedroom, and a sliding glass door at the end of the living room that led out to a small balcony.
Stebbins shut the door behind Hank. “The couch is a pullout, I’ll go grab some spare sheets and blankets,” He said as he walked to the right door, opening it and stepping into what Hank could now see was his bedroom.
Hank dropped his bags next to the couch and looked around. The decor was… Eclectic, to say the least. Multi-colored Persian rugs were spread out on the living room floor, old sketches and a few pinned and preserved bugs hung on the walls, and various knick knacks were scattered among the surfaces throughout the apartment— Brass animals, pieces of bone and antler, old books, and who knows what else. It was as if Stebbins had made his own personal museum within his apartment, and it made Hank wonder if Stebbins was at least partially responsible for the decor and layout of The Emporium itself. The space felt like it’d fit right in next to the exhibit hall, except something living happened to reside here. Hank stepped over to a bookcase next to the couch and started glancing through the titles.
Stebbins walked out of his room and over to the couch, setting down some sheets and a blanket that looked like it was meant more for decoration than it was comfort.
“You a history nut?” Hank asked.
“Hm?” Stebbins turned his head to Hank, brow furrowed.
Hank motioned to the bookcase. “You got a lotta history books.”
“History’s an important subject,” Stebbins answers, his gaze going to the books Hank had motioned towards. “Useful to know about in this line of business, too.”
“I was more of an English Literature guy,” Hank commented.
“Also a good subject. They can go hand-in-hand—” Stebbins stops talking suddenly, and Hank can see his back straighten and stiffen from the corner of his eye. When he turns to look at him, Stebbins’ eyes are wide and his face pale.
“Stebbins—?”
Stebbins suddenly books it to the entry-way, grabbing his jacket and fishing out his car keys as he frantically pulls the jacket on. “I have to go— There’s a spare key in the junk drawer, you can have it until you find your own place—” He’s barely finished his sentence when he yanks open the front door and rushes outside.
“Wait— Where the fuck are you going?!” Hank chases after him, following him down the hall and down the steps. Stebbins is all but running, ignoring Hank’s pursuit of him. He unlocks his car the second he gets outside.
“I can’t explain now, but I’ll be back in a few days—” Stebbins’ voice is fast but even, a practiced calm. He wrenches open the car door and climbs inside, turning on the engine before his door has even shut.
“We were supposed to go back to the Emporium together! What the fuck am I supposed to tell them if I come back without you!” Hank yells at him through the closed car door.
Stebbins rolls down the window and says, “Tell them I heard the hounds,” before putting the car in reverse and peeling it out of the apartment parking lot. Hank watches the car speed away, at a loss for words.
—
Hank walked through the entrance into the Emporium, without Stebbins.
The Emporium was open now, so there was nothing to stop him, but returning without Stebbins felt wrong, especially with how quickly Stebbins left. Not to mention how panicked he was— Stebbins hid it well, but something must have scared the shit out of him for him to up and leave out of the blue.
Tell them I heard the hounds. Whatever the hell that meant.
“Olson?”
Hank jumped and looked to the Gift Shop entrance. In the doorway stood a handsome black man with a scar across his cheek. The man smiled warmly at him. “You can call me McVries, I help run tours here.”
“Uh— Nice to meet ya’,” Hank says, eyes glancing behind McVries to see if Garraty was in the shop.
“Stebbins still outside?” McVries asks.
Hank rubs the back of his neck. “He uh… He said he ‘heard the hounds’?”
He expects McVries to laugh it off— No, he hopes McVries will. Instead, a somber looks comes over his face for a moment. “I see… Well, no worries. He’ll be back in a few days.” Hank gives him a baffled look, which prompts him to continue, “Stebbins doesn’t stay in one place for too long. You’ll get used to him disappearing and coming back.”
“Why the fuck does he do that?”
“Not my place to tell.” Before Hank can question further, McVries walks past him and into the Exhibit Hall. “Here, let me give you a tour of the place!”
The tour started off like a normal tour of the exhibit, with McVries regaling tales of each of the artifacts on display— an antique sailor’s whistle, some porcelain clown dolls, a taxidermy polar bear standing on its hind legs, a chess board whose chess pieces were made of bone, and an antique meat grinder, just to name a few. The tales McVries spun about each item sounded outlandish and impossible, but the way he told it made Hank want to believe him.
“How do you guys come up with all that?” Hank asks, as he starts heading up a staircase with McVries to the second floor.
“Well, we usually already know what they do before we get them,” McVries answered. “There’s a little embellishment here and there, but not much.”
Okay, McVries is officially fucking with Hank. There’s no way the taxidermy bear comes to life, or the chess set is from Death itself, or any other fantastical tale he’s spun. It’s just an Emporium full of weird shit that they gave even weirder stories to.
The second story has a second exhibit hall, and also has another employee’s only section, which McVries leads Hank into. He knocks on a door labeled ‘Security Office’. “Harkness, you in there?”
“Door’s unlocked!” A familiar voice answers back, and McVries opens the door and motions for Hank to follow in.
The Security Office is a cramped space, crammed full of old boxy TVs and monitors, most of which are showing security footage of the Emporium. Hank can’t help but notice that some of the screens, however, are showing the surrounding streets, and a few show places he can’t pinpoint but is fairly certain are not within the Emporium. Amidst the screens and their glow sits a man in a swivel chair, wearing a ratty jean jacket over a button-up and tie. His thick glasses make his eyes look a little too big for his face, and he grins when he sees Hank. “If it isn’t our Leitner Collector!”
“I’d introduce you, but I’m sure you already know ‘im,” McVries said. He looks back to Hank. “This is Harkness, he works security for us— From what I’ve heard, you’ve already met him.”
“Yeah, you’re the asshole who wasn’t gonna let me in,” Hank retorts.
Harkness gives a sheepish smile, “In my defense, you came earlier than expected, and Stebbins and The Major were still in a meeting.” Hank notices the desk pushed against the wall has various notebooks spread across any portion of the surface that wasn’t already taken up by a monitor. Harkness leans forward in his chair a little and suddenly asks, “So what makes those Leitners so important to you?”
Hank opens his mouth, and what he means to say is ‘None of your fucking business’. What comes out instead is, “Two of my friends disappeared after finding Leitners, and I think I might be able to find them if I can find the ones they had.”
Harkness grabs a notebook and scribbles something down as Hank stands stunned— Betrayed by his own words— and McVries scolds, “Harkness. At least give the man a day before you start prying into his shit.”
“Hey, you weren’t curious about it too? I just wanted to know!”
What the hell just happened? Hank hadn’t told anyone about Art and Clementine before, and this guy asks one question and he just immediately spills it? What the fuck was going on? “How— How the fuck—”
McVries sighs, “He’s an Avatar of The Eye. Any question he asks you compels you to answer honestly.” McVries shoots Harkness a look. “Which he likes to use very liberally.”
“An Avatar of what?”
McVries looked back at Hank, a concerned look starting to come over his face. “… The Eye?”
“You’re saying that like I’m supposed to know what the fuck that means,” Hank says.
Harkness suddenly lets out a laugh, covering his mouth and looking gleeful, “Holy shit, he doesn’t know what the entities are!”
“No fuckin’ way he doesn’t,” McVries scolds, before once again looking at Hank, “Right? You know the entities?”
“What the fuck are you talking about?”
Harkness laughs more and realization dawns over McVries’ face. “You’ve been collecting Leitners and you don’t even know what makes them like that?”
“Are you gonna keep asking questions or are you gonna tell me what the fuck this is all about?” Hank shoots back, throwing his hands up.
Harkness grabs one of the notebooks from his desk and tosses it to Hank, who manages to catch it. “This’ll explain a bunch— I want that back after you’re done, though.” Hank looks at the cover of the composite notebook to see “Leitner’s 14” scrawled on the front in sharpie.
“Thanks Harkness, I’ll take it from here,” McVries says, putting a hand on Hank’s shoulder and directing him out of the Security Office, slamming the door shut behind him. “Sorry about Harkness, he can be… A bit much, sometimes.”
“What the fuck are the entities?” Hank asks, cutting to the chase.
“… Right, so…” McVries starts leading Hank back down the hall and down the stairs. “There’s these entities that… To put it really simply, they’re fear entities. There’s 14 of them, each one encompasses a different type of fear.” McVries motions to the notebook in Hank’s hand. “Harkness will have written a lot of stuff about them down. It’s kind of his thing— He writes down anything and everything about anything and everything. Pretty sure he has a notebook on each of us here.” McVries scoffs and smiles slightly, but Hank doesn’t quite find the humor in it. “The entities can sort of… Overtake some people, make them another piece of the entity. We call those people Avatars, and they have some unique abilities. Like Harkness and his questions, for example. Make sense?”
Hank nods slowly, trying to absorb the information. “… Do any of them involve cannibalism?”
“Yeah, the Flesh,” McVries instantly answers, before his brow furrows. “Why’d you ask?”
“Just curious,” Hank dismisses.
“Well,” McVries continues, stopping by the front door. “I do tours, Harkness is in charge of security, Collie is technically also security, Ray works the gift shop, Stebbins finds and collects items for the exhibits, and The Major is the boss. And now you’re another collector. Anything I’m missing?”
“We didn’t meet Collie,” Hank points out.
“Oh, you’ll see him eventually. He’s… A bit scarce.” McVries motions to the notebook again. “Read up on that. Your first day’ll be tomorrow.”
After the disappearances of two of his close friends, Hank Olson's life took a strange turn- One that involves him collecting odd books that once belonged to a Jurgen Leitner.
A meeting with a fellow collector lands him a job he can't refuse, one that will allow him to continue growing his collection and searching for his friends. However, the job turns out to have some unexpected facets, and he begins to learn that there's a lot more to the world and his books than he originally thought.
—
Hank chases Stebbins to Maine to retrieve his stolen books- Only to leave with a new job instead.
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It took Hank about four days to drive to Maine.
The Major’s Oddity Emporium was located in the city of Freeport— A city that Hank didn’t even know existed up until he looked up The Emporium online (which, by the way, had a pretty archaic looking website that was barely even functional. It had a comment section, and Hank left a comment that read “GIVE ME BACK MY BOOKS YOU MOTHERFUCKER”).
It was drizzling when Hank arrived. The brick building had a small, mostly empty parking lot, around the corner from the front entrance. The front looked somewhat modest, with the name ‘The Major’s Oddity Emporium’ carefully hand-painted in orange on two of the front windows, to the left of the door. On the window immediately to the door’s right, someone has painted the Emporium’s hours of operation, and a phone number for if someone wants to schedule a tour with them.
Hank grabbed the doorknob and gave it a tug. It was an hour before it was open, so of course the door was locked tight and didn’t budge. It was worth a shot anyways.
“Deliveries need to be made at the back door,” A staticky voice suddenly said— Hank hadn’t noticed the speaker next to the door until it crackled to life.
Hank pressed the button with his thumb and answered, “I’m not here for a delivery, one of your guys stole shit from me and I want it back.”
The speaker was quiet for moment, before it said, “Ohhh, you’re the Leitner Collector. Yeah, sorry, you’re gonna have to wait until we’re open for the day.”
He presses the button again. “I’m not fucking waiting for you guys to open, you stole from me!”
“I’m sorry, but you’re just going to have to wait the hour— Wh— Collie don’t— Collie don’t do that—”
Hank heard the front door unlock.
“Dammit— Do not come through that door—” Hank didn’t wait for the speaker to continue, before he pulled open the door and stepped inside.
It was clear not all of the lights were on just yet, giving the interior an eeriness that had goosebumps crawling up Hank’s spine. As the door shut behind him, the speaker’s crackly voice was cut off, leaving him in a silence that started to make his ears ring. The entryway expanded into a hall that turned off to the right, and at the beginning of the hall were two different doorways; an open one that went to the left, and a closed one that went to the right. The left doorway had a sign above it that read “Exhibits”, and the right doorway likewise had a sign that read “Gift Shop”.
For a moment, Hank faltered, before steeling himself and walking through the Exhibit door. The room it led to was long, extending down in the same direction as the hall and wrapping around the right, no doubt eventually leading out into that hall. To the left was an information desk, with a few brochures set out. To the right, where the room extended out, was a variety of exhibits, just as the room advertised.
Hank stepped over to the information desk, grabbing a pamphlet and opening it to look for a map. Sure enough, there was a map of the small museum, though it of course lacked any information on employee’s only sections. That was fine, Hank could work with this—
A floorboard creaks behind him.
He turns just in time to see the baseball bat swing towards him—
Hank lets out a flurry of curses as he jumps back, his back slamming against the information desk and just feeling the whiff of air as the bat narrowly misses him. He’s just able to catch that the person holding the bat is a hefty redheaded man, before the man swings the bat at him again.
“FUCK—” Hank scrambles to the side and around until he’s behind the information desk, once again narrowly missing the bat.
“Get back here—” The redhead says, rushing behind the desk and after Hank, who does not in fact ‘get back here’ and instead books it out from behind the desk and down the exhibit hall. Past glass cases and roped off sections he runs, not needing to look back to know the redhead is hot on his heels. “You fucking—”
“Garraty!” A familiar voice suddenly yells, and the redhead pauses just as he was about to swing the bat again, turning to look back at the information desk behind him. Hank puts himself behind a large display case to give himself a buffer between himself and the redhead, before he too looks to the information desk.
Standing next to the information desk, arms crossed and looking throughly bored, is Stebbins. “That’s the one we’ve been expecting, Garraty.”
“Jesus fuck, you couldn’t say he was coming today?” The redhead— Garraty— lowers his bat.
“You—” Hank points an accusatory finger at Stebbins. “You fucking stole my shit!”
“Did I?” Stebbins tilts his head slightly, an amused glint in his eye.
“You motherfucker—” Hank steps towards Stebbins, but Garraty raises his bat again, making him pause.
“Relax, Garraty,” Stebbins says, before returning his attention to Hank. “My employer would like to have a word with you, Olson.” He nods his head towards the doorway, before walking back through it.
Hank eyes Garraty warily, who lowers his bat but is eying Hank with an equal amount of scrutiny. Hank hesitantly takes a few steps forward, circling around Garraty in an attempt to keep distance, then books it out the door once he’s past Garraty.
Stebbins is waiting in front of the Gift Shop door, his hand on the doorknob. “My apologies for Garraty. In his defense, you are breaking and entering.”
“The door was unlocked,” Hank points out.
“I’ll have a talk with Collie about that.” Just after Stebbins says that, Hank swears he hears a laugh right next to him. But when he turns his head to look, there’s no one there. Stebbins opens the Gift Shop door and walks in. Hank quickly follows, glancing around at the shop full of kitschy souvenirs and overpriced knick-knacks. Stebbins walks to an employee’s only door and unlocks it, before holding it open for Hank. “Second door on the right.”
Hank walks through and follows Stebbins’ simple instruction, stopping in front of the second door on the right. Not bothering to knock, he grabs the doorknob and all but slams the door open.
Behind the door is an office, with deep red walls, wood paneling, a few bookshelves, and a dark wood desk. Behind the desk sits a grizzled old man who looks one set of army fatigues away from being a drill sergeant. He wears a set of mirrored aviators and seems to be looking over some papers, not even glancing up when Hank makes his entrance. For a moment, Hank thinks the man doesn’t even know he’s there, before he says in a gruff voice, “So. You’re the Leitner collector, are you?”
“Uh… Y-Yeah, yeah I am,” Hank stammers out, mentally kicking himself for suddenly losing his gumption. Stebbins pushes him further into the room, before stepping in himself and closing the door behind them.
“Take a seat.”
Hank hesitates for a moment, before going and sitting in the leather chair across from the desk. Stebbins remains standing by the door, like some kind of guard dog. A name plate glinting on the desk reads “The Major.”
“Tell me, son,” The man who Hank assumes to be The Major continues, finally setting down the papers he was reading and looking towards Hank. “How long have you been collecting Leitners?”
“… Around three years now,” Hank answers.
“Three years,” The Major muses, lacing his fingers together on the desk in front of him. “And you managed to get your hands on ten Leitners.”
“Uh… Yeah.”
“That’s about three or four a year.”
Hank had prided himself in the amount of Leitners he had been able to collect, but with the way The Major was breaking down the numbers, it suddenly started to feel like less of an accomplishment. “Look, I just want my books back—”
“What d’you need them for, anyways?”
“What do you need them for?” Hank shot back. He immediately regretted the words as soon as they left his mouth. But to his surprise, The Major lets out a hearty laugh.
“I like your attitude, son,” He said, “Billy was right about you.”
Hank’s brow furrowed. “Who the fuck is Billy?”
Stebbins cleared his throat from behind Hank, “Sir, are we almost done?”
“Almost,” The Major answered. “What do you do for work?”
“I’m a freelancer,” Hank lied.
“And how’s freelancing treating you?”
“It’s… It’s going well.”
“How’d you like something a little more stable?”
What? “… What?”
“Let me lay it out for you,” The Major says, “I’m a collector of items with strange and paranormal properties. This includes Leitners. Billy here,” The Major motions to Stebbins. “Is in charge of searching for and collecting some of these items for me. I have a small team of employees, but most of them stay here at the Emporium.” He leans forward in his chair a little. “So, I’m interested in adding someone else onto my team. Someone who’d be in charge of collecting and maintaining Leitners, and perhaps any other strange books we happen to come across.”
Hank narrowed his eyes. “… And why me?”
“You identified a fake Leitner after handling it for only a minute, you’ve been able to collect ten without anyone providing funding for you to do so, and you had the balls to try and buy it off of someone immediately after they beat you out in an auction.” The Major leaned forward again. “You got guts, son. I want people like that on my team.”
“So what, you want me to steal from people like Billy stole from me?”
“Tell me, did you get all your Leitners legally?”
Hank didn’t answer that.
“That’s what I thought. Look, son, let me hire you and you won’t have to scrape the bottom of the barrel to get by anymore. I’ll be paying you to do what you’ve already been doing.”
He had to admit, it sounded good.
Almost too good. Hank knew what people said about things that were too good to be true.
… But could he afford to say no?
“So what d’you say, Olson?” The Major asks, holding out a hand to shake. “We have a deal?”
—
Hank came to Maine to beat the snot out of Stebbins and get his books back, what the fuck was he doing in the guy’s apartment?
Well, it was stay at Stebbins’ apartment, or stay at some motel, and the apartment was the cheaper of the two options. So that was what the fuck.
Hank stepped inside, carrying a backpack, a suitcase, and a duffel bag. The entryway of the apartment immediately opened up to a living room and kitchen, with two doors ahead that Hank assumed led to a bathroom and a bedroom, and a sliding glass door at the end of the living room that led out to a small balcony.
Stebbins shut the door behind Hank. “The couch is a pullout, I’ll go grab some spare sheets and blankets,” He said as he walked to the right door, opening it and stepping into what Hank could now see was his bedroom.
Hank dropped his bags next to the couch and looked around. The decor was… Eclectic, to say the least. Multi-colored Persian rugs were spread out on the living room floor, old sketches and a few pinned and preserved bugs hung on the walls, and various knick knacks were scattered among the surfaces throughout the apartment— Brass animals, pieces of bone and antler, old books, and who knows what else. It was as if Stebbins had made his own personal museum within his apartment, and it made Hank wonder if Stebbins was at least partially responsible for the decor and layout of The Emporium itself. The space felt like it’d fit right in next to the exhibit hall, except something living happened to reside here. Hank stepped over to a bookcase next to the couch and started glancing through the titles.
Stebbins walked out of his room and over to the couch, setting down some sheets and a blanket that looked like it was meant more for decoration than it was comfort.
“You a history nut?” Hank asked.
“Hm?” Stebbins turned his head to Hank, brow furrowed.
Hank motioned to the bookcase. “You got a lotta history books.”
“History’s an important subject,” Stebbins answers, his gaze going to the books Hank had motioned towards. “Useful to know about in this line of business, too.”
“I was more of an English Literature guy,” Hank commented.
“Also a good subject. They can go hand-in-hand—” Stebbins stops talking suddenly, and Hank can see his back straighten and stiffen from the corner of his eye. When he turns to look at him, Stebbins’ eyes are wide and his face pale.
“Stebbins—?”
Stebbins suddenly books it to the entry-way, grabbing his jacket and fishing out his car keys as he frantically pulls the jacket on. “I have to go— There’s a spare key in the junk drawer, you can have it until you find your own place—” He’s barely finished his sentence when he yanks open the front door and rushes outside.
“Wait— Where the fuck are you going?!” Hank chases after him, following him down the hall and down the steps. Stebbins is all but running, ignoring Hank’s pursuit of him. He unlocks his car the second he gets outside.
“I can’t explain now, but I’ll be back in a few days—” Stebbins’ voice is fast but even, a practiced calm. He wrenches open the car door and climbs inside, turning on the engine before his door has even shut.
“We were supposed to go back to the Emporium together! What the fuck am I supposed to tell them if I come back without you!” Hank yells at him through the closed car door.
Stebbins rolls down the window and says, “Tell them I heard the hounds,” before putting the car in reverse and peeling it out of the apartment parking lot. Hank watches the car speed away, at a loss for words.
—
Hank walked through the entrance into the Emporium, without Stebbins.
The Emporium was open now, so there was nothing to stop him, but returning without Stebbins felt wrong, especially with how quickly Stebbins left. Not to mention how panicked he was— Stebbins hid it well, but something must have scared the shit out of him for him to up and leave out of the blue.
Tell them I heard the hounds. Whatever the hell that meant.
“Olson?”
Hank jumped and looked to the Gift Shop entrance. In the doorway stood a handsome black man with a scar across his cheek. The man smiled warmly at him. “You can call me McVries, I help run tours here.”
“Uh— Nice to meet ya’,” Hank says, eyes glancing behind McVries to see if Garraty was in the shop.
“Stebbins still outside?” McVries asks.
Hank rubs the back of his neck. “He uh… He said he ‘heard the hounds’?”
He expects McVries to laugh it off— No, he hopes McVries will. Instead, a somber looks comes over his face for a moment. “I see… Well, no worries. He’ll be back in a few days.” Hank gives him a baffled look, which prompts him to continue, “Stebbins doesn’t stay in one place for too long. You’ll get used to him disappearing and coming back.”
“Why the fuck does he do that?”
“Not my place to tell.” Before Hank can question further, McVries walks past him and into the Exhibit Hall. “Here, let me give you a tour of the place!”
The tour started off like a normal tour of the exhibit, with McVries regaling tales of each of the artifacts on display— an antique sailor’s whistle, some porcelain clown dolls, a taxidermy polar bear standing on its hind legs, a chess board whose chess pieces were made of bone, and an antique meat grinder, just to name a few. The tales McVries spun about each item sounded outlandish and impossible, but the way he told it made Hank want to believe him.
“How do you guys come up with all that?” Hank asks, as he starts heading up a staircase with McVries to the second floor.
“Well, we usually already know what they do before we get them,” McVries answered. “There’s a little embellishment here and there, but not much.”
Okay, McVries is officially fucking with Hank. There’s no way the taxidermy bear comes to life, or the chess set is from Death itself, or any other fantastical tale he’s spun. It’s just an Emporium full of weird shit that they gave even weirder stories to.
The second story has a second exhibit hall, and also has another employee’s only section, which McVries leads Hank into. He knocks on a door labeled ‘Security Office’. “Harkness, you in there?”
“Door’s unlocked!” A familiar voice answers back, and McVries opens the door and motions for Hank to follow in.
The Security Office is a cramped space, crammed full of old boxy TVs and monitors, most of which are showing security footage of the Emporium. Hank can’t help but notice that some of the screens, however, are showing the surrounding streets, and a few show places he can’t pinpoint but is fairly certain are not within the Emporium. Amidst the screens and their glow sits a man in a swivel chair, wearing a ratty jean jacket over a button-up and tie. His thick glasses make his eyes look a little too big for his face, and he grins when he sees Hank. “If it isn’t our Leitner Collector!”
“I’d introduce you, but I’m sure you already know ‘im,” McVries said. He looks back to Hank. “This is Harkness, he works security for us— From what I’ve heard, you’ve already met him.”
“Yeah, you’re the asshole who wasn’t gonna let me in,” Hank retorts.
Harkness gives a sheepish smile, “In my defense, you came earlier than expected, and Stebbins and The Major were still in a meeting.” Hank notices the desk pushed against the wall has various notebooks spread across any portion of the surface that wasn’t already taken up by a monitor. Harkness leans forward in his chair a little and suddenly asks, “So what makes those Leitners so important to you?”
Hank opens his mouth, and what he means to say is ‘None of your fucking business’. What comes out instead is, “Two of my friends disappeared after finding Leitners, and I think I might be able to find them if I can find the ones they had.”
Harkness grabs a notebook and scribbles something down as Hank stands stunned— Betrayed by his own words— and McVries scolds, “Harkness. At least give the man a day before you start prying into his shit.”
“Hey, you weren’t curious about it too? I just wanted to know!”
What the hell just happened? Hank hadn’t told anyone about Art and Clementine before, and this guy asks one question and he just immediately spills it? What the fuck was going on? “How— How the fuck—”
McVries sighs, “He’s an Avatar of The Eye. Any question he asks you compels you to answer honestly.” McVries shoots Harkness a look. “Which he likes to use very liberally.”
“An Avatar of what?”
McVries looked back at Hank, a concerned look starting to come over his face. “… The Eye?”
“You’re saying that like I’m supposed to know what the fuck that means,” Hank says.
Harkness suddenly lets out a laugh, covering his mouth and looking gleeful, “Holy shit, he doesn’t know what the entities are!”
“No fuckin’ way he doesn’t,” McVries scolds, before once again looking at Hank, “Right? You know the entities?”
“What the fuck are you talking about?”
Harkness laughs more and realization dawns over McVries’ face. “You’ve been collecting Leitners and you don’t even know what makes them like that?”
“Are you gonna keep asking questions or are you gonna tell me what the fuck this is all about?” Hank shoots back, throwing his hands up.
Harkness grabs one of the notebooks from his desk and tosses it to Hank, who manages to catch it. “This’ll explain a bunch— I want that back after you’re done, though.” Hank looks at the cover of the composite notebook to see “Leitner’s 14” scrawled on the front in sharpie.
“Thanks Harkness, I’ll take it from here,” McVries says, putting a hand on Hank’s shoulder and directing him out of the Security Office, slamming the door shut behind him. “Sorry about Harkness, he can be… A bit much, sometimes.”
“What the fuck are the entities?” Hank asks, cutting to the chase.
“… Right, so…” McVries starts leading Hank back down the hall and down the stairs. “There’s these entities that… To put it really simply, they’re fear entities. There’s 14 of them, each one encompasses a different type of fear.” McVries motions to the notebook in Hank’s hand. “Harkness will have written a lot of stuff about them down. It’s kind of his thing— He writes down anything and everything about anything and everything. Pretty sure he has a notebook on each of us here.” McVries scoffs and smiles slightly, but Hank doesn’t quite find the humor in it. “The entities can sort of… Overtake some people, make them another piece of the entity. We call those people Avatars, and they have some unique abilities. Like Harkness and his questions, for example. Make sense?”
Hank nods slowly, trying to absorb the information. “… Do any of them involve cannibalism?”
“Yeah, the Flesh,” McVries instantly answers, before his brow furrows. “Why’d you ask?”
“Just curious,” Hank dismisses.
“Well,” McVries continues, stopping by the front door. “I do tours, Harkness is in charge of security, Collie is technically also security, Ray works the gift shop, Stebbins finds and collects items for the exhibits, and The Major is the boss. And now you’re another collector. Anything I’m missing?”
“We didn’t meet Collie,” Hank points out.
“Oh, you’ll see him eventually. He’s… A bit scarce.” McVries motions to the notebook again. “Read up on that. Your first day’ll be tomorrow.”
After the disappearances of two of his close friends, Hank Olson's life took a strange turn- One that involves him collecting odd books that once belonged to a Jurgen Leitner.
A meeting with a fellow collector lands him a job he can't refuse, one that will allow him to continue growing his collection and searching for his friends. However, the job turns out to have some unexpected facets, and he begins to learn that there's a lot more to the world and his books than he originally thought.
Chapter Two: The Emporium - 3761 words
Hank chases Stebbins to Maine to retrieve his stolen books- Only to leave with a new job instead.
Can u maybe.. give us stebbins, ray and Pete headcanons 4 the college au 🥹
IM SO SORRY THIS TOOK SO LONG I PUT IT IN DRAFTS AND FORGOT ABOUT IT ASDFGHJKL
Lemme see if I can find some that I havent already posted!
I think I've made it pretty obvious that Stebbins and Pete know Ray's gay, but Ray himself still hasn't figure it out yet
Ray has only officially dated one person before, and that was Jan in high school. He's been on dating apps and a few dates here and there since, but nothing that's stuck (... Because he doesn't know he's gay)
Ray knows Stebbins and Pete are some flavor of queer, but thinks that's entirely irrelevant to their friendship and he's just a good ally (HE'S FUCKING GAY)
When they first start living without the other boys they all realize none of them are super great at cooking. First few months had a lotta takeout before Ray puts his foot down and insists they all start fucking cooking for the sake of their wallets
Stebbins likes most/all jams/jellies but his two favorites are raspberry and boysenberry
When Stebbins and Ray find out about Pete's uncle, Ray's first instinct is "Ill fuckin kill him" and Pete has to inform him that that is not at all what he wants (Stebbins points out Ray would get caught anyways)
Ray is the one to tell the friend group that the three of them are a couple and he NEVER hears the end of it about how he had a sexuality crisis and immediately came out of it with TWO hot boyfriends
I started writing an oc x canon fic and I'm having fun with it so far but a small part of me is so nervous about the idea of posting it so who knows if I'll post it
(I know it's silly for me to be self conscious of an oc x canon fic considering I dabble in reader inserts but shhhh)
Stebbins had seasonal allergies. They were annoying, but tolerable with allergy meds.
But allergy meds were, frankly, a pretty penny. So when spring rolled around and his allergies started acting up, Stebbins decided to just tough through them instead of wasting money on them. It was fine, they were just allergies.
In which Stebbins contracts Pneumonia
TLW Fic Masterlist (College AU listed under The Walker House Series)
Walker House Series Fic Masterlist
Read on AO3
Stebbins had seasonal allergies. They were annoying, but tolerable with allergy meds.
But allergy meds were, frankly, a pretty penny. So when spring rolled around and his allergies started acting up, Stebbins decided to just tough through them instead of wasting money on them. It was fine, they were just allergies.
Stebbins pulled on his jacket, rubbing his nose a little afterwards as he walked downstairs. He fished his car keys out of his pocket, before calling out, “Garraty, McVries!”
“We’re coming, we’re coming!” Pete called out, walking into the foyer from the living room. Ray wasn’t far behind him, hopping on one foot as he pulled on his shoe.
Recently, Stebbins had discovered that despite this being Pete and Ray’s second year going to school in California, neither had ever tried In-n-Out. Stebbins wouldn’t call himself a huge fan of the burger chain like some would, but it was good enough, and the fact that Pete and Ray had somehow avoided having any yet was a little funny to him. So, he suggested the three of them go out to lunch for them to try it out.
He also invited his mom along, but Pete and Ray didn’t know that yet.
Stebbins walked out to the front yard, followed closely by Pete and Ray as he unlocked his truck. His car was a large, grey truck, bordering on oversized. If Stebbins was being honest, he’d prefer a four-door sedan, maybe in blue, but he hadn’t been thinking about what he wanted when he picked it out— He’d been thinking of what his father would approve of. Now he was pretty sure he’d be stuck with the truck until it kicked the bucket. Nevertheless, it served its purpose.
“Shotgun,” Pete said, bumping his shoulder into Ray’s before speeding over to the passenger side door.
“Oh, c’mon…!” Ray protested, before climbing into the backseat with defeat. Stebbins pretended not to pay any mind to the interaction, climbing into the driver’s seat and buckling in.
“By the way,” Stebbins said as he turned on the ignition, “My Mom’s meeting up with us, so try to behave yourselves.”
“What?!” Pete gave Stebbins a bewildered look from the passenger seat.
“We’re meeting your mom?? Today??” Ray piped up, leaning himself forward so he was over the center console.
“Yup,” Stebbins replied, pulling the truck out of the driveway.
“Why didn’t you warn us?!” Pete asked.
“I’m warning you right now.”
“While we’re already leaving!”
“Oh god, I didn’t shower today,” Ray ran a hand over his face and Stebbins fought back a smile.
“Poor planning on your part, Garraty.”
“I thought we were just going to get fast food and hang! Not meet anyone’s parents!”
Stebbins didn’t say anything, simply smiling to himself as he drove and listening to Pete and Ray commiserate over their shared fate.
—
The nearest In-n-Out had no indoor seating, only two drive-thrus and a handful of outdoor tables and seats. The drive-thrus were both jam-packed, almost spilling out in the main road, but Stebbins managed to maneuver his truck into the parking lot despite this and find an open spot.
Stebbins spotted his mom the second he parked. She was sitting at one of the tables, her blonde hair brushed over her shoulder, wearing her favorite tan cardigan and blue dress. Stebbins switched off his truck and hopped out, sticking his hands in his jacket pockets and bee-lining to his mother, letting Pete and Ray scramble to catch up.
As he approached, Ma looked up and smiled warmly as her eyes landed on him, the corners of her cool brown eyes crinkling with crows-feet. She stood up from the table, and Stebbins leaned down to give her a one-armed hug— Ma was a petite woman, and Stebbins had been taller than her ever since middle school, now he towered nearly a foot over her. Ma hugged him back tightly, and murmured, “Hi, baby.”
“Hi Ma,” Stebbins muttered back, holding onto the hug for just a moment longer before pulling away. He glanced over to see Ray and Pete just catching up, and motioned to them. “Ma, these are my—” He quickly debated his choice of words, “— Friends. These are my friends.”
“Hi,” Pete greeted, giving a charismatic smile that would make any person’s mother swoon and holding out his hand, his demeanor not betraying how he had been panicking about the meeting mere minutes ago. “I’m Peter McVries.”
“And I’m Ray,” Ray chimed in, giving a boyish grin and waiting his turn to shake her hand.
Ma shook both their hands, giving them both scrutinizing looks. “It’s a pleasure to meet you two, I’m Billy’s mom. He’s told me plenty about you two.”
“He has?” Ray asked, looking terrified for a brief moment.
“All good things, I hope,” Pete said, eying Stebbins, who keeps a straight face.
Instead of answering, Ma just gives them a cryptic smile and changes the subject. “I already ordered your food, Billy. I didn’t know what you two would want, so I didn’t order for you.”
“You mean Stebbins doesn’t get his mind-reading powers from you?” Ray asked, feigning shock.
“I’m not psychic, you’re just easier to read than a children’s book,” Stebbins deadpanned.
“That’s not true,” Ray said.
Ma tilted her head a little, looking at Ray for a moment before saying, “You have issues with your father, don’t you?”
Ray paled slightly, gaping as Pete started cracking up and Stebbins held back a smile. Ray looked at Stebbins, “Did you tell her??”
“Nope,” Stebbins replied.
“It’s in the way you carry yourself,” Ma replied simply, causing Pete to laugh even harder.
Eventually, Pete calmed down enough to breathe again, and Ma urged him and Ray to go join the line before it got any longer. After many minutes, the four of them were sat at one of the tables with their food, Ma and Stebbins on one side, Pete and Ray on the other.
“So, boys,” Ma said as she opened a pack of sauce and emptied it onto her fries, “What’s my boy been up to?”
“Nothing bad,” Stebbins said a touch too quickly, his eyes shooting his two friends a look.
“Nothing bad at all? That doesn’t sound like a college boy,” Ma replies smoothly.
“… Did he tell you about playing Never Have I Ever?” Ray grinned.
“Oh?” Ma replied as Stebbins tried to subtly motion for Ray to shut the fuck up.
“He took ten shots and then jumped into the pool,” Ray continued anyways.
Ma’s eyes widened and she looked to Stebbins, who was covering his face with his hand, and scolded, “Billy.”
“He’s saying that as if we all didn’t take ten shots and jump in the pool,” Stebbins tried to defend himself.
“I didn’t,” Ray corrected, still grinning.
“I don’t have to tell you why that was stupid, do I?” Ma said.
Stebbins shook his head slightly, “No…”
“Good.”
“So, Miss Stebbins,” Pete starts.
“You can call me Mary Alice,” Ma said.
“So, Mary Alice,” Pete continues, “Have any good stories about Stebbins when he was little?”
Ma thinks for a moment, a slow smile coming upon her face. “Has he ever told you about when he met the Easter Bunny?”
Oh god.
“We don’t have to remember that—” Stebbins starts.
“Oh, no, I need to hear this one,” Pete insists, grinning widely.
Stebbins buries his face in his hands as Ma begins to tell the story of how, when Billy Stebbins was about four years old, she had taken him with her to the mall to do some shopping, and spotted an Easter Bunny sitting out for photo-ops.
“I didn’t usually pay for those kind of things, but Billy loved rabbits when he was little, so I thought getting pictures with the Easter Bunny just once wouldn’t hurt.”
Stebbins doesn’t need to look at Ray and Pete to know they’re aptly listening, probably leaning forward in their chairs. He suddenly stands up, removing his hands from his face, “I have to go to the bathroom.”
Thankfully, Ma is unphased, simply saying, “Alright, we’ll be out here,” Before she continues the story. Pete gives a teasing wave and Ray flips off Stebbins from under the table as Stebbins quickly made his way to the bathrooms. He didn’t really have to use the restroom, but he couldn’t just sit there and listen to his mom tell his two… Friends about the time he had hysterically cried in the Easter Bunny’s lap. They can both tease him about it later, sure, but that’s a problem for future-Stebbins.
He tries to recite the story in his mind, if only to determine when it’s safe to venture back outside. Once he thinks enough time’s passed, he leaves the restroom. His timing wasn’t far off, as when he gets back to the table, Ma is just finishing the story to a chuckling Ray and Pete. “— I felt so bad, especially since he was so little!” Ma pats a hand on Stebbins’ arm as he sits back down.
“Stebbins? Little?” Ray says, still grinning from the story. “Now that’s hard to imagine.”
“What, you think I popped out the womb 6’4”?” Stebbins jokes dryly.
“Well no, but you must’ve been a big baby.” Pete raises his eyebrows at Ma, silently asking for confirmation.
Ma shakes her head and casually replies, “No, Billy was pretty small up until the end of junior high. As a matter of fact, he was a preemie.” Ray chokes on his drink slightly in response. “He was an itty bitty little thing. Born at only twenty-nine weeks and had to stay in the NICU for almost eight weeks.” She reaches a hand up and pets Stebbins’ hair. “Most stressful eight weeks of my life. If I never see Billy in the hospital again, it’ll be too soon.”
“I don’t have any hospital visits planned,” Stebbins says, half as a joke, half as a reassurance.
“Oh, you better not,” Ma smiles with her warning.
The rest of the lunch flew by, and before long Stebbins was giving his mom another hug and climbing back into his truck, listening to Ray and Pete voice their relief over how their first meeting with her went.
That night, when Stebbins went to bed, he felt fine.
Stebbins had seasonal allergies. They were annoying, but tolerable with allergy meds.
But allergy meds were, frankly, a pretty penny. So when spring rolled around and his allergies started acting up, Stebbins decided to just tough through them instead of wasting money on them. It was fine, they were just allergies.
In which Stebbins contracts Pneumonia
TLW Fic Masterlist (College AU listed under The Walker House Series)
Walker House Series Fic Masterlist
Read on AO3
Stebbins had seasonal allergies. They were annoying, but tolerable with allergy meds.
But allergy meds were, frankly, a pretty penny. So when spring rolled around and his allergies started acting up, Stebbins decided to just tough through them instead of wasting money on them. It was fine, they were just allergies.
Stebbins pulled on his jacket, rubbing his nose a little afterwards as he walked downstairs. He fished his car keys out of his pocket, before calling out, “Garraty, McVries!”
“We’re coming, we’re coming!” Pete called out, walking into the foyer from the living room. Ray wasn’t far behind him, hopping on one foot as he pulled on his shoe.
Recently, Stebbins had discovered that despite this being Pete and Ray’s second year going to school in California, neither had ever tried In-n-Out. Stebbins wouldn’t call himself a huge fan of the burger chain like some would, but it was good enough, and the fact that Pete and Ray had somehow avoided having any yet was a little funny to him. So, he suggested the three of them go out to lunch for them to try it out.
He also invited his mom along, but Pete and Ray didn’t know that yet.
Stebbins walked out to the front yard, followed closely by Pete and Ray as he unlocked his truck. His car was a large, grey truck, bordering on oversized. If Stebbins was being honest, he’d prefer a four-door sedan, maybe in blue, but he hadn’t been thinking about what he wanted when he picked it out— He’d been thinking of what his father would approve of. Now he was pretty sure he’d be stuck with the truck until it kicked the bucket. Nevertheless, it served its purpose.
“Shotgun,” Pete said, bumping his shoulder into Ray’s before speeding over to the passenger side door.
“Oh, c’mon…!” Ray protested, before climbing into the backseat with defeat. Stebbins pretended not to pay any mind to the interaction, climbing into the driver’s seat and buckling in.
“By the way,” Stebbins said as he turned on the ignition, “My Mom’s meeting up with us, so try to behave yourselves.”
“What?!” Pete gave Stebbins a bewildered look from the passenger seat.
“We’re meeting your mom?? Today??” Ray piped up, leaning himself forward so he was over the center console.
“Yup,” Stebbins replied, pulling the truck out of the driveway.
“Why didn’t you warn us?!” Pete asked.
“I’m warning you right now.”
“While we’re already leaving!”
“Oh god, I didn’t shower today,” Ray ran a hand over his face and Stebbins fought back a smile.
“Poor planning on your part, Garraty.”
“I thought we were just going to get fast food and hang! Not meet anyone’s parents!”
Stebbins didn’t say anything, simply smiling to himself as he drove and listening to Pete and Ray commiserate over their shared fate.
—
The nearest In-n-Out had no indoor seating, only two drive-thrus and a handful of outdoor tables and seats. The drive-thrus were both jam-packed, almost spilling out in the main road, but Stebbins managed to maneuver his truck into the parking lot despite this and find an open spot.
Stebbins spotted his mom the second he parked. She was sitting at one of the tables, her blonde hair brushed over her shoulder, wearing her favorite tan cardigan and blue dress. Stebbins switched off his truck and hopped out, sticking his hands in his jacket pockets and bee-lining to his mother, letting Pete and Ray scramble to catch up.
As he approached, Ma looked up and smiled warmly as her eyes landed on him, the corners of her cool brown eyes crinkling with crows-feet. She stood up from the table, and Stebbins leaned down to give her a one-armed hug— Ma was a petite woman, and Stebbins had been taller than her ever since middle school, now he towered nearly a foot over her. Ma hugged him back tightly, and murmured, “Hi, baby.”
“Hi Ma,” Stebbins muttered back, holding onto the hug for just a moment longer before pulling away. He glanced over to see Ray and Pete just catching up, and motioned to them. “Ma, these are my—” He quickly debated his choice of words, “— Friends. These are my friends.”
“Hi,” Pete greeted, giving a charismatic smile that would make any person’s mother swoon and holding out his hand, his demeanor not betraying how he had been panicking about the meeting mere minutes ago. “I’m Peter McVries.”
“And I’m Ray,” Ray chimed in, giving a boyish grin and waiting his turn to shake her hand.
Ma shook both their hands, giving them both scrutinizing looks. “It’s a pleasure to meet you two, I’m Billy’s mom. He’s told me plenty about you two.”
“He has?” Ray asked, looking terrified for a brief moment.
“All good things, I hope,” Pete said, eying Stebbins, who keeps a straight face.
Instead of answering, Ma just gives them a cryptic smile and changes the subject. “I already ordered your food, Billy. I didn’t know what you two would want, so I didn’t order for you.”
“You mean Stebbins doesn’t get his mind-reading powers from you?” Ray asked, feigning shock.
“I’m not psychic, you’re just easier to read than a children’s book,” Stebbins deadpanned.
“That’s not true,” Ray said.
Ma tilted her head a little, looking at Ray for a moment before saying, “You have issues with your father, don’t you?”
Ray paled slightly, gaping as Pete started cracking up and Stebbins held back a smile. Ray looked at Stebbins, “Did you tell her??”
“Nope,” Stebbins replied.
“It’s in the way you carry yourself,” Ma replied simply, causing Pete to laugh even harder.
Eventually, Pete calmed down enough to breathe again, and Ma urged him and Ray to go join the line before it got any longer. After many minutes, the four of them were sat at one of the tables with their food, Ma and Stebbins on one side, Pete and Ray on the other.
“So, boys,” Ma said as she opened a pack of sauce and emptied it onto her fries, “What’s my boy been up to?”
“Nothing bad,” Stebbins said a touch too quickly, his eyes shooting his two friends a look.
“Nothing bad at all? That doesn’t sound like a college boy,” Ma replies smoothly.
“… Did he tell you about playing Never Have I Ever?” Ray grinned.
“Oh?” Ma replied as Stebbins tried to subtly motion for Ray to shut the fuck up.
“He took ten shots and then jumped into the pool,” Ray continued anyways.
Ma’s eyes widened and she looked to Stebbins, who was covering his face with his hand, and scolded, “Billy.”
“He’s saying that as if we all didn’t take ten shots and jump in the pool,” Stebbins tried to defend himself.
“I didn’t,” Ray corrected, still grinning.
“I don’t have to tell you why that was stupid, do I?” Ma said.
Stebbins shook his head slightly, “No…”
“Good.”
“So, Miss Stebbins,” Pete starts.
“You can call me Mary Alice,” Ma said.
“So, Mary Alice,” Pete continues, “Have any good stories about Stebbins when he was little?”
Ma thinks for a moment, a slow smile coming upon her face. “Has he ever told you about when he met the Easter Bunny?”
Oh god.
“We don’t have to remember that—” Stebbins starts.
“Oh, no, I need to hear this one,” Pete insists, grinning widely.
Stebbins buries his face in his hands as Ma begins to tell the story of how, when Billy Stebbins was about four years old, she had taken him with her to the mall to do some shopping, and spotted an Easter Bunny sitting out for photo-ops.
“I didn’t usually pay for those kind of things, but Billy loved rabbits when he was little, so I thought getting pictures with the Easter Bunny just once wouldn’t hurt.”
Stebbins doesn’t need to look at Ray and Pete to know they’re aptly listening, probably leaning forward in their chairs. He suddenly stands up, removing his hands from his face, “I have to go to the bathroom.”
Thankfully, Ma is unphased, simply saying, “Alright, we’ll be out here,” Before she continues the story. Pete gives a teasing wave and Ray flips off Stebbins from under the table as Stebbins quickly made his way to the bathrooms. He didn’t really have to use the restroom, but he couldn’t just sit there and listen to his mom tell his two… Friends about the time he had hysterically cried in the Easter Bunny’s lap. They can both tease him about it later, sure, but that’s a problem for future-Stebbins.
He tries to recite the story in his mind, if only to determine when it’s safe to venture back outside. Once he thinks enough time’s passed, he leaves the restroom. His timing wasn’t far off, as when he gets back to the table, Ma is just finishing the story to a chuckling Ray and Pete. “— I felt so bad, especially since he was so little!” Ma pats a hand on Stebbins’ arm as he sits back down.
“Stebbins? Little?” Ray says, still grinning from the story. “Now that’s hard to imagine.”
“What, you think I popped out the womb 6’4”?” Stebbins jokes dryly.
“Well no, but you must’ve been a big baby.” Pete raises his eyebrows at Ma, silently asking for confirmation.
Ma shakes her head and casually replies, “No, Billy was pretty small up until the end of junior high. As a matter of fact, he was a preemie.” Ray chokes on his drink slightly in response. “He was an itty bitty little thing. Born at only twenty-nine weeks and had to stay in the NICU for almost eight weeks.” She reaches a hand up and pets Stebbins’ hair. “Most stressful eight weeks of my life. If I never see Billy in the hospital again, it’ll be too soon.”
“I don’t have any hospital visits planned,” Stebbins says, half as a joke, half as a reassurance.
“Oh, you better not,” Ma smiles with her warning.
The rest of the lunch flew by, and before long Stebbins was giving his mom another hug and climbing back into his truck, listening to Ray and Pete voice their relief over how their first meeting with her went.
That night, when Stebbins went to bed, he felt fine.
Having a million writing projects is great because you always have something to work on, but then suddenly you blink and you havent updated a fic/series in months
Stebbins had seasonal allergies. They were annoying, but tolerable with allergy meds.
But allergy meds were, frankly, a pretty penny. So when spring rolled around and his allergies started acting up, Stebbins decided to just tough through them instead of wasting money on them. It was fine, they were just allergies.
In which Stebbins contracts Pneumonia
TLW Fic Masterlist (College AU listed under The Walker House Series)
Walker House Series Fic Masterlist
Read on AO3
Stebbins had seasonal allergies. They were annoying, but tolerable with allergy meds.
But allergy meds were, frankly, a pretty penny. So when spring rolled around and his allergies started acting up, Stebbins decided to just tough through them instead of wasting money on them. It was fine, they were just allergies.
Stebbins pulled on his jacket, rubbing his nose a little afterwards as he walked downstairs. He fished his car keys out of his pocket, before calling out, “Garraty, McVries!”
“We’re coming, we’re coming!” Pete called out, walking into the foyer from the living room. Ray wasn’t far behind him, hopping on one foot as he pulled on his shoe.
Recently, Stebbins had discovered that despite this being Pete and Ray’s second year going to school in California, neither had ever tried In-n-Out. Stebbins wouldn’t call himself a huge fan of the burger chain like some would, but it was good enough, and the fact that Pete and Ray had somehow avoided having any yet was a little funny to him. So, he suggested the three of them go out to lunch for them to try it out.
He also invited his mom along, but Pete and Ray didn’t know that yet.
Stebbins walked out to the front yard, followed closely by Pete and Ray as he unlocked his truck. His car was a large, grey truck, bordering on oversized. If Stebbins was being honest, he’d prefer a four-door sedan, maybe in blue, but he hadn’t been thinking about what he wanted when he picked it out— He’d been thinking of what his father would approve of. Now he was pretty sure he’d be stuck with the truck until it kicked the bucket. Nevertheless, it served its purpose.
“Shotgun,” Pete said, bumping his shoulder into Ray’s before speeding over to the passenger side door.
“Oh, c’mon…!” Ray protested, before climbing into the backseat with defeat. Stebbins pretended not to pay any mind to the interaction, climbing into the driver’s seat and buckling in.
“By the way,” Stebbins said as he turned on the ignition, “My Mom’s meeting up with us, so try to behave yourselves.”
“What?!” Pete gave Stebbins a bewildered look from the passenger seat.
“We’re meeting your mom?? Today??” Ray piped up, leaning himself forward so he was over the center console.
“Yup,” Stebbins replied, pulling the truck out of the driveway.
“Why didn’t you warn us?!” Pete asked.
“I’m warning you right now.”
“While we’re already leaving!”
“Oh god, I didn’t shower today,” Ray ran a hand over his face and Stebbins fought back a smile.
“Poor planning on your part, Garraty.”
“I thought we were just going to get fast food and hang! Not meet anyone’s parents!”
Stebbins didn’t say anything, simply smiling to himself as he drove and listening to Pete and Ray commiserate over their shared fate.
—
The nearest In-n-Out had no indoor seating, only two drive-thrus and a handful of outdoor tables and seats. The drive-thrus were both jam-packed, almost spilling out in the main road, but Stebbins managed to maneuver his truck into the parking lot despite this and find an open spot.
Stebbins spotted his mom the second he parked. She was sitting at one of the tables, her blonde hair brushed over her shoulder, wearing her favorite tan cardigan and blue dress. Stebbins switched off his truck and hopped out, sticking his hands in his jacket pockets and bee-lining to his mother, letting Pete and Ray scramble to catch up.
As he approached, Ma looked up and smiled warmly as her eyes landed on him, the corners of her cool brown eyes crinkling with crows-feet. She stood up from the table, and Stebbins leaned down to give her a one-armed hug— Ma was a petite woman, and Stebbins had been taller than her ever since middle school, now he towered nearly a foot over her. Ma hugged him back tightly, and murmured, “Hi, baby.”
“Hi Ma,” Stebbins muttered back, holding onto the hug for just a moment longer before pulling away. He glanced over to see Ray and Pete just catching up, and motioned to them. “Ma, these are my—” He quickly debated his choice of words, “— Friends. These are my friends.”
“Hi,” Pete greeted, giving a charismatic smile that would make any person’s mother swoon and holding out his hand, his demeanor not betraying how he had been panicking about the meeting mere minutes ago. “I’m Peter McVries.”
“And I’m Ray,” Ray chimed in, giving a boyish grin and waiting his turn to shake her hand.
Ma shook both their hands, giving them both scrutinizing looks. “It’s a pleasure to meet you two, I’m Billy’s mom. He’s told me plenty about you two.”
“He has?” Ray asked, looking terrified for a brief moment.
“All good things, I hope,” Pete said, eying Stebbins, who keeps a straight face.
Instead of answering, Ma just gives them a cryptic smile and changes the subject. “I already ordered your food, Billy. I didn’t know what you two would want, so I didn’t order for you.”
“You mean Stebbins doesn’t get his mind-reading powers from you?” Ray asked, feigning shock.
“I’m not psychic, you’re just easier to read than a children’s book,” Stebbins deadpanned.
“That’s not true,” Ray said.
Ma tilted her head a little, looking at Ray for a moment before saying, “You have issues with your father, don’t you?”
Ray paled slightly, gaping as Pete started cracking up and Stebbins held back a smile. Ray looked at Stebbins, “Did you tell her??”
“Nope,” Stebbins replied.
“It’s in the way you carry yourself,” Ma replied simply, causing Pete to laugh even harder.
Eventually, Pete calmed down enough to breathe again, and Ma urged him and Ray to go join the line before it got any longer. After many minutes, the four of them were sat at one of the tables with their food, Ma and Stebbins on one side, Pete and Ray on the other.
“So, boys,” Ma said as she opened a pack of sauce and emptied it onto her fries, “What’s my boy been up to?”
“Nothing bad,” Stebbins said a touch too quickly, his eyes shooting his two friends a look.
“Nothing bad at all? That doesn’t sound like a college boy,” Ma replies smoothly.
“… Did he tell you about playing Never Have I Ever?” Ray grinned.
“Oh?” Ma replied as Stebbins tried to subtly motion for Ray to shut the fuck up.
“He took ten shots and then jumped into the pool,” Ray continued anyways.
Ma’s eyes widened and she looked to Stebbins, who was covering his face with his hand, and scolded, “Billy.”
“He’s saying that as if we all didn’t take ten shots and jump in the pool,” Stebbins tried to defend himself.
“I didn’t,” Ray corrected, still grinning.
“I don’t have to tell you why that was stupid, do I?” Ma said.
Stebbins shook his head slightly, “No…”
“Good.”
“So, Miss Stebbins,” Pete starts.
“You can call me Mary Alice,” Ma said.
“So, Mary Alice,” Pete continues, “Have any good stories about Stebbins when he was little?”
Ma thinks for a moment, a slow smile coming upon her face. “Has he ever told you about when he met the Easter Bunny?”
Oh god.
“We don’t have to remember that—” Stebbins starts.
“Oh, no, I need to hear this one,” Pete insists, grinning widely.
Stebbins buries his face in his hands as Ma begins to tell the story of how, when Billy Stebbins was about four years old, she had taken him with her to the mall to do some shopping, and spotted an Easter Bunny sitting out for photo-ops.
“I didn’t usually pay for those kind of things, but Billy loved rabbits when he was little, so I thought getting pictures with the Easter Bunny just once wouldn’t hurt.”
Stebbins doesn’t need to look at Ray and Pete to know they’re aptly listening, probably leaning forward in their chairs. He suddenly stands up, removing his hands from his face, “I have to go to the bathroom.”
Thankfully, Ma is unphased, simply saying, “Alright, we’ll be out here,” Before she continues the story. Pete gives a teasing wave and Ray flips off Stebbins from under the table as Stebbins quickly made his way to the bathrooms. He didn’t really have to use the restroom, but he couldn’t just sit there and listen to his mom tell his two… Friends about the time he had hysterically cried in the Easter Bunny’s lap. They can both tease him about it later, sure, but that’s a problem for future-Stebbins.
He tries to recite the story in his mind, if only to determine when it’s safe to venture back outside. Once he thinks enough time’s passed, he leaves the restroom. His timing wasn’t far off, as when he gets back to the table, Ma is just finishing the story to a chuckling Ray and Pete. “— I felt so bad, especially since he was so little!” Ma pats a hand on Stebbins’ arm as he sits back down.
“Stebbins? Little?” Ray says, still grinning from the story. “Now that’s hard to imagine.”
“What, you think I popped out the womb 6’4”?” Stebbins jokes dryly.
“Well no, but you must’ve been a big baby.” Pete raises his eyebrows at Ma, silently asking for confirmation.
Ma shakes her head and casually replies, “No, Billy was pretty small up until the end of junior high. As a matter of fact, he was a preemie.” Ray chokes on his drink slightly in response. “He was an itty bitty little thing. Born at only twenty-nine weeks and had to stay in the NICU for almost eight weeks.” She reaches a hand up and pets Stebbins’ hair. “Most stressful eight weeks of my life. If I never see Billy in the hospital again, it’ll be too soon.”
“I don’t have any hospital visits planned,” Stebbins says, half as a joke, half as a reassurance.
“Oh, you better not,” Ma smiles with her warning.
The rest of the lunch flew by, and before long Stebbins was giving his mom another hug and climbing back into his truck, listening to Ray and Pete voice their relief over how their first meeting with her went.
That night, when Stebbins went to bed, he felt fine.
