@thebibliosphere
#i can imagine Ursula and Nathan making these for Vlad #and just leaving them everywhere #absolutely everywhere #and it still takes him months to surface from his current hyperfocus enough to notice #that his bed is covered in little paper bats #hunger pangs #hunger pangs true love bites
Adorable as this is, I raise you: Vlad makes these for a crying baby Riya one day because he doesn’t know how to interact with children unless he’s teaching them something.
She crushes the first few in her tiny, chubby toddler grip (and cries inconsolably about it), but by the time Vlad’s made ten, twenty, thirty of the damn things, Riya’s holding them delicately like butterflies. Her dark eyes shining in wonderment. Not just at the delicate paper bats, but at the person making them for her.
Vlad thinks nothing of it until it becomes a recurrent demand. He can’t so much as step into the same room without Riya squealing his name and toddling after him, pleading for more.
She loves them so much, Vlad makes a mobile out of them to hang from the ceiling in her nursery as a Halloween gift. Lady Margarete thinks it’s morbid and would prefer her to play with the porcelain dolls with the haunted glass eyes and frilly lace smocks she spent a small fortune on in Ingleton.
But all Riya wants is bats.
She outgrows the phase, eventually. As much as any little girl can while being raised in a castle full of vampires. Vlad tries not to be disappointed by this. He’d rather liked making them for her, but Tempus Fugit, and all that. It’s only natural Riya would outgrow him.
His fingers have a mind of their own, though, and sometimes he makes the familiar shapes out of habit. Leaving a paper trail of distraction around the castle. He assumes the thralls sweep them into the fire, and he’d be right. But sometimes Riya finds them first and pockets them, carrying them with her through the day until she’s able to retreat to the sanctuary of her bedroom and lifts down the silk-lined hatbox atop her wardrobe, revealing a stash of paper bats kept lovingly preserved inside.
They’re not much compared to the elaborate gifts Lady Margarete and the Count shower her with. But somehow, they mean so much more. Bats, as it turns out, are for (un)life. Not just Halloween.
