I have mad brainrot for @redwingedwhump’s immortal butler of Blackthorn Hall so I whipped up a lil something. I couldn’t decide if I liked the initial sketch or lineart better so I decided to post both!
TW: restraints, gagged and muzzled, blood, vampire biting and drinking blood, mercy killing mentioned, human experimentation mentioned
It had, in actuality, been only three minutes since Henry had injected Yves with the strange formula before the vampire ceased thrashing and lay still on the table. What had made it seem longer was the screaming, only half stifled by the muzzle gag Yves wore for this.
Now his eyes were closed and he breathed through the fading agony, giving a residual shiver every now and again. He looked exhausted.
“Yves,” Henry tried calling out softly. “Yves, can you hear me?”
Stiffly, as if it pained him, Yves turned his head toward the sound of Henry’s voice.
“Is that it?” said Henry. “Is it over now?”
The vampire blinked open eyes still bloodshot, but no longer the dangerous feral red. He just looked tired. Blearily he tried to focus, squinting at Henry… and saw Lydia, seated beside her brother. Yves’ eyes closed again with a visible wince and he turned his face away.
“Yves-” Henry explained quickly, “She found out on her own, she just came in, I’m sorry-“
“What?” said Lydia. “Oh. Right, you said he didn’t want me to see. Yves, I don’t- I don’t think less of you for this. You don’t have to worry that I-“ She sighed. “I’m sorry you’re hurt. But it’s nothing to be ashamed of, I think.”
An awkward silence resumed, and in it the only sound was the vampire’s breathing beginning, gradually, to slow and to deepen. The twins waited on the sofa, drowsing on each other’s shoulders.
Eventually Henry checked his phone again, and sat up. “That’s fifteen minutes. He said I should take that thing off his face, and, er, feed him, at this point.”
“Should it be your blood again this time?” Lydia asked.
“I don’t think he’d be all that keen on biting a lady.”
She folded her arms. “We’re going to have to sort that right out after this. It’s not fair to you to be the only one who has to do it, and I might be a woman, but in this century that doesn’t mean I can’t handle things.”
Henry had moved to the side of the table. “Yves. I’m taking this thing off you now, alright?” He unbuckled the leather straps of the muzzle as Yves blinked up at him, then pulled it gently away from the vampire’s face and mouth.
“Anhh..” Yves had to open his mouth wide to let the bit out of his mouth and he stretched his jaw as if it ached. His fangs were very much in evidence, top and bottom, long and sharp.
“There, that’s better, right?” said Henry.
Yves’ eyes weren’t on Henry’s face. They were following his hands with a riveted focus. “Y- yes, but-
Henry glanced down. Not his hands, his wrists, where the veins were visible under the skin.
“Now- please-“ Yves panted, licking his dry lips.
Henry hesitated, then offered a wrist to Yves’ mouth-
In a blur, fangs buried deep in his flesh.
“AGH!! Damn!” Henry’s other hand gripped Yves’ bound arm but he forced himself not to jerk away from the bite.
“Henry!” Lydia was beside him in an instant.
“I’m alright! It’s fine- Just sudden,” said Henry tensely. “He bit down fast.”
Yves drank desperately, with none of the gentleness he’d had the first time.
Again, Henry felt the euphoric effect of the venom hit him, and as his knees folded Lydia slid a workbench stool under him and helped him sit down onto it so as not to break the bite.
It was a long minute before Yves was mouthing the wound closed, his lips bloody as he let his head drop back to the table.
“Nff,” said Henry. “Don’t think I’ll… ever get used to how that feels…”
Yves lay with his eyes closed, tension melting from him, looking like an addict after a hit. “Lord, I needed that…” he breathed weakly.
Lydia took Henry’s arm and began to clean and bandage it. “You’re back with us, now?”
Yves nodded. “I am- sorry about biting- quite so hard, Sir. Control is diff- difficult, at that stage of things. That’s why we- Hh- wait a little longer before you let me loose.”
Henry folded his arms, minding the bandage at his wrist. “Well, if you have to wait another fifteen minutes anyway- explain this formula thing, and what it does to you, and why in heaven’s name you’d do this to yourself twice a year.”
Lydia elbowed her brother. “You can’t ask him that now!”
“Yes, I can! He’s stuck there and we’re not going anywhere either. I want to know what the hell just happened,” Henry said firmly.
“…I don’t blame you. I know it’s unsettling to see,” Yves murmured, his eyes closed. “That process is what keeps me ‘tame’, and lets me remain myself. It’s a formula Sir William developed through his work on me …and several others.”
“Others?” said Henry. “But I’ve never heard of any other vampire like you- this old.”
“I’m afraid so. That is because I survived the experimentation where they did not. I was the success.”
“You said he didn’t tell all the professional practitioners in the arcane sciences world- or alchemists, I guess they were back then- what the formula was, because of what it could cost. So …what could it cost?”
Yves nodded. “Look, Turning is a process. It can take up to a month, after being bitten near to death by a vampire and surviving. Most people spend that month trying to find a way to stop that process. Sir William spent that time when I was Turning using some of his best alchemy on me. I hadn’t lost myself yet. He was sure there’d be no stopping the curse if I went fully feral right after Turning, the way some people do.”
“But a lot of people don’t go feral for years after turning into vampires…” Lydia hugged her knees.
“Sometimes vampires go straight to feral right as the Turning is complete, and sometimes the bloodlust creeps in slowly as they Turn. But! Only some remain themselves for a century or so. Those are the usual vampires you’ll have seen. But in the end, even they eventually have to be killed when they finally succumb and go feral in time.”
Yves took another deep breath and continued. “What Sir William found was this: Turning, the process of the curse of vampirism taking hold, is a great deal of magic power in one place. But introducing any more outside magic into a turning vampire, tampering with that process as it happens, risks creating something worse. So much worse. The others Sir William tested with- He had to destroy them.”
“He just killed them-?”
“It was mercy!” Yves countered sharply. “Believe me! The risk of using the formula that created me is that if it doesn’t work you create something unholy! Ancient men called them Strigoi, Varcolac, Wraiths! Shapeshifting? Flying on bat-like wings? Terrible speed? Near total immortality? All those nightmares out of dark legends! That’s what they are! Monsters! Sir William saw what the others were becoming, and he ended them quickly, before they had power enough to break loose from their chains.”
Henry stared. “But why did it work on you?”
“…We don’t know,” Yves said miserably. “He used the same formula on others who were just as far gone as I was. By all his best arts he could only conclude it was something we can’t account for, or just the odds. He would not risk giving others his formula and allowing a single monster free into the world.”
Lydia shuddered. “There’s not still a chance you’ll ever turn into one of those things, is there?”
“During this?” Yves shook the restraints. “…We don’t think so. I’m no longer turning, that time is long past. Becoming a monster like those were... seems to require that surge of magical power the curse uses to take hold.”
Frowning thoughtfully, Henry checked his phone clock, then came back to Yves’ side again, moving to release the restraints. “But ‘we don’t think so’ isn’t the same as ‘no, absolutely not’, is it?”
“No, Sir. It’s not. Hence the steel built into the restraints.” Yves sat up slowly, stiffly. His shirt was damp, sticking to him, and his hair was far from its usual neatness even when he ran a hand through it to try to smooth it down. “If something, somehow, ever goes wrong with this- truly wrong-“
“Yes?”
“You should kill me. Quickly, without hesitation. I’d thank you. I’ve seen a monster like those only once and I don’t want to become one.”
“Yves, we couldn’t-” Lydia came to her feet again.
“We can pray it never comes to that. We really must begin your training as soon as possible.” He sat on the table, rubbing at his chafed wrists.
“You mean… training at being vampire hunters?” Lydia didn’t like the idea any more than she ever had.
“Yes of course. We really must have the Howes to dinner, they might be able to help you make sense of it all. Long time family friends, you know.”
Henry snorted. “How is a dinner party with the noble neighbors going to help?”
“Because they can help you with Hunter training. The Howe family are werewolves.”
For my personal "Whumptober" I figured I'd see how many drawings I could do and I got myself a new sketchbook to use a favorite technique, working on toned paper.
There's a thousand things with my OCs, whumpy or not, that I've promised myself I'd draw, so here goes an attempt to wake up my creative side.
(Gonna do my stupid drawings for my stupid mental health/ humor)
It's Pride Month and i loathe magenta- suffer with me.
Here have a VERY stylized Yves. They had neither his hairstyle, his actual hair color or even the option for shirts to be WHITE. You know like they were for the first few centuries of Shirt as we know it once it wasn't a tunic and was a white thing close to the skin.
So we're retconning backward a bit by about an hour in story-plot-time,
which makes THIS installment #23 and the last thing I wrote into the NEXT chapter, #24.
Thanks for your patience, but I am doing whatever it takes to get writing again and welp, time for some rearranging of furniture. I'll mess with the formatting later if I ever figure out what the heck my word processor is trying to do THIS time... ugh.
This is a series, Masterlist here to start you off.
Content: Grief, and some concerns about vampires.
Lydia found Yves rearranging the the tea things in the Breakfast Room, that smaller space they had been using to avoid the long twelve-seat table of the formal dining room. “Yves?”
“Yes Miss?” He looked up, schooling his expression to a butler’s formality, but she’d caught some indescribable hint in the second just before his pleasant half-smile.
“What’s wrong?”
“Wrong? Oh- nothing Miss, I was just rearranging the table settings, as Miss Kate will not be joining us for tea.”
Lydia frowned. “She won’t? But she just got here- I heard her and Henry talking so I came down to see…”
“She has borrowed Master Henry’s car and gone into Atcombe, I understand,” said Yves, with a careful neutrality of tone.
Lydia felt she’d begun to get the hang of Yves’ habit of covering any of his own feelings with formal manners and this time she thought she could read through them a bit. “Annnnnd that’s upset you.”
“What? Oh, no Miss-“ Yves smiled, lips pressed in a determined line.
The denial seemed to Lydia a little too hasty, too automatic. As if because he was a servant he was accustomed to having no opinions.
“Yves,” said Lydia, “I know you’re probably used to… What would you call it- a ‘Downton Abbey’ sort of separation between servants and- and the owners of the Hall, but—“ She sighed, unable to keep desperation out of her voice, “But you’re all we’ve got. We don’t know how to do any of this.”
She waved, taking in the china tea service, the gardens visible through the window, the manor house and all its history, and finally Yves, a 400 plus year old Butler and servingman. She chose her words carefully, feeling her way to what she wanted to mean. “I know you take your work very seriously, as a— a professional, but could we also be… I dunno, friends?”
Yves set down the plate he’d been holding, finally meeting her eyes properly, and something changed in his usually smooth expression. He certainly had not expected that. But maybe some small part of him had been hoping for it. His own icy blue eyes appeared to soften, and he swallowed as if to school his voice, then said, “Yes Miss. …I think I should like that.”
Lydia tried a tentative smile back. “I would too. You know so much, and you’ve been with the Hall since— Well, how far back?”
“Since the beginning of it as Blackthorne Hall, really,” said Yves. “The first Nightley home burned down at the same time I was Turned to vampire, and Blackthorne Hall is what Sir William rebuilt out of the ashes. That carved stone fireplace in the drawing room is one of the remnants from what he built.”
“And it’s been a Nightley home the whole time?”
“Oh Yes.”
“Sustained, I suppose, on whatever the Crown gives to vampire hunters?” Lydia asked.
“There is that as the main source, yes,” said Yves. “But you and Master Henry won’t be ready for that work for some time yet,” he added quickly, folding a napkin.
“Definitely,” Lydia nodded. “But the place is a huge country house full of repairs to make or restorations to do, or just the upkeep and the grounds alone, and the cook and you… What do we do for income, before we can do the whole… heroic hunting thing?”
“Ah. Yes. Several times in the history of the Hall, there have been pauses in regular hunting, either because it wasn’t needed or because the masters could not physically do the work,” said Yves.
“Miss Edith—“ His voice caught a little, but he carried on. “Miss Edith spent most of her life unable to carry out that kind of mission, and only ever accounted for two ferals in her tenure. Income was through historic tours, or research money she was able to get by writing papers or books about the family history. It was she who standardized the record keeping in the study, and she was even the one to get us cable television, and then the internet. She devoted her time to research, and cataloguing the extensive collection of information in the libraries.”
“You must miss her very much,” said Lydia softly. “I’m sorry. You haven’t had time to adjust, and then we barge in needing to have our hands held… I do wish we’d known her.”
Yves cleared his throat. “Thank you, Miss. Yes, we were… very close, her whole life. But Matthew- that is, your Grandfather Matthew, her twin brother, didn’t approve of the family cause, or the supernatural entanglements that the work sometimes required. It isn’t your fault you didn’t spend much time here after only one visit.”
Lydia shrugged. “Dad always said Granddad wouldn’t talk about it much.”
Yves looked down at the tea service he’d laid out, and the dishes he’d removed from the pattern. “Some people will always find the subject of vampires… off-putting.”
“It’s not your fault,” said Lydia abruptly. “Kate, going into the village, I mean. It’s not because of you, really. She’s— She’s a nice person, it’s just that I don’t think Henry told her just how big this place really is. Not as such. He wanted to break it all to her gently, he said.”
As if summoned by the mention of his name, Henry came to the double doorway of the breakfast room. “Kate’s gone into the village to stay at a rental cottage for a while… Sorry Yves, I know that spoils the tea plans. But do you mind if I put together something out of supper and take it over to her?”
Yves made a little half-bow. “You can certainly do that, if you like, Sir. I’m sure Mrs. Norton will find a way to accommodate you,” he added, with a nod toward the kitchen.
“Was she very upset with you?” said Lydia.
“I’m not sure,” said Henry, running a hand back through his thick dark curls. “With me, or just with how sudden this all is. I think she just needs… time. It’s not as if there’s a rush now we’ve signed on.”
“Very good, Sir.” Yves bowed again, this time with a bit of a smile.
Been thinking about Yves how is that little man vampire
Aw thank you!
I am trying like heck to get my brain to grind its gears into writing, forming scenes according to my plot.
In private RPs, we've been absolutely horrible to him. A Lot.
It'll be quite the switch to get further into this piece I am working on where the nastiest thing he has to deal with is changing the table settings for tea, and talking to Lydia about Awkward Emotional Things.
