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Jun 27, 2022

5 times Luther thought he was the villain (+1 time he wasn’t)

The thing about being a vampire was that, no matter how hard you tried to be a good person, ultimately, it all went out the window the second you had to feed.

Note: I've been thinking a lot about the duality of a villain, and whether someone really, truly can be one without exception. I don't know if they can, but I think if we all relate to Luther this deeply, there's no way we could be doing so if there wasn't just a shred of humanity in there somewhere, right? This is me... trying to find out how the two mesh, I guess.

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The thing about being a vampire was that, no matter how hard you tried to be a good person, ultimately, it all went out the window the second you had to feed. Luther had tried to describe the way the need overtook him before, to someone who had never experienced it.

“Is it like an itch you can’t scratch? Or is it more violent than that?” They’d asked. “Is it like something taking over you? A predator’s instinct?”

“First of all,” Luther had said, quiet, dangerous, “I am not a science experiment. Stop taking notes.”

The young, interested scholar had been embarrassed. Her cheeks had colored, pink in the moonlight coming through the library walls. It was 1863, and Luther was trying his hand at blending in as a University student. It was a unique challenge – he was at the point of immortality that he’d gotten bored enough to want to learn something new. He’d met vampires before, old and tired, that had started to accumulate degrees. And, as he tried to settle, find a new way about living undead, he thought he’d try it.

And, because he thought he’d skate by, he settled on History as an area of study since, well… he’d been there. He figured he’d have all the answers.

It was torture.

There were a number of things he couldn’t stand. Sitting still for hours, listening to droning lectures. The fact that the history books had, quite literally, gotten it wrong.

But the worst part, the thing no one had ever warned him about, was the smell.

People, especially students, smelled fresh.

Luther thought it was something about the way they were, themselves, thirsting for something new, interesting. Like all of the studying and new facts and changes to their perception of the world changed their body chemistry, made their blood more potent. More fragrant. More…floral.

He battled it every day. Held back as much as he could. Until, one day, when he thought he was alone between the shelves of the library, he’d let his fangs slip out, hands on his thighs, trying to take deep, calming breaths through his open mouth, desperate for the smell of blood to leave his airways.

And then, from behind the shelves, he heard a soft, but confident: “Vampire.”

It had taken a moment for him to pull back his fangs, try to pretend he didn’t know what the young woman was talking about, but she’d seen what she’d seen. And she was certain. Back then, myth and legend had a bit more hold on society, a bit more understanding of the things that went bump in the night.

Her name was Amaya. He could have – perhaps, should have – taken care of her right there, that day, between the library shelves. It would have been quick, painless, and no one would have noticed until he’d long cleared his things from his university housing and vanished without a trace.

But he’d been biting back that taste for blood. And he thought he could manage it.

So he befriended her. Answered her questions.

“If I do not take notes,” Amaya told him, cheeks still pink from embarrassment, “There will never be a record of all the things you have done. All the lives you have lived.”

“That would be for the best,” Luther admitted.

“Nearly a century of life, and you do not want anyone to know about it?”

Luther watched the blush travel down from her cheeks to her neck, making the skin splotchy, red… inviting.

“Because, Amaya, not all lives are the kinds of stories you want to tell.”

“Tell me what it feels like,” she said. She didn’t put her notebook down. She was sitting on the edge of a study table, and it was improper, but the rest of the cavernous library was empty. “To want to drink.”

“It is…” Luther thought, truly trying to find the right words. “Unbearable. A constant torture. The longer I try to hold it off, the more fragrant it seems to smell. And, you would think that the larger the group, the harder it would be, but the opposite is true.”

“What do you mean?”

“Being in a full lecture hall, walking through the courtyard, moments like that – you would think that the multiplied heart beats and smells would make the desire harder to resist, but it’s actually moments like… well, moments like this one, that are the hardest.”

“Why?”

“I am not sure. I think it might have something to do with the mixing of smells. Imagine you have a full turkey dinner on the table, see? There is a full spread, the main dish, but a number of sides as well. They are all, individually, potent and delicious, and when you mix them all together, it’s overpowering, and still pleasant. But you can not zero in on one smell. You can not focus on one taste. And so you crave them all, but not enough to know where to start. That, I think, is what it is like for a vampire to be in a crowd of people, warm bodied and vulnerable.”

“And alone?”

“Well alone… you can identify the notes, the way you would with a fine glass of wine. You can smell the hint of what the person had for breakfast, the bit of sweat they missed in the shower, the grass they sat on during their lunch break. You can track the path their blood takes with every pump of their heart, from their chest down to their toes and all the way back again. It is more specific, more palatable, harder to resist.”

There’s a small bit of fear in Amaya’s voice when she asks her next question, but there is still, overwhelmingly, trust. Trust in a creature she considers a friend. “But you are able to. Resist.”

It isn’t a question. It’s something she assumes about him. You are able to. Resist.

Luther tracks the heat of her blood, moving through her body at a heightened pace, now. Her anxiety piques, and it sweetens the taste even more. He thinks it smells like gardenias, of all things, and he wonders why he hasn’t stopped to smell gardenias more often. They are… intoxicating.

“Luther? You are able to resist, are you not?”

Able, Luther thinks, as he takes a step closer to her. Resist.

Able, he thinks, as he closes the distance. Sure.

HIs lips touch her neck, soft flesh malleable underneath them. Gardenias bloom.

He’s able.

He’s just not sure he’s willing.

The 1920’s are weird. There’s a feeling in America that breeds wild, reckless behavior. Nights are constantly alive with parties on estates and free-flowing champagne, and later, Luther thinks the history books finally get something right when they dub the time the Roaring 20’s.

Because there is a dull roar everywhere he goes. It’s as though everyone has convinced themselves that they’re having so much fun that they can’t stop, but no one really believes it, not completely. It’s always one more drink and just another hour.

At first, Luther loves it. He can’t sleep — doesn’t have to, hasn’t in over a hundred years — but for the first time in a while, no one else seems to be able to, either. People think Vampires can’t get drunk, but that isn’t the truth. His heart still pumps, slowly but enough. The blood is borrowed, but it still soaks up the alcohol as good as if he’d made it himself.

So he does what everyone did in the 20’s: he gets into trouble.

The hardest night came somewhere in the middle of the blur, of the roar.

Luther liked to read people. He discovers back-room poker games early on, and every time they crop up, he finds himself back around a table.

It’s a night like that when he starts to wonder whether the stories he’s heard about vampires losing their souls are really, in fact, true.

The thing about being immortal is that you run out of things to do. There’s the ever changing culture, and new inventions that are interesting and exciting (Luther particularly enjoyed the invention of the lightbulb) but the excitement around those things fizzle out quickly. The one thing that remains interesting? The people. The ones whose hearts still beat on their own, without supplemental activities.

(Luther always found the war between lightbulb inventors more interesting than the lightbulb itself. There was nothing wrong with candles.)

That’s how he ends up at poker tables, no matter the decade. He likes learning to read the little facial expressions, like everyone else, but with his heightened senses, he’s lethal at the table. It’s not just his vision, which does help. He can see little facial tells now, of course, something as small as an eyebrow twitch.

But there’s also the smell. He can smell things that he couldn’t before. There’s the general things that are just heightened — he can smell the notes in wine that he used to simply pretend to taste when people swished glasses under his human nose and explained the palate, for example. Perfumes and colognes now have identifiable ingredients in a quick whiff of someone passing by him on the street.

But there’s also the way people’s body chemistry changes, now. He can smell the way anxiety spreads in the bloodstream. It gives people a sour scent, like milk curdling. He can smell nerves. He can smell a lie.

It makes him a fucking fantastic poker player. It doesn’t matter if they have a perfect poker face, or if they stay completely sober at the table (though, most of them don’t, especially in the 20’s). He can taste a bluff on the back of his tongue, can tell a good hand from a bad one with a sharp inhale.

He has an unfair advantage. An inhuman one. It’s wrong, to allow someone with God tier abilities to play with mere mortals. It’s unfair, unethical.

He does it anyway.

It turns out, immortal or not, vampires still have to pay rent.

Luther didn’t have a lot of skills before he was bitten. He made do with what he had, and he grew up in a time where you had a craft or you learned to use other people to survive. He wasn’t like some of the other vampires he’d come across in his life after death. He didn’t have a strong, moral past that he was ripped from the day he came into close contact with a pair of fangs.

Luther, like a lot of people in his time, made ends meet by picking pockets and sleight of hand.

He was a hustler, thru and thru.

He thinks, sometimes, it’s what got him bit in the first place. A hand in the wrong pocket, seen by the wrong person. Vampire.

People seem to forget that, despite the immortality thing, you still have some of the same needs as people with a beating heart. You need a place to stay, clothes to wear, people to care for you. Too many nights in the cold wouldn’t kill you, but it wouldn’t be pleasant, either. And there’s still a certain quality of life that the undead like to maintain. For example: you never really understand the importance of a good couch until you no longer have a reason for a good mattress.

There are a lot of parts that go into a good apartment, which is important for someone who can’t go outside until the sun sets, and doesn’t have a need to sleep. Luther needed a place with little to no natural light (and it takes him a while to find out that there are realtors that specialize in this kind of thing, people who are willing to show places after hours and know how to look for windowless places or ones with good black out curtains), and a comfortable way to spend his days.

He never really felt comfortable in places that were overly extravagant. He didn’t need anything more than a bedroom or two, and a studio fit his needs in a couple of lifetimes. Some vampires felt they really had to commit to the bit, and took over large, Victorian mansions and sprawling houses with rooms they could turn into dungeons and crypts. One guy had a hell of a time during Halloween, but Luther steered clear of him when he heard all of the decorations and camp were a farce to lure trick-or-treaters in for his own late night snack.

For Luther, he likes small places. Places that remind him of who he was before he was turned. Places that he can note all the entrances and exits, and watch his own back without having to rely on anyone else.

Before he finds out about the things other vampires do for money, like extremely long term investments, interest compounded over a century, and the knickknacks you picked up in another lifetime suddenly becoming vintage and valuable, Luther can’t pay for a place. So, he breaks and enters.

It starts small. Places he knows are empty of families on vacation, stuff like that.

Until he finds a place that lets him relax in a way he hasn’t since he became a creature of the night.

It’s a small two bedroom apartment, inhabited by two college students of the frat bro variety. They’ve skimped on the beds (one of them is literally on the floor without even a box spring underneath it) but that doesn’t bother Luther at all. What matters to him is, in the center of the living room, the perfect, immaculate bean bag.

He’s seen couches before. He’s seen a variety of them, from well loved to extremely extravagant. He’s seen leather couches, velvet couches, couches with floral patterns and plastic protective covers.

He has never seen a bean bag like this.

It’s huge, first of all. It stretches almost the length of a twin bed, but it’s round in shape. It’s tall enough that it comes up to his waist. When he flops down into the center, the ridiculous thing molds around his body like it was made for him. He spends six hours watching TV without changing the channel. It’s the closest thing to sleep he’s had in years.

There are other benefits to the place. The guys who live there have invested in heavy black out curtains, and Luther assumes they live a rather nocturnal lifestyle that mirrors his own. And, Luther finds out, he fucking loves Xbox.

So when they guys return from Spring Break, he’s not ready to leave.

He could take the easy route, treat these frat bros as an after dinner snack, and dump the bodies somewhere.

But Luther is… well, he’s bored. He hasn’t had fun in a while. So he takes a more… complicated approach.

He spends weeks making these guys believe their apartment is haunted. He runs through rooms at the speed of light, too fast for their human eyes to see, and moves things around. He turns all of their underwear inside out. He empties their fridge, rearranges their medicine cabinets, hides their weed (he can’t stand the smell, even if that does make him a narc). By the time they leave, he hears one of the guys say something about moving back home, leaving school until he can figure out what’s wrong with him, mentally speaking.

Nothing feels better to Luther than, alone at last, sinking into that ridiculous bean bag and finding that the beads still remember how to mold around his form.

Luther’s living in New Orleans the day that he hears about the hit being put out on two twin teenagers from The Order. He loves the town, loves how it comes alive after dark and stays alive until he crawls back to his place just before the sun creeps over the horizon. It’s the type of town you can live a life in, even if you have to live that life in the dark.

But he’s settled a little bit too much. He’s stayed long enough that people have noticed he isn’t aging, and he has a comfortable job, a normal job. He’s a bouncer for one of the spots on Bourbon Street, and he has a reputation. He’s the slightest one on the street, but by far the most feared. Locals know not to fuck around at his spot.

He finds out about the hit from a visiting vamp.

“Passing through on my way to Oregon,” Luca tells him. “Heard you weren’t even taking contracts anymore — figured this one would have been yours, hands down. But I had to hear that you were out of the game from a stranger, Luther. Had to see it for myself to believe the rumors.”

“People talkin’ about me?” Luther asks the question around the toothpick he’s adopted as part of his new image, human guy that absolutely blends in, tough guy bouncer, a part of the landscape.

“Saying you’ve gone soft.”

“What do I care about a couple of snot nosed teenagers from The Order?”

“Oh, man, no one told you?”

“I don’t like riddles. Spit it out, buy a drink, or keep moving.”

“It’s a Golden Ticket. They’re Rainiers.”

That last name is enough to awaken something in Luther, an old itch he hasn’t thought about scratching in decades. He feels his heart rate pick up, the blood of a rowdy bar patron he’d taken care of earlier in the night coursing through his veins.

“Someone put a hit out on the Rainiers? That hasn’t been approved since -“

“Yeah. That’s why I was surprised you weren’t already halfway across the country by now.”

“You don’t want the hit for yourself?” Luther’s brain is already racing, thinking of ways to do it, which branch of the family is being called fair game. Teenagers. Someone has been ballsy enough to put a hit on the oldest family in The Order for the first time in over fifty years, and they’d put the hit on teenagers.

“It’s a pair, girl and a boy. Girl’s a real shit heel, turns out. And, I didn’t say I don’t want it for myself. I just wanted to see for myself that you didn’t want it.”

“I do,” Luther admits, before he realizes what he’s saying. “I want the hit.”

“Yeah,” the vampire in front of him says, slow, crooked smile taking over most of his face in the dim light. “I figured.”

He gets the information from him. The Rainiers are where they’ve always been, in the small Pacific Northwest town of Baker. The hit is on a pair of twins, still in high school. They’re breeding them earlier and earlier, it looks like. It’s the same line. The same sect of The Order that…

Well.

Luther doesn’t like to think about that.

But the name and the address are enough to make him remember how cold it was that night, how long it took for him to recover, how alone he was for decades. It’s enough to make him pack up his things and hijack a car on his way out of town. It’s enough to stoke the fire of rage for his full cross country drive, as he stretches across the American landscape from Louisiana to the Pacific Northwest.

The miles of desert and corn fields and beautiful trees peeking out of the horizon when he finally reaches the coast don’t do anything to bring his rage down. He keeps the photo of these twins, Bex and Callum, clipped to the sun visor on the driver's side.

Luther is going to kill.

And, he can admit… he wants to.

With every fiber of his being. It feels vengeful, and ugly, and wrong as it twists in his gut, flames stoking in his stomach with every mile driven.

It feels good.

The first time Luther gets a shot at one of the twins, they’re apart. He’s been casing the town for a month, trying to see how they fit into the space, what they’re known for, whether Baker still loves this stupid, murderous little family.

They do, of course. They’re still held up as the founders of the town, and for the few people who still believe the town lore, the saviors of it, too. A coastal town in the Pacific Northwest is the perfect setting to make townspeople believe in things that go bump in the night, and the Rainiers have been gaslighting them into believing the heroic, extremely edited version of history that favors them.

They leave out the fact that, these creatures they kill, are a form of life, too. That not all of them are murderers. That some of them are just trying to make do with the life they have. That not all of them chose to become the monsters they were made into. That some of them aren’t monsters at all.

Luther is, obviously. He does have some kills under his belt, he does drain people of their blood, even when he doesn’t have to, and he is stalking two teenagers through a small town with the intent of murdering them for sport and money.

He’s just saying, not every vampire or witch or wendigo or the like is like him. Not every creature is a villain. Some, most, are just trying to survive.

The problem with people like the Rainiers? They murder without discretion. Luther murders with discretion, and that’s the difference, he thinks.

So, these teenagers. They’re connected at the hip, except for when the boy, Callum, finds some sort of shiny part of high school he wants to engage with. As Luther watches them both, he realizes that he sees something familiar in the boy. This urge to live the life you were promised, despite the destiny you were given. It makes it harder, Luther thinks, to put him in the ground.

The girl, Bex, on the other hand, is a completely different beast.

She’s a Rainier through and through. He can see that in the scar that mars her lip, and the way she doesn’t even try to cover it up. It’s not so much a badge of honor as a fact of life. She is a warrior, or at least has been made to believe she is one. There is good and there is bad and she is the sword of justice for as long as justice will have her.

Which makes her more interesting to Luther. More cut and dry. More deserving of the hit out on her life.

Most people would wait for their targets to be alone so that they have an easier time at killing, but Luther is willing to admit to himself that it’s not about that. It’s not about an easier hit.

It’s about the way Callum holds himself differently than Bex. The way he’s always got tension in his shoulders that he forces out when he’s trying to appear normal in front of his friends. The way he sometimes has a genuine smile, but that he forces one when it comes to the dealings of The Order.

Luther waits to make his move on Bex because he can tell that Callum won’t survive having to watch her die. Not as the last thing he ever sees.

The moment comes when Callum bails on Bex in favor of a student council meeting. She, like the Rainiers before her, does the stupid thing: she goes on a scouting mission alone, armed with a stake and an insane amount of hubris.

Luther jumps her from behind, which isn’t very gentlemanly, but is very vampiric, he thinks. He’s getting back into the vibe, the aesthetic. He won’t be laughed at by colleagues and enemies anymore, not after he snaps a Rainier’s neck and makees it known.

But she’s good. She’s a better fighter than anyone he’s ever come up against, and he’s out of practice. She matches him blow for blow, and when she actually gets him flat on his back in the alley way, he actually feels the breath he doesn’t have to take blast out of his lungs in shock.

He does get his footing back.

He does get an opening.

He could snap her neck and move on, and her brother would be an easy dessert to the whole thing.

He doesn’t.

He takes the window of opportunity, lets it pass by, and leaves.

It isn’t some moral compass suddenly kicking in. He isn’t worried about her brother and his sad eyes, or the type of life she must have already lived to be able to fight the way she has in this small, back alley ambush.

It’s about how much fun he had in a single fight. He hasn’t felt this alive since, well.

Since he became a member of the undead.

He keeps the Rainier girl alive, because he wants to make an absolute meal out of killing her.

+1.

Luther gets a number of openings after that first ambush. He could have killed both of the twins at any given moment. There are, shockingly, even moments where he’s invited in, given trust. The hit on the twins has been all but forgotten, at this point. When he realizes he’s been in Baker with the intent to kill for over a year, he thinks he’s had enough fun. It might be time to move on, finish the job he came here for, and head back to New Orleans, or somewhere new. Maybe New York again, or Las Vegas, or somewhere international.

He heads over to the gym that Bex and Callum use so often, but when he gets there, Bex is wailing on a heavy bag like it’s personally offended her. Luther figures they might as well have one last run of witty banter; they’ve gotten so good at it. So he steps out of the shadows and says:

“You trying to win a fight with an inanimate object again?”

But Bex doesn’t even turn around. She doesn’t respond. She just stops in her tracks, leans forward against the bag, and starts sobbing.

“Whoa - uh. Do you want me to come back later?” Bex keeps crying. Luther gets awkward, for the first time in decades. “Would you - uh, I could call Callum, for you?”

Bex cries a little harder at that. Luther doesn’t leave, but he doesn’t move any closer to her, either. Eventually, she calms down enough to speak. “He’s not going to answer. They don’t get a lot of service on flights to Scotland, I hear.”

“Scotland?”

“He left. He doesn’t - he doesn’t want to be in The Order anymore. He said he wants to be… normal.”

“Nothing wrong with normal.”

“I’m not normal enough for him.”

“He said that?”

“He didn’t ask me to come with him, so.” And Bex starts to cry again. “Why wouldn’t he ask me to come with him?”

Luther doesn’t know what, exactly, possesses him in the moment. It can’t be his heart, which is barely beating since he hasn’t fed in ages. It can’t be his soul, because if the legends are to believe, he hasn’t had one for hundreds of years.

Whatever it is, he crosses the gym. He sits down next to Bex. He lets her cry next to him. And when she says “Why wouldn’t he stay for me?” He decides that, maybe, he doesn’t need to leave Baker after all.

At least not today.

#luther #fan fic #bloodlines #bex rainier #Cameron jones #bloodlines fic #my fic #my writing #5+1 fic #5 + 1 things #5 + 1 fic

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