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TIMING: sometime before a hunter's hunter. LOCATION: a cemetery. PARTIES: @madisonnotmaddie & @vengeancedemon SUMMARY: madison finds emilio in a graveyard and is excited to meet another hunter. emilio is... a little less enthused. CONTENT WARNINGS: mentions of past child & sibling death.

He liked to feel useful. It was something that had always been true about him, something he’d understood about himself for as long as he’d had a ‘self’ to understand at all. He volunteered for the jobs his siblings didn’t want just so there was a reason to keep him around, played bait and put his ass on the line every time a plan called for it because that was how he proved his worth to his family. Even now, with his family gone and him dead, too, Emilio liked doing anything he could do to make it feel as though he had something resembling a purpose.

Tonight, that meant he was out hunting. Tonight, that meant he had a stake in one hand and the other resting in his pocket on a vial of holy water. Clearing spawn and ghouls from the cemeteries was more of a hobby than it was anything else, at this point; Emilio didn’t consider it dangerous work, though it wasn’t unheard of for him to come home bleeding afterwards. He was confident this would never end with him so badly hurt that he could not repair himself, though he supposed some might still call it risky. For Emilio, though, it was the sort of repetitive, mind-numbing task that the mind clung to, sometimes; the sort of thing he needed to keep him sane.

There were only a few spawn out tonight; a sign, probably, that he’d been doing this enough to make a dent in the numbers. He had just finished dusting another when he caught sight of movement just ahead of him, heading his way. Tensing, he gripped his stake and readied himself for an attack. But instead of another spawn, there was a kid facing him, watching him with a curious expression. Emilio relaxed his grip on the stake just a little. “Shouldn’t be wandering the graveyard at night,” he told her, not bothering with an attempt to invent an explanation for what he’d been up to. Eve would kill him if she knew, but he had no idea how to hide the existence of the supernatural from a kid who’d just watched him dust a spawn. “Should head home, okay?”

—

She needed to be worth something. Needed to be useful, or whatever. She needed to not be a failure of a hunter (even though the idea of excessive violence did make her stomach turn inside out), and so she needed to go out and tonight, it was a cemetery’s turn to be visited. It only seemed fair, to her, that she do something of a tour of the town to get her bearings on all aspects of the town. It wasn’t like she’d spent too much time in cemeteries. (Her Buffy DVDs would be wildly disappointed in the girl who they’d raised.) (Or, girl whose pop culture knowledge about people who fought the supernatural they had contributed to.) (Not that she thought she was like Buffy at all. She didn’t have the clever quips that Buffy did, and she didn’t have the skillset either.) Still, Madison felt like in order to get all the vibes right, she needed to go to a cemetery. Whether or not she found anything wasn’t the point, it was just the experience of doing all of this. Plus, Marielle would want to know where the best cemeteries in town were, and Madison didn’t want to disappoint her friend.

She wasn’t alone in the cemetery. There was a man there, who was chasing around after things that looked dead. Looked like they belonged in one of Rory’s movies or in Buffy or just — anywhere but normal places. One of them exploded into dust and internally, she went ‘sick!’. He looked over at her and she wondered for a moment if she’d actually said that out loud.

“I’m a hunter too!” She said, instead, hoping it was something of a good thing to say and that this man wasn’t about to attack her for it. “Just – uh. Not of those things. I don’t think.” She bounced on the balls of her feet. “But I am a hunter and I’m learning stuff and that was so cool, what you just did! Can I help out??”

—

He tensed a little as she spoke, claiming to be a hunter, too. He was inclined to believe her, if only because it would probably take a hunter to decide right away that that was what someone who was dusting a spawn must be. But he wasn’t sure he liked the way she said it. She didn’t know what spawn were, and didn’t ‘think’ she hunted them. She was ‘learning stuff,’ even though she looked to be at least in her late teens, if not inching into her twenties. What kind of family was she from that it had taken so long for her to ‘learn stuff,’ that hunting was still so new to her that she thought it ‘cool’ to see a stranger dust a spawn? If she was from the sort of family that coddled its children — something Emilio had never heard of among hunters, even from people like Henri or Eve whose upbringings had been so vastly different than his own — then why was she here on her own? The wheels in his head were spinning, and not in a direction he wanted to go in.

“You’re a hunter?” He repeated, looking at her dubiously. “You should not — You can’t just say this to people. Just because someone kills something in a graveyard doesn’t make them a hunter. I could be anyone. I could be dangerous. You can’t tell every stranger what you are.” If there had been a heart in his chest, it might have been pounding. Instead, there was a heavy silence inside of him, threatening to swallow him whole.

—

“I’m a hunter.” She replied, face contorting into some deep look of confusion. “But – you – you could be –” she stammered, “I don’t think you are any of those things, I think you are a hunter and it’s important to make good introductions, isn’t it?” Her hand found its way toward her mouth and she chewed on her thumbnail, over and over again. “I don’t think you are dangerous, ‘cause if you were, you wouldn’t be warning me about that. Statistically that happens sometimes in superhero stories, but not always, and so I’m choosing to trust that part of storylines and life and also just, like, the vibes from you. You seem cool.” She grinned, though Madison wasn’t sure if that was something that would be reassuring to this man. He seemed on edge, and it seemed as though some of the on edge of it all was a direct cause of her yammering on.

Switching from her thumbnail to her lip, she worried her lip between her teeth. “But like, can I still help with whatever it is you’re doing? Unless it’s super secret, which I get, but I – I can do stuff.” She sniffed. “I’m supposed to help people, so how can I help you?”

—

“Those things are not the only things you need to worry about,” he replied, frustration and anxiety warring one another for dominance somewhere deep in his chest. “There are plenty of dangerous things that look just as human as you are.” Emilio would know; he was one of them. He bit back a scoff when she said she didn’t think he was dangerous, because of course he was. He had been dangerous even before he had been dead and dangerous, had been a monster even when his heart beat. “This is not a story. This life is not a story.” Stories had happier endings than the lives hunters led. People died in stories, sometimes, but their deaths tended to mean something. They went out in glorious battles, earning honorable ends that saved people. They weren’t cornered in alleyways and tossed into dumpsters. They didn’t die on the floors of their living rooms at four years old in battles only cowards walked away from. This girl, whatever she was, was not a hunter. Hunters knew these things, had seen them proven in bloody and brutal moments before their very eyes. Emilio had known what the world was by the time he was twelve, when his father was a ghost story and his older brother was proven far less invincible than twelve year olds tended to assume their older brothers were. “Nothing about this is cool. This is…”

She wanted to help. How many people was she approaching for this? Had she already found Daiyu, or Eve, or Henri, or Jade? Had she found any of the less savory hunters in town, the ones who killed with far less discrimination than some of the ones Emilio had run into? His palms itched; he shoved his hands into his pockets. “What stuff can you do?” He challenged. “What training do you have? The thing I just killed, what was it? What else do you need to keep an eye out for in graveyards? What’s the most dangerous thing you could find in a place like this? What’s better off left alone?” He got the feeling, based on the interaction so far, that she probably wouldn’t know the answer to any of the questions. (Flora had known what a spawn was. She’d known what ghouls were, and how to kill them even if she’d never done it. He hadn’t been able to stomach the thought of putting a knife in her hand, but he’d taught her about every monster that went bump in the night, anyway, because knowing that sort of thing could be the difference between living and dying. She’d died, anyway. Even with no one locking her in sheds with ghouls, even with a father who coddled her. How long would this girl last, alone in a graveyard?) “You want to help people, be a doctor. This isn’t a good idea.”

—

“I –” she started, unable to find all the words she wanted. “I know. Well, I – yeah. I got nearly attacked by a vampire a few years ago and the vampire looked at least sort of human-ish when I first saw them.” The man’s words made her feel itchy and it wasn’t even the comfortable sort of itchy that sometimes happened. She felt terribly small and at a loss for words. Which was perhaps his goal in talking to her, in trying to convince her of amorphous dangers that lurked in places that weren’t bedroom closets. “It’s cool to save people.” She sniffed, squinting her eyes as if she was looking at something far too bright, even though it was nighttime, even though the sun had bid adieu to the world for today. Madison dug the toe of her shoe into the ground, trying to formulate what she wanted to say next.

Before she could say anything, the man was throwing question after question at her, without so much as any sort of pause in between them for her to get an answer in properly. “I can defeat beasts.” In theory. Somewhat in practice too, though her practice was far more caught up in her mind than in any actual actions that she’d done. Her head was spinning with all of the questions the man was throwing at her. “I have some training. I don’t know about all of the rest of those things. But I am learning.” She hoped that she didn’t sound too whiny, but she wasn’t holding out too much hope for that – after all, she could hear herself and she also knew that she did have a certain propensity for sounding more childish than she wanted to whenever she got stressed out. “I don’t want to be a doctor.” She shook her head. “That’s not how my mind works. I just want to help for the greater good and not be obligated to take compensation for it.” Her hands balled into fists and she shook her head, trying to level with herself. “If you’re here and you’re a hunter, you can help me, right?”

—

Cool, she said. It was cool. Emilio felt his throat tighten, felt his fingers twitch even where he’d shoved his hands into his pockets. Would she think it was cool, the way his hands often looked for a knife when he was sitting on his couch doing nothing at all? He was being harsh. He knew he was being harsh. This was a kid, one who clearly knew something about the supernatural world and wanted to be a part of it. But… But Emilio remembered Jenny. He remembered the way she’d thought vampires cool, remembered how badly she’d wanted to be a part of that world, too. He remembered how that story ended — Henri with his arm ripped off because he’d wanted to help, Jenny a monster with no control to speak of. He wondered how many people she’d killed now. He didn’t have to wonder how afraid she’d been when that upior venom was coursing through her, killing her slow. He could take a guess at that. “Cool,” he repeated flatly, something flaring faintly in his chest. “Most hunters die before they are thirty. They die bloody and alone, with their throats ripped out and meat hanging out of them. Is this cool, too?”

Maybe it was a dick move, slinging a hundred questions at her. Maybe he needed to be a dick to make her understand what kind of life this was. She hunted beasts, so she must have been a ranger. She had ‘some’ training, but she should have had more. She was… what? Eighteen? Twenty? Most hunters, by the time they were that age, at least knew better than to walk up to a stranger in a cemetery and announce that they were hunters, too. At that age, she shouldn’t have been learning. She should have already been aware. “You want to help for the greater good?” He pressed his tongue against his teeth, let the sharpness ground him. “Whose greater good? You hunt beasts, you say. Next full moon, will you kill a werewolf running rabid through the town? Does that help the werewolf’s greater good? Or if you decide not to kill them, if you decide they go home, does it help the greater good of the family they tear through on their way there? The children they swallow whole before they shift back? These are the choices you make, as a hunter. If you hunt, you are responsible for all of it. For the ones you kill, and for the ones you don’t. There is no compensation. You’re right about that. There is also no right answer. You don’t want this.” No one wanted this. Emilio hadn’t wanted it, either. Hunters were born into a life they had no control over, forced to endure it until their bloody ends, but they didn’t want it. Most of them, he thought, probably would have chosen something else if they’d gotten a choice. “You want my help? The best help I can give you is to tell you to go home.”

—

She’d expected that all hunters would be as enthusiastic as she was about the prospect of everything. She’d been proven wrong a number of times already, and she’d reached out to Marielle some of those times, asking her why everyone wasn’t like them. Marielle always placated her, promised again that sometime this year she’d come to town. That pacified Madison for the time being, though her worries often returned. This man – this hunter (even if he hadn’t confirmed confirmed it yet) seemed more on edge and more angry than most. She did her best not to let it bother her too much, but unfortunately for her, her anxieties got the better of her, her stomach twisting and clenching up as she listened to what he said. It was deeply and intensely uncomfortable, and she just stared at him, wide-eyed, unable to respond to his next line of questioning. “I mean, I – well, no, it’s – that’s not cool, but if we’re supposed to help, isn’t that just like, a job hazard?”

His anger felt almost palpable, like the thick humidity that came with the southern summertime (and, she’d learned, some of the northern summertime, too). She wasn’t even sure if it was just anger – part of her wanted to believe that it was concern, but this was a wholly new flavor of concern. It wasn’t something she’d really ever experienced before. So maybe he had a point – maybe she was too stupid for this (he hadn’t said those words, but she imagined that had to be what he was thinking – and so maybe that meant it was true, at least on some level – she’d be texting Marielle a whole barrage of queries), but she also knew that she needed to keep at it, to keep asking and discovering everything that she possibly could.

His questions didn’t stop, and Madison had to sit down on the ground, had to pull her legs against her chest. Take a few deep breaths. “Why aren’t you going home?” She said, snapping a bit at him. She felt immediately guilty but he’d gotten her anxiety levels up to about a billion (okay, maybe not that much, that was being too cruel to this stranger) – she shook herself, blowing a strand of hair out of her face. “If it’s dangerous and bad to be here, why are you here?” It seemed a valid question, though she felt as though he’d have a dozen questions back to her for every one she asked him.

—

She stammered, maybe because she was caught off guard by what he’d said. If that was the case, he thought, there was even more reason to push her away from this life. If hearing about the way hunters died caught her off guard, made her words come out stilted and uncertain, he could only imagine how she’d have felt living it. He thought, again, of his daughter. He thought of the tiny form of her corpse against the wall, twisted in all the wrong directions. He thought of his wife, of his mother, of his nephew, of his siblings. He thought of himself, too, crumpled and bleeding out in a dumpster. He thought of Owen’s corpse in the middle of Rosemary’s necromancy circle; he thought of Jade sitting on his couch with her whole world coming apart, of Eve as a teenager with her leg torn off, of the way Daiyu looked when he’d barged in to stop her from killing Talia, of Henri with his arm ripped from his body. There was no way to live as a hunter and not experience this. There was no version of this story that didn’t hurt.

This kid, he thought, didn’t realize that. She couldn’t. You could hear stories, he knew, of what this life entailed. You could listen to people recount their versions of the terrible things that had happened to them, or hear eulogies about the kinds of things hunters did not survive. But there was a stark difference between hearing about a horror and living it. This girl wanted to save people, but Emilio wanted to save people, too. And this, he thought, was just as noble a rescue as throwing yourself in front of a blade. “It is not a job,” he replied. “It is not something you do with part of your day and then sign off from. It’s a thing that kills you.”

She turned his own questions back on him, snapping at him in sharp tones. It was the most he’d liked her since she approached him. This kind of rage, sure, was something a hunter needed. But she looked uncomfortable with it, like she was wearing someone else’s clothes. This wasn’t her. She wasn’t a hunter. Emilio could tell as much by looking at her. “The first time I killed something on my own,” he said, “I was six years old. The first time I held a weapon, I was so young I don’t remember it now. I have never been anything but this, so I can never be anything but this. And being this has lost me everything I ever had, so there are days where I wish I could be anything else. I’m not going home because I can’t go home. Because this, for me, is what home is. The fight is home. It is the only thing I have. You have other things. Better things. Don’t throw them away for some idea you have that turns this into something it isn’t.”

—

It’s a thing that kills you.

She’d heard it so many times, and she still didn’t fully grasp it or understand. Why was nearly every hunter she met, save for a few (most notably Marielle), so intent on mentioning the death of it all? Everyone died. She’d been to her great-grandad’s funeral when she was six. Hadn’t seen the body because the thought of that was overwhelming but she’d been to a funeral before. She knew that people died. She wasn’t dense. This man made her feel small, maybe because at least with some other hunters it had taken time before they started ranting about death. This man, this hunter seemed far too eager to talk about it from the get go. She’d ask Marielle about that.

Madison knew, at least on some level, that she used Marielle as a crutch, but Marielle was also the big sister she’d never had. Madison had a big sister and two other big siblings, but it wasn’t the same. It made her feel deeply guilty if she thought about it too much. Her siblings were her siblings, even if they’d ended up that way somewhat by accident. “I’ve been told that before.” She said, trying to muster up some energy to make it seem like she didn’t care (even though she did, in fact, care very much), though she couldn’t bring herself to roll her eyes. She couldn’t do it, even if she wanted to, just to prove to this hunter guy that she was tougher than she looked.

She snapped at him but he snapped back, harsher, harder, with more teeth. With sharper teeth that she could practically feel cutting into her skin, leaving her with scars she didn’t want to explain or think about. Phantom scars, ones that even if they weren’t real she knew she’d be running her fingers along after this encounter.

“It has to be worth it.” She snapped back, trying to be as big as she could be, trying to make him see her point of view (and perhaps, on some level, trying to make her own self believe it even more than she already did). “I don’t accept any other outcome!” She crossed her arms over her chest and looked up at the man. “Show me how to stab something and maybe then I’ll leave. How’s that?” It seemed like a fair enough trade, and besides, there was something about this man’s frustration and apparent anger that made everything to do with him impossible to look away from.

—

She’d been told that before. It was almost funny, though Emilio had no real desire to laugh. He wondered what other hunters she’d spoken to, wondered if he knew any of them. Depending on how long she’d been doing this — approaching hunters at random, asking them questions about what they were and what they did and demanding to be taught the same — he wondered how many of the earliest hunters she’d spoken to were even alive, still. How many people had told her what hunting would give her only to have hunting give it to them not long after? If she’d been at this more than a year, odds were the answer was at least one. But that sort of thing probably would have deterred her, would have made it more real, and clearly, it was not yet a solid thought for her. Some things were hard to communicate with words.

“You have been told before,” he repeated, tone flat and dry, “and I have seen it. You ever see blood spilling out of a person’s throat? It’s a different color than it is when it comes from some place else. Brighter. Redder. Comes out fast, too. They’re dry before you’ve got time to blink, sometimes. It happens fast. One minute, they’re making a joke. Not a funny one — that’s another thing about hunters, yeah, they’re not usually very funny. Hard to be, when you start watching people die before most kids your age know what dying is — but you know it’s a joke because of their face. Then, the minute goes by. Something comes out of the woods, and there’s blood coming out of their throat, and all you can think is… it’s redder. And then you can’t think anything at all, because you’ve gotta kill the thing that killed your friend before it kills you, too.” His fingers twitched at his side, curling like they longed for the hilt of a blade to wrap themselves around, or a stake. The memories did that, sometimes; convinced the body it was somewhere it wasn’t. He wondered if she’d been told that before, too.

He looked at her, her eyes wide and her body unscarred, and he thought of his daughter. He thought of her corpse in the corner of his living room, against the wall. He’d have given his life to keep her out of the life that this kid was so eager to be a part of. It churned his stomach, hollowed out his ribs. He wondered if there was any way to make her understand without showing her, any way to get the point across before she saw someone she cared about with meat spilling out of their stomach.

Absently, his thumb brushed against his wedding ring, and he thought Juliana would have been better at this even if he also knew she’d have been talking the kid out of hunting not to save her, but to save everyone else. An inexperienced hunter is more dangerous than an out of control shifter, she’d said once. They’ll get more people killed, every time. He wished she were here now. It was something he wished for often. “It is not ‘worth it,’” he replied. “And it doesn’t care what ‘outcome’ you will ‘accept.’ This is — Christ. This is not something you get by stomping your feet and digging your heels into the dirt. You are a child, and this world does not care. I have seen people younger than you die to this. I have seen people with more experience than you can ever get with a late start die to it, too. This is not just signing up to die before you’re thirty. This is signing up to die bloody. This is signing up to know what your insides look like before you go, to go out holding them in your hands. This is signing up to make friends and love people who will die while you hold them, or die just before you can get to them and leave you with whatever is left. Not a whole body, sometimes. Just pieces. Small bits. You know, sometimes, you find what’s left and you only know who it is because you know their tattoos, or you were there when they got that scar, or you recognize their shoes. You’ve been told all of this. Sure. You think you know everything. See how much what you know matters when something’s teeth are in your throat, or when there’s a knife sticking out of your chest. You start this life now, you’re dead in a year. Maybe two, if you get lucky. Any hunter you find who’s willing to help you with that — anyone who wants to hand you the tools to kill yourself — is not a hunter worth listening to. I’m not going to help you die. You can stand here all night, if you want to. But if you want me to help be part of the reason why you die bloody before you’re old enough to buy a drink in this country… no. Vete a la chingada. I won’t be a part of this.”

—

For a few beats, she just looked at him. Didn’t move, didn’t speak, and for a moment, she wasn’t even sure if she breathed. It was almost easier not too, and she had been pretty good at holding her breath underwater. Was that because of what she was, or just a lucky coincidence? She wanted to ask this man, wanted to ask Daniel, but she wasn’t sure if she could. She could ask Daiyu or Jade, maybe. But she’d ask Marielle. Marielle was always open to any and all of her questions – she didn’t look at her like she was weird or like she was far too much. Madison’s breath returned at once with that thought.

“I’ve seen blood doing that in movies.” She already knew that wouldn’t earn her any sort of credibility, but it was true, and that should matter for something. Besides, movies had to be at least somewhat based on reality and even though she was pretty sure that things like slasher movie villains didn’t strictly exist in real life, she wasn’t going to deny that there had to be things (or even people) who were similar to that. (If she thought about it for too long, she would even say that perhaps she was a slasher movie villain – but she didn’t want to think about things like that, and she was designed to help people, and that was the opposite of what villains in slasher movies did). “It doesn’t seem real.” Which perhaps (or more than perhaps, almost assuredly) would make him think she was even more ill equipped to deal with all of everything.

(He wasn’t wrong, the voices in the back of her head said, in fact, he’s quite correct.)

(She didn’t like that, nor did she like how ridiculously proper the voices seemed to be. She’d never been that proper. She’d been excitable and dirty - always ready to climb something or spend hours outdoors. She wasn’t proper, and she usually wasn’t so bothered by it.)

Madison moved to tuck a strand of hair behind her ear. Wide eyes, looking up at the other man. In another life, she might have found him even more familiar than she already did. Maybe that was part of why she’d assumed he was a hunter. Why he had to be. Because even half of a half of a half of a centimeter of similarity was something that she craved quite violently. It wasn’t pretty, but her wants weren’t always the prettiest (see above, see the trees she’d climbed in her childhood and how she’d gotten many bruises and nearly shattered some of her bones while playing soccer) (maybe she hadn’t shattered or broken her bones because of what she was).

His anger felt familiar in a way that she didn’t want to analyze.

She watched his thumb move to his wedding ring. She wondered what his spouse would say – wondered if his spouse was also a hunter. If there was some sort of rule that hunters had to marry hunters. If there was, she wasn’t sure how she felt about all of that. She should have been thrilled – a hunter being with another hunter was exactly how her life was supposed to go, wasn’t it? But there was something that scratched the back of her mind that said that she didn’t necessarily want that. It had to be because she’d been raised by people who weren’t hunters, and even if she’d felt like salt in a sugar shaker at times, they were her family. Always would be. So that had to be the reason why she felt a bit funny about marrying a hunter with no choice to marry anyone else. Especially since it wasn’t even as though Madison was intending to get married any time soon. She was still in college, though apparently hunter lifespans were like dogs or something, based on what Daniel had told her. But Daniel wasn’t married and he was old (old-er, she corrected herself. Not old old), so she didn’t have to get married yet.

Then he spoke in spanish, and it wasn’t anything her dad ever said to her, and it sounded angry. Of course this man could probably make almost anything sound angry (she felt immediately guilty for thinking that, no matter how true it might have been), but what she made out quickly (which, god, she really did need to get back into practicing her spanish) was certainly not all roses. Well, maybe it was. But only the spikey parts of them. “Then leave me alone!” She said, childish and far too loud for where they currently were. “Váyase. If you really don’t want to be part of this, let me do things all on my own.” She wanted to apologize nearly instantly, because even if yelling was something she’d done before, this stranger hunter man didn’t deserve to be the punching bag for her frustrations. He deserved better than that, and her lips twisted nearly into an apology, but it didn’t come yet. Maybe it would, if he left. Madison didn’t especially want him to leave, even with all his thorns and anger.

—

A laugh escaped from between his lips, brittle and bitter and sharp around the edges. Movies. She’d seen blood in movies, and she thought it could prepare her for the real thing. Emilio had seen blood in movies, too. Corn syrup and food coloring, saturated in low lighting that flickered on a screen. It was no comparison for reality; attempting to frame it as such was almost offensive. What could you learn from an invented version of violence? What could it teach you? Even his mother, steadfast in her teaching and intent on trying every brutal method she could think of to desensitize her children to the things the world expected of them (the things she expected of them) had seen no value in fictionalized versions of bloody ends. You could only learn your lesson from the real thing. Blood would only harden you when it was sticking to your hands.

“This is not a movie,” he snapped. “It is not pretend. You see someone bleeding out in the woods, you won’t see them get up and walk off to go star in something else next week. You’ll see the life leave them instead. You’ll watch them die, people you care about. You’ll see the bravest people you know crying like children with their insides in their hands. And then, it happens to you. The monsters will not spare you because you are young, because you are inexperienced, because you’ve only seen blood in the movies. They’ll tear your throat open, or they’ll take you apart slow, piece by piece. You’ve seen blood in the movies. Have you seen it on your hands? Have you had to press yourself against someone’s wound to keep it in their body while they scream and cry and beg you to stop? Put your whole weight against them, put them in agony because it’s the only way to keep the blood in, and then have them die underneath you, anyway? I have seen children die. I have seen my —” He cut himself off with a trembling exhale, hungry for oxygen his body no longer required. “Fuck your movies. Fuck you, if you think this is the same.”

He was angry. Of course he was angry. Here he was, dead before he hit forty with a kid who hadn’t even made it to five, with a brother who’d died at eighteen and a nephew who should have been in kindergarten instead of attempting to help his mother fend off monsters. He’d held his wife’s bloodless corpse in his arms, had his body broken beyond repair, had his mind shattered so many times now that whatever pieces of it were left no longer fit together neatly, no longer made a clear picture. To stand in front of someone and hear them compare all that to having seen a scene in a movie, as if it was the same thing as watching blood splatter on a screen… The rage filled him up, burned his insides to ash. He was angry, but it wasn’t all he was.

He was jealous, too.

She had a chance at a normal life. It was something Emilio had never even realized he’d wanted until it was too late for him to grasp it, until the damage had already been done. What he was now was not something that could exist in the mundane. He could not be a man who did taxes and read the morning paper; he lacked the foundation for it. He couldn’t enter a room without making note of every exit, couldn’t walk in a crowd without being hyperaware of every single body pressed against his and all the different ways they could damage him. He couldn’t meet someone new without mentally mapping out how he could take them down if he needed to, couldn’t spend substantial amounts of time in a space without feeling the need to stash weapons in every tight corner just in case. Even if he hadn’t died alone and afraid surrounded by other people’s garbage, any chance he might have had at a normal life had evaporated before he’d turned ten, when the soft clay of childhood hardened into something that could no longer be molded, only broken. And she didn’t have that. She could have a normal life. She could sit across the table from someone she loved at fifty, silver in her hair and coffee warming a mug in her hand. What did she want? To be a hero? To be a martyr? To die choking on her own blood only to stand up after and drag her corpse along behind her, the ghosts of everyone she loved flickering in the corner of her vision any time things got quiet?

She didn’t understand, and he wasn’t sure he could make her. She’d seen it in a movie, so she thought she knew how it felt. She’d watched it happen on screen once, and wasn’t that the same as experiencing it? It all sounded so childish; an infant’s guide to trauma. Seeing was experiencing, even if there was a glass screen between you and the weight of it. Christ. What a stupid, idiotic notion it was. There was no accounting for the stench of it, the way it stuck in your nostrils, the way you smelled blood for days after. There was no consideration for the feeling, the sticky, tacky sensation of it covering your hands. She’d seen blood in the movies; but seeing was the easiest part. Anyone could see something happen. Experiencing it was another thing entirely.

He laughed again as she told him to go away, the sound just as sharp as it had been before. Like broken glass, like shrapnel from a dirty bomb; it wanted to slice through everything in its path, wanted to slash it all into ribbons. “You are the one who came up to me,” he replied. “You come to me and you ask me about this, then you get angry because you do not like the answer? You’ll like the answer less when its hands are around your throat. If you don’t want to hear it, you can go. Back to your movies, back to knowing everything because you saw blood on a screen once. Tell yourself I am lying to you. Repeat it when you’re watching someone you love die because of a life you chose. Spare no thought for those of us who got no choice. Go home and tell yourself you’re right until this life proves you wrong.”

—

His laugh wasn’t kind, but why should it have been? What had Madison done to deserve his kindness? (She did think that most people deserved some basic amount of kindness, but not everyone thought that way. As green as she was to the world, she did at least know that. It didn’t mean she had to like it (and she very much did not like it)). So his laugh didn’t owe her any sort of kindness but it did still catch her off guard. Adults didn’t usually laugh like that. Adults weren’t supposed to laugh like that. At least in her experience. She liked to think she had decent experience with adults, but maybe the ones up in Maine were different. Some people back home had said something about Northerners being colder than those in the south, but Madison didn’t usually tend to believe it. It didn’t seem like a very kind sort of thing to believe and therefore it was something she didn’t want to believe. She wanted to be kind, if possible. She’d gotten into far fewer arguments with her siblings than was typical (or so she was told), but she’d never really thought anything of it.

“If this was a movie, I’d be very freaked out.” She said, in an attempt to bite back at what he had said to her. Her bite wasn’t strong, and even she could hear that in the words she said to him. It was weak, or at least out of practice, and she wished that she could have at least a bit more venom to her words. It was a fleeting hope, because she knew that she couldn’t muster any of that, at least not right now. But maybe some day. It was something to push forward to, something else to add to her ever-growing list of ways to improve upon herself. Marielle seemed the sort of person to be able to have more bite, and so she’d consult her very soon. Maybe even on her way home from the disaster that meeting this hunter had turned out to be. “I know it’s not a movie and I know it’s not pretend. I haven’t played pretend for a very long time.” How old did he think she was? Though based on his attitude, Madison figured she could have been nearly any age and he would have looked down on her. She imagined that he looked older than he was, that some sort of weight was on him that made everything go faster. Which might have explained why he was so angry and bitter and almost cruel.

Still, it didn’t stop her from her curiosity. It was important to meet every possible type of hunter that there was, and so it was actually lucky that she’d met him. “Your what?” She asked, though she regretted it almost immediately. “Never mind. Someone close to you, I imagine.” She swallowed, hard, – that was too much of a bite back, though she didn’t mean it in even a remotely sort of cruel way. She’d meant it out of curiosity and a hunger, an ache to know more than she ever could hold in her mind. It was like when her family went to the pier when she was little, and she’d seen how many flavors of ice cream there were to try and she’d begged her parents for seven scoops and they’d agreed, and she hadn’t even been able to finish it all (not even remotely) and she’d felt ill after it. Her eyes were bigger than her stomach, her parents said, and she understood that saying far too much right now. She was too hungry and now the man’s anger would make more than enough sense.

She didn’t like to be too anything, except of course she did. Why else would she want to be a hunter, want to save the world? She wanted to be too good at so many things, but she didn’t appreciate where it had landed her this time. “I came up to you because I was curious, not because I wanted to be told I was childish.” She could feel herself shrinking as she yelled at him, which seemed counter to the whole point. “I know life isn’t like movies. But if I can help, then I should help. If I have skills that other people don’t, it would be a waste not to use them.” She huffed again. “Fine. I’ll leave. But you have to leave too.” She wondered when she would run into him again – it seemed impossible to think about a case where she wouldn’t run into him – the town wasn’t huge and hunters seemed to find other hunters without too much trouble – but maybe next time she’d be more prepared. Maybe next time he would feel more gentle, though her gut told her that that might be hoping for too much. She’d introduce him to Marielle when she came, and then he’d understand. She was certain of it.

—

“This is not a movie,” he replied, “and you should be terrified.” Though English sometimes felt like water in his hands, like a thing he couldn’t quite grasp between closed fingers, Emilio was confident that freaked out was not strong enough phrasing for the weight of a hunter’s life. Freaked out, he thought, was for someone who saw a plastic mask in a Halloween store. It was nothing compared to the things he had seen, the things she would see if she continued down this path she was so adamant she belonged on. Being a hunter was about far more than the blood in your veins; it was a lifetime of training, it was holding a knife with more confidence than you knew how to hold a hand. The life she had — hunter’s blood running through her veins but normalcy and humanity draping itself over her shoulders like a blanket — was what Emilio had failed to give his child, what he had wanted Flora to have. It stung, seeing her reject it knowing what alternative had gathered his daughter up into its cruel arms, knowing the same thing was waiting for this kid, too. He was tired of watching children die. He was tired of a lot of things.

Tired enough to slip up, tired enough to almost say too much. She questioned it, for a moment, and he shot her a sharp glare. He would not use his daughter’s death as a lesson for a stranger to learn. He would not tell this girl that his kid died at four years old, neck snapped and body tossed aside like day old garbage by people who would do far worse to someone like her if she got in their way. He shouldn’t have to. It should have been common sense, he thought, that this life was not a glamorous one. She should have been able to take one look at him and know what this world did to hunters, should have been able to trace it in the lines of his face and the scars littering his body, the way his leg dragged behind him when he walked like a thing taped to the end of his thigh rather than a piece of his own body. “I did not lose someone close to me,” he corrected her. “I lost everyone close to me. That’s what this life gives you. That’s what is waiting for you, if you keep this up.” That and worse.

“You say you don’t play pretend,” he said, “but you are playing pretend right now. You are a child, with plastic swords and cardboard shields. You try to take on the world this way, and the world will pick pieces off your corpse like a vulture. If you’re lucky, it’ll kill you first. If you’re not, you’ll be walking around with bits hanging out of you. Skin hanging off the muscle, muscle separated from the bone. You being here, you talking to me as if we are the same, this is playing pretend.” They were certainly not the same, although Emilio didn’t think himself better than she was. If anything, it was the opposite. She was a person, who watched movies and felt comfortable speaking to strangers in cemeteries. She could have a life, could have love and joy and things that were not his to touch. To be a hunter was not to abandon your humanity; to be a hunter was to never be given any humanity to begin with. Emilio was a weapon because he had been born one, because his mother had begun sharpening his edges from the moment he was born and had not stopped until her death. It was not enough to carry the blood of a hunter; without the training, that blood was as real as the dye and syrup she’d seen on her television screen.

She was curious. He wanted to laugh again, wanted to ask if this had satiated her curiosity, if speaking to him and watching him snap was like throwing stones at a zoo animal through the bars of its enclosure. As if you could experience a wild animal with the protection of a civilization that belonged to you instead of it surrounding you, then think yourself ready to go to its jungle and face it there, too. “The best way you can help is by staying out of this life. You come into it without the training, without the understanding, and all you’ll do is get someone killed. Maybe yourself. Maybe someone else. Maybe both. You don’t want that. I know you don’t want that.” He’d been an ass, but it was coming from a place of wanting to help. He didn’t want this kid to die, didn’t want her to experience the crushing weight of knowing someone else had died because of her naive arrogance. And that was what would happen. Emilio knew that that was what would happen. He couldn’t picture any other ending to the story, couldn’t imagine a kinder world than the dark and dreary one he’d known all his life.

“I don’t have to do anything,” he told her, already turning away. He would not go home from here; he was too wired now, too full of a nervous energy in need of expending. He would find something to kill or someone to fuck, and it would not be enough to allow him to forget about the kid with the dreams of pursuing a life no one should want, would not be enough for him to forget that a year from now she’d either be dead or soaked in someone else’s blood. “Go home,” he called over his shoulder. “Forget about this life so you can have a life that lasts instead.”

Even as he left, he knew his advice would not be followed. Some lessons, he thought, you could only learn the hard way.

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