[Vashmeryl] Vampire Meryl Stryfe [TriStamp]
Meryl was young by vampire standards, she’d been human on the ships, but one of the last to be drawn from her cryosleep, and she hadn’t been awake long enough to realize what was happening when she’d been bitten some 150 years ago.
Her memories before the bite were… hazy. She kind of remembered earth, and signing the paperwork for being part of Project SEEDS, and the overwhelming levels of optimizing she’d not actually felt. She just needed to leave, to go somewhere, do something, be part of something bigger than she was. So it had made perfect sense at the time.
As she hid in the wreckage of ships and then shadows of newly built buildings, she regretted it. It had been childish and look where it had gotten her?
On the hostile planet everyone was just calling No Man’s Land, with a thirst for something the Plants couldn’t provide. Jumping from one place to another, aware that she never aged, that years passed and the only color in her face was often the red of her lips.
There were not many vampires, her maker and only two others had been on the ship. Meryl had run into a handful of others in all the time she’d been on No Man’s Land. It was still significantly more than she’d seen on Earth.
“You don’t want to out number the food supply.” Someone had joked once, but she hadn’t found it funny.
She had run into other non-human’s though. Werewolves mostly, not that they were too open about their existence. The desert was just as cruel and uncaring about them as it was her.
Roberto stank of liquor and wolf. Tired old wolf, even though he was much younger than she was.
He made her drive because he wanted to drink. She did it because it gave her something to do with her hands. The special tinting on the car enough to protect her from the rays of the sun.
And then they met Vash, and her skin burned and ached where the sun touched as she followed him in the desert. He wasn’t like the humans, his heart beat ever so slightly off, his scent more chemical than natural. His touch was warm.
She bit him.
She didn’t want to, did her best to avoid feeding on people, but he let her.
She was just so hungry, hadn’t eaten in over a week, and it gnawed at her. She had done her best to ignore it, but everthing that happened in Jenora had fucked up her supply in the truck and they couldn’t exactly stop so she could pick off an unexpecting townsfolk in the middle of nowhere. Roberto had told her at the start to keep her fangs to herself- she didn’t want the bitter taste of liquor from him anyway.
But Vash had seen her hunger brewing. Watched the way her eyes lost their blue and bled red. Watched her press her lips tight to hide her fangs, putting pressure on them as if it would eliminate her thirst.
“It’s okay.” He told her, pulled her in and cradled her as she tried to pull away. He didn’t give her his neck like she’d heard of people doing. She was glad. He wrapped his prosthetic around her middle and left her in his lap, pulled his sleeve back with his teeth and pressed his arm to her mouth.
And she bit down.
Vash tasted like heat, like overly processed sugar and chemicals and his blood burned down her throat.
It was weird to think it was good, but there was something about it that had her digging her fangs in and sucking hard. Vash winced, but he didn’t try to pull away when her hands calm up to grasp his arm.
Meryl never took a lot, always just enough to make it a while, just a little from multiple people, but it was hard to let go of Vash. He said her name, soft and quiet against the top of her head, and her hands shook when she withdrew.
He bled red like humans, it was smeared across her lips. But he tasted entirely other. The energy coursing through her was like nothing she’d ever experienced, not here or on earth.
His face was pale when she twisted in his lap to see him directly, yet he smiled at her. A real smile, a genuine one, not the false little things he gave to everyone else, and it twisted something inside her, made her ache.
“Better?” He asked, like it was so simple. As if he’d offered her his canteen after they’d been out in the heat. Not like he’d wrestled her into his lap and let her gnaw on his arm.
The loose sleeve of his coat hid the damage, but he didn’t move to do anything about it. About the wound still exposed, the long sleeve of his turtleneck pulled up, exposing pale skin that would now had the imprints of her fangs to the mess of scars and metal already there.
Tears pricked at her eyes, and Vash’s smile fell away. His arms waved around her, like he was afraid to touch her.
“You’re so dumb.” She told him, cheeks wet, the words mangled on her lips as her breath hitched. Vash’s mouth opened to say something, and she flung her arms around his too broad shoulders and buried her face against his chest. Hid herself against his heat and the smell of ozone and sand.
After a long moment of stillness, his arms rested lightly at her back, the point of his chin at the crown of her head. “Yeah.”
“Thank you.” She murmured eventually, already telling herself she wouldn’t let herself get so hungry again. She wouldn’t feed on him, he wouldn’t get the chance to offer. She’d be sure of it. He was too self sacrificing for that.