In which Sandy tells how she became a vampire in the first place. Sandy character study babey!
Part of a larger fanfic I got bits and pieces written for, in which I make this pairing sad :(
The original name was Apollon Emos: The Ballad of Robert and Sandy (like Daytripper, my other fanfic for a different fandom, I'm keeping a theme here) so when I post the entire work, if ever, I'll incorporate this into that OR change this into that. Not sure yet.
Word Count: 1,208 (v short).
AO3 Tags: Domestic Fluff, Character Study, Fluff and Angst. Nothing major, nothing explicit, they are in bed but they're about to go to sleep. No coffins cause people got curtains.
CW: Death. Stalking.
AO3 link.
Notes:
Ok, so, it’s already a habit of the writer to get silly little movies or worlds and write something extensively TOO DEEP for the source material, whatever you take for deep, etc. In this case, I took these characters and boy did I RUN with them. Like, can you even say they’re OOC if they have at most like 10 min of screen time? I don't think so.
Anyway, yeah. The thing about this is that the plan was to do a whole character study of these two called Apollon Emos, in which I make this movie sad! It never materialized, but I have bits written, and I might still turn this into that (and make alterations). I'll decide it later. This is, in any case, a short excerpt of it.
I'm on tumblr @gigglemugger. Tell me if you read this cause my God. It's the most obscure Fandom since the Evil Clergyman.
Robert asked Sandy about where she died. Sandy said it was a place far away from Purgatory, a church where she had gone to light a candle for herself.
She had been walking the halls of the little wooden place, incidentally the same as where she had been baptized, and she had been crying, because she felt it was the only place where crying was acceptable. At home, she was chipper. Here, she accepted that it felt like defeat to come back. He listened to her story patiently.
It happened right before the war was over, when having Veronica Lake hair was still fashionable. Sometime around nineteen forty… Three? Either way, she had the same sort of makeup that she wears everyday—Victory red lipstick, a little bit of eyeshadow for effect—but the clothes were a bit different. Looking back now, she knew that the church was a place where she wouldn't be looked down upon for it, as long as there weren't any faithful servants praying on the benches. To them, she'd probably look like a whore.
She remembered there was no wind, or overhead lights, or even a priest that she could talk to, but there was a row of candles.
"I looked at the saints and the figures for a while," she continued, thinking about it for the first time in a long while."I wanted to ask them why they didn't make me into an actress. I wanted to be one so bad, but Los Angeles was just horrible, and I just didn’t have what it took to live out there. I overworked, I auditioned. I did go to Paramount to try out for a small part as an extra, but I got beat and I think that was the last straw."
“Anyway, the saints didn’t answer, so I lit a candle and walked out. I was really religious back then, which is something I came back and forth on afterwards I guess… (here, she hugged her knees) Anyway, I looked around and the streets were empty, so the plan was to walk home to my parents. My mom was cooking dinner. I was a bit underdressed, so it was cold; I remember that for some reason; and there was this guy who was stalking me." Robert perked up, the yellow light of the lamp on their nightstand illuminating her blonde hair and his naked torso, the white satin sheets rippling around him.
"Stalking you?" Sandy nodded.
"Yeah, he had been doing that since I arrived. It wasn't the first time that I had been stalked," she admitted, and his jaw clenched almost imperceptibly to anyone else but Sandy, who was becoming really good at telling these things about Robert. She laughed it off, "It was 30 years ago, hardly anything to write home about now, but it worried me. I mean I was right to be worried, he turned me into a vampire. I don't think he meant to, though."
“Anyway, I kept walking, looking for a police officer, but there weren’t any, because my town was really small. Bigger than Purgatory, but definitely much smaller than L.A. I walked faster, but you know it was no use. He got me a little bit before I got home. When he was over, he left me on the sidewalk. I woke up in the morgue. I think everyone thought I was dead, so they called the police, which then zipped me up. No autopsy, so I knew it was just a few hours later because some of the films I auditioned for included noir crime movies and the scripts were always more brutal than the finished products. I remember I was terrified and hungry. I got up and I had to contend with the fact that not only was I not dead, I was also naked,” she laughed a sort of hysterical little laugh. “It was bad.”
“I got out discreetly, realized I could do that, you know, be sneaky in an inhuman way, which was shocking, and when I came home my mom screamed. It was awful. Not only that, I was religious because of them, so you can imagine the sort of names they called me, both of my parents. Demon was the nicest. And they smelled great too…” Sandy had a morbid sense of humor, but even she couldn’t deliver this joke well enough, so it fell limp between them. Robert just stated, so she continued. “I made it to my room, took my stuff and left. That was the last time I saw my parents, or that town.”
They were silent. She had almost forgotten where she was—in her bed, in her house, with her, for all intents and purposes, boyfriend of two weeks, far away from nineteen forty three?—when he spoke again.
"Do you ever fear he might turn up in Purgatory?"
"Oh, I don't have to fear that," she said, bubbly again. He glanced at her, enquiring with his eyes. "Don't worry, he's dead."
"How do you know?” She smiled a little humble smile, pointing at herself with both hands.
"I got him quick enough," she clarified when he looked confused. "I killed a few people… You know that already. I killed a lot of people.” He nodded. That made sense, of course, but she knew it wasn’t easy for him to completely accept it. He would never have to kill for food, after all. That sort of thing was in the past. “Anyway, this guy wasn't very good at hiding. He knew the police around where I was from was incompetent, and he kept killing there. I think he was the only vampire I killed up until… You know. When he saw I was alive, he even smiled a little, said it was nice I found my way back to him, like a pretty little prize. I think he said he followed me all the way from L.A., but I don’t remember, I was so mad I just killed him. It felt good. I didn’t wanna be a vampire. I didn’t think of myself as a demon, like my parents, or even Mardulak seemed to, but I definitely thought of myself as a monster. I tried to hold myself back from drinking blood for as long as I could, then I fell on eating criminals… What most of our kind does when they are sentimental, I suppose.”
"Yeah," Robert said and laid back down. There were a few things that he didn't yet understand about Sandy, but he was starting to get there. More than that, he knew that these things only made him like her more. Even through the killing? The bloodsucking? He thought, but said something else out loud, "Wasn't he older? Stronger?" She shrugged.
"He wasn’t that much older, maybe months? Also, I was a woman. He had his guard down." Robert nodded, and then smiled, cocky.
"Well, too bad,” he said, now moving up to put his arms around her, who laid her head on his chest gladly. “I'd love to have gotten him myself.”
"I'm sure," she answered with a smile, looking up at his face, observing it without the glasses. "Don't worry, though, I got it."
ANT ATTACK (1983) // Ant Attack is a ZX Spectrum computer game by Sandy White, published by Quicksilva in 1983. It was converted to the Commodore 64 in 1984.
