Useful
~3k of VtM Augustus' Origin story
Includes: Rape/NonCon elements, Gore, Vampire Turning, Vomiting, and Panic Attacks
“You’re right,” He said, in a transatlantic accent that he staunchly refused to believe was real. “You are important.” The hand on his shoulder clenched down with more force than mundane strength could account for and he made an aborted shout that echoed around all the concrete as his shoulder threatened to leave its socket. The four of them piled into the small elevator that smelled of cigarette smoke. The edge of the rail dug into his thigh where he’d been pressed into the corner. Charles leaned back against the wall next to him and continued, “Just think how much they’d care if you were taken from them.” The bell dinged and the doors shook a moment before sliding open to reveal a beige hallway. He lost strength in his legs as his situation sank in. The thralls had to carry him to the apartment door.
He died.
He was well aware that something was wrong by the time the car came into view. It was perfectly ordinary, was the thing. Not a rental and not a classic, not a junker work car. It had the unpleasant sheen of a car you don’t notice at all. Most people he’d seen get hustled into entirely unmemorable cars by new thralls were never seen again. Well, alive. Someone had put an instant photo of Lucky with his organs all on the outside on a bulletin board in the main hallway of the local Elysium and it had taken a couple of days for it to be taken down. He didn’t struggle, because making any kind of fuss was a good way of getting killed for doing that instead of whatever they had originally abducted him for. Instead he asked questions like he was a fucking idiot. He focused on the leader of this little project, Mister tall, white, and dramatic. His double breasted suit the only thing about this situation that drew the eye. He was young, not young like he was young, where his patrons forgot that he wasn’t alive during the great depression and then didn’t expect anything from him but to fix their 40 year old computers. But young like he kept getting in trouble for hunting on Anarch territory because he thought he deserved to be able to. He bit back the grunt of pain as his head hit the roof of the car he was being shoved into and he wondered if this was like that. If Charles was “taking initiative” again. He kept up idle chatter about his current projects while they drove and hoped it was sinking in. The Prince needs me, I’m important, people know me, if I’m broken so will you be. He made sure it was wrapped in comments about the quality of the thread and the number of bobbins and the deadlines he had to hit so he could pretend not to be threatening a Kindred. Ghouls who put on airs ended up dead far more often than they ended up embraced. He refused to let himself believe he was important enough not to end up the former.
The car stopped in front of a mid-sized apartment complex and pulled into an underground parking garage. He couldn’t stop himself from bracing his feet on the floor and pressing himself into the seats as the car tipped down the too steep ramp into the maze of yellow light and concrete pillars. He hadn’t felt like he was about to be murdered in a while. He wondered if mortal terror was the only thing that would age him anymore. There was something undefinably different about the older ghouls, and the idea that they’d had more near death experiences was as good a theory as any other.
The car pulled into a parking space and his stomach lurched. He finished his story about the restoration work he’d done on the collar of the Prince’s shirt and how honored he was that she’d be wearing it to the next big Elysium before the door opened to an expressionless face and he was forced to acknowledge that they’d arrived. They walked through the empty garage in silence. Charles pressed the elevator call button with the back of his knuckle and draped an arm over his shoulder.
“You’re right,” He said, in a transatlantic accent that he staunchly refused to believe was real. “You are important.” The hand on his shoulder clenched down with more force than mundane strength could account for and he made an aborted shout that echoed around all the concrete as his shoulder threatened to leave its socket. The four of them piled into the small elevator that smelled of cigarette smoke. The edge of the rail dug into his thigh where he’d been pressed into the corner. Charles leaned back against the wall next to him and continued, “Just think how much they’d care if you were taken from them.” The bell dinged and the doors shook a moment before sliding open to reveal a beige hallway. He lost strength in his legs as his situation sank in. The thralls had to carry him to the apartment door.
He died.
He wasn’t expecting it when he woke up with a spasm, tied to a chair. It was not the first time. Notable was the fact that no one else was there. Kindred never tended to wait for hostages to wake up, pretending instead to be too busy with business or pleasure. But there was no pale faced thrall peeking out at him from the shadows, too still as a consequence of the command to Watch. There wasn’t a ghoul either, reading a grimoire like a waiting room magazine. He craned his aching neck around to look at the room, still expecting to find somebody there. He strained his ears to listen for the creaking of someone unseen walking on warped floors and froze when he heard voices outside. He had a vague sense he shouldn’t have been able to, even if he couldn’t make out every word. They were talking about him. Well, about “Augustus” they’d told him he would be Augustus now while they were killing him. He closed his eyes to listen.
“You killed him, you Fucked us all.”
“We f- he’s not right! We need to destroy it!”
“And then what, jackass? He wasn’t lying about all his friends in high places.”
He heard their footsteps as they paced around the, the apartment? He remembered an apartment. Their voices were too low for him to make out the words any more and let the muffled sounds of an argument wash over him as he slouched in the chair. He ignored the uncomfortable way it dug into his upper arms. He heard only his own heartbeat and was surprised to do so. He had thought he remembered dying. He looked down at his shirt, at the dried blood that adhered it to his chest. That at least, wasn’t a dream. They’d killed him.
He thought back over the events he remembered, it had seemed like an embrace. Charles had drank deeper than anyone had before. So deeply he’d thrown off that peace the kiss always brought and started to struggle again. Not strong enough, kine were never really strong enough to escape, weaker still when losing liters of blood. He could barely see when the open wound had been thrust in his face, couldn’t think at all.
He drank too deeply then as well, thirsty for the blood that would save him. Then he’d, he’d. He couldn’t have died. Even though he could remember doing it. The seizure and the coldness that had gripped his heart. He felt different, but not different enough. His heart was still beating. He was still hungry, not just for blood, but for real food. He seemed a bit too alive to have turned. He heard a thud, muffled through the walls, and then the sound of an outer door slamming. He stared at the closed door in front of him, at the sliver of a glow coming in under it from the hallway. He heard the hum of the elevator in the hall and then nothing happened for a while. An hour passed and he grew very tired all at once. He made himself stay awake as he watched and waited, but no one ever came. It stayed quiet. Eventually, it felt safe enough for him to move.
His shoulders clicked in their sockets as he tried to shift his arms, and he twisted uncomfortably to swing them around the back of the chair. There was half of an idea in his head that he could reach the knots in the ropes wrapped above and below his knees, holding him against the seat. Before he could test his theory, the chair tipped over, and broke as it landed. His face hurt where he’d hit the floor and he wheezed against the cheap fake wood as the impact drove the breath from his lungs. He kept his ear against the laminate, waited for the sound of someone coming. His back arched and his shoes scuffed against the floor as he stretched to detangle himself from the remains of the chair.
After several minutes of uncomfortable contortions, he managed to get his legs free. His hands were bound at his wrists, he couldn’t get them over or under him to untie. He had a friction burn on his knuckles by the time he was done trying. It hurt more than it should have, if he was dead, and less, if he was alive. He felt like a thought experiment in quantum mechanics. He braced his back against a wall to stand, and started toward the door. He had to go up on his toes to align his hands with the knob. It opened without protest and he stared into the hallway, the soft grey light calling attention to the unevenness of the plaster on the walls. He kept listening for someone to come even after all the noise he’d made, but there was only dead silence. He leaned too far forward to be comfortable as he walked, precarious with his hands still bound behind him.
The kitchenette was ill equipped. He’d been hosted and “hosted” by kindred enough to tell it had the hallmarks of a place furnished by people who’d forgotten what eating was like, but it had a knife block, one of those novelty ones that looked like a person. He twisted the rope against his wrists while he considered his options. He decided on a bread knife and it only took him three or so tries to actually get it into his hands. He ended up sitting on the counter as he sawed through the rope. It caught his skin occasionally and the smell of his own blood hit his nostrils, fresh like the blood on his shirt wasn’t. He rolled his shoulders and looked at his hands after. He found them unmarred. Small smears of blood, less than a paper cut’s worth were on his hands, but there was no wound attached to them. The skin of his knuckles was healthy and whole. He sighed and rubbed at the unmarred flesh. He marked another point in the invisible tally he was keeping on whether he was alive or dead.
He turned the corner and found a corpse, its throat slit, decapitated. It was little more than bones in a double breasted suit, the skin that hadn’t turned to dust stretched and warped over his skull. The blood on the walls was still wet, there was a puddle underneath the body. The contrast distracted him from his revulsion, from the way the blood still smelled enticing, the way it was by the smell he recognized the remains of what used to be Charles, not his clothes. He crouched in the stillness of the apartment over the body and stared. He stared for a while, watching the carpet get brown and crusty around the edges of the bloody puddle.
The light in the room got brighter, and a strange sensation on his skin startled him out of his trance. He felt weak and tired, hungover all of a sudden. He looked over at the window, he’d missed something important. Early morning sunlight streamed in through the slats on the blinds. He stood up out of the sunbeam and felt better immediately. He started to laugh as he stood over the dead body, manic and loud. Hysterical.
The revulsion came back full force. He swallowed, took a step back from the body of his, Sire? He needed to leave. He had to get out of here. He’d made it to the front door and put his hand on the knob before he remembered that his shirt was covered in blood, still. He swore and started toward the door on the other side of the kitchen. Laid out on the bed in the quiet, conservatively furnished bedroom was a casual gray suit, and a pile of legal papers. Augustus was 26 years old. He had a degree in costume design and middling credit. His suit fit perfectly.
He tucked the folder full of documents and his bloody clothes into a garbage bag and stepped out onto the sunny street. The sick feeling returned immediately. His stomach flipped as he walked to the nearest subway entrance. He felt like crying, felt like laughing again, he wanted to scream, he was so angry. He stared at the ground, switched trains, and listened to his heartbeat in his ears as the car rattled along its tracks. He walked up the stairs to his building. His apartment looked the same as always. He drew the blinds and sat on the couch. He gave up the fight against his exhaustion and stared at the water stain on the ceiling until he lost consciousness.
He woke up in the evening, to the sensation of his heart starting to beat again, and he knew without looking that the sun was down. He gasped in his first breath of air since that morning and jolted. He rubbed his chest over the shirt of his expensive new suit as if it would calm his racing heart. The only thing that happened was that he noticed that, while it was warming, his skin was barely above room temperature. He knew he probably needed to tell someone about this. If only because there was a weird dead body in a downtown apartment covered in his fingerprints.
He waited three days before he told anyone. He haunted his own apartment.
On the first night back, he made himself a cup of strong, sweet coffee and drank it with some prepackaged cookies he found in his pantry. He knew before eating them that it wasn’t what he was hungry for, but they still tasted exactly as they should have. He smiled from the minute he swallowed his first mouthful until his body rejected it a little over an hour later. He kneeled on the floor in front of his toilet and stared at the contents of his stomach for a while, trying to convince himself he had a stomach bug. The red tinge of the water in his toilet bowl wouldn’t let him. His breath hitched in his chest as he tried not to cry. He bit his lip and held his breath before flushing and watched the water circle until it was completely still. He released the breath he’d been holding and resolutely did not consider how long he’d held it.
He got off the tile and turned around in the tiny space to grab the cleaning supplies from under the sink. There was a drop of blood scented coffee on the rim of the seat and he couldn’t bear to look at it. By the time he realized the smell of blood was mostly coming from the crumbling layer of the stuff on his shoulder, there were bleach stains on the knees of his Augustus’ tailored slacks and the grout between his tiles was cleaner than it had been before he rented the apartment. He got in the shower and stared at the red tinged water as it washed down the drain. He pulled himself out of the shower when the water went cold and dripped trails across his nice clean floors on his way to his closet. The sun was coming up and he was getting tired. He pulled on some baggy pajamas and curled up to sleep on the couch again instead of going to his bed.
He woke up the next evening and made it all the way through cooking himself eggs for “breakfast” before he remembered. He stared at the plate accusingly for several long minutes before putting a dash of hot sauce on it and digging in. Those ended up in his toilet as well, redder than the sriracha should have made it. He spent the rest of the night cleaning and reorganizing all the clothes in his apartment, eventually giving up on both the suit and the jeans and tank top he’d brought home with him.
The building’s laundry room was deserted, which made sense, given the hour. He sat next to his laundry basket on the table across from the washers and watched his clothes spin in the dim basement lighting. Eventually, he ran out of clothes. He’d folded all his laundry, hung up his delicates on their rack to dry, and had a sizable pile in a box for donation. It didn’t distract him enough from the fact that he’d seen a neighbor on his way back upstairs and spent some time imagining him bleeding.
The third night he didn’t bother trying to eat, even if he was hungry. He knew it wouldn’t– it wasn’t– He got to work on his commissions instead. He cleaned the clutter off his desk. His “vacation” had made him fall behind. He really did have work he needed to do for the Prince, like he’d told Charles. He sorted his threads and tried not to dwell on which in the gradient of reds he was putting away matched the shade the wet splatter of Charles’ blood on the walls made in the early morning sunlight. His fingers lingered on the trailing end of thread anyway, he worried it between his fingers and watched the color play against his skin. His gums ached. He got to work, sinking into the not quite mindless haze of lacemaking. There wasn’t enough room in his brain past the dance of spindles across his hands, managing tension, pinning, counting, following the pattern to the more complex filigree. He wasn’t thinking about anything at all. He wasn’t. The sun rose again, he was starving.
When he couldn’t hide from it any more, he did what he should have done when he woke up in that empty little room and used his shaking hands to dig a burner phone out of his closet and call Kendra. He took a shuddering breath as the call connected.
“Hello?” Eir voice was sharp at the interruption.
“Ken-” He rasped, before he had to stop, his voice cracking over the first word he’d spoken in four days, since before he– since Before.
“Cousin?” Ey asked, after a pause and his breath hitched. Ken wasn’t really his cousin, but when they’d been introduced, ey’d winked and told him they were going to be family, that they’d be in the same lineage. It had been the first thing that made him really believe he’d be Embraced one day, and not just kept in a holding pattern until the local Prince got bored. They weren’t cousins, not yet, not anymore. Charles had, he’d–
He knew his breath was coming too fast, fast enough to make his chest ache, but he wasn’t dizzy. The hand that wasn’t holding the phone against his cheek hard enough to hurt came up to scratch at the front of his shirt, searching for rope bonds that weren’t there. Distantly, he could hear himself wheezing, Kendra’s increasingly forceful calls of his name.“Kendra,” He said again, managing the entire word this time, even if it still came out uneven, an octave too low. He blinked and something wet hit his fingers where they clenched around the burner phone. “I think,” Weight on his shoulders and teeth in his neck, rough, tearing. A hand in his hair, painful and rough as it raked through his curls in a parody of affection. A voice calling him Augustus, talking absently about how useful he’ll be. “I think I died.”