He is nothing, the once-bright vampire known as Emiel Regis. Mass more than tissue. Only gristle and wetness, like an embryonic sac or an oozing chrysalis. Glistening. So very still.
Dettlaff returns to it to bleed, spilling blood from the fine veins at his wrist. A single sharp puncture from a thumbnail, passing days spent at its side. It is nothing— and yet Dettlaff calls that nothingness by name in the low, silent hours between nightfall and morning. Speaks hushed in ways it will not remember. In a language humans cannot comprehend.
The smell of rot pervades. The tower ruin Dettlaff has chosen with all the finesse of a denning animal does nothing to vent the stench of mildew and mold and clotted blood. The thing he speaks to cannot smell anyway.
It is an age. The years stretch long.
He is tissue more than mass. Gruesome in the way of anatomical etchings: corded sinew exposed to cold, stale air, maps of musculature and webbing veins, all wrapped over one another as though it keeps him held together— a broken toy or a child’s doll, spilling out through exposed seams.
It is better than what it once was.
It is also dispiriting, no doubt, and perhaps maddening also. To be relegated to a fetid root cellar in a long-abandoned village, regenerating at a rate that will span decades more. And still, Dettlaff returns to him often— though possibly not often enough, given the nature of silence and isolation, and the gnawing misery of knitting flesh.
These lands have gone barren, their former inhabitants either dead or departed, but that doesn’t mean that Regis, nascent and brittle as hollow bone, couldn’t easily fall prey to an overly curious nomad seeking out shelter, or a passing thief sniffing out petty coin. And vigilance, to Dettlaff's mind, will always prove far more preferable to remorse.
He makes no noise in his arrival, coalescing loosely from the shadows as though he’d been there all along— but the air that tails him smells sweeter than fungal dirt or musty decay. Crisp and sharp. Flora. It might be spring outside.
“How are you feeling?” He asks, low and rasping, as though the answer isn’t obvious. Attention fixed on the buckles of his glove as he unwinds dark leather with practiced ease, halfway through the process already. A ritual now. All of this. Though coherency fluctuates, in regards to his friend’s ability to respond.
If it is a poor night, he will spare more blood. Compensation.
Dispiriting: very much. Maddening: at times. And the cellar is, one might generously call it, humble. But he doesn't mind it. There are good things to think on, such as having a brain again. Being without one is rather like lacking any pouch or pocket—it's possible to live that way, but far easier to keep track of your notions when they're all in one place. And the muscles of the face and throat and abdomen that allow one to speak, those are very good to have. More valuable, still, is having company to listen to your efforts. Speaking of which—
The answer to Dettlaff's query comes on a wheezing breath, thin as reedsong.
"Oh— there you are. I was just thinking of you."
Emiel Regis, such as he is, resembles little more than a cloudy-eyed bag of bones in a nest of fabric and fur; should any nomad come stumbling down here (heaven help them), he could easily play the corpse. But he seems sharper tonight, even at a glance, than he has been since he was first interred here.
Well. At Dettlaff's glance. Almost anyone else would find him horrifying to look on.
"I'm—" Stirring to lever himself up, determined, his mouth (such as it is) becoming a thin line of effort. There: upright. Sort of. "—as well as can reasonably be expected. Is that the fecundity of nature I smell?"
The words 'I was just thinking of you' fail to prompt anything significant in turn, but there is something to be said for the way Dettlaff’s otherwise resolute focus flickers briefly as he pulls the glove from his palm, gaze shifting under the weight of a blink into the faintest peripheral glance— and then, gone.
He rolls up his sleeve, moving to Regis’ side and sinking into the nesting heap of fabric and fur that had wreathed the carcasstic vampire like a cocooning shroud, now displaced in part by his efforts to rise.
When Dettlaff speaks, it is in the old tongue. Their own tongue, rather than the common language of mankind, for at times he fears even Regis’ immeasurable memory might abandon it if left untested. Unused. Another part of himself surrendered to this wretched world and its baser creatures— though the other vampire does love them so, for reasons Dettlaff still finds incomprehensible. Vexing.
“You should not strain yourself so eagerly.” It risks injury— or a lengthening of recovery. The tearing of tissue or the feathering of its tenuous grasp. A truth he is certain Emiel is fully aware of, and capable of understanding even in his emergent state.
Thus, his low warning begins and ends there.
Dettlaff’s teeth meet flesh, piercing the tender span of his own wrist with ease, and within seconds the pulpy woodland scent is overwritten by something infinitely more potent: his arm circles Regis’ withered shoulders, offering held to narrow lips.
As in all things, perhaps the added precautions are unnecessary: the pacing throughout the territory they now inhabit, the way he insists on opening flesh for Regis, rather than letting the vampire see to it himself, the fact that at times he bares fang and claw alike, when the glow of lantern light draws too near in the otherwise eclipsing depths of night.
But Dettlaff guards what is his. There is no peace to be had elsewise. He cannot stomach it. He never could.
Regis makes a soft, grumbling sound—don't tell him not to strain himself, when did Dettlaff become the doctor, and so on—then wheezes a sigh for the comfort of nearness, for the fragrances of verdancy and petrichor, of leather and of skin not his own, and for the weight of this thing he must do. This thing that must be done for him. If it were for any other reason—this is undeniably different, but—if there were any other way—
He needn't explain. Dettlaff knows. And Dettlaff treats it precisely the way it ought to be treated: plainly, as the biotic function it is, no undue theatrics, a ritual without ceremony. That's what he thinks of as Dettlaff surrounds him, and the nest becomes his body and his voice and his smell. (This, too, could be considered practical. Maybe. If you squint.)
"Tell me everything," he says, likewise in their tongue. His breath, cool as the cellar, is faint even this close. "Start with the sky, if you would."
The blood's coming; before it can drip, he catches it with the flat of his tongue, follows it back, closes his mouth over the source, and drinks. Slowly, as usual. And as usual, he keeps his eyes open until he can't, though he can scarcely see.
After not so long, one hand, all sinew and knobby joints and fingernails, comes up to lay the barest grasp on Dettlaff's forearm, simply to be there. His eyelids flutter, then close. He draws in a slow, full breath and sighs, bone deep.
punches my side a la Kylo Ren to overcome my own weakness
How far he’s come in so short a span. Presumed decades of regeneration have become but a small collection of years, few enough in number that even a mortal creature would think of it as nothing more than a cycling of seasons. A blink. A breath.
Still, perhaps it should come as no surprise: Emiel Regis has always been stitched from the fabric of deviation itself. Drawn to the unpredictable and unknown alike, his teething years were an exercise in recklessness that only preceded his own strange decision to intervene in human affairs. Undignified calamity inevitably brought about as a reward for such selfless intercession.
Bright Regis. Clever Regis. Dettlaff cannot imagine a world where he failed to kneel at the sight of scalded rock gone ruddy with gore.
But Emiel has never asked after that story. Hoarse-throated and dry-lunged, he burns breath now only to know the color of the sky at dusk where they den, or the bowing shape of unfamiliar constellations. Bent grass and towering trees, branches whispering as they rattle from steep northern winds.
Dettlaff can picture it all clearly in his mind. The memory and scent as bright-blooming as reality itself, but they’ve always been antithetical creatures in their strengths: even in their own language, words stiffen across his tongue. Every thought becomes leaden in its application, calcified by ineptitude.
So he’s silent for a beat, despite his promise. And in that silence he shifts to lean against a stony outcropping tucked within the wall at his back, careful as handling fractured glass when he pulls Regis lower to rest against his chest for the sake of easing fragile physiology. There, he tries to think of nothing else. To ignore the heat spreading warm across his wrist, or the feeling of those taloned fingertips perched feather-light along the edges of his forearm. Soft sounds, low exhalations. The delicate scuff of false breath.
This exchange must be biological. Ritual. He owes his friend that much.
Where is he to start, except—
“Bright.”
Eloquent.
But before Regis ceases feeding in order to admonish that woeful display of oratory prowess, Dettlaff stiffly presses on.
“Cloudless in the hours before sunrise, affording a rarer view of slowly dimming constellations. The forest to the north already in bloom, coaxed by spirits I have witnessed only once in passing, though their presence is unmistakable.”
And though it taxes blunter faculties, from there he continues: details the lay of the land that surrounds— the abandoned village in which they now reside, tucked away within a valley cluttered with tall trees, and deeper lakes— and in the distance how cresting mountains are echoed by human architecture. Towering things, unlike flat houses and their accompanying sheds, most often found squatting low in the mud.
Depending on perspective, none of it is fantasy. To cloudy eyes gone weak from disuse, Dettlaff imagines Regis will think it every bit as beautiful as it is described.
Muck and mire and all, perhaps it is.
slides back in with a bad powerpoint effect, hello
Bright, he says. The admonishment nearly comes, too—Regis cracks an eye, thinks about turning his head—but Dettlaff goes on, precisely when he ought. Perhaps he's learnt just how long any given silence between them can stretch before it's sure to break. The character of quietudes. Instinctive? Yes, in all likelihood, he's come to know them without having tried.
A warming thought flowing among warm thoughts. Fantasy and memory intermingling. Sun's warmth and crypt's chill seeking homeostasis. Fragility reduced by degrees no less profound for their microscopic breadth. In the distance, towering things. Margins softening. Mountains. Air's flavour borne through the skin. Whose body is this? He is drinking from himself—
And that's when he knows it's time to stop.
Regis carefully extracts his teeth from the impressions they've made—short of puncturing, he is always so aware and so careful—but doesn't take his mouth away, lingering alongside the wound. The barely perceptible movement of his body, rhythmic, stirred by his pulse. He breathes in, a soft suck of cool air across skin—breathes in like he's going to speak, and doesn't.
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no subject
Dettlaff returns to it to bleed, spilling blood from the fine veins at his wrist. A single sharp puncture from a thumbnail, passing days spent at its side. It is nothing— and yet Dettlaff calls that nothingness by name in the low, silent hours between nightfall and morning. Speaks hushed in ways it will not remember. In a language humans cannot comprehend.
The smell of rot pervades. The tower ruin Dettlaff has chosen with all the finesse of a denning animal does nothing to vent the stench of mildew and mold and clotted blood. The thing he speaks to cannot smell anyway.
It is an age. The years stretch long.
He is tissue more than mass. Gruesome in the way of anatomical etchings: corded sinew exposed to cold, stale air, maps of musculature and webbing veins, all wrapped over one another as though it keeps him held together— a broken toy or a child’s doll, spilling out through exposed seams.
It is better than what it once was.
It is also dispiriting, no doubt, and perhaps maddening also. To be relegated to a fetid root cellar in a long-abandoned village, regenerating at a rate that will span decades more. And still, Dettlaff returns to him often— though possibly not often enough, given the nature of silence and isolation, and the gnawing misery of knitting flesh.
These lands have gone barren, their former inhabitants either dead or departed, but that doesn’t mean that Regis, nascent and brittle as hollow bone, couldn’t easily fall prey to an overly curious nomad seeking out shelter, or a passing thief sniffing out petty coin. And vigilance, to Dettlaff's mind, will always prove far more preferable to remorse.
He makes no noise in his arrival, coalescing loosely from the shadows as though he’d been there all along— but the air that tails him smells sweeter than fungal dirt or musty decay. Crisp and sharp. Flora. It might be spring outside.
“How are you feeling?” He asks, low and rasping, as though the answer isn’t obvious. Attention fixed on the buckles of his glove as he unwinds dark leather with practiced ease, halfway through the process already. A ritual now. All of this. Though coherency fluctuates, in regards to his friend’s ability to respond.
If it is a poor night, he will spare more blood. Compensation.
no subject
The answer to Dettlaff's query comes on a wheezing breath, thin as reedsong.
"Oh— there you are. I was just thinking of you."
Emiel Regis, such as he is, resembles little more than a cloudy-eyed bag of bones in a nest of fabric and fur; should any nomad come stumbling down here (heaven help them), he could easily play the corpse. But he seems sharper tonight, even at a glance, than he has been since he was first interred here.
Well. At Dettlaff's glance. Almost anyone else would find him horrifying to look on.
"I'm—" Stirring to lever himself up, determined, his mouth (such as it is) becoming a thin line of effort. There: upright. Sort of. "—as well as can reasonably be expected. Is that the fecundity of nature I smell?"
Olfactory organs: also good. Miraculous, in fact.
no subject
He rolls up his sleeve, moving to Regis’ side and sinking into the nesting heap of fabric and fur that had wreathed the carcasstic vampire like a cocooning shroud, now displaced in part by his efforts to rise.
When Dettlaff speaks, it is in the old tongue. Their own tongue, rather than the common language of mankind, for at times he fears even Regis’ immeasurable memory might abandon it if left untested. Unused. Another part of himself surrendered to this wretched world and its baser creatures— though the other vampire does love them so, for reasons Dettlaff still finds incomprehensible. Vexing.
“You should not strain yourself so eagerly.” It risks injury— or a lengthening of recovery. The tearing of tissue or the feathering of its tenuous grasp. A truth he is certain Emiel is fully aware of, and capable of understanding even in his emergent state.
Thus, his low warning begins and ends there.
Dettlaff’s teeth meet flesh, piercing the tender span of his own wrist with ease, and within seconds the pulpy woodland scent is overwritten by something infinitely more potent: his arm circles Regis’ withered shoulders, offering held to narrow lips.
As in all things, perhaps the added precautions are unnecessary: the pacing throughout the territory they now inhabit, the way he insists on opening flesh for Regis, rather than letting the vampire see to it himself, the fact that at times he bares fang and claw alike, when the glow of lantern light draws too near in the otherwise eclipsing depths of night.
But Dettlaff guards what is his. There is no peace to be had elsewise. He cannot stomach it. He never could.
Restlessness pervades.
“Drink, and I will tell you what I have seen.”
no subject
He needn't explain. Dettlaff knows. And Dettlaff treats it precisely the way it ought to be treated: plainly, as the biotic function it is, no undue theatrics, a ritual without ceremony. That's what he thinks of as Dettlaff surrounds him, and the nest becomes his body and his voice and his smell. (This, too, could be considered practical. Maybe. If you squint.)
"Tell me everything," he says, likewise in their tongue. His breath, cool as the cellar, is faint even this close. "Start with the sky, if you would."
The blood's coming; before it can drip, he catches it with the flat of his tongue, follows it back, closes his mouth over the source, and drinks. Slowly, as usual. And as usual, he keeps his eyes open until he can't, though he can scarcely see.
After not so long, one hand, all sinew and knobby joints and fingernails, comes up to lay the barest grasp on Dettlaff's forearm, simply to be there. His eyelids flutter, then close. He draws in a slow, full breath and sighs, bone deep.
punches my side a la Kylo Ren to overcome my own weakness
Still, perhaps it should come as no surprise: Emiel Regis has always been stitched from the fabric of deviation itself. Drawn to the unpredictable and unknown alike, his teething years were an exercise in recklessness that only preceded his own strange decision to intervene in human affairs. Undignified calamity inevitably brought about as a reward for such selfless intercession.
Bright Regis. Clever Regis. Dettlaff cannot imagine a world where he failed to kneel at the sight of scalded rock gone ruddy with gore.
But Emiel has never asked after that story. Hoarse-throated and dry-lunged, he burns breath now only to know the color of the sky at dusk where they den, or the bowing shape of unfamiliar constellations. Bent grass and towering trees, branches whispering as they rattle from steep northern winds.
Dettlaff can picture it all clearly in his mind. The memory and scent as bright-blooming as reality itself, but they’ve always been antithetical creatures in their strengths: even in their own language, words stiffen across his tongue. Every thought becomes leaden in its application, calcified by ineptitude.
So he’s silent for a beat, despite his promise. And in that silence he shifts to lean against a stony outcropping tucked within the wall at his back, careful as handling fractured glass when he pulls Regis lower to rest against his chest for the sake of easing fragile physiology. There, he tries to think of nothing else. To ignore the heat spreading warm across his wrist, or the feeling of those taloned fingertips perched feather-light along the edges of his forearm. Soft sounds, low exhalations. The delicate scuff of false breath.
This exchange must be biological. Ritual. He owes his friend that much.
Where is he to start, except—
“Bright.”
Eloquent.
But before Regis ceases feeding in order to admonish that woeful display of oratory prowess, Dettlaff stiffly presses on.
“Cloudless in the hours before sunrise, affording a rarer view of slowly dimming constellations. The forest to the north already in bloom, coaxed by spirits I have witnessed only once in passing, though their presence is unmistakable.”
And though it taxes blunter faculties, from there he continues: details the lay of the land that surrounds— the abandoned village in which they now reside, tucked away within a valley cluttered with tall trees, and deeper lakes— and in the distance how cresting mountains are echoed by human architecture. Towering things, unlike flat houses and their accompanying sheds, most often found squatting low in the mud.
Depending on perspective, none of it is fantasy. To cloudy eyes gone weak from disuse, Dettlaff imagines Regis will think it every bit as beautiful as it is described.
Muck and mire and all, perhaps it is.
slides back in with a bad powerpoint effect, hello
A warming thought flowing among warm thoughts. Fantasy and memory intermingling. Sun's warmth and crypt's chill seeking homeostasis. Fragility reduced by degrees no less profound for their microscopic breadth. In the distance, towering things. Margins softening. Mountains. Air's flavour borne through the skin. Whose body is this? He is drinking from himself—
And that's when he knows it's time to stop.
Regis carefully extracts his teeth from the impressions they've made—short of puncturing, he is always so aware and so careful—but doesn't take his mouth away, lingering alongside the wound. The barely perceptible movement of his body, rhythmic, stirred by his pulse. He breathes in, a soft suck of cool air across skin—breathes in like he's going to speak, and doesn't.