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#erich eeten
ashintheairlikesnow · 9 months
Note
Hello there!
I haven‘t heard of my favourite vampire for a long time. Let‘s see some Erich ultimately giving into his new nature. Pls 🥺👉👈
"Erich was slowly but surely starting to enjoy himself, feeling his humanity slipping away from him."
Dresden, East Germany, 1947
With every passing day, Erich Eeten was slowly - but surely - starting to... enjoy it.
The feeling of skin torn apart by his teeth, the rush of hot blood on his tongue and down his throat, warm skin that went cold as he drank and took another life, and another, and another... It had gone from a horror to an ecstasy, each time the idea that he was doing harm seemed further and further from his mind.
It felt like his humanity was slipping away from him.
More and more often, he found he did not care. He lived, after all, in the ruins of the greatest inhumanity he could ever have imagined.
Tonight, he walked with his hands buried in the pockets of a great overcoat, a cap pulled down low to shield the vaguely feline, inhuman pupils of his gleaming eyes. The ruins of the bombed-out city felt like observers all their own, piles of brick and rubble that seemed to sway towards him and then away.
The darkness slid around him like liquid, and the person he was following did not see him at all.
Why he had even wanted to return to Germany, he wasn't sure. To see his homeland desecrated and wrecked, the land of his father broken by the bombs that it had carelessly egged on again and again... Then split in two.
In the First War, they had taught he and the other soldiers, too young to know better, that there was glory in fighting for your country. Thousands had wandered home with shellshock and nightmares to show for their grand ideals and the ambitions of old rich men who sent the young and poor to die in the fields of France.
If he were going to weep for what Germany lost, he would have done so in 1918.
Here - now - all he could feel was the hunger that was never quite satisfied.
He sidestepped a fallen stone as he moved past the ruins of a grand church. Two walls were all that stood now, the curve on one side and straight lines on the other. A statue of Martin Luther still held court, looming with solemn dignity over the death of worship.
Someone had laid flowers beneath Luther's stone feet. They had gone gray, brown, and dried.
The man Erich followed had paused to light a cigarette, his matches a bright flicker of flame in the ever-present darkness.
Erich felt the ache in his fangs that longed to be buried in soft living skin. He swallowed, shifting slightly to the side. He let the shadows hide him.
It mattered so much less, now, if he knew someone had done harm or not.
Only the old rich men ever truly won the wars. The young and poor only went home to wait until they were forced to fight another.
And was it any worse to take life from a need to survive, than it was to order men like chess pieces to fall and be lost for nothing but vanity and ambition?
At least Erich kills clean.
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ashintheairlikesnow · 2 years
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Zero pressure at all but I desire some modern Auri fuckin people up in their usual ways. How about they make a snack out of a random homeless kid they find on the streets with Erich? They don't have to be mean to them, actually, but y'know, it IS whump...
CW: Vampirism, blood drinking, ~murder!~, Auri being immensely fucking creepy, dubcon touch and kissing, nonexplicit spicy times
-
"When Irish eyes are smiling, sure it's like a morn in spring," They sing, voice low and husky, seemingly too deep for their lithe, lanky frame. They move with their head tipped to one side, blood-spattered white-blond hair hanging across cheekbones, sliding smooth as silk against jaw. Their eyes glimmer as they move in and out of shadows, flashing brilliant like a cat's, slit pupils blown wide in excitement.
They walk slowly - the prey runs.
It doesn't matter.
The man stumbles back and away, trips over his pretty rose garden, shaking droplets of water like a whole new kind of rain, scented lightly in a way that makes Auri think of perfume. The world is a heavy, humid fog around them, too warm and yet they feel nothing but the breeze.
They laugh when he falls, watching him scramble to stand. He's up and moving again, sure he'll survive them, but of course it isn't only them he should be worried about, now is it?
"In the lilt of Irish laughter, you can hear the angels sing..."
"Shut up!" He shouts, half-screams, and their laughter rises over the top of it until a light in the grand house behind him turns on. Auri looks up, bathed in darkness, to see a little girl pushing a window up to open it.
"Daddy?"
"G-go back inside, Frances!" The man's voice trembles, and Auri licks at their lips, a shudder of desire for that fear racing down their spine, the thrill of a hunt nearly finished.
"I am inside, Daddy, what's going on?" She can't be more than seven, the pretty thing. Auri looks up at her. "Is Mummy outside there with you? Or... or should I go get her?"
"No!" His voice is less a scream than a shriek, this time, and Auri feels the purr beginning to rumble even though they haven't bitten him yet. "N-no." The man tries to calm himself, and Auri holds perfectly still, all but invisible beneath the shade of some ancient tree, the last of what must have been a forest here, once. Now it's all civilization and boring as fuck. "No, darling. It's just... Daddy was thinking about a scary dream, that's all."
His eyes land on Auri's, and he holds their gaze in a sudden burst of bravery. That English stiff upper lip, they suppose, their own curling back to bare their fangs. The English always did like to say they could stare death down with dignity.
Well.
Auri would see about that.
He keeps their gaze, and repeats, quietly, "It's just a nightmare."
The words are a plea.
The little girl hesitates, then closes her window, and Auri lifts their chin, listening to the faint sound of her little footsteps as she races down the hall to wake her poor dear mum, so soon to find her darling husband dead in the garden.
"Please," He says, softly, putting his hands up to them. Harmless, unarmed, whatever he thinks might engender pity - but they are far too old and merciless for that. This is far too fun a game. "Please, let this be only a dream-... please don't hurt my wife-... my daughter-"
He backs directly into Erich, a solid steady weight. As hard to move from his place as any tree.
When the man spins around with a cry of alarm, Auri leaps.
Their hands curl around his once-strong biceps, their fangs bury into his shoulder, right through the thin fabric of his nightshirt when they misjudge the spot. They spit cotton and have to pull back and grab and tear it right down the seam before they can bite him again, ignoring Erich's mocking laughter as they pull heavy blood thick with gin, laden with overwhelming cheap false juniper, from the wounds they've made.
"What a mighty hunter you are," Erich teases, cruelty in his gaze, watching as they pull the man to his knees in the grass, dew soaking into every ounce of clothing both of them wear. He only watches - his own eyes sparkle bright while he waits.
"Killed you easily enough," Auri hisses, blood smeared around their mouth in a horrific pantomime of lipstick before they lower their head to drink again.
He snorts. "I was not in my right mind at the time."
"Are you ever?"
They take their fill, then rip out his throat just to see the last spray of life's blood before the body goes still. They stand, slowly, swaying from side to side. They're spinning with the gin he'd had in his veins, and the empty bottle lies on its side not far away. The smile they give Erich is loose, and they exhale in a sound not quite unlike a moan.
"Drunk," They say, as if discovering a new revelation.
"I'm shocked to hear it," He replies, kicking the dead man onto his back to see the way his eyes are still white-rimmed in horror. "He smells like a liquor store." Lights come on in the house behind them, cries for the father and husband who now cannot hear them. The little girl and her mother. Auri licks their lips, only to see Erich shake his head.
For once, they listen, and wonder who else, in other yards, is out in the middle of the night for the taking.
"I wanted children," Erich says suddenly, looking in the direction of the door, as if he will simply stand here and wait for it to be open. "Before the war. Before I fought, before everything around me died. I wanted children, and a family, and-"
"And I wanted to study with Botticelli," Auri replies, grabbing him by the hand and tugging him away. "You see how our dreams come true."
He can't resist their wants - he follows them all but helplessly, and they giggle as they hear the first screams when the man's body is found.
"Tell me he was wicked," Erich says, in a burst of earnest and sudden self-disgust. "This man I helped you to kill. Tell me he was wicked, like the others have been."
Auri is silent, focused on trying to walk steadily when their blood seems to slosh like the last of a bottle in a bar passed around the regulars. They make it to the road at the end of the drive before Erich spins them around, puts his hands to either side of their face, and looks them in the eyes.
"Tell me he was wicked," He whispers. "Evil. Tell me he deserved to die."
Auri stares right back, then leans forward and kisses him, opening their mouth until he licks the blood back off their lips, until they feel him shudder, his dead body coming to life. "He was evil," They say, only slurring their words a little. "And he deserved t'die. Better?"
"Are you lying?"
"Does it matter?"
He growls and they bark laughter right back, pulling him across the road and into someone else's yard, shoving him onto his back on the ground and climbing on top of him, straddling his thighs with their knees on either side.
"Auri-"
"Sssshhh." They press a finger to his lips, looking up to listen as the sounds of sirens begin to wail in the distance, coming ever closer. "We're going to listen to their agony, Erich., as they see him."
"I don't want to hurt innocent people-"
"But you will." They pull his head down to their neck, feel the way he starts to open his mouth by instinct before, with difficulty, he manages to pull it back again. "No. Nein. I said drink."
"You didn't say-"
"I say it now. Drink."
Their fingers bury into his short dark hair, the occasional hint of gray showing through. "When Irish hearts are happy," They sing in a whisper against his ear as his teeth just barely graze their skin, fighting with all he has, "all the world seems bright and gay..."
"You are not Irish," He hisses back. The fresh blood in them smells maddeningly good, though, they can tell - his mouth is watering, his pupils widening, overtaking his iris and lust is overwhelming all his silly remaining morality. Their commands are overriding any hint he has of an ability to control himself. "We are both German."
"No such thing as Germany when I was born," Auri says, laughing again. "We are both dead, Erich, and that is all that matters. Feed from me, meine Liebe-"
"Don't call me that." He hissed and then gave in.
He bit into them viciously, tearing open the side of their neck, and they had to muffle their cry of pleasure with a fist shoved into their own mouth as the stolen blood burst free to fill his.
Even still, they heard from across the street a woman's anguished voice call, "Did you hear that sound?"
They almost can't help the laughter, even as Erich's hands make quick work of their jeans, yanking them down their hips and discarding them to one side, his own pants pulled halfway down his thighs while he still has his fangs buried in their neck.
"For your smile is a part of the love in your heart," they sing in a half-whisper as they spread their legs for him.
"Shut up," He growls, as they lock their ankles behind his back and jam their heels into his skin.
"And it makes sunshine even more bright-"
He jams his hand over their mouth to stop them, and they bite those fingers hard until he groans and lets go again, both of them smeared in red, moving in unison.
They'd been ready for him from the second they had bitten the poor asshole who'd had the bad luck to have insomnia too close to a hungry monster.
By the time he starts to lose himself, hips rocking with abandoned thrusts that would have broken the living, both of them are purring and he has their hands in his, shoved above their head. Their fingers brush a dandelion, yellow as the sun even in the darkness. Friction rubs, pleasure building and building, coiling a spring that soon must snap.
They come with a burst of laughter, and though he glares his body follows their commands effortlessly, even the wordless ones, and he finishes inside them.
Across the street, their laughter drifts, sparkling and brilliant as shards of glass waiting to be stepped on. Men and women standing around a corpse look up, and then run towards it.
The police find nothing but the impression of a human figure in wet grass, and blood from the dead man across the street spilled on the ground.
And also a pair of discarded, forgotten jeans.
-
@mylifeisonthebookshelf @insaneinthepaingame @keeper-of-all-the-random-things @finder-of-rings @newandfiguringitout @astrobly @endless-whump @pretty-face-breaker @gonna-feel-that-tomorrow @doveotions @boxboysandotherwhump @oops-its-whump @cubeswhump @whump-tr0pes @downriver914 @whumptywhumpdump @whumpiary @orchidscript @nonsensical-whump @outofangband @hackles-up @thefancydoughnut @evermetnotforgotten @wildfaewhump come get y’all nonbinary whumper
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ashintheairlikesnow · 2 years
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Auri and Erik, what are your plans for tonight? 😉
Auri, draped in the boneless way of a contented, sated predator over a hotel bed on their back, turns and smiles. Fangs flash briefly in the dim light. "Oh, I don't know. I thought maybe we'd stay in tonight."
There's a small spatter of blood on their cheek that they don't seem to notice.
"Stay in?" Erich, sitting in the hotel's uncomfortable, modern chair, shifts. The plastic-coated seat creaks and shifts under him. He looks over at them. His German accent is still present, but faded by time, softer now. "But-"
""I know, I know. Have it your way." They roll their eyes, stretching their arms over their head, back arching. Very aware that Erich stares at them without trying to hide it - not any longer. "Erich wants to hunt, you see. There's a serial killer loose on the streets of Portland, Oregon or Maine I genuinely cannot remember which one we're in, and Erich likes his dinner wicked."
Erich scowls and looks back at the television. He has no reflection in the nearby mirror hanging off the hotel room's closet door. "I don't have to regret the death of evil."
"You don't have to regret anything, liebling," Auri says in a sing-song voice, rolling over onto their stomach.
"Don't call me that."
"Mon cher."
"It's mon chéri, and not that either."
"Mi amor?"
"Stop it."
"Min kärlek."
"Auri, Ich sagte stopp!"
"Du bist nicht lustig, liebling," Auri says, pouting, some of their silvery blond hair falling loose and wild over their face, emphasizing the way they barely seem human now. "No fun at all. Anyway, we're going to hunt a hunter tonight. Ignore his grumpy face. He'll have fun and he knows it."
Erich doesn't argue, just watches the news, idly picking at a hangnail on one finger. "I want to leave the world better than it was when I died," He says, softly.
Auri watches him, inscrutable. Then they sigh, heavily, and lay their head down on one arm. "At least you don't have to live through the Junkers. That was exceedingly irritating. Oh, but you were hiding in the woods and missed out on Berlin in the 20's. That was nice."
Erich snorts. "Was it?"
Auri goes, briefly, a little more solemn and serious. "For a while, it was. I didn't kill, in Berlin in the 20's. I never needed to. There was so much blood freely given..."
"Wasn't aware you have a shit about blood freely given," Erich mutters. "You mock me enough about it."
"You drink from tiresome assholes. It's annoying that you care if they want you to or not. Berlin in the 20's... Oh, they had such fire and they were so fierce, then. When they were undone, I felt sad for the first time in a century. It's the reason I started hunting for you."
He looks surprised, then. "It was?"
"Yes. I had to go find someone else I had had a feeling about." After a pause, the two vampires staring at each other, they pushed up onto their elbows. "Come on, Erich. Let's go hunt your killer."
"Finally, I'm starving."
"I'm not."
"I know, you fed off the trucker who drove us here."
"That darling man will have one hell of a hangover tomorrow. Let's go."
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ashintheairlikesnow · 2 years
Text
Whumptober Sneak Peek, Day Five
“Poor baby,” The other vampire cooed, running her fingers back through his thick dark hair, speckled with hints of gray that had never grown in any further, frozen in time. “It’ll be a hard true death, you know. A rough one. It’s going to hurt.” She breathed the last words, and pressed a kiss to his lips, where blood was bubbling up, running out of him everywhere it could find an escape. Her lips were warm from feeding.
His were ice-cold, as he faded away.
“But that’s what you get for muscling in on my kill. I hope it’s agony, as you go. I hope you meet your true death weeping.” She pulled back, smiling at him, her eyes glowing faintly in the dark.
Erich coughed up a little more blood.
As she stood up, dusting her hands off, he turned his head, blearily watching her as she began to walk away on heavy platform heels. “Hey,” He croaked, one hand out, scraping at the pavement and broken rock beneath him. “Listen.”
She paused, without looking back. She wore a heavy leather jacket, black jeans, her hair was dyed darker than the night sky. “What?”
“It’s… n-not agony,” Erich managed, and now she did look at him, over one shoulder. He watched her put her hands into her pockets, pull out a lighter and light a cigarette with shaking hands. “It’s… it’s going to be… good. After.”
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Text
No Rest for the Wicked
CW: Vampire whumpee, referenced combat PTSD, some brief suicidal ideation (of the “if I die now, that’s okay” sort) throat torn open, blood loss, a kind of animalization (vampire getting feral for lack of blood), death/murder
For @whumptober 2022, day five: Blood loss
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1989, somewhere in London
His wounds weren’t healing.
There wasn’t enough blood to power the cells to reproduce, to push the itch as they closed and rebuilt themselves, covering over hurt as though it had never happened. As if he were still a man living alone in the woods eighty years ago or more.
Instead, the last of the blood he needed to heal was joining the puddle beneath him in a dirty alley behind a restaurant. Fitting, to die in a crowded noisy city when all he’d ever wanted after the war was to be left the fuck alone to die with the sound of the shells burying themselves into the trenches still playing in the back of his mind.
With the sting of of the gas still echoing in his lungs.
With the screams of the other soldiers whispering in his dreams, trying to pull him into the earth with them. Some of them were still there, buried by time in the fields in France where they had fallen. You could still see, they said, the line of the trenches from airplanes, now green with grass... you could follow their winding path and know where you’d find the last remnants of men who had died screaming, crying, calling for their mothers.
Sometimes, in the newspaper, you’d see articles where some farmer accidentally plowed up a handful of bones, an unexploded shell, ammunitions... but not Erich Eeten.
Erich Eeten hadn’t died with his fellow soldiers, but he hadn’t been able to live with himself afterward, either.
The smell of his own blood was thick and rich, sparkling with death. It would not nourish him, it was only his own. No life was left in it. Erich felt it growing stickier with every passing second, seconds he spent gasping for needless air, clawing with frantic panic at the vampire on top of him.
The one whose fangs had ripped him open.
If the people walking by, only a dozen or so feet away, suspected anything, they never turned to look. Erich had learned over the years that cities often had people in them who never looked further than their own destinations. It was safer that way.
He didn’t blame them.
“Bet you regret stealing my kill now,” The vampire who had attacked him hissed against his neck, lapping at what was still coming out. “I’ve been hunting that hot piece of ass all night.” The press of tongue, warm and wet, made Erich shudder, and he shook his head back and forth, pushing at the vampire’s chest, over her collarbone, but he had no strength.
Nothing left.
The world was dim around its edges, going dark.
“Poor baby,” The vampire cooed, running her fingers back through his thick dark hair, speckled with hints of gray that had never grown in any further, frozen in time. “It’ll be a hard true death, you know. A rough one. It’s going to hurt.” She breathed the last words, and pressed a kiss to his lips, where blood was bubbling up, running out of him everywhere it could find an escape. Her lips were warm from feeding.
His were ice-cold, as he faded away.
“But that’s what you get for muscling in on my kill. I hope it’s agony, as you go. I hope you meet your true death weeping.” She pulled back, smiling at him, her eyes glowing faintly in the dark. “I hope you burn in hell. I’ll never see it.”
Erich coughed up a little more blood in reply, making her flinch backwards as some of it got in her eye and she had to wipe at it, hissing with irritation.
She stood up, dusting her hands off, and he turned his head, blearily watching her as she began to walk away on heavy platform heels. “Hey,” He croaked, one hand out, scraping at the pavement and broken rock beneath him, rolling with effort onto his stomach. “Listen.”
She paused, without looking back. She wore a heavy leather jacket, black jeans, her hair was dyed darker than the night sky. A nose ring glinted. “What?”
“It’s… n-not agony,” Erich managed, and now she did look at him, over one shoulder, eyebrows raising. “There’s... waiting for us, there’s... something. Better.” He watched her put her hands into her pockets, pull out a lighter and light a cigarette with shaking hands. “It’s… it’s going to be… good. After.”
He shifted onto his side, coughing hard to try and get the last of it out of his throat. Everything was copper and darkness, and the world was fading. He would die here, in a back alley in London, far from the battlefields that still haunted his dreams.
He hadn’t died with a gas mask strapped on making him blind and breathless as his lungs burned.
He hadn’t died in the woods in his bed, another long casualty of a war that went uncounted because he’d waited until the war was over to be lost.
But… here, it would end. 
It was as good a place as any.
Better than some.
“You think there’s a heaven?” She asked, hesitating, taking a drag off her cigarette and blowing smoke into the air. “Even for us?”
“I think… I was s-supposed to find out a long… time ago. I’ll… I’ll tell the bastards you s-said hi if I make it.”
She snorted. “I just killed you. You’re oddly cheery about it.”
“Guess… I am. Can’t blame you. Shit move, for me t’steal a kill, right?”
He laughed, but all that did was make him cough up more, and when it bubbled too thickly in his throat to breathe, she left. He listened to her heels click on the ground until they faded to silence. Until even the shouted conversations of the people on the street had gone dim, muffled. He wondered what it was like to die with no heartbeat.
He was about to find out.
Erich’s eyes closed, finally. He hoped only for peace.
When a wrist was pressed to his mouth, warm and living, he groaned and tried to turn his head away. No, no, let me die, let me join them in the fields, let me fall into the trenches where I was supposed to rest-
“Drink, liebling, now,” Auri commanded, and Erich’s mouth opened against his will, took in the hot rush of fresh living blood. He bit down hard, then, gnawing into the skin and listening to a weak cry of pain. The pulse of the wrist’s owner was rapid, fluttering in fear, and his hands came up, smearing his own drying blood over her as he pulled her close, her body hot like a brand against his. He swallowed, and felt some of it run out of the wound in his throat even as the telltale itch began.
The girl was weeping, whoever it was he was killing. He couldn’t care any longer. Now that the hot blood of life was in his mouth, he barely heard her and with a mind gone mad with thirst, he no longer cared. He drank, took in swallow after swallow of salt-sweet copper, and after a moment felt a shift of weight and knew Auri was there, too, holding her down on top of him. 
“Good, liebling, there we go... there we go, my love,” Auri said, and Erich’s eyes opened, taking in their pale face behind the victim’s shoulder, smiling at him with sparkling eyes before they turned and buried their fangs in her neck. She threw her head back and cried out, and there was something obscene about this - Erich on his back with a woman’s hips pressed to his, Auri behind her and pressed to her, how the three of them moved together in a harmony wracked with the poor thing’s pain.
Erich felt his wound healing, and he couldn’t think well enough to remember that he had wanted, before, to die.
Auri drank their fill and left him to take the rest, not moving away but resting their head on the girl’s shoulder and holding her still as she thrashed and struggled, desperate to escape. “Kill her,” Auri whispered. “Drain her dry, liebling.”
Erich was with his packleader.
He had to obey.
He felt every hint of life and breath leave the victim’s body until she was limp, until her heart slowed and finally… stopped.
Only then did he realize what he’d done.
He jerked backwards, his head smacking into the ground beneath him, and Auri pushed themself up, tossing the dead body of the victim carelessly aside. “Feel better?” They asked, hands on their narrow, angular hips. They wore acid-wash jeans and a torn black tank top. They’d been in a club or something while Erich went to hunt alone. 
“No,” Erich ground out, voice still rough, as he rolled onto  all fours and then slowly pushed himself up. His head swam with blood, soaking in it like a man diving into a pool. His chilled fingertips were warming, his face flushing with it. “I was going to die. I wanted to be done with you!”
“But I don’t want you to be done with me. So you won’t. Sorry I was late. I was… busy.”
“Feeding?”
Auri shot him a dazzling smile, and he hated and loved it in equal measures. “No. Well, not the way you’re thinking. Come on. You need to rest somewhere safe.” They held up a key ring, jangling it. “My little friend there-” They gestured at the dead body. “-told me her parents rent her a flat, no roommates. We have a day or so before anyone notices she’s not where she should be. Let’s go get some sleep, hm? Then we have a plane to catch.”
“No,” Erich said, but he knew it was pointless.
“Yes,” Auri replied. “Now. Come, my child.”
They turned and walked out of the alley into the din of the city.
Erich felt the pull of their command, and he set his jaw in a miserable line and followed.
-
@astrobly @finder-of-rings @burtlederp @whump-tr0pes @hackles-up @whumptywhumpdump @boxboysandotherwhump @wildfaewhump 
@whumpworld for Whumptober taglist
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ashintheairlikesnow · 2 years
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A Few
CW: Vampire whumpers, whumpee who is also whumper, sadistic whumper, blood drinking, hints of dubcon intimate whump implied (fade to black)
For @amonthofwhump’s 12 Days of Whump, Day Six: Countdown
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Paris, France, 1940
Erich leans back against the wall, frowning down at the blood under his fingernails as he inspects the cracked, chipped edges. There’s something deeply unsanitary about it, especially since he’s not entirely sure how many peoples’ blood it even is. He can’t possibly do anything about it, though. The blood won’t come out.
The streets of Paris are never empty, not even in these darkest days. There are always those who risk everything for a bit of joy and celebration of life - and there are always those who prey on them. 
Of course, there are those who prey on the predators, too.
He sighs, counting inside his mind, as he sees a man pull his overcoat tight and step quickly over a puddle in the street, glancing left and right, the brim of his hat pulled down low to hide his face. 
Right on time.
They know where he’s headed - to a small flat above a store that has been raided and razed to charring inside. He intends to terrorize the family still hiding within, demand money they don’t have for their dubious protection from Erich’s own countrymen. Invaded in May and conquered by the end of June, France quakes under a war machine they hadn’t known how to defend against.
Germany is an avalanche burying France, Poland, anywhere else its bony fingers can touch. He hears German spoken in the streets, and he recognizes the language but not the feeling within it. He knows the faces but not their expressions. He doesn’t know his country any longer, but then… he’d stopped recognizing his country long before he’d been turned into this. He thinks of the war he fought for them, for their great Imperial pride, and bitter fury churns inside of him, turning the very saliva in his mouth sour.
How many men had died, then - and how many of their very sons would die this time? All for the pride of some great man who stays hidden behind the lines, demanding the soldiers loathe the enemy to the point of death but never willing to risk himself?
He spits off to the side, eyes narrowing, tongue running over his fangs.
Still.
The man stops, perhaps feeling eyes on him, but he doesn’t see Erich hidden in the shadows. He murmurs to himself, and Erich doesn’t know a lot of French but he does know a curse when he hears one. 
Erich keeps counting.
Three… two… one.
Auri drops from the balcony above the man’s head and lands on him, sending him flat on his stomach to the wet sidewalk with little more than a soft oof and the crack of his head against stone.
Their eyes gleam and glimmer iridescent in the darkness, fangs bared, their pale hair white in the near-total darkness aside from street lamps, a wild mess around their shoulders. They lean down and speak into the man’s ear as he struggles, trying to wriggle out from under them, throwing his hands up to try and pull them off.
It doesn’t work.
Erich wonders, idly, what they said to him. Auri doesn’t care about the world, but they feel darkly about what has been done to France for reasons Erich can’t even begin to fathom. He doesn’t ask, granted.
He scratches at the back of his neck, looking over to see a woman and man who were also sneaking out freeze. 
The man lets out a strangled scream for help, bouncing off of the buildings around them, as Auri buries their fangs in his throat, fingers dug so deeply into his shoulders that they’re tearing the fabric of his suit. 
The woman screams as she sees it, pointing at Auri. “Vampire!” She shrieks, in hysteric terror, and she and the man she’s with go racing away. They don’t try to help, or to pull the vampire off of the dying man. 
You don’t stop to help, not in France, not these days.
Erich doesn’t move.
He merely watches Auri’s throat bob as they swallow mouthfuls of hot fresh blood, and then looks up to see the father of the family above the store looking through the window down at the scene, where the muscle meant to scare him is instead dying on his doorstep.
The man looks up and meets Erich’s eyes. 
He, after all, had been told in advance where Erich would be standing.
Merci, the man mouths, tipping his chin down in deference. Merci, monsieur. He doesn’t smile, and Erich doesn’t try to either. They only look at each other. Once upon a time they were the same in more ways than ever they were different. Now, though, one is an inhuman predator, and the other a man who wants only to save his wife and children from the jaws of the beast.
Being a monster doesn’t mean he can’t still do a little good, for as long as Auri will let him, as long as their interest in this game holds.
He pushes himself away from the wall and walks to the storefront, his boots scraping in a whisper against the pavement. Auri looks up at him without letting go of their victim, but their eyes sparkle in a wordless invitation.
Feed with me.
As always, he has found, he can’t quite resist their commands. Not even the wordless ones. He starts walking.
Erich looks up to see the man up above close the curtains again, and knows he’ll move on to the next stage of what they had agreed upon. They’ll line up suitcases by the door, pack everything they need. A very particular vehicle will pull up, and the family will pile inside. By dawn, they will be quit of Paris.
By two days from now, they’ll be on a ship with new names, heading across the ocean. New papers, a new life, paid for by the money Erich takes from the ones he and Auri kill.
He can’t save many - but he can save a few.
He knows what will happen to them, in the end, because he has seen what is happening in Germany. What everyone pretends they don’t know is happening, but they do.
He reaches down and Auri lets go just long enough for him to pull the man, who breathes now in wet gasps as his heart fights to keep beating, close to him. Auri pushes themself up to their feet and presses in on the other side, the man sandwiched between them in their unnatural strength. His hands come up to push weakly at Erich’s chest, he begs in whispered French for mercy.
“Nein,” he whispers in return, and he bites down on the man’s left while Auri digs their fangs back in on the right.
Drinking the last of a life with Auri, his packleader, sends a wave of euphoria down Erich’s spine. They are connected through the veins they drain dry. His knees wobble and he locks them to keep standing, his hands moving, burying themselves in Auri’s hair. He groans, softly, as their hands find his waist in turn, jerking him forward. The man is between them, but still he can’t stop but moan in pleasure.
It’s obscene.
It’s devotion.
They break apart only when the man is wholly and truly dead, and Erich pants softly with breath he hasn’t quite gotten used to not needing, looking at the blood smeared red around Auri’s mouth and finding it beautiful.
It was horrifying, once.
He struggles to remember that, in moments like this.
“I-... I want-”
“I know.” Auri grins, licking their lips until red goes pink and wet, eyes half-closed in their own ecstasy. “Are you satisfied, Erich? We’ve killed another evildoer, are we the angel of death passing doorways marked in blood enough for you?”
“They never said angels were lovely or kind,” Erich says, low and rough, and he grabs their arm and pulls them against him, listening to their laughter before he presses his lips to theirs. Both of them have mouths slick with salt-sweet blood and he licks it off their lips and out of their mouth. He pulls away, jerking them along with him, in love with and loathing them in turn, both at once, the strongest things he has ever felt. 
They make it into an alley before he’s pulling their shirt off over their head. He hears, dimly, the sound of the car pulling up outside the storefront, of the man telling his children not to look at the body as they pile inside. He hears the engine roar as it pulls away, driving off into the night, heading hell for leather for a life that won’t look like this one.
He hopes it works better for them than it did for him.
Auri’s hands push up under his shirt, nails digging into his bare skin, and he tips his head back against the wall. When they bite him, it doesn’t feel like it did when he was living. Their fangs slide in, bury themselves to the hilt, and the venom floods him like a wash of pure and perfect pleasure.
“Please,” He groans. “Please take me.”
Auri is as bright as the sun, full of blood and a force of nature. They pin his wrists above his head, rolling their hips against his.
“Of course,” They murmur. Their lips move against his jaw, where there’s a scar from the war, that he’ll carry for eternity with the others. “Do it again tomorrow?”
“Please,” He whispers. “Yes. Let me help them.”
“My pleasure.” Auri’s mouth moves against his cheek. “Or yours.”
It starts to rain, but neither of them notices. If they did, they wouldn’t care.
-
@mylifeisonthebookshelf @insaneinthepaingame @keeper-of-all-the-random-things @burtlederp @finder-of-rings @newandfiguringitout @astrobly @endless-whump @pretty-face-breaker @gonna-feel-that-tomorrow @doveotions @boxboysandotherwhump @oops-its-whump @cubeswhump @whump-tr0pes @downriver914 @whumptywhumpdump @whumpiary @orchidscript @nonsensical-whump @outofangband @hackles-up@thefancydoughnut @evermetnotforgotten @wildfaewhump come get y’all nonbinary whumper
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ashintheairlikesnow · 2 years
Note
🛏 for Auri and Erich.
I guess you know what we would like to see😉. In the end Auri promised him to be there😇
CW: Auri is a creepy motherfucker, dubcon/noncon touching implied, uh, dubcon... licking...? Look I said they're creepy right
The sky through his window is a blurred blend of red clouds and the last light of day above the canopy of the trees when Erich turns his head, looking out. A crow, or something very like one, takes flight - nothing but a black smear and wings, like a drop of ink in a pool of blood.
There is a weight on him, lukewarm, and he groans, softly. He hurts. Everything aches, his gums throbbing most of all. He runs his tongue over his teeth, finding the new fangs there, grown in hours what had taken him as a child days and days.
His stomach growls.
"I know you're awake," They whisper against his ear, nipping at it with their own fangs, one hand moving over his chest and down his stomach. He looks away, only to have them take his chin and turn it back, forcing his eyes to meet their eyes.
The glimmer in the light doesn't seem so otherworldly anymore. Maybe just because he knows his own eyes now do the same.
"Welcome to the world, newborn babe," Auri Saathoff whispers, delighted in him, in his very existence. No one has been happy Erich Eeten is around for a long, long time.
He blinks at them, and then his head drops back onto his lumpy pillow. He'd made it himself, when he moved out here. He'd been proud of it, then. "I am a grown man of thirty-eight-"
"You're an infant and little more. How do you feel?"
He keeps his eyes closed. "I ache. And... I'm hungry."
Auri hisses softly in excitement, their tongue lapping affectionately along his neck, where the wounds they made have long since been healed. Erich can smell old, dried blood - his own, and theirs - staining his shirt. He shivers at the way it feels to have that rough, cool tongue move against his skin. "There are other people who live in the woods," Auri murmurs. "We can find them. You should feed in the woods, it's a good place to begin. I'll show you what to do."
Erich doesn't want to move. His limbs feel leaden, and yet - his stomach growls. It needs. It is empty, it demands blood. His mouth waters at the very thought of another explosion of taste and heat and life inside of him. "I don't want to kill anyone."
Auri pauses, and when Erich looks at them, they're pouting. "Not even one person?"
"Not in the-... the woods. They have been kind to me." He takes their hand and pulls it to his mouth. He feels nothing when he kisses their knuckles. No heat, no life, no nourishment. Just skin. "We can kill in the town. They salute the growing darkness."
"We must show them, then, how much they will miss the light when it is gone," Auri says, excited, and they shift, swinging a leg over him until they sit on his hips again, their palms pressing just inside his shoulders. "Town, then. We will be so good together, Erich."
Erich doesn't have the energy to snort in response. He keeps his eyes closed, and after a breath of time he feels their mouth move against his neck again. "I'm dead, what good could it do-"
Their fangs slide in, and his eyes fly open, wide, staring up at the darkening ceiling that he can see each detail of, as if it were midday.
"Wh-what-"
"There's no blood to be had from you now," Auri murmurs, licking just to feel him shiver. "But it feels so good, doesn't it?" They bite down again, and this time Erich moans.
"Wait, I don't-... I'm not-"
"That doesn't matter anymore."
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ashintheairlikesnow · 2 years
Text
The Venom’s Mercy
For @whumptober2021 day 24: Flashback | Self-induced Injury to Escape | Revenge
CW: Combat PTSD, vampirism, blood drinking, some vague suicidal ideation (”make it stop”), noncon kissing, noncon touching (nonsexual), intimate whumper, sadistic whumper, creepy whumper
-
1938, Somewhere in Germany
Erich Eeten doesn’t go into town any longer if he doesn’t have to. 
The world is tense, balancing on a string with the width of a single human hair. If he were a patriotic man, he would join in the rallies, the marches, the demands and the chanting. He would be like every other man who survived from his unit, except of course for those who have never regained the use of their ruined legs, their broken bones, their bashed-in faces, their gas-scarred lungs. 
Except, of course, for those who  never came home at all.
He would be a part of something larger than himself, he would see with starry eyes the reclamation of a Germany that everyone knows, whether they admit it or not, never truly existed. 
Oh, the chanting is persuasive, he imagines, unless you’ve seen what war really looks like. It’s a new generation of angry young men being taught the same lies he was taught twenty years ago. Except… they’re darker lies, now. There is so much death in Germany. There is so much destruction.
There is no glory bought with the blood of innocents.
Erich Eeten is not a patriotic man. 
He is not, as they say, a good German. 
Hell, he’s barely alive enough to be a bad one. 
No, not since he came home from the war with chronic anaemia, hands that tremble and shake, the propensity for having to stop sometimes and gasp for air even though the doctors can find nothing wrong with his lungs… and nightmares that have kept him from a restful sleep for so long that he can no longer remember what that sort of sleep felt like.
If the Reich wants Erich to serve in their army, to help them take and take and take, they’ll have to find him first, and Erich has made himself difficult to find.
He’s not… entirely certain anyone even knows he’s alive now. The people of Bad Segeberg, where he goes for whatever he cannot make himself, know him as Leon, and he’s never given them a family name. His hair grayed a little, still blond but with silver threading through it even now, when he is only thirty-eight himself.
The war aged them all, though.
Those who survived it.
He moves along a deer path he’s marked as his own, subtle carvings in the bark of trees. It’s not a human path, and Erich steps so lightly he only leaves the barest hint of his own footprints. He doesn’t want to be found, by the army or by anyone, and he will do what it takes to avoid it. 
There is a darkness taking over his country, a poison that eats it alive from the inside out. When he came home from the war, freed with the other POWs in a prisoner exchange, shivering - Lukas Mȕller was dead by then, taken by pneumonia - and hopeful to see his family again, he had already seen the first seeds of this strange surreal rage starting to sprout. 
He came home to find his entire family had moved. They were gone, someone else living in their house who made a face at him and sent him on his way.
He had no idea where to begin to look for them, and after a year or so he simply gave up. 
He should have left the country when he had the chance. He supposes he could still make the journey on foot, cross a border where no one’s looking and hope when he gets across he won’t be seen as a spy or worse. But… the forest seems easier, and more peaceful. 
He knows the forest.
He knows the hills.
The people in the town do not, and the others who live here in these places are like him. They are men and women - entire families - who want only to be left alone to try and ride out the darkness that has overtaken their land, and hope it does not swallow them whole. He doesn’t worry that they’ll turn him in, and they know he will respect their isolation, too.
He moves in near-silence, winding around a tree, letting his fingertips run briefly over the mark he’s made to remind himself of the path. On his back, his pack is weighed-down and heavy with some basics he can’t quite make for himself, like flour. He’s carried heavier weight than this, marching day-in and day-out from one battlefield to another.
He’s fought his war.
He won’t be conscripted into another one, and he certainly won’t be forced to support it, either.
He’s closing in on the clearing where his small cabin waits, just large enough for Erich to live by himself, when he hears the soft snap of someone - something - stepping on a stick.
He pauses.
His hand rests on a tree trunk, fingertips pressed to the rough texture of the bark, and slowly looks over his shoulder.
The setting sun has thrown shadows deep and dark. What golden light remains shines in stripes through the leaves, breaking through the canopy. Birds still sing, here and there. He watches a red squirrel leap from one branch to another. 
He waits, breathing carefully so as not to make any sound.
There is nothing.
He counts to fifteen, then to twenty, and then he turns back, walking along the path. He makes it another six steps before he hears, this time, the sound of a large creature moving through the underbrush, the rustled sound of footsteps through decaying leaves.
He stops again.
“Wer ist da?” He calls, listening for a response. 
None comes.
Maybe his melancholy thoughts are getting to him, Erich thinks, but his left hand starts to shake in echo to the disquiet in his mind. He has to close his fingers into a fist to settle it, and he can feel the muscles twitching even so. 
He continues on towards home, and this time there is no out-of-place sound to interrupt him. 
The clearing he lives in is small, all the better not to be found out. His cabin is tiny, one single room, just large enough for his bed, a few shelves for his belongings, and the woodstove for heat and cooking. Firewood is piled up against the wall, a haven for spiders as much as it is a provider of warmth when the truly cold days send chilly air seeking out the tiniest cracks in the walls. He has a firepit out front, a small outhouse, a smokehouse as well.
He moves inside, the door closing with a creak of hinges and a heavy smack behind him, dropping his pack onto the small two-person kitchen table he built himself ten years ago when the one he’d scavenged was beginning to totter. He digs out the flour, humming softly to himself, setting it up on a shelf next to the sauerkraut and pickles in jars. 
He misses electricity, some days, but mostly he gets by without it. He lights the oil lamps around the room until he can see well enough, the entire place full of a deep slightly-orange glow.
He checks on the sourdough starter, decides he’ll bake a loaf of bread tomorrow. He’s got a bit of milk from a man down the hill who keeps cattle and trades with him for the wild game Erich prides himself at trapping, and he’ll have sourdough bread and perhaps some potato soup for dinner…
He pauses.
Something is wrong.
At first he can’t place it, only knows that the shaking in his left hand is so bad he drops a plate to the floor, where it clangs and spins before coming to a stop. At least it wasn’t ceramic… he drops things too often now to own anything that can break.
Erich raises his head, like a dog sniffing the air, and then he knows what it is.
It’s quiet.
The birds are no longer singing, there is no sound of chattering squirrels. The wildlife that makes up a peaceful backdrop to his every moment is… silent.
Then, the door hinges start up their ungodly creaking, and he spins around to see-
“S-Sie sind es!”
Erich falls back against the table, scraping it along the floor, his right hand gripping onto the edge. His left hand tries but it shakes too much to get the slightest hold. Dread feels like a wash of awful dizziness spreading throughout his body. His heart drops to his knees and stays there, beating in a sudden frantic panic.
The visitor smiles at him, all fangs and that same long pale hair plaited down their back that he sees so often in his nightmares.
“‘The woods are lovely, dark and deep,’” They singsong, stepping inside and carefully, politely, closing the door behind them. “‘But I have promises to keep, and miles to go before I sleep.’”
“Was tun Sie hier-”
“Oh, stop it. I know you speak English, and I’ve been speaking the age-old Muttersprache for months now trying to find you. I went to the house where your mother lives-... well, lived-”
The dread grows, and alongside it, the anger that has lain banked to embers for two decades within him. His jaw tightens. “You-...” The English comes to him slowly, but it’s there. “You found my mother?”
“No, I didn’t.” They wave one hand, dismissively, walking closer like this home, this place of peace Erich carved from his enduring endless terror and pain, is theirs. “Why are you living as a hermit in the woods, exactly?”
He doesn’t move.
For some reason, he can’t.
Only the trembling of his hand gives away his panic and how badly he wishes he were still down in the town, with the dubious protection of other souls nearby - even if everyone closes their doors to each other these days, as the darkness rolls over them all.
The people in town don’t see it as darkness, of course, but as bringing light. 
True light has no need to hide what it does in the shadows. No, the country has lost its mind, gone to ground in evil, and some part of him knows without knowing that there are things happening that should not be-
“Wir sind die blutsaugers,” Erich whispers.
“Hey.” The vampire rolls their eyes and snaps their fingers right in front of his face, making him jump - how did they get so close so fast? “Eyes on me. I have been looking for you for weeks, you know. Months, even. I checked your mother’s house, I checked the town itself, I wandered around this whole damned country from vampire house to vampire house. Now I finally see you and track you all the way here, and this is my greeting? Hm?”
They cock their head, a tendril of pale hair falling free of the braid and laying perfectly against their cheek. Their eyes capture him, and it is hard, when they do, to look away.
Erich tries. 
He turns his head, teeth grinding together. Somewhere within him, he hears the whistle of the first shell falling, the echoing cries of his fellow soldiers to throw themselves down in the trenches and hope they are not blown apart.
Their mouth is so, so close to his neck.
He feels a sudden wild urge to beg them to finish it, now, what they started in that POW camp so many years ago.
“Why do you look for me?” He asks instead, his voice gruff and coarse. He tries to reach back for the knife he knows lays on the table, but their cold fingers close over his own, pressing his palm down on the rough-hewn wood with a strength they shouldn’t have for their size and stature.
“I owe you, don’t I?” They say, airy and casual.
His stomach turns when the creature nuzzles against his jaw, the pulse that flutters and beats with abandoned fear just beneath it. They’re… so cold, the temperature of the air outside, only now starting to warm a little to the fire in the woodstove. 
“You… owe me?”
He remembers, with sickening revulsion, how it had felt to be tied to the pole in the center of the other POWs watching, his head wrenched to the side-
He shoves at them. 
They don’t expect it and go stumbling back, swearing in a litany of languages, most of which he doesn’t recognize. Erich lunges for the door, thinking nothing of the home he’ll leave behind, one he made for himself through the years of hiding in the woods from every loud sound, from the way the voices of others grated on his nerves. 
He thinks only of escape.
When he pulls the door open, he catches one distinct glimpse of the darkening woods outside the clearing before they catch up to him and smack their hand into it, slamming it out of his hands and shut again. They force it into the frame with such strength that Erich hears it jam into place, taking away his easiest escape, leaving only the paper-lined window he put in himself over his bed.
He spins around, but finds himself pushed back against the door by them, the rounded iron handle digging painfully into his lower back.
They smile at him, eyes glinting in the firelight, flashing iridescent like a cat’s after dark. Their fangs are long, and his eyes are drawn to them, to the memories they pull from the recesses of his mind. The dark places that are never far from his thoughts.
“Pardon, little soldier,” They say, softly, reaching up with their other hand to brush knuckles against the side of his face. “It’s very rude to leave a guest alone in your home, you know.”
“I do not want you here,” He grinds out, and shoves at them again, but this time they’re ready and they grab his wrists, forcing them up above his head with a strength he can’t possibly subdue. His heart lurches, skips a beat, and he feels tears in his eyes.
He is here - and he is twenty years ago, listening to the cries of his fellow soldiers as they drain him dry, the agony that should have led to his death but didn’t. The weeks afterward waking from nightmares.
The years, the fucking years-
“I don’t care,” They reply, and drag their tongue up the side of his neck.
His eyes are wide, staring towards the ceiling, but it’s not the ceiling he sees. It’s a heavy gray sky in a godforsaken battlefield in France. 
“How did you get in?” His lips barely move. “A, a blutsauger must be invited-”
“I found you last night,” They whisper into his ear, toying with it with their teeth, nipping at his earlobe with a fang just hard enough to draw blood. “You talk in your sleep, Herr Erich... and when you are spoken to, you respond.”
He feels the prick of hot tears in his eyes. “No. I, I did not, do not say I said-”
“Bitte komme herein. You were having quite the nightmare. I sat with you until you settled again.”
The idea that this creature sat and watched him sleep, and he’d woken with no idea anyone had ever been there - Erich’s stomach turns at the thought. 
“Now,” They murmur, pulling his earlobe between their lips and sucking at the droplets of blood welling up, “I owe you schnitzel and cabbage... but you’re out here in the woods all by yourself, and I’ll have to settle for giving you the pleasure of my company.” 
He’s going to be sick, but he feels too distant from his body to fully register it.
They rub their thumb over his left wrist, and the shaking in his hand goes still. He looks at Lukas’s face as he fights the French soldiers who hold him back from going to Erich, the worry and fear in his eyes. 
Lukas, who died of pneumonia in 1918 just a week before the war was over, before the Armistice was declared, reaches for him until his arms are jerked behind his back. Next to him the other POWs watch with haunted, wide eyes.
“Bitte-... bitte-”
“Stille,” the vampire murmurs into his ear, and their fangs find his pulse and dig in.
The pain is a flash, a spark of bright white, and Erich lets out a choked, whimpering cry that travels no further than the air between them. Then their venom kicks in, and he feels his body go limp.
Unlike the first time, in that POW camp in France, this time they fill him with a gentle numbness, a soothing sway that holds no pain within it. He feels the push and pull of their mouth working the blood out of him as they let him crumple slowly to the floor, until he lays on his back with them straddling his prone body, sitting on his stomach and curled over him.
Their tongue is cool but warms with his blood, goes from cold to nearly hot as they flush with the life they take from him. 
Their hands move up his sides and over his ribs, tickling with their fingertips, before they press down into his chest just below his collarbone, kneading contentedly at him, the rumbling purr rolling out of them like the sound of a motor at a distance, like the sound of the stray he’d fed for two years out here, the little thing that had lived in the woods with him for a while.
He drifts, in the venom’s mercy, and looks up at a sky full of shells exploding twenty years ago. Inside himself, he dives into the hidden spaces in the trench and holds his breath, hands over his ears, praying he’ll survive this bout long enough to go over the top for the charge.
In his mind, he is tied down for them, and he sees his fellow POWs learning from him the horror of what waits for them if the next vampire chooses them.
In his mind, he is somewhere else, and he isn’t sure how to find his way back. More and more, he thinks he never came back from the front at all.
They pull back, lapping at the wound with a hot wet tongue to close it. “Just like I remembered,” The vampire murmurs, placing their hands on either side of his face, leaning down to give him a bloody, salty-sweet kiss. He gags, instinctively, and they sit up, still holding him down on the floor with their weight, and arch their back with a peal of wild, delighted laughter. “Is that repayment enough, I wonder?”
His limbs tingle pleasantly as the feeling starts to return to them. It takes too much effort to turn his head and follow them with his half-closed, bleary eyes as they stand and move across the room, looking over everything he’s done to make this little cabin a home.
“You should leave,” They say, finally, looking over the sourdough starter in its glass jar, tilting it this way and that to watch the sludge of flour, water, and bacteria shift, breathing the scent in deeply with a smile. 
He swallows, and then again. It’s too much work but he speaks anyway. “... th’ forest?”
“The country.” They set the sourdough starter down and turn around, pulling out one of the chairs and plopping themself casually into it. “I’ve seen wars begin and end a dozen times or more, Herr Eeten. This one will be immense.”
“They told us… the last would be the war to end all wars,” Erich says, groggily, managing slowly to sit up with his back to the door. The dregs of the venom mean he doesn’t panic like he should. It feels… nice.
He can see why there are secret vampire dens where people go to forget. Many of his fellow soldiers have been found there, seeking oblivion where they can get it. 
“They lied,” The vampire says in a flat voice. “The people who start wars, Erich, lie to those who fight them. Every damn time. There is no glorious thousand-year anything on the horizon, only death and death and death. And this time, not the sort I enjoy.”
“I know. I know they’re lying to us. That is why I hide here.” He drops his hands into his lap. The left is trembling again. He closes his eyes against it.
“You can’t hide forever. They’ll find you, sooner or later, with their dreadful efficiency. If I could find you with only the memory of your name and rank, think of how easy it must be for an entire government with every detail from birth til your return from battle?”
He shakes his head, closing his eyes. “I can’t fight again. I cannot do it, blutsauger-”
“Call me Auri.” They sigh, leaning on the table with one elbow. “I can’t believe I worked so hard to remember your name and you forgot mine.”
“You are a nightmare that wakes me,” Erich says, opening his eyes to look at them again. “And little else. You join all the other nightmares. I do not give them names.”
“Do you want to never fight a war again?” They ask, seemingly mildly curious. Their fingers tip-tap on the table, the nails slightly too long. “Unless you choose to, of course. Would you like to live outside of time?”
He swallows.
He knows what they’re offering without needing to hear them say it in full.
Still, though, he finds himself whispering, “Why?”
They hear his real question - why me? - and their smile grows. “You’re beautiful, Erich, even now. Wasted, but beautiful. I’m lonely, these days, and you are, too. Get away from the rot and decay entirely. Become something they cannot give commands to. Walk the world with me. Let’s be lonely together.”
Erich stares at them, trying to think this through, but his brain still feels like foggy sludge. He often does, after he sees the past. It can take hours or even days to get entirely back to himself, and in the interim he loses time. He breathes gas that isn’t there, coughing his lungs out on nothing. He hears shells that aren’t really falling, hiding under his bed until they stop, convinced he’s in a trench and can hear the screams.
He was in Bad Segeberg one day when someone’s automobile backfired and he very nearly killed a man he saw, suddenly, as an enemy soldier.
To his credit, he wasn’t the only man nearby who reacted that way. When they had pulled him off of his near-victim, there had been another man his age hiding, curled with his hands over his head, yelling for his rifle.
And they want Erich to do it all over again?
He’ll die first.
“I am too tired to fight you,” He says by way of reply, and their eyes light up. They stand and move back towards him, dropping to a crouch and then to their hands and knees. They crawl the last few feet towards him, but they move like a predator, not like prey.
He doesn’t try to escape them this time.
He lets them move right up to him, and when they kiss his cheek, he feels nothing.
“Leave men and their petty wars behind,” They whisper, seeking his answer in his eyes, they are so very close and their pupils are blown so wide there is nearly no color around them. “Escape this life and live a new one with me.”
“I hate you,” He replies, but he looks down, rolling his sleeve up in the scant bit of space Auri has left between them. “I have hated you for twenty years.”
“Hate me, if you wish,” Auri replies, “for a thousand years more. But hate me beside me.”
“What happens if I say no?”
“You’ll live here until they find you and drag you away.” They shrug, casual and careless. “You decide.”
Erich doesn’t say yes.
He simply reaches up and grips his hand into their hair, pulling them back against his neck. 
“No more pain, Herr Eeten,” They murmur, biting down and then licking at his blood as it wells hot and demanding. 
They latch on and venom floods him all over again.
Erich embraces the collapse this time. He lets the fog and the dizziness take him, pull and pull from him. When they pull back to cut their own wrist and put it to his mouth, he doesn’t fight them, not this time. He opens, and he swallows the dead blood down, mixed with his own, as though it were a liquor finer than any other.
At first, his body tries to revolt, nausea flips inside him, but he forces his way through it and soon enough the blood takes on the buzzing, burning warmth he has always dreamed about obliterating his memories entirely.
He knows what it feels like when his body starts to ache, the first swell of death coming in close enough to kiss.
He lets Auri hold him, listens to them purr.
When they pull free, they run a hand through his hair, lean down to nuzzle along his face. “Do not fret,” They whisper. The affection, he thinks dazedly, sounds real. “I won’t leave you to die alone, Erich.”
“Please-...” He looks at them, his vision darkening around the edges. “Will it-... will it take the memories away, of what I’ve lost?”
“No.” 
At his sound of despair, they shush him with a finger to his lips. The pain within him grows, his organs beginning to shut down one by one. The heartbeat continues on, strong, the very last thing that will stop.
“But you will see,” Auri continues, their voice beginning to sound further and further away, “that none of it ever mattered at all.”
Erich opens his mouth to protest that this is the opposite of what he wanted to believe about the people he’s lost and the war he fought, but he can’t seem to speak any longer. His eyes drift closed again.
Their whisper is barely audible, against his ear. They kiss him, bloodied lips to bloodied lips. He shivers. “I’ll be here when you live again, Erich.”
The sounds of shelling, the screaming of the men in the trenches, the coughing as the gas seared and burned their lungs and skin…
It all falls silent.
He takes in a final breath and holds it in burning lungs.
“I’ll be here,” Auri says gently, running fingers through his hair like a mother soothing a child with a fever, “when you wake.”
The last thing he feels is his canine teeth starting to loosen as the fangs begin to push them out.
He exhales.
Erich Eeten’s heart beats once, twice… 
And then stops.
-
@mylifeisonthebookshelf @insaneinthepaingame @keeper-of-all-the-random-things @burtlederp @finder-of-rings @newandfiguringitout @astrobly @endless-whump @pretty-face-breaker @gonna-feel-that-tomorrow @doveotions @boxboysandotherwhump @oops-its-whump @cubeswhump @whump-tr0pes @downriver914 @whumptywhumpdump @whumpiary @orchidscript @nonsensical-whump @outofangband @what-a-whump @thefancydoughnut @evermetnotforgotten you may like this! @wildfaewhump come get y’all nonbinary whumper
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ashintheairlikesnow · 2 years
Text
Quite at Home in Hell
For @whumptober2021 day six & day 21:  blood-matted hair & hunger
CW: Vampirism, blood drinking, noncon touch, creepy whumper, sadistic whumper, biting, captivity, dehumanizing language
Vampire Chris AU Masterlist | Follows directly from this piece
Thanks to @boxboysandotherwhump for helping me with the German & @alittlewhump for helping with the French!
-
1918, the Western Front of WWI
The prisoners are held in a small, hastily constructed sort of barracks far too close to the front lines.
Gefrieter Erich Eeten knows why, of course. The hope is that his own people will hesitate before they blast this bit of dirt apart, that they will be concerned enough about killing their fellow soldiers that they’ll give up a few key moments of pause to the French, the Americans, and the British. Give them the advantage in a firefight.
They want to shield themselves with the bodies of the men in this tent, unwashed and dirty, who are exhausted from a day spent digging trenches for their enemies to hide in. 
He can’t exactly blame the Allied powers for it. 
It’s a brilliant bit of strategy, if less and less effective as men on both sides become so battle-hardened that they cease to care about their own lives, let alone each other. Still. He’d almost rather be at one of the true POW camps further away from the front lines, where the Red Cross at least comes to check on their treatment.
Here, so close to the front, there is no one keeping watch on what happens to them at all… and the longer the war draws on, the more viciously they kill each other, the more the prisoners kept here too far for oversight feel like they are teetering at the edge of some terrible invisible cliff. 
There’s a stiff breeze outside the tent, whipping the heavy, waterproofed canvas edges. They’re flapping a little, making a sound that Erich will one day hear in his nightmares. The cold sneaks in through the slight space between tent and ground, and the men in here are huddled together for warmth, sharing the meager blankets they are given. 
At least, though, their captors are officially the French. 
Say what you will about the blasted frogs, they never deny their prisoners a nip of strong cognac to help hold off the cold. The Americans, on the other hand, seem to be laboring under an enforced lack of good liquor, not just for prisoners but for their own soldiers, too. That seems a worse crime than nearly any other, in circumstances like this. To force a man to be a cruel killer without even a nip or three to soothe his conscience… to Erich, it sounds like brutality.
There’s a bit of a scuffle outside the tent, and the prisoners look up. Erich is at the back, leaning back against the rough frame of a cot he sleeps on at night, cards in his hands wrapped in strips of bandage cloth just for warmth. What happened to his gloves, he’s no idea. Probably one of the Allies took them for a souvenir.
The canvas wraps work well enough.
“Au garde-à-vous, prisonniers! Sur vos pieds!” Erich knows the voice - it’s the main guard of the tent they sleep in, a man named Alain who looks entirely too old for war. Here he is, anyway, all moustache and silvering hair, pulling open the entrance of the tent, moving the flap aside. 
Erich glances left and then right, meeting the eyes of his fellow prisoners, and the half-dozen of them that share this single small tent push heavily to their feet, shifting apart as much as the tent will allow, hands behind their back. 
His stomach dips, a low drumbeat of dread alongside his heart. Something tells him this isn’t a social call he wants to be part of. 
He’s even more certain when a tall, thin American steps into the entrance, nearly silhouetted by the dim, barely-there light behind them. Their hair is long, in a loose plait with parts undone, and their eyes gleam, briefly seeming to glow in the dark. Erich is reminded of his mother’s cat, who would stalk mice at night and whose eyes did just the same when light hit them.
He feels very… mouselike.
They wear a medic’s uniform, but it’s a little tattered. There are unrepaired bullet holes through the heavy woolen tunic, and they move with grace and disdain for how heavy wet wool must be, how itchy and uncomfortable. As if it simply doesn’t matter to them.
Because, of course, it doesn’t. The damn thing is a walking corpse, baring fangs in a grisly smile.
“Hello, soldiers,” They say, in a voice that isn’t quite a purr. “You all look a fright.”
“Verdammte Blutsauger,” Lukas Müller mutters to his right. 
Erich hates the bloodsuckers. Everyone does. They come with the Americans, monsters brought from the shadows as a kind of secret weapon. Erich has never seen vampires out in the open before - back home, they are creatures of hiding. They live in cellars and basements and houses with the windows painted in thick matte black. They sweep along the streets at night, a risk for anyone who stays out too late.
But they’re not part of anything. 
Here, they’re death itself, demons quite at home in hell.
 Oh, sure, the Americans claim they use them only for bringing the injured back to safety - and some of them, he’s sure, are kept to that purpose. Some kind of ability to deny the truth of them, if there are enough seen doing only what the official story claims.
Erich, though, has seen one dispatching wounded German soldiers one by one left behind in a field, killing them before they can be recovered by their own people. He’s seen one with fangs buried in the throat of a man who would otherwise have lived. They’re listed as medics, but those things are what keeps the Germans on their own side of the battle lines after dark, and everyone knows it. 
His own side brings canisters of poison gas. The Americans respond with an army laced around its edges in abominations the gas can’t touch.
The vampire sighs, faintly disappointed. “No good morning for me from my audience?”
Erich speaks the best English out of them all - his grandmother was English, taught it to his father in the cradle, who taught it to him. It’s made him more or less the spokesman for his small group of prisoners, and for the larger group when they are moved and briefly allowed to interact with the others. He clears his throat, stepping forward slightly. Lukas and Vilhelm, on his other side, nudge him just a little with their shoulders. It’s meant to be support, he supposes. 
He feels like he’s being pushed onto a target painted on the floor, one invisible only to him. 
“Good morning,” Erich says, voice flat, letting his accent roll far more heavily off his tongue than it needs to, turning good into gut. It’s always good to let the enemy believe you know less than you really do, so he pretends that English comes with difficulty and not ease. “Should you not turn to ash?”
Their eyebrows raise just slightly, not quite in amusement, and they give a brittle little laugh. “First off, Fritz, that’s a myth. Secondly, it’s not even morning. Probably close to evening now, honestly.” 
Erich rolls his eyes. Lukas mutters something under his breath next to him, but the slight creaking of their boots seems to cover it too much to be understandable. Erich sighs, heavily. “Then why did you have us say to you good morning, Blutsauger?” 
“Because it’s funny that you don’t know what time it is, of course. All right, who here is Fritz, who is Hans, and who am I just going to call Kraut?” 
“No one here is named Hans and no one is Fritz, fangs.” Erich tips his chin down slightly, a lock of greasy brown hair falling into his eyes. “May you drown in holy water.”
He spits at the vampire’s feet.
He feels a pang of regret when the vampire turns to look at Alain, the French guard and points back at Erich, cheerful. “I want that one. He’s rude.”
“Das ist pech,” Lukas whispers.
When Alain simply stares at them blankly - and Erich knows Alain speaks English, they’ve spoken before in a tongue they had in common when neither spoke the other’s mother-tongue -  the vampire groans. They don’t seem to know Alain is pretending not to understand them. “Fine. Let’s try this again. Je veux cet homme, s'il vous plaît.”
Alain’s expression tightens a little. He nods, and he won’t look Erich in the eyes as he draws the entrance open a little wider. “Emmenez-le alors.”
“Merci beaucoup,” The vampire says, giving a little bow. Erich backs up, but there isn’t anywhere to go, and none of them is armed. Besides, any resistance is met with removal of meals, with being denied the smallest comforts that make this bearable. With the possibility of all of them being handed over to a vampire, not just one.
This war had been civilized, in some ways, before the Americans brought their monsters.
It’s not actually true, but in this moment it comforts him to pretend it, to have a place to put his furious disgust as the vampire’s thin, long fingers close around his arm and yank him forwards with inhuman strength. They’re clicking their tongue against the top of their mouth in a strange animal way. Erich thinks again of his mother’s cat, making just that sound watching birds outside the windows.
“May your hands be pressed into the holy cross,” Erich snaps as he’s forced out into the freezing humid air outside the tent. There are others walking around - a war camp is never less than controlled chaos, no matter the time of day - but none of them will look at him. No one acknowledges him, although they’ve all seen this before. They know what’s going to happen here. 
“Je déteste ça,” Alain mutters.
A bell is rung, clanging in a discordant note, and soldiers move into the POW tents. Erich is led towards a pole in the center of the ring of prisoner tents, something that a half-century ago might still have been a flogging post, a punishment for mutinous men. 
“Crosses don’t really harm us,” The vampire says, careless and casual. “Very little does, actually. I’m a big fan of garlic, for instance. Silver, though…” They hum, dragging a fingernail over Erich’s wrist. “That hurts.”
He jerks his hand back and free, only to have the vampire laugh, bright and brilliant, and grab him again, spinning him around until they’re behind him, chest pressed to his back, using that demon strength to twist his arms up his back until his bones creak and ache, forcing him forwards towards the pole. 
“I hope you have silver shoved down your throat,” Erich manages, but his heart is pounding in fear as the vampire grabs his hair and jerks his head to the side, forcing his cheek against the rough-hewn wood. Splinters bite into his skin and he grunts as his arms are moved, forced to encircle the pole. His wrists are tied with rope, leaving him looking a little ridiculous, as if he decided today to go for a hug. 
Another rope goes around his shoulders, keeping him in this awkwardly pressed position. He tries to kick back, pulling viciously, but then his ankles come next. The rope goes from them to small metal hooks driven hard into the ground, keeping his legs more than shoulder-width apart. He can’t kick, or even balance himself. He must rely entirely on the pole he’s tied to in order to stay upright. 
“I’m going to enjoy you,” The vampire murmurs. 
Behind Erich, the sounds of a crowd gathering begin. Soft mumbles, exhalations of surprise and disgust. He closes his eyes against the rush of heat he feels - more rage than tears - knowing the prisoners are being brought out to witness this, to be shown what could happen to them next.
It does an excellent job of making them grateful for every day it’s not.
The French commander of the POW camp is barking a running list of commands to his men, but Erich doesn’t speak enough French to clearly understand them. Someone comes close by behind him, and he jolts as there’s a clap to his back. There’s a laugh behind him, not the vampire but someone else.
He manages to see from the corner of his eyes. A different American, of course. Comfortable enough with the vampire to get this close to them. 
“Isn’t this a sorry sight,” The American says, and laughs. “What’s the prize for, fangs?”
The vampire lifts their hand, gently brushing Erich’s hair from his eyes. He spits in their face, this time, and is gratified by a flash of very real anger that briefly overtakes their constant amusement. They slowly wipe the spit away, then clean their hand - sort of - on Erich’s uniform. 
It’s so dirty they’re probably even less clean after that than they were before.
“Reported a desertion. Now I get fresh food.” They lean down, meeting Erich’s furious hazel eyes. “I’m so hungry, Fritz. All the time. Imagine being surrounded by schnitzel and cabbage as far as the eye can see, and you’re not supposed to eat your fill. Imagine how empty you would feel.”
“Fick dich.” 
“What, you won’t even curse at me in English anymore?” The vampire pouts, lower lip sticking out. He hates them more than he’s hated anyone during this godforsaken war. “Come on, you have to understand how hard this is for me, right?”
Erich ignores them, jerks his wrists again, trying to yank himself free of the ropes through sheer force. His back already is aching from being slightly bent forward, his thigh muscles stretched. He does the only thing he can think of - he slowly, with effort, drags his face along the wood and manages to turn away, and look the other direction. 
“Well, fine. I suppose you’ll be mad at me for acting like you all eat schnitzel and cabbage, too,” The vampire says behind him. He doesn’t dignify them with an answer. He fixes his eyes, instead, on a point in the dark roiling clouds in the sky, above the remaining trees. 
“The prisoners are well-positioned to witness,” A French officer states, speaking with a light, dancing accent but without the difficulty and hesitancy some of the regular infantry have. “You may feed when ready, Private Saathoff.”
That gets Erich’s attention. “Saathoff?”
“That’s right.” The vampire laughs, stepping up behind him. Their fingers move through the hair that curls, grown a little too long, over the back of his neck. He shudders with disgust at the intimacy of it. Their mouth moves close to his ear, but there is no heat of breath. Only the brush of lips. “Ich bin Deustcher, genau wie du.” 
“Nothing like me,” Erich grinds out with his teeth gritted together so hard his jaw is already aching. He presses his forehead into the rough wooden pole and closes his eyes. He takes a deep breath. 
If he’s going to die…
“Vater unser im Himmel,” he begins, halting. He hasn’t seen the inside of a church since he was fourteen, and that was twelve years ago now. Still, the words to the Lord’s Prayer come easily, more muscle memory than thought. “Geheiligt werde dein Name. Dein Reich komme, Dein Wille geschehe, wie im Himmel so auf Erden-”
“Zu jeder anderen Zeit hätte ich dich als Haustier behalten.” They use his hair to jerk his head back, and their fangs jam into his neck with a flash of sudden agony.
It’s a white-hot pain that races down his spine to the very tips of his toes, and Erich screams, the sound strangled and thin but still echoing, bouncing off of trees and tents and back into his mind, crashing like the shells that slam into the earth. 
Lukas jerks forwards as if to run to help him and is pushed back by one of the French soldiers, their expression set in a grim line. They have to twist Lukas’s arms behind his back to hold him as he shouts, angrily, that this isn’t fair, it’s against the laws of conduct. 
There’s laughter, at that, from their captors. 
The other prisoners grumble and shift uncomfortably, look at anything but Erich whenever they can, but they can’t escape the sound of his horror, of his pain. 
There’s no pulse of the much-spoken-of venom. There’s no numbness to drift in, there’s no fog to cloud out his awareness of what is happening to him. Every muscle of Erich’s body is tensed tight enough to snap the bones they wrap around, the veins standing out in his throat as if giving them a roadmap of where the food can be found.
He didn’t know vampires could choose not to use the venom.
He didn’t know they could make it feel like this.
When his scream dies, he can’t get enough breath to make another. All he can do is let out high-pitched, thin whimpers and cries. Spots dance before his eyes. Beneath the sound of his heart pounding in a sudden panic to push more blood faster to replace what is being lost, he can feel - can hear - a low rumbling sound against his back.
Erich has heard the rumors that vampires purr, and now he knows they aren’t rumors at all.
He can feel it right through his back, just barely. It’s a vibration that would be pleasant if it didn’t seem to be somehow making everything hurt even worse, waking up his nerves the way the venom is supposed to deaden them. Their hands are closed around his ribs, pressing the tips of their fingers rhythmically against them, as if playing a piano, as if he is dough to be kneaded, as if he isn’t human at all.
As if he’s nothing but a field mouse that found his way into the wrong house, and the vampire is the housecat who has waited too long for a living toy to torment.
There is no prayer, in pain like this. There is no thought beyond the body’s fight for survival and the mind wanting to flee from it, if surviving means this feeling will not end. There is nothing but the feeling of his blood being pulled forcefully out of his body, nothing but his nerves screaming to escape it, nothing but the bite of the ropes that ensure he can do no more than jerk in his bonds and choke on his agony.
It feels like forever - and like a moment - when their fangs pull free, their cool rough tongue lapping at the wounds to close them, purring against his ear with contentment. Their fingers knead into his skin a little bit longer, drawing the moment out as he slumps against the wooden pole he’s tied to. He’s only standing because of the ropes.
Pain rolls through him, breaking against the edges of his body from the inside, like the smaller waves after a storm falling onto a beach already strewn with debris. He slumps. His own breath is a rasping wheeze, taking far more effort than it should.
Nein, Erich, Erich stirb nicht…” Lukas’s voice comes from somewhere so far away, filtering through the noise in Erich’s mind slowly. He can’t even begin to form a response. His mouth won’t answer his commands. It only hangs open, panting, pulling in the chilly air over his tongue. He starts to shiver as the breeze hits the cold sweat in his hair and on his neck, cuts through his uniform somehow.
He doesn’t have enough blood left to warm himself.
Their tongue licks up his neck behind his ear, matting his own blood into his hair there, sticky and hot. It starts to cool and dry immediately in the cold air. Erich’s stomach twists.
“Oh, he won’t die,” The vampire coos, petting through his hair slowly. Their nails scratch at his scalp. “Not today.” Their mouth presses back against his ear. “Thanks for the meal, Erich. And for being so entertaining. Maybe I’ll find you after the war. I’ll buy you a beer… and some schnitzel.”
They push themself away from him, turning away to wipe a bit of blood from the corners of their mouth, and walk with a jaunty step through an opening that appears in the ring of watching prisoners, whose eyes follow them with apprehension and no small amount of fear. 
When Alain comes up to untie him, Erich simply collapses into the Frenchman’s arms as soon as he’s free of the ropes. Lukas is allowed to move up to stand at his other side, putting Erich’s limp left arm around his shoulders, while Alain supports his right. Erich lets his head fall into Lukas’s shoulder, hitching his breath as he forces down a sob. 
“Wh… why do you let them do this?” He asks, his English slurred with the exhaustion that means he is dragged with his boots carving paths through the mud back towards the tent. 
Alain is silent until Erich is dropped onto his cot, the hard frame digging into Erich’s back right through the thin mattress. He glances over his shoulder, the three of them alone in here for the moment, and then looks back. 
“It is believed that this is how we will win,” He says, and pats Erich’s hand. “My apologies. I do not believe in the monsters, but I am not the one to run this war.”
“None of us are,” Erich says, weakly. He closes his eyes. “We are only the ones who must fight in it.”
There’s a pause, and Alain’s exhale is audible in the quiet tent. “I will ensure you are given extra meat rations tonight, and I will find you some schnapps. Essaye de dormir, maintenant, si tu peux,” he says with soft regret lacing his voice. Then there is a shuffle of footsteps, and he’s gone.
Lukas shifts and sits with his back to the cot, in the same position Erich was in before. He swallows, picking up the abandoned cards from the game they’d been playing, looking over Erich’s hand. “You’d have won, you know, on the next hand,” He says in German, before he reaches out to grab the others’ cards and reshuffle the deck.
“Do I still get my… my winnings?” Erich can barely move his lips to speak. He’s so tired. So, so tired. He can feel his hands starting to shake, now that it’s over, the trembling moving slowly up his limbs, stuttering his breathing. 
“My share of the liquor? Not on your life.” Lukas pauses, and then his tone gentles as he looks Erich over again. “You know what... of course you can. You’ll need warmth. What did the bloodsucker say to you, anyway? I couldn’t hear.”
Erich thinks about the promise to find him after the war, about the way they spoke into his ear as if he were little more than a toy top to be spun at their command. In another time, I’d keep you for a pet, they had whispered, before they bit down. 
He shakes his head, slowly. “Lies,” He answers, and feels the softer-edged darkness of sleep begin to take him.
“Lies?” 
“I hope… I hope they were lies.”
For the moment, at least, he is too exhausted by the present to feel terror for the future.
-
@mylifeisonthebookshelf @insaneinthepaingame @keeper-of-all-the-random-things @burtlederp @finder-of-rings @newandfiguringitout @astrobly @endless-whump @pretty-face-breaker @gonna-feel-that-tomorrow @doveotions @boxboysandotherwhump @oops-its-whump @cubeswhump @whump-tr0pes @downriver914 @whumptywhumpdump @whumpiary @orchidscript @nonsensical-whump @outofangband @what-a-whump @thefancydoughnut
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ashintheairlikesnow · 2 years
Note
☺️ - Soft words of reassurance or/and ✋ - A hand carding gently through their hair for Erich, if you're still doing that! I am poisoned by his and Auri's "hand in unlovable hand" relationship, somebody save me
CW: Vampirism, blood drinking, a super dead guy, some brief emeto at the beginning, creepy whumper, intimate whumper, noncon/dubcon kissing and touching, implied fade-to-black dubcon
-
1938, Germany
The woman and her two children run screaming into the night, the woman's headscarf left behind, but Erich Eeten does not follow them.
They were never his target.
Blood spatters onto the cobblestoned streets where he lands on his hands and knees, and Erich stares down at it, tasting the buzz of copper and life on his tongue, down his throat.
In the low lights that line the street, the blood shimmers like rain where it puddles and cools beneath his fingers, which no longer carry any heat of their own.
He might sob. He's not sure what sound he makes.
He throws up again, but is it throwing up if he'd never really swallowed it? At least the woman and her sons would make it home safe, even if they would remember him as a demon, and not as someone trying to help them.
To his left, the man whose throat he's just torn out groans, voice bubbling and burbling as he drowns in his own blood. His fucking hat, with its eagle and skull, has landed several feet away. Erich recognized the bearing, the attitude, even the uniform from those men who skulked around Bad Segeberg looking and watching and listening for defiance, disagreement, dissent.
He knew men like this.
He had never been allowed to kill them before.
All that you've done, and you die like this? How do you like it? How does it feel? I know how it feels to die.
But I came back... and you won't.
The man meets his eyes, wild and white-rimmed in his panic, as his hands scrabble at his throat as though he could close the wound Erich had torn there with his teeth. His mouth opens and closes, like a fish, and there's hysterical laughter bubbling up that Erich doesn't dare let out.
How does it feel, Schutzstaffel, to die like a dog in the street?
The officer's long black coat flares around him like the wings of a fallen bird. Erich chances only the barest glance at how the blood has soaked into his uniform - red on black hardly visible beyond the slight shine in the dim light thrown by the streetlamps - and feels with a twist in his chest a jealous, hideous sneer of that blood should be mine inside him.
Better nourishing him than allowing this man to continue breathing. He crawls, digging his fingers into the spaces between the stones, feeling the grime and grit of city dirt underneath his nails. His mouth latches onto the open wound, and the man claws at him, helpless and weak, while Erich drinks his fill.
Hot blood, full of the life that flees the man's body and moves with its warmth and spark into Erich's, instead. He hears the rumble begin inside his chest, but he can no more stop it than he could have chosen to stop his own heart, before of course... he did.
His stomach heaves again, and he shakes his head, as though he could shake out the thoughts, the new instincts that roll around inside of him. It makes him seem like a dog with a rabbit in its teeth, shaking to snap the neck.
The man's attempts to push him away become weaker, and then his arms fall, and his hand lands in a splatter of his own blood. Erich pulls back, feeling himself start to shake. There are hot bloodied tears on his cheeks, pink tracks that run down and find their way into the hint of stubble that will be with him forever, now.
"I don't know how not to kill," He whispers, but he doesn't have to.
No one else is on the streets of Berlin tonight.
No one except...
He hears them coming closer before he can smell them, before he can hear their voice.
"Sssshhhh, it's all right. You'll learn, liebling." The sound of their speech sings inside of him. He hadn't asked what it meant, to be Turned, not really. What it would change between them.
He hadn't wanted to know.
He hadn't wanted to understand that he would be theirs, wholly and utterly, once it was done.
Their hand presses palm-down to his back, rubbing up and down the length of his spine. He can see the end of their pale plaited hair just at the edge of his vision to the left, and when he tips his head, the rounded front of their heavy boots is visible, too.
There's a blood spot on the steel-toed edge.
Erich swallows, as his mouth floods with saliva. Now that's it done and over, they speak to each other in German or English, and there's no rhyme or reason to the decision. He's learned that Auri Saathoff speaks six languages, four like a native. He's learned that if he lives long enough, he probably will, too - but every one of his languages will be in a dialect few people use any longer by the time he masters it. "I hate you. I hate this-"
"I know," They coo, soft as a mother's lullaby, hand settling at the back of his neck. "I know you do. But you'll get used to it, miene Liebe-"
"Don't call me that," He snaps. "You can't even feel it."
"You don't know that. But all right, Erich."
"He would have hurt them," Erich says, voice flat. The dead man's eyes are still wide open, his expression locked in a final rictus of horror. Because of him.
Erich killed men during the war, but that felt... different than this.
He hadn't realized it would be so different.
"Yes. He would have. I could smell it on him, they wouldn't even be the first of the night. They are men drunk on the very power that will bring them to ruin. It doesn't matter, though, Erich. You don't understand. There is no goodness here. Whether or not they deserve it, if they're evil... none of that really matters."
"It matters to me," Erich says, voice hoarse, but he takes their hand and allows himself to be pulled to his feet. His left hand starts to tremble, to shake. He'd hoped that would go away when he Turned, but it didn't.
None of it really went away.
Even with fangs and a life that cannot be taken so easily as it once could, he hides from gunshots and he fears the sound of the tanks that roll through the streets.
It didn't fix anything.
He swallows, blood tickling his throat, and repeats, "It-... it matters to me."
"For now, yes." Their hand presses to the side of his face, cool and lifeless, and he tips his head into it. His own face flushes with stolen blood as it moves through him, and he opens his own eyes to meet theirs. His are red and rimmed in bloody tears - theirs are clear, and glimmer in the darkness. They glow.
They pull him close, their other hand moving up to run back through his hair, combing their fingers through the short-cropped dark strands. His forehead drops onto their shoulder, and they laugh, softly, against his ear.
"I wish I could kill you," He mutters, and they purr in response. The vibrations roll through him, soothing him unnaturally with the happiness of his packleader rolling through him.
They are a pack of two, and he loathes every fucking second, but he can't pull away.
They did not tell him he would feel like this.
"That will fade, too," They murmur, lips moving against his ear. He feels a throb of warmth, deep within him, and pulls back suddenly, startled by it - only to see them laugh at him in response, sparkling and brilliant. "Oh, didn't I tell you? If you drink enough blood fast enough... some of your body wakes back up, too. Just for a little while."
"I don't want that," He says, voice low, and their thumb moves over his jawline, back and forth, the rough stubble there spotted with silver that will never fade, but it will never worsen, either. "I don't want you."
They pull back to look at him, smiling, and kiss him. He stiffens, but they ignore it, one hand on his face, the other still moving through his hair, to the back of his head, pressing him into the kiss whether he likes it or not. They lick at the blood still smeared around his mouth, over his lips, with a tongue rough as a cat's. They nip at his lips with their fangs, blood welling up only for the wound to heal as fast as they make it.
Erich's tongue is rough now, too.
"You are mine," They say, voice gentle but firm. "You chose it, remember. You chose to belong to me."
"I didn't know what I was choosing," He says, shaking his head. His voice is weak, and his left hand shakes until they take it in theirs and bring his knuckles to their lips, when it goes finally still. "I-... I didn't know it meant-"
"Too late, Erich," Auri Saathoff interrupts, voice sweet as sin, lips to knuckles, leaving faint pinkish smears on each one. As if he'd been in a fistfight, rather than attacked a man in the street who was menacing a woman and her children. They look up at him from beneath heavy eyelashes. "Too, too, too late."
Suddenly, Auri backs up, pulling him with them, until their back smacks into the brick wall of a boarded-up shop and they let out a peal of laughter, tipping their head back and pulling Erich's in so he nuzzles along their neck, whether he wants to or not. His breath would come faster, now, if he needed to breathe.
Sometimes he forgets he doesn't, and he pants like an animal in a sudden desperate bid for oxygen while they laugh at him for it. They say that will stop, too, eventually.
"Someone could come here and find him," Erich protests, but he doesn't pull away from their hands in his hair, his arms moving to hold them, pressing into their lower back through their shirt. "And us."
"We'll kill whoever does," Auri murmurs, kissing at his temples, his hairline, nipping fangs at his ear until the pain pricks there and makes Erich groan, shifting to grab at their thighs.
They lock their ankles behind his back, held up by their back against the wall and his hands alone. He could drop them now.
He can't.
"But-"
"We'll kill whoever sees us and fuck in their blood," Auri hisses, and he can't keep back the low moan at the mental image. “Come now, Erich... If you don't want to be seen, you'd better satisfy me quickly," Auri whispers against his ear, and then buries their fangs in his neck.
Pleasure rolls through him with the first burst of venom, sparks behind his eyes like a burst of lighting that never ends. Erich whispers every curse he can think of in English and German both as his body blazes to burning life with the fresh hot blood inside him and the cold adoration of Auri against him.
"I hate you," He groans. "I hate you so much, I hate you-"
"Hate me," Auri whispers, lapping at his neck, "if you want. Hate me forever." They roll their hips against his, and the pleasure pours through him. He's on fire in a way he can't remember being when he was alive. He rocks back against them.
"I will, I'll hate you until we both burn to ashes-"
"Do it, then." Their fingernails scratch at his back through his shirt. "But you'll hate me while you're so deep inside me you don't know where I end and you begin."
They bite his neck again.
His eyes close, bracing them against the wall as his hands scramble to yank their pants down over their hips.
They laugh again.
He doesn't know how to even begin to explain that he already can't tell the difference.
-
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ashintheairlikesnow · 2 years
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how did I just now notice that he's. Gefreiter Erich Eeten. like yeah he sure is going to be... Eaten
OH THANK THE LORD SOMEONE SAW WHAT I DID THERE
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