Chapter Text
Harsh white lights caught the tips of the gently lapping tide as it brushed the harbour walls. They looked like seagulls, Viago thought. Giant, glowing seagulls about to dive down and swipe the foul-smelling kebab right out of Stu’s hand. It had been a long time since he’d seen a bird so bold in person. They rose so close to the sun that he was tucked safely back up in his casket before the first of them began to stir. Still, the memory of seeing them dive in his youth was so vivid. Funny how that happened.
Nick was muttering on about some contest or other in which you could win a shirt by allowing yourself to be scared. He’d been talking since Dixon street, and even Vladislav, who had initially seemed to enjoy the descriptions of such terror, seemed less enthusiastic after a solid twenty minutes of it. It was something the rest of them had learned over time. To reserve some quiet time for themselves, not to impose upon the others too much. Nick was only a few weeks old, he would learn. Still, Viago’s feet itched to stride ahead, put the noise behind him and find some peace further along the Ara Moana and beyond.
“I can smell werewolves,” Deacon announced. Oh. That explained the loud sniffing. Too young to know, Nick stalled in his prize description and added…
“What? Real ones?”
Viago almost wanted to sigh. They were so close to their bus stop and he’d been looking forward to an early day, if only to escape the cameras for a while. The crew were nice enough, but the constant smell of forbidden blood wore on them all sometimes.
“We’re about to walk past some werewolves,” Vladislav was telling Steve - tonight’s camera operator. “So some shit might go down.”
Steve exchanged a silent glance with Kelly the sound engineer, and both adjusted their grip, holding more securely onto their equipment in preparation to run or dodge. Please, Viago thought, please don’t let anything go down. He’d never been keen on violence, however much his body required it, and so, keeping his head down, he fought the irrational urge to look. Eye contact with an aggressive animal, he had learned, was a bad idea. Best that they simply keep walking and head back home.
“Watch out guys, don’t get fleas.”
“Deacon,” Viago said, more instinct than anything else. Something pulled him back as they passed the centre of the group, like a stretched out elastic band, and his eyes flicked involuntarily upward, skimming over coats and sweaters. They were outnumbered, he realised with dismay. Six wolves, four vampires, but with the added hindrance of a handful of humans. Nick would defend Stu, and the rest were contractually obliged to make at least a passing effort at protecting the crew.
“What’s that, mate?” One of them replied, because nobody was able to just walk quietly away.
“Sorry, what?” Deacon said, as though he had bothered to lower his voice.
“Keep going,” Vladislav urged calmly, and then possibly realising that this might be misinterpreted, switched to “keep walking, keep walking.”
“We heard that, mate, we’ve got sensitive hearing,” said that same wolf in the middle of the pack, drawing Viago’s eye. And thus drawn, there they stuck. He was a little scruffy-looking, a short, rough beard lining his jaw, reddish in hue. As though to match, his broad shoulders were coated in orange, but it was his eyes that truly drew Viago’s attention. Sharp, intelligent eyes, full of quiet confidence and control. So jarring this was in a werewolf, that it stole his breath. He must have been tireder than he thought, because by the time he’d managed to blink this fixation away, Deacon was goading them further with talk of more doggy behaviour, and Viago found himself laying a hand onto his shoulder.
“Come on, Deacon, stop it.”
The wolf’s eyes snapped up to meet Viago’s own, and for the first time in centuries, warmth bloomed in the centre of Viago’s chest, his breath almost hitching from the shock of it. Could a vampire get ill? He wanted to tell his friends to take him home, to find him a doctor, or a witch, failing that, but no words would form. Why did his mouth feel so dry? He had barely fed an hour ago. Much like his own, the wolf’s eyes did not move away. He felt like a rabbit mesmerised in the glare of a looming predator. A very strange experience for a creature that had no usual cause to fear anything.
Only vaguely aware of the words being exchanged around them, Viago’s mind went perfectly, blissfully blank. The wolf turned his head to chastise the one in the long brown coat for something that took a moment to make it through the haze and into his undead brain. When it did, his lips pressed themselves into a thin line. Sometimes he thought, it seemed that the world hadn’t progressed at all, but that didn’t mean that another could not make his displeasure at such words known.
“Hey, hey, hey! Don’t swear,” said the pretty orange one. “We’re werewolves, not swearwolves. What are we?”
Dutifully, the pack repeated the phrase. The swearing wasn’t the issue however, and in order to avoid any hasty action that might lead to a physical conflict, Viago turned and paced.
“That’s a very offensive word to call people,” Vladislav was saying, while the one with glasses agreed and urged the offending party to listen to Anton. Said party clearly had no wish to listen, however, and so, as one of the others chased a stick that did not exist, Viago stopped pacing, and slapped the offending wolf with his gloves.
It was difficult not to think about those eyes. He quite frequently failed, even during his first conversation with Phillip in decades. Love is patient, he’d told him, right before experiencing a small internal panic attack and running away. He stood outside the care home for hours that night, staring up at the window and trying not to wonder why he’d never been haunted in this manner before. He failed at this, too.
“Are you going to eat that?” Vladislav asked him a few days later, and Viago simply shrugged and passed the postman, leaving a smear on the antique rug below.
“Are you ill?” Deacon demanded, when he made no move to clean it.
“It’s already stained,” said Viago.
“Everything is already stained. The last of the clean furniture got splashed in nineteen fifty seven.”
Viago shrugged again. Deacon’s brow creased.
“You are ill,” he decided. “Vladislav, we need to call a witch.”
Vladislav’s surprisingly clean face lifted, a moment, so as to scowl more efficiently at Deacon.
“We are not going to call a witch, I am not going through that again.”
“It did not seem much of an imposition at the time,” Deacon pointed out. Petyr, from his wing chair in the corner, shook his head in agreement.
“I don’t need a witch. I am fine,” Viago insisted. “I’m just not particularly hungry at the moment.”
“Is this about that decrepit old human again?” Deacon wanted to know. His eyes had narrowed to near-slits. He’d never understood. Neither of them had, really, but Vladislav at least had something else of his own to compare it to. Turning into a different animal every time you sought someone out hardly ticked any romantic boxes. “She will be dead soon, yes?”
“I suppose so,” Viago said, and now Vladislav too looked suspicious.
“You suppose so? You uprooted your entire life for that–”
“Crumbling bag of bones?” Deacon interjected.
“Woman,” Vladislav said, shooting Deacon a look. “Or is that it? You don’t need to think about the words of a dog, Viago. We are above such things.”
“It isn’t the…” Viago rubbed tiredly at his eyes, rising from his chair. “I am going to take a walk, I think.”
And so he did, bright hazel eyes following after, and Petyr’s boring into the back of his head.
It wasn’t until he heard the lapping waves that he realised he’d not taken his usual route. He glanced up to see the towering walls of not the care facility, but of the great angular museum, seen on this occasion from the other side. Perhaps, he thought, if he walked around to the other side and saw the harbour path out of context, he could leave the eyes behind and return to normality, such as it was. He turned left.
Though quieter, the Ara Moana looked much the same as it ever did. Viago wandered slowly down past the trees, heading for the benches that more or less overlooked the unfortunate meeting place. Being a Monday, there were fewer humans around - fewer anyone around - and that suited him just fine. It was easier to think in the quiet, though it occurred to him that maybe this was in part his problem. He’d not been out much since and his mind had been allowed to wander and dwell upon something that ordinarily would not have affected him at all.
Sitting on the edge of the first bench, he thought about werewolves. Counter-intuitive, perhaps, but there must have been something about this encounter in particular - the closest he’d ever had - that had shaken him in this way. Much like the rest of his own kind, he had always considered them mindless beasts. Only forced to transform on occasion, but otherwise brutish and quick to anger, and perhaps they were. The one in the brown coat had done nothing at all to challenge this perception. Nor, eventually, had the blond one.
The pretty one, though - Anton, Glasses had called him - despite reacting to Deacon’s initial goading, had been different. The eyes, yes, but also in his general manner. He had reigned them in - something that Viago would never have thought possible. That had to be the reason, Viago decided as he sat there, replaying events in his head. He’d simply been too angry to process it at the time. He drew in a deep breath and smiled, confident that he’d be back to normal by the time he got home. Maybe he’d even pick up a snack on the way.
When the eyes drifted back into his mind’s eye, it was easier now to replace them with something else - when awake, at least. The drift, however, continued, building again over the following days until, once again, he found himself at the harbour. Confused and a touch concerned, he sat again and looked out over the water. There must be something else he was missing. Another realisation he’d failed to reach on his previous visit that would make it all go away. The ever-present cameras made it difficult to sit quietly elsewhere, so it also made sense that he would be drawn to somewhere they weren’t. Saying yes had seemed such a good idea at the time.
He sat, and he sat, returning twice more over the following days. Unable as he was to so easily dismiss a dream, they had morphed over time into something entirely else. The eyes had been warmer, gentler, the face they were set into smiling in a way that once again stole his breath and once even affected the state he awoke in. He’d lain there staring wide-eyed up at the lid of his coffin while his alarm blared, pretending to sleep through it, lest the cameras be present.
During a house meeting about plans for the upcoming Unholy Masquerade, Viago found himself wondering about the included plus one, and whether this might be extended to those of other backgrounds. And then he panicked, staring down at the card in his hand (which didn’t specify), until Deacon leaned over the kitchen table and waved a hand between it and Viago’s face.
“You’re not thinking about inviting the crypt keeper, are you?” Deacon said when Viago blinked back into the room. “There is no way she could outrun a zombie.”
“What? No.” Viago’s nose scrunched up. “It’s way past her bedtime.”
“It starts at six pm,” Vladislav reminded him. “Please do not tell us you watch her sleep. Even we are not that creepy.”
“Of course not,” Viago scoffed. She did quite often drift off while watching television, but there was little point staying beyond that point. “I haven’t been in a while, anyway.”
“You leave all the time.” Deacon said. “You were gone yesterday.”
“I don’t only go there,” Viago protested. “I have other interests.”
“Since when? Your pottery is inside of the house.”
“Sometimes a walk is just a walk, Deacon.”
“And sometimes it is suspicious as fuck.”
Deacon flung his arm out to one side, at the end of which sat Petyr, bright eyes narrowed in Viago’s direction. The stark, unblinking blue unnerved him when so intently focused on his face. Not that Viago would ever have admitted it.
His friend was right though. It was incredibly suspicious, even to Viago himself. He’d kept up his devoted welfare checks for decades, in part because he formed such connections so infrequently, and there had been little else to steal his attention. He’d long since made his peace with the fact that the inevitable heartbreak would mean he likely never would again, and this could hardly be labelled in the same way after a few short minutes of wordless interaction, however unnervingly similar it felt. Was this how his friends felt when they saw an attractive person? How tiresome.
Footsteps approached, but not edible ones, he realised sadly. Whoever it is was dragging along heavy equipment. He’d been followed. Damn Deacon’s big mouth.
“Could you tell us why you’ve been coming here?” Director Toby prompted, as Steve gave him a thumbs up.
“I don’t know,” Viago said. “I think maybe because this is where we met the wolves?”
“How has that meeting affected you?”
“They were very rude. Most of them.” Viago’s lips pulled up in spite of himself.
“But not all of them?”
“No. The… the one with the orange coat made them stop,” he said distantly, having just marginally prevented himself from using the word attractive on camera. “They listened, so I think perhaps he is in charge.”
“Anderson,” offered Kelly. “Anton, local alpha. We spoke to him yesterday.”
“Anton. Yes.” Viago glanced down at his own folded hands. “I thought that is what they had called him.”
“Why do you think the werewolves bought you here?” Toby, again.
“They were not quite what I was expecting,” said Viago. “I have seen very few werewolves before but I have always thought they were uncontrollable, even while human-shaped. There was some control, even in the rude ones.”
“Because of Anton?” Kelly said. Toby, usually the one to ask such questions, did not look pleased about it.
“Perhaps,” said Viago. “I do not know how much control an alpha has over a pack. It would be unusual for them all to be this way, I think. One is unusual enough.”
A silent conversation seemed to take place between the crew, entirely through the medium of eyebrows. No matter how hard he tried to decipher it, Viago found himself unable. He didn’t know them well enough yet. It was a baffling distraction, but a distraction nonetheless. Toby was being stubborn about something, he thought, but it was impossible to tell what.
“You’re not David Attenborough,” Kelly eventually muttered under her breath.
“Let’s move on, shall we?” Toby said in his usual calm tone, albeit through a clenched jaw. “Wh—?”
“Why do you think you’ve been coming here instead of the care home?” Kelly interrupted. Viago’s stomach dropped, and so, he suspected, did his face.
“I have been there a lot,” he said. “Nothing ever changes. You have breaks, yes? From your jobs.”
“But here in place of there–” She began.
“You think I am unaware,” Viago smiled again, before the vein in Toby’s forehead could begin to pulse and cause Viago’s stomach to rumble. “I am almost four hundred years old, of course I am aware.
“It doesn’t bother you?”
“I can do little about it in either case,” he said, looking wistfully back out over the sea.
“Because he’s a werewolf?” Said Toby, having apparently decided to give up and join in.
“It is not so easy for a lot of reasons,” Viago said. “We have not had a single conversation, he has a wedding ring. I am not even so sure that I can call myself unattached.”
Kelly looked as though she wanted to say something about this, but although Toby had resigned himself, she hesitated, with a glance back in his direction.
“It will pass in time,” Viago said simply.
But it didn’t.
The dreams did not relent, nor did the urge to wander. - Was it still considered wandering if you only ever headed to one location? One way or another, he found himself sitting on the same harbour bench twice more before a curious Petyr took it upon himself to follow one night. His past few trips had been planned, if you could call simply giving in planned. Nick had been telling everybody his entire death story, and still sore that he had been transformed at all, Deacon had picked and prodded until a full scale fight had erupted. Petyr must have been as sick of it as Viago was, for how often he usually left their own grounds.
The harbour had become almost a refuge. Something about the lapping waves and distant echoes of drunken humans lifted the tension from his shoulders and bought him peace. He refused to entertain the possibility that this entire thing was anything more than a passing fancy. The scent of wolf lingered that night, and for the moment, did not set his teeth on edge. They had passed through here again more recently, the scent stronger again than it usually was. Far from the repulsion it might have produced a few weeks ago, it brought with it a dull ache in the centre of his chest that felt almost like longing.
“You can sit down, if you like,” he told Petyr. “There is plenty of room.”
Wordless as ever, Petyr did so, and remained there with him, staring out over the water, until Viago judged it time to return home. Petyr grasped his shoulder before they left, and ridiculously, Viago almost felt as though he might tear up. They caught some dinner on the way back through the door. Some bearded weirdo hanging around in the bushes, lurking to see what he might steal, no doubt. He would not steal anything else, and Vladislav was quite pleased with the crossbow and bolts they had bought him.
“You smell of werewolf,” Deacon said, as soon as they stepped back inside.
“We have not seen any,” said Viago, as he tucked his handkerchief back into his pocket, “but they had been nearby, I think.”
Petyr cast upon Deacon a Significant Look, and Deacon did not look pleased about it.
Viago, who had come to feel most at peace (such as it was) and able to focus after one of his walks, settled into the library to read before bed. Immersed as he was, Vladislav had to clear his throat to catch his attention when, a chapter in, Petyr loomed again above him.
“Is it morning already?” Viago asked, tucking in a bookmark. He didn’t ordinarily read so slowly, but he had been tired. Out came Petyr’s hand, clasping a small, dark blue book that he passed over to Viago, who took it automatically, glancing down at the cover. There were no words upon it, only an embossed border with a central decorative oval, of a similar design to those from his youth.
“What is this?”
Petyr only inclined his head toward it. Viago opened the cover to read the title.
The Genuine and Entertaining Memoirs of a Well-Known Wolfman of Intrigue. Written by Himself.
Viago’s brow creased.
“Thank you?”
A further Significant Look passed between Deacon and Vladislav. Vladislav put his own volume, pages down, on the nearest side table. An Essay on the Art of Ingeniously Tormenting; with Proper Rules for the Exercise of that Pleasant Art, said the cover.
“We think…” Vladislav paused, as though awaiting the passing of a sudden cramp, “… that you should read it.”
“You want to start a book club?”
“Not exactly–” Vladislav began.
“Petyr thinks that you are hot for the dog” Deacon blurted out, to which Petyr threw up his hands and stalked off. Vladislav turned slowly toward their remaining roommate.
“You really need to learn to keep your mouth shut.”
“He does! Where is the point of beating the shrubs?”
“But that is not how he said it.”
“He never says anything!”
“You have nothing to worry about,” Viago said wearily. Though he wasn’t entirely convinced that he himself should not be, at this point. “You both find people attractive all the time, it does not mean anything.”
Again, the pair exchanged a Look. Vladislav’s side of it suggested that he had developed a sudden toothache.
Petyr shuffled over and handed Viago another book. Read, And Give It A Name, said the title page. Viago peered up at him, now standing there with a full stack in his pale arms.
“Give what a name?”
Probable Incidents, declared the next book he was handed, followed by Love And Madness. A Story Too True. In A Series Of Letters Between Parties Whose Names Would Perhaps Be Mentioned Were They Less Well Known Or Less Lamented.
“I think this is unlikely, Petyr,” Viago’s smile felt tight on his own face now. “But I appreciate the concern.”
“You’ve got to get back out there, mate,” said Nick on the following evening. “Girls can change overnight, trust me. Fuck knows what’s happened in eighty years. She might be allergic to fur now, or scared of the dark or something. Fuck, mate, what if her mind’s gone? You can’t spend the rest of existence reintroducing yourself every few minutes. She’s in a home for a reason.”
Viago, having been under the impression that this was just something that families eventually did now, had not questioned the reason. Morbidly curious, he glanced over at Deacon, wondering whether his dislike of Nick or else his long standing dismissal of actual emotional connections would win out. Deacon didn’t seem to know either, instead choosing to sit there in strained silence. This was silly, he decided. A single glance couldn’t hold a candle to decades of devotion.
With little else to distract him when the urge to walk grew, and unwilling now to indulge it, Viago began to read the book. As the title had stated, it was about a werewolf that had lived in what was then the Batavian Republic. It chronicled his life from a little before he’d been bitten and onward, glossing over what could only have been a quite unpleasant time of adjustment, and focusing instead on the wolf in question doing what he could to make the most of it. Running through it all, a thread of loneliness that the wolfman had either chosen to ignore, or else had not realised.
A few chapters in, Viago was beginning to lose patience. Why did they even have this book? Why did his friends want to make him feel worse? On the verge of giving up, and with the Unholy Masquerade just around the corner, he sighed his way through the end of one last passage. He reached the end of that chapter. And there his gaze remained for a full minute. Hastily, he turned the page and skimmed through the first lines of the next. And the lines that followed. And the lines after that.
Placing a bookmark carefully into the page, he tucked the book into his coat pocket and fled the house.
“About damn time,” Vladislav said, in the now-distance.