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Bloodfiends never cried in public.
Of course sometimes things happened, they had no greater power than humans to hold back an emotional outburst. But it was frowned upon, simply for the inconvenience it caused. Unlike humans, bloodfiend tears left a stain.
Dante had given Sancho the grace of waiting for her to calm down before reviving the rest of the sinners, and she held it together while P Corp carried away her Father, and while Faust summarized the whole ordeal to Vergilius, and through the eight “I’m sorry”s and the five hugs and the three different sets of eyes glaring at her back with varying intensity. But now she was alone, standing in the doorway of her room, which looked nearly identical to how it did in the morning. Something about that felt wrong, like it shouldn’t be allowed to pretend nothing had changed. Sancho was not the one who created such a bright and playful space. That person was dead, and Sancho had undertaken the noble task of puppeting her corpse.
Turning on her heel, she stalked back to the kitchen and rummaged through the cupboard looking for salvation. In the process her fingers brushed over a jar of marshmallow dip labeled ‘Don Quixote’ in big sparkly letters. Out of every food item she’d randomly asked for on grocery runs, this was the only thing she’d deemed worthy enough to claim exclusively as her own. She snatched it, along with the communal bag of instant coffee. Then she finally entered her room and dumped the entire bag into the toilet bowl so at least that part of her brain would stop whining.
With renewed clarity, Sancho sank to the floor and stared grimly at the neutralized water. The rest of the sinners wouldn’t be happy when they woke up and saw their morning coffee was gone.
Sinners… the word revolved in her mind and she felt not-quite iron rising in her throat. At least the coffee smell would mask the vomit.
...
When she was done she dragged herself to bed, hoping she somehow could fall asleep before the faint sounds of humans shuffling about in their rooms ceased. Hearing wasn’t bloodfiends’ most heightened ability, far from it. But it was a little frightening to just hear nothing, even if she’d already slept through tens of thousands of “nothings” before. It felt wrong to say the girl in the lighthouse had been lonely, as she’d had no concept of companionship to yearn for. Now, though, Rocinante was as isolating as it was freeing. The scent of her peers’ blood still carried a certain allure, and she could feel the steady flow of it through Heathcliff’s thin shirt when he’d awkwardly bent down to hug her. But blood didn’t communicate things in the same way anymore. Or as Nicolina would say, it no longer sang to her.
Oh Nicolina. She wiped stray tears with a towel and strained her weak eyes to count the number of loops they’d stained red. She made it to 780 before having to wipe again, resetting the count. This hypnotic cycle went on for several more resets until she heard the distinct sound of the door opening and froze.
She couldn’t recognize the culprit’s light footsteps from this distance, which was maddening. She should have been able to tell just by the scent of their blood, from a city block away. She took a shuddering breath. It wasn’t like anyone on the bus was a threat. She debated whether or not it was worth asking them to leave. It was possible they hadn’t realized she was under here, but where else would she be at this hour? And if they did know, then they might just be trying to wait her out. Honestly, this was disastrous. The hero Don Quixote would not have been caught dead cowering under the covers. And neither would Sancho, the second kindred, for that matter. She’d managed to flub her moment of self-actualization so hard she’d become a shell that was less than the sum of its parts. She furiously rubbed her eyes dry and cleared her throat.
“Prithee, wherefore dost—??!!!!!”
She literally hissed at the sudden onslaught of light as the blanket was lifted off her by a cheerfully smiling sinner. The fact she was baring her fangs at HONG LU of all people was made even more embarrassing when she remembered that she didn’t have any fangs to speak of.
“Hello Miss Don Quixote!” Hong Lu greeted her like this was nothing out of the ordinary. “Would you like some Longjing tea? It has already been fully infused with precisely 120 leaves~”
Those details were both unnecessarily specific, and suspiciously comforting to hear. “I– Hong lu, what are you doing here?!” she demanded, stuffing the bloody towel under the sheets.
“I’m hosting a tea party for you! Tea always helped the girls back home relax and forget their troubles~” he said brightly. Mouth agape, Sancho watched him pour yellow-green tea into a plain cup for her. She stared at the contents doubtfully before reminding herself it was just Hong Lu, and taking a sip. It tasted…fine, she supposed. He hadn't added any sugar. But she tried to savor it, knowing it probably cost a million ahn per leaf.
…
“Ahem. Why exactly hast thou come at this hour, young Hong Lu? You have explained thou– thy intentions with the tea, yet all the same ‘tis very late.” So late it was technically early. They’d made it back to the bus past midnight, and she’d spent more time crying and throwing up than she’d like to admit.
“Because you looked sad! I knew you wouldn’t be sleepy yet, so it didn’t matter if it was late.”
There it was again. “Thou knew?”
“Well, I guessed. The bloodfiends at our mansion always went to bed at dawn. But yesterday was a big day for you, so I didn’t want to wait too long, in case you were tired.”
Sancho could scarcely believe what she was hearing. “There are bloodfiends living at your family’s mansion?”
“Mhm!”
“W-what are they like? Are they…kind people?” she asked, aware of how naive the question sounded but unsure how else to phrase it.
“Oh absolutely! They were some of my closest friends back home~”
She let herself feel happy about that for one second before remembering who she was talking to, and her hope dwindled back down to the ground. “When you say friends…?”
“Haha, it’s a family tradition that on their 13th birthday, each Jia child receives a fatal wound to the abdomen and is locked in the basement where the bloodfiend family lives!”
“...The basement?”
“Mhm, they’ve lived there for generations! If the Jia child survives for 24 hours, then the door will open back up. I quite enjoyed my time down there,” he said without a trace of negativity. “Of course, I couldn't come too close, otherwise I would have become one of them, just like some of my older siblings. Which would have been a disaster, because I promised Xichun I would do her hair the next morning!”
“I…see…” she said weakly.
“My father said the bloodfiends had mostly gone feral, but I don't know about that. I spent a lot of time chatting to them through the vent in my room. I learned so much about your culture! I asked grandmother for permission to keep the corpses of those I defeated in duels, and poured their blood down to the bloodfiends when no one was looking. Grandmother must have thought I had some unusual hobbies, fuhu~”
“I’m s-sure they…appreciated that…”
“Yep! They always thanked me for the treat, although the younger ones were sure to emphasize that my blood would be the sweetest. I was glad they liked it, when I first went down there I felt reeeally sorry that I didn’t bring any cups, so they had to drink it off the floor.”
“ :/ ”
“It’s a good thing I had those awesome people to talk to, otherwise I would’ve gotten totally lonely after the last of my personal butlers was dismissed. Ah, yesterday brought back so many fond memories~” he said with a genuine air of wistfulness.
Sancho was silent for a long time. She felt more than a little sick, but she’d already emptied her stomach earlier. Besides, maybe this was helpful, somehow. At least she wasn’t crying anymore. She finished her last sip of lukewarm tea to be polite, only to watch with dismay as Hong Lu refilled it from the piping-hot kettle.
“Even if your meeting was a bit unconventional, ’tis true that having friends with whom to converse is a blessing. Bloodfiend or not, I hope I can be a worthy friend to you as well, young Hong Lu,” she said finally.
“Oh, but Miss Don Quixote was already a dear friend to me! I loved the books she’d give me.”
Sancho lowered her head. "Then I apologize for taking her from you.”
“You are the exact same person in my eye,” he said with a twinkle.
“I appreciate that, Hong Lu. Of course the bonds built over a year remain, this change need not affect our relationship. My words were meant in a more…literal sense.”
“So were mine!”
“W-what I meant was…” Sancho didn't know how to explain herself. She didn't even know if she should explain herself. Wasn’t becoming Don Quixote the goal? Sancho wanted the sinners to play along. But Hong Lu spoke with such sincerity, like he actually believed it was possible. For all her talk, Sancho couldn't help but dread a return to oblivion, now that she knew it wasn’t permanent. It was Sancho’s turn now, she’d lost 200 years and Don Quixote was gone,
“NO! Don Quixote lives still, a hero like her could never be defeated!” A familiar voice; that of the idolic fixer from the Tres association; insisted.
“Be serious. This one’s personality is completely different,” a cold voice replied; that of the grade 1 Shi assassin.
“But she's trying so hard…can’t we just pretend?” the Dieci saint, always willing to compromise.
“A lie with effort is still a lie,” insisted the Oufi fixer who despised trickery.
“Lady Don Quixote just needs some time to adjust, then she’ll return like nothing ever happened,” the reticent Zwei assured.
“Is ANYONE going to address the elephant in the room here?! All this time, Don Quixote was a–”
“...Or maybe I’m wrong,” Hong Lu abruptly cut them off. “You know best! I didn’t mean to cause any confusion.”
“Huh?” Sancho’s return to earth was accompanied by a stinging pain and she looked down to see she’d broken her teacup and sent hot liquid bursting onto her hand. She shouldn't have even felt it. How did humans deal with surface burns?
Ah. Right.
She wiped her hand off on the bed and slid it underneath herself for the pressure. “I um. I apologize for my lack of decorum, young Hong Lu. It hath been a day of… many trials.”
There was no reason for Sancho to believe the voices would stop upon regaining her memory, just as there had been no reason for Don Quixote to believe they would after leaving the lighthouse. However, Hong Lu’s lack of reaction opened up the worrying possibility that these were genuine hallucinations, as opposed to just an effect of her EGO room or prolonged isolation. Her fingers ran nervously through her hair only to get stuck on a section matted with blood and be yanked out with more anger than was warranted. Hong Lu, to his credit, continued to just sit there smiling, though it was clear he hadn’t missed a second of this.
Sancho, meanwhile, was rapidly realizing just how unprepared she was. “Ahem. Young Hong Lu. As fate has brought us together, I…would like to ask some things of you, if it wo-wouldst not…be of trouble? Be troublesome for you. Eugh, prithee, do not speak of this to the others.”
Hong Lu nodded. Sancho cast a furtive look at the walls before continuing. “What…sort of person…wouldst thou say I was—I am—the sinner Don Quixote is? If-if you were to play this part, what sorts of behaviors would you find most essential, most…inextricable?”
Except they had been extricated, hadn’t they. She’d managed to stumble through the evening, mostly off adrenaline. But everything about the old Don Quixote had shattered, and she needed to at least pick up the larger pieces before morning. Speaking of which,
“I shall clean this up, while you, uh, ponder the question. Forsooth.” She unthinkingly swept the ceramic shards into her palm and nearly injured herself for the second time; but thankfully they weren’t that sharp.
“Hmm...where to begin...” Hong Lu’s tone was light, but still taking it seriously. “There’s the obvious stuff, like Miss Don Quixote’s loud voice, and her passion for fixers! But you know about that already, right? You must be asking about things Miss Don Quixote wouldn’t notice about herself. Right? Although it's a little hard to say what she did or didn’t notice, when I’m not in her head! Actually, on that note, I have a question.”
“Yes?”
“If you are different people, then why don’t you just ask her these things yourself?”
“I– she–” Sancho froze over the waste bin. Hong Lu seemed to have an uncanny ability to ask the most disarming questions possible. “I don’t…know if I’m ready for that.”
The sinner, the human Don Quixote…her voice had been cut off practically mid sentence, loathsome toward Sancho’s kind till the very end. Had she been missing context? Sure. Could she be reasoned with? Almost certainly. But Sancho couldn’t risk hearing her again. Not now. Not when she could barely keep it together as it was.
“So why don’t you take a break until then?” Hong Lu suggested.
She knew immediately what he meant. “I can’t do that.”
"Why not?” He cocked his head to the side.
“Because! If I stop, then what would have been the point of all that?!”
“Are you sure there is a point?” His voice was not dismissive. He sounded genuinely curious about her thoughts, even though he’d clearly made up his own mind.
“I…want to believe so…” she faltered for a second then burst out, “No, I do believe it! What happened to my Family shan’t be for naught, I will carry on my Father’s legacy. Through the blood in my eyes, all of La Mancha shall bear witness to the dream they could not understand, yet fought for all the same!”
Her face tightened and she returned to the bed to sit beside him. “I, Don Quixote, must be the one to realize that dream. That is why I beseech thee for thy assistance.”
Hong Lu’s smile had dropped at her response; not in sadness, just contemplation; but he soon regained it. “Alrighty then~!”
“But surely I– Don Quixote improved at combat, didn't she??” Sancho protested, “I can be a bit more careful now,”
Hong Lu’s eyes wandered up, purposely avoiding hers.
Sigh. “Understood.” She wrote down mensa… siempre… muere in cramped script, so different from the upright serif letters that filled the rest of the notebook (presumably from trying to copy the newspapers, although memories of the lighthouse blurred together too much to be certain.) “What about the fixer stories? Were there any that the sinners paid close attention to?”
Hong Lu tapped his chin. “Hmmm…nope, not really! I can’t remember any, and the others always complained about how those stories were impossible to follow.”
Sancho nodded, grateful he hadn’t tried to sugarcoat it. “Good, then I do not need to keep track of that.”
She uncrossed her legs, then remembered she shouldn’t do that with company, then remembered she should be practicing letting go of those norms and planted both shoes on the floor. “Just have fun with it, say it loud, smile the whole time,”
"She didn’t smile as much as you’d think, actually,” corrected Hong Lu, who was crossing his legs.
“But you said she was always happy? I remember being always happy.”
“Oh, she was! Except when she was mad or sad. But every time she’d see something new, she’d go quiet and stare at it with biiiig eyes, and if she liked it, her pupils would turn into bright stars! And if she really liked it, then she’d smile and grab someone else to make them look at it too! Miss Don Quixote saw lots and lots of new things every day, so she wasn’t always smiling.”
“I don’t think I can control eye stars…” she murmured, trying to ignore how his words tugged at her heart. “Ahem. Anyway, I think this is enough. Like I said, I have the memories, it was only a matter of outside perspective. I should be fine now.” I should be fine, she repeated like a prayer. A drop of red fell on the mattress between them and they both looked up to see blood lining the edges of the ceiling and leaking down the walls, temporarily transfixed by how it seemed to flow in place, only dripping where it accumulated most near the corners. She should probably move her bed to the center of the room.
“Is there anything else you think is important?” she asked, softer than she’d intended.
“No… appearances aren’t all that hard to maintain, after a while,” Hong Lu mused, then snapped out of it a second later and stood up. “Speaking of appearances, your hair is super bloody! May I lend a hand? Miss Rodya says I’m quite the master stylist.”
Sancho's eyes widened and she raised her arms protectively. “No, that–that’s fine! ‘Tis quite ah…no need for you to touch it.”
“Heheh, don’t worry, it’s not much dirtier than Heathcliff’s! And Heathcliff doesn’t have a reputation to uphold~”
Sancho frowned, feeling like that was a bit unfair, but this was hardly the time to call it out. “Even so, I must decline.”
“Hmmm…Okay!” Hong Lu said without a shred of disappointment. He placed the comb he’d already taken out of his hair onto the side table and stepped back.
Knowing Hong Lu, the thing had to cost like a billion ahn. But also knowing Hong Lu, he’d be unlikely to ever miss it. Don Quixote had lost the brush Faust gave her months ago, and usually just smoothed her hair down with water when necessary (the sheer amount of water in her memories was starting to loop around into being funny.) So, Sancho took the comb without complaint, turning it over several times in her hands before remembering to thank Hong Lu out loud.
Hong Lu took her thanks and subsequent silence as his cue to leave, offering tea one last time, which she initially declined only to change her mind at the last second. Once he left Sancho poured the tea into a container to cool, then used it to work the comb through her hair. She wouldn’t let herself make a habit of this; using substitutes for everything would just make the inevitable rainy day mission worse. But water, like many things, wasn’t something she could deal with tonight.
As always, every other sinner was rewound to pristine condition after the final battle. However Sancho had told Dante it wasn’t necessary, that she could regenerate on her own. Part of it was to spare Dante the pain, but a larger part was the fear that blood, their blood, which drenched her hair and clothes after La Manchaland’s implosion, would simply evaporate into nothing. Sancho was wearing pajamas now, her uniform, stained with both her Family’s blood and chunks of her own hardblood, was already folded neatly in the bottommost drawer of her dresser where it could never seep into the ground or be washed away by rain. When she finished combing, she calmly pulled the clump of loose hair and blood out of the comb and placed it in the drawer as well.
She was well aware this was, to put it mildly, gross. Even with the drawer closed, the faint yet infamously foul scent of bloodfiend wafted around the room. But Sancho was perfectly used to humans finding her disgusting, so if the sinners were serious about their acceptance, then they’d just have to get used to that feeling.
…Not that she wanted to provoke it in them. After convincing herself the red tint was just her imagination, she managed to pour the dirty tea down the sink to avoid giving into the crazed voice in her head telling her to drink it.
Still awake, emotions dulled and unsure what to do with herself, she spun four tight circles left, right, left, right, then hopped onto the counter to open her marshmallow jar. The contents were so stiff that she broke a plastic spoon trying to wrench it out, which probably would have sent her over the edge if Hong Lu hadn’t scared away her tears earlier. Now it just pissed her off, because it was already past midnight, and she’d need to ask another sinner to heat it up in the kitchen for her.
At least, that was the case according to Vergilius. After Don Quixote had accidentally killed herself and the flash boil kettle in one of her numerous bathing-related mishaps, the Red Gaze banned her from all kitchen appliances, and she did not receive a replacement kettle. This was one of his and Faust’s first 100 rules, which Don Quixote had written on the wall in an attempt to remember. Sancho threw the jar in the project moon microwave, typed in a random number (no number was ever ‘random’ to her) and promptly passed out on the bed.
…
She woke up an hour later to the acrid smell of burnt plastic, and spent the rest of the early morning dispassionately chipping 6,288 pieces of charred marshmallow off the miraculously still-functional device with her fingernails, ignoring the tiny cuts it gave her. Then she put on a spare uniform, arranged her pins, and set out to greet each and every sinner with a smile.
Some of them gave her odd looks in return, but most were perfectly content to believe nothing had changed. Or at least, they were content to believe that she believed it. Sancho was too busy concentrating on her performance to keep track of which; and anyway, even if her own was the most flashy, who on this bus wasn’t putting on a show for people?
Sancho hummed and swung her legs all throughout Faust’s explanation of the new mirror dungeon that had opened up last night. Dismissing the sinners' concerned glances when the theme was revealed, she led the vanguard through every floor of the carnival, excited for the moment Dante would turn the clock and erase the blood under her nails.