(for context - this was originally meant to be a buffy fanfiction but turned into its own thing)
She had been rudely awakened (again) by someone breaking into the house on the next floor. With a tired sigh, she got up from the dirty matress and stretched out her arms above her head. In doing so, the oversized man’s shirt she was wearing shifted and creased to her armpits. It was time to move house again.
Packing up her small satchel of personal belongings, Rachel quietly left as new tenants took over the decrepid building – hoping it would fall in on their heads the moment she left.
*
Rachels mother had died shortly after her father’s disapperance. After the crash of 1927, they had lost everything. When a man loses his pride, he has lost everything. None of it happened quickly – it was a slow death, losing what was once theirs. First they only selled off some furniture, never mind the rent. But when simple kindness no longer extended that far, they were thrown out on the streets.
”Why don’t we stay with auntie?” she’d asked, upper lip streaked with milk. Their last hot meal was at a diner her father had used to frequent. Before he went away, to someplace Rachel wished she could go now. Her Mother’s hands had started to crack, skin pale and gritty.
”Because dear, auntie is also like us.”
*
They managed for a little while, staying at a shelter – her mother taking odd jobs during the day as a cleaner, a seamstress. Rachel collected wildflowers to sell by the corner of the road. But she stopped when men came to ask her what they’d have to pay for her rather than the flowers in her hands.
*
When her mother died of pneumonia, she had no money for a burial, let alone a proper coffin.
A sole wooden cross was planted at her head around the wet soil, without an engraving. Like so many other graves around it, wit h similar histories and fates behind them.
*
The years passed.
*
She had gone three days without food. She was usually able to steal something, anything. An apple, a sandwhich – but it had been difficult. They were all so hungry.
As she huddled down to sleep in a doorway somewhere in the vast cityscape, she dimly remembered that it was her sixteenth birthday. Wondered if she’d live long enough to see her next one.
*
Death happened. She didn’t even notice.
*
When she awoke early the next evening, streetlights shining in her eyes, she was feeling oddly refreshed. Energized, despite not having eaten for almost four days now. Odd. Maybe she was just getting used to the pang of hunger too much.
*
She was not even aware that she’d lifted the trash can like it weighed nothing more than a piece of paper before a little boy pointed it out to her.
*
It was getting a little freaky. But at least she’d found a way to earn a living. Masquerading as a boy, she’d been able to get work as a trash collector since she had no apparent trouble with heavy lifting anymore. And there was this other thing -
Sometimes, when she passed people in the street – something inside her reacted – made her look twice at people with no apparent reason. Was she getting paranoid now as well? Homeless and paranoid, wasn’t that a nice combination.
*
One afternoon while she was sitting on a stoop, drinking a coke, she watched a woman being followed into an alley. She’d seen things like this before, knew what probably would happen. Knew that she could do nothing to stop it.
And yet, she calmly put down her soda and pursued them.
It was something like out of a movie. One of those gangster films she’d sneaked in to see so often. The woman was backed into a corner, recoiling from the man who was advancing on her, he was probably pointing a gun or a knife at her, which Rachel couldnt see from her vantage point. It would explain the screaming.
It did not explain why she looked at the frightened woman and thought dinner.
*
Afterwards, she didn’t know just how she managed it. How she wrestled with a man twice her size, how she put that fearful expression into his face, after having thrown him across the small alley and into a pile of garbage. And how the hell did she manage that in the first place?
The blood around her lips is still there when she exits the alley, but nobody cares or notices.
The corpse of the attacker (strange wound at his neck) left behind is merely collected and buried, one of the city’s many unfortunates.
*
She still picks wildflowers in central park to put on her mothers grave. Even though the wooden cross has been stolen, probably sold for firewood, she can still locate the grave with ease. She can’t explain how, or why this is so.
It’s funny, people are supposed to stay in their graves – not come dragging themselves out of them.
*
Instinct tells her to walk circles around the graveyard until the sun comes up, though she doesnt know why.
*
New york in the fall is pretty, the same way wet asphalt and sewer rats are pretty – it’s not. Only those who can still afford to live comfortably thinks it is pretty, something to behold. She has become an expert pickpocket, alongside her odd jobs when heavy lifting is required – but she still has to dress like a man.
The fact that she only is awake at night is something she doesn’t care to analyze. She rarely eats, and if she does it has to be something raw and animal, preferably alive.
She still walks around the graveyards in the city at night, trying to figure out why she feels like she needs to be there.
*
One night at one of the smaller diners downtown, she’s nursing a mug of hot chocolate – the cheap kind, and a man in dorky glasses offers to pay for her drink. He’s insistant. She lets him.
He’s nursing a cup of hot chicken broth at his elbow for himself, untouched, sitting two chairs away from her own – and besides paying for her beverage he doesnt try to make further contact. He wears an expensive looking beige coat and a ratty, much older thee piece suit underneath. Dirty bandages on his fingers and dried blood underneath them.
She doesn’t see the way his eyes follow her manically out the door, into the rain.
*
He follows her outside, walking a few feet behind.
She ignores him.
He follows her home that night to the building she’s currently squatting in. He breaks down the rotting door and repeats what he had said to her earlier, almost like a mantra.
”You’re pretending, and you don’t have to.”
She’s still staring at the door – or whats left of it – on the floor. He’s still staring at her expectantly, childish excitement on his face.
”It’s okay to be scared.”
There’s a speck of fresh blood on the lapel of his expensive coat.
”That’s not what I’m feeling.”
*
She no longer has to sleep in abandoned buildings or on park benches, since Felix has been good enough to accomodate her in his own small apartment. He’s never really there, it turns out. He comes by every evening though, coat wet from the rain. Rachel is left to her own devices during the day. She doesnt stop stealing to make ends meet though, and to this he has nothing to say.
In the evenings and most afternoons, he shows her what their kind can do. Sometimes its dull and exhausting – Felix flinches at her insults, but never protests. He only polishes his glasses and laughs, giggles nervously.
*
He makes her oatmeal porridge for breakfast which she usually forgets to eat or throws directly into the trash bin. Its strange, because neither of them need that kind of sustenence. His culinary skills are something to be desired, since he burns everything. Felix knits scarfs with large holes in them, and drinks endless amounts of tea. He’s pretty erratic and strange.
*
He teaches her how to protect herself– boxing and several forms of martial arts. They do this both indoors and outdoors, late at night when decent people are asleep, and not lurking about in graveyards or alleys. In this, he is a different sort of man. Sometimes he goes easy on her – other times he’s vicious. He laughs when she hurts herself, and other times he looks at his own hands with terror in his eyes and she wonders what he did wrong. She doesnt ask about this behavior – for the same reason he won’t ask about her past.
But just like so many other rules, this one will also be broken.
*
They sometimes go out to eat.
It’s not like it sounds at all.
They go to the cheapest places, and after perhaps, they might see a film. Rachel surprises herself by how comfortable she has let herself get in this new arrangement. Admonishes herself for it. She shouldn’t forget – people are monsters too. She of all people, knows that.
After the movie, they follow a young couple outside the theater.
Neither of them scream.
*
The nest he has informed her of is nearby – he has confirmed it by checking himself. Twelve of them all in all, a real menace to the surrounding community. Makes it harder for themselves too. And no, she must not go there herself – too dangerous, he says. She promises not to go there and kill them all until he comes back.
He is gone for a long time.
Twirling around in time with an old record, she decides that he is taking too long.
*
An ambush.
She bristles at being expected like this – not really fearful. But after being held down, and told in no gentle terms that she’s not going to go out quietly, or any time soon– she starts to realize that maybe death alone is not the only thing to be afraid of.
The leader only has time to graze his fangs along her neck before Felix arrives, taking one down in midair.
He’s like them – a rabid animal, crouching, putting his whole body into tackling, staking him against a railing in the process. He twists one of their necks, eyes wild. Cracking the skull against the pavement with the bottom of his shoe. He’s grinning in a way that cannot be good, not healthy. He’s not small and dorky, the bookish careful man she thought he was. He is the beast, shares the same blood of her blood. No soul, how could she not have felt it before?
He turns to her to look, and she represses a flinch at the uncontrolled violence in his eyes. But also shock, shame.
She gets up anyway and helps him finish the job with the rest of them, shaking off the temporary shock. That close to being bitten, marked – in all the ways you can be.
And he didn’t let it happen.
*
When they leave, she checks herself for bruises while Felix is still breathing hard, even though he has no need to breathe. Blood is oozing from a wound at his temple. Rachel wipes most of it off with her shirtsleeve, as he just stands there and lets her.
”How come it’s always you who end up bleeding the most?” she asks quietly.
On the way home, they hold each others hands as the rain pour down, washing away the dirt from their fingers.
*
Winter comes and goes, and Rachel learns how to be dead.
Turns out, its a lot more fun if you share your coffin with someone else.