dazlious | Call me animal.

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Call me animal.

WHO: Heather Mason and Maurice Hutch (OC)
WHERE: Dogtrot, Texas
WHEN: Just easing into spring.
WHAT: What probably would have been a night spent loitering around the drug store and breaking bottles in the alley like generic malcontent youths takes several unexpected turns when a vampire hunter interrupts Maurice while waiting for his friend from up north.
RATING: Probably PG. CW for violence, mild body horror and transformation.

awsum ill be outside where the rentareel used to be

Maurice had put out the call and now he was in his place, hands in his coat pockets. He hadn't seen his friend for a while now. One thing or another would come up (said things including worrying mothers, various injuries, and plain bad weather) and now that at least the weather had calmed its bad self down, the world was ready to be trampled again.

And what a night for it! It was clear with chilly breezes sneaking around buildings and down alleyways. An orange moon hung low on the horizon and kept the clouds far on the edges of the horizon. It wouldn't rain for two more days. Spring was coming. The tiny green shoots had just barely started poking out of the ground where there was enough actual soil instead of the red clay of Dogtrot. Crispy dead leaves still hung in the corners where the buildings met the sidewalk. Easter candy all but overflowed on super market shelves.

The vampire thought of all the things they would do once Heather got there. They could graffiti the old building marked to be torn down the following week since it was technically not illegal anymore. They could eat pizza at Tod's until they were sick. And DRANKS. And Sega. If Meranda hadn't taken over the sofa for the night. An outlet in her room had blown (or so she said) so she spent a lot of time on the sofa during her WoW raids.

Something interrupted his thoughts. He had lived in Dogtrot for years now and not a lot surprised him. He knew the local vampires, he even knew a local spook or two. He knew the drug addicts and the few homeless and what they sounded like. What he heard on that empty chilly street was none of those things.

"Quack quack!" It was mechanical. Grainy.

Maurice lifted a brow and tugged his phone out wondering if Meranda had passive-aggressively changed the ring on it again.

"Quack quack!"

"The hell...?" It wasn't his phone. Maurice pocketed it and looked all around. The quack came from an alley across the street between a now defunct QUICK CASH and what was going to be a shiny new laundromat. Maurice looked both ways and ventured forward into the gloom.

The garbage can at the end of the alley quacked. Maurice screwed up his face in thought. Broken toy that suddenly came back to life? Stranded cyborge duck?

Up above on the rooftop, a long and lean and very crafty hunter was watching his prey fall for his trap hook, line, and sinker. His father had been a hunter--a normal hunter. Deer, ducks, rams. He had watched him make odd noises to get the attention of the deer. A whistle or a click to make them stop in just the right place. Sometimes to even lure them in.

Humans were the most curious animals that he knew of and though the thing in the alleyway wasn't human (not in the slightest) he had to watch it in fascination and amusement before he made his move.

Maurice peered into the trash. There was an old Talkboy straight from the eighties in the trash quacking away.

"Oh, man, sweet!" It was all his! He reached for it. Something dressed in full army camo descended upon him and drove a thin knife into his shoulder. Maurice screamed like a wildcat and the fight began.

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Maurice tromped along on the narrow overgrown path and cast glances over his shoulder every few paces to see the the dark lumbering shape of his friend. She looked right at home in the tall spindly trees and the light from her eyes and jeering mouth made the woods look like a mobile campfire was wandering through it.

"Oh, I see 'em. Question is, can they catch fish?"

She let out a scoff behind him, as though the idea that they might not be able to was preposterous.

"Of course they can. I mean, look at them. They're huge."

She'd never been fishing in her life.

"What happens if you go in the water?"

Part of him was worried about the pond somehow dousing that flame that burned inside her. Part of him was worried about her destroying the pond. He could see her scraggly leggy ass standing in the middle of it as vapor lifted in clouds leaving flopping fish in the mud.

They would find out because finally the little clearing presented itself. It hadn't changed in years. The pond was round and dark and still and a fallen tree made a neat bridge out to the center. Above them the surrounding trees made a neat halo opening up to the cloudy night sky. A lazy airplane drifted by. The shallow edge was thick with weeds and little white flowers and the surface rippled as the baby fish that hid there sensed movement from the bank. The place was alive with frogs and gnats and all manner of flying bugs. The skeletons of a couple of folding chairs were half hidden in the grass and various junk from Maurice and a few of the other fishermen from the trailer park were strewn about--mostly beer cans, tangles of fishing line, and smashed up styrofoam coolers.

It was a sight for sore eyes. Maurice shuffled over to the edge of the fallen tree and neatly hooked the lantern on one of the stubby branches.

"Here we are!"

She opened her mouth-- er, beak-- to reply, only to stop walking and stand there briefly, like a weird glowing scarecrow come to life.

Because... well, shit.

"... I.... don't know. Actually."

She looked down at her oversized hands, belatedly starting to walk again, though some of the strut had been taken out of her stride.

"... Aside from that thing in the alley, this is the first time I've ... you know. Uh. Done this anywhere aside from my living room."

Maurice paused in yanking out one of the folding chairs from the brush and looked o-- UP at his friend. He wanted Heather to get herself all figured out but he didn't want her going out like a candle! What if that was the downside? There had to be a downside somewhere.

He himself couldn't go in the sun or enjoy proper Itallian food ever again.

Where was Heather's hang-up? The vampire couldn't help but fret. Heather was like a sister and as far as he knew this was one of her first leggy steps into monsterdom. It was scary. He had to show her the way and that meant looking out for her.

"Maaaaybe you oughtta stay here on the bank just to be safe..."

She stared back down at him with her lamplike eyes.

"... Ugh, you really think so? I mean... Not that I was gonna go for a swim..."

She wasn't really a big fan of the water... or at least not murky water. Swimming pools were generally okay, but even if it was nothing more than a shadow of a memory lingering deep in the most primal corner of her brain, she couldn't ever entirely forget dying deep underwater, dragged down by her ankle and crushed.

"I don't know, Heather...I know werewolves and vampires but you're neither."

Maurice plopped down in the folding chair. The ancient moldy weave instantly gave out and he let out a yelp as his ass landed in the grass and his knees all but hit him in the face.

"Shit! Shit! Dammit!" The vampire leaned out and trited to grab the exposed tree root to start heaving himself back upright.

At first, she was startled.

Then Maurice started floundering around and swearing.

Bending down to clap her giant hands on her torn-denim-covered knees, Heather let out a harsh crowing sound that was apparently what passed for laughter in this form.

"Oh my GOD. What did you think was gonna happen, dude?!"

She stepped over, reaching out a hand for him to grab.

"I didn't think it'd rotted plumb through!" His voice was an indignant squawk as he shoved against the railings. He was pretty well stuck. When Heather offered one of her monstrous paws, Maurice reached up automatically--

but paused.

He hadn't touched her before, had he? He couldn't remember. He'd been so injured and dazed there in the alley that it felt like a dream. All the beer that night helped. But here she was again towering over him and offering him her hand.

Maurice shook himself and slapped his cold hand into hers, feeling strange that his was smaller. He'd been both a bat and a dog in her presence but this was just surreal.

"Might as well just sit on the ground now."

In stark contrast to Maurice's cold corpse fingers, the giant meaty fist that he found them clenched in was very warm-- not burning hot, but definitely warm. The hair on it felt almost powdery, and sure enough he'd find smudges of soot on his hand when she let go after hauling him upright.

"Well if YOU broke one of the chairs, they'd definitely break if I tried them," she remarked.

Maurice managed to hide his wince pretty well when their hands made contact. He didn't burst into flames or anything. So that's good. Once he was upright, he pried the chair's frame off his butt and frowned down at it. It had been such a good chair back in the day too.

"Yeeeah, we're just gonna have to go without chairs. It's okay, we're rugged like that." He crouched down and started going through is bag. He pulled out the tackle box and the small lunchbox he'd packed and paused once he found the little tub of bait. His hands were black. For a single terrifying moment he thought he really had been burned and that the burn was so severe that he didn't even feel it. But after he rubbed them together and managed to smudge the soot he deflated in relief.

This would take some getting used to.

"I'll bait you up. You pick a spot because like hell am I lettin' you scare off my fish."

She watched him as he went about his business-- she actually did catch that grimace, and the brief, horrified pause when he looked at his hands. She coughed, looking away and rubbing the back of her head. YOU AND HER BOTH, MAURICE.

"Psh. And scare 'em all down to your end by default? I see what you're doing."

But she got up all the same and started to lumber around the edge of the pond.

Maurice laughed. So he'd been found out! Aw well, he was going to kick her ass at fishing anyway. He knew how twitchy and flighty Heather was. Imagining her sitting still for hours with a fishing pole was kind of hilarious to him.

"Who, meee?"

And it would be nice to have a fishing buddy.

Once he had the worm on the first hook he started working on the second.

Meanwhile as Heather storked her way around the pond, the local wildlife took notice of her. Insects flitted out of her path and frogs that had been singing in the reeds disappear into the dark water with plunks. Ghosts and monsters visited the pond sure, but never gods! The critters knew when to beat it.

She turned around and did the 'keeping an eye on you' motion with two of her big blackened claws.

Then she went back to skulking around.

It was weird, being out barefoot in a swamp. It was something she'd never do as a human. But it felt okay like this. Weird.

It was also kind of a thrill. She felt like she was breaking some kind of rule, doing this out here. It felt enough like that when she was doing it shut up in her own apartment, but this gave her a weird excited tingle somewhere in the pit of her gut just because it felt like any minute, someone would jump out of the bushes and get her in trouble, like she was breaking bottles in an alley.

"Hey, what kinda fish can you catch in a place like this anyway?"

Once he had the second rod baited, he held it up.

"Catfish mostly. C'mere and get your weapon! But sometimes you'll get a perch or somethin' else that wound up in here 'cause of birds. There's pieces of an old house a ways further out. I guess this was their catfish hole. Mom says her family had one when she was little."

Generations and generations of catfish in one muddy pond.

Maurice put Heather's fishing pole aside and cast his own line. His didn't have a floater because he was a PRO. And also he forgot. This early in the year the cats were bound to still be skulking around on the bottom anyway.

He sorely wished he had a chair. The ground was wet and now his pants were wet and it was horrible.

"One of these days I'll get over my thing about guts and actually clean somethin' I catch."

The beast turned and loped back towards Maurice. It was sort of awkward to run with too-small pants on. But she still felt too weird about all this to feel okay about just stripping naked and running wild and free in front of someone else, even if you couldn't really see anything weird.

She took the rod, which felt ridiculously tiny and delicate in her giant hands.

"What, do you usually throw them back?"

Maurice nodded. He couldn't help a grin. The rod did look pretty goofy in her claws. It was like she was holding a toy.

"Yeah, I just let 'em go so they can get bigger." He cranked his reel a few times to drag his bait along the bottom. "One time when we were kids we had us a fish fry, right? And Dad had the electric knife out and us kids were lined up watching him gut. I dunno why it didn't bother me back then as much as it does now but he was doin' his thing and suddenly he got one that had eggs in it and the eggs splattered all over Ike and he screamed so loud."

The vampire grinned sharply at the water. He knew he would have done the same thing if he'd been Ike. But he hadn't so seeing somebody else panic was delicious.

Picking her way back over to the spot she'd picked out, she settled down into a sitting position, cringing inwardly as she heard a few more rips open up in her jeans. 8( She'd really need to figure out a solution to this clothing issue.

But first came fiddling with the fishing rod.

"Oh man, that must've been hilarious."

"It was great! He wouldn't eat fish that whole day."

Maurice watched her, wondering just how she was going to mash the little button and cast with those big sooty mitts of hers. He also wondered another thing.

"You decided what you wanna call...well. Y'know." He gestured to All of Heather with the end of his fishing pole. "I've ran into a lot of different kinds of folks but they all had some kinda name for what they were."

Because like a doofus he'd up and ASKED them.

The twin lights flickered as she blinked.

"... I dunno," she said after a moment, turning her beak down to the rod. She busied herself with prodding and pulling it experimentally before saying, "Does it have to have a name?"

The truth was it DID have a name. In fact, it had many names. Probably more than she knew outside of some deep, ancestral memory that she hadn't made any attempt to dig up.

Maurice thought about that.

"I don't guess so..." Maybe he was becoming too much like Charlie-- spooked by things without names. Calling them Face-eaters. You knew what to expect out of a vampire. You knew what to expect out of a werewolf or a pegasus or a fairy...but Heather was his friend and after watching the end of his line drift along the surface of the water for a moment, he figured 'friend' was just as good a name as any. And he knew exactly what to expect from that.

"We still gotta figure out if you can fly or not one night."

At last, Heather just sort of flicked the rod and cast it out into the water. She figured she'd just yank it back by hand if she felt a tug on the line. That worked, right?

"How would we do that, exactly? If it involves just jumping off a high place and hoping for the best, I'm gonna have to say no."

All the same, she looked over her shoulder at the shadowy limbs branching off from her shoulder-blades thoughtfully.

"Well you could..." When he was feeling particularly spunky, Maurice liked to throw himself off buildings and shift before he hit the street. He'd gotten pretty good at it and had only messed up real bad four times.

"But usually you start from the ground and run around and flap a lot. You'll probably have an easier time than I did. You're a little more...uh...aerodynamic than me."

That got a snort out of her.

"All right, you got a point three..."

All the same, she didn't feel too keen on trying that yet. ... It was all happening a lot faster now than she'd been taking it before.

"... So you're cool with this? I mean... I saw you kinda... flinch back there."

Guilt flickered across Maurice's face--but that could have just been a reflection off the pond.

"What? Naw..." He focused hard on his fishing line and after a beat guessed that wouldn't do. "I'm plenty cool with it. I just...dunno what to expect, y'know? I'm just a little bit flammable."

The vampire looked at the traces of soot left in the creases of his palm.

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