Personal History

Disclaimer: This story is an AU version of a scene in another story by Shallowswan called Illusions. This is my take on the events between D and the Nymph, Luna. Luna is the property of Shallowswan and Vampire Hunter D belongs to God knows who.

The Nobles were dying out. Vampires, who had believed themselves to be as immortal and unchanging as the stars were facing extinction. It was no surprise that the Nobility were in the situation they were in.

When you peeled back the layers, stripped them of their finery, servants and advanced technology, the vampires were nothing but addicts chasing the ever elusive high. For a vampire, blood was more than food, it was obsession. Even leeches and mosquitoes were not so partial to that crimson fluid.

No matter how smart an addict is, they are always stupid. The only vampire worth noting was their King, the one that they called Sacred Ancestor. He wasn't the first vampire, but he was the meanest, the smartest, the most ruthless and the most ambitious.

Without Dracula's iron fist to keep them civilized and keep them in line, the vampires fell into civil war and sloth.

Bounty hunters, assorted mutants, freaks, fiends and psychopaths rose to the challenge of killing off the vampires.

Right now, the best of the vampire hunters was making his way across the burning desert. He was tall and pale. Pale was the wrong word for him, he was fair as alabaster, the embodiment of otherworldly beauty. He was angelic, gorgeous, and almost girly.

But the mysterious rider did not dress like an angel.

A long black cloak protected him from the sun. Whenever he jumped, the cloak would fly out like a pair of wings. On his feet he wore a shiny black pair of biker boots. The toes of the boots were custom made steel capped, more than enough to drive your jawbone into your brain.

The hunter's hands were delicate, like the hands of a musician. Those hands were wrapped in armored, fingerless gloves that had built in brass knuckles. His finger nails were long and claw like. The hunter frequently used his long nails to gouge the eyes of his adversaries.

Underneath his cloak the hunter wore shining black armor which sported impressive shoulder spikes. The armor was bullet proof, acid proof, chemical resistant and temperature controlled. Nothing on the hunter was there for decoration.

The final yet most notable wardrobe items of his massive hat and blue pendant. The hat was enormous, like a small umbrella, designed to keep the sun out.

The pendant was a gorgeous thing, midnight blue and seemingly priceless.

From his head to his toe, from his eyes to his pointed ears, Vampire Hunter D was bad to the bone.

But something was off today. Indeed, D had a companion with him.

Like the moon is different from the sun, the passenger was different from D. She was a woman and beautiful almost beyond anybody's ability to gauge.

While D presented himself as a stone cold killer, the woman was far friendlier looking. Long hair like silver reached to the length of her knees, decorated with desert blooms. Her outfit was simple, made entirely in greens and browns from plant material. The woman looked like the spitting image of some benevolent creature of nature, which she was.

Her name was Luna and she had saved the Life of Vampire Hunter D. Dying from the venom of the manticore, the wandering healer had saved the dhampir's life by summoning the phoenix with its healing teardrops.

Grateful but not showing it, D had agreed to take Luna into the nearest town.

On the way there, Luna attempted to make small talk. "So, D, tell me about yourself."

Instead of doing the polite thing and respond, D decided to stare straight ahead and act like a bastard. He'd perfected the art of ignoring women years ago.

Not deterred by D's stony silence, Luna tried again, putting her hands on D's broad shoulders for emphasis. "Don't be shy; I just want to make conversation."

Still, D continued to be a bastard and ignore the goddess sitting behind him on the cybernetic horse.

Luna was a nymph; seduction and sex were to her species what blood was to vampires. She was a minx with a heart of gold that was confident she had what it took to crack open the heart of even the most hardened men. Luna pouted, "D, don't act this way. I thought you might be a bit more grateful."

"What would you like to know?"

Ah, now she was getting somewhere, "I just want to hear you talk about yourself, you might like it."

D sighed, "Very well, I will tell you a little of myself. But be warned, the details of my life are gruesome and full of sorrow."

Luna hugged the unmoving hunter, "Everybody needs a sympathetic ear sometimes."

Ripples of movement shot through D's body, making a tingle run up Luna's spine. "Very well, I was born some ten thousand years ago. I was baptized by the black witch doctor, Kassavubu, whose real name was Bill Smith."

Luna nodded, a little strange, but a good start.

D continued, "My mother was a human with a weakness for heavy handed men while my father was a vampire with anger management problems and a history of mental illness. Father had a tendency to hit on and rape nearly everything that moved. He was not above bestiality, hence I never bothered with getting a pet."

Luna's eyebrow rose. Alright, this was weird, but D was still really hot.

"When I was five years old I witnessed my parents having sex. Father was holding a plastic bag over my mother's head while spanking her with a spatula mercilessly."

Luna had never seen her mother having sex and she had no desire to, let alone see her mother doing something crazy like that! What D had seen must have been very traumatic. She waited for him to continue.

"I thought my father was trying to kill my mother, it wasn't the first time and I tried to save her. I beat my father over the head with a baseball bat repeatedly. For my offense, father forced me to spend the night in a closet with one of his pedophile friends as company."

Alright, forget his good looks, this guy wrote and published the book on tragic. Luna was shocked, "Oh my Goddess, you poor sap. How did you ever recover from that?"

D's impersonal voice slid out, "If my personal history disturbs you, do you wish for me to stop?"

"No, no, it's alright. I won't interrupt."

D narrowed his eyes, painful repressed memories coming back to him, "At age fifteen, I had my first homosexual encounter. His name was Michael and he was a dhampir."

Luna almost wanted to ask D to stop.

"We engaged in a sadomasochistic tryst that ended badly. We started by flogging each other with a silver whip, but when he grabbed my penis, I failed to become elevated. He grew enraged and inserted a straight razor into my anus. I retaliated by slicing off his scrotal contents with the same knife." D sounded so clinical and bored. He might have been a high school physics teacher.

D failed to notice Luna's stunned silence but his left hand did not.

The left hand spoke in a gruff voice loud enough for only D to hear, "Way to go, D, you can kiss any chance for romance goodbye."

D ignored the parasite in his hand, like always and continued with his story. Curiously, it felt good to talk about his past other than that snide symbiote. "At age sixteen I met Carmella The Bloody for the first time. I discovered the hard way that she enjoyed pleasuring herself with power tools. To this day I'm still not comfortable handling a belt sander. Carmella was very hard on me that night. Fortunately, I was able to stab her in the heart years later."

Luna desperately tried to get D to talk about things that were . . . normal. "So, did you ever date as a kid?"

"I was never able to engage in something as frivolous as love. Mother saw to it that I'd never fall in love. Every day of my life, she had told me that all women were black widows who sucked the life out of a man through his penis and that all women wanted to do was chain me to a wall and take turns raping me because I was more beautiful than other men. I only ever had one girlfriend, briefly and mother was furious about that. "

When D said that his life was full of sorrow and suffering, Luna had thought that he was exaggerating but quite the opposite. D's life was a melodrama of psychopathic parents and ridiculously over the top torments. It was a miracle that he wasn't in a padded room right now.

But that mother of his, she sounded the worst, nearly as bad as D's father. "She said that to you! Was she insane? I can't believe that a mother could say something like-like that to her son. Was she trying to cripple you?"

D exhaled as if in relief, "No, she herself had bad experiences with love. I was the sole good thing to come out of her wedding to my father. Whatever the case, her teachings instilled in me a tremendous fear of women."

"I'm so sorry."

For once, D seemed to notice Luna. Not acknowledge her, but really notice her like he was talking to her out of more than mere obligation. "There's no need for that. Anyway, my father mistook my fear of women for homosexuality and so arranged for me to sleep with various streetwalking whores. When I failed to get an erection or refused to mate with the women, my father tortured me with electrical shocks."

Flashback

D was eighteen years old and chained to a bed in a seedy motel room. He had failed to get it on with the hooker, failing to alter his father's perceptions about him.

D lay on the bed, dressed in only his pants, helpless for the silvered chains around his arms and legs. The young dhampir was frightened out of his mind and it showed. His daddy was the scariest person to ever wear white cotton gloves.

D's father towered over him like the Grim Reaper or some other personification of death. Dracula's voice rumbled like the growl of an angry tiger, "Now son, I won't ask you a second time. Why did you and Tabatha fail to make happy-happy?"

D didn't know what to say. For as long as he could remember, he'd always been afraid of all women save for his own mother. His mother wasn't entirely to blame, Tabatha had the clap. If that wasn't a major turn off then what was?

Words failed him, "Uh . . . um . . . I think it's mom's fault."

Dracula was not pleased with his son's answer "Hit him, Renfield!"

At that moment, Dracula's bug eating servant Renfield sprang into action. Like it was fun, Renfield took two wires attached to a car battery and pressed them to D's chest.

The crackle of electricity couldn't be heard over D's screams.

End Flashback

"What the hell did your mother see in your father?"

D remained silent. He sensed that the present line of conversation was disturbing the beautiful and sensitive Nymph.

"What was your girlfriend's name?"

This question genuinely shocked D, "Hmm?"

Luna smiled encouragingly at him, "You said that you had one girlfriend. I want to know more about her."

For once, the hardened dhampir looked nervous. "Renesmee, her name was Renesmee."

There, something normal, for now. At least something in D's life wasn't pure debauchery. "What was she like?"

D was breaking a sweat, something that he hadn't done in thousands of years for any reason. For the first time beyond all memory, D found it hard to keep his voice flat and impartial. "She was very nice, I don't remember anything else."

That wasn't entirely true. D did remember everything about Renesmee, but what he did know about her was so paltry. It was one of his many regrets, breaking off his relationship with Renesmee so early.

As if reading his thoughts, Luna comforted the well muscled dhampir, "That's alright, if you don't want to speak, you don't have to."

D gulped as two revelations hit him. Firstly, he realized what a horrible person he was, cold, uncaring and unsociable. Only half the time did he act with any kind of decency. The other half he moved with a kind of detached efficiency. He killed the vampires and saved the humans, but it truly had no emotional impact on him. It hadn't for centuries beyond count.

And the second revelation: he was in love with this girl. God help her.

God help him.

Thanks for checking this out everybody :) Be sure to check out Shallowswan's Vampire Hunter D stories.

Ta

Master of the Boot