Disclaimer: CBS owns Moonlight. I do not. All is right in the world.
Author's Note: November is the cruellest month. So, in order to duck my guilt for not writing like the good little drone I am (or for doing any work at all, for that matter), I decided to backdate some fic and post it here. Originally posted to the Moonlight Fics community on LJ. Five triple-drabbles, three hundred words apiece! Possibly PG-13 at best, although I don't see really anything beyond PG. Most of the warnings should be for either characterization - no matter what I'm told, I swear I'm not writing them properly - or improbability of the futures.
Ranges from Mick/Beth to Mick/Josef to gen. No spoilers.
Five Futures That Will Never Be
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1.
A hand on the railing, Mick stills. The frozen quiet of the abandoned building resonates around him. Carefully, he steps off the stair.
The speaking vampire seems the common type: young, probably turned just before the apocalypse began, so giddy to be inhuman and surviving that he's gone stupidly blunt.
"What human?"
"Man, don't give me that crap." He advances. "Nobody else can smell her, but I can. You keep her in your apartment, don't you?" Mick doesn't move; the vamp closes in. "Drinkin' from her alone. That's old-days behavior. Vamps've gotta share now. Solidarity. There ain't enough to go around no more. So you better-"
Mick's hand is a blur; the stake in his sleeve slides between his fingers and he jams it into the heart, twists.
The rest is almost too easy.
Burning the body takes longer. But fire isn't suspicious in the city ruins any more. Nothing is, after the world's end.
She whirls when he unlocks the door and has a stake poised over his heart by the time he reaches for the chain. Fear has hollowed her brilliant blue eyes and--
He forces himself still. She's afraid. Nothing else. No sign of the bone-sickness - yet.
"Here," he says. "I got you something." He tosses her a bag of microwavables.
Her nervous smile flickers. Accepting it, she goes into the kitchen. "Anything happen to you today?"
He closes his eyes, thinking: the young vamp. Ashes under his fingernails.
This can't last. Someday he'll be too thirsty to drain some freshly-fed vamp, too desperate to look elsewhere. Or some nuclear particle will find its way to her - leave her dying, a monster. He's imagined all the thousand ways.
But she's here now. It's enough. It must be.
"No," he says. "Nothing."
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2. Every day, Josef hates her.
On his first step in, he faces the wall and thinks: this is what she has done. She loved him and warped him until he became only a shadow of all the things she had once seen in him, too insubstantial to be dangerous.
Or so she must have dreamt, then.
It would have been easy for her not to guess: madness is hardly simple. And Josef doubts she knew of a vampire's idea of mourning, which is violent and cruel and things that Josef would have enjoyed, under different circumstances.
She might have listened if she'd known - to him, to Mick, to all her desperate instincts crying out for eternity. If he'd explained-- and that's usually where he stops thinking of it. With all her errant morality, she would have never listened, and he knows it.
He's not good at regret. It's not like he can change the past.
(Occasionally he does, however, admit to the small twinge of a chess-player who's lost his queen.)
And now she's bones and dust in the earth, and Mick is slumped in chains bolted to the wall, his mad eyes torn between silver and blood, the serial killer vilified daily on a thousand news channels. The man who killed a city with bare hands.
Josef would have never imagined it. But that's love: a transformation of the darkest kind.
He keeps Mick in his office as a reminder, a penance: this is what weakness makes you in the end. He looks at Mick as little as possible. The fact that Mick never recognises him stings more than he could have expected. And he no longer seeks comfort from anything but blood.
(At night, wrapped tight in darkness and earth in the basement, Josef can hear him screaming.)
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3. He's striding the length of the low red room, hard and fast, prowling like a mad-eyed cat. "What were you trying to prove?" he shouts. "Huh?"
Silently, Josef turns from him; pinpoints of city light wink mockingly at Mick from the glass.
He seizes Josef's shoulder and turns him, shakes him. "Why'd you do it?" he bites out. "Why did you--"
But he can't finish the words without dragging together the pieces of the memory he shattered on sight; the two of them pressed up in a corner, her hands tangled in his hair with a familiarity that speaks of long acquaintance.
His teeth in her throat.
"What," Josef says, "you didn't see it coming?"
Mick breathes in, sharp and hard. "What did you say?"
"Come on," Josef says. "How'd you miss it? Here's a life lesson: when a girl starts reading Anne Rice, she's usually looking for either a stake or a bite."
Without a word, Mick grabs him and slams him into the wall. Purely for the effect, the comfort of violence and crack of bone that he hasn't felt in a long time. He doesn't know why Josef lets him.
"Don't tell me. You thought she wanted to be in journalism because she liked to help people." Josef leans forward. "News-flash: she's human. They like the shock factor. Look at their reality shows."
His eyes are clear, and Mick hates him because this is not how it should have been: this is not how the story should have ended, with the girl he rescued a thrill-seeker and the world sliding apart (again).
"This is not about her," he lies. "Why did you do it?"
Josef shrugs. "For the taste," he says, irrelevantly, and Mick lets him go without really understanding why.
At least until Josef kisses him.
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4. Eventually, it's not enough.
She goes restless and hunting for parts of the city that she does not recognise; the underbelly of Los Angeles, something bleaker than what the mortal eye can see. Occasionally, if she gets lucky, she finds it: a vamp who, plied with the promise of her beckoning smile, reveals this trick, see, that he used 'gainst this other vamp way back when.
Vampires have more secrets than she can count. A way of cutting the stake. A certain degree of flame. Salt and venom and black crystal drugs - so much filthy knowledge in the vampire world.
It's almost astonishing how quick they are to pour out their stories to her and not to one of their own kind. But it's easier, she guesses, to turn to someone who hasn't gone against their own kind before, and there's always the allure of her youth and scent - before she stakes and incinerates them.
It's unreasonable to be afraid for him like this. He's immortal. She isn't. But she's not the princess waiting for her happily-ever-after to come. She's not the girl looking for two-point-five children and the fangless husband who will come to her at night, exhausted from a day at work.
They're an unconventional couple at best, he and her, and she has to make this work.
So she persists: asking questions, steeping herself in darkness, learning all the tricks in the trade. And he continues, heedless in his work of all the dangers she is clearing from his path. She keeps quiet when he explains things, cocks her head and nods, wide-eyed, as if she's never known anything as horrific as the vicious (but censored) details he shares.
But at night, restless in his arms, she wonders when he became the innocent and she the monster.
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5. It's not like love. God, he's almost forgotten what it's like to be in love. It was probably hell, he thinks idly, that disastrous time when everything was passionate and immediate, when everything mattered in that desperate high-key way that seems unique to humanity. He can barely remember now.
This is different. It spans centuries and continents, like a grand, songless opera.
But so what?
So they last. So they'll probably outlast New York City and the goddamn pyramids and the current choice of planets counted in the solar system. So what? It's never going to go anywhere. They work together. That's it.
At times, between bouts of angst and grim focus on redemption, Mick worries about the end of the world. Josef doesn't. There's a long stretch of time between then and now, and he can see every day between.
This is what their days will be:
He'll negotiate deals, put a little pressure where people need it (usually on their heads, occasionally on more tender parts), find trouble and throw it Mick's way. He'll take care of it, they'll drink, and life will go on. Sure, there'll be no more random killings, but that's just one of the prices he's willing to pay for enough technology to take apart every business from Egypt to Russia.
In the downtime, he'll throw temptations at Mick and Mick will duck every chance to fall. It's one of those annoying certainties that he's almost starting to enjoy - one of the last challenges that he hasn't savored to its peak.
This is the spiraling path they'll follow all the way down to the end of eternity.
But that's part of being a vampire. They move with the times but they never really change.
And he's almost surprised to find that he doesn't care.
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