Disclaimer: I don't own "Hot fuzz," "Daybreakers" or any of it's characters, wishful thinking aside.
Authors Note #1: I was provoked. This crossover is essentially "Hot Fuzz," but in the "Daybreakers" 2007 universe. Set after the events of "Hot Fuzz," where the events of "Daybreakers" quickly follow. This is set in the early days of the vampirism outbreak, a year to two years in.
Warnings: vampires, vampire turning, transformation, canon typical violence, blood and injury, grief and loss, drama, romance, angst, friends to lovers, emotional constipation, hand jobs, grief, loss of parents, mild sexual content.
Who defends the high towers?
Chapter One
"Violent scenes in London today as police clashed with protesters over the controversial new blood-rationing schemes. Demonstrators argue that the blood allowances are too strict, that government bodies are failing in their promise to find alternatives. Similar scenes have been occurring across Asia and the Middle East in recent times."
They lost Nicholas and Danny at the beginning. Before things got really shit. Before suspicion became everyone's seventh sense. Everyone with a pulse anyway. Nicholas had been called back to London to attend a meeting and it was all over. Just like that. From what they'd found out, the bastards had turned him there, along with a bunch of higher ups. Probably held him down considering he doubted Angel wouldn't have gone quietly.
Bleedin' vampires.
Danny hadn't lasted much longer. Not after Nicholas rolled back into town, all steely-pale and sharp. Like all the goodness had been pressed right out of him. The next day, Nicholas called in for them both. Then for the next. And the next. Doris tried checking on them, but there had been no answer at Angel's cottage. Or Danny's. Or the pub. Or the shop.
Five days later, Nicholas and Danny breezed into the station, fangs and all. Serious. Predatory. Wrong. They tried talking to them, but it never went anywhere. All it got them with that unnerving stare and a mess of pamphlets in their lockers from HQ. Each one singing the praises about taking the bite by choice.
By fuckin' choice!
The rest of them huddled together in the pub not long after that. Unnerved by the thinning crowds. The pointed flyers tucked beside the specials on the menu offering cash for blood. They talked it over. Seeing the writing on the wall. The way things were going. More and more people were turning. It'd started as a virus, sure. But somehow it had become the new normal. Desirable even. Everywhere you looked it was being thrown at you. That it was safer than staying human. Better.
Still, no one had been prepared when Tony dropped a bomb on 'em.
He'd made an appointment for him and his family to get the bite at the health center. They tore a strip out of him for it o'course. Asking how he could do that? Do that to the kids? But it hadn't done any good. Tony had just stared at the scarred table. Lips twisting. Afraid. Shaking hands knotted in his lap. Long given up trying to hold his pint. And it was hard to blame him. Being human was starting to be something of a liability these days.
"It's for the best, really," Tony stuttered, eyes darting nervously under the thick lens of his glasses. "The telly said-"
"Forget the telly, mate!" Doris exploded, ruddy and dangerously close to tears. Viciously tearing the flyer with the 1-800-DONATE-LIFE number on it into tiny little pieces. Littering depressed confetti across the table. "What do you think is going to happen when there are no more humans? Huh? When every fucking person has taken the bite? What then? What happens when we don't want to give them blood for cash anymore? What happens?!"
And that- that was something to think about right there.
Andy's thigh had been a hot brand against his as they shifted closer. Instinctively closing ranks as the thought took root. The chill of it as cold as a vampire's skin. He could tell Andy wanted to say something - something to take the edge off. But he pressed his leg harder again his in a clear negative.
"What if we don't have a choice?" One of the Turner twins murmured. "I overheard Nicholas on the phone. Said its going to be Department policy by the start of next quarter. No humans allowed on the force."
"They can't force us to-" Andy started, before his voice dropped off like a broken bone. Pitching at the end as Nicholas and Danny walked into the pub. Sinking the octave of the room to a coffin fart. Those unearthly, red-gold eyes reflecting the light as they stared from across the room.
He wondered if they could smell the fear on them.
He wondered if the Nicholas and Danny they'd known was still in there somewhere.
He wondered a lot of things these days.
"They can," he answered instead, taking a sullen sip of his pint. Remembering the grim line of his grandfather's face as he sat by the fire with his back to the window during the worst of the Spring storms. Hands tight around his knees. Thunder booming like falling shells. The lines in the old hardwood floor gaped deep like trenches. "And they will, unless someone does something."
That was what he kept coming back to as the days turned to weeks and things only got worse. Trying to put on a brave face for his mum and da' until he couldn't take it anymore and sat them down to talk about the hard shite. About what happened next. A conversation that included Andy and his folks all in his parent's den. Trying to get them to realize that pretty soon- well, it didn't matter, did it? Because all four of them refused to fly out somewhere safer. To the places that'd opened their borders for any human who wanted to come, no strings attached.
Andy had just looked at him after, asking without words if he really thought it would get that bad. If he was blowing it out of proportion or summat. But he wasn't, and Andy knew it. All you had to do was watch Nicholas when he wasn't watching them and shiver at the chill that radiated from him. Forced to come to terms with the fact that the thin smiles Nicholas and Danny wore these days was just skin that was hiding their eye-teeth.
Patient Zero speaks, tonight on the BBC!
Subwalks expanding nation-wide!
89% organic blood now being served.
Daytime fill-up available.
The outbreak six months in.
Scientists identify the species of bat that started it all!
He pulled his collar up higher as he stood in the fresh sunlight outside the station. Hands cupped around a fag as he fumbled with the lighter. Distracted by the plumes of smoke in the woods up the hill. Wondering, exhausted, if the latest crispy-critter was going to start a forest fire in September after all.
He exhaled nicotine and stress, soaking up the sun.
It was still a virus.
There could still be a way to stop this.
There had to be a way to stop this.
There had to be.
Eight months after the first infection, the House of Commons passed the first blood-letting bill. Declaring all remaining human citizens enemies of the crown. Subject to arrest, seizure and removal to the nearest blood farming facility.
But o' course they were long gone by that point.
They made it to the cairns by dawn. Setting out while the vampires were settling down for the morning. It had been him, Andy, Doris, Bob, Saxon and the twins all making for an old hunting cabin that had been in Bob's family for years. His sister's cousins step-brother's place, or so Bob said - even he didn't remember. Banking on luck and borrowed time before someone remembered the old shack that existed on the meadow track to the north. They used it as a muster point before they met up with some of their mates from the academy. The ones who were running scared with their families. Deciding to try for it together as they looked for somewhere they could be safe.
Neither of their folks made it.
He thought they'd managed to convince them.
That they were going to meet them at the cabin.
But they didn't.
He wasn't sure if it was naivety or knowing the road ahead would be too much for them. He didn't want to know. Not really. Too afraid to think he'd missed the signs on purpose. He couldn't live with that kind of weight. Not on top of everything else.
They watched through a hacked CCTV stream as Nicholas, Danny, Tony and the rest of them tossed their houses the next night. Angry and unnecessarily brutal as the sound of his front door breaking in screamed like something small being trodden upon.
It sounded like he felt.
Breakable and loud and- not good enough.
He wished Nicholas was with them.
The real Nicholas.
Danny too.
He had a bloody list at this point, to be honest.
The realization that something human died in you when you turned was never more clear as they watched the feeds. Getting a front row seat to the moment Tony turned to Nicholas and Danny, watching impassively as the farms burned. All his neurosis and fuckin' tics smoothed away in favor of empty, blood-chilling confidence.
"We'll find them, Sargent. They won't get far, not for long. Not as they are."
Nicholas waited until he and Danny were alone before he opened the door of his police car to show the hand-cuffed hoodie stuffed inside. Lifting her like she weighed nothing as Danny's eyes flashed gold. Hushing a wordless hum into her blonde hair before sinking his teeth. Drinking her down as he captured Danny's mouth in a bloody kiss. Sharing her as the girl whimpered and kicked.
They could only watch, cry, then try and pick up the pieces.
That first night, after they watched the farms burn to ash, he followed Andy outside. There had been words. A hand meant for a shoulder was shaken off instead. There were more words. Angry ones. Eyes glinting tears. Then Andy had swung a fist. But instead of letting it connect like he meant to - knowing Andy needed to get it out - he grabbed him instead. Burying his face in his neck with hot tears that turned into lips against skin. Devolving into bumping hips and confused bursts of pleasure that blossomed between horror and salt-track pain.
He didn't remember much. Grief was a sort of drunkenness all on its own. But he did remember Andy's mouth tasted like nicotine and blood when he'd bit a kiss from it. Just the same as he figured Andy remembered the sound he pulled all the way up from his toes when the bloke wormed his hand under his slacks and jacked him off with a violent half-dozen strokes. Coming all over himself - fist against his teeth - as Andy didn't pull away and they swayed there. Imagining they could smell the ashes of their childhood on the air.
It was the first time he wondered if they'd be okay come morning.
But it wasn't the last.
Years passed like that and things only got worse.
Bob, bless him, slipped away peacefully not long after they found what counted as the Resistance in the early days. They picked up more people along the way. Survivors. People with stories that ate at you when the sun went down. People he stopped trying to know by name. People they lost, eventually. It was how they lost the Turner twins. They woke up one day and found their bedrolls empty. Just like that. Doris didn't smile much after that. But he caught her looking at the cliffs as they packed up. Not wanting to risk if the twins had been picked up by a patrol. Wondering the same thing they all were as the wind from the west whipped thin with ash and sparks. Whispering that if they wanted to know, the answers might be at the bottom of the bluff.
Neither of them looked.
They kept running.
The only thing that made life worth it was Andy, stuck like glue to his side. Just like they always were.
They didn't talk about what had happened that night. But they didn't let it wreck them either. It didn't change things. And that was good. Maybe. He didn't have the emotional maturity to admit he desperately wanted more. At least he thought he did. Or maybe he was just fucked up. Maybe he needed to get his head on straight. It was hard to figure what went on in his head anymore.
There were murmurings over the pond about a cure. About some vampire bloke who did a hail mary through his own bloody windshield and turned back somehow. Audrey, one of the Resistance leaders they'd stayed in contact with on the East coast swore it was true. Saying she had him with her, safe. That he was scarred and half-dead when she found him, but he had a heartbeat. For the first time in years, he was human again. And if they could figure out how it could be the answer to all this.
A way out.
A second chance.
A reason to keep breathing.
A reason to keep fighting.
A reason to keep being.
No one believed it.
But that didn't stop people from talking.
"What do you think?" Andy asked a few nights later, the lantern-light turning his mop of hair redder than was honest. Watching him clean his disassembled crossbow from across the table.
He didn't have to ask what he was on about.
"You know what I think," he answered quietly, not looking up from the cog he was oiling.
"It's Audrey, though," Andy pointed out. Stubborn. Jiggling the table with a rogue knee. Feeling more than seeing the weight of his eyes as they flicked from him to the table, then back again. "She's never steered us wrong before. She helped us find this place, didn't she?"
The old mead mill still smelled like crystallized honey and flowering things. It was the longest run in any place they'd had since they'd left Sandford. Home. They'd been able to regroup here. Start growing food even. She and Doris had gotten close over the years. Exchanging information. Finding ways to help each other. And while they never said exactly where they were located, Audrey mentioned an area she figured might be safe. Something about her parents being in the wine business or sommat.
His nose twitched, saying nothing.
"If it's true-" Andy started, fingers oily from the crossbow parts. The sheen caught the light as a somewhere upstairs a baby started to cry. Looking so bleeding hopeful he wanted to kick in his bloody teeth.
"If it's true," he interrupted. Refusing to soften the words when they came out angry. Spare fist clenched underneath the table. Stinging joint pain he didn't need. Feeling a lot like that bloody sea mine before it clicked itself awake. Just waiting for the moment to pop off.
When he finally looked up from his crossbow, Andy was gone.
For the first time since this had started, he went to bed that night without the familiar shape of Andy in the bedroll next to him. Making him realize what a bastard he'd been as the absence burrowed through his layers like a rot.
He didn't sleep.
And come morning, sipping weak tea and toast, Andy told him he hadn't either.
It didn't make him feel better. Not when he couldn't open his mouth to apologize like he meant to.
Too afraid "I love you," would come tumbling out and ruin what was left of the good.
A/N: Thank you for reading, please let me know what you think. – There will be more to come.