A/N The Vampire AU that nobody asked for, part one.
It's been thirteen years since Sabrina Spellman left Greendale, and she hasn't aged a day.
It was one of the perks of being a vampire. Well, it was one of the perks of being a half-vampire. Immortality was another if you were into that sort of thing. For Sabrina, all the advantages of being a half-breed came from her human side.
Being able to sustain herself on a diet of deliciously diverse human food and go out in the daytime. She went to high school dances, matinee movies, and on beach trips. She got to skip and play and fall in love, even though it never lasted.
Harvey found out a week after her sixteenth birthday. She had gotten sick, really sick. She was vomiting, shaking, and coughing up blood. Her Aunties had never seen anything like it, and Ambrose couldn't find any reasonable explanation as to why it was happening. But there wasn't much information on half-vampires, so she couldn't blame him.
She found out later that brownies Roz shared with her were leftovers from a Sunday dinner. A dinner that her father had blessed. She forgave her. Of course, she did. She didn't know then. She hadn't done it on purpose.
But she didn't know that when she was crying out in pain, barely able to breathe.
She held off taking the blood as long as she could. She knew it would make her better, but she didn't want it. She didn't want her mouth to fill with the iron-rich taste, and she didn't want to like it… but she also didn't want to die.
Her family was gathered around her bed worrying, hoping, praying (to who, Sabrina didn't know) so there was nobody to stop Harvey from barging into her room as blood overflowed past her lips and spilled down her chest.
He ran when he saw her fangs. She passed out.
When she woke up, she felt better. (Only physically.)
Her family kept her home the next day to be sure she was fully healed.
Harvey showed up when she was having pancakes on the front porch.
Ambrose had tracked him down and told him everything. How the blood she had consumed came at no cost. That was the purpose of the mortuary, to take from the dead instead of the living and give Sabrina a normal life in the process.
He knew that she wasn't a killer. He knew that. He knew that was the first time she had blood since she was seven and contracted the swine flu. He knew that she was still Sabrina, that she had always been Sabrina, but he couldn't kiss her again. (He never did, and she didn't blame him.)
She looked in the mirror after he left. Her mouth was still stained by the blood.
She shattered the mirror. She cut her hand. (She had to drink again.)
Roz handled it better, probably because she had her own supernatural thing to deal with, and she was so grateful. She wasn't sure she could deal with someone looking at her differently again.
She had spent many nights crying, screaming, cursing. Although, who she cursed varied from moment to moment. Sometimes it was Diana. (Why couldn't she have loved a human?) Sometimes it was Edward. (Why couldn't he have married a vampire?)
She spent her days wondering which part of herself she hated more. (Somedays it was human. Somedays it was vampire.)
She told Theo shortly after Roz had her vision. He was her friend, and it didn't feel right that he was the only one who didn't know.
She showed him her fangs. He was amazed, and he told her that her life would make a really cool movie. (She supposed that it would.)
Even though everything had been patched up with her friends, she started spending more time at the Coven compound.
At first, it went terribly. The Weird Sisters, a trio of orphan psychic vampires, seemed to have it out for her. They filled the halls with nasty rumors and hurled insults like mortal punches. (Abomination. Unnatural. Half-breed.)
(It was another reminder she didn't need.)
She may be half-human, but she wasn't raised to let people, or vampires, walk all over her. So one day, when she'd had enough, she tore down a blackout curtain they were standing in front of, exposing them to the sunlight.
They retreated hissing and screaming, into the darkened corners of the room.
It took three days, and extra blood, to fully heal their injuries.
They respected her after that, as did the rest of the coven. Zelda was proud, and Nick was amazed.
To be fair, Nick had always been amazed by her. He had always been fascinated by her. He had always called her nice things. (Daywalker, Light-bringer, Brightheart.)
He was just as much of an anomaly as she was. A vampire, raised by a werewolf on a diet of animal blood.
(She was fascinated, too. She never hid it.)
They were the freakshows of the coven, which meant that, to a certain degree, they understood each other.
Zelda liked him better than Harvey, and after hearing about, what she called, the travesty that was his diet, she insisted on having him over for dinner as often as possible.
He watched her eat her breakfast over the rim of his glass with an almost child-like fascination, and when he kissed strawberry sauce off the corner of her mouth he swore he could taste the sweetness.
He knew what she was, but still, he loved her. (Wrapped her up in his bed, in bliss, fangs buried deep in her shoulder.)
For a while, everything was perfect. He took her into all of the hidden parts of the forest (and made love to her in them.) She told him what sunlight felt like, what chocolate tasted like, and how wonderful everything was.
Just when she was starting to think they might be forever, a gunshot echoed throughout the forest. It was followed by a howl of pain that Nick recognized as Amalia, the closest thing he ever had to a mother.
They ran through the forest like the wind, and they could hear the hunter before they saw him. (He was dead the minute they did.)
Sabrina searched his belongings after the deed was done, while Nick dug Amalia a grave. (She offered to help. He refused.) The bag was full of traps and tools and things that looked illegal. The fox pelt was what confirmed that he was a poacher.
They didn't bury him in the woods he disgraced. They took him back to the Coven, to the Sisters, and let what was left of him be desecrated, too.
Nick was never the same after that. No matter what she did, he just got worse. He pointed out that she was human, like the bastard that killed Amalia, and her heart broke all over again.
Roz told her it wasn't her fault. There was nothing she could've done. She knew that was true, but it didn't lessen the pain.
He begged for her forgiveness months later. She gave it, of course, but what she couldn't give him was another chance. She could never forget how dirty he had made her feel when he called her a half-breed, a tainted thing.
(She was Brightheart no longer.)
She was stuck in a daze until graduation, until her cap was tossed high above her head.
(Falling, falling, fallen.)
She couldn't stay. She wasn't like them. She wasn't like anyone.
She left a week later, to find others like her.
(She prayed that she would. To who, she didn't know.)
She promised to call, and she did. (Once in a blue moon.) She spent most of her time alone, and she found that one could learn a lot about one's self that way.
She bleached her hair white a Louisiana. It was the first place she had really stayed since leaving Greendale. She met a lovely vampire named Marie who worked as a night nurse and volunteered at a local hospital.
It was how she got her blood. Never taking more than she needed, as to not interfere with anyone's surgeries or transfusions. Sabrina liked that about her, and Marie liked Sabrina.
She hadn't met anyone like her before, but she had heard stories. The stories weren't much help, but she still stayed.
For six months she ate her way through the local food and learned the local legends. For six months she slept in the same bed and worked as a waitress in a diner. The moment she heard from a pair of nomad vampires that there might be answers for her farther south, she packed her bags, said her goodbyes, and left.
With a promise to call, of course.
She spent a year trapesing around Texas, but all of the local vampires shut her out. They made it clear that she was an outsider. (Unwelcome, unwanted.)
The food was fabulous and varied widely from city to city. The humans were diverse and interesting. They came from different backgrounds, ethnicities, races, and religions. It was an interesting place to be, which was why she stayed for so long, despite her loneliness.
One thing she didn't like, though, was the intense heat. Hate was probably a more accurate description of her feelings towards it.
She got sun sick for the first time in El Paso. It was an overwhelming burning sensation, and she had to break into a blood bank just to make it stop. It turned out that her humanity had its limits. She spent two weeks holed up in a crappy motel room before she felt well enough to travel again.
Mexico was just as guarded as Texas, if not more so. It must've been a cultural thing, but just like Texas, she stayed. Only for eight months, and only in the north. She didn't see the point in traveling further south, where it was hotter, if she wasn't going to get any answers.
The Dia de Los Muertos celebrations were unlike anything she had ever seen, but that was when it hit her that she was twenty, and she bolted for California the moment the festivities were over.
The vampires there were much more welcoming, but that wasn't the best part. These vampires had integrated themselves with humans! They worked night shifts, went to movies and bars, and had human friends. A few even had human lovers!
But despite her best efforts, she didn't find anyone like her. She stayed anyway because it felt like the closest she was going to get to belonging anywhere. That feeling only lasted for two years.
She hopped on a plane to Madrid, after learning that some of the world's oldest covens were in Europe.
They were a private bunch, but they were kind-natured. She bounced around from coven to coven for a few years, gathering information where she could. She got a job at a cafe, then a dress shop, and a shoe store before heading to France.
If Spain was a daydream, then France was a nightmare.
The food wasn't to her taste but the fashion was, so she made do. Unfortunately, she made the mistake of sticking her nose where it didn't belong, and she ended up on the radar of Lucifer Morningstar.
He was the leader of the Marseille Coven; the oldest coven in France.
He approached her in a cafe at half-past midnight and promised her the answers she had been searching for. (She should've known better.)
He had her as a guest in his grand house in Paris for a week, before he said anything about what she was. Even then, it was nothing she didn't already know.
It was another week before he declared that he was having a party and that she would be the guest of honor. She should've run then. (She really should have.)
It was a grand black and white ball, but he paraded her around in a red dress like she was some kind of trophy. She knew instantly that he intended to keep her like some kind of exotic pet. Like an animal that didn't belong in a cage. Like a tiger.
(Tigers didn't belong in cages. He should've known better.)
She faked sick just before daybreak, complete with an overdramatic fainting spell. He insisted on carrying her back to her room. Of course, that was when she suddenly regained consciousness and smashed a window. It was East facing, and he was exposed to the sun the minute it started to rise.
(He burned. She ran.)
She kept running, and she didn't stop until she crossed the Italian border. She looked over her shoulder for weeks, traveling only during the day and locking herself up in hostels and cheap hotels during the night.
She met a particularly nice vampire family in Stilo, who were very happy to have a taste-tester for the wine they produced. They advised her to go back to where it all began, to the father of them all.
She did so, taking the first flight to Israel she could, but only after amassing extensive knowledge on wine and its history.
She called home the minute she landed. Her family missed her, and they wanted to know when she would be coming home. It had been ten years. She told them soon.
(She lied.)
She was only in Israel long enough to see the tree where Judas, the father of all vampires, hanged himself, and curse his name. Did he know that his last, selfish act would create a thing like her?
(A damned thing amongst damned things. An abomination amongst abominations.)
She left when the woman running the boarding house she was staying in noticed that she didn't have a shadow.
(She wondered how people had missed that all her life.)
Greece was cooler. Not by much, but it was enough for her to notice. She didn't find vampires this time, they found her. She was reminded of Lucifer, and she was terrified. But they sang, and it soothed her, and she went willingly.
She was thrust into a world of magick and mystery in, what they said, was the last temple of the goddess Selene. They didn't have any answers for her, but they said they knew how she could get them.
She wanted to believe, she really did, so she did as they instructed. She prayed, and she slept at Selene's altar.
(She dreamt of the Balkans.)
They fed her, and they sent her on the way the very next day. They told her to come back and tell them what it was like when she found what she had been searching for.
(Not if. When.)
And for two sweet seconds, she had hope.
Now, it's starting to fade.
She's sitting in a vampire bar in Albania on her sixth glass of absinthe, and she's wondering if she should just go home.
She orders another glass, and someone sits next to her at the bar. He's not a vampire. He's a demon. A demon with shoulder-length golden hair and a cocky grin. He doesn't belong there.
He laughs when she points this out and says that he was just about to tell her the same thing.
She huffs.
(Where does she belong, then?)
His face falls, a peculiar look for a demon.
(You mean to tell me you do not know?)
She shakes her head.
He stands up and offers her his hand.
(Let me show you.)
She's got nothing to lose, so she takes it.
(His hands are warm.)
Dhampir, he says.
It fits, she says.
This is a universe I definitely want to expand upon. Maybe once 'Cherry Pies' is finished. It will get a full-length story, I just don't know when. This is different than my usual style of writing. It reads more like a poem.
Shout out to Satansstar for beta-ing/ sharing her thoughts.
Hope you guys like it.