Title: Thank you, Dan Curtis
Author: Haldiriell
Genre: humour?
Rating: PG
Summary: Michael's thought immediately after the events of the film, only in a, um, humourous way.
Author's Notes: I'm probably way off on Michael's characterisation, but this begged to be written, so . . . consider this a companion piece to "Fragile". Also, Dan Curtis is the creator of "Dark Shadows".
I thought pulling a double shift in the ER during a full moon was a weird experience. Especially that one time a man came in with a potato shoved somewhere very . . . uncomfortable. I still wonder how he got it there.
But, now that I think about it, this last week has got to be the strangest, hands down.
Okay, so shoot-outs in subways aren't exactly unheard of. Especially in America. Ones where one side of the battle has radioactive bullets . . . that's edging into Twilight Zone territory.
I was all freaked out over that. Now I look back and snort.
You know that movie, "The Matrix"? Where Neo's asking Morpheus what the Matrix is, and Morpheus says something about the rabbit hole?
Compared to the rabbit hole, I just felt into the Mariana trench.
My mother used to watch this television show, "Dark Shadows". She watched it back in the '60s and '70s, and then that revival thing back in the early '90s. It had a vampire on it, Barnabas Collins, and a werewolf, Quentin. My mother thought Quentin was hot. My aunt preferred Barnabas. I thought it was a stupid show, and I only watched when my mother forced me to.
Basically, I grew up with this image of vampires and werewolves. But I knew they weren't real. So I went into something real. Medicine seemed about as far from my family's fascination with movie monsters as I could get.
And then I just had to take a residency in Budapest.
My mother was just delighted, of course. She told me to go tour Transylvania and bring her back souvenirs of Dracula.
Which reminds me, I'll need to ask Selene about that.
Okay, so, the subway. That was tame compared to what happened next. Which was, oh . . . the total and complete meltdown of my life!
One minute, I'm a medical student . . . the next I'm sprouting hair and fangs and trying to eat people. Well, not the eating-people part, but I'm sure that eventually, I would have done it. Selene told me that I would . . . I was thinking she was joking until it happened.
Lucian did that to me. Some short punk with bad fashion sense went all freaky and bit me, and now I'm a werewolf. Or not. Selene also bit me, but that was because that jerk who was trying to get into her pants shot me.
I don't like being shot, I've decided. It kind of hurts.
Of course, that's not all that's happened to me. Let's see . . .
In the last--what, seventy-two hours?--I had some spaghetti out of a can in my apartment, ran for the train, saw some guys in trench coats shoot each other, saved some teenager from bleeding to death, got to work, helped with some surgeries, went home, and had some woman attack me. I had a midget bite me, was in a car accident, got a concussion, saved the same woman from drowning--can vampires drown?--got chased from a mansion by some Rottweilers after a blonde with fangs made me jump out a third story window, and I got chased by some guys dressed like cops. I got chained to a chair for a day, had a bunch of hallucinations, saw another shoot-out, got kidnapped, nearly transformed into a werewolf in the back seat of a cop car, was tied to a board for several hours, got shot, had a vampire bite me . . .
Oh, and then there was the part where I turned into some freaky version of Nightcrawler from X-Men and had a fist-fight a one-thousand, four-hundred year old vampire with a freaking huge sword. I had blue skin and fangs and stuff. Selene tells me that my eyes went all black.
And, apparently, I can talk to werewolves with my mind. And somewhere in the middle of that, I fell in love with a vampire.
All of this has happened to me, and here I am, sitting in Selene's car while she drives, and all I can think about is what I'm going to tell my mother.
I can just see it now.
"Hi, Mom? It's Michael. Oh, I'm doing great. I performed emergency first aid on a shooting victim, and I turned into a half-vampire, half-werewolf who can fly. Oh, and all your future grandchildren are going to have fangs, drink blood, and be allergic to silver. How's Dad?"
Yeah. Right.
Wait. Do I have to drink blood now?
Selene keeps looking at me. I guess she's checking to see if I'm okay. I would say that now being completely immortal would make me "okay". Now that I think about it, she's probably wondering about my mental state, rather than my physical. Considering she saw me naked not too long ago, I don't think she has any concerns over that.
I don't know if I have a mental state right now.
Damn, I just realised that I'll never be able to entertain fantasies about Buffy the Vampire Slayer ever again. And WB's producing "Dark Shadows" this fall . . .
I just had an epiphany. It makes perfect sense, now. This is all Dan Curtis's fault.
"Do you have a cellphone?" I ask suddenly.
She looks at me for a moment, then pulls one from a compartment in the console between us and hands it to me. I stare at it for a moment, then dial a number.
"Corvin residence," I hear my mother's voice say.
"Hi, Mom? It's Michael . . ."
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end