Chapter Text
It was a beautiful day in New Orleans. Grey clouds were spread across the sky like ink stains, heavy with the smell of rain yet to fall. The sun periodically broke through the gaps, and clumps of tourists migrated into the patches of brightness like lizards seeking a warm rock to bask on. The wind came in starts, great rushes of air whipping through the streets before dropping back into stillness.
Renfield loved this kind of weather, changeable, neither-here-nor-there weather. This kind of weather could never sit still long enough to become an omen, no dramatic lashings of rain or flashes of lightning. Just passing sun and half-hearted rain showers signalling nothing in particular.
Renfield sat outside a café, on a plastic chair eating cappuccino foam with a tea spoon. He hiked his thumb through a hole in his jumper’s cuff and idly played with the loose threads. His outfit was obviously thrifted but full of the personality and style he’d been denied for a century under Dracula. The jumper was a pleasant spring green with knitted daisies all across it. He wore dark jeans that were just shy of navy blue after many washes and ripped at the knees. His new rings clinked on his teaspoon as he stirred the coffee foam, they were chunky and made of the kind of silver metal that stains your skin green if you wear them in the rain.
Hanging around the city and people watching bad become a treasured past time of Renfield. He no longer felt as though he was an outsider observing a life that could never be his, but someone who, even for just the duration of a coffee, was a part of humanity. It was fleeting and dream-like, as soon as the sun set, his reality would come back as regular as the tide. But, for a few precious moments, Renfield was a person like any other.
After the café, he headed toward a nearby park. Renfield’s sessions at the support group had helped him to realise he had an unhealthy relationship with the idea of natural vs unnatural. He viewed himself and Dracula, of course, as unnatural beings, and while he knew he would always believe that of Dracula, the group was helping him work through how these concepts affected his self worth.
The train of through often went like this, Renfield mused as he walked, “if I believe my existence is unnatural, then I must be doomed to hurt others as I am incompatible with the natural order and my continued existence is stolen from the lives of others.” These thoughts didn’t distress Renfield as they once might have and nor did they ring as true anymore. This was a well explored area of his mind to him now. These thoughts had been endlessly refuted until they only held power on his worst days. The words of his friends and mentors came to him effortlessly:
“You are not unnatural because the supernatural is as much a part of nature as anything else. As long as people have existed, there have been those who were different. Dracula steals energy from the lives of others and some of that energy sustains you, but when you use that energy, it goes back to nature. It’s all a cycle and you are still apart of that cycle. As long as you’ve lived Robert, one day you will die and join the Earth once more.”
While the idea May sounds morbid to others, to someone like Renfield who spent his whole life surrounded by death, it was comforting. He wasn’t seeking death but knowledge that he would not be here forever, that one day the great equaliser of death would come for him and Dracula the same was a little candle of hope he kept well hidden in the night.
Reaching the edge of the park, Renfield brushed a hand against the trees he passed. Recently, he’d begun to feel more settled here. He could feel the little specs of light he knew were the lives of insects around him. He almost felt like he could brush up against their minds and capture a little of what they were thinking. The simple thoughts are a welcome reprieve to when he begins to spiral. He reached out and felt the regimented order of the ants, each tiny mind a part of a bigger whole, the burrowing worms in the dirt, the struggle of the butterfly leaving it’s cocoon and taking its first flight. It was all like a song to him. An symphony only for him that no one else could hear, each insect contributing a tiny part yet building into a soft and strange melody that soothed him.
Renfield sat down on a park bench, a quieter one, away from the grass and the people, and sat cross-legged on the wood slats. He felt so drawn to the song, he wanted to join, to contribute to haunting sound, but he couldn’t understand the melody, the ever-shifting rhythm evaded him. He worried that if he tried to join the song, he would shatter it’s delicate sound.
So for now, he just listened and tried to hear what it wanted to tell him.