Chapter Text
Shit . That was the first thing Rebecca thought, just, oh shit .
“You’re okay,” she said, because it was that or crying and she didn’t want to stress him out more. “You’re okay, I promise. I’m not angry.”
Her hand had found a place between his shoulder blades, gently stroking. She couldn’t see him afraid of her again, not after last night.
Blood kept pouring from his mouth and nose. It seemed like longer than a person could go without breathing, but Rebecca had enough experience to recognise the adrenaline flooding her body, the way her heart was suddenly racing. Time slowed down in moments like this.
She had to be touching him- if she broke contact, she was suddenly convinced, something awful would happen.
The heaving stopped. He gasped for air, choking, coughing, fine droplets of blood staining the cute yellow curtains above the sink.
“You’re not angry,” he breathed. “You’re not angry. Thank you.”
“I’m not. Sit,” she already had a hand on his shoulder, the other under his opposite arm, guiding him down, almost an embrace. “Put your head between your knees, you look like you’re gonna pass out. I’m getting my car keys, and we’re going to the E.R.”
“How…?” He sank obediently to the floor, eyes following her, then flinched into the correct position.
“If we say that you’re my boyfriend, they’ll let me do most of the talking.” She found a church-branded tote bag by the key dish, shoved in her wallet, her phone, both of their sets of keys. “You’re visiting from… London. We met when I was vacationing there three years ago. Is your real name on the paperwork here?”
“Yeah?”
Charger. Some random books from the shelf by the tv, so she had something to lose herself in if treatment stretched on. The entire apartment smelled like a crime scene; fresh blood and lots of it. Haemorrhage.
“While we’re at the hospital, you’re… Montague Roberts, do you think you can remember that?”
“Montague Roberts.” His voice was wavering.
“Good.” The coconut flavoured pedialyte from the fridge, because he clearly didn’t like grape, and the peanut butter crackers she’d shoved in a drawer while unpacking groceries. “Up.”
She got him about half of the way up before he grabbed the counter, pushing to standing, his arm shaking as he tried to bear his own weight. His pupils had blown wide, his eyes following her sluggishly, like he’d been concussed. They had to get to ground level; she’d be shit-fucked if he lost consciousness before they got downstairs.
“C’mon,” she said, motioning to the door. “Put your hand on my shoulder, you can lean on me.”
There was not a single conscious thought in her head until they made it to the car, just panic-instinct, the kind of cold, utilitarian control that kicked in whenever she was in a crisis scenario. Later she’d realise that he hadn’t argued back once, wonder about it, but in the moment it was just a sequence of actions. Car. Seatbelts. Drive.
“Our story?” she asked, once they were moving. Thank fuck it was early enough to miss rush hour.
“My name is Montague Roberts.” He’d closed his eyes. “I’m your boyfriend of three years. Visiting from London.”
“Good.”
“Is this… new?” he asked, wiping at his mouth, bloodying his sleeve horribly. “D-did it come on suddenly?”
“Stick to how it’s been for real, it’ll be easier.” Her eyes were on the road, her foot on the gas, every ounce of her focus on him. “You’ve been sick for a few days. No appetite, fever, shit like that. Maybe something you picked up travelling.”
“I’ve… I’ve had issues before, but nothing like this.” He was beginning to babble, trip over his speech, eyes half-focused as he turned his head to look at her. “Can’t eat much of the food here. Stomach aches. That sort of…”
She nodded, thinking keep talking keep conscious, stay with me, stay with me, stay with me. Please.
“I don’t think this is my blood, you know?” He’d started slurring a little, head lolled back against the headrest, staring up at the ceiling. “I think it’s his. I think it’s every drop of blood he ever gave me, poisoning me from the inside…”
“Maybe don’t tell the doctors that?”
“I won’t.” He managed a laugh. Something at least close to a smile. She’d never heard him sound so scared, so shaken. “Just my luck, isn’t it? Even killing the bastard wasn’t enough…”
She heard him inhale sharply. Swallow. Cough, in a way that sounded a little bit too much like gagging.
“I don’t care, but you’re paying for the cleaning.” Three more minutes of driving; or, it would have been if she’d been paying any attention to the speed limit. “Just sell more of his antique bullshit.”
Seventy seconds later they were pulling up to the vallet parking sign with blood soaking into the passenger-side footwell and the front of Renfield’s sweater. He’d gone this horrible shade of grey-pale that Rebecca had never seen on him before, not even when he’d been dead- like someone who’d been shot.
She didn’t expect him to even attempt to walk, but he was fiddling with the door handle and stumbling toward the sidewalk before she could suggest an alternative. She climbed out through the passenger side door to support him, one arm around his waist, because he didn’t need to fall and crack his head open on top of all the other bullshit. She was dimly aware of getting blood in her hair, a damp patch on her shirt from where his arm lay loosely across her shoulders, held her free hand. He’d had his hands over his mouth.
The guy at the check-in desk was much more concerned with the rush through to treatment than fact-checking their story, and Rebecca had been ride-along in enough ambulances to know that was bad. Cold terror filled her chest as they were hurried through processing. She clung to his hand almost the entire time, the contact like a lifeline as staff got him in a bed and on a drip and almost-sort-of cleaned up. When things finally slowed down- when they were alone- she could just about breathe again.
But she couldn’t let go.
Not with how cold his palms were; as if the life had drained out of him with the blood he’d expelled.
They’d taken his sweater somewhere, and goosebumps were forming on his arms. In patches, the blood had soaked through to his shirt. She cradled his hand between hers, willing the warmth to help, even just a little. Tried to find a bright side; at least the close contact would be good for their cover.
“I hate this,” he mumbled, looking beseechingly up at her. “I- I can’t stand hospitals, I truly despise them. Rebecca, please...”
He was still ghost-pale, his lips tinged purple-grey. His eyes were wide; wild with terror and so, so blue.
“Then why did you come?” Rebecca was reaching the point where she couldn’t be scared any more, where it automatically ticked over into anger. “Why did you listen to me?”
Anger, centred on herself.
Maybe he’d been right. Maybe they wouldn’t be able to do anything. Maybe all she’d done was make his day worse, dragging them both into a situation they’d have to bullshit their way back out of so he could suffer in peace.
“Why did I…?” He seemed off-kilter at the question; incredulous— like she’d asked if him if the sky was blue. “Because you told me to.”
Something in the way he said it. Like a fact. The most normal thing in the world. Rebecca felt the muscles in her jaw tense; she’d recently broken the habit of grinding her teeth when stressed. He seemed to notice. Squeezed her hand, tried and failed to force a smile. Clarified.
“Because I trust you.”
The world had rearranged itself, wholly.
It had centred on Rebecca.
In part because it had to. There was nothing else he could look at that wouldn’t, quite probably immediately, send him mad. Even now, her touch didn’t entirely overwhelm the sense of panic at the plastic cannula in his arm.
Someone else’s blood. Someone else’s blood. Indirectly vein-to-vein, the one tenet he had never broken, the one he never expected to matter. It itched under his skin; psychological, or the start of a reaction? Had he been altered against this, too?
When he had still been with his Master, blood had bound them. His Master’s blood was what made him more than human, what granted him healing and eternal life. It had reconstructed his body a thousand times. If one could see the lines, he would be marbled through with it, completely, like the fat in a fine cut of meat. He had begged for it like sustenance and taken it like sacrament. More than once, he had been forced to survive on it alone.
Would he die without it?
“I brought books,” Rebecca interrupted his panic. “Should I read something?”
“It would pass the time.”
He didn’t think about the white walls; the places on the bed that could easily be anchor-points for restraints. He’d been in modern hospitals before— the sanitarium was the worst, but a good number of his nightmares harkened back only a few decades. When things had looked near enough the same.
He kept his eyes on Rebecca as she fished a book out of her bag, and began reading aloud. He was too dazed to really follow her narration, even the text of the title too hard to parse. But her voice was soothing, rhythmic, with more softness than he’d ever heard in it. She’d probably never do this again. Hopefully, he’d never come this close to exsanguination again.
But he would, willingly, if it meant he got to repeat this.
If he got to hear her voice like this again, if he got to hold her hand, warm and strong and solid in his own, she could slit his throat for all he cared.
They were only separated from the rest of the department by a thin, blue curtain, and it twitched aside as a woman in scrubs walked through. Rebecca let his hand go to shut her book, and looked anxiously up at the stranger. Waiting for news.
Renfield tried to pay attention, he really did. It was his prognosis, after all. But the adrenaline rush was ending, and the entire world was still fuzzy around the edges, and whenever he focused on her voice for too long, the tone began to get to him.
It was hard to parse the more complicated jargon, and she was speaking in a way that was just a little bit too familiar. A kind of friendly condescension reserved for the infirm. He’d last heard it right before being plunged into an insulin coma. He caught ‘sedation’ and ‘endoscopy’ but that was all he managed before the crawling feeling under his skin got to be too much. Instead, he waited for her to leave, and looked pleadingly back to Rebecca.
“Did you catch any of that?” she asked. He shook his head, the papery material of the pillow crinkling.
She explained. Waiting for the transfusion to finish, then more waiting for safety reasons, then anaesthesia, then some sort of fantastical surgery that relied on modern medical tools he was far too exhausted to understand. Which, like all of the rest of this, sounded terrifying.
“Do you think it will work?” She wouldn’t know; his biology was alien to the both of them. But the world had fallen out from beneath his feet, and he needed some kind of command to cling to.
“It might,” Rebecca answered. “Do you?”
“No.” He stopped there, not trusting himself to continue; not wanting to ramble his way into a breakdown. He anchored himself, in the brown of her eyes and the warmth of her hand, tried not to think at all.
“Why not?” When he stayed stubbornly silent, she added: “I’ll believe you, don’t worry.”
“This is… more than just…” He struggled for the words. “More than a body, this is… His blood bound us. Made me his. If he could heal me through supernatural means, surely I could be destroyed the same way?”
“Robert. He’s dead.”
“Not for certain, and even if he is…” It was harder than he’d expected to form the words, exhausted as he was. “Maybe that’s what did it. He was the source of his power, and mine was only an extension. Maybe this is just what happens.”
“It’s not what happens in the book,” Rebecca unlocked her phone and found the text with a single deft motion. “It says… Power flows between you and your Master like water; learn to dam the outlet.”
He didn’t want to think about the book. The others.
Because there had been others, in the hundreds of years leading up to him.
He lifted his arm, the one with the cannula, slightly. It felt impossibly heavy, like stone, distant from his body. A foreign limb, something alien grafted on. Someone else’s blood was in those veins; a stranger’s. He suddenly wished he could amputate it at the shoulder. Stop the spread.
He kept waiting for the reprimand, his Master’s voice. For the snap of mental agony that would inevitably come; as if his skull was splitting. ‘How dare you’, he would have started, a voice like venom, caustic to the mind. ‘What gives you the right, to damage my property? Remove that at once.’
“He called this dead blood, you know. The more time outside the body, the less there is to it.” Renfield wasn’t speaking clearly anymore; he was too busy trying to keep his eyes open. “He’s right. The cells aren’t dead, but the life is missing.”
He could feel its absence, in the cold sensation of infusion. He had felt that nameless, abstract force spilling freely from his body with the blood of his Master, the same way it had surged into him as he lay on the floor of the Lobo's basement, startling back to life. It was just like bleeding out; the exact fading sensation that came after a vital vessel was cut.
“Was that why he killed his victims?” Rebecca’s voice was soft, still, her fingers between the pages of the book she’d been reading, propping it open. “Taking their… what, their life force?”
He nodded.
“I did too…” He was truly struggling now, the room nothing but a bright blur through his eyelashes. “What did you think I got from the insects?”
He was asleep before she could answer.
Rebecca was pacing.
Waiting for the procedure to end.
They’d whisked Renfield off to the ‘outpatient GI unit’ and ditched her in the waiting room for confusing, confidentiality-related reasons. She’d lost her shit a little once he was out of sight. Got a dirty look from the department receptionist for kicking a chair, which had been bolted down, so it wasn’t like she could break it.
She couldn’t stop thinking about what he’d said.
Life force, in fresh blood. Drawn directly from the living victim; fading when they did. Was that what was in Dracula’s blood, somehow? Why it could revive the dead? Renfield had been staring at her when he said it, his eyes soft and warm and unfocused, like they’d looked when he’d called her Lottie. Maybe this was the same. Memories, revealed as he lost his grip on the present.
She remembered the way he’d scraped his teeth over her skin. How she’d understood, with total certainty, what he wanted in that moment.
Was that what he’d needed?
Could they have avoided this?
Renfield had dozed through most of the wait. She’d spent the time picking through a few more chapters of Wolf at the door. Just to make sure she’d understood what it meant.
The main girl was constantly being hand-fed baby birds by the hunky shredded torso man from the cover. But she started with the blood. In the very beginning of the story, after she’d been cast out of Dracula’s castle and collapsed from the ‘banishment from beneath the shelter of his control’, whatever that meant, the birds were plucked live and their little throats slit so she could sip the blood from them ‘like wine’.
It was gross, but she would do that if she had to. If the transfusion they had scheduled wasn’t enough. Hell, she’d offer, when he was through recovery. It wasn’t like he’d ask.
She paused to look up at the clock. The endoscopy wasn’t supposed to take more than an hour. The minute hand on the clock was broken, wobbling uselessly back and forth at the quarter-hour mark, but the hour hand had already swept past two numbers. Her hands itched, the restlessness begging her to put a fist through something. She wanted to scream. To kick down the electronically-locked double doors and demand to see what they were doing. To call Kate and beg, please, please, just get here, just hold me, don’t make me do this alone again.
But she didn’t. She stayed in the stupid waiting room and grit her teeth and chewed angry patches of raw skin into her knuckles. Felt so powerless it made her nauseous.
And made a decision.
When they told her he’d be moved to recovery, she felt the relief in her whole body.
Apparently, there’d been something “unexpected”, so they were still wrapping up— but that just gave her time. There was a little shop on the main concourse. She bought zip stitches, stick-on wound dressings, alcohol wipes, and a small set of children’s writing utensils.
There’d be less eyes on her up by the outpatient unit, so she went back before she ripped the pencil sharpener out of the cardboard packaging. When she’d got the blade out, she tucked it into her pocket.
W aited.
It didn’t take long. The certainty made things feel faster.
Her focus was on Renfield the second she stepped into the recovery room. And not a second too soon, clearly- she could see the agitation simmering under his skin, his fists clenched in the blankets. His knuckles were turning white.
“Hey,” she said, trying to keep calm. She didn’t like the way he was looking at her, piercing and unblinking. “I missed you.”
“Rebecca?”
His voice was so worn. She crossed the room, immediately, to hug him. Remembered she was supposed to be playing a role, and gave him a chaste, clumsy kiss.
His cheek was cold against hers, his body cool and limp, akin to algor mortis. If she put her fingers to his wrist, she was completely sure, she would struggle to find a pulse.
Life energy, and the lack of it.
“We want to run a few more tests, and keep an eye out for new bleeding.” the woman who’d escorted her- Doctor? Nurse? She hadn’t been paying attention- said. She was on the older side, and sounded condescendingly amused by their whole deal. “He’ll get about a half hour for the sedation to wear off a little more, then we can come talk about that.”
“Don’t want more tests.” the protest was a weak one, Renfield slumping into her embrace as he said it.
“Of course you don’t, hon.” Rebecca was beginning to dislike this woman. “But that’s a conversation for when you’re a bit more with it, okay?”
Renfield nodded. Didn’t speak.
When they were alone again, Rebecca convinced herself to let go.
“Did it work?”
She already knew the answer, but it was cemented when he shook his head.
“It won’t make much difference.” He was looking up at her, that manic terror creeping back into his eyes, giving him a wild, dangerous look, even while he was propped up against pillows, too weak to hold himself upright. “They took pictures of the lesions. They were made from within the flesh. I know what that looks like, Rebecca, I know-”
“I believe you,” she insisted. “And I have an idea.”
He settled a little after that, looking to her with a heartbreaking amount of trust. God, no wonder Dracula had kept his claws in him for so long. If he ever reformed Rebecca was going to kill him again, and even harder.
“How much… ‘life energy’ is in human blood?”
“No.”
“No?” She said. “So it would work?”
“I can’t- I can’t ask that of you, I don’t deserve that.” He was staring at her, eyes wide. He’d slept most of the day and the shadows under them were still so dark. “We don’t even know that it would do anything.”
She wanted to shake him. To grab his shoulders and yell in his face to let her help, to get all of the bullshit out of his head and stop drawing this out into an argument. But she didn’t. Instead, she took a deep breath.
“I’m not crazy about it either, it’s kind of freak shit, but… Friday night, do you remember much?” He shook his head. “You tried to bite me,” she tapped her hand. “Right here- don’t make that face, I’m not upset about it. But you did that because you wanted my blood. My life energy. I think it will fix you, or at least help you. And we’ve got thirty minutes to either do this or not.”
She could see him wavering. His eyes flitted to the pulse-point in her neck, then back up to meet her eye. He looked like he might start crying.
“It’s really not a big deal.” She continued. “Please. Let me take care of you.”
T hat was what it took. He nodded, such a small, stiff, frightened motion, and she got the blade out of her pocket. Thought about it for a second , and switched hands.
It hurt like a bitch. The blade was blunt and she was working right above bone, clumsily cutting left-handed . Blood welled up startlingly quickly, threatened to drip; she had to cup her hand beneath the cut so it wouldn't get everywhere.
R enfield’s arms shook as he tried to prop himself up on his elbows, reach her quicker. She moved instead, sinking closer in so he wouldn’t have to move .
His lips were dry on her skin. Cold.
I t was an awkward position, one hand braced against the mattress, off-balance to get into his space. She’d fall if she tried to stay like that too long.
She ended up lying on her side beside him, her left arm tucked beneath his head so it would be easier for him to swallow. It was… surprisingly comfortable. If not for the sloppy cutting, it would have felt good. The cut stung like hell, and her other arm was starting to fall asleep, but there was a warm, soft feeling growing in her chest all the same. And he was being so ridiculously careful. Only the gentlest draw, even as his hands came up to press her wrist closer, squeezing her arm slightly. Wanting more.
He parted from her, just long enough for a gasping breath, and immediately returned to feeding. Faster, now, desperate, pulling at the tender wound as the blood began to clot. More energy than he’d had before they started. His eyes had fallen closed; the barely-there blood vessels in his eyelids were slowly turning from dusky blue to pink. Her life, showing through his skin.
By the time he stopped- because she certainly wasn’t going to make him stop- his skin was warm to the touch again. He’d lost a little of the pallor.
It had worked .