Carver and Julia have the world's most awkward friendship. One week they're plotting to kill everyone, the next they're getting weird about
blood.
⚠Plotting murder, mentions of canabalism, blood drinking
Carver felt trapped and he didn't usually feel that way. He was used to being able to move freely, to come and go as he pleased. Even after arriving at Derleth, he still retained a certain degree of freedom. He couldn't leave the campus, but he never felt stuck. After weeks staying in the same place, some godforsaken apocalyptic hellscape, not able to move on his own, Carver felt like he was going out of his mind and it was just serving to make him grumpier than he normally was.
He'd built up enough strength by now that he could move around independently, but it was the not being able to leave that was getting to him. He had no interest in whatever fight they were thrown in the middle of. He couldn't blow off steam by jumping into the fray if he wanted to since his vampiric abilities were nearly nonexistent. Now he really was little more than a walking corpse.
Carver was more accustomed to keeping people at arm's length, putting on an air of being more of a dick than he actually was. It didn't tend to ingratiate him to a lot of people and that's the way he liked it. There were a few outliers in Derleth, a few who didn't care or looked past the facade. Julia was one of them. And Julia missing part of her soul was a fucking delight. So when Carver got especially restless, he'd seek her out.
"Hey," he said by way of announcing himself. "I'm hungry. And bored."
Ever since Natasha told Julia not to talk to the AI Overlords of this place, Julia had become interested in doing exactly that. To what end? She hadn’t decided. She had to figure out the how first, and that meant teaching herself coding. She’d kept this project quiet and to herself, but it also made her easy to find since she was almost always at a computer that looked like it’d been taken out of a dumpster from 1999.
(Her progress was exponentially helped by Tilly. They’d worked together before, the last time Tilly was at Derleth, only this time Tilly didn’t remember being there. It gave Julia an advantage. Tilly didn’t know about her shade issue and was always the desperately friendly type. All Julia had to do was smile and chat her up. Julia may have also mentioned to Tilly not to talk to Rick about the code sharing. And given how abrasive Rick was, it took almost no convincing to Tilly that he’d be a dick to Julia about it for getting involved. Technically it wasn’t even a lie, it was just omitting a few choice facts.)
Her hair had started to grow back. She had eyebrows, though her eyelashes were short, spiky things just starting to come back in. Julia was just starting to get used to her face without makeup.
Julia turned in her chair, which also looked like an old reclaimed office chair, patched together with Mad Max bits and pieces, and smiled broadly when she saw Carver. The smile never quite reached her eyes, even when she was genuinely pleased to see him. Like she was up to no good. When Carver was around, she usually hoped that would be the case.
“Would you say you were murder the crew hungry or…?” She was teasing, but the punchline was somewhere closer to murdering the crew would be hilarious not look at this outrageous thing I suggested.
At least with the skies blacked out, it made hiding Carver’s vampirism much easier from the locals that picked them up. Julia was there to cover Carver’s “unique medical situation”. He was important to any number of long and short term plans Julia had in mind.
She stood up to meet him, stepping in close and asked quietly, “What would you like to do?”
Carver laughed when she mentioned murdering the crew. "Alas, I don't have any of my vampire abilities. There's no way I could take out several people. I'll have to settle for your generous donations." He didn't blink an eye about murdering the crew. Or anyone. Sure, it was uncharacteristic of Julia, but her current shadeless nature made him feel more comfortable than he had since the day he showed up on the pirate ship.
"I have no fucking idea, but I figure you need a break from staring at that computer constantly." He couldn't care less about what she was doing. Computer coding looked and sounded boring and he was already bored out of his skull.
"I think we need to invent a new game to pass the time with. Or I might start trying murder for sport." He smirked, although his light tone made it clear he (probably) wouldn't do such a thing. "Or maybe I'll just crank the asshole act up to eleven and annoy the shit out of everyone around here." He never handled being bored well. It's how he ended up constantly getting in trouble throughout his life.
Julia smiled broadly when Carver mentioned murdering the crew for sport. Part of her long term plans in fact including murdering the crew and taking their ship for their own ends. Strike it out on their own. And Julia already had several ideas how they could take out multiple people without powers. She’d made a mirthful almost winking expression when Carver claimed he wouldn’t be able to take them out on his own.
Of course they could. But that was a discussion for another time, when hope of resetting was long past.
“I kinda like the asshole act,” Julia said. “Fucking charming.” Maybe that was because Julia liked not being the only asshole on board. She certainly wasn’t going to encourage good behavior unless it benefited them directly. Quentin complicated that now that he was awake but…
Julia didn’t think too hard about it just then.
“So…” Julia made a perfect ’pop!’ sound with her lips playfully. “What sort of game do you have in mind? Because I’m going to beat you, just so you know. Just putting that out there to start.”
She might have been teasing, but Julia was a deeply competitive, ambitious person. Shade or no shade. The only difference was with her shade, she usually focused those efforts in slightly healthier, more helpful directions.
"You might be the only one who likes the asshole act," he said with a wry laugh. "Of course the whole point is to ensure people don't like me."
Carver looked around until he found something close enough to being a chair and sat on it, legs open, back hunched, elbows resting on his thighs. "I don't have any sort of game in mind. I came to you so that you'd do all the thinking for me. Have you not caught on to that yet?" And he looked at her with his usual half-smirk.
"Otherwise I'm just going to start wandering around and pushing buttons or knocking things over. The apocalypse is so boring. I almost wish I was still in the simulation."
Serious or not, Julia was more than happy to do the thinking for Carver. As long as he was willing to go along with her plotting and scheming, it was at least someone she could depend on if Natasha, Rick and others decided Julia was a liability.
It was why she’d kept a relatively low profile. Not when there was a chance this could all be temporary.
Standing in front of his seated frame, Julia offered her wrist to him. Her smile faltered when he mentioned being in the simulation. Part of her knew she probably belonged there, trapped where she couldn’t do any harm. She inhaled sharply and released the thought slowly with a measured exhale. Julia didn’t want to go back in, but it was hard to know if anything she wanted was a step too far. At what point would she stop recognizing herself?
It took her a half best to regain her confidence. “You want to go fishing? Catch bugs? Farm?”
Julia gently kicked the inside of his shoe to get his attention. “We just have to play nice for a few more weeks. At least until seven days pass in the simulation…”
Carver snorted in response to her suggestions of fishing and catching bugs. "You think that's what it is? We have to wait for the week to pass in the simulation and then everything will reset?" It made a certain degree of sense, in the way anything about Derleth made sense.
"Too fucking bad it's one day in there to one week out here," he said and dropped his head back with an exaggerated sigh. "I think I almost would rather catch bugs." It was definitely easier than playing nice. He had a lot more fun playing the asshole.
He looked at her offered wrist and tilted his head thoughtfully. He made a point of not feeding directly from anyone because he wasn't interested in that kind of intimacy with anyone he'd met so far at Derleth. Much as he liked Julia. He patted down the pockets of the shitty clothes he was wearing before he found a small, metical disk. He pulled it out and pushed it outward into its proper cup-like shape. He grabbed Julia's wrist and dug a fang in like he was popping open a can of soda. He applied enough pressure to squeeze the blood out into the cup. He let go of her wrist once he was satisfied with how much was in his cup.
Feeding in any manner was pleasurable to some degree, but Carver learned a long time ago to hide that fact around others. It was one thing to wink and call women babydoll like a creep, it was another thing to moan over a cup of blood with people around. His face remained passive as he took a long sip of the blood. He could feel the Beast recede further back in his mind.
"Biding our time until a week has passed is not a game, incidentally. That's just more boredom." He tips his head back as he takes another sip.
“I think if it’s not the case, we’re fucked.” Julia half shrugged with one shoulder. It wasn’t untrue, but she didn’t seem terribly concerned either. Acceptance, maybe? Or maybe she was the type of person happy to search out new opportunities.
With her shade, Carver had scared Julia off at the idea of being fed from directly. Without her shade, Julia didn’t care. It made going back and forth between shade and no shade awkward at times, but that was Future Julia’s problem, not hers. It wasn’t a test, but Julia watched him take her wrist as casually as a kegger, with no apparent interest in anything else.
Good to know. The last thing she wanted to do was overplay her hand.
For now they joked about killing the crew, but she couldn’t be entirely certain about what he was willing to do. No risk, no reward. Maybe. If it came to that.
Her mind went somewhere else, however, watching him feed. “Can you taste magic? In the blood.” She meant on a normal given week, but she was curious if he sensed anything magical about her blood this week.
Julia brought her wrist up and wrapped it up, holding it. The puncture was small, it would heal eventually.
“You’re like a hundred years old. Kinda thought you’d be more patient.”
Carver sniffed the blood and took another sip. "I don't think I know what magic tastes like. I've fed off of normal humans before coming here. And a werewolf once." He chugs the rest of the blood and licks his lips. He at least felt more clear-headed now. Which was about as much as he could hope for.
"I'm not 100, I'm 88," he corrected. He collapsed the cup and stuffed the disk back into his pocket. "And I don't see what age has to do with patience anyway." He runs his tongue along one of his fangs.
"If there isn't a reset after…fuck, seven weeks? Fuck." He rubbed both of his hands over his face and sighed. "If we're stuck in this hell hole, do you have a plan? You seem to be plotting." He glanced around their vicinity, checking to see if anyone was around.
"Is that why you mentioned murdering the crew?" He asked, his voice quieter now.
“Would that bother you?” Julia asked. It was clear by her tone, though not purposefully, that it didn’t bother her. Not having her shade was more than just an attitude adjustment. Julia may not have had a beast, but there was no real humanity left in there to speak of.
Normally Julia had to work hard to fake it, remember what she was supposed to be like. But starting the week in the simulation, where there were no incentives to fake it or try, made those small gains she’d struggled with before difficult to claw back.
Carver looked up at her with an arched brow and studied her for a quiet moment. She really was a different person than he was used to. It didn't bother him, but sometimes the stark difference of Julia without her shade really struck him. But he just responded with a lazy half-smirk.
"No, it wouldn't bother me. Survival of the fittest, babydoll. It's every man for himself in the apocalypse."
Julia rolled her eyes at babydoll but that was almost a requirement. If she were a taller person, this might have been an appropriate time to crouch down and have a real eye-to-eye conversation. But given her small stature, there was no need. She only needed to tilt her head downward ever so slightly to get the same effect.
Julia wasn’t entirely sure if she believed him, or if he was putting on an act, but there was no need to test that today.
“If we’re stuck here we only have a few options. Join a doomed rebellion? Get plugged back into a shitty simulation? Or...”
He had to realize this, right?
“...Take our own ship and do our own thing. Make our own path. You will eventually need to learn coding. Eventually,” she added, as a promise. She wouldn’t bore him with that now in case it wasn’t necessary.
There was more to her plan, of course there was, but that was the simplest version of it.
“And if I don’t get magic back and you don’t turn me, I’m resorting to cannibalism because there’s no way I can eat that shit.” Which sounded like a joke at first, but very much wasn’t.
"I'm not even interested in helping the rebellion let alone joining it. And going back into the dumb fucking simulation?" Carver just laughed wryly in response.
"I've done terrible things to survive in the past. I'm not above doing that again if I have to." While Carver was often prone to putting on an act, his face and voice both carried a seriousness. None of those options were ideal, he'd rather go back to that idiotic moving campus and its sunless void, but if he couldn't, well, he'd do what he had to.
"I'll turn you. Vampirism is like cannibalism light. Plus, if you don't get magic back, you'll be weak. There's no place for weakness in whatever this world is. And I maybe kinda like you enough to not want to see you dead. Well, permanently dead anyway."
Julia might have been touched, if she were capable of feeling such a thing. Instead, she smiled and did a little curtsy. It was the same gesture she made to a dryad before firebombing him and burning all of Fillory’s talking trees of the one way forest to death.
Her bratty expression faded when she thought of Quentin, the rest of her friends. In the hole left by her missing conscience she used to picture Q’s frowning face. She did her best to forget the impression of that frown now.
“No one else unless we both agree,” she said. There might have been others at Derleth that would have preferred their path, but there would be more that would try to stop them, and not even with violence. Somehow that felt worse to Julia.
Carver thought about Stevie, the way he felt protective of her like a daughter. Like Annabelle. "Yeah, I agree. There are too many people who would just get in our way." He liked Stevie, but she was a bleeding heart. He couldn't imagine her shrugging off the murder of innocent people for the sake of survival.
"I'm gonna go on hoping it doesn't come to that. If only because I don't know where we'd find a little slice of hell that isn't as bad as the rest. For all its faults, there's usually a degree of comfort at Derleth. I've spent enough of my life roughing it." And there was nothing left for him in his own world. He saved his own ass by leaving Annabelle to the wolves and he would do the same thing again if he had to.
“Shit, your life depresses me,” Julia said, but he did make her smile. Despite being locked in a life and death battle with a god, at least her life back home had places like Fillory, like Brakebills. Even the clean room in Brakebills, a glorified prison cell that made it impossible to cast magic in, was nicer than this place. Julia would know. She’d spent some time in there.
* * *
“Shit, your life depresses me,” Julia said. She wasn’t smiling this time. She didn’t directly say she had a shade this week, but anyone that knew her didn’t need her to. She was hungry, that much was apparent in her eyes. Carver was alive. He smelled alive. He smelled delicious.
Julia didn’t trust herself. Not then. She actually cared about not hurting him. If she’d been shadeless? Hard to say. Certainly she would not have been nearly so reluctant. Less than a week ago, she’d actually wanted this.
Not that Julia was about to bring up the previous week(s). If they didn’t acknowledge or speak about it, did it really count? If her friends never found out, she wouldn’t have to look at their disappointed faces. Perhaps Eliot was right for keeping his distance.
Julia could compartmentalize this. She hadn’t actually done anything wrong. (She’d just stolen the research and drawn up all the plans and preparations necessary for it.)
Carver looked different. Julia didn’t comment on his missing hair or clothing for the week. It was honestly better than the week they were pirates, in her opinion. For her part, she didn’t look that different. The top was a lower cut, the short skirt was only mildly impractical, still all in black, and she had heels that added not quite half a foot in height, but Julia was the type of person that could make walking in those kind of shoes look natural.
“Maybe this is a bad idea,” she said, but Julia could hardly take her eyes off him. It was probably a worse idea for her to go another day without.
"Gee, thanks," Carver replied with a roll of his eyes. "It's not all bad. You get used to after a few decades." Not that Julia would have to worry about being a vampire for longer than a week. Assuming the last so-called adventure was a fluke for being seven weeks and not a new trend.
Carver was very verbally displeased with the way he looked. The only plaid he'd ever wear usually had numerous zippers and straps and maybe some spiky bits attached. The D.A.R.E. shirt was fine, it was pretty funny. The missing nose ring, the missing mohawk, the boring brown hair, the olive drab jacket were all wretched in his opinion.
"It's not a bad idea," he said and fished in his pocket for a knife. Normally he'd use a fang to pop a vein open but his teeth were decidedly less pointy this week. "I'll just stake you if you get carried away." There was a slight curve of a smirk on his lips and he pressed the blade into the tender skin of his wrist with a wince. He was used to drawing blood from others rather than himself.
He licked the blood off the blade and scrunched his nose in disgust. As a vampire, blood was delicious. As a human, it was coppery and unpalatable. He casually held out his bleeding wrist while he pocketed his knife and stealthily wrapped his hand around the stake. Just in case.
“Only a few decades, huh?” Julia smiled wryly. It was one thing to think about drinking blood as a vampire in theory. Julia didn’t technically have any issue with that. It was something else entirely to find herself in that position. She thought about her run in with vampires on her world, and how unappetizing and small a few pre-filled syringes of her blood would have seemed to her now. Maybe that should have been a clue that their information was more of a trap than something of actual value.
Her eyes were locked on Carver’s hands once he pulled out the knife. Normally, seeing him wince would have caused a sort of mirrored sympathy wince, but once blood was drawn it was all Julia noticed.
She approached him carefully, taking his wrist in her hands. She glanced at his wrist, inhaled the scent of his blood, and then glanced at Carver: “This is weird, even for me.”
There was no way this wasn’t going to look awkward, was there? Julia was careful with her mouth, licking up his arm like a dripping ice cream cone, trying not to make a mess or let any of it go to waste. Her mouth was delicate. It took considerable will not to just bite down, her teeth occasionally scraping against his skin as though she were thinking about it, though she was careful only to take what flowed freely.
Her hands, however, gripped Carver’s arm tightly, not quite able to keep as calm and polite as she would have liked to pretend. Her eyes were closed, but she kept the sounds of her approval to a minimum.
Carver wasn't used to being on this end of a feeding. It did a little more for him than he was currently willing to admit and he averted his eyes to look at anything other than Julia's mouth on his wrist. He made a mental note to offer up his blood to the temporary vampires in cups instead of straight from the source.
He closed his eyes briefly, sucked in a breath, when he felt the scrape of fangs against his skin, threatening to bite into him. It took him a moment to come back to his senses enough to look at her to make sure she wasn't going to get carried away. He really didn't feel like losing an arm. Or his life.
He cleared his throat as he briefly glanced away again. "Almost done?"
Shit. It was the way he cleared his throat that brought Julia back to the present. Was she done? She didn’t honestly know, she would have been happy to keep going. It was almost a physical anguish when she pulled her mouth away, but Julia didn’t trust herself to know when to stop, either. In either case, she took Carver’s question as a sign to stop.
There was blood smeared on her lips and her mouth. Julia became self conscious of it and tried to wipe away the evidence with the inside of her wrist.
“Yeah, I’m good.” Completely unconvincing, but she wasn’t willing to risk any hint of it going further than Carver was strictly comfortable with. There was already an awkwardness to the encounter Julia was trying very hard to shove down and not think about. “Um, thank you.”
She was trying hard not to betray how much she’d enjoyed that. Although the lack of immediate eye contact at the start might have been an indication.
The fact that when she did look at him, it was to his bleeding wrist first, might have been the other.
“Do you need anything for that? Like a bandage or..?”
He looked at her with his brow furrowed in an incredulous expression. He pulled some gauze out of his pocket and wound it around the cut. "I got it covered." He recognized the hunger that still lingered in her eyes. A new vampire could drain a person dry and only be just barely satisfied. Julia wasn't quite like a new vampire, though. She wasn't embraced on the brink of death. She wasn't embraced at all.
He pulled the gauze tight and tied it off. "Do you…need anything else?" Carver had never schooled anyone on being a vampire. He vanished after he embraced Annabelle and didn't pop back into her life until a couple of years later. That was the way he preferred it. She didn't owe him anything that way. But this was different. There weren't any clans here, weren't any other vampires except Carver himself (well, ordinarily). He couldn't leave them all at an utter loss of what to do with themselves.
As much as he liked anarchy, this would just lead to a very unnecessary massacre. So he'd help Julia and the rest of him, the best he could.
“Honestly, I have no idea.” It was when the absurdity of the situation hit her that her face broke into a wry smile. “Almost a fucking year of this, and you’d think I’d be unphased by it. Of course the last couple of times I woke up as other people I had their memories and I was still human, so… Guess Derleth decided to throw a curve ball this week.”
And the week before that. But Julia wasn’t bringing that week up. As put together as she was, as intelligent as she was, the more she spoke the more clear it was that she was trying to talk over any potential awkwardness.
She took a beat. It helped and she shrugged, “I’ll be okay.” Who the fuck knew if that was true anymore, but the way Derleth reset Julia wasn’t sure how much it mattered. She would make herself be okay because what other options were there?
"I think it throws us a curveball every week, but that's just me." Carver couldn't imagine being stuck in this place for a year. It certainly kept things interesting, but the longer he was here, the more he missed home.
"If you do need anything else, you know where to find me," he added. He offered her the slightest half-smile. He didn't exactly know how to console anyone about being newly dead. Especially when it was just temporary.
"If you're good now, I'm going to-" He pursued his lips and gestured behind himself. "Go."
“Yeah, no. No, no, you’re-- that’s yeah.” God, she sounded like Quentin.
Julia inhaled deeply through her nose. She didn’t need to breathe but she subconsciously wanted to take in the scent of his blood before he left. Her body stilled, as she willed herself not to move or say anything that would make this situation from awkward to bad.
Without thinking, she licked the blood still on her lips and closed her eyes. She waited to move from the spot until she heard his footfalls head for the door, open and close it behind him.
When he was gone, she opened her eyes and muttered, “Holy shit.”