The Homeless Vampire genre: modern, supernatural, vampires (possible odd couple/road trip comedy?) preferences: het, slash, gen warnings: tba
Max had been very wealthy, once. He vaguely remembered servants and a palace with a hundred rooms and fine clothes. Hunting dogs and a stable full of horses and land to hunt on. Or maybe it was something he’d seen on TV. His memory became hazier the further back he went, and he was so old now he was beginning to worry if maybe his brain was full, and to make room for the new things he learned some old, treasured memory was erased. He would take the memory of a moonlight horseback ride over how to unlock a smartphone, but he didn’t have much choice in the matter.
Once he had been respected and feared. He had possessed many children, and while they may have all come to hate him, they did respect him. They had no choice. He had made them all, made them in his image, and it had pleased him to know an entire subculture powered by his potent blood had spidered out.
That was all gone, now. If any of his children still lived, they were well-hidden. Well hidden and on the run like he was, hoping their paths didn’t cross. Hoping they didn’t bump into each others hunters.
Max Orlok had once lived in a sprawling mansion, and now he slept in the back of a hearse. A very old, very run down hearse that required more and more maintenance. He would have to replace it soon and he dreaded it. The cleverer mortals got the greedier they got, and they became very, very adept at locating their stolen property. Even if he charmed it out of them, when they came to later they noticed their thing was gone, and they came after it.
He was dressed in a slightly ratty, very long double breasted pea coat. Under it was a greyed singlet that had once been white and not frayed and full of holes, and covering his legs was a pair of jeans. On his feet, steel toed work boots. He was very tall and a wiry sort of thin, and it made finding clothing much more difficult than it might’ve been for some of his more petite children.
Not that it had done them any good, in the end. Some of them had sought him out, begging for his help. He had ignored them at first, scorned them for leaving his side to begin with. But as more and more arrived, desperate for protection, he had tried to help. And then he realized they were leading Van Helsing's irritating descendants right to the progenitor, right to their ultimate foe. He had killed a lot of them, turned a few to amuse himself, but in the end, he’d had to hide from his own children.
Max was not proud of what he’d done to survive, but he didn’t need to be. The only goal of survival was to survive, and in that, he was very successful.
Tonight he was in a mostly empty parking lot, sitting on the back bumper of the hearse and staring at the flickering WALMART sign. He’d had a sudden urge to buy cigarettes, sprung from some old habit he’d grown bored of however many decades ago. It was something to do with his hands. With his mouth. Max was hungry, but he didn’t tend to his hunger unless it became a crippling pain in his belly. It was only a mild discomfort, just now. He could wait.
He remembered being handsome once, and there was an echo of that on his face, an echo of an echo, but time had worn most of it away. His features were harsh now, his head bald and his eyebrows bushy and more white than black. His eyes were an alarmingly pale blue, sunken and rimmed with dark skin, like he hadn’t slept for a month. Perhaps the most irritating feature of his, aside from his unfortunate and alarming teeth, were his ears, which came to uneven, limp points. Once they had stood up on their own, but they drooped now, suffering from years of malnutrition and being jammed under a black knit beanie. Even in summer he wore the damned thing. Very few hats could cover his ears.
Max could make people who looked at him forget him. They would see him, but their eyes would slide off and their brain would scramble to un-see him. It was better that they forgot. Most could. Some couldn’t.
They were trouble. The Van Helsing's were almost out of business by now, he was certain. Out of his children to hunt and after him alone, like it had been from the start. There had been some nights, when he didn’t have the hearse and instead had a regular car, that he’d had to cram himself in the trunk during the day and hope for the best. Those nights he had wondered if survival was worth it. He had not made a child in well over a century now, and what a shame that was.
It was very lonely, being a nomad. There was no one to talk to but the moon, and only madmen spoke to the moon.
For now, he and the moon had a silent understanding. A gentleman’s agreement. The moon would not solicit him, and he would pretend that if he spoke aloud, he was talking to himself.
He didn’t like gas stations. So often at this hour there were ne’er do wells, and he had been caught on camera dispatching armed hooligans before. Cameras.
Max pushed off the side of his decrepit, graffiti’d hearse (a faded WASH ME had been traced on the back window) and headed into the WalMart, the collar of his coat pulled up against the cold, his boots crunching in the slush. He was in Pennsylvania, heading for Maine. Once he got there, he’d decide where to go next. To Florida, maybe, or back West. So long as he was moving, he could keep the Van Helsing’s at his back.
Sometimes he wondered if he was imagining them, it had been so long since he’d seen them. Better to be on guard than not, he supposed. At this hour there was no greeter, and he flinched in the harsh and unforgiving fluorescent light. He didn’t need to go all the way into the store to get cigarettes -- there was a counter up front.
Something caught his eye, however, a garish display. Twilight, it declared. There were books and movies alike, and he couldn’t help but go and look. The moment he stopped being curious, Max was certain he would cease his running. He would watch a sunrise and that would be the end of it. Max brushed off that thought and peered around before he picked up a DVD case, his pale hands and the sharp nails that sprung out of his fingers covered with gloves. It was a vampire movie, it claimed.
Max snorted. Please. Not even his most obnoxious, most ridiculous children had been so silly. Still, he scanned the back for familiar names. Nothing tickled his brain. Mortals only. Left to their own devices, vampires would be toothless soon. Toothless and thirsty for hugs instead of blood.
He made a sour face and set the DVD back on the stand. Nevermind all of that. The longer he was on camera, the quicker some half-mad FBI agent would pick up his face on a camera and find him, connect him to some murder from fifty years ago. Max wasn’t entirely sure how they did it, but he knew cameras were part of the problem.
Cameras could see him just fine. He couldn’t make the camera forget him. The camera didn’t care. It drank in everything greedily, greedier than he could ever be. He hated them. Max snorted, irritable, and requested cigarettes from a bored older man who barely looked at him, which was to his advantage. It was awkward to pull money from his sad, battered wallet with gloves on, but he was well-practiced and it wasn't much of a struggle. Possessing a pack of Marlboro Reds, Max stepped outside the WalMart and paused to light up, struggling with the lighter before he remembered they had safety features now. Once it was lit he took a deep drag and started forward, exhaling through his nose. Some memories danced at the back of his mind, a speakeasy and a singer who liked whiskey as much as he did. She'd smoked a cigar and invited him back to her place.
Max smiled at the old memory and sat on the back bumper of his hearse again. There was no rush to get back on the road when you weren't going anywhere in particular. He allowed himself to indulge the old memory. Was she still alive? No, unlikely. She'd been in her twenties, he recalled, and it had been almost a century since Prohibition. He could easily detour down to New Jersey, he supposed, have a look around. See if she had been part of history. Something more reliable than his memory, which was likely comparable to Swiss cheese at this stage.
Thinking of older, more decadent times made him hungry and he peered around the parking lot. Did he dare? Did the security cameras stretch out this far? He wasn't aiming to kill anyone, but a snack for the road would be nice.
Max would honestly settle for a conversation that didn't involve the moon as a silent contributor.