2013. The first time his mother allowed him to wear a smoking. He isn't sure, still is searching for himself, but he knows he prefers he/him to she/her and that his name is not his name anymore.
Seeing that validated made him happy. Seeing his aunts kiss like everything was normal made him happy.
Only cloud in front of the sun was seeing his cousin cry. Why is he unhappy ? This is a happy day.
2014. He changed names, his mother accepted him but his father ? Not so much. It doesn't matter. None of them are really stopping him. He's thinking about taking hormones, but changes his mind every two mornings.
At the very least being called by his new name feels good.
2015. He was just going back home when that guy grabbed him. A punch went through his nose, followed by another, and slurs that he never heard in his lifetime.
Worst is that this voice was strangely familiar.
He got confirmation when he went hiding at his aunt. She was going through a rough patch, her wife's cheating finally revealed and the divorce getting messy, but she still took him in. That's where she confirmed him it was her wife's brother.
He was thirteen and already exposed to transphobia, his cousins silently staring at his wounds from the other side of the room.
He knows what it feels like to be hated. To discover the worst in people. But he is spiteful, he is resilient, and he survived another night.
The following day, he tells his parents he wants hormones. The same day, his aunt is single for good.
2017. He hardly sees his cousins anymore, lost in the divorce and so many other rough patches they went through. Puberty blockers did their job, and he is now on T, with the permission of his parents. His therapist helps him go through that puberty easier that he would with his assigned one.
He has friends, and his heart beats faster when he sees that man in the school grounds. Said man is a proud gay, taking under his wing the baby transgender he was. Looks are exchanged in-between classes, and he gifts him some drawings. The others are made of his face, more beautiful that he ever drew faces.
One day, a group of bullies took his notebook from his hands and saw the drawings he was hiding. They ripped them all, calling him a fag and a tranny, words that are now so familiar to him.
He drew them as he saw them. Ugly, exxagerated villains. Spite is still powering him.
When he's 18, he will have his top surgery. It's already planned. Nothing else has importance.
2019. When his cousin disappeared at the beginning of the year, he never thought he would find him on TV, in the most horrible telenovela there was. But he coudn't stop watching. Even after the end. The most awful end he ever sees.
He remembers the twisted smile, the cries, the shouts. He puts them on paper.
This would be his last act as a free man before long.
2020. He got out of hell only to get back in another one. Unable to get back to his home, to get his long-awaited top surgery, he stayed behind to survive. Alone.
He never was alone before. Even in hell.
He is still spiteful. His drawings get more and more depicting of an horrifying reality. He still survives.
His estranged half-brother asks him if he wants to come live with him in Norway. Norway is not the paradise it was anymore. It was taken over by devils. he can see the devils. He still goes, because he is tired of being alone.
He gets his top surgery on his brother's allowance. His sister-in-law hates that. He feels like he doesn't belong.
He still gets the letter.
The same letter his cousin got two years ago.
2021. He had no choice but to go to that school. Hope's Peak. Nobody really pays attention to him, a survivor among the survivors, and that suits him. His promotion is already considerably down. Apparently, this year's killing game almost exclusively captured new people.
He doesn't care. At least he's alive.
A statement that gets more and more weak.
2022. That new guy is suspiciously interested in him. It's not rare to see him in his vision field just watching over him with his piercing turquoise eyes. His own are always down.
Once he tried to call him. Something simple, a "why are you watching me" kind of call. The guy dissapeared instantly after realising he got spotted.
This is annoying. So he tries to get intel. A vampire hunter, says the other survivors of the 2022 promotion. He had difficulties learning english and speaks in Latin or Romanian most of the time, but it's not what made him the hardest to be integrated.
People think he's a cult survivor. Still is part of it, apparently, and tracks down vampires even here at Hope's Peak. People believe he found one.
He has the same turquoise eyes as a man from his past.
2023. He started talking to the weird guy, discovered he was not that weird after all, just lost. That he could relate. Both of them are survivors of something. This conversations started to make him believe the world was not that rotten after all.
Until he saw in the 2023 promotion his youngest cousin and the relative of the people who ruined his life. And realised he stopped being spiteful a long time ago.
Still, he could be at least for him. Him, who gets flustered around him for reasons he attributes to his supposed vampiric nature. He knows very well what he is, but can't believe people would love him, as his broken self and the sword of Damocles hung above his head.
At the very least this world is worth something. If there is still people ready to approach him.
2024. He is so tired.
The cute guy went in with a prosthetic arm.
He didn't get why he acted horrified at the sight.
That world took away something from him and he can't even realise it.
This world is so rotten.
2025. He didn't wake up at Hope's Peak.
He knows why. He knows what that means.
Ten years of murderous games and a cousin taking the first role do that to people.
He looks around him. There is shouts, complaints, screams and the tired face of a man that lost everything and is ready to retaliate.
Every one around him is rotten to the core. Everyone around him will die with him. He has no hope for a happy ending.
But next to all of these people he hates, there's him.
He doesn't know what he's doing here. He doesn't know what are his chances of survival. But he knows one thing.
If there is to be one survivor of the 2025 killing game, it would be Virgil Vânător.
Whatever he has to do.
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(Virgil is @thal-ent's character)
"Virg'?"
"Yeah ?"
"What are vampires like ?"
The other one held silent for a moment. Vampires. A subject as simple as it is complicated. Well, he was the Ultimate Vampire Hunter, so, it had to be easy for him to answer somehow, but Bastien knew he was digging deep into reflexs and teaching ingrained so deep it would take long to make the truth out of the doctrine.
"Well... they are many legends. Your country has some we don't, and they probably all hold a part of truth somehow, I just know well what I've fought."
A knowing look from both of them to the prostethic arm Virgil had. A sacrifice for survival, said the hunter at the time. Bastien, him, just couldn't believe something was strong enough to take a part from the most powerful person he knew.
"Those things I fought were very different depending if they were starving or not. Either ghoulish, starved and monstrous, but easy to defeat, or humanlike and sadistic. They were the most difficult to defeat."
"At the very least they burned under the sun."
"Yeah. Could you imagine if it just glittered away like in that trashy romance novel Emerens lent me once ?"
A laugh, feeble, echoed from both their throats. Emerens lending the Twilight series to Virgil with the knowing look of "you're gonna hate it so good" still was a funny memory for both of them. Too bad, thought Bastien, that it was invoked to ease expression of trauma.
No matter how Virgil lost his arm, nothing could dull the pain Bastien felt seeing him wounded.
But the tone was clearly set. It was no time to reinvoke past trauma. So Bastien kept laughing.
"Oh, I'll never forget his disgusted face. Sometimes I think the hatred he harbors for that book is oddly personal."
"Something we can agree on. But since we are talking about other vampire perceptions..."
Virgil got serious.
"I studied many legends here at Hope's Peak and so many of them contradicts. There's the classic Dracula, of course, but vampires seem not to be limited to this. Ghoulish creatures, but also immortals surrounded by a veil of mystery, unaffected by the sun. There's one thing that seems to be common to a lot of the legends, though. Apart from the drinking blood, that is."
"What is it ?"
Virgil's hands shivered. Both the flesh one and the metallic one.
"Potential for subjugation."
His eyes, turquoise, met those, dark green, of Bastien. Letting through so many words both of them spent so much time saying.
There was nothing to be added.
Later, meeting with his cousin, Bastien remembered how easy those turquoise eyes found his way into his cold, fueled by spite and desperation heart. He looked at how Thibault was talking about Emerens' last shenanigans with that lovestruck smile only harbored by the one who loves, but is not in love.
He looked farther away, where the two boyfriends were talking Latin. He looked at how the hands of the blond one moved, how the hair of the one who was his fell around his face, surrounding a little smile.
He wondered if vampires really existed somehow, and were sitting some feet away from them, talking like everything was fine, like they didn't caught the heart of two unsuspecting humans beating in their hands.
Strangely, he feared one of them way more than the other.
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