The forest around him is cold with mist, the sharp familiar smell of ancient earth all around him as he ascends the stone steps. There are small pattering footfalls behind him, familiar to his ears, but when he turns...
Nothing. A ghost, or a memory. This place is familiar, after all.
Slowly, he continues his climb, though in his peripheral he can see the slow, sinuous movement of something large slithering past the trees, climbing the hill with him. He does not turn this time, knowing full well what it is that moves in step with him. He would know them anywhere.
They are his. The reason Talon wanted him so badly. But they are not his goal now. No. That lies ahead, through the curling mist. Something red flickers ahead, like torchlight. Or perhaps the flutter of cloth, catching in the moonlight.
A green songbird rests above him in the branches, calling out suddenly as he draws near. The mist ahead on the path roils over on itself, turning black like pitch, spreading outward. He has to hurry, his legs carrying him across the smooth stone steps as quickly as he might go, but that flicker of red is very nearly out of sight, swallowed up by that darkness. Panic seizes him, though he doesn't quite know why. No, no, no no...
Abruptly, that brilliant red flares to life, bursting from the shadow like a bullet, careening towards him. Pain blossoms sharply in his chest, and then--
His eyes open to blackness. An empty room, an empty bed, and though his heart no longer beats he feels that panic shivering inside his ribs in an echo as he reminds himself of where he is.
Jesse wakes with a jolt, eyes wide and staring out across the room without registering any of it. The dream—or was it a nightmare?—had been unusually vivid. And the feeling of panic remains, as does a strong sense of Hanzo having been central to it all.
He sits up and turns, looking down the hall towards the door to the bedroom. Just a nightmare. But even though it hadn’t been real, he rubs at his chest where his pulse would have been racing had he been alive. Is it a phantom pain from his death? Why would it flare up now?
In his dream, he hadn’t been the one shot.
He curses quietly to himself and stands, suddenly full of anxious energy needing an outlet. There’s an urge to check on Hanzo that he can’t shake either. But that would be a bad idea. The last thing the man wants is Jesse bursting into his room. Might be he’ll tell Jesse to make other plans for the following sunrise as his first order of business for the night. That has the anxiousness swinging a whole other way, and for lack of a better way to shake it off, he grabs a cigarillo and lights it. Hanzo doesn’t want the smell of smoke in his hideout? Tough. Jesse at least opens the window and perches himself on the frame.
Every few seconds, his eyes go back to the bedroom door. Linger there. Then they’re forced back to the Hanamura skyline, and the whole thing starts over again.
Hanzo is fine. He’s in the fancy apartment building equivalent of the Fortress of Solitude. He’s fine.
Physically, yes. But the dream -- or perhaps a vision -- lingers with him. It plays against the back of his eyes in the darkness, until he has no choice but to reach for the lamp nearby if only to banish the sight with something else.
Danger. The dream spoke to that, surely. But the nature of it, he's not entirely certain. The details muddle themselves the longer he is awake, though the feeling of dread is not so easily shaken. Was this the answer he'd sought? If so, it seems of little help. Shaking his head he draws himself to the bed's edge, steadying his hand before moving to open the door.
It's unusual for him to leave the bedroom without setting himself to rights first. Hair neatly tied, clothes set straight and immaculate. It's not messy so much as slightly off-center.
But that whisper may as well be a scream for how out of the ordinary it is.
Jesse just so happens to be watching the door when it opens. He straightens up reflexively, shoulders back, and prepares himself for the no doubt stilted greeting to come. The Hanzo that steps out, however, does not match up to his expectations. That sense of something wrong only grows.
He quickly turns and stands, stepping toward Hanzo before remembering the cigarillo in his hand. A few more seconds are wasted as he glances around for a place to set it, and not finding one, gives up. It stays in his grip as he looks back at his sire and looks him up and down.
“Did somethin’ happen?”
It could just as easily be that the night before has left him off-kilter, but something in him says otherwise.
Something twists briefly at the sight of the smoke curling around Jesse's frame, before it registers. The scent of it, so much a part of his profile it's a wonder he didn't pick it up sooner. The dream has well and truly distracted him, hasn't it?
There's a quiet grunt as he shakes his head, padding quietly past Jesse towards the window. Just a glance outside, to reassure himself of their surroundings. It's foolish, but even so.
A second glance at Jesse, however, and he wonders. The other looks on edge, though that could just as easily be the events of last night still at play. A brief crease appears in Hanzo's brow as he stares at his fledgling.
Jesse doesn’t stop watching Hanzo, as if he’ll see the truth of the matter by staring long enough. But there really doesn’t seem to be any truth to find, other than what had already been obvious. Hanzo isn’t hurt, and he hadn’t gone anywhere, and no one had gotten to him in there… so it’s all fine, isn’t it?
“Yeah. Yeah, it’s fine. Just one hell of a bad dream.” A little of the tension eases out of him, and he brings his free hand back through his hair to try and bring some order to the wayward strands.
If one didn't know the additional details, it would seem very dull indeed. A veritable walk in the park. But the similarities are there, and Hanzo cannot help but step forward, eyes narrowing slightly.
"And a dark fog?"
A meaningless detail, unless. Unless it was the strange dream. And if Jesse had managed somehow to share that dream with him, then either they were more strongly linked than he assumed, or it was a vision in fact. Something neither of them could afford to ignore.
Jesse snaps to attention at that, staring at Hanzo with a quickly dawning realization.
“You had it too.”
What does that mean? Jesse takes a moment to reach out with that inner awareness of his, but he doesn’t feel anything else supernatural around. Just the man standing across from him, who he is always so keenly aware of even without trying.
“Is this somethin’ that happens to vampires?”
He doubts it even as he says it. That dream had been so intensely personal to Hanzo. Even not understanding all of it, he knows that. So if Jesse is seeing it too, then what this is likely has more to do with the two of them than the greater vampire community. Still, he can’t help but ask to be thorough.
"You ask that as though I have spent enough time with other vampires to know," he replies, though whatever snide tone the words might have held falls slightly flat in the face of that answer.
The same dream. It had been the same, for both of them. That spot in his chest burns, and he wonders for a moment if it's the same place as that wound Jesse had taken just a few nights prior, from the Reaper.
“Well you’ve had longer to figure it out than some of us here.” Jesse throws just enough sass in there for it to be detectable, but he’s otherwise just as thrown by the whole thing.
“Did it make any sort of sense to you? That thing followin’ you in the woods, and…”
And the arrow. He resists the urge to touch his chest again. He’s healed up since the attack, so any lingering pain has to be a result of the dream. But what did it mean that Hanzo had dreamt of being shot in the same place Jesse had been, both by the Reaper and Hanzo himself?
"...only that the path ahead is dangerous. Which, knowing our kind, says almost nothing."
Danger is ever-present in the world of the undead. Hunter, fellow vampire, and other denizens of the night, all might wish their end for a variety of reasons. Although there is a small detail.
"It wasn't like I was watchin' it from the outside. I was... seein' it from your eyes, I think."
He'd seen what Hanzo had seen, and felt a muted version of what he must have felt. If there was any other insight he had into the dream, Jesse hadn't been privy to that either.
"Felt like I was the one dreamin'. But I knew it was you, at the same time."
He looks down at where his cigarello is dropping ashe onto the floor, and he huffs as he turns to go find a sink to put the embers out in.
"Guess you must've been thinkin' real hard about the future when you fell asleep last night, and it snuck up in your dreams."
He starts the tap and puts the cigarello out in one quick burst of water.
Is that really all it was? His imagination, his anxiety, bleeding through unbidden? That would be the more comforting option, truly. Hanzo lets out a small huff, eyes lowering as he considers.
"And you felt it. Saw it. As if it were your own." His lips twist wryly. "It's little wonder to share another's blood is so forbidden, if such doorways might be open. We are a secretive lot by nature."
To have not even your mind's dreams hidden from another...it's quite the vulnerable position to be in.
"That's what this is?" Jesse turns and leans on the counter, arms folded over his chest. It's embarrassing he hadn't thought of that sooner. The nature of this dream hadn't been unlike the moments they had shared blood in the past. Visions, memories, thoughts and feelings...
They've gotten themselves in real deep with this, seems like.
"Who made that decision anyway? That it's forbidden? There's no way to police that when all the vamps won't talk to each other."
"Certain things are known, even when you do live among others of your kind. Do not reveal yourself to humans, lest you be hunted." Common sense. Things any vampire maintained to survive, especially in this day and age.
"Similarly known is this. The deeper the bloodlines run, the more ancient the vampire, the stronger the blood. The was meant to prevent younger vampires from usurping strength they were not ready for."
He arches an eyebrow.
"Do you know who the best swordsman in the world fears?"
Is that what Jesse has done? Has he gotten stronger than he should have through this exchange of blood? It’s not like he’d taken it by force, but the thought still troubles him. As for the other side-effects… they have to be manageable. Maybe they'll fade as he and Hanzo spend more time apart, which seems like an inevitability now.
“I’d say ‘the second best,’ but I got a feeling this is one of those trick questions.”
Jesse isn't wrong, in that regard. Hanzo shakes his head, all the same.
"No. He fears the worst. He cannot anticipate what the fool will do, and all the master's skill and training will matter little against someone who does not care what should be done. And in so doing, that fool might be the end of all."
A young vampire with no sense of proportion, given the power of an elder? The results would be quite similar, he expects.
"Suppose that makes sense. But I haven't gotten much more powerful than any of you at this age, have I?"
He assumes not, but it's not as if he's had anyone else to compare himself to. When hunting vampires, he'd always operated on a very loose understanding of his quarry's age. The general idea had mattered more than the specifics.
"And I bet there are some people who wouldn't mind this." He taps his head and then gestures between them, indicating the bond. "Dunno, but it seems like the sort of rule people use to make sure they're the only ones doin' a thing for their own reasons."
Again, Hanzo looks as though he's guarding his thoughts very carefully, his expression neutral at best. But beneath, there's that sense of sharp anxiety. The dread from the dream, the anticipation that whatever danger was foretold might yet come to pass.
And there's that sympathetic pang in his chest, or the phantom of it.
Jesse mulls it over for a moment, considering Hanzo's expression as he does. What is the other man hiding? He's not showing his true feelings for a reason. Does he feel so strongly about this himself?
"... It hasn't been that bad."
He doesn't exactly like the idea of anyone being able to just waltz into his mind whenever, but it doesn't seem to work like that. Far as he knows. Rather, it's more like a sort of intimacy. A mutual give and take.
A mutual give and take, but Hanzo is rarely in the giving mood. Too long he's spent having to guard himself, keep things secret to keep himself safe. Distance and silence were his allies, and intimacy of any sort was a risk he could scarce afford.
For a few nights, it had almost seemed as though he were wrong.
But now?
His dark eyes flick away, arms folding tensely across his chest. "It hardly matters. There seems to be little we can do about it now."
Well, that's answer enough on its own. And it's another explicit sign that the wall between them is back in place, rebuilt and reinforced. And there's nothing uncertain about Hanzo's body language, even if his answer is evasive.
"If we stop sharin' blood, it might ease up." He looks down at his metal prosthetic and picks at something caught in a seam of metal.
"Will probably stop altogether if we go our separate ways."
There. It's out there. No more of this uncertainty.
Or perhaps the bond would last, despite distance and time. Hard to say. There was no one to ask, no one who knew their condition better than they had managed to live it, thus far. And it's only partially the point, as it is.
It's an out. Jesse's all but laid it out for him to take. He understands, then. He must. Hanzo's gaze shifts towards the laptop for a moment, yet untouched, before lifting his gaze once more. Taking in Jesse where he stands in the moonlight.
Almost a year now. Almost back where they began all of this. He should have killed Jesse that night, rather than consign them both to this. One in a list of mistakes made over the decades.
"...you should return. To your allies in Overwatch. They might aid you in ending the Reaper once and for all," he adds quietly, after another moment.
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Nothing. A ghost, or a memory. This place is familiar, after all.
Slowly, he continues his climb, though in his peripheral he can see the slow, sinuous movement of something large slithering past the trees, climbing the hill with him. He does not turn this time, knowing full well what it is that moves in step with him. He would know them anywhere.
They are his. The reason Talon wanted him so badly. But they are not his goal now. No. That lies ahead, through the curling mist. Something red flickers ahead, like torchlight. Or perhaps the flutter of cloth, catching in the moonlight.
A green songbird rests above him in the branches, calling out suddenly as he draws near. The mist ahead on the path roils over on itself, turning black like pitch, spreading outward. He has to hurry, his legs carrying him across the smooth stone steps as quickly as he might go, but that flicker of red is very nearly out of sight, swallowed up by that darkness. Panic seizes him, though he doesn't quite know why. No, no, no no...
Abruptly, that brilliant red flares to life, bursting from the shadow like a bullet, careening towards him. Pain blossoms sharply in his chest, and then--
His eyes open to blackness. An empty room, an empty bed, and though his heart no longer beats he feels that panic shivering inside his ribs in an echo as he reminds himself of where he is.
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He sits up and turns, looking down the hall towards the door to the bedroom. Just a nightmare. But even though it hadn’t been real, he rubs at his chest where his pulse would have been racing had he been alive. Is it a phantom pain from his death? Why would it flare up now?
In his dream, he hadn’t been the one shot.
He curses quietly to himself and stands, suddenly full of anxious energy needing an outlet. There’s an urge to check on Hanzo that he can’t shake either. But that would be a bad idea. The last thing the man wants is Jesse bursting into his room. Might be he’ll tell Jesse to make other plans for the following sunrise as his first order of business for the night. That has the anxiousness swinging a whole other way, and for lack of a better way to shake it off, he grabs a cigarillo and lights it. Hanzo doesn’t want the smell of smoke in his hideout? Tough. Jesse at least opens the window and perches himself on the frame.
Every few seconds, his eyes go back to the bedroom door. Linger there. Then they’re forced back to the Hanamura skyline, and the whole thing starts over again.
Hanzo is fine. He’s in the fancy apartment building equivalent of the Fortress of Solitude. He’s fine.
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Physically, yes. But the dream -- or perhaps a vision -- lingers with him. It plays against the back of his eyes in the darkness, until he has no choice but to reach for the lamp nearby if only to banish the sight with something else.
Danger. The dream spoke to that, surely. But the nature of it, he's not entirely certain. The details muddle themselves the longer he is awake, though the feeling of dread is not so easily shaken. Was this the answer he'd sought? If so, it seems of little help. Shaking his head he draws himself to the bed's edge, steadying his hand before moving to open the door.
It's unusual for him to leave the bedroom without setting himself to rights first. Hair neatly tied, clothes set straight and immaculate. It's not messy so much as slightly off-center.
But that whisper may as well be a scream for how out of the ordinary it is.
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He quickly turns and stands, stepping toward Hanzo before remembering the cigarillo in his hand. A few more seconds are wasted as he glances around for a place to set it, and not finding one, gives up. It stays in his grip as he looks back at his sire and looks him up and down.
“Did somethin’ happen?”
It could just as easily be that the night before has left him off-kilter, but something in him says otherwise.
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There's a quiet grunt as he shakes his head, padding quietly past Jesse towards the window. Just a glance outside, to reassure himself of their surroundings. It's foolish, but even so.
A second glance at Jesse, however, and he wonders. The other looks on edge, though that could just as easily be the events of last night still at play. A brief crease appears in Hanzo's brow as he stares at his fledgling.
"...you?"
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“Yeah. Yeah, it’s fine. Just one hell of a bad dream.” A little of the tension eases out of him, and he brings his free hand back through his hair to try and bring some order to the wayward strands.
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That answer earns a more intense look than otherwise might seem warranted. But he can't help but wonder.
"What manner of dream?"
Surely it couldn't be the same one. That would be so unlikely as to be ridiculous, really. And yet.
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"A weird one. About you. You were in the woods, and I think somethin' was walkin' with you. I might've been there, I think?"
Yeah, sounds riveting when he explains it like that.
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"And a dark fog?"
A meaningless detail, unless. Unless it was the strange dream. And if Jesse had managed somehow to share that dream with him, then either they were more strongly linked than he assumed, or it was a vision in fact. Something neither of them could afford to ignore.
Even if they did part ways at this point.
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“You had it too.”
What does that mean? Jesse takes a moment to reach out with that inner awareness of his, but he doesn’t feel anything else supernatural around. Just the man standing across from him, who he is always so keenly aware of even without trying.
“Is this somethin’ that happens to vampires?”
He doubts it even as he says it. That dream had been so intensely personal to Hanzo. Even not understanding all of it, he knows that. So if Jesse is seeing it too, then what this is likely has more to do with the two of them than the greater vampire community. Still, he can’t help but ask to be thorough.
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The same dream. It had been the same, for both of them. That spot in his chest burns, and he wonders for a moment if it's the same place as that wound Jesse had taken just a few nights prior, from the Reaper.
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“Did it make any sort of sense to you? That thing followin’ you in the woods, and…”
And the arrow. He resists the urge to touch his chest again. He’s healed up since the attack, so any lingering pain has to be a result of the dream. But what did it mean that Hanzo had dreamt of being shot in the same place Jesse had been, both by the Reaper and Hanzo himself?
“… the rest of it?”
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Danger is ever-present in the world of the undead. Hunter, fellow vampire, and other denizens of the night, all might wish their end for a variety of reasons. Although there is a small detail.
"I don't recall seeing you. And yet you saw me."
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He'd seen what Hanzo had seen, and felt a muted version of what he must have felt. If there was any other insight he had into the dream, Jesse hadn't been privy to that either.
"Felt like I was the one dreamin'. But I knew it was you, at the same time."
He looks down at where his cigarello is dropping ashe onto the floor, and he huffs as he turns to go find a sink to put the embers out in.
"Guess you must've been thinkin' real hard about the future when you fell asleep last night, and it snuck up in your dreams."
He starts the tap and puts the cigarello out in one quick burst of water.
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"And you felt it. Saw it. As if it were your own." His lips twist wryly. "It's little wonder to share another's blood is so forbidden, if such doorways might be open. We are a secretive lot by nature."
To have not even your mind's dreams hidden from another...it's quite the vulnerable position to be in.
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They've gotten themselves in real deep with this, seems like.
"Who made that decision anyway? That it's forbidden? There's no way to police that when all the vamps won't talk to each other."
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"Similarly known is this. The deeper the bloodlines run, the more ancient the vampire, the stronger the blood. The was meant to prevent younger vampires from usurping strength they were not ready for."
He arches an eyebrow.
"Do you know who the best swordsman in the world fears?"
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“I’d say ‘the second best,’ but I got a feeling this is one of those trick questions.”
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"No. He fears the worst. He cannot anticipate what the fool will do, and all the master's skill and training will matter little against someone who does not care what should be done. And in so doing, that fool might be the end of all."
A young vampire with no sense of proportion, given the power of an elder? The results would be quite similar, he expects.
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He assumes not, but it's not as if he's had anyone else to compare himself to. When hunting vampires, he'd always operated on a very loose understanding of his quarry's age. The general idea had mattered more than the specifics.
"And I bet there are some people who wouldn't mind this." He taps his head and then gestures between them, indicating the bond. "Dunno, but it seems like the sort of rule people use to make sure they're the only ones doin' a thing for their own reasons."
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Again, Hanzo looks as though he's guarding his thoughts very carefully, his expression neutral at best. But beneath, there's that sense of sharp anxiety. The dread from the dream, the anticipation that whatever danger was foretold might yet come to pass.
And there's that sympathetic pang in his chest, or the phantom of it.
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Jesse mulls it over for a moment, considering Hanzo's expression as he does. What is the other man hiding? He's not showing his true feelings for a reason. Does he feel so strongly about this himself?
"... It hasn't been that bad."
He doesn't exactly like the idea of anyone being able to just waltz into his mind whenever, but it doesn't seem to work like that. Far as he knows. Rather, it's more like a sort of intimacy. A mutual give and take.
"Do you?"
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For a few nights, it had almost seemed as though he were wrong.
But now?
His dark eyes flick away, arms folding tensely across his chest. "It hardly matters. There seems to be little we can do about it now."
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"If we stop sharin' blood, it might ease up." He looks down at his metal prosthetic and picks at something caught in a seam of metal.
"Will probably stop altogether if we go our separate ways."
There. It's out there. No more of this uncertainty.
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Or perhaps the bond would last, despite distance and time. Hard to say. There was no one to ask, no one who knew their condition better than they had managed to live it, thus far. And it's only partially the point, as it is.
It's an out. Jesse's all but laid it out for him to take. He understands, then. He must. Hanzo's gaze shifts towards the laptop for a moment, yet untouched, before lifting his gaze once more. Taking in Jesse where he stands in the moonlight.
Almost a year now. Almost back where they began all of this. He should have killed Jesse that night, rather than consign them both to this. One in a list of mistakes made over the decades.
"...you should return. To your allies in Overwatch. They might aid you in ending the Reaper once and for all," he adds quietly, after another moment.
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just let me know if I should change anything!
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guess who just bought themselves a paid account to get demon icons
ahahahah beautiful
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