Misty Rose: Nature
Chapter 14
I’ve talked before about how the vampire world isn’t glamorous. It’s actually kind of stupid, and feels a lot like high school, except the nasty people are actual monsters and not just bitches. And yeah, guys can be bitches too. I’m being gender neutral here. You just got to ignore the stupid macho parts to see it. Ego fights on social media? Making up nasty names to call other guys? Lawsuits? Bitches.
The vampire social the next month just kind of underlined how socially warped and stupid vampires could be. You’d think that glamorous immortal dead people wouldn’t be all awkward and shit, right? Like, they wouldn’t act like some creep trying to hit on you, or like someone who just couldn’t figure out why what he’d done was so stupidly obvious? You’d also think they’d have more than one outfit. But it kind of seems like a lot of them don’t. I mean, I get the party clothes thing. I’ve got a few different outfits I like to wear to parties, and I don’t have enough money to have more than a few, but… if I knew I’d be doing a regular party every month with the same people, I’d at least try to change things up a little. Not wear the same outfit and jewelry and shit every time. Not talking about the ones in suits, I get the whole business look thing. And it’s not like they didn’t have any money. I figured most of the other vampires probably had more money than me and Kaitlyn put together. I didn’t have a job. Maybe they just didn’t think about how same-y they were? It’d make sense if vampires tended to get stuck at whatever point they were turned like the scary lady said.
Anyway, I’m talking about this because of something that happened at the vampire social. There was this one guy, I’d seen him before but didn’t really think he was important. He was… I don’t know, maybe five four, shorter than me. He had spiky red hair and he was fat. Really fat. Think Grimace. Definitely weighed more than me, even though he was shorter. And he had this stupid little goatee thing that… maybe looks good on thin guys, but definitely not on him. He was one of the suit guys, and had a black suit that… looked like it might have been one of the expensive suits, but it just seemed to me like it was a cheap suit made to look like an expensive suit, you know? Had to have been adjusted a lot to fit him, so maybe it wasn’t that cheap, but still. He also had this… stupid cane thing. Some dumb dragon or bird or something for the handle on the top. Not like he needed the cane, he just seemed to like having it so he could wave it around or something. He also had this black leather coat over everything that didn’t really fit him right, and his suit shirt was black, not white, and his tie was red. And I don’t know exactly what it was about him, but the little creep just… felt like the kind of guy who was a date rapist before he got turned into a vampire, and liked being a vampire even more.
I’m pretty sure delusions aren’t a vampire superpower, but this guy made it seem like they were. This guy was walking around like he was super hot and important and shit, and all the girls were going to fly at him crotch first. Never found out the little creep’s name, but I don’t think it mattered because I doubted I’d ever see him at the socials again. He got in pretty major trouble. All the official stuff was done, and everyone was sort of milling around talking. Then the little creep went up to this biker chick. I mentioned her before, right? Not the sort of person you fuck with. The creep went up behind her and poked her in the back with his cane. The biker chick went all stiff, then whirled around and started screaming at the little creep. I don’t know what sort of vampire thing he did, but whatever it was, the biker chick was pissed. Like killing someone pissed. Well, that drew a crowd, and all the sudden sword guy was there. Biker chick calmed down just enough to tell sword guy she’d been assaulted on neutral ground in a more or less respectful way. The creep was standing there trying to say he just poked the biker chick, and that she couldn’t prove he did anything else to her. Which is all kinds of stupid because if some little creep poked me with his stupid-ass cane right before some weird vampire shit happened to me, I’d be pretty fucking sure it was the little creep that did it, you know? That’s like saying you can’t prove the guy with his hand on your ass was the one that pinched you. Sure, it could have been someone else, but if there’s no one else there, it’s pretty fucking likely it’s the same guy.
In any case, I doubted it was something I was going to have to worry about, like I said, because sword guy picked up the creep by the neck, like seriously picked the fat little asshole up with one hand and hauled him out of the room towards the back. Then the Baron sighed like he was going to have to deal with some kind of chore and followed sword guy out. Okay, sure, maybe the Lord and sword guy were just going to slap the little creep around, but I really doubted that’s what happened. And if you’d seen the little creep in action, I don’t think you’d care if he got his head cut off, either. If nothing else, it’s one less vampire hurting humans, and one that’d probably been pretty nasty, too. Maybe it’s cruel, but I don’t really care. The less of those kind of fuckers in the world, the better.
But it’s not just the creep. It’s him, and the weird-ass other vampires, like the two… or was it three? The ones that you can’t tell if they’re guys or girls. Not because of being genderfluid, but because they’re twisted perverts on top of whatever else they are. I mean… people should be free to be whatever gender they feel like they are, right? But nothing gives someone the right to go around acting like they’re going to do something to you with a gallon of baby oil and a live chicken. Which is what I felt like those weird guys wanted to do to me. I don’t know. Maybe I was just being paranoid. But there’s a lot of vampires that… just seem like they’re everything wrong with humans sort of… boiled down to some kind of sick syrup of twisted nastiness. And they actually enjoy being those kind of freaks.
Like… I guess this happened before I was even born, but I guess one of the worst serial killers the city ever had was a vampire. He didn’t get caught by the cops, vampires eventually killed him, and the whole thing was buried and kept away from the media. But this guy wasn’t really even that bad for a vampire. He was mostly just too stupid to understand why leaving a trail of bodies behind him was a bad idea. Scary lady said he didn’t have fangs for some reason, so he’d just… bite humans the same way humans bit things, which would hurt pretty bad, and his victims would struggle, and he’d just… beat them unconscious. Then drink all their blood. Guy wasn’t even trying to be nasty. He was just being a really, really stupid vampire. But he still managed to get the cops looking for a cannibal serial killer because of him biting through parts of his victims while feeding. And because he wasn’t ever caught by the human cops, the families of his victims think the bastard got away. Just think about what he could have done if he’d been trying to be nasty, right?
Then there’s… okay, the scary lady didn’t really get into details, but… I guess some of the special kinds of vampires she mentioned get up to some fucking twisted things. And not being told was somehow worse, you know? I mean… if normal vampires do shit like sacrifice humans and use them like toys and cattle and shit, what do the worse ones do? Scary lady talked about some of the religious vampires making… human chandeliers that’d drip blood down on vampires at rituals and stuff. Or who’d use humans as vessels so the vampires could feel whatever drugs they’d made the humans take… and the humans would usually be forced to overdose, too. And if humans can be as shitty as humans are, what would that mean for vampires, when being a vampire makes people so much worse?
I guess the point of all this is to say that all the movies and books and shows lied. Vampires aren’t hip, or cool, or tragically glamorous or anything. They’re scary and creepy and… sort of pathetic. Like something tore up their lives, and they spend the rest of eternity trying to… stay how they were when they got turned or something. Kind of frozen. And most of them, even the guys, are like the mean girls in high school. Bitchy and gossipy and just… shitty. The others… are skeezy like the little creep, or scary like sword guy, or just… not human, like Baron Whatshisname wasn’t human. Or totally freaky. And I don’t like it because some of them…
Well, some of them… bring back bad memories. Not because of how they look or what they say, but because of… how they feel. Like… they could have been one of the guys holding Kaitlyn down. Or like they’d… just do whatever they liked to you, and you’d know they were going to do it, and it wouldn’t fucking matter what you tried to do, because you’d be trapped and couldn’t fight back or get away or…
Sorry. I’ve had some bad shit happen to me, too. Shit I’m not comfortable talking about. Should probably see someone about it, but… I didn’t have the money before, and now… well, I don’t think I’d survive being locked up in an asylum because I thought I was a vampire. And they don’t have night hours, anyway. I looked. But part of the problem I have with other vampires is that some of them… it’s like they can just see the shit you’ve dealt with, and the shit you can’t deal with, and the shit you can’t fight back against, and… they like it. They pull it right out of your head, and it’s like they know it’ll hurt you, and they actually want to do it. Just like what happened except worse because vampires always make everything they get into worse. And maybe the worst thing about it is that that’s you, too. You’ve got part of the same thing that makes them like that in you, too. Makes you… want to hurt people. Maybe not like that, calling up the worst shit that happened to someone, but… maybe making yourself into the worst shit that happened to them. Like at the party when I rescued Kaitlyn. Yeah, I was saving her, but… I just couldn’t forget that right then, my vampire side wanted me to hurt those guys. And not just hurt them. Break them. Do what they were going to do to Kaitlyn back to them, but a hell of a lot worse. And not just because they were going to hurt Kaitlyn. Because… they were humans, and I wasn’t. They were just food, and food that dared to hurt something of mine.
I’m… just not okay with the idea of being like the people that hurt me. Or that hurt Kaitlyn, you know? Okay, sure, it felt nice to… beat the shit out of that sort of asshole, but… it wasn’t going to hurt the guys that hurt us, or make the hurt go away. I sure didn’t feel that much better because of what I did to those guys. Mostly I was just worried I’d flip out like that on people who didn’t deserve it.
Which was another problem. How part of me thought of Kaitlyn. I was going to have to tell her at some point. Maybe like… when I wasn’t going to be a problem for her anymore. I didn’t want to leave, but I didn’t see any way I wouldn’t hafta deal with that problem. Not if she kept messing with me the way she had been. That’s why I’d get so upset about it. I mean, okay, she’d take some jokes too far, sure. But she didn’t know how that part of me reacted to her doing that. And I couldn’t tell her. Bad enough that being a vampire was trying to turn me into a victimizer. Sort of had, actually. But I didn’t need Kaitlyn to see me as… well, someone that’d maybe do the same kind of things to her.
Anyway, sorry to go off like this because of what was… supposed to be sort of a silly story. But it can be fucking hard to not think about the rest of it sometimes. I read something once that said that was the thing about pain. Like… stuff that was sort of like what caused the pain could cause more pain. Sort of get linked up with what already happened. Well, being a vampire was a whole lot of horrible shit all rolled up together. Unless you’re already a monster of some kind. Or you become one. But even then, maybe the pain doesn’t really go away. You just… become the pain. Or something. I don’t get all this stuff. It gets really fucking complicated.
Maybe I should have taken a psyche class before I dropped out. Vampires are just too fucking messed up to deal with. And it doesn’t help when I’ve got issues, too.
