Chapter Text
I don’t know when we got this close to each other, but at some point we crossed the line of friends into this blurred space that vampire tamers are supposed to avoid.
And it’s just like the world to throw problems at me that I’m woefully under-prepared for. Like, I studied my ass off in school. I learned all about vampire transitions in just about every bloodline that had any information on it. I learned all the quirks, the oddities, I have a particular fascination with fringe cases. It’s why Cooper appealed to me so much. He’s an American bloodline—as pure American as American can get—going vampire at 19 fucking years old. I have old colleagues reaching out to me for information on him so they can add shit to the ever-growing knowledge bank for us guides, and I have to be so fucking careful about any way I write up his case for medical literature because it’d be so damned obvious to anyone in the correct circles to know it’s him I’m talking about.
But nothing could’ve prepared me for falling ass-over-tea-kettle in fucking love with him.
Nothing.
Cooper had been—honestly?—a gem. For a baby vampire. In the grand scheme of 19-year-olds, he’s a well-meaning shithead, but all 19-year-old boys are shitheads. Clouds are found in the sky, who knew? He had one of the roughest transitions I’ve known in terms of just feeling sick all the time and being functionally disabled about half the time, but he still managed to not become a woe is me story or blanket his misery onto other people. He’s genuinely pleasant to be around, he follows instructions weirdly well, he’ll cut the attitude the moment I tell him to (but I do let him get away with too much. I like him. Sue me.), he asks intelligent questions and actually makes sure he understands the answers. Somehow, he had the bandwidth to be fighting for consciousness through back-to-back fevers and fatigue severe enough that he could barely get out of bed while also arranging for a birthday cake and a new laptop to be delivered to the house for me. I asked him what possibly possessed him, and he just shrugged. Said he felt like returning the favor for babysitting him. Since when are shithead 19-year-olds sweet?
And he’s so calm. Baby vampires are supposed to be like hangry five-year-olds, all big, sweeping, intense emotions crumpled up into a newspaper-ball of hunger, discomfort, pain, disorientation, and heightened senses. But Coop’s not that much different from his pre-vampire self. His level of composure was summated as inhuman before he ever went vampire—and, admittedly, I did roll my eyes at that because I was so sure he’d be a dumpster fire whenever he did go vamp—but, no. I’ll eat my thoughts. He’s got some fucking preternatural Zen about him. Sure, he’s a little snappy and witty and pouty when he’s feeling like dogshit, but like, 90% of the idiots I knew in high school had week-long tantrums if their bestie didn’t like their Insta post or some garbage. He’s pretty tolerable as long as he has something to do. And he’s pretty good at finding something to do.
At floor level, I-can’t-function-enough-to-sit-up-even level, we’ll just talk. For hours. About kind of anything. He’s actually way smarter than he looks—and he already seemed like the Jock Who Did His Homework, you know what I mean? Like no, I didn’t get the impression that he lived buried behind textbooks, but I guess I didn’t realize how much he already knew and how curious he still was. Which is really my dumbass fault. Because he’s been lowkey grilling me on the ins and outs of going vampire this entire time.
He doesn’t look like the type who could go on whole-ass ramble about theoretical math, but, apparently, he just idle-modes Mandelbrot sets like it’s a normal thing to be doing. He tried explaining it. I got lost in the first minute, but he seemed so into it that I just let him cook. We played chess together when he couldn’t take lights well enough to kick my ass at 2K. He was pretty shit at it, but he’s getting better. I got him into stand-up comedy, and sometimes we’d just blob on the couch having giggle-fits at Josh Johnson delivering a deadpanned very real, very funny assessment of the state of the world (because, seriously, how do you lose an entire giraffe?). Cooper’s honestly a transition guide’s best-case scenario.
Maybe that’s when we got too close. Hard to tell.
My eyes flew open to a lightning flash across window blinds.
I didn’t know where Cooper was.
That was my first thought. I don’t know where he is, I don’t know if he’s in pain, I don’t know if he’s got a fever, has he eaten, fuck my life—he’s not throwing up again, is he?
It wasn’t until I flailed upright that I felt pain. Dull ache, side of the neck, like I fell asleep funny. My foot caught the comforter and sent me off-balance, but before I stumbled, something clamped around me. The scent of coconut, lavender, orange, something deep and earthy that I couldn’t place, and the musk of warm skin—you know the scent—exploded around me. My cheek pressed into something both soft and stiff, but hot as a heating pad. My fists clutched some kind of thin fabric. His t-shirt. That’s his t-shirt.
“Easy.” Cooper? That’s Cooper’s voice rumbling through his chest and against my face. “Don’t fall.”
“Jesus—are you okay?” I wriggled out of his grasp enough to see him, but it was nearly pitch-black in the room, so I just barely picked up his silhouette. His hands stayed on my arms, holding me in place. I keep forgetting how huge his hands are. It’s like he had the entire span between my shoulders and elbows in his grip.
“I should be asking you that.” His voice was flat. Mechanical. Has he always had a lisp?
“Did-did you eat dinner? Do you have a fever?” I felt around in the dark and pressed the back of my hand to his neck. He felt fine. Maybe a little clammy. “How’s your pain?”
“Darling—”
“Did you take your meds? You can’t miss them, you’ll have a bad flare—”
“You don’t remember, do you?”
I froze at that. “Don’t remember what, Cooper?” Wait, hold on a second. “Why… are you in my room?”
“I-I bit you?” he whispered.
My hand flew to the achy side of my neck, poked a large, square adhesive bandage. Bits of the evening came back. We were talking on the couch. He doesn’t check the weather enough for being in Dallas for the summer, how do you not know about Tornado Alley? I made my way to the kitchen to grab him an orange. Jesus Christ, Cooper, don’t sneak up on me like that!
“Cooper? Hey, easy! Don’t grab me so hard; I’m not going anywhere.”
His eyes were vacant. Vacuous. Endless pits of black pupils around slivers of blue iris, but he released his grip.
“Here.” I held an orange up for him to bite. He turned his nose up at it. “I know, sweetheart, but it’ll help.”
He bit into it, but his attention stayed locked on me. Pupils still blown out. My stomach fell through the floor. He removed his teeth, brushed the orange out of my hand. Swiped the corner of his mouth.
“I’m-I’m sorry. I-I didn’t mean to.”
“No, no, it’s okay,” I said, patting his chest. It was most definitely not okay, but something stung in my heart to hear his voice so broken. “I’m okay.”
He raked a hand through his hair. Lightning flashed one, two, three, four times. He wasn’t looking at me. And he was trembling. Badly.
“Hey, you’re okay.” I don’t know what possessed me to pull him into a hug, but he heaved out a breath and clamped his arms around me. “Ow, my back.”
He lifted me onto the counter like I didn’t weigh anything. I mean, I know he was strong before the vampirism and the vampirism amplified that even more, but it’s jarring to get moved like you don’t exist. He pushed my knees apart and fit his waist between my thighs. It was a bit of a crime that he didn’t know what he was doing. Of course, the universe would do this to me.
“Is this better?” His speech was slurred worse than Monica’s when she’s drunk drunk. And his breath was hot against the shell of my ear.
I pushed against his chest. “Cooper, you don’t know how to do this safely.”
“Please, Darling, just a little?” he whined it into the crook of my neck. “I just want a taste.”
“Cooper…”
He sucked a wet kiss over my pulse. Dragged his lips over the spot. “Please? Fuck, I can almost taste you already…”
I squeaked when he nuzzled his face into the crook of my neck. “Cooper!”
“I-I won’t bite again. I won’t. I-I promise…” Fuck me, he sounded like he was on the verge of tears. “I’m just… fuck, I’m sorry…”
I rubbed his back, trying to soothe him. “Disoriented?”
He shook his head.
I took a chance. “Scared?”
He nodded into my shoulder. Hot wetness hit my collarbone.
“Don’t cry sweetheart.” Don’t look at me like that. It’s just what came out of my mouth. “You’re okay.”
“I’m fucking terrified,” he breathed.
“Shhhh, you’re okay,” I whispered. It’s all I could manage through the shock of it. It’s funny how little his bite hurts. It’s supposed to be like a bee sting or some shit like that, but it just felt like a particularly annoying injection to the neck. And he was being gentle. It’s not uncommon for baby vampires to bite way too hard, tear up your skin, suck so hard that you have giant purple marks for weeks. No, he was gentle. Took little kitten licks, just lapping up whatever blood he could easily get.
“I-I remember doing it,” he mumbled, muffled in my hoodie. “I remember you telling me to stop. And I—” he gasped again. Almost choked on air. His shaking got worse.
Before I could ask him if he was okay (he wasn’t; the fuck was I thinking?), he sank to the floor.
Not a lot scares me. I’m pretty resistant to a lot of horrors—kind of have to be to be in this line of work. Vampires aren’t monsters, there aren’t creatures in the dark, ghosts aren’t real, there are no curses and shit like that. I could just as easily die in a car accident on my way to the grocery store as I could get shot in said grocery store or shredded apart by a random vampire like I’m a gory piñata—there’s no sense in walking around this Earth terrified of any of those possibilities, especially at the expense of caring for and about the people I love. Anything could happen to me. Oh well. Can’t do jack shit about it.
But the idea of Cooper having a panic attack scared me.
Maybe that’s when the line truly blurred. When he stopped being my charge, my responsibility, this kid that I’m tugging along the path of vampirism, kicking and swearing and screaming, and he became someone in that circle of people I love. Because anything could happen to me, sure, but something happening to my loved ones keeps me up at night. Something happening to Cooper keeps me up at night.
I fumbled for the stupid little switch on the nightstand lamp and flipped it on. He was on the floor next to the bed, hugging his knees to his chest, had his forehead on them, was heaving slow, shaking breaths. I don’t know what hurt worse: Seeing that he was freaking the fuck out, or seeing that he’d clearly had this happen enough times to know how to self-regulate said freak-out. Jesus Christ, how many panic attacks does a kid have to go through to be able to breathe right through one as a barely-adult? And why didn’t anyone tell me about this? Does Kelly even know this about her kid?
I’ll admit that I had no idea what to do. Like I know how to get panicking people to calm down, but what am I supposed to do when someone’s calming themselves down? Loiter around? Leave them alone?
I decided to join him on the floor. A little neurodivergent floor time, I guess.
We sat in silence for a while with nothing but an occasional flash of lightning and thunder rumbles to keep us company. It didn’t take him that long to return back to his baseline state, another thing that made me think too hard about how often he’s had to exorcise panic from his being. At some point, I noticed him staring at my hand.
I extended it. More out of curiosity than anything else.
He intertwined his fingers with mine, rested his chin on his forearm, and closed his eyes.
That’s when it happened, when I fell in love with him. If not any point before then, definitely by then. Because every fiber in my body wanted to crawl into his lap.