Chapter Text
Cleo hadn't expected much on her return to her ancestral home. Her mother had told her stories of Oakhurst, of wooden huts that struggled against the winter, of stone walls long since crumbled from a story long past told. The old manor lord had long since passed and his home along with him, leaving the kindly mayor behind. Or… at least that was what he tried to portray. If he was or was not, her mother had been one of many who watched. She did not know him and she was not one of his.
When his arose, she took those she called her own and fled.
Perhaps her lack of action cursed them under her name, she often pondered. The humans she had claimed as her own never lived long, disease, infection, predators, sometimes even just dropping dead from nothing. It only took less than 200 years for the human population to be reduced to just Cleo. Cleo, who couldn't recall her birth mother's sweat-covered arms as she stared, exhausted beyond her years, at her newborn babe with lungs of steel that did not falter. Cleo, who would look into the mirror as her adoptive mother ran her fingers through Cleo's long hair, only to see just herself. Cleo, who held all her ancestor's hopes, wielding the name given to all the first-born daughters.
Perhaps her desire to act would save her, her mother had smiled, kissing her daughter's hair as she bid her farewell. Fangs nicked at a few strands of hair, pressing against the skin, but never piercing. Cleo had rejected that, year after year. Live forever or die young? Cleo had made their choice.
The homes of Oakhurst had been made by the poor, erected after they left their homes in hope for better, under a distant mayor that did not terrorise them. They held limited materials, not built to last, but to be easy to maintain and improve upon, should they all settle. Logs and stone quickly gathered, slowly becoming planks and bricks.
So Cleo wasn't surprised to come across the ruins of was once a thriving community.
She wondered briefly if some of her mother's house still stood or was it completely gone, burnt into ash long since blown away. They wondered even briefer still if her ancestors' home still stood. It did not matter; Cleo had long since been old enough to help her neighbours. To share knowledge with someone new, it was something every long-living she knew cherished.
Cleo hoped they found someone new to share with. She didn't want them to get bored.
No, Cleo wasn't surprised by barely standing ruins. They were a little confused by the weird orb thing in the centre of town, but Cleo lived with a community of vampires. She had long since learnt how to shrug and move on.
No, what surprised Cleo was the people. Oakhurst had been wiped out 200 years ago, her own family some of the few to escape with their lives. Rumours flew through the villages they travelled through, of disease, of plague.
Her family knew better.
Those that recognised them as travellers, who heard rumours of them being of Oakhurst, they kept their distance. Ducking into homes, refusing rooms at inns, corralling children far from them. Humans were scarce in Cleo's life: a few visitors dropping by to trade with those holding collections worthy of the immortal; the odd fearful soldier that wished to hide from a world that hated them; the desperate sick who wanted to experience what it was like to live (but they never counted for long). To come across this gaggle of humans- Cleo wanted to grumble and throw a fit, to chase them all from her home they had only just reclaimed. 200 years of no one, as evidenced by the lack of buildings, and when Cleo decided to finally reclaim what rightfully belonged to them and their family, all these humans barge in. Some even talk about claiming this land themselves.
Rude.
But Cleo knew better than anyone that it took a village to survive. There was much to do before Oakhurst was ready to be comfortably settled in and a few extra hands didn't go amiss. Logs were gathered and planks created a safe shelter from the cursed night. The Undead wandering the land were not welcome, but Cleo had already been warned that such suffering would soak into the soil.
So they did what they knew how to do. They created a farm, all sorts of vegetables thrown her way and snatching a bucket to gather water for the crops. Carrots, potatoes, wheat- those were easy enough. She had been farming those since she could pick up a trowel. Garlic, however, had lived in a small planter, far from the village. The scent alone would often make a vampire vaguely nauseous and, as young vampires often learnt from stupid dares, terribly nauseous when eaten. The farmers of the village never grew it, even when prices for their other crops fell for several years. They could not, so they could not teach, only trade for books that could.
Mother had insisted Cleo learn.
"There is much evil in the world, my little clove," her mother would whisper into her hair as Cleo read the new book. This one was about silver. "You must be prepared to face it from all sides."
Cleo was only seven summers old, but the importance of their mother's words lingered even years later. "Even from you?"
"I hope that is never the case."
But hope could only go so far.
The howls of wolves echoed from far off, a pack migrating. Whether they were wolves or something more, Cleo did not intend to investigate. There was much that hid in these woods, that circled the beacon that was Oakhurst, but the shadows distorted what could be seen. Were these people humans? Were these people dangerous? Cleo had yet to find out for sure, but they had seen Pearl perk up at every howl.
The garlic fields reached far within the walls. Cleo could not prioritise the herb like they wished, not when food was so rationed between the group, always running low, but she stretched it as far as she could without encroaching on other's territories. Their mother taught them to be polite, after all (a challenge when such a thing was instinctive to her). Cleo debated planting outside the walls, but the grass grew far too fast in the crimson moonlight. The town was the only place she could farm without losing three quarters of her crops, not worth the expenditure of energy for such a meagre amount.
"Hey! Cleo!"
Speaking of expenditure of energy.
Cleo bit back the urge to sigh as she was, once again, approached by Avid, this time decorated with a multitude of scratches and twigs. They sent out their luck to Drift. She clearly needed it more than Cleo, if she was going to keep her roommate alive. "Hey, Avid."
The anxious bundle of nerves in human flesh rocked back and forth, from the heels of his feet to the balls, heels, balls, heels, balls. In his hands, he was playing with the fraying rope that twisted around the top of the sachet, sheltering its content from the world. His purple eyes darted back and forth, between the corners and alleys to the gates that marked the exits. Cleo was a farmer, but she had grown up in a village of vampires that would not risk unsatiated hunger. They had seen the fear of the prey of the hunt. She, herself, had been the one to strike down pigs ready for slaughter.
Their fear never tasted the same.
"Did you just want to chat? Or did you need something?" As the only farmer in the midst of this strange mixture of peasants and nobles, Cleo had little time to do much beyond care of their farm, most of which she spent exploring the woods everyone else had the luxury of.
"I- it's just…" Avid chewed on his bottom lip with his right canine. It didn't look much sharper than Cleo's own, but that wasn't a surefire tell. "I- sugar!"
"We don't have candy just lying aroun-"
"I know that!" He squeezed the sachet, fingers ripping a rope fibre free. "I know that. I just- I'm not a fighter." Cleo firmly kept her eyes focused on the crops she was harvesting instead of the empty crossbow adorning his back. If Avid ever found bolts for it, Cleo would break them. The hunter would not be armed under her watch, would not burn their ancestral homeland like those that came before. "B-b-but I'm good at potions! A-and I can make medicines and I know how to stitch up a wound- but only after you clean it!" Avid's hand picked at the bandages wrapped around his neck. They never stained red. Cleo did not know him; it was not their place to ask.
"And what does that have to do with your sweet tooth?"
"I don't have a sweet tooth! Sweets are gross, anyway." He grumbled the last sentence, but Cleo had practice learning to hunt pests. His stomach decided to grumble its own say as well.
"Your stomach seems to disagree."
"Shut up!"
Cleo raised an eyebrow at that. "What was that?"
The shudder that sprinted through Avid's frame brought Cleo a tiny bit of satisfaction. "IWASTALKINGTOMYSTOMACH!"
Sometimes it was good to be feared. "Here."
Avid dropped the sachet, fumbling to catch a freshly harvested carrot. "I-"
"Your stomach was rumbling. Clean it and eat it or I'll force it down your gullet right now."
Avid carefully slipped it into his inventory.
"And no one has found any sugarcane yet," that Cleo or Pearl knew of. Cleo doubted anyone here had enough farming knowledge to hide plants from her. "Anything else I can help you with?"
"Oh."
Quiet disappointment did not suit the usually loud and paranoid man.
"What were you even using sugar for if not to satisfy a sweet tooth? To help the medicine go down?"
Avid choked down a laugh at that. "Nope! It's for potions!"
Potions was not something Cleo had any talent in. Farming was their passion, practically part of their blood, according to Mother. The ancestry she knew reached back to Oakhurst and nearly every descendent was a farmhand in their life at one point or another. One or two had dispersed to the unknown, another few preferring the company of a well-worn book. Cleo still had one of those books, the only one to have survived mostly unharmed, tucked into her small bag that held little else beyond the personal items Cleo didn't dare to leave in the safety of a home they didn't know if they would ever return to.
"What types of potions use sugar?" Cleo knew some travellers who traded for carrots for potions, who laughed the idea of eating something so valuable. They stopped laughing when the prices rose.
"Well, the ones I want to make don't use sugar directly, not on its own!" The shakiness faded from his limbs with each word. The tremble of his voice soothed into the timbre of his voice. Cleo almost couldn't recognise Avid. "You need to use it with a brown mushroom and a spider eye to ferment it. Those can be used to transform all sorts of potions- like healing into harming! There is swiftness- that gives you a speed boost! That needs direct sugar, but it's pretty useless against vampires," ah, there it was. And here Cleo thought they might have a miracle in the making of a single conversation with Avid without the mention of vampires, "since they are super fast. And can fly-"
Maybe Cleo should stop him. Tell him to quit tossing baseless paranoia around. He claimed to be a hunter, yet he did not know the signs of a turned, how to tell the danger from the safety. There was far more beyond vampires to worry about right now and, if they decided to threaten Cleo's town, she would show them what their mother taught them.
"-we don't have a lot of choice, what with a lack of, well, stuff. So I don't want to waste it! I figured maybe I could make some potions to stop the vampires! Like weakness or slowness or harming- so we can all get away!"
Cleo hummed under their breath, planting some carrots into the patch of disturbed dirt they had just harvested. The crimson moonlight was not doing him any favours. What was once purple now glowed an ominous red that did not belong to the mortals of this world. Avid was lucky none believed his frantic ramblings, that none knew one of the tells of a vampire beyond the level of a fresh fledgling, of one that had stained their hands red with one human or countless times with attempts to stave off the hunger. Did the clearly fresh-faced hunter know the sign either? Inexperience was one of the greatest killers. "Aren't vampires undead?"
"…shoot."
Cleo may not know much about potions, but they had seen them used before. When a deal went awry and the violent intruders did not know the truth of their business partners. The Undead did not respond the way the Living did. To forget such an essential fact… Cleo wondered what sort of alchemist he once was.
Avid sheepishly smiled. "Got any melons?"
Cleo didn't want to know how he would desecrate melons. "Did you even bring a brewing stand with you?"
The silence spoke volumes, the self-proclaimed potion-maker fleeing. Avid's trousers ruffled noisily as he shuffled away, the very definition of unsubtle, but that was Avid for you. He didn't do subtlety, despite what his curled up posture implied. "…I'm just going to leave now."
Cleo was the farmer. Avid was just another member of the village eating into her crops. He was nothing more than an extra pair of hands, when he wasn't yelling to the heavens about vampires existing.
…
Cleo didn't need to worry about Avid. He had Drift; Cleo already had Pearl. They didn't live together and they didn't work together. Cleo provided the food. That was as far as their relationship needed to go. He could go cry to Drift at his lack of foresight. It wasn't like they were friends.
…
Stupid human emotions.
"Garlic?" Cleo lifted a hand, holding out the crop they had just finished harvesting. They didn't have to harvest this crop next, not with several closer freshly grown potatoes and wheat, but Avid was always giving his supply away. For a hunter, he was so ill-prepared sometimes, tripped up by his own kindness.
It took barely a second for the cloves to be snatched from Cleo's hand, faster than any human had any right to be. "THANKYOUTHANKYOUTHANKYOU! YOUARETHEBESTCLEO."
Would he one day fall on his face when his kindness wasn't returned?