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“You file your fangs down?” Avid can’t tell if it’s pity, second hand vampiric embarrassment, unbridled disgust, contemptuous anger, or sheer stupendous amazement that colours Scott’s voice. Its precise nature is chimeric: shifting like a kaleidoscope with every syllable wrapped in his bemused, aloof, haughty voice. Avid finds himself growing strangely fond of it as the Oakhurst nights drag longer and bloodier. The initial apprehension and disgust he feels towards the vampire is entering as violent a metamorphosis as his own body - morphing into some sort of monstrous kinship. A longing, perhaps even yearning, for the only horrid constant in the shifting swill of Oakhurst’s accursed blood soaked lands.
He finds Scott’s demeaning seizing of his chin like he’s appraising cattle summoning drastically less fondness.
Avid tries to shy away, to turn his face streaked with pale blush flustering at Scott’s continued audacity from the interrogatory gaze that can’t conceive him as anything higher than cattle, but Scott never lets him. Forcing Avid to stand there basking in the unknowability of the sanguine moons of his eyes, Scott watches Avid shiver with the same fear he finds himself growing sickly fond of like a pox on his soul. Although it’s lesser now, something else is competing with Avid’s dread. Scott isn’t quite sure how he feels about that - not that he shows it, face as still and pallid as the corpse he is.
The tip of his tongue flicks at the eroded cliff edges of his fangs.
It was a process, a painful one… but it worked.
Unlike pulling them out. That was what he tried first.
Old wrought iron tongs he found in the doctor’s makeshift clinic, and a deep clawing loathing for his new dark mantle, had him making off with them as Leg was sleeping and disappearing towards one of the old crypts - if Avid from a week ago could see him now he would cast aspersions of vampirism and monstrosity on him. He would be right of course, but… how quickly the night changes.
“You can do this… you can do this, just like the dentist, yeah, just a quick easy thing, probably won’t even hurt that much,” Avid rambles, voice as steady and consistent as the virgin performance of an ill prepared orchestra. The skull across from him in the dug out of the crypt is a skull in a crypt - unmoving and animated, half crumbled with the degradation of age. But it totally agrees with him, won’t be bad.
Avid’s shoulders slump with an exhale, hand shaking like he’s holding that stake all over again. He needs to do this… for himself, for Drift, and for everyone in Oakhurst.
The metal is cold against his fang, rough drag and Avid clamps it before pulling.
The rush of pain is instantly screaming through him like hunting dogs. Avid keels over, fists tight on the handle and he keeps pulling even as his eyes flood bleary. He keeps pulling, even as his body screams at him, even as his jaw tries to clamp down on instinct, and even as the taste of metal drips and stains itself in his mouth, leaving him gagging and salivating in revulsion at the gruesome portent.
He can feel the first stretch of gum snap away from the tooth like a stretch of fabric pulled too tight and instantly he feels like turning the non-existent contents of his empty stomach into the crypt. The drizzle of blood that starts spilling, a portent of the storm of sanguine he will end with once the horridly necessary business is done,
The roots, the nerves of the fangs, reach into his gums like a thousand clawing hands spilling over one another desperate for purchase, to remain, fighting the separation Avid is forcing upon them.
His hatred for the vampires pushes him onwards through the barbs and thorns. Hatred of them - of himself now - crawling under his skin and puppeting his muscles to push him onwards even as every faculty of his body screams at him.
With a whining cry, Avid scream echo out of the crypt and mix into the miring anguish of Oakhurst. The fang is torn from his mouth in a spray of sanguine. The tongs and fang clatter to the floor as Avid lurches forward in a fitful sobs, gargled screams spilling just as readily as the rush of his red from his mouth that soaks into the stone like he’s gutting a pig inside his mouth.
The pain constricts and binds in bands around his consciousness, jagged and gnarled, thorns sprouting through every vessel and artistry until he feels like he’s being bled dry in his own body. His mouth is sticky, heavy, with blood, another wave rushing out of the flesh crater as he heaves.
Teary eyed, barely able to see, Avid reaches for the tongs and hunched over in blinding agony he wails as the second fang is torn from his jaw.
Pain blinding him, Avid crashes into the sanguine spill and darkness takes him.
Somehow, he awakens in his bed. The suddenness of human comforts disorientate his flittering senses as he fights his way out of bed, managing half a rise before the rush of agony cuts through the blooming numbness like a torch in the dark. A shape of black, white, and red disappears out of the window in a fluttering blur.
By morning, Avid’s fangs have regrown and the pain lingers like smouldering ashes…
For a moment he debates trying again, in case his only road to salvation lay at the end of one paved with miles of pulled fangs, but another strikes him.
The following night, he files down his fangs.
The logic behind his latest method is that the nerves and roots will not be removed so his new horrid form won’t feel the need to sprout replacements while filing them blunt enough that he poses no threat to his friends.
Filling is a slow dragging of the blade as opposed to being violently shanked and disembowelled. The coarse file makes his bones shiver, a repugnant squirm ripple through his body at the horrid sensation shaving away the shame one grating push and pull at a time.
Avid weakly sobs as a dusting of waxy enamel falls and sticks to his mouth, like heavy snowfall blanketing and suffocating the land. Clammy on his tongue, with each sawing motion of the file, Avid chokes and shudders on the unpleasantly flecks filling his mouth.
The pain isn’t as murderous as the impromptu dental work he conducts the night prior, the nerves aren’t being torn bloody from his body, but it’s gruellingly horrid. There’s no agonising reprieve as there was when fang was pulled root and stem, just a mounting thumping pain as he shaves away at the fang.
Slowly, very slowly, the ends become blunter and blunter and Avid chokes wails,weak and broken, with each rough drag.
By the time the sun is rising, Avid burns with exhaustion, willing the file to finish the job before he collapses.
When he awakens, his fangs remain blunted and stubbed. Avid is happy, right?
That’s the feeling he is feeling, should be feeling - that uncomfortable clawing at his chest is just the dregs and echoes of the pain, surely.
Cupping his face, claw tugging his upper lip to the side like a stage curtain, Scott’s eyes remain on his fangs. Stumpy trees for teeth, their ends shaved away till they look like broken knife blades or adult teeth shoved into the mouth of a child. Scott grimaces, his pitying disgust barely contained, “It’s weird, they look weird.”
“Hey now! They-” Avid squeaks defiantly, but Scott’s claw hikes up his lip and keeps hitching his mouth open enough that he can only form a gargle or whine.
“They look weird,” Scott states definitively. “You know there are easier ways to hide them, what am I saying, of course you don’t,” Scott drones, a mote of fondness threatening to tug at the corner of his foul maw as the tip a claw presses into his mouth and scrapes against the tooth.
“It works…” Avid mumbles as soon as Scott’s thumb drops from his lip enough that he is granted the ostentatious gift of talking.
“Yeah but it’s ugly, and you can do better than ugly now you’re one of us,” something dangerously soft colours the night as Scott speaks those words into existence.
Avid wants to deny it, wants to pull a stake on Scott and watch surprise flash across his handsome pallid face as his dark life comes to an end, that he is not one of them. Wants to deny the way Scott looking at him makes me feel -his eyes are low and wide, dark with appreciation like he’s looking at an old family pet - the dark ambitions and fanciful feelings it summons, but he can’t.
Pyro was right. Vampirism really brings out the darkest of the soul. It’s the only reason he finds himself leaning into Scott’s deathly touch, listening to him talk elegantly about all the ways Vampires have evolved to blend in. If nothing else, it will be good information for the hunt, but it offers Avid a rare comfort not often afforded in Oakhurst.