Legendary Vampire in the Apocalypse

Basil moved between the sections without ever needing to check where he was going.

He knew how many people were sleeping in each one and who had already had water, all of it kept in the small notebook in his hand.

A woman near the west windows took her bottle without looking at him. The man beside her glanced up, and his eyes stayed on Dion for a few seconds longer before he gave a faint nod.

An older man two partitions down was sitting up with his head in his hands. Basil crouched beside him.

"Still bad?"

"Ah... it comes and goes. The damn thing gets worse when I lie down." The man chuckled wryly, shaking his head.

"You’re not drinking enough. Finish this before you sleep, all of it, and if it’s still there in the morning come find me."

The man nodded and took the two bottles of water, and Basil put a hand on his shoulder briefly before standing.

Further along, a younger woman was curled on her side beneath a blanket, coughing quietly in her sleep.

Basil paused, pressed the back of his hand to her forehead for a moment. Then he pulled the blanket higher over her shoulder and kept walking.

"Mild fever," he said to Dion, low enough not to carry. "She’s had it since yesterday. Probably just a cold, but I’m keeping an eye on it."

A teenager was sitting against a filing cabinet with his knees pulled up, and he nodded at Dion, who had been very oddly silent this whole time, as they passed.

He looked to be eighteen, perhaps nineteen, with black hair that had grown out, hanging messily toward his eyes.

And those eyes... they were of a dark purple colour, heavy-lidded with exhaustion, as though he had already been behind on his sleep long before the world had forced everyone to be.

Between the hair, the eyes, and the way he sat slouched down against the cabinet, there was something of a delinquent air hanging about him.

"Hey... excuse me, you’re the one who killed the gnoll, right?"

And then it all fell apart the moment he opened his mouth, because no delinquent alive in the apocalypse would lead with an ’excuse me’. Or at least, none that he knew about.

"One of them," Dion was suddenly snapped out of the daze that he had forced himself into to distract himself, and said. "Anton and Madeline dealt with the other one."

"What was it like?" The boy’s hands had tightened around his knees, and his eyes were a little wide and glittering, Dion even silently wondering whether they young guy was fascinated... or from the way that his heart was racing, scared. "I mean... fighting one. I’ve only ever seen them from the windows."

For a few moments, he didn’t say anything. Honestly, he hardly at all had any good experiences fighting the damn things. The first time, he should have died... the second time he was in a very odd, instinctual state, and the third... he suffered to kill it, and nearly drank the blood of a dying human.

Internally, his expression had gone wry.

’None are any sort of dazzling story to tell. And the one I just killed was a sneak attack...’

"They stink, they’re ugly," Dion said, and the boy, as well as Basil’s expressions loosened in surprise at what he had said. But they were suddenly and swiftly sobered as his voice fell, "And they’re smart, sadistic bastards. Their first instinct is to toy with everyone they meet, and their ridiculous strength makes it that much easier for them to do it. So, the windows are the correct distance to be seeing them from."

The boy very slowly nodded, his jaw working as if he were chewing on something he wanted to say.

His eyes fell to the ground, for several moments, then he looked back up at Dion, finally spitting it out:

"I keep waiting for mine. You know... the awakening. Everyone, all you guys who has one, can actually do something to fight back against them, and the rest of us are just... here. It’s so... frustrating."

Basil then suddenly brought himself forward, handing him a water bottle.

"Being here is doing something."

The boy took it, but his eyes went back to Dion, waiting for him to say something, anything at all.

"Then do what you can, instead of thinking about what you can’t. Like, you could be asking if you could help collect water next time, you get what I mean? Thinking so much about what you can’t do will blind you from seeing what you can."

The boy stared at him for a few seconds, blinking, as if the thought had never once presented itself to him as something that was allowed to be his.

"...I could do that?" Then he coughed slightly at the way his own voice had come out, correcting himself. "I mean... they’d let me?"

"You’d be asking Basil," Dion said, gesturing faintly to the man beside him. "And conveniently, he’s right here. It saves you the waiting."

The boy’s eyes swung over to Basil, who had been watching all of this with his arms loosely crossed and something unreadable pulling at the corner of his mouth.

"The taps upstairs are broken," Basil said. "So until they aren’t, everything comes up from the ninth floor on someone’s hands. If you’re serious, come find me after you’ve slept. Actually slept."

"I... yeah. Yes." The boy sat up a little straighter against the filing cabinet, and it was odd how that movement alone seemed to take a few years of tiredness off of him. "I’ll find you."

"Then drink that and lie down. You’re of no use half-dead."

The boy ducked his head at that in a nod, and his hands turned the water bottle over once, holding it a little differently than he had been before... and from what Dion could hear, his heart beating a little differently as well...

’I should figure out how to more accurately tell emotional states from this if its possible...’ He thought to himself when he couldn’t properly put into words what he was feeling from the boy.

They left him there and moved on through the last few sections.

"You’re better at that than you seem," Basil said after a while, his voice low. "First Madeline, now him."

"Am I? All I did was dump a little bit of my work onto him."

"Mm." Basil handed a bottle over a partition to a waiting pair of hands. "Most people don’t do the work skimping the way you just did."

Dion didn’t respond to that.

Though behind them, past the low murmur of the floor, his ears caught how the boy’s heartbeat, which had been racing through their entire conversation, had finally begun settling into something slow, and steady.

They finished the round near the far end of the floor, where the partitions thinned out, and the windows ran from the floor to the ceiling.

The city sat dark beyond the glass, and the few fires still burning out there had dimmed since Dion had last looked over it all from the roof.

Basil tucked the notebook into his back pocket and stood beside Dion for a moment, both of them looking out.

"By the way," Basil said. "How’s Ephraim doing? It’s been a while since I last saw him."