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Chapter Text

The devil is easy to cheat.

And it had been. Olrox had cheated the devil not once. Not twice. But three times. And he would keep on fucking counting until the world would end in a blast of smoke and fire. Or maybe until he would be so utterly bored with everything that he would step into the sun. He snorted. That was not going to happen any time soon, though, despite his maudlin mood. Which. Truly. Wasn’t that maudlin actually. He was in the middle of the Black Sea, on a very luxurious yacht that belonged to his... Mizrak. His lips twitched. Almost two hundred and fifty fucking years later and all of those spent in a monogamous on again, off again relationship with Mizrak, the man was still unsure about whether they should call themselves boyfriends or not.

Olrox had rolled his eyes so many times over the centuries that he’d known and loved Mizrak. So many times. He was old. Half a millenia old. Older than the son of Dracula. Older than that woman who had thought herself a goddess and that had branded him like cattle. He had not flinched back then, though he had wanted to rip her entrails out of her body and braid them into his hair. Erzsebet. And Drolta had made her, that woman, into the vessel for Sekhmet. Olrox’s lips peeled off his fangs in disgust.

„You’re thinking too hard again.”, Mizrak whispered, voice low and thick with arousal. Olrox let his snarl turn into a smile, turning from facing the deep, dark water of the Black Sea to looking at his lover. He was half a millenia old. He wasn’t anyone’s boyfriend. He would like to be Mizrak’s husband, sure, but he’d settle for lover. Beloved. Partner. Not boyfriend. Mizrak’s boyfriend he would not be. Not that they had had any others over the past so many hundreds of years, but alas. Arms wrapped around his waist as he was backed into the hull of the yacht, the moon high and almost full. His neon green eyes were gorgeous like that, he knew. Mizrak was enthralled with him. And yet. „Mon coeur. Where are your thoughts wandering off to? Are you not entertained?”

„By socialites who had not been born at the turn of the century? Surely, Miz, you’re not serious.”, Olrox lifted an eyebrow at his lover’s amused look. Of course that Mizrak had not thought for a single moment that he would be interested in any of the twenty or so extremely rich and very young pretty things that were partying the night away two decks down from where he had been. Alone. But not anymore. His lover was there with him and he knew for a fact that Mizrak had touched none of the youngsters. Not even to feed. Not yet. Or not at all. The yacht and the parties were not for feeding. His fingers found Miz’s jaw. He traced it calmly, leaning into the scent of the man he loved. Who loved him back. He knew that. He was convinced of that. It would surely be fucking nice to hear it from Mizrak’s mouth once in a blue moon. Or at all, frankly. Religious fucking guilt was a thing, though, and Mizrak had not managed to escape it yet, more than two centuries after Olrox had turned him. On the brink of death, Mizrak had not wanted to meet the god that he’d dedicated his entire life to. On the brink of death, Mizrak had not believed that his god would welcome him into that loudly touted heaven and had not wanted to try his chance with the devil either. And Olrox had gotten to keep the warrior monk who had slipped into his heart and into his bed so fucking easily. Like he belonged there. Because Mizrak did. „One of them called me exotic. Thought it was a compliment too. Didn’t like it when I didn’t appreciate it. Last I checked, he was placing bets with his buddies about where I’m from. I should have entered the pool myself with how they weren’t even on the correct continent.”

„Well, then they will surely be too drunk to find their bed tonight. Might accidentally end up at the bottom of the Black Sea. Imagine that.”, his turk muttered, eyes flashing and hands tangling in Olrox’s long, sleek pitch black hair. Adorned. He’d braided his hair intricately for the evening. One thicker braid had caught most of his hair, coming down from the top of his head and following his spine to his waist, with a couple thinner braids decorated with white beads flowing elegantly from his temples and going to his chest and even lower. The rest of his hair was loose. Olrox looked spectacular and he fucking knew it. Mizrak had never been immune to him, not even when firmly entranced in his monachal vows. Well. Olrox wanted to snort. Those had been easy enough to break. Mizrak had not believed in the Catholic Church that much as an institution, but more as in a mission from his god. Lips found his forehead as Mizrak’s fangs caught the light of moon. Gorgeous. „Where did the beyzade think you’re from? Hit me with the most outrageous option.”

„Syria. Middle East. Most of them bet on Palestine, actually. One of them actually said Turkyie while looking Zayn in the eyes. I swear I saw the Turk consider it for a moment.”, he snorted and brought Mizrak closer to him with one single flash of his tongue passing over his lower lip. Oh yes. His man. His forever. Their bodies fit together seamlessly. As they had always, even back then when Mizrak had been out of his head with everything from guilt to lust to longing to a love that the turk had yet to admit to. Olrox was patient. And old. His long, bejewelled fingers traced the lapels of Mizrak’s opened shirt. Cotton. The finest kind, of course, but also the only option for the oppresive heat that surrounded them. Olrox was from the fucking mountains. He hated the heat. Global fucking warming hadn’t been a thing when he’d been born. But then neither had the massacre of his people and he’d lived to see that too. „We really should just rob them blind and be on our merry way. They’re not worth the money we put into this party, Miz.”

„They’re not, no. But we have a deal that we need to honour and Alucard isn’t someone I would like to cross. Besides, the red haired heiress holding court right below us here? She’s the Belmont that we need to help escape.”, Mizrak shrugged at Olrox’s hiss and darkening expression, leaning in and kissing him deeply.

Their fangs sank into each other’s tongues and lower lips for a moment before Olrox arched his back and swept Mizrak’s feet from underneath him, the turk dropping to the hard, metal grate floor of the yacht with a loud ooomph and a curse. In French. He grinned and tsked, his vibrant green eyes locked with his lover’s almost amber ones. Deep brown, but luminous, Mizrak’s eyes were all that Olrox loved in the world. Well. Almost all. He loved himself, of course. He loved Mizrak in general and was particularly attached to that exceptional cock who was hardening underneath his ass, their thin linen pants no match for how their bodies reacted to each other. And how they had always reacted to one another. Hard. Fast. Explosive.

„Tell me again why have I gone from killing Belmonts to saving Belmonts from their own sad and stupid choices? And why are we, as a species, helping vampire hunting royalty survive?”, Olrox asked, dramatically dropping to blanket his lover’s body as he sifted through the voices down below, trying to identify the Belmont heiress. Though that was only in blood, of course. There was nothing left of the fortune of the most famous and most capable family of monster hunters in the history of that job position. For various reasons, of course. For one, hunting monsters wasn’t very lucrative when one couldn’t tell the monsters from the ones that made them. For another, most supernatural creatures were not malicious or trying to take over the fucking world in any way. Dracula aside. And Carmilla. And the Hungarian who’d fashioned herself into an Egyptian goddess. Typical colonialism pride. He scoffed. He still didn’t know what had been going through Drolta’s mind when she’d chosen an European for her African goddess. „Miz. I don’t want to be here. Not tonight. I. Just.”

„I know what date is today and I promise you that once this boat sinks and we take Giselle with us to Alucard, we won’t be bothered for a month. We’ll lock ourself up in your cottage in the Appalachians and, for once, we won’t be the scariest things out in the night. But until then...”, Mizrak nuzzled his high cheekbone and tugged on his braids gently, tangling one of them around his fingers, eyes wide with the same kind of fascination that the younger man had always had for him. Olrox loved it.

Chapter Text

He was a god and he was one to be desired. And he’d fallen for a mortal. Twice. Twice in a fucking row. He had gotten to keep the second mortal, though, and no fucking Belmont and their fucking poor life choices would take Mizrak from him. One of his lovers killed by a self righteous Belmont was one too many. And Olrox thought he had shown so much fucking restraint in not killing Richter when he’d killed Julia. After all, an eye for an eye had been enough for him. Julia’s life for his lover that she had killed. Richter had promised Olrox to come off him for his mother’s death, but alas. Life had gone differently for the youngest of the Belmonts. Revolutionary France had been a ride for sure and then Belmont had been met with how people treated white men who married black women and then the turn of the century had brought forth even more of the horrors of slavery. And Olrox had spent fifty or so of those years trying to both keep Mizrak alive and to not let his newly turned lover kill anyone who didn’t deserve it. The Nahuatl didn’t have that much of a conscience, but Mizrak did and ending the life of an innocent might have been the thing that made the younger man finally have the courage to meet his fucking god. Olrox would have loved to be Mizrak’s god, quite honestly. But maybe not. He much preferred what he currently was and what he had always been to Miz. His lover.

„Until then, I’m here because you want to disappear her from a busy, partying until dawn boat in the middle of the Black Sea. Without a trace. I’m here because the last of the Belmonts needs to be declared dead and lose a tail. Who’s tailing her, Miz? Neither you, nor Alucard feel like you want me to know. And that’s not very nice. I would like to know who I’m supposed to be ferrying off to Adrian’s castle. And why. Don’t you dare answer the who with her name or I will bite your ear off. And possibly hers.”, he smiled softly, voice calm and low and somehow switching to his native tongue in the middle of all of that. He did like threatening people in Nahuatl and it had the distinct advantage of Miz actually understanding and speaking it back to him. Olrox had fallen harder and deeper than ever when Mizrak had asked him for lessons in his native language and had offered... Nothing much in return, truthfully. Olrox had already spoken fluent French by then. But Mizrak had wanted to learn Nahuatl and Olrox had loved teaching it to the turk. The rewards for being a good student had been delicious to say the least.

„She’s bartered her name for the money to save her family ancestral home back in France. And for access to a person with ties to some really shitty trafficking rings. Now, she needs out. She’s gotten her information, I assume. Alucard has tried to pull her out before too, but she refused. So we’re going to make everyone think she’s dead and gone. And then we’re going to park this boat and go fuck the days away. Hunt the nights away.”, his lover whispered in his ear, lips finding his after a few more moments. Mizrak was making a lot of sense. Still. Olrox resented having to save a Belmont. But if she was on some humanitarian rescue mission, then that was fine. Still. She better not try and kill him like all of her ancestor had done before her. It had been funny once. Two hundred and fifty fucking years later, it was just annoying.

„And yet, that doesn’t explain the party, Miz. Or why the Belmonts are suddenly saving humans from humans and not humans from the creatures of the night or whatever their family motto was? Something about helping the helpless or whatever. Of which, let me tell you, they didn’t do much when the helpless weren’t human or when the oppresed were not of the right... Flavour for them.”, Olrox pushed back against Mizrak’s hard chest, straddling his lover and arching his throat just so to present himself exactly how he wanted. And how the turk liked him. Dangerous. Ethereal. His otherworldly green eyes coupled with the glow that the moon gave his skin and with the way the wind lifted his hair made Olrox more than what anyone with even a sliver of sexual desire in their bodies could resist. And Miz had always wanted him so fucking much, from the very first time they had tangled together in that cemetery back in France. A monk. Olrox would have laughed at the idea of a monk sleeping with a vampire or of a vampire having dirty, fast and mind blowing sex with a religious figure in the modern, atheist world that was arising all over Europe, but alas. It had happened. And it would happen soon enough once more, right fucking there. On the deck of the yacht. „You want me to uphold the promise you made Adrian in our name? Fine. I will. But I expect my payment for my ferrying services beforehand.”

„Payment? You’re asking me for payment? For keeping our promise to your friend, former occasional lover and technical Lord of our kind? Don’t even try it for size, Olrox, you know he is the only one that could take on that mantle. You, my heart, would eat us all alive.”, Mizrak let his hands travel up from Olrox’s hips, towards his waist and then there were fingers skirting his nipples and he moaned, back taut and fingers curling around the turk’s wrists.

Olrox was met with a raised eyebrow and a tilted, interested smile. They had role played a few times in their two and a half centuries together, but it wasn’t one of Olrox’s favourite things to do with Mizrak. No. Guard and prisoner or teacher and student or sex worker and customer were all fine and dandy scenarios, but the Nahuatl was mostly fond of being himself with Mizrak. And it worked very well for them. So he wasn’t looking for the kind of payment that that raised eyebrow implied, though he would never say no to Miz. He had, quite literally, never said no to the turk. He should have, at times, back when Mizrak had been so very angry with him for his new pointy teeth and aversion to sunlight, but. Alas. He had not. And sex with Mizrak had always been soul deep, even when it had been tinged with hate. Perhaps especially then.

„Nothing naughty like that, no. You know what I want. If she can vow it and seal it with a drop of her Belmont blood, then I will ferry her pretentious and pompous ass to the ends of the Universe and back. If she can’t or won’t, then... She can swim. The shore is that way. Somewhere.”, he grinned sharply, amused as Mizrak burst into a quick giggle and then into a clear laugh when the ridiculousness of the situation set in for the turk as well. „We can even point her in the correct direction. Hell, I’ll throw in a life jacket too. But her leaving this boat via the Olrox express is tied to what I’ve always wanted from the Belmonts.”

„A way to bring Delsin back.”, the younger man swallowed hard and let his eyes slip to the side as always when bringing up Olrox’s former lover. The one that Julia Belmont had killed almost a decade before Mizrak and Olrox had met. Olrox smiled. Mizrak might not have ever told the older vampire that he was a jealous and possessive soul that liked to share Olrox with exactly no one, but actions spoke so much louder than words at times. And Mizrak had never denied Olrox his desire to find a way to get Delsin’s soul back to the land of the living, no. Mizrak would never do something of that sort. Absolutely not. Mizrak understood why Olrox needed to do that. But that didn’t mean that he liked it. As always, Miz shook the disquiet off after a moment and smiled widely at him, lifting up on his palms to kiss the middle of Olrox’s chest and then his lips. An inhale. An exhale. A nuzzle to his braids and the beads in his hair. Mizrak was still hiding from Olrox’s eyes when he spoke again. „I don’t think she’s in any kind of mind to make such a deal with you, my darling. But I think... I think that Adrian might be desperate enough this time to promise you access to his library and to his own knowledge of the arcane. Not to the Belmont hold, no. But maybe to his own.”

„Is he? The immortal Alucard, desperate for little old Olrox to ferry his latest Belmont to shore?”, Olrox tilted his head to the side and caught Mizrak’s chin in his hand, pressing his thumb between the turk’s lips. His lover’s teeth bit down onto the fleshy part of his finger as he allowed flames to lick out of his eyes and frame his pupils, throwing sharp shades down to his cheekbones and putting his fangs front and fucking center. Mizrak was breathing heavily, his cock hard and right fucking there, where Olrox wanted it. Underneath him. Inside of him. Soon enough. „You know something that you’re not telling me about this latest iteration of a Belmont’s lack of common fucking sense. What is it? Don’t be skimpy with the details. Tell me why would Adrian fucking Țepeș, the fucking heir of Vlad himself, offer moi access to his library and to his knowledge for this one twenty something. And don’t say love. That’s tacky. Adrian hasn’t been in love with a Belmont in at least four hundred years.”

Mizrak was in the process of opening his lovely mouth to actually answer Olrox or so he hoped when a loud and obnoxiously posh You fucking bitch! reverberated throughout the whole of the two upper floors of the yacht, followed closely by the clear and distinct sound of someone getting hit. Slapped, more precisely. And there was a cry. A female cry. A struggle. The first voice continued to berate the woman. The struggle continued. Olrox’s head tilted to the side. Not to listen in better, his hearing worked perfectly well from all positions, but to indicate to a startled Mizrak that they should intervene. Or to ask if they should intervene. The older man wasn’t one to consider that sucking dry an abuser would save the world, but it could change one person’s entire life and Olrox enjoyed that thought. It also brought worshippers to his altar, even if they didn’t know that he was a god and all. It didn’t matter. Worshippers were worshippers and good deeds were good deeds, no matter the motivation. Pure intentions were for the hero types, like Adrian.

„Yeah, fuck. Go.”, Mizrak nodded, never letting go of Olrox as the older man took them from one side of the yacht to the other, two floors down and to the left, in a puff of white smoke. The turk coughed. Sensitive. Mizrak had spent the first few decades of being transported by Olrox from side to side via his teleportation skills by throwing up or plain fainting at the destination. And then that had been followed by the coughing fits. Currently, they were on the clearing throat stage of getting used to Olrox and his abilities. Two hundred and fifty years. „Fucking hell and the Sainted Mary, mother of God.”

Olrox’s head turned towards where his lover was looking. Mizrak didn’t usually invoke the very general name of his Christian god unless something dire was going on. His precious former monk still thought like an eighteenth century religious figure at times and thought it sacrilegious to invoke the name of Yahweh in vain, whatever that was. But when Miz did use it, Olrox knew that there would be trouble hitting the two of them very fucking soon. And then he saw it. And burst out laughing, circling the dead rich kid who had hit a young woman who he assumed was the spoiled brat’s girlfriend. But that wasn’t Olrox’s problem. Not in a thousand lifetimes.

„You’re the Belmont girl. And you’re a vampire.”, the oldest of the three immortals standing there, on deck five of a yacht called Imortella because Mizrak has a sense of humour, said, his long and perfectly manicured nails pointing towards the other girl there. Not the cowering, half dressed one on the floor, still covered in the blood and guts of her potential rapist and definitely abuser. No. Not that one. The one whose eyes flashed in the relative darkness of the open sea and who had blood dripping down her chin. Her claws were glistening too. The remains of the twenty something on the floor were impressively carved up for how little time it had taken Olrox and Mizrak to get there. The Belmont had done so much damage in between one breath and the next and she was shaking. Olrox lifted an eyebrow. „Well? Fix your shit then. Take care of the girl and come find us up top. I’m suddenly very invested in your story. Come tell me all about your life, little one.”

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„I-i... I don’t know how. Mizrak. You said you’d help me.”, the Belmont whispered, pupils contracting and enlarging at an alarming rate that Olrox could only put on the fact that she was new. A baby vampire. Loose. In a closed environment. With twenty hot blooded and very drunk and high humans. Well. Nineteen. She had already eaten one. Olrox was definitely entertained then. And Mizrak had been keeping that jewel of a piece of information all to himself for who knows how long. That would have to be discussed at a later date.

„Yes. Yes, of course. My heart, would you...”, the Turk gestured from Olrox to the young woman on the floor, who was going into shock and was starting to thrash and whimper. Understandable. Modern humans were very ill suited to be faced with their insides at a moment’s notice. He thought about dropping to his haunches to face the bloodied girl, but decided against it. He liked the pants he was wearing. They were Egyptian made and they were threaded with gold. He leaned in and lifted the young woman by her throat, locking his green eyes to her muddy brown ones. The Belmont snarled. Olrox smiled. And, of course, as always, Mizrak sighed. „Or, seriously. Did you have to?”

„Oh, everyone keep their britches on, sweethearts. Belmont girl, what’s your name? Never mind, I don’t care right now. Come. Learn. I’m feeling generous right now.”, Olrox’s lips peeled from his descending fangs, the young woman who was starting to smell sour, of fear and adrenaline and of urine and of snot finally realising that she had really not been saved at all. Maybe. Perhaps in another lifetime, he would have bled her dry to leave no witnesses behind. Or just for fun. But alas, he wasn’t that person anymore. He felt the youngest vampire of their little improvised coven approach him carefully, preferring to keep Mizrak between them. As a buffer. It wasn’t the worst idea that the Belmont had had all night. No, that one was currently staining Olrox’s shoes. Ugh. „You have to look the humans in the eyes. Up close is better at first. It will work from afar later on too. The older you are, the more powerful you get. Naturally. Not with any sort of add ons. Anyway. You look them in the eyes and you let your senses overwhelm theirs. Let your mind overtake theirs. Just reach out. Your abilities are far greater than just sucking blood and hiding from the sun. You couldn’t have been turned that long ago, not with how out of control you are. You’ll know when you have them. Like a fish on a hook. There. I have her. Her mind is mine now. Hello, sugarplum. We’re not sorry for this idiot here. Well. We might be sorry. Belmont, I fear that you’ve fucked up. This was role-playing. Ooooops.”

Mizrak sighed, looking at the Belmont girl with a bit of a put upon look on his handsome face. The young woman that Olrox had in his grasp started to come back to her senses and was trying to scream. Or hit him. With her bloody hands and feet. On his white, linen pants and there they went. He wasn’t pleased with that. Once more, a Belmont was to blame for his wardrobe being decimated. Fucking Belmonts. Ever since he’d first been introduced to Adrian, he had had to deal with their lot and they always came with whining, complaining and zero common sense. Sure, he’d never gotten to meet the original Belmont that Adrian had had a massive crush on, but he couldn’t imagine that that man had been better at fucking life than the twenty something that was currently undergoing a quarter life crisis right in front of his eyes. Olrox was getting bored again.

„Silence, little girl. Belmont, quiet as well. The grown ups are talking now.”, he offered, his lips still stretched out in a smile. Mizrak leaned against the hull of the yacht and studied the situation thoroughly. There was only one way for the whole shtick to end in their favour, but his principled loved would not find it appealing at all. Olrox sighed. „You know we have no other option. Baby Belmont here fucked it up for everyone. Including these lover birds here. Well. One living lover bird? She did try to save you, if it’s any consolation... Ina? Yes. Ina. Sadly, all that this idiot here managed to do was kill your boyfriend and you at the same time. We can’t let you live, Ina. There is no world in which any amount of compulsion will make you forget that you came here with a boyfriend that you felt warm and fuzzy about and then you mysteriously lost him. So. You have to die.”

„No. You’re not serious. You’re him, aren’t you? The Dragon. The American. The green eyed fucking monster that my family keeps writing about and that we are sworn to kill. Mizrak, why is he here? Why is he talking about... You know. Me like that. Who are you?”, the Belmont almost screeched and Olrox burst out in a giggle, snapping Ina’s throat with a single flex of his fingers and throwing her on the yacht deck with a flourish before the last technically living member of the greatest monster hunting clan in the history of the world threw herself at him. Without much warning, but. Honestly. Baby Belmont was clumsy. And young. And Olrox had been fighting her kind of centuries and he had met Julia Belmont, the one that had taken his lover from him. He had met Richter Belmont, the one that had defeated the Vampire Messiah herself. He had met Nitah Belmont, who had been half witch, half whatever mix of Speaker and magically enhanced human her father, Richter, had been. He had met August, Christina, Elisabeta and hadn’t that been a throwback name and he had met so many more of the Belmont. Richter had had ten children. They had all tried to kill Olrox and they had all failed. The little vampireling wouldn’t be the one to do it. She jumped at him. He sidestepped. Mizrak was still sighing. „You. You killed her. You just killed her. I. No. You just killed her. You’re a monster. You’re. No.”

„Well, now. That’s just hurtful. Words matter, you know.”, Olrox mocked, disappearing in one puff of smoke, his green eyes the only thing remaining as the Belmont roared once more and skidded on the blood that was staring to soak down onto the other decks. Unfortunate that. He would hate to have to kill so many humans at once. Maybe. He could feed himself and his lover for a good few months with the twenty... Okay, eighteen humans remaining on board. If he simply paced himself and helped Miz drink responsibly and all that, they could totally keep them all stashed somewhere. Olrox sighed. He couldn’t do that anymore, not in this modern, hyperconnected world. Vampires weren’t a dying breed, but they were a hiding one for sure. And she was still hitting at the empty air. „Yes, yes, coward, animal, beast from hell, I’ve heard it all when I was human too. When your kind came to my land and called it the Americas. At least you got the continent right, if not the exact spot. You get a lollipop for that once you exhaust yourself.”

„Giselle, stop. This is pointless. You killed the boy, Olrox is right to have killed the girl. We need to dispose of their bodies and deal with the rest of the people here. And with the blood. Fucking hell. This evening was supposed to be easy.”, Mizrak complained quietly, pulling a laugh out of Olrox that only served to enrage Giselle even more. He locked eyes with his lover, who shook his head. Olrox pouted. He never got to have any fun. He couldn’t kill the Belmont. Adrian had asked them not to. Well. Technically. Adrian had asked them to deliver the Belmont to him. The older man turned his head to the side, which meant that the only visible and corporeal part of him, his eyes, tilted too as he tracked Giselle’s increasingly frantic moves. Mizrak ruined his fun once more. „Non, mon coeur. He said alive. Don’t even think about it.”

„Fine. But I’m knocking her out. She’s making me dizzy and she’s getting blood drunk. Look at her eyes.”, he shrugged, catching Giselle as she passed through his smoke once more and simply pressing his mind down onto hers until she stopped struggling. An inhale. A nod from his lover. And then he passed the out of it Belmont to the turk as he grabbed the two dead bodies from the yacht floor and smoked them out of there. To the water. Underneath the water. Oh, he hated getting wet like that, without prior notice. His hair was getting wet too and it was long and hard to dry and he would need some masks after all the salt in the water and in the air. He was getting annoyed on top of everything else. He exhaled and followed Mizrak’s scent to where the younger man had taken Giselle. And tied her to a chair with some iron chains. At least his lover had taken his concerns seriously about her upcoming bloodlust. Fucking hell was right. They didn’t need the pain the ass that a young and apparently masterless vampire would bring to the world if uncontrolled. And untrained. „I’m not taking charge of her. At all. Is that why Adrian wants her brought to him? Because she’s a vampire? Where’s her sire? Who turned a fucking Belmont? Mizrak.”

„I think we should just bring her to Adrian and move on. We owe him. He wants her delivered to him. We can do that and then we just forget about her.”, Mizrak sighed, running his hand through his short hair, the salt and pepper look of it still so fucking attractive to Olrox. The turk still was and would always be his fucking weakness. He loved Mizrak. He’d taken on his own personal devil for Mizrak and he’d snatched the younger man from Old Man Coyote’s claws, blood on his fangs and darkness in his chest. Which meant, when speaking about practical things and all that crap that Olrox hated because it gave him heartburn, that Mizrak got away with literal fucking murder. Or, better put, Olrox allowed that and, sometimes, the fact that he had not established any sort of Sire to turned vampire hierarchy with his lover came back to bite him in the fucking ass. Like right then. „Olrox, come on. You know this just goes away the moment we take her to Adrian. It’s just.”

„No. I will literally steal the fucking sun for you and replace it with the moon and you know I can do it, Mizrak. But dealing with a recently turned Belmont that I don’t know anything about and whose purpose I don’t fucking understand in the grand scheme of things... That’s dangerous to you. And to me. To us. Her ancestors tried to kill me and then tried to kill us. Every single one of them, from Julia down.”, the older man hissed, walking towards Giselle and slapping her cheek hard enough to make her focus her glazed over eyes on his own. Hatred burned in them. Oh yes. She knew who he was beyond being the American. Which was technically correct, but it still made him want to scratch her eyes out. Probably just her Belmont blood, quite honestly. He grinned. She spit on him and tried to launch herself at him, falling on her face as the chains held her down firmly and whimpering. For Mizrak. Olrox frowned. „Giselle. Who’s your daddy? Or your mommy? Or your parent, better put? I’m an equal opportunity hater of the Belmont line. Includes all genders and sexualities. Also, who’s your Sire? Shh, child, hissing won’t do help you with anything much. You see, you Belmonts had a serious advantage over us, the monsters of the night, when you were human. You could wield holy weapons, you could walk in the sun, you could mate and make more of you that you could then indoctrinate to fight for you again and again. But now, Giselle dear, now you’ve forfeited that advantage and you’ve joined the ranks of us. So behave. Killing humans is frowned upon in the vampire community. Killing other vampires, though, it’s considered good sport. Now. Either one of you needs to start talking or you both will swim to the shore.”

„Dawn is coming. You wouldn’t let him die.”, Giselle gurgled, her fangs dropping so low that she pierced her lip with them. Clean through. Fucking hells, Olrox had not seen blood hunger brought to that level since the vampires that had been kept prisoners by the literal fucking Nazis at the beginning of the past century. There was something wrong with her. With how she had been made. With why she had been made.

„Him? No. But I would let him swim for a while. You, on the other hand, you I would have no qualms about letting burn. And trust me, we’re nowhere close to the deepest part of this body of water, G. You can’t sink to safety. What was that, like a thousand metres down? Where the light of the sun doesn’t get to when underwater. Can I call you G? Giselle is such a mouthful. Of course I can. I can do any single fucking thing I want with you, G, because you’re no longer human.”, Olrox shrugged, unconcerned about Mizrak’s affronted look or about his lover flipping him off. Lovely, as always, but Miz would get over it. Giselle was silent. Well, not silent. Hissing, spitting, twisting and turning and half bathed in blood already. He so disliked these young, reckless vampires. His Mizrak had not been like that. He sighed. And waited. Unlike Giselle, who was descending into a blood lust that would soon not be quenched by anything else but draining a few humans, Mizrak was much more present. And very pissed off at him. That was always fun. It led to spectacular sex. And to his lover telling him the fucking truth. Usually shouting it at him, but alas. Beggars could not be choosers.

And there it was. He had shoved the tip of his shoe into Giselle’s thigh when Mizrak grabbed his arm, pulling his up and away and into another room. Not that it made any difference after all, the Belmont’s hearing was fine and dandy and very much vampiric, so the metal door was solely there for a need for privacy that Mizrak had not managed to shake since his human life. Behind closed doors and everything. Olrox went easily. Patient. He was patient. And his lover was fucking hot as blazes, angry and annoyed and exasperated and probably... Yes. There it fucking was. Hard as nails. Mizrak might not have liked it when Olrox was being an absolute nightmare to others, but his cock sure did. The older man had a thousand and one theories about how Mizrak’s past as a warrior monk meant that the turk held himself and others to a higher moral standard than Olrox usually employed, mostly because he had lived through the utter destruction of his own people and so many other civilisations that a little rudeness there and everywhere was nothing in the face of fucking survival. And survival was guaranteed only by having and trading information, not pleasantries. Olrox was not, unfortunately, a diplomat. That much was perfectly obvious to both himself and everyone that had gotten to actually know him. He lied, he cheated, he stole and he killed. He was, essentially, a survivor.

Chapter Text

„I would very much like for my cock to also be mad at you. It would make my life so much fucking easier. So much. No. Don’t look at me like that. You were very much out of line out there.”, Mizrak muttered, hissing when Olrox’s hands found his waist and pulled him close. Hissing, sure, but not pushing him away and not even turning his head to the side as the older man leaned in for a kiss. Giving him a kiss too, his turk. Olrox smiled softly, tangling his fingers through Mizrak’s short hair and inhaling deeply when the younger man pulled away from their kiss and buried his nose in his neck, hugging him tightly. And mumbling. Mizrak often mumbled when what he said wasn’t what he wanted to say, but was the truth and nothing but the truth. „You can sense it too, no? That’s why you’re so antagonistic towards her. That there is something awfully wrong with her and with how she was made. She’s off somehow. She smells off. She behaves off. She shouldn’t be out of sight of her Sire. She shouldn’t even be able to move through a place so filled with humans without ripping them to shreds.”

„She’s a Belmont. That should answer all of your questions, dear heart. I hate her on principle. Don’t frown at me, there’s no point. I don’t need another sermon on how forgiveness is a divine act. I am divine already, I don’t need to act like it for a change.”, Olrox rolled his eyes and lifted Mizrak’s face from where it was hidden in his hair, the man meeting his gaze easily and readily. Miz loved him. He knew that. He wished to hear it from his lips, sure, but the lack of the words themselves didn’t make the reality of it less true. Olrox might have danced around the idea that Miz thought that not saying it was enough for his god to be a merciful one on his soul and be gentle in punishing the younger man for the audacity to desire a male. Monotheists seemed awfully stuck on that as a general rule. He hated it, but Mizrak was still working through it and was trying to compensate being exclusively attracted to men by being excessively... Nice. Nice and obliging, especially towards their friends and those that looked like they needed help. „Talk to me, Miz.”

„I dug her out of an underground tomb. A crypt. She said... Adrian said that she’d been infiltrating some human trafficking organisation in the Russian tundra, last he’d heard from her and last he’d checked. She hadn’t been answering his messages for weeks by the time he sent me to go find her. It took me about a week and some very dead enforcers to suss out where the fuck she could have even gone.”, the turk finally explained, dropping down to the unmade bed in the cabin. Not their own. A cabin on the yacht. Whoever was sleeping there had impeccable taste in shoes though. Those were some nice boots. Red soled. Ugh. Uncomfortable. He took that back. Olrox liked being both stylish and not want to kill someone after wearing any type of shoes for longer than ten minutes. He really needed to pay attention to what his lover was saying, but Miz was talking about a Belmont being rather lacking in common sense and that wasn’t anything new. And there was nothing catching his eye or his brain in what the younger man was saying, truly. Not yet, at least. „I drank a thug dry and I used his blood memories to find someone who knew where she was. By the time I got there, I had killed more than a dozen men and women and she had been buried and locked in that crypt for more than a month. She wasn’t even the slightest bit emanciated or anything. It was like she was fucking freshly made. Like she fed on the dead there or something, not on blood like the rest of us. But she ran out on me multiple times while I tried to wrangle her out of that fucking country and somewhere safe. Here, that is.”

„She ran out on you? A fledgling? Ran out on you. She got the upper hand in stealth or in strenght and ran out on you. To feed on the living, I suppose. That’s why you assumed that she is a vampire. That’s why I assumed it too. Because she looks like a vampire. She acts like one, at least next to the blood that she had spilled. She can’t be in the sun too? Yes. Of course.”, he mused, walking around the room from one side to the other. His stroll was over fast and in a hurry. The cabin was tiny and crowded. It was a yacht after all, though a high end one. Olrox grimaced and tugged on one of his looser braids, wrapping it around his finger as he tried to piece together the shit that the Belmonts had dragged them all into once more. Something nagged at the back of his mind. He just had to figure it out. „Why didn’t Adrian come get her himself... Never mind, he can’t actually take anyone but himself out of a place. With that thing that the does when he turns into bats. Very dramatic.”

„Says the guy who turns into a feathered snake. Yes. Very dramatic. Truly.”, Mizrak gestured between them and mimed taking a bow, which brought a smile to Olrox’s face, but also incited him to flipping off his lover. He so loved some parts of modern society and the fact that he could convey so much through such a lovely gesture was important to him personally. The turk snorted and continued speaking, unimpressed by his antics. Rude. „Yes, he was otherwise preoccupied too by trying to rescue that mythical creature from Brazil. I think he got it free too. He’s doing all sorts of conservation effort work. We should join him sometimes.”

„Do I get to kick out the people that took my people’s lands and lives and fucked up their destiny or do I just rescue magical creatures? Because I’m not down for one without the other, sadly. My sense of civic duty doesn’t stretch that far, quite honestly. And I don’t have any remaining guilt about anything much, like Adrian does.”, Olrox shrugged and patted Mizrak’s cheek when the turk frowned, sighing loudly as if he was the ridiculous one. Of course he wasn’t. Of course he was right about wanting his people to have their ancestral lands back and all that. But that wasn’t what Miz was sighing about, he knew. It was more the rest of his sentence that had his lover do the eyerolling and the pulling of his phone from his very well tailored pants and the dialing of... „Well, if we must speak with Adrian and all. Sure. Go ahead. Call him.”

„I already did.”, Mizrak replied dryly, hands snagging onto Olrox’s waist and bringing the older man onto his lap. With a kiss. And a nuzzle. And then Olrox’s fingers were tracing Mizrak’s shoulders and he had almost managed to forget all about the outgoing call and Adrian on the other side of it until he heard it connect. Well. Cockblocking blonde and curly haired asshole. Miz pulled back from their kiss, which made Olrox snarl and the turk laugh. Adrian was humming. Rude. „Hello, son of Dracula.”

„Fuck you, Mizrak darling. Fuck you very much. What do you want? I don’t think this is a booty call. If it is, put me on video. I want to see you two fuck.”, Adrian’s words had a bite to them that Olrox enjoyed. A challenge. He would have totally taken the other vampire on it if his lover would have agreed to that. And Mizrak would have. They had done it before. Everything. With Adrian. They had had sex with Adrian, they had entertained Adrian with their sexual escapades, they had watched Adrian have sex with various other people over the years. But. Alas. Mizrak was a man on a mission and that mission was currently tied up to a chair right next door. And not even in a fun way. Olrox sighed. „Oh, we’re not doing the sexy thing. Then why did you call me? And woke me up. It’s the middle of the fucking day here.”

„We have your baby Belmont. She killed someone already. Well, to be fair, so did I, but I’m always expected to. I need to keep my antihero mantel.”, the green eyed vampire pursed his lips and vanished in a puff of smoke, returning to Mizrak in a split second with Giselle in tow. Snarling. Drooling. Almost feral. No, by the stench of her, definitely feral. Creatures of the night that had fallen onto dark times had a certain je ne sais quoi when it came to their smell, which made them easy to track. At least for Orlox. „Now you can switch to video, please. Adrian, darling, you look dashing as always. Would totally fuck you. However. Before that. What is this and why is it darkening my doorstep and why did you send Mizrak after her? No, let me help you there with that last one. You sent Mizrak after her without either of you telling me because you knew that this is a bad fucking idea and that I would not play ball.”

„To be fair, I didn’t imagine the kind of shit Giselle had managed to find all on her own. It seems like the Belmont name is alive and thriving in her. What... Happened to her?”, Adrian asked, voice low and filled with something that Olrox could have easily mistaken for contempt. It wasn’t. It wasn’t dislike either. It was something like worry, but more like clinical curiosity and Giselle was definitely someone that the Heir of Dracula had not actually met in person before. Interesting. Mizrak was trying to distract Olrox from how right he was about everything by unbuttoning his shirt completely and it worked. Sort of. Not really. Adrian was still speaking and Olrox still had the Belmont’s neck gripped in between his claws.

„Well, if Miz would have dug her up from somewhere in North America, I would have said that she’s been had by... Some form of a windigo? I could find some people who would know more about it. But then that wouldn’t be totally accurate. She’s allergic to the sun according to my precious lover here. She feeds on blood, which doesn’t mean much if we take into account the fact that most night creatures do, vampires included. Theoretically, at least. We haven’t seen her feed. We’ve seen her rip a guy to shreds to save a young woman.”, Olrox pointed out, raising a finger to stop Adrian from speaking and saying something idiotic about the Belmont being brave and moral or any other crap like that. He hoisted her up and closer to the blond, peeling her left eyelid back to show Adrian exactly what he meant. Giselle’s sclera was purple. Red and black and so fucking dirty with clotted blood that it was turning purple. She’d been perfectly fine not even twenty minutes ago as she had been holding court with about five other women and a couple of men. „No. Don’t you even dare. She acted like a rabid dog, which, by the way, she is. I hate the Belmonts as a matter of pride and of survival, but this one takes the fucking cake. Well, of the recent ones and of the ones that I haven’t killed already. She killed a guy that was role-playing a rape fantasy with a girl. I killed the girl too. Couldn’t be helped. So we have two dead humans, both of which are her fault. And nobody has even had a drop of fucking blood all evening. So don’t even dare bullshit me, Adrian. Start from the top. Don’t skip over any of the lines.”

„I don’t have any lines to skip over, Olrox. None whatsoever, I promise. I haven’t yet had the please of meeting this particular Belmont in person. I don’t suppose this counts. She doesn’t seem to be conscious much.”, the blonde sighed, waving his long and elegant fingers at the screen. Olrox did love video calling, though it was fairly useless for him on short distances. Shortish, to be fair. The older he got, the easier it became for him to travel for longer with no amount of trouble. Last time he’d checked, he could get from Ankara to London without breaking a sweat or requiring a feed. Just. Poof. Some white smoke and he was across the continent in the blink of an eye. He truly should have tried his magic trick at the Vatican, whenever the next papal conclave would be held. Olrox grinned. Adrian rolled his eyes. Once more, Mizrak sighed and the Belmont snarled. And drooled all over his shoes. Rude. „I got an email on an encrypted address. It was from her. She had gotten it from Aubrey, who had gotten it from August and so on and so forth. Anyways. She requested help. I denied it since I am not, unlike what you think, dearest, the Belmonts’ servant boy or anything. Nor am I a bondsman for them or their get out of jail free card. Then she insisted that she had something I wanted. Which sounded odd because the Belmonts haven’t had something I wanted since Trevor, so. But it turns out that she actually does fucking have something I wanted. Technically. Did you search her?”

„No. What the fuck, Adrian? I don’t search random, unconscious and non consenting women. Also, I don’t particularly care about putting my hands on naked females, so no, I didn’t search her. Why should I search her? Is she supposed to be carrying whatever it is that you want from her on her person? She couldn’t be this idiotic, could she... Never mind. She’s a Belmont.”, he sneered, dropping Giselle on the small, but cozy bed in the room, deciding that he didn’t particularly care whose it was at that specific moment in time. The entire place was to be torched to the ground anyways, so Giselle’s blood on the pillows or not, it didn’t matter. Still. On principle. He whirled around towards the phone and towards Mizrak, who seemed to be contemplating the insanity of actually putting their hands on a woman who had no idea what they were doing to her. He could do murder. Murder was fine. Murder was self serving or vindication or feeding. He could do stealing and forgery and he could do embezzlement and he could do whatever other kinds of crimes. But he drew the line at children, at abuse, at torture and at rape. Which they wouldn’t be doing, of course, but he still couldn’t make himself even consider undressing Giselle to search her. No. Absolutely not. He lifted a finger and Mizrak sat back down in his chair, lifting his palms up. In surrender and with a shake of his head. Good. Olrox might have left his lover lead them both through the world and through their very long lives, but he would not budge on some things. For nothing in the world. „What is it, Adrian? Either tell me or come swim for her and for what she’s carrying because I will dump her at the bottom of the Black Sea faster than you could blink. And then we would be upset with each other for the next millenium and I would really like to not be. You’re a great fuck.”

„Well, if I knew the way to your cooperation would be through my dick, I would have offered my services a long time ago.”, Adrian smiled wanly, pulling off the sheet that was covering the blonde’s lower half and flashing both Olrox and Mizrak pointedly. The turk blushed, but didn’t look away, licking his lips at the way Adrian’s thighs flexed as the blonde stood up. To pull on some joggers, it seemed. Well. That looked even more indecent, Olrox grinned. And waited. Adrian would talk. He always did. „She has on her my father’s last known location. And it’s fresh. A couple of months old, maybe. A couple of months, not a couple of decades. He might still be there. Vlad might actually still be there. And so might my mother. I have to know, Olrox. You know I have to.”

„That’s insane. Naive. Foolish. You can’t be serious in believing that. You cannot. You think a fucking Belmont and, even more so, a twenty nothing Belmont got close enough to your father, to Vlad himself, that she got a pinpoint on him and on Lisa. And that she would share it with you. No strings attached and all. She would just give it to you. Your father’s address. The most craved thing in the supernatural world. Fucking Drolta would have died for Sekhmet to have been brought back in Lisa’s body. And you think this scrap of a girl has that address?”, Olrox raged at the idiocy of everything, at the desperation that was making Adrian mad and at the kind of world ending shit that a desperate Adrian could rain down on all of them. „And you thought that something so fucking dangerous as retrieving Vlad’s fucking GPS coordinates was Mizrak’s job? Fuck you so fucking very much. You saving my life and my sanity more than once means fucking nothing, Adrian, if you gamble with my walking and breathing heart, do you fucking understand that? Did you fucking stop and consider that at all? Fuck. Fuck, I want to fucking string you up by your fucking balls. I don’t fucking care for that argument that both of you are about to make. That Miz is perfectly capable of making his own decisions and of going into anything on his own. Yes. Yes, you are, Miz. But this. This is beyond us. This is some Sekhmet level of bullshit and we don’t need to be involved in this. At all. There are no more Belmonts who can wield Speaker magic and holy weapons to save us this time. Mizrak. When this explodes in all of our faces, it won’t be our asses that Vlad will spare.”

„There’s nothing to spare or not to spare. My father is with my mother, so he isn’t... Isn’t who he was in that last year. He’s who he was before that. And she’s immortal now, so he’s unlikely to slip again into that state. He also doesn’t have forgemasters anymore. Technically. I can’t promise you that. Look, Ol. I. Just get her to me and that’s it. You forget she ever existed. You go hole up in the Appalachians and you stay there until I call you back and tell you that it’s all good and safe. I just need to know what she knows about Vlad. That’s all.”, Adrian sighed, long fingers wrapping around a bottle that he had pulled out of a fridge, most likely. Off camera. That was fine by Olrox, he didn’t care about what the blonde drank and why. It was blood by the colour and the texture, though. And Olrox was so fucking angry with Adrian for putting Mizrak into that kind of danger that he contemplated smoking himself to Adrian just to punch the other man in the face. Twice over. Fuck.

„I will get her to you. And you will work tirelessly and will bring Delsin back. I know you can do it. And if you can’t, one of your thousand friends with magical benefits can. You will do it, Adrian. You owe me. For this. For me not ripping her throat out the second I realised how fucked up all of this is. You fucking owe me. Nod, Adrian. I will not move a single fucking inch unless you vow to bring Delsin back to me.”, he snarled, his green eyes probably blazing with anger. Increasing anger.

Chapter Text

Mizrak was pale and upset and Olrox felt like he had probably crossed about a thousand and one of his lover’s lines in the sand about how he was allowed to act when it came to the turk himself. Something about keeping their lives independent of one another. It was all crap. Utter fucking crap. Mizrak had not been out of Olrox’s sight for more than a few weeks at a time since the fucking French revolution and both of them liked it that way, the younger man coming back to him over and over again, each time more enthusiastic about their reunion than the last. But. Alas. Olrox was not allowed to offer any sort of counter fucking argument to any of Mizrak’s plans, be they as foolish as some of them were. No. He was only required to be there when they all went to fucking shit and to pick up the pieces, revolution after failed revolution after failed revolution. Olrox was a cynic. Perhaps. But he was one that had survived the fucking impossible and he hadn’t done it by sitting around and waiting to be sacrificed by the higher powers.

Adrian was full of shit. Truthfully. Vlad was dangerous and Adrian hadn’t laid eyes on his father in half a millennium, their last encounter ending up with the one of the oldest vampires ever dead at his son’s feet. Dead. Because Vlad had allowed himself to be killed. Dead. Because Vlad had wanted nothing more but to be reunited with Lisa. Dead. Because Vlad had not been willing to kill Adrian, but had had no such compulsions about literally every fucking one else. Dead. But not anymore. As far as Adrian had been able to find out over the centuries that he’d been hunting all of the illusive sightings of his father and of Lisa, Vlad hadn’t even stayed dead for all that long. Maybe a few years. More like a one single year. The other five hundred that the elder Țepeș hadn’t come anywhere near his Heir were intentional. Olrox could understand Adrian’s obsession with finding his parents, but he could also see how that would lead to nothing good. Only heartbreak that way lay and for however mad he was at Adrian right that fucking instant, he didn’t want the blonde to suffer that final disillusion. A pointless one at that. Vlad knew perfectly well where Adrian was at all times, Olrox was convinced. And Lisa too knew where her son was, Vlad worshipping at her heels. They hadn’t come for Adrian. That was more than enough for Olrox to know about the two of them.

„Do you want me to bring Delsin back, Mizrak? After all, you’re the one that extracted Giselle. You should get a say in what Olrox is demanding of me.”, Adrian asked almost silently. Almost.

Olrox’s anger flared, the entire yacht shaking with his power. Electrical sparks flew from his eyes as he sat there, half speechless and half so fucking angry at Adrian that he could have cleaved the blonde in half. An inhale. An exhale. And half so fucking scared of Mizrak’s answer that it was unfair of him to demand any sort of grace from his current lover about his past one. He wasn’t in love with Delsin anymore. He had not been for centuries, not since he had first laid eyes on Mizrak. Perhaps even before that. Long before that. Perhaps since he had killed Julia Belmont. Perhaps a bit after that. But to ask something like that of Mizrak when Adrian knew exactly how difficult the turk found loving Olrox even two and a half centuries after they had first gotten together... Olrox would absolutely claw Adrian’s eyes out. As soon as his heart would not be trying to crawl up his throat and as soon as his vision would not darken with the panic. Mizrak had said, over and over again, that he understood why Olrox wanted to give Delsin another chance at life. But. But what was an idealistic answer to the reality of having to be put in the same room as the man that Olrox had once loved more than life itself. Once. Not anymore. But once, Delsin had been his entire heart and that belonged to Mizrak currently. He shuddered.

„That, my dear Adrian, is a fucking low blow. And one that I didn’t expect from you and from your high moral standing.”, Mizrak replied, bored and seemingly supremely uninterested in being caught in the middle of the stand off between Olrox himself and a slightly flushed Adrian. Oh. That was fun. Mizrak was so rarely antagonistic towards the blonde that Olrox couldn’t help but enjoy it even as the matter at hand was a very awful one for him. An inhale. An exhale. Giselle was sputtering and, frankly, starting to smell weirdly and Olrox didn’t want to be there to find out why exactly that was. If she was some kind of windigo variation that was native to Asia, then she might start shedding fucking skin and she might actually not even be...

Oh. Oh no.

„I’m not bringing her to you. Not to the castle, not to you directly. Not to the Belmont keep, not anywhere. Meet us where you and I first met. Where you apologised to me for one of your father’s generals taking me as spoils of war and raping me for decades. Do you remember where that was, Adrian?”, Olrox asked, switching from the general French that all three of them understood easily and spoke fluently to Adrian’s native Romanian, which was something that he’d picked up solely for the purpose of speaking with the Heir of Vlad without many others listening in. Mizrak wasn’t bad at it, but not as good as Olrox was and that was just fine by him right then and there. He’d not lied to Miz about his past, but he’d also not shared the details of how exactly he had killed the vampire that had turned him and why that specific act had given him his feathered form. And the powers of a god. It wasn’t in self defense, no matter how many times Adrian would tease him about that little cover up. No. It had become more than abundantly clear for everyone surrounding Miz and himself that he would gladly walk into the sun if the turk so wished it of him, but.

„I remember. I. Olrox.”, Adrian started, abruptly stopping when Olrox snarled at him and ended the call with a low be there in forty eight hours or I kill her.

An inhale. An exhale. He was shaking. Shuddering. He wanted to run. He wanted to run and to hide and to be so fucking far from whatever fucking mess had the Heir of the last vampire King had dragged him and Mizrak in that it wasn’t even fucking funny. Arms wrapped around his waist, Miz’s hands tangling on his lower abdomen and pulling him close. Flush. He could feel his lover’s heat at his back and Mizrak’s lips tracing the knobs of his spine. An inhale. An exhale. He turned around in the turk’s arms, but didn’t dare to look Mizrak in the eyes. He was scared. Not of Vlad. Maybe of what Vlad meant, but not of Vlad. Cautious, yes. But scared, no. Olrox had not been scared of anything but losing the ones that he loved for fucking centuries and he wouldn’t give into that kind of terror once more. But losing Miz was very clearly possible at any given moment in time, be it to the sun, to hunters or to his own fucking conscience. It had never occurred to him, frankly, that he could lose Mizrak to a dead man. Or for a dead man that Olrox hadn’t loved in centuries. Fuck. He wouldn’t. He couldn’t. They had already discussed all of that. Once. Mizrak had said that he understood why Olrox felt like he had to get his former lover back and give the man a new chance at eternity. Not with Olrox, but nonetheless.

„You’re spinning in circles. Inside your head. I can hear it in my head at times, the low buzz of your panic.”, the turk whispered and grabbed his chin, forcing their eyes to lock. Olrox was taller. Not by a whole lot, but enough that it was more than noticeable at times and enough that he could have easily hooked his chin onto Mizrak’s shoulder easily, shoulder he have ever been inclined to do so. He hadn’t been. Much. But. Olrox was taller. Mizrak was bulkier, though, and stronger, even as a vampire. Harder to beat in a brawl, much easier to defeat in anything that required lightness on one’s feet and stealth. However. Those eyes. Those had gotten Olrox hooked on the serious, severe Catholic monk the very first time they had met, in the shadow of that abbey where Emanuel had been brewing Night creatures in the basement. A Forgemaster, Olrox had thought at the time. But no. Not a true one. „Look at me. Here and now. Not in the past. Look and listen. Yes. Like that. I care about you wanting Delsin to be brought back solely because I want you to be at peace with that part of your life. I don’t feel threatened by him. I don’t think you’re going to walk out on us and on me when he is brought back. I don’t fear him. You, American, are mine. And I don’t fucking share. Not like that. Adrian’s an asshole for even considering asking that question, not to mention actually asking it. Forget about his poking and prodding. Tell me why we’re going... Wherever we’re going.”

„We, Turk, are going to my place of birth. And of death, I suppose. To the source of my powers and to where my temples once rose from the jungle and all. No jungle there now. But my people are there and their worship still fuels me.”, Olrox whispered, his lips crashing onto Mizrak’s, awe written on his face. His lover. His lover would claim him if the need arose. And he was Mizrak’s, no doubt about it. But it was soothing to the beast inside of him to know that the younger man would not hesitate to have him marked. For good. Forever. He pulled back from the kiss and smiled softly, his eyes glowing a bright, eerie green as he allowed his magic to reach for Giselle and the tightened his grip on Mizrak, aiming their first smoke jump of a few for the shore up ahead. „We’re going to Ciudad de Mexico, lover. To a cemetery outside of it, more precisely. Hold on. We have a long, long way to go.”

Chapter Text

„This isn’t a cemetery.”, Mizrak said, amused and relaxed as Olrox turned around to look for...

There it was. A sigil. Well. A key, if he were to be perfectly honest, but also if one was to be somewhat petty and nitpicky, a sigil was a better descriptor of what he had just touched. His blood. Freely given. And the door to one of his many, many, many homes in the central and southern part of the current poorly named American continent popped open. With a whistle. The whistle was new. And Mizrak was fast and had the reflexes of a fucking soldier, pulling Olrox out of the way of an actual shotgun that had fired at him. A trap. A pulley system held everything in place and he had foolishly activated it by simply opening his door. To his home. That contained a trap that he had not put in place. The bullet had barely grazed his high cheekbone and the tip of his ear, but it had left a sting.

„Holy. Literally. It’s a holy bullet. Fuck, it burns.”, the Turk hissed as he dug the offending slug from the thick oak behind them and held it up to the artificial light of the porch deck. Olrox frowned. „Did you forget to pay the rent or something, darling?”

„I own the place.”, Olrox replied sharply, lifting an eyebrow at Mizrak’s unimpressed shrug. The younger man held a hand up and refused to let Olrox enter the property with frown and a shake of his head, so all that was left for him to do was pull out his phone and call his house sitter. Also known as the person in charge of his life there, in Mexico. Also known as Mazatl. Unsurprisingly, she picked up after the second ring. „You tried to kill me.”

„My Lord, if I had tried to kill you, you would be dead. Frankly. You’re way too cocky and you think that smoking yourself can save you from everything.”, Mazatl offered, the sound of her ageless voice letting Olrox know that he had caught his... His Mazatl at that moment in time when she wasn’t wearing any sort of anyone else but herself. Which might have proven to be unsettling for others, with her long, tall form, pitch black hair that spun from the top of her head to her soles and milky white eyes that had never seen as a regular human would a day in their very, very long life, but Olrox had always found his kin to be refreshing. Also, it fucking helped that she was a Nagual and one of the very powerful ones. She snorted as he switched the phone to speaker, though it was pointless. Miz could hear them perfectly well. „What kind of bullshit have you brought to my doorstep, Olrox? And why did you trip my most rudimentary of traps? Have you gotten all of your brain sucked through your dick by the Turk that you won’t introduce me to, so much so that you can’t spot my handywork anymore? Did you consider calling ahead and letting me know you were coming? There’s no food at the house. I haven’t aired it properly. The curtains aren’t washed. There’s no altar and people have been wanting audiences with you for months now. You cannot just pop the fuck in and not expect a shotgun to the face.”

„Hi, I’m the Turk who sucked his brains out through his dick, apparently. Are there any more traps inside or can we go in? We have... A friend with us.”, Mizrak snorted into the simmering heat and humidity of the Mexican night, already sweating profusely and refusing to let Olrox just puff in and out of the house. Quickly. Or they could just toss Giselle inside and see if the place blew up. Maybe. But not. Olrox had to be a nice, kind, polite vampire and not kill the last of the Belmonts. Yet. „She’s kind of in the middle of something.”

„I’ll be right there. Don’t touch anything.”, Mazatl breathed harshly into the connection and Olrox sighed. He would never, ever, in a thousand lifetimes hear the end of what had almost happened there that night. First, it would be Mizrak who would never let him forget how he almost got metaphorically smoked by a holy bullet. And secondly, Mazatl was absolutely going to mock him for all eternity for the same thing. Different perspectives, though, so at least he would be keeping it varied.

„See, not going in half cocked was the right choice. You can now stop rolling your eyes at my military tactics. Always survey your environment.”, the younger man started to explain, hands waving between as Mizrak got himself worked up into a good lather when Mazatl materialised right behind Olrox.

He could feel her. And he could see Miz’s eyes growing wide with half a flash of terror and a lot of anger. The anger was curious, at least until the Turk moved, once more, faster than Olrox expected him to and put himself between Mazatl and Olrox. Hissing at her. Spitting mad. It was sweet. Olrox cooed. So did Mazatl, for that matter. Olrox was never going to hear the end of anything that had happened that night. Or would happen. He sighed. Mazatl’s eyes found Giselle’s slumped and unconscious form with deadly precision and she let out a low, displeased sound.

„There is a half dead European darkening my tree line. She stinks. She’s bleeding. And you dropped her on my imported tulips. Also, you’re at least six fucking months late, my Lord.”, Mazatl exhaled loudly, long suffering and lacking in patience. Olrox knew that look on her face. She would start to threaten to cut his balls off soon enough and he really would have liked to stop that from happening. He hadn’t noticed there were tulips where he’d dropped Giselle, let alone imported ones. That was his bad. „You, on the other hand, Turk, are a welcome sight for my very sore eyes. You cannot imagine how much time I’ve spent wanting to make your acquaintance.”

„That was said with such gusto I could swear you’re happier to see Mizrak than myself. And that I rate somewhere close to the half dead European that I might have smoked straight onto your tulips. Imported tulips, yes. I got that. So we can have imported flowers, but not the half dead humans. Got it.”, Olrox offered, sarcasm dripping from his tongue like that honey that Mizrak so favoured. It was made of some rare flowers up a mountain and it cost and arm and a leg, but Olrox always made sure to be well stocked up because his lover absolutely adored it. With some hot tea or with some pastries, that honey was Miz’s favourite thing in the world. Outside of Olrox himself of course. And blood. And a sort of beer that Olrox had no taste for, quite honestly. Anyways. Mazatl was rolling her pupilless eyes at him and letting her long, talon tipped fingers point towards the Belmont girl, who was, at long last, finally passed out. „Yes, fine, I’ll remove her as soon as I have where to put her. The house, Mazatl. Untrap it or whatever it is that you need to do to it. Please.”

„I see you’ve taught him manners too, Mizrak, not just things related to the heart. You have my eternal gratitude for that.”, she replied, her eyes locked with the Turk’s. A silent understanding passed between them and Olrox didn’t like the idea that his lover and his oldest and most powerful... Friend. Accolyte. Priestess. Supervisor and moral compass. His system of checks and balances had been, at one point in time, made of Mazatl and Mazatl alone. And it had worked. Then, he had met others. Friends. Lovers. Worshippers. Leaders. He had cared for some, respected others and murdered the rest. But Mazatl had remained herself. For him. And with him. Olrox loved her dearly and had missed her something fierce, though he would be very hard pressed to admit it out loud. Very. Still. He preened at her obviously taking a good liking to Mizrak. She smiled and nodded at Olrox discreetly. Yes. Mazatl liked the Turk and Olrox could breathe easily once more. „Of course, two hundred and fifty odd years is a good amount of time to house train even the snarliest of beasts. Feathered snakes included. Now step back, gentlemen. This is my job and mine alone. Olrox. Go buy me some tulip bulbs until I finish this. Mizrak can stay. So can the European.”

Olrox easily recognised a dismissal when he was faced with one, but he also knew when he could positively ignore one and when not. Where the Hungarian’s demands had been excessive and ruthless and based on nothing but pure greed and the crushing of opposition without thought or an actual plan beyond taking over the world, followed by maniacal laughter, good old Erzies dismissals Olrox had chosen to obey without question because they got him out of her sight and out of the grasp of her pumped up powers. A vampire on godhood steroids, Erzie had been and not the quality ones either. Unlike himself. But that was a story for a whole other time. All in all, he ignored Mazatl’s dismissal and didn’t leave, taking a few steps back and pulling Mizrak with him, but definitely not getting too close to Giselle and her stench. The tulips were really fighting for their life there, scent wise at least.

„We will dump Giselle in the dungeon underneath the house, lock her up down there, have Mazatl try and figure out what the fuck she is and all that and we... As in you and me, Mizrak, are going to take a very long shower where you will wash my hair, give me a massage and then fuck me. Twice. At least twice. We have blood stored here. We will feed. Then we will sleep and wait for Adrian to show up. But until he does show up, we do not do anything else but be together. Mazatl will take care of everything else. And of us, of course.”, he whispered, leaning into his lover’s side slowly and grinning as the Turk’s arms opened up for him on instinct. Fuck, the man cared for him. Loved him even. He knew that. He could feel that. The look in Mizrak’s eyes when that shotgun had cocked and Olrox had not reacted in time to get out of the way on his own had been pure fucking terror. For him. For him getting hurt. He inhaled Mizrak’s clean scent and almost wanted to whimper. He needed some time alone with his lover and he needed it soon. He had come to that yacht expecting a week of existing in the middle of the Black Sea, not a party and a Belmont and not some twenty year old oligarch heir calling him exotic. He really should have eaten that kid.

„Yes. I agree. All of that and anything else you need. I... I want to see for myself that the holy in that bullet didn’t do much more than graze you cheekbone. Which is already blasphemy, if you ask me. Mazatl, did you have to use blessed bullets? Really?”, the Turk raised his voice just enough for it carry over the wind rustling the trees and reach Mazatl. A tilt of her head, her long hair lifting with the breeze, indicated that she had heard Mizrak, but didn’t much care for answer Olrox’s lover while she was dismantling what was an impressive amount of magical traps. He didn’t understand why all of that was necessary, but Mazatl would inform him. No doubt about that. Not at all. „Well, I see she’s busy. I won’t feel offended by that. And she’s also laughing at us just a little. You, Olrox, are not allowed to open any doors first and foremost for a very long while. Maybe a year. Maybe a decade. No. Don’t argue with me. At all. My heart fucking stopped when you got grazed by a blessed fucking bullet. I get to make demands about your safety too.”

Chapter Text

„That’s so sweet it’s about to give me a toothache all from listening to you two. But.”, Mazatl suddenly stood both in front of them and looking at the house, her selves identical and connected by their long, dark and silly tresses. Mizrak startled and bared his teeth, pushing Olrox behind him once more. Mazatl laughed, the sound a slow one, like nails on a metal surface in the dead of summer. Not quite as intense as in other moments, but still fucking terrifying. Yes, she was quite spectacular and Olrox loved her dearly. Her head doing a complete one eighty on her neck was also very useful in freaking out random people. And Mizrak too. She giggled. Olrox rolled his eyes and raised a hand, gesturing for her to stop with the teasing and get back to business, pulling an honest to the moon pout from her. „You’re not a single drop of fun. And it’s apparently contagious. I thought this hunky man here would have made you fun, my Lord. Instead, it appears like you have turned him unamusing.”

„I don’t know what to tell you about how much I turned Mizrak unamusing, Mazatl. He has a history of being very gruff and serious and he had never worn silk before I met him, so.”, Olrox snickered, tossing his hair over his shoulder and wrapping his long fingers around Miz’s forearm. Just. Just to be sure that Mazatl wouldn’t get on his lover’s stabbing list. For a former catholic monk, Mizrak had an impressive kill tally. Though, honestly, killing for religion was tacky and overdone and he didn’t shy away from admiring that his people had done it too. Still tacky. Still something that had been done in moderate amounts by the Nahuatl when taking into consideration the death and devastation that the Christian crusades had brought to Europe and the Middle East. When compared to those events, his people’s ritualistic killings were positively mild. „Anyways, now that you’ve doubled your efforts to accommodate us, can we go in? And will you be absolutely as amazing as you know you are and take care of Giselle for us? Like. She bites. She also oozes blood? She might need to drink blood, but she doesn’t really smell like a vampire. I don’t know. She’s something. Lock her up really tight until her benefactor comes looking for her. Meanwhile.”

„Meanwhile, you two will go fuck like rabbits while I’m stuck vampire sitting the fledgling that probably got turned with infected blood. Or something like that. She smells... Rotten. Olrox, what else can you tell me about her?”, she asked, splitting herself once more and crouching in front of the very stiff and unmoving Giselle, her spindly fingers turning the young woman’s face from left to right and from up to down and back again. Mazatl’s fingerpads pulled back Giselle’s gums and her eyelids, hissing as more blood clots fell from everywhere basically. Olrox wasn’t squeamish and he doubted that any vampire could ever be, but there was something uncanny about glomps of blood just oozing out of someone’s eyes. Just. Ugh. „She’s not made right, my Lord. That’s what it feels like to me. She’s either made by someone who didn’t know what they were doing and were simply putting all the components of different creatures of the night in one lot and mixing it up wildly. Or she’s made by someone who had a grudge against her. Malicious intent and an actual ritual to pervert the change. You know that the change itself doesn’t require consent from the one that’s changed, though it goes far smoother if it exists. But this kind of damage to the changed one. This is intentional. Could it be that she agreed to this perversion of the creature that she has become?”

„None of those are answers that I have. Mizrak is the one that took on the job to track her down and bring her to Adrian. Yes, she’s one of Adrian’s strays, I suppose. But. Still. I’ll just let Miz tell you what he knows of her. Inside.”, the older vampire chuckled at the disbelief written all over Mazatl’s face and at the discreet sniff that she took of her own flowery, white dress. Giselle truly did stink. It made his eyes water something fierce.

But he didn’t really get much opportunity to complain about anything before Mizrak launched into a detailed description of what had happened before Olrox had met Giselle and how he had found her and what had Adrian told her about the woman he was sent to track. Nothing. Adrian had told Mizrak nothing much, but Mizrak, bless his fucking bleeding heart, had actually gone after her on a whim and a heartfelt story that turned out to be bullshit and all. Olrox was totally going to kill Adrian. It would feel... Cathartic at the very least. At Mizrak’s long look to help the Turk carry Giselle into the house, Olrox turned his nose up and let the tip of his bloodied shoe touch her twitching leg before he smoked all of them inside, including Mazatl. In front of the dungeon cell. Without touching Giselle again. Mizrak was a bit pale from all the space jumping they had done that day, but alas. Necessary.

„Her. In there. You, Mazatl, take care of her and of her... Whatever. Just lay every single protection spell and glyph and ward you can think of. And keep her out of the sun. And fed. Adrian owes me a life for this service I’m providing and I’m not going to let him take her without proper payment.”, Olrox explained plainly, ignoring Mizrak’s resigned expression. It might have just been his lover’s weak stomach for smoke travelling. Or for Olrox’s ever shifting morals. After all, if one could be smoke, why would one’s ethics be etched in stone or anything like that. Foolish. „Do we still have that friend? You know the one. Have him come here and take a look at her. Maybe he can enlighten us. Just a little. We are going upstairs. It should take Adrian a couple of days to get here, so we reconvene tomorrow evening. I expect a report by then, Mazatl. And a list of things that I must get done while I’m here. Please and thank you.”

***

„The rooms up here and all mine and, as you can see, no one enters without my permission, since you couldn’t until I actually invited you in. Fun, no? I thought I could learn something from white people literature and apply it in the most ridiculously on the nose way possible to a vampire’s actual layer. Of course, Mazatl...”, Olrox yelped as Mizrak’s hands caught his waist and turned him around, the Turk strong and fast as always, but also seemingly on a mission to get under Olrox’s skin.

With a kiss. A ferocious kiss, their lips locking together as their bodies moulded to one another and they inhaled each other. He moaned. Mizrak turned his head to the side to slot their lips together better and let those clever, clever and deadly fingers move from Olrox’s waist to his chest and then to his throat, slowly making their way up. Up. And up again, until Miz’s thumb was digging into his jawline and he was being pushed back hard enough to hit the wall behind him with a dull thud. And a peformative yelp. He felt himself warm up under Mizrak’s calm and steady gaze, the fire lighting up easily in the pit of his stomach and the flames licking down to his cock. And even lower. To his hole. And even higher. To his nipples. He moaned and all that Mizrak had done that far had been to kiss him almost chastely and push him away violently. Still. His lover was calm. Olrox knew for a fact what that calm hid. And how deep that well of fear went when it came to the thought that Olrox himself could ever be taken away from Mizrak. As if he wouldn’t cheat the devil a fourth time just to get back to his lover. His eternal lover.

„Take off your clothes. All of them. I want to see you. I want to... I want to see for myself that you’ve not done anything that a drink of blood can’t fix.”, Mizrak offered and Olrox would have said that his lover’s turn was one of demand if not for the desperation hidden within. Barely hidden. The Turk would have made that first part an order, of course, as they liked to play like that at times and Olrox did so enjoy being put on his knees and all, but they had rules as to how to start something like that and coming out with it randomly wasn’t it. So. It wasn’t a scene. They weren’t playing. Not yet, at least. Mizrak was just desperate to reassure himself that Olrox was fine. And the older man had nothing against playing along. Adding his own twist to it too. „Please, Olrox. Don’t make me beg.”

„Not this time, I won’t.”, he murmured in agreement and let his fingers tangle in one of the many hair ties that he kept around him, always and forever, because there was nothing worse than getting one’s long and precious hair tangled during sex. Or during a fight. Unless one liked the aesthetics of something more than the practicality of it, but.

But. He stopped mid gesture, Mizrak’s hand lifting as the man dropped to the edge of the loveseat that took up most of Olrox’s living room and silently asked for him to not pull his hair back. Olrox smiled. He liked that. He liked that Mizrak himself liked his hair and he knew for a fucking fact that Mizrak liked his long, long and dramatic hair not because it made Olrox look more delicate, because it didn’t, though there was nothing wrong with delicate after all. Oh no. No, Mizrak liked his hair because Olrox was gorgeous with it down, waves of it flowing down his shoulders and his back when riding Miz’s cock or when he was getting fucked and... Well. He inhaled. He exhaled. Then he dropped the hair tie back to the side table that he’d picked it up from and simply tossed his hair over one shoulder, revealing his pointy ear and the ear cuff that covered it, intricately carved mother of pearl inlaid with the most spectacular of saphires. He’d been asked if they were real by the socialites from the yacht and he’d demured an answer. But. Fuck yes, they were real. And they were his, just like the man currently looking at him like he was the last drop of water from a mighty desert.

His left side was the one that he was presenting to Mizrak and it wasn’t by mistake. No. It was the one that the bullet from Mazatl’s shotgun had scraped. His left cheekbone. It was all healed up already as his lady in waiting had pointed them to the blood supply as soon as they had set foot in the house, but Mizrak’s eyes had yet to leave the high point of Olrox’s face for more than a few moments at a time. An inhale. An exhale. The older man’s fingers made quick work of his barely buttoned up linen shirt as he tossed it to the ground. He grimaced. It was unsalvageable. He had liked it, but there was Belmont blood on it, so he would rather mourn it than wear it again. Ever. Mizrak’s breath caught in his throat and Olrox smiled. Predator to predator, he would absolutely always make Mizrak surrender to him. In a fair hunt, there was nothing that Mizrak could do to win over Olrox being a literal god. And not even a minor one at that. But. One thing that the Nahuatl had never liked was a fair hunt. And he wanted to be caught more often than not, but only by those that he chose and only when he dictated it. Not yet. Not yet right then and there. But soon. He would be naked and Mizrak would be worshipping at his altar, one way or another, by either crying out his name as Olrox swallowed that thick cock of his down his throat and choked on it or by dropping to his knees in front of Olrox and be begging at his feet. His lips arranged themselves into a grin. A dangerous one. And then his fingers found the tie at the waistband of his linen pants.

An inhale. An exhale. He pulled on it and hooked his fingers in the delicate fabric there, twisting it out of the way as he lowered his pants one single centimetre at a time. An inhale. An exhale. His own, harsh with lust and with need, his cock hardening under Mizrak’s hungry eyes. He smiled, letting his hair hide his expression for a moment and allowing him an unimpedded view of his lover’s lips parting as his pants dropped to the floor and he stood there, back to the wall. And naked. And tall, shoulders rolling back and mouth curling into an indulgent pout as he ran his claws over his chest, teasing one nipple and then the other one, the Turk’s left hand going to his own hardness, pressing down on it to settle himself, Olrox knew. He peeled his lips off his fangs and let his head drop to the cold wall behind him, exposing his throat just enough to make Miz stand up and walk towards him lazily as he palmed his cock.

Chapter Text

„Hands off. Put them on the wall, palms to the plaster. I want to look at you.”, the Turk growled, Olrox letting out a low moan at the sound. Fuck, his brain latched onto that tone and onto the look on Mizrak’s face, half hunger and half fucking desperation and he simply waited to be stalked and hunted. Prey. A predator willingly playing at prey. Fuck. He wanted to run and he wanted to be chased and they had the space to do so, his estate at the edges of Mexico City vast and fucking undisturbed because he was legion all in himself. Fuck. He could run. He could. He was faster and sleeker that the Turk and he was older and more powerful and he could vaporize himself. He could run and Mizrak would give chase and eventually, Olrox would want to be fucked more than he wanted the thrill of his lover’s growls and frustrated snarls. He could run. He didn’t. Because underneath the desire and right on top of that desperation sat Mizrak’s heart, all there for Olrox to see and crave. He had it. He was certain of that. But he needed Miz to hand it over as plainly as he had given his own to the younger man. „Fuck, how can you be so gorgeous and so fucking dangerous at the same time? How? So alive and so.”

„Dead? If it helps, Miz darling, I wasn’t ever dead. Godhood suits me so much better than dead, after all.”, Olrox challenged softly, his green eyes locking with Mizrak’s deep brown ones as the Turk’s hands slipped from his waist to the top of his ass and then a bit lower still, pulling them both flush together. An inhale was punched out of him, his body reacting to his lover’s so fucking naturally that he could help but giggle. High and breathy. Olrox was happy. Mizrak was reassured. And a kiss was placed atop his pulse point, right where his throat met his shoulder. He grinned and lifted his right leg, hooking it over the Turk’s ass and pushing his cock right on top of Mizrak’s hardness. Fuck, he loved that sound that his lover made when they came together like that. Fuck. His hips rolled and Mizrak snarled, pinning him to the wall. He pouted. „You had your looksie at me. I’m fully healed. I’m whole. I’m naked. What are you going to do about that last part, lover?”

Mizrak growled and lifted him up in one swift move, his left leg joining his right one as the Turk’s large, large hands held his thighs. Olrox’s long hair fell around them as he leaned in closer, arms going around Miz’s shoulders and lips locking with his lover’s parted and eager ones. He was bigger, taller and heavier, but that didn’t mean a single thing for a soldier of Mizrak’s constitution and Olrox got carried to the very plush and rich bed in the room as if he weighed nothing. An inhale. An exhale. Their moans and panting filled the space between them just as the smell of their lust started to permeate everything. An inhale. An exhale. And he was being dropped to the mattress, Mizrak naked in a matter of seconds. Naked. And kneeling between his parted legs, lips tracing his lower abdomen and the muscles there, tightening as they were with the touches. Fuck, Olrox couldn’t... He needed to move. He needed Mizrak’s mouth on his cock and he needed to be worshipped and he needed to power up the exact way that he liked, through his lover praying at his fucking altar. At his body. Praying and begging and Mizrak’s hands were clawing at his sides as the Turk pulled him closer to the edge of the bed, his lover’s lips never leaving his skin even as Miz slithered to the plush carpet and simply lost himself in Olrox’s body.

Hot. Breathing. Mouth. On him. On his inner thighs, on his lower belly, on his palms that were digging into Mizrak’s short hair and pushing his lover lower. And lower. To his cock. To his hole. He didn’t fucking care. He just wanted... He shouted as Mizrak’s mouth closed on the crown of his cock and that clever, clever tongue swirled around it. Tasting. He knew how much the Turk liked the saltiness of his precum. Mizrak had spent hours on end a few decades back simply holding his cock in that delicious mouth and tasting him. Fuck, that had been an experience. He craved doing it again, but not right then. No. Then, he wanted more. More Mizrak. More touching. More cock sucking from his worshipper. From his lover. From the man he loved. He arched his back and parted his legs even more, lifting them when Mizrak encouraged him to do so and putting his thighs on top of the Turk’s shoulders. Oh. Yes. He moaned.

He moaned and he screamed and he let his fingers twist and pull at Mizrak’s hair and he couldn’t form a single coherent thought as the younger man’s tongue flattened underneath his cock, the tip of it hitting the back of the Turk’s throat in a matter of seconds. And then Mizrak was sucking. Mercilessly. Lacking finesse and elegance and lacking the patience that the other man usually displayed when taking Olrox apart. None of that was there. None. None of it seemed to matter, not for a single moment and not for a single second. Because all that Olrox felt was Mizrak’s desperation and the need that his lover had to confirm that Olrox was alive. And unharmed. And it was powerful. And somehow off, the older man thought privately, because he’d been in so many other much more dangerous situations and in so many other moments when he could have lost his life and Mizrak had been right there with him for the most part. But. But something was off. Mizrak was desperate in a way that the other man had not been before and Olrox could do nothing more but surrender to that tidal wave of lust and of need and of want and of love.

Mizrak swallowed around his cock and Olrox’s mind blanked, back arching and thighs tightening against the younger man’s head, on the very edge of coming and of spilling his seed in Miz’s mouth. The very edge. But he wasn’t allowed, the Turk’s clever fingers closing onto the base of his hard, swollen and painful cock just as Mizrak pulled up and crawled back onto the bed fully, bending Olrox in fucking half. And panting, lips swollen and wet and tongue darting to catch all of the older man’s precum from Mizrak’s chin. Fuck. Wide and almost frantic eyes met his own as long and thick fingers played with his balls and then travelled lower. To his hole. Mizrak wanted inside of him. And he wanted Mizrak there, stretching him out and touching him and fucking him, that desperation ready to tip over into something darker and needier. Something like bloodlust. But it wasn’t that. It wasn’t blood that was making Mizrak pant and whine and snarl and crave him like that. No. It was Olrox himself that was the focus of everything for the Turk. Oh.

A blink and his lover was gone, rummaging through the attached bathroom. Another blink and Olrox’s body was once again covered by the covetous creature on top of him, cold lube pouring down to his hole. An inhale. An exhale. The circling finger there seemed to have no patience and he didn’t need any patience either. He needed Mizrak to fucking put something in him and he needed to come and he needed to soothe his lover’s anxious movements and whatever was going on inside of the Turk’s head. He needed to. One finger and he moaned, Mizrak’s lips slamming onto his as another finger was added quickly. He hissed, the pain short lived and quickly replaced with blinding pleasure when Mizrak’s fingers curled up inside of him and touched him right fucking there, his gaze unfocusing and his mouth falling open as his cock pulsed. Hard. Fast. He didn’t come. Not yet. Mizrak didn’t want him to. Not for a moment. Not for a second. Mizrak wanted him right fucking there, on the edge of that knife, with him and without any sort of pretense and they were panting into each other’s mouths and there was nothing that the Turk had taken off himself. Not even his boots. Olrox was naked. Mizrak’s cock, thick and fucking delicious, was the only thing that the younger man had any use for, apparently, no matter how much the Nahuatl clawed at him and rendered the back of his shoulders red. With blood.

„You. Won’t. Come. Until. I. Allow. It.”, Mizrak snarled, biting each word into Olrox’s skin, the desperation taking apart every single vestige of seeming patience that the other man might have had. He screamed. He didn’t have anything else what to do but scream and surrender and plead and part his legs as much as he was allowed, that word making his spine fucking liquid and his skin flush hard. And then there was Mizrak’s cock entering him, the head of it wide and it burned and Olrox was consumed by those flames and by the grunting and snarling and growling and by the red, unending eyes of his lover and by the hand that had found its way to his waist and by the way Mizrak was cradling Olrox’s body. Cradling. Protecting. Fucking. Destroying. Taking apart. And showing the older man all of his fucking heart. All of it. In one single swoop. All of it. „Mine. Mine. Mine. Just mine. Mine to live for and mine to die for. Yours. Yours, Olrox. Yours. You will not leave me alone. You will not. I will not allow it. Mine. Just mind. Just. Fucking. Mine.”

Every word was punctuated by a thrust and every thrust was followed by a bite to Olrox’s chest, nipples, shoulders, throat, collarbones, lips, earlobes and arms. Mizrak was consuming him and owning him and taking him apart and rebuilding him in ways that the Turk had not done before and Mizrak was not getting less and less desperate the more the younger man took of Olrox. No. But Mizrak was settling the more Olrox answered his every chant with one of his own. A similar one. A vow passing through them, wrapped in lust and in unspoken, but not unrequited love and in an eternity that he hadn’t been able to see until that very moment when Mizrak’s hips stuttered inside of him and that cock hit all the fucking right fucking spots. And Mizrak came, Olrox’s name on his lips. Like a prayer. Like a chant. Like the most sublime of sacrifices, all given for him and to him. Olrox’s body welcomed everything and Mizrak’s pleasure and devotion tipped the older man over the edge. And into a whiteout. A gorgeous, gauzy, beautiful whiteout, where Mizrak was wrapped around him and where he had feathers and still they were one. As always. As forever. As eternity would have it and dictate it.

Chapter Text

„You’re all juiced up. He fucks that well?”, Mazatl asked pointedly, Olrox’s eyebrows rising as his right hand, personal assistant, lady in waiting and master assassin all rolled up into one elegantly eery female dropped her ass down on his desk and her booted feet in his lap. He was supposed to be catching up on his six months of delayed business deals, be they of monetary value or of the godhood kind, but he was... Distracted. Not much. But just enough to not be able to lock her out of his office with nothing but a thought and a mischievous smile. And that meant that it was to be his fault entirely that he found himself in the current situation, her long, five knuckled fingers poking at his cheek with impunity. „You’re glowing. Like if you would have been human and one that could carry children, I would have sworn he got you pregnant or something yesterday. Though not for lack of fucking trying is that you’re not with happiness and all. The fucking. Heh. See what I did there? And don’t glower, it’s unbecoming of your feathered self. I didn’t spy on you and your precious Mizrak either.”

„The wards. I’m juiced up so they’re juiced up. It doesn’t take the most brilliant mind that Scotland Yard has seen in a century to figure it out.”, Olrox snorted, batting her hands away from his skin and glaring when she tried to poke at his belly and his ribs with her boots. Which were still in his lap. Because of course they were. Couldn’t he have gotten a high priestess like Drolta, full of fervour and a holy mission to resurrect him if anything went wrong with his surprising godhood? No. No, he couldn’t. He had Mazatl and he loved Mazatl, who had never taken her high priestess role seriously, acting instead and anything else but that, which was more than fine by Olrox, because he acted as anything else but a god most of the time. „What do you want, Mazatl? Are you here to tell me that you have all the answers I’m looking for about the Belmont that we’re apparently putting through a detox downstairs? Why are we doing that? I didn’t approve of it.”

„I didn’t ask you, my Lord.”, she flipped him off and jumped out of his lap, suddenly on the other side of the room and way too close to the window on a sunny day for Olrox’s peace of mind. But Mazatl wasn’t a vampire and she wasn’t a creature of the night. Technically, Mazatl wasn’t a creature at all, she was a naturally occurring force that had chosen him to follow through the ages and that had helped him and nurtured and served him when he’d been at his lowest, trying to dig himself out from underneath his former master. And rapist. Mazatl was good people, to put it as bluntly as Olrox ever would, even inside his own head, but she had never allowed him to forget that while she was natural, he was supernatural and more dangerous than he even knew. How he would find out the limitations of his abilities, he was unsure and she wasn’t keen on explaining much of anything to him, to his utter frustration. More than half a millenia old he was and she still held back on things. „You’re overthinking again, Zal.”

„You’ve not called me Zal in centuries, sister. Tell me what has you rattled like this. It’s a bit unnerving.”, Olrox offered, standing up and going to the large bookcase on the opposite side of the room to simply give her some space to roam. He liked his offices cozy, but that didn’t help with how she got when something or someone was bothering her. He could try and take a guess. He could. Maybe he should because she didn’t seem fully convinced that she should tell him, which was strange. But. Still. He waited her out. Mazatl was gorgeously brilliant and didn’t need to be pushed and prodded in any way to be the smartest, most capable soul he had ever met, regardless of anything else. And he had met the absolutely brilliant, if utterly driven mad by the centuries Drolta.

„The Belmont is an issue I didn’t expect. And a much more complicated one that you would want her to be. Adrian... Adrian is either lying to you, which is unlikely. He’s way too nice for that, especially since he’s usually half way to proposing eternal marriage to you every time you flash your eyes at him and flip your hair over your shoulder. Or. The Heir of Vlad is also unaware of what Giselle is. Which, before you ask, is a mystery, but unfortunately that is never a good thing from where we’re standing.”, Mazatl murmured, her eyes darting to the east of the room and low, drawn almost imperceptibly to the detoxing Belmont there. Mizrak was with Giselle, keeping her company and helping her through the rough and tough of a baby blood drinker getting some control over herself. It would be a long couple of days for everyone, but especially for the last of the Belmonts. Mazatl frowned and walked to the door, sliding it shut before slicing her finger open and putting a concealment seal on the wood, effectively separating the room from the rest of the house with just a drop of her blood. Olrox tilted his head to the side and waited, unsure of what could it be so dangerous that Mazatl had considered that their usual precautions to be insufficient in the grand scheme of things. And what she thought that Mizrak couldn’t hear. Giselle was probably not likely to understand Nahuatl after all. But Miz would. And Mazatl didn’t want the Turk in on whatever it was that she wanted Olrox to know. „I tested all that I could extract out of her. Blood, saliva, hair, magic. There’s definitely something wrong with her after her turning, but that’s not all that’s fucked up, Zal. We won’t know for sure for another twenty or so days until her DNA results are back from our lab and we would also need a sample from Adrian too, but I have Adrian’s inherent magic trapped in that little orb he gave you back before you met Mizrak, remember the one?”

„I do. But what does that have to do with anything? You’re so fucking antsy that I swear you’ve discovered the next trendy weapon of mass destruction or something, Mazatl.”, he whispered, trying to remain as calm as possible because seeing her that fucking rattled was not sitting well with him. Not at all. The Belmont girl was an annoyance, sure, but they would unload her on Adrian in less than twenty four hours and then all of what had been happening for the past few days would have been just a bad dream. Nothing more. Nothing less either, but definitely nothing more. Then he would have the time to sit with Mizrak and get whatever it was that was making his lover so intense lately out of the Turk, one single blowjob at a time. Those always worked wonders on relaxing Miz just enough to get the younger man to forget what was proper and all that. From time to time, Mizrak just needed to be helped out of his own fucking head and Olrox was definitely willing and ready to be used as a very talkative sex toy for a few days. The last time that had happened, it had lasted well over a week before the Turk had declared himself sated and his brain quiet. And only after all of that had Mizrak started talking about what had been bothering him back then. The fighting in Europe and the empty deaths all over Asia had been at the forefront of Miz’s misery back in the nineteen forties and fifties and sixties. And seventies. Olrox had provided a lot of therapeutic sex to his lover over the past hundred or so years. Mazatl sighed loudly and pulled him out of his head, Olrox’s eyes following her jerky movements through the room until she settled back down on the regal looking chair next to the windows. „You really don’t want to look me in the eyes, do you? Because you think your theory is so wild that I won’t believe you.”

„You, Olrox, despite being a god and also a vampire and also part of an almost extinct people, still are perfectly rational and could never believe some of the wildest things that people do with eternity. And I’m not talking about your kind of eternity. You’re old, but to immortals like Vlad or the Lioness or even your own feathery self, five hundred years is child’s play. Some of these immortals choose to simply bond with humans and integrate with them fully. You were born as the Feathered Serpent because you are the Feathered Serpent. Turning into a vampire has been coincidental for you, though you’ve adapted to it excellently due to... Everything. Spite. The god that you are. Spite once more. I’m sure I’ve not said spite enough when it comes to you.”, she grinned, but the look on her face was anything but amused. The Belmont had rattled her. But not Giselle herself, Olrox would bet his left fucking pinkie. No. It wasn’t Giselle that was the issue. It wasn’t even what Giselle had been turned into and what that meant. No. It was something about the girl’s blood. „The magic I’ve extracted from her. Well, the magic she has voluntarily given to me to test, quite honestly, since she is cooperative if you don’t try to kill her, Olrox, is similar to Adrian’s. Similar enough that, from my experience with magic and all, they could only be related. Closely. Very closely.”

„You’re telling me that Giselle is his daughter? I don’t think... I.”, Olrox sputtered, his mouth falling open and his mind spinning a thousand and one scenarios a minute because he could fucking swear on the blood of his own people that Adrian had absolutely no clue who the girl was. And. And Mazatl was shaking her head. „Not his daughter? I don’t understand, sister. Stop drawing this out. Whatever craziness this is, just spit it out, Maz. This is giving me a headache and those only go away with a lot of blood or with a lot of sex and we don’t seem to be having the time for any of that.”

„She’s not his daughter. It’s worse. Much, much worse.”, Mazatl cackled. Histerically, if Olrox were to be perfectly honest and all, though he was more than relieved right then and there that she couldn’t read his thoughts. Not even a little. Fucking fuck on a fucking fuckstick. She got herself under control after a few moments and gestured for Olrox to sit down on the padded bench next to the wall, the heavy curtains blocking out all of the rays of the sun from that part of the room. She was soaking in it, though and she looked ethereal. If he had ever had any interest in females or women altogether, he might have tried his luck with her. Might have gotten eaten in the process, but fuck if she wouldn’t have been worth the trouble. He sat down. It didn’t look like he had any other choice, quite honestly. He sat down and she spoke. „Giselle fucking Belmont isn’t Adrian’s daughter. That would have been fucking easy. No. Oh no. She’s not his daughter. She’s his fucking sister. Giselle Belmont isn’t Giselle Belmont. I don’t even know if Giselle Belmont has ever existed or if the real one is carrying another name and is out there in the world, vibing somewhere. Or maybe Giselle Belmont is an identity that the people that raised her invented for her. She is Adrian’s full sister, I want you to keep that in mind, Olrox. And Giselle is twenty five or so years old. That means that that rumour that Adrian had been clinging to for centuries, the one that said that his human mother was still alive and still with Vlad, is very much true. Lisa is still alive. Vlad ia still alive. And they had another child. Which, if I would have to take a fucking wild as fuck guess, the Belmonts took from them somehow. Took and hid and I don’t know why the world isn’t burning right now as it did before, when Lisa was first killed by the people of Târgoviște. But there’s more to this. So much more. Except that I think we’re in Vlad’s direct path of fucking destruction. And I don’t want to die, Olrox. You don’t want to die either. Mizrak wants to meet his god even less. So we’re all fucked. All of us. Unless the DNA testing proves me wrong. In about twenty days. But I don’t think so.”

Chapter Text

„You mean to tell me that I’ve rescued Vlad and Lisa’s second child and that you both think that that won’t actually count for anything because Vlad has a tendency to go into a mindless rage whenever people are hurting his blood? I don’t want to sound like a broken record here, especially one that would be so identical to Adrian’s own broken record, but what about Adrian himself? Does Vlad go into his destroy humanity for daring to hurt my preciousness only when it comes to women? Or what is happening there? Because.”, Mizrak pointed out, the Turk’s fingers carding through Olrox’s long hair with ease. The older man almost purred with the pleasure of it, Mazatl half boggling her eyes at how docile and permissive Olrox was with Mizrak and half snickering under her breath for the same fucking reason, the Nahuatl assumed. He wanted to poke his tongue out at her, but his lover lifted a sharp eyebrow at the interplay between himself and Mazatl and Olrox pouted, but accepted the redirection of his focus back to the matter at hand.

Which was shitty and very much an issue that he didn’t want to deal with. Vlad was a relic of a time long passed. Like the big E had been. Like Drolta. Just. Olrox was a modern man who wanted modern problems, like where to park his hydrogen powered car or his personal sized space ship. He didn’t want to have to worry about the vampire boogeyman coming out of the mists of time once more because of a millenia old war that... That served no one but said boogeyman and the very fucking heads of whoever was fighting for the humans that time around. Honour and principles were very good things to fight for when one didn’t have to worry about dying of whatever recent iteration of the plague was going around during that particular war or of sheer starvation. He shrugged internally. He was a survivor. He’d been naive once, but naivety had only gotten him trussed up, taken from his people, held in chains and raped for something close to a fucking century, so he had ditched naivety and decided that conflict avoidance was his new best friend. Also, being a god helped with all of that, though being a starved and constantly abused god didn’t seem to have been any different than being a regular starved and constantly abused person. Alas. Water under the bridge. So much water. So many bridges. Everyone that had ever dipped their dicks or their fingers or their tongues in Olrox without his express and enthusiastic consent were long dead and would remain so permanently. Mizrak leaned over him and smoothed out his forehead. Oh. He had been frowning.

„I’m okay, dear heart. Just memories. I have more of those than I would care for.”, Olrox sighed and rolled into a sitting position, the couch in the upstairs living room fighting him all the way. It was soft. It was smooth. He loved it. And it loved him laying there, his head previously on Mizrak’s thigh. He sighed. „Because, Miz, then it would mean that we’re not only caught in Vlad’s drama, but that we’re also caught in Adrian and Vlad’s family drama. And the last time those two had beef, the entire land between the Carpathian mountains and the Danube burned to ashes. Twice over. And was invaded by night creatures.”

„According to whatever scarce sources I could dig up and bribe into talking with me, the sightings of Vlad have been rare and he’s never been with anyone else but Lisa. There’s nothing in the magical community about a Forgemaster working with Vlad either and you know how we like to keep each other appraised of what is going on.”, Mazatl offered, tucking her long feet underneath her ass and playing with her long, dark hair, braiding it and taking that braid apart over and over again. Giselle was still downstairs, though Mizrak had assured them both that the girl was doing much, much better and that she was just sleeping and eating some of the blood that Maz had provided for her to munch on. Though some fresh meat might be needed too, Olrox supposed. Giselle’s front teeth were definitely fangs, like a vampire’s, but the rest of her sharpies resembled more those of a Were of whatever kind she might have been bitten by. „Look, I’m not saying we can’t gain something from this. I know you, my hot headed holiness, and I know you would love to find a way to sneak some favours out of this and to have both father, son and the holy ghost downstairs owe you their fucking lives, but we have to thread... I don’t even know. Carefully is putting it mildly. We have to be Vlad proof somehow.”

„And we’re not fucking Vlad proof after having rescued his daughter?”, the Turk muttered incredulously, running a hand over his tired looking face. Olrox didn’t like that. His lover was not supposed to look so over every single fucking thing in the whole wide world. No. Mizrak was happy to be a scholar of and a soldier for any good cause out there, having fought for in so many liberation wars over the centuries that Olrox had lost count at some point. Just. Mizrak was always supposed to be the idealistic one and the one who got up to fight another day and the one who would never stop standing up for everything from the whales to the children of Palestine and Olrox didn’t know what to do with the tiredness in Mizrak’s eyes. Help it settle and help his lover rest, he supposed, but they had no time for real rest. Not if things were about to take a turn for the shitty quite soon. „No. Of course we don’t. Because fucking Vlad has a history of not giving much of a fuck about his children. Also zero fucks about those that have maybe saved his children’s lives. Vlad only cares about Lisa. And thus, only cares about his children because they are a part of Lisa. Not even then, in Adrian’s fucking case. Or, it looks like, in Giselle’s.”

„I mean, I don’t want to be taking Vlad’s side in anything much since he has more than proven himself unfuckingreasonable when it comes to times of immense distress, but we do have to take into consideration the fact that Adrian was trying to kill his father at the time. Actively. Not that killing Vlad could be avoided until the end. From what I understood of the situation from a friend or two that refused to go to said castle in Transylvania, but that did receive news from those couple of months, Vlad was... On a long and drawn out suicide mission, it seemed.”, Mazatl shrugged, her head dropping to the back of the couch and her chest expanding as she let out a low groan. Followed by a growl. Olrox was impressed by how her vocal cords could apparently produce both sounds in rapidfire succession. „Before you frown yourself into a conniption, darling Mizrak, I’m not suggesting that Vlad’s further ignoring of his own son and then whatever is happening with Giselle excuses anything, but. Just. I don’t know. I think their situations might be difficult to compare. Maybe. What do I know? The only thing I’ve been responsible for keeping alive has been your lover and look how well that went for everyone involved. He’s undead. So.”

„I’m a god too, if that softens the blow at all?”, Olrox smiled softly, his hand reaching out for hers, Maz leaning in from across the small distance between the two couches and tangling their fingers together for just a few moments. He had been her charge, that was true, but he’d been unaware of her at the time and had run from all of her attempts to help him or, later on, to free him. For a long while, at least. They had both mourned those lost years, but they were long gone and nothing could have been done about them, at least in Olrox’s opinion. But. Alas. Not everyone could move part things as naturally and as easily as he could. He snorted, nose burying into Mizrak’s belly for a long moment. The king of getting over shit and moving on, that was him for sure. Absolutely. He sighed. „In my very humble opinion, Vlad fucked up and Lisa is either just as self involved as he is or simply unable to get away from the big guy. Unsure which one is fucking worse, honestly. They’re both going to hit Adrian hard. His parents are either unfeeling assholes who abandoned him for the better part of a millennium or his father is keeping his mother sort of hostage and has been for the last five to six hundred years. Cool. As for Giselle. Fuck. Do we think she knows any of this? What do we assume? That she’s a plant? Or that she is just as in the dark as her sibling?”

„I don’t see how she could have been a plant, though, unless Vlad himself had... Done a switched at birth kind of bullshit.”, Mizrak waved his hands around helplessly, trying to capture his own train of thought, Olrox knew. The Nahuatl gestured for Maz to wait before replying and she nodded, her eyes locked onto Olrox’s lover. With care. He smiled. Mazatl liked Mizrak and that was pretty much all that Olrox could ask of her. Genuinely so. „That seems pointless and like some comedic evil mastermind. Like Gru. I don’t know, this definitely doesn’t strike me as something a general of Vlad’s calibre would ever pull on a whim. And with a newborn that he’s supposed to care madly about because it is Lisa’s child. The thing about Giselle is that she is a Belmont. I have spent some time investigating her independently before I went on my mission to retrieve her. I do know how to take care of myself, Olrox. No matter what you say. No. Don’t even dare try to contradict me. Just. Listen. I have all of my research on my private server. I can access it from here and I can show you both what I mean by that. Here. Let me up, sweetheart.”

Olrox blushed. It wasn’t a rare occurrence for Mizrak to call him sweetheart or dear heart or anything of that nature, but to do it so openly, in front of one of Olrox’s friends, that was important and a step forward that the older man had... Had not dared to have himself hope for. Sure, Miz would go out with him and they would be together and they had lived together over the centuries many times and they had slept with others together, but. He swallowed hard. And then Mizrak stood up as Olrox rolled into a sitting position and leaned in, absentmindedly kissing his forehead before going straight to the laptop on the desk, picking it up elegantly and rejoining Mazatl and him on the mirrored couches without actually realising that Olrox was feeling a bit of many ways. Shy. Pleased. A bit shellshocked and a lot interested in the current development of his relationships with Mizrak, though he didn’t really know what it was. And he didn’t know how he had gotten himself into the emotional mess that his feelings, apparently not fully reciprocated by his lover, had become. An inhale. An exhale. Mazatl frowned and stood up, gesturing towards the basement where the not Belmont was still resting. Olrox knew that she had seen something in his eyes that had made her want to give him and Mizrak a few moments of privacy. He craved that. But he was also scared of that. He didn’t want to distract his lover from surviving fucking Vlad, but he also needed to know and to understand what in the flying fucks was happening. Because the Turk had been slowly behaving differently with him over the past few years, that was true, but what were five or so years in the two hundred fifty years that he had had of him being Mizrak’s, but Mizrak being pointedly not his at times. The past couple of days had been even more different, with all that had happened and with how desperate the Turk had been in bed earlier. Just. He nodded to Mazatl and caught Mizrak’s hand as the man sat down next to him, confusion blooming over his handsome face.

Chapter Text

„What exactly is happening right now, Ol?”, the Turk asked, voice low and both curious and somewhat worried.

Oh, his lover knew that Olrox had noticed that something was different and off or... Not. Maybe something was finally right in a way that it hadn’t ever been before. Olrox was scared to ask because he had never understood the deep rooted shame that Mizrak’s religion had poisoned him with and the need that the other man had had to punish himself almost exclusively for liking men. For centuries. Sure, the last half a decade or so had gone far better for the two of them than all the hundreds of years before that, but. Still. Still, Olrox was unsure and scared to shake the boat just when it seemed to have been sailing quite smoothly and in a straight course towards the destination of his choice. Straight. He snorted internally. Queer. For sure queer. He had a definite and almost exclusive preference for the male form, in whatever species that might be in, as long as everyone was consenting and of an adult age. But. But he was old enough to have dabbled here and there with some that preferred a female presentation and he couldn’t deny that it had been an interesting happening. At the time. As for Mizrak, well. Olrox had lived for a very long fucking time with the idea that if his lover could have chosen to also be attracted to women, the Turk would have gladly buried all of his feelings for men deep down and would have ignored them forever. But that was unfair to Mizrak, he knew. He knew and yet he had never managed to shake that feeling that his lover loved him in spite and despite of him being a man and not simply because he was lovable and not simply because Mizrak wanted him outside of anything more than just the two of them being a good match. He couldn’t go down that road, not right then and not right there, when he had Mizrak putting the laptop away and gathering him in those strong arms of his. Olrox went willingly, straddling the younger man and letting his green eyes meet Mizrak’s deep brown ones for a long, long moment. His lover smiled softly and nuzzled his cheek, pulling Olrox’s head to his shoulder. An inhale. An exhale. He was being waited out. Mizrak was a master of patience, especially when it came to Olrox. It had always forced the Nahuatl to make the first fucking step. Always. And he would yet again, mostly because Miz couldn’t really know what he was thinking about, no matter how much he wanted to make his lover able to read his mind at times.

„You’re... You’re changed, Miz. You are changed. You have changed.”, he started, his fingers playing with the frayed edges of Mizrak’s band tshirt. It wasn’t a vintage tshirt either. It was just that old, the Queen logo on the fabric faded with time and multiple washes. So long ago had Mizrak bought that tshirt and yet those few decades had been truly transformative, Olrox knew. He inhaled. He exhaled. A human countenance that he had not managed to leave behind and that helped him both center himself and blend in when needed. Mizrak used his breathing pattern to tap something on his back. Olrox smiled. He knew what that was. „Are you seriously asking me, in the Morse code, if I’m okay? That’s adorable. Why did you do that?”

„I didn’t want to interrupt your thinking. It felt important.”, his lover murmured, Mizrak’s fingers combing through Olrox’s long and flowing hair easily. With familiarity. He sighed, but offer much of anything else. He wanted the Turk to open that gorgeous mouth of his and actually come forward first. With something. Anything. He could wait too. He did. Mizrak smiled against his hair. He felt it. „I did change. I am changing. You did too. You might not see it, but you did too. You... You ran a lot more when we first met. You ran from me. No, wait, let me finish. I hurt you. You used me. We were not amazing at first. We didn’t meet in the proper circumstances, I had spent all of life in one form of organised religion and one only and then the Abbot decided to sell all of our souls and bargain with that woman. And then you showed up. Gorgeous. Impossibly gorgeous and everything I had craved all of my life and everything I had assured myself and forced myself into believing that I was wrong for wanting. You showed up. And you were easy to care for. To hate, at first, for leading me into fucking sin.”

„You showed up at my door, warrior monk.”, Olrox twisted up, lips fighting a smile even as Mizrak’s words weren’t quite the ones he was hoping for. But he had heard an at first there. He would wait. The Turk was glowing and licking his lips and seemed desperate to make him understand something without saying it out loud. But he was done with that. He wanted to hear the words from his lover. Olrox sniffed. „Continue, lover. I’m all ears.”

„Actually, you’re mostly eyes and scorn, I swear.”, the Turk pointed out and Olrox had to agree. So he did, nodding regally and trying to smoke himself into just his eyes and his attitude, but got caught in a kiss before he could manage it completely. An inhale. An exhale. The thud of blood in their veins. Mizrak pulled back and forced their eyes to meet, his lover’s fingers catching and holding Olrox’s chin firmly between them. „At first, I hated you for smashing through every single one of my very carefully erected walls in one single conversation. I was mesmerised by your eyes. And by your sharp, sharp tongue. Then, after you made me a vampire, I hated you for giving me the time to wallow in that reality. Of wanting you beyond what was sane and beyond what I thought my faith demanded of me. Of wanting you beyond the fear of eternal damnation. But that was all a lie, Olrox. I have never hated you. Not for a single moment in my miserable life. I have always hated myself. No. Not like that. I had always hated myself. And that made me unfit to be anything to you.”

Olrox couldn’t say anything. Much. Or at all. Because it didn’t feel like anything of what Mizrak was saying was about him or said to him. Perhaps it was and perhaps he had been so lax on his duties of confession as a deity that he didn’t know how to recognise the need for that anymore in his subjects. Except. Except, of course, that the Turk wasn’t his subject in any way, shape or form and was, rather obviously, more his Consort than anything else. He buried his face in Miz’s neck and waited for his lover to find some more words, if those were needed. And. Well. From how Mizrak’s breathing was not slowing down at all, the Turk did want to say something else. Continue his confession, probably. Olrox wondered if he should feel any amount of guilt for not confronting Miz before about his changing and changed behaviour. It felt like all that his lover had been waiting for was a question from him to let it all out. And yet. And yet, Mizrak was a grown man and a two hundred and fifty year old vampire who had had centuries to work on his own prejudices and desires and needs and wants and who should have found the strenght to open his mouth on his own. Not poked and prodded by Olrox. But then again, Olrox had no ground to stand on either. Mizrak hadn’t been wrong with how he had called Olrox a runner. The warrior monk of a long forgotten time had had the Nahuatl figured out in the blink of an eye. A liar. A survivor. An unlikely ally in a great time of need. A lover.

„You couldn’t fix me, Olrox. Nobody could. Not... Not from the outside in. No. That would not be how that would have to go. I needed to grow into my own skin and grow out of the armour that I had been forced into since before I had whiskers. And that wasn’t something that I had the capacity to do fast enough to not hurt you more than I could possibly endure.”, Mizrak shrugged, lips finding Olrox’s high cheekbone and the top of one pointy ear that was peeking out from between the thick strands of his pitch black hair. The older man sighed and shuddered, not hiding his body’s reaction to his lover’s touch. He wanted to bite at the Turk for presuming to know what he could or could not endure when it came to pain delivered by a loved one, but he assumed the same could be said my Mizrak about him. Olrox himself couldn’t presume what Mizrak could take at seeing him hurting over and over again, year after year after year. Instead, the Turk had chosen a completely different path. „So I took your own methods to heart, lover mine. And I ran. I ran as far and as fast as I could. And I ran for my life and for our future. And I ran, but I also didn’t cut you loose. Not once. Not even once did I cut you loose and I will not regret that or apologise for that. I always knew you were my eternity and that you held my heart inside of your own body and I could never force myself to cut you loose. You deserved so much more than I was back then, in France. Back then. Even a hundred years back, Ol. I was a miserable, miserable fool that would not have done anything else but drag you down with me into my own personal hell. So I ran. I ran and I kept you tied to me and I kept you from loving someone else. I couldn’t. I knew I had to fight for myself and to make myself into a better person. I knew. For myself. But I wasn’t enough of an incentive for myself. You, though. Us. A future us where I could be the man that you deserve and the man that would love you as such, openly and honestly and with more and more of my heart on my sleeve every single day. That was an incentive. And I took it.”

„You never told me to go, no. But. Mizrak. Look at me, please.”, Olrox murmured, his lips unable to stop themselves from touching every single high point of Mizrak’s face, the Turk blushing hard and fast and still trying to hide. From Olrox, perhaps, but maybe also from the absolution of Olrox’s words. After all, Miz had always been a glutton for punishment and not of the fun kind. But if the older man offered both forgiveness and a sort of reciprocity in the not letting go business, then Mizrak would have to face at least half a century of a back and forth that could have been easily avoided if only words would have come out of his very lovely mouth. Olrox chose to ignore the fact that he could have asked too. He felt like he had done enough of the emotional heavy lifting of their relationship. Not of Mizrak’s inner life, of course not, but of their relationship, he had shouldered more than his share of their emotional connection. So he decided to not feel bad for the timing of everything. An inhale. An exhale. And his eyes were met. „You never told me to leave, Miz. But you also didn’t tell me to stay. I stayed. Because you hold my heart inside of you too, lover mine. My love. I stayed, Mizrak, because leaving you wasn’t an option. Sure, that doesn’t make either of us the healthiest or the smartest, but. Well. We fought for one another and we got to here. To now. To us. Now tell me, Miz. What are we? What is us all about? What do you see our future as? What we were is important, sure, but what we will be is even more so. What we are now and what we will be tomorrow and the day after tomorrow and the century after next and all that, that is what matters, Miz. Tell me, my love. What will we be next?”

„We’ll be us.”, the younger man answered and Olrox did not scoff at that. He didn’t. He felt like he should have scoffed. Abso. Fucking. Lutely. So. It was the coward’s way out of what Olrox had asked. He wanted his lover to spell the fuck out what the future would look like for the two of them and he wanted it right that fucking instant. He frowned. He felt his breathing pick up and he struggled to get up from Mizrak’s lap, but found himself held tightly by the Turk. Held. And forced to lock eyes with Mizrak. He could have smoked out of the embrace. He could have smoked out of the room. He could have smoked out of the fucking house. The continent. The plain of existence. That felt a bit dramatic, in the end, but he could have. Instead, just like all the times before when he had wanted to throttle Mizrak, yet didn’t, he chose to stay and wait the fucker out. An inhale. An exhale. Mizrak’s face was almost unreadable. Almost. That fucking stoic mask that the military and the rigidity of his personal faith had beaten into Mizrak was struggling to stay in place. Because his lover was scared. Terrified. Olrox stopped struggling, but he also didn’t reach out to soothe his lover. He couldn’t. He wouldn’t run. But Mizrak had to breach the chasm between them on his own. Olrox had smoked himself over it enough times. He was tired. He was in love. He just wanted his partner to love him as he deserved. Trembling fingers caught onto his hanging, sapphire and gold earrings. „Stop. Stop, please. Please. I need you to listen. I know I fucked up. I know I’ve hurt you for centuries and I know that I am still hurting you now. Just. Please. Let me finish. Please, Olrox. Just.”

Chapter Text

He nodded. He couldn’t put anything into words that wasn’t, at best, a two hundred and fifty year old frustrated scream and, at worst, a fountain of pain that he could have found a way to express earlier. And. Maybe. Maybe some of that would have made Mizrak more willing to talk to him earlier. The Turk didn’t need to be the perfect queer person in order for Olrox to love him as much and as desperately as he did. But Mizrak didn’t know that. Olrox had never told him that. So he took his own guilt at face value and inhaled sharply, nodding again and sitting stiffly in Mizrak’s arms. He hadn’t even moved to the couch once more. He felt like that was character growth on his part. He hadn’t run. He had stayed. And his lover wasn’t hiding anymore. No. His lover was talking. Finally. After centuries.

„I am not being facetious when I’m telling you that we will be us. We will be what we have been for centuries, Olrox. Lovers. Partners. A couple. What we are now. I...”, Mizrak swallowed dryly and licked at his lower lip. Once. Twice. Talking wasn’t one of the Turk’s strong suits, Olrox was well aware of that. He wanted to soothe his lover. His partner. But he couldn’t. Not yet. He couldn’t bring himself to rip open that wound that had been festering in his soul for so long and dare to let it heal in the light. Not yet. Not fucking yet. Not until Mizrak was done talking. He shivered. And dropped his forehead to Mizrak’s. He was a fool. He couldn’t stand seeing the younger man hurting, so he would rather rip himself apart than not offer some kind of balm to Mizrak’s insecurities and. And he was an actual fool. But the Turk exhaled loudly and buried his face in Olrox’s hair, the one spilling between them, and the older vampire sighed, letting his arms cradle his lover. An inhale. An exhale. The blink of an eye. And he was sat on the couch, Mizrak kneeling between his parted legs, the Turk’s hands holding his own reverently. Worshipping him. He gasped silently and watched his lover with something akin to awe, his vivid green eyes locked with Mizrak’s dark ones. „I need you to hear me out, Olrox. I need you to understand that I love you. I love you. I have loved you ever since I have set eyes on you and I have loved you through hating you and through hating myself. I have never, not once in the past two and a half centuries, not loved you. I have not ever not went to sleep thinking of you and have not ever not woke up after dreaming of you. You don’t haunt me, Olrox. You possess me. Every single part of me, down to my marrow and to my soul and to my atoms. I am yours, Olrox. I am yours in a way that I have never been anyone’s before and that I will never be anyone’s ever again. I am yours. I am not my God’s and I am not my Devil’s. I am yours. So whatever it is that you want us to be, Olrox, we will be. We are. Partners. Lovers. If you would have me after all of this time, we could swear to each other. So.”

„Yes to all of that, but you’re going to have to ask me to marry you at a later date, when I’m not snotty and puffed up from crying and... Just. Get up here. Don’t kneel at my feet. Never. Not like this. Not for this.”, Olrox whispered, his fingers wiping at his cheeks as fast as he could and his lap suddenly full of a solid wall of muscle that was trying to hug him, smother him and kiss him, all at the same time. Oh, and that was also crying. They were both crying. They were both fools, he surmised, though for very different reasons and coming from very different pasts. And yet. And yet, they were also the same. Survivors. Relics of a time long past, but never really gone. And still. Still alive, still together, still fighting. He inhaled Mizrak’s half moan and half sob and smoked both of them out of the living room and right back to their bedroom, tangling together as they fell onto the mattress. Olrox rolled himself on top and leaned in, his hair drapped on his left side and down to Mizrak’s chest. Their eyes locked. He smiled. „Yes. You’re mine. As I am yours. I love you as you love me. And I will swear to you. But you will ask me properly. I have standards. I always imagined a proposal in a balloon, under the moon. Some mountains in the background. Maybe we can be tourists in Cappadocia and you can do it there. What do you think?”

„We definitely could. I’ve been carrying this ring with me for the past...”, the younger man started, grinning wildly when Olrox realised what he had said and yelped, patting Mizrak’s body as it the aforementioned ring would be on his lover’s person. There was a ring. There was a ring for him. From Mizrak. There was a ring that the Turk had bought for him. A while back. He scrunched up his nose when his search proved to be futile, but also when Mizrak started laughing, the giggles beginning small and then turning into full on peals of laughter, Olrox pouting and allowing himself to be rolled around. His lover straddled him and winked, leaning in closer until they were nose to nose. Again. They both really liked that position. „Want me to propose now? Or sometime later, in a balloon, in Cappadocia?”

„How long have you had the ring for?”, he asked, unsure why that was the only thing that he could think of to ask Miz even before offering an answer to his lover’s previous question. Olrox needed to know that. Just. That. How long had Mizrak been holding onto a ring for him and how much of an idiot had both of them had been. He needed to know that. He needed to and he needed to let his soul settle in the knowledge that Mizrak loved him and that he loved Mizrak and that he hadn’t been imagining anything for the past two and a half centuries. And he needed a lot more talking to be done before swearing to Mizrak. They needed to clear the space between them of a lot more debris than what had already been clarified. But. But he also wanted his ring and his man and he had standards, sure, but he also had no more patience to speak of. None at all. He swallowed against the tightness in his throat and waited. For a kiss. For an answer. He got both.

„Oh, since the very early two thousands. I had it in my mind since the late 1990s and then I spent about half a decade trying to find a person, human or vampire or whatever else, that could craft it to my exact specifications. And then I had it made. It took a little while to find all the materials and all the things and I might have sneaked out with one of your rings one night for the jeweller to measure it and all that, but. Yeah. I’ve had your ring for the better part of a quarter of a century.”, the Turk answered, voice low and eager and amused and Olrox wanted to bite at him. Bit him. Fuck him. Blow him. Also, maybe scream at him for the fact that the bad lost twenty five fucking years of bliss... And they had eternity to account for. He inhaled. He exhaled. He nodded. Something must have cleared from his gaze because Mizrak smiled softly and nuzzled his cheek, the Turk’s nose burying in his hair. „You smell good. As always. Sometimes, you smell like blood and sweat and the muddy clog of a battle. But other times, you’re just you. Refined. Elegant. Royal. I spent years trying to decide on what a ring worthy of you would look like. What it would be made of. How it would work with the rest of you and with your magic and with your wardrobe and with your flair. I could propose to you in a balloon in Cappadocia, love of my second life, and I will if that’s what you want.”

„Do it here. Now. Ask me.”, Olrox let their lips touch in a kiss that felt like it was half desire and half worship. He inhaled Mizrak’s gasp and he exhaled his own centuries of lust and of love into his... Fiancé? That was such a French word. Well. It was a French word, after all. Betrothed. He liked that word better. Promised. Spoken for. He grinned and waited for the word, whichever one might be, to settle in his mind. Connected formally to another soul. To Mizrak’s soul, better yet. For good. Forever. He frowned and caught Mizrak’s face in his hands, locking their eyes together before the Turk could get up and go in search of the mystery ring that had taken half a decade to craft. „I am a god, Miz. Betrothing yourself to me and then swearing to me, it will tie your soul to mine forever. Beyond forever. Whatever comes after forever and after we’re dust and after we walk into the sun. I’m eternal. And you will be too. There will be no passing to your god’s heaven or hell if you put your soul next to mine. Mizrak. Did you consider that? Please. Did you?”

„Consider it? Olrox. I will say this as many times as I have to and I know I will have to say it a lot because... Well, because I’ve hurt you for so long. But. Listen to me.”, Miz smiled softly, the happiness in him actually reflected in every single crease on the other man’s face. Fuck, his lover looked beautiful. Beautiful and determined, it seemed. Olrox nodded. He was listening. He knew what he had heard before from Mizrak. But. Still. He had to put that forward. He had to. He simply had to do that. He had to bring that to Mizrak’s attention and explain it once more and he had to listen to his lover. He nodded. And listened. Perhaps he would even absorb the words in the end. Long fingers caught his chin as lips found his once more. His eyes fluttered shut. He could listen. He did. „I am yours. I’ve always been yours. I was born to be yours, but I just didn’t know it. Before you, I was throwing myself to one god and fearing a devil that turned out of not have the face that I was expecting. That god abandoned me and allowed me to fall prey to the devil wearing the cross. I was made for a god. But not that one. This one. This one. This one, in the flesh, this one that never abandoned me, this one that saved me and my soul over and over again. I was made to love you, Olrox. And I chose you. From that moment when I first laid eyes on you. I chose you, even if that brought me so much internal misery. My own fault, not yours. My lover. My love. My eternity and beyond. My god to serve and to worship. My partner. My husband, if you will choose me too.”

Chapter Text

„I’m Adrian.”, Vlad’s oldest child said, voice low and seemingly calm. Giselle frowned. Olrox had to admire her instincts, whatever they were made of and whatever she was made of, because they were on point. Adrian was far, far from calm. Adrian was confused. And angry. Maybe not at Giselle. Maybe a little at Giselle too, but even Olrox, who was not a fan of the Belmont girl, could see that getting mad at Giselle was useless. And pointless. Though, truly, she wasn’t a Belmont.

„I’m Giselle.”, she replied, mimicking Adrian’s serious and focused countenance perfectly, the two of them not exactly mirrors of each other. No. Far from it, actually. If Mazatl hadn’t told him that Giselle was, for all intents and purposes, Adrian’s full blooded sister, the Nahuatl wouldn’t have actually believed that. Well, Maz was never wrong about the magical testing, so Olrox had no doubt about the accuracy of his priestess’ words. Still, the DNA would come back in a few days. A rush job, but hopefully a high quality one. Adrian had not... Taken it well. The news. Giselle had been shell shocked for a few moments and then she had snorted, whispering a low guess that explains why they all hated my guts. No context. Mizrak had wanted to ask for context, but Olrox had not let his fiancé do that. They didn’t need context and she didn’t seem to realise that she had spoken out loud. Sometimes, some things just didn’t belong to anyone else but whoever went through them. He felt himself flush with warmth. Fiancé. „I’m your sister.”

„I know. That’s what everyone here says, at least.”, Adrian shrugged and Olrox rolled his eyes, holding Mazatl’s wrist to stop her from doing something rash. Like cutting Adrian’s tongue out or something. Or, well, at least trying to. He grinned sharply and clapped his hands, pointing towards the door at his back, Mizrak somewhere up on the ground floor of the house, waiting for them with a full on presentation of everything they knew about Giselle that far. Adrian sighed and lifted his hands at the sheer look of disdain on Maz’s face, ignoring Olrox for the time being. Rude. „I apologise. That came out wrong. I don’t doubt your magical prowess, your Holyness. I would never. It’s just so fucking hard for me to understand why would my parents have another child after effectively abandoning the one they already had and fucking off to the literal ends of the Earth, without ever letting said child know anything about them. Ever. For five hundred years, give or take half a century or so.”

„Yeah, get in line. You’re wondering why your parents had another child. I am said child, apparently, and I would also like to know why I’ve been had and then also ditched with a bunch of people that hated me for breathing.”, the young woman shrugged, moving to pass by Olrox and Mazatl and get out of the dungeon that she had called detox center for the past seventy two hours. Adrian’s hand came up and wrapped around her forearm. Gently. Olrox was impressed. The older Țepeș was getting better at holding his temper in check and Giselle was right. Adrian’s ire, while just and justifiable, was to be directed at Lisa and Vlad. Giselle was both a collateral victim and an innocent bystander in a centuries old game of hide and seek. Her dark brown eyes lifted to Adrian’s golden ones. Lithe. She was lithe compared to Adrian’s bulk. Sure, she was about as tall as the older man, but she was lithe. Muscled, though. Olrox had to admit that she was beautiful. Different than Adrian, but beautiful. While Adrian was Lisa’s spitting image, Giselle seemed to favour more of Vlad’s colouring and features, at least from what Olrox had seen of the man in paintings. She frowned at her brother and Adrian didn’t seem to know anymore what he had wanted from her. „Yes? What is it?”

„Nothing. Just. I apologise. You’re not to blame for our parents’ mistakes.”, the blond offered neutrally before standing up to his full height and meeting Olrox’s gaze easily. With practiced ease, the Nahuatl noticed. Adrian might have been talented enough to fool someone who didn’t know him as intimately as Olrox did, but he could see how shaken the other man was. Still, Adrian’s lips lifted into a smile. „Let’s go up top. And you have to tell me all about how you got to wear that ring, Olrox. I’m so fucking curious.”

„It’s pretty, no?”, Olrox grinned widely, thrusting his hand towards Adrian and snorting when the other man studied the ring carefully and seriously before nodding. A decision had been made. His engagement ring was pretty. He bit down on his lower lip to keep himself from giggling like a schoolgirl with her first crush. But. His ring was gorgeous. It was all sleek gold and delicate jade filigree encased in the material, topped with one moderately large, but incredibly powerful emerald, all of that set in a very intricate bouquet of marigolds that Olrox couldn’t help but feel in awe of. On a ring. All of that. On a small ring too. Elegant. Not thicker than a centimeter. Carved into the underside of his ring were words, but those were private. They belonged to Mizrak and him alone. „There’s not much of a story to it. One comes to wear an engagement ring because one was proposed marriage. And one accepted.”

„Marriage, huh? I’m happy for you and Miz.”, Adrian licked his lips and tilted his head to the side, watching as his sister and Mazatl ascended the dungeon stairs after having left the two of them behind. Giselle couldn’t care less about Olrox’s new ring and the meaning of that, which was fair. The Nahuatl wasn’t too cut up about that. And Maz had already screamed and screetched and jumped up and down about the development. Cried too. Offered her services as a priestess to unite Olrox and Mizrak. It had been cute.

„I know. That you’re happy for Miz and me. Thank you.”, he murmured, letting his hands catch onto Adrian’s and squeeze them gently. They had history together, the Heir of Vlad and him. A long one. They could have been something different if only they weren’t so fucking different in all the ways that might not have mattered in the long run. But. Well. To make it to the long run, one had to actually get past the short run. And Olrox disliked Adrian’s high horse and the moral fortitude that the other immortal seemed to enjoy to an obscene amount. Also, Adrian was very... Self sacrificing and determined to suffer the punishment of the passing ages quite alone, if not always lonely. And judgy. Definitely judgy. „Your nose is twitching like Sabrina’s. You know, the teenage witch? What’s cooking, pumpkin spice latte?”

„Your desire to keep finding new and original ways of calling me a basic white boy is always entertaining, I swear.”, the blond rolled his eyes and climbed the basement stairs, taking them two at a time and offering Olrox a very nice and highly appreciated view of that tight backside of his. Adrian grunted. „You’re staring at my ass.”

„It’s a lovely ass. Tight and warm. I know that firsthand, after all.”, Olrox purred, the green of his eyes reflected in Adrian’s crystal clear blue ones. He grinned. Mazatl snorted loudly from the office, while Giselle sighed deeply and let out a low Mizrak, you deserve so much better, I swear, are you at all interested in women. Adrian burst out in a cackle as his sister’s words registered, Olrox marching towards the door and inhaling deeply before stepping into the room just in time to witness Mizrak’s amused look and Giselle’s curious one. Maz was bringing in popcorn bowls. His life was a fucking circus and it was all the Țepeșes fault. „If you’re done propositioning my man right in front of my salad...”.

Chapter Text

„Technically, this is popcorn.”, Mazatl offered, completely unhelpfully as per her usual stance on anything and everything concerning Olrox’s pride. He glared at his oldest companion and got blown a kiss for his efforts. He was losing his touch. And his scary factor. Surely. „Oh, stop with the glowering. She’s a toddler and you and Mizrak have led each other by the dick for two and a half centuries. My bad. By the heartstrings and all. Just sit down. Your man has an actual presentation about all of this and it’s got GIFs too.”

„I feel like I’m in an episode of The Office. Ol, I love you. I’m going to marry you. Sit down.”, Mizrak replied, waving his very big pointer stick that ended in a very tiny plastic hand all around the room. With a twirl. Olrox had to give it to his lover, Mizrak made quite a fetching presenter and, surprisingly, was very good at sales pitches. They had made quite a killing back in the late seventies selling their real estate developments to upper middle class North Americans and it had all been thanks to Mizrak and his serious business acumen. Well, not that Olrox missed that, but he was very obviously Nahuatl and no rich, white and pompous man would ever buy a million dollar house from him. He scoffed at the memory, but shook his head when Mizrak raised a questioning brow. Olrox didn’t want to steal Miz’s spotlight, not even for a brief moment. He smiled at the kiss that he received from the younger man and sat down on the indicated couch. Next to Giselle. The tiny hand at the end of Mizrak’s pointer tapped the sliver of space between the young woman and Olrox. „Leave space for Jesus. Or, in this case, for Mazatl. I don’t trust you two to not try and heckle one another to death. Adrian, just perch somewhere. Don’t be weird about it.”

„I don’t know what it is that I might be weird about, Mizrak darling.”, Adrian smirked, jumping elegantly and ending up sitting crosslegged on Olrox’s desk. The Nahuatl sighed. All of his people were, apparently, determined to ruin his very carefully curated life. He sort of loved it, quite honestly, but he couldn’t let that out or they would start painting the walls of his home dark beige or something. Adrian was painfully white at times, he had to admit that. Mizrak just looked long suffering. Maz was clearly enjoying not being the only girl in the room anymore, what with how she was sharing her own bowl of popcorn with Giselle, who still seemed unsure about her big brother. Fair. The young woman had good instincts. „We starting this thing anytime soon or do I have time for another episode of Sailor Moon?”

„Is that where you got all of twirling and spinning and pretty hair inspiration from?”, Miz snickered, lifting a hand to stop any other replies coming from the room before clicking on the projector remote control and plunging the darkened room into the eery white light of a large screen. Olrox inhaled sharply as a picture of Vlad and Lisa showed up on his office wall. A picture. Not a painting. Not a picture of a painting. No. He’d never laid actual eyes on Vlad himself before, let alone on Lisa, but Mizrak had a picture of the two, dressed casually in jeans and plaid shirts and... Not that anything could make Vlad look any less otherworldly. Just. „Mama and Papa Țepeș, as we all know. Picture courtesy of Giselle, by the way. She has actually gotten close enough to the two of them to snap this incredible photo of Vlad cosplaying as a lumberjack. Lisa does look amazing, though. I can see where both of you get your looks. Adrian. Giselle. And your moodiness. That’s all Vlad for sure. Now, this was taken two months ago in Tajikistan. We can all safely assume that Lisa and Vlad are long gone. And we should assume that they might be heading our way.”

„I don’t mean to sound like I don’t know shit about my supposed birth parents, even though I don’t shit, that’s true, but. Like. Why?”, Giselle asked, her eyes calm and wide and absolutely identical to Adrian’s. Olrox sighed. Her question wasn’t a bad one, honestly. He couldn’t... He couldn’t tell exactly why he had assumed, right from the start, that whatever shit Giselle was bringing with her would call upon Vlad’s wrath, but his instinct was that it would. And he had not survived the literal genocide of his people on brains and mercilessness alone. Instinct had also helped. The young woman turned her gaze upon all of them, studying them slowly and carefully. She was smart. Annoying as she had landed in his life pretty much like Richter had during the French Revolution, but smart. Much, much smarter than he had first assumed, her bloody appetite not included. „No, I’m serious. Why would Vlad come after you all? For rescuing me?”

„Because, dear sister, I think you are a loose end. I think I am a loose end too, but I’m old enough and powerful enough that Papa dearest didn’t bother to start a war to try and take me down. But one loose end is good and dangly. Two loose ends? Especially two loose ends that are Lisa’s children? My. My.”, Adrian offered, dropping his phone to Olrox’s desk, where it made a hollow, harsh sound. The room had frozen. Olrox couldn’t quite wrap his head around what the blond was saying, but he also found himself unsurprised, quite honestly. A loose end. But of what end, he wondered, then tensed as Giselle geared up to ask the same question. Mazatl seemed ready to throw up or throw fists, her long nails sinking into the bowl of popcorn almost savegely. Mizrak had paled. Adrian was pained, but also resigned. Olrox didn’t like that.

„A loose end. In what way?”, Mazatl whispered and Olrox wanted to kiss her.

He did.

He did, because she had asked what they all wanted to know and because she had asked what Giselle should have never been forced to ask. The Nahuatl stood up and walked to Adrian’s side, shaking his head. The blond’s sister didn’t need to know all that. They could... Mizrak caught his eyes. Olrox sighed and nodded, leaning against his desk and letting his fingers rest against Adrian’s palm. A squeeze. He waited. They all did.

Chapter Text

„I think he’s convinced Lisa that... That I’m gone. Or if I wasn’t dead then, when they returned a few months after I killed him, that I’ve died somewhere on the way to now.”, the older Țepeș started, swallowing hard and dropping his luminous eyes to the carpet. Fascinating, Olrox knew. Just like his own desire to find Vlad and wring his fucking neck. Twice fucking over. He growled low underneath his breath, which made Adrian turn towards him and bury that pretty, pretty head of his in Olrox’s shoulder. Mizrak smiled and closed the lid of his laptop, cutting the connection to the projector. The room was dark. They could all see perfectly well, but there was no more life sized picture of Vlad and Lisa hanging in mid air. „I thought about this since Lady Maz told me about you and about her suspicions about you. How you were a Belmont. Why you were a Belmont. How I had never met you because you had never existed before that very moment, twenty eight years back, when I was texted about the latest member of the line. I think you and me, sister dear, are supposed to be dead. At least as far as Lisa is concerned. As far as Vlad had her think. You and me, we’re distractions, Giselle. And we shouldn’t exist.”

„At least not outside of whatever twisted idea of familial love and contentment Vlad had envisioned for himself and Lisa. You rebelled and sided with the humans that killed your mother in the first place.”, Mizrak moved to stand on the other side of Adrian, the Turk’s long fingers tugging on the open collar of the blond’s shirt, exposing the very top of that wicked looking scar that Olrox had spent more than one night tracing with his lips. Mizrak too. Giselle gasped, while Mazatl hissed. His Priestess had seen the scarring before, but had hated it every single time. She couldn’t understand how a father could do that to his son. Olrox, sadly, could. „That’s how you got this gnarly souvenir from Papa dearest.”

„He wants us dead because we... What? Take away from Lisa’s attention and love? Or we would, if we would be there with them? They had you. I assume they wanted you and they made efforts to have you, Adrian. Vampires don’t just procreate. You were wanted. You were born of magic and of desire and of wish fulfilment.”, their youngest companion’s head dropped to her hands, Mazatl there to hold her close. They had all found a sibling and were consoling them of a shared, lived in desperation. Vlad. It was all about Vlad. He turned towards Adrian and opened his mouth, but Giselle beat him to the metaphorical punch. „You said we are loose ends. For him. That’s what you’re implying. What about her? What about Lisa? Does she. Could she think the same. Could you be wrong about this. Could she be in on this with him? Why have me as well? I. Adrian. I.”

Adrian’s form blurred from between Olrox and Mizrak, the Nahuatl’s eyes barely able to track the blond. But he didn’t need to. He knew exactly where Adrian was going and it was right in front of his baby sister, kneeling and wrapping her in his arms. An inhale. An exhale. Mazatl retreated discreetly and took her popcorn bowl with her. Giselle had frozen in Adrian’s arms, but only for a beat. Olrox could imagine what was that had made her react like that. Adrian was dangerous and she was far from the predator that her older brother was. But. Also. If Olrox could hazard a guess. Adrian smelled like home. Like shared blood and like warmth. Adrian might not have met her before that day, but he was hugging her and she melted against him.

„I-i. I don’t know, Giselle. I don’t. But I will swear this to you. Hey, look at me, okay? Please.”, Adrian’s voice was low and delicate and Olrox felt like he was intruding. Olrox felt like everyone in that room was intruding on the two siblings, but he also... He also thought that getting himself, Mizrak and Mazatl out of there would have been even more trouble. Also, Maz was still holding onto Giselle’s shoulders, so there was that too. He simply tucked his head into Mizrak’s shoulder and closed his eyes. It was the best he could do about offering privacy to the two half vampires hugging on his locally crafted carpet. „Hey. Yes. That’s it. I’ll swear to you, sister, that he will not harm you. He hasn’t been able to kill me back then, when he was mad with anger and with fury and when I had sided with the ones that had killed his wife. I didn’t fight alone. We won’t fight alone now either.”

„I beg your pardon.”, Olrox began, yelping as Mizrak slapped a hand over his mouth. Which he bit. His lover pouted and pulled that wicked palm away from his lips, leaving him both annoyed that Miz would have actually tried to stop him from talking when he had every right to and mildly horny because the Turk’s blood always turned him on. Mazatl glared at him, staring at his crotch in particular. He shrugged. It wasn’t his fault that he was a simple creature, with simple wants and needs and that Mizrak was the walking, talking, breathing embodiment of all of those needs. He saw the man of his many, many lives, he got hard. It was basic biology.

„Pardon granted.”, the blond had the fucking audacity to reply, bringing out a snort from Miz and a full on cackle from Mazatl. Olrox’s eyes locked with his dearest, oldest friend’s, trying to communicate all of his you’re a traitorous turnip rage. She, of course, flipped him off. Fucking hells. That was what he got for treating his Priestess kindly. Adrian stood up and raised his hands in a peacemaking gesture. Olrox scowled. „Now, now, my old friend. You know you want to help us.”

„I know no such thing. We are gathered here today because my fiancé is a sucker for a lost cause and you two, Giselle and Adrian, are... A cause, that’s for sure. But as for my poor, godly self, I voted for either dumping baby not a Belmont apparently on the bottom of the Black Sea and going on with our lives. Or, alternatively, you would have come pick her up and we would have gone back to our lives, after you would have paid what we discussed for her safe return.”, the Nahuatl hissed, his long, pitch black hair raising all around him as his power coalesced into one single, shining, electrical orb. Adrian flinched. Giselle was staring at them in something akin to awe, but tinged with the suspicion of a trained vampire hunter, while Mizrak was trying very hard to step between Adrian and Olrox.

„Olrox, stop that. You’re going to burn a hole into the carpet.”, Mazatl hissed, pushing Giselle back to the couch when she tried to stand up and walking the two steps to Adrian’s side, grabbing the blond by the forearm and locking their eyes together. „As for you, you do not get to come here and expect or demand help. My Lord has no allegiance to you and yours. Vlad hails from another pantheon entirely and, while Olrox here is the most recent incarnation of the one I serve, that doesn’t mean he’s weaker than your father, child. Nor that they have not met before and nor that Vlad has won every time.”

„What does that mean, Maz?”, Giselle whispered, voice broken and soft. And scared.

Olrox’s mind caught onto that last part easily. The twenty something year old woman was scared and he was making it worse. She wasn’t... She wasn’t the enemy. She was just another one of the souls on Vlad’s long list of innocents that the vampire had hurt. An eye for a fucking eye until the world went blind wasn’t a bad mantra, but to take it to genocide levels was something that Olrox had never understood. Personally. Of Vlad, but of others too. Humans and supernaturals alike confusing survival with the permission to do whatever the fuck it took to obliterate a perceived, generalised enemy, Olrox couldn’t understand. He didn’t want to understand. He shook his head and let his power slither back inside of himself, retreating to Mizrak’s arms.

„I was right. You’re a vessel. Like Erzsébet was. Like Annette was.”, Adrian whispered, eyes widening and body seemingly frozen in that exact spot between Olrox’s antique coffee table and the opaque sun shades that kept him and Mizrak alive and well. Mazatl sighed. She should have sighed more and definitely should have sounded a lot more sheepish than she actually did because what exactly Olrox was had not been on his list of topics for the day. He hated being outed.

„I will say this once and never again, not unless I find it relevant to whatever remains of our relationship after this whole situation. And I probably never will.”, Olrox replied coldly, his glacier like tone making heads snap his way. Mizrak, who was the other single soul in the entire world who knew about what exactly the Nahuatl was except for Mazatl, placed his large, heavy palm on the low of Olrox’s back. He wanted to melt into his lover’s arms once more and he wanted to slap the arrogance out of Adrian twice over. He did. He liked the blond. He had, at one point in time, imagined that he could grow to love the other man, if time and circumstances permitted. But no. Time and circumstances had not permitted and Adrian had absolutely no right to his time and to his circumstances. He swallowed hard, his throat dry all of a sudden. „I am not a vessel. I am myself and myself is Quetzalcoatl. End of story.”

Chapter Text

They had taken... A break from their self dubbed war council. Mazatl had insisted on it, claiming that Giselle needed an early nap time and a long feed and that Adrian should go take a hike. Alone. In the woods. At the bottom of a ravine. For upsetting Olrox, which the Nahuatl found amusing and endearing, but also a tiny bit pointless. The blond wasn’t unkillable, sure, but nothing that could be found in the forests around them could put even the slightest dent in the arrogant asshole’s smooth, porcelain skin and. Well. Adrian hadn’t gone anywhere anyway.

„No. You crossed several lines. Multiple fucking lines. Twice fucking over. Get off our bed.”, Olrox hissed as he entered his and Mizrak’s bedroom, the Turk perched on the windowsill and Adrian lounging in between their sheets. Dressed, fucking thankfully. Olrox had his pride and his limits and his things. A naked Adrian might have pushed at those in a way that he didn’t want to consider right at that moment in time. His glare did nothing to the blond, so he turned to his fiancé. „You should have kicked him out.”

„I am not the one that is a god, așkim.”, Mizrak pointed out and Olrox shrugged. He couldn’t fault his lover for that one and he also sort of melted when he heard that word. Așkim. He cooed. Adrian snorted, but kept blissfully quiet as he walked towards Miz and sank into those welcoming arms. Thick arms. Muscled arms. And the beard. He liked the beard and he liked how it framed Miz’s high cheekbones and luscious lips. He loved everything about his future husband. Well. He didn’t know if he needed like a document or not, since vampires were eternal and paperwork just wasn’t, but he did want a ceremony.

„You’re eyefucking him. Turn to the side a little, I want to watch.”, Adrian had the gall to say.

Olrox froze. Mizrak shook his head, murmuring a low he’s just trying to wind you up. Oh. The Nahuatl knew that. He didn’t doubt that for a single second. However. He was tired of the easeness with which the Heir of Vlad traipsed over everyone’s boundaries. And lives. And deaths. A hollow, metallic laugh that came from way out of the current reality spun around the room, the sound making Mizrak shiver and snarl. Adrian pulled out his sword from thin fucking air. But that didn’t matter. Olrox lifted a sharp eyebrow and stayed everyone’s twitching hands.

„No need for any bloodshed. This isn’t a creature either of wants to face. Ever. He has been sniffing around here for a little while, probably tracking Giselle stench of the freshly dead. And her desperation, I assume. He’ll report back to his Master soon enough.”, the Nahuatl explained, voice bored and soft and body tall and relaxed. His smoke rose and wrapped around Mizrak, momentarily displacing his lover’s physical body and separating the Turk’s soul from his form. Adrian could deal with the little trickster spy on his own, but Miz would not be hurt on Olrox’s watch. Ever again. „Or he will be sent back to his Master. Forcefully.”

„What exactly is it?”, the blond asked, his luminous, golden eyes somehow still tracking the movement of the creature in the room with them even as Olrox was pretty sure that Adrian couldn’t physically see the... Imp, he supposed? He didn’t know how to describe what it was other than just one of the many creatures that had once been a human soul, but that had twisted and turned so many times over the millenia that it had been corrupted beyond belief. And beyond saving, he supposed, though who was he to ever assume who and what could be saved out of a soul. Truly, he had no expertise in the field of saving souls. Or maybe he did. But he didn’t do it hands on.

„A soul. Probably brought forth by a Forgemaster in training or something of that sort. One without a body, so he wanders around randomly. He’ll either get a body as soon as his Forgemaster figures out that he escaped containment or he will go back to where he came from and report to Coyotl. My absolute favourite person in the whole wide fucking Universe.”, Olrox muttered, his green eyes flashing once, twice, three times as he laid a few metaphysical traps for their visitor. Adrian sure had a fuck of a karma, of that he was so sure he would be willing to carve it into something. The blond’s left asscheek, preferably.

„It’s shrieking.”, Mizrak whispered, wincing in sympathy. Or because of the forsaken ratchet that the imp was causing.

An inhale. An exhale. Olrox pushed the tendrils of his magic closer and closer to that bouncing ball of energy and snapped the traps shut, all three of them at once. Trapped. He smiled. Trapped and silenced, thank the ever loving fuck, because that had been a headache. His fingers reached for his phone and fished it out of his left pocket, finding Mazatl’s contact by touch memory alone. He didn’t want to lose sight of his bundle of mother fucking joy. He waited for the call to connect and simply put it on speaker out of courtesy. They were all vampires. They would all hear the conversation nonetheless.

„Maz, did you call our friend? I have one of his here. Causing a scene. A loud one. You know how sensitive I am to being randomly interrupted from my personal time for anything less than an actual apocalypse according to whatever pantheon is in charge of the humans nowadays.”, he rolled his eyes, Mazatl clearly scoffing over the line. He sighed. None of his people seemed to have any respect for his authority anymore. He sort of loved it, if he was to be perfectly honest, but. Alas. That wasn’t the sort of thing that he could say out loud, but that he was pretty sure everyone already knew. How could she not know when she seemed to be dilly dallying the answer that she was to give him? „Priestess.”

„I called. He didn’t answer. And he’s not called back.”, Mazatl offered, the news not sitting well with Olrox for nothing at all. That wasn’t like Acalan. That hadn’t been like his father either. Or like his father’s father. Or like all of the ones before then, all of them Forgemasters and all of them sworn to Olrox for centuries. He growled. „My Lord, I.”

„Did you go check on him?”, Olrox asked, voice steady and soft and calm. Mizrak made a low sound. Distress, it looked like, the Nahuatl’s head snapping to his lover. He unwrapped his smoke from his lover’s body, allowing Miz’s soul to return to his flesh. It was safe. The Turk gathered him close and tangled those large hands of his in Olrox’s hair. Mazatl was quiet. Everyone around him was quiet. „Go check on him, Priestess. And return with news. The news will not be I can’t find him. Is that understood, Mazatl?”

„Yes, my Lord. Giselle...”, she started, but Olrox would have no argument about his orders. Not right then. Not with Acalan missing. Not with Vlad’s history with Forgemasters.

„Adrian can take care of his sister. He’ll join her soon enough.”, he ended the call without waiting for an answer from Maz. He didn’t need an answer from Maz, not one that didn’t contain actual information about Acalan. His fingers caught onto Mizrak’s shirt, bringing the Turk closer to him, but his eyes remained on the blond who seemed like he was gearing up to protest Olrox’s words. That would not do. He lifted a single eyebrow and Adrian looked at him mutinously. But silent. Olrox would take the small wins. „Leave. Go be with your sister. This day is not our day in any way, shape or form. You overreached today and you didn’t apologise for it for a single moment. Don’t... Don’t do it now. Think on it. Mean it if you will say it. Otherwise, I will not have you or your sister in my house and near my lover. I will not fight your war for you, Adrian. Not on a mandatory basis.”

„I-i.”, Adrian started, swallowing hard after a single word. Olrox waited. The blond nodded and rolled out of his and Mizrak’s bed gracefully, dipping his head as he took the two steps towards the door, long fingers wrapping around the handle. „I didn’t think. What I said. I just blurted it out. Both the fighting Vlad thing and the vessel thing. I won’t apologise now because I need to figure out how to put that into the right words, but know that I am sorry and that I do not think of you as empty and without purpose or as a tool.”

Olrox didn’t answer. He didn’t have an answer, if he was to be honest, and he didn’t want to look for one inside of himself right then and there. Perhaps he might have done that in another moment. Perhaps he would have extended an olive branch to Adrian and would have welcomed him in their bed. Mizrak would not have been opposed to that. They had done it before. But not then. The door opened and closed softly behind Adrian, Mazatl’s privacy wards snapping back into place as soon as the lock engaged.

Chapter Text

„Do you want to tell him? About what and who and how you are?”, Miz’s lips traced his jawline, Olrox melting in his lover’s arms. It was natural for him to be there, in the Turk’s arms. He craved it when he didn’t have it and he was greedy for it when he did. He shook his head and dropped to the windowsill, still contemplating what to do with their visitor while he wanted to bury himself in Mizrak’s body for the entire night. Olrox grimaced.

„We’re getting cockblocked by a Forgemaster’s little fuck up.”, the Nahuatl sighed, tilting his head to the side and exposing his long neck to Mizrak’s eyes. His lover was easy like that for him, the Turk’s gaze immediately moving to that patch of skin he had just unveiled. And to his pitch black hair. And to his ear cuff, the end of it a dangly, bright green stone. „You ask me an important, life changing question just now and you go on to drool all over me right after? How am I supposed to answer you?”

„With your mouth on mine.”, the Turk replied, slipping between Olrox’s parted legs and catching his chin in those clever, clever fingers. An inhale. Lips smashed into his own and Olrox exhaled into his lover’s mouth. Slowly. Surely. He was being kissed as a declaration of intent and that intent was for Mizrak to devour him apparently. He wanted to be devoured too. They did still have a trapped soul in their bedroom. Olrox sighed into the kiss and pulled back, grinning as his fiancé pouted. „Ol.”

„Miz.”, Olrox whined right back at the younger man, pushing the Turk towards the en suite bathroom with a wink. „Go, draw us a bath. We can have all of our playtime there for now. I’ll... Try and house our buddy here next door. If Mazatl can’t find anything about Acalan, we have a couple other Forgemasters that we can call to make sure this soul gets back to wherever it is that it came from. For now, though. I really want you naked and me naked next to you.”

„On top of me? In me? Underneath me? Give me some details. I need to prepare for all eventualities here.”, Mizrak snarked at Olrox, a laughter escaping the Nahuatl easily.

He loved the man in front of him. He did. He loved Miz so much more than he had ever loved anyone or anything and he had lived... For a very long time, in the skin he was wearing and out of it. The love of a god was fickle, terrible thing for a mortal, but Olrox felt like he had spent enough time amongst the humans to understand where some of his peers had fucked up majorly and to try and avoid that to the best of his abilities. And Mizrak, thankfully, was not mortal anymore. With a few drops of luck, he could swing it in such a way that Mizrak would not be killable either soon enough. He just needed Adrian to hold onto his side of the bargain they had made for Giselle.

„If I answer with whatever you want, lover, you will... Yup. There it is. I didn’t even answer yet and you’re pouting already. It’s unfair.”, the older man pouted right back at Mizrak and got a kiss for all of his trouble. A kiss. And then a wave as the Turk retreated to their bathroom, Mizrak’s sweet, deep singing voice rising from the other room with a lovely ballad. It wasn’t even a melancholy filled song. No. Just a lyrical love declaration in a long forgotten dialect of modern Turkish that Olrox sort of adored. The dialect. The song. And the man, he definitely loved.

He turned on the spot and walked towards their visitor, taking in everything that he could see from around the bedroom and sorting it into things that he could use to lock up the soul for a little while and things that he would definitely not put a tormented soul in. Like his brush and Mizrak’s comb. Definitely not. But he had a small oil bottle, beautifully decorated and, more importantly, empty. Also, it had never contained any sort of holy anything, unless one wanted to consider the oil he and a very, very old lover had used for fucking holy. Might have been. He didn’t remember the man’s name, if he was being perfectly honest with himself, but he did remember that he had tasted deliciously. Blood and cum. Olrox licked his lips and pulled the cork off that delicate bottle, Mizrak’s arms wrapping around him from behind.

„You do know I’m taller and broader than you, right?”, he teased, the younger man scoffing and biting down playfully on his shoulder, nipping at his shirt and all. „That’s cute. Go back to the bathroom, please. I don’t want you so close to me when I pull our friend here into this bottle. I don’t want you anywhere near this bottle afterwards either, okay? You were almost sacrificed to a Forgemaster once, we’re not doing that shit again. Ever.”

„Will do. I just wanted to tell you that the water is ready and that you still haven’t answered the question I asked. Scratch that. The questions I asked. Multiple questions. Not just one.”, his lover twirled away from him, Olrox rolling his eyes and considering whether... Whether he should even consider the first thing that Mizrak had wanted to know. „Don’t over think, though. Don’t under think either. You’re guilty of both.”

„That’s very rude of you, just so you know. I rarely over think. I barely under think at all. I just think and decide on things fairly quickly.”, Olrox shrugged, laughing when the Turk loudly pointed out that he had been ready to declare his undying love of Mizrak less than a week after they had met. Which. Was fair. He had really been ready to do that, but he had not been wrong, had he? He loved Mizrak. He had loved Mizrak for a very long time. And Mizrak had loved him for just the same amount of time, even if silently for a lot of it. He sighed and lifted his eyes back to the trapped soul, pulsing with a sort of black blue light that made him want to hiss and spit and probably bleed someone. He didn’t like it. He pulled on one of his own strings of magic, bringing the ball of misfortune closer to him and staring into it. Carefully. He didn’t want to get soul goo all over himself. „Let’s get you situated somewhere less in my face, what do you think?”

The soul howled. Of course it did. Olrox was pretty sure the soul had lived as a man and had died as a man. He might not have been in the business of fixing whatever the hell was wrong with souls, but he was very good at spotting patterns. And sure, souls were genderless and the rigid gender norms of modern monotheistic societies were bullshit, but he knew what he was talking about when he had referred to the soul as a he. It was... A hunch, Mazatl had called it, unable to connect it to any of the Feathered Serpent’s actual abilities. Olrox could tell that his ability to read a person’s past lives as easy as if they were an open book to him unsettled Mazatl. She couldn’t explain where it was coming from and it felt too different from what his inner core was, at least to her. But he didn’t think so. He believed something different, though he had never wanted to put it into words for her. There was no point. Perhaps.

A twist of his lips followed by a twist of his fingers brought the soul to the very mouth of the bottle, the glass shaking and vibrating in his hand. It would hold. There was nothing special or powerful about the entity that had escaped whichever Forgemaster that was, so the bottle would hold. He grimaced. He could contain the soul and do so easily, but his fingers burned with the heat of it. There was a reason why souls were the most useful fuel. They were priceless in the economy of the universe, after all. He inhaled sharply and coughed, groaning and cursing at having to actually touch the bright ball of misery to push it inside the bottle. He did. But his skin was burned clean off this palm and the tips of his shorter locks were singed. Not to mention that the soul had wanted to escape and had tried to wiggle out of his grasp, the heat catching onto the hem of his shirt as well. He hated handling souls in that manner. But. Alas. Someone had to do it for right that instant and he was the only one with that ability. Mazatl could too, but her touch was poison to a soul and she preferred not to condemn anyone to eternal extinction if a chance of survival and rebirth was possible. He understood.

Olrox hissed as he peeled off his shirt from his body, wrapping it around his bleeding and torn hand and going in search of a bag of blood. He didn’t particularly like bagged blood, but it was the most easily accessible and the one that kept him the closest to his lover. Who was peeking out of the bathroom, even when Olrox had specifically told the younger man to not... And Mizrak was coming towards him, eyes wide and hands fluttering. The Nahuatl pulled the stopper for the bag of blood that he’d retrieved from the cooler hidden in an antique piece of furniture and sucked on it, his fangs dropping for pretty much nothing.

„What happened? You’re injured. Why are you injured? Did the soul bottling injure you? Let me see. Olrox. Let me see.”, Mizrak grabbed Olrox’s burned hand, careful to not stick his fingers directly into the neatly closing wound. There was a lot of blood on the formerly pristine fabric of Olrox’s shirt, that he couldn’t deny, but. Well. He’d known. He hadn’t informed Mizrak of the consequences of his actions, but he’d known. And he whined as his fiancé prodded at a spot that seemed to have healed over a few strands of fabric from his currently ruined shirt. „I need to rip this open and pull the cotton fibers out. Olrox. It’s like you’ve never healed a superficial wound before. Clean it...”

„... Before feeding. Yes. I know. It just burns like a fucker.”, the Nahuatl mumbled, his lips still on the neck of the bag of blood. Which his lover indicated that he should put down. He sighed, but obeyed and leaned on the cooler, pouting as Mizrak pulled a small, but deadly blade from somewhere on that delicious body of his, delicately placing the sharp end of that knife on Olrox’s palm. And cutting. „Fucking hells, that fucking hurts so much. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.”

„You’re the vampire with the lowest pain tolerance I’ve ever met, Olrox, I swear.”, the Turk muttered and. Well. Olrox yelped as five whole strands of cotton fiber came right out of his sliced and diced palm. He whined. He hated that kind of pain. He enjoyed other kinds and Mizrak knew it, his lover just being facetious at that specific moment in time. Or trying to distract him. He wasn’t easily distractible, though, so he kept on whining as Mizrak dug through his flesh. „Sweetheart. Just a few more... There. I got them all. Olrox, what were you thinking? And what happened?”

„I can’t work with souls just like that. I... The heat and the light from them, it sort of mimics sunlight. It’s pure energy, like the light of a star. So. I burn. In this form, I burn.”, Olrox offered, happily going back to drinking his cold, dead blood. Mildly happily. Moderately so. He would have absolutely preferred a donor or a good hunt, but he still didn’t have the time or the intention to leave his fiancé. They had a bath to take. And maybe he had a decision to make about Adrian knowing certain things about him. Mizrak’s eyes locked with his own. „Everything’s fine now. Look. I’m all healed. I ruined my shirt, though and I’m going to make it Adrian’s problem too. It’s a full outfit that I’ve lost to his problems getting dropped on my fucking doorstep. I’m making him pay for both the pants that his sister bled on and this shirt.”

„You burn when doing Forgemaster stuff and yet you decided to... Do it anyways?”, Mizrak asked, voice low and calm and Olrox froze.

Chapter Text

He hated that tone. He knew what that tone meant. He was in trouble with his lover and he really didn’t want to be in trouble with Mizrak in general, but especially then and there. He wanted a bath. And to feed some more. And to get fucked. Preferably not by life, but by his fiancé’s cock. He wanted to ride Mizrak, not be beaten down by a headache. But. He nodded. He’d never lied to the Turk. He wouldn’t start then.

„I had to.”, the older vampire pointed towards the currently unmoving bottle that housed the errant soul, shrugging and biting down on his lower lip. Mizrak lifted a sharp eyebrow. He had to explain. He hated explaining. He would do it. But he hates doing it. „The soul, he couldn’t be left to his own devices. We don’t know who lost him and we don’t know if he’s actually been lost or he was a very poor spy. We don’t know which Forgemaster dropped the ball and what could have happened to them. There was no one else that could have handled the soul. I did it. I should have told you, but you wouldn’t have left my side and I couldn’t risk you.”

„Yet, you still should have told me and I could have chosen for myself to not let you deal with soul sunlight on your own. You don’t want to risk me, Olrox. Okay. I agree. I understand your point of view. I’m younger and I’ve definitely been far more killable than you’ve ever been, both as a human and as a vampire.”, his fiancé began, crossing his very muscled arms over that same kind of chest and Olrox was really paying attention to Mizrak’s heart, worn all over the man’s sleeves. He was. He was also drooling over Miz’s physical shape, as well as luminous soul and perfect smile. The Nahuatl shook himself out of his reverie and nodded, waiting for Mizrak to continue. „But I need you to understand, agree and accept that I will not let you get hurt either. No matter what the reasoning behind that might be. Nod, Olrox. Nod and give me a kiss and let’s go take a bath. I want to be naked with you. Like yesterday. Like for a whole month. Didn’t we say that we were dropping Giselle in Adrian’s custody and fucking off to the Appalachians?”

„I’m nodding. I’m definitely nodding. Physically and verbally.”, Olrox said, licking his lips and simply waiting... Waiting to see if his lover would move towards the bathroom. Mizrak observed him for a few moments and then did proceed to turn on his heels, grab the Nahuatl by the wrist and practically drag Olrox towards the steam that seemed to seep into the bedroom easily. It was fragrant too. Lavender. Mizrak might have been stressed. Olrox certainly was. „Yes. Naked. And we’re not going to be here for whatever trouble they get into. We’re not taking this on unless we have no chance to escape it and unless our lives depend on us fighting Vlad. So no. We’re going to get Mazatl to find Acalan and then we’re out of here. Urgently. Adrian can deal with his own shit for once.”

„I’m holding you to that. Now strip, Olrox.”, Mizrak ordered and the older male shivered. That tone. That fucking tone made his knees weak and his mind float and there were all the good and happy chemicals floating all around his firing neurons. And he swallowed hard around the lump in his throat, his fingers trailing the lower edge of his destroyed shirt. „I said strip. Not tease.”

„What do I get if I strip and what do I get if I tease?”, the older vampire grinned, busying himself with taking off his pale leather summer shoes and his socks, slipping them underneath one of the cupboards in the bathroom and hoping he wouldn’t forget about them long enough for the humidity to ruin them entirely. He had already lost so many of his clothes to Adrian and Giselle’s drama.

Olrox inhaled, a spike in Mizrak’s scent catching him almost unaware. He tried to stand up, but there was a hand at his nape and he was being bent over the tub, his hands flying to catch himself before he fell face down into the water. Except he wouldn’t have tumbled anywhere near that lavender scented, purple coloured wonder because Mizrak was holding him firm and steady and pushing a very hard cock right next to Olrox’s ass. He moaned.

„Good little godling, aren’t you? A bit mouthy.”, his fiancé murmured, fangs tracing Olrox’s sharply pointed ear and biting down hard and fast on his earlobe, digging in right between the older man’s earrings. Olrox bucked up into Mizrak’s body, but he couldn’t move much without tossing the other vampire clear across the room. He didn’t want that. He wanted to struggle a bit and he wanted to feel overpowered, though the Turk could never actually accomplish anything like that in a thousand years and a hundred lives. „Yes. You like being caught, darling. And you like being taken care of. You do. I’m very much addicted to you, Olrox. So you’ll get me either way. If you strip as I’ve ordered or if you tease as it’s your seductive and sensual nature telling you to. Vixen. But you get me differently. I can be inside of you in less than the span between two of your fucking delicious moans, lover. Or I can have you bent over the sink while I go get my favourite silver threaded crop and make you feel me for days. Either way, it’s your choice. But I’ll be right here with you nonetheless. I won’t leave you alone.”

„Y-yes, you won’t. You won’t leave me alone. You won’t.”, Olrox panted, tangling his fingers with Mizrak’s where their hands met, low on his belly, touching his skin. He had nothing more to offer to the conversation than a low moan and a nod. He knew what he wanted. He wanted everything. All at once. Just by Miz’s hands. Fuck. But first. „Cock. Your cock. I’ll be good.”

„Yes, you will be good. So very good. I love you.”, the Turk nuzzled his nape and helped him stand up, his knees not giving in. That was a success as far as Olrox was concerned. A definite success. „Kiss me and strip.”

He turned around and leaned down, catching Mizrak’s chin in between his thumb and his forefinger. For a long moment, they simply looked at one another, Olrox’s luminous green eyes reflected in Mizrak’s dark brown pupils. The Nahuatl smiled. He was loved. He was cherished. He was worshiped. He felt like he didn’t need anyone else but Mizrak to survive for an eternity. No other worshippers and no matter how many of them could ever replace Mizrak and the love they shared. He let his lips part on top of his fiancé’s, the Turk’s tongue sweeping over his. Softly. Gently. Nothing like what had happened a few seconds back. He enjoyed that. And he enjoyed the care of that current moment too. A kiss. Another one. And another one before he pulled back a step, steadied himself on the sink counter behind him and stripped. No frills. No teasing. Just efficient and good and exactly what Mizrak wanted from him and his skin was on fire with how much liquid heat that poured through his veins.

„Get in the tub, lover. I want to wash you and hold you first. Then you’ll have my cock for as long as you want it.”, Mizrak purred and Olrox grinned, his hand closing over that very hard and very interested and very clothed still cock of his lover’s. The Turk exhaled and pointed to the tub once more. „In. Now. I’ll slip in behind you.”

„Yes, Miz.”, the Nahuatl giggled, his eyes flashing electric and smoke curling around his limbs as he sank into the warm, welcoming water. He let out a low breath and a moan that had nothing to do with how turned on he felt, but rather with how much he needed to just... Just be. Fuck. His hair spilled all around him, wet and clinging to his skin and he pouted. „Bring me a hair tie, please? Not a spiky one or anything. Just a hair tie. I want it out of the way for now and I also want it washed. You’ll take care of that, won’t you, beloved?”

„Of course I will. Anything you need from me, I will do. And I know that smile. Don’t be outrageous right now, I’m not putting on anything glittery and feathery.”, the Turk lifted a sharp, but definitely amused eyebrow and turned on his heels, Olrox licking his lips and following his lover’s ass and back and long legs as Mizrak moved from the bathroom back to the bedroom. „Hair tie? Just that? Anything that you’ve not unpacked yet in any of these suitcases here that I might need for Your Holiness’ hair routine?”

„You know my hair routine by heart, Miz. Does it look like I forgot anything?”, Olrox replied, sinking even further down in the water until only his head and his hair were above the surface of it. A grunt came from the other side of the bathroom door. The older vampire sighed. „Just a hair tie, please. Come take care of me. Come pamper me and come torture me sweetly and just. Wow. Okay. I’m quiet as a mouse.”

Olrox swallowed hard as his fiancé stepped back into the small, steam filled room, naked and golden and beautiful. And all muscles and hardness everywhere. The Nahuatl’s fangs dropped, lengthening and almost piercing his own lower lip. Like a baby vamp he felt in front of Mizrak’s beauty. His lover strutted towards the bathtub and leaned in, bringing that full cock close to Olrox’s lips. And fangs. He’d not fed from that vein there, pulsing underneath the heft of Miz’s cock, in a long, long while.

„No. Not yet. Lift up. I need to do your hair.”, Mizrak cut Olrox’s drooling short, the older man pouting and pushing himself back into a sitting position. His fiancé laughed, low and velvety and so fucking dangerous, making the Nahuatl shiver. The fingertips actually touching his nape and gathering his hair with the utmost of reverence didn’t hurt either. „I love you. You know that. I know you do. But I also know that I’ve spent hundreds of years not telling you that because of... Stuff. So. I love you. I tried to show it to you over the years, but sometimes. Sometimes, words also matter. I love you. I love your eyes and your lips and your high cheekbones and your nose. I love your hair. And I love your broad shoulders and these legs that look so good wrapped around my waist. And I love your cock. So. Fucking. Much.”

The Nahuatl was speechless. Not because he had not received that kind of praise from other lovers and not even because he hadn’t yet received it in so many words from Mizrak before, but... But because he could see the intent and love and respect behind every single one of those words pushing through his bond with the Turk. They had one. Not an acknowledged one, at least not at first, but they had one. They had always had one. He had turned Mizrak two hundred and fifty years back, but their bond had never been one of Sire and Turn. It couldn’t have been, not when he had loved Mizrak back then too, desperately and honestly and dangerously so.

Their bond had morphed over time, strengthened and shifted and stretched thin only to bounce back stronger than ever when Mizrak kept returning to Olrox after years and years away. It had sat, sometimes dull and sometimes shining, right in the middle of Olrox’s chest, tying the god to the mortal plain in such an inextricable way that he had never experienced before. Never. Not with any of his previous lovers, not in any of his previous incarnations.

„I don’t know if it’s a good thing or a bad thing that I’ve managed to make you speechless.”, the Turk snarked, stepping into the bathtub behind Olrox, just as previously stated, legs bracketing the older man’s body, Mizrak’s chest moulding to the Nahuatl’s back. And that cock of Miz’s, resting above Olrox’s ass. Hard. He shivered, his fiancé’s lips tracing the back of his neck and his jawline. „I’m curious now. Tell me what’s going on in your head, așkim.”

„Do you feel it? Our bond. You should be able to feel at least the Siring one, if nothing...”, the Nahuatl started, his words dying on his tongue when his lover caught his chin and turned his head to the side, capturing his mouth in a savage, almost painful kiss that ravaged his soul.

It was a declaration. Olrox could read it, the strenght of that feeling that came barelling down from the middle of Mizrak’s chest to his own, nestling right behind his heart. It was a declaration of intent. Of love. Of care. Of forever. Of knowledge. He shivered and struggled to turn around in his lover’s arms. Miz helped him, their limbs tangling together easily. They had done that dance over and over again throughout the years and it had been one of the only ways that they had had to put the lack of communication behind them and just be. Be alive. Be together. Be honest.

„Here. I want you. Please. Here, Miz. Now. P-please.”, Olrox found himself begging, pleading, whimpering, whining, his fiancé soothing his shivering with kisses and sweet words and a couple of fingers already working him open in the water. It would slosh everywhere, he knew. He would be annoyed afterwards and he would mumble about it, but he couldn’t give less than half a flying fuck right that instant, not when he wanted to be filled and connected to Mizrak in that too. He wanted to feel their bond throb with lust and pleasure too, just as it was shining with love and acknowledgment as it had never before. „F-faster, please. In me. I want it to burn. Pl-please.”

His eyelids fluttered, green eyes closing and opening over and over again, his back arching as a third finger was in him. He moaned and rode what his lover was giving him, head thrown back and hair spilling from the bun that Mizrak had put it in. Olrox was on fire. He whined. His parted lips were taken when his fiancé’s cock entered him. He was stretched and Mizrak had even provided them with some lubrication from somewhere. He didn’t care. He just wanted to be filled. And he was.

Filled and taken and Mizrak knew how to fuck him. His lover was a master at fucking Olrox and at driving him insane with lust and with need and with want and he felt his nails sharpen, clawing at the back of Miz’s shoulders. He whined. He screamed as his fiancé grabbed his hips and pushed his up and down and hit that spot inside of him with every single thrust. Olrox was on fucking fire and that was not a hyperbole, his eyes wide open and electricity moving from them down his cheekbones. To his jaw. To his shoulders. To his collarbones. Mizrak’s lips followed the path of the sparks.

„More. More. Give me more, Mizrak.”, the older vampire demanded, his claws sinking into his lover’s biceps. He mewled. He blinked and he was out of the water, his back hitting the wall of the shower and his legs wrapped around the Turk’s waist. He was bent in half. He cackled and rejoiced in the sheer display of physical power that Mizrak was offering him. Using to satisfy him too. „I. Fucking. Have. You. You’re. Mine. Miz. You’re. Mine.”

Olrox mouthed and bit down and whined and all of it was done in the rhythm of the thrusts of his lover’s cock inside of his hole. He was in that particular place between bliss and pain and he fucking rode through it and he couldn’t stop himself from both clinging to Mizrak and thrashing in the other man’s grip.

Faster, he heard himself beg. Deeper, he growled and Mizrak dropped his legs to the tiles, turning him around and making him brace against the wall as he was being bent at the waist, his hair fallint in a curtain around his shoulders. He clawed at the wall and he fucked back into that hardness and he was leaking all over his feet and he felt pleasure coil down in his belly. Low. And fast. And he couldn’t stop it. He didn’t want to. He needed it. He needed Mizrak’s cum in him too. He needed to burn and he needed to rise from the fucking ashes and he shuddered, spilling all over the back wall, his cum stark white in contrast to the richly, dark coloured tiles. He came.

Mizrak still moved. He shivered, his hole sensitive. But he wanted his lover to come. He needed it. He snarled and tightened against the hardness driving into him, Mizrak close to giving him what he wanted. He knew his lover. He knew what the panting and the breaking of rhythm and the fucking everything meant, the Turk mouthing at his back and kissing his hair with reverence even in the middle of such a physical encounter.

Fucking.

But with feelings. Olrox grinned. There. His hips were grabbed and he was being crowded to the wall fully, his entire body almost lifted clean off the floor by the force of his lover’s thrusts. One. Mizrak growled. Twice. The Turk snarled back as Olrox snarled, their fingers tangling on the wall and the older man’s half hard cock rubbing against the smooth surface of the tiles. Three times. Mizrak’s muscles locked in place. Olrox grinned savagely.

„Yes. Give me what I want. Give me what is mine. Give me you.”, Olrox chanted, energy spilling from him and sinking into Mizrak just as Mizrak’s cum filled his hole. A shout. His own. Fangs buried in his shoulder. His lover’s. „Feed. Yes. Mine. Feed. Mine.”

Mizrak did. His lover fed and fucked into him some more. Lazily. Still hard, though softening. Olrox relaxed into the Turk’s arms. He was pulled from the wall slowly and his fiancé slipped out of him. He didn’t like that. Miz’s fangs out of his body. Miz’s cock out of his body. He didn’t like that. He whined. He was picked up, his lover’s arms going around his shoulders and underneath his knees. He burrowed his head in the crook of Mizrak’s throat, right where he had bitten before. It was all healed by then. Of course it was. He wanted to leave marks on his fiancé. He could, but.

„You’re shivering. I’ll turn on the shower and wash you.”, Mizrak’s voice was low and soft and intimate, lips touching Olrox’s temple for a long moment. The Nahuatl was shivering. He hadn’t noticed that. His fingers scrambled to hold onto his lover’s shoulders. Miz stopped moving and simply locked eyes with him. „You need something. No. You... You want something. You want it so badly that it’s rippling through our connection. What is it? Tell me. You know I would walk through daylight for you.”

„I-i.”, the Nahuatl swallowed hard, throat suddenly dry as he allowed himself to actually bring to the forefront of his mind what he wanted.

What he really wanted. What he’d been dreaming of, in broken glimpses and hidden moments, since he had accepted that Mizrak was the soul that he thought of as a mate to his own. He’d loved many. He would love many more, he assumed, but none would be what Miz was to him. Not in that particular way. Eternity was very long, but he had no intent of ever being separated from the Turk ever fucking again. Not if Mizrak also wanted it.

He licked his lips and gestured to the floor. The Turk let him slip out of his arms, keeping a hold on Olrox’s waist until the older man was steady on his feet. Water poured over the two of them in a matter of seconds, the Nahuatl’s magic reacting almost without his input. Mizrak’s body arched into the heat, the vampire a kitten in disguise. Truly.

„I want you.”, Olrox started, cut off by Mizrak’s immediate nod and amused reply of you have me. The Nahuatl snorted and laid a deep, fast kiss on his lover, pulling back and nuzzling along his fiancé’s jawline before biting down with blunt teeth on Miz’s earlobe. „I want you on my altar. As an offering. As a... Spouse. I want you to come to the altar willingly and let me mate you as a god. Not just as a vampire. I’m a vampire by chance. I’m a god by blood. Will you do that? Will you mate a god and not the vampire you’ve first thought I was?”

Chapter Text

„Acalan is dead.”, Mazatl stated, not looking at Olrox for the life of her.

The room froze. Of course it did. The priestess walked to where Olrox was sitting and kneeled in front of him, head bowed and hands twisted in her long, flowy robes. Giselle made an appalled sound, but Adrian held her wrist gently and stopped the youngest Țepeș from moving anywhere closer to Maz.

„Why?”, Olrox asked, voice deceptively soft and long fingers catching Mazatl's chin. He wanted to read the look in her eyes. „Ah. Vlad.”

„He’s nowhere near this place, I would have sensed him.”, Adrian offered, but Olrox couldn’t give less of a fuck about the blonde’s judgement call if he tried. And, for the time being, he didn’t even care to try.

„We evacuate our people. Mazatl, you coordinate everything with all of your little helpers and you ensure that no one else dies.”, the Nahuatl said, his long hair rising from his shoulders as he imbued a spell into his priestess’ skin. She hissed, but didn’t flinch. „You’ll know where everyone goes and then you’ll forget it. If you get captured, you will forget about me, about Mizrak, about this place. You will be of no use to Vlad. You will die by his hand, most likely, but you will not have betrayed me or mine. Understood, Mazatl?”

„Understood, my Lord.”, Olrox’s oldest and dearest friend smiled sadly, bowing her head and touching his knuckles with her lips.

„You didn’t ask her to forget about Giselle and I.”, the older Țepeș murmured, dropping his head back onto the stiff couch and huffing. „You motherfucker. You would do anything to survive.”

„No. Not anything. I wouldn’t sacrifice Mizrak for my survival.”, Olrox exhaled boredly, standing up and offering his hand to his fiancé, who took it and followed him to the door. At the threshold, Olrox turned around and studied the room. „Rise, Mazatl. You have your orders. Adrian, Giselle. Follow us. Now.”

„I don’t take orders from you. Maz, you can’t be serious, you cannot be taking these kinds of suicidal orders from...”, Giselle started, her voice broken and her throat closing up as Olrox’s fingers wrapped around her throat on his way to slamming her to the bookshelf behind them.

She hissed and spit and scratched at his arm, but he was a god. And Adrian had not moved a single muscle to defend his sister. Interesting. Mizrak was getting ready to be the reasonable one, but Olrox had absolutely no time for any of that either. They were on the back foot and he wouldn’t allow that, not for the moral highground of a little girl that he should have killed back on that boat on the Black Sea.

„I have suffered you enough, Giselle. I have went against every single one of my instincts and I have brought you into my home and I have allowed you near my walking, beating, living heart. You have been alone with Mizrak, which I will not tolerate ever again. Because you, Giselle, are the kind of trouble that needs to be put the fuck down.”, the vampire hissed, his features twisting and lengthening and his hair turning from pitch black and silky to moving, unending scales.

His eyes shone in the sudden dark that he’d plunged the room in, Quetzalcoatl primly staring down at Vlad’s youngest spawn. They weren’t even in the house at the edges of Mexico City anymore. No. They were in between the stars, where he had been born alongside the Universe itself. That one. And all the others. She was struggling in his grasp, unaware of the fact that if he let go, she would be star dust. Less than, even. But maybe she wouldn’t, Quetzalcoatl mused, since she was Vlad’s offspring.

A flicker of blinding light pierced the veil of darkness. It was aimed at him. Mizrak. His bond with Mizrak had been accessed voluntarily by the younger vampire. His heart. His nest. His body quaked and peeled itself off the edges of reality, allowing sight and sound once more to penetrate. Giselle gasped. He blinked and they were back in his study at the house, Adrian frantic and trying to pound through the barrier that he’d lifted when grabbing the young woman.

„Adrian. Let’s not go anywhere else or I might finish what Vlad started and end your sister’s life.”, the Nahuatl whispered, dropping Giselle to the floor and gesturing for the barrier to come down. The blonde rushed forward, picking up his sibling and cradling her shaking form in his arms, cooing at the young woman, but surprisingly not snarling at Olrox. Shocking. But wise. „Smart man. You will take your sister and leave. You will make absolutely sure that Vlad follows you. If. And that is a big if. If you survive this encounter with your Sire, you and I, we will talk again, on much different terms. But I will not fight for you, Adrian. Anything I owed you, I consider fulfilled with Giselle still alive in your arms. Are we clear?”

„Yes.”, Adrian nodded, biting down whatever else he had maybe wanted to add. Smart. Very fucking smart. Olrox’s head turned to the side and he snorted when he caught his own reflection in the standing mirror there. Or perhaps the older Țepeș’s attitude adjustment came from the fact that not a single part of Olrox looked like he had ever been even remotely human anymore. He sighed. „We’ll leave.”

Olrox nodded, his fingers stretching towards the wall behind the siblings, pulling at the fabric of reality as much as his abilities allowed it. Which. Wasn’t much. But he could give them... A head start. He didn’t want Adrian dead. He couldn’t give a fuck about Giselle, but Mazatl seemed to like her. And he wouldn’t deny Mizrak one of his friends in the vampire world either, no matter how much Olrox wanted to throttle the blonde right then and there. He felt a drop of sweat move down from the top of his head to his hairline as a single crevice opened up in the space time continuum. Adrian turned towards it and gasped.

„Where does that take us?”, the blonde eyed the very small, unstable as fuck portal with distrust and Olrox.

Well.

Olrox couldn’t blame the man. At all. He wouldn’t have stepped through it either if he had a choice. Except that Adrian didn’t have a choice and except that the Țepeș siblings needed to fucking leave the premises of his property as soon as possible because they had overstayed their welcome. So much. So terribly much. Adrian’s flying sword hovered at his side suddenly, the blonde looking at it strangely. Olrox’s head tilted to let his eyes take in the blade. A flash moved through the metal and he blinked, knowing full well what he would see in the reflection there.

Eyes. Red eyes. Locked with his green ones. And a voice rising from the steel, curling around the room and making Olrox’s hair stand on its ends.

Vlad.

Chapter Text

„Little Snake. Of course it would have been you that housed my wayward children.”, the First of the vampires purred, as calm and soft spoken as always. Olrox had not had the pleasure of meeting Vlad in the current body he had, but he had more knowledge of the other man than he wanted to. „Tell them to come to me and to their mother and stop playing this foolish game of hide and seek with me.”

„Vlad. You want me to tell your son and your daughter to come find you?”, Olrox let the words sink into every single person in the room.

Adrian’s eyebrows lifted. Giselle was finally standing on her own two feet. Mizrak, wisely, did not try and come see the legendary Vlad on his own. The Nahuatl could have kissed his man for that. He didn’t need a beast like Vlad to have a direct line of sight to his walking heart.

„I do.”, Vlad’s eyes tightened at the corners.

Displeased, Olrox assumed. But not terribly willing to up the scales of the conversation they were having. The Nahuatl smiled. He wasn’t the poster child of restraint, kindness and polite respect, but Vlad. Oh. Vlad was none of those in his best of days. And the past five hundred or so years didn’t really feel like Vlad’s best of days. Maybe. The self proclaimed Vampire King, not that the title was unwarranted, had loved and lost and enacted his revenge all in the span of a couple of decades, which was, Olrox would admit it freely, pretty damn fast for an immortal. Vlad was older than humanity or close by anyways. It wasn’t like anyone was keeping score back then. So for all of that to happen to the other vampire that fucking quickly and in that kind of unfortunate succession...

Olrox could understand the despair and the mind breaking hurt that Vlad had gone through. He would have burned anyone who dared breathe in Mizrak’s direction, let alone what he would have done had anyone actually managed to harm or kill his lover. He had hunted down and killed Julia Belmont for ending Delsin’s second life and what he had felt for the man paled wildly in comparison to how he wanted to merge himself to Mizrak. He understood that murderous tendency when it came to avenging one’s heart being ripped out of one’s chest and burned at the stake. Metaphorically or not.

What he didn’t understand was genocide. And Vlad definitely thought of genocide as yet another weapon in his arsenal, which Olrox was in profound disagreement with. By the way Adrian’s moral backbone seemed to have shaped up, Lisa also didn’t look like she thought much of Vlad’s tendencies to go scorched fucking earth when something didn’t go his way. Something major, true, but still.

„You killed my Forgemaster. You’ll understand if I don’t feel inclined to do you any favours, Vlad.”, the Nahuatl smiled sharply and waited for a reaction from the other vampire.

And there it was. Subtle. So fucking subtle that he would have missed it if he hadn’t been watching so closely. But he had been. And he had seen it. Vlad had winced.

„That. A simple misunderstanding. He failed to mention he was in your service.”, Vlad’s voice filled with an edge that Olrox didn’t appreciate. „I’m sure we can come to a separate agreement about that issue.”

„Let’s.”, Olrox leaned back on the desk that he felt touching his ass, his hands gesturing between himself and Vlad. „I’m all ears.”

„You’re going to bargain with me for a human's life?”, the other vampire said incredulously, the words almost hissed out of Vlad’s mouth. „Now?”

„Your speciesism is showing and it’s not a nice look on you. What would Lisa say about that?”, he replied evenly, shrugging when Vlad definitely got ticked off about it.

That was fine. He was a god. Vlad was, at best guess, just as much of a god. They had met multiple times in their lives and they had not always been enemies, just ad they had not always been friends. Never lovers though. He snorted silently. Wouldn’t that have been an interesting turn of events?

The three others in the room with him and Vlad’s eyes in the sword were frozen. Even Giselle. Olrox had to admit she had not been doing anything stupid lately and that he might have slightly over reacted when he had almost dropped her in the darkness between worlds. However. He had to thank Adrian, most likely, for the death grip that the blonde had on both his sister and Olrox’s fiancé. An inhale. He blinked. An exhale. Vlad blinked.

„What do you want, Quetzalcoatl?”, Vlad asked, the crow feet at the very edge of his eyes nothing more than an affectation.

The immortals didn’t age. They weren’t born and they didn’t end. They weren’t vampires. They weren’t flesh and blood and they couldn’t be made so, not even when they chose to be so. Still, Vlad’s annoyance with his lack of immediate cooperation was giving life to Olrox and he rejoiced in it. He would have wanted to be able to tell Adrian to take his sister and fucking go to the ends the Earth and back again, but he couldn’t. He couldn’t move or look anywhere else but at the sword in front of him because Vlad. Oh. Bless his fucking heart. Vlad couldn’t see his own flesh and blood. The Vampire King was blind when it came to Adrian and Giselle and that might just happen to be the one thing that would save them all.

„A message for a message, Vlad.”, Olrox offered generously, his hands gesturing widely in front of him and his smile fixed on his lips.

He flipped his hair to side, letting his pointed ear and his emerald earring catch Vlad’s eye. His neck too. He snorted internally. Like son, like father, it seemed. The King of the vampires had set the world on fucking fire because of a bunch of fanatics having burned Lisa at the stake and was currently discreetly fixating on the very same spot that Adrian liked to admire fervently in Olrox. The Nahuatl appreciated the taste of both of those moves, honestly. Up to the same point as earlier, though. Revenge was fine. Genocide, less so.

„Who do I have access that you don’t, little Serpent?”, the red eyes snapped back to Olrox’s own bright green ones, locking them together.

The Nahuatl had met Vlad before and had fought Vlad before and had sworn to never find himself in any circumstances which might lead to him bedding Vlad, but he really couldn’t deny how utterly captivating the man was. Just as captivating as Adrian, but in a completely different way. Not even night and day, the father and the son were. No. More like the pits of despair and the highs of a well fought battle.

„Ah. The human.”, Vlad mused, the tone of that single exhale one that made Olrox pay fucking attention because nothing good ever came from the vampire King seemingly smirking. „The Belmont girl. Are you still holding onto that centuries old grudge? Did killing Julia Belmont and then absconding with the sole survivor of that friary not soothe your ruffled feathers, Quetzalcoatl? You still crave Belmont blood for the dead human you had just turned? You can have the girl.”

„The girl?”, the Nahuatl blinked once, struggling to not let his surprise colour his features. He didn’t know how much of him Vlad was seeing, truly. He assumed all of him, so his body language needed to speak of nothing else but the conversation at hand. The negotiation, really. And yet. „Your daughter. The Belmont girl is your daughter.”

„She is a mistake that I have no use for.”, the other man replied, brutally cold and dismissive. If Olrox could have seen Vlad in his entirety, the Nahuatl knew that he would have witnessed the vampire King do more than roll his eyes. Perhaps scoff. Perhaps turn into large bat and fly away in a huff. „You can have her. End the line. Deliver your message. Protect your other human, the monk that you turned after the mess in Paris. What was his name, though? Something interesting. A name I’ve always found soothing too. Something with M?”

„Mizrak. Do you want to meet him, Vlad?”, Olrox asked, making a split second decision between catching the man currently watching him like a fucking hawk by surprise or losing all of what he had won that far by spitting in Vlad’s face.

Metaphorically speaking.

Chapter Text

He had sworn that he would not fight for Adrian and Giselle. He had. Fucking hells, he had sworn that and he had thrown multiple fucking fits about it and he didn’t fucking understand what Vlad was doing. The man had started a genocide to avenge his wife. How could he treat Lisa’s children the was he was? It made no sense and Vlad was a supremely reasonable and logical person.

Olrox had experience galore with maddened gods and immortals that just wanted to end everything and be no more, but the man staring at him with surprise in his eyes didn’t strike the Nahuatl as either. And neither did the little videocall they were having seemed to fit into how Vlad had operated before. A master of solitude in a world of community building humans, the vampire King had been odd, but unflappable. Before, that was. Before Lisa. Before Adrian. Before Lisa’s death and Adrian’s betrayal, the blonde siding with his mother’s people. With the humans.

„I would be honoured. You already know of Lisa, of course.”, Vlad’s voice settled once more and Olrox nodded magnanimously, letting the shift in tone from before slide. He could see the corners of those red eyes flatten. Vlad relaxed back into the conversation.

„I do. I admit I have seen her portrait as well. She is beautiful, Vlad. Adrian takes after her.”, the Serpent slithered closer to the floating sword, laughing when the King snorted dryly and muttered a low I see what you did there, Olrox. „Yes, yes, Adrian takes his pretty from her. But enough about you, no? Some about me too. Mizrak, come. There’s someone you simply must meet.”

Olrox grinned and waited. Mizrak had been a soldier. A leader of men. The Turk understood strategy and subterfuge and Adrian was anyways signing something to Olrox’s fiancé, something that had to be what the Nahuatl wanted to say.

Wait a moment or two. Make a noise. Then come here.

An inhale. An exhale. Mizrak pushed a large book from the side table to the wooden floor, the sound clear and bright across the small space of the private office they were in. An inhale. An exhale. A hand slipped into Olrox’s and a kiss was laid to his cheek. He smiled. Vlad watched the two of them with open interest, though no lust. Not for Mizrak at least. The Nahuatl scoffed internally.

One couldn’t attest for good taste, after all.

„I’ve never met anyone in the sheen of a blade, lover.”, Mizrak snorted, approaching Adrian’s sword carefully and rounding it just to make more noise, Olrox assumed.

The siblings nodded at one another, Adrian pushing Giselle through the still opened portal and gesturing wildly for her to go and get away from the slit in the space time continuum. She refused. Of course she did. Olrox wanted to throttle her once more.

„That cannot be true, young man. You were a warrior monk, were you not?”, the vampire King pointed out as soon as Mizrak rejoined Olrox in front of the blade, the runes on it powerful, but pointless at the moment. Nothing could stop Vlad. Only Vlad.

„I haven’t been called young man in some centuries. It’s a nice feeling, I suppose. Though I was far from a young man even when I was human.”, the Turk tilted his head to the side and blinking carefully as he leaned in to study Vlad’s eyes more closely.

Olrox’s hands itched to sink into his lover’s shirt and pull Mizrak back. Back from Vlad. Back from the mess that the two Țepeș siblings were making of everything. Back from whatever the fuck was Vlad actually doing, because the Nahuatl was no longer fully convinced that the vampire King had actually dumped Giselle on the hunter family because of a bad morning latte or something. Back from the world, quite honestly. Back from everything, at least until they would be mated.

Except.

Except that Olrox was well aware of how Mizrak’s instincts screamed at him to walk into danger and not away from it.

„You have pretty eyes, stranger. Expressive. Dangerous. Who are you?”, Mizrak asked nonchalantly and Olrox snorted. His lover turned to him with a candid look on his face and a perfectly content smile on those deliciously full lips of his. „You forgot your manners, Ol. You didn’t introduce me to your friend here, so I had to take things into my own hands since I am at a clear disadvantage, no? You know who I am, don’t you, Red Eyes?”

„Oh, aren’t you a spitfire, little monk? I can see why the Serpent is so entertained by you, even after all of these centuries.”, Vlad laughed, offering the words up almost coquettishly.

Olrox would have congratulated the older man on his good taste if he also didn’t want to throttle Vlad for completely unrelated reasons to him discreetly flirting with Mizrak. If only. Instead, he kept his face relaxed and his gaze amused as he caught one of the Turk’s hands in his own and lifted it to his lips, kissing its knuckles in apology. An honest one even, just not for not introducing Mizrak to the eyes in the blade’s sheen, but rather because of how he had managed to shove the Turk straight into Vlad’s crosshairs.

„Apologies, my love. I was just mesmerised by your appearance tonight. You look beautiful. And ready for our dinner tonight. We will leave momentarily, don’t worry. We’re not postponing once more.”, Olrox smiled softly, chin pointing towards Vlad’s wickedly clever gaze. „Mizrak, meet Vlad. The vampire King. Adrian’s father. And Vlad, meet my lover and my heart, Mizrak. Don’t take this the wrong way, Vlad, but I hope you two never get to meet face to face.”

„Not taken the wrong way.”, the older man snorted, a poorly masked impatience seemingly tugging at the seams of his control. However, Vlad was charming and excellent at making himself liked well before he had ever made himself feared, his eyes relaxing after the split second slip and focusing back on Mizrak. „It’s a pleasure meeting you, Mizrak. I’m more than charmed and truly wondering what a man like you is doing with a snake like Olrox. Truly.”

„Oh, I think I’m just easily charmed by the villains of a narrative. Are you the villain that history and your own son makes you out to be, Your Majesty?”, the Turk asked plainly, leaning into Olrox’s side and laying a kiss to his shoulder without moving his gaze away from Vlad’s. „I might just swoon.”

The vampire King burst out in a clear peal of laughter, the sound much more honest than anything that Olrox had heard from Vlad in the past... Oh, in the past who even remembered how many millenia since they had first became aware of one another. He grinned too. Mizrak seemed pleased with their reactions, turning around to look at an empty spot behind them, far away from where Vlad could actually see.

„Yes, Maz, we’re coming. Vlad, it was nice meeting you. And unlike my lover here, I wouldn’t mind being in the same room as you and your lady, of course. But I cannot spare Olrox for more than five more minutes at most, so don’t dawdle.”, Mizrak offered, waving at Vlad and kissing Olrox softly, the Nahuatl suddenly immensely grateful for his lover. Just. For Mizrak being. And for Mizrak being his lover. „See you in the car. Don’t be late, Ol.”

Olrox’s eyes flickered to the side, where Mizrak had went after slipping from his arms and where Adrian was still scowling at Giselle, who was very close to being spliced by her attempts to cross back over into the room. It wouldn’t happen. The Nahuatl was able to open a portal to somewhere far, far away, but it didn’t work both ways and he was frankly shocked that it had held up that well until that point. Adrian could still go through it and in less than five minutes too. Hopefully. The door snickered shut as Mizrak closed it, remaining in the room. But. Once more. Vlad could not see anything past the direction where the sword was facing and Adrian, it seemed, was still controlling that.

Chapter Text

„Let’s make this short and to the point then, Vlad, since I have a lover waiting for me, which is far more pleasurable than the two of us just blattering on in here like lost goats.”, the Nahuatl rolled his eyes and pointed at himself for a moment. „I want something from you and it’s not your daughter’s life. Don’t be crass, Vlad. You have access to a crossing into the Nether World. Perhaps even access to the Infinite Corridor and a way to navigate it.”

„That’s all supposition, Quetzalcoatl. Get to the point.”, Vlad’s voice turned cold and sharp, losing all of the delicate amusement of before.

Olrox smiled. Oh. It was so easy to play and to prey on men when they had been thrown off kilter by something as precious as a pretty face. He had not planned for Mizrak to become that, but if it worked. Well. It worked. Who was he to question the lust of others?

„You will find someone for me in the afterworld and you will deliver a message. I don’t care how. I don’t care what you have to do to get my message across. You do that for me, Vlad, and I do something for you.”, Olrox offered plainly, all pretense of the conversation being anything else but a negotiation between two very powerful creatures gone.

The space around him almost frosted over with Vlad’s discontent. Alas, the time for the vampire King to have the upper hand had been long, long ago and, strangely enough, Vlad didn’t seem to want to fight him too much for it either. Odd. Not odder than anything else that had happened that far, but still. Odd enough.

„An eye for an eye until the world goes blind, Olrox. Remember that before you don’t keep your side of the bargain.”, the other man replied haughtily, but the sting of those words was practically non existent with how desperate Vlad had to be to contact him of all people. Though Olrox wondered... „Name them and your message. I shall strive to deliver.”

„Delsin. The vampire that Julia Belmont killed. Find him and tell him that I will give him his life back and his time on this side of the veil.”, the Nahuatl nodded, waiting to see if his former lover’s name meant anything to Vlad.

It didn’t seem to. It truly didn’t seem to. Julia Belmont, though, that was a name that the king of vampires recognised. Of course it was. She had been the last of the American branch of Belmonts and the one that had killed the most innocents. Vlad had failed to care for his flock in that regard and the other man knew it. His brows gathered together for a brief moment.

„Delsin. Your dead lover.”, Vlad murmured, the name of Olrox’s former partner pulsing through the dimensions when it came out of the King’s mouth. A call into the infinite dark. And, seemingly, an answer from somewhere, Vlad’s red eyes catching onto something into the far distance. „It shall be done. You deliver the message I gave you to Adrian. Do whatever you please with the girl. She’s irrelevant.”

„She’s irrelevant. Interesting way to put that. I’ll keep it in mind.”, Olrox whispered, ensuring that Vlad heard him fully, but giving them both the opportunity to pass on commenting more on it. And the vampire King blinked and took that pass with a lot of grace. The Nahuatl smiled. „Oh, one more thing, Vlad. How did you actually come to obtain an audience with me? I’m curious, of course. Purely professionally.”

„Purely professionally, huh? Aren’t you a picture perfect vampire? Well. Vampire hybrid, I suppose.”, the other man snorted, probably desperate to roll his eyes at Olrox, but holding back quite bravely. It wasn’t stately at all for a king to give into temptation and simply do an eyeroll. Olrox would know. „You have a blade that has been dipped in my or my line’s blood in your possession. It was child’s play to follow my blood and to tap into whatever remains of it on the sword.”

„It was child’s play to tap on the remains of old blood on a sword that has been cleaned many, many times since it touched any of your line or yourself, but it isn’t child’s play for you to find your own living blood?”, the Serpent’s tongue almost forked as he desperately tried to keep the glee out of his tone. He manged it, he supposed, because Vlad’s snarl was a thing of beauty. As was the abrupt cut of their connection and as was the way the room exhaled. Loudly. „So interesting, isn’t it, Adrian? Giselle, for fuck’s sake, you will get splinched by that portal if you don’t stop trying to climb through.”

„You fucking... You don’t negotiate with my life and with Adrian’s life just because you.”, Giselle started, her outraged screaming silenced with a gesture by Olrox, who was already getting a headache. He didn’t need a presumptuous, pompous, self righteous twenty something baby vampire to add to it.

„... Just because I can.”, Olrox pointed out, smiling serenely and gesturing towards Adrian’s sword. „And also just because I can, you will take that piece of metal away from here and you will not bring it here again. Ever. I don’t need Vlad tracking it once more. You’ve heard the message. You take the portal and do whatever you please. I will take my pound of flesh from your father for Acalan’s death when the time is right.”

„If... Olrox. Please. Listen to me.”, Adrian begged and, for a brief moment, the Nahuatl wanted to have the fucking strenght to ignore the blonde.

But he couldn’t. He couldn’t because he was weak to pretty men and to anyone who was truly in danger. Even to Giselle’s pleas, which he was still silencing just because she wasn’t his favourite person in the world right that instant. He sighed. Mazatl liked the girl. Mazatl had maternal feelings towards the girl. The girl needed training and protection and she needed to never cross paths with Vlad. Or to not cross paths with Vlad before she was given at least the smidgeon of a chance to make it out alive. Her Belmont training seemed to be woefully lacking, so someone had to provide some other kind of training and Olrox had the sinking feeling that it would be Mizrak and him that would be saddled with that task.

„No. I know what you want to ask me. No. The answer is no.”, he hissed, his hands working to widen the portal just a bit more and then pointing towards it to Adrian. And to the sword. Which somehow seemed to hiss back at him. The blonde spluttered and shook his head. Olrox continued as if nothing and no one could ever stop him, his decision made. „No. Absolutely not. You step through the portal or I will send you through it bodily and you might lose a limb. Go. Leave. Take the sword and the girl. Don’t come back until your daddy issues are resolved. Bye.”

Chapter Text

Mizrak had been sleeping for a while by the time Olrox decided to get out of bed and walk to the small adjoining bathroom of the cabin they had in the Appalachians. Well, that he had, technically, but the Turk would soon own everything that all of Olrox’s identities owned. Soon. He smiled, tossing his hair over one shoulder before starting on braiding it as he stared at himself in the mirror, the blackout, mechanical shades of the cabin still down for the day. There was a spell to keep the sun to a not deadly glare for vampires on the property as well, but Olrox liked to take no chances.

He didn’t appreciate the one severe weakness that his current incarnation had or that he couldn’t do much about it, the sun a major issue that he had to always factor into all of his scheming. Sometimes he did understand old Erzsie and her plan to steal the sun. Sure, it had been a bit megalomaniacal of her and Olrox still didn’t know if whoever had written Despicable Me had been inspired by her almost takeover of the fucking sun, but... All in all, points for flair. For nothing else, though. Negative points for Erzsie’s colonialistic desires and for her treating both Drolta and pretty much everyone else as disposable. Also, negative points for having tried to brand Olrox like he was fucking cattle.

But. Other than that. Major flaws and all. He rolled his eyes in the mirror and snorted. No, he hated Erzsebet still, after more than two and a half centuries. Mostly for the part where she had branded him. Mostly that. The killing of thousands of innocents also didn’t sit well with him, but he was less inclined to go to war with another godling over dead humans. Or so he wished to believe about himself. He sighed, his fingers moving almost mindlessly through his hair strands, his braid thick and missing... He smiled. His hair beads were right where he liked them to be, next to his bathroom sink, but he hadn’t put them there. No. That had been Mizrak’s doing.

Olrox snorted. He was fooling not a single soul, apparently. Not even himself. He had gone to war over the slaughter of innocents with gods and god like creatures and even god like men. He had gone to France to gather information on the dictator rising from Eastern Europe and leaving behind a trail of dead humans and slaughtered communities. And he had found Mizrak, prisoner to his own beliefs and to her, ultimately. So. All in all. He had fought a goddess for a human. He had defied his own sibling for Mizrak’s soul and he would bring Mizrak into the fold of his pantheon in a fortnight’s time. He was about to shape the world because of his love for a human. Former human, truthfully. But still.

„Are you just going to brood all evening or do you think we could share the mirror space?”, Mizrak’s arms wrapped around his waist as his lover stepped into the bathroom and moulded himself to Olrox’s back. Hard cock. The Nahuatl smiled sharply, his ass pushing into his fiancé’s hard, hard, delicious cock. „Yes? Can I help you with something?”

„You could fuck me until I can’t walk and then we could go out to hunt?”, Olrox asked, lifting an eyebrow and letting his electrical sparks lick at his cheekbones before traveling down to his spine and then lower. To his hole. He could feel Mizrak’s eyes on him, tracking the small white sparks.

The Turk’s mouth opened. And snapped shut as a palm landed on their bedroom door, shattering their illusion of privacy and their moment of intimacy. Mizrak let out a low sound of exasperation and Olrox. Well. Olrox was an idiot and had no one else to blame it one but himself and his non existent heart. And his penchant for taking in the most headache inducing strays. The ruckus outside, though, was simply proof of how uncivilised the Belmonts truly were. Still were. He had met a lot of them over the years and their claim to aristocracy was vague at best.

„I know you two are awake. I can hear you moving around. Are you fucking? Ew.”, Giselle shouted through the reinforced and magicked door, once more slapping the wood to hell and back. Olrox inhaled. Mizrak exhaled and seemingly didn’t snort because his lover had a lot of self control, which wasn’t something that Olrox sported a lot of. „Oh. Wait. Not ew because you’re like men. No. Homophobia is ew. Ew more like for the fact that I hate you both and I’m locked in here with you like a little girl and ew because you’re old. Like super old. Though you don’t look old and you both are hot.”

„Oh goodness gracious, go see what she wants before she asks to watch us fuck. I feel like I don’t want to figure out if voyeurism runs in the fucking family or not.”, the Nahuatl muttered, pushing his lover away from him, which was a blasphemy all on its own, to go check on Adrian’s fucking sister.

Who they had gotten stuck with. Because Olrox had a serious problem saying no, fuck all the way off to pretty men asking him to save annoying baby vampires that just happened to be innocent.

„Why is it my turn to go check on the baby?”, the younger man replied, the sarcasm dripping all over the place. Olrox hissed in the mirror. Mizrak hissed back. „I told you to get Mazatl here with us. Or just have her stay with Mazatl.”

„You’re the one that saved her. You deal with her.”, Olrox snarked himself, busy slipping his beads in his hair and continuing braiding it to his satisfaction. And Mizrak’s. The Turk kept on staring for a brief moment. „Put some pants on and go see what she wants. I’ll make sure that she can be moved safely to Mazatl and then she’s off our hands. A couple more days, though.”

„I’m the one that saved her this, I’m the one that saved her that.”, Mizrak mumbled, walking back out of the bathroom and stepping into Olrox’s pijama pants, the silky smoothness of them stretching quite enticingly over the Turk’s firm ass and strong thighs. „Stop staring at me or I’ll flash the kid.”

„She’s twenty something, I’m sure she’s seen a dick before. At least in movies.”, the Nahuatl replied evenly, shutting the bathroom door with a twist of his fingers and a smile.

He turned on the spot, looking at himself in the mirror once more. Admiringly. He did look handsome. Pretty even, from some angles. His beads were colourful and shiny and his earing was expensive and superbly crafted. He was expensive and superbly crafted. He peeled his lips from his teeth, his fangs dropping slightly before covering his lower lip. He liked that. He liked the feeling of the fangs in his mouth and he liked the feeling of them sinking into someone else’s flesh and he liked the fear they struck in the hearts of men. Certain men, at least.

He fussed with his toothbrush, oscillating between the electric one, which he used sparingly because it hurt his gums and the classical one, and then with the controls of the shower. Olrox was patient. Sort of. He mostly liked his needs to be met and his wants to be considered first and he definitely wouldn’t think of postponing a nice, slow, luxurious evening fuck because Giselle was having some sort of toddleresque tantrum over her life being meaningless without a purpose and about why had Mizrak saved her and... The Nahuatl sighed, pulling a fluffy, white bathrobe on and marching into the bedroom, where the girl and his fiance were.

„Why do I keep walking into our bedroom and finding Vlad’s blood lounging on our bed? Where we have definitely fucked, Giselle. Where the old men have definitely fucked. Multiple times. In a row.”, Olrox snarked, rolling his eyes as she blushed for a moment before shrugging and stretching all over the middle of the mattress. „Are you starfishing on the bed now? I swear that your brother isn’t this annoying and that is most definitely a success. To be more more annoying than the blonde Messiah.”

„Adrian’s less annoying because he’s usually naked and you’re usually riding his cock. So. There’s that.”, Miz offered, tone amused and slightly cheeky. Olrox squawked. Giselle grinned widely, rolling to her back and mimicking...

„No, thanks, I prefer a flesh and blood cock.”, he choked out, pointing from her to the door. Or. He sighed. At least to the armchair next to the window. „Off the bed. Now. What do you want? Why are you here?”

„Existentially speaking, who even knows. Metaphorically speaking, because faith willed it so or some crap. And practically, because you and Adrian decided to play feudal lords and ignore the fact that I’m an independent woman and that you two don’t own me, body, mind and soul.”, Giselle lifted a sharp eyebrow and didn’t move from the bed. Olrox stared at Mizrak. The Turk had the audacity to shrug. „So you traded me like cattle. And abducted me. And I’m now stuck here with you and your fiancé, who might as well have left me for dead in that crypt for all the help he is right now. So.”

„All of that doesn’t tell me why you’re here, in our bed, right the fuck now.”, Olrox turned on the spot, walking to the armchair and feeling slightly less than as offended as he should have been for being literally kicked out of his own bed.

Because she wasn’t technically wrong. Sure, she wasn’t right either and she would have been minced meat for any of Vlad’s cronies as soon as she would have been set free into the world, but. Still. Giselle wasn’t wrong. The blonde and him, they had talked over her head and had ignored everything that she had had to say about herself and her own autonomy.

„I want you to let me go.”, she didn’t waste a single moment in asking for what she wanted. Olrox had to admire the tenacity. The sheer foolishness of the matter didn’t take away from how determined Giselle seemed to want to, frankly, fuck life up on her own terms.

Which. Olrox could understand and appreciate. Truly. He smiled. Mizrak stood up from where he had been perched on the windowsill and shook his head. The Nahuatl chose to ignore the love of all of his lives, past, present and future. Utterly ignore Mizrak.

„Okay. You’re free to go.”, the older man opened his palm, slicing his skin just enough for a single drop of blood to trickle down to his forefinger. „Come here. Let me mark you. That will get you through the wards without myself or Mizrak coming with you to the end of the forest.”

„I. Really?”, Giselle stuttered, bouncing into a sitting position and eyeing him suspiciously from where she was still perched in the middle of his and Mizrak’s bed. „What’s the catch?”

„No catch. You’re right. Adrian and I didn’t mind your own desires and wants and needs in the shouting match that followed you climbing out of my portal and back into my office.”, Olrox steepled his fingers together, though he was sure that his fuzzy bathrobe didn’t help with the suaveness of the picture he was trying to project. Mizrak was rubbing his hands over his own face and sighing. Well. Nothing could be done about that right then and there. „So, I’m letting you go. Go forth and multiply or whatever it was that the Christian god said to whoever that was. You can leave. I’m not keeping a full grown adult anywhere against their will, especially one that absolutely understands the consequences of their own actions. Which you do. Don’t you, Giselle? You get what will happen the second you go back to your initial mission of stalking Vlad and Lisa all over the world, don’t you?”

Chapter Text

„That wasn’t my mission. If you would have listened to me at any of the times when I was talking at you, apparently, and not with you, you would have known.”, she snapped and Olrox lifted his hands, acknowledging her observation.

Giselle was right, all in all. Giselle was young and impulsive and all of those other things that young people were before they hit all the walls on their way out of a problem. But what Giselle was not, despite of all of Olrox’s mumbling and grumbling, was a fool.

„Granted, you’re not wrong. Tell me then, what happens when I let you go and you run into one of Vlad’s employees. And you will. Sooner, rather than later, you will. Because your father doesn’t want you anywhere near him and, especially, your mother. For reasons unknown to me.”, the Nahuatl murmured, his fingers catching onto his braid and playing with it. „Miz, why would that be what Vlad wanted? What’s wrong with the whole picture? He stays away from both Adrian, who is actively searching for him and Lisa, and apparently tosses away his new born daughter, handing her over to the fucking wolves, but somehow gets pissed off and had a message to send the minute his children get together?”

„We are missing something.”, the young woman lounging on Olrox’s bed said, his bright green eyes meeting her red ones as she finally rolled off the mattress and caught his sleeve on the way to the door. „Come on, you have a whiteboard in your tiny ass office here. Let’s detective the shit out this. Come, come. Mizrak. Come on.”

„I. What? How did we... Miz?”, Olrox whined, following the tiny spec of barely a vampire in front of him out of his bedroom. His and Mizrak’s. His fiancé was following Giselle and him around like a sweet puppy and not protesting. The Nahuatl’s robe sleeve was still in between Giselle’s fingers and he groaned, frowning as he stared at the back wall of his office. Where the girl had managed to get both him and Mizrak to without a single drop of blood being spilled. He was so done with her. He snarled and pulled his arm out of her grip. „I thought you were leaving.”

„No, I just wanted you to let me go. I didn’t say that I was actually going.”, Giselle pointed out, her grin sharp and her eyes so fucking similar to Vlad’s that, for a second, Olrox had to double check that the older vampire wasn’t standing in front of him. A bad dream that would have been, surely. He shook his head. Mizrak snorted. „I’m not an idiot. I know I would have to be with either you two, Mazatl, Adrian or... I don’t know, in the middle of nowhere, to not draw any attention and to keep safe. I can fight, but I was trained as a Belmont and none of those weapons are accessible to me now. And I wasn’t a very good Belmont, honestly. I sucked at most things and the Morning Star made me itchy. Guess we now know why.”

„Wait. Go back to that.”, Mizrak said, his eyes focused on something beyond all that the eyes could see. Olrox knew when his lover got like that. The Turk was smelling something like a sliver in the way to the truth. Giselle’s head turned to the side, her lips parting in question. „Your life with the Belmonts. Tell us about that. Put it on the whiteboard, actually.”

„I. Okay. Yes.”, she nodded, turning on her heels and digging through Olrox’s desk, looking for dry erase markers, the Nahuatl assumed. If he had those. Which. He did, apparently. That had to have been Mazatl’s handiwork, he didn’t remember ever buying any sort of office supplies. In his life. He truly was spoiled. „Okay. Where should I start?”

„Do you have a birth certificate? You must. We should start there. Do you have it digitally somewhere or is it back in France? Your entire paperwork, we need to start there.”, the Turk asked. Olrox understood where his fiance was going with everything.

„You want us to retrace Vlad’s steps. And whoever in the Belmont family was his accomplice is the key. But that’s decades old evidence, it could all be buried under mountains of legalities and... Money.”, the Nahuatl smiled widely, dropping into one of the two armchairs that barely fit the tiny room they were in. His eyes met Giselle’s. „Come on, gen Zer. You guys have all of your stuff online. Show us your birth certificate and your ID and we can start from there.”

„You pull up every single legal document you have, Giselle. Olrox and myself, we’re going to go put on actual pants and return in a moment.”, Miz laughed, long fingers pointing to the small hallway that barely fit two grown men in it, let alone whoever else it too to populate the the two bedrooms and the office and the kitchen living room combo they had going on in the cabin. „Pants, Ol. Now. Pants.”

„You’re wearing my pants, for one. And for another, I’m a perfect physical specimen. So are you. Why should we have to wear pants in our own home?”, Olrox pouted, groaning all along as they trudged towards their bedroom. Their soundproofed due to spelling bedroom. The Nahuatl grinned and pinned his lover to the door, his nose tracing Mizrak’s high cheekbones and jaw, the stubble there making him horny. „I see what you did here. We take off our clothes first and then put on pants. And since we’re naked and all.”

„You’re incorrigible.”, the Turk grinned up at him and wrapped his arms around Olrox’s shoulders, slipping his large hands underneath the older man’s curtain of pitch black hair and massaging the base of his skull. And his nape. And Olrox wanted to purr, which wasn’t very conducive to the sex he had been planning on. Mizrak smirked. „We’re not getting a fuck in while Giselle waits for us.”

„Oh, but that would make me so corrigible.”, the Nahuatl grinned right back, his pout easily replaced with a sultry twist of his lips. He could see Mizrak giving his proposition a thought. He could. He could also see the exact moment in which his fiancé rejected his idea. „Boo.”

„Boohoo.”, Mizrak rolled his eyes and pushed Olrox off him, stepping towards their bed and getting out of those silk pants and... „No. Go get dressed. We’re helping this woman get her life back.”

„Why? We’re not to blame for her having shitty parents and a shitty destiny.”, Olrox whined, tossing his hair over his shoulder, his beads clinking sweetly. „See, I even put beads in my hair. I know how much you like fucking me when I have beads in my hair. You like the clinking.”

„You make me sound like a deranged toddler.”, the Turk snorted, walking towards their walk in closet and grabbing some dark blue boxers. Cotton. Oh, they were going for a day of labour instead of one of pleasure. Olrox sighed. „And we’re stuck with Giselle because you are physically incapable of saying no to a pair of pretty eyes. Especially if they’re attached to a pretty dick with blonde hair and a saviour complex.”

„You know, I can always tell your mood for the day by the kind of boxers your pick out.”, he replied dryly, breezing into the same walk in closet and debating on a sweet thong, bedazzled and delicious, which provided ample access for... Later on. Or. A boring set of black, silk boxers. Because his boring was still fabulous. Of fucking course.

„Really? And what does my boxers choice today indicate, lover?”, Miz whispered, crowding Olrox against the three piece suits and smoothing one of his very expensive sea silk shirts. He lifted a sharp eyebrow. Mizrak, in his utter cheek, lifted the same eyebrow. „Well?”

„That it’s cloudy, with no chance of sexual release until way later in the night. If at all.”, Olrox poked his tongue out, sighing when his fiancé snorted, but nodded right along. „Unfair. I’m sacrificing my sexual wellbeing to help Giselle. A Beaumont. Even worse. A Țepeș. A Beaumont Țepeș hybrid. The worst combination in the world, I swear.”

„Nah, I think that would have had to fall under... Maybe Erzsébet and Vlad. Now that.”, the Turk shuddered, pushing his long, toned and muscled legs into a pair of black, form fitting jeans. „Imagine that combination of genes.”

„Ugh.”, the Nahuatl huffed and puffed and finally chose an outfit for the night, his lover shadowing his every move.

It was sort of sweet. And sort of annoying, though, that when he reached for a shirt, Mizrak’s hand was already on it, giving it to Olrox. And then on his flowy, lacey pants. And then on his linen shift, long and leaving him half naked, but that was more than enough clothes for him, in his own home. His fingers closed over Mizrak’s when the Turk reached for his gold and ruby house slippers.

„Tell me what you want, Miz.”, Olrox tilted his head to the side, catching the younger man’s blush before it could disappear underneath that black tshirt the Turk had pulled on. „Come on. Is it kinky? Kinkier than that time with me as a serpent?”

„Nothing beats that time. We should definitely do it again. Getting fucked by Quetzalcoatl was novel. And intense. And I would like that again, pretty please.”, Mizrak leaned against the opposite side of their little den of fabric iniquity, eyes tracing Olrox’s features carefully. „I have a request for our... Wedding? Union? Mating?”

„Union. Let’s go with that.”, the Nahuatl swallowed against the sudden lump that had formed in his throat. He didn’t think whatever Mizrak wanted to ask of him was anything bad, but he had also not really detailed much of what was to happen during the ceremony or what that would entail and... „Yes, ask me. If I can make it real, it’s yours.”

„You’re afraid.”, the Turk murmured, cradling Olrox’s cheek in his large palm.

The Nahuatl considered denying that and offering up any other emotion but fear, since it would be... Prettier, he supposed. But he couldn’t lie to his lover. And he didn’t want to. He nodded. Mizrak cursed almost silently and brought his lips down on Olrox’s, their breaths mingling as their mouths said everything that neither of them knew how to put into actual words. Olrox’s arms went around his lover’s neck and, for a brief moment in time, they were alone and melting into one another. An inhale. An exhale. Their lips parted. Dark brown eyes locked with the Nahuatl’s jewel green ones.

„I’m sorry. Let me... Let me say it.”, Mizrak licked his lips and then kissed Olrox’s browbone. Once. Twice. Three times. He nodded. „I’m sorry for the years you waited for me and I was lost. Or on the way to finding myself to become this better man that is worthy of you. I’m sorry. I love you. And I will use the eternity we have to make up for all the hurt of these two and a half centuries. I vow it.”

„Will you vow it on my altar as well?”, Olrox asked, nuzzling into Mizrak’s throat. „There’s more you need to know about the ceremony before we consider it. Truly.”

„I don’t. I’m yours. You’re mine. There’s something in that ceremony that will make your heart stop racing every time I face off against a potential deadly threat. However we need to make that happen, I will do it. For you. For us.”, the younger man nodded and Olrox believed him. He did. He inhaled sharply and exhaled deeply, nodding and not crying in their walk in closet. Humidity would damage the silks. „As for what I wanted to ask you. I want to braid your hair for the ceremony. May I? However your want it braided, I will. I just. I just want to do it myself.”

Chapter Text

„You want to braid my hair for our union?”, the Nahuatl murmured, his fingers mindlessly tracing Mizrak’s jawline and strong neck until they rested on his lover’s collarbones while Olrox himself tried to process what the man in whose arms he was had said. „That. Yes. Yes. Yes. A thousand times yes. But you’ve never wanted to do that before. You’ve always treated my hair with respect, yes, and with care and with love, but you’ve never... Were you scared of asking to braid it?”

„Scared? No. I wasn’t scared, Ol.”, Mizrak shrugged, stepping back from the older man and turning to face the tall, full body mirror that was tucked in a corner in the dressing room.

Mazatl had laughed herself out of the cabin when Olrox had demanded that he had a dressing room in a cabin in the Appalachians, but had definitely come through on the design of it. Truly. The mirror was a stroke of genius and one that allowed Olrox to study his lover’s expressions, even when Mizrak was trying to hide from him. Or maybe from himself, once more. He wrapped his arms around the Turk’s body from behind, his head resting against the other man’s shoulder. Mizrak sighed.

„I wasn’t scared to ask. I was... I was unworthy, I suppose.”, the Turk whispered, the small space around them suffocated with the quiet words. Olrox had expected that. He lifted his head and locked eyes with Mizrak in the mirror, his bright green ones burning with the need to make his lover understand that he had never considered the Turk unworthy of anything. Never. „Don’t. I can read you better than you think. Don’t deny it. I’ve treated you poorly for the past two and a half centuries. A couple of weeks of us having put all of our cards on the table isn’t enough for that hurt to be healed, Olrox.”

„Your hurt? Or mine? Because those are two distinct issues and I would like you to not assume anything about what I’m feeling and how I’ve dealt with our relationship in the past.”, Olrox offered, voice steady and as neutral as he could have made it. Mizrak wasn’t wrong in his assumption that he still had bloody, oozy gashes lining his soul, but he also didn’t want that to stop them from evolving. From moving forward. From healing while growing. „I do not like that word. Worthy. Or unworthy, I suppose. It’s very easy to slip down a slope where some people are worthy of something and others aren’t. Of life. Of love. Of rights. Of dignity. You have always been worthy of anything you want. And I have done plenty of unworthy of you things as well. I’ve turned you without asking for your consent, to start with one.”

„I was dying. You saved me. End of story there.”, Mizrak turned back to face Olrox, lifting his mouth and silently asking for a kiss. The Nahuatl obliged because of course he did. Of course. A kiss. Another one. And he was being pushed out of the closet. He snorted and shot a hand out to keep them both still in the dressing room. Mizrak’s brows lifted as his lover pulled away from Olrox to stare at him in disapproval. „We need not make this a very long talk, fiancé. You’ve grovelled enough for turning me without asking first. I’ve fought those demons in my one mind and won. That, truly, has been the easiest fight to win. You did good in turning me. You gave me a new chance at life and one that I don’t know if was in the mental space to grab with both hands and agree to, no matter how much I wanted it. Wanted you. Fuck, I wanted you so much, from the first moment I saw you.”

„Oh, I know. You fought me in the shadows of that little abbey in the French countryside, loyal to a master that went on to sell you and all of humanity out for... Whatever idiocy that had been.”, the older man purred, letting his lover step into their bedroom and quickly finding a jade handle brush to shove into Mizrak’s hands. The Turk looked at him with wide eyes. „We’re not leaving this room until you brush my hair. Giselle can wait. Giselle will wait. She’s anyways been waiting for two and a half decades. She’s not going to find anything out in the next twenty minutes that she didn’t already knew.”

„I feel like I should disagree with you on that point for some reason, but I won’t. Because it’s fair, actually.”, the Turk rolled his eyes and held the jade hair brush like it was the most precious object ever, looking around to determine where he should sit, Olrox assumed.

„The bed. I’ll sit on the edge and you can sit behind me or stand. However you want.”, Olrox pointed out, Mizrak nodding all along. He smiled. His fiancé smiled back. He offered his hand to the younger man. „Come. It’s not that complicated, I can promise you that. Nor that intimidating.”

„Speak for yourself.”, Mizrak mumbled mulishly, but followed along as they both got situated on the bed. And then Olrox simply rolled his head back, tossing his hair over his shoulders fully and pointing at the top of his head.

„Start from there. This time. Because it’s already brushed and all. Usually, you would start from the bottom and work your way up to untangle any knots or anything without breaking the strand, but you can just pass the brush through it easily for now.”, the Nahuatl grinned, skin flushing when his lover placed the brush on the side of his head, right near the crown, and dragged it down. Slowly. Gently. Mizrak was brushing his hair. „Fuck, that feels... Fuck. Exquisite. Yes. And peaceful too. Yes. Just the rhythm of it and the safety of knowing that you’re the one doing it and. Oh. I can teach you to braid my beads in too. So many things.”

„I might have... Okay, don’t. Like. Okay.”, the Turk stuttered, making Olrox tip his head to the side and carefully study his lover from the corner of his eye. Mizrak was blushing, his gaze moving to a set of drawers that the younger man had claimed as his own at the start of their stay in the cabin. Interesting. Olrox waited as patiently as he knew how to. Which. „You’re fretting and I’m not saying this properly. I stole one of your hair beads like a century or so ago and ever since then, I have been on a mission around the world to get you the most precious and most refined and rarest hair beads I could find. I had artisans that are long dead now make them for me. For you, really. But. Like. Can I show you? And if you like them, you could.”

„Yes. Yes, I would.”, Olrox turned in his lover’s arms, eyes wide.

He was definitely not blinking back tears. No. There was no need for him to cry and he had cried so many times in the past few weeks and he didn’t want to cry twice in a day. Or at all, if he could help it. But Mizrak had been collecting hair beads for a century. For him. His hands shook as they rose to cup the Turk’s face, their lips meeting once. Fiercely. He pulled back and grinned.

„Show me. I want to see. I’ll wear them all for you, my heart. Show me.”, the Nahuatl whispered between another kiss and yet another. But he also kept on smiling as his fiancé moved from the bed to the second drawer of that particular chest and then to the very back of the drawer itself, from where Mizrak pulled a black box. A rather large black box. „Does that have beads in it? All of it? Miz.”

„Yes. All of it. I did have like a century to get them all.”, Mizrak licked his lips and took the two steps to the bed, dropping the wooden box on the bed between the. Olrox’s fingers itched to touch, but he sat on them and waited for the Turk to crawl next to him, hug him from behind and point towards the box with a bit of a too nonchalant gesture for the older man to be fooled by it. „Open it. They’re all yours. I hope you’ll find some to your liking, at least.”

Chapter Text

The Nahuatl didn’t answer right away. He couldn’t. Mizrak wouldn’t believe him if he said that no matter how ugly the beads would be, he would wear them. He would. Because Miz had gotten them for him for over a century and... The beads weren’t ugly. No. They were far, far from ugly. The ones that Olrox could see without digging through the box were splendid. Jade. Or one of the purple stones out there. And some that were golden and some that were the most beautiful combination of blue and silver and some of them delicately sculpted and some not.

„Oh.”, Olrox’s mouth opened, the words he wanted to say almost frozen in the back of his throat. Every single one of those beads was exquisite and there were maybe a hundred of them. Maybe more. His fingers shook as he picked one, brilliantly white and dotted with the most intense gold drops, rolled it around his palm and brought it to his lips, kissing it gently. „Miz. These are. I love you. I. These are beautiful. All of them. I can feel your care and the thought you put into each and everyone one of them. I can feel you loving me through them.”

„Since I didn’t yet know how to be who I needed to be to love you properly in person, I... I collected drops of my feelings for you in this box.”, the younger man offered easily, the truth making Olrox’s heart flutter.

He licked his lips and melted in his fiancé’s arms, his head dropping back to Mizrak’s shoulder. A hand came up his chest and moulded to the base of his throat as they rested there. For a long moment, they just were. Then Mizrak told him stories about some of the beads and Olrox found himself falling harder and harder for a man he didn’t think he could have ever loved more. But. Apparently. He could.

„Let me... This one.”, Mizrak started, his long fingers combing through the beads until he found a brilliantly green one that had been at the bottom of the box, tucked in a corner. Olrox gasped. The colour of that. „It’s identical to your eyes. Like the earrings that you wear and like the rings that you have and all that. It’s an actual emerald an artisan somewhere in Peru turned into a bead for me. It’s much older, though, than the other ones. I picked this up first. Before stealing one of your beads and having the rest of them made to the same quality as your preferred ones. I think I got this sometimes in the early eighteen hundreds. Very early. 1801 or maybe 1802. Definitely Peru.”

„That’s very early. I thought you hated me for a good part of the eighteen hundreds. But you didn’t.”, the Nahuatl murmured, his fingers closing onto the bead that Mizrak was holding. „You were out there buying me beads.”

„Oh, don’t worry, I had plenty complicated feelings for you back then, I can promise you that. Hating, no. I never hated you, Olrox. I wanted you from the moment I laid eyes on you and then I loved you from that moment when you came back for me. Right before everything went to shit in France. I refused to go with you and you didn’t leave.”, his fiancé brought out another bead, a deep burgundy one with a golden filigree. Carved with a single, impossibly delicate triangle. „This is from somewhere deep in the Congo. I spoke none of the language there, but they understood my request beautifully. A bead. I wish I remembered how to get back to that village, deep in the jungle.”

„We can go. We will probably be far from the most dangerous creatures out there, but we can go. Back to the Congo. Back to Peru. Back to everywhere that you’ve walked without me and we can walk every path together, under the moonlight.”, Olrox swallowed hard against the lump in his throat, his eyes blinking back a thousand and one tears that he didn’t want to shed. He snorted. „Fuck, I should have kept all of that for our union vows. Not that I... No, I will offer you vows in return. I will figure out a way to make that ceremony dual. Mazatl will help. And if we can’t do it ourselves, I’ll call upon my siblings.”

„The ones that would like nothing else but to have your head on a spike, Quetzalcoatl? Those ones? Let’s not. How about that. Let’s not.”, Mizrak rolled his eyes, turning Olrox’s head to the side until the two of them could lock gazes. The Turk was mostly unimpressed. Olrox shrugged. „No. We will not be doing that. Tell me about the ceremony. You’re antsy about it.”

„I am. But not now. We should... I can’t believe I’m saying this, honestly. Fuck me. We should be going back to our mistake there, in the living room.”, the older man sighed, definitely not using Giselle as a means of delaying one conversation that he didn’t want to have. Not at all. He would, though. Just later. Mizrak blinked. „Giselle, I mean.”

„Oh, I know who you mean. I don’t know why she’s our mistake. You are the one that has problems saying no to pretty men.”, the Turk lifted a sharp eyebrow and yelped when Olrox pinched his thighs, smoking out of bed and out of reach as soon as Mizrak tried to retaliate. „And now you’re running. Rude, O. Rude.”

„Efficient, actually. I. I want to hear more stories about the beads. Will you tell me all of their stories one by one?”, Olrox asked, his voice coming from everywhere and from nowhere at the same time for as long as he was incorporeal. Mizrak grinned and nodded, rolling out of bed and passing right through what would have been one of the dark patches of Quetzalcoatl’s tail spikes. If not for how Olrox was smoke, of course. „And at the end of the stories, of which I would like one a day, we get unioned. Is that a word? It should be a word. I’m making it one.”

„You’re the god of literacy now?”, Mizrak laughed softly, amused and tender and leaning back into Olrox’s solidified form as they both stared into the mirror they had on top of one of the dressers in their bedroom. „We look good together. And I would need to actually count how many beads there are in there for us to not be surprised by needing to get unioned the following night or something. I’ll do that after we give Giselle something to chomp at.”

„My nerves, probably.”, the Nahuatl rolled his eyes, grabbing his phone from the side table and making a split second decision to text Mazatl. „We need space to get ready for the ceremony, even if it’s three months from now. Giselle needs help with her stuff and company. We’re going to get Maz to come pick her up and then we’re going to hope that they can handle themselves for as long as it takes for Adrian to fucking figure out what his father is doing and why.”

„But if... If Giselle is away from here before Vlad gets back to you about that delivered message.”, his fiancé started before Olrox grasping the door handle and tossing a look behind him, Mizrak’s eyes widening in understanding. „You don’t expect him to come back to you with that.”

„I mean, it wasn’t really a request to ferry a message from the living to the dead and back again in any way, shape or form. I was mostly fishing there. And Vlad, blessed be his shrivelled heart, took the bait. Hook, line and fucking sinker.”, Olrox offered, shrugging once and pointing towards the door. „We leave this room and we don’t discuss any of this in Giselle’s presence. I don’t trust her. She’s young and it’s plenty hard to predict any of the Țepeșes moves on a sunny day in Hell. But when you put them back against a wall even less. A Țepeș raised as a Belmont is sacrilegeous. Let’s not find out what had Vlad so desperate to get rid of her so as to hand her over to a fucking Belmont, shall we?”

„Got it. Point taken. I don’t think she’s dangerous in the way that you’re implying, but I can see where you’re coming from and where you’re going with this.”, Mizrak nodded, beckoning for the older man to wait just a moment longer. „You said you baited Vlad. To see if he had access to the Infinite Corridor, no? What is the Infinite Corridor, O?”

„Oh, that old thing.”, the Nahuatl smirked, his fangs gleaming in the low light of the Appalachian morning in late October. Mizrak’s pupils blew up and Olrox giggled as quietly as possible. „The Infinite Corridor is a way to travel between realms.”

„What’s the catch? There’s always a catch and you know it. There’s always a price for something like this to be accesed and used.”, the Turk tilted his head to the side and waited, making Olrox very fucking proud.

And very fucking horny. He sure loved seeing Mizrak naked and that turned him on, but seeing Mizrak think was even better. Seeing Mizrak reach the correct conclusion with less than half a scrap of information and a fucking prayer. Well. That made Olrox want to climb his mate like a particularly tall tree.

„The catch is that there’s no way in. And, of course, once the way in has been figured out, that there’s no way out. And, of course, once the way out has also been figured out, that there’s no way to control where the corridor takes you. And, of course, once the direction of that magic has been parsed as well... Well, that there’s no way for someone to bring another through it.”, Olrox murmured, voice dark with lust. Mizrak licked his lips. „But. Of course. There’s ways around everything in this universe, dear heart. Even around death, after all.”

Chapter Text

Olrox leaned against the back of the armchair he had dropped into as soon as they had made it to the living room once more and closed his eyes. He was listening to Giselle. He was. It was just that he didn’t much care about the girl or about her plight or, honestly, about the why of Vlad’s actions. The how, though, was interesting.

“Go back to that.”, he said, fingers lazily playing with some strands of hair and eyes fluttering open just as Giselle frowned. Olrox snorted. Of course she couldn’t really tell what had sparked his interest. It was her life, she couldn’t see what didn’t quite fit from so up close. “You said you belong to an offshoot of an offshoot of the Belmont line and that you only met the old man once, when you were a child. He didn’t have children. He purposely didn’t have children. He did have siblings. But. He murdered them all and their children. A bit like Kronos. A man after my own tastes and all.”

“You’re disgusting.”, Giselle frowned, but turned to her memory board or whatever that was that she was writing on, slowly trying to trace her supposed lineage from her adopted relatives back to the main branch of the Belmont line. The sole surviving branch of the Belmont line, at least as far as Olrox was aware.

And he was very aware.

He had spent a lot of the eighteen hundreds murdering them, after all.

“I’m a god, dear girl. In the words of Lord Acton, ultimate power corrupts ultimately or something of that sort. All the Spiderman adaptations also play on that.”, Olrox looked at Giselle, unimpressed and somewhat bored by her still present morals. Mizrak sighed. “Thus. I am ultimately corrupt and morally bankrupt, to make it easier for your mortal sensibilities to take. Start from there when you relate to me, under any and all circumstances.”

“I’m not mortal, remember.”, she rolled her eyes, Olrox determined to not prove the young woman wrong. Not under his own will, of course, but rather because his fiancé had lifted a hand to stop the upcoming demonstration of how fucking mortal Giselle really was.

“Nothing that lives, lives forever. And you, my darling, are a vampire. You’re sturdier than a human, sure, but not by fucking much.”, the Nahuatl replied, already excruciatingly bored with both her and the entire conversation. “Not to mention that you are, as they say, somewhat already fucking dead. Since you’re a vampire and all.”

“Go back to the board and to what Olrox asked initially. There’s no... Just don’t take his baits, Giselle. It’s not worth it. Trust me, I’ve taken his baiting for the first decade of us somehow surviving each other as Master and turn. It’s not worth it.”, Mizrak interjected, the tone of that half amused and half chiding. Olrox gasped in outrage. Giselle snorted. “Please. Continue.”

“I am exceedingly glad that I’m not his turn. Exceedingly.”, she bit out before facing the board once more and pointing to the middle line. And to Xavier Belmont, the last of the original hunters. “My Maman, she always spoke of the old man as if he was someone to be revered. She called him great uncle. With how she talked about him, I used to think he was the leader of the X Men or something.”

“Not far from the truth, of course.”, Olrox pointed out, keeping his voice light and soft and completely not pointed. Or pointy. Mizrak was still eyeing him suspiciously, which was rude and was sort of making him horny, truly. “The Belmont. Xavier. He was already an older gentleman the first time the two of us met and I had zero desire to get any closer to him than he wished to come braid my hair or something. Your brother knew him much, much better. I wouldn’t say intimately, but they had a rapport. You, however, Giselle, were never mentioned. And Adrian talks a lot when he’s properly motivated.”

“I’m going to ignore that last part and take Mizrak’s advice about just being the bigger person in general.”, Giselle smiled, her lips rising, but her eyes not reflecting any of that. She truly did look like Vlad in that exact moment in time. It was uncanny. “I don’t know what to tell you. Why I never came up or why... Maybe Mr. X here lied about him not having any other relatives? I. I think, at least, that my mother was of his blood.”

“Illegitimate children were a dime a dozen even sixty, seventy years ago.”, the Turk shrugged, not truly concerned with where exactly Olrox was going with everything. Not that the older man even knew where that was. Giselle’s familial situation had just caught his eye with how unexpected it was. And how tender. And how... Mizrak’s eyes locked with his own. “You’re thinking of something in particular.”

“How old would you guesstimate the old man was when you met him?”, Olrox pursed his lips and waited for Giselle to answer him. He wasn’t in any hurry and she was truly searching her memories of that encounter, which suited the vampire just fine. He stood up, walking to the board and studying the whole family tree that Giselle had drawn up. “I’ve hunted Belmonts for literal centuries. Adrian has fucked and hunted with Belmonts for even more time. Between myself and your older brother, we know this line inside out. This branch here, the one your Maman referenced, it doesn’t exist. Anymore. It did. Oh, it absolutely did. But from here. Late seventeen hundreds. Until here. Mid nineteen hundreds. There’s no one. There’s nothing. This isn’t lost history, Giselle.”

“It’s a con.”, she murmured, her eyes wide as she turned back to the board. And to her printed pictures of her adoptive parents. Aurora Belmont and Pierre Laury. “You think this is a con. You think. You think Aurora and Pierre were conning Xavier.”

“To be fair, to pull something like this off, I think they must have been grifters. As in, conning was their job. This is a long con and one they must have prepared for for at least half a decade before they even... Got you?”, Mizrak’s body leaned forward, the Turk balancing on the armrest of the sofa as he pointed to a paper held to the board by a magnet. “This is a DNA test. So old Xavier wasn’t a complete fool by the time your Mama and Papa walked into that mansion with you in tow.”

“Yes. But it’s a test I passed. I was proven to be distantly related to Xavier. I don’t even think he demanded a test from Aurora after mine. At least, I don’t... You know. Have it.”, Giselle went to her laptop and pulled up an aerial picture of the Belmont estate in the south of France. Olrox snorted. “The cemetery. Maman could have gotten some DNA from the cemetery. Every single dead Belmont for the past four hundred fucking years is buried there. If there was a body to recover, of course. But she didn’t do the test. The old man did it, from a lock of my hair. He cut it and everything. I.”

“You? You remembered something. What is it?”, the Nahuatl asked, fingers tracing the pictures they had of Aurora and Pierre.

Sure, the couple had been dead for half a decade according to their daughter, but there was something there. Something. Olrox could feel it in the way his fingertips caught in the shadows of those pictures. Something in the way his otherworldly nature locked onto the faces of the two humans smiling at the camera in all their happiness. Something. Something was off.

“She had taught me to cry and scream when any stranger tried to touch me. So I cried and screamed when Xavier came at me with scissors. She... Maman cut my hair. Not the old man. She cut my hair and she bagged the piece of my hair and she gave it to him.”, the young woman sat down, the stool underneath her swaying with the force of her dismay. “I’m an idiot. I didn’t remember that until now. I.”

“Wallow in the self pity of the obvious later, Giselle darling.”, Olrox mused, forefinger pointing from the picture of Aurora to Mizrak and back again. “Lover. How many generations between... Oh. Say the late fourteen hundreds and the mid nineteen hundreds? Guesstimate. You’re good with genealogy.”

“I don’t think you’re asking this correctly. The answer to your question is about twenty five, but you don’t want to know how many theoretical people could have birthed other theoretical people at around the age of twenty to twenty five.”, the Turk scrunched his nose and ran a hand through his short, dark hair. Olrox nodded. He hadn’t asked that correctly and yet, his lover had understood him. He smiled. Mizrak smiled back. “I’d say... Roughly about twelve. What are you thinking?”

“Loop me in. I’m not going to be left on the outside of this while the grownups talk.”, Giselle snarked and Olrox had to give it to the young woman.

She was fucking relentless. Which. Admirable. He sighed. He really didn’t need to like another member of Vlad’s fucked up family.

Not that his was any better. Actually. On second thought. The Țepeșes were role models of mental health and emotional stability compared to his siblings. He shrugged. Well. Everyone was dealt a hand when it came to family and everyone had to play it to their best ability, after all.

“I think Vlad didn’t give you to just about anybody. I think Vlad knew exactly who he gave you to and they... They used you to run their con. I think they found it funny. Amusing. That they used you, Vlad’s daughter, to con a fortune off the last Belmont. And I think Vlad killed them for it.”, the older man explained, pulling the young woman’s phone out of the pocket of his robe and tossing it to Giselle. “Your brother has a digital database of every single piece of art and literature in your father’s wandering castle. I want you to call him and ask for as many pictures of Isaac, your father’s old Forgemaster, as he has stored in there. I don’t care in what medium. Oil, sketches, fucking tapestries. I want to know what Isaac looked like and you’re going to want to know too.”

“Isaac. I read his writings. His and Hector’s. The Abbot had their journals and some of their books.”, Mizrak’s eyes narrowed and his head tilted to the side. “He was Sufi. From Morroco or Algeria, I think. Why ask about Isaac in particular and not go after the obviously French and white one? Hector, I mean. Aurora and Pierre are very. Um. French.”

“You wanted to say white, didn’t you?”, Olrox snickered, dodging the pillow that Mizrak threw at him with a lot of flair. And a lot of grace. “Missed me. Also, true. Hector should have been the first choice, of course, but you seem to not really know a lot about the history of those two and their serving under Vlad, do you? Hector ended up being stolen from Vlad by Carmilla and her merry band of vampires and he ended up on the wrong side of Vlad’s whole journey. Remember. Vlad wanted to exterminate the human race and then probably starve. What do I know.”

Chapter Text

“Carmilla wanted to build a giant human enclosure, from the northern border of Spain to the Urals.”, the young woman offered, her fingers flying over the screen as she seemed to be texting. Hopefully Adrian, but Olrox had determined that she was grown up enough to see to her own life and wellbeing, so if she wanted to go ahead and post on fucking Instagram, he wouldn’t oppose it anymore. Mizrak was staring at her. “What? I told you I was a bad vampire hunter, not a bad vampire scholar. I know my vampire shit. I just suck at hunting vampires.”

“Please don’t sire anyone until you do learn how to not suck at killing vampires.”, the Nahuatl sniffled, playing with his silky robe and rolling his eyes.

Loudly.

Too loudly, apparently, by the way his fiancé was staring at him. Probably because Giselle was frowning and...

“Because you will need to defend your turn, woman. Do you think young vampires, yourself included, aren’t easy picking for older ones? It’s not just humans that prey on the weak of their own kind.”, Olrox sighed, determined to have a good, long chat with Mizrak about insisting that he needed to be declawed.

Maybe not declawed. Maybe just more polite. But why would he need to be polite and what about. He was a god. Giselle was there, just a speck in his and Mizrak’s eternity.

A speck that was currently crossing her legs at the ankles as she was typing one handedly and scratching her under... Underboob with her free hand. Olrox let out a long suffering sound. Giselle was there because he had never learned how to say no and because, secretly and somewhere so deep inside of him that it had to have been at least fifteen lifetimes ago, he liked her.

Ugh.

He shook himself and huffed, ignoring the Turk’s way too self satisfied grin.

“I will ignore the fact that you called me weak because I’m not going to fall for that kind of cheap baiting.”, Giselle scrunched up her nose and lifted a hand, high fiving a very confused Mizrak before shoving an USB cord in her phone and transferring something from the device to the laptop on the desk.

Olrox could see everything that she was doing. His lover could too. Even better, Mizrak could see the letters and numbers and symbols that Giselle, bless all of her twenty something off years, had typed in a tiny, neat box. Which gave all three of them access to the Țepeș legacy, in remote server form.

The money. Uninteresting.

The information, though. That was something fucking else.

The Nahuatl’s eyes glimmered.

“Don’t get any ideas, Adrian says he’s changing the password the second I’m closing this session.”, she grinned, her lips forming a smug smile that Olrox wanted to wipe off her face. With his claws. And fangs. “So. Be nice to me and I might actually let you do a quick search through my big brother’s files here. You help me. I help you. We can do a bit of tit for tat.”

“Or I kill you where you stand, blame one of your father’s minions and let Adrian paint the world red in his hunt for vengeance in your name. I’m sure he’s dying for a rematch with dear, old daddy.”, the oldest vampire in the room offered, not even bothering to stand up and make his point any more obvious than it already was.

He hoped it was. Giselle had an original sort of self preservation that seemed specific to gen Zers. Mazatl had some theories about that, but Olrox couldn’t say he had ever paid much attention to his Priestess’ passion for the psychology of masses.

Unless it was about worshipping him. Then he could be persuaded to care.

“How about this for a tit for tat. You look in the database. I look in the database. Then Adrian can change whatever he wants and we can call it even.”, Olrox shrugged, purring almost silently when his fiancé walked towards him and sat on the coffee table next to him without much of a fuss. His right hand found Mizrak’s knee as he gestured towards the computer. “Now, Giselle, pull up a picture of Isaac, please.”

“You know, one of these days I’m actually going to believe you when you say you’re going to kill me over this and over that and I’m going to take it personally.”, the young woman muttered, her words making Mizrak snorted and cover it with a cough.

Olrox glared at his lover.

De. Fucking. Clawed.

A month old vampire wasn’t afraid of him. His lips peeled from his lengthening fangs and he snarled, the sound... Stopped by Mizrak’s hand on his cheek and by the Turk’s nose tracing his forehead.

“Isn’t that a cute picture. That you two make. Also, picture on the big screen.”, Giselle indicated, Olrox’s eyes moving from her still form to a face he had not seen in literal centuries. “He doesn’t look like any of my parents. I mean, this drawing isn’t what I would call anatomically correct. Maybe a little? Like my father. Well. Not Vlad. The one that raised me. Pierre. What kind of ancestor we’re talking about here? Direct? Or like. An uncle or something. A cousin.”

“Bring up Hector too.”, Mizrak stood up and walked closer the projection, turning to Olrox and tilting his head to the side. “Crazy idea.”

“Well, I’m a god, she’s the theoretically dead daughter of a vampire old enough to technically qualify as a god, we have a blonde half vampire that some people are calling messiah and we’re running from... Something. Unsure what. I’m definitely running from my brother, Coyote.”, the Nahuatl pointed out, elegantly draping all of his hair over one shoulder, leaving the other one half naked and on display. Mizrak’s eyes followed his invitation. So did Giselle’s for that matter. “Whatever you define as crazy, lover, I’m sure I can top it.”

“Is he always like this?”, their young charge muttered, her fingers flying over the keys as she searched for Hector.

And Hector’s image in something. The fifteenth century had not been terribly forthcoming with painting, drawing or doing a random mosaic of a couple of not blue blooded, poor and uneducated Forgemasters, especially since one of them was also not white.

But there were depictions of Hector. Just as there were of Isaac. At one point in time, they had been the most hunted men on the European continent. Olrox knew that for a fact. He’d met the vampire that had claimed Isaac’s life. He had drunk with her and with her wife.

And he had seen Hector’s body, wrapped in rags and called a holy relic, with his own two eyes.

“He is.”, the Turk snorted, his nose twitching as someone resembling the holy relic still being displayed as a saint in a church in France popped up on the big screen. Olrox frowned. “My crazy idea... Call it a hunch or call it my genetics and anthropology degrees at work, but I think that both your adoptive parents were Vlad’s acolytes. Directly.”

“One descended from Isaac and one from Hector? But Vlad would have known that Hector betrayed him. At least for a little while there. That Hector switched sides, siding with Carmilla, even if unwillingly. The big boy isn’t the forgiving kind.”, Olrox pointed out, standing up and approaching the computer where the Țepes’s mysterious database access was located. “Unless Vlad didn’t know about the betrayal.”

“Seems implausible.”, Giselle replied and the Nahuatl nodded, gesturing towards the keyboard. “What do you want me to look for, my Liege? I am forever your serf. Your typing serf. Is that what being a typist really was back in the day? Just a woman sitting at a desk and typing whatever a man in power told her to?”

“Well, darling, I can assure you that no man that has looked like me has ever had a typist working with him, let alone under him.”, the Nahuatl offered dryly before dropping into the office chair that she had vacated a while back. “We were too busy being ran through residential schools or starved in reservations while typists were in fashion.”

“Point made and fully acknowledged. I apologise, that was a bad joke.”, she nodded, startling Olrox out of his funk. “You look shocked.”

“I’ve not had a Țepeș apologise to me yet. One that I didn’t fuck beforehand, I mean.”, he snorted, shrugging off her flipping him with ease. “I can see you looking, sweetheart. Don’t deny it.”

“Deny what? That I find you and Mizrak gorgeous? Yeah, nobody’s blind in here. You’re also ancient and a pain in the ass and not the sharing and caring type. I would much rather find myself... Like a Spike or something.”, Vlad’s youngest child rolled her eyes, half exasperated and half amused in that specific way in which only very young people were. “You know. From Buffy. Or maybe a Spock. I love Spock. Or maybe a McCoy. Damn. I do like sarcastic men with too much trauma.”

“Well, good news is... You’re now immortal and have all the time in the world to look for your special boy.”, Mizrak added, raising a sharp eyebrow and pointing at the screen. “The bad news is that you have to live in order for that eternal search to get going. Oh, and I would totally go for McCoy too. I have a thing for people willing to travel the galaxy and contract a thousand alien diseases in order to further society.”

“So. Basically. Not Olrox.”, Giselle mused, yelping when Olrox’s eyes flashed gold for a second and snake wrapped wound her right wrist before disappearing in a puff of smoke. “You’re an idiot. What if I died of the fright. What then.”

“You’re a vampire.”, Olrox’s sarcasm dripping out of every single syllable as he tapped his fingers on the desk. And waited. “See if you can link your parents in any way to Isaac and Hector. Drop photos of them in the database and do a reverse search. If they are related to the Forgemasters, Adrian would have at least some information on Isaac and Hector’s descendants.”

“Did my brother put out the bounty on them?”, she asked, typing faster than Olrox had ever bothered. He was, as always when it came to Giselle, reluctantly impressed.

“Not if you’re to listen to him tell that story. But he technically did.”, Mizrak mused out loud. The Nahuatl was unsure whether they should be telling that story or not to Giselle, but...

It wasn’t like it was impossible to dig around for. Adrian had made quite a splash in the vampire world after having decided to give up on the solitary confinement thing. And after fixing the castle’s magical engines once more, turning it invisible and easy to move from place to place. As far as Olrox knew, Vlad’s magical, howling castle that Adrian had inherited due to being the last Țepeș alive at the time of Vlad’s initial visit to the afterlife was somewhere in Argentina currently.

Tierra del Fuego. Fun place. He’d taken Mizrak there once.

“There’s hundreds, if not thousands of entries here about what happened to Isaac and Hector and about their lives. Can’t blame my brother for not being thorough, truly.”, Giselle moaned, puppy eyeing Mizrak and then, when that didn’t work, desperately turning to Olrox himself.

Who snorted.

And stood up, patting the desk chair and pointing at it with a wink.

“Take a seat. You have blood in the fridge in the kitchen. Don’t bring it with you anywhere outside of that perimeter, I don’t like stains on things.”, Olrox grinned widely, very much amused by the developing situation. “You have all the time in the world to go through the entries. Mazatl will join you in a couple of hours and you two can work through the day if need be.”

“What will you and Mizrak be doing while I do the grunt work?”, she asked, her protests dying out quite easily as she took the offered seat and disconnected the projector, the image on the wall flickering and disappearing after a few moments. “This will take ages. You two could help, you know. Four people looking at this is much better than one. Or two.”

“My fiancé and myself, we will be fucking.”, the older vampire answered, ignoring her sputtering and her eyerolling. “You asked. I don’t understand why you need to be clutching any pearls here. You asked, I answered. Maybe mind your own business, which is untangling your own fucked up genealogy. Well. Borrowed genealogy. Chop chop. Get to reading. Call us when you have something tangible.”

Chapter Text

“Okay, what exactly will we be doing? Actually.”, Mizrak asked the moment that they were out of hearing range for a young, distracted vampire.

Which was about two rooms and three doors back, in their soundproofed bedroom. Still. Olrox rolled his eyes and hissed.

“Fucking, of course. Why? You don’t think we should be spending this precious quiet downtime doing something so important as being naked together? Have I lost your interest now that I’ve said yes to your proposal of marriage and eternity and...”, the Nahuatl yelped, finding himself backed into the bathroom door and then kissed.

Thoroughly. He sighed, wrapping his arms around Mizrak’s shoulders and arching his back, letting their fronts touch. And rub against each other. He was way too old for how horny the Turk made him all the time, but he couldn’t even begin to question the effect his own chosen life partner had on him.

He would rather spend all of his days naked with Mizrak than be dressed in all the finest things. And without Mizrak. He wouldn’t have that.

Ever.

“Mmmmmmnhumph.”, the Turk grinned, pulling back from the kiss and looking down between their bodies at their hardened cocks. And at Olrox’s pebbled nipples. “No, I think we’re very much fucking fine in the sexual interest category. However. I know you. What are we actually doing, Olrox?”

“Rude.”, Olrox huffed, letting his hands rest on Mizrak’s chest and looking at his lover with a keen curiosity. And with some sharpness. “We’re going to take a little trip to our bonding or marriage location, I guess you can call it. If you want to see it.”

It was far from what he had planned for the evening. Truly far. He had really wanted to just lounge in bed and have lazy sex and then feed and then maybe go for a hunt in the woods. They were in the Appalachians. They could easily hunt there and not be the scariest things around for miles and miles and miles. They might even have some sort of competition with the kind of creatures those ancient mountains would throw at unsuspecting visitors.

Of which they were not.

But still.

It would have been fun.

“Your altar? You’ve never taken me to a place of worship dedicated to you before.”, Mizrak licked his lips, eyes widening and cheeks flushing. “I knew of some, but I never went. It felt like... Maybe it was something you didn’t want to share with me or maybe I didn’t earn your. I don’t know. Maybe I wasn’t fit to worship at your altars? It sounds off when I say it out loud. Or like I’m a lovesick teenager.”

“I didn’t think you’d want to see them.”, the older vampire offered, breath caught in his throat and hands locked onto Mizrak’s hips, holding his man close to him. “And I think we’re both lovesick teenagers, honestly. Since we seem to be suffering from the most common trope in romance, no? Misunderstandings and miscommunication. Also, a lack of communication.”

“We really, really suck at talking to one another. Genuinely. We’re terrible at it.”, the Turk nodded, grinning widely and gesturing to his clothes. “Is this appropriate attire for visiting your temple? Or. Since I’m supposed to be an offering for you. Should I just go naked? Or maybe in some of those white silk pants you enjoy so much? Maybe a robe with nothing underneath.”

“Maybe you want to get fucked now and have your soul melded to mine faster than we’ve discussed. Fiancé.”, Olrox purred, laughing when Mizrak twirled out of his arms and lifted his shirt’s lower half coquettishly, displaying his belly.

And those abs.

Fuck, Olrox was so easy for his lover and he so fucking enjoyed that. So fucking much.

“Maybe I do.”, the younger man replied, lifting a hand when the Nahuatl took a step forward, his bright green eyes starting to sparkle. With electricity and white fire. “Ah. But we’re not going to rush this. We deserve the proper celebration. We deserve... You deserve to have your other worshippers there and you deserve to have this ritual be grand. You like grand, Olrox. You like preening. And you should be given that. I want to give you that.”

Mizrak stopped speaking, the flush in his cheeks spreading faster than Olrox had anticipated, and swallowed hard before dropping the bottom of the tshirt.

“And I want to be seen as yours. I want to be witnessed when I offer myself to you.”, his lover continued, shrugging when Olrox came closer and hugged him. “We’re definitely lovelorn. Not teenagers, though. But I feel like we’ve earned some lovelorning after all these centuries.”

“We definitely have, dearest heart.”, the Nahuatl whispered, running his hands over Mizrak’s back. “We will do this properly, I promise you. It might take us months to get everything settled and we have to do it on a full moon night. But other than that, we will spare no expense and everyone will witness our devotion to one another. I swear it, Mizrak.”

And he did. The room flooded with a fraction of his power, just enough to have his lover shudder and moan with it, his palms coming up to rest on Mizrak’s forearms as they got covered with small, delicate feathers.

I swear I will honour our bonding day with all manner of celebrations.

The words, both uttered by the flesh he was currently wearing and the immortal inside of it, swung around the room and embedded themselves into the very fabric of reality. He had not sworn himself to anything else before. He had sworn himself to Mizrak the night that he’d saved the Turk from certain death.

His brother had thought him insane. His entire family had shunned him for swearing himself to a mortal, even if one that fangs could turn into something a bit more sturdy. But he’d done it. And he hadn’t fucking regretted it. Not for a single moment.

He had hated how Mizrak had treated him for decades on end. But he hadn’t been able to regret Mizrak himself. He hadn’t. And would bring his lover to him not just in flesh.

“Then... Should I change or is this good enough for a visit to your. Um. Place of worship? Temple? Altar? Church? Work with me here, please.”, Mizrak smiled softly, still somewhat nervous and still somewhat antsy. But less than before. Far, far less. Olrox wanted to croon. “Ol. You’re staring at me with that look on your face.”

“That look? Which look is that exactly? Is it me being completely in love with you? Because it shouldn’t be a new one, sweetheart.”, Olrox replied, half snarky and half amused, but all very thoroughly impressed on how serious his lover was about visiting his houses of faith. “Teocalli. That’s what... What my people called temples back when they were ours.”

“House of god.”, the Turk nodded, Olrox once more surprised by how much of his own native tongue Mizrak had learned over the years.

Without purposeful lessons or anything of the sort, the younger man had assimilated everything that Olrox had managed to put out in a slip of tongue or something similar. It was, yet again, another proof of how much Mizrak had actually cared about him over the centuries, even when the showing part of that had fallen to the side. The Nahuatl actually remembered the moment when he’d first uttered the word teocalli in Mizrak’s presence and it was in a small, stone carved Christian place of worship somewhere deep in the Carpathian mountains. He remembered the moment too.

His lover had been struggling with his identity as a soldier more than with his sexuality at the time and had had conflict after conflict after conflict in which... In which Mizrak had almost killed himself over and over again trying to save all the innocents involved in the indiscriminate terror of war and famine. Olrox had watched from the sides for a while before stepping in and simply taking the Turk out of yet another blood bath on a plain in Italy, bringing them both to a remote cabin in the middle of some of the densest woods on the continent.

Mizrak had raged. And then Olrox had pointed to the carved out cave that laid only a few hundred metres behind the cabin.

“Now that’s another look you have on your face. The first one was your I love you, you impossible man look. This is the Damn, the memories look.”, Mizrak laughed, stepping out of Olrox’s arms and going to the small jewellery box that was sitting on their chest of drawers, long fingers already riffling through the small collection there. “My clothes are good. Okay. But I need decoration. I can’t visit one of your holy places without gold and precious stones on me. I’ll pun on... I want to put on an armband. Let me change out of this shirt and into a sleeveless top.”

“You’re fussing.”, the older man pointed out before circling his lover’s waist with his arms and letting his palms rest low on Mizrak’s belly. Low. Skimming the edge of his lover’s jeans. “But I appreciate it. And the thought you’re putting into this, even if I sprung it on you like this. Go put on a tank top. The green one? Matches my eyes.”

“Of course. And I will fuss as much as I want to. I haven’t fussed in the past two and a half centuries. I will now.”, the other vampire shrugged, once more slipping out of Olrox’s embrace. He growled. Mizrak laughed, clear and bright and so endearing. “I need to get my tank top. And then put it on. And. What are you doing.”