(no subject)
Title: Children of the Night
Fandom: Dracula
Prompt List: Off With Her Head
Prompt: Penny Dreadful. "Also called Gallows Literature. A dime novel rife with melodrama, horror, madness and cruelty; a ten cent analogy of vice and virtue in conflict. Soft perfume evocative of noir heroines over rich red grave loam."
Rating: T
Summary: The Harker, Seward and Holmwood offspring are bound by a strange hobby. A calling, if you will.
There was no formal day when Quincey Harker and his friends would meet, but somehow it always seemed to fall at a time when the wind and rain raged outside, adding a sense of shelter to whomever’s home they met in. On such occasions they could not be separated, not even by sex; ever since they were children, Lucy had refused to be chased out of the room when the boys were playing, and if Lucy was going to stay then Jacqueline and Sarah would, too. Not that Quincey and Will minded their presence terribly, for they were pleasant and clever and shared with them a history that went unspoken among most.
A history, and a shared hobby. A calling, if you will.
It was easiest for Lucy, the lady doctor with a tendency towards the Freudian. The wives and daughters who came to her told their troubles, and she would tell them which ones were in their own mind and which ones were caused by exhaustion or poor nutrition. But once in a while, they spoke of husbands who vanished once a month, or fathers who had returned from the war smelling of dirt and with strange, terrible scars. Her patients would speak of the cruelty they suffered at the hands of these men, and she would prescribe something a bit unusual.
“Two this year”, said Lucy Harker. “Vials full of holy water for their coffee. The numbers are dropping; I like to think modernization is driving out the phantoms of yesteryear.”
Will Seward had never had the patience for doctor’s work- his father had tried and failed not to show his disappointment, but at least Lucy had stepped up to take away the burden of apprenticeship. He would rather write poetry about women (before the war) or fields of bodies as seen from the height of a plane (after the war.) He’d been forced to change his name from Wilhelm to William due to an unfortunate similarity to the name of an enemy, but was well-regarded among his comrades in arms. Well-regarded enough to keep in touch after the war with them, and to arrange meetings with the ones who had made strange deals to stay alive.
“Only one.” He didn’t look proud. “Followed him back to his hotel with a stake of hawthorne. I hope to god it’s the last of them.”
If Will looked haunted, Sarah and Jacqueline Holmwood looked positively giddy. The past year had been good to them, Sarah in particular- her hair was cropped short and her skirt shorter still, and both she and her sister had taken to dabbling with cosmetics. They really were spoiled, but none the worse for it, and no less dedicated. Their scheme had been the same for several years, and yet their victims kept falling for it; Sarah would dance the night away until some scoundrel took her outside, where Jacqueline was waiting. If he merely wished to kiss her, she would let him. If he pushed his attentions further, Jacqueline would smash a bottle over his head and leave him in the alley. And if he instead bore his teeth...
“Five!” Jacqueline was positively bursting with excitement. “A silver knife, and the police suspect nothing but a bar fight.”
“If anything, our rates have gone up,” added Sarah. Quincey once again wrestled with the desire to propose to her, and once again his courage failed him.
For his part, Quincey had learned to recognize things from the battlefields, creatures like men but who loped on all fours and ate the flesh of the dead and dying. It was harder to hunt them once he came home, not only because of the lack of fresh bait but because of the injury to his leg. Though the cane he leaned upon was fashionable enough in its way, it did make it hard to keep up with a fleeing beast (or flee from a charging one.) Still, in between the research he did for the university, he found time to patrol the graveyards with his rifle. Unlike vampires, ghouls went down to simple bullets.
“Three, but one was only wounded. Perhaps I should start patrolling with one of you.”
Their parents had raised them well. The upbringings they were blessed with might have been deemed eccentric by some (charm bracelets of the holy symbols from various faiths, any report of a monster in the closet taken deadly serious,) but to them it had been full of useful advice. Still, they did not cling to the past, nor to their parents’ lives and history.
It was the twentieth century, and one had to be proactive.