Fic. Unexpected Visitors pt 5 Ancient History prompt 84 He
Title: Unexpected Visitors Pt 5, Ancient history
’Verse: Servants Journals
Characters: Joseph, Shine, Kat, Maggie, etc…
Prompt:#84 He
Word Count: 2500
Rating: gp… angst, some violence, some Cliché
Notes: this part can stand alone. Maggie tells about her early years…
(You can read as much or as little smut or slash into it as you like. )
This is a brief summery told by her point of view. There is probably enough back info in this summery that if fleshed out, could be a make a trilogy.
^^^(*)^^^
Previously on…
It had been a few days since Maggie had shown up unexpectedly on his doorstep. She hadn’t been alone. Along with her servant, (whom he really wouldn’t have counted) she had brought one of her very old friends (and his servant who also didn’t really count).
Maggie had claimed that she had ‘itchy feet’ again and was embarking on another of her legendary road trips. Jacob, her oldest friends and traveling companions had agreed to go with her. One of the goals of this particular trip was to reunite with some of her favorite people. Because Joseph was one of her lovers and her youngest fledgling at nearly 250 years old he had been first on her list of people to see.
^^^(*)^^^
Vampire Bonding?
A few nights later three well fed vampires, three slightly more than human servants, and one full human man were lounging around Joseph’s living room. They were all more or less drunk.
Earlier that evening Maggie and Jacob had politely and unnecessarily asked it they could hunt in Joseph’s territory. Maggie’s servant woman was six months pregnant and it wasn’t particularly healthy to feed from her during the last trimester. Jacob had fed from his own servant the night before and it was too soon to do so again.
Not only had Joseph giving his permission, but he offered to join them. It wasn’t something they could do on a regular basis because too many disappearances could draw unwanted attention. While one vampire drinking as much as he could in one night was not enough to drain a human to death, three of them could.
Their carefully chosen victim, a young healthy skin-head with more tattoos than common sense was more than willing to drink their booze and let the pretty red headed women pet him. After enough alcohol he hadn’t minded the two handsome men petting him either. His body would never be found. Feeding to the point of gluttony was a treat for the three vampires, and the boy’s blood would last them several days. It didn’t hurt that second hand was the only way the alcohol could affect them.
When they’d gotten home they’d found Richard, Jacob’s servant, Shine, Joseph’s servant, and Kat, Shine’s lover and Joseph’s human servant, had been enjoying a few bottles of wine themselves. Abby, being pregnant, hadn’t been drinking but was relaxed and happy with the company and getting a second hand buzz from her connection with Maggie. Laughter and story telling ensued. Jacob had teased Maggie about being his aunt and that made everyone curious as to how that could be. Jacob informed them that his sire was Maggie’s sister, so of course they wanted to know more about it. Joseph had not been aware that Maggie had a sister. She hadn’t talked much about her earlier years.
Maggie decided later that it must have been the alcohol and the company that got her to talk about her earliest life.
^^(**)^^
Maggie’s Story
I never did learn his whole history. He didn’t talk about it. From his manner and education I suspected that he was an Anglo-Saxon lord, conquered and displaced by an invading Norseman. Whether or not he was a vampire before he was run off his land I can’t say. It is after all just my speculation that he was a lord at all. It doesn’t really matter anyway. By the time he found me he was already the local boogeyman, only talked about in hushed voices by grannies to scare young children into being good. He was the mysterious lord of the unkempt castle hidden in the hills. Everyone believed he was real but would not admit it, even as they planted wild roses and garlic outside their doors. And when someone went missing? Well it was the devil claiming his due. People were too afraid to do anything about it.
Sound familiar? Cliché’s have to start somewhere.
It was the middle of the tenth century. My childhood was good. I had a loving mother, father, sisters, and brothers, and enough to eat. The town I lived in was large and prosperous and the land was at peace. There were other thriving towns and villages within a few days travel of us. My father was a blacksmith. When I was sixteen I was married to a young man not much older than myself. He was good to me and did the best he could for us. I don’t remember if I loved him or not, it was never a question of love. I moved to live with him near his family’s farm two villages away.
By the time I was nineteen, I had a two-year-old son and was expecting another child the next spring.
By the time I was twenty I was a childless widow. Illness during the winter had claimed both my husband and son. I survived but had lost the unborn child.
Being a penniless widow, I became my husband’s brother’s problem. He had a wife and children and his own problems to take care of and he took me in very grudgingly because it was expected of him. He was also a fat mean drunk. That he resented having to take me in he didn’t keep secret. He might as well have put a ‘for sale’ sign on me with how quick he was about finding me a new husband. Within a month he took an offer from the village miller, a widower twice my age with children already grown and flown. The wedding was set for the next month. Looking back on it now, it wouldn’t have been such a bad deal for me. The old man was well off and I would have been too when he died. But I was very young and only saw that that he was old and ugly and just wanted a pretty young thing to warm his bed.
All would probably have been well and I would have accepted my fate if only my bastard of a brother-in-law hadn’t taken a fancy to me himself. Two nights before my second wedding, he got very drunk. He was supposed to be walking me home, but instead he dragged me far enough into the woods that no one heard me crying for help. I remember he kept asking why I was screaming. I wasn’t a virgin and I should be happy to have such a great man as himself. He was twice my weight and I was unable to escape.
When it was over I lay crying on the ground. I don’t know if it was fluke or fate but when he was done gloating he stepped backwards into a gofer hole and lost his balance. He hit his head on a tree branch and fell backwards on his ass, stunned. Hate and the need for revenge filled me at that moment, and I grabbed his belt knife and stabbed him with it repeatedly.
When I was done and came back to my senses he was quite dead, and I was, to use modern terms, quite screwed. There was no way I could go back to the village. Until very recently, rape was the woman’s fault, and I had killed him.
I sat alone crying for what felt like hours. If I went back to the village, could I make them believe that bandits waylaid us? Should I run away and live as a wild woman in the woods? I just remember thinking that I had to figure out what I was going to do quickly when I became aware that I wasn’t alone. Frightened I started looking around to see who was spying on me.
I don’t know what I expected, but it wasn’t Him stepping out of the darkness with his pale skin glowing in the weak moonlight. I knew who he was before he said anything. There was only one person that he could be, wandering around the woods at night. That he was handsome was a surprise to me. I didn’t think to run. I knew it would be useless to try. Maybe I was thinking he would give me a quicker death than being stoned or burned back in the village. So I stood up to him. He looked at me closely, looked at the bloody mess I had made of my brother-in-law, and then looked back at me. That he was judging me was obvious and I waited for his judgment. He asked me a question: If I could, without getting caught or blamed for killing this man, would I do it again? His question made me remember all the hate I had for the man, and how badly he treated his own family and how nasty he had been to me. The handsome monster waited calmly for my answer, and I gave him the simple truth. My life was over anyway, why should I lie to my executioner, I gave him a simple ‘Yes’.
It was the right answer. I saw him smile and it made his face go from a cold-hearted monster to an angelic savior. “Come with me?” he asked. I had nothing to lose, so I went with him.
I joined him in his mysterious unkempt castle hidden in the hills. Only it wasn’t that unkempt, just old and well hidden. And I wasn’t alone. His other bride was a woman not much older than me. As we were both his fledglings, we thought of ourselves as sisters and became great good friends. We kept each other company and sane through the long, lonely years. He was good to us. He even made an effort to teach us both to read and write, though there weren’t very many books to be had. In our own way we all loved each other, and for many years we managed to live as the rumor of the monsters in the woods.
I did find out later that my widowed sister-in-law married the miller. It turned out good for both of them; they really did like each other. He saw that her children were taken care of. I heard the old man died with a smile on his face, and his family made sure she had a generous pension the rest of her life.
We couldn’t just feed indiscriminately even back then. The same reasons we can’t today applied double in those times. Every month or so He would take a specially rigged wagon and go hunting for our food. He would bring back some poor humans to the castle, kidnapped from different towns and villages around us. It was my sister’s and my job to keep them alive as long as possible. We learned very early how to take only enough blood to stop the pain. We were never completely full, but nor were we starving. Much later my sister and I tried keeping prisoners again, but it’s really more work than it’s worth. It worked at the time and it was all we knew.
^^(**)^^
Interlude
Maggie came out of her storytelling trance and looked at Abby, Robert and Shine. “I see you shiver, and I’ll agree it was monstrous. That’s partly why when Kit found Rose I was fascinated to see how he treated her. It was the model that Jacob and I used to found the system we use today. You have to be aware by now how much we brain wash you. You are not children; you know what your benefits and consequences are. I made sure that it didn’t include locking you up in a dungeon. Been there, done that, don’t want to do it again, as they say.”
^^(**)^^
Back to the story
We lived that way for many, many years. What changed? Well the land and country around us changed. And He got bored with us after so many years. Then he got greedy and careless. He stole two more ‘brides’ and brought them back to the castle. Only one of them hadn’t been at all willing. She stepped into the sun as soon as she got the chance. Her family also didn’t take the disappearance of their daughter without a search. Somehow they found out what happened to her and raised the town’s anger. Christianity was spreading and the town’s new priest heard about the devils living in the woods and started preaching against us.
One thing led to another and within a year we had the peasants with pitch forks and torches and wooden stakes beating down our door. It looked just like a scene from Frankenstein. He was too arrogant to run and his new fledgling young to know better. My sister and I ran and hid. One of the wagons in the barn had a false bottom. He used it when he went to get humans from the villages; we used it to hide in. We heard screaming and shouting and loud noises and then we smelled the smoke. Some men did investigate the barn but didn’t finding anything of interest. They took the houses and left the barn alone. It was lucky for us that they didn’t torch it.
By nightfall it was quiet and we came out of hiding. The castle was completely burned out; only the stone walls remained standing. We found a pile of burned bones; it was all that was left of Him and his young bride.
After living a hundred years one hopefully gains a little bit of wisdom and some common sense. My sister and I went through the castle ashes. We knew where the stashes of gold and jewelry had been and it didn’t take us long to find them. The two of us pulled the wagon with the false bottom to the edge of the forest close to the town. This was easy for us; we were monsters after all, not weak human women. The village had stolen our horses, so we simply stole them back. Hitching the horses to the wagon we, to use another modern term, got the hell out of dodge.
It didn’t take us long figure out that two women traveling alone in the 10th century drew unwanted attention. We needed someone to play our husband or brother. That should have been easy to solve, but it did take us a while to find just the right men to turn. Just because we sired them didn’t give us total control of them. There were the ones that turned us down, and there was the one that thought he could rule us for real after we turned him. He only lived long enough to learn differently. We were both near a century old we were stronger and more powerful (and smarter?) than a fledgling. Eventually we found them, a couple of men willing to be our friends and partners in exchange for immortality.
And we live happily ever after…
And now my friend you know the story of my first hundred years.
Aren’t you glad you asked?
^^(**)^^
’Verse: Servants Journals
Characters: Joseph, Shine, Kat, Maggie, etc…
Prompt:#84 He
Word Count: 2500
Rating: gp… angst, some violence, some Cliché
Notes: this part can stand alone. Maggie tells about her early years…
(You can read as much or as little smut or slash into it as you like. )
This is a brief summery told by her point of view. There is probably enough back info in this summery that if fleshed out, could be a make a trilogy.
^^^(*)^^^
Previously on…
It had been a few days since Maggie had shown up unexpectedly on his doorstep. She hadn’t been alone. Along with her servant, (whom he really wouldn’t have counted) she had brought one of her very old friends (and his servant who also didn’t really count).
Maggie had claimed that she had ‘itchy feet’ again and was embarking on another of her legendary road trips. Jacob, her oldest friends and traveling companions had agreed to go with her. One of the goals of this particular trip was to reunite with some of her favorite people. Because Joseph was one of her lovers and her youngest fledgling at nearly 250 years old he had been first on her list of people to see.
^^^(*)^^^
Vampire Bonding?
A few nights later three well fed vampires, three slightly more than human servants, and one full human man were lounging around Joseph’s living room. They were all more or less drunk.
Earlier that evening Maggie and Jacob had politely and unnecessarily asked it they could hunt in Joseph’s territory. Maggie’s servant woman was six months pregnant and it wasn’t particularly healthy to feed from her during the last trimester. Jacob had fed from his own servant the night before and it was too soon to do so again.
Not only had Joseph giving his permission, but he offered to join them. It wasn’t something they could do on a regular basis because too many disappearances could draw unwanted attention. While one vampire drinking as much as he could in one night was not enough to drain a human to death, three of them could.
Their carefully chosen victim, a young healthy skin-head with more tattoos than common sense was more than willing to drink their booze and let the pretty red headed women pet him. After enough alcohol he hadn’t minded the two handsome men petting him either. His body would never be found. Feeding to the point of gluttony was a treat for the three vampires, and the boy’s blood would last them several days. It didn’t hurt that second hand was the only way the alcohol could affect them.
When they’d gotten home they’d found Richard, Jacob’s servant, Shine, Joseph’s servant, and Kat, Shine’s lover and Joseph’s human servant, had been enjoying a few bottles of wine themselves. Abby, being pregnant, hadn’t been drinking but was relaxed and happy with the company and getting a second hand buzz from her connection with Maggie. Laughter and story telling ensued. Jacob had teased Maggie about being his aunt and that made everyone curious as to how that could be. Jacob informed them that his sire was Maggie’s sister, so of course they wanted to know more about it. Joseph had not been aware that Maggie had a sister. She hadn’t talked much about her earlier years.
Maggie decided later that it must have been the alcohol and the company that got her to talk about her earliest life.
^^(**)^^
Maggie’s Story
I never did learn his whole history. He didn’t talk about it. From his manner and education I suspected that he was an Anglo-Saxon lord, conquered and displaced by an invading Norseman. Whether or not he was a vampire before he was run off his land I can’t say. It is after all just my speculation that he was a lord at all. It doesn’t really matter anyway. By the time he found me he was already the local boogeyman, only talked about in hushed voices by grannies to scare young children into being good. He was the mysterious lord of the unkempt castle hidden in the hills. Everyone believed he was real but would not admit it, even as they planted wild roses and garlic outside their doors. And when someone went missing? Well it was the devil claiming his due. People were too afraid to do anything about it.
Sound familiar? Cliché’s have to start somewhere.
It was the middle of the tenth century. My childhood was good. I had a loving mother, father, sisters, and brothers, and enough to eat. The town I lived in was large and prosperous and the land was at peace. There were other thriving towns and villages within a few days travel of us. My father was a blacksmith. When I was sixteen I was married to a young man not much older than myself. He was good to me and did the best he could for us. I don’t remember if I loved him or not, it was never a question of love. I moved to live with him near his family’s farm two villages away.
By the time I was nineteen, I had a two-year-old son and was expecting another child the next spring.
By the time I was twenty I was a childless widow. Illness during the winter had claimed both my husband and son. I survived but had lost the unborn child.
Being a penniless widow, I became my husband’s brother’s problem. He had a wife and children and his own problems to take care of and he took me in very grudgingly because it was expected of him. He was also a fat mean drunk. That he resented having to take me in he didn’t keep secret. He might as well have put a ‘for sale’ sign on me with how quick he was about finding me a new husband. Within a month he took an offer from the village miller, a widower twice my age with children already grown and flown. The wedding was set for the next month. Looking back on it now, it wouldn’t have been such a bad deal for me. The old man was well off and I would have been too when he died. But I was very young and only saw that that he was old and ugly and just wanted a pretty young thing to warm his bed.
All would probably have been well and I would have accepted my fate if only my bastard of a brother-in-law hadn’t taken a fancy to me himself. Two nights before my second wedding, he got very drunk. He was supposed to be walking me home, but instead he dragged me far enough into the woods that no one heard me crying for help. I remember he kept asking why I was screaming. I wasn’t a virgin and I should be happy to have such a great man as himself. He was twice my weight and I was unable to escape.
When it was over I lay crying on the ground. I don’t know if it was fluke or fate but when he was done gloating he stepped backwards into a gofer hole and lost his balance. He hit his head on a tree branch and fell backwards on his ass, stunned. Hate and the need for revenge filled me at that moment, and I grabbed his belt knife and stabbed him with it repeatedly.
When I was done and came back to my senses he was quite dead, and I was, to use modern terms, quite screwed. There was no way I could go back to the village. Until very recently, rape was the woman’s fault, and I had killed him.
I sat alone crying for what felt like hours. If I went back to the village, could I make them believe that bandits waylaid us? Should I run away and live as a wild woman in the woods? I just remember thinking that I had to figure out what I was going to do quickly when I became aware that I wasn’t alone. Frightened I started looking around to see who was spying on me.
I don’t know what I expected, but it wasn’t Him stepping out of the darkness with his pale skin glowing in the weak moonlight. I knew who he was before he said anything. There was only one person that he could be, wandering around the woods at night. That he was handsome was a surprise to me. I didn’t think to run. I knew it would be useless to try. Maybe I was thinking he would give me a quicker death than being stoned or burned back in the village. So I stood up to him. He looked at me closely, looked at the bloody mess I had made of my brother-in-law, and then looked back at me. That he was judging me was obvious and I waited for his judgment. He asked me a question: If I could, without getting caught or blamed for killing this man, would I do it again? His question made me remember all the hate I had for the man, and how badly he treated his own family and how nasty he had been to me. The handsome monster waited calmly for my answer, and I gave him the simple truth. My life was over anyway, why should I lie to my executioner, I gave him a simple ‘Yes’.
It was the right answer. I saw him smile and it made his face go from a cold-hearted monster to an angelic savior. “Come with me?” he asked. I had nothing to lose, so I went with him.
I joined him in his mysterious unkempt castle hidden in the hills. Only it wasn’t that unkempt, just old and well hidden. And I wasn’t alone. His other bride was a woman not much older than me. As we were both his fledglings, we thought of ourselves as sisters and became great good friends. We kept each other company and sane through the long, lonely years. He was good to us. He even made an effort to teach us both to read and write, though there weren’t very many books to be had. In our own way we all loved each other, and for many years we managed to live as the rumor of the monsters in the woods.
I did find out later that my widowed sister-in-law married the miller. It turned out good for both of them; they really did like each other. He saw that her children were taken care of. I heard the old man died with a smile on his face, and his family made sure she had a generous pension the rest of her life.
We couldn’t just feed indiscriminately even back then. The same reasons we can’t today applied double in those times. Every month or so He would take a specially rigged wagon and go hunting for our food. He would bring back some poor humans to the castle, kidnapped from different towns and villages around us. It was my sister’s and my job to keep them alive as long as possible. We learned very early how to take only enough blood to stop the pain. We were never completely full, but nor were we starving. Much later my sister and I tried keeping prisoners again, but it’s really more work than it’s worth. It worked at the time and it was all we knew.
^^(**)^^
Interlude
Maggie came out of her storytelling trance and looked at Abby, Robert and Shine. “I see you shiver, and I’ll agree it was monstrous. That’s partly why when Kit found Rose I was fascinated to see how he treated her. It was the model that Jacob and I used to found the system we use today. You have to be aware by now how much we brain wash you. You are not children; you know what your benefits and consequences are. I made sure that it didn’t include locking you up in a dungeon. Been there, done that, don’t want to do it again, as they say.”
^^(**)^^
Back to the story
We lived that way for many, many years. What changed? Well the land and country around us changed. And He got bored with us after so many years. Then he got greedy and careless. He stole two more ‘brides’ and brought them back to the castle. Only one of them hadn’t been at all willing. She stepped into the sun as soon as she got the chance. Her family also didn’t take the disappearance of their daughter without a search. Somehow they found out what happened to her and raised the town’s anger. Christianity was spreading and the town’s new priest heard about the devils living in the woods and started preaching against us.
One thing led to another and within a year we had the peasants with pitch forks and torches and wooden stakes beating down our door. It looked just like a scene from Frankenstein. He was too arrogant to run and his new fledgling young to know better. My sister and I ran and hid. One of the wagons in the barn had a false bottom. He used it when he went to get humans from the villages; we used it to hide in. We heard screaming and shouting and loud noises and then we smelled the smoke. Some men did investigate the barn but didn’t finding anything of interest. They took the houses and left the barn alone. It was lucky for us that they didn’t torch it.
By nightfall it was quiet and we came out of hiding. The castle was completely burned out; only the stone walls remained standing. We found a pile of burned bones; it was all that was left of Him and his young bride.
After living a hundred years one hopefully gains a little bit of wisdom and some common sense. My sister and I went through the castle ashes. We knew where the stashes of gold and jewelry had been and it didn’t take us long to find them. The two of us pulled the wagon with the false bottom to the edge of the forest close to the town. This was easy for us; we were monsters after all, not weak human women. The village had stolen our horses, so we simply stole them back. Hitching the horses to the wagon we, to use another modern term, got the hell out of dodge.
It didn’t take us long figure out that two women traveling alone in the 10th century drew unwanted attention. We needed someone to play our husband or brother. That should have been easy to solve, but it did take us a while to find just the right men to turn. Just because we sired them didn’t give us total control of them. There were the ones that turned us down, and there was the one that thought he could rule us for real after we turned him. He only lived long enough to learn differently. We were both near a century old we were stronger and more powerful (and smarter?) than a fledgling. Eventually we found them, a couple of men willing to be our friends and partners in exchange for immortality.
And we live happily ever after…
And now my friend you know the story of my first hundred years.
Aren’t you glad you asked?
^^(**)^^