82Title: Beneath Us
Author: CorvusDraconis
Rating: M for safety
Warnings: vampiric violence (oBviously…)
Prompt it contains:Pre-Event Mascot Challenge! Create a fanwork about your team's mascot (Dragon/Werewolf/Vampire/Unicorn) in the Wizarding World interacting with your favourite ship or character, or just being a creature in the Wizarding World.
Summary: SSSHG, In an alternate Sang world, Sanguini is the slave and agent of his ancient master Decebalus, and his servitude has been long and lonely, and his only friend and alley, Tobias, is missing.
Link:
Your team: Vampires
Beta Love: Dragon and the Sneezeathon, Dutchgirl01 the Unplugged, Commander Shepard the Seeker of Steak
Beneath Us
"If it doesn't challenge you, it doesn't change you."
—Fred DeVito
"Ah, Sannguini," the man on the stone throne oozed disdain as his claws tapped the stone armrests.
Sanguini cast his eyes down, bowing. "Lord Decaeneus."
"I see you have been doing your avid best to keep the peace between the idiot mortals and our kind."
"It is what you ordered me to do, Master," Sanguini said.
"Did I?" Decaeneus mused. "I could have sworn that I told you to slay them all. Maybe that was Carnelius. You are both so utterly boring." The elder vampire wrinkled his nose. "I have a crate coming from Mozambique. Deal with it for me. I'm sure it's another assassination attempt rather than a gift anyway."
Sanguini grimaced but bowed. "Yes, Master."
"Get out of my sight, weakling," Decaeneus sneered. "If whatever is in that crate doesn't murder you, go back to your little play with the mortals."
Sanguini bowed stiffly, gritting his teeth, and backed out of his master's sight.
Sanguini found that the shipping warehouse was by far the most disorganised in all the territories of the Sang. Too many orders—and no one cared enough to look for anything other than their own things. Thanks to those like his master, Decaeneus, no one wanted to BE the one responsible for the total cockup that was the shipping warehouse.
Those like Decaeneus took heads first and said oops later after they realised they'd just killed the last person who knew where their object was. That left those in power sending whoever they didn't mind losing to find their objects.
More often than not, it was an assassination attempt rather than the actual shipment.
He checked the tags on the crates, hoping it hadn't been sitting around for weeks and ended up buried under everything else. After over an hour, he began to think that he was sent here to fail, but then he found a dusty box that had been wedged under quite a few other boxes.
Of course, it was at the very bottom.
Of course it was.
Sighing, he tried to play Jenga with the shipping crates, knowing that, even with magic, (which he rarely used lest his master realise he was capable of such things) he was courting disaster in the form of a box avalanche.
One by one, he moved one box over and another somewhere else and then another over, stacking them very carefully so as to not get trapped under a pile of toppling crates.
But just as he was moving one of the larger crates, he heard strange rustling and squeaking noises that did not belong in a normal shipping crate. With a sense of rising horror, he realised those thumping noises meant something was desperately trying to get out, and the sheer shock of it was causing all the boxes he was fighting to avoid toppling to wobble and threaten to crush him beneath them, something even Vesuvius had failed at.
What a way to die, he thought, after surviving all of that.
He didn't even give his situation the satisfaction of a yell of dismay on his part. If he was going to die under a bloody great pile of crates, he was going to die that humiliating death alone.
Strangely, when he managed to open his eyes—a miraculous feat in itself—he found that he was not, as he had fatalistically expected, quite dead.
He grunted and experimentally flexed fingers and toes.
So far so good.
There was a warm weight on his chest, and he wondered if he'd managed to impale himself.
Wouldn't that be ironic—
He looked down and saw a mass of ebony fur with glowing gold-green eyes staring at him as a tiny pink tongue laved across his exposed skin, cleaning the blood off his wound. It looked like a small, if somewhat elongated black panther cub with two very distinctive clublike tentacles that looked very much like a giant squid's long feeder tentacles.
The cub had an extra set of legs, too, as if the tentacles weren't strange enough.
When that blood started crunching, Sanguini realised that the cub had apparently fallen upon a large crate of bloodfruit, and it was the fruit that the hungry little beast was crunching on—not him.
Good to know.
"I don't know what you are, little one, but I hope you prefer blood to my gamey carcass," Sanguini said.
The creature kneaded his chest and head-bumped his chin, rough tongue removing a few layers of his epidermis and the coating of bloodfruit off his face.
Those vibrant, glowing green-gold eyes met his, and a surge of heated magic wove them together as Sanguini felt a sudden rush of the purest love he had ever felt in his long, lonely life. A strangled sob broke from his throat as he held the cub close to him, tears of blood flowing down his cheeks.
The cub tenderly licked his face and Sanguini shuddered as his emotions overflowed over onto those bright green-gold eyes and black satin coat.
Sanguini busted up laughing as the feisty cub leapt up high and snatched a too-slow pigeon right out of the air. Grey feathers blew outward like an explosion, and she proudly set the denuded pigeon into his lap with a loud purr.
He fondly rubbed between her silky ears. "I think I'll name you Hermione," he said. "She was a queen from Shakespeare's A Winter's Tale, and you are mine, silken lady of velvet. My little huntress."
Sanguini drew a claw down his neck, enough to draw blood, and Hermione happily lapped at the offering, her basher tentacles wrapping around his neck to anchor herself, her furry body vibrating with a deep, healing purr.
Sanguini cradled the angry cub with his body, shielding her against the wall as he took the brutal lashing to his back. Blood trickled down his body, rapidly staining the floor red.
He was brave because he had to protect her.
He was strong because he had to be.
He would take the beatings because his master couldn't ever discover his weakness.
His brave predator.
His precious little Hermione.
He would bury his emotions to anchor her.
He would shelter her under his strength.
He would soothe his mind so that she, too, would be soothed.
As blood streamed down from his face, Hermione tenderly licked his skin—to either soothe herself or him, perhaps both of them.
Even as he fell to his knees at his cruel master's lashings, he held her against himself tightly.
Safe.
"I'm okay," he whispered into her fur. "You're okay."
He mentally repeated the reassurances over and over as he forced his mind and body to turn the pain into nothing.
Sanguini's eyes glowed as the lashes continued, but as his body twitched with each blow, he only felt Hermione's warm fur against his body and her righteous fury on his behalf.
Flecks of gold and green seeped into Sanguini's glowing eyes, a ring of each taking their place with his normally crimson irises.
As Sanguini sat at the Wizengamot, he tried to keep a straight face as Hermione kneaded his lap and circled around to make herself the comfiest resting place she could. She eyed the moth that was circling them with avid interest, her teeth chattering together in excitement.
Suddenly there was a rather plump rat scurrying under their feet, and Hermione was on top with a sharp rawwwrrrl! Her clubbed tentacles slammed down in the front and back of the terrified rodent, and her sharp teeth snapped the rat between her jaws. She made loud crunching noises as she ate the rat completely after masticating it to mash.
Some of the Wizengamot was looking at him strangely, expecting, perhaps, to see him eating popcorn or something similar, but since Sanguini was still and silent and Hermione was conveniently cloaked with invisibility, they could only scratch their heads and wonder what was actually going on.
"Tobias would have loved you," Sanguini said to Hermione as he rubbed her chin.
Hermione purred loudly, wrapping her feeder tentacles around his arms to insist that he keep rubbing.
Sanguini laughed, tired but genuine. "He disappeared. My master knew we were close, but he was of a different Line—he couldn't just outright murder him, but that never really stops him. The moment he senses power in his slaves, he makes sure they disappear. He torments those that aren't. To make sure they don't show signs of growing in power. For centuries I have played the weakling—so did Tobias. He was the best at it. It was he that taught me how to swallow power and become lesser to hide it from everyone."
Sanguini rubbed Hermione's belly, smiling as she batted at his hand with all six paws. "I wonder where you came from. You are not like any beast of this world. Definitely not something my master would have ordered, yet I have no idea how you got in that crate of bloodfruit and imports."
Hermione gave him wide eyes, but then mock mauled his hand, eyes closing slightly in the pleasure of nomming his fingers.
Sanguini pulled the growing cub toward him in a snuggle, and closed his eyes. "I'm glad you're here."
As the years went on, Sanguini eased the monotony with the daily tasks his master gave him by teaching Hermione like he would have taught a child or a Sang. He practised both sharing memories in the blood as well as language and characters for writing, starting with roots of Latin and Greek and moving onto others such as Italian and English.
Whether she comprehended it enough to speak it didn't matter. She understood when he said it, and it eased a great part of his lonely heart. Her cublike antics started to fade slightly after the passing of the years, but he found that she retained that playfulness that made her cubhood so entertaining. He found that he had to curb her darker predatory nature with stern control because even though she was a compassionate, protective sort around him, those things that weren't specifically off limits became prey or a plaything, and she wasn't exactly "kind" to her potential food.
And then she began—to make clones of herself.
Perfectly independent projections of herself that were so real that if he hadn't had a bond with her, he wouldn't have known the difference.
The hunt for her was like a sacred meditation.
She would hunt everything from the small rodents, to birds, to all those that dared to sneak into his space during his sleep.
He would wake to find either bones or—a cached corpse hanging in her favourite "larder."
She was a ruthless hunter, paying no heed to such things as social status or power—not that power seemed to matter to her.
Only the need to protect her home—and him.
The strange thing was—he didn't recognise any of those that she had found and, erm, dealt with. Amongst the Sang—well, more specifically under his master, if you died to something that came after you, that made you worthless. And Decebalus—he wouldn't lift a finger to defend any of his Line. If they couldn't survive, they were worthless, yet if they were powerful, they were quickly disposed of as a potential threat.
It made for a very delicate dance on an even finer line.
So, in a way, Hermione did him a great favour. She rid him of assassins, and he could feign innocence even to the point of the truth that he hadn't been responsible.
To not share his blood and life with her did not even cross his mind. To not give her the most knowledge possible, utterly inconceivable. He wanted a companion, not a slave, and the bond between them grew stronger each day, each week, each month, and each passing year.
She made his unlife bearable.
Priceless.
One night, Decebalus sent him away to get his "disgusting morals" away from his sight. He planned to drain at least ten virgins that night, the practice that seemed deeply rooted in traditional superstition rather than sense. Blood was blood, and the only difference was, if you wanted virgin blood you had to get them considerably younger. Not that his master had ever cared about such things. He had Turned Sanguini to gain more access to his "favourite menu" via high society and wealth. He had been Turned at a point when his youthful good looks were preserved to better serve Decebalus. In whatever form of debauchery he so desired.
With a wave of his hand, he sent Sanguini into the middle of nowhere, landing on his rump in the blowing refuse in a manky old town that smelled strongly of spirits and despair.
Wrinkling his nose in distaste, he contemplated what he was going to do with himself, as it was abundantly clear that he would not be welcomed at his master's feet anytime soon.
It was, he admitted, a relief, despite the resignation that ten or more souls would probably die to feed his master. If they were lucky. If they had his "favour" he would Turn them, and they would become his favourite slaves for a few hundred years.
That is, until they did something stupid and got themselves murdered.
Those that had no sense were often murdered quickly.
It was almost a blessing.
Decebalus did not teach. He did not gift power. He did not so much as lift a finger to give a new Turn the sense to not walk out into the sun.
He enjoyed listening to them scream.
Sanguini, however, did not.
A deep purr radiated through him, and an enormous bloodfruit landed in his lap.
Hermione whisker-rubbed against his head, hers was now huge, big enough to dwarf his upper torso. She remained just as playful and affectionate as always, always managing to find him a bloodfruit when he really needed it. How she managed it—he had no idea.
Maybe it was because he had taught her how to teleport—a more silent, efficient ability of the blood that did not come with the Wizarding World's distinctive crack of Disapparation.
If it had been anyone else, it would have been quite unwise, perhaps, to teach such a beast such magic, but he taught her everything because he wanted her to have the best chance of survival.
He never wanted to lose her because he didn't do everything he could to empower her survival.
Whether she realised this gift or not, he didn't know, but if the trail of mangled corpses left by her guarding his sleep was any indicator, she was definitely putting everything he taught to work for her.
He wrapped his arms around her neck and pressed his nose into her spicy fur. She had that scent of almost-cinnamon under her fur, the parchments of a library, and the poor catmint field she would often demolish in a hyper haze of feline high.
Or whatever she actually was.
He had a feeling that her cat-like appearance was exactly that.
A deceptive cover to an otherworldly predator that had somehow landed on him at just the right moment when she imprinted on him instead of thinking him prey.
Whatever gods had been looking out for them that day, he thanked them, if not by name, but at least with the daily prayer of thanks that he had her in his life.
He caught another strong whiff of alcohol, and he realised he was near a pub. The scent of mortals was often mixed with the jobs they did, and the "Muggles" had a heavy, grease-laden odour about them that stank of industry more than the magicals who in many ways remained cloistered in the roots of a more primitive pre-industrial Europe. More often than not, the magic world remained locked in Tudor or older styles, replacing Muggle science with magic.
Pubs, however, remained much the same throughout the centuries.
Rubbing Hermione under the chin, he sank his teeth into the fruit and made it disappear, feeling the ease and "itch" of blood hunger ease. He had no desire to sink fang into a living feed this night. Not when all he could think of was his master entertaining himself.
He stood, using a quick spell to clean the muck from his clothes, and he lay his hand on Hermione's head, rubbing her ear. He felt her approval with the rise of her deep purr—one more trait she shared with the felines of a smaller stature. Not like the lion or jaguar that could not purr.
He found that he rather liked that purr.
She wrapped one tentacle around his waist like an anchor, her whiskers twitching.
This place wasn't like where he took her. It was wholly unfamiliar. He could almost see her mind mapping out the area with her senses.
There was a commotion going on at the Pub, and a group of people shoved another out onto the street. "Go home, ya wretch, you're making all of us pity your fool wife!"
A dark-haired man staggered up from the stone cobbles, cursing, but it was obvious he was completely pissed, gazeboed, shitfaced drunk. Sanguini took a moment to smile in amusement at the word play of slang when "mortal" meant very, very drunk. Drunk enough to still be drunk the morning after.
From the look of it, this man before him was most definitely mortal.
Sanguini's nostrils flared. Something—
He curled his fingers around Hermione's ear and merged his senses with hers. Her sense of smell was, strangely, greater than his, and he wanted to be sure what he thought he smelled wasn't just imagined.
Hermione disappeared from his side with a blur, and Sanguini's eyes widened as she showed up beside the drunken man and put her face right up into his.
"Ah, hallo dere, big puss," he blathered, teetering from side to side. "Why are there five of ye?"
That voice.
Then suddenly she was beside him again, and her tentacles unfurled to plop the drunken bastard in front of him in a very untidy heap.
"Whoa—" the man teetered and landed on his backside staring up at the stars.
Sanguini stared down at him, brows furrowing.
"Yer awful pretty for a bottle and stopper," the man blurted. "Ye here to hear me weep and wail?"
Sanguini blinked. The accent was startling and not at all what he'd been expecting.
Hermione stared at him, her whiskers twitching and lips pulled back from her teeth as she took in a deeper scent from the back of her mouth. She looked at him sceptically, perhaps following his own jumbled thoughts.
There was only one way to be sure—
Sanguini grimaced.
But if it wasn't—he would be forced to dispose of him.
Slaves like him didn't have "thralls."
He grabbed the man by the shirt and dragged him into the alley. He brushed the manky, oily black hair away from the man's face. The familiar brows. The lips he knew well as the aristocratic nose that accented his face—
He drew a talon down the man's clothes, ripping a line down it to expose a distinctive scar made from an ancient Roman sword.
Sanguini's eyes bled to crimson, and he bared his fangs in a flash before sinking them into the man's neck. The man struggled drunkenly, but Sanguini's strength was preternatural. He jerked away abruptly, flipping the man around so that his back was against his chest, and his one arm held him in a lock as he bit his wrist and forced it to the man's mouth, jerking him sharply so he had no choice but to swallow it. The man's legs kicked out, body thrashing wildly, but Sanguini did not let go.
"Vive ut vivas," he whispered against his ear. "Vivere militare est."
The man went limp, hanging in Sanguini's arms, then one pale arm wrapped around Sanguini's arm and the man was actively drinking, his hand curving as tendons stretched, and dark claws formed where once dull, human nails had been. He drank so deep and long that Sanguini began to grimace, sliding down the wall of the alley with the other man in his lap.
Hermione, looking back and forth from Sanguini to the other man seemed to make a decision when she saw Sanguini weakening, and she bit her basher tentacle and shoved it into his mouth, her shimmering reddish-green otherly blood dripping from her wounded tentacle.
Sanguini's eyes widened in surprise, but then he, too, drank, taking in his familiars' strength in her mysterious blood.
There was a pulsing of magic as the strength of their bond tightened, and Sanguini's eyes went from crimson to bright green-gold.
The citizens of Cokeworth all looked out their window in confusion as they heard what they thought was a series of inhuman roars.
But the rest was silence.
Thinking themselves mad, they went back to their mundane lives.
Decebalus smirked with pleasured smugness as he relished the scent of fear and sex around him. Twelve-some virgins lay either dead of almost-Turned depending on if he felt like allowing them to exist with their heads.
He rather enjoyed watching their confusion when Turning them and not telling them anything, letting them wander off into the sun and burn to death. No body, no evidence, and even more pleasurable screams.
He debated on what he would do about Sanguini. While the slave was somewhat useful, he had somehow survived multiple assasination attempts, and at least of them had been a powerful sort with multiple kills. He'd started throwing random assassinations at him to see if the idiot was lazy, but somehow he'd survived them.
More disturbingly so, he had no knowledge of the attempt, and even under interrogation and floggings, Sanguini told him the truth. He had been sleeping.
How could he be so lucky?'
He did enjoy tormenting the man, however, and no other slave had such an equisite scent of self-loathing whenever forced to do things his master desired.
He would have to think more on it. Sanguini offered access to many of the mortals he craved for meals, and a network of social contacts that allowed him to take wealth from many other places. If he just outright murdered him, he would need to have another in place to replace him.
One of his previous meals began to convulse on the floor, foam at the mouth, and finally give a death rattle.
Decebalus sighed. He walked over to the corpse, yanked it up by the neck and snapped the neck, ensuring they wouldn't rise. He wanted no female slaves to distract his male slaves.
He heard an odd thump from elsewhere in his residence, and he sent out his awareness to check what it might have been.
No sound—only the scent of the outdoors and the rather loud pattern of rain.
He wrinkled his nose. He hated water.
Ever since he was first Turned, he couldn't pass over running water, and the quirk seemed to apply to falling water just as well.
He tread toward the window with annoyance, closing them as the rain stung against his skin. He wiped the annoying fluid off himself using the nearby curtain. Such a bother.
He called up the magic to power the silencing wards on the house. He couldn't have the sounds of his meals alerting authorities or other Sang. While they suspected his proclivities, they could never catch him at it. No sound ever escaped his residence to give them reason to officially "visit."
He walked back into the main "entertainment" room, suddenly less inclined for pleasure. Instead he turned to stepping on the necks of those that remained, listening to the sounds of bones crunch and flesh tear.
A strange tingle made the hair on his neck rise, and he whirled.
A giant cat—like a panther stood before him
Larger than life with glowing green eyes.
Malevolent.
Hateful.
A familiar?
Good. Killing a familiar would criple who sent them.
He lashed out at it, claws out—
But his hand and arm flowed through the shape like air.
There was another walking toward him, and he lashed at that too, hissing.
Again, his claws went though air.
An illusion.
There was another, and he swiped again, but this time, he fell to the ground as his balance was lost trying to take out what "must have been the real thing."
Only it wasn't.
He trembled as he pushed himself off the floor. He was going to murder the one who sent these beasts—he was going to make it long and painful.
No one challenged him.
NO one.
There were three of these beasts surrounding him, and he backed to to where he kept his polearms. He would skewer them all!
But as he backed up to where he kept his weapons, he heard a low, triple growl.
He turned slowly as three sets of baleful green eyes burned with bright, seething malevolence.
More illusions.
He reached out for the polearm, expecting his hand to pass through the illusion as it had with the others.
But glinting ivory teeth sank into his arm and tore into it as tentacles slammed into his body, one wrapping around his neck, one for each leg. One for each arm.
He started to scream, but each tentacle clamped around his limbs and rended him to pieces.
As the loud sounds of crunching and flesh tearing filled the residence, not one sound reached the outside world.
Decabalus' wards held strong, even after his death.
In rebuild home built on the remains of Decabalus' fortress home, Hermione yawned as her cubs suckled on her teats. She flicked her tail and tentacles lazily, laying her head down on her legs as her contentment channelled in her deep purr.
She yawned even wider, her elongated vampiric canines making her already long canines seem even longer.
There was a dull thump as her mates returned with the offering of the latest assassin, and they left it outside the sleeping area. They knew she didn't like bodies in their sleeping area.
Her two lovely, powerful mates purred and headbonked her, giving her affectionate licks as they lay down beside her. The cubs attempted to pounce their tentacles and tails with limited success.
Hermione snuggled against them. They were such strong, wonderful mates.
She couldn't have known when she hid from hunters that had set blink dogs against her parents that she would have ended up in such a foreign place, bursting out of a confined box to find herself such a caring, loyal bondmate. A world of magic of a different kind. A world where blood help both power and knowledge—
She purred loudly.
This wasn't the world she was born to, but she and her mates would leave their mark on it through a long life and many, many cubs.
Cubs that would benefit from finding their own bondmates, eventually.
But until then, her cubs would have a strong, powerful family to protect them.
She entwined the tentacles with her mates' and closed her eyes.
But now, it was time for a nap.
And they lived displacerly ever after.