champion time forever~

Tamsin’s true nature as a spirit is revealed to the town doctor. (3904 words) Takes place near the end of Episode 3 of Vampires. Content warning for description of a damaged dead body.

It had been two and a half weeks since Oakhurst’s beacons reactivated, and in that time, Dr. Legundo had found his services rather more needed than one might expect whilst staying in a town left abandoned for two hundred years. His patients came in the form of his fellow townsfolk, the others who had come to the area for their own myriad reasons, and now all found themselves living there in various old properties patched or rebuilt for their use.

At first, the jumbled chaos of loud eccentrics had given him a near-constant headache, particularly those few who insisted on such unexplained things as the supernatural being real. Avid’s paranoia insulted his calm reason, and his so-called “vampire awareness clinic” made mockery of his science and medicine - everything he stood for as a doctor who helped the people. His mantra had for decades been to do no harm, but the amount of times he’d had to stop himself punching the young man was hardly doing him much good either.

After the events of the last eighteen hours, however, the discoveries the doctor had made threw everything on its head, like a lifeboat lost at sea. Vampires were real, end of story - he’d found four of the over-a-dozen people in Oakhurst crouched around a holy beacon to take away its light, and everything thus demonstrated to him had found itself an impossible answer. Yet where others around him had seen the threat and cried war, he looked at the blood-starved group and saw people who needed help. A confrontation he had no true business leaving unscathed from left his mind reeling as he raced back to Oakhurst, thoughts already whirring away at potential ways of fixing this while it tried to take in the new discoveries slammed in like a grenade impact.

He had said they had to protect the town, yet returned to find one of its people dead.

Pearl had been the one to bring the body in, carrying the corpse with surprising ease - it seemed her strength of character extended to physical prowess as well. Had the situation been occurring anywhere other than Oakhurst, Legundo might have felt indignant at her having gone into his house while he wasn’t there and put a dead body inside of it, but the current circumstances could not afford anything better in terms of privacy or dignity - for anyone it concerned. Abolish was trailing behind her as she now stood before him, his prior interactions with the doctor seemingly leading him to start the tough conversation.

“We found her not too far from the town’s entrance,” he began, keeping his voice in its usual steady tone. Despite this, there was a weariness to his words that Legundo had not heard before now. “I say “we”, but it was more Apo.. She ran back in to tell everyone else, although there weren’t that many people here. She was pretty panicked.”

“I just can’t believe something like this could’ve happened..” Pearl said plaintively, clearly also trying to stay strong but letting more of her emotions show through. “Everyone’s been goin’ on about monsters and vampires and that sort of thing, but you still wouldn’t’ve expected this to happen out of nowhere. And Tamsin’d never hurt a fly, we all know that! Why’d it have to be her, eh? You just don’t expect it..“

“Did.. either of you see anything at the scene, where you found her? Did anything look suspect?” Legundo matched her need to process things, passing the onus onto the pair while his own mind still worked through what he had been told. It really should have been Drift who was asking this, what with her being a detective, but getting the knowledge himself in this way was a more direct method, even if it also meant he had to contend with it on top of everything else.

“Not- really..” Abolish replied, though the pause sounded less like one of answers and more like just how Abolish spoke. “She was lying face down, kind of pointed away from Oakhurst - it didn’t really seem like much was around her..”

“No blood around her, no nothing. It’s like she just dropped.” Pearl finished, resigned.

The doctor sighed, unable to bury the hope for more concrete understanding. Still, the information he had been given was still useful, and he intended to make as much use of it as he could.

“Thank you, both of you. That’ll help, I think. I don’t know how much more I’ll be able to tell you, but.. I’ll do what I can to learn what I can from her.”

In spite of the grim tidings, Pearl still managed to muster a smile. “Thanks, Doc. You’ve got her now.”

-----

Alone in his house that had so suddenly been turned from doctor’s surgery to morgue, Legundo still could not help but curse his lack of preparations, even if this sort of situation was the last one he had planned to prepare for. The dense wood and stone he had used in its reconstruction blocked out most sounds from outdoors, but the fraught emotions of the townsfolk outside still managed to slice through the air and weigh down on him, as he felt their expectations creep in. He had to find out what had happened here - he had to do his job, despite this being the one part of his job that every other act tried to stop making necessary.

In some ways, the fact he hadn’t seen it happen was helping. But the past rushed back all the same, from looking down at her and dwelling on the tension, the conflict, the brewing war of last night‑

“Doctor, I can’t stop the bleeding‑” “We’re losing him, Doctor‑” “Legs, I don’t think I can make it‑”

No, he told the scenes and sounds descending like a smokescreen over his senses. More than anything else right now, he needed focus, and to keep that focus on the present moment. This was why he was here; this is what everyone needed him for.

Except, he had come here to save lives, not declare what had taken them..

With a heavy sigh to ground himself, he stubbornly turned his attention back to the body laid out on spare bedsheets. Her eyes were open, staring lifelessly at the barely-complete ceiling; their previous teal-green vibrancy had left her irises so starkly that it was as if they had never held life at all. Her cheek was grazed, which - combined with the mud and grass stains over her clothing - was consistent with her having fallen forwards. What Legundo noticed, however, was how dry the graze on her cheek looked, as if the fall where she had obtained it was a much earlier event than her death.. But he surely would have noticed a wound like that before now, yes?

Casting his mind back through the recent days’ events - of which there had been so, so many - the doctor pondered when he had last seen Tamsin alive. He quickly realised it had only been the previous evening, when the town's beacon had lost its divine protection and she and Pearl were trying to restore it. After preparing and distributing more medicines, he had rushed out towards the lake with Drift and Cleo, proceeding from there to the obelisk to meet Martyn and Avid, and then approaching the castle from behind, where he had seen the world-shattering proof firsthand.. It had been morning by the time he had escaped his conversation with Owen, then encountered him again later at the cow pen, and then.. from what he had gathered, when Apo went outside to look for Pearl on Cleo’s request, she had stumbled across Tamsin instead.

A lot could happen in one day, as his own had just plainly demonstrated, but he knew what a day-old scrape would look like. He did not recall most of the fine details, but neither did he recall seeing any signs of injury on her face.

The lines being etched into his own face from frowning only deepened as he lifted her up to turn her over, but they were joined by an involuntary opening of his mouth as he saw the other side of her body. The front had shown marks from a fall, but the back revealed horrible violence - having removed her cape, her shirt was soaked through with blood and ripped apart in several places. Gashing claw marks tore across her back, as if dragged in and shoving away at the same time, and her arms and shoulders had not fared much better. No beast he knew had claws shaped like that - they almost could have been wrought by human hands, if a human’s hands were capable of anywhere near such sharp force by themselves. Yet the rough, jagged edges ruled out any thoughts of proper weaponry; no blades would be so irregular, even if curved and serrated. The cause of death had revealed itself plainly.

Someone, or something, had done this to her. That much was abundantly clear.

And yet..

The same realisation crept up on him again as he studied the corpse and the carnage. She was already just as cold as the late September winds, despite it having been less than twenty-four hours since her death. The horrible wounds she had sustained were too absent of vigour and vitality, even in fading remnants; none of the blood shone off the light of the torch on the wall, instead staying dry and long-set. Even her shirt, dyed red from what was clearly her own blood (and large amounts of it at that), was crisp to the touch as if merely painted with powder. He wondered whether she might have been frozen, but there was no trace of ice damage, nor any scents of fixatives like those in embalming fluid.

All of his training told him that this was a body which had not been alive for an exceptionally long time, yet had been preserved in as good of a way as any techniques of the age could manage, even without the wounds being patched - or any of those techniques having been implemented at all, regardless of how that could have even happened here.

*How could she have been dead for *this long..?**

He sighed, turning to one side to write in a worn leather book. As he carefully noted the things he had witnessed, he struggled to not let his thoughts march away, ever seeking an explanation for what he saw. Start with the facts, then add on what could be concluded from them - it was the best way of keeping cold truth clear and separate from the trains of thought his expertise did not always know how to drive. Yet it was clear as he worked that something was not right, and the fact he was so aware of this wore away at him as he tried to reconcile things.

Perhaps an outsider’s perspective could somehow give him something he had missed, he mused - but at the same time, he knew he could not go out to face the town at the current moment. Right now, Tamsin was his patient, even if not in the usual sense - and there was still something he could do for her, even if it wasn’t going to change anything in the end.

Sutures were something the doctor always kept on hand, as they were often necessary and always easy to travel with. He reached for his needle and thread, passing it through the eye with practised precision. While part of him knew on a rational level that he did not need to think about whether the stitches would pull or impede movement, his training taught him to consider these details keenly for the sake of living patients, and he saw no reason to deny the same courtesy to a dead one. He worked on each wound in turn, carefully doing what he could to bring the edges together, the long claw marks lending themselves well to being sealed in such a way - and as he worked, he continued to ponder how her skin responded with all the telltale signs of having not been alive for a long time. It reminded him too much of his practical anatomy sessions as a student, working on cadavers donated for the purpose of medical advancement. Yet he found he could not think of her as like those in the slightest - not after having shared so many exchanges and moments with her here in town, a bright hopeful soul young enough to be his daughter.

His work had taken some time, as such was the extent of the fierce injuries she had sustained, but he was able to ground himself by focusing on it, and was not aware of how the townsfolk were feeling as they waited for him out in the open. If he had been more alert to the outside world, he might have seen Cleo peer in once through a gap in the window, but they could clearly see that he was hard at work, and their informing the others of such was more than enough to grant them all more patience.

He could still do something for her, and that meant he was going to.

When Legundo’s work was finished, he let out an exhaled sigh, staring grimly at the corpse despite his efforts going a long way to make her look more presentable than before; he was by no means a trained mortician, but his experience with cadavers still proved advantageous. He was unsure whether any of the others would want to see Tamsin’s body, but he thought it at least prudent to turn her back to a supine position, for the sake of both normalcy and hiding the worst of what he had treated. After a few moments, he stood up to look over his notes once more to check all was in order - as much as it could have been, anyway - before finally turning to go outside.

..Except, he didn’t make it outside.

“Doctor..?”

The voice was accompanied by silence, which had been with him the entire time, but now made itself known with a shocking and oppressive weight. He had not been looking at its source, but he knew exactly where it came from - despite the fact it couldn’t have come from there, it couldn’t have come from anywhere except his own exhausted mind and its fabrications, because it was Tamsin’s.

A breath, interrupted, held ragged between his teeth. An exhale, so tentative, gently pushed through hers.

He barely heard it, but he still noticed.

“..Tamsin?”

It was nothing like the voice he had used to address Owen behind the castle. It was not the direct, measured tone of a man who had set out on a mission into enemy territory with his fellow troops, knowing full well that trouble would await and being prepared for it. The doctor had been given space to carry out a simulacrum of his chosen work, and in doing so had settled into what he was by now - a tired figure out in a storm of emotions whose already-capsized boat of logic has just sunk underneath him.

His now-whirling mind kept him trapped in a hurricane of thoughts, and the walls spun in turn as he did the same to look at her. She was already doing the same, those vibrant teal-green eyes looking up towards his own with the same life he had always known them to hold, before seeing them here just now. The graze on her cheek was nowhere to be seen, and the paling pallor on her skin had faded in favour of her normal warm tone. Unmistakably, inexplicably, she was alive again.

“I.. can- I’m sorry..” she started, her expression quickly wavering under whatever currently wove itself on Legundo’s face. “I didn’t want you to know about this..”

“..About you being dead?” he replied, as if that were normally a good guess for how she would end that sentence.

She kept staring up at him, having already shifted her legs from the rigid way she had been laid to rest, and now using her hands to prop herself upright into more of a sitting position. It seemed as though she did not like lying on her back. “Well, yes; I don’t have much else anymore.”

Legundo’s head felt like it was on fire. He hoped that releasing the tar of his thoughts into questions might help to quell the burning.

“Are you.. also, a vampire?” was how he began, before taking another sharp intake of breath. Bad start. “I’m aware that’s not- We’ve found proof about their existence.” he finished awkwardly, furrowing his brows at his stumbled path forwards.

In a move he was not quite expecting, as if anything could be expected anymore, Tamsin simply closed her eyes and shook her head, returning to look up at him with much of the same apprehension. “No, don’t worry. I’m not a vampire, but.. I had heard about them being here from Shelby. I’d already had to tell them what I am, back at the start of this.. So, when they came up to talk to me a few days ago, she ended up having- a secret of her own to share.”

The tar-soaked gears of his mind ground away, like wagon wheels trudging through trench mud. It sounded as though Shelby had only just been turned into a vampire.. which begged the immediate question of who had been the one to set that fate upon her.

It also meant that Tamsin was something other than a vampire, another type of entity that could wake back up from the dead..

“I’m still dead, doctor.” Her voice rang out bluntly, like she had somehow followed along with his contemplations. “I’m afraid I died a long time ago. I am no.. “mythical creature”, or “horrible monster”, or whatever you might want to call me. Nor am I anything to do with the holy spirits that’ve been helping us and trapping us, for as much as I wish I could help in that regard. Just.. a ghost, of someone who couldn’t move on.”

The admission weighed down like a fire blanket as she looked up towards him so hauntedly.

“Just a ghost..” he echoed, as if that were an ordinary thing. In the life he had led, perhaps it should have been.

Then he jammed the cogs to try and concentrate. “Forgive me for if this sounds- impudent, but.. May I ask how long you have been like this for?”

It came out as almost too measured, a smooth and diligent inquiry from doctor to patient. Even so, it lets them both cling to some sort of normalcy, like a rock in the storm-tossed ocean.

“I was there the last time there were people living in Oakhurst,” replied Tamsin, now speaking with a fonder sense of levity in her tone. “Two hundred years to the day you arrived here, assuming that Mr M’s calendar is accurate. I grew up here.”

A pair of kinder facts cushioned the cruel one, this time landing like rocks on the easing bonfire. With more of the tar burned away..

“..I think I understand.” said Legundo, having sensed how expressing conclusions like this did a lot to calm her.

He did not need to reopen the wounds he had just closed. Not yet, anyway.

There was a moment of less awkward silence, which Tamsin was first to punctuate.

“Er, so.. What happens now..?”

Right. The vestiges of shock were only now settling enough to remind him of the others outside, worriedly chatting and waiting for an autopsy report. Legundo turned his head towards one of the shuttered windows, and felt the flames start to leap upwards again. “I don’t know how they’ll react to you right now,” he admitted without looking at her.

“Ah, they.. They must have seen me before I could find my way back here.” she realised, lamenting. “If something like this happens, then I normally just manifest where I was, and I can go back into my body without much trouble.. I don’t understand what was different this time - I was just trying to catch up with you all, and then before I knew it I was somewhere else entirely.”

It was clear to him that her own mind was whirling with thoughts as she tried to piece together her circumstances, as her gaze had dropped to stare at the wall below his writing desk - but his growing awareness of the rest of the town had started to weigh down again.

They could all work to solve this together.. couldn’t they?

He released a breath his lungs had not quite realised they were holding, and slowly lowered himself towards her by resting a knee on the ground, meeting her where she still sat. “Do you think you would be alright to walk?” he asked, calmly and deliberately.

In response, Tamsin brought her legs under herself, and found she was able to rise to her feet, remaining level with him as he did the same in tandem until both had stood back up to their full heights. He easily stood a foot taller than her. Hoping that her movements would serve well enough as an answer, she took a gulp to steel herself, and looked upwards again.

“Um.. If I could ask.. I realise that this is a lot to ask of you, but..”

The doctor raised both eyebrows, very slightly, while she anxiously addressed his shoulder. “What do you need?”

She turned her head, but not her eyes, towards his own. “You said that you don’t know how the others will react to me. I.. assume you had all told each other I was dead, which would have come as much more of a shock. And yet, in spite of this.. I didn’t know how you would react, doctor. But you’ve taken it so much better than I’d feared you might. I haven’t had to explain myself like this to people before; there haven’t been enough people for decades. For centuries, really - not since I actually lived here in Oakhurst. So I s-simply..” She swallowed, and tried to stop herself from shaking.

“Could you, please, help me with this..?”

Legundo sighs, and pours all of the warmth from the bonfire’s remnants into the words of his answer.

“If I were to sit here, and turn someone away who needs my help, I could never forgive myself for it. I came here to help those who live in these rural conditions, providing what medical care I can supply. To bring them something they might not have access to otherwise, and take a step on an endless path to make amends for all that I have done.

None of that has changed.

You lived here, in Oakhurst. You still do live here, in Oakhurst. I’ve seen that clearly the whole time I’ve been here. And even if you are a ghost, what matters is that you’re standing here now. So of course I will help you. You have my word, Tamsin.”

His green eyes, one glass and one hidden behind glass, smiled down at her with the rest of his face.

She smiled back up at them directly.

“Thank you, doctor. For this, and for taking care of me.”

This is one of the two compositions that was presented to me when I commissioned my friend Mimi to draw Techne around my birthday. I really loved both of them, but eventually asked them to go with the one of Techne holding a little orb depicting Aria and Clio together.

However, the other one still inspired me, so I've decided to have a go at it myself here for their birthday!~ It's quite high-resolution so that you can still make out the details of Clio and Aria in the picture frame, so feel free to zoom in and have a look at those if you'd like.

As the entity created when Aria's darkness consumed Clio's heart, Techne "inherited" the memories that each of us held of the other, even though they awoke in a different world without either one present. So they have Aria's memories of Clio, and Clio's memories of Aria. And this means that memories we both shared between us are their strongest of all.

I was really quite happy with how this turned out by the end, and so I hope that others like it too ^-^

Thank you for taking the time to read this, if you have!

(Oh, and if you were curious.. This is what Mimi's initial sketch was, as well as what the scene of Aria and Clio looks like without the effects of the picture frame!)