!!!! Could we have uhhhh Vamp!Graves having to save Theseus the only way he knows how? (To turn him into a vampire because Theseus very very nearly dies)
Warnings: NEAR-character death
Fate forces his hand, as it was so prone to do. He didn’t want to do it. To spread his curse, the curse of his family. A family only allowed to exist so long as its kin served the President. Complete subservience, a life of glamours and holding back. He didn’t want that for anyone else. He didn’t want that for Theseus.
But one look at the way he fell - a man turned into a doll with its strings cut the moment the bullets struck him - Graves knew he had no other choice.
No other choice, that was, that didn’t end in living a life with Theseus.
In the hellfire that was war, he cut a path as though it were nothing. He was young yet, but for the first time he felt the frailty of time as an immortal would. His expression lost all mock-worry he had been projecting over bullets or bombs. They were nothing to him. Ground was ripped from the very earth beneath his feet in chunks, but he did not sway. Never had he moved so elegantly, for never had he dared lest his peers know.
He parts the sea of war like light through the darkness. Metal bends around him, unable to pierce his skin. His glamour fades, magic rolling from his skin like water, leaving only the truth behind. His flesh is pale like the moon that barely lights his way. Eyes naught but embers that burn in the night, hotter than the muzzle flashes of the enemy. Fingernails that grow, sharp and deadly. Bones like marble, his visage more attractive, more otherworldly.
His men stop, hunched over in their trenches, and look on high at him as though a deity had laid foot on earth. And in a way they were not wrong. He was, after all, going to rip a soul from the greedy hands of death.
He nears and suddenly, he can hear him. Sharp, whistling, wheezing breaths that can’t quite catch in his throat. He’s panicked. Polished and brave as he is, even Theseus wilts beneath the weight of the realization that his human flesh is limited and that life is fleeting. Looking so small in the uniform that once made him look larger than life. Like a boy in his father’s clothing. Graves watches as the redhead, hair muddied, scrabbles weakly at the small holes that weep in his flesh. So small, so insignificant, these oozing dimples. But they will kill him.
Graves has seen it happen before.
So he kneels, fine knees sinking into mud, and gathers the man he had come to call brother into his arms. Brother. Lover. Friend.
Mate, he had hoped. Had fought with himself. For he did not want to pass the curse, but a life without Theseus seemed just as cruel.
“Graves,” Theseus whines through a scared mask of a smile, through bloodied teeth, through pleading eyes. “Percy.”
“I’m here,” he says, and holds him tighter as though that alone could cease the man’s shivering.
“I’m… you’re,” Theseus sucks in a breath, one pupil dilating while they other hung heavy and dull in his iris. “Fuck, mate, you look like an angel.” He barks out a weak, wet laugh. “Kind of fitting.”
“If only I were,” Graves says, and there’s a heaviness on his heart he has never felt before. The knowledge that he would be snatching this light from the world. That this light would change, invisible to death but no longer glowing with life. “Theseus, I’m so sorry.”
Theseus whimpers through a tremulous laugh. He is afraid. Graves can feel it in his pulse even as his heart heart begins to slow. “You didn’t shoot me.”
“No,” he says, “But I can’t let you go.”
There’s a question on Theseus’ lips. A confusion that Graves kisses away, but it is not the goodbye that the man was clearly expecting. It is ‘I’m sorry’, and it leaves his love tense in his arms. He pulls away to then pepper a line of apologies down Theseus’ stable jaw. Through the soft skin of his ear. Down to the thready echo of his pulse, numbered and fleeting. It is warm, but slowly cooling. Damp with fear and pain. He murmurs a soft “I love you,” into the flesh there, and kisses it one last time while a pulse still beats beneath it.
“I love you too–” The word cuts out into a sucked in gasp, like the hush of a gut wound, short and sudden. Sudden like the fangs that pierce Theseus’ throat, then retract, leaving a trail of venom behind. He doesn’t suck - there isn’t much left to take, nor time to take it. He wishes he could though. If this had been his choice and not his ultimatum that fate had given him, he would have taken his time. Would have crested Theseus gently through death so that when he changed, he wouldn’t even notice it between the sighs of pleasure Graves would draw from his parted lips.
He uses a nail to cleave his own flesh and make way for salvation. Blood seeps from the wound, bright and inhuman, and in his eyes he can see a horror awakening in his friend.
“You’re a vampire,” Theseus whispers. A question, a statement. Graves is not strong enough to hold his accusing gaze. He wilts, wrist raised and weeping, and nods.
When he looks back, Theseus has clenched his jaw. Has braced himself. And the weight of that gaze, that courage returned, sucks the strength from Graves bones in a rush. His wrist falls to his side in the mud, and he suddenly feels as old as the mountains his nana always spoke about returning to.
“I’m sorry,” he says and red fills his eyes, hot and heavy on his lashes. “I… I just don’t know what I’m going to do without you.”
He knows Theseus has a dozen questions. Why didn’t you tell me? How did this happen? Who else knows? How are you even allowed in society, America is anti-beasts! But there isn’t time, and he knows Theseus realizes that when his stomach contracts and his fingers tremble around one of the sluggishly leaking wounds. There is no time for questions, only decisions.
Theseus’ lower lip trembles, and Graves feels horrible for having robbed the simplicity of “the inevitable” from him. Because now he has a choice. He can choose to die and stick to his morals. Or he can choose to live, and all the costs that come with it.
He’s pale. His freckles hidden amongst the mud and the blood and the fear that makes the redhead look so fucking young.
“I…” he starts, and when he looks up at Graves, all fear of him is gone - replaced by a gnawing terror of another, much darker thing. “I want to see what Newt becomes. I want to go by to my pop’s farm when this is over and fix it up the way he would’ve wanted me to. I want to… Jesus, I want to do all the things we said we’d do after the war, Percy. I don’t want to die. I don’t want to want that, but I do. It’s not like they fucking tell you, it’s not… “
“There is no glory in death,” Graves says, because he has seen hundreds die – in alleys beneath his teeth. In the mud, in the trenches, in the streets. By his hand, by others. No one dies with grace, death is not so merciless as to spare some concept that any part of life is graceful. We are born into the world wriggling and screaming and we die slowly, messily, and just as scared.
“There’s not,” Theseus says. “I don’t want to die.”
Graves sucks in a guilty breath.
But a hand grabs his nonetheless. Slowly, his wrist is brought to his lover’s mouth and willingly, Theseus draws from him. Hesitant at first, lips hovering over the raw wound, then fast before he can rethink it.
It is in that way, through both of their selfishness, that Graves steals a life from the hands of death - a light plucked from the dark, now invisible to the angel’s eyes. There, in the mud and the muck and the sea of moaning men and screaming, he plucks Theseus from the fabric of mortality so they can start again.
