#clarastarter

Things came with an expiry, people, but relationships most of all. It wasn’t as though Renfield didn’t expect it, he was waiting for it. Clara had history with The Eye, but morality was about cause and effect - there was an end goal in mind here and something like a relationship was not a rational enough reason to stand down. Given recent events, there was a shoe that was going to drop, one way or another Clara would find out the truth. Now and then his mind puzzled over what she might say, he shelved those thoughts and processed them elsewhere as he went about his rituals and his routines. Guilt found its way into his mind as well, but things like emotions were easy to set aside, necessary even. Renfield was not a sadist, even sedated he’d gotten no thrill from cutting or infiltrating the bodies and minds of his subjects over the last century. There was an end goal in mind, that’s what he was working towards. 

Clara had performed a surgery recently, the alpha that Renfield had cautioned Sanem was growing out of control was officially off leash. The Overseer had been confident that the implant was impossible to remove, naturally, Ren knew better. There was one person in the city besides himself with the awareness of supernatural healing factors, anatomy, and surgical experience to be able to pull it off without corking the guy or killing him on the table. Still, the feat was no small accomplishment. Too few, perhaps most people besides him would be able to recognize that. 

While the device was still sending a signal, it was clearly being... Meddled with, when Clara called him he feigned pedantic ignorance and appeared in the doorway of her lab like a specter. Genius came and went, at least as far as mortals were concerned, Clara was different. Supernatural and immortal, perhaps the closest to someone that would be able to understand him. But even she, for all her brilliance, had misjudged him. Ren loved her, and he felt guilty. Grief and anguish that went beyond description, but these two had a place elsewhere in his mind. Once there had been a man who sought to use Renfield, and used he was for centuries his mind and his blood fed Vlad’s sycophantic obsessions. He pulled people apart because he wanted to see what they looked like inside - how long could a lycan’s heart beat outside of its body. Stupid questions of a primitive mind. 

By the time Ren met Clara, the hollowborn was already resolved towards his path. 

“I got your message.” Renfield said as he approached the other’s workstation, “New toy?”

Andreas laughed as Alek shoved his hands into the tidepool and tried to grab the minnows with his fingers. Too young to know yet that a net or a trap might have been more effective, they dashed away and disappeared into the sand that Alek’s fists kicked up. His brother, older but all knobby knees and lanky limbs stepped into the water next to him, sat down and told Alek to follow suit as he dipped a net below. Watch he said as the small fish swam unassumingly into the net as it wove back and forth through the water, only for Andreas to raise the squirming prizes over the tide. Much to Alek’s delight. 

Hands grabbed for the small creatures, much too aggressively and Andreas pulled them back. Careful, he said, then he dipped them back into the water and let the creatures swim out safely. Alek pouted, he was the child who took magnifying glasses to anthills, he wasn’t sitting in the water to let these slippery little guys go. 

In the distance there was a beeping, steady and constant along with the soft voice of someone who was saying something over and over again. Something wet dabbed at his lips and his dry tongue sucked on it, quenching the back of his throat before the process was repeated a few more times. He slept, this time Andreas was saying goodbye again. Alek’s brother was always leaving, always going somewhere. Always saying he’d be back. Back then the boy used to wonder how many times a person could leave before they never returned, that number had to be finite. 

The voice came again, Alek was what they were saying. A name. His name. Blue eyes opened as he groaned, then he spoke, a groggy croak that emanated from the back of his throat. “I’m going to fucking kill them.”

Something in him felt drawn towards the other, watching from the shadows as she stitched and healed and helped. Dirthara had never been at such things, his strength was in all the ways he could destroy something. A distant memory from a time far away invoked thoughts of children laughing, of spells to help and not hurt. He shook his head and stepped out of the shadows, bored already with the competition. Something within her felt familiar, a twist or an abomination depending on who you asked. Not quite a drow but also not quite an eladrin, something else entirely. “Why do you help them?” 

"Keket." Renfield never said her true name, she'd always been Clara to him. "You can't stop me. You won't." The hollowborn tried to pull it, every warring thought and nerve had been pushed towards the back of his mind but there was no movement from his hand. It just hovered there. All Renfield had to do was end it, end magic and he ended all of this. No more necromancy, no more fey, no more drow, no more lycans.

No more Remus. No more Clara. Because they would be dead. Because once he did this then the magic keeping them here would be extinguished with them. Gone. Forever.

How many people would he save? One or two deaths was a tragedy, but if he saved millions - billions? An end to all this suffering. An end to all this pain. Somewhere buried within the recesses of Renfield's maddening eldritch mind there was a warring battle of wills, contests for dominance that the hollowborn stifled and stuffed down. Bit by bit and little by little he'd stepped on himself again and again, stomped down every mortal thought or fleeting feeling. The humanity of it all would be his undoing: something like love couldn't stand in the way of objectable truths, and it was painfully clear from the beginning for anyone truly paying attention - this was over the moment Michael and Tisiphone failed to first destroy the book.

"You can't stop me." Renfield repeated, he was trembling, his normally still features were a wash of several different emotions though none should have been prevalent. "You won't." Again he tried, and again there was nothing. No movement, just the same quivering limb as his mind tried to force something that his body refused to do. "What did you do to me?"

The wolf had put the good doctor behind him, if the Eye had seen to it that Alek would not be able to move against them, he wondered how many people had a story similar to his own. Walking into a human hospital and barking for someone to scan his brain was a sure way to end up in a padded room, or worse, under the scrutiny of the Eye once again. He remembered someone though, a woman who’d had a lot of opinions on the state of the supernatural world. Someone who hated the Eye maybe as much as him, someone with enough skills to open a clinic for the supernatural, and someone who was much more powerful than they had appeared. 

“Doctor.” Alek greeted as he lingered in the doorway, she looked busier than he remembered, maybe more stressed. The clinic smelled faintly of desperation and blood, it reminded him a great deal of any other hospital. “The Eye put something in me when I was there I uh... I could use your help.” 

"Are you going to be patching these lycans up again like last year?" Clara had donated her time to what was arguably not the most worthy of causes, but where there were injuries, she was generally there lending a hand. "I could help if you want an extra set of hands." Renfield held them up, "I still just have two." It was a very lame attempt at a joke but the hollowborn was still adjusting to this change, effectively mortal and powerless. It made everything more difficult but it was still manageable.

Things between them hadn’t ended on the best note but Clara had kept in touch all these years, if only because she needed something. Once or twice, for access or some sort of resource - Virgil and his associates were good when it came to things like red tape. Artifacts confiscated from the black market, state of the art technology, experimental resources. The truth was the two of them couldn’t have been more different, the Ivy weren’t just a coven or even just a family, they were a community. A village. A city. That’s what it took these days. Clara was almost completely solitary, and from what he understood that’s how she preferred it. When they’d known each other on a more personal level she hadn’t had any friends, no one of significance - at least no one that she’d talk to him about. He supposed the two of them had always been strangers. 

“What kind of underwear do scientists wear?” Virgil briefly paused for the best effect, “Kelvin Klein.” Clara hadn’t aged a day, which was to be expected given her history - he kept her real name off his tongue though. She’d chosen Clara so Clara was what the aspect would always be to him. “You like that one? Thought of it on the way over here.” His jokes always did something for people, whether it was an eyeroll, a chuckle, or a gut busting laugh - either way Virgil liked leaving others with a smile on their face.