#compulsion

i. sunday's first light fades, cigarettes burn on gravel, shame shadows the day...

carmen's dedicated to fixing his past mistakes through overworking himself, his approach what others may consider as tyrannical. nothing is going as smoothly as he would like it and his mission further derails itself once uncle jimmy's niece starts working front of house.

ii. maul and tear and stare, search for the praise in the pain, the bird only mourns...

there's a sinister method carmen adapts in order to get away from you. as many of his self-sabotaging tendencies seem to do, it backfires.

iii. overheard a sound, about the sanctuary, ivory steals more…

issues have arisen with your landlord. carmen had no idea he would be so eager to help fix them until he offers something that even surprises himself.

iv. to tempt is to lure, chilled citrus bathes in brandy, oh what have we done…

you unknowingly, at least that’s what carmen initially believes, chip at carmen’s resolve until you whittle it down to scraps. it leaves him with a forbidden, inevitable choice, and one salaciously obvious option.

During your briefing to join the 141, you learned just what that was. Vampires. Not Twilight teen romance vampires, mind you, but the kind that’s just as likely to save an ally as to rip their throat out if they have a bad day. They needed a reminder of their humanity and that came in the package of little old you. Warm and human and so fragile.

Price looks at you as a tool- a way to realign his men with the good in the world, to jog their memories of what it was like to be so breakable. You don’t notice the way he looks at you at the end of a mission, the way he catalogues each and every injury on your body. Making sure you’re okay and not broken. Asset protection, he joked around his cigar when asked. “Can’t have the human go back in pieces, we might be next, love.”

Gaz seems uncertain about having you on the task force. He treats you well and is the one with the steadiest hands and most sated appetite when it comes to patching you up, but he looks at you as if thinking of a ghost, eyes lingering on bandages as if to make sure you don’t burn up and extinguish like a dying star.

Soap, to his credit, is utterly excited. Although his appetite is hard to keep in check sometimes, he adores having you around. He teaches you all the neat tips and tricks about vampires-compulsions, what it was like to be Ghost’s fledgling, things that can protect you and injure them. He’s trying to make you comfortable and feel at home simultaneously, always eager to soother over tensions.

Ghost is the scary one. How wouldn’t he be, huge and looming with those bloodred eyes and that skull mask staring you down without a word? You can feel the weight of his gaze on you every time you enter a room, thick and overbearing and begging for you to make a mistake that he can rectify by killing you. Even in your sleep, you can feel those eyes.

You don’t notice that he slips into the shadows of your room each and every night, eyes focused on ensuring you’re breathing. Making sure you stay tucked safe and sound into your bed, alive and warm and all too human. Or that he and Gaz take turns playing nightguard, memories of a long-lost loved one still haunting their minds. They won’t lose this one.

Nobody’s certain just how Graves and his Shadows got to you. You were never at Los Almas, spared from the situation entirely. There should’ve been no way for you to interact with the rival coven and the patch on your vest combined with the necklace around your throat marked you as coven 141 property and off-limits.

All the same, the room stinks of the American coven of vampires, the stench of a heavy compulsion laid by Graves rolling over you as you thrash and scream against the ropes keeping you tied down.

The look in your eyes is near-feral, hazed with the faint orange of Graves’s effect on you. The coven head himself somehow got around each and every protection laid on, in, and around you and mind-controlled you within an inch of your life. Your mission? Gather information, report back, and kill as many 141 men as possible.

You very nearly succeeded as well. Gaz is still patching up the hole in Soap’s chest from where you attempted to stake the Scot in his bed, still warm and sleepy from the night you’d spent together prior. He doesn’t have the heart to be upset with you, even as he curses and bitches at Gaz. No, Johnny is furious with whatever and whoever slipped up enough to put you in this situation in the first place.

When unable to obey a compulsion, the compulsed party goes insane, for lack of better phrasing. From the second that haze settles over you, the assigned task becomes your primary mission in life. It’s hard to complete a suicide mission when strapped to a chair.

Price works on freeing you of the compulsion while Ghost tracks down whatever information you may have already leaked to Shadow Company. It’s delicate work since without the ability to eliminate Graves, which would release you, John has to put you under a separate and stronger compulsion to undermine the first.

“Shhhh,” He tries to soothe your screaming, both hands holding onto your sweaty cheeks to keep you still while he works. “I know. I know, love, I know. It hurts, but you’re doing so well. So well, just listen, yeah?”

The pitch hits a new level as he lays your mind thicker and thicker with his own will overtop the Shadows’. Your body is rebelling, trembling and arching against the chair they tied you to.

Everything is screaming to kill, to obey Phillip’s order even while Price’s compulsion wraps around and tries to strangle it to nothingness. A gentle croon telling you to surrender your previous mission and sleep. Just sleep.

“Steamin’ Jesus,” Soap curses to Gaz, looking over with worry and a pale face. “The lungs on that bird are going tae explode my head.”

You’re slowly giving into John’s influence, the sweet smells of black tea and cigar smoke soothing and washing away the foreign influence over you. It’s easier to give into John, to surrender yourself to the ancient vampire you trust with your life. “Sorry. I’m s… I’m sorry…”

“Nobody’s mad at you, love,” Price promises as he brushes sweaty hair from your face. “We’re mad at ourselves for not protecting you. They should have never been able to compel you.”

John would never admit it- not to you, not in court, maybe not even to his own men, but he’d compelled you ages ago. Nothing sinister, of course, but he’d placed what was supposed to be a barrier of protection against non-141 vampires in your mind. The only ones who were supposed to get in were them.

However Graves got around it is worrying and disconcerting. It spells less than savoury things ahead, for you and for the covens as a whole.

Graves’s influence finally snaps with a pained scream for you, entire body tensing and arching against your bonds before immediately passing out. John was successful in easing you into rest.

“Fuckin’ hell,” Price has to steady himself on the arm of your chair for just a moment, nauseous and dizzy from the amount of effort this took. He wouldn’t say he’s out of practice in the art of mind control, but it is certainly no longer one of his main skills. Compulsion does not hold up in court, as it stands.

“Are they going to be okay, Cap?” Gaz looks away from where Soap is bandaged and resting against the wall. The Sergeants are trying to hide their concern, but it’s a useless endeavour. He can see the shine of worry even from here- one their faces and on Ghost’s as the Lieutenant steps back in, nodding that he did indeed stop the flow of information.