#bloodborne au

The smell of blood is thick and cloying and delicious and it sears the lining of his lungs with every ragged inhale.

Everything is different. The world is distant, displaced, bleary, and the edges of Jamison’s vision stalk closer with itching darkness as if his consciousness threatened to collapse into void. Poison drips from his teeth, slavering remnants of where his jaws had clamped down, slick with mingling dark and viscous red as if the beast’s essence meant to make a second home out of him—he is the catcher of echoes, the vessel, the Hunter, and he will gladly devour any beast.

The earth beneath him feels too wet, too slippery; something spilled here. Her? His left palm clenches into the soil, claws tearing away spidering roots, and hurls him toward the heaving creature across the clearing. His nose, now elongated and at the end of a long blond muzzle, gathers the forest in a greedy breathful. No, comes his humanity; no, not her. She’s still here. He couldn’t forget her smell even if he wanted. The wet beneath him must be prey.

His teeth gnash into ripped flesh and the Old Blood reaches out for the monstrosity. He can’t control it. The power that makes him whole raises its hackles, a growling and cornered beast, and the ethereal claws from his right arm dive through its abdomen, cleaving between cages of sticky bone. Its howl lodges into his ears, primal and angry and keening and vicious and you must die, and before Jamison can lunge for its throat and close off that awful scream, something slashes down his back and laves it in fire. An unholy sting irrigates the wounds, and the next thing that ripples in among the encroaching dark is the rustling forest canopy.

If he could shout, he would. Something happened to his mouth. Welded shut by poison? Or is his voice unusable like this? His tongue writhes behind his bared teeth, canines glinting with red and rot and torn skin from his impaled quarry, and in a vain attempt to wrest control of his body, he shears sharp nails at the ground beneath, burying dirt and pebbles between the pads of his hands. He breathes in shallow gasps, as if more would make the pain that much more crippling, incapacitating, as if it might slow his heartbeat and stall the poison’s travel, but the still stable shard of him knows his fate—it’s off to the Dream with him.

Slowly, slowly, the forest bleeds back into focus. The darkness is still there, scraping, scraping at his peripheral, threatening to swallow him up, and yet the central point ushers away the fog. She stands over him, her red cloak shrouding her shoulders, black hair spun at the crown of her head and ornaments affixed through it like stars. Her posture is regal. It’s stoic, but power radiates from her entirety. The scent of her blood is somehow saccharine and peels away all other smells; the Old Blood has done nothing but dull his senses until this very meeting, nothing could ever compare, and the beast in him wonders how he could keep it, savor it, consume it, until the poison leeching through his bloodstream thrusts a spike of agony inside of him, and then the pain becomes too much, too much—come on, let him die already, let him die, no use in lingering, come on, bloody hurry up and cark it—and he supposes lying here helpless and weak is a sort of cruel justice for attacking her as he did.

Instinct, the beast reminds him. The Hunt is in all of us.

Drops of vibrant gold watch him overhead. Cool, cautious, she regards him with an air of pity. At least he thinks it’s pity. Might as well be. It’s hard to tell. His vision’s going out again; everything is shifting into the familiar. The fangs have receded, his face has reverted back to jagged shapes, and the claws have retracted into normal nails. His prosthetics are missing. God only knows where they are. Not that he needs them right now, anyhow. If he can suffer this long enough, the Dream waits for him, and he will have no need of them there.

“That was unwise of you.” Her voice is silk and drowns out the monstrosity’s death throes. Blood spatters her face. Had she struck the final blow? “I don’t know if you are brave or stupid.”

He wants to answer both and laugh, but something is wrong with his mouth, like wet cement hardened between his teeth, like his voice knotted itself down his throat and has no means of escape. How far did those wounds go? Did something else get punctured? No, it doesn’t matter. He’s a bleeding mess, pulpy and battered and shorn and watering the earth with some potent cocktail that is bound to birth mutant insects; whether he can talk should be the least of his worries.

The Vildblood cocks her head, curiosity and intrigue. “You’re a Hunter. I see no benefit in your actions. Why?”

His tongue forms the word because behind the flats of his teeth and up on the roof of his mouth, sour blood and bits of flesh lingering by salivary glands: because dying to you is a treat.

With all of her regality and poise, she continues to watch, seeming to find some sort of sport in the event of his slow, agonizing death. She could choose to end him quickly and send him hurtling into the Dream that much faster, but no blades come forth, and the blood gem in the palm of her left hand remains a quiet shimmer. A statement, he assumes. She could be merciful, but she won’t. He respects that. And deserves it.

He doesn’t know how many excruciating minutes it is until the transition finally begins, but when it does, the pain dulls, starting with his fingers, his toes, his leg, his arm, and then his abdomen; once it might have been painkillers, alchemical concoctions, but now is the healing sensation of the Old Blood. His nerves register blessed nothingness. The ground beneath him no longer feels wet, and the distinctive metallic tang in the night air becomes faint, distant, lost. As the world around him begins to wither away into a pale sunset somewhere on the cusp of twilight, she gives him a wry, cunning smile.

“You madman,” she says, and the world goes dark.

Hi, here’s more of the Bloodborne AU nobody asked for! And here’s some tunes for the mood.

Jamison wakes to a pale sky and hard stone splayed beneath his back.

Sweet smelling flowers cluster by his head. The surrounding garden breathes with the passing winds, soft blades of grass whispering unintelligible secrets by his ears. The air is cool, gentle, the breeze a welcome touch, but no matter how many times he’s come back, everything has a sticky sort of dampness that clings to his clothes and burrows down through his marrow, the kind that hangs around the riverside or amongst weathered gravestones.

Death, he supposes. Not that it ever truly comes.

Slowly, he digs his elbows back into the cobble path and lifts himself into a sit. All of his gear is still present, although his weapons lie in a scattered heap beside him. He doesn’t need to sift through his pouches to know that all of his blood vials are gone. The pain is gone, too, he realizes, just as it always is. It’s always gone when he wakes. And while that would be a good thing, the pain is what lets him know he’s not dreaming.

Jamison flexes his hands through his leather gloves. Even his arm and leg are back in this place despite their absence in the waking world. It’s surreal, like the Dream somehow grew an empty doppelganger when he was young, long before he’d contracted his childhood illness, and now that he’s begun to hunt, it’s decided to let him use that vessel here while wrenched away from the waking world. While he does not presume to know anything about the Dream or its intentions, he does know that it is sanctuary. From enemies. From reality. From beasts. From death.

It is always quiet here. It is always peaceful. It is always at some indistinct time between sunset and twilight on an overcast day, and it is always shrouded in a thin layer of mist. The moon always hangs overhead, and there are always ethereal pillars stretching skyward in the distance. And as always, there are the soft undercurrents of prying whispers.

Combing his right hand through his blond hair, his missing hand, his phantom hand, he leans over and grabs a hold of the boom hammer’s haft. It’s a heavy, comforting weight, corporeal and mortal and grounding, and he plants the head against the cold stone and leverages its strength to heave himself upward. The bulky form of the cannon lies at his feet, and it occurs to him that he’ll need more ammunition before he wakes again. The last of his reserves had been spent on the Vileblood and that slavering beast, and while bloodmade bullets will do in a pinch, quicksilver is far more effective. A better bang, he thinks, and without the mess of drawing blood to shape down the barrel of a cannon.

As Jamison hefts the hammer over his back and dredges up the cannon from its nest of flowers, his brow knits in thought, trying to recall what brought him hurtling back into the Dream. It’s a liquid blur at first, shifting somewhere back beyond the edges of his consciousness, and then he remembers, he does, quite clearly: the beast had lunged at him, snarling with jagged teeth and flaps of severed skin sagging from its body, and it struck the final blow down his back after a too quick feint; it tore through fur and flesh and muscle and let its poison seep down through him, coursing into his veins with every heartbeat.

Not the best way to go, if he’s honest. Fawkes the Hunter has died far better deaths.

But the Vileblood finished it off, didn’t she? She did. She must have. Or at least he thinks she did. The last thing he remembers is her staring down at him as he died, knelt over his body with fierce gold flickering in her eyes. He can’t imagine the bloodstarved monstrosity would have left her alone long enough for her to watch him bleed out, or even to witness the poison still his heart. She must have eviscerated it with the strange magic blades he’d seen slice from the construct integrated into her prosthetic arm. She was certainly skilled enough to bring it down; he’s sure of that, especially with how swiftly and brutally she’d cut at him during their own battle before the beast intervened. If she really had finished it off, that must mean she’s still alive somewhere in the forest—waiting.

The whispers follow him as he walks down the cobbled pathway. His boots crunch against small pebbles and soft earth, stamping over faint voices murmuring up from beneath small headstones. The path winds past gated gardens encircled by black spiked bars and trails up to the dilapidated house perched atop the far hill where the gifts of the Workshop can be found. If he plans to go back and meet her, he must be prepared. The silent pact they’d made to pause their skirmish and destroy the beast was only temporary, or so he assumes, and he expects nothing but her full ferocity upon his return.

Jamison tightens his grip on the cannon at the memory. Truthfully, her full ferocity had been a sight to behold. No other beast had tested his abilities in such a way; her presence alone had nearly been enough to reduce him to bloodcraze. He felt it sing through him as he came at her, a deafening chorus spilling from between his lungs, the hammer’s spark a smear of red lightning in the inky night of the forest. He has no doubt she’s different from all the rest: she is cold, calculating, intelligent, and most of all, she is breathtakingly vicious. She granted him no quarter, allowed him no free swings, dodged every cannon blast, and for every inch he let her take, she punished him for it dearly.

She is not new to the Hunt, it seems.

Clusters of malformed messengers watching from worn headstones follow Jamison’s movements as he scales the hill. Their droning murmurs overcome the whispers beneath the wind; sometimes he can discern what he thinks might be words, but he can’t be certain. The cannon becomes easier to carry as he ascends, his strength pouring back into him from the Dream, and he finds himself drawing a deep breath in shivering anticipation.

Absently, he wonders if she will come after him again. It is true that he had stumbled across her by mere chance, but he is the Hunter, and he is bound to hunt like the rest of his brethren. From the measure of her skill and whatever strange blood fills her veins, it seems she must require a hunt as well. The thought of her scouring the forest for him lights a pyre of excitement against the undersides of his ribs.

Yes, yes, he remembers now—with chips of iridescent gold burning in the fading dark, she watched him die, watched the life leak from him onto the forest floor, and with a bloodgem clutched in one palm, her voice carried with him into the Dream: “You madman.”

Jamison slings the boom hammer from his back and cracks it onto the wooden floor of the old house. He grins under the stare of the dusty spines of old books and the shrouded benches by the altar.

“Well, you’re not wrong,” he says.

The Workshop awaits.