Chapter Text
Covered in snow and soaked through, the blonde shivered, she had waited here year after year waiting... Waiting for something and not sure what it was exactly. Around a decade or two ago, the very same area was vibrant and green. Filled with wildflowers and a small, but somewhat deep stream. A good assortment of houses where nestled nearby too. Said houses being a little too far from the neighboring town to be considered part of it, but the people who lived there made do. After all, they had everything they needed and where only a drive away from the more localized town.
“Shit... Fine I’ll play your boring game sis” a teen boy huffed, haphazardly tossed his book down onto the back porch – a book about sword fights and evil demons and wondrous adventure – a book that described the life he’d much prefer to this one. However, he loved his older sister even if she was pint-sized compared to him and Danniel grinned as he pounced up and chased her around the yard, laughing and yelling tag as his hand brushed her shoulder only to turn around and run away from the younger-looking but actually older girl as she began to chase him instead. They were like that for a good hour or so before he lay on the grass exhausted with her curled up at his side and they were content to gaze up at the darkening sky above waiting for their dad to come home and call them in for food.
For a moment or two everything was calm until Danniel decided he wanted to play with the fish in the families backyard stream, the stream itself was tiny but the frogs that lazed about nearby where always fun to chase and pretend where demons he had to chase down and protect his dear sister, Seras, from. While playing about Seras had heard their father come home and had gone inside while her brother played. They may not be children anymore but they hadn’t lost their imagination at all – being house taught had ensured that.
Their dad had brought home an older boy, 18 compared to the twins who were only 13, and rough looking too, scars across his chest where her father’s coat wasn’t covering and she could just about see “He’s staying with us for a few days till his family is housed properly again. They had a house fire and some... Err... Men came and tried to take him and his sisters away. So he’s staying here while his sisters stay with their grandma, a nice woman actually but not enough room for this one to be comfortable” he explained, Seras tried to listen she really did but was finding it hard to tear her eyes away from their guest’s until a scream came from the garden.
There was a man in the stream, Danniel was a bit miffed that the water had begun to turn pinkish and then a deep red up until that point, after all, he couldn’t see the fish very well when the water wasn’t clear, but seeing a man face up in the water as if he’d just lay down to sleep but.. With his eyes open-? It was at that point that he’d screamed, alerting his family to the situation and unknowingly also alerting other nearby men to his presence. Policeman or not, Derek Victoria wasn’t prepared to see a swollen lifeless body in his backyard and instantly made to pull his son inside and to get a shower to clean his now red hands.
The first thing that came to mind was pale. Grossly pale. Almost vampirically so. But his skin was stretched and podgy as if it had become porous and literally soaked up the where he’d been exiled to. Not to mention those lifeless dilated eyes and an open-mouthed yet silent scream. He seemed like a doll, transfixed and stuck silently screaming out for help. It was then that Derek realized who this man was. The local butcher and their neighbor Francis Bernadotte, oh god, he thought, his kid’ll be coming home to a dead dad next week. Phillip was visiting France with his mother and both would be devastated.
Finally Seras and Hans where inside but his son being the daring boy he was, brave and stupid and he didn’t want to leave his dad alone when there were dead people around, was still at his side “Dad..” he said, tugging at the elder’s sleeve “Dad there’s another one, Mr. Wolfe from the orphanage a block away a-and another over there by the tree too” he was shaking but still staring at the dead body of the local orphanage’s head priest. Curled up in a fetal position and covered in claw marks – he looked like he’d been attacked by a wild animal – the male near the tree was actually standing and had held the father's attention the longest. He was holding a knife and covered in blood. It dripped down his fingers almost beautifully but what was most gruesome was that he was literally turning into dust as he stood there, his sadistic grin twisting into a frown as he realized he was becoming dust.
Suddenly events twisted and Derek saw his own son’s mouth froth up from some unknown force. That was until he fell and tried to reach for his back. Right between his shoulder blades sat a poisoned blade. That place that you can never quite reach and within seconds the previously adventurous and brave boy had become a heap of dead flesh in his own back garden, the black mist behind him disappearing as if its work had been done.
Seras was inside the house staring out the window and had seen the entire scene unfold in what she would describe as slow motion. She hadn’t seen the knife enter her brothers back but once the black fog-shaped person had moved she’d been entranced by the foam crawling at the cotton jumper and blood pouring from her younger brother’s now broken nose and busted bottom lip. Her father had staggered away. Seeming pale and sick from the sight, before something whooshed past causing the trees to sway. Suddenly he was slumped down on the floor and trying to crawl away from something she couldn’t see. His hand hit the stream behind him, the stream that had been his favorite part of the entire garden and now filled with a dead man’s blood. Francis had been his best friend.
A hand reached up to cover a now ripped out eye socket as the other tried to pull the Victoria family head up and across the polluted stream and lifeless body. Instead, he fell and spurted vomit that had clearly been held back too long, it was then that the blonde girl saw what had her father so shook. The fog-man was back only more human shaped and extremely tall, a gun in one hand and blood coating his mist-like body that seemed to be transforming as he stepped closer and closer to her dad. The only one she’d ever have. Tears welled up, but before the climax, she was pulled away by the boy her father had brought home earlier.