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They touch down in Aotearoa after dark.
Vlad knows she doesn't mean anything by it. They're tired, jetlagged, any number of things that normally don't make much of a dent on them but with this length of journey are fucking him up, at least. They're staying with some old friends of Tal's, on a sheep farm up in the mountains, all rolling hills and green green grass. It's a necessary stopover, and a close enough place to retreat if things go fucked with Dad while still being able to put an ocean between them.
He doesn’t want to see him. Doesn’t know what they have to talk about at this point. He imagines the absurd beachfront house with wide expanses of window, unused, blackout blinded. He tries not to picture his face.
Tal’s setting up camp in the outhouse when he comes in, looking for a headband, tie, something to keep the hair out of his mouth while he sleeps. It’s gotten long, he knows that - in the vague kind of way he’s as aware of any changes in his appearance as he can be, not being able to see his reflection and all. He can feel it swing around his chin, the awkward layers at the back where the length is all uneven, where it catches in the leather thong of his necklaces.
It won’t stop growing, he knows that - even when everything else does. It’s a weird kind of trip, not knowing when the ageing is going to stop. What he’s going to look like, when eternity starts for real. It’s the last bit of the transformation. Tal likes to say that you’re still adolescent until whatever power that is decides you’ve hit your prime, and freezes you there. She’ll run a hand along the slope of his jaw, trace the space under his eyes and tell him No, you’re still cooking. They’re not quite finished with you yet.
She digs a bobble out of her pocket, tells him to come over and she’ll tie it for him. He stands in front of her and lets her scrape the dark strands of it away from his face. There’s a braid in it at the nape of his neck that she put in somewhere in Hội An that her fingers catch on, and when he winces she tells him not to be a baby.
“It’s long,” she says, absently, and he thinks about what he’s going to say to Dad tomorrow, feels his stomach roil. She pulls it back, then:
“You look just like your dad with it like this, you know?”
He knows she doesn’t mean anything by it. He doesn’t expect her to know how twisted up his insides are already, how hard he had to concentrate to not shift out of bat form over the Pacific as his mind wandered to his father. Was the attention he’d demanded from him already not enough?
She must feel the way he tenses, though, because she finishes looping off the ponytail, and settles her cool, long-fingered hands on his shoulders.
“Vlad?” she says, in her best spooked-horse tone, “You okay?”
He tries his best not to bolt - he’s a grown-up. Instead he drives his thumbnail into his opposite palm and makes for the door.
“I’m just– Need some air.”
It’s not his finest work, but she doesn’t chase him - just lets him out into the cool night.
He finds the clippers in the barn. There’s coarse white wool still in them, but they do the job. The process is soothing, calming, bringing him down from the feverish swirl of vomiting his anxiety up down by the fence posts as the sheep looked on, bemused. He feels around on his scalp for any tufts he may have missed. He leaves the braid, and thinks vaguely about whatever Star Wars movie it was that Robin showed him that one time.
When he heads back in, Tal masks her shock as best she can, which is by her clapping a hand over her mouth to silence her astonished laugh. It breaks something in his mood, makes him realise a little the ridiculousness of it.
“What do you think?” he asks, and she presses her lips together and nods. She beckons him, and he lets her run her hands over the shorn surface of his skull.
“I think he’ll hate it.”
He does. It takes up a good hour of the conversation - him explaining the thousand year history of the role of hair in the Dracula family lineage and genetics as Vlad stares down into the wine glass of blood he pours him every time, like he’s hoping he’s changed his diet in the year since he saw him last. Tal sneaks him an inside smile, and he bites back the retort that sits on the tip of his tongue, about how, as a bastard, he’s not exactly a shining example of the family gene pool, and it’ll have grown back by the next time he comes by anyway.
The conversation moves on, eventually: politics and council talk and a rundown of the Australian vampire scene - so disrespectful, abhorrently unconcerned with ceremony, history, legacy. Vlad points out that’s why he moved there in the first place, but he waves the comment away. He just wants something to complain about.
And it’s as he sits there, hair buzzed, low-grade annoyance, resentment, bitterness prickling under his skin he realises Tal’s right. He’s still a teenager, after all this time. Hopefully this part will be over soon.