~~Jack~~
"Name them yet?"
"No. Really torn on it too." Jack leaned down, held out his hand, and smiled as the two crows each took some oats from his palm. "It's gotta be something meaningful."
"Bonnie and Clyde?" His sire laughed at his own joke. Tacky, but the mafia boss man made it work.
"I'm thinking something a bit less depressing. Just... nothing coming to me."
"I wouldn't get too caught up on making the names special or meaningful. A name's something that should resonate with the person giving it, not carry connotations or expectations on the person receiving it." Julias leaned back against wall of his mansion. The two of them were outside, around back where there was a garden and some pretentious statues. Beyond the backyard, was the outside of the city, rocks and bits of trees and dirt and road. The mansion was surprisingly defendable, because no one could approach it without being seeing. It was something Jack knew Julias would take advantage of. Man probably had snipers in lookout posts nearby, or maybe on top of the mansion.
"... Mulder and Scully."
"You can't be serious." His sire facepalmed, loud enough for Jack to hear his soul breaking. "The great Jack Terry, rising star of the Invictus, watches too much TV."
"Hey! ... does anyone call me that? Seriously?"
"That's how I sold your promotion to Maria and Michael."
"... you fucking liar." He smirked at his sire, laughed a few more times, and lifted his hand. He wore a bird handling glove, a black one that matched his suit nicely, long enough to cover some of his forearm, but thin enough to be discreet. Crows weren't eagles or owls, he didn't need anything major, and the two crows perched on the glove beside each other without issue. "I was thinking G'Kar and Londo, if they were both males, but this one here is female. So, I'm thinking Mulder and Scully."
"I hope you don't tell anyone."
"I'll definitely tell everyone."
"You're not nearly social enough to use 'everyone' in a sentence."
"True. But Damien and Jessy will know, at least."
"How are things with the right hands, anyway?" Julias motioned forward, and the two of them started to walk the garden, and then further out, past the gate, and out into the endless grass, dirt, and rocks that surrounded the city. A casual stroll where the sun would be inescapable, if it decided to throw a temper tantrum and rise before it was supposed to.
"Good, actually. Jessy's teaching Damien and I about the people we bully around to keep the city running smooth. I only just learned about this Terra Den company and the nasty shit their CEO Jeremy Long has been up to." Cyberpunk mob bosses were a thing, he'd only learned in the past couple weeks. Using fancy tech to run his criminal organization.
"Yeah, he's a tough one to keep under our thumb, but he provides a lot of benefits."
Jack wasn't convinced. He frowned over his shoulder, and kicked at a couple of rocks, motion subtle enough to not disturb the two birds still on his arm.
"He traffics some pretty nasty drugs, Julias."
"He does indeed. Heroine, cocaine, barbiturates, others."
"Then why aren't we putting him in the ground?"
"Because he doesn't sell to kids, and he doesn't force his product on anyone. The only people getting addicted and involved in his business are people willing to ruin their lives, old enough and informed enough to make that choice."
"Just because someone's eighteen, and they've read the back of a get-help pamphlet, doesn't mean they're old enough or smart enough to make decisions for themselves." Jack groaned, picked up a rock, and threw it. Still the crows did not move, comfortable on his arm. It made him smile.
"There has to be a cut off point somewhere, Jack. Eighteen-year-olds are fucking idiots, but so are twenty-five-year-olds, and thirty-year-olds, and so on. They're all idiots, just slightly less idiotic than their younger selves. We draw the line somewhere, because the line has to exist somewhere." His sire walked beside him, hands in his pockets, eyes looking up at the night sky. Out here, the darkness was real, and the stars and moon had a chance to shine through. "Half the human adults on this planet aren't smart enough to think more than five minutes into the future, Jack. Don't feel bad because someone gave them some rope and they decided to hang themselves with it."
"Harsh... but, yeah, I get you. You have to call them adults at some point, and let them do their own thing." They'd had similar conversations, before Jack was sired, when Julias took an interest in him and started asking him questions about things. He asked questions, and Jack loved to think about shit, think out loud about shit too; answering them came naturally. Lots of conversations about the nature of people, that Jack had no idea Julias was slipping predator/prey bias into. Kine were prey. Kindred were predators.
The man had been training Jack on how to be a vampire for years before he ever became one. Damn, Kindred liked to think in the long term.
"So anyway," Jack said, continuing, "yeah Jessy and Damien and I are getting along. Jessy's easy, and she surprises me sometimes."
"Smarter than she seems, isn't she?"
"Yeah. Most of the time, she's a crass, rude, sex-obsessed frat boy... girl. Sometimes though, you can tell she's got this Kindred thing figured out, more than most."
"She's Michael's right hand for a reason."
"And Damien is... well, he's Damien. I've caught him smiling on a couple occasions though, so I think that's going well." Getting through to that man was difficult. Half a century of self-induced brainwashing for a psychotic father figure wasn't going to disappear overnight, or even over months. "Jessy's got it in her head to get him laid. And I kind of agree with her, it'd do the man some good."
"You know he's a member of the Lancea et Sanctum, right?"
Jack shook his head. "He is, but their tenets are about the humans, not themselves."
"Been researching the Second Estate?"
"A bit, yeah." Knowledge, it was always about knowledge. If he knew things, he could make decisions predicting more steps ahead, manipulate outcomes, steer circumstances and events. He wasn't half as good at it as Julias, but fuck him if he wasn't going to do his hardest to get that good. "That reminds me. I wanted to ask Damien about history records. Did any survive?"
"Good question. The purge was a violent affair, but as far as I know, Lucas's records were not completely lost. Bu—" He blinked, and looked down as he folded his arms across his chest. "Garry destroyed a lot Lucas's stuff, during the purge, and then again after you killed him. He went to Tony's lair that Lucas was using, and let out a little of his rage, I guess, before the tunnels were collapsed."
After he killed Lucas. That was still a lot to wrap his mind around, killing such an older vampire, in such a powerful way. Dominating a vampire, even a broken one like Damien at the time, was not something Kindred his age were supposed to be able to do. At the time, both he and Julias assumed it must have been a fluke of circumstance, but after the incident with Angela, he knew it wasn't. He'd be able to do it again, hopefully, if someone put his back to the wall.
He stroked the back of the head of the closer crow, Mulder, and smiled as the bird leaned into the touch. "I knew about what Garry did, but Damien might still have some stuff. And now that he's working for Maria, I bet she's got him digitizing some stuff. Or at least has a thrall helping him out."
"Maybe. Were you looking to check into something?"
"Yeah... you might actually be able to provide some insight." He leaned in toward the crow, and the crowd leaned in toward him. Nose bump. Scully grew envious quickly, pecking his glove, and he laughed as he started to stroke her breast feathers instead. "I wanted to ask about... Viktor."
"Yeah? What about?" Julias tried to match his gaze, but he didn't hold it, looking away to the dark horizon instead. His sire didn't want to talk about his own sire, Jack's grand sire, anymore than Jack did, really. But, again, knowledge was everything.
"I keep hearing that he was a very powerful Kindred. But, do we have any history on him?"
"No. Unfortunately, only the Lancea et Sanctum keep records about Kindred, but only those worthy of note, and only the most key points in Kindred history." Their walking took them around in the empty land, but they didn't go far, and soon they drifted back toward the garden behind the mansion. "Everyone keeps tabs on things now though, with the dawn of the digital age. At least, to a point. Detailed records about our illegal activities wouldn't be smart, and any records outright calling out Kindred for being Kindred, less smart. Only the Second Estate would do that, because they dedicate so much of their existence to protecting those records."
"... because vampire memories fade."
"More than fade. You've seen first hand what happens when an elder Kindred needs to take a long sleep, a long torpor, to let the blood lust return to normal levels. Those years of dreaming wreck the mind, turn memories into their playground. Lucas was far more stable before the purge. And Viktor was far more stable when he sired me, far more." Julias opened the back gate, and sighed as it let out a classic metal squeak. "Though, even then, he apparently had secrets from before that I was unaware of."
"Such as?"
"Just... he was more of a monster than I realized." Back in the garden, they walked beside the statues, the fountains, and Julias gestured to the statue that looked like Viktor. "He had a taste for torture. His torpor twisted him into a paranoid psychopath, but even before then, he'd grown a taste for inflicting agony I was unaware of."
Ouch, so much ouch. Jack could see the pain dripping off his sire's body, like blood into the dirt.
"You're a century embraced and you're probably the nicest Kindred in the city, Julias," he said. "If you're worried about Viktor's past becoming your past, I—"
"I thought you were the one worrying about him?"
"I... I am. I shouldn't, I know, but I am. Because..." He sighed, the exact same sigh Julias had made moments before. Lot of sighing going on, whenever the topic went in this direction. "Just worried Viktor's bloodline might rub off on me, us, and sneak into our lives in ways we might not expect."
The memory hit him with all the grace of a car crash. How dare they. That's how his mind had put the whole scenario, that's how his anger, his disgust, his hate, had framed the whole circumstance of his capture and his escape. How dare they. Something Viktor would say, to the point Jack could hear the sound of the man's voice ringing in his head.
The last words Viktor had said to him were: learn your place, and die. Christ, he'd wanted to say those same fuckings words during the whole ordeal.
