An Episode of Not Quite Dead.

Episode Content Warnings

Please bear in mind that this show is a work of horror fiction and frequently places characters in situations which jeopardise their psychological and physical health. This episode contains:

– discussions of patients with mental illnesses and their treatment by others

– mentions of hospitalisation for psychiatric care

– discussions of blood drinking – discussions and brief descriptions of severed fingers and toes

– mention of pulling teeth out without medical protocols in place

– implications of dismembering corpses

– mentions of improper burial

– references to unhealthy relationship dynamics analogous to abusive romantic relationships

– mentions of sex and sexual innuendos

– mentions of violence, torture, and murder

Transcript

A CAR ENGINE IDLES

ALFIE INHALES

ALFIE
Okay, just. Just taking a minute out to. Think. To process. Yeah. Still not heard back from Haley, except for a couple of texts.

ALFIE TURNS OFF THE CAR, THE KEYS RATTLING

ALFIE

I’m starting to worry a bit, you know? What if something’s happened to her? What if the people Bonham works with, they have some kind of alert or something that lets them know if someone has tested vampire blood?

God, if I didn’t know she was mostly testing our stuff on NHS property I’d be more concerned. I don’t think there’s a way you could set up an alert through NHS systems, you know? It’s just not joined up enough on the back end. A lot of senior administrators can barely use fucking computers, there’s just been no funding for training or–

Yeah.

It’s weird, I– don’t miss it, working in the hospital, but I do at the same time, I do? Talking to Haley again, even just a little bit, it’s reminded me how much I loved what I did. I had to love it, it was killing me.

Like I loved Casper and he was kind of killing me too.

Oh god.

Not important.

So.

Neige.

ALFIE DRAWS A SHAKY BREATH

The internet thing. He’s. I really need to speak to Haley about this, honestly, I feel like I can’t judge that action. There’s a sense that like, he just doesn’t get how significant cutting off the internet is. It’s still new, he gets that it’s a powerful tool and stuff, he’s excited about videos and music and demand, but I think to him it’s like— The level of fuck up is just like he’s not let me go to a library? Or something?

What I don’t properly get, which he’s tried to explain now, but like, I can only understand it to a degree, is what it’s like to care for a new vampire? It’s not like parenting someone, he’s pretty clear on that, because the person you’re looking after is a grown up who deserves to be not treated like a child. But… when you’ve just turned into a vampire you’re not in your right mind, not for a long time after. So I think it’s more like— you know when you get a patient who…?

Ugh.

I spent a few weeks of training on a psych ward. It was really amazing, in a lot of ways. I liked the work, it was rewarding, and it was nice to spend time with people who seemed like. I don’t know. They didn’t get a lot of chances to speak to people who didn’t think they were idiotic. Some of them came from family backgrounds where stuff just wasn’t… yeah. There wasn’t a lot of empathy at home, I don’t think. So talking to me and the other nurses on the ward, for some of them, it was the first time I think they’d been listened to like what they were, which was individual adults. Adults in crisis, sure, but not children.

Even the people who had impairments which made them behave in a childlike way, or whose capacity to understand stuff was on the level of childhood, it was… I don’t know, it was important to me to see them as grown-ups, people who needed support making their own decisions, but who absolutely not just deserved to have a say, but whose say in the matter ought to be given extreme priority in deciding what happened to them.

Like there’s nuance in it, right? You can’t just let people endanger themselves. You can’t just let them. It’s your job to try to bridge the gap between those wants and desires which come from a place of pain and fear and sickness, and a way forward which allows this person to actually thrive. How you draw that line, and where you draw it. How you build those bridges. It involves listening. A– and you can’t really bring much of your own shit to the table in stuff like that; there’s an imbalance of power, and you owe it to the people you’re helping to put them and their needs and their situation first.

I think that’s kind of what Neige has been trying to do? I think that’s why he didn’t want to sleep with me, at first. I think it’s why he finds it so hard to talk to me.

He knows that there’s an imbalance of power. That sometimes, because I was just made a vampire a year ago and I don’t know anything, and everything is so fucking difficult, it’s his job to like. Protect me from myself. From bad decisions I’d be making out of a place of fear or vulnerability, right, because I just don’t have the capacity in the moment to do anything else.

And like. I don’t think there’s an amount of explanation that would help, you know, I don’t think it’s reasonable. And I’d forgotten, until he made me listen back to the tapes, I’d— I’d almost forgotten how hard it all was. How intensely scared I felt, all the time, how alone, how frightening Neige himself seemed, in the beginning. How frightening to be so vulnerable, to have no other choice but to let him bathe me because I was too weak to move.

What choice did either of us have, then? I was filthy, I could not move myself.

But we didn’t know each other. It was a kind of trust, but not really.

ALFIE SIGHS

I say, what choice did he have. But like, he didn’t need to do that. He didn’t need to help. He could have left, but he didn’t. And when he made that choice it wasn’t because like–

It wasn’t a moral imperative, you know? He doesn’t work like that. It was just, yeah. He did that, and he knew that if he stayed, and if he helped me, it would mean, like. It would mean more than just giving me baths and teaching me how to hunt. A new vampire needs more than just that, I needed… well. I needed a fucking nurse, didn’t I? So that’s what he was. It’s what he became. And he did his best.

And it was vulnerable for him, too.

I’ve not thought about that. But it was.

For him, he shows up to help Casper, pretty much immediately comes to the conclusion Cas is dead, and then what? He finds me. And like, no, he’s not talked to me about what happened with him and Casper yet, and frankly, I actually… yeah. It was fucking complicated, and I loved Cas, and I don’t know what would have happened if he really had just told me he thought Cas was gone, in those first days, and he’s right: once you’ve lied, at what stage do you actually let me know, you know, when you actually… ? When do you actually…?

When we went to the lab, Neige says he wanted to have had more time with me. He wanted to feel happier about where I was, how I felt about myself, how in control I seemed to be of all these new instincts and feelings. He told me he doesn’t think he’d have let us go to the lab for at least a year if he’d been able to keep me from going there. He told me it was… yeah.

It doesn’t help that Neige’s perspective is next to impossible to imagine. The closest I have is being a nurse, I guess, or looking after my sisters, but like. When I’m being a nurse, there’s a knowledge gap between me and my patient, an experience gap, too. Stuff that might be scary to them is normal to me because I’ve seen it before, and it’s not happening to me, so I’m able to make more sensible decisions. I’m able to help better because I’m removed from those situations, you know?

With my siblings, the gap was like… we were going through the same thing but I had to be more responsible, I had to be more grown up. So even though there wasn’t a knowledge gap or an experience gap, really, at least not between Grace and I, I was kind of… forced to act like there was.

For Neige, the knowledge gap between him and me is kind of vast and unresolvable, right? Even if I live ten thousand years, he’ll still be ten thousand years older than me. The distance only looks small on a scale of millions of years, and like. I don’t think even vampires could last that long, really. Just from where we are now to when there were no humans at all could be as little as two million years, so like, in terms of scale, what then? You know? What then? Perhaps if he were a hundred thousand years old and I was just ninety thousand then. Then m– maybe it wouldn’t feel like such a gulf? But that’s just. That’s so long. That’s so fucking– I can’t conceptualise–

I can barely think of the amount of time that Neige has lived already let alone—

Ugh. He made such a good point, though, about himself. If the conspiracy theorist vampires in their little cults were right about him being the first ever vampire, vampires are an absurdly evolutionarily recent thing, like impossibly recent. Ten thousand years, even twelve thousand, which is the oldest he thinks he could possibly be, even that, it’s nothing. And it’s a good point because it makes the conspiracy theorists sound like idiots; how can something as good at doing whatever it is vampirism does in our bodies evolve in that short amount of time?

And also because it places Neige on a different kind of scale. 10,000 years is a long time for one person, yeah, but on the scale of existence? It’s nothing.

You know, I wonder: could you meaningfully distinguish our bones from human bones?

The teeth are different, I suppose. But… the way they look, that hard shell, much harder than human enamel – I checked when I got rid of Tim so I know for sure it’s harder – it protects that much more breakable matrix structure inside. Maybe they’d preserve less well than human teeth, because of that.

They’re easier to crush than human teeth once you get them out of a jaw, and it seems like destroying the head is a very surefire way to kill a vampire, so that’s… yeah. Probably a lot of our heads are crushed. And from what it says in Bonham doctor’s notes, our bones seem very much like human bones.

Would that be true on a molecular level, I wonder?

I did give real consideration to chopping off one of my fingers, I— I could go out and find that bit of Sherman. I’m not sure where I put his fingers, exactly, but I’ll find them then I can compare the bone structure.

But like, pulling teeth, that’s one thing. Chopping off a finger? That’s something else. Maybe I could— probably could bite it off pretty cleanly? Might even be able to get it to stick back on with enough spit… or maybe it would be more interesting to just watch it grow back? Possibly a toe would be easier? Less noticeable if it didn’t come back. Smaller, too, which means it’s probably less costly, blood-debt wise.

Actually that’s a question, isn’t it: if a human was missing a limb when they were turned vampire, would they grow a new one? The cost in blood would be huge. I… I wonder if Neige knows about that. I reckon he’s probably regrown a limb before. Like ten thousand years is a long time and it’s really common on like a broader statistical scale for people to lose limbs in accidents, like. Not in terms of a general population over a normal lifetime but you know, in terms of him living ten thousand years? It’s probably less likely for him to not lose any limbs, statistically speaking…

Anyway, anyway, I digress. Far. And for a long time.

The point is I don’t know what the fuck it’s like to be Neige. I don’t know what it’s like to be anyone except myself, really, and I can do some like, imagining; I can be sympathetic and empathetic and I can think really hard about it, but I’m never going to get it, am I? So what do you do when your experience of reality is so radically different from someone else’s, right? The only thing you can do is listen. You actually listen.

Honestly, I’m struggling with that. Because he has made mistakes. He’s had to make tough calls and I think he’s made a lot of them wrong, with me. It’s hard to– it’s so important to me, to have control, you know? It’s so important to me that I’m— that he sees me.

Unghf, it’s worse that it’s him. It’s worse that I care, that I want him to care about me, that I find him pretty and kind and I like his company.

It’s harder because I want to fuck him.

It would make things simpler if I didn’t. It would make it even simpler if I didn’t like him at all, even in a friend sort of a way, but I do. And then the fucking. What even is romance, honestly? Is that what it…?

When he was talking about what it’s like to care for a new vampire, when he was explaining how different it was from parenting a child, it– it struck me– he seemed to be speaking from experience. Which is. Mind blowing to me because. Well. He doesn’t remember his human life at all. If he’s parented a child, he did it as a vampire.

I don’t think we can like traditionally have children, I don’t think that’s possible. Maybe with IVF? Fucking. I’m getting ahead of myself. But I can conclusively say that the, uh. Stuff. It tastes sufficiently different to human, um. Stuff. So. Yeah. Not the same. And we’re cold, and– yeah. God nobody’s even here why am I so self-conscious about…?

Vampire jizz does not taste significantly different to vampire spit, though there is a difference in viscosity.

There.

ALFIE TAKES A DEEP BREATH. A MOMENT PASSES. HE SPLUTTERS WITH LAUGHTER.

Oh, hy life is fucking ridiculous. Fucking hell, do you even…?

God. Anyway! I’m only even mentioning this here because it’s important because of Neige. And not just because. Shut up. Future me, I hear you judging me. I know, I fucking know. But yeah. Not because of the taste of him or anything, it’s because I think he raised a child, somehow, at some point. I think he did that, to some capacity. How mental is that, you know? And it struck me that, like even though I don’t agree with Casper, I don’t think we’re dead, I think… There’s an extent to which I’ve still been treating being a vampire as my life ending.

Neige is right. It’s all happened very fast. I’m still so fucking new, honestly, I–

All I’ve thought about for months is Casper and Bonham and like. There’s a beyond that, isn’t there? If I don’t want to die, there’s an after, a place that exists beyond this focus, and I’ve not even…

What do I want that to look like? How does the future look for me, as a vampire?

Honestly I’ve thought more about vampires in general than I have about myself, that something has to change. We need to, at a minimum, legally exist, because we need help! Or situations like this one with Bonham, it’s going to happen again, isn’t it, because there aren’t enough of us alone to keep us safe, and people are afraid of us because we’re different.

I want to go to Grace’s wedding. I want to be there when Tammy graduates. I want to help my mum clean her house when she’s too old and look after her when she needs it. I love them, I care about them. It’s a bad idea to speak to my family right now. But like, honestly? If I’m living, and I’m safe, and I’m not under threat of being like experimented on and tortured, and they’re not at risk of being hurt to get to me, then I don’t want to cut them out of my life. I love them, I care about them! Maybe they’ll want to cut me out, which I’d totally respect, but like. And, ach! I don’t want my future to be secret!

And Neige?

ALFIE SIGHS

Ever since he said it. Ever since he talked about how different the process of caring for a new vampire is from raising a child, I… I don’t know. I sort of. I can kind of see him, with a kid, you know?

I’m not— do I want kids? I don’t know. I don’t fucking know. Maybe in a hundred years. Who knows. Not now, can’t even reasonably think of it now.

ALFIE SIGHS, AGAIN

I’m mad at him, I’m furious at him, he’s fucked up epically, he should not have disconnected the fucking internet because he was scared of me finding out my family were looking for me. But he knew I’d asked Haley to give them a suicide note from me, and he’s right: the way they talk to the press, my mum and Grace… it’s clear she didn’t.

Neige was worried what that kind of betrayal would do to me. He said it was so hard to keep me safe as it was.

He told me that it always is. It’s always difficult. It’s not me, it’s nothing I’ve done, it’s just complicated.

He doesn’t think he’s good at this. He said he felt like a failure since what happened with Claudio and in so many ways everything he does now is shaped by that. He made Claudio, he had to seal him in a tomb for a fucking year to stop him from killing every human on sight, and I’d thought about like, ‘oh that’s a hard thing to do, isn’t it’, and like. I’d considered, sort of, what it must have been like from Claudio’s perspective.

But like. To make a new vampire, you have to– it’s so– hm.

He’d have been drip feeding him, cleaning him, changing his clothes, reassuring him. Everything he did for me. At the end of that, Claudio was violent and angry, and even then Neige didn’t abandon him. And like, Neige isn’t shy about killing vampires, he’ll fucking do it if he thinks you’re gonna be a danger, make no fucking mistake.

But he didn’t kill Claudio.

He shut him away, fed him through a hole, and kept him safe until he could keep himself safe enough to be let out. And after that, despite the vile shit Claudio was spitting out, Neige fucking stood by him until such a point he was sure Claudio was not going to accidentally get himself into trouble.

Which like. Fucking tragic, isn’t it? Because Claudio didn’t get himself into trouble by mistake, he did it deliberately.

I wonder, you know, how much that first decade of his life influenced his view of Neige. He seemed to both fear and respect him, from what I can gather, but obviously I only know Neige’s side of the story and if there’s one thing I’ve learned over the last year, it’s that Neige’s stories aren’t the most reliable, especially when it comes to mistakes he’s made and people he’s loved.

Because yeah, I think there has to be love there, even now, to do what Neige did. There has to be love there.

God it’s so fucking complicated.

I think it was love for Casper that made Neige save me. This is something else he’s not really willing to talk about directly but like… I think that’s what it must have been. And he was so gentle with me even though I gave him nothing back.

I don’t know what to think about him, I don’t know how I fucking feel. I’m angry and I’m sorry and I–

It’s stupid but I feel heard. I feel like he fucking listened to what I said about the internet and everything he did, and he treated me like it mattered. Like it mattered that he’d hurt me and it mattered that I told him.

Like I mattered.

That’s like. On reflection to me the loudest thing out of everything that’s happened is that even when he’s felt like he’s had to keep things from me to keep me safe, he’s always looked at me like I matter. Not just to him, but like, as a person. It matters what I think. It matters what I want. I’m important, not because I’m me, but because I’m a person, and it’s his job, as another person, to respect and honour that.

Am I making any sense at all anymore?

Ugh.

I’m supposed to be hunting. I’m hungry; I should.

Ugh, Neige has stayed with Casper, but. I don’t know, maybe he’s right. Cas really doesn’t seem to be going anywhere. Maybe it’s silly to need someone to sit with him? Ugh.

Maybe I should…? Maybe I should call Neige?

I like hunting with him there. He’s better at it than I am, it makes my life easier, and I just feel safer.

Huhhnnnghh..

I also just.

Like his company.

Fucking. Maybe this is a terrible idea.

Oh, I don’t fucking care, I’m going to call him, I’m going to call him, I’m just doing it, I’m doing it.

[END]