Ambrosia had a theory about the world, and the theory said ‘other people’.

Other people, he thought, were happy. Other people liked being alive. Other people didn’t hurt all the the time. Other people found meaning in their lives, or otherwise contributed more of a positive effect on others than a negative one.

Life was, Ambrosia thought, made for other people. Made for people who would be missed, and who would miss it.

But theory is always a bit harder when put into practice.

-

“You’re miserable!” Ambrosia yells after the fleeing human, shaking his fist from his motel room door. “You’ll regret not just letting me eat you in a few days, see if you fucking don’t!”

The human just makes a loud braying noise that sounds sort of like “help” and sort of like they’d rediscovered their will to live. Ambrosia stays standing in the doorway, not quite able to look away until his prey is out of sight, because he might be an ethical vampire but he’s still a hungry one.

When they’re gone, he shuts the door and flops onto the motel room bed. The entire room smells a little like blood to the enhanced nose, but it had been like that when he’d arrived. It’s fucking maddening.

“Whyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy,” he says into his pillow, chewing on it a little for lack of anything else to chew on. “Divorcee! Late stage cancer! Was vague posting death threats for three months! Orphan! AGREED TO MEET ME TO BE EATEN!”

He rolls flat on his back, because he’s almost hit feathers and trying to get those out of a bone dry mouth isn’t very pleasant. There has to be some kind of key methodology he’s not hitting on. Is it the lack of romance? But he’s not exactly comfortable eating something he’s had sex with. No human could really fault him for that, if they thought it through. The blood bag thing was getting old, and there weren’t enough blood donors for him to feel comfortable stealing like that. Not that there were enough blood donors for him in general, really, but…

His phone dings, which means a hit on his messaging app, which means a possible meal. Ha, as if! More like the tease of a meal from some selfish... tease. Are his similes better when he isn't this hungry? He can't remember.

But it’s been a while since he’s even blooded a selfish tease before they ran out screeching, so he picks up the phone anyways. Live in hope, and all.

It’s not a meal. It’s worse.

GRANDMERE: Have you been eating?

    AMBROSE: Yes. I am eating so many humans, the hunters might come after me!

GRANDMERE: You are far too thin! These fad diets, they do you no good! You only eat one type, yes?

GRANDMERE: Diversify!

GRANDMERE: You cannot be such picky eater, I did not turn a fool

    AMBROSE: Oh… you’re right! I’ve only been eating A-

    AMBROSE: What would I do without you

GRANDMERE: THAT IS MY FEAR!!!!

Ambrosia trades gifs for a minute with the older vampire, feeling sick to his stomach. Grandmere doesn’t look very old, but she’d waited centuries before deciding to foster a son. She’d seduced queens and toppled countries, built companies from the ground up into a monopoly then made a competing one to see if she could beat herself. And now… she had him.

And if he doesn’t get his shit together, soon she’d have no one at all.

-

He met Grandmere when he was protesting sheep shearing with a new and radical approach he called ‘bombs’. He was kind of a dumbass back then, and it was that inherent dumbness that drew her to him. Vampires didn’t have a way to turn off their ethical dilemmas, and it wasn’t uncommon to starve yourself to death. But Grandmere didn’t want a sadist who would mindlessly slaughter hundreds. She wanted a dreamer, an idealist, someone to revolutionize the vampiric world. She wanted an intellectual heir.

Why she thought she’d found that in a budding eco-terrorist, he’s not really sure. Maybe it was his grand delusion of some bigger picture, of becoming something bigger and more longer lived than a single human could be. He thought he’d found that in incendiary devices, but she showed him another way. And he, the fucking fool he was, took it eagerly.

But now here he is, and all the arguments against humans seem petty when he realizes that they’re not the top of the food chain. They’re not gods on earth, bending all the weaker beings to their greedy wills. And the worst thing is that they don’t even know it.

-

He could become a pro-human activist, he supposes. Unmask vampires to the human race again, prove it beyond the shadow of a doubt. But he’s never been smart enough for that kind of campaign, just destructive. And it isn’t as if that kind of truth is hard to cover up - humans cover it up all on their own, all the time, no vampiric intervention needed. He’d used the term ‘sheeple’ as a human, but he hadn’t meant to become a shepherd. He’d meant to fight for sheep rights, for the right to live free and unmolested. He’d scorned those who called it unsustainable, who pointed out that not everyone could live a vegan lifestyle. He’d retorted that maybe then those people shouldn’t live. They’d retorted that vegan lifestyles were unsustainable without non-vegan intervention.

He’d said, mostly meaning it, that maybe then no one should live.

Weird how hard it is to follow through on your convictions when you’re one of the things your convictions are against.

-

BABYGURRL69: so ur lik a reaaaal vamp??? Wow… thats so neat

BABYGURRL69: I mean my life isnt… I dont have mcuh worth hangin on for … but if I could DO something with it…

BABYGURRL69: would it hurt?

    AMBROSE: I can sedate you beforehand.

    AMBROSE: You’d just go to sleep and not wake up.

    AMBROSE: Not that different from assisted-suicide, really.

BABYGURRL69: hmmmm and no funny stuff w my body????

    AMBROSE: Absolutely not.

    AMBROSE: Sustaining myself is innately unethical but I do try and keep it as comfortable and consensual as possible.

    AMBROSE: Easier with humans than with plants or cows really, since I can ask your opinions first.

BABYGURRL69: lol I bet theres lots of volunteers

    AMBROSE: You’d be surprised.

BABYGURRL69: wuuuhhhtt but ur selfies are sooooo… well u kno!!

    AMBROSE: This isn’t Twilight, Ms BabyGurrl69.

    AMBROSE: It’s the most awkward dinner date imaginable.

BABYGURRL69: so like hannibal thne I LOV that show XD XD

    AMBROSE: You don’t actually want to meet, do you

BABYGURRL69: uhhhh

BABYGURRL69: is this out of character now?

    AMBROSE: fuck’s sake

-

When he gets the message, THE message, he’s still not sure whether he’s being pranked or not. But they know things about vampires they couldn’t possibly. They know Grandmere’s human name.

They tell him that they have the answers he needs, and then they tell him an address, and then they stop messaging.

He goes. Of course he goes.

-

The first thing he notices is that it’s more of a castle than a mansion. The second thing he notices is that there’s no roads to it, and that if he had come in a car or on foot like a human he would never have reached it through the thick Virginian woods. But he’d flown here, and when he sets down on the ground and turns from his bat form to his human-shaped form, he begins to suspect that something might be wrong.

The place doesn’t smell… right. It’s that loam and bone stench that clings to older vampires, but a thousand times stronger, strong enough he’s gagging on it. It feels like it wafts up through the dirt, and every step towards the front door makes it stronger. He wonders if his mystery messenger would be angry if he held his nose. His sense of smell has been getting sharper with hunger, and he can say without a shadow of a doubt that nothing on these grounds has living blood in their veins.

He knocks on the front door, but the old wood is soft and rotted, wet to the touch. He doesn’t knock again. Like, he’s got some standards, okay? Creepy mansion, terrible stench, anonymous messages - whatever. But this is where he's going to draw the line. There’s a doorbell, but it looks likely to electrocute him if it worked at all. The bugs crawling out of it suggest it does not. 

Really no choice then.

“DING DONG!” Ambrosia yells. “DING DONG!”

The door opens, and behind it is a monster. For just a second Ambrosia is frozen, transported to a state of instinctual terror that he hasn’t felt since before Grandmere turned him. He begins to back away, but then he blinks, and it is just a woman.

“Oh dear, I forgot to do up my face,” she says, laughing prettily. Ambrosia feels like ‘prettily’ could describe anything she does, with her stunningly well manicured claws and seductively slitted eyes. “Please, come in.”

“I…yeah!” Ambrosia says, his face hot. “Okay.”

“My, you have been suffering, haven’t you?” she tuts, sympathetically grazing a massive hand across his shoulders. He shivers, embarrassed at both the attention and the ultimate conclusion. “I don’t mean that you let yourself go, I find what you’re doing quite honorable, really. You just weren’t well suited for this life, I’ve no idea what your creator was thinking.”

“I- well, I hated humans,” Ambrosia says. He’s vaguely aware of their passing through a hallway, and into a large dining chamber.

“Maybe,” she says, and sits him down at the head of the dining table. She fidgets with his collar, pulling it apart a little to bare his neck. “Or did you hate that the powerful exploited the weak? Hate feeling like a part of that? That humans declared themselves gods of their domain, and then blamed gods who had never spoken for their most heinous acts?”

“Uhhhh,” Ambrosia says.

“Nevermind, hush.” She settles on the chair at the other end of the table and temples her fingers, quite a feat with that many extra joints. “Are you happy, Ambrosia?”

“No.” The answer is effortless, simple, a relief. Has truth ever been that easy?

“Do you like existing?”

“No! I... I hate it.”

She nods, as if making a mental note. “And do you hurt all the time? Is there almost nothing but pain and sorrow in your existence?”

“Yes,” Ambrosia says, hanging his head. His hands clench into fists as he feels the deep truth of that statement.

“Would you miss this existence, if you no longer had it? Would other people suffer at the lack of you?”

Ambrosia almost says yes, thinking of Grandmere but- but he’d been nothing but a disappointment to her, even if she didn’t know it yet. And where was the harm in answering? “No, I… it would be better.”

The woman claps her hands together in apparent delight. “Well, I am just so relieved to hear that, Ambrosia. See, I have this…theory about the world. And it’s so much easier when you can just ask, of course, but-”

Some very unfortunate bells start to ring in Ambrosia’s skull, and he looks at the woman more closely. Still just a woman, with the perfectly ordinary 12 feet of height, and the perfectly ordinary long dragging tail, and the perfectly ordinary red slitted eyes and steaming breath. A pretty woman, sure, a woman who he’d very much want to please, but nothing extraordinary. Reassured, he tries to listen again.

“-it’s still a struggle, finding that person who shares your vision of the world, you know?” her smile is self deprecating, and Ambrosia finds himself smiling too. Really, it is. God knows he’s had his own struggles with that lately. “Which is why I’m just so happy that I’ve found you. I’ve had to do some terrible things you know, things I’m not proud of, but we can both be reassured that you understand where I’m coming from.”

The woman stands, and walks across to take Ambrosia’s hands in her large ones. She smiles benevolently down at him, and he admires the green glisten of her many well aligned teeth. “But the difference is that you didn’t need to feel this bad, Ambrosia, not ever. It’s sweet of you, really, your moral quandaries around ultimate power. You’ve never been the biggest fish in the pond.”

“Fish?” Ambrosia asks, having lost the direction of the conversation. Those bells in his head won’t stop ringing, and he really wishes she’d leave him alone for a moment so he could listen to what they were trying to say.

“But just to be sure, let me ask you one last time,” the woman says, stroking her claws gently over the skin of his palms. There’s something wrong with that observation, and Ambrosia can’t tell what. “May I have you for dinner tonight?”

“Ah,” says Ambrosia politely, as he finally hears what the bells have been screaming. He stands up and retracts his hands. “I see where this- this is actually funny, because- and-”

Ambrosia runs for the door.

“Aw, shit,” says the woman, with a sigh. “And here I thought I wouldn’t have to do something terrible.”