Chapter Text
Neil Josten looks at himself in the dingy bathroom mirror at Columbia High School. It’s the first day of his senior year and he’s on his own for the first time in his life. His newly-dyed dark brown hair is falling across his forehead and the matching contacts in his eyes are unremarkable. Unnoticeable. Exactly the way he likes it.
Satisfied that no one will recognize him, Neil tugs his jacket closer around his shoulders and heads out to find his first period class. Not that there’s any reason anyone at this school should recognize him, but Neil learned a long time ago that should and shouldn’t don’t really mean anything.
His first class is AP European History, and he’s bored by it before he even gets the one-page syllabus. The guy sitting beside him is so tall he has to hunch over to whisper where Neil can hear him, “This class is going to suck.”
“Yeah,” Neil mutters back. He’s already taken a version of this class, or at least half a semester of it, at another school. The dude’s right, it sucked.
“I’m Matt,” The guy says. “You new?”
“Neil.” Neil turns to look at Matt, trying to decide if he knows something. If he’s asking questions with an ulterior motive. No, he decides, taking in Matt’s friendly expression. Just being nice.
So he says, “Um, yeah. Just moved here.”
“Badass.” Matt looks stoked, like meeting a stranger before 9 AM was on his to-do list for the day and now he gets to check it off. “Where from?”
Before Neil can try out one of his practiced lies, the teacher says “Mr. Boyd, would you like to share with the rest of the class?”
“This is Neil,” Matt says, oblivious to Neil’s horror. “He’s new.”
“Welcome.” The teacher nods once at Neil, then holds up the syllabus again. “As I was saying…”
Neil tunes her out in favor of doodling in the corner of his new notebook until the bell rings. Before he can make it to the door, Matt is standing at his shoulder. “Eat lunch with me and my friends,” he says. “I promise they’re mostly nice.”
“Sure,” Neil replies. Because what else is he supposed to say? Fitting in means talking to people, whether he wants to or not.
He makes it through English and Physics, and then he’s standing in the cafeteria line. He’d managed to fill out and turn in the free lunch form when he registered for school last week, so he just types in his student ID number at the end of the line and takes his tray out into the cafeteria.
It’s overwhelming, like most school lunch rooms are. There are students everywhere, talking and yelling over each other. He’s about to fuck it all off and eat lunch in the bathroom when he hears his name being called. Matt is standing on a chair halfway across the cafeteria, waving both hands over his head. Neil waves back and makes his way semi-reluctantly across the cafeteria.
When he gets there, Matt is sitting at a table with three girls and another guy. Neil slides into the empty seat across from Matt, between two of the girls. The one on his left is taller than him even sitting down, with long, perfectly styled blonde hair that falls halfway down her back and immaculate makeup. The girl on his right is much closer to his height and her pale hair looks like the ends have been dipped in pastel rainbows.
“This is Neil,” Matt is saying. He points at the girl on Neil’s left and goes around the table, “That’s Allison, her boyfriend Seth, my girlfriend Danielle, and of course, Renee.”
Renee, the girl on his right with the rainbow hair and a cross around her neck, smiles at him too-sweetly and says, “Hi Neil, welcome to Columbia.”
He immediately doesn’t trust her.
The dark-skinned girl beside Matt, his girlfriend, holds her hand out across the table to Neil. “Call me Dan,” she says. “No one calls me Danielle except my mother when she’s pissed.”
That leaves the other guy at the table, Seth, sitting on Allison’s other side. He appears to be the same brand of tall and and perfect as Allison, with a scruff of dark hair. He just grunts at Neil and looks back at his phone. None of them have the default school lunch that adorns Neil’s tray.
Dan and Renee are both eating home packed lunches and Allison is slowly nibbling on a protein bar. Seth and Matt are plowing through a pile of hot Cheetos, a whole pizza, and bottles of Gatorade they clearly bought from the smaller food stands on the other side of the huge cafeteria. In Neil’s experience that means they’re all either rich or they have parents at home that care. Maybe both.
This time he gets to try out his new backstory as they ask him question after question. His name is Neil Josten, he moved here from California because his mom got a new job. She works a lot, so he barely sees her, but she’s definitely around. Definitely alive.
Definitely not dead, burned, and buried in the Pacific Ocean.
Finally, they seem to get tired of it, and the subject changes to what they did over the summer. Neil lets the conversation wash over him and pulls out his schedule again. He has French next, which should be easy, and then Pre-Calculus before he gets a study hall last period. Between Pre-Calc and Physics he’s going to need it.
“Oh, hey,” Allison says beside him. Neil looks up to see her peering over his shoulder. “We have French together. Maybe you can help me practice.”
Neil folds his schedule back up and shoves it in his pocket. “Maybe.”
“Hey,” Seth says, tearing himself away from his phone to frown at Allison. “Why can’t I help you?”
“Do you speak French?” Allison asks dryly.
“Well, no,” Seth says, like he’s not sure why that matters.
Neil doesn’t get to hear Allison’s response to that, because Matt is yelling “Coach!” and waving his hands around again.
There’s a man striding across the cafeteria towards them. He’s wearing track pants and a long-sleeved school shirt, but Neil can see the edges of tattoos peeking out around his wrists. He stops beside their table and looks at a clipboard in his hand, then back at Neil.
“Neil Josten?” the coach says. At Neil’s nod, he waves the clipboard towards the door of the cafeteria. “Great, come with me.”
“Is he going to be on the team?” Matt’s entire face is lit up as he turns to Neil. “You play Exy?”
“Not since I was a kid,” Neil answers. He looks at the coach again, trying to figure out what he knows and how he knows it, but he can’t read anything in the man’s face. There should have been nothing in his falsified documents that drew anyone’s attention to him on the first day.
“Let’s talk in my office,” the coach says, and walks away before Neil can argue with him. He looks around, unsure if he should follow or if that’s just going to lead to his death. The decision is made for him when Allison shoves at his shoulder.
“Go,” she says. “We need someone interesting on the team.”
“Hey!” Matt looks like he’s about to launch into a whole defense of how interesting he is, so Neil gets up and follows the coach. It seems like the better option, even if he dies at the end.
After he catches up to the coach, they walk in silence for what seems like forever. Finally, they exit the main building, just as the bell rings, and the coach pulls out a set of keys to unlock another door.
“I’m your new Watcher, David Wymack” the coach finally says. He leads Neil down a short hallway and pushes open the door to a cramped, over-crowded office. “Welcome to the Hellmouth.”
“My new what?” Neil blinks, confused. “I’m supposed to be in French class right now.”
“Your new Watcher,” Wymack says again. “The council sent me here a year ago. It took you long enough to show up.”
“Show up for what?” Neil is losing patience fast. “You aren’t making any sense.”
Wymack sighs, like the whole world has just been laid upon his shoulders. “You really don’t know, do you? No one ever told you?”
“Told me what?” Neil takes a step back, into the doorway. The panic is building in his chest. This man knows something. Neil has to get out of there, he has to run.
“Josten.” Wymack shoves a pile of papers off of a chair and points at it. “Sit the fuck down and listen.”
Every instinct Neil has is screaming at him to get out of there, but instead, he sits down. It’s not like he could get very far anyway; he can hear people talking down the hall. They’d surely stop him. Plus, he wants to know what Wymack thinks he knows about Neil.
Wymack drops his clipboard on his desk and sits on the edge of it, nearly overturning a huge coffee mug that’s printed with Tears of my Athletes. “You’re a vampire slayer.”
“I’m sorry,” Neil says, because he must have heard wrong. “What the fuck?”
And then, a beat later, “What’s a Hellmouth?”
----
“So let me get this straight,” Neil says. It’s two hours later and he’s missed the rest of his classes for the day. Instead, he listened to Wymack talk about lore and myths and an incredibly detailed, profanity-ridden history of The Watcher’s Council -- the ancient organization tasked with training slayers and providing one-on-one mentorship.
Wymack called his French and Pre-Calc teachers and asked them not to count Neil absent. “Just getting him fitted for Exy gear,” he’d said. As if Neil has any intention of ever coming back to this school once he’s finally allowed to leave Wymack’s office.
Wymack nods, waiting for Neal to continue. Neil takes a deep breath.
“You expect me to believe,” he says. “That I’m a vampire slayer with superpowers who was born to go around using sticks to murder the undead? And Columbia is a literal portal to Hell?”
“More or less,” Wymack agrees with a shrug. “Although I’m not sure I’d call them superpowers. Not until you’ve done some training. Which is where Exy comes in.”
“Exy.” Neil tries to keep the longing out of his voice when he says it. Exy is his favorite sport, it has been since he was five years old and his father signed him up for Little League. It’s one of the very, very few good memories he has of his father. Actually, maybe the only good memory.
“Yes, Exy.” Wymack picks up the clipboard from earlier and flips through some papers. “Do you know how to play?”
“Yes,” Neil says, answering automatically.
He immediately regrets it, because Wymack slaps the clipboard on the desk and grins at him. “Perfect. We need another striker.”
Neil stands up.It’s harder than it should be -- it’s been years since he wanted to do something as much as he wants to play Exy. “No,” he says, clamping down on the newly rising panic. “No to Exy, no to vampires, no to all of it. I’m leaving. This place is worse than fucking Baltimore.”
Wymack ignores him. “Come by in the morning, I’ll have your gear ready.”
But Neil is already gone, Wymack’s voice fading away behind him.
He runs all the way back to the empty house he’s squatting in. By the time he jumps the back fence and picks the lock, his heart is pounding and he’s covered in sweat, but he feels like he can breathe again. Locking himself in the back bedroom, the one where you can’t see the lights from the street, he flops down on the cot he’s using as a bed and surveys his small collection of possessions.
Clothes, mostly. A few books and a couple of Exy magazines. The binder that contains his entire life and all of his memories, for better or worse. It’s not much, but it’s more than he had when he arrived in Columbia a few weeks ago. His mom didn’t let him carry books. She said they were too heavy.
The plan had been to stay in Columbia for his senior year and graduate before he had to figure out what to do next. It doesn’t look like he’s going to get the luxury of time, though, not with everything Wymack told him. So instead of starting on homework, he quickly shoves everything into his threadbare duffle bag, then flips through his binder for his mom’s list of contacts.
A few hours later, under the cover of darkness, Neil jumps back over the fence, shoulders his duffle, and starts jogging across the park separating the subdivision from the main part of town. If he can get there, he can surely find a phone to use and start calling the few numbers he thinks might still be valid. One of them, a forger, his mom had talked to just before she died. That’s the one he’s counting on the most. If he can’t get a new identity, then it doesn’t matter where he goes.
If he can, then he can get on a plane across the country. Maine, maybe. Somewhere he can get a shitty job and maybe a GED. Maybe he can take some classes online.
He’s so deep in thought that he misses a curve in the path and almost jogs directly into a couple making out against a tree.
“Fuck, sorry.” Neil takes a step back from where his shoulder bounced against one half of the couple’s back before he could stop. He needs to fucking pull it together.
Then, the man turns around and Neil forgets everything. He’s shorter than Neil, but broad, with muscle tone clearly visible under his thin t-shirt. Blond hair is falling across his hazel eyes, but the blood ringing his mouth and dripping down his chin is what turns Neil’s blood cold. He stumbles back, tripping over his own feet and landing hard on the ground.
The man is on him in a second, faster than Neil can track him. Sharp white fangs have dropped down over his bottom lip and Neil can smell the thick iron scent of blood. The dark smear across his too-pale face gleams ruby in the moonlight.
Vampire.
Neil digs his heels into the grass and pushes backwards, feeling for sticks on the ground behind him as he tries to drag himself out of the steel grip the man has on his bicep. He’s going to die here.
With a burst of effort, Neil wrenches to the left, hard, and his arm comes free. He scrambles to his feet, putting distance between himself and the vampire in front of him. The vampire doesn’t go for him again, he just gives Neil a long, sneering look and spits out, “Slayer.”
Neil turns and runs, clutching his bag against the front of his body. He goes the opposite direction of his house, darting through backyards and over fences until he’s sure he isn’t being followed.
Finally, what feels like hours later, he jumps back over his familiar fence and lets himself into the empty house. He should probably find another one, but he can do that tomorrow. For now, he curls up on his cot and tries to make a new plan.
In the morning, he’ll talk to Wymack. He’ll stay until he feels prepared to fight things like the man in the park. Then he’ll leave. He’ll leave before he gets too comfortable.
And if he’s going to stay, he might as well play Exy.