Legendary Vampire in the Apocalypse

"How’s Paris?" Dion asked

"Better than the rest of us."

Basil pushed the door closed behind himself and the rain dulled down into a hum through the wall, and he stayed standing in front of it with his hand still resting on the handle.

He had been out in that corridor for the better part of a minute working out how he wanted to start this, turning it over and settling on one way of putting it and then on another, and now that he was on this side of the door not a word of any of it was of use to him.

"I pointed a gun at you."

"I remember quite vividly, yes."

"..."

Basil let a long breath out through his nose, and his shoulders that had been sitting up tense, finally came down a little.

"I don’t take it back," he said. "If I’d stood there and watched that boy die on the floor in front of me, I’d have meant every word of it, and have shot you."

Dion raised a brow a little, and as he crossed his arms he said then, "I hope you don’t think I was sending empty threats your way then."

Basil stopped briefly, and his jaw shifted a little before the rest of it came out of him.

"At the end of everything, Paris didn’t die. And what you gave him... he had nothing, Dion. Now he’s got a chronicle and a chance that he didn’t have before all this to survive whatever else we have to face. So I’m not going to stand here and pretend to you that it isn’t worth something."

Dion’s attention fell to him properly then.

The rain still drenched him, just as it had everyone for the better part of the hour it had been since the rain began.

Just like everyone else he didn’t have any dry clothes to change into, and underneath the exhaustion and underneath the sickness his heart was beating a good deal harder than it seemed on his expression.

"There is something you can do to make it up to me."

Basil’s mouth opened slightly, and then it shut again, and he waited.

Dion tipped his head at him.

"I want you to teach me to shoot properly. Whatever it is that you know. Pistols, rifles, whatever it was that Ephraim taught you over those fifteen years."

Basil didn’t answer that, his eyes widening a little.

"...You’re staying?"

Dion’s expression let free the curiosity in how Basil would have even begin to think that he wasn’t going to stay.

Basil looked at him for a long moment, and outside the rain kept on against the glass, and somewhere down the corridor somebody started coughing and went on with it for a while before it stopped.

"I would have bet everything I’ve got left," he said, and his voice had come down quieter for it, "that after tonight you’d want as little to do with the lot of us as you could manage, and walk as soon as the rain calmed down enough."

Basil laughed a little, shaking his head, "It’s why I came here as soon as I could."

’Ah... he was relieving his consciousness of me.’

Dion laughed internally at the thought, and he shook his head a little

"If I wanted to leave you all behind immediately," Dion said, "I’d have left when you had the gun on me. The fact that I didn’t ought to tell you something."

Basil huffed faintly through his nose, something that was almost a laugh.

"For now, my plan is to stay, but honestly, it depends on what happens in the next few hours."

"...Yeah," Basil then nodded and said. "I can teach you."

His hand went to his waistband where the CZ sat, patting it once out of habit.

"But we’ve barely got any rounds left. For good practice you’d actually have to be shooting."

"There’s a gun shop six blocks west of here," Dion said. "The one you told me about."

Basil stared at him, nodding faintly.

"...That whole stretch has been crawling since the second night. And I don’t mean a few of them wandering about; I mean the road is thick with them."

Dion nodded a little, "As long as everything goes as I hope it would when we speak with Anton and the others after they’ve recovered, we should be able to get through."

Basil held there a moment longer, his eyes going over Dion’s face.

Then he tapped the doorframe once with his knuckle, and he left without saying anything else, his shoulders a lot looser than before and his back much straighter..

Dion listened to him go, and to the wet cough that took him halfway down the corridor.

Dion smiled to himself and shook his head, laughing to himself.

Thereafter, a few hours had passed, and the rain had not stopped.

Hardly anyone had slept.

The building carried the sound of it through every wall, a low constant vibration that had settled into the floors and the frames and the water sitting in the pipes, and threaded underneath all of that were the wet coughs of the sick coming up and down the corridors in fits that started and stopped and started again.

They had moved the worst of them into the offices along the east corridor, where the rooms were smaller and the doors still shut properly.

The air in there was thick and warm and sour with too many bodies and too much sickness in too little space, and as Dion passed one of the doors the sound of somebody retching came through it, followed by a low murmur from whoever it was that had been sitting with them.

"It’s alright, that’s it, get it up, you’ll feel better for it..."

"Can somebody bring water down here? Any water!"

The fevers had gone up.

The ones who had been shivering when the group came back through the barricades were lying still now with their eyes half open.

’From what I can see, this isn’t just the prana anymore. This is just them getting regular sickness symptoms...

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