more jason?

I was so sure I had this. So sure. Everything was in place, and finally I was going to be useful.

I'd seen what my friends were capable of. One stopped a frenzying vampire dead in his tracks just with a word. Another stabbed one clear through the chest. With a baseball bat. We... we lost a few friends, but every bloodsucker we tagged was one off the streets, no longer a threat.

It's not like we went out of our way to kill every one we found. But there were enough troublemakers that we definitely kept our eyes open. But, at the end of the day, any mundane weapon short of a flamethrower just did not make a dent. Even a shotgun would leave them in good enough shape that they could scurry away to heal off the blood of whatever poor idiot was in their way. I was helpless. The others knew that. They tried to respect me, I guess. But I was always kept in the back, away from the action.

I was helpless, but I refused to be useless. I still had one weapon I could use; words. Not all the vampires were rampaging monsters. Enough of them weren't that maybe, if I could reach out to them, I could use them, maybe get them to spill some of their secrets to give us an edge.

It took a while, but I finally hit on something. The more digging I did, more and more divisions appeared in their little "society." Along with the upper class aristocracy... there were rebels.

It was the perfect place to start.

So I met with their leadership, and they damn well looked the part. VV, a nerd-looking guy in a suit-patterend t-shirt and a massive computer setup and Beryl, a blue-haired punk lady who looked like she could kick my ass seven times before I could blink. Getting their trust was surprisingly easy, probably because I wasn't a threat to them. And oh, were they *thrilled* to hop onto a soapbox. Earful after earful about the awful, oppressive vampire government, something something establishment something 99%. I'll be honest, a lot of it went over my head. But they ended up being exactly what I was looking for.

I went back to the others, with a wealth of information about the inner workings of vampires. I was kind of surprised they believed me. But when that very info helped us to crash a vampire party a couple blocks away, they started giving me permission to go back. I was fucking thrilled. This was it. I was giving back, even if it was just as a peace flag to the Anarchs, that we were willing to help them undermine the Camarilla in exchange for leaving them out of it.

And then there was the night that everything came down.

I got a message from VV to come to the warehouse. So down to the docks I went. There was a woman waiting for me the second I left my car. I'd seen her kicking around the warehouse a few times, but we'd never really spoken. But she was... staring at me, really intensely.

I asked her what was up. She didn't answer, just kept walking closer. She looked... nervous, I guess. Nervous and tense and almost angry.

I tried to talk to her and she just started walking faster. It was about then I realized there was something really fucked up about this. The little voice in my head started yelling "Run! Run, you dumbass!" and I did, tried to get back into my car, pulling my gun to maybe, I dunno, try to scare her off or something.

But she grabbed me. Dragged me out of the car and squeezed my wrist until I dropped the gun. Pinned me against the frame.

And then... she bit me. I don't know what I was expecting, but it didn't hurt. I didn't even know what she was doing until it was too late and I was starting to pass out from blood loss. I... died not too long afterwards.

When I woke up... When it all started to sink in... I don't think I'd ever felt so scared in my life. It was so easy to be brave before that moment, before I'd known real pain and loss. Maybe before I didn't really understand how much all this could touch me. I'd seen other people fall. Get hurt. Die. But... as stupid as it sounds, maybe that stuff wouldn't touch me. Everyone thinks that, don't they? You know someone who drinks and drives and dies. But that can't happen to you. It was real for them. Not for you.

Now it was all real for me now. I was left on my own, living only off my memories of what I'd learned about vampires. I may have been physically moving, but I was *dead.* There was no going home. I wouldn't bring that kind of threat to my family. Not just from what I could do, but what the other bloodsuckers would do to them if they found I'd gone there. I knew how much they valued their secrecy.

In that moment, I was completely, totally alone. In a world where no one would take me back in. As far as my mom and dad and sister and... and my brother would ever know, I'd gone out and never come home. And for what? Why had any of this happened? Because one of the Anarchs felt like it? Everything I'd known was torn down, all because, as far as I knew then, one of them just felt like it.

It's incredible that I ever brought myself to live this long. But all I can do is keep going.