The Village
The ride in the carriage was an uneventful thing. Filled only with the sounds of the rocking of the carriage itself and the soft breathing of Amara, the entire cabin wherein the two women resided held an oppressive, choking atmosphere. Elise didn't even seem to mind, a hat and a veil covering her face from the sunlight, the rest of her clothes covering the entirety of her body, lace gloves covering her slim fingers.
Amara understood her paranoia — After all, the nearby village was a known harbinger of the plague, nearly every villager having been infected by it. Almost all of them had dropped like flies, and if not for someone that supplied medicine to the dying, the village would not have existed by this point.
She assumed that it was Elise who supplied the medicine, her own bag sitting against her hip, containing the ingredients for the medicine. Amara hadn't seen what was inside for herself, for it would be terribly rude to look at all, but she assumed that it was the ingredients. After all, what else would Elise, a medicine seller, need?
The carriage driver almost seemed nervous as they drove towards the village. They kept periodically glancing behind them towards Elise and Amara, staring at Elise as though she would commit something. Amara, for one, didn't understand why.
The carriage stopped just short of the outskirts of a small village, Elise climbing out of the carriage first and offering Amara her hand, making the plague doctor blush, a small thing that was thankfully hidden behind her mask. She grabbed her bag and accepted the hand, knowing that it would be rude not to, and watched as the carriage sped off the moment that she had gotten off, even the horse seeming terrified of the tiny settlement. Poor thing, even it knew the dangers of the plague.
Still holding Elise's hand, Amara began to scan the area with her eyes, and just observing the villagers both confused and terrified her. Some of them were outside of their homes, not looking sickly, but simply...Pale. They wore tattered rags and stared at Amara, but she was used to being despised by townspeople thst thought they didn't need to be cured, but the way they looked at her was odd.
They looked at her in the way that Elise did, and had the plague doctor seen it on a man, she might have called it desire.
She noticed the hand still in hers and lets go of it as if burned, her cheeks flushing pink as she looked back at Elise. Her eyes flashed with something that wasn't clear through the veil, but it seemed like disappointment. Still, she nods, letting Amara be on her way to explore the village while Elise herself retreated to the abandoned little home that she used to create the... Well, in looser terms, medicine.
Elise sat in the little house, placing down her bags and sighing heavily. Her blood wouldn't carry her far enough to treat all the villagers, but she couldn't simply force all the fledglings she had already turned.
She pulled out the equipment from her bag — A knife, a blood transfusion set, and a few more ingredients to make actual antibiotics and pesticides. Humans were foolish in the way that they did not understand how to treat the plague at its core, in the way that they refused to understand symptoms and causes of disease out of fear.
Amara was different, though. She held enough rudimentary knowledge about diseases from simply rummaging around various libraries, and seemed unafraid of the disease itself — More set on trying to find a proper cure for it and having no time to cave into fear. Naïve, but determined. It was a virtue that not all people possessed, and it was what set the girl apart from the rest of the dead and dying fools of the world she tried to heal.
She glances at one of her fledglings who entered the little house, looking at her almost pleadingly.
Fledgling
"The human you brought, I want to feed from her."
Elise glared at the young man she had turned, once an extremely damaged and infected boy on the verge of death. She sneered at him, her eyes narrowing into slits. She didn't want to flash her fangs at the man, and after all, she knew a simple scowl was enough to intimidate him.
Elise
"The animals in the forest are enough for you. Better yet, you help your fellow dying villagers by turning them like I turned you."
His expression seems to sour, and he frowns at the outright rejection.
Fledgling
"Animal blood tastes like ash. I've already turned my sister and my lover, and they've turned their friends. The dying who cannot be saved are left to die. Why are you so protective of a naïve plague doctor?"
Elise sighed, keeping herself from crushing the wood under her palms as she looked at him, still glaring.
Elise
"What have I told you, Victor? You don't eat something that's already been bitten into. She is mine and mine alone. I've never tried to claim the humans you lure into the village for your family. Return a courtesy for once."
Elise
"Yes, now stop pestering me. Get out or help me with the equipment."
The fledgling, Victor apparently, sighed and got to work, moving in tandem with Elise as they set up the medicine shop, or really, the make-shift experiment lab. Elise was the only one that he knew who used the process of blood transfusion, and unlike the doctors who usually used it to prevent people from becoming fledglings, she took into account the intricacies of the process — The need for similar human blood for it to be a successful transfusion, the effects of a disease, such as the plague, had on one's blood, and many more that Victor struggled to wrap his head around. She had saved him through turning him, and she had basically become his mother, for the only people he could label as family were his sister and a pack of strays.
Fledgling
"You care for the human. Why?"
Elise stayed silent for a few minutes, already crushing up plants and water together to make pesticides and antibiotics.
Elise
"I have fed from her. Are you not protective of your own food, Victor?"
In truth, Elise wasn't really protective of her prey in most circumstances. They were usually swine to her, villagers whose blood melted into ash on her tongue. And the fact that she hadn't drained Amara quickly despite her own desires was beginning to trouble her.
Victor stared at her for a few minutes, unblinking, trying to decipher why she was avoiding the question altogether. In the few months that he had known her, he knew that she wasn't one to shy away from any question thrown to her. Even then, she continued grinding fragrant herbs into powder that could be sprinkled around the home, antibiotics that were ingestible by both children and elderly. She was thankful for the large supply of lavender that she had taken from Amara's bag while the human was sleeping, knowing well that it repelled the little fleas that caused the disease. It would prevent the uninfected from being infected at all, and the medicines would at least somewhat lessen the progression of the disease until the subject was viable for turning or a blood transfusion.
Fledgling
"I share my prey with Isabella and John. Human or not, I don't cage my family away from feeding on what I have already bitten."
Elise held her tongue at the retort that she had built in her mind — It was a low-hanging fruit, one that would get her punched should she pick it and give it to him. It was generous to call two people one's entire family, yes, especially when one of the two is not even truly related to you. But, she wouldn't use that against Victor, never. She knew well that he considered her family as well, and she wouldn't deprive him of that with a simple retort.
Elise
"You never learned how to keep your questions to yourself, darling."
And she left it at that. She didn't want to acknowledge to Victor what she felt about Amara, mostly because it was a hazy mess that blurres the lines between the plague doctor being her prey and her lover.
Quietly, they finished setting up the materials and equipment, Victor being the one taking the herbs and antibiotics to the people's doors while Elise oversaw the shop.
She convinced herself that it would be a good day.
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