Die a Hero

The Abridged History of Raven Taylor

I didn’t do anything while he was out besides eat, read and sleep, though the possibilities seemed endless. When he returned about three hours later he had a slight limp and was covered from head to toe in strange marks.
“Did you get into a fight?” I asked accusingly.
“I wish,” was all he seemed to be able to utter before limping towards the direction of his bedroom. He stopped at the doorway and looked back at me, a slightly crazed look in his eyes. “My name’s Charlie, by the way,” and with that, he walked away.
We didn’t speak much over the next week. I wanted to ask him what happened when he went out, but I got the feeling he didn’t want to talk about it. The spasms finally went away a few days after my fever broke, which was a welcome relief. It also meant I didn’t need the paralytic anymore, which seemed to create some complications for Charlie. He obviously didn’t want me escaping and hurting myself or reporting him to HQ, so he had to keep me in his office somehow. He tried cuffing my wrists or ankles to the bed with varying lengths of chain to provide some range of movement as I recovered, but each provided its own difficulties. Finally, he settled on padlocking the small cooler in the corner with the blood in it, figuring it for my source of strength, and putting up ice walls to block each door, not trusting the security of the regular doors, I guess. This allowed me to roam around the room freely without escaping.
I honestly had no plans of escaping, I had no idea where I’d go if I did, but I doubt he’d believe me if I told him that. It wasn’t long after I regained full mobility that I began to hate the bed I had been stuck in for the past week or so. I began my training regiment again, or at least a less intense version of it due to my injuries, and tried sleeping on the floor a few times, but after a little while Charlie noticed and threatened to chain me to the bed again if I didn’t stop. Having no choice, I went back to my daily routine of medical care, eating, sleeping and no fun. 
I quickly exhausted Charlie’s supply of puzzles, and got so tired of reading that I threw a book across the room mid-sentence. That created a bit of commotion, and Charlie rushed into the room, a look of concern turning to exasperation as he saw the book laid out on the floor. He picked it up then pulled a chair up next to where I was sitting.
“How many languages do you speak?” he asked suddenly.
“I lost count. Most of the old ones, minus Sumerian and Akkadian, the guy I was learning them from was an asshole, English, obviously, Spanish, German, Italian, Sardinian, Portuguese, French, Greek, Gaelic, Finnish, Norwegian, Icelandic, Swedish, Hindi, Tagalog, Mongolian, Korean and Japanese. I also know a bit of Danish, but let’s be honest, nobody really speaks Danish, and I tried to learn Mandarin, but I just couldn’t get the pronunciations right. I also speak a few variations of sign language, but not well” I replied, thinking back on all the years I’d spent around the world picking up new skills and languages. I remembered all my friends and teachers from back then, and a bittersweet smile crossed my face.
As if sensing what I was thinking about, Charlie said, “Tell me about them.”
My face lit up as I told him about my childhood best friend, Jackson, whose mom worked for us, and who I would always exchange short stories with, even after his mom remarried and he moved away when we were 15. About the little deaf boy we met when we were 12, after we’d moved to the States, who loved to climb trees, which seemed to cause his own mother no end of grief, and who taught us all the naughty words in ASL. There was the woman from Mexico who came to work for us after Jackson and his mom left, who brought with her a vibrant culture I had never seen before, and a curious instrument she would later teach me how to play, the guitar. When World War I broke out I was in my early 20s, but I was still living at home. Nobody in my family was eligible to fight, but I worried about Jackson because I stopped hearing from him around that time, and I knew he was the kind of person to enlist. I never did hear from him again, and after the war ended I silently mourned him, assuming he had been killed in action. A few years later my dad died, cancer, and my mom buried herself with him. I left the deed to the house I had spent most of my childhood in with the servants who had so dutifully taken care of us and put up with our curiosities throughout the years, and left America behind.
After I left home I spent a few decades touring Europe, learning piano from a classically trained German who wanted to be an athlete, much to his family’s dismay, and the kantele from a beautiful Finnish woman whom I dated for a few years, until one of my mother’s old ‘friends’ turned up and started causing trouble for me. After I moved on I spent a few years between France and Italy, learning to play the cello and violin from a variety of teachers, before I moved to Portugal and met a brilliant chef and studied under him for a while. After I’d had my fill of Portuguese food, I continued my culinary learning journey through Spain, then back through France and Italy, until I landed on the island of Sardinia. There I learned to make su filindeu from this amazingly kind family who took me in for a few years. After long enough, though, people start to notice when you don’t age, so I continued on to Greece, where I not only learned how to make some delicious foods, but I also learned to play the lyre, from a muse, no less. I moved back to my land of birth, Britain, very briefly, and spent most of my days there in the museums and libraries, learning as much as I could about the cultures of the places that they’d been colonizing, before growing bored of the food and moving to Scotland. I bought a sizable houseboat and spent the next half decade going between Scotland and Ireland, attempting to learn all I could about the pre-christian cultures of those places. I attempted to learn the bagpipes from a dreadfully boring human man, who would not stop yelling everything he said, for about a year before deciding that wind instruments weren’t for me, and decided to try my hand at the harp instead, which went considerably better. It probably didn’t hurt that my teacher was a gorgeous banshee that I got along quite splendidly with.
When World War II broke out, I headed north to Iceland, settling down in Breiðholt in Reykjavík for a few years while I got my bearings of the culture. I quickly learned that Icelanders were not the biggest fans of foreigners, but out of desperation to remain out of the path of the war I remained for a few more years, spending time with other foreigners and the occasional elf, before moving to neighboring Greenland, having heard that the US had increased the number of air and sea ports in the country, making traveling there easier. I remained in Greenland until the war ended, at which point I moved with my then-boyfriend to mainland Denmark, where he was from. We started attending university, him studying law and sociology and me studying music and the arts, until my love of and passion for culture and history was reignited and we parted ways. He continued his education, and I moved to the mesopotamian region in search of a being old enough to teach me the culture, traditions and languages of some of the oldest civilizations in recorded history. 
In my trek up and down mesopotamia I found many historians looking for the same answers I sought, and learned everything the contemporary man had discovered about mesopotamian history at the time, as well as any rumors as to anyone who might still continue the practices of the time. Eventually I came across a being claiming to be one of the old gods himself, who went by the name Dumuzid. I would have likened him to one of the demonic creatures of old Sumerian religion and superstition rather than a god, but nevertheless, the origin of his knowledge did seem to be ancient Sumer itself, as he knew seemingly impossible things, and as hard as I tried to kill the nuisance in my first month with him, he would not seem to die. I spent a few more months attempting to study with him, during which time he tried to convince me that I was the avatar of his beloved goddess Inanna, an idea which I found utterly disgusting, until spring time came and he vanished, as the genuine consort of Inanna would according to Sumerian religious lore. No beautiful goddess of fertility and dreams popped up in his place for me to learn from, though, so I continued my studies on my own for the next half-year, until fall time came around and he popped back up and resumed his old ways as if nothing had happened. It was at this point that I’d had enough of him, and I bounced.
I made my way across south Asia until I reached India, where I stayed for a few years, observing history being made in a country newly freed from the rule of a monarchy. My love for the culinary arts was greatly nurtured as well. The dishes of the south-east Asian countries are among the best in the whole world, in my opinion. After I left India I made my way through Myanmar, Thailand and Vietnam, meeting some old acquaintances of my mom’s, never staying in each place for long due to the concerning shift in political climates in the region, before making my way northward through China. I remembered having wanted to spend more time in China learning about their history, culture, and, most importantly, cuisine, but my tour of the country, and, later, the whole continent, was cut short by the rising tensions due to the increase in popularity of communism in the east. It didn’t help that the various different kinds of non-human creatures I met there seemed keenly interested in a half-human, half-vampire in ways that I was deeply uncomfortable with. I continued northward to Mongolia, intending to eventually make my way up to Russia, but I ended up staying there for nearly a decade, spending the bulk of that time in the home of a strange old vampire who’d intercepted me near the border and invited me to live with her. It turned out she wanted to study me, me being such a rare specimen and all, and I delighted in the idea, myself curious about my unique anatomy and traits. During my stay there I met many of her descendants, as well as some of her step-children by marriage to a lovely man in his late 70s, who presented a constant reminder of how I might be if I’d chosen to live a mortal life. 
I was content there, I had access to food and blood, my curiosity was satiated in almost every regard as she had the largest in-home library I’d ever seen, and it was fairly isolated from the outside world, meaning I could relax without worry about the wars and the exhausting ongoing revolutions and various other political changes happening across the continent. It was nice for a while, I learned a lot about myself, and about vampires in general, things my mother had never taught me because she wanted to raise me as human as possible. It’s where I first started combat training, studying closely under my host and a few of her descendants in the Mongolian People’s Army when they would come for a visit. Though her military descendants would sometimes visit, my host kept a strict no-war-talk rule in the house, preferring to keep discussions to more academic topics to stimulate the brain. I understood, and not just from a personal standpoint. There were several copies of old diaries and ledgers that she had kept in her personal library that she gave me permission to read, given I do so with the proper care and in the proper environment as many of them predated even my own mother. From this I learned that my host had seen more than her fair share of war and violence throughout the years, which made her isolated haven from the outside world all the more sensible to me.
As the years progressed, so did her experiments. They were all relatively minor at first, testing my reaction times, vamp healing factor, speed and strength. She tested my temperature weekly, shocked at first that it was so normal in terms of what it should be for a human, asking each time if I felt feverish or particularly cold. I learned that there is no ‘normal’ temperature for vampires, a vampire’s core temperature could be determined based on human genetics, traits of the vampire or vampires that turned them, and abilities that they develop after being turned, but for the most part seemed entirely random. We went through a battery of allergy tests, each more potentially dangerous than the last. There were the common human allergies, which I tested negative for, then the uncommon human allergies, which I also tested negative for, then we moved on to human poisons. That one was less fun, as I microdosed various substances designed to kill people before downing bag after bag of blood. It actually took a bit of convincing on my host’s part to get me to trust her in this experiment, but I was eventually glad I did, because I learned that if I fed regularly enough prior to and drank enough blood after consuming a human poison, it largely had no effect on me. The next allergy test was common vamp allergies, which I had various reactions to, but the ones I did react to, I had a lesser reaction than my host, who had to keep these substances stored in a climate-controlled vault and wear a hazmat suit to bring them out. The next was uncommon vamp allergies, which I somehow managed to test positive for all of. Before testing vamp poisons we both decided it would be wise if I went off blood for a week prior just to be extra safe. As predicted, some of the poisons had more of an effect than others, but none of them proved as dangerous to me as they would’ve been to a full vampire. The testing process took over a year because of how sick I would get, and at some points I had to be given the antidotes because of how close to death I got. I was really happy when that was over, and as a thank you for enduring that for her research she gifted me a bag of golden, though how she got it I’ll never know.
Towards the end of my stay things took a turn for the weird. It started when her husband died, he was well into his 80s and it was his time, but talk spread among his children that there was something off about his death. My host was inconsolable, but seemed to take comfort in our experiments, which I continued to happily let her conduct. We had already finished blood typing and learned that I did, indeed, have a normal human blood type, though one of the ones on the rarer side, AB positive, which coincidentally meant that I was also a universal receiver when it came to blood, makes sense. We had also done every other test on my blood possible, according to my host, which is why I found it a tad strange when she came in and asked to take a bag. When I asked her about it, she casually said she wanted to taste it. Being a fan of culinary exploration myself, I had no objections, though I did ask her to report back what she thought. At breakfast the next day I asked her if she had tried it and what she thought, and she reported that it had been very sour and not to her liking. A few months passed and I began to hear talk of her wanting to take me off blood for a more extended period of time than I was comfortable with for one of her experiments, which was when I decided it was time to go. She seemed very disappointed when I told her I was leaving, then gave me a really old gudok as a goodbye gift, told me I would always have a place in her house, and bid me farewell.
I decided to skip Russia, the idea of going there didn’t sound nearly as appealing as it did before the cold war. I caught my first ever flight from Mongolia directly down to the Philippines, spending a few days to a month on each of the inhabited islands I was able to visit. I learned much about the local culture, history and cuisine, and I wish I’d had more time in each place and an opportunity to explore the whole country, but there are literally thousands of inhabited islands, and I dipped out when it seemed like the political situation there might lead to something more serious. From there I headed up to Korea, or, more accurately, South Korea, as the region had been divided since I first learned about the world. Again, I spent only a few years in my studies there, before finally making my way to Japan. I got around a lot and met a lot of people in those days, I had a decade of the world to catch up on, and I did not waste a second in doing so.
While in Japan I met a beautiful guy, Nikko, as I would later learn was his name, while attending a lecture on Japanese mythology. It turned out he was heavily interested in pre-christian history and the old religions like I was, and we became fast friends. After a few years, I told him my history. He took a little while to process, especially after the first time he saw me absolutely crush a bag of blood after a cooking accident, but he came around. Eventually we moved in together, the first human I’d lived with since I left home. He was my best friend, he dragged me out of bed to make sure I made it to classes on time every morning, and I cooked dinner for us every evening. We’d watch movies and anime and bad TV with even worse subtitles as we ate. I’d sing silly songs I’d make up, accompanied by some instrument I’d grabbed from my room, as he would build diagrams and maps and timelines and replicas of monuments from history. And every day I fell more and more in love with him, and, as I later found out, him with me.
I spent almost the rest of the 20th century in Japan with him. There was a time I believed I would stay there forever with him, the world changing all around us while we remained exactly the same. I’ve learned over the years, though, that no dream is built to last. Being gay in Japan was even more taboo then than it is now, and vampirism has always been met with a combination of fear and skepticism, no matter where you are. I don’t know what exactly led to it, but we were walking home from a date one night, laughing and joking around, when a group of people I recognized from a few places we frequented around town came toward us. I thought nothing of it at first, they were just walking down the street, and so were we, but then I noticed they were on a collision course with the path we were walking. I pulled my boyfriend to the side so we’d be out of the way of the group, but they adjusted the direction they were walking accordingly. It became apparent that their intention was to intercept us. 
I tensed up and stopped laughing, dragging my boyfriend into place so that I stood between the mob and him, doing my best to guarantee his safety. He didn’t seem to understand at first, but then I just barely dodged the first knife, the second one hitting home directly in my stomach. I saw Nikko take a hit as he was trying to scramble away, though, thankfully, the number of knives in this fight seemed limited, and none of them had gotten past me. I don’t remember much about what happened next, I know that after I saw Nikko get punched I went into a rage, and that the guy who punched him went flying pretty hard into a nearby wall. I know at some point the knife was pulled out of my stomach, though if by me, one of the attackers, or Nikko I don’t know. I know that when I had control of my senses again Nikko was looking at me, terrified. I looked down and noticed I was covered in a fair amount of blood, but I could only hope that most of it was mine. I listened closely, and confirmed what I feared, there weren’t enough heartbeats for the number of bodies laying on the ground, though I didn’t bother to check which ones were alive or dead, that would take too much time. I offered Nikko a hand, before realizing it was covered in blood and deciding it would probably be best if I took it back. I crouched down next to where he had been curled up behind me, trying to make himself as small of a target as possible as I defended him, presumably, and slowly coaxed him onto his feet and into coming with me back to our apartment. 
It was hard avoiding people as we made our way home, but luckily the late hour meant that not many were out, and those who were tended to be night dwellers of a similar breed to what I was that evening. I threw my bloody shoes and socks into the dumpster beside our building before we entered and hurriedly made our way up to our apartment, not wanting to run into anyone on the way. As soon as we were in the door Nikko headed for our room, and I headed for the shower. The blood was mostly dried at that point, which was a relief as I didn’t want to make a mess. I grabbed a plastic bag and stepped into the shower to take off my clothes, shoving them in the bag as I did to be thrown away later. Once I’d washed every surface and crevice of my body over and over until I felt some semblance of clean again, I finally stepped out of the shower. I dried myself off, tossed the bag of bloodied clothes, and went into the bedroom to get a fresh pair of underwear and some pajamas. Nikko jumped when I came in, and I realized that going commando, though it was what I was used to after a shower, probably wasn’t appropriate in this situation, so I covered myself with the towel I had wrapped around my head. I quickly went over to my dresser and threw on a pair of underwear and sweats before going to sit down next to Nikko so I could comfort him, but he flinched when I tried to put my arm around his shoulders to give him a hug. I put my arm down and looked down at the floor for a few seconds before suggesting that a nice hot shower might make him feel better.
When he came out of the shower I was sitting on the couch, funny movie cued up, ready to comfort him and take his mind off of things, but he just announced that he was tired and went to bed. I took the hint that he needed some space and slept on the couch that night. It was the longest night I’d had in a while. When morning finally came, it brought no relief. He woke late, and ate the breakfast I’d prepared in silence. When he finally did speak it was only to acknowledge that we’d probably have to move. I agreed, relieved that I didn’t have to have that difficult conversation with him, and suggested Hawaii. He was silent for a while, before nodding his head solemnly. Neither of us wanted to leave our life there behind, but neither of us had a choice. When and if the assholes that survived came to, they could point a finger at either one of us, if they hadn’t already. I went about preparing the necessary documents, a skill I had gotten concerningly good at over the years, and rehoming some of the more valuable items we couldn’t take with us for some extra cash. I secretly stored some of the more sentimental items when I went to retrieve the case of items I bring with me wherever I go, for if either of us ever came back. The next day we were on a plane to Hawaii, leaving our old life behind for the unknown.
When we got there, I started to pull away, fearing that our closeness would put Nikko in danger again. He didn’t seem to make any effort to stop me, so the gap between us just widened. I would’ve left, but I felt too guilty to leave him alone in a foreign land after taking him away from his home. He must have sensed this or something, because a few months in he vanished along with all of what remained of his belongings, leaving only a note with the words, ‘I will always love you. Goodbye.’ written across it in his handwriting. That all happened around 1998 to 1999, and I spent the, previously much awaited, turn of the century alone.
I stayed in Hawaii for a few years after he left. I didn’t ever go looking for him, not wanting to cause him further pain, but apparently he kept track of me because I would still occasionally get postcards from him, though I had no idea how he keeps up with my address changes. While in Hawaii I enjoyed a lot of sun and beach time, and learned to play the Ukulele. I spent most of my time enjoying the nature I had failed to make time to stop and appreciate for many of the past decades. I remember being in Hawaii, coming home from a hike, when I heard the news that the first plane had hit the first of the Twin Towers on 9/11. That day and those that followed were fraught with tension. After that, I decided it was finally time to move back to mainland US, to finally go and visit my mom and dad again.