31_days | January 12th [Priest (2011)] When The Dawn Comes

Title: When the Dawn Comes
Rating: G
Wordcount: 974 words
Series: Priest (2011)
Day & Theme: January 12th - let me know what she looks like at dawn.
Character / Pairing: Black Hat
Notes: Reader needs to be somewhat familiar with the movie Priest to follow some of the instances in this fic. Black Hat is the lovely dude in my icon. XD

Darkness pervaded Black Hat’s every movement, swirling around his tall frame and seeming to spread out to infect every last living thing around him. He didn’t mind the darkness; to him, it seemed a part of him and he took comfort in that darkness. Sometimes he thought that it was the only thing he had left to him, that darkness. Everything else and everything that he was had been taken away from him against his will many moons ago.

The train rattled around him, as the tall man prowled the carriages, a dark form shifting between rooms, endlessly searching for something that wasn’t yet there. He had plans, plans that were bigger than he was, plans that would exact revenge upon those that had left him behind to be taken by vampires.

He supposed that if he were in their position, he would not have willingly left a fallen comrade behind, without at least trying to save them first. He wondered then what had marked him out as different, why he had been left to die at the hands of the vampires, to be reborn again with the blood of the Sola Mira hive’s Queen.

He stopped by one of the windows, leaning one forearm against the wall, one hand drooping across the glass. His black leather glove seemed in dark contrast to his pale skin, growing paler by the day and losing the tan that he’d once had during life. Being a vampire might be good in some regards, namely being largely immortal and more powerful than most human beings, yet there were some things being a vampire took away from a person, other than a normal life. Skin tones flattened out and became ethereally transparent, making the wearer look deathly pale and strangely other-worldly. The constant need for blood as sustenance was a hard burden to bear in the early days, gnawingly invasive yet now steadily controlled the older and more mature a vampire Black Hat became. His face, handsome in life had grown ethereally beautiful now, hazel eyes long lost to bright yellow predator’s irises.

He shifted slightly, black hat dipping low over his face and casting his features into shadow. It was that hat that had earned him the moniker of Black Hat, his true name long lost in the depths of his past, when he‘d been indoctrinated into the brotherhood of the Priests and Priestesses, those super-humans who hunted the very creatures which he now was. The very nature and genetics of his true being, a Priest, had made him the very first human-vampire hybrid, stronger than all humans and vampires combined, stronger even than the Priests he‘d once counted himself as being amongst the ranks of. Little good that did him now.

He shifted again, the only sound in the corridor the sound of the speeding rattles of the train surrounding him and the swish of his long leather coat dragging against the backs of his thighs. His mind wandered to the blond haired Priest who’d left him behind in the Sola Mira vampire hives. He knew, like most other priests knew, that the blond haired Priest had come to the Church late in life and had left a lot of that former life behind. He’d had to, once he’d been called to the brotherhood. Most other Priests, Black Hat included, hadn’t had that luxury of knowing what life was like outside the Church. Black Hat, unlike his former brothers and sisters now knew what life, as a vampire admittedly, was like, and lived a life (or rather afterlife) to the fullest.

He smiled when he thought of the young daughter the blond haired Priest had had to leave behind, that young girl who thought of the priest as her uncle instead of as her father. Black Hat’s smile widened, flashing fangs in the growing light of a brightening day, which would never grow brighter than a murky twilight gloom. Ashes blotted out the sun even on the brightest days, only recognisably lighter from darkness of night to day by the lessening of the neon lights prevalent everywhere. If not for them, the majority of the populace in their walled cities would think the world was plunged into eternal night.

“Fools,” Black Hat growled, voice husky from little use.

Unlike the sheep of humanity, he had free run of the walled cities and everywhere in between, little knowing anymore the cages of the cities. That was another thing that was in favour of becoming a vampire - freedom. He grinned, eyes darkening from brightest yellow to shimmering gold with hunger. He thought again of the Priest’s daughter, knowing that she had to be pretty given who her father was, although Black Hat had never seen her.

The train steamed on, closer to his destination, to the modest farmhouse the Priest’s daughter resided at, and Black Hat knew that once he reached that farmhouse, there would be nothing to save her from himself. He would have his revenge upon his former brother, taking the Priest’s daughter for everything that had happened to Black Hat in the past, that abandonment, that betrayal of being left alone to die in a vampire hive, of knowing he was alone in the caverns without hope of rescue nor retribution.

He wondered again whether the daughter would be pretty.

“Tell me what she looks like when the dawn comes,” he murmured, to no one.

Only time would tell what would happen once he saw her. She was destined to be caged, no better than the familiars that most humans turned into when they were bitten. Black Hat wondered whether Priest's daughter would be like them, the monster like familiars, when she was bitten. He only hoped for his sake rather than her’s that she wouldn’t. Sometimes, it got lonely being a vampire, after all.