Shardeaters

Title: Shardeaters
Rating: NC-17 for sex, violence, gore and general trauma
Author: Ningengirai
Pairing: Schuldig/Farfarello
Disclaimer: The characters Schuldig, Crawford and Farfarello in this story do not belong to me unless otherwise specified. Copyright goes to Project WK/Koyasu Takehito. No money is made from this. This is fanwork.

Summary: In 1886, Vampires lead a good life in London. Do they? Schuldig soon learns that sometimes, digging too deeply into the past doesn\'t always lead to discoveries you ever wanted to make.

Shard Eaters



Prologue


In 1886, England was a dark, dirty country that did not so much hide its grime but flaunted it. Tightly held in the grip of industrialisation, England’s capital London knew best how to make dirt look good. It wasn’t Dickens’s London anymore, much of its flair and magic lost to cold science and progress that left little space for dreams, but you could still find the spark in the eyes of the children as they stared up at a perpetually dark sky. Railway tracks and coal ovens left more marks on London than the monarchy in all its glory and self-righteousness. The smog lay over the city like a shroud, rivalling the famous London Fog for victims and admirers both.


Two years later, the monster known to the world as Jack the Ripper would tear into the stained populace of Whitechapel High Street, leaving behind a trail of death and blood that sought its likes in cruelty and mystery. For now, though, London’s East End still thrived on poverty and crime, not blood, adding its share of screams and death to nights so dark even the flickering lights of the gas and oil lamps provided no shelter from its terrors. The monsters that lived there could easily have rivalled Jack, if not in blood thirst then in ruthlessness. For now, they were safe in their private hells. Jack was still a distant dream in the mind of a man whose face would never be known to the world, but whose deeds would survive the centuries.


Schuldig was in love with London, and sometimes dreamed that the city would survive even the greatest wars and catastrophes that were to come. Like a fantastic Babylon built in the wrong time and place, London gave birth to new things every day, fascinating him with an endless stream of novelties he could try. He liked the eerie, wrong and distorted sounds that came from a gramophone as much as the classic performances of the orchestra in the royal park of Buckingham Palace and Regent’s Park. He followed the almost daily reports about new medical wonders, sometimes even frequenting the publicly performed operations in the hospitals. He watched the people in Hyde Park, in particular Speaker’s Corner, and listened to their wild theories and end of the world prophecies with mundane fascination. Humans never failed to entertain him.


He lived near Covent Garden, in beautiful and very new Shaftesbury Avenue which had been opened to the public barely two months ago. Before, he had lived at Covent Garden, namely in Henrietta Street just to the left of the Piazza, one of London’s busiest centres with its wholesale market. Lately though, a lot of shady figures had made Covent Garden their home, deducting from the peace and quiet - and lastly, the rich and wealthy populace - Schuldig cherished so. There had not been as much dirt in and around Covent Garden as in his favourite hunting ground, the East End, which was another reason why he had loved his small but classy apartment on the second floor of a Victorian-styled house.


Shaftesbury Avenue called to him with its promise of theatrical performances and never ending stream of tourists. The great theatres that would later attract an equal crowd of tourists and locals were not yet built, but Schuldig could see them in the eyes of the street performers and tavern dancers when they acted out Shakespeare’s comedies and the Greek tragedies on small, illicit stages. There was yet another reason why a move to Shaftesbury Avenue had its merits: a young gentleman by the name of Brad Crawford lived there, in the very same building Schuldig moved into. Not as interested in the theatre performances, Crawford chose Shaftesbury Avenue because of its proximity to Charing Cross Road. With its unnumbered little antiquity shops and bookstores, Charing Cross Road had another name in Crawford’s vocabulary: Paradise. He was an avid reader and trader in rare books. He was also an avid dancer and equally enjoyed partaking and watching, busying himself with picking out the bad dancers when the music stopped playing. He called it his very subjective good deed of the night, something that amused Schuldig to no end.


Living in London, if one wanted to live well, was expensive. Aside from a rather generous inheritance he had salvaged from a youth in feudal Europe - his father had been a well-to do merchant in the ancient city of Cologne who married the daughter of a local duke whose roots could be traced back to the Emperor himself - Schuldig had acquired quite a fortune over the years, both as a hunter and gatherer. Those he took from would not need it anymore; pearls, gold, expensive stones and other odds and ends lay well-preserved in several accounts of the immortal Rothschild bank, from where he could draw the needed amount anytime. He spoke French, English and Russian along with his native German dialect and offered his service of translation to several writers who paid him well if they could afford it. If they could not, Schuldig made a bargain with them that would ensure him a fifth of their written work’s proceeds. He had other, shadier means of income he could rely on, but London was a prospering city and the times where a Vampire had to steal from the dead in order to pay rent were over.


The Age of Enlightenment had indeed brought light into the medieval darkness he had known for so long. Schuldig read the works of the contemporary philosophers and compared them to the works of the Greek philosophers, admiring mankind for the process he had not believed them capable of. The Dark Ages had been what their name indicated: long, dark, and dreadful. He knew what they had been like, having lived for the longest time as a traveller through most of the European continent, the ‘Old World’ as it was generally called by his kind. Then he came to London for the first time - on a whim, rather - and watched the thousand lights of the city shine into the night. He sometimes stood on the rooftop of their house, still, watching the lights. Crawford would often join him up there, and they would talk softly, Vampire to Vampire.


 "It’s a good thing you came back from America," Schuldig would say. "I’ve missed you."


Crawford, dressed impeccably in a gentleman’s black suit and crisp white shirt as was the fashion style of this age, would rake a hand through his raven hair, dark blue eyes glowing with the reflections of a thousand flickering gas lamps, and say, "America is many things but I wouldn’t call it home. I’ve missed you too."


They could be sentimental predators if the occasion was right.


Crawford and Schuldig had met by chance in 1646, residing in the picturesque and quite informal Parisian household of a French nobleman to whom they were both acquainted. Their friendship had had a rather bloody start - both invited guests of the foppish young nobleman, whose debauchery and decadent parties were famous in the circles of the rich back then, they recognized each other for what they were: two predators in the same hunting ground. Instead of being at each other’s throat, they struck a strange deal that ensured they would both survive the party. Schuldig started at one end, Crawford at the other; they painted the walls and the floor red where they met in the middle, sated like lions that had happened upon a herd of legless, fat antelopes. It was not unheard of that two of their kind hit it off so well from the very beginning. Most Vampires, aside from the lust for blood, had quite a lot in common. Schuldig and Crawford shared a love for antiquities, luxury, blood and adventure.


Their paths forked again after they bloodied the luxurious French house but they met several times in the following century. In 1720, they boarded a majestic cruiser en route to America. It was the first time Schuldig left his native Europe. Crawford was more than happy to show him the country of his birth. They had a glorious time along the coastal cities and stayed together for nearly sixty years until, in 1776, Schuldig boarded yet another ship in Louisiana’s New Orleans and went on the long way back home. He arrived just in time to clap at Robert Walpole’s appointment as England’s first prime minister and read about Britain’s loss of American colonial territory brought on by the Declaration of Independence.


Crawford arrived in London in 1802, the year the Stock Exchange was formally established. Having no interest in stock markets, Crawford nevertheless fell in love with the prospering city. He stayed.


In the late spring of 1886, Schuldig moved into the house on Shaftesbury Avenue. Half a year later, Crawford proposed that they buy the house. Schuldig did not consider the idea for long. They had enough money between them to buy ten houses and live well for several lifetimes. Why not indulge once? He had just settled into the apartment on the last floor beneath the roof - the curtains before the French windows of their living room blowing gently in the first chilly autumn breezes, the stench of coal and dirt faint beneath the smell of wet earth - when Crawford’s annoyed "What?" sounded through his open bedroom door.