You don't know your real name. You don't know if you ever had a 'real name' or even a real life outside of what you are now. It doesn't matter. It would only spoil the pretty little image you've created of being above the mortal populace. And above them you are in many ways. Snippets have returned over time. Before this you were human, wizard even. You probably had a family, else, where did the ambition and blood snobbery come from? But you were never really, truly, alive before. This is what you were always meant to be: cruel, powerful, vaguely sadistic, and fanged.
.hi my name is jekyll im an addict.
Sanity of mind is perhaps not your strongest suit. You have very high highs and very low lows. You’ve done every form of drug that exists in this world and beyond, but your real addiction is blood. Not just the blood that nourishes you, though it certainly is a pleasure. No, you also relish in the blood that results from quarrels or other incidents and you have no qualms bringing it about. On your lowest days you seek comfort in the sticky liquid and hunt heavily. None of this animal nonsense either, though in a pinch it does the trick. You crave the warmth of human blood; the writhing, the screams and even sometimes the sexual foreplay that brings your hunt to its peak. As a male you have needs too, though your one and only mistress has only even been the blood.
On your better days, you can almost be considered a respectable gentleman. You dress the part and smile when it suits you. The only clue to anyone that you have a darker secret is the glittering point of your fangs that you don’t bother to sheath often. In this world there are many kinds of demons, though none perhaps so deadly as you. If the open world can face those disgusting horrors, then there is no reason they cannot smile in the face of a very small abnormality. If only those smiles knew the truth of the more prominent danger hinted, you happily think that they too would shrink from you the way they do the harmless basilisk. Well. Harmless by comparison. You make no attempt to hide who and what you are anymore. You never really have.
(Does it bother you that these measly, peasant wizards are repulsed by you? That you cannot have a formal, real place in society the way you are due? Perhaps. But it doesn’t stop you from acting the part, their upper classes be damned. You have your own world, behind the darkest curtains, and you rule your own roost. If there are classes amongst the lowest of the low, you like to think you’re the king.)
Your two halves to a whole, the lows and the highs, both comprise and compromise you. The compromise comes in form of rapture. When in one state you cannot relish the benefits of the other and are confined to it. Blood is frenzying, the anger or sexual dominance hard to shrug off. On the other hand, the gentlemanly facade restricts your truest desires. Still you cope. Your true form - that of Mr. Hyde - always trapped in the form of Dr. Jeykll.
.he can't do it like me.
.im gon prove it.
You crave sexual interaction. Often this hitch of yours seeps into the hunt and you’ve been known to bed the very victims you’ve sought out for other purposes. In these cases you don’t kill them, though you rarely kill most that you feed from in the first place. Perhaps it’s a sliver of the humanity you once had but it doesn’t feel right. Providing a service in exchange for a life, now that’s a bit more fair.
When it comes to relations, you have a rather gifted touch. Not relationships, but relations of the carnal sort. Your vanity is also strong and sometimes you prevail upon your partner to succumb by less than fair means, but magic aside, it’s been said that overall you have a knack. You’ve never had to force an unwilling victim to fall into an embrace and you’re glad of it. You’re not sure you’d like to take by force that which isn’t given to you as it ruins a bit of the powertrip. Still, you have your rivals. Your eldest sire for one.
He was once also your lover. He had green eyes just like yours and you remember, the day you killed him, getting very close to those pretty eyes and biting deep into that porcelain cheek brushing just against your lips. Sharp fangs made him flinch but he continued to glower, the look forever imprinted in your mind. You hate your eyes because of it. You sometimes wish you could claw them out or change their color permanently. It is impossible, but at least you can’t tell anymore.
.calling all the monsters.
Paint it red. So red that every other color in the world fades into nothing. Red would be your favorite color if you could distinguish it - green your least. *Ever since your transformation though, you see red as black and there is very little green in your world. Protanopia it's called. You know what the colors are supposed to be for most things but, for whatever reason, while you gained so much in the change, you also lost something precious along with, you suppose, any magical ability you once had. It bothers you less to no longer be a wizard than to have lost the true sense of what color really is. For this you hate him as well as the rest of the world, though you regret nothing. This is your true form, your every essence. You can imagine yourself as nothing less than a hunter and you relish it.
When you were first changed, you remember nothing much was different. The ebullience of color in your world in particular didn’t begin to diminish until later, and so you can still remember the vibrancy of everything you’ve lost. That was the only tradeoff really, considering everything that was gained, but you always were a bit spoiled and so it irks you. You blame him for being flawed and perhaps that’s why you killed him. For tainting you. And stealing your heart. But in the end, you’ve been given so much more. Your strength and speed rival the most powerful of the inhuman; you can scale buildings and sense things no measly wizard ever could. Sadly, you cannot control the blood of others but you can still smell it and sense it.
All in all, you've traded color for power.
With this power you've committed atrocities over the years. You don’t regret them, but you’ve also matured. You’re no longer the impulsive child that rampages at the drop of a hat. You still have your compulsions but they’re more carefully calculated now. Business has taught you a thing or two in that regard.
.im gonna love you until you hate me.
To the extent of your history with those green eyes, you hate thinking about it. Yes you loved him, yes you killed him. But he deserved it for casting you aside the way he did. You gave him everything you could possibly give. He was the only one you let take you and, with the way things were, you’ve never let anyone do so again. You don’t think you ever will. It’s the root of your possessive freakishness, you know that much. Maybe if you’d just tried harder, listened better and pushed back he might have loved you more.
You catered to the every whim of those perfect green eyes. You can still imagine the silky soft feel of red locks as you brushed them back and the cold look on that otherwise perfect porcelain visage. Even after an intimate rendezvous as those swollen lips spluttered every false compliment and promise you wanted to hear, you knew. Yet you didn’t care. You didn’t care until one day: you did. One day when you caught them and that was the end.
Since then you’ve guarded your heart jealously. You’re possessive with what’s yours and hate sharing, especially with other vampires. That’s not to say you haven’t shared victims before, because you have, even in the same instance. But you don’t share what’s really yours: your intimacies, your secrets, your inner turmoils and your people. The very few of them that you’ve managed to scrape up. But, you also hate so fully that you even wonder if you could ever really share like that ever again.
.if you wanna get out a l i v e.
.better run for your life.
In the end you have few friends but many acquaintances. Most of those you interact with for business or otherwise only know on the surface what you are. You’ve killed thousands in your time and you have no qualms. Your only regret is perhaps killing he who gave you everything.
Your biggest fear however, is fire. Controlled fires for heating, or candles used for light, don’t alarm you the way an open, unattended flame does. Much of your world is yet fairly primal in its lighting so you’ve had to adapt, but the flicker of flames reflects your every terror. Fire is the only real way to kill you and you know that; it’s been ingrained in your every fibre of being since the transformation. You’ll never forget the cries of agony he yowled as porcelain skin burnt; red hair singed forever to dust and green eyes shut as those greedy flames enveloped their prey. You haven’t touched a flame since and those who tend the house know better than to make you.
You wonder sometimes, idly, if your existence as a dangerous being will forever throw everyone off your scent though. A part of you hopes so as you make no efforts to encourage anyone. Humans, witches and wizards especially, are troublesome, unworthy things and all the other beasts and monsters you’ve met have their own vanity that clashes with yours. Imperfections abound and you could never settle for anything less than perfect. It’s for the best though. Satan help the forsaken soul who manages to catch your eye, if anyone ever does, because they’d be best off running. Far away, under a rock where you might never find their tortured soul.
.i can make your hands clap.
.come sin with me.
Outside of your deepest, darkest secrets and your insane lifestyle - you enjoy more normal pleasures too. Brothels (that admit you); underground clubs (that you’ve threatened and murdered your way onto). Sometimes you even make the effort to fit in and hide your true darkness. But never for long. It's not your way. It never has been.
.Timeline of [Some] Events.
- Gilbert was reborne as a vampire in 1618 in what was then (rather newly) Brandenburg-Prussia, later to become the Kingdom of Prussia. He doesn’t remember much about his life as a human, but he knows his family was fully, purely wizard and of some consequence. (He doesn’t remember that they were nobility in the Duchy, or that nearly the entire familial line was wiped out by the bubonic plague in 1624. What he does remember are tortured, fevered fragments that he shuts out. His transformation was tricky and as a result there were some lasting side effects.*)
- The first few decades of his vampirism thereafter are a bit of a blur. He falls desperately, madly in love with his sire and then kills the other in a jealous rage, the winter of 1725. He goes it alone for a bit through Siberia wreaking havoc, then somehow, some way, Gilbert finds himself in the court of Empress Catherine of Russia in 1746.
- It’s auspicious timing really, given the political tensions between Prussia and Austria. (Gilbert often wonders to date if he ever [i]really[/i] meant to aid Prussia in his efforts to drudge himself back to reality, or rather if he was more interested in what his new abilities could do to his own benefit. After the new-borne-blood-lust began to cede and his control began to grow, what was there really to stop Gilbert from taking every advantage and pushing the boundaries between human and creature to his own benefit?) It’s here that he meets Galina and conveniently forgets all about his political affiliations in favor of using hers to advance his own, personal ambitions.
- Gilbert flirts with life and death in equal measures in his time at court. He enjoys being in the glittering spotlight as much as he enjoys stealing off to rural villages to indulge desperate whims. It’s not until smallpox begins to limit his feeding grounds that Gilbert is finally forced to make his true nature known, in some capacity, by targeting the courtiers. It chips away at his schemes for power. He’s careful, but rumors abound.
- In winter, the smallpox outbreak worsens and the royal family is evacuated. Fear and superstition begin to cloud the remaining populace and Gilbert decides to take his leave but not without first imparting an accidental gift upon Galina. She is the first of his many victims to actually survive the feeding and subsequent virus. She is the first of his line to become sired.
- Between 1747 and the start of the Seven Year War in 1756, Gilbert primarily wanders the lands of his home. He misses the courtier life and he seeks out privilege and prestige wherever he can, taking advantage of frequently shifting titles and sovereigns.
- By 1810 Gilbert has seen many empires and democracies rise and fall. The Americans, the French, not to mention his beloved Prussia and everything it has already suffered and won. It is around then that he meets a wandering soul that echoes something lost inside the proud, staunchly hedonistic vampire.
- Ishmael is… a fresh breath of life, dragging Gilbert from the confines of his too politically interested mindset. Perhaps he is already too old, too set in his old-fashioned beliefs to become anything of consequence in the ever-changing courts of Europe. Why should he let himself be encumbered by the whims of governments that he will likely outlive anyway? Disguised as a pair of friends on a European tour, he throws ambition to the wind and follows where the younger vampire leads until 1842. Landing in Britain for the first time, Gilbert strikes off on his own once more. (He is uninterested in following Ishmael into the dredges of lost pasts.)
- In 1848 he meets a fascinating creature, a deliciously interesting vampire much after his own heart: Azazel. She is a kindred spirit in many ways, a pride of Gilbert’s without his ever having to take responsibility for her. (Even if he is her great-grand-sire.) They have a brief interlude together, terrorizing much of Ireland in the last few years of the famine, but it certainly makes an impression.
- Once again on his own, Gilbert wanders the small isle for a time and finds his way to London around 1887. His arrival is frosty, just in time for the magical world to rear its peasant head against creatures. Vampires, particularly. He hears whispers about a growing community of those like him in a nearby town called Hogsmeade.
- In 1888, tired of pretending to be lesser than he is (read: human) all the time, Gilbert ventures into the wizarding world with his fangs bared. It has been almost 300 years since he last thought about purebloods or halfbloods, or even how vampires might be perceived amongst a community that actually acknowledges him for what he is. The adjustment does not go particularly well at first, until - in 1890 - Gilbert meets Gaston Wixeldorf.
- In the past three years, Gilbert has taken on the self-proclaimed title of king (ambition restored), ruling a small but successful black-market empire from London. He, in partnership with Wixeldorf, manages to always provide successful disposal services for corpses that may turn up unexpectedly. As a result, Gilbert can be relied upon for always having fresh human blood on hand to distribute outside of the Ministry’s supervision. The exchange is simple: favor to be carried and respect given to be called in whenever due. (Free, until IOU.)
