2026-03-10 12:47 - 18:45 PST
Kingsnake got a call from Javier. He’d gotten her number from Neres, and invited her to meet him outside the Vet Clinic. She called Neres to confirm.
“Yes, please do meet with him. I asked him to speak with you about your sire, and I believe he intends to make things right.”
Kingsnake groans. Of course it was about her sire, seemed like everything was about her sire these nights. “Is this really necessary? He didn’t want to talk with me, I didn’t want to talk with him, end of story.”
“Darling, believe me when I tell you that I have no desire to cause you harm. However, in choosing your future, you must choose to confront your past. How else might you grow?”
”… you’re right. I hate that you’re right about this, but you’re right.” She sighs, feeling a little defeated. “I’ll get to see you later tonight, right?” She asks, with a little more hope in her voice.
“You will, I promise.”
There, Javier left her and Liam, her sire, who she’d seen before1. She confronted him about why he’d embraced her. If she was an accident on an embarrassment. After some prodding, he admitted that he drank too much from her and thought she’d die, so he fed her some of his vitae so she wouldn’t and ran off before she woke up and frenzied.
That was what she expected, but it didn’t hurt any less. She said that things had turned out alright for her. She was lucky2 enough to meet Neres. He wanted to try and amend their… well you couldn’t exactly call it a relationship, but he wanted to atone. He complimented her work on the heist3, and offered to help teach her some Gangrel disciplines. They exchanged numbers in case she did want help with that, but it seemed unlikely. She mentioned she’d be busy anyhow, preparing for her rite.
She returned to Neres and found a plate of Pad Thai, her favorite food, waiting for her. Neres was already halfway through her meal. She reported what had happened, and Neres suggested that she’d chosen well to leave her past behind her.
As she laid down before the sunrise, she received a text from Liam.
“hey, nice catching up with you today. just hit me up if you want to do training and stuff.”
She takes a long while to consider how to reply. She types out several more affirmative replies, before deleting each of them in turn. She reacts with a thumbs up, then removes it. Eventually, she settles on the following message: “It was nice meeting you too, and I appreciate the offer, but Neres says I shouldn’t be distracting myself from my studies. We probably shouldn’t talk anymore.” There’s a lengthy pause before she sends: “please take care, goodbye.” Typing the messages feels awful, but Phoebe tries to convince herself that it’s for her own good. He was a nice guy, but that was it, right? She had everything she needed from him, Neres had said as much. He was a distraction. So why was this so painful? She couldn’t want to see him, could she? But Neres didn’t want her to see him, and so this must have been for the best, right? With a tightness in her throat, and a mess of painful contradictions in her head, she turns off her phone, stares at her ceiling, and waits for the peace of slumber. The sooner she could forget about all this, the sooner she’d feel better again.
Footnotes
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In the Anarchs secret prelude to 1 - Cow Heist! ↩
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Debatable ↩