Chapter Text
Katsuki had barely passed his first century after turning when he finally found his purpose.
The original news had spread quickly. Tales of a British doctor who successfully transfused human blood to a mother during childbirth swept the community. Hushed whispers of what this could mean were present at every social gathering. Katsuki had found himself intrigued, always standing just within earshot to listen in on the conversations of elders and fledglings alike.
Nearly a century later, another physician discovered the reason one person could taste so different from another. Blood groups had become the hot new topic. Underground establishments began to advertise which “flavors” they had on hand. With each new discovery, Katsuki felt his interest in transfusion grow. He found which places those who had broken into the science frequented, slowly building the relationships he’d eventually need if he decided to pursue this.
In the decades following, the budding field was soon filled with vampires. Networks were created, societies established, and codes were shared amongst peers as a signal. Other medical and societal advancements had made it possible to be active during the day. Katsuki would spend his days in libraries, bent over books and other literature. He grasped the theory quickly and kept up with each new discovery in the soon-to-be-named discipline of immunohematology.
When the demand for blood started to surge in the 1950s, Katsuki made the decision to emigrate to the United States. There was already a strong vampiric leadership hold on the American Association of Blood Banks. Through his contacts, he was able to get into a program to become a medical technologist. Over the course of his studies, Katsuki became a skilled technologist, moving throughout the States to keep up appearances. The hierarchy within the various accrediting and regulatory bodies allowed him to seamlessly transition from hospital to hospital. University records would covertly update to show graduation dates that reflected his apparent age; the only thing that Katsuki needed to do on his own was retake the certification exams.
Katsuki had made a name for himself in the community. But after the nightmarish pandemic that swept the globe and killed many of his American colleagues before their time, he notified the VIH branch of the ISBT that he would be moving back to his home country. 2 weeks later, he received all the necessary paperwork in the mail. The letter was signed and sealed with maroon wax, the final words written in the same deep color.
Vivere per sanguis. To live through blood.
Tokyo’s Central Hospital had changed. There had been many times during his studies that Katsuki had dreamed of coming back to work at this very hospital. Clearly, sixty years was a long time, even if it felt like a blip in the three centuries Katsuki had lived so far since his death. Here, however, Katsuki was just a regular twenty-eight-year-old technologist coming back home after doing an internship in America. He had an international ASCP certification, passed the Japanese boards with flying colors, and was ready to take on the task of the lead night shift tech with a cushy permanent placement in the blood bank.
The purple-haired security guard barely peeked over his book at Katsuki before asking what he needed. He was pointed in the direction of HR, and spent nearly an hour there filling out the various paperwork he needed for his orientation. At the end, he was handed his employee ID and given a time for the following day to meet with the director of the lab.
Katsuki slipped his copies of the paperwork into his bag. As he was leaving the room, he bumped into someone.
“Hey, watch where you’re—” the person, a short woman with blonde hair styled in two buns, started to exclaim before she froze. A sly grin crossed her face, hands landing on her hips as she looked Katsuki up and down. “Isn’t it a bit early for you to be out of your cave, nocturnus?”
Katsuki narrowed his eyes at the term, then spotted the tiniest sliver of a pointed tooth digging into her bottom lip. He scoffed, eyes rolling at the flimsy attempt at an insult. “For your information, lumen, we haven’t slept in caves since the 1700s.”
“Oh, a feisty one. You’re old blood, aren’t you?”
He bristled. “And if I am?”
There was a mischievous gleam in the woman’s eyes. “Oh nothing. By the way,” she stuck out her hand, “Toga Himiko, phlebotomy supervisor, at your service.”
Katsuki shook the offered hand, his instincts settling at the gesture. If this lumen were to cause trouble for him in the future, she wouldn’t have bothered with introducing herself by her full name. “Bakugou Katsuki, new lead night shift technologist, blood bank.”
“Pleasure to meet ya, Mr. Technologist. Better run along now, don’t want to burn before you meet the big boss tomorrow.” Before Katsuki could even protest that the risk of burning in the sun had drastically decreased over the last century, Toga was skipping down the hall with a cheery wave over her shoulder. A dreary sigh left him. He straightened up, and headed towards the entrance he had come through earlier. Once again, he got the barest hint of a nod from the security guard as he left.
Katsuki slipped a set of earbuds from his pocket, connecting them to his phone so he could drown out the noise of the lunchtime rush on the train. Of the non-medical technological advances humans had made over the years, headphones were one of his favorites. They worked wonders for his sensitive hearing, cutting out sounds that would typically overwhelm him. He closed his eyes, having already memorized the number of stops from his trip before.
At the fifth, Katsuki got off and headed in the direction of his apartment. He had gotten lucky, managing to find a place near a station that had a direct line to the hospital. It wasn’t much to look at yet since he left most of his belongings in the States, but that would change in the coming weeks once the furniture he’d ordered arrived. The apartment was cozy, but had two bedrooms, the second of which he’d started turning into a home office. The perfect size for one person.
Katsuki stretched out his back with a yawn after locking the door behind him. His jet lag was starting to catch up with him, but Katsuki fought the urge to sleep. He had a meeting with the lab director at ten the following morning. Thankfully, he’d managed to bring two bags of packed cells with him to Japan. His body had adapted to human food to better blend in, but nothing quite satisfied his hunger like blood.
He lazily read the barcode label on one of the bags. O was his usual favorite, but that type didn’t last in the blood bank until expiration often. So this bag of B positive would have to do. Luckily, the preservatives didn’t mess with the flavor too much. Katsuki decided to indulge a bit, and rather than ration out the bag, he cracked a port and poured half into one of his crystal glasses.
It was a special occasion, after all.
Katsuki’s eyes scanned over the sleek plaque next to the door. The name etched in gold lettering matched the one his contact had given him.
Takami Keigo - Laboratory Director
He rapped his knuckles against the wood. The handle turned, and the door opened inwards. Katsuki spotted a lone figure sitting behind the desk. Something in his instincts prickled. No one else was in the room, meaning the door had opened on its own. There was only one class of vampires that could manipulate the air like that. It was practically unheard of for many of them to be left, the majority dying during the mass vampire hunts in Europe in the 1700s. And while Katsuki was old, he wasn’t quite that old. He was only turned in the 1700s in his birthplace of Japan, far away from the hysteria of the time.
“Come in, come in! I’d say I don’t bite, but we both know that’s not a good lie for our kind.” The voice had a playful lit to it, but the gold eyes that tracked him as he walked into the room had Katsuki on edge. He’d never met a Senex before. The air felt suffocating, reminiscent of how Katsuki had felt before his turning. Like prey being observed through the sharp eyes of a hawk.
Katsuki dipped into a shallow bow, the manners still instilled within him from his birth parents as well as his Sire. All of a sudden, the oppressive presence hanging around him disappeared. He heard a laugh, then the squeak of the desk chair as the man in it leaned back. “Now, now. No need for such formalities, Bakugou Katsuki. I’ve heard a lot about you. Aizawa doesn’t talk highly of his former fledglings often, so when he said he had one looking to come to Japan, I was intrigued.”
Another creak as the chair came back up into place. Takami folded his hands in front of him. “Take a seat, we have a lot to talk about before I let you run my lab overnight.”
“You know Aizawa well, then?” Katsuki asked, gracefully dropping into one of the stiff chairs in front of the cedar desk. With the man in front of him more relaxed, he found that he could actually meet his eyes.
“Oh yeah, we go way back. Since before you turned, judging by your smell.” Takami grabbed a folder off a stack on one side of the desk. He flipped it open, tapping on a line that Katsuki recognized as being from his resume. “It says here you’re familiar with all methods for types and screens?”
“Yes. Obviously, I’m most familiar with tube as that’s how things started, but I’ve worked with both gel and solid phase as well.” Katsuki recognized the deflection, and easily shifted into his professional persona. He was fine if the senex didn’t want to talk. His visit did have a purpose after all.
Several minutes of drilling Katsuki on standard methods and protocols later, Takami was standing up to shake his hand. Katsuki saw the air around his back shimmer in a pattern that mimicked wings. He hoped the shiver that ran through his body as their hands touched wasn’t noticeable, though he caught the sly smirk that tugged at the corner of Takami’s lips.
“I think you’ll be an excellent addition to the team. You start tomorrow night at 2300 sharp.”
2 years later
“Oh, Bakugou, thank god you’re here,” Sero exclaimed, gesturing for him to come closer. Katsuki shrugged on his lab coat, keeping it open for the moment as he leaned forward to look at the array of papers covering the bench. “I’ve read over the SOP a dozen times now, but I cannot figure out how to input this tissue inventory that day shift left.”
Katsuki glanced at the screen and sighed. “That’s because you’re putting in the wrong number. For this one, you want the serial number, not the lot.”
Sero cleared the text box, typing in the new number. He hit save and was met with the “product successfully added” pop-up. “Son of a bitch. How do you keep all of these straight?”
“If you looked in the quick guide binder that Kamihara and I made, you’d see the list of all the codes and which numbers to use,” Katsuki deadpanned. He straightened, letting Sero finish logging in the inventory. His eyes drifted around the room, taking note of everything he’d need to fix before he got settled into this shift. The gel cards needed to be restocked, the shortdate board updated, and the box of pipette tips put back in their proper place.
“Oh yeah, don’t forget the new chem tech starts tonight.”
“Since when do we have a new chem tech? What happened to Spark Plug?”
“Dude.” Sero stared at him in disbelief. “Kaminari went on paternity leave last Friday. We had a party for him and everything.”
“I don’t work Fridays, and it was my off weekend,” Katsuki reasoned, grabbing a box of new cards off the shelf and placing them neatly in the rack on the bench.
“And Kaminari has been talking about how excited he is about his kid being born since he found out his wife was pregnant.” Sero's tone had turned harsh, and Katsuki tried to find it within himself to be remorseful. Those kinds of emotions didn’t come to him easily. Not for a lack of trying, but living through centuries of death and destruction had both numbed and hardened him to emotions that could be used as weakness. Luckily for him, he’d gotten excellent at faking them.
“Well, then I‘m happy for him. Maybe keeping up with an infant will help him learn the importance of keeping things organized.” Katsuki caught Sero shaking his head out of the corner of his eye.
“You’re something else, man. Please don’t give this new guy a hard time. Kid just got out of a program, but he sounds like a prodigy. Double major in biochem and clinical lab science, passed national and international boards within a month of graduating. I think you’ll like him.” Sero waggled his eyebrows, to which Katuski rolled his eyes in response. “Just don’t expect him to be up to your insane standards right off the bat.”
“My standards are the basic psychomotor, affective, and cognitive requirements needed to be a successful technologist.” Katsuki moved his badge from his scrubs to his lab coat, quickly doing up all the necessary buttons. He heard Sero sigh, but ignored him in favor of grabbing a pair of gloves from their box. “You should get going before you get called into the office for unapproved overtime again.”
Sero sputtered, near ripping off his lab coat and hanging it on the hook behind the door. “I forgot to clock out one time, dude.” Katsuki didn’t bother with pointing out that it was actually three times that it had happened. Besides, it was better for someone else to be in that office than him.
“Whatever. Have a good night, Bakugou. I hope it’s quiet for you.”
“You mother fucker.” Katsuki growled. Sero ducked out of the room while cackling like the obnoxious prick he was. He snapped his gloves on a little too harshly, the nail of his thumb breaking through the left hand. With a curse, Katsuki ripped it off, tossing the broken glove into the trash and replacing it with a new one.
There wasn’t much written on the communication log aside from their current inventory and that they received a tissue shipment that afternoon. Katsuki did a quick count anyways, taking note of any expiration dates.
A bag of B negative had three days left, so he wrote it on their short date board and marked the bag with a ‘use first’ sticker. As he was putting the bag back in the fridge, a knock sounded at the blood bank door. “Be with you in a moment.”
“Oh, I didn’t mean to interrupt! I just wanted to introduce myself to everyone before I got set up.” A voice Katsuki didn’t recognize made him pause. He quickly finished placing the bag in its proper place, then straightened and turned toward the voice. His eyes landed on a young looking man wearing bright red scrubs, complete with equally obnoxious looking sneakers. The ID badge dangling from his chest pocket read ‘Midoriya Izuku - Medical Lab Scientist.’ Katsuki slowly lifted his gaze up to the man’s face and froze.
‘Well, fuck me.’