Bloodsucker

In D&D lore, true vampires are created after an alpha vampire drinks all of a person’s blood and allows them to drink some of theirs in return. But they’d never allow that. In between true living and true vampirism is a vampire spawn. Once the true vampire creates the spawn, they own them completely—mind and body. Thus, true vampires never give their spawn the permission to drink from them in return. After all, why create an equal out of an obedient puppet? 

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My abuser, Paige, knew I had a hard time saying “no” because she made me that way. One night, about a year into our relationship, she was drunk. I tried to say no. She didn’t stop. No one, not even my parents, ever taught me that my boundaries were worth being respected, so I believed her when she spent the following week convincing me that it “wasn’t that bad.” For a long time, this moment in my life was repressed. It took—and I know how this sounds—a video game to unlock this memory. 

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Baldur’s Gate 3 takes the Dungeons and Dragons experience and makes it into a video game. You can choose to play as a vampire spawn character, Astarion, who is on the run from Cazador, his vampire master who tormented him for centuries. Cazador forced Astarion to use his body to seduce and lure back victims to feed upon while he was forced to feed on nothing but vermin. “What I wanted, how I felt about what I was doing, it never mattered,” Astarion says in one scene. Cazador kept Astarion captive for two hundred years. For two hundred years, Astarion knew only cruelty and pain. 

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I spent nearly four years living under the shadow of Paige’s twisted logic, so many years of her seizing and reshaping my emotions for me, that I don’t remember how I’m actually supposed to feel on my own. Paige sank her teeth into me, draining me of the strength to defend myself and pumping me full of venomous self-doubt in the form of phrases like “that didn’t happen”, “you’re making a bigger problem out of nothing”, or her favorite, “you’re projecting your problems with your past onto me.” She was relentless, and I was vulnerable. I was always vulnerable, and that is how she got away with convincing me to sleep with her one more time after the break up.

* 

Sometimes, dreams force me to remember. A few nights after Paige used my body for the last time, I had a dream about the two of us. I was alone at first, at the crossroads of a bright, white void and our old apartment, right between where our bedroom door opened into the hallway. I was frantically pulling leeches off of my skin, but one in particular refused to die. When I blinked in the dream, the leeches were gone and she was there, hand outstretched toward me with a sinister smile. Just like how it actually happened, she wanted to use me again. Unlike what actually transpired, I knew better and refused. 

* 

The last time I saw her, she kissed my wrist and told me how happy she was that my body was still hers, even if we were broken up. I felt my blood run cold. I should have ran then and there, and I know that, but I bit my tongue. It took every ounce of courage I had, but I finally freed myself. My body wasn’t hers. It was never hers. Whatever she had of me was taken by force and manipulation. 

* 

During the boss battle against Cazador, I took a screenshot of one of Astarion’s lines of dialogue. I remember I sat in my chair, hugging my knees to my chest. Tears fell onto the top of my desk. I repeatedly traced the subtitles on my computer screen with the cursor as I read the line of dialogue over and over, taking in Astarion’s determined facial expression in this one moment of the game as he defiantly steps forward to throw a punch in Cazador’s direction, fangs bared. It made me think of Paige. It made me remember that night all those years ago. I saw myself reflected in Astarion’s red eyes. I am so much more than what you made me.