FIC: The Tongueless Caverns of the Earth, Part 3
See the masterpost for header with warnings & information, or go back to Part 1 or Part 2.
**
Nick wakes up feeling weak and ravenous, alone and naked and sore in bed in the musty house. Joe's nowhere to be seen, and for a second, before Nick remembers to be relieved, he feels crushingly alone, abandoned.
He gets dressed as fast as he can, grabbing his shirt and jeans from where they were drying on the furniture, now stiff and cold from hanging up. Then he drinks the whole bottle of water left on the nightstand before he rummages through his pack for food, wolfing down a granola bar and then getting out his can opener to wrench open some Spaghetti-O's. He's so starving he almost doesn't even get out a spoon, is tempted to just eat with his fingers, all light-headed and exhausted from blood loss. Joe can't have drunk too much from him, but Nick feels weird anyway, out of it and hungry.
He expects Joe to come back in at any moment, but by the time Nick's finished the can and started in on some beef jerky, there's still no sign of him.
Maybe Joe's gone. Maybe he's not coming back. Nick doesn't know how to feel about that.
It's dark out behind the curtains, the middle of the night, and Joe could be out there killing people. People could be dying because Nick couldn't bring himself to kill his brother, because Nick's a sick pervert whose ass is still slick with his brother's come.
Nick should go out and find him, make sure Joe's not actually hurting anyone. He gets up to strap his weapons back on, to get ready to hunt, but before he can, he hears distant singing. Confused, he walks tentatively to the door of the bedroom, listening. He thinks it's coming from close by.
When he opens the door he can tell it's Joe's voice, that it's Joe singing soft and melancholy somewhere in the house. As Nick moves cautiously down the hallway he begins to make out the words.
Joe's singing an old hymn, but he's transposed it to a minor key, so it sounds thin and creepy, echoing in the empty house. "What can make me whole again?" Joe sings as floorboards creak under Nick's feet. Joe's humming through the words he can't remember. "Nothing but the blood of la-la. Oh, precious is hmm-mmm, that makes me white as snow! No other mmm I know, nothing but the blood of mmm-mmm."
The song's coming from one of the rooms off the hallway, and Nick hesitantly pushes in the door, trying to keep it from creaking. As the door swings open, he can see that it's a child's bedroom, a little girl's, all pink and frilly. Joe's got his back to the door, and he's sitting on the floor playing with a dollhouse, moving barbies around the rooms, still singing his song about blood, making sure not to say the name, "Jesus." He probably thinks it's funny, a vampire singing hymns about blood like that. When Nick takes a step into the room he can see that Joe's got a Barbie and a Ken and is rocking their bodies together obscenely, pretending they're fucking, even creepier when it's in the middle of the stuffed animals and ruffled bedskirt, Joe sitting cross-legged on a pink carpet.
Joe must hear him then, because he turns around, grinning his sharp white grin, his eyes all wrong. From the back he'd just looked like Joe, but facing Nick he's a perversion, vacant and inanimate, his eyes black buttons, flat and reflective.
"You're awake!" Joe says. "Awesome, c'mere, I got you a present." He jumps up, movements smooth and graceful, grabbing Nick by the arm and dragging him away, their feet loud as they thunder down the empty staircase, Joe obviously not caring if anybody hears them.
In the front hallway there's a guitar, propped beside the door. It's a good guitar, expensive, the wood beautiful and fine-grained.
"Do you like it?" Joe says, bright and keyed up, all nerves behind his empty eyes. "It's the best one I could find."
Nick hasn't touched a musical instrument this whole year. He looks at it, not knowing what to do. He doesn't think he wants to play.
"C'mon," Joe says, picking it up and holding it out to him. "Take it. That's just the first half of the surprise."
Feeling like someone else is moving his limbs, like he's a marionette or a mechanized toy, Nick slowly takes the guitar, Joe beaming at him with a razor-toothed grin. Then Joe's throwing the front door of the house open and bouncing down the steps into the empty street. The moon's nearly full, so Nick can see to follow him as Joe walks down the middle of the road, right down the yellow stripe, through the weedy grass growing up through the cracking asphalt, past the broken windows of vacant houses. Joe's all silver-pale in the moonlight, unearthly ahead of him.
Joe leads him to an empty space that was probably originally a park -- there's a playground with broken swings, a rusty slide, a cracked water fountain. Down at one end is a bandshell, where probably a marching band played for Fourth of July, where maybe the whole town assembled a long time ago. Joe heads straight for the stage, jumping up onto it like he belongs there.
Being on stage is another thing Nick hasn't done in a year. He stands at the base of it holding the new guitar awkwardly, not sure what to do.
"C'mon, Nick, look, isn't this great?" Joe says. He spreads his arms out, gesturing to the whole place. "Get up here and play!"
Nick doesn't want to, but he feels like his will's been taken away, like he has to do what Joe says. He goes around to the stairs, climbing them carefully, putting the strap of the guitar over his shoulders. His stomach's churning just being up there, just touching a guitar. No Kevin. No Garbo, no John Taylor. Just him and Joe and the grass coming up through the floor of the stage, the vast empty expanse of vacant lot where the audience should be.
But Joe seems to find the emptiness of the town, of the park, of America, to be this awesome thing, making the whole world his playground. With his mouth, he starts sounding out the start of "Tonight."
"Nick, c'mon!" he says. Like a zombie, Nick starts playing the chords, his fingers shaping them without him having to think about it, the sense memory of it so clear. He's playing the song a little too slow, though, and acoustic like this it sounds like a dirge. But Joe's bobbing his head, enthusiastic like they've got amps and Kevin and a band, like their parents are in the wings, like the grassy space in front of them is full of screaming fans. The strings hurt Nick's uncalloused fingers.
"Well, here we are again," Joe sings, and then they're playing a concert for nobody, for the swaying grass and the owls in the trees, hooting in the distance. "As the morning sun begins to rise, we're fading fast," Joe sings, and Nick feels like throwing up.
Nick doesn't know why he keeps playing, but he does, through the whole song, and a few more after that. Joe's just so happy. Later they go back to the house and Joe fucks him again, bending him over the couch, telling Nick over and over how glad he is he found him. Nick thinks about being back in that cemetery, warm under the ground, about the peace it must be to just be bones.
**
"Where do you want to go?" Joe asks. He's standing on top of an abandoned minivan with long-flat tires, bouncing absently, the metal creaking.
Nick's sitting on the curb, his pack on his back, stakes strapped to his chest, ready to go. While they were having sex Joe bit him again, drank, so he's still weak and foggy-headed, unable to think about anything much. His neck hurts; his head aches. Joe's very high up, too high to really look at directly without straining his neck, pulling at the scabs there.
It's strange to be in a group of two again, to be talking out loud about where to go. It's like Nick's a normal hunter, someone who works in a team, who has a backup. He thinks longingly of the hunters he met in Cincinnati, who seemed so ordinary, so human, who wanted him to join them. He should've done that a long time ago, teamed up with someone, been a person. Maybe that could've saved him from this, but it's too late now. It feels like years since he met those hunters.
"East," Nick says, even so. "Let's go east." Those other hunters were going up the east coast, he remembers vaguely. Maybe that's the place to go if you want to be human, even if there's not a lot of hope for Nick at this point.
"Okay," Joe says, and he jumps off the roof, landing on his feet like a cat, light. He shouldn't be able to do that; every once in awhile Nick'll forget that he's a vampire, that he has this cool, durable strength to him, and then he'll jump off a minivan like it's jumping off a curb and Nick remembers. "East it is."
**
Traveling together, they go more slowly than Nick would by himself. Joe's a ball of energy, swinging from lampposts, walking the whole way down one street on top of parked cars, leaping lightly from one roof to the next, Nick trudging down the sidewalk beside him. When they pass stores Joe insists on going in, seeing if there's anything cool to loot. There hardly ever is -- mostly people took the good stuff with them when they moved to the cities, and a lot of vampires have been here before them anyway, but sometimes you'll find the odd place that hasn't been touched. Joe's constantly optimistic that this next store is going to be the one.
Joe breaks the window of a little boutique with a trash can, the glass shattering loud in the stillness of the night. He looks back at Nick after he does it, all grinning and pleased with himself; if he were a dog, his tail would be wagging. Nick feels strange as he watches Joe disappear into the blackness of the store. Joe's better at seeing in the dark than Nick is -- maybe his eyes really are all pupil, black and receptive.
Nick sits on the curb to wait for him, and maybe five minutes later, Joe comes bursting out of the store again, beaming. He's got something purple in his hands and he practically dances over to Nick, his movements still oddly smooth and light -- Nick can't get used to them. "Nick, Nick," he says. "Stand up."
Nick gets to his feet slowly, and Joe starts wrapping the purple cloth around his neck -- it's a scarf. "It's perfect!" Joe says, tucking it around the back of his collar. "Do you like it?"
Nick looks down at it and doesn't know what to say. It is warm, welcome in the late autumn chill, but the purple isn't exactly good hunting camouflage. Not that he's doing any hunting now anyway. "Sure," Nick says finally, perversely not wanting to hurt Joe's feelings, not wanting to let him down. The scarf covers up his bites anyway. That's a little bit of a relief. "It's great."
"You look so awesome," Joe says. It's strange to see him acting like Joe, all bouncy and enthusiastic, but moving so much more gracefully than Joe ever did, his eyes flat, his skin colorless. Nick's half paralyzed with horror and half wanting to fall into it, to imagine it's really Joe, to have a brother again. He's missed him -- the sick thing is that he's missed him more than anything.
"Thanks, Joe," Nick says. He feels fake, like he's putting on a play, calling this thing Joe when it's not Joe. Even though he can almost pretend.
Joe smiles, but then suddenly moves vampire-fast, so fast it's just a blur, snatching at something at their feet. When he comes back up again, he's got a snake in his hand, holding it pinched between two fingers right behind the head, the snake writhing around. It's just a little garter snake, but it makes Nick jump, rear back. With everything so overgrown, snakes are a real problem for hunters -- Nick carries a snakebite kit in his pack, and he hears rattlesnakes pretty regularly.
Joe puts the snake to his mouth and slides it against one fang, splitting it open. As the snake dies he puts it in his mouth, sucking on it like it's a lollypop, draining the blood from it casually, like he does it all the time.
He finally notices that Nick's staring at him in horror and looks a little confused. "What?" he says, all garbled around the snake.
"What are you doing?" Nick manages to get out, feeling sick. The snake hangs out of the corner of Joe's mouth, making Joe into a horror, something foreign and incomprehensible, not his brother at all.
Joe still looks confused. "I'm hungry," he says. "What? You can have the meat when I'm done, if you want."
Nick swallows and turns, trying to go back to walking, trying to forget it. He just -- he needs to not think about it. Any of it. Their whole life out here these last few days. "No," he says. "That's okay."
There aren't a lot of humans wandering around at night anymore, and Nick knew that vampires drain animals a lot to stay alive. He finds the carcasses all the time. He just... didn't think about Joe doing it. Or about it being snakes.
They walk through the night, finally stopping when Joe says it's getting toward sunrise, though Nick can't see much of a difference in the sky in front of them. But Joe says he can smell it, and then goes about trying to pick a house for them to sleep in during the day. It's strange -- Nick's gotten used to sleeping outside in the sunshine, trusting the light to protect him, but now that he's with Joe they need thick curtains, the safety of walls, everything reversed. Nick hasn't seen the sun in what feels like forever, relegated to this long night, this long darkness.
Once Joe finally picks a house, he goes around to every room of it shutting the blinds, closing the curtains, making sure the windows are completely covered, that no light can get through the chinks, that it's all closed up like a tomb. The house feels even stuffier and more claustrophobic once that's done, no stars out the windows, no trees, just Nick and Joe in these shut-up rooms. Joe takes Nick up to the master bedroom, the double bed there.
"Nick," he says as he takes Nick's clothes off. "Nicholas, Nicky J." He touches Nick all over, running his hands over Nick's chest and arms and back like he's memorizing it all, like he's checking to see that Nick's all there, the way a parent might count all their baby's fingers and toes. His skin is cool, and Nick starts shivering as Joe nuzzles into his neck. It's always coldest right before the sun comes up, and it's been a long night walking out in the late autumn chill. The house at least cuts the wind, but it's not heated and there aren't enough blankets. Nick can't stop shivering.
Joe licks at his neck. "You cold?" he asks.
Nick nods, trying to keep his teeth from chattering. He feels out of control, how he can't stop his jaw from shaking, can't stop his body jittering. How he wants Joe to stop touching him and to never stop, all at once.
Joe licks at his neck again, his teeth grazing Nick but not pressing in. "I could turn you," Joe says slowly, quiet and hesitant like he's not sure how Nick will react, like he's offering Nick a present he's sure is going to be thrown back in his face. "It's easy. You wouldn't ever be cold again."
Nick's cold, so cold. But he can't do it, can't say yes, he just can't. His heart's beating hard and he doesn't want to die. "No," Nick says through his chattering teeth. "No, thanks."
Joe doesn't press it, even though he keeps nuzzling at Nick's neck. "Okay," he says, and then he's kissing Nick, starting to turn him over in the bed. Nick lets him, going over onto his belly, dropping his head to his forearms. Joe's cold at his back, beginning to move, work him open, and Nick's still shivering. He lies there freezing and tries not to think.
**
Nick oversleeps, woozy and exhausted from blood loss and stress. He doesn't know how long ago the sun set, but Joe's not in bed with him, and Nick dresses slowly in the stuffy bedroom. He's starving and running low on food, but he's pretty sure this house is near a 7-11 that probably still has some canned goods. He might as well go down and get some while he waits for Joe to get back.
The street is dark and empty when he gets outside, the stars bright, and he picks through the wreck of the convenience store, looking for anything he can find. It smells terrible in there, and he thinks animals have gotten into some of the food, but he finds some cans that are intact and takes them out into the street to eat them.
He ends up sitting on the hood of a car, eating mandarin oranges out of a can with his fingers. It's very quiet, just the sound of crickets and the wind in the trees. It doesn't sound like there's anyone else alive for miles.
He's just finished the oranges and has gotten off the car to grab another one of the cans from the ground when he hears someone yelping in the distance, a gleeful, ecstatic sound. Nick goes very still and wary, listening hard for where it's coming from, but after a few more yelps, coming closer and closer, he realizes that it's Joe.
God, Joe's so dumb, being so loud -- why's he drawing so much attention to himself? Though -- maybe Nick's thinking like a prey animal. Maybe if you're the predator you don't have to worry about things like that.
The yelps get closer and closer, and then Joe tears around the corner, running fast and happy, and he doesn't even slow down much as he gets close to Nick, just barrels into him, laughing and bearing him down to the pavement, arms and legs all over him like a puppy. Nick goes down on his back, Joe on top of him, Nick laughing in spite of himself.
Joe kisses him all over his face, and he's hot and sticky, and Nick doesn't know why, but when Joe pulls back a little Nick can see that his mouth is dripping red, blood all over him, smeared dark and thick over his chin, around his lips. Nick recoils back, banging his head against the asphalt.
"What?" Joe says.
Nick feels like he's going to throw up. He's been pretending this is Joe, that this isn't an evil thing, but here Joe is coming back to him with someone's blood still on him, someone Nick didn't stop him from killing. "You're all bloody," Nick manages to say. He just wants Joe to go away, wants this all to go away, wants to stop existing somehow. He can see his own pale reflection in Joe's black eyes.
"Hmm?" Joe says. "Oh. Right. It's just from a deer, would you relax?"
"A deer?" Nick says.
Joe's starting to unbutton his shirt, still weighing Nick down, cool and heavy against Nick's skin, trying to work his thigh between Nick's legs, spreading them. "Yeah, I was starving," he says. "So I killed a deer."
Nick's looking up at him but Joe won't make eye contact. His shirt's bloody too, spatters of gore everywhere. "Would you even tell me if it were from a person?" Nick asks.
"Sure," Joe says, but he's still not looking Nick in the eye.
Nick wants to believe him so badly. And really -- it probably was a deer. There aren't many people hanging around outside the cities at night, right? So... it probably was. Though Nick wonders what he would do if he actually saw Joe killing someone, if he actually saw Joe eating a human being. That's an uncomfortable thought, because he honestly doesn't know, and that scares him as much as anything, Joe on top of him like this, hot blood dripping off him and onto Nick. Nick all bloody by proxy.
Joe's hyper and wound-up, rolling his hips against Nick, working his hands between them to try to get at Nick's fly. And the sick thing is, Nick recognizes that feeling, being all pent up and full of adrenaline after a hunt, killing something and then wanting to fuck something, needing to get that energy out. After hunting vampires, Nick would feel the exact same way, needing to jerk off somewhere afterward, desperate and turned on and trying not to think about how fucked up that was. He remembers once having vampire blood on his hand as he did it, needing to touch himself so badly he couldn't even bother to wash up first.
He's never seen it from quite this angle, though, Joe's bloody face looking down at him, Joe's pointed teeth and matte eyes, Joe shoving his hips into him, hard through his pants, desperate and needy and humping Nick like he can't help himself.
They're in the middle of the street, lying all obscene out in the open where anyone could see them. "Joe," Nick says, pushing at his shoulder. "C'mon, let's go inside."
"Why?" Joe says. "No one's around." He's worked Nick's fly open and his hand wraps around Nick's cock, making Nick jerk up into him involuntarily, getting harder and harder. Gravel and weeds poke at the back of Nick's neck. The faded yellow line down the center of the street is beside his left hand, and Nick's listening hard, mortified, trying to hear if anyone's coming up on them, if anybody's going to catch them, but all he can hear is his own heart in his ears, his own gasping breaths. Joe wiggles Nick's jeans down just far enough, so they're around his knees, so Joe can press his legs apart, and Nick's already aching for it, can feel how bad he wants Joe inside.
"Joe," Nick says, squirming around. "C'mon, someone could see us."
Joe snorts a little bit, wiggling his own jeans down so his cock springs out, so it's poking between Nick's legs. Nick spreads them wider before he can stop himself. "No one cares," he says. "No one's here. We've got the whole world to ourselves."
That's not true, Nick knows it's not true, but right now it almost feels like it. Over Joe's shoulder he can see rusting cars, the broken windows of storefronts, grass growing up through the sidewalk, empty stars in the sky. The only sounds are nature sounds, animals, a raccoon digging at an old trashcan, the whole countryside reverting to wilderness. And Joe and Nick in the middle of it, fucking alone in the street, Joe between Nick's legs.
Joe guides his cock to Nick's asshole with his hand, starting to stuff the bulb of the head inside. Nick's still so slick from the last time it goes easy, so open from how much they've been doing this that it doesn't even hurt, that the burn and stretch of it just feels good. Once his dick's caught there, Joe presses in hard and fast, sheathing his whole length hard inside Nick, so Nick can feel him deep, so Nick's all full and tight, overwhelmed with it.
Nick gasps, and Joe looks down at him with happy soot-black eyes, inhuman and wrong and pleased, his bloody mouth sharp and brutal, his lips falling open. "Fuck, you feel so good," Joe says as he starts to move, as the slick length of him slips back out of Nick before he shoves it back in, moving out slow and in fast, so Nick's body jars and Nick grunts on each thrust. "You take it so good," Joe says. The blood smeared around his mouth stands out even brighter on his pale skin, and Nick closes his eyes, giving in to it.
The wind picks up, ruffling the weeds around them, and Nick tries to stop thinking about whether anyone else is around, vampires or humans or whoever, whether anyone could be an audience to this. How Nick's legs are spread and open, how Joe's fucking him hard and fast, rutting crudely in the middle of the road.
Vampires probably wouldn't think anything of it, though. Just another vampire and his human pet, some stupid loser who thinks vampires are sexy, who's willing to go along with it, to get drained bit by bit as the vampire fucks him -- until finally one day the vampire gets bored and sucks him dry, leaves him white and empty on the side of the road, not even bothering to turn him. Stupid teenage Twilight fans, stupid groupies. If a vampire walked by right now and saw Joe doing this to Nick, they'd just figure Nick was one of those.
Maybe Nick is. Nick doesn't even know anymore. He closes his eyes and starts to jerk himself off in time with Joe moving in his body, waits for the bite to come.
**
The days are starting to blur together, turning into a horrible routine -- Nick's more and more lightheaded every day, dizzy and fatigued, and there's no way his body can take much more of this. He needs to stop it, get to a city, see a doctor, something. Get free from this horror, this slow death he's walking towards. Sometimes during the day while Joe's asleep he takes a stake and tries to make himself put it through Joe's heart, put an end to this. One of them has to die here, they can't go on like this, but he can never bring himself to actually do it, actually kill Joe. He wishes he could, but he doesn't have the stomach for it, no matter how much he tells himself that this is a monster, that it isn't Joe, that it isn't his brother. No matter what Joe does to him.
He thinks maybe he could manage running away, but every time he gets the chance he just can't seem to actually leave, be alone again -- he can't stand the thought of going back to having nobody, even if this perverse non-Joe shouldn't really count as somebody. Besides, running away would take a plan, and he can't think with his constant headache, his foggy brain that can't seem to focus on much of anything. It always seems easier just to sleep, to give in, to let Joe take him east for one more day.
He loses track of the time. It gets colder and darker every day.
**
One night Joe finds them a house to stay in that vampires have used before, so all the windows are boarded up, the inside protected from the sunlight. There's a drained human corpse downstairs, just starting to rot, and Joe drags it outside matter-of-factly, dumping it into the backyard like trash, like nothing you would ever think of bothering to bury. Nick tries not to look at it, its limbs splayed, torso rolled half on its side, its head at an impossible angle. The whole house smells awful, like decay, but Joe doesn't seem to notice. Nick pretends he doesn't notice either.
The house is pitch black with the windows boarded up, so from the inside you can't tell how close it is to dawn at all. Joe leads Nick up to the bedroom, Nick following him blindly in the dark, but at least upstairs Joe lights a candle, so Nick can see the dim outlines of the furniture.
Joe sits up against the headboard of the bed, pulling Nick in between his spread legs so Nick's leaning back against his chest. He starts jerking Nick off slowly as he bites his neck, starting to sip blood out in this leisurely way, not taking too much at a time, just licking drops away. Nick's all sluggish, barely awake, Joe's erection digging into his back, Joe's cool body wrapped around him. It's a night like any other, lethargic and sexual and Joe's hand moving in time with his mouth on Nick's skin. Nick reclines against him and doesn't know if he hates him or loves him.
Nick's not sure how much time goes by -- he's half-asleep, his eyes mostly closed, the lazy arousal drawing out -- but then there's a bang from downstairs, startling him awake. Joe stops moving behind him, sitting up straight, going tense.
"What's that?" Nick mutters as Joe starts to get up, sliding out from under Nick, pulling his jeans back on with those strange graceful movements he has. "Joe?" Nick says.
Joe smiles tightly, his black eyes flat, reflecting the flame of the candle from beside the bed. "Probably some other vampires looking to camp out here," he says. "No big deal." Then he yells, "Hey, occupado!" as he starts out of the room, shutting the door carefully behind him.
Oh, okay. Joe will take care of it. Nick's so tired. He lets his eyes flutter closed again, leaning back against the pillows. He hurts all over, and he can hear Joe running down the stairs. He just wants to go to sleep.
But then to his surprise there's yelling, the sounds of a scuffle downstairs, thumping and banging, and Nick's wide awake again, sitting straight up. He doesn't know what's going on, but the sounds of a fight have made his instincts kick in, so he's grabbed a stake and is up and out of the bed before he quite knows what he's doing, pulling his boxers back on fast, heart thumping with adrenaline. Why is Joe fighting? Why would other vampires want to hurt him?
Nick fumbles his way through the deep darkness of the hallway, finding the stairs by feel. As he goes down them, though, it's getting lighter, and pretty soon he's squinting -- that's sunlight. He didn't even know it was past dawn. It's so bright -- he'd forgotten how bright the sun is, even indirectly like this, even in the shadows away from it. The front door of the house must be open around the corner from the stairs.
There's a crash from right nearby, and Nick takes another step down, and suddenly he's low enough to see what's going on. He expects Joe to be fighting the other vampires -- but of course it's not vampires, the sun's out, of course it's not. There are two human hunters there instead, one lunging at Joe with a stake in his hand, Joe leaping out of the way and knocking him back, vampire-quick and terrifying, so the hunter flies across the room, crashing through an end table and into a wall, sliding slumped to the ground and staying there, not moving. Nick doesn't know if he's dead or just unconscious.
The other hunter circles around, then comes at Joe, stake poised to attack him. Joe tackles him to the ground so they're scuffling, Joe on top, then the hunter, grappling for dominance, Joe holding the hunter's wrist, keeping the stake away from him. They look so strange wrestling with each other like that, the hunter's tan so dark against Joe's pale skin.
No one's seen Nick yet, and he stands there paralyzed on the stairs, not knowing what to do. It's Joe, his brother Joe, fighting these strangers... but it's not Joe, it's a demon in Joe's body, and Joe's just another vampire to these hunters, another vampire who they think deserves to die. Who Nick would kill without thinking twice about it if it weren't his brother. If Nick weren't pretending it was his brother.
The hunter who'd gotten thrown across the room, who has red hair, moves slightly, waking up, blinking his eyes rapidly like he's trying to get his vision to clear. He must have just been knocked out. As he looks blearily around the room, he's the first one to catch sight of Nick, and he stares, all confused and out of it, like he doesn't understand what he's seeing. For a second Nick realizes how strange this must look, Nick standing on the stairs in just his underwear, his pale bare chest, bite marks still on his neck, like any vampire groupie except for the stake in his hand. Coming downstairs from where he'd just been up in a vampire's bed.
For a second Nick thinks the hunter looks vaguely familiar, but before he can place him there's a bang and Nick swivels to look at the fight again, at what Joe's doing. The dark-haired hunter he's fighting is scrambling across the room to grab his stake -- the bang must've been Joe knocking it out of his hand. In a second, the hunter's on his feet again, holding the stake, spinning to face Joe, but while he was grabbing it, Joe looked up, caught sight of Nick standing there on the staircase.
Joe's face lights up. "Nick!" he says, like the cavalry's just come, like now he knows they can win. "Quick, help me out!"
At Joe's voice, the dark-haired hunter whips his head around to see who Joe's talking to, momentarily distracted, staring at Nick. In just that brief pause Joe seizes his advantage and is on him, twisting the hunter's wrist so the stake falls out of his hand. The hunter yells in pain and Joe lunges at his throat, sinking his teeth into it before the hunter even has a chance to move. It must be a glancing bite, because the hunter's still struggling, but oh God, what's Joe doing?
"Joe!" Nick yells. He can see the dark blood seeping out of the hunter's throat, but the other, redheaded hunter is barely getting to his feet, holding onto the doorjamb next to him for support like he's dizzy and unsteady from being knocked out, so it's not like he can even help his friend. Oh, God, Joe's going to kill this guy right in front of Nick.
Nick can't just stand here and watch this. He rushes over, grabs Joe's shoulder, tries to pull him off. "Joe!" he says again, trying to get him to stop, shaking his shoulder. "Joe, stop it!"
The dark-haired hunter is groaning, blood dribbling out of him, dark as it oozes down his throat around Joe's mouth, where Joe's not even sucking down all of it, and Joe won't stop, he won't stop, he's still drinking even though Nick's pleading with him, shaking him.
"C'mon, Nick," Joe mumbles. "We're winning." He slurps at the hunter's neck and he's not going to stop, he's going to drain him dry. He thinks Nick's on his side.
"Do something!" the redhead says from across the room, wobbling on his feet, clinging to the wall and looking at Nick like Nick's a fellow human being. "Please!" Nick looks at him helplessly for a second, not knowing what to do. How can the hunter and Joe both think Nick's on their side?
He doesn't know what to do, so he pulls at Joe harder, managing to dislodge him from the bite for a second, but that just annoys Joe. "Knock it off, Nicky," Joe says irritably and bats Nick away. He probably doesn't mean to hit him hard, but he's vampire-strong, and the blow knocks Nick back, hurts like hell on his collarbone.
Nick's angry now, goes to shove Joe back, and Joe hits him again, still trying to get back to drinking the hunter's blood, and then before Nick has time to think what he's doing, his hand moves out of instinct, reacting to the blow, to fighting with a vampire, and he brings the stake down. It goes into Joe's back, penetrating deep, through the cold flesh and blood, the squelch and pressure of it the same as every other time Nick has done this, the hundreds of times he's done this.
Joe goes limp, falling forward, heavy onto his prey, and the dark-haired hunter groans and shoves him off, so Joe's body slides away from him, falls onto the floor, the stake still buried in his chest. His limbs splay awkwardly and unnaturally, falling at odd angles, and he doesn't move.
Nick must've hit his heart. He always hits the heart. Joe's body is lying at his feet with Nick's stake buried deep inside him. There's a roaring in Nick's ears.
Nick staggers backward until he hits a wall, and then his knees give out so he slides down to the floor, still staring at Joe's body. It's lying right where that rotting human corpse had been when they came in. Everything's happening too fast and too bright, and how does Joe have a stake through him? Joe wasn't ready for that, had his back turned to Nick because it had never occurred to him that Nick might do that, turn traitor like that. Nick hadn't even totally meant to, he just -- he's staked so many vampires while they were doing that, sucking blood out of some human's throat, he couldn't help it. The hunter's blood is still smeared red around Joe's dead mouth.
Out of the corner of his eye, Nick can see that the redheaded hunter's finally steady enough to walk, and has hurried over to his friend, that he's wadded up a shirt or something to put some pressure on his friend's bite, trying to get the bleeding to slow down. They're talking in low murmurs to each other, all "You all right?" and "Here, let me..."
Nick can't process anything -- he feels like he should be able to rewind, to make it so none of that happened. He killed Joe -- how is that possible? He can still feel the stretch from Joe fucking him earlier, still feel where Joe's hands had been on his chest, his cock.
It's freezing in this house, a cold breeze coming in from the open door, and Nick starts to shiver, shake all over. He wraps his arms around his knees, scooting into the corner, so walls are on two sides of him, pressed against his back and side. Now that there's some light in the room, Nick can see the decay of the house like he hadn't when he and Joe had come in, the mildewed, peeling wallpaper, the dirty rug. It must still stink from the dead body earlier, too, but Nick's been inside so long he can't even smell that anymore, can only remember how strong the smell was at first, how it was like a blow to the face when you walked in the door.
The stake's made a gruesome hole in Joe's chest, blood slowly pooling underneath him, dripping out sluggishly since his heart's not beating, since he only has the blood in him that he's drunk. Nick did that to him.
"Hey," one of the hunters says, in a louder voice than they've been using up till now, all warm and friendly.
It takes Nick a second to realize the hunter's talking to him, and then even longer to be able to turn his head to look. Everything seems like it's happening at a distance.
It's the dark-haired one talking, the one with the bite. The other hunter must have gotten out their first-aid kit, because he's taping gauze to his friend's neck now, making a bandage to cover up the bite, most of the blood mopped up except for where it soaked into the dark-haired hunter's shirt. "Thanks," he says. "That was a close one. We really owe you."
Nick guesses he should say you're welcome, but he can't seem to get his mouth to move. He's gone numb, can't feel anything, can't think. The hunters look so odd, like there's something a little off about them, but then Nick realizes that he's just not used to seeing humans anymore, that the contrast between them and Joe makes them look cartoonishly healthy, color to their skin, their eyes ordinary brown and blue.
"Stop talking and hold still," the redhead murmurs to his friend, trying to tape the bandage in place, and the dark-haired one rolls his eyes, but holds still, making a face at Nick like, you see what I put up with?
But then as he looks at Nick, the dark-haired one's brow furrows, like he's trying to figure something out, and Nick starts to feel confused too, because now that he's really seeing them, he realizes he knows them from somewhere, but he can't place it.
"Um," the dark-haired one says. "Hey, aren't you -- I mean, aren't you that kid? From, where was it -- we waited at the gate together. I forget what city. You're a hunter."
The redhead looks up at Nick, surprised, but after he gets a good look at him he nods to himself. "Cincinnati," he says, filling in his friend's blanks. He goes back to the bandage, finishes putting the last piece of tape on, and takes a step back. "Yeah."
"I, um," Nick says. Oh, huh, they are those hunters. He had -- they were why he told Joe to go east. "Right, yeah. Hi."
"Are you okay?" the dark-haired one asks. "You're bleeding."
He is? Nick automatically puts a hand up to his neck and it comes back warm and sticky and bright with blood. Oh. Crap. Joe was too distracted to lick that closed and it must have been bleeding this whole time, because now that he looks it's all down Nick's chest, dark and gory.
"Here," the redhead says, and he grabs some cloth off the banister -- Nick and Joe had dropped all their stuff really haphazardly as they'd gone upstairs, leaving a trail of clothes behind them. The redhead comes over to Nick with the cloth and crouches down beside him, dabbing at Nick's bleeding neck, trying to get the blood cleared away so he can see the injury.
Nick knows he's going to see that it's a bite, that there are white scars of older ones beside it. That the hunters are going to realize Nick was calling that vampire by his name, that they're going to figure out what was going on, that Nick was letting Joe fuck him, that Nick's just some pathetic groupie with a hard-on for a monster. Normally Nick would be mortified at the idea of them finding out, but now he can't seem to feel anything. He can still see Joe's body over the hunter's shoulder.
The redhead's hands against Nick's neck feel incredibly hot, like there's something wrong, like they burn where they touch him. For a second Nick wonders if this guy has a fever or something before he remembers that human hands are supposed to be warm.
The hunter sucks in a breath through his teeth as he sees Nick's bite, like he thinks it looks like it hurts, but then his face goes quiet and still as he sees the scars, and his eyes flick down to Nick's boxers for a second, then up to Nick's face, wary and confused. Nick can see him putting it together. He leans his head back against the wall behind him and closes his eyes, waiting for the hunter to say something, to be disgusted.
The hunter keeps quiet, though. He just goes back to dabbing at Nick's neck, and finally he presses the cloth against the bite. "Hold that there," he says to Nick. "Keep some pressure on it. It's almost stopped bleeding."
Nick swallows, blinking his eyes open, confused, but he does what he's told, puts his hand up to hold the cloth to the wound. As Nick does, he realizes that the cloth the hunter was using is the purple scarf Joe gave him, that blood's soaking into the dark fabric. Nick wants to move it away, keep it clean, but then realizes it's too late for that, that it's already stained, so he just gives in, presses it into the wound carefully.
"Is your stuff upstairs?" the dark-haired one says, and when Nick nods, he starts up to get it, taking the stairs two at a time, collecting clothes as he goes. He'll probably see the mussed bed when he gets up there, notice how the room smells like sex, but Nick can't seem to care. The redhead comes back with the first-aid kit and goes about bandaging Nick up. Both hunters are acting normal and business-like, like the world's not any different, and Nick feels so strange.
Joe's dead. It's all over. Nick's heart is pounding in his ears and he knows Joe's been dead for a year, but now his body's actually stopped moving, and Nick's so cold and empty. Joe was the last brother he had.
He feels dazed and woozy as he's bandaged up, as the blood's wiped off him, as he stands up and gets dressed. He keeps expecting Joe to open his eyes, to smile at Nick again with his horrible teeth, for it all to have been a mistake, but Joe doesn't, the corpse just lies there. Nick's still holding the blood-stiff scarf Joe gave him, twisting it in his hands.
The hunters are getting their stuff together, arguing about whether the redhead's well enough to get on the road or if he should rest since he got knocked out. "I'm fine," the redhead says. "Besides, I think we should all probably get to a hospital. We can probably make Columbus by tonight."
The dark-haired one looks dubious, putting his stake back into his belt. "Yeah, we'll travel real fast," he says. "Everyone all blood-lossed and concussed." He looks over at Nick, and Nick suddenly realizes that Nick's included in that group, that this guy's just casually making Nick a part of the 'everyone.' That's so strange. As Nick blinks, surprised, the hunter says to Nick, "You think you can make it to Columbus?"
Nick's still so stunned at the inclusion that it takes him a second to respond. "Um, yeah," he finally says. He hasn't been part of a group with anyone but Joe in a long time.
The dark-haired one shrugs, looking at his friend, a shrug like he's tried to talk sense into them, but whatever, if everyone's bound and determined to do the opposite. "Oh, fine," he says. "Let's get out of here then. It smells disgusting anyway." He swings his pack up onto his back.
The redhead smiles, picking up his own pack, and Nick does the same, feeling vague and distanced, like everything's a little unreal. Joe's body's still lying behind them, dark in the shadows.
As they go around the corner to the front door, for a second the light dazzles Nick's eyes, so he can't see at all. It's been so long since he's seen actual sunlight. He blinks and blinks and by the time he can see again, the redheaded hunter's walking out the door, and Nick sees the sunlight catch his hair, making it halo around his head for a second, bright and shining.
The dark-haired hunter gestures for Nick to go out the door next, like they want Nick in between them, like they can keep him safe, even though Nick barely knows what safe means anymore. Joe's dead behind him, stake through his heart in a house that smells like death, and he won't come after Nick ever again, and Nick feels like crying.
Nick hesitates for a moment, looking back at Joe, the pale limbs of his body, the sockets of his shadowed eyes, and then finally turns away.
He walks out into the sunlight.
**
END
**
Nick wakes up feeling weak and ravenous, alone and naked and sore in bed in the musty house. Joe's nowhere to be seen, and for a second, before Nick remembers to be relieved, he feels crushingly alone, abandoned.
He gets dressed as fast as he can, grabbing his shirt and jeans from where they were drying on the furniture, now stiff and cold from hanging up. Then he drinks the whole bottle of water left on the nightstand before he rummages through his pack for food, wolfing down a granola bar and then getting out his can opener to wrench open some Spaghetti-O's. He's so starving he almost doesn't even get out a spoon, is tempted to just eat with his fingers, all light-headed and exhausted from blood loss. Joe can't have drunk too much from him, but Nick feels weird anyway, out of it and hungry.
He expects Joe to come back in at any moment, but by the time Nick's finished the can and started in on some beef jerky, there's still no sign of him.
Maybe Joe's gone. Maybe he's not coming back. Nick doesn't know how to feel about that.
It's dark out behind the curtains, the middle of the night, and Joe could be out there killing people. People could be dying because Nick couldn't bring himself to kill his brother, because Nick's a sick pervert whose ass is still slick with his brother's come.
Nick should go out and find him, make sure Joe's not actually hurting anyone. He gets up to strap his weapons back on, to get ready to hunt, but before he can, he hears distant singing. Confused, he walks tentatively to the door of the bedroom, listening. He thinks it's coming from close by.
When he opens the door he can tell it's Joe's voice, that it's Joe singing soft and melancholy somewhere in the house. As Nick moves cautiously down the hallway he begins to make out the words.
Joe's singing an old hymn, but he's transposed it to a minor key, so it sounds thin and creepy, echoing in the empty house. "What can make me whole again?" Joe sings as floorboards creak under Nick's feet. Joe's humming through the words he can't remember. "Nothing but the blood of la-la. Oh, precious is hmm-mmm, that makes me white as snow! No other mmm I know, nothing but the blood of mmm-mmm."
The song's coming from one of the rooms off the hallway, and Nick hesitantly pushes in the door, trying to keep it from creaking. As the door swings open, he can see that it's a child's bedroom, a little girl's, all pink and frilly. Joe's got his back to the door, and he's sitting on the floor playing with a dollhouse, moving barbies around the rooms, still singing his song about blood, making sure not to say the name, "Jesus." He probably thinks it's funny, a vampire singing hymns about blood like that. When Nick takes a step into the room he can see that Joe's got a Barbie and a Ken and is rocking their bodies together obscenely, pretending they're fucking, even creepier when it's in the middle of the stuffed animals and ruffled bedskirt, Joe sitting cross-legged on a pink carpet.
Joe must hear him then, because he turns around, grinning his sharp white grin, his eyes all wrong. From the back he'd just looked like Joe, but facing Nick he's a perversion, vacant and inanimate, his eyes black buttons, flat and reflective.
"You're awake!" Joe says. "Awesome, c'mere, I got you a present." He jumps up, movements smooth and graceful, grabbing Nick by the arm and dragging him away, their feet loud as they thunder down the empty staircase, Joe obviously not caring if anybody hears them.
In the front hallway there's a guitar, propped beside the door. It's a good guitar, expensive, the wood beautiful and fine-grained.
"Do you like it?" Joe says, bright and keyed up, all nerves behind his empty eyes. "It's the best one I could find."
Nick hasn't touched a musical instrument this whole year. He looks at it, not knowing what to do. He doesn't think he wants to play.
"C'mon," Joe says, picking it up and holding it out to him. "Take it. That's just the first half of the surprise."
Feeling like someone else is moving his limbs, like he's a marionette or a mechanized toy, Nick slowly takes the guitar, Joe beaming at him with a razor-toothed grin. Then Joe's throwing the front door of the house open and bouncing down the steps into the empty street. The moon's nearly full, so Nick can see to follow him as Joe walks down the middle of the road, right down the yellow stripe, through the weedy grass growing up through the cracking asphalt, past the broken windows of vacant houses. Joe's all silver-pale in the moonlight, unearthly ahead of him.
Joe leads him to an empty space that was probably originally a park -- there's a playground with broken swings, a rusty slide, a cracked water fountain. Down at one end is a bandshell, where probably a marching band played for Fourth of July, where maybe the whole town assembled a long time ago. Joe heads straight for the stage, jumping up onto it like he belongs there.
Being on stage is another thing Nick hasn't done in a year. He stands at the base of it holding the new guitar awkwardly, not sure what to do.
"C'mon, Nick, look, isn't this great?" Joe says. He spreads his arms out, gesturing to the whole place. "Get up here and play!"
Nick doesn't want to, but he feels like his will's been taken away, like he has to do what Joe says. He goes around to the stairs, climbing them carefully, putting the strap of the guitar over his shoulders. His stomach's churning just being up there, just touching a guitar. No Kevin. No Garbo, no John Taylor. Just him and Joe and the grass coming up through the floor of the stage, the vast empty expanse of vacant lot where the audience should be.
But Joe seems to find the emptiness of the town, of the park, of America, to be this awesome thing, making the whole world his playground. With his mouth, he starts sounding out the start of "Tonight."
"Nick, c'mon!" he says. Like a zombie, Nick starts playing the chords, his fingers shaping them without him having to think about it, the sense memory of it so clear. He's playing the song a little too slow, though, and acoustic like this it sounds like a dirge. But Joe's bobbing his head, enthusiastic like they've got amps and Kevin and a band, like their parents are in the wings, like the grassy space in front of them is full of screaming fans. The strings hurt Nick's uncalloused fingers.
"Well, here we are again," Joe sings, and then they're playing a concert for nobody, for the swaying grass and the owls in the trees, hooting in the distance. "As the morning sun begins to rise, we're fading fast," Joe sings, and Nick feels like throwing up.
Nick doesn't know why he keeps playing, but he does, through the whole song, and a few more after that. Joe's just so happy. Later they go back to the house and Joe fucks him again, bending him over the couch, telling Nick over and over how glad he is he found him. Nick thinks about being back in that cemetery, warm under the ground, about the peace it must be to just be bones.
**
"Where do you want to go?" Joe asks. He's standing on top of an abandoned minivan with long-flat tires, bouncing absently, the metal creaking.
Nick's sitting on the curb, his pack on his back, stakes strapped to his chest, ready to go. While they were having sex Joe bit him again, drank, so he's still weak and foggy-headed, unable to think about anything much. His neck hurts; his head aches. Joe's very high up, too high to really look at directly without straining his neck, pulling at the scabs there.
It's strange to be in a group of two again, to be talking out loud about where to go. It's like Nick's a normal hunter, someone who works in a team, who has a backup. He thinks longingly of the hunters he met in Cincinnati, who seemed so ordinary, so human, who wanted him to join them. He should've done that a long time ago, teamed up with someone, been a person. Maybe that could've saved him from this, but it's too late now. It feels like years since he met those hunters.
"East," Nick says, even so. "Let's go east." Those other hunters were going up the east coast, he remembers vaguely. Maybe that's the place to go if you want to be human, even if there's not a lot of hope for Nick at this point.
"Okay," Joe says, and he jumps off the roof, landing on his feet like a cat, light. He shouldn't be able to do that; every once in awhile Nick'll forget that he's a vampire, that he has this cool, durable strength to him, and then he'll jump off a minivan like it's jumping off a curb and Nick remembers. "East it is."
**
Traveling together, they go more slowly than Nick would by himself. Joe's a ball of energy, swinging from lampposts, walking the whole way down one street on top of parked cars, leaping lightly from one roof to the next, Nick trudging down the sidewalk beside him. When they pass stores Joe insists on going in, seeing if there's anything cool to loot. There hardly ever is -- mostly people took the good stuff with them when they moved to the cities, and a lot of vampires have been here before them anyway, but sometimes you'll find the odd place that hasn't been touched. Joe's constantly optimistic that this next store is going to be the one.
Joe breaks the window of a little boutique with a trash can, the glass shattering loud in the stillness of the night. He looks back at Nick after he does it, all grinning and pleased with himself; if he were a dog, his tail would be wagging. Nick feels strange as he watches Joe disappear into the blackness of the store. Joe's better at seeing in the dark than Nick is -- maybe his eyes really are all pupil, black and receptive.
Nick sits on the curb to wait for him, and maybe five minutes later, Joe comes bursting out of the store again, beaming. He's got something purple in his hands and he practically dances over to Nick, his movements still oddly smooth and light -- Nick can't get used to them. "Nick, Nick," he says. "Stand up."
Nick gets to his feet slowly, and Joe starts wrapping the purple cloth around his neck -- it's a scarf. "It's perfect!" Joe says, tucking it around the back of his collar. "Do you like it?"
Nick looks down at it and doesn't know what to say. It is warm, welcome in the late autumn chill, but the purple isn't exactly good hunting camouflage. Not that he's doing any hunting now anyway. "Sure," Nick says finally, perversely not wanting to hurt Joe's feelings, not wanting to let him down. The scarf covers up his bites anyway. That's a little bit of a relief. "It's great."
"You look so awesome," Joe says. It's strange to see him acting like Joe, all bouncy and enthusiastic, but moving so much more gracefully than Joe ever did, his eyes flat, his skin colorless. Nick's half paralyzed with horror and half wanting to fall into it, to imagine it's really Joe, to have a brother again. He's missed him -- the sick thing is that he's missed him more than anything.
"Thanks, Joe," Nick says. He feels fake, like he's putting on a play, calling this thing Joe when it's not Joe. Even though he can almost pretend.
Joe smiles, but then suddenly moves vampire-fast, so fast it's just a blur, snatching at something at their feet. When he comes back up again, he's got a snake in his hand, holding it pinched between two fingers right behind the head, the snake writhing around. It's just a little garter snake, but it makes Nick jump, rear back. With everything so overgrown, snakes are a real problem for hunters -- Nick carries a snakebite kit in his pack, and he hears rattlesnakes pretty regularly.
Joe puts the snake to his mouth and slides it against one fang, splitting it open. As the snake dies he puts it in his mouth, sucking on it like it's a lollypop, draining the blood from it casually, like he does it all the time.
He finally notices that Nick's staring at him in horror and looks a little confused. "What?" he says, all garbled around the snake.
"What are you doing?" Nick manages to get out, feeling sick. The snake hangs out of the corner of Joe's mouth, making Joe into a horror, something foreign and incomprehensible, not his brother at all.
Joe still looks confused. "I'm hungry," he says. "What? You can have the meat when I'm done, if you want."
Nick swallows and turns, trying to go back to walking, trying to forget it. He just -- he needs to not think about it. Any of it. Their whole life out here these last few days. "No," he says. "That's okay."
There aren't a lot of humans wandering around at night anymore, and Nick knew that vampires drain animals a lot to stay alive. He finds the carcasses all the time. He just... didn't think about Joe doing it. Or about it being snakes.
They walk through the night, finally stopping when Joe says it's getting toward sunrise, though Nick can't see much of a difference in the sky in front of them. But Joe says he can smell it, and then goes about trying to pick a house for them to sleep in during the day. It's strange -- Nick's gotten used to sleeping outside in the sunshine, trusting the light to protect him, but now that he's with Joe they need thick curtains, the safety of walls, everything reversed. Nick hasn't seen the sun in what feels like forever, relegated to this long night, this long darkness.
Once Joe finally picks a house, he goes around to every room of it shutting the blinds, closing the curtains, making sure the windows are completely covered, that no light can get through the chinks, that it's all closed up like a tomb. The house feels even stuffier and more claustrophobic once that's done, no stars out the windows, no trees, just Nick and Joe in these shut-up rooms. Joe takes Nick up to the master bedroom, the double bed there.
"Nick," he says as he takes Nick's clothes off. "Nicholas, Nicky J." He touches Nick all over, running his hands over Nick's chest and arms and back like he's memorizing it all, like he's checking to see that Nick's all there, the way a parent might count all their baby's fingers and toes. His skin is cool, and Nick starts shivering as Joe nuzzles into his neck. It's always coldest right before the sun comes up, and it's been a long night walking out in the late autumn chill. The house at least cuts the wind, but it's not heated and there aren't enough blankets. Nick can't stop shivering.
Joe licks at his neck. "You cold?" he asks.
Nick nods, trying to keep his teeth from chattering. He feels out of control, how he can't stop his jaw from shaking, can't stop his body jittering. How he wants Joe to stop touching him and to never stop, all at once.
Joe licks at his neck again, his teeth grazing Nick but not pressing in. "I could turn you," Joe says slowly, quiet and hesitant like he's not sure how Nick will react, like he's offering Nick a present he's sure is going to be thrown back in his face. "It's easy. You wouldn't ever be cold again."
Nick's cold, so cold. But he can't do it, can't say yes, he just can't. His heart's beating hard and he doesn't want to die. "No," Nick says through his chattering teeth. "No, thanks."
Joe doesn't press it, even though he keeps nuzzling at Nick's neck. "Okay," he says, and then he's kissing Nick, starting to turn him over in the bed. Nick lets him, going over onto his belly, dropping his head to his forearms. Joe's cold at his back, beginning to move, work him open, and Nick's still shivering. He lies there freezing and tries not to think.
**
Nick oversleeps, woozy and exhausted from blood loss and stress. He doesn't know how long ago the sun set, but Joe's not in bed with him, and Nick dresses slowly in the stuffy bedroom. He's starving and running low on food, but he's pretty sure this house is near a 7-11 that probably still has some canned goods. He might as well go down and get some while he waits for Joe to get back.
The street is dark and empty when he gets outside, the stars bright, and he picks through the wreck of the convenience store, looking for anything he can find. It smells terrible in there, and he thinks animals have gotten into some of the food, but he finds some cans that are intact and takes them out into the street to eat them.
He ends up sitting on the hood of a car, eating mandarin oranges out of a can with his fingers. It's very quiet, just the sound of crickets and the wind in the trees. It doesn't sound like there's anyone else alive for miles.
He's just finished the oranges and has gotten off the car to grab another one of the cans from the ground when he hears someone yelping in the distance, a gleeful, ecstatic sound. Nick goes very still and wary, listening hard for where it's coming from, but after a few more yelps, coming closer and closer, he realizes that it's Joe.
God, Joe's so dumb, being so loud -- why's he drawing so much attention to himself? Though -- maybe Nick's thinking like a prey animal. Maybe if you're the predator you don't have to worry about things like that.
The yelps get closer and closer, and then Joe tears around the corner, running fast and happy, and he doesn't even slow down much as he gets close to Nick, just barrels into him, laughing and bearing him down to the pavement, arms and legs all over him like a puppy. Nick goes down on his back, Joe on top of him, Nick laughing in spite of himself.
Joe kisses him all over his face, and he's hot and sticky, and Nick doesn't know why, but when Joe pulls back a little Nick can see that his mouth is dripping red, blood all over him, smeared dark and thick over his chin, around his lips. Nick recoils back, banging his head against the asphalt.
"What?" Joe says.
Nick feels like he's going to throw up. He's been pretending this is Joe, that this isn't an evil thing, but here Joe is coming back to him with someone's blood still on him, someone Nick didn't stop him from killing. "You're all bloody," Nick manages to say. He just wants Joe to go away, wants this all to go away, wants to stop existing somehow. He can see his own pale reflection in Joe's black eyes.
"Hmm?" Joe says. "Oh. Right. It's just from a deer, would you relax?"
"A deer?" Nick says.
Joe's starting to unbutton his shirt, still weighing Nick down, cool and heavy against Nick's skin, trying to work his thigh between Nick's legs, spreading them. "Yeah, I was starving," he says. "So I killed a deer."
Nick's looking up at him but Joe won't make eye contact. His shirt's bloody too, spatters of gore everywhere. "Would you even tell me if it were from a person?" Nick asks.
"Sure," Joe says, but he's still not looking Nick in the eye.
Nick wants to believe him so badly. And really -- it probably was a deer. There aren't many people hanging around outside the cities at night, right? So... it probably was. Though Nick wonders what he would do if he actually saw Joe killing someone, if he actually saw Joe eating a human being. That's an uncomfortable thought, because he honestly doesn't know, and that scares him as much as anything, Joe on top of him like this, hot blood dripping off him and onto Nick. Nick all bloody by proxy.
Joe's hyper and wound-up, rolling his hips against Nick, working his hands between them to try to get at Nick's fly. And the sick thing is, Nick recognizes that feeling, being all pent up and full of adrenaline after a hunt, killing something and then wanting to fuck something, needing to get that energy out. After hunting vampires, Nick would feel the exact same way, needing to jerk off somewhere afterward, desperate and turned on and trying not to think about how fucked up that was. He remembers once having vampire blood on his hand as he did it, needing to touch himself so badly he couldn't even bother to wash up first.
He's never seen it from quite this angle, though, Joe's bloody face looking down at him, Joe's pointed teeth and matte eyes, Joe shoving his hips into him, hard through his pants, desperate and needy and humping Nick like he can't help himself.
They're in the middle of the street, lying all obscene out in the open where anyone could see them. "Joe," Nick says, pushing at his shoulder. "C'mon, let's go inside."
"Why?" Joe says. "No one's around." He's worked Nick's fly open and his hand wraps around Nick's cock, making Nick jerk up into him involuntarily, getting harder and harder. Gravel and weeds poke at the back of Nick's neck. The faded yellow line down the center of the street is beside his left hand, and Nick's listening hard, mortified, trying to hear if anyone's coming up on them, if anybody's going to catch them, but all he can hear is his own heart in his ears, his own gasping breaths. Joe wiggles Nick's jeans down just far enough, so they're around his knees, so Joe can press his legs apart, and Nick's already aching for it, can feel how bad he wants Joe inside.
"Joe," Nick says, squirming around. "C'mon, someone could see us."
Joe snorts a little bit, wiggling his own jeans down so his cock springs out, so it's poking between Nick's legs. Nick spreads them wider before he can stop himself. "No one cares," he says. "No one's here. We've got the whole world to ourselves."
That's not true, Nick knows it's not true, but right now it almost feels like it. Over Joe's shoulder he can see rusting cars, the broken windows of storefronts, grass growing up through the sidewalk, empty stars in the sky. The only sounds are nature sounds, animals, a raccoon digging at an old trashcan, the whole countryside reverting to wilderness. And Joe and Nick in the middle of it, fucking alone in the street, Joe between Nick's legs.
Joe guides his cock to Nick's asshole with his hand, starting to stuff the bulb of the head inside. Nick's still so slick from the last time it goes easy, so open from how much they've been doing this that it doesn't even hurt, that the burn and stretch of it just feels good. Once his dick's caught there, Joe presses in hard and fast, sheathing his whole length hard inside Nick, so Nick can feel him deep, so Nick's all full and tight, overwhelmed with it.
Nick gasps, and Joe looks down at him with happy soot-black eyes, inhuman and wrong and pleased, his bloody mouth sharp and brutal, his lips falling open. "Fuck, you feel so good," Joe says as he starts to move, as the slick length of him slips back out of Nick before he shoves it back in, moving out slow and in fast, so Nick's body jars and Nick grunts on each thrust. "You take it so good," Joe says. The blood smeared around his mouth stands out even brighter on his pale skin, and Nick closes his eyes, giving in to it.
The wind picks up, ruffling the weeds around them, and Nick tries to stop thinking about whether anyone else is around, vampires or humans or whoever, whether anyone could be an audience to this. How Nick's legs are spread and open, how Joe's fucking him hard and fast, rutting crudely in the middle of the road.
Vampires probably wouldn't think anything of it, though. Just another vampire and his human pet, some stupid loser who thinks vampires are sexy, who's willing to go along with it, to get drained bit by bit as the vampire fucks him -- until finally one day the vampire gets bored and sucks him dry, leaves him white and empty on the side of the road, not even bothering to turn him. Stupid teenage Twilight fans, stupid groupies. If a vampire walked by right now and saw Joe doing this to Nick, they'd just figure Nick was one of those.
Maybe Nick is. Nick doesn't even know anymore. He closes his eyes and starts to jerk himself off in time with Joe moving in his body, waits for the bite to come.
**
The days are starting to blur together, turning into a horrible routine -- Nick's more and more lightheaded every day, dizzy and fatigued, and there's no way his body can take much more of this. He needs to stop it, get to a city, see a doctor, something. Get free from this horror, this slow death he's walking towards. Sometimes during the day while Joe's asleep he takes a stake and tries to make himself put it through Joe's heart, put an end to this. One of them has to die here, they can't go on like this, but he can never bring himself to actually do it, actually kill Joe. He wishes he could, but he doesn't have the stomach for it, no matter how much he tells himself that this is a monster, that it isn't Joe, that it isn't his brother. No matter what Joe does to him.
He thinks maybe he could manage running away, but every time he gets the chance he just can't seem to actually leave, be alone again -- he can't stand the thought of going back to having nobody, even if this perverse non-Joe shouldn't really count as somebody. Besides, running away would take a plan, and he can't think with his constant headache, his foggy brain that can't seem to focus on much of anything. It always seems easier just to sleep, to give in, to let Joe take him east for one more day.
He loses track of the time. It gets colder and darker every day.
**
One night Joe finds them a house to stay in that vampires have used before, so all the windows are boarded up, the inside protected from the sunlight. There's a drained human corpse downstairs, just starting to rot, and Joe drags it outside matter-of-factly, dumping it into the backyard like trash, like nothing you would ever think of bothering to bury. Nick tries not to look at it, its limbs splayed, torso rolled half on its side, its head at an impossible angle. The whole house smells awful, like decay, but Joe doesn't seem to notice. Nick pretends he doesn't notice either.
The house is pitch black with the windows boarded up, so from the inside you can't tell how close it is to dawn at all. Joe leads Nick up to the bedroom, Nick following him blindly in the dark, but at least upstairs Joe lights a candle, so Nick can see the dim outlines of the furniture.
Joe sits up against the headboard of the bed, pulling Nick in between his spread legs so Nick's leaning back against his chest. He starts jerking Nick off slowly as he bites his neck, starting to sip blood out in this leisurely way, not taking too much at a time, just licking drops away. Nick's all sluggish, barely awake, Joe's erection digging into his back, Joe's cool body wrapped around him. It's a night like any other, lethargic and sexual and Joe's hand moving in time with his mouth on Nick's skin. Nick reclines against him and doesn't know if he hates him or loves him.
Nick's not sure how much time goes by -- he's half-asleep, his eyes mostly closed, the lazy arousal drawing out -- but then there's a bang from downstairs, startling him awake. Joe stops moving behind him, sitting up straight, going tense.
"What's that?" Nick mutters as Joe starts to get up, sliding out from under Nick, pulling his jeans back on with those strange graceful movements he has. "Joe?" Nick says.
Joe smiles tightly, his black eyes flat, reflecting the flame of the candle from beside the bed. "Probably some other vampires looking to camp out here," he says. "No big deal." Then he yells, "Hey, occupado!" as he starts out of the room, shutting the door carefully behind him.
Oh, okay. Joe will take care of it. Nick's so tired. He lets his eyes flutter closed again, leaning back against the pillows. He hurts all over, and he can hear Joe running down the stairs. He just wants to go to sleep.
But then to his surprise there's yelling, the sounds of a scuffle downstairs, thumping and banging, and Nick's wide awake again, sitting straight up. He doesn't know what's going on, but the sounds of a fight have made his instincts kick in, so he's grabbed a stake and is up and out of the bed before he quite knows what he's doing, pulling his boxers back on fast, heart thumping with adrenaline. Why is Joe fighting? Why would other vampires want to hurt him?
Nick fumbles his way through the deep darkness of the hallway, finding the stairs by feel. As he goes down them, though, it's getting lighter, and pretty soon he's squinting -- that's sunlight. He didn't even know it was past dawn. It's so bright -- he'd forgotten how bright the sun is, even indirectly like this, even in the shadows away from it. The front door of the house must be open around the corner from the stairs.
There's a crash from right nearby, and Nick takes another step down, and suddenly he's low enough to see what's going on. He expects Joe to be fighting the other vampires -- but of course it's not vampires, the sun's out, of course it's not. There are two human hunters there instead, one lunging at Joe with a stake in his hand, Joe leaping out of the way and knocking him back, vampire-quick and terrifying, so the hunter flies across the room, crashing through an end table and into a wall, sliding slumped to the ground and staying there, not moving. Nick doesn't know if he's dead or just unconscious.
The other hunter circles around, then comes at Joe, stake poised to attack him. Joe tackles him to the ground so they're scuffling, Joe on top, then the hunter, grappling for dominance, Joe holding the hunter's wrist, keeping the stake away from him. They look so strange wrestling with each other like that, the hunter's tan so dark against Joe's pale skin.
No one's seen Nick yet, and he stands there paralyzed on the stairs, not knowing what to do. It's Joe, his brother Joe, fighting these strangers... but it's not Joe, it's a demon in Joe's body, and Joe's just another vampire to these hunters, another vampire who they think deserves to die. Who Nick would kill without thinking twice about it if it weren't his brother. If Nick weren't pretending it was his brother.
The hunter who'd gotten thrown across the room, who has red hair, moves slightly, waking up, blinking his eyes rapidly like he's trying to get his vision to clear. He must have just been knocked out. As he looks blearily around the room, he's the first one to catch sight of Nick, and he stares, all confused and out of it, like he doesn't understand what he's seeing. For a second Nick realizes how strange this must look, Nick standing on the stairs in just his underwear, his pale bare chest, bite marks still on his neck, like any vampire groupie except for the stake in his hand. Coming downstairs from where he'd just been up in a vampire's bed.
For a second Nick thinks the hunter looks vaguely familiar, but before he can place him there's a bang and Nick swivels to look at the fight again, at what Joe's doing. The dark-haired hunter he's fighting is scrambling across the room to grab his stake -- the bang must've been Joe knocking it out of his hand. In a second, the hunter's on his feet again, holding the stake, spinning to face Joe, but while he was grabbing it, Joe looked up, caught sight of Nick standing there on the staircase.
Joe's face lights up. "Nick!" he says, like the cavalry's just come, like now he knows they can win. "Quick, help me out!"
At Joe's voice, the dark-haired hunter whips his head around to see who Joe's talking to, momentarily distracted, staring at Nick. In just that brief pause Joe seizes his advantage and is on him, twisting the hunter's wrist so the stake falls out of his hand. The hunter yells in pain and Joe lunges at his throat, sinking his teeth into it before the hunter even has a chance to move. It must be a glancing bite, because the hunter's still struggling, but oh God, what's Joe doing?
"Joe!" Nick yells. He can see the dark blood seeping out of the hunter's throat, but the other, redheaded hunter is barely getting to his feet, holding onto the doorjamb next to him for support like he's dizzy and unsteady from being knocked out, so it's not like he can even help his friend. Oh, God, Joe's going to kill this guy right in front of Nick.
Nick can't just stand here and watch this. He rushes over, grabs Joe's shoulder, tries to pull him off. "Joe!" he says again, trying to get him to stop, shaking his shoulder. "Joe, stop it!"
The dark-haired hunter is groaning, blood dribbling out of him, dark as it oozes down his throat around Joe's mouth, where Joe's not even sucking down all of it, and Joe won't stop, he won't stop, he's still drinking even though Nick's pleading with him, shaking him.
"C'mon, Nick," Joe mumbles. "We're winning." He slurps at the hunter's neck and he's not going to stop, he's going to drain him dry. He thinks Nick's on his side.
"Do something!" the redhead says from across the room, wobbling on his feet, clinging to the wall and looking at Nick like Nick's a fellow human being. "Please!" Nick looks at him helplessly for a second, not knowing what to do. How can the hunter and Joe both think Nick's on their side?
He doesn't know what to do, so he pulls at Joe harder, managing to dislodge him from the bite for a second, but that just annoys Joe. "Knock it off, Nicky," Joe says irritably and bats Nick away. He probably doesn't mean to hit him hard, but he's vampire-strong, and the blow knocks Nick back, hurts like hell on his collarbone.
Nick's angry now, goes to shove Joe back, and Joe hits him again, still trying to get back to drinking the hunter's blood, and then before Nick has time to think what he's doing, his hand moves out of instinct, reacting to the blow, to fighting with a vampire, and he brings the stake down. It goes into Joe's back, penetrating deep, through the cold flesh and blood, the squelch and pressure of it the same as every other time Nick has done this, the hundreds of times he's done this.
Joe goes limp, falling forward, heavy onto his prey, and the dark-haired hunter groans and shoves him off, so Joe's body slides away from him, falls onto the floor, the stake still buried in his chest. His limbs splay awkwardly and unnaturally, falling at odd angles, and he doesn't move.
Nick must've hit his heart. He always hits the heart. Joe's body is lying at his feet with Nick's stake buried deep inside him. There's a roaring in Nick's ears.
Nick staggers backward until he hits a wall, and then his knees give out so he slides down to the floor, still staring at Joe's body. It's lying right where that rotting human corpse had been when they came in. Everything's happening too fast and too bright, and how does Joe have a stake through him? Joe wasn't ready for that, had his back turned to Nick because it had never occurred to him that Nick might do that, turn traitor like that. Nick hadn't even totally meant to, he just -- he's staked so many vampires while they were doing that, sucking blood out of some human's throat, he couldn't help it. The hunter's blood is still smeared red around Joe's dead mouth.
Out of the corner of his eye, Nick can see that the redheaded hunter's finally steady enough to walk, and has hurried over to his friend, that he's wadded up a shirt or something to put some pressure on his friend's bite, trying to get the bleeding to slow down. They're talking in low murmurs to each other, all "You all right?" and "Here, let me..."
Nick can't process anything -- he feels like he should be able to rewind, to make it so none of that happened. He killed Joe -- how is that possible? He can still feel the stretch from Joe fucking him earlier, still feel where Joe's hands had been on his chest, his cock.
It's freezing in this house, a cold breeze coming in from the open door, and Nick starts to shiver, shake all over. He wraps his arms around his knees, scooting into the corner, so walls are on two sides of him, pressed against his back and side. Now that there's some light in the room, Nick can see the decay of the house like he hadn't when he and Joe had come in, the mildewed, peeling wallpaper, the dirty rug. It must still stink from the dead body earlier, too, but Nick's been inside so long he can't even smell that anymore, can only remember how strong the smell was at first, how it was like a blow to the face when you walked in the door.
The stake's made a gruesome hole in Joe's chest, blood slowly pooling underneath him, dripping out sluggishly since his heart's not beating, since he only has the blood in him that he's drunk. Nick did that to him.
"Hey," one of the hunters says, in a louder voice than they've been using up till now, all warm and friendly.
It takes Nick a second to realize the hunter's talking to him, and then even longer to be able to turn his head to look. Everything seems like it's happening at a distance.
It's the dark-haired one talking, the one with the bite. The other hunter must have gotten out their first-aid kit, because he's taping gauze to his friend's neck now, making a bandage to cover up the bite, most of the blood mopped up except for where it soaked into the dark-haired hunter's shirt. "Thanks," he says. "That was a close one. We really owe you."
Nick guesses he should say you're welcome, but he can't seem to get his mouth to move. He's gone numb, can't feel anything, can't think. The hunters look so odd, like there's something a little off about them, but then Nick realizes that he's just not used to seeing humans anymore, that the contrast between them and Joe makes them look cartoonishly healthy, color to their skin, their eyes ordinary brown and blue.
"Stop talking and hold still," the redhead murmurs to his friend, trying to tape the bandage in place, and the dark-haired one rolls his eyes, but holds still, making a face at Nick like, you see what I put up with?
But then as he looks at Nick, the dark-haired one's brow furrows, like he's trying to figure something out, and Nick starts to feel confused too, because now that he's really seeing them, he realizes he knows them from somewhere, but he can't place it.
"Um," the dark-haired one says. "Hey, aren't you -- I mean, aren't you that kid? From, where was it -- we waited at the gate together. I forget what city. You're a hunter."
The redhead looks up at Nick, surprised, but after he gets a good look at him he nods to himself. "Cincinnati," he says, filling in his friend's blanks. He goes back to the bandage, finishes putting the last piece of tape on, and takes a step back. "Yeah."
"I, um," Nick says. Oh, huh, they are those hunters. He had -- they were why he told Joe to go east. "Right, yeah. Hi."
"Are you okay?" the dark-haired one asks. "You're bleeding."
He is? Nick automatically puts a hand up to his neck and it comes back warm and sticky and bright with blood. Oh. Crap. Joe was too distracted to lick that closed and it must have been bleeding this whole time, because now that he looks it's all down Nick's chest, dark and gory.
"Here," the redhead says, and he grabs some cloth off the banister -- Nick and Joe had dropped all their stuff really haphazardly as they'd gone upstairs, leaving a trail of clothes behind them. The redhead comes over to Nick with the cloth and crouches down beside him, dabbing at Nick's bleeding neck, trying to get the blood cleared away so he can see the injury.
Nick knows he's going to see that it's a bite, that there are white scars of older ones beside it. That the hunters are going to realize Nick was calling that vampire by his name, that they're going to figure out what was going on, that Nick was letting Joe fuck him, that Nick's just some pathetic groupie with a hard-on for a monster. Normally Nick would be mortified at the idea of them finding out, but now he can't seem to feel anything. He can still see Joe's body over the hunter's shoulder.
The redhead's hands against Nick's neck feel incredibly hot, like there's something wrong, like they burn where they touch him. For a second Nick wonders if this guy has a fever or something before he remembers that human hands are supposed to be warm.
The hunter sucks in a breath through his teeth as he sees Nick's bite, like he thinks it looks like it hurts, but then his face goes quiet and still as he sees the scars, and his eyes flick down to Nick's boxers for a second, then up to Nick's face, wary and confused. Nick can see him putting it together. He leans his head back against the wall behind him and closes his eyes, waiting for the hunter to say something, to be disgusted.
The hunter keeps quiet, though. He just goes back to dabbing at Nick's neck, and finally he presses the cloth against the bite. "Hold that there," he says to Nick. "Keep some pressure on it. It's almost stopped bleeding."
Nick swallows, blinking his eyes open, confused, but he does what he's told, puts his hand up to hold the cloth to the wound. As Nick does, he realizes that the cloth the hunter was using is the purple scarf Joe gave him, that blood's soaking into the dark fabric. Nick wants to move it away, keep it clean, but then realizes it's too late for that, that it's already stained, so he just gives in, presses it into the wound carefully.
"Is your stuff upstairs?" the dark-haired one says, and when Nick nods, he starts up to get it, taking the stairs two at a time, collecting clothes as he goes. He'll probably see the mussed bed when he gets up there, notice how the room smells like sex, but Nick can't seem to care. The redhead comes back with the first-aid kit and goes about bandaging Nick up. Both hunters are acting normal and business-like, like the world's not any different, and Nick feels so strange.
Joe's dead. It's all over. Nick's heart is pounding in his ears and he knows Joe's been dead for a year, but now his body's actually stopped moving, and Nick's so cold and empty. Joe was the last brother he had.
He feels dazed and woozy as he's bandaged up, as the blood's wiped off him, as he stands up and gets dressed. He keeps expecting Joe to open his eyes, to smile at Nick again with his horrible teeth, for it all to have been a mistake, but Joe doesn't, the corpse just lies there. Nick's still holding the blood-stiff scarf Joe gave him, twisting it in his hands.
The hunters are getting their stuff together, arguing about whether the redhead's well enough to get on the road or if he should rest since he got knocked out. "I'm fine," the redhead says. "Besides, I think we should all probably get to a hospital. We can probably make Columbus by tonight."
The dark-haired one looks dubious, putting his stake back into his belt. "Yeah, we'll travel real fast," he says. "Everyone all blood-lossed and concussed." He looks over at Nick, and Nick suddenly realizes that Nick's included in that group, that this guy's just casually making Nick a part of the 'everyone.' That's so strange. As Nick blinks, surprised, the hunter says to Nick, "You think you can make it to Columbus?"
Nick's still so stunned at the inclusion that it takes him a second to respond. "Um, yeah," he finally says. He hasn't been part of a group with anyone but Joe in a long time.
The dark-haired one shrugs, looking at his friend, a shrug like he's tried to talk sense into them, but whatever, if everyone's bound and determined to do the opposite. "Oh, fine," he says. "Let's get out of here then. It smells disgusting anyway." He swings his pack up onto his back.
The redhead smiles, picking up his own pack, and Nick does the same, feeling vague and distanced, like everything's a little unreal. Joe's body's still lying behind them, dark in the shadows.
As they go around the corner to the front door, for a second the light dazzles Nick's eyes, so he can't see at all. It's been so long since he's seen actual sunlight. He blinks and blinks and by the time he can see again, the redheaded hunter's walking out the door, and Nick sees the sunlight catch his hair, making it halo around his head for a second, bright and shining.
The dark-haired hunter gestures for Nick to go out the door next, like they want Nick in between them, like they can keep him safe, even though Nick barely knows what safe means anymore. Joe's dead behind him, stake through his heart in a house that smells like death, and he won't come after Nick ever again, and Nick feels like crying.
Nick hesitates for a moment, looking back at Joe, the pale limbs of his body, the sockets of his shadowed eyes, and then finally turns away.
He walks out into the sunlight.
**
END