sorry about the blood in your mouth (I wish it was mine) - FDTD - Seth/Richie (3/3)
The days bleed into one another, the way the sun rises and sets every day, dusk and dawn merging into each other until Seth can’t really tell which is which anymore when he looks up at the sky, can’t tell if the spot of light in the dark sky means the sun is going to rise or if it’s just setting. Seth has given up keeping track. He falls asleep when Richie drives and wakes up in a new town, always, like they teleported, like they weren’t even really there at all. Sleep, wake up, be somewhere new. Seth doesn’t have to do anything.
“Where are we going?” he asks.
Richie shrugs. “Nowhere. Around,” he says, more calm about their lack of direction than Seth’s ever seen him.
It gets more desertic as they go, into the center of Mexico, where there’s either deserts and mountains. Seth wants to go to the coast-sits in a hotel room cross legged and has a map he only half understands in front of him, staring and points to here. We could go Cuernavaca, he tells Richie. They call it the city of eternal spring. It sounds a bit like what Carlos said about El Rey. Beaches and blue agave, brother. “Sounds nice, right?”
“Since when do you wanna settle down?” Richie asks, flipping through channels.
“Since I went to prison,” Seth snaps and keeps staring at maps. Further south, there are pyramids, heading into the heart of it, and Seth doesn’t want to go there. Pyramids have spooked him since the Titty Twister. “We could go to the other coast too. Mérida seems nice.”
Richie ignores him and watches cartoons in Spanish. Seth throws the map at his head.
He stops following Richie when he goes out to hunt, mostly because he knows the routine now and there’s no reason to do so, not anymore, but Seth is always awake when he comes back, twitching and itchy and unable to sleep, rushing towards him when he walks through the door. Richie smells like fresh, metallic blood, the scent catching thickly in the back of his Seth’s throat, and someone else’s sweat, spots of red on his white shirt.
“How does no one notice the mess you make?” Seth says, kissing him like he can’t help it, can’t help but be pulled into Richie’s orbit, biting and tugging at him. “Fuck you, Richie, you’re going to get caught if you keep getting your clothes bloody like this,” he says, but Richie lets him push him against the door and kiss him until both their lips are swollen and Seth can taste Richie’s meal like it was his too. Richie laughs into his mouth and puts his arms around him, hands on Seth’s hips, eyes glittering.
(Richie cuts him, every time they fuck now, always taking some during sex like he’s starved for it, doesn’t matter how recently he fed. The wounds rarely ever get a chance to heal before Richie wants to feed again)
“Did you get rid of the body?” Seth asks later, from the shower, getting the smell of blood and come off him. He doesn’t really mind the smell-they’ve come out of jobs and fucked in the car with the same scent before-but it’s different this time, pushed under his skin and bones.
“Of course I did,” he says, laughing. His hair is no longer slicked back, starting wearing it like when they were kids and before Richie started putting gel in his hair to keep it out of his eyes. It falls into his face, the loose strands making him look younger and more boyish than he actually is. “It’s not my first time, you know. Who showed you how to hide a body?”
Seth smiles despite himself.
Seth starts to sleep when Richie does, his schedule just sliding over to synch up with his. He wakes up a few times to Richie shaking him awake, Richie’s eyes on his, already dressed up and ready to go, sun set a while ago. Once, Seth woke up and it was closing in on midnight and he has no idea how long he slept, and Richie was watching him, hovering over him on the bed, gazing intently (Seth thinks of Carlos less and less the further they get away from the Titty Twister, but sometimes he remembers what he said and tries not to shudder, shove it away).
“Why didn’t you wake me?” He asks and Richie shrugs.
“You seem to have needed the rest,” Richie says simply. That doesn’t make sense, it’s not like they’re doing anything strenuous, just driving around and figuring out where to go-and letting Richie feed off him, drink him. Seth is okay with it, but sometimes he feels dizzy and lightheaded after, and Richie has to lead him to the bathroom to clean up the wound.
It’s just easier to exist at night together, even if they get further with Seth behind the wheel during the day and Richie hidden in the trunk. They get further, but it’s not like they’re in a rush.
Sometimes Richie pulls over in the middle of the night and he’s hungry but there’s no one around but Seth, so Seth rolls up the sleeve of his shirt, buttoning down until his forearm’s exposed and lets Richie drag the blade tip until he’s bleeding. Lets Richie feed like that, mouth pressed into the veins of his inner arm, nothing but sucking sounds and the desert around them and the rough slide of Richie’s tongue, almost like he’s nursing a child.
Feels like he’s food, something warm for Richie to suck on and he tries not to shudder, but he can feel it traveling up his spine, like something crawling out from his under his skin (he doesn’t know how to describe the experience-he’s food and prey, and brother and lover, and something else entirely).
“The things I do for you, Richie,” Seth mumbles, mostly to himself, running his hand through Richie’s hair, but Richie glances up at him while he’s still feeding, and stares at him oddly, pushing his glasses up and lifts his mouth away.
“Do you want me to stop?” He asks.
“No,” Seth says, before he can think about it, before the answer gets lodged in his throat. “No, I don’t.”
The cut on his forearm is throbbing and bleeding, and Seth doesn’t want him to stop. Don’t make me explain why, brother, because Seth can’t put it into words, just that Richie wanting, needing his blood gets his heart pounding and face flushed, that he can still crawl his way inside him like he’s always had.
“You just say that like you don’t like it,” Richie says softly, yellow eyes narrowed and blood dripping down his chin, white teeth red. He reaches over to cup his cock, squeeze just hard enough to take Seth’s breath away.
“I like it,” Seth groans like it’s punched out of him, groans again when Richie’s fingers slip under his pants and underwear, and there’s something animal in Richie’s smile, like trying to be smug, but it goes beyond that, and Seth feels trapped, held down there by his brother’s gaze.
Richie blows him in the car and leaves a bloody imprint of his mouth on his cock.
This is the new normal, Seth tells himself, you better get used to it.
(He is, he thinks; he’s covered in scars that weren’t there before they got to Mexico, and he pushes back Richie’s hair when they get in his eyes while he feeds and he never wants let go but some moments, it still feels like he’s in prison, and missing Richie every day, missing something.)
*
In Veracruz, Seth fucks up a con and gets a knife to his throat in a back alleyway, pressing it just the slightest bit, enough to hurt with a promise of violence. Seth grins until he gets punched in the solar plexus and doubles over, the knife grazing his throat enough to draw blood.
It’s not like Seth is worried, though. Richie is always there.
Seth glances back up when he hears a cut off scream, a yelp that was rising until suddenly the voice is gone. He sees Richie with a hand clamped tightly, squeezing, around the mark’s mouth, Richie’s fangs buried in his throat, feeding messy and ugly.
Seth is used to the bodies. The sheer brutality of it still throws him. The two of them have always been brutal, he knows-he once bashed a man’s skull in for his brother, blood and brain matter all over his clothes, and he’s done more, worse since then-but he looks away, feeling useless now with his gun. He wants to put a bullet in the mark’s head, just to prove he can still dispose of someone, but that makes more noise than what Richie is doing.
“You could have sprung sooner,” Seth says when he’s done, when Richie comes over and tilts Seth’s head up to meet his eyes, check on his injuries. Seth doesn’t really bother to clean Richie up, better to wait until they’re back in their room and with a shower. “Or at least let me take care of myself,” he says, and Richie grins at him, fanged and bloodstained.
“Thanks,” he says. “Did you get your money?”
Seth nods, because this is what they do now; con a mark, lure him out, Seth gets his money and Richie gets dinner. A small time thing, no where near a real job, but familiar enough for Seth, enough to get his bearings, even with Richie getting all lizard snake monster on them.
Richie puts his arm around him, walking him back to the car. He presses Seth against the door before he gets in, leaning in to lick the blood off Seth’s throat, like he can’t help himself, Seth shuddering (vampires are territorial, Seth vaguely remembers, but it doesn’t matter; he’s always been Richie’s).
Later, Richie sits on his bare chest, pressing the blade of his knife against his throat, where the mark had pressed it today, where the blood still stains his skin a bit even after it stopped bleeding. It rests against his jugular, Seth’s pulse pounding harshly against it. Richie’s eyes are dark and hooded, and hungry as he looks down on him.
“Can I?” he asks, his hand steady.
“Yeah,” Seth says. “You don’t have to ask all the time.” But Richie just smiles down at him, and Seth likes telling him, likes hearing the can I and telling him yes, yes.
Richie drags the knife down his chest instead of his throat, serrated blade teasingly scratching, like a promise, Seth shivering at its cool touch. Richie is slow and careful, edge of the knife grazing above his nipple then down below, slicing a cut open mid chest. It’s just a trickle, but Seth gasps anyway when Richie just laps at the blood, pink tongue darting out.
“Why do you that?” Seth asks when Richie moves on, further down; he cuts him a little bit more down on his hip, where Richie hasn’t left a mark there yet, fingers pressing down on the hollow of his hip and watching blood well out before drinking. Seth’s hands are on his shoulders, idly kneading, his fingertips hot against Richie’s skin (he used to touch Richie all the time to ground him, bring him back to earth when he got so fixated on something, I’m here, Richie, come back-but now he fixates on him, now he’s the meal and what does he pull him back from).
“You just drained some asshole dry. Aren’t you full already?”
“I’m always hungry,” Richie says, glancing up to look at him, features smoothing out, face opened up.
Seth doesn’t have a response for that. He reaches up and pushes Richie’s glasses up for him, and wraps his hand around Richie’s throat, just to touch him, feel the lack of pulse even when his skin is warm from the kill. Just to make sure he’s grabbing on to his brother. Richie shudders, places a hand over his throat as well, fingers lightly dancing over his skin and pressing down a bit. He likes feeling Seth’s pulse, too.
He stares at Seth for a long time, until even Seth can’t read the look on his face anymore. He thinks he’s staring still when Seth falls asleep.
*
The texas ranger called them monsters.
“Oh, we’re the bad guys?” Seth shouted at him. “I’m not denying it, but you’re the one out of jurisdiction. What does that make you?”
Seth said it grinning, like he won, like this was a victory, outlaws versus cops-I fought the law and I won-but Richie standing next to him was dead, walking corpse, and he doesn’t think either of them can hold up a flag and call it winning, exactly. More like compromise.
The last time he saw Freddie Gonzalez, they were leaving him in the dust and he wasn’t chasing after them. Seth expected him to, expected to have to put another round in his chest and one in his head just to make sure it’d take this time, but the ranger-covered in blood from fighting culebras and a tired, wane look in his eyes-just stared at them, gun drawn but otherwise doing nothing.
“Take your best shot, ranger,” Seth dared, not entirely feeling the smile on his face, but Richie at his back-now a terrifying undead snake vampire, but one on his team, at least for the moment-made him feel cocky. “I’d like to see you try. You shoot either one of us and it’s not going to end well for you. You can’t hit us both at once”
“I”m not afraid,” Freddie scoffed, glancing at Richie with a highly skeptical look on his face, like Richie’s fucking lizard face was nothing impressive. “But I think you two are fucked as it is.”
He didn’t holster the gun-this isn’t a white flag-but he lowered it, headed towards the exit.
“What about your revenge, cowboy?”
“Richie’s already dead,” Freddie said, walking away. “I’m pretty sure you’ll follow soon.”
“He has a wife and daughter,” Richie said when he left, leaning in to whisper in his ear. That makes sense to him.
We all got family to take care of, at the end of the day.
Seth felt a bit guilty for leaving Kate and her brother behind, with nothing except a couple million between them, like he could pay for their father’s death with it, that’ll no doubt get confiscated by the cops. He hopes they at least hide it where he told them to.
“Take us with you,” she asked, holding her brother’s hand tightly. Seth thought of two other siblings with a useless dead father, an unwelcome sense of obligation churning at him. Scott was shaking, Scott was reluctant, Scott hated them, and hated them more now that Richie was a vampire but still, he leaned into his sister, following her lead.
For a stupid moment, he wanted to take them with them, because after all, their father is dead because of him, and it might be nice to have two protegés to pass on their criminal know-how. Might be nice to be proud of someone.
He told her no-go with Freddie, go with the ranger, because fuck it if Seth has ever cared enough to do the right thing, just the right thing for him. It wasn’t as if Seth could take Kate and Scott with them on a roadtrip through an unknown country, no telling what Richie would do now.
No telling what Richie would do to them.
“They’ll be okay,” Richie said to him later, his hand lingering next to his. “They got each other.”
*
(He should have seen it coming.)
Seth wakes up and rolls over to find Richie still staring at him, too close, no sense of personal space (not that it ever mattered). He’s next to him on the bed, close enough so Seth could have felt him breathing if he still bothered to breathe.
“Hey,” Seth says, still groggy and half asleep. “What time is it?” He can’t tell anymore. It looks dark outside, but the curtains are drawn and that doesn’t tell him anything.
“About eleven,” Richie says, in a detached voice. “You slept a lot again.”
“Oh,” Seth says, still a little lightheaded. “You could just wake me, you know.” He sighs, shaking his head, putting a hand to his temples and then rubbing out the sleep from his eyes. “Did you already eat?”
Richie shakes his head. “Seth,” he says, and nothing else. He leans over, closer and Seth thinks he’s going to kiss him, but instead he nuzzles his throat, the side of his jaw, his skin cool and pasty.
“Hey, easy brother,” Seth says, laughing a little, putting his hands on the back of his neck, fingers lingering in his hair. “What, you want a quickie now?”
“No. I’m going to fix things,” Richie says softly, but his eyes are dark and narrowed in fierce intensity, the kind he gets while picking a lock or cracking a safe.
(He didn’t, because don’t bite the hand that fucking feeds you, right? That’s just common fucking sense, a dog knows better than that.)
Seth doesn’t get a chance to respond, because Richie’s fangs are in his throat.
He’s never felt that before.
Richie’s teeth have grazed down his throat before, recklessly teasing but always playful, never going there. This feels a hundred times more painful than his knife, tearing and burning, skin and flesh blown in white hot pain and Seth can’t even scream. Richie’s mouth is stronger than he ever thought it was, locked down over his flesh, hands pinning Seth to the bed, and Seth doesn’t even have the strength left in his arms to try to push him off.
Their fangs have fucking venom, and Seth’s not sure how he forgot about this, spent too long with his brother trying to tell himself everything was the same otherwise, and now he feels like he’s on fire, skin inflamed. Seth’s vision goes dim, white around his eyes, and he thinks he hears something, right before he passes out-Richie’s voice, faint and whispered, we’re going to be okay.
*
“Goddammit, Richie,” Seth snarls when he wakes up on the floor.
His voice is funny. His throat feels clogged and his gums itch. He’s covered in his own blood. “Richie, what the fuck?”
Richie smiles at him from across the room. “I fixed us,” he says, smug and pleased with himself.
“Jesus fucking christ, Richie,” he says, standing up. His voice is so scratchy, thick and rough. His tongue feels numb. It’s like the day he found Monica, dead and eviscerated in their hotel room, eyes gouged out, some awful sinking feeling in his gut, a sense of helplessness so strong it was going to strangle him alive, breath gone out of him and feeling like he might puke. He feels like he might puke now. He can’t breathe-he’s not breathing. Seth sucks in a sudden, panicked breath, trying to remember that he can still breathe. He thinks he might hyperventilate.
“Easy,” Richie says, standing next to him, hands on his shoulders to balance him. “Take it easy, try to-”
Seth shrugs out of his grasp, batting his hands away. “Just, Jesus, what did you do?” He reaches up to touch his throat. It’s whole-sticky and caked with blood, flakes of it falling on the tile as he brushes his fingers across it, but whole.
Richie rolls his eyes. “What do you think, Seth? I made you a vampire like me. I fixed our problems. It was easy. I should have done it the night we left the bar.”
“Fuck you,” Seth spits out. “Just, fuck you, man, don’t you fucking condescend to me. This is not fixing our problems, this is making more problems, you fucking deranged excuse for a prodigy, you could have fucking warned me, or asked, or, fuck.” Seth feels dizzy. Are vampires supposed to feel dizzy? He can’t stop pacing. Everything is loud, clattering sounds from outside and the buzz of the air conditioning, everything is just too loud. He feels like he’s going to climb right out of his skin. “We were doing fine, goddammit, we were working, we were-”
“I see the way you look at me,” Richie says. He looms, drawing himself up to full height, silent as a blade in the dark. His eyes have the same kind of glint in them that they had when they got to the bar and Seth fucking wishes they’ve stopped at some other bar down the road, not that one. “I’m not stupid. I’m not blind. You’re afraid of me-”
“We were working,” Seth says. His voice sounds different. Lower, deeper pitched. He doesn’t think he’s doing it on purpose. “I was dealing with the changes you’ve gone through, fuck you, just, fuck you.”
“But you’re not denying it. You still think I’m a monster. So I fixed it. Now we’re back.”
Seth stares, pants a breath he can’t really breathe more, looks his brother up and down.
He snarls, mouth curling, and lunges at Richie instead. Slams him against the wall then the other wall, lamp crashing and footboard breaking. He throws him to the ground and claws for him, and Richie is laughing, grinning wide up at a him and Seth doesn’t really care, because he can attack now. There’s a strength in his body that wasn’t there before, like he’s made of iron, something powerful buzzing and coursing through him. It’s easy, so fucking easy now to pin Richie down on the hard floor underneath them, to put his legs on either side of his hips and grab him by the throat with both hands and squeeze.
Richie grabs his throat too, nails digging into the skin and fingers pressing down tight on a windpipe he no longer needs.
“Hey,” Richie says. “You hear that?”
He does. Seth hears a lot, the cars rushing outside and the idle conversations-and he can hear the approaching footsteps outside. Not too far, two hotel rooms down over, but they’ll be here soon.
“Hey,” Richie says, not choking, stroking his neck now. “I just wanted us to be the same again.” He places a hand on the back of Seth’s head and pulls him closer, until their foreheads are touching. Seth leans into it, lets his eyes close shut as he leans against his brother, his grip on his throat loosening. It’s a warm night, but neither of them sweat, not even after that fight.
“Are you hungry?” Richie asks again. Seth’s eyes feel funny, his skin tingling, like there’s something moving behind it, hot and alive. Is that how it’s supposed to feel? He nods.
“Listen.”
Seth listens. It’s a woman (the maid, he thinks, but does it matter?) and he can hear her heartbeat, loud and steady like a drum. He can smell her blood under her skin, even from here.
It was always easy to forgive Richie. If there was ever anything to forgive.
“Why don’t we say we let her in?” Richie says, and they share a grin with a mouth full of teeth.
*
Jacob had asked him, before the old man died, if he was really willing to go down to hell with his brother.
And Seth laughed, looking at the man on the ground he’d shot to protect Richie. Wondering where the hell did Jacob get such a ridiculous question. “This ain’t my first rodeo, padre,” he said.
He didn’t understand, but that’s alright, he didn’t need to understand, just stay out of his way.
He’d already been with Richie in hell, since the day Richie set the fire, since the day they did their first job, since the day Seth bashed a man’s skull in for his brother-and all the fucked up shit he’s done that wasn’t about Richie. Maybe before, even, since they were condemned to have a piece of shit father who was only good for getting drunk and beating children.
Seth and Richie walked into hell hand in hand a long time ago, before Mexico. Makes no difference what Richie is or isn’t.
*
They kill a hitch-hiker by the side of the road.
The hitchhiker was blond, an American tourist, the surfer type, the college kid back-packing in Mexico on no money, even though he had rich parents at home, for the experience. Seth wanted to kill him on principle alone.
Still, they work up to it. Seth asks him what his name is (Bradley, he says, he’s a fucking Brad), where he’s from (California, he says, UC Santa Barbara), what he’s studying (economics), what he’s doing here. What are your plans after college?, and the kid talks what sounds like nonsense, he thinks, all technical stuff, internships and networking and far away things that were never in reach for them.
“Santa Barbara, huh?” Seth asks. “Never been but that’s not far from L.A., right? Richie, we did a job in L.A. once, remember?”
Richie glances sidelong at him, arching an eyebrow. He nods briefly, a flicker of a smile on his lips, even if his eyes narrow.
“What kind of job?” Brad asks.
“Contract work,” Seth says. “Paid well, but man I fucking hated L.A., traffic was a nightmare.”
Brad laughs like they’re bonding. “Tell me about it, the 91 could kill a man.”
Seth snorts. Richie sits in the passenger seat and keeps shooting Seth side glares, little glances that scream what the fuck is taking so long and Seth just ignores him.
“Where are we going?” the kid asks, when Seth turns not at the sign back to the city, but at a darker, back road, away from the main road. The concrete road turns to dirt and sand and gravel eventually, and the signs disappear, the path around the road turning snarled, empty and desolate.
The kid’s heart is pounding, a loud rhythmic thump-thump in his chest, even if his face is still the easy-breezy smiling, like nothing is wrong but it was always hard to fool Seth.
“Short-cut,” Seth says, smiling at him. “It’s faster. Trust me”
Richie sighs, impatient. He doesn’t say anything the entire time.
There’s a beach around here, one away from the tourists. There’s no food stands or parking lots or nearby hotels to stay at and watch the waves from the balcony, just sand and rocks, lots of it. Tourists don’t come here, just locals every now and then, when they want to get away from the tourists.
“This isn’t a short-cut,” the kid says when Seth parks the car over a mound of sand, his voice trembling, shrinking into the seat. Seth used to think he knew what fear was like, familiar with the wane, wide-eyed faces and the tears of hostages and victims as Seth pat them on the shoulders and told them everything would be fine if the cooperated, but now it’s different. Thick in the air, intoxicating and mouth watering.
Seth meets Brad’s eyes in the rearview mirror, watches his own eyes slip to cobra yellow-green, his smile turn sharp-toothed, face change to something more reptilian and snake-like. “We’re the Gecko brothers. Maybe you’ve heard of us? We were on the news a while back.”
Richie is faster than he is, though. It’s less than two seconds flat, how he moves, zooming out the door, tugging the passenger side door open and dragging the kid out by his foot, because god forbid they get blood in their car.
The kid screams, high and pained, when Richie bites through his abdomen and the scent of blood and fear intermingle in the air. Seth doesn’t want to wait anymore, Seth rushes out as well, takes the kid from behind and tears into his throat, cutting and gnawing open a gaping wound and clapping his mouth shut around it. He tastes like schnapps and cherry, and sweet, sickly fear.
The hitchhiker trusted them because they were white and American and spoke english, which really, he should know better.
Seth and Richie don’t bury the body, what’s left of it anyway, just drag it out to the ocean and let it float away.
“Did you have to talk so much?” Richie asks.
Seth laughs, puts a blood-stained hand around the back of Richie’s neck and leads him back to the car. “I didn’t have to, but I wanted to. He should know who we are, don’t you think?”
Things haven’t changed much, to be honest, after Richie turned him. He still feels mostly the same-hungrier, maybe but he’s always been hungry, starving and hollow for something he couldn’t put a name to and never could fill. He still feels like himself. He doesn't know what he was worried about, why he feared this.
Like he was really going to let Richie live forever without him. Honestly.
“It’s not exactly the kind of beach you wanted,” Richie says, leaning backwards against the car, staring out into the ocean. He faces Seth, pensive and brows knitted together. There’s blood on his shirt, another ruined article of clothing. “You know, sunshine and blue agave.”
Seth’s mouth curves into an easy, slow smile, glancing up at his brother. “I didn’t want the beach,” he says, kicking at the sand and cupping Richie’s cheek, blood smeared upon bloody skin. Seth leans in and presses his lips against Richie’s mouth, because he can, tasting the remains of their meal there. On this side, it’s different now, no longer just the heavy iron taste, but an explosion of flavor on his tongue, sweet and sharp and savory. Seth wants to lap it up from Richie’s face, slides his tongue in his mouth to get a little more of it.
Richie makes a noise like a hum or a growl, his teeth sharp against Seth’s tongue. Seth’s still cupping his cheek when he pulls away, Richie pushing into his hand, Richie’s face no longer smooth but rougher and snake-like under his hands. He always lost his control and composure for Seth, all Seth has to do is touch him, never stop touching him and Richie folds (it’s a wonder he held out so long).
“I wanted you. Us,” Seth says. “The Gecko Brothers ride again.” They used to tell each other that, when they started doing jobs, real jobs, not candy-ass holding up stores and shit.
Richie grins, wide and toothy, and leans closer into him, foreheads touching just to touch, eyes gleaming bright and monstrous in the dark and Seth thinks they’ll be okay now.
Part 1 || Part 2