(no subject)
Made From the Sharpest Things, 8/?
Fandom: Bandom AU (primarily My Chemical Romance and Fall Out Boy, with various and sundry other bands).
Rating: R (language, violence, slight sexuality)
Pairings: Eventual Frank/Gerard, Pete/Patrick
Summary: What happens when the video for "A Little Less 16 Candles..." and repeat playings of "Vampires Will Never Hurt You" mix in my head.
Warnings: Bandom vampire AU, so if that's not your thing...yeah. Also character death and members of The Used being villains, but no more villainous than all the FBR-family vampires over in Chicago are being.
Notes: Tentative halfway point reached! \o? And I want to thank anyone who's giving this story a chance in spite of its massive WIP-ness. Unfortunately, I, uh, went and signed up for bandombigbang, because I am insane. So things will be a bit slow(er) on the vampire front while an entirely different massive AU consumes my brain for a few months, but stay tuned! There's an angry angry vampire hunter!Frank in my head who'll never let me hear the end of it if I leave him hanging.
Previous chapters here, here, here, and here.
Gerard dreams about Frank for the first time a little more than a week after they meet.
The dreams are nothing new-he’s been having them since his second or third night as a vampire. He doesn’t know if they’re common among his kind, but suspects they might not be. His own theory is that they’re his price to pay for the path he’s chosen; that if he’s not going to hunt, the hunger and darkness that are a part of him now are going to have to find another outlet.
But that’s just his theory. The only other vamp he could ask about it is Pete, who he’s still only communicated with by way of Mikey so far, and Gerard’s not telling Mikey about the dreams if he can help it.
The details change sometimes, but the dreams are always essentially the same-slow, careful stalking, anticipation, want, followed by the thrill of the chase, the final struggle, and then the blood. He wakes up with the last light of day seeping through the closed blinds in his room, lying in a cold sweat with the phantom taste of blood in his mouth, and all he can think about for the first five minutes of awareness is how much he wants.
The victims are the main thing that changes from dream to dream. They’re male or female, different ages, different skin colors, but he only ever remembers them vaguely. They’re never very well-defined, just vehicles for the hunger.
The first time that changes is the night he jolts awake with a luridly clear memory of Frank’s face, wide-eyed, and Frank’s throat warm under his teeth.
It still takes a few minutes for him to climb out of the mindless haze of desire, and that leaves him with a sick weight of guilt in the pit of his stomach. The first coherent thought he manages is this could turn into a problem.
The fact that he sincerely doesn’t want to hurt Frank, that he likes Frank, seems like it ought to be a comfort, something he can concentrate on and try to shake the dreams off, but that only makes it more fucked-up. Yeah, he likes Frank-likes him a lot, and that’s part of the problem.
Gerard is what he is, now, and it seems that that means desire and bloodlust are tied together, whether Gerard wants it that way or not.
It doesn’t help, of course, that Frank is eighteen and one of Gerard’s little brother’s best friends. It helps even less that the two of them are being thrown into combat training together, and that Gerard gets to deal with things like Ray taking him aside during a session and explaining, calmly and earnestly, that he and Bob need Gerard to try and pin Frank down.
“It’d be stupid to have him spar with an actual vampire and not make the most of it, y’know?” Ray explains, matter-of-factly.
“It makes sense,” Gerard agrees, unable to keep the discomfort out of his voice entirely. “It’s just, with the blood thing…I’ve been trusting myself more to avoid temptation than resist it. I don’t want…”
Ray nods, his expression serious. “Figured that might be a factor. Bob and I’ll be right there, and I’d say we could restrain you pretty easily between the two of us, but if you don’t want to risk it…”
“What if he doesn’t want to risk it?” Gerard asks.
“We already talked it over with him,” Ray says, a bit tersely-Gerard can imagine how that conversation might have gone. “He’s not crazy about it, but he agrees it’s worth trying.”
Gerard swallows hard. “Just…err on the side of caution if you need to, all right? Don’t let me hurt him.”
Ray nods again. “Trust me, we won’t.”
Gerard came into this with less fighting spirit than Frank, but a vampire’s instincts and an artist’s sense of perfectionism to counter it. Bob’s got him started learning hand-to-hand combat-his own style, which is sort of like judo by way of boxing by way of good old-fashioned barroom brawling-saying they’ll work their way up to the wielding of sharp objects if and when he’s confident in Gerard’s chances of not stabbing himself on accident.
Gerard and Frank have sparred a few times before, enough that Gerard has a rough idea of what to expect, and of what Frank might expect from him. But he’s never used his full strength against Frank before, and for all Frank’s wary alertness, he’s taken by surprise when Gerard rushes him, catching him around the throat with one hand and bearing him down.
Frank strikes out, and Gerard catches his wrist. There’s a quick, fierce moment of struggling, and then they’re on the floor of the loft, Frank on his back with Gerard kneeling over him, hands wrapped around his wrist and throat. Frank’s eyes are wide, his mouth open as he pants for breath, and as if he’s done this a hundred times, Gerard knows what comes next-leaning in, lowering his mouth to where the pulse pounds on the side of Frank’s neck, claiming the prey he’s brought to ground.
And then Ray says his name, cautiously, and Bob takes a single step forward, and Gerard blinks and sinks back on his haunches, still on top of Frank, but loosening his hold and no longer looming over Frank’s exposed neck.
“Son of a bitch,” Frank hisses, shaken and a little bit angry, at Gerard or himself.
Bob comes closer and drops into a crouch, looking down at Frank. “Yep,” he says cheerfully. “That’s what you’d better be ready for. Next time, I want it to at least be a little harder for him to do that.”
Frank glares at Bob, and then glares at Gerard when he stands up and offers a hand, but he takes it, hopping nimbly back to his feet.
“You okay?” Gerard asks, and Frank smirks, one of those quicksilver mood changes Gerard’s still getting used to.
“I’m not made of glass, man.” Frank rubs his neck, adding, “Wouldn’t complain if you wanted to go a little easier next time, though. Fuck, I need a cigarette.” He digs through his pockets; Gerard does, too, and finds his pack first, and Frank raises an eyebrow as he offers them. “You still smoke?”
Gerard shrugs. “Force of habit. I could probably quit pretty easy now, I don’t feel addicted or anything…but then, it’s not like I’ve gotta worry about lung cancer anymore, y’know?”
“Guess not.” Frank takes a cigarette, hesitates a moment, and then nods, with another quick smile. “Thanks.”
Gerard feels like something just happened, but he’s not sure entirely what. He’s also not sure whether going home and taking a cold shower would do him any good when his default state is being cold these days.
It would be awkward under any circumstances, feeling this way about Frank. But under different circumstances, Gerard wouldn’t be struggling to ignore the sound of Frank’s heartbeat and the smell of his sweat, trying not to let himself wonder just how hard Frank would be to catch and pin down if they were struggling in earnest, without Bob and Ray right there.
And if Frank seems to be loosening up around Gerard a little, reassured by Gerard’s continued failure to go for his neck the second his guard is down, Gerard doesn’t want that to change.
He’s not sure how to deal with it, but what he tries to do is to focus. He tries to look past Frank’s eyes and face and body, past sharp, quick grace and surprising reserves of strength and the warm smell of blood, and see Frank, who he wants to help, whose trust he wants to earn. He does his best to push the hunger to the back of his mind, to not let it control him. If he can’t do that, he may as well lock himself in the basement for the rest of eternity.
Frank kills his first vampire a week and two days after he starts training.
Ray and Bob are both, like, ten feet away, hiding behind fucking trees or something and ready to step in if he needs help, but Frank tries to act like they’re not, like he has to sink or swim on his own with this. He gets knocked off his feet and has to grope for his knife when it flies out of his grip and feels teeth snapping less than an inch away from his neck, and then he gets hold of the knife again and just sort of stabs blindly until the vamp stops moving, at which point Frank rolls it over and makes sure to get it in the heart for good measure.
Bob holds Frank’s bangs back from his face when he throws up afterwards, and Ray rubs his back and hands him a water bottle when he’s done, and neither of them say anything cliche about everyone doing that their first time.
Frank wonders, after the fact, if his starting to actually hunt is going to make things weird with Gerard. Things have been getting un-weird a lot faster than Frank expected, but now he has to wonder what Gerard’s going to think of knowing that Frank’s killed one of his own kind earlier in the evening, or is planning to do so later.
Gerard doesn’t seem to mind much.
“How’d you go about it?” he asks when the subject comes up. “Like, did you find a vampire who was attacking someone, or wait for one to try and go for you?”
“Second one,” Frank mutters around a cigarette, at which Gerard shrugs.
“So you weren’t hunting down someone who was just minding their own business and not hurting anyone, basically.”
“Nope,” Frank says. “So we’re cool as long as I don’t do that?”
“I’m not gonna get bent out of shape over you killing in self-defense or defense of others, Frank,” Gerard says, and crushes out his own cigarette. “Are we gonna spar or what?”
Gerard, Frank is noticing, seems very open to embracing the concept of Biblical justice.
Frank goes on more hunts and kills more vampires, and Ray and Bob lurk from fifteen feet away, and then from twenty. They still agree he’s not ready to go out totally on his own yet-and they don’t plan on letting him walk the streets alone at night anyway, considering Jepha-but it won’t do him any good to rely on them too much.
That’s what Frank’s thinking-insofar as he’s thinking anything-the night the vampire he’s fighting turns and runs, and he follows. He hears Bob shout for him to slow the fuck down, to wait for him and Ray, but if Frank does that, the bastard’s going to get away and damn it, he can do this on his own, he has to.
Intent on the chase, he never sees how far ahead of Ray and Bob he’s getting-and never sees who tackles him as he rushes around a corner, or delivers the blow that knocks him out.
Gerard and Mikey are at home, perched on opposite ends of the couch while Mikey channel-surfs and Gerard sketches. When Mikey’s phone rings, and he answers, Gerard can hear Ray’s voice on the other end-tinny and distant, but Gerard can just make out the words.
“Mikey-” he begins, Mikey ignoring him as he paces back and forth, asking where they’ve looked already, where they’re planning to look, if he can help or call anyone. “Mikey, let me talk to him-let-oh, for-” Gerard leans forward and snatches the phone, ignoring Mikey’s squawk of protest. “Ray, it’s Gerard. Listen-was he hurt at all? Like, was there any blood?”
“A little,” Ray tells him. “Why?”
“I might be able to track him,” Gerard says. “I’ve never done it before, but I know all you guys’ scents pretty well by now, and…well, if he’s bleeding…”
“Worth a shot,” Ray says after a brief, uncomfortable pause. “We can come get you-”
“I could move faster on my own,” Gerard points out. “And you guys can keep looking other places, in case I don’t find him. Just tell me where he went missing.”
The patch of blood on the concrete is small, and mostly dry by the time Gerard finds it. He presses his fingers against it anyway, then brings them to his face and inhales. Frank.
The trail of scent in the air is faint, but enough for Gerard to follow, and within fifty feet he finds another splash of blood on the pavement, fresher than the first. The third patch he finds has barely had any time to dry, and looking at the darkened, run-down houses around it, Gerard thinks he knows where he’s going.
He pulls out his phone, tapping a quick message to Mikey. house I stayed in right after I was turned. looks abandoned on the outside. I think that’s where the trail’s heading. He types out the address, and then keeps moving. A voice in the back of his head suggest that maybe he should wait for Ray and Bob, but a louder, more insistent voice points out that Frank is in Bert or Jeph or Quinn’s hands, and bleeding.
The house hasn’t changed at all in the time he’s been away-sagging porch, boarded-up windows, faded, peeling paint. Gerard moves up the wooden steps as quietly as he can manage, not hesitating.
The first thing that sets off a warning bell in his head is that the door is unlocked.
The second thing is that Frank’s scent is here, but not as strong as it should be-not as strong as it would be if he were in the house.
The third thing is getting slammed into the wall.
“And that would be you, taking the bait,” Quinn informs him, pinning Gerard’s arms behind his back.
“Where is he?” Gerard growls, lips pulling back from his teeth in a snarl of helpless anger.
“Oh, don’t worry about that,” Quinn says. “You’ll see your little hunter friend soon enough.”
“I-what?” That’s, like, the polar opposite of a snappy comeback, but Gerard dismisses that as currently pretty unimportant.
“You’ll see.”
The blow to the back of Gerard’s head would probably be enough to kill him, if he were mortal. As it is, it knocks him out pretty completely.
Chapter 9
Fandom: Bandom AU (primarily My Chemical Romance and Fall Out Boy, with various and sundry other bands).
Rating: R (language, violence, slight sexuality)
Pairings: Eventual Frank/Gerard, Pete/Patrick
Summary: What happens when the video for "A Little Less 16 Candles..." and repeat playings of "Vampires Will Never Hurt You" mix in my head.
Warnings: Bandom vampire AU, so if that's not your thing...yeah. Also character death and members of The Used being villains, but no more villainous than all the FBR-family vampires over in Chicago are being.
Notes: Tentative halfway point reached! \o? And I want to thank anyone who's giving this story a chance in spite of its massive WIP-ness. Unfortunately, I, uh, went and signed up for bandombigbang, because I am insane. So things will be a bit slow(er) on the vampire front while an entirely different massive AU consumes my brain for a few months, but stay tuned! There's an angry angry vampire hunter!Frank in my head who'll never let me hear the end of it if I leave him hanging.
Previous chapters here, here, here, and here.
Gerard dreams about Frank for the first time a little more than a week after they meet.
The dreams are nothing new-he’s been having them since his second or third night as a vampire. He doesn’t know if they’re common among his kind, but suspects they might not be. His own theory is that they’re his price to pay for the path he’s chosen; that if he’s not going to hunt, the hunger and darkness that are a part of him now are going to have to find another outlet.
But that’s just his theory. The only other vamp he could ask about it is Pete, who he’s still only communicated with by way of Mikey so far, and Gerard’s not telling Mikey about the dreams if he can help it.
The details change sometimes, but the dreams are always essentially the same-slow, careful stalking, anticipation, want, followed by the thrill of the chase, the final struggle, and then the blood. He wakes up with the last light of day seeping through the closed blinds in his room, lying in a cold sweat with the phantom taste of blood in his mouth, and all he can think about for the first five minutes of awareness is how much he wants.
The victims are the main thing that changes from dream to dream. They’re male or female, different ages, different skin colors, but he only ever remembers them vaguely. They’re never very well-defined, just vehicles for the hunger.
The first time that changes is the night he jolts awake with a luridly clear memory of Frank’s face, wide-eyed, and Frank’s throat warm under his teeth.
It still takes a few minutes for him to climb out of the mindless haze of desire, and that leaves him with a sick weight of guilt in the pit of his stomach. The first coherent thought he manages is this could turn into a problem.
The fact that he sincerely doesn’t want to hurt Frank, that he likes Frank, seems like it ought to be a comfort, something he can concentrate on and try to shake the dreams off, but that only makes it more fucked-up. Yeah, he likes Frank-likes him a lot, and that’s part of the problem.
Gerard is what he is, now, and it seems that that means desire and bloodlust are tied together, whether Gerard wants it that way or not.
It doesn’t help, of course, that Frank is eighteen and one of Gerard’s little brother’s best friends. It helps even less that the two of them are being thrown into combat training together, and that Gerard gets to deal with things like Ray taking him aside during a session and explaining, calmly and earnestly, that he and Bob need Gerard to try and pin Frank down.
“It’d be stupid to have him spar with an actual vampire and not make the most of it, y’know?” Ray explains, matter-of-factly.
“It makes sense,” Gerard agrees, unable to keep the discomfort out of his voice entirely. “It’s just, with the blood thing…I’ve been trusting myself more to avoid temptation than resist it. I don’t want…”
Ray nods, his expression serious. “Figured that might be a factor. Bob and I’ll be right there, and I’d say we could restrain you pretty easily between the two of us, but if you don’t want to risk it…”
“What if he doesn’t want to risk it?” Gerard asks.
“We already talked it over with him,” Ray says, a bit tersely-Gerard can imagine how that conversation might have gone. “He’s not crazy about it, but he agrees it’s worth trying.”
Gerard swallows hard. “Just…err on the side of caution if you need to, all right? Don’t let me hurt him.”
Ray nods again. “Trust me, we won’t.”
Gerard came into this with less fighting spirit than Frank, but a vampire’s instincts and an artist’s sense of perfectionism to counter it. Bob’s got him started learning hand-to-hand combat-his own style, which is sort of like judo by way of boxing by way of good old-fashioned barroom brawling-saying they’ll work their way up to the wielding of sharp objects if and when he’s confident in Gerard’s chances of not stabbing himself on accident.
Gerard and Frank have sparred a few times before, enough that Gerard has a rough idea of what to expect, and of what Frank might expect from him. But he’s never used his full strength against Frank before, and for all Frank’s wary alertness, he’s taken by surprise when Gerard rushes him, catching him around the throat with one hand and bearing him down.
Frank strikes out, and Gerard catches his wrist. There’s a quick, fierce moment of struggling, and then they’re on the floor of the loft, Frank on his back with Gerard kneeling over him, hands wrapped around his wrist and throat. Frank’s eyes are wide, his mouth open as he pants for breath, and as if he’s done this a hundred times, Gerard knows what comes next-leaning in, lowering his mouth to where the pulse pounds on the side of Frank’s neck, claiming the prey he’s brought to ground.
And then Ray says his name, cautiously, and Bob takes a single step forward, and Gerard blinks and sinks back on his haunches, still on top of Frank, but loosening his hold and no longer looming over Frank’s exposed neck.
“Son of a bitch,” Frank hisses, shaken and a little bit angry, at Gerard or himself.
Bob comes closer and drops into a crouch, looking down at Frank. “Yep,” he says cheerfully. “That’s what you’d better be ready for. Next time, I want it to at least be a little harder for him to do that.”
Frank glares at Bob, and then glares at Gerard when he stands up and offers a hand, but he takes it, hopping nimbly back to his feet.
“You okay?” Gerard asks, and Frank smirks, one of those quicksilver mood changes Gerard’s still getting used to.
“I’m not made of glass, man.” Frank rubs his neck, adding, “Wouldn’t complain if you wanted to go a little easier next time, though. Fuck, I need a cigarette.” He digs through his pockets; Gerard does, too, and finds his pack first, and Frank raises an eyebrow as he offers them. “You still smoke?”
Gerard shrugs. “Force of habit. I could probably quit pretty easy now, I don’t feel addicted or anything…but then, it’s not like I’ve gotta worry about lung cancer anymore, y’know?”
“Guess not.” Frank takes a cigarette, hesitates a moment, and then nods, with another quick smile. “Thanks.”
Gerard feels like something just happened, but he’s not sure entirely what. He’s also not sure whether going home and taking a cold shower would do him any good when his default state is being cold these days.
It would be awkward under any circumstances, feeling this way about Frank. But under different circumstances, Gerard wouldn’t be struggling to ignore the sound of Frank’s heartbeat and the smell of his sweat, trying not to let himself wonder just how hard Frank would be to catch and pin down if they were struggling in earnest, without Bob and Ray right there.
And if Frank seems to be loosening up around Gerard a little, reassured by Gerard’s continued failure to go for his neck the second his guard is down, Gerard doesn’t want that to change.
He’s not sure how to deal with it, but what he tries to do is to focus. He tries to look past Frank’s eyes and face and body, past sharp, quick grace and surprising reserves of strength and the warm smell of blood, and see Frank, who he wants to help, whose trust he wants to earn. He does his best to push the hunger to the back of his mind, to not let it control him. If he can’t do that, he may as well lock himself in the basement for the rest of eternity.
Frank kills his first vampire a week and two days after he starts training.
Ray and Bob are both, like, ten feet away, hiding behind fucking trees or something and ready to step in if he needs help, but Frank tries to act like they’re not, like he has to sink or swim on his own with this. He gets knocked off his feet and has to grope for his knife when it flies out of his grip and feels teeth snapping less than an inch away from his neck, and then he gets hold of the knife again and just sort of stabs blindly until the vamp stops moving, at which point Frank rolls it over and makes sure to get it in the heart for good measure.
Bob holds Frank’s bangs back from his face when he throws up afterwards, and Ray rubs his back and hands him a water bottle when he’s done, and neither of them say anything cliche about everyone doing that their first time.
Frank wonders, after the fact, if his starting to actually hunt is going to make things weird with Gerard. Things have been getting un-weird a lot faster than Frank expected, but now he has to wonder what Gerard’s going to think of knowing that Frank’s killed one of his own kind earlier in the evening, or is planning to do so later.
Gerard doesn’t seem to mind much.
“How’d you go about it?” he asks when the subject comes up. “Like, did you find a vampire who was attacking someone, or wait for one to try and go for you?”
“Second one,” Frank mutters around a cigarette, at which Gerard shrugs.
“So you weren’t hunting down someone who was just minding their own business and not hurting anyone, basically.”
“Nope,” Frank says. “So we’re cool as long as I don’t do that?”
“I’m not gonna get bent out of shape over you killing in self-defense or defense of others, Frank,” Gerard says, and crushes out his own cigarette. “Are we gonna spar or what?”
Gerard, Frank is noticing, seems very open to embracing the concept of Biblical justice.
Frank goes on more hunts and kills more vampires, and Ray and Bob lurk from fifteen feet away, and then from twenty. They still agree he’s not ready to go out totally on his own yet-and they don’t plan on letting him walk the streets alone at night anyway, considering Jepha-but it won’t do him any good to rely on them too much.
That’s what Frank’s thinking-insofar as he’s thinking anything-the night the vampire he’s fighting turns and runs, and he follows. He hears Bob shout for him to slow the fuck down, to wait for him and Ray, but if Frank does that, the bastard’s going to get away and damn it, he can do this on his own, he has to.
Intent on the chase, he never sees how far ahead of Ray and Bob he’s getting-and never sees who tackles him as he rushes around a corner, or delivers the blow that knocks him out.
Gerard and Mikey are at home, perched on opposite ends of the couch while Mikey channel-surfs and Gerard sketches. When Mikey’s phone rings, and he answers, Gerard can hear Ray’s voice on the other end-tinny and distant, but Gerard can just make out the words.
“Mikey-” he begins, Mikey ignoring him as he paces back and forth, asking where they’ve looked already, where they’re planning to look, if he can help or call anyone. “Mikey, let me talk to him-let-oh, for-” Gerard leans forward and snatches the phone, ignoring Mikey’s squawk of protest. “Ray, it’s Gerard. Listen-was he hurt at all? Like, was there any blood?”
“A little,” Ray tells him. “Why?”
“I might be able to track him,” Gerard says. “I’ve never done it before, but I know all you guys’ scents pretty well by now, and…well, if he’s bleeding…”
“Worth a shot,” Ray says after a brief, uncomfortable pause. “We can come get you-”
“I could move faster on my own,” Gerard points out. “And you guys can keep looking other places, in case I don’t find him. Just tell me where he went missing.”
The patch of blood on the concrete is small, and mostly dry by the time Gerard finds it. He presses his fingers against it anyway, then brings them to his face and inhales. Frank.
The trail of scent in the air is faint, but enough for Gerard to follow, and within fifty feet he finds another splash of blood on the pavement, fresher than the first. The third patch he finds has barely had any time to dry, and looking at the darkened, run-down houses around it, Gerard thinks he knows where he’s going.
He pulls out his phone, tapping a quick message to Mikey. house I stayed in right after I was turned. looks abandoned on the outside. I think that’s where the trail’s heading. He types out the address, and then keeps moving. A voice in the back of his head suggest that maybe he should wait for Ray and Bob, but a louder, more insistent voice points out that Frank is in Bert or Jeph or Quinn’s hands, and bleeding.
The house hasn’t changed at all in the time he’s been away-sagging porch, boarded-up windows, faded, peeling paint. Gerard moves up the wooden steps as quietly as he can manage, not hesitating.
The first thing that sets off a warning bell in his head is that the door is unlocked.
The second thing is that Frank’s scent is here, but not as strong as it should be-not as strong as it would be if he were in the house.
The third thing is getting slammed into the wall.
“And that would be you, taking the bait,” Quinn informs him, pinning Gerard’s arms behind his back.
“Where is he?” Gerard growls, lips pulling back from his teeth in a snarl of helpless anger.
“Oh, don’t worry about that,” Quinn says. “You’ll see your little hunter friend soon enough.”
“I-what?” That’s, like, the polar opposite of a snappy comeback, but Gerard dismisses that as currently pretty unimportant.
“You’ll see.”
The blow to the back of Gerard’s head would probably be enough to kill him, if he were mortal. As it is, it knocks him out pretty completely.
Chapter 9