Fic: Under Starlit Nights (Pete/Mikey/Alicia, AU, R)
Title: Under Starlit Nights
Summary: Even after everything, Pete never regrets turning Mikey into a vampire.
Pairing: Pete/Mikey/Alicia
Rating: R
Word count: 7732
Warnings: Set in the A Little Less Sixteen Candles AU, so warnings for, you know, vampires and blood and violence and death.
AN: A response to a prompt by secrethitmen that careened wildly out of control. (I can’t believe I wrote this in less than a day.) Huge thanks to the lovely chmclfairytales for the beta! ♥
Pete was moping in his van at a rest stop when the screaming started.
“Jesus, look up, you bastard!” yelled a girl right outside his window. Her black shirt clung wetly to her torso; Pete knew it wasn’t water. “I need help! I was in a car crash!”
She looked confused and terror-stricken. Pete glanced around, but his van was the only car in the rest stop. He remembered thinking that was a good thing a few hours previously. Now, not so much.
“I can’t,” Pete said, turning his head away so the scent would be less intense. God, she was beautiful, soaked in blood like that. He tugged his hood more securely in place.
She scowled and banged on his window, leaving red smears. “Fucking asshole! I need help! Get out of the fucking car, now!”
“I have to go,” Pete hissed, trying to keep his fangs hidden. He got the sense that they wouldn’t be a deterrent for this girl. He reached for the keys in the ignition.
“It’s my husband,” she said, leaning down. She had a necklace of words tattooed on her chest, Pete couldn’t quite make them out. Not that he was staring. Her voice lost its shrill edge as she pleaded, “Please, there’s no one else around.”
Now that she wasn’t screaming, he could see that her makeup wasn’t artfully smeared, it was tracked through with tears and smudged with bloody fingerprints. Fuck.
He thought of Patrick, and the way things had fallen to hell the last time he’d tried to help people, and then looked back at this lovely bloodstained girl glaring at him, brimming with impatience and terror.
Fuck. This was going to end badly.
He opened the door of his van with a rusty creak. The girl was taller than him, tattooed and dyed dark hair and defiant eyes.
“What the fuck is wrong with you? Are you too stoned to help?” Her mouth was twisted up in anger again, and she prodded his shoulder, as if to get a reaction out of him. “Mikey’s hurt, bad, and I need help.”
“I don’t know what you want me to do,” Pete said, ducking his head down so that his hood would cast a shadow over his face. The smell of blood was even stronger, the girl was fucking soaked in it. Whoever Mikey was, he was fucked. Pete didn’t have to see him to know that.
He had to get away from her or he was going to lose it. He hadn’t tasted human blood in... god, he didn’t even know how long, and he was drunk of the very smell of it.
“Do you have a phone? I’m not getting any service out here in Bumfuck Nowhweresville,” she said, frantically scrabbling at his arm.
“I don’t have a phone,” Pete said. He didn’t need one, he didn’t have anyone left.
“Then come, help! Jesus, you’re slow. Here, this way,” and she was leading him into the night.
*
“He’s fucked,” Pete said when he saw Mikey tangled up in a twisted heap of metal that had once been a car.
Alicia, as she’d proclaimed her name to be during her scared rants in his direction on the way to the crash site, punched him in the arm. “Don’t say that.”
“Lish?” Mikey groaned out, clearly unable to form the rest of the syllables of her name.
“Mikey! Oh, baby, I didn’t want to leave you alone but I went to find help,” Alicia said, reaching into the twisted metal and grasping something - Pete assumed it was a hand. “This dumb fucker was all I could find.”
“Cold,” said Mikey. Pete crouched down beside Alicia, and got his first clear look at Mikey.
Beautiful, he thought, staring at the bloody broken boy.
“I’ve got you,” Alicia said, her voice a frightened waver. “Mikey, baby, I’ve got you.”
Pete couldn’t see all of what had happened to Mikey, but he knew blood and mortality and the fragility of life, and knew what Alicia was too scared to admit.
Mikey’s eyes fluttered, eyelashes casting shadows on his sharp cheekbones in the red glow emitting from the dash. The red light made the actual blood smeared on him look black, and his skin appear crimson. Pete couldn’t stop staring.
This will end badly, he thought.
Alicia was sobbing now.
A tiny groan seemed to be all that Mikey was capable of making. Pete thought of his empty van, the makeshift blood-bar in the back where he tried to make his concoction nightly, the silence that seemed to have overtaken his life since... since everything.
“I love you,” Alicia was saying, over and over. “Don’t go, I love you.”
Mikey’s eyes closed, and Pete thought maybe it was the last time. He didn’t even know what color his eyes were. There were a pair of broken glasses laying shattered on the ground.
Everything seemed very far away, and Pete realized that these last few minutes were the closest he’d felt to being alive in a very long time. The scent of blood wrapped around him like a fog, filling his lungs and sending his mind spiraling towards thoughts he’d suppressed for a very long time.
He didn’t have to be alone.
He stared at the boy, the man who was dying before him.
He didn’t have to be alone. This wasn’t damnation, this was salvation.
“Move,” he said to Alicia, pushing her to the side. She let out an outraged shriek, tried to push herself up off the ground, and let out a sharp cry of pain as a sliver of glass sliced into her palm. The scent of more fresh blood, this time from a different source, made Pete feel dizzier than ever, fangs tingling and body thrumming.
He laughed, wildly uninhibited, and pulled Mikey out of the car, limbs flopping carelessly as a ragdoll.
“What are you doing? You’re hurting him!” Alicia cried, scrambling across the dirt towards them. The blood on her hands congealed into mud.
“I’m fixing him,” Pete hissed, baring his teeth at her for the first time. “You’re the one who wanted me to save him.”
Alicia froze, staring at him with wide eyes -- but not skeptical, Pete noticed dimly through the haze of bloodlust.
“You can’t be,” she whispered. Her hair hung lank in her face, and she brushed it out of the way with a bloody hand. “That’s impossible.”
Pete turned his back to her and looked more closely at Mikey. He was nearly gone, his heartbeat was stuttering and faltering like spent fireworks. There wasn’t much time, if Pete wanted this... if Pete was really this far gone with bloodlust and loneliness, then this was his only chance.
He ripped open his own wrist with his fangs - his own blood tasted watery and stale - and pressed it to Mikey’s mouth, watching his blood fill the unresponsive mouth, dribbling down a pale cheek before Mikey reflexively swallowed.
“You can’t be,” Alicia whispered behind him, her breath warm on his cool skin. “God, this can’t be real.”
Pete looked up at her, eyes shining with inhuman light. “You’ll live to know differently.”
*
Pete didn’t really know a lot about the transformation.
He only had strained, painful memories of his own- images of darkness and pain and lust and sensations he couldn’t even describe - that he didn’t like to think of, not even in the emptiest, loneliest hours of the night.
The rest of the night passed in a blur for him- he carried Mikey’s body back to his van, Alicia trailing along like she wasn’t a bloody mess walking into the den of a vampire. He glared at her, and she glared right back, baring her own completely human teeth at him.
“I’m not leaving him,” she said resolutely, staring at the limp body of her husband. She’d let out a tiny gasp when he’d stopped breathing, grasped his hand and kissed a tattoo on the inside of his forearm, but she’d stopped crying. Her eyes were red-rimmed and swollen, and Pete ignored the way she kept wiping her nose on the bloody sleeve of the hoodie he’d handed her in hopes of covering up the smell of blood enough for him to drive without ripping out her pretty pale throat.
“Fine, your own funeral,” Pete muttered grimly, and licked his lips again. He’d taken the last of Mikey’s blood, and god, human blood was even headier stuff than he remembered. Maybe it was just Mikey; somehow, just the few mouthfuls that had been left in his body had energized Pete, sending a golden haze across his vision.
He was practically bouncing in his seat, and so long as he didn’t get too close to Alicia, everything felt more... together than it had in a while.
He cast a glance to the back. This wasn’t a mistake, he told himself. He wasn’t being stupid again. This was...
Fate.
*
There was something wrong when Pete woke up.
He laid still for a long moment, trying to place what was off. The hotel room was generic, just like all the rest he’d ever woken in. The big metal screen he’d made to fit over hotel room windows was firmly in place, and the room was dark and cool. The air conditioner whirred, the faucet in the bathroom dripped...
And beside him someone was breathing, and a heartbeat as loud as machine gun fire echoed through his pounding head.
He turned his head, and the girl - Alicia - was sleeping beside him, face burrowed into Mikey’s unmoving shoulder.
“Fuck,” he said, the previous night coming back to him in a flash. “Fuck!”
Mikey would be waking soon, and his stupid fucking wife was cuddled up against him like breakfast in bed.
He sat up, grabbed her wrist, jerked her away. “What the fuck?” he yelled at her.
“What?” she said, blearily wiping sleep out of her eyes, looking around the room, confused. “Where... oh, fuck.”
She’d taken a bath at some point during the day, he saw. She was still wearing his hoodie, zipped up over bare skin, and a pair of pants he recognized as his own. There was a strip of her old t-shirt tied around the hand she’d cut, and now he could see she had bruises forming all over, one especially nasty on her forehead, mostly hidden by her bangs.
She was staring at Mikey, whom she seemed to have also cleaned up during the night. He wasn’t wearing a shirt any longer, Pete realized, staring at the bony angles of his torso and the clean lines of his shoulder. His skin was white as bone. Pete wasn’t sure... he hoped the transformation had worked.
“Are you fucking retarded?” Pete hissed, baring his teeth. “Why the hell would you climb in bed with vampires?”
Alicia motioned around the bare motel room. “I didn’t see anywhere else to go. Besides, Mikey would never hurt me.”
“Maybe not before,” Pete snapped. “But this is a whole different ballgame.”
Alicia rolled her eyes. “You don’t even know Mikey.”
“You don’t know anything about vampires,” Pete shot back.
“Drink blood, stay out of the sunlight, sleep like the dead,” Alicia said, counting on her fingers. “Now tell me three things about Mikey that don’t involve his death date or how hot he is.”
Now that Pete thought about it, he had an awful lot of tattoos that proved he shouldn’t make lifelong commitments while inebriated. Alicia was still staring at him. He thought about getting rid of her, somehow. He could tell Mikey that she’d died in the car accident, and maybe Mikey would be sad, but if it was Pete, he would thank his lucky stars for being given immortality and getting rid of this shrew in one fell swoop.
“You are so totally wrong,” Pete said. A total lie. “I mean--”
He turned his head. There was a stirring on the bed.
“Get in the bathroom,” he said, desperately. “And lock the door.”
He had the feeling that Mikey would hate himself if his first act as a vampire was to kill his wife.
“Mikey,” Alicia breathed. “Mikey, you’re alive.”
Mikey was blinking rapidly and pushing himself up into a sitting position. He stared at his hands, brows furrowed.
“Not really,” Pete said to Alicia. “He’s kind of not alive at all.”
Mikey lifted his hand to his face, and prodded at his mouth. Pete tried to remember what it had been like to suddenly have a mouthful of fangs. In the blurry tangled mess of memories he had of his own transformation, nothing as benign as teeth stood a chance of being recalled.
Alicia started to move towards Mikey, but Pete grabbed her arm. It seemed like he was having to manhandle the girl an awful lot, he thought, as she turned and glared and tried to pull away.
“Let me go, asshole, I have to be over there,” she hissed. She had a scary look in her eyes. She was hot as fuck, Pete thought, but he was damn glad she wasn’t the one he’d turned.
Mikey looked up.
“Alicia,” he said. The words were garbled, as though he had a terrible lisp. He frowned.
“Are you okay?” she asked. She stopped trying to wrench her arm away from Pete. “Mikey, I didn’t know what to do, I couldn’t lose you, I couldn’t stop him. Are you okay?”
“I’m... I’m okay,” Mikey said slowly. Pete began to wonder if Mikey was maybe a little dimwitted.
“Really or are you just saying that?” Alicia demanded. “Mikey, you died last night. Your corpse laid on that bed all day. You don’t have a pulse.”
Her voice shook as she said the words, and Pete wondered for the first time what she’d done all day, besides cleaning the blood off herself and her husband.
Mikey opened his mouth and shut it again. “I... it’s hard to remember,” he said. “Last night, I mean. I remember dinner, I remember us driving, I remember... I remember the brakes going out.” He stopped for a minute, looking down at himself. His skin was unmarked, there was no sign of the injuries that had killed him.
“I was so fucking scared.” Alicia’s voice was barely more than a whisper.
“I remember... I was.. There was blood.” There was no horror in Mikey’s voice. Just lust.
Alicia was shaking. Pete loosened his grip on her, thinking she needed space. She pulled away and was halfway across the room before Pete could do much more than stare and think, she’s mad.
Pete had done a lot of fucking stupid things when he was alive, but racing to a newborn vampire’s arms when they were talking about blood took the cake over anything he had ever thought about doing.
Alicia had her arms wrapped around Mikey, and he nuzzled his face into the crook of her neck.
“God, you smell amazing,” he said. He stroked her arm, Alicia shivered. Pete couldn’t look away.
“I don’t... Mikey, you’re a fucking vampire,” Alicia whispered. Pete wondered if she knew he could still hear her.
“I know, Gee’s gonna piss himself,” Mikey replied. He was sniffing her neck.
“You’re... are you going to bite me?” Alicia didn’t sound scared, exactly.
“I really want to,” Mikey said honestly. “But I don’t want to hurt you.”
Alicia glanced at Pete. “He needs it, doesn’t he?”
“He’s going to have to feed,” Pete said. “But he’s.. he won’t be able to control himself.”
“Mikey has great self-control,” Alicia said with confidence. “Besides, you could stop him, right?”
Pete didn’t think anyone had ever looked at him with completely trust like that before, especially since he’d become a vampire. Even Patrick had...
“Maybe,” he said. “Do you really want to risk your life on maybes?”
“What else is there?” she replied, grinning at Mikey.
“I won’t hurt you,” he said into her neck. His tongue darted out and traced a line over a vein. Alicia shuddered. “God, Alicia, you wouldn’t believe how you fuckin’ smell.”
“Such a sweet talker,” she said, sweeping her hair up into a messy ponytail. Pete kind of stared at the way her blood pulsed under her pale skin. No wonder Mikey was mesmerized. He moved closer, sitting on the edge of the bed.
“Easy now,” Pete encouraged. “Just ease into it, slowly.”
Nothing like coaching a virgin, he thought as Mikey’s mouth clamped down on Alicia’s neck, and Pete scooted closer to place a steadying hand on the small of her back as Mikey bit down. Alicia let out a gasp, wrapping her own arms around Mikey and holding him tight.
Mikey suckled on her neck like a child, and Pete could stop himself from leaning in and licking up the delicate stream of blood that escaped Mikey’s greedy desperate lips. Alicia was stiff, but then slowly relaxed, leaning back into Pete and lolling her head to the side.
“Oh,” she said. “Oh, fuck.”
Her blood burned on Pete’s lips. It’d been so long since he’d had proper human blood, tasting it two nights in a row was like taking straight shots of whisky after years of being straightedge.
“God,” he said. “Fuck, you’re beautiful.”
He didn’t know which of them he was talking to. He didn’t think it really mattered.
Through his blissful haze, he realized that Mikey should probably pull away soon, if Alicia were to survive the meal.
“Mikey, that’s enough,” he said. "Mikey!”
He slipped a hand around, touching Mikey’s cheek.
"That’s enough,” he cautioned.
Alicia let out a gasp, body stiffening again between them. Pete worried, glancing fretfully back between them before realizing, oh. Oh. Alicia wasn’t in pain. She scrabbled at Mikey’s shoulders, gasping and stretching her neck even more under his sloppy ministrations. She shuddered, and Mikey pulled away from her neck with a wet slurp.
Mikey’s pupils were blown, and it looked like starlight shone from in his infant eyes. He wasn’t saying anything, just staring at Alicia like she was the most precious thing in the universe.
Pete couldn’t stop himself. He licked up the remaining droplets of blood off Alicia’s neck, running his tongue across the twin holes Mikey had left before leaning over Alicia’s shoulder and kissing Mikey himself, licking his bloodstained lips and running his tongue across Mikey’s sharp new fangs.
Alicia lolled bonelessly between them, watching lazily as Mikey slid a hand up to touch Pete’s jaw, returning the kiss eagerly.
As Alicia drifted off to sleep between them, Pete whispered into Mikey’s mouth, “Do you hate me for what I’ve done?”
It wasn’t fair to ask him now, now when he was drunk off his lover’s blood and filled with all the wonder a sated thirst could bring a vampire. Pete didn’t always fight fair.
“No,” Mikey replied, tightening his grip on Pete’s neck just a little too much, just enough that Pete felt where bruises would form if he were mortal. “I don’t hate you.”
It was enough.
*
The night wore on. Drunk from human blood and dizzy from bloodloss, Mikey and Alicia didn’t seem to realize the magnitude of what had happened.
Both drunk and dizzy himself, veins feeling as though they were sloshing emptily inside him from transforming Mikey and the few precious mouthfuls of Alicia’s blood sizzling inside him, Pete didn’t think it was important to remind them.
He didn’t ask questions about their lives. Last names, addresses, family members were for the living, Pete thought. Nothing good would come out of reminding them of what they’d lost in that car crash.
Fate, he thought again. Mikey was beautiful as a vampire, just like Pete had thought he would. Pete had thought that William was the most beautiful deadly creature he’d ever seen, all wicked eyes and smirking smiles, but now... now Pete thought differently.
Alicia kept mumbling that Mikey looked different without his glasses, without all the straightening and styling that he apparently normally put his hair through. It hung free around his face until Mikey got frustrated and smoothed it back with water. Pete could remember the way everything felt more sensitive, increased a thousandfold, after the first gluttonous feast, and thought the feel of loose strands of hair brushing against his cheeks must have been driving Mikey mad.
Pete just kept laughing quietly, watching Mikey and his lovely human wife. All pale skin, both of them, and dark hair. But now Mikey thrummed with something more, something extra that Pete had given him.
Mikey was moving and talking and letting out nervous bursts of laughter because Pete had intervened. Alicia was smiling and touching Mikey as if she thought he was going to dissipate like a dream because Pete had done something.
They were his, now, he thought. His because Mikey’s life belonged to him.
He laughed loudly at that thought, remembering William saying something similar to him after his own death and resurrection.
Mikey and Alicia stared at him, concerned.
*
When Pete awoke to fine Mikey and Alicia curled up beside him, hands clenched together and matching tattoos pressed together like a promise, he felt a sharp pang of jealousy.
He couldn’t remember falling asleep - a glance at the illuminated clock on the flimsy night stand told him it was three in the morning. Pete hadn’t fallen asleep in the night since.. Since just after his own transformation, his body feeling weak and hungry.
There was something off, he thought, then realized that there were two heartbeats in the room. Alicia’s slow and steady one, and another frantic, terrified one.
He heard a muffled shriek, and turned to see a girl tied to a chair in the corner of the room.
Her eyes were wide and terrified, and she was trying without much success to scream around the gag in her mouth.
“What the fuck?” Pete said.
“You’re a wreck,” Alicia said stretching. “Look at yourself, you look like you’ve been living in someone’s attic eating rats.”
Pete bristled. “Fancy talk from someone with a bruise the size of Antarctica on her face.” He knew it was a weak comeback, but there was a fucking girl tied to the chair in his motel room.
Alicia rolled her eyes. “She’s just a party girl,” she said impatiently. “She’s so fucked up right now she’s gonna think this was just a bad trip in the morning.”
In the morning. Alicia didn’t intend for him to kill the girl. He kept staring at her.
“You saved my life,” Mikey said. He peered over Alicia, whose shoulders shook with laughter. Pete didn’t think anything about this was funny. “It’s the least we could do.”
Pete was so very, very fucked.
The girl thrashed a bit, and yeah, she probably wasn’t going to remember this in the morning.
Chicago felt very far away.
Pete climbed off the bed and thought, just this once wouldn’t hurt.
*
After a while, it began to feel... normal, again, to hear a heartbeat when he woke. Pete hadn’t thought that could happen again, not after Chicago. Alicia’s breathing was loud, and occasionally snores filled the room, and Pete thought it was beautiful.
Life, he thought, tracing a finger over her left breast, feeling the heartbeat echoing inside. Alicia mumbled something incoherent in her sleep and her nipple puckered up. Pete continued to trace letters on her breast with his cold fingertip, his initials and hers and Mikey’s, hearts and stars and ouroboros.
He looked up, and Mikey was watching him with heavy-lidded eyes.
“She’s beautiful,” Pete whispered.
“I know,” Mikey said with a wistful sort of sadness. “She’s dying, though.”
Pete shook his head. Beauty and death were one and the same, and Alicia might be dying, but it was the same slow inevitable pull of mortality as everyone living.
“I can’t live without her,” Mikey said, staring at Pete directly.
Pete sucked in a useless breath. “It won’t be... she won’t be the same.”
“I’m not the same either,” Mikey replied. “We’ve talked about it.”
“I can’t let that happen,” Pete said. Alicia’s heartbeat under his fingertips was strong, and he tried to imagine her flesh as cool and flawless as Mikey’s. It was monstrous.
“It’s not your decision,” Mikey said, flashing his fangs.
Pete resolved to not let either one out of his sight. Just until the first flushes of immortality passed from Mikey and he realized... he realized that he was making a mistake.
Alicia mumbled, “God, stop being so goddamn noisy,” and rolled over, pressing her face into the pillow and kicking her legs out luxuriously.
“Sorry,” Mikey whispered, pressing a kiss on the back of her fragile neck, never looking away from Pete.
*
They took to traveling around, nomadic and free.
Strange, how before Mikey and Alicia, Pete had felt like a pariah when he drove aimlessly through the countryside, staying away from other vampires and their territorial ambitions. Now, it felt like those vampires mired in pissing contests were the idiots, and this - free and acting on impulse - was how they were meant to behave.
At first, Pete was jealous whenever Mikey brought up Gee, voice hopeful and reverent and incredulous and longing, until Alicia rolled her eyes and informed him that Gerard was Mikey’s brother back in Jersey.
“Oh,” Pete said, and the jealousy didn’t abate. He barely even thought of his own siblings, and here Mikey had someone so important to him that he wanted to risk everything to meet.
“Gerard wouldn’t stake me,” Mikey said, rolling his own eyes. Pete was beginning to feel like the child of the group, nevermind he was the oldest and most experienced. Mikey shared a look with Alicia, one of those looks that made Pete feel like a hitchhiker. “He’ll be so pissed that I found out vampires were real first, though.”
“More likely he’ll be pissed you went and died and didn’t tell him,” Alicia said, lighting a cigarette.
Mikey shrugged.
Pete changed the subject. “Where are we going tonight?”
“There’s a band I’ve been wanting to see...” Alicia said, and that was that.
*
Pete wasn’t sure why he didn’t tell Mikey about the concoction.
They never killed anyone - a few times it had been close, Mikey’s self-control not nearly as good as Alicia had thought. Alicia herself was looking pale and anemic, because she was always offering up her own neck rather than helping hunt down a meal.
Pete was never more than an arm’s reach away when Mikey bit into her, protective of her lingering humanity. Mikey hadn’t brought it up again, but Pete knew better than most that silence didn’t mean that the plan had been forgotten. Mikey wasn’t overly talkative at the best of times anyhow - Alicia had made the off comment a few times that he had gotten quieter in death.
Pete told himself it was because of how vital and bright the diet of human blood made Mikey. He was barely recognizable as the same person Pete had first seen in that twisted wreckage - death suited him, better than it had ever suited Pete.
Mikey asked one night if Pete had ever killed anyone.
Alicia was off inside the fast food joint, buying herself food.
Pete watched her through the plate glass windows, pale as a ghost with bruised eyes, and wondered if maybe Mikey was right about her.
“I’m not telling you that,” Pete said. They hadn’t really discussed the morality of vampirism at length, though Pete had noticed every feeding had been a little shorter, a little less relished. Mikey hadn’t killed anyone. “I don’t like to talk about the past.”
Pete always clammed up when Mikey’s questions led them to Pete’s own history, rather than just basic facts of vampirism. He hadn’t so much as spoken Patrick or William’s name to him. He didn’t talk about Chicago, and the mess there. He edged around it like it was quicksand, like he’d lose himself in the bog of memories if he so much as said the words aloud.
“Then you’ve got something to hide,” Mikey said. He was slouched in his seat, sunglasses pulled over his eyes to block out the florescent lights. He was still a baby in vampire terms, and any bright light was too much for him.
Pete stayed silent.
*
Maybe, Pete admitted to himself, the reason he wasn’t telling Mikey about the concoction was that he didn’t want to go back himself.
The mouthfuls of human blood no longer sizzled within him, no longer burned paths down the back of his throat like it was laced with holy water. Instead, he thrummed with life, feeling invigorated and more alive than he had in years.
The concoction had never fully replicated the way that blood made him blossom, and the shadows under his eyes disappeared the longer he stayed with Mikey and Alicia, in direct opposition to Alicia, who became frailer by the day.
Pete knew what Mikey was doing, but drunk off the golden-edged feeling that the steady nightly mouthfuls of human blood was giving him, he couldn’t quite focus enough to care.
“I missed this,” he said dumbly one night as they sent a hard-eyed boy staggering back down the street, confused and still stoned enough to laugh as he bumped into a lightpost. “I’d forgotten...”
Mikey looked at him, raising an eyebrow. “You’ve been a vampire longer than I have,” he pointed out levelly.
“Yeah, but,” Pete said. “I wasn’t... I was straightedge, man.”
Mikey’s lips were red, and Pete leaned in and licked them. It tasted like living and dreams and everything Pete’s life-after-death had been missing.
“There’s another way,” Mikey said. He wasn’t moving.
“Not a good one, no,” Pete said. “All dreary and burning hunger and feeling as though you’re a fucking ghost, man, it ain’t living.”
He sounded like a fucking junkie, and maybe he was, but fuck he felt alive. He didn’t want to give that up.
Mikey stepped away from him. There was no difference in heat, Mikey was the temperature outside now that he was dead. Pete thought he would have mourned this fact, had he ever touched him while he had been warm and lucid.
“There’s another fucking way,” Mikey said coldly.
Pete blinked, confused.
“I mean... there’s... what, aren’t you fucking happy, Mikey?” Pete snapped.
“Oh, I’m real goddamn happy, living off other people like a fucking parasite,” Mikey said. “I’m too ashamed of myself to call my brother and let him know I’m not rotting in a ditch somewhere, Pete. Does that seem like I’m happy to you?”
“But,” Pete said. “You have me. And Alicia.”
“Three people, Pete, and two of them corpses,” Mikey said. “We aren’t part of the world. We aren’t living, Pete. This is hiding. We’re hiding and leeching off people who don’t deserve it, and you smile in your fucking sleep, you’re so happy.”
Pete felt strange, like the world had just been ripped out from under his feet. Like he was in one of those circus funhouses, trying to keep his balance while the room spun around and around. “But... you wanted to turn Alicia.”
Mikey gave him a look, one Pete couldn’t identify. “I don’t want to be stuck alone with you for eternity.”
He turned and walked away.
Pete was left alone.
*
He spent the next week detoxing himself.
It was ridiculous to think of human blood as an addiction, especially when he was a fucking vampire, but after watching Mikey leave, sitting in his empty van, waking up alone in a bed that suddenly seemed too large with only one person in it...
He had to do something.
He found the ingredients to the last version of his concoction he’d been working on, and grimaced when it went down chunky and sluggish. If he still had a gag reflex, he was sure he would have vomited it up, but afterwards his stomach felt heavy and leaden, and he could be around humans without the temptation of pressing his fangs into their delicate skin and feasting.
The further away the golden-edged high of drinking human blood got, the more Pete realized he’d fucked up. He hadn’t even... fuck, he’d just assumed Mikey had the same killer instinct as every other newborn vampire. Nevermind that he’d never been inclined to go for the kill. Nevermind that Mikey had chosen to take Alicia’s willingly offered blood rather than taking from strangers.
He’d always taken as little as possible, and disappeared after the incidents where he’d almost taken too much in fits of infantile lust.
Pete had just assumed... Pete had been so fucking stoned off the influx of blood that he hadn’t even realized that Mikey was miserable.
And that first night... the girl tied to the chair...
He remembered how terrified Alicia had been, how fucking scared she’d been because she’d just watched her husband die and some fucking weirdo from a van pour blood down his throat.
He’d never told them that it was possible to live without blood, and Mikey and Alicia hadn’t wanted to part.
He was putting together all the pieces too late.
Pete had fucked up, and he had no one to blame but himself.
*
The thing was, Pete had no fucking clue where to find Mikey. Even if Mikey wanted to hear his apology, which Pete really fucking doubted.
He really hated their nomadic lifestyle with a burning passion.
He thought things through. William had always seemed to be able to find Pete when the fancy struck him. How had he done it?
Pete was regretting a lot of things these days, and he added ‘not learning cool vampire sire tricks’ to his mental tally.
He spend his nights wandering, until one night he got a strange prickling sense of familiarity. Like he could reach out and touch someone he was missing, like they were right there...
He slammed on the brakes of his van, staring at the motel he was driving past. There was no fucking way. He couldn’t just... he couldn’t be outside the motel Mikey was at. He wasn’t that lucky.
It felt... it felt like his heart was tearing in two, suddenly. He climbed out of his van, leaving it sitting there on the side of the street, and raced to the motel. He thought back, remembering the way he’d chosen his route at random, following the random tugs of his heartstrings, and maybe...
Maybe that was how William had done it after all. Letting instinct take the wheel, and follow blindly to the exact place he needed to be the most.
He raced down the sidewalk, staring at the identical doors leading to identical shabby rooms, and trying to figure out where Mikey was. He was here, he was so close, and Pete wasn’t going to fuck things up even more than he already had. He was going to fix it, he was going to apologize, he was going to help Mikey, they could be good together...
He considered pounding on doors until he got the right one, but that would take too fucking long. He had to get to Mikey now, he could feel it in his bones. Something was wrong, something was off, something was...
There. There. A plain black car sat in front of a room with the curtains smooshed oddly against the window.
Like there was something behind them, blocking all possible rays of sunlight from entering the room.
Like a vampire was using that room as his den.
Pete raced, feeling the wind cold on his cheeks. He’d be panting if he needed to breath, and he let the air rush in and out of his lungs for the hell of it. Mikey was near, Mikey was close and Pete was going to fix everything.
Pete was going to have him back, fully and completely. He was going to learn everything about Mikey. He was clear-eyed and his brain wasn’t fogged with the haze of blood-drenched bliss, and he was going to fucking seduce Mikey into loving him again, into being with him again.
He knocked on the door, timidly at first then frantically as no one answered. Mikey was in there, Pete knew it, Pete could hear him...
Pete could hear him sobbing inside.
“Fuck,” he breathed out, nostrils flaring as he suddenly realized what the coppery sweet familiar tang was. “Fuck! Mikey, let me in there! Mikey!”
He slammed against the door, felt it splinter under his fists. He wrenched at the doorknob, feeling it give but the fucking deadbolt was thrown, it was keeping him out..
With another shove, he pushed the door in, boards splintering, and rushed into the room. He stopped, frozen, just in the thresh hold.
Mikey was crying and clutching at Alicia. There was blood everywhere, still lazily bubbling up from her torn throat. It soaked the front of Mikey and the sheets around them. Alicia’s head was to the side, lolling like a doll’s, and her eyes were glassy. Her lips moved, but no sound came out.
Mikey looked up, terror-struck. His fangs had strings of bloody saliva hanging off them, and his wordless cries slowly formed into understandable words. “I didn’t mean... accident... oh, god, Pete, what do I do?”
Alicia’s hand was clutched in his bloody t-shirt. Pete was paralyzed.
“Pete, fuck, help me!” Mikey looked at him, desperate. He didn’t even seem to register how fucking improbable it was that Pete had shown up, right in the nick of time.
Pete was across the room, crawling across the bedspread that was sticky with drying blood, and stared at Alicia.
“There’s only one thing I can do,” he said. It was hard to force the words out around his fangs, fully extended and practically aching from the overwhelming smell of blood.
“Do it,” Mikey whispered. “I can’t lose her.”
Alicia blinked. Her mouth seemed to be forming the word, “yes.”
There were tears welling up in Pete’s eyes, stupid fucking tears he tried to blink away as he bit into his wrist, pressed it to Alicia’s mouth. He looked up at Mikey, and grabbed one of Mikey’s hands. He unclenched the fingers, which had gone blue from how tight they were fisted in Alicia’s shirt, and before he could change his mind, ripped his teeth through Mikey’s delicate skin on his wrist, just below his tattoo. Blood sluggishly began to drip from the wound - Mikey was half-starved, Pete could see.
He pressed Mikey’s wrist alongside his own, and mingled their blood flow into Alicia’s mouth.
“Neither of us are strong enough to transform her alone,” Pete said. His voice cracked. God, Mikey was right here and he was a fucking wreck but he was still beautiful even with Alicia dying right here between them.
“I didn’t... I stopped, I didn’t want to hurt anyone, and she was so delicate, I’d taken too much from her, and then... then...” Mikey couldn’t finish the sentence.
“If you don’t eat, the bloodlust takes over,” Pete said patiently. Mikey knew that, he’d told him already.
“But she’s Alicia.” Mikey looked dumb with the horror of what he’d done. He kept licking his lips, then shuddering. Pete couldn’t tell if the shudders were disgust or lust; he suspected both.
“You’re a fucking vampire,” Pete said, more harshly than he should, given the circumstance. Between them, Alicia stopped swallowing and closed her eyes. He couldn’t even make out her tattoo under the blood. He resisted the urge to lick her clean.
The strangled cry Mikey let out made Pete turn his head, squeezing his eyes shut. They didn’t deserve this. Mikey didn’t need this guilt hanging over him.
Mikey deserved so much more than this bloody semblance of life.
Pete clasped hands with Mikey, their bleeding wrists pressed together. Mikey’s tattoo pressed against Pete’s own tattooed forearm, and they didn’t look nearly as symmetrical as Alicia’s, but Pete thought it wasn’t a bad match, really.
He carefully eased Alicia off Mikey’s lap with his free hand, untangling her limp fingers from Mikey’s shirt.
“I can’t believe,” Mikey said dully, staring. “I didn’t...”
He sounded like a child, broken and pitiful. Pete never wanted to hear that in his voice ever again, and he privately swore to keep Mikey from heartbreak.
“You couldn’t help it,” Pete said quietly. “None of us can, not when the thirst gets too strong.”
“I didn’t even think, I just... Alicia,” Mikey said.
Pete knew that tone, had felt it himself. “It’s... it doesn’t get better,” he said. “But you’ll still be together, even if she’s a little different. We all change.”
He hoped Alicia kept most of her personality, at least. He didn’t know what he’d do if she woke as a killer.
Mikey focused on Pete for the first time. “You saved her.”
“I only found her because of you,” Pete said. Fuck, right, remind Mikey he’d been the one to rip her throat out.
Mikey wasn’t paying attention to him any longer, he was staring back at Alicia. “What... what did she do, when it was me?”
That seemed like eons ago. “I was asleep, but... she cleaned you up. Cleaned herself off. It was messy for you, too. She slept with you, so you weren’t alone. So we weren’t alone.”
Mikey nodded. “Then that’s what I’m doing for her.”
*
In the end, they threw the sheets in a barrel behind the motel and burned the sheets and the clothes Alicia and Mikey had been wearing. Pete retrieved his van, throwing away the parking citation plastered to his windshield, and scrounging up clothes for them both.
Mikey curled up around Alicia, unwilling to let her out of his sight. Pete sat on the edge of the bed tentatively, wondering how to apologize.
“I am a fucktard,” Pete finally said.
Mikey opened his eyes a little, gave Pete an odd look. “Yeah?”
“I mean... I didn’t mean to. You know,” Pete said. “I wasn’t trying to trick you. Keep things from you. I was just... it was lonely for me, for a long time. After...” he trailed off. He still didn’t want to talk about Chicago. “I lost someone too, and it hurt and it still hurts, but you... you make it hurt less.”
It was the most honest thing Pete could say. He wanted to say other things, things like ‘I love you’ and ‘I want to spend forever with you’ and ‘if it weren’t for you and Alicia I would still be wasting away,’ but didn’t. Mikey either knew or he didn’t, but either way it wasn’t for Pete to announce, not here, not now.
“You kept me and Alicia together,” Mikey said. “You... you’re Pete.”
Pete didn’t know what that meant.
Mikey brushed a strand of Alicia’s hair out of her face, kissing her unmoving lips softly. “We owe you and we hate you and we love you and we were fucking miserable without you.”
Oh. Pete didn’t have anything to say.
Outside, the sun rose.
Pete fell asleep with one arm looped protectively over Alicia’s stomach, fingers tangled up with Mikey’s.
*
As a vampire, Alicia was hot as fuck. Pete couldn’t stop staring at her. She kept running her hands over her face, her teeth, her body, as though they were all new.
They were, Pete supposed.
The terror in her eyes when she’d woken had sent a tremor through Mikey, and Pete had clenched his hand more tightly than he already had been.
“It’s normal,” he whispered, like he had a fucking clue. Mikey nodded, eyes glued to Alicia, probably remembering his own resurrection. Projecting it onto Alicia’s expression.
Pete thought again of the darkness and the hunger that had engulfed him, and hoped he wasn’t the fucking norm.
“Alicia?” Mikey said hesitantly.
She turned her head. She was digging her hands into the bare mattress, ripping through the flimsy stained material with her untested new strength. “M-Mikey,” she said. “This is a fucking trip.”
Pete kind of laughed, a loud bray inappropriate for the tenseness in the room.
Alicia stared at him, then laughed, shoulders shaking. “Fuck, I’m dead. Mostly dead, whatever”
“We’re all dead down here,” Mikey said, deadpan. He hurried across the room and pulled Alicia close. “I was so goddamn scared. I thought I’d lost you.”
“You’ll never lose me,” Alicia said quietly.
“I’ll understand if you hate me,” Mikey said. “I mean--”
Alicia cut him off. “Don’t fucking say it.”
“I have to,” Mikey said. “I killed you.”
Alicia prodded her fangs. “I don’t feel dead.”
“You will,” Pete said. “But at least you aren’t alone.”
He picked up the concoction they’d cobbled together for her, handing her the glass. “We didn’t think... Mikey didn’t think you’d want to drink from someone alive.”
Alicia nodded, eyes flaring gold as she sniffed the concoction. “I... I can understand, now. But I don’t want to.”
She sipped at the glass, scrunching up her nose. “Fuck, that’s disgusting.”
“The price we pay,” Mikey monotoned. “Drink up, the night is young.”
He seemed fucking giddy, Pete thought. Like he hadn’t really believed that Alicia was going to wake. Like he’d thought they were just going to sit here and watch her rot.
Pete hadn’t allowed himself to think that until just then, and he leapt onto the bed and wrapped his arms tightly around his two companions. “We were scared,” he whispered to her.
“So was I,” she said. “But... we’re together now.”
“Together,” repeated Mikey, giving Pete a hard look.
Pete finally understood. It wasn’t him that was doing the claiming, he was being claimed.
“So what are we going to do?” he said. “Now that we’re together. Stuck like this forever, really.”
Mikey and Alicia exchanged a look. “We’re going to Jersey.”
Pete scrunched up his nose. “Eww. Why?”
“We have family there,” Alicia said calmly.
“My brother is going to freak out,” Mikey said joyfully. He glanced at the blocked window, judging it. “I think it’s full dark.”
Pete grabbed both their hands. “The night belongs to lovers.”
Mikey and Alicia rolled their eyes at him, but joined him in the next line anyway. “The night belongs to us.”
Summary: Even after everything, Pete never regrets turning Mikey into a vampire.
Pairing: Pete/Mikey/Alicia
Rating: R
Word count: 7732
Warnings: Set in the A Little Less Sixteen Candles AU, so warnings for, you know, vampires and blood and violence and death.
AN: A response to a prompt by secrethitmen that careened wildly out of control. (I can’t believe I wrote this in less than a day.) Huge thanks to the lovely chmclfairytales for the beta! ♥
Pete was moping in his van at a rest stop when the screaming started.
“Jesus, look up, you bastard!” yelled a girl right outside his window. Her black shirt clung wetly to her torso; Pete knew it wasn’t water. “I need help! I was in a car crash!”
She looked confused and terror-stricken. Pete glanced around, but his van was the only car in the rest stop. He remembered thinking that was a good thing a few hours previously. Now, not so much.
“I can’t,” Pete said, turning his head away so the scent would be less intense. God, she was beautiful, soaked in blood like that. He tugged his hood more securely in place.
She scowled and banged on his window, leaving red smears. “Fucking asshole! I need help! Get out of the fucking car, now!”
“I have to go,” Pete hissed, trying to keep his fangs hidden. He got the sense that they wouldn’t be a deterrent for this girl. He reached for the keys in the ignition.
“It’s my husband,” she said, leaning down. She had a necklace of words tattooed on her chest, Pete couldn’t quite make them out. Not that he was staring. Her voice lost its shrill edge as she pleaded, “Please, there’s no one else around.”
Now that she wasn’t screaming, he could see that her makeup wasn’t artfully smeared, it was tracked through with tears and smudged with bloody fingerprints. Fuck.
He thought of Patrick, and the way things had fallen to hell the last time he’d tried to help people, and then looked back at this lovely bloodstained girl glaring at him, brimming with impatience and terror.
Fuck. This was going to end badly.
He opened the door of his van with a rusty creak. The girl was taller than him, tattooed and dyed dark hair and defiant eyes.
“What the fuck is wrong with you? Are you too stoned to help?” Her mouth was twisted up in anger again, and she prodded his shoulder, as if to get a reaction out of him. “Mikey’s hurt, bad, and I need help.”
“I don’t know what you want me to do,” Pete said, ducking his head down so that his hood would cast a shadow over his face. The smell of blood was even stronger, the girl was fucking soaked in it. Whoever Mikey was, he was fucked. Pete didn’t have to see him to know that.
He had to get away from her or he was going to lose it. He hadn’t tasted human blood in... god, he didn’t even know how long, and he was drunk of the very smell of it.
“Do you have a phone? I’m not getting any service out here in Bumfuck Nowhweresville,” she said, frantically scrabbling at his arm.
“I don’t have a phone,” Pete said. He didn’t need one, he didn’t have anyone left.
“Then come, help! Jesus, you’re slow. Here, this way,” and she was leading him into the night.
*
“He’s fucked,” Pete said when he saw Mikey tangled up in a twisted heap of metal that had once been a car.
Alicia, as she’d proclaimed her name to be during her scared rants in his direction on the way to the crash site, punched him in the arm. “Don’t say that.”
“Lish?” Mikey groaned out, clearly unable to form the rest of the syllables of her name.
“Mikey! Oh, baby, I didn’t want to leave you alone but I went to find help,” Alicia said, reaching into the twisted metal and grasping something - Pete assumed it was a hand. “This dumb fucker was all I could find.”
“Cold,” said Mikey. Pete crouched down beside Alicia, and got his first clear look at Mikey.
Beautiful, he thought, staring at the bloody broken boy.
“I’ve got you,” Alicia said, her voice a frightened waver. “Mikey, baby, I’ve got you.”
Pete couldn’t see all of what had happened to Mikey, but he knew blood and mortality and the fragility of life, and knew what Alicia was too scared to admit.
Mikey’s eyes fluttered, eyelashes casting shadows on his sharp cheekbones in the red glow emitting from the dash. The red light made the actual blood smeared on him look black, and his skin appear crimson. Pete couldn’t stop staring.
This will end badly, he thought.
Alicia was sobbing now.
A tiny groan seemed to be all that Mikey was capable of making. Pete thought of his empty van, the makeshift blood-bar in the back where he tried to make his concoction nightly, the silence that seemed to have overtaken his life since... since everything.
“I love you,” Alicia was saying, over and over. “Don’t go, I love you.”
Mikey’s eyes closed, and Pete thought maybe it was the last time. He didn’t even know what color his eyes were. There were a pair of broken glasses laying shattered on the ground.
Everything seemed very far away, and Pete realized that these last few minutes were the closest he’d felt to being alive in a very long time. The scent of blood wrapped around him like a fog, filling his lungs and sending his mind spiraling towards thoughts he’d suppressed for a very long time.
He didn’t have to be alone.
He stared at the boy, the man who was dying before him.
He didn’t have to be alone. This wasn’t damnation, this was salvation.
“Move,” he said to Alicia, pushing her to the side. She let out an outraged shriek, tried to push herself up off the ground, and let out a sharp cry of pain as a sliver of glass sliced into her palm. The scent of more fresh blood, this time from a different source, made Pete feel dizzier than ever, fangs tingling and body thrumming.
He laughed, wildly uninhibited, and pulled Mikey out of the car, limbs flopping carelessly as a ragdoll.
“What are you doing? You’re hurting him!” Alicia cried, scrambling across the dirt towards them. The blood on her hands congealed into mud.
“I’m fixing him,” Pete hissed, baring his teeth at her for the first time. “You’re the one who wanted me to save him.”
Alicia froze, staring at him with wide eyes -- but not skeptical, Pete noticed dimly through the haze of bloodlust.
“You can’t be,” she whispered. Her hair hung lank in her face, and she brushed it out of the way with a bloody hand. “That’s impossible.”
Pete turned his back to her and looked more closely at Mikey. He was nearly gone, his heartbeat was stuttering and faltering like spent fireworks. There wasn’t much time, if Pete wanted this... if Pete was really this far gone with bloodlust and loneliness, then this was his only chance.
He ripped open his own wrist with his fangs - his own blood tasted watery and stale - and pressed it to Mikey’s mouth, watching his blood fill the unresponsive mouth, dribbling down a pale cheek before Mikey reflexively swallowed.
“You can’t be,” Alicia whispered behind him, her breath warm on his cool skin. “God, this can’t be real.”
Pete looked up at her, eyes shining with inhuman light. “You’ll live to know differently.”
*
Pete didn’t really know a lot about the transformation.
He only had strained, painful memories of his own- images of darkness and pain and lust and sensations he couldn’t even describe - that he didn’t like to think of, not even in the emptiest, loneliest hours of the night.
The rest of the night passed in a blur for him- he carried Mikey’s body back to his van, Alicia trailing along like she wasn’t a bloody mess walking into the den of a vampire. He glared at her, and she glared right back, baring her own completely human teeth at him.
“I’m not leaving him,” she said resolutely, staring at the limp body of her husband. She’d let out a tiny gasp when he’d stopped breathing, grasped his hand and kissed a tattoo on the inside of his forearm, but she’d stopped crying. Her eyes were red-rimmed and swollen, and Pete ignored the way she kept wiping her nose on the bloody sleeve of the hoodie he’d handed her in hopes of covering up the smell of blood enough for him to drive without ripping out her pretty pale throat.
“Fine, your own funeral,” Pete muttered grimly, and licked his lips again. He’d taken the last of Mikey’s blood, and god, human blood was even headier stuff than he remembered. Maybe it was just Mikey; somehow, just the few mouthfuls that had been left in his body had energized Pete, sending a golden haze across his vision.
He was practically bouncing in his seat, and so long as he didn’t get too close to Alicia, everything felt more... together than it had in a while.
He cast a glance to the back. This wasn’t a mistake, he told himself. He wasn’t being stupid again. This was...
Fate.
*
There was something wrong when Pete woke up.
He laid still for a long moment, trying to place what was off. The hotel room was generic, just like all the rest he’d ever woken in. The big metal screen he’d made to fit over hotel room windows was firmly in place, and the room was dark and cool. The air conditioner whirred, the faucet in the bathroom dripped...
And beside him someone was breathing, and a heartbeat as loud as machine gun fire echoed through his pounding head.
He turned his head, and the girl - Alicia - was sleeping beside him, face burrowed into Mikey’s unmoving shoulder.
“Fuck,” he said, the previous night coming back to him in a flash. “Fuck!”
Mikey would be waking soon, and his stupid fucking wife was cuddled up against him like breakfast in bed.
He sat up, grabbed her wrist, jerked her away. “What the fuck?” he yelled at her.
“What?” she said, blearily wiping sleep out of her eyes, looking around the room, confused. “Where... oh, fuck.”
She’d taken a bath at some point during the day, he saw. She was still wearing his hoodie, zipped up over bare skin, and a pair of pants he recognized as his own. There was a strip of her old t-shirt tied around the hand she’d cut, and now he could see she had bruises forming all over, one especially nasty on her forehead, mostly hidden by her bangs.
She was staring at Mikey, whom she seemed to have also cleaned up during the night. He wasn’t wearing a shirt any longer, Pete realized, staring at the bony angles of his torso and the clean lines of his shoulder. His skin was white as bone. Pete wasn’t sure... he hoped the transformation had worked.
“Are you fucking retarded?” Pete hissed, baring his teeth. “Why the hell would you climb in bed with vampires?”
Alicia motioned around the bare motel room. “I didn’t see anywhere else to go. Besides, Mikey would never hurt me.”
“Maybe not before,” Pete snapped. “But this is a whole different ballgame.”
Alicia rolled her eyes. “You don’t even know Mikey.”
“You don’t know anything about vampires,” Pete shot back.
“Drink blood, stay out of the sunlight, sleep like the dead,” Alicia said, counting on her fingers. “Now tell me three things about Mikey that don’t involve his death date or how hot he is.”
Now that Pete thought about it, he had an awful lot of tattoos that proved he shouldn’t make lifelong commitments while inebriated. Alicia was still staring at him. He thought about getting rid of her, somehow. He could tell Mikey that she’d died in the car accident, and maybe Mikey would be sad, but if it was Pete, he would thank his lucky stars for being given immortality and getting rid of this shrew in one fell swoop.
“You are so totally wrong,” Pete said. A total lie. “I mean--”
He turned his head. There was a stirring on the bed.
“Get in the bathroom,” he said, desperately. “And lock the door.”
He had the feeling that Mikey would hate himself if his first act as a vampire was to kill his wife.
“Mikey,” Alicia breathed. “Mikey, you’re alive.”
Mikey was blinking rapidly and pushing himself up into a sitting position. He stared at his hands, brows furrowed.
“Not really,” Pete said to Alicia. “He’s kind of not alive at all.”
Mikey lifted his hand to his face, and prodded at his mouth. Pete tried to remember what it had been like to suddenly have a mouthful of fangs. In the blurry tangled mess of memories he had of his own transformation, nothing as benign as teeth stood a chance of being recalled.
Alicia started to move towards Mikey, but Pete grabbed her arm. It seemed like he was having to manhandle the girl an awful lot, he thought, as she turned and glared and tried to pull away.
“Let me go, asshole, I have to be over there,” she hissed. She had a scary look in her eyes. She was hot as fuck, Pete thought, but he was damn glad she wasn’t the one he’d turned.
Mikey looked up.
“Alicia,” he said. The words were garbled, as though he had a terrible lisp. He frowned.
“Are you okay?” she asked. She stopped trying to wrench her arm away from Pete. “Mikey, I didn’t know what to do, I couldn’t lose you, I couldn’t stop him. Are you okay?”
“I’m... I’m okay,” Mikey said slowly. Pete began to wonder if Mikey was maybe a little dimwitted.
“Really or are you just saying that?” Alicia demanded. “Mikey, you died last night. Your corpse laid on that bed all day. You don’t have a pulse.”
Her voice shook as she said the words, and Pete wondered for the first time what she’d done all day, besides cleaning the blood off herself and her husband.
Mikey opened his mouth and shut it again. “I... it’s hard to remember,” he said. “Last night, I mean. I remember dinner, I remember us driving, I remember... I remember the brakes going out.” He stopped for a minute, looking down at himself. His skin was unmarked, there was no sign of the injuries that had killed him.
“I was so fucking scared.” Alicia’s voice was barely more than a whisper.
“I remember... I was.. There was blood.” There was no horror in Mikey’s voice. Just lust.
Alicia was shaking. Pete loosened his grip on her, thinking she needed space. She pulled away and was halfway across the room before Pete could do much more than stare and think, she’s mad.
Pete had done a lot of fucking stupid things when he was alive, but racing to a newborn vampire’s arms when they were talking about blood took the cake over anything he had ever thought about doing.
Alicia had her arms wrapped around Mikey, and he nuzzled his face into the crook of her neck.
“God, you smell amazing,” he said. He stroked her arm, Alicia shivered. Pete couldn’t look away.
“I don’t... Mikey, you’re a fucking vampire,” Alicia whispered. Pete wondered if she knew he could still hear her.
“I know, Gee’s gonna piss himself,” Mikey replied. He was sniffing her neck.
“You’re... are you going to bite me?” Alicia didn’t sound scared, exactly.
“I really want to,” Mikey said honestly. “But I don’t want to hurt you.”
Alicia glanced at Pete. “He needs it, doesn’t he?”
“He’s going to have to feed,” Pete said. “But he’s.. he won’t be able to control himself.”
“Mikey has great self-control,” Alicia said with confidence. “Besides, you could stop him, right?”
Pete didn’t think anyone had ever looked at him with completely trust like that before, especially since he’d become a vampire. Even Patrick had...
“Maybe,” he said. “Do you really want to risk your life on maybes?”
“What else is there?” she replied, grinning at Mikey.
“I won’t hurt you,” he said into her neck. His tongue darted out and traced a line over a vein. Alicia shuddered. “God, Alicia, you wouldn’t believe how you fuckin’ smell.”
“Such a sweet talker,” she said, sweeping her hair up into a messy ponytail. Pete kind of stared at the way her blood pulsed under her pale skin. No wonder Mikey was mesmerized. He moved closer, sitting on the edge of the bed.
“Easy now,” Pete encouraged. “Just ease into it, slowly.”
Nothing like coaching a virgin, he thought as Mikey’s mouth clamped down on Alicia’s neck, and Pete scooted closer to place a steadying hand on the small of her back as Mikey bit down. Alicia let out a gasp, wrapping her own arms around Mikey and holding him tight.
Mikey suckled on her neck like a child, and Pete could stop himself from leaning in and licking up the delicate stream of blood that escaped Mikey’s greedy desperate lips. Alicia was stiff, but then slowly relaxed, leaning back into Pete and lolling her head to the side.
“Oh,” she said. “Oh, fuck.”
Her blood burned on Pete’s lips. It’d been so long since he’d had proper human blood, tasting it two nights in a row was like taking straight shots of whisky after years of being straightedge.
“God,” he said. “Fuck, you’re beautiful.”
He didn’t know which of them he was talking to. He didn’t think it really mattered.
Through his blissful haze, he realized that Mikey should probably pull away soon, if Alicia were to survive the meal.
“Mikey, that’s enough,” he said. "Mikey!”
He slipped a hand around, touching Mikey’s cheek.
"That’s enough,” he cautioned.
Alicia let out a gasp, body stiffening again between them. Pete worried, glancing fretfully back between them before realizing, oh. Oh. Alicia wasn’t in pain. She scrabbled at Mikey’s shoulders, gasping and stretching her neck even more under his sloppy ministrations. She shuddered, and Mikey pulled away from her neck with a wet slurp.
Mikey’s pupils were blown, and it looked like starlight shone from in his infant eyes. He wasn’t saying anything, just staring at Alicia like she was the most precious thing in the universe.
Pete couldn’t stop himself. He licked up the remaining droplets of blood off Alicia’s neck, running his tongue across the twin holes Mikey had left before leaning over Alicia’s shoulder and kissing Mikey himself, licking his bloodstained lips and running his tongue across Mikey’s sharp new fangs.
Alicia lolled bonelessly between them, watching lazily as Mikey slid a hand up to touch Pete’s jaw, returning the kiss eagerly.
As Alicia drifted off to sleep between them, Pete whispered into Mikey’s mouth, “Do you hate me for what I’ve done?”
It wasn’t fair to ask him now, now when he was drunk off his lover’s blood and filled with all the wonder a sated thirst could bring a vampire. Pete didn’t always fight fair.
“No,” Mikey replied, tightening his grip on Pete’s neck just a little too much, just enough that Pete felt where bruises would form if he were mortal. “I don’t hate you.”
It was enough.
*
The night wore on. Drunk from human blood and dizzy from bloodloss, Mikey and Alicia didn’t seem to realize the magnitude of what had happened.
Both drunk and dizzy himself, veins feeling as though they were sloshing emptily inside him from transforming Mikey and the few precious mouthfuls of Alicia’s blood sizzling inside him, Pete didn’t think it was important to remind them.
He didn’t ask questions about their lives. Last names, addresses, family members were for the living, Pete thought. Nothing good would come out of reminding them of what they’d lost in that car crash.
Fate, he thought again. Mikey was beautiful as a vampire, just like Pete had thought he would. Pete had thought that William was the most beautiful deadly creature he’d ever seen, all wicked eyes and smirking smiles, but now... now Pete thought differently.
Alicia kept mumbling that Mikey looked different without his glasses, without all the straightening and styling that he apparently normally put his hair through. It hung free around his face until Mikey got frustrated and smoothed it back with water. Pete could remember the way everything felt more sensitive, increased a thousandfold, after the first gluttonous feast, and thought the feel of loose strands of hair brushing against his cheeks must have been driving Mikey mad.
Pete just kept laughing quietly, watching Mikey and his lovely human wife. All pale skin, both of them, and dark hair. But now Mikey thrummed with something more, something extra that Pete had given him.
Mikey was moving and talking and letting out nervous bursts of laughter because Pete had intervened. Alicia was smiling and touching Mikey as if she thought he was going to dissipate like a dream because Pete had done something.
They were his, now, he thought. His because Mikey’s life belonged to him.
He laughed loudly at that thought, remembering William saying something similar to him after his own death and resurrection.
Mikey and Alicia stared at him, concerned.
*
When Pete awoke to fine Mikey and Alicia curled up beside him, hands clenched together and matching tattoos pressed together like a promise, he felt a sharp pang of jealousy.
He couldn’t remember falling asleep - a glance at the illuminated clock on the flimsy night stand told him it was three in the morning. Pete hadn’t fallen asleep in the night since.. Since just after his own transformation, his body feeling weak and hungry.
There was something off, he thought, then realized that there were two heartbeats in the room. Alicia’s slow and steady one, and another frantic, terrified one.
He heard a muffled shriek, and turned to see a girl tied to a chair in the corner of the room.
Her eyes were wide and terrified, and she was trying without much success to scream around the gag in her mouth.
“What the fuck?” Pete said.
“You’re a wreck,” Alicia said stretching. “Look at yourself, you look like you’ve been living in someone’s attic eating rats.”
Pete bristled. “Fancy talk from someone with a bruise the size of Antarctica on her face.” He knew it was a weak comeback, but there was a fucking girl tied to the chair in his motel room.
Alicia rolled her eyes. “She’s just a party girl,” she said impatiently. “She’s so fucked up right now she’s gonna think this was just a bad trip in the morning.”
In the morning. Alicia didn’t intend for him to kill the girl. He kept staring at her.
“You saved my life,” Mikey said. He peered over Alicia, whose shoulders shook with laughter. Pete didn’t think anything about this was funny. “It’s the least we could do.”
Pete was so very, very fucked.
The girl thrashed a bit, and yeah, she probably wasn’t going to remember this in the morning.
Chicago felt very far away.
Pete climbed off the bed and thought, just this once wouldn’t hurt.
*
After a while, it began to feel... normal, again, to hear a heartbeat when he woke. Pete hadn’t thought that could happen again, not after Chicago. Alicia’s breathing was loud, and occasionally snores filled the room, and Pete thought it was beautiful.
Life, he thought, tracing a finger over her left breast, feeling the heartbeat echoing inside. Alicia mumbled something incoherent in her sleep and her nipple puckered up. Pete continued to trace letters on her breast with his cold fingertip, his initials and hers and Mikey’s, hearts and stars and ouroboros.
He looked up, and Mikey was watching him with heavy-lidded eyes.
“She’s beautiful,” Pete whispered.
“I know,” Mikey said with a wistful sort of sadness. “She’s dying, though.”
Pete shook his head. Beauty and death were one and the same, and Alicia might be dying, but it was the same slow inevitable pull of mortality as everyone living.
“I can’t live without her,” Mikey said, staring at Pete directly.
Pete sucked in a useless breath. “It won’t be... she won’t be the same.”
“I’m not the same either,” Mikey replied. “We’ve talked about it.”
“I can’t let that happen,” Pete said. Alicia’s heartbeat under his fingertips was strong, and he tried to imagine her flesh as cool and flawless as Mikey’s. It was monstrous.
“It’s not your decision,” Mikey said, flashing his fangs.
Pete resolved to not let either one out of his sight. Just until the first flushes of immortality passed from Mikey and he realized... he realized that he was making a mistake.
Alicia mumbled, “God, stop being so goddamn noisy,” and rolled over, pressing her face into the pillow and kicking her legs out luxuriously.
“Sorry,” Mikey whispered, pressing a kiss on the back of her fragile neck, never looking away from Pete.
*
They took to traveling around, nomadic and free.
Strange, how before Mikey and Alicia, Pete had felt like a pariah when he drove aimlessly through the countryside, staying away from other vampires and their territorial ambitions. Now, it felt like those vampires mired in pissing contests were the idiots, and this - free and acting on impulse - was how they were meant to behave.
At first, Pete was jealous whenever Mikey brought up Gee, voice hopeful and reverent and incredulous and longing, until Alicia rolled her eyes and informed him that Gerard was Mikey’s brother back in Jersey.
“Oh,” Pete said, and the jealousy didn’t abate. He barely even thought of his own siblings, and here Mikey had someone so important to him that he wanted to risk everything to meet.
“Gerard wouldn’t stake me,” Mikey said, rolling his own eyes. Pete was beginning to feel like the child of the group, nevermind he was the oldest and most experienced. Mikey shared a look with Alicia, one of those looks that made Pete feel like a hitchhiker. “He’ll be so pissed that I found out vampires were real first, though.”
“More likely he’ll be pissed you went and died and didn’t tell him,” Alicia said, lighting a cigarette.
Mikey shrugged.
Pete changed the subject. “Where are we going tonight?”
“There’s a band I’ve been wanting to see...” Alicia said, and that was that.
*
Pete wasn’t sure why he didn’t tell Mikey about the concoction.
They never killed anyone - a few times it had been close, Mikey’s self-control not nearly as good as Alicia had thought. Alicia herself was looking pale and anemic, because she was always offering up her own neck rather than helping hunt down a meal.
Pete was never more than an arm’s reach away when Mikey bit into her, protective of her lingering humanity. Mikey hadn’t brought it up again, but Pete knew better than most that silence didn’t mean that the plan had been forgotten. Mikey wasn’t overly talkative at the best of times anyhow - Alicia had made the off comment a few times that he had gotten quieter in death.
Pete told himself it was because of how vital and bright the diet of human blood made Mikey. He was barely recognizable as the same person Pete had first seen in that twisted wreckage - death suited him, better than it had ever suited Pete.
Mikey asked one night if Pete had ever killed anyone.
Alicia was off inside the fast food joint, buying herself food.
Pete watched her through the plate glass windows, pale as a ghost with bruised eyes, and wondered if maybe Mikey was right about her.
“I’m not telling you that,” Pete said. They hadn’t really discussed the morality of vampirism at length, though Pete had noticed every feeding had been a little shorter, a little less relished. Mikey hadn’t killed anyone. “I don’t like to talk about the past.”
Pete always clammed up when Mikey’s questions led them to Pete’s own history, rather than just basic facts of vampirism. He hadn’t so much as spoken Patrick or William’s name to him. He didn’t talk about Chicago, and the mess there. He edged around it like it was quicksand, like he’d lose himself in the bog of memories if he so much as said the words aloud.
“Then you’ve got something to hide,” Mikey said. He was slouched in his seat, sunglasses pulled over his eyes to block out the florescent lights. He was still a baby in vampire terms, and any bright light was too much for him.
Pete stayed silent.
*
Maybe, Pete admitted to himself, the reason he wasn’t telling Mikey about the concoction was that he didn’t want to go back himself.
The mouthfuls of human blood no longer sizzled within him, no longer burned paths down the back of his throat like it was laced with holy water. Instead, he thrummed with life, feeling invigorated and more alive than he had in years.
The concoction had never fully replicated the way that blood made him blossom, and the shadows under his eyes disappeared the longer he stayed with Mikey and Alicia, in direct opposition to Alicia, who became frailer by the day.
Pete knew what Mikey was doing, but drunk off the golden-edged feeling that the steady nightly mouthfuls of human blood was giving him, he couldn’t quite focus enough to care.
“I missed this,” he said dumbly one night as they sent a hard-eyed boy staggering back down the street, confused and still stoned enough to laugh as he bumped into a lightpost. “I’d forgotten...”
Mikey looked at him, raising an eyebrow. “You’ve been a vampire longer than I have,” he pointed out levelly.
“Yeah, but,” Pete said. “I wasn’t... I was straightedge, man.”
Mikey’s lips were red, and Pete leaned in and licked them. It tasted like living and dreams and everything Pete’s life-after-death had been missing.
“There’s another way,” Mikey said. He wasn’t moving.
“Not a good one, no,” Pete said. “All dreary and burning hunger and feeling as though you’re a fucking ghost, man, it ain’t living.”
He sounded like a fucking junkie, and maybe he was, but fuck he felt alive. He didn’t want to give that up.
Mikey stepped away from him. There was no difference in heat, Mikey was the temperature outside now that he was dead. Pete thought he would have mourned this fact, had he ever touched him while he had been warm and lucid.
“There’s another fucking way,” Mikey said coldly.
Pete blinked, confused.
“I mean... there’s... what, aren’t you fucking happy, Mikey?” Pete snapped.
“Oh, I’m real goddamn happy, living off other people like a fucking parasite,” Mikey said. “I’m too ashamed of myself to call my brother and let him know I’m not rotting in a ditch somewhere, Pete. Does that seem like I’m happy to you?”
“But,” Pete said. “You have me. And Alicia.”
“Three people, Pete, and two of them corpses,” Mikey said. “We aren’t part of the world. We aren’t living, Pete. This is hiding. We’re hiding and leeching off people who don’t deserve it, and you smile in your fucking sleep, you’re so happy.”
Pete felt strange, like the world had just been ripped out from under his feet. Like he was in one of those circus funhouses, trying to keep his balance while the room spun around and around. “But... you wanted to turn Alicia.”
Mikey gave him a look, one Pete couldn’t identify. “I don’t want to be stuck alone with you for eternity.”
He turned and walked away.
Pete was left alone.
*
He spent the next week detoxing himself.
It was ridiculous to think of human blood as an addiction, especially when he was a fucking vampire, but after watching Mikey leave, sitting in his empty van, waking up alone in a bed that suddenly seemed too large with only one person in it...
He had to do something.
He found the ingredients to the last version of his concoction he’d been working on, and grimaced when it went down chunky and sluggish. If he still had a gag reflex, he was sure he would have vomited it up, but afterwards his stomach felt heavy and leaden, and he could be around humans without the temptation of pressing his fangs into their delicate skin and feasting.
The further away the golden-edged high of drinking human blood got, the more Pete realized he’d fucked up. He hadn’t even... fuck, he’d just assumed Mikey had the same killer instinct as every other newborn vampire. Nevermind that he’d never been inclined to go for the kill. Nevermind that Mikey had chosen to take Alicia’s willingly offered blood rather than taking from strangers.
He’d always taken as little as possible, and disappeared after the incidents where he’d almost taken too much in fits of infantile lust.
Pete had just assumed... Pete had been so fucking stoned off the influx of blood that he hadn’t even realized that Mikey was miserable.
And that first night... the girl tied to the chair...
He remembered how terrified Alicia had been, how fucking scared she’d been because she’d just watched her husband die and some fucking weirdo from a van pour blood down his throat.
He’d never told them that it was possible to live without blood, and Mikey and Alicia hadn’t wanted to part.
He was putting together all the pieces too late.
Pete had fucked up, and he had no one to blame but himself.
*
The thing was, Pete had no fucking clue where to find Mikey. Even if Mikey wanted to hear his apology, which Pete really fucking doubted.
He really hated their nomadic lifestyle with a burning passion.
He thought things through. William had always seemed to be able to find Pete when the fancy struck him. How had he done it?
Pete was regretting a lot of things these days, and he added ‘not learning cool vampire sire tricks’ to his mental tally.
He spend his nights wandering, until one night he got a strange prickling sense of familiarity. Like he could reach out and touch someone he was missing, like they were right there...
He slammed on the brakes of his van, staring at the motel he was driving past. There was no fucking way. He couldn’t just... he couldn’t be outside the motel Mikey was at. He wasn’t that lucky.
It felt... it felt like his heart was tearing in two, suddenly. He climbed out of his van, leaving it sitting there on the side of the street, and raced to the motel. He thought back, remembering the way he’d chosen his route at random, following the random tugs of his heartstrings, and maybe...
Maybe that was how William had done it after all. Letting instinct take the wheel, and follow blindly to the exact place he needed to be the most.
He raced down the sidewalk, staring at the identical doors leading to identical shabby rooms, and trying to figure out where Mikey was. He was here, he was so close, and Pete wasn’t going to fuck things up even more than he already had. He was going to fix it, he was going to apologize, he was going to help Mikey, they could be good together...
He considered pounding on doors until he got the right one, but that would take too fucking long. He had to get to Mikey now, he could feel it in his bones. Something was wrong, something was off, something was...
There. There. A plain black car sat in front of a room with the curtains smooshed oddly against the window.
Like there was something behind them, blocking all possible rays of sunlight from entering the room.
Like a vampire was using that room as his den.
Pete raced, feeling the wind cold on his cheeks. He’d be panting if he needed to breath, and he let the air rush in and out of his lungs for the hell of it. Mikey was near, Mikey was close and Pete was going to fix everything.
Pete was going to have him back, fully and completely. He was going to learn everything about Mikey. He was clear-eyed and his brain wasn’t fogged with the haze of blood-drenched bliss, and he was going to fucking seduce Mikey into loving him again, into being with him again.
He knocked on the door, timidly at first then frantically as no one answered. Mikey was in there, Pete knew it, Pete could hear him...
Pete could hear him sobbing inside.
“Fuck,” he breathed out, nostrils flaring as he suddenly realized what the coppery sweet familiar tang was. “Fuck! Mikey, let me in there! Mikey!”
He slammed against the door, felt it splinter under his fists. He wrenched at the doorknob, feeling it give but the fucking deadbolt was thrown, it was keeping him out..
With another shove, he pushed the door in, boards splintering, and rushed into the room. He stopped, frozen, just in the thresh hold.
Mikey was crying and clutching at Alicia. There was blood everywhere, still lazily bubbling up from her torn throat. It soaked the front of Mikey and the sheets around them. Alicia’s head was to the side, lolling like a doll’s, and her eyes were glassy. Her lips moved, but no sound came out.
Mikey looked up, terror-struck. His fangs had strings of bloody saliva hanging off them, and his wordless cries slowly formed into understandable words. “I didn’t mean... accident... oh, god, Pete, what do I do?”
Alicia’s hand was clutched in his bloody t-shirt. Pete was paralyzed.
“Pete, fuck, help me!” Mikey looked at him, desperate. He didn’t even seem to register how fucking improbable it was that Pete had shown up, right in the nick of time.
Pete was across the room, crawling across the bedspread that was sticky with drying blood, and stared at Alicia.
“There’s only one thing I can do,” he said. It was hard to force the words out around his fangs, fully extended and practically aching from the overwhelming smell of blood.
“Do it,” Mikey whispered. “I can’t lose her.”
Alicia blinked. Her mouth seemed to be forming the word, “yes.”
There were tears welling up in Pete’s eyes, stupid fucking tears he tried to blink away as he bit into his wrist, pressed it to Alicia’s mouth. He looked up at Mikey, and grabbed one of Mikey’s hands. He unclenched the fingers, which had gone blue from how tight they were fisted in Alicia’s shirt, and before he could change his mind, ripped his teeth through Mikey’s delicate skin on his wrist, just below his tattoo. Blood sluggishly began to drip from the wound - Mikey was half-starved, Pete could see.
He pressed Mikey’s wrist alongside his own, and mingled their blood flow into Alicia’s mouth.
“Neither of us are strong enough to transform her alone,” Pete said. His voice cracked. God, Mikey was right here and he was a fucking wreck but he was still beautiful even with Alicia dying right here between them.
“I didn’t... I stopped, I didn’t want to hurt anyone, and she was so delicate, I’d taken too much from her, and then... then...” Mikey couldn’t finish the sentence.
“If you don’t eat, the bloodlust takes over,” Pete said patiently. Mikey knew that, he’d told him already.
“But she’s Alicia.” Mikey looked dumb with the horror of what he’d done. He kept licking his lips, then shuddering. Pete couldn’t tell if the shudders were disgust or lust; he suspected both.
“You’re a fucking vampire,” Pete said, more harshly than he should, given the circumstance. Between them, Alicia stopped swallowing and closed her eyes. He couldn’t even make out her tattoo under the blood. He resisted the urge to lick her clean.
The strangled cry Mikey let out made Pete turn his head, squeezing his eyes shut. They didn’t deserve this. Mikey didn’t need this guilt hanging over him.
Mikey deserved so much more than this bloody semblance of life.
Pete clasped hands with Mikey, their bleeding wrists pressed together. Mikey’s tattoo pressed against Pete’s own tattooed forearm, and they didn’t look nearly as symmetrical as Alicia’s, but Pete thought it wasn’t a bad match, really.
He carefully eased Alicia off Mikey’s lap with his free hand, untangling her limp fingers from Mikey’s shirt.
“I can’t believe,” Mikey said dully, staring. “I didn’t...”
He sounded like a child, broken and pitiful. Pete never wanted to hear that in his voice ever again, and he privately swore to keep Mikey from heartbreak.
“You couldn’t help it,” Pete said quietly. “None of us can, not when the thirst gets too strong.”
“I didn’t even think, I just... Alicia,” Mikey said.
Pete knew that tone, had felt it himself. “It’s... it doesn’t get better,” he said. “But you’ll still be together, even if she’s a little different. We all change.”
He hoped Alicia kept most of her personality, at least. He didn’t know what he’d do if she woke as a killer.
Mikey focused on Pete for the first time. “You saved her.”
“I only found her because of you,” Pete said. Fuck, right, remind Mikey he’d been the one to rip her throat out.
Mikey wasn’t paying attention to him any longer, he was staring back at Alicia. “What... what did she do, when it was me?”
That seemed like eons ago. “I was asleep, but... she cleaned you up. Cleaned herself off. It was messy for you, too. She slept with you, so you weren’t alone. So we weren’t alone.”
Mikey nodded. “Then that’s what I’m doing for her.”
*
In the end, they threw the sheets in a barrel behind the motel and burned the sheets and the clothes Alicia and Mikey had been wearing. Pete retrieved his van, throwing away the parking citation plastered to his windshield, and scrounging up clothes for them both.
Mikey curled up around Alicia, unwilling to let her out of his sight. Pete sat on the edge of the bed tentatively, wondering how to apologize.
“I am a fucktard,” Pete finally said.
Mikey opened his eyes a little, gave Pete an odd look. “Yeah?”
“I mean... I didn’t mean to. You know,” Pete said. “I wasn’t trying to trick you. Keep things from you. I was just... it was lonely for me, for a long time. After...” he trailed off. He still didn’t want to talk about Chicago. “I lost someone too, and it hurt and it still hurts, but you... you make it hurt less.”
It was the most honest thing Pete could say. He wanted to say other things, things like ‘I love you’ and ‘I want to spend forever with you’ and ‘if it weren’t for you and Alicia I would still be wasting away,’ but didn’t. Mikey either knew or he didn’t, but either way it wasn’t for Pete to announce, not here, not now.
“You kept me and Alicia together,” Mikey said. “You... you’re Pete.”
Pete didn’t know what that meant.
Mikey brushed a strand of Alicia’s hair out of her face, kissing her unmoving lips softly. “We owe you and we hate you and we love you and we were fucking miserable without you.”
Oh. Pete didn’t have anything to say.
Outside, the sun rose.
Pete fell asleep with one arm looped protectively over Alicia’s stomach, fingers tangled up with Mikey’s.
*
As a vampire, Alicia was hot as fuck. Pete couldn’t stop staring at her. She kept running her hands over her face, her teeth, her body, as though they were all new.
They were, Pete supposed.
The terror in her eyes when she’d woken had sent a tremor through Mikey, and Pete had clenched his hand more tightly than he already had been.
“It’s normal,” he whispered, like he had a fucking clue. Mikey nodded, eyes glued to Alicia, probably remembering his own resurrection. Projecting it onto Alicia’s expression.
Pete thought again of the darkness and the hunger that had engulfed him, and hoped he wasn’t the fucking norm.
“Alicia?” Mikey said hesitantly.
She turned her head. She was digging her hands into the bare mattress, ripping through the flimsy stained material with her untested new strength. “M-Mikey,” she said. “This is a fucking trip.”
Pete kind of laughed, a loud bray inappropriate for the tenseness in the room.
Alicia stared at him, then laughed, shoulders shaking. “Fuck, I’m dead. Mostly dead, whatever”
“We’re all dead down here,” Mikey said, deadpan. He hurried across the room and pulled Alicia close. “I was so goddamn scared. I thought I’d lost you.”
“You’ll never lose me,” Alicia said quietly.
“I’ll understand if you hate me,” Mikey said. “I mean--”
Alicia cut him off. “Don’t fucking say it.”
“I have to,” Mikey said. “I killed you.”
Alicia prodded her fangs. “I don’t feel dead.”
“You will,” Pete said. “But at least you aren’t alone.”
He picked up the concoction they’d cobbled together for her, handing her the glass. “We didn’t think... Mikey didn’t think you’d want to drink from someone alive.”
Alicia nodded, eyes flaring gold as she sniffed the concoction. “I... I can understand, now. But I don’t want to.”
She sipped at the glass, scrunching up her nose. “Fuck, that’s disgusting.”
“The price we pay,” Mikey monotoned. “Drink up, the night is young.”
He seemed fucking giddy, Pete thought. Like he hadn’t really believed that Alicia was going to wake. Like he’d thought they were just going to sit here and watch her rot.
Pete hadn’t allowed himself to think that until just then, and he leapt onto the bed and wrapped his arms tightly around his two companions. “We were scared,” he whispered to her.
“So was I,” she said. “But... we’re together now.”
“Together,” repeated Mikey, giving Pete a hard look.
Pete finally understood. It wasn’t him that was doing the claiming, he was being claimed.
“So what are we going to do?” he said. “Now that we’re together. Stuck like this forever, really.”
Mikey and Alicia exchanged a look. “We’re going to Jersey.”
Pete scrunched up his nose. “Eww. Why?”
“We have family there,” Alicia said calmly.
“My brother is going to freak out,” Mikey said joyfully. He glanced at the blocked window, judging it. “I think it’s full dark.”
Pete grabbed both their hands. “The night belongs to lovers.”
Mikey and Alicia rolled their eyes at him, but joined him in the next line anyway. “The night belongs to us.”