Posted originally on the Archive_of_Our_Own at https://archiveofourown.org/ works/5828299. Rating: Explicit Archive Warning: Graphic_Depictions_Of_Violence, Major_Character_Death, Underage Category: M/M Fandom: Fall_Out_Boy, patrick_stump_-_Fandom, Pete_Wentz_-_Fandom Relationship: Patrick_Stump/Pete_Wentz Character: Pete_Wentz, Patrick_Stump, Andy_Hurley, More_to_come_-_Character Additional Tags: Top!Pete, Vampire_AU, technically_character_death, But_not_for_long_so yay_for_that, Dom-like!Patrick, but_Pete_is_not_a_sub, bottom!patrick, I promise, None_sexual_domination, Eventual_Smut, It's_happy_when_it_gets past_all_that_sad_stuff, This_might_have_triggers, So_yeah, Triggers Series: Part 1 of What's_Light_If_There's_No_Darkness? Stats: Published: 2016-01-27 Chapters: 2/? Words: 4625 ****** Two Cold Souls ****** by Regret_Me_(MythicObsessions) Summary This story isn’t about Pete, or his best friend(recent lover and tamer) Patrick. It’s not about his feelings, or his thoughts. It’s definitely not about his childhood. It’s not about blood or love, though that does play a part. It’s about knowing a good thing when Pete sees it. And seriously, so what if that happens to include his best friend(and maybe boyfriend), myths of the undead, collars, a little biting kink and maybe a lot of undead(not dead) sex? It’s about the idea that maybe, despite common belief, Pete can have a good life. And maybe it just takes dying a little for him to figure that out for himself. Notes I can't promise updates. Busy-bee is me~~~ See the end of the work for more notes ***** Chapter 0: Take Me Away From Here. ***** It was dark. Blackness thick and heavy around him like tar, threatening to swallow him up and spit him out. A hand graced his shoulder, and he felt like his skin were rotting away from that point, but a whispered word told him it wasn’t a danger. Like a breath being pulled from his lungs, he opened his eyes, saw light and colors where there had just been shades of gray before and shadows. He blinked his eyes, hot like whiskey and blood in the empty white room, searching for the hand he knew he had felt. A hand with a ring wrapped like liquid gold around it’s third finger. A physical sign of a vow Pete himself had taken once, but broke too soon after. His breathing was rough and felt like poison to his lungs but he kept breathing when a voice told him too.    Nothing was visible then what was right before his eyes, a type of tunnel vision that permitted only what he could see without moving his eyes or focusing on anything at all. But he felt a hand, tracing circles on his back, fingers crawling up his spine, that ring burning trust through his body like a brand. He could handle this, if only for a moment. Handle not glancing up at his friend, his keeper. And Patrick could handle this for ages. Years maybe, Pete thought. Patrick could handle anything. And his hunger faded to near nothing with a tug of the metal around his neck. Take me away from here. This wicked, horrible world. I never wanted to be borne here anyway. Never wanted to be reborn here. I trust you with my heart, take me away. Away from here.   ***** Chapter 1: Negatives and Positives ***** Chapter Summary Patrick disliked the building. Chapter Notes This is actually going to be a story. Like with plot and everything. See the end of the chapter for more notes   Patrick disliked the building. Covered in dull gray, short and ugly from the outside. He disliked how the people who worked in said building tried to make it a happier place, covering the windows with almost see-through pictures of happier places. Islands and theme parks. It only made the fact all the more obvious, you were there because something, whether you admitted it or not, was wrong. Patrick wouldn’t admit such a thing.  Though the whole thing about clothing and maybe he was a little wrong in a sense but it didn’t matter because it didn’t affect him or his day to day life. Well, not much at least.    But the building had upsides, though few and rare, and normally barely an upside at all. It did have upsides. The building sometimes filled up with people like Patrick, shy, stuttery and a little, but not much, wrong. And sometimes it was filled with people like Pete. Pete was this kid Patrick saw only sometimes, Tuesdays and Thursdays every other week on rotation, and he was Patrick’s idea of the buildings upsides. Pete was loud, attention seeking, and clingy. Normally all things Patrick found annoying or demeaning but with Pete, he found it endearing. Maybe it was the floppy emo fringe or maybe it was Pete’s opinions on music. He didn’t quite know what had drawn him to the kid in the first place, except that it had happened and now Patrick didn’t want to be drawn apart. And this was a person he only got to speak to once, or twice, a month, already affecting Patrick’s life more than speaking to doctor Landau. The doctor Patrick had to sit with for an hour and a half once every other week was someone Patrick wouldn’t have known if he had the choice. Eventually Patrick looked up from his game-boy, threw Pete a smile, who had been hanging over his shoulder to watch him play Super Mario Land, and decided he wanted to know Pete outside of this fucked up building, with it’s overly happy workers. The conversation was short, but it still meant more to Patrick   “You want to hang out after this?” Patrick had asked, despite his shyness.   “Yes.” Pete had hissed with open excitement and had made grabby hands at Patrick’s game-boy after Patrick had died for the millionth time. Pete was better then Patrick was at the game.     He understood, somewhere, that he was a lost cause. Pete got that his parents had given up. He understood why they had. Even after the whole closet situation, when Pete screamed too loud and his mother had panicked and just locked him away, he could understand why she had done it. What he hadn’t understood was why she couldn’t have just talked to him. So what? His childhood wasn’t a play in a lush green park. His parents stopped caring when Pete looked like he couldn’t be cared for. It was understandable. Reasonable? No. But Pete wasn’t bitter. He just didn’t like to think back so far to the days of his childhood. The days where his parents refused to meet his eyes. And then Patrick. It was a simple solution to a problem present in Pete’s life. Eye contact. One of the things you never know you’ll miss until it’s gone, until people glance away as you glance up to meet them. Patrick was nothing like that. Despite the rumors of screaming insanity, Patrick didn’t glance away from Pete’s whorish gaze. His body language shouting “look at me!” And Patrick had. Simply flicked his gaze to Pete one day in that horrible building. Simply looked. Pete never really knew love, not unless you count before his mother coddled him in infancy. But in that moment? When wild sea green met hot, bubbling whisky, Pete knew love.     Maybe it was childish, the way he seemed to float weightless to Patrick, like a planet to it’s new sun. The silent threat of being consumed unimportant.  You're the sun in my solar system. Pete clung to this new thing. Attention. He liked it. He wanted more. YEARS_LATER The Sun burned bright and hot in the sky that day, dipping lower and lower until it was nothing but a lighter spot on the horizon. Pete stumbled out of that dreadful therapy building, tripping only once on the cracked cement of the walk. Patrick tailed him like a loyal dog, silent in all his beauty but so loud if Pete looked back to his eyes. He didn’t.  Instead he waved his hand over his shoulder, pointing forward towards the all- night diner they both liked. It was a familiar dance of nothing; shallow breaths and long moments of eye-contact. Pete felt safer here in the world when he had Patrick by his side, a warm comfort like hot-cocoa and fireplaces in the winter. A flashback to his childhood and that wasn’t so pleasant, so he shook his head and the thoughts there from it.     Patrick never ate when they went to the diner. In fact, Pete never had seen Patrick eat at all, something that maybe should have worried Pete as his best friend, seeing as Patrick went to the building for some reason, but it never came up. And Patrick wasn’t dead so obviously he ate since Pete had known him for so long that even an animal couldn’t have gone so long without food. Years and years. He could barely remember days where Patrick didn’t breathe down his neck in this weird type of backseat driving. Backseat driving Pete’s body. One of those thoughts that sent Pete diving back into his childhood and he didn’t like that place, so he shook it off again, watched Patrick’s mouth move as he ordered their usual coffees and Pete   his favorite muffin.  “What’s wrong?” Patrick asked, soft and sweet.  “Nothing.” Pete shrugged. “Just thinking.”  “Oh that can’t be good.” Patrick huffed.“Tell me what’s on your weary mind.” And Pete picked up a little fond smile on Patrick’s features.  “How long have we known each other?”  Pete shrugged again. And Pete wanted to take that sentence back, knew they were starting to drift out of normal and that familiar dance of breath and eye-contact was slipping away before Pete could reach out for it again.  “Three, maybe four now, years?” Patrick answered it like a question. Like maybe he didn’t really know either.  “Oh.” Pete mumbled, “Long time.” He smiled a flirty smile at the Waitress as she set his plate and both of their coffees down.  “Yeah. It’s been awhile.” Patrick nodded. Pete wanted to correct Patrick there. Wanted to shake him and say “Awhile? No, it’s been centuries. I’ve remembered you for centuries.” But he didn’t. He couldn’t and he never would. That he knew. They drank silently, Pete wrapping his muffin in a paper towel before standing up to pay and crowd Patrick home. The diner was the old kind, like a house re-purposed for a restaurant. Where the doors looked like the entryway of a family home, relaxing in the familiarity. Pete always liked people who tried for familiarity, for comfort. Pete loved the idea of the whole diner. But he really loved the doors. They looked almost medieval, two halves of a circle turned away from each other on one side of the double doors, but when they were closed, it completed to make a new circle, leaving two halves out but oddly like winds. It was, again, a familiar idea. Pete was a half, more of a quarter in his eyes, and Patrick was the rest of him. His completion. Fuck the rest.   His hands pressed hot against the doors, knocking them open for the cold of the newly born night to feel out the interior. Breathing in the icy air, he hooked his fingers around on side of the doors, one of the halves, and held it open for Patrick.    He could feel an absent hole against his back, not warm like a human body but still, a press of something.   Like a ghost, maybe. He didn’t think anything of it until a hand wrapped around his waist and his grip on the door faltered right as Patrick stepped through the threshold. His breath rushed out like a scream but it didn’t have the sound, a soft oof. And there was Patrick, a warm existence in front of him but it felt like a burn against the now frozen body against his back. Fear in Patrick’s eyes, a glint of something metallic, like the spoons Pete’s mom used to treasure with the little roses in the handle, and then a prick.   Pete had only felt a needle once, when his not-so-great friends demanded he try heroin, and he hadn’t really liked the feeling. A coldness that sunk into his veins and drifted, spread out. He liked the mark, but not the needle piercing his arm.  This was kind of like that. A prick, like that needle sinking into his forearm, right above that blue vein that showed, only now the prick was doubled and high on his neck.  A hand closed around his jaw, and he could remember nights where he needed more than a fuck, needed to lose control, and this felt kind of like that. In the bad way though, like he couldn’t fight back, and when the rush of his own blood flooded his hearing, he felt a little lost. Blinked up to meet Patrick’s eyes, watched that glint dive away, the pressure behind him fade but now his neck felt wet, sodden, dripping with something that was cold but also with moments of heat, blinding against the former. Tar sunk in around him, dragged him down, away from the stars, the lights in Patrick’s eyes.        The first touch was soft, a questioning brush of warm and wet. A cloth touching his scalp, and an oddly soothing hum that might have been in his own head. The ache in his neck had faded to a dull throb, a numbness in its place where once was agony. Sliding back into a place Pete was familiar with, a place he liked having pain be. A place he could revel in but not run from. He wasn’t awake. Not really. Borderline consciousness, but he could feel an urgent something behind his closed eyes. Almost like a command, pure instinct demanding Pete reach out for that thump thump thump of a heart beat, find a notch where the sound was louder and sink his teeth into it, and that made Pete feel strange. Hungry.    Patrick had never been so scared and it wasn’t all because of who was turned. He hadn’t ever hesitated when he had his blade in his hand but when he saw that Vamp spit up blood that definitely wasn’t Pete’s against his neck, Patrick couldn’t deal with the infection. He couldn’t settle the tip of his knife over Pete’s heart like he had that Vamp, his hands wouldn’t stop shaking when he tried. And the basement was dark, so he wasn’t even stopping the infection. Not even trying anymore. Once the fever had started, Patrick wouldn’t waste any more of his viles on Pete. Not that it’d be wasting, not if it was for Pete but he seriously doubted anyone else would have understood that. And despite his desire to pour every known cure down Pete’s throat, he held back but he still lunged forward when Pete’s body refused to swallow the liquid that could result in Pete’s humanity, poured more into his own mouth and pressed it into Pete’s. Shockingly effective, Patrick wondered about that. How his friend’s body wouldn’t react to anything until Patrick forced his tongue down until Pete swallowed. Huffing, he settled himself over Pete, his ear pressed against Pete’s chest, listening. And he didn’t cry, he didn’t, when that repeating beat slowed to a halt in his best friend’s rib-cage and the room became silent except Patrick’s soft stuttering breaths, and they weren’t sobs. He hadn’t gotten off Pete either to get that sharp blade that could end Pete’s soon to be misery. Patrick was selfish, he knew. He knew that raising a fledgling without a sire was like trying to build a snowman in hell. Odds long and maybe it’d be a waste of time anyway.    He wondered, settling a warm rag on Pete’s forehead, how he’d get the first blood Pete would evidently need. He couldn’t leave a fledgling alone, not without a fuck ton of blessed water or maybe a silver lock. And neither were easy to come by. Maybe, he thought in one of his weaker moments, he could let Pete just bite him. The idea was absurd. A first drink was meant to be monitored with knowing eyes or with a mortal who no one cared died. But teaching restraint was the idea and how could Patrick do that when he had no control over the situation at all. He had been bitten before and he knew how that felt. Not exactly pain, and there was something like a drug in a vamp’s saliva, something so easy to get addicted to that letting Pete bite him would almost be like signing a contract to always let Pete do it and that wasn’t a good idea. Patrick needed to be in control. Patrick held his phone in his hand, thinking as his old friend’s number blinked on the screen. Andy was the kind of hunter that never really questioned other people’s motives. A thing that could be horrible or, well, exactly what Patrick needed right then. His fingers tapped on the pad of paper settled over his knees, his toes barely touching Pete’s side but he still wasn’t willing to stop touching him for any length of time. He felt protective. Like maybe he was on suicide watch except the person he was watching was already dead. On the paper he had written thing’s he’d ask Andy to get him. A list so short and so utterly plain that it made Patrick’s stomach turn. And it was kind of funny, in a weird way. Like he was going to get a dog.   The first thing was obvious. Packets of blood, as many as he could get. The second was maybe a little strange.  A choker chain. The type of collar you use when you're trying to train a dog that’s probably stronger than you. The type that if tugged too hard, bites into the skin and tightens until the dog has to stop and breath. He thought about that for a moment. It wasn’t like Pete would need to breath but the bite would be enough to make him stagger.   And he couldn’t believe he was even thinking about this. Raising a fucking vampire. Something even the best Hunters could barely do, not without the Sire under their command and Patrick had made sure that Pete’s Sire was dead even before the infection could set in. He ended up calling Andy though, despite his own worries, about all the what- ifs in his head. He couldn’t think about that sort of thing when it was Pete who he needed to tame. He could, in the very least, try to do it.    When Pete really woke up there was an itch. Like maybe needles against his skin, something like when he got his tattoos but subtle, almost not there. And there was an ache behind his teeth and it made him want to gnaw on something. He shifted, felt warmth against his side and curled towards it. He knew, the moment the smell hit him, that it was Patrick, familiar and still so agonizingly silent. There was a moment when he wanted to reach up and pull Patrick down, put his teeth in his neck and just, keep him there. And that. That was weird. Pete pulled open his eyes and unconsciously flinched away from himself, pushing up and off the bed he was in and away, until his back hit something cold and hard. It was too light. “Hey-” Patrick cut off. “Hey, just…” Pete made a sound then, something like a rush of air between his teeth but really could have been a hiss.  “No.” Patrick said, “Don’t you even start.” He was firm and not as beautiful as Pete remembered, for that moment. Pete blinked, straightened up against, he felt, the brick wall behind him, his shoulder blades digging in uncomfortably. Patrick reached for something, but Pete wasn’t looking at his hands, his eyes glued onto Patrick’s neck like he couldn’t look away. Tunnel vision. His teeth ached with hunger. Something hard and flesh soft shattered against his cheeks and he blinked up to Patrick’s eyes again. Patrick was glaring, his hand outstretched, palm open with a white powder sticking between his fingers.  “What was that?” Pete asked, rubbing his eyes absently. That fucking hurt.  “Salt.” Patrick said simply.  “Did you just throw salt at me?”  “Yeah, you-”  “Wow, Trick.” Pete drawled. “Real mature.”  “You looked like you were going to fucking pounce on me.” Patrick whined, drawing his hand back and cradling it to his chest. Pete stuttered. He was so transparent.  “You're hungry?” Patrick asked, and his hesitation was obvious even to Pete, the most observant creature on earth.  “I-” Pete stopped. He was hungry, but it didn’t feel right. It was a hunger that spread from his stomach through his veins, and- A heavy breath sucked in, he realized he hadn’t tasted air since he woke up. His lungs ached with the intake and Patrick looked surprised.  “You don’t have to do that…” Patrick said. “You need to focus, okay?” Pete looked at Patrick, confused. He was focused, he had just forgotten to breath and maybe he should have felt that.  “Focus on yourself.” Patrick snapped. Pete blinked but obeyed. He breathed in again and felt the hollowness rake through him, and he realized with a strange sense of calm that he couldn’t feel his own heart. And the pain came back full force. The ache in his jaw, behind his teeth, the empty feeling in his veins, the gnawing hunger in his stomach. A throb in his neck. Curling a hand around his neck as his vision blurred with it. He remembered the ocean, a shifting, moving mass of cold water. The way his eyes stung with the saltiness of it and he blinked up at Patrick. Only a mass of unfocused lead shaped like his friend.    Patrick was a star student. He had been throughout middle school and even through high school after he met Pete. Keeping his grades up was difficult with the side training, his mother holding that blade that Patrick now kept under one of his vests that Pete just thought he was fond off.  He was the best learner in his family. Even when he had to learn the alchemy of poison designing and learning how to use it, the hardest thing a hunter could learn, and Pete had happened to go through his first real break up and first real suicide attempt during the first week of this training. Patrick kept up his studies even when Pete was crying into his shoulder, or asleep in     Patrick’s lap after confessing to sins as if Patrick were some sort of saint, and could redeem him.   Patrick kept his books, the old ones with leather bindings and a smell like rotten frog corpses, on him at all times. Read when Pete looked to be asleep.   At that time, he was stressed, tired, but still so willing to pull all- nighters if Pete had fallen asleep during the day and he couldn’t have studied during that time. A couple close calls with Pete reading, or seeing, the books made Patrick realize maybe it was impossible to keep a friendship built on lies.    Technically, it wasn’t completely built on lies. Pete knew Patrick’s name, his interest in the undead and music, despite his mother’s warnings about not having time. Pete knew that Patrick never liked girls, knew Patrick wasn’t planning on telling his mother until he was able to run to his own home and hide from her, or ever in general. Pete knew things Patrick wasn’t willing to let his parents know, his brother or sister. Pete had a lot of Patrick’s secrets, and it wasn’t fair that Patrick would keep the biggest one away from Pete like he had for years of their friendship. And Patrick considered Pete as something more like family than his own. But in a way that Patrick wouldn’t admit.   He remembered nights after Pete left the hospital where he ignored his studies to sing to Pete. And he remembered watching Pete’s chest rise and fall with his breath, just looking for reassurance that Pete was alive. Alive. Now was nothing like that.   Patrick was still curled against Pete’s side, singing softly, but there wasn’t any movement. Nothing to reassure Patrick that Pete was alive. It left something like a hole in Patrick’s chest, thinking that Pete might never wake up, there being no reason for him to anymore.  He could admit, maybe, he missed Pete’s shallow, sobbing breaths in the darkness of the basement, selfishly. He missed the feeling of Pete’s mouth pressed against the soft skin of his stomach, the one touch he’d always flinch away from if anyone else did it. But Pete wasn’t dead. He wasn’t alive either.    Patrick sat on the bed,  a packet of cold blood in his hand like a weapon, held away from his body but not towards Pete. Pete was still asleep. Patrick had just gone up to the house to get the box of items from Andy, who shrugged when Patrick tried to explain and shut him up with a quick “I don’t need to know.” and just left. He made it back in seconds.    See, Patrick had a thing about human blood. He didn’t consider that gray-red stuff that vamps bled out actual human blood. More like stolen blood that got fucked with too much. He had a thing about human blood. It made his stomach flip and his usually nonexistent gag reflex trigger. He shuddered and thought about how he could open the bag without all of that blood getting all over the place. He hadn’t got the tubes or that stringy wires he needed to put it directly into Pete’s system, which would be ideal so Pete never got a feel for actually biting.     Patrick sighed, he didn’t really want to open the bag, or risk opening the bag, before Pete was awake enough to use it but he also knew that Pete could only go so long without physically needing the blood to maintain his half dead state. And by half dead, Patrick was just consoling himself. Pete was past half-dead. And Patrick just wanted this blood in his system so he could hear Pete’s heart beat again, if only for just a minute. Patrick gagged at the feel of the blood moving in the bag, felt for a moment like he might throw up, he looked up to regain his control. And then a grip closed around his, Patrick’s eyes shot open and looked down at a very familiar, very cold hand. Patrick blinked up to see Pete’s familiar eyes smiling back at him, a glint of questioning there but no words.  “I-” Patrick started, stopping too fast. The thing was, Patrick didn’t know howto explain the whole “holding a bag of blood” thing. But when he looked at Pete again, he realized he might not need to explain it.  “Just…” Patrick shifted, pressed the bag into Pete’s hand, swallowing through the dryness in his throat at the swoosh in the bag that the movement caused.   “I mean…”   "‘trick.” Pete said, hushing Patrick without actually telling him to shut up. “I think I know what I have to do.” And Patrick frowned, blinked against the wetness in his eyes. Pete smiled at him then, and Patrick recoiled.     The four long teeth he had seen before. He remembered during long nights, with Pete asleep on his bed, studying those teeth. In the place where humans had their cuspid teeth, four long, needle sharp fangs resided in the mouth of a vampire. Nothing like the stories in pop culture. Instead, a little more like cat teeth only so sharp and with weird mechanics. Elongating when hunger was too pressing, shorting and looking almost like the normal cuspid when the need was met. Pete didn’t seem to notice Patrick’s break, his eyes had fallen from Patrick’s to the bag, red and maybe too cold for Pete’s liking, and that made Patrick feel a little better. That Pete didn’t see his anger, his hurt. Confusion.      Normally when your best friend died, you didn’t expect to be feeding them again. And, yeah, Patrick was maybe a bit confused about that. Not his mind, but his heart. Clutched and weeping at the thought of Patrick’s first love dead. Patrick let himself touch Pete’s arm, met his eyes like he had that first time. Blue mixing and swirling with bubbling hot whiskey, flaked now with blood red. He wanted to kiss Pete but he wouldn’t. Instead he smiled, weak but it was enough and nodded down at the bag.  “Just bite it?” Patrick suggested.   Pete shrugged a little, brought that bag to his mouth and gingerly bit down. Patrick saw the moment the blood tasted Pete’s tongue, watched Pete’s eyes flare red, and it was amazing. Amazingly and disgusting, true, but also kind of amazing how it drew up Pete’s color. Flushed his skin in a way Patrick could recognize from summer days on the shoreline with Pete’s loud happy laughter. Patrick could ignore the blood that eased out of Pete’s mouth. He smiled, reached for the empty bag when Pete offered it back, and he didn’t feel endangered.  “More?” Pete asked.  “Not yet, okay?” Patrick wanted to give him what he wanted. Chapter End Notes Sticky adventures into the world of the gross and disturbing. Comment, share, show you care! Love you all, my little obsessions. End Notes So it's official, thanks to my sweetest role model, I have myself a poetry Tumblr. Here's_a_link And if that doesn't work, you can always just click the link here: http://nununiversicontritum.tumblr.com/ Or do the whole copy/paste thing. Comment, Share, Show You Care! Love you, my little obsessions. Please drop_by_the_archive_and_comment to let the author know if you enjoyed their work!