Let The Darkness Lead You Home 1 страница

Let The Darkness Lead You Home

rivers_bend

Summary:

Vampires are in charge and most of the humans on earth are prey, so Frank Iero's parents have him train as a cyber tech to protect him. Leaving the family he's born into may have saved his life, but his parents never could have expected the lengths he'd go to in order to find a new family to call home.

Notes:

• For autoschediastic.

There is a fantastic mix and wonderful art to go with this. They can be found here: MIX; ART

Thank you so much to the bbb mods, my artist and mixer, and all the wonderful people who helped me write this. More on that at the end.

as always, I do not know any of the people whose names and public personas are used in this story and neither believe nor claim this to be true.

(See the end of the work for more notes.)

Work Text:

When he turns on his monitor, Frank can't see anything but shifting blacks, and even in the darkness has to brighten his screen to max to make out the shadows he knows Gerard can discern as clearly as Frank can see his own hands at noon. It looks like Captain Gabe has taken Gerard hunting. They're in the woods and the moon is new— perfect time for infrareds, but Gerard isn't using them. Then the screen flares bright in the black of the lab, blinding Frank before he can blink. Spots dance behind his lids as he murmurs, "lights, ten percent," but when he opens his eyes again the spots fade, and he can see the red and orange shapes moving through the blue-green columns of trees. A black square in the corner of the monitor shows him what the camera can pick up of Gerard's unaltered vision, but Frank's eyes are glued to the dozen or more red figures he can see in the center of his screen. Frank really did it. This is so fucking cool.

As the red shapes get closer, Frank sees there are more like two dozen of them, and he wonders if Central has game parks or if the prey population there is just particularly stupid. Either way, clearly neither the captain nor Gerard will end the night hungry. As Frank watches, Gerard blinks momentarily to x-ray view—useless in such dim lighting—then back to infrared. He must be still getting used to the eye movements it takes to control the new alt. Frank wonders if he'll get it on his own or if he'll want Frank to make adjustments.

A green-grey blur shoots across Gerard's field of vision, and seconds later the red-orange humans scatter. Frank finds his own head following as Gerard moves his, tracking first one then another of the blobs before zeroing in on one moving toward him off to his right. The flashes Frank can see of Gerard's hands and wrists as he runs are green tinged with yellow—Gerent Travis is obviously keeping his guest better fed than he's keeping his captain if Gerard is that warm. In seconds, the blob quadruples in size, then fills the screen completely as Gerard grabs it by its arms and pulls it close enough to bite.

Frank is used to moments of black interrupting his view as Gerard closes his eyes in rapture at the first taste of blood, but the infrared alt works through his lid, and Frank can see every second of the feed as Gerard's victim cools from deep crimson to orange, orange to yellow, like a macabre sunrise. When Gerard pulls away, widening his field of vision, Frank can see his hands glowing bright on the human's now-dim shoulders. He's not prepared for the sight of Gerard literally flushed with blood.

It's not that he doesn't know Gerard is hotter after feeding. Making a point or asking a question, he's touched Frank's hands and arms, and Frank has to touch him when he does his implants, so he's felt his skin cold, cool, and warm, but this—god, this —is hot. This alt is either the best or worst idea Frank's ever had.

He hopes it goes better than the roommate debacle when he was sixteen and hacked into the school's housing computer to get paired with the grad student he'd had a crush on for two years. Frank had ended up spending a lot of time pretending to be asleep while Omar fucked his girlfriend not very quietly in a bed less than four feet from Frank's head.

If Gerard were looking at him now, Frank's skin would be nearly white, boiling over as he imagines those blood-hot hands wrapped around his wrists, holding him immobile. In person, the gerent has only ever treated Frank with respect, but on screen there is no hint that Gerard is anything but a monster; he's not bound by even the lax and sloppy human morals that remain from the days before, and he could at any moment turn on Frank. As a gerent he's not subject to the vampire laws that forbid eating the tech-rank humans or the pets. He could provoke an uprising if he ate enough people belonging to his subjects, but Frank is his. Frank's fate rests entirely in his hands.

And to feel those hands on him, hot like a human but with Gerard's vampire strength—it's hard to breathe just thinking about it. Frank knows it's fucked up, but the whole fucking world is fucked up, and he doesn't know any other way to be.

On the monitor, Gerard lets his meal go, and Frank gets a glimpse of it crumpling to the ground before Gerard turns, his focus back on the living humans now tiny specks scattered in the distance. They must be half a mile away; the range Frank achieved is beyond even his wildest expectations. He is a fucking genius.

One of the specks grows bigger, closer and closer still, getting taller and thinner until Gerard blinks his infrared vision off, and Frank's screen goes dark. He plays with his monitor settings until he gets enough contrast to recognize the lanky captain from an angle that must mean he's putting an arm around Gerard's shoulder. Captains have rank, but even so, Mikey would never touch another gerent like that, so casually. Frank's met Gabe, though—even installed a music mod behind one ear for him nine months ago—and Gabe stands even less on protocol than the Ways, whose ideas of propriety are based more on family loyalty than the ancient laws. Frank doesn't like seeing anyone but Gerard's brother Mikey touching him that way, and hates that Gerard lets him get away with it, even though he knows that Gerard would never risk angering Gerent Travis by insulting his captain, and that he has a grudging fondness for Gabe besides. He watches several more minutes as they weave through the trees, but Gerard never looks down or over at Gabe, and Frank eventually heads for the tanks where he's been growing nerve fibers in a new medium. He's hoping to get to the point soon where he can grow them right on the circuits, and it's looking like this formula could be the trick.

**

Dusk is Frank's favorite time of day at Eastern's compound. When he was little, it meant time to put away his bike and his toys, go inside and be coddled, and he hated the setting sun. But now it means the household's waking up soon and Frank will have new footage to edit and problems to solve, and if Gerard isn't too busy, he sometimes comes down personally to see what Frank is up to. Now Frank thinks sunset is beautiful. His rooms are on the back of the house, facing west, and he installed overrides on the centrally-controlled shutters so he can watch from his living room as the sky turns pink and orange over the trees.

But tonight he's in his windowless lab across the hall already, parts and tools spread out around him, racing against the setting sun a time zone away in Central. It's not a complicated job, but he promised Captain Mikey that it would be done ASAP, and Frank's never broken a promise to him in almost fifteen years. He's calibrating a couple of headsets so they work with the in-ear comms already installed in the regular compound security team, and he would be done already except he's added new features since they last had temps in-house, so there's more testing to do than usual. The sooner he gets the testing done, the sooner he can get to his vid monitors to see if Gerard might hunt again with the infrareds. Frank never should have designed the lab with them so far from the testing station.

It's been days since Frank saw Gerard in the flesh. He hasn't turned on his recorder once since crossing Central's border, and without tape coming in, Frank's addicted to the streaming feed. When Gerard's logging footage every day, or in and out of the lab, Frank sometimes goes a week or more without watching him live, and even when Gerard's around but too busy or not in the mood to be recorded, Frank is usually careful, trying to limit himself to an hour or two a night, three at most, because he doesn't know if even his magic touch with tech would be enough to save him if the gerent found out that Frank could watch him that way. But since Gerard trusts his brother to keep things running smoothly while he's away, he hasn't been in touch, and the only contact Frank has with him is watching his world through the alts installed in his eyes.

Mikey comes down with the temps just in time to catch the ping Frank set to alert him to rising time at Central's compound. Thank fuck it's just an alarm and he didn't set the monitors to auto-on with Gerard's live feed, because Mikey's too familiar with Gerent Travis and Captain Gabe, knows Gerard doesn't record in the other zones, and he'd figure out pretty quickly that Frank's streaming Gerard's alts.

Frank walks the vamps through the various coms settings, double-checks with Mikey that he's dialing them in to the right channels, and keeps his back to his monitors the whole time. He almost has them out the door when Mikey stops.

"When you're in the Gerent's house, you show respect to the techs," he says to the guards, who've already turned away from Frank. "When one of them does something for you, you say 'thank you.'"

It's clear Mikey doesn't miss the look the guards shoot each other before they say, "Yes, Captain," and then, lips curled in matching sneers, "thanks, tech."

Obviously Frank isn't going to need to make space in his calendar to upgrade these guys from headsets to implants.

"I appreciate you taking the time, Frank," Mikey says after he's ushered the temps out into the hall. "And Gee said to tell you he loves the infrareds. He can't wait to get home and get a hunt on tape."

It's all Frank can do not to grin like a fool and tell Mikey how fantastic it looks on screen. The kill-vid junkies are going to throw money at them to keep the infrared videos coming. "Good," he says, keeping his feet planted against the pull of his monitors. "Great. I'm glad they work."

"Best thing we ever did, bringing you in." Mikey claps Frank on the shoulder, gives it a squeeze.

Frank can't disagree.

He was five years old when he built his first mod. When it made his mother cry, he thought he'd upset her, and only understood much later that she was simply happy her son had a skill useful to the vamps and might have a future safe from becoming a vampire's next meal.

He'd snuck outside to play while his mom was at the store and his dad was napping. A street-ragged mutt darted out in front of a speeding car, and the bumper clipped her left flank, knocking her under the tires, crushing one back leg completely. By the time his mother got home, he'd bandaged up the dog's leg and was feeding her water out of his favorite bowl.

Frank's mom had never let him keep any of the stray dogs that wandered the streets after their owners were killed, but she hadn't been able to say no to one whose blood-streaked head was cradled in her son's lap. Not when Frank looked up at her with wet eyes and said, "Her name's Princess." She helped Frank get her in the car and took her to the vet where they removed her left hind leg.

"Dogs are pretty good about adjusting," the vet promised when he let them pick her up again. She'll probably be able to walk after a fashion.

But that wasn't enough for Frank, and he built her a new leg with parts he found in the garage. It was a crude fix, clunky and ill-fitting, but over the years Frank kept improving it when he wasn't working on other projects, and by the time he left for Rutgers when he was twelve, Princess could control her bionic leg with enough precision to scratch her ears.

When he was growing up his family had scrimped, saved and stolen to get him supplies, and when he'd gotten to college it felt like he'd died and gone to tech heaven. When he finished his thesis, he didn't want to graduate, sure that whoever hired him wouldn't have have the things the school labs had for him to work with.

But the slim vampire with blood-red hair and hazel eyes that seemed able to divine all Frank's secrets who sat down across from him at the recruitment fair and said, "You're younger than I thought you'd be, but I read your work on in-eye cameras, and you're the man we need," turned out to be Eastern's gerent himself, and Frank learned that even the best tech school in the country was on meager rations compared to the royal compound. And he still gets everything he needs. Except time to check his monitors undisturbed.

"Thanks, Mikey," he says. "Best for me, too."

With one last squeeze, Mikey lets him go, and Frank's finally alone. He orders the lights to dim as he crosses to the bank of monitors against the far wall.

**

Although Gerard went to Central on foot and with only one bodyguard, he comes back with an entourage. Unsurprisingly, given Central's dominance in the transport-tech field, they arrive in a brand-new hover, gold and black with the Central Zone's seal on the underside. Gerard jumps down first, flinging himself at his brother, nearly knocking him over, and then clinging just a little bit longer than usual. Mikey pats him on the back and gives him a curious look, but doesn't seem fazed when Gerard clutches his arm as he introduces their guests.

The hover's pilot is the vamp who came with Gabe when he got his music mod, and two more vampires climb out behind him. Frank wonders if they're mother and daughter, they look so much alike, with their dark reddish hair, olive skin, and deep brown eyes. Gerard introduces the younger looking one as Mizuki—Frank guesses she was nineteen or twenty when she was turned—and the older one as Miyako.

"They're here for you, Frank," Gerard adds as his bodyguard steps over to pick up their bags.

The last two off the shuttle wear pet's bands. Frank recognizes the girl from her last visit. She sticks close to the driver's elbow and doesn't say anything. The other pet is a man about Frank's age, near his height, and covered with a similar number of tattoos. But he's broad across the shoulders in a way Frank could never be, even if he spent as many hours in the gym as he now does in front of his monitors, and his hair is short in the back and over his ears where Frank has let his grow almost to his shoulders.

Gerard beckons the man over and introduces him directly to Mikey. "This is Pete. He's a gift from Captain Gabe. He said to tell you you'll like him."

"A pet?" Mikey says doubtfully. Plenty of vampires in Eastern have pets, but Gerard and Mikey have never been partial to keeping any themselves and they tacitly discourage the other vamps living in the compound from having any.

"I prefer Pete to pet," Pete says, flashing a toothy smile in Mikey's direction like he's not meeting a strange vampire for the first time. Like Mikey doesn't own him now. Frank would count him brave, but maybe he's just really good at reading the temperature of a room, because Mikey actually smiles back at his impudence.

"Pete," Mikey says, holding his hand out to shake—an old-fashioned gesture that confuses Pete for a moment before he reciprocates. Now it's Gerard's turn to look at his brother askance, but Mikey doesn't even seem to notice.

When Mizuki and Miyako come down to Frank's lab the next night, he's surprised to hear they want to volunteer for alts that are barely beyond the circuit-building phase. But he was hashing out the theory with Gerard a few nights before he left, and apparently Gerard was excited enough about the idea to brag on Frank's inventions in Mizuki and Miyako's hearing.

It was trouble with human trafficking along the border with Southern that gave Frank the idea originally. The kidnappers were working during the day to avoid Mikey's soldiers, and Mikey made an off-hand comment about wishing he could see through the eyes of the humans he was sending out to gather information. At the time Frank fixed them up with paired goggles—cameras on the humans' and monitors on the vamps'—but the idea of figuring out a way to get one person's visual information into another person's brain without external monitors kept niggling at Frank and wouldn't let go. He's been working on it for months, and was just starting to think of asking Gerard for a body to test the hookups on, but apparently he gets volunteers instead. No matter how much he protests that he's nowhere near ready for conscious subjects, the vamps counter that they don't care about the risk.

"Just listen to their story, Frank," Gerard breaks into the middle of Frank's third set of arguments. "You'll want to help them."

"I didn't say I wouldn't—"

"Mizuki is my little sister," Miyako interrupts.

"Only three minutes younger," Mizuki adds with a smile that says they've told this story more than once. "Not that you'd know that now."

"My little sister. The other half of me. And she was taken right from under my nose."

Which goes a way to explaining Gerard's clinging to Mikey in the driveway. Despite the fact that Mikey's totally kick-ass and respected by every vamp Frank's ever met, Gerard is still totally overprotective of him.

"I was the one who went off with the boy with the pretty hair while you were getting us drinks. It wasn't your fault."

"I shouldn't have let you—"

Trying to get things back on track, Gerard takes up the story. "It was the old days when we were still underground. It took Miyako almost twenty years to find her sister."

Frank had gathered that from the way Miyako looks twice her twin's age. "So if you can see through the other one's eyes, you'll never lose each other again?" he asks.

"Exactly." Their voices blend perfectly.

Miyako insists on going under the knife first, her sister by her side watching Frank's every move with a scowl on her face. As if that weren't nerve-wracking enough, Gerard has pulled Frank's lab stool over from its place by his electron microscope so he can have a view of the proceedings too. It shouldn't be any more stressful than any of the scores of other times Frank's done this—he's only starting with the camera alts, after all—but he knows the receivers are next, and he hasn't even tried them on a corpse yet.

Then, as he's setting up his tray practically under Gerard's nose, he realizes that he might notice Frank's using the same camera Gerard has in his own eye. Only this time he knows it has streaming because that's the whole point. Gerard doesn't seem to be paying attention to anything but his guests though.

"You ready?" Frank asks Miyako to cover the shaking in his hands.

"Ready," she answers, squeezing her sister's arm as Frank lowers the retractor to her exposed eyeball.

Frank falls into the rhythm of his work, adjusting to the split vision in his goggles—five-times magnification on the left, feed from his fiberoptic camera on the right—the muscles in his hands making tiny adjustments as he hooks lab-grown nerves to bio-nerves, able somehow that he never could explain to work on this scale directly instead of being stuck with the gross movements the human hand should be capable of. Calmed by the routine, Frank realizes that even with tech-enhanced vampire vision, Gerard could never have identified the circuits anyway. The whole thing is hardly larger than a flea, and the differences between this design and the camera-only version are literally microscopic. That, at least for now, is not an alt Gerard has found a reason to desire.

The camera installations go smoothly, and Frank sends the vampires off to hunt with their host while he calibrates the receivers which he'll install tomorrow night. Gerard beams at him as they file out, stopping to give the back of Frank's neck a squeeze, and something about it reminds him so much of his father that Frank's heart lurches.

"You okay?" Gerard asks, bending fractionally closer so he can look Frank in the eyes.

"Yeah," Frank says, shrugging him off. "I'm fine." Frank has little enough desire to examine the complicated feelings he has for his gerent when he's by himself. When Gerard is looking right at him, he has none.

"Remember to sleep at some point. And eat something," Gerard says. Frank sometimes thinks Gerard is distrustful of how easily a human can ignore his body's needs. Which is either ironic or makes perfect sense, given that what scares humans most about vampires is how utterly driven their needs make them. Frank doubts however, that vampires find a human's relationship to his needs nearly as fascinating as Frank finds a vampire's.

"I will," Frank says, because he always tries to be well rested and fed before doing surgery. And he won't be able to do much with Miyako and Mizuki's tech once they're sleeping anyway.

Gerard pats his arm, says, "Good," and follows his guests out the door.

The next night doesn't go as well. Frank has no problems with the installation, but neither Miyako nor Mizuki can see through her sister's camera. With the x-ray and infrared it just superimposes over the body's visual input, but with two different image sources that would give you double vision, so Frank designed it so you could see the other person's input only when you closed your eyes. Instead, the vamps are seeing blackness. He does what adjustments he can with them there, but as daylight approaches, he has to admit defeat.

"Well," Gerard says clapping Frank on the shoulder heartily, "back to the drawing board." He has the false jovial tone of Frank's least favorite professor from his early days in tech school. The tone the guy got just before he'd tell you that you read the wrong chapters and got an F on your midterm.

"I'm sorry," Frank says again, though he's said it a hundred times tonight already. "It might be that the sensors need the light stimulus on the optic nerve to fire images at the brain, or—"

"You'll figure it out, Frank," Gerard says. It sounds much more like a command than a reassurance.

Before Frank can say anything else, the three vampires have melted out into the hall.

He stays up all day going over the data, his designs, old notes from earlier inventions, and even hacks a remote access to the Rutgers system to see if any new research is being done there, but he doesn't have answers good enough to satisfy Gerard and his guests by the time the sun sets again. When no one has come to his lab by an hour after nightfall, Frank checks Gerard's live feed. Just from the quality and angle of the light, Frank knows Gerard's at his desk, and then a ledger slides into view, numbers in long columns that Gerard taps idly with a pen. Not on his way down, then. Exhausted, stomach growling, Frank goes to his apartment and makes himself something to eat.

The plan is to finish his dinner—lunch? Breakfast? Frank isn't sure how many meals he skipped—and go back to the lab to keep working. The twins probably want to get home, and Gerard promised them that Frank could deliver. He's sure he's almost there, the answer's just around the corner. Instead, Gerard finds him some time later curled into a ball in the corner of his sofa, sound asleep, throw pillow clutched to his chest.

"What are you doing here?" Gerard asks once Frank's responded enough to the hand on his ankle to actually open his eyes.

"Shit," Frank says, trying to scramble at least semi-upright. "I was gonna go back after I ate something, but somehow I fell asleep." He scrubs at his face with both hands, gets his feet on the floor. "I'll just—"

But Gerard sits down in Frank's armchair, knees casually splayed, one arm flung out to the side. "Surely your bed is more comfortable. And warmer. If you're going to make a habit of sleeping on the couch, you need a blanket."

"A— what?" Frank says. The lab. The twins. The tech. What the fuck, blankets?

"I didn't mean to bother you. I thought you were usually awake at this hour."

Frank doesn't have a fucking clue what time it is, but if Gerard's up, it's fair to say it's an hour Frank's usually awake.

"Yeah," Frank says. "I— Lemme get some coffee, and I can get back to work. I didn't mean to make Miyako and Mizuki wait."

"Oh," Gerard says, waving the hand he'd had resting on his stomach. "They all went home at sunset. The twins say thank you by the way."

Frank rubs his face again, tugging his ears this time too for good measure. "The alts work now?" he asks. He's ninty-nine percent sure he couldn't have accidentally done something remotely to make them functional, but there's always a tiny chance.

"No." Gerard stands and heads for Frank's kitchen area. "But they appreciate you not making them wait until you'd done more tests before you let them try out the new tech. Now they know they'll be first in line when you get it working."

"Okay," Frank says, parsing through that. "They will. Absolutely." The twins aren't mad at Gerard. Gerard isn't mad at Frank. Gerard is… Gerard is pulling the bag of coffee beans out of Frank's freezer and walking them over to where his grinder and coffeemaker are sitting on the counter. "What are you doing?" Frank blurts.

"You said you needed coffee. I fucking miss coffee. It's not the same if I drink it now."

To the best of his memory, Frank's never seen any of the vampires eat or drink anything but blood. Apparently they can, though. "I can make it," Frank says, finally propelling himself to his feet. Jesus. Twenty-four hours without food or sleep leaves him with a worse hangover than an evening spent with a bottle of Jack. He used to be able to pull all-nighters, take a nap and get up good as new. Fuck getting old.

"I've got it. You've got a good old-fashioned setup here. Sit." He points at the kitchen table. Frank does as he's told.

"Mikey and I used to drink so much coffee we had to shoplift beans." Gerard stops talking while the grinder roars and shivers under his palm, but continues as soon as it stops. "That was my first clue something was wrong, actually. He mostly slept all day anyway. But he stopped drinking coffee."

Not that Gerard never babbles—he absolutely does—but usually it's about some project, or something he's asked Frank about. He doesn't usually talk about himself, and Frank is having trouble following. "Mikey stopped drinking coffee?"

Gerard ignores the question while he gets everything ready. He knows his way around the machine like it's his own, and also where Frank keeps his mugs and which is his favorite. He does have to ask how much sugar Frank wants, which stops Frank heading too far down the track of certainty that Gerard has installed cameras in Frank's apartment. Though he's still gonna check once Gerard leaves. Not that the gerent doesn't have the right to monitor anywhere in his compound, but Frank would like to know where any cameras are. And where Gerard got them, since Frank knows the location of all the ones he's made.

"At least they didn't take him," Gerard says, once he's got the water in and there's nothing else to do. He's not really answering the question, but Frank senses he's not changing the subject either. "I don't know how Miyako survived that."

"Oh," Frank says, finally connecting the dots. It should take more than just the smell of coffee to wake him up, but the human brain is fucking weird. "Mikey was turned first?"

"I was busy at work, commuting to the city every day, but I could have paid more attention to who he was hanging out with. It was just starting to get trendy, getting vamps to turn you, and a lot of the kids in the music scene were doing it."

The coffee is starting to drip in earnest now, a steady stream of rich brown liquid pouring into the glass carafe. Frank's nose is twitching. He's not the only one. But Gerard sits down in the chair closest to the counter, his back to the pot. "It was three or four days before I noticed anything different."

"Mikey was a musician?" He's never asked to have a music mod, said anything about Frank's drum kit the few times he's been in Frank's apartment. Frank's seen him with the bulge of a music player in his pocket, watched through Gerard's eyes as he bobbed his head to an unheard beat, but it never occurred to Frank that Mikey actually played.

Дата добавления: 2015-09-29