Strange Days
.
AN: This is a sequel to my oneshot Passing Glances, and probably won't make any sense to you if you haven't read that story first.
Warnings: some incestuous vibes - but not as you may think; mildly dubious consent in one scene; mentioning of sexual child abuse
.
Challenges
With a triumphant cry, Star stops her bike at the shoreline, hardly a foot from the waves that are licking up the beach. She has mastered the art of riding in record time – which is no wonder, considering her other half's expertise in the field. In this case, her other half's not Michael, but Marko, who's inhabiting her body and sharing her mind since the Santa Carla pack has decided they needed bodies again half a year ago.
Marko has always liked Star, regardless of the little competition for David's attention and affection they had been running back in the day. He doesn't mind her riding his bike. On the contrary – he's rather thrilled that through her, he can own his baby again.
Needless to say, everyone's still getting used to the arrangement. Especially David and Michael are constantly butting heads – in Michael's head, for David had decided that if he was to inhabit a human being, it could and would be none other than Michael.
Naturally, the humans have adopted the bikes of the Boys. David's still a little jealous of Michael handling his Triumph. He always has a snide remark at the ready if the young man doesn't master the heavy machine to the supernatural perfection David himself did. As of late, he finds little to complain about though, since Michael has become quite apt at riding this special brand of beast.
In contrast to David and Michael, Paul and Sam are getting along splendidly. They're always on overdrive, and driving everyone else mental en route. Well, everyone but Alan and Dwayne, who are both stoic enough to take the onslaught of Paul and Sam combined with the stance of a rock in a raging sea. Maybe the vampire and the Frog even fortify each other, now that they're sharing a body.
It's lucky that Dwayne's so patient, since it takes a lot of patience to teach Alan, who's rather scared of crashing and hurting himself or, worse, one of the others, how to ride.
In addition to coaxing and encouraging Alan, Dwayne also has to tone down Paul, lest he egg Sam on to do something on his bike that might prove fatal for the boy's fragile mortal body. At the moment, Paul's teaching Sam how to do wheelies, which has Sam giddy with adrenaline, and Michael worried as fuck.
Mortality – quite a problem of its own. Their human hosts are still just that – human. They're weak and vulnerable, and the vampires parasitizing on them have to take great care to keep them from harm. Until they inhabited their fragile mortal shells, they had all but forgotten how precarious a human existence could be. So much is detrimental to it, from outright force down to such banalities as the wrong kind of food.
It's a tad disquieting. If they don't watch out for them, their humans might be irreparably damaged or even killed, and they would have to go through the pains of searching for suitable hosts and preparing the chosen humans for the invasion yet again.
Then there's the plane of intimacy and sex, which poses a whole different bunch of problems.
The vampires are persuasive, but they aren't able to force their hosts into compliance. They have to argue, and nudge, and coax, which can be pretty exhausting for both parties involved.
The Boys had never been exclusive in their coupling, but if one wanted to draw analogies to human relationships, one could probably say that David and Marko had been sort of together, as had been Paul and Dwayne.
It had been little work to get Michael and Star to hook up again, in the course reuniting David and Marko, but it's considerably harder to meld Sam and Alan into a couple. They're teenage boys, after all, and even though they're prone to experimenting at least a little, they're not ready to jump into a straight-on homosexual relationship. So Dwayne and Paul have to be very careful in guiding their hosts to the destined outcome, which is especially hard for the latter.
Overall, in their own best interest, the vampires have to be what they usually aren't, at least not towards humans: considerate – in all ranks.
It's quite the challenge, really.
.
Long Since Gone
Grandpa always knew about the vampires, so he immediately notices when something changes in his daughter and grandsons. At first, he doesn't understand what exactly has happened. But when, one day, he sees David looking at him from out of Michael's eyes, he knows. The vampires are no strangers to him – especially not David. Once upon a time, when he was young, Grandpa had been very much enamored with the Boys. With David, maybe in love, even.
It's the strangest thing to see David shining through his grandson. He watches Michael while he roams about the house, and suddenly there's David's unearthly grace in his movements. The boy turns and smiles at him, no, smirks, and it's entirely David's smirk, with Michael barely visible behind it, and David looks at his old friend from out of Michael's eyes like one would through the window of a house. Then things shift, and the young man in front of him is mostly his grandson again, with David just barely noticeable in a gesture or a smile. And then Michael opens his mouth and talks, and it's predominately him, but he tells a joke that David once told, or he uses a phrase that was hip in the fifties and is now very much out of use.
The strangest thing, really.
He feels like a total creep for it, but Grandpa's actually drawn towards Michael, or rather towards the creature that presently resides in his body and mind. But David's inseparable from Michael now, and so Elias Woodcroft – yes, that's his name, he wasn't always known as Grandpa, naturally, he was once young and wild as Michael now is, as David still is and always will be, and if he had taken David's offer … But that was a long time ago. And yet …
What's worse, Michael seems to be aware of his grandfather's attraction towards him. At first, the boy was visibly weirded out by it and withdrew from almost all kinds of interaction with him. But then something changed. It's as if Michael and David have reached an agreement of sorts, and as if it's now mostly David who interacts with Elias – especially when Elias' brittle feelings towards him start to show.
Elias doesn't know how, but the vampires and their hosts certainly communicate, and apparently also negotiate and compromise with each other.
He's a little afraid though of how far David might be able to convince Michael in this regard.
.
Adventurous
'Oh, come on now!'
It's Paul, of course, and he's whining in Sam's head yet again.
'Just tell him! It ain't so hard!'
"But I don't wanna tell him!" Sam replies. He's angry and confused, and the words come out much louder than he intended them to. Alan, who walks with him in the schoolyard, turns his head and looks at him rather alarmed. He probably has a good idea of what's going on – and that's exactly what makes Sam heat up even more. He can practically feel the blood concentrate in his face, making him turn an embarrassing, unmanly shade of pink. He shakes his head in annoyance and a vain attempt to brush it off.
"It's Paul! He's … He just keeps bothering me!"
Something shifts in Alan's eyes. Where there was concern and uncertainness just a split second ago, there's now steely coldness – the telltale sign of Dwayne taking the reins.
Although Dwayne feels friendly and appears to mean them no harm, his emergence always changes Alan in a way that makes Sam shiver. It's the same with the others. If one of the vampires is speaking, the eyes of their human kind of glaze over. It's disquieting, to say the least, especially if it happens to Mikey, but it's weirdest when Sam watches his own face in the mirror and sees it change as Paul comes out.
Paul always surfaces when Sam looks into a mirror, presumably just to irritate him. But maybe he's simply as enamored with his good looks as Sam himself is.
"Paul!" Dwayne chides, cutting through Sam's thoughts. It's still Alan's voice, if a little deeper, but with an infliction different from his friend's. "Don't push him!"
Sam honestly wouldn't dare to act against Dwayne's command; the guy's just too scary. But Paul simply does the mental equivalent of flipping Dwayne off, accompanied by a wave of both rude and lewd words and feelings.
The vampires don't have to talk out loud if they don't want to, they're still able to communicate mentally. Usually they try to shield their conversations from their human hosts, but they don't always succeed at it. Strong emotions seem especially hard to hide.
Since Paul's an emotional guy, Sam's constantly flooded by feelings that are not his own and can be rather alarming – especially the raunchy and murderous ones. He has the strong suspicion that sometimes, Paul doesn't even try to shield him from those, always enjoying to tick Sam off.
However, he could do far worse than just rile Sam if he wanted to. Sam knows this well enough. Once, Paul let him feel what it was like to dissolve in that bathtub. It still ranks as the most terrible experience of Sam's life – worse than when he realized that his brother was a vampire, worse than when the Boys raided their house, worse even than the moment his father told him he'd leave.
Sam's actually thankful that Paul does no more than taunt him. But he has to keep his dignity, and so he acts annoyed when most times, really, he isn't. He's more like confused and, yes, scared. There are a lot of things in Paul and the others he doesn't understand. Sometimes he doesn't only receive Paul's thoughts and feelings, but those of the whole collective. At times, this collective even includes Max and Thorn.
If they don't structure their thoughts, don't tone down their emotions, it's like being swept away by a tornado. They plunge him into a whole different world, where nothing he thought he knew holds true anymore. They warp his perception until he doesn't know up from down and right from wrong. Sometimes they get so bloodthirsty that Sam has to lock himself in his room to not harm anybody.
Then there's that whole different level of weirdness that encompasses all the extraordinarily tender feelings towards each other the vampires are capable of.
The first time Sam felt it, he was so overwhelmed that it completely dazed him.
The Boys are interwoven with each other in ways an ordinary human being can't even begin to understand. Even Sam, who hosts one of them, is just starting to get part of it.
They are very nearly one heart and mind. Sometimes they almost seem as one entity, sharing thoughts and emotions as if they belonged to the same person, before they split up into separate beings again, but still stay closely entwined with each other.
At times there's sexual tension between them that's so strong that it makes Sam's toes curl and his hair stand up, making him want to do things … very crazy things.
One of those things is Star. Well, she's not really a thing, of course, and, even worse, she's officially Michael's girlfriend. The problem is, she's also hosting Marko, and Paul seems to have a massive interest in doing something not so innocent with Star to get to his vampire buddy.
One day, when Sam is staring at his image in the bathroom mirror once again, watching Paul surface and submerge as if Sam himself were putting a mask on and off, he hears Star rummaging about in the room next door. There aren't that many sleeping rooms in the house, so Michael and Star are sharing, as are Sam and Alan.
On noticing Star, Paul immediately starts to fidget inside Sam. As he constantly does when Alan – and therefore Dwayne – are anywhere near him, he tries to coax Sam into doing … something. The difference is that, in this case, Sam actually feels like listening to him.
Very carefully, he puts his hand on the knob and opens the door, just a fraction of an inch.
Paul practically bounces with happiness.
'Oooh, this is going to be so cool, baby bro!'
Sam does his best to ignore him. As he peeks through the small gap, he sees Star moving about, undressing. She's already progressed rather far, wearing nothing but one of her long, sequined skirts.
Suddenly, the air seems rather hot around Sam. He draws in an excited breath – and Star hears him. She turns around, bare-breasted. In contrast to what Sam might have expected if he had had enough blood in his brain left to think, she does look neither shocked nor angry. A little surprised, maybe; but she quickly recovers and smiles at him.
Or is it Marko smiling at Paul? Sometimes it's pretty hard to tell.
Whatever the case, Paul certainly rises to the challenge. The mental push Sam receives is so forceful it feels almost physical. Not entirely voluntarily, he pushes the door further open and all but stumbles into Mike's room. Star giggles at his much too eager and rather graceless entrance. If Sam could, he would hit Paul. Hard.
"Uuuh …" he mutters, feeling both stupid and helpless.
Star laughs again, but it's kind. "Sam," she says and smiles, but in her eyes, he sees as much of Marko as of her. Her smile turns into a smirk as she grabs his hand and pulls, and then they're somehow on Mike's bed and she's kissing him. Her hands are all over him, and she grips him harder than he thinks a woman should, though from total lack of experience, he can't really tell. Her laugh is breathless and excited and sounds distinctly not like her.
'Yuck, Sam, stop worrying! It don't matter anyhow!' Paul demands in his head, and then he pushes him again. Sam becomes dislodged in his own mind and body, almost a spectator to the following events. Even though he feels everything, it's still somewhat disconnected from him.
His hands roam over Star's breast, and hers over his. He pushes up her skirt, and … Oh my.
Sam's very aroused and very embarrassed, especially since it's his own body doing these things. He's never done anything like it before, but Paul certainly has. Star seems rather pleased, or maybe it's Marko. Sam's very confused right now. Star's squirming under him, making cute little noises. It's quite … remarkable.
Just as things are about to reach their natural climax, the door opens and Mikey stands in front of them.
Sam wants to die right there on the spot, but Paul's not impressed, and neither is Marko. Star herself seems a little undecided. Still, those three finish what they're doing while Sam has the creepy feeling of watching his own body from the outside.
The whole time, Mike just stands there, open-mouthed. When things on the bed finally come to a close, he looks at his girlfriend, then at his little brother, who's only slowly regaining control over his body.
"Star …? Marko …? Paul …? Sam …? Do I even wanna know?" Michael mutters. "No, I don't think I do." He turns and leaves, just like that, closing the door carefully behind him.
Sam assumes that it will take him a very long time to sort this out.
.
Together
If Lucy had to describe her current state of mind, she would call it happy. Yes, she's happy, strange as it may sound.
Her boys are all well again.
Michael has found a girl. Maybe he has also found a boy, but that doesn't bother her.
Her sons have made friends.
Lucy herself has gotten four additional boys, well, five really, counting Alan in, and even a daughter.
Then there's Max, who's simply adorable.
And even her dad has accepted all those unusual changes.
Since most of the new family members don't have a body of their own, the household budget has hardly been strained. Also, Michael and Star are now contributing to the general income as well.
Her son has finished school last year and is now working at a garage, where he does splendidly; which is really no wonder, seeing that he has the support of four technically skilled guys – at least in his mind.
Star, two years older than Michael, twenty now, is currently employed at a jewelry shop on the Boardwalk. She also makes herself useful at home.
Alan has turned seventeen two weeks ago. He's still going to school, but he practically lives with them, sharing a room with Sam, with the disinterested consent of his drugged up parents, and much to the chagrin of his brother.
There are two dogs in the family now. Nanook's still Sam's, of course, but Thorn's fiercely loyal to Lucy, and through her, to Max.
Max is always with her, and he's just the perfect gentleman. He never tires of complimenting her for her dresses or housekeeping, and gives her advice on how to run the shop and how to keep the Boys under control.
Lucy feels so much stronger with Max by her side.
She really doesn't know what she'd do without him.
Max helps her to care for their family. At first, she was at a loss of how to reach out to his Boys. But she needn't have worried – they reached out to her.
The first time she heard Sam say "Yeah, momma!" in that strange lilt, she didn't immediately realize that it was Paul speaking through him. But then he laughed, a laugh that was Sam's and yet not Sam's, and she remembered the Boys on their bikes, circling her in front of Max's store. Paul had called her momma then, in a taunting, almost challenging way.
Now, there's no challenge in Sam's eyes as he winks at her – which Sam never does. Then he smiles, open-mouthed, and she thinks she sees a little too much of his teeth as he does so. A moment later, Paul's gone, and it's just her son who smiles at her in his usual way.
Lucy has learned to pull the Boys out at will. The incentive was Michael smoking in the house. She doesn't want her sons to smoke, neither in the house nor elsewhere. So she tells Michael off, and just receives a blank stare in reply. Then he regards the cigarette as if she had just awoken him from out of a dream. When she tells him to look at her, there's confusion in his eyes, but deep down, there's laughter.
"David?" Lucy asks tentatively, and the laughter comes to the forefront. A smirk blooms up on Michael's lips.
Lucy takes a deep breath, and feels Max doing the mental equivalent to it. "You don't smoke in our house!" they say together, rather forcefully. "And you don't smoke inside of … Well, simply don't smoke! It's Michael's health you're ruining, not yours!"
David and Michael combined blink at them, surprised and, yes, slightly intimidated.
Lucy supposes that, together, she and Max can make quite an impression on their sons.
.
Doing the Math
The hardest thing about it is his estrangement from Edgar.
Sure, he has won a whole bunch of new brothers, and they're all pretty cool and stuff, not to mention very exceptional, but they're not Edgar, with whom he has spend every single day of the past sixteen years.
Without Edgar, Alan feels lost, even though he's the older of the two, and it should by all rights be Edgar feeling lost without him – which he probably does.
Which doesn't make things any easier.
Alan sighs and stares out of the window. A picture of a motorbike flashes before his inner eye – the very motorbike he's supposed to try and ride again tonight. To him, it looks like a huge, dangerous animal. A killer, just like its owner.
As he thinks it, he notices said owner silently brushing his mind in an almost tender way. It feels a little like an encouraging pad on the back – almost, but not quite a caress.
Alan is not sure whether he approves of Dwayne interfering with his thoughts and emotions like this or not. Sometimes it actually makes things easier. But it's still an invasion, and he thinks he should be irritated by it. Only, at most times, he isn't.
None of them who are now hosting the soul of a creature he would formerly have called a suckmonkey or the devil's spawn was forced to accept a vampire inside themselves. Yet, they had only a very vague idea, if any idea at all, what housing one of the pack would mean for their own lives.
It's quite different from anything Alan could have imagined.
Dwayne's constantly with him, and Alan can receive thoughts and feelings from the others as well. It's as if they were spiders, all sharing a web and communicating through it with barely conceivable signals.
In a way, Alan feels safer now he's so interconnected. He knows that as long as the vampires exist, and as long as he himself lives, he will never be alone again.
The thought is comforting and scary at the same time.
He still misses Edgar, no matter what.
'Alan …' Dwayne nudges him. 'You know you're sitting through a maths test, yeah?'
With a jolt, Alan returns to the present. Maths, right. Shit.
His grades have always been abysmal, no matter which subject. Edgar and he simply hadn't got the time to do anything for school while they were still running the shop and caring for themselves and their parents together.
However, things have changed.
It must have been sometime in late September or early October last year when the vampires started to slowly seep into them. It wasn't as obvious as opening a door and Dwayne stepping in and closing it behind him, all in plain sight. No, it had been a gradual process.
Alan isn't completely sure, but he estimates that it took at least a month to complete the transition. Intentionally or not, everyone of them pushed the Boys out a couple of times before they were firmly anchored in their human hosts. On Christmas, they had been safely installed though. Man, that had been a thoroughly weird holiday …
'Alan.'
Dwayne's nudging is more urgent now. Like Paul and Marko, he actually completed college, and with distinction, at that.
Apart from David, the vampires all are spoiled, rebellious middle-class kids. Go figure.
The funny thing is that Dwayne actually wants him to succeed at school. As a result and to his own surprise, his performance has become distinctly better during the last few months. It's early spring now. As things are, if Dwayne continues to push him, Alan might actually finish High School with a good grade point average. Especially since Dwayne and the others also give him tips during examinations …
There's also the fact that he no longer has to manage the shop, his brother and his parents. Instead, he is cared for by Lucy. He gets yummy food and a healthy amount of sleep – even though sharing a room with Sam, and even though being kind of possessed by a nocturnal creature. Lucy is fairly adamant on the kids going to bed early and not being kept awake at night, at least not on weekdays. Since Lucy, in a way, is also their head-vampire Max, the Boys can do nothing but obey her.
Sam, on the other hand, doesn't always listen to his mum, and there have been nights in which he has kept Alan awake in the most entertaining manner ...
'Alan!' Dwayne chides, but he can practically hear the vampire's amusement through his words.
Sure enough, with his new family, Alan's life has changed in the most extraordinary ways.
.
Patchwork
"What do you think? The blue one or the gray?" Star holds up two patches of fabric.
'I'd say both,' Marko answers inside her head. 'The gray one would look cool on the right elbow, and the other … maybe up front, next to the one with the eagle?'
Experimentally, Star puts the patches where he suggested. "I think I'd rather put it further down," she says, moving the blue fabric around on the front of the jacket until she's found the perfect position.
'Well, it's your body that has to wear it …'
She sticks her tongue out at him, and he laughs.
Star always thought that Marko didn't like her. In the beginning, when she had known the Boys for only a few days, she had realized with shock that he and David had something going between the two of them, and had assumed that he must be jealous of her. Later on, she had found out that the Boys were sleeping around a lot, especially with each other. It had bemused her a great deal. Shortly after, she had found out that they were vampires, and the resulting confusion had wiped out everything else.
Now that she's sharing body and mind with Marko, she knows that he never detested her, that he, in fact, liked her from the get go, and that she has to thank mostly Marko for leveling out David's mood-swings to a degree that allowed her to stay alive among the Boys for so long. After all, she had lived with them for almost two months before Michael showed up.
The funny thing is, she feels far better with Marko inside her. He's made her more self-assured and confident and less passive than she has been before. With Marko's assistance, she's able to stand up to everyone else, be it Michael, David, or even Max. He is afraid of no one and nothing. Well, nearly nothing.
Having been killed by a teenage boy surely has cut him down a notch.
At her thought, Marko sort of grimaces inside her. It gives her a funny feeling.
"Sorry," she mutters. "I didn't wanna be rude …"
'It's okay, Star-baby,' he replies. 'I still love you.'
Star just knows that he's telling the truth.
It makes her smile.
.
Hot
Sex has become a very different affair from pre-possessed days. If Michael sleeps with Star, it's also David who sleeps with her, and Michael's not only making love to his girlfriend, but to Marko also. They're so entwined with each other that everybody receives everybody else's feelings. At first, it was quite bemusing, but now Michael thinks it incredibly hot. He knows that it's partly David who nudges him to feel this way, but the sex is so extraordinarily good that he hardly cares. Star seems to be of the same opinion.
Michael feels David caressing Star through him, and then he feels David's mental caress in his own body and mind, and then there's Marko responding, and Star rearing up, pulling him closer, kissing him hard …
Their love-making has become a little more violent though. They often draw blood now. But it's not sadism or masochism that drives them, it's just the Boys' hunger, and they never hurt each other in earnest. Frankly, Michael thinks it's quite exciting.
There's also everyday life, of course, which has become distinctly different for all of them.
It was the strangest thing when Michael, for the first time, went out with them into the sun. He still remembers it as if it happened yesterday, although it was almost half a year ago, sometime in October, on a splendidly warm and bright afternoon, when …
… Michael has had enough. He needs to go out in the daylight. He just has to.
The problem is that they absolutely don't want to. They're scared, yes, actually scared, and scared shitless, at that, that they will all go up in flames, Michael included – even if they are no longer corporeal beings and even though their other hosts are still safely inside.
In fact, they have unnerved everyone so much with their panicked protests that no one dared to venture outside while the sun was up for almost a week after the vampires took residence inside them.
But there are limits, and Michael is determined to show them the ropes. There's no way he's going to live the rest of his life in darkness, and neither will his family.
He opens the door and steps out onto the front porch.
They're cringing away inside him, mortally afraid, mentally climbing over each other, curdling together as if they could protect themselves by it – even Max. Their panicked screeching nearly makes Michael's brain explode, and he feels almost irresistibly compelled to step back into the shadows.
If they wouldn't make his head hurt so terribly, he might actually feel compassion for them.
As it is, he is predominately angry, and that helps him to stay out in the open, even taking a few steps further away from the house, getting himself baked by the California sun.
The truth is, he doesn't really know what it will do to them. Maybe they really will evaporate and be no more, like mist does when the sun rises.
But he sincerely doubts it.
The Boys are conspicuously quiet in his head. For a moment, Michael almost panics. Has he killed them, yet again? Although they sometimes annoy him to high hell, he certainly doesn't mean them any harm – not anymore.
But then the "Ahs!" and "Ohs!" begin. None of them have seen the sun for decades, and they didn't expect to see it ever again, except in death maybe. Now they're simply awed by it.
In the end, Michael has to step into the shadow of the house against their protest, lest he get a nasty sunburn. They still plead with him to stay out in the open though, in the shadows, if he has to, to soak in the view of the brightly illuminated land.
For the next few days, Michael and the others are cajoled into doing all kinds of activities out in the blazing sun, from garden work to lazing around on the beach.
Michael finds it almost endearing how much the vampires enjoy to be part of the world of light again.
.
In the End
It costs Laddie more than a year to find her, and it happens at a point when he very nearly has given up – on everything, really: his search, his dignity, and his life.
He's almost twelve now, and the last one and a half years have been extremely rough on him.
The day before, he had fallen into the hands of a very nasty man he doesn't want to think about at the moment. He was far stronger than Laddie, of course, and did with him as he wanted to, never minding the way Laddie screamed, and scratched, and bit. When he was done, he threw the boy out of his car in the middle of nowhere.
That's where she finds him.
Laddie's sure that she intends to kill him, at first. But he can't allow that. Finally, here's the long-awaited chance to bring his family back.
She has to turn him. She simply has to. He has to make her understand.
And then, suddenly, she halts. She tastes the air with her tongue. Then she kneels down beside him, takes his hand, which is still bleeding from the fight he put up against that pervert, and tastes him. She pauses again and looks into his eyes, confused.
"You're marked," she states. "Why are you marked, and at such a young age?"
Laddie swallows. "You gotta turn me," he says, his voice a little shaky. "Please. I've gotta get back to them. To save them!"
Curious, she tilts her head. "Who are they? What's your story?"
And Laddie starts to tell her.
.
The End, maybe …
12