You guys are the best like srsly omfg I love all of you :"3 I'm sorry this took longer, but I had a lot of marching band shindigs to go to, so it didn't pop out until tonight! So here is like a thousand days later than the last update haha xD

Costume Idea Of This Motherfucking Week : I, personally, think that it would be hilarious if Ethan went as a warlock with a magic wand and a pointy hat and all sorts of stereotyped magician things, and if Benny went as a Psychic with a scarf around his head and a travel sized crystal ball and tarot cards to throw at people. Just let that sink in and tell me if that isn't the type of shit those two would pull.

xXxXxXx

Ethan didn't get to bring the mounting issue up to the vampires until around seven o'clock that night. His parents had decided to go out that night, for a date twice that week, so Sarah was called in for an emergency babysitting session.

Jane was sitting in the living room, eating pizza and watching Aquamarine, while the teenagers gathered up together in the kitchen at Ethan's breakfast bar. Sarah and Erica stood in front of Ethan and Benny, who sat next to each other with their sides pressed together, and Rory floated in the air with his legs crossed gym style.

"So, you're suggesting that there's something going on around town?" Sarah asked, and she sounded incredibly unsurprised at the idea, because there was always something up in Whitechapel.

"Yeah," and Ethan sounded just as equally unsurprised. "I mean, and all of this happening so close to Halloween? I don't think that's a coincidence."

Erica was still trying to wrap her head around what Ethan had said was the cause of all of the ruckus lately. "But that seems kind of unlikely for this town, you guys. Usually whatever's supernatural is here to create a generic, mass hysteria. Nothing's spent time getting under everyone's skin before."

"Well then there's a starting point," Sarah said. "This thing likes to fester at the nerves of its victims. Does that sound like anything we know of?"

A flower of pain was beginning to bloom behind Ethan's eyes, and suddenly, all he wanted to do was lay down and sleep for a thousand years. He should have known he wouldn't be getting off easy this year, because all he wanted was a quiet holiday to spend with Benny, or the rest of his friends; and Ethan never got what he wanted in the grand scheme of things.

Sighing, he folded his arms on the bar and rested his forehead against them.

"No." he muttered into the fabric of his sweatshirt. "Not really."

"We'll have to do some research then," his babysitter pointed out unhelpfully, and then she made a point to let Erica know that 'we'll' meant everyone.

"Then the little terror on the ceiling has to do something helpful, too, besides letting what's left of his common sense slide out of his ears, hanging upside down like that."

Ethan lifted his head from his arms long enough to look up and see that, yes, indeed, Rory was now sitting upside down on his kitchen ceiling.

"This is how I get my brain to concentrate." Rory justified, and began pretending that he was meditating by making 'Ahuoom.' noises with the curl of his mouth.

"Or get yourself to throw up," Erica muttered to herself.

Ethan sighed and turned away from the sight, choosing instead to look at Benny with grim eyes.

"Every damn year." he groaned, and it was so quiet that the taller boy almost didn't hear him. But he had learned how to tune into Ethan's changes in volume, starting from pianissimo to fortissimo and back again and to the in betweens.

Benny reached out and gripped the pack of Ethan's neck with his large, warm hand, and his best friend all but melted into his touch.

"It's gonna be fine, E." Benny assured him, a crooked smile tugging at the end of his mouth. "We've battled tons of things before- this isn't any different."

Nodding, Ethan acknowledged this. Benny was right, of course, and he was just being melodramatic.

Jane walked into the now slightly chaotic kitchen to grab another can of Coke, entering at just the right time to witness Erica beginning to chuck oranges at Rory, who was still sitting upside down on the ceiling. Ethan watched as Rory dodged the fruit easily, Erica shouted, Sarah called them all sorts of words that sounded like 'immature', and Jane eyed them all as if they were insane.

Ethan just groaned again and began banging his head against Benny's chest.

What had his life become.

xXxXxXx

"Okay, so here's the plan." Benny mumbled into his ear as he looked over something from a notebook. Ethan looked highly unimpressed, as well as Sarah and Erica; Rory looked entirely too into the whole thing, choosing even to wear black that day. "We're gonna Mission: Impossible the hell out of this school. Keep your eyes peeled for anyone suspicious, or related to anything that would be considered a horrific sense of humor."

"I'm sorry to interrupt your pep talk," Sarah threw out, pointing a purple painted nail in her best friend's direction. "But that just summed Erica up to a tee. We're going to need a little more than that."

Erica tried to look absolutely wounded by what Sarah had said, but even she knew that there was no point in denying it; Erica was terrifying and loved being so.

Throwing his hands up, Benny just grumbled and threw the offending notebook back into his locker.

"Just keep your eyes peeled, Alice." he told Sarah. "And your blonde babe Rosalie, too."

Sarah snorted. "Whatever you say, Buffy."

xXxXxXx

When the five met up again at lunch, they decided to go over what they'd seen that day. Which was close to nothing.

"I saw Tara Higgins drawing some really weird symbols on her math homework today in Calc." Erica reported; all five of them were leaning into each other, like they were discussing something super incredibly secretive and important. Everyone else was giving them weird looks, but Erica would just glare or snap at them and the person would look away at once.

"No," Sarah shook her head in a dismissive sort of way. "Tara's in the medieval club and they're going over witchcraft and that sort of thing."

Benny looked incredibly miffed by this. "It's not like us warlocks and witches dance around moonlit circles and chant random crap. We do serious stuff, not that ridiculous nonsense Mrs. Wynona teaches."

Ethan reached under the table and placed a pale hand on Benny's knee, giving it a light squeeze. Benny calmed down at once, and the hot sparks under his skin cooled from furious to irked.

"Anyway," Rory said, raising an eyebrow at Benny's explosion. "I heard Finn Bellamy saying some stuff in a different language today. He sounded pretty angry and the words sounded pretty mystical."

Ethan's entire body rolled along with his eyes. "Rory, it was German, you moron. We have that class together with him, remember? He was doing a skit with Hannah and she metaphorically stole his wallet."

"Oh."

"What about you two?" Erica pointed at Ethan and Sarah. "Anything at all?"

Ethan said 'Nada,' at the same time Sarah said 'No," and Benny ran a hand frustratedly through his hair.

"Of course." Sitting up, Benny moved his hand under the table to grip onto Ethan's, as if the other boy was the only thing keeping him grounded. "Well, let's keep going. We've got two more classes after this, and I'm sure we can dig something up if we try hard enough."

"You know, Ben, you could be a motivational speaker." Rory told Benny with a smile. "Your talks are really blood-pumping."

Benny smiled at Rory with tight amusement. "No, I wouldn't- all of my speeches would either be 'Stop being idiots,' or 'Get over your stupid shit and do something about it.' No one would hire me. Like, ever."

"You get me going." Ethan said casually, and Erica choked on a wayward grape while Benny flushed and Sarah just hid her smile behind taking a drink of water.

xXxXxXx

When stepping into the local mall's Halloween costume store, Ethan crinkled up his nose- the whole place reeked of plastic and rubber and too much make-up.

He was stopping by Boogie Man's to look for some odds and ends to add to his nearly-complete costume, which he'd decided on last minute since Benny convinced him to go to Sarah's party. He needed a lot of green everything, but as it was turning out the only thing incredibly green was slime and Glow-In-The-Dark nail polish.

But it was still fun and oddly therapeutic, venturing from aisle to aisle and looking at all of the costume possibilities. There were many zombie costumes, and psychopathic murder-related pieces, and a lot of sparkly things for women. His favorite thing to do was see something cool he liked and run through a list of possibilities it could turn out to be for in his head.

He had just come in from the bookstore down at the other end of the mall, and had spent about two hours, curled up on the ground and leafing through a bunch of books in the Mythology/Lore section. Trying to figure out possibilities as to what was now haunting the town turned about to be easier said than done, and his eyes ached from all of the newly acquired information he'd gain.

None of it had been useful for his current situation, but on the 'Interesting Scale' from hole-punching papers to Alchemy, some of the things he had read were Outerspace cool.

Eventually his eyes felt as though they were going to dry up and fall out of his head, so stopping at the cafe to get a coffee, he left the shop sucking down a latte while reeking of freshly-opened pages and espresso.

His hips swayed slightly of their own accord as he heard Monster Mash come on over the speakers in the store, and he snickered lightly at the little montage of Munsters things tucked into a corner of the store. There was just about everything themed by the old black and white TV show, from pens to journals to stickers and ceramic mugs, and Ethan was incredibly amused by it.

Outside, as the song carried on, a few clusters of people began to talk to each other and look down the long corridor of the mall, housing a bunch of stores squeezed together. Ethan could hear raised voices, and turning to look out of the doorway, a Munster box set in hand, he watched as a man ran by the doorway, shouting nonsense at the top of his lungs.

And when Ethan blinked in confusion, the whole thing was over. The man was out of site, carrying on down the line of stores, and shoppers were grouped together, staring after him.

"Crazy bastard." a woman muttered as she came into Ethan's isle, looking around the shelves. A cluster of Halloween themed socks caught her attention and she looked over them, smiling to herself.

"Uh, excuse me," Ethan said as politely as he could with his mind on overdrive. "But what just happened? All I heard was the guy shouting and saw him run by."

The woman, who looked to be about thirty or so, looked up and smiled at him with amusement. "I guess the guy went to the bathroom and saw something that made him split. I think he was saying it was a mummy, but that might just have been him crying out for his mother."

Ethan watched as she shook her head and chuckled, grabbing a pair of black socks with bright orange pumpkins on them, and another with green ghosts on them, before walking away with her basket in hand.

Looking down at the box set in his hand, Ethan bit his lip and asked himself for what had to be the hundredth time what was going on in Whitechapel.

The Munsters smiled back up at him, in their long capes and pointy fangs and vintage black and white photography, and deciding to indulge himself, Ethan threw the box set into his basket.

He didn't leave the store with much else.

xXxXxXx

Just as they had been in the bookstore, Ethan's eyes felt as though they were burning themselves from the inside out and getting ready to drop from the sockets.

Benny was over, curled up on Ethan's bed with a laptop on the comforter and a blanket around his lean shoulders. Ethan was starfishing on the ground with his iPad on the carpet and his head propped up by his hand. They were researching, just as Ethan had only a few hours prior, and Ethan's already crammed brain was going into overload. His head felt like the food-making machine from Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs.

Moaning almost silently, Ethan dropped his head onto the ground and carded his fingers into his hair. And left them there for about ten minutes, while silently begging for death.

"What's up, dude?" Benny asked from the bed, and Ethan was reminded that that was another reason why he loved Benny so much- they might have been dating but he didn't feel the need to always call Ethan things like Baby and Love. It was more comfortable hearing him say dude, or E.

"Nothing." Ethan muttered into his carpet. "Just sick of reading stuff on all sort of batshit supernatural things. I did it for three hours at Noel's today and now my head feels like the space underneath someone's bed that's been stuffed with socks and dirty clothes and forgotten homework."

"Let's take a break, then."

Ethan looked up at Benny and saw as he closed the lid of his computer and set it on the ground; still curled up ridiculously in one of Ethan's comforters, he reached a pale hand out from the cave of navy fabric and reached for him.

It took Ethan less than ten seconds to scramble up off of the floor and snuggle up to Benny, who also wrapped the blanket around him. It was like a furnace and Ethan realized as if for the first time how cold it was in his room.

They folded into each other and as if by magic (something Ethan wouldn't be surprised by, if it were the case) the stress of the day and the ache in his head mellowed out almost entirely.

"I love fighting the beasts of Whitechapel." Ethan mumbled into Benny's neck, where he'd pressed his cold nose into. "I really do. But I wish that we got holidays off like everyone else does, you know?"

Benny laughed softly and laid them backwards more comfortably into the mound of pillows on Ethan's bed.

"Yeah, I know what you mean."

xXxXxXx

When Samantha came upstairs to get the boys for dinner, she found them curled up together on Ethan's bed, fast asleep with their computers on the ground and some light music playing from Ethan's iPod.

Smiling, she closed the door and continued to let them sleep with a bittersweet pang in her heart. She loved both of her boys to death but she hated how fast they were growing up.

If they remained Juniors for the rest of their lives, teenagers with drama and each other to hold onto, she would be the happiest mom in the entire world.

"Where're the boys, Sam?" Ross asked her when she came into the dining room.

"Sleeping." she told him with a warm smile on her face. "I guess they were doing homework or something together and just conked out."

Ross smiled back. "Alright."

Jane made a face at the thought of the two being all snuggly and dripping with love. "Gross."

xXxXxXx

A/N: Again, I am soooooooooooooooooo sorry that this took a while, but since school just started my brain has been scrambled eggs and you know?! Plus marching band is kind of a kick in the ass with all of the practicing and ugh any bandos out there that feel the pain? It's hard as fuck work man.

But I hope you enjoyed this, and I should have the next chapter up some time this week so I can catch up!