rivers_bend

master post


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 with 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.

"He fooled around a little, but mostly he was a fan. Did some promotions stuff. I don't know. I wasn't paying enough attention." Gerard's sleeves tonight are longer than his arms, and he tugs the right one down with his left hand, folding it over his fingertips, then pushing them out through the fold.

He does it again, and a third time, before Frank asks, "So how did you get turned?"

"Smells like the coffee's ready," Gerard says.

Before Gerard can continue waiting on him in his own kitchen, Frank jumps up and pours coffee into the prepared mug. "You made enough for ten people," he says. "Do you want some? Or is it not the same in that way where it's gross?"

"I'll just smell yours." Gerard lifts his nose a little and sniffs in example. It's just a joke, a bit of conversational byplay, but even from the other side of his monitors, Frank recognizes the angle of Gerard's head, the slight movement he makes as he scents his prey.

Frank's fingers are suddenly ice against the heat of the mug, and the skin on his neck and shoulders creeps with goosebumps. Can Gerard taste coffee in the blood of his victims if they've been drinking it? Can he smell it on their skin? Does the caffeine cross over to buzz in his brain?

"Frank?" Gerard says. And he's sniffing again, but not playing this time. Sniffing like he smells something he likes. "Frank? Why are you afraid?"

His habit of threading two fingers through the handle of his mug saves Frank from dropping it, but when he lurches in shock, he splashes coffee down one arm and all over the floor.

"Nothing. I'm not— Ow! Fuck." He's not afraid. Not exactly. Gerard wouldn't—

Faster than Frank can see, Gerard's out of his chair, kneeling at Frank's feet, dropping a towel he got from somewhere onto the spill of coffee, and cradling Frank's burned wrist in both hands. Lifting it toward his—

"What?" Frank says helplessly as Gerard's mouth closes on the reddened flesh.

But there's no prick of fangs, no pain, just a gentle drawing sensation, and the weirdly cool press of a pointed tongue. It soothes the burn, not like ice, but like the good aloe lotion Frank still buys because it was always in the bathroom when he was little. "What?" he says again, his voice shaking badly.

The suction increases, pulling Frank's skin against the smooth, flat surfaces of Gerard's human teeth for just long enough to make Frank's guts twist hot and low, then with a last lick Gerard releases him. Thank fuck he stands after that, so he's not face to face with Frank's totally inappropriate boner.

"Better?" Gerard asks, eyes searching Frank's for something Frank doesn't begin to have the brain power to guess at right now.

"I— What did—" Frank bends his wrist, twisting his hand to pull at the skin, but it doesn't hurt anymore. When he looks, the redness is gone.

"It's an enzyme," Gerard says, taking Frank's mug out of his lax grip, setting it on the counter. "Healing properties. Breaks down almost instantly if you take it out of our mouths though. The US army tried mining vampires for their spit back in the 1960s for use on the battlefields, but all it got them was a bunch of pissed off vamps."

Before Gerard's time—if Mikey was turned in the vampire-trend population swell before the revolution, it's fifteen or twenty years before they were even born—but Gerard is full of anecdotes about vampire history, and probably knows as much about 1950 or 1880 as he does about 2040. "Huh," Frank says, flexing his wrist again. Were the labs like Frank's? Probably not. No computers back then, at least not anything like what he has now. They were probably in bunkers deep underground somewhere, damp walls, flickering lights, vampires chained to metal tables while men in fatigues with short-clipped hair pried their jaws open with steel tools, dripped blood into their mouths to get the juices flowing, sucked—

"Maybe coffee's a bad idea," Gerard interrupts. "Why don't you go to bed. Get some real sleep."

"I'm fine," Frank says. He has questions. Things he wants Gerard to tell him. "I can sleep later."

"Now," Gerard says. His grip on Frank's arm isn't tight, but Frank knows he couldn't break it. "Sleep."

Frank lets Gerard push him toward his bedroom.

**


Frank sleeps for sixteen hours and then eats like he hasn't seen food in a month. He's going to go back to the lab, but he remembers what Gerard said about Mikey being in the music scene back in the days before, and ends up heading for the closet in the hall and pulling out his uncle's old guitar. He never got very good at it, since his life at Rutgers didn't leave him free time to practice and school holidays didn't give him much time to improve, but he plays often enough now that his fingers remember the chords, and playing clears his head, lets circuit designs work themselves out.

After making sure the hall door is bolted in case any insomniac vamps are wandering around, Frank opens his shutters and windows to the day and sits himself in a patch of autumn sunlight, trusting the breeze will keep him cool. His Dad's drums are sitting in the corner, better than the guitar for head-clearing when Frank's frustrated or pissed off, or for making him feel closer to his dad when he needs that, but today Frank wants the precision of the pain in his fingertips, not a full-body workout.

The E string needs replacing, and as Frank removes the old one, fits the new one in its place, he wonders. What did Mikey dabble in? Frank can't see him behind a kit. Maybe guitar. Or keyboards. He and Gerard both have the fingers to play keys. There isn't a keyboard in the compound as far as Frank knows, but they could get one. Frank could build one if he got the right parts. Bob, who comes around sometimes to help Frank with sound effects on the movies, plays the drums, and they've jammed together a few times, but Frank misses the family get togethers where they'd play for hours, until his fingers and wrists protested. His family was always so careful, avoiding the places vamps tended to feed, staying in after sunset whenever they could, Frank always figured they'd be around forever. But his mom never thought to worry about a corner-store at nine-thirty in the morning, and walked right into a robbery. One night they were all together, celebrating Frank's twenty-first birthday, and three days later she was dead. Frank's dad was taken by a vamp outside a bar less than a week after the funeral.

"He didn't want to live without your mother," Frank's uncle told him, like that was supposed to be comforting. Frank was skeptical of the theory, but after that recklessness seemed to run in the family. By the time he turned twenty-three, Frank was the only Iero left.

He thought for a while that he'd never be able to play again, but keeping music locked away didn't make him miss them any less, and eventually his guitar and then the drums made it back into his living space. He should ask Mikey if he wants to play sometime.

Once he's gotten the guitar back in working order, Frank picks out the song his mom used to sing to him when he had trouble sleeping. He doesn't get it quite right, but he does it again, and then again, until it sounds the way he remembers it. The sun is dipping below the tops of the trees when he puts the instrument carefully back in its case. His brain hasn't solved the vision problem, but he's got an idea for a change in the nerve-conduction matrix he's working on.


When his lab door swishes open a few hours later, Frank has his eyes glued to the viewscreen of his spectroscope.

"I brought you something," Gerard says, and Frank spins on his stool.

Gerard is standing just inside the doorway, a small, plump, grey-haired woman limp in his arms. But Frank looks closer, at the raw wound on her neck, the healthy glow of Gerard's skin which is completely absent in hers, and corrects himself. A small, plump, grey-haired body in his arms.

"Oh," Frank says. "Right." He's used to it now, Gerard, or sometimes one of the others, bringing him bodies. But it had been a shock at first. In the post-revolution world, fresh corpses are not hard to come by. The prey doesn't have a choice about their bodies being used for science, though their families can claim them afterwards if they choose. In college, if Frank wanted to dissect an eyeball or plastinate the nerves to the heart, he could go down to cold storage, pull open one of the drawers marked with a new-haul tag, and get what he wanted. Here, they come fresh.

"She didn't have glasses, so I hope her eyes are good enough for what you need," Gerard continues, moving to place the body on Frank's dissecting table.

Even though humans aren't allowed alts, the vamps don't bother policing vision mods as long as they only correct short-sightedness or replace the need for reading glasses. It's not always easy to tell how old a victim was, but this one looks old enough Frank's pretty sure she's had some kind of surgery. Though who knows. Maybe whatever it is will provide him with the key he needs to get the damn feedback to work.

"Thanks. I'm sure she'll be fine."

He expects Gerard to leave then, go meet with his brother or work on one of his many projects, but instead Gerard gestures toward the trio of comfortable chairs in the corner. "Will it bother you if I stay?" he asks.

"I need to finish what I was doing here," Frank says. "Not sure how exciting it'll be."

"That's okay," Gerard answers. He pulls a small pad out of the inside pocket of his jacket, grabs one of the pens off Frank's desk as he passes, and settles himself. "You don't have to entertain me."

It takes a while to get used to having someone else there, but after the third time Frank looks over and finds Gerard engrossed in whatever he's doing in his notebook, he starts to relax a little, and he eventually loses himself again in the maze of axons and dendrites on his viewscreen.

"Yes!" Frank hisses when he finally gets conduction across as well as down his sample matrix, and he jumps when Gerard answers, "Success?"

"Fuck, you scared me." Frank clutches his chest with hands aching from hours of tiny movements.

"So I see." Gerard's nostrils flare under eyes wide with amusement.

Ignoring the way that doesn't exactly make his heart stop racing, Frank turns his gaze to his dissecting table and notices that the body's gone. "Where—?"

"I put her in the refrigerator. You looked busy."

"Sorry," Frank says. It was rude to ignore his gerent's wishes, even if they were only implied by the gift of a body and weren't explicit orders. "I wanted to finish what I was doing before my sample atrophied."

"No rush," Gerard says. "I told them it took four years before you got the infrareds to compensate for a vamp's fluctuating body temperature, but that was totally worth the wait. They aren't expecting miracles."

It feels all backwards to have done live tests first. Usually they're the last step, vamps brought to him in shackles, sentenced to go under his knife for crimes Frank doesn't always understand. It was disconcerting as hell at first, cutting open someone's head while they spit invective in his face, but the supply of criminals is what had allowed him to move from mods to alts: x-ray vision, infrared—move beyond cameras to tech worked into the vampires' brains that changed how they could see.

"I'll get to it tomorrow night," Frank says, letting his eyes settle on the fridge for a moment to fix it in his mental agenda.

"I used her as a model," Gerard tells him, "so it's not like she went to waste."

He was drawing, then, not making lists. "Well, that's—" Frank doesn't know what the expected response is to learning he was manipulating human nerves while a vampire king sat behind him using a freshly drained corpse for life drawing practice, so he trails off. He mostly just wants to see the sketches. He's only ever seen Gerard's art on his monitors.

"I'd better get upstairs," Gerard says, tucking his notebook away.


He doesn't return the next night, but he's back the night after that, and the next one, and then two nights later. If Frank's busy, Gerard mostly stays quiet, but when Frank's just puttering, Gerard asks him questions.

"Is everything okay with— everything?" Frank finally asks when he's seen Gerard more in two weeks than he's seen him in any given two-month time in fifteen years.

"Sure. Mikey's just, he and Pete have been getting to know each other."

Frank doesn't see what that has to do with him.

"He's a good pet apparently."

And oh. Oh. Getting to know each other in the kind of way where Gerard's presence would be cock blocking.

"Have you ever had a pet?" Frank braves asking.

"When I first became Gerent. It was expected. But when someone's in your bed because it's required of them— It's not really my thing."

Frank cannot imagine being in Gerard's bed and not being one-hundred percent enthusiastic about it. But he's a tech, and that's not in a tech's job description, so he can't really put himself in a pet's shoes. Besides which, it's not like he's going to tell Gerard that.

"Right," he says, nodding a little.

"You're more interesting than my empty study," Gerard says. "But if I'm bothering you, I can do something else."

"No," Frank says. Gerard in person is actually less distracting than Gerard on his monitors most nights. "No. It's fine."

Gerard does come down less after a while, three or four nights a week instead of five or six, but Frank doesn't get to go back to watching him via his alts, because half the time he doesn't show, Pete comes down instead.

He and Pete sometimes watch old movies, or Pete drags him up to pester Gerard's mechanic, Ray, into letting them sit in Gerard's cars, where Pete spins elaborate road-trip fantasies peppered with anecdotes from the traveling he's actually done. He makes it sound exciting, and while Frank's in the passenger seat, he feels a longing to see the country. But as soon as he's back in his lab, or on his sofa with his stuff around him, Frank wonders why he'd want to be anywhere else.

**


Despite a promising start with the old woman Gerard brought him, and several other attempts on other corpses, Frank doesn't come up with anything he thinks is worth trying on a vamp, though he does use a vampire Mikey's men brought in to test his nerve matrix. He hasn't found any practical applications yet, but it's satisfying to watch all the muscles in the vamp's back twitch at once when Frank applies a pinpoint electric current. When Mikey tells Frank that the guy is here because he tried to burn another vamp's pet alive, it's even more satisfying to watch him writhe and scream in Mikey's hold when Frank turns the current up to max.

"That worse than having your hand cut off, Karl?" Mikey asks the vamp once he's stopped screeching.

"No!" Karl cries, but from the look of panic in his eyes and the way he barely flinched when Frank lifted the skin off his back to lay the matrix down, Frank suspects he's lying to get out of another round of shocks.

"You okay leaving it in, Frankie?" Mikey asks. "Karl didn't learn much from his last punishment. His hand grew back in a couple of weeks." Mikey looks at Frank's current box. "And have you got a spare one of those?"

"Sure," Frank says. Vampires drain humans to survive. But a burned corpse doesn't yield any blood; that's just killing for fun. Karl needs to learn a lesson.

"If you can't think of any other use for this matrix thing, I think we've got one." Mikey keeps one hand in the restraining harness he brought his prisoner down in, and holds the other out for Frank's current box. "Let me know if I can bring you any other repeat offenders."


All other projects get put on hold when the first infrared video they release gets more downloads in twenty-four hours than any of their other titles have gotten in a week. Frank's working every hour he can making circuits and installing them in the group of vampires they use for hunt vids, though Gerard does come down and threaten to physically carry Frank to bed when he doesn't think he's getting enough rest. Whether it's fortunately or unfortunately Frank can't decide, but he never actually makes good on his threat.

Three weeks gets all the vid vamps upgraded, and then they're working flat-out getting the video processed. Bob comes in to help, and Frank misses having Gerard to himself, asking about Frank's designs, or just sketching quietly in the corner. With Bob around, he's either hovering and demanding constant status updates, or Frank won't see him for days. But when they break for food, Bob will come over to Frank's apartment and kick around on the drums, and sometimes they'll get Pete to come down and play with them, rapping along to Frank's noodling on the guitar, or keeping ragged time on a bass he dug up somewhere, and their company mostly makes up for Gerard's mercurial moods.

Things finally calm down again in January when demand for vids settles back to normal, and Western's gerent, Greta, hires Bob away to work on one of her pet projects. Gerard heads out on a trip around the zone, checking in with his lieutenants, showing his face, reminding the vampires that they have a gerent to answer to. And probably, if other years are anything to go by, adding to his classic car collection along the way. As with his trip to Central in the fall, he doesn't bother recording his kills, so Frank's back to watching his live feed when he's got the lab to himself. Except instead of staring with rapt attention the way he used to, Frank often just has it on in the background, trying to recreate the feeling of having Gerard in the lab with him. Since he can only see what Gerard's seeing and can't actually look at Gerard, though, it's not the same.

**


Winter in Eastern can be cold and snow-bound or grey and wet, but this year is combining the two, leaving the ground a miserable muddy quagmire half the time and slick with black ice the rest. The recordings are coming in with so many slips and falls that Frank asks Gerard if they shouldn't just capitalize on it, try to make the vids funny on purpose.

"There was a show when me and Mikes were little." Gerard closes his eyes and tips his head back, making his throat impossibly long. Frank tries very hard not to think about how much he'd like to bite it. It helps remembering that Gerard is a vampire and could kill him in seconds.

"TV show?" Frank asks when Gerard seems frozen.

"Yeah. These guys would like, punch each other in the nuts 'til they puked. Jackass. That was it. It was really popular. This is kind of the same thing, I guess."

"Kind of?" The video Frank has cued up right now shows a man trying to run across an icy parking lot, his legs flying out from under him, making him skid halfway under a car. The vampire has to pull him out to get to his neck. From the shake in the camera it's clear she's laughing.

"Either way," Gerard says, "do it. You always make the right decisions about this shit."

The comedy vids don't do as well as the infrareds, but they do gain a rabidly loyal following. Frank still prefers the straight-up hunts, though, and is grateful when spring finally arrives.

**



Now that Pete and Mikey are past their honeymoon period and winter's over, Gerard rarely comes to Frank's domain before nine, and more often it's after midnight, but Frank's just pulling his lunch off the stove a little after seven when the alarm on his wrist chimes softly to let him know someone's in his lab. Before he has time to give the voice command to turn on the screen in the corner of the kitchen to see who it is, Gerard's there in the doorway, nostrils flaring, one hand holding a rolled sheaf of papers, the other fluttering excitedly around his face. "Frank," he says, "Frankie. You're here."

Frank doesn't say of course he's here or ask where else he might be—Gerard sometimes forgets his own orders, like that Frank isn't supposed to leave the compound unless accompanied by one of the Ways or any two of the six lieutenants Gerard's decided he trusts with his most valuable human. Frank would never take advantage of his forgetfulness, but he doesn't want to remind him of it, either.

"Yes," Frank says, setting his bowl of soup and toast to the side so he can give Gerard his full attention.

"No, no," Gerard says, when he notices. "Eat. Let me show you what I found." He gestures Frank toward the kitchen table, and sits down across from him.

Frank had assumed Gerard's papers were his own drawings of some new tech he wanted Frank to try, but when he unrolls them, it turns out to be an old magazine of some kind. There's a figure all dressed in red on the cover, and, as best Frank can tell upside down and with Gerard obsessively smoothing his hands over the page, the words The Amazing Spider-Man emblazoned across the top.

"What is it?" Frank asks when Gerard just looks at him expectantly, hands still restless.

"It's a comic book! Spiderman. He has these great web shooters."

So, tech after all. Frank keeps his smile to himself. He can't imagine why a vampire would need to shoot spiderwebs. Probably just because Gerard wants to know if he can. Gerard is flipping through the pages, clearly looking for something. When he finds it, his face lights up. "See?" he says, spinning the book around so Frank can look too, but being careful to keep it out of range of Frank's soup.

"You want me to make you web shooters?" Frank peers at the picture. The red-clad figure is bound to a hulking shape by a silvery thread spreading out into a net, his free hand outstretched with a second thread emerging from his wrist.

"Maybe for Mikey. That seems something more— A captain might find that more useful."

Frank can see how an old-west sheriff like in some of the movies salvaged from his dad's hard drive when Gerard had taken him to get his parents' things would benefit from web shooters, but Mikey has fangs, and hands strong enough to rip out a man's windpipe as easily as Frank lifts his spoon to his mouth. He doesn't need webbing to catch a human. And no matter how clever Frank is with tech, there simply isn't any substance on earth that both can be stored as a liquid and has the tensile strength to contain a vamp that doesn't want to be contained.

"Mmmm," Frank says, using his mouth full of toast to mask his skepticism.

"And look!" Gerard flips to a new page and flashes it at Frank, but then turns it back so he can find something else before Frank's eyes can even register what he's seeing.

Frank shovels food in his mouth as fast as he can in case Gerard wants to decamp to the lab and get started right away, but as he watches, Gerard's page turning slows, and he stops on a double-page spread that seems to be a fight scene, tracing one finger over the lines of ink. "I had so many of these when I was— before," he says softly enough Frank has to strain to hear him. Gerard doesn't look up. "I even drew. Not these, but—"

"But…" Frank says softly when Gerard doesn't continue.

"It was a long time ago." Gerard shuts the book and pushes it aside. "And that wasn't why I came, actually. We can look at that later. Gerent Ulrich wants to hire your services. Infrared mods. Can you be ready in an hour?"

"Infrared's an alt," Frank says. No matter how many times Frank tells him, Gerard doesn't seem to get the distinction between alts and mods. "Alts are wired into your nerves. Mods are like Captain Gabe's music player, or the universal key in Mikey's hand."

"An alt," Gerard murmurs, and then at a more normal volume says, "So, an hour?"

Infrared is getting more popular amongst Gerard's friends, and Frank mentally catalogues the contents of his lab. "I have everything I need," he says once he's sure that's true. "He can come any time."

"We'll have to pack it up," Gerard corrects him. "Gerent Ulrich doesn't leave his compound. I'll send Pete down to help you."

Frank wishes Gerard would stay and help him, or stay and watch, talk to him some more, but Gerard probably has a lot to attend to so soon after sundown, especially if they're going to travel tonight. "I do want to see the—" Frank struggles for a second to recall the word— "comic book," he says. "I'm not sure how practical— But the book itself. Will you show it to me?"

Gerard's face lights up again and he puts the book carefully in the inside pocket of his waistcoat. "We can do it as soon as we're back. I'm not letting Ulrich get his filthy hands on it."

By the time Frank's blinked, Gerard is gone.

Frank keeps his lab meticulously organized, so he would actually rather not have Pete's help with packing, but he doesn't mind the company.

With uncharacteristically wild hair and a huge-ass grin on his face, Pete shows up about fifteen minutes after Gerard disappears. "Gerard said you need me?" he says.

Frank tries not to be jealous that it looks like Gerard had to drag Pete out of bed to get him here. At least Frank is sure the one he dragged him from wasn't Gerard's. Gerard may never have taken Frank to his bed, but Frank has never seen him take any other human there, either.

"You can lay out those cases on the table," Frank says, shaking off all thoughts of beds and bedmates. Pete does as he's told.

Pete's a lot more help than Frank expected, and they get the packing done in just over half an hour. He seems to know quite a lot about tech, and more than a pet has reason to about mods.

"I was in engineering-school for a while," Pete answers when Frank asks him about it. "But before I could qualify for tech status, my dad was killed, and my mom was sick. She needed me. Gerent Travis' scouts found me when I was trying to hitchhike back to campus, and took me to the compound. I was Captain Gabe's for a while, and then they sent me here. So, no more school for me."

Frank files that information away to think about. With a tech-obsessed gerent who doesn't place much stock in the status to be gained by having pets, there might be some kind of apprentice program to be worked out here. "How did I not know this before?" Frank asks.

"More interesting things to talk about than failed dreams," Pete answers, tone suspiciously light.

"But—" Frank says.

"Gotta get back upstairs. Hope you have a good trip south. That's the one zone I've never been to."

That reminds Frank he never got to hear the end of Pete's story about the time Gabe took him to Western Zone to see Gerent Greta, but Pete's gone before Frank can ask for the rest of the tale.

Part 2