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Entry tags:	fic: moonlight

Moonlight fic: Learning Curve
TITLE: Learning Curve
AUTHOR: Mari
RATING: NC-17
SPOILERS: Through 1.11 “Love Lasts Forever”
DISCLAIMERS: This is not my sandbox.
PAIRING: Josh/Mick
SUMMARY: Mick heeds Beth’s request.
AUTHOR’S NOTES: This is the AU that emerges when I refuse to accept canon as it is, heh. Because the enormous universe that sprang forth from my other vampire AU was not enough to keep me satisfied any longer. Major thanks to decidedly for the beta, without whom the key scene would be a great, heaping pile of suck.



Josh wanted to be a doctor when he first entered college, only to discover in the middle of his first biology class that hated blood. He told people this story when they ask him why he entered law as a profession, ending it with a smile. “So I decided to become a prosecutor instead, so that I could try to keep as much blood from being shed as possible.” It always got a laugh, always made him a hit at parties. It didn’t occur to him until his second year in the DA’s office and his twenty-first case that by preventing other blood from being shed he might be laying his own on the altar. It was the most ridiculous and unassuming case in the world, a white collar criminal hacking into his own company’s financial accounts and skimming from the top, one percent at a time, for his own use. The man was a moron outside of his eerie ability to read exactly what a computer wanted; that Josh was going to win and ensure that the criminal didn’t see daylight again for a very long time was virtually certain.

The man, as it turned out, had a drug habit, a bad one, and it was very important to his suppliers that he stay free so that he could continue siphoning money into their hands in order to pay his debts. When Josh got an iffy search pushed through on the basis of probable cause and saved the case from a mistrial, a car that had been idling outside of the office for the better part of an hour before he made it out began rolling slowly up to him. The man in the passenger’s seat leaned out the window and sprayed bullets in his direction. By some impossible gift of luck, the only one that actually found his body struck his bicep. He spent three sleepless nights wondering if he had made the right decision with his life, and then, by utter chance, on the fourth night he met Beth.

Josh never told her that his job had nearly killed him a scarce three days before they had met. By the time that she was in a position to see him naked, the stitches were gone, and he made up a ridiculous story about tripping onto a metal rebar to explain the scar. Josh always wondered if Beth knew that he was lying, because she for once set her reporter’s instincts to the side and didn’t dig.

I hate blood, Josh thought again as his limp body was pulled out of the trunk and laid out on the leaf-strewn ground. Already he was growing cold with the force with which the red liquid was exiting his body; it was impossible to keep his teeth from chattering. He heard Beth calling his name in a high, urgent voice that balanced on the verge of hysteria, and then Mick’s lower, reassuring rumble. “Okay, buddy, be brave,” Mick said, and then there was a searing pain in the side of his neck that made him arch his back and cry out. His spine was barely touching the dirt again before he felt his eyes rolling back in his head and a deep grayness stretching out its thin fingers to pluck at his hair and clothing. Josh was turning his head towards it, for it was soft and numbing, and was on the verge of following it wherever it might lead before he was brought back abruptly by another terrible pain, this time in his leg. Josh yelled and tried to pull away, but something was wrong: what should have been a full-throated cry instead only exited his mouth as the most breathy of whispers.

“Easy, easy, easy,” Mick said from somewhere above him, while Beth whispered his name and cupped his face. He knew her hands anywhere. Josh moved his lips to shape her name and hoped that she understood him before his eyes rolled back again to greet his new lover, the gray lover, who was increasingly happy to welcome him with every second that passed. Beth responded by saying his name again in a tone so saturated with panic that it brought Josh back when nothing else could, however briefly. He heard an argument going on above his head, though the gray lover was whispering into his ear too sweetly for him to make out any words. It only lasted for a second, and was ended by Beth’s voice, pleading and clogged with tears.

“I’m so sorry,” Mick said from a place only a few inches away from Josh’s ear, and Josh wanted to ask why, he was no idiot and knew that Mick was after his girl and that maybe his girl was after Mick in return, but that didn’t mean that Mick had shot him. A big callused hand cradled the back of Josh’s head and lifted him from the dirt. Something warm and wet was pressed up against Josh’s mouth, and he tried to turn his face away, gasping. He hated that taste, he hadn’t even been able to suck on a wounded finger when he was a kid, but the person holding his head was persistent, and in the end Josh had no choice.

He drank, and then he followed his gray lover down, whispering an apology to Beth for his infidelity as he went.

*
Josh choked on the air upon awakening and knew immediately that something was wrong. He had been shot at least three times, he remembered that much before he had lost consciousness, and he should have been surrounded by the steady, monotonous beeping of machines keeping him alive and not feeling much of anything outside of the false chemical calm that came with vast quantities of morphine. Instead, he felt alert. He felt sore. He felt...God, he felt so hungry.

“Beth, get out of here,” came Mick’s low rumble. It was located on the other side of what Josh knew without opening his eyes was a significantly-sized room, and yet Josh could hear him as well as if he was kneeling down beside Josh and speaking directly into his ear.

“But--” Beth’s higher lilt was already raised in protest, and Josh could imagine the obstinate look on her face. He opened his eyes with a struggle, turned his head, and saw Beth and Mick arguing with one another in the doorway to a well-furnished room. Mick’s living room, Josh remembered. He had only been here once before, and the two of them had been circling each other so intensely, Josh trying to hide it and Mick not even bothering, that it was a wonder he could remember what the room looked like at all.

They were whispering to one another. Whispering, and yet Josh’s ears rang. Something was wrong. Something was so very wrong. He started to push himself up and onto his elbows with limbs that did not want to obey him.

Mick jerked his head around at even that slight noise and then grabbed at Beth’s bicep, shoving her out of the room so hard that her feet nearly left the ground. “Get out of here and don’t come back until I say it’s safe.”

“It’s Josh,” Beth insisted, and dug her feels into the hardwood floor. “He’s not going to hurt me.”

“He needs to feed, and until he does that and realizes who he is again, he just might.” Mick leaned forward and into Beth’s face. If he realized that Josh could hear the two of them as easily as if they were shouting, then he didn’t care. “I told you that life and death is not a game, Beth. Batting people around has consequences.”

Beth reeled backwards as if she had been slapped. Josh felt the same; every time that he had seen Mick and Beth together when they were not immediately aware that he was watching, Mick had stared at Beth as if she was a precious and beautiful piece of carved glass that would shatter if he did not handle her with great care. Listening more carefully, Josh realized that Mick’s voice had been shaking with some huge and fettered emotion.

“All right,” Beth said slowly, staring up at Mick’s face. “I’ll come back later?”

“I’ll call you when he’s settled,” Mick said before he guided her to the front door and shut it firmly behind her. Josh wanted to be irritated as he listened to his romantic rival discussing him as if he were either a small child or a potted plant, but he still felt so heavy and thick that it was all that he could do to keep himself braced onto his elbows and not flat on his back. He watched Mick lean his head against the thick metal door after Beth had gone and then pound it once, twice, with enough force that he was in danger of breaking his hand. He turned back towards Josh.

“What’s going on?” Josh croaked. Mick met his gaze and walked over to him without saying a word. His eyes were dark, his face clear of emotion. Josh noticed that Mick’s hands were clenching and unclenching and wondered, for the first time since they’d met, if Mick was intending to strike him. He looked down at his shirt and saw that it was covered in so much blood that it nearly appeared as if it had been dyed. Shot. He had been shot. He should be in a hospital, and not on a strange man’s couch while that same man ushered his girlfriend out the door with dire warning about her safety. “What happened?” Josh said, a new note of urgency entering his voice. He swung his legs over the side of the couch and nearly fell as he tried to support himself; his legs felt more like those of a newborn than a man.

Mick paused halfway between Josh and the front door and studied him for several minutes. “You need to eat,” he said abruptly, turning towards his kitchen instead. Josh was glad of it. There was an expression in Mick’s eyes that was not soothing Josh’s nerves at all, and he wanted a clear avenue of escape to the door if he should need it, if he could get his legs under him and cooperating for that long.

“You’re weak,” Mick continued from the kitchen. Though Josh could not see him, he could hear him rummaging around, and then the clink of a bottle being opened. With the sound came a smell that would have brought Josh to his knees if he had been capable of standing and which flooded his mouth with saliva between one second and the next. He was hungry, he was thirsty, he didn’t know how to describe this new hybrid feeling that had overcome him, only that it was tied to that smell and that only that smell could satisfy it. “I wasn’t...I wasn’t injured when I was turned. It might take you longer to get on your feet again.”

Nothing that Mick was saying was making any sense, but as long as he was the bearer of that smell Josh didn’t think that he could be moved to care. He sat up against the back of the couch and plucked his blood-dried shirt away from his chest with one hand as he watched Mick emerge from the kitchen with a tall glass of something thick and dark in his hand. Mick stopped when he saw what Josh was doing; Josh only had eyes for the glass.

“Here,” Mick said. He forced the glass into Josh’s hand and looked away again almost as quickly. Josh didn’t care, for the glass was filled with that sweet-salty-copper smell, and he could think of nothing more important than drinking it down. He had taken three deep gulps before the taste was able to catch up with him and bring recognition with it. It was then all that Josh could do not to throw up all three of those swallows again almost as quickly.

“Slow,” Mick said, watching Josh closely. “Go slowly the first time. You’ll get used to it.” His shoulders lifted into a shrug that might have been convincing, if Josh didn’t look too closely at the rest of him. “It’s cold, but warming it doesn’t help. I’ve tried.”

“It’s blood!” Josh exclaimed as he stared down in horror at the glass in his hand. He wanted to throw it across the room at the same time that he wanted to drink all of it down at a gulp, and lick the glass clean afterwards. He could feel the sunrise outside of Mick’s walls, hear the heartbeats of the people walking up and down his hallway and smell their flesh, but from Mick and himself he could detect nothing at all. Josh’s breath began to come faster in his throat.

“Yes, it is.” Mick took a seat on an ottoman opposite Josh and leaned forward. Josh thought of the one acid trip that he had witnessed while in college, and how the person doing the drugs had had a sober one sitting beside him and talking him through it so that the trip didn’t take a turn for the nasty.

God, Josh hoped that he was on drugs.

“Blood is all that you can eat now.” Mick continued to stare at him. He looked terribly, gut-wrenchingly sad on Josh’s behalf; it was that look that managed to convince Josh of the impossible. “You’re a vampire.”

Josh’s legs, as it turned out, could support him just fine when he was desperate enough. He dropped the glass and leapt up from the couch. The glass shattered as it struck the wood floor, sending blood and glittering shards flying in all directions. It was still all that Josh could do not to fall to his knees and lap up the droplets.

Mick watched as Josh kept running backwards until his spine struck Mick’s bookcase hard with nowhere left to go, and then leaned over calmly and began to pick up the largest shards of glass from the floor. He didn’t seem angry. If anything, Josh thought that Mick seemed sadder than any other human being that had ever come before him.

“It’s nearly noon,” Mick said calmly, as if Josh was not on the verge of hyperventilating on the other side of the room from him. “You have nowhere to go.” He flicked his gaze up to Josh again; Josh came to the uneasy conclusion that Mick had been as drawn to the scent of blood as Josh himself was. “New vampires can’t handle sunlight the way that the older ones can.”

“Stop saying that word,” Josh blurted out. Mick raised his eyebrow slightly and Josh got the sudden feeling that he was being humored. The rage which swept over him was unlike anything that he had ever felt before, even when he had learned that Beth was going to be made a target in his stead, and it was not until much later that Josh calmed down enough to realize that it didn’t even feel human. He was across Mick’s living room faster than his brain had time to catch up with, certainly much faster than he ought to have been able to move. Josh had no idea what he intended to do when he got there, though pulling Mick’s head from his shoulders with his fair hands did not seem like a terrible idea.

If Josh thought that he was fast now, then Mick defied physics. He whirled out of the way of Josh’s charge faster than Josh’s eye could follow, seized him by the bloodied collar, and then hurled him against the wall hard enough to make several of the tasteful and abstract pictures on that side of the room fall down to the floor, and not a few of the books from the other side. The neighbors must surely believe that either the end of the world or some truly energetic sex was taking place within the apartment. Josh’s breath hitched as he waited for Mick to strike him, but Mick merely held him in place with his hands clasped loosely about Josh’s neck, the way that someone might hold back a disobedient kitten, and made all the worse by the malicious power that Josh could feel Mick stubbornly refusing to release. Power that he could feel in himself, too, dark and coiling, he who had always made it a point of pride that he had never abused the potential of his job.

Vampire. Three months worth of stubbornly turning a blind eye towards whispered conversations and odd hours as he told himself that he could trust her began to make a perfect and terrible sense.

“Why?” Josh asked finally. Pinned up against a vampire’s wall, it might have been one of the most ridiculous questions to ask, but it was also the only one that Josh could think of.

Mick continued to regard Josh with a steady gaze that was made all the more terrible by the fact that Josh could readily imagine that Mick had been in his same position before. “Because you would have died if I didn’t,” he said. Mick didn’t sound as if he was altogether convinced that it was a good enough reason; that made two of them. Josh took advantage of a loosening in Mick’s grip to double over, put his face into his hands, and sob.

*
Josh did not know what kind of a vampire Mick was, but as a guidance counselor he left something to be desired. He was left alone to sink down against the wall until his spell of crying was done while Mick left to clean up the mess that Josh had made by dropping the class. Josh could still sense Mick giving him sideways glances whenever he thought it possible that Josh would not notice, and if he had been in any other situation Josh would have thought that it was nearly funny. If Mick was trying to leave him to his privacy while he sorted his feelings out on the matter, Josh wanted to call across the room, then he was forgetting two very important details. One, the fact that they were both vampires meant that until the sun set they were trapped together; Josh had not even liked that when he was human and he had thought that Mick was. Two, it was going to take far longer than fifteen minutes for Josh to come to terms with the loss of his own humanity. It was with a certain dark humor that Josh thought it was fortuitous that an eternity had suddenly been handed to him.

“Here,” Mick said, appearing without warning beside Josh again and making him jump. Even with his enhanced hearing, he had not noticed Mick’s approach. “You still need to eat. Try it again.” He pushed another glass of blood into Josh’s hand. Josh noted that this time Mick did not pull away immediately, should Josh throw or drop the glass again.

Josh glanced down at the dark liquid and then away, his stomach roiling with how much he both needed the blood and needed it away from himself. “Where did it come from?” he asked.

“Blood bank,” Mick answered. Josh opened his eyes again and stared at him hard. “It’s the truth. You need human blood, but you don’t have to take it from humans.”

“Do other vampires?” He was still a lawyer; he couldn’t seem to shut himself up when it came to the asking of questions.

“A few. You don’t have to be one of them, if you try hard enough.” A hard note entered Mick’s voice and made Josh wonder how many of those vampires came into Mick’s sphere of influence, and how many of them actually made it out again.

That smell, that sweet and coppery and intensely alive smell, was going to drive Josh insane if he didn’t give in to it, to hell with his past aversion to the very sight of blood. “Bottom’s up,” he muttered humorlessly before he tilted the glass up to his lips. He wondered if it would make things any easier if he were to hold his nose first, until the first few drops of blood struck his tongue and something else entirely took over. The hunger that took Josh over from the inside would have nothing to do with any action that took that taste away from him. Josh gulped down the blood quickly enough to send a spike of pain through the center of his forehead; Mick had not been joking when he had said that he kept it cold. He still didn’t stop until every available drop was gone and he was fighting down the urge to lick the rim clean like a cat, and then he hissed and pressed the heel of his hand against the headache.

“Yes, you can still get those.” If Mick had sounded amused, Josh thought that he probably would have hit him. Since Mick still sounded sad and tired, as if this was his tragedy that was being acted out instead of Josh’s own, then Josh decided that he really had no choice but to hit him.

He broke his second glass of the hour by hurling it as hard as he could at Mick’s head. Whatever Mick had been expecting Josh to do, it clearly wasn’t that, and the rim caught him in a glancing blow just above his eyebrow before he could duck away. Josh followed that by a punch that struck Mick directly on the jaw and felt better than anything else that he had done since he had woken up on Mick’s couch and found his rival ushering his girlfriend out the door. I should have done that weeks ago, Josh thought. It didn’t bother him that he was still capable of incredibly shallow thoughts in the middle of an existential crisis. Under the circumstances, he thought that it might be the only thing keeping him sane.

Hitting Mick might have been very pleasant, but being hit in return was certainly not. Mick did not seem inclined to go easy on Josh out of consideration for grief or youth, as his punch was powerful enough to knock Josh’s head back and send him sagging halfway back down to the floor again. Mick forced him back down the rest of the way with his body down on Josh’s own, pinning Josh’s wrists down so that Josh could not take him by surprise again, and his grip was not a joke this time. Blood was trickling down from a cut opened up above Mick’s eye from the glass; with Mick leaning down over Josh as he was, it was only a matter of seconds before it began to drip down onto Josh’s face. He sputtered and turned his face away, gagging as his new instincts could not manage to leave him alone for even that long. When one of the drops landed near his mouth, Josh surged up against Mick’s grip so that he could wipe it away before he was forced to lick it off. He bucked up and cursed as he realized that he might as well have been fighting a wall.

Infuriatingly, Mick himself still didn’t seem angry. He leaned more of his weight down onto Josh’s wrists as Josh only fought him harder and said, in a calm voice that more than anything else made Josh want to hit him again, “If I let you up, am I going to be cleaning up broken glass until the sun sets?”

“Why didn’t you let me die?” Josh asked instead. “Because it would have killed me otherwise?” He made a hollow sound that should have been a laugh before it died halfway up his throat. Somehow, he doubted that his life meant all that much to Mick.

“Believe it or not, yes.” Mick leaned down on Josh’s wrists one more time for emphasis before he jumped up and was out of Josh’s immediate range with one fluid movement. Denied of even that target, Josh stayed on the floor. “And because it would have killed her.”

There was no need to specify who the her in question was. Between the two of them, there would always ever only be the one. Josh stared up at Mick’s ceiling and said in a dull voice, “As a psychologist, you suck.”

Mick made a startled snorting sound. It took Josh several seconds to realize Mick might even have been fighting back a laugh. “Yeah, well, I’m clearly a shit doctor, too. Sorry about that.”

Josh had a dim memory of Mick’s hands actually being in his neck and in his leg, doing his best to stop the inevitable. He turned his head far enough to look at Mick and discovered that Mick was carefully not looking at him in return. More vivid was his recollection of his own blood splattering onto the leaves in thick, nearly ropy spurts. Mick would have had to have been a superhero to overcome that.

“That part wasn’t your fault,” Josh said. He very carefully did not absolve Mick of his guilt for the other part. For a few seconds, it looked as if Mick might even be on the verge of cracking a smile.

Mick walked over and nudged Josh in the ribs a few times with his show, hard enough to feel but not hard enough to hurt. “There’s a freezer in the bedroom,” he said. “You can have it for the rest of the day.” Josh was sure that his eyes were widening, for Mick said. “You’ll sleep better in the cold. You’ll also need to eat again before the sun sets, at least once. You’ll want to fight it. Don’t. It’ll be much worse when you do give in if you fight it.” Josh thought that he heard a hitch in Mick’s voice; his face was cool and blank as Josh watched him. “You’re safe here, for the day. Might as well use that.”

For the day. That was just as well. The very thought of thinking of anything that might happen beyond that was more than Josh could take at the moment, when even looking ahead to the next hour was proving a difficult task. “And what then?” he asked.

“I’ll teach you what you need to know.” Mick said. It was to his credit that his voice did not stutter at all.

*
“How the hell does he manage this?” Josh asked to no one in particular, staring down at a real, honest to God meat freezer in the place where a man’s bed should have been. He was inclined to think that this was Mick’s idea of a cosmic joke, where he in any way convinced that the man had a sense of humor in the first place. He placed his hand gingerly inside the freezer and discovered that it was working before he pulled it out again. The cold drew him back, though, and he was so exhausted.

“Oh, for God’s sake,” Josh finally said to no one in particular before he swung one of his legs over the side and prepared to climb in. All things considered, that he could actually find the time to be exasperated should have meant that his day was looking up.

Someone knocked on the door downstairs. Josh froze in his awkward position and listened as the sound that should have been barely perceptible echoed as if it was happening right in front of him.

“I told you that I’d call you,” Mick said. Josh was disturbed to discover that he recognized Beth’s scent, the unique pattern of her breathing and the way that she shifted her weight from one foot to the other when she was either nervous or indignant.

“Yes, you did,” Beth said. “That call. I’m still waiting for it.”

Mick’s sigh echoed and made Josh feel tired along with him even as he was standing up a full flight of stairs. “Beth--” he started.

“Don’t try to tell me that I can’t possibly understand your world if you keep shoving me out of it,” Beth said, and even though no power on the earth could have taken Josh down those stairs, he couldn’t help a small inward moment of, ‘That’s my girl.’

Another sigh. “Not yet,” Mick said. “Later. The first days are...” While Josh was expecting Mick to apologize, his voice was nearly fierce as he said, “It was nearly two weeks before I even remembered who I was after I was turned, Beth. I still don’t remember everything that I did during that time. You don’t want to me here. Trust me on this.” ‘Like you didn’t trust my judgement earlier,’ went unspoken, and even though this concerned him as much as it did either of them, Josh felt as if he was intruding. He pulled his leg out of the freezer and then turned, uncertain of where he should go when he could hear everything.

“But that was because of Coraline.” Beth sounded uncertain now, even a little wary, and Josh was only more confused as he realized that he didn’t have the faintest of ideas who this Coraline person was. While Beth and Mick had been spending so much time together, they had clearly gone over a lot of Mick’s personal history. Josh did not know why that suddenly made him feel better, except that it left the two of them with less time to be making eyes at each other.

“And if you don’t want something similar to happen to Josh, you need to not be here.” Mick’s voice was firm. When Beth did not immediately fire back an indignant retort, Josh knew that his body language must be saying something else entirely. He was probably touching Beth’s arm with the tips of his fingers, leaning close, their foreheads and mouths nearly touching. Nothing that pushed over into impropriety, for Josh was certain that he could hear and smell everything that they were doing together down in the entryway. He heard Beth’s heartbeat quicken and changed his mind; the very edge of impropriety.

“Okay.” Beth’s footsteps moved back, as if she was allowing herself to be ushered out. They paused for a moment, and then Josh heard her say very clearly, “I love you.”

Mick did not respond; he knew as well as Josh did that she had not said it for him. Beth knew a great deal about vampire physiology, as it turned out.

Josh retreated to one corner of the room as he heard Mick coming up the stairs without quite knowing why. A desire not to appear as if he had been eavesdropping, perhaps, even though Mick would surely know that Josh had heard everything. He could not say why he felt such deference to a private moment between his girlfriend and his rival for her affections; it just seemed the right thing to do.

“How are you doing?” Mick asked from the doorway without making any acknowledgment of the way that Josh had retreated. He didn’t really give a shit about how Josh was doing, he realized suddenly, but was only doing it out of a sense of obligation to Beth, and because he thought that it was right.

Suddenly, Josh felt much better about the entire situation.

“Fine,” he said, and then made a face. “Considering.”

“That...gets better.” Someone needed to tell Mick that he was a shit liar, Josh decided. He wished that it could be him, but that was probably the wrong thing to say to the man who had saved his life, no matter how much he was still trying to sketch out the details of what that might mean.

“Sure.” Josh started to push past Mick, their shoulders brushing against one another in the doorway. There was a second of electricity that made Josh pause before he could go on. It was their shared species now, he decided. It had to be. “And thank you.” That was easier than he had expected, hardly hurt at all.

“Don’t mention it.”

*
In spite of Mick’s offer, Josh could not bring himself to come near Mick’s freezer again. It seemed too...intimate, somehow, after the glimpse into Mick and Beth that he had been given, too close to what he imagined that it would be like to come home and find Mick in Josh’s own bed. He slept on the couch instead as the sun set, his body telling him that it was not the time for sleep now even as his exhaustion would give him no other choice. Mick had been right; he would have slept better in the cold. Josh tossed and turned on the couch instead, opening his eyes frequently to stare up at the ceiling that he could see as brightly as if it was noon on a sunlit day. There were beads of sweat running down his spine, he could feel his fangs pressing into his lower lip hard enough to leave dimples in the flesh, and he needed to eat again. Mick had not been exaggerating about that detail; always, in the back of Josh’s mind, were thoughts of dark, pulsing blood.

He swung his legs over the side of the couch and retreated through the darkened apartment into Mick’s kitchen. He had observed the compartment where Mick kept his blood earlier and was able to pour himself a glass even through his hungered haze. Josh’s hand shook for a few seconds as he contemplated drinking the blood straight from the bag, but he fought back the urge and fumbled for a cup, managing this time not to throw it at anyone. He could drink his meals from a glass like a semblance of a human. He could hang onto civilization at least that much.

The blood was cold, thick, and not what Josh wanted. He drank until he gagged all the same, trying to force away the thoughts of warm and sweetly-scented necks that nagged at him. In the dark, it was harder to pretend that he was still a man. He needed sunlight, even if it was only the scent of it until he could tolerate it the way that Mick had told him that older vampires could.

Josh set the glass in the sink, considering it a good day that he managed not to shatter it against one of Mick’s walls, and headed up the stairs to where Mick was sleeping in his cold freezer. He was a novice; that he didn’t particularly like the expert didn’t mean that Mick didn’t have something to offer. Josh listened for his own footsteps and found that even with vampire hearing he could not hear them, for he moved like a predator now. He didn’t knock before he entered the bedroom.

The lid to the freezer was closed. Josh opened it and found Mick’s hazel eyes focused on him immediately. Mick blinked a few times, seemingly not registering immediately that Josh was there, and Josh found himself feeling better, actually, to know that there were some things that Mick could not cradle in the palm of his hand. “What’s wrong?” Mick asked. His voice was slurred with sleep. It gave him a husky whiskey/honey rasp that made Josh’s sluggish heartbeat suddenly remember its old pace.

“I can’t stop thinking of blood,” Josh said simply. He darted his tongue out, touching the sharp point of a fang that he could not control. Mick’s eyes followed the movement.

“I told you, that’s normal.” Mick sat up and rubbed his hand over his face. Josh noticed for the first time that Mick was not wearing any clothing. In his present state, necks were of far greater interest to him than genitalia. “It’ll fade.” Mick did not, Josh noticed, promise that it would ever go away entirely.

“That’s not helping me a whole lot right now, but thanks.” Mick’s eyes flashed with something that might have been amusement before he was able to get it under control again. Josh imagined that sarcasm was probably a step up from violence and broken glass, but that did not mean that he intended to calm down any time soon. “Did...Coraline distract you when you were first turned, from the blood?”

That was no longer amusement that made Mick’s eyes flash. His eyes lingered on the fangs that Josh could not seem to retract for a few seconds before he answered, “She did.”

“How?”

Mick laughed softly, shook his head, looked away. “You don’t want that.”

Josh put his hands on the edge of Mick’s freezer so that he could lean all the way into the other man’s personal space. “All that I can think about right now is tearing out throats,” he said in a calm voice that he did not feel. And one of those throats, God help him, was topped with blonde hair. “So unless you want my new career to be a short one--”

Mick flashed him a smile suddenly, a hostile one that reminded Josh all over again that he was still much more a sheep than he was a wolf. “Careful,” he told Josh. “Coraline is about all that I remember from those two weeks.”

He didn’t have to like a person to be attracted to them, Josh reminded himself. There were more than a few incidents from college which testified to that very fact. He leaned even closer towards Mick and the vast expanse of his bared chest and pulled his lips back into a smile of his own. He could still feel his fangs biting into his lower lip. “Try me.”

Mick moved faster than any man without leverage had a right to do. He lunged up from the freezer and met Josh’s mouth hard with his own; his lips were cold. Josh let himself be shoved backwards until his spine was impacting Mick’s wall with Mick’s hands on his shoulders in the meanwhile, Mick’s entire nude form pressed against him from the front. There were, Josh discovered in only a handful of seconds, one part of himself in particular that worked just fine even if he did have a vastly lowered heartbeat. Josh opened his mouth to Mick’s first insistent probing and felt a fang nicking at his lip in return. Blood flowed between them; Mick licked it away before Josh could taste it. Didn’t matter, even the smell of it was enough, and Josh squirmed further up against Mick as his cock began demanding attention. He could feel Mick growing hard, as well, and reached to take care of that issue, but Mick’s hand on his wrist stopped him.

“Shhh,” Mick whispered to him before he bit down hard on Josh’s lower lip again. Josh made a growling sound that he hardly recognized as himself and surged up hard against Mick again. Mick chuckled, low and dark, and bit at the side of Josh’s neck. He didn’t break the skin; that nearly made it worse. Mick palmed Josh’s cock through his slacks and stroked at it until it was fully erect and Josh was starting to fear that his human side was going to slide away altogether. When Mick finally slid his zipper down and took Josh’s overheated flesh into his cool hand, Josh that he was going to sob. His hips surged towards Mick while his mouth took Mick’s mouth again. This time he was the one in control, this time it was his mouth that found the side of Mick’s neck and laved the skin. He could not stop himself from breaking the flesh and felt Mick’s blood sliding into his mouth. It was dark, heady, and not anything like the blood that he had been living on since he had woken up again.

It was better.

Mick gasped in mingled surprise, pain, and, Josh wondered, pleasure, before he joined his cock and Josh’s into one hand. They rubbed together slowly, Josh’s uncontrollable thrusts forward matched by Mick’s more controlled and measured movements, made all the more intoxicating by the amusement that Josh could feel behind every movement. Sometimes, Josh decided as he felt his prostate tightening and tried to keep from swearing aloud, Mick was clearly an asshole. And what made it all the worse was the fact that Josh kind of thought that he liked it.

He arched and muttered something that might have been Beth’s name, might have even been Mick’s, and might have been a mindless mingling of both, as Mick ran a callused thumb over the sensitive head of his penis. He loosed his fangs from the side of Mick’s neck as he shot his sperm across Mick’s hand and half-sagged against the wall. He watched through hooded eyes as Mick then brought himself off, and seeing Mick’s back arch in the second just before ejaculation was nearly enough to bring Josh to his feet his penis into his hand for another round. He wanted to know, suddenly, what else his new limits were going to turn out to be, outside of an ability to shove himself into conversations where he would rather not be.

Mick made a sound that was half-moan and half-growl as he came. Josh sucked in his breath and decided that he didn’t need to like the man in order to realize how desperately goddamned hot that sound was, either, and that maybe he understood now why Mick insisted upon sleeping in a working freezer.

“That was what Coraline did to distract you?” Josh asked when he had his voice back. “I think that I need to meet this woman.”

A complicated look came over Mick’s face before he smiled. “It’s one of the only part of those two weeks that I remember.”

“Small wonder.” He still couldn’t get the taste of blood out of his mouth, and he thought that maybe he even liked it that way. Josh flicked his tongue across his lips and felt panic rising in him again. He couldn’t fuck a fellow vampire every time that he felt himself having another existential crisis. For one thing, as much as he knew that his job in the DA’s office was over, it would make going into public at all incredibly difficult.

“Hey.” Mick put his hand onto Josh’s shoulder. Compared to everything else, being comforted by a naked man was the very least of the strange things that had happened to Josh. “I’m a freak. Most vampires? They seem to think that this life is the best thing that ever happened to them.”

Josh snorted. “At my...at my old work, I came around a lot of people who shouldn’t have been in control of a goldfish, let alone life and death. Telling me that most people liked it doesn’t convince me that it’s a good thing.”

Mick regarded Josh for a long moment with his head tilted to one side before he said, “What do you know, you might actually grow into one of the good ones.”

Josh hesitated, then reached out and shoved lightly, almost playfully, at Mick’s shoulder before he walked into the shower without asking. He turned the water on as cold as it would go once he was there, and nearly fell asleep standing up.

*
It was three days before Josh called Beth. He slept on Mick’s couch the entire time, though he carried an ice pack with him more often than not. They didn’t touch each other again; this time, they remembered Beth. Josh understood that he had been unfaithful with something much more real than the gray lover who had taken him under the first time, and somehow doubted that Beth would appreciate learning that she might no longer have to choose, provided that he and Mick didn’t actually have to have conversations when they weren’t having sex.

She answered her cellular phone on the first ring and was at Mick’s apartment within thirty minutes. She threw herself into Josh’s arms and embraced him tightly enough to make all thoughts of awkwardness flee from his mind. “Oh, my God,” she whispered, pulling back only as far as she needed to in order to cradle his face. “You’re so cold.”

“I’m dead, Beth,” Josh told her. “I still died when I was shot.” That line that Beth always got when reality was not to her liking appeared between her eyes. Josh could have kissed it. “I just didn’t stay that way.”

“Do you...” Beth glanced to Mick, who was lingering on the edge of the living room and trying to avoid hearing too much of their conversation. Remembering his own struggle with that same task, Josh was inclined to forgive. The stubborn line deepened. “I don’t regret asking Mick to do it.”

Josh knew that from the very second that she had walked through the door, in every stubborn line of her body. For Beth, the answer was always, always life. “I know.” Josh stroked Beth’s hair, smelled the blood traveling through her veins, watched it in the place where her skin was stretched the thinnest. He touched his thumb lightly to her lower lip and said, “I don’t regret it, either.” You always reached for life. He glanced up at Mick again, across the room. “We’ll figure the rest of it out.”

End