Bob knew that perhaps he had indeed made the worst of mistakes in trusting either of the Way brothers, but kindness did seem to cling to you the longer you spent on this side of the town; he knew all too well that kindness lay in an absolute abundance in their territory, and at least that brought forth the zero tolerance for troublemakers policy, but it most certainly did not benefit the ones unlucky enough to be preyed upon.

He knew that they, or at least the authority: the voices that were heard, didn't want a war as much as the living, so at least there were promises like that to act as therapy for his conscience, but Bob knew he could never truly trust anyone here - human or otherwise.

The place they had agreed to meet was secluded: the cluster of trees near the graveyard, yet outside of its gates, and outside of its power: you didn't go inside that place for a very good reason, and yet Bob couldn't help but feel just a little nervous, and he couldn't help but cling to the wooden shaft of a stake in his jacket pocket.

Perhaps it was a stupid precaution and unnecessary too, but Bob wasn't taking any chances here, especially being just so close to this place. He even wondered if its effects grew like clawed hands, grasping out of the gates and reaching for innocent and uneducated passers-by; he'd heard that the worst fates were reserved for those that strayed in places they shouldn't.

Their community was one of such spite in which the stupid were punished, not taught, and the fear based dictatorship served as education for the others, and the naive and innocent didn't make it very far at all. It was cruel, for sure, but it counted as nothing in comparison to just half of what they were capable of, and with such a thought in mind, Bob never let his hand let slip on the stake as he waited in the dawn; the time of day giving him a small advantage in the time constraints of their meeting for the other party, at the very least.

This however, could of course, be turned on him, because their intelligence and cunning was something you should never doubt, and Bob knew all too well that there weren't stories of such naiveties because people never quite lived long enough to tell such tales.

He couldn't help but be just a little nervous, of course, his faith - whatever was left of it; the church did fuck all in this town, and a belief in God did nothing when the antichrist was all too very real. Whatever was left of his faith was the only thing Bob Bryar had to cling to right now and even then he knew it could very easily be deemed nothing but worthless at the cold hands of someone whose heart no longer cared to beat, and someone whose blood was not their own, but the blood they stole off the weak and the living.

"Oh so you did indeed decide to grace me with your presence, Bryar." He was caught a little off guard by the cold and almost pretentious voice that seemed to make its way through the shadows first: a body following behind. "It seems the living are not all such cowards as the stories make them out to be."

"You have stories?" Bob raised his eyebrows as he found himself in a state of perplexation; both eyes focused upon the tall and almost scrawny figure before him: dressed in a black suit leaving nothing besides the utterly sickly pale complexion to show his state of death.

"Don't we all?" He mused, a chuckle gracing his lips as he narrowed the distance between himself and the man who called himself this town's protector; he must say he did admire the arrogance needed to put such a title upon oneself. "What are we all without stories? What are we without the things to haunt our nightmares and the things to grace our dreams? What are we without the shivers on our spine around a campfire? And what are we without that fear that keeps us running when we think we hear footsteps behind us out alone at night?" He let his face carve itself into almost a theatrically overdramatic smirk. "What are we, Mr Bryar? What are we without stories?"

"Bored?" Bob chanced, unsure as to what his point was here and as to why he insisted upon moving dramatically with every word he said; it was intimidation but to an almost pathetic degree.

"Seems the ones about stupidity were true." He muttered under his breath, smirk catching as his lips as if with grappling hooks. "But without stories, Mr Bryar, we are nothing, because we are all stories, aren't we, Mr Bryar? The undead, the ones without beating hearts - we are nothing but a story, and you, you - the one who thinks arrogant and naive enough to believe he can truly save everyone in the end, because the war - another story, will happen, Mr Bryar."

"We can stop it together - you don't want it either." Bob continued, certainty still strong in his voice: a mystery neither party found themselves able to decode, but perhaps Bob just gave very few shits, especially in the face of such a conceited asshole, even if it was a conceited asshole who could kill him in a second, but of course both of them knew that a kill either way would not go without severe consequence.

"Oh, but we cannot stop things out our control, and Mr Bryar, there are whispers. Whispers cannot go unnoticed, but it seems whispers have such an awful difficulty when it comes to being dealt with, but there are whispers, and we should be ready."

"To stop whatever we face?" Bob asked, gripped by a sudden, crushing uncertainty for the first time, and he did not like it one bit, but surely it was to be nothing but expected as if anyone should knew, it was Bob Bryar, that you shouldn't put trust in anyone, especially not them. "Surely? You can't just let it happen."

"The fault, I hear is on our side, Bryar, and I'm sorry, but matters like that find no way into your business, especially as nothing is even official: nothing more than whispers - nothing." And Bob didn't dare question one at such close proximity, especially one that seemed no more afraid of the war that loomed as he would be of a block of cheese. "I can only offer condolences in order of the poor living that is sacrificed in this, and I can assure you that this is totally out of my control."

"You're their leader." Bob exclaimed, almost in outrage, but not quite, bottling most of it in for the sake of living to be older than twenty five.

"I'm the person telling the children not to play with their toys, yes." He raised both eyebrows as he stepped back into the darkness. "Think about that, Bryar." And in a moment; there was nothing - Bob alone in the darkness, and for the first time: truly fucking scared, and with no one to go for comfort, because he soon realised that he was himself just that person.

-

"We're all fucking fucked, Bert. That's what's happening, here." Bob had once again found himself at Bert's house, despite having first declined another invitation and then bursting in fifteen minutes later, fuming and in quite the state, leaving Bert to sit on his sofa and smoke another cigarette without the need for an ashtray: truth be told, he was just a little too lazy to go and fetch one from where he all too comfortably resided upon the rotting leather of his sofa.

"So, basically they are just going to let it happen, huh?" Bert asked, eyebrows rose high as Bob joined him on the sofa and stole a cigarette from the packet on the table without a need to ask; Bert only smirked, knowing he'd ensure Bob owed him for that one. "Talk about cowardice, really."

"Fucking assholes - never should have even initiated contact with them, and now we can't even stop this, and these fucking 'whispers'." Bob took what was probably a cancerously long drag of what was technically Bert's cigarette, as he spoke.

"So who do you think it's going to be that's taken? I mean, that's how it works, isn't it?" Bert asked, sitting up a little as he found himself gaining an almost unexpected interest in the dilemma they found themselves faced with everyday, only today it was just magnified by ten thousand.

"You're the fucking psychic medium, here, bitch." bob rolled his eyes, and Bert flashed him a scowl: a casual, friendly scowl, but a scowl nonetheless. "Come on, powers working today or do I 'need' to get you some dope before that shit starts to work 'properly'?"

Bert smirked just a little as Bob all so casually called him out on his perhaps not all so morally acceptable means in which he frequented the acquiring of free weed. "Uhmm... it's just... it's... that graveyard, and there's someone there: climbing over the gate, and he's human - a he... I can just tell, I just know that, and in the graveyard, up at the mausoleum, there's a figure - one of them, definitely. If I can just get closer- fuck!"

Bert screamed out, almost collapsing back onto the sofa, his eyes rolling up in their sockets as he starting exhaling like crazy, his cigarette dropping from his fingers and falling upon the floor in the state that he lay in.

"They don't like you looking, huh?" Bob asked, attempting to make a joke out of something that clearly worried him too: things that Bob couldn't understand were generally bad, bad things and not to be messed with.

"The graveyard... I... I could see the graveyard... and it hurts, because... it kills you, and the graveyard... Bob... the graveyard. The screaming...." He sat up, coughing and retching, Bob running to the kitchen to grab him a glass of water that might have been vodka: the bottle was clear and he didn't look further, but from the way Bert downed it, he reckoned or at least from such behaviour, hoped it was indeed water. "It isn't a graveyard, Bob."

"What do you mean?" Bob's eyes widened, his tone only growing louder in panic. "What the hell do you mean?"

"It's a graveyard, architecturally, yes, but there are no dead buried there: all the dead are walking about. All the dead are all one of them, and... buried in coffins six feet deep under the headstones... those aren't the dead, Bob, those are the living."

"What?" He exclaimed, eyes almost setting alight with a mix of anger, fear, and utter disbelief. "What do you mean?"

"They’re feeding from the living - locked up under there. It's like a catacombs of passageways under the ground there, Bob... I wouldn't: you're not going to do anything about this, please don't be that stupid, because if you get rid of the living, hidden away as their food source then they're going to start feeding upon people up here."

"Wouldn't the treaty already have been broken like that?" Bob asked, jumping to conclusions as his heart pounded like crazy in his chest. 

"They're not dead, but they're dying down there: possibly hundreds of years old. They're keeping them alive somehow, and just enough so that they can continue to be fed from." Bert exclaimed, his head pounding with the images he knew he'd never find himself able to rid from his mind.

"We can't just let them suffer like this!" Bob exclaimed, slamming his fist down against Bert's coffee table, and his knuckles bleeding in result, yet he ignored them, the pain screaming through his veins nothing in comparison to the bloodshed looming upon the horizon.

"We can't do anything until the treaty is broken, Bob." Bert reminded him: still breathing far too much as he struggled to cope with the fact that the air had practically been drained from his lungs as his eyes wandered too far and saw what they- what no one, was ever supposed to see.

"So, we have to let it be broken." Bob said with such certainty that almost scared the guy picking up his cigarette from the floor beside him.

"Bob, but this guy I saw going into the graveyard - it's going to be him, do you not even care?"

"We have to-"

"Bob, this isn't you."

"Bert, we're all going to fucking die; I really can't be Mr Nice Guy anymore."

-

Frank couldn't sleep.

And wasn't just that his mind was elsewhere or that he simply wasn't tired; every cell, every nerve, every inch of his body was craving the comfort of sleep, but there was just a little twitch, a little hunch that just wouldn't let sleep come, and it was just that very same overactive instinct that Frank had grown to hate in his time here.

He knew of the dangers of this place, or at least he thought he did, and he still felt as if the thoughts gnawing away at the back of his mind served in nothing but irrationality, and he couldn't help but bide his time away in secluded naivety as he cursed his mind and his instincts and didn't even spare enough time to think for one moment that something might be really watching him.

He dismissed it as his overactive imagination and dismissed it as his bedroom here, which he'd just never really liked, and he dismissed it as a dream he was floating around and in and out of: he dismissed it as anything he could.

Because deep down: so deep down that he wasn't even at all conscious of it, Frank was scared, and Frank knew something was watching him and Frank just dreaded to know what.

But on the surface, Frank was pissed off at his lack of sleep, more than anything, and the Frank people saw got up out of bed without a care at what was just past two in the morning, whereas Frank on the inside screamed and cried, because it seemed like inside Frank was the only one who hadn't completely disregarded his instincts and common sense in favour of some asshole with a trenchcoat that wanted to have sex with him, and just may or may not be a vampire.

The Frank people saw thought that was kind of cool; the Frank people didn't... well, didn't.

And it seemed that the unseen Frank proved to be unheard too, as he grabbed a hoodie and replaced pyjama bottoms with skinny jeans, pushing his feet, with just a little difficultly, into already laced up converse, and opened his bedroom window and did his best not to consider the risk of death as he made his way down the drain pipe and had what was at least heart attacks on the way down.

And it was of course only the real heart attack he got when he found that there was in fact somebody waiting for him at the bottom, yet that heart attack soon vanquished and reappeared in the form of a deathly glare as Frank lay his eyes upon the unforgettable dark hair, eyes that almost seemed to glow, and of course, the fucking trenchcoat.

"What the actual fuck?" Frank exclaimed, eyes growing wide as he locked them with Gerard's; the latter of the two only smirked in response, clearly far too amused by Frank's display of anger. "I could have had a fucking heart attack."

"I couldn't." Gerard added, smirk practically falling from his lips with zeal, leaving Frank with no other option but to narrow his eyes as the taller of the two continued. "Don't have a heart - well, technically, I still do. Whether, it functions properly, or at all, however is an entirely different matter."

"Yeah, I get it... vampires suck blood to feed, doesn't need any of their own pumping out of their heart." Frank rolled his eyes, perhaps reconsidering his tolerance to the dodgy, yet stupidly attractive guy he'd found himself encountering perhaps far too much for it to be conscience lately. 

"No, actually." Gerard stopped, smirk never seeming to have the slightest desire to leave his lips at all. Frank could only exhaling what was nothing more than a sigh of the most theatrical exasperation, before continuing on down the street: the absence of light that two am brought only rendered by the faulty streetlights that flickered far too much and their lights were far too dim to be at all truly affective, and of course, budget required that they were placed in such a sparsity that gaps of darkness lay between streaming pools of dim light, which Frank couldn't help but sprint between - as if he had any reason or excuse to be scared of the dark when he was walking with a vampire by his side, though.

Gerard quickened his pace to catch up with Frank, soon joining him in pace, which may or may not have been helped by just a little trick or two that he had up his sleeve. "We do need blood, just not our own, well we can't produce our own, being technically dead, and we are, partially, I guess. It's our organs that have rotted away and shrivelled up, and it keeps blood to sustain us and keep us alive, and I guess, in that case, it is indeed the blood of others, but with plenty of that, our bodies do function just like yours, well, physically. There is that whole thing with disappearing into the darkness and shit as well, but that is actually kind of complicated, and you're-"

"I'm what? Human? Don't go there, Gerard." Frank snapped, simply determined in the fact that under no circumstance would he allow this asshole to continue parading on in the untouched belief that he was superior, and still only due to the fact that he didn't own the blood coursing throughout his veins.

"Younger than me." Gerard smirked, going in for what was undoubtedly the most ridiculous save ever, and Frank knew that not a word that left his mouth right then held a single ounce of truth at all, but Frank just had a weakness for cute boys with dark hair and trenchcoats and fangs, so Gerard got off lightly on this one.

"Whatever." Frank rolled his eyes as the two of them turned down into an alleyway, both still utterly unaware as to any form of destination, simply letting their feet lead them where they needed to be taken. "So, how does the 'blood sucking' thing actually work? Are you like Count Dracula or more like Edward Cullen, huh?"

"I'm not a fucking movie cliché, Frank." Gerard stopped the two of them in the shadows, light streaming in down from the next lamppost about ten metres away, leaving the two of them not in utter darkness, but certainly a light in which Gerard definitely had the advantage when it came to sight.

"I know..." Frank stuttered back, unable to help just how uncomfortable he found himself with Gerard pinning him to the wall, their bodies pressed close together.

"Huh? Yeah? Do you, Frankie?" He chuckled a little, locking their eyes and growing nothing but more amused with Frank's continued intimidation. "Or would it be better if I showed you? A little demonstration, huh?"

"You just want to give me a hickey, don't you?" Frank grinned, pushing Gerard away from him a little with his newfound confidence in the novelty he found in the situation. "You like me, don't you? Think I'm cute, huh?"

"Pretty much..." Gerard exhaled, a smile biting at his lips as he couldn’t quite lock his eyes with Frank, because goddamn, it wasn't supposed to go like this - they weren't supposed to make him embarrassed, but there was just something about Frank that even when everything was screaming at him to run, he just didn't, and he never could, and Frank really just couldn't help but think the same about Gerard. "Yeah, you're fucking gorgeous, Frankie."

"Now, you're just sweet talking me, aren't you, Gerard?" Frank pushed Gerard further away, watching as their eyes connected and he considered the pros and cons of kissing who was probably the most beautiful guy he'd ever seen, and surprisingly, it seemed to just be all pros.

"Just telling the truth, Frankie." He continued in the same manner, attempting to push Frank back against the wall once more, only for the younger of the two to utterly surprise him by spinning him around and pinning him back against the brickwork instead. "Frank, what are you doing-"

"Shutting you up, asshole." Frank let a smirk slip over his lips as he continued, far too amused by Gerard's eyes bright and open wide as it seemed he almost found difficultly in understanding the fact that a boy both shorter and younger than him, and on top of that, human, had him under his control, and pinned back against a wall, and really he didn't know whether to be horribly aroused or horribly concerned, but he just let himself go for the former, because maybe Gerard just did have the slightest, slightest of soft spots when it came to boys like Frank Iero.

"And how are you going to do that?" Gerard asked, amusement sparking in his eyes.

"By kissing you."

And for just a moment, the taller of the two doubted him, but Frank soon made it very clear in the seriousness of his words as their lips meet and everything just became far too much all at once.

- 

Hey guys;) I hope you're happy with that sufficient amount of Frerard I have included in this chapter;) Anyway, if you did appreciate that or whatever, please leave a vote and/or a comment - it'd be nice, y'know, whatever - I love you all <3