Chapter Text
Andy only had to lose control and bite Patrick against his will once to take every possible precaution to never do that again. He fed more than necessary. When they were on tour, Patrick could make him the tomato juice blend that kept him going. When he wasn’t, there were blood banks. It worked out well.
The thing was. The thing was that he preferred the weird 1 part Patrick 99 parts tomato juice blend to regular blood. The thing was that it tasted so much better than regular blood, that it made him feel stronger, more present. The thing was that, frankly, he felt kind of guilty taking donated blood when humans needed that to recover. And he didn’t need to feed that often anyway, so before he went to Chile, he didn’t stock up.
He could ask Patrick for a blend, and that would taste amazing and leave him satiated for longer. Win win.
The thing was that Andy hadn’t been planning on Patrick getting tortured to the brink of death by egrigors and losing, you know, excessive amounts of blood. Again.
He wasn’t starving or anything, he wasn’t that bad, and he wouldn’t be in danger of losing control. He could easily make it back to the States without any danger to himself, but Patrick.
Patrick was bleeding all the time. And Andy could smell it all the time.
They hadn’t planned on spending an extended period of time in Chile. It wasn’t supposed to be a super long trip. And yet.
Andy tried to make sense of it with timelines.
Andy, Joe, and Pete had gotten back to the hotel room at around eight that night, the day Patrick had been taken. And earlier that day, Andy had been injured. And he hadn’t had anything to drink in the week before that, but that was fine. He could go home and drink donated blood and it would be fine, and-
And then the next morning came.
And, for maybe the first time in the whole run of the band, Patrick was the first one awake.
Andy woke up, his neck aching from sleeping on the couch, and was shocked when he looked up and saw Patrick sitting in a chair next to him, looking dubiously at a thick book laid out on his lap, his face occasionally twitching in pain.
“Hey,” Andy said, softly as he could. Patrick jumped anyway, eyes going wide as he looked at Andy. Andy could hear his heart rate increase, could smell the fresh blood seeping into cotton, and he bit down on his tongue to keep his mouth from watering.
“Pete up yet?” he asked.
Patrick shook his head, and Andy frowned.
“Should you wake him?” he suggested. “I mean, if he wakes up and you’re gone-”
“Yeah,” Patrick said. “Yeah, you’re right.”
He didn’t move.
“Or I could?” Andy asked. Patrick’s shoulders slumped in relief.
“Yeah,” he croaked. His voice sounded worse than yesterday, nothing but a hoarse whisper. “Thanks.”
Andy didn’t realize until he had walked into the adjoining room that Patrick’s reasons for not wanting to wake Pete himself might not have been minimizing walking on his shattered ankle. It was easier to think when he wasn’t just marinating in the scent of Patrick’s blood, sweet and potent as it was.
He shook Pete awake gently and opened with “Patrick’s fine,” which was a good choice, based on the alarm in his eyes.
“Sitting out in the living room,” Andy told him. “Um, trying to read On the Road , I think.”
Pete laughed, and it sounded wet.
“I didn’t think that was really up his alley,” he said. Andy shrugged.
“It’s in English,” he said. The wolf at the foot of the bed stirred, and Andy felt his gut twist. Everyone had been in here last night. He could have slept on the chair - ought to have, maybe. But even now he was dreading going back into their little living room, dreading the scent of Patrick pressing in on him from all sides. But he wasn’t half-asleep still, so he had no reason to linger. If anything, he was probably expected to go back out, to watch over Patrick…
Andy didn’t say anything when he left, just took a good, deep breath of the air in the bedroom - one he immediately regretted, because while Patrick wasn’t actively bleeding there, the stale scent of yesterday’s blood was still all around.
Fuck, he was thirsty.
Patrick didn’t look up when Andy came in, but when he sat down on the couch Patrick jumped like a bomb had gone off.
“Sorry,” Andy said. “I didn’t mean to freak you out there.”
“Fine,” Patrick said, and Andy winced. His heart was going so fast, and he could smell the blood seeping through his bandages, saturating all the cloth, and-
“Don’t you need to change bandages pretty often?” Andy asked, his voice strained.
“Huh?” Patrick asked, like he was only barely there. “Oh, um- yeah, I do, I just- I, uh-”
“I can go get Pete?”
“Could you help?”
God, Andy hated this. He could see how much it cost Patrick to ask him that.
“No,” he said anyway, hating the tightness in Patrick’s eyes, the stiff set to his shoulders. “No, I’m sorry, I just- I can’t.”
“Oh,” Patrick said. “Yeah, that’s- why-?”
“I’m just kind of thirsty right now,” Andy said miserably.
“Oh,” said Patrick again. Would his heart ever beat at a normal speed again? “Okay. Right. Thanks.”
Andy watched as he slowly, painstakingly got to his feet. He didn’t offer to help him. He knew he couldn’t.
Andy always hated it when people stated a problem they had aloud and waited for someone else to offer to solve it. He thought that was cowardly and obnoxious, someone saying “Gosh, I sure do wish I didn’t have to do the dishes!” and hoping anyone else would step up and offer to take care of it. He prided himself on not being that sort of person. If one wanted help, he thought, they ought to ask for it.
So maybe he was getting some sort of karmic repercussion that day, staring at Patrick and wishing he would just offer to spare a single fucking drop of his blood mixed in with some tomato juice. Because Andy couldn’t ask him. He absolutely was not going to ask him for blood when he had just had so much harvested. But fuck .
Worse, they kept not going home. If Andy could just get back to Milwaukee he could go to the bank where they knew him there, or he could talk to his mom, or if it got really unbearable he could compel a well-to-do stranger on the fucking sidewalk, but here he didn’t speak the language and everyone kept staying hunkered down in the hotel room and no matter what they did, Andy couldn’t escape the mind-numbing scent of Patrick’s blood, hot and fresh and calling to him.
Later, he would realize how stupid he was being. He would remember they had been traveling with other humans, that he could have gotten a drop of blood from one of them to mix in to make his blend. But Patrick’s blood was loud . Andy couldn’t think straight around it.
Patrick did his best to spend time with Andy. Andy did his best to avoid Patrick. Neither of them talked about the why, though it was obvious: Andy was thirsty and his egrigor had done the least damage of the four.
Patrick needed Andy around and Andy needed them to be far apart.
It wasn’t the best case scenario by any stretch of the imagination.
It was their fifth day in Chile when Joe dragged Andy into the hall under the thin guise of grabbing their delivery rather than inviting someone into the room.
“Dude,” Joe said. “Are you… okay?”
Andy glanced at the door, saw that it was shut tight, and then took a tentative breath. When he realized how much the hall didn’t smell like Patrick’s blood, he started taking deep, gulping inhales, glutting himself on clean smelling air.
“Um?” Joe said.
Andy gripped the wall convulsively, just trying to breathe.
“You’re freaking me out,” Joe told him, his tone conversational. Andy would mistake it for bored if he knew Joe a little less well. They were all exhausted. Joe had just reached the depths of his ability to emote.
“Blood,” Andy said, almost a whimper. “Everything in there smells like - it’s all saturated with the scent of Patrick’s blood, and I’m losing it.”
Joe gave him a sympathetic face, but he clearly didn’t understand the depths of the issue.
“Right,” he said. “Well, you’re- I mean, you’re not gonna bite him or anything, are you?”
“No,” Andy said. He almost laughed. It wasn’t funny. “No, but I can’t- I can’t fucking think. I can’t- I feel like I’m going insane.”
“Would it help if you drank something else?” Joe asked. Andy nodded.
“I don’t know where to go here,” he said. “I don’t speak Spanish. We’re all- we can’t split up. I don’t-”
“Would it be bad for you to drink some good old fashioned Patrick blend?” Joe asked.
“No,” Andy did laugh this time. “No, that would be amazing, but I- Joe, I can’t ask him for that. How could I ask something like that?”
“A drop?” Joe said, wrinkling his nose. “Wait, okay, so it’s not gonna make you more prone to just chomp down on his neck if you taste it too?”
“No!”
“Then what’s the problem?”
“I can’t ask that,” Andy said. “I can’t do it. He’s- they bled him so much.”
Joe stared at Andy like he was an idiot.
“You’ve been starving yourself because… you didn’t want to burden anyone?” he asked.
“It sounds ridiculous when you phrase it like that,” Andy said.
Joe massaged his temples.
“Okay, so I’ll go talk to Patrick, and-”
“No! I’m not gonna-”
“Oh my God, you’re impossible. Okay, fine,” Joe said. He looked a little peeved, and under that, panicked. Andy knew the feeling. “How opposed are you to doing something decidedly unhygienic?”
Joe helped Patrick with his next bandage change. He helped Patrick with most of the bandage changes, because it went faster with both him and Pete, and Patrick was getting remarkably good at staring at the ceiling and tolerating it.
He still asked Andy every time. Andy still shook his head every time.
And then it was over and no one seemed more outwardly traumatized than they had been an hour before, and Joe nodded Andy over to the kitchen. Andy watched as he heated tomato juice in the microwave, then, just before passing the mug over to Andy, dropped a bloody square of bandage into the juice.
“Bon appetit,” Joe said, his nose wrinkled. “Vampire tea. And the world’s grossest teabag.”
Andy snatched the cup and drank it down fast, feeling, for the first time in weeks, satiated.
“Better?” Joe asked.
“Better,” Andy moaned.
Andy helped Patrick change bandages before they got on the plane. He wasn’t very good at it, but it was something.