AN: This idea has been rattling around in my head for a couple days and I decided to write it out. Not that I'm knocking the movie or anything, seriously, it's one of my favorite vampire movies, but I found the dynamic between Seth and Richie more interesting to watch than the vampires. Mainly because I'm studying psychology in school, I like the idea of the brothers. Seth, a thief with honor, trying to look after his younger brother, a psychopath teetering on the edge of madness, while running from the law.

This is a pre-FDTD one-shot but depending how this goes, I might add on a couple more. We'll see. Non-slash/incest story. Sorry.

Disclaimer: I don't own From Dusk Till Dawn or its characters.

With another labored strike, the sharp end of the rusted shovel cut through the damp earth and came back up with a slight tug before another shovelful of dirt was tossed off to the side and immediately forgotten.

"Seth?"

At the soft sound of his name, Seth Gecko almost flinched at how young and innocent the owner's voice sounded, making it nearly impossible for him to hold on to the anger he felt just a few hours earlier.

"What Richie?"

Seth's tone was short and biting towards his little brother, trying to make it clear that he wasn't interested in hearing anything the boy had to say. He didn't even so much as glance at Richie as he continued with his current, grim task.

The younger boy didn't seem to take note of his frustration though. He just sat quietly and watched the worn shovel in his older brother's hands dig repeatedly into the soft ground of their backyard. It had rained earlier that day, making the hole much easier to dig than last time, but Seth wasn't sure if he should feel grateful for that or not. Yes, this whole unpleasant ordeal would be over faster than last time, but Seth's shoes and pants were getting caked in mud, which only served to irritate him further. Good clothes were hard to come by for the Gecko family.

"Where do things go when they die?" Richie asked curiously as he picked up Seth's forgotten flashlight and started clicking it off and on rapidly, just like every annoying child needed to do at least once in their life.

"Why the hell are you asking me? How am I suppose to know?" Came Seth's sharp response before he abruptly stopped digging and fixed his glare on his brother. "Would you knock it off! I told you to keep the goddamn light on me, Richie! I'm not a fucking raccoon, I can't see in the dark!"

Immediately, the younger boy did what he was told without protest and put the flashlight back where he found it, making sure the light was angled on his brother. Things grew silent again as Richie's misplaced sense of contentment deflated and he recoiled into himself. The only sound around them was the dull, wet noise of a shovel upturning damp soil and tossing it unceremoniously into the darkness of the Gecko's backyard.

At the thick silence, Seth looked up from the mud-covered shovel and towards his brother. Richie sat with his legs crisscrossed while his head bowed in rejection and his glasses (that were two sizes too big for his face) hung precariously on the bridge of his nose. He matched the picture perfect image of a kicked puppy, a sight that almost made Seth shudder. The very thought reminded him of why they were outside in the middle of the night, digging a fucking hole in the first place.

Seth knew he should still be mad at Richie. How else would the boy learn that there were serious consequences for his actions? But it was difficult to do so when it came to the youngest of the Gecko brothers, especially when he made himself look so small and pathetic in the wake of his big brother's anger. It only made Seth feel like he was slowly turning into his father, an idea that terrified him to no end.

"Just keep the light on me, buddy. When I'm done, we can go back inside and I'll fix you something to eat," Seth promised after letting out an exhausted sigh. He honestly didn't know how much more of this he could take. Four holes in one month? It has never been this bad before.

"Okay," Richie replied with less dejection, picking up on the lighter note in Seth's tone. He couldn't understand why Seth was so angry with him all the time. He figured maybe it was the same reason why their dad was always so angry with Seth, reasons that Seth wouldn't tell Richie no matter how many times he asked. He had an inkling they all centered around him somehow, though.

Another silence followed but it didn't last long. Seeing that Seth wasn't as upset with him as before, Richie decided to try his question again. He really wanted to know what his brother thought. Seth was really smart. He was the smartest person Richie knew, teachers at school included. He seemed to have an answer for everything. "Seth?"

"Yeah?" Seth answered indifferently, still digging.

"I know you don't know where things go when they die, but where do you think they go?" Richie asked in that curious, almost babyish tone of his that made him come off as five years old instead of eleven. Seth couldn't remember how many times he told Richie not to talk like that, knowing from the get-go that it was a lost cause. He didn't even think Richie realized he was doing it half the time.

"They go in the ground," Seth deadpanned while stomping the shovel into the soil a little harder than necessary. He wanted to finish this and get inside, away from the cold. Not play twenty stupid questions with his brother.

"No, I know that," Richie protested with a small whine. "I mean, where do they go? Like, is there a place they go?"

"What do you mean place? Are you talking about heaven, Richie?"

Instead of answering, Richie just shrugged his shoulders and started picking at the neon orange band-aid Seth put on his knee the other day after he busted it up at the playground. Richie had gotten into another fight with one of the neighborhood kids. Usually, Seth stayed out of it, wanting to teach Richie how to defend himself because big brother might not always be around every time he got his destructive ass into trouble, but even Seth found it necessary to intervene sometimes; like when Richie broke the kid's nose.

Later, when he asked Richie about the fight, he told Seth that the other boy shoved him first, which made his older brother immediately doubtful. Seth didn't know the kid personally, but he had seen him around the neighborhood enough times to know that he was an even bigger dork than Richie. The kid couldn't pick a fight even if his life depended on it, but Richie seemed adamant that he had started everything.

Afterwards, he always demanded to know if Seth believed him, which he did...sort of.

Seth knew in Richie's mind he was telling the truth, but his little brother has always been a few cards short of a full deck. So even though Seth didn't always wholeheartedly believe his brother's version of events, he still told Richie he did. For both their sakes, really. But usually, Seth just refused to deal with some things altogether. He was only fifteen years old for Christ's sake. He was Richie's brother, not his father.

Although, Seth was possibly the closest thing Richie will ever come to having a parent.

Now, that's not say that whenever Richie got into it with another kid, Seth just sat back and watched his little brother get the shit kicked out of him. It was only when he got into fights with children in his own age group, that Seth let Richie deal with it on his own. If Richie couldn't keep it together and play nice with his classmates for more than ten minutes, that wasn't Seth's problem. He had enough of those already. He didn't need Richie adding to it with his bullshit. Seth wasn't the poster child of peace either. He got into more fights on a daily basis than Richie did in an entire month. No matter how much he tried, Seth couldn't devote every waking hour watching Richie, nor could he fight all his battles for him. It was just too much for him to handle on his own.

"No, Richie," Seth said after a while. "I don't think they go to heaven."

"Why not?"

"Because there isn't one."

"But Father Morris and Aunt Claire said there is," Richie pointed out.

"Well they're both full of shit," Seth threw back, irritably. "Especially Aunt Claire."

Aunt Claire was their mother's crazy, bible-thumping sister. She lived across town in a small two-bedroom apartment with her hundreds of cats, fitting the crazy cat lady stereotype perfectly. She was single and had no life of her own (or so Seth assumed because of her extremist outlook on life that tended to rub people the wrong way). She came by every Sunday to drag him and his brother to church so they could feel God's love and accept him into their hearts, or some dumb shit like that. Richie thought their aunt was hilarious with her constant bible talk, even though the woman didn't have so much as an ounce of personality in her entire body, but Seth hated her, and not because of her in-your-face religious views.

Ever since Richie was born and their mother died, Aunt Claire has been threatening to take Richie away. She wanted to take him to her apartment so she could raise him to be the perfect, churchgoing son she never had, and probably never will have. The crotchety old bat didn't want Seth though, not that he gave a rat's ass. She saw him as nothing but a nasty little boy, born oozing with filth and sin, which Seth was sometimes inclined to agree with. He was a pretty horrible kid, and he didn't like the idea of her taking Richie away. He belonged with Seth, not that heinous bitch. Only he could look after Richie.

There was something not right going on inside Richard's head, and Seth would have to be blind, deaf, and stupid not to realize it. Only he could handle Richie and his increasingly disturbing behavior. Anyone else would send the boy off to a mental institution where he would be pumped with medication and left to live his life behind padded walls like some drugged up zombie.

He didn't know exactly what was wrong with Richie (he wasn't a fucking doctor), nor did he know if his little brother would get worse, but Richie was still blood. He was the only family member he had left that Seth cared about, and he would rather bash Aunt Claire's skull in than risk having him taken away. Not that she even had any power to do so, so long as Seth and Richie's father was still alive (not that Seth gave a rat's ass about that either). So until that ugly bastard finally drank himself to death, and Seth kept things around the house just clean enough to keep Child Services away, Aunt Claire would just have to rot in that cat-filled shit hole by herself. She wasn't getting Richie.

"Did dad bust your lip or did you get that at school?" Richie asked, changing subjects randomly like he always did.

"School," Seth reported before straightening up from his bent over position and letting out a heavy breath. He picked up the flashlight from the ground and shined it on the hole, deciding that it was finally deep enough. He might've dug a little deeper than necessary, but one could never be too careful with something they're trying to hide. Just like all the other times, he needed to make sure this little mistake never resurfaced again.

"Richie, hold the shovel and flashlight while I throw this thing in here."

Richie did as he was told, making sure Seth had enough light as he picked up a bundle of dirty sheets that laid off to the side of the hole, forgotten by both brothers until then. Despite how pointless it would be to handle the content of sheets carefully, Seth couldn't bring himself to just dump the bundle into the hole like a sack of garbage. Maybe he was feeling guilty? Guilty for letting Richie out of his sight for so long? Or maybe he was just too tired to be indifferent and uncaring - as shocking as that might be. Either way, Seth found himself gently lowering the bundle into the hole, all the while gnawing on his previously mentioned, busted lip.

"Who'd ya fight this time?"

"Aaron Mathers."

"The big kid that lives near the school?"

"Yep."

"Did you win?"

"Of course. I always win, don't I?"

Seth's opponent may have been bigger and older than him, but he had more than enough nerve and anger inside him to beat Mathers into the pavement. Seth always won, but as he told Richie that, his tone lacked the pride he felt after he had sent Aaron home crying. Any feelings of victory went out the window later that evening when he stumbled home and saw what Richie had done.

"Cool," Richie smiled.

Seth barely held back a scoff before he took the shovel from Richie's hand and started filling in the hole again, practically undoing all his hard work, but what did he care? Just as long as he got rid of the thing that would undoubtedly cause him more nightmares.

"What'cha fight about?"

"Don't worry about it," Seth said as he shoveled more dirt back into the hole, the white sheet slowly disappearing from sight.

"Wassit about me?"

"No," He lied through gritted teeth, his grip on the shovel tightening like his jaw.

Richie seemed to notice this and it only made him want to know even more. "Then how come you're gettin' mad, Seth?"

"I told you not to worry about it, Richard!" Seth finally snapped, smacking the ground with the shovel in clear warning. "It wasn't about you! Now just sit down and shut up!"

Another silence followed as the two brothers stared at each other. Seth narrowed his eyes, just daring the other boy to talk back, while Richie looked at him with wide eyes. Eventually he lowered his head in submission, hiding his face behind dirty lenses and oily dark hair. He bowed away from his older brother in rejection and sank back down to the ground to idly play with the grass, making Seth feel like crap again. He sharply exhaled through his nose as his eyes rolled towards the dark sky.

"Look, I'm sorry I snapped, buddy," He apologized before going back to work.

"Okay," Came Richie's quiet response.

Knowing that he wasn't going to be so easily forgiven for his outburst, Seth put down the shovel and walked over to where Richie was ripping out blades of grass. He flopped down next to him without a word. He didn't mean to lose his temper, especially towards Richie. It was just the subject of Seth and Aaron's fight pissed him off enough the first time, he didn't need to bring it up again. The fight had been about Richie.

Apparently, Mathers' dog went missing last week and the schoolyard rumor pool told him that someone saw Richie with it the day it went missing, and since Richie was still in elementary school, Mathers decided he would confront Seth with his newfound knowledge. Big mistake. Their little "chat" escalated into a full-out shouting match where Mathers made the remark about Richie being a little, psychotic freak that killed their mother and now gets a kick out of killing other people's pets. An even bigger mistake.

Seth had Mathers on the ground and was pounding the shit out of him before anyone could blink. It took about three teachers to pry him off the other boy.

It was one thing to insult Richie, that happened nearly everyday, but it was something entirely different to insult their dead mother. It left Seth seeing red, which ended with him busting open his knuckles on Mathers' face.

It wasn't Richie fault their mother died. It really wasn't.

She died in childbirth, but Seth never blamed Richie for that. Medically yes, Richie killed her, but it wasn't as black and white as some people made it out to be. In Seth's eyes, it had been solely their father's fault. If that drunk sonofabitch hadn't pushed his mother down a flight of stairs in a fit of rage when she was eight and a half months pregnant with Richie, then his brother would've been born on time, she would still be alive, and Seth wouldn't have grown up as fast as he did, probably. Plus, his old man probably wouldn't have made the oldest Gecko brother his own personal punching bag.

"Hey," Seth chided lightly, putting his arm around the younger boy's shoulders and pulling him close. "Just don't worry about it. That's my job, kay?"

"Kay, Seth," Richie said back, seeming to brighten up a little again.

With a curt nod and a tired grunt, Seth hoisted himself off the ground, ignoring his aching muscles, and picked up his shovel again. "Alright, no more talking now. I need to finish this."

Ever loyal to his big brother, Richie remained silent as he watched Seth finish filling in the hole. He only broke that silence when Seth shoveled in the last of the dirt and patted it down until it was flat and leveled with the grass. Seth made a mental note to himself to find something to cover the small patch until the grass grew back.

"I really am sorry, Seth," Richie said, so quietly that the older boy almost missed it. "I didn't mean to."

Seth looked down at his brother with a blank expression for several seconds before letting out an exhausted sigh, his shoulders visibly slacking. "I know you didn't, buddy."

"You do believe me though, right? It attacked me first, Seth. I was only trying to pet it, but it bit my hand. Honest."

"...then how come you don't have any marks on you, Richard?" Seth asked, not looking up from the hole where he had just buried yet another unfortunate, neighborhood cat.

At the question, Richie looked down at his hands, stained with dirt from the ground and blood from the cream-colored tabby. The younger boy slowly examined them with a perplexed expression written across his face as if he had never seen them before.

A throat-clenching silence followed where neither brother moved a muscle and Seth had to fight back the urge to sniff when the bridge of his nose started to itch and his eyes began sting. When Richie stopped looking over his hands and refused to meet his brother's gaze, Seth choked back the sad sound crawling up his throat and walked over to a nearby shed to put back the shovel. Once that was done, he rubbed his own hands together in an attempt to get some of the dirt off. He flinched when the action irritated the developing blister on his palm. He then closed the shed door and locked it, knowing his dad would have his ass if he didn't.

Seth didn't return to Richie right away. He just stood facing the closed shed door with his eyes shut tightly while he tried to collect himself and erase the flashing images in his head. Images of him pounding a kid twice his size until he begged for mercy. Him coming home beaten and bruised only to get more beaten and bruised when he told his father he had been suspended from school for fighting again. Finding Richie crying and covered in blood on the side of the house with a broken pile of bones and fur laying on the ground in front of him. Aunt Claire screaming at him how he was going to hell just because his Sunday shirt had a small stain on it. And probably the most disturbing of all, the image of his mother laying in a pool of blood at the bottom of the stairs with her leg twisted at an odd angle and her strawberry blonde hair a tangled mess, choking out a cry for Seth to run and get help.

Seth felt the left side of his face twitch in a nervous tick he had ever since he could remember. He took in a deep, shuddering breath and held it in for a few moments before slowly letting it out.

"Come on, Richie," Seth said as he walked back to his brother, his expression indifferent and solid as stone once again. "Time to go inside."

"Okay, Seth," Richie replied again in his babyish tone.

The boy pulled himself off the ground and wiped his hands on his already filthy shirt, a hand-me-down baseball jersey of Seth's. He quickly fell into pace next to Seth as the older boy walked by him and headed towards the house. When they reached the back door, Seth motioned for Richie to go ahead of him while he kicked off his muddy shoes and left them on the porch, telling Richie to do the same.

Just before he followed behind his brother though, Seth looked back at the yard one last time, taking in the freshly dug grave and the six older ones surrounding it. Pushing the dark feelings in his chest to the side, Seth entered the house and firmly shut the door behind him, already thinking up a believable lie to tell his neighbor when they came looking for their pet.

Once inside with the back door locked, Seth headed into the kitchen and started leafing through the fridge for something edible he could feed to his brother. Richie planted himself in front of the living room TV with a content smile and didn't move for next the hour or so as he watched the colorful cartoons run around on the cracked screen, leaving Seth to wonder when the hell things had gotten so bad. If they hadn't already been like that to begin with.

AN: Well, there you have it. I don't really know what exactly drove me to write this but once it was in my head, I couldn't get it out. Plus, the From Dusk Till Dawn section needed more stories anyways. There were a few OC's in here but they were minor characters and only existed for the sake of the one-shot. I also had to make up my own backstory for the brothers since we obviously don't know their real one.

If you enjoyed this, let me know in a review please! Maybe if I get a couple of good reviews, I'll write a few more Pre-FDTD one-shots.

~Scorpiofreak~