Pay for it
(2000 words)
Two minor characters some into unexpected contact. Three or four years before Johnny C. screws everyone's lives over, Jimmy was just... weird.
Warning: Slash. Weirdness. Unstable character narrating.
I don't want you to hate me, I want you to wanna hate me,
I don't want you to date me, I want you to wanna date me
-Mindless Self Indulgence
Jimmy always knew he had bad luck. He brought it on himself really—like his ninth grade English teach had told him, with the construction stapler buried in his forearm: Jimmy was a bad seed. People get what they deserve, everybody knows that. Jimmy threatened teachers and stole from convenience stores, and so his karma was more potent and explosive than the moonshine that brewed in his father's yellowed bathtub. That made sense. Luck was out to get him, and so he made his plans accordingly.
The problem, really, started when he forgot to watch his back. Luck particularly liked to stalk him around the neighborhood, waiting patiently for him to let down his guard and then jump him, like some sort of sadistic fangirl ready to carve her name into a band member's arm with a rusted straight razor. Was that image overly specific? Yes. Was it accurate? Also yes.
He'd had a nice dream. That was how it all started, a nice dream about shoving her endless wad of chewing gum down the throat of this cheerleader from his geometry class, a really nice dream where there was no more popping smacking sounds in the blissful silence that followed her enraged gagging and subsequent keeling over. He woke up in a good mood. The sensation was so unusual that he completely forgot to keep his eyes on the metaphorical road and so, inevitably, that was the moment Luck came barreling down the corner, bearing down on him, smelling blood.
He eyed the Thing in front of him with utter disbelieving horror. His fingers went cold. He was in the middle of the neighborhood on his way to school, and he was really not prepared to deal with this kind of harrowing so early in the morning.
The Thing looked at him with great, green, hungry eyes, tracking his every movement with impossible intensity. Its fur bristled, haunches coiled like springs, ready to jump. God, it was huge. What had he ever done to deserve this, really? Had he killed someone in a past life? In his current life? Was he sleep-killing?
Jimmy took a step back as it occurred to him to run. But wasn't running supposed to attract predators? He took another look at its gleaming teeth and decided anything was better than standing here till it attacked. Maybe it'd be surprised enough to give him a head start, and then… Oh shit. There was one behind him too. And this one was even uglier. Fuck, he was so totally going to die now.
Just as he was debating whether or not to make a break for the woods and the devil take the hindmost, something impossible happened: Jimmy finally had a stroke of good luck.
"Mittens," a man exclaimed, swooping in and scooping up the hideous pile of fur, "Mittens, what are you doing out here?" The man, probably three years older than Jimmy and wearing glasses, looked up and noticed the rock-still, tense-as-a-crushed-spring boy who was glaring apprehensively at his cat.
"Meow," the cat said.
The older man spotted the second cat behind Jimmy and rushed to scoop it up too, tucking one under each arm where they lolled contentedly. Jimmy hissed and recoiled when one cat swung a bit too close to his arm for comfort.
"I'm sorry about that," the older boy said, and Jimmy noticed that he had one of those mod little beards, which might have looked Satan-esque on anyone else, but only managed to make him look like a beatnik. "My cats don't usually get out far enough to harass people. I don't know how they escaped. Bad luck, I suppose."
"Uh, yeah," Jimmy muttered, relaxing slightly when the other man moved away. "Bad luck."
The stranger did a bit of quick cat-juggling so that both the felines dangled from one arm and then stuck out his free hand. "I'm Edgar. Edgar Vargas. Pleased to meet you."
"…Jimmy," he replied, hesitantly taking the offered hand. What a fairy.
Something sparked in Jimmy when their hands met, like static jumping from the dryer with a painful twang, but inside his squishy bits instead of over his fingers. It seemed ominous. He supposed it was Luck telling him he'd had an unexpected reprieve, but it'd be back soon, worse than ever. Jimmy had to even the score somehow; one for one, or Luck was going to catch him on its own terms. That was karmic returns. He looked at Edgar, considering.
"You can, um, let go now," Edgar said, slightly red.
Jimmy did.
As the older man rushed off to his house, cats swinging along the way, Jimmy noted two things: One, Edgar lived in house 665 (a remarkably neat looking house), and two, the guy seemed pretty… nice. After all, he'd basically saved Jimmy's life there, and he hadn't said a thing about it. True, they were his cats, and from what little Jimmy understood about cats, it seemed like they very rarely ate their owners (alive, anyways. He'd heard things about the other scenario). Still, he'd shown up just in the nick of time, and all he'd done was shake Jimmy's hand.
Good god, what does a fairy want?
Jimmy harbored, as all self-professed straight men do, the inescapable fear that his body was somehow inexplicably desirable to all the gay men on earth, and therefore had to be protected. A reasonable person would have considered that perhaps being psychotic, snide, and straight might make him less desirable than, oh, say a happy, attractive, gay man.
Jimmy, however, has never been accused of being reasonable.
So… Edgar, being very obviously a fruit cup and therefore at heart a sex-fiend who preys on innocent straight men (though to be honest he'd looked more like a Hispanic angel than a dangerous pervert)… well, he could possibly be paid back with…
In his room later, Jimmy contemplated his fate as a martyr.
You've got to balance things out, he thought to himself, kicking off knee-high boots. Gotta be even numbers on both sides. Gotta pay back. That's the way the universe works. Someone does something for you, you do something for them. It was rare enough for anybody to do anything remotely nice for jimmy that he wasn't entirely sure how the exchange was supposed to work out in practice, but he was clear enough on the theory.
Erk. So how was he going to do this thing?
In his closet, there were exactly four outfits, and exactly two sets of shoes. They were all black. He read somewhere that in the Middle Ages, when they had to send a sacrificial virgin off to feed the dragon so it wouldn't ruin everything, they dressed her up in, like, non-offensive clothes. A white dress, or something. To show she was going quietly.
Well, he was throwing himself at the mercy of a homo… so maybe pink? But he didn't own any pink. Jimmy looked around desperately. You had to do these things the right way!
In the end, he came to grips with the fact that he owned no pink, and broke into the neighbor's house. They had a daughter who was about his age, and she ought to own something pink. She was a girl and all, right? Well, it turned out, kinda. She actually owned only one pink anything—Jimmy knew, because he'd gone through the whole fucking room—and that was a set of pseudo-sporty pink pajamas. They still smelled like chick. Weird.
It was better than nothing, right? At least it didn't have princesses on it, or sparkles or something (Jimmy had very little in the way of actual knowledge when it came to girls). Once safely back in his own room, Jimmy wiggled into the feminine monstrosity with a single-minded fervor. The shirt had a star on the front, which was white, but only the sleeves were pink. Small mercies.
He caught sight of himself in the mirror, and… wow, he looked incredibly gay. Perfect! His ass looked nice too, which, he supposed, was probably a good thing. He kind of shut off the train of thought after that, though. Scary places down the road.
Jimmy ducked out the window, avoiding the kitchen because you knew what was going to happen when you went through there, and dashed through the woods and a few backyards. It wasn't like he had any friends to see him, but still, being caught in the middle of the road wearing girl's pajamas which he'd stolen out of a girl's room while rushing off to appease karma by sacrificing himself to a flaming homo…was not a situation he particularly favored.
A dash through one more backyard, and he was standing on Edgar Vargas's property, staring at his back door—which was a classy white, and reminded Jimmy of something off a fifties sitcom.
Unconcerned with the ramifications of 'trespassing' or 'stalking', Jimmy waltzed up to the door, adjusted the pink pants, and knocked very loudly.
He wondered if it would be particularly painful. Edgar seemed nice enough, maybe he'd go easy on Jimmy if he, like, begged or something. That was an uncomfortable image. He shifted the waist of the pants again.
A very confused Edgar swung open the door, first eyeing the pink pajamas and then Jimmy himself standing on the back porch of the Vargas house. He gave Jimmy a helpless, bewildered look.
"Um," he said, "Hi again. Is there—can I help you with something?"
There he went again, being nice for no particular reason. Jimmy needed to get this debt squared away fast before anything else got added to his bill.
"I'm sacrificing my virginity to you," the younger boy explained, with an air of obviousness. "Since you saved me this morning and stuff. Can we make this as not-painful as possible?"
Edgar glanced left, then right, then craned his neck to peer behind Jimmy. He discreetly pinched his own arm. "What are you talking about?" he asked, even more puzzled than before, if that was possible.
"You know," Jimmy said, "payback. You save me, I screw you, then everybody goes about their business like normal."
"You're crazy," Edgar said, with a kind of dawning awe. "Jimmy, wasn't it? I don't expect you to… er… sleep with me, just because I picked up a couple of cats that were bothering you. Frankly speaking, I think you might be having a psychotic break."
Obviously, Jimmy thought, you haven't taken the time to look at those cats lately. But what he said was, "Well, aren't you gay?"
"I—"
"So shouldn't you be jumping at the chance to fuck me?"
Edgar looked a bit faint. "That's not—I mean—on principal, that doesn't seem like a very fair trade to me."
"Really?" Jimmy thought about it. "Do you want my liver too, or something? Because I kind of need it."
"No!" Edgar insisted, looking startled. "I didn't even do anything." He grabbed Jimmy by the arm and dragged him into the house.
Jimmy figured they were finally getting somewhere.
"I don't want to sleep with you," the older boy said, floundering, "I mean, not that you aren't attractive, in a psychotic sort of way, not that I'm hitting on you here, or anything, but—"
Jimmy interrupted him, feeling a bit put out. "Well then, how am I going to pay you back? I got all dressed up in sacrificial clothing and everything, and I've gotta do this now before karma starts wracking up interest on me. Interest, Edgar."
His host rubbed the bridge of his rather large nose, warding off a headache. What was so confusing about this? He looked like someone who had woken up to find their bed nailed to the ceiling and wasn't altogether sure if they should try walking down the wall. He did have a nice face, even if he was seriously putting a damper on Jimmy's can-do attitude here. Nice house, nice face—everything about Edgar seemed to be just… nice.
"You can," Edgar said slowly, opening his eyes, "you can give me a kiss."
Jimmy looked at him. He looked at Jimmy.
A kiss, huh?
He could work with that.
END