Title: Right to Ownership
Summary: Custis Pendleton on the issue of poessession.
Pairings: Custis/Waverly, Treavor/Waverly
Rating: M
Notes/Warnings: Implied canon incest, or desire for it anyways. Treavor abuse (It will never stop), non- con, and other general dickery that you can associate with the twins. Takes place in low chaos run.
"Everything will be yours one day, son"
Custis took this literally, because while the inheritance was evenly split between him and Morgan, he had come out first so his father decided to tell him this and at the tender age of four, in the innocent selfish way all children have, he took everything to mean everything.
Few took measures to dissuade him of this.
He protected what was his fiercely, obsessively, from any hands—barring Morgan's, because that was an entirely different thing altogether—and he made sure to teach this to Treavor early on, born six months after the conversation with his father and the last quarter that should have been theirs was given to the undeserving little wretch.
There was a dual purpose to this, however, because Treavor was the first person that was truly his. To break and to mold, he turned his younger brother into pitiful mess, a coward who couldn't even dare to sneeze, lest he be felled by fists and brutal kicks.
Custis convinced his twin not to kick Treavor out, after their father died, for this reason. He'd know—always know—the painful string of torment that he is kept on, but as a man who'd never worked a day in his life he would have nowhere else to go.
So little Treavor stayed, and Custis continued to play.
-u-
The maid was pretty—she would have made an excellent whore—and he gave her a possessive onceover, the hiss of his cigarette being snubbed out, audible in the tense silence. She trembled, knuckles white, veins popping, and stance so rigid that he hoped it didn't ruin the experience.
Custis eyed the door again. Locked. No one would disturbed them, and they couldn't do a thing anyways.
"Take it off"
Her stance didn't soften as the dress fell to the ground.
-u-
He'd kissed Waverly when they were seventeen, in his bedroom on the day of his and Morgan's birthday party. She was smart—smarter than most that Custis has had the displeasure of meeting—and was like him in many ways. He'd gripped her hard enough to leave bruises, and she'd nicked his lips hard enough to draw blood, and he ignored that he and his twin had planned to push just how far they could hold Treavor's head under the punch before he went limp.
Custis learned how much of a trollop, and a manipulative witch she was only a week later when Treavor looked just a bit too happy, and he beat the reason out of him, taking great pleasure in telling his younger brother exactly what Waverly really thought about him and hit him harder than he usually would.
He didn't like to share.
The Boyles, however, were on such a standing with them such as he could, never would, be able to bend Waverly to his will. Ever. That simple notion tainted him black with anger, envy, and a raw possessiveness that sent him rambling about her infidelities and the impurities between her legs to every person of interest he could. She'd smiled—that awful little smile—laughing about how she'd gotten one of the infamous Pendleton twins infatuated with her.
He'd denied this, and it went back and forth, becoming crueler as their ages grew, until it was an unspoken rule at parties that the two of them weren't to be left within twenty feet of the other.
-u-
Morgan spent much of his time humoring his twin, and Custis had feelings so mixed on this that he eventually learned to just go with it. Because his twin knew him, understood him, more than their own parents, who couldn't tell the two of them apart until Morgan grew that little extra inch after hitting puberty.
Custis did not take well to his twin having associates—they didn't have friends, no one did in the treacherous circles of Dunwall's nobility—over, even though by proxy he was admitted into the social circle, because Custis hadn't seen the need for anybody else throughout his childhood and didn't see a reason to break the routine in manhood. Every time this happened, he'd stubbornly stuck to his twin's side in the hours after, drinking and insisting, "Fuck off Morgan, I am not codependent on you."
His brother always gave a knowing nod, and Custis resisted the urge to grab him, shake him, and scream how he was his brother, his twin, his companion, and no one else's, because he was born his and would remain his until they rested in matching graves in the family plot together.
He was struck in blank horror when he realized that he wouldn't know what to do if his twin passed before him.
Morgan knew, knew enough to know why the pattern was played out with him even angrier and drunker whenever Custis would find his brother after a night at the Golden Cat, and Custis wasn't sure how his twin felt about that. Not even after a day when he was so particularly drunk that he lost all foresight and punched the mirror in Morgan's room to pieces—Outsider's eyes that was stupid—and Morgan had yanked him over to the couch and leaned him against him, while they both poured as much brandy down their mouths as they could, and he'd wrapped his bleeding hand in the sleeve of his jacket.
Custis never dared asked though. Never tried risking it all, because there were some things that even twins weren't supposed to know, and the result when brought into tangibility—if unreciprocated—could be so disastrous that he didn't think Morgan would stick around otherwise.
He didn't think about what he would do then.
-u-
The mines stopped producing in a slow trickle, and even with all of Custis' business acumen he could not stop the draining of the Pendleton family coffers. There were solutions—yet ones so unthinkable that he was willing to swallow all pride and pen down the letter begging for his cousins' money rather than put out the sign that would give away the estate his family had kept for generations, since the day Dunwall had been built upon the sweat of them and the other founding families.
He did not think about this though, simply held his home in the stubborn proverbial grip of a man that felt the world owed him what was his.
-u-
He was Lord Custis Pendleton, and he would not bend. Not for Slackjaw and his thugs who'd smirked, smug and satisfied as they'd cut out his and Morgan's tongues—he'd spat at the wretch and gotten a broken rib for it—not for the slave drivers, and the foremen who'd had the gall to sell and buy them for their own fucking mine. He would not drive the axe in desperate search for silver—he was not going to send what little money that belonged to him to Treavor—not even to stop the beatings he got every day.
He was Lord Custis Pendleton and he did not belong to anyone. They belonged to him, and he wouldn't join the ranks of those he'd bought, even after Morgan had got fed up enough to slap him, and roughly shove the pickaxe into his hands in a tired and pleading gesture.
He was Lord Custis Pendleton and he would not die in a mine cave-in—he regretted not spending the coin to fortify the structures six months ago—and the only time he willingly picked up an axe, was to start digging his and his twin's way out. He'd lost track of the time they'd been down there, and desperately tried to keep their one lantern from going out, ignoring the painful gnawing in his stomach.
He was Lord Custis Pendleton and he was going to get them out, because Morgan had gotten sick and he wasn't going to face the cruelties of underground life without his other half. Morgan went quiet after two days, and Custis spent hours screaming his throat hoarse.
He was Lord Custis Pendleton…
And he didn't have a single thing left. Not his wealth, not his servants, not his twin whom he'd shoved as far back as he could so he wouldn't have to look at the cold face that would mirror his soon enough. Inevitable after, what had to have been, more than a week trapped in the small space lacking both food and clean water.
He was Lord…
No he wasn't.
He was Custis Pendleton…
And he would die an object of someone else, in his own mine, in a sick reversal of roles that would send the world laughing at its own sick joke.