AN: This fic was written as a present for untimely on y-gallery, who drew a very awesome picture (http:/yaoi./view/708500/) whose mauve comforter and hilarious dialogue in the artist comment inspired me to continue the circle of love with some writing. The comic Hanna is Not a Boy's Name still belongs to the lovely Tessa Stone and not me, who is just playing in her sandbox without making any money or meaning any offense.

.

BROS FOR LIFE

-by: Lira-

.

Veser told Hanna the party would be bangin' but so far Hanna was not so impressed. So far he knew that his hostess could sing on key if one put three beers in her, but not much else about her or the other folks at the party. The alcohol was flowing copiously but he'd had one thing called an Irish car bomb and had to resist the urge to find the nearest bathroom and throw up in it. Kevin wasn't there to make the most of it, and Hanna had almost forgotten what life was like before his undead pal.

Right then, the most entertaining venues for him to pursue seemed to be figuring out if he could float one form of alcohol on top of another a la the cards that were strewn about the liquor cabinet, or start sizing up all of the house's art while pretending he was Conrad with a toothache. He'd kind of annoyed every other guest who wasn't completely smashed, by that point.

Veser had been gone a while. Veser always talked smack about all the chicks who were lining up to go for a swim in the shark tank, but Hanna didn't exactly see him with a lot of girls. He wondered if there was really a girl there drunk enough to give it a whirl, and then immediately felt guilty for even thinking it. Veser was cool. They were friends.

An arm came out of nowhere and slung around Hanna's shoulder, placing a mouth near Hanna's ear. All he heard was "Score."

"What?" Hanna asked.

"Bedroom. Now," Veser told him, steering him around and heading for the stairs.

It seemed like the best idea just then, so Hanna went with it. Veser was the one who had downed a few shots at the start of the party, played some of the dumb games until half of the party was drunk and the other half decided the games were stupid. The banister passed in flashes as they went up, past two doors on the right and in one on the left. It was probably a girl's room, from the soft wallpaper and mauve bedspread, but Hanna wasn't going to judge.

"Sit down, man," Veser told him, hopping on the bed. "Story time."

Hanna crawled on and crossed his legs, ready to go even though he was expecting a lot of loving descriptions of the behinds of some of the girls at the party. Veser seemed to kind of have a type.

"So you saw the girl with the blonde hair and shit?" Veser asked him, leaning back all comfy like he ruled the bedroom.

"You mean our hostess, right?" Hanna asked back, wondering for not the first time who had invited Veser to the party in the first place.

"Yeah. Her," Veser said impatiently. "The one who was getting all up on that Todd guy during Never Have I Ever."

"The game where that girl with the largest, uh, endowments won in record time because she'd done every demented thing someone else could think of?" Hanna clarified.

"Yes, that one," Veser said, obviously thinking Hanna was ruining his story. "So I caught her by the liquor cabinet and poured her a drink, right?"

Hanna didn't say anything about Veser's bartending skills and the actual age someone would find on a real ID issued him by the state.

"And we started making out and shit, right?" Veser asked.

Hanna just nodded. He was realizing that he and Vincent never had conversations that included hand motions miming shoving one's tongue down someone's throat. He... Didn't really mind with Veser. Just realized he kind of maybe wanted to do that once or twice, and not necessarily with the girl who'd won the prize for being the biggest slut in the house. With or without her considerable endowments.

"So she asked me to come up to one of the bedrooms," Veser continued, seeming completely unaware of Hanna's thoughts. "And I think it was, like, the room this girl's little brother sleeps in or something, 'cause there were rocket ships on fucking everything. But it was cool."

Considering that Veser liked to put little cartoon sharks on everything he thought no one was ever going to see, it had better be cool. Hanna personally preferred little cartoon dinosaurs. He had boxers with all of the major – in his opinion – classifications, in different colors.

"So you didn't lose your, uh, boner, even though you're on her little brother's bed?" Hanna asked, so he was contributing.

"Nah man," Veser told him. "With a body that bangin' you don't lose wood unless the little sucker comes out from under the bed and grabs your dick."

"...That didn't happen did it?" Hanna found himself asking.

"No," Veser said flatly, giving him a weird look. "You're working too many cases. Anyway, so we're lying down and making out and shit, and she's kinda touchin' my dick through my pants, and didn't hit me or anything when I stuck my hand under her shirt and grabbed her boob."

Hanna was certainly not paying any more attention just because they had gotten to Veser talking about himself in a way similar to a girl's breasts or her butt. Any of this was beyond the realm of his every day.

"And so she kinda grabs my dick out of my pants, doesn't even unzip all the way or comment on, you know, the boxers" – Hanna knew, the sharks again – "and she's still really close and we're making out and her skirts kind of riding up, right? And she stops and she like, gives me these 'fuck me' eyes, right?"

"Right," Hanna murmured, kind of hypnotized at that point despite himself.

"And then I stuck it in her poon-tang," Veser concluded, almost like the punchline of a joke. But then he kept on going. "And she was /wet,/ man. Like you know... Like she /wanted/ it."

Somehow this sounded like a novelty. Hanna remembered the shark boxers despite himself, and Veser running around getting breakfast for them both, and how someone else was always making him breakfast, even if it was just cereal and milk out of a mini-fridge. He then remembered Veser was talking about having sex with a girl.

"Well I hope she wanted it," he found himself saying, without even thinking the words before they tumbled out of his mouth. "She does have you all alone in her little brother's bedroom."

"Well, yeah," Veser said, derailed again. "But she was all kind of bucking against me and stuff, right? She had to want it."

Hanna laughed a bit, kind of nervously, saying, "Oh Veser, you're so smart." Then, with the same sort of verbal diarrhea, "You can stick it in my poon-tang."

"...What," Veser said.

Hanna stopped, backtracked over the past few sentences exchanged, and wondered where his brain had gone. Was that really what he'd been thinking? Okay, he'd been thinking about boxers kind of lot, but guys weren't even supposed to have... Well, vaginas and all that. Just because he wanted a kiss from someone other than Miss Buxom didn't... Well... Okay maybe a little.

"I should revise that," Hanna blurted out, quicker than the time before. "I don't have a poontang and this bedroom doesn't have the kiddie décor and we're talking about d-dick too much for too dudes compared to, like, any other conversation I've had ever."

"Guys talk about this stuff Hanna," Veser told him flatly. "How else are you gonna know you're doin' it right?"

"Because the girl likes it?" Hanna suggested.

"Of course not!" Veser practically yelled. "This is what experimentation is for and shit except you ran right over that one."

For Hanna experimentation mostly meant combining runes in different ways and hoping he didn't summon something nasty, or trying a new team in his pokemon game, or giving Pascal names from whatever book he last picked up off the shelves at the local library. Experimentation did not mean sticking his tongue down his guy friend's throats, although part of that might be that two of them were dead and Hanna didn't really know how well they were preserved in there. Conrad would probably taste like stale blood and Leroy would be old dusty paper.

Not that he thought about it much. Veser would probably be saltwater.

"Since I kind of ran over it," Hanna said, so slowly it kind of hurt, like spitting out watermelon seeds but getting them all stuck in your teeth. "Why don't you just lay it on me, like that story about, err, our hostess."

Hanna meant, lay an explanation on him. Tell him what he wasn't getting because he was stopping to ask. Veser seemed to take it as a green flag to plant a kiss on him, and Hanna found out that he didn't really taste salty at all. Actually kind of faintly sweet, the way the cinnamon brandy smelled downstairs. Sweet, but also spicy and with the hidden bite of alcohol. Veser had probably been drinking some more.

It didn't really occur to Hanna to shove Veser off or ask what he was doing or anything, because they'd kind of been talking about experimenting and he'd told Veser to do something and he was the one thinking about people tasting. And then he wondered what he tasted like, like maybe the way his magic marker smelled when he just left it uncapped for a little while, but that was kind of disgusting and if he really tasted like that Veser probably would have stopped by then and he hadn't.

And it didn't really bother Hanna that much that Veser was probably thinking Hanna was the girl, because he didn't really think of it for more than a second when he'd been wondering if the blonde girl had been the one on her back in that other room or if it had been Veser and Veser hadn't told him. He couldn't hear any of the sounds of the party downstairs, and it didn't seem weird that he was in an unfamiliar girl's room, because if he was really making out with a real babe at a party it would be in an unfamiliar girly room, right? And by that point he couldn't really see anything anyway because Veser had slowed down long enough to take off his glasses and toss them on the night table. Which meant slightly less tongue attempting to taste his tonsils.

"God, do you breathe?" was the first thing Hanna actually said, given the chance.

"You're not dead, right?" Veser asked back.

"That doesn't mean you're doing it /right/ that just means I can not breathe for a massive amount of time!" Hanna protested.

"Fine," Veser huffed. "Your turn."

Hanna remembered all of those sappy movies he totally hadn't watched with Irving all of those nights when they weren't doing anything, and moved one hand to the back of Veser's neck. It turned out that if he moved his mouth slowly long enough Veser stopped trying to eat his face and went with it, at which point he could do the tongue thing and revise his opinion to apple brandy, still with a little bit of cinnamon in it. In his opinion it worked a lot better when attention was paid to the other person's tongue, and not their tonsils. It was still so strange, being able to feel the contours of someone else's mouth, a space that usually only housed the one tongue. If was also weird being the one taking his time for a moment and not trying to see if he could taste Veser's pizza from dinner before.

The next time, when they stopped, Veser stared at him long enough for Hanna to realize that something was going on without his glasses.

"You've never done that, huh?" Veser asked him, with less of the machismo than before.

"Nnnno?" Hanna tried.

"Okay," Veser said, the deviousness coming back. "'Cause you know, there's plenty else you could be doing too."

As with most bad ideas, Hanna chugged along into it with no problem. "Okay, biting here."

Then Veser bared his pointy little teeth, which summoned half a thought about how Hanna hadn't gotten his tongue bitten off with Veser's kissing technique, and waved something around in his hand which Hanna couldn't even see. Upon grabbing at it out of frustration, Hanna found a bottle, which didn't mean too much to him just then, and a foil packet which meant a whole lot more.

"You know when I made that poontang comment," he said, starting to laugh a little from nerves. "I was joking, right? I mean, I don't even, what would you..."

"I told you man," Veser said. "Trust me. I know what I'm doing."

Hanna gave him what had to be a funny look.

"I watch a lot of porn, okay?"

Hanna actually didn't ask what sort of porn Veser was watching, because that was one thing he probably didn't need to be thinking about. Porn-viewing probably didn't qualify Veser to be sticking his dick anywhere, but what qualified anyone? He'd just have to hope it was some good porn if he wasn't going to zip up his pants and leave right then, and Veser had gone for his pants while they were... Making out or whatever, really?

"Okay, okay," Hanna said, just pushing on. "So what's the bottle?"

"...It's lube, Hanna," Veser said. "Guys need lube."

Okay, now he felt like a car who needed his oil changed. Hanna was beginning to wonder why anyone did any of this for fun when they could just play pokemon and sit around an apartment with an undead guy who had too much love for adorable little skitties and water types that surfed all over his trapinches.

It seemed to be because the other person would shove his hands down your pants all covered in sickly-sweet smelling oil and grab your dick like he owned you. All of Hanna's trapinches scuttled away and it was just Veser jerking him off hard and fast and slick because he must have used an ungodly amount of whatever was in the little bottle, and-

"Veser where did that come from in the first place?" he blurted out.

"The drawer on the night table," Veser told him. "I think they're hers."

And it didn't matter that Veser was really stroking him with some girl's baby oil because it made the slide of his hand obscenely clean, but with enough of a grip that there was still friction and it occurred to Hanna dimly that this was probably the same exact move Veser performed on himself. Except without the baby oil, unless Veser had his own baby oil at home, and somehow Hanna was thinking about Veser's bath products and a little if they would smell like cinnamon or apples but mostly that someone else's hand was touching him with heady familiarity.

It didn't seem like such a far step to scramble out of his pants, to abandon brightly-colored dinosaur boxers in favor of tugging down Veser's jeans for a glimpse of those shark ones he knew were under there. It didn't matter that they spilled the oil when Hanna tried to squeeze some out, or that Veser insisted upon play-fighting with him for about five minutes, until they were twice as sweaty as before and panting far harder, just because Hanna tried to flip them over so he could get a better grip. It didn't matter that he'd gotten socked in the gut once and might have accidentally poked Veser in the eye, because they were rolled on their sides and going slower now, just because they were both breathing too quickly to keep up the breakneck pace.

"Okay so," Hanna panted, because he was getting close but not much mattered when he had a foreign hand on his equipment. "That stuff before about the porn."

Veser looked at him for a minute like he didn't know what the fuck Hanna was on about, and then he laughed and flicked his wrist and just stopped for a second. "Aw man I didn't think you were really going to go for that shit."

"What?" Hanna asked, just nothing else coming to voice.

"Yeah, fuck, people get their assholes turned inside out," Veser told him, a bit too cheerfully. "Watch more porn and get back to me. Or no, wait. Movie party. We need some beer and a few skinflicks."

This should have sounded like a bad idea, but Mathais needed some time to play his RPGs. Movies was totally cool, even if they were filled with other guy's dicks.

"Right," Hanna said. "Movie night."

Veser did that little flick of his eyes that meant he hadn't actually expected Hanna to go for that one, and Hanna caught it that time but didn't really care. If he stopped talking to listen he could actually hear the slick sound of his hand moving – or perhaps Veser's hand that time – tugging them both closer and closer to the end, when there would be a fistbump and probably some talk of doing more shots and a crack about girl's asses or tits.

When Hanna came he was quiet, having gotten used to Chapman living with him and to wanting to shield this part of being alive and human from him. Quiet enough that the gentle moans accompanying orgasm did not tip Veser off enough, the pulsing of Hanna's dick did not tip Veser off enough, and Veser had to glance down to confirm that his hand really was a lot stickier than before to believe what was happening. Hanna kept going, shakier than before, hand jerking just a tad quicker, as if it knew it was in opposition of something. Veser didn't kiss Hanna when he came, but he bit down, bit down what looked like hard and Hanna was surprised he didn't make himself bleed.

It took Veser a while to really acknowledge that they were done, which meant Hanna lay there with his hand loosely around Veser, watching Veser's eyelids shudder because his eyes weren't open all the way. It looked like Veser was staring at about Hanna's navel, which was possible because Hanna was only still wearing his shirt and his socks, and the shirt had edged up quite a bit during the activities. Veser's hand was curled in reflection of Hanna's, with Veser sliding his thumbnail back and forth under the head of Hanna's penis lightly enough that Hanna barely felt it. For once he didn't really feel like saying anything.

"You wanna get another drink?" Hanna asked finally. "Talk to some people?"

"They're probably playing beer pong or in the bathroom talking to Bloody Mary by now," Veser said dismissively.

"They don't really think they're gonna summon a ghost, do they?" Hanna asked, still feeling lazy, but coming alert slightly on instinct. "'Cause I'm not supposed to truck with any more ghosts."

"Those girls never do shit in those bathrooms," Veser said. "You should draw runes on their candles and make shit a hell of a lot more interesting."

Hanna laughed a little, although he wouldn't do it, and let go of Veser. Veser took a moment to pay attention and do the same. They sat up and Hanna couldn't see anything, until he groped for his glasses where they lay on the night table. A return to vision was like the return to the real world, where the cheery décor of the foreign room came back in and Hanna remembered that he was at a party with a bunch of people he didn't really know. A bunch of people he didn't really know who were probably all shitfaced by then. Well, they'd all probably laugh a lot more when he told them not to summon Bloody Mary unless they had a pack of tarot cards and at least two digits they didn't mind losing.

Next was the putting on of clothes, something that might be rumored to be awkward, but which really wasn't. Once they were both dressed more or less as they'd come, and had given each other sliding glances making sure they looked about normal, it was time to get back to partying.

"So hey it's a good thing no one walked in on us huh man?" Veser asked cheerfully as they made for the door.

Hanna hadn't even thought about it.

"I mean, what the fuck would you do? Yell at them to get the hell out and get back to business?"

"Next time, I'd lock the door if I didn't want anyone coming in. Simple," Hanna told him.

It was kind of funny that Veser really hadn't thought of that. The comment earned the fistbump, which Hanna returned, before heading down the hallway to social central. This time Hanna bypassed the shot cards and just poured a tiny glass of the cinnamon brandy, which was followed with a little dollop of apple schnapps. Tasting delicious, he was prepared to inform three drunk girls that no really, the star in a pentagram only had five points, not six.