A/N: I wasn't tripping balls when I wrote this, I swear.
Feel free to ask any questions or send any messages. My tumblr is iliamo.
Also available on AO3.
If people asked Lukas what was between him and Matthias, he was sure he wouldn't know how to answer.
They both had met at age eleven in a backyard reunion, when the magic of puberty kicks in and the brain starts to think about love as something other than candy and games. Lukas' parents came to the States from Norway a few years before he was born, while Matthias arrived with his family from Copenhagen a few months before turning five. Their parents became close perhaps due to similar cultural background and thus both preteens saw each other often. At first, Lukas thought Matthias was a kid that spoke like a Norwegian with rocks inside his mouth, while the latter thought the former was incapable of speech altogether.
During recess, their classmates wondered if they ever considered each other as friends, for everyone saw a kid that had such amount of energy that the other could barely stand him. A common joke around the time was that Lukas could hold the Guinness award for Most Attempts at Strangling via Tie.
Comments notwithstanding, both Lukas and Matthias never actually hated each other. Despite annoyances and perpetual arguments, they always stuck to each other and everyone else knew that once a teacher uttered the word team work, nothing could separate them.
At age thirteen, the two ended up attending summer camp outside the city. Lukas thought the whole thing was a bad joke played by his parents, but alas, he was to survive three weeks in a cabin with Matthias Kohler, actual living proof that the Infinite Battery could exist.
On the fourteenth day of (Lukas') hell, all the preteens gathered around the campfire and began talking about scary stories and urban legends. Matthias did his best effort to scare everyone, but seeing as he made the story on the spot, no one fell for it.
Once the marshmallow roasting ceremony began, Miss Elizabeta, one of the people in charge of the camp, began to talk the story of a young prince that fell in love with a princess of a distant land. However, once he confessed his love, the princess told the prince that she was under a curse and in order for both to be together, he would have to sacrifice half of his remaining years of life. The prince was so in love that he accepted and both lived the rest of their short lives happily ever after.
Some of the girls thought of the thing as romantic. Lukas just thought the guy was an idiot and had no qualms expressing his opinion to everyone.
Miss Elizabeta just giggled and said to them with a mouth full of marshmallow, "Well, I guess he kind of was. But, in the end, I can tell you that when you are in love, you have to make a sacrifice. Maybe the challenge is to decide if that other person is worth it."
Lukas still thought the prince was full of shit.
(A few months later, after he went to Actual Heaven Barnes & Noble, he found the book Miss Elizabeta took the story from. Except the cover actually featured two very shirtless men. And she was kind enough to skip what exactly had both of them done after dealing with the curse. Lukas Bondevik would never look at candles the same way ever again.)
Age sixteen is kind of an awkward age for many reasons. By that point, most teens have had The Talk, and raging hormones dictate that there's no time like the present to begin experimenting.
It was the middle of March when Lukas was at Matthias' house for team assignment. After two hours of wrestling the Xbox controller away, the pair started to write their essay.
Matthias' father went to his son's room and told them he would could back later, as he needed to buy some missing ingredients for dinner at the grocery store from four blocks away. His mother was still at work and wouldn't arrive until two hours later. That meant both teenagers would be alone in the house for at least an hour.
They kept writing their essay when Matthias mentioned "Hey did you hear that Berwald and Tino were kissing the other day after Algebra! I totally knew it was gonna happen! I wonder who's gonna top once they start fucking..." He went on with all the tact of a drunken man.
Then, all of the sudden, Lukas got up his seat, held Matthias' face tightly between his hands, and kissed him in the mouth with all the expertise of an amateur tennis player taking on Serena Williams. After he broke the kiss, the two stared at each other in the most uncomfortable silence of the decade. Matthias was barely able to muster the word "Duuuuude" in slow motion.
In the end, they didn't go beyond first base, but they were thankful Matthias' parents never found out they only managed to write two pages of their homework in three hours (and this time, the Xbox was not the culprit).
Maybe both of them were actually total prudes, for the home run was made when they reached eighteen. Or perhaps their brains had to do it once in order to flip on the sex switch, since once they began, they hardly stopped.
The first time was when Lukas' parents were away for the whole week in Trondheim with the grandparents. Lukas stayed in the States as the school semester wasn't over yet. Matthias went on Friday night for movies and drinks. At first, they watched the shittiest movies Matthias could find on the Internet. Later, while on the middle of Miami Connection, their mouths decided they were better together than with popcorn. One thing led to another and both lost their virginity on the living room sofa.
While their families, friends and classmates thought of Matthias Kohler and Lukas Bondevik as two friends in name only that for some reason did not murder each other, they had no clue of what happened when they weren't looking.
From that day forward, the pair began having sex everywhere they could: on a park bench late at night; inside Berwald's car in their high school's parking lot during prom; on the grass of the Kohler's backyard when the rest of the family was out; inside an empty classroom before the janitor arrived; even once in one of Alfred's shitty parties, where they were so drunk they ended up laughing rather than moaning.
After graduating high school, they told their parents both were going to share an apartment and split the rent. Their families, ever so innocent, were happy for their sons and wished them good luck for college.
From there on, their routine consisted of college, part time jobs ―Matthias on a record store and Lukas on the college library― and sex at night when they weren't too tired and caffeinated from midterms or finals.
When he was twenty, while visiting his parents, Lukas was asked by his mother if he had considered getting a girlfriend.
The question, for once, caught him off guard. He and Matthias had never been open about what they had been doing in the past years. It wasn't because of fear, as their parents had made it clear they didn't mind if any of them ended up with a boyfriend, and plenty of their friends and acquaintances were gay, like Tino and Berwald.
Maybe it was because they never thought of themselves as such. Aside from the sex and the kissing, they never did anything else that people in romantic relationships did; and to everybody else, they were the same two friends-who-are-inseparable-but-so-different-it's-a-miracle-they-haven't-strangled-each-other.
He ended up telling his mother that he would 'think about it later, but no time for romance now, mom.' Thankfully, with college ―or, as he and Matthias would call it, Actual Hell on Earth― his mother thought he was just waiting for after graduation.
However, the question remained on the back of his head that night even after he was with his bare back on the floor and Matthias fumbled with the belt like a child freeing a candy from its prison wrapper.
Twenty-three years-old Lukas wasn't prepared for the bombshell that was Tino's announcement.
"Berwald and I were thinking about adopting."
"...What?"
The shock on his face must have been very noticeable, because Tino sputtered while drinking his coffee and amended, "Not right now! We just said that maybe we could adopt a baby in a few years. We couldn't afford it right now anyway."
That made Lukas relax a bit, but he still wondered what changed Tino's mind. "I thought you didn't want children."
Tino gave a small chuckle and slowly drank his coffee. Then, he smiled and looked at Lukas directly in the eyes. "I know I said that. But Berwald really wants to be a father, I can tell. He told me early on that no children was fine if that made me happy, but I started thinking about it for a while and maybe it's not a bad idea."
"...I honestly can't ever see you changing diapers."
"Maybe," Tino laughed heartily, "but I love him, and I'm willing to do this. He's worth it."
Lukas wondered if he had heard that before.
A few months after turning twenty-five, free from the evil clutches of the American Education System, the pair decided to go on a vacation.
Their parents bought them their plane tickets as a gift. They would spend a week in Norway and another one in Denmark. Lukas had planned for them to visit the Geirangerfjord and, to save money, stay for most of their days in Norway in the house where his grandparents had lived in Trondheim before passing away.
Their friends thought of their vacation as the European version of a bro roadtrip ―though Emil, Berwald and Tino were starting to suspect something else was going on―, just with more cold.
On their third night at the house, they sat on the couch covered with blankets and drinking all the local beer they could afford, which, with their American salaries, was not many. After a while, they went straight to kissing and decided what the hell, might as well go all in. They entered the bedroom and suddenly their mouths became magnets again. They kissed until their lips got bored with each other and moved to the rest of their bodies. All of a sudden, a cold day of February became hotter than a volcano and clothes ended up on the floor.
Without even thinking about it, both landed on the bed and proceeded to explore the each other's body with their hands and tongues. Before they knew it, they were making love tangled in the bedsheets.
This time, however, Lukas started to feel a wave of intense pain that accompanied the pleasure, along with bedsheets that felt damp with something that was not sweat. As he briefly looked around, he saw the bed covered with small red spots. He moved one hands away from Matthias' back ―to the displeasure of both―, and noticed that both were bleeding from small spots all over their bodies.
Soon enough, he started to feel lightheaded, as if he was floating in the clouds, and struggled to remain conscious.
Matthias ―whose face showed that he was starting to feel pain too― became slightly aware that Lukas was getting pale, his eyes were having a hard time staying open, and his expression was pained. He stopped, body covered in sweat and blood, and asked between pants for air,
"Are you okay? We can stop if you're not feeling well."
Lukas was gasping for air when the realization hit all over him.
He finally understood why, on that day way back then, the idiot prince (who was actually a very shirtless man from a trashy novel) did what he did for the princess (also a very shirtless man from a trashy novel).
He leaned forward with all the strength he could muster, pulled the man in a tight embrace and kissed him in the mouth with all the passion that had accumulated for all those years. The sheets were starting to turn pink with all the blood that came over them.
The kiss seemed to last forever. To Matthias' surprise, once it was over, he saw Lukas give him the most loving and sincere smile he had ever seen (When they were teenagers, Matthias once joked that a Lukas manufactured smile was rarer than a Dodo). Then, Lukas said:
"Don't worry about me. I love you. I love you so much, I don't care what happens to me. You are worth every second of it."
With renewed energy, he kept going and two kept kissing their bodies, ignoring the pool of blood that forming under them. "I love you too", he said between kisses.
Once they were done, they slowly shuffled around the bloodstained bed, too exhausted to do anything other than sleep.
They laid on the bed,
holding hands lovingly,
closed their eyes with a smile,
and never woke up.