Title: and everything you say gives me a real bad feeling

Chapter: get your head out of the oven (the Monster / Highschool AU)

Pairing: Edd/Tord

Rating: Teen. For a full list of warnings, see the ao3 version

Notes: if the formatting is messed up, check out this story on ao3 (with the explanatory footnotes, too). Work ID: 16376657

Playgoers, I bid you welcome. The theatre is a temple, and we are here to worship the gods of comedy and tragedy. Tonight, I am pleased to announce…

You're shoving him out the door with a foot on his lower back and a hand full of the pillowcase he'd thrown in your face. "Come on, these bodies aren't gonna resurrect themselves."

He digs his blunt, human nails into the door frame, heels leaving light marks on the floor, voice raised over the sounds of Matt and Tom's booing. "Edd, seriously, I have to work."

"Lame." Tom shakes his own plastic pumpkin. "Now come on, Edd, we don't have all night."

"Yeah," Matt adds, twirling his black parasol in his hands. "I've already wasted enough time sealing Tom's body paint."

"So take your test tube," you say with as much authority as you can muster, "take your pillowcase, and get a move on." Your foot digs into his back, almost sending him toppling forward, but he spins out of your grasp.

"I—" A hand yanking you by the collar "—have—" test tube thrown, earning a muffled kitchen shout "—work to do."

He shoves past you, knocking your head off the little table by the door so forcefully it bounces. Your second tongue darts out from beneath your hoodie to grab it as you watch him disappear up the staircase again, a steak of white and red.

You almost throw some generic insult after him, but his parents are still too much within earshot, so instead you simply flick off his general direction.

"Let him go." Tom is already starting down the street, dunking under the legs of larger, hairier beasts, blue-grey tail dragging loudly through the dead leaves.

A curt nod from Matt. "He's gonna stress himself bald by the time he's twenty." Whatever note of concern vanishing as he shrugs and readjusts the glittering, emerald crown atop his head. "Glad I can't relate."

Couldn't agree more.

Slam the door, apologize to his father when he sticks his scowl out the window, steal a handful of candy from the bowl atop the his other father's broad chest, the larger Mr. Auslander-Desmet hardly stirring as you clop down the porch steps and rush for your friends.

A few blocks away, across from the college, a train screams and the houses all around you shudder, trees curling in as if to try and block their ears, Tom and the other demons whooping their anger to the darkling sky.

A glance over your shoulder – one of the jack-o-lanterns you had all carved together has fallen (or been kicked) off the steps, smashed open and collecting ant colonies in the brittle, brown grass. The closest other things to decorations this year are his father's Cookie Monster onesie, the large plastic spider sitting on the couch's arm, and the silly faded faces drawn on the empty flower pots in the windowsills.

Which shatter as his other father throws a large black form out of the window, one which bounces off his husband's chest, starting him awake and spilling candy into the debris. "And you'll clean that up, too," goes the voice from the window, "unless you want to start finally paying rent around here."

The black form, pulsating and lengthening to the size of a large dog, shakes its head and slips off the porch into the burlap-covered rose bushes, vanishing too from sight.

"Oh," a sleep-soaked voice. "Is Tord not going with you guys?"

On the side the house, where a fake body would normally hang by a rope, lab lights flicker back on, before Tord reaches out and closes the shutters.

Your eyes shift back to his other father, rubbing his hand over his tired, confused face, before you turn and run.

Hoards have been boasted of, traded, fought over, redistributed, and majorly consumed, washed down with cola or fizzy O-negative. So here you are again, crouching in his bushes, feeling so full you fear and wish you're going to vomit. It's barely past 12, moon bright as a floodlight, but Tom's mother had taken one look at her son's candy corn-painted horns and throw a strop. And since Matt has spent too long sewing the details into his royal cape and gown, you're the only one left to risk getting your hands dirtied and jeans torn by the trembling rose bushes trying to needle themselves free of their sacks.

His house has been cleaned – not a hint of a candy wrapper, not a speck of clay pot dust, no decorations or pumpkin guts in the yard. The pockets of drunken teenagers and beasts and ghouls stay away, their voices seeming to get a tad quieter as they past by. You feel it in your stomach, your second teeth itching, your extra throat parched and a tad swollen.

Around you, the wind seethes.

A peep into the living room window shows only his fathers stiffly cuddling on the love seat as the air fills with cheerful, decidedly unspooky Broadway tunes. Nothing out of the ordinary, and hey, it's even one of your favorite Sondheim scores.

("Something familiar")

("Something peculiar")

One of his fathers keeps trying to kiss the other's neck, spread a hand across his thigh, only for the other to curl away.

("Something for everyone")

("A comedy tonight!")

Next.

To the other side of the house, to the shutters like open arms.

You've already texted him that him you're here, but the bed sheet line isn't out, so you grab a small stone off the ground and lob it at his window.

He pops his head out the window and you stare, a few heartbeats before he flicks you off and you flick him off too, both hands.

"You done?" You ask him, and his face contorts in a very angry god, if only, before he throws out the makeshift rope.

The advances must be continuing, because someone is hammering on the remote and making the volume scale until you can hear TV's loud whisper through the walls.

("No royal curse")

("No trojan horse")

("And there's a happy ending, of course!")

Not for everyone, apparently.

Would falling to your death and exploding in a candy-guts rainfall count as tragedy tomorrow, comedy tonight? On paper, the fates aren't exactly in your favor – you are, after all, dragging your thirty pounds of excess weight up the side of his house on a cotton-poly rope, and against anyone but Tom you're the slowest at the rock wall and rope climb in gym.

But the trees are still wide awake, pulling a branch or two out of their goodbye hugs to push you up the wall like a mother helping her toddler climb their first playground ladder – not that you needed it, but you throw a thanks over your shoulder, anyway, batting away the branches that try to follow you inside.

"How's the work, Mr. West?" You ask as you swing yourself into the room, careful not to knock off the still-wispy ash trays atop the dresser the rope is tied to. You don't see him immediately, which means he must be back under his bed, sprawled on the pallet he's left in memory of sleepovers past (and for when he's too tired to climb into bed; you know, you've skyped him enough to see him ringed by the telltale glow in the dark star stickers, falling asleep face-first into his laptop keyboard).

The music shuts off.

"In here," he calls, confirming your suspicions from behind the spare velvet curtains. His bed is too high, as though a bunk bed paused in utero, and covered with books and papers. The walls are plastered with equations and award ribbons and tentacle girl posters, take-out boxes and empty bags and cans almost as numerous as the PVC figurines that serve as bookends along his overstuffed shelves, so much trash it makes your second water.

You steal to him over a floor covered in white homemade confetti, pulling the crimson wall aside. He's stripped down to his black boxers, lolled against the wall like a rag doll, clip-on lamp casting harsh shadows across his face. Passing a stress ball between his hands, looking at you with bruise-rimmed eyes nearly black in the low light.

"How's it going?" you ask again.

"Oh, you know." A quick shrug. "It's going."

You crawl inside and sit down abreast, moving to touch his shoulder and letting your hand drop when he snaps, "No," without a glance in your direction. Unlike with Tom, Tord's 'no's are not simply 'yes's he's too proud to give, any violation met with violence, like the time Matt tried to tickle him and Tord threw him into a wall. You'll simply have to wait it out.

Which definitely contrasts with the ever-rarer nights where he'll rap his knuckles on your window and crawl into your bed – nothing sexual, nothing but normal conversation as you play video games and card your fingers through his hair, or turn on some shitty horror movie and lie there with him, top and tail, barely touching at all.

Tord is weird.

So instead, you pull the small baggie of leftover candy from your hoodie and offer it to him. "Don't worry, it's kosher."

A small noise of amusement, reaching behind his laptop for a cut of totally-kosher bacon on a paper plate. "Halloween isn't kosher," he retorts blandly.

Shake it. "Be a little rebellious."

"I don't like sweets."

"That's why I got you all the sour stuff, dipshit. Now c'mon, I had to nearly skullfuck Tom to get him away from these." Another, harder shake.

You expect him to quip back, recall you to the time he'd asked Tom if he stuck anything in there when he jacked off and nearly got his own black eye for his curiosity, but instead Tord squeezes the ball and leans forward, resting his chin on his hand.

He mutters something under his breath, which you ask him to repeat. "You can have 'em."

"You sure?"

A nod.

So you start popping them into your upper mouth, wrapper and all, and wait for him to notice.

Instead he stares at the trail of shredded paper that leads underneath the wall of curtain and into the rest of the chaos.

"You know," You say around your sweets. "You could have gone with us and gotten just as much accomplished." He tries to elbow you in the stomach, but you block most of it with your own. "You know I'm right."

"Fuck off."

"What are you working on, anyway?" You ask, spitting the candy out into your hand. "This is the first time Halloween's been on a Friday in years and you missed it to – what? Do homework and listen to them argue?"

A squeeze on the stress ball so hard that you can see the angry ropes of muscle in his hand. "Science fair."

"Which is when?"

"A month."

"See? Plenty of time." If he were to take a little break and let his mind rest he'd have it all done by the end of next we—

-crash-

He's thrown the ball like a bullet and apparently knocked something over on the other side of the room. The motion so sudden you'd jerked away from your skin.

"It's a waste of time," he mutters, still not facing you. "Look at how long it took you to make that dumb fucking costume."

"Because you wouldn't help me!" You snap back – you had been playing the reanimated Dr. Carl Hill, a prop head hand-decorated and hollowed out for your treats.

You'd been pretty proud of your work, too, however now lost it is in the black hole of Matt's room. Still, you know he would have made something better – would have taken something Styrofoam and make it able to cackle and scream to the heavens, could've slicked his hair down and put on his father's reading glasses and been your true rival.

Not like you have any other human friends, anyway.

"Besides, you're the one who promised me we'd go as Hill and West this year."

"When did I do that?"

"Uh, last year. On Halloween, when we discussed our plans for next year. You even promised on your 90 gigs, dude, come on."

You expect him to crack some joke, to at least smile at you, but instead a silence unfurls. A tension that makes your stomach bury a growl.

But he's the one to break his gaze away first, grousing, "Just buy some fucking candy at the store."

"God forbid your friends want to hang out with you."

His sideways glance is hard and swirling with things unsaid, and you want to remind Tord of the detention Tom recently served for socking a banshee who'd called his parents "fags" in the eye, how Matt then gave out a near-concussion by tripping said banshee backwards and making his skull crack on the edge of a desk, but you don't. Instead you let him say, "We can hang out later."

"When, later? You say that constantly."

"Because things come up!" His voice is raising, your hackles shocked up. "What do you want from me?"

"Duh!" – You want a lot of things you can think but can't say, hoping he'll read them off you the way you can feel something familiar in the dark and know that it's yours. - " To see you!"

His gaze makes your second stomach bare its teeth, but you don't let it go.

He huffs through his nose and crawls out, bare feet crackling dully over paper. "You're so fucking clingy," and you can't tell whether he meant to say that under his breath or just loud enough for you to hear it.

You roll your eyes and remind him that he's the one who let you in. Crawling forward, lying down with the drapes cutting you in half, chin rested in your palms.

He picks up off his desk a globe larger than your head and tosses it to the side, crashing against his dresser.

And he must see your pained expression as you simply say, "They're going to hear you," because he sighs and sits down in his desk chair, fishing around an open drawer for something.

How a boy who barely talks in school can be so loud at home, you'll never know. You've been upgraded to a room of your own since the summer and it has still not undone your instinct to whisper, to hush, to walk on tiptoes and avoid the places where the floor groans like a dying man.

He tosses you a can of cola. "I don't care."

You crack it open, taking a large, burning sip. "Yeah, but what if they come up here and find me?" At best you've been tolerated and at worst you've felt the disdain radiate off his thinner father in waves (and you remember Tord telling you about the jokes his other father made about how you and Matt and Tom "at least keep him from shooting up the school").

(but so much for that, because last summer Tord won the fight to stay here and not go back to his bio-mom in Norway, at the cost of being transferred to someplace none of you have any chance of setting foot in.)

As if answering your fears, you hear a few distant steps towards the stairs, a muffled, "You alright, schat?"

"Yeah Pa, I'm fine!" he yells back. Then he drags his chair across the debris and double-checks that the door is locked.

With the footsteps receding, Tord leans down and picks the ball back up, digging his nails into the rubber. "We'll leave when they go to sleep."

"Same shit?" You ask.

He throws the ball up, knocking out some pencils stuck like knives into the ceiling. "Different day."

"That sucks." What else are you supposed to say?

You mention offhandedly that the trees are lusting after you again, so for your disguise he puts on Evil Dead, laptop hooked up to a small TV screen on his desk. One of your favorites, but you've also seen it a few dozen times by now, so you're content to shift the papers around and lie down on his bed, flipping through his daily planner as your belly-mouth feeds on empty aluminum cans, thrumming lowly in pleasure.

(At one point you catch his eyes on a track from your prehensile tongue to one of his tankōbon volumes on the floor and back again; you give him your gravest don't fucking say it look until he raises his hands in surrender)

(well, don't say it again).

Tord sets to work again, marking up the whiteboard hung on the wall, complaining while he writes, erases, writes, erases until the sleeve of his costume store lab coat is streaked with a muddy rainbow. "Seriously, listen to this shit" – He grabs a book off one of the indiscriminate stacks and reads: "Pacini presents a genealogy and critique of blah blah blah blah, and shows why the apparently emancipatory rejection of heteronomy compromised the ideal of self-legislated freedom. Does that sound at all interesting to you?"

You blink, your lips thinned into a harsh line. "Those definitely were words coming out of your mouth."

"Exactly. Oh but uhh you need to be well-rounded, my parents made me do a lot more when I was your age, oh, except last time you said you were bored all the time because your parents never let you do anything – uhhh I didn't say that, you're crazy, I never contradict myself even though you have a clear memory of me doing so like two hours ago." He slams his fist against the board, a sharp clap of metal against drywall. "Drives me up a fucking wall."

You wince – part of you wants to crack a joke, maybe recall to him Bill Hicks using a broom and fake accent to get a high Ringo down from the ceiling – that's one of his favorites, or, or his marketing bit, redirect his anger.

But you can already predict he's going to correct your attempt to, "If anyone here works as my parents, kill yourselves."

It's too soon.

You thumb through a few more pages of his planner, trying to make sense of his left-handed demon scrawl. "Have you considered just lying about going to all these clubs and shit? Because I know you don't care about half of this." Good lord, over the upcoming weeks he must have zero hours a day left for sleep and still be doing homework during three of them. "Since when have the homeless been anything but bonus points to you?"

Exactly, you expect him to say with an air of exasperation, or my dads are making me do it, or I know, right? But he rolls his eyes and gestures for you to hand it over.

"Seriously, you're not gonna be young forever, Tord." That's what your mother pours down your ear every day, it seems – enjoy your youth, play, run, scream, joke, don't get knocked up / don't knock anyone up at sixteen, just take this franchise out back and put it out of its misery.

He opens his mouth to reply when footsteps start up the stairs. He turns down the movie and you instinctively dive under the bed, drawing yourself as flat against the wall as you can.

"Tord?" A gentle knock on the door, but you can't tell which one the voice belongs to. "We're going to bed, honey."

"Okay."

"Remember you have your guitar lesson at noon."

"Okay, Dad."

"And tutoring at three."

"Okay, Dad."

"Alright, just making sure. Goodnight."

"Night."

You know, the first couple times you visited post-apocalypse, one of them would rap against the door and ask, "How much of that did you hear?", even try to come in before Tord would lie and say he's naked, he's in bed, he had his ear buds in the whole time.

(And obviously you have no evidence, but you still swear you felt their silent sighs of relief from the other side of the door.)

Whichever one is there lingers a second too long, before his footsteps finally start back down the stairs. Tord listens carefully, ear pressed against his door for the click of theirs, you peeking your head out like an animal peering out of its den.

"Okay, they're gone." He again checks that his door is locked. "Let's get out of here."

The worst part of Halloween is the roadkill.

With the crowds thinning out and congregating in bars and cemeteries, they shamble up and down the sides of the road, dragging whatever was left still attached to them, however thinly. (If only they weren't caught between this life and the next, if only you weren't already living in a house-shaped clown car, if only, if only.)

Thank god you live in a college town like this, where most animal ghosts are possums or wild cats or lost pets – you've seen no shortage of videos of deer and moose and bears fighting with humanoid spirits over the apples and Cheeto bags left buried along the sides of roads.

And hey, your stomach's even settled now; there're always a few spots they've missed.

Tord leads you onto campus, past the gym and towards the first cluster of dorms – past that, you know, is the library and the public garden behind it, probably now overrun with living shadows and the ghosts of students bored to death. When it's too cold you use his father's key cards to get into the campus center, avoiding those still studying and huddling around the Wii in the student center, but for now, the temperature's perfectly tolerable with your hoodies on.

A few yards in front you, barely visible beneath the yellow eye of a streetlight, is a ghost carrying an armful of art supplies and a stool.

In the grass, you hear gagging.

"Hey little buddy," Tord squats, holding out his hand to the tabby arched up, sputtering and dry-heaving by the side of the brick sidewalk. "What's that you got in your mouth?" You nearly face-plant him as you balance on his shoulders and lean over for a better look. Its orange fur is too long and well-kept to be a stray, too much of the grass behind it visible to be alive, but there are no wounds far as your eye can see.

"Poor baby," You mutter, and Tord murmurs back his agreement. The cat looks at Tord, then at you as you crouch down a little closer, cooing softly.

Who would have thought that ghosts can choke?

And if it died from that…

The cat doesn't cringe away, so you dare closer, reaching towards it when it suddenly vomits, spilling bile and a –

"He really fucking did it."

"What?" Tord asks. "Who did what?"

You give an exasperated sigh, rubbing along the cat's back – your hand sinks down too deep, the fur more of a memory than a sensation. "Tom buried his mixtapes instead of apples this year."

Tord hollers in laughter, smothering his voice with his arm. "Holy shit, really?"

"Well," you continue, leaning down for inspection – trouble gone, the cat slips off into the bushes, leaving you only with the blue cassette tape. "It has his name on it."

"He didn't sign it with his rap name?"

"I don't think he has one yet." Tom had given you a few contenders, which you and Matt had all shot down – like, Blue Leader, really? Even those shitty YA books Matt reads try and do better.

"Oh, that's disappointing." Tord picks the tape up, turning it over in his hands. "What?" he asks your rictus. "It's just ghost vomit, it's not real. Now c'mon, we still got another five minutes' walk."

"You know, you wouldn't have to find out about this stuff through ghost cats if you were to—oh, I dunno – actually hang out with us."

He sighs, as though breathing out his whole body. "How many times must I say—"

"Skip stuff. Take a break. Lie." The word rolls slowly off your tongue, as though you're talking to a third-grader. "Seriously, though, live a little."

A dismissive wave. "I can be young when I'm older."

"No you can't," You say with a dark chuckle. "That's kinda the point."

"What's there to do now, though? Everything cool happens when you're older – like driving and getting hammered and fucking hot 3D girls."

"Okay, but why wait to disappoint your parents when you can do it now by hanging out with me?"

"I already hang out with you."

"Hang out with me in public."

"You know I—"

"I know, I know," that it's not his doing but that overfull planner, that thinly-veiled disgust that radiates off his overeducated father whenever he looks at his son's choice of company. "I'm just saying. Take a break every once in a while."

"I was making good progress before you tried to kidnap me."

"I distinctly remember your room already looking like a paper shredder ejaculated everywhere."

"I just get a little frustrated, sue me."

"Alright, alright," You dare clap your hand over his shoulder, tilting away from the punch that doesn't come as you clasp your hands together and look into his silver glare almost pleadingly. "Think about it this way: What would Clownius do?"

Clownius Thundercock, the character you both share, the star of the comics you leave in each other's mailboxes every week like clockwork, building off ideas, red-lining mistakes, offering scathing critiques only you two can handle.

Clownius, the current self-proclaimed king of his own motorcycle ninja gang empire and greatest underdog protagonist the world's never seen.

His face twists; you know he's trying to smother a smile.

So you raise your eyebrows in a silent Well?

He breaks. Laughs, turns away from you, shaking his head as he motions for the trip to start anew. "You got me there."

It's not much of a public garden – some benches and tables, some huge silver sculpture one of the art students must have done that doesn't look like much of anything, the plants themselves caged off behind chain-link and a list of rules long as you're tall.

"Hey little buddies," you offer your finger to the flowers trying to crawl their way out, leaves and thin vines slowly curling towards your attentions through the rings in the fence. The garden is softly singing, tittering, the flowers not trying to escape mocking and pulling at those that are.

Tord blows a cloud of gray into a cluster of wilted freesias.

"Oh, so now you're being rebellious?" You ask, knocking his shoulder. Tord laughs and offers you the cigarette, only to jerk away once your tongue tries to wrap around his arm.

"Unless you wanna shoot a hentai right here, I suggest you not do that."

"You offered me a cig, I'm trying to take it."

"Now you're just making fun of me."

"Anyone with a tentacle fetish deserves to be made fun of."

"So you're just gonna shit all over the whole foundation of our friendship?"

You return his cocksure grin. "I thought the foundation of our friendship was you seeing that they took out the vending machines and asking me why you shouldn't bring your AK to school and get the new high score?" That had been your first out-of-class interaction, both of you heading for the bus loop to walk back to his house, where he'd hurriedly promised you could get the group project done in no time at all.

You'd told him he'd probably trip and shoot his balls off before he could even get past the doors.

His father keeps the key to the demon's nest high atop a shelf, one which only your belly-maw can get to, and as he watched you grope blindly for it, aflush with the familiar embarrassment of using your power in an unfamiliar place – a human's house, no less! – he'd asked what else that mouth could do.

(Well, I can eat cans and bottles and—)

(No, no, he'd shaken his head with a laugh, that's not what I meant)

And as he fed his family's demonic tenant leftover spinach casserole and wished for a month of completed homework for the both of you, tolerance made way for something more. Something involving the exchanging the phone numbers and long nights writing text message essays over horror movies and stand-up comedy.

"Oh, yeah," he chuckles dryly. "I forgot about that."

He starts walking again, so you ask his back, "How could you forget about that?"

"Do you have any idea how stressed out I was?" he quips back. "I'm amazed I didn't have an aneurysm."

The bats and blood-drinking butterflies congregated along the tables like thick, black blankets take off as he climbs atop the closest one, putting his cig out on the wood and lying down flat.

You sit down. It's a starless night. "If it makes you feel any better, I was really nervous too."

"Did I take your human virginity?" A knitted brow. "No, wait, let me –"

"Yes."

His eyes find yours, and you flash him an OK. He smiles sheepishly and pulls out his phone, pressing play before letting the device rest against his clavicle, hands folded across his stomach and eyes staring through the trees. The song starts with chirping birds and distant horns, before bursting into drums and high-pitched, wordless chanting.

("Well I know he's alive and tricking me into all sorts of things")

"What is this?" You ask.

"'Treasure Hugs' by Stepdad."

"Never heard of them."

He shrugs.

You wait for him to say more, but he doesn't, so you plant your chin in his hands and settle in to listen. The music probably isn't loud enough to be heard from the path, and if that was meant to create some kind of weird intimacy between you it fails, because all you can think of is how Tom and Matt would be fucking blaring whatever music they felt like were they here, Tom because fuck 'em, let them hear, and Matt because he thinks he's doing them a public service.

("And I just came back from coffee and I didn't bring my mind")

(" – what's the use? It's gone dry")

("no excuse, no goodbye…")

Wait, has Tord ever shown you any of his music before?

You almost ask, but he's simply forgotten whatever prohibition he's placed on himself, you'd rather not remind him. The song is nice enough, too, filling you with ideas for drawings and maybe a brief animation or two, though nothing so compelling it can't wait. Tord is blinking slowly, silver eyes faraway, before he raises his phone up and takes a picture of the sky.

"You wanna know what's really weird and kinda fucked up?" he asks, inspecting his photograph. Before you can reply, however, he elaborates: "I just took a picture of how you can see the moon through these tree branches, right? But even though we're both looking at the same thing, what I'm looking at and the photo look nothing alike."

"R slash I'm 14 and this is deep."

"How did I fucking know you'd say that?" he titters out, to which you give an innocent shrug.

"But no, my point is that when I look at this picture again, that's how I'm gonna remember the trees and the moon looking. Even though right now I can tell it's wrong. You know?"

You discreetly check your own phone for the time – past midnight, sounds about right. So you return your gaze to him and shrug. "I guess. But there's not really much we can do about it."

"I know, it's just…like, I legitimately don't remember that much about the day I brought you over to my house, even though it was obviously a big deal for the both of us. I know it happened, of course, but I don't have a lot of the details. So all I have is you, and if you're misremembering stuff then I'll remember it the wrong way, too, without even realizing it."

"Yeah, that is kinda fucked up," you say, and wait for him to reply, to explain what the hell the song means, to tell you a joke, but instead you both lapse back into silence.

(Imagine what you could make, if your muse hadn't killed herself)

(And after all these mistakes, my life's no better than Hell)

"So," he says suddenly. "How's your comic doing?"

A small smile, a half shrug. "It's going pretty well, y'know – all three of my followers seem to like it." Well, all one of your followers ever seems to be online, and none of them have said anything, but they haven't said anything bad, either.

A light bulb above your head. "I think I'm gonna change my last name to Sworld," you say as he starts to fidget with his phone, turning the music down. "Like imagine graduation and they have to call Edd Sworld up on stage." It's better than Edward Whiting, that's for sure. Your descendants can thank you later.

He jerks with the force of swallowing his laughter. You smile at him, ear-to-ear and knowingly, your eyes boring into his until he cracks.

Finally he says, voice thick with mirth: "Yeah that's right, I'm an Edd Sworld Guy. You wanna know who else was an Edd Sworld—" He breaks, doubled over and breathless, so you continue the line "—Edd Sworld Guy ? Brock Lesnar. He split just like I'm splitting!" And now you too finish off together: "But the difference between me and Brock is that when I split, I'm taking the WWE title with me!"

He knocks his head back against the wood, face pinched, holding his stomach – and you laugh too, it's probably not that funny, but you don't care. We don't always have to be funny in this economy.

When he starts to regain his breath, you add, "I just thought of something terrible."

"What?"

"I dunno if I wanna share."

"Well don't play just the tip with me, spill it."

He might hit you for this – or, given the space between your bodies and the positioning of hands, vault up to choke you. But it'll probably be worth it. "I was thinking, 'What if your dad does CM Punk's pipebomb when he leaves your other dad?'"

A long noise at the cross-section of amusement and pain. "I'm going to kill your entire family."

"Instead of taking the kids he just takes his old championship off the wall and walks out," you add, undeterred, already regretting with every word how much you can envision it. Tord wheezes and flips you off, burying his head in his other sleeve. "Too soon?"

He shakes his head, an exasperated, hollowing. "Not soon enough. I wish they would split already so I don't have to watch them fight constantly. We can't even ride in a car for five minutes without them at each other's throats over nothing. It's so embarrassing."

A pause.

"Do you think he knows about the affair?" You ask, voice quiet and low, a conspiratorial whisper.

He shrugs. "I dunno. I mean, really I don't know either, but if I'm suspicious then he definitely is too. I'm glad he hasn't asked me about it, though – if I can't remember what the fucking trees look like correctly, how am I supposed to remember all the days my dad came home at like two in the morning?"

"You could start writing it down," you offer.

He scrunches his nose, a little noise of acknowledgment, and shrugs. "So basically: divorce arc when."

"I feel like your parents' marriage is just that arc that's dragging on forever because the author's run out of good ideas and 's just stalling."

Finger guns. "Bingo. Or! Or it got put on hiatus at a crucial plot point because the mangaka wanted to spend a month beating iDOLMSTER." A dark chuckle, before he turns his attention back to his phone, turning on another song. A long, screeching feedback, soon joined by some soft guitar chords and even softer, incomprehensible voice.

Tord starts mouthing along, singing under his breath, staring at the sky as though there's anything interesting to be found. He sings rather prettily, you think, but then again you do too when your voice is a whisper.

You're about to ask him, though, what the point of all this is when he slides his fingers over yours – you look into his face, at those eyes still staring up at the invisible stars, and feel a gentle heat creeping across your cheeks, all the way into the tips of your ears. You try not to squeeze too hard.

Across the street, the train blares its horn.

Tord instantly jerks away from you, yelling out a "FUCK OFF!" so loud the whole garden shudders in fear. The train unleashes another useless scream and you're cackling so hard you nearly fall out of your seat.

He joins you, though, rubbing the heels of his hands into his eyes. "That gave me the legal right to kill any and all train conductors."

"I can't tell what this scene's supposed to be!" You blurt out through your laughter, holding onto your stomach, trying to keep your other tongue in. "First it was a comedy and now it's some kinda shitty indie movie."

"Really?" He asks. "Because I thought it was a dramedy."

You dismiss him with a wave. "You're the one who keeps trying to make it a drama. I came to your house to cheer you up and now you drag me out to talk about memory and listen to songs about coffee brains and putting heads in ovens."

"You said you wanted to hang out with me, dude!" He protests with a grin. "This is what I wanna do right now."

"Did you plan it all out?"

"Yeah, I even wrote a script. You think that monologue earlier came off the cuff?" A raspberry. "I wish."

"I think of my life like a shitty biography," you say. "Like the kind they show you in school but everyone in class thinks it's boring. When is something exciting gonna happen, all he does all day is watch porn!"

"All he does all day is draw porn!" Tord adds. "And they're waiting for the reveal that I draw all your favorite comics."

"But it never comes because I have way too much self-respect to read anime porn."

"It's called hentai and it's ART!"

(Meanwhile, on the phone: "Sylvia, get your head out of the oven...!")

When your laughter dies down again, you ask, "What would they write about this scene in reviews?"

"Incomprehensible tone. Boring cinematography, just shot, reverse-shot. Bad acting, bad soundtrack, nothing's fucking happening."

"—Will they just fuck already?"

"Yeah, I didn't pay eight quid for them to not get their dicks out!"

The flowers have started to whisper and laugh amongst themselves, probably at you both for being such obnoxious idiots, but you don't care.

Tord turns his hips, settling his feet on the bench beside you, hands dangling between his knees. You want to ask to hold one again, or – no. No, you don't.

Regardless, you don't have the chance to ask anyway, because he looks at his phone, pauses the music, and sighs. "It's 12:30. Patryck's been having a lot of insomnia lately, so he might try and check on me soon."

"I thought you locked your door?"

"Yeah, but he knows I don't go to bed until, like, 3 am on Friday nights, so he's been trying to get me to hang out with him more. Thank god we just watch TV."

Your hands travel down your sweatshirt, worrying the hem as your second mouth bites its hidden lip. You hate to ask, but it's far too late to worry about propriety, isn't it? Still, the words come almost too quietly for him to hear: "Have you thought anymore about who you wanna go with?"

He rubs his nose and shrugs. "I dunno. On the one hand, Patryck'll probably drown me next time I get a C on my test, but he also buys me tons of stuff when he feels bad. Pau's …" Another shrug. "I just don't know dude."

"He's a pretty fun guy," you offer, though of course you don't include how you ran from him earlier, how his simple largeness, some faint traces of giant DNA, makes you feel as though at any moment he's going to crack your skull open like a grape.

(Something his other father would simply pay someone else to do, which at least gives you theoretically some time to pack up and flee the country.)

"Yeah, usually, but…he's been really weird ever since this whole affair thing's started." Tord pushes himself down onto the bench, sitting now abreast to you. "I did a little research, and it said that usually guys will get a new relationship started before they end one so they can just hop on over, which I thought meant he'd be happier, but he's not. At all."

Tord rolls his shoulders back, the pops in his bones audible, and then slumps to the side, letting his head rest against your shoulder. "Oh well. I can take whatever either one of them throws at me."

"And if not, at least you have your spinach casserole demon."

A drawling, humorless laugh. "Right."

(A week later, long after you've forgotten almost all but the feeling of the conversation, he leaves a short dialogue between Clownius and his newest harem member in your mailbox. While cleaning off the guts of her clingy cyborg T-Rex xx-boyfriend, K asks him why he hasn't told any of his brothers about his adventures. To which he says he'll wait until the worst of the consequences catches up with him, otherwise they'd never believe it.)

(To which K gives him a quizzical look, before she flips her pink hair and replies, "Good luck –

- with your necrophilia," Tom slurs as you unscrew one of the knobs of the Bathmobile's figurehead until it clatters into the blood-soaked bowl. Tom inhales deeply, as though about to really lay into you for this stupid terrible idiotic doubleplusungood plan while your fingers fumble the knob over and over again, each fall seemingly louder than the last. Instead he simply sighs, knocks his flask against your shoulder. "Don't rot your dick off or…whatever."

Your heart jumps onto your tongue as something scraps against the Bathmobile's new shower-curtain frame, but alongside the sleepy murmurs comes the memory that Tord's asleep inside.

Tom furrows his brow and places his hand under your chin, closing your mouth for you. "Can you hyperventilate quietly, please? You're gonna give me a headache." But any venom in those words dissipates as he shoves the half-empty flask into your hands. Before you can state your confusion, however, he nearly shoves you off your feet and heads back into the house, yelling over the yawn and slam of the front door to pick up some more alcohol on your way back.

Quickly popping his head back out to remind you to wear protection, then vanishing again just as fast.

Your eyes travel from the door to the flask to the Bathmobile and back again, before you pop off the cap and throw a burning mouthful down your throat. "Thanks mom," you murmur under your breath. "I will."

Your hand reaches down into your sweatshirt's front pocket, feeling the sheet of paper carefully folded into quarters. You should have rolled it up and hugged it tight with a rubber band, that way there wouldn't be any creases, you idiot –

A deep breath. Relax.

You take it out for just one final check, holding Tom's flask in your armpit and trying to ignore the –

"Shit" you hiss under your breath, dropping the flask, rubbing the alcohol that's poured out off on your jeans but it's too late, there's a dark streak down your side and a tiny smear on the page. Your hands are shaking as you unfold it again, your brain flooding with such overwhelming loathing that all the whole thing dissolves to noise.

(Really, this is what you're gonna give him?)

It's fine. It's Tord. He likes these kinds of things.

(Will he still like it stained and sweaty and wrinkled and)

Calm down, think

(Well I THINK it's fucking terrible -)

Tord shifts again, startling you so badly you rip the paper.

Not too much, no, not too badly at all, but once you see those frayed edges you can no longer help yourself. You tear it up into fourths, eighths, sixteenths, throwing it down into the dried gore of your driveway before rubbing your hands over your burning face, willing the feverish blood to drain.

Finally, looking at the confetti over your feet, you take a second to truly breathe.

You card your fingers through your still-wet hair as you straighten back up, pooling all your tensions in your lungs before pouring them out in one long, heavy sigh.

Fuck it, we'll do it live.