Disclaimer: I don't own House of Wax obviously. This is written for entertainment purposes only.

Note: Twincest warning! Last chance to run!

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When the hospital finally let them go—him hobbling on crutches and Carly's finger wrapped in gauze until it was nearly the size of her whole fist—they got a room at the Holiday Inn to wait. For what, Nick wasn't really sure. Their parents to come and pick them up, maybe. Or for one of them to find the energy to go buy plane tickets home.

They were both still covered in blood and wax. He was a little scared of what his sister was going to look like once she cleaned all that off. How bad were the bruises, the scrapes? And that didn't even include emotional damage in the mix. She'd seen her boyfriend turned into a wax statue, half his face ripped away. She'd been imprisoned by a fucking maniac, who'd chopped off part of her finger. She'd beaten that same maniac to death and stabbed another one in the heart.

She'd killed to protect him, Nick thought as he half-sat, half-collapsed on the bed closest to the door. It wasn't supposed to work that way—he was supposed to do anything to protect her. The wrench, the crossbow… Now Carly was stained as much as he was.

But she was alive, standing in front of him, taking his crutches away and leaning them against the wall. They tipped over, making a horrible clatter as they struck the floor, but neither moved to pick them up. She was still wearing his shirt too—the wife beater he'd taken off his own back after she almost fell head-first into that pit of rotting road-kill.

Carly had, apparently, spent the whole day tripping over bodies.

And he should have been right there, with her, the entire time! He was a selfish, fucking bastard for going off and leaving her alone with the creepy road-kill guy, with only Wade to protect her. How had he ever talked himself into thinking Wade could take care of her?

He'd backed off for her sake, he told himself as he watched her slide down the front of the bureau and start trying to unlace her boots. He'd backed off; let Wade move in. Tried to give Carly and her boyfriend space since he couldn't give her what she really wanted. Nick wasn't the good twin, after all.

Her bandage was getting in the way—she couldn't undo the laces. It didn't help that she always knotted them because they were too long. Every set of shoes from her size 6 to a size 12 got the same length of laces.

"Give me your foot," he ordered, patting the knee of his good leg.

Carly scooted forward on the carpet until she was at his feet and lifted her leg up.

Nick caught her ankle and guided the boot into his lap. There was wax, he realized, mucus yellow wax crusted all over her boot. The leg of her jeans too. He swallowed and picked it off the laces enough to get them untied, then he pulled the boot off and threw it across the hotel room. It hit the wall above the heater, shaking loose a shower of wax fragments. "I'm never going to look at a candle the same way again," he muttered.

"Nick…" Her voice cracked when she spoke, as if she was on the verge of bursting into tears. "Can we please not talk about it?"

She was crying, Nick saw as he reached down for her other foot. Tears trickled silently down her cheeks, washing away soot and blood, leaving only a few blobs of hardened wax behind. "Yeah, sure. Not a problem." He peeled her sock off this time as well, feeling the wax tear at her skin as the fabric came away.

Carly yelped, then blushed. "I guess I won't have to worry about shaving my ankles for a couple of weeks." She ripped off the other sock, pressing her torn and swollen lips tightly together.

"I thought we weren't talking about it." He tried to make it sound teasing, but it didn't quite come out that way.

She looked up at him with watery eyes. "I just want to get this stuff off me—I just want to be clean."

They didn't have anything clean to change into—everything from the campsite had been confiscated by the police as "evidence". Nick had gotten a pair of sweat pants from the hospital after the nurses cut his jeans off to get at the stab wound on his thigh. But Carly still wore the same thing she'd had on the morning before when he'd foolishly left her to try and go to that motherfucking football game. She was going to have a hell of a time showering without getting the bandage on her finger wet, and he didn't want her to try and clean her face by herself, not with her lips such a mess.

Just looking at those poor, abused lips made Nick want to put his fist through something. That son of a bitch had glued them together so Carly couldn't call out. Call out to him. But she'd forced them open—ripped them apart when she heard his voice.

"Why are you looking at me like that?" she asked.

Nick looked away. "Fill the ice bucket with hot water and get some soap and a washcloth. I'll try and clean your face."

The look she shot him said she wanted an answer, but she went anyway. For once in her life, not arguing with him.

No, that wasn't true, Nick had to correct himself as he shrugged out of his jacket—the muscles in his shoulders and back burning in protest—there'd been a time when they were little when they agreed on everything. He'd know what Carly was thinking, just by looking at her, and she could finish his sentences for him. With a groan, he eased himself up the bed until his back was resting against the headboard. Even that simple a move pulled on the wound on his leg and made him want to hiss.

The water stopped. Carly came out of the bathroom, the ice bucket under one arm and soap and a washcloth pinched between the intact fingers of her bandaged hand. She's stripped and wrapped herself in a towel. Its stark whiteness against her pale skin made every cut, every abrasion stand out like a beacon. Look! they proclaimed to the world, Nick let two psychos kick the shit out of his sister!

Carly put the bucket on the nightstand and sat down on the edge of the bed, holding the items in her other hand out to him. "I hope you don't mind…this." She gestured at the towel. "I couldn't stand being in those clothes any longer."

Nick unwrapped the bar of complimentary soap as she settled on the edge of the bed beside him. "What? You don't like my shirt?" Dipping a corner of the washcloth into the steaming water, he rubbed it first on the soap and then across her forehead.

Her lips twisted into a smirk. "Oh, yes, you have such excellent taste in fashion. Wife beaters—three for $10.99 at Wal-Mart." The smile faded. "I'll buy you a new pack when we get home." She tried to look down at her hands folded in her lap, but Nick caught her chin and forced her to look back up at him.

Her driver's license claimed her eyes were blue, but that wasn't entirely true. Blue-gray was more like it. His were the exact same shade. Twins, just like the wackos who'd hurt the both of them so badly. And the scariest part of this was just how much he could relate. Not to the pulling innocent people off the highway and encasing them in wax part, but to the doing anything for your twin. Because, in the end, who else did he have except Carly? Not their parents certainly—they hadn't even bothered to bail him out of jail this last time. The 'rents had written him off as a bad egg back in junior high when…

Nick had stared at her long enough that the defiant edge had come back into her expression. "What?" she demanded, and he felt he could breathe again.

Gently, he dabbed at the blood around her mouth, trying not to tear off the new-formed scabs. "Do you remember when we used to play that kissing game when we were little?" It wasn't so much a game as the two of them trying to teach each other to kiss. His solution to the day Carly had come home from school in tears because Bobby Pritchard had convinced her to kiss him and then told everyone in their seventh-grade class that she was horrible at it. Nick remembered an afternoon of hiding in his bedroom, exploring each others' mouths with lips and tongues in a haze of yellowish sunlight. Their mom had found them just as Carly had fallen over, tipped by the pressure of his mouth on hers. He'd taken the blame for what they were doing, just like he'd taken the blame for Dalton stealing that car. He had to. Carly was the good twin, not him. Never him.

Carly ducked her head again as her cheeks flushed, and he felt his nail scrape over her damaged skin. She hissed. When she lifted her head again, he could see where he'd ripped open part of the wound. A bead of blood was welling up, round and crimson just left of center on her lower lip.

Nick moved forward, stopping just a sliver of an inch away from her face…pausing. His breath rattled heavy in his ears as he waited for her to do something. Her storm cloud eyes met his, unfocused because of their closeness but on him just the same. He put a hand on her shoulder and felt a shudder run through her as the skin of her bare arms prickled with goosebumps. "Do you remember?" he asked again, whispering.

"I do," she murmured back.

He closed the space between them, licking softly over her lower lip and tasting pennies on his tongue. What Carly didn't know, he thought as she guided his tongue into her mouth and deepened the kiss, was that he'd spent almost a decade trying to find someone who kissed just like her and always coming up empty. Kissing his sister had never been just a game. Not to him. Not ever.

And maybe now that she was as irreversibly damaged as he was, he could finally admit it.