Le Petit Mort
"Light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul."
― Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita
Pain. There is pain everywhere, dull and aching, and you don't want to move at all. You're lying in your bed, naked, your body refusing to move or breathe. You feebly try to go back to sleep, but you're up already. You silently hope today is Saturday, and recollect what you can from the night before… oh. Yeah, it's Saturday.
You wonder if maybe the entire night was just a hazy, half-drunken dream that blurred into reality, maybe there's a chance you came home fine and just passed out on your bed. But your muscles ache in the way they always do the day after a strife, and your chest stings and itches like a motherfucker. When your hand brushes up against your chest, you confirm that there is gauze stretched over it, and your heart sinks with the realization that everything last night was real. Half of you is celebrating, dangling bells and letting the Hallelujahs ring out, but the reality of the situation is quickly catching up. You've just crossed a threshold you can't uncross, and you don't have a fucking clue what the hell Bro is thinking. There's a very good chance he's just fucking with you for the hell of it. Hell, maybe he'll even pass it off as some sort of valuable life lesson to be learned, like it excuses him at all. There's a familiar pit in your stomach, only this time it isn't guilt, but a horrible feeling that you've made a terrible mistake.
Your phone buzzes somewhere near your bed, but like hell you're going to get up just to find it. It's probably Karkat making up an adorable excuse to see you like he actually needs one, or it's John telling you his dad is dumb for whatever reason it is today. Or maybe it's Rose, her weird freudian powers tingling, knowing that you and your brother did something. She'd smile with wisdom, and proclaim herself the great Sibyl of Incest, seer of all that is perverse and thoroughly fucked up. You've been trying to deny your obsession with Bro to her for years, and she still won't let up. You barely even talk about him except in passing, so you don't know what the hell got the right idea in her head.
You finally muster up the willpower to check your phone, rolling onto your side to potentially find it by the side of your bed where your pants are. You find it, but as you're leaning over the side you look forward to see the discarded bottle of lube from last night, and it seems almost comical just sitting there, as if it could be staring back at you, confirming your actions and by extension, your stupidity.
You roll back onto your bed, now suddenly exhausted once more from the effort. You have a bunch of Pesterchum notifications from Karkat, and the numbers on the screen inform you that it's currently 12:27.
CG: HEY IDIOT
CG: FUCKFACE
CG: SUPREME BULGEWAD, KING OF ALL THAT IS AWFUL AND PATHETICALLY USELESS
CG: TAINT-CHAFING ASSBAG SON-OF-A WEASEL-EATING PROSTITUTE
CG: DAVE MOTHERFUCKING STRIDER
CG: THIS IS ABSOLUTELY USELESS ISN'T IT. I AM REALLY NOT IN THE FUCKING MOOD TO SIT ON MY ASS ALL DAY AT HOME TO BE BERATED BY MY BRAINLESS HAVOC-WREAKING PISS POOR EXCUSE FOR A LUSUS, SO PLEASE FUCKING ANSWER ME BEFORE I RIP MY OWN FUCKING THINKPAN OUT OF IT'S RESTING PLACE INSIDE MY SKULL.
TG: naw man im here whats up
CG: FINALLY, YOU DEIGN ME WORTHY OF YOUR PRESENCE. I AM ABSOLUTELY FUCKING HONORED BY YOUR GENEROSITY, OH GREAT BENEVOLENT LORD OF FUCK YOU.
TG: dude chill i just woke up
TG: still in my jammies and shit
CG: OKAY FIRST OF ALL, HOW THE HELL CAN YOU SLEEP UNTIL NOON? AREN'T YOU HUMANS SUPPOSED TO BE DIURNAL? IT TOOK TIME TO ADJUST TO THIS STUPID FUCKING SLEEPING SCHEDULE, AND HERE YOU ARE FUCKING IT RIGHT IN THE ASS WITH YOUR COMPLETE AND UTTER INABILITY TO CONFORM TO YOUR OWN SPECIES' EVOLUTIONARY CONVENTIONS. AND WHO THE ACTUAL FUCK SAYS "JAMMIES?"
TG: i went to sleep at like four
TG: and i say jammies you weenie
TG: but really im just saying that to spare your delicate sensibilities
TG: im straight up naked
TG: i think the jammies goblin took my clothes in the night like the creepy kleptomaniac sad sack of dicks he is
TG: i loved those jammies too man
CG: WOW, SHUT THE FUCK UP. I WAS THINKING OF ASKING YOU TO DO SOMETHING ALONG THE LINES OF "HANGING OUT" BUT I SUPPOSE THAT WOULD BE PUTTING TOO MUCH FAITH IN OUR FRIENDSHIP. I REQUEST YOUR PRESENCE, STRIDER, AS SAD AND PITIFULLY LONELY AS THAT IS.
TG: aw karkles i knew you liked me all along *fucking swoon*
TG: should i be expecting flowers and saccharine declarations of love?
TG: if you buy me dinner i might even be willing to watch one of your shitty romcoms
TG: and afterwards ill be tearing up because the love is just too much
TG: youll be a total hardass eyes fucking dry as the sahara desert
TG: but youll put a hand on my cheek and tell me our love can be the same
TG: and at that point everyones staring bc im actually bawling like a lil bitch
TG: but it was actually a ploy to touch my human boobs?
TG: what a surprising turn of events
TG: i knew you only loved me for my looks
CG: ACTUALLY, YOU KNOW WHAT? FUCK IT, I RESCIND MY PREVIOUS STATEMENTS. I'M TAKING THEM RIGHT THE FUCK BACK AND YOU CAN GO FUCK YOURSELF. THERE'S ONLY SO MUCH BULLSHIT I CAN DEAL WITH AND YOUR ENTIRE EXISTENCE IS BASICALLY AKIN TO THAT OF AN INCONTINENT HOOFBEASTS ANUS. I DON'T KNOW HOW I EVER IMAGINE THAT THINGS WILL BE DIFFERENT. DO I JUST PSYCHE MYSELF INTO THINKING "NO, IT'S OKAY, HE WON'T BE THE UNIVERSE'S BIGGEST GRUBFUCKER TODAY. JUST THIS ONCE?"
TG: whatever im down to chill
CG: FUCKING FANTASTIC.
TG: i can pick you up soonish but im actually naked so youre gonna have to give me time to put clothes on etc.
CG: I WASN'T GOING TO MENTION IT EARLIER, BUT YOU REALLY HAVE TO STOP IMPLANTING THAT HORRIFIC VISUAL IN MY MIND.
TG: please im hot and you know it
TG: bitches be up in my grill all the time
TG: they just cant get enough of me and it can be all hells of inconvenient too like excuse me i have shit to do i cant be carrying around these bitches everywhere
TG: these pants are for your protection karkat
CG: YOU'RE ABSOLUTELY HELPLESS, AREN'T YOU?
TG: whatever you love it
Thankful for the distraction, you pry yourself out of bed. Everything is sore and your chest still hurts, but you're more than willing to have an excuse to get out of the apartment, away from the potential to find Bro lurking in the living room. You're not ready to talk about what happened last night, or since Bro is a man of little words, try to decipher the subtext of everything he says, the calculated and precise crudeness that he's always spoken with. You got sick of the ridiculous mind games ages ago.
You quickly pull on some clothes from your closet, ignoring how much your body is pestering you about being gentle with it's dull aches. You quickly put on your shoes and pocket your phone before heading to the bathroom, where you find your shades (as if you needed yet another reminder), vaguely fix your hair, quickly put on deodorant, and disapprove of the very obvious purple bruise on the side of your neck. You can't get rid of it, and hiding it would probably make it more obvious if anything, so you leave it and hope Karkat doesn't make a big fucking deal about it, which is putting a lot of faith in Karkat's willingness to be polite. Your eyes look like shit beneath your shades, but with them your face looks almost normal, concealing most of the evidence of you being kicked last night, and the heavy bags under your eyes from a built up lack of sleep and usual exhaustion. While you're at it, you pop a couple Advil in your mouth and hope it'll take care of the minor headache and pain in your chest. It itches like crazy underneath the gauze, but there's not much you can do about that.
When you go out to the living room, you can't see Bro, so you snatch your keys from somewhere amongst the din of your kitchen counter and slip out as quickly as possible. There's no way to know if he's out for sure unless Lil Cal and Bro's equipment are gone, and he doesn't ever take the stuff in the middle of the day unless he's travelling somewhere, in which case you would have seen a stack of cash somewhere in the apartment to take care of yourself. He never tells you when he's going to leave, you just come home or wake up to find him gone, leaving you to work out how many days he'll be gone based on how much he gave you. Anyway, Bro might be here, and he might not, so you don't risk it and get the fuck out of there before you even have a chance of confronting him.
Karkat only lives about fifteen minutes away, even in the post-lunch hour traffic. You pull up the driveway to his hive in the middle of a mostly-troll suburb, and then shoot him a quick pester telling him to get his ass out here. Three minutes later, Karkat emerges with trademarked messy hair and long sleeves even though it's late September and almost ninety degrees out.
"Where to?" You ask as he gets into the passenger seat.
"Anywhere but here," he says. "My lusus is going shithive maggots."
"Lunch? I haven't eaten since lunch yesterday and I'm having some mad hunger, yo," you say, turning the ignition and backing out of Karkat's driveway.
"Fine, but you do realize you only had a bag of chips and that vile swill you call apple juice yesterday? How are you still standing?" He asks, with concerned snark.
"I'm like Gandhi, dude," you say.
"An extremely underweight vegetarian seeking the liberation of India?" Karkat asks.
"To a T, dude," you say.
You pull into a relatively cheap restaurant that caters to both trolls and humans. Most restaurants do, but oftentimes they're more skewed one way or the other, and some just have the little box at the bottom of the menu for the idiots that don't like the food but came to the place anyway. Some troll places have actually labelled the human sections as such, which has led to more than a few humans being scandalized and throwing a royal fit about it, usually ending up somewhere in the news if you look deep enough.
"You look like shit," Karkat says after you both have your menus and a rather annoying green troll waitress takes your drink orders with the most forced Texan accent you have ever heard.
"Love you, too," you say, making yourself busy with the menu. You realize at this point that you don't even care what you eat, so long as it's food.
"Hey, Sweethearts, would ya like anything ta drink?" The waitress asks, slathering her words in possibly the most atrocious Texan accent you have ever heard. She smiles with too many fangs and she has the neck muscles of a god. Not surprising, given her gargantuan horns, but everything she does makes her like like she's trying way too hard to fit in with humans.
You and Karkat both order, but he's more visibly balking at her, and you're pretty sure his glare has somehow hurt her feelings.
"I think you made her cry," you say as she walks away.
"I didn't, she's fine," he says, crossing his arms over his chest.
"You're going to feel bad and drown your sorrows in Fall Out Boy later, aren't you?" You ask, raising your eyebrows. You'd almost forgotten that you face hurt that much on your right side.
You feel a sharp kick to your shin under the table. "Better than the shit you listen to," he says.
"What have I played around you? N.W.A. and the Wu-Tang Clan? Are you saying the revolutionaries of rap, the ultimate classics, are shit? Because if you are, you better fuckin be able to beat Ice Cube in a rap battle," you say, as the waitress comes back with your drinks and the pad waiters always use to take orders.
"Well, consider me utterly schooled on the concept of rap. Not like it's a completely inane and irrelevant art form," Karkat hisses from across the table, garnering a stern and confused look from the waitress, who continues to try to break her own face with the size of her smile.
You and Karkat finally order, and you even manage to get Karkat to smile back at her.
"I can get you into some cool Norwegian bands if you want," Dave says.
"I can't even tell when you're joking or not anymore," he sighs. "The irony thing from your brother is kind of a huge pain in the ass, have I told you?"
The mention of Bro makes you go stiff. Not that kind of stiff, either, you realize. You're on edge about the whole thing, you know you're going to have to go home and deal with that. "I'm pretty sure you never shut your flapping windhole about it," you say, trying to pass of your weird hesitation.
Karkat lowers his eyebrows. "Are you okay?" he asks, rather sullen all of the sudden. "Because I'm pretty sure you just had an emotion."
"Wow, yes, thank you, I am capable of having those occasionally," you say.
"I'm watching you," he says.
The two of you don't talk about much before your food comes. You scarf down your food, practically inhaling it, while Karkat picks at his at his usual slow pace. You're done long before he's even halfway through, so you sit, just watching him eat, hoping it isn't that weird to do so.
"You have a massive hickey on your neck. I've been trying not to mention it, but it's been fucking staring at me this entire time," Karkat says.
"Yeah, what about it?" You ask, crossing your arms, leaning on the table.
"Why?" He asks, as a piece of his strange troll food disappears into his mouth.
"Someone got a little carried away, you know, all the bitches can't keep themselves in line all the time. Shit happens," you say, trying to avoid having to explain anything. Thinking about it makes you remember Bro's mouth on your neck, his hands all over you, his eyes staring down above you, dark orange and still somehow overpowering in their nakedness. You swear to Christ, you are not going to get a fucking boner right now.
"Please, shroud yourself in more mystery. It's not like you need to be any more of a douchebag, not like I'm your best and only friend within a 1000 mile radius or anything," he says, rolling his eyes at you.
"You don't know them," you say, because after three years knowing this guy, you can't even remember if he knows you're gay or not. You're starting to realize Karkat might have a point about the whole mystery thing.
"I don't know you, assface," he says.
The waitress had apparently taken Karkat's artificial smile as interest, so she slipped her number behind the receipt for the bill, writing her name with little hearts around it. You absently wonder if the hate-romance thing works the same way with trolls, but you doubt Karkat would answer you without a brutal, boring discourse on the more finite details of troll romance.
"What, you didn't like the Texan twang?" You tease, poking at the little slip with her number.
"It's bad enough being around you," he says.
"I do not have an accent," you say back.
"Listen to yourself sometime. And I meant it's bad enough being around you, the king of all idiots. Please, tell me why I need one more in my life?" He says as the two of you slip out of the booth.
"Aw, you like me," you say, which earns a sturdy punch to your shoulder.
It's late when Bro gets home, a few hours after you've said goodbye to Karkat, an hour after you said hi John, right in the middle of watching something on TV you don't really care about. He plants himself on the other side of the futon, fitting into it like it was built for him. He does that with everything; he makes it seem like the world is his, at his command and completely focused on him. He does it with you, dimming the rest of the world around him, making it so that he's the only thing you can focus on. You look at him because there's nothing else to look at.
"What do you want," he asks, not even looking at you, just seeing you staring out of the corner of your eyes. Your heart feels like it's pumping acid, sending a sick feeling coursing through your body. At the same time, you're tempted to curl up next to him, cling to him for dear life like a child, and somewhere deep down, you know that's because you're supposed to be his kid.
"We gonna get dinner?" You ask, matching his abrasive tone, resisting the urge to launch yourself at him like one of Jade's Squiddle toys.
Bro shrugs. "You know where the phone is," he says.
You can feel his eyes following you when you get up. Your legs feel clunky and awkward under his gaze, your movements unsure. You grab the phone, look at him, and ask, "What do you want?"
He stares at you in response, so you go ahead and pick the Greek place that does deliveries, ordering both of your usuals.
"Come here," Bro says as you set the phone on the kitchen counter. You walk over to the futon slowly, because you have that instinctual fear telling you he might attack you at any moment.
You stand in front of him, between his knees, looking down at him on the futon, and somehow feeling smaller than him. He does that with everything. He plants his hands on your hips, holding you, staring at you. You think you're learning what it's like to be unravelled from the inside.
He runs his hand up your torso, over your shirt, up to where his fingers touch gauze.
"Is it bothering you?" He asks calmly, running his thumb along the line where the gauze sits. His touch feels tender, intimate, caring. He's making a transition from unaffected to loving, and you know you shouldn't trust that, somewhere you know that he's fucking with you. You want to melt into his touch so badly. You need him to care about you, even if you have to shut the parts of your brain telling you this is a bad idea.
"No," you say, almost under your breath, reaching to take grab his hand at your chest. You wish you were saying no to him, not just his question. Maybe he wasn't even asking about the cut. You don't care, you melt into his touch, feeling yourself become utterly lost in his presence.
He pulls you in closer, and you half want to climb into his lap before you realize you're not that much smaller than he is. You have to force yourself to remember you're not a virgin, you're not a kid, you could be his equal. You could, but you aren't. You put a hand on his shoulder and lean down to kiss him, lightly, your knee pressing into the fabric of the futon between his legs, letting go of his hand as he moves it to your back.
Kissing is a strange action by itself; it's just tongue and lips and spit and the taste of flesh, never much more than that. Everyone you've ever kissed has just been a substitute, a stand-in for Bro. You've only ever kissed out of sheer desperation and blind lust, as an expected precursor to what comes next. Right now, with Bro, it feels like you're getting an answer of some kind, to a question you didn't know you asked. He doesn't smell like much, just a vague hint of soap. You wonder if he smells too similar to you; you're related and living together. A day's worth of stubble scratches across your chin as Bro sucks your bottom lip in between his own, pulling you closer, drawing you in. You reach up to push your shades to the top of your head, careful not to break contact with his lips. You've never kissed someone like this before. It's comforting, at least temporarily, sending a wave of relief washing over your body. You don't need to focus on anything else; the world is dim around you. There's only him.
And then there's the knock on the door, whether it's minutes or seconds later. Bro gently pushes you off of him, getting up from the futon to go fish out his wallet and pay the delivery guy. When he comes back, the room is filled with the smell of gyros. You sit where you sat when he first came home, on the other side of the futon. He sets the bag of food between you, letting you take out your own polystyrene container and plastic fork as he sits down. Bro takes his own food as you begin to eat. He switches the TV over to your ridiculously old VCR, and soon the sounds of shoe-shining and an eighties beat replace the silence.
Whoa, oh-oh-oh, let's get on over to Pryor's Place
Oh oh, we're gonna party, so don't be late
There's a sudden slip back into normalcy, watching TV with Bro, not worrying about what he thinks or what he'll say, just being near him. For the first time in a very long time, you feel safe. You feel comfortable. And when he jerks you off that night, you face buried in his neck, you think things might actually be okay.