[fic] you are a freak but you make me so happy i forget what bad feels like

[apiphile]

Title: Falling Sideways
Fandom: Thursdayverse TU
Word Count: 15,431
Rating: R/NC-17
Pairing: CANON.
Warnings: Oh shut your piehole. I warn for nothing.
Disclaimer: Didn't happen, not their real lives, this is an AU, I will kill you with my wang.
Notes: Guts/Appendices to WeekFight Hotel, please read that first. Thanks to tsuki_no_bara for M-W page refs.

Guts:
Burning Down The House (Quinn)
Digging Upwards (Dan)
No Way of Going Back (Bert)

The boy with fresh-washed hair and a crooked smile is watching black ants like walking periods march over a rest-room windowsill. Jepha Howard corrects his mental image for relevance and the passage of time: his hair is a month dirty with sweat and grit and he is not a 'boy' any more - but there is an echo in his head all the same.

He has been here before. De ja the hole in Jepha's head vu. It's familiar and unfamiliar. He's watching it from outside his own head.

The rest-room floor is dusty but apart from one or two dark splotches, unusually dry for what it is. The ants kinda confirm it's not exactly a well-trodden path, out here in the dirt and the quiet where cars have stopped coming.

Dan bangs the broken cubicle door with his knee and squints up from the seat… the sun is sneaking in over the cracked concrete … sheets and slats of light … all golden and empty… Dan never wears sunglasses. He hates shadows. "The fuck are you going?"

Jepha indicates himself, his sternum and face, with the S of handsome. "I'm right here."

"You weren't," Dan says, one eye shut. Jepha leans … the wall is cold and smells of mushrooms as much as it does of urine … a cave in the desert. He can't deny Dan has a point.

"I guess I wasn't."

Dan never asks if he wants to talk about it. None of them do, and that's keen … he never does want to … he's not sure he knows what 'it' is … or that he really wants to find out.

Jepha watches the ants walk through thick dust on the windowsill, at nose-level. They're carrying … specks of something bigger than their own tiny ant heads … struggling along under these incredible burdens. Atlas-ants.

"Quit daydreaming," Dan says, using Cranky Old Teacher voice and almost immediately eliciting a giggle, unbidden. "You will wear out your brain and then I'll have to come in your ear to stop your eyes from drying out from the back."

Jepha starts to laugh properly, his stomach caving in. Where the hell Dan gets this stuff.

"Are you going to pee, hollow-head-dryballs?"

Jepha raises his finger to hover over a wandering ant, casting a shadow on it. "No."

Dan breaks into a sing-song imitation of Bert that would convince no one who has not lived with him and learnt his intonation so thoroughly as they have; "Are you going to poo?"

"Noooo." Jepha closes one eye and examines the ant, which seems to have identified a potential threat above it and is scurrying frantically in circles.

"Are you going to … peel off your skin and turn into an ant?" Dan bangs his knuckles over the broken door, over and over.

Jepha takes his hand away from the ant. "No."

"Are you… going to stop saying 'no' before I come over there and beat your ass to paste and then spread it on a sandwich and eat it?" Bang bang bang bang. His words fall in time with his knuckles. Andspreaditandeatit. Could be a sandwich, could be someone's asshole.

Even the words are like fingers over his spine, electric; it used to be he'd be blind to intention until skin scraped skin. Jepha considers his answer at length … Dan's tapping his fingers on the cubicle door's frame now, standing on his feet. He has thighs like mountain ranges … a fence of flesh … bulwarks of bone …

"…no," Jepha ducks his head and smiles.

The next instant he's back up against the wall with an arm on either side of him, encaging him, engaging him, encouraging him; Dan's arms are like walls … prison bars … a safety fucking net. Dan smacks his forehead lightly off Jepha's, bone and bone, close enough Jepha's fucked sense of smell can almost catch unwashed hair and unbrushed teeth. Mostly because he knows that's what they are.

"Ass-beating commences in ten," Dan says severely, putting one sand-paper palm to Jepha's chin, "and-" the rest of his words are lost as Jepha's pulse leaps and his skin stretches toward Dan's hand, and only the pressure of thick fingers holds Jepha inside his own body.

For as long as Jepha can remember he's been like this…

… he's also aware that 'as long as he can remember' is not the measure of stability it might be for someone else.

There are gaps.

"JEPHA."

Fingers slip from his chin to his throat and there are hips at his hips and a mouth against his, not kissing, just pressing. And he's back in his body, solid again. Jepha cracks open an eye with difficulty, fighting the urge to dissolve from the bones out, and Dan's cheek fills his vision in close-up.

"You weren't listening," Dan mutters, his lips shaping the words against the softness of Jepha's mouth, his breath into Jepha's breath, pushing him back into his body. "What happens when you don't listen?"

"My eardrums atrophy," Jepha grins. He likes the sound of 'atrophy'. It's not going to beat 'acute' for degrees of awesomeness, but one day he's going to make it all the way through the whole fucking Merriam-Webster dictionary and then he will be smart enough to figure out what his fucking problem is. Or if it's …

Words aren't as easy for him as they are for Bert and Dan. Bert is, Dan says, a profoundly profane poet of poop. Bert will bow in acknowledgement of this compliment and dub Dan the Fuckmonkey Buttflunky who gets funky when he's done key-cutting, which usually results in Dan countering with something so fucking ridiculous that Jepha laughs himself a cramp and falls down.

Quinn doesn't drizzle words about with quite the same … loose-tongued abandon … but he always seems to know what he's going to say and what he ought to say (and what he ought not to); sometimes Jepha can see him half-suffocating on things he knows he shouldn't say and wants to, yearns to, burns to. Generally when Quinn does say something it's like being punched in the ear.

Dan puts his pinky through the tunnel in Jepha's earlobe and pulls. Jepha's body coalesces gently into a slightly denser cloud and … he breathes through his mouth … conscious, so conscious of the sound he has just made. It's a groan or a sigh, or something in between.

"Pay attention."

Dan's hipbones crush Jepha's spine into the wall, clamp his stomach into its correct location (against Dan's abdomen), and Jepha's dick gives an impatient twitch. Dan's mouth is touching his. Jepha shapes the obvious answer and smirks through it:

"…no."

And Dan bites on his lip and slaps a hand to Jepha's flank and crushes him and hurts him and holds him; Jepha's throat makes a sound into Dan's teeth and the bathroom door bangs.

"No tea, just coffee," Bert trills, as something goes whizzing past and shatters against the wall. "Oh, no coffee either. Jepha, you prude, you still have pants on!"

Dan untangles his teeth from Jepha's bruised lower lip, letting a guttural sound drool out with a little blood. He pushes Jepha harder with his hips (Jepha's whole body is warm with someone else's heat, his face flushed, his asshole loose) and tells Bert, "He's saving himself for Jesus."

"I thought you were a divine agent of the Lord?" Bert snickers, already half-out the door, trailing broken glass and coffee crystals in his wake along with his untied sneaker laces. He has on fingerless gloves. It's a hundred four degrees outside and Bert is wearing woollen gloves. "Dick him in the ass, Dan," Bert calls over his shoulder, "DO IT FOR SATAN."

Jepha's head is full of locked doors and his body is a hole. He avoids the locked places like he's playing hide-and-go-fuck-yourself (this is what Bert always calls it). His body is a hole; in contravention of normal physics (Bert says), instead of being sucked into the emptiness inside him, Jepha's always pushing away from it. Like a slow explosion, his body and consciousness falling apart; he's yet to be stoned or tripping hard enough to know what the fuck that's actually meant to mean, but he understands the locked doors.

There are gaps … in his memory … like in a Tennessee smile. Huge and frequent; the banks of them on either side are gross enough he doesn't want to bridge them. What's gone is best forgotten.

Sometimes he finds his body does things without telling him he's going to: kicking road signs, leaping in ponds, binge-eating, folding himself around someone's arm like he belongs there. He finds himself knee-deep in a cow byre and no idea how he got there while Bert's bat-pitched giggle flits around him in the dusk, eating flies. "POOP-BATHER! POOP-BATHER!"

Sometimes Jepha cares to connect blackouts and black holes: mostly he lets sleeping dogs lie … in some tiny-fuck place in Illinois he pets a golden retriever chained to a stake outside an empty trailer, because seeing it there made his whole body curl up on itself like a louse by a lit match; he 'wakes up' in the back of the silver stolen car with Bert blowing him and pummelling his thighs and Quinn reading a road map like he's not watching. No bridge. No clues. Apparently he'd walked and talked and eaten like normal, but it's just … a jump-cut. Nothing.

Bert tells him a story about Quinn fighting pitbulls for pennies in -

"Where was it, Quinnface?"

"Gainesville, and it was sixty-five bucks, you ungrateful pissant."

- in Gainesville, fighting pitbulls, their skin shit-sweaty 'til Quinn tore them stern-to-snout and walked off with the spiked collars and guts on his tongue; somehow the tale is familiar … Bert hasn't told it before, but there's an echo, an echo … collars and growling, the smell of dogs, and piss, and old fears. Old fears, old old fears.

The very first thing Jepha remembers at all (if it's really first; the order of his Swiss Cheese memory is as decayed as Quinn's crumbling and infected toenails) is being carried in someone's arms. Light and shade, strong arms, heat and thirst, too weak to fight or freak. He is small … not a baby, not an infant, but skinny … so thin his arms slip through the retaining atoms of memory and drag much of that time with them.

Someone is carrying him, someone he doesn't know. He is thirsty and his neck hurts and he can't lift his head any more.

His next memory is almost identical, but he is bigger and older and when people talk around him this time he makes out distinct words, angry words aimed at someone absent.

There are plastic tubes in his stomach like worms. He watches them with empty detachment, his head thumping too much to cry or shriek or fear. He is dull-edged. Maybe seven? someone says, they say. There are more angry voices. Shocked voices.

The word he remembers longest from this slice of his mind is "N E G L E C T".

It's the first printed word he learns to recognise, the first hand-scrawled word he can call to his mind, on all the pieces of paper that pass his impassive face. Page 394 of the Merriam-Webster.

Jepha remembers sitting in silence in a hot car, picking at the blue-white bandage over where the IV went in. There are Batman band-aids on every finger from blood sugar tests. His hair is clean and his clothes are donated, too large for him, smelling of charity and soap flakes. His teeth are crooked but scraped-white, his gums plump at last, his speech still clumsy.

A man in a red shirt … his face, his name, his purpose, have all been left behind in puddles and sleepless nights, jettisoned with the endless baggage of things Jepha has no business hanging onto … opens the driver's door and says, "Took a long time to find her. Your Gramma."

There was probably more to it than those words, but what Jepha remembers are the fluffy-headed weeds growing in the smashed desert dirt, the ancient crumbling white dog turds, and … ants. That's where the ants were …little black dots toiling away over the gritty ground in columns. His shoes are just a little bit too big.

The trailer is an inverted Oreo: peeling white outside and stuffy darkness inside. It must smell bad … the man in the red shirt almost gags and there are flies dancing like static in the solid air; cartoons on the hospice TV say flies mean stench. All the curtains are drawn, and it takes an age for his eyes to adjust.

"Ma'am?" says the man. Jepha thinks he may have tried to slip his hand into Red Shirt's for comfort, but he knows he didn't succeed if he did try. "Hello?"

For a long minute they both think she is dead.

Gramma Howard is a landmass supported on worn velvet cushions. She is the half-blind queen of a tiny kingdom caked in the fur of a three-years'-dead lap dog. She is so fat her stomach spills off the bed and she slumps, neither sitting nor lying, her face finger-widths deep in cake make-up and wrinkles.

Her fingers are like balls, choked with shining rings in a variety of tarnished hues.

Jepha remembers this precise moment with diamond clarity because she started till his eyes dried out.

"You brung my Jepharee?"

Her accent is wacky. It sounds like films (she's not from this snow-streaked desert state but the sweatier, swampier places below the Mason-Dixon line, a genuine Southern Belle gone a long way to seed) and too many cigarettes, and she pulls him to her sweaty, crushing embrace and squeezes his face in her palm until his lips pop out like a hungry fish. Jepha feels strange and strangely comfortable with this, more so when she stops popping his mouth and starts ruffling his hair.

"You can go now," she tells the red shirt man. Orders.

Jepha has no belongings (years later he rationalises: anything he might have 'had' was a donation to the hospice, it would not be fair to take it away from the other kids there), and the clothes he stands up in are the long-ago sloughings … of some of the boy he will never meet. Old skin.

Gramma's teeth are the colour of dirty bathroom porcelain, but she has pride. They are her teeth.

The trailer and Gramma are clear memories: he learnt to cook road-kill and government cheese and wilted vegetables, to braid Gramma's brittle hair and dye it the eye-searing orange she favoured. He learnt to shoplift macrons and mascara; he learnt to say 'please' and 'thank you' and 'motherfucker' and 'Negro'. It took him some time to unlearn the latter.

Gramma liked to tell stories about when she was young and beautiful and men chased her all over the South; at least one of those narratives turned out, years later, to be the plot of some black and white movie. Jepha guesses you have to make your own glamour, your own grandeur, and he doesn't blame her.

Gramma taught him to read her gossip pages and romance novels and her old, old diaries (round handwriting giving way to spiderish scrawl), hiding behind a smoke haze of old memories - like a shawl. She taught him to paint her nails and dance pretty and turn the TV up loud; she was by no means deaf, "Them neighbours of mine are pricks, they can stand a little culture now and then. And she's a whore. You never see girls like her in the daylight, Jepharee."

In school Jepha learns that he lives with a crazy old witch, that hair cut with kitchen scissors and a straight razor he had to sharpen himself is not and never will be cool, and that tiny skinny boys who speak with an affected Southern accent spend a lot of their day head-down in a toilet bowl.

Jepha thinks he remembers girl friends from school, older girl friends. Much older.

His hair spiked with soap or dyed with beet juice as their fancy took them, his shoulders a foot rest, his back a book-shelf. Holding hand bags and coats in winter evenings while his friends ground, humped, blew and fucked in the back seats of parked cars; in alleys behind the hardware store or the broken entrance to the 'picture house' … as Gramma called it … whose faded hoarding advertised the same movie all the years Jepha lived in that town.

He remembers them putting on sin-red lipstick in a school bathroom … and that it's not his school … he doesn't remember how they looked, just the action …grease over chewed lips. One girl holding his head steady and laughing … she scrawls clown lips on him …he will get his ass pounded and his face slapped by various agents of heternormative vigilance for this.

But these memories blur into ones which Jepha knows are later, faces and bodies of girls he knew later, and he can't keep the order straight. The bathroom is different every time he sees the lipstick in his mind; there are so many gaps.

He knows he is eleven the day he leaves school for good because it is his birthday, and he has spent two weeks looking at the red-circled date in the calendar, cooking meals for two, and refusing to accept that Gramma has not moved or spoken in that time … that the flies are thicker than soup in the already dense air … that the smell is so bad even he can catch it in his weak nostrils … even he can still remember it; like flowers left for too long in a vase … like the back bins of an abattoir.

He knows he is eleven … he knows he is afraid and confused and hungry and itching under his skin … there is a gap in his memory here like a pothole in the road and on the slippery opposite bank of it he's working for Mamia, Joanne, and Peaches … thirteen years old … no explanation for the missing time.

Mamia is thirty-five but only admits to twenty-seven if someone might get his wallet out; her skin is the colour of liver failure but healthy enough to convince at night, and she collects framed pictures of tigers. Holograms are her favourites.

Joanne is twenty and has cigarette burns up her arm to the shoulder. She likes Garth Brooks and knitting and washes her mouth with undiluted Lysol after every blowjob, her wire-rack chest heaving unpuked vomit.

And Peaches is tall and broad-shouldered and sneers and scares the living shit out of Jepha on average once a fucking week; she has eyes like punches and a voice like slaps and wears aviator shades with pearl arms, and never any make-up.

Of course he doesn't remember any of the johns.

Just the admonition (page 9 in the Merriam-Webster) to be whatever age they expected of him, to smile nice, to say thank you, and if they scared him or hurt him:

"Shut the goddamn fucking hell up," Peaches finishes, brushing her teeth in the mirror, "only scream if they want screaming, capice? You make a sound they don't like, I'll take all your goddamn fucking back rent out at once."

Jepha's pretty good at not freaking out, really. He lies still or wriggles or smiles or cries on demand … watches a succession of loafers, gym socks, sneakers, man-sandals, dress shoes … come and go with their hairy potbellies … inverted nipples … pasty skin … long fingernails … prison tattoos … soft voices … greasy hair … beards. They all button back up to respectability when they leave. Jepha doesn't have that option; he looks like what he is.

There's another gap that Jepha guesses contains his first stay in juvie, it's about the right time. He doesn't know … he guesses he was arrested drinking liquor outside Peaches' apartment … he guesses maybe there was a sting … he guesses maybe he doesn't want to know.

And all the while he was working for Mamie and Joanne and Peaches, turning acquiescence (a very good word, page 6) into liquor money Jepha liked best the guys … and occasionally women … who pushed him so hard into the sharp-springed mattress that he stopped thinking in terms of 'should' and started thinking 'can't' and felt better … lost all his choices … went limp and oozing under their bodies.

All things close and personal, all wounds great and small.

Rehab-to-work was another of those gaps; all he remembers really is being bored by the hymnbooks and thrilled by the rock shows he snuck into, still underage and underweight; in the breathless crush of the mosh pit he found himself … found his feet … his chest … his head … as they came into contact with other people.

Punching and spitting … elated and elevated … then that one stupid-fuck time where he thrashed too hard and broke a kid's nose: he hadn't meant to be a fuck-up, he'd just wanted to keep the circle smashing back into him over and over … wanted to feel part of something … of himself, of that kid … of the world he kept disintegrating into.

This was not an adequate defence in court, and Jepha went back to juvie again.

More gaps: this time there is no rehab-to-work after juvie, just a futile drive to keep himself together with heroin (failure; he couldn't even stay hooked to the stupid shit), ink in his skin (his body is a roadmap of random sigils and bright colours, put there by soft-gloved men and women, paid for by dick-sucking money), and fucking … fucking for money … fucking for safety … fucking for the sake of keeping himself inside his own body … a crooked smile … paying people to spend hours jabbing a needle into his skin … antsy and horny and vibrating but still there in the room for once, just about.

He remembers Vegas, though.

Vegas was a huge-fuck mistake.

Nineteen and short, an odd mix of Southern manners and juvie slang, he's dragged himself West with the intention of hitting San Francisco … the hallowed city …freak central … a Mecca for perverts and peaceniks, some of whom might even employ him … love him … keep him. He's left a short string of hand-holding boy-and-girlfriends in parking lots and dance clubs … a hundred blowjobs in a hundred seedy bathrooms …holding his own windpipe closed till he comes. Auto-erotic asphyxiation (not in the Merriam-Webster).

Sometimes Jepha tried to get picked up legit … in bars: for love and not money, but, as one sneering queen tells him on his way to shop Jepha to security for it, Jepha looks like what he is.

Desperate, underage, underweight, underloved…

…and a whore.

So Vegas is already going badly; Jepha's on the North side of town in a cowboy shirt and a stolen Stetson (not the dancer they were looking for in that joint; impressively bendy and compliant to every suggestion, but too many tattoos, too small), trying to steal sleep from the desert air with his feet on a bench and his head on the ground. It's late or early enough to be very cold … he's hungry enough to be thinking of trash cans as canteens again.

A car pulls up. It's a gray something. Toyota. New.

Jepha sort of half-rolls himself into a compact, half-alert half-ball. Chances are it's nothing but chances also are there's a drunk with a wallet and right now Jepha has no line between head and mugging … blowjobs and robbery; he's that fucking hungry.

Doors open and like ghosts in a bad dream guys open the trunk. He breathes quieter as they haul a body-sized bundle out and drop it onto the broken concrete.

"Get up-" a distant voice. The body is kicked back to his or her knees as soon as they comply. "-dumb fuck."

The silhouettes of two men with drawn guns pointed at a kneeling figure is commonplace graffiti. It's iconic … it's in art … all over walls … posters … movie theatres; it's in front of Jepha like a bad fucking joke … dog's vomit … real and muted in predawn blues, and when the sound of the shot reaches his delayed brain the body is already slumping.

The feeling of dread that creeps up his spine and through his hollow stomach puts desert nights and his snowy former home to all kinds of pathetic shame.

Jepha has no real excuses for rolling the corpse. They'll have stripped it before they go; he goes to toe it over all the same as soon as the car's out of earshot.

The eyes make him uncomfortable. Jepha squats on his toes and puts his acquired hat on the guy's slack and bleeding face to shield it from crows.

And after that, he gets the hell out of Gomorrah.

… the last thing he's expecting in the silver, soft-topped Jaguar is a scrawny little blue-eyed Jesus his own approximate size, and a big bad wolf who even Jepha's nose can smell is rotten on the inside.

He has no excuses for getting in the car, either … wants to be somewhere Not Here. If they kill him (and the beast in the shotgun seat is practically brandishing a scythe and an hourglass) he'll be someplace Not Here. That's good enough.

They have sunglasses and liquor and Bert, Jepha realises very fast, is so fucking crazy he's gone through sane twice, the second time on rollerskates backwards and juggling cats (Dan's words, much later).

It's okay.

Jepha's not sure he's sane either, and when Bert slaps Quinn in the leg and tries to bite his goddamned face over nothing Jepha's hungry, sun-stricken mind can discern, he gets the weirdest fucking feeling. Like he just found himself.

Sometimes Jepha's body does shit without warning him.

He's new and half-naked in the heat, eating fries from a greasy box in a parking lot in Portland, and Bert is drawing on his back with a board marker. It's hot, hot; Quinn has retaliated by putting on a paint-streaked fur coat he found in a dumpster and going to 'sleep' on the hood of the dented and scratched silver car. Guard dog … sleeping beast.

Bert reaches around him to steal a handful of too-salty limp fries from the red card box; Jepha's shoulders hunch themselves angrily over the food and he growls, low and bestial and unexpected, before he knows he's doing any of it.

"Fucking fine, don't share then," Bert snaps like Jepha just fucking cut him, throwing the fries back into his lap and stamping away to the railings that divide the lot from the empty road.

Quinn's watching them both: mud-eyed … mad-eyed … from the hood, fur coat slipping away over his bony shoulders … his expression unreadable under the ambient anger.

Jepha abandons the fried and all but crawls on his belly to where Bert's sulking: "Sorrysorrysorrysorrysorry…" in time with his beating heart … his mental chant: don’t leave don't leave me don’t leave me please don't leave me here alone don't leave me … which he knows by now is futile.

Everyone leaves.

"You," Bert says, pointing at him with his middle and ring fingers, "are a fucking freak, Jepharee." But he says it in a tone of surprised delight … like he's having something hoped-for confirmed … like he's winning an unwinnable bet. "A fucked-up fucking freak fucker."

He drops down from the railing and squats next to where Jepha's crawled … hands and knees, bad dog-bad dog … and pats him condescendingly on the head, his other hand a fist in his own filthy hair. It feels good to be mocked like this.

"I'm keeping you, okay?" Bert says, jabbing Jepha in the back of the ear with his thumb. An accident, not accident.

Okay.

Oh god yes. It was okay.

The first time he sees Quinn kill someone is not the cold jolt of encroaching mortality that Vegas was; he's just grateful to be accepted by someone who can do that. To be tolerated in the same air.

The road is treacherous with ice crystals. Bert is still inside the steaming heap of their late chariot, eating Cheetos with his legs crossed and a gross red ribbon tied to his hair but in no way actually holding it back.

Jepha's out in the cold, ostensibly to check the state of the engine, though he knows it's fucked and in reality he's here to soak up any ire from the guy Bert just drove into. He will take the beating on their behalf …he will smile through the pain and embrace the adrenaline … he already feels serene in anticipation (page 25) of this douchebag's brutality.

The guy driving the tan pick-up (a Ford) is red raw and probably weighs nearly three times what Jepha does. He's blunt burnt sober and could kill him with one fat arm; Jepha faces up, metal-studded David to redneck Goliath … smiles appeasingly. "Sorry, sir, I think our brakes are faulty."

Gramma's best Mississippi vowels. He wears them like pearls.

Mt Douche has a baseball bat. At least it's not a gun.

The first word out of the guy's brick-wide maw is 'fucking' and the second is 'faggot'. Jepha actually owns a t-shirt now that proclaims the as much in marker pen capitals on faded red, but he's not wearing it.

"Good call!" Jepha says as cheerfully as he can.

He thinks about stitches and soft hands. He thinks how bad his broken bones will hurt him and how hard it will be to walk away. He's doing this for Bert; the thought makes his muscles flutter. He's doing this for Quinn.

This pretty martyrdom of his … it doesn't make it much further:

"Hey asshole," says the three-hundred-pound douche mountain, "You fucking wrecked my fender. This truck's my fucking livelihood, you understand? You rich asshole faggots understand what you just did?"

"Sorry?" Jepha suggest, still smiling, his hands in his jacket pockets. It is a sports jacket with gold foil stripes and it is too thin, too thin for this icy wind.

The whole noble self-sacrifice thing is kinda undermined as Quinn launches himself from fucking nowhere and collides hard with the guy's face.

There is a yell.

There is another, pained-sounding yell.

Jepha sees many of these fights before he realises Quinn's laden with inventive and vicious concealed weapons and that he's always balanced on a knife-edge between victory and death, every single time. That he's not good. That he's just … Quinn.

Quinn is not a showy fighter or a strong one or a graceful one, he's not even all that fucking good …but he's smart and focussed and so, so angry. Always.

Another gurgling yell. It sounds like, "My fucking EYE!"

It's not Quinn. Quinn never makes a sound when he fights, Jepha knows that already. He saves his energy, saves his breath, saves his mind for the fray.

Jepha backs up a little, his feet cold. There is blood now. There is a lot of blood, smeared and spread on Quinn like housepaint, like a dog rolling in cowshit.

Soon all he can hear is Quinn's panting.

The huge body shakes the earth as it falls, but Quinn's not done. He kicks Douche Mountain's temples like he's trying to launch that skull into orbit … like his foot is a five iron and he's a fucking golf pro. There are cracks, cracks, and squelches.

Bert kicks the car door open. "Hey, fuckass, get his keys. We need a new ride."

Quinn, however, does not seem to be inclined to stop.

Jepha crawls into the storm of fury and slips blood-sticky, body-warm car keys out of a hip pocket and into his palm, hoping and praying that nothing of his body gets in Quinn's way. It's not the first time he's robbed a corpse but it's the first time he's done it while the body's … still … being killed.

One of Quinn's feet nearly gets him in the jaw.

Jepha scrambles back and palms the keys to Bert. Bert pets him on the head and the back of the neck and Jepha glows briefly, like a kicked fire.

"Quinn," Bert stands. "You got blood on your cheek."

He got blood fucking everywhere. There's red all over him, but the words seem to hit him somewhere in the mind and Quinn straightens up, muscles like bedsprings, and brushes russet from his cheekbone with the back of his hand. This does precisely nothing but make matters worse; it just smudges more blood over the bone in a wide streak. He's panting and black-eyed and vicious and his hair is plastered against his skull with arterial showers. He's bone-awkward, an armoured beast, unsteady and showing his yellow teeth and ruby-red chin.

Intellectually … right in his brain … Jepha knows Quinn is ugly, and made uglier by his all-too-obvious insanity, but right here and now he is beautiful as a forest fire and Jepha wants to cling to him … kiss his neck and his mouth … and his shoulders … and shout, shout, shout, YES WE ARE ALIVE.

He guesses Quinn feels it right now, that ALIVE in his chest.

Bert, who cannot have heard Jepha's half-wordless thoughts, grins beside him and says in a fiercely proud whisper, "I know."

Bert's a great lay, when he remembers he's fucking.

When he's focussed on fucking Jepha, Jepha feels fucking focussed on, never a moment allowed to drift out of frame, swearing and squirming, teased and tormented and bitten and fucked, fucked, fucked, while Quinn sulks in the bathroom or the front seat or behind a dumpster and unconvincingly ignores the noise, the grunts and thumping, the whole affair … Jepha's … intrigued … at first. By the thought of what he might be like … what he might be like to fuck; Quinn is fire and fury and hits fucking hard even when he's just miming shut the fuck up on Jepha's bones.

He probably wouldn't even survive it if Quinn Allman ever magically ascended (page 34) beyond his dick issues and stuck it in Jepha like a knife … like a knife. It would be like being fucked with knives. Jepha's almost acutely disappointed.

Bert is great but he's eminently distractible (Dan's words, much later).

What he gets out of it is happy-Jepha, he says. The guy has no fucking clue what it feels like to come, he says. Can' t know about it …he's actually fucking weirder than Quinn, who for all his glowering and snarling and protective … guarding of his prick … and his Bert … still gets off on the inside of his shorts now and then, even if he thinks no one else can hear his breathing change.

So Bert's … often just wandered off and left Jepha horny and crazed and shaking at the seams while he investigates a vending machine that dispenses cans of nuts with yellow labels, or a crow corpse in the verge, or decides that instead of fucking he wants to drive Quinn fucking insane as well by poking him repeatedly in the ear.

Leaves him, leaves him to finish himself off … lonely … or squirm in greater and greater distress until he thinks he's going to fucking unravel …and dives back … darts back … to play with Jepha's piercings with idle disinterest, mind on other matters.

Basically, Bert is a fucking great lay when he remembers to be.

It's only fair Bert and Quinn get to watch him and Dan fuck; he's watched them fuck with their mouths so often … opposite sides of rooms … parking lots … cars … one up a tree and the other throwing stones. Bert and Quinn can fuck with their backs to each other in separate rooms … and besides, Jepha likes an audience.

He'd like it better if they maybe joined in, but Bert prefers to read and Quinn would rather set himself on fire than his mouth to someone's prick.

Hearing them talk to each other shatters his heart into a million shining fragments, to begin with. He feels so outside, the words lost … his words lost … no clue or cue what to say … when to say it … but now there is Dan, who just makes it up as he goes along. Who doesn't seem to care if the words … if they're the right ones. He just … talks.

"How do you know what to say?" Jepha mumbles. He's so stoned he thinks his back has possibly become one with the carpet. The patterns are crawling over his tattoos. His eyes cannot prop open.

Dan gives him a confused look. "Dan open mouth. Words fall out. Problem in stopping," and he flicks Jepha in the nose.

"Truer words," Bert says solemnly, stonily, stonedly, "have never yet been spoken."

"Buttbiscuits," Dan says archly.

"Apart from that."

In the two years Quinn is in prison there is not a single gap in Jepha's memory; the eight weeks leading up to his sentencing are a total blur, but every moment after is all too clear. He privately thinks of them as the years Bert was in prison, too, because he was so different then: leaner … sharper … more pungent … wilder.

Unhappy.

His urgency, his discomfort, was immediately contagious. But it … wore off … Jepha. It wore off him sooner because he had a fucking epiphany in the back bright-lit room of some industrial property where piss and sweat condensed on the walls and bruises were worn like badges.

Turned out that Jepha was really good at fighting when he was doing it for money (… just like everything else, sneered the memory of the bitchy queen in Vegas, … whore), when he wasn't required to hate the guy he was hitting.

Bert cared only about winning.

Winning and winning and the roar … the love of the crowd … the flush in his cheeks … the sweat in his hair … on his fingerless gloves … his trademark. When he was in the room he was flying and Jepha smiled watching him … watching Bert soar. When he was in the room where blood and pain went down, Bert went up, and Jepha went up on vicarious wings.

Jepha didn't care about winning or losing. He didn't hate and he didn't much care to hurt others and he'd never ever been a guy for pride … but the fights, the fights he fucking loved.

"You would," Bert snorted when Jepha finally succeeded in getting the words out in the right order to make some sort of sense, sluicing someone else's blood from his mouth … Jepha washing out his mouth with soap, not Bert. Bert was just eating turkey jerky from the wrapper and spitting half-chewed wads at the wall. They looked like tumours. "Pervert," Bert said, swallowing some at last, "dirty dirty freaky pervert."

Between fights Bert broods and Jepha fidgets and Bert fucks him to keep him still but in all that time it's the weirdest, most uncomfortable sex Jepha's ever had … voluntarily … nails in his chest and thighs, sure, teeth at his throat, sure … but Bert always seemed to be in search of something … never in the room … like being fucked by a ghost.

You would.

Of course. Of course he would. Incalculable minutes crushed between legs and arms and the floor or the fence … his head thrown back and teeth bared … he can't kid himself he's doing it for Bert … for the money … sometimes Jepha goes whole fights, bleeding and breathing, with his dick hard.

If he was Bert he'd have used that, rubbed it on them … freaked them out … like he freaked them out drinking and smoking in the cage … in the pit … a cigarette to the eyelid, once; in that moment Bert's face was Quinn's face.

He's not Bert. He won't fight in a ring of fire for the applause it brings. He doesn't taunt the crowd. He's not fighting for them, and he doesn't rub his hard-on against the guys he fights. He's not fighting for them.

Jepha jerks off before fights … after fights … he still fucking rises when someone's elbow gets his throat … fist hits his thighs … foot smashes into his ass. His dick won't hear of being quiet when someone's whaling on him.

For two years Bert broods and vanishes inside himself, and Jepha's high and horny and sad and lonely and they're both one inch-step from falling apart all the fucking time and then Bert says fuck it and they go back South to steal Quinn a house.

(the plan is grandiose and fucking insane; Jepha's so charmed he can't speak and is reduced to giggling and clutching the bed sheets, gross-dirty cotton spilling like vomit between his handsome fingers)

It's a great plan, with one flaw that makes Jepha foam at the brain. A great plan: but Bert won't let him kill the guard dogs.

Bert has watched Jepha in a cage match snap a man's neck and cheered him on … petted him while he puked the night through in the aftermath, stroking the back of his neck as Jepha muttered I just killed someone like he'd never been uncertain someone lived before … but he's not having it.

"Poison," Jepha says, pleading, hidden in the bushes on the outskirts of the property. He can see one security camera from where he stands; Bert has plans for it.

"Fuck off," Bert says shortly, tearing at the wool of his gloves with his teeth, like a dog at a wound.

"It won't hurt them," Jepha mutters. He's not sure he's right about that but for once his mouth won't stop moving … there's something in his throat that wants to get out.

"It's not their fault," Bert says, angry-giggles on his lips like spit, his hands in his hair, lifting it and tugging it, his own hair. "They are what they are."

Jepha knows he's talking about Quinn now but he can't let it go. "Please."

"NO." Bert pulls at his own lip, thinking.

"Please," Jepha drops easily to all fours … his body made for something other than bipedal posture (he's no idea what the opposite of bipedal is, there's still that much dictionary left to read) … rubs his face on Bert's filthy jeans. He has no idea why or what moves him to keep pleading … no idea why he wants or if he wants. But the words are there for once. The words are there. "Please, please. Please. Please."

Bert grabs his hair in a fist and yanks his head back until Jepha's eyes meet his and sting and water.

"We are not. Killing. The fucking. Dogs," Bert says slowly, laughter bubbling under, bad-laughter, threat-laughter. The rose bush clutches at Jepha's clothes, at his palms flat on the floor. Bert holds his gaze and his hair for an eternity. "We are not killing the fucking dogs, Jepharee. We are not killing the dogs. We are not fucking killing the dogs. Stop. Asking."

Jepha nods and swallows as best he can, and Bert tickles him under the chin, on the 'K' of 'Choke' and Jepha whines, low and empty and pleading again. His throat is too tight and he's hungry, hungry again.

Bert poisons the dogs.

"We are what we are, too," he says.

Jepha doesn't know how to say I miss him as well so he spends his fight money unwisely instead. New ink of ugly and ridiculous things, and a tacky trashy ghetto grille … attracted to its shine like a magpie … like a moth to the flame.

Bert approves of it entirely. He pries Jepha's gums back to kiss him on the teeth, inspecting a gift horse against all the best advice. Jepha grins helplessly into Bert's mouth and Bert slaps him upside the head. "You look like fucking garbage," Bert says, giggling.

"I am what I am," Jepha points out.

He still doesn't know how the fuck to say I missed you. Quinn's so horribly broken when he comes that Jepha's stunned into stillness; Bert seems delighted, but Bert always did love the broken edges of smashed crockery more than the functioning things they encountered.

But their breathing when they sleep is like a lullaby, and the house comes smashing down around them, and when the dust settles everything feels better … brighter … normal.

Sometimes Jepha's body responds without him knowing why.

Sometimes he knows those things are coming but he doesn't know what the fuck to do.

Sometimes …

… those times.

They have been in an arcade. Jepha is cradling Bert's wins in the crook of his arm and squinting at the lights and grinning because he appears to be armed with a pink fluffy rabbit, a fuckload of cash, some stolen wallets, and a toilet roll which he took from the staff bathroom because it was soft and it was there. His feet are sweaty-squelchy in unsocked sneakers and his teeth are glinting happy-white, a haircut on the horizon and a new tattoo on his thigh.

Bert's gone hurtling back into the arcade with another fistful of pennies and started pelting Quinn with them; just through the doors Jepha can see security bearing down on them both, ready to throw their asses out. Bert has probably failed to hit Quinn even once, he's such a shitty shot, but everyone else in the arcade will be nursing bruises.

Something smashes. Someone will probably call the cops.

Jepha examines the top of the bunny's head. Bert said wait here, so he's waiting here, and right now Bert - Jepha stands on tiptoes and cranes his neck - is diving between old-time penny-slots and Quinn is already running toward him.

The air is just warm enough to make the thin sports jacket comfortable but not actually warm enough to be unnecessary. The bunny's head smells … Jepha sniffs hard … of industrial packing foam.

Something else smashes.

"You just come out of there?"

Jepha doesn't know why he didn't hear the car pull up but there's a cop standing within six feet of him and he doesn't fucking like it. He smiles and shrugs and waits for his brain to come up with some words.

"Did you or did you not just come out of that building?"

The cop is a blur in Jepha's head. A blur in a uniform with a grating voice and a belt with things hanging from it like air-fresheners in cars; he seems pissed.

Jepha says, "Yes?" and tries to look innocent, cooperative, sober, and non-threatening. Mostly this involves trying to hide in the collar of the jacket he's wearing … why doesn't it have a hood, fuck … and sliding his mouth, his face behind the bunny. It's an ugly-fuck bunny. This is probably why Bert was so insistent on having it.

The cop sniffs and recoils. Jepha guesses it's either his sneakers or the gasoline Bert soaked his hair in this morning. Could be just about anything. Might be the beer.

"Sir," the cop says like he cannot personally believe that he has to use this word to address someone who looks like Jepha, "I'm going to need to see some ID."

This is going to be a problem. Jepha puts the bunny down carefully on top of an ash-tray stand … no smoking in the arcade … and slips his hands into his hip pockets, scrunching up his face in pre-apology. He has no ID. He isn't sure he's ever had ID. He's not wholly sure his name's actually Jepharee Howard, but that's what Gramma called him and that's what he's sticking with until someone gives him a better name. And he has no fucking ID.

Jepha grimaces. "I don't-"

"Didn't think so," said the cop, and something silver flashes in his hands. "Turn around."

Jepha's heard Bert and Quinn yell often enough now to know the words: This isn't fair, fuck you, I haven't done anything, get off me, you asshole, fuck you, fuck you, fuck you. But they're stuck in the back of his throat and his arms and legs won't move.

He barely feels his head bounce off the hood of the car.

"When an officer of the law asks you to turn around, you fucking turn around," the cop grunts. There's a click. Jepha feels something cold and metal and hard around his wrists and the world quits being solid right there and then.

"Stand up," the cop barks, exasperated, not angry.

He can't stand up … he can't move. He can't think … he's not sure he can see.

"The fuck?" the cop adds. Jepha's faintly aware that his leg his shaking. His fingers twist up around each other in claws. He can't move … he can't breathe.

He registers but does not understand: Quinn and Bert are standing in the doorway of the arcade, staring. They're not moving. He's not moving. Nothing can move, and his muscles disintegrate further into mush as he slides down the side of the car and pools on the floor. He can't breathe and he can't move. He can't breathe and he can't move.

Jepha tries to kick but his legs won't obey him.

He's not sure how he knows Quinn jolts on the spot; he knows Bert holds him back, but most of what he knows is that he can't move and he can't breathe and his hands are caught in steel bracelets and there's a cop frowning at him.

He tries to say, please take them off but he can't move his lips.

"Hey," Bert's voice in the fractured remains of the universe … a familiar thing … a familiar sting on his face, parking lot dirt. Old fears. Old fears. And he can't move and he can't breathe. "Hey, you need to take those off him."

It's more polite than Jepha's ever heard Bert talk.

"Uh-huh, you think I'm going to -"

Bert's voice is breathless and closer. "Yeah, whatever, but he's epileptic, dude, and if he has a seizure right now he's going to break his fucking arms against those."

Jepha can't move … what Bert's saying isn't true. He thinks. It probably isn't true.

"You have his medication?" the cop sounds worried and suspicious. Jepha can't breathe but he hasn't passed out yet so he must be fucking breathing but he feels like his lungs are made of wood. He can't move his legs or his arms. No one is touching him at all but he feels like something's trying to bust out of his chest. No one is touching him at all. No one.

Quinn's voice … red and heavy with unspoken fuck yous … thick with unspat spit … all fenced in … "Oh yeah, we can fucking afford medication. Sure."

Bert says, "Just take them off. He's not going anywhere."

"Are you telling me how to do my job?"

Jepha can't breathe. Everything is falling apart. He is falling apart.

"Jesus Christ," Bert says, sounding ten years older than he is. "I'm telling you how to keep your fffff-your job. What the hell happens if he dies when you have him in cuffs, d'you think about that?" Jepha's legs are shaking and the floor is the whole world and there fucking fucking fucking fucking handcuffs on his wrists.

Please Jepha says, but nothing comes out. His lips won't move.

"Okay, okay." There's a click. Jepha's on his back. They're off his wrists.

But now the shaking won't stop and he's … coming … apart. There's nothing between him and the air. He has no skin. Everything is gone. Jepha's gone.

"Is he gonna … like … right now?"

And then there's a small warm body stretched out over the top of his, pushing him into the dirt. There are hands holding his arms over his chest like he's a body in a box, crushing them under someone else's weight, and he can't quite find his head or his tongue but he knows when hair tickles his face that Bert's lying on him like a blanket.

Bert's nose hits his nose.

That's where his nose is. On his face, right there under Bert's face.

"Can't really tell," Bert mutters. The words say can't really tell, the tone says fuck off now. "Wanna risk it?"

A decision is reached and there's a shuffle. "You want to get the fuck out of here by the time I get back from getting coffee."

"Yessir," Bert grunts. There's no way in hell he could trust Quinn to say that.

Bert's body is an umbrella … a blanket … an answer to a question Jepha can't phrase. Car pulls away. Engine disappears. Jepha feels the dirt under his hips, the night on his face, his own tongue an oyster in his mouth.

"FUCKING SHIT-BREATHING MOTHERFUCKER WHORE-RAPING TURD-LICKER," Bert shrieks. He's been holding that one in; Jepha could feel it through his ribs. Vibrating in there. It's loud enough to make ears bleed and he knows Bert's even turned his head to keep it from draining into Jepha's mouth.

Quinn kicks him in the side. Very, very hard.

"Get the fuck up, fuck-up," Quinn snarls.

"I can't." But he can speak. The words just come to his mouth. It's such a relief to find them again that he wants to cry. It's such a relief that Bert's flattened him to the ground and Quinn's kicking him again in an ecstasy of very restrained irritation that he wants to fucking cry.

He's never been good at figuring out how to do that, either.

His legs are still shaking in their skin when Bert crawls off him and cradles his head like a kitten in his lap. "Quit kicking him, Quinn, unless you're going to fucking blow him."

Bert's face looks freaky upside-down and this close, bright eyes like skinned grapes hiding in a tent of unwashed hair, looking down into Jepha's open mouth. He gets a mouthful of spit drooled into his throat and merely swallows. From Bert's mouth to his … there's phlegm in it. Jepha feels special.

When Bert sits up enough Jepha can see again, Quinn's throwing stones at car windows. This will not end well. "Fucking crazy fucked up fucking fucker," grinds out from between his teeth.

Bert pinches Jepha in the neck. "Scream."

But he doesn't know how.

He doesn't remember meeting Dan.

And he feels so fucking cheated.

Once, Dan nearly managed to get his foot so far in it that his fucking hips disappeared … whatever 'it' is when a foot gets put in it … right over his head. Offered to jerk Quinn off, though not in so many words; still new enough not to know what the fuck he was doing. Something Jepha'd done, before he realised that would just make Quinn hate him for-fucking-ever.

They were in a house with bedrooms Jepha hadn't seen because Quinn had kicked him down the stairs when he tried to go up there.

"Bad dog."

Jepha, panting and scraped raw in a heap.

"You won't fucking like it."

They smoked up and smoked up and smoked some more … a groaning greening smoke cloud … all the windows taped up and carded over … and an itch on his lungs.

Bert sang a song about kids being snatched up from their homes and stuffed in vans and fucked in the ass; Quinn, stoned and slipping down Dan's leg like a miracle in green … Quinn soft and blurred … Quinn out of focus enough to allow a hand on his head, a broken-nailed thumb stroking his ear … Quinn was shouting about cannibals and baby-rapists until Bert picked them up and put them in song. Then midget porn stars and children eating their own shit. Bert played invisible piano in the smoke, his hair lumpy behind his ears. Quinn yelled about setting fire to preschools. Bert put it in the song. Quinn demanded that there be a line about … about … about … about sledgehammers (why, Jepha never found out, but Bert stopped singing for nearly ten minutes because he was laughing so hard and cussing Quinn's mom in exuberant, coughing whoops). Bert finally got it into the song. Quinn barked about sandpapering cop balls.

Bert was singing about sandblasting testicles when Dan joined in. Flipped some jokes about the size of cop balls. About the house they were in being a rape dump.

"A fucking what?" Bert stopped singing and started laughing again.

"MY FUCKING SONG," Quinn yelled in dismay.

"A rape dump. It's where they dump teenagers before they skullfuck them," Dan said knowledgeably, twirling an invisible moustache until Jepha though he was about to choke to death fucking laughing. "That's probably what the handcuffs on the bed are-"

"MY FUCKING SONG, YOU ASSHOLE," Quinn complained, making a syrupy motion with his leg that would probably have been a lightning-fast knee-breaking kick if he wasn't complete and totally and utterly fucking out of it.

Jepha's mouth said, "Stop it.," in Dan's direction.

Bert was singing about rape dumps now, only they were something involving refrigerators and rats and buttfucking and Quinn's mom and the song didn't rhyme.

Dan looked at Jepha for a long time, his hand frozen over Quinn's head, not quite touching his hair any more. Then he looked at the floor, and put the smoke in Quinn's mouth with his long, strong fingers.

Three fucking weeks go past before Jepha figures out the right words to say thank you and even then he's not sure:

Dan's stealing pretzels and they're on the road again … moving like sand in the wind … Bert's plan a silent unshared shadow … Jepha drops the magazine he's trying to decipher (all the words make sense, the reason for writing an article about growing carrots completely eludes him) and says, "You stopped," and sounds like he's starting a fight. Fuck.

"Yeah."

"Why?" He still sounds like he's fighting and that's all wrong. He wants to say thank you. This speaking with words business is stupid and complicated and keeps going fucking wrong. Jepha's sure he's scowling now, scowling in horrible frustrated concentration.

"You asked me to," Dan says, like it's the simplest and most logical thing in the word. Like everyone would just stop if he asked them to. Like the world would … stop and let him catch up. Like every fist and chain and handcuff … would just stop.

Jepha's staring like his eyes will dry out.

He grabs Dan's hand by the thumb and drags it unresisting to his clavicle (he's broken it, he remembers the names of the things that hurt) … spreads those fingers out like a bone fan … pulls them around his throat … over the colours of his skin … and can't choke off another smile as they tighten immediately like a collar.

Dan's got him all figured out after all.

But Jepha says it anyway just in case. "Yours."

Dan's eyebrow vanishes into his hair. "Oh really?"

Jepha holds up his hands, wrists pressed together, hands apart, a mime for tied up that needs no explanation. "Really."

"Really." Dan parrots, smirking at him. He's throwing pretzels lazily back onto the floor with his other hand. "I wonder if there's a magic word to make you walk backwards to the bathroom."

"Backwards?" Jepha asks, trying not to put his hands in his pockets for fear of getting too close to his balls.

"I'm not letting go."

Jepha nearly falls to his knees right there, but the bathroom is not far. Not far. Bert and Quinn are being assholes in their own specific ways, fucking up the store and stealing shit they neither need nor want, Bert trying to hit Quinn with airborne candy and failing as always, Quinn having more success at spitting down missiles in mid-air.

The bathroom is tiny and cramped and has a polite notice on the door declaiming that it is for staff only, and Dan shoves Jepha so hard against the hand-basin that the basin wobbles. And his back aches.

"I only have one hand so you're going to have to get yourself out of those pants," Dan says in a low and almost even voice, his thumb repositioning itself over Jepha's windpipe … Jepha's hips make a sweep towards Dan … little jerks … unconscious movement. "Well, get on with it before I change my mind, can't you?"

Jepha can't help snorting as he fumbles his fuck-tight jeans away from his crotch and tries to wriggle.

"No really," Dan says seriously, "I think Bert and Quinn might actually succeed in making someone explode with rage in a minute and I want to be there when it happens. And stop groping yourself, that's my job."

There are a lot of things Jepha likes about Dan. Really likes, too, not just Doesn't Object To. Like his shoulders or his hands or the way he wakes up wanting to fuck and doesn't care if Jepha doesn't manage to say a fucking word all day, or his aimless stories or his jokes, the way his huge hands hold Jepha together like a vice, one on either hipbone. The way he wants to keep a finger or a hand on him, even before this exchange. His hands and his voice and his weirdly intent stare that is a different kind of weirdly intent to Bert's seeing into your mind stare or Quinn's figuring out how best to kill you stare.

And.

Honestly.

His dick.

Dan butts him into the basin again. It hits the same spot and Jepha makes a sound he can't identify. His body is a tornado and these moments … compress it. Make it whole. He feels every single atom of Dan's hands on his neck. He feels … every single bit of his body … real. Alive.

His dick, really.

(Bert says: Dan is hung like a fucking mule. A mule that starred in mule-porn.
Quinn says: Will you shut up about his fucking dick.)

Jepha's never seen a mule but he's seen a lot of dick and Dan's pretty much fits in the top ten that he remembers. He braces himself against the basin and gets his legs around Dan's hips, his pants a puddle on the dirty floor.

There's a moment where he thinks Dan's going to do something stupid like brush the hair off his forehead but … he snatches Jepha's bangs and jerks his head back instead. And then there's another moment … and another … and the bathroom is moving through time with him inside it.

And then … he's stretched into shape … Dan's inside him and Jepha's clinging like a creeping vine, his legs and arms … his head back … Dan's inside him. There aren't words. He's … all there. All together and Dan's inside him.

"Oh god is there no end to your constant talk talk talk talk talk," Dan grunts, and Jepha realises he has, in fact, been letting little fragments of spineless sounds drool out of his mouth along with choking breaths.

Dan claps his hand over Jepha's mouth and pushes harder and Jepha throws his head back again, hard enough to make his skull crack against the wall and hard enough to make Dan close his hand tighter, tighter on Jepha's hip.

"If that's some sort of comment about my technique," Dan whispers, his voice thick as clotted blood and his fingers flexing on Jepha's cheek, "you’re a douchebag." He presses his hand into Jepha's teeth and his dick … his dick into Jepha …Jepha's ankles knot around him. "Unless it's a good comment," Dan adds in a thoughtful whisper, like he isn't … his voice is muffled by lower lip. "But if you knock yourself unconscious I'm taking it as a cri-cri-ticism-"

Jepha's thighs burn.

"Fuck," Dan adds. His hand … which was dry … is now slithery with sweat on Jepha's mouth. "Ffffuck," Dan repeats, his fingers digging into the flesh around Jepha's hip like blunt bone knives, biting his body, bruising him, holding him together.

Jepha holds onto the rim of the basin and tries not to smack his head against the wall.

His thighs are on fire and his body is a thunderstorm in a glass jar. Dan's inside him, his hand holding Jepha's words into his body so they can't escape and the … really … fucked up … thing here is that if Jepha … asks him…

If Jepha asks him…

If he asks.

Dan will stop.

NEXT