Before Z-Day
Um, yeah, just started writing and this is what came out, lolz. Sorry for the crap fill xP
When Daryl was a little kid, he was awkward and uncertain, shy even, and he could have turned into one of those more or less invisible kids in the back of the classroom if it hadn’t been for Merle. Merle was big, strong and mean, and he wanted Daryl to be the same as him, so even when Daryl would have preferred to hide he had to step into -and fill- Merle’s shadow, or someone else would have kicked him to the ground and taken that spot for themselves.
He learned quickly that it’s each man for themselves, but brothers fight for each other ’til the end. Unless it’s about a girl, then it’s age before -well, anything. Merle got into lots of fights, so naturally Daryl had to do that too, if not to look good in Merle’s eyes then to defend himself against Merle’s many enemies in and out of school. He ended up in so many fights the principal never bothered to ask him about it, just handed him a new detention slip every time he skulked into the musty old office. Daryl’s father never cared about all the fights he got into, all that old bastard cared about was his smokes and beer.
Oh, and football. Never get between old man Dixon and his football on the half-broken tellie.
When Daryl was eleven he sort-of fancied a girl in his grade, a pretty girl named Rosie with the biggest brown doe eyes and caramel skin. Daryl spent five weeks running errands for different store owners to be able to buy her that pretty bracelet with small glass flowers he saw her staring at through a store window once after school, and he brought it to her wrapped in sparkly pink paper with a yellow bow and a small boquet of wild flowers he’d picked himself.
That night Merle beat the crap out of him, telling Daryl how no Dixon man was to let some sleazy bitch rule their lives and take their money, and most importantly of all; Dixon’s didn’t mix with coloured savages. Daryl wanted to tell Merle that Rosie’s father was a well-respected dentist and that her family had lived in America for several generations so she most definitely wasn’t a savage, but he knew Merle would lose his shit if he did so he just kept quiet.
The next day when Rosie sat down in the bench next to Daryl’s he pulled her hair and called her a name that got him suspended for a week. Merle used to say that name about girls all the time, especially the girls in his own grade and Mrs P, the pretty young math teacher with suncoloured hair and freckles all over her uppity nose. Daryl knew it was a bad name since Merle never said anything good about anything (well, unless it was the death penalty or Aryans or beer or stupid shit like that) but he hadn’t quite expected it to get such a reaction.
Needless to say his father never said a thing about Daryl being home a week other than yelling for him to buy more beer and chips, and Merle just patted Daryl on the back with a proud grin while he slipped him an old skin magazine he’d gotten tired of. Daryl threw it into the back of his closet, but not before he’d peeked in it. One of the girls had freckles all over her nose like Mrs P.
By the time Daryl turned fifteen he’d earned himself a reputation that stood on it’s own, even if he’d always be known as ’Merle Dixon’s crazy-ass kid brother’. He drank and fought with the best of them and knew how to treat a lady - like the whore she was. At the slightest flash of dark skin or slanted eyes he’d be the first to start yelling racial slurs.
And if he still dreamt of dark eyes and caramel skin, and fantasised about taking a pretty girl on a fancy date and hold her hand under the moonlight, well. That was nothing Merle needed to know about.
...
Glenn was a small child, even for a Korean boy. He was the only Asian American kid in school and his parents expected him to get the highest grades possible. According to them, he was to walk in his father’s footsteps and become a doctor. It was as stereotyphical as it could get and as far away from what Glenn wanted with his life as possible. Already when he was six and lugged heavy tomes of books in his backpack while big, square glasses balanced on his small nose he knew that he was giving up his own life for his parents.
He wanted so much, he wanted to dance and sing and become an actor, or perhaps to open his own restaurant or even travel the world, just going from job to job and experiencing new things. The last thing he wanted was to sit still, or to waste away behind heavy books or in bleach white hallways that smelled of looming death.
But Glenn was a good boy who loved his parents, so he quietly carried his books year in and year out, struggling with grades he barely could reach and keeping up the ’perfect son’ facade. He never told about the bullying, or how hard it was to even get out of bed in the morning, never about how often he would look at his mom’s fancy kitchen knives and fantasize about slitting his own wrists with them, blood spilling all over her obsessively clean marble floors.
But when time came to apply for collage the facade finally cracked. After an increasingly stressful week looking over every single pamphlet for fancy colleges his parents brought him he just snapped, throwing a fit and screaming at his parents, letting out everything he’d been bottling up for so many years. The night ended in the hospital after he’d downed half a bottle of sleeping pills.
The psychologist called it a psycothic break, but his parents spent some hours talking it over with her and then it was listed as a ’minor stress-related tantrum’. Some months later he went on to college and the ’incident’ was never spoken about again. But something was broken inside of Glenn, and he just couldn’t be bothered anymore. His grades started slipping and he often skipped class to hang out with his new friends. Maybe he wanted to rebel, to stir up some feelings -anything- from his parents, to convince himself that they still cared, because he never bothered hiding it.
And the day he brought a friend home and let the guy fuck him in his bedroom with his door unlocked they finally payed attention to him again, long enough to disown him and throw him out of the door. It was a stupid thing to do but maybe it was what he needed, to finally get free from the cage he’d been kept in his whole life. He ended up spending a couple of weeks with the male friend -Joshua- before he moved in with Jill and her boyfriend Samael. Jill was a tigress in and out of bed, wild red hair bouncing around her pale face in short curls and piercings just about everywhere she could get them. Samael was big and gentle, a teddy bear who loved to cuddle and pamper his bed partners, his long dreadlocks interspaced with colourful pearls Jill liked to put there. Jill often joked about them being a perfect delicious treat together, Samael the dark chocolate and Glenn the creamy caramel while Jill was the sweet vanilla.
When Jill moved to Australia to pursue a career as a pro surfer Samael went with her, but Glenn decided to stay behind. It was a decision he regretted for a long time after, when he had to move into a tiny shithole of an apartment and get several part-time jobs to try and pay off his debts. Maybe he could have crawled to the cross and begged his parents for forgiveness, but it still hurt too much for him to even consider being the one to apologise.
And then, it was just too late.
When Daryl was a little kid, he was awkward and uncertain, shy even, and he could have turned into one of those more or less invisible kids in the back of the classroom if it hadn’t been for Merle. Merle was big, strong and mean, and he wanted Daryl to be the same as him, so even when Daryl would have preferred to hide he had to step into -and fill- Merle’s shadow, or someone else would have kicked him to the ground and taken that spot for themselves.
He learned quickly that it’s each man for themselves, but brothers fight for each other ’til the end. Unless it’s about a girl, then it’s age before -well, anything. Merle got into lots of fights, so naturally Daryl had to do that too, if not to look good in Merle’s eyes then to defend himself against Merle’s many enemies in and out of school. He ended up in so many fights the principal never bothered to ask him about it, just handed him a new detention slip every time he skulked into the musty old office. Daryl’s father never cared about all the fights he got into, all that old bastard cared about was his smokes and beer.
Oh, and football. Never get between old man Dixon and his football on the half-broken tellie.
When Daryl was eleven he sort-of fancied a girl in his grade, a pretty girl named Rosie with the biggest brown doe eyes and caramel skin. Daryl spent five weeks running errands for different store owners to be able to buy her that pretty bracelet with small glass flowers he saw her staring at through a store window once after school, and he brought it to her wrapped in sparkly pink paper with a yellow bow and a small boquet of wild flowers he’d picked himself.
That night Merle beat the crap out of him, telling Daryl how no Dixon man was to let some sleazy bitch rule their lives and take their money, and most importantly of all; Dixon’s didn’t mix with coloured savages. Daryl wanted to tell Merle that Rosie’s father was a well-respected dentist and that her family had lived in America for several generations so she most definitely wasn’t a savage, but he knew Merle would lose his shit if he did so he just kept quiet.
The next day when Rosie sat down in the bench next to Daryl’s he pulled her hair and called her a name that got him suspended for a week. Merle used to say that name about girls all the time, especially the girls in his own grade and Mrs P, the pretty young math teacher with suncoloured hair and freckles all over her uppity nose. Daryl knew it was a bad name since Merle never said anything good about anything (well, unless it was the death penalty or Aryans or beer or stupid shit like that) but he hadn’t quite expected it to get such a reaction.
Needless to say his father never said a thing about Daryl being home a week other than yelling for him to buy more beer and chips, and Merle just patted Daryl on the back with a proud grin while he slipped him an old skin magazine he’d gotten tired of. Daryl threw it into the back of his closet, but not before he’d peeked in it. One of the girls had freckles all over her nose like Mrs P.
By the time Daryl turned fifteen he’d earned himself a reputation that stood on it’s own, even if he’d always be known as ’Merle Dixon’s crazy-ass kid brother’. He drank and fought with the best of them and knew how to treat a lady - like the whore she was. At the slightest flash of dark skin or slanted eyes he’d be the first to start yelling racial slurs.
And if he still dreamt of dark eyes and caramel skin, and fantasised about taking a pretty girl on a fancy date and hold her hand under the moonlight, well. That was nothing Merle needed to know about.
...
Glenn was a small child, even for a Korean boy. He was the only Asian American kid in school and his parents expected him to get the highest grades possible. According to them, he was to walk in his father’s footsteps and become a doctor. It was as stereotyphical as it could get and as far away from what Glenn wanted with his life as possible. Already when he was six and lugged heavy tomes of books in his backpack while big, square glasses balanced on his small nose he knew that he was giving up his own life for his parents.
He wanted so much, he wanted to dance and sing and become an actor, or perhaps to open his own restaurant or even travel the world, just going from job to job and experiencing new things. The last thing he wanted was to sit still, or to waste away behind heavy books or in bleach white hallways that smelled of looming death.
But Glenn was a good boy who loved his parents, so he quietly carried his books year in and year out, struggling with grades he barely could reach and keeping up the ’perfect son’ facade. He never told about the bullying, or how hard it was to even get out of bed in the morning, never about how often he would look at his mom’s fancy kitchen knives and fantasize about slitting his own wrists with them, blood spilling all over her obsessively clean marble floors.
But when time came to apply for collage the facade finally cracked. After an increasingly stressful week looking over every single pamphlet for fancy colleges his parents brought him he just snapped, throwing a fit and screaming at his parents, letting out everything he’d been bottling up for so many years. The night ended in the hospital after he’d downed half a bottle of sleeping pills.
The psychologist called it a psycothic break, but his parents spent some hours talking it over with her and then it was listed as a ’minor stress-related tantrum’. Some months later he went on to college and the ’incident’ was never spoken about again. But something was broken inside of Glenn, and he just couldn’t be bothered anymore. His grades started slipping and he often skipped class to hang out with his new friends. Maybe he wanted to rebel, to stir up some feelings -anything- from his parents, to convince himself that they still cared, because he never bothered hiding it.
And the day he brought a friend home and let the guy fuck him in his bedroom with his door unlocked they finally payed attention to him again, long enough to disown him and throw him out of the door. It was a stupid thing to do but maybe it was what he needed, to finally get free from the cage he’d been kept in his whole life. He ended up spending a couple of weeks with the male friend -Joshua- before he moved in with Jill and her boyfriend Samael. Jill was a tigress in and out of bed, wild red hair bouncing around her pale face in short curls and piercings just about everywhere she could get them. Samael was big and gentle, a teddy bear who loved to cuddle and pamper his bed partners, his long dreadlocks interspaced with colourful pearls Jill liked to put there. Jill often joked about them being a perfect delicious treat together, Samael the dark chocolate and Glenn the creamy caramel while Jill was the sweet vanilla.
When Jill moved to Australia to pursue a career as a pro surfer Samael went with her, but Glenn decided to stay behind. It was a decision he regretted for a long time after, when he had to move into a tiny shithole of an apartment and get several part-time jobs to try and pay off his debts. Maybe he could have crawled to the cross and begged his parents for forgiveness, but it still hurt too much for him to even consider being the one to apologise.
And then, it was just too late.