(no subject)
Eh. I've tinkered with this all morning. It's been sitting in my work-in-progress folder forever, not going anywhere, with about a million outtakes stored away in other documents, and I think this is as far out of my comfort zone as I'm willing to go with it. I don't really like doing angst in this fandom, it makes me sad.
Title: Interlude
Fandom: Tokio Hotel
Pairing: Tom/OFC
Rating: R
Summary: Afterwards, Tom will wonder how he could let it happen.
Word count: 3500
Warnings: Angsty. And it's got vaguely smutty het (omg the horror!).
Afterwards, Tom will wonder how he could let it happen, how it could all spiral so far out of control. But maybe that’s how these things go; if nothing else, Bill may be right about that.
The difference is that Tom doesn’t like it, not one bit.
The girl is supposed to be nothing but a pair of spectacular, dick-sucking lips, hot and wet and amazing, and it’s not until after she’s gone, leaving him with a smile and her number in his sticky palm, that Tom realizes he never even asked her name and he feels vaguely ashamed of himself, here, at home, when he’s not being a rockstar and she’s not one of his groupies, not really.
He doesn’t need Bill to tell him that this is no way to look at another human being: as a warm, willing body, a set of pleasing lips and holes, but he’s a teenage male and it’s all he can do to be gentle, considerate of her pleasure too when he sees her again, through a haze of liquor and smoke and stroboscope lights a week later, and he inches her underwear down her thighs and himself inside her quivering body next to the trashcans out back, the great anticlimax to all her girlhood fantasies.
There is minimal fuss, and he spares her no more than three words at a time before he shoves his tongue into her mouth, kissing her hard. She’s pliant beneath him, takes what he’ll give and thanks him for it afterwards, and the easy, mellow conversation she makes when they’re done requires barely any attention at all. Lucky: it’s the end of the year and Tom is tired, worn out by the effort of putting on his act every minute of every day. She’s a good girl; she never asks for more than what he’ll offer voluntarily, and so it feels okay to keep coming back for a while, once, twice, more times than Tom cares to count.
It’s Bill who makes things complicated.
Bill allows his brother three weeks of deliberate, merciful ignorance until he remarks, “You keep meeting a particular girl,” carefully, over a late breakfast of coffee, cornflakes and the previous night’s leftover fries, and he leaves it at that, turning to the sink to rinse his mug and bowl in a rare show of patience; and even though Tom is grateful that his brother isn’t prying (yet), there are no secrets between them, never, and he knows that Bill deserves an explanation if Tom’s going to keep sneaking off and leaving Bill behind on their nights out.
He shifts in his seat, uncomfortable. “Uh, yeah.”
“Why?” Bill looks back over his shoulder through a curtain of black hair; his face is half-hidden, and Tom can’t see his eyes, but there’s an undercurrent of anticipation in Bill’s tone that Bill is trying very hard to suppress, and with a sinking feeling, Tom realizes that he shouldn’t have waited, shouldn’t have let Bill’s curiosity build like this, because now he can’t really tell Bill how he actually feels without sounding like a total asshole, and even though Bill already knows Tom can be an asshole, Tom knows Bill is touchy on this particular subject and his twin’s disappointment has always been more than he can bear.
He’s an awful coward, really.
He shrugs a little before he answers, as if he could throw off this bothersome weight. “I like her.” Like her mouth, her cunt, her pretty tits, he thinks, and feels trapped by his own words. “She’s nice,” he says, defiantly, and hopes that it’s actually true.
“Really now?” Bill laughs, delighted. He turns and leans back against the counter, elbows braced on the edge, and grins his cheerful, contagious grin that Tom can’t but return. “Well.” He nods his head sagely. “Told you you’re not immune. It just took the right person.”
“Oh, shut up, Bill, it’s not like that.” Tom pats his pockets, feeling around desperately for his pack of smokes. It’s not like that, but he can’t think of a way to tell Bill that won’t make Bill give him another of those horrible, resigned looks that Tom knows all too well, the look Bill gives him every time he returns to the tour bus flushed and grinning and smelling of sex and cheap, flowery perfume. It’s almost Christmas, they’re home, and Tom just wants to relax and have fun and have his brother be happy too, happy with him.
But things are already getting complicated. Tom can feel it, and he hates complicated.
Bill doesn’t. Bill seems to live and breathe for complexity, controversy, and sometimes, Tom hates that too. Bill huffs. “I’ll never understand why you’re so averse to falling in lo--”
“Shut up!” As if they haven’t had that conversation already, many times over. Tom scowls. “I don’t even know her at all, really.”
But Bill rolls his eyes and stubbornly refuses to understand. “But you keep meeting her,” he insists. “You keep leaving me behind to go off with her. Are you saying there’s no good reason for that?”
Guilt gnaws at Tom’s insides. His face heats up. “No,” he says, defeated by such logic. What else is he supposed to say? A fuck is a fuck, and Tom likes fucking a whole lot, but they live by a strict fraternal code: unwritten, unspoken promises that trump everything else, and Tom should’ve remembered those, all the things that usually matter to him. In time, before Bill could jump to conclusions. But Tom didn’t.
“So she’s special?”
“I suppose.” She must be, after all. Tom clenches his fists. His definition of ‘special’ deviates from Bill’s, he knows, but Bill is already too far gone with his theories to know or care, and it’s frustrating and makes Tom feel like a dirty liar.
Bill’s grin is back. “Aha,” he says, triumphant. “I told you, there’s a special someone out there for everyone, even you,” and Tom knows how badly Bill wants to believe that, how much it means to him to be right in this, and so Tom says nothing to protest.
Perhaps, if Bill thinks that this is it, it’s true. Tom doesn’t know what it’s supposed to feel like, being in love. There are no bells ringing and no choirs singing and he’s not walking, weightless, on fluffy pink clouds. There’s a nice warm tingle at the pit of his stomach when he thinks of her, yes, but he knows that well enough to recognize it for what it really is.
There’s only one true thing inside him to measure his feelings against, and they fall short, as expected. He can’t tell Bill that, he just can’t, not when Bill is so determined to live vicariously, but Tom can’t help but think that he’s used up his quota of true love, and he feels guilty for it and angry for feeling guilty because it’s enough, it should be enough for anyone, and sometimes, in angry moments of frustration, Tom wants to grab Bill and shake him and demand why it’s not enough for him.
But Tom gets it, he does. He hasn’t had any illusions about ‘happily ever after’ since their parents split up, but Bill is clinging all the harder to his dream of a fairytale ending, and Tom can’t take that away from him. Bill still wants to make things better; turn the world right side up again. Tom knows that, and he understands, but he doesn’t see why they should be the ones to fix their parents’ mistakes. It’s asking too much: of Bill, of him, of those nice, naïve girls who follow him at a snap of his fingers, lay their hopes and dreams and innocent desire before him and receive nothing in return.
Life is not fair.
She wears all the right clothes to fit in with the party crowd at the upscale clubs they like to frequent, but she speaks the unmistakable dialect of Hamburg and swears like a sailor to match when the heel of her expensive shoe gets caught between the cobblestones, outside. The vulgarity makes things easier; Tom pulls her along by the elbow, into the shadows along the walls and kisses her, and then her fingers are in his hair, sneaking up under his cap, her nails scratch at his scalp, and Tom moans as lust zigzags through him like an electric current, makes him forget his doubts and every good, honorable thing he meant to do. For a few, precious moments, life is good; and when it’s not anymore, when he comes down from his high to the smell of the wet street and into his sweaty, trembling body, he feels awkward and caught once again and he doesn’t know what to say.
Music drifts up into the quiet street from the dark pit of the club, and he turns and walks away, waiting for her to catch up only when he’s inside, flinching under the hard loud rhythmic beats like he’s been punched in the gut, and it’s too noisy to say anything at all. The air in here is thick and hot, and his body feels sluggish and heavy with tired resignation. His blood refuses to rise to the pulsating rhythm, or to the jolt of the alcohol he tosses back, sharp and burning, from a small, sticky glass. The world spins for a moment, flickering black and blood-red like a roulette wheel behind his eyelids as he tilts back his head to drink, and he sucks in a startled breath, waiting for the inevitable outcome, for the game to end.
It never does.
“May I sit with you for a while?” She’s given up trying to get him to dance, but she’s never been this brazen before. End it now. Now now now! a voice inside his head screams, but her breath is hot in his ear, and the weight of her leaning into him seems to drag him down. He can’t muster the energy to resist.
She totters a little on her damaged heels as he leads her upstairs, where skinny, fashionable people sip expensive drinks; he must’ve been rough with her. He doesn’t feel a thing, but somewhere, at the back of his muddy mind, he remembers with detached clarity how he shoved her up against the rough, crumbling wall, and he supposes that she deserves to be sat down and talked to like a person. He can’t think of a reason not to; not of a good one.
Upstairs, Bill sits in a dark corner, watching the crowd below from under heavy, black eyelids. He turns his head a fraction when they approach, smirking around the sugary rim of his glass, and she gasps quietly when they slide into the booth opposite him. She knows who they are of course, like all of Germany does, but meeting Bill in the flesh still seems to come as a shock to most people, like having his dark, quizzical gaze turned on them gives them a jolt, or maybe it’s that his hair is even bigger in person than it looks in pictures. Tom has tried to imagine meeting Bill for the first time and failed. He cannot, and sometimes, he feels a little sad that he can’t remember the first, electrifying moment he became aware of that oddly striking person that he calls his twin.
But then, he doesn’t want to imagine a time before Bill. Or after.
“Hey,” he gives the expected, unnecessary greeting. He could feel his twin’s eyes on them from the moment they entered the club. “This is my brother, Bill,” he tells his date, feeling awkward and uncomfortable and suddenly wishing to be far away in space and time, back in their old room in their old house, when no one knew them and they knew no one and didn’t want to, either.
But they’re here now, and there is a brief, strangely charged moment of silence. “I love your jacket,” the girl tells Bill then, her voice wavering, sweetly nervous, on the last word, and she couldn’t have done better if Tom had coached her beforehand.
Bill laughs, and that awe-inspiring, black-and-white mask of his slips to reveal his goofy smile. “I love your bag.” His eyes flicker to Tom for a split second, but the connection is too brief to know what he’s really thinking. “You’ve got great taste.”
Things get worse than complicated after that; a tangled web of lies and pretences that is of Tom’s own making but has him entrapped all the same, in sticky-soft marshmallow kisses that make him feel sick, caresses and whispered words that bind her to him, bind him to her.
She’s the first woman (aside from their mom) to ever set foot in their house, their sanctuary; curiously, she looks around and finds the dinner Tom’s cooking about to get burned on the stove.
“Oh, baby,“ she says, amused, and presses a small, light kiss to the corner of his mouth. Her eyes twinkle as she twists her long hair back and sets about fixing the mess he’s made of their dinner. Afterwards, she makes him help her do the dishes before she allows him to do her, right there on the kitchen table, and the soapy citrus smell that clings to her hands as she strokes his cheeks is more homey than Tom can stand.
“So good,” she murmurs when he’s above her, inside her, digging his fingers into her thighs until his nails leave crescent marks and she should scream in pain, “So good, oh, you’re so good, don’t stop.”
At night, he locks himself in the bathroom, sits on the floor, heated skin pressed against the cold tiles, and goes over it in his mind: the things he said, the things she might have heard, the point where he allowed her to claim him. He never did, not in so many words, but she takes his kisses for promises and wears the bruises of the hard, ruthless touch that is supposed to drive her away like badges of pride, and Tom can’t think of a thing he could do. Not without asking Bill for help, not without making Bill hate him for hating something so good and sweet, something that Bill yearns to have and can’t find for himself, so at least Tom must have it and be happy. He isn’t; he’s stuck, wretched and desperate and unable to make her let go without a fight, and Tom can’t fight her; he may be an asshole, but not that kind.
It’s a bubble that they live in for while, a few weeks of fake domestic bliss that feel surreal against the backdrop of their usual hectic lifestyle. Suddenly, there’s dinners instead of sex, evenings spent on the couch watching movies, and tender moments when she is beneath him, panting in the darkness, and reaches out to touch him with all the wonder and awe of the faithful gazing upon an angel.
Instinctively, Tom shrinks away, and watches hurt flash in her eyes with sick elation. He doesn’t want this, never did, never said he did, and he has no use for affectionate touches, not from her. Still, his own callousness eats at him when she serves him breakfast in bed the next morning to make up for her imagined mistakes, and he can’t feel anything but contempt, for her and him and what this thing has become.
Bill, for one, adores her, and shows his approval by disappearing for days at a time so Tom and his girlfriend can be alone, together. It worries her to no end: “I think your brother hates me,“ and Tom gives a cruel, noncommittal noise that makes her bite her lip and duck her head to hide the wetness in her eyes.
He hates himself for the sick flutter of dark hope inside his chest, hates her for clinging to him all the harder, hates Bill for not making this easy. If Bill could only dislike her, just a little, it’d spare Tom all the guilt and awkwardness: Tom would break up with her, simple as that, because there are rules, and things would be all right again. But Bill doesn’t, and so Tom has to endure his brother’s absences as well as Bill’s pep talk when they happen to be together for once, and it’s like they’re never alone anymore, never them. There’s something between them always, someone sweet and wonderful and completely, utterly unneeded. As weeks turn into a month, it drives him near out of his mind.
Tom doesn’t understand how he can be the only one who sees it; how both his brother and his girlfriend can be so preoccupied with how things should be that they can’t see them for what they are, and he’s so tired of being the only one who doesn’t exist in a dreamland of fluffy clouds and hearts and happiness. It’s fake, and it offends his sense of what love really should be all about, and he wants to shake them both so they’ll wake up already.
Especially Bill.
It’s a long time coming, but when Tom finally reaches his breaking point, it’s still with sudden, gut-wrenching shock. Three little words, whispered sweetly into the night, that carry with them all her hopes for the new year, and panic surges up inside him like bile. He spits out a response, viciously, watches her face crumple with sickening satisfaction, and twists the knife deeper with all his pent-up scorn so there can be no mistake, so the hurt can’t ever give way to denial or rationalization. A part of him, nagging incessantly, yells at him to stop, to let her down gently because she doesn’t deserve this cruelty, but he’s too scared of fanning the flames of a hope that just won’t die. He can’t; that would be truly hurtful.
She waits him out, flinching under every harsh word like he’s slicing her up, her beautiful body bending under the attack like a willow to a harsh winter breeze. Her porcelain face, all sweetness still in agony, seems to splinter into shards: black tears trickle down her cheeks, her pink mouth wobbles with the force of her suppressed sobs, and nothing is left of the perfect doll’s features that first drew his attention: he has destroyed her, thoroughly, and when she staggers out, clutching her head in her hands, he wonders with distant concern how far her shaky legs will carry her.
Far enough, he hopes.
Alone, he stands in the empty hall; the weight of her presence fades away with the flowery scent of her perfume, and then, suddenly, he can breathe again. It’s like resurfacing from under black, heavy water, like drawing the first, sweet breath of life, and Tom can’t even feel guilty, because he feels so right.
Alone, he sets out to clean up, clean out.
When Bill returns home from god-knows-where he finds her gone, the house wiped of any trace of her and her number deleted from all the phones, while Tom sits cross-legged on the carpet in the living room, strumming the guitar in his lap, savoring their shared solitude.
“She left?”
“Yup.”
“She’s not coming back, is she?”
“Nope.”
Bill folds up his long limbs to sit beside Tom on the floor. “I’m sorry it didn’t work out,” he murmurs, patting Tom’s shoulder, and, for the moment, Tom is too relieved to be indignant that Bill would think he got dumped, too relieved to care about anything at all, anything but sitting in companionable silence, quiet notes floating on the air and Bill’s hand warm on his shoulder.
“Don’t be, I’m not,” he says then.
Bill sighs. “I was hoping--”
“Yeah, I know.” Tom snorts out a laugh. It seems almost funny, now that it’s over. “Give up, it’s not gonna happen.”
“Is too,” Bill insists wearily, because that’s what he has to say, this is the role he plays, whether he still feels it or not, and Tom feels the pain trickle through the cracks of his composure then, albeit not for what he has lost. Never that.
He swallows hard. “Maybe for you,” he offers, and right then, he really does hope that it will, no matter how much it might hurt, no matter how much the words alone can burn his mouth and make him taste ashes.
“Maybe.” Bill smiles tiredly and nudges Tom’s shoulder with his own. “Hey. It’s midnight.”
It is; the sound of bells picks up somewhere in the distance. Outside the window, fireworks hiss and sputter in the cold air and explode in a shower of sparks, reds and greens and blues, and together, they sit in their dark house and watch as the world spins on in jubilation, towards another new beginning.
“I guess we can go on vacation now after all,” Bill says thoughtfully, “You and me, just like always.”
“Yeah,” Tom murmurs. “Always.”
For now, it doesn’t matter who is right and who is wrong and if fate will teach them both a lesson in the end. It’s a new year, and they’ve begun it together. Chances are that’s how they’ll end it, too.
Title: Interlude
Fandom: Tokio Hotel
Pairing: Tom/OFC
Rating: R
Summary: Afterwards, Tom will wonder how he could let it happen.
Word count: 3500
Warnings: Angsty. And it's got vaguely smutty het (omg the horror!).
Afterwards, Tom will wonder how he could let it happen, how it could all spiral so far out of control. But maybe that’s how these things go; if nothing else, Bill may be right about that.
The difference is that Tom doesn’t like it, not one bit.
The girl is supposed to be nothing but a pair of spectacular, dick-sucking lips, hot and wet and amazing, and it’s not until after she’s gone, leaving him with a smile and her number in his sticky palm, that Tom realizes he never even asked her name and he feels vaguely ashamed of himself, here, at home, when he’s not being a rockstar and she’s not one of his groupies, not really.
He doesn’t need Bill to tell him that this is no way to look at another human being: as a warm, willing body, a set of pleasing lips and holes, but he’s a teenage male and it’s all he can do to be gentle, considerate of her pleasure too when he sees her again, through a haze of liquor and smoke and stroboscope lights a week later, and he inches her underwear down her thighs and himself inside her quivering body next to the trashcans out back, the great anticlimax to all her girlhood fantasies.
There is minimal fuss, and he spares her no more than three words at a time before he shoves his tongue into her mouth, kissing her hard. She’s pliant beneath him, takes what he’ll give and thanks him for it afterwards, and the easy, mellow conversation she makes when they’re done requires barely any attention at all. Lucky: it’s the end of the year and Tom is tired, worn out by the effort of putting on his act every minute of every day. She’s a good girl; she never asks for more than what he’ll offer voluntarily, and so it feels okay to keep coming back for a while, once, twice, more times than Tom cares to count.
It’s Bill who makes things complicated.
Bill allows his brother three weeks of deliberate, merciful ignorance until he remarks, “You keep meeting a particular girl,” carefully, over a late breakfast of coffee, cornflakes and the previous night’s leftover fries, and he leaves it at that, turning to the sink to rinse his mug and bowl in a rare show of patience; and even though Tom is grateful that his brother isn’t prying (yet), there are no secrets between them, never, and he knows that Bill deserves an explanation if Tom’s going to keep sneaking off and leaving Bill behind on their nights out.
He shifts in his seat, uncomfortable. “Uh, yeah.”
“Why?” Bill looks back over his shoulder through a curtain of black hair; his face is half-hidden, and Tom can’t see his eyes, but there’s an undercurrent of anticipation in Bill’s tone that Bill is trying very hard to suppress, and with a sinking feeling, Tom realizes that he shouldn’t have waited, shouldn’t have let Bill’s curiosity build like this, because now he can’t really tell Bill how he actually feels without sounding like a total asshole, and even though Bill already knows Tom can be an asshole, Tom knows Bill is touchy on this particular subject and his twin’s disappointment has always been more than he can bear.
He’s an awful coward, really.
He shrugs a little before he answers, as if he could throw off this bothersome weight. “I like her.” Like her mouth, her cunt, her pretty tits, he thinks, and feels trapped by his own words. “She’s nice,” he says, defiantly, and hopes that it’s actually true.
“Really now?” Bill laughs, delighted. He turns and leans back against the counter, elbows braced on the edge, and grins his cheerful, contagious grin that Tom can’t but return. “Well.” He nods his head sagely. “Told you you’re not immune. It just took the right person.”
“Oh, shut up, Bill, it’s not like that.” Tom pats his pockets, feeling around desperately for his pack of smokes. It’s not like that, but he can’t think of a way to tell Bill that won’t make Bill give him another of those horrible, resigned looks that Tom knows all too well, the look Bill gives him every time he returns to the tour bus flushed and grinning and smelling of sex and cheap, flowery perfume. It’s almost Christmas, they’re home, and Tom just wants to relax and have fun and have his brother be happy too, happy with him.
But things are already getting complicated. Tom can feel it, and he hates complicated.
Bill doesn’t. Bill seems to live and breathe for complexity, controversy, and sometimes, Tom hates that too. Bill huffs. “I’ll never understand why you’re so averse to falling in lo--”
“Shut up!” As if they haven’t had that conversation already, many times over. Tom scowls. “I don’t even know her at all, really.”
But Bill rolls his eyes and stubbornly refuses to understand. “But you keep meeting her,” he insists. “You keep leaving me behind to go off with her. Are you saying there’s no good reason for that?”
Guilt gnaws at Tom’s insides. His face heats up. “No,” he says, defeated by such logic. What else is he supposed to say? A fuck is a fuck, and Tom likes fucking a whole lot, but they live by a strict fraternal code: unwritten, unspoken promises that trump everything else, and Tom should’ve remembered those, all the things that usually matter to him. In time, before Bill could jump to conclusions. But Tom didn’t.
“So she’s special?”
“I suppose.” She must be, after all. Tom clenches his fists. His definition of ‘special’ deviates from Bill’s, he knows, but Bill is already too far gone with his theories to know or care, and it’s frustrating and makes Tom feel like a dirty liar.
Bill’s grin is back. “Aha,” he says, triumphant. “I told you, there’s a special someone out there for everyone, even you,” and Tom knows how badly Bill wants to believe that, how much it means to him to be right in this, and so Tom says nothing to protest.
Perhaps, if Bill thinks that this is it, it’s true. Tom doesn’t know what it’s supposed to feel like, being in love. There are no bells ringing and no choirs singing and he’s not walking, weightless, on fluffy pink clouds. There’s a nice warm tingle at the pit of his stomach when he thinks of her, yes, but he knows that well enough to recognize it for what it really is.
There’s only one true thing inside him to measure his feelings against, and they fall short, as expected. He can’t tell Bill that, he just can’t, not when Bill is so determined to live vicariously, but Tom can’t help but think that he’s used up his quota of true love, and he feels guilty for it and angry for feeling guilty because it’s enough, it should be enough for anyone, and sometimes, in angry moments of frustration, Tom wants to grab Bill and shake him and demand why it’s not enough for him.
But Tom gets it, he does. He hasn’t had any illusions about ‘happily ever after’ since their parents split up, but Bill is clinging all the harder to his dream of a fairytale ending, and Tom can’t take that away from him. Bill still wants to make things better; turn the world right side up again. Tom knows that, and he understands, but he doesn’t see why they should be the ones to fix their parents’ mistakes. It’s asking too much: of Bill, of him, of those nice, naïve girls who follow him at a snap of his fingers, lay their hopes and dreams and innocent desire before him and receive nothing in return.
Life is not fair.
She wears all the right clothes to fit in with the party crowd at the upscale clubs they like to frequent, but she speaks the unmistakable dialect of Hamburg and swears like a sailor to match when the heel of her expensive shoe gets caught between the cobblestones, outside. The vulgarity makes things easier; Tom pulls her along by the elbow, into the shadows along the walls and kisses her, and then her fingers are in his hair, sneaking up under his cap, her nails scratch at his scalp, and Tom moans as lust zigzags through him like an electric current, makes him forget his doubts and every good, honorable thing he meant to do. For a few, precious moments, life is good; and when it’s not anymore, when he comes down from his high to the smell of the wet street and into his sweaty, trembling body, he feels awkward and caught once again and he doesn’t know what to say.
Music drifts up into the quiet street from the dark pit of the club, and he turns and walks away, waiting for her to catch up only when he’s inside, flinching under the hard loud rhythmic beats like he’s been punched in the gut, and it’s too noisy to say anything at all. The air in here is thick and hot, and his body feels sluggish and heavy with tired resignation. His blood refuses to rise to the pulsating rhythm, or to the jolt of the alcohol he tosses back, sharp and burning, from a small, sticky glass. The world spins for a moment, flickering black and blood-red like a roulette wheel behind his eyelids as he tilts back his head to drink, and he sucks in a startled breath, waiting for the inevitable outcome, for the game to end.
It never does.
“May I sit with you for a while?” She’s given up trying to get him to dance, but she’s never been this brazen before. End it now. Now now now! a voice inside his head screams, but her breath is hot in his ear, and the weight of her leaning into him seems to drag him down. He can’t muster the energy to resist.
She totters a little on her damaged heels as he leads her upstairs, where skinny, fashionable people sip expensive drinks; he must’ve been rough with her. He doesn’t feel a thing, but somewhere, at the back of his muddy mind, he remembers with detached clarity how he shoved her up against the rough, crumbling wall, and he supposes that she deserves to be sat down and talked to like a person. He can’t think of a reason not to; not of a good one.
Upstairs, Bill sits in a dark corner, watching the crowd below from under heavy, black eyelids. He turns his head a fraction when they approach, smirking around the sugary rim of his glass, and she gasps quietly when they slide into the booth opposite him. She knows who they are of course, like all of Germany does, but meeting Bill in the flesh still seems to come as a shock to most people, like having his dark, quizzical gaze turned on them gives them a jolt, or maybe it’s that his hair is even bigger in person than it looks in pictures. Tom has tried to imagine meeting Bill for the first time and failed. He cannot, and sometimes, he feels a little sad that he can’t remember the first, electrifying moment he became aware of that oddly striking person that he calls his twin.
But then, he doesn’t want to imagine a time before Bill. Or after.
“Hey,” he gives the expected, unnecessary greeting. He could feel his twin’s eyes on them from the moment they entered the club. “This is my brother, Bill,” he tells his date, feeling awkward and uncomfortable and suddenly wishing to be far away in space and time, back in their old room in their old house, when no one knew them and they knew no one and didn’t want to, either.
But they’re here now, and there is a brief, strangely charged moment of silence. “I love your jacket,” the girl tells Bill then, her voice wavering, sweetly nervous, on the last word, and she couldn’t have done better if Tom had coached her beforehand.
Bill laughs, and that awe-inspiring, black-and-white mask of his slips to reveal his goofy smile. “I love your bag.” His eyes flicker to Tom for a split second, but the connection is too brief to know what he’s really thinking. “You’ve got great taste.”
Things get worse than complicated after that; a tangled web of lies and pretences that is of Tom’s own making but has him entrapped all the same, in sticky-soft marshmallow kisses that make him feel sick, caresses and whispered words that bind her to him, bind him to her.
She’s the first woman (aside from their mom) to ever set foot in their house, their sanctuary; curiously, she looks around and finds the dinner Tom’s cooking about to get burned on the stove.
“Oh, baby,“ she says, amused, and presses a small, light kiss to the corner of his mouth. Her eyes twinkle as she twists her long hair back and sets about fixing the mess he’s made of their dinner. Afterwards, she makes him help her do the dishes before she allows him to do her, right there on the kitchen table, and the soapy citrus smell that clings to her hands as she strokes his cheeks is more homey than Tom can stand.
“So good,” she murmurs when he’s above her, inside her, digging his fingers into her thighs until his nails leave crescent marks and she should scream in pain, “So good, oh, you’re so good, don’t stop.”
At night, he locks himself in the bathroom, sits on the floor, heated skin pressed against the cold tiles, and goes over it in his mind: the things he said, the things she might have heard, the point where he allowed her to claim him. He never did, not in so many words, but she takes his kisses for promises and wears the bruises of the hard, ruthless touch that is supposed to drive her away like badges of pride, and Tom can’t think of a thing he could do. Not without asking Bill for help, not without making Bill hate him for hating something so good and sweet, something that Bill yearns to have and can’t find for himself, so at least Tom must have it and be happy. He isn’t; he’s stuck, wretched and desperate and unable to make her let go without a fight, and Tom can’t fight her; he may be an asshole, but not that kind.
It’s a bubble that they live in for while, a few weeks of fake domestic bliss that feel surreal against the backdrop of their usual hectic lifestyle. Suddenly, there’s dinners instead of sex, evenings spent on the couch watching movies, and tender moments when she is beneath him, panting in the darkness, and reaches out to touch him with all the wonder and awe of the faithful gazing upon an angel.
Instinctively, Tom shrinks away, and watches hurt flash in her eyes with sick elation. He doesn’t want this, never did, never said he did, and he has no use for affectionate touches, not from her. Still, his own callousness eats at him when she serves him breakfast in bed the next morning to make up for her imagined mistakes, and he can’t feel anything but contempt, for her and him and what this thing has become.
Bill, for one, adores her, and shows his approval by disappearing for days at a time so Tom and his girlfriend can be alone, together. It worries her to no end: “I think your brother hates me,“ and Tom gives a cruel, noncommittal noise that makes her bite her lip and duck her head to hide the wetness in her eyes.
He hates himself for the sick flutter of dark hope inside his chest, hates her for clinging to him all the harder, hates Bill for not making this easy. If Bill could only dislike her, just a little, it’d spare Tom all the guilt and awkwardness: Tom would break up with her, simple as that, because there are rules, and things would be all right again. But Bill doesn’t, and so Tom has to endure his brother’s absences as well as Bill’s pep talk when they happen to be together for once, and it’s like they’re never alone anymore, never them. There’s something between them always, someone sweet and wonderful and completely, utterly unneeded. As weeks turn into a month, it drives him near out of his mind.
Tom doesn’t understand how he can be the only one who sees it; how both his brother and his girlfriend can be so preoccupied with how things should be that they can’t see them for what they are, and he’s so tired of being the only one who doesn’t exist in a dreamland of fluffy clouds and hearts and happiness. It’s fake, and it offends his sense of what love really should be all about, and he wants to shake them both so they’ll wake up already.
Especially Bill.
It’s a long time coming, but when Tom finally reaches his breaking point, it’s still with sudden, gut-wrenching shock. Three little words, whispered sweetly into the night, that carry with them all her hopes for the new year, and panic surges up inside him like bile. He spits out a response, viciously, watches her face crumple with sickening satisfaction, and twists the knife deeper with all his pent-up scorn so there can be no mistake, so the hurt can’t ever give way to denial or rationalization. A part of him, nagging incessantly, yells at him to stop, to let her down gently because she doesn’t deserve this cruelty, but he’s too scared of fanning the flames of a hope that just won’t die. He can’t; that would be truly hurtful.
She waits him out, flinching under every harsh word like he’s slicing her up, her beautiful body bending under the attack like a willow to a harsh winter breeze. Her porcelain face, all sweetness still in agony, seems to splinter into shards: black tears trickle down her cheeks, her pink mouth wobbles with the force of her suppressed sobs, and nothing is left of the perfect doll’s features that first drew his attention: he has destroyed her, thoroughly, and when she staggers out, clutching her head in her hands, he wonders with distant concern how far her shaky legs will carry her.
Far enough, he hopes.
Alone, he stands in the empty hall; the weight of her presence fades away with the flowery scent of her perfume, and then, suddenly, he can breathe again. It’s like resurfacing from under black, heavy water, like drawing the first, sweet breath of life, and Tom can’t even feel guilty, because he feels so right.
Alone, he sets out to clean up, clean out.
When Bill returns home from god-knows-where he finds her gone, the house wiped of any trace of her and her number deleted from all the phones, while Tom sits cross-legged on the carpet in the living room, strumming the guitar in his lap, savoring their shared solitude.
“She left?”
“Yup.”
“She’s not coming back, is she?”
“Nope.”
Bill folds up his long limbs to sit beside Tom on the floor. “I’m sorry it didn’t work out,” he murmurs, patting Tom’s shoulder, and, for the moment, Tom is too relieved to be indignant that Bill would think he got dumped, too relieved to care about anything at all, anything but sitting in companionable silence, quiet notes floating on the air and Bill’s hand warm on his shoulder.
“Don’t be, I’m not,” he says then.
Bill sighs. “I was hoping--”
“Yeah, I know.” Tom snorts out a laugh. It seems almost funny, now that it’s over. “Give up, it’s not gonna happen.”
“Is too,” Bill insists wearily, because that’s what he has to say, this is the role he plays, whether he still feels it or not, and Tom feels the pain trickle through the cracks of his composure then, albeit not for what he has lost. Never that.
He swallows hard. “Maybe for you,” he offers, and right then, he really does hope that it will, no matter how much it might hurt, no matter how much the words alone can burn his mouth and make him taste ashes.
“Maybe.” Bill smiles tiredly and nudges Tom’s shoulder with his own. “Hey. It’s midnight.”
It is; the sound of bells picks up somewhere in the distance. Outside the window, fireworks hiss and sputter in the cold air and explode in a shower of sparks, reds and greens and blues, and together, they sit in their dark house and watch as the world spins on in jubilation, towards another new beginning.
“I guess we can go on vacation now after all,” Bill says thoughtfully, “You and me, just like always.”
“Yeah,” Tom murmurs. “Always.”
For now, it doesn’t matter who is right and who is wrong and if fate will teach them both a lesson in the end. It’s a new year, and they’ve begun it together. Chances are that’s how they’ll end it, too.