Snake - C/Z, R
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No, this isn't the one I was talking about the other day. That one's still cooking.
Warning: this one gets into a dark place. So be prepared.
Snake
Casey stands at the kitchen window, looking out into the night. The moonlight washes the branches of the oak at the boathouse's door, flickering in the leaves. It pours through the glass, lighting the pale tiles. The moon's face looks down at him, with that expression that he's always wished was gentle concern, as if there were someone watching over him. He knows it's not so, but he wishes it were.
The carpet on the stairs is soft and chill with the late night. Zeke makes his way down, rubbing his face as he steps carefully in the near dark. He woke to find himself alone in his bed, his hand sliding over the empty space, and slipped on his sweats to look for Casey. Now he sighs as he finds him in the kitchen, looking out the window, the light shining over his skin and turning it silver.
"Hey," he says softly. Casey looks over at him, and Zeke stops at the look on his face. The moonlight illuminates his eyes from the side, turning them a strange glittering pale color, not really blue but not anything else, either. There is no smile on his face, and Zeke asks, "What's going on?"
There's a long silence. Casey just stares at him, and Zeke feels it building, though he doesn't know what. He can see Casey's lips pressing together, and there's a slight tremor in his throat, as if he were holding something back, something he doesn't want to let out. Zeke's throat tightens, and he takes a step closer, but Casey steps back. "Hey," he says again, "what is it, buddy? Talk to me." He reaches a hand towards him, but Casey pulls away until he's up against the counter.
"I don't belong to you," he says, and his voice is brittle and tight.
Maybe it's having just woken up, but Zeke doesn't understand what Casey means. "What?" he says in confusion.
"I'm not yours," Casey says with vehemence, and his voice is harder now.
Zeke gets it now, and sighs softly. "Casey," he says. "I never said that."
"No," Casey replies, "no, you didn't, did you? You made me say it." Now his voice is higher, anger making it pointed. "You made me say it," thicker now, and is that a waver of tears? oh, casey... "before you'd…" He closes his eyes, his brow furrowing in pain.
A dart of guilt pierces Zeke's chest. "Casey," he murmurs, drawing closer, "that was just bed talk." He raises his hand to Casey's face but doesn't touch him, not yet, and tries but fails to control the tremor in his voice. "I know you don't belong to me." He lets his fingers touch Casey's cheek, ghosting feather-light over his luminous skin, as Casey looks at him again. God, his eyes. "Baby..." Zeke whispers, the word surprising even himself. He never uses words like that.
Casey erupts in rage, shoving his hands against Zeke and driving him back. "No!" he shouts. "I'm not your baby! I'm not!" His hands become fists he curls into himself, then brings to his head. "I'm not! I don't belong to you!" He starts shaking, and Zeke is really scared now. Casey seems almost as if he's breaking open, cracking and spilling out some awful flood from deep inside, a flood that might consume him. "I belong to me! Not you!" he cries, trembling, "Not you! Not my parents! Not… not…" and he's gasping now, panic hitting him, and Zeke feels a wash of ice flooding his back. His gaze sharpens like a hawk's as he watches him shivering.
"Casey," he says, trying to break through the state Casey's worked himself into. He grabs hold of the pale wrists to bring him close, and Casey almost shrieks, pulling hard and fighting him. Zeke's voice shakes as he asks, "What is it? Tell me, Case," but he thinks he knows, pulling him closer. He lets go of Casey's wrists and winds his arms around the struggling, sweating body.
Casey, shivering, chokes as he tries to speak. "They… they…" and then he can't and he tries to push Zeke away, but Zeke won't let him. He hugs him close, and tries hard to control himself. A dark, poisonous realization is growing in his mind, and his eyes seem to fill with blood to match the rage filling his heart. His arms try to tighten, and the fight to stay gentle is almost impossible for a moment. He feels the shaking and how Casey's voice has lowered into sobs, and when he slides his hand over Casey's jaw to turn his face, how he cries out and jerks his face away. Maggie, Zeke thinks, and then on that thought, not again... He can feel it rising: the jaw-grinding heat, the desire for blood, for murder. He keeps feeling it as he kisses Casey's face, strokes his back and tries to bring him down, to calm him. He looks down at him, at the pain and fear filling his oceanic eyes, and suddenly there's nothing more important than soothing Casey's terror, letting him know I'm here, I'm here, only me, no one else, you're safe, you're safe. He keeps pressing gently, as Casey sobs and then clings to him, his skin feverish and shining in the moonlight. Zeke's heart feels as if it might break as he caresses his lover. He swallows a sob, and his voice trembles on the edge of harshness.
"Tell me who."
He'd called her his kitten. Little Maggie Ziegler, who wasn't really a part of anybody's circle, but who everybody liked anyway. Cheerful and kind, always seeing everyone's good side, she'd been one of the first people he met when he started at Herrington three years ago, and he'd been amused at the way she would blush and duck her head whenever he spoke to her. But then she would look up, a playful glint in her eye, and smile at him. She giggled when he'd first called her Kitten, with none of the smarminess of someone like Marie Chaney or Delilah Profitt, just sweet nervousness. He'd liked her so much.
And then one day during his junior year he'd parked the GTO near the football field after school, intending to take a run as he always did at least twice a week. Getting out, he'd noticed a group of guys he later came to think of as the gorilla squad walking away from the field. Gabe and Eddie were laughing and pushing shoulders, Lucas was swaggering, and Dave...
Dave was buckling his belt.
Zeke had frozen when he saw that. Suspicion dawned, sharp and ugly, and a part of him told him to just get in his car and go. But the biggest part of him was tightening up, tightening up, that certainty forming that he knew what he was seeing. His hands gripped the edge of the car door, and his breath began to blow hard. He kept perfectly still, not moving as they walked across the grass and back towards the school. Then he shut the door and started walking towards the bleachers. Nearly there, he stopped.
A book lay on the ground next to one of the banks of bleachers. Its pages flapped in the breeze, a slip of paper escaping and blowing away across the grass, and the incongruity of its presence had finally filled him with fear. He strode over to the bleachers and, ducking his head, looked underneath.
Casey trudges into school on Monday, exhausted. Zeke brought him home Sunday morning, before his parents got back from Cincinnati. The silence was strained between them, and Zeke didn't speak as Casey moved to get out of the car. But he took Casey's hand for a moment and held it, and Casey squeezed back. Then Zeke drove away, and Casey went into the house to try and find something to do before his mom and dad came home, brimming with the usual cheerful energy they bring back from their outings, and which always makes Casey feel as if he's the reason they aren't happy all the time.
Now he walks into the main building at school, somehow managing to make it to the door without anybody fucking with him. Rare, but not unheard of. The jocks must have their hands full this morning. He goes through his usual ritual of stowing books, pulling out needed supplies, etc. Closing his locker, he walks off to his first class, English Lit.
As he rounds the corner, he sees a couple of the jocks lounging against their lockers. Meat McIvey and Dave Andrews. Casey startles and backs off, moving to put other students between himself and them, intending to turn around and take the other stairway down the hall, when he sees Zeke enter the building through the east door. As he walks down the hall, nodding hi to a couple of people, he looks up and sees them. Oh, fuck, Casey thinks as Zeke's face hardens. He ducks behind another student so he won't be seen, but watches as Zeke quickens his pace, nearly at a run when he grabs Dave by the collar, pulls him up and slams him against the lockers.
"What the FUCK?" Dave yells as Zeke grips him by the throat. "What the fuck is your problem, Tyler?" McIvey tries to muscle up close, but Zeke stops him with one finger pointed at him - Back the fuck off, I'll deal with you later.
Zeke's voice is low and harsh, but it carries, and Casey's sure he means it to carry to all the kids around them right now. "Did you think I'd forgotten, motherfucker?" he rasps, and his hand tightens. He pulls him back and slams him against the metal again. "Did you? Newsflash, you fucking maggot: I haven't forgotten. I will never forget, and you can double that now." Dave tries to pry Zeke's hand from his neck, but succeeds only in getting a knee shoved into his groin, as Zeke continues rasping his threats. "I swear to God, if I ever hear you've so much as cupped your balls at another student, I will jam my fist up your ass and pull your fucking guts out through the hole. Do you understand me?" Dave sputters and grips his arm, not answering. Zeke slams him back again. "Do you?"
Dave gasps, "All right, yeah, I get it, all right asshole, let me go, fucker!" Zeke does it again, slower, slam, gives him one last squeeze to choke his air off for a second, then lets go.
"Tell your playmates, motherfucker," he says as Dave bends, coughing and gasping, over his aching groin. Zeke sneers at him in contempt. "You're a fucking animal, and if there was any justice, somebody'd put you down like a rabid dog," he says, and Dave glares up at the implicit threat. Zeke turns, leaving the bastard to writhe in pain, and as he walks away, he sees Casey staring at him, eyes wide with horror. The boy ducks his head and darts away, leaving Zeke to realize with growing foreboding just how badly he's fucked up.
She'd been half lying on the ground in the gloom, pushing herself to try and sit up. Her skirt was ripped and hiked up to her waist on one side, and Zeke bit his lip when he saw the bruises and scratches on her naked back and arms. He could hear her breath shaking and her quiet sobs as she tried to find her blouse. He approached slowly, not wanting to startle her, so she didn't see him until he whispered her name. "Maggie."
At the sound of his voice, she'd cried out and cowered, covering her head. When she saw who it was, she'd started crying in earnest and wouldn't look at him, and the sight of her bruised mouth and panicked eyes nearly broke Zeke's heart. He'd gone back to the car and gotten a blanket, but she'd scuttled back away from him when he tried to come close. It took a while to calm her down, and he'd finally had to put the blanket on the ground and step away to let her wrap herself in it. When he tried to get her to come back to the nurse's office with him, she'd wept even harder and begged him not to tell anyone. At last he'd convinced her to let him take her to a small clinic nearby, where they didn't know her. He'd done what she asked. He didn't tell anyone. He tried to be around for her, but she never approached him. She also never smiled again.
Three weeks later she was dead, hung by a knotted sheet in the stairwell of her home, and the whole school convulsed in mourning. Nobody could figure out what had happened, why someone as happy and kind as Maggie would do such a thing.
Except Zeke. He knew. The very day Maggie's suicide was announced to the school, he'd gone to Principal Drake and told her everything. And the bitch had looked at him with her frosty eyes and wondered aloud why he hadn't come to her before. Then came some cold bullshit about "your word against the word of our star athletes", and Zeke had never felt so much hate in his life. He'd looked at her tightly pressed lips and hard eyes, and in that moment he wanted nothing so much as to put a bullet through her brain. That was the first time he'd been marked as a troublemaker, but it wouldn't be the last.
Zeke sits in Biology class, waiting for Miss Drake to come get him and slap another suspension on him. It means nothing next to the satisfaction of seeing Dave doubled up in pain like the fucking piece of shit he is. Zeke's jaw is tight, but inside he's warm with the feeling of a threat well delivered. I'll get you someday, you fucker, he thinks. He watches Casey at his bench a couple of rows up, back resolutely turned to him, and his throat tightens. He swallows, feeling a pang of regret for the fright he'd given him. He looks down at the book he doesn't need to read, and knows something's been lost. He just hopes it isn't everything.
Chapter 36 of High Contrast
Chapter 37
No, this isn't the one I was talking about the other day. That one's still cooking.
Warning: this one gets into a dark place. So be prepared.
Snake
Casey stands at the kitchen window, looking out into the night. The moonlight washes the branches of the oak at the boathouse's door, flickering in the leaves. It pours through the glass, lighting the pale tiles. The moon's face looks down at him, with that expression that he's always wished was gentle concern, as if there were someone watching over him. He knows it's not so, but he wishes it were.
The carpet on the stairs is soft and chill with the late night. Zeke makes his way down, rubbing his face as he steps carefully in the near dark. He woke to find himself alone in his bed, his hand sliding over the empty space, and slipped on his sweats to look for Casey. Now he sighs as he finds him in the kitchen, looking out the window, the light shining over his skin and turning it silver.
"Hey," he says softly. Casey looks over at him, and Zeke stops at the look on his face. The moonlight illuminates his eyes from the side, turning them a strange glittering pale color, not really blue but not anything else, either. There is no smile on his face, and Zeke asks, "What's going on?"
There's a long silence. Casey just stares at him, and Zeke feels it building, though he doesn't know what. He can see Casey's lips pressing together, and there's a slight tremor in his throat, as if he were holding something back, something he doesn't want to let out. Zeke's throat tightens, and he takes a step closer, but Casey steps back. "Hey," he says again, "what is it, buddy? Talk to me." He reaches a hand towards him, but Casey pulls away until he's up against the counter.
"I don't belong to you," he says, and his voice is brittle and tight.
Maybe it's having just woken up, but Zeke doesn't understand what Casey means. "What?" he says in confusion.
"I'm not yours," Casey says with vehemence, and his voice is harder now.
Zeke gets it now, and sighs softly. "Casey," he says. "I never said that."
"No," Casey replies, "no, you didn't, did you? You made me say it." Now his voice is higher, anger making it pointed. "You made me say it," thicker now, and is that a waver of tears? oh, casey... "before you'd…" He closes his eyes, his brow furrowing in pain.
A dart of guilt pierces Zeke's chest. "Casey," he murmurs, drawing closer, "that was just bed talk." He raises his hand to Casey's face but doesn't touch him, not yet, and tries but fails to control the tremor in his voice. "I know you don't belong to me." He lets his fingers touch Casey's cheek, ghosting feather-light over his luminous skin, as Casey looks at him again. God, his eyes. "Baby..." Zeke whispers, the word surprising even himself. He never uses words like that.
Casey erupts in rage, shoving his hands against Zeke and driving him back. "No!" he shouts. "I'm not your baby! I'm not!" His hands become fists he curls into himself, then brings to his head. "I'm not! I don't belong to you!" He starts shaking, and Zeke is really scared now. Casey seems almost as if he's breaking open, cracking and spilling out some awful flood from deep inside, a flood that might consume him. "I belong to me! Not you!" he cries, trembling, "Not you! Not my parents! Not… not…" and he's gasping now, panic hitting him, and Zeke feels a wash of ice flooding his back. His gaze sharpens like a hawk's as he watches him shivering.
"Casey," he says, trying to break through the state Casey's worked himself into. He grabs hold of the pale wrists to bring him close, and Casey almost shrieks, pulling hard and fighting him. Zeke's voice shakes as he asks, "What is it? Tell me, Case," but he thinks he knows, pulling him closer. He lets go of Casey's wrists and winds his arms around the struggling, sweating body.
Casey, shivering, chokes as he tries to speak. "They… they…" and then he can't and he tries to push Zeke away, but Zeke won't let him. He hugs him close, and tries hard to control himself. A dark, poisonous realization is growing in his mind, and his eyes seem to fill with blood to match the rage filling his heart. His arms try to tighten, and the fight to stay gentle is almost impossible for a moment. He feels the shaking and how Casey's voice has lowered into sobs, and when he slides his hand over Casey's jaw to turn his face, how he cries out and jerks his face away. Maggie, Zeke thinks, and then on that thought, not again... He can feel it rising: the jaw-grinding heat, the desire for blood, for murder. He keeps feeling it as he kisses Casey's face, strokes his back and tries to bring him down, to calm him. He looks down at him, at the pain and fear filling his oceanic eyes, and suddenly there's nothing more important than soothing Casey's terror, letting him know I'm here, I'm here, only me, no one else, you're safe, you're safe. He keeps pressing gently, as Casey sobs and then clings to him, his skin feverish and shining in the moonlight. Zeke's heart feels as if it might break as he caresses his lover. He swallows a sob, and his voice trembles on the edge of harshness.
"Tell me who."
He'd called her his kitten. Little Maggie Ziegler, who wasn't really a part of anybody's circle, but who everybody liked anyway. Cheerful and kind, always seeing everyone's good side, she'd been one of the first people he met when he started at Herrington three years ago, and he'd been amused at the way she would blush and duck her head whenever he spoke to her. But then she would look up, a playful glint in her eye, and smile at him. She giggled when he'd first called her Kitten, with none of the smarminess of someone like Marie Chaney or Delilah Profitt, just sweet nervousness. He'd liked her so much.
And then one day during his junior year he'd parked the GTO near the football field after school, intending to take a run as he always did at least twice a week. Getting out, he'd noticed a group of guys he later came to think of as the gorilla squad walking away from the field. Gabe and Eddie were laughing and pushing shoulders, Lucas was swaggering, and Dave...
Dave was buckling his belt.
Zeke had frozen when he saw that. Suspicion dawned, sharp and ugly, and a part of him told him to just get in his car and go. But the biggest part of him was tightening up, tightening up, that certainty forming that he knew what he was seeing. His hands gripped the edge of the car door, and his breath began to blow hard. He kept perfectly still, not moving as they walked across the grass and back towards the school. Then he shut the door and started walking towards the bleachers. Nearly there, he stopped.
A book lay on the ground next to one of the banks of bleachers. Its pages flapped in the breeze, a slip of paper escaping and blowing away across the grass, and the incongruity of its presence had finally filled him with fear. He strode over to the bleachers and, ducking his head, looked underneath.
Casey trudges into school on Monday, exhausted. Zeke brought him home Sunday morning, before his parents got back from Cincinnati. The silence was strained between them, and Zeke didn't speak as Casey moved to get out of the car. But he took Casey's hand for a moment and held it, and Casey squeezed back. Then Zeke drove away, and Casey went into the house to try and find something to do before his mom and dad came home, brimming with the usual cheerful energy they bring back from their outings, and which always makes Casey feel as if he's the reason they aren't happy all the time.
Now he walks into the main building at school, somehow managing to make it to the door without anybody fucking with him. Rare, but not unheard of. The jocks must have their hands full this morning. He goes through his usual ritual of stowing books, pulling out needed supplies, etc. Closing his locker, he walks off to his first class, English Lit.
As he rounds the corner, he sees a couple of the jocks lounging against their lockers. Meat McIvey and Dave Andrews. Casey startles and backs off, moving to put other students between himself and them, intending to turn around and take the other stairway down the hall, when he sees Zeke enter the building through the east door. As he walks down the hall, nodding hi to a couple of people, he looks up and sees them. Oh, fuck, Casey thinks as Zeke's face hardens. He ducks behind another student so he won't be seen, but watches as Zeke quickens his pace, nearly at a run when he grabs Dave by the collar, pulls him up and slams him against the lockers.
"What the FUCK?" Dave yells as Zeke grips him by the throat. "What the fuck is your problem, Tyler?" McIvey tries to muscle up close, but Zeke stops him with one finger pointed at him - Back the fuck off, I'll deal with you later.
Zeke's voice is low and harsh, but it carries, and Casey's sure he means it to carry to all the kids around them right now. "Did you think I'd forgotten, motherfucker?" he rasps, and his hand tightens. He pulls him back and slams him against the metal again. "Did you? Newsflash, you fucking maggot: I haven't forgotten. I will never forget, and you can double that now." Dave tries to pry Zeke's hand from his neck, but succeeds only in getting a knee shoved into his groin, as Zeke continues rasping his threats. "I swear to God, if I ever hear you've so much as cupped your balls at another student, I will jam my fist up your ass and pull your fucking guts out through the hole. Do you understand me?" Dave sputters and grips his arm, not answering. Zeke slams him back again. "Do you?"
Dave gasps, "All right, yeah, I get it, all right asshole, let me go, fucker!" Zeke does it again, slower, slam, gives him one last squeeze to choke his air off for a second, then lets go.
"Tell your playmates, motherfucker," he says as Dave bends, coughing and gasping, over his aching groin. Zeke sneers at him in contempt. "You're a fucking animal, and if there was any justice, somebody'd put you down like a rabid dog," he says, and Dave glares up at the implicit threat. Zeke turns, leaving the bastard to writhe in pain, and as he walks away, he sees Casey staring at him, eyes wide with horror. The boy ducks his head and darts away, leaving Zeke to realize with growing foreboding just how badly he's fucked up.
She'd been half lying on the ground in the gloom, pushing herself to try and sit up. Her skirt was ripped and hiked up to her waist on one side, and Zeke bit his lip when he saw the bruises and scratches on her naked back and arms. He could hear her breath shaking and her quiet sobs as she tried to find her blouse. He approached slowly, not wanting to startle her, so she didn't see him until he whispered her name. "Maggie."
At the sound of his voice, she'd cried out and cowered, covering her head. When she saw who it was, she'd started crying in earnest and wouldn't look at him, and the sight of her bruised mouth and panicked eyes nearly broke Zeke's heart. He'd gone back to the car and gotten a blanket, but she'd scuttled back away from him when he tried to come close. It took a while to calm her down, and he'd finally had to put the blanket on the ground and step away to let her wrap herself in it. When he tried to get her to come back to the nurse's office with him, she'd wept even harder and begged him not to tell anyone. At last he'd convinced her to let him take her to a small clinic nearby, where they didn't know her. He'd done what she asked. He didn't tell anyone. He tried to be around for her, but she never approached him. She also never smiled again.
Three weeks later she was dead, hung by a knotted sheet in the stairwell of her home, and the whole school convulsed in mourning. Nobody could figure out what had happened, why someone as happy and kind as Maggie would do such a thing.
Except Zeke. He knew. The very day Maggie's suicide was announced to the school, he'd gone to Principal Drake and told her everything. And the bitch had looked at him with her frosty eyes and wondered aloud why he hadn't come to her before. Then came some cold bullshit about "your word against the word of our star athletes", and Zeke had never felt so much hate in his life. He'd looked at her tightly pressed lips and hard eyes, and in that moment he wanted nothing so much as to put a bullet through her brain. That was the first time he'd been marked as a troublemaker, but it wouldn't be the last.
Zeke sits in Biology class, waiting for Miss Drake to come get him and slap another suspension on him. It means nothing next to the satisfaction of seeing Dave doubled up in pain like the fucking piece of shit he is. Zeke's jaw is tight, but inside he's warm with the feeling of a threat well delivered. I'll get you someday, you fucker, he thinks. He watches Casey at his bench a couple of rows up, back resolutely turned to him, and his throat tightens. He swallows, feeling a pang of regret for the fright he'd given him. He looks down at the book he doesn't need to read, and knows something's been lost. He just hopes it isn't everything.
Chapter 36 of High Contrast
Chapter 37