Posted originally on the Archive_of_Our_Own at https://archiveofourown.org/
works/6806854.
  Rating:
      Explicit
  Archive Warning:
      Rape/Non-Con, Underage
  Category:
      M/M
  Fandom:
      Homestuck
  Relationship:
      Kankri_Vantas/Karkat_Vantas
  Character:
      Kankri_Vantas, Karkat_Vantas, The_Signless_|_The_Sufferer
  Additional Tags:
      Child_Abuse, Childhood_Sexual_Abuse, Child_on_Child_Sexual_Abuse, Sibling
      Incest, Incest, Hand_Jobs, Humiliation, Wet_Dream, Grooming
  Series:
      Part 2 of >__
  Stats:
      Published: 2016-05-10 Updated: 2016-05-14 Chapters: 2/? Words: 11432
****** > root access ******
by 2x2verse_(agent_florida)
Summary
     > random access memory
     > drive_boot: X:/RECOVERED_!childhood
     > root access granted
Notes
     thanks to my beta/partner in crime tuna_mayo_make_it_zesty
See the end of the work for more notes
***** Chapter 1 *****
He doesn’t play with you like he used to.
He turns sixteen right before you turn twelve. Dad buys him his own Lexus. Mom
takes him to get his driver’s license. When they give him the keys, they tell
him he can go wherever he wants with whoever he wants. Of course he can. He’s
the eldest son, the prodigal child. Mana from heaven. Sunshine out of his ass.
He can do nothing wrong. He’s perfect, the little shit.
It’s not that he’s the favorite, it’s that you’re the unfavorite. The problem
child. The child who still has temper tantrums in middle school. The child who
gets sent to the principal’s office once a week. The child who can never quite
remember to do his homework, who never quite goes to bed on time, who sleeps
through classes and still has bags under his eyes. You’re the kind of kid that
always gets a head shake and an exasperated sigh, a what are we going to do
with you attitude.
So Kankri has one caveat on his emptor: Always be home in time to put Karkat to
bed.
Mom would do it, but she always has her charity things at night. She’s almost
never there when you get home from school. If she is, she’s taking frantic
phone calls and reapplying her lipstick three times before she deems herself
presentable enough to attend her latest fundraising gala.
Dad would do it, but he’s always at work. Always. One hundred percent of the
time. Sometimes he comes home, maybe once a week to spend an hour with you, but
it’s not enough, it’s never enough. He’s the kind of lawyer that always puts
the client first, even before himself. He does really important work, all this
civil rights stuff, and he’s saved more people from the chair than you can
count on both hands. That’s just the death penalty cases—then there’s all the
states that pass bathroom bills, and all the places that refuse to perform gay
marriages in this the year of our lord 2008, and all the accessibility laws he
defends, and all the work he’s put into repealing Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell. You
love your dad so much, and you’re so proud of him. Maybe you’ll grow out of
your temper and into a better temperament, grow up to be like him. You just
wish you saw him more often, in person rather than walking out of a courthouse
doing a rushed interview with a local news reporter.
There’s nobody else, so it falls on Kankri. He makes you food and helps you
with your homework and does all the household chores, because he is a good
elder son and he does everything he’s supposed to. Just like you don’t. He’s
the perfect son, quite the treasure. He even keeps a schedule of what chores
need done when.
Today is Wednesday. Tonight is laundry night. And you are terrified.
Because you think you might have wet the bed last night.
First thing when you get home from school, you wrench your sheets off your bed
and stuff them into a basket. Kankri catches you before you get all the way to
the mud room, though. Literally catches you, hand on your arm. “Oh, Karkat. I
didn’t realize your sheets needed laundered already. I thought I had taken care
of them on Sunday. They shouldn’t need washed again until this weekend. Did
something happen?”
Like he knows. Your stomach turns. “Nothing happened,” you grumble, and shift
your eyes to deliberately fix on the floor.
“Did you stain them with something? I’ll have to pre-treat them if that turns
out to be the case. Here, why don’t you show me and I can do it for you.” Fuck
no are you showing him where it is, let alone what it is. You yank the basket
away from him, try to get out of the vice of his fingers, but he holds you
solidly in place. “Show me, Karkat. I need to know how to help you.”
You want the ground to swallow you whole. As it is, Kankri lets go of your
arm—there have to be fingerprint bruises there, have to be—and starts airing
your dirty laundry. “It’s nothing,” you lie to him again.
Too late. Kankri’s already thrown your pillowcases to the ground after turning
them over in his hands. “If you’d had a nosebleed,” he’s still nattering to
himself, “then I could use peroxide. I don’t think that would ruin the dye, but
it could take a while to treat.” Going through your fitted sheet this time,
testing the elastic edges with the span between thumb and forefinger, checking
for marks.
Your fingers have the handles of the basket in a death grip. Your face has to
be melting off with its own heat by now. This is more humiliating than waking
up like that. Because Kanri’s hands move in from the edges, seek out the
middle, and find the crusted-over patch dead center.
“Oh,” he says, dropping your laundry immediately, and his lips curl.
He doesn’t really say anything after that. Which is weird. Your older brother
is usually full of words. Every waking moment he’s talking your ear off about
something stupid, but it’s only when you talk back that one of you gets in
trouble. (You. Always you. He riles you up and gets you to raise your voice at
him and then it’s always your fault.) “What?” you dare him.
“Well, I’m not quite sure I know how to deal with this,” he says through a
sneer. He’s still rifling through your flat sheet, trying to find the
corresponding stained patch. “I thought you had better self-control than that,
but, ah. I see it’s happened anyhow. Why didn’t you tell me right away? Did you
think you could hide this from me?”
“I—no?” Is that the right answer? You didn’t want to hide it from him, you just
never wanted him to find out. Those are different, right?
“I don’t want you to hide things like this from me,” he tells you. “I confess,
I’m not quite sure how to get this, ah. Particular stain out. I’ll have to do a
Bing search, I suppose. Why don’t you get your other,” he coughs delicately,
“dirty clothes so I can see their stains and pre-treat them as well?”
You thought you could get away with the sheets. You really could. He’d go
through your hamper to find your sleep pants eventually, though. Those could
wait, the sheets you need to sleep on tonight, but you didn’t think he’d want
to wash your clothes until this weekend—your throat closes up and you
metaphorically dig your heels in. “I don’t want to.”
Kankri sighs. “That’s quite alright. I didn’t expect you to be acting like such
a child over this, but if you’re going to be a baby about it, then sit down and
start on your homework while I gather the laundry myself.”
“No!” It comes out of you so automatically he might as well have hit behind
your elbows with a rubber hammer, and you drop the laundry basket out of
instinct as well. “If you’re going to be like that, then I’ll just do it
myfuckingself.”
“Watch your language,” Kankri says idly, but you’re already storming out of the
room, hands shaking too badly for you to give him a coherent one-finger salute.
Once you’re back in your room, you stare at your empty, naked bed like it’s a
mark of failure. You already checked—it didn’t make it through to the mattress,
there was nothing there. The only reason there was any on the sheets was that
your sleep pants only had a button fly. Kids in double digits, kids like you,
aren’t supposed to wet the bed like babies that poop hard in their diapers.
It’s humiliating enough that it happened. That Kankri has to bear witness
is—can you spontaneously teleport to Mars? Is that a thing you can do?
You try not to look him in the eye when you bring down the rest of your
laundry. He finds your crusty clothes immediately and sets them aside with your
sheets, careful not to touch the stains too much. Fuck, you’re disgusting. And
you can’t even do your own laundry so you can stop being so fucking
embarrassed. No, you have to rely on Kankri, flawless Kankri, selfless Kankri,
to do it for you. He won’t show you how, just starts running the cold tap in
the utility sink so he can fill the basin and pre-soak your stains out. “I’m
glad you told me eventually,” he says over the running water. “But I would have
been able to take care of this much sooner if you had just been honest with me
from the outset.”
The way he says it, it sounds like you were lying. That’s not it. That’s not it
at all. You just kind of… wish it had never happened. “Sorry,” you mumble at
your backpack while you dig your homework out.
Kankri doesn’t forgive you. “Just don’t do it again,” he insists, and you nod
dumbly. “I’m not sure your sheets will be done by the time you’re supposed to
go to bed. Will you be okay if you sleep somewhere else?”
Or are you just going to do that again? is the unspoken second half of the
question. “I’ll be fine.”
“Don’t lie to me,” Kankri says idly, sitting down at the kitchen table with you
and riffling through his math textbook. Everything looks so intimidating.
You’ve just barely worked up to getting letters in your numbers, and he’s doing
something called precalculus, where the letters make the numbers into pretty
curves and lines and graphs. You don’t understand anything anymore, how
something that good can be extrapolated from equations this ugly. “You can
sleep in my bed,” he decides for you as he picks out his problem set for the
night. “Oh, and Father left the credit card for us tonight. I’m supposed to
pick up dinner for both of us. What would you like from Rizzo’s?”
That’s the vegan place ten minutes away. “I don’t want Rizzo’s.”
“You’re eating Rizzo’s.” He wants to be out of the house, you realize. Away
from you. You’ve fucked up that badly. He might be at the other end of the
table from you, but he seems a million miles away. Unreachable. “Do your
homework. Or do you need help with that as well?”
“I can do it.” That might be the only thing you can do on your own at this
point.
The minutes tick by slowly, inexorably. Every formula Kankri writes out is in a
practiced hand, his graphs perfectly plotted. You can barely read your own
chickenscratch. The washer peters out and Kankri gets up to change it over,
starting the dryer and getting another load going; while he’s gone, you look in
the back of your textbook for the answers to your worksheet. Then, “Karkat,
would you kindly bring me the dishwasher soap?”
You slam your book shut on your own hand. “Fuck,” you say to no one in
particular, sucking your fingers into your mouth. “Coming,” and you get it from
under the sink. “Why do you need this for clothes?”
“These stains aren’t coming out. This is my second attempt to prewash at this
point.” Kankri sighs. “I’m really working very hard to make sure you don’t have
to throw these sheets away. I’m sure they’re salvageable if I work on them hard
enough, but this isn’t like anything I’ve seen before. Squirt some on my hand,
please,” and he holds his palm out to you.
Fumbling fingers lock the cap against the child-proofing before you remember
you have to squeeze on the way off. The gel comes out thick and clear on
Kankri’s fingertips. Then he’s plunging his hand into the cold water in the
sink basin, hissing at the temperature, so he can dredge out your filthy
laundry and at least pretend to make it clean again. You’re horrified to watch
as he massages the soap into the fabric of your flat sheet, then the fitted
one, so gentle it barely suds up. “Let me do it,” you tell him on instinct,
because he’s touching what you did and it’s awful.
“You don’t know how,” he reminds you. Now that both sheets are done, he moves
onto your pants, rubbing his fingers against the fly of them, between the
buttons, underneath, so he can scrub out everything bad you did. It’s just
clothes, but it’s like you can feel the circular motion against the base of
your brain, literally trying to rub in what you’ve done. “I think if I let this
set for a while longer,” he says eventually, once the soap is off his fingers
and saturating into cotton, “I’ll be able to put it through a few wash cycles.
It might not be the same once I’m done, but it’ll still be your laundry. I just
hope that stain isn’t permanent.”
“Me too,” you say with as large a voice as you can muster. You fucking too.
“Now,” Kankri says, like he never heard your little whimper, “I’m going to go
out for a while and bring back dinner. Do your homework, and no video games
until I can see you’ve finished. You’ll be good, won’t you?”
“Yeah,” you mumble. He never tousles your hair, though you think he might for a
minute. He sometimes does. Then again, you kind of fucked up really bad and
ruined his night. “When will you be back?”
“In time to put you to bed,” he tells you, grabbing his Lexus keys and heading
out the door.
Well, that’s as vague a promise as ever you’ve heard. That’s the only condition
on his freedom. And he’s supposed to pick you up dinner. Is he going to let you
starve? Just when that panic races through your head, your guts let out an
embarrassing gurgle. If you’re not hungry now, you certainly will be soon.
Fuck.
Your first foray through the drawer freezer under the french-door refrigerator
is fruitless. Well, not exactly—Mom has all her frozen fruit for her morning
smoothies—but there’s nothing here for you to make into a quick meal. You’re
not one of those families that just has Hot Pockets or pizza rolls sitting
around for junk food. Any frozen meal that comes into the house immediately
gets snatched up by Dad so he can eat it at work.
The refrigerator comes up similarly empty, unless you want to have dinner
that’s entirely celery sticks and baby carrots, and that’s supposed to be for
the rest of this week’s lunches anyway. Mom would notice if you took one of her
protein shakes, and Kankri would notice if you got into the leftovers. And it’s
not like you can reach the microwave to heat them up, anyway—you’re still too
short to reach that far above the stove, and Kankri would notice if you moved a
chair out of place or left a mark on the ceramic cooktop where you climbed up.
Walking into the pantry is similarly disappointing. There’s an entire shelf
full of baking books and a stand mixer and appliances and cake mixes so your
mom can put together emergency cookies and brownies for fundraisers, but none
of that is something you can just put in your mouth and not be hungry. There’s
pasta, and rice, and soup, and canned vegetables, but none of that is a meal on
its own, and there would be dishes, wouldn’t there. You can’t do dishes yet,
Kankri’s never taught you how to clean the nonstick cookware and you only know
how to put soap in the dishwasher, not how to run it, so he’d know you were
trying to avoid eating whatever kind of rabbit food he’s bringing home.
It’s very quiet in the background now, too. The dryer’s done, and the washer’s
stopped spinning. Fuck. What are you supposed to do? Is it your job to switch
over the loads? What did Kankri want to do next? All you want to do is make
sure your nasty laundry gets in and out as fast as possible. Can you just…
gently move things into a basket without having to fold them, since you don’t
quite know how? Shit, Kankri will notice. The buttons on the dryer look like
they’re written in Greek to you—you don’t know what those settings do, what if
you ruin the clothes that are about to go in there? You don’t know how to set
the washer, either, how much soap it needs, and what’s this fabric softener and
liquid bleach stuff? Why couldn’t you just pour the bleach all over your stuff?
Wouldn’t that make it clean?
Your stomach knots in on itself again. You can’t feed yourself and you can’t do
your own laundry. What kind of worthless piece of shit are you? You want to lay
down in bed and pull the blankets up over your ears and lay in the dark for a
while but you can’t even do that because your sheets are still unclean and
soaked through and you can’t do anything about it.
“Oh, have you finished your homework already?” Kankri’s voice interrupts your
inner panic. He doesn’t slam the door on the way in, even though he has his
hands full of takeout.
“Yes?” comes out shrill, your voice cracking. Fuck, you’re the worst. “I
thought you said—“
“Did you think I’d leave you on your own for dinner?” he chides you. Yes. Yes,
you absolutely thought that, because he said—“I said I’d be back to put you to
bed, and I am, aren’t I, so.” One of the plastic takeout boxes goes on top of
your half-done math worksheet; Kankri either doesn’t catch on that you lied, or
he’s willing to let your grades suffer for your own bad decisions. “Eat up.”
The clear plastic lid on your dinner is fogged over. When you take off the
cover, a rabbit-y smell hits you in the face. “The fuck is this?”
“For the second time tonight, Karkat, watch your language, or I might have to
make you eat soap for dinner.”
Soap might be preferable. He brought you back quinoa. You fucking hate quinoa.
And the beans, shit, the beans, all mixed in with the quinoa, and nothing to
break it up but pepper slivers and onion bits with fakey fake grill marks on
them. Your entire torso throbs with hunger so insistently you think you might
faint, but your esophagus is currently doing some kind of gymnastics in your
throat that makes you want to throw up.
“Eat your dinner,” Kankri says again, and passes you plastic silverware.
You don’t really have much of a choice, do you. Your hand betrays you, grabbing
the spoon (because fuck if you’re trying to stab little grains and strings of
veggies with a fork) and shoveling the first steaming bite into your mouth. It
kind of burns your tongue a little. That might be a good thing, because you
can’t imagine yourself eating all of this otherwise, even though you’re
starving. It has the consistency and taste of very crunchy glue with random
curry packets not mixed in all that well.
He must hate you. There’s no other reason for him getting you your least
favorite thing from your least favorite restaurant. You can deal with the
portobello burger, which is what Kankri’s currently shoving in his big fat
mouth, juice dripping down his fingers—his favorite, you know, with the sweet
potato fries on the side that are actually okay. But he gets you this, after
you did that, and—he has to hate you. That’s the only reason. He wants to
punish you and take care of you all at the same time, and you’re so hungry that
you have to take what he’s offering you or curl in on yourself to starve.
“Don’t make that face,” Kankri tells you. “I got you the healthiest thing on
the menu. Quinoa has some of the most balanced proteins you’ll find outside
of—ugh—actual meat.” If you focus on his words instead of what you’re
swallowing, it makes eating easier, even though the way he talks is just as
unappetizing. “It’s naturally gluten free and contains iron, all your B
vitamins, magnesium, phosphorous, potassium, calcium, vitamin E and fiber. It’s
also a complete protein and has all your pernine essential amino acids. Now,
the legumes have protein, too, but…”
You tune him out under the sound of your not-chewing. He can talk about
whatever the hell he wants, so long as he’s not chewing you out. The inside of
your mouth feels both sticky and dry, it’s weird. But god bless you, you’re
trying. You actually manage to scorf the whole thing down before Kankri’s
finished with his fries. When you throw your takeout container in the trash,
you glare at your older brother. “Happy now?”
“Very. Father would feel better, knowing you ate what I brought you.”
Just the mention has your chest puffing up. You took one for the team, didn’t
you. Dad loves this health food stuff, wants you to be as much of a fan as he
is, and you’re trying, but you’re just a kid and you do love you some Doritos
sometimes. But if you can eat that, maybe you can even eat (bleargh) fucking
kale if you try hard enough. That’s emboldened you enough to try your luck:
“Can I go play the N64?”
“Show me your worksheet first,” he says, carefully picking at his fingertips
with a paper napkin. His fingers aren’t greasy by the time you hand it over,
still incomplete. “Karkat, please. Your grades are already abysmal. You need to
do your homework.”
“Why?”
“Because you need good grades to go to law school, and your report cards right
now are, to put it mildly, offensive.”
You’re not even twelve, you’re eleven, you want to scream at him. You’re not
supposed to be thinking about going to college and getting degrees. You’ll be
lucky if you make it through sixth grade intact. “I already know what six plus
nine is,” you grouse, swiping the paper back out of his hand. You hope it cuts.
“I don’t need an n in there to tell me what I’m doing.”
“Then you shouldn’t have any problem finishing this worksheet.” For his part,
Kankri’s tidying up, taking a washcloth to the table where you spilled a bit of
dinner and rinsing glasses. He changes out the laundry again, and then he moves
onto an entirely different subject, some sort of English assignment that means
he has to highlight parts of speech with different colors and underline
participial phrases, whatever those are. Fuck if you know how to speak coherent
English a lot of the time. It’s hard enough for you to read normal stuff, you
have no idea how you’re going to handle being in high school.
What’s important, though, is that your sheets still aren’t in the wash and it’s
starting to get dark out. While you’re still scratching out the meaning of d on
your math worksheet, Kankri’s moved on to his Spanish homework. He finishes
even that by the time he finally, finally dredges up your dirty stuff and
wrings it out. “Well?” you ask him, trying not to sound too hopeful.
“Too soon to tell,” he mutters, frowning at it. “It might take a few washes.”
You look at the clock at the same time he does. “Where do you want to sleep
tonight?” he asks you
My own bed, but you can’t, can you. And you can’t fall asleep in your parents’
room, because that’s just weird, being the kid who crawls to Mommy and Daddy in
the middle of the night because he’s scared of his own brain. It takes a real
little kid to be afraid of the dark or freaked out by nightmares. (Says the
infant who wet the bed, look at you, you little hypocrite, you’re following in
your big brother’s footsteps so well.) You don’t want to sleep on the couch
because it’s not that comfy and it’s too bright out downstairs and you don’t
want to wake up when Mom starts making breakfast. “Your room?” comes out of
you, voice impossibly small.
Kankri only lets out a tiny huff at that, not a huge one. “Fine,” he says. “I
guess I can let you sleep in my bed for one night, since you made a mess all
over your own sheets. I’m taking a risk on you.” Is it even physically possible
for you to feel more ashamed? Because you keep trying to outdo yourself. “I
might not go to bed for a little while, though, I have to finish my chemistry
lab.”
“So can I stay up?” Is it too much to ask?
“Yes.” But before you can make a move for a game controller, “To take a
shower,” he finishes his sentence. “I don’t want you rubbing your greasy head
all over my pillow, I have enough problems with pimples as it is. Not to
belittle those with diagnosable acne vulgaris, of course! But I have no wish to
become among those afflicted. It makes one feel almost like a leper. I’ll wash
my face, and you’ll wash your hair, and we’ll make the most of it.”
You don’t know what he’s talking about. You’ve never seen him break out before.
But if you’re that grimy to him, then maybe you should get clean. This will be
your second shower today, but the first one probably doesn’t count, because you
still felt weird afterwards, like the stain you’d made in your bed was
something that doesn’t just wash out with soap.
The bathroom is the only room in the house with a lock on it, and that’s only
because you and Kankri share it. Not even the master bedroom has a way to keep
you out, but that’s because you’re never supposed to go in. You try to lather
up while you’re in the shower, but nothing makes you feel better. Your belly
feels weird and twisted after this morning, after dinner, and it’s almost like
there’s something itchy under your hair or at the back of your neck that you
can’t quite scratch. You don’t know what’s wrong with you. You don’t know why
you feel too big for your skin, like it’s stretched tight over a wireframe made
of gently vibrating panic. You feel a little bit like you got hit by a truck.
Maybe you just need to sleep.
Kankri isn’t quite upstairs by the time you walk into his room. It’s weird in
here. Nothing like yours at all. He has so many bookcases in here, with all the
books he reads that he doesn’t even have to read for school or anything.
They’re even alphabetized. His closet door is always primly closed, and there’s
no clothes on the floor, dirty or otherwise. He isn’t allowed to keep his
computer in here, but there’s empty space on his desk for if it was. And his
bed, pushed into the corner of the room, is crisply made, even the duvet with
its box-pleat corners. It’s bigger than yours, too, a full bed for a full
adult, not the twin you have.
There’s two pillows, but bunched one under the other, like he sleeps with both.
Should you take one? Do you not get one? Should you bring your own, even though
they’re naked without any pillowcases on? You tug at a loose thread in your
sleep pants and it feels like it tugs at your stomach. This is weird. This
place isn’t yours and you don’t belong in it, but it’s the only bed you have.
You crawl in like an invader and try to make yourself as small as you can,
flattening yourself to the wall and facing the door so you can stay on high
alert for intruders. Maybe you can make sure he won’t even notice you. He
already doesn’t want you here, and you don’t want to make this worse. Still,
even as relaxed as you can make yourself, you can’t sleep, because what if it
happens again? Here, in someone else’s bed?
Kankri comes into his own room an eternity later, smelling like soap and pomp.
You didn’t realize that he slept in that long-sleeved shirt—you thought he
slept in just his boxers, like you prefer just your flannel pants and no shirt
or briefs or anything. But he slips into bed facing you, and his body is so
warm, even his feet as they brush against your freezing toes. “Did I wake you?”
he says, hushed and warm.
“No.”
“Were you awake this whole time?”
“Yeah.”
“Why?” Like hell are you telling him anything. “Is it because my room is
strange?” Shake of your head. “Is it because the bed is too big?” Another
shake, even more vigorous this time, because you’re jealous, you want to spread
out like he can. But he doesn’t take up too much room, and he lets you know
without words that it’s okay to come away from the wall and closer to the
center. “Is it because you’re scared?” You bury your face in the pillow. It’s
not a no, and yet.
He runs a hand down your bare arm. His body is so hot compared to yours, like
you’re just a pile of ashes and he’s still red as fire. “’m not scared,” you
lie.
“I don’t think you want that to happen again, though.” Waiting for a response,
then, “Do you?” You don’t move your face from where your nose is pressed into
animal-cruelty-free down. “It’s okay, Karkat.”
“’s not,” you mumble into your faceful of bed.
“It’s okay,” he repeats ardently, like his tone would make it any less of a
lie. The more he pets your arm, the more you realize you’re shaking. He left
bruises there earlier and it’s like he’s saying sorry without using words. “Oh,
you poor little thing. You don’t know what happened, do you?”
This is a trick question. You don’t move, don’t speak, hardly dare to breathe.
Your skin breaks out in goosebumps against Kankri’s fingers and you’re afraid
he could read your guilt in Braille.
“I thought—I never realized this might happen so soon—at school they must
have—did Father ever—“ He cuts himself off, hems a few times for good measure.
“Ah. Well then. I suppose it has become incumbent upon me to teach you a few
things about growing up.”
Your skin goes less shivery. When Kankri puts his arm around you, you huddle
into him. It’s okay, you keep trying to tell yourself. He feels sorry for you.
He wants to tell you what’s wrong with you. Besides everything, that is.
“There is a thing,” Kankri starts saying, and you realize he’s launching into
Talk Mode, the way he talks like an impassable wall of text. “That happens to
young men about your age.” Men. You’re a man. Not a boy, a man. Not a baby, an
adult. Your chest feels funny. “That’s called puberty. From the Latin puber,
meaning adult. The process your body goes through to make you into a grown-up.”
“Like a pupa?”
“Like a pupa,” he confirms, and kisses you on the forehead. Your scalp feels
tingly and you decide you like that feeling. “And sometimes, your body will let
you know when it’s time to start changing from a child into an adult, like a
caterpillar knows how to make a chrysalis and turn into a butterfly.”
“Will I be pretty?” you ask him.
“You’re already pretty,” he tells you, and snuggles closer. “And there’s
nothing wrong with being a worm, per se.” One of those phrases Dad uses, but
you never understand. “But you have to grow up sometime, and this is when
you’ve started to grow up.”
Your face scrunches as you try to parse what he’s saying. “I don’t get it.”
“Shh, I’m getting there.” His hand runs in sweeping gestures all up and down
your bare spine. The cotton of his shirt feels good against your front. There’s
pictures of the two of you all up in each other’s business like this, from
before Kankri went to school. He was five, and you were one, and he would curl
around you protectively and wrap your baby hand around his little finger. He’s
trying to make you feel like an adult, but all you can think about is how much
older he is, he’s four years older, he’s practically legal already and you’re
still just some dumb grade schooler who pees the bed. “I didn’t realize you
were this much taller already.”
“Is that why my bed feels so short?”
“Probably. Mother and Father will probably buy you a new one soon. And Father’s
so tall, you’ll probably be as tall as he is.” You’ll be as tall as Dad, that’s
why you’re growing so early. There might be some hope for you after all.
Kankri keeps nattering at you, even though your chest feels like it might
evacuate from your body and start floating up to the ceiling. “You’ve started
growing, and, ah. I’m sure you’ve noticed your entire body growing as well.
Things like your hair, perhaps,” and at this he runs his fingertips along your
scalp and parts your still-damp hair with his fingers and you like that, you
like that very much. “Getting coarser and darker in other places. Or your
voice—I noticed your voice cracking earlier.”
“Thanks,” you tell him sarcastically, and it cracks again, because this is your
life and that was inevitable.
“It’s another sign that your body is ready to become an adult. But one of the
most prominent signs is—“ He halts. “There’s really no good way to explain
this, but I don’t want you left in the dark because of any discomfort from me.
You deserve to know what’s happening to you, and since no one else will
explain, the task has fallen upon me. Do you know why you did what you did last
night?”
You’re going to spontaneously combust. The edges of you are going to curl
inwards towards the flame and get eaten alive like every other part of you.
“No,” you tell the pillow.
Kankri gently extricates your face, turns you towards him. You’re both on your
sides. His one leg is between both of yours, an easy tangle, a soft
familiarity. His hands are so gentle. “It’s called a nocturnal emission,” he
says, voice clipped and clinical. “During the night, your body became aroused,
and your member became erect, probably as it received sensation from your pants
and your sheets. You rubbed against the fabric until you ejaculated in your
sleep. Do you know what that means? Ejaculate?”
“Something gross,” you mumble, and try to push away from Kankri’s hand to go
back to ostriching your head in the pillow.
“You had a release,” he says, and you think he’s using a euphemism but you
can’t really tell because you’re stupid and he’s smart and he’s done all this
before and you’re just a dumb kid that spills something or another from his
dick onto his sheets in the middle of the night. “The fluid is called semen.
It’s pearl to white and can be thick, but yours may have seeped through your
clothes to get on your sheets like it did. Perhaps you had multiple nocturnal
emissions in the night.” He sounds only mildly disgusted with you, thankfully.
You’re disgusted enough with yourself for the both of you. “I did what?”
“You orgasmed in your sleep.”
Oh. OH. That’s a word. A word you know from the shitty health class you took
back around the winter, where everything was people sniggering at textbook
diagrams and passing around crude slang for cocks like it was social currency.
“But I—“ You don’t know how to tell Kankri he’s wrong. “I thought orgasms only
happen with other people?”
“So you’ve had some formal education about this already,” Kankri surmises,
mostly to himself. Your blood is rushing too hard in your ears to be able to
hear him properly. “What do you know about orgasms?”
You’re going to launch off of this planet and throw yourself into the sun.
Kankri keeps stroking your back, he’s never stopped, slow up and down, measured
like your breathing cadence as you struggle to keep your breath under control.
“They—when two people have sex, they touch each other, the boy’s thing goes in
the girl’s, and if they orgasm then they can have a baby, and—but I thought if,
you can only do it with two people? I don’t know.” You suddenly feel very
stupid.
“You can orgasm by yourself, if that’s a thing you want to do.” Kankri tells
you. You’re so glad he’s letting you know these things. Fuck, you thought you
wet the bed like a baby, but this—what you did—it means you’re turning into an
adult? So that’s a good thing. Sort of? Then why did you feel so dirty? “But
when you orgasm with other people—Karkat, I want you to listen to me.” His
soothing hand stops. The quiet is too loud, feels like dead weight on your
eardrums; your heartbeat pushes back. “I’m very serious about this. That’s a
very adult thing to do, a very serious thing to do, and you need to make sure
you’re doing the right thing.”
“Uh-huh?” Why did he stop talking? Everything makes more sense when he’s
talking.
The hand starts rubbing again. Staying around the small of your back, in a
broad, hot circle. Your guts wind themselves tighter, mirroring every movement
of Kankri’s hand. Everything between your legs does something hot, heavy, like
a pulse, like a throb, and it’s like nothing you’ve ever felt before. It’s too
much, and you’re choking on your own tongue. And while that bloodrush goes to a
place that’s never been this sensitive before, Kankri’s hand moves around, to
the soft of your belly, with his hand flat against your navel and your stomach
squirming underneath.
And then he leans forward, and he kisses your cheek. Your nose. And then—other
hand coming up, up to your face, two hands, too many, takes your jaw gingerly
between thumb and forefinger, and kisses you.
Closed mouths. Easy pressure, gentle slide. Not a peck, so this isn’t like the
kisses you’ve had before. Not little playground things, not truth or dare. This
isn’t a game. This one rushes through all of you, flies straight down your
spine and makes everything too bright and too much again. The tingle is coming
from inside your skin, like light that wants to burst out of you, or darkness
that wants to rush into you.
Kankri leaves you, retreats to the other side of the pillow. “I love you,” he
says. “So much, Karkat. I want to take care of you, I just wish you would let
me. I need to know how to help you.”
You’re drowning and you need him to reach in and pull you to safety. You’re
dizzy and you need him to hold you until things make sense again. “I,” and
there’s nothing else there, just a cracked vowel that wobbles in the silence of
the room.
“You’re an adult now, and this is,” he’s saying, “what adults do, to help each
other. To take care of each other. And I want to take care of you, but you need
to let me.”
His hand slips down and lands on the fly of your pants and everything stops.
The world is glass. Your breath could shatter it. Your heart cuts itself on it.
Your dick is swollen and it aches and you’ve never felt like this before and it
sort of hurts but not in a pain way, in an anticipation way, and you don’t know
what will make it better but you don’t want to trust fate to take care of it
for you. Nocturnal emission, runs through your head, and orgasm, and ejaculate,
and if you go to sleep like this and rub against your pants and Kankri’s sheets
it’ll get all over his bed and all over him and you couldn’t do that to him,
couldn’t make him all disgusting just because your body is being selfish.
“Baby.” The nickname he’s used for you since you came home from the hospital,
sometimes mocking, sometimes fond, but this time the sound has an impact to it
that hits you straight in the chest and lodges right between your lungs. “If
you ever need someone to take care of this for you, just let me know. It’s
okay. I love you. You know how everyone says you should only do this with
people who love you? To show how much you love them?”
He pulls down your sleep pants.
“I love you so much.”
And wraps the hand that was at your back, at your belly, around your cock.
“Let me help you.”
The loop of his fingers pulls up, drags against sensitive skin that’s never
been touched like this before, and you close your eyes and don’t know why you
wish you weren’t here when it feels so good.
“You’re an adult now, baby.”
Then why do you feel so small? Why do you feel so weak? His fingers go back
down, cupping around you as they slide, and your hips jerk into his hand.
“I need you to know—you can’t do this with just anyone.”
He never stops talking, his voice urgent even as his hand is patient. Like he’s
waiting for something, even though you don’t know what he’s waiting for. His
hand passes up and then back down again, the same easy cadence he was using to
rub your back, moving with your breath, except yours starts going backwards
every time the sensitive skin at the head of your dick grazes against the
thinness at the inside of his wrist.
“You can only do this with people who love you.”
You want to crawl out of your own skin. You want to stop breathing because it
doesn’t matter, you can’t get enough air anyway. Your body is too small for
you, or too big, maybe, you feel like you’re roaming around in a suit that
isn’t yours and your hands catch blindly on someone else’s sheets and Kankri
breathes into your hair as he kisses your front cowlick and nudges at your face
with his nose so he can kiss your lips again.
“You have to know they love you, really know it, body and soul, or you’re just
going to turn into a whore, some degenerate generic slut.”
Faster, because you’re hiccupping now, not sure how to comprehend this physical
blitzkrieg except in disparate parts. The cling of Kankri’s lips to yours. His
fingers grazing, first your sack, then the tender gap at the inside of your
thigh. The sweetness of his breath in your face. The welcoming grasp of him
around you again, slick and hot with some sort of gross sticky clear stuff
that’s drooling out of you. You’re disgusting, you’re just a fountain of fluids
from your dick, snot from your nose as you sniffle, prickle of tears behind
your eyes, sweat gathering at your hairline. But Kankri, he loves you, he wants
to take care of you, and he cleaned up after you, and he’ll clean up after you
again, just keep making you a mess and clean up every time, except what if
you’re too dirty to be clean ever again? What if you’re too filthy to wash this
away?
“It’s okay, baby. I love you. You know I love you. Let go.”
Of what? You’re holding on so tight, nails digging into cotton and worrying
little holes, tension spiraling around your bones and locking you in place. You
don’t know what’s coming, but something big, you can taste it behind your
teeth, a horizon, a nuclear bomb—
“Release.”
Your body listens. Something in you unhinges and you know you won’t ever be
able to latch it closed again. A howl like grief gets stuck in your lungs and
you hunch in, try to draw away, even as Kankri draws it out of you—whatever it
is that’s making you tremble, that feels like shattering without any guarantee
of being put back together. It’s not just that your cock throbs in his hand,
it’s that something else is coming from it, these little pearl-globs of sticky
that pass with every pulse and catch on Kankri’s fingers, on your sleep pants.
The only thing missing from this symphony of filth is vomit, and even that’s
tucked away against the back of your throat as Kankri drags his hand up, off
finally, wiping it on the flannel of your sleep pants before letting the
elastic snap against your skin. “It’s okay,” he tells you. You can’t cry. That
would make you into a whiny little baby, and he thinks you’re an adult. Should
you feel like an adult? “I’ll always take care of you when that happens. You
won’t make your bed dirty any more.”
Then why do you still feel so filthy? You want to get up, change out of your
clothes that are now sticking to you with drying spooge, take your third shower
in twenty-four hours, but your spine is cold against the drywall and you can’t
climb over Kankri or you’ll get it all over him, all over his sheets, and he’ll
be mad, and you don’t think you could handle that right now. “Let me get up.”
“There’s nothing wrong with you, though,” Kankri insists, and he loops his
arm—the hand that just touched you—around to your back, caressing you like he
wasn’t just touching your privates. “This is normal. This is all a part of
growing up.”
He never stops talking. Even while your brain is stuttering, trying to get back
online without sudden onset Tourette’s syndrome drowning out your thoughts, his
voice seeps into you, saturates you. He mumbles himself into sleep, but your
heart is still kicking in your chest and your lungs still feel too full when
you take in a breath. Is growing up supposed to hurt like this? The pain that
isn’t from a bruise or a cut but from somewhere between your ribs and your
stomach, a hollow place you want to scrape at so you can feel something real?
Is growing up supposed to be this terrifying? Kankri seems like he’s fine, why
are you being such a baby about this?
He doesn’t play with you like he used to, but that’s because you’re not a child
anymore.
***** Chapter 2 *****
It’s a week and a day before your twelfth birthday and even Dad knows how tall
you are now. He made it, he was able to come to your stupid little sixth grade
graduation, but what’s important is that he doesn’t have to lean down so much
to hug you now. He smiles, like he does, all wide and honest, and says “my son”
in that voice like he might actually be proud of you, and tells you that you
might end up taller than him by the time you quit growing. It makes you feel
like you’re flying until you have to hug him goodbye, he has to go back to
work, he won’t miss your birthday but that means he has to go back to the
office and work extra hard.
He never takes a day off and sometimes that worries you.
What worries you even more is that Kankri hasn’t let you sleep in your own bed
since he found out you were having wet dreams. At first he said it was because
your sheets were ruined, but Mom bought you replacements and Kankri still can’t
be assed to make your bed. After Dad goes back to work and Mom jets off to the
PTA Fundraiser Ball or whateverthefuck, Kankri folds you into his bed, your
back to the wall, before he climbs in himself. “It’s a true pity Father’s too
busy to spend very much time with you,” he says, like he’s not stabbing you
with every word.
“That—” Your voice keeps cracking around him. “That’s not true,” you try again,
and feel like you’re lying.
“He only stayed an hour or two,” Kankri points out. His knees bump against
yours. When his hand grabs for your shoulder, you scoot closer to him. He
won’t—not again, he wouldn’t—“I’m not sure he wanted to attend your little
commencement ceremony. It’s only a changing-over of grades—you changed schools
last year and he took the entire evening off of work for that.”
You can’t tell him to stop because he’s not wrong. “Shut up,” you say instead.
He never listens. “If I were to speculate on why he didn’t want to stay for the
attempted parent reception, I might go so far as to say your grades simply
weren’t good enough. He doesn’t want to spend time around you when you
disappoint him like that.”
You must be disappointing Kankri, too. He doesn’t dawdle tonight. He just holds
you close with an arm around your shoulders and a hand down your sleep pants,
jerking you off hastily with his lips smeared against your temple. Like he
doesn’t want to expend any effort on you, like you’re not worth him taking his
time. “Kankri!” you yell at him, because it’s too much, too fast, it feels like
he’s forcing it out of you.
“Don’t worry,” he tells you, thumb rubbing a circle into the place between your
shoulderblades and mouth sinful hot at your ear. “I still love you. I’ll always
love you the most.” The chafe-burn against the most sensitive skin you have
makes it feel more like sin than love, though.
You climax suddenly, messily, biting your tongue so hard you draw blood and
blowing against the inside of your sleep pants. Kankri doesn’t even have to
wipe his hand off on you this time; you must be learning how to keep it to
yourself, how not to make him disgusting with your filth. The texture of wet,
sticky cotton is too loud against your skin, and you stare at your brother
until you’re sure he’s asleep next to you. Can you shower in the middle of the
night? Can you get up and change and come back, or will he notice? Should you
just go sleep somewhere else?
In his sleep, Kankri idly reaches for you, loops an arm around your waist,
snuffles his way into the hollow of your collarbone. He’s your brother and he
loves you. He’s just trying to take care of you. And while you stare into the
darkness of his room, your pulse tries to jump out of your skin every time he
shifts against you.
--
Dad says you can get your own full bed.
Full bed, like you’re a full boy. Not a boy—a full adult, even. Kankri
certainly seems to think so. On the nights when he doesn’t touch you, he
whispers secrets to you, secrets only adults get to know. Like how to tell
whether you love someone or not. How you can only love one person deeply enough
to have that kind of pure connection with them. The ways you can fail someone
if you say you love them but your attention starts to wander. How much
rejection hurts. Why you stop loving people entirely. That it’s never good to
stick around when that love turns into hate, because you can ruin someone like
that, taint them with your touch.
Will he keep talking to you like this if you get your own big bed? Because you
like these nights the best, the nights when he tells you all the things you
need to know about growing up without punctuating it with a hands-on lesson.
Sometimes he’ll hold you close and mumble into your hair, his heartbeat under
the shell of your ear louder than his voice and more intimate than his whisper.
Sometimes he’ll face you, both of you on your side of the pillows, and gravely
explain your naïve childhood mistakes as you drift off, never remembering where
he left off in his monologue.
Because he’ll start one and then keep it going for days if he can. He never
loses his train of thought, and he’s always full of so many words. If he’s been
constantly derailing himself for a few days, he’ll end up full circle,
explaining the basics to you. What it means when you get an erection. How to
know if you’re ready to have sex with someone. Why you never want to cheat on
your one significant other. The kinds of names people will call you.
Your new furniture gets here tomorrow. This is the last night you’ll have to
stay in Kankri’s bed. And it’s one of those nights. “When you lose your
virginity,” he tells you, quiet like the darkness might be able to overhear
you, “I want you to pick that person carefully.”
“That—that p—” You stutter, because he’s got your dick in the loose-looped cage
of his fingers and he’s drawing off slow, so slow, before he shifts your
foreskin on the way back down. “That girl,” you sigh out.
“Oh?” A slight stutter, then the movement halts entirely. You open your eyes.
Kankri’s looking at you quizzically. “I never took you for the kind of young
man who was so exceedingly heteronormative.” You don’t know what the words
mean, but you’re pretty sure he’s insulting you. “Of course, I’m willing to
give you the benefit of the doubt—I’m sure you’re surrounded by peers who
casually use the word ‘gay’ to mean ‘unpopular’—but really, baby, you should
think about changing your language for your own benefit.”
He’s talking too much and moving too little. You don’t know what to say,
besides mumbling “fucking gay” under your breath because that seems to piss him
off, and you don’t know what to do, besides shove your hips against him with a
little more purpose.
The hand on you squeezes too hard to be pleasurable, then retreats entirely.
You make a disgusting whimpering noise that feels like throwing up in your own
mouth. “Karkat,” he snaps at you, like he’s cursing at you, and you shrink into
yourself. Fuck, you fucked it up, you always fuck everything up—“I want you to
listen to me, and I want you to understand what I’m saying. Don’t do that.
Don’t take more than people are offering you. Don’t push people to go faster
than they’re ready for. That’s ignoring consent, and that’s rape, baby. Do you
understand me?”
You didn’t just fuck it up, you fashioned a perfect dumpster for yourself and
threw this right in there and then wallowed around in it. You are trash. You
are horrible. “I’m sorry.”
He goes back to fondling you immediately—how can he bring himself to touch
something so disgusting? Are you even human anymore? “Don’t do it again,” he
murmurs to you, warm and bright, and gives you another slow, agonizing stroke.
“Where was I…? Oh, I believe I was instructing you on how to properly pick a
partner for your first time.”
“Please just touch me.” You can’t stand the glacial pass of heated fingers over
heated flesh.
“Baby, really. This is important. I can’t halt your education merely because
you have a tendency to get distracted by the physical.” He twists his wrist
just so and you choke on your own spit. “That first time,” and he just keeps
talking, it’s unbearable, “you have to make sure, double triple sure, that this
is the right time, and the right person. If you’re nervous, at all, about
anything, don’t do it.”
You’re shivery right now, though, trying to hide the tremors in your skin from
his questing hands. “What if—”
“It has to be meaningful,” he talks right over you. “If you go into that first
time thinking it’s not going to mean anything to you, well, first of all, you
would have been horribly misguided, and I’m not going to let that happen to
you. And second of all, they will want it to be meaningful, too. So you have to
make it count, and choose carefully.”
Slow pass of skin on skin. Your dick is drooling profusely. You can taste the
sunrise on the underside of your tongue and it won’t show itself. “Kankri,
fuck!”
“No, that’s what I’m saying, baby, it can’t be just a fuck to you,” and he
spits the word out like it hurts him to say it. “You only have one opportunity
to make a memory as phenomenal as that. And it should be with someone you want
to keep making memories with, someone you truly love.”
Never mind that you don’t know what love is. Right now, love feels a lot like
getting dangled over a cliff so you get dizzy staring at the chasm below but
never allowed to fall and have the sweet relief of crashing into the ground.
“I—”
“Don’t you dare embarrass yourself by sleeping around until you find someone
who counts. You’d be just another whore if you did that.” Harsher grip from his
hand, enough to really get you somewhere—“A slut is all you’d be, willing to
have sex with anyone if it made you feel good.” Speeding up, cadence as frantic
as your racing heartbeat—“A degenerate lowlife who only thinks about his own
pleasure and no one else’s.”
You cum with a shout, with him calling you names. “Don’t,” comes out of you in
the wake of this latest orgasm, he can do whatever he wants but he can’t just
say that to you.
“Don’t,” he mirrors back at you, and reaches up with the hand he just made
filthy with your jizz and thumbs away the wet under your eyes. “I know you’re
still redeemable after all. I won’t let you be like that, baby. I’ll always be
here for you.”
But he gets tired of shushing you before you get tired of blinking out tears,
and you can’t figure out why it’s harder to breathe when it’s this dark.
--
Your new furniture is arriving tomorrow, Mom says while she makes your lunch.
Crumbs of Goldfish spray out of your mouth in your excitement. “Shit, really?”
Tonight, tonight is the last night, tomorrow night you won’t have to stay in
Kankri’s bed and you can stay in your own and he won’t be able to mess with
you, it’ll be over, finally, fucking finally. Three weeks was too long to put
up with it.
“Yes, really.” Mom doesn’t even bother to chide you on your cursing anymore.
She always wonders where you learn such filthy words, because Kankri certainly
never swears and Dad never has the opportunity, but she never says you can’t
say them. “Do you want a new bedspread to match?”
“Uh, hell yeah,” you tell her. “And new pillows?”
“If you want them,” she offers, ladling tomato soup out into three bowls. She
has to leave soon to go to another planning meeting, but she said she could
stick around long enough to feed you, she said, she promised, and as long as
she’s here Kankri can’t do jack shit to you.
You’re getting a lot of new things in anticipation of your birthday this
weekend. Can you push your luck? Kankri’s not even around to hear you ask,
still busy on his computer talking to one of his friends he’s supposed to meet
up with later while he leaves you here alone. “Um, Mom, can I—could I maybe—”
How do you even ask for this. “Getalockonmydoor?” comes out in a rush.
“Aw, sweetie.” That’s the nothings that precede a no. “I always knock before I
come in. It’s never been a problem before! You know your dad and I will always
respect your privacy. Why do you think you need one?”
You’re so close. It’s right there, you can taste it on the tip of your tongue,
all the things that want to spill out of you, but it’s like jamming a finger
down your throat when poison control says you don’t even have to throw up. You
gag on your own words for a second, get your throat back under control, and you
only squeak a little when you start to explain. “I mean, we share a bathroom,”
you don’t even want to say his name for fear you’ll summon him, “and I’m naked
in there, and we have a lock on the bathroom, don’t we? And I’m naked in my
room too, and, fuck. I know you knock, but it would just—feel better, I guess,
if I had one.” That rationale was pitiful. You’ll never be a great persuader
like your dad.
Mom looks like she’s listening, though. “Well,” she drawls out eventually,
putting your soup down in front of you, “if it’s important to you, baby, we can
always put a lock on your door. Just like the one on the bathroom door, if that
would make you feel safer. Okay?”
What would make you feel safer is if she wouldn’t call you what he calls you.
You throw your last handful of Goldfish in your soup and watch them slowly
drown.
--
It’s not a real lock. It’s just a little button you can push, no keyhole on the
other side, just a little opening where someone can push in a paperclip and
trigger your door right back open. But they’re replacing your doorknob and
there’s nothing else you can do about it, it has to match the rest of the
house, but this isn’t what you thought you were getting and you’re not sure why
this is ruining your day when everything else has been so awesome. Dad’s going
to be home all afternoon tomorrow for your birthday and he’s going to take you
to the awesome medieval exhibit on loan at the museum in the city where there
will be swords and armor and reenactments and you’re going to do dinner with
him, just him, just you and him, best birthday ever.
And your day is getting ruined by a square millimeter of space.
Your bed, you must admit, is awesome. It feels like it goes on for ages, you
can spread out and fling yourself around and hog all the covers and it’s just
you by yourself and it’s great. Or it would be, if every few minutes you didn’t
hear a gentle rapraprap at your door. “Go away,” you mumbled the first time,
and it just got louder with every repetition. “Go the fuck away!” you tell
Kankri this time. Your door is closed and locked and he is unwelcome.
He mutters something on the other side of your door that you can’t quite catch,
and his footsteps fall away. He’s going away, yes, you win, finally—except no,
he went away so he could start scraping something inside your keyhole, poking
and prodding with awful metal-on-metal noises until something pops suddenly and
the lock gives with just the right kind of pressure. It’s not long after that
Kankri strides into your room, not proud but not ashamed, just treating it like
it’s normal that he just broke into your personal space. “Are you all right?”
“I was,” you emphasize, and roll over to face away from him. Maybe he’ll go
away if you ignore him.
“Well, I was just coming in to make sure you were in bed. You know Father
prefers it if you keep a normal sleep schedule, and I want to help you with
that.” The shift of your mattress tells you he just sat down at the corner of
your bed. “You know you’ll owe a dollar for that,” he says offhandedly.
You snort. Of course not, because this is your life and it wants to fuck you
over. “The swear jar isn’t real.” You pull a pillow over your head, jam it
against your ear.
A gentle hand comes up to your arm, prods it down. “Yes, it is,” Kankri tells
you. “And you owe a dollar. I know Mother has given up on correcting your foul
language, but that’s no way for an adult to act, baby. That’s what children do,
say rude words to frighten other people away. And if this is what it takes to
make you pay for your mistakes, then I will make sure it’s literal.” A caress
to your bare arm, and then his weight on your bed shifts—he’s, no, he’s, he’s
climbing in, and your heart cleaves in two, half jumping up to close off your
airway, the other half dropping out of you to fall to your toes.
You’re still facing away from him, but he doesn’t seem to mind. He just lays
his head down on your pillow, puts his nose at the knot where your skull meets
your spine, and slings an arm over your waist. His body slots against yours
like it was meant to, like you were made for him to hold.
You don’t remember falling asleep, and you don’t remember waking up, mostly
because it cycles throughout the night. It has to be every hour or so that you
startle out of slumber, never able to sleep for more than forty-five minutes
with someone nuzzling into your ribs as easily as he could stab you in the
back. When his hand, that hand, creeps along your front, your stomach swoops,
but it goes up, not down, and cradles your heartbeat against his palm, like
that belongs to him, too. The way he breathes across your bare skin, the rasp
of his clothes too loud against you, all of it makes you want to somehow jump
out of yourself and into someone else, like you could leave this behind, but
no, you’re stuck, trapped here. A loving embrace with someone who loves you,
and you feel like you’re in a cage?
You’re such an ungrateful fuck.
Because Kankri keeps triggering your fight/flight reflex, you watch a dawn for
the first time in years. Your twelfth birthday begins gray and only lightens,
never colors. Kankri’s hand looks alien against your skin, ashen fingers
curling around your hip and holding you fast. His body burns against yours, his
lips whispering against your shoulderblades as he curls close around you.
Close enough that you feel something unyielding against the tender place where
your inner thighs meet your crotch.
“Mmh,” Kankri doesn’t say, just makes a sleepy noise as he yanks you closer.
Like you’re nothing more than a pillow, a stuffed animal, a soft thing for him
to cling to. That pressure against your scrawny-ass thigh gap doesn’t cease,
and you’re afraid to breathe too hard, have a noticeable pulse, because you
don’t want to move and give it, give him, give yourself any ideas. This must be
why it happens overnight, because your body’s responding just like his, more
out of reflex than because you want it.
Dread winds around your bones, a familiar friend, and it doesn’t let go even
when Kankri draws his hips back, stops invading your personal space quite so
personally. It just means his half-hard cock gets pressed against the small of
your back through a layer of fabric. “Mmh,” he grunts out again, slipping a few
times until he finds a position he likes. Or is he—he wouldn’t be—he said it
was wrong to rub against—he can’t just—
It stops before you’ve resolved to bolt out of bed. The solid length of it just
presses into your skin, no movement against you, and Kankri hooks his chin
around your shoulder. You were panicked over nothing. There’s not even anything
wet back there, besides your own cold sweat. He didn’t—you’re just being a
fucking baby about it—did he?
In a few hours, Mom will ask you why you’re not eating your birthday cake
breakfast. For now, you hope your stomach settles in time for dinner so you
don’t disappoint your dad.
End Notes
     *hastily closes lid over myself in my metal garbage can*
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