Chapter Text
Right hand to a nonexistent God, Eric never meant for shit to go down like this.
Let’s start simple, shall we? Multiple choice.
After years of systematic abuse, neglect, and a chronic tendency to be underestimated, a person finally reaches his breaking point. He is now:
a. Homicidal
b. Suicidal
c. Kind of a fag for the only other person who ever understood him
d. All of the above
The answer is d. All of the above.
He doesn’t remember who suggested NBK, just that it started as a running joke that slowly turned into serious discussion, which turned into planning. Planning turned into making bombs, and eventually they got Robyn to buy them those guns.
Christ. Why Dylan didn’t just fuck her, he’ll never know. She clearly wanted it. Maybe if he had, then none of them would be in this situation right now.
But he’s getting ahead of himself.
Because if Dylan had just sucked it up and fucked Robyn, he probably wouldn’t have fucked Jack, and Jack wouldn’t have ruined everything. He, Eric, is smarter than Robyn. He could’ve engineered some rift and pulled them apart, ensuring once again that Dylan had nowhere to go and no one but him. It would’ve taken some time, yeah, but he had time. Back then, at least.
Jack was a problem. His increasing presence in Dylan’s life was a problem. Dylan’s smart – the smartest, wisest person Eric has ever known – but sometimes he’s so fucking dumb. Jack made him dumb. Jack was a distraction.
Eric hated him. He hated him for being tall and queer and the way he dressed and talked. He hated his prettyboy face, and the fact that he thought Einstürzende Neubauten was better than KMFDM, because they’re fucking not, and that’s such a pretentious, faggoty opinion. He hated that he couldn’t get to him, that he always had some kind of goddamn comeback chambered and ready to go with his finger on the trigger. Mostly he hated Jack because Dylan loved him.
Eric liked to think about eating Jack, and imagined it would be like eating hot wings. Easy to suck the thin meat from his bones. Instead of ranch dip, he’d carve a hole and fuck the space between his ribs until he came, preferably while he was still alive. What would it feel like to put your dick into someone’s lung while they were trying to breathe? What sorts of sounds would they make? What would their eyes look like? He’d sure like to find out.
That Day, December fucking 11th, 19-fucking-98, Eric learned that, unlike Robyn, Jack may be smarter than him. That was the day that everything started to really make sense. Eric thought he had a bead on things before that, but he was wrong. When Jack crawled over with his broken face and put his hand on his chest and told him to go home, the thought that popped into his head was, ‘I love him more than you ever will.’ And that scared the shit out of him. At any rate, he recognized that he’d been beaten this time. He’d have to retreat, re-group, and come back stronger.
Maybe he already knew he loved Dylan before that moment. But what the fuck was he supposed to do? Show up on his doorstep with flowers? “Well gee, Mr. and Mrs. Klebold, I’d sure love it if you’d let me take your young man to the sock-hop next Friday! Scout’s honor, I’ll have him back by 9:00 with his virtue intact!”
Fuck. NO.
That’s not who he is; not who they are. NBK was their only option. It was fate. More romantic than a root beer float with two straws at the soda fountain, more intimate than any sticky fumbling in the back seat of the BMW at the local drive-in.
Dylan got distracted. Jack distracted him. For a long time, Eric hated them both for it.
The Army and Navy Academy wasn’t bad. They didn’t put up with any of his shit, but that really only sucked in the beginning. The first (and only) time he shouted, “Heil Hitler!” they made him run on a track until he puked. But it was like that for everyone, so he didn’t ever feel singled out. Everyone was equal, no one messed with him. Once he was beaten down enough to succumb to it, he found he actually liked the simple, militaristic routine of it all. Wake up at this time, eat only this food, and only when we say. Fold your uniform like this, make your bed like this. Walk here, stand there. Shout when you’re told to, shut up when you’re told to. Go to bed when we say.
Do these things enough times and you get rewarded.
Do these things correctly and your enemy doesn’t get to kill you.
This was a concept he thought he’d understood, too – the necessity of careful routine, devoid of emotion, when it came to the successful execution of war. He thought that’s how he had been approaching NBK. But he learned very quickly that they’d been too chaotic, too imprecise, compared to the flawless, unfeeling, time-tested death machine of the U.S. military industrial complex. The superficial trappings and jargon do not a soldier make. And Eric wanted to be Special Forces. He wanted to be Black Ops.
They made him do counseling too, and they put him back on meds. And as shocking as it was, he even started to like that stuff. Unlike the fuckheads back in Jefferson County who only saw him as a case file, running out the clock until he turned 18 and became someone else’s problem, these guys were good. They could tell when he was bullshitting, and they called him out on it. They reminded him that he wasn’t the first ‘troubled teen’ who’d tried to pull the wool over their eyes, and he was far from the best at it, so knock it off. It made him respect them, which made him listen, which eventually resulted in him feeling better.
For eight months in California, Eric took his meds, focused in class, and spoke honestly to his counsellors. The red, angry fog lifted from in front of his eyes, and for the first time he could remember, he felt healthy. It was actually good. He graduated with a 2.7 GPA, which was significantly better than anyone had expected, and notably 2.7 points higher than he’d have gotten if he’d blown his head off with a shotgun. But the ROTC program at CU Boulder didn’t like it (didn’t like the cut of his jib at all, actually) so MSU Denver it was. By the end of August, he’d crammed into a colorless, one-room bolt hole with another cadet. ROTC had paired them up randomly and it showed, because this guy really knew how to jam Eric up. His name was Mike, and he didn’t take shit seriously. He was noisy, he liked to party, and he thought computers were stupid.
Eric didn’t have to attend counseling at MSU. In hindsight, that was probably a big fuckup on someone’s part.
It was around that time that he really started to miss Dylan. He wondered where he was, and if he’d graduated and gone to Arizona like he wanted. He wondered what he was majoring in, and if he was happy. He wondered if Jack was still hanging around. So, a few days into the school year, Eric logged in to AIM just to see. Just to make sure. To know. He switched screen names, though. He couldn’t bear to look at the last messages he’d sent Dylan, on the day everything went to hell.
And there he was. Those glorious, perfect letters, V-o-D-k-A, with a little green dot next them like no time had passed at all. Almost like he’d been waiting for him.
Had he?
When Eric messaged, he replied within minutes.
Dylan was wary of him at first, which Eric figured was fair. He’d gone over there with a knife and threatened to kill them both. But they slipped back into the rhythm of each other with startling ease. Dylan said he was proud of him for taking his meds and going to counseling and graduating, which was kinda gay. But Dylan also said that counseling was helping him, too.
Of course, Jack was still hanging around. But there wasn’t as much emotion attached to that whole situation anymore. Combination of time and head meds, he figured.
They kept it up. Messages turned into phone calls. Jack had no idea, obviously. This (like everything he and Dylan have ever done, in his opinion) was none of his business.
Eric dug out his camcorder and started watching through their old videos from back home. Most of it made him cringe, but he liked seeing the two of them smiling together. He found himself pausing on frames of Dylan’s face or replaying sections where his voice was particularly clear. It’s what he did on Friday nights, while the other cadets went out to party and get laid. That first semester, he was in this intro to 3D-modelling class for game design, and at one point, he tried to make himself a little computer-Dylan. But he couldn’t get his face right and that pissed him off, so he gave up.
They kept talking. Dylan liked to talk about Jack a lot, which made sense but it still made Eric wanna hurl. He learned that Dylan always did the fucking in that arrangement, with Jack taking it up the ass. That was good, at least. Not surprising. And then he said that giving blowjobs ‘wasn’t so bad’ and that it’s kinda cool to have that much power over someone – you’ve got their dick between your teeth, and they’re trusting that you’re not gonna bite. (The only thing that made Eric want to suck was the barrel of a shotgun.) He never asked for any of that information, but he never told Dylan to shut up about it either, because he needed to prove that he was better now.
Whenever Mike got loud or left his shit lying around or came in drunk in the middle of the night and turned all the lights on, Eric thought about how much better it would be if he lived with Dylan instead.
It was Dylan’s idea that he come out for spring break. He doesn’t think Jack knows that detail. And going into it, he really did intend to keep up his good behavior. He just wanted to hang out and see his best friend, no ulterior motive whatsoever.
But when he got out there…it was all wrong. Jack had the upper hand, especially with the way he’d short-stopped him on the porch. After that, everything felt ruined. It suddenly annoyed him to see Dylan so fucking happy, because it seemed like he’d gotten everything he ever wanted: dream school, car and apartment in a different state from his parents, PlayStation. Hell, he even had someone buying him alcohol and riding his dick every night, telling him he loved him, never mind that it was Jack. Dylan had everything, and all he had to do to get it was let Jack fuck Eric over.
By the end of the first day in Arizona, he realized he couldn’t keep up. Dylan was outpacing him with his jokes, his references. He was good at video games and had a better grasp of coding and programming than he did. Eric felt dumb, sluggish. Out of the loop, and out of control. Docile.
Is this how he’d felt since the Academy? Had it been like this for months?
While Jack and Dylan watched Star Wars, Eric watched Dylan pop boners playing with his boyfriend’s feet and he thought back on long nights of Rebel Missions, of driving around with the video camera and making explosives in the basement. None of this felt like that. Dylan didn’t feel like that anymore. The air between them has changed somehow, covalent bonds weakened, orbit decaying as they spiraled apart on different trajectories.
Give it time, he could hear his old counselor say. You just got here, and you’ve both made a lot of difficult, positive changes since you last saw each other. You’ll find a new, healthier rhythm.
BULLSHIT.
Pop quiz.
(Dylan + Jack)(Eric + x) = y
y = Jack > Eric
Solve for x.
Don’t bother showing your work. This one is easy, mental math.
Eric solved it, all right. And that’s when he knew he had to stop taking his meds. He had to. Words on a computer screen and a voice on the phone were one thing, but seeing him in person was something else entirely. There was all this wrongness, like he’d lost the ability to perceive a color, only he didn’t realize it before because Dylan is the only thing in the universe that possesses that color.
It had to be the meds.
He left the bottles on the bathroom counter and even flushed one of each pill every day, because he wouldn’t have put it past that sneaky son of a bitch Jack to be counting his damn meds.
That first morning, he woke up on the couch with heart palpitations, and dizzy enough that he had a hard time standing. He pulled a prank to try and get back into the spirit of things, which went over splendidly, and then spent the rest of the day trying to drink as much water as he could to flush the chemicals out of his system.
The next morning didn’t feel much better, but Dylan wanted to go to Mexico so he sucked it up and got in the car. Still dizzy, still having heart palpitations, and on top of it all, his skin had started to ache like he had a fever. But there was something else, too. Like the anxious hum in your veins after you’ve been chain smoking. They spent the day dicking around, filming each other with the camcorder, and by evening, most of it had gone. Except for the anxious hum. That was still there, and it had turned dark and angry in a way that felt pleasantly familiar.
Maybe Eric was just cooked from standing out in the blazing sun all day, or maybe it was the liquor they’d started drinking as soon as they’d arrived, but when night fell and he saw the girl (and she was a girl) sitting outside of the motel, he knew what he wanted to do.
Dylan didn’t get it. He tried to stop Eric going over there, and physically dragged him away to yell at him when he saw him touch her tits. Eric tried to tell him that it was for both of them, that they could do whatever they wanted, but Dylan didn’t like that either. He kept freaking out about how she was too young, and they were going to get in trouble.
“Fine,” Eric had said (and this is where he fucked up), “let’s just get a room ourselves, then.”
Of course, Dylan had asked why. And for whatever reason, he hadn’t been ready for that question.
“Because I’m fuckin’ drunk,” he’d said, “and I don’t wanna go back tonight. I want it to be just us two again.” And then he’d touched him on the arm.
Really fucking un-subtle. Product of too much alcohol and quitting the meds cold turkey, he figured. He couldn’t think straight, all he knew was want, Sehnsucht, and it had turned him into a blunt instrument. A dumb animal. And maybe Dylan didn’t know what Eric was trying to do, but he definitely didn’t like it. Eric should’ve given it up, but he didn’t (again, major fuck-up.) He argued, tried to backpedal, tried to justify it and convince him, and it turned into a gigantic fucking fight. He eventually got so worked up that pushed Dylan hard on the chest, and Dylan lost his fucking shit. In a way, it was kind of nice. For a few, blissful seconds, he had his Vodka back, not whatever brainwashed thing Jack had domesticated him into. Dylan even took a couple of swings at him, and when none of them connected, he just fucking plowed him over in the dirt. Other people got involved at that point, and random bystanders had to pry Dylan off of him.
The drive back to Arizona fucking sucked. Tense silence, no music, Dylan white-knuckling the steering wheel. Eric’s hard on came and went incon-fucking-veniently, due to the simple fact of being in an enclosed space with V. They had to pull over twice so he could puke, and that pissed him off, because it was embarrassing and it made him think of Jack.
Who, of course, had been waiting up for them all night like he was their fucking parole officer or whatever the fuck. Disguising his need for weird, possessive control over Dylan with a mask of ‘I’ve just been worried sick, young man!’
Oh, yeah. Eric saw right through it. His disgusting, manipulative, female tactics.
And it didn’t escape his notice that Dylan never cited Jack as a reason not to fuck that girl.
Yeah. He was starting to feel sharp again. More alert.
By the next morning, all seemed to have been forgiven. They didn’t talk about it; they just sort of picked up where they’d left off.
And then they went to that club.
Eric tried to use what he’d learned at the Academy. He focused in on the difference between the inexpert planning of NBK and the time-tested methods of warfare, and he tried to examine his attempt in Mexico through that lens. He had to be better this time. Tighten it up, make it count. Because he was out of time – it was Friday night, and he had to leave on Sunday.
He held out for hours in that place. That hollow edifice shat out by some fucking taste-generating machine trained on the cult of celebrity worship and consumer fetish, pandering to the lowest common denominator among the shuffling herd. The people reflected nothing. The exploding, manic strobes illuminated nothing.
Malice and hatred bled from his pores like mustard gas.
“You’re not fucking married to him, man,” he’d said. “Are you seriously gonna let yourself die without a single taste of pussy?”
All the while, he kept his head on a swivel, ready to out-maneuver Jack. The fucking interloper.
“You say you’re bisexual, but how do you know if you’ve never fucked a girl?”
It had worked too well. Just like back home, the girls liked Dylan more. They shoved Eric to the side and gave him all of their attention. Was it his hair? His earring? Height? Jack’s clothes definitely helped. That was the best Eric had ever seen him dressed, which pissed him off, because he couldn’t look at his Vodka without seeing Jack. Like he was wearing a second skin; one that was just begging to be flayed away.
Eric knew why he loved Dylan – the carbon in their bones came from the same dead star, like two halves of the same whole, and they’ve been destined to die together since this universe was born from the death-spasms of the last. Duh. But the girls didn’t have any of that. Their zombie senses weren’t attuned to the right frequency, and they never would be. So, what the fuck did they see in Dylan that they couldn’t see in him?
Didn’t matter. The end result was the same. Dylan took off with that dumb slut, and he was stuck back at the apartment with Jack.
The drunker he got, the more he really started to resent them both. He started thinking about killing Jack, just so he could see the look on Dylan’s face when he found the body. He considered getting the knife out of his bag (the one he promised and promised and promised he didn’t bring with him, oh, he would never bring a weapon into the house!) and plunging it into Jack’s gut. He’d shove it up into his heart and then yank it out through his ribcage. Strangle him, squish his head, bite his temples into his skull, rip off his jaw.
So many options. So few chances. So little time.
But then he caught sight of the scars on his leg, and when Jack told him where they’d come from, everything suddenly felt weird and hot and anxious in a way Eric couldn’t quite name.
While he stood in the bathroom doorway and watched Jack puke his guts out, he thought very seriously about kissing him. He experimented with it for a little while, torturing Jack and testing himself at the same time. It felt like dissecting a frog in freshman bio. Poke here, cut there, move this aside. See what you find. What makes it live? What makes it die? Amazing how much pain you can inflict on someone with just the power of words, as long as you know which words to use. He got Jack to cry, and his tears were the sweetest thing he’d ever tasted. And then Jack passed out, and that meant Eric could really do what he wanted.
First order of business was that he wanted to see those scars again. The existence of that hidden galaxy of his own design made him feel like a fucking God. No matter how hard he tried, no matter how much he stripped away, Jack would never be able to look at himself without seeing him. Eric was carved into his naked body forever. He did get his Bowie knife at that point, because he knew that no matter what else happened, he wanted to peel off that strip of skin and keep it as a souvenir.
Eric knelt on the bed and pulled Jack’s skirt up and tested the look of the steel against that scarred thigh. He held it against his ghost-pale skin until it warmed, watching the blade glimmer and flash in the residual light from the TV out in the living room. He was drunk enough that everything was crisscrossing and overlapping in front of him, and he kept almost tipping over on the mattress, but it didn’t matter. If Jack woke up, he’d just kill him.
He was wearing another one of those slutty, black jockstraps, like when he confronted him on the porch. Fag lingerie, Eric thought. Disgusting. He blinked and suddenly the jockstrap was gone, and he was pressing the flat of the knife against the soft flesh of Jack’s penis. He nudged and rolled it back and forth, then slid the blade under it and flipped it up against his stomach. Playing with the strange fleshiness of the thing. It annoyed him how big it was. It pulsed and pressed into the metal, filling with blood. Eric wondered if he could make him cut himself on it, if he got him hard enough. He wondered if he should just cut it off.
A single word popped into his head: teeth.
Best he can figure, that’s how Jack’s dick wound up in his mouth. Don’t fucking ask why. He was drunk, and if he couldn’t have Dylan, he wanted to take something from Dylan. At least, that’s what he’s been telling himself for the last two weeks. It felt interesting in his mouth, like it would be soft and chewy if he bit down on it. The longer he spent thinking about it, working the flesh over with his tongue, the harder Jack got.
Amidst all the spit and sweat and gagging (because it is fucking hard to fit any amount of dick in your mouth; he has no idea how the girls in porn make it look so easy) he remembered what Dylan had said about blowjobs. How it feels so powerful, like you’ve got total control over someone. That didn’t apply exactly, since Jack was asleep and had no idea what was happening to him and therefore wasn’t trusting him to do a damn thing. This was a different kind of power. Not needing someone’s trust to do whatever you want, just doing it.
He thought back to Columbine, and how badly he wanted to get some before he and Dylan went NBK. He had fantasies of grabbing someone and shoving them into a room, pulling their clothes off, and fucking them hard. Some innocent, flawless body. Long, smooth legs. Corpse-pale skin, jet black hair.
Jack had all of those things.
Chalk it up to teenage hormones, or maybe he’s just an insane fucking rapist. But he was drunk, he had a hard-on, and he wanted flesh. Just his luck, he had someone spread out in front of him like a feast.
He honestly didn’t think there would be consequences.
Jack liked to take it up the ass. He did that all the time, from what Dylan said. What was the appeal? There had to be some kind of appeal. Otherwise, fags like him wouldn’t do it. He figures that’s the line of logic that ended with his jeans around his knees and his fingers in his own ass. It was tight. Dry, until he spat on his fingers. And it wasn’t bad, as long as he didn’t really think about what he was doing, and that was easy because he was so drunk. Think about V, he told himself. And he did.
It was a weirdly powerful feeling, making Jack get hard against his will. It made him get hard, too.
Somewhere in there, he heard the knife slide off the bed and thump down onto the carpet. He told himself he’d go get it, but later. He wanted to cum first.
And then, against all fucking odds, Jack woke up. He freaked out, and Eric got so fucking scared. It felt like falling through the ice on a frozen pond – that had happened to him once when he was a kid, back in New York, and this felt just the same. He couldn’t remember any of his violent fantasies from earlier, much less work up the nerve to do anything. It’s different when the person is awake and looking at you, especially when they just caught you doing...that shit. And just like on the porch, Eric’s brain shorted out and his limbs locked up; an automatic, animal deference to the dominant party.
“Fuck me,” he said. “Just fuck me.”
There’s this thing that Dylan liked to say back in Colorado, on nights that they really got to drinking. “In vino veritas.” It’s Greek or Latin or something, and Dylan said it meant that you were only really yourself when you were drunk. Like alcohol unearthed all the hidden truths and desires you had to keep locked away in order to get through life as a functioning member of “society.”
Eric doesn’t know about that. All he knows is that, in that moment, he was thinking of Dylan. How much he loved him, and how much he wanted everyone else in the world to hurt as much as he did.
And it did hurt. It was a kind of pain the human body wasn’t designed to process, like a pinching feeling deep in your fucking guts. The fundamental wrongness of it made him lightheaded. The urge to puke rose and fell with each thrust, and for a while, he really thought he was gonna. One wrong move, and he’d have been spewing beer and stomach acid all over Jack and Dylan’s bed.
But goddammit, the pleasure. It felt so fucking good, even with the pain. Maybe because of it. Like a spool of hot, red cord strung between the inside of his asshole and the tip of his dick, and it just kept winding tighter and tighter.
Yeah, he understood. He got why Jack did it all the time.
After Jack flipped him over, Eric stared up at the pictures above the bed; those two fags wrapped up in gauze together. He thought about the hidden lyrics to Ringfinger that Dylan found in the liner notes of the Pretty Hate Machine CD. ‘I'm so tired I can't get to sleep, and the squeaking of the bed is right in time with the song that's repeating in my head. I just want you to know, when I do it, I only think of you.’ It played over and over and over again until he came.
The next morning was trash. He felt like shit when he woke up, and not just because he could hear Dylan and Jack fighting. In a weird way, it sort of felt like listening to his parents fight, all holed up in his basement. Maybe because he knew that they, like his parents so often did, were fighting about him.
Jack left, and Dylan called him a couple of times. And when Jack quit answering, he made like he was going to go over to the tattoo shop and kill him. He wanted the knife and was talking about buying a gun. And while Eric didn’t really give a fuck about Jack getting killed, he didn’t want Dylan to leave. So, while Dylan tore through cabinets trying to find the kitchen knives, Eric ran into the bedroom and ripped the belt off of his jeans. Dylan had his back turned, so Eric jumped up (literally jumped, both feet off the ground, because Dylan’s so goddamn fucking tall) and slung the belt around Dylan’s neck. When he came down, Dylan came down too, falling like a dead tree on the linoleum.
They beat the fuck out of each other. Like, really went at it, harder than they ever had before. And they wrecked the apartment – knocking shit off of shelves, putting dents in the walls. All the shit from the coffee table wound up on the floor when Eric tried to jump over it and missed. He caught his shin on the edge and faceplanted on the carpet in front of the TV, dragging the pizza boxes and beer cans and piles of cigarette butts right along with him.
It went on for so long that Eric sort of forgot what exactly they were fighting about. It felt like they were fighting about everything – NBK, and the way shit went down between them back in Littleton. They were fighting about Robyn and Brooks and Rock n Bowl and BJ, and that goddamn fucking van break-in, and the fact that Dylan always seemed have other friends and Eric never did. They were fighting about Dylan stealing the bombs and guns and still getting everything he ever wanted, while Eric got shipped off to fucking military school. Mostly, they were fighting about Jack, and everything for which he’d become effigy.
He tried to bite Dylan on the neck, but he missed and got the corner of his face instead. It didn’t matter though. Flesh was flesh was flesh, and after all these years, he finally had the taste of Vodka on his tongue.
There wasn’t really any explosive end to it. They both eventually just…ran out of stamina. Eric remembers sitting on Dylan’s stomach and choking him, watching his face get redder and redder, but his hands felt so thick and achy that he just couldn’t do it anymore. He let go and slumped over onto his chest and started crying, and then Dylan was crying too, but his hand was on Eric’s back, and that felt good. Neither of them said ‘sorry’ out loud, but it was understood.
Dylan got up and unearthed the bottle of vodka from the mess in the living room, and then he put out his hand and pulled Eric to his feet and they went into the bedroom and fell asleep. But it wasn’t like nothing happened this time, like it had been after Mexico. Everything felt different. Everything had changed. It was like they were on the verge of something.
He thinks a lot about the conversation they’d had, lying in bed together that day.
“Do you ever think about what it would be like if shit had all gone down differently?” he’d asked.
“Like how?”
“Like…what would’ve happened if we’d gone through with it. If you’d never involved him.”
Dylan didn’t like that question, and didn’t respond to it.
“We could have done it, you know. We would’ve changed the world forever. Everyone, for the rest of history, would’ve known our names and what we’d done.”
“Is that true, though? Or would the history books have read that we were just two pussies who couldn’t take a joke?”
“Doesn’t matter. We’d be studied. We would be in the history books. And anyone who came after us, anyone smart enough to hate this fucked up world and understand that they have the ability to change it with enough willpower, would see it all for what it really was.”
“Which is what?”
A love song, he thought. “Look around you, V. You know this isn’t where we’re supposed to be.”
“No.”
He shifted closer, hand hovering over Dylan’s chest. “But see, that’s the thing. I was always more committed to it than you were.”
“That’s not true.”
Yes, it was. Of course, it was. “Did you ever stop to think that it was for you? All of it?”
“Dude, don’t put that on me. It was for both of us. It was revolution, retribution. Wrath. Fucking natural selection. Like you just said, it was bigger than either of us.”
“Do you still believe in those things?”
It took him a long time to answer that one. “Not the way I used to.”
Ouch. “Oh, what? Because you got laid?”
“Dude, just stop.”
“You’re the only thing I’ve ever…not hated. Do you know that?”
“Yeah. I know, Reb.”
When he woke up later and found Dylan and Jack kissing…
Was macht ein Mann? Doch nur ein Tier.
Thinking back on that night, on the perfect moment when his body slid into Dylan’s for the first time, feels like looking directly into the sun. If he does it for too long, it starts to hurt. Not because of embarrassment, even though there was plenty of that. He came so fucking pathetically fast that first time, and even though he knows it’s not really his fault, it still felt like shit. And after he came the second time and Jack kept fucking him, he was drilling down into something so insanely hypersensitive that it felt like he was being electrocuted. He wound up pissing himself while his dick was still in Dylan’s ass. He’s ashamed that it happened, but more ashamed of how…God, how fucking exciting it was. At least Dylan didn’t make a big deal out of it.
No, what hurts is the creeping fear that he’ll never, ever experience that again for the rest of his stupid fucking life. There was a perfect rhythm between his flesh and Dylan’s, like their blood was singing together. Way past any description of sex he’s ever read, way past anything he’s ever seen in porn or even imagined would be possible. Because he and Dylan share something that no other people in the history of humanity ever have, he knows it. He could feel it when their tongues touched, and when he made Dylan cum. That…
Actually, that’s none of your business. That moment is private. You wouldn’t fucking get it anyway.
And then it was over. Faster than Eric could get a grip on it, Dylan was kicking him out, all crying about his dumb boyfriend and how he needed to find him and make everything right, or whatever the fuck gay shit. Eric made him keep the knife, because it would’ve felt wrong not to. He knew Dylan would need it sooner or later. But when he tried to kiss him, he pulled away. And Eric couldn’t even kill him for it like he wanted to, because he’d already handed over the knife.
If there is a hell, it’ll be an eternity spent re-living the drive back to Denver. It was just…
There aren’t words. Not in English, anyway. Maybe there are in German, because they’ve always been good at summing up those indescribable feelings in a single word.
A few times, he tested what would happen if he let go of the steering wheel, closed his eyes, and floored it. Like that one scene in Fight Club, but in broad daylight. Mostly, he just wound up on the rumble strips, and then instinct kicked in and he put his hands back on the wheel like a pussy. But a couple of times, he drifted over into the oncoming lane. He knows because he could hear the trucks coming, and hear them leaning on their horns.
The first time it happened, he panicked again and opened his eyes and swerved out of the way. But the second time, he was ready. He heard the truck coming, heard the horn. He balled his hands into fists and pounded them against the side of his head and he screamed and screamed and screamed, so fucking ready for it. One split second of pain, and then nothing. No more pain, not ever again. The roar of the truck engine got louder and louder, the horn rose in pitch, and the car rocked and swerved, but the impact never came. When he opened his eyes, the semi was half-driving in the desert on the side of the road to get around him.
He got pulled over for that one. Guy must’ve called it in on that stupid fucking trucker radio that they all have. State Trooper let him off with a warning for drowsy driving and escorted him to the next rest stop where he was instructed to get some sleep. He said the ROTC student ID showed him that Eric wasn’t a bad kid, he just needed to be more careful, and thank fuck for sealed juvenile records.
He peeled out as soon as the cop left, and he didn’t try that again.
On his first morning back, he overslept like a motherfucker, and Mike didn’t bother waking him up. The piece of shit idiot. He sprinted into formation late, still with his mohawk, which just seemed stupid at that point. Everyone got punished for it, but especially Mike. Eric knows that was supposed to be some kind of reverse psychology trick to make him feel guilty for letting everyone in his unit down, but it didn’t work, because he couldn’t give a fuck about the rest of those assholes anymore. The real trouble came when they dragged them all into the bathroom for random, post-spring-break drug tests. He and Dylan had been huffing more weed than oxygen for the past week, so he knew he was totally fucked. Nothing to do but count his days waiting for the results.
And that’s where he’s at now. He only leaves his dorm for ROTC, not even bothering to go to class or even really eat. (Fucking JACK, that prettyboy FUCK, this has to be HIS FAULT, like Eric caught his girly fucking anorexia like a goddamn STD) He just stares at his computer screen, opening and closing AIM but never fucking working up the nut to just fucking type something. He’s writing a lot again with pen and paper, like he’d done at Columbine. Angry shit. New plans, new lists. Names, locations. Ordnance. He keeps writing Jack’s name and then crossing it out. Writing it, crossing it out. Writing it, underlining it, crossing it out.
And he watches their videos. The ones from back home, and the precious few minutes of footage he’d gotten in Arizona. They light up his brain like a drug. If he could somehow mainline them into his arm like an IV, he would. Maybe that would fix him.
He hasn’t started his meds again, by the way. He’s vaguely worried about that coming up in his drug test, because he doesn’t actually know what they’re testing for exactly. But just like the weed, there’s nothing to do about it now. Going forward, he’ll pick up his prescriptions on time like a good boy, but he’s not taking that fucking poison anymore. He’ll die before he tunes himself out like that again.
He jerks off to weird shit these days. Mental images of tying Dylan down and pissing in his ass, on purpose this time. Holding Jack by the hair and making him beg Eric to stick his fingers down his throat and let him puke. He jerks off to the idea of eating them both, or sometimes feeding Jack to Dylan. He wants to be naked and covered in their blood. He wants to tear Jack’s throat out with his teeth and then fuck the hole until he chokes to death or drowns in cum. He wants to bite off Dylan’s ear and swallow it, so that a part of Dylan can be metabolized into a part of him. He would tear Dylan’s chest open with his bare hands if it meant he could have one more moment inside him. He imagines these things and jerks off until he has stars in his eyes. Until he’s shooting blood.
He tries to stick his fingers in his own ass once, but it’s just not right.
It's weird how often Jack pops into his head during moments like these. For a while, he thought it was just how much he hated him. But lately, he’s started to think that it’s because he sees Jack as a part of Dylan – one of Dylan’s things, one of his possessions, or maybe even something deeper, like a trait – and he loves Dylan, so his soul is confused and it makes his simple, animal brain think he loves Jack, too.
He's not a fag. He’s not. These are EXTENUATING FUCKING CIRCUMSTANCES.
It's two weeks before he can’t take it anymore. He doesn’t know what tips the scales, but all of a sudden, it feels like he’s fucking drowning. If he doesn’t talk to Dylan, he’ll die. If he doesn’t talk to Dylan, he’ll kill himself. So, late at night, while Mike is out partying, he logs on to AIM.
REBDOOMER (01:21:44 AM): V im sorry
REBDOOMER (01:21:55 AM): I need u
REBDOOMER (01:26:03 AM): please answer
Perfect little messages in glittering bottles, bobbing on the waves as he casts them out on their hopeful journey.
He sets his camcorder up on the desk, hits play on his videos, and waits. Mike turns up some indistinct amount of time later, and Eric tells him to get out. He doesn’t listen and turns on the lights, so Eric grabs the knife taped under his computer desk, takes him by the collar, jams the tip of the blade into the hollow of his throat, and forces him back out into the hallway. And Mike’s all screaming and freaking out, saying he’s gonna tell on him (grow up), but Eric is weirdly calm about the whole thing. It’s almost like he’s watching it all happen from outside his own body; not really in control, just spectating. Once Mike is out, he shuts the door and pushes one of the beds up against it.
There are going to be consequences for that. He’s not stupid, he knows he’s only digging himself deeper. But there are more important things in life than ROTC rank and grades. It’s so scary how he let himself forget that for so long.
And then he hears it. That little two-tone chiptune bell sounding from his computer.
VoDkA (03:02:27 AM): I’m here reb
Eric smiles. In the reflection of his computer screen, he can see his mouth spreading out wide and red across the bottom of his face. It sort of looks like a wound with the stitches torn out.