Chapter Text
Till meets Ivan for the first time in kindergarten. Ivan snatches a cluster of pretty blue flowers from between Till’s chubby fingers and crushes them underfoot. He doesn’t say anything when he does it. Till remembers his own vision clouding with tears of fury, fists shaking at his sides as he looks at the strange boy and tries to understand why he did what he did.
Ivan watches back, impassively; big, dark eyes empty of remorse.
Till was never good with words either. Instead of asking why Ivan did it, he launches himself on him, hitting him as hard as he can muster. That’s what dad does when he’s mad at mom.
The first flicker of life he sees in Ivan’s face is when the smaller boy manages to flip Till onto his back, pummelling him in the nose in retaliation. Ivan has a snaggletooth which peeks out at Till as he cracks a smile. His eyes burn like the sticky, shiny edges of the blacktop on a hot summer’s day. Till tastes his own blood when he sees that smile for the first time, coppery and slick in between his teeth as he bites down on his own tongue. The taste of blood is never far from Ivan’s smile, it turns out.
Afterwards, the teacher gives them both a time out. They’re left to sit at the edge of the playground and sulk alongside each other. Till’s hand feels particularly sore, worse than it usually is when his temper snaps and he raises his fist to hit someone. His palm is shiny and tight, littered with red welts. It isn’t until years later he finds out that the plant he’d held in such high regard was poison leadwort.
Banished at the edge of recess, Ivan notices Till sniffling in pain. He makes a sound in the back of his throat before he spits on Till’s reddened hand, the cool wetness of his saliva a balm for the sting. Ivan smiles that snaggletooth smile of his again, small thumbs working spit into Till’s skin.
“Cheer up,” he says.
“Can I come play at your house?” Ivan asks.
They just started the first grade. Till’s mom says they can walk the last stretch of road to school together as long as they hold hands. Till hates it. Ivan always squeezes too hard, makes a show of hanging on even when they reach the door to their classroom and have to take their shoes off.
Till shakes his head, finally managing to wrangle his grip free of Ivan.
“No. Quit asking already,” Till says, stowing his shoes in his cubby and going to take off his coat. He tugs at the sleeve of his shirt, trying to keep the purple bruise on his wrist from Ivan’s keen gaze. He thinks he manages because Ivan doesn’t say anything, and Ivan always says something when Till’s dad leaves a mark on him.
The next day, Till answers the door to a police officer when he’s supposed to be hiding in the airing cupboard. His dad has his mom upstairs and she’s making those same whimpers she always does amidst the repetitive banging of a bed frame. Till can’t see very well out of his left eye; dad must have lost big at the races today.
The police officer makes Till wait in her car, talks into a little radio she has strapped to her shoulder. When another car comes, two more police officers enter Till’s house and then they take his dad away.
He misses school for a few days. When he goes back, and his mom drops him at the usual corner, Ivan is there waiting. He takes Till’s hand, dark eyes only lingering for a moment on the bruises that his mom has around her pale neck.
“Can I come play at your house now?” Ivan asks as they walk.
Till looks over at him to tell him no and to stop asking once and for all , but before he can he feels the way Ivan’s fingers tighten around his own like Till might try and sprint away. Ivan points at Till’s eye - it’s not swollen shut anymore, just green around the edges.
“That’s why I couldn’t come before, right?” Ivan asks carefully. He tilts his head. “But your dad’s gone now.”
Till isn’t sure what to say to that. Ivan takes his silence as confirmation of his invite, and follows Till back to the corner like a duckling without a mother that day when school is over. Till’s mom asks him where Ivan’s mommy is, isn’t she coming to pick him up? Ivan tells her he’s big enough now to walk home on his own - nanny is looking after his little sister and he thinks his mom might be overseas.
Till’s mom lets him come play. So begins the ritual of Ivan coming to their house after school every Friday.
“When’s your birthday?” Till asks when they start the second grade.
“Don’t have one,” Ivan tells him. He flicks Till on the ear. “Adopted, remember?”
Till swipes his hand away, rolls his eyes.
“But you must celebrate sometime ,” Till insists, ignoring the burning tips of his ears. It makes him embarrassed for some reason when Ivan brings up the fact he and his little sister were adopted. Maybe it's because despite the fact she picked them out specially, Ivan’s mom doesn’t seem to like them much. She’s never around, always working. Ivan’s nanny doesn’t like him much either, preferring to spend all her time with quiet, boring Sua. Ivan’s nanny doesn’t speak much English, and what she can say usually relates back to the time she’d caught Ivan catching butterflies in the back yard and yanking their wings off their bodies.
“February 14th,” Ivan says eventually, drawing a heart with the tips of his fingers in the air between them. “Valentine’s Day. Is what mom picked out. She said it was romantic.”
Till doesn’t know much about romance, nor does he care to find out, but when they’re making their Valentines in class that year, he scribbles out the message on the front of his card and writes ‘Happy Birthday Ivan’ in his best handwriting. He presents it to him alongside his lucky pencil. Ivan has always seemed to like it - he steals it from Till’s desk often and chews on the end despite the fact Till has chewed it nearly through to the centre.
Ivan acts like he’s never received another present in his life before (which Till knows is not true because his mom got him a brand new bike for Christmas and he barely wants to ride the thing - he left it in Till’s front yard the week after New Year’s and never took it back).
Till lets Ivan hug him without protest for five seconds, which is five seconds longer than he normally permits Ivan to hug him. Ivan asks if this means they’re best friends.
Till isn’t sure about best friends, but he doesn’t say so. Ivan might be a weirdo, but he’s the only friend Till’s got.
Till loses his last baby tooth during a game of kickball turned fist fight with the fifth graders. Ivan doesn’t step in to assist until Till is squirming on the ground, pinned down by an older boy with his face in the dirt. Ivan kicks the boy as hard as he can square between his legs, watching as he rolls off Till gasping in pain.
He pauses to pick something up off the ground before getting down on his hands and knees and placing his face so close to Till's that their noses are practically touching.
“Are you hurt?” he asks calmly. Till shoves him away, holding a hand trembling with adrenaline up to his mouth. He can feel the gap in his teeth when he thrusts his tongue forwards, rubbing dirt from where the boy had ground his chin into the sandy kickball field.
“No, I’m not hurt,” Till spits back. “Quit worrying so much. Besides, you were happy to let him hit me!”
Ivan watches him blankly.
“You told me not to get involved,” Ivan points out, as Till hauls himself up off the ground and starts looking for his tooth.
“There’s a difference between not getting involved and letting a guy punch my tooth out, Ivan,” Till responds angrily, toeing around in the dusty earth for any sign of his prize. “Help me find my tooth, would you? The tooth fairy won’t come if it's not under your pillow.”
“The tooth fairy isn’t real, Till,” Ivan says, grinning broadly as he stands up too, thrusting his hands into his pockets. Till feels his face grow red with embarrassment, shoves Ivan aggressively away from him when he sidles up close.
“He is too!” Till insists, ultimately deciding to cut his losses when the fifth grader Ivan kicked between the legs starts to stagger to his feet again. The two of them disappear from the site quickly before a teacher can be called, both of them falling into the traditional rhythm of hiding behind the cafeteria dumpsters. This is a good spot to lay low until recess is over, lest his opponents try to pick another fight. Till gets into them at least once a week. The other kids make fun of his ratty clothes and his skinny legs and the fact Ivan never leaves his side. They’ve started to call him a sissy, whatever that means.
Crouching down behind the dumpsters, Till lets out a deep sigh.
“What is a sissy anyways?” he asks Ivan, whose hands are still buried in his pockets. Ivan shrugs.
“You’d only get madder if I told you,” he says easily. Till opens his mouth to insist, but Ivan has freed one of his hands and is now poking his index finger through the gap in Till’s teeth. The gum is raw with fresh nerve endings, and it sends a toe curling sensation down Till’s spine when Ivan’s fingernail nicks it.
He swallows down a yelp of discomfort, grabbing Ivan by the wrist and holding his hand still, away from his mouth.
“Why would you do that?” Till demands, watching as Ivan wriggles his fingers where his hand is paralysed by Till’s grasp.
Ivan just smiles, seemingly delighted with the contact.
Till silently wishes he had any other friends.
When they start middle school, a girl named Mizi joins their class.
Till doesn’t think he’s ever seen anyone more beautiful in his entire life.
She’s got hair the same colour as her pretty, rosy cheeks, and eyes which shine even from behind the thick lenses of her glasses. She’s immediately popular, gains a cult following of their classmates who laugh at all her jokes and take turns braiding her hair.
One day at lunch, she comes back to their classroom to get something from her desk. Ivan and Till are the only ones still there, Till having pulled out the battered old second hand guitar his mother managed to get him for his birthday. She can’t afford lessons, but there’s plenty of tutorials online which Till can binge on Ivan’s expensive phone.
Till’s not aware Mizi’s even listening until Ivan reaches down and presses pause on the video he’s playing along with.
“Hello, Mizi,” Ivan says smoothly, dark eyes flickering to the doorway over Till’s shoulder.
“Hey Ivan,” Mizi says, before coming to stand between the two of their desks. She’s smiling at Till with the same lovely smile she offers to everyone else, clenching her palms together. “I didn’t know you played guitar, Till. That was so awesome, I love that song!”
Till gapes for a moment, mouth moving listlessly as he tries to remember how to speak. Each millisecond that passes in silence makes him even more painfully self-aware, the telltale roar of a blush crawling up his neck to his face. Somehow, he manages to take a deep gulp of air, the oxygen spurring his brain on to remember how to speak.
“Oh, really?” he asks breathlessly, fingers twitching over the strings nervously. “You… know that song?”
Mizi nods, obviously choosing to ignore his hopeless flailing attempts to talk to her (she’s so sweet it makes Till’s chest hurt).
“Sure I do!” she responds, humming the melody back at him while swaying from side to side. Music is generally an easier way for Till to communicate anything, so instead of choking on his own tongue again, he picks up the melody along with Mizi. Her eyes shine as he strums, her mouth beginning to form the words as she sings along with his playing. Till thinks it's possibly the loveliest thing he’s ever heard in his life.
During the instrumental break, Mizi nudges Ivan with her elbow. Till tries not to freeze in shock - he’s never seen Ivan allow anyone but him to touch him before.
“Do you know the harmony, Ivan? Or how about you sing the melody and I’ll sing the harmony? You’re in choir too, right?”
Ivan blinks for a moment, a rare wave of shock washing over his usually blank expression before he seems to remember himself. Mizi taps the rhythm along his arm as she takes up a harmony part, nodding encouragingly as he sings the melody back at her. Ivan has a really nice voice. Till watches the two of them, transfixed as he finishes the guitar part and Mizi giggles in delight.
“We make a good trio, huh? Maybe we could do something for the spring concert, wouldn’t that be fun?”
Till doesn’t shut up about Mizi for the entire journey home. He doesn’t really shut up about Mizi again throughout the entirety of their first year of middle school.
The next day at lunch, when he pulls out his guitar to study up on chord progressions, Ivan has mysteriously let his phone die. Till thinks that odd — he usually even brings a portable charger in case Till wants to stay after school and practice some more.
“I guess it just slipped my mind,” Ivan says breezily when Till asks what the big idea is. When Mizi stays with them at lunch anyway, Till decides he doesn’t care if Ivan never charges his phone again.
The next year, Ivan’s sister Sua starts at their school.
Mizi meets Sua by happenstance, when she visits their classroom before the first bell to inform Ivan that their mother will be making a rare appearance at dinner that evening, so he can’t be late.
When Mizi sees Sua, her face floods with the same unstoppable blush that Till’s does every time Mizi sings along as he plays his guitar. He wonders what’s gotten into her - Sua is possibly more creepy than Ivan. At least, he thinks that, but in actuality he’s probably just more used to Ivan’s brand of creepiness than Sua’s.
Even Ivan seems intrigued by the brief interaction between his sister and Mizi, sitting up from where he’s been slumped in his chair over the top of Till’s desk to watch Mizi shyly compliment Sua’s hair.
Sua pops up in their classroom more and more over the course of the next two years of middle school. When they start high school, and stopping by the classroom isn’t an option anymore, she starts inviting Mizi over. The two of them disappear upstairs to Sua’s room as Ivan and Till do their homework at Ivan’s kitchen table. Till can’t help but feel jealous - Mizi is his friend, she’s in his class, they’ve known each other for three whole years now. She’s impossibly lovely - even Ivan likes her, and famously Ivan doesn’t like anyone but Till. He thinks it's absurd how Sua has just wormed her way in. Towards the end of middle school, she’d effectively been ignoring him and Ivan during her visits to the classroom in favour of hanging on Mizi’s every word.
Ivan throws his pen down atop his math book one afternoon, chin falling lazily into his palm as he watches Till.
“Your jealousy is showing,” he says snidely, watching Till’s brow furrow in annoyance.
“What are you talking about?” Till snaps, shutting his own math book with a dejected sigh. Ivan nods his head pointedly in Till’s direction.
“That. You’ve been huffing and puffing all afternoon. It’s distracting.”
Till opens his mouth to bite back a retort, but Ivan is ignoring him, picking up his phone and scanning a text which has just come through. It’s Friday, a rare Friday spent at Ivan’s and not Till’s because Till had found out Mizi was coming home with Sua.
“Pizza’s on its way,” Ivan says. “Wanna go get the girls? I’ll put the movie on.”
Pissed at Ivan’s insufferable observation skills, Till shoves his seat back from the table and mutters a string of curses in Ivan’s direction.
He tries to expel some of the annoyance from his body as he climbs the dark stairway up to Sua’s room; she practically has this entire floor to herself, with Ivan’s room being a converted loft in the eaves of the house.
He knocks on the door, but there’s music blaring from within. When no one answers, Till grits his teeth together and knocks harder. He taps his foot in irritation on the plush carpet, counts to five before he grabs the brass knob and shoves the door open, wondering what the hell they’re doing that they can’t hear him.
Evidently, Sua can’t hear because her ears are smothered with Mizi’s thighs, her face buried between the other girl’s legs. Presumably, Mizi can’t hear between her own whimpers and the blare of the music from the speakers.
Till shuts the door as quickly as he opened it, before Mizi can open her eyes, before Sua can turn to look at him with spit and whatever else all over her chin.
He doesn’t return to the kitchen, making his way up the narrow set of stairs to Ivan’s bedroom, where he buries his face in a pillow and screams.
He’s not sure how long he’s up there on his own, licking his wounds. Ivan emerges at some point, his shiny dark head appearing up the narrow staircase. He’s carrying a half empty box of pizza, a bottle of something honey coloured tucked below his armpit. Till rolls back onto his front, burying his face in one of the many pillows scattered across Ivan’s bed again.
“You never came back,” Ivan says, mouth full of pizza. Till doesn’t say anything. He feels the end of the bed dip, feels Ivan’s fingers tickling the bottom of his socked foot. He kicks out blindly, as hard as he can, earning an ‘ oof ’ of surprise from the end of the bed. “Hey, watch it,” Ivan says good-naturedly. “Wrong sibling. I’m not the one with my tongue down Mizi’s throat.”
Till tears the pillow away from himself, throws it directly at Ivan’s face.
“In her throat?!” Till demands hoarsely, his voice croaking in protest. “I wish all I’d seen was Sua’s tongue in her throat !”
Ivan’t eyebrows raise in mild intrigue, almost as if Till’s telling him the weather report changed unexpectedly. He takes another bite of pizza, wrinkles his nose as he swallows a mushroom and slides the box up the bed towards Till in offering.
“I see,” he hums, tongue running distractedly along his bottom lip to chase a stray string of cheese. “That is worse than I expected.”
“Than you—? You knew what they were doing!” Till roars, shoving the pizza box off the bed and leaping over to where Ivan is perched lazily on the end. Nearly blind with rage, he grabs Ivan by the front of his school shirt, balled up in his fist as he shakes as hard as he can. “You sent me up to get them because you knew what they were doing and what? You wanted to torture me? Did the fact that someone other than you held even a shred of my attention piss you off that much?!”
Ivan doesn’t look angry that Till is squeezing the cotton of his shirt so hard the top few buttons have come undone. On the contrary, his eyes are wide with excitement, that canine tooth that he refused to let the orthodontist fix when he had braces two summers ago glinting with malice.
“I mean, I didn’t know they’d be taking it that far,” he says, before his grin widens even more, “although Sua is my sister.”
Till has never wanted to hit him so much in his life.
“ Fuck you, Ivan,” he snarls, shoving him back with as much force as he can muster. Ivan doesn’t move much. Bastard had had a growth spurt during winter break and now he’s taller than Till can ever hope to be. Ivan smirks.
“If you want,” he purrs. “Although I think you’d have more fun on the bottom. I mean if you want to get back at Mizi.”
Till flounders for a second looking for an appropriate response. He decides to pointedly ignore the first part of that sentence, chalking it up to Ivan’s bizarre sense of humour and his wicked desire to crawl under Till’s skin at every given opportunity.
“I don’t want to get back at Mizi,” Till says, all of the fight disappearing from him at once. He feels like a balloon that the air has been let out of. He sighs, reaching down to retrieve the fallen pizza box. The pizza is fairly cold at this point, but Till feels empty and drained. He pries a piece away from the oil slick box, chews blandly as Ivan watches him. He doesn’t bother to redo the buttons on his shirt which Till had torn loose, revealing a sliver of his pale collarbone. It’s strangely distracting.
Till sighs deeply.
“I don’t want to get back at Mizi,” he repeats. “It’s not like… she didn’t do anything wrong. If she likes Sua, then… she likes Sua.”
Ivan stares at Till as he finishes his pizza, before reaching down off the end of the bed and producing the glass bottle he’d brought up with him. Upon closer inspection, Till can see its liquor; some kind of spiced rum. Ivan pops the cork, offers the bottle to Till.
“I thought you might be interested in drowning your sorrows,” Ivan says simply.
Disallowing himself a moment to think any deeper about Ivan’s proposition, Till takes the bottle of rum and brings it to his lips. It’s sweet and it licks like fire at his gullet as it slips down into his stomach. He scrunches his nose up in surprise - it doesn’t taste bad, just strong. And it's rather sickeningly saccharine.
“Very you to raid the liquor cabinet for liquid sugar,” Till says, mouth still around the rim of the bottle. His voice disappears into it, vibrating back at him with the low rumble of someone approaching the tail end of puberty. Ivan is watching him closely, eyes skittering down Till’s face to consider his lips poised to take another drink. It makes Till’s stomach do a funny kind of twist. He swallows back another gulp. It’s probably just the rum.
He offers Ivan back the bottle. He takes a generous swig, smacking his lips together when he’s done. Ivan grins, dark hair falling into his even darker eyes.
“Still wanna watch that movie?” he asks.
They settle down in Ivan’s ridiculously huge bed with the rest of their pizza, the bottle of rum and Ivan’s laptop balanced precariously between them. It’s some kind of space epic, about the end of the world and children raised like pets and forced to compete with each other in an alien talent show. Ivan points at the individual hideous aliens and attributes them various teachers' names in a deadpan tone which makes Till laugh until there are tears in his eyes. The movie is dumb, but Ivan says he picked it because he thought Till would like the music. It’s pretty good. Till privately thinks it's sweet that Ivan thought that much about it. That’s kind of Ivan’s whole thing though. He’s always thinking of what Till might like to do, what he might think of something. Till realises then the mushrooms on the pizza - a staple in he and his mother’s home on Friday nights - and notes Ivan hates mushrooms.
Ivan tucks the bottle of liquor away before they can drink too much - his mother won’t realise but nanny will, and Ivan says he can’t deal with another meandering call from his mother about torturing the help.
Somehow, they’ve wound up curled around each other. Till is between Ivan’s legs, leant back against his torso, but twisted around just enough that he can see his face. Ivan had been pawing through his hair as the movie drew to a close, as their drunken giggles ruined the climax as the heroine failed in her last ditch effort to save the hero. The heroine wasn’t even really in love with the hero anyway - Till thinks maybe it was better for him to die before he properly realised.
Ivan has stopped stroking his hair. Till realises he’s been staring off into space, fixated on Ivan’s torso. His shirt is riding up a little, and Till can see a burgeoning happy trail disappearing into his soft sweatpants. He suddenly feels like his throat is a little tighter. Ivan shifts, the sharp V-shape of his abdominal muscles disappearing into the band of white boxer shorts. Till’s cheeks are definitely redder, skin flushed from the nape of his neck to the tips of his ears.
“Till,” Ivan says.
He says his name differently than anyone else in the entire world. It always has this… devout ring to it. Like Ivan thinks Till is special. His voice is syrupy slow with the influence of too much rum, Till thinks. They’re very close.
Till watches Ivan’s tongue dart out along the seam of his lips. He feels a bizarre tug in his belly, a tingle from the tip of his spine through to where his dick now twitches with interest. Till thinks the rum is perhaps dulling his inhibitions, and yet somehow jerking his senses into overdrive. It's alien how he settles comfortably into the sudden warmth that overwhelms his skin as he presses up closer to his best friend’s chest. He should be freaking out right now. He should be shoving Ivan away.
Instead, he lets Ivan lean down and kiss him. His lips are dry from the air conditioned room, but his tongue is slick and tastes like the stale remnants of sugar and vanilla spice. Ivan lets out a long breath, one Till didn’t realise he’d been holding, hand coming up to cup Till’s cheek and tilt his head back a little. Ivan pulls back ever so slightly, changes the angle of the kiss, lets out a low moan somewhere in the back of his throat as he laps hungrily into Till’s mouth.
Till feels that moan dance along his tongue. It shudders through him, draws too much attention to the ripple of desire in his half hard dick. He pulls away.
Ivan watches him with eyes that could bore a hole through Till’s very soul if he left them too long unchecked. There’s something heady now, in the air between them. It's rich with the smell of rum and warmth and hormones, and Till swallows thickly as he offers Ivan a weak smile. That’s his first mistake - if he were really acting like himself, he’d have shoved Ivan away, hissing bloody murder at him in the dark room.
“Must have… drunk too much after all,” he says shakily. He pulls back, untangles his legs from Ivan’s. He ignores the obvious outline of Ivan’s own half hard dick in his sweatpants. Till tugs the blanket up over himself and hopes he’s not being too obvious. “Maybe we should get some sleep. … Night, Ivan.”
With that, Till slides below the duvet and turns in the opposite direction. He stays as still as he can, desperate for Ivan to just leave it, for once in his life to just leave Till be, and let the moment slip away.
For some reason, he does. Till hears Ivan lie down, scoot to the far edge of the bed. The rum carries Till into a quick bout of dreamless sleep, the space between him and his best friend vast and cold for the first time in their lives.
Till wakes up and it's still dark outside.
He can hear little choked gasps coming from the other side of the bed, and can feel the duvet moving gently back and forth. Ivan lets out a whimper, tries to swallow it back.
He’s masturbating.
Till knows he should be horrified. His best friend is lying on the opposite side of the bed, pleasuring himself as Till sleeps. He should leap out of the bed now, call his mom and take the tongue lashing that comes with him being quite obviously drunk.
Instead, Till surrenders to the hot tug of arousal in his abdomen, reaches down as slowly as he dares, and rubs himself to completion. He comes in his hand, around the same time as Ivan does, both of them biting down on their bottom lips to hide their disgusting display from the other.
Till wipes his spend on his leg, the sudden stark awareness of his actions coming into focus in his post-orgasm haze.
Ivan has gone back to sleep.
Till does the same.
“Mom? Is… Ivan strange?”
His mom glances at him with curious eyes as she blows steam from the rim of her teacup. She shrugs, smiles at him gently.
“Do you think he’s strange?” she asks, interlocking her fingers together and settling her chin atop them. Till twists uncomfortably in his chair. He shrugs.
“Well… I’m a little strange, right?” Tills asks, thinking back to the sneers of the children on the playground. People have always found him disconcerting, right from when he was a kindergartener that picked fights with his shadow and was littered with bruises until now, when he’d prefer to have his headphones jammed into his ears, learning a new solo than talking to his classmates. He continues. “So I guess I’m not exactly qualified to make that judgement.”
His mother laughs a little at that, reaching across the table to smooth some of his unruly hair out of his face. Till cringes away from her, trying to bat her away and get her to concentrate on the matter at hand. She takes a sip of her tea, aquamarine eyes the same shade as Till’s glittering.
“If you think that, then why does it matter?” she asks reasonably. “The two of you seem well suited for each other to me. Maybe you’re both a little strange, but you’re perfectly matched. And Ivan has always cared a lot about you.” She smiles. “That’s all I’ve ever wanted for you, Till.”
Till rolls his eyes in embarrassment as his mother gives him that big soppy smile of her’s.
“You mean he’s always been weirdly obsessed with me,” Till snips back, mind reeling back to the kiss in Ivan’s bed, to the aborted gasps of pleasure that left the two of them as they masturbated alongside each other. He can feel his cheeks warming at the very memory. His mother presses her cool hand to his face.
Till jerks at her touch, watches her with wide, guilty eyes. She raises a brow.
“Did something happen between you and Ivan?” she asks gently. “Do you want to talk to me about it?”
“No! No, nothing— nothing happened , mom. Jesus, why do you always have to make everything so deep, I was just asking you a question!”
Till quickly descends into a flurry of snapping words, anything to push his mother away, avoid facing the fact that something had happened between him and Ivan… and that something had irreparably changed the way Till felt every time Ivan’s touched him since. Ivan acts the same as he always has; but then that has Till worrying all the more. Maybe Ivan’s always felt… some kind of way about him and Till’s just been too dumb to see it.
The doorbell rings and a moment later, Ivan lets himself into the house.
Till’s mother leans back from him at the table, mouth pressed into a thin line as she watches him. After everything she and Till went through when Till was a kid, his mom is kind of hesitant to press him about anything now that he’s older. Till hears her crying through the wall sometimes in her room, on the phone to his aunt saying that she thinks the way Till is now is all her fault. He didn’t think anything was particularly wrong with him in the first place, but it seems she doesn’t agree.
“Hello Io,” Ivan says, dropping a kiss to Till’s mother’s cheek as he sweeps into the kitchen. He’s always done it, since he was a little kid - he says it's because he’s never had a mother of his own to greet. Till knows for a fact this is just a lame excuse to keep doing it because he knows it pisses Till off. “Hello, Till,” Ivan adds, offering him a small smile.
It’s too intimate, midnight eyes radiating empty heat as Ivan’s snaggletooth peers out at Till, pinching the flesh of his soft, pink bottom lip. Till can remember what it felt like, how he wants to take it between his teeth even now and feel it again. He wants to feel Ivan’s lips again , wants to run his hand down Ivan’s chest and meet with the trail of dark hair disappearing towards his navel—
Till shoves his chair back from the table with such force it nearly lifts the linoleum.
“Quit being weird,” he barks at Ivan. “Come on, we’re gonna be late!”
With that, Till tugs his guitar up onto his back and exits the kitchen. Ivan doesn’t follow right away, probably giving his mother a fucking look that says ‘kids today, huh?’
When they exit out onto the street, Ivan tries to take Till’s hand. Till snatches his fingers away, sighing deeply. Ivan chuckles.
“Come on,” he says. “We did it all the time when we were kids.”
Till is pretending to be asleep.
It's been nearly a whole year since Ivan kissed him. Since they lay side by side and got off to thought of the other. Till has largely pretended it never happened. Chalk it up to the rum, the fact he’d just had his heart shattered into a million tiny pieces. Whatever. So what if a chill runs down his spine sometimes when Ivan sticks his finger in Till’s ear, or when he licks the nape of his neck when he tilts forwards and falls asleep in class? So what if every time they’ve hung out, alone, in Ivan’s room or Till’s room since, Till has forbidden himself the comfort and security of Ivan’s arms? He shoves him away harder, hisses insults, demands to know why Ivan is such a fucking freak.
Ivan takes it all in his stride.
A normal person might think this meant Till thought Ivan was too good for him, which couldn’t be further from the truth. Till thinks they’re both as fucked up as the other, a devastating pair of fucking losers that have only the other to rely on.
“Are you coming?”
Till hears Sua’s voice from the open classroom door. The sun is setting, or it had been when he’d last let his eyes flutter shut. He’s collapsed over the top of Ivan’s desk, cheek pressed to the sticky wood, arms folded in his lap. Ivan has been stroking his hair steadily for the last ten minutes now. Till has decided to continue to play dead; after all, it’s been so long since he allowed himself to succumb to the familiar softness of Ivan’s slim fingers.
“Till’s asleep,” Ivan says quietly.
“I can see that,” Sua responds tightly. “Shouldn’t you wake him up? He’ll get a crick in his neck on the desk like that.”
“Mmm… I’m almost certain he will.”
“And what? You’re hoping he’ll let you massage the pain away?”
“What an innocent supposition,” Ivan says coolly. His fingers don’t stop their determined course along Till’s scalp, pausing to scratch softly at the crown of his head every so often. “Given the activities you and Mizi are known to partake in.”
“Don’t change the subject, Ivan.” Sua sounds bored. Till supposes she’s nearly as familiar with Ivan’s passive antagonism as he is.
“I’ll wake him up now. He’ll be embarrassed if you’re here so be a good girl and wait for us in the entrance way.”
A pause.
“Five minutes or I’m sending Mizi to get you both.”
Ivan huffs out a laugh, but Till can hear a note of agitation there. He’s losing his patience.
“What do you think I’m going to do to him, Sua? Have my wicked way while he’s got his eyes shut?”
“You say that like it's the furthest thing from your mind. I know you.”
“So does Till,” Ivan replies at once. “Till knows me, and he trusts me. Enough to fall asleep on my desk, enough to have spent nearly his entire life by my side. It’s more than can be said for anyone else.”
“Is that supposed to make me feel bad?” Sua asks dryly. “Try harder.”
“I’m not trying to make you feel bad, Sua.” Ivan sighs. It’s heavy. He’s lost all interest in continuing this conversation. He doesn’t talk to Till much about his relationship with Sua. The two of them have never really seemed to get along. Ivan told Till once it's because they’re annoyingly alike at the bottom of it all. Loyal to a fault, too clever for their own good. It makes them see things other people don’t. It means they’ll ultimately always pick the most obvious solution to a problem just to eliminate it, even if it means hurting themselves in the process.
“Just be careful,” Sua says at last. “Till isn’t like us. He isn’t like Mizi.”
“Believe me,” Ivan says gravely, “I understand Till better than I understand myself sometimes.”
Sua snorts.
“I don’t doubt that in the slightest. I’ll see you in five minutes.”
There’s silence for a moment. Ivan’s fingers haven’t stopped sifting through Till’s hair this whole time. He’s going to need to wash it tonight.
“You can quit pretending to be asleep now,” Ivan says gently.
Till’s shoulders stiffen almost involuntarily, and without another thought he jerks up straight in his seat. Ivan is smiling down at him, eyes dark with amusement. His hand slips from the top of Till’s head to caress the length of his face. Till shivers.
“You knew I was awake the whole time?” he asks cautiously.
Ivan tilts his head to the side, eyes tightening at the edges ever so slightly. He looks like a cat considering its prey before it lunges for the killing blow.
“I always know when you’re pretending to sleep, Till. Especially if you’re right there next to me.”
Till feels his cheeks explode with an embarrassing flush. All he can think of is the soft whimper Ivan made across the bed from him as he came in his hand.
Ivan stands up from his desk.
“You heard my sister. Let’s go before she accuses me of molesting you in your sleep.”
Till thinks it strange that Ivan doesn’t try to tease him more about what happened in his bed. Ivan is rarely so merciful; especially where Till is concerned.
It reeks of malice, of a promise.
(Ivan doesn’t make promises. He makes threats.)
Till is the last in their class to turn 18.
His mom hosts a small gathering in their backyard, all three square metres of it (which is fine really, because Till only has a handful of friends). She strings a banner across the washing line, orders take out from Till’s favourite restaurant. She bakes him a cake from a box, nearly bursts into tears when they all sing happy birthday. Till’s face feels as if it's in a permanent state of embarrassment, the flush never subsiding for a single second throughout the evening as attention is showered upon him.
Mizi gets him a new set of pencils and Sua gets him a new sketchbook. Mizi’s friend Hyuna and her bizarre situationship Luka get him a starter set of watercolour paints to accompany. His mom gets him a trial membership for some music software (although Till hasn’t the heart to tell her the beat up old PC they have in the kitchen is too old to support it - he’ll probably have to use one of Ivan’s high-end laptops to run it). Ivan insists on giving him his presents ‘after everyone else has gone.’ Till thinks it's typical of Ivan to assume he’s staying over. But then, he doesn’t actually protest all that much in response to it.
The sun sets, the rest of them peel off home and Till’s mom takes a sleeping pill and passes out. It’s still warm in the garden, just he and Ivan seated at the rickety picnic table that’s been there since before they moved in. The sound of crickets chirping in the purple dusk is impossibly soothing, the relief Till feels at no longer being the centre of everyone’s attention making him pliant and sleepy. Ivan’s still here of course, but Till is always the centre of Ivan’s attention, so he’s used to it.
Ivan grins at him, barely able to contain his excitement as he produces his gifts.
“I got you a few things,” he says, sliding the bag across to Till.
Till is nearly too tired to scowl, but he manages it somehow.
“I told you not to go overboard,” he mutters, beginning to tear away tissue paper from the lip of the bag. Ivan rolls his eyes.
“And I didn’t,” he insists. “I’d have got you a whole new guitar if I wanted to go overboard.”
Instead, Ivan had opted to buy Till nearly every component of an electric guitar in pieces - shiny new pick-ups, new pegs, new strings, a new strap, a new cable to connect it to his shitty amp, a new pedal…
Till wishes he had the energy to protest, but his exhaustion, combined with the sheer excitement at the prospect of picking his guitar apart and upgrading it bit by bit is enough to combat it.
When he’s finished unwrapping it all, he sighs deeply, watching Ivan preen with delight.
“This is too much,” he says finally, clutching his new strap between his hands tightly. “I’ll never be able to get you something this good. I can’t even remember what I got you for your birthday.”
Ivan’s grin widens again, eyes glittering with excitement.
“You drew me a picture,” he says. Till cringes, rubbing a hand roughly over his face to try and conceal the now reappearing blush.
“Yeah, which cost me exactly nothing,” he grumbles.
Ivan reaches up to pull Till’s hand away from his face. His expression is grave now, searching.
“It was a picture of me, though,” he says (and there it is again, that lingering tremble of reverence in his tone, the one that makes something warm unfurl deep in Till’s gut and his mouth dry up). “You drew me.” Ivan’s eyes narrow as his smile reappears, wicked this time. “And I thought, is this how Till sees me? He really thinks I’m this pretty?”
Till shoves him harshly in the arm.
“Fuck off,” he replies, but its missing it’s usual brittle edge. Till’s fingers linger on Ivan’s arm, caught in the crook of his elbow. He swallows past that dry feeling, his mouth suddenly aching. “... You know you’re pretty, asshole.”
“Do I?” Ivan asks, and its whisper still in the garden, the drone of the crickets and the grumble of cars as they pass in the street reduced to nothing while Till is trapped in Ivan’s orbit. His eyes sparkle like the stars twinkling to life above them, a cosmos trapped in their midnight coloured depths. Ivan shakes his head, gently, fingers reaching out to dance along Till’s jawline. It’s like electricity is snapping from Ivan’s skin to his own, the air around them charged with something Till is afraid to try and name.
Lips a moment from Till’s, Ivan speaks again.
“Maybe you should tell me more often.”
Ivan doesn’t move. Till holds his breath.
A car backfires in the street and brings them both hurtling back into reality. Till leaps away, gathering up his gifts with a hurried hand.
“You don’t need me to tell you how pretty you are,” Till mutters. “What, don’t you have like fifty confessions a week? You’re all set.”
Ivan doesn’t move, watching Till closely. Till wonders if an air of impatience doesn’t cling to him. Ivan is silent for an instant too long, doesn’t open his mouth to speak until Till is finished packing everything up and watching him expectantly.
Ivan shrugs, but the shit-eating grin comes too slow. He’s forcing it.
“Fifty is a bit of an exaggeration,” he says coolly.
Till tosses his head up, dismissing the attempt at a joke.
“Come on,” he says. “Let’s go to bed.”
Ivan follows without comment.
Till’s bedroom is half the size even still of the back yard. It hadn’t been a problem when he and Ivan were little kids, bundled up together on the occasional Friday night that Ivan’s nanny let him stay. As the two have grown, Ivan’s place has become the more natural place to return to, with the abundance of food and space and the fact his bed is so large Till can’t even see him when they wake up. Ivan especially has had a growth spurt in the last year of high school, broadening out into what is undeniably a man. Till isn’t that much shorter, but he’s sinewy and slight. He can hold his own in a fight, but he’s small enough he can comfortably exist in his small space.
Ivan nearly fills half of his bedroom with his shoulders alone.
Till shuts the door to his room behind them, reaching up under his shirt to scratch at his stomach. He turns to face Ivan.
“It’s gonna be a tight squeeze… maybe you should just go home after all,” Till says. Ivan isn’t listening, yanking his T-shirt off without pause. Till watches his abdominal muscles ripple with the movement. The trail of hair disappearing into his designer boxers is thicker than it had been that night in Ivan’s bed. There’s hair all over his chest too, impeccably groomed despite its dark pervasiveness. Ivan’s hair is ruffled from its usually perfected style. It falls gracelessly into his eyes as he watches Till.
Till feels like there’s a lump in his throat. That heavy energy is back in the air again, almost tangible between the two of them, a spark catching from the slightest movement. (Ivan has always had a special talent for setting fires).
“Too tired,” Ivan replies. “Not going home now.”
Till doesn’t argue, fatigue settling across his bones too.
He removes his own shirt, tries not to cringe away from Ivan’s broad form. It’s stupid - they see each other half naked every week in PE and it’s never made Till feel hot all over like this before. It’s never made his abdomen catch fire like this, heat pooling between his legs as he thinks of those long lost noises falling from Ivan’s lips as he pleasured himself.
“...Whatever. You’re sleeping on the inside,” he snaps, shutting the bedroom light off before he has to look over at Ivan again. Ivan slips his jeans off, obediently climbing onto Till’s twin-sized mattress, hands folded behind his head on the single pillow.
Till thinks his eyes almost hold a flicker of red in their depths - warm like the blood he can taste in his mouth when he sees Ivan smile the same way he did all those years ago.
Till takes off his own jeans, sliding under the covers and lying bone straight alongside his friend.
There’s quiet for a moment before Till reaches up to pinch the delicate skin of Ivan’s underarm.
“Move your arms, I can’t fit my head on the pillow, idiot,” he hisses. Ivan obliges, arms coming down to rest atop the duvet cover. There’s really not enough room for them to lie side by side like this, not if either of them want to get even a nip of sleep, so Till flips over onto his side, back facing Ivan. He hears Ivan do the same, rolling onto his side so there’s a small gap between the two of them now. He wishes Ivan had turned to face the wall. Till can feel his wet breath on the back of his neck.
The sensation sends a shiver down his spine. His fucking dick is betraying him, twitching with interest. Till tries to shut his eyes as tight as he can, pushing it all away. Behind him, Ivan moves closer.
It figures that his dick would have had some kind of growth spurt too. Till can feel Ivan, hard, pressed up against the dip of his back. He stiffens, his whole body running somehow impossibly hot and cold at the same time. He feels like he’s just been dunked beneath a pool of lukewarm water. He feels like his skin will peel off his body if he itches it. He feels like he can sense every hair on Ivan’s skin lifting in response to Till’s sharp intake of breath.
“Ivan,” Till whispers, hoarsely, unsure of what else to say.
A beat.
“Sorry,” Ivan says, although he doesn’t sound sorry at all. “Hormones and all that.”
Still frozen in place, Till tries to take a deep breath. It stutters through his nostrils, loud and obtrusive in their quiet space. His head feels fuzzy, like he can’t quite concentrate - he’s not surprised. The rate at which all the blood in his body has rushed to his own cock has probably deprived his brain of all oxygen.
Till shifts a little in the bed, trying to readjust his now stiff cock in his underwear. His ass brushes the tip of Ivan, so big his cockhead is straining against the waistline of his boxer shorts. Till nearly hisses in outrage. Of course he’s packing; is there anything the motherfucker hasn’t got on Till?
He realises too late that the shift may have appeared like an invitation. (He realises too late; rather, Till tries to force down the acceptance that a part of him had shifted just to feel Ivan twitch against him). His dick aches to be touched, chafing against the inside of his boxers.
Ivan presses harder into his ass now, trying to find space in the valley of Till’s ass cheeks. A warm palm snakes its way from behind Till around his hip, settles on his belly. It’s too close to the tip of his own straining arousal. His heart leaps into his chest - he can’t let Ivan know he’s into this or he’ll never live it down.
Ivan is too quick for him though. He lets out his own belaboured breath, right in Till’s ear, as his hand reaches down to ghost the outline of Till through the fabric. Till thinks he can feel Ivan shudder against him when it becomes clear he’s hard too. Ivan’s fingers cup Till’s cock through his underwear, his thumb ghosting over the damp patch of moisture which has already leaked through.
Till tries to protest. When he opens his mouth, all that leaves is a whimper.
Then, Ivan is inside Till’s boxer shorts, big palm wrapped around his shaft as he pumps him in time with thrusting his own cock up against Till’s ass. Till’s breath catches in his throat, desperate to suppress another needy whine as Ivan begins to mouth at the nape of his neck. He’s stroking him quicker now as the tip of his tongue dances along the shell of Till’s ear. He catches his earlobe between his teeth, tugs until Till can’t contain the gasp of pleasure.
Ivan’s all but rutting up against him now, like a dog desperate to reach completion, nipping at the soft skin of Till’s neck, interspersed with frantic kisses.
“Till,” he whispers his name into skin, buried in Till’s sweat slick hairline, reverent and devoted and impossibly aroused.
Till thinks he might die of embarrassment when that word, his name, wrapped around Ivan’s lips like that , makes him come. Ivan strokes him through it, whispers words of undiluted praise and adoration into his ear as he trembles with pleasure, before Till feels Ivan’s hips stutter and he spills against the curve of his ass. He feels the wetness seep through his boxers, as Ivan finally stops writhing against his sheets.
As the fog of arousal fades from around them, Till feels as if a lead weight has settled in his stomach instead.
“We…” he starts, choking back horror at what they’d both just done, “We’re never doing that again.”
“Really?” Ivan asks at once. He props himself up on his elbow, so he can see Till’s beetroot face and clenched teeth. “Because it seems like we both enjoyed it. Didn’t you enjoy it Till?”
Till clenches his teeth tighter. The word no , the denial which he’s been using as an armour to defend himself since that first night in Ivan’s bed doesn’t come. Till has lied through his teeth for the sake of pride before - why is this any different? Why can’t he force that same sentiment? Escape to the comfortable safety of rejecting Ivan’s advances?
Ivan tugs at his shoulder. Till lets him pull him around onto his back, so Ivan is leaning above him, thick, dark lashes ghosting the tips of his cheekbones as he watches Till closely.
“Didn’t you enjoy it, Till?”
He closes the distance between their mouths and kisses him softly.
Till’s not sure if it's the fury at letting Ivan get his way, or the fact that every part of his body sings with it.
The kisses turn heavy, tongues rough and lips bruising as Ivan dives into him. He pulls away, thumb smearing drool that mingles between the two of them across Till’s swollen bottom lip. Till bites him.
Ivan smiles.
Till can taste blood.