Work Text:
Why can't we laugh now like we did then?
How come I see you and ache instead?
— Glass Animals, "Pork Soda"
They met, as so many of their ilk did, in the mines.
Neither of them would ever be able to agree what had started the scuffle. Silco always maintained that Vander had shot him a nasty look. Vander swore it was over his lunch, swiped by the scrawny, dirty thing that was Silco, that he’d found him hastily scarfing down the last of a mediocre egg salad sandwich out of Vander’s locker. Whenever they argued about it, Felicia and Benzo would roll their eyes.
What they did agree on was that within five minutes of knowing each other, Vander had Silco pinned to the floor of the break room, and Silco sunk his teeth into the webbing between Vander’s thumb and forefinger, making him howl in pain. Forced to release Silco out of the half-chokehold he had him in, Vander stared at the indents of Silco’s crooked teeth in his hand. He’d bitten so deeply that blood was beading in the pit of each wound. Vander swore and shook out his injured hand and when he looked back at Silco, green eyes shining back at him with crazed mirth, Vander realized that he had met a fucking madman.
That is, he had finally, finally met his match.
Not that long after, Vander gave him his first mark.
They’d been drunk, as they so often were after a long day spent in the mines, arguing over nothing important, as they so often did. Tactics. Tone. Presentation. Vander, ever the optimist, slavishly devoted to the idea of the bloodless revolution. And then Silco the pragmatist, who knew what to do when things got down to brass tacks.
Harsh words eventually turned to blows. And it had been Silco who’d started it, because it was Silco who always started it, with a slap that might have passed as a joke if he’d been more sober. But the alcohol was the closest thing to honesty between them back then, and the sharp crack of the fleshy part of his palm connecting with Vander’s cheek may as well have been the sound of a pistol.
“Don’t ever say that,” Silco spat, peevish and drunk and barely even remembering what Vander had said to set him off, his hand stinging at his side. And Vander stared at him, outraged, before vaulting over the bar and into Silco, knocking them both ass-over-teakettle to the floor. The stool he’d been perched on clattered on its side as the two of them grappled on the filthy tile, Vander yanking Silco’s hair out of its elastic and making him yelp.
“Slapping me?” Vander slurred, and the grip on Silco’s hair tightened, mean enough that his scalp burned. It felt good. Silco struggled against him, pushed against his shoulder. “Like I’m some kind of dog?”
“A dog would be better behaved,” Silco shot back, and that was what earned him the sock in the jaw that sent stars scattering across his vision and blood filling his mouth. He choked on it, coughed, splattering Vander’s face with flecks of spit and blood. “Case in point.”
Vander looked at him hard. Silco preferred him like this, the shock of red covering his face an unsettling contrast to those maddeningly tranquil ocean eyes. He didn’t know how Vander restrained himself, didn’t beat every Enforcer to bloody paste out of the fury simmering inside him, fed by every single day of indignity endured in the Undercity. There was a biting dog under his skin and Silco wished he could coax it out, feed it from his hand.
Giving Vander his blood would have to suffice.
“And you?” Vander asked, wiping at his face – smearing Silco’s blood across his skin. It made Silco’s heart seize in his chest. “Do you know what they call you ‘round these parts? Silco the Snake.”
“Because I’m so very cold-blooded,” Silco retorted, and as if to prove Vander’s point, jabbed a thumb into Vander’s eye. He reeled back, howling; Silco hooked a knee around his hip and, leveraging Vander’s weight against him, rolled them over so he sat straddling Vander’s waist. Not that this was a position he could hold forever. Silco was light enough that Vander would throw him off eventually.
“Keep fighting dirty, I’m sure that’ll win the hearts of the people.”
“As if I’m interested in a clean fight. Revolutions aren’t won through traditional rules of engagement, Vander.”
Silco’s mouth was still bleeding. He wiped at it absently with the back of his hand. When he looked back at Vander, he realized his partner was gaping at him.
“What?”
“Hells, Silco, your teeth!”
Kissing was a rough affair, when they got the time to do it.
Vander liked to lay Silco out on his cot and cover him with his body, one big thigh between Silco’s knees that he would rut helplessly against, breath coming in fast, staccato hisses through his teeth. Vander would kiss him slow and languid, tongue tapping against his hard palate till Silco’s skin felt two sizes too tight on his body and he’d smack the heel of his hand against Vander’s pectoral and huff something like “What am I, your wife? Stop making love to me, Vander.” And then he would bite Vander’s tongue and make him yelp.
“Pretty sure if anyone’s the wife, ‘s me,” Vander rasped. He let Silco nip at him, bite his lip hard enough to draw blood. Pulled away to look at his comrade, thin mouth kiss-swollen and slick with spit. “‘M always the one feeding your ungrateful ass.”
Then, to punctuate his point, Vander hooked two fingers into Silco’s lower lip, coaxing his mouth open so he could see his pink tongue, the saliva that pooled beneath it. The yellow-white of his crooked teeth and, most importantly, the chip in his front incisors that Vander had put there in that fistfight ages ago. Such an intimate thing, to stamp your mark into the shape of a man’s bite. A smile tugged at the corner of Vander’s lip. He spat into Silco’s waiting mouth, a perfect little globule of blood and saliva, settling itself upon his lover’s tongue.
“Now swallow, luvvy.”
Silco stared at him, green eyes glossy with lust, a faraway look in his pupils. Exhaled, his breath a soft, shuddering thing as he shut his mouth and obeyed, presenting his throat so Vander could watch the bob of his Adam’s apple. Ages passed before he spoke again, before his lips could form the shapes for his words. He wanted Vander to kiss him again, push his tongue through the gap in his damaged front teeth.
“Maybe I should put a ring on your finger, then. Always wanted a wifey.”
It was a joke, of course. Marriage was for topsiders, people who had more than a good ten or fifteen years together before succumbing to the riot of cancers and other maladies the Gray unleashed upon their bodies. Marriage was for people with inheritances to leave to their children. What could they give each other but their blood, their bones? A jacket, with an initial chalked into the collar?
Vander barked a laugh, even as the thought made his heart squeeze. Even as Silco nipped at his ear and said that stupid endearment again, dripping with mirth: My wifey.
It was fitting that he’d go out this way, with Vander’s hands around his neck.
Many lifetimes ago it had been reversed – Silco in his lap, thumbs pressed against Vander’s throat. A question: Do you trust me? Vander’s big hands settled on his hips. Buried deep in the heat of him, nested together like dolls. His grip tightened and Vander gasped, head knocking against the wall. His hair was shaggy, fell over his seawater eyes – he needed it cut soon. Needed a shave, too, but Silco was thinking about telling him to grow his beard out. Vander had a too-young face for the things they’d been through.
There weren’t many ways Silco could hurt him. But Vander had welcomed it, welcomed his thin, bony fingers pressed into his windpipe, slowly depriving him of air. If Silco had felt in the mood, probably he could’ve really killed him that way, wringing the softest, most delicate parts of him. Like breaking a bird in his hands. The thought scared him. Made him wet.
Vander had seized under him, startling Silco. Made him let off his throat a little, scared he really would pass out. But Vander had only laughed, the sound of it mangled in his abused throat. Thumbed at Silco’s neglected dick, pushing the pad of his finger under the head and making Silco hiss, inadvertently tightening his fingers.
“Just like that, Sil,” Vander would press. “Takes a lot more effort t’kill me.”
Vander, who never saw him as the runt. Vander, who wrestled him as an equal, knew him as the threat he was with a shiv hidden in his boot. Vander, who had given him his jagged front teeth and his ruined eye and now held him down in the filthy waters of the Sump with both hands. Used all his strength to do it, because he knew nothing less would take.
I’m glad it was you, Silco thought deliriously as he went under.
“Please.”
Dying in the water would’ve been a mercy. Instead, Silco got a half-life spent out in the wastes and a useless eye slowly rotting out of his head. Every day he got to wake up and see his face in the mirror, the necrotic flesh covering his left cheek, and think, Vander did this to me.
Vander, now on his knees before him, pleading. Silco had been right; the beard suited him. He’d grown into himself. Was a man people turned to listen to. Silco, on the other hand, now had the face to match his ugly insides.
“I fail to see how this isn’t a favor you could ask of your good friend Sheriff Grayson.”
“I’m coming to you as a friend, Silco.”
He clipped the end of his cigar. Lit it, and took a drag. “You and I both know we aren’t friends.”
Vander was silent. His eyes shone. Threatening tears. Silco could hardly bear to look at him like this.
“Vi’s sick. She needs medicine. And you have … connections. Rather not owe any more debts to the Enforcers, if I can help it.”
Silco curled his lip. “That child has made you soft.”
“Better soft than the eel you turned out to be.”
“They’ve made you a dog,” Silco snapped, and he took Vander’s chin in his hand, nails digging into his flesh. “Begging for scraps. A kept thing. Suffering indignity after indignity – for what? For our people to slowly suffocate to death? Is that the fate of the glorious nation of Zaun?”
“She could be dying, Silco –”
“And thousands more like her shall die, because the Hound of the Underground cast his lot with topside!” Silco seethed. “Thousands more shall get sick, or end up in brothels, or on the wrong end of an Enforcer’s rifle, because you’ve abandoned them. For sentiment. For compromise.”
Vander’s expression was cold and utterly still. “You’re a monster.”
Silco laughed, high and shrill. “No more than what you made me, brother. You were even kind enough to give me the perfect face for the role!”
Vander’s eyes flashed, and in a split-second he was up, crowding Silco into his desk, face caught between a big thumb and forefinger, squashing Silco’s mouth up into something small and pinched.
“Keep preaching to me about ethics.” Vander’s voice was low, dangerous. “That chemical you’ve been synthesizing is gonna kill us all, Silco. What’ll you say to a little boy orphaned at six ‘cos his Shimmer-addict father drowned in a puddle of his own vomit, I wonder?”
Silco smiled, showing all his teeth – jagged as an eel – and spat in Vander’s face, a fat globe of saliva landing on his cheek. Vander reeled back, wiping at it in stunned outrage.
“Now swallow, luvvy,” Silco drawled in his best approximation of Vander.
That earned him a hard slap across the face.
Repayment for all those years ago. Vander hit like a train – always did – and Silco knew, as he doubled over to spit blood, that his good cheek would bruise. He worked his fingers into the abused flesh. He wanted it to bruise.
“Is this where you fuck me?” Silco rasped, spitting again. He straightened to look at Vander. Felt himself throb in time to the bruise forming on his face. Vander stepped between his knees, settled a hand over the buttons of his fly. Leaned in, breath ghosting over his skin. Silco bit his lip. His cunt clenched in anticipation. He thought of Vander knuckle-deep in him, fucking hard enough to bruise, and his tongue felt too big for his mouth.
“You wish,” Vander whispered, smacking the back of his hand against Silco’s heaving chest, and backing away.
Infuriating Vander, who Silco missed like an old bruise he would poke and prod at, standing over him, asking him for the world. Vander, who first took his smile and then his eye and, at this rate, Silco’s whole goddamned existence.
Vander, who Silco loved with all of his wretched, blackened heart.
I forgive you, he did not say, because Vander did not ask it of him. I’m lost. So are you. They’ll smother Zaun in the crib without the both of us. You can have my eye, as long as you keep yours on me.
Stubborn, the both of them. Silco clicked his tongue with an irritated tsk, reaching into the hinged cigar box on his desk to produce a bottle of tablets.
“Antibiotics,” Vander murmured, eyes flicking warily from Silco’s face to the bottle in his hand. “How did you –”
“I’m the Eye of Zaun, Vander,” Silco scoffed, “I know everything.”
As Vander reached for the bottle, Silco held it away. “Ah-ah. This isn’t a charity. What’ll you give me?”
“Whatever you want,” Vander said. The utter resignation in his voice made Silco’s blood sing.
“Give me your arm, then.”
Vander obeyed. Silco turned it over, traced the blue veins that corded the vast expanse of his inner forearm with his finger. Then he plucked the cigar from his lips and stubbed it firmly in the dead center of Vander’s forearm, the embers biting into his flesh with a soft hiss. Vander jerked in his grip; Silco only held him tighter. A smile crinkled the edges of his eyes as he watched Vander squirm, sweat breaking out on his brow.
“Good,” Silco said finally, after what felt like a lifetime. When he removed the cigar there was an angry red burn stamped into Vander’s flesh; Silco could feel Vander shaking in his grip. “You’ll look at that burn for the rest of your life and remember that I once showed you the mercy you never deigned to show me. Understand?”
Vander didn’t speak. Slow nod of his head. Silco couldn’t help but smile wider.
He tossed the bottle of antibiotic tablets to Vander, who caught it with trembling hands. The bottle gleamed in Vander’s hand as he examined it. Looked back at Silco. Eyes so bright they might’ve made Silco cry if his left eye could produce tears anymore.
“Thank you.”
Bile rising in his throat. Silco swallowed it.
“Don’t come ‘round asking for any more favors.”
There was no better weapon for Silco than his knives. They fit easily into a boot, a belt, the bony curve of his palm. In a different time, a different place, the lithe curve of his fingers might have marked him as a pianist, a surgeon. Down here, in the muck and the mire, they marked him as dangerous, curled around the hilt of a blade, precise as a scalpel in its wielding.
He used to call it a little kiss, when he slid the knife home into flesh. It was intimate, like touching a lover. If you meant to kill, you could feel wetness spread from the wound under your hands, hot and slick as when you’d press a hand between a man’s legs.
Silco kissed him one last time, then, the night Vander died. The knife thrust between his ribs, his lifeblood rushing over Silco’s hands, staining his shirt. Vander tried to say something but the sound that came was wet, his breath shivering and clotted. Like wind through wet tissue paper.
Silco’s eyes, both the good one and the ruined one, were wide. Like it was just occurring to him what he’d done. The Hound of the Underground slumped against him limply, dead. For just a moment, it felt like an embrace.
Numbly, he shoved the body of his old friend and enemy over the side of the gangway, into the flames.
The first time Powder called him Dad it was in his office – Vander’s office – as she dabbed foundation onto his ruined cheek.
Silco blanched. “I thought Vander was your father.”
“He was,” Powder said, and blew her shaggy fringe out of her face as she worked. It occurred to Silco that Vander must have played hairdresser to his kids, occasionally hacking the overgrowth out of their eyes. He would need to figure out how to braid hair. Silco was never much good with scissors. “Now you are.” A beat of silence. “I don’t think he ever liked me that much, anyway.”
She was a scrawny little thing like Silco was. He wondered if Vander had seen him in her. Silco would catch her scribbling in notebooks at the bar like he used to all those ages ago. She’d look up at him and grin her gap-toothed child’s grin, her eyes the same color of seawater as Vander’s, and it would make something small and long-forgotten in him ache.
“We’re two of a pair, then.”
And he believed it. Had to believe it, for both their sakes.
“Hell of a dream that must’ve been, luvvy.”
Vander’s voice was rough with sleep in the dim light of their bedroom. When he spoke, his beard scratched at the nape of Silco’s neck. Silco blinked once, blearily, eyes slowly adjusting to the darkness.
“They’ve been coming more frequently since the boy came,” Silco said, rolling over in Vander’s arms to look at him. He meant Ekko, but according to Powder he’d been Ekko-but- not, hence: the boy. Not their Ekko. “Was I talking?”
Silco’s vision wasn’t much good in daylight, and it was damn near worthless here in the dark, but he could at least make out the smile that cracked Vander’s face. “Just saying my name a whole lot more’n usual.”
“Don’t flatter yourself,” Silco said, but he allowed Vander to thumb at his bad eye, stroking the scarring that interrupted the line of his eyebrow. He wondered how it felt to be Vander, waking up every morning to see the worst day of their lives stamped into his partner’s face. Wondered how it would feel if everything had gone differently enough to wake to an empty bed. The thought was alien to him. “I don’t think either of us lasted.”
“Hm?”
“If you hadn’t come back to me. If I hadn’t forgiven you. I think this room, this bed, with both of us in it, is a statistical anomaly. At least according to all the evidence I’ve seen.”
“Oh, wonderful. So in all those other universes I don’t have to deal with your cold feet?”
“In all those other universes, we’re both dead.” Silco caught Vander’s wrist, pressing his open mouth to the inside of it, teeth scraping against his pulse point. He thought of biting in, leaving a bracelet of marks encircling Vander’s wrist. All those years together and violence still itched under both their skin, in their teeth. They were two halves of some ugly beast with a too-fragile heart and blood matting its fur. Of course it couldn’t live with that heart broken.
Silco swung a leg over Vander’s hips, straddling him, and pushed his shirt up to his sternum. He didn’t need to see where he was going; Silco could find the scar knotting the flesh over Vander’s ribs blind. “You remember when I did this to you?”
Vander laughed breathlessly. His skin broke out in gooseflesh where Silco stroked it. “I couldn’t forget if I tried.”
“You survived,” Silco said. “Against all odds.”
“Yeah,” Vander breathed, hands circling Silco’s waist. “Y’know, I’ve got something I could stick in you.” His fingers dipped lower, hooking into the waistband of Silco’s pajama bottoms. “Return the favor, ‘n all that.”
Afterward, as they lay staring at the ceiling, sweat-soaked and sated, Vander said, “Maybe I do want you to put a ring on my finger.”
Silco’s laughter was sharp and startled. A rare thing. Silence settled back over them for a long, uncomfortable moment. A deep bite Silco had pressed into the nape of Vander’s neck throbbed. A terrifying feeling, a kind of drop, like stepping out of a window and into thin air, began to settle into his gut.
Then, clarity from Silco.
“You’re being serious.”
“We’re old men, Sil,” Vander groaned, smothering the sound under his pillow. “I think we’ve earned a bit of sentimentality. You know neither my mum or da lived to be as old as we are? They would’ve killed for some frivolous bleeding wedding.”
Stupid, stupid idea. Stupid of him to have brought it up. Maybe if he held the pillow over his face long enough he’d smother himself to death and be spared any further embarrassment.
He did not die. Brief brush of Silco’s hand against his as he gingerly pried the pillow away and set it aside. Thin, bony fingers stroking through his beard. Silco was such a small thing compared to him but the way he held Vander, at times domineering or tender depending on what he needed (and Silco always seemed to know what he needed), made Vander feel like something very tiny, swallowed up in the sea of this man who could command any room he entered with just his walk, just a look, just the sound of his voice.
“You really want to be my wife,” Silco teased, hand skittering away just as Vander tried to nip at his thumb.
“I believe the word you used was wifey.”
“Gods, don’t remind me. I was a real piece of work as a young man, wasn’t I?”
“Well, just your luck you met the one idiot who stuck his hand down his shorts about it the next time he got a moment to himself.” And speaking of that, Silco’s other hand was creeping south, nails scratching the hair on his stomach, till it rested on Vander’s half-hard cock. “Fuck, love. Want to go again?”
Silco hummed. His eyes were bright even in the darkness. “Question for a question. Want to marry me? Fix me coffee every morning? Give me a gaggle of brats to look after?”
His grip tightened, drawing a punched-out moan from Vander. “I already did all that, so I might as well make a — hah — honest man of you.”
“Then let’s spit on it.”
Vander grinned. He thought of Silco all those years back, black hair running over the pillows like an oil spill. His throat bared, working around Vander’s saliva. Now, Silco cradled Vander’s face, fingers easing open his mouth, the pad of his thumb warm and salty against Vander’s tongue.
“Yes,” Vander agreed. “Let’s.”