Chapter Text
“Do you think you get to hear the shot when you game over yourself?”
It’s a stupid fucking question. Eric knows this.
In fact, it’s not so much a question as it is a Dylan-management tactic. One he came up with so long ago that it just feels like instinct now. All it takes is for Dylan to get that stormy, far-away look on his face that he has going on right now, and Eric knows it’s time to get to work: push some boundaries, cross some lines, do or say something outrageous. Whatever it takes to zap some life back into him. Historically, it’s worked like a charm. Lately… not so much.
Dylan sits slumped against Blackjack’s back door —a felled tree to Eric’s woodpecker fingers tap tap tapping on the brick wall of the alley. They’re halfway through their break and Eric still hasn’t managed to get a decent conversation going. He paces back and forth, only stopping every once in a while to bend down and pluck the cigarette from Dylan’s mouth without warning. By now he’s managed to steal five drags, and still no reaction: Dylan just waits for him to place it back and resumes smoking, like there was no interruption at all. Eric hacks out a cough. He doesn’t even like this brand.
So. A stupid question.
Dylan stares, caught off-guard.
“…what?”
“When you game over yourself,” Eric repeats, “do you think you get to hear the shot before it’s lights out?”
Game over is unsubtle enough as it is, barely counts as code, but the alley is empty anyway. He figures a visual aid might entice Dylan further. He forms a gun with his fingers, aims it at his own chin, pulls the trigger. It works. Just like jangling keys in front of a baby.
Dylan starts tracking Eric’s movements as he paces in front of him, a new glimmer of interest in his eyes. His attention has returned to where it belongs and the earth can continue to spin. Hallelujah.
“Well, the bullet’s supposed to travel faster than sound, right?” Dylan bites the tip of his thumb. Eric can almost taste the nicotine and oregano soaked into the skin. “So no, you wouldn’t hear it.”
Eric shrugs. “Hm. I guess I don’t really believe it.”
Dylan scratches his brow, irritated by the floury handprint Eric managed to stamp there at the beginning of their shift. That was his first effort in snapping him out of his funk, but Dylan didn’t even notice. Maybe he would have if it were in blood. Or at least tomato sauce.
“Your belief has nothing to do with it, dude. It’s just fucking… physics,” he scowls, but the specks of flour take all the gravitas out of it.
Eric kicks a pebble against the opposite wall. It ricochets and splinters into shrapnel.
“It just feels kind of unfair. You go through all that trouble and don’t even get to hear it?”
“Unfair. Weren’t you going on about firearms being the great equalizer the other day?” Dylan smacks away the hand that Eric was lowering to steal his cigarette once again. “And speaking of, how about you light your own?”
The ungrateful bitch. As if Eric didn’t shoplift that very pack for him. Still. A laugh fizzes out of Eric like foam out of a shaken soda can. It’s meant to be casual, but it comes out somewhere between relieved and thrilled.
That’s what Dylan-management is. Striking a damp match over and over, wondering each time if it’ll ever light up. The same anticipation coiling in your spine, the same burst of adrenaline once it finally ignites. And the same teeth-rattling jitters when you touch the flame to the fuse. Boom.
***
Dylan skips school two days in a row. Eric loses his fucking mind.
Not at first. On Monday, he’s more annoyed than anything. He drifts from class to class, scanning the computer lab and the cafeteria as he walks by, expecting Dylan to show up at any second. It feels like he might start hallucinating if he looks any harder. Dylan sticking out in the hallway crowd, shrugging off questions by the lockers, meeting Eric’s eyes across the parking lot. All mirages. No sign of him anywhere.
Which is fine. It’s whatever. It’s not like he needs him there at all times. Yes, occasionally Dylan might act as a buffer between him and the world full of zombies, but Eric’s no muzzled beast. Fuck that. He can play nice when he wants. What bothers him is the principle of the thing. No heads-up whatsoever. Less than two months left till NBK —if there was ever a time to act like a hivemind, it’s now. They’re supposed to share intel, not spring surprises on each other.
Unless… unless Dylan couldn’t get in touch with him for some reason. As in, he’s literally incapable. As in, something is wrong.
Fuck. He has to stop. This line of thinking is no use to anyone.
Back at home, he spends all afternoon intermittently logging into AIM, frowning at the greyed-out line of Dylan’s handle, then forcing himself not to check again for as long as he can stand it.
The second day is much worse. He’s short-fused and baggy-eyed, more so than usual, though he attributes most of that to the god-awful sleep he got the previous night. The breaking point comes when Zach walks up to him in the middle of a hallway and grills him about something something where’s Dylan? something something. As if the torrent of squeaky shoes and inane teenage chatter wasn’t grating his senses already. Do I look like his fucking nanny, Eric spits out, more caustic than he means it. Out of control like a frothing, rabid dog. Not even a pitbull. More like a toy poodle.
The pit in his stomach grows deeper with each passing class. He’s not worried that Dylan might rat him out —to whom? Their parents, their friends, the fucking cops? Fat chance. And he’s sure as hell not going to back out. If anything, it’s the opposite. Dylan and his never-ending sulking, the bone deep sighs that come out even when Eric thinks they were having a grand fucking time.
Goddamn it. Less than two months to go, Eric repeats to himself. Louder and louder, as if trying to project that idea directly into Dylan’s brain, wherever the fuck he is right now. And whatever the fuck he’s doing.
Was anything off the last time he saw him? That would’ve been two days ago, when he dropped Dylan off after a night out bowling. Don’t go killing yourself without me, Eric said in lieu of a goodbye, staring straight ahead out the windshield. It’s his go-to line at this point. Delivered with varying degrees of irony, as much as he can muster at any given time. Dylan just stumbled out of the car with a laugh, ha. Chose to take it as a joke. Like always.
…fuck this. All of this. Eric slips out into the parking lot, ditches his last class. Who cares. On the drive back home he has to stop himself from turning the corner that would take him to Dylan’s house. Get it the fuck together.
He gets home and barely acknowledges his mother before he makes a beeline for the phone. He dials the Klebold’s number, surprised that it’s still stored in some remote filing cabinet of his brain. It’s been months since he last used it —it’s meant to be for emergencies, they both decided, as a last resort of communication. Well, this situation qualifies. If Dylan disagrees with his assessment, he can come fight him on it.
For every ring that goes unanswered, a new image of Dylan flashes in his head, like a slideshow of half-forgotten nightmares. Ring. Swinging from a rafter in the attic. Ring. Sinking a razor blade into his forearm, deep and vertical. Ring. Swallowing the assortment of pain killers that Sue Klebold keeps in her medicine cabinet, because leave it up to Dylan to kill himself in the faggiest way possible.
Click.
“Oh, Eric,” Sue makes no effort to disguise the distaste in her voice. Yeah. The feeling is fucking mutual. “No, Dylan isn’t feeling well. He had a doctor’s appointment, didn’t he mention that?”
Eric grinds his teeth. Takes a deep breath. See? He can behave himself.
“Well, can I talk to him for a second? We gotta hand something in tomorrow and—”
“He’s asleep right now, I’d prefer not to bother him. But he’ll be back to school soon, okay?”
Eric bristles. He wants to reach across the landline, shake her by the shoulders. Wrap the telephone cord around her neck. Move your ass upstairs. Do you have any idea what could be going on behind that door. Do you not know who your son is. Usually he revels in the ignorance of the idiots around them. Their rose colored glasses, their utter lack of imagination. Right now, it just infuriates him.
Beep. Sue ends the call before he can come up with anything remotely acceptable to say. Doesn’t even promise to tell Dylan he called. Eric slams down the headset so forcefully it knocks the whole phone off the coffee table.
For a split second, he wishes he lived in Sue Klebold’s version of reality. If only she was right about him, about both of them. It would be so. Much. Easier. If Eric really was what she called him in the police station over a year ago, while he was waiting to be picked up. A psychopath. He never figured out if she knew he was within earshot, but it didn’t matter. It felt good to hear. It was better, had a little more danger to it than what he’d been called when he was younger. A troublemaker, a bad influence, the fucking pied piper he got once, from an English teacher. The last time he cried about it he was about nine.
But now? He likes how it makes him feel, the crackle of power it sends down his spine. Everyone, lock your little boys up, Eric Harris is on the prowl. He’ll devour your perfect sons and spit them back out all wrong. Corrupted.
Because that’s what happened, right? With them. Everyone thinks he owns Dylan. Everyone thinks he’s gotten inside Dylan, in some way (or multiple ways, if he heard right what the white hats were yelling that one time). When someone doesn’t like what Dylan has to say, it’s because Eric is speaking through his mouth. If Dylan gets caught doing something bad, that’s Eric yanking on his strings like a puppet. People that give Dylan a wide berth when Eric’s around, swoop back in once he’s out of sight.
And that should all be proof enough for Eric. A kind of guarantee, a purchase receipt. Sometimes it is. Sometimes he’s convinced that he has weaved himself into Dylan’s life so tightly that no one can ever get near without seeing strands of Eric all over.
That doesn’t mean that Dylan can’t fuck it all up himself. Do something to ruin the illusion. Disappear for two days, for example. Or give Eric one of his odd looks, like he can see into him, through him. Like he knows a secret Eric doesn’t and has absolutely no intention of sharing it.
He drives to Dylan’s place and parks a block away so as not to tip Sue off. The house is dead quiet when he walks up to it. No way to peek into Dylan’s room, even if he cranes his neck back —the dark curtains seal the window from one end to the other. Eric feels like he could burn holes through them with his eyes.
Should he knock? No. There’s a chance he might be blowing this way out of proportion. Not to mention the fact that Sue wouldn’t let him upstairs anyway. If anything, she might sense the desperation on him and become suspicious. Go snooping around. Everything goes up in flames.
He’s about to turn back towards the car, thoroughly freaked out, when the front door opens. It’s Sue. Shit. Shit, he has to hide, but there’s not enough time. He only manages to turn away, pretend to be positively enthralled by a crack in the pavement and the lone blade of grass growing out of it. Sue doesn’t notice him. She climbs into her car, fusses with something in her purse and pulls away in a crunch of gravel. The only car left in the driveway is Dylan’s.
Eric waits until she turns the corner to ring the doorbell. It echoes inside the house once, then again. He bites back a curse. It gets stuck on the lump in his throat. Scanning the sidewalk, he zeroes in on a tree with thick, low-hanging branches. One sharp kick and one of them comes loose.
“Oooooh Vodkaaa,” he singsongs, lighthearted in a way he’s never felt, then launches the branch at the window.
A few seconds go by. The breeze turns into a whooshing sound in his ears. His vision starts darkening at the edges, narrowing into a tunnel that only fits Dylan’s window, his chest caving in—
The curtain shifts. All the air rushes back into Eric’s lungs.
His nervous system is still regulating itself when the front door cracks open. Dylan peers out with one bleary eye, confused.
“Can I help you?” His voice is thick with sleep.
It dawns on Eric that he has no reason to be here. Not one he can admit to, at least. He shoves his way into the house in a bid to buy time. Dylan offers no resistance. An excuse, any excuse… Eric’s eyes adjust to the darkness of the foyer. His brainstorming comes to a halt, distracted.
“What the fuck are you wearing?”
Dylan fiddles with the scarf wrapped around his throat. It’s a gaudy red thing that reeks of Sue’s perfume.
“Ugh. Yeah,” he pulls down the fabric a bit. One side of his jaw bulges out like he’s trying to hide a ping pong ball there. Eric takes a step back reflexively. Dylan sets the scarf back in place.
“Shit, dude. You got the mumps or something?”
“Nah. If you think this is bad, though, you should’ve seen me yesterday.” Before Eric can question him further, his face lights up like he just got an idea. “You wanna see something gross?”
“Always.”
Dylan’s room is in a state of disarray that would throw Sue into a tizzy if she knew a guest saw it. Well, Eric hardly counts as a welcomed guest anyway. The chair is out of service, on account of the mountains of laundry piled on top of it. The desk is strewn with what Eric recognizes as old documents from the Diversion program (blocky typewriter front, yuck), as well as various scraps of paper chock-full of Dylan’s handwriting (atrocious, infinitely more interesting). He strains his neck, compelled to make out at least some of the scribbles, but then…
Then he notices Dylan’s unmade bed. The sheets are rumpled, probably still sleep-warm. Infused with the same mixture of sweat and shampoo and body spray that clings to Eric’s couch every time he sleeps over. Something twists in his stomach. By the time he tears his gaze away, Dylan’s gathered all the pages from the desk and shoved them out of sight.
Eric clears his throat, annoyed. At himself, at Dylan, whoever. He doesn’t ask for permission, simply places the bedsheets back in place, half-assing it, and throws on the comforter that’s bunched up by the foot of the bed. There. Now he has a place to sit. Placated for now, he watches Dylan wrestle with that damn desk drawer that hasn’t worked right in the entire time Eric has known him. It finally flies open, knocking Dylan’s knee. He curses under his breath, rummages for what ends up being an empty Tic Tac box and tosses it at Eric, who has to dive to catch it. Piss poor aim as usual.
Eric holds the tiny box up to the light. It rattles, not actually empty. Through the orange tinted plastic he can make out… what is that? The shape of a tooth wrapped in a bit of gauze —a perfect molar, like the illustration you might see on a poster at the dentist’s office.
“It hurt like a bitch,” Dylan grimaces. He gives up on closing the drawer, glances around for a place to sit. He ends up crisscross apple sauce on the floor, propped back on his hands so he can look up at Eric. “It wasn’t even all the way out, so they had to drill into my gums. And the stitches are annoying.”
Eric tips the wisdom tooth onto his palm to inspect it. It’s tacky with saliva and mottled with specks of blood. He picks at a fiber of gauze stuck to the enamel. The roots poke into the pad of his thumb, one of them blunt, cracked at the very end. He presses harder.
Dylan asks if anything of interest happened at school, but his attempts at making conversation fall on deaf ears. Both days are a blur in Eric’s memory. Mentally, he wasn’t really there for any of it. He was wasting time and effort worrying while Dylan slept off his painkillers. Eric should be angrier at that. Instead, he just wishes he’d been here, so he could’ve fucking… held icepacks to Dylan’s swollen face. Or whatever.
He better go soon. Sue will be back any time now with the groceries for Dylan’s soft diet (I swear to god, I’m never touching scrambled eggs again). They’re halfway down the stairs when Dylan stops, gives Eric a pointed look over his shoulder. Only then does Eric realize he’s still clutching the Tic Tac box in his fist.
“You can keep it if you want,” Dylan says.
“Why the hell would I wanna keep it?”
The real question is: why does he want to keep it?
Dylan shrugs. “You tell me.”
A wisdom tooth. Dylan’s. Part of his body, straight out of his skull and into Eric’s pocket.
“I mean,” he says lamely, “it might make for a good prop.”
Dylan’s mouth quirks up into a grin. The look he gives Eric makes him want to jump right off the stairs.
This is it. This is precisely what he was talking about. All it takes is one of these fleeting, panicky moments, for Eric’s delusions of ownership to fall apart, and it can happen anywhere, at any time. Hell, Dylan doesn’t even have to be doing anything. They could be in the middle of class, and Dylan might nibble on the end of a pen or brush his hair out of the way, and suddenly Eric gets struck with that thorny ache in his chest. It’s even worse if Dylan proceeds to look up, catch him staring. Face blank and undecipherable.
So, no. Eric’s not fooling himself. He’s not the devil to Dylan’s lanky, blond-haloed angel. If it were up to him, Dylan would only ever look at him with unquestioning devotion. Not a thought would go by in that head without Eric sanctioning it. He wouldn’t have this… power, that Eric has not willingly given him, and that Eric doesn’t seem to have over Dylan in turn.
Someone here is the dog and someone is the owner. That’s how it always works. And Eric likes to think he’s the one who leads, but he knows he’s definitely the one who snarls.
***
Dylan is drunk. The ideal state of being as far as he’s concerned, his thoughts syrupy and sticky, swirling around dangerous ideas and getting stuck on them.
It’s all Kathy’s fault if he really thinks about it; at least in a removed, far-away sense. She didn’t want her son’s room to be a dank dungeon, she said, so that’s why they’re both overheating now in the Harrises' basement, even as the end of March looms closer. Although in all fairness, the alcohol doesn’t help with that.
Eric’s shirtless, sitting next to the couch Dylan’s limbs keep trying to spill out of. He has a nice red flush that Dylan shouldn’t focus on, shouldn’t follow as it creeps down Eric’s jaw and neck, all the way to his exposed chest —because that’s the problem right there, that’s the spiral Dylan’s trying so hard to swim against.
If it were anyone else here, he knows, Eric would keep his shirt on. Too self-conscious about the deformity, the scar that only serves to highlight it. And Dylan’s staring can’t possibly be doing anything to alleviate his insecurities, but he can’t help himself. Even when sober, his gaze gets drawn back there every chance he gets, always looking for a hint of the divot even through the clothing, and now that it’s bare and perfectly at eye level, well. The bad habit is worse than ever. Just shameless.
Pectus excavatum, is what it’s called. There aren’t many Latin terms his brain can conjure up, but he’s read this one so many times that it’s seared into his memory. Back at the school library there are twelve tomes of a human anatomy encyclopedia, some sort of collection, bound in green cloth and tightly packed together on one of the top shelves. Eric’s condition is tucked away in the fifth volume, at the corner of the page, with only a few lines dedicated to explaining the basic facts. It makes sense, it’s not a huge deal in the grand scheme of things that can go wrong in a person’s body (not that Eric would agree). Dylan can recite the whole entry by heart, but to him they’re empty, clinical words —like a prayer from a religion he doesn’t believe in. No matter how many times he repeats it in his head, it doesn’t offer any of what he’s looking for.
Which would be… some legend, maybe, about people born with missing hearts. Or with hearts turned inside out. Doesn’t that sound just like Eric? A hollow chest implies a need to fill it, like a treasure begs to be found. Or something like that. Any of the nonsense that crosses Dylan’s mind when he thinks about it. He can’t fathom why Eric hates it so bad, why he snaps at anyone that so much as acknowledges it, why he gets quiet and downcast when Dylan digs a pen into it, or his elbow. How can he resent the fact that he came into the world branded with a mythology of his own?
Not to mention all the ways it might come in handy. Dylas has some ideas. Like doing shots off Eric’s sternum. No glass needed, he could just pour the liquor straight into the cavity and lap at it. Lick the red up his neck, up to the hammering pulse point. Yes. What if he tried that? Eric isn’t as drunk as him, he rarely is. Doesn’t like being too far gone, he said once, not so much that he loses control of himself and starts feeling like a meat suit he can’t quite operate. Even when they were in front of the camera an hour ago, leaving video evidence for all to enjoy, he was doing a lot more grimacing than drinking. Dylan is polite enough not to mention it, the same way that Eric pretends not to notice him swiping away a barrage of tears every now and then.
Being a lot more sober, maybe he’d beat Dylan if he tried anything weird. Maybe he’d knock him to the ground and bust his lip and break his nose and turn him into a bloody pulp until it was all gloriously over, the revulsion in Eric’s eyes the last thing he ever sees, his bruised knuckles a final caress. Dylan wouldn’t even fight back. Eric might like that —he’s always wondering aloud how a one-on-one fight between them would go. Dylan knows he’d stand a good chance. The freakish height doesn’t come without its upsides. But then he’d have to factor in his utter lack of coordination, and the higher level of blood alcohol content he’d likely be sporting, and suddenly Eric wouldn’t be at such a disadvantage after all.
And besides, Dylan’s never so much as thrown a punch. For him, unlike Eric, every waking moment feels like fumbling around in a faulty meat suit. He has all the hardware and none of the software. That’s how he thought of it a few years ago, when he got talked into trying out for basketball and it predictably ended in disaster. What a waste, someone said under their breath, watching him trip over his own legs for the third time. Yeah. His lust for violence might be detached from his physical body now, but once there’s an actual weapon in his hands… It’ll be like finally being plugged in. Ha. He’ll show them a waste alright.
In any case. For all of Eric’s talk, for all those attempts to goad him into a wrestling match, an actual fight has never taken place. Dylan doesn’t even get a chance to refuse —Eric always backs out first. It’s got to do with the balancing act they’re constantly performing. If there was ever a definitive winner, if they knew for sure which side the coin landed on, something would break. Some vital piece to the infrastructure of their bond, its very skeleton; a backbone, a wishbone. If Dylan won, Eric would never look him in the eye again. If Eric won, the weight of his disappointment and loss of respect would crush Dylan to death. Catch 22. No favorable outcome possible for anyone involved.
No fighting, then. But maybe Dylan could still do it. Touch Eric and have it not carry the undertone of brutality that comes with their every interaction. And maybe Eric wouldn’t hurt him. No wrath, no disgust. Maybe he’d sigh and go pliant under him, put his hands on Dylan’s body and his mouth too—
—and it would be as catastrophic as them trying to kill each other. So. He needs to stop thinking about this. He needs to stop drinking this much around Eric.
A nudge to his shoulder brings Dylan back to reality.
“We really shoulda got some food into you, man,” Eric says, apparently having been sizing him up as well. “We need you in top shape for April. Now it’s too late.”
“Mighty glass house you’re throwing that stone from,” Dylan answers, good-natured in a way that Eric appreciates but never achieves himself.
It’s not the first time it’s come up. A couple months ago, they were sitting at the cafeteria when Eric started looking him up and down, features pinched in some vague sense of alarm. He took the cheese sandwich he was about to bite into and sliced it into triangles, offered Dylan the bigger one. Whatever face Dylan made in response was enough for Eric to frown and shove both halves down his throat in record time, chewing so viciously it looked painful. And that was the last that anyone (didn’t) say on the topic. Until now.
“I’m serious, dude,” Eric lifts Dylan’s arm by the wrist, fingers jabbing into the bony bits. “Any time now the anorexics are gonna come line up for advice... huh. Guess that’d be one way to get pussy.”
Dylan snorts. It’s not like that. He’s not a girl, he’s not trying to fit into a bikini or a prom dress. For him it’s not about the ends, but rather the means. He enjoys being hungry, the slow simmering agony that comes with it. Starvation makes the edges of perception fuzzy, much like alcohol, with the added benefit that he can do it all the time, even at school or at home, and have no one be the wiser. Other than Eric, apparently.
“Can you imagine?” Eric’s saying, still lost in this stupid scenario. “All of them gathering around you like ‘please Dyl, show us how to stick our fingers down our throats, we’re too stupid to figure it out.’”
“‘Ah, ladies,’” Dylan plays along. “‘It’s all in the gag reflex. You shoulda thought about it before you trained it out of you.’”
Eric howls with laughter.
(The topic is fresh in their minds. Someone at school was handing out pamphlets the other day, spreading awareness about the warning signs for eating disorders. The photographs of partially undressed women served their purpose: they got Eric and him to read the whole thing, huddled together in a corner of the computer lab. The cover had a picture of a teenager with her back to the camera, spine knotty and thighs twig-thin, while the mirror in front of her spat out a fat, bloated version of herself. The next page had a girl bent over a toilet, clutching her stomach, her face obscured by a curtain of stringy dark hair.
“Which do you think is the hottest?” Eric asked, “Anorexia or bulimia?”
“Uh… do you think those are the girls’ names?”
“No, you dumbass.”
Dylan considered it for a second.
“Bulimia, I guess.”
Eric wrinkled his nose. “What, you into puke?”
“No,” Dylan rolled his eyes, irritated at having to defend his answer to a batshit question Eric himself had posed. “That’s my point, it fucking sucks. And they still do it. I don’t know. I like the idea of going against every instinct or… sense of self-preservation, to achieve something greater. Something other than what your primitive animal brain wants. I don’t know,” he shrugged, hyper aware of the quirk in Eric’s brow. Like he wasn’t expecting him to take it that seriously but was pleased nonetheless. “How about you?”
“Hm. I get your point, but it’s too messy. I can’t get over the rotten teeth. Starving yourself, though. That’s gotta take discipline, you know? Self-control. That’s what gets me going.”
And that —that, absurdly, made Dylan’s chest swell with fondness. It must’ve shown on his face, because Eric asked “what?” and Dylan had to change the subject; there was no way for him to phrase what he was thinking that didn’t lead to Eric taking offense. What he would’ve liked to say was something like that’s funny. For someone that goes by Reb, deep down I think you prefer the comfort of folding yourself back in line.
And then maybe Eric would have explained himself, said that control as a concept wasn’t the problem, but rather that it was someone else trying to impose it on him. Free will and all that shit. But most likely he would’ve just told Dylan to go fuck himself, so the conversation ended there.)
Eric grabs Dylan’s knee, maybe to ground himself, until he stops laughing. “I don’t fully get how it works, though.”
“Hm? What?”
“Why sticking your fingers in there makes you throw up.”
“It’s the… the fucking… thing back there.”
“Beluga? Uvula?”
“Uvula, that.”
“I thought only girls had that.”
Dylan sits up against the armrest so he can hit Eric with the full weight of his blank stare. Eric blinks up at him from his spot on the floor, doesn’t give the slightest indication that he’s bullshitting. This is the other game they play, one where everyone wins: Eric gets to feel like a master manipulator, Dylan pretends he wouldn’t follow him into hell out of his own free will.
“You’re thinking of something else,” Dylan says, unimpressed.
“No dude, I’m telling you. I don’t think we have one of those.”
“Get a mirror and check for yourself if you don’t believe me.”
“You think I’ve never looked into a mirror before? It’s not there.”
“For fuck’s sake—here, look.”
Dylan angles his head back, opens his mouth wide and sticks his tongue out as far as it will go. He hums a questioning noise, points to where he knows for damn sure Eric can see his uvula…
And Eric shoves two whole fingers into his mouth.
The sheer shock of it has his jaw seizing closed, though Eric doesn’t actually go far enough for him to gag. He more so presses down on the surface of his tongue. His skin tastes like Dorito salt and pizza grease and underneath all that —in an abstract sense, probably brought on by the liquor and Dylan’s personal brand of whimsy— gun residue. It’s only a little awful. Dylan can’t even tell himself he walked into this blind: it’s part of the thrill of being alone with Eric, seeing what new bizarre power play he can come up with.
Last time he got it into his head that he was gonna try braiding a lock of Dylan’s hair; nevermind that neither of them have sisters or any business knowing how to do that. They ended up cramped against the bathroom counter, Dylan trying to get a good enough look at the mirror to untangle the blond knots while Eric… being Eric, was absolutely no help and offered no solutions, other than clinging to Dylan’s shoulder and snickering warm air against his neck. It tickled. By three am they gave up, had to resort to a pair of scissors.
Right now, worst case scenario for Dylan is he throws up. Unpleasant, embarrassing, sure. For Eric it’s even worse. Directly inside the wolf’s mouth with the sole purpose of annoying him; not a terribly favorable position to put himself in. Dylan can see in his eyes the exact moment that realization hits —and shoots out his hand just before Eric can pull away, catches him by the wrist, holds him in place.
He doesn’t bite. He doesn’t need to. There’s a fresh laceration there already, in the webbing between Eric’s fingers, from shooting the sawed-off shotgun earlier today. All Dylan has to do is scrape a fang against the flimsy layer of clotting for it to come apart, and then…
Eric gasps in pain. A string of blood seeps into Dylan’s mouth. It’s overwhelming, the metallic tang coats his taste buds and rises to his nose; but it’s also familiar, reminds Dylan of every time he’s held a key between his teeth or licked a paper cut. Eric’s blood tastes just like anyone else’s and yet it doesn’t, it can’t, and Dylan is so, so, so glad he’s doing this.
The twin wound in Dylan’s opposite hand twinges as if in sympathy. Or maybe it’s eager to be bitten as well, made once again identical. An epiphany: they need to make some sort of blood pact. They have to, because if they’re gonna twine their fates together, if they’re gonna make a salad of indistinguishable brain matter a month from now, they better fucking know what each other’s blood tastes like. They better make every effort to fuse into one, get the closest they can get to a single person in two bodies.
In the dimness of the basement, Eric’s pupils have swallowed all color from his eyes, which are now anchored to Dylan, to the way his lips wrap around his fingers and the hollowing of his cheeks. Eric’s chest rises and falls heavily, like he has to focus on breathing through the pain. He should bring it up now, Dylan thinks, the blood pact thing, because Eric looks like he will agree to anything, anything at all right now, if Dylan could only figure out how to speak and suck at the same time.
No time for that. He lets go of Eric’s wrist —marveling, for a second, at the fact that Eric doesn’t pull away— and tears into his own scab on the other hand. Red beads across the slit and he brings it up for both of them to see, no words needed, and Eric stares in abject fascination at the blood, reaches out, squeezes more of it out. Impatient, Dylan forces the issue. He bumps his bloody hand against Eric’s chin until it finally, finally dawns on him and his lips part and the warm wetness of his tongue smooths over the cut…
Suddenly, a noise from upstairs. Someone, Kathy or Wayne, getting up to piss or grab a glass of water or make sure their son isn’t partaking in a cultish blood ritual. Eric’s neck snaps towards the stairs. He drops Dylan’s hand, yanks his own back. Dylan can feel Eric’s spine tensing as acutely as if it was his own, the cold dread washing over his body, the heartbeat hammering in his throat. He gets the distinct impression that Eric would rather give his dad a tour of their arsenal or let him hear the tapes they’ve been recording than have him walk into… whatever the fuck this is.
Nobody comes to check on them. All the energy whooshes out of them, gets absorbed by the stifling heat of the room, the dead silence.
“Jesus christ, man” Eric says after a while. He’s carefully inspecting his spit-covered fingers, not meeting Dylan’s eyes. “You’re a freak, you know that.”
There’s a streak of blood across his lip, but there’s no way Dylan can bring it up now. Self-conscious, he wipes the excess saliva off the corners of his mouth.
“Says the one who tried to stick his arm down my throat. I don’t know where that thing’s been.”
“Yes you do! You know Arlene. If anything, I don’t know where your mouth has been.”
They both crack a smile. That’s enough to bring the mood back to baseline.
Eric sighs, still staring at the wound. From his spot on the couch, Dylan can’t get a good enough look at it. Are his teeth marks etched into the skin? He fucking hopes so.
“With our luck, watch it get infected,” Eric mutters.
Dylan’s stomach drops. That’s where Eric’s mind goes to. Infection. Disease. Contamination. It’s not like either of them is carrying anything. More to the point, it’s not like it fucking matters. Imminent death should liberate them, not restrain them. The lack of consequences is part of the appeal. Why spend their last few weeks behaving for the sake of an autopsy they won’t get to read?
Well, because others will. That’s why. For a blistering flash of a moment, he genuinely despises Eric. The one who claims to laugh in the face of ostracism and renounce all social conventions. Still chained by them. Mortified at the thought of someone calling him a fag, even after death, even after all the other things they’re gonna call him. Stupid, stupid little boy.
The feeling burns hot in Dylan’s chest and then tapers off, as usual, but it sours the whole thing regardless. Nearly sobers him up. He lies back down, blanket up to his chin, and feels his blood —his and a little bit of Eric’s— pump through his neck, his temples, his fingertips. Diluting. Tainting. Purifying.
Eric turns to him just as he’s about to head for his bed on the opposite side of the room. He hovers near the light switch, shifts his weight, sensing Dylan’s sudden moodiness.
“Hey, V.” He sounds young, vulnerable.
“Mhm?”
“If you were a chick, you’d be a hot anorexic.”
“…thanks, Reb.”
***
The sun is setting as they drive down the mountain. A pretty view, Eric supposes, if you’re a dumb fucking tourist. Photo camera hanging from your neck, scrambling to get a good shot of the streaky pastel clouds over the rocks. Tripping. Freefalling.
From where Eric’s sitting behind the wheel, it’s nothing more than a fucking nuisance. The light reflects off every surface of his car, multiplies in the mirrors and the windows and his sunglasses. Well, at least he’s getting some use out of those. He was starting to forget they’re not just for decoration.
Dylan is squinting in the passenger seat, trying to dodge the sun rays that bore into his face like lasers. Zang. An orange beam over his eye. Another across the bridge of his nose. Then one glinting off his earring. Eric watches him pat the countless pockets of his duster for his shades, not realizing he has them on already, holding his hair back.
He’s debating whether to tell him or not when he has to swerve, make a sharper turn than he meant. Distracted. Dylan shoots him a disapproving glance. Like it wasn’t his damn fault in the first place.
They start talking headlines. More specifically, which combination the journalists are gonna go for when they have to mention them in articles (so, so many articles): Harris and Klebold or Klebold and Harris? Eric argues he has age on his side, Dylan claims his name is more distinctive. Whatever that means.
“Think of it this way,” Dylan says. The road gets trickier, so Eric can only afford to catch glimpses of him every few seconds. “You’re like, a middle schooler, right? You get to class, some kid is talking about an urban legend he heard from his brother’s friend or something. You decide you gotta try it out. So, you follow the instructions. You have to go to the bathroom, not any bathroom, the darkest, creepiest bathroom in school, the one that’s always out of service and no one wants to go into. You get there, the light won’t turn on. You stand in front of the mirror, real close. You say the ghost’s name once. Twice. Three times. For a second, nothing. And then your head fucking explodes.”
“Where is this even—”
“Now be honest,” Dylan jabs a finger into his sternum and shuts him right up, “does the story work better if the ghost is called Klebold or Harris?”
“…come on, now.”
“I rest my case.”
Dylan sits back with a satisfied flourish, then immediately starts squirming. It’s a chronic discomfort, he bitched once, like it was an actual medical diagnosis. More like an ant colony living up your ass, was Eric’s guess.
Now, Dylan reaches under his seat and unearths an old liquor bottle, nearly empty save for the last few dregs sloshing at the bottom. Eric messes with the stereo, Dylan groans in advance. It’s a recipe for frustration —they’ve taken this rocky road a hundred times and know that every bump makes the record hiccup, the music skip a few seconds.
“I hope I can come back to do that shit,” Eric muses after half a song. “Take out some eleven-year-old twerps.”
“Hm. Doing them a favor.”
“Damn right.”
Dylan rolls down his window, no doubt planning on aiming the bottle at the first road sign or overfilled trashcan they drive by, but then stops in his tracks. They’re saving those now, for Molotov cocktails. He pouts. The nipping cold wind whips his hair all over. Eric nudges his knee.
“Hey, peel off the label. No free product placement at NBK.”
Dylan snorts but doesn’t say anything else. The next few minutes are filled with the stuttering of a KMFDM track, every ten seconds of uninterrupted audio feeling like a victory. While Dylan ponders over… god knows what, Eric thinks about becoming a vengeful spirit. In most of the movies he’s seen, the haunting is supposed to be a temporary state, leading to the inevitable conclusion of the ghost “finding peace”. What an alien fucking concept. Eric can’t imagine ever feeling that way. He could nuke Columbine High School off the map —and they will— and it still wouldn’t be enough. Wouldn’t even make a dent in the ugly dark cloud he’s constantly chewing over, like tar-flavored bubblegum.
It’s better not to think about that. The after. No point in wondering. Whatever is there to know, if anything at all, he’ll find out soon enough. There are other scenarios he’d rather waste time on. Especially when he has trouble sleeping at night, which is increasingly often. He wonders if Dylan…
“What if we didn’t stop there?” he hears himself say, horrified, then figures he can’t stop now. “After the school, I mean. We could set the bombs a few hours in advance, get a decent headstart. They wouldn’t immediately know it was us, you know.”
A quick glance lets him know that Dylan is busying himself with the bottle on his lap, his expression lost somewhere beneath the shades and the angle and the dwindling daylight. Eric has the impulse to snatch the sunglasses right off his face. Put them over his own pair, double his defenses. He keeps talking. The words come out desperate, rapid-fire.
“It doesn’t have to be an automatic game over. I mean, what do we have to lose at that point? We might as well stretch it as far as we can. I don’t know, go on a rampage. We could hot wire a car or something, I’ve no idea how but I’m sure a buddy of mine—”
Mercifully, he runs out of breath before he runs out of words. He could keep going forever. He has. Hours upon hours of tossing and turning while he tells himself his little bedtime stories. Motels, diners, a last hurrah road trip, living on the lam. Bonnie and Clyde. Mallory and Mickey. Billy and Stu. If you squint. Sometimes that’s what’s he’s most excited about. Sometimes everything leading up to it feels like a means to an end. Sometimes.
“Um,” Dylan’s zeroed in on the label. Eric can’t look at him directly. He focuses on the spindly fingers scraping the glue residue, the grating squeak of nails on glass. “Game over is kind of a selling point for me. So.”
For a brief, explosive moment, Eric is determined to drive the car off the rails and end it all in fiery death for them both. Rock meeting flesh. Nothing left but broken, charred bodies. He has to bite his tongue and white-knuckle the steering wheel to breathe through the urge. His hand still stings where Dylan’s teeth reopened the wound. It hasn’t healed right yet. Per their schedule, it never will.
“Fuck, yeah, me too. You know that. I’m just —I’m just saying shit. Can’t you just play along? Jesus christ, would it kill you to humor me? For like, one fucking second?”
The sun’s gone down now but his face is hot. He just couldn’t fucking help himself, could he. What was he thinking. Fantasizing like a kid before Christmas. Worse, telling Dylan about it. He replays the god-awful mildness of Dylan’s voice in his head, letting him down gently. Humiliating. And for what? What did he expect? There was only one response he was ever going to get from Dylan and that was it. Eric has no business feeling the burning sensation of tears building up in his nose. Stupid. Like poking a bruise and being surprised when it wells with pain.
Because Eric knows. He’s not a fucking idiot. There is no version of reality in which they make it out of Columbine alive. And that’s by design. It’s fine, it’s great, it’s the grand finale of the hellish performance they’re gonna put on but —fuck, he’s not like Dylan. There might be something fundamentally the same about them, the only two conscious beings among the slew of mindless drones that bloat the world, but. But. They’re two of a kind. Not identical.
Most of the time that’s a good thing. Back in the Diversion program they had him talk to some… psychiatrist or therapist or mindfucker woman. She asked Eric if he would befriend a clone of himself. His own honesty surprised him: fuck no. He wouldn’t even want to be around him. For whatever reason Dylan does, and some days it feels like nothing short of a small miracle. One of the few life has afforded him.
But the difference between them still hurts. Eric doesn’t cross the street without looking, doesn’t trace the edge of cliffs with the toe of his scuffed boot, doesn’t fucking drool at the thought of eating a bullet like a starved hyena with a stake. Not like Dylan does. Eric’s gonna be dead by the end of this, yes, and that knowledge is filed away, a fixed date in the imminent future, creeping closer like the shockwaves of a bomb in the horizon. A matter of time.
The record skips again. It cuts off the very end of a song, comes back well into the next one, anticlimactic. He prods the stereo buttons until it turns off. The mountains disappear in the rearview mirror. They twist through the residential streets while the silence threatens to swallow them whole.
“For what it’s worth, I think you’re gonna win” Dylan mumbles into the collar of his duster. “They’re probably gonna go with alphabetical order. Harris and Klebold.”
Eric doesn’t answer. He’s starting to feel like a schoolgirl daydreaming about her crush, practicing her married name on the margins of a textbook. Heart doodles and all.
***
The countdown’s almost over. Only four nights separate them from NBK, and they’re spending this one together.
It’s a strategic move, at least in part. That was Eric’s reasoning, to have “something halfway between a briefing and a military council”. Dylan rolled his eyes and invited him over for “the final sleepover”. A more honest description. It gets right to the heart of the matter: the hope that time will move faster in each other’s company, as it always has.
They sit opposite each other on Dylan’s bedroom floor, two islands surrounded by a sea of crude maps and diagrams strewn around them. They pretend to walk through each step of the plan one last time. It’s all perfunctory. They could recite it forwards and backwards, half asleep or drunk off their minds, no real words needed. Only shorthand, code, gestures, the whole fucking dialect they’ve constructed around this singular event.
What else? Contingencies. Contingencies, Eric says. They need to go over those. But they don’t, not really. Every time one of them brings up something that could go wrong, they gloss over it or talk their way around it, unwilling to make any changes this late into the game. Like the time Eric found out he’d studied the wrong material ten minutes before a chem test. No point course-correcting now.
Around midnight they sink into silence. Eric grits his teeth, on edge. An insidious thought keeps beating at the forefront of his mind. Or rather several thoughts clotting together, threatening to come loose at any second and clog up a vital artery.
The journals. Eric’s is no secret diary, no teenage bleeding heart soaking into a page. It’s a declaration of war. That’s why he lets Dylan flip through it when they’re down in the basement. And that’s the problem right there. He can’t think of a single time Dylan has done the same. Always scribbling on the corners of pages, folding bits of paper and stuffing them in his pockets or ripping them into confetti.
Fucking ridiculous, is what it is. Not to mention asymmetrical. For Eric, there’s no thought so terrible that he can’t tell Dylan about it, much as he might resent that fact sometimes. So what can’t Dylan share with him? With Eric, of all people. His best friend, his accomplice, his fucking… partner in crime or whatever. What could he possibly be writing that’s worse than what they’re about to do together? The answer is nothing. Which means it’s not worse. Not objectively. It’s something he chooses to hide from Eric specifically.
And that —that makes Eric’s blood boil. It doesn’t make any sense. Dylan is the only person in the world that can keep up with Eric without missing a beat, the only one that has ever truly got him. Whatever Eric is or whatever might be wrong with him can’t be that bad, isn’t bad at all, actually, because Dylan is the same. Right?
That should work both ways. It should give him absolute insight into the workings of Dylan’s mind. But maybe it doesn’t. Maybe Eric’s understanding of Dylan is as skewed as Sue’s, as limited as anyone else’s. Sometimes… sometimes he wonders if Dylan isn’t just chameleoning himself into what he thinks Eric wants. Holding up a mirror between them and pretending it’s a window.
Eric wishes he could crack Dylan’s skull open. Scoop out anything and anyone else. Fill it only with thoughts of blood-brains-guts, Eric-Eric-Eric.
“Have you eaten yet?”
Eric looks up, startled. Stares at Dylan’s head, impervious, unfortunately sealed shut, permanently out of reach.
“No, actually.”
Dylan gets on his feet. Stretches upright. Towers over Eric.
“I think there’s still some leftover lasagna if you’re hungry.”
“Uh, yeah. Okay.”
Eric watches as he leaves the door ajar, listens to his footsteps hitting the stairs. How long can it take for Dylan to heat up dinner? A couple minutes, tops. Eric’s fingers tingle, like they do every time he’s about to do something he knows he shouldn’t.
“I couldn’t make up my mind if I should use the oven or the microwave and I went with the oven, but then I figured since it’s so late you’re probably hungry, so I ended up just… Reb?”
Eric’s staring out the window, spine ramrod straight and fists clenched. Dylan has to call out to him again to get him to acknowledge the lukewarm plate he’s offering. When he turns to meet his gaze, Dylan almost flinches. The empty eyes, the pale absence of his expression… off kilter in a way he’s never seen, not even during Eric’s best attempts at concealing his emotions.
Dylan watches him eat in quiet, escalating anxiety, does his best to stop the skin of his arms from breaking into goosebumps. Originally he planned on stealing a bite or two off the plate, but even as Eric leaves most of it untouched, he can’t bring himself to do it. Maybe he fucked up the reheating process worse than he thought. Maybe it’s scalding hot on the outside but frosty and mushy on the inside.
There has to be something they can talk about other than Tuesday, but what? The upcoming KMFDM album? It’s not like they’ll be here to listen to it. Which is for the best, they’ve agreed. There’s a real possibility it’ll suck, turn to ash the same way everything good does. And isn’t that what this is all about? Accelerating entropy. Spearheading it before it has a chance to take them with it.
They spend a few minutes putting away the evidence papering the room, and then change into the worn clothes they use as pajamas. Eric doesn’t utter a word or even look at him directly. He also shows no intention of leaving. Tom mentioned the guest room being clean and ready in the split second they all crossed paths downstairs, but if Eric’s forgotten about that, Dylan’s not about to remind him.
Dylan pulls back the covers and gets into bed, sticks the whole length of his body against the wall. Half the bed remains empty. Exactly the measure of plausible deniability. Eric’s brow quirks up. He shoots a glance at the bedroom door, his jaw clicks. The moment stretches. Then, too quickly for Dylan to see what his face ultimately lands on, he turns off the bedside lamp and climbs into bed with him.
It’s a twin size, barely large enough for Dylan on his own, let alone a whole new person thrown into the mix. Eric’s stiff as a statue, clearly determined to leave a sliver of empty space between them, but it’s futile —it’s either touch Dylan or fall right off the edge. The glow of the streetlight sneaking in through the curtains draws an outline around his features, emphasizes the sharp angle of his nose. The slope of his shoulder comes to rest against Dylan’s hand, and Dylan starts picking at the pilling cotton of his shirt, thinking.
This whole night has been a funeral. Their funeral. Possibly the only one they’ll ever get, which is how it should be. Who would be worthy of attending the funeral of two gods? Surely only the gods themselves. A while ago they were the mourners, solemn and woeful, and now it’s their turn to play the mourned. Two corpses rotting in the narrow, oppressive box that is Dylan’s bed. It feels like they’ve already been buried. Like Tuesday has already happened, come and gone, and they’ve skipped straight to the aftermath, to the grave. With no memory of the act itself, no satisfaction and no joy in reminiscing; only this, now and for the rest of eternity. It’s like something out of Dylan’s deepest fantasies. A single casket. Both of them blown to bits. Their mutilated remains tangled together, indistinguishable from each other. He could fall asleep just like this, cramped and suffocated, and have the best sleep of his life.
But of course, there’s a fundamental element out of place, shattering the illusion. Eric. Still as stone, fist clenched over his stomach, as if there were an electrical current running through his body, winding him tighter and tighter. It’s the way he gets when he’s assessing a situation. Every muscle poised for fighting or fleeing. A mask of inertia over a whirlwind of thoughts, sheer kinetic energy trapped in a bottle.
“Are you nervous?” Dylan whispers, though the real question is are you scared. When it comes to Eric, there’s always some translating involved.
“No.” His eyelashes catch the light when he blinks. It’s not often. He’s staring blankly at the ceiling.
“I guess I am, a little bit. In a good way.”
“…that so? No second thoughts? Nothing you would do differently?”
His voice is clipped, hinting at something, but Dylas has no idea as to what.
“I mean, it would’ve been cool if the napalm worked right, but it’s whatever now. We don’t technically need—”
“You’re still on time, you know. If you’re so desperate to replace me.”
What.
“What?”
“You better hurry up though, ‘cause the clock is tick-tick-tick-ticking the fuck down—”
Dylan’s brain is the world’s slowest operating system and he’s failing to reboot it.
“Wait, wait, hang on. What are you talking about?”
Eric swings his arm. For a moment Dylan’s sure he’s about to get punched in the nose, but no: the only thing that brushes his face is a balled-up handful of paper that nearly disappears in the abyss between the wall and the bed. He scrambles to salvage it, then sits up on his heels.
It’s too dark to read comfortably, but it doesn’t matter. He only needs to make out a few of the loops and angles that make up his own handwriting for the rest of the words to pop into his brain, like hearing an old song for the first time in decades. And just as foreign, too —he remembers writing these as if he watched someone else do it. Someone who got locked inside Dylan’s body at some point, when he wasn’t looking, and was now desperately trying to scratch his way out on the torn-off pages of a notebook, ink bleeding out of every pore, hysterical. A botched exorcism.
The seeds of shame and betrayal take root in his stomach. They get swiftly trampled by Eric’s voice, no longer anywhere near resembling a whisper.
“Shit, I’ll bring you the phone right now, hm? If you wanna call over Zach or fucking… whats-her-face.”
“Keep your voice down.”
Eric sits up, a whir of limbs, and for once Dylan doesn’t have to look down at him.
“What? Can’t even do that on your own? That’s right. You’d have to get me to do it for you, same as everything else. Hey, look at me. Look at me,” Eric smacks his face lightly, like you would a misbehaving dog, a bitch. “You think any of this would be happening if I wasn’t holding your hand the whole way through? You think you’re doing me a favor?”
“You sound fucking insane.”
“Yeah, sure. I’m the crazy one. Not the guy writing complete fucking nonsense like a schizo—”
“And who gave you permission to—”
“—bitching and whining about being so tortured and so unloved— hey, at least you got some self-awareness. Maybe you’re not that retarded after all. You know no one else would ever wanna do anything like this, least of all with you. That’s why you’re stuck with me.”
Eric’s voice shakes. Unravels. All of him does. The words are machinegun fire, bouncing from one topic to the other before Dylan can even think of an answer. No point in arguing.
“Eric. Shut the fuck up.”
“I guess there’s always Robyn.” A shrill, manic burst of laughter. “I mean, if she wants to go to prom with you then clearly there’s something wrong with her, so maybe I’m just underestimating her.”
“My parents are down the hall.”
Another swing of the pendulum and all the humor flashes out of Eric’s eyes, the loathing floods back in.
“Great. Call them over, let them hear. Explain to them exactly what we’ve been doing and what we’re going to do. Or are you gonna pin it all on me? Let me guess. Evil Eric dragged you into this, right? He put a gun in your hands, he wrote a script for you to read, forced you to sleep in the same bed, what’s next? Am I trying to fucking rap—”
“Shut up shut up shut up.”
Dylan’s hand moves of its own accord, reaches blindly for Eric’s throat. Squeezes. Chokes off the rest of the sentence. Before Eric can struggle in earnest, Dylan gathers all his strength to knock him onto his back, then climbs on top of him to immobilize him. His knee digs into Eric’s stomach, the rest of his leg pins down his thigh. With his remaining hand he catches one arm against the pillow, leaving Eric a single usable fist that he slams down on Dylan’s shoulder, over and over, fruitless.
“I don’t understand why you’re choosing to do this so close to the finish line,” Dylan mutters, jagged, all teeth. “And over what? I don’t fucking get it. You want to take all the credit? You want me to take the blame? Does it have anything to do with that or is it just plain jealousy?”
Eric tries to gasp out an answer but it’s no use. Dylan’s arm is like a steel pipe over his neck and his seizing chest. The irony registers somewhere, in the more cold-blooded recesses of Dylan’s psyche. How odd. How desperate this body is to keep itself alive, in spite of what the brain knows will happen in a few short days.
Dylan leans down, so close he’s sure Eric can feel his breath ghosting over his lips, where his own is lacking.
“Do you know I’ve been living the whole past year around this? I wake up every day, I go to that dumpster fire of a school and sit through class after class, I make a billion pizzas to get the money we need, I apply for college, I pick out dorm rooms with my mom, I kiss her good morning and good night and pretend to be a real fucking person, all of it —so I get to do this with you. Knowing I don’t have to do any of that. Knowing I could make it all stop in an instant, and still, still, you’re here throwing a hissy fit?”
It strikes him that Eric really is trying to wrestle him off, but can’t. If anything he seems weaker by the second, no longer writhing, his eyes glazed over. His carotid artery flutters against Dylan’s fingertips. Mesmerizing. He has to let up now, he knows. Has to swallow back the tidal wave of power, trust that he’ll get it back on Tuesday and then some. That it’ll be enough to sate him. Even if they are anonymous bodies, torn apart at a distance, and this is Eric under him.
Dylan loosens the pressure but keeps his hand in place. The air wheezes back into Eric, punctuated by a hacking cough. Beneath the welling tears, Eric glares up at him with undiluted venom. Whatever vitriol his hypoxic brain is stringing together, Dylan’s not about to let him get a word in, not yet.
“Fucking look around,” he jostles Eric, makes his head bounce off the mattress. “Do you see anyone else here? No? That’s because it’s you. Not Zach, not some fucking chick. Does that register for you at all? You got a whole year of my life, all the way to the end. What more could you possibly want from—”
Dylan shifts his shin. The rest of his ranting dissolves into nothing.
Because he can feel Eric. He can feel him through the thin layer of clothing sheathing his groin. Warm. And hard. Against Dylan’s leg.
“Well,” he says blankly. “I guess there’s that.”
“…fuck you, Dylan.”
All the fight goes out of Eric. He’s stock-still, no longer trying to shove Dylan off, empty stare fixed on some dark spot up on the ceiling. His breath comes out in hot puffs. A leftover reflex tear trails down by his ear, soaks into the pillow.
And Dylan… Dylan reels. He lets go of Eric’s wrist, fully expecting an onslaught that will knock him to the ground and splinter his head open against the freshly vacuumed floor. Leave a hell of a crime scene for everyone to puzzle over and never find any answers. But no. No attack, no ferocity. The stillness swells one unbelievable second after another.
Dylan has a choice here. He could disengage, scurry away into the guest room and lock himself in there until the morning. Get praised by his mother for being such a good host and giving up the better bed to Eric. If Eric’s even still around by then, that is. If he doesn’t flee in the middle of the night, freaked out, never to be heard from again. That’s option A.
As for option B…Whatever beast was in Dylan just now, controlling his movements, is starting to mutate from red-hot brutality to something else. Something slippery, snake-like and no less violent, coiling in his stomach with dark satisfaction. This is really no choice at all, is it. His mind’s been made up from the beginning.
Dylan takes a shaky breath, his heart in his throat. He moves so that his knee is holding Eric’s to the side, leaving him enough space to maneuver between his legs. The hand he used to strangle him trails downwards, dips into the hollow of Eric’s sternum over the frayed fabric of his shirt, then follows the path of the aorta as it branches off, blood pumping under his touch.
“Is this it? That’s what this was all about?” despite Dylan’s best attempt at a dispassionate drawl, there’s no way Eric misses his impatience, the wobble in his voice.
He slips his hand into Eric’s sleep shorts before he can talk himself out of it. Eric hisses, shadowing the sigh that Dylan lets out; two opposite reactions to the contrast between the feverishly hot skin of Eric’s cock and Dylan’s perpetually cold fingers as they coil around it.
“If I do this, is it gonna be enough?”
Dylan gives him a tentative stroke, then another. Eric doesn’t utter a word but arches into his touch. For a moment his gaze darts across Dylan’s face, searching, then returns to a fixed point over Dylan’s shoulder. Whether he found what he was looking for or not he doesn’t say, only juts his chin out in defiance. Okay then.
Dylan gets to work. Honestly, it can’t be very good. There’s less sliding and more scraping going on than there should be, the friction of dry skin on skin makes it too labored and the angle is awkward —though given their inexperience it would be no matter what. As much as Dylan hates to admit it, he suspects he might be getting more out of this than Eric is.
Time for a change of technique. It was his death grip on Eric’s neck that got him this far, he figures, so maybe he needs to stick to what works. Call it an educated guess. He adds more pressure to his strokes, hopes it hurts a little bit, hopes Eric’s into that. It takes a second, but he manages to get a rhythm going. A whine tears out of Eric and Dylan halts, stunned. He forces his eyesight to check for pink splotching Eric’s face or sweat building up at his hairline, but it’s too dark. Eric squirms under his attention anyway, brings up the collar of his shirt to cover his mouth with a shuddering breath. Hiding. Dylan allows it, even as he hates it.
In retaliation, he dips his thumb into the precome gathering at the slit. Eric jolts. Dylan’s pace becomes frantic, all slick and glide and rough squeezing. Eric thrusts up to meet his movements, clings to Dylan’s shoulder where he was pummeling him before. He shoves the collar of Dylan’s shirt aside so he can dig his blunt nails into him, and Dylan wonders what he’s gonna find in the mirror later: a handprint bruised into him or a peppering of tiny half-moon scratches?
He’s been too lenient, he decides. He wants to see Eric, the pale expanse of his throat, the bobbing movements of his swallows, the collarbones poking out; so he rips the shirt from between Eric’s teeth, where he was holding it to muffle his whimpers. Eric laughs, breathless, delirious. It hits Dylan so deeply then, so sharply —the urge to mark him up, to tear into him like an animal toying with its prey. But then he thinks about coroners and autopsies and how Eric really would call it all off, because this isn’t evidence he wants to leave behind, and so Dylan can’t, he doesn’t.
And then Eric comes. It echoes all over his body:
in the half-swallowed moan reverberating in his chest;
in the spasming stripe of flesh of his abdomen, where the hem of his shirt’s ridden up;
in the hand tangling into Dylan’s collar and stretching it beyond repair. As if it wasn’t already ruined, like everything else about them.
Dylan has to look away. He never realized, until now, how much he wanted to see this, Eric, in such a state, unguarded. A wave of fulfilment washes over him, like he’s leeching off Eric’s high. He can’t bring himself to regret this. When he goes out in a blitz of bullets, he’s gonna take the school and the students and all his reasons with him, and he’ll take this moment as well.
They can never take it from him. Let them try. Let them open him up, gawk at his insides, pore over his school assignments, question every person that has ever crossed paths with him, draw timelines and maps until they think they’ve explained him, boiled him down to a dossier. But they’ll never have this.
He waits until the aftershocks have passed to pull his hand out of Eric’s shorts. Most of the fluid has seeped into the fabric, some of it cools on his fingers. He smears it on Eric’s stomach, more as an excuse to touch the downy trail of hair there than anything else. There’s another wet spot where Eric was mouthing at his shirt. The arm that’s been keeping Dylan hovering over Eric burns in exhaustion, so he sits back. Now that their minds are empty, the sound of Eric’s panting is deafening. The clock down the hall ticks as if clearing its throat, as if resuming an activity they didn’t even realize had stopped.
Dylan’s suddenly hyper aware of himself: his face burns so furiously it might as well be steaming, his lower lip stings where he must have bitten it, he has an erection that he instinctually rushes to hide under the sheets.
Eric sits up, once again level with him. So caught up is Dylan in his own physical reality that he fails to read his intentions. Eric looks at him with wide, wild eyes that then slant down to his mouth. His hand cradles Dylan’s face, gentler than he’s ever seen him handle anything or anyone else, even his dog, even Arlene. He leans in to kiss Dylan, and Dylan—
Dylan turns away. Faces the wall. Eric freezes, so close that the tip of his nose traces a line across Dylan’s cheekbone. An endless void tears open between them.
“We, um. We should go to sleep now,” Dylan says, so soft he barely hears himself. He lies down without sparing Eric a glance. The wall is bitterly cold when he presses his forehead to it.
For a while Eric doesn’t move. Doesn’t even breathe, it feels like. Maybe he’s trying to explain to himself what just happened, or he’s waiting for Dylan to do it. But Dylan won’t. He can’t. He can’t let Eric kiss him, and he can’t tell him that it would ruin everything. It would open a crack in the story, the one they’re trying to tell about themselves and who they are and the mark they’re gonna leave in the world. And through that crack, any delusion might slip in.
Because what if he kisses Eric and fucking loves it, what if he wants to do it as much as possible? What if there are other things Dylan wants to do? Things he doesn’t know he wants or has never let himself consider. Like holding Eric’s hand. Or have Eric’s thighs bracketing his hips. What if three more nights are suddenly not enough anymore, stop being an eternity to wade through and become a race against the clock? What if Dylan starts feeling like he’s running. Out. Of time.
And what if Eric takes all of that and speaks a future into existence for them? Dylan would believe him. That’s the most terrifying thought of all.
The idea of their lives expanding beyond next week fills Dylan with a dread so visceral he can’t separate it from the essence of himself. As if it’s coded into him, hardwired into the very core of his being. That fear is him. He doesn’t exist outside of it. Finding something worth living for would take so much courage. And Dylan is, if nothing else, a coward.
Say he takes that leap with Eric, then what? The emotional equivalent of a road drawn on top of a brick wall, like a fucking Wile E. Coyote skit. That’s what. Dylan doomed to lose him later down the line, to the Marines or to his father or to the first girl that agrees to go out with him.
All so it can end the same way: Dylan stored in a morgue cooler, alone. Sliced apart on a steel table, alone. Buried under the packed soil, alone.
Their names no longer twisted together in black ink, on the front page of every newspaper; no longer whispered among terrified children like an ancient curse, like a single word. Two asteroids passing by, briefly illuminating each other before fading into the endless darkness of space.
No. No. Better to collide. Better to shatter into a million pieces and make sure everything burns down with them. A controlled detonation instead of an unpredictable blast. This way, he never has to let go of Eric or find out what it feels like to lose him. He can keep clinging, sinking claws and fangs into the tender flesh of him, deep enough that you’d have to rewrite history to tear them apart. Frozen in amber. Immortalized. Together forever, guaranteed.
The bed creaks at the loss of Eric’s weight. There’s the rustle of clothes, the zipper of a bag, the bedroom door swinging open. We can go over it again on Monday, in Eric’s voice, croaky and unfamiliar —whether that’s from real damage to the larynx or something else, there’s no way to know. He leaves.
Dylan closes his eyes. By the time he falls asleep the room is awash with daylight.
***
They return to the library.
The air is thick with gunpowder and it reeks of gasoline. The fire alarms get drowned out by the tinnitus in Eric’s ears, making them more of a suggestion than an order to evacuate. Wandering around is a challenge in its own right. The bodies slumped over and the pools of blood (no longer expanding, as big as they’re going to get) make for a shoddy obstacle course he has to navigate. Every few seconds, if he concentrates hard enough, he can make out the police sirens going off outside, muted and discordant. Like reality leaking into a dream.
Eric has hated this school for as long as he’s known it, and here it is now: irrefutable proof that it hates him right back. The noise, the smoke —it’s the school assaulting his senses, trying to get into his body so it can destroy him from the inside out. Not that he’s gonna give it the satisfaction.
He turns to find Dylan appraising the carnage with his head down, back to his characteristic slouch. As if he’s trying to shrivel back into anonymity. When their eyes meet, he seems startled. Like he forgot Eric was even there. And his expression… For a split second he looks like a stranger. The stranger from Friday night, the night that didn’t happen, the night that Eric has erased from his account of his time on earth.
And yet. He’s gotta give it to Dylan, he had the right idea: the last thing Eric wants is to survive this. His own skin feels uninhabitable, stuck to his clothes by a layer of grime and sweat and cortisol that will never wash off. Thank fuck he’ll never see his mother again, will never have to meet her eyes —it’s either relief at this realization or his rapidly dwindling adrenaline that makes his knees buckle, sends him tumbling backwards. He catches himself against a bookcase, slumps down until he’s sat on the floor. The path of least resistance.
He regrets it. All of it. The last hour and the years that led up to it. He would also do it all over again, if only so he could regret it once more.
Dylan watches him from his vantage point, as usual. Eric wonders what he sees. The blood caked to his face. A snotty toddler after a tantrum. He should say something, he thinks. About game over, about keeping an ear out for the gunshot, like they talked about at Blackjack’s a lifetime ago. He wonders if Dylan remembers the conversation. He wonders if he ever crosses Dylan’s mind at all.
Barrel between his teeth. The feeling of going to sleep first at a sleepover, knowing he’s about to miss the best part.
Time to find out, he doesn’t say. Lights out.
Dylan manages to look away before it happens. Something wet sprays his face. The gunshot is as unremarkable as the hundred that came before it; even more so now that the novelty has worn off.
He sinks to his knees. Eric’s lifeless arm lingers at the edge of his peripheral vision. Nothing. Not a single muscle twitch or reflex from the fingers that used to be in constant motion. No longer a complex network of firing neurons strung together by synapsis, circuited better than a motherboard. Just decaying meat.
Dylan’s eye catches on the scorched cover of a book with a familiar green spine —the human anatomy encyclopedia, volume nine. It’s the wrong one. No comfort to be found there.
At the end of it all, this feeling. He remembers it. Being the only one left awake at a sleepover, in the dark and quiet, the last living creature on Earth. He hated it as a kid and he hates it now. He aims at his temple and pulls the trigger.
If there’s any reaction to the sound, any processing of information in the frantic, fading jolts of electrical activity that used to be Dylan, it doesn’t matter. He can’t tell Eric anyway.