Chapter Text
What most people didn’t seem to understand was that actually, the trick to getting everybody to leave you alone about any given subject was just to yell about it constantly. The key was to be sufficiently crude and uncomfortable about whatever it was, conditioning total avoidance and discomfort in the people around you.
People often think you’re entirely oblivious to the way you’re perceived, that ignorance was the only logical explanation for your obnoxious absurdity, but it’s entirely the opposite.
You’re like the boy who cried wolf, but the order of events and intentions have been flipped. You never flagged any danger until it had its teeth lodged in your throat. In the aftermath you can’t stop grotesquely invoking it, not because you’re seeking any kind of real protection but to dispel the thought from anyone’s mind that you had actually been maimed.
Speaking of sex is only palatable when you’re in total control of it. You need to make it into a weapon of humiliation and degradation, always a punishment and a power play. It is never about mutual gratification, intimacy, or least of all love. This is the only way to make sense of what happened to you: that’s what sex is meant for, after all. Breaking little boys against their will. Nothing abnormal about it.
This is why you find the few times he tries to joke about the subject so untenable. He’s always implying it’s something pleasurable simply because it feels good. This rebellion against your world order makes you feel off-kilter, annoyed at the divergence. He’s not supposed to want things like that. He’s supposed to want things to be exactly how they are.
It’s also one of the reasons why it is so important that you never actually touch him, even though you’re often struck by how easy it would be to do so when you’re scuffling on the ground or sitting side by side on the rooftop. Sometimes the line gets so murky that you’re a little bit afraid that he will be the one to push you two over the edge, but those moments are fleeting at best.
The way you toy with him and stretch him out to a berated breaking point has a lot of those same qualities that you associate with sex, except this time you’re not the one getting fucked. It feels safe and stabilizing to be the one with your hands on the reins now, but even with your famously dysfunctional moral compass, you think that if you ever took this subliminal domination to its physical conclusion everything would break apart.
You can imagine it with nightmarish clarity: penetrating him and then immediately collapsing onto him sobbing, apologizing excessively for this violation, for taking advantage of a child who didn’t know any better.
What’s actually more enticing to you, but even less likely, is some kind of playacting of the opposite dynamic. Not in the literal sense– the thought of ever being touched or used like that again makes you gag.
When he is unkind and callous, lashing out at you for your impulsive immaturity, there is an instinctual stirring feeling. You want to pause the back-and-forth for a moment. Ask him to say it again. Slower. With even more malice.
It’s puzzling because in general, what happened to you had made you almost rabidly belligerent in the face of criticism. You kicked every bully in the shins and were always the last to back down in a sibling dispute.
It was protective: you had been made vulnerable one way so you would never be made vulnerable again.
This felt different, in this different house, now years removed from the source of that explosive hyper vigilance. It was like the offer of a vacation from the constant overwhelm of needing to micromanage every aspect of your environment to feel safe. The only place you could imagine being willingly subjugated was under his heel.
But the risk of saying it aloud was far greater than any potential reward. You can play it out with him laughing at you with absurd disgust. He might even ask questions about what really happened to you that night, breaking the seal of that anxious wondering about how much he knew or assumed, and how much he would even care. Worst of all, he could barely react, packing an overnight bag and wordlessly leaving you alone here to again be crushed alive by some form of sexual sin.
You don’t ever say anything. His jokes and comments on the topic become even rarer with time, your own outbursts about molestation starting to subside as well.
The only way to really be in control of this was to hold it as far from the both of you as you could physically manage, and to then keep stretching a little farther.