Mysterious Skin - I Wish I Was (14/15)
Title: I Wish I Was (14/15)
Author: osaki_nana_707
Pairings/Characters: Brian, Neil
Rating: R
Warnings:language, mentions of abuse, drug abuse, sexual situations
Summary: Brian's not through with Neil. Neil's not through destroying himself.
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Chapter 14
(Brian Lackey)
I stepped inside the apartment quietly, shutting the door with my back. The first thing I noticed was how much of a mess it was. The second thing I noticed was a drop on the floor that looked alarmingly like blood…
I checked my nose, even though I hadn't been over there, out of nervous habit. It was clean of blood anyway. It had been for a while actually.
I walked in slowly, hand brushing against the wall, taking in everything. The feeling was similar to Christmas Eve in Coach Heider's house; or rather what was once his house. It had that same feeling of being watched and of the thrumming in the air that something was about to happen. The place was dimly lit, and the stacks of things, and the dirt, and the shadows all reminded me of that house, even though they weren't similar at all.
This was where Neil lived, not Heider.
So, where was he?
A nagging part of me didn't want to know and hoped that maybe he'd climbed out the fire escape and run off because he sensed me or something, but I pushed forward from the wall and stepped into the middle of the room because I sensed that he was in the apartment. I knew that he was there.
I combed my hands through my hair idly, sending droplets of water flying all over. I chewed on my bottom lip and looked back at the front door, nearly chickening out, but then I heard a moan from the room across from me.
That was him. I knew it was. It certainly wasn't anyone else.
I pressed my hands against the wood of the door, hesitating. Would he fly into a rage if he saw me? Would he tell me to get out and then not acknowledge I was there until Wendy and Eric got back? I really didn't know him that well, so I didn't know what he would do, and it made my heart leap up into my throat. Neil wasn't really one to speak up or anything. The one time I'd really talked to him, he was full of swallowed words and steely gazes. I didn't know if I was more nervous with the idea of him shouting, or the idea of him just staring at me like he didn't even know who I was.
I swallowed the metaphorical heart back down and decided I'd draw it out as long as I could and have him come to me. I knocked.
No response.
I knocked again. Maybe he wasn't in there, but of course he was; I'd heard him.
"I don't know why you're fucking knocking…" I heard him grumble. "Never stopped you from barging in here before…"
The door swung open, allowing us to meet again face to face.
He just stared, lips parted like he'd wanted his jaw to drop but forgot how to do it. I was horrified, but not because he was staring.
Neil looked terrible, and that was putting it lightly. His dark circles were so heavy that he looked like he'd been punched in both eyes. He was gray with light stubble on his chin, and his lips were chapped and cracked in several places. He was bone thin with long, scraggly, greasy hair hanging in his eyes and across protruding cheek bones, and there was an unpleasantly grisly spot on his head where he looked like he'd been injured somehow. He smelled horrible, and his clothes had stains on them (some of which looked distinctly like blood). His arm had been bandaged up along with his hand on the opposite arm, and the bandages were ragged like he'd been picking and scratching at them. The dirt under his nails was so thick that it was nearly black… and the worst part was that none of that compared to the dead, desolate look in his eyes.
I swallowed and took in a shuddered breath. He looked so drastically different from the Neil I'd seen just three or so months ago that I didn't know what to do. He didn't even look alive.
"What are you doing here?" he asked, almost like he didn't believe I was even really standing there. I swore he expected me to dissipate on the spot like some sort of illusion that had shown up there solely to fuck with him.
"I… that is… um…" I stammered, unable to bring my voice up higher than a whisper for this corpse version of Neil McCormick that had somehow reanimated and stood (or rather slumped) before me. There was something absolutely terrifying about this once human being, like he'd come straight from the scariest horror movie or haunted house I'd ever frequented…
And then I realized it wasn't terrifying at all.
Just terribly, terribly sad.
"What happened to you?" I asked, trying to ignore the thundering of my heart against my chest. Anything I had intended to say on the way up the stairs was out the window and completely forgotten about.
"I asked you first," he said snidely. He reached out then and touched my face, pressing his dirty fingers into my skin as if to check if I was real. They sank into my cheek and grazed against my cheekbone and then brushed across my lips. A realization seemed to dawn on him that I actually was there.
"I… I came here to see you. What happened to you?"
He smirked, and his smirk was falser than I remembered, and his teeth were yellower than I remembered and said, "Cocaine is a hell of a drug."
"Yeah… I can see that…" I said, completely unable to think of anything else to respond to that with.
"Well…" he said, and that false smirk had already faded away like it had never been there, "you saw me. Now you can leave."
"I'm not going to leave. Wendy and Eric left me here, and I promised her I wouldn't leave you here alone." I hoped that my voice didn't falter.
He glanced at me sideways while he was fishing a cigarette out of his pocket. It looked like it was his last one. "You don't have any loyalties to Wendy," he mumbled, peeking inside the box. "Why do I always run out of cigarettes when you're around?" He lit it but ended up in a coughing fit over it, dropping it to the floor, and he looked so young, so young, so young.
And then I remembered that he was my age, and that left me even more confused.
"I'm not leaving," I repeated, straightening my shoulders, and stamped out his cigarette, "so you might as well talk to me."
"I don't have anything to say to you," he said.
"Then, you can listen."
He blinked and stepped forward, and I stepped back, afraid he was going to do something drastic (Wendy had said he'd been prone to violence lately), but instead he just wandered into the living room like he'd never been there before and sat down on the couch. He sniffed.
I sat down next to him, folding my hands over my knees and looked around again. "What happened?" I asked.
"I already told you," he said quietly.
"No… that's not what I meant…" I paused, pursing my lips. I was quiet for what felt like a really long time… and then I asked, "Were you really mugged on the way to the airport?"
He looked at me with his eyebrows raised, stunned… and then, he started laughing hysterically. "Are you serious? Are you fucking serious?" he asked through gasps of air, and there was absolutely no mirth in his laugh whatsoever. It was the most stilted, uncomfortable sound I'd ever heard, and I had to fight back the urge to squirm further away from him and go running from the apartment in terror.
I waited for his laughter to start dying down, but when it wasn't, I said loudly so that he could hear me, "Yes. I am serious. Were you?"
He shut his mouth, silencing himself, and looked into my eyes. His eyes watered, and he said, quietly…
"No."
He didn't seem to have any laughter left in him after that. He just sat there, gazing at me with a foreign eye.
"What happened?" I asked again.
"Do you remember that summer when you were eight, after the baseball game got rained out?" he asked, smiling, and I could have punched him.
Actually, I did.
I punched him so hard that he nearly toppled off of the couch. He clutched to his jaw with his bandaged hand, and I was sure it would bruise, even though I wasn't that strong. "How dare you ask me such a dumb fucking question?" I seethed, unable to help myself.
"Well, you didn't remember it before," he smugly responded. I refrained from punching him again.
"Well, yeah, of course I remember that night. I can't forget that night no matter how hard I try."
He pulled his face back up, and his eyes were still watering (or were those tears? No, it couldn't be, not Neil McCormick). "Seemed like a valid question. Didn't know if maybe you…" he shrugged it off, deciding explaining himself was a waste of time because it was.
"I asked you, what happened that night before you came back to Hutchinson?" I asked as sternly as I could muster.
"What happened?" he paused, and his little grin faltered, and maybe those were tears in his eyes. "I was abducted by aliens."
I almost hauled off and slapped him, but the sentence sunk into my skin, and I realized that what he was saying wasn't to mock me at all. Those were tears in his eyes.
"Somebody raped you," I said.
The sentence tasted like vomit.
His nose started to bleed almost as soon as the words escaped my mouth, and I watched that red trail of blood like I was looking into a mirror at a face I no longer recognized. He wasn't the one who was supposed to have the nosebleeds. It was supposed to be me.
"What happened?" I asked again, hating myself, but I had to know.
"It was supposed to be like any other job. He drove me back to his place, and he made me snort coke, and then… he, he started making me fuck him with my mouth, and he threw me down on the bed, and I realized that things weren't going right, so I locked myself in his bathroom… and then he, he broke the door open, and he smacked me across the face, and I fell into the tub, and he hoisted my legs up and…" His breath was coming in rapid spurts, like it never reached his lungs, and that thick line of blood was still rolling smoothly down his lip and chin, parallel with the tears. "…and he…"
I pulled my shirt tail out of my pants and wiped his nose with it, silencing him. "I know," I said gently.
He continued anyway. "My head kept banging up against the tub, and he just kept yelling slut, slut, take it all, slut, god, you love it, don't you, slut?... and all I could do was lay there with my ass in the air and fucking take it. He kept ramming into me and beating me over the head with a shampoo bottle, and I just kept watching my blood swirl down the drain… and then I woke up, laying on the street without a coat and without any money and completely alone…"
His head found its way to my shoulder, and I placed a hand into his hair, stroking it gently. He sniffed and ran his wrist across his upper lip, sending a fresh smear of blood across his face.
"And all this time… I've been thinking that I fucking deserved what he did. I deserve it because that's all that I am is a slut… All I am is a hole for someone to fuck. It's all I ever have been."
And it hit me like lightning, making the hairs on my arms stand on end, and I was sure if I looked in a mirror my pupils would have been blown to smithereens. "Neil," I said, voice barely above a whisper, "I've seeked you out because there's something I need to tell you about yourself that you don't know..."
"What…?" he asked, fist clenching to my sleeve.
Oh, God…
I could hardly breathe as I stared upwards at the line between the wall and the ceiling. His head slowly made its way to my lap.
"Neil… you… when you were eight years old, your little league coach molested you... He raped you."
It sounded stupid on one hand, but I knew…
I knew.
Neil made a strangled noise, but I pressed on. "He'd take your clothes off, and when there was another boy involved… it was up to you to make it seem fun, like a really cool game you were playing… He'd make you kiss other boys, and sometimes he would kiss you, and then he would go down on you…" He made another whimpering noise, legs squirming. "He'd make you play the five dollar game… where he'd make you do crazy sex things, and if you could do them, he'd give you five dollars… He made you fist him, all the way up to your elbow, and he made you believe he was going to suck you in and devour you completely… and then he'd drive you home and leave you in your driveway… until next time… The end."
He squeaked, which was the only word I could think of to describe the sound, and I looked down at him to see that his eyes were squeezed shut, and his mouth was wide open in a look of revulsion, and there was fresh blood spilling all over his face and on my pants… and then…
He wailed. Between little squeaks and shouts, he started to sob uncontrollably, face continually contorting into something more and more miserable and turn red from lack of air. I shushed him and stroked at his hair, but he just started shivering violently beneath my hands… I kept shushing him, but his noises just got louder and more unbearable and sad, and I knew then all of the lies he'd ever told to me and every reason why he was Neil McCormick. He was a victim, just like me… except he'd been so unlucky that it had happened to him again. And again. And again and again and again. And then again… and he was so young, so young, so young. Someone had taken this young, young boy and tainted him until he found himself truthfully believing that he was worthless as anything but an orifice with which to screw into and convinced himself that every single thing that the two men… no, the dozens of men… had done to him… was well deserved. He truly believed he deserved it.
He snorted coke to escape the clutches of those men and of the disgust he had with himself… but it led him to revealing on the outside how he felt on the inside… how he felt repulsive, nauseating… completely unlovable.
He laid there, curled in my lap, half-screaming, and crumbled. He hadn't told anyone because no one would understand. He didn't think he deserved the sympathy… and I found myself trying not to cry as I turned my gaze back to the ceiling, hopelessly shushing him over and over just because I needed to do something…
In the sounds of the police sirens in the distance, I somehow picked out the notes of "Silent Night." The way his wail increased in volume, I felt that he could hear it too, that he could feel how fucking backwards this was and how it should have been me as the sniveling, bloody mess in his lap while he stared at the ceiling and tried not to care…
And as we sat there, I wanted to tell Neil that it was over now, and that everything would be okay…but it was a lie.
…and besides, I couldn't speak anyway.
Author: osaki_nana_707
Pairings/Characters: Brian, Neil
Rating: R
Warnings:language, mentions of abuse, drug abuse, sexual situations
Summary: Brian's not through with Neil. Neil's not through destroying himself.
Read
Chapter 14
(Brian Lackey)
I stepped inside the apartment quietly, shutting the door with my back. The first thing I noticed was how much of a mess it was. The second thing I noticed was a drop on the floor that looked alarmingly like blood…
I checked my nose, even though I hadn't been over there, out of nervous habit. It was clean of blood anyway. It had been for a while actually.
I walked in slowly, hand brushing against the wall, taking in everything. The feeling was similar to Christmas Eve in Coach Heider's house; or rather what was once his house. It had that same feeling of being watched and of the thrumming in the air that something was about to happen. The place was dimly lit, and the stacks of things, and the dirt, and the shadows all reminded me of that house, even though they weren't similar at all.
This was where Neil lived, not Heider.
So, where was he?
A nagging part of me didn't want to know and hoped that maybe he'd climbed out the fire escape and run off because he sensed me or something, but I pushed forward from the wall and stepped into the middle of the room because I sensed that he was in the apartment. I knew that he was there.
I combed my hands through my hair idly, sending droplets of water flying all over. I chewed on my bottom lip and looked back at the front door, nearly chickening out, but then I heard a moan from the room across from me.
That was him. I knew it was. It certainly wasn't anyone else.
I pressed my hands against the wood of the door, hesitating. Would he fly into a rage if he saw me? Would he tell me to get out and then not acknowledge I was there until Wendy and Eric got back? I really didn't know him that well, so I didn't know what he would do, and it made my heart leap up into my throat. Neil wasn't really one to speak up or anything. The one time I'd really talked to him, he was full of swallowed words and steely gazes. I didn't know if I was more nervous with the idea of him shouting, or the idea of him just staring at me like he didn't even know who I was.
I swallowed the metaphorical heart back down and decided I'd draw it out as long as I could and have him come to me. I knocked.
No response.
I knocked again. Maybe he wasn't in there, but of course he was; I'd heard him.
"I don't know why you're fucking knocking…" I heard him grumble. "Never stopped you from barging in here before…"
The door swung open, allowing us to meet again face to face.
He just stared, lips parted like he'd wanted his jaw to drop but forgot how to do it. I was horrified, but not because he was staring.
Neil looked terrible, and that was putting it lightly. His dark circles were so heavy that he looked like he'd been punched in both eyes. He was gray with light stubble on his chin, and his lips were chapped and cracked in several places. He was bone thin with long, scraggly, greasy hair hanging in his eyes and across protruding cheek bones, and there was an unpleasantly grisly spot on his head where he looked like he'd been injured somehow. He smelled horrible, and his clothes had stains on them (some of which looked distinctly like blood). His arm had been bandaged up along with his hand on the opposite arm, and the bandages were ragged like he'd been picking and scratching at them. The dirt under his nails was so thick that it was nearly black… and the worst part was that none of that compared to the dead, desolate look in his eyes.
I swallowed and took in a shuddered breath. He looked so drastically different from the Neil I'd seen just three or so months ago that I didn't know what to do. He didn't even look alive.
"What are you doing here?" he asked, almost like he didn't believe I was even really standing there. I swore he expected me to dissipate on the spot like some sort of illusion that had shown up there solely to fuck with him.
"I… that is… um…" I stammered, unable to bring my voice up higher than a whisper for this corpse version of Neil McCormick that had somehow reanimated and stood (or rather slumped) before me. There was something absolutely terrifying about this once human being, like he'd come straight from the scariest horror movie or haunted house I'd ever frequented…
And then I realized it wasn't terrifying at all.
Just terribly, terribly sad.
"What happened to you?" I asked, trying to ignore the thundering of my heart against my chest. Anything I had intended to say on the way up the stairs was out the window and completely forgotten about.
"I asked you first," he said snidely. He reached out then and touched my face, pressing his dirty fingers into my skin as if to check if I was real. They sank into my cheek and grazed against my cheekbone and then brushed across my lips. A realization seemed to dawn on him that I actually was there.
"I… I came here to see you. What happened to you?"
He smirked, and his smirk was falser than I remembered, and his teeth were yellower than I remembered and said, "Cocaine is a hell of a drug."
"Yeah… I can see that…" I said, completely unable to think of anything else to respond to that with.
"Well…" he said, and that false smirk had already faded away like it had never been there, "you saw me. Now you can leave."
"I'm not going to leave. Wendy and Eric left me here, and I promised her I wouldn't leave you here alone." I hoped that my voice didn't falter.
He glanced at me sideways while he was fishing a cigarette out of his pocket. It looked like it was his last one. "You don't have any loyalties to Wendy," he mumbled, peeking inside the box. "Why do I always run out of cigarettes when you're around?" He lit it but ended up in a coughing fit over it, dropping it to the floor, and he looked so young, so young, so young.
And then I remembered that he was my age, and that left me even more confused.
"I'm not leaving," I repeated, straightening my shoulders, and stamped out his cigarette, "so you might as well talk to me."
"I don't have anything to say to you," he said.
"Then, you can listen."
He blinked and stepped forward, and I stepped back, afraid he was going to do something drastic (Wendy had said he'd been prone to violence lately), but instead he just wandered into the living room like he'd never been there before and sat down on the couch. He sniffed.
I sat down next to him, folding my hands over my knees and looked around again. "What happened?" I asked.
"I already told you," he said quietly.
"No… that's not what I meant…" I paused, pursing my lips. I was quiet for what felt like a really long time… and then I asked, "Were you really mugged on the way to the airport?"
He looked at me with his eyebrows raised, stunned… and then, he started laughing hysterically. "Are you serious? Are you fucking serious?" he asked through gasps of air, and there was absolutely no mirth in his laugh whatsoever. It was the most stilted, uncomfortable sound I'd ever heard, and I had to fight back the urge to squirm further away from him and go running from the apartment in terror.
I waited for his laughter to start dying down, but when it wasn't, I said loudly so that he could hear me, "Yes. I am serious. Were you?"
He shut his mouth, silencing himself, and looked into my eyes. His eyes watered, and he said, quietly…
"No."
He didn't seem to have any laughter left in him after that. He just sat there, gazing at me with a foreign eye.
"What happened?" I asked again.
"Do you remember that summer when you were eight, after the baseball game got rained out?" he asked, smiling, and I could have punched him.
Actually, I did.
I punched him so hard that he nearly toppled off of the couch. He clutched to his jaw with his bandaged hand, and I was sure it would bruise, even though I wasn't that strong. "How dare you ask me such a dumb fucking question?" I seethed, unable to help myself.
"Well, you didn't remember it before," he smugly responded. I refrained from punching him again.
"Well, yeah, of course I remember that night. I can't forget that night no matter how hard I try."
He pulled his face back up, and his eyes were still watering (or were those tears? No, it couldn't be, not Neil McCormick). "Seemed like a valid question. Didn't know if maybe you…" he shrugged it off, deciding explaining himself was a waste of time because it was.
"I asked you, what happened that night before you came back to Hutchinson?" I asked as sternly as I could muster.
"What happened?" he paused, and his little grin faltered, and maybe those were tears in his eyes. "I was abducted by aliens."
I almost hauled off and slapped him, but the sentence sunk into my skin, and I realized that what he was saying wasn't to mock me at all. Those were tears in his eyes.
"Somebody raped you," I said.
The sentence tasted like vomit.
His nose started to bleed almost as soon as the words escaped my mouth, and I watched that red trail of blood like I was looking into a mirror at a face I no longer recognized. He wasn't the one who was supposed to have the nosebleeds. It was supposed to be me.
"What happened?" I asked again, hating myself, but I had to know.
"It was supposed to be like any other job. He drove me back to his place, and he made me snort coke, and then… he, he started making me fuck him with my mouth, and he threw me down on the bed, and I realized that things weren't going right, so I locked myself in his bathroom… and then he, he broke the door open, and he smacked me across the face, and I fell into the tub, and he hoisted my legs up and…" His breath was coming in rapid spurts, like it never reached his lungs, and that thick line of blood was still rolling smoothly down his lip and chin, parallel with the tears. "…and he…"
I pulled my shirt tail out of my pants and wiped his nose with it, silencing him. "I know," I said gently.
He continued anyway. "My head kept banging up against the tub, and he just kept yelling slut, slut, take it all, slut, god, you love it, don't you, slut?... and all I could do was lay there with my ass in the air and fucking take it. He kept ramming into me and beating me over the head with a shampoo bottle, and I just kept watching my blood swirl down the drain… and then I woke up, laying on the street without a coat and without any money and completely alone…"
His head found its way to my shoulder, and I placed a hand into his hair, stroking it gently. He sniffed and ran his wrist across his upper lip, sending a fresh smear of blood across his face.
"And all this time… I've been thinking that I fucking deserved what he did. I deserve it because that's all that I am is a slut… All I am is a hole for someone to fuck. It's all I ever have been."
And it hit me like lightning, making the hairs on my arms stand on end, and I was sure if I looked in a mirror my pupils would have been blown to smithereens. "Neil," I said, voice barely above a whisper, "I've seeked you out because there's something I need to tell you about yourself that you don't know..."
"What…?" he asked, fist clenching to my sleeve.
Oh, God…
I could hardly breathe as I stared upwards at the line between the wall and the ceiling. His head slowly made its way to my lap.
"Neil… you… when you were eight years old, your little league coach molested you... He raped you."
It sounded stupid on one hand, but I knew…
I knew.
Neil made a strangled noise, but I pressed on. "He'd take your clothes off, and when there was another boy involved… it was up to you to make it seem fun, like a really cool game you were playing… He'd make you kiss other boys, and sometimes he would kiss you, and then he would go down on you…" He made another whimpering noise, legs squirming. "He'd make you play the five dollar game… where he'd make you do crazy sex things, and if you could do them, he'd give you five dollars… He made you fist him, all the way up to your elbow, and he made you believe he was going to suck you in and devour you completely… and then he'd drive you home and leave you in your driveway… until next time… The end."
He squeaked, which was the only word I could think of to describe the sound, and I looked down at him to see that his eyes were squeezed shut, and his mouth was wide open in a look of revulsion, and there was fresh blood spilling all over his face and on my pants… and then…
He wailed. Between little squeaks and shouts, he started to sob uncontrollably, face continually contorting into something more and more miserable and turn red from lack of air. I shushed him and stroked at his hair, but he just started shivering violently beneath my hands… I kept shushing him, but his noises just got louder and more unbearable and sad, and I knew then all of the lies he'd ever told to me and every reason why he was Neil McCormick. He was a victim, just like me… except he'd been so unlucky that it had happened to him again. And again. And again and again and again. And then again… and he was so young, so young, so young. Someone had taken this young, young boy and tainted him until he found himself truthfully believing that he was worthless as anything but an orifice with which to screw into and convinced himself that every single thing that the two men… no, the dozens of men… had done to him… was well deserved. He truly believed he deserved it.
He snorted coke to escape the clutches of those men and of the disgust he had with himself… but it led him to revealing on the outside how he felt on the inside… how he felt repulsive, nauseating… completely unlovable.
He laid there, curled in my lap, half-screaming, and crumbled. He hadn't told anyone because no one would understand. He didn't think he deserved the sympathy… and I found myself trying not to cry as I turned my gaze back to the ceiling, hopelessly shushing him over and over just because I needed to do something…
In the sounds of the police sirens in the distance, I somehow picked out the notes of "Silent Night." The way his wail increased in volume, I felt that he could hear it too, that he could feel how fucking backwards this was and how it should have been me as the sniveling, bloody mess in his lap while he stared at the ceiling and tried not to care…
And as we sat there, I wanted to tell Neil that it was over now, and that everything would be okay…but it was a lie.
…and besides, I couldn't speak anyway.