Chapter Text
See you @ home my man
You delete the text with what you know it’s uncalled for viciousness. The fucker leaves burn marks in your pocket. Halfway through your second bottle of Goose, you ride on two neurons and still manage to hack your way into the phones insides and restore the deleted sentence. It lights up the screen in cold white and blue and you refuse to let it close. It’s….NO, you refuse to call it by its name.
*
Butch has the power, the inconceivable bliss to remain the same. Stubborn like a mule, hard as the engine block of your Escalade, sharp and perceptive and yet…Butch is Butch. You refuse to call him your cop. You reject the pronoun, you hide the possessiveness. You do your part within the Brotherhood. Crack codes, reinvent dead old languages, wire houses, mansions and insanely lavish cribs up in the smog filled skies of the city. You stay far away from your own penthouse. Like it’s infested. Like it’s an aquarium filled with lesser blood. You know, of course, that it’s not.
You know it to be empty. Well, as empty as it can be with your semen there on the floor, on your table, on the bed. Hers too. Spots of salted dry tears. From all of you. You never cleaned up. But you can’t go back. It would make you acknowledge the unconceivable.
That after 50 years, you find the emptiness all too familiar. Again.
*
Sharing the Pit with 3 is becoming unbearable. You wake up to the sounds of sex; they permeate your mind and veins. After a while, you’re unable to say if it comes from your own room, your conjugal bed…or theirs. You see it just as clearly. You linger on marks on Jane’s body that come from you. You see marks on yours that she never questions. You start to hate her for it.
Butch meets you in the middle of the day by the fridge with the same serene, stupid look, satisfied grin and bonded fragrance.
He gets some ice. You suck on a bottle. He gives you the hairy eye. You give him the middle finger. So much better than words, right? Other thoughts in the house make their way to you. You try and try to home in on them instead of him. But he laughs and heads back to Marissa, a spring in his step.
You crawl to the bathroom and try not to vomit.
*
You start to dream about it. About the beginning. Simple, small things, like you giving him your Red Sox cap. You don’t feel much in those dreams. Just the tips of his fingers, the vein in his wrist. Your voice, spread as a cacophony of vowels thick with meaning he never gets, or never shows you he gets. He’s not even a few vampire months old. You tell him to be careful tonight cop, and he sends you to fuck off V, I’m not a child.
And really, you don’t feel much in these dreams, but you think. You can’t stop your fucking mind as it thinks in this game cop, you are a child, a newborn, I delivered you into this world myself.
And when you wake up and Jane is there, peacefully sleeping, you thank yourself and not the gods that you woke up before you could think it. Before it made your tongue curl and twist to form the words, and pervert you yet again.
The dream didn’t last as long, but then again, your mind still works, it never shuts down and you rush to the bathroom and bite on your tongue hard and shout around your hard gloved fist. You shut up. You climb back in bed. You fuck her. Hard.
*
Butch sometimes stands there on the couch. You’re so attuned to him you follow. He waits for you every time. Nightmare? is what you say, like an idiot. But it’s your part and you play it, just to lull him to calm again. To sleep, to her. Sometimes you thought about doing something other than asking that idiotic question to make him come through. At first it involved foosball, then Tivoed games, or rap. You even spent a week in the Safe House with Jane and away from him and the Pit. You thought it was not his nightmare, but your vision coming to him in his sleep, to torment him.
He was on your door step the third night. You come back to the Pit after that. You never leave again. You come back to the couch when it happens. You ask Nightmare?
You stop wanting to change this routine when punches come into mind, and bites and your blood in him. Over the years, you stop thinking altogether. You just sit there.
Nightmare?
Same one V. The same one.
And you come to hate repetitions. Vicious circles, like sleep, wake up, sleep, wake up. Like fight, clean, fight, clean. And most of all, the mother of all cocksucking repetitions: sane V, insane V, sane V, fucked up V.
Butch has the same nightmare. You know it; it’s projected on your brain map, since the beginning. Butch is a baby in the arms of his MIA vampire father. Butch is full of blood. His father’s lips are covered in angry red marks. Like from a kill, like from a sin. And then, in an instant, the father is you. Looking down at Butch. Cradling him, smothering him. And you shine. And Butch is terrified. He starts to scream only at the next part of the nightmare. You scream already. This nightmare will be the death of you. Oh wait, it already is. Because your sanity keeps you alive and let’s be honest, you’re losing your shit again.
Butch rises from the couch after a few minutes. Like he can’t allow it to last longer. Like clockwork, like your blades. Hits his thighs, runs a hand over his head, says no way in hell.
You envy his calm. Your knees still shake. Your hand for sure. After all that and he’s the one who reaches. He grips your neck, shakes you good. Says jack shit to you but smiles a face splitting smile.
In his nightmare you take the place of his father. You ruin him. And then you drain his unborn child. Butch never says anything. He trusts you. It’s more than you deserve.
*
“Come on man, I need it.”
“Keep your pie hole open and I might show you what you really need, Hollywood.”
“Nope, told you already I’m not into balls and chains. But seriously, can I borrow it?”
“Even if you want to use my shit to compose the biggest fucking masterpiece of contemporary literature, and I would still say no.”
“V…I know you don’t use it anymore. It sits there under your desk and collects dust. How long has it been, 40, 50 years?”
“NO. End. Of.”
“Man, I was not gonna use it to break into the Pentagon files. Or download shit. Just to watch a movie with my Mary. My kid has this new game on and he confiscated our laptop-…”
“Use Phury’s old one. I updated his PC a year ago. And he also keeps his…garbage.”
Rhage grunts curses at your obsession with your Toys, old and new and he mumbles that you’re a possessive SOB. If he only knew. But you know. You know you are and more than that, you’re ruined in the head and stupid and sick. Because you know the reason why your password protected laptop can’t be opened by anyone. Not even you. It sits there, just sits, a smooth black reminder. You hide your hands after you unconsciously caress it, even now.
You try to forget the password. You try to recreate the events, the reasons for which you chose that 4 letter declaration of doom. You fail at both.
You take the laptop out. It burns in your hand. You wish your hand would burn it. The keys remember your touch and they feel heavy in their effort to compute.
He walks in. Your heart goes into overdrive, like an old motherboard suffocated by an even older, dusted fan.
“V buddy, even the fact that you remember the passwords for your entire tech gizmo hoarders’ wet dream, and I know it’s different on each one, you’re anal like that, and it gives me headaches.”
Nobody else can ever know. It’s with a wicked sense of masochism that you say it, the same moment you start to insert the password. Slow, aching, like a sex session unknown to you before watching him with his mate.
“Cop, the moment I’ll forget it’ll be free, roomy and quiet inside my head. But also I’ll probably be dead and buried.”
And you look up at him, see how he smiles and the smile fades as he tries to decide if you made a joke. You smile too. You expect the lashes of pain, the strings of guilt, the paradox of pleasure, as you type, one by one, the letters. Your brand, your doom, never taking your eyes away from his.
M-I-N-E
And your past opens along with the old Windows logo. Butch smiles again and calls you big brain techzilla and you want to sink your teeth into his flesh and your cock into his insides and make him type that fucking password again and again and again.