Chapter Text
“Boys?”
The screen door slams against its frame, tinny metal screeching as dry hinges bounce. Heavy footfalls on the wooden deck, the sound of their father’s grunted cursing as he goes down the steps two at a time.
“Get your asses out here right now. Or you’re really gonna wish you did, I can promise you that.”
Will swallows hard, turning to whisper against his twin's cheek. Adam is trembling, and Will can feel the wetness of his tears.
“It’ll be okay,” he whispers. “I promise.”
Adam’s lips quiver and he sucks in a harsh breath, but no sound comes out. Will takes him in a hug, hand running light but firm on his shoulder.
“I’m gonna count to ten,” their father threatens. His voice is louder now. Closer.
There’s a nook behind the shed. It’s their hiding spot, and Beau can’t know of its existence. Adam is shaking like a leaf. He couldn’t stand right now, much less to confront their dad. It has to fall on Will.
It usually does, but that’s okay. Will understands, and for Adam, it only feels natural to sacrifice himself a thousand times over.
“We can’t let him find us,” Will says. His voice is steadier than it should be. There’s too much experience in the set of his shoulders as he stands and prepares to confront the man that lives in their house and calls himself father.
“Wait,” Adam whispers.
He reaches up, and Will aches to take that hand and pull them off into the forest, or to the cornfield that sits to the west of their trailer, isolated and surrounded on all sides by nature.
Not a soul in sight to witness. Freedom. If only.
“Stay here until I come get you,” Will says.
He crawls out from behind the stack of boxes, from out of the shadows and into the searing late summer sun.
“Dad!”
Seconds pass in silence, but then his father rounds back around the corner of the trailer, grass crunching beneath his feet.
It’s freshly cut, and sweet to Will’s nose even as his heart picks up, fluttering like a bird against the delicate cage of his ribs. His pupils constrict in the bright, golden light until his father approaches, huge and looming. Enough to block out the sun.
“What the fuck is this?” Beau asks.
“What is what?”
“Don’t get smart with me. This.”
He slaps a rolled up nudie mag into Will’s hand. There’s a woman with blonde hair and large, fake breasts on the cover. She’s posed behind a guitar amp to hide the nipples. Will has stared at her long enough that he thinks he might be able to draw her from memory.
“I’ve never seen that before in my life,” he declares.
There’s conviction behind it, false though it may be. He doesn’t have to rely on the truth, just on the way his brother needs him.
“You’re lying, boy. I can smell it on you.”
Don’t falter. Don’t flinch.
“I’m not. It’s probably yours. You must have picked that up at the gas station and then forgot about it.”
Beau snarls, eyes going dark. Will can read everything inside them, whether he wants to or not. Beau knows he buys that shit, but he doesn’t want to be reminded of it. He’s a good, Christian man. He’ll whip his boys raw for engaging with filth such as this. Grown men can do whatever they want, kids have to do what they’re told.
“Maybe it’s Mitch’s,” Will rushes out, taking one stab at dodging punishment. Mitch is Beau’s drinking buddy. It’d make sense. “He does stuff like that.”
Something seems to flicker behind Beau’s eyes, and he peers at his son with a gaze like a scalpel. Then he spits on the dirt, and drops the magazine on the ground. He starts digging through his jean pockets until he finds a matchbox, and tosses it at Will.
“Burn it,” Beau says.
Will strikes the match, the scrape of it loud in his ears. He glances up and sees Adam peering from around the shed, fingers hooked on the corner. Beau coughs and Will drops the lit match on the magazine. It lands right in the center and Will steps back, watching the flame almost appear to go out, but then it grows and soon the whole thing is burning, corners curling, smoke trailing into the air.
“That’s a good boy,” Beau says. “Now go find your brother, and get inside for dinner.”
Dinner that Adam will cook. Macaroni in a pot, like it always is on Saturday nights.
Then Will is a alone. He watches the fire burn until it smolders out, then gives it a few good stomps, sneaker heel digging into the ashes. He waves his hand and Adam comes out from hiding, posture tense as he makes his way over.
“Oh, no,” he says softly.
“Yeah. Sorry about that. It was a gonner as soon as he found it.”
“I know.” Adam sighs, and rubs his hands on his arms. It’s late summer but it’s like he’s freezing. Will moves closer to him, confident that their father isn’t going to turn the corner, and draws him into a hug.
They stand like that for a moment, thin arms draped around each other, before Adam steps back, shifting on his feet.
“Do you think he’s still going to be mad at you?”
Will shrugs. “Don’t know.”
The truth is that it could go either way. Sometimes Beau really does let go of things after a talk. Other times it’s like the offense simmers in his brain, and he comes back twice as angry as he was before. He doesn’t ever punch them, or hurt them like that. But he does whip them sometimes, bare-assed and bent over the bed, and something like the incident today could definitely end up that way.
Will has a flash memory of standing in his father’s bedroom, picking between the leather belts hanging in his closet. It’s a recent one.
Will’s jaw tightens, and he shakes his head.
“It’s time for dinner anyways. Your turn to cook,” he says.
Adam rolls his eyes. “I know that.”
Will’s mouth twitches in a smile and he gives Adam’s hand a squeeze, momentarily brightened by a warm pulse of affection for his brother.
An hour and a half later, Will clings onto that moment as he’s bent over his father’s bed again, with his pants around his knees, counting lashings out loud until he reaches fifteen.
———
“Will?” Adam is standing next to his bed in the room they share together.
His fingers are weaving together endlessly, his shoulders hunched forward to make himself smaller. They don’t need to exchange words for Will to know what Adam is feeling, and even as Will’s ass radiates pain and heat, he closes the door behind him and reaches out to give Adam some reassurance.
“Calm down,” Will insists. “You know this ain’t your fault.”
“That’s not true, though. It was my magazine and I-I.. I’m the one who left it lying there. It’s my fault he found it.” Adam’s voice grows weak and sad at the end. His hands fly up to his head, tugging at his dark hair, and Will draws him in closer.
“Stupid Adam, stupid, stupid Adam,” Adam whimpers, doing his best to keep from shouting.
Even in this state he knows how bad it would be to draw their father’s attention again, after the night this has been. They both know the walls of this trailer are like paper.
“You’re not. Don’t say shit like that. Stop it. Stop it, please.”
Despite how it hurts, Will pulls Adam down to their shared bed. Will hisses at the pressure on his behind, and manages to turn them as a unit so they’re lying on their sides together, face to face, with Will’s arm thrown over Adam’s shaking body.
“It’s fine. We’ll just be more careful next time.”
Adam sniffles. “That was my only magazine.”
“Another one will turn up. You found that one in the woods, right? There’s got to be more. Some kind of, I don’t know, porn fairy of the forest.”
Silence for a moment, then Adam lets out a quiet laugh. Will’s shoulders relax, and he melts more into his brother’s embrace. Like this, it’s as though the world can slow down. His brother’s arms are a place of safety and affection. A smoldering, radiating core of heat that puts the life back into Will that their father does his best to extract.
A sudden, seizing feeling squeezes at Will’s heart and before he realizes he’s doing it, he’s kissing at his brother’s jaw. Adam lets out a quiet squeak but his arms squeeze just as tight, his fingers leaving tingling traces on Will’s skin.
“You need a shower,” Adam says, making no move to get away.
“After.” Will’s reply is breathless. His need is rising rapidly, an emotional and deeply physical surge that sends his hands traveling down, palms cupping at Adam’s ass.
“Will. A-are you sure we can do this?”
“Of course we fucking can,” Will emphasizes the curse word as much as he can without worrying about the paper walls. “It just feels good. And I love you, Adam.”
That’s always enough to make Adam relax. Though he never says it back, he lets Will hold him and touch him however he wants. Will doesn’t need Adam to say it back, either. He knows his twin. He can see Adam’s love just as easily as he can see the neon sign outside the strip club on the highway about a mile from their home.
“You’re hard,” Adam whispers.
Without asking—without needing to ask—he rolls his hips, and Will groans. That pit of need grows deeper, driving them to rut and rock against each other’s bodies. Their breaths grow light, both chasing their pleasure and falling into one another, always falling into one another. The moment hangs like that until Will pulls his boxers down to his knees, then reaching between their bodies to shove Adam’s underwear down.
“Touch me,” Will pleads. “It’ll make me feel better.”
“I want to make you feel better,” Adam affirms.
But before anything else, he leans forward and gives Will a deep, clumsy kiss. Will groans quietly into it, circling his hand around the base of his cock and rutting forward, sliding his cock against his brother’s. Their twin needs keep them in sync, pleasure winding up their spines. Adam throws his head back and whimpers, biting his lip to keep as quiet as he can.
Then he reaches between them, bats Will’s hand away. He encircles their aching erections with his hand and strokes. Will’s mouth falls open, balls pulsing and drawing tight to his body from the force of his arousal. Soon there are sticky, wet noises coming from where Adam strokes them both so fervently, and they slide against each other in a desperate rhythm, pleasure burning all the way up and down their spines.
It hits Will that they don’t have to hide forever forever. They’ll grow up, and they’ll leave. They’ll hit the road and land somewhere and it’ll just be the two of them, and Adam can be as loud as he wants.
Will shudders, eyes going half lidded, messily pressing forward for a kiss from his brother’s lips, and then he’s coming. Thick, white come shoots in volleys against Adam’s own cock, and his stomach as well. It spurs him on, and seconds later he’s following right behind, shuddering and throbbing in Adam’s grip.
They lie there for a moment, catching their breath, and Adam is the first one to turn onto his back.
“Do we have any napkins?”
Will lifts his head and looks on their narrow dresser, and then on the floor, but he doesn’t see a box.
“No,” he says, and hops up. “I’ll go get some.”
And he takes off to the kitchen, assuming their father is asleep by now. He’s correct, so he returns with the napkins a moment later and hands one over as he starts to clean himself, wiping away the evidence of the pleasure they just shared. Adam turns to lie next to the wall like he always does, and Will settles in beside him.
Despite everything, he falls asleep feeling like it was a good day.
It was the best day that he would experience for a long time. And the problem is not that Beau started beating them any worse than he already did.
It’s that he stopped.
About a week after the porno mag incident, Beau goes out to some kind of meeting with a guy he met from work. One meeting turns into another and another, and over the weeks, fewer bottles are left in the living room each night. Then there are none. Alcohol doesn’t seep from their father’s pores anymore. Adam says as much, lying in bed with his hands drawn up to his chest, facing the wall.
Beau is still an asshole, still yells sometimes and gives long, half-baked lectures. But when he gets mad, he doesn’t break things and he doesn’t whip them with the belt. It’s almost scarier than when he was, well, scary. It sets Will on edge because this doesn’t just happen. It’s got to be a trick. Beau will snap one night and murder them, surely.
As convinced as Will is of that, Adam seems to feel the opposite. It’s the first crack in their bond, the suffering that has bound them together so tightly. Will can’t entirely put that into words but he feels it. He feels it like a dagger through the chest when he expresses his feelings about their father, and Adam gets upset.
“He’s being nicer now,” Adam insists. His hands are tightening on the hem of his shirt.
“For now. It’s not going to last,” Will replies, calmly, because it’s a fact.
“You’re not giving him a chance!” Adam shouts.
Will’s eyebrows fly up and he looks at his twin, reading in his body language and hating everything that it tells him.
Adam trusts their father, somehow, after everything. He genuinely thinks there’s a chance that the worst is over, that Beau will maybe even become a good father. Whatever that looks like. But what’s worse, is that Adam wants it to be true.
It’s written in the tension in his muscles, the way his shoulders are hunched and his face has turned a bit red.
Sensing there’s no point in arguing, Will gets up, dusts his knees off with force, and walks away.
The beginning of the end. So few words exchanged, and things are never the same between them.
They don’t speak about it that night, and they don’t cuddle either. From this point forward, that only happens on the worst of the worst days. Days where Adam gets bullied, or their father goes off on a tirade about how they’re both hell-bound if they don’t stop being so disobedient.
Months blend into years, and soon Adam and Will sleep on their own, their old mattress thrown in the shed for storage. It looks thin and crumpled on the concrete floor. Will stares at it for too long before heading back inside.
That first separate night, Will wondered if Adam was cold as he was. It was winter.
Their dad might not be a drunk anymore, but their blankets are still thin. It wasn’t so bad when they had each other.
Soon enough they’re in their late teens, and it’s time to pick a way forward. Once upon a time, Will assumed this was something they’d do together. They’d aim for the same school, live in the same area. Far away from here. And for a little while, it does seem like that’s going to happen. It’s a logistical thing, according to Adam. Better to be close, and there’s a school in the city with a great electrical engineering program. Adam lights up when he talks about it, and Will finds himself smiling again.
That hope nurtures an ache, too. One that twists in his chest and feels as dense as one of Adam’s beloved stars.
But then, Beau dies.
It’s awful. He keels over at work, slumped with his head on a motor and his arms in the innards of whatever car he was working on that day. Adam and Will are both legally adults at this point, and they have no living relatives. All the responsibility falls on to them, though Adam shuts down.
It’s a miracle Will doesn’t. Their father did not have his ‘arrangements in order.’ And he didn’t leave much to inherit, either. He owned the trailer but not the land, and it’s not like his belongings were worth anything. By the time Will and Adam are watching his body get lowered into the dirt, Will vibrates in his skin and knows he can’t spend another day in this place. Not this town, not this state.
He’ll go somewhere else. Anywhere. California, Mississippi, Montana, Pennsylvania, Alaska, just any-fucking-where to get the taste of this place out of his mouth.
He assumes Adam will go with him.
His assumption is incorrect. In the car after the funeral, he goes on a small tirade, escalating until he says they need to pick up and move to Memphis. He doesn’t have any attachment to that city, it’s the first one that lands on his tongue, and Adam’s eyes go huge.
“I don’t want to move that far! I’m not going with you! Stop assuming I want to!”
All the disappointment and loss that’s been building inside Will over the last few years has hardened him enough that his face doesn’t show the way his heart shatters. He shoves those feelings down for Adam’s benefit, something inside him cracking more and more with each second of forced calm.
Head swimming, Will lets Adam’s words soak over him for a moment, and he gently grabs Adam’s arm when it twitches like he’s about to start ripping his hair out at the root.
If Adam doesn’t want to move that far, then Adam won’t move that far. That’s just the reality of it, and Will is going to have to stick around to help make sure Adam gets off on the right foot. It’s half pragmatic honesty about how difficult it will be for Adam to get used to doing everything by himself, and half a grasp at these last few months they’ll spend together.
At least he’ll get that. Will loves his brother. Adam deserves to get what he wants. That was true when they were small, and it’s true now that they’re grown.
“I’m sorry, Adam. You don’t have to move,” Will says, voice even. Defeated, laced with so many kinds of loss.
“T-thank you,” Adam says. “I’m sorry too. I didn’t mean to yell.”
“We’re dealing with a lot.”
And that’s it.
Will does what he said he’d do. He helps Adam move into his dorm room, helps him make a chore plan and a list of all the closest, relevant stores. The university is surprisingly willing to give Adam accommodations after Will goes in to talk with the office staff after a unhelpful phone call had him feeling ready to blow all their heads off with their father’s rifle.
Days whirls by until the time comes for Adam to start classes, and for Will to go wherever he’s going and figure out a job there. Will drives Adam to the campus one final time, and when they part it’s with a light, awkward hug given while Will is still sitting in the driver’s seat.
“Call me if you need anything,” he says.
“I will.”
“I love you, Adam.”
Adam nods. “You too.”
They don’t see each other again until winter break. It’s two weeks spent in the shitty apartment Will has managed to secure for himself one city over. He’d thought about going further but as he traced his fingers on the map he felt an invisible collar tightening on his neck, or maybe it was a noose. Either way, he knew it would be bad to leave Adam alone.
Even though nothing has gone wrong, and Adam won’t stop gushing about how much he loves his classes and his new friends, something bad could still happen.
When Adam sleeps in Will’s apartment, he does not sleep in Will’s bed.
Two winters later, they’re not even staying together for breaks. Will’s own time in university is starting to draw to a close as well, and soon he might have to move for work.
And he does. Louisiana.
Adam doesn’t even stay over before that happens.
After that, year melt together. Calendar pages flipping rapid-fire, Will’s features changing and hardening, hair growing on his jaw and strands of gray weaving their subtle way into his hair. Suddenly he’s off to Quantico. Suddenly he’s failing his entrance to the FBI. Suddenly he’s thirty-five, and it’s over two years since he last talked to Adam for more than about fifteen minutes.
Lonely, isolated, trapped with crystalline memories and no real clear direction for the future, Will makes a decision.
He fishes out an old notebook from the back of a drawer in his desk, and starts making a plan.