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Andy had just cheated, blocking her arm as she tried to throw her mom's toothless skull into the ocean. Or was it dad's? She didn't really care which it was, especially once her anger and her fists settled as he pulled her into a big brother-like hug. Her forehead settled against his chest and his arms enveloped her as his chin rested gently on the top of her head. In that moment, she felt a moment of profound gratitude to her mom, perhaps for the first time in her life.
Without her neglect, she wouldn't have realized that Andy, her Andy, was the only soul she'd ever need. The rest were irrelevant, unnoticeable in the hypnotizing green glow of Andy's eyes.
It seemed like for the moment he forgot about the vision they'd just seen, she thought to herself. Then she giggled, wondering if he had been thinking about it the whole time, and thought about reaching for his pants to check. Another thing to hold over him. He was a sweet little marshmallow-spined boy. He only needed some guidance. Just needed a push here and there, when it really counted. Then he could be trusted to make the right decisions. Well, there was only ever one right decision for him to make.
"Where do we go next, Andy?" She asked softly. She felt worried. He’d said his nightmares and insomnia had abated, at least a little, but didn’t explain why. Ashley felt her grip on him slipping, even now. The vision offered some solace, but even before that, he’d basically just said that he could easily replace her with a bottle of sleeping pills. She remembered with frustration how quickly she changed her tune, trying to leave, trying to say how much she wanted to leave with him.
He thought about her question for a bit.
"Not sure. We got a lot of cash from mom's credit card, but that's probably no longer viable. Maybe the cultists would know about fake IDs? Or-- actually, I met someone in college before, y'know– who did that sort of thing. Maybe I can figure out how to contact her?"
" Her ?" She grumbled into his chest, pulling back to look up with scant betrayal on her face.
"No, no, I know, Ashley. I wasn’t interested then, not interested now. Besides, I was with Julia at the time, so-
"Yeah, yeah, whoever you're fucking becomes the center of your world, I know. No room for anybody else."
"Jealous that it wasn't you?" He asked with a smirk, though his eyebrows furrowed in anger, before remembering that vision and regretting that he had said anything at all.
She thought about going off on him for that as she thought about all the encouraging voicemails she had left Julia, but settled for staring at the floor with a dejected look on her face. Andrew, perhaps sensing the coming wave of intense envy and jealousy, returned to the matter of IDs to continue avoiding the consequences of all the unchecked garbage that flowed from his mouth.
"Hm. We're, uh, both over 20, and she might be weirded out if I ask for a fake ID now, especially one with a different name, but maybe we can start with you so we can get housing, you can start working, and I can do the same once I find a different option for an ID? We could pretend you're underage and I'm just doing you a solid so we can order liquor to the apartment or something to make it through quarantine."
He thought about it a little more and she clung tighter to his chest and he clung tighter to her, felt the wind rustle the hair on her fucked up head.
"Actually, if we pretend to have been quarantined in a different apartment, say we've been having food issues, she might understand we're just trying to cheat the system to survive. Or, give limited information about their little life insurance scam and blame them for the need for IDs, maybe a credit scam. Still, a potential loose end, we're supposed to be dead and all. I don't see it being an issue of her knowing about our apartment or mom and dad, but--"
"Ugh," he groaned. "The lack of options here really sucks. Who knew that being dead was such hard work? Killed with fucking paperwork, at that. Let's– let's drive to that motel by the forest, outside the city. The one we were at last was the only one in city limits that takes cash. We can sleep on it there. What's that place called again?"
Ashley gave a disinterested hum without answering his question because he’d figure it out, she released the center of her universe, and climbed without a word into the passenger seat of the hitman's car. Andrew sighed, following her to the car.
"Hey," he said, reaching across the driver’s seat from outside the car and pushing his finger into her cheek. "I have something for you."
She looked up, clearly interested but trying to be moody about it. He got out of the car, reached into the trunk, and grabbed something. When he returned, he presented her with a blanket he'd stolen from their parents' couch and covered her with it, making a little extra effort to tuck the edges behind her shoulders and under her thighs. She saw that his neck leaned awfully close to her.
"Don't worry," he preempted as a grossed-out look crossed her face, "I did some laundry while you were cleaning up the other... stuff... anyway, it's clean, is all. I used a loooot of detergent just in case. And the hottest dryer cycle."
"How thoughtful," she whispered, feeling her sadness alleviate, if only a little. "Thank you, Andy."
He leaned over his bundled creature and planted a kiss on the top of her head, messing her hair with a free hand before jabbing the keys into the ignition. He pulled off from the side of the bridge and the two drove off in search of another moth-eaten bed to rot in.
He turned on the radio, to keep an ear on the news. Andrew figured that their missing parents would end up on somebody's radar eventually. Especially if they didn't have their mortgage on autopay, or if the neighbors actually liked their mom enough as much as she said they did, or any of the other possible things they forgot about. Like, fuck-- his goddamn fingerprints, they didn't clean the fucking house enough! He didn't see their cars, but surely they had at least one. If they're gone but their cars are present, and so on and so forth with the endless ways this could continue to go tits up.
Ugh. That phrasing brought his little sister to mind and he really wished it fucking didn't. She always wore that revealing top, always had her bra straps visible. He found it extremely irritating. Images of her more poorly dressed broke down the door of his subconscious into the open, and he shook his head free of that wretched thought spiral.
"Andy?" She asked in a gloomy pout with her head leaning against the window, looking at him from her periphery. "Am I pretty?"
What an absolutely wonderful fucking time for her to ask him that.
"Never said you weren't," he said in a quick, tight voice, trying to avoid a fight without coming any closer to that vision he wanted desperately to avoid. Between the, oh let's see, seven or so murders, give or take the ones that weren’t technically their doing, the damaged pair had racked up over the course of their short lives, they were already horribly bound together by circumstance and good old fashioned bad choices. They got an early start at working on it, one might call them prodigal. That line? Well, it’s the last one left, as far as Andrew could see. No coming back from that. Game over. Not that it wouldn't have been bad on its own, but it would have meant utter severance from anyone else as long as they remained near each other when tallied alongside everything else.
"You never said I was, either,” she felt herself slipping into a dark spiral, like if the sun withheld affection from the earth and just let it freeze to death in the big great nothing, like she was going to disappear if he stopped looking at her. It didn’t matter how he looked at her, only that he did it as often as physically possible. Not that she could really admit that to him, or herself for that matter, just another seething bubble popping in the tarpit of her subconscious.
“Why can’t you just say it? Why do I have to pull it out of you? Like–”
“Like pulling teeth?” He joked.
“Hahahaha!” She laughed in spite of herself. “If you still have that screwdriver I’m sure I could get something nice out of you. What do you say, hm?”
“I’ll do you one better,” he said, shifting in his seat and pulling something she couldn’t see out of his pocket that he quickly maneuvered into his mouth.
“What the fuck are–” she started, before he looked away from the road and spat something tiny and white at her. It plinked off her forehead and she stared at the spot where landed in the footwell one of their parents’ fucking teeth .
“There, tooth pulled, all better?” He laughed, wiping his mouth before returning his attention to the road.
“Did–” she said, barely able to contain her laughter, “did you keep that just for this joke?”
“Living with you is exactly like pulling teeth,” he said with a prophetically raised index finger, “I knew it’d come up eventually. Or maybe immediately.”
“How many did you fucking keep?”
“Well, now there’s a question whose answer spoils the fun, hmm?”
“So much for being careful! I could always go digging through your pockets while you sleep you know,” she said it like she was offering some fair exchange that only made sense to her.
“Ashley, if I weren’t already so absolutely sure you’ve done that before I might be concerned. Even then, I’d rather you dig for those than anything else.”
“Oh, yeah?” She asked. He felt himself wither as one great, obnoxious eyebrow quirked at him. “What else do you think I’m gonna dig for, big brother?”
“Oh my fucking god, Ashley,” he said, “will you please let that go?”
“I will when you will,” she said with a curl on her lips.
“Great,” he yelled at the windshield, “then consider it gone.”
“Sure, sure,” she said. “Whatever you say, handsome .”
She giggled at his anger while his knuckles tightened around the steering wheel, paling to the color of bone. He briefly thought to himself that it might be more important for them, and the world at large for that matter, to put them around her neck and let the car crash than to keep going down this road. Andrew stared straight ahead, wandering down this long path to the motel at the edge of a dark forest. They were almost there, maybe another five or ten minutes.
“I guess…” he started with a sigh, “do you really think it’s just bound to happen?”
“I mean,” she said with an open-palmed gesture reserved for those who asked particularly idiotic questions, “if it’s just the two of us, what’s the alternative? No one else wants us. If we’re already so far gone…?”
She let the sentence trail off, or didn’t have anything else to add, until she said:
“I mean, you’ve already tried to choke me, what difference would–”
“Okay, okay!” he interrupted in embarrassment, “I get your point.”
“And?”
“There is no ‘and,’” he said, regaining a semblance of composure, though still death-gripping the steering wheel. “I get what you’re saying, that's all. The world is composed entirely of fine and easily crossed lines. It all starts to blur, until one day you find yourself so utterly lost in the dark, and then–”
“And theeeen–?” she asked again like she was prompting a toddler as he lost the rest of the sentence to his gnawing thoughts, she grew irritated with Andrew’s propensity for not finishing his sentences. Showed her how much he could barely finish anything he started. How lost he would be without her, she thought.
“Boom,” he said with a frustrated whisper, “and then boom. Just to see something that isn’t the pitch black.”
“Very eloquent, very dramatic, beloved –” she said, as if this were a fuse and also the best place of all the places in the world to sit around and play with a lighter, “It’s so heartwarming for my favoritest big brother in the world to say that loving me is the same as standing around a ticking time bomb.”
He sighed.
“That’s not what I–”
”Is that the motel?” she pointed to interrupt before he nearly missed the turn.
He didn’t ask the question on the tip of his tongue as he parked the car as far away as possible and shut off all the lights. He already knew what she thought of his love life, but hers? It seemed non-existent. Didn’t she have even a single concept of the kind of person she wanted in her life that wasn’t shaped like him? Though, the thought made him both queasy and angry for reasons he was determined not to reason with. Within his mind’s eye, far off to the side of its periphery, a memory sat neglected of his regret that he had not killed the warden in their old apartment more slowly for leering at Ashley.
Which could have meant anything.
They walked into the lobby and it looked like someone had pissed in all the fluorescents. The person who in a nicer location might have been called a concierge informed them they only had a single bed available. Andrew groaned, but handed over the cash for the night, praying the room would have a couch. Or maybe just an Andrew-sized spot on the floor.
They unlocked the door and entered the room. It had a bathroom with the bare minimum, including a shower stall. There was, to Andrew’s chagrin, neither couch nor him-sized space on the floor.
“How do you wanna do this?” he asked.
“Oh, I’ll take the king bed on the third floor, thanks,” she replied. “And can you order room service for me? Maybe steak tartar and some good– no, top shelf– champagne?”
“While you’re busy looking for that, I’ll take the bed,” Andrew said with the fakest cheer he could muster.
“No, you fucking won’t!” she snapped, shoving passed him as he walked to the bed. She jumped onto it and turned to face him with a smug look of victory on her face, an eyebrow quirked, only to yelp with fear as Andrew lunged for her and pinned her to the bed by her wrists. Ashley regained her composure, returning her face to one of smug disinterest, daring little Andy to do something. He tensed at his own reaction, clearly remembering the vision, unable to see a path of interaction that didn’t lead to that mortifying future.
That vision began to look more and more like an inescapable prison.
“You are a horrible, demonic brat of a creature,” he whispered, talking meant he wouldn’t make any dumb decisions with his hands, with his mouth, with his– ugh! He couldn’t tell if she could hear the hatred dripping from his voice, but Andrew figured his little sister wasn’t so much of an idiot as to think this was friendly banter.
“Aww, Andy!” she said, testing the hold he had on her wrists and flexing her fingers, “are you flirting with me?”
“Shut up!” he hissed, tightening his grip on her wrists.
“Feeling a little pent up , are we?” she teased as her eyes darted to where he held her down. He laughed, in a genuine fashion that took Ashley by surprise.
“How would you know, virgin?” he retorted with an easy smile claiming room on his face from the stoic anger that was there moments ago. “I’m sure you think babies are made by kissing or holding hands without gloves on.”
“We did go to public school,” she giggled, squirming to release the tension she felt from expecting Andrew to be more rough with her. “SexEd wasn’t their forte. If we did have sex, you'd put it in my belly button, right?”
Andrew certainly felt her wriggling beneath him and it pissed him off.
“If by it you mean a knife, then maybe. You might have learned something if you were more interested in class than– Can you stop fucking moving?”
“Why, does it make you feeeeeel something? For your little sister to be so powerless under your big, strong arms?”
God, he wanted to strangle her. He couldn’t tell if it felt more appealing to leave her alone to suffer for the rest of her miserable life, or to break her and make her regret being such a festering blackhole of a human being. She was his responsibility, after all. His most precious work.
“What did our friend Lord Unknown call you while we were in the basement? Tar Soul? It's amazing, and somehow not at all surprising, that even demons can see what a rotten asshole you are.”
“You gonna keep berating me while I’m held down?” she asked, jutting her head off the bed and putting her face right in his. “Someone sure gets off on being mean! Why don’t you spank me and tell me I’ve been a bad girl while you’re at it?”
“In no small part because neither of those words could possibly encompass your twisted nature,” he mused.
“Oh? But you would if I weren’t as lovable as I am now?”
“Sure, Ashley, because even our fucking parents saw you for what you were. No one else wanted to be around you long enough to spank you and call you a bad girl,” he spat. “That’s why they dumped your ‘lovable self’ on me. ”
She sucked air for a second like he’d punched her and said:
“Andy, stop– this isn’t–”
“Shut up. You know what happened, while you were getting the money? Mom apologized to me for leaving me alone to raise you without help. Did you hear that part or just the bit you could be a bitch about?”
“Get the fuck off of me,” she growled through her teeth.
“Oh? Can’t take what you dish out? I thought I was the pussy here?”
“Fuck you!”
“You’d like that, wouldn’t you? Being every woman I could ever want, without being worth half as much as any one of them?”
Ashley tried to fight him off with renewed effort. She thrashed and kicked but he sat over her legs, still pinned at the wrists, and felt the conundrum of very little leverage in size, power, or nutrition. Andrew watched with half-open, disinterested eyes as her hands curled into claws as she tried to lift her arms enough to swipe her nails at his face. Andrew just sat on her, held her down, and waited for her to run out of energy.
She struggled for a few more minutes, but eventually she just didn’t have the strength and collapsed into the bed, breathing heavily.
“Now that I’m thinking about it… maybe that vision is the demon’s best bet. Who else would be better to get more souls for it than two of the most damned people in existence?”
Ashley didn’t say anything through her ragged breaths.
“I’m going to get off of you now,” he said as he rolled towards the top of the bed, landing on the shitty mattress with a muted thud. His legs dangled off the side and he and Ashley stared at the ceiling next to each other. He waited for her to carry on with her attack, but it didn’t come. He wondered ambiently in which particular way she wished he was dead.
“Why are you still here, if I’m so awful? You could just take the money and the car while I’m asleep and leave me for dead.”
“I do love you, you know,” he said with an exhausted sigh, “I really do. It’s just hard to get to your heart through all the tar. Even dinosaurs got trapped and died in that shit.”
Andrew heard an amused exhale escape her nose.
“What kinds of dinosaurs do you think are buried in my soul?” she asked with a playful tone.
“Hmm,” he wondered, “I feel like you’d attract a lot of the humble Pachycephalosaurus.”
“I– I don’t remember that one,” she admitted.
“The hard-headed ones.”
“Booooooo,” she exclaimed, aiming a thumbs down in his direction. “Do you think your soul is so dinosaur free?”
“Oh, not at all,” he laughed, “I’m thinking there are several of the regal Brontosaurus .”
“Hah, like you wouldn’t only attract the meat eating ones by now.”
“Hahahaha!” he laughed, “Fair point, fair point. Maybe a few velociraptors? A T-Rex feels a touch arrogant.”
“A few?” she laughed.
“A few, a few dozen, what’s the difference?”
He looked at the mole on his palm while listening to her outburst of laughter.
“I wonder what kind of soul the demon would see in me,” he half-said, half-asked.
“We could ask. Got one charge left. I’m sure it’d be very funny.”
“I– don’t think that’s a good idea,” he said, killing the joke for the sake of logistics. “No charge means more dead people. Or, if not dead people, less security for us. Not that I don’t agree it’d be funny.”
“I’m surprised you aren’t more convinced that we could be killed in our sleep at any time,” she said in a voice that indicated that she almost felt proud.
“If it gets that bad, one of us could keep watch with the gun and the other can sleep with the cleaver. Fool me once, and all. Kinda hard to gauge when it’s a good time to use it, I guess? Besides, I really don’t need to see episode two of that last vision.”
“Ha,” she said, “I recall you initiating round two. Afraid of your own handiwork?”
“And I recall you needing me to go easy on you.”
“What?! I’m a delicate lady! I require a loving touch.”
He placed a kiss on her cheek that could be described as both delicate and loving, which she leaned into with a contented hum. He pulled her in closer and let her head rest on his chest. His fingers twirled in the loose black tendrils that escaped the confines of her ponytail. She rubbed her cheek deeper into his chest, trying to make a nest in his ribcage. He kissed her a few times on the top of her head and noticed that her hair felt soft on his lips.
“Ugh,” she groaned. “Bathroom break. Be right back.”
She untangled from him and he watched her dark outline move towards the bathroom. His brain buzzed poisonous thoughts that went as quickly as they came, this horrible anxious hum taking up so much space. He dropped his arms to his side and immediately recoiled when he felt something wet near where Ashley had just been.
“Jesus fucking christ,” he said as he pulled his hand away. He got up to wash his hands.
Ashley came out of the bathroom as he approached, tilting her head at him as a silent question.
“Gonna get the blanket out of the car,” he said, “after I wash my hands.”
“Huh?” she asked.
“You left a fucking wet spot on the bed, Ashley.”
Andrew watched as a rare expression of supreme embarrassment screwed up Ashley’s rapidly reddening face.
“You’re– you’re lying,” she stammered.
It took him by surprise that she was actually embarrassed enough not to roll with the punches. That’s virgins, for you. He dragged her by the wrist over to the bed and put her hand on it, despite her attempts to pull away. Pretty easy to find, it was darker in color than the rest of the bed.
“Am I, though?”
He let go to leave her with that while he cleaned up and walked outside, grabbing the blanket from the car. On his return, Andrew found his sister standing next to the bed with her arms wrapped around herself. He flicked the thin sheets off of the motel mattress and placed the stolen blanket over it, navigating around Ashley who appeared to have forgotten how to use her legs. He crawled into the slightly dried bed, maneuvering his body to avoid any remnants.
“If you need to go take care of that,” he said while his eyes closed, “the bathroom’s over there. Just imagine me berating you some more, I’m sure it’ll do the trick. You don’t rub your belly button, though, just a heads up.”
“Oh my god, shut the fuck up.”
Andrew shrugged, shutting the fuck up. She looked on at him with deep frustration at his detached apathy.
“Maybe I’ll go ask the friendly concierge to help me out, what do you think?”
Andrew’s eyes shot open and their venomous green glowed with intensity in Ashley’s direction.
“Over my, and a lot of other people’s, dead bodies.”
“Aww, Aaaandy,” She cried, clasping her hands together at her cheek, “so protective of your little sister’s virginity! Why ever might that be?”
He ground his teeth together.
“Gonna auction me off for more motel money?” She asked. “Or do you just want me for yourself whenever you’re ready to admit that vision only bothers you because you want it and can’t fucking admit it?”
“Ashley, I swear to–”
“Is that why you asked if we’re like that?” she demanded. “Can’t trust yourself to make a decision? Want me to say no for you so you don’t have to think about it?”
He opened his mouth but she yelled over him.
“Can’t even admit it,” she said, “you get pissy when I so much as suggest I be ravished by some handsome rogue–”
“Stop–”
“Why?” she asked. “It’s kind of fun. Maybe I should threaten to fuck people more often. You can have the leftovers once someone with a spine deflowers me. Since you only go for hussies anyway–”
Something inexplicable to Andrew bubbled up in him as a blind rage.
“You ungrateful little–”
“ Ungrateful? Hah! I’m supposed to sing your praises when you raised me to be like this? How is me expressing a desire to fuck someone else ungrateful to you? ”
She felt extremely compelled to shoot him. Approximately three times.
“Because,” Andrew said in a voice as cold as the grave, rising from the bed and moving slowly towards her. Ashley remained where she was as he stood over her. He grabbed her by the chin with one hand and leaned into her face. He, in that moment, felt entirely empty of everything that had ever concerned him about the life he led except for one single thought, composed of three words. His thumb worked Ashley’s lower lip down as he spoke a wretched incantation. Ashley felt herself smiling around his invading thumb as he said:
“You. Are. Mine.”