Chapter Text
It starts on the day he walks in on Gideon masturbating.
Funnily enough, it’s not the first time it has happened and as Caleb watches his roommate shove his still-hard dick back under the waistband of his shorts, he begins to wonder whether he’s witnessing the beginning stages of another man’s budding sex addiction.
“Third times a charm,” he jokes under his breath as he nudges the door shut behind him with the heel of his boot.
Despite not having heard him unlock the door, Gideon apparently hears his mumbling just fine. “You couldn’t knock?”
“This is my room just as much as it’s yours.” Caleb jingles his keys to emphasise the point. “You couldn’t jack it in the bathroom?”
“I… didn’t know you’d be back. Thought I’d be meeting you and the other guys there.”
“I needed to get—actually, can we have this conversation when that thing isn’t laser-trained on my forehead?”
“Shit.” Gideon’s hands snap to his crotch and Caleb is courteous enough to glance at a wall as the other man attempts to adjust himself. It’s purely a coincidence that Caleb’s eyes fall upon the wall that they’ve both unconsciously decided to dub their memorabilia wall of their newly assigned room.
Interspliced between movie posters, certificates and aircraft magazine cut-outs, there are polaroid pictures of the two of them, the two of them with their shared friends, the two of them with their respective families. Despite the awkwardness of the moment still happening in his periphery, Caleb finds his eyes snagging on one picture in particular. Him and you—his adorable baby sister.
Your arms hug his throat and legs hug his hips as you cling to him like the cutest koala he’s ever seen. It’s the last picture the both of you took together before you all crouched into the taxi that drove you to the train station in time for him to catch the train that dragged him away from home for the very first time just under three years ago. Away from home and right to the front gates of the Aerospace Academy.
The thought pulls a bittersweet smile across his face.
“So,” he starts when his eyes are back on Gideon, “you in heat or something?”
“What?”
“Three times this week, Gideon?” Caleb deadpans. “Seriously?”
“T-That’s a perfectly normal and healthy amount for a man my age.”
“Sure,” Caleb says, not agreeing but not quite disagreeing either. He simply doesn’t know the metrics of a healthy twenty-something year old man’s masturbation rate. “But if I keep on catching you in the act, I’m going to start thinking that it’s because of me. Do you like my new haircut that much? Is it doing it for you?”
As Gideon takes the time to roll his eyes, there’s a lull in the conversation that makes it quiet enough for Caleb to hear… moaning. High and breathy whines punctuated by the unmistakable sound of something wet slicking itself against something even wetter.
Gideon must notice the noise the moment Caleb does because, immediately, his hand shoots forward to slam a button on his keyboard. The space bar, most likely. Caleb lifts a brow—half unimpressed, half amused—before he lets his gaze flicker downwards, slow enough for Gideon to track the movement but fast enough to make it clear that he’s not intending to stare at the erection that has simply gone nowhere.
“Do you want to do us both a favour and go finish that off in the bathroom?” Caleb asks. He flicks his gaze to the face of his watch next. “Make it quick, though. We have about fifteen minutes until we need to leave and you know how Patrick gets when we’re late.”
Gideon’s mouth drops open like he’s about to say something but he’s quick to think better of it. Twitchy hands push himself out of his deskchair and he stumbles towards the ensuite bathroom. Just before he gets there, however, Caleb clears his throat.
“You don’t want to take your… material with you?” he asks, his tone a touch mean.
“I’m not going to—Jesus Christ, man! I’m going to take a fucking shower.”
“Make it super cold so security doesn't think you’re walking into the bar with a weapon on you.”
“I’m going to internalise that as you commenting that I have an impressively sized dick.”
“They don’t let pocket pistols into bars either.”
“Fuck you.”
“I think I’ll pass,” Caleb says. “Wouldn’t want to get in-between the beautiful thing you and your hand share with one another.”
Gideon mumbles out a string of curses but otherwise says nothing else as he, finally, leaves the main area of the dorm room. Caleb allows himself a quick chuckle only once the bathroom door shuts, the lock clicking into place with a resounding snap of metal against metal, but the laughter is cut short when he gets a whiff of the surrounding room. It’s not a foul smell per se but it’s heady, bodily, the kind of smell that you don’t really want sticking to clothes that you intend to wear outside of the house.
Windows line the western wall and Caleb ambles towards them, pushing them ajar to welcome in the evening breeze.
The cold cuts through the surrounding frowsiness and he nods his silent appreciation before glancing back at his watch. Eight more minutes until they have to leave. They’ll be late. Oh well. Patrick may be strict about timeliness but he enjoys partaking in a good ribbing session just as much as the rest of them do; Caleb’ll give him a recount of what made them late in an attempt to appease him.
He’s walking across the room, towards his own drawers to retrieve his cologne, when his steps fall to a stop right in front of Gideon’s desk instead.
It’s not curiosity that stops him.
It genuinely isn’t.
Rather, he stops in front of the desk, in front of the laptop, with the intention of switching off the device and plugging it into the charger on Gideon’s behalf. Knowing Gideon, despite the laptop’s current less-than-savoury purpose, it’ll probably be needed for class early tomorrow morning and the last thing Caleb wants to deal with is being woken up earlier than his alarm just because Gideon is pacing the room, mumbling about not charging the device himself.
Caleb plucks the charger cord up from where it lays across the desk, his intentions still ironclad and innocent, as he pulls the semi-closed laptop open. He thinks absentmindedly that he'll need to wash his own hands after this—Lord knows whether Gideon touched his dick then his keyboard. He swiped his own fingers across the trackpad, the cursor dragging towards the bottom-left corner of the screen, towards the power button, but then he freezes.
He… knows that bedroom.
At first he notices the carpet and, somewhere at the very back of his mind, he thinks that it’s funny how familiar the beige tufts are. But his eyes have always been quicker than most and they’re already moving away from the carpet to look at the wall. Familiar wallpaper, too. Maybe that wouldn’t have made him pause if it was just that—familiar yet nondescript carpet and wallpaper—but it’s what’s on the wallpaper that steals his breath.
Plain beige is disrupted by an array of posters, stickers, pictures, and magazines cut-outs, and although he can’t make out the exact images on each sheet of paper, the large blocks of colour look too familiar and the haphazard way they’ve been stuck to the wall calls to mind too many memories for him to simply ignore.
He knows that room, has seen that room and its plethora of furniture and decorations too many times before. He has stood in that room. Cleaned that room. Hell… has even helped decorate the room into what it now looks like on Gideon’s laptop screen.
The only thing Caleb hasn’t seen before is… the body.
The naked body.
Slick with noticeable sweat despite the distance between the bed and the camera. Back propped up against pillows and plushies. Legs spread wide enough that the eyes of the camera can stare right between them. Both arms stretched out between thighs as eager-looking hands clutch at the girthy base of a toy. A purple dildo—it’s silicone, visibly slick, too.
Given that the video is paused, the body—the very naked body in the very familiar bedroom—is frozen in action. Still, there’s a tension in the limbs that betrays exactly what was happening before Gideon pressed pause and exactly what would happen if Caleb’s twitching fingers pressed play.
Where the body is bare and tense, however, the face is the exact opposite. A mask covers it from the forehead down to the very top of ajar lips. He doesn’t know if it’s the lighting or if the lace is too tightly woven, but he can’t make out anything through the mask’s material. Can barely even see the bump of a nose.
What he can see steals his attention, though.
A mouth. Lips bare with not a hint of gloss or lipstick, but blotchy red, as if they’ve been roughed up, bitten hard. The chin is tucked down toward the chest, and despite not being able to see the eyes, Caleb knows where they must be trained: on the hands, on what they clutch, on the way the body is split open around it.
Wet silicone.
Drenched bedsheets.
Familiar drenched bedsheets.
And his own hands are sweating, the trackpad of Gideon’s laptop slick beneath his fingers.
He knows that bedroom but the logical part of his conclusion sputters like a stubborn engine, refusing to roar to life.
No.
It can’t be.
Who is that?
How did—how did they get into your room?
Onto your bed?
Confusion keeps him staring until the sound of the shower in the adjacent room finally cuts off. Then, five minutes after that, when Gideon finally leaves the bathroom smelling like 5-in-1 body wash with a towel wrapped about his waist, Caleb is standing stock-still on the opposite side of the room, laptop discarded, shaking hands occupying themselves with the task of spritzing cologne on the skin behind his ears.
And as Gideon pulls on dark jeans and a Henley, dressing adequately for a Tuesday night out on the town, Caleb stares down at the three missed calls from Patrick sitting on his phone. He doesn’t answer any of them. Instead, he’s swiping across to his camera roll to look at his two latest pictures—both of them pictures of Gideon’s laptop screen. One is of the naked body strewn out in that all-too-familiar bedroom. The other? A close-up of the top-left corner of the website, the creator’s username at the very centre of the image.
✈︎
“This particular class exists because, unfortunately, the DAA loses more of its personnel to psychological failure as opposed to Wanderer contact. This conditioning is less about courage—at this point in your careers, we already know you all have that in spades—and more about decision stability. We want you stable. We need you utterly infallible.
“You see, when someone is under immense pressure, their cognitive bandwidth narrows. That’s natural. Expected. However, we want to make sure that you’re able to correctly prioritise when that happens. We want you to be consistent in your decision making even when you’re under distress. Especially when you’re under distress, in fact.
“Can you execute procedure precisely even while sleep deprived? Can you follow orders while emotionally compromised? Can you defer any moral judgments until after the mission is done?
“By the time we’re finished with you here, by the time you graduate and take on your roles as pilots for the DAA, the answer to each and every one of these questions will be a resounding yes. Must be a resounding yes! Do you want to know why? Because cadets who attempt to carry moral reckonings into active operations compromise not only themselves, not only their team members, but the very mission that the DAA was built upon.”
There’s a voice speaking from the very front of the lecture hall and even if Caleb was paying any sort of attention to the world around him, he wouldn’t have been able to make out the person’s features.
They stand before the class as a shadow, their frame backlit by the large projector screen that reads COGNITIVE RESILIENCE IN DEEPSPACE OPERATIONS in bold, sans serif font.
In conjunction with the voice, Caleb can hear the fast typing of fingers on laptop keyboards and pencils scratching against paper as his peers jot down notes. Caleb has his own pen in hand but his notes are far from academic. He writes out the username again, bolder this time, the black ink of his biro embossing itself onto the page of his notebook.
Pippi10-4.
It’s been two days.
Two whole days.
He writes it again: Pippi10-4.
Two days and he’s yet to catch Gideon in the act again but he doesn’t know what that means. Not really. It could mean anything. Could mean that the third time really was a charm, a charm that led his roommate to his senses. Led to him deleting his account. Led to him choosing a life of abstinence, instead.
It could also mean that Gideon hasn’t stopped at all. Could mean that he’s grown smarter, sneakier in his perversion. He could be smart enough now to lock himself away in the bathroom. Yesterday, Caleb came back from the gym to the sound of the shower running. It could’ve been then: the fourth time. Hell, they don’t even have the same class schedule. For all Caleb knows, Gideon could be in the dorm right now, fingers gripping at himself while he leers down at your open—
Caleb screws his eyes shut and writes the username again while blind: Pippi10-4.
Pippi, he continues writing, his wrist aching, as in Pipsqueak? Pipsqueak. Pip. Squeak. Pip—
Does Gideon know he calls you that?
He tries to cast his mind back to all the conversations he’s shared with the other man about you over the past few years but it’s, of course, impossible to pinpoint each and every one of them.
Despite all the years, however, Gideon’s only ever met you once and, even then, that was only through Caleb’s phone screen. Not even three days into his time at the academy, you’d video called him out of the blue, demanding to not only see his dorm room but also the man that he’d be sharing it with for the foreseeable future. Had he called you pipsqueak then?
Maybe.
No. No, not maybe.
Most likely.
Had Gideon taken note of it?
Had he got a glimpse of your bedroom in the background as he smiled down at the phone, promising you that he’d look after Caleb on your behalf? Didn’t he call you cute after he hung up?
“Your sister is such a mother hen,” Caleb thinks he remembers him saying. “Cute.”
Did he also memorise the wallpaper, the elaborate plushie layout on your bed, the slight orange-hue of your energy-saving light fixture, only to then stumble upon this… account years later and make the connection all on his own?
Is the sick-fuck getting off to you knowingly?
Is he letting himself get caught just to mock Caleb with the information?
There’s a sudden copper smell so potent, so thick and heavy, that it becomes a taste against Caleb’s tongue. His fingers tighten around his pen until the tip of it pierces straight through his littered notebook page.
“Dude? What the fuck?” Someone stage-whispers from his left.
Caleb turns to face the stranger seated next to him. He tries to tug out the name of the man from the fog between his ears but he comes up blank.
This kind of occurrence has, admittedly, become pretty commonplace: Caleb running into strangers while walking down the hallway or grabbing a quick snack from the canteen. Strangers who know his face and his name well enough to address him with a familiarity tinged with either awe or envy.
Normally, Caleb handles these interactions with impressive dexterity. He smiles, humbles himself, makes a witty joke about being better at remembering the names of plane parts than people’s faces, and leaves with yet another person convinced that they’ve just made a friend in him. It’s worked for him so far and, as a result, has increased these encounters tenfold.
But now, blinking stupidly at the nameless student beside him, he can’t muster even an ounce of his common cordiality. In fact, he’s pretty sure he’s scowling at the guy.
“Are you alright?” the unfamiliar man asks, jutting his chin in the direction of Caleb’s hand.
Caleb follows his prompting to find his index finger oozing red where the jagged edge of broken plastic has punctured his skin.
Oh.
He’s snapped his pen.
He stares at the open wound for a beat of a couple seconds before releasing his grip on the stationery and dropping it on the desk in front of him. Red splatters down on the page of his notebook, adding a full stop next to the eighteenth Pippi10-4 scrawled and staining the remaining empty lines of the sheet. The pain of the injury comes to him languidly; a hot, throbbing sting from the point where the blood wells up only to trickle down the rest of his finger and across the middle of his calloused palm.
It's this same bleeding hand that he raises up.
“Mr. Xia!” The voice from the front of the room responds with a tone a touch more jovial than the one used just moments prior. “Was there something you wanted to add?”
Several heads have now swivelled around to catch a glimpse of him. Again, Caleb can’t attach a name to any of them. He asks, “May I be excused?”
“Oh…” The lecturer pauses, their disappointment evident. “Is something the matter?”
Is something the matter? There’s a buzzing between Caleb’s ears—loud and impossibly jarring—but he can hear his answer as it rings through his skull just fine. Is something the matter? Yes. Yes, something's the matter.
Everything’s the matter.
He knows that bedroom, knows that wallpaper, that carpet. Pippi?. Pipsqueak. 10-4? So clearly, so obviously chosen because it’s a call sign.
It’s obvious. It’s all so fucking obvious. He knows the face hidden under that mask, knows the head of hair attached to that body. Knows that body, he now admits to himself. He’s held it, hugged it, nursed it to health. Just hasn’t seen it in that state before. Naked. Very naked. Curves unbridled by any stitch of clothing. Skin slick with sweat and flushed with overexertion, nipples hard and pointed at the—
“He’s bleeding, sir,” someone’s voice cuts in. “Pretty badly.”
Caleb blinks hard and finds that his unnamed desk partner is replying on his behalf. He also notices that his hand is still raised and hovering, displaying his wound to all his peers that still continue watching him. He clenches his fingers into a fist, ignoring the throbbing pain, before lowering his arm.
Scattered mumbling starts up around the section of the lecture hall that he’s seated in. More and more people turn to the left, to the right or turn to look over their shoulder at him and his current state. Sweat beads the bridge of his nose but he makes no moves to wipe it away.
There’s a response from the podium but Caleb isn’t listening hard enough to decipher whether it's a permission for him to leave or not. Uncaring, he gets moving, collecting his belongings to shove them into his backpack’s side pocket.
He feels a quick pat on his back, a silent gesture of reassurance and support from yet another unfamiliar student. Caleb does nothing to show appreciation for the gesture, nothing to show that he even felt the touch at all. He doesn’t even bother tucking his chair beneath the desk before scurrying his way out of the lecture room and into the sparsely populated academy hallways.
It’s with that same bleeding hand that he eventually unlocks his room door.
A small part of his brain is happy to find the space empty, Gideon nowhere to be found, but the other part of his brain—larger, louder—doesn’t even register that fact at all.
His belongings are dropped by his feet. He doesn’t even toe off his boots. Blood smears across the shell of his laptop as he grabs it off his desk before he half-stumbles, half-falls onto the bottom bunk. Red meets white keys as he types out the website that he’s now memorised by name.
LookSee—peer into the private.
A distant belated thought has him wondering if he should use a private browser for this. Is that what people do? Or… maybe a VPN? But before that thought process properly takes root, he’s already entered the website proper, hovering the cursor over LookSee’s internal search engine.
He types out with fingers slippery with sweat, with blood: Pippi1044.
“Shit.” His voice trembles. The burning in his eyes reminds him—forces him—to blink.
Backspace.
Backspace.
He corrects himself, types out: Pippi10-4.
There’s only one single search result.
He hovers the cursor over the username but makes no move to click into the account.
There’s a profile picture.
He doesn’t click on it either.
But… he does lean in closer, squinting, his nose hitting the screen and his breath clouding the glass.
Despite how pixelated the image is, it’s very clearly a picture of a plushie. The Sunny Apple leans against a pillow—a very familiar pillow—with a silky black mask playfully fixed across its eyes. Caleb stares back at it, his breath picking up, the noise between his ears growing louder.
If there was even a shred of uncertainty before, it’s gone now.
He remembers the day he won you that toy at the arcade. All those coins spent and wasted, all those times you’d poked his arm or pinched his waist in mockery when he failed. Then that single time he’d been victorious and the way you’d jumped on him, squeezed him with joy as you planted a peck of gratitude against his right cheek, clumsy and close enough that your lips met the very corner of his own.
Your perfume clung to his shirt during the whole train ride home.
His nose is still pressed to the laptop screen. The cursor shakes where it still hovers over the username. Your username linked to your account. Pippi10-4. Pipsqueak. You. His baby sister. You. You. You. His injured finger twitches on his laptop’s trackpad, but before it can apply the necessary pressure, his left hand all but shoves the device out and off his lap.
It lands on the floor with a painful sound.
He doesn’t check to see if it’s broken.
He’s moving. Fleeing, really. Refusing to turn around as he leaves the sleeping area of the dorm behind to, instead, lock himself away in the bathroom.
Once there, he wastes no time. He doesn’t even switch the lights on.
Autopilot carries him across the tiles until he can shove the shower curtain aside, step in, twist the water nozzle with such a firm grip that his wrist throbs with the movement.
Water from the showerhead spits down at him with a relentless, cold spray. It flattens his hair over his forehead, the tips of the strands itching at his lashes, but he makes no moves to smooth them away. He deserves some discomfort. Deserves a lot more than mere discomfort for what he’s thinking about, for the images that are currently flashing across his mind’s eye.
Some water even trickles down his cheeks to pool and then trickle out of his mouth that hangs ajar. He’s panting, he realises belatedly. He can hear each laboured breath just beneath the sound of water hitting the tiles, hitting the boots that he still hasn’t removed and the clothes that still cover his body.
How pathetic must he look right now?
Like a drooling dog?
Like a starving, untrained mutt of a man?
“Fuck,” he whispers at that treacherous part of himself that presses—foul and adamant—against the inseam of his drenched cargos. “Not again.”
… ✈︎
… ✈︎
… ✈︎
Isn’t it normal for brothers to find their baby sisters beautiful?
Not for the first or last time, Caleb found his eyes drifting away from the road and the traffic stretching out in front of him to instead watch you in the rear view mirror.
With your temple pressed against the window, sunlight painted your face in a gentle, golden hue. Your brows were furrowed, the skin between them creased, and he wondered what you must be worrying about in those dreams of yours. If he reached back, caressed the folded skin there, could he pluck those worries away? Forever?
“She’s out like a light.”
The voice was enough to snap Caleb’s gaze back to the road.
“Yeah.” Caleb sent a quick nod to Josephine. “She must’ve been really excited. She spent the whole night pacing about her bedroom. Thought she was going to cause a house fire with all the friction she was causing.”
The elderly woman let out a laugh that she quickly stifled behind her palm, glancing backwards to make sure her amusement hadn’t pulled you from your sleep. It hadn’t.
“I really should be thanking you.”
Again, the voice of his grandmother was enough to pull his eyes away from and back towards the road. “What for?”
“For, well, this.” Josephine gave him a smaller smile of her own before turning to take yet another glance over her shoulder. At you. “I probably don’t need to tell you this because you know her moods better than I do but, darling, she really needed this.”
Caleb nodded but otherwise remained quiet.
Yes. He did know your moods, knew them like the back of his hand, and he’d noticed the shift from the very first day he’d broken the news that he’d not only applied for the Aerospace Academy but that he’d also gotten in and would have to move in order to attend it.
Not a day had passed where he hadn’t regretted how he broke the news to you. To find out that he’d applied to the school behind your back and been successful in his hidden agenda had been a lot for you to process. He remembered the twitch of your expression when you digested the information. You’d smiled, gave your congratulations, then promptly excused yourself for the bathroom, and although you returned seven minutes later with your eyes bright and playful grin intact, Caleb knew you. Knew you by heart. Knew you like he knew how to blink, how to breathe—instinctively.
And that suppressed sadness only worsened the closer his move out date got. Mall trips with Gran for suitcases and clothes and kitchen appliances were silent affairs, all his attempts at making jokes to lift your spirits were met with stiff nods or no response at all. When Caleb would make the mistake of mentioning his need to finish packing, you’d lock up tight as a clam before leaving the room entirely.
Looking away from the road again, Caleb glanced at where you were laying against the car window, your brows still furrowed.
How can I take away all your worries, he pondered, if my methods of doing so only make you worry more?
“Seriously, Caleb.” Josephine’s voice was so motherly, so soft that it almost got lost in the sound of the passing traffic outside. She spoke like she could read Caleb too so he sucked in a breath and put more effort into controlling his facial expression.
She continued just as softly, “Thank you.”
“No need to thank me, Gran.” He dismissed her gratitude with a shrug and a slight scoffing laugh. Again, his eyes drifted to the rear view mirror. You shifted against the window, turning slightly as though chasing the warmth of the sun against the glass. Watching you scrunch up your sleeping face morphed his feigned smile into something genuine and he turned to face Josephine just in time for her to catch a glimpse of it as well. “What are big brothers for?”
—
If it’s normal for big brothers to find their baby sisters beautiful… isn’t it normal for them to get angry at others who prey on that beauty?
Only half an hour passed since the three of you found a spot to situate yourselves on the sand before you started complaining about wanting something sweet. Caleb had packed a plethora of snacks—tangerines, ripe strawberries, two containers of perfectly sliced apples—but your tastebuds wanted something even sweeter, something less health-conscious. So, while you and Gran remained by the towels and the cooler, Caleb queued in front of a dingy shack just east of the beach entrance, his hands in his board shorts, his bare feet flat against the warm, white sand. He dipped his chin upwards, inhaling the salty air. When the wind carried the noise of your laughter to where he stood a couple feet away, he peeled his eyes open to catch a glimpse of you.
You twirled across the beach in front of Josephine, your shoulders shimmying to the rhythm that the elderly woman seemed to be hitting against the side of the plastic cooler. Your hair was a windswept mess, skin already glistening with sweat and overzealous sunscreen application. As you spun, you spread your arms wide as though you were trying to embrace the whole world. Caleb watched you move and felt all the air in his lungs leave him.
God.
You rivalled the sun.
“She’s a cute little thing, ain’t she?”
The voice tugged him back to earth with jarring speed. Caleb jerked his head to face the unknown speaker and, immediately, catalogued everything about him. He seemed older by only a handful of years, had brown hair buzzed close to his scalp, a single earring dangling from his left ear, a smirk that Caleb wanted to smash further open on the bones of his knuckles.
It didn’t help that the man continued talking. “Swear,” he said, his eyes flicking away from Caleb to resume gawking at you, “my eyes have been glued to her since she shrugged out of her—”
“She’s my little sister.”
Silence. Save for the distant sound of the rushing waves and the brush of wind against his eardrums—complete and utter silence. And there must have been something in Caleb’s tone or in his expression or in the way his body shifted as he spoke because as soon as the admission left his mouth, the stranger that had once been leaning into him, as though confiding a secret with a close friend, took two hurried steps backwards. Retreating. Even with the new distance between them, Caleb remained unblinking, staring at the man until he took another three steps away, his hands now raised, fingers splayed in further apology.
It was the sound of the vendor calling him forward that worked to break his glare.
At the counter, Caleb recited the order with stilted affection: one scope of strawberry ice cream, one chocolate, one vanilla, a drizzle of caramel and and a wafer stabbed into the pile of dessert. It was an obscene order, one he would never buy for himself, one he’s bought for you far more than once.
He chewed on his inner left cheek, swallowed the pain of his teeth, as he watched the worker prepare the ice cream. When the plastic bowl was eventually slid towards him, he had to pry his nails from his palms to loosen his fists. His right hand trembled as he reached forward to pay. And although the cold bowl soothed the nail marks he’d imposed on himself, it did very little to soothe him elsewhere. As he turned to leave, he clipped his shoulder against the stranger’s with enough force to send him stumbling to the side. Caleb didn’t apologise and the other man—either too startled to speak or suddenly too smart—knew not to verbalise any complaints.
He returned to his family to find you no longer dancing. Instead, you were sitting, your arms nearly elbow deep in wet sand. Gran sat somewhere in his periphery but he paid her no mind, choosing to instead come to a stop right in front of you, standing over you, looking down at you, perfectly placing himself to block the view of you from the man that was surely still standing in front of the ice cream shack, gawking.
Who else is looking at you? Who the fuck else?
He had to remind himself to not clench his fingers again lest he wanted to squish your ice cream.
“Aren’t you cold?” he managed to eventually ask.
You took your own time to respond, glancing up at the sun that hung, high and impossibly bright, in the sky. “Am I… cold?”
He could hear exactly what you wanted to say through your tone alone. Stupid question. Stupid Caleb.
“It’s possible,” he said but even as he defended himself, he could feel the tension leaving him the longer he stood under the rays of your full attention. “I mean, you’re barely wearing anything.”
“I’m wearing three articles of clothing.” A bikini top, bikini bottoms and a red mesh cover-up that hid barely any covering at all. Clothing? Hm. Caleb would’ve normally argued that point. You continued, “What about you? You’re wearing one. Just one. You’re literally only wearing shorts.” Your eyes narrowed further and Caleb knew the insult was coming, anticipated it almost. All attention from you being good attention to him. “Don’t be a sexist prick, Caleb.”
“Hey!” Gran’s shout snatched your attention away from him and onto her as she scolded you. “None of that.”
“Sorry.”
“Don’t apologise to me. Apologise to your brother.”
You blinked rapidly before placing your eyes back on him. Your face was scrunched up tight with irritation and he could tell that you were chewing on a retort that Gran would appreciate even less than what you’d just said.
“No, no, you’re right.” He was sure to stop you before you felt the pain of having to begin. “Gēge was in the wrong and he’s sorry,” he said, keeping his eyes trained on you instead of looking at the woman behind you. As the tension in your face visibly eased, the tension in his shoulders did the same. “Have some ice cream as an apology.”
“I’ll have some ice cream but not as your apology.”
“No?”
“You were already buying me ice cream before you did something wrong,” you reasoned with furrowed brows and Caleb thought about sinking his teeth into the plump apples of your cheeks, eating you whole. “You need to give me something else and then I’ll… think about it.”
“Think about what? Forgiving me?”
You gave him no further response on the matter and he couldn’t help but laugh. As his chuckles faded out, you leaned forward, your arms still buried beneath the sand for some unknown reason. “Ahhh…”
Autopilot had him digging a spoonful of ice cream on your behalf, dropping to a squat and bending forward to deposit it on your tongue.
He watched you swallow. “What are you doing neck-deep in the sand?”
“A sandcastle,” you answered flippantly. “Ahhh…”
He gave you some more.
“You should build one too,” you said after licking the roof of your mouth. “We can have Gran vote on which one is best and the loser will be stuck doing all the chores for the rest of the month.”
He was about to scoop up more ice cream for you but his movements stuttered. Should he remind you? Remind you that he… wouldn’t be in Linkon for the rest of the month? Should he ruin your mood with the truth of his departure for the umpteenth time?
He made his choice swiftly.
He nodded but remained quiet.
Another spoonful of ice cream was on its way to your mouth, and then another, and then another, until there wasn’t just a spoonful of ice cream in front of you but, also, a relatively large bee.
You flinched, the heaped plastic spoon bumping against the tip of your nose, ice cream smearing across your philtrum as you tried to flee.
“Ah!”
“Are you alright?” Gran asked, leaning in closer.
Caleb balanced the bowl on his thigh, shooing away the bee until it eventually flew to bother another family further down the beach.
“G-Gēge—”
Even with your arms still in the sand, you continued cowering. Your eyes were pinched shut, shoulders raised to your ears and Caleb found himself frowning instead of making a joke about the ice cream now splattered across the lower-half of your face.
“It’s okay, pipsqueak, it’s okay. It’s gone,” he said. He reached a hand forward to wipe at your nose and your upper lip, licking the residual chocolate ice cream off his fingers after he did so. “I promise it’s gone.”
You peeled your eyes open, still wary, before letting out a relieved breath when you found nothing and no one but him kneeling in front of you.
“You okay?”
“Argh.” You looked down at your chest with a grimace.
A dollop of ice cream sat at the very centre of your chest, plastering the red mesh of your coverup over the curves of your—Caleb dragged his eyes away.
“I’ll—” He cleared his throat. “I’ll go get you some tissues.”
“It’s okay. You can just—”
He didn’t linger long enough to hear the end of your suggestion. He set the bowl of ice cream on the nearby cooler, did not spare Josephine a glance, and jogged the short distance towards the public bathrooms.
Inside, he had to side-step two young boys on their way out. They sent him polite smiles; he sent them nothing.
The room met him with silence and the smell of damp, stale air. It met him, too, with his reflection. Situated above the row of sinks, four mirrors, smudged and dented with age, threw his image back at him from every angle.
He had thought he could hide in here for a moment, just a brief moment to gather himself, but the mirrors made that impossible. They showed him everything. Heavy eyelids. Furrowed brows. The way he chewed at the flesh of his bottom lip, gnawing at dry skin and tugging, tugging, tugging until he tasted not only the salt of his sweat but the copper of his own blood.
“She’s my little sister,” he said, using the same tone he’d used with the lecher in the ice cream line. This time, however, there was no one to direct his anger at but himself.
… ✈︎
… ✈︎
… ✈︎
Caleb’s already four beers deep into his Friday night when he feels a hand fall upon his left shoulder.
“What the hell?” It’s Timothy. He squeezes Caleb’s shoulder in a friendly gesture before perching himself on the empty barstool to his left. Behind him, Patrick and Gideon stand, the two of them also confused yet pleasantly surprised to see him. Tim continues, “First you miss class this morning and now you’re drinking without us? What the hell is going on, man?”
Great question, Caleb thinks as he brings the rim of his glass to his lips to take yet another gulp. Where should he start? Maybe he should start with the notification he woke up to on his phone.
He honestly doesn’t remember how he found out that LookSee has an app, doesn’t even remember downloading it. Or making an account. Or turning its notifications on. He does, however, remember what you posted: an album of pictures not even five minutes after seven in the morning. He’d had to pay an additional fee to get access to the whole folder but once he did, he’d spent at least two hours scrolling his way through the five of the new images.
They started off innocent enough. Image one: you smiling at the camera, holding your phone above you at that angle you like to use whenever you’re sending him random selfies throughout your day. If it wasn’t for the mask, he’s sure your eyes would look so big, so impossibly bright, as they glanced up at the camera lens, up at him.
Image two: the angle shifting slightly to show less of your covered face and more of your covered body. And, well, you are covered. Completely. Light grey chiffon blouse buttoned up to your neck and tucked into a slate grey, pleated skirt that flares out around your thighs. Those are bare, though. Your thighs. But, like you, the angle is meant to tease; only a slither of skin makes it into the photo frame.
By image three things got obscene.
Caleb was zooming into the picture—chiffon blouse unbuttoned low enough to show the lack of a bra, thighs spread wide enough to hitch up the hem of the skirt, smiling lips now open, tongue poking out, spit dripping down the right corner of your mouth—when his daily alarm for class had gone off. He silenced and swiped the notification away immediately when it had dropped down to block his view of your face.
Instead of the truth, he looks at Timothy and goes with this: “My bad.”
“Yeah,” Tim snorts. “Your fucking bad. Apparently you’ve been ignoring Gideon as well.”
Pausing from taking another sip of beer, Caleb slides his gaze towards the man in question. Gideon’s earlier pleased shock of having seen him has clearly dampened into some sort of apprehension. As Caleb stares at him, unblinking, it’s Gideon that breaks eye contact by feigning a cough into the curve of his elbow.
Caleb finishes his sip before asking, “How exactly does someone ignore their bunk mate?” and only when Timothy and Patrick let out quick, snorting chuckles does he realise they’re not registering the genuineness of his question. He spares yet another glance at Gideon and sees that he’s registered it perfectly. He’s standing there, stiff, shoulders impossibly tense, his face screwed up in a wince.
It’s almost impressive how in tune with the truth of Caleb’s moods the guy is but he guesses that that’s what happens after bunking with someone for so long. If it wasn’t for the massive fucking elephant in the room, maybe Caleb would be happy to know he’s found someone who actually sees him past the persona he’s coincidentally cultivated. It’s unnerving being known like that. Unnerving and… freeing, maybe? He takes another sip of beer to avoid confronting the juxtaposition of that truth.
“Is it family stuff?”
Caleb glances at Patrick.
“That’s the only thing I can think of that would throw you out of whack like this.” The man shrugs, sips more of his cocktail. “You really do wear your love for them on your sleeve.”
“More like all over his body,” Tim chimes back in but then he winces. “I hope it’s not your grandmother.”
“No, no.” Caleb waves away his concern, the movement of his hand as sluggish as his voice. “Gran is fine. Healthy.”
“Thank god.”
“Your sister?”
An ache travels up the length of Caleb’s neck at the speed that he snaps his head in Gideon’s direction. “Don’t.”
“I was just asking if—”
“Don’t talk about my fucking sister.”
All three of the other men share glances—equal parts wary and confused—but they all acquiesce eventually, nodding and still getting comfortable in barstools near Caleb despite his outburst. He moves his mouth to say something—to apologise maybe, or to make matters worse, more likely—but luckily for him, the words don’t quite make it out.
He stares at Gideon as he orders a drink of his own. Stares at him and hates that even while drunk he can’t deny how genuine his questioning was. He doesn’t know, does he? He really doesn’t know it’s you. Fuck. He really doesn’t fucking know.
Caleb chugs the rest of his beer, letting his chin drop to his chest as he swallows. He’s not entirely sure what he wanted to feel after this realisation but all he knows now is that he feels like shit. Worse than shit. He tears his eyes away from Gideon’s side profile to, instead, attempt to focus his gaze on the bartender.
“Excuse me,” he raises his hand to beckon the worker over. “Another.”
Caleb slowly and surely drinks himself silent.
As the guys around him share anecdotes and jokes about the past week of classes, he drinks himself so quiet that he gradually forgets to laugh, forgets to participate in the conversation at all.
One would assume that a silent drunk is better than an angry one, better than one who lashes out and throws fists or chairs, but a silent Caleb is… different. A silent Caleb is brooding, stony-faced and cold. A silent Caleb is a Caleb that these men have not properly been acquainted with yet. He’s not a display of violence but, instead, a promise of it. Like a knife balanced on the edge of a counter—not stabbing anyone currently but could if someone was clumsy enough to get too close. Oh, he could.
It’s Patrick that cuts him off as he tries to raise an uncoordinated hand to beckon the bartender forward for his eighth drink.
It’s Timothy that half-forces him to shrug back on his jacket, tugging the zip up to cover his exposed throat.
It’s Gideon who guides him out of his seat, through the bar exit and down into the taxicab waiting on the street for their arrival. When Caleb shoves an elbow into his torso hard enough to make the other man let out a wheeze, only Caleb knows that it wasn’t a mere accident. He didn’t just drink himself silent… he drank himself angry. He’s a shaken bottle, liquid fizzing, pressure rising, and even in his drunken stupor he’s worried about what will happen when someone accidentally pops the lid.
“I’ll get in with him.” He hears Gideon say, presumably to the other guys.
“No,” he grunts.
Gideon ducks down to look at him through the ajar car door. “You’re out of it, man. Will you even be able to unlock the door?”
“I don’t want…” Caleb smooths a hand over his head, pulling the hair at his nape. “I’ll be fine. Go enjoy the rest of your night.”
“I’ll drop you off and come back out if the fomo-bug bites. Hurry up. Scoot over.”
Don’t you get it? I’ll beat the shit out of you. I’ll punch your teeth down the back of your throat if I even see you think about your fucking laptop tonight. I swear to God I will. I like you well enough, Gideon, but she’s my sister. My baby sister. And you—knowingingly, unknowingly, it-doesn’t-fucking-matter-ingly—
“Just…” Caleb forces the word out to stop his whirling thoughts. “Just go.”
“Seriously, man, I don’t mind—”
“Just fuck off, Gideon.”
Anger doesn’t reveal itself in Gideon’s face or even in the way that he does, finally, tell Caleb goodbye. Rather, it reveals itself in the way he slams the car door behind him. In Caleb’s blurred periphery, he sees the cab driver flinch at the force used.
The two of them sit in silence for a beat.
The stranger says, “Good evening, sir.”
Caleb sinks deeper into the car seat—not to get comfortable but to, instead, will the leather to swallow him whole. “Is it?”
“Is it… not?”
He doesn’t respond.
Perturbed but doing his best to not show it, the driver continues, “Just to confirm: your destination is the Aerospace Academy, correct?”
Caleb screws up his face. “Apparently.”
✈︎
When Gideon tiptoes into the dorm four hours later—at roughly two in the morning—he does so with light footsteps and half-breaths, trying not to wake Caleb up. It’s unnecessary. Caleb is still awake. It’s also unnecessary because Caleb’s anger has turned away from Gideon entirely and has, instead, curled inward on itself. As he lies there, motionless, listening to Gideon clumsily prepare for sleep, his right wrist twinges with pain.
In the time he’s spent intoxicated and alone, boxed in by the four walls of their shared dorm, Caleb has brought himself to orgasm not once, not twice, fuck, not even three times. Four times. Each climax rawer and more guttural than the last.
He didn’t even click on anything specific.
Not a specific photograph album, or video, or livestream replay.
He just entered your account, scrolled and scrolled with his left thumb, staring down at rows upon rows of thumbnails of you in different positions, different poses, none of them locked away from him now because he’s paid for the full subscription. When did he do that? He doesn’t quite remember. But he’s done it and it’s given him full, seemingly unfettered access to you and your content. So much fucking content. And, as he sat at his desk scrolling with his left hand and stroking—no, fucking himself—with his right, the mere knowledge of all that content was enough. The mere thought of you, of your existence on such a platform, was enough to shove his body into orgasms that stole his breath and his sanity, the last one hurling him forward to clumsily smack his forehead against his wooden desk.
He washed his hands ferociously afterwards, standing in the darkness of the bathroom with his head lowered so he wouldn’t catch a glimpse of himself in the mirror. He swears he was thorough and yet he lays in bed, worrying that he didn’t clean up everything, that something remains. Is there a stain on the floor? On the underside of his desk? On his soul, perhaps? Even now with his face buried in his pillow, his forehead throbs—with guilt, with drink, with the dull echo of impact.
He can’t fault Gideon for not knowing it’s you—not fairly, anyway—but he can absolutely fault himself. All the liquor he spent his night drowning in and that logic still remains afloat. He saw Gideon’s face, saw his genuine concern and confusion at the bar. He knows that he doesn’t know that it’s you. But Caleb… Caleb knows that bedroom, that plushie, that bed frame, that poster. He knows you and yet… four orgasms, an annual subscription payment charged to his account, notifications for your posts switched on.
Isn’t it normal for big brothers to find their baby sisters beautiful?
He knows the answer just as much as he knows that he’s still asking the entirely wrong question.
So, he spends the rest of the witching hours doing exactly that: faulting himself. Pressing his wrist into the mattress at an awkward angle, aggravating the joint not just as punishment but as a necessary precaution to stop himself from falling asleep. He avoids his dreams because he knows what he’ll find the moment he closes his eyes: your beautiful face, dirtied and dripping with his cum.
✈︎
“Is your grandmother sick?”
One of the first things Caleb—and the other members of his entering cohort—learnt at the academy was how to present themselves in front of their superiors. They were all still too green behind the ears to do anything formal like saluting, but there were expectations all the same. Posture, for one, had to be perfect. Shoulders back. Chin level. Chest lifted. Hands clasped behind the back, the body an image of pristine discipline and self-control.
Caleb stands like this now and feels the hard bump of his phone in his back pocket. He shouldn’t have it on him—there are strict rules about bringing phones into supervisor offices—but he’d forgotten it was there.
A single buzz travels from the pocketed device and up the back of his left hand. Everything between his ears seems to buzz with it.
He’s turned all his notifications off.
All of them.
All of them, of course, except for yours.
What message has he received from you—and fuck—on what platform?
“Son,” a voice cuts through the buzzing, “I asked you a question.”
“My sister,” Caleb blurts out.
The older man—Caleb’s training officer—doesn’t flinch away from the sudden increase in Caleb’s volume, the sudden tension in his voice, but the raising of his brow signifies pretty clearly that the shift is unexpected. Unnatural. Not normal. It takes a lot of effort for Caleb to suck in a slow breath and he uses that moment to unclench his fists, lower his shoulders from where they’ve hiked up towards his ears.
“My sister is”—probably livestreaming right now. Spreading her thighs and the lips of her cunt to thousands of slobbering, starving men located all across the globe—”unwell, sir, and my grandmother is far too elderly to handle her all alone.”
“You think you’re the only cadet with a family?”
Caleb’s eye twitches. “No, sir,” he says, “but from that reaction, I assume I’m the only one brave enough to come to you about missing school on their behalf.”
“Thin line between bravery and disrespect.”
“And I’ll walk it in order to honour my obligations to my family,” Caleb rebuttals, his tone blade precise. Then, remembering that he’s trying to trigger the man’s favour and not his ire, he tacks on, “Sir.”
The man stares at him before dropping his eyes to the file on the desk in front of him. Caleb can guess what’s in it: his stellar grades, his superb physical training reviews, his pesky failed mental health evaluation, his impeccable flying stats. So when the man doesn’t comment on any of it and instead says, “It says here that she’s got heart issues,” Caleb tenses.
Why do they have your information? And, how did they get it? He definitely doesn’t remember giving it to them. He has questions, several of them, but he swallows them, leaves them to dissolve in the acid of his stomach for now.
What was that class earlier in the week about? Ah, yes. The importance of timing and prioritisation.
“Yes, sir.”
“Hmm.”
The older man gives him four days leave and a week of canteen cleaning obligations for when he returns.
So, that’s what Caleb sticks to. When people ask him where he’ll be over the weekend and when he tells them that he’s heading home, he tells them that a member of his family is feeling unwell. And when they ask which member—because there are only two of them and everyone seems to know that about him—he’ll shake his head and say no, no it’s not Gran, it’s you.
You.
You’re the sick one. You, sticking out your tongue to show the back of your throat to these men on the internet. You, shoving your panties down in public spaces to take pictures of a wet cunt nestled between plump, impossibly smooth thighs. You, pressing fingers and toys into each and every one of your holes for tips and niche internet fame.
Not him, who’s paid a chunk of his grocery allowance in order to watch it all.
He’s going home because you’re the one who’s sick and he needs… he needs to take care of you. He repeats that mantra in his head as he bows his head slightly before leaving his training officer’s office behind, repeats the mantra as he steamrolls his way through the hallways back towards his dorm room, ignoring smiles and foreign waves as he makes the journey. If he was in his right mind he might’ve been happy to find the room empty, Gideon-free, but he’s not in his right mind and as he finally pulls his phone out of his pocket to see the notification from you his sanity is further questioned.
It’s not a LookSee notification.
It’s three text messages.
You left behind a couple jumpers, the first one reads. The second: You’re not here to wear them yourself so… And, of course, the third message is a picture.
He doesn’t open it.
He wants to—can feel his fingers twitch, can feel saliva pool at his molars with the force of how much he wants to—but he doesn’t.
“Sick, sick, sick,” he mumbles to himself when he tosses his phone down on a nearby surface. To keep his hands busy he snatches up a nearby rucksack and makes quick, haphazard work of shoving his clothes and underwear into it.
It’s you who’s sick. You.
Not him.
Not.
Him.