Work Text:
“What were you wearing?”
Lister can’t make sense of the tweet at first. It’s two in the morning and he’s been scrolling through Twitter for the past few hours, his promise to Rowan that he would sleep tonight long forgotten.
It only begins to click as he opens the quote retweets, seeing hundreds of peoples stories from the lowest points in their lives. All within a 280 character limit. He scrolls through them slowly, reading each one with care, as if he was reading a text from a friend. Some seem to be adults, a lot still children. An ache forms deep in his chest, growing with each post he reads until he can feel it in his skin. Certain situations evoke an eerily familiar sensation. He reads about a boy and his music teacher, leaving him with a sickly sense of deja vu.
He remembers hearing about an art exhibit with the same premise months ago, but he hadn’t thought twice about it until now. Thinking about that kind of stuff for too long only ever brings back unwanted memories, things he assumed were never that bad until recently. Now it’s too late to distract himself, hot hands squeezing the cold skin of his thigh. All he can do is lay there and wait, tell himself it isn’t real, that nothing’s happening, that it doesn’t hurt so he’s okay.
He thinks of the woman and her wedding dress; how the best night of her life had been tainted by the man she believed to be the love of her life. Does she have to look away at the sight of pretty white dresses? Did she ever meet someone new, someone who treats her well? He thinks of the various displays of children's clothes, too small to go through something so horrible. Much, much too small. He’s never been religious, if God exists then he has no desire to dedicate his life to a being that would let any harm come to a child smaller than he was.
He tries to think about what he was wearing the first time he had sex, but he can't focus on a singular thought. They all come back to him so fast, only to fade away again moments after. Another pair of hands ghost over his chest, and he pulls a pillow tightly to himself. So tightly he can barely breathe.
He opens his camera roll. He scrolls through old pictures of him and his friends, remembering the times everything wasn’t so shit. Videos of band practice, pictures of sleepovers at Jimmy’s, the odd stray cat decided to join him as he waited in the rain at bus stops.
He scrolls all the way down to where they must’ve been 15, as his Year 11 timetable stares back at him. Just above is a collection of pictures from his 16th birthday. Rowan had gotten him a card with those giant, ugly '16 today' badges, forcing him to wear it all day. There’s a picture of the three of them in their uniforms, Lister in the middle, wearing it with an innocent, slightly awkward smile.
He can hear the pop of the buttons being undone as his white collared shirt is pulled off his shoulders. Faintly, but he can hear it.
Then it hits him.
His uniform. He was still wearing his school uniform.
Luckily enough for him, his birthday landed on a Friday. Usually, he'd take the day off, sleep in late, treat himself to breakfast for once and watch movies he pirated on his mother's laptop alone. But this year was different, he had friends that didn't make him dread going to school anymore. Almost everyone treated him in ways he wasn't used to, with something similar to respect. People he didn't talk to wished him a happy birthday, and he couldn't even tell if he knew them from history or physics. Everything was so new, and fun, and for once he felt he didn’t actually hate school.
It could’ve stayed that way if he just chose to take the bus home instead.
It wasn't uncommon for her to pick him up from school on days his mum worked overtime and he didn't want to take the bus. They had become increasingly common by then actually, but he was okay with that. He enjoyed the time he spent with her when it was just the two of them. Most adults in his life were either shit, or thought he was shit. But she wasn't like his teachers or his parents, and much less Cecily. During her breaks, she bought him snacks and listened to his rants about his most recent argument with Rowan. He told her how he was so sure there’s something about him that had caused his mother to hate him, but he wasn’t sure what. He had felt so unwanted in every place that wasn't with her. She was the first adult that made him feel seen.
She picked him up that day, but instead of driving him home, they went back to her place. When she stopped at a restaurant on the way, the waiter mistook them for a mother and son. He remembers sharing dessert with her, but not what they had. She paid for his food and invited him inside shortly after. The door is locked behind them.
A gift bag was waiting for him on her coffee table. He found himself running to it like a kid on Christmas morning.
He immediately opened the box of chocolates beside it, taking one, then handing the opened box out for her as he looked in the bag. To his surprise, it was a bottle of vodka. What looked to be an expensive kind, too. Back then he never drank that much, only ever at the occasional house party everyone at school now wanted him at. Vodka is something he’d never even considered drinking. He’d always been told to stay away from it. His Mum would tell that it wasn’t for people his age. But he was different, she told him, he was mature, so it was completely fine.
A shot was poured for him. She tried to teach him how to take it, but his face gave away how much he hated the taste and the way it burned at the back of his throat. A few seconds later, she came out of the kitchen with a bottle of cherry coke, added it to a new glass and encouraged him to drink it like that. Something sweet to make it easier for him. Or maybe to make it easier for her. He doesn’t know anymore.
It wasn’t so bad the second time.
As the night went on, she continued to fill his glass, slowly he began to pay no attention to the taste, the half empty bottle abandoned on the side of the table. He was too young to process the warnings; the hunger in her eyes, the way she got closer with each drink, nor the hand trailing up his thigh. His glass nearly empty, she held it to his lips, watching as he swallowed the rest. When some spilled onto his shirt, he giggled to himself, only to be interrupted by her kissing him.
It came as a shock, but he didn’t push her away. He sat there, eyes wide open, unsure of what he was supposed to do.
He was wearing boxers with a stupid Minecraft print on the waistband, too. Childish, he knows, but he hadn’t exactly expected to lose his virginity on her couch that night. He can remember throwing them away when he got home, terrified his mother would somehow find out, despite the fact he did all his own laundry. She still doesn’t know. Part of him now wished she had found out sooner, maybe then he wouldn’t feel the way he does now. Shadows of her hands staining his pale skin.
His tie was one of those fake, clip-on ones. To this day he still has no idea how to tie a real one, Rowan or Jimmy always offering to do it for him instead. She had attempted to teach him once.
Four years ago, he was still a child. He barely cared about it when it happened, he even bragged about it to Rowan while drunk at some point. It didn’t go very well. Yet now, at twenty years old, he finds himself crying in his bedroom over mistakes that he shouldn’t consider his own.
He screenshots the picture, cropping out the others, and opens Twitter again. He replies to the tweet without an explanation. He isn’t sure why, but he does it anyway.
As a flood of notifications comes streaming through he instantly regrets it. Somehow he manages to delete the tweet before his app crashes. This is an issue for future Lister. And future Rowan. And future Jimmy. They’ll find out about it in– well, a few hours at this point. Fuck.
Ghostly hands still float across his body. Tight around his neck and thighs, groping him in places he never asked her to.
He can’t help but feel this is incredibly dramatic of him. It wasn’t like anything was that bad, people go through worse. He wasn’t forced, or beaten, or kidnapped. He was just a little too drunk and a little too nervous to say no. Regretting sex doesn’t mean he was raped, he just made a bad decision.
He wonders if she would’ve listened if he rejected her advances. If he had cried like he was now, then maybe she would’ve been kind enough to let go and take him home and he’d be over it by now.
Part of him knows that wouldn’t happen. If anything, him being too drunk to care made it a lot less traumatic for him.
A phone rings. Nobody picks it up. It rings again, and nobody answers. By the third call, he realises it’s his own.
By the time he checks it, there are three missed calls from Cecily.
She picks up on the first ring when he calls back. “I’m sorry,” he says, but he’s not sure what he’s apologising for.
“It wasn’t your fault. Not at all, Allister,” she says. She knows. He doesn’t know how, but she knows exactly what he’s thinking. “I get it, it’s hard–”
“You don’t get it,” he mumbles into his phone.
“Allister,” she cuts him off before he can continue, “I get it.”
The weight of the words lays heavy on his chest as she repeats herself.
She gets it. She understands.
He cries harder. Not too sure whether it’s out of hurt for Cecily, guilt now creeping up on him, or relief that someone in his life actually understands what it’s like.
He finally talks to someone, an actual adult, about it for the first time. He tells her almost everything, who it was, how long it went on. About how, now that he doesn’t drink, she haunts him when he sleeps at night. The woman from the recording studio that Cecily picked out, in hope that it being closer to home would be best for them as they started out. Safer and more convenient than travelling all the way to London just yet, back when they had plenty of time to think about things other than the band. It’s a bit funny looking back at it, he thinks to himself.
Cecily keeps talking to him until he tires himself out. Her words are soft. The softest he’s ever heard her speak before. In those twenty minutes, Lister feels like a child again. Back when his mum would tell him how brave he is after scraping his knee at the park. Or when he’d be allowed to sleep in her bed after a particularly scary bad-dream.
Nightmares used to be much more simple back then. Lister now knows he should’ve feared the living more than the dead.
The call doesn’t end until Cecily is sure he’s fallen asleep. That conversation didn’t fix him. He still has nightmares that night, but when he wakes up Rowan is making breakfast for him and Jimmy. They don't bring it up as he sits himself on a stool at the kitchen island. Neither one of them brings it up, the twitter situation– the newest one that is. For a second he hopes they haven’t heard of it yet, but as Jimmy passes him a plate of French toast, he knows that they already do.