Work Text:
The summer the creek ran dry, the cicadas screamed until it sounded like the air itself was splitting open.
Chris remembers that first. The noise. The heat. The way everything on the Washington property felt swollen and feverish, like it was waiting for a storm that wouldn’t come.
They were sixteen.
The twins were alive. The house was still holy ground.
Josh took him down past the tree line, past the place the groundskeepers bothered to trim. To the old hunting shed that hadn’t been used in years. Rusted hooks still hung from the rafters. A deer skull nailed crooked to the back wall like a shrine no one finished building.
It smelled like dust and old iron.
Josh sat on the workbench like he owned the decay. Chris resisted telling him he was now due a tetanus shot after this.
“You ever watch people sleep?” he asked, like he was asking about the weather.
Chris laughed automatically. “Dude, what?”
Josh didn’t laugh.
There was a security system installed after some tabloid nonsense a few years back. Cameras in the hallways. Cameras outside the bedrooms. Not inside, that would be illegal, even for the Washingtons.
But Josh had figured out the passwords anyway.
“Sometimes I can’t sleep,” he said. “So I just… watch.”
The cicadas pulsed outside. The shed held its breath. Chris imagined the shell giving away under his foot, turning into dust, green bleeding on dirt.
“I watch the hallway cameras. The red light flickering. I watch people walk to the bathroom. I watch them come back. I watch the doors close.” He swallowed, almost thoughtful. “I like knowing they’re in there. That they’re breathing. That if something happened, I’d see it first.”
Chris’s stomach dipped.
“That’s kinda creepy, man.”
Josh tilted his head.
“Is it?”
He didn’t sound defensive. He sounded curious. Like he genuinely wanted the answer.
Chris tried to picture it. Josh alone in the dark theater room, screens glowing blue against his face, watching the house sleep like it was something sacred. A bowl of buttery popcorn on his lap, seeping through the flimsy material and onto his dark wash jeans.
Josh continued, softer now.
“Sometimes I stand outside the twins’ doors. Just to hear them breathing.” A pause. “Just to make sure.”
There it was.
Not violent.
Not cruel.
Just wrong enough.
Chris should have stepped back.
Instead, he stepped closer.
“You’re just paranoid,” Chris said, voice gentler than he meant it to be. “You like control. That’s not the same as being… you know. A serial killer.”
Josh’s mouth twitched.
“That’s reassuring.”
Silence pressed in around them. A fly buzzed against the warped windowpane. Legs tapping insistently, asking to be let in, or in frantic warning.
Josh slid off the workbench and closed the distance between them until Chris could smell the faint sweetness of sunscreen and something metallic underneath, like coins rubbed between fingers.
“Sometimes,” Josh said, quieter, “I think about what it would be like if everyone just stopped.”
Chris stiffened.
Josh saw it and clarified immediately, quick, almost frantic:
“Not like that. Not blood. Not screaming. Just, quiet. Like the house empty. Like I’m the only one awake. And I can walk through every room and know exactly where everything is. No surprises.”
His eyes lifted to Chris’s.
“I like knowing where people are,” he admitted. “I like knowing where you are.”
That was the part that shifted something.
The confession stopped being abstract.
Josh reached out and caught Chris’s wrist, fingers wrapping around the pulse point like he was checking for proof of life.
Chris’s heart was hammering.
Josh smiled faintly.
“See? You’re alive. That’s good.”
The grip wasn’t painful. Just firm. Possessive in a way that didn’t feel practiced.
Chris knew, in some distant, rational part of his brain, that this was a red flag. That most people would pull away.
He didn’t.
The urge to grab, to pull, to reciprocate, grew with each passing moment.
“Josh,” he said, breath uneven, “you’re not hurting anyone.”
Josh searched his face like he was waiting for disgust.
Chris didn’t give it to him.
Instead he shrugged, small and helpless and honest. “You’re just… weird.”
Josh huffed a soft laugh. Relief flickered across his features so quickly it almost hurt to look at.
“If I ever did something bad,” Josh asked, voice dipping into something dangerously sincere, “you’d still be on my side, right?”
There are moments that divide your life clean in half. This was one of them. Chris could have joked. Could have deflected. Could have said it depends.
Instead he said, without thinking, “Yeah.”
No hesitation.
Josh’s fingers tightened just slightly around his pulse.
Something passed between them then, not a touch beyond that wrist, but something heavier. An understanding. A choice.
Footsteps echoed faintly in the distance. One of the twins calling their names.
Josh dropped his hand first.
They walked back to the house like nothing had happened.
They never spoke about it again.
After that day, Josh grew sharper. More theatrical. Like he regretted letting anyone see under the skin.
Chris leaned harder into jokes.
And the creek stayed dry until September.
Years later, in the lodge basement, metal and damp wood thick in the air, blood staining their clothes, with tear ridden faces, Chris would smell something faintly rusted and remember fingers around his pulse.
Remember the question.
If I ever did something bad, you’d still be on my side, right?
And the worst part, the thing he would never admit out loud, wasn’t that he hadn’t known.
It was that he had.
And he hadn’t minded.