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Stanley has a bit of an obsession with Xeno.
It’s always been that way. He's known Xeno his whole life, after all: he's only ever spent the first month of his life as an infant without him.
Born a month apart, exactly thirty days and twenty-two minutes apart. If Stanley believed in fate, then there would be no better example of it than that.
For the longest time, everyone had known the two of them came as a pair, just like vanilla accompanies chocolate, or sunshine follows rain. Back in kindergarten, Xeno used to throw tantrums whenever he was separated from his best friend, his big, dark eyes welling up with angry tears as his whole face turned red in frustration.
Stanley would stay silent; he had never been the crying kind. But he'd hold on to Xeno's small hand so tightly that their teachers would physically struggle to pull them apart, until they inevitably gave up and let the two boys have their way.
It was the natural order of things, after all.
Stanley and Xeno. Xeno and Stanley.
They had had all their firsts together. They lost their first tooth a day apart; celebrated their first Christmas together; even had their baptism simultaneously, the two 4-year-olds categorically refusing for one to be blessed by the priest before the other.
Their parents all thought it was sweet, at first. Xeno was outspoken and excitable, while Stanley remained cool and level-headed. Stanley was athletic, while Xeno devoured books. They completed each other in every regard to the point it was almost comical.
“Here’s Stan’s shadow,” they’d say with a smile when the smaller boy hid behind the taller one.
“There goes Xeno and his little knight,” they’d laugh when the blonde would carry his best friend on his back all the way home to shield a lightly scraped knee.
Things only showed signs of changing in their third year of primary school.
Stanley's parents—his father, mostly—had begun encouraging him to spend time with other children during recess.
“Why?” he had asked, genuinely confused. “I have Xeno.”
The man had chuckled at that, patting his shoulder with a large, calloused hand.
“’ Course you do, kiddo,” he had hummed in his deep, gravely voice. “But don't ya want some friends who like the same stuff ya do? Football n’ cartoons n’ all that?”
He didn’t care about that, not really. Xeno was enough.
Xeno had always been more than enough.
Still, he tried, for the sake of making his father proud. Finding friends was easy for him: other children were drawn to his natural sense of leadership and his budding good looks. He exuded a type of silent confidence that was impossible not to fall in line with. Boys argued over which team would have him during gym class; girls lined up during breaks to giggle and hold his hand for a few seconds at a time.
He hadn't minded. The attention was neither good, nor bad: his ‘friends’ existed in a state of semi-relevance, fun to spend time with if Xeno wasn't around, irrelevant if Xeno was.
On the other hand, his other half struggled greatly with finding more companions. The other children didn't get his complicated jokes, his snarky comments, the way he dressed, or the way he talked.
He was too much for them, and they were too little for him.
The silver-haired boy would pretend he was unaffected by the whole affair, but Stanley could tell that was a lie.
Xeno cared. Xeno cared deeply.
He wanted others to learn about the elegant secrets of his beloved science, so they could marvel over his ideas and experiments.
Stanley had tried to have his other playmates include Xeno in their games every now and then, but the other boys quickly got bored with the young genius’ elaborate inventions and never-ending rants. After a while, he had stopped trying to push it, and, to his surprise, Xeno seemed much happier with only him around.
And he quickly found that… he felt the very same way.
Some odd part of him liked that Xeno couldn't find anyone else who understood him—someone other than Stanley. He enjoyed being his one and only friend, his assistant, his confidante, his protector. Even if the young blonde didn’t always get all of the scientific ramblings his friend would go on and on about, he'd always be the one Xeno would come to, no matter the situation.
They didn’t need anyone else. They had, and would always have, each other.
At seven years old, Stanley came to realize the only human life he truly cared for—more than his parents’, more than his own—was Xeno’s.
As they grew a little older, threats to their precious status quo came and went; Stanley always took care of them carefully, with the same deadly precision he used to aim for a deer’s head on his hunting trips with his father.
Those dangers came in all shapes and sizes. Some were more obvious than others, easier to gently push to the side. Others required more force.
He didn’t mind. Not as long as it was for Xeno
Helene Liu had been a somewhat pretty girl, with her nerdy type of charm. Two long and dark braids framed her small, round face, a pair of thick pink glasses sitting at the edge of her button nose. Her teeth were all nice and straight when she smiled, like rows of tiny pearls.
She was a transfer student from Canada, and she had made the mistake of trying to worm her way into Xeno's brain in 3rd grade.
“You should have seen her prototype for the science fair, Stan!” Xeno had exclaimed for the umpteenth time that day, clearly not noticing his words were making Stanley want to puke. “The execution isn't perfect, far from it, but the concept and schematics were incredibly elegant! If it wasn't for our project, I’m certain she’d take the award home!”
He had never heard that level of admiration from the young genius for anyone their age, let alone anyone they went to school with.
He hated it. Oh, how he hated it.
The thought of Xeno doing his future projects with her, of him giving her those proud smiles reserved for him and holding her tanned hand instead of his, as their miniature rocket would soar into the skies, ripped a large hole through his stomach.
A hungry, aching gap that ached for sustenance, that required immediate action before the enemy gained any further territory.
He studied Helene like prey. What she ate, who her friends were, what time she left school. He didn’t need to write any of it down: he remembered everything with cold, placid certainty.
There was no place for error where Xeno was involved.
To this day, he felt no remorse as little Helene cried her eyes out when he pinned her to the girl’s dirty bathroom floor, her small nose bruised and bloodied. Dark specks of crimson were peppered on her face, blending with the rest of her freckles
“Don’t talk to Xeno ever again,” he had warned, his breath warm next to her ear, her twin braids dishevelled into unrecognizable messes. He had contemplated cutting them or burning them in front of her with his father’s lighter, but the result would be much harder to explain.
The girl kept on sobbing, too stupid to realize no one would come to her rescue no matter how loud she was. He had planned around all potential variables to guarantee no one would interrupt, calculated around the teachers’ rounds and the guardian pick-up time.
‘She’s not that smart, after all,’ he thought with a ping of vindication. This was the girl who thought she was good enough to take away Xeno from him?
“If I catch you sniffin’ around him again, I’m gonna put a bullet in your parents’ skull,” he whispered slowly, and he felt the body under his tense in fear. Good. “I know your dad works at the dentist clinic on Elmer Street. I know your mom goes joggin’ every morning on St Mary's at seven thirty. I know you love ‘em. Don’t ya?”
Helene let out a hiccup that vaguely resembled a yes. Her glasses lay a few feet away from her, broken and out of reach. With how much she was crying, she probably wouldn’t even be able to see anything with them on.
She’d gone from pretty little girl to blind, pitiful mole rat in the span of a minute.
“Then don’t talk to him. Don’t even look at him,” he bristled. The open chasm in his stomach bellowed fiercely, hungry for the small gasps of pain and fear she let out uncontrollably.
She had to know. She had to learn.
“Don’t take things that aren’t yours.”
The next day, Helene Liu had spontaneously dropped out of the town’s junior science fair, despite the event being only a week away. Two months later, her parents had moved her to a different school, citing that their little girl seemed to have a lot of trouble integrating into her current environment.
Stanley had never heard from her again.
After they’d won the science fair, Xeno and Stanley used the first ten dollars of their two-hundred-dollar check to buy more ice cream than either of them could ever eat. They’d devoured it together by the river, laughing with their bellies much too full, Xeno already discussing his ideas for their next project. Their hands were laced together over the shiny golden trophy, soon to join their growing collection in Xeno’s bedroom.
And all it had taken to render the world this perfect had been to make a single little girl cry.
Stanley could live with that.
And he could live with a lot more.
Xeno has a bit of an obsession with Stanley.
He remembers vividly the first time he had seen his friend’s lips wrap around a colourful sucker, and wished they’d been on his skin instead.
He had been ten, too young to properly understand the extent of what those thoughts had meant, but too smart to refute the undeniable feeling of warmth that blossomed in his chest whenever his eyes focused for too long on Stanley’s lips.
He’d studied the problem from a mathematical angle, at first. The Greeks believed beauty to be found in structures following the golden ratio, in the symmetries that mimicked the appearance of the Gods.
Stanley certainly fit that criteria: every inch of his face was perfect, his features in impeccable relation to one another, soft and sharp, feminine and masculine. Had Xeno not known any better, he could have thought his best friend was a marble statue that had been given movement.
But Stanley, in all his elegance, was undoubtedly flesh and blood. Which meant he could fall prey to the same pitfalls all living creatures did: fatigue, illness, and eventually, death.
But not on Xeno’s watch. Not as long as Xeno was beside him. If the very rules of nature and physics ever attempted to take Stanley away from him, he’d fight them tooth and nail with the power of science until his own last breath.
It was the least he could do for Stanley, after all.
His Stanley.
Parasites were attracted to the blonde’s looks like moths to a flame. A different girl would slip a cutesy pink note in his locker at least once a week, professing flowery nonsense like they had any claims over his knight.
Unfortunately for them, knowing Stanley was a science, one which he had perfected. He had only ever needed a single try to guess the code to his best friend’s locker: 10-01-996.
Xeno’s birthday.
Every week, he methodically gathered every stupid glittery card from Stanley’s locker before patiently ripping them to indecipherable shreds and throwing them at the bottom of a garbage can. His friend remained none the wiser, and the few girls who did gather the courage to ask him why he hadn’t replied to their confession would only receive a confused, blank stare.
It made the unnamed thing inside Xeno purr with pleasure. The same illness that told him to pick up Stanley’s discarded lollipop sticks and put them inside his own mouth to chase the remains of his taste.
He approached his newfound fascination with Stanley’s lips as he did everything else; an hypothesis.
“Stan,” he had asked one afternoon when the blonde was finishing his homework in his bedroom as Xeno read a book on molecular fusion. “Come here.”
Stanley hadn’t argued, or demanded why. He had simply put his pen down, risen from his chair, and gone to stand patiently at Xeno’s side for his next order.
That’s why he was the perfect knight.
That’s why he belonged to Xeno.
“Is the lollipop good?” he had asked, unblinking.
“’S the same as usual. So yeah, I guess,” Stanley shrugged.
The young genius waited for a handful of seconds, staring at the plastic stick poking from Stanley’s mouth. His lips had turned cherry pink from the colour additives, almost as if he were wearing lipstick.
The thing in him hurt with want, a growing tumour overwhelming his nervous system and the might of his young mind.
“I want to try it,” he stated flatly, and Stanley had looked at him with slight confusion.
“You don’t like candy. You always say it’s bad for my teeth,” he replied matter-of-factly, raising a brow.
Xeno frowned, a pout already forming on his face, and the blonde sighed.
“Fine, fine. Just test it on here, then,” he offered, tapping his own bottom lip with the tip of his finger.
Other children their age would surely have found it strange.
But not them. Never them.
If Stanley was an extension of Xeno’s body, then licking Stanley’s lip was the same as licking his own. Nothing weird about that. It was only an experiment.
When he was done, pulling back from the blonde’s face, he noticed the dark flush that had spread on his tan cheeks, highlighting hundreds of freckles that speckled his skin like stars.
“H-how is it?” Stanley had asked, slightly out of breath.
“Tolerable,” Xeno had simply answered, nonchalantly returning to his book. He could only pray his best friend wouldn’t notice his elevated heart rate from how close they had been.
He had been able to confirm that benzaldehyde—the organic compound behind the artificial flavour of cherry—was indeed not the genesis of the bizarre set of symptoms afflicting him.
Rather, the root cause seemed to be Stanley’s lips themselves.
Interesting.
“Let’s try a different flavour, next time,” he suggested with a smile, and, as he always did, Stanley agreed.
Stanley would never admit it to him, but Xeno was the reason he had begun smoking.
He remembered interrogating his father as a child about the habit, the evening after they’d studied the dangerous effects of tobacco in biology class.
“Miss Donahay said it’s gonna kill you one day,” Stanley repeated to his father with a frown.
The older man had laughed, pulling the cigarette from his lips. The smoke had danced in the autumn air, thick and gray, climbing up and up into the sky until it reached the clouds.
“Lotta things will kill ya, kid,” he hummed, inhaling another puff. His large shoulders seem to decompress with the action. “Hell, ya mama’ll probably kill me first. But this helps me relax. Helps me forget the stuff that’s stuck in my brain. Don’t ya have shit you’d like to forget, too?”
Stanley stayed silent, and his father chuckled drily.
“’Course ya don’t, you’re thirteen, for crying out loud. Just make sure ya don’t touch this stuff, ya hear? It’ll mess ya up for good.”
But Stanley did have something he wanted to forget. Thoughts that, no matter how hard he tried, wouldn’t leave his mind.
Xeno’s legs.
Those thin, delicate, pale legs that seemed like they could crack from a strong gust of wind. He’d spend hours lying in bed as he held on to yet another piece of clothing he’d stolen from his friend's closet; imagining the kisses and bruises he’d leave on them, the way they’d wrap around his waist to bring Stanley closer.
He dreamed about digging his fingers in the little scientist’s frail thighs until they turned purple, about putting Xeno’s dainty ankles on his shoulders and devouring every inch of him like an animal.
Xeno's hair.
He thought of the long, beautiful, silvery strands the other boy spends so much time styling each morning perfectly, and how good it would feel to ruin them. To grab a fistful of the near-white tresses and tug, the slick gel melting uselessly around the warmth of his fingers. Xeno could try and protest with the flowery language of his, beg, even, but Stanley wouldn't falter. He wouldn't even need to use much of his strength to keep the young genius’s head flush to his crotch, to press those small lips against the metallic zipper of his jeans.
He pictured angry, crystalline tears falling from onyx eyes, as sweat, saliva, and other fluids mix in the sad remains of Xeno's pompadour, like a king with a broken crown.
Xeno's hands.
His perfect fingers so unlike Stanley's own calloused, tan digits, wrapping around the blonde’s neck, and squeezing. The ten pale fingers and their impeccably sharp nails haunted him, their ghosts lingering on his skin at all hours of the day. He saw himself, on his knees like a dog, at Xeno's mercy—where he belongs, where he's always belonged—and the calculated way those fingers would hold his jaw open. Xeno would observe him with pleased disgust, still so short for a thirteen-year-old boy, and spit, ensuring with the tip of his index that Stanley didn’t waste a drop before swallowing.
He knew it wasn’t normal. Not only was Xeno a guy, but none of his other friends even talked about desiring girls the way he desired Xeno.
They wanted to make out, hold hands, maybe touch their breasts.
Stanley wanted Xeno to ruin every part of his body and mind until he couldn’t say a word but his master's name.
So, he started smoking. The first cigarette tasted like burnt plastic and cat hair, and he nearly choked on it. The second one went smoother, his eyes only watering at every subsequent hit. The third finally felt relaxing, like the gentle wave of heat of a stovetop in the middle of winter.
It didn’t make him forget about Xeno. But, somehow, it helped.
Xeno had never been angry at Stanley before.
Stanley was perfect. Stanley was the better half of their shared soul. Stanley was the reason why the world spun and the sun shone.
But then again, Stanley had never lied to him before.
He should know better than to lie to Xeno. Xeno knew more about Stanley than Stanley knew about himself. He owned a decade’s worth of notes on the blonde—every lost tooth, every growth spurt, every decibel his voice lowered.
He even secretly took samples of the blonde's blood once a month during the nights he slept over, just to make certain the useless doctors at the local clinic hadn’t missed anything important in their findings.
They never did, because his Stanley was always in peak condition. The ideal amounts of iron, potassium, and sodium. Exceptionally well-defined muscles for a fifteen-year-old. Skin devoid of a single blemish or impurity.
An irreplaceable human specimen.
It wasn’t from lack of trust that he'd placed a tracker on Stanley, but from fear of theft. Others had noticed his strengths, smarts, and beauty, and many had tried encroaching on Xeno's territory by inviting the blonde on various dates or outings.
None of them realized Xeno’s established ownership over Stanley. Per the doctrine of discovery, he was the only person who had rights over the blonde’s body and mind. He was the one who found him, who sculpted and moulded him through years spent glued to his side.
He already had three legalized patents to his name and a comet catalogued under Wingfield 376 for his contributions in its recording, but he’d happily trade all of them away for the chance of permanently branding Stanley.
He knew his best friend was smart enough to stay away from plebeians who couldn't decipher his true worth if they had a microscope shoved up their ass; but a scientist had to consider all possible variables, even however unlikely.
Which was why, although raging disbelief hit him once he realized Stanley wasn't at the basketball court on Fifth Street like he said he'd be, but rather, somewhere deep in the wooded area next to the local high school, Xeno remembered to breathe.
Stanley wouldn't lie to him; that statement was a universal truth. Which meant someone had to have tricked him, or led him astray.
The red dot that identified Stanley’s position beeped insistently on his monitor. He headed there without a second thought, not bothering to grab his autumn coat.
He expected to find Stanley at some sort of degenerate party, wrapped around some disgusting, filthy, germ-ridden cheerleader with her inelegant tongue halfway down his mouth. Xeno was many things, but a fool wasn’t one of them: he knew what boys their age talked about after class, how they’d oggle the growing curves of their female classmates’ bodies. Even in his university courses, it seemed to be the only thing his fellow male students talked about during breaks.
Of course, such trivial things had never interested him, but he’d always feared his other half might one day crave the one thing he couldn’t offer him: a woman’s touch.
The thought spun over and over in his mind as he ran faster than he ever had before, almost tripping over thick roots twice, the wool of his sweater catching in wild pine branches
What he found wasn’t what he expected.
It was a small, derelict cabin, one barely big enough to contain a bed and a kitchenette. Once, it could have been the refuge of a hunter, somewhere to stack fresh meat and spend a few nights.
As it stood, now, it was a hunk of wood, rust and lichen, with the roof halfway collapsed in on itself, and a single partially broken window catching the dying light of the day with its sharp edges.
Xeno carefully approached the crumbling shack, his heart beating wildly in his chest. All his fears were coming true in front of him: Stanley, his Stanley, must have been in there with some girl, spreading her legs open and letting her kiss his perfect lips.
No, no, no! That’s not right, it can’t be—!
He pressed his body next to the broken window, desperately listening in for sound, any sound.
The groaning of wood. Laboured breathing. A wet, slippery back and forth. Heavy exhales that bordered on moans.
In that moment, Xeno remembered every single way a human being could be killed.
He would find this girl, and make her pay.
He’d open her up with a surgical scalpel first, to carefully study which part of her had managed to entice Stanley. He’d watch everything from the beating of her heart in his hand to the way her blood would pool to the floor with the dedication of a mortician.
Then, he’d make her suffer, administering various chemicals to her skin until it burned, and she lost her voice from screaming, her vocal cords reduced to mush.
Finally, when all the light had gone from her eyes, he’d kill her, dissolve her body in acid, turn her bones to powder, and spread the remains in the sewer system.
It was only a fitting end for larcenous trash.
But to do that, he had to actually peer through that damned window to know who she was. His meek little heart trembled at the idea of witnessing Stan smiling at someone else, discovering something new with someone else.
A first time that did not include Xeno.
But he had to look. He had no choice.
Beyond the dirty window stood Stanley, his back to him, his pants pooled at his knees. The rhythmic way he moved his hand at the level of his crotch left little doubt as to what he was doing, his back heaving with effort. But a quick look around the abandoned cabin revealed Stanley was very much alone; not a single wicked temptress in sight.
‘So he’s just masturbating?’ Xeno thought, immediately hit by a wave of relief. ‘But then, why go so far out to do it? Is he that scared his parents might stumble on him?’
Just then, he noticed a flash of white in Stanley’s hands. The other boy was holding onto something, a pristine piece of cloth that seemed wholly out of place in the dirty shack.
He recognized it immediately, his heart swelling with an entirely different emotion than the one that had driven him here in the first place.
It was his lab coat.
Stanley was holding his lab coat as he was pumping his cock, occasionally bringing it to his face and burying his nose into it.
“Xe…” came that beautiful voice from inside the cabin, “Fuck, Xeno…”
He had been certain he had lost that lab coat weeks ago. One day, he’d left it at their rocket test grounds, and the next, it was gone. Stanley had simply shrugged when he’d asked him if the blonde had seen it anywhere, and that had been the end of it.
But to know who had it this whole time, and more importantly, what it was being used for, filled Xeno with a sense of success greater than he’d ever experienced.
He watched silently as the blonde kept touching himself harshly, his pace quick and impatient, the fabric bundled in his fist. When he came, staining the pure white coat in sticky release, the young genius had to put a hand over his mouth to prevent a moan from escaping.
He was painfully hard.
He left the scene quickly after, scared Stanley might leave soon after being done—or worse, regain his superior sense of awareness and detect Xeno’s presence outside. Telling Stanley he had learned of his feelings towards him through using a GPS tracker and perversely peeping on him was far from elegant, so, he refrained. He knew that, some way or another, their relationship would evolve to its next logical phase naturally, without him needing to force it.
Still, every time the red dot on his monitor beeped in that spot in the forest, his feet took him to the little derelict cabin and that spot beneath the window on their own, where he listened and recorded the sound of his best friend moaning his name over, and over again.
If it was his name that Stanley was moaning, then surely, he owned the rights to those sounds and the person making them, didn’t he?
Stanley was jealous.
He’d always been easily prone to jealousy when it came to Xeno.
He envied Xeno's parents for getting to spend their nights and mornings with him; he despised Xeno's university professors for being able to hold his fascination; he cursed every doctor who had ever laid a hand on an inch of Xeno's skin that was still out of his reach.
Hell, some days, he'd find himself jealous of the various inanimate objects Xeno handled on the daily—how nice would it have been to be a vial of potassium nitrate so gently held between the young genius’s hands or the pillows he lay his head on every night?
He never voiced those feelings out loud, of course; he was reasonable enough to know it would sound crazy to anyone else, because it was crazy. His feelings for Xeno were driving him insane, an insatiable, never-ending craving for a delicacy he wasn't allowed to have, and his behaviour was growing more and more risky.
He knew all that, knew the dangers of what he was about to do, but it wasn't enough to stop him.
Xeno had been sleeping over at the university student dorms every week for the last three months. Before, his mother would drive him every morning to campus, a solid hour away from their little redneck town, and he'd return home in the evening by bus.
It was an arrangement that worked perfectly for the two boys, who would spend every evening together tinkering with new projects and schemes before parting ways for the night. Stanley was used to not seeing Xeno during the day, anyway; the other teen had started his bachelor's degree in physics when he was just ten, leaving his best friend behind in the mediocrity of middle school.
He couldn’t be mad at that, not when it made Xeno so happy.
But now that Xeno had begun his master’s degree, and that he had entered the final stage of writing his thesis, he had no time to spare doing the back and forth between their shitty little town and the dorm in Houston every day. Especially now that the sixteen-year-old was preparing for his internship at NASA…
Of course, Stanley was proud of him. Xeno often called them two halves of the same soul, which meant that any accomplishment of Xeno’s was an accomplishment of Stanley’s, and vice versa. But only seeing the subject of his growing obsessions on weekends—with heavy bags under his usually wide, shining eyes, and a constant look of utter fatigue—was beginning to feel like torture.
His mind had made up for the physical lack of Xeno’s presence by filling every single thought in Stanley’s mind with him.
Xeno, Xeno, Xeno, Xeno.
The scent of gel in his hair and the dimples of his smile. The lovable frown of disapproval every time he’d catch Stanley smoking. The pale collarbone peaking from beneath his shirts, begging to be marked by Stanley’s teeth.
He was starving for him.
The young marksman was barely sleeping, eating at his own fingernails until they bled at the thought of some older classmate seducing Xeno with talks of science and working their way into his bed, much too far for Stanley to intervene.
Going to the range to shoot his frustrations out had stopped helping days ago, and he'd reached the point where he had to smoke a pack a day to keep his nerves from breaking. A guy at school had asked him for a lighter last week, and he'd been so lost in his own murderous thoughts that he'd almost broken the poor kid's arm by reflex.
‘Xeno, Xeno, Xeno, Xeno,’ his mind kept on singing like a prayer to an absent god.
No item in his collection of stolen treasures was enough anymore; they’d all lost their scent far too quickly, leaving him with a pitiful altar of useless clothes, food wrappers, and scribbled notes that he gathered no pleasure from licking and rubbing against his face.
Having Xeno living apart from him was worse than anything he could have ever expected; it was asking him to breathe without lungs.
It was pure survival instinct that forced him to grab the keys to his car that morning—an old red Toyota Camry from his father that barely held on together with glue and tape—and drive straight to Rice University without a word to anyone. Who would even scold him for cutting class? Xeno?
If he was swift enough, the other teen would never even know he’d passed by his dorm.
In theory, he could have turned around at any point, taken a left from the highway and returned on the road that led home, and it'd be like nothing had even happened at all.
But in practice, ‘home’ was where Xeno was, and without him, Stanley was so lost he'd started to forget how to live.
He parked a couple of streets away from the main campus, careful to keep his baseball cap over his eyes and to blend into the crowd of young adults bustling about. Xeno would be in class right about now, none the wiser; Stanley had learned his schedule by heart, just in case.
Sneaking in was no issue: he looked older for his age, and the security guard didn’t even blink as he waltzed right in through the front gates. He found Xeno’s room easily, and, spotting no potential witnesses, quickly fished the small device with the copy of Xeno’s ID from his jeans pocket.
He’d watched Xeno clone cards hundreds of times, from his father’s credit card to the administrator's pass at their local arcade. The process was easy enough for someone like him to grasp, especially with a genius’s guidance, and a single glimpse at Xeno’s original card was enough for him to memorize the factory and card numbers.
The other teen had most definitely not intended for him to use that knowledge in this way, but Stanley liked to think that, if he’d known, his best friend would be rather proud of him for using science rather than strength for breaking into his dorm room.
None of that mattered anymore, though, and as the key reader blinked green, he slipped into the room without hesitation.
The plan was only to sneak in and take a couple more items to bring back home, like a wretched dog pining for his owner’s scent. Some worn underwear, a pair of socks, maybe a dirty shirt, things Xeno's busy mind wouldn't notice were gone, but that would let him feel like he was breathing above water again rather than under it.
But once he was inside, the Xeno-like scent of the small, slightly messy room wrapped around him like a trap around prey, and he could tell that it wouldn't be enough to satiate him.
‘What if he is sleeping with someone? Getting taken advantage of?’ whispered the treacherous voice in his ears. ‘Isn't it your duty to know if he is? To protect him? Aren't you his ultimate knight?’
Then, more syrupy sweet, more devastating:
‘Don't you want to know if someone has used his pretty mouth before you?’
The very idea was enough to break him and whatever sense of decency or pride remained in his being.
He dug through everything, from the inside of notebooks to the lining of the pillows, desperate and feverish. He wasn't even sure what he was looking for—a love note, a woman's thong, a condom?—but the carnivorous feeling was eating him alive, carnivorous and greedy.
He ripped the closet apart like a madman, searching for something, anything that would quench his thirst. He almost let out a broken sob when he found a lonely purple tie in his friend’s laundry basket, a small stain of sauce dirtying the edge of the soft fabric.
Quickly, with trembling hands, he wrapped it around his own neck, and pulled, imagining it to be Xeno’s hands. It smelled of burger grease and dark coffee, sweat and body odour, fabric softener and Xeno.
He moaned brokenly, tightening the hold of the tie, his other hand descending into his pants feverishly.
Xeno, Xeno, Xeno, Xeno.
The blurry image of some shadowy figure standing over Xeno's bare body was making him see red as he pumped his already half-hard member, the mixture of relief and frustration rendering him deaf to the world.
It felt good, and it felt bad; it felt sweet, and it felt bitter; it felt like living, and it felt dying.
He was so lost to the sensations, to the hunger he’d been combating for weeks, that when the door hissed open and light footsteps echoed behind him, he didn’t register someone else’s presence before it was far too late.
The blade on his neck felt cold and sharp, and incredibly sobering. He froze, like a child with his hand caught in a cookie jar.
“…Stan?” said a stunned voice he'd recognize amongst thousands, the knife faltering against his skin, and Stanley turned around, one hand still clutching onto the tie while the other remained motionless on his cock.
“Xe,” he exhaled, and it was as if the world had regained colour, as if the birds had begun singing once more and the air lightened. Xeno's very presence was his oxygen—he couldn't, wouldn't let him be apart from him again.
The other teen’s wide eyes noticed the tie, first, then lowered until they spotted the situation in the blonde’s crotch, his cheeks turning beet red.
“S-Stan, what are you—”
He pounced on the other boy so fast he never had time to react. His arms wrapped around him, possessive, needy, trembling. Xeno let out a surprised huff, almost stumbling backwards, but Stanley's strong arms maintained him in place like an anchor.
“Sorry,” he managed to croak out, and that was a lie. He wasn't sorry at all. Every atom of his being was breathing in Xeno's scent, the fresh smell of his detergent and the arousing one of the beads of sweat on his neck. He had missed it more than words could ever say. “I, uh, I wanted to surprise you. Didn't mean to freak you out.”
He had no excuse ready to explain the stained tie around his neck, or the visibly still pulsating member tenting his pants.
Xeno stayed silent for a moment, neither responding to Stanley's embrace, nor pushing him away.
“Why were you looking through my things?” he finally said, his voice so close to the blonde’s ear it felt like the ghost of a kiss.
The blonde swallowed drily, refusing to move. What could he even answer to that?
“Stanley,” Xeno repeated at his silence. “Were you trying to see if I was sleeping with someone here?”
His grip on the other boy impossibly tightened. Of course, he'd know.
Surely, the young genius had to be struggling to breathe right now; but he made no mention of it, his voice calm and measured.
“Tell me,” Xeno said softly, both a plea and an order, and Stanley, loyal pet that he was, could refuse neither.
“…yes,” he admitted, burying his face into the crook of Xeno’s neck in shame. Would this be it? Would this be the moment Xeno decided he’d crossed the invisible line in the sand and broken the unspoken rules of their lifelong friendship?
If so… if so, then all that would remain would be trapping his other half in a box, and bringing him far, far away from anyone who could ever find him. He would keep him by his side, forever and always, until the day Xeno loved him just as much as Stanley revered the dirt of the ground the young genius walked on.
He’d rather have both of them dead and buried together, arms wrapped around one another just as they were now, than face a world without Xeno in it.
“Why?” Xeno asked, the emotion in his voice indecipherable.
“’was jealous,” was all the blonde could say.
“Why?”
“’cause I want you all to myself,” he whispered, just loud enough to know the other boy would hear. “I can't let someone else touch you, I…I can't.”
It sounded so odd out loud, so real that it was close to frightening.
I can’t do anything without you. I can’t let you leave me behind again. I can’t exist if you’re not there to tell me how.
A moment passed, tense, out of time and space; still, Xeno made no move that indicated he wanted the young marksman to get off him.
“Why?” he repeated almost mechanically, and Stanley realized he was trying to get him to say something, say the words he’d been too much of a coward to say for over a decade.
This might just be his last chance to tell him. What was there left to lose?
“Because I’m in love with you, and you’re mine,” he breathed out, a weight that he’d forgotten existed lifting off his shoulders and disappearing into the void.
He’d said it. Finally, he’d said it.
He felt like an animal stuck under the barrel of a gun, waiting for the inevitable shot that would spray his innards across the floor.
The shot that never came.
A cold palm craddled his cheek, then, gently but forcefully pushing him back so they could look at each other face to face.
Xeno was smiling. A dazzling, beautiful, wicked smile that sent a shiver through the blonde’s very bones.
“I’ve waited oh so very long for those words,” he hummed, nails petting the side of the blonde’s face, and that action alone almost elicited a trust of his hips forward. “But you are mistaken, Stan.”
He let out a light, airy chuckle at the look of pitiful confusion in his friend’s eyes.
“Let me put it this way. If I carve my name into every inch of your skin,” he suggested smoothly, and the knife he’d used to surprise whom he’d believed was a stranger reappeared in his right hand, laying flush against Stanley’s heart, “will that be enough for you to know who belongs to whom?”
He could hear the ringing of his heartbeat in his own ears, the burning warmth emanating from his body at every one of Xeno’s touches, the cold digits of his spare hand wrapping around his neck and grabbing hold of the discarded tie.
‘More, more,’ he thought. ‘Burn me alive. Eat me until there’s nothing left.’
“If I use those dreadful cigarettes of yours to mark your arms and your chest,” he continued, thumb digging into Stanley’s carotid, and it was too much and not enough, the blonde letting out a weak moan, shamelessly trusting his hips forward in a failed attempt to meet Xeno’s. “Will that be enough for you to know I own you, or will you crawl back in here again like a starved dog, begging me for more?”
The sharp knife dug in his chest, precise and methodical, going through the cheap fabric of his shirt and his tan skin like butter; Stanley didn’t flinch. Something loving and twisted shone in Xeno’s features as the first droplets of blood began pooling out of the surgical cut. Then, a second, identical one, crossing over the first, both incisions just deep enough to draw crimson pearls.
There was no need to look down to know the shape that he’d traced right onto his other half’s wildly beating heart.
X.
“I am yours, as I’ve always been, but more than that… You are mine,” Xeno said, and it was a promise, an unquestionable truth, a reality that supplanted all others. “Understood?”
And all Stanley could do was nod, unable to contain tears of relief from rolling down his reddened cheeks, the endless hunger finally quieting as he kissed the boy who had owned him from the moment he was born.
Stanley and Xeno. Xeno and Stanley. As it should be.
It was simply the natural order of things, after all.