cerberusia:

stridercest:

stop shipping fictional/simulated incest ships and perpetuating abuse, you goddamn freaks. if you get off to siblings i hope your siblings and family members find out and disown you, and you die a slow and painful death!

Before the game, when I was a kid, I couldn’t imagine Bro at my age. It never even occurred to me to think about it: he’d so obviously sprung into being, fully formed and adult, from the head of the goddess Irony that trying to imagine him as anything else seemed disrespectful.

It wasn’t until I saw Dirk that it really hit home for me that Bro had once been a teenager, like me. I guess sixteen is kind of late to finally realise that the person who brought you up is a real person, but in my defence, Bro always tried to make out like he wasn’t.

When we made it to New Earth and picked up our guardians again – even Bec, and don’t ask me how that worked – I made Bro tell me the stuff he’d left out when I was growing up. There was a lot of stuff, and he didn’t want to tell me most of it, but I was willing to use any means at my disposal to weasel it out of him, up to and including emotional blackmail. Before the game, it would never have worked: but Bro no longer had Lil Cal dripping poison into his head and I wasn’t a kid any more.

Unlike Dirk, who’d crashed into the ocean on a meteor and raised his own damn self – or so he claimed – Bro had landed in entirely dry Houston, and been taken into care. Two group homes and three foster families later, he aged out of the system and started doing officially what he’d been doing unofficially and illegally for years.

“So are any of them still around? Your foster families?” We were lying on the couch, with Bro holding onto me like a teddy bear. It was a tight squeeze for two grown men, even on our deep futon, but I liked it enough to wriggle into Bro’s embrace when I saw the opportunity. My arm was around his waist, and I played with the tiny strip of pale, freckled skin exposed where his t-shirt rode up in the back.

Bro shrugged carefully, so as not to dislodge me.

“I guess.” His tone suggested that he wasn’t keen to go looking.

“Were they mean?” I was dying of curiosity about Bro growing up in 80s Houston. I really hoped there were photos somewhere.

“Not really. We just didn’t get on.” I could feel Bro’s toes clench tight where our feet were pressed together, so I dropped it. There were any number of reasons why they might not have been a good fit, and to be honest, most of them centered on Bro. I could try again later.

“Sorry, kiddo,” he added after a minute. “No honorary grandparents hiding here. They’d probably have disowned me anyway.” Was that an oblique reference to the gay-but-I-don’t-use-that-term thing? If it was, the sad thing was that it was probably true. But no more! We made a new Texas that didn’t do that shit any more. It was one of the nicer things about Earth 2.

“Hey, if I want a grandparent, there’s always Nannasprite.” I wriggled a little closer on the couch. “But who gives a shit? We’ve got family already.” I said that a little bit more fiercely that I meant to, but I meant what I said. “Wanna call your daughter up and have her perform bullshit psychoanalysis on you while she salivates over every sordid secret of your childhood?” That was only half-sarcastic. Bro really did find shooting the Freudian shit with Rose prime entertainment.

“Mm, in a few hours. She won’t have had breakfast yet, and you know she turns into Bad Cop if you catch her on an empty stomach.” Oh, I knew that alright. I’d learnt the hard way back on the Meteor.

“A few hours, huh?” I gave him my best, sexiest smirk. “And until-”

I didn’t get a chance to finish my line: Bro’s big hand cupped the back of my head and drew me closer, and he covered my lips with his. He kissed me slowly, lazily. I put my hand in his hair and opened my mouth to invite his tongue it, but all he did was bite gently at my lip.

“You’re the only family I need,” he said into my mouth, low and rumbly – and then we didn’t need to speak for a while.