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THE SAME SIN BINDS US: PLOT DRAFT
For a star to be born, a gaseous nebula must collapse. So he shall collapse. Crumble. This isn’t his death; This is his birth.
The first time Elias’ life crumbles before his feet, the stale winter air drags heavy against his skin. His bones hang like weighted icicles sandwiched between flesh and sinew and muscle that isn't his. He’s curled up somewhere on the sidewalk, his head lolled to the side and cheek squished against the wet snow. It should be cold, but he can’t really feel it.
He can’t feel anything but the prick in his mouth. When he swipes a languid tongue over the skin of his bottom lips, it comes away raw with a wound and iron is left in the wake of his identity. Somewhere in the limbo of life and death, Elias remains. Alone. Though not for the first time.
Elias rebuilds his life for one week as an empty shell, walking around with a void in his chest that he refuses to feed, walking around with a ball and chain shackled to his ankles because the hunger feels too much for his teenage mind to bear.
The second time Elias’ life atomizes in his hands is when his teeth find the soft, taut skin of his best friend’s. Before this they were amazing. Their lives are so deeply intertwined that Elias thinks maybe that's where he went wrong; thinking, maybe Aleksandr really is the only person he can depend on, maybe even love. Thinking. Wondering. Worrying that maybe there was no way out of this life.
He dances a strange ballet with Aleksandr in the remaining weeks he’s convinced he has left. Walking around campus with a metaphorical ball and chain clinging to him everywhere he goes, talking to Aleksandr as a shell of the former man he once was. Aleksandr is omnipresent wherever he goes. When Elias shuts his eyes all he sees are the gold flecks in Aleksandr’s honey eyes. All he smells is Aleksandr’s detergent. All he hears is the steady thrum of a heartbeat under his red Adidas jacket.
Release comes in the form of razors down his throat. The feeling of it is so repulsive on his tongue that it comes away like honey. Something sweet drowning out everything stilted that built up between them. A numbness he couldn’t rub out of his fingers for hours. A tense morning. Something greater just cresting between them that Aleksandr couldn’t for the life of him quite figure out what it was. It felt like. Something familiar. Something forbidden. Just out of reach, but the warmth coats him and makes him all sweaty with apprehension. There’s a name for this, he knows.
He and Elias stay this way for weeks. Maybe even months. The memory’s so dusted and dirty in his mind that he can’t even recall what grade they were in. They don’t talk about it, he just lets Elias jump the fence to his bedroom window, lets him sneak under the blanket and talk to him about whatever for about an hour until the dam breaks and Elias digs his fingers into him. Warm and wet and everything he’s ever wanted. Everything Aleksandr's ever wanted. He can never read Elias’ expression. It’s mostly just too dim, but something about the stress between Elias’ eyebrows tells him a different story. Not just two syllables and probably untrue. Something about the way his fingers flinch and tense when he pulls away when Elias finally sees what he’s done of his neck.
He should have seen this coming.
The weeks leading up to it, Aleksandr had no idea it would happen. Elias seemed. Different. Brighter, warmer, someone else. Someone else. He’d smile. Elias hated his teeth, said they were always stained a weird tint from the blood. The air around him was calmer. Aleksandr thought something happened between them. Puzzle pieces bridging to form a bigger picture. A click into place.
To Elias, it was a snap.
Elias runs away. From Aleksandr, from the sinking feeling of guilt and shame and a bridge he never named, never dared to cross, all coming to pierce his heart like a fishing hook dug too deep, because he never learnt how to do anything else. What was he supposed to do when caught between gunfire? Run, deny, defend? He only ever learnt how to do the first, never bothered with the rest because running took him so far.
But running will only ever widen the distance, never erase it completely. It can take you to different grass, where the air smells fresher than that of a house with moldy corners and a stain he’s run his finger over more than once. Sometimes grass is never greener. Sometimes it’s dead.
Aleksandr finally lands on a familiar name and chases Elias because that’s his job. That’s his job and he’s not doing it out of an animalistic instinct to always be closest to Elias no matter what. And then he finds Elias and he doesn't pounce. He watches. From six feet away. From twelve feet away. From across a blood bar and hovering behind him on a busy intersection crossing. For days.
When Aleksandr finally makes his move and finds him he has to act normal. He has to wear a turtleneck in may and has to smooth out the tremble in his fingers telling him to run. To pin him down and straddle his hips and push a dark barrel into his temple and to stick something sharp and metal and shiny into his neck and into his thighs and into his everywhere because to be close to Elias can only mean to wear his skin. Why? He finds Elias and acts like he hasn’t been waiting for this for years. There’s no real explanation for why he wants this, other than the fact that he wants Elias. He doesn’t hate Elias. He doesn’t know if hate is too strong a word or too weak. He knows one thing; He knows they’re bounded. By blood and death and vampirism. They are alike. And he had missed Elias. He wanted to see him. And he wanted to see him suffer. He wanted to see Elias’ eyes when they lit up with pain. Sparked with pleasure. He wanted to watch yellow bile drip from his pink lips and sweeter words drift through from between them. He wanted Elias. He wanted his attention. He wants to be Elias’ most profound memory. And if there was no positive way to be remembered, he’ll settle for being remembered like this. He’ll wait.
Aleksandr is asking him why he ran, even if both of them know that their senses are carefully trained so they can leap up and sprint at any given moment. Even though this isn’t right. It's a strange power dynamic at play over here but they’re both equally violent so what is it really.
Part of Elias feels horrified. He never thought he’d see Aleksandr again, let alone dig his heels into the moist asphalt and have a conversation with him. He never thought that the skinny, young, Aleksandr would become so distant and what he is now.
ELIAS & TOBIAS (TW// INCEST)
He knows his parents tried, he feels sorry because Tobias was unwillingly caught in the eye of a tornado. It’s just. Elias doesn’t know if he ever felt it. Elias sees the cracks and slips and what they say to each other when they think the rest of the house is sleeping, when he and his brother have their heads stacked against the door frame and his brother is keeping him quiet with a sweaty hand over his mouth. They would talk about the church, and the crops, and the economy, and the children, and the children, and they would say words Elias didn’t know the meaning of.
Elias and Tobias would sit in the dark of their room and his brother would teach him all the dirty words, all of them ways to become a man. All of them ways he learnt from their dad. They didn’t get along, but Tobias would still crawl into his bed at night. At least he’s not alone, Elias would think. At least, even without his mom or his dad, Tobias would be here.
Nights would begin at the blade edge of his body. His brother sneaking into his mouth, serrating each of his teeth, sucking them clean enough to rid the room of shadows and coat his body with them instead.
Elias is nine. His brother asks him if he’s ever seen an erection. If he knows the S word. Elias wonders if that’s what Tobias does to him. Tobias told him he could never tell their parents. He could get into trouble. People don’t get to know about this. You like it when I’m nice to you, right? This is how I like you best. Don’t ruin it, Elias. And Tobias was so much older than him. There was no reason to run. There was nothing else waiting for him.
Elias is still nine when he meets Aleksandr, under the stale overhead lights of their Sunday school. Aleksandr is sitting on the curb with red knees and dirty dress shoes. He reminds him a little of himself, quiet and off-kilter and awkward. They were too young to fit in with the older kids, and too old to relate to any of the younger kids. It’s easy to make friends when you’re a kid, but Elias supposes he and Aleksandr gravitated towards each other because they found something of themselves in the other.
Aleksandr starts coming over to Elias’ house whenever his parents are too busy to look after him. Aleksandr meets Tobias and Elias tries not to feel as wrong-footed as he does when Aleksandr immediately expresses his disdain for Tobias. Elias tries not to ignore the way Tobias moves rooms whenever Aleksandr and him appear.
Elias remembers what Aleksandr used to be like. He was like a child who didn’t know when to stop testing the boundaries of human emotion. Elias remembers the smell of the grass whenever he and Aleksandr would play it rough in the fields. Elias knows it’s all fun and games between them, especially when you’re kids, but sometimes Aleksandr would hit him hard enough for it to bruise for weeks. Sometimes Aleksandr’s eyes glow a little too much when Elias is under him. It feels like Aleksandr is using Elias as an outlet.
Later in life Elias learns why his father is abusive and why his mother does nothing. Later in life, fevered and teething through the sheets, Tobias finally tells him why it was him. Elias was not their father’s child. Elias was a bastard. Elias and Tobias’ mother had been unfaithful and Elias and their father kept her around. Out of mercy, or out of a sick want to be the only man to hurt her, they would never know. But Elias remembers the way Tobias told him once more to never tell anyone of it. To be loved is to be a secret.
One day Tobias bites down too hard on the concave skin between his shoulder and his neck.
It didn’t take long for Elias to realize this was why they were being shunned.
It didn’t take long. Tobias left for the military and was dead before Elias’ first letter ever reached him, the clover sticker keeping it shut never ripped open, his body limp from the ceiling of his barracks.
Tobias never felt like Aleksandr. Elias didn’t believe in anything but Tobias for a little while. Aleksandr is looking at him. He should be overjoyed. He should be overjoyed. He should be overjoyed. He should love this, feel up this feeling and get drunk on it with filthy greed. But he’s stupid. He doesn’t know what to do when Aleksandr looks at him like that—like one wrong move and Aleksandr will kill himself and take Elias with him. That’s what it felt like to be loved, he supposes. To be a risk.
It didn't take long for his father to follow in his footsteps. Half sunken into the soil of their corn fields with no weapon in sight. His mother wouldn’t tell him why. And the townspeople, usually so eager to get their voices running, hadn’t said a word. Not to her. Not to him.