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“I’m thinking of letting you go.” The worst part is, he really means it.
There is a moment of strained hopefulness that crosses the boy’s dirtied face, hesitant and distrustful still - but there. Bright and shining. The Grabber knows the answer already, but he asks all the same. Half wishing the boy lies, half wishing he tells the truth. “What’s your name?”
"Finney.” A truth, then. “Johnathan Finn Blake, but everyone calls me Finney." He says it so earnestly, sits up a little straighter where he’s been huddled against the far wall and for a long stretch both just quietly observe the other. Wild animals in opposite cages. What Finney says next shouldn’t surprise him so much, but most everything the boy does is marvelously unpredictable. "What’s yours? Fair is fair."
Fair is fair. The Grabber lets out a tremulous breath and comes to sit on the bottom step, slides the tray of still steaming scrambled eggs across the floor for Finney, but the boy just sips from the chilled soda as he listens. "Albert Shaw. My brother calls me Al, mostly."
For the first time since Finney met this man, he thinks Albert feels more himself than The Grabber. "You're like my mom, aren't you? She heard voices in her head that told her about the future, told her to do things she didn’t want to, but no matter how much she told the voices 'no' they didn't stop."
He remembers more than Gwen, of course. Remembers their mother slamming her head against the wall and begging the voices to stop, begging them to go away and she does want 'the shine' anymore. Gwen has it, but she doesn't hear voices. Finney has it, but he hears the things meant to stay in other people's heads - their secret thoughts. It's how he knows The Grabber didn't rape his friend, didn't put his hands on any of them - but wanted to kiss Finney the moment he saw him.
Albert doesn't know what to do with that, with Finney talking to him like a normal man. He doesn't know what to do with Finney at all and so he steeples his fingers and rests his chin atop them, watches the boy sip on his soda and when the light hits just right Al can see how Finney shines.
Someone, somewhere, called it 'the shining' and Albert knows what that means now. When he looks at Finney he is brighter than anything in the whole world, than any of the other boys ever were.
They talk and talk for hours down there. Albert on the bottom stair, breath hot and muggy in the confines of his mask, and Finney slowly inches his way from pressed against the wall to sitting at the end of the mattress - legs outstretched in front of him. Albert could snatch his ankle, could hurt him before the boy even had a chance to react, but Finney isn’t frightened anymore and Al suspects he never really was.
Scooching across the concrete floor, inch-by-inch, he tells Albert of the old dogeared astronomy books in his closet, of wanting to go see the exhibit at the science center in downtown Denver - but his dad wont let him. He tells Albert of playing baseball and how the other boys don't want to be his friend because they call him 'Finn the fag' at school.
He tells Albert of his daddy whipping him and his little sister with a belt every day. Sometimes twice. Sometimes more.
In return Albert tells him of his own daddy, a mountain of a man with a ruddy reddened face from all that booze, who put him in the basement and 'did bad things' to the little boy Albert Shaw once was. Things Finney doesn't need to know the specifics of to understand. The naughty boy game, he thinks. He learns of how this man protected his baby brother, just like Finney did for Gwen. Albert speaks excitedly of doing magic tricks for little kids who believe it's real and how to build the perfect garden so everything blooms at just the right time. He runs that hardware store on Main Street, the one with a little greenhouse, and Finney wants to see it.
“If you plan it just right everything can bloom all at once, or stagger it out across a whole year. It’s really beautiful.” Albert says and Finney ends up sitting criss-cross at the man's feet - peering up with those big brown eyes and Albert wants so badly to cry.
He admits, in a tremulous voice, that he really didn't mean to hurt anyone and Finney believes him - it wasn't entirely his mother who killed herself either. That doesn't mean Albert is innocent, but Finney thinks maybe 'good' and 'bad' aren't all there is in the world and maybe someone can be both things at once. Albert might not be bad, but The Grabber is. Just like his mom was good and the voice in her mind was the one that made her put their dad's gun to her head and pull the trigger.
'That was somebody else', she’d said to him once too.
Finney was eight years old when his momma broke his arm. He recalls, in agonizingly vivid detail, how her eyes had gone manic and wild. Unfocused at some spot over his shoulder as if seeing something else entirely, before suddenly sharpening right on him. She was looking, but not seeing - a kind of hazy distance in her dark eyes.
“Help me, Finney.” And when his mother spoke it sounded as though a second voice was mimicking her, a split second delay that followed along in a discordant echo. “There’s a monster inside me.”
He'd been eight years old and frightened as his mother pulled and pulled on his little arm so hard it popped. His scream shattered whatever spell had fallen over her and Edith Blake looked on in horror as her son howled in pain - scrambling away from her as he sobbed and clutched his limp arm to his chest.
“Baby no, no. I’m so sorry, that wasn’t me! It was…it was someone else.” She’d said and Finney wonders if the voice Al hears is the same one his momma did.
The man touches him again, just the feather-light brush of his fingers smoothing Finney's hair from his face, and it is the only gentle hand he's ever been given in all his life.
Albert lets him go.
Sits Finney in the back of the van that smells of greasepaint and sticky sweet soda and they talk the whole drive into town. Quiet whispering back and forth. ‘Bruce said my arm was mint’, Finney tells him and Albert distantly remembers beating Bruce Yamada’s face into the concrete floor. ‘You could come to one of my games, if I go back on the team.’ Albert doesn’t know why Finney would want him to do that, can’t figure out if the boy is just making nervous small-talk because he’s afraid Al might change his mind half-way into town, or if Finney really means it.
But if he means it then Al has to think of all the possible reasons why and that makes his skull throb from the inside out.
Al drops him off at the corner store in the middle of the night, gives Finney enough change to use the payphone and call home. Then he waits, idling in the van, until he sees the headlights of Terrence Blake's pickup truck rounding the bend before he leaves Finney alone in the payphone stall. He expects the police to show up any minute, but they never do.
A day later he see's Finney Blake on the news, cleaned up and showered and pretty. The boy tells a concerned news reporter that he doesn't know where he was. That he doesn't know who took him. Doesn't know if it was a man or a woman or even if it was one of his schoolyard bullies playing a cruel prank.
"I don't know. I don't remember. No one spoke to me and I couldn't see anything." Finney says it with tears in his eyes like a good traumatized boy should, but there's a blankness to his cherubic face - all closed off and denying further inspection. He promised Albert not to tattle and he's not a naughty boy after all. But he is special. Albert's special boy who shines so big and so bright it feels like Finney can see him right through the television - as if he’s looking at Albert from the other side.
The voice of The Grabber still speaks to him, but it's different now. It's quieter, it's not his father anymore. The voice, for the first time in Albert's life, is his own.
He wonders if he should kill himself like Finney's mother did, it would probably be the only retribution he could offer and it is a thought that lingers in his mind so often it feels like he’s already done it a dozen times over. Then, despite all that says he should not, Finney begins appearing. A little shadow that follows him around, always just out of sight, and at first Al thinks it's his imagination; that he just wishes to see Finney so badly that he's picking out every similar looking young man from a crowd.
Half of him wants to talk to the boy again, to hear more about baseball and the stars and what books he likes most. Another part is terrified of Finney seeing him in the light of day, of seeing his face. Seeing the man, because it's different. It's different.
The masks are someone else, something else, and when he puts them on now it feels incorrect in a way they didn't before he let Finney go. Before it felt like the mask was the only real part of himself, now they feel like some alien entity trying to crawl beneath his skin. At night Albert goes to the house across the street, the one he was renovating to give Max when his brother finishes at rehab and can help around the shop again, and he sits in the dirt basement and he cries. He cries and screams and begs and says he's sorry and the worst most awful part of it all is that he means it.
He didn't want them to die, didn’t want to take them away, and so he keeps the boys close - keeps them safe. He could've done anything else, like cut them up into itty bitty pieces and thrown them into the wilds for the buzzards. He could've dumped their lifeless little bodies off on the side of the road to be discovered by some poor unlucky bastard.
But he didn't.
He buried them and he kept them, because they're his responsibility now and he cares for each tiny body like he cares for the roses planted in flower beds all along the greenhouse. Albert speaks to them all night, tells them about his daddy and his ma’ that left him and Max all alone. Tells them of Max and drugs that scramble his brother's brain like an egg in its shell. He tells the boys of their families that miss them. Of Mr. Hopper crying on tv and begging his son to come home because they think Vance just ran away. Of Griffin's mom all alone now. He's so sorry.
Albert cannot hear them here, not like Finney did on the black phone, and he's too cowardly to go downstairs anymore and try for himself. Sometimes he just stands on the top step for ages and ages, cold basement air licking at his bare feet until he slams the door shut and hides beneath the blankets like a scared child. Finney would be brave though, he knows this. Maybe there's something special about being young like that, something about teenagerhood that lets Finney be smarter and braver and better than Albert is. Shine brighter, too.
One night, three weeks after leaving Finney at the payphone, Albert decides he's going to kill himself for real. He drives out to the lake he went swimming in as a teenager, the one all the kids go to play at each summer. The one with tire swings dangling over the clearest bluest water he's ever seen - so clear it's reflecting the stars like a mirror. He stands on the bridge railing and looks down into the night sky and thinks it would be a pretty way to die. The fall isn't that far, small enough that little kids go jumping off the bridge all the time, all screaming whooping laughter beneath the summer sun. But he's got a gun in the glove-box and he can go out the way Finney's momma did, fall into the water and die in the stars.
It's getting colder now that the end of October nears, trees are growing barren and the gnarled reach of their bone branches feels like the withered hands of five little boys in the dirt basement.
Finney is warm though. Warm where he puts a fierce hand around Albert's wrist and pulls the man backwards off the ledge a second before he considers pulling the trigger. The gun plops into the lake, sinks heavily into the watery night sky and the sound of it shatters the quiet night as loud as the ricochet of a bullet. Finney isn't letting him go, he's holding Albert down with the slight weight of his skinny body - sits right on the man’s thighs and the blunt dig of his short nails bites into Al's skin. There's a fading bruise around the corner of his mouth that Al recognizes from the news reports, he thinks it must've been from when he’d thrown the boy in the trunk of the van - that Finney must've gone knocking about on the drive to the house, and he feels bad for it.
He feels bad for hurting Finney, but there's different bruises now too. Ones he can see from where Finney has pushed his sleeves up his arms and they're the imprint of his daddy's big mean fingers. Most people in Galesburg know of Terrence Blake and his drinking habits, it's hard not to. He's been fired from the factory a dozen times and rehired just as many. He drinks at the bar with a small handful of other viciously cruel fathers that once dragged a gay man out behind the drugstore and nearly beat him to death. He thinks of 'Finn the fag' and Terrence Blake and the rumors that 'The Grabber' didn't even kidnap this boy at all; that maybe Finney just ran off with another boy and didn't want his daddy to find out.
Albert has learned, in the scant few weeks after releasing Finney, that the boy is deeply unloved.
He is a miserably unwanted little creature, the queer kid people look at and and question if he was even worth being stolen at all. The people of Galesburg think The Grabber is some breed of pedophile, so Albert doesn't know why they'd think a sexpest like that would care either way, and the truth is one wouldn't - but the upstanding moral Christian citizens do. So they look at Finney with his pretty androgynous face and his queerness and they sort of wish he'd stayed missing.
Finney should want him dead, everyone should. Even if it was the voice of his father, The Grabber, who compelled him to snatch those boys off the streets - he is still the one who did it and…It wasn’t The Grabber who pet Finney's hair away from his sweet face. It wasn't The Grabber who wanted to kiss him. Finney must know this too, he must. But he holds Al down, spread across the man's lap, and Albert doesn't know what the boy is going to do now.
He would gladly let Finney do anything to him, would be happy if this boy tore him asunder.
It's dark enough that Albert can turn and hide his face away from that piercing stare, shakes his hair out to cover his eyes like he does at work when the anxiety gets too much and it's almost like wearing the mask again. For a moment he thinks Finney is about to bite him, he leans in until he's practically stretched across Albert’s entire chest and puts his little face right into the man’s throat and Albert is certain the boy is going to bite.
He doesn't. He just breathes against Al's skin, holds him still until the man can feel the calm beat of Finney's heart pressing him into the Earth and feels his own start to match.
It reminds Albert of when he was just a small boy and would pile on every pillow and stuffed animal he could fit atop of himself, the weight of it holding him down was comforting in a way he couldn't explain and somehow Finney knew to do it. His smart, shining, boy. He doesn't want Finney to look at him. He frightens Albert so very much and Al lets out a shattered sob that rocks the boy with the force of it. Then he's grasping into the back of Finney’s pullover with big calloused hands and he's crying like some pathetic loser. Like a child all over again, but all Finney does is hold him down and let him.
It's dark at home and Max isn't there, is off at that clinic in Denver for the weekend - maybe longer. Albert sits at the kitchen table with his face buried into his arms and he trembles, adrenaline and fear and something stronger is rushing through his blood and he can't stop picturing the gun dropping into the lake. Silver breaking the surface of the starry water, ripples in the dark. He's cold, freezing as he sits there with his mind being pushed through a sieve, and Finney is standing at the microwave waiting for a mug of coffee to reheat. The mechanical whirring is the only sound in the whole house, outside of Samson's sleepy snores.
‘Your dog is a lot nicer than I thought he’d be. He sounded so mean.’
‘He’s big, but he’s gentle.’
Albert made Finney close his eyes on the drive home, begged him to. Pleaded: ‘Don't look at me, please don't look at me’ and, miraculously, Finney obliged. Sat there in the passenger seat of the van with his eyes shut and his face dutifully turned towards the window. Albert hates it when people l o o k a t h i m, hates his own face so goddamn much. He looks like their father. The same pale eyes and sandy hair. Handsome, to anyone but himself.
Finney puts the daisy yellow mug on the table near Albert's arm and doesn't step away, reaches out and tucks a length of graying hair behind the man's ear and Albert startles so hard the table shakes.
"Stop. Please, please stop." He begs, but Finney refuses this time.
Crouches down onto the heels of his weather worn sneakers and tries to peer up between the man's crossed arms, a wryly teasing look in his eyes as Albert tries to shuffle away, pulls his long hair back over his face and holds it there in his fists like a shy toddler. Finney takes his hands, gently guiding them away so he can cup the man's face and so so gently pushes Albert's hair back - tucks it behind his ears again and Al clenches his eyes shut against the intensity of how bright Finney is.
He doesn’t want to see the disgust he imagines must be there.
Albert is handsome, but Finney knew that already. Even with the mask on or covering half of his face, Albert was handsome. Alluring in some way he didn't have the words for. He's handsome now that he isn't covered in greasepaint or that spooky grin, his hair is soft and brown with a hearty streaking of gray - but he doesn't really look all that much older. Maybe in his mid 40's, if he had to guess.
The blooming of delicate lines around his eyes, the crease at his brow. Just the barest hint of age lines around his mouth, there only when Albert cringes away like this. There's a little bit of stubble around his jaw, brown and gray, and Finney touches the pad of his fingers there to feel it prickle against his skin.
This man is mine, he thinks and doesn't yet know how true that is.
"Take me to see the stars?" Finney asks and hardly recognizes his own voice.
Albert blinks owlishly down into the boy's face, pale and lovely beneath the halogen glow of the kitchen lights. He'd be lying if he said Finney wasn’t a singularly beautiful young man, that it hadn’t played a part in why he’d stolen him away. I wasn't going to touch him, I swear it. I just wanted to look. The solemn line of his little mouth goes suddenly soft, a sweetly lopsided smile, and Albert doesn't know it's because the boy finds him delightfully captivating. That Finney likes his blue eyes and the crooked line of his teeth.
"W-what?" He asks, baffled and wrong-footed by the gentle way Finney is smiling up at him.
"The science center, you told me you've gone before. So take me with you and I'll tell you about the stars." Finney wants to go walk the halls and see planetary exhibits, he wants to see this man in the sunlight and not a dingy cold basement or with a gun to his temple. He wants to hold Albert's hand. He wants to kiss him and he knows Albert wants that too, even though it's awful.
He wants, and Finney has decided the universe owes him enough to take it.
Finney is turned around in the passenger seat, craning his neck to peer into the trunk with open curiosity. “What’s all that stuff? On the side of the van. It looks like a cage for some giant fire extinguisher.”
“Not quite.” Al huffs a laugh and glances sideways towards him, at the breeze rushing in from the window and ruffling Finney’s shaggy hair, and it is the most surreal he has ever felt. Finney is there, just sitting beside him on a Wednesday afternoon and Albert is taking them to the goddamn science center, just like he’d promised. He’d take Finney to Alaska if it’d please him. “It’s for helium canisters.”
The boy turns to him in wide-eyed surprise, an eager little smile breaking across his face. Finney hadn’t been entirely sure whether the whole magician thing was a lie and he is inordinately giddy to find out it wasn’t. “Wait, you do magic stuff like…for real?”
‘Would you like to see a magic trick?’
“Yes. For real.” His grip around the steering-wheel turns crushing. Al remembers stumbling outside the van with his arms full of groceries, Finney looking at him with some mixture of bemused wariness, but he sees it in his mind as if looking through thick gauze. It is hazy and unfocused to him the way it was when he took a knife to Griffin Stagg’s little throat. The way it was with all of them. As if he was in his own body but at a great distance, sluggish and heavy - dragging himself through pond muck. He wonders if it is something inside him that is rotten, or if he was infected by his fathers haunting presence. “I could show you sometime, if you’d like.”
Why the fuck would Finney want that? Al thinks a second after he’s offered. Why would he want to go anywhere with a man who'd done this to him? Why? Why? Albert isn’t sure, but he thinks it might be for the same reason he was compelled to take Finney in the first place; the shining. It is a beacon, brighter than any star in the sky, and it draws them together like meteors on a collision course. It feels like fate. Like Finney was always meant to be here and Albert feels guilt settle heavy as stone in his belly.
“I’d like that.” Finney turns back in his seat properly, fiddling with the knobs on the radio after popping in a cassette tape for Fleetwood Mac. “Y’know this van is pretty cool, when I am not in the trunk.”
Albert makes a sound somewhere between a wheeze and a barking laugh, it comes out a little hysterical but when he spins around to look at the boy Finney is grinning impishly up at him. “For fucks sake, how can you say shit like that?”
He shrugs, leaning back in his seat and bringing his shoes up onto the dash. Finney looks terrifically lovely like this, cloaked in the unashamed confidence of boyhood. “I dunno. I think if you’ve had enough bad stuff happen to you for long enough, anything can become sorta funny. Would you like me to do something real bad to you? Would it make us even?”
Yes. Albert thinks wildly, but that isn’t the truth of it at all. “Nothing could make us even, Finn.”
No one has ever called him just Finn before and Finney decides he likes it, but only if Albert is the one who says it. He likes a lot of things when it comes to Albert Shaw, the sorts of things a fifteen year old boy shouldn’t like about a man old enough to be his father - but he does anyway.
Right and wrong.
Good and bad.
Finney has thought about killing his dad since he was still just a small child, has stood at the man's bedside with a pillow in his little trembling fists too many times to count. Once, after Terrence beat him so badly Finney couldn’t walk for the next two days, he’d poured drain cleaner into his daddys beer - came so close to letting him drink it that he could practically hear the man choke.
It would be justified, who could blame him? But it would be bad. It would make Gwen cry and he sort of hated that she still loved their father. She doesn’t understand, she can’t. Gwen knows that her big brother has lied about where he went, about who took him and what really happened - she knows because she tells him of her dreams and Finney couldn’t give her an answer that would make her happy. So he said nothing. She thinks Finney is different now and she’s right, but it wasn’t that Albert changed him, it’s that Finney has stopped pretending.
‘It’s in your eyes.’ She’d said. ‘I can see it in your eyes, the shine.’
“But would it please you? If I hurt you?” He says and knows that Albert sort of wants him to. He knows that this man wants to lay down and let the worms chew on his bones, that he would allow Finney to strangle the life out of him. If he’s lucky, maybe Al would even let him have a kiss…
“I reckon anything you did would please me.” It comes out more honest than he’d meant it to, but Finney has his little claws under Al’s skin and he can practically feel the boy rooting around in his head. He hates how much he likes it, how much he wants to let Finney crawl inside of his own body and roost between his ribs.
It is not in spite of what Albert has done, but because of it that Finney wants very much to please this man.
The halls are, unsurprisingly, empty - swirling neon lights casting abstract galaxies on the wall as Finney leans over a display table of faux moon rocks. The carpets are astonishingly ugly, like something out of the roller-rink or arcade, and the atrocious repeating pattern makes Albert’s head swim. But then Finney turns to him, limned by that burst of vivid light, and snatches his hand up to tug Al through a curtained off corridor.
“They’ve got a planetarium in here.” He’s all excited whispering, as if anyone else was even there to interrupt - but that makes Albert suddenly consider something he should’ve much earlier.
“Shouldn’t you be in school?” Al blurts out inelegantly.
It’s a Wednesday afternoon in early November, of course the place is empty - it’s a school day…That doesn’t stop him from following the boy into the darkened room, alight with the projection of a night sky above their heads. It makes Albert think of the night Finney stopped him from blowing his brains out at the lake, of the stars overhead and below his feet.
“No one cares if I’m there or not.” Finney says it so matter-of-factly, no particular emotion attached at all, and that’s how Al knows it hurts the boy more than he wants to let on. Finney had been missing for a whole week, showed up bruised and disheveled in a payphone stall at 3am on a Sunday, yet here he is skipping class and going completely unnoticed.
How miserable.
“I care.” It isn’t that Albert wishes he hadn’t said that, more that he wishes it didn’t come out so pathetically yearning. He should not yearn for anything relating to Finney Blake, and yet here he is - giving up a day at work to take a fifteen year old to see plastic models of the solar system. It’s the most fun he’s had in ages and he would do this a hundred times more just to see Finney’s unabashed excitement.
“Yes. You certainly do.” Their hands are still locked together as Finney pulls him along to what he deems are the perfect seats in an empty auditorium, doesn’t drop Al’s hand even as he sits. It feels so natural, so normal, that Albert doesn’t even notice their fingers are laced together on the armrest between them.
The room is dark and cold and it leaves Albert’s mind drifting, bobbing weightlessly in ebbs and flows as the sky rotates overhead. Beside him he hears Finney’s soft voice, all barely contained eagerness, as he points with his free hand up above them. ‘That one is Pisces, it’s the zodiac constellation for November.’ He turns and catches the glow of soft light dripping across Finney in the dark, oozing like liquid silver across his skin when the lights flicker above them in a vast array of slowly spinning starlight. It alights the rise of his cheeks, the upturn of his round nose and sends his dark eyes glinting - catches in the whorls of his messy hair.
A desperate ache shoots through his bones and Albert faces upwards once more, clenches his eyes shut in the dark as he listens to the gentle rumble of Finney’s voice beside him. He doesn’t realize he’s clutching the boy’s hand so tightly his knuckles are going white, but Finney just turns his palm up and lets him. It isn’t until he feels him squeeze his hand back that Al lets out the breath he’d been holding. Feels it woosh out of him and echo too loudly in the empty room.
Finney is looking at him now and it’s with a fierceness he is starting to recognize as Finney coming to some grand decision. Making his mind up on something very important.
“Fair is fair, Albert.” He says and it is the first time Finney has ever said the man’s name. The first time he has tasted the word on his tongue and he takes a moment to really savor it.
His eyes are wide and blue even in the dark, a little furrow at his brow as Finney stares the man down in a way he knows is a little too intense. But Albert looks beautiful here with starlight glinting in his bright eyes. Finney thinks of this man with his masked face turned up towards the harsh light in the basement, the shadows it cast until his eyes were just empty and black. There was an eerie beauty to him even then, to the languorous careful way he’d moved in darkness and the rasping voice reverberating off ceramic.
Here in the daytime, when there is only Albert Shaw, he’s a withdrawn quiet man - clever and quick, but flinches away from the presence of strangers.
Finney likes both parts of him. The caged thing that hides in his chest, some trapped bird with its black beating wings, and the softly calloused hands of a man with his winter blue eyes that see far too much. He wants to know if Albert would like him too, if he would like the angry little beast that rattles Finney’s ribs like the bars of a cage. If he would like the miserably lonely boy he is at heart, full of the same shining that compelled his mother to end her own life. It’s the thing that drives everyone else away, some inherent wrongness built into his bones that other people can see festering inside him.
He would, Finney knows. He would like all of me.
“Finn?” Albert breathes it out, all fearful and rushing blood in his ears. He knows what the boy wants now, can see the shine of it in the way his eyes crinkle as he smiles - lopsidedly sweet and beautifully boyish. Don’t. Don’t. Don’t.
“Fair is fair.” Finney says again, shuffling close enough that the arm of the chair is digging uncomfortably into his side. “You chose me, so I choose you.”
“Don’t.” There’s no way Finney could want that, no way he should want it and Albert is terrified - can hear it in his own croaking voice.
“I already did. You’re mine, so I’m yours.”
“You don’t know what you’re saying, you can’t. Finney, please. You can’t.”
His fingers are warm where they press into Albert’s skin, trailing over the prickling stubble growing from his jawline up to his cheek. “Kiss?”
A gun dropping into dark waters, ripples sending the mirrored stars dancing across the lake. Finney with his dirtied hands reaching for a bottle of Sprite as a dog barks upstairs, his friend’s lifeless body buried across the street. There is a ceramic mask in the costume trunk that sits in Al’s van, half-finished birdhouses and potted plants waiting for him at work. A scar that runs the length of Albert Shaw’s right forearm, gouged into him by the dangerously sharp end of a pen light shaped like a rocket ship.
Robin Arellano gave it to him out of a box of Cracker-Jacks and now it has Albert’s blood dried into the plastic.
“I’ll take you to him.” Albert says, holding the boy’s chin when Finney tries to lean in across the armrest to kiss him - and they are close enough now to be practically breathing in the other. It is, somehow, more intimate than the kiss Albert denies him. “Then ask me again.”
Finney knows what he means, knows that Al is both hoping for and expecting punishment from him. But he agrees, breath warm against the man’s skin.
It's nearing 10:30 at night by the time Finney is standing on the front porch. There’s dirt caked to his jeans and under his fingernails, and the heavy weight of Albert’s leather jacket is warm around his shoulders. Even as he stands there in the dark, Finney can feel the electricity buzzing in the air, he knows it must be coming from Gwen - because their father has only ever felt like red-hot anger.
He’s lucky tonight, it seems, as Terrence is passed out drunk on the sofa and snoring so loudly it muffles the sound of Finney warily shutting the front door behind him. He toes off his dirty sneakers and pads barefoot across the living-room, hoping he can put off whatever is about to happen with Gwen until tomorrow. Maybe longer.
Maybe forever.
He isn’t ready for whatever she has to say, not now. Not after Albert took him to the empty house across the street and he can still hear the eerie echo of their footsteps in the darkness as Al took him down into the dirt basement.
It didn’t smell like he expected it to. There was no sticky sweet odor of rot or buzzing of flies, just the cloying scent of old dirt and stale air - like a sealed tomb just reopened. Finney isn’t certain how long he stood there on the bottom step before finally crossing the line from the house above to the basement below, one foot sinking down into the dark soil as he came upon the mound of dirt he knew to be Robin.
Their shadows weren’t there, none of them were. Contained only to the opposite basement and the black phone on its wall - but Finney still strained to hear any possible whisper from the graves below his feet.
He’d sank down to his knees in the dirt, felt the cool silk of it between his fingers as he began to dig with a wild fervor. Half of Finney wanted, needed, to see Robin’s face - the other half quailed at imagining the empty shell of the only friend he’d ever had. In the summertime Finney dreaded the arrival of cicadas, fragile little insect bodies wriggling from their carapace - left still clinging to tree bark and scattering across pavement. Sometimes they never made it out, stuck forever half inside their molted shells.
Half alive, half dead.
“Finney stop!” Albert was at his back, snatching the boy’s wrists out of the dirt before he could get any further. Pulled Finney against the sturdy warmth of his chest while scrambling backwards until he hit the concrete wall, holding him tight as the boy thrashed and wailed and cried fat bubbling tears.
It was a howling miserable sound, echoing with pain that shot through them both like spider-webbing fault lines in the Earth. The sound of Finney’s grief reverberated off the walls, an echo chamber, before he slumped heavily against Albert like a marionette with its strings cut.
The basement was cold, colder somehow than the one across the street, and Finney shivered as he turned in Al’s arms to bury his face into the hollow of the man’s throat. The moment Albert released his wrists Finney was clinging to him, reaching frantically for the front of his shirt and the fall of his long hair as Finney desperately scrambled for this man. Held onto him tightly as his little chest heaved with shuddering breaths.
He doesn’t know how long they stayed like that, Albert with Finney in his lap as they held onto each other. Sniffing sobs and Albert’s fingers soothing through his curly hair. Knows only that at some point he’d gently pulled Finney’s arms through the sleeves of that brown leather coat, bundled him up in it as Finney allowed himself to be maneuvered.
“Tell me about him?”
So he did. Finney told him of a boy that stood up for him when no one else would, who skinned his knuckles raw from fighting other boys and always won. He was saving up his allowance to go see The Texas Chainsaw Massacre in theaters a second time because he thought Leatherface was badass. Robin’s favorite color was orange and his least favorite food was mint chocolate chip ice cream, but he loved cream soda. Robin was brave and he was strong and he was the only friend Finney’s ever had.
By the time he’d run out of words and tears, night had fallen and Albert looked devastatingly heartbroken. Spoke soft and slow as he shifted Finney sideways in his lap. “I’ve got to take you home, Finn. It’s 10 o'clock and your dad will be worried.”
“You know he won’t be.” Finney’s throat felt raw, gritty like swallowing a mouthful of sand, but he knew the longer he stayed out the worse the punishment would be if his dad caught him coming home so late…
Finney is thinking of cold dirt and Albert Shaw’s hands holding him together at the seams as he steps carefully across the squeaky wooden floorboards. Tries to be as quiet as he can manage so his father won't wake up, but the door at the end of the hall swings open and Gwen is there in her pajamas - bristly agitation squaring her shoulders. They pause for just a moment, eyes on each other, before Finney darts into his room and leans against the closed door, beating Gwen there by half a step.
“FINNEY.” She hisses through his bedroom door, knocking in frustration.
Not now, please not now. But he knows she won’t relent and the risk of their dad waking up is one he isn’t ready to face, not now. Not tonight, when he feels as if his whole body is rubbed raw. When his mind is swirling like water down the drain. He relents and opens the door enough for her to slip through.
“Where the hell have you been?!” She’s half whispering, half shouting and Finney is sort of impressed at how she manages to do both at once.
“Out.”
“Don’t pull this shit with me, don’t you dare.” Gwen is pointing at him accusingly. “Where. Were. You?”
Finney knew this had to happen, that he couldn’t keep it a secret forever and most of all not from Gwen, but he tenses defensively all the same. “The science center. I went to see the planetary exhibit.”
She looks absolutely dumbfounded, floundering in surprise before straightening up with a displeased huff. “With who?”
When he doesn’t respond she eyes him from top to bottom, and the look on her face isn’t quite disgust - but it’s close. Something akin to pity, maybe. “You’re lucky dad didn’t see you come home wearing that, he’d have a damn fit.”
That? Oh… Finney hadn’t thought of Albert’s jacket, the one that smells of smoky musk and sawdust, of the Earth after it rains. The leather is well worn, smoothed down matte and wonderfully soft as Finney runs his fingers along the sleeve. It hangs over his hands almost entirely, engulfs him in oversized warmth and the scent of a man.
He realizes now that Gwen thinks Albert is turning him into something he shouldn’t be - thinks he’s so traumatized that he’s letting this man take advantage of him.
“He isn’t turning me queer, Gwen. I was already a fag, you know that.”
Her little fists ball at her sides and Gwen glances away as red flushes up her cheeks. “I know, but it’s…it’s different when you’re running around with some man.”
Some man. Like Finney was just picked up by a stranger at the bar, as if Albert didn’t belong to him - every last atom of that man was his and nobody could take him away. “You don’t get it. You just…can’t.”
She can’t, Finney knows this, and yet wasn’t prepared for just how awful her rejection would really feel. The simple truth was that for as much as he loved his sister, Finney resented her in equal measure. He resents that as the years went on and his queerness blossomed into something unavoidable, their fathers ire turned sharply onto him. It became more and more common for Finney to face the belt alone while Gwen was spared - so long as she kept those dreams to herself.
Finney cannot, will not, hide his queerness.
“Then help me understand.” She already knows, doesn’t need prophetic dreams to see what’s plainly obvious and Finney flares with possessiveness. Clenches his jaw shut until his teeth grind painfully and Gwen just looks at him with all that pity. Like he’s just some pathetic mangy animal on the street corner. “Tell me it isn’t him.”
Finney says nothing. He won’t lie, can’t lie to her anyway, and he refuses to play this game. Refuses to let Gwen take this man away, clings to the thought of Albert Shaw with taloned claws and knows nothing will ever be the same again.
At first the warm weight at his back is nothing unusual, Samson often hops up onto the bed on cold nights - all flopped about with his wagging tail as he pushes Al half off the side. In Albert’s drowsy mind he thinks little of it, stirs only when he finally registers the weight of Finney’s arm curled around his waist and the pressing heat along his back is very much the stretch of a human body.
Albert is rather abruptly awake, scrambling to turn over, and finds exactly what he’d expected. “Finney?”
The boy is dressed in just a pair of flannel pajama pants and the same sort of threadbare henley he’d worn the day Albert spirited him away. His feet are bare, reddened with cold and the scratch of pavement - his hair a windblown mess. It must’ve taken Finney at least half an hour to make the trek across town on foot, and in the obscenely early hours of the morning no less.
His eyes are so very dark, pitch as the night sky, and if not for the warm glow of streetlights filtering in through the blinds Al wouldn’t be able to make his shape out at all. But then Finney tilts his face up and the pained loneliness there is overwhelming. Al makes to reach backwards for the lamp at his bedside, but Finney pulls him back with trembling hands.
“Not yet.” His voice is so small, lost into the darkness of Albert’s room.
“How'd you even get in?” There are a thousand things he should ask, a thousand more things he should be doing. But he knows Finney isn’t ready for them now, may not be for some time, and so Albert takes his small hand between his own - puffs warm breath against the boy’s cold skin. Finney is absolutely freezing, the tips of his fingers pinkened like the cold burn across his nose.
“The kitchen window, above the sink. I climbed on the garbage cans to reach.” Finney admits it unashamedly, scooting closer, and Albert absolutely should not be holding the comforter open for him to crawl beneath.
He does it anyway and hopes in the light of day he can forgive himself.
“I’ll give you a key, if you’re going to burglarize my kitchen.” Albert’s voice is rasping with sleep, a low timbre that reminds Finney very much of the way he'd spoken behind the mask and it makes him shiver with something bubbling up in his tummy.
Finney wants. Feels greedy with how much that wanting fills him up, and after tonight he knows there is no going home for him now. No way to go back. He shuffles down beneath the comforter and doesn’t even make an attempt to keep some distance between them, has abandoned all notions of social propriety in the dirt basement across the street. He is cold, he is lonely, and he hurts in ways he never has before. So he carefully tucks his foot between the man’s ankles and hopes, he hopes, Albert wont turn him away now.
“...What happened?” Albert can feel Finney trembling as the boy brings them closer, moving slow enough he can tell Finney is expecting rejection. First just the brush of their legs from knee’s down, then he finally breaks and presses his cheek against Al’s chest.
He wants to tell Finney it’s okay, but knows it isn’t. None of it is okay. None of what has brought Finney to him tonight was ever okay, but they can’t stop now. Can’t go back. If he was a good man none of this would have happened at all, but Finney is here now with his skin chilled into pinkness by the November cold. When Albert puts a warm hand to the middle of his back Finney sucks in a hissing breath, flinches at the touch and it is one of pain that Al recognizes far too well.
“My dad found your jacket under my bed…” He says as Albert carefully puts his palm up beneath the boy’s shirt to feel the welts that scatter across Finney’s back. The touch is so soft, so warm, and Finney is desperate for it - tilts his face up hopefully just like he did at the science center. Begging for a kiss.
It isn’t quite the one he was asking for, but the press of Albert’s mouth against his forehead is enough to make him whimper. Finney sobs, feels the burn of tears in his eyes and he just can’t keep it in anymore. It’s all so much, so goddamn much.
“Shh, I know.” Albert’s voice is gravely in the dark and he kisses the rise of Finney’s cheek, the bridge of his nose, then turns the boy’s face to kiss the other cheek too. It’s a kiss, a real kiss, even if not the way Finney was begging for it’s still the first he’s ever had. “I know, sweetheart.”
It doesn’t feel real until morning, when Albert has to face the sight of Finney asleep beside him. He’s flopped onto his belly, breath soft and slow. In the hazy light of dawn Finney's hair is a dark smudge against the pale cream pillowcases and he stands out starkly where no one else has been in Albert’s life.
No one has ever been beside him when he awoke.
For a long stretch Albert just watches him, caught in the gravitational pull of this bright young man. There are freckles scattered across his nose, little constellations against the paleness of his skin, and Albert reaches out to trail his finger across them. Feels the heat of him so so close. It’s different than before, in the basement, this time Finney wants him to - this time it was Finney who touched first. That matters. It means something.
The effort it takes to drag himself out of bed is immense. Finney continues to sleep soundly with his arms wrapped around one of the pillows, the blankets kicked halfway down, and Albert can see the old scars on his back where the boy’s shirt has rucked up in the night. There are fresh welts that bloom black and blue before disappearing beneath Finney’s shirt, raw and painful looking, and a thought claws away at the back of his mind - it is not the first time and it won't be the last, but now it’s solidifying. Taking shape into a suspicion that grows like weeds in the cracks of pavement.
By the time Finney wakes it’s nearly noon and Albert is on the sofa clutching a mug of black, unsweetened, coffee while watching the news play out; unsurprisingly, it’s about The Grabber and how Finney Blake seems to mark the last boy to be taken. They theorize that The Grabber has been spooked by the boy’s escape and is laying low or perhaps given up entirely. They’re not far off, with that last part.
“They think you raped me.” Finney says, rubbing sleep from his eyes as he pads barefoot into the living room. He watches the news report with a faint look of disdain and Albert recalls the prying questions of eager news reporters. How they’d shoved their bulky cameras in the boy’s face like he was some animal at the zoo they wanted to prod at for a reaction.
Finney had cried on cue, just like they’d wanted him to, and sniffled childishly into his sleeve - all beautiful crocodile tears. An act of make-believe, because he’d known exactly what was expected of him.
Al tenses immediately, an oozing layer of filth crawling across his skin. “What?”
“Mhm. They think I’m lying about it, when I said no one touched me. They wanted me to do some kinda kit or whatever at the hospital, but I kicked the nurse in the face so they backed off.”
Albert can’t get that image out of his head, policemen and nurses trying to force Finney into agreeing - as if that wouldn’t re-traumatize someone already hurt by something like…that. He hates it, hates the thought of anyone putting their hands on Finney. Hates the implication that he had done so himself, even though Albert knows it’s a reasonable suspicion for the police to have. It isn’t like this is the first time he’s heard the public theory about what The Grabber had done to those boys, but it is the first time he is hearing it directly and it leaves a cold stone sinking into his gut.
He wants to shower and scrub his skin raw just to peel away the oily feeling of disgust.
“They’re not wrong for thinking that way. Statistically speaking, it’s the likely reason someone would have taken you. Them.” He says, tentative and careful. Hating himself more than he ever has as he sets his mug on the coffee table. “But they’re wrong for trying to force you.”
Finney has his eyes on the television, the news report playing out in dull colors, but his focus is distant. As if he isn’t really seeing at all. “You aren’t a pedophile or whatever. Robin would’ve told me if you touched him like that.”
He wasn’t wrong, Albert really wasn’t. He hadn’t taken those boy’s for anything other than the feral compulsion to seek out the shining each of them possessed, some wild animal driven by unhinged instinct. The ghostly voice of his father bouncing around in his head would’ve done it though, would’ve hurt those boys like he’d hurt Albert as a child - but not for any reason other than the power it would give. The power to hurt and control and be stronger than someone else.
Perhaps if there’d been less Albert that remained and more of The Grabber, more of his father, the police would be right in their suspicions.
“Robin would’ve told you…” He knew, in some way, that Finney had been speaking to someone on the black phone - but hadn’t known who. Or perhaps he just hadn’t wanted to admit it to himself. He wonders if Robin Arellano would talk to him as well, if he ever got up the nerve to answer.
“But I already knew that. When I met you, I mean. I knew you didn’t. That you weren’t like that. I wouldn’t have gone near you if you had been. I would’ve known.”
Albert reclines into the sofa until his neck is digging into the backrest, stares up at the ceiling and the little patches of dust he always misses when cleaning, then lets out a heavy breath.
“Finney…did you let me take you?”
The boy is quiet for long enough that Albert already has his answer, the truth he’s suspected all along. He holds out a beckoning hand to Finney and isn’t surprised when he takes it.
“Yes.” Finney is looking into his face with something fervent and wild in his eyes, a frenetic energy that sparks around him. Al can almost see it, the shining, like the glare of sunlight off a camera lens.
“Why?”
“You said you just wanted to look at me.” Finney’s voice is all intense, incandescent wanting that fizzes up in his tummy like sparklers on the 4th of July. “Why?”
Albert isn’t certain which is worse; if he had simply killed Finney like the others, or this unbreakable connection that’s formed between them. Is it worse that Finney asked to be held last night? That Finney lets him press a kiss against the back of his hand as the boy stands there between Albert’s knees? He doesn’t know, but what he is absolutely sure of is that a world without Finney Blake in it is not a world worth living in - he must be there, he must.
Albert feels it through every inch of his body, down to the very marrow, that Finney would’ve been the death of him. One way or another. He still might be, in some other place where hardly any of Albert Shaw the man remained.
In some other place where the voice in his mind blotted out all else.
But that isn’t the world they are in and Finney has let this man kiss his cheek, the bridge of his nose, and now the ridge of his knuckles as Albert holds his small hand. “Because you’re beautiful, Finn. I’m sorry…”
There are innumerable things Albert is sorry for, things that go back to when he was even younger than Finney is now and he can barely recall their shape. But Finney doesn’t flinch away from it, from how Al presses the boy’s hand against his cheek and he feels like a supplicant at church.
“Why are you sorry for that? I think you’re beautiful too, but I’m not sorry at all.” He means it, he isn’t sorry in the least.
Finney thinks it was worth the belt he got from Terrence last night - maybe worth every smack his dad had to offer. Worth it because he got to spend the last three days wrapped up in the heady warmth of Albert’s leather jacket that is now draped across the back of a kitchen chair, the only thing he managed to snatch from home before running away from his dad.
Finney isn’t sorry for sliding his hand along the curve of the man’s jaw or how he likes the feel of Albert’s hair between his fingers. He isn’t sorry for any of it and doesn't want Al to be either, not for this. “You wanted to kiss me when you met me. You felt bad for thinking it, but I heard it.”
‘Met’ is a very generous way to describe…that, but Albert lets out a weak laugh at the honesty. Finney heard everything, in some small way at the very least, and still went to him willingly.
“I did.”
“But you won't kiss me now?”
“You don’t know what you’re asking, Finney. I did a very bad thing to you and…and it would be understandable that you’d feel confused. That you would want things you wouldn’t normally want.”
He gives a sharp little tug on the man’s hair and Albert bites back a sound that is most certainly not one of pain. Finney wants and he is so full of it that he feels ready to burst, like his body is too small to really keep all of him inside, and the thought of how last night could’ve gone much differently is one Finney can’t shake. There is no part of Albert Shaw he doesn’t want to see, no atom of his being Finney would refuse - he knows, the same way his mama knew secrets too, that Albert was his from the very beginning.
“Kiss.” He says, and it’s breathlessly desperate. “Kiss.”
The way Finney kisses him is sweetly clumsy, the inexperienced first kiss of a boy who is greedy for it and he can taste the bitter black coffee when he touches his tongue to Albert’s mouth. He doesn’t really know what he’s doing, how to make this work like he’s seen in movies or read in comic books - but he knows it is good and that he wants to keep kissing Albert for the rest of his life. Their noses bump when Finney tries to press in closer and Al is suddenly the one guiding him into another kiss, tilting them together so it goes from awkward to so goddamn perfect he wants to cry.
Albert makes to pull away but Finney chases him with his mouth, scrambles up onto the man’s lap and clings to every inch he can get his little hands on. He feels like the frothing bubbles in a soda bottle, all fizzy and light and he can feel the same thing radiating off of Albert in sunshine brightness. Finney is not the only one of them that shines so beautifully.
He knows, for the most part, how two boys have sex. Has heard it crudely described around the locker room after gym class, and he knows he very much wants to do that with Albert - even if he can’t figure out how to ask for it.
But before he can try Albert stills him, cups his face in calloused hands and hushes his whining protest. It is a gentle chastising, soft at the edges and so warm Finney doesn’t even mind. He minds even less when he sees the overwhelming adoration on the man’s face, but so too is it the look of a wolf that wants to gobble him up - to consume and be consumed.
Albert won’t let him, not right now. Not with the way he is dutifully quieting the ache in Finney’s chest with a hand brushing the curls from his face, slows down the rush of his heart until all that wanting becomes bearable - isn’t ready to set him ablaze.
“Fair is fair, Albert.” He thinks that, maybe, choosing to love the thing that could hurt you the most is the only love he knows how to give. To reach into that deep dark angry thing that clatters around inside another person and find it beautiful, even when it drips with ichor.
Finney knows he loves this man, ferociously and devotedly.
The fridge is woefully bare as Albert crouches to rifle through what he has on hand…a loaf of bread, a carton of eggs, some jars of half used marmalade. Hardly much of anything, and the truth is he simply hadn’t been expecting to live long enough to require another grocery trip. But here he is, significantly more alive than he’d previously expected to be, and in very sudden possession of a fifteen year old runaway.
Finney has sat himself on the counter-top, legs dangling above the floor as he openly inspects the kitchen in great curiosity. He’s still dressed in the pajamas from the night prior and Albert realizes he has a very limited set of options on how to go about this…
“I’ll have to take you home.”
“What?! No, please don’t.” Finney pleads, looking equal parts betrayed and terrified.
“You haven’t even got shoes, Finney.” He leans against the counter beside where the boy is sitting, arms crossed over his broad chest. “I won't make you go home if you don’t want to, but you need something more than just pajamas. You can borrow my clothes until then.”
The night he left Finney Blake at the payphone there was nothing, no amount of shining, that could’ve prepared him for this boy to come crashing back into his life. It’s the choice that makes it matter, that actually means something. The choice that Finney has made between his own father and Albert, two very different men who’ve harmed him in very different ways and Albert isn’t ignorant to that fact. He’s hurt Finney immeasurably and no amount of outings to look at plastic renditions of the planetary system can make that any better.
And yet Finney is here.
Afraid to go home, to be left alone. Had sat in his lap and kissed Albert with his little heart burst open, claiming Al all for himself with greedy hands. He’d give every inch of his being to Finney, if the boy asked for it - feels the thunderous roar of his own heart at just how completely devoted he is to this miraculous, impossible, boy. He has been from the very beginning and considers that, perhaps, he was born already belonging to Finney.
“You’ll let me stay here?” Finney is winding a strand of Albert’s sandy hair around one finger, touches with familiarity - as if he’s known this man all his life. He isn’t shy, doesn’t ask permission because he knows he already has it.
The irony of that request is astounding and the look on Albert’s face makes the boy burst out laughing. It isn’t funny in the least, none of it is, and yet it’s just as Finney said; sometimes, when you’ve had enough bad things happen to you, anything can be just a little bit funny. Maybe it’s all those bad things that build up until you have to laugh to stop from crying, to make yourself feel better about all the things that feel awful.
“Yes. But I need you to listen carefully, Finn. If you ever want to leave I’ll take you back, I won’t keep you if you don’t want to be kept.” Those are the rules, it must be Finney’s choice and his choice alone or none of this, whatever this even is, will withstand the future.
“What about you, Mr.Shaw? Do you want to be kept?” Finney is mischief and affection and a dark wild thing as tucks the man’s hair back from his handsome face.
“By you? Yes.” He says honestly.
“Show me.” What he really means is ‘kiss me’ and Albert wants that so terribly much.
What Albert has quickly discovered is that he is a horribly weak man where Finney is involved. When he hesitates, Finney pouts beautifully - the little jut of his lower lip and those brown Bambi eyes as he watches Albert deliberate. He can’t take it back now: letting the boy into his bed, kissing him chastely in the dark and then…not so chastely. Can't take back how Finney sat astride his lap and he’d done nothing to stop it.
Just like he can’t take back putting Finney in the basement.
‘Show me’, so he does. Stands between Finney’s legs and plants his hands on either side of him, watches how the boy takes in an eager little breath before Albert leans in and kisses him again. It’s less clumsy than Finney’s first attempt, but just as sweet when this has no right to be. It’s sweet and soft and Finney’s arms are around his shoulders, like he’s afraid Al will leave him even now. He couldn’t, it’s an unimaginable thing to him as he crowds Finney against the cabinets at his back - tries not to kiss too hard and too greedily.
But he’s a desperate man, full of fervent devoutness for this boy. His boy. Presses his cheek to the crown of Finney’s hair and breathes in the cottony sweetness of him.
“Can I keep you?” He shouldn’t ask that, shouldn’t want it at all.
Just like Finney shouldn’t tell him yes.
Albert learns several new things about Finney Blake. He learns that the boy is a sugar fiend for grape soda and pleaded with Al to buy him just one from the grocery store, he’d grown up having to make his little sister meals of peanut-butter & jelly sandwiches when their father was too drunk to bother, and that Finney has a strange peculiarity around certain foods touching on his plate. He separates them into little piles so nothing touches the other and eats in an order only he understands the reasoning behind. Albert has also learned that he enjoys the sight of Finney wearing his clothing far far too much.
Most of all he has learned that Finney is not a weak creature, that he is vibrantly fierce when he allows the shine to break through the cracks. The night Finney ran away from home he hadn’t passively sat back and let his father whip him into submission and he tells Albert of it all.
He’s standing at the stove, stirring a pot of spaghetti sauce as it bubbles away, when Finney comes up behind him and wraps his arms around the man’s waist - pressing all along Albert’s back as if it is his right to do so. Finney is a needy thing, soaks up every ounce of attention and affection Al offers him and it is a plentiful supply. Bottomless. Albert tries not to let all of it overflow, not to drown them both in the sheer depth of it because the touch of this boy is searing against his skin.
It’s an innocent move, Finney seeking connection and comfort and Albert feels wicked for how it pleases him so much. For how much he wants to put his mouth on every inch of him.
“I almost killed my dad.” Finney says and tells him of how his daddy, the good ol’ boy Terrence Blake, was whipping his own son with the same worn leather belt he always took to his children. Whispers of reaching across the kitchen counter and snatching up the frying pan warming atop the burner, swinging it with all his might right into the side of his father’s head. It wasn’t searingly hot, but enough to leave the scorching impression of the pans bottom along Terrence’s cheek.
Finney tells of how his daddy had howled and cussed and dropped to the kitchen floor with blisters bubbling beneath his skin. Ruddy-faced and ready to murder. He’d sat on the man’s chest and put his hands around Terrence’s throat, squeezed and squeezed until his baby sister came rushing in to make him ‘stop! Finney stop!’
“It isn’t fair.” He says into the back of Albert’s shoulder, his voice full of bitter resentment and the ache of betrayal. He is hurt more by Gwen than by the belt. “She loves dad even when he hits her, when he hits me, but when I fight back she wants me to stop? How is that fair?”
A bundle of rosemary and thyme and basil is dropped into the pot, and Finney peers under the man’s arm to watch in interest. At home, at his dad's house, they didn’t have money for things like fresh herbs - they had ancient jars of dried stuff that probably should’ve been tossed out before Gwen was even born. Finney doesn’t recognize some of what Albert is stirring in and feels too embarrassed to ask outright, but Al can see it in his eyes - can feel it in the aura of shining that radiates off of Finney like the rays of sunshine in the summer.
The closer they are, physically and otherwise, the more he is able to pick up the wispy tendrils of Finney’s emotions.
“Rosemary.” Albert says as he holds a sprig up for Finney to inspect. It looks sort of like the branches of a Christmas tree and smells herbal, not unlike the camphor oil his mother used to rub into his skin when Finney was still a small child and got sick every winter.
He holds up another sprig of something that looks similar to the rosemary but with smaller…leafy bits. It smells almost spicy and when Finney leans in to inspect it Albert playfully swats the tip of his nose with it. “This one is thyme.”
“I know the big flat leaf is basil.” Finney ducks back under the man’s arm, hides his blush and hopes Albert hasn’t noticed. “It smells good.”
Albert hums in agreement, lets the boy press against him once more. “Your sister, Gwen, she…she’s very young and she’s going to feel a lot of conflicting things. She wants to love your dad, she wants to be a normal happy family, and when you fought back that shattered the illusion.”
“Did you fight back?”
“I did. Our father was trying to hurt Max in ways he hadn’t tried to before and I hit him with a baseball bat to make him stop.”
Finney isn’t stupid, he may be naive about some things - but not ignorant. He knows what Albert means and wishes he could’ve met this man when Al was still just a teenager. Thinks that maybe they could’ve grown up together and saved each other.
“Max was the one upstairs, wasn’t he? He would’ve seen you taking me food…where is he now? Did you hurt him?”
Albert tenses uncomfortably. He knows, of course, that he cannot play house with Finney as if they are normal people - cannot do what Gwen has done with their father and pretend nothing bad has ever happened. Yet it leaves him disquieted and pained all the same.
“He was and I didn’t. He’s at a clinic in Denver for people with…certain addictions. I took him in when he needed a place to stay for a while and the timing happened to be…particularly awful.”
“Or lucky, for me anyway.”
“Please don’t say that, Finney.” He turns in the boy’s arms, pushes the tumble of Finney’s hair back as he looks down into his pretty face. “I don’t like to think of hurting you. It’s selfish and it’s cowardly, but I hate it anyway.”
“You would’ve let me go no matter what.” Finney sounds so confident, looks awfully smug about it as well, and Albert knows he’s right - he really would’ve. “You like me.”
“I do.” He can’t help but feel charmed by how innocently simple Finney makes that sound, as if he isn’t a grown man that has grossly overstepped in every aspect of their…their what? Relationship? What kind of relationship?
In some ways Finney requires him to be almost fatherly, in others some sort of…mentor - but that most certainly doesn’t account for the boy crawling into bed with him at night and asking for a kiss. It doesn’t account for Albert both allowing and wanting those things.
“You like me a lot.” Finney emphasizes, that familiar spark of mischief in his eyes. At times Finney plays up being charmingly boyish, knows that he is an androgynous little thing with a pretty face, but quick as anything he turns far too knowing for his own good. He is a creature caught in the liminal space of teenagerhood, equal parts too mature and too childish - but knows which one to be to get what he wants.
It’s delightfully larkish.
“Quite a bit more than I should.” Albert admits because it’s both true and impossible to hide.
“I think you like me exactly as much as you should.” Finney thoughtfully reaches up to card his fingers through the man's hair and seems particularly fascinated by the streaks of gray around his ears. “Actually, I think you should like me even more.”
The gentle touch is distracting and Al feels himself particularly enchanted by it. “Do you? I’m pretty sure I’m already significantly more fond of you than a man my age has any right to be.”
“Just exactly how fond of me are you?” He asks, playful and breathtaking. Finney gives a small pull of the man’s hair, watches the way Albert’s lashes flutter as he sucks in a stuttering breath. It pleases him immensely to have some power over this man, to know Albert defers to him so readily - it’s a heady mix that bubbles up in his tummy and leaves Finney wanting again and again. “How old are you anyway? I’m fifteen, my birthday isn't until July.”
Christ. He leans into Finney's exploratory touch, feels a little lightheaded by how it sends heat pooling in his belly. Too much, far too much.
“I know.” He heard it on the news, but had known even before then. The same way he’d known which path between the houses Finney took on his way home from school. He’s too old for what Finney wants from him, is certain that once Finney realizes just how much older he is the boy will reconsider…whatever this is. Albert doesnt think dating is even close to what they have, it’s too big and too uncontrollable for something as simple as that. “I’ll be forty-six in a few weeks.”
“Well then, happy birthday Mr.Shaw.” Finney teases, stretching up to drop his chin on the man’s shoulder. He is entirely unconcerned by this information, knows he ought to be and simply finds it doesn’t mean shit to him anymore. Albert isn’t just anybody, he is Finney’s and that - to Finney at least - makes it very different. They belong to each other, after all. “...The sauce is gonna boil over.”
Albert curses and spins back around to turn off the burner. Damn it. “That should bother you, Finn.”
“The sauce?”
“Not the sauce.” He sends the boy a wry scowl without any real heat behind it.
Finney hops up onto the counter-top, just as he does nearly every day when Albert is at the sink doing dishes and passes them along for Finney to dry. His legs dangle above the floor and Albert does his best not to stare at the way his own shirt hangs loosely over the boy's shoulders. The image of Finney wearing his clothing is an intimate one, something that both of them seem to take a great deal of pleasure in. Finney has a rucksack of clothes he’d grabbed from his fathers house and it sits largely untouched in the guest room.
Albert had tried to be a gentleman about it. Placed the bag on the still, as of yet, untouched guest-bed with the intention of showing Finney he had no particular obligations towards him. That Finney should be comfortable going where he likes, but it wasn’t at all surprising when he very pointedly ignored that unspoken offer altogether and continued to crawl into bed with Albert each night.
“I like you.” Finney says as if it is that simple. I like you. He means much more than that, but the nervousness that flutters in his chest keeps him from saying it. “I’m keeping you, until you tell me you don’t want to be kept.”
Weeks ago, so many he has nearly lost count, Finney sat in the back of Albert’s van and spoke of the other boys on his baseball team that hated him ferociously. He’d offered, voice small and shy, that maybe Albert would want to come see him play - assuming he even went back on the team at all. At the time Al hadn’t known whether the boy was simply talking to fill the silence, making small-talk just in case The Grabber changed his mind on letting him go, or if Finney really meant it.
He did, or at the very least he does now.
It isn’t the first time Albert has dropped in on one of the local baseball games, Galesburg is a small town with small town entertainment, but the last time he’d been to one was the cloudy afternoon Bruce Yamada went missing. The memory of it is hazy in his mind, he recalls the boy wearing a uniform similar to the one Finney dons now, that he’d gone riding his bike towards home after the youthful excitement of winning a game and…then what? Albert can’t recall the space between seeing Bruce riding down the street and blood drip drip dripping warm and red down his own hands. It felt as if waking from a bout of sleepwalking, the sight of Bruce’s small cold body had left him heaving up sick on the concrete floor.
The Yamada’s don’t come to the games anymore and Al feels selfish for how relieved that makes him now.
“Sorry.” He murmurs when a small girl goes rushing past him up to the fence - sticks her little fingers through the lattice, and Al readjusts Finney’s backpack over one shoulder. He feels like a goddamn idiot coming here, using the boy’s forgotten book bag as an excuse just to come see him. However…Finney could be a deviously clever little thing when it suited him and Albert wonders just how forgotten the backpack really is.
When Finney spoke of his peers disliking him so much Al had assumed it was with a grain of childish exaggeration, he was proven wrong. They were all hyena laughter, raucous voices as they skirted around the boy like he was diseased or else went slamming into him on a run from one base to the next - foul little beasties with their slobbering maws. Finney scuffs his sneakers in the dirt, shoulders tense as he dares to peer up from beneath the shade of his baseball cap and scan the bleachers.
It was a pitifully hopeful look that quickly begins to fade into disappointment, but then he catches sight of Albert standing among the crowd and his face lights up. Forgotten backpack indeed. Finney could’ve simply asked for him to come and Al would’ve walked over hot coals just to be here, the boy must know that. He must know how surely he has Albert wrapped around his finger and Al is grateful for it. Grateful to be allowed this at all.
It’s pathetic, he knows this. But that doesn’t stop it from being true.
Albert doesn’t think he enjoys watching baseball so much as he enjoys watching Finney. The boy is lovely in everything he does, even when tinged with the shade of embarrassment and shyness. Finney is sweetly gawky, a coltish thing that stumbles like a fawn on new legs when under the cruel scrutiny of his peers, and when he takes the baseball cap off to wipe the sweat dripping down his forehead his hair is a fluffy mess. It’s cute, it’s charming, and Finney bashfully rakes his fingers through to smooth it down - glances red-faced in Al’s direction before shoving the cap back on.
It is almost flirtatious…it is flirtatious and Al catches the curious stare of that little girl peeking at him over her shoulder. She eyes him critically, as if trying to place his face in her memory, but he only recognizes her as Gwen when the game is over and she is on the catcher's mound speaking with Finney in a hushed urgent voice.
“When are you coming home?”
“I’m not going back to dads unless I need to grab something.”
“Where do you even go? You haven’t been home at night in weeks.”
“Drop it, Gwen.”
She knows. Of course she does, Finney has told him just as much and secretly Albert has suspected that, eventually, it would come to this. Gwen Blake could ostensibly try to rat him out - could take her prophetic dreams to the police and beg them to look in on where her big brother has been going…But their father has not once tried to stop him. Hasn’t tried looking for his own son who was stolen away once before and faced down death itself all alone, but now Finney goes unnoticed.
Unwanted.
No wonder the boy walked so fearlessly to the wolf.
Besides, it isn’t as if the boy is missing. Again. Finney goes to school, most days, he even occasionally drops into his fathers house for whatever left-behind belongings the boy deems important enough to grab from his childhood bedroom. Then he goes right back to Albert.
He shows up at the hardware store, school bag still around his shoulders, and seats himself behind the counter without asking - knowing he has full access to every last inch of Albert’s life already. It pleases the man when Finney does this, when his shyness has melted away and the boy takes hold of him with those greedy hands. He brushes slender fingers through the accumulated sawdust on the worktable and tunes the radio station to whichever is playing Fleetwood Mac or ABBA. Then he slowly spins about on the stool while reading aloud from the book he has chosen to write his next Literature essay on.
It is the only class he genuinely enjoys, besides the science lectures on astronomy.
“ ‘...and therefore, the gods caught him away to themselves, to be Zeus’ wine-pourer, for the sake of his beauty, so he might be among the immortals.’ Soooo…does that mean Zeus was in love with Ganymede?
“What do you think? Do you think Zeus loved the boy, or his beauty?”
“I think Zeus wanted to have him, to possess him, but didn’t love him.”
“I agree.”
“Would you ever call me Ganymede?”
“Would you call me Zeus?”
“No. You love me.”
Albert should go. Should fuck off and wait in the parking lot and pretend he wasn’t here just to watch Finney run beneath the sunshine and smile bashfully in his direction. Gwen will take one real look at him and she’ll know and it could make things so much worse than it ever has to be. As if this isn’t already awful.
Albert should do a lot of things, but he does none of them.
“Heya, Finn.” Al puts on the same childishly lilting voice he uses at birthday parties for small children, the real shy ones who hide behind their mothers skirt when the magician asks them to pick a card. He smiles sweet and stupid like he has no goddamn idea who Gwen is, like he’s too dumb to be of any real harm. “You left this at home.”
Gwen tenses, her mouth a terse line as she watches the way her brother smiles crookedly at him. How Finney visibly eases as this man carefully loops the messenger bag around the boy’s shoulders with a touch more familiar than it ought to be. The touch of a man who allows this boy to sleep in the same bed with him every night and caves to each request for kiss that Finney asks of him.
“Thanks…” Finney says honestly and means much more than that.
Al knows he’s showing off, preening, and knows it’s absolutely absurd to do so in front of a little girl who can’t be any older than twelve. But it’s her place in Finney’s life that matters, it’s her ability to bring everything crashing down on them both if she pries hard enough and makes enough of a fuss.
So he dares her to.
Because Finney needs it of him.
He needs Albert to be a little bit awful. To put on the mask of harmless naïve stupidity that belies a cunning cruelty. Albert the man is not cruel, he is troubled and lonely and has a power inside that whispers terrifying words into his mind. The Grabber is cruelty personified, an accumulation of every vicious act his body remembers, and it's a delicate line to tread between them both.
But he can do it for Finney. He can step one foot over the edge because Al knows it is this brilliant boy who holds him back from tumbling below. That it is Finney who anchors him, a counterweight against gravity that would pull him down down down.
“Then I would never call you Ganymede. You aren’t my cup-bearer, Finn. I’m yours.”
The diner thrums with indecipherable chatter, the distant beat of a song on the radio he can’t quite make out the words to, and the muffled rush of cars up and down Main Street. Finney nudges his leg with the toe of his sneaker, sending the man a playful look right before blowing the paper wrapper off the end of his straw - it goes sailing right over Albert’s shoulder, lost among the seat cushions.
“Happy birthday, Mr. Shaw.”
Finney calls him that, teasing and lighthearted, because he knows it ruffles Albert just a little bit to be called mister by the same boy who shares his bed. Neither of them are under any illusions as to it being a wildly inappropriate relationship between them, whatever sort of relationship it is they have. Albert loves this boy with fervent devotion and knows there can be no other if Finney ever left. He is the beginning and end of all things.
Just as he knows that once he allowed the boy into his bed, without restriction, he could never take it back. They haven’t done anything, it really is just the sharing of comfort and companionship they find in the dark - but Albert is no fatherly replacement to Finney, even if he must act as caregiver by necessity. He hasn’t touched this boy, but they kiss with increasing frequency and intensity and Finney is terribly sweet in asking for it. The boy will press against him in the dark, arms around Al’s shoulders as he tries to drag them ever closer.
Albert knows only that he loves Finney as he has never loved before, but if there’s a word for what their relationship is he doesn’t know it. Lovers, maybe? But he isn’t certain if it’s love Finney feels towards him. Boyfriends? It sounds a little too childish, too mundane to really cover every aspect of their lives. He loves, and it is enough for him to hope he is loved in return.
“If you keep calling me that, I’ll take it as permission to ground you.”
Finney pops a French fry in his mouth, but it doesn’t hide the sly look on his face at all. “You’d punish me on your birthday?”
“It’s the only gift I need.” Al nudges him right back, feeling light and playful as they sit together in the little corner booth with its red vinyl seats and salt on their fingers. The burgers here are the only thing Albert ever gets and he’s inordinately pleased that Finney seems to like them too…it feels, impossibly, like being out on a date.
“I might have another one for you, but I’m not sure if it’s a good or bad gift…” Finney hesitates, licking grease off his fingers. “I talked to Griffin today.”
Albert damn near chokes, sits there in tense silence as Finney relays speaking with Griffin Stagg on the black phone down in the basement. The shadow of a boy long dead, the first of five who linger behind like wisps - cicadas that never made it free from their shells. Boys forever stuck in the half-life between childhood and adulthood. Their little bodies cannot stay in that dirt basement, of course they can’t, but Finney says there’s a way to make up for it. Just a little.
“Plant them a garden.” He says, cherry Coke sparkling on his tongue. “Put them beneath and no one will find them, but they’ll be happier.”
“Will they…leave?”
“No. But that’s the other part of your gift.”
There are many secrets kept in small towns, the kind that go unchecked and ignored even when they’re hardly a secret at all. Parents who raise their hand against their own children, teachers that coax students into playing games a child should never know the fear of. Finney knows this just as Albert does. It was all five who spoke to him on the phone, a single unified voice that echoed in his ear - just like his mother had done years and years ago, and they told Finney exactly what Albert Shaw could do to make it up to them.
“Find the really bad ones.”
Albert knows immediately what Finney means. What the five young men lingering in the basement are asking of him. Find the really bad ones and do to them as you did to us. It's fair, he thinks, for them to demand a trade. Sinners for the innocents. He could do it, knows he’s capable - even if a fully grown adult presents challenges the naïveté of teenagers does not. Maybe the boys are hoping he’ll die in the process anyway, though the thought of leaving Finney all alone is one Al shirks from. What do the other boys think of the survivor who has gone right back to the beast?
Do they know of every time Finney begs for a kiss? Sleeps in bed with him?
Do they know Albert loves him?
Finney is watching him in a way that leaves him feeling far too seen. Picked apart. Perhaps the boy is gathering the threads of his thoughts up as he’d done the afternoon Albert stole him away.
“Yes.”
“Yes?”
“They know what I’m doing with you, Vance thinks I’m a pervert. No one else seems to care, they’re not exactly...themselves anymore. They didn’t remember their names at first, I had to remind them, and the longer they’ve been dead the more they kinda get…” Finney pauses as he struggles to find a way to put words to something beyond explanation. “Hazy. I don’t think it’s really them, y’know?”
“No. I don’t know.”
“It’s like…in horror movies and stuff. How a ghost sort of just reenacts their last moments, right? But the ghost isn’t the whole of who a person was. Just that last little piece of them.”
Albert doesn’t know if this is a good or bad gift either, but he’s grateful for it anyway. Even though it feels like being skinned alive.
They’re arguing back and forth in the living room, Finney gesturing wildly as Albert stands his ground with shaking fists.
“No, you’re staying out of this.” Albert tries to be firm without being frightening, keeps his voice as even as he can but Finney refuses to back down.
“Why not!? I can do it too! I need to!” He shouts, looking more hurt than angry.
“I’M NOT TAKING A GODDAMN CHILD TO A MURDER SCENE.”
They are inches apart, chests heaving with each huffing breath, but then Finney drops heavily to the couch as all that frenzied energy whooshes out of him. He holds his arms up towards Albert, a childish request that he obeys readily. Coming to kneel on the rug between the boy’s knees so he can gather Finney up in the hug he’s begging for.
“Kiss?” Finney asks, softly apologetic. Nudges their foreheads together like a cat begging for attention.
This is not a conversation that can be solved with a kiss, but Al cannot turn him away. Not now, not ever. The kiss is a gentle thing, the way he always tries to keep it, even when heat is searing him from the inside out - but then Finney leans back into the cushions and drags Al along with him. It’s a messy sprawl, Albert half atop him and the boy suddenly bites at his lower lip. It sends a tingling warmth right to his belly and Albert lets out a little surprised breath that Finney takes full advantage of, pressing his tongue against Al’s with the same curious inexperience that he does all things with. It’s the most overt the boy has been with him and it makes Albert jerk backwards in surprise.
“Am I a child when you kiss me?” Finney’s breath is puffing out of him still, but not in anger. He is beautiful the way he’d been with his legs propped up on the dashboard of Albert’s van, unselfconscious in his own body.
A complicated look crosses his face as Albert kneels there between the boy’s legs, caught in his arms with the lingering taste of cherry soda on their tongues. Wine poured from Zeus’ cup.
“I…No. I don’t know.” He admits, guilt and longing and love churning his blood. “I don’t think of you as a child, not. I mean. Not like this. I wouldn’t kiss you if I thought of you that way, Finney.”
“You can’t have it both ways, Albert. You can’t kiss me like an adult but treat me like a child when it suits you.” Finney grabs his wrist, pulling Albert’s hand to the flat dip of his belly then up beneath his shirt until the man’s palm is pressing warmth against his skin. “I am not a child. Call me your boy, your partner, your lover. Call me a husband. But never call me a child.”
Ganymede would’ve run, would’ve never looked back if he had the chance. But Finney does not. He stays and he chooses and now he wraps his legs around Albert’s waist with an intent a child cannot know. That of a young man who wants and is telling the only way he knows how.
“What do you call me?” Albert is desperate to know, agonizes over it with his heart pounding beneath his ribs. Trails his hand up beneath the boy’s shirt until he can press his mouth to the bare skin of Finney’s stomach. It's the boldest he has ever been, the first time he has reached for this boy so greedily.
His breath hitches and he squirms beneath Albert’s touch. It feels good and leaves a sparking sweetness in his belly, all spun sugar. “Mine. I call you mine.”
“Tell me to stop.” The boy is so very warm where Albert presses his cheek to Finney’s belly, arms wrapped around him with more possessiveness than he really means to show. It's frightening, just how desperately he wants him. Mine is a beautiful thing to be, it’s true and it’s lovely but it’s just vague enough to leave Albert wanting for more. Finney must see it in him, feel the conflicted love rolling off the man in waves, because his laugh is soft - not unkind as he smooths the hair back from Albert’s face.
“I like you, Albert. I like the gray in your hair and the way your eyes crinkle when you smile…I like how strong you are and that you chose to be gentle with me. I like the way you sing along with the radio when you think I can’t hear. I like the shining inside you, even when it drives you mad. I…” Oh, this is for real now and Finney should be afraid. He should be terrified, but he isn't. “I like you a lot. More than a lot. You're mine and I love you and I don’t want you to stop.”
You’re mine and I love you.
I don’t want you to stop.
He should’ve known. From the moment Finney was honest and told The Grabber his name, he should’ve known how nothing could ever be the same again. Albert knows it now, of course, and it fills him up like the starry water would’ve filled his lungs - drowned him in a galaxy. He clutches the boy so tightly it feels as if they might be able to crawl inside each other, kisses Finney open-mouthed and broken apart until they are wild animals consuming and being consumed. Blunt little human teeth gnawing on each other's bones.
Finney would be beautiful, down the very marrow.
The boy is beautiful still even when he stands barefoot in blood that oozes across the concrete floor, chills on his fair skin. The elementary school’s music teacher is dead at their feet and it is Finney who wears a mask now too: the bottom half of a smiling rictus grin that pairs with the curving horns which cover Albert’s face from the bridge of his nose up to his hairline. The air down there is cold and tastes metallic, like sucking on a greasy coin, but Finney is so goddamn perfect that nothing else matters.
For once the mask doesn’t feel like some wriggling insect crawling beneath his skin and Albert knows it is because Finney is here too.
Mr. Cochran was a good teacher, well liked by students and fellow teachers and parents alike. He came to work every day and did the very best he could, treated each of his little charges with the utmost care and gentleness - would never ever lay a single hand on one of his dear students. Afterwards he would go home, hang his coat up by the door, and torture his little eight year old daughter in varying degrees based on what he deemed the severity of her transgressions.
If she burnt dinner it would be her job to eat it off the dirty floor, if she had not cleaned to his satisfaction she would spend days locked in the broom closet with no relief from the hunger and no choice but to soil herself.
Mr. Cochran would punish her for that too.
It is the first man Finney has ever killed and he thought he would feel bad about it, but he doesn’t. He thought it would be difficult and it was, but that’s okay because Albert was there to hold kind Mr. Cochran down while Finney sat upon the man’s chest and tore his throat wide. No, he doesn’t feel bad at all. But he feels something thrumming beneath his skin, a livewire that sparks in his blood and leaves Finney shivering from top to bottom. Albert has to physically lift him up over one shoulder to drag the boy upstairs, hushes him softly when Finney trashes for just a moment before going pliant against him - all that frenetic energy easing out little by little.
Shh. It's me, Finn. I’ve got you.
The shower runs hot enough to nearly scald, but Finney likes it that way. He likes how Albert is so gentle when unlatching the leather strap of the mask around his face, frees it from his skin and brushes away the droplet of Mr. Cochran’s blood oozing down Finney’s cheek. He hushes and soothes in the voice of The Man, not The Grabber, and helps Finney undress down to his boxers before leaving him alone to shower. He wishes Al would’ve stayed. Wishes the man would’ve undressed him down to nothingness and gotten into the shower with him, keeps wishing for it even as he stands there with steam fogging the mirror and blood running rusty red down the drain.
I love you. I don’t want you to stop.
He thinks maybe Albert wanted those things too, remembers the way the man had kissed him equal parts demanding and begging - let just a little bit of that wolf out before reining it back in, tucking the beast away before Finney could tell him just how badly he wants that too. For a long long stretch he stands on the fluffy bath mat looking at himself in the mirror, turns this way and that as he judges the willowy planes of his body and each scar forever etched into his skin. His hair is still damp, water steadily trickling down the back of his neck, when he steps out of the bathroom.
Albert has washed the blood off his hands in the kitchen sink, scrubbed the halves of each mask with a bristle brush and diluted bleach until not a single speck of blood remains in the cracks. His hands do not shake as they’d done when he awoke from a nightmare dreamstate to find another young boy dead at his feet, he suspects it's because this time the person deserved it. Deserved to be held down and made to suffer as he’d done to his own child. Suffer the little children.
There’s a carafe of whiskey on the side table in the living-room and he pours it neat into a faceted low-ball glass. Leans with his back against the kitchen counter, eyes shut against the dim overhead light, as he tries to drink slow and steady instead of submitting to the urge of simply swallowing it down in one shot. Albert doesn’t drink nearly often enough to suffer through downing it all in one go, but he just might take the whole bottle when Finney waltzes barefoot into the kitchen and snatches the glass from him to try and take a sip for himself.
Albert quickly grabs the drink away from him, a very reasonable protest on his tongue that dies the moment he realizes Finney is stark naked.
“Jesus.” He blurts out while nearly fumbling the whiskey, holding it tightly in both hands like it could be a barrier between himself and Finney.
There is absolutely no good reason for him to look, but the boy demurely tucks his hands behind his back and rocks forward on his heels - coquettish and unashamed. Water drips down his pale skin, little rivulets that trail down the dip of his collarbone and along the curve of his hips. It wets his cheek like rain, the sharp bow of his little pink mouth. Don’t look. Don’t look. For fuck sake don’t look. But he does, because Finney has freckles that scatter all over his skin like the pinpricks of starlight in the night sky.
There are darker clusters sprinkled along the tanned rise of his shoulders, fainter specks on the boy’s knees and his thighs and…and Christ. Albert looks because he can’t not and immediately darts his eyes up to the ceiling. Finney is hard as he stands there, unselfconscious and bold. Al brings the whiskey glass up and drinks heavily from it, feels like maybe he ought to go grab the whole damn bottle after all.
“I wanna try too.” Finney says, as if he isn’t the most beautiful and devious little creature on the planet. “Just a sip?”
“You won’t like it.” He croaks, face gone red hot, and fuck he’s hard now too - but that’s not particularly new when it comes to Finney. He finds himself getting hard damn near every night the boy crawls in bed with him, always trying to shift their bodies far enough apart that Finney won’t notice. Won't feel it. He gets hard from just a simple kiss now, feels like a horny teenager all over again with how pathetic it's gotten.
Finney is crowding into his space, one tiny step at a time, skin scrubbed rosy pink and the scent of Albert’s own soap lingering in the boy’s hair. He shrugs, smiling up at him with something wolfish in his dark eyes. “I just want a taste, Al.”
“A small taste.” He concedes weakly. Out of all the transgressions Albert has allowed, a tiny sip of whiskey is nowhere near the worst.
When he offers up the glass Finney instead guides it back up to Albert’s lips - encourages the man to drink and he dutifully obeys. Equal parts bewildered and filled with blinding desire. The whiskey hits his tongue, all bitter and smoky with an almost honey sweetness, but Finney quickly chases it. Holds Albert’s face with both hands and pulls him into a kiss so he can taste for himself, sips right from Albert’s mouth and darts his tongue inside.
The lowball glass does not shatter when it goes clattering to the floor, spilling the last dregs of whiskey across tile. Albert barely registers it at all, it's hardly important when he is lifting Finney right up onto the kitchen table and crowding him backwards flat against the wood. Hands on the smooth warm skin of his narrow waist, holding the boy there as he stands between his knees. Finney is grabbing for him, little fists in his hair and the back of Albert’s shirt - tugging incessantly. He is all gossamer spun softness, a sapling reaching towards sunshine with boyish eagerness and Albert is breaking apart at the seams.
Finney props one foot up on the edge of the table and haphazardly grinds against him, the roughness of Albert’s trousers isn’t enough to make him stop. He’s felt the same hardness from this man before, when he has tried to hide it in the mornings or when Finney sits on his lap as they kiss, but he doesn’t want Albert to hide from him now. There are mornings when he will press back against the man’s front, encourage Albert’s half-sleep arousal and hopes that one day he would awaken to give Finney what he so desperately wants - but it never goes further once Al fully wakes. He will put immediate space between them and Finney plays possum, acts as if he was just sleeping the whole time, and listens to Albert stomp off to the shower.
He wonders if Al jerks off in there. If this man has touched himself thinking of the boy that shares his bed.
Al doesn’t know if he will be as sensitive to this as some men are, but when he swipes his tongue over the rise of Finney’s hardened nipple the boy keens. Thrashes beneath him and slides his hands up beneath Albert’s sweater to claw at bare skin. It’s a beautiful reedy sound that Albert draws out again when he carefully bites at the same spot, curls his other hand around Finney’s slender waist and pulls the boy into the hard thrust of his hips. It isn’t enough, no matter how sensitive Finney is, but he hesitates to go any further.
“It’s okay.” Finney pants out, the scratch of his blunt nails down Albert’s back. “You love me, so it’s okay.”
He does. Of course he does, has never loved anyone like this in all his life and Al knows he never will again. Finney is the end of the line for him. That doesn’t make it okay, not in the least - but he’s weak and in love and Finney is stretched out below him. Small and pretty. Hard, slickness dripping down his cock and the urge to put his mouth on Finney just might drive him mad. Albert touches him so softly, knows that the moment he puts his hands on this boy there will be no way to take it back - no way to pretend he does not belong to Finney.
No way to pretend that Finney doesn’t belong to him in return. Fair is fair.
When Albert touches him it both soothes and riles, is not nearly enough but feels so much. The man is watching him the way he’s seen worshipers in prayer look upon Jesus on the cross. As if Finney is some holy thing and he realizes now that Albert is worshiping him. Has been the entire time. Then Al leans down and takes the reddened head of his cock into the wet heat of his mouth and Finney damn near shouts. It's impossibly good, an unfamiliar but not unwelcome touch entirely because it is from this man. He takes a fistful of Albert’s hair, gasping out a pitifully choked little noise.
“Please.” He begs, not entirely knowing for what. “Please.”
The span of Finney’s waist is slight enough that Albert’s fingers nearly touch when he grips the boy tight. Finney jerks up into his mouth, apologizes weakly and pets the hair back from his face but Al wants it again. Wants Finney to fuck into his mouth as hard as he likes and encourages him by lifting the boy up from underneath. Laves messily at his cock, chasing the taste of precum that drips down his skin. It’s heady and he feels drunk on just a few sips of whiskey and Finney’s pretty gasping moans.
He can tell how close Finney is by the tightening grip of the little fist in his hair, the increasingly jerky squirming of him in Albert’s hold. He can’t last, he cant and Finney cums in his mouth so easily, gasps sweetly as he trembles and strokes his hand along Albert’s cheek. Murmurs that he’s sorry, he didn’t mean to. But Al wanted it, enjoyed it, and both of them are still hard and Finney is panting for more.
“Greedy.” Albert’s voice is all grit. The sight of Finney, cum dripping down his pretty little cock, is one he will take to his grave. Fire licks at his skin and that big dark thing inside him is roaring away, it feels as if they are feeding off each other in an endless cycle. Finney’s wanting is his own, sinking into the very atoms of him. “You want more, Finney? Tell me, use your words and tell me.”
Greedy. Yes, yes he feels greedy the same way he soaks up Albert’s attention any chance he gets and what is this if not another kind of attention?
“I want...I want you to…” Asking for it with words is a lot more embarrassing than asking with actions, leaving him feeling suddenly bashful when even his own nudity has not. “I want you to be inside of me.”
He says it as if it won't shatter Albert entirely, as if his delicate pleading voice isn’t ricocheting around in the man’s skull. The bullet he never fired. Finney says it because it’s true, because he has wanted this for a lot longer than Albert could ever imagine. He sees how Albert’s pale eyes have been swallowed up by black and the man nuzzles into the inside of Finney’s thigh. That adoring wolf who both worships him and wants to gobble him up.
Albert wonders if perhaps this has all been the fever dream of a dying man - nerves misfiring after he took the gun to his head. But not even Albert’s wild imagination could’ve conjured this up, nothing but starstuff could’ve conjured up Finney Blake.
Al doesn’t know which part of him it is that’s touching Finney; if it is the man or monster that bites into the delicate skin of the boy’s pale throat and leaves it bruised - kisses the spot and soothes with his tongue. Finney bucks up against him, so pretty and so soft, when he uses slickened fingers to stretch the boy open. Strokes in-and-out until Finney is scratching dents into the tabletop, then curls two fingers against a sensitive spot inside him that has Finney whimpering and his back arching.
“Mine.” It’s all he knows, all Albert can think of as he fucks the boy on his fingers - watches breathlessly as Finney rocks his hips to try and take more. His needy little boy, but Al can take care of him. He will. He will do such a good job taking care of his sweetheart that Finney won’t ever want to leave again. “My bright, beautiful, boy.”
He can see it, the shining that loops between them like an ouroboros. Feeding into and from the other, some cosmic string binding them together.
“On your tummy, sweetheart. Let me see you.” He coos in a voice not unlike the one that once promised Finney ‘nothing bad will happen to you here’. Albert turns his boy atop the table until Finney is on his belly with his toes barely brushing the kitchen floor and Al can stretch out across his back, tests the weight of them with a little shove of his hips. The table creaks but Finney's weight is hardly anything at all.
“Please, please, please.” Finney babbles, grinding himself back against the hardness he can feel even through the man’s trousers. Feels alight with white-hot heat as he scrambles for balance bent over the edge of the table - the one they’ve shared breakfasts at for weeks now and Finney won’t be able to look at it the same way again. Will always think of how big and warm the first push of Albert’s cock felt.
He’s big and he’s good and Finney cries out at the feeling of Al hitting against some perfect, wonderful, spot inside him. Keens and whimpers when he pulls out entirely and fucks back in hard enough to send the table scraping across tile. One big hand is around Finney’s waist while the other presses at the small of his back - forcing him into an arch that makes Albert feel even deeper.
“There you go, baby. That’s it, I’ve got you.” Albert kisses the back of his neck, nuzzles into Finney’s shoulder as he fucks those pretty moans out of him. He’s so small, tight and hot and perfect - takes his cock just as eagerly as he took his fingers and fucked his mouth.
“So big…” He whines, trying to move himself with the rhythm of Albert fucking into him, but it’s too much and Finney goes pliant when he can’t keep up. His toes barely reaching the floor now. Albert really is big, the man can see it as he rocks inside him - can see how his cock stretches him open until Finney can do little other than take it.
“But you’re taking me so well, sweetheart.” Albert hardly recognizes the gravely rasping voice that comes from his mouth. Feels it rumbling deep in his chest, where the shine roosts beneath his ribs. “Is this what you wanted?”
Finney nods frantically, cheek pressed into the smooth wood of the kitchen table, as if fearful Al will stop if he doesn’t answer fast enough. “Yes! Yes, please.”
“I know.” He stretches out across Finney’s back, arms bracketing him on either side with the languid roll of his hips. It’s not enough to ease the ache burning through Finney like brush fire, and the boy whines as he tries to encourage Albert to go faster. “I can hear it, every time you looked at me you were practically screaming it. So tell me, say it out loud and I’ll give you more.”
It is an awful and beautiful thing, how much he loves this man. How he can hardly look at Al without feeling it bubble up in his chest, sweet and light as clouds in the summer sky. But thinking it, feeling it inside, is different than saying the words aloud - where Albert has the potential to break his heart for real. He wouldn’t, could never conceive of a time he didn’t love Finney.
Albert slows until he stills inside him, so deep in his body that Finney doesn’t know if they’ll ever really be apart again. The man turns his cheek against Finney’s shoulder, breath heavy in his ear. He’s waiting, will give no more until the boy says it.
“I love you.” Finney means it with every inch of his soul, feels the tilt of the Earth go slip sliding on its axis as if his confession has up-righted the whole of the universe. “I love you, Albert.”
His arms are pulled around his back and held there by Albert’s big hand around his skinny wrists, the man driving into him hard enough that Finney arches right off the table. It’s a brutally rough thing that burns as much as it sends pleasure zipping up his spine - it is exactly what Finney wanted and he wails brokenly at the feel of it. Albert doesn’t slow, but Finney hears the little adoring sob the man lets out. Feels the wetness dripping down Albert’s face as he nuzzles sweetly against his heated skin - cheek to his shoulder.
“I love you, Finney.” Albert does, he loves him, is so goddamn full of it he can hardly see anything else in the whole world and it damn near drowns him. Finney loving him in return is awful, it’s wonderful, it’s the only good thing that has ever been given to Albert in all his life.
The boy is fucking himself back on Al’s cock, trying to meet the relentless shove of his hips but it’s all uncoordinated - his inexperienced sweetheart that wants more but doesn’t quite know how to get it. “Precious boy. If I fuck you good enough will you cum for me again? Can you be a good boy and do that for me?”
Finney thinks he could do damn near anything if Albert asked it of him now, but he nods and babbles out a yes that sounds pathetically desperate. Yes, yes he can do that. It will take very little, every inch of his body feels alight - hypersensitive to the smallest touch and Albert must know for he is pressing kisses into the back of his neck. Is so very gentle with the pale raised scars on Finney’s back, ones that Al himself has his share of from his own cruel daddy, and bites carefully at the crook of the boy’s neck.
With his arms held fast behind his back Finney cannot touch himself like he so badly wants to, but Al is generous. Reaches down the front of his boy to take his cock again, gathers the wetness dripping from him and drags it down then back up. Jerks him off in rhythm to the roll of his hips, angles up until he can feel the soft spot inside Finney that has him crying out - squirming and trashing beneath him, fucking into Albert’s fist then back against his cock pressing hard inside him. Sensitive. It’s almost too much, too good all at once, and he can’t make it last any more. Can’t keep it all inside and he cums messily over Albert’s fist, whines and hides his reddened face against the table as it drips between the man’s fingers to the floor between their feet.
“No no, don’t be embarrassed. You did so good, Finney. You did just what I asked.” Albert brings his fingers up to his mouth, darts his tongue out to taste and Finney peers over his shoulder to watch. Is it good? What would I taste like? What would he taste like? Finney doesn’t know if Albert has caught a hint of the thoughts bouncing around his head or if the curiosity is plain on his face, but either way the man offers his fingers to him. “C’mon love, you said you wanted a taste.”
He hesitates before taking two of the man’s thick fingers into his mouth, tastes himself on Albert’s skin and decides it isn’t all that bad at all. Bitter, a little bit, but not bad and Albert is so pleased by him obeying that Finney wouldn’t mind doing it again just to see the way his eyes go dilated and dark. The next thrust inside him is uncoordinated and Albert gasps as he bows over until his forehead is pressing into Finney’s back, his voice coming out strained. “Let me? Can I Finney?”
Oh, he wants that so much. Has wanted that since he first laid eyes on this man fumbling outside that big black van. “Yes. Please? Please, I wanna know what you feel like.”
His boy is so sweet, so generous, and Albert is gracious and greedy. Releases Finney’s arms to take hold of his waist and hold him there, holds his pretty boy down to the table as he cums and fucks him through it until he can do no more. Albert expects to feel some rush of guilt. Expects to be flooded with oh god, what have I done? But he isn’t. He feels hollowed out, flayed apart and put back together again as he clutches Finney against his chest - desperate and unwilling to be apart. When he tries to pull out Finney begs him to stay, just a minute in a soft scratching voice and who is he to deny this boy anything? So he waits until Finney’s heaving breath begins to even and pulls out as slow and soft as he can.
He catches Finney when his knees buckle, hoisting his boy up into his arms so Finney can drop his head against Al’s shoulder - clinging around the man’s neck. Albert carries him this way until they are seated on the edge of the bathtub and Albert has a damp washcloth rubbing gently over the boy’s sweat soaked skin, dips between his legs and Finney squirms in oversensitivity. He whines against Al’s shoulder, a sound that is both eager and saying too much.
“It’s alright, love. I just want to make sure I didn’t hurt you.”
“You didn’t.” Finney sounds wonderfully sleepy, drags his fingers through the tangle of Al’s hair and nuzzles his little cheek against the man's shoulder. “S’nice. I’ll tell you if I don’t like it, but I wanna do that again. It feels good.”
Albert has heard a lot of things from the partners he’s had in the past, none of them - no matter how basely flattering - made him feel so suddenly shy. So goddamn lovesick. “Promise you’ll tell me if I do something you don’t want?”
“I promise.”
It’s dark and quiet as Albert redresses them in the bedroom. Guides Finney’s arms through the comfy tee-shirt he favors from Al’s own closet and dresses him in clean pajama pants. Let’s the boy do the same for him, amusedly ducking his head so Finney can pull a sleep-shirt over his broad shoulders. It’s sweet, it’s soft, it’s so comfortable and easy that Albert expects to wake up from this dream at any moment - but he doesn’t. He lays with Finney beneath the covers and holds him close enough that Albert can press his ear to the boy’s chest and hear the steady flutter of his heartbeat.
“Can I keep you?” Albert will ask into the golden light of morning. Hears the answer rumble through Finney’s chest and is brought to tears all over again.
Finney is no Ganymede, but he chooses to feast on pomegranate seeds. Chooses to spend the winters with a mask over his face and blood on his hands, and in between there is sunshine and spring and a garden built on the bones of five boys that whisper in his ear. Their shadows which tell Finney Blake where to find the really bad ones, so when the days grow short and dark he and Albert can drag the wicked down down down to the underworld. Sinners for the innocent. A garden planted carefully that will remain green all year ‘round, even when snowfall causes the flowers to wither.
“Can I keep you?” Finney will ask into the blue light of dusk. The answer soft on Albert’s adoring breath against his cheek and he is brought to tears all over again.