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“In the middle of the journey of our life I found myself within a dark woods where the straight way was lost.”
Dante’s Inferno
-
“Forgive me, father, for I have sinned.”
“What troubles you, my child?”
They’re in the front pew of the small chapel. The kneeler is nearly eaten through by mice, the horsehair stolen for their bedding. Craig can feel the old wood making his knees strain. The air smells like the chapel always does; damp stone, incense, emptiness. The stained glass window directly above glows as the sun crests over the horizon to bring with it a new day.
It always seemed so much bigger than him when he was a child, dressed in his white vestments and forced to kneel, in a similar fashion as he is now, at the feet of Father Thomas Tucker.
Though he’d been in the town orphanage for the entirety of his life, the priest had always held a particular interest in him. Now, having just taken Holy Orders and been ordained himself, Craig thinks it's nice to finally be permitted to call the man ‘Father,’ even if it's in a strictly hierarchical manner.
They’re not in the confessional booth. Father doesn’t like to take confession with him there. He says it's better to look in the eyes of his protege as he admits to his fallible human nature.
He’s not looking in his eyes right now. He’s staring straight ahead, at the crucifix carved from the granite of the mountain overlooking the village.
“I have engaged in sins of the flesh,” Craig tells him, his voice a monotonous hum. It rings back to him off every stony surface in the church, mocking him. It's as if the place echoes his own transgressions back at him before storing them up in its thick walls. Here, under the watchful eye of God, he surrenders his sins and asks for forgiveness. He is absolved every time, free to step beyond the threshold and leave his secrets trapped in the old building.
Father nods. His thick fingers twitch where they’re resting on his knee, hairy in a way Craig feels his will become one day.
“Do you accept what you have done is wrong, my child?” Father asks.
Craig nods.
“I do.”
“Sit up,” Father tells him, his hand slipping from his knee to the seat of the pew and tapping on the wood. It’s worn from years of a withering congregation crowding as close to the altar as they can. As if the closer they are, the more likely their prayers will be answered. Craig isn’t certain where that logic is derived. He spent most of his childhood and teenage years kneeling upon the altar during every service, and still he’s yet to be heard.
Craig slips up and onto the pew, careful not to look at Father Tucker. He faces forwards too, keeping his hands folded in his lap. Father reaches across and gently tugs his fingers apart, so his palms fall outwards away from his knees.
“A decade of the rosary for every instance since our last confession,” Father says. “God forgives your shortcomings, my child. You are only human. He sees the efforts you’re making in assisting me to tend to his flock.”
“Thank you, Father,” Craig says. The words are quiet, swallowed up by the sudden pound of blood in his ears as Father slips his hand between his legs.
“Go in peace to love and serve the Lord,” Father says, as he strokes Craig to half-hardness through his dark pants.
“Amen,” Craig replies. Choked, around a pleasure that doesn’t feel like his own. It never has.
“Amen,” Father whispers back, a secret. Another for the walls. Another decade of the rosary.
Craig watches the way the sun spills through the stained glass, illuminating the bleakness of the chapel in shards of colour. If God makes his presence known here on this mortal plain, it's surely at daybreak in the stained glass. The sun is truly glorious at this hour of the morning.
“Forgive me father, for I have sinned.”
The termites have been at the inside of the confessional booth. Craig can see the way the wood pilfers away to nothing, a hole worn in the very bottom corner. He’ll have to see about having that fixed. He tilts his chin towards the slotted screen between him and his parishioner, so she can hear him better.
“What troubles you, my child?”
She takes a breath, a trembling thing, like she’s excited.
“I’ve been thinking of you while I touch myself, Father. I make myself feel good, and pretend it's your fingers that bring me that pleasure.”
Craig presses the toe of his shoe against the hole worn by the termites, cutting out the beam of light that spills into the booth from beyond.
“And where is your husband while you’re committing these acts?” he asks. He’s not supposed to know who sits on the opposing side of the booth, but given the population of this mountain side town and the few people who still bother to attend confession, it's clear to tell it’s Bebe Donovan.
“In the brothel,” she says sharply. “Laying with other women. Surely he’s been to confession to tell you as much. I told him he ought to attend.”
“Your husband’s mortal soul is of great value,” Craig responds, sorting through her words cautiously. “You should continue to be a loving wife to him, and continue to fear the Lord, as should we all.”
“Is it your fear of the Lord that made you pursue a life of the cloth, Father?” Bebe asks softly. “It must be a great one. For a man as handsome and righteous as yourself to surrender his life to God — it's as if you’ve been sent to test me.”
Craig flexes his toe through his shoe and watches a beam of light burst through the wood, hitting the edge of the wooden seat he sits on. Dust motes dance in the brightness. They look like tufts of cotton set free by a warm summer breeze. He smiles.
“I have been sent to guide you, child,” he says.
If Bebe knew the deeper perversions of his soul, the one he imagines when he touches himself each night, she surely wouldn’t say such things. The locket below his collar rests heavy, but warm against his heart.
“And I’m so grateful for you, Father,” Bebe says.
“A decade of the rosary,” Craig says. “For every instance since our last confession. God forgives your shortcomings, my child.”
“Praise be to God,” Bebe whispers. A beat, before she says, “When should I return for my next confession, Father?”
“As always,” Craig says, hoping his tone comes across as careful and reflective as opposed to bored. “Each Friday before you take communion on Sunday. Go now, in peace, to love and serve the Lord.”
“Amen,” Bebe mutters the word as if it's an afterthought, before the wood of the confessional booth creaks like the bones of a half-dead man, and she leaves.
Craig sends up a quiet prayer in the hopes she doesn’t return next Friday, but he’s long since given up hope that anyone is actually listening. This is all a test. He’s unsure if the Lord will ever grant him reprieve from it in this mortal realm, but he’s been told the Kingdom of Heaven is worth it.
He palms at the locket around his neck, and thinks of all the unbaptised babies burning in Hell.
As Craig steps back into the chapel after wishing his parishioners well on the steps on Sunday, Father Tucker is nowhere to be seen.
Craig rolls his shoulders, the stiff fabric of his vestments itching where he’d given himself a rash shaving this morning. Bebe Donovan’s husband had watched him accusatorily throughout the entire sermon, as if he’d had her in the confessional booth. The man’s guilt combined with his wife’s wandering eye are undoubtedly weighing on his soul. Craig had been sure to offer him confession on his journey out of the chapel, and Bebe’s smile had glowed.
He walks deeper into the chapel, down the aisle towards the altar, pausing to genuflect. As his knee touches the sweaty stone floor, he hears faint gasps coming from the tabernacle, where they store Holy Communion. A back room, off the side of the altar. There had been no wine for communion this week either. He stands, in the hopes he’ll be able to catch Father in the act and distract him long enough to stop him from depleting their reserves any further.
When he steps through into the tabernacle, the sight before him is a familiar one.
When Father Tucker had taken him back here as a youth, it was as if his soul would rise up out of his body and observe from elsewhere in the room. Peering from around the corner, as he was doing now in body, considering the acts the priest was committing against him, still in his pressed white altar boy vestments.
Father Tucker has his hand wrapped around the boy’s member. Craig knows intimately how it feels — rough, coarse with hair, too warm, too clammy — demonstrating how he wants the boy to move his own hand, where it's wrapped around the priest’s. The noises are coming from the boy. High pitched gasps where his throat buckles with each breath, the beginnings of the bump in his throat bobbing as he weeps.
The jealousy that curdles in Craig’s stomach is enough to make bile rise in the back of his throat. He swallows loudly, and the boy’s wide blue eyes jerk towards him, as he spills in the priest’s hand.
Father Tucker turns his head sharply, his eyes narrow and his face pink with exertion and sudden, undeniable fury at being interrupted.
“Spying is a sin, Father,” he says coldly.
The boy vomits then, the gruel he’d eaten in the orphanage this morning grey upon the pristine white of his robes. It mottles with the spend already splattered across the linen. An unpleasant collage of stains to try and beat out of the fabric.
“Wretch,” Father spits, his head spinning back to the boy. He strikes him across the face, and the shock of the smack seems to bring the boy back to himself. Before he pisses himself, Craig nods towards the back door of the chapel.
“Away with you,” he says. “Take those to Mrs Cartman to be washed. Quick about it.”
The boy scrambles away, the bitter tang of semen and vomit lingering in the air even after he’s gone.
There is silence for another moment, Father facing away from him, cradling himself where he’s still exposed. Craig can feel the jealousy mounting into something akin to rage. He tightens his hand into a fist and tries to control himself.
“Is what you take from me not enough, Father?” he asks.
Has Craig not dedicated enough of his life to being his father’s perfect toy? Made in his image, wrongfully brought into this world when a Peruvian missionary fell prey to the young priest in this very chapel? Has Craig’s entire life not been moulded to suit this man, to sate his urges and bring him the relief he needs?
“Do not speak such vile ideations into reality,” Father says. He watches Craig from the corner of his eye, his shoulders heaving with frustration. Craig can taste it in the air; the salinity of his sweat a precursor to every moment in Craig’s life that emulated this one. Father stands up straighter. “You’re a man now, Craig. Better to commit sins of the flesh with those who are still malleable.”
He turns, still exposed, nodding towards where he still rests, unfulfilled.
For the first time in a long time, Craig feels himself wanting to resist. Refuse the man of what he’s always believed himself to be entitled to; Craig’s innocence, his virtue. The jealousy forces his feet forwards, heavy like lead. He falls to his knees before Father Tucker.
“Besides,” Father says, as he strokes Craig’s oil slick hair, trailing that fat finger down the sharp edge of his cheek. Craig takes him in his mouth. Father sighs with relief, but his brows bow with concern. “I fear the pleasure you reap from this act to be perverse, Craig.”
“Forgive me father, for I have sinned.”
Bebe’s voice is low in her chest, like they’re lovers sharing secrets on a pillow and not priest and parishioner.
“What troubles you, my child?”
“I’ve been considering killing my husband,” she says. Reverently, Craig thinks. She says it like that in itself is a prayer. The carpenter had come during the week to patch up the hole the termites had gnawed. He finds himself mourning the loss of the single streak of light allowed to breach this confession booth. Coffin. He wonders if this is what it feels like to be buried below the earth in a wooden box. He presses his palm across the locket around his neck. Bebe continues when he doesn’t react.
“I’ve been considering summoning a demon, like those girls out east that were burned at the stake. An imp to do my bidding. What do you think?”
Craig can hear the titillation in her voice. She finds this amusing, saying things that she deems the most shocking to try and get a rise out of him. He wonders what it would take, at this point in his life, for that to actually happen.
“I think,” he says, clearing his throat quickly when his words emerge garbled with disinterested roughness. “I think,” he repeats, “that I shall have to speak to the librarian about the books young ladies in this town are able to access. I worry you’re becoming fantastical with all of this Bebe. Rest assured, the Lord in his Almighty wisdom would not allow such a creature to roam the Earth so easily.”
There’s rustling, as a slip of paper is shoved between the gap in the divider in the confessional booth. Craig doesn’t take it right away, just lets it hang there. It’s covered in chicken scratch scrawl, the ink blotted. The kind of writing someone who has only ever written on slate might produce.
“The instructions are all there,” Bebe whispers. “I’m deep in despair, Father. Won’t you save me?”
Craig yanks the paper free of the splintered wood between two fingers, and folds it up without giving it further scrutiny.
“The Lord in Heaven is the only one capable of saving the sinners of this earth,” Craig says, dry, unaffected. “My advice would be adding a decade of the Lord’s prayer to your rosary daily, and turning to him when you feel such urges.”
“I only ever feel the Lord’s presence when I’m here with you, Father,” Bebe says. “You’re different from the other men in this town.”
Craig flits the paper back and forth between his fingers, and wonders just what she means by that.
“I am but his mouthpiece,” he says. “He sees all, whether you fear him or not.”
He attends his old orphanage that week to give Last Rites to a child dying of pneumonia.
“Don’t know why you started insisting on baptising the little wretches,” Garrison, the principal, states, as he leads Craig to the child’s bedside. They both have cloths wrapped around their mouths, every creak of the floorboards beneath their feet deafening in the silent orphanage. It was always like this when one of the other boys took ill. Craig remembers tiptoeing around the place, as if the sickness would take him too if he drew too much attention to himself.
“Everyone’s mortal soul deserves to be cleansed of the sin we’re brought into this world with,” Craig says. “Even these fatherless children.”
“Hmph,” Garrison grunts, shooting Craig a sideways glance. He doesn’t like him very much. It’s unusual for an ex-orphan to rise above their station like this and become a member of the cloth. Garrison knows why Craig is a special circumstance too, he suspects, which is another in a long line of transgressions committed against this world that he lacked any control over.
They reach the child’s room. The stench is putrid even through the cloth, and Garrison refuses to come to the beside, lingering by the door.
“May God take him soon,” he mutters. “There aren’t enough beds in this place as it is.”
He doesn’t linger.
Craig looks down at the delirious heap of bones shivering in the bed beside him. The sheets are near translucent with sweat, blood and bile smeared across the child’s nose and chin as he wheezes through the liquid congealing inside his lungs.
The boy reaches for his hand, the clammy tips of his fingers brushing the edge of Craig’s hand.
“So warm,” he says, gritty like he’s swallowed a mouthful of silt. He coughs, and it's a wicked thing, the rattles of someone on the cusp of their last breaths. “Jesus… save… me,” the boy murmurs.
Craig blesses himself quickly before lifting a clean pillow from the next bed over and pressing it over the boy’s face.
His little body only seizes once or twice before the fight goes out of him. He’s too weak to fight back, no clawing at the moth eaten cotton or kicking.
When Craig lifts the pillow away, the boy’s grey eyes are glassy, like marbles. His hair is dark though, like crow’s feathers against the mattress. Nothing like Craig’s angel.
He fingers the locket around his neck and exits the room.
Garrison, who is waiting just down the hall, raises his brows.
“That was quick,” he says. Craig nods.
“I should hope death will come for the rest of us with similar haste.”
“Bless me Father, for I have sinned.”
Bebe’s words are breathy this week, as the audible slick fumble of her fingers between her skirts makes Craig’s stomach turn.
He’s not really listening though. He’s still thinking about the boy dying in the orphanage. Not the one he’d put out of his misery; rather, the boy who’d died of consumption in the bed next to him when he was twelve, who had buttery golden hair and a tremor. His angel.
It’s been a long time since Craig has permitted himself to think about him.
Bebe’s moans sound the way his angel’s had, in the bed next to him, sweating out a fever that Craig had gotten over quickly when the first wave hit the orphanage. Craig had liked the way the boy sounded, breathy and out of his mind with the heat of his fever. He had slipped his hand between his legs and stroked himself, softly at first, like he was afraid of it. He’d never done it outside of appeasing Father Tucker. It felt wrong. If it was only for his pleasure, what purpose did it serve? He wasn’t obeying the whims of another, he wasn’t sparing other altar boys from the same treatment. This was a bodily reaction, instinctive, like he wanted to imagine the moans spilling from the boy’s lips were for him. As he came in his own hand, he bit down on his pillow, mourning the fact he’d created such a mess in his thin sheets. Matron would surely see and beat him for his perversion. He smeared it as thinly as he could across the sheets, hoping it would have dried like drool by the morning.
Then, the moans in the bed next to him turned guttural.
His angel, the fair haired boy who had joined the orphanage only the summer before, was hacking up something in the dark.
Craig thought of him like an angel, because of his yellow hair and pale skin; all the other children in South Park were ruddy with dirt and dark hair, smears of mud against the backdrop of the snowy mountains. The angel boy had never been allowed to play outside with them, wracked with tremors as he was, but he would watch from the bedroom window when Craig and the others were outside. Craig didn’t play much with the other boys. His reputation for being Father Tucker’s favourite made them wary of him. As if they thought the Lord would be more likely to hear the way they cussed and fought with each other just by proximity to him.
The angel boy caught his eye one of those days, when Craig was below the old oak tree in the yard, and had made a funny face at him. It was ravaged by a tremor, the angel boy’s whole face seizing up and his eyes shutting tight in a twitch. When it passed, he smiled at Craig, wide and effortless. No one had ever looked at Craig like that.
However, it seemed not even angels could be spared the wrath of their God. When Craig awoke the night after pleasuring himself to the boy’s moans, he was dead in the bed beside him. Consumption, they said later. He choked on his own blood. Craig remembers being the first to wake up, the first to see him.
Even then, rigid with death, he was beautiful. Like a china doll, pale and stiff, his hair like the downy feathers of a baby duck.
Craig cut himself a lock of that hair, and placed it inside the only known trinket his mother had bestowed upon him before leaving him in this place. The locket he wore around his neck every single day of his life. He kept his angel’s golden hair there, something to remind himself of how inherently wicked he was, and how this life would never be anything but cruel because of it. He only ever got what he was deserving of.
He listens to Bebe yelp as she finishes, the repetitive glide of skin over skin coming to an abrupt halt as the confessional booth shivers alongside her.
Father Tucker is with the altar boy again.
Craig clutches his locket tight in his hand. His cock is hard against his leg.
“Go in peace to love and serve the Lord,” he says.
He’s in the outhouse, thinking of his golden haired angel while he clutches his locket and fists his cock when Father finds him.
Craig wonders if he had been being too loud; he wasn’t conscious of it in the moment, but then, he wasn’t conscious of much. All he could think of was the moans of his golden boy and scent of blood in the air.
Father opens the door to the outhouse and, upon seeing him pleasuring himself, spits at his feet.
“Get into the church,” he says.
Craig does as he’s told, spend cooling against the inside of his drawers from the multiple times he’d come already. The church is dark, lit only by the few candles Mrs Cartman can spare before the oncoming winter. Craig follows Father Tucker down the aisle, genuflecting deeply as the other man takes a step up onto the altar. He’s removing his belt before Craig even has the time to register it.
“Take off your shirt,” he instructs. Craig moves as if possessed, the motions beaten into his body from years of this very torment. Here, under the eyes of Jesus hanging on his cross, he too will suffer.
And for what?
His father still loathes him; his body is no good anymore, too old, too muscular, too hairy. He’s hounded by a woman who lusts after him in a way he can’t hope to reciprocate. His angel has been dead for many long years now. Can Craig even remember what he really looked like? Is the image of him in his mind something else entirely now?
“Give me that locket, and prostrate yourself.”
Craig snaps back into his body all at once, the frigid floor beneath the thin fabric of his pants eating up and into his bones. He looks up at the man on the altar and keeps his locket clenched tight in his fist.
“Father—”
“Take off your shirt,” he repeats, slipping his belt off. “And give me that locket, Craig. I won’t tell you again.”
Craig is clutching the locket so hard in his palm he can feel the clasp eating into his skin. He wants it to scar him, burn him, leaving its imprints on his skin as has everything else that’s ever been dear to him.
He doesn’t get a chance to obey; Father slaps his belt harshly across Craig’s knuckles and the locket falls to the stony floor, shattering open.
Craig cries out with the sting of pain making his hand seize, reaching up hurriedly with his other hand to strip himself of his shirt as instructed. He bends low to the floor, forehead pressing to the sandy roughness as the leather belt slaps across his shoulders. He bites down on his lip. Father hates when you make noise. Perhaps if he’s quiet, he will allow him to gather up his locket somehow and have it repaired. Maybe he can salvage some of his angel’s golden hair from where it's been scattered across the church.
Father’s shoe comes down on the locket — the sickening crunch of it breaking completely is masked with the snap of another lash across his back with the belt.
“Masturbation is a vile sin,” Father says.
The belt slaps across his back again. The pain is so violent, a sudden white hot gash across his flesh, that his vision goes blank. He gasps for breath, but lifts his head slightly. He knows masturbation is a vile sin. Perhaps if he looks apologetic enough, Father will just touch him and absolve him of some of that.
He does no such thing.
It’s a beating more brutal than Craig’s had in years. The pain makes his back radiate warmth, throbbing in protest as his skin blisters and swells in on itself. Scars of past transgressions stretch painfully, the skin pulled taut already. Craig feels as if he is bursting at the seams, the extent of his wretchedness sticky on the backs of his teeth where he can taste his own blood.
He’s not sure exactly when Father leaves. His ears are ringing so violently he doubts he would’ve noticed if Jesus himself had stepped down off the cross and carried him to his death. When he manages to lift his head off the ground, the first thing he sees is his locket. It hadn’t been a fancy thing, most likely wrought from tin. It’s crumpled accordingly. His angel’s hair is gone, cast up and away by the draughts that rush across the floors of the chapel.
As Craig pulls himself up to his knees, the slip of paper Bebe Donovan had given him falls out of his pocket.
He stares at it for a second, contemplating.
Then, he does something he’s only ever truly done in the bed next to his dying angel, and surrenders himself to instinct.
He follows the instructions to the letter. First, he drags the two mirrors from the vestibule out onto the altar, positioning them so they face each other about two feet away. He retrieves the fat, tallow candles burning away to nearly nothing and positions them between the mirrors.
He swipes his hand along his back, finding his palm blackened with his own blood. Falling to his knees once again, ignoring the way they shudder with agony, he drags his blood between the mirrors and the candles, forming a circle. Within that, he draws a pentagram, a symbol which Bebe has scrawled helpfully in the corner of her instructions. Finally, he scoops up what remains of his locket; a protective talisman, the instructions relay, something to keep him safe from the demon.
The last requirement is to stand at the head of the circle, looking at himself in the first mirror, and to read a Bible verse backwards. He lifts the Bible from the pulpit, ignoring the way his blood coats the finely bleached pages and gold leaf. He feels as if he is already in a trance. As if, whatever demon he’s about to call forth is already guiding his actions, informing his ability to perform his ritual correctly.
His back stings with the whip of the draughts throughout the chapel, the candles fluttering dangerously. He chooses a verse from Leviticus 18:22, and stares at the page. It's as if the words come to him in reverse, a garbled collection of nonsense sounds erupting from his own mouth. It sounds like it's coming from someone else. It feels like it's coming from someone else.
Once again, Craig is but a bystander in this place. Watching on as his own life, his own will, is bent by some external force.
He’s not afraid. It’s as it always has been.
The chapel is swallowed by shadows beyond the circle where he stands. The candles seem to flare a little more as he reaches the end of the verse, new life breathed into them from something Craig’s eyes can’t see. They dim again all at once, whipping dangerously as if they might extinguish at any moment. A gust of wind from below the oak doors at the far end of the chapel and nothing more. Craig stares at his own gaunt reflection, sees nothing in the peridot green of his irises. An empty vessel, made to obey the whims of his father. What had he hoped for really? Bebe’s far fetched ritual to present him with some reason for being here?
No. He’d participated in this farce in a burst of childish frustration. Now the altar is smeared with blood and he’s going to have to clean it before leaving.
His gaze flickers back up from where it had fallen to survey the blackness of his own blood, darker still with the sun having vanished.
This time, in the mirror, he meets the eyes of another.
Inky black, like the time Craig had spilled a bottle of the stuff during his study of the Holy Book. They glitter mildly with the reflection of the candles, and all at once, the elven face which surrounds them comes into focus.
Downy golden hair, like a baby duck. Freckles spattered like stardust across the bridge of a turned up nose. A smile that hitches on one side more than the other, the teeth squashed into the space and pointier for it. The only difference between this creature and his angel is the endless expanse of its dark eyes. It leans out from behind him, its presence cool where its bare skin brushes up against the back of Craig’s own bare skin. It smiles, hooks its chin over Craig’s shoulder. The barren chill in its flesh is made real then, against his own body’s inherent warmth.
The creature’s eyes slip shut, and like this, it could be his angel.
“So warm,” it says. Its eyes flutter open. Gone is any illusion that it is of this earth.
Silence. It seems to be waiting for Craig to speak.
“Who are you?”
He hears his own voice reverberating back off the cold stone of the chapel, but it doesn’t feel like his own throat vibrates with the question. The creature smiles broader, shifting so it’s peering further around his body and watching him closely in the mirror. Like this, Craig can see its differences go further than its soulless eyes. Ruddy horns knife through the fine golden strands of its hair, protruding like anthills desperate to be free of the red earth; leathery wings twitch free from its back, unfurling like a sheaf of paper tucked in on itself repeatedly; its toned legs give way to cloven hooves, the same copper as the blood dried on the torn up pads of Craig’s fingers. It’s naked too, soft member tucked between its legs and obscured somewhat by a thatch of sandy dark hair.
“Who do you think I am?” the creature asks.
Craig shakes his head. Its voice seems to be thrown from every corner of the room too. Craig wonders if either of them have actually moved their lips since catching sight of one another.
“You’re the boy from the orphanage,” he says. The creature tilts its head thoughtfully.
“Am I?” it asks.
“Tweek,” Craig says the name he has scarcely allowed himself to even think since the day the boy took his last breath in the bed alongside him. The imp nods solemnly, but the hitch of a smile never leaves its sweet face. Long lashes flutter across the apples of rosy cheeks.
“Oh yes,” Tweek agrees. “Of course that’s who I am.”
“Are you really?” Craig presses. The longer he looks upon the imp that calls itself Tweek, the longer his eyes find things to look at, it doesn’t seem right. Tweek pouts, slim bottom lip pert where he frowns. He looks at his own reflection for a moment, then back towards Craig’s.
“Isn’t that who you see when you look at me?”
Craig nods.
The imp Tweek smiles wider, red gums on show. It's as if his cheeks stretch too wide for a moment, uncanny in its attempt to appear happy.
“Well, then. That’s who I am. You’re the one who summoned me here, after all.” The imp pauses, his smile growing shy. He utters the next word with puckish glee. “Craig.”
The sound of his own name in the rasping tenor of Tweek’s voice grasps a hold of his very soul. There, on the altar, in his father’s church, before the eyes of God, he feels it loosen from its moorings. It slips away through the cracks, long since beaten into his body, and into the curled talons of the imp that rests its hand upon his bare shoulder.
It feels wrong. As if, he was never as hollow to begin with as he’d once feared. Now, the gaping maw of nothingness unhinges its jaw in the pit of his belly and cries out for something. The imp seems pleased.
“Why did you summon me?” Tweek asks then, tilting his head to one side like a pup seeking its master’s attention. Craig swallows, words dry on his tongue. He shakes his head.
“I don’t know,” he answers. Tweek just continues to watch him in the mirror, apparently waiting for something more. A mouse darts from one side of the aisle to the other. A moth flutters too close to one of the candles, its wings sizzling in the quiet. Tweek shakes his head, almost imperceptibly.
“I don’t believe that’s true,” he says softly. His chin is still firmly placed upon Craig’s shoulder, the only place where their bodies meet. It’s all that is keeping Craig tied down to this moment, as fantastical as it is. He wonders if Father beat him across the head instead of just lashing his back. Is he lying, dying in this church, envisioning all of this with his last moments on earth? It seems strange, for this to be the final vision his consciousness decides to give him. Strange, but not entirely unexpected.
Tweek smiles again, but the childlike innocence is tainted with blood, as he presses his lips to the wounds on Craig’s back. The kiss is fleeting. Craig is certain it's the first he’s ever received.
“It won’t do for us to lie to one another,” Tweek says.
“I wanted to see you,” Craig replies.
His voice sounds foreign. Wavering. The voice of a child calling out for a friend in the next bed over, only to find their throat full of black bile.
“To see me,” Tweek repeats, his breath clammy and cold where it lands on Craig’s bare shoulder.
“Yes,” Craig says. He can’t look away from the shadows cast upon the imp’s cheeks with those pale lashes. He can feel something slithering around his thigh, determined, like a snake. The tip of a forked tail flicks playfully in the mirror where it rests just above the bulge in his pants. How long has he been hard? He’s sweating. How long has he been gasping for breath in the presence of this creature? He tries to swallow down the lust fast consuming him, blossoming from every spot on his body that the imp touches. His throat clicks, perilous and loud in the unnatural silence which has settled over the chapel. “Is this a dream?”
Tweek laughs. It’s musical, in the same way rain is when it spatters against the stained glass windows.
“How sweet,” the imp coos. Its inky dark eyes burn with something like amusement, but it's difficult to pick out amongst the depths. “Most would consider coming face to face with someone they killed a nightmare.”
Craig’s breath hitches as the tip of the imp’s tail flicks across the straining bulge of his cock. His throat feels as if he’s been caught in a snare, breaths coming quick and fast as his lungs burn to try and pull air in. The imp works its tail forwards and back, upwards and down across his cock, the friction burning, the tease of stimulation rapidly tightening like a bow string in Craig’s stomach. He grasps the edge of the mirror, knuckles white as he stares at the creature, now laving its cool tongue across his bloody shoulder. It feels like an eel moving through water, slippery and unyielding, and yet it makes Craig shudder with pleasure.
Perverse, as he is, the orgasm which follows is bliss.
When he wakes up in his bed the next morning, semen encrusted in the hair of his stomach, he is lying on his back, and all of his wounds are gone.
He arrives for mass having not spoken a word to Mrs Cartman or Father at breakfast. Dressed in his vestments, he awaits Father’s entry down the aisle, the incense so thick in the air he can seldom make out the whites of anyone’s eyes. The heavy perfume coats his tongue and makes it dry. He swallows it back, feels the same sensation he had upon the altar last night.
No trace of his bloodied pentagram or ritual.
A dream after all.
And yet, when he locks eyes with the golden haired boy in the front pew, he’s aware, in the place where his soul used to be, that it's Tweek.
He doesn’t look quite so impish now — gone the fathomless depths of ink spilled eyes. They’re blue, bright and inquisitive. He’s wearing shoes, no tail, no horns, no wings.
Is Craig still dreaming?
The doors of the chapel open, and Father begins his procession down the aisle.
Tweek smiles at Craig, that same smile that makes his cheeks look as if they’re being tugged into place by overzealous claws.
All at once, Craig is concerned for his own mental faculties.
If he is awake, then he’s hallucinating a dead boy.
It’s not until communion, when the parishioners line up dutifully to receive the Body of Christ, that Craig is met with his answer. Tweek is no hallucination.
He waits his turn, head dipped low, until he reaches the front of the line. Diligently, he clasps his palms together in prayer, as Craig holds the wafer before his face.
“The Body of Christ,” Craig mutters as if it's a secret. Tweek’s eyes dance with wicked amusement. It’s clear to see, like this, in the topaz of his irises.
“Amen,” he replies, before opening his mouth and allowing his tongue to roll slowly out. It’s decidedly long, almost too pinched at the tip. Craig is abruptly reminded of a forked tail stroking him to completion. Tweek lolls his tongue expectantly, teasing the tip of it forward inch by further inch. Craig quickly sets the wafer on Tweek’s tongue, eyes only dropping to appreciate the sight in its entirety when Tweek shuts his mouth around Craig’s idle fingers. He swirls his tongue around the digits buried along with the communion wafer, and Craig is unable to conceal the visible shudder that runs the length of his spine.
Cold and unyielding, like sticking your hand inside the long dead carcass of a chicken.
Tweek pulls off his fingers with an audible pop and disappears back to his seat.
Craig can feel the colour high in his cheeks as he gives communion to the next parishioner, but they don’t seem to notice.
When mass is over, Craig stands diligently at the doors of the chapel, wishing everyone goodbye. There is no sign of Tweek, his golden haired angel, no matter how many times he cranes his neck over the crowd to catch a glimpse. Perhaps still knelt in the front row, perhaps lighting a candle for a loved one. The chapel empties out and he is left with the altar boy cleaning up after the service, and Father, who calls him to his side as they go to change out of their vestments.
Distracted, Craig barely hears the platitudes falling from Father’s lips.
“... learnt your lesson. Do you feel rejuvenated by the penance you offered?”
Craig blinks, realising abruptly that Father is waiting for him to speak.
He looks at his face, and for what feels like the first time in his life, actually sees the man.
His nose is bulbous and red from his indulgence in the communion wine, eyes bloodshot and beady to match. Pores stretch open across his aged skin, craters that loom across the pockmarked flesh and patchy grey hair. He’s missing nearly all his hair now, deep set creases around his eyes reminiscent of the folds of his vestments, sagging flesh repeating on itself. Soft. Old. He smells like incense that’s been left in the cellar, stuffy and spoiled. All at once, Craig finds himself almost gagging on it, his stomach turned to the point of jerking aimlessly in his belly.
“Penance,” Craig says. He thinks on it a moment before speaking again. “Is that what you call it?”
Father’s brows furrow, straggly hairs catching on the folds in his forehead and the greying sockets of his eyes, before furious realization makes his watery eyes blow wide.
“How dare you speak to me like that,” Father says, voice a dangerous whisper. Or perhaps Craig would have found it dangerous, had he heard it yesterday. He’s seen true danger now, wrapped in the skin of a dead man and smiling at him like its owner is taking a lesson in mimicry.
The altar boy drops the lit candle he was carrying, wax spilling across the altar as he yelps in fright. Father’s attention is stolen away, a huff of fury the only noise he makes as he crosses to the candle and stamps out where it's caught on the edge of the carpet.
“Clumsy fool,” he says to the boy. “You’re able bodied aren’t you? Well? Speak up!”
“Y-Yes… Father,” the boy gasps, terror stricken and shrinking with it.
Father places the spent candle to one side, reaching for the boy’s chin and clutching it between thick fingers. His nails are too long and yellowed, thick with neglect.
“Into my chambers,” he instructs the boy. “You can offer penance for your foolhardiness there.”
The boy looks at Craig, his eyes wide and pleading. Craig wonders what makes him think he has any control over what happens next.
The boy seems to cotton on quickly, the clever thing. Craig watches as he follows Father through the door at the side of the altar, his fingers pale as bone and clutching at one another behind his back as he goes.
“Is it safe to leave the child with him?”
Tweek’s voice is bright like the sunlight pilfering through the stained glass above their heads. Craig turns to look at him, sitting in the third pew from the front, as if he’d been there the entire time. He frowns.
“Safe?” he repeats the word, unfamiliar on his tongue. “... A roof over his head at night and a meal when he needs it. He has all those things. Whatever else happens, safety is the absence of destitution. Isn’t it?”
Tweek shrugs thin shoulders, tugging at his bottom lip in thought.
“Some might say safety is the protection of innocence,” Tweek replies. Craig watches him, idly plucking at his lip in a broken rhythm.
“Is that what you say?” he asks.
Tweek laughs.
“Oh, I wouldn’t know much about innocence.”
It’s a purr, a fluid thing which curls up in Craig’s chest like a cat coming to rest.
Tweek stands and walks towards him. He’s short, at least a head and a half shorter than Craig, so when he looks at him he has to tilt his head all the way back. Craig’s mouth is dry as the words come to him, unbidden.
“Nor would I.”
Tweek tilts his head slightly, tongue creeping out to flick along his bottom lip. It’s enticing, that’s undeniable. Craig can feel himself stirring with every brief movement he makes. Craig realises, in the absence of any, that Tweek makes not a single sound as he begins to circle him slowly. A predator assessing his prey. Although, Craig thinks as his neck burns red hot under Tweek’s scrutiny, he doesn’t think he would mind falling prey to this creature. The thought should terrify him.
“You said you summoned me here because you wanted to see me,” Tweek says contemplatively. “Do you prefer me like this?”
Craig swallows and remembers what the imp had said last night about lying to one another.
“Yes,” he replies. Tweek nods, continuing his walk around Craig’s body, never lifting a hand to touch him.
“I thought you might. You should know, though, that I can only appear this way for you. And I can only conceal my presence as long as you continue to feed me.”
“Feed… you?”
Tweek stands before him again, apples of his cheeks so red they look fit to bite.
“Yes,” he answers easily. “Last night it was your blood, and the scent of your pleasure. It really wet my appetite. I’d like to taste it this time.”
“My blood?” Craig asks.
“Your pleasure,” Tweek answers.
There is a pond, not far outside of South Park, where geysers spit free of the earth. It’s hot and the air is thick with sulphurous fumes and noxious gas, and the only time Craig has ever been there, he’d nearly fainted from the heat. It feels as if he’s stepped back into the place now, as Tweek pushes Craig into the pew and falls to his knees.
Craig swallows back the flood of saliva and surge of self-loathing that come on in tandem. Tweek lays a cheek upon his thigh, fingers toying with the seam of his pants, lashes fluttering demurely as he parts his lips.
“You should warm me up first,” he says. “I saw you shiver before. When you put the wafer in my mouth.” Tweek’s tongue encircles the edge of Craig’s finger, clenched across his knee. “Give me a taste.”
“Of… my pleasure,” Craig repeats, dry like the communion wafer that Tweek had swallowed. Tweek’s smile is impish.
“Yes, Craig.”
His finger twitches, almost involuntary. He watches as though he’s detached from his own limbs, his finger easing into the pocket of Tweek’s cheek and feeling the cool slide there. It makes him shiver again, and Tweek shares in it. He presses the pad of his finger into the flat of Tweek’s tongue, lefts his nail bump the ridges along the roof of his mouth. He presses another finger inside Tweek’s mouth as his jaw falls open further, mesmerized by the way the flesh seems to blossom warmer under his touch. As if it's stealing the heat. Siphoning it from Craig’s body. Siphoning something. His good sense. His better judgement. Suddenly, all of it is slipping away, replaced only by the slick whorl of Tweek’s tongue along the edges of his fingers.
Tweek moans, the shape of Craig’s name but an unformed thing, his tongue unable to snap the word shut. Craig adds another finger, watches as drool pools from Tweek’s mouth. It eases over the plush curve of his lip, lazy in its path to trickle down his chin. It makes the heel of Craig’s palm wet where it's pressed up to his jaw. He adds another finger, four now hungrily searching for something in the cavern of Tweek’s luscious mouth while his thumb presses roughly into his cheek. Tweek whines when Craig presses harder to swap the angle, so he presses harder still. Wonders if he will bruise. Will the pretty alabaster of his skin be marked by Craig’s own hands? What would it look like? How would it feel to leave bruises with his teeth?
Tweek gags, and Craig moves to rip his hand free of his throat, suddenly aware of how far back he’s probed. Tweek shakes his head, eyes glittering with tears. It makes the blue of his eyes glimmer, shifting in the light. His pupils fatten and spill, more ink bleeding into a pristine page, until his irises are eaten up by it. Endless dark pools reflect Craig’s reddened cheeks back at him, the burn of lust evident where he can catch his own reflection. He’s so hard in his pants, he can feel his cock straining against the seam. It jumps when Tweek swallows tightly around the tips of his fingers, more drool oozing free and making his chin glisten. It drips from the sharp point of his face, the splat of it soft against the old stone between Craig’s shoes.
“Tweek.”
Craig’s voice is not his own. It can’t be. He’s never sounded so breathless before, so ardent. Is this pleasure? He feels like his heart could stop beating at any moment. His balls ache with each gulp Tweek’s throat makes as he seems to swallow Craig’s fingers down deeper, tongue rolling back and forth between the webbing. A tear runs the length of Tweek’s face, and it's pink with blood. Abruptly, Tweek sucks all four fingers tightly, the pucker of his lips pink and enticing. The way they flutter, winking at him back and forth and glistening with saliva, is reminiscent of something else. Something carved into the deepest depths of Craig’s most vile fantasies.
Craig shifts to adjust himself in his pants, and the friction takes him by surprise.
He gasps when he comes, and Tweek bites down on his fingertips.
The pain is as bright and sudden as the orgasm, making his thighs quake and his stomach lurch. He sees his own blood meld with Tweek’s spit and his cock shivers again. For a second, when he blinks, he’s certain he can see the imp as he is. Ruddy horns, tail flicking like a whip at his back, wings fluttering in ecstasy. The little cock between his legs fat and kicking as he comes across the chapel floor.
Craig pulls his fingers free of Tweek’s lips. He smiles, sweet as the first raspberries of summertime and just as red.
“Why did you summon me?” Tweek asks, his cheek plump as he props it comfortably on the inside of Craig’s thigh. As though he were made for it. As if he’s done it a thousand times over.
“I missed you,” Craig says, soft, as soft as the downy hair on Tweek’s head. The words don’t feel like his own. It strikes something like clarity into him, makes him suddenly cognizant of where they are. Of who is watching.
What is this creature that has tempted him so?
Tweek nods.
“You’re getting closer,” he says.
Craig shuts his eyes, gathering his wits. Maybe if he doesn’t look upon the imp for a moment, he can regain some of his sense.
When he opens his eyes again, the chapel is empty, dark.
Closer to what, he wonders.
The next morning, Father is not at breakfast. Mrs Cartman worries her way through Craig’s first meal of the day, which serves to give him indigestion.
It's a dull day, slush at the sides of the road as Craig makes the short walk from the parochial house to the chapel. As he approaches, he sees the altar boy from yesterday running, legs as unsteady as a newborn lamb, eyes so wide it's a wonder they’re not popping out of his skull. When he sees Craig, he doesn’t stop. His voice is a tremulous rush as he passes. Craig notices the dark patch in his school trousers.
“Don’t go in there!”
Craig pauses, turning to watch the boy continue to run, never looking back.
He considers the chapel.
It stands stoic as ever, a silent sentinel to watch South Park and keep its secrets.
Craig presses his palm to the old wood of the door, wincing slightly as his skin stretches over the wound Tweek left on his fingers yesterday. The light in the chapel is low, centred in one place where the stained glass soaks up what little filters through the cloud cover. Craig’s eyes adjust gradually, the sea of red laid before him sharpening into focus in one sudden, breathtaking moment.
Tweek stands before the granite crucifix on the altar. Above him, Father Tucker is flayed, neck nailed to the base of the cross and palms hanging limply at his sides where he hangs upside down, his feet affixed where Jesus’ open mouth yawns in endless suffering. Father’s mouth is doing rather the same thing, rigid in its own eternal grimace.
His innards spill down his torso too. Craig can smell the salaciousness of sweetbreads, the butcher’s store at Christmas time when everyone keeps the giblets in their turkeys for added flavour. The air is stale with it, warm, and it catches the back of Craig’s throat and makes him gag before the image can even really register in his mind.
Tweek awaits him on the altar, still masquerading as his angel boy, and shuffling something back and forth in the palm of his hand. It clacks like dice. When he sees Craig, his eyes light up. He hops off the altar, allowing the teeth still clinging to the roots he’d torn from Father’s mouth fall from his palm to the wayside.
“What have you done?”
A redundant question, perhaps, but the only one Craig can think to ask.
Tweek’s head tips to one side, curious. He glances back at the sight of Father nailed to the cross and turns back, one eyebrow raised with intrigue. As if in a playful challenge. Obviously you can see what I’ve done.
Instead, he says:
“I’ve saved you.”
Craig reaches into his pocket, procuring the rosary beads he always keeps on his person. He sinks to his knees, lips moving numbly over the Lord’s prayer, one he’s said so many times the words have lost all meaning.
Tweek watches him from a little ways a way for a moment before he speaks. His voice is like the sigh of a meadow in springtime, so far removed from the macabre sight that lies behind him.
“What are you doing?” he asks.
Craig shakes his head, refusing to be drawn in for another second by whatever evil he has brought into this church. Him. It was him who did this, who brought this monster here.
“God will save me,” Craig tells himself, a fresh wave of nausea hitting the back of his throat as he breathes in the rotten scent of Father. “God… God help me. God is supposed to save me. Not… not you. Not like this.”
Tweek screws his face up at that, apparently displeased.
“Where was God when this man used you the way that he did?” he asks. Craig is not looking at him, staring instead at the beads wrapped too tightly around his trembling hands, clasped together. He hears the soft pad of bare feet harden to a hollow thunk, like they’ve transformed. Hooves. He shakes his head, blinking back delirium as it encroaches on his senses. The scent of ichor is sticky on the roof of his mouth, and his mouth waters as if hungry for it.
“… part of his plan, the life we lead here on earth. The Kingdom of Heaven awaits us and there, we’ll be rewarded for playing our parts—”
“Where was God when you were beaten and used? Has he heard any of the prayers you’ve sent up? Answered them?” Tweek presses harder. Craig’s fingers sting where the beads bite into the cuts from Tweek’s sharp teeth. His eyes swim with panic.
“He…” Craig licks his lips, searching for the answers Father had given him time and time again. He’d always explained, Father had, in the aftermath of it all, why he was doing what he was doing. Craig has always believed him. Why wouldn’t he? “The Lord works mysteriously… we don’t know the answers to all of the trials he gives us, only that we should… that we should obey and… and repent—”
“I am the answer,” Tweek says simply. Craig can see his cloven hooves where he stops before him, can see the fuzz coating the inhuman bones of his legs that seem to curve in on themselves. His eyes trail upwards, his traitorous gaze catching on Tweek’s cock before slipping up the svelte muscle of his torso. Tweek’s eyes glitter as he surveys him, this time not with tears, but with knowing. “You called upon me for help, and I came. I heeded your call, and have done nothing but give you everything you desired.” Tweek circles him as he thumbs his way across his own curved talons to list Craig’s transgressions. Craig watches him, powerless to look away, utterly entranced by the heady shift of the air around this creature; the way he makes his very blood sing in his veins.
“The eyes of your lost love,” Tweek says. “The affection you’ve always craved. Your freedom from the monster that has shackled you to this place.”
Craig swallows tightly, determined to remain true. He doesn’t know how this creature has bewitched him so, but he must remain stoic and steadfast in his devotion to the only entity that he’s ever known. The only thing that he’s ever been led to believe can save him.
“I… I must remain… faithful…” he whispers. “The paradise that awaits beyond this place… that is why we suffer here. That’s what it's all in service of.”
“Sweet Craig,” Tweek hums his name like a song. He kneels before him, the sharp points of his beautiful face stained with ichor. His hands are coated with blood when he cups Craig’s cheek, curved talons slicing the skin there so keenly Craig doesn’t even feel the pain which should follow. Craig’s eyes are transfixed on the imp’s tongue as he speaks, memories of it wrapped tantalizingly around his fingers fresh in his mind. Longing to feel it wrapped around his cock boiling in his blood. Tweek smiles when he speaks, as if explaining something unpleasant to a child. As if softening the blow.
“There’s no paradise that awaits you. A small price to pay for my services, but your soul belongs to me nonetheless. There’s no kingdom that will take you, empty as you are.” His eyes glitter like the granite crucifix behind him. “But I will. I want you, hollow as you are. I always have.”
Something catches in Craig then, a fish with a hook in his belly, dragging him up to gulp lungfuls of oxygen that will undoubtedly kill him.
“You… always.” His tongue feels numb, heavy. “You always have?”
Tweek thumbs along Craig’s cheekbone, careful to avoid the pocket of his eye with his talon. He almost looks sweet when he nods, despite the blackness of the blood which encrusts his bare skin.
“Since the day we met. Since the day I left you.”
The words hang in the air like the dust motes that swirl eternally in the decrepit old building.
“It is you,” Craig says, thinking of unbaptised babies. Fiery pits. Downy hair and eyes the colour of tar; he can’t recall what came before. Not now that he’s faced with this tangible thing.
Craig stands, palms rising to cup either side of the imp’s face and holding him still as he presses his mouth to his pert pink lips.
The imp snarls into the kiss, forked tongue lashing as he yanks his chin back. The rosary beads, still wound around Craig’s palm, sear his skin where they touch. Craig loosens his grip, watches them clatter to the mosaic tile below their feet. His feet, the imp’s hooves. His eyes trail the length of his furry legs, knees crooked and tail already curling mischievously out and around his thigh. It’s too hot, even through the fabric of his slacks, which is bizarre when combined with the icy slickness of the imp’s mouth. With how cold the imp had been when it first appeared. Tweek opens his mouth wide, tongue slipping forwards in invitation once again, and Craig dives right back in.
There is a leak in the corner of the chapel, and when it rains, the marble pillar holding what’s left of the roof up is moist and cool with droplets. That’s what Tweek’s mouth is like, the intrusive thought Craig has always possessed to align the flat of his tongue with the marble and taste the stone. Tweek is careful to keep his gnarled talons from slicing Craig’s skin further, but the same cannot be said for his vestments. The black of his shirt is quickly flayed along the apex of his shoulders when Tweek throws his arms around his neck, clinging onto him as Craig licks into his mouth. It’s rapidly descending into less of a kiss, just mouthing at each other messily while their tongues meet somewhere in the middle. Craig’s chin drips with spit, the taste of the imp coppery. Perhaps it's less the taste of the imp and the blood which is still in the air.
Regardless, it speaks to something wicked inside him. Deep and dark rooted, reaching out to allow the whip of Tweek’s forked tail to tug him in closer and unfurl.
Craig realises they’ve been stumbling backward, his own desperate attempts to shove the entirety of his tongue into Tweek’s mouth and feel every ridge of his keen teeth causing them to back up onto the altar. Craig’s eyes are clenched shut as he drags his kisses down the imp’s chin, chewing on his neck and his shoulder, tasting that marble pillar in every bite. He can’t see Father, if he keeps his eyes shut.
It’s always been like that.
With a firm beat of his leathery wings, Tweek lifts himself up, so he’s balanced on the edge of the altar. His cock is hard between his legs, curved in a way that’s different to Craig’s. It makes his heart jump with excitement, the knowledge of what another of the same can look like; the same but different, and joyous in that fact.
He can feel his own dick fattening with interest, desperate to be touched, worsened when Tweek lifts the edge of one of his cloven feet and runs it along the bulge.
“I want it all this time,” Tweek says. Gleeful, pink in the cheek with eyes heavy lidded. Craig doesn’t need to ask for clarification.
He unzips his pants, as Tweek reaches down between his legs, past the way his cock rests on his furry upper thigh. He’s on his back, wings splayed wide, the light from the stained glass colouring every facet of his being with greens and yellows and blues and reds. He looks anything but the devil he is, two fingers parting his ass so Craig can see the shiny promise of his hole.
Craig’s eyes are open now. He doesn’t want to miss a moment of this; the way Tweek’s lashes flutter, the hitch of his breath as Craig pumps his cock once and bullies the head of it past the tight puncture of Tweek’s rim. He hisses, cheeks splitting in a wide smile when he gazes up at Craig. His eyes glitter, pupiless but focused somehow, the sound of his body giving way to the insistent press of Craig’s cock like frogspawn squeezed through a fist.
Craig is dimly aware of Father’s unseeing eyes watching him too. The eyes of every saint in this chapel, gazing from the stained glass, carved into the stations of the cross on every wall. Tweek’s wings shudder, and seem to expand, curling around the two of them until all Craig can see is the rosy hue of his cheeks.
“Eyes on me, Craig,” Tweek says sweetly. “Look at me. Only me.” Craig shivers, the clutch of Tweek’s body around his cock maddening. For a mouth as cool and alien as he has, his ass is the opposite. Craig feels as if he’s set his bare member amongst a pit of coals, the heat making his toes curl in his shoes, just on the edge of unpleasantness. It makes every thrust of his hips more urgent, chasing the pleasure that comes with the movement, staving off the pain which threatens with every throb of his own blood as he chases his end.
“Touch me,” Tweek begs, and his lashes cling together with moisture as if he were crying.
Craig thinks of his angel, the golden haired boy who died in the bed next to him. Had he stayed alive, would they have had this? Would Craig have been able to open himself up like this, give himself away like this? Would Tweek have opened up for him as readily?
The eyes of the chapel aren’t the only problem. The eyes of the people of South Park would never have let them have it.
Craig curls his fist around Tweek’s cock, breath harrowed as he watches it disappear in his grip. He trembles as his back curves, hips making aborted little thrusts to chase his own pleasure as Craig can feel his own cresting at the base of his spine.
“Give it to me,” Tweek begs him, or instructs him, Craig can’t be sure as the sudden sharp slice of his talons in the muscle of his back wracks him with pain. Something about it toes the line of that same pleasure, too hot, too all encompassing, and he feels himself spilling violently inside the depths of Tweek’s ass.
The imp comes too, viscous and bright, painting his pebbled nipples and chin with the stuff.
The pleasure is cauterised with the sudden pierce of talons through Craig’s chest, like a hot knife through butter. Tweek watches his own movements as he wraps his hand around Craig’s heart, still pounding beyond his ribcage. Ink dark eyes flicker up to meet Craig’s own, his breath caught for the last time in the cavern of his soon-to-be empty chest.
“You were very good,” Tweek tells him, his smile almost melancholy. “You always are.”
It was worth it, Craig thinks, as darkness encroaches on the edges of his vision and he succumbs to the sudden cold. Like Tweek’s mouth, but everywhere now. He’d have liked to feel Tweek’s mouth everywhere, but this is just as good. Even if it was all a ruse, it was worth it.
Even to hold him for just a moment, like this.
His angel.