Fan Fiction ❯ Xin ❯ Xin ( Chapter 1 )

Xin

By: Rei

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This story is about a little boy named Mikey, and a not-quite-little girl named Laura. What happened to Mikey is a lot like what happened to Laura, but Laura was bigger and understood most of what was going on. Mikey didn't, so he had to ask a lot of people who didn't really know anything, and only told him because they knew they had nothing to say.

What happened when Laura was thirteen and Mikey was seven was their mother dying. This could happen to anyone. Maybe your mother has just died recently too. But it does no good to give a statistic, to say this many million kids have dead mothers. No one with a dead mother of their own wants to hear any of that. It makes their grief a little less real, a little less tangible. But they feel it all the same. Feeling guilty about feeling sad never did anyone any good.

Laura and Mikey's mom died in the way a lot of moms do. She killed herself because she was sad. Mikey didn't know what about, he didn't even know why his mother was dead until Laura finally told him. Laura thought she knew why, but she could have been wrong. It might have been because their grandpa just died of emphysema and didn't leave their mom a single thing because he did not love her. It could have been because she had a miscarriage last month. It could have been for a lot of reasons. There were a lot of deaths, and Mama's was just another one in a long, long chain of people getting gone. Laura didn't know no matter how many times she went over it in her head. And she told Mikey whatever she could think of that wouldn't make him too sad.

Mikey had just gotten home from school the afternoon Mama first started to be dead. She wasn't exactly at that stage just yet when Mikey got there, but she wasn't really alive either. She'd taken a pill that was called cyanide, and Laura spent many sleepless nights afterwards wondering where she got it. Laura had heard you could buy that sort of thing on the Internet. So you could buy death. That was a comforting thought. She'd have to keep Mikey off the computer from now on.

So Mama had just been lying there on the kitchen floor, eyes big and bulging. She was too far-gone to do anything about it by the time Mikey got Daddy and Laura to come home and help. Mama was taken to the hospital but it was too late. There was nothing anyone could do to make her live again. Nothing could make her wake up and make breakfast for herself, go to work and come home and work on her poems that weren't any good. Nothing could get her up to tickle Mikey until he cried, or braid Laura's hair and tell her she was beautiful. Daddy tried to do these things, but his fingers didn't tickle like Mama's did, and his braids looked sloppy and dumb. So Daddy couldn't be Mama, though he did try. In the end he went back to being Daddy, which wasn't too helpful or nice for anyone but Daddy. In the end, Laura and Mikey realized that they didn't like their daddy very much. It wasn't his fault; it was just that Mama had been a lot better.

Anyhow, before they realized all that about Daddy, Laura and Mikey had to go to Mom's funeral. Mikey didn't want to go, so he cried very hard into his Pokemon bed sheets, and threw his gameboy at Laura, who had a bruise for days. It matched very well with the black dress she'd picked out to mourn Mama in. It was a very simple black dress that clung to her breasts and behind like Mikey to Mama's hand. It simply would not let go. Laura actually had a very hard time taking it off later when Owen Strakoavski took her virginity away that night. But Laura didn't tell Mikey and of that. He was too young, and Laura had no particular desire to discuss her sex life with a little boy. The only person she wanted to talk to was dead now, so she told girls she didn't like very much, and very soon the whole school knew. Laura was now thought of as the school slut, so she got to have a lot of sex after school in the locker room with boy she did not know. One of them might have been named Roger, but she only knew because he had a shirt that said Roger on it. That might not have been his name. Laura worried she might get pregnant or AIDS. Both seemed like diseases even though one is a blessing for someone who isn't thirteen and doesn't live with only boys who dont understand.

But Laura didn't get AIDS and she didn't get pregnant. The bad thing that happened later wasn't something she knew about for a long, long time.

That was because it happened to Mikey, who was too young to know it was bad, and didn't tell Laura or Daddy or anyone. Gordon Ackerman would be in jail by now if Mikey knew enough to tell. Gordon Ackerman might have problems of his own, or he might just be a very bad man. But it doesn't matter why Gordon decided to take off his pants and put himself inside Mikey, because this story isn't about Gordon, it's about Mikey and Laura who dont care as long as they are all okay.

What matters is that Gordon did decide to do that bad thing to Mikey. There was a lot of blood and Mikey cried, but Gordon told him its something all boys do, and he shouldn't worry. If he did worry though, he'd better not tell anyone or Gordon would come and kill him. He had a shotgun at home and was looking for the occasion to use it. Mikey didn't want to be dead like Mama, so he didn't tell Laura who he loved, or Daddy who he didn't love that much. He didn't tell Andrew, his best friend at school, or his smiling stupid teacher Miss Ethyl.

Laura only found out because it was she who'd brought Gordon into their house. It was to have sex, because Gordon didn't want to do it in the locker room anymore, it smelled like old socks and menstrual blood. Laura would have asked how he knew her house didn't smell worse, but she didn't want him to be mad at her. She knew he had a gun and she was scared. All she had to defend herself was a German shepherd named Gnasher. Gnasher was old and fat and smelly, and couldn't do much but wet himself in fear if Gordon got mad at Laura.

Later Gordon told her what he'd done to Mikey. Laura didn't know why he said a word. Obviously Mikey wasn't telling anyone, and Gordon could have pretended he was innocent forever if not for that. Well, besides renting out the school's whore, that is. Laura had an unofficial pimp now, named Sean Unjoez. He didn't look like a pimp at all, he wore red-checked shirts and loose blue jeans. But people gave Sean money to have sex with Laura. Laura never got a cent. She was thinking about getting a real prostitution job, as she didn't seem to be good at anything else. Once you start something its hard to stop, even if you dont like it all that much.

So Laura told Daddy about Gordon. Daddy thought about what Mama might have done and decided she'd have sued his ass and had him thrown in jail. Mikey and Laura managed to convince him not to do that. Instead, they egged his house on Halloween and laughed had him from the shadows of the trees. It didn't seem an adequate revenge because Mikey stopped talking. Then he stopped eating. Then he stopped breathing. That last thing was because of the not eating. He almost starved to death, but he went to the hospital and they put vitamins in him and he was okay. Then he had to go for counseling, but it didn't work because all he'd say was what everyone already knew. Gordon raped Mikey and threatened to kill him. Mikey was too little to say how he'd been hurt by that.

Laura stopped seeing Gordon after that. She also stopped seeing Sean, and all those other boys who wanted to twang her brastrap, among other things. Laura decided she was tired of that kind of life, and didn't want to risk her little brother's safety again. If she did keep selling herself then she certainly wouldn't bring any of it home. She'd had no idea that Gordon might want Mikey. She could hardly imagine anyone wanting to hurt someone she loved so much.

So they were okay for a while. Daddy got addicted to a couple of drugs and so did Laura, but that wasn't so bad compared to what had just happened. Laura eventually got over her addictions even though Daddy didn't. Mikey went on being quiet and not knowing why. It's hard to be hurting and not be able to explain your pain. Mikey didn't know that Gordon was the cause. Mikey didn't know that he'd been raped.

Many years later, Laura got married to a man named Adan Xin. This story is also about him. His last name meant Heart and that was ironic because he had a heart condition. He almost died of a heart attack on their wedding night but he was okay in the end. They had triplet babies, and then one baby all by itself at the end. The triplets were called Bailin, Heilin, and Amalia. The by itself baby was called Chang Chang. His name meant 'often', which isn't a very good meaning, but Laura thought the characters you wrote to get that word were the most beautiful things that could ever be. They looked for all the world like suns, she said. So they had girl's named for black and white forests, a girl with an American name, and a boy who was called often.

Mikey did not get married and he did not have any babies. He didn't get a job counseling rape victims, or kids whose mothers had died. He sold real estate and was bored by it. His life was sad but ordinary. He didn't do anything he cared about and no one he worked with cared about him. He did not have a lover and he did not have a friend. His main social event consisted of barhopping with Laura and Adan every couple of weeks. One night though, Laura and Adan couldn't find a baby-sitter for their four children. They asked all the neighborhood girls and boys, all the teenagers with no jobs and no where to go, but apparently they did have something better to be doing then changing a baby called Often's diapers. And true to his name, he soiled them quite often.

Because Adan hadn't been out in weeks due to his heart acting up, he was very anxious to get out of their roach-ridden apartment and go barhopping like they always did. Laura wanted to go too, and she argued that Mikey was her brother so Adan should stay home with the kids while she went to see him. Adan fired back that his own brother was a Neo-Nazi and he didn't want to see him, so why couldn't he mooch off of her for a little brotherly love?

Laura couldn't think of a good reason why not except that Mikey was her brother and would never be Adan's no matter what they did. But she didn't have the heart to tell him no after he'd been cooped up in the house for weeks. So it came to pass that Laura stayed home with the baby and toddlers, and Adan and Mikey went out to Louisa's a dingy little bar at the edge of town.

Mikey ate a bacon cheeseburger with big greasy French fries and topped it all off with pint after pint of Sapporo. Adan ate things that wouldn't clog up his arteries and give him yet another heart attack, and he didn't have all that much beer, at least not compared to Mikey. Mikey was a raging drunk by the time the night was through.

He picked up many women and had his way with them in the bathroom stall while Adan listened to Chang Chang say his first word over the staticky connection of his cell phone. He couldn't hear what it was but he knew Laura would tell him later. Still, he was becoming very bored and wishing that he'd stayed home and had been the one to hear Chang Chang's first word. The triplets had all started doing things at once, but Chang Chang was special. The other three could walk and he couldn't. They could talk and use the toilet and he couldn't. When he learned, it was special.

Finally Mikey grew tired of the women, and came back to Adan and the endless supply of Sapporo. He started drinking again, and as he drank he started looking at Adan in a different way. He was a very attractive man indeed. A bit skinny, because having a heart condition since childhood keeps one from building up much muscle mass, but Mikey found that even more appealing. The feminine look was good, because Mikey figured himself as straight. Certainly all the straight sex he'd had was better then the one and only time he'd had gay sex. He hadn't liked Gordon's penis up his ass then, and he doubted he'd like Adan's in the same place now. But if he could play the dominant one, then he wouldn't mind having a go with his sister's husband.

Be sure to take into account that Mikey was very seriously drunk when he thought this. Mikey was a nice person who would never want to hurt his sister in such a way had he been sober. But he was drunk and remembering things he didn't want to. Sex would make things better, and perhaps this particular kind of sex would bring the memory to life and make it leave for good. If he enjoyed himself with Adan, then maybe Gordon wouldn't have been so bad either. Maybe he could stop the nightmares he had when he wasn't thinking about anything else that night. He'd learned since age seven what had occurred back then, and it disturbed him to know of it. Adan would be different though. Adan would cure him, turn him into a presentable human being who could call himself uncle to Laura's brood.

So he reached for Adan, told him sweet things in his ear and begged for him to submit. If he struggled then there would be no point and Mikey would have to remain sullied and sick forever. After much cajoling and pleading, Adan agreed to do it. It may have been because he was drunk himself, or because he really found Mikey sexually attractive. Mikey doubted the latter, but that was not the point. As long as Adan let him do what he wanted to him, then things would be okay.

So they lay together in the bathroom stall, and Mikey went inside of Adan.

Mikey went home to his dingy apartment and had the worst nightmares of his life when he went to sleep. Adan went home to his dingy apartment, and had a minor heart attack that kept him insomniac with pain through the night. Obviously they were both having their own type of guilt reaction. It is not bad to lay with a man and try to put away the past. It is terrible to do it with your sister's husband. It is not bad to succumb to desire when you are drunk, and let yourself be butt-fucked on the bathroom floor. It is terrible to do so with your wife's little brother. It is terrible to hurt the only girl you've ever loved besides your mother. Besides your children.

It would be worse to let Laura find out. So Adan and Mikey made a pact not to tell. But now they needed to have sex every time they saw each other. They couldn't fight the attraction, and they couldn't stop themselves from falling in love. Eventually, Laura began to matter less and less to Adan, even though he cared about her and the children very much. Laura mattered a good deal to Mikey, but a hole that Laura couldn't fill was filled by Adan. Eventually Adan had to leave Laura, because he was guilty as long as he stayed. When he allowed himself to be with Mikey then he would not be sick every time they did the thing normal lovers do.

So they allowed it. Laura found someone else and was as happy as someone with four kids and a few lingering drug addictions could be. Adan didn't feel guilty and neither did Mikey. Now they'd have nights of passionate lovemaking in the bed they bought together, or they'd watch TV together and Adan would fall asleep with his head in Mikey's lap. Sometimes they fought, and sometimes Mikey didn't like it when Adan wanted to see his kids. Sometimes Adan got sick and needed a lot of help from Mikey. Mikey tried his best to give it, and tried not to get so mad that Adan wanted to see his babies. He remembered that he was their uncle and he should see them too, so most often they'd see Laura and the kids after Adan had recovered from his most recent heart problem. And they'd go barhopping like they used to, only a lot of the bars were called Chuck E. Cheeses now. The triplets were getting too old to smuggle in under their coats.

If anyone was unhappy with the situation, they didn't say anything to the others. They carried on this way until Adan died.

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The End