#dukexceit

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“I’m sorry,” Patton sobs, spit and bits of human liver coming from his mouth more than words do. “I’m so so sorry, Remus.” 

He holds her insides in his hands, but it is he who feels cracked open. The sins he’s worked so hard to keep at bay strewn out and about and on the walls for all the world to see. Because even when there’s a heart throbbing against his palm - not really pulsating at all, but moving so lifelike from how hard he shakes - he always ends up here. Making it about himself. 

Remus inhales, a juxtapose to the very still chest merely a few feet away. “You’re a ghoul.” 

He says it so calmly. Like he expected to walk into this scene after finishing a night shift at the hospital. As if this isn’t the first time he’s realized his roommate isn’t human. 

Patton glances at the broken body sprawled between his legs. At the woman who now looks more like a ragged doll than the neighbor who helped carry his groceries just a day before. And then he stares at his kagune, bright and blue and solid, but with the fluidity of a river, cocooning itself between the split of skin on her stomach, stretching the wound more and more until the sound of blood oozing onto the living room carpet roars like a waterfall. 

He looks up at his roommate, sclera coated in black instead of white and irises a shade lighter than the heavy red dripping from Patton’s chin. “I don’t wanna be.

“I want to be forgiven.” Patton wipes away the snot that drips from his nose, the tears that slide down his cheeks, unaware of the smears of blood he leaves in their place.“I want to be good. So, please, don’t turn me in.” 

Remus grins. Like a monster under the bed would. Like Patton should. “Liar.” 

Patton flinches back, more so from the shock than the accusation. This is not the reaction of a man terrified for his life. This is a man at the dealers’ table, holding the winning cards and knows it. “I’m not a liar! Who would choose this life? Having to constantly look over my shoulder, outcasted by the world, the killings - ”

“The power.” Remus cuts in. 

Something snarls in Patton’s gut. “I don’t care for that.” 

“Liiiiiiiiiaaaaar.” 

“I am not a liar!” The thing inside him raises its hackles, pacing slowly. He releases a sob. “Lying is wrong!” 

Remus laughs. Somehow a more sickening sound than the squelch coming from Patton’s kagune ripping itself free from the girl’s abdomen. “Nice to know the ghoul I caught red-handed - literally red-handed -  has a good sense of morality. What’s next? You’re waiting for marriage? Haven’t even touched yourself yet to preserve some purity bullshit?” 

“It’s because I’m a ghoul I’m so strict on myself about lying!” Patton cries. “The horrible things I’ve done to survive - ”

And like a drunk driver who thinks nothing can go wrong, Patton sees headlights in the shape of familiar amber eyes and there’s no time to step on the brakes before everything falls away. Please, she bawls, barely able to string the vowels together as easily as Patton can string her large intestine along and along and along and along. Please don’t do this. 

Patton avoids looking at the crumpled body he towers over. “Why bother with the little sins when you’re doing the big ones?” 

“Sins?” Remus’ eyes flicker to the cross around Patton’s neck. It hits Patton then that Remus’ gaze has been locked in on him this whole time, with the exception of the ten seconds he stared at the corpse when he first walked in. Patton should be glad the attention is gone, so why does he wish for it back? “Even after all this, you believe there’s a God? That you earned your way to the pearly gates despite all the lives you’ve fucked enough times over to make your bitch?” 

Patton can’t help but instinctively clutch the jewelry. “Belief is all I have. I don’t deserve a place in heaven, but the least I can do is try to do better in other ways to make up for the hurt I’ve caused. That has to count for something.” When he lets go he realizes his cross is now covered in blood. “It has to.” 

Remus steps closer, daring to enter the pool of blood that Patton was foolish enough to believe acted as a barrier, a warning. A threat.

“I can’t believe this shit I’m hearing! Do you mean to tell me murder cancels out because you tipped the pizza delivery guy more than twenty percent?!” Remus is shrieking now. He’s a city wire, spitting rogue sparks at Patton’s skin. “You don’t get to repent when you’re just going to do it again! There’s no point! As pointless as the creation made by your God where the left testicle hangs lower than the right one!”

Patton jumps to his feet, but it isn’t solid ground he stands on. The floor is slipping beneath him, with nowhere stable to go to. 

“The point is to be a good person! I don’t get to just stop, Remus! I have to eat! I didn’t even let her in with the intent to kill her! I let her in because she wanted to borrow eggs and I didn’t realize she cut herself on something until I opened the door and smelled the blood!”  

His hunger shrieks at the door because she’s there too. Two creatures as alive as the other. But this is a gladiator fight. The door shuts. He places his bets. 

He didn’t know not to open the door, but he knew better than to close it. 

Patton expects his voice to shake. He nearly flinches when what comes out is a deep rasp from the back of his throat. “I didn’t want to kill her. I… I just get so hungry.” 

A grin slides over Remus’ face, as direct and chilling as a hammer to the skull, and the thought that comes next hits Patton just as hard.

He needs to get out of this mess the same way he got in it.

“The wolf always blames the food chain,” the hammer says, and Patton breaks. 

The thing in Patton’s gut snaps its jaw, then strikes. 

His kagune reacts first, shoving Remus to the wall so hard an audible crack whips through the air. His legs comprehend the danger - the thrill - right after, seemingly gliding over the floor from how fast he moves. By the time the human has opened his eyes his hands are pinned against his head and Patton’s kagune hovers just a centimeter above the center of his chest. 

All done in less than three seconds. A testament to how inhuman Patton is, and yet he’s forced to wear their skin. 

“I’m a good person.” His breath ghosts over Remus’ lips. Is it wrong he wonders if it tickles or stings? 

Remus smirks. 

Patton hopes it’s both. 

“What you are,” Remus says, tilting his head to the right so that his cheek brushes against Patton’s forearm, smiling as if he isn’t the rodent in this mouse and cat game, “is a beast.” 

Color spreads to Patton’s cheeks, sitting there like it has a weight of its own, reminding him of how wrong this is. How wrong he and Remus are, whether separate or together. 

“There’s a wolf in you, pacing for the next chase. The poor thing’s been without a pack for so long,” Remus says softly. If Patton closes his eyes, he can almost feel Remus’ hands trailing up and down his stomach, softly, attentively - dare he say- adoringly, trying to find the lump of the wolf. Nails softly dragging before Remus’ fingers rest in between the curve of fat that ends where his hips start.

Perhaps it’s the thought of someone wanting to touch him willingly, wantingly, outside of those who hit or scratch or slap when he’s trying to fill his stomach for the day, that keeps the memories of why he’s been alone so long at bay. Better to focus on Remus’ half-lidded eyes than the day he was hidden under the floorboards by his parents at nine-years-old moments before ghoul investigators kicked down the door. 

“How much longer do I have to rile you up before I can get you to face me as who you truly are?” Remus asks, slightly purring. 

Kill him. 

Patton should. Should kiss him and shove his tongue through the gap he always considered adorable before tearing out the teeth Remus still has left. Should kiss the scar under his chin that Patton bandaged after a bar fight went wrong and replace it with a newer, deeper, and unhealable one. Should kiss the freckles scattered across his cheeks like a galaxy and use the constellations to find out what order he should rip them out in. 

Kiss him kill him kiss him kill him kiss him kill him kiss him kill him kiss him kill -

Remus turns his head slightly to, as if reading Patton’s mind, brush his lips against Patton’s forearms. “Not much longer, it seems,” Remus hums. 

A gasp leaves Patton’s mouth. He steps back immediately, forearm burning. 

But that’s not the only thing that burns. 

“How dare you.” He spits, eyes wild, and kagune flickering like a hungry tongue. “Do not speak as if you know me when you have no idea what it means to be born wrong.” 

At that response, anger flares up in Remus’ eyes. Patton almost sighs in relief when he sees it. It’s both relieving and terrifying to see Remus read him so clearly while Patton has no idea what’s going on in Remus’ playground of a brain. 

And then he realizes he was a fool to think he understood Remus at all because a second later the human pulls off his shirt. 

“Remus!” Patton stutters, face burning such an intense color of pink it makes up for the devoid of color on the corpses’ body at his feet. Before he can embarrass himself further with a failed attempt at a coherent sentence, Remus turns around and Patton’s eyes - curse his dumb eyes - don’t look away. 

An unwelcome jolt of desire shoots through him, but it is instantly squashed when he realizes what he’s really supposed to be looking at. Multiple slashes, old, deep, and that look to be caused at the hands of a wooden ruler, vertically run along Remus’ back. 

“You’re right. I wasn’t born wrong.” Remus looks over his shoulder, voice losing the edge of madness that makes him so him. “But my parents thought differently. So I understand the pain and hurt that comes with it.” 

Remus throws the shirt aside and begins stalking towards him, somehow still talking in the present while Patton is stuck in the six seconds before when he realized Remus also has freckles on his back. “I could tell right away that you were like me. Deceiving others. Deceiving yourself. I just didn’t know why, so I promised myself not to say anything until I had all the facts. For the first fourteen years of my life, I tried to fit in the mold my parents made for me before I realized this isn’t a Cinderella story where the shoe fucking fits in the end. My mother thought the scars on my back were punishment for playing the note of a violin incorrectly. She couldn’t be more wrong. It was a punishment for lying to myself for so long. It came to me then that I can’t be what I’m not. I can’t lie to myself or others anymore.” 

Patton doesn’t move away as Remus stops before him with the confidence of a man who didn’t just step over a dead body, too busy being pulled under by unending tides every time he gets too close to shore. 

For a long time, he told himself lying was not as easy to stomach as mankind. And yet it’s all he’s ever done. All he knows. He rips his roots out from one life to the next. Created new identities whenever the police got too close to the truth. Learned to turn around when someone’s order got called out. He had that name once. He had them all. A coffee mocha for the Dylan that was friends with a boy who had purple hair and skin so pale Dylan thought bleeding would do him good. Four cheese empanadas for Barry, who coincidentally met a man named Logan Berry, who didn’t like him all that much but would punch in a discount for him, so Barry would leave a nice tip because that’s what nice people did and he wanted to be like those people. Not the wolf in sheep’s clothing. 

When he resurfaced from the floorboards that day he was reborn amongst the cheers and applause of his neighbors congratulating the ghoul investigators for freeing the world from two evils. With his parents’ fresh blood squishing underneath his shoes as he made his escape out the back a horrible thought came to him. 

The world thought him better off not being born at all. 

Is that what would happen when death inevitably claimed him? No one to wail or grieve to prove he was loved. Not even a grave. His existence was despised. His death was cause for celebration. 

And what was a nine-year-old to do with that information but change?

He is drowning. He can’t even scream unless he wants to make the death more painful. Maybe he should. Self-destruction is a very human thing. 

Remus’ cups the ghoul’s face in his hands. A life raft Patton instantly clings to. 

“And that’s the difference between you and me,” Remus says, voice the gentlest it can be with the edge of permanent madness laced around his tongue. “This goody two shoes people pleasure you play? It’s not you. It never was. So cut the bullshit. You are so much better than that. You always were. Live for yourself, not for others.” 

Patton holds onto Remus’ hands, afraid once it leaves - because everyone always leaves - he’ll be made much emptier without it. He should not be feeling these things, least of all for this man, this human, when the air around him crackles with such a wrongness that it out wins Patton’s. No, worse. Better. It compliments his. 

If she hadn’t been nice, hadn’t been so her, she wouldn’t have helped Patton carry his groceries. And so she wouldn’t have known he had a batch of plentiful eggs to lend after realizing she had none to make the brownies for her nieces’ upcoming birthday. She’s on the walls, on the carpet, on the couch, on his clothes, because she was what the world took advantage of: kind. 

And that is why creatures like Patton survive. You do not make company with survivors and expect to leave in one piece. 

He’s at the shore now. But he’s not the same man who went into the water. He has been homesick for a person he could never be.

“Why are you telling me this?” Patton asks, while also wondering what could possibly be, in the already long list of things, more wrong with him that he finds the calluses on Remus’ hands make his touch more comforting than it already was. 

Remus presses their foreheads together. “Because I want you to know you don’t need to hide who you are around me. Ghoul or something else. You’re not alone anymore.” 

Patton doesn’t know what it means that his kagune, a literal weapon of destruction, tentatively lingers around Remus’ waist wanting to wrap around it in a mockery of a hug. Or how he feels about his soulless eyes, meant to strike horror and fear into the hearts of his food, soften as it drinks up the dimples on Remus’ face and the crook of his nose. 

He is saved from thinking too much about it when Remus speaks again. 

“You’re beautiful.” 

A beat of silence. At least, Patton thinks there’s one, the only beat he hears is the erratic beating of his heart against his chest. 

“You… you can’t believe that” is what Patton finally says. Eyes wide and the room suddenly too hot and the smell of her is starting to fill up the room which is definitely what’s keeping him from thinking clearly, even though the smell of rotting flesh is not new to him at all. 

Remus raises an eyebrow. “Well, it seems you missed the conversation we just had about not lying for others, so I guess I’ll have to start from the beginning. Ahem, you’re a ghoul - ” 

“You’re insane.” Patton rolls his eyes, unable to stop the totally unnoticeable and not at all loud snort that escapes a second later. He nearly flinches a second later when he realizes how mean it could come across. Patton never said anything mean. Who is he now? Is this another mask or is the real him slowly peeking through?

Remus smiles. “And so are you. Let’s lose our minds together and drive off a cliff like Thelma and Louise.” 

It isn’t a nice smile. Too much red gums and canine teeth, not sharp at all but giving off the impression that they should be. Everything about this human is sharp in the most troubling way. And yet, although it wasn’t the prettiest thing to look at, that doesn’t mean it didn’t make Patton feel something. 

He’s pretty sure it’s the first real thing he’s felt in a long time. 

With the last of his reserve crumbling away, he wraps his kagune around Remus and allows himself to indulge in the moment by closing his eyes. His hands pressed against the edge of his folded legs, pinky outstretched to lightly brush against Remus’ knee. It’s the smallest of contact, still, the pad of that same finger buzzes and sizzles in the most delicious way. 

“All the prettiest flowers have thorns,” Remus speaks, an earnest look in his eyes that almost undoes the chords of chaos that make him up. “Flowers don’t cry when they prick someone’s thumb. So why should you? We are what we do to survive. You can either take accountability for your actions or let the shame eat you as easily as you eat others. The choice is yours, but dammit - ” 

Remus pulls back slightly to get a good look at Patton’s face. There is an intensity and purpose in his body so rigid Patton fears he’ll break apart. 

“I want you to choose to not only survive but to live, Patton.” 

Patton stills, mouth suddenly dry. “... That’s not my name.”

Remus blinks. “Record scratch?” 

“Patton was a name I gave myself not too long ago,” the ghoul forces out. “I’ve had others. As fake as the one I have now. My real name…” He takes a deep breath, feeling the water of the crashing tides lick at his heels, ready to pull him back in. “My real name is Janus.” 

It goes quiet. 

It can’t be an eternity, but that’s what it feels like to Pa - no, to Janus. If it’s weird on his own tongue, then what could it possibly feel like to Remus? Is this where Janus has crossed the line? A fake name somehow more of a deal-breaker than eating mankind? 

His heart lurches at having had a taste of something… something he can’t really put his finger on, but he knows it’s something more, only to have it pulled out from underneath him. Will the pain in his heart stop if he rips it out? If that was what made this horrible emotion, this terrifying and numb feeling of loss to something that he shouldn’t have allowed to be his in the first place, stop he’d gladly do it. 

Then, because Remus is full of surprises, Janus is pulled by the hem of his shirt into a kiss. 

The kiss is anything but quiet. The kind of smooch you hear in some trashy, cheap porn production from a store that would allow a seven-year-old to walk out with. Remus shouldn’t be making out with him like this. Not when the crust of dried blood still lingers on Janus’ lips. Or when the stench of his latest kill sticks to him so thick his own kagune couldn’t pierce through it. 

Yet Remus shows no sign of stopping. 

Remus bites Janus’ lower lip and oh. Stars aren’t normally this close to the earth, right? Because that’s all Janus sees. In an instant his hands are gripping at Remus’ waist, holding on for dear life as Remus moves on to using his tongue for something other than giving Janus a harsh - but much needed - reality check. 

When Remus pulls back, Janus unconsciously brings his hands to his lips, as if the action will somehow replay the moment. How is it that someone so human can unravel a monster such as himself so easily as breathing? 

“Janus,” Remus says in awe, like his name consists of all the most heavenly sounds in a single word. Janus could listen to Remus say his name for eternity. 

“Janus, Janus, Janus, Janus. I love it! I've never met someone who has a name with the word anu - ” 

”We’re pronouncing it Ja-nice from now on, ” Janus says, immediately snapped out of daydream mode. 

Remus pouts. ”Fine. You're no fun.” 

”Am I?” Janus blurts out before he can stop himself. 

There is so much he doesn’t know about himself. Where does he even begin to piece together who he really is? 

Remus comfortingly squeezes Janus’ hand.  ”Don't worry. We’ll find out. Together.” 

Janus allows a small smile to slip on his face. He may not know who he is, but he knows what he wants. 

“I’d like that.”

The two get to their feet, now that the moment has passed they are acutely aware of the underlying problem in the room. 

“So, what are you going to do with the rest of the body?” Remus asks, approaching it to poke it with the front of his boot. 

“Eat it, of course. I’m still terribly hungry.” 

Remus whirls around immediately, a glint in his eyes similar to the ones found in kids wandering around Disneyland. “Can I watch?” 

Obviously, Janus should be disgusted. Instead, a small blush coats his cheeks and he finds himself star-struck at the sight of the cute gap in Remus’ lopsided grin.