Snapshots

-

“So who’s going to talk to the brat about sex and girls and boys?”

Orange juice sprayed everywhere at Hoody’s idle question, Liu choking on the inhaled liquid.

“My babies!” Toby yelped as he threw his arms up over his waffles to protect them from contamination.

Jeff’s coffee cup stopped a few inches from his mouth as he stared blankly.

BEN flat out left the room. Just spun around on his heel and left the room only seconds after entering.

Eyeless tilted his head to the side thoughtfully. “You think it’s time for that?”

Laughing Jack merely looked puzzled, mopping orange juice off his feathered coat. “Didn’t you do that already?”

Masky flung a hand out and grabbed Boy by the hood of his sweatshirt before he could follow BEN out of the room. “No, we just told him to ignore it when people started fucking on screen.”

“But he’s twelve now, right?” Hoody persisted. “He should probably hear it from one of us before it becomes a problem while he’s away at school.”

“It’s not going to be a problem, I’ve not even started puberty yet!” Boy yelped, trying to wriggle out of his sweatshirt towards freedom. Masky just reeled him in by the hood and locked an arm around his neck.

“You will soon though, you’re already fixating so I guess it’s time. We’ll even be nice and let you choose who gives you The Talk.”

“As long as it’s not Jeff,” Eyeless corrected. “Or Laughing Jack. ”

“Hey! ...no, yeah, I’m out.” Jeff was having no part of this. Teaching Boy how to murder and torture people was fine, he was NOT going to talk to him about sex. Nope. “Shut. Up.” as the clown opened his mouth.

Boy wheezed, nearly choking under Masky’s heavy grip. “I’m what? I’m not fixing anything! Can we go back to the physical torture and fucking skip the mental torture, please? Pretty please?”

Nope. It wasn’t enough that he’d been forced to run the Gauntlet of Horror, that he then had to spend the days afterwards helping build a fucking goat pen and shed. Now they had decided it was time to fuck with his mind.

His family sucked.

After some debate, it was Liu and Eyeless who took the cringing child to the so-called Library for The Talk. Eyeless was really good with technical stuff and anatomy, while Liu was there to add the more.. Uhh.. emotional aspect to things. And since Eyeless couldn’t see the books meant someone had to be there to read the key passages.

Of course, even for ‘normal’ families the talk was never easy. and this family was anything but normal so things got weird and complicated real fast. Too complicated even for the older boys.

“Well, I mean, yeah, Laughing Jack kind of comes off as a masochist but really he’s.. uh...”

“Three people make it difficult, not impossible. Go ask Toby about it later, ok?”

“No, that falls under the kink category and I’m just going to have you google that. Please try not give Ben a virus when you look things up.”

“Slender is what you’d call asexual, he has no interest in sexual pleasure. ..to the disappointment of many fucked up fans. Or not fucked up fans, which is why they’re disappointed. No, don’t ask Slender about it jesus christ.”

Boy left with a headache, a list of sex related terms to look up, and a thick textbook on human psychology. He… understood the basics of what sex was supposed to be. Male on female, male on male, female on female, the combinations got funky after that but there was a general theme to things that Boy could follow.

That was the easy part.

The whys of sex were mind-boggling and Boy wasn’t sure if he could look at his family the same ever again. Jeff had a clown kink, Hoody liked having his ears nibbled on, and Eyeless thought lubricated condoms were more efficient.

Boy decided he had been traumatized enough for one night. He poked his head into the game room to find BEN all by himself. The Glitch Ghost was sitting in the middle of the couch, or rather a foot above the middle of the couch, and playing a video game. The usual.

“Can I play?”

“Sure, grab a controller.”

After searching out his favorite controller from the bin, he settled in next to BEN floating above the couch cushions. It was a trick Boy had taught himself years ago because if BEN could do it why couldn’t he? A lot more comfortable than the battered and broken couch, the poor thing getting a daily beating from being jumped on, wrestled on, used as a barricade, shot at...

BEN side-eyed him for a moment as Boy picked out a character to play. “Birds and the Bees huh?”

“Huh?”

“Nevermind. It’s what they called the sex talk back when I was still alive. Always use condoms, get permission, when a man loves a woman very much…, that sort of stuff.” BEN shuddered, making the tail of his hat swing behind him.

Boy frowned. “Liu didn’t say anything about love. Just that if I wanted to have sex with a willing person I should try to make them feel comfortable. Otherwise, make sure they’re tied up really good.”

“Of course he did.” BEN rolled his eyes, spinning them almost all the way around inside his skull. “Just remember that you gotta take most of what the older guys say with a grain of salt. We’re all sorts of fucked-up in the head, more so on some things than others.”

Boy could understand that. He decided to stop thinking about the whole thing and just play games with BEN. Much better idea than thinking of the various ways two people could twist themselves up into a pretzel.

It wasn’t until later that Boy realized- Eyeless and Liu had completely forgotten about the whole baby-making part of sex. Boy knew the two events were connected but for some reason it had been more important to go over the difference between water-based lube and oil-based lube. For fuck’s sake, Eyeless had told him in detail where every stereotypical erogenous zone on the human body was located, for male and female, but hadn’t thought to explain where the baby came in to things?

Not that Boy felt he really needed to know, but seriously. That was a big part of things!

...wasn’t it?

Shit.

No, he wasn’t looking it up. Sex was a gooey gross mess, and way way too weird for everyone involved. Ugh.

Boy eyed the snake cage in the corner of his room. Voldemort was lounging on his tree branch, seemingly reading a book Boy had propped open for him. Boy even turned the page every once in awhile.

“Hey. Old man. How do wizards have sex?”

Voldemort’s scaled head swung around very slowly and stared at him. And then just as slowly, the cobra curled up so that his head was muffled under a few coils of his own body.

Boy glared. See if he went hunting for a juicy rat any time soon!