Peter is in love with a boy.
He’s in love with a boy from across the street, with just-after-dusk eyes and just-before-dawn hair. His love has sandy skin and cranberry lips and a laugh that floats up the sooty brick like fairy dusted ivy.
Peter’s in love, but there are no sinscars that Peter can see.
He can’t sully the boy across the street with his spiderweb guilt.
So Peter sits on the escape and stares between the metal and listens as dusk-dawn-fairyivy-sand laughs and he dreams.
*
Loki is, well, not quite in love, but he’s getting close. ‘Cause there’s this boy, this runt of a thing, with winterburn lips and blue-patriot eyes and hair the color of old faded furniture. He’s beautiful, the boy on the stairwell.
Tempting, like the sweet smoke that keeps Loki on this planet. But that boy doesn’t laugh, and he doesn’t quite cry, but when the boy with the winterburn lips sighs?
Loki shivers, slips a coat over his tank tops and dreams about spiderwebbed arms and a shatter-glass neck.
*
Peter doesn’t leave his house much. He used to go to school with the other kids. Use to run and play and dance. But then one day his sleeves slipped up and everything changed. No one had ever seen marcas pro delicto so large, so spread across the skin. They knew he had small marks on his neck.
It’s nothing really, small things here and there. Most people do. Guilt is funny that way, smearing itself across the skin.
Only Peter’s never really goes away.
But that day they began to see, Peter’s guiltscars weren’t just on his neck, or on his palms. He wonders if they figured out they’re all across his chest.
So Peter stays home and he dances alone in the attic and he dreams of the sun smeared across his skin; of a fire, of glass, of everything gone wrong.
*
Loki’s no creep, despite what his brother says. But sometimes he stays up well past the sun to watch the boy from the firewell escape, cloaked in old jeans and a blue hoodie. He’s a good kid. That’s what first caught Loki’s eyes.
He’s a good kid who cleans up trash and waters flowers and delivers groceries. Who climbs up the walls and shuts windows forgotten and climbs into the gutters to rescue objects remembered.
He leaves coins in his wake and fills up coffees and all manner of good-boy treats.
Loki doesn’t understand. He’s watched the boy change, can’t help how their windows align. He’s seen the stark red lines marring all of his chest, all of his back.
He knows who the boy is, thinks most people do.
He wonders who has figured out the secret to his marks.
*
Peter’s afraid of the fairyivy laugh filtering up into his attic. Because the innocent boy shouldn’t be in his house, shouldn’t drop by with flowers for May.
But he’s been doing this lately, slithering into Peter’s home, bewitching Aunt May.
But there’s a million dried flowers hanging from Peter’s rafters; gifts from a boy with post-dusk eyes and pre-dawn hair.
May wants him to come down, to say hello. But she should know better. Peter has seen the guy in nothing but a tank-top and briefs. Once, on accident, when he remembered to close his curtains too late. His fairy-laugh boy with his sandy smooth skin, no, Peter can’t touch him.
He’s never seen guiltscars spread.
He doesn’t want to find out.
But the boy keeps coming by and leaving Peter flowers; sunflowers, trillium, and purple cranebill and he leaves them with stolen love poems for Peter signed “Loki.”
The flourish in that signature makes Peter blush, wondering how long he spent with a pen in hand practicing those curves and curls.
Peter never follows the laugh, but he dances under flowers and sometimes when petals fall and brush his fast, it feels like fingers trailing soft and warm.
*
Loki doesn’t- he won’t invade the spider-boy’s web. Not directly, anyway. But he slinks over the threshold and comes bearing gifts and he sits with a lady with tiny prints in the crook of her arm, left after her body betrayed her.
She smiles at him, makes him steaming soup and hearty sandwiches and she sings songs of the orphan dancing in her attic.
“He’s a good lad, charming and soft,” she says with a smile like just after rain. “What happened, it wasn’t his fault. He can’t figure that out though, but it’s not. He’s a good kid.”
She drifts to the clouds, gets lost in camomile steam, and Loki brushes her hand and smiles. “I know he is.” But he doesn’t tell her about midnight jaunts, because that’s for him to savor.
He thinks one night to talk to him, but he doesn’t want to spook the spider off the streets. So he slinks his way back to the attic, climbs through the open window. There’s a bed on the corner that smells like roses and chair and he settles among the pillows.
He doesn’t mean to fall asleep.
*
Peter stumbles through his window right before the sun breaks free, and for a moment he watches, picturing long hair on bony shoulders.
And then someone sniffs, whimpers, and Peter falls with a thud against the wooden slats.
The boy in his bed bolts up, cries out, curls against the wall, and there’s a pain in his eyes Peter knows too well, so he doesn’t say anything when he hands him the shirt.
Loki doesn’t put in on though. He grabs Peter’s fingers and pads them over the lighting down his chest, turns so Peter can trace the electricity on his spine.
“We all have our scars, Peter,” Loki says quiet. His voice isn’t quite as musical as his laugh, sounds more like shattered windchime. “Father had a hard fist, and I was a bit troublesome.” He looks at Peter with dark, firm eyes. “But Thor made sure he never touched me.”
And Peter knows who Thor is, has seen the bulky weight beside Loki.
“I didn’t kill him, if that’s what your thinking,” Loki whispers. “His heart failed. I didn’t kill him,” and Loki pauses, and looks so small against Peter’s pillows, “but I would have.” Lighting cracks, grows along his belly, and Loki absently traces it. “For all that he did to Thor, for all the pain I caused my brother…”
He doesn’t finish because Peter is there, is on his knees above him, has his hands on sandy smooth skin, kisses cranberry lips.
*
Aunt May finds them curled into each other, and she studies the storm on Loki’s skin. Her boys have had hard lives, and she sighs when she sees how red Peter’s webs are.
So she doesn’t wake them. She shuts the door and makes a show of the bacon she fries and when they stumble down in backwards shirts and inside out shorts she pretends she doesn’t see.
Peter’s smiling, shy and small, but he’s smiling and sitting on her couch and he’s not wearing his hoodie.
Later, when the moon is high and she should be asleep, she hears them out on Peter’s escape. She listens as Peter tells Loki about the lab, about the night. When he was seven and young and curious.
“I wasn’t supposed to be there. I had a recital that night but I hadn’t felt well. They brought me along, sat me at my desk, told me to tinker with my toys and not touch anything. But the rock, shiny and humming, sang to me. I don’t, I,” Peter pauses. “I don’t quite know what happened but the windows all shattered and they tried to get to me and all I can really see when I shut my eyes and think is this weird silver webbing that went right through them.”
Aunt May shuts her door when Peter cries and she thinks, maybe now they’ll fade, but she touches the tiny prints on her elbow and knows that guilt’s a funny, tricky thing without logic.
*
People talk sometimes, about the guiltscar boys. Ones with more than tiny little sensible marks. The boy whose torso is shattered glass and firey spider webs, and the one with lightning and thunder on his skin.
They’re good, happy boys, with bright smiles and soft words.
Their guilt is large, is vibrant, but it’s not really their fault. Not exactly. Not entirely. But these guilt-ridden boys find joy in each other and they protect all the others with shame on their skin.
The spider-glass boy dances on stage and his lighting-struck lover writes the songs and together they share the burden of all they’ve done wrong.
Marcas pro delicto they laugh, what beautiful, ridiculous scars.
The webs are all grey and the lighting doesn’t flash these days.