Hi, dear readers! I'm back. This is the review of "The Fuck Club" visual novel I was developing, but halted a few months ago. This time I'm in for good to reboot this universe with multiple stories.
This is a work of fiction. Every resemblance with people and organizations is non intended.
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The College Club Chapters 5 Oliver Welr patreon.com/oliverwelr
"Good morning, baby. I have a surprise for you later." Was the notification message I received from my boyfriend Carl. He was so cute! We spent the week without managing to get some time alone to release the tension. Even the workouts with The Club didn't have space for us being alone together.
And the craziest part of this was - I didn't remember how my first week in college went.
Being grumpy in the mornings wasn't going so well on my body. I don't know what it was, but I was feeling like I was on a massive hangover from last night. I got up the bed, noticing Ethan had already left the room, and checked my phone again to see it was only 6:20 a.m. that Friday. I changed-- well, put some clothes on and collected my backpack to leave the room.
At the classroom, I saw Leon-from-the-cafeteria coming in and silently greeting me, going to the back of the room for a seat. After class ended, he grabbed his things quickly and ran out the door. Maybe he was in a hurry to have lunch, I thought, but decided to join him when I saw he was still walking down the hallway, just a few steps forward. I jogged to get to him, but he started jogging at a faster pace. And just when I managed to get past some people gathered in a small group, blocking my view, I met Carl coming into my direction.
"Oh hey, babe!" I greeted him, trying to look past his body to search for Leon.
"Hey." He lifted my chin and kissed me briefly. "Let's get rolling." We joined hands and started walking the same direction. Leon was still there in the end of the hallway. When he looked behind and saw us together, he started running again through the people.
"Leon, common man. Stop! Leon--" I tried to call him while everybody looked at my face, like I was a freak shouting in the hallway. I dragged Carl with me.
"Babe, what's happening?" He asked, joining along.
No, I mean. Everybody was frozen looking at my face, literally.
"Aren't you seeing this?" I asked him, signaling the weird people looking like NPCs.
"What?" He asked back, but I didn't have time to make my point.
I saw Leon taking a right turn in a hallway that nobody was using. We took the same turn and nobody was there, neither was he. When I went back a couple of steps, nobody was even in the hallway we had just passed by. Everybody was simply Thanos-snapped-his-finger gone.
"Where the hell did everybody go?" I asked nobody.
"I don't know." For a second, I forgot Carl was there. Wasn't he finding all this completely weird?
I paid attention at the left hallway on the intersection that we were on and noticed I couldn't see the end of it. But that was off because the building was a square around the inner open yard. I kept going forward, down the weird hallway, to investigate with Carl just behind me. The windows on my right side let me see outside of the building where the garden was. On my left, the classroom doors and we kept going. Somewhere behind us, the windows stopped facing the garden and it seemed to face a huge lab where I saw Chris punching with his fists against the windows. Not only one of those windows, but he was punching all of them like a bunch of TVs playing the same video. I looked back to the hallway and saw the lights shutting down, one by one, making the hallway turn completely pitch black.
What?! It's the middle of the day, I thought to myself.
I looked back at the hundreds of Chris "outside" and he seemed to scream something, but I couldn't hear it over the glass. I came closer to the window in front of me, until I touched where it was cracking, to try to hear him.
"...up... Michael, wake up!" He was screaming his lungs out but it was all muffled at my side.
"No." I heard Carl calmly saying.
The glass shattered and I felt water flooding the room. But what room? Everything was a black blur around me. I was drowning, but I couldn't see any liquid at all. I felt shortness of breath as the invisible water was dangerously reaching my neck. Air stopped going into my lungs while I was in a big amount of pain.
Did I tell you I'm afraid of water?
The College Club Chapters 6 Oliver Welr patreon.com/oliverwelr
It was my first day of summer vacation and Carl was coming to pick me up, in a couple of minutes, for us to go take some time alone in his parents' beach house in Southampton. The vacation between terms was three weeks long, but we wanted to make the best out of it since we were engaged and doing freaky shit alone was always on the menu. Just as I was finishing combing my long brown hair, I heard the knock on my door.
"Come in!" I shouted with my girly shrieked voice.
"Don't need to yell, baby!" He closed the door behind him and entered my dorm room while I was still sitting and watching myself in the mirror. "You're beautiful today, by the way." He leaned in and hugged me from behind, kissing my left cheek. My tiny body disappeared under those massive arms of his.
"Today? What do you mean by that, Mr. Carl?" I playfully got out of his hug and stood up. My tiny red top and black mini skirt were targeted from above. He stood there gobbling at my body for an entire minute. I rolled my eyes and crossed my arms. Urgh! Guys are so unbelievable! They just look at a girl's body and get lost.
"Babe?" I double snapped my fingers around his face. "Get my cases down to the car."
"You're bossy, Ms. Mikaela!" He snapped out of the trance and tried to lift my two pink suitcases. "Are you packing stones inside it? I can't even lift it from the bed." He playfully complained.
"You're strong, baby. You can do it." I cheered for him and jumped a couple of times, making my breasts bounce. He gazed directly at them, again and I revolved my eyes, pushing him out of the room.
When he closed the car's door for me, like a gentleman, he circled the front of it and got in himself, checking on his phone.
"So, I've talked to my parents and they are in London right now. Maybe we got the house for ourselves the entire time." He smirked, starting the car.
"More time for us to fuck through the entire house." I giggled.
"I like that idea pretty much." He laughed, maneuvering the car away.
"Oh, I bet you do." I placed my right hand over his left thigh, massaging it a bit.
I felt the sun, invading the car window, in my soft skin, but neither burning nor hot. The light air of the city was a little cold and that got me excited to get to the beach to get a nice bikini tan marked on my body, like a tattoo. I looked at my left hand for a moment and analyzed my engagement ring. A beautiful thin gold rosé with branch details around the circle, plus a green topaz stone -- my favorite one -- forming a tiny hexagon on top of my finger.
As Carl looked from the corner of his eye, keeping his head focused on the road ahead, he noticed I was twisting my hand, opening and closing it, looking at my ring.
"Are you happy?" He asked me.
"Yeah! Of course I am." I assured him.
"I was really nervous proposing to you in the middle of the term." He admitted.
"I know. But it worked!" I paused looking at his face. His profile was so symmetrical it looked almost virtually made. "Are you happy?" I asked him back.
"More than you can even imagine." He smiled, laughing under his breath.
The car trip flew by and soon we were arriving at his parents' house. We were really excited to have some alone time after that term, which was really hard, wasn't it? We deserved this! I deserved this! I put a lot of work into getting an A in-- The baseball team, which my fiancé plays for, finished the championship at--
I blinked twice. Nothing was there. Everything was a whole gap of a blank space in my mind. Why couldn't I remember those things?
As I stood still for a moment, holding a heavy box I took from the car, I couldn't recall how the past term ended. I tilted my head to the right and Carl, who was coming back to pick some more things up, noticed I had a weird face.
"What's wrong, baby?" He asked, concerned.
"I don't know how the last months went." I said.
"What?! What are you talking about? You did good. Term was awesome for us." He grabbed the last box from the trunk and shut it. He massaged my back with his big right hand, carrying the box under this left armpit, and guided me towards the house. His words were reassuring, almost like it was the sufficient truth that I chose to hold on to. I followed him into the house, deciding to let it go. I was a fiancee in love with a gorgeous man, alone with him and nothing else could matter.
The concept of that two store house was stunning, though; I instantly fell in love with it. From the outside, the red tile facade was charming, but missing the classical chimney. The front door delivered me to a hallway with a stair glued to the left wall, the path to the living room -- the first door to my right. At the end of the hallway, double doors opened for me; it was the kitchen with a half glass door to the pool in the backyard. Everything was completely white and immaculate, except for the brown hardwood floors.
We carried our stuff upstairs, to the first bedroom to our right, and found ourselves in a room with a double bed, the covers recently put together like a hotel room and a bunch of modern furniture around. I rolled the suitcases to a corner and piled my box on top of the other one Carl brought up.
While I was trying to organize our things and unpack some of our clothes, he hugged me from behind, playfully, making me giggle.
"Baby, common! We need to unpack before we get too lazy." I said, patting his forearm, him hugging me around my stomach.
"Why can't we get lazy? We've got nothing to do. It's just you and me, forever." He kissed the top of my head.
I turned to face him, inside his strong hold. He wasn't letting me go so easily unless he got what he wanted and I knew exactly what he needed. It was hard and pressing against me. "I know something we can do." I suggested.
"Yes, I can do you." He answered with a grin.
I felt his arms on my lower back pulling me towards him. He was strong and I couldn't escape unless he wanted me to. He lowered his head to kiss me passionately and I let myself go into his demanding pace. I couldn't control myself around him; I wanted him more and more at every minute. All I knew in my head was that a voice was screaming he was the man of my life. He guided me to the bed and soon I felt his dick pressing against my panties, rubbing a good spot down there. I wanted him inside me; I craved for him.
Exhausted to the limit, I drifted into sleep embraced in his arms. He was big-spooning me, cock still hard pressing against my ass and breathing heavily over my head. I want to say I felt trapped, because the weight of that arm on top of my skinny body overwhelmed me, but it oddly made me feel safe.
When I opened my eyes, it seemed already late as the sun was setting down. I got up with Carl still asleep at my right side, and went to search for my phone, but I couldn't find it anywhere in any of my bags. I can't believe I left my phone at the dorms, I thought and sighted. Carl moved on the bed, waking up.
"Baby, have you seen my phone?" I asked him.
"I thought you had it in your bag." He said, brushing his eyes with the back of his hand. "On what phone did we use the maps?" I was still rummaging through my clothes, not believing I forgot the only electronic thing I use the most.
"Mine." He was sitting, with his tattooed torso naked.
"Fuck! I forgot it then." I gave up, throwing my hands in the air and leaving the pile of turned clothes on the floor.
"You can use mine if you need."
"I just wanted to see what time it is and maybe order some food for us." I climbed the bed on top of him and kissed him while reaching his iPhone on the nightstand.
He laughed between my kisses and took the phone off my hand, saying "It's 6:40 p.m. and I, your man, will order something for you to eat. What do you want to eat? Italian?"
"Ooh, yummy! Some plain and simple pizza would be nice." I tilted my head to the side, resumed kissing his left cheek, finding my way down to his neck while he tapped on his phone.
He tossed it on the bed once he finished and leaned his body back, giving me the space to proceed as I wanted. I smelled the perfume on his skin, the tip of my nose rubbing from his shoulders up to his jaw, feeling his recently shaved beard brushing my right cheek. Suddenly I stopped, looking at his closed eyes. He lowered his head and opened them back, piercing me.
"Why did you stop? My cock's hard." He complained.
"Great! Now get this monster snake all cleaned up while I set the table for the pizza." I giggled, trying to get up, but his right hand reacted fast, holding my left wrist.
"You're not going anywhere, Mikaela. Finish what you've started." He put on his alpha sexy face. He made me hold the pole that was causing a tent in the white sheets, gripping his big hand on top of mine.
I leaned forward again, next to his ear, whispering, "If you behave like a good boy, I'll give you what you want on top of the dinner table."
"You're amazing." He bit his lower lip and got up, front tail swinging to the bathroom. I wore my "hers" black robe and descended to see if I needed to clean up anything in the kitchen before the meal arrived. The cabinets were all navy blue with white handlers and, for what it seemed, everything inside it was pretty neat, like the housekeeper had just passed by.
I found some wine glasses hanging underneath the upper cabinets, a mini electric bodega under the counter and decided to wait for the pizza with some cabernet in my hands. As soon as I took the first sip, the aged grape soft flavor invaded my sensor system and I sighted with my eyes closed. God! I needed it.
The doorbell went off and I closed the front of my robe to attend to the door. What a fast delivery they got down here! I heard Carl shouting something from upstairs, maybe asking for me to get the door.
When I opened it, I saw Chris wearing a blue polo shirt and matching cap with the Domino's logo on them. The wine glass I forgot to leave in the kitchen just fell off my hands. What was this psychopath doing here, miles away from campus? I thought to myself. He checked me head to toe and I felt I wasn't wearing enough clothes for the situation.
"Is that you, Chris?" I asked him, gulping a big ball of saliva. I looked with the corner of my eyes to see if I could find something to defend myself.
"No, ma'am. My name is Charles. That would be eighteen bucks." He answered, offering me the pizza box.
I froze, not sure of whether to take it or not. Given the past history of him, I could only assume that there was a bomb in there ready to explode on my face. But maybe I could be imagining things and that guy was way too similar to him that suddenly made me remember the guy that raped me, I thought.
Shaking, I backed away still facing him to find my wallet, until I bumped my back into Carl. I felt instantly safer. If that man was really Chris, he was the only one that could confirm I was not delusional.
"Who is it, baby?" He asked behind me.
Wasn't it obvious?
Chris -- or "Charles", as he said -- stared behind me, looking up at Carl's face. He made a calculating face as he was trying to remember something. When he laid his piercy eyes back on me, I felt shivers again. Could he try to do something to me even in Carl's presence? I felt he was analyzing the situation before making his decision.
"Michael?" He called me by a boy's name.
"Mikaela." I corrected him.
Chris glanced an angry look towards Carl again and took a step in, entering our house. I shrieked and ran behind my fiance.
"Stop right there or I'm calling the police." I found the only guts left inside me to say it with my voice trembling, almost crying.
That's when I paid attention to Carl, who was too shocked to do something.
"I've woken you up." Carl's voice was a whisper.
Chris slowly took steps towards him and I could see tears coming down his eyes, as he was seeming to struggle against an invisible wave. I saw all his muscles rigidging up, a vein popping in his shoulder, while he tried to get near Carl.
"What have you done to him? Is this what you wanted, you twisted perv?" Chris hissed.
"That's it, pal! I'm calling the cops on you." I shouted and grabbed the phone on the wall. I put it in my ear and dialed the emergency number on it, but the line was mute as it has never been connected to something. Chris looked at me and I stared inside his blue eyes for a moment that felt like eternity. I remembered him jogging with me in Central Park, going with me to a baseball game, the two of us traveling around the world avoiding France, his crying face, planes; an overwhelming rush of feelings that ran back into my mind, in the form of flashes.
I came to all my senses again and looked down at myself. I thought, where were my muscles? Why were Chris and Carl so much taller than me? Why was Carl covered in tattoos? Does he have muscles now?
"Chris, what's going on? What happened?" I asked my brother.
"Wake up!" His whisper reverberated through the house.
I roared and felt my powers coming back into my man body, like I was awakening. I felt my muscles tensing up and my feet left the ground for a couple of seconds. I shut my eyes, summoning an intense green light to surround me, and collected it into a fireball between my hands. It felt liberating to feel my powers back again. I took one last look at Carl, who was sweating every liquid he had in that fake body of his. That was the last thing I saw when I exploded the ball, feeling everything around me disappear.
The College Club Chapters 7 Oliver Welr patreon.com/oliverwelr
I woke up in a random lab at the university, sure I was having a hell of a nightmare. Panting, I realized I was laying on a not so comfortable gurney, wires coming out of my forearms, hooking me to a computer next to the bed. I was in pain and everything in my body hurted. It scared me when I heard noises coming from other computers, just like mine, and I quickly got myself up to check on the other people there. I could make the shattering pain in my muscles vanish away later.
Moaning for every joint hurting inside my body, I got up taking deep breaths and looked around. Almost everybody that had participated in my dream was there, sleeping. The screens of their computers showed an error message named "Station woke up. Rebooting the system in 30 seconds."
In front of my metal bed, there was a computer with three big screens. The middle one was constantly repeating the last ten seconds of the dream in fullscreen -- me, turning back from a woman's body to my original one, summoning my Light and blacking out everything. The left screen was some sort of software with a code trying to recharge, but the bar displayed "Error 507. Rebooting the system in 23 seconds." The right one had a bunch of squares with our names and heartbeats. At the bottom corner it had a date "December 22nd, 2020".
I flinched my eyes back to the one with the code and realized it was written on C. The optional classes I took back in the first year were paying off, at last. I read the first block of the code and it held identification of the project: "The Fuck Club, by Ethan Andrich and Carl Greene". It was the virtual reality game they were working on as a final project for them to graduate in Computer Science.
Well, I gotta give it to them. With a little help from my magic they managed to accomplish it and fuck everything up along the process. My brown hardcover notebook of spells was tossed on the chair in front of the computer with post-its coming out of its border top. The screen beeped, indicating it would reboot the system in 5 seconds, but I clicked to cancel it. God no!
I opened my notebook on the first post-it mark; it led me directly to the rune I researched to temporarily channel a portion of my power into another person. It was a drawing of one square linked by the bottom left corner to a circle. The second pagemark was in the page containing steps to perform the Reality Spell, of course. I didn't even pull it off myself and these crazy motherfuckers got it to work on their first try? They weren't even powerful. I closed it and made it disappear in thin air. It wasn't even supposed to be here. The last time I used it, I locked it inside my vault in New York.
I turned back to my friends sleeping in their gurneys. Mine and its computer had the number "7". Carl, Jeff, Ethan, Jim, Chris and Leon, in this order, were still sound asleep hooked on. I reached for my brothers, first Chris and then Leon, unhooking the wires and checking their actual vitals with two of my fingers at the side of their necks. Their bodies were alive, for what I could tell. I was afraid to get inside their minds and discover that their brains were damaged by the magic. Believe me when I say I didn't know how to control all of my powers.
When Chris woke up coughing like he was drowning at the beach, I helped him to sit up while he screamed my name between his deep breaths. He was hyperventilating and I had to do something fast to stop it. I held his face with both my hands and made him turn to look at me.
"Chris! That's me. You're ok. That's me - Michael, your brother. Everything's alright!" His pupils got smaller as he concentrated his gaze on my face, taking down his breathing to a normal pace. "There you go! I'm here. I'm your brother."
He reached my hands and rashly took them off his face, like I was burning him with something.
"What the hell?!" He was startled and checking out every corner inside the lab. "I thought that--"
He got interrupted by Leon, at his left, waking up coughing and panting like he did seconds ago. I circled Chris' bed and got to my older brother. He didn't wake up screaming for me, but the hyperventilation thing was about to happen again.
"Leon, breathe calmly! Easy, easy!" I said, holding his face. "Look at me! You're ok! You're with me now. Remember me?" I smiled at him when his pupils fixated on my face.
He leaned forward and started to cry, hugging me. My reaction was just to pat his back and brush my hand up and down. We don't get to see our straight older brother crying too much since ever.
"It's ok now." I reassured him.
"I thought I would never see both of you again." He said on my shoulder.
"What are you talking about, Leon? We're here." I said.
He regained his composure and leaned back on his bed.
"Michael, when I got here like two hours ago and saw you all in the coffins, I--" He held his tears. "I checked the code, Michael. Carl was trying to either forever live under this or kill everybody if it didn't work."
"What are you talking about?! I remember him showing up in my dorm with some beers and inviting me to check his final project." I recalled the past Thursday evening. I didn't even know how many days we were under. "We came down here, I drank at least half of my beer on the way and I think it made me... lightheaded."
"He did the same to me. He lured me here saying you had to talk to me about something serious." Chris admitted, behind me.
I noticed his voice was a little weird and that maybe he had to fill up a gap, but it was all still fresh for me to think straight.
"Why didn't you shut the whole thing off?" I asked Leon.
"I got scared it would lead everybody into an induced coma." He paused. "I'm sorry, Michael."
"No, that's not your fault. Once again, you're saving the ass of your two young brothers." I held his right shoulder and squeezed it. "It was a smart decision."
"Oh, fuck!" He laughed, looking at the ceiling, red eyes from crying. "I thought I was going to kill myself trying to go under with you, guys."
"That's why you didn't show up until class started in the dream? How did you find us here?" I asked him.
"Thursday I tried to text you to meet me at the bar, but you didn't answer. You never fail to answer your snaps so I tried tracking your phone, but both of your locations were blocked to me. I tried going to an Apple Store, but they said they would release information just for the cops. Since I know you both could be messing with something out of this world, I took a plane back to New York that night, invaded dad's law firm, in the middle of the Friday dawn, and broke into your iCloud. Flight back and find you all here." He finished explaining his mission to locate us.
"Why won't you accept my rune? It all could be easily over on day one!" I complained to him. Even though he liked to travel around using me and Chris to open him a portal, Leon never wanted to mess with our magic. I could make him the sexiest-most-powerful-straight-motherfucker alive, but he didn't want it. He lowered his gaze, thinking about what I said and I instantly felt bad at myself. As much as my powers had given, they had taken from me. Leon watched it all happen closely since I was eighteen years old and awakened them. I knew he never wanted to be like me and I couldn't force him to.
"I didn't mean that." I apologized. I turned to Chris to change the subject, "You didn't hold your right in there, bro?!"
The fake memory of our fight in the street had faded sensorial details. For what I remember, getting punched by my brother hurted a lot more than how it felt.
"That wasn't myself." I tried to reach for his shoulder too, but he dodged me. Ok, he was being really weird! Normally we are so intimate with each other that we have to watch ourselves in public; people had mistaken us for a couple a few times before. But after the things we experienced inside this thing, something had changed for him and I didn't know what.
Leon got up from the bed and walked to the computer to check the heartbeat of the others. We were all graduating in Law School, but he was so passionate about medicine that sometimes I forgot he gave it up when our father nicely asked him to.
"Do we unplug them?" He asked me.
"I did it with you. It seemed to work. I stopped the code to not restart." I answered. "So who do we have to blame?" Chris got up and went to check the main screen. He brushed the mouse and the timeline appeared. The raw video was 30 hours long. "What the hell?!" He asked nobody, in a low tone.
"We all know who - me." I answered while Chris clicked at a random spot of the timeline bar. It started showing me and Carl almost kissing each other at Omega Psi. When I asked him to give up on joining The Club, the footage tweaked and the next frame was poorly cut to us by the pool outside. When Chris clicked on another spot, it showed me getting up naked in the hotel bed in Paris. He clicked somewhere else and got up from the chair.
"So blame me as well." He sighted and leaned back into the computer table. "What do we do now?" He pointed with his chin to our friends still sleeping.
"I say we wake them up." I suggested.
Chris walked to Carl's bed and fiercely took his wires off, that's when I noticed Carl's unusual pale skin tone. It was completely covered in fading tattoos. He didn't have any of those before, he didn't like them as he once said to me. He even had one coming from his chin up to his bottom lip. But those weren't just random skin drawings, those were the runes. Some were random lines that didn't represent any known shape or form, and some were Greek alphabet letters. The only flaw was they all exhausted their effects once used and, for the looks of it, he'd experimented a bunch of them on himself. My skinny boyfriend messed with something he didn't know about and it was all my fault, again. Everything around me was crumbling faster than I could've ever imagined.
I watched Chris' movements while I unplugged Jeff. Leon did Ethan and Jim. He wasn't telling me something I sensed I needed to know. Jeff was the first one to wake up with the same reaction. I held his back to help his sitting position and he started crying.
"Please don't kill me. Please! I beg you, Michael. Don't kill me!" He sobbed and I held his face for him to turn and look at me.
He flinched when he fixed his eyes on me, like I was going to punch him or something. I thought my heart skipped a beat because he never rejected me like that before.
"Jeff?! You're ok. I'm not going to hurt you." I let go of his back, feeling his muscles tensing at my touch.
"Jeff, what the hell were you thinking? Do you even know what you did?" Chris moved to his right side and crossed his arms. His questioning tone was harsh, demanding explanations from a scared person.
"Jeff, it's ok. You can talk to me." I said and made an angry face at my brother.
"He said not to speak with you. He said you're mean and that you were trying to kill him." Both his hands were hugging his head down in a sitting fetal position.
Chris looked at his right forearm and noticed something I didn't before. He reached it and pulled it away from his head. When his blond hair wasn't covering it anymore, I saw the drawing on the inner side. It was a big handwritten "β". Chris quickly reached for Carl's same member and showed me the "α". My guts sank and revolved inside my stomach. I held Jeff's tattooed arm, but he quickly retracted away from me.
"Jeff, what did Carl do?" I asked him again.
"He said he would take care of me. Everything would be fine as long as we kept you sleeping." Only then he remembered to look to his right, to his alpha, who was still sleeping. He turned to look at me, fear running through his eyes. "Did you kill him?" I tried to reach for his cheek and, once more, he instantly tried to defend himself. I sighed and closed my eyes. They were my fucking boyfriends. How could he not trust me anymore? I giggled under my breath. I had done my research too well.
"Jeff, that's Michael. Don't you remember him, bro?!" Leon tried to talk some sense into his mind, but it was useless.
I turned my back away from them, I couldn't stand to see him like that. I approached the server computer again, where Leon was still leaning back watching that stormy waking up.
"What is he talking about?" He leaned to my side and whispered.
"He's been brainwashed." I said.
"What?!" His voice climbed an octave.
There you have it! Both my boyfriends were completely out of their minds. Well, I mean, one minute I was excited that my boyfriend pulled off a VR game and the next one, he drugs me so he can use my powers to trap us all inside it. Is that real love?
But that wasn't the true Jeff. The buff blond that I learned to like because of Carl. I never had a thing for blondies, but Jeff was blond fun, surfer fun, manly fun, getting high fun. The VR game showed him for what he was, always having Carl's back. Except for The Club part. God, what a sickening lore for a game!
Watching Jeff's childish face towards Chris because of that rune had me nauseous, so I stepped outside the room.
The hallway was lightened up by the usual lights. Outside the windows, the darkness of the streets made me realize it was past 10 p.m. for sure. It was the first week of our last winter vacation at Harvard, so the campus was lacking students and the laboratories would certainly be deserted. Carl was such a genius he waited for the right moment to make his plan work. But why did he do this? He already had me and Jeff. We loved each other.
I slid my body against the wall until I was sitting on the raw cold floor of the hallway. I remembered both him and Carl in my bed on one of our vacations. It was our first trip together as a trio. Barcelona bonded us for life the first time we went. Loving two men at once in a king bed was divine.
I was suddenly taken off of my memories when Leon opened the door.
"Jim and Ethan also aren't taking this well." He said with only his head out of the door. "They're crying like babies."
"Do they have runes?" I asked him.
"I don't think so."
I mimicked an imaginary switch with my fingers and heard their beds squeaking to the impact of their torsos.
"Better than sleeping pills." I tried to smirk.
He knew I was taking it hard so he got his whole body out the door to close it and came to talk to me.
"Don't you have one of those to make everything go back to normal?" He mimicked my prior hand movements.
"That's not so simple."
"Why don't you try to talk to Carl?" He lowered himself and said it to me.
"Is he awake already?"
"No."
"Good." I got up determined.
I thought it would be better to face Carl in dreamland without the effect of the runes on his body. I laughed in my mind. I'm going back to Dream Oxford, then. Bizarre!
As he was unhooked from computer number one, laying there, the only thing that signaled he was barely alive was his body shivering on a three seconds loop. I put my right hand on his forehead and concentrated on finding him until I was able to connect to his mind.
I was taken back to the virtual reality he created. This time, I could see the excess of brightness that made everything looking creamy white to the touch of the sunlight. I remember him saying that he inserted this bright filter in Ethan's game to add up to the fantasy of the story during development. For people to remember it was just a game and to not take anything serious, but it was fucking too serious for me, at that point. We were in the middle of a whole green open area in the middle of that fake city. He was sitting on the grass underneath a tree's shadow contemplating directly into the sun. I had my regular Omega Psi black jacket I had usually worn in real life, my white undershirt and black jeans. He was wearing a weird maintenance blue one piece uniform, like the janitors. I walked up to him, noticing from the three buttons opened on the unit, that he still had the pecs tattoos and his virtually enhanced muscles.
"Carl?" I called him, my voice echoing throughout the entire city.
He didn't respond to me, but I knew he knew I was there. After all, he's the damn almighty god of this place.
"I really did it, didn't I?" He asked nobody. He lowered his eyes from the sky and looked at the horizon behind me, concentrating.
I heard thunder, big rocks crackling and loud thuds coming from northwest of the city. He was shutting everything down, deleting the map files from the server.
"Carl, why did you do this? Do you have any idea how dangerous my magic is?" I lowered myself in front of him.
"I don't. Because you never told me you had such powers. You never trusted me. You never cared about me." The sadness on his face was sincere. I knew him that much.
"There is a reason why I didn't announce it to everybody. Shit happens when I do this, don't you see it now?" I pointed to the fake campus dismantling behind us. Buildings were smashing into each other and streets were folding on itselves like pancakes. The city was closing into us.
"I thought you loved me." His voice quieted down to a whisper. "I had prepared everything for you. I paved your way into my relationship with Jeff just for you to come and save me from him. I waited for you until that night at the restaurant." He lowered his head between his legs and continued. "That night, when he proposed to me, and only me, in front of our friends, I looked at you and you were cheering for us two. Happy that we were going to be married without you, weren't you? Did you even care about me? About how I felt that night?"
"Carl, this was what Jeff wanted. We've talked about this! This was all meant to be you and him together, forever. Your love story is so beautiful it doesn't have space for me anymore." I caressed the side of his hair.
"You know this is not true. You know this is not how I feel. You know I love you, Michael. But I have no patience anymore." He let a tear fall at the end of his sentence.
"Jeff talked to me before proposing, Carl. He wanted us to do it together, the three of us. But I--" I paused. "I'm scared, alright? By the end of the semester, I'll be back to New York, working for my father. You know that, Jeff knew that and I wasn't going to make this an issue and get in the way of your happiness. But I do love you, Carl. You'll always have a special place in my heart." I pulled him in for a hug but he didn't accept it, neither rejected it. He was just an inanimate human doll in my arms.
"Not that love. I want what he has." He opened his right hand and showed me my green stone ring on his palm.
My body went limp, I instantly got up and took a few steps back away from him, Superman running from kryptonite. I didn't know where he found it, nor what it held inside, but that was the stone I was delivered with a very big warning note not to use it until I was ready. For what? I don't know yet to this day.
"Where the fuck did you find this?" I harshly asked him. He crossed a line nobody ever did before with me. If he wanted to hijack all my crypto coins, steal all my money from my bank account or even kill me, that's fine, he could've had his reasons. But to play me with my Secrecy Stone, something I never told him about, that was it for me.
"You know where. I wanted you to--" He closed his palm and got up, coming in my direction.
"Stop!" I raged at him and took another step back, preparing my arms to use my powers on him.
"Wasn't it wonderful, Michael? Wasn't it so good when we were in love here? When I conquered you like you did with me back in freshman year? Wasn't it wonderful having nobody, not even Jeff, between us? Weren't you truly in love in my arms everyday?" His tears were uncontrollable. "You took it away from me again and now I want you to feel what I feel. The emptiness an unrequited love leaves behind." His face went mad this time.
"I don't want to see what's inside it. This isn't even the real one, we're in VR." I blurted out with my right index up, trying to defend myself.
"We are, aren't we? Take a look at what I found out about this." He tossed it down to the grass and stepped on the stone, crushing it. All the sound effects stopped for me to hear the glassy cracking sound under his foot.
"No!" I roared.
I panted hard, kneeling at the ground, and soon I started hyperventilating. My brother Chris pulled my head to his shoulder, for my right ear to be closer to his mouth, while he repeatedly whispered words until my breathing calmed down and I could concentrate on what he said.
"You're okay. You're safe. It's me - Chris. You're okay..." He continued to repeat. I hug him and sob like a little child missing their parents.
"I fucked everything up again, Chris!" I said between my tears.
"No, you didn't, Michael. We've talked about this. That's life and shit happens." He reassured me.
"No, that's not normal, Chris! Everything is falling apart around us." I vented.
"Michael! Hey! Calm down." Leon lowered himself in front of me. "Let's go back to New York so we--"
He was interrupted by Carl's body shaking uncontrollably this time. Leon got up, secured his head to prevent it from hurting. After an eternity of a minute, the shaking came to an end. He quickly proceeded to check his vitals and his eyes widened.
"Chris, chest compressions, chest compressions!" He ordered and rushed to search for something in the many cabinets around the room, while my brother obeyed.
After Leon dropped out of Med School in the first semester, nicely asked by our father, he kept the basics and the passion of being an aspiring doctor. He always had that kind of enthusiasm about human health. I guess he watched too many doctor's shows. I knew he would love to find a defibrillator lying around the corner or an adrenaline shot hidden in those cabinets, but that was a freaking Computer Lab, weirdly adapted by Carl -- I could only assume at that moment -- to hold the support to our virtual life.
"He's not coming back, Leon!" He blew some air into Carl's mouth and stopped to listen to his heart, ears glued to his chest for a second, then resumed the compressions. "Common, Carl!"
My heart sank to my stomach. Carl was the man of my dreams. He showed me love, love doubled up. He wasn't in his right mind when he did all this. I knew I had to come clean about my powers to him and Jeff eventually, but I wanted to protect them both. This is what happens when I try to do something with my magic. This curse has been following me around since he warned me in my second year. I didn't want it anymore!
Leon lowered himself in front of me, trying to say something. I was still kneeling in the same position. My knees hurt, but I didn't care. My heart hurt a billion times more. He was dead. I killed my own boyfriend. The man I loved. I was a murderer. His blood was going to lie on my hands forever.
Chris opened a round pink portal in front of Leon and helped him to get me up on my feet, dragging me to our father's apartment in New York, where we "lived". I turned my head behind, so I could see the lifeless body of my boyfriend one last time and remind myself that it was all my fault. Gully had warned me about this over and over. That I was facing consequences of the stone, that I was running out of time. Time was coming for me to make a decision about the Secrecy Stone.
When Chris closed the portal and my brothers dropped me on the living room floor, I wasn't able to cry anymore. Not because I'm a heartless son of a bitch, but because I was angry at myself. Things could have gone so much differently if I told them about me or if I just did something to help them. Anything. I had multiple opportunities to help my friends, to help my boyfriends, to help my classmates, but I sat still watching everyone face life the hard way, just because Gully and Rae kept saying, "It's life. Get over it. Shit happens. You can't interfere that much." Well, look where this has gotten me. Was I a really good friend? Was I a really good boyfriend? A good person?
I curled onto myself, laying on the couch, in shock with what just happened. All I knew is that Chris and Leon were trying to talk to me, but I didn't care. The person I wanted to comfort me was dead and the other one probably would end up hating me forever. I felt my left cheek wet to the touch of the leather. I was crying, I didn't know for how long. The last thing I saw was Chris emerging again from a portal, massaging my head and tucking me in to sleep there.
As soon as I woke up, disorientated, I looked around and found myself at my father's penthouse, my apartment per say. The glass walls to the pool balcony displayed the Manhattan night with its bright lights emanating from the streets. I stood up trying not to start another crying session. I didn't know if I had enough liquid in my body to do that anymore. I walked to my bedroom to check on my safe box, behind the big blue illusionism painting on top of my bed. I know it's cliché and obvious having those on a wall, behind the painting, blah, blah, blah. But at least mine opened with my fingerprint so I could feel I was hightech. I sighed in relief when I found it there in one piece. How the fuck did he knew about my Secrecy Stone was a question he couldn't answer me anymore.
I noticed the hallway shining behind my ajar door and sensed Gully's Light coming from there. If he was about to lecture me, I would teleport myself to freaking Antarctica.
"I'm not going to lecture you." He walked into my bedroom with no invitation when I opened my door.
I know Gully's name sounds like he's a tiny old gray hair ancient man, but scratch that image out of your head. I tapped that once and would have done it over and over again if I wasn't dating... Carl.
"Then why are you here?" I put on the best steady voice I could find.
"Because I know what you're planning to do." He sat on my bed. "I'm here to stop you."
His gray eyes pierced my soul. He was my magic mentor, he knew my steps before I could even walk.
"Please, I need to go back to our past and change this. If I could just make him not know me--"
"He could've been someone else. He could've married Jeff earlier. He could've dropped out of college. He could've killed himself again, Michael!" He interrupted me. He was impatient. "You can't do this expecting your life will magically turn into a better one. This is your story now. You chose it. That was his story. He chose it. Accept it."
"How can I accept the fact that I've killed Carl and Jeff hates my guts?" I sat on the ground. "I'm completely alone, Gully." I gulped down the crying burning feeling in the back of my throat.
"Michael, you didn't kill anybody. Carl messed with something dangerous. I've told you multiple times, soldier - your powers have consequences. Every action you make has a counter back. And you're not alone. You have everything! Chris and Leon love you like no brothers I ever met, you have tons of friends back at Harvard, powers that can bend the universe on your behalf and still you want to behave like a petty child. Michael, you're past this. You're 24, not 18 anymore. Face it the mature way." He said it with his soft voice, an unusual thing for Gully. "You have to let him go. He betrayed you."
"He didn't, Gully. It's my fucking magic. You said it yourself. You said over and over again that unexpected things would happen until I read the stone!" I vented at him. How could he blame anyone else besides me?
He sighed and let the silence hover over us for a minute.
"I have to go back to Rae." He got up from my bed and took a stop at my door. "I'll warn you this, though - don't play God with your past. It won't do Carl any good."
A few seconds after he shone away through a green portal, I heard some noises in Chris' room. His door was just across mine, so I quickly got up and tried to open it. To my surprise, it was locked. Something he never does except when he has someone over. I knocked after hearing some chatting.
"Chris, is everything alright in there?"
"Help--" I heard Jeff's voice being muffled.
"Jeff?!" I asked and he stopped talking. "Chris, what's going on?"
I could've unlocked it and barged in myself, but I never invaded Chris' personal space before.
"Chris, open up!" I banged my fist a couple of times and heard the door unlocking. Jeff was sitting on the double bed with Chris hand simply covering his mouth. He wasn't trying to escape him and I sensed the Puppet Strings between them. My boyf-- Jeff was being held against his will, for sure. When he averted his eyes to me, he started shouting something in Chris' hand.
"Chris, take him back. He doesn't want to be here."
"He was trying to break into the labs again." He explained.
"It's the rune." I paused when I remembered the scene we must've left at the lab. "What did you do with Carl?"
"We cleaned up everything and left his body there." He lowered his gaze when he saw my wanting-to-cry face. He left Carl alone and helpless. "I anon-called the police." He answered my unspoken question, explaining himself.
The whole time I was looking at Jeff. His fiance and alpha had just died and he was lost. He wasn't strong-muscle-rock-and-roll Jeff anymore. He was just a puppy without a tutor.
"Chris, let him speak." He didn't take his hand off and I looked at him annoyed. "Please."
"You murderer!" He shouted at me.
I closed my eyes and took a step back. All I could do was think about Carl, his face close to mine while he prepared to kiss me. I opened my eyes again and summoned a black pen in my hand, giving it to Chris.
"You have to take him. I'm not able to do it." I said.
"But, Michael, this isn't right." He took the pen. "He'll not be himself once I forcefully take him."
"Please, I--" I paused, watering my eyes. "Take him and release him. You're better than me at this. I don't want to use my powers on him. I'll never stop thinking that he's with me just because of the rune. If I'm feeling like a piece of shit right now, imagine how he feels inside. He's empty, that's not my Jeff."
"I'm not yours! I belong to Carl!" He barked at me again. "You killed him, you fucker! You killed him!" He trashed, trying to get out of Chris' invisible grip, but my brother controlled him again.
"What's going on?" Leon was at the door in his boxers.
He brushed his sleepy eyes with the back of his hand and analyzed the situation inside the room. Chris took Jeff's right arm, exposing the beta tattoo up, with his right hand. Jeff's only resistance were his tensed biceps, the veins and nerves popping out under his skin. With his left hand, Chris started drawing on his own inner forearm, gulping and breathing hard to the touch of the pen.
When we want to mark someone with a rune, we do it with a simple pen and channel our magic into the ink. The result is that the tip of the pen keeps shining like a welding machine. It hurts to look directly into it and it burns our skin. A lot.
Chris' breathing was hard, paced and deep when he let the pen drop to the ground. He held his own elbow, letting go of Jeff's control. As soon as he realized he was free, he quickly launched and tackled me down to the carpet. He straddled on top of me, both his thighs keeping me pinned to the ground while I lost my breath with the strong impact. I laid there waiting for him to kick my ass. I deserved that physical pain and he deserved his revenge. When his right fist was making its way down, Chris' voice froze him in place.
"Get up."
"He murdered Carl!" He vented, not wavering his eyes off me for a second.
"Carl killed himself, Jeff." Chris took one last deep breath recovering from the pain in his arm and shook both of them, like preparing to take a swim. "He was jealous of you."
"That's not true. He loved me." He slowly lowered his once closed fist.
"Will I ever lie to you, Jeff? I'm your alpha!" He grabbed Jeff's left arm and made him stand up. "He loved Michael, Jeff. He did everything to fool you into his plan." He brushed Jeff's hair behind his ears softly. They stood face to face.
"No, that's not--"
Leon helped me get back on my feet whispering, "You ok?"
I nodded yes.
"Jeff, I want you to remember all the good memories you have with Michael." Chris was softly brushing his right hand on Jeff's left arm, up and down.
"No! Carl said it was all lies." He shook his head.
"Jeff, close your eyes." He obeyed Chris' trance voice. "Carl isn't here anymore. Michael is the one you trust."
"No, he--"
"Michael is the one that loves you. He gave up everything so you could propose to Carl, remember?"
"He--"
"Michael loves you, Jeff. He'll do you no harm." He paused. "Open your eyes and say it, Jeff. You know it's true. He loves you"
"He loves me." Jeff whispered.
"You want him."
"I want you, Michael." Jeff repeated to me, this time.
Chris agreed with his head and turned his whole body to face me.
"Forget what Carl did to you. Look at Michael. He has always been there for you two. He's broken too, Jeff. You both feel his loss. But you'll only find comfort in his arms. He needs someone to go through grief too, Jeff. You're the one that knows how to talk to him about this." He said next to his left ear. "Now, go with him and say how you feel." He gave a little push for Jeff to come at me.
"I miss him, Michael." He took two steps forward, put his right hand on the back of my neck and pulled me in for a quick peck, then hugged me. He was acting a little bit normal so I could breathe again. I surrounded his lower back with my left arm while I caressed his hair with my right hand for him to cry on my shoulder. That right there was my Jeff acting the way he should. His boyish manners were back, even his hair was waving like it was free. He was, once again, acting more like Jeff who looked like a muscle mountain, but cried like a baby.
I opened my eyes to thank my brother for this. He was the best magical bro someone could've asked for. But he was already out of the room.
"What the hell?!" I heard Leon whispering behind me.