⚠️ Read at your own risk ⚠️
I.
Candlelight. Stone walls. Thirty voices rising together in Latin.
Silas didn't hear thirty voices. He heard one.
Adrian stood in the second row, hands folded, golden-brown hair catching the light. His voice cut through the others — clear, high, untouched. Silas could've picked it out blind.
The hymn ended. Boys filed out of the pews. Adrian broke from the line and came straight to him, cheeks flushed.
"How was I?"
Silas ruffled his hair. "Perfect. As always."
Adrian grinned like it was the first time he'd ever heard it.
They walked home from choir practice the way they always did, three years and a whole world of difference between them — like any two brothers. Except they weren't like any two brothers, not really, and both of them had stopped pretending otherwise a long time ago, even if neither said it out loud.
───
Their parents weren't a subject either of them brought up if they could help it.
Robert Bryant had money, power, and no interest in being faithful to anyone. He'd cheated on Gwen more than once — she'd suspected for years and looked away, until she couldn't anymore. She found out for certain while pregnant with Adrian, and that was the end of looking away.
"You make my children corrupted," she told him. "Like you."
The divorce didn't touch his money. It touched his access. A few visits a year, if that. Gwen wanted her sons pure, obedient, God-fearing, and she sent them to the strictest Catholic school she could find to make sure of it.
The priests were harsh. Punishment was physical, and it came easily, for infractions as small as a whispered word during Mass. In a place like that, two brothers with nowhere else to turn, turn to each other.
Silas was eleven the year Adrian arrived, small and scared, gripping his hand in the dormitory hall. Something in him locked into place that day and never let go.
He fought for Adrian more times than he could count — boys who mocked his soft voice, his pretty face, how he leaned on his older brother. Silas put them on the ground and never regretted what came after.
"You don't have to keep doing that," Adrian told him once.
"Yes I do."
"Why?"
"Because you're mine to protect."
Adrian never fully understood why that made his chest go warm and tight at once. He just knew he liked hearing it.
───
II.
The day everything tilted, Adrian was fifteen. Father Ambrose called him into the office for being late to class. The lecture started ordinary enough—duty, discipline, the importance of punctuality—but the man’s eyes kept sliding over Adrian’s face, his throat, the way his uniform sat on his narrow shoulders. He spoke of tests from God, of loyalty, of beauty that could lead a man astray if one was not careful. Adrian left the office with his stomach knotted and his thoughts scrambled. He couldn't tell anymore if he'd done something wrong just by existing the way he did.
He didn't understand all of it. He understood enough to feel sick.
Silas was waiting outside the dormitory when he got back.
"You're late. What happened?"
Adrian tried to explain. He got maybe half of it out — enough — before his voice gave up on him.
Silas went very still.
"Which office."
"Silas—"
"Which office."
Adrian didn't get an answer out fast enough. Silas was already moving.
───
He came back an hour later with a split lip, a bruised eye, and knuckles scraped raw. Whatever he'd said to Father Ambrose, whatever Father Ambrose had said back, it had ended with two other priests dragging Silas out and making sure he understood exactly what defiance cost in that school.
Adrian took one look at him and burst into tears.
"I'm fine," Silas said. "Adrian—"
"You're not fine, look at your face—"
Silas sat down heavily on his bed and let Adrian fuss over him anyway, dabbing at the cut over his eye with a wet cloth, hands shaking the whole time. Silas pulled him down onto his lap without really thinking about it — just wanting him closer, wanting to prove to both of them that he was still standing.
Adrian curled into him, forehead against his shoulder, still crying.
"I hate that they hurt you because of me."
"Don't." Silas tipped his chin up. "Don't ever think that. You didn't do anything."
"Then why does it always end like this?"
"Because I'd do it every time. A hundred times. I don't care what it costs me."
Adrian looked up at him, eyes wet, lips parted around something he didn't say. And Silas — exhausted, aching, raw in a way that had nothing to do with his split lip — leaned in.
For one second, their faces were close enough that Adrian could feel his breath.
Then Silas sucked in a sharp breath and pulled back like he'd been burned.
"You should get some sleep," he said, voice rough, not looking at him.
Adrian nodded. Said nothing. Lay awake a long time after, replaying that one second over and over, wishing — quietly, guiltily — that Silas hadn't stopped.
───
III.
Silas graduated that year. Adrian had two more years left.
Gwen made sure the distance wasn't only physical.
"You need to focus on your studies," she told him, every time he asked to visit Silas's college.
That was the reason she gave. The real one sat heavier — Silas had spent years standing against her, refusing to back down even from his own mother, and she'd never forgiven him for it. Called him a bad influence. Meant something else she couldn't name any better than her sons could.
Two years. Texts at odd hours. Phone calls that ran too long. Video calls where they just sat in comfortable silence, doing separate homework, because being on the line together was better than not being on it at all.
Adrian had never studied harder in his life. He had one goal, and it wasn't a secret from himself anymore, even if he never said it out loud to anyone: get into Silas's college. Get back to him. Properly, this time.
───
He finished his last year of school on a gray June morning. Gwen hugged him stiffly, told him to make good choices, and — for once — didn't try to stop him from leaving.
He was on a train that afternoon.
───
IV.
Silas opened the door before Adrian even knocked.
Two years. Adrian stood taller now, jaw sharper, still achingly familiar underneath it. Silas's eyes moved over him like he was trying to memorize something he'd been starving for.
"You're here," Silas said.
"I'm here."
Neither of them moved for a second. Then Adrian stepped forward, and Silas's hand came up to his jaw, and two years of holding still finally broke.
Silas kissed him — slow at first, like he still expected himself to stop. He didn't.
Adrian made a small, wrecked sound against his mouth and grabbed the front of his shirt, kissing him back like he'd been waiting his whole life for permission he was never going to ask for out loud.
"Adrian," Silas breathed, forehead against his. "What am I doing to you—"
"Please." Adrian's voice cracked. "Don't hold back. I wanted it too. For so long."
That was all it took.
They stumbled inside, the door shutting behind them, mouths never quite parting for long. Silas walked him back until Adrian's shoulders hit the wall, and Adrian let him, let his brother crowd close and kiss him again, deeper, one hand sliding into his hair.
"Tell me this is real," Adrian said.
"It's real." Silas kissed his jaw, his throat. "You're really here. God, I've thought about this—"
"Show me."
Silas made a low sound and pulled him toward the bedroom, shedding his jacket somewhere along the way, Adrian's fingers working clumsily at his own shirt buttons until Silas brushed his hands aside and did it for him.
He laid Adrian down like something he still couldn't quite believe he was allowed to touch.
"Silas—"
"I've got you." He kissed down his throat, his collarbone, hands mapping skin he'd spent two years only dreaming about. "I've always got you."
There was nothing rushed about it, even with two years of waiting behind them — Silas took his time, learning every place that made Adrian's breath catch, every place that made him say his name like it was the only word he knew. No barrier came off that either of them wasn't ready to lose; what passed between them was hands and mouths and heat, want built up over years finally given somewhere to go.
Adrian arched into every touch, breath breaking apart around Silas's name, until there was nothing quiet left in either of them.
Afterward, they lay tangled together, Adrian's head on Silas's chest, both of them still catching their breath.
"We're not going back," Adrian said quietly. "Are we."
"No." Silas pressed a kiss to his hair. "We're not going back."
───
V.
Two days later, Adrian went home to pack.
Gwen watched him fold shirts into a suitcase without a word for a long time.
"You got into his college," she finally said. Not a question.
"I did."
"I'm proud of you." She meant it, Adrian could tell. There was something else underneath it too — something she didn't have a name for, some quiet unease she couldn't quite place, watching her younger son leave for the same city as her older one. She told herself it was just an empty house. She didn't look at it any closer than that.
───
Silas met him at the station and carried the heaviest bag without being asked.
The apartment was Robert's doing, in the only way Robert knew how to show up for his sons — tuition, accommodation, no expense spared, and no questions asked either. Two bedrooms, though only one had ever really been in use since Silas moved in. Floor-to-ceiling windows. A kitchen neither of them used properly, for a view neither of them had gotten tired of yet.
"He really went overboard," Silas said, setting the last box down. "Guilt money, probably."
"Let him feel guilty, then." Adrian looked around at it anyway — at the boxes, at Silas standing in the middle of it all, looking at him like he still couldn't quite believe he'd stayed.
"It's ours," Adrian said.
Silas crossed the room and kissed him, unhurried, certain, like a door finally closing on everything before this.
Their own little world. No priests. No Gwen. No permission needed from anyone but each other.
Fin — for now.
