Work Text:
i.
1995
Felix may know how to swing a metal pipe and send four punks running but his understanding of first aid leaves a lot to be desired.
For an eight year old, of course, this is to be expected.
He sticks a plaster haphazardly to Wolfgang’s forehead, gives him a glass of water and a cigarette from his older brother’s stash, and declares him “fixed.”
“What about my arm?” Wolfgang asks. There’s a tiny scratch running across his wrist that he thinks he got two days ago from a stray cat, but Felix sees it and his eyes light up. He disappears for a moment into the kitchen, only to reappear with a rusty brown box that creaks when he lifts the lid. He takes out a thick bandage and a broken safety pin, fiddles with the pin until it fastens properly, wraps the bandage crookedly around Wolfgang’s wrist and fastens it with a grand flourish.
Wolfgang can tell Felix has never had to use the first aid box in his life.
ii.
1999
They’re twelve years old and sitting underneath the table in his uncle’s kitchen. It’s December 28th, only a few more days until the new millennium, but Felix is so skinny he doesn’t look like he’ll make it that far. He’s still smaller than Wolfgang (his growth spurt will hit in 2001 and Wolfgang will be jealous) and there are dark smudges under his eyes.
Wolfgang knows the Bernners have no money, but it still hurts to watch Felix shrink a little more every day until his shirts are too big for him and he has to steal his brother’s belts and make new holes in them with a screwdriver.
It’s difficult to sneak into the kitchen without being caught by one of his uncle’s men, or Steiner for that matter, who has free rein over the house. Wolfgang packs a knapsack with food from the larder, cold meats, cheese and bread, clinking bottles of Coca Cola, and they traverse the labyrinthine passageways back to his room.
“Your house is fucking insane, man,” Felix says. He rips into a piece of bread while Wolfgang sets about meticulously preparing a sandwich.
“It’s not my house,” he says, and Felix rolls his eyes.
“Your room is bigger than my house, Wolfie.”
Wolfgang grins. “Yeah, it is, isn’t it?”
They eat in silence for a few moments and Felix kicks at Wolfgang’s feet until their ankles are tangled up and they can’t be bothered untangling them.
“New Year’s resolutions?” Wolfgang asks.
“Get laid,” Felix says without missing a beat, and Wolfgang throws an empty wrapper at him.
“And?”
“And?” Felix says. “That’s all there is, man!” He launches himself at Wolfgang and pins him to the bed. They wrestle, sometimes, though Felix is so light that Wolfgang could throw him off in a second. Instead, the other boy sits there for a moment and looks proud of himself until Wolfgang flips him and they end up with their heads hanging off the side of the bed. Felix’s neck seems to go on forever and his cheeks flush as the blood rushes to his head. Wolfgang grabs the other half of his sandwich.
“Eat this,” he says, and Felix obliges as they sit up and rest against the headboard. “We need to get some money together, get out of this shithole.”
“Money doesn’t grow on trees, Wolfgang,” Felix says in a very high-pitched impersonation of his mother.
“Yeah, yeah,” Wolfgang rolls his eyes. “I’m serious. I want to leave. You and me. Two stood against many.”
Felix grins at him and steals his drink.
iii.
2003
Wolfgang feels the impact reverberate through his body as the car connects with his legs and he tumbles to the ground. Felix is two steps ahead but he turns at Wolfgang’s gasp as the wind is knocked out of him and stretches out a long arm, grabs Wolfgang by the collar and drags him into an alleyway. They crouch behind a dumpster and watch the store owner and two cops rush past without seeing them, and Felix lets out a too loud laugh, lets his head rest on Wolfgang’s shoulder. Wolfgang feels blood dripping from his eyebrow down to his mouth and lets it run into the crease of his lips until he can taste it.
“Fucking hell,” Felix says, and it vibrates into the point between Wolfgang’s neck and shoulder. “Fuck.”
They’re small fry, really, pickpockets one day, liquor store thieves the next. Banks and high-tech safes aren’t even on their radar yet, although Wolfgang enjoys cracking the little things—cheap hotel safes, school lockers, stolen briefcases with nothing important inside—for fun, finds that it’s the only part of his father he truly appreciates inheriting, especially when he gets to see the look on Felix’s face when they both hear the telltale click.
When he tries to stand his right ankle folds underneath him and he staggers into Felix, who catches him and in turn stumbles into the wall.
“Whoa, whoa, are you okay?” Felix presses a hand against Wolfgang’s forehead and it comes away red and wet. “Jesus, Wolfie.”
“It’s nothing.”
“But—”
“We need to get out of here.”
Felix nods shakily and adjusts his rucksack, gets an arm under and around Wolfgang and walks him, half-limping, towards the nearest taxi. The ride back to their apartment is wrought with tension. Every now and then Felix tightens his grip on the rucksack and Wolfgang can tell he is only just refraining from opening it and inspecting their haul. Other times he simply grasps Wolfgang’s wrist without looking at him and breathes out sharp and fast through his nose, staring hard at the seat in front of him.
Wolfgang simply sits and blinks when the blood trickles into his line of vision.
They arrive home and he pays the driver with the cash they’d nabbed from a middle aged businessman earlier in the afternoon. As soon as they’re inside the door Felix straps his ankle and sutures the cut above his eyebrow (he’s gotten better over the years), then manoeuvres him towards and onto the bed so that he’s lying on his side with his arms wrapped around Felix, who trembles from head to toe with unreleased adrenaline.
They only have one bed, and even if they could afford two—which they really, really can’t—they wouldn’t bother. It’s easier to fall into bed together, whether they remain on opposite sides after an argument or curl into one another and wake up in a tangled mess, and neither of them has any qualms about doing more than just sleeping.
“It’s because we’re sixteen,” Felix says. “One day, when we’re not horny as fuck all the time—”
“When will you ever not be horny?” Wolfgang says, and Felix shushes him.
“We’ll be married to pretty girls and we’ll do manly things together, you know, chop wood for the fire and hunt deer for dinner and—”
And Wolfgang thinks maybe he’s right, although he isn’t so sure when he feels Felix’s hand on his hip and hears him say, “Until then, I want you to fuck me.”
iv.
2008
When Wolfgang turns twenty one he takes his girlfriend to Paris for the weekend. It’s the middle of July and the streets are filled with people, and while they eat croissants on a bench by la tour Eiffel he tries to stop the dust from getting in his eyes. In the evening he spends two hours on the phone with Felix while she flirts with the bartender, and he doesn’t really mind because it makes him feel less guilty.
The next day, a Renault Clio clips his scooter while he circles the Arc de Triomphe and he spends his birthday in a French hospital room with his legs in casts and the drip drip drip of the saline in his ears.
He sleeps, eats, watches the German news channel and reads the newspaper cartoons without really understanding them. It’s on the fourth day that he wakes up slowly to a sense of being watched, and when he stretches his fingers he finds a hand wrapped around his own, warm and clammy from resting there so long. He seeks out the deep scar underneath the index finger and smiles, says “Hallo” and finds that his voice has gone, and opens his eyes.
Felix stares back at him, half reverent, half cocky, and tightens his grip. He’s slotted into a too small chair and his limbs spill over, restrained only by a too tight denim jacket that Wolfgang remembers finding in a thrift store in 2002 and a pair of sweatpants that leave his ankles bare.
He finds out later that Felix lost the one job he’d ever held for spending a week in a Paris hotel room looking after Wolfgang, though Felix never tells him that.
They never spend another birthday apart.
v.
2015
It’s strange at first, having him around but not around, present but far away. Wolfgang sleeps on the couch so that the doctors can set Felix up in his bed with the saline drip and the beeping machines that keep him up at night. He gets a crick in his neck and his knees don’t bend properly in the mornings but he’s determined that this will only be temporary. It has to be temporary.
Kala is around, sometimes peripherally, the scent of her perfume in the air or the brush of her hair against his arm when he moves, other times more palpably, sitting across from him with a sad smile on her face. He tries to reconcile what he feels for Kala with what he feels for Felix, tries to ascertain which is the more pure, which is the more tangible, whether he can have one or both or neither, cries some more and rests his head on Felix’s thigh, feels Kala’s hand on his shoulder, there but not there. Everyone he loves feels distant.
When it finally happens, it happens abruptly. It’s loud and violent and quick and perfectly in keeping with Felix’s nature. He thrashes and cries out and doesn’t seem to know where he is for a long, long time, even with Wolfgang’s arms wrapped around his torso so that he doesn’t heave himself onto the floor.
Felix isn’t back for a long time. There are overnight stays at the hospital for observation, endless appointments with surgeons to assess the damage to his chest, and psychologically he’s gone for a while, distinctively not Felix. Wolfgang watches on with trepidation as his friend appears, disappears, and reappears in equal measure.
Kala is there, too, not just for him, but for Felix too. She rests her hand on Felix’s arm and her chin upon his head, and although Wolfgang can’t understand the logistics of it, he is sure Felix feels the difference between him and her, somehow, and takes comfort in it. He realises, then, that Kala senses not only his emotions but his feelings, too. If Felix is his friend, then he is her friend, too.