“Did he do that when he was mad at you? Call you in?”
“Sometimes,” Damien admitted. “He’d laugh and pretend like everything was great, then grab me by the hair or arm. I’d never really know. This time, I could tell he was pissed off. Hell, you could almost see it coming off of him, but in I went. Like a fucking dog hoping for a treat, even though I knew there were alligators in there. Maybe I was hoping he was pissed off at my mom. She ticked him off all the time.
“Next thing I knew, I was on the floor.” He tried shrugging it off, but flashes of pain echoed through his limbs and back as if he were there again, lying on the study’s parquet floor and spitting out mouthfuls of blood. “I don’t know how many times he hit me. Fuck, I don’t think I even felt anything anymore after a while. I kept telling him I was sorry, but he wasn’t listening to me.”
“What were you sorry about?”
He tried to remember the words his father shouted at him, sifting through the derogatory slurs to find the substance of the man’s anger. “He found a magazine in my room. I’d gotten it at school from a guy who’d wanted to show me how disgusting it was. It was pretty hard core. Two guys doing… shit, practically everything. I took it away from the guy and told him I was going to tell the dean, but seriously, I just wanted to go home and jack off all over it. I never even really got to look at it. He found it that morning.
“He kept calling me a faggot and said he’d kill me before I….” He had to close his eyes again, pushing out as much of the pain as he could. Even the iron band of Sionn’s arms around him didn’t stave off some of the anguish leaking out from his heart. “I did everything right. Dude, I’d skipped entire fucking grades at school, learned piano because my mom wanted me to. Shit, I would have played sports if he didn’t think I’d get the shit kicked out of me. That was fucking funny. I couldn’t play soccer or baseball because I might get hurt, but he could fucking cut me apart with a steel rod whenever he wanted to because I belonged to him. He kept saying that… over and over. I fucking belonged to him, and he was going to fix me… or kill me. He wasn’t going to have a faggot for a son.”
Sionn’s embrace got tighter, and Damien relaxed into it, willing something of the man’s strength to reach the emptiness inside of him. He sat in silence, listening to Sionn breathe and feeling the man’s hands rubbing at his arms, then the length of his scar, soothing away the hurt pounding through his chest.
“I’m sorry you had to go through that, love,” Sionn murmured into Damien’s hair. “Even if my da turned his back on me, he never tried to take me down. He just walked away. He didn’t leave me with the kind of pain you’re going through. No one should have to go through this.”
“It got better, you know?” He caught himself beginning to breathe again. “I know that sounds fucking stupid, but it did. I got out of there. I found… Miki. Fuck, I found myself. My dad might have left me with scars on my back, but fuck him, I own me now. Not him. Me.” He tugged up the back of his shirt, leaning forward to get some space between his back and Sionn. “You see that tat? Feel it. Feel what’s underneath it.”
Damien didn’t need to know when Sionn found the worst of the scars. Even though he lost the feeling under some of his skin, the light flutter of the man’s fingertips stuttered when they encountered the long, deep slashes hidden beneath his ink.
“God, he could have cut through your spine,” Sionn whispered in shock. “Damien, he could have killed you.”
“He tried. He did. But he couldn’t. And God knows, he fucking tried so damned hard.” He finally could laugh, bitter and sweet, but it was still a laugh. “Everyone thought we used my tattoo on the album cover because it was some ego trip of mine, but see, the guys… they were there when I broke through all this shit. We were flying so damned high, and I wanted something to show how far I’d come since… that night. Spent almost two months in Japan getting it done, and it fucking hurt like hell over some of the scars, but when it was over… when it was all healed, it was… me. It was us.”
“We’d all come from shit, Irish,” Damien pressed back into Sionn’s touch, and the man responded by sliding his hands around to Damien’s belly, stroking at his stomach under Damien’s shirt. “The kirin was our way of giving a big fuck-you to everyone who hurt us. It was our protection against the evil behind us. Every fucking scar, every damned broken bone didn’t matter anymore because we took the pain we got and spat it back. We were Sinner’s Gin, Sionn. Sinner’s fucking Gin.”