Work Text:
snuff (2 of 6)
snuffed; snuffing; snuffs
transitive verb
b: to cause the end of; to put an end to
also: kill, execute
snuff (3 of 6)
adjective
characterized by the sensationalistic depiction of violence
especially: featuring a real rather than a staged murder
—snuff movies
The first time Mike meets Jay, the kid has a shiny black eye behind his Jeffery Dahmer glasses.
Rich is far from a violent person. The idea that he’s beating his kid is absurd and kind of hilarious on its face, so Mike can only assume that he’s getting bullied at school from, well, frankly the very essence of everything about him. It’s pretty uncharitable to think something that cruel about an unsuspecting fourteen-year-old who can’t weigh more than eighty pounds, but it’s difficult to come to any other conclusion when he’s watching a demented compilation of a woman tearing people apart in bloody chunks in between making incomprehensible notes in a thick, abused journal with Crayola markers.
“Hey, buddy, uh… what’s… whatcha watchin’?” Mike asks, lingering in the den’s entryway. “You’re really into film, huh? Your dad, he, um, he said you were into scary movies.”
Jay doesn’t look up, his tongue flashing out over his rabbit teeth as he grasps his journal. The hand placement is odd, which immediately gives Mike the idea that he’s a little special. Challenged, maybe.
“I like all kinds of movies,” Jay finally replies. “If they’re good movies. But I guess I like scary movies the most.”
“Is this a scary movie? Here? Or is this, uh… are you watching porn? In the den? Is this pornography?”
“It’s In My Skin. Dans ma peau,” Jay says as though Mike is the retarded one. “You’ve seriously never seen it? Dad said that you’re way into movies.”
Mike snorts. “I’m not into art movies. Or, you know, this shit. ‘Extreme horror’.”
Jay stares at Mike for a moment before sniffing and going back to his journal. He flips a crackly, ink-saturated page. “Okay. Sure. Whatever. Cool.”
Mike has clearly deeply offended Rich’s son, which isn’t ideal. He clears his throat and busies himself with the IPA in his hand. “You into Star Trek at all?”
“No.”
Mike takes a very hard swig of his beer. “What’s going on with that fuckin’ eye of yours? You get in a fight? Did you win?”
“I shot at a feral cat and the BB bounced back and hit me in the eye.”
“Your dad didn’t hit you, did he? I wanna make sure he didn’t. That might be a dealbreaker.”
“No, a BB hit me in the eye,” Jay says slowly. “Are you retarded?”
“Are you? Are you retarded? Don’t you have any manners?”
“I mean, can’t you listen? Sorry. I already said it once.”
“Jesus. Fucking—yeah. Okay.” Mike rubs his forehead. “Sorry. Lie all you want. I’m gonna go find your dad.”
“Okay.”
That interaction lays the groundwork for the next few years of Mike’s life. He rewrites the conversation in his head again and again, wondering if things could have gone differently.
Probably not, but it’s alluring to think about.
Jay is sixteen years old and he’s burning toys in the backyard.
Mike sips his mug of Donut Shop Surprise coffee and Jack Daniel’s, unable to look away. After a nutritious breakfast of Pop-Tarts, sugar cereal, and a Dr. Pepper, Jay threw a jacket over his pajamas and shoes on his feet so he could start his weekend the way he always does: causing random, violent acts of destruction for no reason at all because he thinks they’ll make good movies.
Mike sometimes makes the mistake of asking Jay what kind of movies he’s making. And then Jay will show him footage of burning toys, roadkill, spliced pieces of restaurant employee training instructional videos, nineteen-seventies Christmas-oriented Jell-O commercials, and clips of Mike himself always filmed voyeuristically. Never Rich. Rich is never in any of his movies.
The little freak is targeting him.
The tripod is adjusted meticulously. Jay has the scene blocked in his journal and even though it’s the same shit every time, he always does brand new blocking for it. Mike once carefully broached the subject of getting Jay tested for autism, but Rich dismissed him and just told him that Jay is passionate. A little weird, yeah, but all kids are weird, Rich assured him. For instance, wasn’t Mike a little weird as a kid? He had to have been.
Admittedly, yes. Sure. But Mike hadn’t targeted an aging, tired screenwriter for the sake of fucking with him over and over and over for nothing.
“Do you hate me?” Mike asks Jay warily upon the kid’s return. Jay looks up and flips his notebook shut, a perfectly puzzled expression twisting his chipmunk features.
“No,” Jay says, snorting a little. “Why? Why would I hate you? Did you do something?”
“I just, uh… No reason.” Mike drains the last of his whiskey and coffee and smacks his lips. “S’no reason. It’s just that it’s kind of fucking with me that you keep showing me your—your deranged, sick, twisted fetish videos with me spliced in.”
“Fetish…?” Jay’s eyebrows knit together. “They’re not fetish videos. It’s not, like, porn. I’m not making porn. There’s no sex.”
“What the fuck are you making?”
“Movies,” Jay says stubbornly. “What else would they be?”
“Literally everything I just said. Twisted fetish shit.”
“But I’m not making sex movies. There aren’t any sex scenes.”
“Do you know what a fetish is? Or—do you, for real?” Mike asks, narrowing his eyes. “Or are you messing with me?”
“I know what a fetish is, asshole. I know every fetish,” Jay replies, every bit as suspicious as Mike. “I think that you think this is all about sex because you want it to be.”
“Jay,” Mike says slowly, “why would I want your weird boiled baby head movies to be about sex when you won’t stop putting me in them? Why would I want that from you?”
“I don’t know! Why would you!? You’re the creepy old man, just like Dad always says!” Jay snaps the lens cap back on his camera and shoves it back into its bag like he’s trying to punish it. “It’s not my fault that you look like… you know, that.”
The thing is, it’s a fair assessment, but what the fuck?
“Like what?” Mike says, only half-pretending to sound hurt. “Like—explain it to me. You know. If you know so fuckin’ much.”
“You’re joking, but, well, you know, I do know a lot and I know that you know what I know.” Jay heaves the strap of his bag over his shoulder with a snooty, irritating sniff and leaves the kitchen with all the grace and dignity that a buck-toothed, four-foot-high teenager with a pineapple haircut can muster.
Highly distressing. Mike burns his hand on the side of the coffee pot when he tries desperately to brew another few cups.
“She was in Paging Doctor No-Name,” Jay points out to Mike. “Well, the Italian title was I dottori scopano, uccidono e mutilano. Literally, like, Doctors fuck, murder, and mutilate. And, I mean, it makes sense if you watch it. That’s most of what happens. Top billing even though she was in the movie for five minutes. It’s because they got her to show her tits for that whole five minutes.”
“Mm-hm.” Mike is surprised that he’s able to process anything that Jay is saying at all. He should probably be happy and grateful that Jay is attempting to spend any quality time with him, but of course it would only be so he could force Mike to watch boring, insane, uncomfortable dogshit instead of an actual movie while Mike was so drunk he doesn’t know if he could successfully get off the couch. If only Jay were halfway normal and they could just go to a goddamn Packers game. Or even watch a real movie. Mike would settle for that.
He drifts in and out of consciousness and dramatic, grotesque displays of gore fetishism until Jay jumps up, his arm knocking against the couch and jostling it. Mike makes a vaguely unhappy noise and rubs the heel of his hand against his heavy eye.
“S’it over?” he croaks.
“Yeah. Well. That one is. I don’t even think you watched it,” Jay says, jabbing the eject button on the VCR.
“No fuckin’ shit.” Mike lets his head fall back against the couch. Terrible idea, because it makes his whole world swim and his stomach turns unpleasantly. “Jesus.”
Jay, in all his gnarled, bony lankiness, kneels down and snaps open a plastic VHS case. Empty, blank, clean, clear. Only a Sharpie scribble across the tape’s label that Mike can’t read at all.
“Makin’ me watch your dark web snuff shit again?” Mike grumbles.
Jay giggles wildly, like he’s a farm girl frolicking through a meadow instead of an Investigation Discovery miniseries waiting to happen. “Uh… kinda.”
“Don't do this shit to me.” Actively working against his own best interests, Mike makes a vague grab and finally a successful attempt at picking his unnumbered beer back up. It could be the eighth, it could be more. He doesn’t know. He does have the feeling that Rich will be wringing his hands over Mike cleaning them out one too many times in the span of a few weeks, but Rich isn’t the one who has to babysit the fucking Antichrist every weekend. “I’ll throw up. On you. If you make me watch fucking Isis beheading videos or whatever you jerk off to.”
Jay’s eyes shine in a way that doesn’t do anything to soothe Mike’s queasiness. “Yeah? Do you promise?”
“What?”
“To throw up on me.”
“Yeah. Whatever.”
“Cool.” Jay grins and pops the tape into the VCR, feeding the weak beast a lump of rotten food.
The film—Mike doesn’t know what else to call it—opens with nothing but a recording of a child screaming and begging for mercy over repeated strikes against skin. The screen, fuzzy and spitting static, remains black until the torture tapers off, the unnamed victim sobbing quietly and licking its wounds.
“Great,” Mike slurs. “So you used your dad’s fuckin’—you stole his credit card or you stole mine so you could buy, uh… child porn? And put it in your movies? Fuck is wrong with you?”
“It’s not—! It’s just a sound byte from YouTube! Jesus Christ. I don’t even know how to buy child porn.”
“Thank fuck. Feds’re gonna be knocking on this door any day now. Busting through the windows. Smashing…” Mike waves his hand as vaguely as his weak wrist can muster. “Yeah.”
Jay just snorts a little. A dog begins to tear open unidentifiable roadkill on one side of the screen as Jay himself brushes his teeth in the bathroom mirror on the other side, foam dripping from his mouth as easily as it does from the rabid animal’s.
Midway through the collective carnage, the kid shuffles over and attaches himself to Mike, uncharacteristically clingy. A hand snakes around Mike’s arm and grasps it, unevenly-clipped fingernails digging in just enough to bite. Mike’s eyes shift from the nasty little tongue that Jay has poking out from between his teeth to the small, spindly, choking fingers wrapped snugly around flesh that should feel totally foreign to him. Big doe eyes blink and focus on the box TV.
Mike doesn’t really know what to say and he thinks it’s kind of a bad move to tell Jay to back off—that won’t do anyone any favors—so he just leaves it alone. He can’t really help but to leave it alone, honestly. He’s on the verge of passing out. He’ll let the kid do whatever. It’s fine. He’s not that much of a threat off-camera.
The last thing that Mike sees on the screen is a pair of angry feet messily stomping out a battered collection of Barbie dolls. His last coherent thought is that maybe it’s supposed to be some kind of take on modern feminism or something, but that’s as good as it gets. He’s gone. He’s out to lunch. Jay’s fingers won’t let him go.
The lights are off and Mike’s head is submerged in what feels like spoiled butterscotch pudding.
He is aware of two things: he’s freezing cold and his mouth is drier than Scottsdale. He is made aware of a third thing almost as quickly: there’s something in his mouth. He lifts a lead-heavy arm—an alarmingly naked arm—and plucks whatever it is out from between his cracked lips.
He squints under the dull glow of the moonlight streaming in through the den’s slim window, unfolding the crumpled sheet of paper.
‘IF YOU MAKE IT WEIRD, THEN I’LL MAKE IT WEIRDER’, scrawled big and bold in black marker.
All he can do is go back to sleep.
Jay doesn’t ever really do homework. Mostly by choice, Mike thinks. He’s pretty sure that he’s able to wiggle out of doing most of it because of some SPED loophole and the shit he does get sent home with is pointless busy work to keep some part of his brain engaged. It’s not that he can’t perform in regular classes; he just won’t. Because he’s a little artist like his daddy. The good one that he likes. The one that he respects.
Despite whatever his relationship to homework is, he still just uses it as a shield in between gawking at his computer and watching ultra-crushed 140p videos on random freak sites on Tor. Browsing subreddits with names like r/womengettingcrushed or something. Checking out Russian image boards where people put cats in dryers for fun. And, sure enough, as soon as Mike pushes his bedroom door open, the laptop immediately snaps shut and Jay pretends to busy himself with a textbook that he probably hasn’t read for the entire school year. He picks up a highlighter and marks over a passage that reads “worthwhile perspective”.
“Need some help, champ?”
”You could knock, like…” Jay highlights “Upon further reading”. It’s insane that he tries at all. “What? I’m fine.”
“Yeah. No, it’s—looks like it.” Mike clears his throat. “Did you rape me a couple nights ago?” he asks, polite and inquisitive.
“Uh…” Jay flips a few pages, his tongue between his braces. “…no. Mike, look, I’m kind of busy.”
“Okay, don’t bullshit me.” Mike snaps the door shut. “Did you fucking rape me or not?”
“Oh my God, you’re crazy. You are seriously crazy.” Jay still won’t look up from the stupid textbook. He writes “1 37 t7984 M lincoln” on a sticky note. “You’re acting crazy, Dad. Get out of my room.”
“I’m gonna tell your real dad and you’re gonna get sent to fuckin’ juvie, you fucking—you sick little weirdo! You’re gonna look like Swiss cheese in three days!” Mike hisses. “Do you think they’re gonna let you off easy? A judge won’t give one fuck about experimental films! That’s all evidence to them!”
“You sound like a paranoid schizophrenic, you know that?” Jay licks his lips and finally looks up at Mike. He gives a haphazard little shrug, his eyes shining. “I mean, no one’s gonna believe you.”
Mike is just barely beyond buzzed and that particular state makes him more agile than usual. Sharp. Alert. Alert in a sloppy way, but alert nonetheless, like a rabid animal whose brain is fried but its body is beyond alive. When he leaps forward to grab the front of Jay’s shirt and pull him up off his desk chair, he just barely misses as Jay shrieks and scrambles away, falling off in a heap on the floor. Mike dives for him and Jay, unspeakably tiny, hops and kicks like a rabbit, clambering onto the bed.
“Get the fuck back here!” Mike snatches Jay’s ankle and yanks him back, only incensed by the shrieky little sound that Jay makes. When Mike flips him over, Jay is grinning ear to ear, blushing bright, unsettling red.
“What did you do to me? I’m not fucking around.” Mike grabs at Jay’s neck, shoving the heel of his hand into the column of Jay’s throat. His own heart throbs somewhere near his tonsils. “Did you actually—you didn’t, did you? You didn’t. You just want me to freak out on you. You don’t have the goddamn guts.”
“I didn’t put anything up your ass,” Jay says, giggling breathlessly, twitching under Mike in a way that’s hideously uncomfortable. “I-if that’s what you were worried about.”
Honestly, Mike kind of was, but how is he supposed to believe that?
“Then what the fuck else did you do!? You—you stripped me, you little—what did you do?”
Jay rolls his eyes and Mike desperately wishes he could squeeze Jay’s neck hard enough to see them pop out like a cartoon. “Oh, come on, is it even rape if you don’t remember it?”
“Yeah? Yes? What the fuck—are you joking? You’re fucking with me, right? You know I’m not your idiot guidance counselor that you can manipulate and pull shit out of a hat for. You little fucking creep. I knew it. I knew there was something wrong with you. There’s always been something wrong with you.” Mike clenches his fist and Jay gags, coughing, his hand shooting up to curl around Mike’s wrist. “I knew you had a thing for me. This weird gay freak thing.”
Jay is able to sneer through the loss of oxygen. “I—y-you—l-like you didn’t. You wanted—” He nearly retches, his pink tongue falling limp over his fat bottom lip. “—I know you wanted it.”
Mike backs off just because he needs Jay to explain himself. He pins the kid’s wrists back instead, looming over him. Jay gasps for air, his eyes falling shut, his head tipping back against the bedsheets. Jay’s way too into it, too visibly into it, and Mike is trying to ignore that because he feels as though something unbelievably bad is about to happen to him, like he can feel the barrel of a gun against the back of his head. “I’m not a fucking pedo, you psycho cunt. Even if I was, I wouldn’t molest you if you were the last kid on earth.”
“I’m not even a kid! Like, maybe the law would say that, but the law says a lot of dumb shit! I’m legal. I’m a big boy. I’m a grownup, basically. Touching is legal in Wisconsin.” Jay is flushed beyond measure, his breathing shallow. Mike feels a horrible, nauseating thrill roll through him that makes him tighten his grip. “Dad doesn’t have to know. You never fuck him anyway.”
“How do you—fuck it. Yeah. I bet you’d just listen and jerk your shit off to it anyway. I could tell him tonight and ruin your life. Sixteen years down the drain.”
“Sure, go tell Dad. Tell him everything. Tell him I’m a gross pervert. It’s not like you totally have a chip on your shoulder and you’ve been telling him for years that I should be in a psych ward.” Jay pushes his thigh up and Mike makes a noise like he has a barbed-wire fence wrapped around his throat. “We’re not even related.”
“I think you like pretending.” Mike should be breaking away. He should be removing himself from the situation and drinking himself into a coma. He needs to not remember any of this. He needs to get out. He should go for a drive despite the fact that the blizzard outside is currently pelting against the windows like it’s laughing at him, knowing that he’s trapped and it loves it and it thinks it’s hilarious. He should be doing absolutely anything other than this. He should be fucking working. Doing anything. Anything at all.
But he’s not. The maniacal rodent child beneath him writhes and cackles and humps him and it makes his head cloud in a miasma of terror and animal instinct and confusion.
“Is this what you want from me?” Mike manages between his teeth. “Seriously? If I jerk you off, are you gonna leave me alone?”
Jay nods quickly, too quickly. He sounds like he’s hyperventilating. “Yeah, sure,” he says, breathy and needy. “I-I think you’d feel better. If you gave me what I wanted. Be a good dad.”
“Don’t fucking call me that.” Mike feels nauseous as he reaches down, fumbling with Jay’s jeans. Jay shuts his eyes, his chest rising and falling unsteadily. Mike swallows hard and looks away, his vision going blurry as he mindlessly analyzes a fold in the sheets, focusing on what kind of shape it could be described as.
Jay’s dick is unbelievably hard and leaking precum when Mike touches it, nearly spilling into the folds of his foreskin. Mike knows it probably tastes like sweat and a general unwashed boy stickiness, sour and rotten. Teenage boys are always rotten no matter how often they bathe. Narrow hips stutter up against Mike’s hand and chase heat madly. Mike still won’t look at Jay’s face, but he does hear the absurd kitten cries that fall unbidden from Jay’s lips, soft and high-pitched, like he’s something to want instead of something to sedate.
Mike refuses to want him. At this point, it isn’t even about any moral qualms; it’s more about not giving Jay the satisfaction. Mike is not going to want him and Mike is not going to get anything out of this and Mike’s erection is purely a non-consensual biological response. Mike is normal. Mike will always be normal.
“Fuck,” Jay whimpers. It’s a rare form of helplessness that is abnormal to Mike. Mike closes his eyes and swallows again. It’s more difficult this time.
Jay takes about ninety seconds to come. It’s for the best, but Mike still wants to make fun of him for it anyway, because, like, really? What is he, sixteen or something? Jay shudders and snaps like a bow string, gasping. Mike pulls his hand off as soon as he can and he sees white jets splatter across the front of Jay’s shirt in his peripheral.
“So we’re even,” Mike mutters, wiping his hand on the sheets before he straightens up. “Good. Yeah. Now, uh… no more rape. Rape is bad. I want you to know that, Jay. Good boys don’t rape.”
“Oh, I know that.” Jay draws his fingers through the spunk on his shirt and pinches his fingertips together, pulling them apart, letting the mess drool down to his palm. It’s unsightly. It’s very bad to look at. “That was great. I can make you come if you want.”
“No,” Mike says immediately, stumbling back and hitting the back of Jay’s desk chair. “No, no, we’re, it’s, you—we made a deal. Clean that shit up before your dad gets home.”
“You too,” Jay says, arching his brow as he sucks on his finger.
Mike does. Facedown in his pillow in his own room, grasping the cotton for dear life with his free hand.
He cleans his shit up. And he doesn’t feel good about it.
A month or so goes by before Rich remarks that he hasn’t seen the two of them get along so well in, well, maybe ever. They’re closer. They’ve reached an understanding.
“He’s starting to get my movies,” Jay tells him, digging his fingernails into Mike’s thigh under the dinner table. “Like, actually get them. He’s cool with them.”
Mike carefully puts a neutral expression together like a picture puzzle, nodding and smiling a closed, tight-lipped smile. He can practically hear the den hum with electricity from where he is, a stack of tapes staring daggers at him in his mind’s eye. DEAL 1. DEAL 2. PAST MIDNIGHT. UNTITLED #4. 3 AT ONCE. DON’T TELL THE COPS. All starring him and his disgusting, obese, worn-out, elderly body in positions he never knew he was capable of. Carefully-obscured faces. A filthy bastard wrapped around a delicate, manipulative, filthier angel.
“That’s… right,” Mike says slowly, slowly enough that he’s trying to press it upon himself. Like he wants to believe it.
Moving pictures cloud his mind’s eye. Jay’s little dagger hand relaxes.
“Yeah. He’s so cool with them.”