This story is about a boy who is abused by his brother and gets the chance to tell his story. I won't give out more information than that; why he does it is a question that the story will reveal. Warnings: incest, abuse (both physical and sexual), language, anything else you can think of. Please do give me your opinion!

Burning Butterflies

I don't know how to start. I've never written a story before. The closest I came to ever writing one was when I wrote a short fiction piece last year. Just so you know, I'm not going to care that you actually get to know so much about me. I guess that's the whole point with this thing, but anyway. If you ever ask about any of this, you know what my answer will be.

Here I am now and I have to write down all of this shit which I don't even want to tell anyone. Sorry, I shouldn't have used that word, but I'm trying to narrow down on the scratching overs...if that's what it's called. I don't like it when writings look ugly. I want things to look neat and tidy. He liked it too, when I kept things neat and tidy. Heh, how pathetic to introduce him by him saying that he liked things neat and tidy. But that's not what you want to know about him, right? You want to know of his bad sides; the ones that hurt me, so you can justify your accusations, so you can point out someone to stand guilty. I'm not going to bias this...writing like that. I'm going to tell you how I felt, how I saw it and how I experienced it, because it's my life and my story.

He couldn't get over the grief of our parents' passing away. Or maybe he did, I'm not sure. I can't even remember their faces. From the first moment it was me and my brother. He was my mother and father, he was my universe. It was he who mattered the most.

But I remember one sunny afternoon when I was five and my father called me to his dark green armchair that always stunk of smoke and had numerous burn holes in it. Those burn holes looks like liquid, as if the chair itself was melting. They seemed lachrymose. I remember his wrinkled white and faint-blue striped shirt sleeve above his hairy arm, it's the most clear picture I have of him in my memory. I remember him making me take a blow of his cigarette, and when I coughed and felt light-headed, he said: "See how bad it is? Don't ever go near this thing, okay?" in his calm whiskey voice.

That's the only thing I remember of my parents.

Christian said that Dad always liked to show things by practicing them. He told me that Dad had done that to him too, the cigarette thing. He'd done it several times, especially when he'd found out that Christian smoked behind the old abanoned shoe factory with a couple of "deliquents", as Dad called them.

I think his heart problems took him that year, my Dad. That year when I was five. He wasn't much for living anyway. He was bored without my Mom I guess, or so Christian said. He said that Dad had been full of vitality, getting up for work every morning at five o'clock while my Mom prepared him breakfast and he ran around the kitchen doing his tie. But after my mother passed away while giving birth to me, Dad had gone really low.

After my Mom had passed away, Dad had cared for me with all his might and still went to work until he started to come home with his hands shaking and slowly began to distance himself from me and Christian more and more. He'd started sitting in that goddamned armchair more frequently until he barely ever moved from it. And one day when Christian came home from school and hoisted me up in his arms from where I was playing in my own little world on the littered carpet in the dull, dusty sunlight of the living room, he'd seen that my Dad had finally let his last sigh escape him.

Christian threw that armchair out as soon as Dad was driven away by the paramedics. He didn't cry and he wasn't angry, he just stood on the pavement with my small hand in his and watched them drive away with my Dad in a black sack, and then he walked back into the living room and threw that chair out the door to the backyard where he later made up a bonfire with it. I don't remember much of the bonfire but it's horrendeous smell.

Christian was just eleven then, so he had no chance of taking care of me by himself, but of course my dear aunt Misha took us in. Aunt Misha was Dad's younger sister by twelve years and had wanted to take us out of Dad's custody ever since I'd been born. She was deeply religious despite her rather young age and a kindergarten teacher. She thought that a single man had no chance of taking care of two kids all by himself. Perhaps she was right in a way. But I don't think she was that good of a person either. She made Christian change schools and put me in the kindergarten she worked at. I was scared senseless; I'd never been around so many kids before, and they teased me. Children are cruel creatures. I was called all sorts of names but my real name, Cody. The bullying continued past that stage though. Actually, it never stopped.

You see, aunt Misha wasn't unkind or uncaring, she simply...didn't feel much. She was completely driven by logic and her sense of right and wrong. I think that even her reasons for choosing her job came from that she viewed it as being "right".

Aunt Misha noticed how low I seemed and made me sit down with her in the kitchen to talk about it. She always gave me treats when she thought I would be good. I was ten then, not yet aware of the desires of the flesh so to speak, yet I knew that religious women shouldn't wear skirts as tight and short as hers, or reveal their breasts like she did with the few buttons she actually bothered to button up on her white bussiness shirts. I couldn't help myself from staring at those large balls pushing up in a weird way. I wasn't used to women so much. The only women I'd been around had been her and my current math teacher.

I admit that I was a rather sexual kid. I never hesitated to masturbate when I thought that no one saw, which was rather hard since me and Christian shared a room together. Yet some nights when he was out with his girlfriends or if I thought he was deep asleep, I would lie in my bed and let my fantasies wander away to scenes that I'd managed to catch from my brother's pornography films.

So the I was, staring down aunt Misha's blouse while she let her hand caress the side of my face where I'd recently aquired a bruise.

"What has happened, darling? You think I don't notice that you're not yourself?"

Like she'd ever seen me any other way. I snorted, cocking my head free. I felt some kind of hate well up in me, though I decided that I cannot hate her since she was my only relative besides Christian.

"Nothing..." I said, like I always did. What should I say to her? But after that she grew truly furious.

"You think I can just let it pass? I've let you handle it for so long now. I've stayed out of your bussiness for so long! You just let them do this to you! And everytime I ask it's 'nothing'?! At least you can tell me so I can speak with..."

I stopped listening right about then and sunk back into my thoughts about how I should avoid getting my lunch-money stolen, when that same bruise on my face started smarting anew.

I was shocked. I stared up at her and felt myself on the verge of bawling.

Despite the hard growth I'd gone through, I was rather sensitive, guess I still am. I find it hard to trust people, yet if I do and they betray me, the world crashes down, and that's how it felt then when she slapped me.

She was growing tired of me, she couldn't take all those crying and screaming children's voices anymore. She'd had enough. So she took it out on me since I was close at hand and because Christian was too strong for her. Christian was out most of the time anyway, so he just got to experience her scolding him a few times for being late or not doing his homework properly.

My brother would have none of aunt Mishas ways and dragged me out of that house the very day he turned sixteen, which was only a month ago since aunt's fit. He was well aware that we'd inherited the old house from Dad, and by some means unbeknownst to me, he'd managed to sell it and buy a rather run-down apartment somewhere further south of town where he thought aunt Misha wouldn't find us.

Aunt Misha had wanted to give us a family, yet luckily for us both, or perhaps unluckily, she married after a month and gave up the idea of taking care of her brother's left behind puppies when she discovered the joy of having a family of her own.

She didn't even bother to track us down anymore.

Me and Christian had it quite nice in that apartment though. Honestly, it was the best time in my life, those few first months of Chirstian and me and our apartment with the wet cracks in the ceiling and walls. He'd bought some second hand furniture and made it really cozy with prints of paintings on the walls. My favorite painting was the one of Ophelia floating in the flower adorned water. It had an eerie yet beautiful feeling about it. I couldn't comprehend how she could be so beautiful even in death.

Me and Christian became very close since we had to share all the time we weren't out with each other. I'd taken a job of giving out papers on the weekends and went to school like any ordinary kid. Christian worked in a pizzeria nearby and went to school too. We lived as ordinary lives as possible. We watched the Simpsons on the old 14" TV together, laughing like madmans until our stomachs hurt and the TV decided to start flimmering again. It usually went back to normal with a slap on the side though.

We went out together often too, and sometimes, when Christian felt that we had money to get through the month and also to save, he'd buy me McDonald's food or ice-cream, or if it was winter, candy.

I would often lie in my bed in my room and stare out of the window. Chirstian slept in the living room and let me have a place to call my own; he'd always prefered sleeping on the floor anyway. He insisted that sleeping on a bed made his back ache.

It was rather strange that despite the street lights, the sky outside my window was quite full of stars, almost as if the clouds had gotten glitter strewn over them. I would bathe in the cold moonlight and mewl while I stretched myself out, loving the feeling of my dry feet against the chilly beige bed-covers and the warmth of my hand holding a loose grip about my genitals.

Sometimes, if the fantasies came and I grew aroused, I would tighten that grip and let my palm run up and down my shaft until I couldn't take it anymore and spasmed, turning to my side and heaving.

It was such a night then too, when it happened for the first time, because sometime had to be the first time, right?

It was on such a night when I was twelve. On a night when I was lying on my bed and feeling content despite the fact that I still had no friends but Carl who thought he was my friend simply because he followed me everywhere and told me a lot of unnecessary facts about everything that I found uninteresting.

It was on such a night when I'd just let the fantasies run wild in the eye of my mind that Christian came to my room. I'd been to naïve to think he'd never seen me with my hands down my pants before, but it really did shock me.

I quickly took my hands out and tried to sit up, my eyes wide, my whole body quivering with fear and embaressment. I tried hard to steady my breath and pretend as if nothing, but it was loud and clear that he'd seen it...and that it wasn't the first time.

Christian was surprisingly calm when he came closer to my bed and seated himself beside my naked shins. The soft golden hair on my legs stood up, my heart pounding out of my chest, it seemed. But he didn't scold me like I'd expected. Usually when I did something bad, he'd come to my room at night and speak, usually he'd give a light slap on my thigh, making me promise it was my last time.

So that night I guessed I would get scolded both for this and whatever I might've done during the day. Or maybe he came to confess his feelings to me. They sometimes overwhelmed him like they do with any person. He didn't want me to feel guilty for that he took care of me, but the hardships sometimes became too much and he had to bury his head against my chest and let his soft sobs and sniffles escape him. He always glared at me if I looked down and saw his tear-streaked face then, so I tried to avoid watching him when he did so and only put my arms around him as he clutched my t-shirt.

His body was much larger than mine, he was strongly built; firm and muscly, yet lean. I was his opposite. It was one of the reasons behind his power over me, I guess, that I was much smaller than him. I was bony and had an oval, girly face which made the bullying at school even worse. I tried to hide it by wearing big soft caps in earth colors which blended in with my light brown hair.

But that night he didn't do any of that. Instead he scooped my frightened figure into his strong arms and caught my chin to force my gaze to his. Our eyes were a reflection of each other's; green with a touch of honey.

I couldn't escape to look at the shadow of a black beard on his face; he was so much older now. He was eighteen years old and that's practically an adult.

He knew that I was in puberty and that I masturbated a lot. He knew that I was scared over the changes taking place in my body. He knew that my stomach was filled with burning butterflies as he pressed his deep red, chapped lips against mine and let his tongue slide into my mouth, warm and dripping with the poison of immoral pleasure.