Chapter Text
Edgar wasn't a boy anymore. Short, sure. Underfed, absolutely, but he couldn't be mistaken for a child. He would probably have been stocky in another life, would likely have gained muscle and breadth and solidity with enviable ease, but instead he was here.
Too thin and too pale by far even for his naturally fair complexion, surviving out of what Curtis could only assume to be bloody-mindedness, Edgar still managed to endear himself to people even past his seemingly boundless energy and his volatile mouth. He forced his way into people's view, insinuated himself into situations where anyone else would assume there wasn't room and add fuel to whatever fire he found; a constant, desperate need to purge his impotent rage against the cruel dictatorship of the Front pushing him to argue and even scrap with his friends-neighbors-family.
Curtis had seen him in vicious arguments that morphed into tearful hugs, fist fights that ended in giggle fits. He had dragged Edgar bodily away from situations wherein his self-destructive streak might have written checks his scrappy strength couldn't cash.
("What's a check?" Edgar asked directly after Curtis had used this particular idiom in a post-scuffle rant, and Curtis had felt suddenly very old and very tired.)
He was Curtis' to protect, and Edgar just didn't know any other way to work off energy, so Curtis had silently resigned himself to pulling the young man--not a boy anymore, perhaps never a boy at all--out of each gnashing maw he so cheerfully threw himself into. He would absorb every bit of wayward energy he could manage, keep Edgar out of harm's way as long as he could. This was his penance.
That's what he told himself, anyway.
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"Have you had sex, Curtis?"
It came seemingly out of nowhere, completely lacking the undertone of awkward shame the topic would have carried Before. On the Train, sex was... it just was. It sometimes caused babies, it served as a distraction from hunger, from grief.
Prophylactics were extinct, at least in the Tail, but people didn't worry much since the lack of decent food made menstruation a memory for most people with uteri and pregnancy a rarity. Sickness was a constant, who knew how anyone caught what, but since most of the sex in the Tail was had by monogamous couples they thankfully hadn't all been wiped out by aggressive crotch rot. A few, certainly, but such was life aboard the Train.
"Why." Curtis couldn't even make it sound like a question, the word just fell out of his mouth, heavy, and landed with a thud in the relative silence of the car. Most people were asleep, but Edgar had proven repeatedly over his lifetime that he was not most people.
"Just wonderin'. Have you?"
Curtis grit his teeth before deciding that answering would be shorter torture than arguing over the need for this conversation.
"Few times."
"Before?" Always so perceptive, Edgar, even if that hyper-awareness only seemed to extend to Curtis.
"Yeah," and he was suddenly done. "Go to sleep, Edgar."
The restlessness from the lower bunk quieted for a few moments, and then:
"What does it feel like?"
"CHRIST", and it wasn't loud, Curtis wouldn't be loud when so many people were sleeping rather than actively feeling hungry or ill, but it was thick, the word fighting his throat all the way out and settling around him in his bunk. "Go to sleep!"
No more words came from underneath him, but within a minute Curtis could hear the slick-slick-slick sounds of Edgar tiring himself out the best way he knew.
Long after the inevitable (fucking noisy) crescendo, Curtis stared at the rafters above him, unblinking and unwilling to acknowledge the fact that he was desperately, achingly hard.