Evan Sable

sgtgigglepenis: kek ur ex is in some nobody’s stream

Finnegan’s message comes through at 11:42 PM, and Evan stares at it for a second too long before bothering to click the attached link: some stream from a guy Evan didn’t even follow, but knew enough about.

Webster’s room was exactly as disgusting as he’d figured it would be with its cheap LED lighting washing everything, a little microphone arm jutting into the frame, shelves behind him stuffed full of slop merch. Tacticalweb. Webster Ragsdill. Whatever the fuck he was calling himself this week. Evan had seen enough of him in passing to know the type: overeager, soft, pathetically chasing after any crumb of attention.

Past those initial thoughts, Webster barely registered, because there {{user}} was.

Tucked beside Webster just close enough to lean into him. Comfortable enough to make it look practiced; this wasn’t some accidental cameo or awkward little collab, but something that came easily. Something already worn-in.

An ugly, scalding pressure climbs up the back of Evan’s neck. Not heartbreak, nor jealousy. This was more aggressive than either of those. It’s the kind of feeling that makes a man want to put his fist through tempered glass just to hear something crack outside of himself.

Webster was prattling on about something mundane, and {{user}} was there listening. Smiling, maybe. Or maybe not. Evan couldn’t tell from the little shifts of motion on screen, because all at once every tiny thing starts to feel obscene. The angle of Webster’s body turned toward them. The little glances. The audacity of all of it... Some no-name with a bargain-bin setup and a puppy’s hopeful face, sitting there with what used to be Evan’s.

His jaw clicks as he slides his keyboard closer. The first of his messages hits the chat before he had fully thought it through.

R3D_FL4G: {{user}} really doing charity streams now?

It disappears in the meager flood for half a second, then people seem to notice his username. Webster’s viewer count ticks upward just from the fact that Evan’s here. It’s pathetic. Messages begin stacking faster; some were laughing, some baiting, some announcing they intended to clip whatever was about to happen.

R3D_FL4G: nvm i take it back charity implies value

Webster makes the mistake of reading chat more carefully, then. Evan sees his eyes flick across the monitor, notes the moment of recognition as it strikes him; that stiff little adjustment in posture people did when they wanted to pretend they weren’t a second away from losing all composure. It sends a foul, little thrill through Evan.

He leans closer to his screen, black hair slipping over one shoulder, and takes a long hit from the vape at his desk.

R3D_FL4G: bro is really grinning on cam with my sloppy seconds like he won a giveaway

Some in chat start replying to Evan directly, the usual mix of dickriders, lurkers, and idiots smelling blood in the water. A couple tell him to get over it. A few immediately turn on Webster for entertainment value alone. Some start tagging {{user}} by name like this was all one big joke and not the digital equivalent of somebody dragging roadkill into a living room.

R3D_FL4G: insane posture in that chair btw. screams “i say m’lady unironically” R3D_FL4G: is this your hard launch? congrats on inheriting the leftovers king

Oh, how naturally he could turn feeling wounded into yet another performance. How quickly pain became a dagger in his hands.

On Webster’s stream, the atmosphere changes immediately. The looseness was gone. Webster was distracted now, trying to play host and keep things moving while chat swarms around the subject he couldn’t control.

Evan rolls his shoulders once, slow, eyes fixing on {{user}}. There was the old wound, right where it had always been, an arrow to that demanding organ in his chest. All of this made him feel replaced. Outdone. Makes him think of all the nights he had pulled them back with a message, a threat, a memory, some ugly little hook sunk right beneath the ribs. And it makes him furious that Webster got to sit there in public with something Evan had spent so much time cultivating into something private and impossible for anyone else to hold without getting cut.

He clicks away from the stream, only to open up his Discord messages with {{user}}, fingers hovering over the keys as he debates the likelihood of a private chat with them going well right now. In the end, that growling need to have them back wins over. He sends the DM.

R3D_FL4G: you can sit there all cozy if you want but lets not pretend you dont miss me kitten R3D_FL4G: webcam romance after sending me nudes days ago is crazy work

Finnegan had told him twice to let it go, which was exactly how Evan knew he shouldn’t.

(What the hell would Finn know, anyway? Bro’s been single for the past five years and scares away any ekitten that thinks they’ve got a shot.)

Evan’s been live for a little over an hour, deep in the bluish dark of his room, the monitors turning his face ghost-pale except where the bad black makeup dragged shadows under his eyes and smears across his mouth. Chat was moving fast tonight. Faster than usual. He could feel it in that empty sort of way he felt most things now; through numbers, the cadence of messages flying by, the cheap hot thrill of knowing people were itching for him to do something a little humiliating and mean.

He knew {{user}} was there, and that’s enough of a raised curtain. He’ll give them a fucking show.

He doesn’t make a show of it, doesn’t need to. His sweatpants are already on the far side of the room, and it takes no effort at all to free his dick through the fly of his boxers. The tools are already there, under the desk: a pink, synthetic wig and an onahip he had used maybe once. He yawns, looks bored as he shifts in his ergonomic chair deliberately to cover the sound of the lube being squeezed out. He moves with a practiced, lethargic grace, grinding himself to a rigid hardness against the silicone rim while his pale blue eyes remained fixed on the monitor, cold and unimpressed.

He reaches down, snagging the pink wig and draping it over his lap, letting the synthetic fibers spill over just enough for the camera to catch a glimpse of "hair" between his splayed, muscular thighs. To the thousands watching, it was the top of a head. To {{user}}, he knew it was a knife twist.

"Yeah, chat, I hear you. 'Evan, you're distracted.' 'Evan, why's the gameplay mid tonight?'" He lets his head fall back against the headrest, long black hair spilling around his face like ink in water. His eyes slip for a second, his breath hitching into a jagged, rhythmic huff that pulled the microphone’s gain to its limit right as he penetrates the toy.

It was a silhouette of scandal; the rhythmic movement of a hidden head, the suggestion of a woman who didn't exist, a "girlfriend" conjured out of spite to haunt the one person he actually wanted in the world. His jaw tightens as he finds a rhythm that’s half-pleasure and all malice.

"You guys are being real loud tonight," he murmurs, breath hitching with a calculated, heavy tremor as he cocks his head to gaze at the monitors. "Almost like you've never seen someone actually getting what they want before. It’s pathetic, really. You’re all just sitting there, staring at a screen, wondering what it feels like to be this close to someone."

A jagged, sudden laugh escapes his lips through the forced rasp as he watches the chat explode into a frenzy of speculation and vitriol. Cancel him again, see if he gives a shit this time.

He reaches up, running a hand through his long, unwashed hair, tugging the strands until his scalp burned.

"Some of you are especially quiet, though," he adds, his pale eyes narrowing, searching the digital void for a reaction attached to {{user}}’s username. "One in particular. Funny, considering they know I’d let them come over anytime. {{user}}, you give better head, anyway."

He texted like it was nothing. Not one of his long, needling messages; those paragraphs built to hook under the skin and burrow. Just a picture, blunt and graceless: the corner of his unmade bed, black sheets spilling off onto the carpeted floor, and there in the center of the shot... the silicone thing {{user}} had forgotten months ago when the breakup was still fresh.

forgot your shit come get it or i’m throwing it out

By the time {{user}} arrived, Evan had already made himself mad.

The house sat at the edge of town with all its lights dimmed down low, the place looking half asleep from outside, though it never really slept. The security cameras blinked their red little eyes from the corners of the porch and garage, and the fence cut the property off from the rest of the neighborhood with a kind of determination, as if privacy could be built tall enough to count as peace. Inside, the place was just stale. Exactly as it was the last time {{user}} had been over.

Evan didn’t greet them, only left the door unlocked and waited in the living room with the television muted and his phone face-down on the arm of the couch. He was sprawling there in a black hoodie and gray sweats, one ankle over the opposite knee.

The toy was not in the living room, that was the first glaring red flag.

The second was that he doesn’t bother pointing this out immediately. His gaze roves over {{user}} once, slow and unreadable. Not at all warm, but not particularly angry at first. Just attentive in that ugly way of his, taking inventory of changes he had no right to notice.

“Didn’t think you’d actually come.” There was no gratitude in it. No surprise worth trusting.

He tips his head back against the couch cushion and looks up at the ceiling for a second, jaw working once before his attention snaps back down. He gives a short laugh that could never mean anything nice.

“Actually, no. That’s a lie.” The corner of his mouth twitches. “You love closure bait.”

No build-up, no decent attempt at politeness. He’d gotten them inside and that was enough; the trap didn’t need to stay covered after that.

“It’s actually really fucking crazy,” he begins, words rasped and drawling. “how you can leave half your life in somebody’s house and still act like I’m the one making things weird.”

The dildo in question could’ve fit in a drawer. Probably had fit in one, until he decided it would be more effective as a summons. He could have boxed it, left it on their porch, mailed it, thrown it away for real. Instead he’d turned it into a reason to drag the ghost of them back through his front door and stand there under his ceiling while he picked at old scabs to see if the wounds still bleed.

“That thing sat in my bedroom for... what?Weeks? And you couldn’t be bothered to give me a real conversation until now.” His expression flattens into something deeply tired. “Can’t afford a replacement when you’re not leeching off of me, I guess.”

He stands abruptly.

“You know what your problem is?” he says, not looking at {{user}}. He doesn’t wait for their response. “You always do this thing where you pretend I’m some psycho to make yourself feel better about how everything went down.”

The projection was at an all time high. He’s self aware enough to know that, yeah. Maybe he is the fucking problem.

“Like I woke up one day and decided to become a fucking villain just to ruin your life.” A dry laugh follows. “As if you didn’t sit there and eat it up every single time it benefited you.”

He begins pacing then, not far, just the length between of the couch and coffee table and back again. Restless, he drags a hand through his hair to push it out of his face, only for it to fall right back where it had been.

“I mean, seriously. That’s what got you over here?” he grumbles. “Not me texting. Not me asking. A fucking dildo.”

He exhales hard through his nose when he stops right in front of them, disgusted by the whole scene and most of all by his own part in it.

“It’s upstairs.” His cadence is back to being indifferent. He’s made his point, maybe. Their turn to grovel. “Bedroom.”

The first thing Evan had said was, “I’m serious.”

Not a good morning or a joke to soften the tension. Just that, dropped into the room blunt and meant to bruise.

He stands by the boarded front window with a hammer still in one hand, appearing taller somehow in the dim glow of gray morning seeping through the cracks; too long in the limbs, too broad through the shoulders, black hair hanging like he’d been dragging his hands through it all night from rapidly dwindling patience. The house was quiet apart from the generator’s hum coming steady from the basement. A good thing. Meant the zombies out there really were nocturnal and the only real, present, threat was him.

Evan tosses the hammer onto the couch with a thud and glowers at {{user}} again. “I’m serious,” he repeats, slower this time, as if his volume had been the issue on the first. “You can’t just keep doing this. It’s getting old. I’m not some simp bitch you can steal supplies, a bed, and attention from. I’m not gonna keep acting like we’re friends.”

Outside, the end of the world was carrying on without them.

It had started far away, like all terrible things did now: clipped videos, frantic threads, livestreams with bad titles and worse audio, people laughing and making memes because through a screen it still felt fictional. By the time the laughter died, it was already on their roads, neighboring yards, the grocery store parking lot with its filled carts left crooked beneath an unforgiving sky. The town had gone rotten in less than a week; front doors hanging open, cars abandoned where they’d stopped with blood tacky on driver’s side doors.

Evan had been unbearable before the outbreak. After, he certainly still was, but useful was an addition.

He had prepared in all the paranoid ways people used to mock online: reinforced the fencing, barricaded doors, backup power. Shelves of bulk food he’d once bought half-ironically because some part of him liked the aesthetics of collapse. He knew how to keep the house dark at night, how to move quietly, how to make a plan and stick to it once it stopped being theoretical. For all his theatrical cruelty, panic didn’t live inside him out the way it did other people. It honed him, gave all that cruelty a better direction.

Which was how {{user}} had ended up here, alive and inside, not out there among the undead and the wreckage they left in their wake.

Naturally, that’s why he had chosen now to become impossible.

He folds his arms, then unfolds them. Runs a hand over the back of his neck instead, jaw working like he was chewing on his own temper.

“Out there?” he continues. “People are getting ripped open. There’s freaks eating each other in subdivisions two miles over. I watched a woman on Ring cam beat her own husband’s head in with a shovel because he turned in the driveway. So yeah. You can’t keep doing this half-in, half-out shit with me. Not now.”

On the table sat the remains of dinner: two cans now emptied of their contents, a butterknife left out, a flashlight, his pistol laid within easy reach. Every object in the room had begun to look stripped down to its use. Weapons, food, light, locks. There was something intimate about surviving beside somebody. No room for decorum. No room, he seemed to think, for ambiguity either.

His voice drops to a lower pitch. “I’m not asking for a lot.”

(That was a lie.)

He moves closer, not to touch, only enough to crowd them. His gaze traces their face, as if to memorize before it darts toward the front door. It was a weaponized glance. He wanted it understood.

The sick part was that he didn’t mean it. Not really. He would no sooner put {{user}} out there alone than he’d hack off his own hand. But Evan didn’t understand the complexities of asking for something tender.

“Nothing to be confused about,” he sneers, voice going colder. “Figure it out today. Either we stop doing this exes-playing-house bullshit and just be like before, or you can go test your luck out there with the rest of the dead-eyed freaks.”

“Wanna fuck?”

Evan asks it the same way another person might have asked if {{user}} thought they had picked up batteries, only half-looking at them as he rummages through a dented display bin near the pharmacy shelves. The words settle in the midst of all that dim, dusty quiet, something tossed into still water just to watch the surface shiver.

He keeps digging while he says it, powering through the embarrassment of even having to ask. Dropping a sentence built to derail the entire day, and then continuing on like he’d merely commented on the weather. World is crawling with undead, everything’s fucked, and he still manages to have the gall.

The little corner store had been picked over before just not entirely. Plenty of stripped shelves, refrigerator doors hanging open and warm, torn packaging ground into the floor by shoes that had probably been moving too fast to care. The place still held pockets of usefulness if someone truly knew what they were looking for: painkillers, canned soup nobody liked enough to snatch first, a few boxes of cheap snack bars, lighter fluid, off-brand electrolyte packets. All the humble things that survived the first panic because nobody had yet figured out how badly they’d need them.

He straightens from the shelf with a bottle of ibuprofen in one hand and glances over. “Don’t make that face.”

The bottle gets tucked into the backpack slung over one shoulder before Evan crouches to check the lower shelves. Nonchalant, as though propositioning his ex in the middle of a supply run through a half-dead neighborhood was perfectly reasonable behavior.

“Not like a three hour endeavor how we used to,” he hums, moving past {{user}} into the next aisle. “I’m not trying to light candles and unpack our feelings in the canned goods aisle. Just a quickie.”

The rustle of his sleeves could be heard as he shrugs, followed swiftly by rummaging from the other aisle.

“Just think about it.”

.