He Makes Me (Queen AU)

Chapter 19

Slight but significant change to the ending of the previous chapter:

INSTEAD OF: "It's so cute how you think you can lie to me," Tim sneered, the smile disappearing from his face almost as quickly as it appeared. His hands found their way back to the drummer's...

IT'S NOW: The humored grin disappeared from his face almost as quickly as it had appeared before his hands found their way back to the drummer's...

Thanks for reading!

The revelation hit Roger like a freight truck. It was as if Tim had drugged him again, except this time, instead of using an old rag dipped in chloroform, all he used was his voice; his words.

This is your home now.

The blonde stumbled backwards, clutching the wall in a pathetic attempt to catch himself before he fell further into the nightmare that was slowly becoming his reality. His mind searched desperately for an explanation, bewildered as to how his night had started off with Jo leaving for her class and him resigning to the couch for a drunken Coronation Street marathon, but ended with him in a place he still didn't recognize with a schoolgirl's uniform on his body and warm blood dripping from his glass-shard-ridden hands. The gaps in his memory were too much to overcome.

What had he done to deserve this?

Roger's eyes glistened with agonized tears as he met the brunette's stare, sensing from the softened yet emotionless expression slathered across his face that he didn't know either. The drummer swore he caught a glimmer of remorse in the soulless eyes locked on his, but as soon he blinked, that glimmer was gone, and Tim was turning his back to him.

"Follow me," the brunette muttered, dragging his feet down the dark hallway. He didn't stop or look back until he had reached the staircase that lured the blonde over just moments ago, glancing over his shoulder and spotting the drummer leaned against the wall across from the bedroom, standing in the residual glow of the television and sticking out like a sore thumb in the shadowed corridor. "You said you were looking for the bathroom, did you not?"

Hesitant to answer, and partially scared to, Roger remained quiet, hugging himself. The small, sharp fragments protruding from his skin tugged at the white threads, and the blood oozing from the wounds drew messy lines across the wrinkled fabric. The brunette had to contain himself, seething at the blonde's carelessness for his costume. He clenched his hands into fists by his sides and pressed his lips together, refraining from commenting on the atrocious act.

Instead, Tim inhaled deeply and exhaled slowly, uncurling his fingers and parting his lips to calmly reveal, "I'm just trying to get you cleaned up, Rog."

"I don't trust you," the blonde confessed, a timid quality to his usually confident voice.

"You don't need to trust me," the brunette countered, crossing his arms. "You just need to do what I say."

"And if I don't?" Roger dared to ask—his rebellious nature persistent despite the consequences he could face.

Tim flinched at the drummer's defiance, as if he hadn't experienced it from his prior projects. The blonde's resistance affected him differently, though. Perhaps because there were no emotions involved in his previous attempts—that is, except for his last one. The emotions brought about by him were ones forged out of jealousy, animosity, resentment. Roger, on the other hand, instilled many feelings in the brunette, most of them coming from a place of longing, yearning, wanting something he knew he couldn't have. However, now that he had him, his emotions were all over the place; harder to control, and Roger's unruliness made it no easier.

"That's not an option," the brunette answered tersely, denying the blonde any rebuttal by turning on his heel and disappearing down the hall opposite the one Roger had been left behind in. It didn't take long for the shadows to nudge the drummer in the bassist's direction, encouraging him to pick up his pace when, suddenly, a light turned on, a silhouette slipping into the newly illuminated room. He nearly tripped over his feet reaching the doorway, grabbing the threshold for support and lifting his tired eyes to see Tim sitting on the edge of a tub that looked as though it hadn't been used or washed in years. In his hands was a bottle of rubbing alcohol, and beside him sat a roll of gauze, a roll of cloth tape, a rag that had seen better days, and a pair of tweezers that had lost its shine with age.

"Sit," Tim instructed, nodding his head at the empty spot next to him.

Roger bit his lip, nervous to get that close to his bandmate again, but the stinging in his hands was only getting worse, and he didn't believe that the bleeding was enough to kill him. So, with much reluctance, the blonde joined the brunette on the tub's edge.

"Hands over the tub," the bassist commanded, pivoting his torso to face the drummer. Roger mirrored his actions, extending his hands over the grimy basin and watching as Tim poured the alcohol over his wounds—the pain the brunette inflicted upon him worse now than it was when he took hold of his hands and squeezed them tight.

Roger tried to pull away, but Tim was quick, wrapping his free hand around the blonde's wrists and holding them in place. The blonde tried to use the alcohol to his advantage, to slip his hands out from the brunette's grasp, but it tightened the more he squirmed, and the clear, burning liquid that splattered on his raw skin heightened the pain.

Just when it seemed as though the blonde's pain tolerance had been reached its limit, Tim swapped out the bottle for the rag and gently dabbed the palms of Roger's hands with it, drying up the excess. With each press of the cloth to his skin, the drummer took a sharp breath, earning a glare from the bassist when the gasp that slipped past his lips turned into a whimper.

"What the hell's your problem?" Tim snapped, returning his attention to the blonde's hands that, for the most part, had stopped bleeding. "Never been cut before?"

Roger scoffed. "'Course I have."

"Then stop acting like you haven't."

The blonde frowned, muttering under his breath, "'Still hurts."

"Well, I'm not the one who lost his shit and threw a fit over some pictures, am I?" the bassist grumbled, draping the bloodied, alcohol-soaked rag over his thigh and snatching the pair of tweezers from behind him. He went to extract the glass shards from the drummer's skin when he noticed his furrowed brows.

The brunette sighed. "What now?"

"How...How did you know I did that?" the blonde stammered, barely able to recall the event himself.

Tim shifted uncomfortably, a faint blush rising in his cheeks as he pinched the tweezers around the first shard and slowly unwedged it from Roger's palm. "I heard you," he lied, failing to reveal that he had eyes all over, and that he hadn't been in bed the whole time the drummer was wandering about. "After all, you weren't particularly quiet about it."

A cloak of silence blanketed the pair as the brunette continued to carefully pick the glass out from the blonde's hand, laying the broken pieces down on the rag one by one. Not once did Roger look away from Tim while he did this, trying to understand what his endgame was; what this project was all about.

From what he'd witnessed so far, it seemed like Tim dressed up men as women to take pictures of them to put on that cursed wall, but then what? He kept them around as company? Drugged them when they wanted to leave? Threatened them into staying by playing nice? What was it all for?