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Deviant Desires	By : Flagg1991 Category: +G through L > The Loud House Views: 8519 -:- Recommendations : 0 -:- Currently Reading : 0
Disclaimer: I do not own the Loud House and will not profit from this story

Chapter List
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Weak amber light filtered through the open window over the desk and a whiff of warm wind rustled the screen. The high, joyous trill of birdsong greeted the new day, and in the commons down below, a girl laughed and called someone named Johnny a loser. Lincoln Loud peeled one eyelid open, and the world swam gradually into focus. It was just past seven by the clock on the nightstand, and the alarm was set for seven-fifteen.
Might as well get up now.
For a moment he simply lay there, regretting every decision he had ever made to bring him to this point - getting out of bed early on an off day - then he swung his legs out from under the covers and sat up. The fabric of his blue boxer shorts bunched in his ass crack and his damp white T-shirt stuck to his sweaty frame; the A/C in his dorm didn't work right and even with the window open, it got hot. He got to his feet, pulled his boxers out of his ass, and shuffled to the mini fridge next to the desk, the hardwood floor gritty and cool on his bare feet. He bent, opened the door, and retrieved a can of Coke from the top shelf. A slice of pizza on a paper plate, a green squeeze bottle shaped like a lime, and a couple cans of Natty Ice were the only other occupants.
He popped the lid, took a long, grateful drink, and perched on the edge of the desk. Below, archaic brick buildings loomed over a green commons dotted by trees and benches and crisscrossed with concrete walkways. Normally, it would be thronged with kids making their way to class but now it stood desolate and empty, the only living things in evidence the birds and a few squirrels chasing each other up and down the gnarled trunk of a spreading oak tree. A white plastic bag blew along the ground like a restless spirit, then got hung up on a branch and fluttered impotently for a moment before going slack, as if in surrender.
Today was the first day of spring break and most of the kids on campus had left the night before. Lincoln's roommate, Andrew, let out after his last class yesterday, and for the first time in months, Lincoln had the place to himself.
You know what that means.
He watched anime with the volume turned all the way up.
Taking another drink, Lincoln got up and went to the dresser, where he sifted through the drawers in an attempt to dig up enough socks, underwear, and shirts to keep him clothed for the week. He sat the soda aside, fetched his duffle bag from under his bed, and carried it to the desk. In the courtyard, a security guard in black walked an idle beat, his hands thrust into the pockets of his jacket. Lincoln shoved the clothes into the bag, tossed in a Ziploc baggie containing his toiletries, then zipped it up.
He was spending Spring Break with Sam and Luna. He was planning to take a bus back to Royal Woods, but his boss wouldn't give him any time off. I need you makin' sandwiches, Loud, he said, not trouble on the beach! Well, sir, I wasn't going to the beach, I was going home, but okay. It took Lincoln forever to find that job and he was terrified of losing it and going back to searching every nook and cranny with a fine tooth comb while his money dwindled. There's nothing scarier, nothing more wrought with hopelessness, than being an adult and looking for a job, but not finding one.
That's the stuff nightmares are made of.
He didn't make much at the deli, but he was able to eat and have a little bit of cash in his pocket, so if missing out on seeing his family was what it took to keep the boss happy, fine. Lincoln was a well-adjusted adult, he didn't need to be shoved up his family's ass. He'd catch them next time.
He was going to just stay here, but he was talking to Luna on the phone one day, and she insisted that he come over and "crash on the couch, bro." He tried to beg off, but she was persistent. "Come on, man, it's been a while, I really wanna see you." It hadn't been all that long. They saw each other at Christmas, which was...let's see..he counted on his fingers. Five months.
Whoa.
Five months?
That was a long time.
Growing up, Lincoln was close with his family. Not in an obsessive, co-dependent, way, but maybe a little more than average. Kind of hard not to get close to someone when you live stacked eleven deep in a house with paper thin walls. His sisters were also very forceful. They had their needs and Lincoln was the only one who could meet them.
Ew. That sounded bad.
No, see, his sisters all had their own thing going on, Leni making dresses, Luna rocking, Luan comedy, Lucy writing morbid-ass poetry, and Lynn...back at it again with the sportsball. The only person they could get to help them was him, because he, unlike the others, was small, timid, and weak. All you had to go was grab him by the scruff of his neck and boom, you had someone to listen to your stand-up routine or model your pink, frilly couldn't do that with Lynn because she'd ram her elbow in your guts and tell you to get bent. Lincoln wouldn't because if he tried, you could kick his little runt ass up and down the hallway until he begged forgiveness and promised to do whatever you wanted him to whenever you wanted him to do it. Because of that, he spent a lot of time with each one of his sisters and considered them very close. Life, however, had gotten in the way, and sometimes he was so consumed with the inner workings of his own existence - schedule, homework, making them sandmiches - that he didn't even think of his family for weeks on end.
Which is how, he reckoned, he was able to think five months wasn't a long time between visits. Jeez, it didn't even feel like five months. Time flies when you're having fun, right?
If working a shit job, studying, and being up to your eyeballs in student loan debt can be considered "fun."
Dressing in a pair of jeans and a white T-shirt covered in faded grease and mustard stains from work, Lincoln sat on the edge of the bed and pulled his shoes on. Luna and Sam both had the morning off, so he'd head over there on the bus and hang with them until they had to leave for work. He wasn't on the schedule at the deli, but Bob, who worked the days Lincoln didn't, was a pill head who didn't always come in when he was supposed to, so there was a good chance he would get called in anyway.
An hour later, after hitting the communal bathroom, Lincoln slung his backpack over his shoulder and left the building. The halls were eerily silent and the flickering fluorescent lights overhead lent it a decidedly horror-movie air that he didn't like. He expected a masked killer to step out of every doorway he passed, but he made it to the stairwell unmolested, and let out a breath he wasn't aware he'd been holding. He went down the steps, footfalls echoing behind him like the coming of ghostly doom, and stopped at the mailbox in the lobby.
Nothing.
Outside, the day was warm and airy, the scent of blossoming buds wrapping around his senses like a snake (stare into my coils, lil' boy). The traffic sounds from College Ave washed over him as he walked the three blocks from his dorm to the end of campus, a tapestry of swishing air, humming tires, beeping, and, once, someone yelling a startled, "I'm walkin' here!" During his ten minute trek, Lincoln allowed his mind to wander, and wound up coming back to Ronnie Anne.
When they were eleven, he and Ronnie Anne were best friends. They went to the arcade together, played video games together, told each other all their problems, and even kissed a few times, once with tongue. They were on the cusp of puberty, two kids dipping their toes into the murky and mysterious waters of sexuality, and if things had worked out differently, who knows? When she was almost thirteen, she, her mother, and her brother Bobby moved from Royal Woods to Detroit and, in the natural course of things, they lost touch. They were friends on Facebook and traded the occasional private message - Lincoln "liked" some of her pictures, and she his. After State accepted him last year, he messaged her and proposed the idea of them hanging out sometime. She said Sure why not? and deep down, Lincoln wondered if maybe they could pick things up where they left off all those years ago. He didn't particularly carry a flame for her - if he did say so himself - but he had good memories of their tie together and she was beautiful, so why not try? If it didn't work out, it didn't work out.
Looking back, he wondered if that wasn't his way of trying to latch onto a little bit of familiarity in a strange new environment. He had lived in Royal Woods, at home, his entire life, and suddenly he found himself a grown man practically on his own in a city he knew little about. Ronnie Anne was, in a way, like a life preserver.
Only things didn't work out.
At all.
See, somewhere, somehow, Ronnie Anne changed. Gone was playful tomboy of Lincoln's youth. In her place was an abrasive, loud-mouth woman who worked a dead end job and went clubbing every Friday and Saturday night. She was what Pop-Pop, dead these past two years, might call a "hood rat." Her idea of fun involved weed, alcohol, and partying, and the few times Lincoln met up with her, it felt almost like she was a different person entirely, an alien pod-woman who only looked like Ronalda Santiago, but wasn't really her.
Lincoln, on the other hand, was bookish and what Pop-Pop (bless his soul) would call "a real pencil-neck geek." He liked video games, Dungeons and Dragons, and Trek Warz. He still thought Ace Savvy was the man and Kang of the Rang remained his favorite epic fantasy film.
People change, he knew that, but he had an image of Ronnie Anne built up in his mind, and discovering that it was only a snapshot of a little girl who didn't exist anymore stung Lincoln deeply.
Worse was the thought that maybe...just maybe...he was the odd one here. Ronnie Anne wasn't that little girl anymore because little girls eventually grow up. Lincoln was, by and large, the same boy he was at eleven. He liked the same things, had a lot of the same opinions, you could say that, in essence, he had never grown up.
You'd be wrong, though.
Right?
Liking board games and science fiction didn't mean he wasn't an adult. He just liked what he liked. Ronnie Anne was the one who changed and really, did she change for the better? No, she hadn't.
That didn't stop the new and pressing self-doubts, and it didn't make him feel any better. Over the past two months he had been hyper-conscious of everything he did, liked, and said. Other boys his age went out with girls, played football, worked out, and other...well...grown-up things. He sat in front of a screen and played XBox Live with twelve-year-olds. Other guys his age didn't get as excited about things as he did. When the new Trek Warz movie came out last month, he was as giddy as a kid on Christmas...and that made him feel like crap. That's something a little boy would do, a man would acknowledge it with mild interest even if he was stoked for it.
He couldn't help himself, though. He was who he was.
Over the past few weeks, he had been coming to terms with that, and he was comfortable enough in his skin that playing DnD with his friends or reading Ace Savvy comics under a leafy tree in the commons didn't fill him with shame. He did, however, wonder if he was lacking something, some undefinable component of manhood.
A girlfriend?
Eh, maybe.
He'd never had a serious girlfriend outside of Ronnie Anne and like any normal guy, he wanted one, but he didn't see how that'd make him more grown-up. They joke about being with a girl making you a "man" but he knew immature man-boys who had girlfriends; it sure didn't help them.
He needed something else, but what?
Eight months in a bamboo cage?
He grinned. That was a reference to a video game. Call of Honor: Aftermath. In it, you play a guy who was taken POW in Vietnam and then comes home with a roaring case of PTSD. On level three, he gets into an argument with his wife and says, "I was a boy, then I spent eight months in a bamboo cage and came out a man."
As enticing as that sounded, Lincoln didn't think it would be any better than getting a girlfriend.
The northwest edge of State campus is bordered by Center Street, a broad lane boasting fast food joints, gas stations, and cheap motels where even cheaper hookers plied their not-so-secret trade. Every once in a while, one accosted Lincoln as he walked to or from the bus stop. They were all old, ugly, and had a look of shame in their drug-addled eyes. Lincoln had never taken one of them up on their offer (even the one who offered him a deep discount because he was "cute") and didn't see any way he ever would. Paying for sex is bad enough, but knowing that the distracted girl beneath you doesn't even want to be there...man, that's a new level of humiliation. The bus stop was on the corner of Center and Harley Staggers Avenue, its place marked by a simple glass and metal shelter over a bench. Trash, cigarette butts, and dead leaves littered the cracked concrete surrounding it, and a black guy in rags sat on the bench with his head down, his side to side sway telling Lincoln he was either drunk or high. Cars rushed by in either lane, and across the way, a couple construction workers in orange vests and yellow hard hats stood around a hole in the ground looking perplexed. Huh, it's round.
Lincoln leaned against a NO PARKING sign and absently watched traffic pass. Though he called himself an adult...and was in the legal sense...he was still only eighteen. It didn't make much sense to beat himself up for not being 100 percent grown-up when he was still technically a teenager. He was dimly aware that he had a lot of life ahead of him and thought that he would eventually have all the experiences that go into making one a true adult. It was just...he didn't know. Things had been weird since leaving Royal Woods and while he thought he was adjusted, maybe he wasn't. This was a time of change and transformation and he if that doesn't put you off balance, nothing will.
Counting down the days to the beginning of spring break, he found himself getting more and more excited by the prospect of hanging out with Luna. Like Ronnie Anne, she was familiar, a beacon of comfort in a dark, crashing sea. Whenever he was around her, or any of his sisters for that matter, he felt a certain ease, the way you might when you slip on an old shoe broken in juuuust right. Right now, craning forward to see down the street (still no bus), he hummed with nervous energy. He was always inexplicably apprehensive about seeing his family after long periods of time, but as soon as he got around them, his tension melted instantly away.
Ten minutes later, the bus ambled down the street and came to a rolling stop. The doors clunked open and Lincoln climbed on. He dropped his change into the fare box then moved down the aisle, grabbing a seat toward the back. Cool air pumped from overhead vents, but it was still hot, and he opened the window.
Eleven stops separated State from Luna's neighborhood. The route skirted the edge of Downtown, ran between the ritzy Hamilton Hills district to the north and Callahan Point in the south, and crossed the interstate over I-69. At one point, the Detroit River appeared in the distance, and Canada beyond.
Twenty-five minutes after setting out, Lincoln yanked the pullcord and the bus pulled to the curb in front of a Subway with grimy windows. The buildings here were all old and decrepit, their brick faded smooth and dull red by time and the elements, in some cases covered in elaborate graffiti, and the people Lincoln saw milling on the corner looked rough and mean. He got up, shouldered his bag, and got off.
In the near half-hour since leaving State, the temperature had risen ten degrees, turning the morning almost uncomfortably warm. Lincoln threaded his thumb through the strap of his backpack and walked the two blocks to Luna's building, a towering brownstone with a fire escape and barred windows on the first floor. Fifty years ago, it may have been a nice place, but today it was run down and dumpy. In the lobby, cracked floor tiles clacked under his feet and a hand lettered sign reading OUT OF ORDUR was taped to the elevator, as it had been every time he visited Luna and Sam. A Mexican woman in a shower cap and rumpled pink dress stood at the bank of cubby mailboxes to the left, and when Lincoln passed, he distinctly heard a muttered Jodida factura de electricidad.
Translation: Fucking electric bill.
Dirt, dust, and bits of debris littered the stairs and on the second floor landing, an old white man with a bushy beard sat against the wall with a 40 between his legs. Luna and Sam's apartment was at the end of the fourth. The carpet was matted and splotched with stains and faint cooking odors lingered in the stagnant air. Luna and Sam's place was pleasant enough, but the rest of the building made him feel unexplainably claustrophobic, like the walls were closing in on him.
At their door, he knocked and waited. At the end of the hall, a white guy came out of an apartment, scratched his nuts and went into another apartment directly across the way.
The knob turned and Luna appeared in the frame, clad in denim cutoffs and a purple tank top. Her hair was shaggier than it was the last time he saw her and her face a little thinner, as though she were finally losing those last few ounces of baby fat. Her big, brown eyes lit up when she registered his presence, and a shit-eating grin ran across her thin lips. "Hey, bro," she said and threw her arms out.
"Hey," Lincoln said.
Lincoln took her into his arms and she wrapped slipped her arms around his waist, her face burrowing affectionately into his chest. Her thin body fused to his, her soft warmth and the steady beat of her heart comforting and familiar, like a fuzzy blanket. Lincoln breathed deeply of her scent, clean and bold like summer rain, and he rested his chin on her head, her shaggy brown hair tickling his skin.
He wouldn't say he was closer to Luna than his other sisters, but, he supposed, he was. He didn't hug and cuddle Luan or Lynn the way he did Luna. Some people might call it weird, but their affection for one another was pure, innocent, and natural. Long ago, her constantly touching him, looking at him, and smiling at him when they were together made him uncomfortable, but now that he was older and had tasted the cold, bitter wine of a cruel and indifferent world, he appreciated it.
"I missed you," she said soberly.
"I missed you too," Lincoln said.
Without warning, Luna squeezed his as tight as she could, and his spine cracked in at least three places. He let out a breathless umph, then hissed through his teeth when she slapped his back as hard as she could.
Alright then.
If that's how it's gonna be.
He did the same, and she yelped.
She shoved him away with a laugh and swiped her bangs out of her eyes. "Don't you know you're not supposed to hit a girl?"
"I didn't hit, I smacked."
Luna bit her bottom lip and faked a punch to his stomach. Lincoln jumped back and crossed his arms defensively over his guts. "That counts as hitting," Luna said.
Inside, Luna closed the door behind them. Sunlight streamed through the windows and suffused the tidy living, lending it a bright and happy air. The walls here were clean and the carpet freshly vacuumed; an apple scented candle flickered on the coffee table and the lemony smell of Lysol found his nose. Sam lay stretched out on the couch in a pair of jeans and a black T-shirt with KORN across the chest. The remote rested on her stomach and her hands were laced behind her head. "Hey, Linc," she said.
"Hey," he said.
Luna took his bag and sat it in the corner, then the three of them sat on the couch, Lincoln in the middle and Luna snuggling up to him like a satisfied cat. "How was the ride over?" Sam asked.
"It was alright," Lincoln shrugged. "Saw a couple winos."
Sam snickered. "Was that dude still laid out on the landing?"
"Nah, he was sitting up when I walked by."
Sam hung her head. "He's been living there for, like, a week."
"He's fine," Luna said. "He says hi when he's awake."
"He didn't say it, but he looked it," Lincoln quipped.
Sam laughed and Luna rolled her eyes. "Okay, Luan," Luna said.
"That wasn't a pun, though."
"It also wasn't funny."
Ow.
And thus started the weirdest week of Lincoln Loud's life.
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Deviant Desires