Bread and Butter

Bend that rotten back of yers, lil' basterd! Our rotten floor has planks of wood more flexable than ya!" old John grunted, almost spitting as he talked.

"Nooo, dad, stop! You're gonna hurt him!!" Alfred even stopped his exercise, staring with his eyes wide open at what was being done to his little brother's body.

"N- no, it doesn't hurt at all," little Oscar's voice could be barely heard because of the tension in his body. His cute face was all wet and some of his long blond curls got stuck to his forehead.

"Alfred! Why did ya stop the exercise?! Ya think the muscle would grow by itself!?" the old man roared at the brunet boy.

The boy got back to the workout, his face just as wet as his brother's. It was a usual evening since both of them were adopted by John and began to call him a father. John worked as a clown in the circus since his very youth, but now he was nothing but an old fat ruin.

He found the boys begging in the street and talked them into living with him because they could do much more together than apart. He didn't promise an easy life full of candies, but promised that he knows some tricks to put some bread on the table. Since they started to live together, John began to train the older boy as an athlete and the younger one as a bendy clown.

After a month they started performing some little stunts in the street. John figured out he wasn't mistaken about the boys' talents and he started getting more and more demanding of them, specially Oscar whose bendy skills kept attracting bigger and bigger crowds. Soon John became very pushy with the boy, trying to make him even more flexible.

Little Oscar knew, of course, that it's his bendy back that got them nearly all of their daily bread, so he tried his best not to whine while getting trained, and it's mostly his brother Alfred who was worried all the time.

_{The inspiration for this story came after watching the music clip Geboren um zu leben (Born to live) by Unheilig ^.^ I loved it and watched it 5 times in one day XD}