81
skeletons of shadow
Super Junior/Heroes (KiTeuk, Kangin, Donghae)
1,684 words. Second person. R. Mild spoilers for Heroes, but au from the main plot.
Cast: Kibum - Isaac, Eeteuk - Eden, Kangin - the Hatian, Donghae - Mr. Bennett, Kyuhyun - Sylar, Sungmin - Peter, Siwon - Simone, Xiah - Charlie.
In the end, she tells him to cut open his skull, tells him to crack it like an egg over a mixing bowl, and he does. She watches the blood drip down his cheeks, through his hair, the back of his neck, and she tells him to laugh, sound bubbling from his lungs like the blood from his skull, and he does. And just before he dies, she tells him tell her how to use it, how to use the brains, and he does.
You find her on the floor with her hands in his head, blood seeping around her fingers, and she turns to you, her smile flickering as she takes him in, and she says I just wanted to do good before her eyes roll up in her head.
It’s not until she wakes up again that the screaming starts.
*
“It has to be fixed,” she says to you, “fix it, Kibum, please, the sound of it ticking, tick tick ticking, the sound. It’s telling me to fix it, but I don’t know how.” She’s curled up on your bed with her hands over her ears, and you want her back.
“Eeteuk,” you say, holding out your hand for her, “Eeteuk, tell me, what’s broken?” Her hands slowly fall to her sides, and she smiles.
“Everything.”
*
The drop of blood on the floor is quarter sized, shiny and red, wet. You stand there, watching it, and she says,
“Don’t move.”
You look up, and she’s in the doorway, fingertips wet with blood, and you watch the soft glide of it down her arms. Drip drops of blood on the smooth hardwood. But she’s still Eeteuk, and you can’t move. She digs her fingers into her arms, and she smiles at you. You know by now that when she smiles (that dimple, the glimmer of her sharp white teeth) she’s almost herself and almost sane and she wants none of it. None.
“Tell them to leave me alone, Kibum. Tell them to leave me alone.” The sharp tilt of her voice vertical and to the left means she’s using her power, one of them, and it’s not working.
When you can finally move again, you press your fingers to the cuts up and down her forearms and you think telekinesis.
*
In the night, you listen to her talk, and you don’t sleep. You’re not sure she can stop talking anymore, there’s too much inside that she can’t make sense of.
“The time traveler is readying himself for war, but he doesn’t know the stakes, and he doesn’t know the odds. He barely even knows her name,” she pauses, almost considering, shivering in your arms. “Her name was Xiah, and she’s in here now, with me. With me in here with him.” Eeteuk presses her face against your neck, wet breath shallow and wild, and you stroke a hand through her short hair, and you wish, you wish, you wish-
“You want me back, you want the real me, but I’m right here, and if I’m not here, than who am I now? And if I’m not the real me, than who is?”
And you think telepathy. You touch the small of her back, bare skin, and you pull her in closer. There’s not much else you can do.
“Kill me,” she says, “kill me,” but you know you never will, and you know that she knows that. “Kill the betrayer, before you bleed and there’s nothing left.”
*
You try it without the drugs, you try the art without the drugs, and it comes out jumbled and unwilling, like prodding a sleeping animal. You get snatches of faces (Sungmin and Siwon secretly smiling, Changmin behind a podium), moving bodies (Kangin running toward a glass wall, Donghae smiling as he pulls the trigger), but mostly you get her.
standing on a lake of ice with her arms spread, and she’s so cold, so cold, unbearably cold, her lips tinged blue, her arms and belly scarred
and
the curve of her smile as she watches you sleep, but you see the gun in her hand, and the way that she holds it, toward her own slight body
and
her tongue in the crook of your arm, small and pink, the words pouring from her mouth ‘snip snip snip, not losing what you’ll miss’
She’s staring at you when you put down your brush and look back, but she just snaps and turns away.
“Stop looking through me,” she says, “there’s nothing here to see.”
*
You pull her fingers out of his head and tug her into your lap, lips against her hair, whispering words you don’t know now and won’t remember later. She’s pale and still and dead in against you, but she’s breathing and that’s enough.
When Donghae opens the door, measured steps stopping just next to you, you have no idea how long you’ve been sitting there on the floor with her, the blood soaking into your pants. Donghae doesn’t look surprised, but he never does, and you understand. Kangin is standing in the doorway, but his face holds even less expression than Donghae’s does.
“What are you going to do with her?” you ask, your voice muffled against her hair.
“Take her back to her room,” Donghae says, and that’s the end of it.
*
She steals your red paint, and she starts to write on the walls. Thick trails of dripping words and phrases that make no sense to you, but you let her because you’re out of ideas.
Kyuhyun is Sylar is me, they say. your walls can’t hold us and two months left and tick TOCK.
Above the window, curtains pulled back to frame the glass: I can freeze the flesh from your bones through summer, feast on it in the winter, beneath the bare trees
Just above the light switch, to the right of the door: If I flew, who would catch me?
Along the molding near the floor, small and thin: my mind is filled with them, and she says she’s sorry, sorry, sorrysorry
You trace them with your fingers and try to understand, but even she doesn’t know, so how are you supposed to?
*
She screams for three days, whenever she’s not sedated, and the only reason she stops is that her voice gives out.
“Eeteuk,” you say, and sit next to her bed, “can you hear me? Eeteuk?”
“I can hear the birds, beautiful, beautiful, but they’ll die soon, they’ll melt into skeletons of shadow against the sidewalk.”
They’re her first words, after, and it takes you a while to figure them out. She won’t explain them. Her next words are,
“Kibum, Kibum, I hurt.”
*
She huddles against your ribs and breathes out cold.
“I can feel the ice on my tongue,” she says, and you shiver but you pull her closer against you. She has ice on her breath, yes, and don’t know what to call it, but she can’t control it yet. Her fingers leech cold, and you curl up with her under all the blankets you can find and you try your body heat against it. Her skin is icy, pale pale pale, and she says,
“You burn, you burn, oh, Kibum, don’t,” but you stay anyway, until you can’t stop shuddering, until you can see your breath. She licks the hollow of your throat, liquid ice, and you wonder if you’ll freeze to death in the night, and you wonder if you’ll mind, if she’ll care. She presses her face against your chest, wraps her arms around your waist and she says,
“Don’t die. They still need you.”
*
You don’t know what they do with Kyuhyun’s body, the ruined mush of his brain, but Donghae doesn’t come to see you. Kangin visits her once, watches from the doorway and she tosses, sedated, digging her fingernails into the sheets and twisting them around her. He looks at you with an expression you don’t understand, and then he leaves.
*
“Get away from me!” She screams and the sheets wrap around you and pull you down, “Away, away, away from me, get away!”
She’s bleeding on the bed again, the cuts across her stomach criss crossing and complicated. She pushes you down, with her fingers instead, and she says,
“Stay.” So you do.
She smears her blood under your eyes and down your cheeks like war paint, straddling your thighs and leaning in close. She licks at the corner of your mouth, slips her tongue past your lips, and she’s still bleeding, but her fingers wrap around the back of your head.
“You can’t be mine,” she says sadly when she pulls away. Then she tilts her head to the side, fingers sifting through your hair. “But I can be yours, at least for a little while.”
When she presses closer, she’s pushing you with everything she has, and you can’t resist.
*
She leaves you notes, slips of paper with small neat handwriting, and you keep them in the drawer next to your bed, just in case.
The first says if you weren’t here, I’d be just so much spider web strung and stretched, fibers of nothing but glistening white.
You find one under your pillow, a few days later, that says don’t trust the politician, his hands are stained with black paint and disbelief.
The one curled inside the toe of your left shoe says I wish you would kill me, but I’m glad that you still can’t.
One says it wasn’t my idea and one says BANG, dead, the blood ran red, all this filth inside my head.
The last one just says I love you.
*
“Eeteuk,” you say, so much more you should be saying, like no and don’t and please, and she smiles.
“I know,” she says, “you can’t. But I can.”
She flicks off the safety, and you want to say stop, but you just say,
“Eeteuk, Eeteuk,” your voice half broken, and she shakes her head at you, puts the gun to her head -
and you lunge.
*
Super Junior/Heroes (KiTeuk, Kangin, Donghae)
1,684 words. Second person. R. Mild spoilers for Heroes, but au from the main plot.
Cast: Kibum - Isaac, Eeteuk - Eden, Kangin - the Hatian, Donghae - Mr. Bennett, Kyuhyun - Sylar, Sungmin - Peter, Siwon - Simone, Xiah - Charlie.
In the end, she tells him to cut open his skull, tells him to crack it like an egg over a mixing bowl, and he does. She watches the blood drip down his cheeks, through his hair, the back of his neck, and she tells him to laugh, sound bubbling from his lungs like the blood from his skull, and he does. And just before he dies, she tells him tell her how to use it, how to use the brains, and he does.
You find her on the floor with her hands in his head, blood seeping around her fingers, and she turns to you, her smile flickering as she takes him in, and she says I just wanted to do good before her eyes roll up in her head.
It’s not until she wakes up again that the screaming starts.
*
“It has to be fixed,” she says to you, “fix it, Kibum, please, the sound of it ticking, tick tick ticking, the sound. It’s telling me to fix it, but I don’t know how.” She’s curled up on your bed with her hands over her ears, and you want her back.
“Eeteuk,” you say, holding out your hand for her, “Eeteuk, tell me, what’s broken?” Her hands slowly fall to her sides, and she smiles.
“Everything.”
*
The drop of blood on the floor is quarter sized, shiny and red, wet. You stand there, watching it, and she says,
“Don’t move.”
You look up, and she’s in the doorway, fingertips wet with blood, and you watch the soft glide of it down her arms. Drip drops of blood on the smooth hardwood. But she’s still Eeteuk, and you can’t move. She digs her fingers into her arms, and she smiles at you. You know by now that when she smiles (that dimple, the glimmer of her sharp white teeth) she’s almost herself and almost sane and she wants none of it. None.
“Tell them to leave me alone, Kibum. Tell them to leave me alone.” The sharp tilt of her voice vertical and to the left means she’s using her power, one of them, and it’s not working.
When you can finally move again, you press your fingers to the cuts up and down her forearms and you think telekinesis.
*
In the night, you listen to her talk, and you don’t sleep. You’re not sure she can stop talking anymore, there’s too much inside that she can’t make sense of.
“The time traveler is readying himself for war, but he doesn’t know the stakes, and he doesn’t know the odds. He barely even knows her name,” she pauses, almost considering, shivering in your arms. “Her name was Xiah, and she’s in here now, with me. With me in here with him.” Eeteuk presses her face against your neck, wet breath shallow and wild, and you stroke a hand through her short hair, and you wish, you wish, you wish-
“You want me back, you want the real me, but I’m right here, and if I’m not here, than who am I now? And if I’m not the real me, than who is?”
And you think telepathy. You touch the small of her back, bare skin, and you pull her in closer. There’s not much else you can do.
“Kill me,” she says, “kill me,” but you know you never will, and you know that she knows that. “Kill the betrayer, before you bleed and there’s nothing left.”
*
You try it without the drugs, you try the art without the drugs, and it comes out jumbled and unwilling, like prodding a sleeping animal. You get snatches of faces (Sungmin and Siwon secretly smiling, Changmin behind a podium), moving bodies (Kangin running toward a glass wall, Donghae smiling as he pulls the trigger), but mostly you get her.
standing on a lake of ice with her arms spread, and she’s so cold, so cold, unbearably cold, her lips tinged blue, her arms and belly scarred
and
the curve of her smile as she watches you sleep, but you see the gun in her hand, and the way that she holds it, toward her own slight body
and
her tongue in the crook of your arm, small and pink, the words pouring from her mouth ‘snip snip snip, not losing what you’ll miss’
She’s staring at you when you put down your brush and look back, but she just snaps and turns away.
“Stop looking through me,” she says, “there’s nothing here to see.”
*
You pull her fingers out of his head and tug her into your lap, lips against her hair, whispering words you don’t know now and won’t remember later. She’s pale and still and dead in against you, but she’s breathing and that’s enough.
When Donghae opens the door, measured steps stopping just next to you, you have no idea how long you’ve been sitting there on the floor with her, the blood soaking into your pants. Donghae doesn’t look surprised, but he never does, and you understand. Kangin is standing in the doorway, but his face holds even less expression than Donghae’s does.
“What are you going to do with her?” you ask, your voice muffled against her hair.
“Take her back to her room,” Donghae says, and that’s the end of it.
*
She steals your red paint, and she starts to write on the walls. Thick trails of dripping words and phrases that make no sense to you, but you let her because you’re out of ideas.
Kyuhyun is Sylar is me, they say. your walls can’t hold us and two months left and tick TOCK.
Above the window, curtains pulled back to frame the glass: I can freeze the flesh from your bones through summer, feast on it in the winter, beneath the bare trees
Just above the light switch, to the right of the door: If I flew, who would catch me?
Along the molding near the floor, small and thin: my mind is filled with them, and she says she’s sorry, sorry, sorrysorry
You trace them with your fingers and try to understand, but even she doesn’t know, so how are you supposed to?
*
She screams for three days, whenever she’s not sedated, and the only reason she stops is that her voice gives out.
“Eeteuk,” you say, and sit next to her bed, “can you hear me? Eeteuk?”
“I can hear the birds, beautiful, beautiful, but they’ll die soon, they’ll melt into skeletons of shadow against the sidewalk.”
They’re her first words, after, and it takes you a while to figure them out. She won’t explain them. Her next words are,
“Kibum, Kibum, I hurt.”
*
She huddles against your ribs and breathes out cold.
“I can feel the ice on my tongue,” she says, and you shiver but you pull her closer against you. She has ice on her breath, yes, and don’t know what to call it, but she can’t control it yet. Her fingers leech cold, and you curl up with her under all the blankets you can find and you try your body heat against it. Her skin is icy, pale pale pale, and she says,
“You burn, you burn, oh, Kibum, don’t,” but you stay anyway, until you can’t stop shuddering, until you can see your breath. She licks the hollow of your throat, liquid ice, and you wonder if you’ll freeze to death in the night, and you wonder if you’ll mind, if she’ll care. She presses her face against your chest, wraps her arms around your waist and she says,
“Don’t die. They still need you.”
*
You don’t know what they do with Kyuhyun’s body, the ruined mush of his brain, but Donghae doesn’t come to see you. Kangin visits her once, watches from the doorway and she tosses, sedated, digging her fingernails into the sheets and twisting them around her. He looks at you with an expression you don’t understand, and then he leaves.
*
“Get away from me!” She screams and the sheets wrap around you and pull you down, “Away, away, away from me, get away!”
She’s bleeding on the bed again, the cuts across her stomach criss crossing and complicated. She pushes you down, with her fingers instead, and she says,
“Stay.” So you do.
She smears her blood under your eyes and down your cheeks like war paint, straddling your thighs and leaning in close. She licks at the corner of your mouth, slips her tongue past your lips, and she’s still bleeding, but her fingers wrap around the back of your head.
“You can’t be mine,” she says sadly when she pulls away. Then she tilts her head to the side, fingers sifting through your hair. “But I can be yours, at least for a little while.”
When she presses closer, she’s pushing you with everything she has, and you can’t resist.
*
She leaves you notes, slips of paper with small neat handwriting, and you keep them in the drawer next to your bed, just in case.
The first says if you weren’t here, I’d be just so much spider web strung and stretched, fibers of nothing but glistening white.
You find one under your pillow, a few days later, that says don’t trust the politician, his hands are stained with black paint and disbelief.
The one curled inside the toe of your left shoe says I wish you would kill me, but I’m glad that you still can’t.
One says it wasn’t my idea and one says BANG, dead, the blood ran red, all this filth inside my head.
The last one just says I love you.
*
“Eeteuk,” you say, so much more you should be saying, like no and don’t and please, and she smiles.
“I know,” she says, “you can’t. But I can.”
She flicks off the safety, and you want to say stop, but you just say,
“Eeteuk, Eeteuk,” your voice half broken, and she shakes her head at you, puts the gun to her head -
and you lunge.
*