checking out (system blow): [2/2]
part one | part two
We drive slower and speak louder over the heavy rains beating down on the roof of the bus. The wind blows the drops in sideways and the guards closed most of the windows but I asked them to leave mine open because a wet arm and lap is as close I’m ever going to get to getting caught in the rain again.
Today Baekhyun calls for Kyungsoo to sit next to him during visiting hour. Wufan sits on his own because he likes to lie down across three seats at once-his legs would stretch across the aisle to prop his feet up on the other side-and take catnaps when he gets the chance.
I stare, because I know for a fact that Baekhyun doesn’t like the rain.
“I wish I had your hair,” Baekhyun says, elbow placed on the back of Kyungsoo’s seat so that he could run those long, mesmerizing fingers through Kyungsoo’s thick midnight locks. “You’re so pretty, Kyungsoo.”
Across the aisle Zitao sits up. “Are you seeing this?”
I stare, because it occurs to me that Baekhyun hasn’t bothered anyone since Sehun got on the bus.
Kyungsoo looks back at Baekhyun with a slightly uncertain expression, but he doesn’t ask Baekhyun to stop. He’s also taken the window seat because Baekhyun told him that he doesn’t like the rain. Because he understands. Keep them happy, keep them happy, keep them happy.
Except something’s not right.
Baekhyun moves his hand to stroke Kyungsoo’s cheek, fingers brushing light and delicate. “Who do you take after in your family? Did your mom give you those lips, or was it your dad? What about your eyebrows?”
The entire right side of my body is soaked and the cold is starting to bite a little, sweeping like venom and turning my knuckles white.
Yixing turns to look at me, utterly emotionless. “Seven bottles of beer on the wall, seven bottles of beer...”
I realize belatedly that it’s not the cold. My nails are digging into my palms.
Wufan is still asleep.
“If one of those bottles should happen to fall...”
Four aisles in front of me Sehun looks up.
“Six bottles left of beer on the wall.”
“And what big eyes you have.”
“NO!” Kyungsoo screams; their seat combusts into a furious tangle of limbs whipping about as the bus walls shudder beneath Kyungsoo’s shrieking and the guard moves to get up but someone else gets there first and he’s trying to pull Baekhyun off of Kyungsoo but Baekhyun’s latched onto him hard and Wufan’s finally awake and he hollers Kyungsoo’s name louder than I’ve ever heard him shout and Baekhyun’s twisting in Sehun’s grasp to face him now and everything starts getting louder and louder and my legs feel like they’re going to collapse and then something’s breaking in my hands and there’s an explosion against the side of my face and I can taste blood in my mouth and-
“Get the fuck down!” The guard knocks Baekhyun down face-first, his knee digging hard between Baekhyun’s shoulder blades to hold him in place as he makes a grab for Baekhyun’s hands. “You little cunt, and the reports said you were so well-behaved, too-”
“Oh my god, Luhan, you-are you alright?”
“Shut him up,” I groan, ignoring the sting in my face and squeezing my eyes shut tight as I lie twisted on the floor. Kyungsoo’s still screaming at the top of his lungs right over my head and the high-pitched noise is pounding mercilessly against my temple and eardrums. “Shut him up, Wufan, for fuck’s sake, shut him the fuck up!”
“Kyungsoo,” I hear Wufan say, voice low and secure, and Kyungsoo’s wails move away from over my head and further towards the back of the bus. “Kyungsoo, shh, shh, it’s alright, I’ve got you, I’m right here, he can’t hurt you, it’s okay, come here...”
“Let me go, let me fucking go, I don’t have them yet, he’s still got them, I didn’t get them, I didn’t get them, I need them, do you understand me, let me fucking go I don’t have them-” Baekhyun convulses violently underneath the guard’s hold in a desperate attempt to free himself, tears soaking his flushed face. He starts banging his head repeatedly against the floor, leaving a mess of drool and snot behind, his entire frame heaving with his sobs. “Please, please, I want them, I didn’t get them yet, I didn’t get them, please...”
A hand grips around my arm. “Luhan?”
I finally force my eyes back open. The back of my head feels like someone has taken a sledgehammer to it but I can tell by the way Sehun’s hovering over me and assessing the left side of my face that that is where the real damage has been dealt.
“Did Baekhyun do this?”
Yixing’s face pops into view as well. Apparently this is worth leaving his seat despite not regaining visiting privileges yet. “Shit, that’s deep. Might’ve even torn through a few nerve endings.”
I turn my head to look over at Baekhyun, who is now utterly incapable of forming any coherent words and is just garbling and making a lot of furious noise. His right hand has blood all over the fingertips and nails now, just the way I’d always imagined them.
I’ve made a huge mistake.
Yixing leans over the guard to study Baekhyun. “Think you broke his wrist,” he reports to me.
I shove Sehun’s hand off of my arm to stand up, even though my legs are weak from the disuse of never having left my seat till now and the only thing that kept them from buckling on the way here was pure adrenaline. The scratch marks are beginning to throb and I can feel something wet tricking down the underside of my chin.
“I need the first aid kit,” I call out to the guard in a dead voice.
“Not that I don’t appreciate what you just did, but you’re going to have to wait a minute because I’m kind of busy here. In the meantime everyone else sit the fuck down.”
There’s a seat at the very front of the bus that gets used for incidents like this. It’s the only one that’s got belt restrains to hold your wrists and feet down to the seat, and because it’s at the very front all you get is the view outside-no other inmates to stare at and muse over, in case they haven’t calmed down yet. By this point the night shift has woken up from all of the noise and helps the day guard pull Baekhyun up to the front of the bus and strap him down.
Yixing walks calmly back to his seat. Now that he’s gotten a good look at my battle wound there’s no reason for him to be disobeying orders. I follow him in order to get back to my own seat, only to realize that Wufan and Kyungsoo are both occupying it, Kyungsoo curled up on Wufan’s lap and gripping onto his shirt as he continues to sob into Wufan’s neck, Wufan’s arms gently rocking him as he murmurs soothing and deep into Kyungsoo’s hair.
A hand closes around my wrist. I’m being tugged back in the direction I just came from. “Sit down,” Sehun says.
I can’t sit down. This was not supposed to happen. This shouldn’t be happening. I’m supposed to be at the back of the bus, away from everyone, away from him. Sehun shoves me into his aisle anyway, and I flop lifelessly into the window seat as he cages me in, sitting down next to me and placing the first aid kit in his lap.
“What the fuck were you doing trying to intervene like that?” Yixing says from the back of the bus, on his knees in his seat and steadying himself on the backrest of the chair in front of him to look at Sehun.
“He would’ve hurt Kyungsoo.” Sehun wipes something along my cheek and neck to clean the blood away. I don’t look at him, just stare straight forward, right past everything and through the windshield at the front of the bus.
“Could’ve hurt you.”
“He didn’t though.”
“You weren’t the brightest kid in your class, were you?”
Sehun ignores him. “I don’t think these’ll need stitches.” He rubs something thick and greasy onto the scratches. His fingers are careful on my face, too slow, too gentle. His touch his warm. Maternal. I refuse to acknowledge him, because that last thought makes my throat tighten.
Eventually he gets around to taping some gauze onto them, and after he does he takes hold of my chin and forces me to look at him.
“Did he hurt you anywhere else?” Sehun asks, searching me.
I empty myself out and look back at him blankly. “Move out of the way.”
“Luhan.”
“Let me go back to my seat. I want my seat back.”
Sehun exhales through his nostrils. Something in his eyes goes dark, weighs down his shoulders and I watch them shrink. I remember why we’re all here in the first place. Keep him happy.
So I humor him. I reach up and take his hand in mine, the one that’s still holding my chin, and pull it away, holding it a little longer than I should have. His hand is warm and dry in my palm. “Please,” I say.
Sehun looks at me, then relents with a sigh. I start breathing again.
Wufan gives Kyungsoo a moment alone with me. He’s still sniffling, nose all red and eyes bloodshot (but still intact). Snow White on a sick day. He looks like he wants to hug me so I stand stiffer than a wooden post with arms pressed to my sides.
“Thanks,” Kyungsoo says, voice cracking and hoarse.
“Don’t do that,” I want to snap at him, but he’s finally calmed down some and I’m not a complete idiot. “Just be careful,” I don’t say to him, don’t need to, because with an incident like this Baekhyun is as good as on death row now. To return to the calm that he had once mastered is impossible; he is going to waste away and die in that chair at the front of the bus.
So instead I lean forward and drop my voice. “I suggest you keep Wufan in check. He might try and do something stupid otherwise.”
Kyungsoo swallows.
Zitao taps Yixing’s shoulder. They switch spots so that Zitao’s in the aisle seat now. “Why’d you do it?” Zitao asks.
The rainwater turns the air ripe with the metallic stench of my blood.
“You’ve never tried to stop someone before. You just watched same as us. You don’t even like Kyungsoo.”
Further up, Kyungsoo has both of Sehun’s hands in his own. He says something to Sehun, and Sehun smiles. It
makes him look younger than he already is.
Zitao follows my gaze. He watches them. He stares at me.
“You can’t be serious.”
I close my eyes. This shit is exhausting.
“You should know better,” I mumble to the piece of thread I’m picking at between our seats.
Kyungsoo plays with his thumbs next to me. He does know better, better than anyone on this bus, really, so I can’t understand why he’s entertaining the risk of sitting next to me.
It takes him a while, but then he looks at me, right at the spot where my wounds are covered with Sehun’s patchwork. His gaze is quiet and serious. “I’m just returning what I owe you.”
I finally look over at him, because that has to be the smartest thing I’ve heard him say yet.
I wake up to a mouthful of dust. The air is stiflingly hot. I cough air that grates the inside of my throat like sandpaper, narrowing eyes to the wide expanse of sand and brush outside. Where the fuck do they keep driving us?
“You bled through your bandages. They need to be changed.”
I wipe the moisture off my brow with the back of my hand. I stink of sweat and rust.
It stings like a bitch, and the way he wordlessly fusses over the task, with that soft maternal touch again, is laden with a bitter familiarity that gets me agitated, but I let Sehun do as he likes. No need to upset him in such irritable heat. Or anyone else, for that matter.
“Forgot to thank you the other day.”
“For what?” I mutter.
“For helping me.”
“Whoa, Jesus!” Yixing yells as I tackle Sehun straight out of our seats, the two of us crash-colliding into Yixing’s before tumbling onto the ground.
“Hey!” the guard gets up and moves towards us.
“I didn’t do it to help you,” I seethe, pining my arm across Sehun’s chest. “Do you understand me?”
Sehun looks up at me, expression unreadable. “You don’t get it, do you?” he says.
The guard comes closer.
“You’re not dangerous. I know that. You know that. And I’ll make you see it.”
“Get off of him!”
“I will,” Sehun says, “break you.”
My body freezes on me and becomes a roaring vortex of white noise. I can’t do anything but stare at Sehun as the guard finally yanks me off of him.
“Have you ever stopped to smell the flowers?”
I stare. We all do. Sehun’s prohibited from sitting next to me for the time being, so there he is, leaning way over the middle seat of the bus, calling out to me, the volume needed to carry the distance attracting the attention of every other person on the bus.
“Have you ever taken a moment to slow down and look at them, take in their colour and their fragrance and their shape, appreciate them for the way they remind you how delicate everything is? Or do you just walk by them, ignore them, isolate their beauty from your vision, because the want, the need to pick them off their stems after is too tempting?”
Everyone watches me for a reaction, even the guard.
“Don’t be stupid,” I say back to him. “I don’t pick flowers.”
“It doesn’t mean anything anyway.”
“Just let me do this, please?”
Sehun grabs hold of my right hand before I can protest any further and holds it in both of his. He leans over and squints like he’s reading very small print.
I stare. This is the first thing he does after regaining visiting privileges.
“Your heart line’s all chopped up. It’s a sign of emotional trauma.”
“Is that supposed to be news?”
Sehun doesn’t say anything. It pisses me off, because now he’s making it like it’s supposed to mean something.
“Inconsistent thought. Lots of life change, by external means. Long life.”
“Not what I wanted to hear.” I pull my hand away. Ignore how cold it feels afterward. “What the hell you doing learning superstitious shit like this anyway?”
Sehun smiles like we share a secret. “Before, when I didn’t know what was wrong with me, I just tried looking at people’s palms instead.”
Before. We all had a before. But talking about it is slowly coming a weird taboo here. Of course that means that Sehun goes ahead and talks about before.
“What did you do?”
“What?”
“To calm down.”
I look Sehun in the eye. “I talked about my mom.”
That forces Sehun to take a minute so it can sink in.
“You ever tried reading your own palm?” I say sardonically. “Live your life through your lines? Could’ve made it out of this situation if you tried.”
Sehun shakes his head. “Can’t.” He holds our hands out together for me to compare, then points to his own palm. “My fate line’s missing.”
I think too much.
My heart slowly becomes a separate entity in my chest, something I can feel. Probably a sugar rush. They loaded the sweets on heavy when the bus stopped a few days ago. (The front seat’s empty now.)
I can’t sleep even as the night sky sings me a lullaby.
The window spits out sand. In my eye. On my seatmate. On Sehun.
I look at Sehun’s sleeping face.
“So what’s wrong with you anyway?” I finally asked him one day.
Sehun didn’t answer, and when he started slumping sideways I thought he just fell asleep. But then, just before I dozed off too, Sehun opened his mouth, his breath hot on my neck. “I haunt people.”
I don’t like him.
“Here.” Sehun hands me the muffin. “I’m allergic to eggs anyway.”
I don’t like him.
“My name is Shixun,” Sehun says in the stupidest Mandarin I’ve ever heard, and I have to look out the window and press quivering lips together while Yixing and Zitao howl in the background.
I don’t like him.
“You drooled on me while you slept,” Sehun says, “but I didn’t wake you since you finally looked ugly for once.”
I don’t like him. I don’t like him. I don’t like him. I don’t like him. I don’t like him. I don’t like him.
“Told you,” Sehun laughs. He points to my face. “Told you I’d break you.”
Now everyone sits with bated breaths as they stare at me, and for the first time, I understand about the flowers.
I hate him.
It’s all wrong.
“No,” I say, staring.
Sehun talks over me. “You don’t get it, do you?” he says softly.
The bristles catch and make crackling noises around my ears as they snap through sweat and dirt-encrusted knots.
“I don’t want to die.”
“No, no, no, no.”
“But you’re so radiant when you smile.”
“No, no, no no no no no.”
“It makes me smile too, Luhan. It makes me happy. Isn’t that what you want?”
“Stop,” I say, and my mouth tastes like salt. “Stop, stop it, Sehun.”
Sehun finally stops brushing my hair, looking at me, and I think for a moment that he might actually leave. Instead he reaches out and places a hand on my chest, thin and frail just like the rest of him. It makes me hyperaware of how violently my heart is beating.
“See?” Sehun grins, pressing his fingertips to my pulse. “We’re exactly the same.”
Nothing nothing’s there stop stop perfect stop don’t do that no don’t think don’t look like sunlight it’s nothing stop don’t think smile it hurts look away don’t think it hurts it hurts-
“Hey,” Yixing calls out to me.
Sehun’s head nearly falls out of my lap as the bus swerves abruptly to the right. I reach out before he can and place my arm, secure, over his chest. Something drums against my palm.
See? We’re exactly the same.
“Hey, Luhan,” Yixing says, a few tufts of the hair at the top of his head wiggling in the cross breeze that our open windows create, “sorry about the kid.”
For once, breakfast tasted good. The air smells really clean today, so I spend it with my head lazing against the headrest and my face tilted towards the breeze. I feel lightheaded, dazed, not like myself.
(-ould brush my hair until it was fri-)
I allow myself to stare at Sehun’s face. He’s sleeping with his head in my lap. I touch his hair and his forehead and his eyelids and his cheeks, and then finally his neck, where my hand stays for the rest of the day. My hands are rough and dry but I sit, all day, and massage Sehun’s throat gently. Gently. Gently.
Something doesn’t feel right. There’s something that’s not good about this. I can sense it, vaguely. But I don’t remember why.
(-e’d bake me muffins and buy me ba-)
I feel so light.
Just as I reach over with my other hand, Sehun opens his eyes and looks at me. In the lighting of the sun at this angle, I can see myself in his pupils, the first I’ve seen myself in a very long time. And my face is doing something that it’s been out of practice with, so that my expression looks deranged, and could be mistaken for a grimace.
(-ext to me and hold me hold me you always held me while I sle-)
But Sehun knows what my face is trying to do, and he copies me, except it’s the real thing, warm and present. He takes the hand still hovering over him and kisses the inside of my palm.
And that’s when my fingers tighten.
I guess I’m checking out soon, huh?
Where?
Outside.
What? How?
...You’re smiling.
The next morning, the bus stops, and the seat next to mine is empty.