got your bible, got your gun
GOT YOUR BIBLE, GOT YOUR GUN
3400 words, jaejoong/nana, creepy
A/N: True Detective introduced me to the wonderful The King in Yellow, a book by Robert W. Chambers. I’ve read it and I’ve loved it like I usually love all dark eerie things. So this came out of my reading and my obsession with True Detective; the story is set in rural United States, loosely inspired by the tv show atmosphere and two stories from the book (In the Court of the Dragon and The Street of the Four Winds) - plus Lana Del Rey’s Ultraviolence.
Oh, it's actually a love story, between something cruel and something wicked. My favorite kind. Also: it's unfinished. Oopsies. Have fun! ♥
I love you the first time
I love you the last time
Yo soy la princesa, comprende mis white lines
‘Cause I'm your jazz singer
And you're my cult leader
I love you forever
Nana has voodoo eyes, that’s his best description of her.
Voodoo eyes, rattling the lungs inside his body.
She dips her head, swinging her body in a perfect allegra, feet touching heights and dusty air. A few bucks are thrown around her, as she spins around the pole - the angel, that’s how they call that (that’s how Jaejoong calls her, in his mind). She’s barely dressed, the most interesting parts of her body hiding secretly behind strips of cheap fabric. The room smells of tacky perfume and smoke, the music is questionable; her show goes on, slightly sleazy, deliberately slow.
Nobody claps when she’s done; she picks up the fifty-six dollars spread around her feet. Nana disappears behind her curtains, any leftover charm swaying on her bony hips, glitter-covered eyes facing the other way.
“You need a ride home?”
He’s been waiting for her for the past hour, standing idly at the bar’s parking lot. A crystalline layer of ice makes everything glow in the shady background.
"No."
She's all wrapped in a sweater, black, twice as big as her diminutive body, a hoodie covering her white stroke of hair. Her legs are bare despite the biting breeze, old converse shoes on her feet, gray and ugly. Nana doesn't stall. She keeps walking, seemingly unaware of the darkness around her. Jaejoong knows she has been dipping her feet into it for a while.
"I'll give you money, if you let me take you home."
He means it. Jaejoong wears biker jackets and jeans and there's a mess going on on his insides all the time. His face is smudged with dirt. She stops, a small smile curling her lips up. Gumiho, he thinks. She’s a gumiho. She feeds on human liver and $1 cheeseburgers at the local McDonald’s.
"I'm expensive."
"How?”
There’s a pause in which she takes a pack of camel N.9’s from the hoodie’s pocket, the pink box a contrast to her looks. She lights it herself, and stares at him through the smoke. “Two Benjies,” she says then, tapping her shoes’ welts on the dirt, her voice childish. Jaejoong lets out a short laugh, Nana smiles, blowing smoke out of her nostrils. “I’m big on the American revolution.”
“Come on, then.”
She lives in a trailer park by the road, not too far from the bar’s exit. Jaejoong sends her away with a nod, two hundred dollars and a bleeding heart. Nana waves the bills at him before going inside.
He spends twelve hundred dollars before he gets an invitation to go inside. He likes to think they’re intimate, by then. Nana doesn't seem to care about personal relationships at all (there's something very wrong inside her eyes, like staring into a cliff, its darkness looking back at you), but she lets him in, so he sticks around. Her trailer is decorated with Jesus and death, eerie, cold and dark. Faces of saints stare at him, Nana takes her clothes off. She has a tattoo on her lower back. 23:4.
“What does that mean?”
“Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I fear no evil, for you are with me,” she crawls on top of him, his breath gets caught on his throat. Nana feels like a thorn crown, Jaejoong watches himself bleed through a dirty mirror. “Your rod and your staff, they comfort me.”
She whispers prayers as they make love, but love it’s what it’s not, it’s painful and inhumane, dirt crawling under their skin, red like her screams. When they’re done he has his head on her chest, listening to her heart beat slow down. She’s still whispering, and the whispers scare him to death; from a decrepit coffee table, an image of the Virgin Mary looks back at him. “And I shall dwell in the house of the Lord forever.”
Rural Louisiana is an empty space in the middle of nowhere. No one comes in, no one gets out. It’s made of alcohol and farmlands, dirt and churches, holy and horror. Nana likes it best, Jaejoong likes it less. He dreams of her, walking through crops made of darkness with antlers on her head and her voodoo eyes apothic and cruel. He usually wakes up screaming.
(“Even the darkness is not dark to you,” Nana says, eyes closed, as he screams into her chest, feeling her ribcages under his fingers, leaving marks all over the whiteness of her body. “Darkness is as light-”)
“Do you need to work tonight?”
“I need the money,” Nana says under her breath. She’s been watching the woods where coyotes roam and howl deep within layers of trees and filth, making the chilly air around them reverb. On her arms an old Winchester, model 1912. Jaejoong watches the woods too, but he can’t see what she sees. The coyote howls again, Nana shoots twice, Jaejoong’s ears hurt. She disappears into the woods, and comes back ten minutes later with a hare over her shoulder. “Do you cook?”
“Yeah.”
“Then let’s eat.”
(The hare stares at him with dead eyes, he chops off the head.)
Jaejoong likes to watch her dance. It turns him on as much as it chokes the breath on his throat, like it’s poisoned. It’s a terrifying feeling he seems to enjoy, to be that close to death. She strips, catcalls thrown in the air, hands feeling up her legs. In his head, she has iron antlers’ coming out of her skull, her body is made of gold. It might be the schizophrenia taking control of his brain cells. He swallows a pill down with watery whiskey, Nana strikes her last pose before leaving the stage. He grabs her by the waist later backstage, she burns him with the tip of her coffin nail, he likes the way it feels, pain liquefies his insides, melting away his humanity.
"I never kissed you."
"You never asked."
"Can I?"
"Two Benjies."
Jaejoong smiles and slides two hundred dollars over the table that separates them. It takes a few days until it happens (like everything is with Nana), he is washing dirty porcelain on her tiny sink when she slides hands under his shirt, his skin turning to dust under her bony fingers. He turns to hold her head with wet hands, foam glorifying her mermaid hair like a halo, and he kisses her harder than he should. It tastes like the bubblegum she's been chewing and woods and cheap vodka.
(He takes three pills later, hands shaking; in his brain damaged images of necks being snapped and her silvery hair sticking to his throat.)
Nana grew up on that same trailer. At 13 she was left there by a faceless mother, her father could be any of the sleazy men feeling her up at the bar. Her neighbors were coyotes, teenage prostitutes and old ladies that smelled of formaldehyde and poverty. Jaejoong grew up at a house with too many sisters and unwelcoming foster parents. He wanted to be a singer, Nana wanted to be left alone. None got their wish.
"Where do you get your money from?"
Nana has the Winchester with her and sharpness in her stare. There's game somewhere in the woods, where he can't see, but she’s aiming at him, playfully (or not, still, there’s eagerness all over his soul for being so close to the muzzle). “I rob,” Jaejoong replies simply. He does rob ATM machines by the roads and small gas stations by empty crop fields. “I’m pretty good at it, too.”
“You’re a coyote, then.”
She points over his shoulder and shoots five times, getting up and coming back with game on her shoulder like the other times, fresh corpses to be eaten. They dine on pelican meat, potatoes and cheap beer, and later they lay together on her sofa, Nana watches the TV, Jaejoong strokes her hair. It’s almost like they’re normal. It doesn’t last much.
Sometimes Jaejoong roams the woods where Nana goes hunting. Feet bare and cold air on his lungs, he walks into the night. He can smell the bones of dead animals, while owls lurk up on the skinny trees, watching. Time is nonexistent.
“I had a crazy dream,” he starts, the next day, while driving Nana to work. She doesn’t seem to pay attention, voodoo eyes absorbing the muted colors of the outside, bathed in the sheer. “I was a coyote.”
Nana focuses her eyes on him, then, a strange cloud of disgust behind her pupils. They’re filled with coal and hatred, and it scares Jaejoong. “You should go to church.” Of course she’d say that, he thinks. It was just a dream, he reassures her. “You have some bad blood in you.”
He prefers not to know what she means.
She takes him to church, eventually. People stare at him, but not his material self, not his body, or his clothes - they stare way deeper than that, into his lungs, into his brain, deep within his soul. Every pair of eyes is a judgment day, making him sick to his stomach. Nana, though, is welcomed, like a prodigal lamb from a parable. She smiles and embraces people, eyes glistening, amens are exchanged, young girls braid her hair through the sermon. Nana doesn’t have Sunday clothes, her dress is a little shorter, in the faintest shade of cerulean, but she’s a church child, she’s welcome no matter what flaws. That’s what my mama told me, she tells him. Go to church, get money, stay alive. “She’ll come back for me when she’s ready.”
“She told you that?”
“Him,” his eyes follow hers to the image of a man in yellow robes, the painting’s face chipped by time and devotion; maybe Jesus, maybe the Devil.
She walks to the reverend, and he blesses her, touching her forehead; Jaejoong thinks he can see it burn on the her skin, the cross, red and ugly. Nana sings the hallelujah with all those people, but Jaejoong isn’t sure she knows what it means. When it’s time to go, they find Jaejoong’s truck vandalized. There’s a cross on the hood, and on the doors there are words scattered. “Demon,” Nana reads one of them. She doesn’t seem bothered (and Jaejoong pretends he doesn’t see how her eyes grow darker and darker). “Bad blood.”
He runs through the woods that night, and his cries are howls, screams, shattering the stale, dark air. There’s blood on his teeth, on his eyes, on his hands, bad, bad blood.
(Jaejoong wakes up screaming, Nana has the riffle pointed to his head.)
(She always does, in one way or another.)
Jaejoong hears three shots from inside of her trailer, echoing inside his head. Nana’s out hunting again, hares and badgers, food for their carnivore needs. She doesn’t bring back small game this time, though. “Jaejoong!”
He runs outside and finds her at the edge of the woods, jeans and t-shirt dirt with splatters of blood. She’s dragging a coyote, a strange smile on lips. Gumiho, he thinks again. She skins it, and a week later she’s made it into a vest, and the meat turned into meatloaves, and she made necklaces out of the bones. It’s horrifying, Jaejoong thinks, how someone so beautiful could be so cruel. He’s gone for that week, back to sleeping in his truck parked by the road, missing and fearing Nana all at once.
(He goes back to her, eventually.)
“Marry me.”
They’re at the dressing room in the back of the bar. It’s ugly and it smells like hairspray. There are old pictures on the walls and mirrors, of old strippers, of old lives that might have turned to grime by then. Jaejoong remembers one from the evening news, missing since past summer. It’s violent in the void of those lands. “Why are you saying that now?”
“Because I’m in love with you.”
“You don’t even know my real name, Jaejoong,” Nana’s smile is sharp, twisted. Jaejoong tells her he doesn’t need to know anything else (and he doesn’t want to, either, but those words never leave his tongue, the thought itself frightening and dark). She finishes fixing her make-up, lips bloody red, eyes like constellations. “It’s Im Jin-Ah.”
(They get married in a small ceremony among her church peers. The reverend blesses their union, speaks of Jesus, speaks of God, speaks of Heaven, speaks of holiness - Jaejoong barely hears. Nana wears yellow, a dress made of cheap lace, more like a nightgown, dry flowers on her head, barefoot. Her eyes, though, her eyes are dark, and they consume his soul entirely.)
He has an empty bottle of pills by some point of the next few months. Within one week he can feel the disease crawling under his skin. He’s starving. Nana shoots to kill among antlers and scrawny trees.
“What are you?”
The question comes after a week of prayer - silent, by his bedside. Jaejoong feels his guts turn to liquid, bones quivering, teeth yearning. I’m Jaejoong, he replies, twice, she shakes her head. “God hates you, you know. He hates me too, but in a different way. Jaejoong - what are you?”
“I’m sick.” Dying. He feels like dying. His gums bleed and it tastes metallic, brewing pure disgust in his pit. Nana holds the gun to his head, her fingers tangled with the trigger, and she asks him again. He can’t answer. Bad blood, she whispers, over and over, until he falls asleep, gun to his head, holding on to her clothes.
He dreams she lets him outside a fortnight later. He runs - runs away, but not really. Nana watches, her gun neatly packed under their crooked bed. The earth feels soft under his feet, his paws, his fur gets caught up in the branches. When he gets home, Nana looks into his yellow eyes, deeper within his soul than she had ever looked before, his canine showing don’t seem to scare her off. Coyote.
Jaejoong wakes up on the sofa, drenched in sweat, Nana holding his hand, Bible in hand. There’s dirt underneath her nails, but she sleeps soundly.
“I got your pills.”
He feels more than he listen her talk, her movement just a glimpse between his half-closed lids. Nana makes him swallow two of them, with water that tastes like coal. He coughs, she holds him down. Antipsychotic. Dopamine. Risperidone. “You’ll get better. God told me so.”
“God doesn’t talk,” he manages to say, and he feels like his breath is death. “God, Nana.”
“You’ll be alright.”
“Schizophrenia,” Nana says softly. Jaejoong doesn’t say anything. She’s wearing the coyote fur, her hair a violent streak of oranges as the sun is setting on the horizon behind the woodlands, turning colors gray into shades of fire. “Like Syd Barret?”
“Yeah,” he allows himself a smile. Nana and her dark eyes and deep knowledge of dead people. “Bad blood.”
“Bad blood,” she nods.
“You’re not you all the time.”
“What do you mean?”
It’s been calm for the past weeks. Jaejoong’s brain is in a safe haven of stolen prescription drugs, Nana hasn’t shot anything but she holds her gun steady, they sleep more than they talk, she dances, he watches. She looks away, hair sticky of dye, staining the t-shirt she stole from his pile of clothes.
“You’re not yourself.”
“What do you mean?” he asks again, though he feels his lungs fail to work for a moment. The air comes out stiff, like he’s breathing poison.
“I’ve seen you run during the night. Run with them.”
“I don’t-“
“Coyote. Right?”
He tries to explain - words stumble on lies and horror. Nana points the gun to his head, but there’s some sort of sweetness in her stare he’s never seen before. He wonders if she’ll ever do it, shoot him, clean his remains afterwards. It scares him cold.
“It’s the disease,” he says finally. “I become it.”
“God-“
“Stop with your God bullshit,” Jaejoong snaps, pushing her gun away. He feels tired all of a sudden, like death has a crow perked on his shoulder, weighting him down, and its name is Nana. “There is no God, Nana. This is it, this is what we’ve got - it’s what I’ve got. Disease. You. That’s all I have. God isn’t fucking here.”
Her hair is black now, falling over her shoulders like a waterfall made of petroleum, sticky, oily, thick. Blondes are out of order, she had said when he questioned her about it the other day. Brunettes are in. She’s perfect anyway, he thinks. In an awful, God-blinding way; voodoo eyes and lanky bones and red nails and lacey underwear (she never wear those for him, they’re for the bar). He wonders how much longer he can go loving and hating her so.
He stares at the yellow sign over her door (it’s always been there, crooked, hanging on a thread, a symbol of whatever religion that was, a warning, stay away - he never listened, did he?), she shoots into the woods, barefoot and hungry. She wears the coyote vest, he wears his soul out.
“I want to run with you.”
Nana’s voice is small, oddly enough. She doesn’t have guns with her, sitting lazily against the trailer’s porch, eyes slightly closed. The last days of summer drip all around them in a strange redness, burning the trees tops and lighting up the fireflies; the heat turning the afternoon into a slow-motion scenario. Jaejoong stares at her, sees past the antlers and the chocking and the hate and sees Nana, a girl, his girl, kiss worth Two Benjies.
“I don’t want you to.”
“Do you think I’d be afraid?” He almost smiles, except he forgot how to. Nana crawls near him, feline and lazy, to rest her head on his shoulder. They sit there for a while, and Jaejoong feels the woods looking back at him, while her hair tickles his shoulder. He remembers, 24:3.
“No.”
“Then why not?”
“I think you’d kill me.”
She turns her face to look at him and Jaejoong can’t help but think it’s the first time he can see past the hollowness of her pupils, beyond the voodoo and the darkness that exist inside her. They’re clear, for once. They’re looking and seeing. “Perhaps.”
God hates me too, she had said once.
Jaejoong runs away with the moonlight and she follows. He is a coyote, she is something else. Something very old, inhuman, unearthly, bad, bad blood. They run together, breathing in the woodlands around them, the poverty and insanity, death and mud. She dresses in yellow and holds her guns, and for a moment there she has antlers on her head, and her eyes are lopsided and empty. You, sir, her voice whispers, should unmask. She shoots him and she skins him and wears him like a vest.
But it’s just a dream - a nightmare. Nana is asleep next to him when he wakes up, clean and human, hair like pitch all over her. They go to church the next Sunday, and when she sings the hallelujah, he sings it too. Rituals come and past, his head grows darker, he holds her hand, everything feels thin as paper.
“Your blood wouldn’t make me love you less.”
They knock the Virgin Mary from the table at some point during the night, and Jaejoong thinks hate has dripped out of his body like unwanted tears, staining the moldy carpet the ugliest shade of gray. The disease makes his brain convulse, the vicious imagery trying to take control. He prays with her, then, over and over, amidst sweat and feverish screams, and it’s gone. It’s all gone. Their bodies are empty shells, but their souls are high on weed and darkness and love. Love like his blood. Love - bad, bad love.
She’s barefoot, yes, but her yellow dress is covered by a sweater too big to be hers - the one she was wearing the first time they met. Summer has given space to a chilly fall, and the leaves crack under their weight in the woodlands. Jaejoong sits next to her. He can listen to her pray under her breath, like a chant, like magic. Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I fear no evil, for you are with me - for you are with me, for you are with me, she repeats, and her hands find the fur near his ears. Girl and coyote, preacher and sinner, hunter and pray, Nana and Jaejoong. The woods are dead, silent.
He sprints, she follows.
He unmasks, she isn’t afraid.
A/N 2.0: yeah, this is not finished at all, I wanted to write a bit more, I wanted an ACTUAL ending - but I can't. I tried and failed. So I'm sorry if it ends too abruptly. But final considerations to be made: yes, Jaejoong is a shape-shifter. Or like. A werecoyote. And he has a brain disease, too. No, Nana doesn't have any powers or anything. She's just void, the enviroment she lives in sucked the life out of her eyes, that's all. She's also a walking contradiction. This story doesn't make much sense - but I just wanted to write something half-inspired by True Detective and set in the wonderfully creepy rural Louisiana. ♥ Oh, and have a mini-fanmix:
1. ultraviolence - lana del rey
2. howl - florence+the machine
3. your bones - of monsters and men
4. timshel - mumford & sons
5. take me to church - hozier
6. far from any road - the handsome family
3400 words, jaejoong/nana, creepy
A/N: True Detective introduced me to the wonderful The King in Yellow, a book by Robert W. Chambers. I’ve read it and I’ve loved it like I usually love all dark eerie things. So this came out of my reading and my obsession with True Detective; the story is set in rural United States, loosely inspired by the tv show atmosphere and two stories from the book (In the Court of the Dragon and The Street of the Four Winds) - plus Lana Del Rey’s Ultraviolence.
Oh, it's actually a love story, between something cruel and something wicked. My favorite kind. Also: it's unfinished. Oopsies. Have fun! ♥
I love you the first time
I love you the last time
Yo soy la princesa, comprende mis white lines
‘Cause I'm your jazz singer
And you're my cult leader
I love you forever
Nana has voodoo eyes, that’s his best description of her.
Voodoo eyes, rattling the lungs inside his body.
She dips her head, swinging her body in a perfect allegra, feet touching heights and dusty air. A few bucks are thrown around her, as she spins around the pole - the angel, that’s how they call that (that’s how Jaejoong calls her, in his mind). She’s barely dressed, the most interesting parts of her body hiding secretly behind strips of cheap fabric. The room smells of tacky perfume and smoke, the music is questionable; her show goes on, slightly sleazy, deliberately slow.
Nobody claps when she’s done; she picks up the fifty-six dollars spread around her feet. Nana disappears behind her curtains, any leftover charm swaying on her bony hips, glitter-covered eyes facing the other way.
“You need a ride home?”
He’s been waiting for her for the past hour, standing idly at the bar’s parking lot. A crystalline layer of ice makes everything glow in the shady background.
"No."
She's all wrapped in a sweater, black, twice as big as her diminutive body, a hoodie covering her white stroke of hair. Her legs are bare despite the biting breeze, old converse shoes on her feet, gray and ugly. Nana doesn't stall. She keeps walking, seemingly unaware of the darkness around her. Jaejoong knows she has been dipping her feet into it for a while.
"I'll give you money, if you let me take you home."
He means it. Jaejoong wears biker jackets and jeans and there's a mess going on on his insides all the time. His face is smudged with dirt. She stops, a small smile curling her lips up. Gumiho, he thinks. She’s a gumiho. She feeds on human liver and $1 cheeseburgers at the local McDonald’s.
"I'm expensive."
"How?”
There’s a pause in which she takes a pack of camel N.9’s from the hoodie’s pocket, the pink box a contrast to her looks. She lights it herself, and stares at him through the smoke. “Two Benjies,” she says then, tapping her shoes’ welts on the dirt, her voice childish. Jaejoong lets out a short laugh, Nana smiles, blowing smoke out of her nostrils. “I’m big on the American revolution.”
“Come on, then.”
She lives in a trailer park by the road, not too far from the bar’s exit. Jaejoong sends her away with a nod, two hundred dollars and a bleeding heart. Nana waves the bills at him before going inside.
He spends twelve hundred dollars before he gets an invitation to go inside. He likes to think they’re intimate, by then. Nana doesn't seem to care about personal relationships at all (there's something very wrong inside her eyes, like staring into a cliff, its darkness looking back at you), but she lets him in, so he sticks around. Her trailer is decorated with Jesus and death, eerie, cold and dark. Faces of saints stare at him, Nana takes her clothes off. She has a tattoo on her lower back. 23:4.
“What does that mean?”
“Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I fear no evil, for you are with me,” she crawls on top of him, his breath gets caught on his throat. Nana feels like a thorn crown, Jaejoong watches himself bleed through a dirty mirror. “Your rod and your staff, they comfort me.”
She whispers prayers as they make love, but love it’s what it’s not, it’s painful and inhumane, dirt crawling under their skin, red like her screams. When they’re done he has his head on her chest, listening to her heart beat slow down. She’s still whispering, and the whispers scare him to death; from a decrepit coffee table, an image of the Virgin Mary looks back at him. “And I shall dwell in the house of the Lord forever.”
Rural Louisiana is an empty space in the middle of nowhere. No one comes in, no one gets out. It’s made of alcohol and farmlands, dirt and churches, holy and horror. Nana likes it best, Jaejoong likes it less. He dreams of her, walking through crops made of darkness with antlers on her head and her voodoo eyes apothic and cruel. He usually wakes up screaming.
(“Even the darkness is not dark to you,” Nana says, eyes closed, as he screams into her chest, feeling her ribcages under his fingers, leaving marks all over the whiteness of her body. “Darkness is as light-”)
“Do you need to work tonight?”
“I need the money,” Nana says under her breath. She’s been watching the woods where coyotes roam and howl deep within layers of trees and filth, making the chilly air around them reverb. On her arms an old Winchester, model 1912. Jaejoong watches the woods too, but he can’t see what she sees. The coyote howls again, Nana shoots twice, Jaejoong’s ears hurt. She disappears into the woods, and comes back ten minutes later with a hare over her shoulder. “Do you cook?”
“Yeah.”
“Then let’s eat.”
(The hare stares at him with dead eyes, he chops off the head.)
Jaejoong likes to watch her dance. It turns him on as much as it chokes the breath on his throat, like it’s poisoned. It’s a terrifying feeling he seems to enjoy, to be that close to death. She strips, catcalls thrown in the air, hands feeling up her legs. In his head, she has iron antlers’ coming out of her skull, her body is made of gold. It might be the schizophrenia taking control of his brain cells. He swallows a pill down with watery whiskey, Nana strikes her last pose before leaving the stage. He grabs her by the waist later backstage, she burns him with the tip of her coffin nail, he likes the way it feels, pain liquefies his insides, melting away his humanity.
"I never kissed you."
"You never asked."
"Can I?"
"Two Benjies."
Jaejoong smiles and slides two hundred dollars over the table that separates them. It takes a few days until it happens (like everything is with Nana), he is washing dirty porcelain on her tiny sink when she slides hands under his shirt, his skin turning to dust under her bony fingers. He turns to hold her head with wet hands, foam glorifying her mermaid hair like a halo, and he kisses her harder than he should. It tastes like the bubblegum she's been chewing and woods and cheap vodka.
(He takes three pills later, hands shaking; in his brain damaged images of necks being snapped and her silvery hair sticking to his throat.)
Nana grew up on that same trailer. At 13 she was left there by a faceless mother, her father could be any of the sleazy men feeling her up at the bar. Her neighbors were coyotes, teenage prostitutes and old ladies that smelled of formaldehyde and poverty. Jaejoong grew up at a house with too many sisters and unwelcoming foster parents. He wanted to be a singer, Nana wanted to be left alone. None got their wish.
"Where do you get your money from?"
Nana has the Winchester with her and sharpness in her stare. There's game somewhere in the woods, where he can't see, but she’s aiming at him, playfully (or not, still, there’s eagerness all over his soul for being so close to the muzzle). “I rob,” Jaejoong replies simply. He does rob ATM machines by the roads and small gas stations by empty crop fields. “I’m pretty good at it, too.”
“You’re a coyote, then.”
She points over his shoulder and shoots five times, getting up and coming back with game on her shoulder like the other times, fresh corpses to be eaten. They dine on pelican meat, potatoes and cheap beer, and later they lay together on her sofa, Nana watches the TV, Jaejoong strokes her hair. It’s almost like they’re normal. It doesn’t last much.
Sometimes Jaejoong roams the woods where Nana goes hunting. Feet bare and cold air on his lungs, he walks into the night. He can smell the bones of dead animals, while owls lurk up on the skinny trees, watching. Time is nonexistent.
“I had a crazy dream,” he starts, the next day, while driving Nana to work. She doesn’t seem to pay attention, voodoo eyes absorbing the muted colors of the outside, bathed in the sheer. “I was a coyote.”
Nana focuses her eyes on him, then, a strange cloud of disgust behind her pupils. They’re filled with coal and hatred, and it scares Jaejoong. “You should go to church.” Of course she’d say that, he thinks. It was just a dream, he reassures her. “You have some bad blood in you.”
He prefers not to know what she means.
She takes him to church, eventually. People stare at him, but not his material self, not his body, or his clothes - they stare way deeper than that, into his lungs, into his brain, deep within his soul. Every pair of eyes is a judgment day, making him sick to his stomach. Nana, though, is welcomed, like a prodigal lamb from a parable. She smiles and embraces people, eyes glistening, amens are exchanged, young girls braid her hair through the sermon. Nana doesn’t have Sunday clothes, her dress is a little shorter, in the faintest shade of cerulean, but she’s a church child, she’s welcome no matter what flaws. That’s what my mama told me, she tells him. Go to church, get money, stay alive. “She’ll come back for me when she’s ready.”
“She told you that?”
“Him,” his eyes follow hers to the image of a man in yellow robes, the painting’s face chipped by time and devotion; maybe Jesus, maybe the Devil.
She walks to the reverend, and he blesses her, touching her forehead; Jaejoong thinks he can see it burn on the her skin, the cross, red and ugly. Nana sings the hallelujah with all those people, but Jaejoong isn’t sure she knows what it means. When it’s time to go, they find Jaejoong’s truck vandalized. There’s a cross on the hood, and on the doors there are words scattered. “Demon,” Nana reads one of them. She doesn’t seem bothered (and Jaejoong pretends he doesn’t see how her eyes grow darker and darker). “Bad blood.”
He runs through the woods that night, and his cries are howls, screams, shattering the stale, dark air. There’s blood on his teeth, on his eyes, on his hands, bad, bad blood.
(Jaejoong wakes up screaming, Nana has the riffle pointed to his head.)
(She always does, in one way or another.)
Jaejoong hears three shots from inside of her trailer, echoing inside his head. Nana’s out hunting again, hares and badgers, food for their carnivore needs. She doesn’t bring back small game this time, though. “Jaejoong!”
He runs outside and finds her at the edge of the woods, jeans and t-shirt dirt with splatters of blood. She’s dragging a coyote, a strange smile on lips. Gumiho, he thinks again. She skins it, and a week later she’s made it into a vest, and the meat turned into meatloaves, and she made necklaces out of the bones. It’s horrifying, Jaejoong thinks, how someone so beautiful could be so cruel. He’s gone for that week, back to sleeping in his truck parked by the road, missing and fearing Nana all at once.
(He goes back to her, eventually.)
“Marry me.”
They’re at the dressing room in the back of the bar. It’s ugly and it smells like hairspray. There are old pictures on the walls and mirrors, of old strippers, of old lives that might have turned to grime by then. Jaejoong remembers one from the evening news, missing since past summer. It’s violent in the void of those lands. “Why are you saying that now?”
“Because I’m in love with you.”
“You don’t even know my real name, Jaejoong,” Nana’s smile is sharp, twisted. Jaejoong tells her he doesn’t need to know anything else (and he doesn’t want to, either, but those words never leave his tongue, the thought itself frightening and dark). She finishes fixing her make-up, lips bloody red, eyes like constellations. “It’s Im Jin-Ah.”
(They get married in a small ceremony among her church peers. The reverend blesses their union, speaks of Jesus, speaks of God, speaks of Heaven, speaks of holiness - Jaejoong barely hears. Nana wears yellow, a dress made of cheap lace, more like a nightgown, dry flowers on her head, barefoot. Her eyes, though, her eyes are dark, and they consume his soul entirely.)
He has an empty bottle of pills by some point of the next few months. Within one week he can feel the disease crawling under his skin. He’s starving. Nana shoots to kill among antlers and scrawny trees.
“What are you?”
The question comes after a week of prayer - silent, by his bedside. Jaejoong feels his guts turn to liquid, bones quivering, teeth yearning. I’m Jaejoong, he replies, twice, she shakes her head. “God hates you, you know. He hates me too, but in a different way. Jaejoong - what are you?”
“I’m sick.” Dying. He feels like dying. His gums bleed and it tastes metallic, brewing pure disgust in his pit. Nana holds the gun to his head, her fingers tangled with the trigger, and she asks him again. He can’t answer. Bad blood, she whispers, over and over, until he falls asleep, gun to his head, holding on to her clothes.
He dreams she lets him outside a fortnight later. He runs - runs away, but not really. Nana watches, her gun neatly packed under their crooked bed. The earth feels soft under his feet, his paws, his fur gets caught up in the branches. When he gets home, Nana looks into his yellow eyes, deeper within his soul than she had ever looked before, his canine showing don’t seem to scare her off. Coyote.
Jaejoong wakes up on the sofa, drenched in sweat, Nana holding his hand, Bible in hand. There’s dirt underneath her nails, but she sleeps soundly.
“I got your pills.”
He feels more than he listen her talk, her movement just a glimpse between his half-closed lids. Nana makes him swallow two of them, with water that tastes like coal. He coughs, she holds him down. Antipsychotic. Dopamine. Risperidone. “You’ll get better. God told me so.”
“God doesn’t talk,” he manages to say, and he feels like his breath is death. “God, Nana.”
“You’ll be alright.”
“Schizophrenia,” Nana says softly. Jaejoong doesn’t say anything. She’s wearing the coyote fur, her hair a violent streak of oranges as the sun is setting on the horizon behind the woodlands, turning colors gray into shades of fire. “Like Syd Barret?”
“Yeah,” he allows himself a smile. Nana and her dark eyes and deep knowledge of dead people. “Bad blood.”
“Bad blood,” she nods.
“You’re not you all the time.”
“What do you mean?”
It’s been calm for the past weeks. Jaejoong’s brain is in a safe haven of stolen prescription drugs, Nana hasn’t shot anything but she holds her gun steady, they sleep more than they talk, she dances, he watches. She looks away, hair sticky of dye, staining the t-shirt she stole from his pile of clothes.
“You’re not yourself.”
“What do you mean?” he asks again, though he feels his lungs fail to work for a moment. The air comes out stiff, like he’s breathing poison.
“I’ve seen you run during the night. Run with them.”
“I don’t-“
“Coyote. Right?”
He tries to explain - words stumble on lies and horror. Nana points the gun to his head, but there’s some sort of sweetness in her stare he’s never seen before. He wonders if she’ll ever do it, shoot him, clean his remains afterwards. It scares him cold.
“It’s the disease,” he says finally. “I become it.”
“God-“
“Stop with your God bullshit,” Jaejoong snaps, pushing her gun away. He feels tired all of a sudden, like death has a crow perked on his shoulder, weighting him down, and its name is Nana. “There is no God, Nana. This is it, this is what we’ve got - it’s what I’ve got. Disease. You. That’s all I have. God isn’t fucking here.”
Her hair is black now, falling over her shoulders like a waterfall made of petroleum, sticky, oily, thick. Blondes are out of order, she had said when he questioned her about it the other day. Brunettes are in. She’s perfect anyway, he thinks. In an awful, God-blinding way; voodoo eyes and lanky bones and red nails and lacey underwear (she never wear those for him, they’re for the bar). He wonders how much longer he can go loving and hating her so.
He stares at the yellow sign over her door (it’s always been there, crooked, hanging on a thread, a symbol of whatever religion that was, a warning, stay away - he never listened, did he?), she shoots into the woods, barefoot and hungry. She wears the coyote vest, he wears his soul out.
“I want to run with you.”
Nana’s voice is small, oddly enough. She doesn’t have guns with her, sitting lazily against the trailer’s porch, eyes slightly closed. The last days of summer drip all around them in a strange redness, burning the trees tops and lighting up the fireflies; the heat turning the afternoon into a slow-motion scenario. Jaejoong stares at her, sees past the antlers and the chocking and the hate and sees Nana, a girl, his girl, kiss worth Two Benjies.
“I don’t want you to.”
“Do you think I’d be afraid?” He almost smiles, except he forgot how to. Nana crawls near him, feline and lazy, to rest her head on his shoulder. They sit there for a while, and Jaejoong feels the woods looking back at him, while her hair tickles his shoulder. He remembers, 24:3.
“No.”
“Then why not?”
“I think you’d kill me.”
She turns her face to look at him and Jaejoong can’t help but think it’s the first time he can see past the hollowness of her pupils, beyond the voodoo and the darkness that exist inside her. They’re clear, for once. They’re looking and seeing. “Perhaps.”
God hates me too, she had said once.
Jaejoong runs away with the moonlight and she follows. He is a coyote, she is something else. Something very old, inhuman, unearthly, bad, bad blood. They run together, breathing in the woodlands around them, the poverty and insanity, death and mud. She dresses in yellow and holds her guns, and for a moment there she has antlers on her head, and her eyes are lopsided and empty. You, sir, her voice whispers, should unmask. She shoots him and she skins him and wears him like a vest.
But it’s just a dream - a nightmare. Nana is asleep next to him when he wakes up, clean and human, hair like pitch all over her. They go to church the next Sunday, and when she sings the hallelujah, he sings it too. Rituals come and past, his head grows darker, he holds her hand, everything feels thin as paper.
“Your blood wouldn’t make me love you less.”
They knock the Virgin Mary from the table at some point during the night, and Jaejoong thinks hate has dripped out of his body like unwanted tears, staining the moldy carpet the ugliest shade of gray. The disease makes his brain convulse, the vicious imagery trying to take control. He prays with her, then, over and over, amidst sweat and feverish screams, and it’s gone. It’s all gone. Their bodies are empty shells, but their souls are high on weed and darkness and love. Love like his blood. Love - bad, bad love.
She’s barefoot, yes, but her yellow dress is covered by a sweater too big to be hers - the one she was wearing the first time they met. Summer has given space to a chilly fall, and the leaves crack under their weight in the woodlands. Jaejoong sits next to her. He can listen to her pray under her breath, like a chant, like magic. Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I fear no evil, for you are with me - for you are with me, for you are with me, she repeats, and her hands find the fur near his ears. Girl and coyote, preacher and sinner, hunter and pray, Nana and Jaejoong. The woods are dead, silent.
He sprints, she follows.
He unmasks, she isn’t afraid.
A/N 2.0: yeah, this is not finished at all, I wanted to write a bit more, I wanted an ACTUAL ending - but I can't. I tried and failed. So I'm sorry if it ends too abruptly. But final considerations to be made: yes, Jaejoong is a shape-shifter. Or like. A werecoyote. And he has a brain disease, too. No, Nana doesn't have any powers or anything. She's just void, the enviroment she lives in sucked the life out of her eyes, that's all. She's also a walking contradiction. This story doesn't make much sense - but I just wanted to write something half-inspired by True Detective and set in the wonderfully creepy rural Louisiana. ♥ Oh, and have a mini-fanmix:
1. ultraviolence - lana del rey
2. howl - florence+the machine
3. your bones - of monsters and men
4. timshel - mumford & sons
5. take me to church - hozier
6. far from any road - the handsome family