i chased your love around a figure 8
I CHASED YOUR LOVE AROUND A FIGURE 8
part 1, 6221 words, R
angst/romance/supernatural
myungzy, one-sided myungyeol
A/N: this is alternative-universe (twisted) Peter Pan. And it's also vampires. Hah. R-rating for violence/sexual topics and gore. Have fun!
breathe your smoke into my lungs
still not too young to die young
Suzy lives in a white room - a boring one, she reckons. White hospital walls, washed out, once-pink bed sheets, withering flowers dying out on a table, beeping machines that cast a greenish, eerie glow after dark, and of course that everlasting distasteful smell of ether and death. It reeks, and Suzy probably reeks of it too, no matter how hard she scrubs her skin during her showers (she does, and it hurts), but Seoul St. Mary’s Hospital has been her home for the past twelve years and she likes to think she’s used to it (she’s really not). There’s no use complaining about it now, anyway, when she’s leaving.
Not literally leaving - that won’t ever happen (it will, she just won’t be around to see it). Suzy was born rotten, and for that she has to die young. She’ll be put in a white coffin with pristine clothing on, and she’ll look white and pasty and finally dead. There’s even a place for her at the graveyard near the hospital’s chapel, and the flowers have been paid for a long time ago by loving parents she once had (although she can’t remember). Suzy doesn’t want to rush, but she doesn’t fear it either - it’s the natural process, she muses, it’s like sleeping for a long time.
Whatever she is expecting to come and get her, it is not the boy perched over her bed, all dark and red tones contrasting so clearly with the whiteness of the room around them. If she had to choose a word to describe him, it’d be dirty; black chipped nail polish, smudged black eye makeup that makes his eyes look sunken in, red on his face and on his fingers - a tone of red Suzy knows very well. He is staring, with the curiosity of a child as it analyzes a very ugly looking, but mildly interesting, new toy. He’s not just in her head, not this time, but the possibility doesn’t scare her enough. Her damaged brain alerts her to call someone, but she quickly brushes the thought away. Maybe this is it.
“Are you Death?”
Death, as she imagined before, would come to her in a black robe, holding a scythe, perhaps - the classic Reaper - and he would walk her through Death 101 before taking her soul. The judgmental Virgin Mary statue in her room never really liked that version, and Suzy could almost see that porcelain face twisting in disgust when the thought crosses her mind again now. It almost makes her smile secretly at the saint, but she doesn’t think it would suit the situation she’s in. The boy is still there - symmetrical and sharp, very three-dimensional and smeared in all the shades of red that aren’t supposed to be there.
“I’m not.” He shifts his weight a little, and Suzy is not as disappointed as she was expecting. There is, oddly enough, only an empty feeling of acceptance. “But you sure looked dead just now.”
Suzy doesn’t think she needs to explain, but she does anyway. “I was sleeping.” He looks around, taking all her world in with empty, dark eyes. It crosses her mind that she had always slept like the dead, and that’s pretty fucking ironic, in her opinion. With the corner of her eyes, she sees the Virgin Mary scolding her with condemnatory blue eyes. No swearing! “What’s your name?”
His eyes are back on her, and his voice is soft when he replies. “I’m L. Are you sick?” He bluntly ignores her slightly irritated expression, pushing himself up and sitting on her bed. Suzy moves her feet involuntarily, giving the space she shouldn’t give him. L’s dirty fingers leave red patterns on her bed sheets.
“Yes.” It stings a little, the first time saying she’s sick. Maybe because the boy in front of her looks very much alive, a vague but harsh reminder he’ll grow up to become something while she will die having barely lived. Suzy never interacts with people - at least not enough to make her feel that way, and the foreignness of the feeling bothers her. In St. Mary’s Hospital, not a lot of people still care for the impatient ghost girl in Room 1013. “I’ve been sick for a while. What do you want here?”
L plays with blankets just over her ankles, drawing symbols she can’t see. He looks bothered, and Suzy wonders if her sickness is the reason behind it. It takes a while for him to answer. “Do you ever leave this room?”
It’s not exactly the words she was expecting. It’s an invasive question she doesn’t want to consider, but her body seems to betray her because her tongue is already rolling before her brain can tell her to shove him away and call for a nurse instead of replying. Fucking damaged stupid brain (the Virgin Mary shudders in her spot).
“I don’t remember the last time I’ve been out in the yards, but I do, to get sunlight,” she hears herself say and it feels like an out of body experience. “They say sun always helps the dying. I say bullshit.”
“You smell like it,” L mutters as he tugs his hands in leathery pockets on his jacket. Suzy feels her cheeks heating up - all she smells is the foul scent of the hospital’s hallways and all the souls in it. She curls her toes, dragging her legs up until her chin is resting on her knees. Protection from the boy that just won’t leave, she guesses. Interestingly enough, L does the same - going as far as taking off his Converse shoes so he could properly mirror her. “You smell very much of the sun. I’d say you’ve been to the yards not a day ago - maybe even earlier yesterday, considering it’s already two in the morning.”
His words prickle, make her uncomfortable. Suzy’s well aware she can’t remember, that her brain is not entirely capable of providing her with the information she needs about people and facts and time - but it’s unsettling to be exposed like that by a stranger. She’s used to accepting pity coming from people she meets during her hallway walks, not emotionless truth. “That’s - that’s ridiculous. What do you -?”
“I was hungry; I fed. I saw you; I got curious.” It’s a simple answer, and he gives it to her as matter-of-factly as possible, observing her quietly. In the dark, the whites of his eyes disappear, and Suzy feels like she’s looking into the murky black eyes of a monster. “You’re pretty.”
Pretty is not usually a word she’d use to describe herself. Sickly; fragile; doomed, yes. Pretty, no. When Suzy looks into the mirror of her bathroom (it’s broken on the side, so she sees herself having four eyes, which makes her giggle sometimes), all she sees is a corpse that happens to walk around. So the compliment surprises her, makes her blush much more than before, and suddenly she doesn’t know what to do with her hands, or her fingers, or herself. She wants to say something back - You’re pretty too? No, that’s ridiculous (he is). Thank you. I know. No! Ugh! - but the awkward silence that had installed itself in the room is broken when her door bursts open. At first Suzy thinks it’s one of the night shift nurses, checking to see if she’s still alive (a task they don’t care to perform very often), but the boy runs a nervous hand through his brown hair, and she sees the bright red on his fingers as well. It sticks to his hair like paint.
“What the fuck are you doing?”
The voice is entirely different from L’s soft voice. It’s rushing with adrenaline, and it’s higher and brighter. While L’s voice is a shade of boring gray, this boy’s voice is a sparkly yellow. Suzy watches as the boy sitting on her bed sighs, a deeply disgruntled look on his face. He eases himself off her bed, snatching his shoes on the floor.
“I was having a conversation, Sungyeol, fuck off.” The Virgin Mary statue looks furious. Suzy doesn’t move from her spot - both of them have blood on their hands and it doesn’t seem like a wise decision to say anything. “Are you done?”
“Of course we’re done. What do you think we are, baby vamps?” Sungyeol rolls his eyes, shoving the door closed. He doesn’t seem to notice Suzy - or he simply chooses to ignore her presence. She feels like the second option is more likely. “We got blood stacked up, too. Sunggyu must be a chipmunk or something, man. Saving for the winter and all that shit!”
Sungyeol’s laugh is high-pitched, and he jumps around the room as he speaks. His fingers grab the portraits on the table in front of her bed, and after one bored look drops them again. Her books are taken from the bookcase, just to be dropped as well, and Suzy watches with horror as he goes through her underwear drawer. He is much taller than L seems to be, and leaner (possibly meaner, too). Finally, his big eyes focus on her frail body frame under the covers. He cocks his head to the side, getting closer.
“Did you eat her out, perhaps? She looks hot.”
L groans, disgusted, and Suzy understands that whatever he said, it doesn’t mean something necessarily polite. She doesn’t feel the need to know what is their exchange about, but there’s a lot of furious glances and one of her books flies across the room (it misses Sungyeol’s head by inches). Sungyeol folds in half with laugher, the blood smeared on his face making him look like a particularly nasty movie villain.
“Don’t worry about him, he’s going to be a virgin forever,” L says over his shoulder. Suzy wants to tell him she doesn’t really want to know who is a virgin and who is not - but she doesn’t, because her voice is still nowhere to be found. Sungyeol curses him from across the room, and throws himself into the old, dusty armchair near her bed, his feet over her bedside table. “Sungyeol is just a shithead.”
“You just wanted to eat her, don’t fuck around,” the other boy laughs loudly. If they could see the Virgin Mary and her horrified expression, they would mind their language a bit - but Suzy is very sure only she is able to see the twisted little face eyeballing them.
“Could you - leave?” Once again, she hears her voice like it’s coming out from another person. Both boys look back at her, Sungyeol with hardly any interest. She takes a few breaths in before finding her voice again, stronger. “Just leave.”
“Oy, you hear the lady; glamor her and let’s go. I want to go out to drink before we go to ground.” Sungyeol jumps up, stretching his long limbs and yawning. Suzy has a hard time understanding what glamor is, and as usual her brain shuts off any kind of access she may have to her very candid and confusing memories.
“She doesn’t need glamor.” L has something else on his face now, and Suzy recognizes immediately; pity, laced with a very subtle line of I-don’t-give-a-shit. “She’ll forget on her own.”
You son of a-
The thought crosses her mind, and her lips are already halfway opened with the words to curse him, but L and Sungyeol leave as quickly as they came in, leaving only silence and the metallic scent of blood behind. Her body stirs out of its stillness, and her knees hurt once she jumps out of her bed, a thin line of anger taking control of her otherwise calm façade. She’ll forget on her own, he had said. Mockery - like she’s not capable of keeping the memory (sadly that’s true, but Suzy won’t admit it, stubborn as she is).
As she paces the room, her feet start dragging, until she’s barely walking. The anger dissipates; her body cools down, her hands grow colder again. Suzy finally crawls into bed, even though she doesn’t feel tired. After saying goodnight to a very unhappy Virgin Mary, she closes her eyes. L’s face is imprinted on the inside of her eyelids. She studies his features with eyes closed, careful not to miss any details, and she lets her bruised memory take him in. His face is the last image she sees before drifting off into a deep sleep, her nightly prayers dying out in her throat before reaching up to higher skies.
White, white, white - am I dead?
Suzy isn’t dead just yet. She’s slept with the lights on, and the pallid colors hurt her eyes and make her hide under thin layers of blankets. She stretches like a cat, her body still heavy with sleep, eyes glancing between the covers to the digital clock on her bedside table. Four fifteen in the morning. The book she must have been reading before falling asleep is on the floor, facing down, its cover bright red glowing like an emergency lamp to guide her way (she realizes she doesn’t remember anymore what page she was on). It takes a few minutes but she drags her body out of the warm bed, feet meeting the cold floor, making her shudder. She quickly finds her way to the switch near the door, and soon her room is plunged into calming darkness. The yellow glow from outside buildings casts shadows in weird shapes on her walls, and if she were still a child, she would have been afraid to stay there alone.
Except, in that small corner of Seoul St. Mary’s Hospital, in that room, Suzy isn’t alone. She sees with the corner of her sleepy eyes one of the shadows detaching itself from the wall near the window, arms folded and with an annoyed expression. Her brain fights to remember, but she only gets a blank space for her efforts. She doesn’t feel fear, either - the probability of the shadow being completely imaginary is very high, and Suzy had developed techniques to ignore her own illusions over the years. There’s medicine, of course, but the medicine won’t let her feel anything at all - or think, or pray, or sleep the whole night straight.
“You’re awake again.” His voice is soft and calm, and he slumps down on her bed, making the mattress squeak under his weight. Suzy’s hand reaches over to the light switch again.
She remembers, like words from her mother language, the traces of his face. She can’t remember his name, but the rest is still there, in her memory. Blurry and scattered like pieces of a challenging puzzle. She had forgotten almost everything; the clothes, the smell, the slight touch of his fingers on the bed sheets over her ankles - but his face is still in her mind. Her brain had given her a white canvas, and she had painted his messy hair, the sunken eyes, the red smears on his cheeks. The nameless boy, the only face she could remember, is sitting on her bed again; like he did before in a time Suzy can’t really place (it might never have happened, for all she knows).
“You’re back,” she states simply, tip-toeing her way back to her bed, but then deciding she doesn’t want to get on the bed with the stranger. She stops near the windows, and pretends the Virgin Mary is holding her hand for comfort. He’s dissecting her, that’s what it feels like. Suzy stares back, unyielding under his gaze, until he looks away with a bored sigh, interest maybe completely lost.
“I was around.” He shrugs, fingers carefully straightening her bed sheets. “You don’t really remember me, do you?”
“No.” It’s an honest reply. Suzy doesn’t lie, not much. She doesn’t have anyone to lie to. He chuckles, and the sound feels unnatural; the boy in her mind was serious and mute. But the way his lips curl up makes him look less threatening - pretty, even - and she feels a tinge of red tainting her cheeks already. “Why did you come back if you knew I wouldn’t remember?”
He lies down on her bed, his legs swinging from it without touching the floor, his arms behind his head and eyes closed. Suzy takes a few brave steps and allows herself to sit down near him. Uncertainty runs gradually out of her system as she watches his chest move slowly like he’s fallen asleep. Suzy lets herself stare, the details she couldn’t previously remember now filling up the picture in her mind. His dark eyes flash open again and he catches her stare, and for a second or so, Suzy can’t really breathe. It’s a strange feeling, and she doesn’t particularly like it.
“You’re pretty,” he mumbles, and Suzy thinks it sounds familiar in her ears. She doesn’t say anything, her voice caught up in her throat, looking straight ahead at the white washed walls and away from him. “Would you like to remember things? To live a little longer?”
That’s impossible, her brain points out once the words are barely out of his mouth. When her brain cells are gone, they’re gone; they might take with them her memories, or knowledge, or make her imagine things that never existed - there’s no way of turning back. There’s no cure for dementia, Suzy is well aware of that. She’s waiting, she has been waiting for a long time, just to go, to close her eyes and disappear from the world. It’s mockery to think this boy could make her remember, or save her life. And that’s exactly what she tells him; his face twists into a frown as he sits up again, turning his body to face her.
“It’s not impossible.” He gets closer to her and Suzy feels like running to the other side of the room. “I’ll show you.”
“I’ve been in this hospital for twelve years and I’m sure they would’ve told me by now if it were possible to save me.” Suzy’s voice is unwavering, and it assures her. “I hardly think you can.”
“Jump out of the window, then. Take a fucking bunch of pills.”
Suzy’s pride leaves her immediately, and her shoulders slouch a little, her expression probably melting down to a broken one. His words cut sharp as razor blades, but his face is emotionless; like he couldn’t care any less for her. Having salt poured in her wound hurts more than she would have expected. What he means is very clear. If you can’t be cured, why don’t you just die already? Why wait?
“Sinners can’t go to Heaven.” Her answer is a generic one, something she hears and reads whenever she takes a walk to the chapel. It sounds ridiculous when she says it, because there’s zero faith in her voice. She’s pretty sure the Virgin Mary statue is glaring furiously at her (she is). Suzy doesn’t believe in Heaven, she believes in a really long sleep.
“I’ve been to Heaven; it’s not as great as they make it out to be.”
“You’re crazy.” The irony of saying that almost makes her laugh, but of course she doesn’t. And yet, his voice is laced with confidence and truth, and suddenly she’s curious. Maybe he had died before, and somebody brought him back to life. Maybe he’s seen it and he remembers it. It’s possible - the possibility of it brings her comfort, for some reason. Something else exists. “What is it like?”
“Dark and lonely,” he says and shrugs his shoulders, his bored tone implying it’s not as great as she would like. “Like the night, but longer.”
Suzy feels like he’s not talking about death anymore, or Heaven. There’s silence now, and all she can hear is her own breathing. His is barely there, in odd patterns, like he doesn’t need to inhale and exhale like she does. Her eyelashes are beginning to feel heavy with sleep again, but Suzy is very sure she can sleep no longer. Her clock beeps twice - it’s five in the morning. The boy looks out of the window, to the starless sky that’s beginning its transition from dark to light.
“Show me, then.”
She’s not completely sure why she had just accepted whatever the strange boy was going to offer her - but there is something uncanny about his face and his words. It doesn’t mean she believes in him as much as she believes in her doctors (or in her darling Virgin Mary), just that she’s curious. She wants to see Heaven like he saw, and she wants to experience remembering his face once again if he goes away to return another day, month, year. Suzy is so lost in thought, she doesn’t see when it happens - but all of a sudden his fingers are bleeding, and he’s offering them to her. A disgusted expression crawls on her face, and she pushes his hand away. “What are you doing -?”
“Just take it -” They struggle a bit, Suzy pushing his hand away while he forces the bleeding fingers in her general direction. Her weakling body tires much faster, and in a second of carelessness she lets down her guard and gets blood all over her lips.
She feels like vomiting, but still her tongue runs over her bottom lip, savoring the crimson liquid. It doesn’t taste like what she had imagined, it’s almost sweet - metallic sweet, actually - and it’s thick like honey. Her eyes are pressed closed when her fingers find his, and she tries very hard not to imagine it’s blood she’s taking because the thought makes her stomach hurl. It burns her throat, feeling foreign and unwanted in her body. Finally, she lets his fingers go, coughing up on the blood, her eyes flashing open. Her cheeks are burning, her whole body is, and she feels embarrassed and dirty.
“It’s going to be okay,” the boy tells her, and Suzy wants to believe him for the sake of her sanity. For the first time in years she asks God to make her forget as quickly as she can. His fingers have stopped bleeding, and he wipes them out in her once clean bed sheets. Suzy’s watching him because she realizes she can’t look away, and when he holds her face to wipe her bloody lips, she doesn’t complain. His touch prickles, broiling her skin. For some reason he thinks it’s okay to kiss her, and so he does, and it’s quick and confusing and it tastes bitter.
It’s very much like watching her life from another person’s perspective. It’s her first kiss, probably the only kiss she’ll get before dying, and she’s not so sure anymore if she wants to forget. The boy is almost at the door before she realizes it and her voice cracks when she asks him for his name. “L,” he replies, and she tells herself not to forget (even though she is sure she will). Suzy doesn’t fall asleep until the sun is high and the medicine given her by a very unhappy looking nurse makes her drowsy. Her brain is a mess of memories, red and white, flashing like sirens - she holds onto them until she loses sense of reality and falls into deep slumber, no prayers this time.
Suzy dies that day, her heart failing on her while she sleeps, but the doctors are able to bring her back before she can see what Heaven is like. Liar.
Suzy’s room is full of hospital machines and it smells like death when she sees L again. This time, everything about him is recognizable. His smell, his hair, his eyes, his lips, his blood. Three days and nineteen hours have passed since she’d last seen him, and she remembers every minute of every day. It’s dark outside, and her room is somewhat silent. Oxygen machines and beeping screens are forgotten already. She had thought he was Death, and the nonsense makes her smile - even though she’s pretty sure he can’t be human, L can’t be Death either. He restored her memory, fractions of it - and he kissed her (and she remembers), and he forced blood down her throat (and she remembers). It tasted like honey and acid. She didn’t enjoy it.
“What happened?”
There’s a hint of apprehension in his voice, and it makes her face feel warm and her body to stir. She reaches up to show him the bracelets on her wrists, something she had gotten used to after all those years. For some reason, every time she lost control over her own body was because of something she might have done to kill herself (say the doctors), and so she was physically restrained on her bed until doctors or other general assholes decided she was okay again (or as okay as a dying patient can be). Of course, Suzy never really tried anything. She was happy enough just waiting and forgetting. A girl with no memories has absolutely no reason to be unhappy since the pain washes away with her neurons - sure, the good things go as well, but those are easier to let go of.
“I died,” she explains, sitting up to face him, her wrist belts pulling her down whenever she moves. “But not really. They brought me back.”
L is climbing on her bed again, and it already feels like he belongs in there. He rips the tight plastic bracelets around her wrists as if they’re made of paper, and she rubs her skin slowly, grateful for the release. He takes off his shoes, combat boots this time, and crawls until he’s sitting just beside her, his head on the bed post, his arm pressing against hers and his eyes at the ceiling. “Are you here to steal more blood with your friends?”
“We don’t steal.” He smiles, shaking his head a little. His bony fingers play with the zipper of his jacket nervously. “Ok, we steal it. We sell it later, and we keep some to ourselves.”
“Why?”
“Because we need to eat,” he says, and the thought is alarming, scary and wonderful at the same time. Suzy’s not fond of the eating blood part - it makes her slightly sick in her stomach just to think of it - but curiosity runs through her body like a flame. She’s pretty sure not many people are able to talk to people that are not exactly people, just mirror images with ugly truths concealed somewhere inside. And she’s read books (sometimes reread them, for the sake of remembering) - books where people like that do exist. “There aren’t many comatose patients left in this place, so blood bags are the only way.”
“You take it from people, too.” Her voice is barely a whisper, and she’s sure the color has left her face already. It’s not a question, because she already knows that’s what they do - whatever L and his friends are, or aren’t. The room feels much smaller than it actually is, and his presence is slowly starting to suffocate her; even the fabric of his clothes against her skin feels strange. But there’s thrill, too, and it feels weirdly good - like in a horror movie, just before the final scare. It’s conflicting, and her head aches just to think of it. “Were you going to -?”
“I thought you were in a coma, yes.” He closes his eyes, and takes what it sounds like a deep breath, but no air comes out of his lungs. “Will you tell on me to your doctors?” His voice is playful now, and he elbows her softly. The touch makes her shiver.
“I’ll forget; there’s no point in asking me that.”
L looks back at her, but Suzy doesn’t face him. She’s a little afraid his eyes will look dark like those of a monster, even though she knows that’s not possible (she hopes, more than she knows). His stare creeps under her skin like tiny spiders crawling all over. She shudders, running a hand over her arms to make sure the spiders aren’t there. The Virgin Mary statue -quiet ever since she woke up - shakes her tiny porcelain head, and Suzy is pretty sure she’s being judged by those small blue eyes.
“I could give you enough blood to-“
“Heal me?” Suzy has that out of body experience feeling as soon as she says it. She could be standing near the bed watching two strangers talk for all she knows. There’s nothing that can heal her, and she had accepted that many years ago, in a time she can’t remember. She wakes up and sleeps in a hospital bed, in her white boring hospital room with its sometimes withered, dry flowers, and other times with wrinkled nuns praying at her feet. Her family is made up of these walls, and the pastel colored bed sheets, and the oxygen machines with their soothing beeps, and her mother figure is a Virgin Mary statue. Suzy has always felt like she didn’t belong to people, but to the hospital itself - her farthest memories were born there, like she herself was born among these white walls and the smell of ether. It reeks, and Suzy reeks of it too. It is part of her and it won’t come out in the shower, as she would sometimes like it to.
She’s leaving, soon - there’s no telling when it will happen, but it will, and Suzy will sleep and then never wake up again, and her memories will come back once she’s in Heaven (not that she believes in it… not much). The thought of being healed doesn’t exist in her world, it’s not something she thinks about, and it’s not something possible - it wasn’t, at least. But L made her remember, and to have that power is something exquisite and precious.
“If you want to, I can… I can do it.” He nods. “But you’d be like me.”
“What is that like?”
“Different.” His voice is emotionless again, and barely there, like he’s holding back from saying whatever he needs to say. A smile curls his lips up. “Eventually… fun. Do you -?”
“No.” Drinking blood out of comatose people does not seem like fun in Suzy’s books. She makes a face, imagining how life would be if she had to survive on other people’s blood. She’s just fine with her daily dose of chocolate pudding - sometimes tasteless, she reckons, but still chocolate. It’d be a lie to say she never thought of growing up, of course she did, but those thoughts are frequently forgotten by her bruised brain, so it doesn’t hurt as much to think about it. That’s why waiting isn’t so terrible - it’s just another way of growing up. Living would be a wonderful experience, but Suzy is content enough surviving the day. She was born rotten, she was going to die young. Penalty accepted. “But thank you.”
“What about leaving here?” L is closer, whispering in her ear like he’s her conscience. Oh, that. Suzy thinks she’s very unfit for the outer world, too frail, too pasty, too almost-dead - and of course, she never had anywhere to go. Parents she can’t remember are waiting for her at the graveyard, as they had embraced the eternal nap already. No sisters, or brothers, of friends or family to go to. Suzy is a loner, an imprisoned bird who doesn’t have wings anymore - and she never really minded that. “Come with me.”
“Why?”
“Because,” He shrugs, and he’s not close anymore (Suzy is secretly thankful for that). It doesn’t seem like he has an answer and the silence drags for a while. “Because… Well, I live with boys. We could use a girl to cook and clean.”
“It’s perfectly wonderful how you talk about girls,” there’s annoyance in Suzy’s voice. She doesn’t know how to cook - or clean, for that matter - and those things are certainly not in her bucket list (her bucket list is made of one changeable wish, and she had been fulfilling them every year; this year’s wish is to live just long enough to see her favorite pop band on the end of the year award shows - it’s not much, but it’d make her happy) (there’s six more months to go).
“That’s what happens when you live with a bunch of disgusting boys,” They both laugh, and it’s a first, Suzy thinks. The fear, or the anxiousness, had dissipated - like it usually happens with her (medicine); but she’s glad they did. Even Virgin Mary looks less pissed off. “You’ve met Sungyeol - I mean-“
“Point taken.”
“So will you? Come with me?” L sounds eager, and Suzy gets lost in his words after a while. You shouldn’t just watch life from inside a white box, he’s saying. It sounds like a politician’s speech, carefully prepared to brainwash whoever listens to it. Motivational and touching, brilliantly spoken and laced with far too many lies and false promises. Suzy doesn’t believe in life as he paints - colorful, or bright, or adventurous - because she only learned pain and medication and a bucket list with no more than one wish, because she can’t hope to fulfill more than that. It’s not completely bad, she knows it could be worse - she enjoys her monochromatic life as much as she can, until she’s put inside her coffin to appreciate a nice, eternal snooze.
“I’ll go for three days,” She announces, and L’s words get lost in his mouth. “You will let me come back if I want to. I will not cook - or clean!”
It’s an absolutely scary decision, she thinks. She doesn’t feel it - the fear - but it’s there somewhere, mixed with a turmoil of other feelings she can’t really set apart. For twelve years, the farthest she ever went was the yards near the parking lot, where she could see the gates to the outside world; each step closer an adventure itself (she categorized those steps as tests, not adventures). Suzy grew up in a hospital, surrounded by people that don’t believe in fairy tales or pirates and ships and lost princesses - so she doesn’t believe in them either, preferring to accept diseases and diagnosis much easier than she would accept an adventure. But as a good scientist, she needs proof adventures don’t exist, so she can come back and die with another interesting piece of knowledge forgotten somewhere in her brain.
She doesn’t have time to assimilate the fact she said yes to going away from home with a somewhat familiar stranger because L is already leaping from her bed, and she’s on her feet because he’s pulling her, and he looks like a person from the Cancer wing that just got cured. It’s endearing, Suzy thinks.
“Can’t we wait until morning?” She asks, after being basically shoved inside her closed to change clothes (Suzy thinks that’s not how relationships are supposed to be built between people - with pushing and shoving - but she does feel less of a weakling and more like a person whenever he’s touching her; he isn't afraid she'll break because he seems to believe she won't).
“No - are you really taking this damn statue?”
“Yes!” From the dark closet, she rolls her eyes in exasperation, wishing she could just go outside in her pajamas like she does ever so often to buy ice-cream from a vending machine on the first floor. Nobody cares. “And why?”
“I’ll decay in the morning,” L’s voice is contained, and it sounds muffled because of the closed closet doors. Suzy doesn’t understand what he means (and honestly doesn’t want to).
There’s one dress Suzy never wore before, because it’s the dress she’s going to be buried in. It’s white and pristine like it should be, and her only pair of nice shoes fit perfectly well with it. The seam is a bit short on the thighs, because the dress was bought by the nuns of St. Mary’s for her fifteenth birthday, and she can’t seem to close the buttons of the back by herself. L does, when she steps out of the closet in her funeral clothes, and it feels awkward and too intimate. She looks good in that dress - blanched, yes, like she should be. It’ll go well with the flowers, it’s her only thought.
It’s thirteen minutes past two in the morning when she stops in front of her open door, carefully enough not to really step out of her room just yet. L is in front of her, out in the silent corridor, and he waits. She made her bed, and left a note to whoever came to her room the next morning. I’ll be back in three days, don’t worry about me (and I’m still wearing my hospital bracelet in case I die, and I took my medication from the cabin - I’m sorry I had to break it, by the way; you may want to fix that, I guess) - Suzy. She holds the Virgin Mary closer to her, and in her mind she hears the statue’s tiny heartbeat, comforting her.
“Shall we go?”
It’s his hand he offers, and it’s dirty and stained of red like it usually goes for him. She takes it - his skin rough against hers, her hand small against his. Virgin Mary holds her breath, and so does Suzy, and stepping out seems like jumping out of a window into the night sky.
And then they run away.
(to continue)
part 1, 6221 words, R
angst/romance/supernatural
myungzy, one-sided myungyeol
A/N: this is alternative-universe (twisted) Peter Pan. And it's also vampires. Hah. R-rating for violence/sexual topics and gore. Have fun!
breathe your smoke into my lungs
still not too young to die young
Suzy lives in a white room - a boring one, she reckons. White hospital walls, washed out, once-pink bed sheets, withering flowers dying out on a table, beeping machines that cast a greenish, eerie glow after dark, and of course that everlasting distasteful smell of ether and death. It reeks, and Suzy probably reeks of it too, no matter how hard she scrubs her skin during her showers (she does, and it hurts), but Seoul St. Mary’s Hospital has been her home for the past twelve years and she likes to think she’s used to it (she’s really not). There’s no use complaining about it now, anyway, when she’s leaving.
Not literally leaving - that won’t ever happen (it will, she just won’t be around to see it). Suzy was born rotten, and for that she has to die young. She’ll be put in a white coffin with pristine clothing on, and she’ll look white and pasty and finally dead. There’s even a place for her at the graveyard near the hospital’s chapel, and the flowers have been paid for a long time ago by loving parents she once had (although she can’t remember). Suzy doesn’t want to rush, but she doesn’t fear it either - it’s the natural process, she muses, it’s like sleeping for a long time.
Whatever she is expecting to come and get her, it is not the boy perched over her bed, all dark and red tones contrasting so clearly with the whiteness of the room around them. If she had to choose a word to describe him, it’d be dirty; black chipped nail polish, smudged black eye makeup that makes his eyes look sunken in, red on his face and on his fingers - a tone of red Suzy knows very well. He is staring, with the curiosity of a child as it analyzes a very ugly looking, but mildly interesting, new toy. He’s not just in her head, not this time, but the possibility doesn’t scare her enough. Her damaged brain alerts her to call someone, but she quickly brushes the thought away. Maybe this is it.
“Are you Death?”
Death, as she imagined before, would come to her in a black robe, holding a scythe, perhaps - the classic Reaper - and he would walk her through Death 101 before taking her soul. The judgmental Virgin Mary statue in her room never really liked that version, and Suzy could almost see that porcelain face twisting in disgust when the thought crosses her mind again now. It almost makes her smile secretly at the saint, but she doesn’t think it would suit the situation she’s in. The boy is still there - symmetrical and sharp, very three-dimensional and smeared in all the shades of red that aren’t supposed to be there.
“I’m not.” He shifts his weight a little, and Suzy is not as disappointed as she was expecting. There is, oddly enough, only an empty feeling of acceptance. “But you sure looked dead just now.”
Suzy doesn’t think she needs to explain, but she does anyway. “I was sleeping.” He looks around, taking all her world in with empty, dark eyes. It crosses her mind that she had always slept like the dead, and that’s pretty fucking ironic, in her opinion. With the corner of her eyes, she sees the Virgin Mary scolding her with condemnatory blue eyes. No swearing! “What’s your name?”
His eyes are back on her, and his voice is soft when he replies. “I’m L. Are you sick?” He bluntly ignores her slightly irritated expression, pushing himself up and sitting on her bed. Suzy moves her feet involuntarily, giving the space she shouldn’t give him. L’s dirty fingers leave red patterns on her bed sheets.
“Yes.” It stings a little, the first time saying she’s sick. Maybe because the boy in front of her looks very much alive, a vague but harsh reminder he’ll grow up to become something while she will die having barely lived. Suzy never interacts with people - at least not enough to make her feel that way, and the foreignness of the feeling bothers her. In St. Mary’s Hospital, not a lot of people still care for the impatient ghost girl in Room 1013. “I’ve been sick for a while. What do you want here?”
L plays with blankets just over her ankles, drawing symbols she can’t see. He looks bothered, and Suzy wonders if her sickness is the reason behind it. It takes a while for him to answer. “Do you ever leave this room?”
It’s not exactly the words she was expecting. It’s an invasive question she doesn’t want to consider, but her body seems to betray her because her tongue is already rolling before her brain can tell her to shove him away and call for a nurse instead of replying. Fucking damaged stupid brain (the Virgin Mary shudders in her spot).
“I don’t remember the last time I’ve been out in the yards, but I do, to get sunlight,” she hears herself say and it feels like an out of body experience. “They say sun always helps the dying. I say bullshit.”
“You smell like it,” L mutters as he tugs his hands in leathery pockets on his jacket. Suzy feels her cheeks heating up - all she smells is the foul scent of the hospital’s hallways and all the souls in it. She curls her toes, dragging her legs up until her chin is resting on her knees. Protection from the boy that just won’t leave, she guesses. Interestingly enough, L does the same - going as far as taking off his Converse shoes so he could properly mirror her. “You smell very much of the sun. I’d say you’ve been to the yards not a day ago - maybe even earlier yesterday, considering it’s already two in the morning.”
His words prickle, make her uncomfortable. Suzy’s well aware she can’t remember, that her brain is not entirely capable of providing her with the information she needs about people and facts and time - but it’s unsettling to be exposed like that by a stranger. She’s used to accepting pity coming from people she meets during her hallway walks, not emotionless truth. “That’s - that’s ridiculous. What do you -?”
“I was hungry; I fed. I saw you; I got curious.” It’s a simple answer, and he gives it to her as matter-of-factly as possible, observing her quietly. In the dark, the whites of his eyes disappear, and Suzy feels like she’s looking into the murky black eyes of a monster. “You’re pretty.”
Pretty is not usually a word she’d use to describe herself. Sickly; fragile; doomed, yes. Pretty, no. When Suzy looks into the mirror of her bathroom (it’s broken on the side, so she sees herself having four eyes, which makes her giggle sometimes), all she sees is a corpse that happens to walk around. So the compliment surprises her, makes her blush much more than before, and suddenly she doesn’t know what to do with her hands, or her fingers, or herself. She wants to say something back - You’re pretty too? No, that’s ridiculous (he is). Thank you. I know. No! Ugh! - but the awkward silence that had installed itself in the room is broken when her door bursts open. At first Suzy thinks it’s one of the night shift nurses, checking to see if she’s still alive (a task they don’t care to perform very often), but the boy runs a nervous hand through his brown hair, and she sees the bright red on his fingers as well. It sticks to his hair like paint.
“What the fuck are you doing?”
The voice is entirely different from L’s soft voice. It’s rushing with adrenaline, and it’s higher and brighter. While L’s voice is a shade of boring gray, this boy’s voice is a sparkly yellow. Suzy watches as the boy sitting on her bed sighs, a deeply disgruntled look on his face. He eases himself off her bed, snatching his shoes on the floor.
“I was having a conversation, Sungyeol, fuck off.” The Virgin Mary statue looks furious. Suzy doesn’t move from her spot - both of them have blood on their hands and it doesn’t seem like a wise decision to say anything. “Are you done?”
“Of course we’re done. What do you think we are, baby vamps?” Sungyeol rolls his eyes, shoving the door closed. He doesn’t seem to notice Suzy - or he simply chooses to ignore her presence. She feels like the second option is more likely. “We got blood stacked up, too. Sunggyu must be a chipmunk or something, man. Saving for the winter and all that shit!”
Sungyeol’s laugh is high-pitched, and he jumps around the room as he speaks. His fingers grab the portraits on the table in front of her bed, and after one bored look drops them again. Her books are taken from the bookcase, just to be dropped as well, and Suzy watches with horror as he goes through her underwear drawer. He is much taller than L seems to be, and leaner (possibly meaner, too). Finally, his big eyes focus on her frail body frame under the covers. He cocks his head to the side, getting closer.
“Did you eat her out, perhaps? She looks hot.”
L groans, disgusted, and Suzy understands that whatever he said, it doesn’t mean something necessarily polite. She doesn’t feel the need to know what is their exchange about, but there’s a lot of furious glances and one of her books flies across the room (it misses Sungyeol’s head by inches). Sungyeol folds in half with laugher, the blood smeared on his face making him look like a particularly nasty movie villain.
“Don’t worry about him, he’s going to be a virgin forever,” L says over his shoulder. Suzy wants to tell him she doesn’t really want to know who is a virgin and who is not - but she doesn’t, because her voice is still nowhere to be found. Sungyeol curses him from across the room, and throws himself into the old, dusty armchair near her bed, his feet over her bedside table. “Sungyeol is just a shithead.”
“You just wanted to eat her, don’t fuck around,” the other boy laughs loudly. If they could see the Virgin Mary and her horrified expression, they would mind their language a bit - but Suzy is very sure only she is able to see the twisted little face eyeballing them.
“Could you - leave?” Once again, she hears her voice like it’s coming out from another person. Both boys look back at her, Sungyeol with hardly any interest. She takes a few breaths in before finding her voice again, stronger. “Just leave.”
“Oy, you hear the lady; glamor her and let’s go. I want to go out to drink before we go to ground.” Sungyeol jumps up, stretching his long limbs and yawning. Suzy has a hard time understanding what glamor is, and as usual her brain shuts off any kind of access she may have to her very candid and confusing memories.
“She doesn’t need glamor.” L has something else on his face now, and Suzy recognizes immediately; pity, laced with a very subtle line of I-don’t-give-a-shit. “She’ll forget on her own.”
You son of a-
The thought crosses her mind, and her lips are already halfway opened with the words to curse him, but L and Sungyeol leave as quickly as they came in, leaving only silence and the metallic scent of blood behind. Her body stirs out of its stillness, and her knees hurt once she jumps out of her bed, a thin line of anger taking control of her otherwise calm façade. She’ll forget on her own, he had said. Mockery - like she’s not capable of keeping the memory (sadly that’s true, but Suzy won’t admit it, stubborn as she is).
As she paces the room, her feet start dragging, until she’s barely walking. The anger dissipates; her body cools down, her hands grow colder again. Suzy finally crawls into bed, even though she doesn’t feel tired. After saying goodnight to a very unhappy Virgin Mary, she closes her eyes. L’s face is imprinted on the inside of her eyelids. She studies his features with eyes closed, careful not to miss any details, and she lets her bruised memory take him in. His face is the last image she sees before drifting off into a deep sleep, her nightly prayers dying out in her throat before reaching up to higher skies.
White, white, white - am I dead?
Suzy isn’t dead just yet. She’s slept with the lights on, and the pallid colors hurt her eyes and make her hide under thin layers of blankets. She stretches like a cat, her body still heavy with sleep, eyes glancing between the covers to the digital clock on her bedside table. Four fifteen in the morning. The book she must have been reading before falling asleep is on the floor, facing down, its cover bright red glowing like an emergency lamp to guide her way (she realizes she doesn’t remember anymore what page she was on). It takes a few minutes but she drags her body out of the warm bed, feet meeting the cold floor, making her shudder. She quickly finds her way to the switch near the door, and soon her room is plunged into calming darkness. The yellow glow from outside buildings casts shadows in weird shapes on her walls, and if she were still a child, she would have been afraid to stay there alone.
Except, in that small corner of Seoul St. Mary’s Hospital, in that room, Suzy isn’t alone. She sees with the corner of her sleepy eyes one of the shadows detaching itself from the wall near the window, arms folded and with an annoyed expression. Her brain fights to remember, but she only gets a blank space for her efforts. She doesn’t feel fear, either - the probability of the shadow being completely imaginary is very high, and Suzy had developed techniques to ignore her own illusions over the years. There’s medicine, of course, but the medicine won’t let her feel anything at all - or think, or pray, or sleep the whole night straight.
“You’re awake again.” His voice is soft and calm, and he slumps down on her bed, making the mattress squeak under his weight. Suzy’s hand reaches over to the light switch again.
She remembers, like words from her mother language, the traces of his face. She can’t remember his name, but the rest is still there, in her memory. Blurry and scattered like pieces of a challenging puzzle. She had forgotten almost everything; the clothes, the smell, the slight touch of his fingers on the bed sheets over her ankles - but his face is still in her mind. Her brain had given her a white canvas, and she had painted his messy hair, the sunken eyes, the red smears on his cheeks. The nameless boy, the only face she could remember, is sitting on her bed again; like he did before in a time Suzy can’t really place (it might never have happened, for all she knows).
“You’re back,” she states simply, tip-toeing her way back to her bed, but then deciding she doesn’t want to get on the bed with the stranger. She stops near the windows, and pretends the Virgin Mary is holding her hand for comfort. He’s dissecting her, that’s what it feels like. Suzy stares back, unyielding under his gaze, until he looks away with a bored sigh, interest maybe completely lost.
“I was around.” He shrugs, fingers carefully straightening her bed sheets. “You don’t really remember me, do you?”
“No.” It’s an honest reply. Suzy doesn’t lie, not much. She doesn’t have anyone to lie to. He chuckles, and the sound feels unnatural; the boy in her mind was serious and mute. But the way his lips curl up makes him look less threatening - pretty, even - and she feels a tinge of red tainting her cheeks already. “Why did you come back if you knew I wouldn’t remember?”
He lies down on her bed, his legs swinging from it without touching the floor, his arms behind his head and eyes closed. Suzy takes a few brave steps and allows herself to sit down near him. Uncertainty runs gradually out of her system as she watches his chest move slowly like he’s fallen asleep. Suzy lets herself stare, the details she couldn’t previously remember now filling up the picture in her mind. His dark eyes flash open again and he catches her stare, and for a second or so, Suzy can’t really breathe. It’s a strange feeling, and she doesn’t particularly like it.
“You’re pretty,” he mumbles, and Suzy thinks it sounds familiar in her ears. She doesn’t say anything, her voice caught up in her throat, looking straight ahead at the white washed walls and away from him. “Would you like to remember things? To live a little longer?”
That’s impossible, her brain points out once the words are barely out of his mouth. When her brain cells are gone, they’re gone; they might take with them her memories, or knowledge, or make her imagine things that never existed - there’s no way of turning back. There’s no cure for dementia, Suzy is well aware of that. She’s waiting, she has been waiting for a long time, just to go, to close her eyes and disappear from the world. It’s mockery to think this boy could make her remember, or save her life. And that’s exactly what she tells him; his face twists into a frown as he sits up again, turning his body to face her.
“It’s not impossible.” He gets closer to her and Suzy feels like running to the other side of the room. “I’ll show you.”
“I’ve been in this hospital for twelve years and I’m sure they would’ve told me by now if it were possible to save me.” Suzy’s voice is unwavering, and it assures her. “I hardly think you can.”
“Jump out of the window, then. Take a fucking bunch of pills.”
Suzy’s pride leaves her immediately, and her shoulders slouch a little, her expression probably melting down to a broken one. His words cut sharp as razor blades, but his face is emotionless; like he couldn’t care any less for her. Having salt poured in her wound hurts more than she would have expected. What he means is very clear. If you can’t be cured, why don’t you just die already? Why wait?
“Sinners can’t go to Heaven.” Her answer is a generic one, something she hears and reads whenever she takes a walk to the chapel. It sounds ridiculous when she says it, because there’s zero faith in her voice. She’s pretty sure the Virgin Mary statue is glaring furiously at her (she is). Suzy doesn’t believe in Heaven, she believes in a really long sleep.
“I’ve been to Heaven; it’s not as great as they make it out to be.”
“You’re crazy.” The irony of saying that almost makes her laugh, but of course she doesn’t. And yet, his voice is laced with confidence and truth, and suddenly she’s curious. Maybe he had died before, and somebody brought him back to life. Maybe he’s seen it and he remembers it. It’s possible - the possibility of it brings her comfort, for some reason. Something else exists. “What is it like?”
“Dark and lonely,” he says and shrugs his shoulders, his bored tone implying it’s not as great as she would like. “Like the night, but longer.”
Suzy feels like he’s not talking about death anymore, or Heaven. There’s silence now, and all she can hear is her own breathing. His is barely there, in odd patterns, like he doesn’t need to inhale and exhale like she does. Her eyelashes are beginning to feel heavy with sleep again, but Suzy is very sure she can sleep no longer. Her clock beeps twice - it’s five in the morning. The boy looks out of the window, to the starless sky that’s beginning its transition from dark to light.
“Show me, then.”
She’s not completely sure why she had just accepted whatever the strange boy was going to offer her - but there is something uncanny about his face and his words. It doesn’t mean she believes in him as much as she believes in her doctors (or in her darling Virgin Mary), just that she’s curious. She wants to see Heaven like he saw, and she wants to experience remembering his face once again if he goes away to return another day, month, year. Suzy is so lost in thought, she doesn’t see when it happens - but all of a sudden his fingers are bleeding, and he’s offering them to her. A disgusted expression crawls on her face, and she pushes his hand away. “What are you doing -?”
“Just take it -” They struggle a bit, Suzy pushing his hand away while he forces the bleeding fingers in her general direction. Her weakling body tires much faster, and in a second of carelessness she lets down her guard and gets blood all over her lips.
She feels like vomiting, but still her tongue runs over her bottom lip, savoring the crimson liquid. It doesn’t taste like what she had imagined, it’s almost sweet - metallic sweet, actually - and it’s thick like honey. Her eyes are pressed closed when her fingers find his, and she tries very hard not to imagine it’s blood she’s taking because the thought makes her stomach hurl. It burns her throat, feeling foreign and unwanted in her body. Finally, she lets his fingers go, coughing up on the blood, her eyes flashing open. Her cheeks are burning, her whole body is, and she feels embarrassed and dirty.
“It’s going to be okay,” the boy tells her, and Suzy wants to believe him for the sake of her sanity. For the first time in years she asks God to make her forget as quickly as she can. His fingers have stopped bleeding, and he wipes them out in her once clean bed sheets. Suzy’s watching him because she realizes she can’t look away, and when he holds her face to wipe her bloody lips, she doesn’t complain. His touch prickles, broiling her skin. For some reason he thinks it’s okay to kiss her, and so he does, and it’s quick and confusing and it tastes bitter.
It’s very much like watching her life from another person’s perspective. It’s her first kiss, probably the only kiss she’ll get before dying, and she’s not so sure anymore if she wants to forget. The boy is almost at the door before she realizes it and her voice cracks when she asks him for his name. “L,” he replies, and she tells herself not to forget (even though she is sure she will). Suzy doesn’t fall asleep until the sun is high and the medicine given her by a very unhappy looking nurse makes her drowsy. Her brain is a mess of memories, red and white, flashing like sirens - she holds onto them until she loses sense of reality and falls into deep slumber, no prayers this time.
Suzy dies that day, her heart failing on her while she sleeps, but the doctors are able to bring her back before she can see what Heaven is like. Liar.
Suzy’s room is full of hospital machines and it smells like death when she sees L again. This time, everything about him is recognizable. His smell, his hair, his eyes, his lips, his blood. Three days and nineteen hours have passed since she’d last seen him, and she remembers every minute of every day. It’s dark outside, and her room is somewhat silent. Oxygen machines and beeping screens are forgotten already. She had thought he was Death, and the nonsense makes her smile - even though she’s pretty sure he can’t be human, L can’t be Death either. He restored her memory, fractions of it - and he kissed her (and she remembers), and he forced blood down her throat (and she remembers). It tasted like honey and acid. She didn’t enjoy it.
“What happened?”
There’s a hint of apprehension in his voice, and it makes her face feel warm and her body to stir. She reaches up to show him the bracelets on her wrists, something she had gotten used to after all those years. For some reason, every time she lost control over her own body was because of something she might have done to kill herself (say the doctors), and so she was physically restrained on her bed until doctors or other general assholes decided she was okay again (or as okay as a dying patient can be). Of course, Suzy never really tried anything. She was happy enough just waiting and forgetting. A girl with no memories has absolutely no reason to be unhappy since the pain washes away with her neurons - sure, the good things go as well, but those are easier to let go of.
“I died,” she explains, sitting up to face him, her wrist belts pulling her down whenever she moves. “But not really. They brought me back.”
L is climbing on her bed again, and it already feels like he belongs in there. He rips the tight plastic bracelets around her wrists as if they’re made of paper, and she rubs her skin slowly, grateful for the release. He takes off his shoes, combat boots this time, and crawls until he’s sitting just beside her, his head on the bed post, his arm pressing against hers and his eyes at the ceiling. “Are you here to steal more blood with your friends?”
“We don’t steal.” He smiles, shaking his head a little. His bony fingers play with the zipper of his jacket nervously. “Ok, we steal it. We sell it later, and we keep some to ourselves.”
“Why?”
“Because we need to eat,” he says, and the thought is alarming, scary and wonderful at the same time. Suzy’s not fond of the eating blood part - it makes her slightly sick in her stomach just to think of it - but curiosity runs through her body like a flame. She’s pretty sure not many people are able to talk to people that are not exactly people, just mirror images with ugly truths concealed somewhere inside. And she’s read books (sometimes reread them, for the sake of remembering) - books where people like that do exist. “There aren’t many comatose patients left in this place, so blood bags are the only way.”
“You take it from people, too.” Her voice is barely a whisper, and she’s sure the color has left her face already. It’s not a question, because she already knows that’s what they do - whatever L and his friends are, or aren’t. The room feels much smaller than it actually is, and his presence is slowly starting to suffocate her; even the fabric of his clothes against her skin feels strange. But there’s thrill, too, and it feels weirdly good - like in a horror movie, just before the final scare. It’s conflicting, and her head aches just to think of it. “Were you going to -?”
“I thought you were in a coma, yes.” He closes his eyes, and takes what it sounds like a deep breath, but no air comes out of his lungs. “Will you tell on me to your doctors?” His voice is playful now, and he elbows her softly. The touch makes her shiver.
“I’ll forget; there’s no point in asking me that.”
L looks back at her, but Suzy doesn’t face him. She’s a little afraid his eyes will look dark like those of a monster, even though she knows that’s not possible (she hopes, more than she knows). His stare creeps under her skin like tiny spiders crawling all over. She shudders, running a hand over her arms to make sure the spiders aren’t there. The Virgin Mary statue -quiet ever since she woke up - shakes her tiny porcelain head, and Suzy is pretty sure she’s being judged by those small blue eyes.
“I could give you enough blood to-“
“Heal me?” Suzy has that out of body experience feeling as soon as she says it. She could be standing near the bed watching two strangers talk for all she knows. There’s nothing that can heal her, and she had accepted that many years ago, in a time she can’t remember. She wakes up and sleeps in a hospital bed, in her white boring hospital room with its sometimes withered, dry flowers, and other times with wrinkled nuns praying at her feet. Her family is made up of these walls, and the pastel colored bed sheets, and the oxygen machines with their soothing beeps, and her mother figure is a Virgin Mary statue. Suzy has always felt like she didn’t belong to people, but to the hospital itself - her farthest memories were born there, like she herself was born among these white walls and the smell of ether. It reeks, and Suzy reeks of it too. It is part of her and it won’t come out in the shower, as she would sometimes like it to.
She’s leaving, soon - there’s no telling when it will happen, but it will, and Suzy will sleep and then never wake up again, and her memories will come back once she’s in Heaven (not that she believes in it… not much). The thought of being healed doesn’t exist in her world, it’s not something she thinks about, and it’s not something possible - it wasn’t, at least. But L made her remember, and to have that power is something exquisite and precious.
“If you want to, I can… I can do it.” He nods. “But you’d be like me.”
“What is that like?”
“Different.” His voice is emotionless again, and barely there, like he’s holding back from saying whatever he needs to say. A smile curls his lips up. “Eventually… fun. Do you -?”
“No.” Drinking blood out of comatose people does not seem like fun in Suzy’s books. She makes a face, imagining how life would be if she had to survive on other people’s blood. She’s just fine with her daily dose of chocolate pudding - sometimes tasteless, she reckons, but still chocolate. It’d be a lie to say she never thought of growing up, of course she did, but those thoughts are frequently forgotten by her bruised brain, so it doesn’t hurt as much to think about it. That’s why waiting isn’t so terrible - it’s just another way of growing up. Living would be a wonderful experience, but Suzy is content enough surviving the day. She was born rotten, she was going to die young. Penalty accepted. “But thank you.”
“What about leaving here?” L is closer, whispering in her ear like he’s her conscience. Oh, that. Suzy thinks she’s very unfit for the outer world, too frail, too pasty, too almost-dead - and of course, she never had anywhere to go. Parents she can’t remember are waiting for her at the graveyard, as they had embraced the eternal nap already. No sisters, or brothers, of friends or family to go to. Suzy is a loner, an imprisoned bird who doesn’t have wings anymore - and she never really minded that. “Come with me.”
“Why?”
“Because,” He shrugs, and he’s not close anymore (Suzy is secretly thankful for that). It doesn’t seem like he has an answer and the silence drags for a while. “Because… Well, I live with boys. We could use a girl to cook and clean.”
“It’s perfectly wonderful how you talk about girls,” there’s annoyance in Suzy’s voice. She doesn’t know how to cook - or clean, for that matter - and those things are certainly not in her bucket list (her bucket list is made of one changeable wish, and she had been fulfilling them every year; this year’s wish is to live just long enough to see her favorite pop band on the end of the year award shows - it’s not much, but it’d make her happy) (there’s six more months to go).
“That’s what happens when you live with a bunch of disgusting boys,” They both laugh, and it’s a first, Suzy thinks. The fear, or the anxiousness, had dissipated - like it usually happens with her (medicine); but she’s glad they did. Even Virgin Mary looks less pissed off. “You’ve met Sungyeol - I mean-“
“Point taken.”
“So will you? Come with me?” L sounds eager, and Suzy gets lost in his words after a while. You shouldn’t just watch life from inside a white box, he’s saying. It sounds like a politician’s speech, carefully prepared to brainwash whoever listens to it. Motivational and touching, brilliantly spoken and laced with far too many lies and false promises. Suzy doesn’t believe in life as he paints - colorful, or bright, or adventurous - because she only learned pain and medication and a bucket list with no more than one wish, because she can’t hope to fulfill more than that. It’s not completely bad, she knows it could be worse - she enjoys her monochromatic life as much as she can, until she’s put inside her coffin to appreciate a nice, eternal snooze.
“I’ll go for three days,” She announces, and L’s words get lost in his mouth. “You will let me come back if I want to. I will not cook - or clean!”
It’s an absolutely scary decision, she thinks. She doesn’t feel it - the fear - but it’s there somewhere, mixed with a turmoil of other feelings she can’t really set apart. For twelve years, the farthest she ever went was the yards near the parking lot, where she could see the gates to the outside world; each step closer an adventure itself (she categorized those steps as tests, not adventures). Suzy grew up in a hospital, surrounded by people that don’t believe in fairy tales or pirates and ships and lost princesses - so she doesn’t believe in them either, preferring to accept diseases and diagnosis much easier than she would accept an adventure. But as a good scientist, she needs proof adventures don’t exist, so she can come back and die with another interesting piece of knowledge forgotten somewhere in her brain.
She doesn’t have time to assimilate the fact she said yes to going away from home with a somewhat familiar stranger because L is already leaping from her bed, and she’s on her feet because he’s pulling her, and he looks like a person from the Cancer wing that just got cured. It’s endearing, Suzy thinks.
“Can’t we wait until morning?” She asks, after being basically shoved inside her closed to change clothes (Suzy thinks that’s not how relationships are supposed to be built between people - with pushing and shoving - but she does feel less of a weakling and more like a person whenever he’s touching her; he isn't afraid she'll break because he seems to believe she won't).
“No - are you really taking this damn statue?”
“Yes!” From the dark closet, she rolls her eyes in exasperation, wishing she could just go outside in her pajamas like she does ever so often to buy ice-cream from a vending machine on the first floor. Nobody cares. “And why?”
“I’ll decay in the morning,” L’s voice is contained, and it sounds muffled because of the closed closet doors. Suzy doesn’t understand what he means (and honestly doesn’t want to).
There’s one dress Suzy never wore before, because it’s the dress she’s going to be buried in. It’s white and pristine like it should be, and her only pair of nice shoes fit perfectly well with it. The seam is a bit short on the thighs, because the dress was bought by the nuns of St. Mary’s for her fifteenth birthday, and she can’t seem to close the buttons of the back by herself. L does, when she steps out of the closet in her funeral clothes, and it feels awkward and too intimate. She looks good in that dress - blanched, yes, like she should be. It’ll go well with the flowers, it’s her only thought.
It’s thirteen minutes past two in the morning when she stops in front of her open door, carefully enough not to really step out of her room just yet. L is in front of her, out in the silent corridor, and he waits. She made her bed, and left a note to whoever came to her room the next morning. I’ll be back in three days, don’t worry about me (and I’m still wearing my hospital bracelet in case I die, and I took my medication from the cabin - I’m sorry I had to break it, by the way; you may want to fix that, I guess) - Suzy. She holds the Virgin Mary closer to her, and in her mind she hears the statue’s tiny heartbeat, comforting her.
“Shall we go?”
It’s his hand he offers, and it’s dirty and stained of red like it usually goes for him. She takes it - his skin rough against hers, her hand small against his. Virgin Mary holds her breath, and so does Suzy, and stepping out seems like jumping out of a window into the night sky.
And then they run away.
(to continue)