look into my eyes (butterfly)
FANDOM: EXO
PAIRING: Sehun-centric, mentions of suho/sehun (likely sehun/tao)
RATING: R
WORDCOUNT: 2.2K+ (est. 6-8K+)
SUMMARY: Sehun is the little cancer, the sole anomaly in an otherwise perfect system
NOTES: HS!AU + Warnings for bullying, homophobia. Very rough draft. Have several more scenes written out but they don't link to what's written here. A more introspective piece, with less focus on plot and more like a sort of character study? unbetaed completely so excuse any errors >.< also lj has eaten my formatting...will come back up to fill it in when I get home
The rain is a rhythm against the concrete, a discordant melody buried beneath the sounds of feet against the pavements. Across: the traffic lights blink and stutter, walk, walking, amber, slow, red, stop, green, go. Left, right: the brush of flesh against the morning rush, umbrellas jutting like elbows into the sky, cold bodies of purpose and direction. Centre: A boy, a kite in the wind, string-less, flotsam adrift, him, it-an existence, not alive, not dead. In front: cars moving in synchronicity with the glowing hues, water spilling from between tarmac and grey dust.
He closes his eyes and braces himself.
***
This is a butterfly, colored in shades of grey and white.
Its wings, inked with black lines and dark webs of scars, are still and silent as the wind blows. Feet stand on thorns of the red red rose till they are scarred and broken, dancing as they bleed in the weight of the breeze. This is a butterfly whose wings are tugged by hands, caught in the barbed wires of stem and leaf. This is a butterfly, fragile and cold as ice. This is a butterfly with thin, broken wings, sharp as shards of glass on skin...wings that cannot take flight.
***
If loneliness is a sound, then, he thinks, loneliness must be the echoing silence of an empty heart.
***
The door slams behind him, a sudden noise that juxtaposes the mellow ambers of the backdrop of fall. His feet move, one step after the next, mindlessly slow. Perhaps it’s because it is morning, and he’s still barely awake and functioning. Perhaps it is because they ache with blue and browned skin, and red threads around his thumbs down his wrists. Perhaps he doesn’t quite like what morning brings, and his feet are but a mirror’s reflection of his heart’s own desire for time to pause even just for a while.
He can spot the outlines of the iron gates that frame the building down the winding path on his right. Long, white walls and glass windows too dim to permeate light-this is the place of nightmares, a paradigm of conformity with their blue blazers and grey slacks, and their ideals of beauty and perfection that mold them.
(Hakgyo, reads the sign, two letters in bolded black against the white plaster, school.)
The wind is chilly as he crushes a few leaves beneath his boot, and he tightens the stiff fabric of his jacket around his chest.
This is a place of cold words and harsher hands-a place of conformity where he is different and he must pay the price.
***
Morning assembly begins in slightly over five, and he lets himself be seen before he leaps over the fence and past the border of dark blue and chartreuse green.
This is his escape, the flux of his imagination blending into reality as he paints a dreamscape of colors in the red-orange glow of dawn. Here, in the empty field of dawn, he runs into morning and disappears into smoking embers of dust. Here, he is the wind, a gentle bird in the sky, a full-winged monarch butterfly. Here, he is king and he is everything. This is his reality and he can dream, he can feel the breath of morning warm against his face and the numbed sting of red lines along pale skin. His heart is his own and his body his to bend, and he can breathe. It is a reprieve of sorts, it is freedom, his little haven away from the world until dusk whisks away his fantasies and his face is full of blood and tears once more.
***
“Where were you during morning assembly?”
It is the student body president, stalking over as he goes through the attendance sheet again.
“Were you late?”
He shrugs, silent but for the sound of crumpled fabric rustling against hollowed bones. Perhaps he was, perhaps he wasn't, he doesn't remember (or chooses not to). There is very little to care about another mark on his record.
Joonmyun frowns, lips pursing but saying nothing as he marks late in scarlet pen against the letters Oh Sehun.
"Third time this month Oh, another one and the school has to call your parents," chides the elder boy, his voice placating, as if he were talking to a small child. But Sehun merely nods, lips pursed and eyes sleepy as he brushes past Joonmyun. There's a warm hand on his shoulder, and Joonmyun stops him, For a moment, the boy opens his mouth, as if to say something more -- but then he blinks, and the words are swallowed in the line of his throat.
Figures, he thinks, and wonders why he had thought (fleetingly) otherwise. After all, Joonmyun is part of the system, the poster boy of conformity and acquiescence. Warm hands, crisp, starched uniform and polished shoes, a disarming smile and the all the self-importance of a future statesman, Joonmyun has too much to lose and nothing to gain from fickle questions. Perhaps he would have done something, once, Sehun thinks, but that time had long passed and Joonmyun had grown older, wiser, smarter. He knew what to do, what had to be done, and he'd cut him off and left him behind in the dust of empty words and promises he had once made.
Joonmyun is the casual bystander, guilty of omission, but the guiltiest of them all.
***
The butterfly flounders, falters, wings disintegrating to dust-and in the sidelines, they watch, grins feral and eyes hungry.
***
Time is the river that flows in numbers and words, but changes nothing.
Wash rinse repeat.
***
The sound of a rapping ruler against the whiteboard rouses him from his daydreams, and the teacher hollers at him to pay attention.
The word Calculus is scrawled in her curly script across the board, and she drones on and on about the principles of integration.
“The essence of calculus is the derivative, to differentiate…"
Freak, whispers Baekhyun into his ear as he hurls a spit ball from behind him, fucking faggot. Beside him, Jongdae barks a laugh, hooting as Baekhyun shoves staple bullets down the back of his shirt.
He doesn’t flinch as the metal scrapes in thin white lines; he feels nothing, not the faint sting of peeling skin or the cold slide of saliva. He feels no pain and does not hurt, because he is nothing. And nothing can hurt him.
He stares blankly at the blue polystyrene desk. In front of him, his assignment is in shreds of white, little parts breaking off the nucleus like small paper butterflies as they flit out the window.
He closes his eyes and disintegrates into sand against the wind.
***
Cool drops of water fleck on broken wings, little beads of crystal glinting in the half-covered sun. It’s raining, the butterfly realizes, and it stretches out a tentatively to reach the little glass drops falling from the sky as it soaks through fibrous wings and into bone.
***
He wakes up when the bell goes and doesn't wait to greet the saem before he's barrelling out the gates like a bullet train--
“Not so fast."
Tall, gangly, with an eerily wide smile showing a full set of teeth, Park Chanyeol.
“where do you think you’re going?”
Chanyeol presses a heavy arm across his neck, and he struggles without avail to escape the crushing cage of the elder boy's arms.
The the world tilts in slow-motion as he leans sideways, rattling bones hammering against the metal of a locker door. He feels his head collide with the tiled floor and the tall boy stomps on his face with the sole of his left converse. Red trickles down his philtrum and he can taste copper on his tongue. "Little Sehunnie," the boy coos, "bet he loves to take things up the ass."
His audience laughs, their voices like nails on chalkboard.
Bony fingers pulls him up by the collar, the shock of dark blonde hair easily recognizable even as he braces himself for the cool tiles of the floor.
“I think the little prick is hurt,” he calls mockingly, pretty face contorting into a sneer as he cradles his head in his hands almost tenderly before he rams his skull into the floor again. Baekhyun, by the elder boy’s side, cackles with glee as he stomps his feet onto his flesh for good measure.
He says nothing, hears nothing, does nothing. Instead, he feels. The weight of words and noise and movement are remunerated in his thoughts, and his mind, his heart feels a thousand tonnes. Inside him brews a hurricane, the eye of a storm, quivering in precision and tightly wound control quickly unravelling, like a ballerina in the music box, spinning, spinning-spinning out of control.
***
The sun is warm against his face and a light reddish hue settles on his skin. The sky, cloudless and picturesque, greets his gaze and the wind stings a little against his cheek. There’s sweat on his brow as he runs, arms spread-eagled into the Phoebus’ fiery embrace.
***
He leans his head back against the cool floor. The tiles are smeared a shade of darkening red, and the fire burns in his flesh and consumes him whole. It hurts all over; pale skin is daubed in hues of blue and purple and black, and his heart lies thumping and marred with cracks on the bathroom floor.
7.00pm, his watch reads, and outside, amber gradually fades to night.
A single transparent tear rolls down his cheeks, a meandering track against the red.
***
This is reality, harsh as a stinging knife through his chest.
***
There is no escape from the night.
There are no hues of gold and imaginary starlight. There is no bird or king or butterfly. There is no meadow, no dust, no wind. There is only him, ickle, brittle, Oh Sehun. He is breakable, and he is broken.
In the night, he weeps. He lets them soak through blue, papery skin, lets them choke him until he cannot breathe because everything hurts and everything is pain. His heart throbs -- a phantom pain. Someone pushes their hands through his chest and rips out his heart.
In the night, he remembers. He remembers a better time, when he was young, when he was just Sehun, not the homo two blocks down. His parents had smiled at him then, the precious younger child. Kris, no, Wufan hyung had still been in school then, his older brother fondly ruffling his hair as he headed off to school. Sundays were spent at the church where his parents had once been married, and Joonmyun hyung would laugh with him as his father gave sermons by the pew. He remembers when Chanyeol had been his friend, and they laughed over ice cream and lunches. He remembers when the day he'd kissed the senior on the football team, the day he'd ruined everything by being gay, by wanting to love a man and not the princess he was always supposed to marry.
In the night, he is alone, and the silver tempts him, entices him with its numbing warmth of redredred. He lets himself spiral. It feels like a free-fall. It feels like catharsis. It feels like relief.
He lets go.
Home is a prison, empty and cold, dark walls claustrophobic, lonely. His parents don't live with him; he is the scum his father preaches about, the very thing his parents had schooled him to hate. And he does, hate himself. He hates the way he looks, plump cheeks, braces and lisp, he hates how it makes him talk as if he has cotton shoved too deep down his mouth.He hates the way he cannot be the person his parents want him to be. He hates how his heart still rips, bleeding out at words he has too often heard, how he cannot empty himself, that even in his deepest fantasies everything still burns like ash to skin or the dying embers of a cigarette flame.
He hates his own weakness.
So he digs it out and pulls it to little bitty pieces of him. He buries half in rivulets of red, the other in a cesspool of vomit and cistern water flushing down the pipes and far far away.
***
He wakes to rain against his cheeks. Outside, the moon hovers, round white belly stark against the starless blanket of night, bracketed within the steel grilles of his windowpane.
He listens to the soft sound of wind, the sudden, intermittent cry of burning asphalt, the sound of hushed chatters from across the thinness of plaster and semi-concrete. The barest of light filters in through the curtains, and he tugs his blanket around his form just a little tighter, savoring the warmth.
He traces the lines on his wrist absently. The skin is raw, blemished like porcelain broken and put back together again. He feels the soft sun through the clouds and drifts for the slightest of moments before the shrill beep of his alarm pulls him back to reality.
There's a dangerous idea taking root in his mind as he ambles out of bed, the kind of vacant pain he allows himself in the secrecy of night. It feels like poison in his veins, a polluting darkness, festering flesh. But it feels like a conclusion, it feels like a purpose, marching down towards the end of the line.
(Idly, he wonders if they would be eaten alive by guilt, buried to death by the weight of their sins.)
PAIRING: Sehun-centric, mentions of suho/sehun (likely sehun/tao)
RATING: R
WORDCOUNT: 2.2K+ (est. 6-8K+)
SUMMARY: Sehun is the little cancer, the sole anomaly in an otherwise perfect system
NOTES: HS!AU + Warnings for bullying, homophobia. Very rough draft. Have several more scenes written out but they don't link to what's written here. A more introspective piece, with less focus on plot and more like a sort of character study? unbetaed completely so excuse any errors >.< also lj has eaten my formatting...will come back up to fill it in when I get home
The rain is a rhythm against the concrete, a discordant melody buried beneath the sounds of feet against the pavements. Across: the traffic lights blink and stutter, walk, walking, amber, slow, red, stop, green, go. Left, right: the brush of flesh against the morning rush, umbrellas jutting like elbows into the sky, cold bodies of purpose and direction. Centre: A boy, a kite in the wind, string-less, flotsam adrift, him, it-an existence, not alive, not dead. In front: cars moving in synchronicity with the glowing hues, water spilling from between tarmac and grey dust.
He closes his eyes and braces himself.
***
This is a butterfly, colored in shades of grey and white.
Its wings, inked with black lines and dark webs of scars, are still and silent as the wind blows. Feet stand on thorns of the red red rose till they are scarred and broken, dancing as they bleed in the weight of the breeze. This is a butterfly whose wings are tugged by hands, caught in the barbed wires of stem and leaf. This is a butterfly, fragile and cold as ice. This is a butterfly with thin, broken wings, sharp as shards of glass on skin...wings that cannot take flight.
***
If loneliness is a sound, then, he thinks, loneliness must be the echoing silence of an empty heart.
***
The door slams behind him, a sudden noise that juxtaposes the mellow ambers of the backdrop of fall. His feet move, one step after the next, mindlessly slow. Perhaps it’s because it is morning, and he’s still barely awake and functioning. Perhaps it is because they ache with blue and browned skin, and red threads around his thumbs down his wrists. Perhaps he doesn’t quite like what morning brings, and his feet are but a mirror’s reflection of his heart’s own desire for time to pause even just for a while.
He can spot the outlines of the iron gates that frame the building down the winding path on his right. Long, white walls and glass windows too dim to permeate light-this is the place of nightmares, a paradigm of conformity with their blue blazers and grey slacks, and their ideals of beauty and perfection that mold them.
(Hakgyo, reads the sign, two letters in bolded black against the white plaster, school.)
The wind is chilly as he crushes a few leaves beneath his boot, and he tightens the stiff fabric of his jacket around his chest.
This is a place of cold words and harsher hands-a place of conformity where he is different and he must pay the price.
***
Morning assembly begins in slightly over five, and he lets himself be seen before he leaps over the fence and past the border of dark blue and chartreuse green.
This is his escape, the flux of his imagination blending into reality as he paints a dreamscape of colors in the red-orange glow of dawn. Here, in the empty field of dawn, he runs into morning and disappears into smoking embers of dust. Here, he is the wind, a gentle bird in the sky, a full-winged monarch butterfly. Here, he is king and he is everything. This is his reality and he can dream, he can feel the breath of morning warm against his face and the numbed sting of red lines along pale skin. His heart is his own and his body his to bend, and he can breathe. It is a reprieve of sorts, it is freedom, his little haven away from the world until dusk whisks away his fantasies and his face is full of blood and tears once more.
***
“Where were you during morning assembly?”
It is the student body president, stalking over as he goes through the attendance sheet again.
“Were you late?”
He shrugs, silent but for the sound of crumpled fabric rustling against hollowed bones. Perhaps he was, perhaps he wasn't, he doesn't remember (or chooses not to). There is very little to care about another mark on his record.
Joonmyun frowns, lips pursing but saying nothing as he marks late in scarlet pen against the letters Oh Sehun.
"Third time this month Oh, another one and the school has to call your parents," chides the elder boy, his voice placating, as if he were talking to a small child. But Sehun merely nods, lips pursed and eyes sleepy as he brushes past Joonmyun. There's a warm hand on his shoulder, and Joonmyun stops him, For a moment, the boy opens his mouth, as if to say something more -- but then he blinks, and the words are swallowed in the line of his throat.
Figures, he thinks, and wonders why he had thought (fleetingly) otherwise. After all, Joonmyun is part of the system, the poster boy of conformity and acquiescence. Warm hands, crisp, starched uniform and polished shoes, a disarming smile and the all the self-importance of a future statesman, Joonmyun has too much to lose and nothing to gain from fickle questions. Perhaps he would have done something, once, Sehun thinks, but that time had long passed and Joonmyun had grown older, wiser, smarter. He knew what to do, what had to be done, and he'd cut him off and left him behind in the dust of empty words and promises he had once made.
Joonmyun is the casual bystander, guilty of omission, but the guiltiest of them all.
***
The butterfly flounders, falters, wings disintegrating to dust-and in the sidelines, they watch, grins feral and eyes hungry.
***
Time is the river that flows in numbers and words, but changes nothing.
Wash rinse repeat.
***
The sound of a rapping ruler against the whiteboard rouses him from his daydreams, and the teacher hollers at him to pay attention.
The word Calculus is scrawled in her curly script across the board, and she drones on and on about the principles of integration.
“The essence of calculus is the derivative, to differentiate…"
Freak, whispers Baekhyun into his ear as he hurls a spit ball from behind him, fucking faggot. Beside him, Jongdae barks a laugh, hooting as Baekhyun shoves staple bullets down the back of his shirt.
He doesn’t flinch as the metal scrapes in thin white lines; he feels nothing, not the faint sting of peeling skin or the cold slide of saliva. He feels no pain and does not hurt, because he is nothing. And nothing can hurt him.
He stares blankly at the blue polystyrene desk. In front of him, his assignment is in shreds of white, little parts breaking off the nucleus like small paper butterflies as they flit out the window.
He closes his eyes and disintegrates into sand against the wind.
***
Cool drops of water fleck on broken wings, little beads of crystal glinting in the half-covered sun. It’s raining, the butterfly realizes, and it stretches out a tentatively to reach the little glass drops falling from the sky as it soaks through fibrous wings and into bone.
***
He wakes up when the bell goes and doesn't wait to greet the saem before he's barrelling out the gates like a bullet train--
“Not so fast."
Tall, gangly, with an eerily wide smile showing a full set of teeth, Park Chanyeol.
“where do you think you’re going?”
Chanyeol presses a heavy arm across his neck, and he struggles without avail to escape the crushing cage of the elder boy's arms.
The the world tilts in slow-motion as he leans sideways, rattling bones hammering against the metal of a locker door. He feels his head collide with the tiled floor and the tall boy stomps on his face with the sole of his left converse. Red trickles down his philtrum and he can taste copper on his tongue. "Little Sehunnie," the boy coos, "bet he loves to take things up the ass."
His audience laughs, their voices like nails on chalkboard.
Bony fingers pulls him up by the collar, the shock of dark blonde hair easily recognizable even as he braces himself for the cool tiles of the floor.
“I think the little prick is hurt,” he calls mockingly, pretty face contorting into a sneer as he cradles his head in his hands almost tenderly before he rams his skull into the floor again. Baekhyun, by the elder boy’s side, cackles with glee as he stomps his feet onto his flesh for good measure.
He says nothing, hears nothing, does nothing. Instead, he feels. The weight of words and noise and movement are remunerated in his thoughts, and his mind, his heart feels a thousand tonnes. Inside him brews a hurricane, the eye of a storm, quivering in precision and tightly wound control quickly unravelling, like a ballerina in the music box, spinning, spinning-spinning out of control.
***
The sun is warm against his face and a light reddish hue settles on his skin. The sky, cloudless and picturesque, greets his gaze and the wind stings a little against his cheek. There’s sweat on his brow as he runs, arms spread-eagled into the Phoebus’ fiery embrace.
***
He leans his head back against the cool floor. The tiles are smeared a shade of darkening red, and the fire burns in his flesh and consumes him whole. It hurts all over; pale skin is daubed in hues of blue and purple and black, and his heart lies thumping and marred with cracks on the bathroom floor.
7.00pm, his watch reads, and outside, amber gradually fades to night.
A single transparent tear rolls down his cheeks, a meandering track against the red.
***
This is reality, harsh as a stinging knife through his chest.
***
There is no escape from the night.
There are no hues of gold and imaginary starlight. There is no bird or king or butterfly. There is no meadow, no dust, no wind. There is only him, ickle, brittle, Oh Sehun. He is breakable, and he is broken.
In the night, he weeps. He lets them soak through blue, papery skin, lets them choke him until he cannot breathe because everything hurts and everything is pain. His heart throbs -- a phantom pain. Someone pushes their hands through his chest and rips out his heart.
In the night, he remembers. He remembers a better time, when he was young, when he was just Sehun, not the homo two blocks down. His parents had smiled at him then, the precious younger child. Kris, no, Wufan hyung had still been in school then, his older brother fondly ruffling his hair as he headed off to school. Sundays were spent at the church where his parents had once been married, and Joonmyun hyung would laugh with him as his father gave sermons by the pew. He remembers when Chanyeol had been his friend, and they laughed over ice cream and lunches. He remembers when the day he'd kissed the senior on the football team, the day he'd ruined everything by being gay, by wanting to love a man and not the princess he was always supposed to marry.
In the night, he is alone, and the silver tempts him, entices him with its numbing warmth of redredred. He lets himself spiral. It feels like a free-fall. It feels like catharsis. It feels like relief.
He lets go.
Home is a prison, empty and cold, dark walls claustrophobic, lonely. His parents don't live with him; he is the scum his father preaches about, the very thing his parents had schooled him to hate. And he does, hate himself. He hates the way he looks, plump cheeks, braces and lisp, he hates how it makes him talk as if he has cotton shoved too deep down his mouth.He hates the way he cannot be the person his parents want him to be. He hates how his heart still rips, bleeding out at words he has too often heard, how he cannot empty himself, that even in his deepest fantasies everything still burns like ash to skin or the dying embers of a cigarette flame.
He hates his own weakness.
So he digs it out and pulls it to little bitty pieces of him. He buries half in rivulets of red, the other in a cesspool of vomit and cistern water flushing down the pipes and far far away.
***
He wakes to rain against his cheeks. Outside, the moon hovers, round white belly stark against the starless blanket of night, bracketed within the steel grilles of his windowpane.
He listens to the soft sound of wind, the sudden, intermittent cry of burning asphalt, the sound of hushed chatters from across the thinness of plaster and semi-concrete. The barest of light filters in through the curtains, and he tugs his blanket around his form just a little tighter, savoring the warmth.
He traces the lines on his wrist absently. The skin is raw, blemished like porcelain broken and put back together again. He feels the soft sun through the clouds and drifts for the slightest of moments before the shrill beep of his alarm pulls him back to reality.
There's a dangerous idea taking root in his mind as he ambles out of bed, the kind of vacant pain he allows himself in the secrecy of night. It feels like poison in his veins, a polluting darkness, festering flesh. But it feels like a conclusion, it feels like a purpose, marching down towards the end of the line.
(Idly, he wonders if they would be eaten alive by guilt, buried to death by the weight of their sins.)