Darling, Erase These Lines
Title: Darling, Erase These Lines
Pairing: Kaisoo, mentioned Jundae
Rating: R
Genre: Horror (?), Hannibal!AU
Warnings: Hover and read carefully!
Length: ~4.7k
Summary: Everyone is messed up, but at least the sociopathic serial killer who put him in jail is a great fuck.
(A/N: Written for keizeria as a pinch-hit in universexo! This is by far the most messed up piece I've ever written and I love it to death. Thanks to wangzi for betaing this for me!!!!)
three weeks ago.
“It was you.”
The barrel of the gun is just a bolded part of the linear trajectory towards Dr. Kim’s face. Everything is framed in vignettes. Tunnel vision. Where fuzzy blackness once formed a thick outline around gelled back hair, stoic eyes of brooding black coffee, and the loose knot of a tie, Kyungsoo sees nothing but the dark grey metal and the trigger under it. A thin halo of multi-colored, blurred light in the gap between where his tunnel vision ends and the gun begins.
“All along, it was you.”
“You have no proof.”
“The proof is in here.” Slowly, carefully, blindly, Kyungsoo brings an index finger to his temple and taps it twice. “It’s always in here.”
He imagines that Dr. Kim’s face is relaxed as it always is, lips in that straight-lined smirk that betrays nothing but confidence. False or otherwise, it won’t say. He imagines that that perpetual glint of calculating mirth hovers in an ellipse of white glow where the light reflects from his irises. He hears dress shoes against polished linoleum, a flicker of light where the doctor’s hand reaches out for him. He imagines that his own hand is not shaking, that his finger is not trembling on the trigger. That he can shoot. Dr. Kim’s hand slides gently over his cheek, a little past his ears, fingers tangling into hair with casual intimidation. It stops.
“Then let’s take it out, shall we?”
needle tip blue veins glinting silver something hurts nothing there Dr. Kim, smiling
What is there but a swinging golden pendulum reflecting light against black? Everything, invisible.
Open up. Tunnel vision, gone.
Through foggy rectangular slits, eyebrows furrowed at him. A metal door slides shut on squeaky wheels.
Jail.
today. now. reality.
“Don’t eat that.”
Kyungsoo looks up from the lumpy slop on his tray to see Dr. Kim standing in front of his cell, body interrupted from time to time by the cold metal bars that separate sociopathic murderer from innocent convict. He wears that same expressionless smirk that Kyungsoo sees behind his eyelids when he blinks. An invisible gun weighs on his hand, now shaking, index finger trembling over an invisible trigger. He brings the gun up. Dr. Kim smiles. He shoots.
“Bang,” he whispers, then shoots again twice. He says it louder this time, without expression. “Bang. Bang.”
Dr. Kim slides a new tray through the food compartment. He’s done this three days in a row already. It smells like deceit, fried like chicken, steamed like fish. “I brought you food.”
“Oh. Fantastic.” Sarcasm. Bang, bang bang. “Homemade?”
The expressionless smirk twitches up at one corner; a lopsided, empty smile. “As always.”
Dr. Kim waits. Kyungsoo scoops more of the slop into his mouth, chews on the bumpy parts. Every time he swallows, he retches and his eyes water, and Dr. Kim taps the tray, smiling a little wider. On his last scoop, he chokes and throws it all up, eyes squeezed shut.
When he opens them, there is a severed ear in the puddle, sitting untainted amongst the discolored, translucent yellow on the cement floor. He shouts and scrambles backwards. Arms windmilling, steps erratic, tunnel vision fading in and out, breaths uneven, choking on air. His back hits the wall. He stands there, staring at the puddle, panting.
The floor is spotless.
Dr. Kim taps the tray, smiling wider. “Come, Kyungsoo. You’ve eaten my food before. It’s not that bad.”
Leaning against the wall, breaths heaving, Kyungsoo stares through half-lidded eyes in Dr. Kim’s general direction, watching his shape blur in and out of focus as it slides around behind the bars, merging with them and then coming apart again. He swallows the air in gallonfuls. The face outside stays the same: a wide, stoic smirk.
“Fuck you,” Kyungsoo says. The words ride on his weakening breaths, barely coming out, only sounding because his lips move while he exhales. “Fuck you, fuck you, fuck you…”
His eyelids flutter shut, though his mouth keeps moving. Soon enough, he can hear Dr. Kim tapping his fingers on the metal in sync with the rhythm of his cursing. Too tired for this, he thinks, too tired, too crazy, too empty.
In the briefest millisecond that flickers with sleep, he hears Dr. Kim chuckle under his breath, rattling the tray in the compartment. His eyes open to clear vision and Dr. Kim’s ever cocky, ever expressionless face.
The concrete is cold.
Sighing, Kyungsoo stands up and meets Dr. Kim’s gaze as expressionlessly as he can manage, snatching the tray out from the compartment. When the visitor opens his mouth to list the food prepared as he usually does, Kyungsoo glares at him and cuts him off.
“Who is it?” he spits, stabbing a fork into the meat, eyeing it with disgusted, guilty hunger.
Dr. Kim cocks his head to the side, smiling, and points to the microphone wired into the corner of the cell. “Eat up,” he says. “You need to recover.”
cold eyes dripping blood innocent traitors bloodthirsty Dr. Kim, smirking
Kyungsoo knows it’s a dream because in the mirror in front of him, he is transparent right down to his esophagus. He knows, but it doesn’t feel like one. A pile of human body parts starts in the sloshing green acid of his stomach and reaches up, up, up, almost right back out of his throat. At the very bottom, bubbling inside the bile-colored liquid, is the severed ear he found in his sink four weeks back-the one that he never ate. And on top of it is everything else: half-curled, twisted up fingers scattered among bits of lung, chopped up pieces of heart still beating and sloshing blood over the other innards and outards in pulsing waterfalls, crushed bone, sinewy veins, optic nerves, spinal cords, chunks of brain, what looks like a dissected scrotum, bruised eyeballs and all these things, every part of a human imaginable to the subconscious mind, that Dr. Kim might have fed him. All these parts of the victims whose murderers he drove himself insane to identify, and it was Dr. Kim all along.
He doesn’t scream. Maybe he knew all this time what Dr. Kim was, who the Ripper really was, and wasn’t surprised. Maybe he knew it when Dr. Kim drugged him with amytal and aphrodisiacs five weeks back and asked him after dinner if he wanted to fuck. They did, against the wall, lips and teeth and fingers feathering up inside thighs and a whole lot that Kyungsoo fortunately(?) can’t remember because he was drugged and he’s dreaming. He had his Swiss Army knife in the back pocket of his jeans. He should have taken it out and sliced Dr. Kim’s testicles off and dissected them and eaten them like the scrotum in his transparent nightmare esophagus.
He wakes up, cheek pressed against cold concrete, lying on the floor next to his bed. The covers have tumbled to the floor with him. He’s hard. It isn’t his fault Dr. Kim fucked him so well.
Untangling himself from the cocoon of thick sheets, Kyungsoo pushes himself up and stumbles over to the end of the bed where his glasses sit. He slides them on, then sits back on the stiff mattress, back against his pillow, legs crossed, hands folded over his crotch. Footsteps sound down the hallway. Keys jangling. He closes his eyes-they’ll probably walk past him, anyway.
When the key clangs against the metal of his cell, he peeks one eye open. Chief Kim has his eyebrows furrowed as the lock clicks. Dr. Kim stands behind him, the ever-nonchalant smirk on his lips. Their gazes meet. Dr. Kim’s lips twitch and he drags his eyes down ever so slowly, down to where Kyungsoo has his hands crossed. His fingers twitch, either in discomfort or irritation. Even he doesn’t know. Dr. Kim looks back up, straight in the eye, and wets his lips with a slow drag of the tongue. Kyungsoo squeezes his hands together tighter.
“Dr. Kim has approved you for temporary leave in order to hold your appointment in his office,” Chief Kim says. His voice is high and irritating, scratches against Kyungsoo’s eardrums. No wonder Jongdae wants a divorce with him, he thinks, snickering to himself. Chief Kim looks suspicious for a moment, but Dr. Kim pushes him aside and slides the door open. “Don’t do anything stupid, Kyungsoo.”
“Hm.”
The chief turns to Dr. Kim. “Are you sure you trust him?”
“He’s my friend,” he replies, looking directly at Kyungsoo. “Of course I do.”
Kyungsoo snorts and walks out the door, letting the chief handcuff him on the way out. “After everything, Junmyeon. After everything, you still have to ask Dr. Kim if you can trust me. Never once thought to ask me if you could trust him, did you? Maybe that’s why Sehun’s gone. You don’t even trust your own damn team.”
Chief Kim says nothing.
“He’s right. Who knows? Maybe you can’t trust me.”
“You do realize that he’s accusing you of murdering and cannibalizing over a dozen people, right?”
“And you realize that you’re accusing him of the same?”
“Well what do you want me to do about it? Investigate you? Are you putting yourself up for investigation?”
“If that’s what you usually do for people who are reasonably accused of being serial cannibals, then yes.”
Chief Kim stares at his shoes, then flips open his cell phone. “Alright then. Go to your appointment now, or whatever-hello, yes, this is NIS Chief Kim Junmyeon…”
Shaking his head, Dr. Kim slings an arm around Kyungsoo’s shoulders, laughing when he stiffens, and walks him out of the halls and into the parking lot. They stop at a taxi with no driver. Kyungsoo shudders, watching blood seep out from the trunk and drip onto the floor. His stomach growls for some reason. His throat is terrifyingly dry. He wonders what someone else’s blood would taste like in his mouth.
When he blinks, the blood disappears. The taxi driver honks. Dr. Kim holds the door open for him, curving his lips into the vague difference between a smile and a smirk. Kyungsoo smiles, saccharine sarcasm, and ducks his head to enter. After settling into the seat opposite, Dr. Kim smiles back.
“Don’t be like that, Kyungsoo. I got you out. Welcome to freedom.”
“You also put me in.”
“I cooked you nice food.”
“Nice food that got me put in jail.”
“You have no eviden-”
“It’s in here,” Kyungsoo snaps, tapping his temple with his index finger, impatient and rough. “It’s always been in here. And you can’t take it away. I know. They gave me amytal because they didn’t trust me, but amytal makes you know.”
“You had a seizure.”
“Ah, yes,” he sighs with mock content, staring out the window. “A seizure of truth.”
“Oh, Kyungsoo,” Dr. Kim says, still smirking through the disappointment in his voice. “I’ll never understand why you cannot be as fond of me as I am of you. We were friends, weren’t we? I still consider you my friend.”
“I was never your friend.”
A brief silence. “Oh, Kyungsoo.”
dark alley cold water frozen knife blood everywhere Dr. Kim, cooking
“Will you draw me another clock, Kyungsoo?”
“Ha.”
“Perhaps we will get you out on the basis of insanity. You don’t remember killing anyone, after all.”
“Except that I’ve insisted multiple times that I am not insane, and you were the killer. I remember, Dr. Kim. Almost everything. And I was the one who sent Luhan after you. I know when he went to investigate you. And three days later you showcased him in those giant expanding glass slides-” his voice catches and he coughs a few times, wiping his eyes with the back of his sleeve, “-and Sehun’s arm, who else could it have been, Dr. Kim? I sent him for you and he ended up dead. If nothing I say is proof because no one else has seen it and I’m insane, then fine. But everyone saw that. And everyone in his department-they’re onto you, doctor. Even Junmyeon. They’ll be onto you.”
“Fantastic. Let them come to me. I’m sure they will draw the correct conclusions this time-”
“I’m hungry,” Kyungsoo says. “It’s lunchtime.”
“Alright. Would you like me to cook?”
“Do I have an option?”
Dr. Kim smiles. “I’ll be in the kitchen if you need me. In the meantime, please draw me a clock.”
“Right.”
Kyungsoo takes a piece of paper from the table beside him and stares at it, leaning over so that he can draw against the armrest. After he finishes, he glances toward the kitchen, where Dr. Kim is busy cooking. It occurs to him that no one has ever seen the inside of Dr. Kim’s refrigerator. The food is always prepared, or being prepared when there are guests, and when people are in the kitchen he’s always standing in the narrow space between the refrigerator and the island where he arranges the food. He squints at the wall, and it disappears, and past the shape of Dr. Kim slicing meat onto a plate, the refrigerator fades to transparency. On the center shelf, he sees the severed, half-dissected, raw scrotum sitting on top of a leaf of lettuce covering a porcelain plate with gold embellishments, a few pieces of hair still sticking out in various places.
When he blinks, he knows the hallucinations will disappear, so he keeps his eyes open for as long as possible. The scrotum stares back. It starts moving, slithering across the plate, and on the top shelf the zip-loc bagged hearts start beating again, bloodless, and the eyeballs on the heads sitting on the bottom shelf start rolling in their sockets. Without warning, the scrotum leaps off the plate and attacks him, reaching out for his face as it flies through the walls, and when he swats it away, hand interrupting the space before his eyes, all he can see in front of him is the wood paneled wall between Dr. Kim’s desk and the kitchen.
“Ha,” he says, and a third of the sound is genuine laughter. He blinks again and looks at the place where the scrotum should be, and there it sits. It starts squirming again, slithering across the carpet. He follows it.
The scrotum leads him to a door beside Dr. Kim’s bookshelves. He tests the knob-it’s unlocked-then pushes through. When he feels the wall for a light switch, the scrotum cackles at him. He bites his lip, embarrassed. Ahead of him, the scrotum squirms over what feels to be a thick rug to another door in the back of the hall they’re walking down. The door opens to a spiraling staircase with a faint glow coming out of some chamber at the bottom.
“Wheee!” the scrotum squeals. It throws itself down the staircase, tumbling all the way to the bottom. Kyungsoo sighs and takes the steps, one by one.
Right when he reaches the bottom, Dr. Kim’s faraway voice calls to him.
“Lunch is ready, Kyungsoo.”
He blinks. His feet are planted on the carpet in the meeting room, and he’s sitting in the meeting chair where he drew the clock against the armrest, staring at the wall between this room and the kitchen. Dr. Kim smiles at him as he walks nearer, balancing several plates along his forearms. Kneeling, he sets them down on the coffee table in front of him.
“Okroshka soup, containing an assortment of raw vegetables with freshly hunted veal. This one is crown roast of lamb, sauteéd with-”
“Okay,” Kyungsoo says. “Thanks. I’m hungry.”
“Shall we continue with our meeting, then?”
Kyungsoo stirs the soup, watching the bits of meat swirl around with the vegetables. “Promise me that this isn’t Luhan.”
“Luhan is still with the NIS team. I highly doubt that part of him could have made it into this soup.”
“Maybe you kept parts of him.”
“That is assuming that I killed him, or infiltrated the laboratory.”
“The former.”
“Proof is useless in the mind, especially if you are insane.” Dr. Kim glances over at the clock, quirking an eyebrow and then returning to his food. “Demonstrated mental imbalances do not make for a trustworthy witness. Now, shall we?”
“I need wine.”
“Of course. I’ll go get some for you.”
When the door to the kitchen swings shut, Kyungsoo looks down at his food again. On the carpet just under his plate, the scrotum reappears, squealing and doing a strange little dance. “Wheee!” it says, then scurries off under the door beside the bookshelf. “Wheee!”
Kyungsoo raises both eyebrows. Looking back to his food, he takes a spoonful of the soup and drinks it, chewing deliberately on the meat. “Hm.”
“How is it?”
Dr. Kim sets two glasses on the table, presenting the bottle of wine shortly after as he grips the neck in his hand. When he opens his mouth to speak, Kyungsoo glares at him.
“Alright then,” he says, still smiling. He pours the wine, then sets the rest of the bottle between them.
Kyungsoo stares at his soup as he picks up the glass, at first drinking in small sips, then taking a huge swig before setting it back down. “It’s good.” He takes another spoonful of soup. “Delectable.”
“Only the finest for you. Now, shall we continue?”
“Sure.”
“Does your clock look accurate to you?”
“Yes.”
“Good. Have you had any troubling hallucinations lately?”
“Troubling?” Kyungsoo laughs, harsh and brief. “No. Nothing that I’m not already used to.”
“Hallucinations in general, then?”
“You saw me have one just a few days ago.”
“Do you mind telling them to me?”
“The ear you somehow shoved down my throat. The one I regurgitated into the sink. I keep coughing it back up even though it’s already gone.”
“Alright.” Dr. Kim sets his food to the side and scribbles something down on a notepad. “Anything else?”
“Talking scrotums.”
“Pardon?”
Kyungsoo finishes his wine. Dr. Kim nods at him and pours him another glass, all the way to the top. He downs half of it before responding. “A talking, half-dissected scrotum.”
Dr. Kim writes this down too. “Where did this… scrotum… first appear to you?”
“A dream.”
“Ah, a dream,” Dr. Kim repeats, setting the notepad down. Very deliberately, he meets Kyungsoo’s gaze, slowly folding his hands together, leaning forward with his elbows propped just above his knees. “Then, describe this dream. When did you have it?”
“Just last night. I dreamt that when I looked in the mirror, I was transparent just enough so I could see what was in my esophagus. At the bottom of the pile of things I supposedly ate, there was the ear. There were a lot of other things in the pile, but the only other thing there was just one of was the scrotum. All this stuff you shoved down my throat.” Kyungsoo laughs. When he stops, he finishes the rest of his wine and sets it down for more. Watches Dr. Kim refill it, all the way to the top, then takes another small sip. “The first thing I thought when I saw it was that five weeks ago, when you drugged me and fucked me, I should have taken my pocket knife out and castrated you.”
“Did I do that, now?” Dr. Kim asks, smiling so wide that the corners of his lips seem to be pushing into his cheeks. “Was I good?”
Kyungsoo sips again at his wine, takes his time finishing the soup. Dr. Kim watches him all the while, hands still folded. Kyungsoo thinks about what he can remember. Warm lips, taste of blood, fingers in hair, tingling up and down his spine, sharp arousal, drug-dulled pleasure under every inch of skin. A short burst of warmth in his lower torso.
“Good enough,” he says. He pokes at the lamb with a fork. “But I can’t remember, since you drugged me.”
“Should I remind you then?” He glances at Kyungsoo’s wine glass. “While you’re still sober? Well, sober enough-”
“So this scrotum appeared again when you were in the kitchen. I saw through the walls and into your refrigerator. In the bottom shelf I saw an assortment of heads, though I guess that’s unreasonable now since there’s not much to eat in a head-at least not that I can think of, I don’t know about you, since you’re a professional-and on the top there were probably a dozen zip-locked hearts. And in the center shelf, all alone, was the same half-dissected scrotum, sitting on a plate. It jumped at my face, flew through all the walls. I swatted it away. Then it started laughing and squirming and led me somewhere.”
“Where did it lead you to?”
“A staircase.”
Dr. Kim’s expression doesn’t change in the slightest when Kyungsoo looks up to check. Instead, he simply keeps his eyes locked on Kyungsoo’s as he drinks more of his wine.
“Then you said it was lunchtime and the scrotum ran away.”
“I’m curious. Did it lead you somewhere in this building?”
“Yes.”
“Have you been there before?”
Kyungsoo wryly at his food. “If I have, it was under something that blocked it from my memory.”
“Do you believe it exists?”
“Yes.”
“Then,” Dr. Kim says, putting everything down and standing up. He gestures toward the bookshelf door. Kyungsoo’s gut drops. “Shall we?”
hot breath sinister hands nerves aflame Jongin, head back, eyes closed
“I see.”
Kyungsoo stands, silent, staring expressionlessly at the expansive basement-turned twist between a surgical laboratory and a morgue. Dr. Kim doesn’t seem aggravated in the slightest. He places his hand on the small of Kyungsoo’s back and nudges him forward. His NIS badge glints on the nearest metal table. Dr. Kim notices that he’s looking at it and picks it up, tucking it neatly into Kyungsoo’s breast pocket.
“You’re right. You’ve been here before. I’ve taken you here many times already.”
“Thought so.” Kyungsoo looks down at his arm and sees the shadows of needles pressing into his veins, kaleidoscopic distortions around Dr. Kim’s black coffee irises as they examine him. He hears echoes of hypnotic monotone when he passes by glass panels with the constant drip drip drip of dark crimson sliding down smooth surfaces.
They walk on, deeper into the basement. The lighting only goes through the center, faded white light like pale shadows cast over sharp surfaces that fade into black. Kyungsoo thinks he can catch the outlines of corpses, but the light never goes far enough for him to be sure. It’s cold. The only source of warmth is Dr. Kim’s hand on his back. He wonders how far he’ll be able to go before something goes wrong, inside his head or outside of it.
He passes a surgical counter where the blood on top still looks fresh, reflecting the few streaks of dim light that hit it. Something glints at the corner and catches his eye. An NIS badge. He stops. Dr. Kim chuckles quietly.
“Is that Luhan’s?”
“Would you like to check?”
Kyungsoo shakes his head. They walk past it, no more than a few steps before he bites his lip and turns back, flipping the badge open with a finger. The I.D. is missing.
“Evidence,” Kyungsoo mumbles. “It’s not just in here anymore.”
A coarse finger brushes something wet from his cheek, leaving a streak of rapidly cooling water over his skin. Dr. Kim cups his face in one hand, looking down at him, lips still curved ever so slightly in that little smirk, that imperceptible, ever-present condescension, only this time, his eyes feel a little bit sympathetic. Kyungsoo remembers that when he saw the taxi in the parking lot, he wondered for a moment what someone else’s blood would taste like, and that when he got put in jail, he woke up the second night to Dr. Kim’s shadow on the wall with someone else’s, whispering something about psychological facts, why people tend to have sex more after funerals. They were talking about him like being incarcerated was the same as being cremated.
Upstairs, far, far away, footsteps. Junmyeon’s voice.
Dr. Kim, eyes closed, lips dry and cold, so close, too close, pressed against his own. Hand on his cheek, fingers sliding through his hair, Luhan’s badge, watching, in the corner.
Kyungsoo bites down. Bites down as hard as he can, so hard that he finally shuts his eyes, squeezing them. Feels flesh give way to warmth that floods into his throat, dribbling down chins and slipping through the spaces between lips. The transparent esophagus with its beating hearts now swimming under a new waterfall of blood, Dr. Kim’s blood, coursing down, slipping through crevices like a forceful wave of filling. Warmth, pooling in his stomach, bleaching green bile with red until there’s so much that it’s opaque, a solid column of dark burgundy. He can’t see the ear anymore. His esophagus twitches in the place where he once saw the scrotum as it squirms about, trying to escape. Blood everywhere, Dr. Kim’s blood, sliding through organs and tissue and into his own veins.
Jacket off. Belt undone. Rough hands slipping under his shirt, rough hands pulling things down, shoving him, cold concrete against his back, turning him around, cold concrete against his stomach, through his shirt. Luhan’s badge, Luhan’s badge, Luhan’s badge.
What is there but that golden pendulum swinging back and forth, back and forth, chanting through the dusty air: who cares, who cares, who cares?
They fuck on the floor where the concrete is hard and the NIS badge bruises his chest because Dr. Kim never removes his shirt, where the blood still drips from tables into wet, fresh puddles and the bodies in the back are watching along with Luhan’s badge. Funeral sex. Funeral sex to make up for all the bodies who will never see their funerals, for every crime scene tick of insanity where he saw rotting body parts and flowers in eye sockets and birds pecking on hearts and lungs stuffed like turkeys and hung on Christmas trees, for all the victims he didn’t know he ate until he saw Dr. Kim’s diagrams of rotting body parts and flowers in eye sockets and birds pecking on hearts and lungs stuffed like turkeys and hung on Christmas trees. Funeral sex until he comes back to reality, sanity, until he stops seeing talking scrotums and Luhan’s still-clothed corpse, dripping blood out from glass panels. They fuck on the floor without aphrodisiacs and amytal but with Kyungsoo’s lips making sounds he didn’t know they could make, with so many yes, Jongins and fuck, oh God, fucks that he could refill his esophagus with them and choke them right back out.
Fingers draw currents of electricity down his spine and out of his skin and Dr. Kim presses him farther into the ground, all the way through the floor where his sanity sits alive and waiting in a locked coffin, hands brushing between thighs, lips dragging over skin, teeth nipping along chest, Luhan’s badge nothing but another hallucination, everything a hallucination but Dr. Kim and his grunting and his rough hands and thrusts and the guilty, thawing warmth erupting from every possible nerve ending.
door bursting door slamming hands up you’re under arrest Dr. Kim, click, bang, bang bang
“Jongin, fuck-oh, God.”
sticky warmth empty conscience innocent guilty, same thing
They lie there, sprawled over each other, nothing between them but Kyungsoo’s worn shirt and a sticky layer of sweat. Down the hall, in the focus of the light, Kyungsoo makes out a new shape, a pile, two or three bodies-he can’t tell. Dr. Kim cards his fingers through Kyungsoo’s hair, carresses his cheek, kisses his neck.
“We shall dine well tonight, Kyungsoo, my friend.”
Pairing: Kaisoo, mentioned Jundae
Rating: R
Genre: Horror (?), Hannibal!AU
Warnings: Hover and read carefully!
Length: ~4.7k
Summary: Everyone is messed up, but at least the sociopathic serial killer who put him in jail is a great fuck.
(A/N: Written for keizeria as a pinch-hit in universexo! This is by far the most messed up piece I've ever written and I love it to death. Thanks to wangzi for betaing this for me!!!!)
three weeks ago.
“It was you.”
The barrel of the gun is just a bolded part of the linear trajectory towards Dr. Kim’s face. Everything is framed in vignettes. Tunnel vision. Where fuzzy blackness once formed a thick outline around gelled back hair, stoic eyes of brooding black coffee, and the loose knot of a tie, Kyungsoo sees nothing but the dark grey metal and the trigger under it. A thin halo of multi-colored, blurred light in the gap between where his tunnel vision ends and the gun begins.
“All along, it was you.”
“You have no proof.”
“The proof is in here.” Slowly, carefully, blindly, Kyungsoo brings an index finger to his temple and taps it twice. “It’s always in here.”
He imagines that Dr. Kim’s face is relaxed as it always is, lips in that straight-lined smirk that betrays nothing but confidence. False or otherwise, it won’t say. He imagines that that perpetual glint of calculating mirth hovers in an ellipse of white glow where the light reflects from his irises. He hears dress shoes against polished linoleum, a flicker of light where the doctor’s hand reaches out for him. He imagines that his own hand is not shaking, that his finger is not trembling on the trigger. That he can shoot. Dr. Kim’s hand slides gently over his cheek, a little past his ears, fingers tangling into hair with casual intimidation. It stops.
“Then let’s take it out, shall we?”
needle tip blue veins glinting silver something hurts nothing there Dr. Kim, smiling
What is there but a swinging golden pendulum reflecting light against black? Everything, invisible.
Open up. Tunnel vision, gone.
Through foggy rectangular slits, eyebrows furrowed at him. A metal door slides shut on squeaky wheels.
Jail.
today. now. reality.
“Don’t eat that.”
Kyungsoo looks up from the lumpy slop on his tray to see Dr. Kim standing in front of his cell, body interrupted from time to time by the cold metal bars that separate sociopathic murderer from innocent convict. He wears that same expressionless smirk that Kyungsoo sees behind his eyelids when he blinks. An invisible gun weighs on his hand, now shaking, index finger trembling over an invisible trigger. He brings the gun up. Dr. Kim smiles. He shoots.
“Bang,” he whispers, then shoots again twice. He says it louder this time, without expression. “Bang. Bang.”
Dr. Kim slides a new tray through the food compartment. He’s done this three days in a row already. It smells like deceit, fried like chicken, steamed like fish. “I brought you food.”
“Oh. Fantastic.” Sarcasm. Bang, bang bang. “Homemade?”
The expressionless smirk twitches up at one corner; a lopsided, empty smile. “As always.”
Dr. Kim waits. Kyungsoo scoops more of the slop into his mouth, chews on the bumpy parts. Every time he swallows, he retches and his eyes water, and Dr. Kim taps the tray, smiling a little wider. On his last scoop, he chokes and throws it all up, eyes squeezed shut.
When he opens them, there is a severed ear in the puddle, sitting untainted amongst the discolored, translucent yellow on the cement floor. He shouts and scrambles backwards. Arms windmilling, steps erratic, tunnel vision fading in and out, breaths uneven, choking on air. His back hits the wall. He stands there, staring at the puddle, panting.
The floor is spotless.
Dr. Kim taps the tray, smiling wider. “Come, Kyungsoo. You’ve eaten my food before. It’s not that bad.”
Leaning against the wall, breaths heaving, Kyungsoo stares through half-lidded eyes in Dr. Kim’s general direction, watching his shape blur in and out of focus as it slides around behind the bars, merging with them and then coming apart again. He swallows the air in gallonfuls. The face outside stays the same: a wide, stoic smirk.
“Fuck you,” Kyungsoo says. The words ride on his weakening breaths, barely coming out, only sounding because his lips move while he exhales. “Fuck you, fuck you, fuck you…”
His eyelids flutter shut, though his mouth keeps moving. Soon enough, he can hear Dr. Kim tapping his fingers on the metal in sync with the rhythm of his cursing. Too tired for this, he thinks, too tired, too crazy, too empty.
In the briefest millisecond that flickers with sleep, he hears Dr. Kim chuckle under his breath, rattling the tray in the compartment. His eyes open to clear vision and Dr. Kim’s ever cocky, ever expressionless face.
The concrete is cold.
Sighing, Kyungsoo stands up and meets Dr. Kim’s gaze as expressionlessly as he can manage, snatching the tray out from the compartment. When the visitor opens his mouth to list the food prepared as he usually does, Kyungsoo glares at him and cuts him off.
“Who is it?” he spits, stabbing a fork into the meat, eyeing it with disgusted, guilty hunger.
Dr. Kim cocks his head to the side, smiling, and points to the microphone wired into the corner of the cell. “Eat up,” he says. “You need to recover.”
cold eyes dripping blood innocent traitors bloodthirsty Dr. Kim, smirking
Kyungsoo knows it’s a dream because in the mirror in front of him, he is transparent right down to his esophagus. He knows, but it doesn’t feel like one. A pile of human body parts starts in the sloshing green acid of his stomach and reaches up, up, up, almost right back out of his throat. At the very bottom, bubbling inside the bile-colored liquid, is the severed ear he found in his sink four weeks back-the one that he never ate. And on top of it is everything else: half-curled, twisted up fingers scattered among bits of lung, chopped up pieces of heart still beating and sloshing blood over the other innards and outards in pulsing waterfalls, crushed bone, sinewy veins, optic nerves, spinal cords, chunks of brain, what looks like a dissected scrotum, bruised eyeballs and all these things, every part of a human imaginable to the subconscious mind, that Dr. Kim might have fed him. All these parts of the victims whose murderers he drove himself insane to identify, and it was Dr. Kim all along.
He doesn’t scream. Maybe he knew all this time what Dr. Kim was, who the Ripper really was, and wasn’t surprised. Maybe he knew it when Dr. Kim drugged him with amytal and aphrodisiacs five weeks back and asked him after dinner if he wanted to fuck. They did, against the wall, lips and teeth and fingers feathering up inside thighs and a whole lot that Kyungsoo fortunately(?) can’t remember because he was drugged and he’s dreaming. He had his Swiss Army knife in the back pocket of his jeans. He should have taken it out and sliced Dr. Kim’s testicles off and dissected them and eaten them like the scrotum in his transparent nightmare esophagus.
He wakes up, cheek pressed against cold concrete, lying on the floor next to his bed. The covers have tumbled to the floor with him. He’s hard. It isn’t his fault Dr. Kim fucked him so well.
Untangling himself from the cocoon of thick sheets, Kyungsoo pushes himself up and stumbles over to the end of the bed where his glasses sit. He slides them on, then sits back on the stiff mattress, back against his pillow, legs crossed, hands folded over his crotch. Footsteps sound down the hallway. Keys jangling. He closes his eyes-they’ll probably walk past him, anyway.
When the key clangs against the metal of his cell, he peeks one eye open. Chief Kim has his eyebrows furrowed as the lock clicks. Dr. Kim stands behind him, the ever-nonchalant smirk on his lips. Their gazes meet. Dr. Kim’s lips twitch and he drags his eyes down ever so slowly, down to where Kyungsoo has his hands crossed. His fingers twitch, either in discomfort or irritation. Even he doesn’t know. Dr. Kim looks back up, straight in the eye, and wets his lips with a slow drag of the tongue. Kyungsoo squeezes his hands together tighter.
“Dr. Kim has approved you for temporary leave in order to hold your appointment in his office,” Chief Kim says. His voice is high and irritating, scratches against Kyungsoo’s eardrums. No wonder Jongdae wants a divorce with him, he thinks, snickering to himself. Chief Kim looks suspicious for a moment, but Dr. Kim pushes him aside and slides the door open. “Don’t do anything stupid, Kyungsoo.”
“Hm.”
The chief turns to Dr. Kim. “Are you sure you trust him?”
“He’s my friend,” he replies, looking directly at Kyungsoo. “Of course I do.”
Kyungsoo snorts and walks out the door, letting the chief handcuff him on the way out. “After everything, Junmyeon. After everything, you still have to ask Dr. Kim if you can trust me. Never once thought to ask me if you could trust him, did you? Maybe that’s why Sehun’s gone. You don’t even trust your own damn team.”
Chief Kim says nothing.
“He’s right. Who knows? Maybe you can’t trust me.”
“You do realize that he’s accusing you of murdering and cannibalizing over a dozen people, right?”
“And you realize that you’re accusing him of the same?”
“Well what do you want me to do about it? Investigate you? Are you putting yourself up for investigation?”
“If that’s what you usually do for people who are reasonably accused of being serial cannibals, then yes.”
Chief Kim stares at his shoes, then flips open his cell phone. “Alright then. Go to your appointment now, or whatever-hello, yes, this is NIS Chief Kim Junmyeon…”
Shaking his head, Dr. Kim slings an arm around Kyungsoo’s shoulders, laughing when he stiffens, and walks him out of the halls and into the parking lot. They stop at a taxi with no driver. Kyungsoo shudders, watching blood seep out from the trunk and drip onto the floor. His stomach growls for some reason. His throat is terrifyingly dry. He wonders what someone else’s blood would taste like in his mouth.
When he blinks, the blood disappears. The taxi driver honks. Dr. Kim holds the door open for him, curving his lips into the vague difference between a smile and a smirk. Kyungsoo smiles, saccharine sarcasm, and ducks his head to enter. After settling into the seat opposite, Dr. Kim smiles back.
“Don’t be like that, Kyungsoo. I got you out. Welcome to freedom.”
“You also put me in.”
“I cooked you nice food.”
“Nice food that got me put in jail.”
“You have no eviden-”
“It’s in here,” Kyungsoo snaps, tapping his temple with his index finger, impatient and rough. “It’s always been in here. And you can’t take it away. I know. They gave me amytal because they didn’t trust me, but amytal makes you know.”
“You had a seizure.”
“Ah, yes,” he sighs with mock content, staring out the window. “A seizure of truth.”
“Oh, Kyungsoo,” Dr. Kim says, still smirking through the disappointment in his voice. “I’ll never understand why you cannot be as fond of me as I am of you. We were friends, weren’t we? I still consider you my friend.”
“I was never your friend.”
A brief silence. “Oh, Kyungsoo.”
dark alley cold water frozen knife blood everywhere Dr. Kim, cooking
“Will you draw me another clock, Kyungsoo?”
“Ha.”
“Perhaps we will get you out on the basis of insanity. You don’t remember killing anyone, after all.”
“Except that I’ve insisted multiple times that I am not insane, and you were the killer. I remember, Dr. Kim. Almost everything. And I was the one who sent Luhan after you. I know when he went to investigate you. And three days later you showcased him in those giant expanding glass slides-” his voice catches and he coughs a few times, wiping his eyes with the back of his sleeve, “-and Sehun’s arm, who else could it have been, Dr. Kim? I sent him for you and he ended up dead. If nothing I say is proof because no one else has seen it and I’m insane, then fine. But everyone saw that. And everyone in his department-they’re onto you, doctor. Even Junmyeon. They’ll be onto you.”
“Fantastic. Let them come to me. I’m sure they will draw the correct conclusions this time-”
“I’m hungry,” Kyungsoo says. “It’s lunchtime.”
“Alright. Would you like me to cook?”
“Do I have an option?”
Dr. Kim smiles. “I’ll be in the kitchen if you need me. In the meantime, please draw me a clock.”
“Right.”
Kyungsoo takes a piece of paper from the table beside him and stares at it, leaning over so that he can draw against the armrest. After he finishes, he glances toward the kitchen, where Dr. Kim is busy cooking. It occurs to him that no one has ever seen the inside of Dr. Kim’s refrigerator. The food is always prepared, or being prepared when there are guests, and when people are in the kitchen he’s always standing in the narrow space between the refrigerator and the island where he arranges the food. He squints at the wall, and it disappears, and past the shape of Dr. Kim slicing meat onto a plate, the refrigerator fades to transparency. On the center shelf, he sees the severed, half-dissected, raw scrotum sitting on top of a leaf of lettuce covering a porcelain plate with gold embellishments, a few pieces of hair still sticking out in various places.
When he blinks, he knows the hallucinations will disappear, so he keeps his eyes open for as long as possible. The scrotum stares back. It starts moving, slithering across the plate, and on the top shelf the zip-loc bagged hearts start beating again, bloodless, and the eyeballs on the heads sitting on the bottom shelf start rolling in their sockets. Without warning, the scrotum leaps off the plate and attacks him, reaching out for his face as it flies through the walls, and when he swats it away, hand interrupting the space before his eyes, all he can see in front of him is the wood paneled wall between Dr. Kim’s desk and the kitchen.
“Ha,” he says, and a third of the sound is genuine laughter. He blinks again and looks at the place where the scrotum should be, and there it sits. It starts squirming again, slithering across the carpet. He follows it.
The scrotum leads him to a door beside Dr. Kim’s bookshelves. He tests the knob-it’s unlocked-then pushes through. When he feels the wall for a light switch, the scrotum cackles at him. He bites his lip, embarrassed. Ahead of him, the scrotum squirms over what feels to be a thick rug to another door in the back of the hall they’re walking down. The door opens to a spiraling staircase with a faint glow coming out of some chamber at the bottom.
“Wheee!” the scrotum squeals. It throws itself down the staircase, tumbling all the way to the bottom. Kyungsoo sighs and takes the steps, one by one.
Right when he reaches the bottom, Dr. Kim’s faraway voice calls to him.
“Lunch is ready, Kyungsoo.”
He blinks. His feet are planted on the carpet in the meeting room, and he’s sitting in the meeting chair where he drew the clock against the armrest, staring at the wall between this room and the kitchen. Dr. Kim smiles at him as he walks nearer, balancing several plates along his forearms. Kneeling, he sets them down on the coffee table in front of him.
“Okroshka soup, containing an assortment of raw vegetables with freshly hunted veal. This one is crown roast of lamb, sauteéd with-”
“Okay,” Kyungsoo says. “Thanks. I’m hungry.”
“Shall we continue with our meeting, then?”
Kyungsoo stirs the soup, watching the bits of meat swirl around with the vegetables. “Promise me that this isn’t Luhan.”
“Luhan is still with the NIS team. I highly doubt that part of him could have made it into this soup.”
“Maybe you kept parts of him.”
“That is assuming that I killed him, or infiltrated the laboratory.”
“The former.”
“Proof is useless in the mind, especially if you are insane.” Dr. Kim glances over at the clock, quirking an eyebrow and then returning to his food. “Demonstrated mental imbalances do not make for a trustworthy witness. Now, shall we?”
“I need wine.”
“Of course. I’ll go get some for you.”
When the door to the kitchen swings shut, Kyungsoo looks down at his food again. On the carpet just under his plate, the scrotum reappears, squealing and doing a strange little dance. “Wheee!” it says, then scurries off under the door beside the bookshelf. “Wheee!”
Kyungsoo raises both eyebrows. Looking back to his food, he takes a spoonful of the soup and drinks it, chewing deliberately on the meat. “Hm.”
“How is it?”
Dr. Kim sets two glasses on the table, presenting the bottle of wine shortly after as he grips the neck in his hand. When he opens his mouth to speak, Kyungsoo glares at him.
“Alright then,” he says, still smiling. He pours the wine, then sets the rest of the bottle between them.
Kyungsoo stares at his soup as he picks up the glass, at first drinking in small sips, then taking a huge swig before setting it back down. “It’s good.” He takes another spoonful of soup. “Delectable.”
“Only the finest for you. Now, shall we continue?”
“Sure.”
“Does your clock look accurate to you?”
“Yes.”
“Good. Have you had any troubling hallucinations lately?”
“Troubling?” Kyungsoo laughs, harsh and brief. “No. Nothing that I’m not already used to.”
“Hallucinations in general, then?”
“You saw me have one just a few days ago.”
“Do you mind telling them to me?”
“The ear you somehow shoved down my throat. The one I regurgitated into the sink. I keep coughing it back up even though it’s already gone.”
“Alright.” Dr. Kim sets his food to the side and scribbles something down on a notepad. “Anything else?”
“Talking scrotums.”
“Pardon?”
Kyungsoo finishes his wine. Dr. Kim nods at him and pours him another glass, all the way to the top. He downs half of it before responding. “A talking, half-dissected scrotum.”
Dr. Kim writes this down too. “Where did this… scrotum… first appear to you?”
“A dream.”
“Ah, a dream,” Dr. Kim repeats, setting the notepad down. Very deliberately, he meets Kyungsoo’s gaze, slowly folding his hands together, leaning forward with his elbows propped just above his knees. “Then, describe this dream. When did you have it?”
“Just last night. I dreamt that when I looked in the mirror, I was transparent just enough so I could see what was in my esophagus. At the bottom of the pile of things I supposedly ate, there was the ear. There were a lot of other things in the pile, but the only other thing there was just one of was the scrotum. All this stuff you shoved down my throat.” Kyungsoo laughs. When he stops, he finishes the rest of his wine and sets it down for more. Watches Dr. Kim refill it, all the way to the top, then takes another small sip. “The first thing I thought when I saw it was that five weeks ago, when you drugged me and fucked me, I should have taken my pocket knife out and castrated you.”
“Did I do that, now?” Dr. Kim asks, smiling so wide that the corners of his lips seem to be pushing into his cheeks. “Was I good?”
Kyungsoo sips again at his wine, takes his time finishing the soup. Dr. Kim watches him all the while, hands still folded. Kyungsoo thinks about what he can remember. Warm lips, taste of blood, fingers in hair, tingling up and down his spine, sharp arousal, drug-dulled pleasure under every inch of skin. A short burst of warmth in his lower torso.
“Good enough,” he says. He pokes at the lamb with a fork. “But I can’t remember, since you drugged me.”
“Should I remind you then?” He glances at Kyungsoo’s wine glass. “While you’re still sober? Well, sober enough-”
“So this scrotum appeared again when you were in the kitchen. I saw through the walls and into your refrigerator. In the bottom shelf I saw an assortment of heads, though I guess that’s unreasonable now since there’s not much to eat in a head-at least not that I can think of, I don’t know about you, since you’re a professional-and on the top there were probably a dozen zip-locked hearts. And in the center shelf, all alone, was the same half-dissected scrotum, sitting on a plate. It jumped at my face, flew through all the walls. I swatted it away. Then it started laughing and squirming and led me somewhere.”
“Where did it lead you to?”
“A staircase.”
Dr. Kim’s expression doesn’t change in the slightest when Kyungsoo looks up to check. Instead, he simply keeps his eyes locked on Kyungsoo’s as he drinks more of his wine.
“Then you said it was lunchtime and the scrotum ran away.”
“I’m curious. Did it lead you somewhere in this building?”
“Yes.”
“Have you been there before?”
Kyungsoo wryly at his food. “If I have, it was under something that blocked it from my memory.”
“Do you believe it exists?”
“Yes.”
“Then,” Dr. Kim says, putting everything down and standing up. He gestures toward the bookshelf door. Kyungsoo’s gut drops. “Shall we?”
hot breath sinister hands nerves aflame Jongin, head back, eyes closed
“I see.”
Kyungsoo stands, silent, staring expressionlessly at the expansive basement-turned twist between a surgical laboratory and a morgue. Dr. Kim doesn’t seem aggravated in the slightest. He places his hand on the small of Kyungsoo’s back and nudges him forward. His NIS badge glints on the nearest metal table. Dr. Kim notices that he’s looking at it and picks it up, tucking it neatly into Kyungsoo’s breast pocket.
“You’re right. You’ve been here before. I’ve taken you here many times already.”
“Thought so.” Kyungsoo looks down at his arm and sees the shadows of needles pressing into his veins, kaleidoscopic distortions around Dr. Kim’s black coffee irises as they examine him. He hears echoes of hypnotic monotone when he passes by glass panels with the constant drip drip drip of dark crimson sliding down smooth surfaces.
They walk on, deeper into the basement. The lighting only goes through the center, faded white light like pale shadows cast over sharp surfaces that fade into black. Kyungsoo thinks he can catch the outlines of corpses, but the light never goes far enough for him to be sure. It’s cold. The only source of warmth is Dr. Kim’s hand on his back. He wonders how far he’ll be able to go before something goes wrong, inside his head or outside of it.
He passes a surgical counter where the blood on top still looks fresh, reflecting the few streaks of dim light that hit it. Something glints at the corner and catches his eye. An NIS badge. He stops. Dr. Kim chuckles quietly.
“Is that Luhan’s?”
“Would you like to check?”
Kyungsoo shakes his head. They walk past it, no more than a few steps before he bites his lip and turns back, flipping the badge open with a finger. The I.D. is missing.
“Evidence,” Kyungsoo mumbles. “It’s not just in here anymore.”
A coarse finger brushes something wet from his cheek, leaving a streak of rapidly cooling water over his skin. Dr. Kim cups his face in one hand, looking down at him, lips still curved ever so slightly in that little smirk, that imperceptible, ever-present condescension, only this time, his eyes feel a little bit sympathetic. Kyungsoo remembers that when he saw the taxi in the parking lot, he wondered for a moment what someone else’s blood would taste like, and that when he got put in jail, he woke up the second night to Dr. Kim’s shadow on the wall with someone else’s, whispering something about psychological facts, why people tend to have sex more after funerals. They were talking about him like being incarcerated was the same as being cremated.
Upstairs, far, far away, footsteps. Junmyeon’s voice.
Dr. Kim, eyes closed, lips dry and cold, so close, too close, pressed against his own. Hand on his cheek, fingers sliding through his hair, Luhan’s badge, watching, in the corner.
Kyungsoo bites down. Bites down as hard as he can, so hard that he finally shuts his eyes, squeezing them. Feels flesh give way to warmth that floods into his throat, dribbling down chins and slipping through the spaces between lips. The transparent esophagus with its beating hearts now swimming under a new waterfall of blood, Dr. Kim’s blood, coursing down, slipping through crevices like a forceful wave of filling. Warmth, pooling in his stomach, bleaching green bile with red until there’s so much that it’s opaque, a solid column of dark burgundy. He can’t see the ear anymore. His esophagus twitches in the place where he once saw the scrotum as it squirms about, trying to escape. Blood everywhere, Dr. Kim’s blood, sliding through organs and tissue and into his own veins.
Jacket off. Belt undone. Rough hands slipping under his shirt, rough hands pulling things down, shoving him, cold concrete against his back, turning him around, cold concrete against his stomach, through his shirt. Luhan’s badge, Luhan’s badge, Luhan’s badge.
What is there but that golden pendulum swinging back and forth, back and forth, chanting through the dusty air: who cares, who cares, who cares?
They fuck on the floor where the concrete is hard and the NIS badge bruises his chest because Dr. Kim never removes his shirt, where the blood still drips from tables into wet, fresh puddles and the bodies in the back are watching along with Luhan’s badge. Funeral sex. Funeral sex to make up for all the bodies who will never see their funerals, for every crime scene tick of insanity where he saw rotting body parts and flowers in eye sockets and birds pecking on hearts and lungs stuffed like turkeys and hung on Christmas trees, for all the victims he didn’t know he ate until he saw Dr. Kim’s diagrams of rotting body parts and flowers in eye sockets and birds pecking on hearts and lungs stuffed like turkeys and hung on Christmas trees. Funeral sex until he comes back to reality, sanity, until he stops seeing talking scrotums and Luhan’s still-clothed corpse, dripping blood out from glass panels. They fuck on the floor without aphrodisiacs and amytal but with Kyungsoo’s lips making sounds he didn’t know they could make, with so many yes, Jongins and fuck, oh God, fucks that he could refill his esophagus with them and choke them right back out.
Fingers draw currents of electricity down his spine and out of his skin and Dr. Kim presses him farther into the ground, all the way through the floor where his sanity sits alive and waiting in a locked coffin, hands brushing between thighs, lips dragging over skin, teeth nipping along chest, Luhan’s badge nothing but another hallucination, everything a hallucination but Dr. Kim and his grunting and his rough hands and thrusts and the guilty, thawing warmth erupting from every possible nerve ending.
door bursting door slamming hands up you’re under arrest Dr. Kim, click, bang, bang bang
“Jongin, fuck-oh, God.”
sticky warmth empty conscience innocent guilty, same thing
They lie there, sprawled over each other, nothing between them but Kyungsoo’s worn shirt and a sticky layer of sweat. Down the hall, in the focus of the light, Kyungsoo makes out a new shape, a pile, two or three bodies-he can’t tell. Dr. Kim cards his fingers through Kyungsoo’s hair, carresses his cheek, kisses his neck.
“We shall dine well tonight, Kyungsoo, my friend.”