(no subject)
strange love | nc-17 | ~3700 | kenbin
inspired by a photoset i saw on tumblr. thanks to riley for sitting on me about this forever and ever. happy halloween (part one) everyone!
WARNING: RATED FOR GORE, AS WELL AS SOME SEXUAL CONTENT. SORRY NOT SORRY. DON'T CLICK THE CUT IF YOU CAN'T HANDLE SOME BLOOD.
Tonight’s the night, Hongbin thinks, inspecting his face closely in the mirror for any more traces of blemish. He’s kind of nervous, believing his date is going to notice the intense amount of concealer he’s wearing over a particular pimple. It takes a few minutes but he eventually convinces himself that they’ll probably end up in dim lighting for most of the night, anyway, and that it doesn’t matter if he’s only wearing a little makeup.
It’s the first night he’ll be spending out with Jaehwan. It’s the first time he’ll be meeting Jaehwan, actually, though the two of them have spent more hours conversing than Hongbin cares to count.
Hongbin runs a blog dedicated to serial killers, actually makes enough to afford a shoebox apartment just on advertisement. Not exactly the kind of job where you have long days and early nights. In the midst of his research for a blog post, Hongbin had stumbled across a message board for people going into or already in the field of working for the dead. Of course, he created himself an account immediately, and made himself a handful of people with whom he could discuss his particular line of work -- people who were willing to tell him the gorey details of cases they had worked. It was at that point that he fell in love.
Of course, after awhile -- six months to be exact -- he’d found the online citizens frequenting the board shallow and pedantic, arguing motives of serial killers or appearing to use the ideas of killing people for masturbatory fodder. He was about to delete his account, complete with four-thousand-plus posts and the various stats that come therein, when he was approached by Jaehwan, who had made some joke or another, confirming the suspicions Hongbin had held onto for quite some time now regarding their fellow message board frequenters.
It was at that point he fell in love a second time, but this time in a completely different way.
They exchanged numbers after about two weeks, and when they texted they ended up talking about more than just serial killers, blood, guts and gore. They talked about homework -- Hongbin’s school days are behind him, and he didn’t really feel like he could handle the anxieties of going to university, while Jaehwan was a student of forensic pathology at the local community college -- and they talk about Hongbin’s job. They talked about their families, especially around the holidays when Hongbin’s dreading seeing his and Jaehwan can’t wait to see little nieces and nephews and how big they’ve gotten while he’s been away at school. How precious, Hongbin decided then. How utterly precious.
And Jaehwan has only gotten cuter over time. Hongbin swears to everything holy he’s weak, that it’s not like him to have one of those schoolgirl infatuations, that it’s something in Jaehwan’s flirty emoji sent via text that make his heart flutter in ways it hasn’t for as long as he can remember.
Hongbin quits reminiscing long enough to check his hair for the eleventy-billionth time. It looks fine, he decides, sighing with his bottom lip jutting out so that it ruffles his bangs into perfection.
He doesn’t want to admit it, but he’s been looking forward to this for a long time.
---
The start of the night is something like a fairy-tale. They go to dinner first, set in a dimly-lit restaurant with candles on every table and the scent of seafood swirling soft in the air. The bill must be astronomical, Hongbin thinks as he dines, a slow enjoyment of good company and a good meal; when the ticket comes, Jaehwan insists upon paying, despite the fact that the both of them look like they could have gone a little cheaper. “Nothing but the best for you,” Jaehwan says shyly, and Hongbin fights not to blush.
Jaehwan is a complete and total gentleman, doesn’t even so much as start to touch without confirmation of the go-ahead, and Hongbin is charmed by the quiet jokes he makes, by the way his smile lights up his entire face when he deigns to show it.
Hongbin doesn’t want to admit it, but he’s smiling more tonight than he has in a long time. It feels...nice, pleasant, like the way it would to come home after a long day of work and take off your shoes and lay down on the couch doing absolutely nothing. Not that he has a lot of experience with that, recently, but he gets the idea just the same.
The only off detail is that Jaehwan keeps nervously rustling the oversized bag he carries on one shoulder, glancing down at it with concerned eyes, as if something’s going to jump out of it and attack the both of them.
---
Hongbin’s memory flashes back to a particular message, a 3am discussion had when Jaehwan was running on no sleep and Hongbin was half-delirious from not having eaten in a couple of days, a habit of his -- he forgets more often than he’d like. He’d read the words a few times before really absorbing them.
”You know,” Jaehwan had written, ”I spend so much time dealing with the dead that it makes me wonder what it’s like to...I guess, make them like that, you know?”
It devolved from there, Hongbin pontificating on the methodology used while Jaehwan waxed poetic on the tender nature of human flesh. Truth be told, it kind of turned Hongbin on, thinking of his skin beneath steady, well-trained fingers and slightly-calloused palms, a surgical knife cutting into the curve of his shoulder. Blood welling up under the knife, spilling from the site of the wound--
It took about ten minutes but he crossed one more thing off his to-do list for the day: getting off. He’d come into his own palm, shaking, sweat pooling in the hollows of his collarbones.
Of course, that had caused an interruption in their conversation; in the interim he’d received several concerned messages from Jaehwan’s end, wondering where Hongbin had gone. He turned his spinning chair back to the computer screen, having been unable to face the image of the boy he was probably a little in love with while touching himself. He apologised and answered the questions posed to him, no longer thinking deeply but rather dreaming of what it’d be like to let Jaehwan cut into him. Just once or twice. Nothing serious.
---
They’re lying in bed together, fingers intertwined, Hongbin gazing out the window and into the darkness with the distinct feeling of wide eyes burning holes into the side of his face, when Jaehwan proposes it.
“Remember that conversation we had when we first started Skyping?” he asks, shifting so that he’s propped up on his elbow and he’s got his cheek in his palm. “The one about...about serial killers.” There’s something shy about his tone, something that makes Hongbin turn his visual attentions away from the window out of which he’d been staring. “I wonder if you know that I was thinking the whole time about what it’d be like to cut someone up.”
And maybe it’s the moment but Hongbin leans in and kisses Jaehwan’s cheek, bold as you please considering the decidedly chaste nature of their evening. “I was wondering what it’d be like to be cut,” he confesses, breathless, a blush staining his ivory cheeks.
Jaehwan looks overjoyed, and Hongbin’s the one that’s put him there. It sends his heart flying, despite the morbid nature of their suddenly-fulfilled desires.
Across the room is Jaehwan’s bag; he kisses Hongbin’s Cupid’s bow softly before going to it, flipping it open. It doesn’t take someone with great vision to see the dull gleam of metal catching in the moonlight; Hongbin shifts so that he’s sitting with his legs tucked under him, peers over Jaehwan’s shoulders to try and see exactly what it is he’s been carrying with him all night. Someone else might find it a bit presumptuous for Jaehwan to have brought these things on a first date, but Hongbin merely feels a certain sense of arousal that heightens his curiosity even further.
When Jaehwan finally turns, straightens, rising to his feet, he’s holding a rather sinister-looking pair of scissors in his right hand. Hongbin’s breath stills in his chest. “Okay,” breathes Jaehwan, the grin tugging at his lips a sharp contrast to the almost-painful anticipation Hongbin is experiencing, “okay, I...I want to do this. With you. You’re the only person I’ve ever met that’s felt the same as I do. But...I want to do it right. Does that make sense? So we’re going to set some rules.” This sounds as good a place to start as any, so Hongbin remains silent, makes a gesture that implores Jaehwan to continue.
“First of all, no cutting any lethal places. I want to do this again, if you do. Second, we’re not going to cut each others’ faces. At least, not this time. I don’t think I could do that to you, you’re too beautiful.” Hongbin disagrees, wants to protest that Jaehwan is the better-looking of the two of them, and not out of a need for flattery, but keeps his comment to himself. “Third,” and here he gestures behind him to the bag sitting in the corner of the room, “I’ve brought first-aid supplies with me, so we can fix each other up afterward. No hospitals. I don’t need anyone else knowing about this.” Hongbin listens intently, biting down on his lower lip, and when Jaehwan gives him a look that clearly asks whether or not he’s got anything to add, he ponders for a moment.
“You have to help me clean afterward, too. Not just me, I mean whatever blood we get all over the place.” His voice wavers slightly, but he remains confident in his decision. “And when it’s all over, I want to stitch you up. I’m probably not very good at it, but I’m going to try my best, if that’s okay with you.”
Jaehwan smiles brightly. “Agreed. You have bleach, right? We’ll make everything spotless. I would hate to mess up this lovely apartment.”
Hongbin, at a loss for words at how touching this moment is (as well as its juxtaposition with what they’re about to do) nods, swallowing hard. “I understand,” he agrees, and his voice doesn’t waver. This is the thing he’s been dreaming about for what feels like the last lifetime, and with someone he truly cares about, he feels…safe?
Jaehwan clips the scissors loudly in the air, a sickly sort of grin tugging across his features, as if he can’t believe his eyes. “Just a little cut, first,” he proclaims almost abashedly, crossing the room in slow, precise steps. Hongbin inches forward to the edge of the bed on his hands and knees, craning his neck to look up at Jaehwan with his eyebrows raised, his mouth slightly agape. Jaehwan pauses, then reaches down and takes Hongbin by the hand, twining their fingers together as he tugs the other out of bed, onto the floor.
“Your sheets are so nice,” Jaehwan mumbles, “it’d be a shame to get blood on them.” And Hongbin hates messes almost as much as he hates cleaning, so he’s inclined to agree. They stand there, bed-adjacent in the middle of Hongbin’s bedroom floor, nose-to-nose, their lips almost touching, their eyes never once leaving one another’s. “You’re really sure about this?” Jaehwan asks, shifting just so and causing the tips of their noses to brush together.
“I’m sure,” Hongbin says after a deep breath, and he kisses Jaehwan softly, his hand cupping the other man’s cheek, thumb brushing in the hollow beneath his eye. Then they break apart and Jaehwan takes those scissors, skims the tip of them along the line of Hongbin’s collarbone over his shirt. In a quick shuffle of his arms, Hongbin loses this pesky piece of clothing, then takes a step back, nearly tripping over the mass of cotton at his feet.
“Relax,” Jaehwan says, “I’ll only hurt you as long as you want me to.” Then he takes Hongbin’s hand in his, raises it til the back is bathed in moonlight, and flicks open the scissors. Hongbin studies the instrument in Jaehwan’s hand with a quizzical expression; the blades are slightly curved, and thicker than normal.
He doesn’t flinch when the blade presses against the back of his wrist, doesn’t cry out when it cuts into his flesh, when blood wells up against the blade.
Just a little cut, he tells himself, willing himself to keep from trembling or, worse yet, getting hard at the sight of his own skin tearing apart. He finds himself breathless even though the cut is shallow, even though only a slow trickle of blood drips to the floor between them.
Jaehwan takes the scissors back, head tilted, lips parted, clearly admiring his handiwork. “Beautiful,” he breathes, astonishment touching his tone. Then he hands the shears to Hongbin, who takes the handles between agitated fingers, scanning Jaehwan for a place on which to cut.
Eventually he stuffs the shears into back pocket and helps the other out of his shirt, so as to keep any blood from staining the lovely pressed button-up Jaehwan had been wearing on their date. Their discarded clothes get kicked to the side so they don’t get dribbled onto, and Hongbin’s free hand goes to Jaehwan’s shoulder, holding him steady as he makes a small cut into the hollow between two of Jaehwan’s ribs.
Apparently it hurts more than Jaehwan had anticipated; he hisses as his blood spills, but otherwise smiles weakly, nodding, encouraging. He doesn’t look as strong as he could, and that scares Hongbin a little, but he mumbles quiet ‘go on’s, trying to compel Hongbin to continue on. So he passes the scissors, his bleeding hand wrapped around Jaehwan’s wrist as he shoves the shears into the other.
They go on like this for some time, exchanging cuts, exchanging kisses inbetween, Hongbin with a small nick just under his collarbone when Jaehwan isn’t feeling too brave, another on his upper thigh when the pants come off; Hongbin getting daring when Jaehwan’s pants go missing too and cutting one deep into the curve of Jaehwan’s posterior, not to mention one at the back of his wrist to match the one Hongbin is wearing. A puddle of blood, albeit a small one, is forming between their bare feet, and when they pause to regain breath, to regain that feeling of being chained to the earth, Hongbin glances down at it with wide eyes.
It doesn’t stop there. Hongbin gets cut at the nape of his neck, just below where his hair, growing shaggy in his laziness, stops, curls up. Jaehwan gets cut behind the knee, and Hongbin is almost surgically careful to avoid the veins there, knowing that touching any of them could spell big trouble for this encounter. He doesn’t want to be the one to break the rules. Jaehwan looks like he wants to do it, too, keeps staring at the curve of Hongbin’s cheek, probably imagining what it’d look like split open, dripping red.
At one point they abandon the scissors entirely, Jaehwan carefully digging into his little bag of tools to pull out a scalpel, most likely nicked from one of his practicals classrooms. It’s as he’s coming back across the room that Hongbin notices the growth spurting forth from the front of Jaehwan’s pants, not full, but enough to be noticeable, and he feels...better, somehow. Comforted.
“One more,” he says, compelled by the pool of red between their feet. He starts by taking Jaehwan by the hip, spinning him around. Then he takes the shears in his now-steady hand, drags the blade long and hard down Jaehwan’s back, parallel to his spine, careful, measured. The blood falls quickly, gushing in a fall down the nicely-toned muscles of Jaehwan’s back. Hongbin pulls back, stares, eyes wide in a mix of abject horror and fascination, watching what he’s just done take root. He reaches out, presses his hand to the wound, covers his own hand in Jaehwan’s blood.
“Okay, we’re done,” Hongbin says, “or, um, I’m done. Unless you want one more, too.”
“I kind of do, is that okay?”
“Yes, definitely.” And Hongbin offers the scissors back to Jaehwan, who takes them quickly, slices down the length of Hongbin’s sternum, none too deep, not nearly as bad as the one Hongbin had done on him last. Then he shifts forward, the suddenness of the movement almost startling Hongbin, and presses a kiss to the top of the wound.
Hongbin cranes his neck a bit, peers down the length of his nose at this fresh cut, then leans in, presses his lips to Jaehwan’s, bloodied palm against the side of his neck, holding him steady in case he should faint. He looks paler than he had even before this entire thing started, after all, and it might just be blood loss, but he’d rather be safe than sorry. They hold hands as Hongbin busies himself in the kitchen, digging out cleaning supplies and rubber gloves and rags from his cabinets. “For later,” he says, happy to be bleeding and free though Jaehwan’s expression speaks of concern. “I’m just going to feel like kissing you in the future. I’m not going to want to get all these things. Besides, we need the bleach.”
Jaehwan drops a stack of towels on the floor next to his bag, squats to dig in it, his wrists covered in black fabric for a long minute before he pulls out a small zippered pouch. He unzips it as he rises once more, revealing its contents as a few different gauge needles and strands upon strands of surgical thread. Hongbin wants to ask where he got these supplies, but thinks better of it, bites on his lower lip so hard he swears he tastes copper flooding his mouth. Instead he busies himself pouring a glass shallow with bleach, takes one of the needles when Jaehwan offers it to him, dips it in the liquid inside the glass.
When everything is sterile and set up, they sit across from one another on the floor, legs criss-crossed, holding hands, gazing into each other’s eyes for a long minute. Then the blood loss proves to be so much and they set to repairing each other, one slow stitch at a time, a needle digging into flesh, then looping back around with a length of thread. Jaehwan’s hands shake even more than they had previously; it’s a wonder he doesn’t make many crooked stitches. When he’s finished with his first cut, the one down Hongbin’s chest, Hongbin reaches up, touches the wound, no longer hanging open, appreciates the feel of his skin puckered together with intent to heal.
He holds his breath when Jaehwan applies antiseptic to the sewed-up wound, the pads of his fingers tender against Hongbin’s chest, and finds that he again has to will his dick to cooperate with the decidedly calm nature of the situation.
Hongbin is a decidedly better human seamster. He takes long, filling breaths inbetween each drag of the needle, watches as the thread pokes through the wound on Jaehwan’s butt. It occurs to him that perhaps fixing the cut on Jaehwan’s back should take priority, but he finds himself loving the way that one’s going to scar a little more with each passing moment, eyeing the way the blood runs in rivulets across either side of Jaehwan’s back. He reaches out during a pause in his stitching to stroke unsteady fingertips against it; Jaehwan hisses at the contact, back arching involuntarily, and Hongbin swears he can hear the other gritting his teeth. It’s not in Hongbin to make someone cry, but he really wants to. So he busies his one hand with sewing as slowly as he possibly can, the other working idle fingers at the bottom of his favourite wound, teasing it open just a little further with every touch, until it hurts, until it bleeds.
He’s not breaking the rules, he thinks as he continues on, they hadn’t said anything about not making things worse. Still, he feels a little guilty, knows that Jaehwan isn’t as strong to pain as Hongbin himself, so when he finishes with the wound he sets to mending that one, not even giving Jaehwan a chance to fix him up a little more. It takes a little more effort to pull together the distended lengths of skin at either side of this cut, and it’s so deep that it would have needed stitches even if they hadn’t agreed to do it to one another at the beginning of all this, so Hongbin supposes he owes this situation a little bit of gratitude.
He’s not felt this close to someone in quite some time. And maybe it’s the blood caked under his nails, stuck drying to his palms, smeared across someone else’s skin, maybe it’s the dull gleam of the needle in the little light there is in the room, maybe it’s a combination of tender flesh under his hands and careful ministrations to keep from making a bad (but good, so good) situation worse, but there’s a hauntingly familiar sense of tension settled into the very pit of his gut. He knows what it is, but he won’t do anything about it. At least not yet, and nothing so crass as to do with this perfect man laying face-down on his bedroom floor.
When they’re all patched up, gauze and medical tape applied over stitched-up lacerations, content and sated in their need for blood and guts and gore, they go to bed together, hands interlocked, completely comfortable. They don’t sleep for hours, just talking about the experience, about planning their next venture into the world of slicing each other up. Occasionally one will reach out to touch the other’s bandaged wounds, or their own, mainly a point of disbelief -- ‘I can’t believe we’ve done this’.
Right as they’re about to fall asleep, Hongbin snuggles in, his forehead in the crook of Jaehwan’s neck, and mumbles into his collar, “I wouldn’t want to cut your face, either.”
Jaehwan shifts, his arm moving higher up Hongbin’s shoulders, relaxing the hold he has on the other. “You wouldn’t?”
“You’re the most handsome man I’ve ever seen. I’ll just wipe my blood on your face, instead, if I need to see it that badly.”
With that, they share one last kiss, and collapse into each other's arms, sleep taking over them at last.
inspired by a photoset i saw on tumblr. thanks to riley for sitting on me about this forever and ever. happy halloween (part one) everyone!
WARNING: RATED FOR GORE, AS WELL AS SOME SEXUAL CONTENT. SORRY NOT SORRY. DON'T CLICK THE CUT IF YOU CAN'T HANDLE SOME BLOOD.
Tonight’s the night, Hongbin thinks, inspecting his face closely in the mirror for any more traces of blemish. He’s kind of nervous, believing his date is going to notice the intense amount of concealer he’s wearing over a particular pimple. It takes a few minutes but he eventually convinces himself that they’ll probably end up in dim lighting for most of the night, anyway, and that it doesn’t matter if he’s only wearing a little makeup.
It’s the first night he’ll be spending out with Jaehwan. It’s the first time he’ll be meeting Jaehwan, actually, though the two of them have spent more hours conversing than Hongbin cares to count.
Hongbin runs a blog dedicated to serial killers, actually makes enough to afford a shoebox apartment just on advertisement. Not exactly the kind of job where you have long days and early nights. In the midst of his research for a blog post, Hongbin had stumbled across a message board for people going into or already in the field of working for the dead. Of course, he created himself an account immediately, and made himself a handful of people with whom he could discuss his particular line of work -- people who were willing to tell him the gorey details of cases they had worked. It was at that point that he fell in love.
Of course, after awhile -- six months to be exact -- he’d found the online citizens frequenting the board shallow and pedantic, arguing motives of serial killers or appearing to use the ideas of killing people for masturbatory fodder. He was about to delete his account, complete with four-thousand-plus posts and the various stats that come therein, when he was approached by Jaehwan, who had made some joke or another, confirming the suspicions Hongbin had held onto for quite some time now regarding their fellow message board frequenters.
It was at that point he fell in love a second time, but this time in a completely different way.
They exchanged numbers after about two weeks, and when they texted they ended up talking about more than just serial killers, blood, guts and gore. They talked about homework -- Hongbin’s school days are behind him, and he didn’t really feel like he could handle the anxieties of going to university, while Jaehwan was a student of forensic pathology at the local community college -- and they talk about Hongbin’s job. They talked about their families, especially around the holidays when Hongbin’s dreading seeing his and Jaehwan can’t wait to see little nieces and nephews and how big they’ve gotten while he’s been away at school. How precious, Hongbin decided then. How utterly precious.
And Jaehwan has only gotten cuter over time. Hongbin swears to everything holy he’s weak, that it’s not like him to have one of those schoolgirl infatuations, that it’s something in Jaehwan’s flirty emoji sent via text that make his heart flutter in ways it hasn’t for as long as he can remember.
Hongbin quits reminiscing long enough to check his hair for the eleventy-billionth time. It looks fine, he decides, sighing with his bottom lip jutting out so that it ruffles his bangs into perfection.
He doesn’t want to admit it, but he’s been looking forward to this for a long time.
---
The start of the night is something like a fairy-tale. They go to dinner first, set in a dimly-lit restaurant with candles on every table and the scent of seafood swirling soft in the air. The bill must be astronomical, Hongbin thinks as he dines, a slow enjoyment of good company and a good meal; when the ticket comes, Jaehwan insists upon paying, despite the fact that the both of them look like they could have gone a little cheaper. “Nothing but the best for you,” Jaehwan says shyly, and Hongbin fights not to blush.
Jaehwan is a complete and total gentleman, doesn’t even so much as start to touch without confirmation of the go-ahead, and Hongbin is charmed by the quiet jokes he makes, by the way his smile lights up his entire face when he deigns to show it.
Hongbin doesn’t want to admit it, but he’s smiling more tonight than he has in a long time. It feels...nice, pleasant, like the way it would to come home after a long day of work and take off your shoes and lay down on the couch doing absolutely nothing. Not that he has a lot of experience with that, recently, but he gets the idea just the same.
The only off detail is that Jaehwan keeps nervously rustling the oversized bag he carries on one shoulder, glancing down at it with concerned eyes, as if something’s going to jump out of it and attack the both of them.
---
Hongbin’s memory flashes back to a particular message, a 3am discussion had when Jaehwan was running on no sleep and Hongbin was half-delirious from not having eaten in a couple of days, a habit of his -- he forgets more often than he’d like. He’d read the words a few times before really absorbing them.
”You know,” Jaehwan had written, ”I spend so much time dealing with the dead that it makes me wonder what it’s like to...I guess, make them like that, you know?”
It devolved from there, Hongbin pontificating on the methodology used while Jaehwan waxed poetic on the tender nature of human flesh. Truth be told, it kind of turned Hongbin on, thinking of his skin beneath steady, well-trained fingers and slightly-calloused palms, a surgical knife cutting into the curve of his shoulder. Blood welling up under the knife, spilling from the site of the wound--
It took about ten minutes but he crossed one more thing off his to-do list for the day: getting off. He’d come into his own palm, shaking, sweat pooling in the hollows of his collarbones.
Of course, that had caused an interruption in their conversation; in the interim he’d received several concerned messages from Jaehwan’s end, wondering where Hongbin had gone. He turned his spinning chair back to the computer screen, having been unable to face the image of the boy he was probably a little in love with while touching himself. He apologised and answered the questions posed to him, no longer thinking deeply but rather dreaming of what it’d be like to let Jaehwan cut into him. Just once or twice. Nothing serious.
---
They’re lying in bed together, fingers intertwined, Hongbin gazing out the window and into the darkness with the distinct feeling of wide eyes burning holes into the side of his face, when Jaehwan proposes it.
“Remember that conversation we had when we first started Skyping?” he asks, shifting so that he’s propped up on his elbow and he’s got his cheek in his palm. “The one about...about serial killers.” There’s something shy about his tone, something that makes Hongbin turn his visual attentions away from the window out of which he’d been staring. “I wonder if you know that I was thinking the whole time about what it’d be like to cut someone up.”
And maybe it’s the moment but Hongbin leans in and kisses Jaehwan’s cheek, bold as you please considering the decidedly chaste nature of their evening. “I was wondering what it’d be like to be cut,” he confesses, breathless, a blush staining his ivory cheeks.
Jaehwan looks overjoyed, and Hongbin’s the one that’s put him there. It sends his heart flying, despite the morbid nature of their suddenly-fulfilled desires.
Across the room is Jaehwan’s bag; he kisses Hongbin’s Cupid’s bow softly before going to it, flipping it open. It doesn’t take someone with great vision to see the dull gleam of metal catching in the moonlight; Hongbin shifts so that he’s sitting with his legs tucked under him, peers over Jaehwan’s shoulders to try and see exactly what it is he’s been carrying with him all night. Someone else might find it a bit presumptuous for Jaehwan to have brought these things on a first date, but Hongbin merely feels a certain sense of arousal that heightens his curiosity even further.
When Jaehwan finally turns, straightens, rising to his feet, he’s holding a rather sinister-looking pair of scissors in his right hand. Hongbin’s breath stills in his chest. “Okay,” breathes Jaehwan, the grin tugging at his lips a sharp contrast to the almost-painful anticipation Hongbin is experiencing, “okay, I...I want to do this. With you. You’re the only person I’ve ever met that’s felt the same as I do. But...I want to do it right. Does that make sense? So we’re going to set some rules.” This sounds as good a place to start as any, so Hongbin remains silent, makes a gesture that implores Jaehwan to continue.
“First of all, no cutting any lethal places. I want to do this again, if you do. Second, we’re not going to cut each others’ faces. At least, not this time. I don’t think I could do that to you, you’re too beautiful.” Hongbin disagrees, wants to protest that Jaehwan is the better-looking of the two of them, and not out of a need for flattery, but keeps his comment to himself. “Third,” and here he gestures behind him to the bag sitting in the corner of the room, “I’ve brought first-aid supplies with me, so we can fix each other up afterward. No hospitals. I don’t need anyone else knowing about this.” Hongbin listens intently, biting down on his lower lip, and when Jaehwan gives him a look that clearly asks whether or not he’s got anything to add, he ponders for a moment.
“You have to help me clean afterward, too. Not just me, I mean whatever blood we get all over the place.” His voice wavers slightly, but he remains confident in his decision. “And when it’s all over, I want to stitch you up. I’m probably not very good at it, but I’m going to try my best, if that’s okay with you.”
Jaehwan smiles brightly. “Agreed. You have bleach, right? We’ll make everything spotless. I would hate to mess up this lovely apartment.”
Hongbin, at a loss for words at how touching this moment is (as well as its juxtaposition with what they’re about to do) nods, swallowing hard. “I understand,” he agrees, and his voice doesn’t waver. This is the thing he’s been dreaming about for what feels like the last lifetime, and with someone he truly cares about, he feels…safe?
Jaehwan clips the scissors loudly in the air, a sickly sort of grin tugging across his features, as if he can’t believe his eyes. “Just a little cut, first,” he proclaims almost abashedly, crossing the room in slow, precise steps. Hongbin inches forward to the edge of the bed on his hands and knees, craning his neck to look up at Jaehwan with his eyebrows raised, his mouth slightly agape. Jaehwan pauses, then reaches down and takes Hongbin by the hand, twining their fingers together as he tugs the other out of bed, onto the floor.
“Your sheets are so nice,” Jaehwan mumbles, “it’d be a shame to get blood on them.” And Hongbin hates messes almost as much as he hates cleaning, so he’s inclined to agree. They stand there, bed-adjacent in the middle of Hongbin’s bedroom floor, nose-to-nose, their lips almost touching, their eyes never once leaving one another’s. “You’re really sure about this?” Jaehwan asks, shifting just so and causing the tips of their noses to brush together.
“I’m sure,” Hongbin says after a deep breath, and he kisses Jaehwan softly, his hand cupping the other man’s cheek, thumb brushing in the hollow beneath his eye. Then they break apart and Jaehwan takes those scissors, skims the tip of them along the line of Hongbin’s collarbone over his shirt. In a quick shuffle of his arms, Hongbin loses this pesky piece of clothing, then takes a step back, nearly tripping over the mass of cotton at his feet.
“Relax,” Jaehwan says, “I’ll only hurt you as long as you want me to.” Then he takes Hongbin’s hand in his, raises it til the back is bathed in moonlight, and flicks open the scissors. Hongbin studies the instrument in Jaehwan’s hand with a quizzical expression; the blades are slightly curved, and thicker than normal.
He doesn’t flinch when the blade presses against the back of his wrist, doesn’t cry out when it cuts into his flesh, when blood wells up against the blade.
Just a little cut, he tells himself, willing himself to keep from trembling or, worse yet, getting hard at the sight of his own skin tearing apart. He finds himself breathless even though the cut is shallow, even though only a slow trickle of blood drips to the floor between them.
Jaehwan takes the scissors back, head tilted, lips parted, clearly admiring his handiwork. “Beautiful,” he breathes, astonishment touching his tone. Then he hands the shears to Hongbin, who takes the handles between agitated fingers, scanning Jaehwan for a place on which to cut.
Eventually he stuffs the shears into back pocket and helps the other out of his shirt, so as to keep any blood from staining the lovely pressed button-up Jaehwan had been wearing on their date. Their discarded clothes get kicked to the side so they don’t get dribbled onto, and Hongbin’s free hand goes to Jaehwan’s shoulder, holding him steady as he makes a small cut into the hollow between two of Jaehwan’s ribs.
Apparently it hurts more than Jaehwan had anticipated; he hisses as his blood spills, but otherwise smiles weakly, nodding, encouraging. He doesn’t look as strong as he could, and that scares Hongbin a little, but he mumbles quiet ‘go on’s, trying to compel Hongbin to continue on. So he passes the scissors, his bleeding hand wrapped around Jaehwan’s wrist as he shoves the shears into the other.
They go on like this for some time, exchanging cuts, exchanging kisses inbetween, Hongbin with a small nick just under his collarbone when Jaehwan isn’t feeling too brave, another on his upper thigh when the pants come off; Hongbin getting daring when Jaehwan’s pants go missing too and cutting one deep into the curve of Jaehwan’s posterior, not to mention one at the back of his wrist to match the one Hongbin is wearing. A puddle of blood, albeit a small one, is forming between their bare feet, and when they pause to regain breath, to regain that feeling of being chained to the earth, Hongbin glances down at it with wide eyes.
It doesn’t stop there. Hongbin gets cut at the nape of his neck, just below where his hair, growing shaggy in his laziness, stops, curls up. Jaehwan gets cut behind the knee, and Hongbin is almost surgically careful to avoid the veins there, knowing that touching any of them could spell big trouble for this encounter. He doesn’t want to be the one to break the rules. Jaehwan looks like he wants to do it, too, keeps staring at the curve of Hongbin’s cheek, probably imagining what it’d look like split open, dripping red.
At one point they abandon the scissors entirely, Jaehwan carefully digging into his little bag of tools to pull out a scalpel, most likely nicked from one of his practicals classrooms. It’s as he’s coming back across the room that Hongbin notices the growth spurting forth from the front of Jaehwan’s pants, not full, but enough to be noticeable, and he feels...better, somehow. Comforted.
“One more,” he says, compelled by the pool of red between their feet. He starts by taking Jaehwan by the hip, spinning him around. Then he takes the shears in his now-steady hand, drags the blade long and hard down Jaehwan’s back, parallel to his spine, careful, measured. The blood falls quickly, gushing in a fall down the nicely-toned muscles of Jaehwan’s back. Hongbin pulls back, stares, eyes wide in a mix of abject horror and fascination, watching what he’s just done take root. He reaches out, presses his hand to the wound, covers his own hand in Jaehwan’s blood.
“Okay, we’re done,” Hongbin says, “or, um, I’m done. Unless you want one more, too.”
“I kind of do, is that okay?”
“Yes, definitely.” And Hongbin offers the scissors back to Jaehwan, who takes them quickly, slices down the length of Hongbin’s sternum, none too deep, not nearly as bad as the one Hongbin had done on him last. Then he shifts forward, the suddenness of the movement almost startling Hongbin, and presses a kiss to the top of the wound.
Hongbin cranes his neck a bit, peers down the length of his nose at this fresh cut, then leans in, presses his lips to Jaehwan’s, bloodied palm against the side of his neck, holding him steady in case he should faint. He looks paler than he had even before this entire thing started, after all, and it might just be blood loss, but he’d rather be safe than sorry. They hold hands as Hongbin busies himself in the kitchen, digging out cleaning supplies and rubber gloves and rags from his cabinets. “For later,” he says, happy to be bleeding and free though Jaehwan’s expression speaks of concern. “I’m just going to feel like kissing you in the future. I’m not going to want to get all these things. Besides, we need the bleach.”
Jaehwan drops a stack of towels on the floor next to his bag, squats to dig in it, his wrists covered in black fabric for a long minute before he pulls out a small zippered pouch. He unzips it as he rises once more, revealing its contents as a few different gauge needles and strands upon strands of surgical thread. Hongbin wants to ask where he got these supplies, but thinks better of it, bites on his lower lip so hard he swears he tastes copper flooding his mouth. Instead he busies himself pouring a glass shallow with bleach, takes one of the needles when Jaehwan offers it to him, dips it in the liquid inside the glass.
When everything is sterile and set up, they sit across from one another on the floor, legs criss-crossed, holding hands, gazing into each other’s eyes for a long minute. Then the blood loss proves to be so much and they set to repairing each other, one slow stitch at a time, a needle digging into flesh, then looping back around with a length of thread. Jaehwan’s hands shake even more than they had previously; it’s a wonder he doesn’t make many crooked stitches. When he’s finished with his first cut, the one down Hongbin’s chest, Hongbin reaches up, touches the wound, no longer hanging open, appreciates the feel of his skin puckered together with intent to heal.
He holds his breath when Jaehwan applies antiseptic to the sewed-up wound, the pads of his fingers tender against Hongbin’s chest, and finds that he again has to will his dick to cooperate with the decidedly calm nature of the situation.
Hongbin is a decidedly better human seamster. He takes long, filling breaths inbetween each drag of the needle, watches as the thread pokes through the wound on Jaehwan’s butt. It occurs to him that perhaps fixing the cut on Jaehwan’s back should take priority, but he finds himself loving the way that one’s going to scar a little more with each passing moment, eyeing the way the blood runs in rivulets across either side of Jaehwan’s back. He reaches out during a pause in his stitching to stroke unsteady fingertips against it; Jaehwan hisses at the contact, back arching involuntarily, and Hongbin swears he can hear the other gritting his teeth. It’s not in Hongbin to make someone cry, but he really wants to. So he busies his one hand with sewing as slowly as he possibly can, the other working idle fingers at the bottom of his favourite wound, teasing it open just a little further with every touch, until it hurts, until it bleeds.
He’s not breaking the rules, he thinks as he continues on, they hadn’t said anything about not making things worse. Still, he feels a little guilty, knows that Jaehwan isn’t as strong to pain as Hongbin himself, so when he finishes with the wound he sets to mending that one, not even giving Jaehwan a chance to fix him up a little more. It takes a little more effort to pull together the distended lengths of skin at either side of this cut, and it’s so deep that it would have needed stitches even if they hadn’t agreed to do it to one another at the beginning of all this, so Hongbin supposes he owes this situation a little bit of gratitude.
He’s not felt this close to someone in quite some time. And maybe it’s the blood caked under his nails, stuck drying to his palms, smeared across someone else’s skin, maybe it’s the dull gleam of the needle in the little light there is in the room, maybe it’s a combination of tender flesh under his hands and careful ministrations to keep from making a bad (but good, so good) situation worse, but there’s a hauntingly familiar sense of tension settled into the very pit of his gut. He knows what it is, but he won’t do anything about it. At least not yet, and nothing so crass as to do with this perfect man laying face-down on his bedroom floor.
When they’re all patched up, gauze and medical tape applied over stitched-up lacerations, content and sated in their need for blood and guts and gore, they go to bed together, hands interlocked, completely comfortable. They don’t sleep for hours, just talking about the experience, about planning their next venture into the world of slicing each other up. Occasionally one will reach out to touch the other’s bandaged wounds, or their own, mainly a point of disbelief -- ‘I can’t believe we’ve done this’.
Right as they’re about to fall asleep, Hongbin snuggles in, his forehead in the crook of Jaehwan’s neck, and mumbles into his collar, “I wouldn’t want to cut your face, either.”
Jaehwan shifts, his arm moving higher up Hongbin’s shoulders, relaxing the hold he has on the other. “You wouldn’t?”
“You’re the most handsome man I’ve ever seen. I’ll just wipe my blood on your face, instead, if I need to see it that badly.”
With that, they share one last kiss, and collapse into each other's arms, sleep taking over them at last.