Merry Christmas, You Filthy Animal
Title: Merry Christmas, You Filthy Animal
Chapters: Oneshot
Pairings: Luhan-centric, Baekhyun/Luhan
Rating: PG-13
Genre: angst
Warnings: mild self-mutilation, depressing thoughts
Summary: Luhan wants to be a Vogue-cover, stick-shaped, pastel princess darling and can already hear everyone laughing at him. Except for maybe Baekhyun. But Baekhyun's probably laughing on the inside.
a/n: what the fuck is this anna??? i have no idea tbh
There were two types of people in the world and Luhan considered himself neither of them.
First, there were the beautiful people. The picture perfect, Chanel wearing, heart stopping, heaven-kissed people, who woke up and went to bed and repeated the process easily, all the while wearing a toothy grin because out of all the people in the high school class photo they were the ones who had remembered it was picture day and had their hair brushed and their make-up done on point, even though their faces were already chiseled out of perfect marble by an artist with a perfect vision.
Then there were the ugly people. The misshaped, paper-bag covered, ew get away from me, you make me want to hurl people, who were the crust of society and the leftovers from media genocide, rotting the earth with their filth one broken mirror at a time.
The reason why Luhan was neither was simple. The main point being that he wasn't beautiful. No matter how you twisted, shaped, or bended it, Luhan wasn't up to par with the Vogue-cover, stick-shaped, pastel princess darlings who bled blood of the richest and most luxurious red.
The sad thing was that he didn't fit into the other category either. The ugly people. The ugly people of the world were the people in the 'before shots' of extreme make-overs, those ugly duckling kids who grew up and blossomed into beautiful swans like a knobby little rose-nub did into its full, heavy flower. Vibrant red, soft and supple.
Luhan was his own category of human. Of ugly. He couldn't be saved. He couldn't be fixed or made over or any other procedure that would attempt to morph his face into something easy on the eyes.
Luhan was hard on the eyes. A chore. A real chore. With the one mirror left in his dorm he could pinpoint his faults to a T (even if pointing all of them out was an endless task in itself), and he would reach for his blue marker pen and draw over his face and body everything that he would fix if he could; everything that added up to make him a walking math equation of eyesore and blemish to the world that everyone was better off without.
An 'X' for remove and an 'O' for enhance, and then all the dotted and squiggly lines in between. His face was a dirty, mangled canvas with room for too much impossible improvement, but he couldn't help himself. He ended up covered in blue and looked like he was severely ill.
His nose was too flat. It was small and simple and slightly askew. Ugly.
His eyes crinkled when he laughed like he was old and dying. Lines that would cause premature aging and made him look like a peeling fruit; too much excess skin and not enough pull to make his smile passable. Ugly.
His face was small and disproportionate to his body, balancing his eyes, nose, and mouth in a way that an amateur artist tossed paint around and hoped for a premium result when really they were just an ignorant fool with too much time on their hands. Fucking ugly.
The scar on his lip was a deformity and made him look like a failed mutant experiment from a pulp fiction era comic. The more repulsive version of James Whale's Frankenstein who had tripped and fallen into a mixture of hydrogen peroxide and sulphuric acid, a walking monster crying for help through heavy malformation and disfigurement. Ugly. Kill it before it kills you.
Thunder-thighs from hell and inward pointing knees and a wonky toe and dry skin and sweaty palms and uneven eyebrows and warped, distorted everything that made him heave and puke before he'd even finished marking himself up in blue ink, his skin getting red and irritated under the colour as if he didn't have enough problems with his appearance already.
In the end he was left with a perfect mark-up of what he wanted to be. It was a little bitter. He was still in the editing phase, but nobody wanted to help edit him. He'd stolen a scalpel from an undisclosed location one day to try and begin the work on himself, but he'd only managed to cut down his cheek about five centimeters before he punctured in by accident and fainted with blood gushing into his mouth in a metallic, warm chokehold.
Some days he was angry because it wasn't fair that he had been given a body from the 'Recycled Miscreations' file. Why couldn't he have been born pretty like everyone else? Golden ratio, Snow White, I've been kissed by the spring rain and Walt Disney fucked my mom pretty. No faults. No embarrassing defects.
And then some days he was sad just because self-pity happened to come hand in hand with a hideous appearance. Tears pushed out and ran down his dumb, lopsided face. Down, down, down; steady streams that ended at the collar of his off-white sweater just above his way too prominent collarbones that someone had commented on last week. What a mess. Puffy, red eyes and a runny nose. What a disgusting mess.
To make it worse, everyone in his industry was beautiful. The God-like, doll featured, strive to be me kind of beautiful that just kept hitting him in the face like an acrid stench. All his friends were in that category. Anyone would die for Sehun's nose, Kyungsoo's lips and Chanyeol's teeth. Kris was inhumanly handsome and Suho had a killer smile, warming everyone within a ten mile radius. Xiumin was cute and Tao was unique and Lay's body was a masterpiece like it had been mapped out and built by Adonis. Chen's cheekbones were unreal, Kai was literally a Greek god, and Baekhyun was just a whole nother level of perfection that made the words die in his throat as he tried to cough them up.
Painfully enough, Baekhyun had wanted to be with him, of all people. The most perfect person on earth wanted to touch the likes of the purged waste of the universe's efforts; the five-year-old looking, short and bony, pitiful and rather horribly appalling Luhan. Paradox had never meant more to him than then, when Baekhyun had told him he liked him in the practice room after dark with nobody else there to witness it. Luhan had leapt forward and kissed him out of desperation because maybe some of Baekhyun's perfection would rub off on him, but when he pulled away and looked in the mirror he was still the same, foul monster that he saw in window reflections every morning.
After that realization he became terrified that maybe he had infected Baekhyun with it instead. Oh the heavens would surely punish him for ruining their best work. He sprinted out of the practice room in tears and Baekhyun had called his name but Luhan just wanted to disappear or stick his head into a deep-fryer turned up to the highest temperature possible.
But somehow, somehow, Baekhyun and him ended up dating, like a big 'fuck you' to everything in life that was beautiful and perfect. Baekhyun was relentless and Luhan couldn't say no, and suddenly he was trapped in this gilded cage where he was exposed and vulnerable past his comfort level, an angel peering in at him with a watchful eye every passing second. Oh, the shame.
Kisses on his lips did nothing to reassure him. Baekhyun must be lying. How could anybody want to touch an offensive mistake such as himself without recoiling? Someone must have put him up to it. One of the other perfect people that were tired of his hideousness dragging the group down.
He wished he wasn't in any of the group pictures because he stuck out like a sore thumb and nobody seemed to dare comment on it. He ruined the photograph like a smudge of ink or a ghastly scratch and nobody had the courtesy to put him out of his misery and just tell him that maybe he wasn't meant for the entertainment business in the first place.
Every eye was drawn to him when he walked through the company building or visited music shows and Luhan knew they were picking out his flaws, scrunching up their nose at the wandering dumpster baby that must have gotten muddled up with someone else and was hanging around with people he wasn’t supposed to.
Luhan thought back to the Disney animation of The Ugly Duckling and wanted to cry. He remembered the cartoon cygnet weeping big, fat tears that looked the size of his face before they fell into the pond where his reflection was and distorted it completely as the water rippled. Luhan kind of felt like that too. He felt like the odd one out and even though people kept calling him ‘pretty’ and ‘cute’, he knew it’s a lie because this was the entertainment industry and everybody had to be polite and respectful and keep up their image.
So when Baekhyun called him beautiful one night when the two of them were making love, the only word going through his mind was bullshit, because that’s what it was. Baekhyun kept saying that afterwards and even began talking about how much he loved him and Luhan wondered how long he could keep it up; how long he could keep lying like that without feeling guilty.
It came to the point where Luhan could no longer feel any pleasure when they were intimate, and even on his own he couldn’t bring himself to ecstasy anymore. He was hurting too much. He was half hard and something like half way through pleasuring himself one day when he just stopped moving his hand and decided that he didn’t want to touch himself anymore because the thought of himself and his body was making him sick. So instead of working on fixing his libido problem by doing that, Luhan locked the bathroom door and just stayed in there the entire night, lying horizontally on the tiled floor. Baekhyun asked him to come out several times; he even pushed small notes written on yellow paper under the door in the hopes that he could coax him out, but Luhan was happy just staying in there, staying on the floor and staring at the ceiling just like that, where nobody could lie to him and nobody had to see him just…existing.
Because he had a lot of time to think in there, he remembered when he was eight years old he’d fallen on the ground and ripped his knees while he was trying to catch up with the ice cream truck that had passed their house a second too early for him to reach it. It had been painful and had made him cry, but most of all he remembered how disgusted he felt because of it. There had been blood all over the sidewalk and caked down his legs and he thought he could see parts of his skin peel off in long sheets. He was too terrified to look at his knees in case they’d been skinned right down the bone, so he’d just sat there and felt horrible and gross. He’d felt like a zombie that was losing its limbs; losing its heart and humanity. An odd thought process but yes, every part of him felt estranged and disgusted by his new, disfigured appearance. His mom had come running towards him and told him it was okay, that the wounds would heal and it would all go away, but even now at twenty-two, Luhan still saw himself the way he did that day. He saw everything that was wrong with him, and everything that had ever been wrong. The ripped knees; they were still there. The gravel stuck in his flesh; still there.
“Wow, you’re such a baby for crying to yourself about something dumb like that. There are people who are suffering in this world right now and are dying and you just keep crying because you’re an insecure piece of shit.”
When Luhan talked to himself he usually didn’t have anything nice to say, and that was proof. He felt the wet tears down the side of his face dry gradually and he stopped talking to himself because he could be really mean sometimes and it hurt a lot. But he supposed it was better hearing it from himself than someone else. He would insult himself before they could do it. The tactic wasn’t that bad, he thought.
He was pretty numb and apathetic towards what was going on around him when finally someone decided they needed to break down the bathroom door and force him out, voices scolding him as the door obliterated.
Why were you in there for so long, Luhan?
You worried our manager sick!
We have to pay for the damage done to the door, you know. You could have just come out yourself.
The only one who wasn’t scolding him was Baekhyun. Baekhyun held his hand and asked him if he wanted to talk about it and when Luhan said no Baekhyun begged him to talk about it, because he’d probably realized there was something really, really wrong.
But Baekhyun wouldn’t understand because he was already there. Baekhyun wouldn’t be able to see where Luhan was coming from because he’d never known the pain of being ugly; of being born in a body that made your own skin crawl. Baekhyun had always been perfect and everyone else had always been perfect and Luhan was just that one little outlier hanging out at the very edge by the rocky shores and soul-crushing waves and breath-taking wind all by himself while he whimpered for someone to come save him.
Please tell me what’s wrong. I’m worried about you.
For a sliver of a second Luhan actually wanted to tell him. Luhan wanted to think that Baekhyun would understand and would listen to him without thinking he was some sort of demented freak. That he would maybe hold him and tell him he was beautiful all over again and actually mean it. But Luhan stopped himself just in time and said that he was just feeling really ill and that he wanted to be alone.
Baekhyun didn’t leave him alone though. Maybe Baekhyun saw right through him, like he usually did, or maybe he wanted to be considerate, but Baekhyun put Luhan to bed and got in next to him, holding around him with both arms and squeezing tight.
When Baekhyun had finally fallen asleep Luhan cried into his hands silently, apologizing to Baekhyun multiple times because he wasn’t better, because he wasn’t prettier and because he wasn’t perfect like Baekhyun was. He mourned Baekhyun like he’d passed away because that poor fool had been stuck with the shell of a lonely corpse with some skin on the outside and a little bit of flesh and it was a waste of Baekhyun’s every breathing second and day and month and just life in general. What a shitty boyfriend Luhan was.
In the end, Luhan didn’t want the latest iPhone that hit the shops next with cool new features and a lot of buzz around it. He didn’t want to meet his heroes from Manchester United. He didn’t want success in life, he didn’t want fame, and he didn’t want money. He didn’t want peace on earth and he didn’t want chocolate and he didn’t want his parents to love him again or his friends from high school to greet him warmly. He definitely didn’t want thousands of people cheering for him at a show and he didn’t want his members to remember his birthday. He didn’t want the calls from Korea when they were in China saying I miss you and I can’t wait til you get back, baby, and he didn’t even want the soft, loving kisses that were smacked onto his mouth when he returned to their dorms again. Not yet. He didn’t want to keep living but he didn’t want to die either and he knew that was paradoxical but so was he. He didn’t really want anything.
He just wanted to feel beautiful for once.
Chapters: Oneshot
Pairings: Luhan-centric, Baekhyun/Luhan
Rating: PG-13
Genre: angst
Warnings: mild self-mutilation, depressing thoughts
Summary: Luhan wants to be a Vogue-cover, stick-shaped, pastel princess darling and can already hear everyone laughing at him. Except for maybe Baekhyun. But Baekhyun's probably laughing on the inside.
a/n: what the fuck is this anna??? i have no idea tbh
There were two types of people in the world and Luhan considered himself neither of them.
First, there were the beautiful people. The picture perfect, Chanel wearing, heart stopping, heaven-kissed people, who woke up and went to bed and repeated the process easily, all the while wearing a toothy grin because out of all the people in the high school class photo they were the ones who had remembered it was picture day and had their hair brushed and their make-up done on point, even though their faces were already chiseled out of perfect marble by an artist with a perfect vision.
Then there were the ugly people. The misshaped, paper-bag covered, ew get away from me, you make me want to hurl people, who were the crust of society and the leftovers from media genocide, rotting the earth with their filth one broken mirror at a time.
The reason why Luhan was neither was simple. The main point being that he wasn't beautiful. No matter how you twisted, shaped, or bended it, Luhan wasn't up to par with the Vogue-cover, stick-shaped, pastel princess darlings who bled blood of the richest and most luxurious red.
The sad thing was that he didn't fit into the other category either. The ugly people. The ugly people of the world were the people in the 'before shots' of extreme make-overs, those ugly duckling kids who grew up and blossomed into beautiful swans like a knobby little rose-nub did into its full, heavy flower. Vibrant red, soft and supple.
Luhan was his own category of human. Of ugly. He couldn't be saved. He couldn't be fixed or made over or any other procedure that would attempt to morph his face into something easy on the eyes.
Luhan was hard on the eyes. A chore. A real chore. With the one mirror left in his dorm he could pinpoint his faults to a T (even if pointing all of them out was an endless task in itself), and he would reach for his blue marker pen and draw over his face and body everything that he would fix if he could; everything that added up to make him a walking math equation of eyesore and blemish to the world that everyone was better off without.
An 'X' for remove and an 'O' for enhance, and then all the dotted and squiggly lines in between. His face was a dirty, mangled canvas with room for too much impossible improvement, but he couldn't help himself. He ended up covered in blue and looked like he was severely ill.
His nose was too flat. It was small and simple and slightly askew. Ugly.
His eyes crinkled when he laughed like he was old and dying. Lines that would cause premature aging and made him look like a peeling fruit; too much excess skin and not enough pull to make his smile passable. Ugly.
His face was small and disproportionate to his body, balancing his eyes, nose, and mouth in a way that an amateur artist tossed paint around and hoped for a premium result when really they were just an ignorant fool with too much time on their hands. Fucking ugly.
The scar on his lip was a deformity and made him look like a failed mutant experiment from a pulp fiction era comic. The more repulsive version of James Whale's Frankenstein who had tripped and fallen into a mixture of hydrogen peroxide and sulphuric acid, a walking monster crying for help through heavy malformation and disfigurement. Ugly. Kill it before it kills you.
Thunder-thighs from hell and inward pointing knees and a wonky toe and dry skin and sweaty palms and uneven eyebrows and warped, distorted everything that made him heave and puke before he'd even finished marking himself up in blue ink, his skin getting red and irritated under the colour as if he didn't have enough problems with his appearance already.
In the end he was left with a perfect mark-up of what he wanted to be. It was a little bitter. He was still in the editing phase, but nobody wanted to help edit him. He'd stolen a scalpel from an undisclosed location one day to try and begin the work on himself, but he'd only managed to cut down his cheek about five centimeters before he punctured in by accident and fainted with blood gushing into his mouth in a metallic, warm chokehold.
Some days he was angry because it wasn't fair that he had been given a body from the 'Recycled Miscreations' file. Why couldn't he have been born pretty like everyone else? Golden ratio, Snow White, I've been kissed by the spring rain and Walt Disney fucked my mom pretty. No faults. No embarrassing defects.
And then some days he was sad just because self-pity happened to come hand in hand with a hideous appearance. Tears pushed out and ran down his dumb, lopsided face. Down, down, down; steady streams that ended at the collar of his off-white sweater just above his way too prominent collarbones that someone had commented on last week. What a mess. Puffy, red eyes and a runny nose. What a disgusting mess.
To make it worse, everyone in his industry was beautiful. The God-like, doll featured, strive to be me kind of beautiful that just kept hitting him in the face like an acrid stench. All his friends were in that category. Anyone would die for Sehun's nose, Kyungsoo's lips and Chanyeol's teeth. Kris was inhumanly handsome and Suho had a killer smile, warming everyone within a ten mile radius. Xiumin was cute and Tao was unique and Lay's body was a masterpiece like it had been mapped out and built by Adonis. Chen's cheekbones were unreal, Kai was literally a Greek god, and Baekhyun was just a whole nother level of perfection that made the words die in his throat as he tried to cough them up.
Painfully enough, Baekhyun had wanted to be with him, of all people. The most perfect person on earth wanted to touch the likes of the purged waste of the universe's efforts; the five-year-old looking, short and bony, pitiful and rather horribly appalling Luhan. Paradox had never meant more to him than then, when Baekhyun had told him he liked him in the practice room after dark with nobody else there to witness it. Luhan had leapt forward and kissed him out of desperation because maybe some of Baekhyun's perfection would rub off on him, but when he pulled away and looked in the mirror he was still the same, foul monster that he saw in window reflections every morning.
After that realization he became terrified that maybe he had infected Baekhyun with it instead. Oh the heavens would surely punish him for ruining their best work. He sprinted out of the practice room in tears and Baekhyun had called his name but Luhan just wanted to disappear or stick his head into a deep-fryer turned up to the highest temperature possible.
But somehow, somehow, Baekhyun and him ended up dating, like a big 'fuck you' to everything in life that was beautiful and perfect. Baekhyun was relentless and Luhan couldn't say no, and suddenly he was trapped in this gilded cage where he was exposed and vulnerable past his comfort level, an angel peering in at him with a watchful eye every passing second. Oh, the shame.
Kisses on his lips did nothing to reassure him. Baekhyun must be lying. How could anybody want to touch an offensive mistake such as himself without recoiling? Someone must have put him up to it. One of the other perfect people that were tired of his hideousness dragging the group down.
He wished he wasn't in any of the group pictures because he stuck out like a sore thumb and nobody seemed to dare comment on it. He ruined the photograph like a smudge of ink or a ghastly scratch and nobody had the courtesy to put him out of his misery and just tell him that maybe he wasn't meant for the entertainment business in the first place.
Every eye was drawn to him when he walked through the company building or visited music shows and Luhan knew they were picking out his flaws, scrunching up their nose at the wandering dumpster baby that must have gotten muddled up with someone else and was hanging around with people he wasn’t supposed to.
Luhan thought back to the Disney animation of The Ugly Duckling and wanted to cry. He remembered the cartoon cygnet weeping big, fat tears that looked the size of his face before they fell into the pond where his reflection was and distorted it completely as the water rippled. Luhan kind of felt like that too. He felt like the odd one out and even though people kept calling him ‘pretty’ and ‘cute’, he knew it’s a lie because this was the entertainment industry and everybody had to be polite and respectful and keep up their image.
So when Baekhyun called him beautiful one night when the two of them were making love, the only word going through his mind was bullshit, because that’s what it was. Baekhyun kept saying that afterwards and even began talking about how much he loved him and Luhan wondered how long he could keep it up; how long he could keep lying like that without feeling guilty.
It came to the point where Luhan could no longer feel any pleasure when they were intimate, and even on his own he couldn’t bring himself to ecstasy anymore. He was hurting too much. He was half hard and something like half way through pleasuring himself one day when he just stopped moving his hand and decided that he didn’t want to touch himself anymore because the thought of himself and his body was making him sick. So instead of working on fixing his libido problem by doing that, Luhan locked the bathroom door and just stayed in there the entire night, lying horizontally on the tiled floor. Baekhyun asked him to come out several times; he even pushed small notes written on yellow paper under the door in the hopes that he could coax him out, but Luhan was happy just staying in there, staying on the floor and staring at the ceiling just like that, where nobody could lie to him and nobody had to see him just…existing.
Because he had a lot of time to think in there, he remembered when he was eight years old he’d fallen on the ground and ripped his knees while he was trying to catch up with the ice cream truck that had passed their house a second too early for him to reach it. It had been painful and had made him cry, but most of all he remembered how disgusted he felt because of it. There had been blood all over the sidewalk and caked down his legs and he thought he could see parts of his skin peel off in long sheets. He was too terrified to look at his knees in case they’d been skinned right down the bone, so he’d just sat there and felt horrible and gross. He’d felt like a zombie that was losing its limbs; losing its heart and humanity. An odd thought process but yes, every part of him felt estranged and disgusted by his new, disfigured appearance. His mom had come running towards him and told him it was okay, that the wounds would heal and it would all go away, but even now at twenty-two, Luhan still saw himself the way he did that day. He saw everything that was wrong with him, and everything that had ever been wrong. The ripped knees; they were still there. The gravel stuck in his flesh; still there.
“Wow, you’re such a baby for crying to yourself about something dumb like that. There are people who are suffering in this world right now and are dying and you just keep crying because you’re an insecure piece of shit.”
When Luhan talked to himself he usually didn’t have anything nice to say, and that was proof. He felt the wet tears down the side of his face dry gradually and he stopped talking to himself because he could be really mean sometimes and it hurt a lot. But he supposed it was better hearing it from himself than someone else. He would insult himself before they could do it. The tactic wasn’t that bad, he thought.
He was pretty numb and apathetic towards what was going on around him when finally someone decided they needed to break down the bathroom door and force him out, voices scolding him as the door obliterated.
Why were you in there for so long, Luhan?
You worried our manager sick!
We have to pay for the damage done to the door, you know. You could have just come out yourself.
The only one who wasn’t scolding him was Baekhyun. Baekhyun held his hand and asked him if he wanted to talk about it and when Luhan said no Baekhyun begged him to talk about it, because he’d probably realized there was something really, really wrong.
But Baekhyun wouldn’t understand because he was already there. Baekhyun wouldn’t be able to see where Luhan was coming from because he’d never known the pain of being ugly; of being born in a body that made your own skin crawl. Baekhyun had always been perfect and everyone else had always been perfect and Luhan was just that one little outlier hanging out at the very edge by the rocky shores and soul-crushing waves and breath-taking wind all by himself while he whimpered for someone to come save him.
Please tell me what’s wrong. I’m worried about you.
For a sliver of a second Luhan actually wanted to tell him. Luhan wanted to think that Baekhyun would understand and would listen to him without thinking he was some sort of demented freak. That he would maybe hold him and tell him he was beautiful all over again and actually mean it. But Luhan stopped himself just in time and said that he was just feeling really ill and that he wanted to be alone.
Baekhyun didn’t leave him alone though. Maybe Baekhyun saw right through him, like he usually did, or maybe he wanted to be considerate, but Baekhyun put Luhan to bed and got in next to him, holding around him with both arms and squeezing tight.
When Baekhyun had finally fallen asleep Luhan cried into his hands silently, apologizing to Baekhyun multiple times because he wasn’t better, because he wasn’t prettier and because he wasn’t perfect like Baekhyun was. He mourned Baekhyun like he’d passed away because that poor fool had been stuck with the shell of a lonely corpse with some skin on the outside and a little bit of flesh and it was a waste of Baekhyun’s every breathing second and day and month and just life in general. What a shitty boyfriend Luhan was.
In the end, Luhan didn’t want the latest iPhone that hit the shops next with cool new features and a lot of buzz around it. He didn’t want to meet his heroes from Manchester United. He didn’t want success in life, he didn’t want fame, and he didn’t want money. He didn’t want peace on earth and he didn’t want chocolate and he didn’t want his parents to love him again or his friends from high school to greet him warmly. He definitely didn’t want thousands of people cheering for him at a show and he didn’t want his members to remember his birthday. He didn’t want the calls from Korea when they were in China saying I miss you and I can’t wait til you get back, baby, and he didn’t even want the soft, loving kisses that were smacked onto his mouth when he returned to their dorms again. Not yet. He didn’t want to keep living but he didn’t want to die either and he knew that was paradoxical but so was he. He didn’t really want anything.
He just wanted to feel beautiful for once.