±
±
2,407w; pg-13 (krystal/chen)
and as dead things, they could not love with the wholeness of their being.
a/n: for p_swizzle! i'm running behind and i really wanted to write you lay/fei but i didn't know how to do it without making it 20k long so i hope this is okay instead ;; i loved all your prompts but this one spoke to me a lot! thank you for always being such a sweetie and joy to talk to, i'm so glad we met this year ♥
Krystal was the type to rip out hearts and eat them for breakfast, knife and fork in hand, the blood still finding some way to drip down the front of her white dress no matter how neatly she devoured it. She'd sing along to cartoon theme songs as they played on the television on Sunday mornings, lounging across the sofa with the blinds tightly shut, creating a shoddy illusion of night. The sun always forced itself in, somehow, after all, and Jongdae wondered if the moon ever got fed up with being pushed aside so soon, its face pallid during the daytime, cream-colored like Krystal's socks, rolled high up to her knees. When she kicked up her legs, the skirt of her dress, blood stains becoming one with shadows, would hike up, giving him a view of her thighs, and Jongdae would wonder how many men she'd tricked between them, pulling at the off-white carpet beneath him.
He wouldn't be tricked by her, though, Jongdae had promised himself a long time ago, when he blinked and she was suddenly there, sitting at his dining room table, trying to untangle the knots in her chestnut hair. Sitting with her legs crossed on the stool - all on purpose, Jongdae knew, Krystal was purposeful - the skirt of her dress falling down like it did when she kicked her legs on the couch. You couldn't trick dead people, Jongdae knew, much less people who'd been dead for a long time.
There was no blood when she trailed her tongue against the side of his neck, sliding down from the crevice behind his ear, biting down. No tell-tale red, puncture wounds - none of that. Instead, Jongdae closed his eyes when Krystal bit down and her teeth met the stuffy air of his apartment, and nothing else.
According to Krystal, the last time she'd been here, in Seoul, was thirty-seven years ago. Then, she'd been someone called Soojung, and the name tasted watery on Jongdae's lips when he had echoed it back to her. Soojung had been born, removed from her mother's womb via c-section. It'd been a bloody affair, and maybe that was how she - Krystal, that is - turned out how she was now.
She'd been eating a bowl of fruit-flavored cereal as she told him this, artificial colors the first Jongdae had seen in a while other than the dusty rose sunsets from in between the living room blinds. Krystal had shut those on the second day Jongdae woke up to find her still there with him, and they had lived in a relative darkness ever since.
"Want some?" she offered when she noticed Jongdae staring. He shook his head.
She stopped talking after that, putting the bowl in the sink after she finished eating, and then she was shrugging on one of his old black coats, dust-free from its tenure in his closet, and heading out the door, eyes the kind of navy blue that suffocated the yellow of the sun at dusk, pushing its face into the horizon so the moon could breathe once again. Hungry eyes, eyes looking for the need to take someone's life, and whatever didn't hit her tongue would hit the front of her dress, in between her breasts but a little off center towards the left, in the place where her heart would (should) be.
That was the first night Krystal returned with blood stains.
They didn't talk much about it. In fact, they didn't talk much at all - Krystal wasn't one of many words and Jongdae had one-sided conversations in his head more often than not. Most of the time, the only noise in his apartment came from the television that Krystal liked to watch, flipping through channels for hours on end.
Jongdae, sad to say, but to which he easily admitted, wasn't much of a host. Haunted apartment complexes weren't very social to begin with, and it'd been forty, maybe even fifty, years since someone last stopped by - a lycanthrope, who'd left the big gash in his bedroom wall, and when Jongdae had felt particularly lonely in those fifty years he'd spent alone, he would sit on the musty sheets of his bed and stare at it. It looked like a wound, the nasty kind that bled out, and once the blood stopped, it was just a gaping hole in your flesh, looking back at you, daring you to look at it.
Krystal was the one who used his bedroom now, but she had never asked Jongdae about it. Maybe its bloodlessness made it nothing of interest to her, or maybe she just didn't care for it at all. Either way, Jongdae would be up throughout the night lying on Krystal's sofa - technically his, but Krystal used it more than him now - and sometimes he'd think of all the years that passed like the dusty sunsets through his blinds. Sometimes he'd think of the people he used to know, all dead now, kind of like him.
Sometimes, he'd think of Krystal, and her thighs and her blood and the men she brought back some nights, licking into her mouth before she pushed them into Jongdae's musty sheets, bed frame creaking like Jongdae remembered, like it was about to break, slipping Jongdae's black jacket off her shoulders as she stared at them from where she stood at the foot of the bed, the only whole person Jongdae could see from the half-open door. She'd lean over them, then, and Jongdae would only see her legs as he heard the crack of a breaking neck or the hoarse screams as she ripped at his throat. On the worst days, there'd be the squelch of a heart being pulled out, the sound sick to Jongdae's ears, and he'd wonder if she was getting blood on the sheets.
One night, she'd looked over her shoulder after the deed was done, a spot of blood on her cheeks, drying, and it looked like a birthmark. And even though her eyes were dark and satiated, the still, but very much real, heart bleeding in her hands, it was as if he'd intruded on some very private moment that he had no right to see, but at the same time, it was as if she wanted him to see it.
He'd turned away then, and if he could have shut the door behind him, he would've. That was the first sleepless night he spent on the sofa, thinking of Krystal.
By the time the sun was shut out by the blinds, the body was gone.
The front of her dress was the color of dying flowers by April. Jongdae only knew because one day, Krystal had come back with a calendar and a bouquet of magenta hyacinths. She'd hung the calendar on the wall and put the hyacinths in a vase next to one of the many closed windows and Jongdae had forgotten that they existed until he noticed their petals were shriveled and an ashy brown on the twelfth. That was around the time they'd sat across from each other in Jongdae's dining room, Krystal swirling her index finger on the rim of her milk glass.
"You're like a character out of a fairy tale," she remarked, taking a sip. When she put the glass down, her lips were stained white, and it was the first time Jongdae saw anything other than blood dripping off them. "A friendly fantastical landlord, or something of the sort."
Jongdae laughed. "You're as much as of a fairy tale character as I am, then," he said, honestly, hands wispy when he looked at them, contrasted against the table.
Krystal's shadow bled into the image. She was solid and she was real and she could touch and blood stained her white dress, Jongdae wouldn't have remembered it was white if he didn't remember what she looked like, legs with cream-colored socks rolled up past her knees and the view of her thighs where the skirt fell away, perched on the stool she was sitting on now all those weeks, no, months, ago, a sudden image that he thought would disappear after he blinked but persisted instead. She did not smile at him, and there was no smile already on her face that could fade off it, and her finger tilted the glass toward the part of the rim she was tracing, too much pressure, she could apply pressure, and then the milk was spilling into the place where Jongdae's hands should have been. He did not feel it wet his fingertips.
Silence stretched between them again, the length of each of Jongdae's blinds placed end-to-end against each other. Maybe that equated to a mile or two.
When she spoke again, the sun had already set, bathing them in a comfortable plane of charcoal. Jongdae was wondering if she would put on his black jacket and head out again, only to take it off and place it next to the man she brought home on the bed before sucking him of his blood, leaving behind only the husk and Jongdae's jacket as a witness to the crime, when her voice shook above the quiet. "But I'm not," she told him, and he looked up to the place where her eyes should've been, though he could not see them in the darkness. He did not know if Krystal sounded bold or terrified when she continued.
"I'm a nightmare."
Krystal gave up boys by September. Jongdae didn't ask about it and Krystal didn't explain, so they lived in a tense, albeit familiar wordlessness for the next few weeks. His jacket hung, untouched, on the coat rack by the door, and began to collect dust.
That was around the time Krystal began glitching out. She'd be there, wiggling her toes in her cream-colored socks on the sofa, one moment, then pixelating and dissolving into a transparency the next. The first time it'd happened, Jongdae had stared at the space Krystal had been in, waiting for her to come back. She'd reappeared on the stool she'd sat on the first time he saw her, sitting normally this time.
Sometimes, it'd take longer for her to come back. Seconds, then minutes, then hours. One time, a week, and the food that she'd bought spoiled. Other times, only parts of her disappeared, and she'd be stuck on the couch because one or both of her calves down had been erased.
Jongdae wanted to ask. He'd be in the middle of opening his mouth, the questions on his tongue, and then she'd glance at him, tired and lifeless, and then the crux of it all occurred to him then: he wasn't alive, but she also wasn't alive, and a nightmare was like a parasite, and once she stopped feeding, she would grow lifeless and dead, for real this time, like him.
She'd been a nightmare when she looked over his shoulder, meeting his eyes, a spot of blood drying on her cheek like a birthmark. But nightmares couldn't have birthmarks, nightmares weren't born, and Soojung tasted like water on Jongdae's lips because she had been made of it, sixty percent or so, thirty-seven years ago, when she'd lived in Seoul, removed from her mother's womb via c-section, while Krystal wasn't born but programmed, and now Jongdae got what she meant when she said but I'm not -
It was December, and the first snow had probably already fallen on the other side of the closed blinds, when Krystal finally spoke to him again. She hadn't moved from the sofa at all lately unless she reappeared back onto the stool in the dining room, but even then, she'd just drag herself back to it. It was like watching someone die. A first for Jongdae, who hadn't been able to see his family and friends grow old, hadn't been able to go to their funerals, hadn't been able to leave his apartment. The idea struck him as vastly overrated as he watched Krystal suffer through the months.
She wet her lips with her tongue before speaking. "You were a fairy tale," she said to Jongdae, eyes serious. Lifeless as usual. The front of her dress hadn't gotten any darker, and the hyacinths she had bought in April were still sitting by the window, dead.
"And I was a fairy tale, too," Krystal continued when Jongdae did nothing but stare in response. She smiled then, and it was the first smile he'd ever seen on her face. He shelved the memory away, under December thirteenth, or so the calendar told him, and her smile began to fade as silence settled between them once again.
And in the silence, Jongdae wondered what she meant. They were both dead, from the time they met each other to now, present-tense and in the present past. Other than that and his jacket that remained on the coat rack and his apartment, they shared no similarities. She was a nightmare, fading as the person she plagued blinked the sleep out of their eyes, and he existed in the same space as her, but did not exist all the same. There could be no and's or too's or both's that encompassed what they were or had been, both of them some sort of dead, and to be dead in the first place, they had to be alive once, alive and human. Humans weaved fairy tales and fantastical characters out of the unknown, not glitches and ghosts that haunted their old apartments, realizing that they were both something, both used-to-be humans, not human anymore.
The hand that Krystal reached out towards him glitches.
(He's in her embrace, kneeling beside her from where she's lying on his sofa, her arms around the place his shoulders appear. He wouldn't be tricked by her, Jongdae had promised himself a long time ago, and he hadn't been. You couldn't trick dead people, Jongdae knew, much less people who'd been dead for a long time, like he had been.
Her nose travels down the side of his face, lips pressing faintly against his cheek, then the junction where his jaw meets his neck. She doesn't breathe. Instead, her tongue trails down the side of his neck, sliding down from the crevice behind his ear. Jongdae shivers and closes his eyes.
This time when she bites down, she draws blood.)
2,407w; pg-13 (krystal/chen)
and as dead things, they could not love with the wholeness of their being.
a/n: for p_swizzle! i'm running behind and i really wanted to write you lay/fei but i didn't know how to do it without making it 20k long so i hope this is okay instead ;; i loved all your prompts but this one spoke to me a lot! thank you for always being such a sweetie and joy to talk to, i'm so glad we met this year ♥
Krystal was the type to rip out hearts and eat them for breakfast, knife and fork in hand, the blood still finding some way to drip down the front of her white dress no matter how neatly she devoured it. She'd sing along to cartoon theme songs as they played on the television on Sunday mornings, lounging across the sofa with the blinds tightly shut, creating a shoddy illusion of night. The sun always forced itself in, somehow, after all, and Jongdae wondered if the moon ever got fed up with being pushed aside so soon, its face pallid during the daytime, cream-colored like Krystal's socks, rolled high up to her knees. When she kicked up her legs, the skirt of her dress, blood stains becoming one with shadows, would hike up, giving him a view of her thighs, and Jongdae would wonder how many men she'd tricked between them, pulling at the off-white carpet beneath him.
He wouldn't be tricked by her, though, Jongdae had promised himself a long time ago, when he blinked and she was suddenly there, sitting at his dining room table, trying to untangle the knots in her chestnut hair. Sitting with her legs crossed on the stool - all on purpose, Jongdae knew, Krystal was purposeful - the skirt of her dress falling down like it did when she kicked her legs on the couch. You couldn't trick dead people, Jongdae knew, much less people who'd been dead for a long time.
There was no blood when she trailed her tongue against the side of his neck, sliding down from the crevice behind his ear, biting down. No tell-tale red, puncture wounds - none of that. Instead, Jongdae closed his eyes when Krystal bit down and her teeth met the stuffy air of his apartment, and nothing else.
According to Krystal, the last time she'd been here, in Seoul, was thirty-seven years ago. Then, she'd been someone called Soojung, and the name tasted watery on Jongdae's lips when he had echoed it back to her. Soojung had been born, removed from her mother's womb via c-section. It'd been a bloody affair, and maybe that was how she - Krystal, that is - turned out how she was now.
She'd been eating a bowl of fruit-flavored cereal as she told him this, artificial colors the first Jongdae had seen in a while other than the dusty rose sunsets from in between the living room blinds. Krystal had shut those on the second day Jongdae woke up to find her still there with him, and they had lived in a relative darkness ever since.
"Want some?" she offered when she noticed Jongdae staring. He shook his head.
She stopped talking after that, putting the bowl in the sink after she finished eating, and then she was shrugging on one of his old black coats, dust-free from its tenure in his closet, and heading out the door, eyes the kind of navy blue that suffocated the yellow of the sun at dusk, pushing its face into the horizon so the moon could breathe once again. Hungry eyes, eyes looking for the need to take someone's life, and whatever didn't hit her tongue would hit the front of her dress, in between her breasts but a little off center towards the left, in the place where her heart would (should) be.
That was the first night Krystal returned with blood stains.
They didn't talk much about it. In fact, they didn't talk much at all - Krystal wasn't one of many words and Jongdae had one-sided conversations in his head more often than not. Most of the time, the only noise in his apartment came from the television that Krystal liked to watch, flipping through channels for hours on end.
Jongdae, sad to say, but to which he easily admitted, wasn't much of a host. Haunted apartment complexes weren't very social to begin with, and it'd been forty, maybe even fifty, years since someone last stopped by - a lycanthrope, who'd left the big gash in his bedroom wall, and when Jongdae had felt particularly lonely in those fifty years he'd spent alone, he would sit on the musty sheets of his bed and stare at it. It looked like a wound, the nasty kind that bled out, and once the blood stopped, it was just a gaping hole in your flesh, looking back at you, daring you to look at it.
Krystal was the one who used his bedroom now, but she had never asked Jongdae about it. Maybe its bloodlessness made it nothing of interest to her, or maybe she just didn't care for it at all. Either way, Jongdae would be up throughout the night lying on Krystal's sofa - technically his, but Krystal used it more than him now - and sometimes he'd think of all the years that passed like the dusty sunsets through his blinds. Sometimes he'd think of the people he used to know, all dead now, kind of like him.
Sometimes, he'd think of Krystal, and her thighs and her blood and the men she brought back some nights, licking into her mouth before she pushed them into Jongdae's musty sheets, bed frame creaking like Jongdae remembered, like it was about to break, slipping Jongdae's black jacket off her shoulders as she stared at them from where she stood at the foot of the bed, the only whole person Jongdae could see from the half-open door. She'd lean over them, then, and Jongdae would only see her legs as he heard the crack of a breaking neck or the hoarse screams as she ripped at his throat. On the worst days, there'd be the squelch of a heart being pulled out, the sound sick to Jongdae's ears, and he'd wonder if she was getting blood on the sheets.
One night, she'd looked over her shoulder after the deed was done, a spot of blood on her cheeks, drying, and it looked like a birthmark. And even though her eyes were dark and satiated, the still, but very much real, heart bleeding in her hands, it was as if he'd intruded on some very private moment that he had no right to see, but at the same time, it was as if she wanted him to see it.
He'd turned away then, and if he could have shut the door behind him, he would've. That was the first sleepless night he spent on the sofa, thinking of Krystal.
By the time the sun was shut out by the blinds, the body was gone.
The front of her dress was the color of dying flowers by April. Jongdae only knew because one day, Krystal had come back with a calendar and a bouquet of magenta hyacinths. She'd hung the calendar on the wall and put the hyacinths in a vase next to one of the many closed windows and Jongdae had forgotten that they existed until he noticed their petals were shriveled and an ashy brown on the twelfth. That was around the time they'd sat across from each other in Jongdae's dining room, Krystal swirling her index finger on the rim of her milk glass.
"You're like a character out of a fairy tale," she remarked, taking a sip. When she put the glass down, her lips were stained white, and it was the first time Jongdae saw anything other than blood dripping off them. "A friendly fantastical landlord, or something of the sort."
Jongdae laughed. "You're as much as of a fairy tale character as I am, then," he said, honestly, hands wispy when he looked at them, contrasted against the table.
Krystal's shadow bled into the image. She was solid and she was real and she could touch and blood stained her white dress, Jongdae wouldn't have remembered it was white if he didn't remember what she looked like, legs with cream-colored socks rolled up past her knees and the view of her thighs where the skirt fell away, perched on the stool she was sitting on now all those weeks, no, months, ago, a sudden image that he thought would disappear after he blinked but persisted instead. She did not smile at him, and there was no smile already on her face that could fade off it, and her finger tilted the glass toward the part of the rim she was tracing, too much pressure, she could apply pressure, and then the milk was spilling into the place where Jongdae's hands should have been. He did not feel it wet his fingertips.
Silence stretched between them again, the length of each of Jongdae's blinds placed end-to-end against each other. Maybe that equated to a mile or two.
When she spoke again, the sun had already set, bathing them in a comfortable plane of charcoal. Jongdae was wondering if she would put on his black jacket and head out again, only to take it off and place it next to the man she brought home on the bed before sucking him of his blood, leaving behind only the husk and Jongdae's jacket as a witness to the crime, when her voice shook above the quiet. "But I'm not," she told him, and he looked up to the place where her eyes should've been, though he could not see them in the darkness. He did not know if Krystal sounded bold or terrified when she continued.
"I'm a nightmare."
Krystal gave up boys by September. Jongdae didn't ask about it and Krystal didn't explain, so they lived in a tense, albeit familiar wordlessness for the next few weeks. His jacket hung, untouched, on the coat rack by the door, and began to collect dust.
That was around the time Krystal began glitching out. She'd be there, wiggling her toes in her cream-colored socks on the sofa, one moment, then pixelating and dissolving into a transparency the next. The first time it'd happened, Jongdae had stared at the space Krystal had been in, waiting for her to come back. She'd reappeared on the stool she'd sat on the first time he saw her, sitting normally this time.
Sometimes, it'd take longer for her to come back. Seconds, then minutes, then hours. One time, a week, and the food that she'd bought spoiled. Other times, only parts of her disappeared, and she'd be stuck on the couch because one or both of her calves down had been erased.
Jongdae wanted to ask. He'd be in the middle of opening his mouth, the questions on his tongue, and then she'd glance at him, tired and lifeless, and then the crux of it all occurred to him then: he wasn't alive, but she also wasn't alive, and a nightmare was like a parasite, and once she stopped feeding, she would grow lifeless and dead, for real this time, like him.
She'd been a nightmare when she looked over his shoulder, meeting his eyes, a spot of blood drying on her cheek like a birthmark. But nightmares couldn't have birthmarks, nightmares weren't born, and Soojung tasted like water on Jongdae's lips because she had been made of it, sixty percent or so, thirty-seven years ago, when she'd lived in Seoul, removed from her mother's womb via c-section, while Krystal wasn't born but programmed, and now Jongdae got what she meant when she said but I'm not -
It was December, and the first snow had probably already fallen on the other side of the closed blinds, when Krystal finally spoke to him again. She hadn't moved from the sofa at all lately unless she reappeared back onto the stool in the dining room, but even then, she'd just drag herself back to it. It was like watching someone die. A first for Jongdae, who hadn't been able to see his family and friends grow old, hadn't been able to go to their funerals, hadn't been able to leave his apartment. The idea struck him as vastly overrated as he watched Krystal suffer through the months.
She wet her lips with her tongue before speaking. "You were a fairy tale," she said to Jongdae, eyes serious. Lifeless as usual. The front of her dress hadn't gotten any darker, and the hyacinths she had bought in April were still sitting by the window, dead.
"And I was a fairy tale, too," Krystal continued when Jongdae did nothing but stare in response. She smiled then, and it was the first smile he'd ever seen on her face. He shelved the memory away, under December thirteenth, or so the calendar told him, and her smile began to fade as silence settled between them once again.
And in the silence, Jongdae wondered what she meant. They were both dead, from the time they met each other to now, present-tense and in the present past. Other than that and his jacket that remained on the coat rack and his apartment, they shared no similarities. She was a nightmare, fading as the person she plagued blinked the sleep out of their eyes, and he existed in the same space as her, but did not exist all the same. There could be no and's or too's or both's that encompassed what they were or had been, both of them some sort of dead, and to be dead in the first place, they had to be alive once, alive and human. Humans weaved fairy tales and fantastical characters out of the unknown, not glitches and ghosts that haunted their old apartments, realizing that they were both something, both used-to-be humans, not human anymore.
The hand that Krystal reached out towards him glitches.
(He's in her embrace, kneeling beside her from where she's lying on his sofa, her arms around the place his shoulders appear. He wouldn't be tricked by her, Jongdae had promised himself a long time ago, and he hadn't been. You couldn't trick dead people, Jongdae knew, much less people who'd been dead for a long time, like he had been.
Her nose travels down the side of his face, lips pressing faintly against his cheek, then the junction where his jaw meets his neck. She doesn't breathe. Instead, her tongue trails down the side of his neck, sliding down from the crevice behind his ear. Jongdae shivers and closes his eyes.
This time when she bites down, she draws blood.)