the placebo effect
gd/top | r, 2532 words, ar
seunghyun's done. jiyong deals.
take a deep breath and let me explain
all the pain that's been wracking my brain
STAY/BIG BANG
Jiyong is the only one in the east wing. This time of night, everyone else is probably asleep, or watching late-night television, or on a red-eye flight - but Jiyong is, instead, pacing Hallway C in the emergency out-patient unit, the rubber soles of his shoes squeaking against the linoleum tile. His legs fall asleep ten minutes into the routine, but he keeps hobbling back and forth just to do something with himself, until the doctor finally shows his face.
He tells Jiyong about the good things, the bad things, the heavy-sedation, semi-coherence - and all the other bullshit that is supposed to make Jiyong feel kind of better about the whole situation but instead just reminds him why he's here and not at home brushing his teeth.
It takes him a half hour to actually push the door open to Seunghyun's room, and then he still stands in the far corner like he's been sentenced, away from the beeping and the machines and the needles that disappear into the crook of Seunghyun's arm. Get a grip, he tells himself, and manages to look up.
Seunghyun appears to be sleeping, black hair fanned out too long and unmoving on the pillow, but after a moment he cracks open his eyes and notices Jiyong. His smile is soppy, a strange brand of stupid, so unlike him.
"Hi," he says, strangely bright.
"Um... hey," Jiyong says, "are you -" but he trails off before he says 'okay'. Don't be stupid. Seunghyun is not okay. He starts over. "How're you feeling?"
Seunghyun appears to think about it for a second, eyes rolling to the ceiling and back. "I'm good," he decides. He smiles again, this time with eyes glazed over.
"Do you... remember anything?" Jiyong closes his eyes. "Fuck. You don't have to -"
"I slit my wrists. The razor hurt, kinda more than I thought it would. They make it look really easy in the movies and shit." Seunghyun sounds like he does when he's trying to gain sympathy from a noona - his lips even pursed just so as he fiddles with his I.V., slowed by the bandages on his wrists that lead all the way to his elbows. "I guess I passed out, because I don't remember what happened next."
Seunghyun might as well be talking about the weather. And Jiyong, he knows Seunghyun is doped up on meds, he knows how loopy Seunghyun can get on just regular ibuprofen, but.
Jiyong turns and walks out of the hospital, drives all the way home before he remembers the crime scene in his bathroom and almost hits a parked car on his way out of the garage again. He finds a shitty hotel by the airport and doesn't sleep, staring up at the red light of the fire alarm until the sun comes up.
The first night back is hard. The sound of running water provides the only constant stream of noise for at least a good two hours. Jiyong sits just beside the door, back pressed against the wall and watching the beam of light from the crack between the door and the tiled ground. Waits till it seems like a decent amount of time that he's left Seunghyun alone - but not enough for Seunghyun to have tried anything. And then he grips the bronze doorknob in his hands to pull himself up and in.
It's so steamy inside he can barely see. The tub is all but filled to the brim, and the streaming jet of water makes small tidal waves inside the contained space. The shower curtain is still crumpled on the floor, left from when Seunghyun pulled it down before he tried to kill himself, tears and tenterhooks buried in the red plastic. Seunghyun is in the bathtub where Jiyong left him, staring off into a space Jiyong can't see. His two hands float atop the water like buoys.
Jiyong sits carefully at the edge, just above the water. He starts to reach for one of Seunghyun's hands, but the older boy snatches it away.
"It's gonna hurt later," Jiyong tells him. Seunghyun's eyes flicker over to meet his, and this time, when he takes Seunghyun's hand again, he doesn't pull away.
Jiyong unwinds the soggy bandages one by one. The scars are still angry, fresh, dotted with red and crust and interlaced with tight gray stitches. Maybe Seunghyun tried making a pattern here, or there, or maybe it's just all random. Jiyong brushes a finger against a bumpy ridge, and some of the dead skin comes away on his fingers - and he almost gags, wants to throw up. Instead, he bites the inside of his cheek and fishes the soap out of the bottom of the tub. He washes everything as best he can. The blood stains the water a light rose pink, and the color drifts in clouds back to Seunghyun, circling around his knees and torso. He doesn't wince, not even once; his eyes say he's gone again.
"Your fingers are getting pruny," Jiyong says. There's no response when Jiyong turns the spigot off.
"Hyung," Jiyong says. His voice echoes around the room and fades. He sighs.
After a minute, Seunghyun closes his eyes and rests the back of his head against the tiled wall. Some of the turbulent waters spills onto the floor.
Seunghyun changes his own bandages after that.
Some days Seunghyun eats, and some days he doesn't. It's hard to bend his wrists with the bulky bandages, and he doesn't like it when Jiyong tries to feed him.
"It's not a big deal," he says once, but apparently, this is the wrong thing to say.
"I'm not hungry."
Later, Jiyong catches him by the pantry with a bowl of cold food and a spoon when Seunghyun thinks Jiyong is working. It's sloppy work, most of the food shaking dangerously and dropping back into the dish than makes it into his mouth. It takes Seunghyun two hours to eat it.
Jiyong knows, because he watches him the whole time.
The nights are getting colder, and slivers of moonlight streaming through the window never seem to hit Seunghyun, who sleeps in the dark. Jiyong isn't ever sure whether or not to leave him alone when he's unconscious. He ends up watching him through half-closed eyelids from the other side of the bed, sheets twisted in his fists, and counts Seunghyun's breaths like he's afraid they'll just stop, and despite everything, Seunghyun will die anyway.
Seunghyun's fingers poking through the bandages finds Jiyong's wrists to hang onto. Sometimes his bitten fingernails accidentally dig into Jiyong's skin, leaving him scars of his own to contend with in the morning.
The only time Jiyong tries to reach for Seunghyun first, a barely-there graze across his jawline, he jerks awake, staring at Jiyong like he's having trouble placing him. After that, Jiyong just lets Seunghyun touch him when he wants and how he wants and how much he wants. He tries not to shiver when he wakes to the stained gauze of Seunghyun's bindings dragging across his skin.
The first time Jiyong comes home and Seunghyun isn't there, he thinks of red water and red curtains and sprints like a madman towards the direction of the bathroom, stumbling and falling on his face and almost knocking himself unconscious on the lip of the tub. Wrists, wrists, wrists, his head says.
It takes a minute for his vision to clear so he can see that the bathroom is empty, bathtub hollow and white like the underbelly of a shell.
Then, it becomes all about finding him, of tearing through the rooms and then the whole apartment building when he's not in them and then the block and then the surrounding streets, up and down and running and panting until he can't breathe and his cheeks are flushed and he's a tangled, unwound mess, tripping on his undone shoelaces every other second and one arm out of his coat but too frenzied to put it on right.
What is it this time? Maybe he just wants Jiyong close enough to watch. From a neighboring rooftop, looking at Seunghyun's remains splashed across the sidewalk below. Or, some empty barn holding Seunghyun's legs steady to prevent them from swinging lifeless in the air. Or the back alley of a pharmacy, crushing stray pills beneath his feet as he tries to sweep the remainders back into the bottle in Seunghyun's hand. Or the fucking moon attempting to impose gravity, who really knows.
He finally skitters to a halt, hands on his knees and gulping air into his lungs. He is in front of some sort of park, with a running creek that tears it in half. In between windblown tears, his eyes skim to a familiar figure in a puffy coat and a knit hat, sitting atop a concrete pipe from which the river water spills.
The adrenalin rushes out of him, and Jiyong's tired. He hobbles across the grass to Seunghyun, and is still breathing hard when he reaches his shoulder, but he manages a scowl.
"What the fuck?"
Seunghyun looks up, eyes frighteningly clear. His hands are stuffed in the coat pockets, legs dangling dangerously close to the rushing water below them.
"What the fuck, Seunghyun," Jiyong repeats, too pissed to call him hyung.
"Hey?" Seunghyun is confused, and Jiyong wants to punch him in the face, wants to close his hands around his neck and send him crashing headfirst into the river that will carry him away and drown him.
"You can't just - you didn't even - god," Jiyong snarls, "Just tell me where the fuck you're going next time. I don't know if I'm still supposed to be fucking nice to you and walking on eggshells and shit but I just - I don't understand what the fuck's so hard about leaving me a - a goddamn sticky note or something so I go fucking out of my head because I think you're actually dead this time!"
Jiyong isn't actually sure he's supposed to use the word 'dead' around people like Seunghyun. Maybe it's a trigger word that will set the older boy off all over again. "I don't get if you even, like. If you get any of it."
Seunghyun's eyebrows disappear into his cap. "I get it. You don't have to follow me around everywhere, though."
Jiyong is too exhausted to argue. He flops down on the curved concrete beside Seunghyun, and watches the foamy water go beneath their feet. It gives him an odd sense of vertigo. Seunghyun is childishly kicking his feet in scissor motions, and the toe of his shoe barely skims the top of the water.
Jiyong thinks he might be smiling, kind of. It's sort of uncertain, and not enough to make the dimples on his cheeks show, but still. He stuffs his hand inside Seunghyun's coat pocket, winding around the bandages, to quietly set his shivering fingers on top of Seunghyun's.
Two weeks later, and then another four days after that, and then nine after that, Seunghyun isn't at the apartment again. The sticky notes he leaves on the door are blank, and Jiyong wonders if he's found some sort of humor in the situation and is mocking him, or if he's just got nothing to say.
Seunghyun starts wearing colors one day. He looks like a washed out mannequin, the ones without heads or feet, made solely to display the clothes. "A clothes hanger," Jiyong says. It makes Seunghyun grin crooked, sort of familiar. He's still not talking very much and spaces out sometimes, but Jiyong doesn't give a damn.
The day the bandages come off, Jiyong sits with Seunghyun in the waiting room for what seems like hours on uncomfortable plastic chairs, feeling his ass slowly go numb as the minutes slog by.
The doctor takes forever snipping away the stitches. Jiyong watches them come out, piece by piece like barbed wire. Afterwards, when they are left alone for a few minutes, Seunghyun shows Jiyong his new arms. He even lets Jiyong touch them, the woven white scars like a tapestry, flanked by tiny dots on either side where the stitches were. Jiyong's fingers shake a little.
"Does it still hurt?"
Seunghyun shakes his head. "I think I'm good," he says, and then he is shrugging on his long-sleeve hoodie and it's like nothing happened here at all.
That night, Jiyong wakes suddenly from a dream of falling. He crawls across the mattress and pushes the sleeves of Seunghyun's shirt up to make himself believe it. The scars look even brighter in the darkness, and it's hard to think Seunghyun has blood underneath this skin at all. Jiyong is still holding onto his arms when (it's probably the reason why) Seunghyun wakes.
He immediately lets go, an apology already on the tip of his tongue - but Seunghyun stares at him, bleary-eyed, before relaxing, smile uncurling on his lips. Jiyong is still astounded at how easily it comes to him now.
"Hey there," he says. And then Jiyong is kissing him, is brushing his tongue against Seunghyun's teeth and lips, hands knotted in his hair, and Seunghyun tastes metallic and cold and strange but Jiyong is used to change. He shifts closer, one hand falling to Seunghyun's hip as he tangles their legs together. He's afraid and aware that at some point Seunghyun might say it's too much, but at the same time banking on the fact that he won't - and, oh god how he's missed this. He touches Seunghyun's face, his eyebrows, his jaw, his collarbones that disappear into his shirt.
"You're back, right?" Jiyong mumbles. "You're here? Please be here."
Seunghyun kisses him, and then they're kissing again, and Jiyong can still taste Seunghyun somewhere buried, and maybe nothing's really happened after all, give or take a few scars along the way. Jiyong thinks that maybe he can get used to this.
He ends up with his face pressed to Seunghyun's chest, hearing his heart pump strong and sure through the layers of fabric as he rubs Seunghyun's mended arms, his bony fingers circling every scar, every dot.
"How're you feeling?" He asks.
Seunghyun sighs before he answers, slow and stuttering. "I never know anymore," he says.
Jiyong sticks the key in the lock and opens the door to the apartment. A square of yellow flutters to the floor, and he picks it up, realizing after a minute that it's another sticky note. It seems a little old and faded at the corners, yellow turning to white.
Square note in hand, he wanders the apartment calling Seunghyun's name. It occurred to Jiyong whilst he was away, with time to spare on planes and trains, and excessive amounts of boredom, that he's never asked Seunghyun why it happened at all. Their last conversation ended with Seunghyun actually maybe implying he missed him - maybe they're ready for it. Jiyong frowns at yet another empty room.
And then he gets to the bathroom, the one with the red shower curtain they finally hung back on the rod.
It's on the floor.
edited: 02.15.2012