i'm always chasing unicorns [ fic ]
they were gods, once
gd/top | r, 1531 words, ar
scoop the stars from the sky.
what would you do if you saw spaceships?
would you fear them? every aircraft, every camera
is a wish that wasn't granted.
TAKE ME SOMEWHERE NICE/MOGWAI
Hyung, I feel like I'm always chasing unicorns, he says.
He is in in his small white t-shirt when they find him, the one that used to be yours until it shrunk in the wash, with the fraying threads in the center that is dangerously close to becoming a hole. He goes kicking and screaming, or so they tell you; you weren't there when it happened, a conscious decision.
By the time you quietly slip through the metal-barred doors to see him, he is already bound and gagged, quiet and ominous in a corner of his cell.
His black hair is a sheath over his eyes. Once or twice he chews through the sleeves of his straitjacket, licks the blood off his lips. After the second time, the doctors up the dosage of his medication.
Jiyong starts to smile like a good boy an hour into the new procedure; he is released in another hundred days.
Progress, they say. Jiyong has made progress - but you know he's actually just a quick learner.
The night he's released, he comes home with you, hand clammy against your jacket. He counts the cracks in the pavement under his breath all the way to your apartment, spacing out the words like lyrics of a song.
Inside, you sit on the edgee of your couch and watch him feel the walls, up and down and in and out and around and about at a leisurely pace, leaving smudge marks on the white paint. What are you doing, you say, and he only grins, a little lopsided and strange, as he says he's checking for monsters.
You don't tell him the only ones here are inside of his head - and you lose your words entirely when he approaches you, almost shy how he edges close, and caresses your stomach like he does the walls. His hands are miniscule, translucent almost, as he thumbs the lines of your chest, bony fingers grazing over your stomach and dipping under your shirt. He is cold against your skin.
No monsters here, he says after a pause. A black thumbprint is left on the breast pocket of your shirt.
He holds traces of Jiyong, of your Jiyong who stitched his own clothes copied off runway fashions from the magazines - Jiyong, who disappeared when all you wanted him to do was stay the night - who spaced out his pencils exactly the same distance apart on his desk when he was stressed - but this Jiyong fits like a badly drawn interpretation of a photograph. He scuffs your gold sneakers, and doesn't style his hair anymore. Sometimes he swings upside down on the laundry bar from the roof, arms spread-eagle like a bird to watch the city below, and almost gives you a heart attack when he says he can probably fly if he tried.
Numbers are always in his head now. Once, you wake up in the middle of the night and hear his voice echoing from somewhere close. After convincing yourself that he hasn't in fact taken the house down and the voices aren't in your own head, you stumble out to the kitchen and catch him in the pantry, sitting in the midst of a spilt bag of rice and counting the individual grains, lining them up in straight, endless rows stretching to infinity.
He gets mad at you when you sweep it all away into the bin. You ruined it, he whines, you ruined it, you ruined it. Over and over again until he falls asleep wrapped around you on the couch.
You're reluctant to take him out, but he bugs you to let him, please, just once. It's how you find yourself shrugging on your coat before helping him with the zipper on his.
He makes a beeline for the park, scrawny legs carrying him faster than you can keep up with. Jiyong, he finds a playpen, and climbs on the monkey bars, and hogs the swings, singing to himself in number-speak and managing to entirely ignore the other children - and their mothers. You sit on the park bench, a distance away; you don't want to let him out of your sight, but after a while your gaze starts to drop to the pavement before you drift asleep.
You jerk awake to a scream, and then are on your feet and scrambling towards the noise before your brain can catch up to what is going on. Jiyong has bits of gray fuzz all over his fingers and his hair and his lashes. He is holding a naked bird in his hands, stained red, as he strips the rest of its feathers away, much the way a schoolgirl would play he-loves-me with a daisy.
The mothers are off their seats, keeping their children back. He's dangerous, one of them shouts. Her fingers squeeze around her daughter's wrist, accusatory and bleak. He's unstable, he's a freak, get him out of here!
You kneel down by his side and gently reach between his fingers until your own close around the dead animal to set it down on the ground beside him. There is dirt in his face; as you brush it away, he looks at you with sudden, terrified eyes, and asks, what did I do?
Hyung, he says, why are you shaking?
For six-point-five seconds, Kwon Jiyong is lucid again.
And what he sees is a dead bird on the ground with all its feathers plucked out, caught in his hands, stuck between his teeth, gently drifting around him like ghosts, as a gathering crowd points at the blood on his shirt. What he sees is you, your eyes, afraid, frozen, gaunt. Jiyong recoils, falls backward onto the pavement. And you are Judas Iscariot.
And then Jiyong recycles again.
And you are left to go forward.
So.
You're not dangerous, you say, more for yourself than him, maybe. You're not dangerous. You pull him up by his elbows and walk him home again.
The sparrow is buried in an old flowerpot on your balcony, flowers long uprooted and thrown onto the asphalt below. After the funeral, you sit on the stone balcony chair, smoking.
After a minute, the screen door slides open, and Jiyong is shuffling out to sit with you. His hands steeple in prayer for a few seconds, with a look of such concentration on his face - before he forgets and goes to draw constellations on the knuckles of his feet.
Jiyong has already decided there are no monsters here, but for you, it's not so easy.
For the next few days, you watch him sunning himself in the patch of sun streaming down from the skylight, listen to the echoes of his invisible shadows when he locks himself in the bathroom, and you wonder what he sees. What it's like.
To you, he's an old cassette tape with the insides pulled out and unwound, all still there but bent and scrambled at best. You remember him before, when he used to drive you crazy with how he could never stop talking, and would scribble it down when he couldn't, on notepads and butcher paper and the bathroom mirror and then his own arms when he ran out of space. Maybe it was then that he was the tangled cassette with his insides all twisted and showing. Maybe now, they've finally been scrolled back in place again. Only, he's just not playing the same thing as everybody else.
I'm scooping the stars from the sky, the ones you don't even see, he said.
He rarely reaches for you these days. Well, frankly, he never used to much, anyway, but at least he knew you were there. Now, Jiyong has no idea where there is anymore, he zigzags so fast - so sometimes, you take a deep breath and pull him back yourself.
Then, he will smile at you, cracked porcelain, and you'll kiss him because you can't not, just to remind him that even in his strange new world, there is still that tiny little anchor there, that you-shaped window if he ever wants to climb back to the other side again.
Your mouth brushes against the scabs on his lips, and his eyelashes are soft against your cheek, and you feel feel it. You have forgotten how perfectly you fit together until you press yourself over him again, one of your hands capped against his forehead to tell him that you're trying not to be scared anymore, that this is what he used to be and still can be, if he will ever let you unravel him again.
What's it like, you ask. His fingers circle lazy rings around your back, and he sighs against your mouth and says it's chasing unicorns, slaying dragon tails, watching phoenixes fly away. You look down at his shirt, your old white one, and there is finally a hole in the chest.
You don't understand, Seunghyun, Jiyong says, but it's okay.
One of these days - and you have plenty of them - you figure for maybe one moment, you and Jiyong will be in the same world again. And it's worth going forward for.
edited: 02.20.2012
note: andddd this is what happens when i don't plan beforehand.
gd/top | r, 1531 words, ar
scoop the stars from the sky.
what would you do if you saw spaceships?
would you fear them? every aircraft, every camera
is a wish that wasn't granted.
TAKE ME SOMEWHERE NICE/MOGWAI
Hyung, I feel like I'm always chasing unicorns, he says.
He is in in his small white t-shirt when they find him, the one that used to be yours until it shrunk in the wash, with the fraying threads in the center that is dangerously close to becoming a hole. He goes kicking and screaming, or so they tell you; you weren't there when it happened, a conscious decision.
By the time you quietly slip through the metal-barred doors to see him, he is already bound and gagged, quiet and ominous in a corner of his cell.
His black hair is a sheath over his eyes. Once or twice he chews through the sleeves of his straitjacket, licks the blood off his lips. After the second time, the doctors up the dosage of his medication.
Jiyong starts to smile like a good boy an hour into the new procedure; he is released in another hundred days.
Progress, they say. Jiyong has made progress - but you know he's actually just a quick learner.
The night he's released, he comes home with you, hand clammy against your jacket. He counts the cracks in the pavement under his breath all the way to your apartment, spacing out the words like lyrics of a song.
Inside, you sit on the edgee of your couch and watch him feel the walls, up and down and in and out and around and about at a leisurely pace, leaving smudge marks on the white paint. What are you doing, you say, and he only grins, a little lopsided and strange, as he says he's checking for monsters.
You don't tell him the only ones here are inside of his head - and you lose your words entirely when he approaches you, almost shy how he edges close, and caresses your stomach like he does the walls. His hands are miniscule, translucent almost, as he thumbs the lines of your chest, bony fingers grazing over your stomach and dipping under your shirt. He is cold against your skin.
No monsters here, he says after a pause. A black thumbprint is left on the breast pocket of your shirt.
He holds traces of Jiyong, of your Jiyong who stitched his own clothes copied off runway fashions from the magazines - Jiyong, who disappeared when all you wanted him to do was stay the night - who spaced out his pencils exactly the same distance apart on his desk when he was stressed - but this Jiyong fits like a badly drawn interpretation of a photograph. He scuffs your gold sneakers, and doesn't style his hair anymore. Sometimes he swings upside down on the laundry bar from the roof, arms spread-eagle like a bird to watch the city below, and almost gives you a heart attack when he says he can probably fly if he tried.
Numbers are always in his head now. Once, you wake up in the middle of the night and hear his voice echoing from somewhere close. After convincing yourself that he hasn't in fact taken the house down and the voices aren't in your own head, you stumble out to the kitchen and catch him in the pantry, sitting in the midst of a spilt bag of rice and counting the individual grains, lining them up in straight, endless rows stretching to infinity.
He gets mad at you when you sweep it all away into the bin. You ruined it, he whines, you ruined it, you ruined it. Over and over again until he falls asleep wrapped around you on the couch.
You're reluctant to take him out, but he bugs you to let him, please, just once. It's how you find yourself shrugging on your coat before helping him with the zipper on his.
He makes a beeline for the park, scrawny legs carrying him faster than you can keep up with. Jiyong, he finds a playpen, and climbs on the monkey bars, and hogs the swings, singing to himself in number-speak and managing to entirely ignore the other children - and their mothers. You sit on the park bench, a distance away; you don't want to let him out of your sight, but after a while your gaze starts to drop to the pavement before you drift asleep.
You jerk awake to a scream, and then are on your feet and scrambling towards the noise before your brain can catch up to what is going on. Jiyong has bits of gray fuzz all over his fingers and his hair and his lashes. He is holding a naked bird in his hands, stained red, as he strips the rest of its feathers away, much the way a schoolgirl would play he-loves-me with a daisy.
The mothers are off their seats, keeping their children back. He's dangerous, one of them shouts. Her fingers squeeze around her daughter's wrist, accusatory and bleak. He's unstable, he's a freak, get him out of here!
You kneel down by his side and gently reach between his fingers until your own close around the dead animal to set it down on the ground beside him. There is dirt in his face; as you brush it away, he looks at you with sudden, terrified eyes, and asks, what did I do?
Hyung, he says, why are you shaking?
For six-point-five seconds, Kwon Jiyong is lucid again.
And what he sees is a dead bird on the ground with all its feathers plucked out, caught in his hands, stuck between his teeth, gently drifting around him like ghosts, as a gathering crowd points at the blood on his shirt. What he sees is you, your eyes, afraid, frozen, gaunt. Jiyong recoils, falls backward onto the pavement. And you are Judas Iscariot.
And then Jiyong recycles again.
And you are left to go forward.
So.
You're not dangerous, you say, more for yourself than him, maybe. You're not dangerous. You pull him up by his elbows and walk him home again.
The sparrow is buried in an old flowerpot on your balcony, flowers long uprooted and thrown onto the asphalt below. After the funeral, you sit on the stone balcony chair, smoking.
After a minute, the screen door slides open, and Jiyong is shuffling out to sit with you. His hands steeple in prayer for a few seconds, with a look of such concentration on his face - before he forgets and goes to draw constellations on the knuckles of his feet.
Jiyong has already decided there are no monsters here, but for you, it's not so easy.
For the next few days, you watch him sunning himself in the patch of sun streaming down from the skylight, listen to the echoes of his invisible shadows when he locks himself in the bathroom, and you wonder what he sees. What it's like.
To you, he's an old cassette tape with the insides pulled out and unwound, all still there but bent and scrambled at best. You remember him before, when he used to drive you crazy with how he could never stop talking, and would scribble it down when he couldn't, on notepads and butcher paper and the bathroom mirror and then his own arms when he ran out of space. Maybe it was then that he was the tangled cassette with his insides all twisted and showing. Maybe now, they've finally been scrolled back in place again. Only, he's just not playing the same thing as everybody else.
I'm scooping the stars from the sky, the ones you don't even see, he said.
He rarely reaches for you these days. Well, frankly, he never used to much, anyway, but at least he knew you were there. Now, Jiyong has no idea where there is anymore, he zigzags so fast - so sometimes, you take a deep breath and pull him back yourself.
Then, he will smile at you, cracked porcelain, and you'll kiss him because you can't not, just to remind him that even in his strange new world, there is still that tiny little anchor there, that you-shaped window if he ever wants to climb back to the other side again.
Your mouth brushes against the scabs on his lips, and his eyelashes are soft against your cheek, and you feel feel it. You have forgotten how perfectly you fit together until you press yourself over him again, one of your hands capped against his forehead to tell him that you're trying not to be scared anymore, that this is what he used to be and still can be, if he will ever let you unravel him again.
What's it like, you ask. His fingers circle lazy rings around your back, and he sighs against your mouth and says it's chasing unicorns, slaying dragon tails, watching phoenixes fly away. You look down at his shirt, your old white one, and there is finally a hole in the chest.
You don't understand, Seunghyun, Jiyong says, but it's okay.
One of these days - and you have plenty of them - you figure for maybe one moment, you and Jiyong will be in the same world again. And it's worth going forward for.
edited: 02.20.2012
note: andddd this is what happens when i don't plan beforehand.