Gods Are Like Stars (Born Dying) [1/2]
Title: Gods Are Like Stars (Born Dying)
Pairings: Kaisoo
Rating: R
Genre: ??? Angst? Tragedy? ????
Warnings: Hover and read carefully!!
Length: ~7.3k (total ~14.8k)
Summary: God gives up divinity for a boy who sees ghosts.
(A/N: This was written for donawhalee during forjongin! This was one of my favorite prompts to write, ever, hands down. Although it didn't turn out as I planned it to, writing it was an incredible experience and I hope everyone enjoys it ^^ And of course, thanks to my betas evilmaknae0927 and jesstoast for being awesome and cheering me through this. ((For background on one of the scenes, you might want to glean over Franz Kafka's A Hunger Artist.)))
January 14, 2010
On His sixteenth birthday, God makes home in white spaces between concrete walls, gaps between sanity and wrinkled bedsheets stained with blood from chewed-up finger nails. He lies under lights of jaundice that are exactly four-hundred-and-thirty-two shades too bright for His liking and watches with His hair crackling from static on dry-cleaned pillowcases as seven different species of miniature moth and two different species of assassin fly make irritating noises before sizzling inside incandescent light bulbs that are three decades too old. They’ll tell you that God lives in the clouds with angels and halos and staircases of gold and silver and platinum, but that’s not true. God doesn’t live anywhere. I would know. I’ve been kicked out too many times from too many places to say otherwise.
The last letter is cut off by a startling jerk of the hand. Jongin’s pen goes flying across the room, clattering on the floor with the sharp clacking sounds of cheap plastic on cheap linoleum. This is familiar, this is routine, but the feeling is never any less frustrating. An ugly smudge of black ink now barrels angrily over neatly curled letters. Jongin growls with frustration before slamming the leather-bound journal shut and throwing it down onto the mattress, wondering if he should call the nurse to pick up the goddamn pen again or get up himself.
The time on the analog clock on the wall in front of him reads 11:46 PM. If the nurses do come, they’ll probably yell at him or give him dirty looks and not give his pen back, so he rolls out of bed and crawls over the dusty floor to pick it up, watching small drops of crimson ooze out from under his nails as he moves his hands. Crawling, Jongin thinks to himself, is not something God should have to do. Then again, God shouldn’t have to be orphaned by his parents and thrown from house to house until he gets kicked into a mental facility for “chewing on his bloody nails too much.”
As he reaches for his pen-which has so unfortunately rolled under another patient’s bed-he finds himself face-to-face with a smiling, wide-eyed boy staring at him from the opposite gap under the bed frame, eagerly reaching his arm out for the pen and snatching it away. Confused, Jongin opens his mouth to protest; before he can make a sound, the scrawny kid scrambles over the mattress and sprawls over on his back, head hanging upside-down over the edge and staring, wide-eyed and pale-faced and creepy, right at him.
“Hi,” he stage-whispers, a little too cheerfully and energetically for Jongin’s taste, “Hi! I’m Kyungsoo! You’re new here, right? Yeah! That’s why I was watching you! I watch people a lot! Oh, I got your pen for you! Here, here you go!” He waves the pen wildly in front of the other’s face, and Jongin narrows his eyes and snatches it away briskly.
“I could have gotten it myself, you know,” he snaps.
With that, he stands up, brushes off his clothing, and storms back to his bed, grabbing his diary from the mattress and slamming it down on the nightstand along with his pen. After indignantly shoving himself under the thick covers, he refuses to look at Kyungsoo, instead forcefully squinting at the boring white of the smooth ceiling. This is fucking stupid, he thinks to himself, God doesn’t even get patterned walls to stare at.
After several minutes of squinting, he feels as though the boredom will eat him alive, so he squeezes his eyes shut and opens them to stare at a different part of the ceiling that-guess-fucking-what-looks exactly the same. It feels as though the mattress is slowly devouring him, too, wrapped stuffing growing higher and higher around him as he sinks down into it, waiting for him to press close enough into the center so that it can envelop him through osmosis and suck him into its rough, crappy thread-count membrane. He wonders if it’ll feel like living in the clouds while he suffocates between cramped layers of cotton or whatever the hell is inside of a mattress. Whether it does or not, it’ll probably feel better than staring at the stupid, blank ceiling while he can feel the creepy maniac’s eyes boring holes into his head from twenty feet away.
He’s just about to turn his back on the other when his hand spasmodically pulls away from his mouth. The sound of burgundy spattering across the pristine white of his comforter comes in a sudden forte against the backdrop of silence in the dim room, and he jerks into a sitting position, startled by the sound of his own blood.
Kyungsoo giggles when Jongin curses; he can barely stand a few seconds of the incessant tittering before he turns to face him, eyes burning with enough fury to make Kyungsoo giggle just the slightest bit quieter before he asks, “Hey you, your fingers are bleeding, right? Did you know that?”
“Yes, I fucking know,” he scoffs, turning back to watch the blood pool at his fingertips in bright contrast to the bedsheets. “Of course they’re fucking bleeding.”
Kyungsoo blinks at him before breaking out into a fit of giggles again, leaning over to shut his nightstand light off and talking to the empty space in front of him. “Don’t you think he should stop biting them if they’re bleeding, Ghostie?”
Jongin huffs and shuts his own light, turning his back to Kyungsoo and snuggling as deep as he can into the mattress, willing for it to gobble him up while he clutches the covers and pulls them over his head.
“Don’t you think I wish I could?” he mumbles, chewing on his lip enough to make it bleed. “Insane piece of shit-for-brains.”
“Did you back-talk me yesterday, after I asked Ghostie if you should stop biting your nails?”
Jongin wakes up the next morning to a disheveled swirl of black hair and pale skin and swollen pink lips smiling at him about two inches away from his face. Giant eyes of deep brown blink right above his own and he jerks upright, so disoriented by grogginess and shock that he slams the top of his head against the headboard. Kyungsoo claps, bringing his nose so close to Jongin’s own that he can feel it breathing in the air he exhales.
“Ghostie says you did. He told me you back-talked me. That is very rude!”
He doesn’t respond-just clutches his head and curls against his knees, groaning in pain, while Kyungsoo refuses to move his goddamn face out of his personal space.
“Do you think he’s okay, Ghostie?” he asks in hushed tones, as though it’s some sort of secret that he cares to know if Jongin is okay.
Jongin thinks that he just gets stupider and stupider. “I’m right fucking here, you know?” he grumbles, breathing in deeply to control the throbbing inside his skull. “You can just ask me.”
“That’s a bad word. Why do you use that word all the time? It’s very bad. Ghostie doesn’t like bad words-”
“Shut up and go away.”
Before he realizes it, his hand somehow finds its way to his lips again, and he’s biting on nails that aren’t even there anymore, teeth slipping right off the edge of his cuticles and digging harshly into the raw skin underneath. He tastes the copper on his tongue while Kyungsoo stares at him with those creepy eyes that take up half his face, and sucks it off his fingers when it starts to pool over the edge, until his fingers look like small bowls of tomato soup and he can’t keep up with the bleeding anymore. Sticking his index finger in his mouth, he laps up the metallic taste and watches the rest of it drip rapidly onto white fabric, until he feels something stifling and familiar clench his stomach and crawl up into his throat. Glancing at Kyungsoo, he mumbles weakly, “I said shut up and go away.”
Kyungsoo stays, unblinking and fascinated by the drops of maroon splattering onto bleached sheets.
The finger inside his mouth is burning. Acid pools behind his gums and under his tongue, and he wants to spit it at Kyungsoo to make him go away, but before he can, it all comes up, bile from an empty stomach pouring itself all over the covers and onto his shirt and splatting a little onto Kyungsoo’s clothing, but Kyungsoo just blinks at him, bewildered, before poking the button that calls the nurses and staring at him more. They rush over, each and every one of them shoving pills and cups of water at him, until he takes them all and yells at them that he’s okay. They glare at him and scatter out the door, leaving Kyungsoo behind, still staring at him, and Jongin wishes he had puked straight onto his stupid creepy face.
Another nurse shuffles in, ushering him off the bed to change his sheets, and tells Kyungsoo, “The mean vomiting boy will have to stay with you for a while, okay? Let him take a nap on your bed if he asks you politely.” He nods, eagerly, and Jongin looks at the window across the room and wonders how many floors up he is.
“Fuck you,” he retorts, wrinkling his nose at the nurse. She mimics his expression and shoos him away, muttering something under her breath as she strips the bed.
Suddenly, Kyungsoo grabs his hand and Jongin jumps, startled, before properly facing him. There’s this ridiculously pitiful look in his eyes, so Jongin sneers at him and smacks his hand away.
“Ghostie,” he murmurs quietly, turning away from Jongin and wringing his hands in front of him, “do you think he’s okay?”
Jongin gapes at him like he’s insane-which he is; they apparently all are-and after a few moments of silence, Kyungsoo looks at him sadly, shuffling dejectedly over to his own bed to curl up and sleep.
He doesn’t wake up for the rest of the day, and all Jongin can do is stare at the stupid boring ceiling.
January 15, 2010
I’ve probably said this a million times already, but I’ll say it again. They’ll tell you a lot of things about God that aren’t true. They say that He’s all-powerful, that He can watch His people and draw out lines of fate that twist and turn and connect them to other people and places and events, but the truth is, God can barely even control Himself. Sixteen years of living, and God can barely even stand without looking like Huntington’s disease or a fucked up basal ganglia. Sixteen years of living, and God still bites His nails and sips His own blood like soup, vomits on empty stomachs and chews His bottom lip into pulp. More than anything, though, God hurts; people abuse Him and make a pariah of Him, because He isn't the fictional fallacy they write Him to be. The thing is, though, God isn't anything like that. I am brilliance manifest in brokenness, and that makes me all the better.
Jongin recognizes the nightmare as soon as it begins. He’s watching himself in the ICU of the hospital he was born in through a thick glass window; his biological mother and father and the doctor stand by the crib, whispering to each other while he sleeps-withered, jaundice and grey, corpselike-under flickering doses of UV light that don’t seem to be doing anything. His father signs off a check and slumps over, and his mother rubs his back comfortingly. “The landlord will give us an extension on the rent,” she whispers, and the doctor smiles and tells them that the baby will be okay. Jongin narrows his eyes, glaring with anger hot enough to bore holes straight through the baby’s cadaverous outline: he should never have been born.
His finger twitches, and the scene fast-forwards in a blur of his father’s debts and his mother’s weariness, and his own selfish cries piercing through the air far after twilight. Time moves too quickly for him to make anything out, but he can vaguely hear his parents fighting. It stops.
They’re in the hospital again. This time, he’s two-and-a-half. His lips are bleeding, and his parents have wrapped his fingers through and through in cotton balls, now drenched with crimson. Pieces of wispy, white fabric stick to the deep gashes on his lips. The doctor speaks, and his mother buries her face behind her hands and cries, while his father hugs her close and slumps over again, discreetly writing out another check.
A two-and-a-half year old retard stares intently at the cotton wrapped around his fingers, and sticks them back in his mouth, like teething toys.
Jongin begins to pound on the window, screaming that he’s smart, that his HPRT deficiency doesn’t mean he’ll be stupid forever, that they need to keep him, that they’ll only have to deal with him for eighteen more years, maximum, before he withers away, but they can’t hear him behind the big glass barrier. He can’t even hear himself.
If he wanted to change it, this could be the recurring dream with a happy ending, where he isn’t diagnosed with a dumb disease, or where he is but his parents decide to keep him, or where his foster families don’t keep kicking him out, or where they suddenly discover a cure, or where he just isn’t born at all. Lucid dreaming is rudimentary compared to his other mental feats. But what would be the point in that? None of those things would ever happen anyway, and denying himself reality would only make it all hit harder.
At some point, he feels the tissue of his fist starting to bruise against the window, feels the corners of his mouth pushing themselves down, feels the tingling burn in his nose and eyes. His screaming turns hysterical until it dissipates into a mess of choked-up sobs, and he can’t pound on the window anymore, he can’t feel his arm, and they won’t ever hear him, but maybe it doesn’t even matter, because who the fuck wants a retard for a baby, who the fuck wants a retard for anything, who the fuck would ever want to keep him, the retarded baby who bleeds on everything he touches because he can’t stop chewing his retarded fingers. They should have killed him when he was born. They should have let him die.
Eventually, consciousness seeps far enough into his bones for him to hear the distant sound of his own whimpering, accompanied by the familiar crinkling of someone flipping the pages of a book. With a few staggered breaths, he forces the burning sensation in his eyes away, opening them in a groggy squint as he glares, aggravated, at the bright ceiling lights. He can see the shadowed outline of at least four dead bugs in the glass casing of the bulb above him. Disgusted, he turns onto his side to check the clock on his nightstand-only to find that Kyungsoo, that fucking idiot Kyungsoo, is flipping contentedly through the pages of his goddamn diary.
He doesn't even know what to say. What does he even say to someone who wakes up in the morning and decides it would be oh-so-pedestrian to read someone’s diary? Squinting with the effort, he hoists himself up onto his elbows, steadying himself to smack Kyungsoo's rudeness straight out of him-and realizes he doesn't even know what to do then. Does he punch Kyungsoo in the jaw? Slap him? If he breaks the Kyungsoo’s nose, will he stop being such a nuisance?
Out of the blue, Jongin's right arm gives out from under him, flying recklessly in Kyungsoo's direction to whack the diary straight out of his hands, then swinging upwards to connect with Kyungsoo's chin. Jongin watches, horrified, as his diary falls face-open against the dusty linoleum, while Kyungsoo stumbles backwards with a startled yelp, steps coming just shy of squashing the precious leather journal splayed across the floor.
"I didn't step on it!" he declares with relief as he falls backwards onto his butt, inches away from sitting on the book. "It's okay! It's okay! I bit my tongue though-" he sticks his tongue out, crossing his eyes in an attempt to examine the damage, then looks up at Jongin, "-ith it bleeding, Jong-nini?"
Forgetting that he lacks complete control of his right arm at the moment, Jongin attempts to hoist himself back into a steady position; almost immediately, it gives out from under him. The momentum of his weight pushes him from the bed in an awkward tangle of limbs, and he falls smack on top of Kyungsoo, knocking him out of his sitting position. Wary of trying and failing again, Jongin stays where he is, hoping as hard as he can that he’s broken one of Kyungsoo’s ribs.
Instead, Kyungsoo giggles, holding their weight easily as he props himself up. “You’re very skinny! Ghostie says that’s not healthy. He says that he will give you his lunch today.”
“Well, Ghostie is fucking stupid,” Jongin snaps, sitting up on Kyungsoo’s stomach with as much force as he can muster. “Why the hell does he want to give me his stupid lunch? I already get my own goddamn lunch.”
He starts to add that he can’t keep anything down, anyway-sooner or later, they’re going to stick needles into his veins to keep him alive because for some odd reason, they have to go and keep every damn person alive regardless of whether there’s even a point to it-but Kyungsoo interrupts him with a sudden silence, complexion oddly morose.
Jongin watches, confused but apathetic, as Kyungsoo meticulously brushes off the diary and returns it, pressing it gently against his chest. He wriggles out from underneath Jongin’s seat, carefully folding Jongin’s arms over the journal before regressing to his bed and slipping between covers in the fetal position.
Hours later, after lunch, dinner, and a few unfortunate rounds of vomiting in the nearest toilet, Jongin finds himself glaring with unbridled accusation at the ceiling again, just about ready to shoot a hole in it to make it less boring, or maybe in his own head so he doesn’t have to be bored anymore.
“Shut up, Ghostie.”
Jongin bites harder into his bottom lip than he already is, all too prepared to begin ripping all of his hair out. Fuck Ghostie, whatever the hell that is. Fuck Kyungsoo. Everyone just needs to shut the fuck up, and this whole damn place needs to stop being so fucking irritating. While he writhes against the mattress in aggravation, Kyungsoo continues. “It’s just a story. Gods don’t die.”
Completely and utterly bewildered, Jongin snaps his gaze toward Kyungsoo. After a few minutes of quiet, Kyungsoo turns toward him as well, eyes barely peeking out behind the covers he’s piled over his face. “Is your name really Jongin? Are you God?”
“What the hell do you think?”
“Then,” Kyungsoo’s voice suddenly fades to a whisper, “are you going to die?”
Jongin doesn’t bother to answer, instead flipping around to face the opposite direction, tugging the covers over his head as tightly as he can and squeezing his eyes shut. For once, Kyungsoo respects Jongin’s silence; within several minutes, Jongin can hear him snoring quietly through the thick stuffing of his comforter. The pain that shoots through his hand as he continues to bite on his fingers suddenly escalates until it’s intolerable, and Jongin tears them away from his teeth, reaching to the nightstand for his diary and grabbing his pen.
January 16, 2010
This place is beginning to feel a little bit like heaven-but it’s not what you think it is in the slightest. Heaven is indeed filled with clouds and angels and halos and staircases, but the clouds are everywhere, suffocating, white and boring, poised to swallow you whole; the halos are rusted, useless, hovering over good-intentions on a death march; the staircases spiral down instead of up: down, down, down, all the way into nowhere; and the angels are nothing but vapid imbeciles. I know this because I will probably live here for however long it takes to complete my forced traversal of the mortal world. They tell you that God lives in heaven-I used to live nowhere. But if I am to live anywhere, it is in heaven; if this is heaven, then Kyungsoo must be an angel; if Kyungsoo is an angel, then I hold no faith in the future of any supernatural realm, for they are all just as witless as the rest of the cretins on this Earth.
I shall patiently await the end of my stay. In this purgatory, my brilliance manifests for naught but to be sucked dry from the thin, cracking shell which guards my divinity.
Death lingers quietly in the air between his covers. He breathes it in, exhales it, tastes the blood seeping out from the scars on his lips and fingers.
Tenderly, it lulls him to sleep.
The weeks pass with such tedium that Jongin begins to ask the nurses for the date every morning after Kyungsoo interrupts his sleep, for fear that time has been repeating itself. His attempts to argue his sanity have long since faded; the constant, overbearing ennui lays waste to his painstakingly developed mental prowess, and the juxtaposition of this new, epic listlessness to his previous intellectual strain agitates his imagination. If he stares at the walls long enough and squints hard enough, he can make himself see and feel the stale, yellowing white paint dripping from the ceilings and walls and onto his skin, where it burns like acid and he lets it, until he chokes on the salty copper pooling in the back of his throat, or until one of his limbs decide to take a spontaneous trip out of the invisible straightjacket he lies in. At night, the digital and analog clocks grow mouths and cackle at him like Salem witches, slithering into the ECG that perpetually throbs in his ears, devouring the digital neon peaks with such gusto that he can hear his mortality crunched between their jaws, fracturing their glass teeth, treble-clef staccato blending into the beeping of digitized heart rates until he no longer listens to his own heartbeat; rather, the tinkle of porcelain against chipped porcelain.
His cognitive state deteriorates before his eyes: his muscles spasm more, he defaults to slouching again when he sits up, with his arms bent at the elbows like zombies' until he forces himself into something more proper, his nails and lips bleed and scar and bleed again, more than ever; the inside of his skull itches over some foreign burn that fogs around his cerebral cortex. Kyungsoo bothers him more often-maybe he notices-smiles at him a little more tentatively, offers him his lunch, hovers even closer to the call button for the nurses. All it does is piss Jongin off, because calling the nurses won’t help him in the slightest, and nor will Kyungsoo’s lilted lips or inedible hospital gruel, but Kyungsoo sticks around and stares anyway, as though he’s studying the process of existential decomposition.
Eventually, though, Jongin has to admit to himself that Kyungsoo is the only thing that ever changes in the slightest. He doesn’t repeat the same things every day, though they’re always similar, and he sometimes tries to feed Ghostie, dumping his entire tray of lunch on the floor in the process, and sometimes he argues with Ghostie over trivial things, and sometimes he tells Jongin nonsensical, disconnected stories, undeterred by the fierce demands for him to shut the fuck up. It’s a genuine paradox-the little influxes in Kyungsoo’s behavior are the only things that draw his attention, rescuing him from an otherwise stagnant world, yet the more they draw his attention, the more aggravated he becomes.
As the weeks pass by and Jongin feels the sibilant boiling of insanity in his cerebral arteries, as he watches his condition regress until his enzyme deficiency practically becomes visible, his attentiveness to any and every fluctuation grows until he can pinpoint the exact way in which Kyungsoo’s bed hair differs from morning to morning. He recants in his head the number of seconds that pass between each time Kyungsoo blinks, and calculates the average the next day so he can compare it to the previous. He remembers every dip in Kyungsoo’s voice with every laugh and knows exactly in what places they change.
Still, the mental stimulation comes nowhere near what he’s accustomed to putting himself through.
Tonight, Jongin turns to look at the digital clock for the some-hundredth time. His front teeth are buried deep-almost halfway-into his bottom lip, and his fingertips ache and itch, prickling with numbness that makes him wish he could just bite them straight off. 4:53 AM stares back at him, watching his every move. It sends an electrifying discomfort through his spine. 4:54 AM curves into a sneering crescent; 4:55 AM parts its lips to reveal malignant fangs, winking at him in neon red; 4:56 AM thuds in his chest, the sound of crunching glass replacing the rhythm of his cardiac cycle. Someone whimpers.
“Kyungsoo,” he whispers, urgent, voice cracking. Already, he regrets it but, “are you awake?"
Slowly, he turns his gaze to Kyungsoo while time cackles behind his eardrums, louder and louder; he’s petrified, so still that he can’t even move his lips to speak again, limbs uncharacteristically frozen in place, again refusing him control.
Millennia pass before 4:57 registers, low bass beneath the piercing sound of shattering crystal. Hopelessly, he squeezes his eyes shut. Kyungsoo, he begs, Kyungsoo, Kyungsoo, Kyungsoo, wake up, wake up, please. It’s the only name he knows other than his birth parents’ and his own.
He can’t keep track of the minutes anymore. He keeps his eyes shut with such force that tears begin to form in the corners. The noise of the glass in his chest is deafening. The person is still whimpering. Maybe it’s his own voice. He wants it to shut up. Shut up. Shut up. His whole body is numb. Still. It’s cold. Something warm on his cheek: tender. Half of his mattress sinks. He might roll off. Tumbling down a green grass hill, maybe, with flowers and butterflies, without scars on his fingers. His mattress moves around him. Warmth, around his waist, against his back. Soft. The cackling stops. The crunching stops. The whimpering stops. It’s quiet. He can hear his own heartbeat. His eyes relax, slowly. He snuggles deep into the mattress, towards the source of warmth, turns to it, nuzzles closer. It’s so quiet. Peaceful. Home, maybe. Heaven as they say it is. God can sleep here, in the clouds, with the angels.
At noon, he wakes up to Kyungsoo’s tray clattering on the floor again. “I’m trying to feed Ghostie.”
“Honey,” the nurse coos, exasperation and insincerity oozing from the gaps between clenched teeth, “Ghostie doesn’t need to be fed-we explained this yesterday, remember? Eat your lunch, sweetie.”
Jongin squints at her, at Kyungsoo, at the tray on the floor.
“I feed Ghostie every day,” he retorts. His nose scrunches up, lines forming above the bridge, and maybe Jongin’s wrong, but he thinks Kyungsoo has just raised his voice. “I feed Ghostie every day. You know it. Ghostie needs food, I do this every day.”
“Kyungsoo, darling, you need to eat more. This food is being paid for, just for you. Not for Ghostie. Do you understand? Eat.”
“Why are you making Ghostie hungry today? You never make me keep Ghostie hungry the other days! I have to feed Ghostie!” Bending over, he picks up the tray and drops it again. The soup spills all over the floor, and the boxed entreé skids around on the plastic surface. “Ghostie, eat your food! You’re making trouble.”
“I tell you this every day! Ghostie doesn’t exist!” the nurse snaps, suddenly, picking up the boxed meal and opening it up. Hesitating, she smiles again and adds, “Darling-”
Kyungsoo snatches the box back, and Jongin wants to laugh at the surprise on the nurse’s face. Just as quickly, the nurse pries his hands from the box; it goes on like this for a while. On the one hand, Jongin’s amused: they have this argument almost every day, until Kyungsoo starts eating to shoo the nurse away and proceeds to dump the rest on the floor once she’s gone. But he’s never snatched it back before, and the nurse has never seemed so frustrated-nor has she ever called for the other nurses to try and pacify him like she is now, nor has he ever resisted the force-feeding this long, this fiercely. Jongin’s eyes dart to the clock-they’ve been trying to get Kyungsoo to eat for seven minutes now-and Kyungsoo’s protests have escalated to screaming and shouting and the nurses look like crazed surgeons, holding him down and trying to shove food into his mouth.
He decides it best to not think about last night. Maybe everyone is at their breaking point today.
There’s one final, screeching protest before Jongin realizes that Kyungsoo is crying.
“If he doesn’t want to fucking eat, you can’t fucking make him eat!” he yells, startled by his own voice, but continues regardless. He pushes his way through the nurses, forcing down the bile building up in the back of his throat. “What the fuck are you doing? You’re supposed to fucking take care of him, you fucking idiots, where the hell is this cheapass asylum anyway, you’re all fucking unqualified idiots. Leave him the fuck alone.”
Almost instantaneously, Kyungsoo silences, wiping his eyes and blinking meekly at the five spoons shoved in front of his face. Hesitating, he opens his mouth and leans forward, taking in a mouthful of withered salad. The nurses collectively sigh, confused by both Kyungsoo’s obedience and Jongin’s sudden ability to speak for someone who isn’t himself, but too tired to care. Kyungsoo tentatively picks up one of the spoons and begins eating the remaining contents on his own.
When they leave, he keeps eating, staring at Jongin, eyes wide in shock. Just as surprised at himself, Jongin stares at his own reflection in Kyungsoo’s irises. His fingertips are bleeding into his mouth again, along with a familiar sour taste flooding under his tongue and behind his teeth.
“Ghostie says you shouldn’t bite your fingers,” Kyungsoo whispers. The words are so quiet it’s as if he’s exhaling them, just breathing through moving lips. He reaches forward for Jongin’s wrist, to grab it and pull it away, and Jongin feels something churning in the pit of his stomach, like he’s going to throw up again except that it tickles a little.
Just before Kyungsoo’s skin makes contact with his own, he jerks away and briskly walks back to his nightstand. “Whatever,” he mumbles, picking up his diary and his pen. “Ghostie doesn’t know a damn thing.”
Jongin writes for a few hours, connecting the entries from last year into a story, summarizing the weeks that he hasn’t been writing because they’ve all been the same. He doesn’t notice at what point Kyungsoo begins to hover over his shoulder again to watch him write-he doesn’t even remember at which point during these tedious weeks he stopped minding. When he finishes though, when he begins to write about what happened yesterday, 4:53, 4:54, 4:55, 4:56, 4:57, he can suddenly feel Kyungsoo’s gaze boring holes through his grip on the pen, searing the edges of his diary.
“Do you not remember?” he asks, smiling, poking Jongin gently in the arm a few times.
“Remember what?”
Frowning, Kyungsoo looks nervously to his left, then nods, presumably, to Ghostie. “Ghostie woke me up last night because he said you were saying my name. So I-”
Without warning, Jongin pushes Kyungsoo out of the way and tosses his diary recklessly onto the mattress. “You must have been dreaming,” he snaps. His heart rate escalates rapidly, as if he’s suddenly being chased by something, and his stomach twists around in its place. “I don’t even know your name. I don’t care. Leave me alone, Ky-you idiot.”
“But-”
He doesn’t know what he’s doing in the slightest. He probably should have brought his diary with him, but he’s already halfway down the hall, half-running-half-stumbling toward the emergency staircase as fast as his uncoordinated legs will carry him. When he finally gets to the door, he fumbles with the handle, and it takes all the strength he can muster for him to push it open. He slips on the first step three times before he resorts to crawling on his hands and knees, all the flights up, until he reaches a door labeled “ROOF ACCESS: AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY.” Panting with the effort, he rises to his feet, leaning all his weight onto the push bar-which is clearly far from enough-until it suddenly gives out, sending him stumbling forward and crashing into the cement wall bordering the edge.
“Jong-nini-”
“LEAVE ME ALONE, KYUNGSOO, LEAVE ME THE FUCK ALONE.”
For a while, Kyungsoo hesitates. “Ghostie says you don’t mean that.”
“Will your stupid fucking Ghostie just shut the fuck up? Leave me the fuck alone you dead piece of shit.”
“I don’t think you mean it,” he mumbles, staring at his hands and wringing them together. “Otherwise you wouldn’t have-”
“I didn’t!” Jongin throws his arms up in the air and stands up, teeth again digging into his bottom lip. After several minutes of extreme exertion, he manages to scramble onto the cement ledge, throwing his legs over the side and staring at the sidewalk. The people are no taller than his pinky finger.
A breeze cards back his bangs, just strong enough to make him feel like he might fall backwards. By the time it fades, Kyungsoo still hasn’t spoken, and Jongin doesn’t check if he’s still there. He’s not sure which he’d rather have. If his neurons act up again, misfire again or whatever it is that they do, he might just fling himself off. He’ll fall flat onto the cement, twisted up into some indeterminate shape, bones broken everywhere, no bigger than his pinky finger. His diary-book hybrid will never be published, but maybe no one wants to read about the real God. Everyone likes to think that God is an abstract figure in the sky who takes care of people, but that’s really not who He is. He’s just a boy, maybe two boys, or lots of little boys, or maybe girls, making stabs at the impossible. Mastering their own worlds. Taking control of what they can’t control. God is a manifestation of suffering trying to eliminate itself and make things better even though not everything can be fixed. God is out of control and in control all at the same time, because He works for it. But no one wants to hear that. He should probably stop writing.
It occurs to him that if he falls, Kyungsoo might see. He’ll be a splat on the ground, like a bug, and if Kyungsoo holds up his pinky finger he’ll not be any bigger. He’s bitten into his lip so hard that a part of it has just come off far enough to flop around in his mouth, and he plays with it on the hinge it’s clinging by, pushing it around on the tip of his tongue, tasting something bitter. A boy with bulky headphones sitting on his head walks down the street, reading a book while he grips a pencil between pursed lips. He’s wearing a leather jacket, a loose T-shirt with a skull on it, black skinny jeans, sneakers. Gripping the cement edge with one hand, Jongin holds up his pinky again. He breathes in.
“Kyungsoo,” he starts, turning around, not sure if he expects Kyungsoo to be there or if he’s simply hoping. “Sit he-”
A disbelieving chuckle interrupts his habit of sucking the blood from his lip. Kyungsoo has been quietly standing right behind him, hands hovering just around his waist, poised to grab him should he fall. When Jongin turns around, he darts back, hurriedly folding his hands behind him.
“G-Ghostie s-said I should b-b-be careful, but you said to leave you alone, Ghostie said I should watch you, I was watching you and-”
“Sit with me.”
Kyungsoo blinks a few times, reactionless, and then breaks out into a smile, scrambling recklessly over the edge. Jongin laughs: Kyungsoo climbs over funny, so that he’s facing the wrong way-back to the view, facing the door to the entrance, and now he can’t turn around. He really is stupid, but maybe Jongin should be happy about that, because he doubts Kyungsoo would like him at all if he had even half a brain in his dumb head.
“Don’t let me fall, okay, Jong-nini?”
“Right,” he replies, warily. He wasn’t even strong enough to push open the door. If Kyungsoo falls, if he loses his balance, it’s not like he’ll miraculously have the strength necessary to catch Kyungsoo, let alone hold onto him. Suddenly, he’s annoyed again.
The boy with the bulky headphones walks around the same block five more times before Kyungsoo finally finishes turning around. At that point, Jongin can already feel the irritation building up in his chest and settling thick in his throat. He doesn’t even remember why he asked Kyungsoo to sit with him in the first place. Maybe, after last night, Kyungsoo’s stupidity has worn off on him.
Whatever weight on his chest dissipates then reforms, just as heavy, but with an uncomfortable new warmth. For as long as he can remember, Jongin has been ready to die. He was born that way, with death in his veins, occupying the empty gaps in his brain where it misformed, filling the space between his muscles, pushing life out through his fingers and lips. Fear-as he’s read in novels, seen in movies, and heard in the news-comes from the instinctive will to survive. If he’s always been prepared to die, he should never have anything to be afraid of. All these weeks, he’s never been afraid of what his imagination presents to him: not the acid dripping from the ceiling onto his skin, not the clocks and the sound of their glass teeth crunching in his chest over the imaginary beeping of the ECG, not the mattress pulling him in to devour him and suffocate him. The question remains, then: what changed?
Jongin coughs several times, choking out acidic liquid and watching as it falls to the street, hoping somewhere in the back of his mind that it’ll hit the one boy’s head. They’ve hardly been on the rooftop for a few minutes, but all of a sudden he wants to leave. Out of the corner of his eye, he watches Kyungsoo leaning over the edge, smiling as he swings his feet around. As the glow over the horizon sears into the backs of his retinas, he remembers the warmth around his waist, against his back, the worn T-shirt fabric against his nose, the faint scent of baby powder, the fear-or whatever it was-evaporating into thin air, the off-key lullabies resonating against his ear. The weird feeling in his chest becomes unbearably foreign, swells and presses against his ribcage as though it’ll burst right out.
“This is stupid,” he snaps, turning around and shakily lowering himself from the edge. The sun sits a little more than halfway below the horizon as he stands by the exit, waiting for Kyungsoo to follow suit and open the door for him. “All of this is really stupid.”
Giggling at him, Kyungsoo pulls open the door to the staircase, again reaching to take his hand. Jongin pulls his arm away and squeezes briskly between Kyungsoo and the doorframe, sitting at the top step and slowly pushing his way down.
“Why do you do it this way?” Kyungsoo asks, sitting down once he’s caught up to Jongin and scooting down the steps in the same manner. “Ghostie thinks you’re weird.”
“Yeah, well maybe I think he’s fucking weird, too.”
The rest of the seven flights down, Jongin stays quiet, while Kyungsoo occasionally breaks out in short bursts of giggling or bouts of babbling to Ghostie. His voice fades into the background, behind the echo of the ECG, behind the faint hum of the warmth lingering on his skin in spite of the cold weather. When he finally gets back to his bed and curls up against the pillow with his diary, Kyungsoo tries to climb up and sit next to him. Half of his mattress sinks, and he imagines that in some lifetime far, far away from this one, God really does live in the heaven that people talk about, without scars on his fingertips.
It’s only a matter of weeks, he reminds himself, kicking Kyungsoo from the mattress. It’s only a matter of weeks.
February 18th, 2010
I feel the limited weight of my time seeping through my fingers like grains of sand from a broken hourglass. Perhaps-and this is what I would like to believe-it is mere boredom playing torture to the core of my imagination; but that most likely isn’t the case. In the time that has passed, the edges of my mind have been sipping from the banks of delirium. At times I imagine that the white paint from the confines of this cell drips onto my skin and burns through; I imagine that the mattress aims to swallow me whole and suffocate me inside layers of coarse stuffing and fabric; I imagine that the clocks grow teeth as the minutes pass, that the sounds of their ravenous jaws around my heart, crunching like the shrill shattering of glass, blends into the constant beeping of the ECG that has been ticking in my head since the beginning of time, until it devours the sharp rhythm as well, and replaces it. Yesterday, I felt afraid for the first time. Fear stems from the human despisement of death, yet I have been aware of the state of my health since I first learned to understand the human language. I don’t fear the inevitable end-I never have, for, unlike others, I was already born with its hands around my neck. I cannot comprehend what it was that led me to become the quivering, whimpering imbecile that I became yesterday. I cannot comprehend what it was that led me to request Kyungsoo’s presence in that time of desperation.
Furthermore, and what most confuses me, is the vividity with which I remember it, and the frequency with which my mind gravitates back towards it. This kind of feeling is nearly opposite of what a feeling is defined by. The warmth, as I remember it, is almost tangible. At any point in time, I can recall the exact way in which it seeped from his skin to mine, the exact texture of his clothing against my cheek; even when he is nowhere near me, I can still detect the faint aroma of baby powder and something unknown. These memories are also accompanied by a strange sense of yearning, though I don’t know what it is that I yearn for. Perhaps, to take his hand in mine; perhaps that, and nothing more.
Sighing, Jongin looks over at Kyungsoo who, despite forgetting to turn off the light by his nightstand, has fallen asleep with his face almost entirely covered by his pillow. Leaning back in his pillow, he closes his eyes for several seconds, then reads the final line of the new entry again.
Teeth digging into his lip, he sits up, stiff, and tears it out, crumpling it up and throwing it on the floor.
It’s only a matter of weeks.
( Part Two )
Pairings: Kaisoo
Rating: R
Genre: ??? Angst? Tragedy? ????
Warnings: Hover and read carefully!!
Length: ~7.3k (total ~14.8k)
Summary: God gives up divinity for a boy who sees ghosts.
(A/N: This was written for donawhalee during forjongin! This was one of my favorite prompts to write, ever, hands down. Although it didn't turn out as I planned it to, writing it was an incredible experience and I hope everyone enjoys it ^^ And of course, thanks to my betas evilmaknae0927 and jesstoast for being awesome and cheering me through this. ((For background on one of the scenes, you might want to glean over Franz Kafka's A Hunger Artist.)))
January 14, 2010
On His sixteenth birthday, God makes home in white spaces between concrete walls, gaps between sanity and wrinkled bedsheets stained with blood from chewed-up finger nails. He lies under lights of jaundice that are exactly four-hundred-and-thirty-two shades too bright for His liking and watches with His hair crackling from static on dry-cleaned pillowcases as seven different species of miniature moth and two different species of assassin fly make irritating noises before sizzling inside incandescent light bulbs that are three decades too old. They’ll tell you that God lives in the clouds with angels and halos and staircases of gold and silver and platinum, but that’s not true. God doesn’t live anywhere. I would know. I’ve been kicked out too many times from too many places to say otherwise.
The last letter is cut off by a startling jerk of the hand. Jongin’s pen goes flying across the room, clattering on the floor with the sharp clacking sounds of cheap plastic on cheap linoleum. This is familiar, this is routine, but the feeling is never any less frustrating. An ugly smudge of black ink now barrels angrily over neatly curled letters. Jongin growls with frustration before slamming the leather-bound journal shut and throwing it down onto the mattress, wondering if he should call the nurse to pick up the goddamn pen again or get up himself.
The time on the analog clock on the wall in front of him reads 11:46 PM. If the nurses do come, they’ll probably yell at him or give him dirty looks and not give his pen back, so he rolls out of bed and crawls over the dusty floor to pick it up, watching small drops of crimson ooze out from under his nails as he moves his hands. Crawling, Jongin thinks to himself, is not something God should have to do. Then again, God shouldn’t have to be orphaned by his parents and thrown from house to house until he gets kicked into a mental facility for “chewing on his bloody nails too much.”
As he reaches for his pen-which has so unfortunately rolled under another patient’s bed-he finds himself face-to-face with a smiling, wide-eyed boy staring at him from the opposite gap under the bed frame, eagerly reaching his arm out for the pen and snatching it away. Confused, Jongin opens his mouth to protest; before he can make a sound, the scrawny kid scrambles over the mattress and sprawls over on his back, head hanging upside-down over the edge and staring, wide-eyed and pale-faced and creepy, right at him.
“Hi,” he stage-whispers, a little too cheerfully and energetically for Jongin’s taste, “Hi! I’m Kyungsoo! You’re new here, right? Yeah! That’s why I was watching you! I watch people a lot! Oh, I got your pen for you! Here, here you go!” He waves the pen wildly in front of the other’s face, and Jongin narrows his eyes and snatches it away briskly.
“I could have gotten it myself, you know,” he snaps.
With that, he stands up, brushes off his clothing, and storms back to his bed, grabbing his diary from the mattress and slamming it down on the nightstand along with his pen. After indignantly shoving himself under the thick covers, he refuses to look at Kyungsoo, instead forcefully squinting at the boring white of the smooth ceiling. This is fucking stupid, he thinks to himself, God doesn’t even get patterned walls to stare at.
After several minutes of squinting, he feels as though the boredom will eat him alive, so he squeezes his eyes shut and opens them to stare at a different part of the ceiling that-guess-fucking-what-looks exactly the same. It feels as though the mattress is slowly devouring him, too, wrapped stuffing growing higher and higher around him as he sinks down into it, waiting for him to press close enough into the center so that it can envelop him through osmosis and suck him into its rough, crappy thread-count membrane. He wonders if it’ll feel like living in the clouds while he suffocates between cramped layers of cotton or whatever the hell is inside of a mattress. Whether it does or not, it’ll probably feel better than staring at the stupid, blank ceiling while he can feel the creepy maniac’s eyes boring holes into his head from twenty feet away.
He’s just about to turn his back on the other when his hand spasmodically pulls away from his mouth. The sound of burgundy spattering across the pristine white of his comforter comes in a sudden forte against the backdrop of silence in the dim room, and he jerks into a sitting position, startled by the sound of his own blood.
Kyungsoo giggles when Jongin curses; he can barely stand a few seconds of the incessant tittering before he turns to face him, eyes burning with enough fury to make Kyungsoo giggle just the slightest bit quieter before he asks, “Hey you, your fingers are bleeding, right? Did you know that?”
“Yes, I fucking know,” he scoffs, turning back to watch the blood pool at his fingertips in bright contrast to the bedsheets. “Of course they’re fucking bleeding.”
Kyungsoo blinks at him before breaking out into a fit of giggles again, leaning over to shut his nightstand light off and talking to the empty space in front of him. “Don’t you think he should stop biting them if they’re bleeding, Ghostie?”
Jongin huffs and shuts his own light, turning his back to Kyungsoo and snuggling as deep as he can into the mattress, willing for it to gobble him up while he clutches the covers and pulls them over his head.
“Don’t you think I wish I could?” he mumbles, chewing on his lip enough to make it bleed. “Insane piece of shit-for-brains.”
“Did you back-talk me yesterday, after I asked Ghostie if you should stop biting your nails?”
Jongin wakes up the next morning to a disheveled swirl of black hair and pale skin and swollen pink lips smiling at him about two inches away from his face. Giant eyes of deep brown blink right above his own and he jerks upright, so disoriented by grogginess and shock that he slams the top of his head against the headboard. Kyungsoo claps, bringing his nose so close to Jongin’s own that he can feel it breathing in the air he exhales.
“Ghostie says you did. He told me you back-talked me. That is very rude!”
He doesn’t respond-just clutches his head and curls against his knees, groaning in pain, while Kyungsoo refuses to move his goddamn face out of his personal space.
“Do you think he’s okay, Ghostie?” he asks in hushed tones, as though it’s some sort of secret that he cares to know if Jongin is okay.
Jongin thinks that he just gets stupider and stupider. “I’m right fucking here, you know?” he grumbles, breathing in deeply to control the throbbing inside his skull. “You can just ask me.”
“That’s a bad word. Why do you use that word all the time? It’s very bad. Ghostie doesn’t like bad words-”
“Shut up and go away.”
Before he realizes it, his hand somehow finds its way to his lips again, and he’s biting on nails that aren’t even there anymore, teeth slipping right off the edge of his cuticles and digging harshly into the raw skin underneath. He tastes the copper on his tongue while Kyungsoo stares at him with those creepy eyes that take up half his face, and sucks it off his fingers when it starts to pool over the edge, until his fingers look like small bowls of tomato soup and he can’t keep up with the bleeding anymore. Sticking his index finger in his mouth, he laps up the metallic taste and watches the rest of it drip rapidly onto white fabric, until he feels something stifling and familiar clench his stomach and crawl up into his throat. Glancing at Kyungsoo, he mumbles weakly, “I said shut up and go away.”
Kyungsoo stays, unblinking and fascinated by the drops of maroon splattering onto bleached sheets.
The finger inside his mouth is burning. Acid pools behind his gums and under his tongue, and he wants to spit it at Kyungsoo to make him go away, but before he can, it all comes up, bile from an empty stomach pouring itself all over the covers and onto his shirt and splatting a little onto Kyungsoo’s clothing, but Kyungsoo just blinks at him, bewildered, before poking the button that calls the nurses and staring at him more. They rush over, each and every one of them shoving pills and cups of water at him, until he takes them all and yells at them that he’s okay. They glare at him and scatter out the door, leaving Kyungsoo behind, still staring at him, and Jongin wishes he had puked straight onto his stupid creepy face.
Another nurse shuffles in, ushering him off the bed to change his sheets, and tells Kyungsoo, “The mean vomiting boy will have to stay with you for a while, okay? Let him take a nap on your bed if he asks you politely.” He nods, eagerly, and Jongin looks at the window across the room and wonders how many floors up he is.
“Fuck you,” he retorts, wrinkling his nose at the nurse. She mimics his expression and shoos him away, muttering something under her breath as she strips the bed.
Suddenly, Kyungsoo grabs his hand and Jongin jumps, startled, before properly facing him. There’s this ridiculously pitiful look in his eyes, so Jongin sneers at him and smacks his hand away.
“Ghostie,” he murmurs quietly, turning away from Jongin and wringing his hands in front of him, “do you think he’s okay?”
Jongin gapes at him like he’s insane-which he is; they apparently all are-and after a few moments of silence, Kyungsoo looks at him sadly, shuffling dejectedly over to his own bed to curl up and sleep.
He doesn’t wake up for the rest of the day, and all Jongin can do is stare at the stupid boring ceiling.
January 15, 2010
I’ve probably said this a million times already, but I’ll say it again. They’ll tell you a lot of things about God that aren’t true. They say that He’s all-powerful, that He can watch His people and draw out lines of fate that twist and turn and connect them to other people and places and events, but the truth is, God can barely even control Himself. Sixteen years of living, and God can barely even stand without looking like Huntington’s disease or a fucked up basal ganglia. Sixteen years of living, and God still bites His nails and sips His own blood like soup, vomits on empty stomachs and chews His bottom lip into pulp. More than anything, though, God hurts; people abuse Him and make a pariah of Him, because He isn't the fictional fallacy they write Him to be. The thing is, though, God isn't anything like that. I am brilliance manifest in brokenness, and that makes me all the better.
Jongin recognizes the nightmare as soon as it begins. He’s watching himself in the ICU of the hospital he was born in through a thick glass window; his biological mother and father and the doctor stand by the crib, whispering to each other while he sleeps-withered, jaundice and grey, corpselike-under flickering doses of UV light that don’t seem to be doing anything. His father signs off a check and slumps over, and his mother rubs his back comfortingly. “The landlord will give us an extension on the rent,” she whispers, and the doctor smiles and tells them that the baby will be okay. Jongin narrows his eyes, glaring with anger hot enough to bore holes straight through the baby’s cadaverous outline: he should never have been born.
His finger twitches, and the scene fast-forwards in a blur of his father’s debts and his mother’s weariness, and his own selfish cries piercing through the air far after twilight. Time moves too quickly for him to make anything out, but he can vaguely hear his parents fighting. It stops.
They’re in the hospital again. This time, he’s two-and-a-half. His lips are bleeding, and his parents have wrapped his fingers through and through in cotton balls, now drenched with crimson. Pieces of wispy, white fabric stick to the deep gashes on his lips. The doctor speaks, and his mother buries her face behind her hands and cries, while his father hugs her close and slumps over again, discreetly writing out another check.
A two-and-a-half year old retard stares intently at the cotton wrapped around his fingers, and sticks them back in his mouth, like teething toys.
Jongin begins to pound on the window, screaming that he’s smart, that his HPRT deficiency doesn’t mean he’ll be stupid forever, that they need to keep him, that they’ll only have to deal with him for eighteen more years, maximum, before he withers away, but they can’t hear him behind the big glass barrier. He can’t even hear himself.
If he wanted to change it, this could be the recurring dream with a happy ending, where he isn’t diagnosed with a dumb disease, or where he is but his parents decide to keep him, or where his foster families don’t keep kicking him out, or where they suddenly discover a cure, or where he just isn’t born at all. Lucid dreaming is rudimentary compared to his other mental feats. But what would be the point in that? None of those things would ever happen anyway, and denying himself reality would only make it all hit harder.
At some point, he feels the tissue of his fist starting to bruise against the window, feels the corners of his mouth pushing themselves down, feels the tingling burn in his nose and eyes. His screaming turns hysterical until it dissipates into a mess of choked-up sobs, and he can’t pound on the window anymore, he can’t feel his arm, and they won’t ever hear him, but maybe it doesn’t even matter, because who the fuck wants a retard for a baby, who the fuck wants a retard for anything, who the fuck would ever want to keep him, the retarded baby who bleeds on everything he touches because he can’t stop chewing his retarded fingers. They should have killed him when he was born. They should have let him die.
Eventually, consciousness seeps far enough into his bones for him to hear the distant sound of his own whimpering, accompanied by the familiar crinkling of someone flipping the pages of a book. With a few staggered breaths, he forces the burning sensation in his eyes away, opening them in a groggy squint as he glares, aggravated, at the bright ceiling lights. He can see the shadowed outline of at least four dead bugs in the glass casing of the bulb above him. Disgusted, he turns onto his side to check the clock on his nightstand-only to find that Kyungsoo, that fucking idiot Kyungsoo, is flipping contentedly through the pages of his goddamn diary.
He doesn't even know what to say. What does he even say to someone who wakes up in the morning and decides it would be oh-so-pedestrian to read someone’s diary? Squinting with the effort, he hoists himself up onto his elbows, steadying himself to smack Kyungsoo's rudeness straight out of him-and realizes he doesn't even know what to do then. Does he punch Kyungsoo in the jaw? Slap him? If he breaks the Kyungsoo’s nose, will he stop being such a nuisance?
Out of the blue, Jongin's right arm gives out from under him, flying recklessly in Kyungsoo's direction to whack the diary straight out of his hands, then swinging upwards to connect with Kyungsoo's chin. Jongin watches, horrified, as his diary falls face-open against the dusty linoleum, while Kyungsoo stumbles backwards with a startled yelp, steps coming just shy of squashing the precious leather journal splayed across the floor.
"I didn't step on it!" he declares with relief as he falls backwards onto his butt, inches away from sitting on the book. "It's okay! It's okay! I bit my tongue though-" he sticks his tongue out, crossing his eyes in an attempt to examine the damage, then looks up at Jongin, "-ith it bleeding, Jong-nini?"
Forgetting that he lacks complete control of his right arm at the moment, Jongin attempts to hoist himself back into a steady position; almost immediately, it gives out from under him. The momentum of his weight pushes him from the bed in an awkward tangle of limbs, and he falls smack on top of Kyungsoo, knocking him out of his sitting position. Wary of trying and failing again, Jongin stays where he is, hoping as hard as he can that he’s broken one of Kyungsoo’s ribs.
Instead, Kyungsoo giggles, holding their weight easily as he props himself up. “You’re very skinny! Ghostie says that’s not healthy. He says that he will give you his lunch today.”
“Well, Ghostie is fucking stupid,” Jongin snaps, sitting up on Kyungsoo’s stomach with as much force as he can muster. “Why the hell does he want to give me his stupid lunch? I already get my own goddamn lunch.”
He starts to add that he can’t keep anything down, anyway-sooner or later, they’re going to stick needles into his veins to keep him alive because for some odd reason, they have to go and keep every damn person alive regardless of whether there’s even a point to it-but Kyungsoo interrupts him with a sudden silence, complexion oddly morose.
Jongin watches, confused but apathetic, as Kyungsoo meticulously brushes off the diary and returns it, pressing it gently against his chest. He wriggles out from underneath Jongin’s seat, carefully folding Jongin’s arms over the journal before regressing to his bed and slipping between covers in the fetal position.
Hours later, after lunch, dinner, and a few unfortunate rounds of vomiting in the nearest toilet, Jongin finds himself glaring with unbridled accusation at the ceiling again, just about ready to shoot a hole in it to make it less boring, or maybe in his own head so he doesn’t have to be bored anymore.
“Shut up, Ghostie.”
Jongin bites harder into his bottom lip than he already is, all too prepared to begin ripping all of his hair out. Fuck Ghostie, whatever the hell that is. Fuck Kyungsoo. Everyone just needs to shut the fuck up, and this whole damn place needs to stop being so fucking irritating. While he writhes against the mattress in aggravation, Kyungsoo continues. “It’s just a story. Gods don’t die.”
Completely and utterly bewildered, Jongin snaps his gaze toward Kyungsoo. After a few minutes of quiet, Kyungsoo turns toward him as well, eyes barely peeking out behind the covers he’s piled over his face. “Is your name really Jongin? Are you God?”
“What the hell do you think?”
“Then,” Kyungsoo’s voice suddenly fades to a whisper, “are you going to die?”
Jongin doesn’t bother to answer, instead flipping around to face the opposite direction, tugging the covers over his head as tightly as he can and squeezing his eyes shut. For once, Kyungsoo respects Jongin’s silence; within several minutes, Jongin can hear him snoring quietly through the thick stuffing of his comforter. The pain that shoots through his hand as he continues to bite on his fingers suddenly escalates until it’s intolerable, and Jongin tears them away from his teeth, reaching to the nightstand for his diary and grabbing his pen.
January 16, 2010
This place is beginning to feel a little bit like heaven-but it’s not what you think it is in the slightest. Heaven is indeed filled with clouds and angels and halos and staircases, but the clouds are everywhere, suffocating, white and boring, poised to swallow you whole; the halos are rusted, useless, hovering over good-intentions on a death march; the staircases spiral down instead of up: down, down, down, all the way into nowhere; and the angels are nothing but vapid imbeciles. I know this because I will probably live here for however long it takes to complete my forced traversal of the mortal world. They tell you that God lives in heaven-I used to live nowhere. But if I am to live anywhere, it is in heaven; if this is heaven, then Kyungsoo must be an angel; if Kyungsoo is an angel, then I hold no faith in the future of any supernatural realm, for they are all just as witless as the rest of the cretins on this Earth.
I shall patiently await the end of my stay. In this purgatory, my brilliance manifests for naught but to be sucked dry from the thin, cracking shell which guards my divinity.
Death lingers quietly in the air between his covers. He breathes it in, exhales it, tastes the blood seeping out from the scars on his lips and fingers.
Tenderly, it lulls him to sleep.
The weeks pass with such tedium that Jongin begins to ask the nurses for the date every morning after Kyungsoo interrupts his sleep, for fear that time has been repeating itself. His attempts to argue his sanity have long since faded; the constant, overbearing ennui lays waste to his painstakingly developed mental prowess, and the juxtaposition of this new, epic listlessness to his previous intellectual strain agitates his imagination. If he stares at the walls long enough and squints hard enough, he can make himself see and feel the stale, yellowing white paint dripping from the ceilings and walls and onto his skin, where it burns like acid and he lets it, until he chokes on the salty copper pooling in the back of his throat, or until one of his limbs decide to take a spontaneous trip out of the invisible straightjacket he lies in. At night, the digital and analog clocks grow mouths and cackle at him like Salem witches, slithering into the ECG that perpetually throbs in his ears, devouring the digital neon peaks with such gusto that he can hear his mortality crunched between their jaws, fracturing their glass teeth, treble-clef staccato blending into the beeping of digitized heart rates until he no longer listens to his own heartbeat; rather, the tinkle of porcelain against chipped porcelain.
His cognitive state deteriorates before his eyes: his muscles spasm more, he defaults to slouching again when he sits up, with his arms bent at the elbows like zombies' until he forces himself into something more proper, his nails and lips bleed and scar and bleed again, more than ever; the inside of his skull itches over some foreign burn that fogs around his cerebral cortex. Kyungsoo bothers him more often-maybe he notices-smiles at him a little more tentatively, offers him his lunch, hovers even closer to the call button for the nurses. All it does is piss Jongin off, because calling the nurses won’t help him in the slightest, and nor will Kyungsoo’s lilted lips or inedible hospital gruel, but Kyungsoo sticks around and stares anyway, as though he’s studying the process of existential decomposition.
Eventually, though, Jongin has to admit to himself that Kyungsoo is the only thing that ever changes in the slightest. He doesn’t repeat the same things every day, though they’re always similar, and he sometimes tries to feed Ghostie, dumping his entire tray of lunch on the floor in the process, and sometimes he argues with Ghostie over trivial things, and sometimes he tells Jongin nonsensical, disconnected stories, undeterred by the fierce demands for him to shut the fuck up. It’s a genuine paradox-the little influxes in Kyungsoo’s behavior are the only things that draw his attention, rescuing him from an otherwise stagnant world, yet the more they draw his attention, the more aggravated he becomes.
As the weeks pass by and Jongin feels the sibilant boiling of insanity in his cerebral arteries, as he watches his condition regress until his enzyme deficiency practically becomes visible, his attentiveness to any and every fluctuation grows until he can pinpoint the exact way in which Kyungsoo’s bed hair differs from morning to morning. He recants in his head the number of seconds that pass between each time Kyungsoo blinks, and calculates the average the next day so he can compare it to the previous. He remembers every dip in Kyungsoo’s voice with every laugh and knows exactly in what places they change.
Still, the mental stimulation comes nowhere near what he’s accustomed to putting himself through.
Tonight, Jongin turns to look at the digital clock for the some-hundredth time. His front teeth are buried deep-almost halfway-into his bottom lip, and his fingertips ache and itch, prickling with numbness that makes him wish he could just bite them straight off. 4:53 AM stares back at him, watching his every move. It sends an electrifying discomfort through his spine. 4:54 AM curves into a sneering crescent; 4:55 AM parts its lips to reveal malignant fangs, winking at him in neon red; 4:56 AM thuds in his chest, the sound of crunching glass replacing the rhythm of his cardiac cycle. Someone whimpers.
“Kyungsoo,” he whispers, urgent, voice cracking. Already, he regrets it but, “are you awake?"
Slowly, he turns his gaze to Kyungsoo while time cackles behind his eardrums, louder and louder; he’s petrified, so still that he can’t even move his lips to speak again, limbs uncharacteristically frozen in place, again refusing him control.
Millennia pass before 4:57 registers, low bass beneath the piercing sound of shattering crystal. Hopelessly, he squeezes his eyes shut. Kyungsoo, he begs, Kyungsoo, Kyungsoo, Kyungsoo, wake up, wake up, please. It’s the only name he knows other than his birth parents’ and his own.
He can’t keep track of the minutes anymore. He keeps his eyes shut with such force that tears begin to form in the corners. The noise of the glass in his chest is deafening. The person is still whimpering. Maybe it’s his own voice. He wants it to shut up. Shut up. Shut up. His whole body is numb. Still. It’s cold. Something warm on his cheek: tender. Half of his mattress sinks. He might roll off. Tumbling down a green grass hill, maybe, with flowers and butterflies, without scars on his fingers. His mattress moves around him. Warmth, around his waist, against his back. Soft. The cackling stops. The crunching stops. The whimpering stops. It’s quiet. He can hear his own heartbeat. His eyes relax, slowly. He snuggles deep into the mattress, towards the source of warmth, turns to it, nuzzles closer. It’s so quiet. Peaceful. Home, maybe. Heaven as they say it is. God can sleep here, in the clouds, with the angels.
At noon, he wakes up to Kyungsoo’s tray clattering on the floor again. “I’m trying to feed Ghostie.”
“Honey,” the nurse coos, exasperation and insincerity oozing from the gaps between clenched teeth, “Ghostie doesn’t need to be fed-we explained this yesterday, remember? Eat your lunch, sweetie.”
Jongin squints at her, at Kyungsoo, at the tray on the floor.
“I feed Ghostie every day,” he retorts. His nose scrunches up, lines forming above the bridge, and maybe Jongin’s wrong, but he thinks Kyungsoo has just raised his voice. “I feed Ghostie every day. You know it. Ghostie needs food, I do this every day.”
“Kyungsoo, darling, you need to eat more. This food is being paid for, just for you. Not for Ghostie. Do you understand? Eat.”
“Why are you making Ghostie hungry today? You never make me keep Ghostie hungry the other days! I have to feed Ghostie!” Bending over, he picks up the tray and drops it again. The soup spills all over the floor, and the boxed entreé skids around on the plastic surface. “Ghostie, eat your food! You’re making trouble.”
“I tell you this every day! Ghostie doesn’t exist!” the nurse snaps, suddenly, picking up the boxed meal and opening it up. Hesitating, she smiles again and adds, “Darling-”
Kyungsoo snatches the box back, and Jongin wants to laugh at the surprise on the nurse’s face. Just as quickly, the nurse pries his hands from the box; it goes on like this for a while. On the one hand, Jongin’s amused: they have this argument almost every day, until Kyungsoo starts eating to shoo the nurse away and proceeds to dump the rest on the floor once she’s gone. But he’s never snatched it back before, and the nurse has never seemed so frustrated-nor has she ever called for the other nurses to try and pacify him like she is now, nor has he ever resisted the force-feeding this long, this fiercely. Jongin’s eyes dart to the clock-they’ve been trying to get Kyungsoo to eat for seven minutes now-and Kyungsoo’s protests have escalated to screaming and shouting and the nurses look like crazed surgeons, holding him down and trying to shove food into his mouth.
He decides it best to not think about last night. Maybe everyone is at their breaking point today.
There’s one final, screeching protest before Jongin realizes that Kyungsoo is crying.
“If he doesn’t want to fucking eat, you can’t fucking make him eat!” he yells, startled by his own voice, but continues regardless. He pushes his way through the nurses, forcing down the bile building up in the back of his throat. “What the fuck are you doing? You’re supposed to fucking take care of him, you fucking idiots, where the hell is this cheapass asylum anyway, you’re all fucking unqualified idiots. Leave him the fuck alone.”
Almost instantaneously, Kyungsoo silences, wiping his eyes and blinking meekly at the five spoons shoved in front of his face. Hesitating, he opens his mouth and leans forward, taking in a mouthful of withered salad. The nurses collectively sigh, confused by both Kyungsoo’s obedience and Jongin’s sudden ability to speak for someone who isn’t himself, but too tired to care. Kyungsoo tentatively picks up one of the spoons and begins eating the remaining contents on his own.
When they leave, he keeps eating, staring at Jongin, eyes wide in shock. Just as surprised at himself, Jongin stares at his own reflection in Kyungsoo’s irises. His fingertips are bleeding into his mouth again, along with a familiar sour taste flooding under his tongue and behind his teeth.
“Ghostie says you shouldn’t bite your fingers,” Kyungsoo whispers. The words are so quiet it’s as if he’s exhaling them, just breathing through moving lips. He reaches forward for Jongin’s wrist, to grab it and pull it away, and Jongin feels something churning in the pit of his stomach, like he’s going to throw up again except that it tickles a little.
Just before Kyungsoo’s skin makes contact with his own, he jerks away and briskly walks back to his nightstand. “Whatever,” he mumbles, picking up his diary and his pen. “Ghostie doesn’t know a damn thing.”
Jongin writes for a few hours, connecting the entries from last year into a story, summarizing the weeks that he hasn’t been writing because they’ve all been the same. He doesn’t notice at what point Kyungsoo begins to hover over his shoulder again to watch him write-he doesn’t even remember at which point during these tedious weeks he stopped minding. When he finishes though, when he begins to write about what happened yesterday, 4:53, 4:54, 4:55, 4:56, 4:57, he can suddenly feel Kyungsoo’s gaze boring holes through his grip on the pen, searing the edges of his diary.
“Do you not remember?” he asks, smiling, poking Jongin gently in the arm a few times.
“Remember what?”
Frowning, Kyungsoo looks nervously to his left, then nods, presumably, to Ghostie. “Ghostie woke me up last night because he said you were saying my name. So I-”
Without warning, Jongin pushes Kyungsoo out of the way and tosses his diary recklessly onto the mattress. “You must have been dreaming,” he snaps. His heart rate escalates rapidly, as if he’s suddenly being chased by something, and his stomach twists around in its place. “I don’t even know your name. I don’t care. Leave me alone, Ky-you idiot.”
“But-”
He doesn’t know what he’s doing in the slightest. He probably should have brought his diary with him, but he’s already halfway down the hall, half-running-half-stumbling toward the emergency staircase as fast as his uncoordinated legs will carry him. When he finally gets to the door, he fumbles with the handle, and it takes all the strength he can muster for him to push it open. He slips on the first step three times before he resorts to crawling on his hands and knees, all the flights up, until he reaches a door labeled “ROOF ACCESS: AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY.” Panting with the effort, he rises to his feet, leaning all his weight onto the push bar-which is clearly far from enough-until it suddenly gives out, sending him stumbling forward and crashing into the cement wall bordering the edge.
“Jong-nini-”
“LEAVE ME ALONE, KYUNGSOO, LEAVE ME THE FUCK ALONE.”
For a while, Kyungsoo hesitates. “Ghostie says you don’t mean that.”
“Will your stupid fucking Ghostie just shut the fuck up? Leave me the fuck alone you dead piece of shit.”
“I don’t think you mean it,” he mumbles, staring at his hands and wringing them together. “Otherwise you wouldn’t have-”
“I didn’t!” Jongin throws his arms up in the air and stands up, teeth again digging into his bottom lip. After several minutes of extreme exertion, he manages to scramble onto the cement ledge, throwing his legs over the side and staring at the sidewalk. The people are no taller than his pinky finger.
A breeze cards back his bangs, just strong enough to make him feel like he might fall backwards. By the time it fades, Kyungsoo still hasn’t spoken, and Jongin doesn’t check if he’s still there. He’s not sure which he’d rather have. If his neurons act up again, misfire again or whatever it is that they do, he might just fling himself off. He’ll fall flat onto the cement, twisted up into some indeterminate shape, bones broken everywhere, no bigger than his pinky finger. His diary-book hybrid will never be published, but maybe no one wants to read about the real God. Everyone likes to think that God is an abstract figure in the sky who takes care of people, but that’s really not who He is. He’s just a boy, maybe two boys, or lots of little boys, or maybe girls, making stabs at the impossible. Mastering their own worlds. Taking control of what they can’t control. God is a manifestation of suffering trying to eliminate itself and make things better even though not everything can be fixed. God is out of control and in control all at the same time, because He works for it. But no one wants to hear that. He should probably stop writing.
It occurs to him that if he falls, Kyungsoo might see. He’ll be a splat on the ground, like a bug, and if Kyungsoo holds up his pinky finger he’ll not be any bigger. He’s bitten into his lip so hard that a part of it has just come off far enough to flop around in his mouth, and he plays with it on the hinge it’s clinging by, pushing it around on the tip of his tongue, tasting something bitter. A boy with bulky headphones sitting on his head walks down the street, reading a book while he grips a pencil between pursed lips. He’s wearing a leather jacket, a loose T-shirt with a skull on it, black skinny jeans, sneakers. Gripping the cement edge with one hand, Jongin holds up his pinky again. He breathes in.
“Kyungsoo,” he starts, turning around, not sure if he expects Kyungsoo to be there or if he’s simply hoping. “Sit he-”
A disbelieving chuckle interrupts his habit of sucking the blood from his lip. Kyungsoo has been quietly standing right behind him, hands hovering just around his waist, poised to grab him should he fall. When Jongin turns around, he darts back, hurriedly folding his hands behind him.
“G-Ghostie s-said I should b-b-be careful, but you said to leave you alone, Ghostie said I should watch you, I was watching you and-”
“Sit with me.”
Kyungsoo blinks a few times, reactionless, and then breaks out into a smile, scrambling recklessly over the edge. Jongin laughs: Kyungsoo climbs over funny, so that he’s facing the wrong way-back to the view, facing the door to the entrance, and now he can’t turn around. He really is stupid, but maybe Jongin should be happy about that, because he doubts Kyungsoo would like him at all if he had even half a brain in his dumb head.
“Don’t let me fall, okay, Jong-nini?”
“Right,” he replies, warily. He wasn’t even strong enough to push open the door. If Kyungsoo falls, if he loses his balance, it’s not like he’ll miraculously have the strength necessary to catch Kyungsoo, let alone hold onto him. Suddenly, he’s annoyed again.
The boy with the bulky headphones walks around the same block five more times before Kyungsoo finally finishes turning around. At that point, Jongin can already feel the irritation building up in his chest and settling thick in his throat. He doesn’t even remember why he asked Kyungsoo to sit with him in the first place. Maybe, after last night, Kyungsoo’s stupidity has worn off on him.
Whatever weight on his chest dissipates then reforms, just as heavy, but with an uncomfortable new warmth. For as long as he can remember, Jongin has been ready to die. He was born that way, with death in his veins, occupying the empty gaps in his brain where it misformed, filling the space between his muscles, pushing life out through his fingers and lips. Fear-as he’s read in novels, seen in movies, and heard in the news-comes from the instinctive will to survive. If he’s always been prepared to die, he should never have anything to be afraid of. All these weeks, he’s never been afraid of what his imagination presents to him: not the acid dripping from the ceiling onto his skin, not the clocks and the sound of their glass teeth crunching in his chest over the imaginary beeping of the ECG, not the mattress pulling him in to devour him and suffocate him. The question remains, then: what changed?
Jongin coughs several times, choking out acidic liquid and watching as it falls to the street, hoping somewhere in the back of his mind that it’ll hit the one boy’s head. They’ve hardly been on the rooftop for a few minutes, but all of a sudden he wants to leave. Out of the corner of his eye, he watches Kyungsoo leaning over the edge, smiling as he swings his feet around. As the glow over the horizon sears into the backs of his retinas, he remembers the warmth around his waist, against his back, the worn T-shirt fabric against his nose, the faint scent of baby powder, the fear-or whatever it was-evaporating into thin air, the off-key lullabies resonating against his ear. The weird feeling in his chest becomes unbearably foreign, swells and presses against his ribcage as though it’ll burst right out.
“This is stupid,” he snaps, turning around and shakily lowering himself from the edge. The sun sits a little more than halfway below the horizon as he stands by the exit, waiting for Kyungsoo to follow suit and open the door for him. “All of this is really stupid.”
Giggling at him, Kyungsoo pulls open the door to the staircase, again reaching to take his hand. Jongin pulls his arm away and squeezes briskly between Kyungsoo and the doorframe, sitting at the top step and slowly pushing his way down.
“Why do you do it this way?” Kyungsoo asks, sitting down once he’s caught up to Jongin and scooting down the steps in the same manner. “Ghostie thinks you’re weird.”
“Yeah, well maybe I think he’s fucking weird, too.”
The rest of the seven flights down, Jongin stays quiet, while Kyungsoo occasionally breaks out in short bursts of giggling or bouts of babbling to Ghostie. His voice fades into the background, behind the echo of the ECG, behind the faint hum of the warmth lingering on his skin in spite of the cold weather. When he finally gets back to his bed and curls up against the pillow with his diary, Kyungsoo tries to climb up and sit next to him. Half of his mattress sinks, and he imagines that in some lifetime far, far away from this one, God really does live in the heaven that people talk about, without scars on his fingertips.
It’s only a matter of weeks, he reminds himself, kicking Kyungsoo from the mattress. It’s only a matter of weeks.
February 18th, 2010
I feel the limited weight of my time seeping through my fingers like grains of sand from a broken hourglass. Perhaps-and this is what I would like to believe-it is mere boredom playing torture to the core of my imagination; but that most likely isn’t the case. In the time that has passed, the edges of my mind have been sipping from the banks of delirium. At times I imagine that the white paint from the confines of this cell drips onto my skin and burns through; I imagine that the mattress aims to swallow me whole and suffocate me inside layers of coarse stuffing and fabric; I imagine that the clocks grow teeth as the minutes pass, that the sounds of their ravenous jaws around my heart, crunching like the shrill shattering of glass, blends into the constant beeping of the ECG that has been ticking in my head since the beginning of time, until it devours the sharp rhythm as well, and replaces it. Yesterday, I felt afraid for the first time. Fear stems from the human despisement of death, yet I have been aware of the state of my health since I first learned to understand the human language. I don’t fear the inevitable end-I never have, for, unlike others, I was already born with its hands around my neck. I cannot comprehend what it was that led me to become the quivering, whimpering imbecile that I became yesterday. I cannot comprehend what it was that led me to request Kyungsoo’s presence in that time of desperation.
Furthermore, and what most confuses me, is the vividity with which I remember it, and the frequency with which my mind gravitates back towards it. This kind of feeling is nearly opposite of what a feeling is defined by. The warmth, as I remember it, is almost tangible. At any point in time, I can recall the exact way in which it seeped from his skin to mine, the exact texture of his clothing against my cheek; even when he is nowhere near me, I can still detect the faint aroma of baby powder and something unknown. These memories are also accompanied by a strange sense of yearning, though I don’t know what it is that I yearn for. Perhaps, to take his hand in mine; perhaps that, and nothing more.
Sighing, Jongin looks over at Kyungsoo who, despite forgetting to turn off the light by his nightstand, has fallen asleep with his face almost entirely covered by his pillow. Leaning back in his pillow, he closes his eyes for several seconds, then reads the final line of the new entry again.
Teeth digging into his lip, he sits up, stiff, and tears it out, crumpling it up and throwing it on the floor.
It’s only a matter of weeks.
( Part Two )