His Own Shadow
Title: His Own Shadow - part I
Author: pins_and_wheels
Rating: PG-13 to NC-17
Warning: AU, dark, non-con, beta-less
Length: 40k and growing, this bit is 2.5k
Pairing: Kai/Taemin (main), Key/Taemin, one-sided Minho/Taemin, Jinki/Taemin
Summary: Taemin loses a part of himself he doesn't know how to hold on to.
A/N: Part I - still not a lot going on. If I knew how to use livejournal at all I could maybe post this stupid thing in larger chunks, but it's just not happening.
prologue
~ * ~
Normally, Taemin sleeps in until the very last possible moment - he is seventeen, after all.
Most days take him five or six drowsy gropings of his snooze button before he’s able to so much as fall out of bed, and not until halfway through his morning shower can he achieve anything close to what might be considered consciousness. He values the few hours he has to sleep. What with school, friends, and his dizzying list of extracirriculars, Taemin feels he barely has time spare to breathe, let alone the luxury of a full night’s worth of rest.
Not normal, therefore, was waking up as though he had been dropped from a great height, feeling his sheets slam into him like a brick wall.
“Oh god, fuck, fuck. Oh god.”
Taemin registers the sound of his own voice before anything else can sink in; he’s saying something - no, moaning, nonsensical strings of curses and groans. He’s hoarse, the same way he always is on the wrong end of one of Kibum’s epic house parties, which tells him he’s been making same noises for hours.
It takes physically muffling his mouth with balled up duvet to get the sound bubbling out of his body to stop. He waits until he's only panting against wet cotton. Then he forces himself to roll over, out of his mountain of pillows, so he can verify that he is, in fact, in his bedroom, rather than at the bottom of an elevator shaft.
When he opens his eyes to nothingness, sheer panic strikes; sleep addled brain fumbling his nightmare with his reality - where had he landed? It takes a beat and a shift on the glowing face of his alarm - but no, he realizes; this is simply what 4:32 in the morning looks like.
His nerves wilt,
and it suddenly occurs to Taemin how much physical discomfort he's in.
He aches; his entire body aches. His back muscles feel horribly sore and the skin rubbed raw, done over with steel wool. His head is pounding, his limbs throb as though they had been yanked from their sockets and stuck back in place for appearance’s sake. His chest - his chest - his chest…he can’t catch his breath; he’s winded for some reason, completely, his lungs unwilling to retain air, like it’s big gulps of water he’s trying to pant in instead.
He aches; down to the knuckles in his pinky toes.
The flu? He swallows carefully - his throat, while dry, doesn’t burn the way it should if he had contracted a virus. His skin is sticky but he doesn’t feel feverish. He doesn’t even feel as bleary as he does on normal mornings; he’s wide-awake, clear-headed and in pain.
Taemin closes his eyes and tries to remember.
His dream - for he’s sure he had just been dreaming - sits in his mind like an upended jigsaw puzzle. A pile of similarly colored pieces. The only part he can recall clearly is hands around his neck trying to squeeze the life out of him - the rest, only darkness and fear so potent it inspires nausea. He can still taste his terror in the sour sludge at the back of his throat.
Taemin gives himself a few minutes to collect his thoughts, plucking maybe-details out of the murk, but soon grows bored. Reflecting on snippets of a dream that were proving as easy to hold onto as water was a waste of time (even good-for-nothing-except-dreaming-time, the bloody ass crack of dawn). Freud would probably have a lot to say about pushing himself off the top of a building, but Taemin’s not interested in whatever message his subconscious is trying to send. He’s just pissed it woke him up.
Eventually he hauls his battered body out of bed, standing at the foot of it and stretching each muscle carefully to assess the damage. When he’s assured himself there’s nothing seriously (or, at least, visibly) wrong, he decides to take a shower, because he doesn’t know what else to do so early in the morning and his sweat-saoked impression staring back at him from his bed is taunting.
He’s on his way out, casting one last suspicious glance over to his rumpled sheets when something very odd happens. Stranger even than his nightmare, or rising before the sun or the inexplicable chest pain that continues to throb.
Taemin trips.
He trips.
Not just trips, but trips spectacularly. He is so unprepared for the rare moment of gracelessness that he doesn’t even try to break the fall - it feels like slow motion as he watches the floor jump up to greet him, connecting with his left knee and hip, belly-flopping and just barely managing to turn his head to the side to prevent a full on face plant.
Taemin lays there awhile, expression befuddled, trying to remember the last time in his life that he had actually fallen over. He scrolls back years. Over countless hours of dance practice and pre-teenage that should be highlighted by this sort of ungainliness, over painfully awkward puberty that was most of middle school; hiding in his locker and ducking bullies on the bus. Even the boundary testing period before that; figuring out just what these hands and feet could do, through tag and duck-duck-goose and red rover red rover send Taemin on over. But he comes up with nothing.
The control Taemin had over his movements was like a singer’s perfect pitch - he was born with it and it didn’t vary, he didn’t have off days. He simply did not do tripping.
Perhaps, he considers as he drags his bruised knees and ego into the shower, he actually was ill. He’d never heard of a flu with late-onset throat pain and early-onset awkward, but that didn’t mean such a thing did not exist.
As Taemin works the last of conditioner from his hair, the steam around his waist is pulled out by a draft, sucking, too, a sigh from his lips. He can’t distinctly hear anything over the water roar but it could only be one person, the woman who raised him, letting herself in.
"By all means," he mutters, but there's shower in his mouth, so it comes out a gargle.
His mother had a lousy sense for boundaries and not in the standard, overbearing but vaguely charming Korean umma sort of way.
It was hard to blame her, though. Loosing her husband eight months into her first pregnancy had ruined any chance for them to form a normal mother-son bond. At the time, she had been profoundly vulnerable. New to the city, at a new job - without friends, without nearby relatives and, without warning, without her other half.
Taemin had come into the world and she clung to him, immediately; her swaddled joy-made-buoy.
To this day she would tell her friends (bragging, almost) about how long it had taken her pretty, little prince to learn to walk, since she hardly ever had the strength to put him down. You should have seen him - so cute - wobbling around on string cheese legs at three and four.
She would tell them and her friends would exchange looks; passing judgment Taemin would notice and his mother would not.
It got better as he got older and her company job became more high-powered. Long hours forced his mother to give him some space and Taemin was let off his leash (literally, she used to leash him, even before it was in vogue). They were still unusually close, but only when her schedule allowed.
He shuts off the tap and hears her click closer. Unembarrassed, he slides the western-style shower door back and steps out, hand falling when he sees the empty space that occupies the bar where the towel he’d set aside for himself had hung. He looks - his mum has replaced the towel he had picked with a larger, fluffier one - nothing but the best. Standing on the opposite end of the bathmat as him, she holds the terry cloth out before her like a bullfighter. He drips forward.
“Hey, baby.” Her voice is respectfully soft for the time of day, “Why are you up so early?”
She wraps the towel around his shoulders, patting his neck dry as he mumbles, “Couldn’t sleep.” He lets her dote for a while, keeping his eyes downcast at their feet - his tiny, wet ones toe-to-toe with her bright, salmon heels - a pastel touch to an otherwise plain grey work dress and blazer.
“Do you know why?”
Taemin shrugs. “Stress, maybe. I had a weird dream.”
“What about?”
He looks up to face her and as he moves a sense of weightlessness overtakes him - everything solid evaporates and he’s left with an intensely real free falling sensation, an echo of rushing wind screams in his ears.
As soon as it starts, it is over.
And as soon as it's over, he’s not sure if it happened at all.
“I - I don’t, school, probably. Stress, or whatever. Why are you up?”
She left the door open, he notices, so that the steam wouldn’t spoil her perfect bun. It’s her travel bun; the only time she wears her hair up is before a long flight, so she can look just as flawless disembarking the plane as she does getting on. Sure enough, Taemin can see two suitcases awaiting her patiently in the hall.
Business, then.
“Where are you going?”
“Beijing, Lord help me. You know what Chinese air does to my skin. I swear, I age three years with every visit,” she complains, running the tips of her index fingers over invisible crows feet. “But that’s just two nights - then it’s off to New York. This time, I will see a Broadway show, even if it kills me. I’ve been to that damn American city too many times and suffered through too many awkward buyer negotiations in English - because god forbid we bring along a translator - I have earned myself a good seat at a good Broadway show. A fantastic seat. Center orchestra! And, you know, I might buy an extra spot - just for my coat and purse.”
Taemin smiles at her bravado and the way she smacks her tiny fist into her tiny palm, but it’s all he can manage.
His mother notices his lack of enthusiasm on her behalf and deflates. She hugs him close, and he knows she really must not be able to help herself, because his hair is dripping water on her outfit. It would wrinkle. It might dry mis-colored.
“You’d know I’d take you with me, baby, if I could. But you’ve got school and dance and--”
“I know, it’s fine. I’m not upset.”
“Don’t lie to me.” She pulls back just enough look into his eyes.
“I’m not." He looks back. "Really.”
“A mother can smell a lie on her son’s breath, you know.”
“Yeah, is that right? I can smell old coffee on yours, so - ouch!” A summer breeze would pack a stronger punch, he thinks, pretending to nurse a sore shoulder. She pushes him out of the way, squeezing a dollop of toothpaste onto her finger, glaring as she scrubs her teeth. “What? You raised me to be honest.”
She wipes her finger off on his towel and Taemin wrinkles his nose.
“You’re a brat.”
“It’s learned behavior, mother.”
She eye rolls as well as any tween, but her smile still indulges him.
“This color is nice on you.” She says as though she's noticed it for the first time, pinching a chunk of his fringe and giving the golden wad a tug, “I’ll do a braid. Sit.”
Obediently, Taemin settles on the toilet seat, keeping a loose hold of his towel at the waist and titling his head. His mother makes quick work of two fishtails down the right side of his head, clipping them with bobby pins pulled out of thin air. Taemin was pretty sure women had compartments in their bodies for certain things they could never be without - skin pockets for hairclips and tampons and lip gloss.
“There, beautiful. Now, just, hold still - one more sec…” He makes a grunt of protest when she holds his chin steady, coming at him armed with eyeliner.
“Mum.”
“Hush, you.”
“How many times,” she shushes him and he bites his tongue, rolling his eyes as she edges the corners of them in coal.
“Done.”
“How many times do I have to remind you that you don’t have a daughter?”
She scoffs.
“Who needs a girl? My baby’s even prettier,” she turns his face to the mirror so he can see himself, “aren’t you?”
Almond eyes, two pairs, equally black. Gently hooked noses, high cheekbones, full, wide mauve lips. It was probably because he had never met his father, but there were moments Taemin felt sure that he had come from his mother alone - conceived by grief, born of her need for a distraction, one day spontaneously bursting from her loins. Humph-squelsh-wham; mini-her, plus a few distinctly male add-on.
They got comments for it all the time and Taemin, too, couldn’t see any proof of other genetic material.
He watches her retouch her make-up. She's completely unhurried, and he imagines the rows upon rows of sour expressions that await her boarding the plane five minutes after take-off.
“You’ll be good while I’m gone.” She isn’t quite asking but Taemin places his hand on his chest and nods solemnly all the same.
“On my mother’s grave.”
“Lousy, little-”
“How long will it be this time?”
Midst dabbing a funny, stretched frown with sherbet lipstick, she pauses. “The trip?”
“The trip.”
“No more than a week. Less, if I do my job right.” Her reflection grins and winks at his, “When I get back we’ll go shopping, okay? Umma will buy you something special.”
Taemin checks himself in the mirror to make sure his smile looks genuine enough; he knows she feels guilty about how much time she has to spend abroad. Four years ago, when the pattern first started, it had really bothered him - he had felt small and lonely and abandoned, and the Eastern European nanny she had hired to stay in the apartment while she was gone was a cold woman with disfigured teeth. That had only lasted a year, though. By fourteen he was deemed old enough to watch himself, Katja had been let go and Taemin had learned to appreciate time he had alone. Space was nice sometimes, when his mother’s brand of affection had her practically living under his skin.
But that morning, he feels a little different.
That morning, not having someone close to watch over him seems like something worth being upset about.
He’s pulled from his musings by a quick kiss to his temple.
“Don’t be sad. I love you.”
“Love you, too.”
“I left food-money on the counter in the kitchen, but if you need more you know my card number.”
Taemin nods.
He’s still sitting on the toilet seat in the bathroom when she leaves the flat, his eyes closed, listening to her heels click-clacking into nothingness. But when she closes the door, the slide-snap of the lock sounds off inside his head - oddly loud, oddly close - and afterward he’s left weighed down by what feels like more than an apartments worth of emptiness.
~ * ~
A/N: Spent time editing this only to have my internet freak out and lose everything, so now I just have a sandwich of old-new mediocrity and I don't care. I care enough to complain about it but - no. I can't read my own writing anymore or I'll rip my hair out.
part II
Author: pins_and_wheels
Rating: PG-13 to NC-17
Warning: AU, dark, non-con, beta-less
Length: 40k and growing, this bit is 2.5k
Pairing: Kai/Taemin (main), Key/Taemin, one-sided Minho/Taemin, Jinki/Taemin
Summary: Taemin loses a part of himself he doesn't know how to hold on to.
A/N: Part I - still not a lot going on. If I knew how to use livejournal at all I could maybe post this stupid thing in larger chunks, but it's just not happening.
prologue
~ * ~
Normally, Taemin sleeps in until the very last possible moment - he is seventeen, after all.
Most days take him five or six drowsy gropings of his snooze button before he’s able to so much as fall out of bed, and not until halfway through his morning shower can he achieve anything close to what might be considered consciousness. He values the few hours he has to sleep. What with school, friends, and his dizzying list of extracirriculars, Taemin feels he barely has time spare to breathe, let alone the luxury of a full night’s worth of rest.
Not normal, therefore, was waking up as though he had been dropped from a great height, feeling his sheets slam into him like a brick wall.
“Oh god, fuck, fuck. Oh god.”
Taemin registers the sound of his own voice before anything else can sink in; he’s saying something - no, moaning, nonsensical strings of curses and groans. He’s hoarse, the same way he always is on the wrong end of one of Kibum’s epic house parties, which tells him he’s been making same noises for hours.
It takes physically muffling his mouth with balled up duvet to get the sound bubbling out of his body to stop. He waits until he's only panting against wet cotton. Then he forces himself to roll over, out of his mountain of pillows, so he can verify that he is, in fact, in his bedroom, rather than at the bottom of an elevator shaft.
When he opens his eyes to nothingness, sheer panic strikes; sleep addled brain fumbling his nightmare with his reality - where had he landed? It takes a beat and a shift on the glowing face of his alarm - but no, he realizes; this is simply what 4:32 in the morning looks like.
His nerves wilt,
and it suddenly occurs to Taemin how much physical discomfort he's in.
He aches; his entire body aches. His back muscles feel horribly sore and the skin rubbed raw, done over with steel wool. His head is pounding, his limbs throb as though they had been yanked from their sockets and stuck back in place for appearance’s sake. His chest - his chest - his chest…he can’t catch his breath; he’s winded for some reason, completely, his lungs unwilling to retain air, like it’s big gulps of water he’s trying to pant in instead.
He aches; down to the knuckles in his pinky toes.
The flu? He swallows carefully - his throat, while dry, doesn’t burn the way it should if he had contracted a virus. His skin is sticky but he doesn’t feel feverish. He doesn’t even feel as bleary as he does on normal mornings; he’s wide-awake, clear-headed and in pain.
Taemin closes his eyes and tries to remember.
His dream - for he’s sure he had just been dreaming - sits in his mind like an upended jigsaw puzzle. A pile of similarly colored pieces. The only part he can recall clearly is hands around his neck trying to squeeze the life out of him - the rest, only darkness and fear so potent it inspires nausea. He can still taste his terror in the sour sludge at the back of his throat.
Taemin gives himself a few minutes to collect his thoughts, plucking maybe-details out of the murk, but soon grows bored. Reflecting on snippets of a dream that were proving as easy to hold onto as water was a waste of time (even good-for-nothing-except-dreaming-time, the bloody ass crack of dawn). Freud would probably have a lot to say about pushing himself off the top of a building, but Taemin’s not interested in whatever message his subconscious is trying to send. He’s just pissed it woke him up.
Eventually he hauls his battered body out of bed, standing at the foot of it and stretching each muscle carefully to assess the damage. When he’s assured himself there’s nothing seriously (or, at least, visibly) wrong, he decides to take a shower, because he doesn’t know what else to do so early in the morning and his sweat-saoked impression staring back at him from his bed is taunting.
He’s on his way out, casting one last suspicious glance over to his rumpled sheets when something very odd happens. Stranger even than his nightmare, or rising before the sun or the inexplicable chest pain that continues to throb.
Taemin trips.
He trips.
Not just trips, but trips spectacularly. He is so unprepared for the rare moment of gracelessness that he doesn’t even try to break the fall - it feels like slow motion as he watches the floor jump up to greet him, connecting with his left knee and hip, belly-flopping and just barely managing to turn his head to the side to prevent a full on face plant.
Taemin lays there awhile, expression befuddled, trying to remember the last time in his life that he had actually fallen over. He scrolls back years. Over countless hours of dance practice and pre-teenage that should be highlighted by this sort of ungainliness, over painfully awkward puberty that was most of middle school; hiding in his locker and ducking bullies on the bus. Even the boundary testing period before that; figuring out just what these hands and feet could do, through tag and duck-duck-goose and red rover red rover send Taemin on over. But he comes up with nothing.
The control Taemin had over his movements was like a singer’s perfect pitch - he was born with it and it didn’t vary, he didn’t have off days. He simply did not do tripping.
Perhaps, he considers as he drags his bruised knees and ego into the shower, he actually was ill. He’d never heard of a flu with late-onset throat pain and early-onset awkward, but that didn’t mean such a thing did not exist.
As Taemin works the last of conditioner from his hair, the steam around his waist is pulled out by a draft, sucking, too, a sigh from his lips. He can’t distinctly hear anything over the water roar but it could only be one person, the woman who raised him, letting herself in.
"By all means," he mutters, but there's shower in his mouth, so it comes out a gargle.
His mother had a lousy sense for boundaries and not in the standard, overbearing but vaguely charming Korean umma sort of way.
It was hard to blame her, though. Loosing her husband eight months into her first pregnancy had ruined any chance for them to form a normal mother-son bond. At the time, she had been profoundly vulnerable. New to the city, at a new job - without friends, without nearby relatives and, without warning, without her other half.
Taemin had come into the world and she clung to him, immediately; her swaddled joy-made-buoy.
To this day she would tell her friends (bragging, almost) about how long it had taken her pretty, little prince to learn to walk, since she hardly ever had the strength to put him down. You should have seen him - so cute - wobbling around on string cheese legs at three and four.
She would tell them and her friends would exchange looks; passing judgment Taemin would notice and his mother would not.
It got better as he got older and her company job became more high-powered. Long hours forced his mother to give him some space and Taemin was let off his leash (literally, she used to leash him, even before it was in vogue). They were still unusually close, but only when her schedule allowed.
He shuts off the tap and hears her click closer. Unembarrassed, he slides the western-style shower door back and steps out, hand falling when he sees the empty space that occupies the bar where the towel he’d set aside for himself had hung. He looks - his mum has replaced the towel he had picked with a larger, fluffier one - nothing but the best. Standing on the opposite end of the bathmat as him, she holds the terry cloth out before her like a bullfighter. He drips forward.
“Hey, baby.” Her voice is respectfully soft for the time of day, “Why are you up so early?”
She wraps the towel around his shoulders, patting his neck dry as he mumbles, “Couldn’t sleep.” He lets her dote for a while, keeping his eyes downcast at their feet - his tiny, wet ones toe-to-toe with her bright, salmon heels - a pastel touch to an otherwise plain grey work dress and blazer.
“Do you know why?”
Taemin shrugs. “Stress, maybe. I had a weird dream.”
“What about?”
He looks up to face her and as he moves a sense of weightlessness overtakes him - everything solid evaporates and he’s left with an intensely real free falling sensation, an echo of rushing wind screams in his ears.
As soon as it starts, it is over.
And as soon as it's over, he’s not sure if it happened at all.
“I - I don’t, school, probably. Stress, or whatever. Why are you up?”
She left the door open, he notices, so that the steam wouldn’t spoil her perfect bun. It’s her travel bun; the only time she wears her hair up is before a long flight, so she can look just as flawless disembarking the plane as she does getting on. Sure enough, Taemin can see two suitcases awaiting her patiently in the hall.
Business, then.
“Where are you going?”
“Beijing, Lord help me. You know what Chinese air does to my skin. I swear, I age three years with every visit,” she complains, running the tips of her index fingers over invisible crows feet. “But that’s just two nights - then it’s off to New York. This time, I will see a Broadway show, even if it kills me. I’ve been to that damn American city too many times and suffered through too many awkward buyer negotiations in English - because god forbid we bring along a translator - I have earned myself a good seat at a good Broadway show. A fantastic seat. Center orchestra! And, you know, I might buy an extra spot - just for my coat and purse.”
Taemin smiles at her bravado and the way she smacks her tiny fist into her tiny palm, but it’s all he can manage.
His mother notices his lack of enthusiasm on her behalf and deflates. She hugs him close, and he knows she really must not be able to help herself, because his hair is dripping water on her outfit. It would wrinkle. It might dry mis-colored.
“You’d know I’d take you with me, baby, if I could. But you’ve got school and dance and--”
“I know, it’s fine. I’m not upset.”
“Don’t lie to me.” She pulls back just enough look into his eyes.
“I’m not." He looks back. "Really.”
“A mother can smell a lie on her son’s breath, you know.”
“Yeah, is that right? I can smell old coffee on yours, so - ouch!” A summer breeze would pack a stronger punch, he thinks, pretending to nurse a sore shoulder. She pushes him out of the way, squeezing a dollop of toothpaste onto her finger, glaring as she scrubs her teeth. “What? You raised me to be honest.”
She wipes her finger off on his towel and Taemin wrinkles his nose.
“You’re a brat.”
“It’s learned behavior, mother.”
She eye rolls as well as any tween, but her smile still indulges him.
“This color is nice on you.” She says as though she's noticed it for the first time, pinching a chunk of his fringe and giving the golden wad a tug, “I’ll do a braid. Sit.”
Obediently, Taemin settles on the toilet seat, keeping a loose hold of his towel at the waist and titling his head. His mother makes quick work of two fishtails down the right side of his head, clipping them with bobby pins pulled out of thin air. Taemin was pretty sure women had compartments in their bodies for certain things they could never be without - skin pockets for hairclips and tampons and lip gloss.
“There, beautiful. Now, just, hold still - one more sec…” He makes a grunt of protest when she holds his chin steady, coming at him armed with eyeliner.
“Mum.”
“Hush, you.”
“How many times,” she shushes him and he bites his tongue, rolling his eyes as she edges the corners of them in coal.
“Done.”
“How many times do I have to remind you that you don’t have a daughter?”
She scoffs.
“Who needs a girl? My baby’s even prettier,” she turns his face to the mirror so he can see himself, “aren’t you?”
Almond eyes, two pairs, equally black. Gently hooked noses, high cheekbones, full, wide mauve lips. It was probably because he had never met his father, but there were moments Taemin felt sure that he had come from his mother alone - conceived by grief, born of her need for a distraction, one day spontaneously bursting from her loins. Humph-squelsh-wham; mini-her, plus a few distinctly male add-on.
They got comments for it all the time and Taemin, too, couldn’t see any proof of other genetic material.
He watches her retouch her make-up. She's completely unhurried, and he imagines the rows upon rows of sour expressions that await her boarding the plane five minutes after take-off.
“You’ll be good while I’m gone.” She isn’t quite asking but Taemin places his hand on his chest and nods solemnly all the same.
“On my mother’s grave.”
“Lousy, little-”
“How long will it be this time?”
Midst dabbing a funny, stretched frown with sherbet lipstick, she pauses. “The trip?”
“The trip.”
“No more than a week. Less, if I do my job right.” Her reflection grins and winks at his, “When I get back we’ll go shopping, okay? Umma will buy you something special.”
Taemin checks himself in the mirror to make sure his smile looks genuine enough; he knows she feels guilty about how much time she has to spend abroad. Four years ago, when the pattern first started, it had really bothered him - he had felt small and lonely and abandoned, and the Eastern European nanny she had hired to stay in the apartment while she was gone was a cold woman with disfigured teeth. That had only lasted a year, though. By fourteen he was deemed old enough to watch himself, Katja had been let go and Taemin had learned to appreciate time he had alone. Space was nice sometimes, when his mother’s brand of affection had her practically living under his skin.
But that morning, he feels a little different.
That morning, not having someone close to watch over him seems like something worth being upset about.
He’s pulled from his musings by a quick kiss to his temple.
“Don’t be sad. I love you.”
“Love you, too.”
“I left food-money on the counter in the kitchen, but if you need more you know my card number.”
Taemin nods.
He’s still sitting on the toilet seat in the bathroom when she leaves the flat, his eyes closed, listening to her heels click-clacking into nothingness. But when she closes the door, the slide-snap of the lock sounds off inside his head - oddly loud, oddly close - and afterward he’s left weighed down by what feels like more than an apartments worth of emptiness.
~ * ~
A/N: Spent time editing this only to have my internet freak out and lose everything, so now I just have a sandwich of old-new mediocrity and I don't care. I care enough to complain about it but - no. I can't read my own writing anymore or I'll rip my hair out.
part II