(no subject)
Spring
Based on Igor Stravinsky's ballet The Rite of Spring
Taemin-centric
Warnings: description-heavy, character death.
PG
the ground thumps hard beneath him, shocking from his heels to his spine. his heart drips a slow and steady rhythm down his back, sliding and curling at the base of his knees, python-quick and thick with ritual.
there’s a drum on the right.
a beat from the left times the slither of shadows across his path; a swish of skirts, the sing of a blade or three, and he’s on his knees with the drums thumping adrenaline through his blood. it pulls at his limbs, blurring smudging the lines around his vision, around the white-powdered faces and the hide of sleeves.
someone reaches out to him and he snaps back, eyes wide and sparked in the dim light. they lock gazes for a second, half of, but his neck is twisting without consent to meet an identical pair of dark slits and his arm reaches out again. his leg comes free of its bind against his other; it snakes along the grass, following the tracer of his pointer finger and meeting its bound, rebound, testing the limits of his tendons.
taemin meets the train wreck extreme of his pulse head-on; stumbles, dips, slips, falls, scrambles back onto his knees and then the balls of his feet. half his support slips out from under him and contorts him painfully, muscles in his back burning a velvet fire up his thin bird bones that scrambles them and keeps him from taking flight. the grass cuts at his heels and feet, shadows of knives joining to and fro with their hands reaching at him, for him, around him and blanketing him.
they stab;
nails grazing and fingers grasping, blood thumping behind a tourniquet tightening around his temples until the blood pulses a rat race around the top of his skull.
he pauses for a breath and they stab, again, their protests rising to the pinnacle of the forest, spiraling arms of elms puncturing the blanket and sending the torrent crashing down around his head. he screams and he can’t hear it, doesn’t hear it, only cuts the whisper of breath as it streaks past his teeth. it’s cold and he’s cold, his heart is feeble and tearing the fibers of his skin, smearing blood along his collarbones. it’s rising and sinking in the back of his throat and spilling out of his mouth, fingers stuffing it back down and emerging coated in glimmering fluid-smeared dirt.
taemin is a mess inside, of grass-streaked brown pearls clinging to his skin and rubbing sandpaper raw to his tongue, but he has to get it back in; get it all back in until someone gets it first, like that little girl with the long black hair and the gleaming knife, that one with the pale hands that stalks forward so silently. before she sinks her talons in his mouth he pulls his tongue out his own, immature and taunting, bet you can't, but know i won't.
his feet are jolting, heels digging into the grass and unearthing more pearls and more gems, rubies and diamonds collecting around his bare soles and his bare soul as he clutches for them, pulls and twists and writhes until he’s sunk inside of them. they pool around his shoulders, arms flitting along his skin and growing warmer by the second, scattering the gems that he sees clinging to his arms. it’s a furnace unfurling around him streaked with hail and ice running shivers down his sides, collecting in the hollows of his hips. he wants it off, jerks up and down and rolls to his stomach because the droplets are steaming from the fire of his skin and beading along his arms, spreading themselves along the diamonds seeping from his pores.
he clutches these flash frozen tears, the emeralds that spear through his knuckles and itch along every nerve ending electric adorning his sparkling chin and glittering wrists. his heart pulses rubies through him and he scrabbles for them but they’re speeding fast and furious in front of his eyes and from his tongue. he grasps harder and he can feel them, now, stinging against his palms, sliding cuts along the folds of his skin until he feels them vibrating tuning-fork tense in the quiet hollow of his lungs. they’ve paused in the palm of his hand and dance along his fingertips, his tongue and the point of it forked between his teeth.
they’re still and crystal, glimmering dim from his eyes.
stopped.
um. yeah. this is what happens spur-of-the-moment when writing.