Poison
The darkness of the beyond reached me after years. I never had thought it would find me like this. Even now the painful memories replay through my grey-hazed mind. My glassy eyes stare emptily at the wall. I can imagine my sunken cheekbones, my reddened lips, bruised eyes.
I can see.
The yellow stains my skin, my teeth have rotted past what they should have, I'm sure. I feel the holes covering my body, tiny incisions and punctures that will never close. Nobody else can see, but I know they're there. They'll always be with me, just like the fractured fragments of my dreams.
I don't look the way I say, she tells me. She's the only one I can trust anymore, but I don't know if I can believe her.
You pathetic, lying piece of shit. You're a murderer. A murderer. You killed her, Sungyeol, you fucking coward. You don't deserve to be here. You should rot.
The fingers brush through my hair as I cling to her body, my head cushioned in her lap, her hands cradling my head. I don't deserve this. Why should she stay with me?
But she isn't really here, no. They took Carina away from me years ago. The warmth is something I am imagining. It must be. And my family is gone. And my skin and teeth and bones rot away slowly. Soon they will disappear like everything else in my world.
But I do it to survive.
Yellowed skin, yellowed teeth, colorless dark eyes and prematurely graying black hair. It's the only thing that's kept them from me. The drug is my perfection. I find my cure in the needles I so often shove into my arms. They haven't taken me. They haven't sold me. They never will.
Everything is black. I sit in the empty room for days and nights, windowless, shrouded by night eternally. They come and go, but they don't disrupt me. They never talk, but what is there to say? You look better today? That would be a laugh. I've aged in this room. It seems so long ago that I'd won, so long ago since I was that fifteen-year-old boy who got through training with a five and made it out by pure luck. How old am I now? I feel fifty, but I'm only in my twenties, I know.
They cheered so loudly at my return, but some cried. Her family cried, and now I cry for them. Carina, my district partner. I can still feel her hands. I can still imagine her soft fingers, brushing over my skin.
I am an open book. I have no secrets because there is no need for secrecy anymore. I am dead inside. I've killed myself.
The holes are growing larger in my body, capacious, swallowing my life. I am drained. I am soulless. I don't deserve to be here.
You're a murderer, Sungyeol. Pathetic, crying after what you've done? You should have been the one gutted. You remember how you broke her fingers? One by one, cutting them at the joints. Her beautiful rivers of blood, the scalp you held in your hands…what was her name? Aristae?
She deserved it.
You killed Carina too. You ripped out her heart and slit her throat.
She had to die.
I had to win.
But you should be dead.
I should be dead. It's right, the voice. Now, I'm waiting to die. Then, death would have greeted me as a friend. A companion, pure. But now I am death.
The hollow sobs break from my throat like Aristae's screams had from hers. Like the gurgles from Carina's dead body, blood trailing into the sand.
The needle's shaking, still wedged halfway into my left arm.
I wait for the high. I wait for the release.
One day, it will completely overtake me, and that's when I will disappear, like a shadow in this dark room. My life, wasted away.
I'm the most useless victor, anyway.
And I have nobody to care. Nobody to notice.
I wait for the next day, when two more lives will be taken, two lives that I could have helped, but refused. I wait for the next day, when the scenes will replay in my head, over and over again. I wait for the next day, when I will once again fade into the shadows of the room and the drug, the morphling which I so crave.
But in the long run, I don't care about the next day.
I am waiting to die. I am waiting to quit breathing. I am waiting to burn the holes completely through my body. I am waiting to run into the night and follow the footsteps of twenty-three other misplaced souls.
My head pounds when I finally remove the needle, rolling back and hitting the sweat-soaked pillow lightly.
I am waiting to die. But death doesn't want me, though he has waited so long to have me. I am hideous, so despicable that death has cast me out.
If they could see me now, what would they see? A faceless, nameless figure, dark and twisted at odd angles? Cracked and torn apart, displayed like a demon?
I shut my eyes, and wait for the next day, when I will once again find the drug, but lose death, because even the master of the netherworld detests me.
I am poison.
I know most of my HG readers are waiting for updates on Infectious. Sorry to say that I have writers block as of late, but it will be up before the end of the month. In the meantime, this is my attempt to ease back into writing for the fandom. Hopefully it isn't just nine hundred words of empty shit. If anyone actually reads this, I hope you enjoyed it.
-Junhong