When Kieren was alive, he used pens to trace the veins that mapped a life under his pale skin. 'Practice' was a morbid half-joke, one that left him with a bruise on his shoulder and Jem not speaking to him for a week. But it wasn't something significant. It wasn't until he had already used his father's gift to cut himself open that he realized how little he had been kidding.
At first, when he comes back, he is too tightly wound to do any movement that isn't deliberate, necessary. His skin has never felt quite like it fit, and being buried and reborn does nothing to fix that. But, almost as an afterthought, as he remembers the steps of how to live, so too do his muscles relax. And when they relax, they start to remember.
It's not until Jem shoots him a dirty look that Kieren notices he's been staring into space, fingers tracing the faint broken lines. It's the day after Rick's funeral, and he can't stop touching the scars on his wrists.
He knows it's stupid to think about what would have happened to Rick if he hadn't come back. Rick would still have come home and felt guilty. Bill Macey still would have murdered his son. Kieren traces his veins and his scars and he's content, with being above ground, even with the mirrors and burying Rick twice, really, he is learning how to be okay with living. But his fingers trace now dead life lines to a tune of what if what if.
Kieren is an artist. He looks at people and maps them, what's seen and what they carry inside them. He could not trace the lines of Rick but on a canvas he could do his best to replicate him, the strong jaw and need for his father's approval both just lines in a painting. Kieren has never enjoyed mirrors but self portraits were a compromise. He could hide the things he hated, could bring out the courage he often hid away, pretend it showed in his eyes.
Now, the mirrors are all covered, and he does not know his own face well enough to capture it. His lines are in all the wrong places. He does manage one pencil study of his wrist, the muted veins framing his scar. He doesn't know why he thought it would help. He slides it into a drawer and doesn't pick up a pencil again for a while.
He's always liked long sleeves. He knows they used to make his mother nervous, because she is as sharp as his father is oblivious, and she knew what he started hiding, under those sleeves. Now, they all know exactly what scars he's hiding. It was, after all, an open casket funeral. So Sue holds back her concern. The sleeves also conveniently hide the spiderwebs staining his skin, a study in permanent marker, because when presented with a blank piece of paper, Kieren freezes, but something in his blank arms has grown terrifying to him. He traces and retraces his useless veins like a prayer before he goes to sleep.
When the undead dream, the nightmares are usually real. Kieren makes himself a walking dreamcatcher and pretends he doesn't dream at all.
Amy dreams in colours and in places she's never been. Kieren isn't surprised. The rules for how this half life is supposed to work don't seem to touch her.
Kieren hides in his room, unable to listen as they read off the names of the newest extremists to make themselves known. He crosses stiff fingers and he hopes Blue Oblivion can't touch her either.
Amy never questions his long sleeves, she just drags him along with her, and sometimes she holds on tight enough that he thinks when he peels back his sleeve there will be new bruises, one for each of her fingers. There never is. This disappoints him.
Amy returns. And when she does, he almost tells her 'please, please hold on tighter,' his own brand of tattoo. Instead, he tells her he's going to Paris.
And he is. He really is.
Sure, he'll miss Amy, and Jem, and Mom and Dad. And of course, Rick, Rick who died twice and who he's always missed, even when they were both breathing and alive and Rick was drunkenly allowing them to touch, I miss you I miss you mouthed against bare skin.
Paris will be good. Paris has to be good. So what if he's barely been able to touch his pencils, paints, let alone draw and create. So what if Amy's right, and he's running away. She ran away too, and she comes back with her belief tucked away but still shining, and if Amy had decided to film some videos about this belief, about the light she has and shares without questions, Kieren thinks he wouldn't have been able to resist her, that pull. Amy is magnetic.
If she's allowed to run away, so is he. He's damaged, no shining star. They might have missed him in the ground, but they'll be fine now, Paris isn't that far but far enough, he thinks, hopes, begs. And Amy has Simon now, strong and so sure. He offers a worldview like he's offering a coat and Kieren may be lost and freezing but he doesn't trust the Profit or this pretty messenger.
(And God when he says he didn't realize Kieren was one of them it should please him, but instead it makes him angry, snapping at the man's stolen words wrapped up like wisdom)
Simon is a young boy in his dad's big coat, layers of other people making up a man, and Kieren doesn't like sifting through quotes and sermons to have a conversation. But Simon wears lines on his arms too. When he sees Kieren's wrists, he doesn't use any words but his own. And Kieren can't help but think that they're beautiful and wonder why Simon trusts his own voice so little that he lets everyone else speak through him.
Maybe coaxing out those words can be his own project, something to work on while he's waiting for Paris to be an option again. He wants to grab the man and peel off those layers, see what he looks like underneath. Sitting by the fire with him, he feels very warm, even though that's impossible, heat is something that spilled out of him and never quite made it back. Around Simon the actor, though, maybe he's allowed to pretend. Pretend this feeling is real, isn't just misplaced hope and a fire. Because Simon seems so very close, and Paris is so far.
And if Kieren could stop time, well, he'd have done it a long time ago. Stopped Rick leaving, once or maybe twice. Stopped Bill from shooting his neighbours in the street. But if he could stop time, he'd stop it here as well, but the Simon at the fire and the Simon at the GP surgery are not the same. This here is Simon the Disciple, Simon the Chosen, and Kieren hates it, hates the soundbites and how disappointed he looks, walking away.
There it is again, everyone else doing the leaving, again and again, and Kieren tried that and look how it turned out. He's tired of the sight of people's backs, their tombstones. What Simon doesn't get is that Kieren's never been Chosen, not for anything, where there's supposed to be a purpose, in his soul or in his chest or whatever, there's nothing. He's hollow. He really is rotten. Empty inside with a spiderweb of cracks and lines holding him together.
So why is he going to the bungalow? Maybe it's because, as negative as he is and he is a negative person, no matter what Amy says, when he steps in front of a gun he's not hollow, and it's not just because he wonders what will happen if someone finally pulls the trigger. He doesn't want to die, not anymore. When he stops Gary, for the second time (and things come in thirds, so he will make sure to watch out for Gary, who hated him even before he crawled back into this town), he can almost hear his heart pounding in his chest.
He feels alive. That's the feeling. He's burning again, the heat of anger making his dead nerves sing in a way he never quite managed to grasp when he was breathing.
Why the bungalow? He can pretend it's for Amy, because Amy is bright like sunshine and if anyone knows about warmth it's her. But this heat is different, darker, like nighttime and pasts told by firelight, and when Simon opens the door it surges, Simon is who he came here for, he's who Kieren needs right now. There's worry in the man's eyes, but Kieren can't deal with concern, because then he'll have to deal with how close he just came, and the image of Freddie tied up in the back of Gary's truck is still stuck behind his eyes.
So he shuts Simon up. Their lines crash and tangle and if he pulls away, if Simon leaves Kieren's not sure how he'll go about untangling them again.
Simon doesn't pull away. He kisses back, and Kieren doesn't know, doesn't know if that's good enough for tomorrow, but in this moment it's enough. He needs something in his hands so he can stop drawing lines, lines from the barrel to his forehead, lines that should have ended and lines that did, and if that Something is Simon Monroe, if that something is this, kissing him deep enough to cut through everyone he speaks for, so it's just Simon and just Kieren, no chosen few just these choices that have sent them spiralling together... Well. That's something.
That's something.