Pairing: None – Ryou-centric; features Bakura
Genre: AU, Angst
Rating: PG-13
Words: 341, 218
Warnings: self-injury
Summary: Ryou's body is naught but a desecrated landscape.
A/N: Two ficlets written at different times but on the same topic, so I thought I'd group them together. They work with each other.
Memory Album
Installment Twelve: Desecrated
One.
Dots and pinpricks of blood well up at the incision, beading together—a heavy weight, a sac hanging off the delicate white skin of his inner thigh. Then it falls, sliding, a red, wet trail down the flesh—a story of pain and frustration, eons old.
Two.
Another welt, another incision. The blood runs pink as it drips into the bathwater, leaving pools of grotesque tie-dye by his leg.
Three, four, five, six.
It doesn't really hurt—not when he's doing it initially. It's just a physical shock, a jolt to his system that brings perspiration to his palms and a wild thump to his heartbeat. It clears his head, and suddenly, the muddle of his mind becomes as pristine as an untouched well.
It's a rush: a wild, electric rush.
The pain only comes with the healing process. When the flesh around the cuts swell, forming a knot of white-hot pain that stings deeply all up his legs and arms. The burn only comes from healing, and sometimes, he wishes the cuts would remain raw and bleeding, just so he can watch the streams of crimson cascade down his pallid body.
It's a beautiful contrast.
When he reaches seventy, the razor drops from his lax fingers to sink lifelessly to the bottom of the bathtub—the quaint, white, porcelain bathtub filled with rose-tinted water.
It somehow feels wrong, defiling something so pure.
Oh, but his skin certainly isn't—it's far from pure. It's a wasteland: a graveyard of broken dreams and dashed hopes, littered with a myriad of gravestones. They are long and short, thin and wide, deep and narrow, and he has so many, his whole body has become a paradox: tainted sacred ground.
Desecrated graves upon the dirt of his mind.
When Bakura knocks on the bathroom door, asking softly if he is alright, he doesn't answer. His brother knows the unspoken response he can't dare speak aloud.
He can imagine the sad look on Bakura's face, and buries his head between his wet thighs and cries.
-----
Early morning sunrise.
He sits upon his bed, face tilted towards the window. Bars of faint light stretch across his features, an ethereal glow upon the already pallid expanse of his skin. The light glides across the smooth curve of his cheeks, dropping into the dips beneath his eyes and are swallowed up by the greedy pools of shadow that reside there.
Today is a school day.
He sits upon the sheets—crumpled sheets, and out of the corner of his eye, he spots the bedcovers coming undone from the mattress. The sheets are soft, worn with years of use. Yet, they are rough, unbearably so, against the raw welts that line his legs.
He lifts a gentle hand and runs the pad of his fingers against the swollen incisions along the outside of his calf, feeling the rise of flesh and tracing the tiny mountain ranges upon his skin. He imagines that there is a sunset across his landscape. The dying rays of light paint the various peaks rose and burgundy, crimson and pale mauve—and they are terribly beautiful, yet so grotesque he almost can't stand them.
He draws his legs up to his chest, curling around his own landscape of pain, hiding from himself.
The clock ticks 6:52, and he shall be late for school.