destroy to create

In her dreams, she continues to count. There is rope cutting into her wrists, teeth cutting into her lips, silent scream cutting into her ribcage. ( five, six– time is the overseer of all things. seven, eight– can you see me now? nine, ten, eleven. i am awake, i am awake, i am– ). She jolts in her seat when a large hand slaps her face, and she is no longer dreaming. She feels the rope tug harshly against her rice paper skin and is reminded that she never dreams. Outside, the waves gently fold over one another. She can’t tell if the dried sea salt crumbling on her skin is from her tears or from the ocean. Instead, she continues to count. 

Early morning carries heat like the bitter aftertaste of regret. It hangs stiff and sticky in the air, then settles about the room in a dusty layer of decay. Her eyes are wet and heady from remembrance: the coarse hands that had coiled around her tender neck, the coarse hands that had left purple fingerprints under her jaw, the coarse hands that had burned an imprint of a slim ring around her fourth finger seven summers ago. 

Twelve, thirteen, fourteen. There are footsteps in the distance. These are the footsteps that have come to claim what they had never meant to gain in the first place. Trust funds, a delicate hand in marriage, an empire of wealth and dirty politics. They kick the door open, and her breath tangles in her chest. Fifteen, six– “Look at you,” he sneers, grabbing her face from behind and twisting it until she is forced to look into those eyes. Black, raw, and unforgiving. “You always looked so pretty in red,” his eyes flash, but there is only darkness where there was once light. His breath taints the air with its acrid hands, wraps around her throat until she is gasping for her next breath. “So, so pretty…” he murmurs, finger following a lazy trail of dried blood down her temple. He grins, teeth shining all sinister and foul to the core. 

There are some winters that never leave her bones. He slaps her hard, kicks her until there is frost that turns her spine brittle. The rope feels heavy and wet embracing shaking limbs. When he turns to leave, the pool of gold returns to wash up against her toes. Seventeen, eighteen. Father, can you hear me? The door slams shut, and booming laughter reverberates against the thin walls. 

their lips sewed together by bribery and threats that will leave gunpowder in their lungs if they dared opened mouths. enriched in the savage brutality none are blind to, but feigning an ignorance under forced circumstances comes with the desire to live. they don't even look at him standing on the deck -- pretend he isn't here with blood caked underneath his fingernails ( from carrying her in ), cigarette held loosely between his hands, he doesn't smoke out of addiction. humans are predictable in their own excessive fear driving them through the barest of fragility, he imagines he shouldn't understand. but he does and if he could pity them, he would. he is pleasantly amused when she doesn't scream out as the bastard breaks her skin open. skin a myraid of galaxy laced bruises. but not surprised to see that bitter acceptance on her face masked by silent tears, he's read enough on her to know who she is.

out here -- ten miles directly off the coast of tarragona, spain, he cannot quite tell where the sky itself begins from the expanse of bitter gold sea, faded after glow casts his hands in the same shade. he drops the cigarette overboard, making his way down the dilapidated stairs leading to solitary darkness and through the singled off door he finds the room they've set up specifically for the guest. youngkwang is loud, incredibly so as he boasts of his conquests breaking down what's already composed of fragmented pieces, and he slides out the door with orders stuck to his mouth. how he wants the younger one to hurt her -- how he wants to make her bleed, ripped shred by shred, until she's nothing more than a lingering mass on the floor and he's left there to pick up remaining pieces. he imagines the spoiled man calls it love. kai, he's taehyun here, nods with the cold uniformity this role requires. it's when they're both standing over her and his hand is forcing her to regain focus on what he has to do here, grasping the sharp handled knife as he had done that cigarette earlier, loosely, too skilled to be of coincidence. he bares down enough on her thigh to bust through flesh. wonders in the back of his mind if he can get her to scream for him.

01: THE PURGE.

listen.

Routine: He wakes up unable to breathe. His lungs are burning and fingers trembling. As they mostly do. It doesn’t take much, sometimes he’ll be shaking during the summer, windows closed shut and pullover pooling around his waist and wrists because eating feels like gradual suffocation at gun aim. He takes off his shirt–esophagus coiling and uncoiling each time he hiccups and his larynx convulses–and leaves the bed once his vision blurs into white. He stumbles towards the door, falls and rests his forehead against the cold hardwood floor. If he cries, it serves as white noise to accompany the parched heaving and panting for air. Sehun is a self-replicating rash. Feels a bit like a tumor, like concentrated gore. All septic scabs, perpetually itching and raw. His father hadn’t wanted a boy. Boys have the innate need to draw blood. He didn’t want a combat dog under his roof. Distance was a desideratum. Maybe if Sehun wasn’t the copy of a copy of a copy his father wouldn’t have been forced to mourn the loss of plastic.

Organization: He sits at a corner table, waiting. They don’t do this often, Jongin and him. Because he is difficult to be around but Jongin gets that. Jongin is, too. Conversation with him isn’t all interspersed compliments and fast-forwarded maiming. (Cognitive printing of autopsy reports.) He doesn’t order coffee, instead asks for tap water and a chocolate muffin he places on the middle of the table to keep waitstaff at an arm’s length. It’s cold outside, and yet he can feel perspiration accumulating in the inner folds of his palms. He’s forgotten to wear socks and the sole of his worn boots sticks to the bottom of his feet. There is a picture he keeps in his wallet. A polaroid picture taken in ‘78 of the first Sehun smiling somewhere in Russia. The original had been able to feel, profoundly, and sustain interpersonal relationships regardless of documented importance. Charismatic and emphatic. The soldiers in training in Maine had liked him for that. Because he was the Asian with the funny accent, in charge of comic relief whenever they were relocated and expected to wear their rifles like lightweight accessory. He kills for the first time in Panskoye. The blood on his uniform had dried before they reached the next city. Sehun had poured alcohol over it and lit a match. He remembers staring at the fire until the flame had left nothing behind but a scorched patch of grass. He never has had health problems but a week after Russia Sehun is diagnosed with chronic bronchitis.

This might not be a real memory: He kills for the first time in Seoul. He isn’t a soldier anymore. (And maybe never was.) But he sweats through shirt after shirt and the polaroid has long become eroded around the edges. The years eating the glossy paper away. He buys a black sports bag and stacks hardcover Kafka novels over a .9 mm and a BOR. Whenever he leaves the house he doesn’t plan on returning. But he does anyway. He looks down at his hands and then up again, left leg twitching whenever he holds his breath. He waits for Jongin. He waits until he cannot sit still anymore and instead, walks over to the exit and back to his table again.

Yes: He wakes up unable to breathe. In the darkness Sehun holds his hands. Everything that scares him crawling in the shadows, rasping, “I will guide you.” He wakes up unable to breathe. In the darkness Minwoo crawls, crying and yelling, to the door, throat closing, closed, drowning. He wakes up unable to breathe. In the darkness, there is nothing. Just the absence of light.

Jongin enters the coffee shop.

it's all easy, killing a man takes no effort, killing a man through another on a separate continent while he lays in his bed with his wife without leaving minimum traces involves precision, but it too comes natural. a function, like breathing. he only does this when he needs to be in korea keeping up with this pseudo-identity requires him to be at certain places at certain times, hiding underneath the premise of falsehoods and easy lies wreckless on his tongue. there are bare-minimum notes about this assignment written on the crumbled currency, but the black lines bleed into hysteria and he cannot decipher his own writings flickering back & forth between multiple languages, some dead.

something soothing about turning his thoughts into a tangled manuscript. serving as a guide he does not need. he's a creature of habit, despite thinking otherwise. he hears his other phone vibrate relentlessly on the countertop, serving as a passive distraction. he picks it up, navigating through the inbox ( minwoo texts like he talks, structureless and without clear focus, all that unhinged showcased like an open wound, bloody, infectious ) without ever losing focus on his real task at hand.

he always operate in two worlds. this is no exception.

with no  guide to help him see, he goes off memory alone assigning orders to men that have no choice but to obey; having the blueprint embedded in his head down to the minuscule details of the surrounding landscape makes this that much easier to accomplish. weapon of choice. light-weight gun equipped with a poison ampule. effects. paralyzing of the arteries that feed into the brain, clinically dead in one and a half-minutes. understanding the mechanisms comes easy because he constructed it himself from aluminum materials, hermetically sealed and shipped to berlin. when the call ends with a click, he knows the job has been done and he replies to the message sitting unanswered in his inbox -- fine, be there soon --, he'll met him in the cafe they always go to. muddling over caffeine that goes cold too quick and that neither bother to touch because normalcy serves as merely a visual aid for them, never saying anything of significance for talking loses its weight after repetitive conversations. this goes deeper than the mundane. they're better than this. it takes him an hour to burn the notes and make it to that side of the city, the bell attached to the door rings when he enters. he’s a little late, but it doesn't matter. minwoo sits where he always does, predictable, always predictable. an air of vulnerability, disillusions, he wonders if minwoo can truly see him. but kai can see everything and he sees enough for the both of them. he watches him enough to know, nothing is lost.