#kolinn

It is not hunger that drives him to it. Hunger is a brute thing now, a constant pressure under the ribs, a voice that does not negotiate. The apple is something else.

On the far end of the table, Kol is perched like a question that refuses to be ignored.

He sits on the wood as if the world is made for his comfort, as if rules are something other people invent for the sole purpose of watching him break them. There is a woman in his arms—her back arched, her fingers digging into his shoulders with the frantic, pointless strength of the living—and Kol’s mouth is at her throat.

Finn does not look up at first.

He keeps his eyes on the line of script and lets the knowledge settle into him slowly, the way he has learned to let everything settle: without reaction, without indulgence. The monk who penned these words believed his thoughts might outlast him. He could not have imagined Finn reading them like this—apple in hand, monsters in the corner of the room.

The wet sound reaches him anyway.

It is not loud. Kol does not need to be loud. Kol is, by nature, an interruption. His feeding has a rhythm to it—open-mouthed, shameless—blood drawn in greedy pulls and swallowed as if it is simply wine at supper. The woman makes a small sound, and Finn’s fingers tighten around his apple without him meaning to.

He takes another bite, forces the crunch.

He thinks, briefly, of Eden in the way his mother spoke of it once—paradise, innocence, the fall. He thinks of a fruit held in a hand, of a mouth that does not yet know what it is to hunger.

He thinks: I am eating my apple and pretending this is still a garden.

Kol laughs against the woman’s skin, a soft breath of delight, and Finn’s attempt at a garden collapses in on itself like paper in water.

He turns the page.

“Are you truly going to sit there and read while I do all the work?” Kol says, voice bright with blood.

Finn keeps his gaze on the text. “You are doing nothing that resembles work.”

“Oh, Finn.” Kol’s tone turns syrupy, amused. “Always so severe. Always so—”

The woman’s knees buckle.

Finn’s eyes flick, once, toward her as she slips down Kol’s body and collapses in a heap on the ground.

Dead.

It is obvious in a way Finn has learned to recognize without thinking—how quickly the slackness arrives, how the throat does not swallow anymore, how the warmth is already beginning to drain from the skin. A life ended with the same careless efficiency Kol ends most things, as if the world is full of bodies and therefore none of them can ever truly matter.

Finn looks back to his book before the shape of her death can become a thought. He keeps chewing. He keeps swallowing.

Apple and corpse. Bite and blood. Eating and being eaten.

This is what his life is now, no matter how slowly he eats, no matter how clean he keeps his hands.

“You’re eating like a dying man, brother.”

Finn’s eyes lift before he can stop them. They land on Kol’s mouth.

Kol’s lips are red. Not stained prettily, not the tasteful smear of a man who wiped his mouth—red in the way a butcher’s hands are red. Blood caught at the corner. Blood in the fine dark of his lashes. Blood smeared across his cheeks, his neck, his laugh lines.

Finn looks away too quickly, furious with himself for looking at all.

“Leave,” Finn says again, and hears the edge in his voice, hears the way it betrays him.

Kol’s grin turns sharp. “Or what?”

Finn draws in a slow breath through his nose. He tastes apple. He tastes the faint tang of ink. He tastes, under it all, the copper in the air from the woman’s throat.

He hates how clearly his body registers it.

He hates how his mouth waters.

He hates most of all that his siblings do not seem to hate themselves for it—

Hates most of all how he desperately, viciously wishes that he could be unincumbered by his morality, that he could join them in the muck, in the horrific sticky red.

Finn’s fingers flex around the apple. His thumb finds the indentation where his teeth have bitten. A small bruise in the fruit’s flesh. Proof that he has made his mark on something that cannot heal.

He looks down at it and thinks, absurdly: Eve must have felt like this. Not sinful, not wicked—simply aware. Simply awake. Simply unable to return to innocence once the bite has been taken.

He takes another bite of his apple.

Kol’s movement is sudden, the way Kol always is when he decides he wants something. A flash of motion at the corner of Finn’s vision. A shift of air. The scrape of a boot against wood.

Before Finn can look back up, Kol’s hand shoots out and knocks the apple clean from Finn’s grasp.

It hits the floor and rolls—red skin flashing in the candlelight, a bright, stupid thing.

It bumps once against the dead woman’s hip and comes to rest there, nestled absurdly against her slackened hand as if she might pick it up, as if she might sit up and take a bite.

Finn goes still.

Kol’s laugh is soft and delighted. “Messy eater,” he says, mockingly sweet. “Look at you.”

Finn’s gaze lifts.

Kol is looking at him like he has won something. Like he has proven a point. Like he has dragged Finn one inch closer to him and intends to drag him the rest of the way.

Finn stands.

He does not slam the book shut. He does not shout. His movements are controlled in the way he has trained them to be—because if he lets himself become loud, he might become Kol, and Finn has been fighting becoming Kol since the day they turned.

He walks around the table.

Kol stays perched on the edge, chin lifted, waiting. Brazen. Bloody. Beautiful in that awful way all of them are now, as if the curse has polished their faces into something made for worship.

Finn stops close enough that their knees nearly touch.

“You’re dripping,” Finn says, low.

Kol blinks slowly. “Am I?”

Finn lifts his hand.

His thumb presses beneath Kol’s eye and drags, firm and deliberate, wiping the blood away in one slow stroke. The red smears warm under his skin. Finn feels it more sharply than he should—feels the intimacy of touching Kol’s face, feels the sick satisfaction of correcting him.

Kol’s breath catches, small and traitorous, and Finn hates that too—hates how quickly Kol’s body answers touch, as if touch is the only language he trusts.

“You have made a mess of yourself,” Finn says again, quieter.

Finn’s thumb slides to the corner of Kol’s mouth and wipes there too. Kol’s lips part slightly—his eyes do not leave Finn’s.

Finn’s stomach twists.

He should pull his hand away.

He should step back.

He should pick up his book and return to his apple and to the lie of the garden.

Instead, he brings his thumb to his own mouth.

He licks.

The taste is immediate—iron and salt, hot and intimate, the bright copper of the woman’s blood carried into Finn by Kol’s face. Finn’s tongue curls around the pad of his thumb and Kol’s gaze goes, for half a heartbeat, strangely empty—like something in him has gone silent.

Sapphic diaries: Sunday

Ch2:Finn

Ch2:Klaus