#vmxgun

the air is sweet and acrid with the scent of cotton candy and gasoline.

a bomb goes off; the rattling of automatic weapons follows rapid-fire.

mark, like all the other pawns upon the playing field, nearly buckles at the knees and crashes to the hard black asphalt when the heat and the force and the flames come rising up to smash the midnight into halves, quarters, eighths, sixteenths.

( his appearance deceives. he’s a pawn unlike all other pawns. they should run. they need to run. mark matters none but he’s still got a gun )

seoul is a piano sonata shot all to hell by the staccato of cannon fire,

and mark is a marionette defined by the pull of his strings.

it is time for the puppet to dance. everyone has a role to play,

and his orders are to kill, kill, kill.

kill them all.

( i’m so sorry )

lanterns dot the rows of festival booths like little origami stars folded by and fallen from a heavenly hand.

the fire presses down upon the festival from every cardinal direction. it heaves its hot, rancid breath down upon the backs of their necks and threatens to devour the corrupt city whole. mark looks only at the lanterns.

he thinks they are beautiful.

they are beautiful, and he is so terribly sorry for what his hands are about to do. the lanterns glow warm and yellow in the irises of his dark, dark eyes and mark wishes that he were here to gorge on street food, to knock down stacks of milk bottles with a baseball, to laugh, and to swallow a tiny morsel of happiness and to hold that happiness inside of himself because it is his and he is alive, and no one can take that away from him, his levity or his life, when the lanterns are bright and the night sings softly with hope–

but it’s all too fitting that mark only gets to walk amongst the lanterns as a fucking hurricane.

he gets to walk amongst the lanterns as thunder and lightning and a sleek black gun to bring some rain down upon this perfect little parade.

it is time. mark pulls the mask over his face and it, too, is yellow– yellow like the spinning, swaying lanterns– with rose-dipped cheeks and a black button nose seated right above its cheery, cartoonish smile. it’s a goddamn pikachu mask and that, too, is somehow fitting.

( i don’t want to do this i don’t want to do this i don’t want to do this i don’t want to do this i’m sorry )

but when has mark ever had a choice when it comes to his body and the sins it has been made to do?

smoke burns his vision; his eyelashes flutter against airborne debris and a battering of near-tangible heat. the safety releases. his hand steadies.

the man in the pikachu mask blinks blindness from his gaze, but his aim holds true nonetheless.

mark drops away from himself. he lets go, and it all just drops away.

he squeezes the trigger and a scarlet rosette blooms across the back of a woman’s pretty white sundress. he squeezes the trigger and a wet red flower opens itself up in the center of a man’s chest, right at the core of his heart.

he blinks the smothering miasma from his stinging, watering eyes and a young girl’s round white moon face flickers into his pistol’s line of fire.

mark’s finger turns to stone upon the trigger.

she is just a child. she is also lovely. she wears her hair in two black pigtails so silken that they shine and bounce to the movements of her head, and tears cut tracks into the ash and grime that coats her pallid cheeks. she falls to the side of the woman in white– now, white and red red red– and the shape of a word appears on her small, quivering mouth. the word is ‘mother’. she looks at mark and the line his gun makes in his hand– looks at him unwaveringly, unrelentingly, with eyes that are awed and abhorred by what they view– and mark knows that he has witnessed a scared little animal gaze into the face of an apex predator to see its own death staring back. the ‘o’ of her opened mouth is deep and black, a portal into the watching abyss that mark cannot tear his eyes from, and although her screams are swallowed up by all the other screams, he knows that hers exists. it is alive with terror.

mark pulls the plastic mask up over his face and allows it to tumble, too yellow and too smiling, onto the hot black tarmac. the safety clicks back into place within the gun and then the gun is fluttering away from his hands like a big evil bird, and the gun is a raven, maybe. the raven skitters to the ground with a clattering metal retort and lies still.

he is an orphan. he has made another into an orphan. for this, he shall not be forgiven.

( i’m so, so sorry )

mark’s mouth molds into the shape of ‘sorry’, sorry sorry sorry sorry, an endless litany of sorry, but his tongue is dry and his ash-choked throat refuses to unstick itself and in the end, sorry means nothing anyway. sorry doesn’t mend mutilated flesh or put the lifeblood back into a mother. the little girl watches the true countenance of her apex predator appear and then shatter apart, contorting into something true– something sad, something scared– and she does not understand. she does not understand why a bullet has not ripped through her yet to leave her as stone-still as her mother. she does not understand why the man in the pikachu mask unveiled his real visage only to drop his weapon and mumble– all numb in the face and dead in the eyes– these little quavering things that she could never hope to hear.

abruptly, her confusion mutates back into wide-eyed shock and the girl is feeling her fear again, the selfsame fear she had momentarily forgotten how to feel. she points at mark. the shape of a lone man solidifies out of the vibrating, pulsating mass of screaming, stampeding people to scoop the child up into his arms. her pigtails bounce. she still shrieks. she still points.

mark wonders if the man had been the girl’s father. he wonders. he is devastatingly sorry. his 'sorry’ still does not put the breath of life back into the slain woman in white.

the little girl had not been pointing at mark.

she had been pointing behind him.

mark doesn’t know what’s happening to him. the world whistles past his eyes, flashes through his ears– lanterns smoke fire lanterns fire guns bang bang blood fire sorry blood dress sorry sorry– and suddenly, he is– and suddenly, he is very much–

and suddenly, mark is very much dying.

the wooden construct above his head is a circus performer– a massive stilt-walker teetering forth on broken stilts, stilts that are sharp and snapped and flaming hotly– and mark sees it looming in his peripheral vision only as the stilts– the supports– flay apart and fail, and the great burning thing comes rushing down to embrace him in its crushing arms.

he’s knocked flat on his back. the wooden beams slam down atop him, whipping his powerless limbs this way and that, and one falling timber catches him directly in the forehead. it cracks his skull back into the road. he lies very still, scarcely breathing. the debris has compressed all of the air straight from his flattened lungs. he lies very still and origami stars chase each other’s tails around within the pools of his eyes, shooting comet-like through his discombobulated brain.

this is it.

this is how he will die.

if the beams do not impale him or crush him completely beneath their weight, then he will burn to death.

isn’t this what he wants?

death is easy. it’s living that’s the hard part. and he’s ready to fold.

( no )

mark gasps. filthy, smoke-laden air rushes into his lungs and he wheezes; he coughs; he blinks dirt and dust from his eyes, and his pinioned legs twitch underneath all of the wooden weight that binds them.

( no. stop lying to yourself. you say that you feel nothing, but you want to feel everything– and you’re scared of feeling everything– all at once, all at the same time. you’re a liar. you’re a pretender. you’ll never be the same as your masters because you care about things, about everything, and nothing will ever be enough to fully excise that truth out of you. you don’t want to die but you don’t know how to live. you’re afraid. you’re afraid and being afraid is what scares you the most. you’re afraid of death. you’re afraid to be alone. you’re afraid of your loneliness. you’re afraid of love. you’re afraid of falling in love. you’re afraid to die. you don’t want to die. you don’t want to die but you don’t know how to live. you want to live anyway )

the fear wakes mark up.

he’s had a scream confined within his chest since his days of childhood, and he has always swallowed it down, held it inside. allowed it to burn there, caged and captured.

for the first time in his life, mark looses it from the depths of his throat. he lets those two unspoken words sing free, and they become a sharp noise– a clear, piercing noise– the war cry of a frightened, wounded little beast– a little beast that does not want to die; it’s a sound that curdles the blood, thickens it to ice in the vein, and it cuts through the burning night sky like a knife and echoes, echoes, echoes.

“help me!”

the words thin until they are nothing but an organic shriek. it’s the sort of scream that wrecks the throat utterly, and mark was already suffocating– he cannot breathe except in gasps, and the agonized wheezing draws in more smoke and dust than oxygen, shredding the throat and seizing the lungs– but he forces the screams into the world anyway.

epinephrine makes everything bright and lucid, and maybe he deserves this for all the ills that he has done, but this is not what he wants.

improbable tears spill forth from his blurry, clouded eyes. it is so viciously hot beneath the burning wood and immolating skyline that he would’ve thought his tears had all dried, but he is wrong. the tears are thick, salty, and mix with the blood from the gash upon his forehead. it blinds him. he is blinded, and burning, and screaming his whole life out into the choking air.

( please help me i want to live )

mark can feel the hot little teeth of flames gnawing through the fabric of his jeans. it won’t be long now until his lower body, compressed and immobile, is completely aflame– and not much longer after that until his arms and abdomen suffer the awful lickings of the fire, as well. one arm is trapped against his chest; the other, beneath him. he hears popping from within the mass of smoldering wood and senses the internal shifting within the beams.

with another guttural cry, mark wrenches his arm out from underneath his body and catches a wayward plank of wood against his palm just before its jagged, nail-tipped edge embeds itself into the soft, pale column of his throat. his spine creaks. his lungs struggle for breath. mark turns his head away from the threatening wood and presses his cheek to the roughness of the asphalt.

time’s up. mark invests all of his remaining breath into the liberation of his other arm– the arm not currently acting as the sole safeguard between himself and a gory demise– and his screams die in perfect synchronization with the closure of his eyelids.

but he gets the arm free.

he is exhausted. he is smothered. his hand stretches out, searching and frightened. clean, well-manicured fingernails scrabble across the ground in a blind, shivering panic, clawing at the hard asphalt only to shred themselves apart in the process.

( help me stay with me please)

it has been an overcast day that bled into a rainy evening. gunmetal gray stormclouds blew in on the stiff, hot breeze– an entire fleet of cumulonimbus, and all so heavy and full with their lightning and their fury. they pierced themselves upon the spires of seoul’s tall, glass-faced skyscrapers until the steel-colored sky finally split open like a milky-blind eye to lash back at the city beneath with a downpouring of fierce, needling tears.

the eye in the sky has closed once more. seoul now sits still and silent and very, very slick. few fires will rage tonight. the dampness permeates too deeply into everything, and the hazy, lazy ennui, leaden in the bones and in the blood, runs too thickly, too. excess rainwater pools upon the streets and sidewalks like swatches of dark molten mirrors, catching and holding the illumination of the humming, murmuring neon signs within their surfaces.

mark pauses to gaze into one of these puddles. his face glows blurry and smooth, haloed in a soft pink hue. it’s almost pretty. blinking the shine from his eyes, mark steps on through the puddle and continues walking. slowly, slowly– going nowhere in particular. he’s walking just to walk– to move, and be reminded of his inescapable aliveness. his sneaker lands in the center of the puddle, disrupting the image of a boy painted in misty pinks, and leaves only ripples in its wake.

he’d had only one client scheduled for tonight, and the slimy bastard seems to have stood him up.

but mark is glad for it. he’s got a little hurting red mouth sewn closed upon his side and the last thing he wants right now is for another set of brusque, calloused hands to grab at him and rough him up further– to scuttle all over his battered, protesting body like fleshed, dexterous cockroaches. quite frankly, he would prefer actual roaches upon him tonight to a man’s strange hands. so, mark is relieved. he’s relieved, and walking just to walk, and perhaps he’s also very much ill.

mark needs time to repair himself. his last mission, while technically a success, has left him terribly unglued. it’s an awful thing, to realize that you are coming apart at the seams and that there’s not enough tape in your possession– maybe not enough tape in the whole fucking world– that could pull your mauled parts together and seal all the cracks in-between, making you into a complete and feeling creature again. there will never be enough tape to fix mark– but he possesses a needle and some thread and can sew a row of neat, tight stitches through a raw and smarting wound. mark will gather up all his broken bits, piece them back together– like a color-by-number picture, only his numbers are struck through with lines of blood and oh no where does this sharp little piece go, what about this one and this one, too– and, eventually, he will push through this. he always does. he has no choice. he needs time, though– and it’s rare for him, but he needs some fucking time.

he looks like hell– feels even worse– and who would’ve known that make-up could conceal all of hades and lucifer’s own goddamned wrath so well? he wears foundation like a portrait wears its paint. unseen to the outside eye is the plum, bruise-ish rings that encircle his eyes– for his sleep has been dragged in upon the coattails of painkillers, and is thin and restless when it does come. each slivered fingertip upon mark’s hands are cleaned and dressed, and beneath the loose fabric of his hoodie lies the central source of all his woes– a messy, sutured stab wound.

the cut delves deep into his side, sliced into his lower abdomen just above the line of his sharp hipbone. even on the drugs, mark still finds himself hurting through the numbness. feeling pain on painkillers is like seeing sunglow through closed eyelids, and although the ache is minimal mark still senses it everywhere, aching in his teeth and skull and sides and stomach. the waistband of his shorts rubs against the bandage– and thus, the wound lying beneath it– with each step. mark keeps walking. friction builds. he feels a tad bit nauseous, but there’s nothing in his stomach to expel. he presses a hand flat against his hip and keeps walking. faint prickes of a cold, cold sweat break out across his arms, back, and at the nape of his neck.

he toys with his tongue piercing, idly rolling it between his teeth. the stud has been a constant metallic taste in his mouth for a long while now. he’s used to it. he’s used to the cool hardness of a blade tucked up his sleeve, or stowed in his pocket, or strapped against his thigh– and the chill of needles, too, both syringes and the fatter, thicker needle weapons used to stab into sensitive nerve points or pry up fingernails. mark realizes just how many different metals are hidden within and against his body. he’s not sure what to do or feel about that rumination, so he twirls his piercing some more and tries his best to forget.

it’s very late. or very early. depends on how one views the world and the way clocks count time with their ticks and clicks. he’s in the belly of cottonmouth territory, but he feels no particular unease. this is, technically speaking, home turf. these people can’t hurt him any more than they already have.

mark doesn’t want to go home. there’s no point to it, really. sleep won’t come, and he can be alone out here just as well as he could be alone in his bed. perhaps he should force his legs to carry him home anyway. that would be the intelligent thing to do.

mark is always doing the intelligent thing. he’s always trying to survive. maybe he wants to take the stupid option tonight. maybe he wants to walk until his sutures irritate enough to weep blood. maybe he wants to smoke a cigarette and wander around until the break of dawn– until he’s so fucking exhausted that he has no choice but to rest.

the storefronts are all burned-out shells here. these handful of streets took a real beating during the immolation days two years prior. since they’re seated right in the literal maw of the cottonmouths, no business ever dared rebuild. graffiti now coats the few bits of glass that remain in smashed-out windows and most every other ash-blackened surface with obscenities and spray-painted colors.

mark stops beneath the faint, flickering light of a lamppost not yet broken. he digs his bandaged hands into the pocket of his hoodie to withdraw a lighter and a package of cigarettes.

he lights up. takes a drag.

there’s a motorcycle approaching, noisy as all hell.

it’s a dumbass move to come riding through here– at two in the motherfucking morning, nonetheless– all while being that cacophonous. the motorcycle rider is practically asking to get mugged. or shot. maybe he’s brave. or a newbie cottonmouth who’s making a fool of himself. or maybe he’s just a goddamn dumbass.

mark would’ve rolled his eyes if he actually gave a fuck.

oh. looks like it’s a delivery boy. mark leans against the lamppost and smokes. whoever ordered take-out at two o’clock in the morning and made this guy drive into cottonmouth territory to deliver it deserves to get their face kicked in.

‘take-out’ brings mark to the thought of food. because he took no clients tonight, he will not eat tomorrow. he hasn’t got the money and won’t get paid until the end of the week.

oh well. that’s just too fucking bad, isn’t it? just too fucking bad.