#vmxlightsout

There is a seamless panel of windows that spans two walls of Jongsuk’s penthouse apartment, showcasing the skyline of Seoul; tonight, that skyline is burning. The blaze of the city casts the apartment in flickering hues of orange and gold that catch on the crystal of the chandelier and fracture, dancing across marble counters and polished wood as if they too are burning. Smoke rises thick from the heart of the city. Its inky fingertips have yet to reach high enough to obscure the chaos in the streets from view, but the ground shakes as another explosion rocks the city. It will not be long before Seoul is choking on ash and soot. 

Inside the apartment, Jongsuk stands at his desk with a map of the city spread across its surface. The office is a flurry of arguments. In the corner, two weapons dealers are hashing it out, crunching numbers as they decide just how much of their stock Wolfsbane can afford to sacrifice. There are three others gathered around the table with Jongsuk, marking key locations on the map, places that Wolfsbane cannot afford to let the snakes overrun. 

Jongsuk’s phone buzzes from where it rests on the edge of the map. He reaches for it absently, too focused on the red circle being drawn around the city’s main power plant to spare it a glance just yet. He nods in approval of the newest addition. “We can’t let them get control over the city’s power. Blacking out Seoul is the quickest way to shut the city down.” 

He hears murmurs of consent around him as he finally checks his phone. A lone text awaits him. There’s no name attached and the number is blocked, but Jongsuk knows all too well who the message is from. Chaeyoung was never one to waste words, after all. 

[ ✉ incoming sms; blocked id ] Handle it.

Jongsuk tosses his phone back on the desktop with an annoyed curl of his lip. He ignores the looks he receives from the others gathered around the table and turns his attention back to the map. Continuing as if nothing at all had happened, he snatched the red pen and made a heavy circle around City Hall, tapping the butt of the pen against the mark as he lifted his gaze to meet everyone’s gaze in turn. “This is where everything began. They’ll seize the building to make a statement.” Jongsuk drops his gaze back to the map. “We’re not going to give them the chance.” 

The sound of the doorbell ringing sends the room into sudden silence. 

Shooting a look at the guard nearest the office door, Jongsuk nods once, sending the man to go investigate. He dismisses the disturbance as an annoyance and intends to return to laying out a strategy to defend the city, but there’s a strangled sound from the next room that interrupts Jongsuk before he can finish his thought. 

With a huff of irritation he straightens, slapping the pen in his hand on the desk before moving around it and heading for the living room. He’s flanked within moments, guards drawing their weapons, fingers already poised over triggers in preparation for whatever may await them in the entryway. 

What awaits them is the guard, holding a black gift box, looking like he’s going to be sick any moment. 

Jongsuk’s brow furrows. 

The guard’s head rises as the room begins to fill. His eyes immediately seek out Jongsuk, and his jaw works as he holds the second’s gaze. “Sir. You... it’s for you,” he says, somber and tripping over his words, his unease completely out of character for the usually dauntless man. That alone is setting off all sorts of warning bells in Jongsuk’s head as his guard hefts the box higher and slowly closes the distance between them. 

Jongsuk’s jaw tightens as the man stops in front of him. He continues to hold the box out in offering-- or maybe it’s disgust? as if he’s dutifully holding it but keeping it as far away from himself as he can even so-- and Jongsuk holds his gaze a moment longer before reaching out to lift the lead. 

“Be careful,” the guard blurts suddenly, shifting the package away from Jongsuk. “There’s-- you’ll see. Just be careful,” he finishes lamely, shoulders slumping before he moves the box back within reach. 

The reaction leaves Jongsuk narrowing his eyes, the warnings ringing in his ears near deafening now, but he pointedly turns his attention back to the box. He lifts the lid an inch, then two. When he catches sight of its contents he steps closer and yanks the lid off completely. 

It falls to the ground a foot or so away, forgotten. 

For a second, Jongsuk forgets how to breathe. He forgets how to draw breath into his lungs, how to expel it, how to relieve the sharp pressure in his chest. All he sees is crimson. The packaging is stained with it. Blood coats the waxen tissue paper, drenching it, rendering it sodden and sloppy. 

A human head rests carefully nestled in the center of the bloody gift wrap.

There’s a shout of outrage from somewhere behind Jongsuk. He hardly hears it, the roar in his ears too loud as he reaches out on auto-pilot, fingers brushing over a still-warm forehead, pushing aside a shock of dark hair to get a better look. The guard hisses something at him, but Jongsuk doesn’t register it. He’s too busy studying the face staring unseeingly up at him. 

He knows this face. 

It is-- was-- one of his. It’s one of the boys that Jongsuk had plucked from the streets with the promise of a hot meal and steady work. He was a kid-- sixteen, seventeen at best. He was a kid, and he was just doing what he had to do to survive. He still could have turned things around. He his whole life ahead of him to figure it out. 

His hand has started to shake when Jongsuk takes notice of the snake nestled in the corner of the packaging. Its body is loosely coiled and its head rests on the edge of the bloodied tissue paper. Jongsuk only tenses for an instant. Anger overwhelms common sense and he grabs the snake by the head without a second thought, fingers tightening in an iron grip as he lifts it straight from the box. 

The guard holding the gift box startles and stumbles back a step. His grip on the package slips, but he doesn’t let it hit the ground, clutching it closer in an instinctive effort to correct his grip. The severed head inside is jostled with the motion and the guard groans as if he’s going to be sick soon.

The serpent hangs limp from Jongsuk’s grip. It was dead before it was ever placed in the box. Now that his brain’s had a chance to catch up with his body, Jongsuk reasons that it had to be if Cottonmouth wanted to ensure that the head arrived on his doorstep in mint condition. With a disgusted scoff, he throws the snake aside and turns to face a second guard. 

“Get word out,” he grinds out, voice carrying without having to be raised. No one in the room dares to make a sound. “We move now.” 

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)