The bathroom is a sickly green color and the lights sound off with that too-harsh buzzing noise. Maybe he's the only one who can hear it. If he's lucky, he gets left in the pitch dark, cold water up to his shoulders.
-
She doesn't take prisoners, only her children. This is just your inheritance.
-
If he's luckier than lucky, he's got someone to split the bones of his knees and his shins every time they try to fuse together. He's got someone to shatter his kneecaps and ankles and push them apart all over again.
-
Konstantin is gone for twenty days at sea and comes to the only door he knows will do this for him.
-
He promised himself he would be different. He wouldn't eat meat anymore. He would train himself not to crave it, not to desire something warm and damp in his mouth, coppery with give, followed by the shrieks of something alive at the other end because at the end of the day he would refuse to become this kind of monster, beating inside him like another living thing in a too-small skin. It struggles to push outwards. It leaves palm-shaped bruises on his legs and on his ribs like beatings. Yet here he is now with a cold fish dumped into his palms, half-alive and gasping. Fish don't scream, not that you can hear, but Konstantin can feel a pulse under his palms rapping like an unwelcome guest at a door. Ash is standing at the side of the tub like some kind of spectator, like he doesn't know what Konstantin will do next when the both of them very well know that the fish won't die of asphyxiation.
He is uncomfortable with eyes on him so he slides down as much as the give of the restraints will let him. Slips to the bottom of the tub where the water is still clear as he looks up. The fish still thrashes in his palms, but stronger, and Konstantin wishes he could give it that chance to escape, let it rely on that instinctive hope that if it wiggles around enough it will find some purchase and swim far, far away.
Ash is looking down the way a child might at some fish who is collecting flakes from the top of the tank. The remaining air in Konstantin's lungs escapes and forms a get of soft bubbles.
Fine.
He pushes blunt nails into the scales of the fish and brings it up to his lips and teeth, tearing into it and letting the blood muck up the water again starting from his eyes.
Nothing to see here.
The water is pink when Ash returns, but the fish is gone--bones and all and Konstantin's lips are stained red and there are scales sticking to the sides of the tub.
-
Ash opens his mouth wide one night and counts his teeth.
All seventy-four of them.
-
"I could pull them out."
"They'll go away."
-
They don't and Ash is getting out a soft roll of tools while Konstantin cradles his too-full jaw and sobs.
-
There are uneven, sharp teeth in a haphazard pile on the soap dish mounted on the wall beside the tub. They are falling over each other. There was a root attached to each at one point but now they are just bone.
(Maybe Ash doesn't think he sees him in the early hours of the morning sucking the nerve and gristle out of each one, but he does. The sound is soothing to the terrible ache in his mouth.)
-
He stays in the tub for three weeks.
Ash breaks the fusing bones in his legs over and over again until he doesn't scream anymore, he just anticipates it. The snap of bone, the slow magic regenerating bone and tissue slowly into shape again. Into what should be a correct shape, but humane and monster fight. They squabble in his blood, argue over what is the "proper" shape and where the human pulls the piscine pushes forward, stretches and painfully fuses shin to ankle and heel to arch. But Ash is good. He'll do this for him. He'll break each bone over and over again (Konstantin is fully convinced that this will stop eventually).
Ash is good. Ash is very good. He cuts the too-thick scales off his thighs and shins and he severs the new tendons trying to form between his legs. One evening, Ash is looking at them in the moon light that's pouring through the small window. They are half through a book and Konstantin is lounging in newly drawn water that is only slightly pink because his skin has reformed over the severed, raw muscles again--formed bright and rosy, looking freshly scrubbed with soft little scales, all iridescent and green-blue-pink. Konstantin follows his eyes, follows them to the long, thick strips of muscle with their thick layer of insulating gristle and fat and Konstantin sees them draped over the edge of the tub, as if maybe he'd reconsider them. Reconsider this. He swallows when he meets cool eyes and looks at the strips of unnecessary and stubborn muscle trying to fuse his legs together.
He choke and shrugs because Ash's everything practically screams for it. He can hear it all. Your tense shoulders and fingers never lie, the twitch of muscle like you want to reach out and grab it like a starving man. It's like having a thousand dollar cut of fucking sashimi laid out in front of you but you can't touch it. Can't eat it. Can't even lean in to smell how fresh it is off the fucking fish because that's weird
But they've done a lot of weird things over these past few weeks.
And Konstantin has forgotten about school, but he doesn't want to go back to sea. He just wants this to be over (the secret in his heart of hearts is this: it isn't going to be over. He is too much his father's son.) And so he breaks this silence, this contentious moment: ]
Eat it.
[ Nothing's stopping you. ]
I don't need it, [ he says, toned hushed, too loud even in a whisper against the bathroom walls. ] You can eat it.
[ there's nothing like the threat of violence to really spur someone into taking drastic action.
(this time, "drastic action" is grabbing someone at random from the crowd and laying a hell of a kiss on them.)
(last time, it was shoving someone out a sixteenth story window. times change.)
throwing someone off your trail by schmoozing the first viable stranger takes a hell of a lot of confidence, really good acting, and an eye that can pick out the stranger who won't shove you off the moment you lock lips with them. in the handful of second that it takes for him to size up and seize his intended accomplice, he's done his best to make himself look as appealing as possible, and this is how you do it: throw off the heavy hood, rest the chunky headphones and their cord wrapped once-twice around a slender throat, run fingers through hair to give it a tousle for that just-recently-banged-in-a-back-alley-chic. smile. always remember to smile.
smile, and lie until people believe that you're honest. give 'em a wink. give 'em a plea: ] Help a guy out.
[ make sure that you don't give them a chance to think with the wrong head, either. hook your fingers into the belt loops on their pants, fit your free hand against the tender nape of their neck before you lay it on them, and once you've got them locked, don't hold back. nothing kills the faux-mood more than obvious faux-kissing. use tongue, use teeth; give them a little sigh. this works, it works, it's always worked. ]
[ Ash talks to the dead. He thanks them, every day, for giving him something to eat, because his mother may have been a proper ghoul but she was one who understood manners too. Sometimes, when a body's freshly died, Ash can actually talk to them - he sees the outlines of their ghosts reflected on the metal beds. Some of them get mad. Some of them make small "oh"s, as if resigned to their fates.
The fact of it is: yes, sometimes the noises of the living can wake the dead. Luckily, nothing's on the table today. Pun wholly intended. ]
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
CW: GROSS.
-
The bathroom is a sickly green color and the lights sound off with that too-harsh buzzing noise. Maybe he's the only one who can hear it. If he's lucky, he gets left in the pitch dark, cold water up to his shoulders.
-
She doesn't take prisoners, only her children. This is just your inheritance.
-
If he's luckier than lucky, he's got someone to split the bones of his knees and his shins every time they try to fuse together. He's got someone to shatter his kneecaps and ankles and push them apart all over again.
-
Konstantin is gone for twenty days at sea and comes to the only door he knows will do this for him.
-
He promised himself he would be different. He wouldn't eat meat anymore. He would train himself not to crave it, not to desire something warm and damp in his mouth, coppery with give, followed by the shrieks of something alive at the other end because at the end of the day he would refuse to become this kind of monster, beating inside him like another living thing in a too-small skin. It struggles to push outwards. It leaves palm-shaped bruises on his legs and on his ribs like beatings. Yet here he is now with a cold fish dumped into his palms, half-alive and gasping. Fish don't scream, not that you can hear, but Konstantin can feel a pulse under his palms rapping like an unwelcome guest at a door. Ash is standing at the side of the tub like some kind of spectator, like he doesn't know what Konstantin will do next when the both of them very well know that the fish won't die of asphyxiation.
He is uncomfortable with eyes on him so he slides down as much as the give of the restraints will let him. Slips to the bottom of the tub where the water is still clear as he looks up. The fish still thrashes in his palms, but stronger, and Konstantin wishes he could give it that chance to escape, let it rely on that instinctive hope that if it wiggles around enough it will find some purchase and swim far, far away.
Ash is looking down the way a child might at some fish who is collecting flakes from the top of the tank. The remaining air in Konstantin's lungs escapes and forms a get of soft bubbles.
Fine.
He pushes blunt nails into the scales of the fish and brings it up to his lips and teeth, tearing into it and letting the blood muck up the water again starting from his eyes.
Nothing to see here.
The water is pink when Ash returns, but the fish is gone--bones and all and Konstantin's lips are stained red and there are scales sticking to the sides of the tub.
-
Ash opens his mouth wide one night and counts his teeth.
All seventy-four of them.
-
"I could pull them out."
"They'll go away."
-
They don't and Ash is getting out a soft roll of tools while Konstantin cradles his too-full jaw and sobs.
-
There are uneven, sharp teeth in a haphazard pile on the soap dish mounted on the wall beside the tub. They are falling over each other. There was a root attached to each at one point but now they are just bone.
(Maybe Ash doesn't think he sees him in the early hours of the morning sucking the nerve and gristle out of each one, but he does. The sound is soothing to the terrible ache in his mouth.)
-
He stays in the tub for three weeks.
Ash breaks the fusing bones in his legs over and over again until he doesn't scream anymore, he just anticipates it. The snap of bone, the slow magic regenerating bone and tissue slowly into shape again. Into what should be a correct shape, but humane and monster fight. They squabble in his blood, argue over what is the "proper" shape and where the human pulls the piscine pushes forward, stretches and painfully fuses shin to ankle and heel to arch. But Ash is good. He'll do this for him. He'll break each bone over and over again (Konstantin is fully convinced that this will stop eventually).
Ash is good. Ash is very good. He cuts the too-thick scales off his thighs and shins and he severs the new tendons trying to form between his legs. One evening, Ash is looking at them in the moon light that's pouring through the small window. They are half through a book and Konstantin is lounging in newly drawn water that is only slightly pink because his skin has reformed over the severed, raw muscles again--formed bright and rosy, looking freshly scrubbed with soft little scales, all iridescent and green-blue-pink. Konstantin follows his eyes, follows them to the long, thick strips of muscle with their thick layer of insulating gristle and fat and Konstantin sees them draped over the edge of the tub, as if maybe he'd reconsider them. Reconsider this. He swallows when he meets cool eyes and looks at the strips of unnecessary and stubborn muscle trying to fuse his legs together.
He choke and shrugs because Ash's everything practically screams for it. He can hear it all. Your tense shoulders and fingers never lie, the twitch of muscle like you want to reach out and grab it like a starving man. It's like having a thousand dollar cut of fucking sashimi laid out in front of you but you can't touch it. Can't eat it. Can't even lean in to smell how fresh it is off the fucking fish because that's weird
But they've done a lot of weird things over these past few weeks.
And Konstantin has forgotten about school, but he doesn't want to go back to sea. He just wants this to be over (the secret in his heart of hearts is this: it isn't going to be over. He is too much his father's son.) And so he breaks this silence, this contentious moment: ]
Eat it.
[ Nothing's stopping you. ]
I don't need it, [ he says, toned hushed, too loud even in a whisper against the bathroom walls. ] You can eat it.
cw: also gross, nothing in this thread will be worksafe. THERE I'M DONE.
FINALLY DONE also i feel u edit comments
i think i can trace my recent raw fish obsession to this thread...
hi............... it me...
(this time, "drastic action" is grabbing someone at random from the crowd and laying a hell of a kiss on them.)
(last time, it was shoving someone out a sixteenth story window. times change.)
throwing someone off your trail by schmoozing the first viable stranger takes a hell of a lot of confidence, really good acting, and an eye that can pick out the stranger who won't shove you off the moment you lock lips with them. in the handful of second that it takes for him to size up and seize his intended accomplice, he's done his best to make himself look as appealing as possible, and this is how you do it: throw off the heavy hood, rest the chunky headphones and their cord wrapped once-twice around a slender throat, run fingers through hair to give it a tousle for that just-recently-banged-in-a-back-alley-chic. smile. always remember to smile.
smile, and lie until people believe that you're honest. give 'em a wink. give 'em a plea: ] Help a guy out.
[ make sure that you don't give them a chance to think with the wrong head, either. hook your fingers into the belt loops on their pants, fit your free hand against the tender nape of their neck before you lay it on them, and once you've got them locked, don't hold back. nothing kills the faux-mood more than obvious faux-kissing. use tongue, use teeth; give them a little sigh. this works, it works, it's always worked. ]
no subject
You are.
[ Ash talks to the dead. He thanks them, every day, for giving him something to eat, because his mother may have been a proper ghoul but she was one who understood manners too. Sometimes, when a body's freshly died, Ash can actually talk to them - he sees the outlines of their ghosts reflected on the metal beds. Some of them get mad. Some of them make small "oh"s, as if resigned to their fates.
The fact of it is: yes, sometimes the noises of the living can wake the dead. Luckily, nothing's on the table today. Pun wholly intended. ]
You don't wanna wake the dead.
OH NO I LOVE THIS
(no subject)
txt.
Dude.
What the HECK.
(Before you ask, she made it across.)
oh no
u done goofed
rood!!! is me
(no subject)
(no subject)
(no subject)