Drafts

My breathing is low and shallow. I feel numb, yet I am devoured completely by a pain so intense and fierce that the world around me flickers and fades. I think if I was to scream, it would shatter everything, the world would just explode. The pain is everything, it's my world and it eats away at who I am until I'm nobody.

I hold his shaking, trembling body as it turns paler and paler and I know his throat is burning up and crumbling in on itself. His whole body drying up and turning to dust inside. The hunger consuming him, oh the hunger. I can feel my own burning near the back of my throat. I haven't taken my pill today. Again. I always forgot when I'm not with a client. But now Felix's dying and I have to focus on that.

He coughs once, blood flying out his parched mouth and splattering back down on his pale, concave cheeks. Oh, Felix, what has become of you?

"Rae?" His pale, unseeing eyes shift around trying to find me. But he's blind now, and he won't be able to see me. So I stroke his hair, murmering to let him know I'm here. "How long have you been doing this, again?"

"Twelve years, three months and six days," I say without hesitation. Although I don't feel strong, my voice comes out a lot steadier than Fee's. His own beautiful voice has turned to a hoarse whisper. "Longer than you've been alive, kiddo."

That makes him smile, and his white eyes close again and he rasps away his last breaths in my arms. I want desperatly to slip him a handful of my pills. Anything to numb the pain and help him slip away a little easier. But I know he'll be cut open, checked on. And everyone who has the pills can be identified by the numbers stamped on the plastic casing. So I ignore the temptation and kiss Felix's forehead. It's hot and clammy, his sweat sticks to my mouth when I pull away and when I run my tongue along my lips I can taste salt. I don't know if it's the sweat from his fever or the tears from the pain. The kind of pain that only watching your baby brother die can bring.

Yugi slipped into the evening clothes waiting in his bedroom.

Somebody had laid them among his bedsheets and books, staking them up pretty high (due to the creases and folds that indicated Yami had no damn clue how to fold.) And also, he seemingly had no idea how to be originally romantic, but it was sweet of him to have dotted the clothes with cologne, placed a masquerade mask on top of the tuxedo, and hidden a manila invitation form between the sleeve and cumberbund (holy crap a cumberbund).

The sleeves of the tuxedo slipped off Yami's wrists, and eventually he gave up trying to pin them back with invisible buttons and secured the mask over the bridge of his nose. He remembered Italy; swaying down the Venice alleys and dipping his flesh into the ageless fountains of Rome with the millions of festive masks alternating over the two of their faces. He didn't remember if this peppermint-green one belonged to him or Yami- officially- and it hardly mattered because whatever one possessed, the other owned just as much.

The air was light and Yugi used the oversized sleeve to brush off the decaying wetness from his face. He smiled. It turned out Yami didn't just abandon him afterall. Still, the fires of disappointment lingered until he tied the sash-belt around his waist and felt it flutter into his stomach. With all of the funeral planning, there had been no time to dance. Kissing the white cheeks of his old friend, holding Ryou's hand and trying to flush his own pink energy back into the boy. And worst of all, having Yami have to listen to all his memories of that former love, both swelling with sorrow and sometimes unsuppressible jealousy he felt when it seemed like Yugi still belonged to Ryou. He never did; especially not now. But he had had to delve into the past so as not to lose it with that dead, boyish flesh.

Yugi sauntered down the stairs, the familiar floorboards acting as his absorbent structure. His misery, his anger, his sadness flowed under the house and was sucked deep into the core of the ground. Within two minutes, he had arrived where Yami intended him. And there was Yami, propped up against the kitchen counter, his pinkish mask gleaming in the fluorescent light. Yugi smiled back at him; a knowing smile, and extended his arm as the music began.

so there's this girl, right, and I know, I know you've
heard this story a million billion times before but it's
different this time (isn't that what they all say)

The flowers began to bloom and my mother was dying. Her skin was always pale, hardly more than a weary grey that seemed to permeate into everything in the house, and her hair was lackluster. I think that was the hardest part—watching her fade away, like a flickering shadow of a human, just as the rest of the world came alive. The months moved by in waves, like a flipbook of pictures of my family staggering through the house that we had just moved into. There were boxes of unpacked books and vases and summer clothes in the front hall.

“Where’d you get all those scars?”

(No name) had immediately flinched when the boy tapped him on the shoulder. It was a reflex he was unable to rid himself of. The voice of the other boy was timid and slightly scared, as if the boy who never spoke might suddenly snap at him or hurt him for being so nosy. His mom was always telling him to keep his nose out of other people’s business, but the temptation to ask questions was too much to resist.

--- turned towards the other boy and ran his eyes across the pale bare flesh of the boy’s almost naked body. His chest was unmarked but frighteningly pale, his skinny stick legs marked with only a bruise on his knee from a playground scrape. No scars. No cuts. Nothing.

“How come you don’t have any?” He asked instead of answering. Anything to avoid talking about the scars and what was behind them.

The boy was startled. He hadn’t expected that sort of response, and now that the question was asked, he couldn’t think of an answer. Why didn't he have any scars?

The first time he heard it, they were caught between two mattresses on a thick couch that had been herded onto the main floor room. “Dad.”

“I love you, dad,” the boy had said. And Leon had shrugged it off. It was a goofy mistake, like when you called your teacher “mom” and tried to cover it up behind a cough or question. But-- Cloud didn’t cover it up. He didn’t smile self-consciously either or giggle at himself, he just let it slide through his lips, against Leon’s chest. Still, he was half asleep and Leon smiled it away.

But it happened again; always at loosely intimate moments when they were curled up and warmed within a frame of comfort. But then in the second frame, the word would appear and buffer the entire room around them, for the word began to mean something.

It meant Cloud wanted a guardian, not a lover.

Well, Leon thought. But Cloud would still stretch up his arms, which were beaded with perspiration that dripped from the boy’s own mind, and beg Leon back to his bed.

Their bed was creased with shapes that looked like crowns and spades, but were really just the indents of age and the countless movements that bodies upon it had made. Wrinkles of the love, messes for the wrestling, and splotches upon blemishes of tight-fisted tears that could only last for moments. Rest, or pure unconsciousness, could last for months.
...

My neck was the coldest part of my body; you coddled it between two warm lips and left marks like a sunset, falling into the horizon of the line between my lips.

Later that night, I examined the bruises in my mirror. Were they teeth, or fangs? Herbivore? Locative? Had the shark tooth you wore around your neck been kissing me instead? The marks looked like night-time now- blue bruises glazed in purple smoke, winding around the back of my shoulders.

I wrapped a scarf around the evidence. My neck could only be warm when it wasn't visible, too ashamed the following day to show its sunrise.

Something I found in my draft section, written in January;

Bright orange lips glowing in a sea of unfamiliar faces, soft curly tendrils flowing against her scalp, eyebrows drawn together in a sense of confusion and misunderstood feelings

You don't realize how well you know the taste of summer air until you time travel with your eyes closed.

You claim
that I stole pieces of your life from you.
But you have
cut sectors,
and rations, to feast on consolation,
and my kindness
to sharpen your teeth with.
I have been filed down
beneath your bite.
But you still dare me
to "fucking fight."

I bring to you the last of my disdain,
hand-prints and breath not cleared by the rain
and take you under, hot breath on your jaw
you are the only creature in my mouth who never would thaw.

I don't care where you go
or what you want.
Or why you crawl in
& whisper, and haunt.
But you are free
to turn and pack
but you can always;
always come back.

Thor used to crush ants for Loki when they were children.

With his toy steel hammer, he'd flatten the bugs one by one, sparing his squeamish brother their tiny legs crawling onto his skin.

So now Loki doesn't know why, when Thor is standing so close with Mjölnir in his grasp, (watching Loki bleed, stoic and breathless on the ground), his brother doesn't take out his enemies, when they are only just another pile of ants.

this is pretty much collecting dust...

“I’m gonna leave,” I told my family as I gathered them up in the living room of our family house. Before they had a chance to blow up, I continued, “It’s just- what if they get in? What if one of you get bit? I don’t want to be around if something happens. I don’t wanna see any of you have to kill one another. I’m leaving, I packed up last night.”

They were silent, then finally my dad nodded, “That’s understandable, and I won’t stop you. But just know that we’ll be here. If you decide to come back, and we’re not here, we’ll leave a note.”

A year later, I stepped into my house, the door was busted open, and my family wasn’t here. I braced myself, as I moved slowly throughout the house, there were only a couple of slow biters outside, and they weren’t that big of a threat. Besides, I had Matt and Speed as look outs. I stepped in the living room and noticed some picture frames were missing from the walls. I couldn’t help but want to check if one of them were still here… dead but alive. I whistled a little tune, and waited.

It is said that you only get one chance to live your life, there's no exceptions once you die its the end of you. But I didn't really think about until I actually died, that was the end of me, I was never going to see my friends or family again, I was gone part of the past nothing more nothing less. What I didn't understand was why I got a second chance, no I don't mean being re-resuscitated. I was given somebody else's body to live in. A body that doesn't belong to me, a body who I do not recognize, a body that now belongs to me.