In which Queenie is muzzled, and Kinger bites back.
I fucking love house of leaves
Rewritten: no | Illustrations: no | swag levels: anxious
(See the end of the work for more notes.)
Empty.
Yellow curtains “Sasha, necke deinen jüngeren Bruder nicht!” Table for five candles, bloody hands, broken glass and cicada. John, god don’t scare me like that! You have to stay with the
the
green forest. Crunching leaves. Crawfish in muddy
find hello? Hello? Dammit John, don’t you ever pick your — oh, there you are. Hey, Cassie wants you to come to her
…Whi ch way is the fucking
bus
Humming melodies. um, p-pardon me sir, but where’s the— um — the A-7 train, I can’t find
tr ain
standing at the bustling,
Loud noise, out the. But she never to mind. Standing outside, toe-to-toe. Crunching leaves. Tapping shoes on the paved sidewalk, by the corner, along the street that’s hardest to drive. Traffic racing, walking. To the train, to leaving. Earplugs in his pockets, 22, 23, 48, 15. Cold hands in the humming engine, fumbling with parts, remember what your father taught you. Remember the Berlin snow.
Twenty two. Smiling. Weight of a backpack weighing on his spine, shifted between words — bracelet. Jangling as she tugged at the scruff of hair behind his neck. Pang of pain as the copper caught.
On his knees.
He loved her.
Well. Hey, stay safe, alright? Send me photos.
Her smile seems so real. Her face seems so familiar, her eyes a soft dream. Dream. A dream, that’s all this is, isn’t it?
The truth, so violent, chokes out a throat that isn’t there.
Gentle amber-gold. Neon that burns his thoughts. Pupils that bubble and shift shuddering into color and sharper nightmares — her gaze pierces like a knife and hollows him out, raw and empty. Her hand shifts, thumb pressing over the line of his jaw, tugging his scarf, catching his eye, warm and dark, cool and light. Skin, fabric— muddled memories, one voice reaching out through it all.
They say your life plays in front of you when you die…is that what this is?
Shards of gravel drop from the syllables, hitting the floor with small clatters. Her pupils contract, eyes wide. Smile dropped. Dark curls spin into the aether. Her fingers press harder. Her hand is warm.
I wish I remembered it all better. But if I’m going to die now, that’s alright.
Hands burst from the darkness, trailing chains he knows are there but never manifest. They fasten around his shoulders, their gazes nick his skin, and he can see her mouth open in a scream. Limbs explode from nothing, swirling curls morphing to shifting tongues. Hands claw at her clothes, fix around her knees. The same chains cling to him.
The ground below is velvet, black as blood. Her hands dig into it as she is pulled to her knees. Hands scrape at his stomach, lock his ankles in place. She’s screaming. He knows the sound.
He's on his knees. He’s before her door. She is dragged backwards into the infinite, mouth locked in a snarl, hands on her head, under her jaw, forcing it shut with a bleeding tongue caught between her teeth. He tastes the blood in his mouth. In the distance, sirens blare. Motorcycle crash on the A-57, responders are on the scene.
I need you to wake up.
Her eyes lock on his. His head is filled with agony in thread-thin white, tangling around his wrists, around his neck, burrowing behind his eyes like blue light. She fights. She fights and she screams and what can he do, but watch? The lonely king at the back of the board, looking on at the slaughter, when forces have been lost and God is just a player at a park bench. The hands are in his eyes, in his hair. They pull at hers. She screams. He can do nothing.
The world shakes on its foundations. Bone bursts from spine. Organs writhe like ribbons. The scream turns to a screech, the screech to a roar, the roar to a sound unnamed. Jaws burst from cartilage and tongues ring it all, always dissolving, always stretching. Growing pains. Dying breaths. Polygon in the wound, sharp-black-knives, prickling in the light that burns the body.
The hands do not stop her as she lunges for him.
Queenie screams as she rakes every one of her sharp edges against the fire. The import, export, file and futility. She tears and writhes and reaches out for him— but that tether line. That export. The struggle to flatten him into a file would flay him apart, and doom them both to death. John is alive, and living is a threat, an overwhelming amount of system-pressure— he’d kill us both. He’s fucking nuclear.
Didn’t she vow, once, a long time ago, that she would look after him? The church bells rang over her words, brassy promises, held strong. He took her hands in his. His palms were warm. He swore he wouldn’t cry when the time came; but he was always that kind of person.
In sickness and in health, they said. She is sick now, she thinks. Sick with the irony of it all. Sick of the crown. Sick with the pain. Sick with having all she’s wanted dropped in her lap, and knowing to accept would be to kill him.
Queenie, buried deep in his memories, sinks her teeth into the connection— and snarls as she tears it to shreds.
Til death do us part.
Strings cut into his wrists. Bone is severed and he is held in the claws of a beautiful thing. Hands fall in bloody tatters to the floor. Empty gloves lie abandoned alongside them. Water drips in a house left empty. Software screams and hardware creaks— The white threads untangle, and it is a pair of wonderful hands behind them. It is a pair of beautiful neon-ringed eyes, and this is a beautiful dream.
He’s sorry. He’s so sorry. He’s so sorry. He’s on his knees at a broken door. There is no one beside him. He is clutching a cloak to his chest, he is clawing at the spot a hole once loomed, and there is nothing there. He’s so sorry. He’s so sorry. Please come back. Please come back. I miss you. I miss you. Where are you. I miss you, please come back— I never deserved you, never deserved anything, I should have listened to you, god how I wish I listened— I promise, I love you, please, PLEASE, PLEASE—!
His shirt is balled in her hands. Standing at a train station. The air is cold. The sun does not inch in the sky. The birds sing in loops, her breath ragged, far away. Her eyes are wide. They stare from above, from the clouds, from Gods lap with a chain around her neck she looks down on him, and he cannot move to reach her. Only beg.
Streetlights buzz. Cicadas lie beheaded on the earth. Birds scream to a desolate sky. Far away, a computer fizzles, and pain shoots through them both. For a moment it all almost feels real.
Then her mouth opens, and he falls.
The circus pitches, and suddenly hurls. With a crack like gods head hitting concrete, a single limp body is spat from the transfer and back into open air.
The red glow hits his back, now; and he hits the ground in silence.
The world explodes into sensation. Dust, grit, stone and bruises— The textures bites through his shirt and into his side, sending him into a skidding roll that knocks his limbs against the ground like bouncing pebbles. His arms fly out to save his head from being splattered, vertigo spinning his stomach to nausea, the momentum rolling him until his ribs scrape on the stone.
For a moment Kinger doesn't know where he is. For a split second, John is weightless in the air, decades dead pain still fresh on his nerves— but then it’s Kinger’s face slamming against a hard surface, stars spinning behind his eyes as his skull makes a sharp crack against solid rock. He falls back with a thud, the burning pain forcing all thought out of his mind. His hands are digging into the ground, theres dust in his mouth, and there's a searing pain behind his eyes that may or may not be a concussion– But he’s alive.
Always alive. Adrenaline shudders through his body in waves that make it hard to breathe. He trembles from it the way a hunted rabbit might, pupils blown wide, stuttering coughs coming from his mouth. His throat catches and Kinger finally hacks the blockage out of his throat (something he hopes is a rock, and not a tooth,) then coughs one final time before snapping out of it.
He– Lived.
“What—“ he rasps, slumping to the ground. His eyes water, the world barely a blur of blue. “What— What…?”
(“What the fuck is going on!?”
Red velvet. Glistening eyes. A checkered forest. Their first adventure.)
What is happening to him?
Ground. Solid ground. Kinger sits bolt upright in spite of his screaming spine, clutching at the dirt. He was running. He was running? Oh god, he was running– what was he running from? Who?
His head is throbbing. He clutches it with both hands, feeling for any cracks— but it’s skin, not wood. Hes human. He’s in hell. He was walking—
Another spike of pain. He groans past the pounding. He was walking, with— Barnaby. Barnaby?
Barnaby. The cowboy with the loaded gun. A valiant knight with no armor except a hat, belt, and optimism. Open mouths. Static screams, black oil seeping across darkened candy dirt. A lashing tail. His own breathing, hard and fast and worthless, gravel crunching, adrenaline running circles around a spinning mind– running, hiding, hunted, breathing, fighting, slamming his fist into the earth and then open air, and then open air, and then open air, and then open air, and then open air, and then open air, and then an open mouth, and a sinking vortex of eyes he cannot name.
Kinger struggles to keep his head up, dots dancing in his vision. His thoughts swirl. His hand, full of pins and needles, covered in absctraction-black, opens and closes like a flower that can’t decide if it wants to wilt. He can’t remember taking them away from his face, he can’t think.
Stale air brushes through his hair. The sky is an oppressive render-blue, marked with hazy half shapes that could be cubes in the distance. Gray dust is below him. Pebbles bite into his knees.
He’s…cold.
All of him is cold. His scraped arms and shaking hands. The back of his neck. Kinger raises a hand to his throat, feeling for the familiar fur and clasp.
But there’s nothing there. Suddenly he’s a blur of movement, twisting, scrambling in the dirt, searching blindly through the clouds of powdered candy-dust for his one lifeline, his one source of comfort, his hiding place, his plank of wood in a churning ocean; But the cloak is not there. Her cloak is not there. She is not there.
Kinger still clutches blindly for the place warmth once was, his eyes staring off into the nothing. His gaze wanders over the bleak horizon. The flat dust. The thin grid in the sky that marks the borders of oblivion. The blood in his mouth means nothing; his throbbing arms and side mean nothing.
Because she is not there. Because he has lost her.
The pain he’s feeling is so beautifully blinding he can almost accept it as punishment. Kinger digs his hands into his hair, trying to will his pulse to slow, his breathing to still— but it hitches and shudders, and soon the world is growing darker around him with every breath he takes, and is he losing consciousness, or are the hallucinations just starting again? He has nothing to fend them off with, no safety to cling to, he just clipped through the map to run from the only friend he's found in hours— but that friend probably would have killed him all the same.
(theres always a meaning to)
An eye opens in his peripheral.
They bubble from the ground like surfacing worms. He doubles over where he kneels. The render seeps, and shifts. He’s dizzy, dizzy, dizzy— He feels like he might faint. He feels like he might die. His heartbeat feels like its eroding the inside of his ribs, and some animal instinct begs him to breathe, but he can’t, not past the dullness and the delusion and the knowledge that this is going to kill him anyway. Spots dance in his vision. He steals a breath, and it prolongs the suffering a little more– Ringing bells, ringing in his ears, a drum in his chest choking him— Adrenaline and exhaustion, panic and pain, agony and apathy. His breath stutters and yet he cannot care.
Kinger is weak. Kinger is tired. Kinger hurts. Kinger has scraped the very bottom of the barrel, and there is nothing left for him to hold onto. Kinger buries his head in his knees, telling himself between gasping breaths to obey that one command. Don’t look. Don’t look at them. Don’t look. Hallucinations creep closer to him, the static digging in teeth. Voices mumble and murmur, taunting and asking— he can feel them rubbing against his mind, he can feel the fire burning low behind his eyes— all this running, and never looking the darkness in the eye, even though he already knows what will stare back.
The world begins to buzz, and Kinger squeezes his eyes shut. His thoughts climb over and overturn themselves, grinding and scratching. Don’t look, he screams inside his own head, don't look! He fights to think of anything else, and fails. Don’t—
Look
The world contorts. Spins. Vertigo overtakes him, and suddenly, he feels like he’s falling again. “No,” Kinger rasps, biting his cheek until he tastes blood.
Look
Look,
(at me. you know I love you, right?)
“Don’t. Don’t– do that,” He hisses. backed into a corner, trapped and so exposed. Without her cloak to warm him, what is he? How could he lose her? Didn’t he love her? Why didn’t he hold on tighter? “Don’t. Don’t—“
Look(here. See where the wall clips?)
“Stop, stop it don’t— you can’t—“
His eyes are shut, but he can feel them. He bites his tongue, but all it does is fill his mouth with blood, coppery and thick. The machines crawling over his skin, the ladybirds, the wires. Wires. A wire hell, he thinks, through a haze. That’s how I got here. Is that what’s going to kill me?
(Look, we get to pick our characters…)
The pain is blinding.
(Want to match?)
It’s a recent feature.
(Of course.)
( I have a bad feeling abouKeep going. Don’t look. Paper hands over his eyes. Burning blue. Agony. Helplessness. A car wrenching over the side of the highway, branch through the windshield, a million miles away. There is nobody here now to see him break down.
Nobody to call on the swaying phone-lines, dipping and waving in the December storm.
No iced moon above him.
No cold to numb his nerves.
Nobody to tell him, in the silence of a highway, to take the left turn.
“Stop,”
He rasps, eyes blinking open. “St– Stop, stop,”
It's no longer a plea. He buries his fist in his shirt, feeling the heartbeat, feeling the pulse. It's racing. It's living. Hold on. Hold on— recite what you know so you don’t lose it.
“I…My name is John Bauer,” he wheezes, tears dripping down his nose. “I— I am forty eight, my wife is Quin Bauer,”
The air screams. His hands tremble against the dust. One blackened by errors, one bleeding, both hazing, first two then four. Eyes and wires crossed. “She liked chamomile. I liked earl gray, the year is–”
He doesn't know anymore. He heaves breath after shaking breath. The static whispers. Everything hurts, and oh, It would be so much easier, it would be so much better than this, to just sink into oblivion. To cease, finally. How long has his corpse been thrown from maw to maw, just another toy in a cascade of broken figurines. How long has that mindlessness of his saved him from the fate he deserves by assassinating any half-decent thought in his head.
The holes in his skull may as well be from a gun in the mouth. What else do you call it when you leave the person you most love alone to die? What else do you call it, when you run yourself into the ground over and over again in her name. What else do you call he's been reduced to; An empty shell of a man, betrayed by everything, waiting to die.
But despite it. The pain and the blood. He doesn’t want to.
Kinger, maybe, has been waiting to die. But John, clawing his way out of the darkness of a shattered mind, knows there’s something there worth remembering.
"Two thousand thirty-five,”
He opens his eyes.
“My birthday, my birthday is— October fourth,”
And the eyes aren’t there.
And “I’m here.”
“I’m here.” He whispers, every muscles shaking. “It's over.”
And he’s sitting in a room alone, whats left of her corpse still rotting on the floor. Wooden shards digging into him. A ribcage askew.
“It's over,” The static rears like a wave. He wants to fight, to rear away, but– “It's over,” he chokes as the static crashes down, and the sensations spill over, and then– It's a bad day today. Let it pass. It’ll pass. Holding her in the darkness, whispering affirmation. It'll pass. We were happy. I held her.
It all swallows him. The static washes over him, but just as the tide washes in, it washes out again. Something gives inside him.
His vision clears. One breath. Another. Aching. The world is a haze of blue-gray. His head swims from the effort of looking, the pain around his arm recedes, just slightly. He can barely see it for how his vision is swimming, but he feels it too. Sensation pricking beneath the corrupted skin. They were young. She was hurting. He held her.
And he is still alive.
And he cannot hold her anymore.
John Bauer curls inward. His head rests against the dust. The pain pours out from him. He wheezes, airless and hysterical, as he stares into the tear-spotted dust. No eyes. No static. Just him.
The blue sky hangs silent. The map above twinkles with a thousand dying lights, one star hanging amidst it, as John clutches the memories close. Deep in his heart he feels the agony. Deep in his soul he learns that the pain will not kill him. And deep in his bones he feels it, John Bauer letting himself let go.
And he gets up.
“It's only a cloak.”
He mutters. He stumbles, but stays standing, even as his vision drifts in and out of focus. He steadies. His eyes lock on the distant blob that might be shelter, clutching the numbness of his arm like a prayer. He gets up. His teeth are grit. His goal is clear. Rock bottom. Don’t dig.
“Just cloth,”
He insists, swallowing back blood. His good sense recoils at the statement, still reeling from what’s left of his panic attack. No, that was her cloak. The same one he slept beside every night for years. That cloak was her. And yet he knows she'd hate being so associated with something that in the end was never her. Tears prick at his eyes again, but he wipes them away. Deep breath.
“A model.” He mumbles. “Nothing but a model.”
She is dead. And if he lives for her, he dies.
“Focus.”
She is dead. How does he stay alive? His gaze drifts to the map, hanging far above. It fixes on that distant glow— that lone star, of a distant cowboy with a torch in his stomach, He remembers slamming his fist into the ground, and he remembers falling, and he remembers…
His hands clench. He lets it wash over him.
“Find a hole n’ hide in it, that’s my tactic!” He had said, scampering along. Kinger had nodded politely; seems reasonable enough.
A hole to hide in. Shelter. Shelter is the dim shape ahead of him.
Shelter is what he needs, to rest his aching ankle, lick his wounds, stitch up his mind. A chill wind blows through his hair, whistling over a flat plane of pink candy-dust. Burning blue sky hangs far above. It mocks him as it blurs into mist.
“Live.” He tells himself, voice hoarse. “Live.”
Somewhere far above, Barnaby's star flickers out.
this chapter fought me every step of the way, man. But I’m out! I’m out, now I can FINALLY post what I’ve been waiting to post, in like, a few days, or something. Chapters should come quicker now, as the fall has been,..,,like,.,..the worst fucking thing ever for me to write.
Yeah, kinger/john is alive. you may wonder where i am going with this and when/how the fuck he will find queenie. my answer is that i am evil. as i said! updates should be faster now! especially considering i have new adhd meds!