Chapter Text
Choose the easy way out,
Take a knife, pick a poison,
Drink yourself into oblivion,
‘Cause hell, baby, is your personal heaven.
*
There’s blood on Yunho's hands. A stark shade of crimson and he's rubbed them raw. Try to wash everything under steaming water but it doesn't come off. Doesn’t disappear and he struggles to learn to live with it. Wake up in the morning, make coffee, scrape off imaginary blood from his palms, pretend he's not going crazy – every day routine, of course he can do it. Of course. He can smell the pungent odour, can taste copper coating his tongue like the cheap liquor Hojun loves too much.
When he sleeps, he hears screams instead of silences.
The screams get so loud he wonders if he’ll go deaf. If he’d still hear them when his eardrums have ruptured.
"Your eyebags are getting worse," Siwon points out one day. He buys Yunho lunch and says, "How can you take care of the town if you don’t take care of yourself?"
Yunho grimaces, but eats the sandwich offered when his stomach grumbles. He doesn’t tell Siwon about nightmares cutting his sleep into shreds. Siwon has enough to worry about; the brown files of unsolved cases sitting on his table like a pile of slumbering skeletons (murdered children decapitated women dead dead dead like he’ll be if he isn’t careful).
So every Sunday, he goes into different churches and his car collects miles upon miles of empty roads through the desert. He slips inside confession booths and tells elaborate lies to unseen faces. He nods when mellow voices tell him 'it’s okay, the Lord have mercy' – sometimes he thinks about the dead and wonders if they have been offered mercy as well. But at the end of the day, he says ’thank you’ as if he means it and steps out into sunlight with shadows in the curl of his lips.
And he'd return to the town full of ghosts (his, always his).
*
"Drink with me," Hojun says every time Yunho drops by the bar. He plays love songs on a piano older than the town and his alcohol-stained fingers slip more than once. Jarring notes to accompany the distorted tilt of his smiles. "Why don’t you drink with me, Yun-ah?"
Yunho accepts the glass Hojun slides over the bartop but he doesn’t take a sip. He already has his own brand of suicide. "Why do you drink, hyung?"
Hojun laughs and his hands are heavy on Yunho's shoulder. Yunho doesn’t really know why (how) but he finds himself dancing (swaying) with Hojun in the middle of an empty bar, a silent waltz between upturned stools and polished wood. Hojun leads and Yunho follows, fingers digging indents into his waist. Yunho remembers the years when Hojun’s eyes were bright with promises and he's that little kid who followed the older boy into dark woods.
Someday I’m gonna be famous, Yunho, and I’ll take you away from this shithole.
Yunho used to believe him.
But now Hojun drinks his way towards inevitable destruction and Yunho thinks he'd still follow him. Even in that march into hell.
"You can always ask me to stop," Hojun breathes into the crook of Yunho's neck. Yunho feels his smile, slow and tired, against the skin there and he holds him a little bit closer. The bottle of whiskey digs a sharp indent between Yunho's shoulder blades. "I would do it. For you."
And Yunho realises, once he'd escape that bar, that he still believes Hojun's empty promises.
*
There’s a low ache in Yunho’s belly, nervous energy rattling right underneath his skin. He’s being fucked with deep, slow strokes and his breath is sticky in his throat, struggling to drag through the tourniquet of belt around his neck. He needs to be fucked out, fucked so hard and rough to settle the chaos inside him, but he’s in no position to demand. The sheets are creased and scratchy under Yunho’s back, the bed smells of unwashed bodies and stale alcohol. Water stains spread across the ceiling like stagnant clouds and the curtains are tightly drawn so the shapes of their bodies are just outlines in the dark.
More secrets for him to keep, to bury.
Yunho keens in desperation, turning to stutters when the belt clinches a notch tighter.
“Shhh—” Sharp teeth graze his jaw and snaps at his ear, gnawing on the flesh. The cock slows, almost leisurely, and ragged nails dig into his sore nipples. He smells tar and sulphur and rotten things. “We don’t want them to hear you, now, do we?”
His fingers claw at the sheets. His lungs scream at him.
“You’ll be good, won’t you?”
*
Siwon stops by Yunho's office on his way out and he grins despite the dimming light in his eyes, the hunch of his shoulder. Yunho thinks everyone is growing old before their time and maybe he's just as exhausted. Siwon sits on the edge of the table and steals a sip from the cup of cold coffee, face pulling into a grimace because it’s too bitter. Yunho's been drinking his coffee black nowadays, to match whatever it is nesting inside the cavity of his chest.
"I’m getting nowhere."
Yunho tries to guess what Siwon is talking about and he realises Siwon hasn’t spoken to him lately. Yunho hasn’t seen him at all for the past few weeks and the town is just a small hole in the middle of nowhere. There's no place to hide. He touches Siwon's arm. "Are you okay?"
Siwon waves aside the concern. "Nah, I’m alright. It’s just— this case I’m working on."
Oh. "Do you need help?"
Siwon laughs and nearly spills coffee over his untucked shirt. He used to dress to impress, one dapper suit after another (Yunho’s favourite is the robin blue he wore two years ago on his birthday). Now, Siwon doesn’t even shave. "Don’t we all?"
Don’t we all?
Yunho watches Siwon’s back as he walks out of the office and wonders if he sleeps at night.
*
It’s another Sunday and Yunho drives to this small town, a blurred circle at the edge of the map. He doesn’t really know what to expect, but his nightmares are getting worse and he really, really needs to escape. The voices in his head gets louder, especially when he's not distracted by work and Siwon’s lingering stares are making him restless (as if Siwon knows, as if he can hear them too). The church sits in a comfortable circle of well-kept buildings, quiet and solemn and Yunho hesitates for a second as he stares at the giant cross nailed over the entrance.
"Are you coming inside?"
The voice startles and surprises, and his hand twitches towards the gun he wears under his jacket. Something instinctive in his line of career and he frowns at the tall man in overcoat, dust settling over broad shoulders. The man steps through Yunho's silence and crosses the threshold, footsteps echoing across pews and stained glasses. It takes a few heartbeats, but Yunho follows like a lost sheep and the man is the only shepherd he can find (even if he might be led to the butcher, he follows). He disappears behind a door and Yunho is left alone in the aisle, watching dust motes floating over shards of pale sunlight.
There are angels on the windows, wings tinted with the colours of a rainbow.
When the man walks out again, Yunho decides that he doesn’t look like an ordinary priest. His eyes are too sharp, too dark when he looks at Yunho.
"You’re not from around here."
"Um, yes." Yunho offers a hand and the priest's palm is sandpaper rough, his grip tight and sure. "I’m here to confess, Father."
"Why?"
"—Excuse me?"
"Why are you confessing?"
Yunho opens his mouth and the priest smiles when he comes up empty.
He's often asked a ‘what’ instead of a 'why’ – unprepared for the path to fork into somewhere dangerously unfamiliar.
"Come back when you know," the priest says. He reaches out to smooth a hand over the lapel of Yunho's coat. "Detective."
Yunho drives all the way back to his lovely little town with his head full of hymns, fingers curling tight and uneasy around the map.
*
There’s a petite old woman, wrapped in layers of kaftans, smiling down at him from her balcony as he gets out of his car. The apartment building is old, a relic from when the town was famous for its coal mines (instead of the mutilated and the dead) and the local municipal could afford a few flourishes. It’s not much, but the building is in better shape than the ones further down the street, where drug runners and junkies and whatever else masquerading as human have made a home inside their rundown walls. Yunho hefts a paper bag out of his back seat, locks the car and waves at her.
He’d taken pictures of her daughter-in-law the year before.
She was hacked into sixteen pieces and found inside a garbage bag stuck against the storm drain, her bright red hair a messy tangle among rotting intestines and chunks of flesh.
The old woman calls him Sooyoung sometimes.
“Son,” she calls from her perch, in the voice of a lifetime smoker. The kaftans flare out around her like a giant, colourful tent and he hears the faint jangling of her bangles when she moves closer to the railing. He stands there, looking up politely. Her cataract-cloudy eyes stare back at him. Lucid, for now. “I hear things. I sit in my chair— I sit in my chair and I hear things. Quiet things.”
Yunho blinks. His neck hurts from the angle.
“They tell me he’s coming.” Her thin, cracked lips curl into an absent smile. “He’s coming for you, son.”
*
tbc