White | Silver | Black
30 Kisses (2x6x2)
--Stained
Rated: Extreme R, not for the squeamish
Pairs: implied 2x6x2
Warning: self-mutilation, lots and lots of blood, stream of consciousness, extreme angst, unsolved angst. Serious-ness.
*****NOTE: Self-mutilation is not a joke, and should be taken very seriously. I did not write this for the sheer hell of writing a "cutter fic," as they call it... I wrote it simply because this is the way it wants to be written. I take this issue very seriously, and I'd appreciate if you did the same.
I stare at my hands and I see red. I've cut them with the knife--I didn't mean to do it, but it happened, and now I'm staring at them. I can't help it. The blood intrigues me. It intrigues me to know how red my hands can be... I pick up the knife and I make the cut bigger. The blood pools in my palm, spilling onto the tiled floor of the kitchen, and I look down and stare at the drops. They look black on the white tile, like liquid tar on a dove's feather. I bend down in jerky motions, my body shaking for a reason I can't explain, and I press my bloodied palm to the floor, over those drops, staining the tile red, ever beautiful red. I swipe across, making a streak. I laugh a hoarse sound before I fall to the floor, my knees weak, and I sit in my beautiful puddle of red, admiring it the way Treize used to admire his rose gardens.
This is mine, this is all mine. I own very little, being who I am, but this red is mine. I own this red. I control this red. If I want, I'll bathe in this red. I think I will. I slap my palms together, spreading the red over my other hand. My skin is stained, tinted red, beloved red, and I soak the ever-bleeding cut of palm into my skin, making it all so very red. I wash my hands in my own blood, making sure to cover every last crevice. I even scrape my fingernails into the cut, to get underneath them. I don't feel any pain, or maybe I do, I can't really tell. It doesn't matter, because the red is all over me, inside of me, around me, under me. I see red, and I smile. This is mine.
I lay my head down on the floor, and stare straight ahead. The world looks so big from down here. So unkind. I turn and look at my great puddle of red, so close to my face, so near. I swirl my fingers in it, making designs in it. The world is unkind. But who cares? They can't hurt me if I'm already bathed in my red, how can you bleed a man who is already bleeding?
I pick up the knife again. I cut my other palm with it, and then make little marks up and down my arms, drawing random patterns, making fun with it. My eyes grow heavy as I work, and slowly, I become very drowsy. After a short while, I'm so tired I can't hold the knife anymore, and so I put it down, and close my eyes. The red is all over me. I feel cleansed.
No. I feel dirty. I feel stained. I feel... I don't care what I feel. I just feel.
A voice screams so suddenly that I almost jerk in surprise, but I'm too tired to move. I think it calls my name, but I'm not sure, so I open my eyes and try to ask it. My mouth feels like it's been stuffed with mothballs, my vocal cords replaced with snakes. I utter only a strange kind of hiss and blink uncontrollably as foreign hands wrap around me, dragging me up off the floor.
My legs fail, and the hands guide me into a controlled fall. I land in one of the flimsy dining chairs and slump onto the dining table in a heap. I growl, annoyed, and swat the hands away from me lazily. They're annoying me, I was fine before they came, I was feeling things and the red embraced me.
The voice comes back, chattering endlessly like a mindless yipping woman, and I groan, annoyed with it. Why won't it shut up? I can't understand what the hell it's saying anyway.
I close my eyes and try to go back to sleep, but the hands come back and they shake me hard. The voice says something, but I can't really decipher the words. It sounds angry, and I'm angry because the damn thing won't leave me alone. I open my eyes again and glare at the blurry mass in front of me. I say something. I can't remember what it was, but I know it was very intelligent.
The voice says something that sounds oddly like a curse and mutters to itself. I close my eyes again and fold my wet red arms under me. My entire body feels like a lead weight and I drift, slipping into heaven so damned slowly...
The hands are back again. This time one of them slaps me in the face, and the voice is yelling angrily. It's telling me to do things, but I don't want to do them, and so I try to ignore it. But I can't, because those hands and lifting me up, making me walk. I lean on that body, resting my head on that shoulder, mostly because I'm damn tired and that shoulder is really comfortable. The hands hoist my arms around that comfortable, nice body, and strong arms--clean, unred strong arms--lift me up and drag me of out the kitchen. They drop me in the blue recliner in the living room, the one right in front of the television. I wonder briefly what's on at this hour, and I try to ask, but I don't think the hands understand me because they don't give me the remote.
The hands pull my arms out, laying them on the rests to either side of me. The voice is still chattering, forever chattering, and vaguely, I notice that it sounds a little nervous. I frown, and open my eyes again, reaching up to touch that blurry face with bloodied fingertips. I tell that face not to worry, that I'll be fine.
The face makes the hands pull my wet red arms away and they lay them back down on the armrests. The voice is condemning and not a little hurt, and so I shudder, but not from the cold. A wet cloth washes it's way up my arms, taking the red away. I resist, try to pull from it, but I'm so weak now, I can't even put up a decent fight. Those hands steal the red away from me, slowly, cruelly, and I shake my head, ask for it to stop.
It doesn't, but a free hand finds it's way to my hair, sifting through it in an intimate sort of way. I frown then, wondering who my torturer is, to be so soothing in my moment of greatest agony.
The hands put peroxide on my major cuts. I hiss and tears sting the back of my eyes, a few of them spilling down my cheeks. I only realize it because I can feel the burn of release in my lashes, can feel the tiny burst of that invisible wall of water, and then the spill, rolling down like a bead of sweat, tracing the contours of my face to drip off the cliff of my chin. It tickles, and I laugh oddly, my head falling back in the chair with a thump. The hand in my hair trails down to my wet cheeks and wipes my eyes for me, thumb lingering as it brushes softly, slowly, over that wet patch of tear.
Dimly, I feel my hands and arms wrapped in bandage. The hands do it gently, slowly, all the way to my elbow. The hands themselves are shaken and terribly nervous, but the bandage is soft, kissing my cuts like the lips of a lover. I breathe deeply and I feel so relaxed, I drift away again. I don't know if I fall asleep, because I don't dream, but when I open my eyes again, there are bright lights everywhere and the smell of chemicals sting my nostrils, my eyes burning in the bright depths of my own personal hell. I close them again, and fight tears of pain.
For the first time, the voice is clear. It asks me, "What the hell were you thinking?"
I open my eyes again, grimacing at it takes forever to adjust to the harsh light. I squint at the figure by my bed, the owner of such a quietly demanding voice, and I hold my breath. Furious blue-violet eyes are boring into my soul, killing me slowly from the inside out. He is wearing black, forever black, his hair pulled back into that damned braid that hardly makes him look like a girl, no matter how hard I try imagine it sometimes.
I grin stupidly, but it's the wrong _expression because he snorts in disgust and looks away from me. He says, "I won't live with a fucking cutter."
I raise a brow. I try to speak, but can't. My throat is so dry... God, I'm so thirsty, I'm going to die of it. Weak, trembling hands reach out to him. I point to the cup of water I've just now noticed on the side table and make a sort of pleading sound.
He scowls, but gets up and hands me the cup. I try to grip it, but it drops, and he catches it before it falls, saving most of the water with an odd sort of detachment. His blank eyes watch as I drink carefully, blessing the cool fluid as if it were the ambrosia of heaven.
"More," I croak, and he gives me a second glass.
When I finish, he puts the cup back down and marches back to his chair, glaring at me as if I'd just tried to kill myself.
I laugh again. I can't help it.
I look down at my arms and notice the red slashes still bleeding through the dressings. My skin is still a little stained and it itches, so I scratch at it. The tingle suddenly becomes a fire when I scratch it, burning, and I rub it, chafe at it, trying to get it to come off. My hands are so bloody, I realize, my hands are so stained...
I rub my hands raw until a different hand lands over them and forces me to stop. I look up into his blue-violet eyes of fire, my hands burning, my skin stained so red, so wrong, so bad, it itches. I try to scratch it again, but he forces my hands apart and shakes his head.
I growl and shove him away, but I'm too weak and he overpowers me.
"What it is with you and your hands?" he asks me in a low breath of fury. He hates me because I've hurt myself, and I duck my head in shame. I don't answer because I can't remember why.
"Answer me, damnit!" He shakes me, his voice quivering slightly. I look up, stunned, and notice how wet his eyes are. I lift a hand, unwinding it out from under his grip, and trail up his jaw, tracing his eyes. My own eyes are burning again from the pain of my itching hands, my hands stained, so red, itching... I lean up and I kiss him.
I don't know why, I just do it. Distraction, I think dully, I just need a little distraction. I rub my hands in that distraction, scratching the cuts under the bandages before he pulls them away again. With a glare, I say, "I'm not a cutter."
He barks a cruel laugh. "Then what are you, Zechs?"
"Stained," I answer.
He just looks at me. I can't tell what he's thinking.
He takes my right hand and opens my palm carefully. He traces the red mark of the cut seeping into the bandage and I hiss as he presses into it slightly, watching it bleed. Then he lifts it to his face and kisses it, his eyes gone very dark as he speaks softly. "I'll leave you if you do this again."
I shake my head, in denial. I don't want that. I like this man. He's special.
I won't let him go.
But he's serious and I know it. He lays my hand down, and pushes me back into the pillows. He orders me to sleep. He tells me we'll talk about it later.
I have dreams of red, I have terrible nightmares... my hands itch so badly that I scratch the skin away, digging under my very bones to kill it, to hurt it. I scream. I wake, and he's there, and I fall asleep again.
I have dreams of blue-violet, and I sleep peacefully, the red gone, washed away. He tells me in my dreams that he'll fix it, and make it better.
He washes my hands, and the red is gone.
Gone until tomorrow... gone until I bleed again.
--Fini