the devil skates on thin ice ∙ myg ✓

6 ↝ the cognisance

The atmosphere of his bedroom is discomposed. The sunlight that filters inside the stuffy space outlines the shape of her body where it has been carved out by the creases on the mattress. The sheets incline and decline like a small mountain range—an imprint of her presence. Yoongi stands at the centre of the room, slowly suffocating on his own breath, eyes boring into the lingering remnant of her existence that haunts him like a restless spirit. The hills and slopes in his bed. Her, entirely.

Yoongi did not dare to tell her that, last night, he carried her limp form across the grassy accommodation courtyard once the taxi had pulled up to the curb. Tucked safely into his chest, murmuring nonsensical sentences against his collarbone. He refused to let her know that he held her chin as he tipped nearly a litre of water past her lips over a span of three glassfuls; that he rubbed between her shoulder blades and gingerly held back her hair while she vomited in the bathroom sink; that he gave her the sweater to change into. And most definitely, he never hinted that she stumbled quietly into the living room while he was draping the couch-come-makeshift-bed in a quilt, clutching at his wrist and entreating him to stay by her side while she fell asleep.

An utter fool, he had obliged without question. Perched on the edge of the mattress, he drew soothing patterns over the back of her hand for the scarce minutes that it took her to drift off. Even then, he had remained much longer than necessary to gaze at the soft pout of her lips, the delicate feathering of her splayed eyelashes, the moonlight accentuating the youthful innocence that only sleep can ever conjure.

No, she did not deserve that kind of knowledge. That glorious victory hanging over his head in an upper-hand that she could use against him in the future.

Now, his knees tremble and he feels pathetic. An utterly despicable excuse for a human being with the sweater of his that she was wearing bunched up in his fists and clutched to his chest like a lifeline. Their smells kiss with tongues in the maroon threads; the colour of her blood. Yoongi knows this because he has seen it with his own two eyes against frozen white. Tinted silvery blue by the shadows of midnight draped across the sky, studded at the centre by the full moon in all of its might.

The thin film coating Yoongi's unblinking eyes dries into a delicate crust. He knows why she would not have told her friends about the two of them, and yet, he cannot help but wonder. Is she really so terrified of her own vulnerability? Of being cracked open like a fault line splitting the earth, allowing those standing by to peek at the gory innards? Perhaps, it is because she already understands how it feels; the sensation of flesh slicing open, of cells pulling apart to allow the bone to cut through and be exposed to the still, icy air. She has known such pain all too well, so she folds it like origami until it can fit in the thin crack between her fibula and talus, and she lives as though she was never once hurt.

Yoongi watches the dust motes glacially glide through the sunlight, basking in the warm honey of it and landing upon the mountains that she rose amongst his bed sheets. There, with the blood-soaked sweater pressed against his thrumming heartbeat, with her tone of malice remaining to be a sticky syrup in his ear, the realisation surrounds and embraces him. He had believed he understood this entire time, and yet, he had always been beyond far off the mark. He knows this now because of the ghost of her figure atop his mattress. He understands why she pushes him away with all her might; with all the breath in her lungs. He understands why her body folds inward, smaller, like origami to hide in the spaces between bones, when she sees his face.

Yoongi has cracked her open once, and he is not afraid to do it twice. This time, for the right reasons. This time, with his eyes wide open.