congratulations || jeongchan

- 34 - Pooling -

For me, my heart still hurts every time I breathe

-

It stretched out on all sides.
Silent.
Cold.

He held out his hand and when he brought it back to his face it was covered in blood.

The fingertips were shredded as if they had been scrabbling for purchase on a rock face, trying to stop a fall, or as if they had been furiously tearing at the edge of a door, trying to open it from the inside, trying to get out.

He ran his hand through his hair. Now the blood was everywhere.

It was all he could smell, all he could see. All he could taste in this new world.

In this dark, dark shadow that seemed to be all that remained.

He screamed in his head.

He screamed out loud.

Blood filled his mouth.

His voice was swallowed by the darkness.

He reached out again, he brought his hand back, it was bleeding, the tips of his fingers shredded.

As if-

He ran his hand over his head, smearing blood into the strands of his hair.

Now it was everywhere.

As if-

As if they had been....

What had been?
He couldn't remember.

The blood was in his nose, his mouth, running all down his arms in spidering torrents of copper turned gold in the dark.

It was falling from his eyes like tears.

As if-

It was so cold.
So dark.

He wished for anything.

He wished for his own name.

Alone in that space.

He wished for anything.

As if....

It were as if....

He were nothing at all.

The blood pooled at the base of his throat, where his neck met his shoulder.

In pooled in a puddle of rocks, weighing heavy on his heart, a puddle of gold, of tears, in the end, of nothing at all.

Chan woke up, tears dripping in uneven rhythms from his eyes.

He would stop shaking soon, he had to.

"This is why I hate going to sleep." He growled to empty space of his room.

He laced his hands across his knees and leant his cheek on them so he could look at the rain sliding its way down his tiny window.

He had meant to get a curtain for it years ago.

But, like most things, the idea got lost and left behind pretty quickly.

Minho had offered to put one up, but Chan figured that it it been this long, that if there was a curtain, he would probably miss the rain. Or the gentle fall of snow as it parachuted its way to the ground. Or the soft glow of the sun as it mourned it's forgotten goodbye, until it could rise again and dazzle the sky with its fire.