UNORTHODOX | KAI PARKER

XX. TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY.

Chapter 20

content warning: descriptors of suicide.

°•°•°

Kai thinks that he died in the Prison World.

He doesn't think. He knows he died there. Many times. Many ways.

The first time he died was in Portland. In his own house, of his own volition.

He can't really remember his thought process behind it. Why he actually decided the best place to finally... do it would be his own house. Maybe he thought it would be poetic, or therapeutic in a way. To, once again, line the walls, the floors, with his own blood. Of his own volition.

Not blood birthed from his skin by Joshua. And not even his blood birthed from his skin by his own hands— like so many times before. Because all those times were because of Joshua. Joshua wrapping his hand around Kai's on the knife, and digging his fingers into his skin. While the blade digs into his son's flesh. And some may argue that this time was the same. Imprisoned here because of Joshua. An entire universe away, yet Joshua still found a way to take the blade and cut his child. He would, wouldn't he?

But... Kai doesn't know. This time felt different.

It was his own decision. Mind finally free from the lingerings of Joshua for what felt like the first time ever. His mind was empty. And so was he. All five and a half litres of blood draining from his body. And Kai felt perfectly empty. Void of the thing that gave him life— that made him human.

He didn't really want to be human anymore. He didn't really want to be anything.

It was therapeutic. Until he woke up, anyway. And did it all over again. Again and again and again. Until he simply just didn't have the energy anymore.

Kai thinks he died in the Prison World. Knows that he did.

But nothing can change the fact. The fact that he died long before that. In the same house. Just not in the Prison World. And not of his own volition.

And he thinks that he's still sort of there. Haunting it. Or that it's haunting him. He may look alive. Flesh and bones. Walking around and talking and living. But he's always there. Where the blood has seeped through the cracks. Rotting under the floorboards.

In the Prison World.

In his house.

And he can't really get out.

But enough of the gross sentimentalities of his house. Both the Prison World, and the place that should've been home— his houses. Because he's not there anymore. Not physically, anyway. He's here. In a taxi, of all places.

He may have died in the twentieth century, but he's alive here. In the twenty-first.

And it's so much different, and so much similar, than he ever could've imagined.

Kai fumbles around in the back seat of the taxi-cab. Trying everything in his strange, siphoner power to manoeuvre the skin tight, itchy denim away from his skin. Jesus fucking Christ, what the fuck was the twenty-first century thinking when they made these skin tight torture chambers?

Don't get it twisted, he can definitely understand the appeal. He knows that he looks hot as fuck in the dark skinny jeans. Stolen from some department store with the residual magic he still, somehow, possessed, but God. I can barely fucking breathe.