the things that haunt us | ☀ + vepar

Disgusting. Wrong. Broken. It burns, the words into my flesh like brands into a cow's hide. They pucker my skin, staining them bright purple and green and I am disgusting. I am broken. I am wrong. He might not want it. Venus told me.

(Who would want you, he whispered into my ears.)

I don't know how not to feel it, the fluttering in my chest. The way my stomach twists itself into bloody knots whenever I see him and I feel so wrong. I feel so guilty. This isn't how it should be and yet here I am and I'm going to ruin everything again. It'll be mom all over again. And Venus will have more reason to hate me.

And maybe then I will unzip these puckered scars on my wrists and embrace something so much sweeter than this daily grind. (But I cannot leave Venus like this.)

(I cannot leave him.)

He's taller than me. There aren't many I meet that even rival my height but he just might be a demigod, descended from the heavens for tonight and meant to wrap his hands so tightly around my wrists. And my throat burns and the world is slow around me because I think I have drank too much poison. My knees are weak my head is spinning and I cannot fight his hands wrapped around my hips, digging into my bones.

"Take me home." he orders. I haven't the strength to disagree.

His hands are rough, roaming the length of my body the whole trek back to my castle and I cannot breathe for he is grabbing onto the collar of my shirt so tight. I am going to die I think I am going to die.

He is just so rough.

My hands shake as I force the key into the lock, the door cracks open and I trip over the vines that must have sat waiting upon the threshold because his weight is marble atop me, no matter how hard I push there is not even the slightest leeway. He is a statue. Immobile.

"Can't breathe." I murmur as he helps me to my feet, leading numb legs over to the couch and settling himself on top of me.

His only reply are teeth to my neck and it hurts. And I try to push him away but his grip only tightens and it hurts.

It hurts.

Blinding light creeps into the corners of my vision, white hot burning colors into my skin and I am startled into consciousness. Venus? The man whose tongue has now taken up residence somewhere in the back of my throat does not even flinch at the sudden change of scenery, he is too busy trying to rip my shirt from my flesh, to tear the layers away and to expose me. My neck throbs from where he so brutally bit into it, warmth pooling around the back of my neck and I am going to gag I am so disgusted. I can smell the blood. I hate the stench.

He tastes of bitterness. Of acid rain and oil spots upon the street. He burns. I squirm underneath him, eyes flying about the room and trying to see who turned the light so bright. Who ripped the world from darkness. I wonder if I could beg them to save me because right now his fingers work themselves under the waist of my pants and I'm tempted to bite his tongue off because I don't want this.

I don't want this.

There's no use telling him that is there?

My eyes find him and its like the world goes dark again. His hands are stained red, guilty. The boy's hands are on the switch and he is looking at me. I don't want this. My hands make their way into the demigod's hair and I push his head back, pulling his tongue from between my lips and sending him onto hard wood floors.

My shirt is ripped and my pants hang low and all I want is to dissolve into nothingness right here and right now because the world is too bright and too much and there is blood staining what was meant to be a night of release. A night to prove that I did not need the boy that made my head spin and my heart wander.

It seems I proved the opposite.

"Get out!" My voice is high pitched, not as intimidating as I meant it to be, it shakes and crumbles in front of me like glass from a window and I feel just as fragile. Just as broken. "Get out, get out, get oUT!" I cannot tell if the salt trailing into the corners of my mouth is blood or tears but I do not care.

He swears as he leaves, palm kissing my cheek and sending stars to the corners of my eyes before I lock the door behind his retreating figure and I fall to the ground in a heap of stardust and iron.

Highs and lows. They are a staple of my disorder, of the title that has been placed upon my head and the reason that I must take the pills I so often avoid. The ones that make me slow, that turn off parts of my brain because I would surely self destruct if I left it alone. I only survived sixteen years without treatment because mother's manipulation was more potent than any drug I have ever taken.

Today is a low. This week has been full of them, of moments when my heart refuses to pull itself off of of the ground and I am left wondering if anything is worth it. If in the end, what time we greet death matters at all because we meet him just the same. Life is meaningless because there is nothing when we die. There is no god. No being would be this cruel.

Even without the man's help, I would have felt like this. Felt hopeless. It is because I am broken and I can never be strong like Venus. I could have never gotten a job without him. And my whole life I will be a tumor, my whole life I will be dependent on him and I am sure he will come to hate me sooner or later.

Maybe he will kill me one day, get so tired of me that he will simply watch me die. Beg me to.

I am a leech.

There are soft hands on my shoulder and I know they are his. The boy's. I don't want to look up, for him to see me with blue stains down my cheeks and pain in my eyes. I don't want him to see the throbbing of a dead pump in a dead chest, I don't want him to see madness in my eyes because I want him to like me. I want him to like me so much that it pains me just to think about it.

He asks me if I am okay and I shake my head.

"I just want to go away. I don't want to be here. I want to disappear."

It's not worth the effort to lie, not even to him.

He is broken. It's not surprising, given what he is. An avox, someone so thoroughly crushed beneath the heel of every goddamn boot that ever crossed his path, someone destroyed and broken and ground to a pulp. People are animals, eager to thrive off of the pain of others, to drink deeply from their fear and to feel powerful. And we spend our childhoods terrified of the monsters in our closets when the real villains are those sleeping in the room next to ours.

I trust very few people. (And yet I let a stranger into my house because I hadn't the ability to tell him no. To beg for mercy. I am too proud.) I trust very few people but this boy is one of them. He's gotten better, his time with us. He's not an easy one to read, every emotion gives but a fraction of a tell. Unless you look closely, there is no way to tell what he is feeling. And perhaps before Venus and me, no one even bothered to try.

He used to not act unless told. His world was built upon stepping stones, upon dos and do nots and to take a step out of line was death. (The rules were carved so neatly into his neck. Bright and red and irritated.)

But I am not good at giving orders. I am not strong like Venus. I am absolutely nothing like my big brother and nobody fucking gets it. They expect me to take charge and to be confident but all I want to do is create and to fade away. Into the background. Into the darkness. I am not a man meant to lead. No one understands that, though. No one but Venus and just maybe this avox because he does not wait for orders anymore.

His hands are on my skin, wiping away the tears that I cannot seem to stop. He pulls them from between my lids and turns them to diamonds before crushing them between his fingers. He whispers to me like this, soft sounds leaving his lip and tethering me to the ground because I was certainly just about to tumble into nothing again and I-

I need him.

Because living hurts and breathing stings. Every heartbeat is so excruciatingly painful that I just want to die and as hard as Venus tries I don't think he understands just what that's like. He is my guardian, placed upon a pedestal but he cannot understand. Not something as complex at this. And just maybe I think I have found someone who finally does.

"Do you have a name?" The words are sudden, shaking and broken and cutting up the insides of my mouth. "...do you have something that I can call you because I'm tired of calling you Avox. That's a title, not a name. You have a name."

And I just want to think about him, about anything but what had just happened because I don't know what I'm going to tell Venus when he sees the mess I have become.

"Sun." I repeat his name slowly, softly it flies from between my lips and I cannot stifle the tearful smile that blooms there. Fed by the diamonds still brimming in the corners of my eyes and it is warm. He is warm. Sun like the star, Sun like the center of the universe and Sun like the avox sat in front of me. It fits him, the softness of it all. The harshness of the light and its suddenness at dawn, the way it spills onto the horizon in sharp winding colors and it is perfect. He is perfect.

I'm so pathetic.

"Sun. It's nice to meet you." An amused gasp leaves me and I burst into tears again because he is suddenly so real beneath my finger tips. And he is here and he is soft and I run my fingers through his hair in an attempt to calm myself because the tears will not stop. They aren't those of grief, not terrified sobbing, there is nothing less of the hopelessness that I had felt only moments before.

I am simply overwhelmed. There is so much to be felt and so little of me left to feel it that I cannot take all of it in. I have reached my breaking point and it spills out onto my cheeks and down onto the collar of my torn shirt. It stings the bite wound on my neck and all of this excess escapes me so suddenly that I just want to curl up and go to sleep because I won't have to think about anything at all.

My chest heaves, desperate for air and I am chaos. I am a storm and a hurricane and I am a tornado. I'm going to destroy myself if I'm not careful and Venus knows it. I wonder if Sun does too.

Sun.

Sun like that stars in the sky and the world below because he is the reason that I am here and not trapped beneath that beast of a man and I don't know how to say thank you.

So I place my palms upon his cheeks and I press my lips to his forehead because there are no words I can say that will mean as much.

"Sun." I whisper the name again.

For so long I have felt lost. I have felt useless and small and I know that I really am all of those things but none of it actually matters. Not right now. His hands are on my own and they are warm. They are the warmth carried on a summer's breeze, the type that smells of dried pine and bitter grapes. It reminds me of the months that followed my mother's death. The first time I had ever seen the outside for more than an hour at a time and Venus took me to a great lake with pale grass and we sat on a blankets watching the hungry waters pull dirt into it's depths and-

I am happy. I am so happy that I smile against his skin because he tastes sweet and bitter and nothing like what I imagined but it's okay. It's really okay because I don't think the either of us are what the other expected.

He is so strong. He looks weak, like silken ribbons frayed and snapped and he looks so broken but that is not Sun. Sun is the one who ran his fingers through my hair when he was not told and he was the one who did not stand in the avox pens. He is a stallion beaten into submission and I think that is what I saw when I rooted myself into the floor and I looked at the long haired avox who was half-dead and yet a thousand different kinds of alive.

I've stopped wearing my gloves around him. The scars on my wrists have never been something I've worn with pride. They are shameful things, I am a shameful thing and I think I have come to accept it ever since I was eighteen and I woke up in a hospital bed with Venus' palm pressed against my own and thick white bracelets around each wrist.

And they handed me blue pills that took everything away and I was cold and tired until I wasn't.

Venus doesn't like this. He doesn't want me to feel this and disobeying my big brother is like tearing my eyes out of their sockets one by one by one and it hurts. It hurts because more than anything I want to sew a smile onto his lips because there is so much bad I do, so much straw that I have put on the camel's back that one day I'm going to break his spine and I just want to make him as happy as I feel right now. Venus is so guarded and cold, there is so much to be said and so few words that I can manage and I'm sorry Venus because I'm going to disobey you and I'm really truly sorry about that.

Do. Not. Melt. Sun tells me and I cannot help but smile because he makes me so warm that how can I not?

"I love you so much." I whisper and I kiss him like the moon does the horizon every dawn and it is not long or deep, nothing more than a chaste peck on his lips but my cheeks have turned bright red and I feel as though I have ripped myself apart and this time no amount of needles and thread can put me back together.

He does not react. He sits still as a statue and there is nothing but confusion in his ey-

no, there is something more.

And suddenly I am nothing.

Hopes held so precious in cupped palms falls to the floor and I can hear it shatter. A thousand shards sent into eyes that burn; it's as though I have taken acid to the sockets and they are turning to mush within my skull and I am helpless to do anything but sit and revel in the pain.

But I am not crying. I close my eyes and I push myself against the wall, trying to get hold of the everything that so suddenly disappeared, leaving me empty and broken there is so little you can do when you give another your heart and leave it upon the ground to die. Perhaps they buried it under layers of cement and iron and there's no point trying to dig it up because it belongs to them, after all.

They can destroy it any way they please.

I want to disappear. I want to take back everything that happened tonight and I wish that Sun hadn't even saved me because I'd rather that man ruin me then have to see the fear in his eyes again.

He might not want it, Venus said.

Who would want you, he whispered in my ears.

Who would want you. Who would want you.

(Worthless!) Mother screeches and she is cackling somewhere in the back of my mind, tapping heeled shoes upon my spine and it hurts. I want to beg her to stop but I am just making myself smaller against the plaster hoping that maybe I will phase right through. (Who would want you, my sweetie, if there is a better version in the next room? There's no point going outside, no one would like you there. Now be good and write that paper for mommy. It's due tomorrow and hon, remember to sign my full name this time.)

Venus was right. Mom was right. And I was a fool.

I am always the fool.

I am small and I am worthless. I am weak and I am ugly and I should have known.

He might not want it, Venus said.

Of course he wouldn't.

I don't know why I continue to doubt my brother because in the end it seems he only saves me heartache and embarrassment. In the end perhaps the only think I am good for is being used. Used by that man and used by mom for her job and her papers and as a punching bag when she had a bad day. (God, Vepar, what are you doing?! Look at the state of this place! Is that blood on the sheets? Have you been cutting your arms again you idiot boy? Do you think I will pity you!? I have no pity for the weak.)

When I open my eyes they are dry. They are cold.

He might not want it.

I know, I'm sorry.

I'll listen next time I'm sorry.

No! Please! Don't lock the door! Stop! The voices are too loud in the closet please stop!

...

Hello?

It's quiet.

"I'm sorry."

"I'm sorry that was... foolish. I should have asked I won't..."

"Don't worry that won't happen again,"

"Avox."