homecoming }} jasper oneshot

Home. It smells like him, searing paths down my spine and the mere thought is excruciating. I am weak- bullets have found their home within my stomach, iron fireworks have torn me to pieces and I wasn't scared. I feared not the wrath of war nor death's kiss. And yet here I am demolished by the trace of a boy who was never mine to begin with.

There is hardly anyone to announce my homecoming too. Father would complain that I am taking time off work, my brothers would wrap their hands around my throat and help me remember why I took this job in the first place. I was so sure that it would be safe- that we would be free from stupid politics because I couldn't get married anyway. And it turns out every precaution I took was for not, he left me anyway.

I almost wish I'd let them marry me off. I'd be miserable and trapped in a loveless marriage, sure, but at least this gaping hole in my sternum would be patched with flimsy cloth. There would no nights that passed in eerie silence with only the sloshing of a half empty bottle and the stench of burning paper. It would be a step up from the life I am living now.

A life that can hardly be called that.

There's a pile of mail behind my door- no doubt bills and advertisements and other arbitrary trinkets. I'm not important enough to be acknowledged with pen to paper. Such effort is taken for things of actual worth. I don't think I ever qualified. Numb hands shove the unopened envelopes in some forgotten corner of the room, responsibility to be faced another day.

There are ghosts that have sewn themselves to these halls. I can see forgotten smiles faded into the bits of paint we splashed upon the walls. A war that caused the better part of a month to be spent picking bits of bitter rainbows from my scalp and three-hundred dollars lost coaxing my landlord into silence.

The last time I woke up here was with him. We had packed the night before and fretted over everything I might need for training. And I was dressed from head to toe in crisp white linen that morning. "Care to do the honors?" He pinned the trainee badge to my collar and I stole five more minutes upon his lips. I didn't want to go, I begged for that moment to last forever because we had never been apart so long.

One week. I was gone for one fucking week.

Had he been planning it all along? To leave me? To marry someone else?

The ring on my finger has never felt so heavy. It burns- white hot metal chipping away at the frost coating my heart and yet I find no relief in the sensation. It only makes this pain more potent, turning a usual dull ache into something that might just split all of me in two. I can feel myself pulling apart at the seams, the threads of everything that I am meant to be fraying and burning and I need it all to stop.

There's a bottle on the counter- one I brought home with me. Liquid gold to burn paths down my throat, to renew the barriers around my skin. One to heal every wound left by him, the ones that do not heal like any of the physical ailments I have come to know. Bullets and blades were not so deadly as those seven words.

"I don't love you. I never did."

"Yeah well I never stopped." I scream and it comes out as a whisper. Hopelessly numb as I empty the last of my supply and maybe I have finally managed to force my blood to run black. Perhaps I have been trying to kill myself since I picked up this nasty habit. Smoke and poison, toil and trouble, cauldron bubble and something wicked this way came.

There's nothing in my cabinets but boxes of sugar sweet cardboard, expiration dating some month, some day four years ago. Some day, some month after he said I do and I screamed I don't and I left on a train because this entire city was a thorn in my side and he was the antidote that had slipped between the gaps in my careless fingers. Relief taken for granted because of course he would always be there. He was mine and I was his and it had been like that since we were young.

Crash! He is glass shattered upon my kitchen floor, the bottle i brought home forcing itself into the pads of my fingers- sucking up all of my black blood and stowing it away in the spaces between kitchen tile. I dropped it.

And then I threw it away. I tried to move on but the world is dull and I am numb and I can still feel the pressure of silver thorns between my split skin. My fault, my fault. This is somehow my fault and dammit I have to fucking fix this. I have to make it all better. That's what I did when his smiles were too wide and his laughs were church bells echoing about the courtyard. "What's wrong Oblivion?"

Because I always thought I would be able to tell. I knew when he was falling to pieces I knew him better than I knew the canvas of my own body. A body now branded by pain and blood and a thousand times I could have died.

But I didn't.

Every morning is excruciating. Slipping into consciousness something like forcing metal through my eyes and expecting everything to look the same. I want to crumble to dust and I want to stop existing. The beat of my heart would not be so painful then. Other's screams would not be my problem- the tears they shed something irrelevant to a boy whose soul was black and whose body was limp. Flesh decaying and eyes shut tight. Oh it sounds like bliss.

It's a selfish fantasy- one that I might have made fun of all those years ago. When death was something to fear because there was a reason to keep on living. And it's not that one man was keeping me alive, it was not up to Oblivion to breathe air into deflating lungs and send a stagnant heart into nervous stuttering. This is my own weakness, a father who has ruined me without lifting a finger and brothers who do nothing but. A dead sister and a little brother who I have been told to hate and yet I feel nothing. And at this point the only man who gives a damn about me is as dead as I.

Speaking of- I tug a phone out of my pocket and I stain it with thinning blood. And I'm not in the mood to speak so I send myself directly to voicemail, laughing at the bitter irony of it all. I loathe this loneliness, this disease eating me from the inside out and yet I fall into its embrace every chance I get. "Hey, Superman, 's me." My tongue is heavy tripping over every word I drag from between my lips and yet I cannot be bothered to act as though I have my life together for one more second. "You're gonna haaaate me because I didn't tell you earlier but I'm homeeee!"

And I fall asleep with an empty bottle clutched to my chest.