Archive of Our Own

The human body is equal parts fragile and resilient. 

A slight chemical imbalance can kill it but the same flesh can endure the loss of a limb. An air bubble in the veins is fatal but a stab wound can be healed from. It takes fifteen minutes to die by suffocation though even then you can’t be sure it's not just unconsciousness. People can, quite famously, survive a metal beam through the skull, piercing and debilitating half their brain, and live on with only slight deficits to their personality and cognitive skills. You can’t survive without water intake for more than three days, at best a week. Such flexible durability makes torture and murder particularly invigorating. 

There’s simply so many options.

Murder is a more finicky thing, though that really does come down to perspective. With torture, naturally there’s the problem of making sure they don’t talk once you let them go. Murder on the other hand – there’s a degree of certainty required that demands more of the perpetrator. It’s a time commitment – making sure your victim is truly dead – not to mention the disposal and clean up, hours spent scouting out places to dump the remains, how to do so while evading detection long-term, how to erase your tracks. Deciding, simply, whether to leave it where it is or dispose of it at all. It’s a downpayment of effort.

Shame Minho isn’t planning on letting this man live, even if it will eat into his evening. 

He’s marked out his calendar for tonight, told Jisung he can’t make it home for dinner and to not wait up. Jisung won’t disturb him. As far as his boyfriend knows, Minho is at a private company dinner with his higher-ups, discussing – amongst other things – the prospect of a promotion. He won’t actually be getting a promotion so no matter how tonight gruesomely ends he has consoling kisses and doting cuddles to look forward to tomorrow morning. He’s planned ahead for the time. Of course, he’ll gladly accept if he can wrap it up before the hour he allotted but he has to prepare for eventualities, possibilities, deviations on top of the standard course. He prides himself on his organisation and forward thinking as much as he does his ability to adapt.

Although, it’s a pity Minho has to miss their Friday movie night. Jisung was really looking forward to watching The Medium with him. A low budget indie production filled to the brim with C and D tier celebrities and directed by two no-name newbies that nevertheless caught his interest because of the chatter on his favourite niche horror and gore recommendations forum. He had talked Minho’s ear off about it for the past two days, hanging off his shoulders while he flipped the morning eggs, whispering into his shoulder about the VFX shots he’d sneaked a peak at amidst replies on the masterpost and how he just couldn’t wait until Friday rolled around so they’d have the free time to dedicate their full attention.

The muted disappointment in Jisung’s voice as he told him this morning that he’d been invited out and couldn’t refuse his boss had registered like a pulling of a nail, or a tooth from its bed – a pain Minho had needed to brace and clench against, swallow back into his mouth lest he shriek.

He wouldn’t have done it if he didn’t have to. Minho wishes he could say that to Jisung, wishes he could have pressed it into mouth like a kiss. Wants to fall to his knees and beg for penance like a devotee in the pews, a sinner at a boarded up confessional. But that would only confuse Jisung further.

There wasn’t a night as perfect as this one for several months, with his target as flawlessly isolated and helpless and ripe for the picking. He’s charted out his plans so he can be done as soon as he can, so he can return to his mundanity with Jisung without any delay without having to look over his shoulder and wait.

It’s another tally against tonight’s target, this urgency that requires him to abandon Jisung’s plans. As the elevator ticks up another floor, Minho considers how he’ll dole out the punishment for that particular slight. A nail? A finger?

The elevator stops at the tenth floor. Minho picks his briefcase off the floor and exits swiftly, adjusting his facemask as he stops in front of the last door on the left. He ensures that he travels light, with the bare essentials for clean-up and his picking of the best weapons. He can always get creative with whatever he can find at the man’s penthouse suite. They do enjoy that. Makes the pain so much sweeter. 

Hefting the delicious weight of his briefcase in his palm, he lifts his other hand to knock on the door. Faint sounds of life travel down the hallway, a grunt. An exasperated exclamation and mortified squeak that traverses much more space than it was intended to. Low squealing moans accompanying it swiftly cut off into abject silence. 

Minho waits, patient as ever, until a minute or two later a low grumble heralds the occupant’s arrival at the entryway. Minho scoffs. What a fool, answering a knock to a penthouse. At least it makes his business easier. 

“Hello,” he beams, as soon as the door swings open, revealing a middle-aged man on the younger side of fifty dressed in nothing more than a sweat damp bathrobe and standing awkwardly at the foyer of his own hallway. Without pause, Minho pushes his way past him and into the corridor, strides confidently down through the hall, leaving the man to splutter nonsensically behind him, waddling behind as Minho lopes ahead. 

The hallway lets out into an expansive living room, stacked with a large furling L-couch wrapped around a TV display. Behind it the wall bottlenecks before exposing a marble-topped dining table larger than the size of Minho’s entire living area, decorated by a sprucing of white orchids sprouting from a tall bleached and stippled vase. The penthouse bursts with spacious rooms to boast about just as he had studied in the layouts. Shining stovetops, wracked with technologies on every available shelf, gilded platinum trimming on surfaces that don’t deserve it. Brimming with plasticine shows of wealth. 

Minho tips his head up and sees another one. “Oooh, what a pretty chandelier,” he coos. 

Despite the walls lined with picture perfect spines, lined up neatly for display to flaunt their wordy scribed titles, and the monuments and antiques hidden behind flimsy barriers of glass, stocked and full, crowding against each other where they stand, the suite rings barren. Desolate. Each adornment no more than a twig sticking out of the sand in a desert. 

The master bedroom is quite conspicuous, a sculpted and embellished door flung wide open to reveal an ostentatious gold-plated frame holding up a wide mattress, bookended on each side by gaudy bedside tables topped with lurid lamps. Opposite this hangs a curved screen television, paused predictably in the middle of bukkake porn. Minho has half the mind to smash it. Instead, tossing his briefcase into the centre of the bed, he flounces onto it and turns back to scrutinise the man’s half hard cock peeking through the slits of his robe, competing quite vigorously in colour with his reddened neck and face. 

“You opened the door in that state?” Minho jeers. 

“You knocked!” the man retaliates, rushing up close and at last drawing in to grab Minho by the collar of his shirt. “Who the hell are you? Get out of my house!”

Minho takes in the pudgy fingers scrunching his tee. He purposely wore something he didn’t care about dirtying too much, expecting that he might have to get rid of it after his fun, but this is unacceptable. He’s the one who gets to decide when his things get ruined. He lets the clenched fist slip out of his view, lifting his head to stare the man straight in the eye. 

“Let go.”

“Get out of my house!” comes the snarled reply, a measly attempt at threatening. The man tries to drag him off the bed, out of his room. This is his next mistake. Another tally added. Minho can just start deducting from here; his patience for folly is running thin anyhow. He’ll take more time once the man is properly cowed. 

He places his hand above the one fisted in his shirt, and with exceeding calm, peels back a finger. Until it’s unfurled from his shirt, stretched out flat. And then further. And further. Finally, it pops out of its socket with a satisfying schlock. 

Oh what a disappointment. Minho was hoping to break the bone, not just dislocate it. A messier break is harder to fix. Well, not that the man is going to get fixed up anyhow. 

Predictably, the man screams and retracts his hand in a hurry, cradling the dislodged finger to his chest with tears already shining on his cheeks. Weak. Puny. Minho wants him to last longer than this. What fun is it if he bends so easily?

“What the hell?” the man yells, aghast. “You broke my finger!”

“Astute observation.” Minho dusts the man’s traces off his top and smooths the wrinkles down, though the lines it left are still starkly visible. Disappointing. He stands up to his full height, staring down his nose at the distinct angle of the man’s finger with mild satisfaction. “Would you like me to break another?”

“What do you want from me?” the man blubbers, backing into the wall beside the door, feeling for the threshold with this undamaged hand. 

“Do you really want to know?”

“Yes, you fucker! You broke into my home and snapped my finger. I want to know why.”

Minho tilts his head. His left hand ventures into a pocket to curl around a knife, pulling it out lazily. “I don’t think I’ll tell you. Much more fun for me that way.” People like this man have more skeletons in their closet than will ever reach the light of day. Give them reasonable suspicion, however, and all those bones will come tumbling out through loose lips, scrambling to find a way out of their predicament, throwing brittle dried out secrets at Minho in delirious attempts to stem the pain. 

The more Minho withholds his own agendas, the more he gets gifted with fuel for his vendettas. It’s a beautifully self-fulfilling cycle. 

His lips twitch up subconsciously. The knife in his palm feels like an extension of his own will. 

“Now,” Minho begins clinically. He bites down on the knife handle as he draws a crumpled pair of gloves from another pocket, pulling them on with a snap, tugged up to just under the bend of his elbow. The blue latex will look lovely juxtaposed with crimson blood. “Before we start, let me just confirm. You’re Kang Jungjae, of KJJ Corporations?”

Emotions war on his face, twisting between resignation and denial, attempting to calculate which answer will end the conversation. It’s a false notion. No matter what he says, Minho knows who he is. It’s just a measure of how much truth he’s willing to tell. 

“That’s not me,” Jungjae finally decides. “You’ve got the wrong person.”

Minho hums, twirling the knife between his fingers. The light from the various fixtures on the ceiling reflect quite magnificently on the edge of the blade, splaying rainbows onto the walls. “How unfortunate for you that it wasn’t really a question. I don’t have patience for liars.”

“No I’m telling the truth–” But even in the middle of the sentence, he must realise how fruitless the protest is in the face of Minho’s cutting grin. Jungjae’s face pales, blood draining down in a surge, and he abandons the conversation to make a mad dash for the door, stumbling down the hallway with weak-willed legs. He’s not going to get fair with bare feet and a semi-erect dick until his dignity kicks in or his legs give out in his hurry so Minho only saunters down the corridor behind him lazily, waiting for him to slip up on the polished tiles.

As expected, it takes little more than a few seconds for Jungjae to trip up in his haste, flopping bodily onto the floor, belly slapping onto tile. 

“Please, please, let me go,” Jungjae begs, limbs flailing around and body seizing like a fish out of water. Ignoring his struggling, Minho snatches up a leg and drags him summarily back to the bedroom, lugging him like a flack tire to a rope. To a novice, the body weight of an old man might register as a hindrance, but Minho has done this enough for it to not bother him as he throws Jungjae up against the wall by his bed, snatching a cuff from his briefcase to lock him up while he works. 

The cufflink squeaks as it crimps into place – a little rusty but it’ll do its job. Minho makes sure to tighten it two notches more than necessary, just so that the metal cuts into Jungjae’s wrist and deters him from making any extraneous struggling movements. 

In truth, a face like Jungjae’s stands out from Minho’s usual kaleidoscope of aged pests, despite not being that far off mathematically. They are all some sort of variant on the same formula: thinning hair, grizzly stubble, sagging wrinkles. A potbelly caged in unfitted shirts, wrestling with the buttons and their spindly threads. Jungjae has the precursor of all these deficits sitting on his body but hasn’t quite aged into them yet. He might have even been something of a looker in his glory days, had he paid slightly more attention to his skin and style. 

There’s something tragic in that too. Minho knows, better than most, that it’s easy to want to believe that everything evil is ugly. That karmic justice exists and enacts penalty to your face, if not other things, but it’s simply not true. There is beauty in the darkest places, beauty undeserved, like the dangling light of an anglerfish, otherwise marred. He’s had his fair share of proof for that matter too, but just as much for the opposite - starting with himself. His existence evidences evil as a honey-trapped flower. It makes the job smoother. Drip the honey down into waiting lips and people will take any lie, any excuse, to stay close to the flower’s nectar. No one wants to believe that such a pretty thing could be capable of violence, so they twist the truth in their minds. 

Jungjae’s face is even more fetching when he’s scared, not that it means anything to Minho. He has a flower at home of his own, the only flower he’ll ever care to raise, more bewitching than anything in the world. There’s nothing in the world he wouldn’t do – hasn’t done – to protect it. To keep its petals smooth and untouched, soil rich and fertilised. In the face of his blossom, Jungjae is nothing more than a weed growing in the cracks of concrete and encroaching on gardens where it doesn’t belong. Something to be trimmed and eradicated to ensure a full bloom. 

The knife pauses in its lazy twirl, gently cupped in the dip of Minho’s palm. Jungjae cowers into the wall as Minho leans in. His injured hand still cradled to his chest. Best finish that off first then. 

He wrenches the hand out of its nestled place, outstretched between them and his knife tucked back into an elastic band by his wrist. Jungjae’s skin is cold to the touch as Minho snakes a fist around the next finger and – snap. 

The sound is wetter than the last, the angle of the contortion clearer too. Jungjae bellows full-throated and anguished, just like Minho had hoped he would. He wonders when Jungjae will get tired of screaming so passionately, when he’ll resign himself to the pain. How long will he last? The disconnected joint, torn tendons holding the finger limp between the socket and where it hangs is squishy to the touch. Minho relishes the give of it for a second longer before moving onto the next finger and snapping it too – this time further up.

Instead of popping out of the joint, it snaps in the middle of a bone this time, with a crisp and sharp crack. Jungjae’s entire body jerks with a loud cry, his arm harshly tugging back, but aborts midway through the movement as it disturbs the injury. His slumps, hanging precariously by the cuff tied to the bed frame. Minho kicks his head up with the toe of his shoe, just to confirm that he hasn’t passed out already. How unsatisfying would it be, to snap the limbs of an unconscious victim. No reaction, no reward but a puppet to manipulate. There are plenty who find their joy in that, Minho supposes, but he is not one of them.

He doesn’t do it for the sake of the final product; he does it for the pain. To etch the memory of himself into their very bones, into the darkest recesses of their minds. To haunt them unto death and beyond. To bestow upon them a name, that will become more than legacy than anything they achieved in life. 

A name Minho has carved into his skin until it scratches his soul. 

Luckily, Jungjae has not passed out as of yet. His face is concerningly blanched, but he’s last until the last finger at least, and then Minho can give him a breather to garner up some hope until he starts with the knives. 

He cuts him some slack on the pinkie, not going for the bone, just pulling it back until it juts out perpendicular. If Jungjae had his wits and another hand about him, he might even succeed in popping that one back in himself. The thumb though, that’s a different story. 

That one, Minho tears straight off. 

There’s a process to it that he’s perfected to complete with finesse. Disjoint, pressure on the weak spot, leverage, pull. The stringy flesh that hands off the stump can be cleaned up with one of his many knives and the thumb itself, separated, pudgy, a sausage with a nail. Well, it’s not without its uses. 

Jungjae howls. Tears choking his lungs. There’s some resemblance of words in the noises that escape him but too faint to be recognisable. “Please please, I’m sorry I’m sorry. Whatever I did I’m sorry. Forgive me.”

“Forgive you?” Minho barks. The severed thumb stains the surface of his blue gloves and tracks blood down his arm, inching closer and closer to the rolled up sleeves of his shirt. The scent of it is so pungent, despite being so little in volume, thickening the air with iron. “You can’t seriously believe an apology is going to help you now. Especially when you don’t even know what it is you’re repenting for.”

Repent is the word. Repenting is what Jungjae doesn’t know he needs to do. Minho drags his cadaver up to the dais, straightens him under the pinpoint spotlight tunnelled and magnified through the sparkle of sunlight pick glass. Wool rips off him in clumps under Minho’s handling. He bleats. 

Minho doesn’t know whether Jungjae hears him at all; he’s screaming so loudly. Blood, thick and viscous, drips steadily down from the stub on his hand onto the carpet, blooming like a red flower as it soaks into the material. He screams and screams, clutching at the stump as if holding it tight enough will stop the flow. Pah, it’s not like such a small wound would kill him. 

Eventually the ached wailing peters out into pathetic gasping sobs, dragging and hitching out of his body. Falling to the floor yet again, Jungjae haphazardly arranges himself into a prostrate, pressing his forehead into the floor by Minho’s feet as much as his chained arm will allow. 

“Please, it hurts. Please stop. Please.” His grotesquely disfigured arm, fingers angled every which way, stretches towards Minho’s shoes to beg. 

“I don’t have any reason to stop.” Minho says to the tousled twist of hair, to the scalp peeking through and the face pleading to his sneakers. 

“Who paid you to– I’ll- I’ll double the payment. I’ll triple it! Just let me go, please.” 

Snot and sweat and tears and blood churn together and coalesce on the floor. Minho snatches his feet back to avoid the concoction touching his sneakers, although it’s likely by the end of the night they’ll be noticeably dirtied enough to necessitate replacing them. If Jisung asks, he’ll say a coworker threw up on them. That he didn’t want to bring them home to reek up the apartment, that it was beyond salvaging. Jisung won’t dig, he never does, because he trusts Minho. Minho could have a gun to his face and a loaded chamber and Jisung would just smile on the other end, putting his livelihood in the cup of Minho’s closed palms, convicted with a faith larger than devotion that Minho would never hurt him.

Minho lies and lies and he is made of lies. But his lies are always a protection. A silk blindfold slipped carefully over Jisung’s eyes that says, you don’t need to watch, love. That says, I’ll take care of this . Minho slips into another room and lets the blade loose there.

Here.

He leans down to Jungjae’s level, crouching with his hands hanging over his knees, head tilted just so. 

“Ahjussi, what gives you the impression I’m doing this for money?” he asks, crooked grin and all. “I assure you I'm here purely on personal business.”

“Then,” Jungjae gulps. “Then why?”

“Hmmm.” The severed thumb is quite a tactile fidget, gliding along his finger much like the knife does. He throws it onto the bed. “Guess.”

If possible, Jungjae’s complexion becomes even whiter. Minho knows exactly why. He knows everything about Kang Jungjae. Knows every possible branch of his family tree. Every stitch on his body. Every asset he owns. Minho’s expeditions are anything but improvised. They are devised down to the last details, the only thing that fluctuates is how exactly he chooses to maim and kill. Nothing is a mystery to him. Not the number of workers Jungjae has at beck and call, their shifts, schedules, days off. The days Jungjae takes for himself, to hide his own depravity. Every residence under his name. 

Minho knows it all. 

That’s how he’s here, in full confidence he won’t be caught. That there’s no one here to hear them or call for help or report him. To even notice he’s come and gone. 

“Go on.” Minho prods. He extracts his knife from the elastic bang again, using the point to flick the hair of Jungjae’s face and tilt his chin up. “Get up and tell me. What do you think you’ve done to earn this?”

Jungjae stays slack on the floor. 

Minho kicks a foot into his face. Just a tap. Just enough to get his chin hovering over the floor and have it smack down again. Jungjae whimpers. “Get up,” he says, holding his knife under his chin. 

Jungjae scrambles to get up without either of his hands for help, pushing himself up by the shoulders with wavering grunts and keens. At long last, he fights his way to his knees and collapses back into the wall. 

“Tell me,” Minho orders, knife held precisely at the tip of his chin. Jungjae breathes through his mouth, laboured and wet, and it fogs up the silver of the blade. 

“The CJM stocks tanking… that had nothing to do with me. I’m on a board, I don’t get to decide things like that.”

Minho clicks his tongue. “I don’t give two shits about stocks.” This man is testing his patience. “I told you no one sent me. Don’t scratch the top of the barrel. Don’t try to shift responsibility. Tell me about yourself.”

“I’m serious! I don’t know what you’re–”

The knife comes down, stabbing into his ankle and driving into the floor.

Reflexively, a shriek tears out of Jungjae’s throat. 

“I told you, I don’t have patience for liars,” Minho repeats blithely over the resounding noise of Jungjae sobbing into his ruined hand like a child. 

Thumbing a pocket on his pants, Minho retrieves another knife, identical in shape and size. Most of them are. It had been easier to get them in bulk, with only a few variations for speciality purposes. He already knew when he was obtaining them that he’d need to account for disposal, for knives being used up in the task of pinning people down, leaving them in. There’s a whole other sort of amusement in longevity, but that’s not in the schedule for tonight. 

He admires it for a moment, catching Jungjae’s gaze so that he uses the moment to take it in as well before trailing the blade lightly across the stretch of Jungjae’s bare legs, exposed by his undone bathrobe, right up to where his thigh meets his pelvis and further still, smiling ruthlessly all the while. The pressure is just enough to divert the blood underneath and create a little imprint of colour, but not enough to pierce the skin. Watching the white trail streaming behind the blade lights up a flame in Minho’s gut. 

“Until you say exactly what I’m looking for,” he trails the blade back down until it’s barely a hand's length away from the one in his ankle, “I’m going to put knife after knife in you. All the way up to your poor little cock. And then I’ll put one there too.”

Jungjae snivels, snot dripping down his face onto the upper flap of his lip.

“You’ve got eleven tries total.” Minho taps at the knife driven into his ankle, jostling it so it tears into all the neighbouring tendons, making the damage just that much more irreversible. “And you just wasted one. So by all means, go on running your mouth about stocks and business deals and petty corporate rivalry as if I give a shit, but know it won’t spare you any pain.”

“Please,” Jungjae bleats.

“Ahhh I’m getting really tired of that word. Here’s another rule: if you say please again, I’m pulling out your eye. The next time after that, one of your balls is getting cut off. The next time after that… Well, I’m flexible. And creative. You get the idea.”

Jungjae opens his mouth but he closes it again just as quickly, biting his lip against the reflexive pleas. 

Minho hums, pleased. “You’re getting the hang of it, ahjussi. So?”

Jungjae’s face collapses. The longer the silence stretches, the harder he grinds his teeth into his bottom lip, chewing it up until a speck of blood erupts from the corner. How humiliating it must be, to be held captive in your own home, the evidence of your depravity standing undeniable, laid bare pixel by pixel, a knife driven through your leg, a hand mangled and the other locked to your bed frame. Your mahogany bed frame. A symbol of your wealth, assets, power and yet it means nothing in the face of blind violence. And yet, it is the very thing that prevents your escape. Even then, even knowing that his fate is unavoidable, Jungjae blanches at the thought of confessing his crimes. 

Does he consider them crimes?

His hesitation is a double barrel. Whether it is because saying them aloud would bring to reality the horror of it, or because he fears repercussions for an incorrect guess. 

It’s fine. No matter what he says – whether he realises his mistake or not – he’s dying today. Minho has no intentions to withdraw that end goal. Everything else is just a ploy to get there. To play with his food. 

Jungjae breathes hard and each of them wavers, in and out. The sound of it is chock full of wetness, and not in a pleasant way. It’s mucous, thick, and sticky. It’s entirely unlike the way Jisung cries, despite being a similar level of disorder. Jisung can’t help it. When he cries, his emotions take over him. He doesn’t know what he says and he hiccups through his words, battling through it to apologise to Minho for whatever it was, or to berate him for being mean. No matter what the reason, it rends Minho’s heart without fail. Breaks him down into his constituent parts. He stares at his hands, at his body, and feels unworthy down to the very last atom. He is dirty. 

Minho is corrupt and dirty and cruel, but not so inhuman that he is incapable of feeling remorse. What he does feel is pointed only in one direction. Only to Jisung. 

Jisung owns it all. All of his love, all of his remorse, regret, sadness, guilt. All of his humanity. It belongs only to him. Because it doesn’t matter anywhere else. Jisung is the only one who deserves it. Minho decided that a long time ago. 

“I broke a man’s no–”

Minho stabs his second knife through Jungjae’s calf without a millisecond of hesitation. It must go through the bone because there’s a crackly, stiff quality to the sound that can’t be achieved by meat alone. The fire in Minho’s stomach stokes, and his smile tugs further up his lips. 

Jungjae screams through this too, but it’s to be expected. 

“Why?” he sobs. “Why why why . Just tell me what it is so I can apologise. Fuck. ”

A third knife taps on the cap of Jungjae’s right knee. It echoes through the cartilage with a dull knock. 

“That’s not what this is about, ahjussi. I don’t want an apology. I want retribution. I want you to know .”

Minho angles the knife so that the tip is poking into the gap between the patella and the junction of the tibia and femur. The meniscus is tender when he pushes it in just slightly, but after so much damage has been done the soft push is hardly enough to scare Jungjae. 

He grabs a handful of sparse hair on the side of his head and propels it inward. 

“It’s that isn’t it? From two years ago. Two years ago, when I ordered a hit on–” already it’s wrong, so Minho lets the knife sink in, “Kwon Daeho.” The knife finds itself safely lodged in the meniscus cartilage and gargles the name between his flailing tongue, but not so horribly that Minho can’t make it out. He doesn’t care, but that’s beside the point. It’s good dirt anyway. He wonders if Kwon Daeho died from the hit. Wonders what he did to deserve it.

He jiggles the handle around a little, just because he can. It tears some truly throat-wrenching screams out of Jungjae. 

“Ple-” he cuts himself off by biting his tongue. His eyes are wide as he whips his head to beseech Minho, wrought with innate, immutable fear. 

Minho grins, baring all of his teeth. His whole body feels so alive, like he can feel every last fibre of his nails and each hair on his skin. Hypersensitive to the air and to each minute change in his body. The blood is freshly pumping through his organs, and muscles respond as if in perfect control. So when he imagines wedging his index and middle finger into Jungjae’s eye socket, just below his eyelid, and his thumb below, his hand responds perfectly to execute the command. 

They sink in with a squelch. A fluttery brush of a sensation coupled with a weak clench around his digits informs him that Jungjae is attempting to close his eyes against the intrusion to no avail, the squeeze releasing just as quickly once met with the fruitlessness of the endeavour. Minho pinches his fingers within the confined space and feels the pads of his thumb and index close in around a thin wiry extension behind the ball.

He secures his fingers around that fleshy cord and yanks. 

Do you remember? Fragile and resilient. Fragility makes for pain. Resilience ensures life. Fragility means Minho only has to know the exact amount of force to exert. Resilience means Jungjae’s body will keep running until it absolutely can’t.

Fragility and resilience.

The perfect combination for torture.

Broken bones won’t kill you, no matter how painful they are. The knives are still in his legs so he won’t bleed out. And the eye–

Minho hefts it in his palm, its trailing optic nerve dangling precariously between his fingers and smearing sludgy tracks of blood onto the blue of his gloves. It’s light, oh so light. It barely weighs anything, barely fills up the space between the cage of his digits, but it paints them so violently red from the burst veins, and the gap it’s left in his skull is a vibrant painting of gore. Each capillary, all tens and thousands of them, severed and spilling over into the gored out cavity, flowing and trickling like a slow going fountain. Water passes over the craggy rocks, through the divots between them as they pile up on the river bed and lift the water level. Blood drips down and down until it pools and tips over, breaching the waterline and over that too, just as a stream over a protrusion.  

The ball in his palm is worth nothing anymore. One could argue that it was worth nothing this whole time – for how does one argue for the value of sight, for the pleasure of a sensation, a sense – but in Minho’s palm it is nothing but a spherical lump of meat and flesh. Of carbon, long and chained.

Minho was never big on the sciences, never cared for long droning lectures and journeys to the abstract. He liked real, tangible. The flexion of a muscle. The ruination of a tendon. Numbers on a page that went up and down. Jisung’s palm on his chest and his breath on Minho’s lips. But he has masqueraded normality to get to this point, and that included high school biology. And if he remembers one thing from sun-secluded musty late evening classes and tone-dry professors it is this: everything living or once alive was built, is continuously building, from carbon. Everything that dies will return to it.

Even now. Jungjae breathes in – oxygen enters his lungs and so too does carbon. He breathes out, in pants and gasp, hacking and spitting and crying. The carbon is expelled.

His pudgy broken fingers scramble for the space in his skull, and to do so, his muscles contract. And to do so, his cells must create energy. And to do so, they take carbon in and break it down, build it up. And so he moves. And so he screams, a pleasant melody to Minho’s ears.

That’s life.

(The other thing, that Minho hadn’t needed to exert a single ounce of energy to memorise: the give of the frog’s elastic skin under his scalpel blade. The smooth split, like torn rubber between twin scissor steel. The errant twitch of its legs, sporadic from a wild jerk to lifeless quivers to stillness. Control. Complete control, unlike anything he had experienced before. He’d held its puny heart in his hand, still beating, gushing blood profusely onto his fingers, spluttering weakly, and beating despite anything. And yet it was in his palm. It was both alive and dead. And it was in his palm.)

The frog’s heart was smaller than Jungjae’s eyeball, but it weighed the same in Minho’s palm, bogged down by blood as it was. He couldn’t crush it then – there was classroom decorum and he was wearing a pristine white lab coat he couldn’t afford to dry clean under his parents pay check – but he can now.

It leaks through his fingers, slimy and slippery, dripping off in rag-like slips. Veiny and above all uncomfortably wet. Moist.

He shoves the same hand, not bothered to shake off the remnants of the eye that cling to the gaps, over Jungjae’s warbling mouth. Jungjae chokes on the taste of his blood, spits against the tang of iron ingested wrongly, choking against the retina sliding down his tongue and hitting his uvula. The colour of it smears on the jaw, paints his lips and cheeks.

Two dissections, Minho had done, before he quit biology. Before he could quit biology, after it was not mandatory anymore. The second was a sheep’s eye. The retina was glossier, shinier than a human eyeball because of course it is. Because of course humanity cannot even manage to retain the beauty of nature so desperate is it to cull itself of animality.

“You’ve exhausted all but one of your chances,” Minho informs him. “I was too generous perhaps and I’m getting quite bored of your show. You’re quite the forgetful one.”

He removes his hand.

“Swallow it,” he orders. Jungjae gags on another wracking sob, eyeing Minho out of the corner of his eyes as he looms above like a titan, casting a long shadow on his visage. Through tears and visible disgust, he forces himself to close his lips around it and force it down. “Now speak.”

Jungjae groans weakly, spitting out his meat on his tongue. His remaining eye is swelling with tears, swimming, and leaking tears where the other leaks red.

“I don’t know what you want me to say,” he cries, hanging his head. His cavity bleeds straight into his lap, directly onto the white of his bathrobe and over his crotch. What a striking resemblance it bears to Minho’s high school lab coat. What a cosmic coincidence.

Minho doesn’t believe in fate or poetry. That there is a larger meaning to life is the greatest farce sold to humankind, to keep the masses quiet and obedient. Cinematic parallels are nothing but deliberate motifs directors plant into their films for viewers like Jisung to point at and squeal. Divine punishment doesn’t exert itself. It needs to be summoned. It demands to be incited. It does not move without provocation, without exertion.

But if that is how the world works, Minho has successfully made himself into a god.

He does not incite karmic justice.

He is Justice. He is the Divine Punishment.

Minho rears back his arm and punches a right hook straight to Jungjae’s jaw. It unhinges from its connection to Jungjae’s face, kept up only by tenterhooks. 

“ Speak ,” Minho commands, speaking over Jungjae’s keening. “I’ve given you the dignity of not treating you like the mutt you are, so if you don’t want to bark, you will speak.”

Brows beading with sweat, Jungjae works his mouth. He swallows once, twice, making sure his mandible is connected to the rest of him still. From what Minho can see, of the impact zone from his turned profile, it hasn’t unhinged but there is a definite looseness to the attachment, a unscrewed nail halfway out of the wall leaving it rocky to the touch and an unoiled hinge that groans when its flexed. His mouth doesn’t close all the way when he tries to gulp down the saliva, the back of his throat bracketing off but lips not able to touch, and it makes globs of spit stick and come back up, dribbling along his dimpled chin.

Minho grinds the heel of his boot into Jungjae’s long flack dick as a warning. A reminder that he is waiting.

“The funds I stole.”

Minho’s grin splits his face. There’s a click as his own jaw unhooks to accommodate the width of it, and an ache in his muscles as they pull apart his cheeks. It hurts. It needs to hurt.

He pets the side of Jungjae’s face, tracing the line of the line down from his ear along the side of the face, the one side he has turned to Minho.

“Where did you steal them from, ahjussi?” he asks, honey sweet. His voice tips higher, sugar-coated and nothing like the dull husk he has affected the whole night that scrapes his vocal cords like gravel rough rocks under a mortar and pestle. It’s so saccharine it scorches, in a not dissimilar way to the grind of skin on mineral, brighter and hotter even.

Jungjae has stolen more funds than he can ever conceivably list off. The alphabetized column runs a miles long, wraps around the Seoul perimeter like chains, like a snake eating its own tail, starting from actuary cost-cutting to or scalping of zero balance accounts, trailing its way through all the letters, every abundant and ample embezzlement methods in the book used in the arsenal of commercial fraud. Ticking them off like a checklist. Despite all that crass effort, all his underhanded attempts and plays at power, his pathetic moves for wealth, he’s still just a member of the KJJ board. He doesn’t even have veto capabilities, no special preference and no discernable voice in the masses. Not a chairman, nor a president. Not even a vice.

Was it worth it to him? Each slash across his palm, each bridge burned to ashes. Was it worth it to vote on the next motion for investment shares where he’d get a smaller cut than staff who’d been on board for less than half his years? Did it matter so much to him?

“From my clients.”

Without an inch of hesitation in the accelerative force or a hair of error in the angle of delivery, Minho pierces a knife through Jungjae’s thigh, right at the crease, right on the tentative border with his crotch where the coldness of the silver breaths down the bulging veins of his dick like frost. Where the most tentative of his pain-inducing squirming movements bring it bobbing farther then closer to his pathetic symbol of manhood.

Jungjae doesn’t scream. He whimpers like a wounded prey animal that has accepted its lot in death rather than a predator howling out in injustice. He has grown accustomed to the pain radiating through the rest of the body that a new one hardly registers.

Perfect. That means Minho can advance to the next stage.

“And here I thought you were aware of my expectations. Ahjussi, you disappoint me.” He slowly withdraws the dagger wedged in the joint of his knee and drives it back in again in the other gap. Slides it out again and forces it back in. Again. And Again. The skin around the synopial hangs out in strips, stringy muscle bare and cartilage oozing out like an infection. The knife has lost its shine so he tosses it back into his briefcase; it clatters against the topside before it settles.

Jungjae doesn’t scream, tired out.

“Don’t give me that shit about clients. About business, as if you’re just an honest corporate salesman doing your nine to five and coming home to a clean record and a good night’s sleep. Tell me the secrets that you wouldn’t dare dream of uttering in your sleep. That you’d take to your grave.”

Minho controls when Jungjae dies. This room right here, in all its lavish, ostentatious opulence, this façade of wealth, is his grave. He’s been digging it for decades, preparing his coffin for a grand exit. This is where he dies. Without knowing, he had chosen it for himself.

There is an angry ring of both dried and flowing blood around Jungjae’s hand, where the handcuff digs it. It’s a sturdy model. Minho’s most necessary tool, though he doubts that even if he undid it now Jungjae could retaliate in any capacity. He’s much too weak, from blood loss and out-of-order parts to put up a fair fight, not that he’s worth one.

“The BSK chairman’s eldest son, Park Joongi. I was helping him manage his accounts,” Jungjae pants. “He was so… he was always checked out when I met him. He made it so easy. Anyone would have done it. Anyone would have,” he defends himself, hysterical.

“Park Joongi,” Minho repeats to the room at large. It bounces back emptily from the vaulted ceiling. “Park Joongi. Park Joongi.” The name means something to him. Not a visceral deep ache that pulses like a second heartbeat, a parasite setting up house in his stomach that he finds as if it were a foetus in a womb, but a peripheral itch. Barely a nick. On the news perhaps, in a paper. A name that would grace headlines for a day, there and gone. Lit and buried. “The one who hung himself?”

The cuff rattles against the headboard before Jungjae freezes. A deer in headlights. A hunter cowed by the apex. Minho barks out a laugh. “Of course it was easy, the man had half his foot in his grave at that point. He was a dead man walking.”

What had the outlets said? A stern father with an iron and punishing fist. Internal financial pressures. An illegitimate half sibling and a conspiring family doctor. A younger brother and a son he’d left behind. The whole ordeal was blown out and messy, scandalous and pitiful in equal measure, pasting the scratched surface of a deep family history over front covers like tabloid gossip drivel. There had been one errant article speculating on murder which had been quickly scrubbed from the net and physical copies purged, overrun by speculations on Joongi’s deviant and reckless behaviour, his accrued debts chasing behind him round the clock head till they reached the true zero and the guilt of his past misgivings catching up to him at the final point. Culminating into the noose around his neck and tightening that looped knot.  

This had all been years ago, half a decade give or take, something Minho had overheard on their busted box television in Gimpo during his rushed breakfast, his mother tutting over the grotesque stories they ran on the news and how sorry she felt for them all. What a mess it all was. She had a bleeding heart like that, in a way that would later make Minho think of how easily she would get on with Jisung, how easily she would come to like him, her heart bleeding on his too, drenching it in that thick heavy affection she boasted. He was right about it naturally; she took to him like a bee to a flower, latching onto it with an instinctual responsibility and coddling him with all the care he needed to blossom into the beauty he is. That he would become.

At times Minho thinks she loves Jisung more than she ever loved him. Which is just as well. She’d never treated him like the monster he was – is – but she’d known he wasn’t normal with that sort of maternal intuition people touted in fairytales and to make themselves feel better about not understanding their child. She had sensed that offness in him. Had identified that something wrong before Minho even understood that he hungered in a different way. That he was never satisfied. She’d raised him as best she could, but perhaps she could never love him. Not the way she could love Jisung, the way someone like Jisung deserved to be loved and how Minho didn’t. 

“Or do you mean to tell mean you’re the reason why Park Joongi committed suicide?” Minho hefts himself up to his full height, knees popping with the motion. He chuckles under his breath at the impeccable irony of his joints ringing out with strain when Jungjae’s are so ruined, dislocated to the point of having nowhere to sound against.

“No!”

Minho quirks a brow. “So, what? He would’ve done it anyway? Even if you didn’t run his stocks into the ground, ruin his reputation with his father and throw his to the loan sharks.” Both could be true, is the thing. Maybe Jungjae led Joongi to the maws of his disease, held him stout under the sharpened teeth and tied him to his deathbed, leeching away his assets in the same step as holding incentive for the bite down in the other hand. Maybe he toppled the first domino, lit the fuse to the pile of explosives a mile off, an inch too close. And maybe Joongi was already there anyway, blank behind the eyes and at the end of his tied off, ceiling hanging rope.

Minho doesn’t care beyond the faint memory of scorched toast rising around the newscaster’s bored telegraphing of his passing. Park Joongi is a late childhood conspiracy laid to rest, one he doesn’t even bother to open.

“Say,” Minho asks, fiddling with the sleek metal lighter carelessly tossed aside onto the side table, flicking the cap open and shut. Open and shut. The rhythm of it like a metronome. “Did you know that during the press run of our beloved Joongi’s death, there was one reporter from a small-time publisher that ran a most peculiar story? I don’t remember their name, forgive me, but they did mention a detail of Joongi’s autopsy that no one else deigned to report on – that he had burns all over his body. Old burns. Superficial, yes, but deep enough to last for the years that they did. Is that true, ahjussi?”

He places the lighter back on the table, a distinct one-two clink of it hitting the wood and the ever so faint sensation of the fuel jostling around inside. Minho so loves the smell of gasoline.  

“Yes,” Jungjae admits hesitantly. When his mouth gapes, Minho can see the scraps of his eye painting his tongue. “He always wore long sleeves, and high collars but– yes. When they slipped up his arm, it was plain to see how red and raised the skin underneath was.”

“I see,” Minho accepts. “Now tell me this: do you have an iron, ahjussi?” He saunters around the room, flinging open the wide door to his walk-in wardrobe and waltzing down the length of it, pulling out drawers as he goes. “Doesn’t have to be a clothing iron, I doubt you do your own dress shirts. But perhaps.” He stalks out of the wardrobe and crosses the room to the marble tiled bathroom, far more expansive that it has any need to be with a spa the size of his bed up against the window, overlooking the star-studded skyline of Gangnam. In the counter under the sink, Minho finds exactly what he wants.

“You couldn’t even manage to be a faithful husband,” Minho sneers, tone full of disdain and put-upon consternation, shaking his head as he extracts a baby pink curler. He carries it back to where Jungjae lays limp against the wall next to his bed, an outlet a scant metre and a half from his slack figure and the drape of his cream coloured sheets. “Me and you both know your wife has the most beautiful natural waves.”

He plugs the curler in, unspools the cord, and sets it on the carpet by his feet as he waits for it to warm, just a foot out of Jungjae’s reach, not that he has to worry about his mobility.

“You know what happened to Park Joongi, so I trust you know what that’s for.” Minho sits across from Jungjae, crossing his legs over each other and flipping his last remaining clean knife between his gloved fingers. “In the meantime, let me tell you a story, ahjussi. Listen close. Do you have kids?”

Minho knows he does. A two year old baby boy living with his mother out in the countryside with two doting grandparents and two absent ones. His name is Baek Jungchan, after his mother, and he has wavy hair just like hers, though it’s hard to tell with how wispy it is on his head. He has an affable countenance and doesn’t cry when unfamiliar faces get close, when stranger’s arms pick him up and carry him around his extensive estate. He knows because he held Jungchan in his own two arms last week, smiling back at the child’s bubbles of confused gurgling laughter. An innocent child coddled and secure in a private estate, without a worry in the world, just as it should be.

Jungjae is silent, his face drained of colour as if he can’t believe the conversation is broaching this. As if he can’t believe this is on the table now. How dare he. The meat on Minho’s bones is hotter than any flame in hell and it burns him inside out like a pyre, like the centre of the earth. How fucking dare he affect horror. Offence. How dare he be scared. 

At Jungjae’s lack of response, Minho fastens his grip across the hilt and slashes clean across his protruding belly. A shallow scratch, but wide, and it wells with a fountain, dripping stark along his hairy stomach.

And yet it’s so sweet, isn’t it? The reassurance Minho gets from this horror every time. What he’s doing is right. How could it not be right, when the thought of it is so chilling to even the worst people. It’s a salve straight to the burn, and it’s so fucking sweet it drills a cavity into his molar, cracked and brown.

“Do you?” Minho growls.

“I do. I do.”

Minho smiles. “Do you love him?”

“I do . Please, don’t touch him,” Jungjae scrambles, his broken body thrown into a limp bow. “Please.”

“Ahh, appeal to emotion?” Minho giggles. “You’re a bit late. Most people try that before threats and intimidation.”

He situates the heel of his steel-capped boot on the guy’s dick, leaning back and bearing down enough to fracture it in this position as he considers. “Hmm actually I think it might be a fifty-fifty split. Though I hate to break it to you but neither of them work. Especially emotional appeal. Didn’t you say it yourself, I’m heartless. ”

“Please,” Jungjae begs, even with the sickly yellow bile retching up to the roof of his mouth. “He’s innocent. He has nothing to do with me.”

“How could that be? He’s your flesh and blood. But look at that parental instinct,” Minho praises, cupping Jungjae’s face in a mocking caress. “That’s good. It’ll make this easy to for you to understand.”

He takes a step back, and settles back on the bed. The plush king mattress adorned in tassel threads and a sheer silk canopy and so much cleaner than anything this man deserves. The pattern is arabesque, slightly lifted vines curling in and out of each other, overlapping into forever extending mandalas. He runs a hand over the patterned weaving tendrils, appreciating the make, contrasting it in his head to the plain black sheets Jisung has likely tucked himself into. He’ll be home soon, to that warmth, to that soft-beating heart.

“This is the story of a little boy. Let’s call him Jungchan.” Minho relishes the widening of Jungjae’s remaining eye, the fear that overtakes him as his face runs pale to learn the true extent of how much Minho has dug up of him. A bastard child living with his not-mother in a far-off rural estate, written out of documentation, scrubbed well and true for fear of repercussions to his own transgressions. The horror lining the creases of his eyes and worn into the wrinkles of his brow are beyond anything he had felt for himself, an evidence of a heart somewhere inside that thicket but too thorned and closed off to mean anything.

Jungchan is not the only child in the world. How simple it would be, if there was only one venerated thing to protect. There’s a whole world of children. A whole world of innocents, not-innocents, children children children, as young and blameless as Jungchan. Minho was one, once. Jisung was.

Jisung was.

Jisung is now a little less young, but still as blameless and with a body and soul that does not reflect that the world had seen that in him.

“Jungchan is a good boy. A perfect son,” Minho continues, relishing in that bite of fear, sharp and tangy. “He lives in a small house with his mummy and his daddy who love him very very much. He doesn’t have a lot of toys – because it’s a small house – and sometimes his parents fight with their upstairs neighbour, but he’s very happy. Because Jungchan is a child. All he needs is his mum to kiss him goodnight when she turns off the lights and his dad to give him hugs when he does to work and one little doll to keep him company.”

Minho slumps onto the bed, mattress bouncing as it absorbs his weight. It’s so plush he’s sinking into it, canopy obscuring the clean expanse of the roof with its lace. He stares at the ceiling, trying to scrutinise flaws onto it as he speaks. Trying to categorise physical flaws. He doesn’t have to expend any effort into dredging up the details, the ins and outs, because he knows everything about it better than the back of his hand. Better than the shape of his mothers face, gracing every corner of his comfortable childhood. Than the lived, catalogued experience of his body. It bubbles out of him almost unbidden, like pus dribbling from a long infected wound. Long-festering. Every victim he takes is but a pale, useless gauze without anaesthetic, without rubbing alcohol to remove the dust and the discharge oozes, rhyolitic.

“Jungchan’s father is an legal consultant in a small-time firm. It’s the only one that would hire him because he graduated out of a non-prestige college, but he likes the work there. It’s honest work. He defends petty criminals who got caught in the act and the local kids who don’t know any better and reformed ex-gang grunts trying to turn over a new leaf on parole. It doesn’t make much, because they don’t have much to give, but it pays the bills piling on their counter and he gets to come home with a fresh heart and clean hands.” Minho stares pointedly at Jungjae’s hands, disfigured to unrecognition and slick with his own fluids, tasting for the first time his own pain instead of another’s. “Jungchan’s mother doesn’t work, because her parents didn’t have the money to pay for her tuition on top of the fees for her older brothers and she married young anyway. ”

Jungjae’s gaze is unfocused, pupils milky and shot through with angry pink streaks discharging into his sclera, woozily floating between the iron on his carpet hissing as the metal heats and Minho lounging on his bed.

Like everything else about him, it’s a disappointment. Minho has barely done anything to him, bar a few broken peripheral bones, a ligament, a few stab wounds, and an eye. Sure he’s suffering from a considerable amount of blood loss from the eyes, but he hasn’t even removed the blades plugging up the other incisions apart from the one in his knee, which is dripping with a sedate sludge. The human body is more durable than this, sturdier that he exhibits. Of all of Minho’s victims to date, he has checked out amongst the quickest. Which makes it a swift night for him, but which also saps the fun.

Detracts from the gravitas.

This story is everything. It is the reason. It is at the core of Minho’s intention for all his uncountable crimes. Why he stays up at night after Jisung has gone to sleep, extracting himself from his lover's arms to find the notebook covered front to back in his musings, schedule, observations, calculations. Why he lies to Jisung bold-faced and why he crawls back into his bed in the night after washing his hands under the sink with a dousing of peroxide and doesn’t feel like he’s breaking glass in his bare hands. Why he doesn’t sink under the guilt of it all, why he doesn’t throw himself at Jisung feet because he’s already there, hands cupping the supple skin of his sole and the rough calluses of his heels, forehead tucked against the thin, warm veins running along the dorsum. This is all for him. Jisung will understand that and that is all Minho needs.  

“But it doesn’t matter that she doesn’t have a degree, or that she’d rather stay at home taking care of Jungchan. The new landlord had driven up their rent to cover a family vacation to Europe. They paid last month’s rent two weeks late, and can’t scrounge up enough to pay this month’s on top of that, and there’s an eviction notice pasted on their front door the day his dad comes home from clearing a teen boy’s drug possession charges pro bono. Jungchan’s mum takes up odd jobs to make ends meet. The rich ahjummas in Yongin pay her in cash to walk their dogs and fix their clothes and clean their houses. But she gets mugged as she’s walking home, because she lives in a small home in a poor neighbourhood.”

Minho returns his focus to the pristine ceiling, to the silk under his fingers.

“But, ahjussi, have you ever considered what makes a neighbourhood poor? What makes a poor neighbourhood dangerous? If those things are truly the same. Sameun-dong was never a paradise, clearly – the houses were cramped, the flats shared paper thin walls, with a musty mould scent that lingered around the corner of the streets, no matter where you turn – but it was a place you could raise a family. The people were nice and everyone knew everyone. Not anymore. There are unfamiliar faces on the streets, the crime rates are climbing. People getting pickpocketed and high school girls molested and fathers found bleeding in alleys. Jungchan’s parents are scared. They don’t have the money but they know they can’t stay. What would you do ahjussi? You don’t have a family home. You don’t have savings. But you do have a child you need to keep safe.

“Desperation speaks the language of capital.” Minho clenches the sheets into a tight fist, takes too long to let it go. He can feel the tight laces on his sneakers compressed his feet and the weight of the steel cap. Jungjae groans again, weaker this time. “They take out a loan and move to a quieter neighbourhood. A cleaner neighbourhood. Somewhere to raise their kid, with a decently funded public school and a well-maintained family park and an almost too good to be true dry cleaner shop that accepts his mum to work despite her lack of experience. Things are good. Jungchan is at the top off his class, his mum comes home with a freshly inked lines in her bankbook and his dad is out defending justice.”

There’s nothing on the ceiling. No seam, no oddity, no give.

He straightens up and casts his gaze on the expansive walls. From the corner of his eye, he catches Jungjae’s head lolling against his chest like a broken puppet and he kicks the man squarely in the side to get him to snap to attention, steel-toe right to the upper palpating tract where his kidney rises close to the surface. He coughs up a yellowed glob of spit and some remnants of his eye, and Minho scoffs at the place where it lands on his carpet, slowly sponging up the moisture.

His pained pants and expletive moaning fills the suite but at least he’s listening again.

“We know what goes wrong,” Minho says, staring right at the bald patch on the spiral of his head, pockmarked with the evidence of where his hair used to be like exiting wounds. Does Jungjae know what it is? The universal downfall of this capitalist shithole, when he’s never once been victim to it, only perpetrator. Does he? “What has to go wrong. It’s money. It’s always money. Always, always, always. Money paid, money to be paid, money in the wrong hands. Too little on one side and greed for more on the other. They didn’t read the fine print, you see. Rookie mistake, but who could blame them when it got them that idyllic life they could only dream of.”

In another world, Minho would resent them a little for this, too. For being so foolish and naïve that it would come back to harm the only thing he’s ever loved. But they’re already dead, and hating them is not a sin he could as easily make up for.

“They should’ve known better: that good things don’t come easy, that even a quiet life comes with a price tag attached, that even a second to breathe is not good for the economy. The sharks came knocking on their door after only ten months. Jungchan didn’t even get a single good year, not even one.

“His mum agrees to suspicious requests from shady one-time customers to cover extra costs and his father’s still practising law, but he takes up manual labour in the night – because that pays best – for a railway to their old town that’s been redeveloped into a luxury estate. He comes home early in the morning, sleeps for two hours with burning lead-filled limbs and gets up at five to catch the bus to his office on time.”

Jungjae’s eyes are drifting again. Fucking asshole. But when Minho looks closer, they’re not drifting, no. The pain has made him sluggish, they’re fading out. His vision must be swimming, pooling in and out with swathes of black.

It’s okay.

It’s okay, Minho tells himself.

He’s going to die anyway. This story is more for him anyway. More for him to say and for Jungjae to hear. For Minho to know that he knew. For Jungjae to comprehend the reason for his death in its entirety. He’ll understand, even if he’s halfway delirious on torture and unable to speak, unable to move.

Minho flips the knife in his palm so he’s gripping it in reverse, leans over the man’s prone body and stabs it clean through the swell of his stomach, entering at the miniscule dip of his belly button and then further, further until the surrounding flesh balloons out from the force of it. And then, finally, when it’s gone too far, the distention pops with a wet spurt and deflates, spewing blood out instead of expelling air.

It’s not enough.

It will never be enough.

Nothing will ever make up for what has already been done. What has already been lived through. Everything Minho does is merely recompense. Taking back a grain from a loaded cart of rice sacks.

He drags the serrated end of the knife outward, pulling it through all through gruesome internal structures, not caring what he ruptures in the process – relishing what splits under his blade – on and on until the metal has nowhere to go, until it rips clean out into stale air, musty with the scent of iron and burning carpet.

Minho’s nostrils flare wide as he breathes it in and goes straight to his brain, tickling something familiar. Ahhh, this is what he needs. Minho is, unfortunately but unchangeably human. He cannot smell fear, as such, but he can smell this: the certain aroma of death, of imminent and unavoidably agony.

Blood wretches and dribbles out of Jungjae’s mouth, travelling up from his severed and garbled organs. Everything is bleeding. Falling out of him. Rope-like intestines slump out, at first just one curled up length, until the weight of it pulls on the inside and the rest comes tumbling out behind, spooling on his lap next to his sorry dick.

“Listen up, ahjussi. This is where the important part starts,” he drawls, crouching on his full soles and watching contentedly the leisurely drip of the entrails and viscera and colon from the sizable slit in his stomach like it’s prime time television. He props an elbow on his knee and leans his check onto his palm. “One day, his boss at the railway tells him to install a platform from the unguarded end of the catwalk without a wire. He tries to refuse, tries to stall until they can get the safety equipment, but the man won’t listen. Says he has deadlines and quotas to meet, says if he doesn’t get up there within the next five minutes he’s getting a termination of employment letter in the place of his paycheck. Jungchan’s father needs that paycheck. To make sure they can stay in their new apartment, keep the lights on and the water running and to put food on the table. So his kid doesn’t go hungry. So his kid can go to school. So he goes up.”

What goes up, must come down. Ocean water evaporates and condenses into clouds and it must come down as rain, in due time. A baseball lobbed unfairly high in a friendly game of father-son catch in a small but well-trimmed public park will land on the ankle high lawngrass, bouncing lamely on the turf, or into the worn ripped leather of a second-hand glove on fingers that barely fill the sweaty sleeve. Jungchan’s father climbs up the catwalk and he has to come down somehow, whether it’s by the same ladder he took up or–

“He falls. Of course he does. He doesn’t die on impact but it’s a close thing, because he snaps his neck.” Minho draws a clean line across his Adam’s apple where it would’ve crooked sideways, tilting his head to mime the deformation. “He takes his last breath with the shadows of colleagues he barely spoke to crowding out the overhead lights and his boss eating his sandwich in his office on break.

“Twelve people died in the construction of that railway. Just that line alone. Three before he even joined the project, one during his tenure, seven after him. And yet not one was reported on the news. No obituaries. No headlines. Not even a tabloid side-line in One Step Forward, that one man who cared about Park Joongi’s story more than a noose around a stack of bills. Who knows if that poor little guy even knew about what was going on. Everyone was paid off to bury it under the cement pour, a truth that’s dangerous only as long as it remains wet. You have to pay for it to dry. To put it under wraps. They have so much money, they’re shitting it right out of their asses. And Jungchan’s mum? She has so little she’s willing to eat it. But you know the worst part?”

Because it can always get worse. Because ‘worst’ is something you always think you’ve hit – pickaxing into stone and thinking it’s bedrock – and that’s what it means to be naïve. Naïve and foolish and yet Minho is not allowed to hate them.

“The hush money they offer – force – onto Jungchan’s mum isn’t even enough to cover the next month's rent after they clear off the bills for the funeral services. The cycle starts again, like a music box rewound, like a tape cranked back to the start of a mixtape, like a sand timer flipped on its head. This time it’s Jungchan’s mum alone who’s trying to do all the work. Trying not to get evicted. Trying to explain to her son why his father isn’t home yet, why he’s not coming home, while burning herself to make all those ends meet.”

Jungjae, as much as he wants to, will not die from this wound. If Minho called emergency care right now, it would take them a whole team and several sleepless nights of effort and a full crew and an enviable tabloid of resources, but they would be able to do something about the mess of his body. Stem of the bleeding in the cavity of his eye, replace all the vaguely necessary but also mostly replaceable spliced through organs, stitch back up the gaping wounds and set his fingers back straight. It would take time, money, labour, but it could be done.

Minho wouldn’t leave him with any such chances of course, wouldn’t leave him any chances at all. But it does mean that he doesn’t have to monitor his state or practice caution in maiming him as he wills. Should he pull a nail? It seems like the sort of thing he should do, calling himself a torturer and all but he’d never quite enjoyed the feel of it. Too juvenile, too basic. Predictable, in a sense, even if it would hurt in the way he wanted it to.

He doesn’t. If only because he pulled them from the last guy and he wants to avoid creating an MO and it wasn’t quite as satisfying as advertised in Russian spy films Jisung had dosed him on in the lead up to Halloween last year.

“It consumes her easily enough. An rent warning and she works harder. She’s hospitalised for overworking and she can’t pay those fees so she overworks again. She barely sees her son. He hates her and she hates herself for not being able to give him anything and they hate her until she dies as well. From a too hot day and an empty stomach. Heatstroke.”

It’s the simplest things really. What is it they say about butterflies and thunderstorms? Although in this case, it’s less of a free-ranging insect and more of a heavily mismanaged conservatory and the thunderstorm is just the unleashed cruelty of poorly socialised adults.

Jungjae’s legs jerk out and he rolls in his spot as if a shrimped posture will alleviate some of the pain flaring up every avenue of arteries and veins. It’s not disruptive, beyond his mild childish groans but Minho stomps his boot into the closest ankle anyway to pin him down.

“Heatstroke and a missing safety harness. That’s all it takes to ruin Jungchan’s life in a matter of two months. It just gets worse and worse from there. His relatives are either dead or don’t want to take him in – they have their own problems – so he gets bought out. Can you imagine that?” Minho laughs, not without a dosing of bitterness choking up his lungs like thorned vines. This is always the hard part to get out. The part that chokes him up because it’s this that wakes him up when he does go to sleep. Whimpers from a misplaced scene in a nightmare that isn’t his own and trembles from the slight, too thin body he wraps himself around. This is the part that lingers, that hasn’t died yet.  

“A couple million won wired over and there you go, a slip of paper and a kid in your ownership. They’re a rich family, obviously, to have enough to dole out for the rights and skip the tediousness processes. The dad’s going into politics and needs some street cred, and what better way than to paste pictures on the internet of the poor orphan boy you fished out of poverty and gave a better life. They dote on him and buy him velvet trim suits and angle him just right on camera for the photo ops. For the first time in his life, Jungchan has more food on his plate than he could possibly eat in one sitting and he almost chokes on the abundance of it. The kind of luxuries you enjoy every day, I’m sure,” Minho levels, accusatory, “but is entirely foreign to him. It seems too perfect that he could have all of it.”

“But that’s the problem with paying for a kid with cold hard cash like a cute toy you found at the store. The second he voices out a thought of his own, a meek refusal, the delicate balance of it snaps and devolves so quickly. It turns on him. Suddenly, he’s the villain. The ungrateful brat that didn’t know a good thing when it was stuffed in his mouth, who raised his hand against the mother who pulled him out of a life of grime and cruelty and pain.”

“The thing is: Jungchan smells of the slum. He can’t wash it off himself. You can never wash that sort of shit off,” Minho explains. To Jungjae, it’s probably as exotic and befuddling a concept as third year college economics is to a kindergartner because he’s opened his eyes to the world with argentum on his tongue. “Even if you scrub at it. It’s like a scar slashed across his face, it’s so unignorable. It’s in the way his wide eyes dart around when accusations are made, like he’s afraid to be caught out for existing. How he tucks into himself and just rolls with the punches that land on him, just to tough it out. That’s how easy it is to turn the narrative against him. He’s a fucking kid. He doesn’t have the language to explain himself.”

Ah. The iron is ready. The iron has been ready, steadily steaming away and affecting the sight of rising smoke in the bedroom for minutes now, the shiny coil unsuspecting in all manner of appearance apart from the wisps curling around it evaporating into the air as a layer of ash singes brown and ruddy into the carpet.

Here comes retribution.

Minho hasn’t had dinner yet. He couldn’t have any at home because of his cover story to Jisung about the company meal, and he hadn’t stopped on the way here out of paranoia that he’d be caught on the CCTV cameras of the store in the surrounding streets. He needs to limit his pathways, controlled variables not allowing for surprise routes. Given that he won’t stop anywhere on the way home either, and that he won’t chance waking Jisung up with the microwave trying to heat up leftovers once he’s back home, it means he’ll go hungry tonight.

Here's another thing Minho remembers from an off-topic tirade of his biology teacher from ninth grade: hunger is an emptiness that literally burns a hole through you. Through your stomach, first, and then the longer you go, you let that acid – steepled and strong, so strong to be sloshing around in your internals a danger to yourself because remember it’s always two sides to the coin – builds and bubbles like the pressure under a volcano, like magma under rock until it comes bursting out and burns. Charring through your throat, and the lining of your oesophagus, intestines, the back of your mouth hitting your uvula until it’s no longer a part of you.

Minho burns.

Minho has been burning, ever since he saw Jisung across the SNU courtyard, since tears dried on the shoulder of his raggy sweatshirt, since he took him home and slept with his pulsing heartbeat underhand. He’s so empty it aches – like magma fissuring into a mountain bed, like the friction of tectonic plates colliding. An ache beyond the material and the physical, a hollowing right in the centre of his soul.

This is the only way to quench it. Some would call it bloodlust, but to Minho this is just the state he exists in, perpetually hungering for something to fill him, tame him down and lock him back up, seal him away until he’s freed afresh.

He snags the curling iron from off the floor, brandishing it like a weapon. It is a weapon, of sorts. Jungjae knows this, courtesy of yours truly Park Joongi. Anything can be a weapon if wielded with the right intent, and Minho has intent in spades. Truckfuls.

“To everyone who sees it on paper, he deserves juvie. He deserves the threat of jail time, the stain on his record, the halfway house he gets sent to. The halfway house that’s bleeding dry of funds, with a matron who funnels more funds into her own pockets and those of her higher ups than into the communal fridge. With a supervisor whose hands linger like a leech. With a single volunteer caretaker who cares enough to notice and is removed for it. He wastes away in that fucking halfway house for four years before he ages out of the system and they don’t have a grip on him anymore. And he runs but he doesn’t have anywhere to run to.”

Minho pins the wand to Jungjae’s throat, the line that one would use a garrotte to behead him with and the sound of sizzling greets his ears almost immediately, accompanied by a rejuvenated cacophony of bellowing. He presses harder and steadier, until the smell of it becomes almost too much that it could cling to the walls and finally pulls off.

“Except to me,” Minho cackles. “Me.” He could choke on it. “ Me .”

What remains on Jungjae’s neck is a thick brand of seared red, burnt like a grilled cut of meat not let lay to full cook, too pink that it still bleeds. Minho should cook him all the way. He will.

“This story could’ve happened to anyone,” Minho hisses. “It could have happened to your son, to Kang Jungchan. It could happen right now, if I killed you and your wife and your mistress and dropped him off at a group home. It’s just Jisung’s fate that it happened to him instead.”

Minho drops the iron low, a lick of humour stretching tight, and poises it right where it’ll strike fastest to Jungjae’s dignity. He lines it right up perfectly to the length of the poor old man’s cock and lets it smoulder as he tries to fight his way back, away from the bristling heat and fails, his body flagging.

The smoke twines around his forearm in ringlets, a layer of flesh ascending in gaseous form.

“This isn’t a rot, Kang Jungjae-ssi, that you can cut off clean and separate to make the whole safe to ingest.” The musk of the burning is inescapable now but that’s for the better. “It’s an infection, a mould that grows in the shadows, and it’s there where you can hardly see it. It’s not done if I just kill the man who touched my Jisungie. If I string up the entrails of the halfway house supervisor and the rich bastard traffickers who turned on him and the boss man who sent his dad up to the catwalk. This shit is systematic, there’s too many moving parts. And that’s where you come in.”

“What did I do?” Jungjae cries. His eyes are so glossed over, so overcast with a filmy layer of milkiness that he hardly seems present but he comes back to argue for his innocence as if he had ever had such a thing. As if his innocence was in contest, rather than the exact position of his wrongdoing. His tears mix in with the trail of blood dribbling from his mouth down his chin. The box of his voice must brush up excruciatingly with the burn on his throat to fight for every word. “What the fuck did I even do? I don’t know this kid. I’ve never heard of him.”

“I’m sure you can barely even remember it. I’m sure it was as easy to you as flicking a finger, stamping off on a piece of paper. You see, one of the companies you scalped funds from: they were the main investor in that railway construction. When the money turns up dry in their accounts,” Minho explains, “it’s not you who pays, of course it isn’t, they’ll just crack down on the ants beneath them to make up for the difference.”

From somewhere, Jungjae summons the energy to continue to argue. “What are you trying to say? What does that even mean, that I killed that boy’s father?”

“ Yes ,” Minho growls, borderline animalistic. “You might not see it that way, but. Yes. Jisungie is too nice, he’d never say it. He wouldn’t see it that way. That’s why I’m here, to see it through with logic. To help him enact the revenge he wouldn’t take for himself.”

“He’ll never forgive you!” Jungjae accuses, as if he has any idea what Jisung wants. What Jisung needs. Who Jisung is, even. Better than Minho, of all people, who owns Jisung body and soul, who has eaten him as if he is a part of himself, who carries Jisung around in his stomach through the saliva of their kisses, the taste of his release swallowed, the scrapings of skin he takes back when he bites at his neck, clinging to his teeth and washed down with his morning coffee. “If you do this he’ll never forgive you!”

Minho almost laughs in his face. He does, crackled and full-bodied. “Do I look like I give a shit about forgiveness?”

If – No, when all the sins Minho has committed come under the heavenly light, splayed out bare, he won’t ask Jisung to forgive him. He won’t make Jisung stain himself by absolving Minho. He’ll live with his sins and his punishment, just as he would wish on anyone else. Whatever it is Jisung decides to do with him when he finds out, Minho will simply lay as a slain lamb at the altar and await the divine justice of his deity.

Despite the dangerous dangle of Jungjae’s now marred neck and the numerous wounds clamouring for his attention, Jungjae raises his eyes past the milky fog of the past half hour to look vaguely in the direction of Minho’s looming face to ask, “That boy, don’t you feel bad for him? Dragging him down to hell with you.”

That boy.

“How many times do I have to tell you, ahjussi? I don’t feel .”

It scrapes. It cuts, like a scissor gliding through paper, a scalpel pulling apart a seam. It burns . Minho is the hole that’s carved into his stomach. He is the emptiness that lives inside him as much as he is the love the Jisung fills him back up with.  

That boy.

“Jisung,” Minho bites, hand clenching around the handle. His grip feels sweaty, all of a sudden, too loose as if it's about to slip. “ His name is Han. Ji. Sung,” he says, enunciating each syllable one by one to the depths of his mouth, perfectly rounded off by his tongue and lips, pushed out into the air as a prayer and a premonition of death simultaneously. Han Jisung. He whispers it in his sleep. Han Jisung. He cries it at the height of his mortal pleasure. Han Jisung, Han Jisung, Han Jisung. A mantra he’s been reciting since his conception. “Say his name. Fucking say it . Remember him.”

Minho regrips the handle, holds it tight against Jungjae’s manhood until even that is not enough. Removes it and pierces it through the gaping aperture in Jungjae’s torso, stripped open flesh flapping in invitation. Magma at the core. Internal, pressurised. This is where heat belongs.

“Fuck you,” Jungjae spits, with the last of his draining energy, with his eyes rolling into the back of his head as a guttural scream pulls out of the deepest expanse of his ruined throat.

Remember him.  

Minho drives it further, stabs up to a place untouched by his knife, still begging to be ruined and masticated. Let every part of this man wither into ashes. Let him be nothing but dust.

“Say his name, ahjussi,” Minho snarls. Further, deeper, further. “I won’t let you die until you do.”

Kang Jungjae is a man who has done more than he could possibly ever explain. More than he will ever be able to atone for. Atonement lies squarely beyond his reach, attainable only through his death. The problem is, without a helping hand, Jungjae would have never even thought to atone at all. Not to worry, Minho will do it for him. 

Don’t misunderstand. Minho is not a saint nor a martyr. He does not claim to be the hand of god, nor the devil incarnate. He is simply a selfish man, singularly obsessed. Not any more or less guilty, despicable, twisted.

Jungjae’s scream pitches again.

This is a common mistake, a quotidian misstep. There is always more pain that you haven’t felt. Always.

It doesn’t take much longer for Jungjae to sing his tune. The iron drills its way through the space between his lungs – Minho can feel the hardness of his ribcage, the solemn bottom curve digging into this wrist – and the coil sidles up right next to his heart and there’s fluid gushing everywhere, drenching Minho’s glove-clad arm and threatening to seep into his skin. 

Han Jisung, Han Jisung, Han Jisung.

“His name is Han Jisung!" Jungjae howls. He is human no longer, just a barely beating lump of meat, whittled down to primal instinct. "Please, please just kill me already.”

Minho smiles, sickly wide with only one thing left on his mind. “Gladly.”

Kang Jungjae dies with Jisung’s name on his lips.

It’s well past midnight, barely a few hours off sunrise when Minho crawls back home. Jungjae had died earlier than that, much earlier, but it’s the clean-up that takes the longest even if Minho has help that he pays for with a cracked open safe, hidden within a boarded up section of the wall with a crease so minor it took an entire monologue worth of scrutinising to find the fault line. He missed out on the fun of interrogating the pin code out of his victim, swept along by the heat of the moment, but Seungmin knows where to look and how to listen to the tumblers to get it to click open all on its own.

He abandons the penthouse in all its sullied glory for Seungmin to scour but deals with the corpse himself, a final emotional indemnity, the fulfilment of hammering a nail perfectly straight and sanding off the stretch of wood. Minho likes seeing it through, hauling the limp weight to the car he only uses for these expeditions, driving out as close to buttfuck nowhere as he can get to in a reasonable amount of time and building up a pyre. He’s content that he’s far enough from suspicion that no one will come around questioning the strange musky scent, so he lets it blow plumes into the air until a greyed pile of soot lays at his feet and then he tips it all into the river. Lets it wash away downstream, carried away and dispersed by the fast-flowing current.

He buries his ruined shirt into the recess of the trunk, stowed away to be washed when he has the time and eventually returned to his normal wardrobe rotation so as not to shatter Jisung’s illusion of normality that balances on such a thin fence between his past and the present Minho forges through.

Then, Minho crouches by the river bed and lets his hands run in the startling chilled current, stripped of the bloodied elbow length latex, until they feel clean enough to be able to handle Jisung in their grasp. He’ll never earn back true purity but he can have this, a mighty façade of worthiness that he zips up skintight. A different set of gloves he dons, this time to make him more palatable instead of dangerous. He doesn’t trust himself to touch Jisung otherwise, to not tarnish him with the freight of all he does. The freshwater, frozen to subzero by the fog and the temperature hanging low in the pitch black night, numbs his nerves until he coldness too is just a sensation that runs off the back of his hands. They sway lightly in the flow, dragged back listlessly in the inertial momentum as he leaves his arms slack, and it’s meditative in a way to give back control to nature.

As much as death is a natural cycle of the universe, it needs agents to be dealt. Minho rents out this jurisdiction, paying in the tithes of his time and planning, and returning it to the water at the end of his nights. Like a child loaning out a book from a library and popping it back into its little loan sleeve after two weeks, watching it slide down its ramp to its original place. Setting it free where it belongs, travelling down. Always down.

When the night eases up on the temperature, fog dissipating in patches, Minho finally flexes out of his squat, knees cracking like a stick splinters, waves his hands to rid them off remnant droplets and treks back to his car parked unobtrusively a good measure into the camouflage of tree trunks and makes sure to reverse out of his spot while disturbing the least amount of foliage lest he give away his tracks and whereabouts.  

He drives at a steady pace to the edgewise town, just big enough to not arouse suspicion from a unfamiliar appearance, not big enough to be on criminal radar, and takes surreptitious sips from a bottle of booze tucked into the glove box to sufficiently carry the must of it on him back home without getting too inebriated to maintain his wheel and course with focus. The town comes into view as the fog clears out in its entirety, Minho depositing the vehicle at an empty storage garage. He’ll come back later in the week to properly clear it out of anything he needs to keep and dispose of the rest more conclusively, tying off all the ends to be untraceable, and get Seungmin to sell the car to a local man who won’t ask too many questions and pay in cash whenever it won’t raise flags. He won’t be using it again, that’s for sure.

Then, the hike back home. A slow walk, unavoidable, but largely through unmonitored areas. When he gets close enough to a bus back home, he pays with coins and sits at the back, sets a timer for when he knows they’ll round near his apartment. Sleep, as a constant thing, eludes him, not that he wants more than the snatches he gets before he arrives back to his warmth. To the flame he’s trapped in a fireplace like Howl binding Calcifer through nothing more than his heart. His flame is tethered, but so is he. He could not survive without returning to it to thaw him down from the cold, to melt away the hardness that grows on him like a glacier.

They live on the fourth floor, a west facing flat in an east facing building that grants Jisung his most coveted luxury of darkness well into the afternoon and a less coveted but just as appreciated glorious view of every sunset, if he so manages to keep the blinds open. Minho takes the stairs. He cherishes the strain of his hamstrings, the groan of his body as it floats him up.

He doesn’t reek of alcohol as much now but it’s okay. Jisung knows him to be an enthusiastic drinker on good nights, but he also knows that Minho can stand his ground against his superiors and doesn’t consider company dinners a place to let loose. Whatever has woven into his clothes and the fibres under his skin is sufficient.

The front door creaks on its hinges as he carefully pushes it open. No amount of lubricant will dull a resonance born from rust, Minho has tried. He doesn’t turn on the lights, letting muscle memory and pull him through the apartment, avoiding the patches he knows Jisung is prone to unloading his messenger bag and remotes and knickknacks in, anything he can accidentally kick into the wall to stir up a fess. The plaster floorboard is brisk on his bare soles, stripped of his sneakers and socks, but a kind that he welcomes. He tiptoes through the mental minefield blueprint he built for Jisung – not out of wood and steel and nails but with saucepans and groceries and sheets they picked out together. Sometimes, it feels like this is all Minho can hope to give him. He had resigned himself to this small wish, in the past, and how stupid it seems now to have relinquished himself to the future.

Now, he has buried that resignation under willpower. On a platter, one day, he will present Jisung with a future where he no longer has to be afraid, where everything that once tormented him, that chases him into his dreams, has no place in the mortal realm, and he will give Jisung this: a long, happy life. It is not what Minho deserves, it’s not even what karma has allotted for Jisung, but what Minho will wrangle. What he will wrap up into a box and give alongside his heart, still pulsing outside his chest. Like the frog heart he tore out of its chest.

Jisung has left the door of their bedroom open. Minho slithers in.

Jisung always sleeps pushed up against the wall, leaving the space closer to the door open waiting for Minho to slot in and complete him.

Like a frog heart. Like the silky, glitter sliver of sheep retina.

In his sleep, Jisung parts his lips unconsciously, enticingly pouted, and he breathes through his mouth. Breathes in the air of the room where Minho’s sweat wafts, mixed in with dust motes and fabric softener and tucked away mothballs. Minho kneels by the bed and for a long moment content himself with just watching. Jisung won’t stir, he’s a deep sleeper, for all that it doesn’t help with nightmares.

He tears himself away. He needs to shower, if just for pretences, if just to say that he did. Just a rinse, and then he’ll allow himself back.

Minho does it quickly: strips himself, washes under the water before it can even turn warm, towels and dries. Before he lifts the covers he makes sure he’s warm, that his vessels have dilated, that the water has been swept clean, that his entrance won’t invite discomfort. When he’s certain, he lets himself clamber in. Their covers fall around him as he settles, closing them off from the world, cocooning and sectioning them off, sealing them for metamorphosis, for conjoining.

The hunger, the emptiness, guides his arms around Jisung and he doesn’t protest. He wraps himself around Jisung – like a vice, like a noose, like a flower folding its petal back in over its stamen through the night. This is the kindest he knows to be. The gentlest he can manage. He tries.

Jisung’s hair tickles soft against the underside of his jaw. His back ripples in stable, unfaltering long breaths. His forehead is fevered syrup to the metronome of Minho’s jugular.

Jisung’s heart rabbits right up against the gaping aperture in Minho’s stomach, a massage dead centre to where it burns.

He is pliable, pure, candied. Tomorrow he’ll blink his eyes at Minho, wide and beaded from the moon, and he’ll ask why he came home so late. Minho will bring him coffee by the cup, bitterness depressed by sugar and creamer though he’ll never tell, and Jisung will drink it in cautious meek sips, wanting it hot but susceptible to burning his tongue, blanket curling like clouds around him, like a coat of woolly fur. And when the mug is drained, Minho will take it from him, place it on the side table and push Jisung back into the mattress to kiss him silly in place of answering. Curl one hand into his fluffy hair, another into his heavenly dip of his waist. Press his lips to Jisung’s belly button like reciting a mantra.

Jisung is a lamb, perfect and kept and still innocent despite his wandering, despite being pulled astray by greedy hands. And yet it’s Minho who slaughters himself like sacrifice, like both the offering and the hand that slits it. And yet it’s Minho who lies at the dais under stained glass and carvings and statues in Jisung’s likeness and begs with dying breath.  

Every night, Jisung goes to bed with a murderer.

He wakes to a worshipper.