Work Text:
the deep:
Warmly,
The deep is a downward devotion.
Sedna says:
Come down here and help me with this phantom-pain-turned-animal on my body. I deserve your love down here because I have not deserved any of the traumas I have been dealt.
Descend through the razor-sharp slit, passing beyond the lifeless souls and the hideous cauldron. There is work to be done.
Massage her aching, loving her. The "mistress of life and death" needs be courted, appeased, softened by shaman love.
Jungeun wakes up gasping, head pounding, body screaming in pain. She remembers dying. The running, pursued by some malevolent…thing. She remembers tripping over a tree root, or her dress catching on a twisted branch. She remembers the sickening crunch of her own trachea. She should not have woken up. She’d died. She reaches up to touch her neck with a shaky hand; it’s completely intact.
Then she looks around. She’s not outside anymore. She’s in a dusty mansion, half the roof torn off as if a child had thrown a tantrum with their dollhouse. She stands on shaky legs, looking down at her dress, stained a horrible reddish brown and stiff with her dried blood. It’s hers, she knows, because she’d died. She goes to find a mirror to inspect the damage.
Except she can’t. She stares uncomprehendingly at the wall behind her reflected in the mirror in one of the guest bedrooms. She sees everything in the room reflected in perfect detail, except her. All that appears is a floating, tattered dress.
Jungeun tries to leave the mansion. She cannot stomach being inside her place of death any longer, especially when she sees the dark stain on the ground she’d risen from.
Then the sun streaming in through a broken window catches on her skin and sets her alight, howling and crashing into a wall to escape it. She stares at the welt on her arm, then at the bright sun’s mocking ray shining bright through the dusty air of the room.
On her second night of wandering, Her stomach growls. She feels her limbs drag, and she finds it harder to breathe as she becomes more and more lethargic. She's hungry, and she needs to find food.
She sees, distantly on the road, a faint glow of light. A village. She wanders towards it, thankful she's not hopelessly lost anymore.
The village is lovely, she thinks as she approaches it. It's just a small cluster of houses on the outskirts and a bar, still lively at this time of night. That’s all she can observe before a woman calls out to her and everything fades to a hazy red.
She stumbles back, terrified. She doesn’t recognize where she is, and her mouth tastes of copper.
With bleary eyes, she looks around. She’s in a small home, only a few rooms, but the furniture is sturdy and the meal on the table is still warm. She takes a few steps towards it when she stumbles over something on the floor.
When she processes what she’s seeing, she screams, scrambling back and tripping over the sturdy leg of a stool in the kitchen area. There’s a corpse on the floor. She covers her mouth with her hand in shock, and finds her face is wet. The liquid is thick, almost slippery against her skin and she feels her stomach turn.
She does not stay in that house long enough to admit to herself what she’d done.
She wanders sleeplessly to the next town, delirious and terrified, but no longer hungry. She’s numb when a woman sees her and pulls her to a large house. Jungeun comes along, following her to the doorway, but when she tries to enter, a sharp, shocking pain electrifies her nerves and she stumbles back. The woman turns, and her eyes settle in realization. “I know it’s a brothel, and you’re probably much too proper, but you need help. Come inside.” Jungeun swallows and nods, taking a cautious step through the threshold.
The woman nods approvingly. Jungeun looks around at the other women, all murmuring around her, wondering what she’d encountered on the road. She says nothing. They had no idea they were encountering her.
The woman, a madam, invites her to stay after she’s changed into a new dress, a pretty blue thing with delicate lace. It’s just the sort of thing she’d have lingered at a window to look at before…all of this. “It’s not respectable work, but it’s work, and the women here are family now. No one asks questions. This could be your home.”
Jungeun smiles, keeping her mouth carefully closed. Jungeun has a home. She asks for a pen and an envelope.
Dearest Jiwoo,
I’m coming home.
Love,
Jungeun
desire line:
the way we want to go. often the shortest distance between two points. an expediency. a trampling and then an erosion. an accretion of many subjective individual decisions…an ever-widening way. in need of care and restoration. the opposite of meandering, an antonym of lost. a microcosm.
Jungeun has to sate her hunger once more on her journey home. She sobs over the body, her face smeared with the poor man’s blood. He’d just been looking for his dog. She tries to forget the way he begged, eyes wide with hope, when he heard her whisper an apology.
She cleans herself with the handkerchief she finds in his pocket, blotting uselessly at the spots of blood that had ended up on the light blue fabric of her dress.
“You cannot be like this when you return home,” she murmurs to herself. “You are not a monster.” She knows the second part is a lie.
And yet, something in her soul settles when Jiwoo answers the door, smile wide and excited. Even in the pouring rain, a familiar warmth settles over her.
“Jiwoo” Jungeun doesn’t mean for it to come out like a prayer.
Lightning flashes overhead and Jungeun sees Jiwoo’s eyebrows furrow with worry. She looks self-consciously down at herself, afraid she’d missed a spot of blood. “Jungeun?” Jiwoo reaches out for her, and Jungeun realizes she must not be able to see her without the lightning. Unlike Jungeun, who could take her time to study Jiwoo with her clear night vision.
But not right now, as Jiwoo reaches out into the darkness, feeling for Jungeun. Jungeun grabs her wrist, catching her hand inches from her face. She feels Jiwoo startle at the grasp, then hold back, pulling her towards the entrance. Jungeun stops, panicked. She couldn’t enter; not without—“Can I come in?”
“Of course! What kind of question is that?” Jiwoo looks confused, of course, and Jungeun can offer no explanation. She pulls her inside, and now Jungeun follows her willingly this time. “Why didn’t you let yourself in?” she scolds. “You know you’re always welcome.”
“I didn’t want to disturb,” Jungeun says as a way to excuse it. She knows it’s silly, and she expects Jiwoo’s baffled reply.
“You? You’d never—” Jungeun watches Jiwoo pause to study her face, like Jungeun is suddenly a stranger. Jungeun glances at the mirror in the doorway to check herself over on instinct and remembers that she cannot.
She swallows, thinking as hard as she can to herself, I am not a monster. It doesn’t feel any more true this time, not when she hears the hesitation in Jiwoo’s voice as she forces a smile.
“Welcome home, Jungeun.”
Jiwoo bursts into her room midmorning, a bouquet of sweet roses in her hand. “Why is it so dark in here?”
Jungeun watches her reach for the curtains, sinking into the familiarity, before she remembers the burn of sunlight against her skin. “Dont!” She’s up in a second, body pressed to Jiwoo’s and hand closing over hers to hold the curtains shut. She lingers for a second, feeling the heat radiating off of Jiwoo. It’s scalding but familiar, like standing just too close to the hearth on a cold night. “I would like to sleep in.” Then, quickly, to change the subject. “Are those roses?”
Jiwoo nods, offering them to Jungeun, hand tightening around the stalks and fingers pressing into the thorns. Jungeun almost warns her, then—“ouch”—it’s too late.
Jungeun tastes the air change more than she smells it. The copper of Jiwoo’s blood coats the room in a rich scent, and it closes in on Jungeun. She feels her fangs heavy in her mouth, the saliva pooling under her tongue. “You need to leave.”
“But—” Jiwoo looks…unsure. Not quite afraid, but Jungeun cannot have her around for this.
“Jiwoo,” Jungeun pleads. “Please, leave.” She hates the way her voice breaks, hates how this is the first time Jiwoo seems to recognize her.
Jiwoo seems almost startled into action, and she leaves quickly. Jungeun stares at the single drop of blood on the floor. Lick it up, screams her id. You are not a monster, shouts her superego. She takes a deep breath and walks to the desk, still set up with her stationary kit and accouterments. She digs through the drawers, swearing she’d left a handkerchief in here for ink spills.
Then her hand brushes the letter opener Jiwoo had given her one birthday and she hisses at the burn, stumbling away from the desk and cursing at the pain. She gives up searching and blots it with the hem of the skirt she’d arrived in. The blood blends in with the mud and Jungeun takes that as a sign to forget about the blood altogether.
Sooyoung is nice enough. Jiwoo had hired her as a companion when Jungeun had left, and she’d been nothing but welcoming. Still, something about her relationship with Jiwoo makes Jungeun angry. She wonders if her…new condition had made her temper shorter, not that she hadn’t always been quick to anger. But it seemed worse now. She’d wanted to put her fork through Sooyoung’s hand when it had brushed Jiwoo’s as she passed a dish.
It must show on her face, because Sooyoung stops eating dinner with them shortly after.
Jiwoo gets closer to her, asks the servants to take out some of the dining table leaves. And she doesn’t stop trying to locate their old intimacy.
Jungeun is thankful that one of them still remembers her humanity.
“How was Transilvania?” Jiwoo asks, because they haven’t talked about it yet. Jungeun had been careful to avoid the subject. She can’t remember much of it, not with what had happened after.
She settles on, “I don’t know what to tell you.”
“Maybe start at the beginning,” Jiwoo presses. She’s determined to make this work, but all Jungeun can picture is her face confronted with disgust, or worse, fear.
“I’m afraid you won’t like the truth.”
“Jungeun,” Jiwoo replies, an undercurrent of anger in her voice, “I’m not afraid of you,” like she’s frustrated. Like she’s been trying to tell Jungeun that she already knows.
Still, she’s still afraid to speak it into existence. Jungeun knows how that feels. “I’m not your Jungeun,” she settles on. An admission of what Jiwoo had known all along.
“You came home,” Jiwoo counters. It sounds like a plea, and It feels like a chess game, but Jungeun doesn’t know what Jiwoo is asking for or who’s supposed to capture whom.
“I had nowhere else to go.”
“You came here because this is your place. Beside me.” Jiwoo is adamant. Jungeun is stunned. Jiwoo had won.
“There is no place I would rather be,” Jungeun admits, and somehow, it feels more weighty than any other admission that night.
orrido (from the Latin horridus, a derivative of horrère, "to feel horror”):
a rocky throat of tremendous depth and beauty, formed by the action of water falling through caverns and down ravines, making for tumultuous passage into an isolated valley.
Jiwoo is closer now, less afraid, though Jungeun doesn’t understand how. It’s as if Jiwoo was more afraid that Jungeun was human, just cold and distant and strange, than she was that something more foundational had changed about her.
She cuddles up to Jungeun, bounding into Jungeun’s room at sunset and staying up until the sun begins to peek over the tops of the hills. She is lively and vivacious and Jungeun cannot help but reflect it back at her, the moon illuminating as best she can back at her own personal sun. She’d always been brighter around Jiwoo.
“I realized I never said,” Jiwoo murmurs into her neck as they curl into each other in Jungeun’s bed, “I’m happy you’re back.”
Jiwoo wants to ask something, but she holds back. Jungeun can hear the hitch in her voice and she starts and stops herself a few times. “You always say what you think, right?” she murmurs. She lifts a hand to Jiwoo’s face, lets her skin burn against her palm.
“Not always,” Jiwoo whispers back. Her breath ghosts over Jungeun’s lips.
Jungeun can’t help it then. She gets closer, running a hand through Jiwoo’s hair. She is not a monster. Not here with Jiwoo. And that’s what lets her do this:
Jungeun kisses Jiwoo, soft and reverent. Her lips could save her from damnation.
Jungeun wakes up hungry.
She’d been hungry for days, but she’d been able to avoid thinking of it. Especially with Jiwoo at her side. It hadn’t impacted her ability to exist. But now, the hunger pangs have started, and she can feel her vision go fuzzy when Jiwoo throws a leg over her lap and tugs Jungeun’s face to her neck.
It’s unavoidable: Jungeun is starving.
She feel herself getting weaker. She didn’t expect it to happen so fast. She avoids getting out of bed, terrified of losing control, waking up with Jiwoo’s throat between her teeth.
It’s harder to hide her fangs, too. They’re growing in her mouth, like her physiology is mocking her, reminding her that she cannot deny her nature, that she is a monster, and she will kill if she is to survive.
She lets Jiwoo into her room anyway. She could not deny her if she tried.
At first, they just dance, hugging each other close. Jungeun is embarrassed at the way she stumbles over her feet—she used to be better at this, she used to love dancing.
“Jungeun,” Jiwoo murmurs. Her face is stricken with concern. Jungeun suffocates on the care in her voice. “What do you eat? What do you need to eat?”
Jungeun swallows heavily. She cannot bring herself to answer. “Nothing.”
Jiwoo chews her lip in frustration. “That’s not true. Jungeun—”
Jungeun tears herself away, hit with another pang, stumbles, only for Jiwoo to catch her. She knows how this ends. Jiwoo will make her say it and then she will hate Jungeun and Jungeun won’t be able to live with the way Jiwoo’s face twist up in disgust when she looks at her. “Jungeun—”
“Blood. Human blood,” Jungeun has to choke out the woods. They taste like iron on her tongue, and the worst part is, she likes it. She swallows down the saliva pooled under her tongue. If she has to die to suppress the monster crawling under her skin, so be it.
“I’m not going to let you starve.” Jiwoo stares at her, searching.
Jungeun’s mouth is dry, painfully so. “No. You will. I won't eat from you.”
Jungeun doesn’t even remember what happens to lead Jiwoo to press the letter opener to her palm. She doesn’t even remember the two of them crossing the room.
“What—No, Jiwoo—” She reaches out, jaw aching and heart twisting beneath her ribs.
She can hear the conviction in Jiwoo’s voice when she says, “I’ll do it,” and presses the letter opener harder into her palm. Not enough to draw blood, but enough that her flesh goes white around the edge of the blade.
“Come here.” Jungeun gives in. If it’s the only way to back Jiwoo up from this precipice, she would. Jungeun embraces her, pressing the letter opener back into Jiwoo’s hand and ignoring the burn. It’s not hard. All her senses are dulled. She’s dying. Or perhaps her undeath is ending.
“It’s made from silver — if I can’t stop myself, please, stop me.”
They both know that Jiwoo’s nod is dishonest.
Feeding from Jiwoo is a revelation, and Jungeun cannot help the sob that bubbles up from somewhere deep in her chest. She know it must look foolish, crying so hard into Jiwoo’s wrist, even as she laps at the blood flowing out of the punctures she’s made. She can’t help it. Jiwoo is lovely. Far too lovely—maybe the only salvation she’d even need.
Perhaps something like this was always inevitable—Jungeun worshiping like this on her knees at the altar of blood and love, Jiwoo presiding over her prayers with a soft hand running through Jungeun’s hair even when her voice becomes slurred with fatigue.
Jungeun almost doesn’t pull herself away in time.
Jungeun sometimes catches Jiwoo in the bathroom examining herself in the mirror. It makes something ugly twist in her gut. They both know how she looks—how she is not the same as she used to be. Jungeun remembers the letter opener in her drawer. The one Jungeun had needed a handkerchief to return to her drawer the morning after that night. The one that had lain forgotten on the nightstand next to Jungeun’s bed. It’s not her fault. It’s not her fault.
Jungeun has to admit she’s a monster now, killing Jiwoo even as she tries to make that death as lovely as possible, gentle lips on her, gentle touches. All before her teeth press into her skin.
Jiwoo will die, she knows, and soon.
She cannot bear the thought.
Sanctuary:
a bounded space, without border. Where I am immune from gods and masters, without need of defense. Where I am inalienable. This point in time. Impassable. No birth or death allowed, only the living or dead…shining island. Church without priest or icon, only acoustic stone. Our city, ecumenical—belonging to all inhabitants of earth.