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Kaiser walks the line of fantasy and reality when he's asleep and awake.
He closes his eyes and is haunted by blood red; of his partner’s body limp on the floor of their apartment, the way his eyes are cold and dead, the way the vintage rug they bought together all those months ago soaked up the crimson, tainted with red, tainted with Alexis.
He opens his eyes and he swears he can little wisps of Alexis all around him.
It starts with Alexis's room, which stays untouched by dust since his murder. Kaiser cleans the empty room every week like clockwork, something about giving Alexis the utmost respect even in death.
He sweeps the floor of dust, wipes down the various trophies and makes sure that all the little picture frames that litter the main desk in the room stay spic and span.
Sometimes, Kaiser gets lost in those old photos. He remembers the exact moment in time and relives it within his mind, thinking of those better times; times when Alexis was alive‒ and he'll think of their second anniversary as boyfriends, or the one time they got so wasted at a party that they ended up passed out on the floor with each other.
And on a normal day, Kaiser could get caught up in their little memories for hours. Maybe he'll cry, maybe he'll smile, but always, he curses the world for taking Alexis away from him like that.
He's miserable and he knows it, so today, Kaiser sits on Alexis's bed and cries.
He cries for the moments taken away from him, the little moments that threaten to leave his mind as he struggles to hold on to every last bit of Alexis left in his memories and their items.
And that’s when he sees him .
He feels cold, dead fingers on his skin, the feeling of a hand seemingly consolingly caress his cheek as he breaks down, lungs gasping for air as the tears burn his eyes and throat.
Kaiser looks up, petrified with pure terror.
Before him is a ghost, an apparition or even a hallucination, because Alexis is here. But instead of the beautiful and human features that Kaiser’s come to love all these past years, it’s Alexis’s corpse.
His skin is deathly pale, veins ugly and blue against the sinewy and odd angle of his limbs. His eyes are devoid of life, piercing Kaiser just like the first time he saw Alexis’s body on the floor, staring up at him.
He cries like Kaiser, except the watery tears that drip from Kaiser’s swollen and tired eyes like crystals, Alexis (or at least Kaiser’s grotesque vision of his deceased lover) cries red.
It's the haunting scarlet that plagues Kaiser’s existence. Alexis’s tears of blood make trails of crimson down his face.
But as sudden as Alexis appears, he flashes away with the blink of an eye.
And yet Kaiser, who stays paralyzed with fear on the bed as he attempts to process just what he’s seen, hopes to see his love once more.
The second time Kaiser sees Alexis is in the dead of night.
Kaiser sleeps alone in his room, clutching the stuffed animal that Alexis once won at a shitty university carnival for him.
Sometimes, the nightmares are too much for him, and he jolts awake with a pounding heart and a tear stained face.
So as always, he shuffles a little bit in bed, clutches the bear even tighter to his chest before he shuts his eyes and attempts to let his heart and breath calm down.
He tries to ignore the way the bed feels empty in Alexis’s absence, tries to ignore the way he just can’t stop himself from taking another shaky breath before he tries to still himself.
For Kaiser, darkness is eerie, and his mind is never silent, because he swears he can hear the sound of Alexis’s voice try to beckon him to open his eyes, or hears the sound of that oh so sweet laughter that floats through his ears and calls to him.
He tosses and turns, shuffling in bed in order to find a comfortable spot before his foot brushes against something cold and limp; flesh .
And with his horrified realization is the heavy and petrifying thought that Alexis is here, lying beside him. His first thought is to close his eyes and ignore it all; hoping that his feigned ignorance can give him the bliss of not having to confront whatever it is that is underneath the sheets.
The corpse next to him moves ; a grotesquely slow movement paired with the sound of stiff and immobile joints forcing themselves to bend and twist in order to propel its limbs.
Kaiser holds his breath so intensely that he thinks he could even will his heart to stop beating as well.
The figure’s crawl towards him is nothing short of agonizing. The air is as cold as ice, yet stagnant as the breaths that he desperately tries to hold in.
He feels how the bed dips when the corpse finally looms over his body. The creaks and sickening pops of flesh and joints fall silent in the dead of the night, as whatever it is seems to investigate Kaiser’s body as he lay immobile with his eyes screwed shut.
And then he feels that heavy, dark presence pull the sheets back at a snail’s pace, carefully unraveling Micheal like a gift to be savored. The kiss of air that hits his skin causes the hair on his bare arms to raise, of fear and of cold.
There’s a quieter crackling, akin to the sound of the cracking of finger joints that approaches him. Just like the first day that Kaiser saw that figment of Alexis, his face is caressed by those unnatural fingers, icy and dead. They beckon him and guide his head to face the ceiling before they halt.
“I know you can see me, Michael.” It says, with his voice. “ Won’t you open your eyes, Michael?”
Like glass, Michael finally shatters, because who could it be other than Alexis?
He hesitantly cracks his eyes open, letting himself drink in the image of his dead lover. He immediately zeroes in on the unsightly slash that leaves a gaping hole on Alexis’s abdomen, exposing bloody flesh and sinewy muscle that almost melts off his frame but is seemingly held frozen in time.
Michael never had the courage to see the extent of the damage that was done to Alexis immediately after the incident. He had only seen Alexis laying face up before he quickly called emergency services, unwilling to face the reality that he could have possibly been murdered. Following that, his final look at Alexis was during his viewing, where he lay motionless, but as beautifully at peace than ever.
Seeing the wound in the flesh shakes Michael to the core. A feeling of nausea instantly shoots through his core and he feels the way saliva pools under his tongue. He jerks his eyes away as fast as he can in hopes of quelling the rising feeling in his throat. In his haste, he catches sight of soulless, magenta eyes.
The face is exactly how Alexis looked while he was casket ready, sans the haunting eyes that track and consume his behavior.
The mortician had done wonders to preserve Alexis and his loveliness in his death. Gone were the almost imperceptible freckles that used to grace the skin of his nose, covered by the makeup that delicately imitated warmth in the flesh and hid the sallowness of a corpse. His torso was almost completely covered by a beautiful bouquet of roses, a symbol of the everlasting love between them that rested above where he bled to his untimely death.
And at the same time, although he’s terrified out of his mind and half convinced that he’s finally become fucking crazy in the wake of Alexis’ death, Michael can’t help but believe that the being that watches him as it holds him really is his love.
If it’s really Alexis, then it only brings one question to his mind.
“How are you even here?” He asks, his voice coming out as a hoarse whisper.
Alexis’ hand turns with more sickening pops to gently cup his cheeks, reverent. “ You know me, ” he jokes, “ I just can’t bear to be without you. ” The back end of the statement carries a dark edge, marked by a slight possessive lilt that toes the line of manic.
“ I’ve been with you all this time, Michael, ” he continues. “ I was stuck watching you tear yourself apart over me while I was here. I knew I was still around for a reason, and I knew that it was because you still needed me.”
It’s pathetic, really, that those words are all it takes for Michael to finally break from his fear induced paralysis and trap Alexis into a bone crushing hug, ignoring all the warning signs that flash in the back of his brain as they fall onto the bed.
“You don’t even know how much I needed you, Alexis,” he sobs, burying his face into a stiff shoulder as he’s also enveloped by his dead lover. “I thought of you every day and night, wanted you to come back to me with every breath I took.”
Being able to finally say these words takes a boulder of a burden off of his chest— and at last, Michael feels alive .
Alexis coos into his ear, tenderly. “ And you brought me back with how much you wanted me. I could feel just how much you needed me and each and every day you spent praying to see me again gave me all that I needed to come back .”
It feels like a fever dream, as if he were living a nightmare where he was forced to fall off of a cliff only to hit the ground and land in heaven. The rational side of his brain continues to screech at him in horror, but his heart can’t help but hold onto Alexis as if he’s the only thing anchoring him to the world.
Delusion or not, Michael’s determined to keep Alexis with him. “Then it really was you, all those weeks ago,” he whispers, filled with an unimaginable warmth in his chest to know that Alexis really loved him so much that he tried to show himself once more.
“It really was me, ” Alexis says before moving to free himself from Michael’s grasp and lift himself with his arms so that he could peer down at the blonde. “ And now I need you to do one thing for me if you want to be together forever .”
His words are sweet like syrup, almost dripping into Michael’s mind as he suddenly feels inexplicably and just so, immensely, tired. A part of him feels as if he’s slowly sinking in tar, as the feeling of the world around him dulls and his vision goes hazy, save for the piercing magenta of Alexis’ eyes.
He finds himself unable to even think of refusing, head already nodding in agreement and eager to listen to what Alexis has to say.
All sounds are drowned out, fuzzy like cotton aside from Alexis’ voice, which seemingly resounds in his mind and reaches into his soul. He feels the compulsion to listen and hang onto every single syllable.
“ Michael, when you fall asleep, you need to remember me at my best, think of when we were the happiest together and imagine that I’ve never died in the first place ,” Alexis smiles, eyes dead and unfeeling as ever. “ I need you to think of every promise we’ve made and hang on to that feeling so that I can stay here with you forever, okay? ”
It’s the last thing Michael hears before he fully slips under and sinks .
The third time Michael sees Alexis is the following morning when he wakes up from what he thought was just a dream to see a beautiful figure kneeling at his bedside, fingers intertwined with his own.
His skin is warm and glowing, the same youthful brightness that dances on his cheeks that Michael remembers admiring almost a year ago. Alexis here in the flesh, and every single cell in Michael’s body seems to roar and scream at his presence.
But then, Alexis meets his gaze with those lovely eyes and then his entire being seems to freeze under some type of strange power. A sense of euphoria washes over him, and somehow, the world seems just a bit brighter than before.
Truly , he thinks as Alexis adoringly kisses his fingers, Alexis is all he’ll ever need.