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Prompting is currently open. Prompting is open from 28 December 2024 to 19 January 2025.
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"the poem begins not where the knife enters, but where the blade twists"
"beauty is terror"
"you'll just have to taste me, when he's kissing you"
Calling all readers, lovers of poetry and music, screen and stage. Quote collecters and lyric hoarders, unleash your archive. For this round, every prompt must contain a quote - you can combine them, add commentary, link to articles, do whatever. Steal from a literary classic, or copy a hit tweet.
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[FILL] bright dead things
Major Tags: explicit sexual content, implied violent sex, implied choking, general violence
Additional Tags: small towns, messed-up upbringings, one-sided Minghao/Yixing, second person POV (Minghao's POV), not quite a mafia AU but close, mutually destructive exes, ambiguous ending
Permission to remix: Please ask
***
You know how impossible it sounds when you say it, watching the flames lick the last visible inch of the sturdy leather seat of your motorcycle of ten years, ruined by the only one who has ever known your weak spots, and yet you say it because it's true and you're still too fucking honest for your own good.
It all started because it was fun. Nothing more, nothing less.
*
He had the only bicycle of all the kids living on your lane and a beguiling fucking smile, even at eleven.
You had newly learnt how to do a backflip and dodge a punch in the alley behind school and really, it took much less than that to become someone interesting in a small town where everyone grew up with the singular dream of leaving.
*
By the time you were eighteen, you knew the sound of his footsteps on the gravel outside your window better than you had known your father's face and he knew you would only initiate kisses underwater in the community pool at 6 am but reciprocate no matter how risky and public the events where he tried it.
You realised you had to get away when the most familiar cheek under your tight reared-back-and-ready knuckles was his, even if it was because he wanted you to teach him the one dance you stuck to while all its tamer accompaniments got abandoned the year your mother, too, disappeared.
Maybe it wasn't a realisation so much as a slow awakening to something that was glaring at you all along; you had always liked it when you rode his bike in tandem down the road at the edge of the forest next to down, brambled and twig-lined, bound to rope you both into a fall that split your knees open and scuffed your elbows.
Nobody else you knew believed love was preserved in the act of drawing blood from one's lover with their own hands.
But what the hell did you both even know back then?
It was fun. That's all there was to it.
*
The leaving was inevitable as was the parting. You never told him where you're going and he never asked you to stay--only pushed you into the backseat of his uncle's car and touched you until you begged to be fucked, and then he did. A last act of his love and a last act of your violence. Or vice versa.
*
But you should've known that people like you never got away from anything you were running from. Not the poverty or the fistfights or the only love that cut you down to your bones only to have you desire the pain, not abhor it.
*
So here he is, the forgotten ghost of your past but ghost no more, yours no more, forgotten no more.
If you're as honest as you pride yourself to be, none of that is true. None of it, except all of it.
Because he's here and you did forget how his smile could drive you to murder if you let it. He's here and he punches with intent, not like the limp-fisted boy who seemed alive only when the sun hit his hair just right. He's here, at the club you hang around and do odd jobs for the worst kind of people, arm-in-arm with Yixing, like they're the ones with a history that gave your stupid town its first and only public indecency scare.
Yixing, who has been a bouncer at the club because he doesn't have the means to be anything more but wants to fucking protect people anyway.
Yixing, who you've wanted since the moment you laid eyes on him. Yixing who takes your bloodied body home and fixes you up but never tugs you into his bed, even though surely he knows that the only reason you let him catch you post-fights and unguarded, over and over again, is for that very reason.
He's here and his body is curved around Yixing's and he's not yours and for the first time since you met Yixing you know you don't have to be the one to instigate a fight to top off a bad night.
*
So you find out what shithole he's putting up in and you trash it while he's out pretending Yixing is his type, too, even though you both know he's not. Surely Yixing's never let a lover press their thumb into his wounds and laugh like the world's funniest joke was birthed from the touch of their fingertips to raw hurt.
And then he finds your bike and sets fire to it, no trace of him left behind at the club's lot where you keep it save for the way Yixing won't meet your eyes.
It's okay though. You understand now that he wouldn't have been able to satisfy the madman in you, anyway, would probably hate how you'd wake up the morning after and push him around like it was what he deserved when he didn't.
When you go home, near dawn, it doesn't surprise you to find him sitting outside your door, long legs stretched out and a cigarette dangling from his lips. After all, you've only ever loved beyond the point of obsession and the only thing he's never been casual about is you.
He doesn't ask to be let in and you don't keep him out.
You're too honest to tell him you don't want him and he's never needed words to navigate this anyway.
He'll follow you to bed and say please and get his hands around your throat and counts your breaths even if you shake your head and you will cry and surrender and slap him for it in the morning; and then you'll find a fight until the itch for him returns, or he will, if the blood stains on his denim jacket are anything to go by--and you'll want to leave by the end of the week because you have always wanted to get away, but ten years and then some apart, you still haven't figured out if away meant away from what was your home or away from him as well, so you'll rail and bitch and threaten to do it but you won't. Not until the itch subsides.
But hey, if history always does repeat itself, at least you can be certain that it will be fun.
Re: [FILL] bright dead things
I love how it was open as to whether this is Minghao or Junhui POV but then the appearance of toxic boyfriend Yixing... and then I knew, omg PB you wrote this FOR ME. Thank you this was so fun to read and imagine <3
Re: [FILL] bright dead things
Re: [FILL] bright dead things
it's not truly 17hols until there is a haoxing from pb :') thank you for this tradition friend it makes me so giddy!