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crookedspoonfic · 7 years

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WIP Day #3

Your Canon-Verse WIP.

I give up. There are still two hours left in the day, but that’s not nearly enough time for me to beat this thing into shape. Instead, I’ll give you a peek.

I don’t know if this actually counts as canon, because I made up all of it. My goal was to try and keep the character dynamic more or less canon-compliant, but uhh, I think we don’t get to canon events in this snippet.

Fandom: The Raven Cycle Characters/Pairings: Kavinsky (+Ronan) Rating: Mature for child abuse, bullying, homophobia, drug abuse, and being wacky in the head, I suppose

When I started this: October 2016, in one form or another When I last touched it: March 2017

But first, another of my unnecessary and unnecessarily long comments: This grew out of my first try at TRC fic, which thankfully never made it to the light of day. It was that obligatory canon character study, but it was terrible. I repurposed some lines for a rewrite and tried different approaches, like splitting it up and using the individual parts for other projects, which is probably why the mood is all over the place.

For the purpose of this WIP challenge, I stitched some back together and added some ideas I had regarding K’s potential backstory. Today’s edit also weirdly turned the mood in this from rather sad to slightly dark and fucked up. Go me.

Under the cut, you’ll find nearly 2k of “idk what this is, whether it makes sense, or if I should continue to work on it.” (I pretty much just like stacking words on top of one another and wait for them to topple into place.)

Enjoy. If you can.

You tell yourself you haven't always been this pathetic.

You've spent many hours in grand stupors, passed out on bathroom floors, hallways, stairs even, waking to a pain in your head, your joints, your heart that would only grow worse over time unless you get another fix -- to alleviate the emotional impact if not the physical one -- and sometimes you don't because you're unable to move, unable to do anything but sink deeper into the pit of despair that lurks so far below the surface mere cutting tools don't reach it.

Yeah, you've been there and you've grown used to it, used to starting awake in strangers' cars, in stranger's beds, on strange piles of shards and other things with jagged, rending edges, like yesterday's trash, broken and forgotten.

You've grown used to starting awake to strangers in your house, on your floor, your bed, (you -- like your body's a blow-up doll and no longer yours when your consciousness vacates it for a while,) used to loud music, fast cars, and neon strobe lights, used to having crowds around you, fawning over you, spewing the same sycophantic bullshit as anyone else, while their drinks slosh dangerously in their cups and their fingers find their way into your hair, your mouth, your pockets, turned inside out in search for what only you can give them: the ride of their lives.

Disorientation became your game and you played it till you won.

It was a way of life and you were living it, disregarding that you were already dead inside.

You've been in a string of pathetic situations before you learned to ride the buzz and not let it ride you, before you learned that staying high and staying in control were not mutually exclusive even if it was fun for a time to give up one for the other. Keeps you on your toes.

Going up, you never worried about coming down. You never worried about anything.

So, you've been fucked up a lot, but you've never felt as fucked up as you do now, empty and shaking and so alone. There are texts on your phone, but your thumbs too numb to open them, the screen is screeching at your eyes, and the messages are garbled as if the words had been thrown into a blender. They don't go through to you.

Inside your chest, a nauseating merry-go-round made of razor wire is slicing at you, whittling you away, carving you hollow.

You like to think you haven't always been this way. That there's a progression to these things.

Yours seems inevitable enough.

You still remember the days before now, before this, before everything, although you try your best to erase them, line by fucking line. It's easier to forget than to go running around with all that baggage. Who needs that shit anyway?

You were a sweet-faced boy, the aunts told you, by which they meant you look like a girl. You hated that.

They weren't your aunts, but wives of the men who worked for your father, and they came by to keep your mother company when he was away. Or busy. Or both. Which was all the time. You thought of them as a flock of birds for their matching outfits, their gleaming jewelry, their impeccable hair, the way they tittered and they cooed, and how you've never seen one arrive without the others.

So they perched on the sofa and the armchairs, coffee cups daintily placed on their saucers, and they sang their merry tune of how lucky your mother was for having such a sweet boy, such an angel, he does so take after you, dear. They simpered, pinched your cheeks, ruffled your hair, and you hated it at the time, hated that you had to be still and smile and endure it, because if you did, they'd stop fussing sooner instead of later, growing bored with you as if you sort of faded in the background.

But you liked the attention all the same. At least somebody noticed you for a while.

The aunts brought their sons, if they had them, and brought toys if they didn't. Action figures, toy cars, dinosaurs, whatever they'd been told young boys your age were crazy about. Or they brought stories about how they would also like a son, a healthy, strong son, because their husbands wanted one, so that is what they should want, too. Maybe they did, but you couldn't tell, you could only overhear bits and pieces when you sneaked into the kitchen to get away from the other boys.

You were supposed to be playing with them, be nice to them, but they weren't nice to you, so why should you care? You were small, you were fine-boned and you were pretty, and nobody liked you.

But it was okay, you didn't like them either.

Except that you did, in ways you didn't understand at the time, because nobody told you about these things and you never had the chance to figure them out for yourself.

Maybe they didn't like the implications of you, maybe you made them feel something they weren't supposed to feel, maybe there's always been something despicable about you. Maybe that was it. All you know is that they teased you, that they made you cry because of it, and that your father didn't want a cry-baby for a son. He never called you his son, he called you other things that took you years to understand, things that the boys in your backyard echoed before they wrestled you to the ground and stuffed sticks and soil and sand into your mouth and made you swallow.

You still remember their names or what names they called you, what they looked like,

what they made you feel.

Your father never said anything to the boys or their fathers. Why would he? It would draw attention to what a pathetic weakling you were and he was probably too ashamed of you already. His preferred method of making sure you wouldn't get beat up again was taking the matter out of their hands. You earned yourself a clout whenever he caught you sniveling, sometimes even if it was from a cold, and sometimes he wouldn't stop until you stopped.

Sometimes you wondered if he wanted you to stop completely.

You were supposed to stand up for yourself, that was the understanding.

Your mother didn't like how he ruined your face, you were her handsome boy after all, but she also did nothing to stop him. That was fine with you. If he used his fists on you, maybe he wouldn't have to use them on her. (That was before she took to hitting you as well, you devil child, you cursed evil thing, when you still had some loyalty in you, some sense of solidarity.) He never hit <em>her </em>face, but a shiner or two on yours were okay because it detracts from your looks and adds character. Simple as that.

It's a lesson you took to heart and made use of at school. Your father liked to see you get into fights, liked it when you came home with scarred knuckles and split skin, when you proved to him you were a man after all and worthy of being called his son.

You stare into the mirror. Nothing stares back. You're seeing through yourself, at the wall in the back, or maybe the back of your head. It's dark in there, it must be, you cannot see the light.

You're covered in gasoline and someone struck a match. Your skin is burning.

This is what his touch must feel like. Around your throat, squeezing the life out of you. Whatever life there is left of you.

You splash some water on your face and it reappears in the mirror.

Pretty thing, they used to call you. They used to beat you up for it, as if your looks were somehow offensive to them.

No one would call you pretty now, with your sunken cheeks, broken nose and bloodshot eyes, and you prefer it that way.

You conceal the damage of last night and the many nights before with white sunglasses and a grin that's as changeable as your mood while it remains one thing at its core. An impenetrable fortress.

Your parents may have taught you something useful, after all.

There must have been a time when you thought your parents loved you, that they just couldn't show it in words or gestures, so they showered you with gifts to distract you from their emptiness that was becoming your emptiness.

"You need to stop spoiling him," they told each other when they thought you couldn't hear, but they never did.

When you woke up to yet another gift on your pillow, one you've been wishing for very hard but never had the chance to tell them about, you thought it was their way of saying sorry for being so distant. You thought it was their way of soothing you after your nightmares.

You were delighted by it when you were very small, and put off by it as you grew older, because you saw it as a cheap ploy to buy your loyalty. Fuck that.

Until you noticed they didn't get you anything.

"You're spoiling him too much. He's soft enough."

"I thought you got him this toy."

The answer to this riddle, however, was a much better gift than anything they could have given you.

You know now that every gift comes with strings attached. And sometimes, those strings are darkness itself.

Come to think of it, your mother never hit you before your very existence started to threaten her sanity. Not that she'd had much of it to begin with, but your dreaming didn't exactly help. It only exacerbated it. And then, when you killed your father and he still continued living after that, well, that was the end of it. She never let you live that one down.

Or she wouldn't, if you kept her sedated any less. She prefers the brain fog to the knowledge of what you are, too. Otherwise she could have left a long time ago. Tried to, in fact, but even with her means, she was unable to find anything that killed her brain that what you provided for free.

Family discount.

You've had enough to drink for a lifetime, but there's a restlessness eating you up from inside that you need to douse and you know just the thing to do it with.

It comes in a plain vodka bottle, looks and tastes like lighter fuel, and the fumes alone are enough to intoxicate you three ways from Sunday.

The best part about it, however, is how much it burns. Every swig of that hellish concoction is another splash of kerosene onto that ever-raging fire that is consuming the very fiber of your being.

You know who you have to thank for stoking it, for making it so unbearable to take another goddamn fucking breath.

Family, you think. It's more of a curse than a thought, really. But it rams itself into your head with the force of a sledgehammer.

Family. Now there's an idea.

#the raven cycle #wipweek2017 #wipweek: day 3 #joseph kavinsky #rating: mature #backstory #my stuff #crookedspoon writes dumb shit #wips #snippets #lots of words stacked on top of one another #ugh i am never ever going to post a fic of this format to tumblr #trying to figure out where one section ends and the next begins was a pain #do let me know it this is actually something you'd like to see completed in one form or another #still on the fence about what to do with it #might just hack it into pieces again and use it for parts #wipweek

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