Work Text:
"'Love is red sheets of pain
A flawless disease
Invisible chain
Oh lover, scream out my name
Your spiraling song
Your tortured refrain
The music of your spinal cord
Your brainwaves crashing on the shore"
- Scanners, 'Violence is Golden'
Ethan is crying, curled up in a little ball, buried under the tick bedding.
He prays no one will find him here. He’s scared. He’s scared.
She leaned in to kiss his hand.
Now two of his fingers are gone.
Ethan shuts his eyes, wet and stingy from the tears.
He tries to focus on something else other than the pain.
The coppery smell in his nose.
The wet sheets beneath him, soaking up.
The stale taste of vomit in his mouth. He can’t look or he’ll throw up again.
It shot right out of him when he saw the hints of pale bone peeking out from underneath the red mess. The thought alone makes him feel nauseous all over again.
A knock on the door.
“Ethan, puiul meu, I have some bandages. Can I come inside?”
It’s her.
His whole body shakes with a large sob and he hugs his knees even tighter to his chest.
It happened so fast.
There was a shrill, wet sound, then his fingers broke like candy canes.
After that he doesn’t remember anything else but red and running.
But she found him.
Ethan doesn’t answer any of the other pleas she makes either before she finally lets herself in.
The blanket is pulled off him and he whimpers, covering his face with both his intact and maimed hand, tasting blood.
“Don’t kill me. Don’tkillmedon’tkillme…”
“Please, sweetling, calm down––”
Her monstrous fingers touch his shoulder and he yelps, shaking even harder.
“––mami can’t help you if you won’t let her.”
You hurt me.
“And if you won’t let me help you, it will keep hurting.”
Give them back.
He tries to scramble off the bed, away, but she seizes him by the shoulders, forcibly pulling him back toward her.
His head is full of cotton candy. He has never been as scared in his life, until he isn’t, until the fear is so great he stops being afraid of her.
Ethan squirms and kicks and screams as she drips a burning liquid onto his hand and bandages it. She can barely hide the anger beneath her kind expression, baring her teeth like a wolf ready to pounce.
“Be. Still.”
Her palm hits his face like a wrecking ball and his body grows limp and fragile at the impact, it smacks the fear back into him.
“Forgive me, iubțel, but you were only making it worse for yourself. If you move too much your wounds will only hurt more, and you wouldn’t listen to me.”
When he’s finally freed, Ethan crawls back under the sheets and cries to himself, trying to forget the pain and his fingers and her. He thinks about his parents instead, but it only makes everything hurt more.
“Is there anything else I could do for you? Anything to make it better…” now her voice is full of honey again – sugary, sweet, disgusting.
(He remembers the large hands of his father, which seem like those of a doll compared to hers, lifting him up on his shoulders at a baseball game. Remembers how he’d just started giving him swimming lessons in their pool.)
“Home. I want to go home. Let me go home.”
(He remembers every birthday cake his mother baked him. Remembers how she would tie his shoe laces for him. Remembers the smell of her perfume, cheap and chemical and not like hers at all.)
“This place has always been your home, child,” her voice makes his teeth rot. “You will realize this eventually. Home is where your family is.”
The fresh pain in his jaws burns even brighter than that in his fingers.
Red-purple marks are forming on his skin where she touched him.
*
In the morning a maiden comes to wash Ethan and reapply the bandages.
Mother (at times his brain slips up, thinking of her as that. Even if he were aware of it, he would not be able to tell when the shift from ‘that horrible woman’ to ‘Mother’ happened) is standing at the other end of the room, watching the maiden scrub the dried blood off. The maiden’s hands tremble; she’s cleaning him like he is something expensive.
“It is better me and your sisters keep our distance whilst you are healing,” she says, taking a drag from her strange, spider leg cigarette. The whole castle smells of smoke and mold and copper.
After the maiden has removed the bandage and washed away the blood, the bones become more apparent. Not bigger than a penny, hidden at the end of the hollows of the stumps. If you don’t look closely, you’d miss them.
“Ethan, my sweet, please don’t worry. Give it a few months and your fingers will have regrown.”
But they are there.
Bones.
“Nothing can truly hurt you, you see? For you are gifted.”
Strangely enough, his bones aren’t white. They’re a filthy yellow like the teeth of the man he’s supposed to call Uncle Karl.
The meaty ends of his fingers are shredded and torn. Before this, Ethan had never gotten seriously hurt. A scraped knee or two. The tiny prick of a needle at the doctor’s. Now it seems silly how scared he was of such little pain.
Ethan was always aware that adults are bigger and stronger, and Mother tenfold so, but he never knew how fragile his body really is.
She could put her teeth on his finger and slowly peel the skin off it like a carrot.
She could stomp a hole into his stomach and not even break out into a sweat.
His head could easily fit into her mouth. Then all she’d have to do is bite down and just like that, he’d be no more.
The worst part is, he didn’t do anything wrong. She’ll hurt him even if he behaves, even if she doesn’t want to.
Ethan starts to cry again.
The maiden keeps washing him like nothing’s the matter, beads of sweat running down her forehead as she nervously looks between him and her, not knowing what to do.
Through his tears he can see Mother looking like she is the one in pain. Ethan shrinks further down into the bathwater, like he wants to drown or swim through the drain to freedom.
She remains there at the other end of the room, watching.
She doesn’t come to his side, doesn’t wipe away the tears, doesn’t hold him and sing soothingly to him – and for that he is incredibly grateful.
*
When he peeks through the door, he sees Mother holding the bloodstained sheets to her face, her massive body shivering like a collapsing tower.
She is loudly, desperately in- and exhaling into the sheet, like she is choking. If only she would suffocate and die.
But instead, her hand slides between the curtains of her creamy white gown, her hips bucking into it.
That Ethan has seen before. When she touches him, she often pants and trembles like this. It’s when the robe parts that he startles, barely suppressing a low cry.
She doesn’t look like him down there. She looks like an animal.
A hungry animal. Eating her fingers then letting them go, unlike how she did with Ethan, again and again, insatiable. It feels as if he is watching something insane and unnatural, her almighty body breaking apart by her own hand.
The sounds and spasms are those of a rabid animal, there is no fragment of her usual grace and composure as she takes the sheet stained with his blood between her legs and begins frenziedly rutting into it.
The seams where his fingers used to be itch and tingle painfully, his whole body revolting at the fact his blood caused this. If only he hadn’t seen.
After a sudden scream which pulsates in Ethan’s veins like a terrible echo, she falls to her knees, almost collapsing to the floor, moaning, inhaling, muttering things he can’t understand.
Then her body stills, breaking his petrification with it.
He doesn’t even care if she hears, he takes to his feet and runs away, just away, away, away, away.
*
She must have heard. For he is served even more delicious and impressive meals than before. Every day he wakes up to a new toy on his bedside.
None of this matters to him, none of this makes him happy.
The only thing he is glad for is not having to see her and the others.
They give him tinctures to drain the pain out of his hand and every other part of his body, until he feels empty like a deflated balloon.
Still, he can barely sleep. Even in this state, the fear of waking up and being even less than before terrifies him.
If he stares out of the window long enough, Ethan can pretend to be somewhere else, to be running through the forest, away from them.
If he stares at the ceiling long enough until it has lost all familiarity, Ethan can pretend to be on vacation, in a fancy hotel his family could never have afforded, having the time of his life.
The one thing he wishes for would be for the castle to be made of ginger bread. That’s the only thing Hänsel’s got over him.
*
“You’ve got to be fucking kidding me. I’m not going to keep doing your bullshit requests when you’re eating your so-called super weapon.”
“Don’t you dare insinuate such things! How could you ever dare to insult a mother like this!”
“You can shove that crap right up your ass again. Like you actually give a fuck about that kid. You’re pulling the same shit Miranda did with me, you fucking Rabenmutter.”
He has become used to falling asleep to screaming the way he was used to the buzzing of mosquitos at night, in his real life.
There, too, are bugs here which steal your blood, but those he is supposed to call ‘sisters’.
“Out! Out! Out with you this once! Or I shall drag you there by your insides!”
“Oh with pleasure, Schwesterherz. I was a fucking fool to trust your schemes anyway. If your experiments won’t kill the kid then you certainly will.”
What follows are hysterical screams in Romanian, then the sound of what Ethan presumes is the dinner table with all its arrangements hitting the wall, just off target enough not to kill Uncle Karl.
*
“You are irresistible to me, Ethan. I lost control.” She is kneeling before him as if to propose, her dreaded hands resting on his thighs.
“Please, forgive me. Nothing has ever made pained me like the guilt for what I did.”
Nothing has ever pained me like what you did.
“It was an accident. Please, please don’t be so hard on your mother.”
She’s trembling.
“I love you so.”
The honesty in her voice scares him. The warmth it evokes inside him scares him.
She takes his bandaged hand and leans in to kiss it.
His mouth forms into a silent scream and he instinctively begins to struggle.
There is merely the soft of her lips.
“See? It will never happen again. I promise. I swear it on my name.”
There is a shimmer in her eyes.
Hungry. So hungry.
But they are wet with tears, too.
He nods and when she embraces him, he wraps his arms around her neck and lets her carry him to bed.
Then, she strips him naked and lays him out on the bed like a coverlet, roaming his small body with hands and lips and tongue.
Nothing hurts, everything feels good.
Ethan likes being touched by her like that, because it makes him unable to think of anything else.
He grabs onto her shoulders and begs for more.
A part of him has come to terms with it now.
Her love is going to kill him, one way or another.
*
The stumps are turning black. Mother tells him not to worry about it.
Still, Ethan looks. Touches the tip of each finger with his right while she scrubs his chest with a sponge as big as a loaf of bread.
Thumb.
This little piggy wanted to go home.
Pointer.
This little piggy went insane.
Middle.
This little piggy tried to forget the pain.
Stump one.
This little piggy became roast beef.
Stump two.
This little piggy tried to run.
Mother is humming something. Her lap doesn’t make for a good seat, her skin is slippery, its difficult for him to keep his balance and not slip between her breasts where he can hardly breathe.
There is a mirror on the other side of the room. Ethan studies his reflection in it, his tiny frame rested against hers. This place is nothing but a horrible funhouse.
This little piggy cried ‘help me help me’, all the way home.