ㅤᴅᴏᴏʀ ⋮ A27

The night dies as nothing but a blur, alternating flashes of shattered memory fragments and something else that may as well be deemed... insanity. A trance, is what they call it, a state of mind in which the brain immerses itself due to exasperating circumstances—it is but a bubble fabricated by human nature in which what’s known as reality merges with an ocean of wonders and loses itself like a pearl buried in sand. So amidst havoc they cling to an edge of security, a hint of light, a desperate attempt to prevent suffocating liters of violent tides from filling such delicate lungs. But it seems, like every other night, the voices in his head aren’t kind, and they start eating his flesh inside out in this otherwise bull cycle— his bones clean too. There’s no convention to this; just a fluctuation that keeps being volatile in the confines of his thoughts, creating ripples that never stop echoing. It’s scarring his throat, singeing the roof of his mouth with a ferocity he has felt since the day he had become entirely, wholly, alone.

Truly there’d been endless nights, when the demons he once made company with return. They laid with him against the cemented ground and cold rock, press their lips by his ear and speak of Laurence and Ophelia’s willow tree. Their clammy grip always grasps him too close as they shake his blue shoulders—and it’s then he remembers how familiar they sounded: Delirium.

(Delirium's hands would wander, linger around joints and gently guide the arm that holds the weapon for murder. She would wrap at the hand of the mortal and entices him with the promise of pleasant outcomes: 'it’s just a name, a faceless that shall end up scribbled along your journals, and nothing more.' When he retreats back into the shadows from which he came, he witnesses despair and encourages the decay of guilt.)

And Taekwoon stares up only to descend into reverence, repetition.

In this prolonged ellipsis, he waits for the fake dreams to numb the palate of his tongue—but he’s too awake here. The moon soon began to look like a smudged thumprint on the window to the right. Every so often he’d glance to squint to the window through the dark, but the unsteady glow becomes nothing more than a blurry halo of light. It might as well be a reflection of every dim light in his apartment. In the spiked moments of the hour, the night heaves another sigh.

He brought an arm to cover his eyes shut, wrapping himself for a modicum of sleep—just for the necessity of it all, and for once over the turbulent years of his existence, he gradually falls into slumber induced by his own machinations; speckles of reality faltering for a moment, whispering beasts calling in his ears and the claws of screeching deaths ripping through withering entrails. (But as you sleep, you slip into different planes of existence and make up for your mistakes.) It might as well be said that dreams for Taekwoon surely don’t come with bliss and the dusted cinnamon dreams of the blank mind. Dreams for him are etched with haunt from every fold, crack and tremor from his body. In one, he dies from a gunshot wound. In the second, he stands in someone’s Eden; resplendissant flowers that no human tongue could ever hope to describe—the vision of paradise itself soon transforms into the shape of a woman, ocean eyes, supple skin, anatomy sewed by the hands of God, a heart of gold, a sacred sanctuary made to be revered and venerated. She was nothing but love.

She was nothing but love.

Living and breathing, staining history with splatters of blood. (And then you catch her before he stumbles off the cliff, the cry of a bullet flying past your ear.)

Beyond his scorched skin, wild fire in his lungs; an urge to shout, to release the ugly ichor brimming at the back of his throat with calls, curses, but the scenario shifts and disintegrates away into nothingness.

Taekwoon stirs from another dream about /her./
He’s awake.

Despite the ache—the haunting, he smiles before bitter words make it through a silent breath. “What do you want me to do...”

Midnight paints the sky in sombre shades of solitude, with it, of malevolence interspersed between columns of stars. The layers, laid so thick across the canvas, encroach upon the city steadily, menacingly: an atrophy to the worsening, withering mind that turns unabridged tonight. In here, his thoughts are bare, like gritted teeth that chatter as if they were bullets ricocheting on the floor. 0.046 seconds later, lying scattered on the floor are the shrapnels, pollens, dusts. In here, the thoughts grow, black, like rotten nights that heave in the tone of oncoming hurricanes.

Along the splinters of a cloudless background comes an anomaly in the form of a body in the fostering darkness of the room: Taekwoon tucks his hand inside the crevice of his left pocket, fishing his phone out to thumb idly against the profiler a few times. For a beat, seconds at most, what resonates is the humid breeze that rushes in his ears. (Tonight, there is a voice over the comms of avant-garde creations, formed together to piece a glass of syllables poured over in a matter of minute. Connections—just like that, he is back into the complex.) There are remainders of coffee-stained cups that accumulate droplets inside the kitchen sink when he forgets to remind himself to do them before the next order, the air is just as stodgy; albeit perfect for tenebrosity that enshrouds peccadillos to violations of a darker cause: the task of localising a person. For him, it is fairly easy if you know their eccentricities; time squandered on stalking, plotting, memorization of physical regard, resulted in a more-than-decent enough knowledge of the person’s hard-ironed habits that cloy in the crevices of their skin (humans are creatures of propensity; adhering to routine in their general spectrum with their dying breaths.)

Now, he finds the partriture of his blueprints hidden amongst the rotten penumbra of nighttime from the bedroom window. Sharp, hawk eyes peer into a scope, zeroing in on a creature of interest; his mark, his tally. Slender fingers sheathed in dead coal gloves hugged the trigger of an equally ebony bolt action rifle. One hand pulls the bolt back in the suppressed rifle, loading a bullet in the chamber. Everything an act, a design. Precision in madness.

Peril to set his blood alight in azure of flame.

However, no more than a moment must past when a flicker of white across the back of his eyes makes him shutter—in the obscurity he finds faint fragments of memoirs where adpotive mother (succumbing to the scum father existed as) and father (Satan on formal documents) shouts at his ears, where fists made for suppossed tender recreate the core of violence, where open wounds bleed out the flaws because he wants a /warrior/. Nevermind the bruises and scars marring the skin. One: exclusive, isolated, perfect, concrete. One shot, one bullet, one kill. Don’t screw it up. One in a million are the chances a misstep could lead to a lack of professionalism and the slip of a finger, one in a million are the forecasts in favor of failure. One in a million, but the one will always be there, haunting, gnawing, shredding through the guts like a feral beast. Bitter is how it tastes on the tongue, so much so Taekwoon is able to physically feel the chill slithering down his spine, unable to conceal the manner in which his form twitches in rancor over flashes he is incapable of shutting down.

Ghosts like them haunt even after death, and this is eternal company.

The memoirs (the haunting and the taunting, more likely) and the ghosts momentarily dissipates when the small contraption in his ear spewed out the all-too familiar vox he’s come to operate with. It takes a second, maybe even a minute, before the voice on the other line halts to await his response. “Ah... ‘s fine. Although there has been... dare I say—a little rat scampering around. You shouldn’t worry about that. But in the case it needs to be said—for your benefit then—I’m pest control,” comes his riposte, voice blending in with the sursurrus of chaos dulled to a murmur, interwoven with a scoff that fizzles meekly beneath the static.

In the moonlight hours Taekwoon’s aquiline features are ghastly; washed out by the moonlight glow; calculating, waiting, watching...

⎡ ᴍᴜʀᴅᴇʀ ᴍʏsᴛᴇʀʏ ᴇᴠᴇɴᴛ: ᴍᴜʀᴅᴇʀ sᴄᴇɴᴇ ⎦