Page 88 of Fragile Facade
Unable to be near my extended family any longer, I disappear into the fog of Janie’s Woods and end up at the pond on Carnival Hill—the one Riot drowned me in. I fucking hate myself for being here, getting nostalgic over something so ruinous. But I’m a puzzle, and I sense that one of my pieces got left behind here. Something chipped away from the foundation of who I am when he pushed me under the water and made a new deal with me, and I can’t decide if I hate him or appreciate him for it.
Because I’m different now, and different isn’t always good. Bending to look at my face, I lift my mask and study the murky water. I try to wrap my head around the way my illusion shifts, morphing my familiar reflection with these new parts of me, exposed only because old parts are missing. I think the piece I miss the most is the one that pushed my biggest button—the button that triggered me into becoming a madman who sought out Death like she was a dance partner.
Am I still looking for her? Am I obnoxiously flirting, screaming at her to pay attention to me so I can slam that door in her face, or am I tongue-tied, unsure what I’ll say to her if I ever wind up on her doorstep again?
Uncertainty isn’t my friend, and introspection is worse. I’m still the same person, and Riot—Killian—has gotten too many tricks over me. As I smile at the wobbly mirror reflecting my insanity back at me, I know exactly how to make myself feel better.
I’ll use Riot.
* * *
He’s notin his room, but I’m being patient. Facts told me he’s with Medic, and that’s all I needed to know. While I wait, I write out more calling cards, getting my vulnerable bits out onto paper to rid my physical body of them. I can’t say it to his face, but I can write down the things that scare me and the softer things I enjoy and hide them around his room for him to find if he’s ever inclined to look. I hope he never finds them.
It's another way to express emotion without having to verbally admit to this shit.
By the time he finally unlocks and opens his bedroom door at Vile House, I’m jittering with impatience and a need to expel everything morbid about myself straight onto him. I have a plan, and I’m ready to enact it, but when I step out of the shadowed corner and see his head hang, I pause. I don’t even breathe.
Riot whips his shirt across the room, sighing in a way that sounds painful. With his back to me, I barely swallow my gasp.His back…
His Vile House tattoo…
It's burned and broken, the skull a grotesque mess and his name almost entirely gone. As the burns heal, peeling away skin to build new skin, the design changes into something deformed and nearly unrecognizable. For a man like Killian, who only found himself once he joined Vile House, I can understand how devastating this must be for him.
His dark wavy hair hits his shoulders now, hanging over his nape in rambunctious waves. When his shoulders slump and he braces his arms on his dresser, head hung, it falls to cover his side profile, blocking my view of his anguished face. He’s hurting. Emotionally.
I don’t know how to deal with that.
Especially because Riot is the kind of person who needs visual reminders of who he is, and his tattoo has always been his anchor. Now it’s his downfall, and a part of me wants to make him feel better without knowing how to achieve that. I won’t admit that I’m broken, but… he’s fixed me before, and it’s time I do more than bring him a fucking smoothie.
I pull my mask over my face and grab his off the hook by the bathroom door. Silently, I stand right behind him, barely emitting a signal as he keeps his head low, shoulders and back heaving while he self-regulates horribly. I look at myself in the mirror over the dresser. The glow-in-the-dark parts of my mask are lit up teal, and Killian’s dark head of hair and tanned, scarred shoulders block my body. We’re a sight together. An ominous one with a soft side I’m not yet ready to admit to.
I care about him in some sort of way that left me half dead while he was captured, and breaking on his behalf now that he’s suffering. What does it all mean? I don’t know, but the fight in me isn’t against it. It’s for it.
When his back rises with a deep breath, I spook him. “Unmasked and broken. That’s your base layer, yeah?”
Killian whips around, hand on my throat, face right in front of mine. He’s seething, pissed off about being spied on while he was letting himself crack in solitude. He looks at my mask, wondering why I’m wearing it inside the house, but he doesn’t ask because he’s too busy trying to come up with excuses for what he was doing. To talk it away and pretend it doesn’t exist. To put up a front that shows him as nothing but corrupted perfection. To manipulate the situation to his benefit.
His eyes are roiling with storms instead of Krypt’s monsters, and in the grey of them, I see it buried under all his power. Weakness and fear. A lack of understanding. A need to prove himselfto himself. “Get out.”
“No.”
“Soren, I swear to fucking god, if you don’t back off right now, I can’t be responsible for?—”
“This is you? The real you without the masks?”
He falters for words but holds my throat tighter. I watch him try to reinforce every bit of charm and deception he’s mastered over the years. Those masks don’t come, though. He can’t grasp one, which makes him try to hide even more. When he drops his hand and looks down to avoid my gaze, I tilt his chin and force him to look at me.
My knuckles brush his stubble, and his eyes narrow in another attempt to disappear. “You don’t need them. Not with me.”
His nostrils flare and his cheek muscles feather. “I need them. With myself.”
I shake my head at him, holding up his Vile House mask. “This is Riot. You. Killian fucking Hallows.” I show him the white and black, the opposing shades that mark him as who he is. “It’s the only mask you need.”
He looks at it, trying to accept my truthful words, but his eyes dip downward and he shakes his head in my grip. “I… fuck, I need the ninety seconds.”
“No, you don’t.”
“Don’t fucking look at me right now.”
