Work Text:
In the light of early morning, fresh water splashes into a vase of roses seated on a dark wood table. They rise on carefully manicured stems, baby’s breath sprinkled between them, red and white and elegant.
(Red for love and hate and sacrifice.)
The sky beyond the great glass window panes is as capricious as the sea, at times a frightening vermillion, at times an impenetrable black, churning like waves and wavering like a heat haze. Whatever light shines beyond the clouds trickles through stained the same, terrible red.
Slender fingers pluck a single rose from the rest, stems bristling. Cain lifts it to his face, closes his eyes, and breathes deeply. His lips brush the petals and your heartbeat quickens in envy. His grip is gentle, delicately holding it between his thumb and forefinger with a gentleness he’s never shown you.
He knows; you know that he knows. His eyes like honeyed wine, amber circled by carnelian, stare straight through your indifference. Smiling, poised in his seat like royalty, he holds it out towards you as you kneel on the floor before him.
It isn’t a gift; it’s a show of benevolence, the calm before the storm. You bow your head, gently touching the leaves at the flower’s base, and taste where his lips were in the sweetest kiss you will ever receive. When you begin to pull away he grasps the back of your head to hold you in place. Still smiling. Making you feel like less than nothing.
(He would make you search for meaning in the most nebulous and transient of things, in the light that streamed through the windows at daybreak, in the shadows that fell across the bedroom cast by a chest of drawers, in the shapes of clouds and the contours of light fixtures and the way he touched you, always asking, “What are you thinking of? What does this mean?”
You’d been afraid of wrong answers in the past, but the pain is second to the embarrassment and the shame, the sneer his lips curl into and the leer of his eyes when you open your mouth and say something he finds uncouth or insufficient.
He always has you looking, always thinking so you will be ready when he asks next, so you do not disappoint him. The times of day are the id, ego and super-ego. His whims are not simply whims but a pattern and exercise of ownership. The shades of the sky are red like roses—like pain and passion and him.
You search for meaning until you exhaust the world of it, until every color is faded and every sensation is dull and everything you once found beautiful is shriveled and unbearable to look at, and even your own reflection is something flickering and temporary and empty.)
You hesitate. He presses the rose against your lips and its scent surrounds you. He asks what it means to you. The red light of morning falls across your body but you feel no warmth.
You open your mouth wider, feel the petals bend against the roof of your mouth, the rose resting on your tongue. There’s only the faintest, earthy taste.
(The brutalization of innocence. The corruption of purity. Sexual frustration turned into destruction.)
Cain pushes harder, forcing the stem down. You choke on the thorns as they catch on the inside of your throat and scrape through you, and finally you taste something stronger than the musk of rose. You try to bite down to hold it in place and he wraps your hair around his fist and pulls, so hard that you gasp and the thorns dig into your mouth.
(It hurts. The balance between pleasure and pain. It hurts. You don’t want to think about it anymore.)
Blood runs hot and thick down your throat. You flinch involuntarily, trying to find something to hold onto. You feel the cold glass of the vase, water condensing on the surface as your fingertips graze it. The other roses are turned towards the sky, away from you, refusing to look at you. Maybe it means something.
(It doesn’t mean anything. You’re kneeling on the floor with thorns inside of you and blood is bubbling up in your mouth, trickling down your chin and dripping on your knees. It doesn’t mean anything.
You just don’t want to die.)
Cain’s eyes stray from you to the window and you whimper as he stands, his harsh but steadying hands leaving you, and your trembling fingers reach into your mouth, trying to find part of the stem to hold onto. You impale your fingers on the thorns and struggle to pull the rose out of your throat. You feel every inch of it as it tears you open from the inside, every swallow making you gag in pain, every reflexive shudder making it hold onto you harder.
It hurts so badly and yet you can hardly remember what pain means. You clutch desperately at your throat, heaving and coughing, and blood spatters over the floor.
“What a beautiful sunrise,” he muses.
You wonder if he’s going to let you choke, if he’s enjoying the sound of your ragged, painful breaths.
You don’t think it would mean anything to him.