Blood on Your Shirt

The pain of looking into the past, and seeing something wished forgotten.

The two, blonde, bored, laid hesitant on her canopied bed, waiting for the rain on the windowed wall separating the balcony and the room to stop. Tsuki dozed face-down on the mattress, his phone cupped in his hand playing an orchestral variation of his recent favorite video game’s theme. The rain overlaid the melody, the tinks of the marimba highlighting the heavy thunk of droplets. Star propped himself up on his elbows to gaze out the windows at the watercolored sky, bleak and desperate. This moment was the first one in weeks when they weren’t thinking of anything. They weren’t hearing voices, from the past, present or future; they weren’t drowning in dreams painful enough to be reality; they weren’t wondering where Aura went. The older twin listened to music, the younger to rain.

They locked their door before sleeping. Only one other person had the key, and the door stuttered open under the hand of a man too tired to open his eyes--more tired than he’d been in thousands of years.

Star didn’t look over, “Shae, why are you here?”

The demon--or former demon?--yawned, dropping his bag and coat on the floor, then himself on the couch. “You’re the ones who asked me to drop by after work. Something about memories?”

Tsuki stirred, “Oh, Star, we wanted to use him for mind reading practice.”

“Ah,” Star rose from the bed, Tsuki a beat behind, “yeah, we wanted to practice seeing the past.”

Shae scoffed, “Seems counterintuitive to your goal.”

The twins shrugged, “Not if you know what our goal is.”

“You can’t be her.”

“We can try, Shae.”

He grumbled, rubbed his face down with his palm, the scratch of calluses on scruff. “You already have her impetuous voice. Fine. I choose the memory, you can’t back out. Hope you’re looking forward to what I’ve been thinking about lately.”

Tsuki and Star sat down across from him, squeezing into an armchair made for one. They made themselves as close as possible, a mess of limbs and loose hair and blue eyes, and focused so hard on the thing that came naturally to Aura. Psychic connectivity. Shae has outward-facing selective memory--being with Aura, it made it easier if he could choose what she could “see.” He can unlock one of his time capsules at any time and let a perfect memory flow forth, but the flaw in having perfect memory, is in imperfect memories.

The feeling was anxious, disgusted with a certain race--humanity--with which he had only recently become acquainted. Disgusted with the way they were different from her. His head was dominated with the symbiosis of two bodies, hers and his, but he had to kick the door in first, and swing his winter coat onto the table before he could listen for the sound of her heartbeat in the lonely apartment. It was a dark brown day, there was grime on the doorframe, and under the collar of his white shirt. The sunset drew sepia tones across the lovers’ beaten bed.

The scent of blood. The deep rotten stench, sifting everything through and spitting it back out a gorey mass. Warm blue vapor rose from the crack in the bathroom door, the latch stiff from being locked but not slammed hard enough to catch. The gush of the bath, filling a porcelain tub. He heard her heartbeat now too. Slower, even than before. The blood being washed away… From her? Something else?

His fingers grazed the door handle.

“Do not come in.”

Her voice made him stop. His heart, beating again after so long, leapt higher than he thought possible. Her voice was plain and imperative, soft because she knew he would hear it. It wasn’t sweet and lilting, held none of the charming caress he was used to listening for in it.

“Aura? What’s wrong?” His voice was so close to wavering that he knew it was fear and not just worry. The air was saturated with iron. The water was echoing deep and lubbing, running high.

“Only come in if you did not understand what I meant the other day.”

Do not panic. I was not lying. It will be gone soon.

She came home from the doctor. She had been vomiting. The doctor examined her; his wife did too. She came back holding her stomach over her white dress. “They said it is morning sickness.”

Aura wasn’t smiling at him. There was a cold, lifeless air around her. It was weird; she said before that she was infertile. But there was no sting of betrayal. Only worry. Head-aching worry.

She was not lying.

The door flew wide, as his eyes did, meeting their own color. Red. A trail of bloody red, sloppy lines and the small footprints of a girl dressed in white. There was blood on her too. On the front and back of her dress, starting from her thighs, streaming down her legs. She was leaning over the side of the bath and washing her hands in the torrential water. It was nearly to the rim of the tub. She looked over when the door slammed into the wall, when the click of his shoes sounded on the tile floors, rushing towards her.

“What happened?” his tone held more panic than he wanted it too. She stood up straight, offered her wet hands forward and pushed them into his. Some of the tendrils of her hair, white loops and waves, were tip-dyed in red. Her dripping hands were glaciers. She gestured her head toward the toilet and his eyes found what she wanted them to.

A pool, a swelling ocean of scarlet. Blood smeared the seat and dribbled around the base.

“Wha…” It was all he could do to draw breath.

“Sorry about the mess.” She turned to examine the scene as well. Where it had come from was still leaking. It was sticking to the toes of his shoes. She reached over and switched the tap off. They stood in silence. Only he could hear her heart accelerating.

“Your child.”

Her voice was lost like the echo in a chasm.

Looking between her blue eyes and her red aftermath was giving him a headache.

“What?”

She removed a hand from his, pointed to the toilet bowl. “The egg you inseminated. This is what happens to the children that try to grow inside me.”

She dropped her hand. Her face turned to the bowl, away from him. She wouldn’t look back. “Undress me.”

It was a dress he had taken her out of before. The straps tie, they just had to be undone, and the whole would drift to the floor. His head felt like static. It was done before he could think about the purpose of the command.

Like cloth, her white skin was dyed so thoroughly. Every thread, every hair. Red. From between her legs a little blood still seemed to trickle. It seeped into the lines between her hips and thighs, the backs of her knees, around the jaunty bones of her ankles. The streams carved into her delicate skin. The urge to hug her came over him.

“Why?”

She finally looked over at him. “A self-defense mechanism. My body is not strong enough to carry and deliver a child. So it forcibly evicts that which places it in harm’s way.”

“You would think… a body like yours would want to have children.”

Aura wrinkled her nose, almost snickering. “You would think. The universe plays tricks. The gods who built me gave me a murdering body, so their children I murder.”

“Fitting.”

“Filthy. Lift me into the tub.”
“It’ll flow over.”

“We need to clean the floor anyway. Flush the toilet as well.”

In a rush of steam and cascade of water, her freezing body drifted into the boiling bath and melted, camouflaged with the porcelain sides until the water turned pink. The blood smoothie rippled itself out of existence, down copper pipes and into the copper ground. She didn’t ask for it, but his white shirt soaked up the blood from the tile beside her white dress, overrun with the river of his displacement. His hands found her in the bloody water and were prepared to do this over and over, until she had no eggs left to bleed into porcelain and wash away. His arms held her warming body and felt that she was ashamed, bothered that he was bothered.

“You know,” his response was more casual than their blood bath and the tears brimming her eyelashes deserved, “as a son of hell, you are the only child of the gods I believe is worth something. The last thing I want is another hindrance.”

“You are trash.” She wished she wasn’t crying.

“I am aware.”

“Congrats on sitting through that s**t show,” Shae opened his eyes, looked over the table at the two boys. Star had his eyes buried in his older brother’s neck; Star sniffled behind his sleeve. Even Shae looked a bit sympathetic. “Gives you another perspective on why she loved you guys so much, huh?” The two nodded, bonking heads. The scent of blood was gone, but the sight forever remained, inside the three.

Author's Note

If you read more of my future writing you'll see more about these people, I write about them all the time, which is why it may seem like you were just thrown into a random scene without context (bc you kind of were).
-Aura