Infestation: SFH Mini Fic
just to warn you all, this is a body horror fic. it's really nasty. but body horror is one of my favorite genres so bare with me. this is also a post cannon fic wherein I imagine jongwoo to be coping with the events of eden in....a way......
Jongwoo crawled under the covers of his bed, plain white sheets brushing against his skin uncomfortably. He adjusted the cotton pillow underneath his head and tucked his hands underneath to give support to the much too soft stuffing. The moon-shaped night light he kept shined yellow, the light just barely strong enough to distract him from sleeping. Maybe he should move it off of his nightstand.
He would be able to sleep tonight. He would. He was completely certain of it. He’d done everything he was supposed to; had carried out his nighttime ritual exactly according to how he had written it down that morning.
His therapist told him that writing his feelings and plans down would help him to cope—and so write he did. He made lists for each of his days, lists for each task to be completed, lists of the horrors that visited him in his sleep the night prior. Life got a little easier, but his nightmares wouldn’t go away.
Jongwoo closed his eyes and turned away from the nightlight. He counted backwards in his head. His therapist told him it would help to fall asleep faster.
Jongwoo opened his eyes. His nightlight had turned off at some point, as his room was now completely cast in pitch black. The sheet under him was damp with sweat and stuck to his skin like wet clothes. He swung his legs over the bed, but instead of the cheap stick-on hardwood floors of his apartment, his feet met dewey grass. Jongwoo stood up and brushed his toes through the grass to make sure it was real, squatting down to dig his fingers into the soil underneath. It was definitely real grass.
Jongwoo shrugged it off and opened his bedroom door. The door opened into a darkly lit hallway. The walls were blackened like they had begun to mold and the numbers on each room door were rusted over. He’d opened the door to Eden.
He hadn’t lived there in years. After everything that had happened, Jongwoo had booked it back home as soon as he was discharged from the hospital. When he’d knocked on the front door of his home, his mother opened the door in confusion. He explained to her that Jaeho, the friend who’d he gone to Seoul to work for, had died, and left out any details about the residence.
Yet, here he stood once more in the grimy halls of Eden. Except they were slightly different than he remembered. As he walked further along, hand dragging him through the darkness, it occurred to him that the walls had a sort of furry, carpet-like texture. It was difficult to tell in the dull lighting, but it looked like moss had taken root in the walls.. Jongwoo skipped past the kitchen and bathrooms, instead heading directly for the stairs, of which were growing vines. It seemed the whole of Eden had turned into an overgrown garden. Did that mean no one lived here any longer? No, that couldn’t be true.
Jongwoo pulled himself up the stairs to the fourth floor. The door was covered in tangled vines which he ripped apart until there was enough clear space to get to the door handle. When he opened it, an earthly scent immediately flooded his nose—the smell of soil and rocks and grass, and something muskier too that didn’t register in his head. The air on the fourth floor was moist and sticky, as if the place had been turned into a greenhouse.
He ventured off to the back room where a dentist chair was usually set up. The door creaked open, and at first it was too dark for Jongwoo to see anything. But he could hear it. The quiet squirming noises that whispered under the draft.
In the middle of the room lay a large body. The arms and legs were bound by thick vines, tying up the limbs like an intricate shibari scene. They wrapped in between and over the legs, contorting them unlike any human body could ever accomplish its own. The arms lay flat out next to the sides, but Jongwoo could only imagine how beautiful the body would look if the vines had pulled those delicate arms back, stretching the muscles taut like a bow string. Overhead, an apple tree stood tall, branches pulled down by succulent fruit. He had entered a garden of paradise.
Jongwoo stepped forward in between the feet. By now, his eyes had adjusted to the darkness and he could see them now. See him now. Seo Moonjo. Most of the muscle had withered away from his body, but his face was still obvious—his bone structure far too prominent to be confused for anyone else. There were maggots squiggling throughout his body, taking away tiny pieces of flesh as they wiggled their way underneath his bones. Full colonies of ants trailed their way up his fingers and through his arms, collecting scraps to take back to their nest. The vines had twisted through his hair, now matted with blood and earth, but the slice at his throat had been left untouched by nature. The handiwork was too beautiful to destroy—it was a mark of divine power. The Gods had given Jongwoo one chance to make his impression on Moonjo, and he delivered with the fury of a thousand beasts.
Jongwoo looked down at his own feet, noticing how the insects had begun to crawl under him to squeeze into the soil, choosing to bury their treasures away underneath the damp grass. The room was completely infested.
Jongwoo dropped to his knees and ran a hand up one of the legs. He squeezed only slightly, as if testing the ripeness of a fruit from the supermarket, and gasped at how easily the flesh tore away from Moonjo’s thigh. Moths had long since eaten away at the black slacks that once covered his legs, only scraps left over from the carnage. Jongwoo dug his fingers into the flesh a little harder, and pulled back a layer of skin. It was so pale now, so beautiful, so close in color to what the original Seo Moonjo had been like. But there was something mystifying about the lack of color in this rotting flesh, white like the underbelly of a fish. It smelt horrible, not unlike the stench of roadkill that everyone is too afraid to shovel off the road, but it wasn’t a smell Jongwoo was unused to by now.
He dangled the piece of skin in front of him and his mouth began to salivate. The epidermis layer was still somewhat intact, but the fat layer had not been graced with the same restoration. Drool spilled down his lips, the liquid pooling in his mouth uncontrollably.
In all of his excitement, he had almost missed the spider that crawled out from the slit at the neck. Moonjo looked so beautiful this way. Body taken over by nature—flesh decomposing into the earth. Every living creature soon returned to the soil, nature made no expectations for any man, not even Moonjo.
Jongwoo crawled over the body, over Moonjo, and lowered his head down to rest on sternum. The bones were fragile, all the muscle had dissolved over time, and Jongwoo had to be careful not apply too much pressure to the ribcage. Moonjo was light as a feather. This man who had loomed over his life for weeks was now reduced to a frail set of bones. Jongwoo grinned. He trailed his fingers up the line of Moonjo’s shoulder lovingly, hand coming to rest at blue lips. How incredible—these lips which had once been so full of a deep red color, now so cold and so light.
Jongwoo pushed his fingers into the mouth and wrenched the jaw open. The pads of his fingers pressed along the teeth that still remained in his skull. He giggled to himself, stuck on the thought of how fun it would be to rip one out of the jaw bone. Jongwoo still kept the bracelet of teeth Moonjo had given him. In the first several months after he escaped, he had refused to take it off. After desperate pleas from his worried mother, he agreed to keep it in a jewelry box, somewhere she wouldn’t have to see it. He took it out when he felt uneasy—played with each tooth and rolled them between his fingers.
His therapist told him it would be best to throw out the bracelet—it was an unhealthy attachment to a traumatic moment in his life—but she knew nothing of the dreams he lived out with this bracelet, with Moonjo that night. The way his body shivered when his hand rubbed over his cock in the middle of the night and the cool chain brushed against the underside of the head, and he could imagine for just a moment that Moonjo was the one touching him, the phantom of skilled fingers trailing around him until he burst.
Now, pressed against the corpse, he thought if he pulled one of the teeth, he could take it as a keepsake—a small treasure Moonjo had lent him in the afterlife. They were destined to be together in life and death. Moonjo had vowed that they would be together forever. Everything that belonged to Moonjo also belonged to Jongwoo now. He pulled one out, wrapping his fingers around one of Moonjo’s back molars. He tucked the tooth into his pocket—he’d put it in his box later. Spiders were beginning to trail their way over Jongwoo’s ribs. His body was becoming a part of Moonjo’s now. He sat back up, just shy of straddling the waist but being careful to keep all his weight on his knees, pressing into the dirt.
He felt the drool again. It was trailing down his chin, some of it puddling in between the empty cavity of the ribs. Right. All of these little bugs were treating themselves to his spoils. It was his turn now. Flies buzzed in his ears, giving suggestions of where he should bite.
He bowed down once more, licking a stripe up the side of the cheek that hadn’t fully decomposed. His saliva ran down Moonjo's chin, almost like tear stains. He would have looked pretty with tears running down his face.
Jongwoo bit down on the cheek, teeth ripping into the thin layer of skin and peeling it back from the jawbone. It was a horrible texture, all rubbery like the gristly fat one pulls off from their pork. Jongwoo took the flesh into his mouth, his teeth chewing down fiercely and his tongue wrapping around the skin. It tasted so bad, like spoiled meat. But it was still so good. It was Moonjo. He swallowed it down toughly. It was a part of him now. Moonjo was a part of him now. He had given Moonjo so much, bits and pieces of his soul. But this? This was something Moonjo never could have taken from him.
Seo Moonjo, who tore into human flesh like it was a delicacy, who’d suggested for him to try different parts of the body to get a real taste for the meat, who was now being devoured by maggots—and by Jongwoo.
Jongwoo shot up out of his bed, panting heavily. The warm glow of his plastic moon caught his eye. He was in his room again. He was home. When his breathing had calmed, Jongwoo checked his pockets for the tooth he’d taken as a souvenir. Nothing. He scrambled out of bed, ripping the sheets from his legs, and jumped up to look for his jewelry box. He picked up the box and took out the bracelet of teeth, clutching it in his hand until he felt his nerves unravel. He looked back in the box, and there lay the tooth. Moonjo’s tooth. He smiled, put the bracelet back into the box, and returned to bed. As he lulled himself back to sleep, he heard a faint voice whisper in his ear.
“Jagiya, did I taste good?”
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