in the warmth the room appears smaller than it is. on the apex of owen’s forehead a dapple of sweat refuses to leave, reappears seemingly the moment after the back of his hand lifts to wipe it away before rolling down the hollow of his temple as he’s laid across a couch. this room is brighter, too, foolish judgement to stay in here with his eyes following the movement of the others’ hand lining up tiny sweets. he remains anyway. “thought you’d never ask.” the remark’s benign. a poor quip to be funny, one immediately burrowing nervousness in his head should it fall flat. “hey, wait a sec,” he’s too late. ares is out of the room and he cranes his neck to project the voice. “you gonna eat those skittles? i will, if you won’t.”
“thought you’d never ask,” comes ares delayed echo from the other room. the air conditioning unit exhales in his face and on his bare shoulders, and he removes himself from its steady hum, stopping on his way back to owen at the fridge. sparkling water will expedite the cooling process. “you want?” he offers one bottle. he can’t remember if owen is the sort to tolerate mineral water. he’s been told it’s an acquired taste, which may be true – there is something about it that ares can understand as unpleasant on an abstract other-people’s-shoes level – though ares can’t remember where he acquired it from. it’s always been available to him. “i hate skittles,” he confesses.
the afternoon is overly warm, and river is stripped to nothing but a white undershirt. the heat has done something to his brain; he’s fully immersed in sorting a pack of skittles into rows by colour, so that they will run the spectrum from dark to light. he has no intention of eating them. he hates their cloying taste. the sour ones are better; everyone ought to know that. the sound of a world war two documentary wafts in from the other room, loud enough to hear, low enough that he can’t quite follow the plot. “wait,” he says, to the room at large. “i have air conditioning.” @absentsdream
* cha eunwoo, cis male + he/him | you know ares blackthorn, right? they’re twenty-four, and they’ve lived in irving for, like, three years? well, their spotify wrapped says they listened to nobody speak by dj shadow, run the jewels like, a million times this year, which makes sense ‘cause they’ve got that whole death-touched, leather jacket, gold leaf thing going on. i just checked and their birthday is november 29th, so they’re a sagittarius, which is unsurprising, all things considered.
trigger warnings : death, alcohol, hallucinations / breaks with reality (implied) and/or ambiguous supernatural / horror elements (depending on interpretation).
ares’ parents die when he’s seven months old, and he is whisked away in the hands of his caretaker to the vast blackthorn estate. he is set to inherit his family’s gangnam district home, as well as their winter estate in california, when he turns eighteen. at the time of their deaths, his late parents’ pharmaceutical company is still thriving. he is adopted by the blackthorns, who were close with his parents. their progeny are allegedly cursed – only one of seven children of each blackthorn generation generally survive. then again, eventually everyone’s survival rate drops to zero. an older ares will find he isn’t very picky about the when, the how, or the why of the inevitable.ares seems to inherit the blackthorn family luck simply by guilt of association.
his best friend at his private boarding school is killed the summer of their senior year. ares is emotionless at the funeral. it feels as if the permanence of the situation simply hasn’t occurred to him yet. he remembers smoking a cigarette outside the church in which the funeral took place, wishing he was back in his dorm. lethargy grips him throughout the day, until finally he is allowed to fall into a dreamless sleep. his only other close friend at school, mary, is disturbed by his lack of reaction. he doesn’t know how to explain to her that the entirety of his reaction is internal, and besides, it hasn’t hit him properly yet. but he thinks, at the time, that it must eventually. that someday it will feel perfectly real that he will never see jacques again.
ares isn’t particularly close with his adoptive siblings. he gets along alright with them all, but there’s always a general awareness that if curses are real – and ares feels he may as well believe in them, because they do make life seem more interesting – that most of them may be dead eventually. he wonders – again, if curses are real – if he’ll be among the dead. if adoption is enough to bring him in. he’s been a blackthorn for a very long time. he was named after a blackthorn, too. indirectly named for a greek god, but that doesn’t really feel like the sort of loophole that might wrestle one free of a curse.
ares and mary are married when they’re both nineteen, and they move into ares’ penthouse suite in one of the buildings bequeathed to him. mary’s parents are not happy about the union. mary, raised catholic, was supposed to marry a catholic. ares is not a catholic. mary and ares do not plan on having children. they plan on partying like there’s no tomorrow, because, for all they know, there might literally be no tomorrow.
mary gets a bit fed up with this after a year and a half, and they undergo an amiable divorce. ares is becoming more and more detached from her. he thinks he can see the faces of his parents, following him through the city. he leaves, but there they are again, in paris, and in prague, and in hong kong.
he chooses a random place on a map of the american continent. then he chooses another random place, because he refuses to go to florida. north carolina wins out. irving sounds like just the sort of place to relax and recuperate and stop seeing the faces of the dead.
on the flight over to his new home, he sees himself, sat several aisles down in business class. he returns to his seat in first, trying not to overreact. he’ll see about finding a psychiatrist when he lands.
he doesn’t bother. whatever it is that he’s seeing, why ever it is that he’s seeing them, it changes nothing. besides, while he doesn’t actively believe in curses, or omens of death, he doesn’t not believe in them.
he sees his own face in irving sometimes, when mirrors are nowhere to be seen. after a while it stops being unnerving and crosses into distraction. he sees jacques the first winter he spends in irving, watching him in a shop window. ares waves at him. jacques doesn’t wave back, which ares supposes is fair. social cues probably don’t apply to the dead, or to hallucinations.
he spends much of his time in irving relaxing, going to the gym, drinking, etcetera, though he occasionally has zoom call meetings with the board of his parents’ – now his – company. he doesn’t care for business, doesn’t have the head for it. the company is involved in a major scandal when ares is 23, but he’s achieved enough anonymity and is detached enough from the company that he’s not bothered over it. nobody knows where he is; he intends to keep things that way.
half a year later, his family’s company goes bankrupt. he gets out while he can, and finds that, for the first time in his life, the contents of his bank account are finite. and instead of reaching out to the blackthorns, he accepts this. he keeps his apartment in irving and finds a job he’s vaguely qualified for. he cuts off all communication with the people in his old life.
