Chapter Text
Footsteps padded across the tile floor, the door creaking open and shutting with a gentle thump.
Kalim curled around his phone, held in both of his hands, and let himself choke on his regret with deep, heaving cries. The carpet wrapped around his trembling, fetal form tightened around him, presumably in hopes that compression could comfort him enough to calm. It couldn’t. The carpet still tried its hardest.
He was a bad person, wasn’t he? Jamil really was just doing his job, after all. A job he had to do under threat of poverty and suffering for his entire family. And it was Kalim’s fault; or, if not his, then Al-Asim’s. Both were him, at the end of the day. He’d only be Kalim until his first wife, after all.
First. Because, of course, he wanted seven. He wanted to consummate his marriage with three officiators watching. He wanted to not be able to remember all of his childrens’ names and birth dates. He wanted weddings that cost enough to feed whole families for months. That was desirable - no, that was the best life anyone could ever ask for. Or so he’d been told.
He felt dirty. Corrupt. Violated. Like he’d been constructed out of rotting wood, soft and molding, fibers fraying.
Well, his organs were sustained by blood money, no? Even if his family only acted as middlemen in between gun suppliers, politicians and the military industrial complex, every calorie was a person's life lost in exchange for a penny in the piggy bank.
Old fables always told of those who drained the life force from others to sustain spry, youthful bodies for eternity. Always told of how the underdog would rip their soul back and watch the witch shrivel into a pile of shavings. Billionaires existed in stories only to be burned at the pire, sacrificed on the altar of the suppressed and starved.
If he were truly good, he would accept that as his fate. For the greater collective, for the swaths of people who lived lives like Ruggie’s or Azul’s - people who contributed to society in real, tangible ways and still had to worry about next month’s rent, or how much that nice jacket cost.
But he was selfish. And, selfishly, he felt gutted. Split open and strewn out on the floor of his own room, to be found by morning by someone he never invited inside.
He needed to apologize. It wasn’t Jamil’s fault he had a job.
The thought of him made his skin crawl. Body tighten in on itself, nails claw at the bare flesh of his arms.
Why had he said that? He didn’t hate Jamil. He could never hate Jamil. He was so stupid.
It wasn’t that he’d looked through Kalim’s stuff. It wasn’t the yelling. That was fine. Jamil was worried, Kalim was thankful. And, really, he did make a good point - it was pretty irresponsible of him to drink. What if he blacked out and hurt someone? That had never gotten even close to happening, sure, but it could! And what if he said something he couldn’t take back, what if…
He’d done that though, no? Sure, he thought Jamil was asleep, but still. He was so, so stupid. Jamil was right to scold him.
Kalim shouldn’t have apologized the first time. If he hadn’t stopped, Jamil wouldn’t have forced him to say… something. He didn’t know what had been wrenched from him. It was like being roofied - one woke only with the understanding that something had been taken from them, violently, that knowledge stored deep in the bone. But bone couldn’t hold memory, or description.
He should apologize now, though. He’d yelled, he’d made a scene, distracted Jamil from his homework and kept him from sleeping. That wasn’t fair to him. He was just doing his job.
Kalim was just other peoples’ problem. No autonomy, no agency, and therefore, never responsible for his own actions. He should’ve been grateful for the liberty, for the privilege. So why was he so angry? Why was he still incapable of breathing properly? Was he dying? Maybe something had been in those pancakes…
No! Jamil wouldn’t poison him. Even if he would mind control him, pin him down and take what they wanted, snap his ribcage open and pry- Jamil would never stoop that low! Kalim knew that. Sometimes people just forgot how to breathe without gasping and shaking! It was probably just in Kalim’s head anyway.
He hoped he wouldn’t get a response, wouldn’t break one of the eggshells he danced upon. The light of his phone screen burned his red eyes, fingers trembling as he plugged in his pin. Kalim made sure to type slowly, careful to not let tear-blurry vision or twitchy digits corrupt the spelling of the text. “Thank you. I’m sorry I yelled. Have a good night.”
He watched the screen, hyperventilating, choking on his own fear. His throat was still raw from screaming.
Kalim had meant it when he texted it, but not for a second after. For one fleeting moment, he’d been bitter, angry at how he was being treated, tired of the notion that he was some collector’s item that was to sit unmoving in a glass cage. It dissipated into nothing but despair as quickly as it flared. He was lucky. He lived a life so gilded in gold he no longer saw beauty in it. He never went hungry, never felt the biting cold or strangling heat of a house without climate control. How dare he claim to hate the less fortunate because they’d grown tired of their undeserved oppression.
He was so ungrateful. He should’ve been ashamed. He was ashamed; in the way that turned bone marrow rancid and flesh moldy.
He wanted to rip his skin off. Maybe, if he took off the casing, it would grow back right. Maybe, if he got to the innards, he could take a toothbrush to the dirt, scrub it from his rotten organs. His hand moved to claw at his arms unconsciously, but the warm fabric of the carpet cocooning him stopped it.
Wait, something on the screen had changed.
The message now had two small check marks below it, delivered and read.
There was no reply. Relief washed over him like the tide.
But… no. He shouldn’t have been relieved. He loved Jamil.
”He’s such a beautiful boy,” A figure, face corrupted by time and repression, cooed, voice slimy, dripping in the fluids he spent his entire life injecting the unwilling with. “White hair, red eyes, tattoos… What isn’t there to love?”
“And so quiet…” The other smiled, slinking across the sandstone floor. “Do you think it speaks Tagalog?”
“Doubt it. Doesn’t matter anyway. S’not like we’re gonna ask it anything.” He did, a bit. He was from a family of merchants, after all. He needed to be able to speak with clients in the future, and Tagalog was a common first language locally. Kalim - no, number 3, the Asim, it - kept playing mancala with Jamil in the back of his mind. Let reality dissolve. See no evil, speak no evil, hear no evil… see no evil, speak no evil, hear-
“Wonder how much it takes to make an heir scream…”
Reality came back to him with an anguished screech and a light head. The magic carpet pet his face with its tassels, wrapped around him as tight as it could. Kalim understood that to be an attempt to calm him, but all it did was make him feel like he’d been bagged.
Get it off, get it off get it offgetitoffgetitoff-
Fabric whipped against the bedframe two inches from his face, smacking him with one of its corners and dragging him from his hiding spot in rage. He thrashed against its ‘grip’ (two of its corners wrapped around his leg), out of both blind fear and the pain shooting down his joint and into his thigh. “Stop! STOP! LET ME GO! GET OFF OF ME!”
It didn’t listen. No one ever listened. They never would.
The carpet wrenched him from his hiding place, ignored his hands clawing at the bed frame above in an attempt to stay in the dark. His fingers hooked on the lip of the wood, stretching his arms uncomfortably far as he tried in vain to stop the assailant. He was out of practice - his fingers slipped, and, head slightly raised for extra grip strength, the back of his skull smacked against the tile with a blinding thump.
Familiar white encased him, so nostalgic he almost enjoyed it. But the world didn’t stay away for long.
He came back to with the sound of his own groaning, splintered hand rubbing the quickly-growing goose egg. He was grateful to feel no liquid seeping through his hair. Slightly doubled, squinted vision showed him a half-worried, half-angry decor piece floating above him. It gently touched the side of his cheek, checking on him. He flinched.
Visibly conflicted as it watched Kalim sit up, it gestured at one of its edges, ripped and frayed where the golden embroidery should have been defining its borders.
Wait… he’d done that?
Tears flooded his eyes.
He hurt everyone and everything around him. He was like an untrained dog - destroying things, then offering big, wet eyes as his only form of compensation. This, this was why he didn’t let himself get angry!
Pathetically, he whispered a meaningless, “I’m sorry…” and buried his face in his hands.
He wasn’t sure how long he sat there, self-pitying and sobbing. He was such a brat. 17 years old, and he broke down in tears when things got mad at him for breaking them? Spoiled.
At some point, a demon from the dark beyond wrapped around his hand. Kalim shot back, but they didn’t care. They were stronger than him, he was tied up. What would a little boy like him do to stop them? Eyes half-lidded, a man grabbed his chin and put his thumb against his lip, playing with the supple flesh of his prey. In an instant, on instinct, Kalim took the digit into his mouth and bit down with all his meager strength. Liquid life poured into his mouth, causing the severed flesh to float to the roof of his m-
Kalim was a teenager, almost a man, on the floor of his bedroom and staring blankly at a very confused piece of fabric.
His eyes were puffy and heavy, the late night and the tears sucking any vestige of energy from him. Kalim reached out a shaking hand to pat the hovering carpet before him, then turned to pull himself up by the foot of his bed.
Pain and stiffness knocked him right back to the floor, leaving the magic carpet - whom he just maimed out of panic - to catch his head before it cracked against the tile a second time.
Kalim allowed it to guide him back down limply, enveloped in embroidery. It slipped out from under him once he was safely laid on the ground, hovering above him and tipping a corner to the side in confusion. He smiled up at it weakly.
“Help me up…?” He knew, after attacking it, he had no right to ask. Still, he raised one of his hands up, and still, the magic carpet placed a corner in his open palm.
He wrapped his fingers around it and let the blanket hoist him up to sit, then lifted his other arm to brace himself while he stood. The magic carpet bore his weight, which his aching feet could not. Stabilizing himself before crawling into the sheets, he looked his bed over. Perfectly made, save for the wrinkles made from where Jamil had sat.
He shivered. Almost gagged.
At the thought of a slave doing a job he was obligated to do. He had no right to feel violated. His family had violated the Vipers’ very personhood for centuries.
Still, the feeling persisted as he limped his way into his comforters, the magic carpet boosting him up when his feet slipped.
Pathetic.
His head hit his pillows, and he was guided to sleep by the most crushing form of guilt, the warm carpet curled up beside him despite its wound. Seven, really? It cudded back up that easily. He could beat a puppy and guilt-trip it into bounding back into his arms.
But, like every rich man, he still somehow slept at night.
—
He woke in paralyzed agony, legs unwilling to move, femurs and hips melted down to calcium based lava.
This was why he stopped worrying himself with things out of his control. Stress was never kind to him.
But, as it was, he lied unmoving. The dawn came in through his windows, soft and blue in the earliest hours. Daggers shot through his body, down his legs, up his abdomen, through his arms. Cloying, creeping nausea frostbit his esophagus. Kalim kept staring blankly out into the desert. There would be no dancing in the sands for him today.
He was always denied pain medication because of that. When he hurt, he wanted to dance. The doctors, therefore, never took his pain seriously. ‘No, no, if you were really at an eight, you wouldn’t be able to walk’. He always thought that was stupid. Nothing got him off his feet. In danger, one must flee, and an object in motion stays in motion. Every instinct he’d ever had would tell him to do cartwheels around the med bay. No morphine for the little ballerina.
He had probably been being dramatic, like they’d said. Despite that, the ibuprofen they offered never worked.
Already disarmed and lying down, however, no force could wrench his body from its gaudy, plush grave. Not even the steadily encroaching feeling of sickness could incite much more than him rolling over to face his door in hopes that, if he were to throw up, he could lean over the edge and not sully his sheets.
Maybe Jamil would come and check on him.
But probably not. And, for some reason, the thought of him forcing his way back in for a third time brought him nothing but dread.
He wanted comfort. Jamil was comfort.
But that was all fake. That mirage gave way to sand dunes months ago. Why, then, did he keep walking toward it?
Tight, strained muscles around his middle whined as he laid unmoving, staring blankly at his door. It had handles. If he really wanted to, he could stick a broom handle in between them, bar what was rightfully his off from the rest of the world.
But it wasn’t rightfully his. Everything he had was stolen from workers.
That thought was finally the one to make him choke. Coughing caused firebolts, lightning rods to shoot through every inch of his being, the world white hot and stabbing. His hip flexors, quads, abs turned to kindling, muscle fibers separated and dried in the accursed desert sun for a bonfire fed by every strained breath he pulled in. He barely managed to lift his head a few centimeters when acid finally flooded his mouth.
Welp. So much for aiming for the tile.
After a few moments of blind sputtering, he squinted open his eyes, confused by the sound of scraping. Just beyond his bed was the carpet, having pushed a trash can over from the other side of his room. Sweet, if ultimately useless. The pillow in front of him was stained with half-absorbed spit and bile, having not eaten since dinner. Luckily, it was one of the smaller, decorative ones. Kalim tiredly pawed it off the edge of his mattress and onto the floor, rolling over with the last few drops of energy in him.
He barely registered the carpet patting him on the head with a tassel. Normally, such a sudden contact would shoot him back up, checking who it was from and why.
Unless Jamil was nearby, of course.
For some reason, the thought of him being no more than a hundred feet away didn’t bring him any comfort.
—
The sun burned his closed eyes. He tossed an arm over his face with a groan. His stomach growled, angry at having not been fed.
Ugh, what time was it?
Eyes strained by the light, he fumbled around for his phone. Why did it smell like acid?
Oh, right.
His hand brushed against a cool glass screen, and Kalim grabbed it. Sevens, his arms were tired. And his waist hurt. And he was hot, and…
“Mmmngh…” He whined into his pillow, lethargic and unwilling to do much more than twitch his fingers. Propping his hand holding his phone up with a stray pillow, he pressed the power button. 10:13.
He’d missed two of his morning classes and, if he were to immediately shoot up and run despite the cramping in his legs, would be tardy to the third.
Jamil hadn’t woken him for school, then?
He didn’t know if he was sad or relieved. He knew, of course, it should have been the former. But Jamil didn’t need to add anything more to his plate, and honestly? Kalim didn’t want to see him. He wouldn’t get it. He never did. It was like he was making a deliberate effort not to most of the time. But, of course, Jamil would never do that. Jamil was much more capable of dealing with reality than Kalim had ever been. Rejecting something off-handedly for his own comfort just wasn’t something he was prone to doing.
The magic carpet poked Kalim’s cheek. He groggily looked to where it had curled up to see it pointing at his door. ’Go eat something.’
He didn’t really want to get up, but he was hungry, and he couldn’t spend the entire day rotting in bed.
One time he’d felt similar to this, not long after winter break. He’d mentioned it to Jamil, asked him how to fix the newly developed black hole in his chest. Jamil had told him to go take a nap like he’d always done before, and Kalim had perked up at the idea of his normal tactics working on such an all-consuming discomfort. Said if that didn’t work he could call Cater or Lilia.
He’d ended up swimming in and out of sleep for the rest of the day and doing his own make-up at four in the morning because he was wide awake and incapable of making himself do anything to perk up further. He’d tried to dance, but his feet were sluggish.
Kalim kept distracting himself with basic need fulfillment and doing what Jamil recommended on days like these, but no napping. That would cement him to the mattress if he let it.
So, with grit teeth and a herculean effort, he propped himself up on his forearms. Slowly, he swung one spasming leg over the edge, then hauled the second dead weight over. The magic carpet hovered beside him, preparing to provide support if needed. It already knew how pathetic he was.
To his credit, Kalim did try to get up on his own. The first time he just plopped back down to where he’d been sitting. The second, his knees gave out under him and he had to catch himself with the waiting side of the floating textile.
As he struggled to get his footing, his fingers brushed against the ripped edge of the fabric, and the carpet twitched. It was trying not to move away, knowing he needed it to take his body weight. But it reacted.
He did that. He hurt everyone who ever tried to be good to him.
But there was no point dwelling on what had already been done! He’d just call the artisan who does repairs on it later.
As it was, though, he looked down to the cold ground below his feet. The round pillow he’d knocked off his bed a few hours ago sat beside his toes.
Knowing he couldn’t bend down, he started to climb up onto the carpet. His efforts were sloppy, but the magic carpet accommodated his movement and helped him. It didn’t need to be told to float him to the floor, having watched his eyes. He grabbed the dirty pillow and put it in his own lap, refusing to further desecrate the carpet.
It seemed to appreciate that, though there wasn’t anything but instinct to tell him so.
It hovered over to the door, helping Kalim push it open.
“To the laundry room.” He tried to make it sound like a theatric demand, but it came out quiet and rough. The carpet didn’t mind, though. It just took the order with the same acceptance Jamil used to.
How dare he miss that.