Intrinsic

[Lincoln King]

Inspiration
Music

Shame burned, tasting of copper and coloured crimson as it dribbled down his chin and from the corners of his mouth. Everything else was swollen into blackness bar the sliver of dull light that his retina's latched onto like a lifeline. The pain was no longer a sensation, the shock had sent it screaming into some distant part of his mind that merely acknowledged it existed. Instead what he felt was a dull throbbing through every inch of his battered body, blood rising to the surface in blooming bruises like macabre bouquets against his skin. Tingles of pins and needles tried to urge him to move his protesting limbs that would rather remain limp and listless on the asphalt, resigned to their fate. A concrete curb caressed along the curve of his spine, huddled haphazardly against it to avoid getting a car to the face was one so inclined as to drive-by and drift over his decimated self. He felt OK, the fear had galloped away with his racing pulse, heart slowing after the assault had subsided and the assailants went to lick the few wounds he managed to inflict in the flurry of fists. His knuckles had split, a notable addition to his impressive list of maladies and malarkey for the evening, it's what had earned his lip the right to do the same in retaliation. Consciousness came and went with the roaring of blood rushing in his ears, like a great tide ebbing and flowing to mark the ominous drag of time. Hope was hinged on that fading crack of light and the whistling, wheezing breaths he managed through lungs that felt trapped inside their prison of splintered ribs. His heart raged behind that crushed cave, the muscle contracting convulsively in an effort to restore his oxygen saturation to an acceptable standard while he choked down blood into battered lungs.

The embrace that had crushed his thoracic cavity started as affection, an expression of passion but upon rude interruption had erupted into blinding violence. There were four, inclusive of the cruel crusher. No, that pain was gone externally but his insides radiated with the ache of bile bitter betrayal, acidic abandonment and that cloying copper shame that threatened to suffocate.He’d accepted that he was going to die here alone, decided it, because he’d given in to urges, to the desire to be with who he wanted to be with. Damn desire. The thing was he wasn’t alone, not anymore, but the vehement victim was so far gone that presence of another went mostly unnoticed. He didn't feel the hands that held him, turning him to his side so that he could further expel the dangerous fluids that flooded his airways. He barely heard the voice that spoke soothing words in harsh whispers, a desperate urging. His broken nose couldn't smell the soap and leather scent of his saviour, he would only remember it later as some distant memory conjured to help him breathe deep during times of stress. The arms that cradled him didn't shake, but he knew one of them trembled in the back of that beaten up **** box the saviour’s friend drove dangerously to the hospital. His skin was losing its feverish heat, the clammy coolness that spoke of his blood loss far from soothing as the harsh lights of the hospital hit him.

When Lincoln King woke four days later his saviour was gone, the dark haired man who'd bent down and whispered desperately to bring him back from the brink. Nothing remained but a leather jacket that hung empty over a chair, flakes of red brown crusted and crumbling in patches where Lincoln had bled with abandon during their short time together. While it waited for him he didn't feel alone, he refused to let it leave his sight even when his parents tried to insist it be removed from the room. The man had called himself Kingsley, it was something to focus on in his mangled state, to ponder and repeat in hopes it might begin to mean something. Lincoln clung to the fuzzy memories of Kingsley when medication induced sleep claimed him over and over. It wasn’t difficult to establish that the man hadn’t used his real name, once they’d found the teenagers identification and worked out that the mangled kid in the bed was the heir apparent to the King fortune. His rescuer hadn’t wanted to implicate himself in what could become a potentially messy story were it to get out. The parents handled that, a few well placed bills had him in a private room, with dedicated staff sworn to secrecy and plans to whisk him away to recover for the summer, some excuse about a semester abroad. Perhaps they really would ship him back to Sweden; it wouldn’t be the first time.

He never would figure out the man’s real identity, and that single name, one given hastily, begun to take on a life of it’s own once the one who had given it disappeared. No one had counted on this man, Kingsley, invading many facets of the teenager’s life for years to come but the obsession became something he relied on, somehow linking it with his own identity in those crucial days of recovery. It had been around two weeks before Christmas when the assault had happened, ten years had passed and still, when he put that jacket on in front of the mirror he saw the dark haired man before him. The familiar crooked smile, the shy glance away that seemed innocent enough until it turned back, shockingly sharp with a quiet determination, a fierce protectiveness. There was a remoteness to him now, he’d gone from being a treasured guardian to grow into a violent menace, an entity unto himself that infected and involved itself so heavily in Lincoln’s world that it was difficult to separate the two. Prayer turned plague; never alone but desperately lonely for it. When you feared yourself how could you ask someone to try and love all of you?

Three years of “rage blackouts” and “hallucinations” eventually lead to a diagnosis of multiple personality disorder brought on by trauma related to his assault and the stress induced by it. Six years of adjusting, of learning that while he wasn’t entirely “crazy” he sure as **** was fucked up. Four of those years in an uneasy truce, acknowledging the changes they had both gone through as they’d grown together and finding ways to cohabit in this body that wore the scars of past trespasses. Ten years of this, ten years of not just being Lincoln King, of being a man discovering who he was outside of his family and only finding fears he was too chicken **** to face without Kingsley at his back. Too afraid to really accept his identity, to really own he was to the point where he’d clung childishly to this man that represented the will to fight, the NEED to fight for yourself.

Standing in front of the mirror his face was blurred, the image coming back to him of two men overlapping, their individual features lost as they clashed together. One man, one body and two minds.

He didn't believe the saying that time healed all wounds, not when the invisible still wept, barely stitched together with false bravado and blind ambition to appear whole; singular and complete oneself. Bruises faded, cuts and scrapes sealed, bones healed and the physical scars were few but ever present.

It seemed the medication never really wore off.