The shower doesn't stop running.

Like falling footsteps, like an earthbound trajectory, like a familiar path leading to home; it doesn't stop. He doesn't make it stop. Kris blinks. It's his hand on the knob, alabaster fingers pressed on the swell of its metallic body. He doesn't make it move. It's trembling- he feels it, in the fluctuating heat between his palm and the bell of his shiny companion. Why doesn't he want it to move? He flexes his fingers. Loosen, tighten, loosen, tighten, curl. The bone of his wrist tips upwards. Ah, that must be it. It's not supposed to be rotary; he needs to push it down. If he can push down the shower knob, then the water will stop falling, and the shower will stop running.

( Not really, no. He can't. The knob twitches under his touch. It gives, gives, gives-- a flat second later, he pulls it back up. )

Lethargic slaps ring loudly against stark white walls. A garbled grunt, the slam of a fist; a shuddery sigh spills into the chittering notes of tumbling water. There's steam on the glass, masking the flitty silhouette of distress. He's bathed in white. Doused in white. White walls, white lights, white steam. White towels and white t-shirts and white bottles lining the tall white shelves.

( White skin, white teeth, white fingers so much longer than terracotta ones wrapped around an aluminium sword. )

He turns his gaze skywards, drags a hand through his hair. It's rough and unruly, meticulously scrubbed with soap, so clean that it snarls when his fingers slide beside once-compliant tresses. They catch on a troublesome knot. In tandem, he clicks his tongue. Whereas others eased themselves out with the patiently running water, that one had stayed stubborn, knotted even tighter which each pull, intention honeyed over. It doesn't undo.

Ah, how stubborn. He contemplates taking the pair of scissors in the cupboard to cut it off. Cut all of his hair off.

Last he checked outside the window, it had been raining. Quite heavily, too, despite the television's predicted drizzle. Or caterpillar rain, as his friend in the shower had liked to call it, because it was fuzzy like all the spikes on the little caterpillars they sometimes found on the bushes outside. Even though he hated bugs, he always took time to bend down and admire them. It was amusing watching the scarecrow made of overgrown hay and lanky limbs squat down on the pavement, plastic file barricading his face from the wriggling thing, curious and mortified. It takes no more than empty threats from Kris- "Hurry, or I'll throw it in your face." "Quick, come here, or its mother will come after you!" "You are bug-eyed already. If you stare any longer, you'll become one of their brothers, do you want that?"-  to get his pigeon-galled friend to leave. Ironic, really. He was convinced that pigeons could digest caterpillars.

"Ah, Yifan!"

"You wouldn't dare! You ran away from a balloon!"

"You have to recognise me if I turn into a caterpillar. What? You just have to find the clumsiest one? No, I'm not that bad, you-"

He could see that face in front of him, suddenly. Hear his voice in the back of his mind, when he whined, at three in the morning, for Kris to wake up so he wouldn't have to shower alone; for Kris to let him take one of his strawberries when he'd run out of snacks to eat; for Kris to get out of the shower so he wouldn't have to be scared looking at the caterpillar, the same caterpillar that he looked at from behind a pink plastic file but brought home anyway, because 'it looked so helpless swinging about in the rain'.

"What's there to be scared of? It's just a fuzzy little thing. You're so much bigger. Here, let me put it on my finger- aw, what the hell, it doesn't even go past the pad of my thumb."

"Buuuut, Yifan, we're so much bigger than knives and guns too!"

His face, his face. One streak across sun-kissed skin. Blue around his neck, guns and knives, catalogues in the closet, dreams of a pearl handle cradled in his hands, knocking against his head.

His fist slams against the glimmering knob. Abruptly, the noise stops, like a sudden dip after a mighty crescendo. As the vestigial wetness drips away into the drain, he storms out of the bathroom, not closing the door, not turning off the lights. The towels are left untouched.

He falls asleep that night watching a caterpillar eat its weight in leaves. The rain lulls him to sleep, puts his vision in the frame of a white-washed summer day, with the habitual nagging reminder that he should only give one strawberry to Tao when he asks, not the entire box, not the second box that he'd saved for the next day and the day after.

Outside, the shower doesn't stop.