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arcadian-litterateur · 3 months

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bury it | kirin o'connor

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summary: kirin has a no-side-effects solution to dealing with trauma: he buries it. but as time goes on while he’s trapped on the island, he realizes slowly that this “no-side-effects” solution does, indeed, have side effects—and they might just be eating him alive.

word count: 1.7k

warnings: mentions of ab*se and r*pe

a/n: i know we never got kirin’s full backstory in the wilds before it was cancelled; only a tiny part of it, so i decided to use what little information we had, kirin’s obviously trained responses with josh’s situation, and fan theories to create my own backstory for him. this is a super dark one shot, guys, and it’s not romance or anything. it’s just a backstory for kirin, but i do indeed plan on making more kirin one shots that will most likely use this backstory as a foundation, so keep an eye on that! this is like my own little the wilds world-building, ig you could say. also... @mirchoff here it is! probably not at all what you thought the "kirin one shot" would be but i have a dark side ig. don't worry we'll get less dark kirin content soon.

𝗞𝗜𝗥𝗜𝗡 𝗜𝗦 no stranger to this shitty feeling. This shitty feeling of not mattering to the people he's supposed to matter to. It hit him early, and it fucked with his soul. He had a choice: let it fuck him up, or bury it.

He buried it, and he's been burying it ever since.

On the outside, he's always been the golden boy, the star athlete, the happy, popular jock who has everything he could ever want. He's always been a stereotype; a cliche…an easy-to-read, hard-to-get-with jock.

On the inside, he figures he's still a cliche, just a different one. He's an eccedentesiast. Someone who hides pain behind a smile. The golden boy, sure, but the golden boy with a dark past.

Maybe that's all he is: a remix of all the other broken, blond white boys. After all, what piece of Kirin O’ Connor isn't borrowed? He acts like his mom—she's a good woman, but she’s emotionally unavailable to him, much like his emotional withdrawal from the people around him. He looks just like his dad—fucking piece of shit. He got his jock attitude from the popular boys he used to idolize on television—now he realizes it was easier for them, because they had a script, and he didn't even get a plot summary. His talk comes from his coach—who saved his life, for which he'll always be grateful, but then ended up being a shitty, racist person just like the rest of them, and he hates him for it.

If he thinks about it, Kirin O’Connor doesn't truly like being this convoluted chemical reaction of different people. He wants to be something of his own. But he isn't sure how. And when he's honest with himself, he acknowledges that he's scared he's too fucked up to be anything on his own.

It started when he was a young, young boy, and his mother's father—he will never call him his grandfather—kicked them out of his house. He's not sure when he realized that relatives aren't supposed to be jerks, but he knows without a doubt that the only thing he and that man have in common is blood. He swears he will never be like his mother’s father; he will never sentence someone to cold nights in a car with the backseat for a bed.

Kirin still remembers clearly the days before he was popular. When he was still living in his mom’s car, abandoned by his father and now his grandfather, he watched his mom slowly slip away from him. And when he voiced his concerns to his teacher, explaining as best as an eight-year-old can that his mom needed help, he was mocked by the other children.

He was bullied by the other children for being forced into the role of caregiver too early.

Kirin shoved that pain down and decided that he was above it all. He spent so much time above it all that eventually, everyone else worked their way up, pulling themselves to his level like they envied his life. Gosh, if only they knew what his life was like.

He’s had two stepdads, and neither lasted. The first was named Grant, the second was Harvey. They were both artists, like maybe his mom had a type or something, and they were both sick. Not disease sick, but fucked up in the head, gross sick. Grant would always come home drunk, the classic stepdad with a beer belly and a loud, “Honey, I’m home!” He’d force Kirin’s mom to make his gross, alcoholic friends bean dip and casseroles. They’d trash the living room and then complain when Kirin didn’t clean up after them.

Kirin didn’t understand why his mom put up with it for as long as she did. It was only after Harvey was gone, too, that his mom showed Kirin the scar from the fireplace poker that Grant had stabbed her with when he was too drunk to think straight, whispering out the nasty threats Grant had made towards Kirin if she didn’t keep quiet. Kirin remembered that trip to the ER, but his mom told everyone she’d tripped and bumped the poker. And everyone had believed it, Kirin included.

But if Grant was awful, Harvey was a demon from hell. Actually, Kirin had contemplated this theory totally seriously at one point, so confused as to how someone could be so cruel. What his mom had seen in this guy was beyond him, but once the new couple got back from their honeymoon, Harvey turned nasty, and Kirin had to sit and watch. Harvey didn’t even try to hide the fact that he abused Kirin’s mom from the boy, who was fourteen at the time. He’d almost boast about it, as if he expected Kirin to take his side, too. Instead, Kirin learned the hard way that Harvey was harder to expose than he thought.

Sometimes, if Kirin is feeling especially masochistic, he’ll pull up his shirt and brush his hands along the dull, dark lumps of scar tissue all over his stomach from the countless times Harvey put out his cigarette on the boy’s pale skin. Maybe that’s one of the reasons that Kirin stays tan—it doesn’t hide the scars all the way, but it makes them seem less suspicious. Like they’re birthmarks or freckles.

But the cigarette burns were the least cruel abuse that Harvey subjected him to, and he doesn’t really want to even think about the other shit Harvey put him through. Kirin hasn’t told anyone about the darkest parts of that time in his life. They’ve heard about all the physical abuse; the violence, but he’s never told anyone about the worst of it. Not his therapist, not his CPS officer. Definitely not his mom, even though she’d endured the same, or even worse. If he talks about the hazy memories from those nights, he has to confront the fact that they were real, and so he leaves those memories be. Tells himself they’re just nightmares.

It could be true. Harvey is a consistent visitor in Kirin’s dreams. Even if the real man is locked away in a prison somewhere, he still haunts Kirin’s sleep like a specter.

He haunts Kirin now, even on this godforsaken island in the middle of nowhere. Kirin knows in his head that even if Harvey escaped prison and found Kirin’s old high school, he’d have no way to get to Kirin, because nobody fucking knows where he is.

Even Kirin doesn’t know where he is.

Maybe his memories that he swears are nightmares are the reason he could tell something was wrong with Josh. Kirin can’t explain what exactly tipped him off, but something inside his chest got super fucking tight, like it was constricting all of his blood and was going to rip his heart apart, and so he jumped in and told Josh to come with him. He was convinced he was being paranoid.

But now, staring at the welts on Josh’s chest, Kirin feels his blood chill, his fingertips finding the small pebbled cigarette scars on his torso as goosebumps rise on his body. Josh spews some excuse about gluten when Kirin confronts him about it, and Kirin isn’t having it.

He isn’t proud of what he does next, but he’s desperate to get this boy to tell him what’s wrong—or what isn’t wrong. What might just be in Kirin’s head, like all the nightmares.

So he brings up Seth, uses him as a weapon, as a match that he waves under Josh’s nose, trying to light the fuse in this meek boy, trying to get him to snap and admit something, anything. And just like Kirin knew it would, it works. Josh is yelling at him, talking about how Seth is the problem, and the way his voice quivers as he trails off and his fists tighten up in a defensive stance makes Kirin want to crumple to the ground.

Because he knows that look. That terrified, angry look. He knows that look, because he’s seen it in the mirror on himself. Josh isn’t Josh right now as Kirin stares down at him. Josh is fourteen-year-old Kirin trying to explain away the odd wounds on his stomach to his coach, who isn’t buying it. Josh is fourteen-year-old Kirin breaking down in the lacrosse team’s locker room, finally admitting what Harvey’s been doing.

And in that instant, even before he asks Josh to elaborate, Kirin knows what Josh did. He knows without a doubt what a sick, demented fuck Seth is, and all he can see when he blinks is Harvey, leering and spitting and screaming at Kirin, hurting him in more ways than just physical.

Kirin sees red, and he knows at that moment that he’s going to make Seth pay for what he’s done to Josh, because no one ever made Harvey pay for his worst crimes against Kirin, and Kirin can’t stand to see another r*pist get away with it.

Kirin freezes as the thought flashes through his mind, a hand flying up to his torso again, numbly pinching at one of the scars. He’s never been willing to even think it before. To ever truly face the reality of Harvey’s twisted abuse. But he just did, and the full force of it is crashing down on Kirin, bringing tears to his eyes. He blinks them away, rage almost bubbling out of his throat as he growls,

“I’m going to kill him.”

And he isn’t truly thinking about Seth at that moment, not really, but since he can’t get his hands on Harvey to tear him limb from limb, he’ll have to settle.

Even after he’s pulled away from Seth, the sick asshole sadly still alive and breathing, Kirin knows that he won’t stop protecting Josh. He won’t let Josh do what he did. Because when Harvey hurt Kirin, Kirin buried it. That’s what he did with the hard shit. He buried it. And slowly, it’s killing him from the inside out. Kirin doesn’t want Josh to fall prey to that. Kirin doesn’t want Josh to bury it.

And Kirin thinks to himself that maybe, just maybe, it’s time to pull out a shovel and start digging. Not a grave for Seth or Harvey, (oh, how he wishes), but a hole into the deep abysses in his heart, so he can finally start to unbury all of the shit rotting away from inside him.

Kirin is done burying it.

𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘦𝘯𝘥

#fanfiction #one shot #angst #the wilds #kirin o'connor #kirin the wilds #the wilds kirin #the boys the wilds #kirin #charles alexander #the wilds angst #the wilds one shot #the wilds season 2 #kirin the wilds backstory #kirin backstory the wilds #kirin character study

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