#ten fic

Ever since that first encounter, Ten became a regular at the cafe. He would come in every other day if not everyday. Soon enough, you two became acquaintances, sharing small talk every now and then. One particularly quiet day, you even sat with him during your break. That day, you learned more about the intriguing man. And, it was safe to say your relationship had upgraded to friends.

Soon enough, as much as you wished you didn’t, you found yourself falling more and more into the sickenly-sweet man. You would never admit that out loud though, the memories of your past surfacing at every thought of a newfound relationship. You swore to yourself that you wouldn’t let yourself fall for another kind persona, being played dirty the last time you did. It happened almost a year ago, yet you remembered the shatter of your heart like it was yesterday.

You wanted to believe that Ten only had good intentions, you really did. Then again, you had also believed the same when you gave away your love and trust to Jey, your ex-lover. And, what had he done? He had gone and thrown it all away when he decided to go sleep with another woman. That day was inbred in your memory, remembered in vast details. You came back home from the cafe, same time as usual. You remember being excited to be back in your lover’s arms after a tiring day. What you didn’t expect though, was the sight that greeted you. The sight of him in your shared bed with another woman in his arms.

The thought still haunts you, and that one lingering question always makes its reappearance in the back of your mind. Why? Why..? Were you not enough for him? Did he lose interest in you? Had you done something to make him dislike you? Had he simply been playing with you all along? He had destroyed you on the inside to say the least. You trusted him enough to reveal your most vulnerable self to him, and this is what you got in return. Now, you found yourself overanalyzing every single interaction with any potential new love interests.

A few months had gone by, and Ten really made you want to believe in love again. He was a gentleman, his kindness was almost unbelievable. Sometimes you felt like he was too nice, making you wonder if it was all an act. He visited the cafe everyday after he was off work, staying until closing time so he could walk you home in the peace and quiet of the evening. You guys shared many late night talks, enjoying each other’s presence. Ten thought his actions would show as a sign he was interested in you, but it seems you were oblivious to his subtle hints.

Today was another one of those days. Ten would wait for you, sitting at a small table, whilst you finished closing up the shop. The cafe was already closed for a while, you just had to finish cleaning up a bit. Suddenly the bell of the cafe rings in the quiet of the space, signalling an incoming customer. You probably forgot to lock the door, you tell yourself. “Sorry, we’re closed!” you call out from behind the counter, putting away some dishes.

The space is quiet once again, so naturally you assume that whoever was there, left. What you don’t expect is to be met face to face by the last person you ever wanted to see. Time seems to still as your heart drops to your stomach, wide eyes staring back at him. “Jey..” you mutter under your breath, unsure what to say or do. “We’re closed.” you say sternly, after recovering from your initial shock.

“Look, (Y/N)-” he takes a step forwards, towards the counter separating you both.

“No, I don’t want to talk. Please, leave.” you mumble. You step from behind the counter, trying to lead him back to the exit. But Jey keeps on insisting, he grabs your wrist stopping you from moving any further.

“(Y/N), please hear me out. It was a mistake, leaving you was a mistake-” he starts.

The screeching of a chair can be heard, Ten who had silently been watching the whole interaction abruptly getting up.

Jey glances at him before staring back at you, fingers still wrapped around your wrist. “I thought you were closed?”

“She is.” Ten speaks up. “And I advise you to leave.” he says in his usual tone. You take Jey’s distraction as an opportunity to rip your arm from his hold.

Jey looks him up and down before speaking up, “And, who are you?” he says directed to him.

Ten steps closer to you, putting himself in between you two. He looks back at you before staring back into Jey’s stare. “Her boyfriend.” he states bluntly.

Jey seems taken aback, eyes staring into yours, searching for an answer. “Are you serious?” he says appalled.

You glance at Ten before refocusing on Jey, deciding to play along, you slowly nod.

Jey lifts a hand, running it frustratingly through his hair before muttering curses under his breath. He scoffs and shakes his head unamused, before turning around and leaving the cafe without a word.

Upon his departure, you let out a breath you hadn’t even realised you were holding. Immediately going to lock the front door.

When you turn back around, you find Ten looking back at you with a worried expression. “Are you okay?” he asks softly, meeting you across the room. You nod before letting out a soft chuckle.

“Boyfriend? What’s that supposed to mean,” You say, referring to earlier.

“I don’t know, did you want it to mean something..?” he replies, tentatively.

You look away, seemingly caught off guard by the rhetorical question. “I don’t know,” you say, voice barely audible.

A few minutes in silence pass, before Ten speaks up again. “(Y/N),” he starts, grabbing your attention. “I’ve been meaning to ask you this all day,” he says.

“Would you like to go to the carnival with me tonight?” he asks softly,“It doesn’t have to be as a date or anything, unless you want it to be..?” he adds.

You look back at him, surprise coating your features. He wanted to take you out, and as a date? You pondered over the idea. There was no denying beneath this underlying fear, there were some sorts of feelings for Ten. But, were you ready to accept that? Were you ready to see someone in this type of way again?

You took a moment to think about it. During the time you got to know him, Ten only proved himself to be a good person. His kindness only seemed to be a part of his caring nature, and nothing of ill intentions. You wanted to give him a chance.

Each passing seconds, the silence only seemed to stretch and Ten found himself more and more nervous about your reaction. Until you finally spoke up, “I- Yeah, I think I’d like that..” Ten smiled at your answer.

And that’s how you both finally found yourselves alone together, walking away from the small crowd after a night filled with laughter and enjoyment. Ten was still holding your hand as you abruptly stopped, causing him to turn around confused. “(Y/N)?” he asks softly.

“Thank you for tonight, Ten.” you whisper, causing him to smile in return.

“Of course, I’m glad you had fun.” he says as he holds both of your hands gently in his, facing you completely now. He stares down at you, a longing look in his eyes. Whilst you stare up at him, eyes filled with unspoken truths.

Lost in the moment and enticed by you. Ten softly leans down, lips merely inches from yours. “Is this okay?” he whispers, his warm breath fanning against your mouth.

You simply nod, closing the remaining distance between you.

Your lips on his felt right, this felt right. And that’s when you realised; you wanted to believe in love again. But, more importantly, you wanted to believe in Ten.

The practice room was quiet except for the steady beat pulsing through the speakers. Ten moved like liquid—sharp, fluid, and precise—every motion hitting perfectly on the rhythm. He wasn’t thinking, not really. When he danced, it was instinct.

But his eyes kept flicking toward the mirror. The one on the far wall, the two-way mirror that separated this studio from the smaller one next door. He couldn’t see through it, of course. It reflected his own image back at him, sweat-damp skin and focused eyes. But sometimes… sometimes he swore he felt something on the other side.

The beat changed. He caught the flicker of movement in his peripheral vision—just a shadow, the suggestion of someone moving on the other side of the glass. He kept going, but his heart sped up. It always did when they were there.

He didn’t know their name. He wasn’t even sure they were aware of him. But whoever they were… they danced like no one Ten had ever seen. Free and emotive, like every part of their soul bled into their movement. He’d catch glimpses of it sometimes, those shadows behind the mirror, and he couldn’t look away.

What he didn’t know was that on the other side, the reader was equally captivated.

They shouldn’t have been watching him. Their own practice was supposed to come first. But when Ten danced, it was impossible not to watch. His control, his grace—it was magnetic. And the mirror… the mirror felt like a secret. Like they were getting to see something intimate and powerful without him ever knowing.

One night, it all unraveled.

Ten stayed late. So did they. In the quiet of their respective rooms, the music blurred into a shared pulse. And without thinking, they began to mirror him.

Ten felt it before he saw it—the way his body moved in perfect synchronization with the flicker behind the glass. He slowed his steps, and the shadow slowed with him. He reached an arm out, and so did they.

His heart pounded.

Slowly, he turned toward the mirror. And the movement on the other side stopped.

For a long moment, there was only the rise and fall of their breathing. Then—tentatively—he lifted his hand, fingers brushing the glass.

On the other side, they did the same.

Their eyes met through the mirror.

And the air shifted.

The spell broke when the music stopped. Ten stepped back, his pulse wild. He wanted to say something—knock on the door, find them—but the hesitation rooted him in place.

But the next day, when their eyes met across the studio’s lobby…

He smiled.

And so did they.

Ten couldn’t stop thinking about it. Every time they passed each other in the hallway or warmed up in separate rooms, his eyes searched for them. And they… they felt it too. The quiet tug, the invisible thread drawing them closer.

One evening, Ten finally worked up the nerve. He lingered in the hallway after class, pretending to check his phone until they walked by.

“Hey,” he called out, heart thudding.

They turned, eyes wide. “Hey.”

He hesitated, then smiled. “You’re… in Studio B, right?”

Their cheeks warmed. “Yeah. And you’re in A.”

“I… I see you dance sometimes,” he admitted, voice soft.

Their breath caught. “I see you too.”

The silence stretched, charged and uncertain.

“Want to practice together sometime?” Ten asked, his pulse a wild rhythm.

Each day, your planning meetings end with nothing truly decided. Each night, you dream again of Hell, of the Queen of the Night, of the torture that Yuta and Ten are enduring. Each morning you wake feeling more stressed than you had been the day before, more afraid of what is happening to them, and how different you might find them – they’ve been imprisoned in two separate prisons, possibly tortured, who knows what sort of effect that’s had on them since you last saw them.

You cover lots of things in the meetings that should reassure you of the success of this mission, but they don’t necessarily reassure you of anything.

Jeno and Jaemin tell you about the layout of Hell, of secret entrances and passages and exits while they also regale you with amusing stories of their time at Hell’s boarding school. Johnny tells each of you how shadows work – not the obvious way, but the magical way that lets him twine them around his fingers and send them away to do his bidding. There are skills lessons – Ira instructing you more in the ways of the Watchers, Jaemin and Jeno giving you more information about demons that they’d learned in their demonic boarding school, combat lessons from Jaehyun the werewolf (which Haechan seems only too eager to go head-to-head with some of your new companions). Ira and the sirens discuss various plans to leave the island and to return, revealing the secrets you’ve been wondering about since Renjun brought you here.

You keep your distance from the sirens, still a little wary of them after the dream you had a week ago in which they’d drowned you. It doesn’t help that all three of them have a mildly terrifying aura anyway, and it only gets worse every time that you see Seulgi watching all of you like you’re her prey during Jaehyun’s combat lessons. But you know that the sirens are actually rather sweet. Sunmi is kind and truly nurturing with her sisters. Seulgi actually is quite adorable and soft-hearted when it comes down to it — one day after Johnny’s shadow-talks, you see Seulgi playing with his shadow tendrils like they’re kittens while Johnny watches on with amusement. 

Minnie, though, shows such affection for Renjun. She acts cute and flirty and clingy, constantly trying to steal his attention away from Haechan who, in turn, tries to steal Renjun’s attention back. 

You try hard not to find the dynamic between the elf, the vampire, and the siren very amusing and familiar. 

Finally on the morning of the seventh day, you wake in the darkness of your bedroom to find that Mark’s side of the bed is empty.

It’s late. Or early. The sky outside the window of your bedroom is still a deep, dark shade of blue with stars just barely visible, tiny pinpricks of silver light in the sky. You can see the ink of the sea in the distance, whitecap waves reflecting moonlight.

The night is truly silent tonight. Your view out the window could be nothing more than just a pretty picture in the frame for all the sound you catch – no wind blowing, you can’t hear the waves rushing against the shoreline. No one whispers in the halls or other rooms of Ira’s house. The only sound is the thundering of your own heart in your ears and the dull sizzling sound of your handprints you’ve burnt into the sheets where you’ve been clutching them.

A nightmare is what woke you.

It’s similar to the one you had a week ago, centered on Hell. Every part of it was confusing and disappointing as each element of your plot to rescue Ten and Yuta fell through completely. You woke when the dream couldn’t possibly have gotten any worse.

You saw them burning. 

Everyone.

Everyone burned. Yuta and Ten, although that should have been impossible. Mark and WinWin, Ira, the sirens, the others that Ira has drawn here to his island to help you with this mission. 

They were all burning in your dream. The dream was so vivid that you could smell burning hair and flesh; you could see the terror in their eyes; you could hear their cries and screams. You had heard the vile laughter of the Queen of the Night, cackling with wicked delight while they burned and she made you watch.

Now, as you lie here in the waking aftermath of your nightmare, you try to focus on your surroundings to ground you in the present. 

Behind you, WinWin is unmoving, an arm pitched above his head, the sheets twisted around his hips, one exposed leg visible and covered in white scars like lightning bolts originating from the silvery bite mark left behind by the Fell Beasts. Tonight he’s unbothered, deep in dreams so he doesn’t budge even as you leave the bed, as you quietly dress yourself. 

Soft snores sound from the bedrooms you pass. There’s no sign of anyone being awake, no sounds of the unsleeping vampires being aware of you moving through the house. You creep down the spiral stairs, taking careful steps to keep quiet as you make your way out through the front door. 

Dawn is just beginning to touch the perfect blue darkness of night. Peach colored sunrise swirls through the navy clouds and the steel gray of the choppy sea. Deep shadows remain over much of the island, and you stick to them, remembering Johnny’s advice of bending shadows to help hide you, which you apply skillfully as you leave the eaves of the house towards the cliff’s edge.

As you walk forward, you glance backwards, attempting to look up at the lighthouse tower’s peak, trying to see if maybe Mark is up there. You know he’s got a tendency to climb up the tower so he can sit there and stare at the stars. If he’s up there right now, you can’t distinguish him from the dark. And if he is up there, he must not notice you because he doesn’t descend to join you or stop you either way.

You don’t want him to join you.

The nightmares that have been plaguing you all week have been bad enough, but the one you just awoke from truly has put you in a state of panic. No one else can come with you, you saw the argument for that in your dream. Everyone here on the island has been helpful in these planning stages, but if they come with you, they’re just weaknesses for you, they’ll hold you back and make you much more noticeable than if you just go by yourself.

You know how to get off the island now, and you have a plan for exactly how you’re going to get into Hell, how you’re going to locate Ten and Yuta, and how you’re going to escape. You’ve even got a Plan B tucked away in the back of your mind in case your original plan goes awry.

The beach looks nearly the same as it had the day that you arrived. Foamy white waves crash against the shore, rushing through the pebbles as you near the water’s edge. 

Since your arrival to Ira’s island, you’d wondered several times how the portal magic worked for the island. Ira and Renjun had made it clear that it was only possible to enter the island via portal, and that made sense. Up until a few days ago when one rescue strategy had been discussed, you hadn’t known how to leave the island. At what point did the sea become a portal back to the rest of the world?

Ira had led all of the group out onto the porch outside the front door. With his arm outstretched, he pointed out at the sea visible beyond the cliff’s edge. “See the water, where it turns from a shallow turquoise to a darker blue? Do you see the circle of turquoise out a little further? It’s straight out from the inlet where you all came in.”

The sea faded from turquoise closer to the shore to a deeper blue as the sea floor dropped off, but then there was in fact a pocket of lighter color out in the deep.

“This portal works a bit different from other portals. To exit the secure space I’ve placed this island in, you have to have a specific mental picture of your destination, you have to focus on it and push through.”

“Push through? It’s in the middle of the water. How will we know when we’ve reached the portal to push through and to focus?” Jeno had turned to your father in confusion. 

Mark, standing beside you in the shadow of the house’s doorway, grimaced. “Trust me, you’ll know. Coming through is easy enough, but when we left to find you guys, I thought like you. It was in the middle of the water, so how would we know? But it’s like hitting an invisible wall. You have to focus on holding your destination in mind while you also push through what feels like a solid wall of water.”

Ira nods. “I didn’t make it easy to come and go.”

And now, in the present moment as you stand on the shore and face the morning gray of the sea, you hope you’ll be able to find the portal. From down here at the water level, you can’t see a difference in the water like you’d been able to from up above. It’s impossible to tell how far out you’re going to have to swim.

You stare out at the water. 

If you don’t go now, you’re going to lose your nerve.

Images of your dream last night flash through your mind.

Ten screaming as hungry flames consumed him. Yuta’s body stretched out on the floor as veins of poisoned fire wrapped around his throat, crawling over his cheeks and mouth. 

It had all seemed so real, so terrifying. You can’t take another night of not knowing that they’re safe, of not having them in your arms again.

The seawater is cool where it touches your bare ankle. 

Ira had said the portal is just a straight swim out from the shore. You can do this. 

You take a few steps more out into the water, shivering as the cool water rises up your body, as the waves splash it even higher. 

You pull in a deep, full breath and with one last glimpse back at the cliffs behind you – halfway hoping to see a familiar face, halfway checking to make sure that there isn’t anyone watching. There isn’t anyone. You face the horizon again, and you dive beneath the surface.

Below the water, the world is dark and still. You’re still close to the shore, in only a few feet of water, but as you begin swimming forward, the bottom falls away beneath you. Darkness grows around you when you reach the open water of the sea. There’s a different feeling to the water, a hollowness and a pull of gravity as the forever black maw opens beneath you.

High above you, the sunrise bursts in prismatic colors over the surface. Your lungs begin to ache and your heart longs for you to rise to the surface again, to feel the heat of the sunrise on your face and a fresh breath of air filling your lungs, but instead you keep swimming forward into the endless, deep dark.

The pressure grows stronger  in your chest, in your head, in your throat, and you feel like you’re being squeezed to death and frozen as the sea around you becomes entirely black. Momentarily, the thought crosses your mind that you’ve slipped right through the portal without being aware, that you’ve been somehow sucked into that Abyss that Yuta and Ten once told you about – the place where soulless supernaturals go when they die.

And then, you feel it.

A wall of pressure.

You pull an image of your destination into your mind, focusing on it with every part of you that’s not worrying about being able to breathe, and you push forward.

You feel as if you’re making absolutely no progress no matter how hard you push against it, and for a moment you’re right back trapped in that mirror at the House of the Watchers – again, you can’t breathe, you’re trapped against a barrier with everything you want on the other side. You push and you push, trying to keep a river a million miles away held in your mind, pushing, pushing, feeling your lungs seizing in your chest and dots of blackness and sparks of impossible light spark across your vision.

The world breaks around you, shattering and transforming into a world of bright sound and heat and so much air.

Each breath sears your lungs, your chest burning in an entirely unpleasant manner, but you can’t help gasping for more and more air. Your hair drips into your eyes, making them sting. There’s so much noise, and after the suffocation of the deep sea, all of this everything is very disorienting.

It takes a moment or two of treading water before you realize that your escape from the island actually worked.

River water stains your skin with tiny granules of silt, a twig has tangled itself in your hair as well as a slimy piece of plant life that has twisted through your fingers. You shake it off, pluck the twig from your hair, and you look back up to the banks of the river you’re in, at the high city buildings reaching up into the orange haze of the sky.

You’ve come back to Hell City.

Something silvery flickers by you in the water, and it takes a moment too long for you to realize what it is. Another pale streak rushes by you, and this time you recognize it for what it is. A memory rises to the surface of your mind.

In your early days here, as Ten and Yuta showed you around the city, they’d brought you here to the riverwalk along this river that marks the border of Hell City. Right now, you’re a bit upriver from that spot where the river splits in two, but you still remember clearly leaning against the railing with Yuta beside you, his arm wound around your waist to keep you from tipping into the dangerous water.

It’s the memory of that day that has inspired your rescue plan. 

“What do you see when you look at the water?” Yuta had asked you that day. And that morning, just as right now, you’d seen a whitish silver ribbon twisting through the water. With his hands on you, keeping you safely planted on solid ground, Yuta had explained to you, “Those are spirits of the damned. This river leads straight to Hell. Proper Hell, not just this city. Water is a transmitter, or conductor, carrying the spirits down where they belong. A little way down the way, the river vanishes underground, and it never resurfaces.”

It’s funny, thinking back on that now. You’ve definitely learned that water works as a pathway – it’s taken you to Purgatory and to Ira’s little special corner of the universe, and it’s brought you back here.

And if your plan works, this river is going to take you straight to Hell.

This is something that has come up in your week of planning. Jaemin’s voice echoes from the back of your mind. “Once you’re in that river, it’s a certainty as to where you’re going. Because the river is a one-way ticket to Hell. Spirit Express, no stops, no clear return.”

In the present moment, you can already feel the current of the river sucking at you, pulling you downstream. A cold wave slaps into the side of your head, and you swear you hear a voice whispering a death song in your ear, and you keep your mouth closed tightly, trying to keep your face above water, even as the current pulls you along, threatening to drag you under even as you fight to stay afloat.

And then you see it just up ahead. The river forks.

One branch of the river continues on through the regular, mortal, unmagical world towards the ocean. The other branch grows darker and darker until eventually it delves underground, passing briefly through Hell City’s underground, and then surging even deeper below to the realm of the demons; this branch of the river is the one that has you in its gravity.

And suddenly it really has a grip on you. You’re being propelled forward in the water, carried along faster than you had been just a moment before, racing towards the place where the river disappears underground.

The moment is obvious when the power of the great river of the damned finally overpowers the simple current of the natural river. One moment, you’re still able to fight to keep your head above water, and the next you can feel the force of the water pulling you downward.

You keep getting pulled under, managing one final gasp for breath in the instant before it’s impossible, sucking in a little of the river water despite all of your previous attempts. It tastes like poison as it trickles over your tongue, and the moment you resurface, you cough and gag, trying to expel the toxic water. Repeat.

Occasionally, you feel something else in the water, hitting against you, bumping and slithering and slimy. Mostly it feels incorporeal, as if you’re just feeling passing souls. Until you feel the tug at your ankles, the gravity pushing you down further from the surface.

You wish you had something to hold onto, some easier way to get to Hell than this, but Jaemin and Jeno had assured you that this was going to be the easiest way for all of you to get there, and even though you’re going this alone now, you don’t know any other way to get to Hell. 

You’re being sucked downward, and you flail around, trying to claw your way back to the surface for one last breath, one last glimpse of the sunlight –

Free-fall.

You’re in free-fall, no longer controlled by the river’s current but by gravity.

Lights flicker to life – far away and below you, growing rapidly bigger and closer.

You recognize where you are, but you’ve never seen it from this perspective.

You’re tumbling in the waterfall you’ve seen before, racing through Hell City’s underground, and within seconds you’ll be crashing into the next layer of the underworld. Streams of silvery light surround you, and if you could really force your eyes to focus on anything, you feel certain that you might be able to make out features of faces or limbs. These are souls, after all.

The air is full of voices – whispers of the souls, your own screams.

You feel the impact as your body crashes into the pool of water at the base of Hell City’s underground waterfall. It doesn’t hurt necessarily, but you can feel the water passing like a heavy wave beating against you when you stand unprepared in the surf. And then everything is dark and cool again. The air is filled with the rushing sound of water and passing air and all the whispers of the souls around you. And you’re spinning.

It takes a moment to really realize that, but soon you come to understand that you’re spiraling downwards in tighter and tighter curls, moving faster and faster, you and all of these souls are funneled to a point.

You’re spinning in the darkness, and then suddenly you’re not.

In a great cold splash and a burst of warm light, you’re standing dripping wet on a stone floor. 

“What the fuck?” You hiss, blinking and looking around.

Directly in front of you is the broad back of a very tall, large man. He doesn't turn to look at you, only shuffling forward a step. 

A cold wave of water rushes over your feet as a considerable splash sounds from behind you.

You glance over your shoulder and find an elderly woman standing there with round glasses sliding toward the tip of her nose, her hair curling loose down to her shoulders. She doesn’t seem to take too much notice of you. Momentarily, there’s another big splash, a second wave assaulting your feet as a spout of water shoots down from the distant blackness of the ceiling, the jet of water deposits another soul in what appears to be a line growing behind you.

You twist around to the front, leaning around the broad man in front of you to get a look at what you’re in line for.

“What the fuck?” You repeat, looking at the line that stretches into the impenetrable distance. It winds forward, twisting around rocky structures that jut up from the floor. A deep reddish-orange glow semi-illuminates this vast space, but the end of the line in either direction – as the spout of water continues to deposit an endless string of souls behind you in line – is swallowed by the same darkness that resides above your head.

But do you really have to wait in line?

None of the others around you pay any attention to you or anyone else. They all wear bored, resigned expressions, content to shuffle forward step by step as the line slowly shifts forward with some unknown signal.

It is eerily silent. Your brain can’t comprehend the absolute lack of sound when you can see so many people. You should be able to hear breathing or some slight shifting, fabric brushing together, feet moving on the floor, an exasperated sigh or grumbling under the breath. You even half expect to hear a distant echo, water droplets trickling down from somewhere or even dripping from clothes, but as the Hell Delivery System waterfall moves ever farther down the line, you can’t even hear its roar of delivery anymore.

And you’re soaking wet. Uncomfortably so.

You know that you could easily call your demon fire and make quick work of drying yourself off, but some instinctive feeling in your belly is telling you not to do that. It might just draw attention to you.

Not that there seems to be anyone overseeing this line, enforcing behavior. If you just stand here waiting in line for some unknown end, you’ll just be wasting time. There probably isn’t anyone who will even notice if you cut the line a little.

You’ve moved only a dozen paces since your arrival. 

You take a step out of line, pause, waiting for something to happen.

After a few beats, nothing has happened.

You begin to move, passing up the column of this endless queue. No one moves or spares you a glance, speaks or breathes or anything. So you walk, and you walk and walk and walk, searching for the front of the line.

Is this Hell? Just this, waiting in line forever? Moving forward inch by inch for all of eternity. Because you’ve been walking for at least half an hour, and the front of the line doesn’t seem anywhere in sight. Although, the scenery has slightly changed. There seem to be more outcroppings of rock here, and there are large torches mounted to the walls, providing a stronger orange light than the previous ambient red-orange glow.

Another fifteen minutes pass by in unchanging silence. You look behind you to see the line vanishing back into dim light some distance back, twisting out of sight around a big boulder. Ahead of you looks pretty much the same.

But then you hear something.

It sounds like footsteps, so you freeze. Sharp clicking footsteps pass over the stone floor. Heavy breathing and the acrid scent of brimstone.

A demon.

You don’t dare to move even a little bit. Wherever this demon is, it must be ahead of you, around the next curve of the line, but you’re sure even a slight move would draw its attention to exactly where you are as it prowls along the line.

Sure enough, around the curve ahead, you see a puff of black smoke, a shadow painted on the wall of a beast. It’s coming towards you.

You clench your hands into fists, and you feel your nails bite against your palms hard enough to break skin.

The demon’s shadow on the wall twitches, head tilting curiously to the side, and you glance down to see a trickle of your blood as it drips from your hand.

A sharp whistle cuts through the never-ending space, echoing off the rock walls and the invisible ceiling. The demon twists around, a growl rumbling from it. A second whistle, and the beast sets off in the opposite direction. You hear a grinding sound of stone against stone, a third whistle and another growl from the demon.

You take a step forward, conscious of the coarse sand that dusts the stone floor, aware that even a slightly wrong move could cause sound. If only there was some way to silence your footsteps so you could sneak forward, hopefully catching a glimpse around the next curve of the line, maybe to see what is happening ahead. Have you finally found the front of the line?

You take a tentative step forward, and there’s a soft crunch of a pebble beneath your foot.

Your heart leaps in your throat, but then you remember.

During the weeks of Ira’s lack of availability and assistance with this plan, you’d dug into any and all of the books he had in his home. There were boring books about gardening and maintenance, cookbooks, and even self-help books, but there had also been histories of the Watchers, but these were ancient texts that you felt must be from the early days of the Watchers because they were just histories, they held information pertaining to the instruction of young Watchers. 

Those texts you had devoured, pouring over them for long hours until Mark or WinWin had dragged you away, providing you with ample distraction. 

But you had learned some things from those texts about the powers of the Watchers, the abilities that you possess. You’d practiced a few things, but you are fully aware that you’re a long way from being adept at the skills. 

Although, one of the magical skills you’d read about, and that you’d once attempted semi-successfully, had been the power to become undetectable – invisible and silent – for up to an hour. You’d used that experiment to sneak up on WinWin and scare him, for which you’d had to apologize and make it up to him when you returned to detectability about ten minutes later.

But isn’t that what you need right now? To be undetectable?

Luckily, the process had been rather simple, and you’d made certain to memorize it before even attempting it that first time. 

The powers of the Watchers were magic like you’d not quite seen it before. Sure, some of it involved fancy words and waving your hands around, but there was a simplicity to it all that almost seems deceptive, like you feel like it should be much more difficult than it is, and by finding it easy, you must be doing it wrong. But that’s not the case at all. Maybe it seems that way because you’re so new to this power that you were actually born with; it’s a part of you, so natural that it just flows without having to work too hard at it. 

Either way, the effort to become undetectable right now is simple. 

The sandy soil underfoot is actually much more fine than you’d believed. It’s a soft, reddish-brown powder that clings to your fingertips as you crouch and gather a handful. Disturbingly, it reminds you of dried blood. 

You spit into the small pile of soil in your hand, mixing it into a paste that you try not to think too much about as you dip your paste-coated fingers and paint them around your face.

It’s more difficult without a mirror to know if you’re getting the runes correct, but you hope that you don’t fuck it up too much.

You can tell it’s taking effect, and you begin to hurry before you lose the ability of physical touch. This spell truly makes you undetectable – invisible, silent, and intangible.

Just as you put the finishing touches on yourself, you see your fingertips fading away.

You lift your hand to your face, and you can feel your breath on your fingertips, and you think that maybe there’s the barest imprint on the air in front of you, but you can’t actually see anything there. Beneath you – where your feet should be – there’s no sign of your footprints, not even when you take a step forward.

As you walk around the curve, you don’t find the front of the line. You’re certainly closer to the front, but now the line straightens out instead of curving, moving forward into the far distance where you can see looming high in the shadows, the faintly lit arch of a massive doorway. But right here beside the line, just on this side of that curve in the rocks, is a hidden doorway. You can still see a glowing outline of it as you reach it, but your intangible fingers can’t find any purchase to pry the door open.

Again, this is where you’re grateful to be part Watcher. There’s a magical phrase for this, and a moment later the hidden doorway is grinding open again, revealing a narrow hallway roughly carved through the rock, winding away and downward. To a certain degree, it reminds you of the passages Yuta and Ten had led you through to take you from the surface of Hell City down into its underground, although these tunnels of Hell are much better illuminated. 

Once you’re through the entrance, you close the door again with a simple wave of your hand.

The rocky ridges in the walls of the tunnel are a warmer reddish brown than where the evenly spaced torches along the walls illuminate. You get a vague impression that you’re staring down a great beast’s throat, looking at the insides of its ribcage. As you pass silently down the tunnel – footsteps leaving no mark in the sandy floor nor even a scuff or sound of your footfalls – you grow even more aware of how you’re sinking further and further into Hell.

The flickering light of the torches on the ribbed walls of the tunnel truly gives the sense of being slowly swallowed by a beast, and you’re terrified and exhilarated to learn what awaits you.

And then you see it.

A small archway up ahead, open and unguarded.

Slipping through the archway into Hell Proper is easy, but what you find immediately on the other side is less so.

The hidden tunnel didn’t just bypass the rest of Hell’s eternal waiting line to the Great Gates. You managed to bypass a lot of the structure of Hell, and the tunnel has spat you out into the one place that you’ve feared and yet dreamed about for too long now.

You’re in the throne room of the Queen of the Night.

You’re in the very belly of the beast.

And you’re not alone.

You melt into the shadows at the edge of the throne room, pressing your back to the wall, your shoulders blend into an enormous woven tapestry as you make an attempt to conceal yourself even more against its pattern. There are too many people – or demons, you suppose – for you to feel safe even with your Watcher spell making you undetectable. Your heart pounds as you look around, observing the space. 

The ceiling vanishes above you into darkness just as it had in Hell’s lobby, but here there’s at least a hint of architecture. Something sort of Gothic, sort of Art Nouveau which adds an odd bit of whimsy to the otherwise imposing aura. Columns span the length of the room, leading your eye toward the apse – a semicircular space at the far end of the room, the ceiling ribbed and vaulted. The back curved wall of the apse is more window than wall, and it reminds you of something you might have seen in a Church before, although it’s much more dark and whimsical than the structured beauty of a Church’s stained glass window. It has an organic feel to it, like the wall is covered in vines that have grown around irregularly shaped black windows. 

You try not to imagine those windows as eyes, but it’s difficult to do. You feel as if you’re being observed. 

Seated there above it all, doing nothing to help the feeling of being watched, is the Queen’s throne. The high seat is housed in the apse, and you’ve seen it before.

Her throne is exactly as you’d pictured it in your dreams. Massive. An unscalable monolith, carved of black stone that reflects torchlight from the walls, thin trails of liquid darkness seep from unknown pores in the throne, and although you can’t see the base of the throne at the moment due to the throng of of demons in the way, you know that black liquid is dripping down into the black pool the throne rises from. You’d dreamed it exactly like this. 

And also like your dreams, seated atop the throne is the Queen herself, veiled in shadow.

All you can see of her are her hands, which are clawed and deformed. Her twisted long fingers are pale as bone until they taper at the tips into black points which she taps against the arms of her throne. Her voice is a rasp, reminiscent of dry leaves rattling against each other, like bare branches snapping in a strong breeze, and an underlying tone of train wheels screeching on the track. Whatever language she’s speaking in, you can’t understand it, although the demons around you certainly seem to.

They cheer at whatever it is that she’s rasping in her unholy voice.

A demon rises up above the crowd on stilt-like legs, pronouncing something that you still can’t understand. A few others respond, and the Queen laughs – her voice echoes sharply around the room, bounced back at you by all the hard stone. 

And then you hear the rattle of chains. An eerie clinking.

You need to get closer.

Even sticking to the edges of the throne room, skirting the gathered court, you narrowly avoid detection. There are guards stationed along the walls, as well as court members whose presences overflow even beyond their physical forms – similar to Johnny back on Ira’s island, with his shadows that reach beyond himself. 

At one point, you swear one of the demons turns its head to look in your direction, but it can’t see through your Watcher magic, so it turns back to face the Queen.

You keep moving until you reach the front of the crowd, until you can see the black pool beneath the throne. Heavy chains in the dark water, just like your dreams. But unlike your dreams, the chains aren’t looped around the limbs of your boyfriends. Now the chains lie limp in the water, empty.

You’re not sure if you feel relief or some other unnamed combination of fear and horror and frustration.

If they’re not here, like they had been in your dream, then where are they?

Are they hiding on the other side of the throne? Perhaps they’re just not visible from your vantage point here, and if you could just squeeze through the crowd….

It’s easier said than done.

More than once, one of the demons bumps into you, which shouldn’t be possible unless your undetectability is wearing off. Luckily, those that bump into you seem to think they’ve just bumped into another demon in the crowd with them, and they brush it off, but each time it happens you curl in a little tighter on yourself, pushing onward.

And then someone steps directly into your path, and you pull up short. 

Another demon stands slightly behind the first, reaching up to adjust the collar of the first demon’s jacket, to brush nonexistent lint from the demon’s shoulders. 

“Stop,” the demon hisses. 

The second demon drops his hands from the other’s shoulders, murmuring a quiet, “Yes, my Prince.”

A Prince of Hell. 

Ten and Yuta had once briefly mentioned the Princes to you in passing. The five Princes of Hell mostly kept to themselves, although both of your boyfriends had met them a few times. 

The Prince standing before you is very handsome. Dark reddish brown hair curls around his ears. His eyes glow a deep red as he turns to look over his shoulder at what must surely be a servant. 

Suddenly, another demon shoulders his way forward through the crowd. He’s taller than the first Prince, his hair a smooth ebony encircled by a crown of obsidian. 

“Kun,” he says, “We missed you.”

Prince Kun — the first Prince — turns to his brother. “Mother had me handling some business.” He faces the Queen, listening intently as she continues speaking her demonic tongue. “Hendery, don’t you ever wonder why she tries to keep us separate from our people? It’s only times like these she allows us among them, and even then she wants us to be kept apart. To be just simply out on display.” 

Hendery’s head turns slightly, and you follow his gaze to a small dais off to the side. Three other Princes sit there on thrones carved of dark stone, looking bored. 

“You know why,” Hendery answers. “It’s to keep us safe.”

When Kun looks at his younger brother, his eyes seem to flare a shade brighter. “If we’re never among our people, how can they ever hope to know us? How are we to ever understand them? And if they don’t know us and we don’t know them, what hope do any of us ever have of ruling them?”

His jaw clenches, hands curling into fists at his sides. Hendery only gives his brother a look of mild confusion. 

“Sometimes, Hendery, I think that Mother never plans to pass the throne on.” Kun’s voice has lowered to the point that you need to strain to hear it, meant only for his brother’s ears. “Sometimes I wonder if I’ll have to steal it from her so I can fulfill my destiny as King.”

“Don’t say that.” There’s now a tick in Hendery’s jaw. 

“I’ve made it clear how I feel in the past about Mother’s rule, the changes and improvements I will make when I’m King. Don’t act like this is anything new.” Kun turns to face his brother, and you spot other demons in the crowd casting sideways glances at their two Princes. 

A third Prince, this one with silver hair and a light and bright expression, appears and throws his arms around the shoulders of his brothers. “Come, brothers. Let’s go sit. Mom says there’s a feast after her speech.”

Unwilling to continue their argument in front of their younger brother, both Kun and Hendery drop it. They carve a path through the crowd on the way back to the dais. You take the opportunity created in their wake, and you make your way clear through the crowd, following them although you don’t plan to reach their thrones with them. 

Instead, once you reach the edge of the Queen of the Night's audience, you turn your attention again to the pool at the base of her throne and the chains rusting in the liquid. 

On this side of the throne room, you can see that the pool of water trails away toward the sides of the room, trickling through a grated section at the back of the apse. There are more chains scattered throughout the water, all of them empty. Well, mostly empty. You try not to look too closely as you catch a pearly gleam of bones tangled in one of the lengths of chain. 

There’s a narrow strip of raised stone along the edge of the room just below where some of the chains are bolted into the walls. The dark water swirls, a light current keeping it moving on the way toward those grates in the back. 

High above you on the throne, the Queen’s voice still echoes out over her people. As you’re still invisible and unable to understand what the Queen of the Night is saying, you decide to take the opportunity to explore the apse.

The narrow pathway is just wide enough for you to fit without touching the water. Every few feet as you shuffle along it, you glance backwards.

All of the demons are still gazing upwards at their Queen. The dais of Princes are the only ones who aren’t devoting all of their attention to her. Kun is sitting on his throne, his left ankle resting on his knee as he disinterestedly picks at his nails. The dark-haired Hendery keeps casting glances at his elder brother. The young silver-haired prince is distractedly stroking the backs of the phantom shadow cats that twine around his ankles and stand on his shoulders and rest on the arms of his throne; as you watch, one stretches up to place its paws on his chest and rub its shadowy head beneath his chin. 

There are two other Princes sitting there, both of them with their heads bowed together in quiet conversation, although they appear to be joking around, judging by the barely suppressed laughter. One of them looks as if he’s part-bat – large membranous wings are tucked behind him. His wings are dark and angular, although the webbing is thin and paler in color. He’s very handsome, despite the bat wings and the vicious blood red color of his eyes. His hair is a deep, dark brown color, parted precisely down the middle, and two sections of his bangs fall down to perfectly frame his face.

The last Prince is round-faced, pale, and very relaxed. He’s handsome as well, although at this point you’re half-certain that being extremely handsome is a demonic condition. His jaw is so strong, his eyes gleam with mirth as he whispers with his brother. He exudes a sense of casualness, a very go-with-the-flow vibe that immediately puts you at ease even as you’re sneaking around behind his mother’s throne.

Perhaps it puts you a little too at ease.

Upon your next step, your foot slips.

Your toes dip into the water, and to your surprise, a few shallow ripples spread out over the surface of the dark liquid.

You dart a glance toward the high throne, toward the crowd, and to the Princes. 

Prince Kun has turned to look in your direction, his eyebrows furrowed together as he scans the shadows where you hide. You hope that your spell of undetectability, which is clearly beginning to wear off, stands up beneath the Prince’s scrutiny. His eyes narrow, focusing on the back section of the apse, but after another moment, he blinks and returns to his nails.

Moving forward, you go more carefully.

You’re not sure exactly what you expect to find back here. Maybe it’s something about those dark eye-like windows staring down at you, but you feel drawn into the shadows at the back of the apse, to the place where you can hear the dark water trickling and tink tink tinking down through the grate. 

When you reach the end of the stone edging, you’re right there upon the grating.

There’s an odd swoop in your belly as you take the first step onto the drain. Maybe it’s because it’s not a solid surface, and you halfway expect the thin bars to give way beneath your weight. But they hold and you take another step and another, making your way to the very back of the apse. 

There’s a doorway.

The door is recessed, half hidden in the shadows between intricate carvings, a leering gargoyle with wings like the Prince back on the dais. 

Of course, the strange pull you’re feeling is guiding you towards that doorway. 

You take a step towards the doorway, and as you do, the gargoyle moves.

A flutter of its wings. A shake of its head. 

It turns away from you, its ears tilting like dog ears do when they’re listening for something. You hold your breath, pleading with the universe to let your undetectability hold for just a little longer. You walk lightly, quietly, without breathing, and you slip right by the gargoyle, into the recessed doorway.

A yawning mouth opens before you. 

Almost literally.

The doorway has stalactites hanging from the top like jagged teeth. A cool draft plays with your hair as it breathes by you from the dark maw beyond the doorway. The air is damp, carrying with it the smell of mildew and sulfur. 

The knot in your belly tightens, rising in your throat as you whisper another helpful spell Ira’s books had taught you. Nightvision. 

Although the path had been pitch black a moment before, the way before you suddenly blooms in color. The night vision provided by the spell isn’t quite like what you thought counted as night vision in your old life. It’s not all green and black, like you’d seen in movies and on TV. Everything is just… glowy. Like there is an ambient faint light source providing just enough light that you can see the cracks in the stones on the floor and the walls. You can see where a few feet ahead of you the path becomes stairs diving down into the unknown. 

You take those stairs carefully, trying not to slip on the damp, slick stone where it’s been worn smooth by use over the eons. 

Down and down and down deeper you wind, until at last you reach the bottom, only to find a barred door padlocked shut. You’re surprised that you can see a little bit better through the barred window of the door, and as you peer into the dark, you think the increased visibility is due to a faint light source from high above; you can hear a soft trickle, and you realize that the light and the water sound is likely coming from the drain grate high overhead. 

You can see little else than some rough rocks – large boulder-like monoliths that glisten wetly. You think for a moment that you hear the rattle of a chain, but then there’s nothing. No movement, no sound. What if you’ve come all the way down here, and this is just the chamber where the Queen of the Night keeps some horrid, monstrous pet? 

But still, there’s a weight in your belly, a magnetic pull that swoops as you step right up to the bars of the door, as you curl your hands around the bar and press your face between the gap, trying to get a better look around even as the rusty texture of the bars scrapes against your cheeks.

High above you, there’s a distant roar. It takes a moment for you to realize it’s the clamor of the crowd gathered before the Queen. They’re cheering about something. Thunder rumbles overhead, and you swear a few pebbles dislodge from the faraway ceiling, shaken loose by the drumbeats of footsteps in celebration as the demons continue their rallying.

Again, you hear movement. A chain’s rattle. The quiet echo of a single footstep followed by a quiet incomprehensible murmur.

Your heart thuds a beat harder.

You reach for the padlock, and without waiting, without thinking about if this is a terrible idea that you’ll come to regret, you reach below your surface for the fire that’s always there. 

Demon fire bursts to life in your hand, glowing white-hot and then flaring blue at the core of your hand, wrapped around the padlock until the metal softens and then melts, dripping to the floor like small drops of starlight.

The cell door groans slightly as your luminous hand pushes at it, melting the metal even as it swings open on rusty hinges. 

In the light given off by your skin, you can see what you hadn’t been able to before.

At first you think it is a statue, as still as it is with its face upturned to the light and sound above. Then, you realize it’s another gargoyle. 

Ram’s horns curl from the sides of his head, clawed feet and fingers of abnormal length. He stands nude with his back to you, and where you would imagine wings would jut from his shoulders, there are instead cracked lines in the shape of wings stretching from the nape of his neck down to his tailbone. At his feet another gargoyle kneels, also nude with wings etched into his back, a tail curls over his thigh, shaggy hair reaches almost to his shoulders, and two sharp horns rise from the top of his head, curving slightly forward.

It’s only when the one standing turns his head that you gasp.

The eyes are sunken in shadow. The face is gaunt and pale.

But you would recognize those eyes anywhere.

“Yuta,” you choke out, tears rising to your eyes as you stumble forward. 

The kneeling one lifts his head at the sound of your voice, his eyes striking against your soul. 

“Ten?” You collapse on your knees in front of them both. 

Now that you’re closer you can see the manacles on their ankles, the chains stretching back towards the wall. You reach for Ten’s face first, your palms gentle as you touch his sharp, unfamiliar bone structure. “What happened to you?”

Ten turns his head, unable to meet your gaze. 

“Are you really here?” Yuta rasps, his voice dry and rattling in his chest. “How are you here? Did she find you?”

You tug on Ten’s chin, turning his face back towards yours. He meets your eyes once briefly before looking at the floor again – they’re the yellow cat eyes that he used to flash at you on occasion. You stroke his cheek tenderly; he might not look how he did the last time you saw him, but that doesn’t change anything. 

“No, she didn’t find me,” You answer Yuta, “Renjun got us out of the House of the Watchers; he got us safely to my father,” you tell them. 

Ten lifts his head, his eyes bright. “He did?”

Your heart warms in your chest when he looks into your eyes. “Yes. And the first thing I made my father promise was that we would come rescue you. Now here I am, and I’m getting you out of here, bringing you to safety under my father’s protection.” You rise to your feet again.

Yuta shifts towards you, and when you reach for him, he stops you with his fingers light on your wrist. “My love, you can’t.”

You jerk your hand away from his hold. “What do you mean ‘I can’t?’ What can’t I do?”

With a clanking sound, Ten stands as well. 

“You can’t break us out of here,” Ten explains softly. “We’re bound here by the Queen’s law. And if she finds you here, she’s going to destroy you.” Now he lays his hand on your cheek, just as gentle as you’d been with him.

“Fuck that. I can save you both. I didn’t come all of this way, sneaking out of my father’s place, finding my way to Hell’s entrance, and sneaking in here all alone just to find you and not save you. Why would I give up so easily?” You take a half step back, looking between your boyfriends. You haven’t even properly had the time to rejoice in finding them, and they’re trying to drown your mood with this dark pessimism?

Yuta shakes his head. “For the moment, we’re going to ignore that you just said you’re here alone, which is insane. You don't understand. You can’t break us out. We’re chained in here. We’ve never seen a key, and these chains are impervious to everything we’ve tried, which isn’t too much honestly because all that’s down here is rocks. We can’t even really use magic because demon magic doesn’t work well within the walls of this chamber; trust me, we’ve tried. 

“For weeks, each of us has tried time and again to get a message out to you, to contact you in some way or see you through a veil. We tried to build a binding connection between ourselves and you so maybe we could pass a message along, show you how to find us. A few weeks ago, Ten thought he was almost successful at opening a tiny window, but all we saw was starlit darkness and a tall light blazing in the distance.” 

You remember that night on the island when you and WinWin and Renjun sat on the porch. You thought you’d seen something in the distance. A blip of something. A light, maybe. Could that have been them? 

“Trying to reach you has taken all of what natural energy remained; it’s why we look like this. Our true forms.” Yuta holds his arms out so you can see all of him bared in the light from above. “How can you still want us when we look like this?”

You scoff. “Seriously? You think I’m so shallow that I care what you look like right now? I love you both. I have fought my way through Hell and high water – literally – to get here. And I’m not going to pretend, but I’m honestly a little distracted and turned on by the sight of Ten’s dick right now. So yeah, I still want you now.” You cast a small glance between Ten’s legs where there’s an actual goddamned forked penis. “Which I was right about your dick, Ten, and you lied, I’d just like to point out.”

For the first time in too long, you see a ghost of Ten’s smile. Before you first had sex, he’d told you that he definitely didn’t have a forked penis or a tail or horns; but now you’re seeing the real him, and it turns out he’s actually got all three.

“And as for the chains, I’m sure I can find a way to break them.” You take a step back, looking down at the chains and manacles keeping them prisoner down here. “I just need to think.”

Overhead, the sound of the Queen and the crowd pours down through the grate. 

“What’s going on up there, anyway?” You ask, crouching to get a closer look at the manacle on Yuta’s ankle.

Silence is the only answer you receive until you look up.

Both of your boyfriends look down at you. You ask, “What?”

Ten looks at Yuta. “Just tell her.”

Yuta sighs. “A trial. The Queen and the Princes and all of the court are up there, right? She only does that for a big trial.” He pauses, lifting a hand up to touch one of his ram’s horns. “Specifically, this is our trial. Although, it’s as much a trial as the one the Watcher’s were going to give us. Our Queen seeks the death penalty for our disobedience and disloyalty; and who among her court and sons are going to tell her no?”

Immediately, the red-haired Prince Kun appears in your mind. But that’s unimportant right now. What is important is breaking these chains. Once you break them, you’ll nearly be done with the rescue.

You grab Yuta’s chain in both hands, and you pull, putting all of your strength and reaching down into that well of power within you to summon your fire. 

Nothing.

“Told you,” Ten says, “Demon powers don’t work in here. If they did, we’d have prettied ourselves up for you, and burned our way out of here forever ago.”

Yuta clucks softly. “We appreciate it, my love, but the trial sounds pretty decided up there. You should leave while you can.”

Both of them flinch at the loud, jarring sound of the chain smacking against the floor as you throw it down and stand up. You’re not anywhere near tall enough to come nose-to-nose with Yuta when he’s in his pure demon form, but you do your best. 

“I’m not leaving you. You’re both absolute idiots if you think I’m going anywhere without you now.” You spin around, turning your back to the both of them as you think. You close your eyes, trying to picture everything that you’ve read and learned and plotted back on Ira’s island. Surely someone in all the planning had come up with something about how to actually break them out. Surely not all of your plans had relied on magic? 

You should’ve brought a crowbar. Would a crowbar help, though? Surely there are tools that would help in this situation that you could’ve toted through your journey to Hell? You should’ve brought a blowtorch or something. 

Ten actually laughs when you say that aloud.

You glare at him. 

“What? I’m just imagining you busting in here with a whole blowtorch, the welder mask, a fuel cylinder, and an oxygen cylinder strapped to your back.” Ten laughs again.

“I wouldn’t need all of that if I’d thought ahead. I could’ve just manifested something that works like it’s got all of that, but it could be small and portable, able to just fit in my hand.” You frown. You’ve created original things before; objects that you’d imagined up and wanted in your apartment in Hell City. You could create whatever you wanted there, in the House of the Watchers, on Ira’s island – shit, you’d even created your own miniature solar system.

Oh.

You’d created your own stars and moons and planets before. 

That hadn’t been just basic manifestation, Ira had assured you when you brought it up one day. That was the Watcher magic that made that possible. Being a Watcher meant that you had the power of creation. It was completely separate from your demon magic. 

You drop to your knees again at the feet of your boyfriends. When you cup your hands together and close your eyes, Ten makes a noise of confusion.

“What are you doing? We told you already that–” He starts, but you cut him off with a quick shh.

Yuta and Ten watch as you dip into your well of power again, and this time you dig deeper, searching for the warm glow of your Watcher powers, focusing on bringing it all together into your hands. You can feel the moment it begins to work, when you feel heat pooling in your palms, when the buzzing in your mind becomes the quiet whispering of thermal energy eating the air, radiant light glowing through your eyelids.

“Maybe you should both look away,” you advise, and you can almost feel the power on your tongue and lips. You can feel the shift of power as the miniature white star takes form in your hands, as you have to keep your mind focused to control it. The star hisses in the damp air, sending up spirals of steam as you move carefully, bringing it closer to Ten’s chain.

When the star meets the chain, it’s a similar effect to your fiery hand encircling the padlock to the cell. Gobs of molten metal drip to the floor as the star liquefies the chain.

Ten gasps when the strain disappears from his ankle. 

Without another moment wasted, you move to Yuta’s bond, melting through his chain just as quickly. As soon as what remains of Yuta’s tether hits the floor, you sink back on your heels, let your hands fall apart, and you focus on dissipating the star safely, cooling it until it sinks, just a perfectly round black pebble resting in the center of your palm.

Again, there is cheering from far above you, and then the cry of the Queen’s voice in one final declaration.

Ten and Yuta look at each other.

“What?” You ask, rising to your feet once again. You slip the dead star into your pocket. “What’s happening up there?”

Ten swallows hard. Yuta shakes his head. 

“It’s over.” Yuta looks at you. “The trial, I mean. She just cried out ‘Death to the disloyal.’”

Your heart does something very strange – it stops beating or beats harder or just simply jerks in your chest – whatever it is, you gasp, clutching at your chest. This can’t happen. You won’t let it. You didn’t come all this way, do all of these things, create a whole fucking white dwarf star to cut your boyfriends free only to have them give up because some fucking Queen up there decided that they should die. 

No. 

You won’t let them.

“You’re not dying today,” you command them. “I refuse to let that happen. We’re leaving. Fuck the Queen. There’s got to be some way out of here that won’t take us back up into the throne room.”

After a moment of uncertainty, Ten looks at you and Yuta. “Well, there is one thing I think we could try.”

Yuta nods. “Then let’s go.”

You try not to look too closely as your boyfriends begin moving. Since you’ve never seen them in their true demon forms before, you’ve never seen them moving, and it’s mildly disturbing honestly. Yuta has backwards knees like an animal, so each step he takes, his knees bend the opposite way that you’re used to seeing. Ten just seems to float a couple inches off the ground. With the horns and the tail and the deep scars down their backs, it feels entirely new to look at them, and you’re beyond grateful when Ten takes the first step through the doorway of their prison and immediately the version of him that you’re used to snaps into place. 

As soon as Yuta follows Ten out, he resumes his usual appearance as well. But you don’t have time to stand there and admire them. Each of them pulls together some semblance of clothing that seems to knit itself from the damp shadows around the edges of the room, covering up their nudity.

“Come on,” Ten whispers, and he glances up the long staircase that leads up to the throne room. 

Darkness puddles in the space under the staircase, and to your surprise, that’s where Ten leads you and Yuta. “I used to explore the palace when I was skipping out on guard duty,” Ten explains in a whisper, “I found plenty of the secret passages and trapdoors and all sorts of secret things. And there’s one that comes out right back here.”

In the dim light, you watch Ten feel along the stone wall until finally his fingers catch in the gap between one stone and the next. There’s a faint click, and then with a grinding sound, a door slides inward to reveal a dark passage within. 

Ten steps in first, then you, and Yuta takes up the end. Once the door swings closed behind you, the tunnel is plunged into darkness. 

You bring a tiny white star to life again in your hands, and for a brief moment you see Ten and Yuta’s faces. You don’t have time to admire them, to actually rejoice in the reunion with your soulmates. You can feel it in the air, in the stones, in the tense set of Ten’s shoulders as he turns and walks away: you’re short on time. 

“Go on, my love.” Yuta’s hand is light against your lower back. “Keep up.”

The tunnel is long and dark, cool and damp. It branches off a few times, it narrows and the ceiling drops to the point that all three of you must crawl on your hands and knees to pass through to a section with a little more height. But Ten seems to know where he’s going, and with the help of your little light and Yuta’s warm hand occasionally reminding you of his presence behind you, you steadily make your way forward. 

“Where are we going?” You ask after several long minutes. 

“There are three exits from Hell,” Ten explains in a whisper. “The first is the entrance, although it’s a little more difficult to leave that way since we’d be going against the flow of souls. The second is the way the Queen brought Yuta and I in; she’s in possession of a mirror that acts as a portal, and that’s how she usually dispatched us on important missions as it’s the most private method of exit.” 

He pauses then at a fork in the path. 

“And the last one?” You ask, stepping up beside him. 

There’s a draft coming from the pathway to the left, but there’s almost a pull trying to guide you down the one on the right. You can see a faint light rightwards, perhaps a little sound of music that makes you want to dance.

“What’s that way?” You take a step ahead, face turned towards the music and the light

Ten and Yuta each grasp one of your wrists. 

“No,” Yuta rasps, “Not that way.”

Again, you feel the draft on your left cheek. The air has a breath of something sweet, something that reminds you of autumn. 

“This way.” Ten takes the lead again, and neither of them releases their hold on your wrists. “This way is the third exit option. It’s the one we’re taking.”

The path toward the light had curved deeper down into Hell, but you realize that the autumn path is leading slightly upward, the incline causing a slight burn in your calves and your breathing comes out harder than you expected as the path grows steeper and steeper until eventually you’re basically facing a wall.

Far above you, you see a light. But in between that light and the three of you down here at the bottom of this wall are about a hundred rungs of a ladder carved into the stone. 

Ten starts climbing, and you have no choice but to follow. You’ve made it up about maybe twenty rungs before your arms start burning, unused to working like this. You wish that you were able to give yourself fully functioning wings so you could fly the rest of the way out of here, but instead you double-down your focus, breathe, and keep climbing.

You barely even notice when Ten disappears from a few rungs above you. It’s only when you reach for the next rung of the ladder and find your hand placed into Ten’s instead, that you realize you’ve reached the top. He hauls you up to your feet on solid ground, and you grip onto his arm as you look around.

You’ve emerged from what is basically a crack in the wall. There’s a crumbling bit of pathway directly in front of you that extends to your left where it eventually joins with a well-kept path. 

The realm opens up in front of you in a cavernous space. Curved bridges arc over canyons you can see down into. Fires of all colors illuminate the paths and bridges and buildings. It’s still rocky, still everything has the cast of the red-brown dirt that made up the tunnels and the entryway, but it’s so much more open than you were expecting it to be. 

Behind you, Yuta clambers up through the crack, joining you and Ten.

“That’s where we’re going,” Ten says, pointing ahead. 

From here, you can’t really tell what it is that he’s pointing at other than a bridge that leads to a floating platform of stone that branches off into four more bridges. 

Off in the distance, you hear a loud, angry cry.

Yuta’s face pales. “That’s her. She must have realized we’ve gone.”

“We don’t have long, then.” Ten grabs your hand.

You run. The three of you fly along the path, scree kicked over the edge to tumble down into the abyss below. You reach the first bridge, and you try your best to not look over the side; you don’t really want to see how far the canyon goes down, nor do you want to see what might exist at the bottom of it. Luckily, with Ten’s hand still firm around yours, you don’t have the time to worry either about what would happen if you slipped. Ten runs quickly and smoothly, and you have no choice but to keep up with him, Yuta sticking behind you like your shadow. 

You fly over the platform, taking another bridge that shoots you off in another direction, and now you can better see that there are many bridges and deep crevasses all over the place. A wary peek shows you that Hell continues beneath you in many layers – bridges connect islands of stone suspended in the canyons, and you can see the true fires of Hell burning deep below. There are stairs and ramps that lead down below, and you realize you’re just at the top of Hell.

There are buildings here on occasion. You pass a bridge and find yourself jogging down a street with buildings on either side and lampposts giving off a flickering red light. You pass by what could be a park perhaps with grotesque statues and benches and what you’re almost positive is a sand volleyball court. 

Each time you think that you must finally be approaching the spot Ten said would be the exit, he keeps going. Yuta keeps up a steady pace behind you. 

“Aren’t we almost there? How big is Hell, anyway?” You gasp when Ten suddenly jerks your arm, dragging you along another new bridge. Surely you must be getting close because you can see another great wall of stone looming out of the darkness before you, much like the one you’d climbed out of what feels like forever ago. 

“Almost there,” Yuta says from behind you. “And it’s damn near infinite, but that’s when you go downwards.”

Again, you try not to look too hard at what extends beneath you. Instead you focus on what’s ahead. 

This bridge leads to a grove of sorts. Trees made of shiny black stone cling to the edges of this stone island, their roots dangling over the edge, dipping out through the seemingly solid stone they grow from. It must be solid enough to hold the whole weight of this grove of obsidian trees. Their leaves shimmer and shiver in a nonexistent breeze, changing between moonsilver and steel, like blades. You scan the branches as the three of you jog along a cleared path, half-expecting to find nothing, but also hoping to see some little creatures in the branches — birds or squirrels, insects or bats even. 

A fork in the path through the dark trees presents you the choice between a small bridge over a crack through which the level of Hell beneath you is visible before it curves out across the open space to another area of Hell, or you can choose a path that winds deeper into the forest. 

Ten, of course, drags you towards the left branch, deeper into the trees. 

You do hear something above you in the branches. It snaps a branch in one tree before landing in another. But even when you look up, you can’t tell what it is. You can only see the silvery leaves fluttering down towards you, although they vanish in a puff of smoke before they reach you. 

And Yuta swears viciously behind you. Ten forces you to run faster. 

And then you hear voices. 

Sibilant whispers through the trees. A cackle of laughter. 

Up ahead there is a glimmer through the trees, as of a handheld light swinging. The volume of the voices increases, still just incomprehensible whispers. 

Ten breaks from the path, branches tear along your arm, tugging at your clothes and your hair. One twig burns across your cheek. The light continues swinging through the trees, and you find yourself rushing forward to meet it. 

And then there you are. 

Ten comes to a complete stop. You crash into his back, and he reaches back to steady you. Yuta steps around you, moving so he’s shoulder-to-shoulder with Ten, both of them acting as a barrier between you and what lies ahead. 

At first you think it is just a small, empty clearing. 

But then you see the truth. 

A black pool of liquid sits restlessly in the center of the clearing, the surface of it is choppy and bubbling, a gray mist hovers above the surface. A hook beside the pool holds one lantern, casting light down on the pool’s surface, but another light is held by a demon that stands among his peers at the edge of the pool. 

They all turn to look at the three of you. 

“Ah,” drawls Prince Kun, drawing himself up straight. “There you are.”

His gaze passes casually over your boyfriends before settling on you. He lingers, cocking his head slightly to the side, the look of an intelligent predator glowing in his eyes. At his sides, his brothers shift on their feet, sizing up Ten and Yuta and, to a lesser extent, you. 

“Move out of the way, Kun,” Yuta hisses. “We just want to be free, not to hurt you or your brothers.”

“Well, Mother just wants to put you to death.” One of the younger Princes steps forward. “So who are we to stop her from that? We’re just here to stall you until she can arrive.”

“Chenle!” Prince Hendery hisses at the young Prince, jabbing him with his elbow. 

Prince Kun glances at his younger brothers, then back at you. “Forgive my brother. He doesn’t truly understand what we’re doing here.”

Yuta curls his hands into fists at his sides. “And what’s that?”

Kun grins, cocky and sly. “We are definitely stalling for Mother to arrive. But not for the reasons he thinks.”

In that moment, you recall Kun’s hushed words in the throne room exchanged between him and Hendery. “Sometimes I wonder if I’ll have to steal it from her so I can fulfill my destiny as King,” Kun had said. And here he stands now, posted between you and your freedom, poised with three escapees who will do anything to escape from the Queen’s clutches. 

You lean forward, squeezing between Yuta and Ten. “You’re plotting to involve us in something, aren’t you? You’re the Prince who longs to be King, but as long as your mother sits the throne, that’s not possible. And she doesn’t show any signs of abdicating anytime soon, so you’re thinking a little coup…. A convenient ‘accidental’ death by two death-sentenced fugitives in an escape attempt would do well to insure your placement upon the throne without the eternal wait. Hmm?”

Yuta turns to look at you, Ten squeezes your wrist. But you don’t look away from Prince Kun’s vibrant eyes, suddenly alive with hunger as he grins. 

“You’re smart. I can see why Yuta and Ten like you so much.” He takes a step towards you. “We used to know each other well, your boyfriends and I. They were my personal guard, best of the best up until my mother decided they were too good to be left on my service, and she repurposed them for a more special mission.” 

Again, Yuta and Ten move so they’re blocking you. 

“Don’t worry,” Kun placates them, holding his hands up as he says, “Your girlfriend is right.”

Hendery frowns. Chenle takes a step back, casting quick looks at his other two remaining brothers. 

The silver haired Prince who interrupted conversation earlier in the throne room interrupts again by stepping forward and placing his hand on Kun’s shoulder. “I’m with you,” he agrees. “You know I’m sick of her control. I want some freedom.”

Kun nods. “Thank you, YangYang.”

The final brother, the one who possesses wings like a bat, shakes his wings at that moment. It’s a dry leathery sound that draws every eye in the clearing to him. He looks first at Hendery and Chenle, then says, “Don’t act like you’ve never thought of it. We’ve all been under the thumb of tyranny for too long. Haven’t we longed for freedom too? To be able to take a short trip up to the mortal world just to see it? To feel the wind on our faces? Feel the light of the sun?”

“She’s our mother.” Chenle bristles. 

The brothers turn upon each other then, bickering as they face each other. 

Ten turns his head, his eye catching yours. “The pond,” he mutters out of the side of his mouth. “That is the last exit from here. We just have to get in, keep swimming, and we’ll come out where we’re supposed to.”

You understand that magic. Something you’ve come to understand here is that the lines of magic between Watchers and demons and even with Renjun’s elf magic is that they’re all drawn quite closely together, overlapping in many places. 

“Make a run for it?” Yuta asks. “While they’re distracted?”

And then everything falls quiet. The Princes cease their arguments. The leaves grow still. Whatever small movements you’d heard in the trees earlier stop altogether. The air turns chill and so fragile that you feel as if a single sound could shatter everything. 

She comes from across the clearing, which is one moment empty and then it’s not. She moves silently and smoothly, her long gown dirty at the hem as she passes barefoot over the obsidian soil and detritus of shiny leaves. Her hair hangs free and wild around her shoulders, only a thin gossamer veil hides her face. The air crackles faintly as she moves, the way it does before lightning strikes. 

You stare as the Queen of the Night takes a seat, building herself a glittering black throne of shadow and stone as she lowers herself, trusting in her magic to catch her. . 

 “At last,” she says, her voice a sigh and a rasp, the creak of branches on a stormy night. Even though she wears the veil, which still muddles her features, you can tell she’s got her sights set on you as she continues, “At last we meet, face-to-face, my dear. I’ve waited years for this moment.”

“Mom,” YangYang begins, but the Queen flicks her fingers in his direction, and the young Prince falls silent. 

“Your birth, dear child, was an abomination.” Her words are a hiss. “The fact of your creation is disgusting.” 

You shrink into yourself at her words, but you can’t bring yourself to look away from her. 

“The power held in your bones is enough to transform the world, has anyone told you that?” She leans forward on her throne. “Power enough to feed me for eons if I could just get a taste.”

Yuta firmly steps in front of you, which draws a horrifyingly shrill scale of laughter from the Queen. 

“Oh, Yuta, do you think you could really stop me now? You’re weak, both of you,” she says with a lazy gesture towards Ten. “And her blood belongs to me, it calls to me, like to like.”

A chill climbs your spine. “I’m nothing like you.”

Again, the laughter. 

“Darling,” the Queen tips her head back, her laughter climbing up into the branches of the obsidian trees. “Just because I don’t share the same toxic combination of blood as you, doesn’t mean we’re not still alike.” 

The veil flutters away from her face, folded back over her wild hair by an invisible breeze, and she tilts her face forward again to look at you. 

Your heart free falls through the bottom of your stomach, and you clutch at Yuta and Ten as your knees threaten to buckle. 

The Queen of the Night wears your mother’s face. 

A pleased smile grows on her face at your reaction. “We share blood, my dear. Since learning the truth of your heritage, haven’t you ever wondered why the Queen of demons would spare your mother for her traitorous dalliance with your father? I wouldn’t have done that for anyone, nor would I have offered forgiveness so easily to anyone but my own sister.”

As your shock clears, you see now that her face differs slightly from your mother, but the similarities are certainly there. Her mouth sits a little different, her lips wind a little tighter. She doesn’t have the small mole your mother had beneath her right eye, or the faint scar that cut through her eyebrow. Close but different. Sisters. 

“You still did cause her death, though,” Ten interjects. “You may not have chosen to kill her right away, but you did call for her death, as well as the death of the Watcher.”

The Queen snarls, “I had my reasons, Ten. My sister was set to inherit the throne from our father. She had more power, so she should have been Queen of the Night, but she never wanted it.” The Queen laughs before saying, “She fell pregnant, began losing her powers once the holy seed of that Watcher took root, and she slunk away to the mortal world, glad that she no longer would be forced to the throne. But then she produced you.”

Her gaze is piercing, a blade of black ice straight to your heart. 

“That is the great irony, of course,” she says to you, “Your mother never wanted power, but she gave life to someone more powerful than any demon, than any Watcher. I took the throne from the King before he could make a deal with my sister, and my first aim was to take your life before you could grow up and realize that you have a claim to my throne. But the Watchers sought you out as well because they were afraid and intrigued by the result of a union between our kinds. We fought a war over your cradle, and it was only because your mother possessed such power that we were thwarted time and again until finally we settled on a treatise for peace. 

“You were to be raised in ignorance, never aware of your powers, ignorant of your heritage, of the entire supernatural world that you come from. So long as my sister could keep you unaware of this throne, and of the immensity of power you could have, we weren’t to touch a hair on your little head. My throne would be safe as long as you were blind to its existence, and the Watchers need not worry about your power if you didn’t realize you had it either.” She leers at you, such violence in your eyes that you can tell some part of the Queen – your mother’s own sister – longs to throw herself at you and attack.

To your surprise, it’s the youngest prince that speaks up now. “So what happened, Mother?”

She spares her son a minute glance. “I found a loophole, Chenle. I couldn’t have a living risk to my throne, despite the treaty. I knew the Watchers were surely looking for a way around it as well. Like I said, a half-demon half-Watcher is an abomination. Your mother was my sister, dear,” she addresses you again, “and I loved her dearly. But there was this tiny little loophole in our peace accord that meant you were only safe from us while you were under her protection. So, yes, I called for her death. And for good measure, the death of that Watcher as well.”

The Queen claps her hands, brushing her palms against each other as if ridding herself of dirt. “I sent a small troop of demons after her. They were to dispatch her and the mortal lover she took to help raise you, and once they were both gone, my demons were supposed to locate you as well, to bring you to me.” Her smile goes sharp as she says, “But they returned empty-handed, to my never-ending disappointment, and there was no sign of you. Somehow you were still protected by my sister even after her death. So, I set Yuta and Ten on your trail, and like the loyal bloodhounds they were, they eagerly went in search of you.”

The Princes – your cousins, apparently – all stand there, staring at their mother as she unleashes this story. You’re at least relieved to see that none of them look at her with any approval or admiration. Kun actually looks more angry and more determined than he did before.

“Raging cunt,” Yuta whispers under his breath. 

The Queen looks at him, her mouth twisting in a tight smile. “I wanted them to bring me your heart. But strangely their loyalty wavered as soon as they met you, and they hid you in Hell City, knowing that I couldn’t go there myself. Of course, them hiding you from me only made me want you more. Originally, I planned to only consume your power, and send you back to the mortal world to live your sad, plain mortal life.”

You can’t imagine going back to your life before. You’ve tried that once already since having your eyes opened to this world, and you couldn’t do it. She would have to erase all of your memories of this — of Ten, Yuta, WinWin, and Mark; of the Watchers and demons; of everyone and everything that has transformed your life over the last several months. 

You do not want that. 

Not that you’d be willing to give her your power regardless. You’ve barely met her, but judging by the hate her own sons feel towards her, you doubt she would do any good with the powers she would steal from you. 

“Now that they’ve betrayed me,” the Queen continues, “I have to show some punishment in return, do I not? No longer do I long just to punish Ten and Yuta with their own demise, nor to satisfy myself with your power and sending you merrily on your way. Now that you’ve conveniently dropped yourself into my lap, dear niece…” Her lips curl in a wicked grin, her sharp teeth shine in the light as she declares, “I’m going to eat your heart and make them watch.”

Suddenly, it doesn’t matter what Prince Kun was planning. You don’t give a damn if he was going to end his mother quickly or brutally unleash years of pent up rage on her.

All you know in that moment is that Yuta and Ten both lunge for the Queen. And you are filled with a white-hot rage that your physical body simply can’t contain – the inferno breaks through the barrier of your skin, and you can see yourself reflected in the black mirror of the Queen’s eyes.

In that moment you are more demon than anything else, just a raging inferno incarnate, hurtling at the Queen. 

Her sons stand frozen, watching. 

Yuta and Ten fall back, at your sides like two wings of shadow as you fly across the clearing, and the Watcher part of you pulls together your flames into the shape of a fiery blade, casting you in its golden light, painting you as a vision of a vengeful angel.

The Queen’s eyes widen, but her lips curl in an awed smile — full of terror and delight as you come soaring towards her — even at the very moment that you swing your blade, as it connects with her throat. 

Her wicked head separates from the rest of her unholy body.

Her smile doesn’t falter even as her head falls from her shoulders, her tangled hair twisting over her face as her head rolls across the floor of the clearing.

One of the Princes cries out, another turns and you hear him vomiting into the grass.

You point the tip of your fiery blade at the corpse of your mother’s sister, the Queen of the Night. A twisted, dark part of you considers cutting open her chest, pulling out her heart, and eating it in front of her sons much like she had wanted to do to you. But you restrain yourself, satisfying the urge by simply touching the tip of the blade to her body and watching it engulf her in flames.

A hand falls on your shoulder as you watch the body burn.

“That’s enough, my love.” Yuta’s voice is gentle, placating, trying to get you to draw back into yourself because you’re still masquerading as a vengeful angel, wreathed in dancing flames.

Ten reaches for your hand that isn’t clutching the sword. “Come back to us, darling.”

You’re not sure whether you drop the sword or if it just simply vanishes from your grip, but your hand is empty as you lift it to Ten’s face. His eyes flutter shut as you brush the backs of your still-afire fingers against his cheek. His fingers trace up your burning skin from the bend of your elbow up to the softness of your inner wrist, and when his fingertips connect in a loop around your wrist, Ten opens his eyes as he turns his head and sighs over your skin.

His breath is a gentle wave, extinguishing your flames in a domino effect beginning with your fingertips and spreading everywhere until you stand as normal before them. A little smokier and charred than usual perhaps, but otherwise normal. Your clothes seem to have barely survived your personal inferno.

Beside you, Prince Kun clears his throat.

Ten drops his hold on your wrist, but he doesn’t let go of your other hand, nor does Yuta release your shoulder. 

Kun’s brothers are gone from the clearing, save Prince YangYang who lingers at the mouth of the path, looking back at you and his eldest brother, although you can tell he’s determinedly not looking at what remains of his mother – her head and the smoking lump that used to be her body. 

“Can I have a moment alone with the Prince… or King?” You ask your boyfriends. You’re looking at Kun, but he’s not looking at you. 

Yuta squeezes your shoulder and takes a step back, but when Ten lingers, Yuta has to take him by the hand and pull him away to the other end of the clearing. YangYang disappears too, leaving just you and Kun and the dead Queen.

“Well, that’s done,” Kun sighs after a few moments. He lifts his gaze from the corpse, and to your surprise, he offers you his hand. “It’s nice to meet you, cousin. She never told us that’s what you were to us. Actually, I’m not entirely sure how much my younger brothers knew of her hunt for you.” 

You look over at the path down which YangYang disappeared. “I know this is along the lines of what you wanted, Prince Kun. But what of your brothers? They may have agreed to having her off the throne, but was this too much?”

He shrugs. “I don’t know how they thought it was going to happen. But once she started threatening you, I could see where it was going. Honestly,” Kun says, nudging his mother’s disembodied head with the toe of his shiny shoe, “I don’t know what she thought would happen. As if you were just going to peacefully give yourself up and let your lovers watch you be eaten by her?” He scoffs and turns away from the smoking remains of the former Queen of the Night. “You should leave, cousin. Now, before the realm realizes what you’ve done. There’s deeply-rooted demon magic in this place, and if you don’t hurry, I can’t guarantee that you’ll make it out.”

Your first thought is his brothers – that they’ll turn on you and sic the demon army and all sorts of horrible beasts after you. But Kun quickly clarifies, “Whatever magic was used to build this place knows who is in charge, and if it senses that the Queen was murdered, it might do things to ensure that you don’t escape. It’ll close the exits, set the hellhounds after you. My brothers won’t get involved, don’t worry about that.”

A knot works its way up your throat, drawing tighter and tighter until you force out the question that’s been bothering you. “And what of you, Your Highness? Are you going to pursue justice for your mother after I leave? Am I going to continue being hunted by demonkind for the crimes I’ve committed here, for the power I possess that apparently gives me a claim to a throne that I swear I don’t want?”

Kun smiles and shakes his head. “Trust me, cousin, I don’t give a damn what you do with the rest of your life. Be free. Take Yuta and Ten with you, and be happy. As long as you don’t try to make a bid for my throne, you’re free to live your life in the mortal world or in Purgatory with the other Watchers; you can even visit or live in Hell, I don’t care.”

You know exactly where you want to be. You want to return to Ira’s island, safely with Ten and Yuta in tow. You want to be reunited with WinWin and Mark because although it’s only been a day since you left them behind, it feels like it’s been months. And it’s been even longer since you’ve had all four of your boys together, and you just know that it’s going to feel so good to have them together, all yours.

But now the Queen is out of the way, Kun is telling you that you’re free to go, and the pond that Ten says is the portal back to the surface world is right there. 

You sigh. 

You’ve almost got everything you want.

And then the surface of the pond begins to bubble and slosh over the sides. With a vast cloud of steam that erupts and fills the air with the smell of burnt rubber, the pond dries up entirely.

“Shit,” Kun swears, “That’ll be the deep magic I was telling you about. It’s trying to lock you in.”

Distantly, you hear baying – howling and barking that sends an uncontrollable shiver through your entire body. 

“And that’ll be the hellhounds. As I recall, the alpha Cerberus wasn’t particularly fond of Yuta the last time they encountered each other.” Kun looks past your shoulder towards your boyfriends. “Run. I highly recommend going as fast as you can back to the palace. Ten should know the way to the mirror.”

You turn away, ready to heed Kun’s words as you can already tell the hellhounds are growing closer. 

Kun catches your wrist before you can take two steps. “My last piece of parting advice, if the hellhounds catch up to you… don’t look back. Not even once you’re through the portal.”

You don’t ask why. You don’t linger for another moment as a loud snarl sounds from somewhere along the path across the clearing.

“Let’s go!” Yuta hisses, racing forward to grab your hand.

Ten leads the way, setting out full pelt. Yuta’s fingers stay laced with yours as you sprint back through the obsidian forest, across a bridge, down a crumbling set of stairs to the next level of Hell. The whole time, you can hear the growling of the hellhounds chasing after you, and whether it’s through your own supernatural strength or just pure luck, you manage to keep ahead of them.

Ten winds and wends you through Hell, up and down stairs and through tunnels. At one point he leads you and Yuta to leap over a chasm between two areas, a deep river of magma swirling at an incredible heat beneath you. 

You wish you had the chance to actually look around and explore Hell because from what you can see of it, it truly looks like an interesting place. But any time you slow even slightly to admire the bizarre architecture and landscaping of this realm, you hear the scraping of claws against stone, the panting of the hounds, and Yuta’s grip drags on your hand to speed you along after Ten. 

“When we reach the mirror,” Yuta tells you, his voice shaken with each labored breath, “You’re going first. Ten and I will be behind you to try to fend off the hounds if they follow. We’ll be right behind you.”

“No, I want you two in front of me where I can see you, so I know that we’re all making it out of here.” You try to argue, but that’s pretty hard to do when Yuta’s suddenly jerking you around a sharp corner, Ten’s footsteps slap against the stone ahead of you, and you can see the three of you are rapidly approaching a wall.

Ten skids to a stop, and you watch as he starts touching the wall, running his hands along it at eye-level, searching for a seam. Just as his fingers catch on something that you can’t see, as you hear a faint click and a panel in the wall pops inward slightly, you hear the clatter of tiny pebbles being kicked across the floor and claws scrambling to turn a sharp corner.

You don’t even realize you’ve begun to turn your head towards the sound until Yuta’s palms are warm on your cheeks, keeping your head from facing back. “No, you can’t look at them. That’s how the hounds trap souls that attempt escape. If you look at them, if they look back at you, they’ll capture your soul and you’ll be stuck. Don’t look at them. Follow Ten.”

“Come on!” Ten cries as he holds open the door he’s found, waving you and Yuta forward.

No sooner have you both crossed the threshold than the door slams shut behind you. A split second after that, there’s an immense bang as a heavy body throws itself against the door.

“They might not be able to open this door,” Ten says, “But it’s not going to stop them from finding us for long.”

“Where are we?” The space you’re in is almost entirely black, only a faint glow emanates from small crystals embedded in the walls. 

Yuta answers, “The palace. This is a servant’s entrance to the royal baths.”

Ten snaps his fingers, and a ball of fire appears in his palm, illuminating his face. “I wish that we could take you to the baths, darling. They’re exquisite. Heated by the magma core, so it’s delightfully warm. There’s every scent of every kind of body care you could hope for. When we were in Prince Kun’s service, I admit I spent quite a bit of time in the baths.”

“Too much time enjoying the pleasures of the baths rather than working, if I recall,” Yuta laughs. “And as wonderful as a nice bath sounds right now, shouldn’t you be taking us to the Queen’s mirror? I assume you know some secret, faster way to get there?”

Ten grins. “Like I said earlier, I spent plenty of time exploring the secrets of the palace.” He looks at you, his dark eyes reflecting the light of his flame, the heat of his passion. “I know a shortcut that’ll get us there in no time. And the sooner we’re free and it’s just us, the better. I’ve missed you so much, darling. I fully plan to make up for lost time, and remind Mark and WinWin that we were your lovers first.”

His fingers brush your collarbone where your shirt has been burnt away, and you know there’s probably a hickey or the lasting imprint of Mark’s teeth there. 

Yuta is smiling. “I’m excited to see them, too.”

“Then let’s go. The sooner, the better.”

Ten nods, turns, and begins walking off down the dark tunnel. Behind you, there’s another solid thud against the door, the baying howl of a frustrated hound, and then silence. 

“There’s a main door to the palace not too far from here,” Yuta tells you, “So we’d better hurry before the hounds reach it. I fucking hope Ten knows the secret passages as well as he thinks he does.” He waits for you to take off at a jog before he follows at the same pace, chasing after Ten’s distant flame. 

When you step out into an open chamber, you’re surprised by the stunningly humid air ripe with floral scent until you realize this is the royal baths. The baths have been dug into the floor, and their surfaces give off curls of steam that rise to caress the ceiling, lovingly wrap around you and welcome you in. Iridescent bubbles float from the surface of one bath that smells like cotton candy, and another bath you pass by shimmers like the water is made of molten gold. 

Ten’s light is just a hazy orange glow ahead of you, and you nearly lose sight of him as the steam grows thicker around you and Yuta. Yuta has one hand touching your lower back as you wind carefully through the pools that make up the baths. At one point, in a narrow ledge between two pools, your foot does slip on the slick surface, and it’s only by Yuta quickly grabbing the back of your clothes that you manage to not take a dip in the unnaturally blue water. 

You can feel the humidity threading through your hair, dampening it until it sticks against your face and neck. You’re sure you almost look as if you had actually fallen into the pool, but as you finally draw up next to Ten, you’re pleased to see that he looks the same, and Yuta does as well although he’s raked his fingers through his hair to push it back away from his face. 

“Here,” Ten murmurs, “One of you hold this.”

You offer up your hands, and Ten pours his flame into your palms. 

You’re reminded of the first day you made your own flame, sitting with Ten, his hands warm on yours, his flame passed from his fingertip to yours, the way it had felt like a fluttering heartbeat. Now you feel that way again, and you realize how familiar Ten’s fire feels, like a welcome kiss from your long lost lover. 

You pull your hands towards your chest, longing to press his flame over your heart. 

Ten crouches on the floor in the middle of the room. 

Here, the floor is made up of a million tiny tiles all coming together to make a mosaic image of a figure upon a throne over the burning masses below. An interesting choice of artwork for a relaxing bath space, but whatever, everyone has their own taste in artwork. 

Ten runs his fingers over the tiles, and you watch the colors shift, responding to his touch. Until he reaches the small tiled throne. It glows as his fingers pass over it, and then it transforms into a handle, raised from the floor just an inch or two. 

“Yuta, help,” Ten grunts as he fits his fingers around the handle and attempts to haul open this secret passage’s door. 

Yuta crouches beside him, and you watch in the wavering light of your handheld flame as they both work in tandem to lift open the hatch. 

Ten jumps down, you follow, and Yuta brings up the rear again, dragging the door shut easily as he comes. You pass Ten’s flame back over to his hands so he can lead the way. The passage goes straight for a short distance before it becomes a set of stairs rising upwards. 

You’re surprised you only stumble once or twice as the three of you climb the stairs at a run, though luckily it is only a few flights before Ten shoves against a wall, and it swings outwards.

You run out into a large, beautiful chamber. It’s full of rich reds and golds, marble tiles, a large fur rug that looks as though it comes from a massive beast or many pelts sewn together, heavy furniture and fine fabrics. You look around in awe, trying to catch your breath even as Ten drags you forward by the hand. 

“It’s just over here.” He directs the words over his shoulder. 

Various doors lead out of this room. A large set of double-doors probably lead back out into the rest of the palace, if you had to guess. A smaller set of doors have panes of glass set in them, through which you can make out the dim firelight of Hell, so you assume those doors lead out to a balcony. You’re sure one of the doorways leads to the late-Queen’s bedchamber, another possibly to some kind of an office, and then there’s the small door Ten leads you and Yuta to. 

It’s rather nondescript, nearly blending into the wall itself. 

You’re just a few short feet from it when you hear a sound coming from the other side of the large double-doors. 

Raised voices, panic and heavy footsteps moving rapidly along a corridor outside. And then, amidst the clamor of the guards, the keening howl of hellhounds on the hunt. 

“Fucking shit!” Yuta is right behind you, close enough that you feel the kiss of heat as he summons his flames. “Go, Ten. Get her through the mirror. If they make it through, I’ll hold them off.”

Your arm wrenches painfully as you twist around and plant your feet. Ten is still trying to drag you towards the door that leads to the mirror portal, but you won’t leave Yuta. 

“No, you can’t stay here!” You argue. “Come with us. If we just run, they won’t catch us.”

Yuta’s fire is burning hot enough to distort the air between you with waves. “I’m not staying behind, I swear. Just until you’re through the portal, and I’ll be right behind you.”

No. 

You’re this close.

You reach for him, reaching through the waves of intense heat, and you clasp your hand around his wrist. “Defend our position from inside the room, then. Not from out here.”

There’s a softness in Yuta’s eyes when he’s and your face. His flames dim slightly. “Alright, I guess that works too.”

Ten throws open the small door to the portal room, waving you in first. 

The room on the other side is a small, dirt room. There’s nothing to it — dirt walls, dirt floor, dirt ceiling, a singular torch with its end planted in the ground illuminates the bare room; its light is only intensified by the only decoration: the large gilt mirror that stands tall enough and wide enough to be able to admit two tall men standing abreast of each other. 

Yuta bumps against your back before sliding around you, and then Ten is there too, his hand at your waist as the door to the room clicks shut. 

You can see your image reflected in the mirror — the unwavering image of all three of you standing side by side. 

A knot forms in your throat, but now is not the time to cry. You can do that later when you’re all safe and free back in your father’s little bubble, when you’re reunited with Mark and WinWin as well. 

On the other side of the door, you hear the loud bang of the double-doors being thrown open. Footsteps, the clacking of claws, the whines of the hounds. 

Yuta turns, his flames rising in heat and brightness as he faces the last door between you and the hounds. 

Ten wraps his arm around your waist dragging you along with him towards the mirror. 

As you stand facing the mirror this time, knowing you’re about to travel through it, you hope it goes smoother than the last time. You lift a hand to the surface, and as your fingertips brush along the image, minuscule ripples expand across the mirror. This mirror feels so much more liquid, like actual cool water, no resistance. 

“Go,” Ten urges, “Now. Think of our destination as you pass through, and that’s where this will lead. Go.”

A thud that shakes loose a few clumps of dirt from around the door. You can hear claws scraping against the door, you can see the shadowy movement as one hellhound attempts to dig under the door. The door holds, though it rattles in place. 

“Go,” Ten repeats. 

“I’ll hold them off,” Yuta growls, and his fire is still building. “But you have to get through.”

“I’m right here, right behind you,” Ten keeps his voice gentle, encouraging. “Just step through the portal, my darling.”

He’s holding one of your hands lightly in his own, and you use that hold of his to have him help you balance as you lift a foot to step through the frame. 

Ira’s island, you think, imagining the sight of the lighthouse, of the island, the kitchen, the study, the living room, the cove with the sirens. 

The mirror smoothly drinks you in, wrapping around you like stepping into blessedly cool air conditioning after standing in the disgustingly sticky heat of a humid summer day. A long passage extends before you, which is somewhat different from the mirror journey you experienced with Renjun, but it feels so blessedly cool on this side that you don’t hesitate to keep pulling yourself through the mirror. You pass through until all that remains on the other side is your fingertips pinched between Ten’s, but even then, Ten lets go, and the last of you sinks inside the mirror. 

Ten stands just on the other side, staring at you through a faintly blue tint. 

“Come on,” you say, “Hurry.”

The door into the chamber bursts open. Yuta sends up a wall of flame. 

Ten whips around to aid Yuta. You step back towards them, ready to throw yourself through the mirror as well to help, but your palms crash against the inside of the mirror as if it were back to being solid glass, no longer the fluid surface that let you in. 

You slam your hands against the glass. You yell, scream, cry, swear. 

Both Yuta and Ten stand wreathed in flames, putting up walls of fire between the door and the mirror at their backs. They’re being pushed back, you realize. Soon they’ll be backed against the mirror. 

You can see Yuta gritting his teeth together as he puts his all into maintaining the inferno he’s creating. His usual appearance is fading slightly, you can see his true demon features beginning to peek through. The same can be said for Ten. 

You hit the glass one more time. 

Ten twists his head around to look at you. His eyes are the piercing narrow-eyed slits of his cat-like eyes. “You need to go,” he calls to you. 

“No, not without you.” You lean your forehead against the glass. “I can’t come back through. I can’t come to you. Come here, hurry!” You can see shadows, smoky figures moving in the walls of flame Yuta and Ten have thrown up. “Hurry!”

“Go!” Ten shouts, his voice raw, raging, echoing up the passage behind you. And then, a little more gently, “We’re right behind you, I promise. Just trust that we’re behind you, and don’t look back! Now, go!”

This time he says it with enough power in his voice that you stumble back from the force of it. 

On the other side of the mirror, Ten turns back to face forward, to face his flames and the hellhounds. 

You take another step backward up the passage even though everything in you is telling you not to leave, to run back at the mirror and do something to make it let you through it, even though your mind is saying that, your body won’t obey. Your body is listening to Ten as you turn and start running up the passage. 

Your throat feels raw as you pant for breath, but you keep going, running up the sloping tunnel even as you feel as if your chest is going to cave in and your heart is going to burst. You can’t hear anything at all over the racing of your heart and the thunder of your breathing, so you can’t even hear if Ten and Yuta are behind you. Hell, you can’t even tell if the hounds are still pursuing you or not. 

Kun’s warning and Ten’s last words ring in your ears.

Don’t look back.

You just have to trust.

Sobs tear from your throat with each jolt of your feet against the ground. You feel like you’ve been running for hours, days, weeks. You just want to peek backwards, to know if they’re behind you because if they’re not then all of this will have been in vain, and they’ll be re-imprisoned in Hell for the crime of the Queen’s death.

Don’t look back.

You’re almost certain you hear a footfall behind you, rock scattering under someone else’s foot. Was that a breath? Was it an echo of your own breathing, or was it the panting of a hellhound almost upon you?

Don’t look back.

An entire lifetime ago, you’d sat in a literature class that taught mythology. At the time, you’d felt a bizarre mixture of shame and interest – your highly religious upbringing made you feel that learning these stories was improper as they were based on false idols, but you were so intrigued by the pantheon of gods, their many stories and interactions with mortals that differed so greatly from the stories of the One God that you were familiar with.

Among those many myths you’d learned in that stuffy classroom, there was the tale of Orpheus and Eurydice. The woman who died from a snakebite, and her lover who journeyed into the Underworld to bring her back. 

The story comes back to you now. 

Orpheus, who rescued Eurydice, who was allowed to bring her back to the mortal world on the sole condition that he didn’t look back at her until they were both in the mortal world. And now, more than ever, you understand that story. You have two lovers behind you, death nipping at your heels, and as you race out of Hell, you can’t look back – it’s a warning you’ve received now twice, and as much as you want to look back to be certain that Ten and Yuta are behind you, you know the mistake Orpheus made; in the last moments before success, Orpheus looked back. 

Eurydice was lost forevermore.

It could have just been a tale, except that when poring over tomes and tales at Ira’s kitchen table during the useless planning of this rescue, one account had been that of Orpheus. 

A miserable tale that you’d barely been able to stomach reading given your circumstances. How Orpheus, barred from telling her that he was forbidden to look back at her, marched before his wife out of the Underworld, both of them in cold silence. He heard no sign of her – not a footstep or a sniffle, not the sound of her voice or a whisper of her breath as they walked for an eternity – and he wondered if she was truly there, or were the words of the gods false and he was walking this endless path from Hades for no reason? 

With mere footsteps left before he and his wife rejoined the mortal world, with hope burning bright in his heart as the light of the Sun warmed his bones, Orpheus couldn’t stand the suspense any longer. As he turned, he heard her anguished cry of his name, he saw the horror on Eurydice’s face, and Orpheus had no choice but to watch as she was reclaimed by shadow and drawn back down into the Underworld, screaming for him.

Don’t look back, Kun and Ten had both uttered the warning, Orpheus’ tale echoing the words at you again.

You run until your knees feel like liquid and your feet like stones, your chest burns with each breath, and surely if you didn’t have the power of your mother and father both in your veins, you’d have collapsed long ago. How far can this path from Hell possibly be? 

Your toe catches a loose stone on the floor, and you stumble. Your palms burn as they scuff along the rough floor, your knees bruise and sting where the tatters of your clothes don’t cover them. 

There’s no sound behind you. No hands reach forward to help you up and urge you on as you stay there for a moment – hands and knees on the dirty floor with your head bowed as your tears drip into the dirt, your ragged breath still loud in your ears. 

Are you alone? Or is that deeply-rooted demon magic Kun mentioned holding Yuta and Ten under the same spell as Eurydice had been – unable to make a sound or touch you, unable to make their real presence known to you?

You find the strength to push to your feet again, to start forward again. Your mind races, and you can’t help thinking, I just want to go home, to be free of all of this. I just want to be happy with my boyfriends again, like we were in our apartment. All four of us. Why did everything have to go so wrong? Why did everything have to play out like this? 

You run even as your bones ache and your mouth dries out. You feel hollow.

And then the ground evens out. 

And you look up, and you can see watery daylight ahead of you.

You remember this: the sight of the world through the inside of the mirror. The watery distortion of everything when Renjun first led you through a mirror portal to escape the dungeon of the Watchers. You pray the exit runs smoother this time than the last – that you won’t feel like you’re drowning and suffocating and stuck within a glue trap as you had last time.

A fresh burst of energy rolls through you as you see it so close, close enough you can reach out and touch it.

Your fingertips pass through like reaching into water.

Your toe catches the inner lip of the mirror.

The world tilts and blurs, nausea rolls your stomach as you fly through the mirror and dash yourself against the floor on the right side of the mirror.

And you wait.

You don’t dare to turn to look into the mirror. You don’t know what you would be able to see. Does it look just like a regular mirror, reflecting only you and the room you’re in? Is it semi-transparent, so you’re able to see back into the passageway you’ve just escaped through? 

But more terrifying than that – in some version of Orpheus and Eurydice, he reached the safety of the mortal world, and rejoicing in that, he turned to celebrate with his wife, only to find that she had yet to pass the border between the realm of Hades and the surface. Thus, he lost her because they were not both with their feet safely on the soil and in the sunlight.

You won’t make that mistake, even if it means you have to wait here forever with your cheek pressed against the wood of the floor, your clothes crumbling even more into charred bits after the rough friction of passing through the mirror and colliding with the world. 

Tears still spill down your cheeks, and you squeeze your eyes shut because you’ve nothing to look at anyway. 

<-previous || next–>

a/n: Thank you for reading! I'm so excited to see what y'all think about the rescue finally happening! It was a little bit different than originally planned, both in the opinion of the characters, and also different than I originally planned lol This chapter is the reason it took me so long to finally finish writing this story.

── ⋆⋅𑣿⋅⋆ ─── ⋆⋅𑣿⋅⋆ ─── ⋆⋅𑣿⋅⋆ ──

A text tone caught your attention, but you see nothing on your screen. You look over to the phone, which belonged to your boyfriend, on the table.

Czennie

When are you going to tell Y/N?

You scrunched your face in confusion. You didn't know who this person was and what Ten would have to tell you. Another text came in, your heart dropping to your stomach as you read it.

Czennie

I like you and you like me. So what's the hold up?

You drop the phone onto the couch. You knew that your relationship with Ten wasn't the same anymore. You didn't feel sadness or hurt at the information. Only numbness, you knew that the two of you had grown distant lately. The relationship had changed; often times either ignoring or arguing with each other. But you didn't think he had gain feelings for someone new.

. ݁₊ ⊹ . ݁˖ . ݁˚ ༘ 𑣿⋆ ₊˚. ݁₊ ⊹ . ݁˖ . ݁

You watched while sipping on your tea as Ten walked into the kitchen. His blond hair still slightly wet from his shower. The male doesn't say anything as he slips past you. Before he would have put his hand on your waist and teased you. "Do you have any plans today?" you ask, trying to be casual, as you took another sip from your mug. Ten turned his head, an incredulous look on his face. He scanned you before answering.

"No...why?" He was hesitant and his voice full of suspicion.

"Really? No plans at all, not even later tonight?"

Ten only shook his head, his body now fully facing you. Leaning with the hands behind him onto the counter space. "Good. Meet me at The Vision at 6" you told the male as you placed your now empty mug into the sink. You walked into the bedroom, grabbing some clothes and bath necessities into a backpack. You'd find a day to come back for the rest of your things another day. "I'm going to Wei's but I'll be waiting for you outside" you said, not looking in Ten's direction, as you slipped into a pair of shoes. While waiting for the male to get out after the text, you had messaged your friend asking to stay at theirs until you got yourself sorted. Luckily they had agreed, in turn allowing you to escape from an awkward situation.

. ݁₊ ⊹ . ݁˖ . ݁˚ ༘ 𑣿⋆ ₊˚. ݁₊ ⊹ . ݁˖ . ݁

You stood outside The Vision; the setting of your first date with Ten, and now the last. You had thought it would be fitting that the relationship ended in the same place that it essentially started. Ten walked up to you, he was wearing white tank under a mesh top with jeans. "So what are we doing here?" he asked, crossing his arms and quirking his eyebrow. You could tell that he was now annoyed; it made you wonder if his new toy had contacted him since you left. But you kept your thoughts to yourself, anything else would ruin what you had planned. Instead you just scoffed and turn to walk inside the restaurant.

"Follow me" you said, looking back at the blond male with a smirk. The last thing you saw before you turned away was Ten rolling his eyes. Once sat the two ordered before falling into silence. You didn't care to try breaking it over the course of your last meal together, only speaking to the waiter when they came over. The two of you must have looked weird to the wait staff and other customers.

"If you wanted to play the silent game then we could have done that in the comfort of our home" Ten harshly whispered to you, leaning over the table so that no one surrounding the table could hear. It was probably the closest that he had gotten to you in who knows how long. You couldn't even properly remember the last time that you shared a kiss with your boyfriend.

"That's not the reason why we're here" you plainly replied to the male. Leaning into the back of your seat and looking over your nails. Then you looked back up into Ten's face, making piercing contact with his eyes.

"Then why?" Once again his teeth were gritted, his annoyance seeming to grow more as the night continued to play out.

"Well it's to my belief that you actually have something that you need to tell me."

"What?" Ten's face regained his confusion from earlier. That either means he hadn't seen the messages from this whoever or he was acting. Though you weren't sure the second reason made sense as there was no reason to keep pretending to love you.

"Yeah...I saw the messages from your new little thing. So I'm allowing you the opportunity to tell me yourself, last chance." You watched as Ten leaned back in shock at your words. All the color draining from his face and his hand stressfully running through his hair. He mummered curses under his breath before leaning in again, albeit not as close as the previous time.

"Y/N, you got to believe me. I didn't mean for this-"

"I don't care for your excuses. Honestly this fate probably wasn't far from happening for us. Just be a man and tell me" you interrupted the male from what was possibly the start of a long ramble. Of course while you were putting on a tougher act than how you felt, you didn't want to hear his shitty excuses. Not now, not ever. What you wanted was for the man to own up to what was happening, give you one last bit of respect for you and for your relationship.

"Y/N.." Ten trailed, his eyes not meeting yours and it seemed as though he was fidgeting with his fingers. You just rolled your eyes as he dragged this out. Did you not even deserve a break up from the person who no longer loved you? Was it going to be up to you to officially end this relationship? Was Ten ever going to inform you about his dissolved feelings or was he planning on cheating on you with someone else?

"God. You can't even do it while I'm giving you the chance. Well then-" You started as you got up from your seat with vigor. Ten grabbed your forearm, stopping you from moving as he lightly trembled.

"Y/N I'm so sorry. So sorry" his voice cracked and his shaking grew as you could tell he was holding back tears. Ten looked up into yours, his glistening from said unshed tears; you fought against the ones pricking your own to keep up the demeanor you've put up. "I'm a bad guy and I should have done this some time before. I'm sorry you found out the way you did and I don't blame you if you hate me" he continued as he stood up himself. Your fore arm was still in his grip, rooting you to the spot that you stood. Wrapping you up in his arms, you shared the most physical interaction with Ten in what was at least 5 months, in a hug. "Let's break up." You nodded as you buried your face into his shoulder, the tears you tried fighting escaping and wetting his shoulder. The two of you stood in a hug, where everyone with seeing vision watched with confusion and weird faces, for several minutes. When you separated, you wiped your face from the wet trails on your cheeks. You noticed that Ten hadn't cried and his eyes were threatening to breach his waterline.

"Thank you."

"It's the last thing I can do for you."

—.☘︎ ݁˖—

𝚜𝚑𝚊𝚗'𝚜 𝚝𝚑𝚘𝚞𝚐𝚑𝚝𝚜

This was first inspired by Ariana Grande's One Last Time, cause it plays several times during my shift.

—.☘︎ ݁˖—

That last phrase punctured through your thoughts and reeled you back in almost forcefully. All of a sudden you could hear and feel again as heaving sounds pressed against your ears. Sharp needles of pain suddenly shot up in your chest and you blinked, confused, as your sight came into focus. Jaemin's face leaned closer to yours as he reached out a hand to cup your cheek. The feel of his skin against yours made you realize that you were shaking, and that it was you who was making the gasping noises as you choked on air.

"Shh… Focus on me."

You stared at him wordlessly as you felt the sound of his voice almost physically wrap around you. It was a stark contrast to the confusing churn of emotions twisting in your chest, and it took you a moment to finally realize that he was pushing back against your meltdown with his ability. Slowly, you closed your eyes to submit and let him in. He obviously felt the change, because the artificial calm finally broke through your mental boundaries the moment you stopped resisting.

"Good girl… It's okay… You're okay."

Your shaking had gradually stopped all except for your fingers which, you realized upon opening your eyes again, were wrapped around the wrist of his hand still holding your face. Gently, you felt him move his thumb under your eye to wipe the tears brimming there.

"Papa… They have him."

The voice that came out of you didn't even sound like it was yours, but you still pushed out the first thing that your mind locked on as soon as the worst of your mental blackout had cleared. Jaemin's eyes slightly widened, surprised, before his brows furrowed in concern. Slight movements beside him finally made you look up. You have no idea how you got back to the bunker after that face off with Haneul, but the rest of the boys are huddled over you now, wearing similar expressions.

"Jeno too. They're—they're hurting both of them—"

Your voice broke as flashes of both scenes came rushing back to you. You folded on your seat as soon as they came, your arms going around yourself as the rest of Haneul's words came slamming against you like waves again. You barely felt the arm resting on your back, rubbing gentle circles on it, until you heard Renjun's voice beside you.

"Hey. Don't push yourself too hard. Tell us everything at your own pace and—"

"Who is IL Matto?"

Your question quickly cut him off. You didn't even need to look up to notice the shift in the room the moment the words left you. All of a sudden the air felt thick with tension as everyone froze. You looked up slowly, your gaze clashing with Mark's.

"Is she the girl you love? The one behind all of this?"

He didn't answer, but the look on his face was enough of the confirmation that you need. A knot started twisting and tightening in your stomach.

"They're after her. Haneul Lee… he wants her. They are about to start the last phase of their experiments with a new project—Project Vision and she's their subject."

If the room seemed tense earlier, then the choking silence has definitely escalated now to a new level. Everyone has gone so still that you could almost swear they’ve collectively stopped breathing. Renjun was the first one who broke the silence, his voice laced with an undercurrent of barely concealed fear when he spoke.

"What do you mean? Haneul knows who she is?"

You shook your head slightly.

"I don't know. But he did give orders to look for her after they—after they're done with whatever it is that they are doing with Jeno. He said he is going to hunt her down."

You were so focused on trying to recollect Haneul's exact words that you didn't even notice Mark crossing the distance to where you are. He had gone so still earlier that you gasped in surprise when you felt him suddenly grasp your wrist. His hold was tight, mirroring the desperation in his eyes.

"Does he know what she can do?"

You were shocked. You've never seen him act this way before.

"N-No… He didn't say anything. But he knows my mother and how she," you stopped, suddenly finding it hard to work through the tight lump in your throat. "How she was the former IL Matto. Haneul knew them. My parents."

You saw how the rest of the boys exchanged glances in your peripheral vision. Jaemin reached out to you silently again, this time weaving his fingers through yours. His warmth clashed with the cold that’s slowly seeping to the rest of your limbs.

"If he is after her… and he knows the Headmaster from before, then he might have an idea…" Haechan said, his voice thin. He exchanged a look with Renjun from over your head.

"Is there something else he told you?" Jaemin carefully asked now, probably in an effort to reel you back from the oncoming panic attack that he can feel from you again. You tried to focus on the sound of his voice to ground yourself.

"Kun… wanted me to join them. Haneul gave me eight hours to think about it."

Your words hung thick in the air. Chenle, who had been quiet from the start, finally broke his silence.

"They're going to kill us… In eight hours."

Nobody spoke. Nobody even dared react, knowing he was telling the truth.

"We have to get out of here…" Jisung said, eyes moving towards the others. You, however, turned your attention to Mark again.

"What can she do? IL Matto? Why do you think they want her?"

The boy in question didn't seem to want to answer at first. Though he has already let go of you after his whir of the moment reaction, you noticed the undercurrent of unexplained tension still buzzing around him. It was almost out of character for his usual personality that seems to always be in control of things. It took you a moment to read it, but when Mark finally met your gaze, the realization hit you hard.

He isn't afraid for himself and the prospect of dying. He isn't even afraid for his friends.

He is terrified… for her.

"IL Matto can change the nature of Arcana powers," he started slowly, eyes steady on yours. "Unlike the former mistress of the Arcana, your mother, she cannot possess the abilities of other masters. But she can magnify their Arcanas to levels that we cannot manage to do ourselves."

Your eyes widened. Renjun continued on beside you.

"Ability Amplification is how we call it. Arcana holders like us have limitations because we are still only human vessels given temporary mastery of these abilities. She can change it if she wills to, by unlocking ranges that taps to the real Arcana source."

Everything was falling into place. Your gaze started going out of focus as the realizations started coming one by one.

"Haneul and the machine he made can only copy abilities for a limited amount of time," you whispered, more to yourself than anyone else. "That's why she is the last phase of the project. Her Arcana will extend all the abilities they have copied so far and…"

"And will let him create exact, if not more powerful clones of us," Haechan finished grimly.

"We have to get to her," Mark's words made all of you turn towards him. There was a set look on his face that made a foreboding feeling start to grow in the pit of your stomach. "No matter what happens, we can't let Cypher get their hands on IL Matto."

You couldn't put your finger on it, but something about the way he said that made the knots of anxiety in your chest wound tighter. Before you even realized what you were doing, you were grabbing at his hand and gripping it tight. Your gaze sought for his, begging for his promise.

"Please. If we are going to leave, save my father too. With Jeno."

The way that he immediately didn't answer made your desperation grow.

"Mark," you whispered. "You promised…"

A shadow of something clouded over his eyes for a quick second. Before you could even process what it is, you felt gentle hands grab you by the shoulders again and pull you back to your seat.

"Hey… try to relax…" Jaemin said as he tried to soothe you.

"Mark—"

"I promise," the boy finally said, his words resting thickly in the tensed silence. You stared straight at his eyes, willing to see if he meant it, but you couldn't easily read him for once. A few more seconds passed before you finally allowed yourself to loosen your stance.

"You should try and rest. We'll… come up with something," Renjun took your hand and gave it a gentle tug. "We’ll talk again after. Do you want to lie down? I'll sit with you."

It took you a moment before you managed to give a small nod. With your response, Renjun finally stood up and guided you to do the same. You did, letting him steer you towards the direction of the bunkers after. You felt so drained and tired that you didn't even notice the loaded glance he exchanged with the rest of the boys before you both detached yourself from the group.

"Hyung… What do we do?" Jisung whispered in the silence that you and Renjun left when your pair finally disappeared at the other end of the room. Mark didn't immediately reply, wearing an expression that also sat in Jaemin and Haechan's faces. Everyone seemed to know what the answer is, but nobody wanted to say it out loud.

"We'll have to get Jeno and the Headmaster before we leave this place."

"How? We don't even know where they are," Chenle asked next.

"We'll follow the plan she talked to us about before. I think it might work."

"And if it doesn't? What if we run out of time?" Haechan finally asked the pressing question everyone wished they could jump over. Mark's jaw ticked, but he looked up after a while to give each boy a pointed glance.

"Then we leave this place with or without them…"

"No matter what happens, we choose IL Matto over everyone else."

*******

"Sir, the chambers are ready."

Kun didn't budge despite the notice fed to him on his earpiece. His eyes were set on a spot by the wall, face emotionless as he slowly turned over the mask he was holding in his hand. It was just an hour or two before the sun would rise outside, and yet the air clinging in the corridor was as grim and cold as the darkest of twilight. His fingers ran now on the plastic edges of the straps before he slowly raised them to press a button on his in-ear. 

"We're sure all air chambers are sealed shut?"

"Yes, sir."

"Any movements inside?"

"The heat sensors show nothing. They're all sleeping."

He didn't say anything else after that. Silently, he turned towards the dozen or  so men standing on alert beside him. Just like him, the crew was wearing thick hazmat suits and gas masks, with guns resting heavy on their hands. He nodded now towards the one closest to him—the chief of guard, though he made sure the rest of his words were clear enough to be heard by the rest of the group when he spoke.

"Try to move as silently as you can when you go inside. We don't want to wake up any of them. All seven of you who have the gas cans, make sure to throw them in the right direction. The poison is fast acting and will only take 15 seconds at most to work. The rest of you, don't move until I say so. We want to keep this as clean as possible."

The group gave a collective nod towards his orders. Kun finally moved to put on his own gas mask and pulled a small monitor from his pocket after—a handheld device showing what looked like a heat radar checker. Seven red dots were clustered on one of its sides, unmoving. He gave it one last check before finally nodding towards the small army behind him.

"Let's go."

Their unit moved like a shadow towards the metal doors of the bunker. With a set stare, he waited for the entrance to open in almost painful silence. The room was dark when the doors finally parted, but that didn't stop the trained men from slipping inside, silent like ghosts. Kun brought the rear of the group, making sure each one was in their right position before he walked over and raised his hand. The tension was palpable as the wards waited for his go signal. One second. Two seconds. Three seconds. His own heartbeat felt slow in his chest, as if death was after him itself.

Finally, he brought his hand down in one quick, smooth motion.

The sequence of the next actions that followed were quick and measured. Seven of the masked men moved forward, each holding a steel cylindrical container in both hands. The remaining men behind Kun raised their high-powered rifles in synchrony, the ends aimed at the direction of the beds. One by one, the men armed with the poison cans pressed the release button on the cylinders before letting them roll towards the same side of the room.

For a moment nothing moved in the silence. After a few seconds, however, thick white fumes started bursting from the canisters and quickly covered the room with smoke. Slight rustling can be heard from the direction of the beds as the sleeping occupants seemed to have finally realized what was happening. Soon enough, the noises were punctured with sounds of coughing, groans, and shouts as if people were struggling and trying to flail around.

"Nobody move until I say so."

Everyone in the room stayed still and followed his orders despite the ruckus. The smoke was so thick that Kun could barely see two feet from where he was standing and he waited for the fumes to disperse before making another move. After almost half a minute of painful waiting, the room finally cleared up a bit just as the struggling noises quieted down. His eyes fell on the small monitor on his hand, now dead of the seven traces of light from earlier.

"Control room, all heat sources are out. Can you confirm?"

A slight crackling sound from his earpiece followed after a beat of silence.

"Confirming zero feedback from the heat map. We need to have visual evidence of the bodies though."

At that, Kun slipped the device back to his pocket before finally taking a step deeper into the room. Silently, he moved past the vanguards who set off the poison gas, straight towards the end of the room. Splayed motionlessly on the beds and the floor next to them are seven figures—six boys and a girl.

He stopped next to the two bodies closest to him now, their faces partly covered by the way they fell on the floor. Kun swallowed back the uncomfortable feeling sitting at his tongue as he knelt in front of the one nearer him to turn its face up carefully…

He locked gazes with the glassy, bloodshot eyes of Haechan. The boy’s lips were slightly parted as if he froze in the middle of taking a deep breath. A small trail of foam trickled from the side of his mouth, the same one that you could also see now upon closer inspection of the girl lying down beside him. Half of her body was covered by the boy, as if in a protective stance, but there’s no mistaking the face of his former partner now, cold and frozen with death. 

His stomach turned. Without saying another word, he leaned over and pressed a finger to the side of the boy's neck.

"No pulse for Patient 01. 00 is showing the same signs of death," he said almost emotionlessly to his earpiece. "I’m sending feedback from my body camera. You can check for the visual."

A few soft clicks that only he could hear took over on the line. After a couple of seconds, the voice spoke again, this time with finality.

"Confirming time of death of 01 and 00. Check the others, and then we can move the bodies out of the room."

Kun didn't waste another second to pick himself up from his crouch. He gave a nod towards the men closest to him, who then moved forward to do exactly what the voice ordered. Finally, he motioned at the remaining group still waiting near the entrance with their guns.

"Help them with the corpses. We need to transport them to the morgue as soon as possible."

Without another glance back at the scene, he went out of the room to leave the others to take care of the mess. The moment that he was within safe distance, he immediately pulled his mask off and took a deep breath. Cold sweat stained the collar of his protective suit and he leaned towards the nearest wall, eyes closing as he tried to push back the nausea that was in danger of overcoming him. His head was spinning… and he was sure it wasn't because of the effects of the toxic gas.

He was still in the middle of trying to collect himself when a slight buzzing sound in his earpiece sounded again. At first he wanted to ignore it, having already provided the information the control room needed, but then the next voice that came on made him open his eyes again in surprise.

"Dr. Qian. Is it done?" Haneul Lee's low, steady tone asked.

Kun straightened himself and quickly tried to breathe in to keep his voice steady before answering.

"Yes, sir. The effect of the poison fumes was instant."

A pause.

"And the girl?"

Kun took seconds to answer.

"She's also dead, sir."

Silence followed his words. Just when he thought the man dropped the call, he spoke again.

"Transport the bodies to the cremation room instead. We'll burn them in one batch."

Kun couldn't have felt more thankful that the man can't see his expression at the moment.

"How about Lee Jeno?"

"We'll use another way. He might not be killed just as easily. I'll personally arrange something else for him."

Kun didn't know what that meant, but he was sure it wasn't anything good. Before he could even do or say anything else, the other was already closing off the conversation with his last words.

"I need you to update the system about the new developments. Move all the files to the right vaults and inform the network,"

"That Project Dream is over."

******* The man was the picture of stillness as he kept his gaze on the feedback on the screen. His private office was dark, with the only light coming from the monitors casting shadows over his features. Haneul Lee almost looked like a statue as he remained set on his seat, his usually sharp eyes now staring off blankly as he watched guards move out on the live video he was watching. A parade of seven body bags were being carried off by the group, all bound tightly to keep the poison clinging from their corpses sealed.

His gaze focused now on the last bag on the line which looks significantly smaller and lighter than the rest. As he stared at it, his thumb unconsciously ran over the face of the ornate-looking pocket watch in his hand. His fingers felt the groove of the pattern etched on its cover—an elaborate pattern reminiscent of the beauty of snowflakes.

"You'll be the godfather of my little princess, yes?"

Her voice sounded so alive to his ears still that it almost felt like she was just there, standing beside him again. He could perfectly see her smile in his mind's eye, the way her eyes crinkled at the side as they danced with happiness. In that slip of a moment, he wasn't sitting in his office anymore, but back in the old halls of Rosewood that he used to call his second home.

"Of course, he is. He's the only one we can trust to take care of her if ever something bad happens to us," a new voice, a baritone this time, joined in the conversation. The words echoed in his head as if someone shouted them at him. They were so clear… and so distinct, that he felt like he only needed to turn his head to the side to see his former best friend exchange a loving look with his wife.

His thumb stopped moving over the pocket watch now as he started feeling the memories start to get the most of him. He has always hated the way they come back to him in the most inconvenient of times, making him remember what once was and what will never be again in haunting flashes. Without even realizing it, his hold on the watch on his hand tightened, its edges digging against his skin. 

The flow of his thoughts only came to a halt when he saw the group he was watching finally stop in front of a pair of heavy-duty doors from his monitor. Willing himself to refocus, he pressed a button on his keyboard which quickly changed the view that he was seeing. From its former view from the outside, the screen now showed a wide capture of the room beyond the security door. He waited for the gates to open and watched closely as the guards hauled the body bags on the steel beds taking up the space of the area. With deathly stillness, he followed the movements of the man at the head of the group who reached out to the bag closest to him. He opened the seal and parted it… showing the pale and almost exact copy of the face of the woman in his memories just minutes prior. 

This time, he actually felt his heart stop for a moment. The words came rushing back again—the smiles, the memories, and then the promises.

He killed her. The daughter of the only woman she ever loved. The child he promised to protect at one point in time, before fate messed everything up.

"Darling. We're done with the boy."

The sound of a cold, lilting voice from the doorway of his office made Haneul tear his eyes away from the screen. Leaning on the threshold, arms crossed over her chest and looking like a beautiful ghostly vision against the brighter hallway, was Miyoung Lee.

His wife's piercing gaze finally cut through his thoughts. His face might not have given them away, but he knew, with the woman's piercing gaze, that she could pick up something. With practiced calm, he reigned in himself, stowing away the watch he had been holding into his coat pocket.

"Collection is over?" He smoothly asked in an almost emotionless tone. Miyoung barely moved from her spot, eyes still set on him.

"Mm. We're merging his Arcana with the others."

"And the boy's status?"

"Incredibly weak. If you're going to kill him, now is the best time to do it."

The way she said that lacked any traces of warmth and empathy. Miyoung’s inflection alone would be enough to send someone on their knees in fear, but for him, it was exactly what he needed to hear so he could finish the last thing he needed to do for the night. Silently, he picked himself up from his seat and put on his coat again. The warmth of the wayward memories that caught up with him was still buzzing at the back of his mind, but he consciously pushed them back now, latching on instead in the cold indifference his wife offered.  

"I'll take care of him. You better go to IL Giudizio. Make sure that he is ready for the assimilation."

"Are the rest dead?"

Haneul froze just a little bit just as he stepped back from his table. Miyoung was still looking at him with her penetrating gaze, though there was now a different fire burning subtly behind them. He stared back at her, looking disinterested.

"Yes. They are."

"And the girl?"

He paused. The woman slightly leaned her head to the side, her expression unreadable.

"She’s gone too."

It took a couple of seconds before any of them moved. It was like a silent war between the two of them, one that is loaded with meaning even without the need for any words. None of them wanted to give way and back down first, until finally, Miyoung broke the rising tension with a slow smile. Her eyes, once smouldering, now danced with glee.

"That's good news. If that's the case, then we can wrap this up."

Haneul didn't say anything else. His wife finally straightened up from leaning by the door, an obvious sign that she was finally satisfied with his answer. He was about to take his leave as well when he gave one last glance to his monitor. It was supposed to be a fleeting last look, but he suddenly paused when he caught something out of place there.

All seven body bags are open now, showing a glimpse of the faces inside of them. Instead of the kids he know, however, the lifeless bodies that reflected on the screen were that of strangers—men he assumed were part of the vanguard that did the silent assassination from earlier based on the peek of the blue protective suit peeking under their body bags. He looked up just in time at the guards standing over the corpses to catch one of them removing his mask.

The stranger stared straight at him from the camera as his features shifted and changed. Haneul caught up on what was happening just before the moment the transformation was complete.

Zhong Chenle smirked straight at him from the camera just as the remaining men around him took off their masks.

The last thing he saw before the feedback was cut off was a bright explosive ball going straight for his view.

******* "Poison gas. That's how they're going to kill us."

Six pairs of eyes turned towards you in silence. None of your party huddled at the table really looked surprised at your announcement, though there was an obvious tightness in the air that cloaked the room. Everyone seemed to share the same sense of tension that was growing every passing minute as you sat in silence.

“We’re sure about that?” Renjun asked quietly now from his seat. It took you a beat, but you nodded in confirmation and looked pointedly around the room.

“According to the layout of this place, that is how it looks like. You see the air vents there? They aren’t regular chutes. If you take a closer look, they’re designed to tightly seal upon command. There’s no need for them if they’re planning to attack using guns or anything that uses blunt force.”

“They won’t do that, since they know we can easily overpower them with our offenses,” Mark said. “Oxide poison makes the most sense, since we can’t fight and escape it physically.”

“And it’s the quickest method with the most minimal contact,” Haechan added lowly. You nodded. Beside him, Jaemin leveled you with his intense stare. 

“What’s the plan then? Without contact, the rest of us can’t easily use our Arcanas.”

“Are we going to try and escape from here before then? We don’t even know when they’ll come after us,” Jisung joined in, his voice sounding the most serious you’ve ever heard from him. 

Chenle shot him a grim look in answer. “But we can’t. We tried before, but this place is built like a monster. They intentionally weakened us to lower the chances of our Arcanas busting us out of this place.”

You frowned. “He’s right. I’ve seen the security level of this place when I first came in and I’m pretty sure it can only be opened from the outside. Trying to use your powers will just weaken you more and make it easier for them to kill,” you said. Beside you, Haechan started tapping his fingers lightly on the table in frustration.

“So we just let them slaughter us like that, huh?”

“Exactly.”

You knew it was a rhetorical question from him, so you weren’t surprised at all when everyone turned their heads towards you at your reply. You met each boy’s gaze unwaveringly, silently willing them to listen closely to what you were about to say. 

“That’s exactly what we’re going to do. We let them kill us, because there is no other way we can get out of this room other than have them move us out on their own.”

“I don’t understand…” Renjun trailed off.

“Poison gases are deadly, but their effects are not instant. At least from what I know, it can take a few seconds to minutes before they kill someone. That’s more than enough time for us to do something,” you moved your gaze towards Mark who was sitting on the head of the table. “Mark, you control all forms of matter and their structure. Do you think your Arcana can change the toxicity levels of vapor?”

The boy’s eyes slightly widened in surprise. You knew he was starting to catch up with what you were trying to say from the look on his face.

“If you mean changing poison into pure, harmless gas, then yes, I think I can do it…”

You nodded. “Then we have a chance. This is how we’re going to do it. First, on the day that they’re going to kill us, we need to convince Cypher that we are still inside this room, just in case they are still tracking our movements.”

“But we are… inside. There’s no way out,” Jaemin said, looking completely lost. You shook your head slightly. 

“Wrong. We can’t go out, but that doesn’t mean we can’t hide anywhere else,” you said pointedly as your gaze slowly moved to Haechan. The boy frowned at what you said before his lips parted slightly in realization. “I’m pretty sure no poison gas can get into those shadow dimensions,” you added, the second you knew he got it. You could feel everyone on the edge of their seats now so you continued.

“Here’s how we can pull it off—and I need everyone to listen because we all need to work together to make sure it works. Haechan creates illusions of us being in the room before the attack. Once that’s done, we’ll have to move and hide inside one of his dimension portals to wait things out. Mark, we need you and Chenle to stay behind. Do you think you can do something to make sure the gas doesn’t get to you and him first?”

The boy gave a tight nod. “I can shift the air in the room so that it creates a vacuum around us. We’ll be protected.”

“Good. You and Chenle will have to find a way to somehow overpower the men closest to you under the cover of the smoke. They’ll be wearing masks for sure, and you need to move quick to attack seven of them, no more no less. Once they are poisoned, you need to switch clothes with them as quickly as you can,” you turned now towards the younger boy who had been listening to you intently.

“Chenle, you’re very important for the next steps. Once the men are poisoned, Mark has to neutralize the gas so that it can be safe for us to come out of hiding. Nobody else in the room will notice this as long as we have casualties in the room. Once we’re back in the room, you need to transform the dead bodies to look exactly like us, and change us to take their appearances. We can get out of the room then, under the disguise of the guards once we move our ‘bodies’ out.”

Nobody spoke or even made the slightest sound for a good few seconds even when you finished speaking. Instead, the boys simply stared at you with varying looks of shock and disbelief. Haechan finally broke the silence, his tone hushed when he spoke.

“Holy shit… That’s genius.”

Renjun nodded slowly, his gaze unwavering on your face too. “That might work…”

You, on the other hand, faltered slightly. “You think so? It’s going to take a lot on all of you.”

Mark shook his head. “It probably will, but it’s not like we have any other choice. We’ll have to make it work.”

The rest of the boys exchanged silent looks between each other in confirmation. Finally, Chenle said what everyone else was thinking, his words sounding like a death sentence.

“Let’s all wait to die then.”

******* “Jisung, a little help here?!”

A bright ball of light zoomed over your head just as you ducked and got on your knees. The sensation enveloping you was one of the most uncomfortable you’ve ever felt, with your flesh moving and churning against your bones as if they have a mind of their own. Somewhere beyond you, you heard Haechan’s voice call out again just as one of Jisung’s energy explosives hit something and sent the floor rumbling. Mixed in with his voice are random shouts of voices from the guards who went into the room and were still in shock from the ruckus that was happening. With a last wince, you felt your body finally snap into place again as Chenle’s Arcana finally faded off. You turned your head to the side in time to see Jaemin shift back to his appearance at the same time, a displeased look obvious in his face.

“Hell, don’t ever make me look that ugly again,” he said through gritted teeth as he pulled off the heavy protective clothing that he used as a disguise. You felt his hand immediately shoot up towards you to pull you to an upright position, only for you to try and pull him back as a man suddenly charged towards your pair from out of nowhere, his gun pointed straight at your chests. Jaemin immediately realized what was happening and held on to you as he turned his head back. 

“Jaemin, watch out—!”

The boy only look slightly concerned at the danger. Expression not even changing, he looked the man straight in the eye, causing the latter to immediately stiffen in his spot. You only heard his next words as he pushed you a little behind him to cover your view with his back.

“Don’t even think about it. Shoot yourself.”

The sound of the gun going off was swallowed by the other sounds of explosion in the room. Before you could even process what happened, you felt another slight tug at your hand as you were once again pushed forward. Renjun and Haechan appeared on your side just as you tried to look around, the latter bringing the rear as he tried to push your group forward.  

“Mark-hyung! Chenle!”

The two boys in question were currently on the other side of the room, both engaged in fights of their own. You only caught glimpses of them as you moved, but you were sure you saw balls of fire from Mark’s hand and what look like ragged blades made of steel being thrown around by Chenle to the men closest to him. The older of the pair gave your group one quick look, before blasting another man off his way.

“Jisung, go with them! We’ll follow. Find Jeno and the headmaster!”

You swiveled your head to find Jisung at the head of the room, blue currents crackling in his hand just as he electrocuted a man he was in a lock of arms with. Without another word, he pushed the unconscious guard off him and started running towards your pack still being led by Jaemin. The latter’s eyes were swiveling everywhere, desperately searching for something. 

“Renjun, which one—”

“The man near the door. He knows where they are. He’s he head of guard,” the other boy quickly answered, his pupils dilated as he stared at the said guard. His eyes looked glassy but focused at the same time, and you knew, he had gotten into the man’s head, sifting through his memories. “I got it. I already know where they are, but we need him to open the door. Jeno’s closest to us.”

Jaemin didn’t waste any second to take action. Crossing the distance just as Jisung met your group, he barely even flinched when the man raised his gun and open fired towards your direction. You gasped, but the bullets flew off towards different directions as Jisung pulled up his energy shield around all of you at the nick of time. One bullet actually bounced back towards the guard, catching him on his thigh and making him double over in pain towards the floor. Jaemin caught before he even managed to catch his next breath though, his hand going over half of the man’s face. 

“Stand up. Bring us to Jeno,” he ordered, his voice low and commanding. The guard’s eyes glazed over, and like a puppet, stood up and started walking towards the door despite the heavy bleeding on his leg.

“Jisung, bring the front. I’ll take care of the defense,” Haechan’s voice sounded tense as your group finally stepped out of the room. The hallway that welcomed you was now flashing with red lights and you could hear sirens blaring in the distance. You ignored the growing painful stitch at your side as your unit started speeding down the corridors, following the hypnotized man at the head of your group. 

“We don’t have much time. We need to get to them fast,” you panted as you tried your best to keep up with everyone. A sudden bright flash of light almost made you trip in surprise as Jisung threw spears of light towards a group of men that suddenly appeared from around one of the bends you just passed. Behind you, Renjun quickly picked you up and pushed you forward again, his hand on your back. 

“We’re almost there. Jeno’s in the third hallway,” Renjun said urgently before his breath caught. Eyes widening, he suddenly turned around and shouted at Haechan who was just a few feet behind.

“Haechan, three guards incoming—”

He was barely able to finish his sentence when three men appeared just as he said, their guns set on your group. Before any of them could pull the trigger, however, a big gaping black hole opened behind them with monstrous jaws. One man almost screamed in surprise, but he was immediately cut off when it swallowed him and the rest of the guards, leaving nothing but their guns clattering on the floor. You gasped but Haechan barely even missed a beat as he continued to run behind your group.

“I swear, if we’re not even close yet—”

“We’re here!”

Jaemin’s voice cut through the noise as your group skidded to a halt in front of a double set of metal doors. Breaths heaving, you all watched as the hypnotized warden moved over like a puppet to unlock it in a trance. It took a moment before the said gates parted, but you felt yourself pushed inside as soon as you could slip between the crack. The rest of the boys followed behind shortly, just as the wayward sound of bullets came from the corridor you just left. You have barely caught your breaths and balance when you all collectively froze in shock at the scene that welcomed you.

Strapped in the bed in the middle of the room was Jeno, his eyes only half open as he stared at nothing in particular. Hovering above him, his hand pressed against his barely moving chest, was another boy who seemed to be surrounded by a dark force field. Your eyes widened just as the stranger looked up and locked gazes with yours. You almost stumbled backwards as you realized what you were looking at. Somebody caught you just in time before you lost your balance, Mark’s voice barely piercing through your fear as he spoke.

“What’s happening—”

The boy’s voice faded just as the monster with Jeno’s exact face twisted his lips into a smirk.

******* “What the fuck…”

Chenle’s shocked voice was like a shot of cold water that brought all of you back to your senses. Eyes still wide, you felt Mark’s arm pull you back urgently before he stepped in front of you. His stance was tight, but you could feel the slight tremors running through him as he kept you close. When the monster straightened up and stepped away from the bed, the rest of the boys around you fell back to defensive stances even with different levels of horror on their faces.

“Jeno-hyung,” Jisung mumbled, sounding equal parts lost and terrified. As if it heard him, the creature turned his head towards him before taking another step towards your group. There was something about the nature of its movement that seemed deeply unnatural and eerie, and you could see now how its eyes glowed black, the same way Jeno’s did back in the torture room. Unlike Jeno though, you knew this boy your were looking at is anything but human. 

“That’s not him,” Jaemin’s hollow voice barely pierced through your shock as he finally spoke beside you. A heavy weight settled at the pit of your stomach as Renjun finished what the other couldn’t say.

“That’s a clone.”

Renjun’s last word is what seemed to have triggered the spiral of events that followed. The shadow image of Jeno smirked wider at the sound of it, its eyes turning even darker as it regarded your group. Not a heartbeat after, black humanoid shadows burst out from the floor and caused tremors that threw all of you out of balance. A sound of pain was torn away from you forcefully as you were slammed back against the wall by the earthquake it caused. Your head spun, but you managed to open your eyes just in time to see the monsters start to move towards the direction of your group, their sizes growing with every step.

“Shit!”

“He has the same Arcana as him!”

“Watch out!

The shouts overlapped around you into a cacophony of mess. A growing ringing in your ears kept you from knowing who was shouting, but you did feel a force try to pick you up from the floor as you tried to blink away the spinning of your head. You focus and balance still off, you barely registered your body being shoved again into the wall. You blinked. Looking up, you saw Chenle’s hazy profile before you. There was a wall of rock covering the both of you from whatever force was pushing from the other side, and he gritted his teeth in pain as his hands pressed against the barrier. Your mind only snapped to clarity at what was happening when long, deep cracks ran around his summoned shield right in front of your eyes.

“Chenle—”

“Haechan-hyung! This isn’t gonna work! We need your shadow room!”

A deafening roar from somewhere made you instinctively grab the boy and throw both of you towards the floor. It was done just at the nick of time too, as a massive clawed arm finally broke through the rock shield Chenle was trying to hold up. Your first instinct was to roll away and drag your pair away as far as possible from the still raging monster now pounding at the ruined shield, but a different set of arms both lifted you from the floor before you could even do it. You barely caught a glimpse of Jaemin before he was dragging you towards the other end of the room, his eyes wild as he looked around. You gasped as you saw half of his face covered with blood, but you didn’t even have enough time to process that as another explosion made you unconsciously flinch and curl.

“Haechan! Do something! I have her!” the boy roared over the sounds of blasts and growls that has taken over the room. A rain of loose rocks and cement poured over your heads from the ceiling as another resounding bang tore through the air.

“I’m trying! Get out of the way!” Haechan’s voice shouted back from god knows where. You couldn’t see him in the ruckus that was happening, and you didn’t even have a chance to try and look for him, because the next thing you know, a black void opened in your peripheral vision. Jaemin started pushing you towards it without another word. 

“No! You need to come too!” You screamed in panic when you realized he and Chenle weren’t coming with you. You tried to reach out to both of them just as the void started to close, but both quickly stepped away before you could get your hands on them.

“We can’t. We need to get Jeno first. Mark and the others can’t do it on their own, just stay there and wait for us!”

That was the last you heard before the darkness finally swallowed you. All of a sudden the noise from the room cut off, and you were surrounded with nothing but the deafening silence of the room Haechan conjured with his chaos magic. Only the sound of your heaving breaths pressed against your ears as your knees finally gave way and you fell to the floor.

You didn’t know how long you stayed there as you tried to catch your breath. You weren’t sure if you are bleeding anywhere, but that was the least of your worries as you fought against the crashing emotions inside of you that made you almost choke in your own breath. There was a moment of silence as you tried to clutch on the floor of shadows in an effort to ground yourself, but it was short-lived as an unexpected tremor shook the very void you were in. You gasped and looked around wildly. The force felt like something of an attack from the outside, but you couldn’t confirm when it suddenly stopped just as soon as it came. At this point, you knew your nerves were frayed to their limit. The dead silence that followed was even more painful as you waited breathlessly for the next blow. 

Boom!

Your scream caught in your throat at the splitting sound that sliced the  silence enveloping you. All of a sudden, the darkness surrounding you was overcome by a sudden wash of light coming from a crack in the void. Before you could even wrap your head around what you were looking at, a monstrous arm reached out from the hole and wrapped its burning fingers around your neck. It pulled you back so hard and fast into the source of the light that the only thing that registered to you was the chilling sound of cracks that tore through your consciousness. The next thing you know you were staring at one of the shadow monsters as it held you in mid-air by your neck, its black glowing eyes drilling against you.

The blunt force must have broken something in you because you could feel nothing of the pain after. The shock of it all, however, is what really made you numb. It barely even registered to you how you were back in the real world, Haechan’s dimension seemingly torn into shreds by the beast alone. Your head was feeling heavy, and you’re convinced you are about to lose consciousness any time as more of your airflow was cut off. With the last of your energy, you tried to move your eyes across the room. Your sight had gone blurry by the edges, but you managed to register the bleeding face of Mark staring up at you in horror before you felt gravity started to pull you down. Slowly, the monster let go of its hold on your neck, only for your body to be caught again in mid-air… by its arm piercing through your stomach.

“No!”

“Mark! Stop!”

“Kun-ge!”

“Ten! Get to her first! I’ll get the others!”

Everything was just a blur of colors, shapes, and sounds after that. Your body hit the floor, but you didn’t feel any pain as the last of your breaths started to leave you. Your eyes were still open, but your mind was struggling to understand what you were seeing and what they mean. Even in the growing hollowness quickly swallowing you though, you saw the way the shadow monster stopped just before it was about to drive its last blow on your battered body, as if it was suddenly frozen in time. It was only a few seconds before you lost consciousness when a familiar face took over your dimmed line of sight, his face hovering over you as he made a motion to pick you up.

“Hey, you’re okay. Just stay still.”

Ten…?

“We’re getting out of here.”

******* The feeling was worse than what you hoped death would be like.

If limbo was a solid construct, it is exactly the sensation that was wrapping you right now. It was different from anything you have experienced before, with your consciousness caught between a wakeful state and a growing numbness that always seems to pull you under every time you were just about to break the surface. You have no idea where you are or even who you are, and yet there was one strand of thought that you were clinging desperately into as a lifeline.

You were fading into nothing. And it was terrifying.

"Love. Love, don't close your eyes. Don't go to sleep yet."

"We're losing her—no. No. We need to do something!"

"Renjun! Where are you!"

The sound of that name brought a mild undercurrent of shock over whatever trace of life was still left in you. You know that name… you've said it so many times before but you couldn't really remember why… Renjun… Renjun…

"Renjun?"

"Yes, noona?"

The way your vision snapped to focus almost knocked out the air from you. From floating in nothingness, you were all of a sudden back on your feet again, standing in the middle of a shadowed corridor. Turning your head to the side, your eyes ever so slightly widened when you saw Renjun beside you, his gaze set on something in front of him. You frowned. You didn't know what was happening, but at the same time, there was a part of you that seemed to exactly know the answers you are trying to grasp. You watched silently as the boy’s lips turned up into a soft smile as if he could hear your thoughts, before he finally turned to look at you.

"Where are we?"

He tilted his head a little to the side at your question. He seemed calm, a complete  contrast to the confusion swirling in your head at the moment. He gave you a look before turning away again and nodding his chin towards something. The action made you finally follow his gaze, only for your heart to drop at what you saw beyond.

"Where it all started. I think you know exactly where we are."

The white door from your dreams loomed in front of you like a ghost. It looks exactly like the real one you walked through back in Rosewood—the threshold to your father's office where you found his secrets. The only difference now is that the door you are looking at didn’t have its bronze knob burned and singed yet, and that there was no smoke coming from under its gap near the floor.

"Why are we…"

Your voice trailed off as you took in the sight in front of you. You were so lost that you didn't even notice the way Renjun had threaded his fingers on yours until you felt him squeeze your hand. The comfort the gesture brought grounded you just a little, numbing your mind before it went down a full spiral.

"It's time to open that door again."

He said those words so softly, and yet you could hear the urgency in them still. You hesitated. A part of you didn't want to move, afraid of what you might find on the other side of it, but there was also something unexplainable urging you to do the exact opposite. For a few more seconds you stood there, gauging your options, before finally raising your hand and reaching out to the knob. Beside you, Renjun gave you one final squeeze just as you turned and pushed it back.

The door parted slowly as if it had a life of its own. You weren't sure if you were still breathing in the first place, but your chest felt absolutely still as you waited for it to reveal what was behind it. When you finally caught glimpses of what's beyond, there was a brief moment when your mind started to figure out what you were seeing. Everything looked exactly the same from your father’s office back in the academy, but then your eyes moved down to its center... 

And landed on a girl lying on a table in the middle of the room. You couldn’t see her face at first since she had her head turned away from you so you took a silent step inside to try and see more. You have finally passed through the door when she finally moved, causing the light in the room to wash all over your features. You stopped, your breath freezing in your chest. Lying beyond was a woman....

With the exact same face as you. 

It felt like the floor was torn away from under your footing. You were confused, the feeling only growing as another table materialized next to where your doppelganger was. Your eyes widened in surprise. Resting on it was Renjun, his hair still long just like when he first came to Cypher. Quickly, you turned to look at the boy on your side. The Renjun who first came to your dreams was still there holding your hand. He was looking at both your duplicates beyond with an unreadable light in his eyes. 

“What’s happening?” you asked, your voice sounding thin and almost breaking at the edges. He squeezed your hand again but kept his sight trained straight at the scene in front of you. 

“Watch.” 

You did what you were told. The doppelgangers in front of you have barely moved since they came into focus, so your eyes bounced around the other details around them in the hopes of finding something that can make you better understand. When they finally focused on the tables they were lying on, a shocking realization hit you like a wave. They were the exact same desks you found in your father’s office—the ones you thought were so out of place when you first stumbled on them. 

That’s when it hit you. 

You're not looking at an illusion, nor was this just a dream. The girl you are looking at is not a copycat. 

But you…

"From a memory," Renjun whispered beside you as if he just heard your train of thought. At that moment, you saw the girl’s lips move, silently at first, before they finally formed words. 

"I trust you."

The sound of your own voice startled you. The moment you heard them, the scene changed as if someone had flipped it. This time, there were also others in the room, surrounding the table where you are. Mark, Jeno, Jaemin, Haechan, Jisung and Chenle were looking down on you and Renjun's doppelgangers, their faces unreadable. Renjun's double also turned his head towards the girl beside him before reaching out gently to her face. Above him, Jaemin moved over to hold him down while the rest hovered around you. You noticed how the boys seemed to take calculated positions, as if whatever was happening was already pre-arranged. Mark stood over to your left while Jeno hovered near your head. Jaemin, Chenle, and Haechan reached out to pin down your hands and legs. 

"This is going to hurt," Renjun vision whispered to yours. 

You nodded.

"I know."

"Close your eyes."

You flinched as you heard yourself scream in pain just as soon as she did what she was told. The moment was fleeting, however, as your view of the room suddenly spun out of control. The corridor melted and vanished, including Renjun and the whole slice of memory you have been watching, only for it to snap back at an entirely different place. That happened again and again, words jumping and scenes flipping as you jumped from one place to another. All throughout, you remained on your spot, unable to do anything but watch and listen to whatever it was presented in front of you. 

"You need to do it, Mark. It's the only way it will work."

"Make sure to give me a good dream, alright Haechan?"

"Chenle and Jisung… you'll help noona, right?"

"I'm sorry, Jaemin…"

"Give me this pendant at the right moment, Renjun. And a flower. A yellow daffodil will be nice."

"Jeno… Will you wait for me?"

You doubled over and clutched at the sides of your head as the noises, colors, smells, and sensations washed over you like a huge tidal wave. You could feel yourself splitting at the seams and being brought back together again and again. You were confused. In pain. Terrified. Lost.

"I'll leave my memories to your care."

Your own haunting voice echoed in your head. The words made you freeze, killing the screams you didn't even know were making. Eyes wide and pupils shaking, you looked up again only to find yourself in an entirely different room. Your gaze settled on another vision of you and the boys, though this time, everything was different.

Your eyes focused on an exact copy of you again lying down on a bed. Unlike the vision at Rosewood, however, this version of you looked pale and almost lifeless. Black marks decorated your neck, and half of your body from your stomach down was drenched in blood. Your chest was still… Except for the times it unnaturally gets lifted from Jisung's electric shocks. Your heart dropped to your chest as you realized what you were looking at.

This was not part of your dreams or even your memories.

This… was your present.

"She's losing a lot of blood. Chenle!" Haechan's high-pitched voice turned on the rest of the noises of the previously silent scene you were watching. He was holding what looked like a blood-soaked towel against the hole in your stomach, his own hands stained with the red liquid as he tried his best to plug your wound. Across from him, clutching your other side was Chenle, whose face was illuminated by a strange light coming from his hands pressed close to your flesh. He looked pale. Scared.

"I'm trying. Her muscles are binding slowly because her wound is severe. Jisung—"

"Her heart is not starting," the other boy, who was hovering over your upper half, answered in a trembling voice. You watched as he pressed his hands on your chest again before sending another jolt of electricity that sent your back arching up before falling limply on the bed. “We need her heartbeat to pick up faster. I can’t do it alone.” 

"Her pulse. It's fading," Mark sounded hollow as he clutched on to your hand. "We can't do this. Her life force is leaving faster than we can bring it back."

Jaemin, who was standing next to him, gritted his teeth in frustration. He was trying to hold up Renjun who was currently standing by your head with his hands pressed against your temples. "We need Jeno. Where are they?"

As soon as he said the name, a new movement from your peripheral vision made you tear your eyes away from the bloody scene. Appearing out of thin air was Ten trying to hold up Kun and Jeno on both his sides. Your lips parted in shock. Your surprise was mirrored by the other boys, though they were quicker to recover at the sight of the newcomers.

Renjun didn't waste another breath before calling out to the younger of the trio.

"Jeno, she's dying! You need to hold back her lifeforce from fading to give Chenle and Jisung more time to revive her."

You watched, stumped, as the boy in question pulled himself away from Ten and immediately tried to rush over to where you are. He looked disoriented and weak, but he managed to catch himself and grab on to your other free hand before he lost his balance. Just like Chenle, a glow came from his hand, weak but still lighting up your joined palms. You took in a breath as things finally started moving in your head. 

"I'm here. Come on. Fight it."

Jeno's raspy voice sounded close to your ears even as you watched him from the safe distance of where you stood. When you saw him press your other self's cold fingers against his lips, you felt a jolt in your chest that was mirrored by the slight movement of your other body across the room. The other boys caught it, Mark in particular who held on tighter to your other hand he was still holding.

"Her pulse is getting stronger. Chenle, Jisung, just a little bit more."

The two boys in question said something back, but you didn't catch any of it as your attention was caught by Renjun from the other side of the room. Unlike the others who seemed unaware of your detached presence in the scene, he looked right straight at you, his eyes piercing.

"Noona. It's time to remember."

The next sequence of events all happened in a matter of seconds. You were yanked back from the ground you were standing on as your consciousness was sucked into a void where blasts of colors and sounds clashed and melded with each other. Wounds closed and bones snapped back to their right places. Memories of the far and recent past melded together, forming a singular consciousness that grew and grew and grew until they consumed you. Everything was unbearably overwhelming, not until a voice pierced through the noise.

"Please. Come back to me."

Everything stilled to a sudden halt. The room was silent, the only sound you can hear being the calm thumps of your own heartbeat. Slowly, you opened your eyes and let your vision settle on the first thing you could see. Jeno's face came into focus, his gaze moving over the rest of your features quickly. The moment your eyes locked, you saw realization dawn behind his.

"Do you…"

You didn't answer. Instead, you reached out for his face, your thumb grazing his cheek.

"Can you help me up, love?" You whispered. He momentarily paused before he took a step back to gently guide you into a sitting position. Around you, the rest of the boys moved away from the bed to give you breathing space. Kun and Ten also stepped closer towards your line of vision from the other side of the room. They were wearing the same expression the rest had on their faces—a mixture of concern, wariness, and reverence. You touched every single face staring at you with your gaze, before your lips tipped into a slow smile.

"Hello, boys… Missed me?"

Nobody said a word at first. Finally, Kun gave a slight bow of his head in answer.

"Welcome back…"

"IL Matto."

AUTHOR’S NOTE: So... I may have half-lied about a couple of things. First, it is true that this is Arcane’s end. The catch, is that it is only the last chapter of the first book. I decided to split the plot into two parts, because I know so many things have happened in the story already and I needed a breather to gather more inspiration for the remaining half of the story. I would like to thank everyone who has been with this journey so far. I really wouldn’t have kept the torch up this long if not for all of your support. For now though, I need to take a quick rest. 

Book 2 may come a little later than my usual timeline of publishing updates, but as you’ve figured out from the end of the chapter, it will cover the rest of the story with a heavy focus on everything that has happened before the start of Arcane. For those of you who want to read it, I’ll be waiting for you again once it starts. 

Again, I’d like to express my appreciation to all of you who have showed loved for Arcane. Can’t wait to see you again at the start of a new journey. P.S. Congratulations to all those who came so close with the theories and thank you to those who took the time to think about them. You’re all starting to learn how to pick my brain. <3 ;)

Love, 

Sammy

-----

BOOK 2: Chapter 1

When Ten shows up on your doorstep, he’s still wearing his makeup and hairstyling from earlier that day; you know they’d had a stage performing Kick Back. The only indicators of his restless mood are the slight twitch of his lips and the weary expression in his eyes, which you don’t even get a good look at before he has his mouth on yours and is backing you into your house.

You kiss him back for several moments until you have to separate yourself from him so you can actually close the front door, because his hand is already ascending up your shirt and you don’t need to give the neighbors an eyeful. “I don’t know why you didn’t take the makeup off, it’ll just get fucked up anyway.”

“Because it looks good on me,” Ten responds, like it’s too obvious for words.

You roll your eyes and giggle. “Hmm...well, you’re not wrong.”

The corner of his mouth lifts as he steps close to you again. “And look, you’ve even got my favorite shorts on...” His hands are firm on you as he gropes your ass, pulling your body towards his. “You wanted to be a good little baby for me, didn’t you?” Those words make your stomach pitch, and you think of how ridiculously easy it is for him to get you just as pliable as he wants.

“M-maybe.” Ten presses his lips to yours again and cups his hands under your thighs so he can carry you over to the kitchen counter. You protest lightly when he sets you down on it, though it’s difficult to form a full sentence when he’s got his tongue in your mouth. “Here? I make food here.”

“We’ve already fucked here, Y/N, don’t act so fussy about it.” There is truth to it; he’s bent you over this counter more than a couple times before.

“But that’s different,” you sigh, listening to the smacking of his lips as he kisses along your jaw and down your neck.

“I don’t feel like walking all the way to your bedroom.” He’s pushed your shirt up above your chest now, his mouth trailing up your sternum and between your breasts.

“You’re so lazy, it’s only a few feet away.” It gets a bit harder to focus on your words when he latches his mouth to one of your dusky nipples, suckling it and teasing it gently with his teeth.

“Lazy?” One of his hands dips past your shorts and underwear, his fingers nudging between your lower lips. The soft touch over your clit makes you shudder, and he keeps his fingers there, rubbing it in a maddening circle. “All I do to make you feel good, and you call me lazy…”

Ten’s fingers dive lower still, pressing against your entrance and gliding through all the slick that’s already gathered there, then pushing in deep. You grasp the back of his neck, your hand sliding into his gelled hair as he simultaneously focuses his attention on your breasts and your pussy.

The pads of his fingers rub that honeyed, pleasurable spot inside of you as soon as he finds it, making your legs weaken, and you’re glad you’re already sitting down. He makes sure the knuckles of his other fingers slip across your clit as he fingers you, heightening the stimulation, and this motion drives you a little further up the wall.

“Ten,” you sigh, leaning back slightly as he scissors his fingers inside you and sucks on your breasts. His tongue rolls around your nipple, sending heated tingles through your body and down your spine. His fingers keep hooking into that sweet spot, and it makes your stomach get warm and your walls grow wetter until you are dripping around him and onto the counter below you. You have a vague thought about how you’ll have to clean this up later, but you know he gets his thrills from getting you this wet, and you can tell by the stiff outline of his dick pressing against his sweatpants.

And just when you are inching closer to feeling that rope of tension snap within your body, your chest heaving against his eager mouth, his fingers slide entirely out and leave you feeling empty.

“Wait, don’t stop,” you cry out, reaching for him as he steps back from you. Your complaint goes unheeded as he reaches for your waistband and strips your shorts off, but not your underwear. He slips a thumb over the black fabric of your panties, dragging it momentarily over your clit before pulling away; he smirks at the stickiness covering the pad of his thumb even through that layer of clothing.

Then he shoves his sweatpants further down over his hips, freeing his reddened cock from his confines. You didn’t see him pull the condom out but it’s there now, and he rolls it hurriedly over his shaft.

“Not even gonna take your clothes off? Ah...you must be really upset today,” you remark absently. An abrupt moan punctuates the end of your sentence when Ten pulls your panties to the side and pushes into you, his other hand gripping your thigh.

“Mm, don’t wanna talk about it,” he replies, but it’s mostly spoken into the side of your neck as he buries his face there and leaves over a dozen open-mouthed kisses. His grip on your thigh tightens fractionally as he begins thrusting into you, dragging his hips away until his tip is just kissing your entrance, and then shoving back in like he’s trying to bury himself wholly within you. “Just wanna forget...god, you’re so tight…”

He ends up laying you across the counter, one hand supporting you by the back of the neck for leverage as he thrusts into you hard enough to make your body shift up the counter slightly. His thighs smack against your own as he fucks you, and it is all you can do to let him pull one of your legs over his shoulder and continue pushing into you like a man starved. Your mouth parts in a silent, overwhelmed moan, and you let him push his thumb past your lips, sucking around the tip of his digit like you often do to his dick.

“Y/N, Y/N—Fuck.” Ten’s voice is a lot less steady than you expected it to be, especially with how nonchalantly he was talking earlier, and you get the inkling that he is already close to cumming. His hold on your leg tightens and his head tilts back as he mindlessly thrusts into you, using your body to get himself off; his thumb stays hooked into your cheek, keeping your mouth parted so you end up drooling on yourself and his hand. The furrow between his brows, the wild strands of his hair in his face, and the way he sucks his bottom lip between his teeth is sexy, but not quite sexy enough to get you off, which you want him to do, with his fingers or dick or anything else.

His tip hits your spot every few thrusts, and this alone could be enough to get you off, just a little more—you focus your attention on that single delirious point of pleasure and the way his hips crash against yours—

The palpable tension that was coming off him earlier unspools itself quickly as Ten spills into the condom, his pace stopping as he holds himself deep in you but flexes his hips for that barest hint of friction. You still haven’t come yet, though, and you’re irritated about it, especially with how he barged into your place fiending for sex. But then he pulls out and disposes of the condom in one deft movement, then strips you out of your underwear before picking you up off the counter again. His hands never leave your ass as he carries you to the couch. 

“Don’t worry, kitten. You know I always take good care of you. Don’t I?”

If you had it in you, you’d want to hate him for calling you by that pet name. It makes you delusional enough to think there could maybe be something more between you.

Ten had even taken to calling you kitten outside of the bedroom. It first happened in front of the WayV members, and you’d wanted to die of embarrassment from how everyone else gave either surprised or knowing looks. Despite the momentary panic of the situation, Ten found that his precious little name for you came way too easily off his tongue and kept on calling you that. And despite yourself, you did not tell him to stop—couldn’t even if you wanted to. It gave you something to cling to, no matter how slight.

“Don’t I?” he repeats, pushing his face into your neck to kiss your throat and feeling your pulse thump wildly against his mouth like a butterfly’s wings.

“You do, Ten,” you sigh. Then he plants a satisfied kiss on your lips in response, nipping at your bottom lip and sucking it between his own. His lip stain is almost completely rubbed off now, giving way to the natural pink of his mouth.

Ten pulls your body on top of his, tugging at your hips and coaxing you to move up more until your pussy is over his mouth. He looks up at you with eyes dark like charcoal, and just as hot.

He parts your lower lips with his fingers and dips his middle finger into you, creating a soft squelching sound from how wet you are. With his other hand kneading your hip, he pushes a couple digits into you to get them wet and pulls them out again to drag the wetness over your clit; he circles it lightly with only the very tips of his fingers, giving enough friction to keep you on edge but not enough to satisfy you. You take a deep breath, your hands moving restlessly against the couch arm, trying to be patient—and not just knock him on the head and tell him to eat you already.

Ten leans up and brings your pelvis down so he can lay wet kisses over your clit; he reintroduces his fingers and immediately goes looking for that bunch of nerves again, the button that will have you dripping down his chin. Then he shifts his hand from your hip to pull the hood of your clit back, exposing more of that sensitive nub, and he mouths at your clit so intensely that you have to focus on not clamping your legs around his head.

You’re already wound up from him fucking you earlier, and it does not take much longer to finally come, your inner muscles squeezing around his fingers as they stroke in and out of you. Your hands slip to his hair as he parts his mouth a little wider, like he’s trying to suck your entire pussy. You are not even embarrassed by the messy slurping sounds he’s creating—it feels good enough to push you over into another orgasm right on the heels of the first one.

“Woo, oh fuck, okay,” you choke out once he releases your swollen clit from the tight grip of his mouth. He takes his fingers out of you too and licks them clean of your cum.

Ten looks up from between your legs with his mouth messy with cum and his hair ruffled out of place, still looking very much insatiable even though he’s already fucked you once and eaten you out. You’re still holding onto his dark strands, and you slide one of your hands down further to thumb at the corner of his eye.

“Just like I said,” you murmur breathlessly, smudging some of the eyeliner that’s already running outside its lines. “You’re two seconds away from looking like a raccoon...go take a shower.”

He drops one last little kiss on your clit, and your legs tremble on either side of him. “Come with me.”

You go with him all while knowing that little actual washing will happen. And as you predicted, Ten pushes you against the shower wall as soon as you’re both naked and fingers you again until you have to slump against him to be able to stand. When he is done, smirking and dick hard against your stomach, you suck him off until he’s cumming down your throat and calling out some semblance of your name in a long, shivering moan. By the time you both get around to cleaning up, the water has turned cool.

Neither of you bother to put on any clothes once you get into bed.

“You better feel better after all that,” you say, blinking your eyes at him within the dimness of the room, trying to make your pupils adjust to the dark faster. Ten’s hair is damp against the pillow, and a distant memory sparks in your mind of that dream that became the catalyst for all this. Feeling suddenly disarrayed, you turn on your back and look at a spot on the ceiling, wondering what the fuck your friendship has transformed into.

“I do,” he hums, grinning. “You’re too good to me.” He draws his fingers up the length of your arm as he tells you this. His eyelids are already closing halfway, weighed down with sleepiness. Though he is beautiful with his stage styling, he is also painfully attractive scrubbed down to his bare face, and it makes your heart throb to look at him.

“Maybe I am,” you whisper back, closing your eyes.

--

When you wake up next to Ten the next morning, it once again feels like waking up to a boyfriend. You try to move out of his embrace, but he complains, half-asleep, and pulls you closer. You are too defenseless to reject the promise of his arms around you and allow yourself to mold your body against his once more. Somewhere between his arms gripping you more tightly and his hair fanning across your neck like down feathers, you fall asleep again.

Waking up the second time comes by way of him kissing your neck and shoulder—you with one of his arms around your back and your breasts pushed against his chest. When he notices you’ve woken up, he moves back to look at you and brings his hand to the side of your face. His own face is half-illuminated by the sun spilling through the crack in the curtains, some silly little smile on his lips and his eyes crinkled like he’s just seen the happiest, cutest thing in the world, and you decide then and there that you can’t do this anymore.

His nose nudges yours, like he’s about to kiss you. “Kitten…”

“Stop,” you say.

Ten’s face drops, and he pauses. “Stop what?”

“Stop this. I don’t want this anymore.” You successfully shimmy away from him this time. He lets you do it, but stares at you with a troubled expression.

“What...do you mean?”

“We can’t keep doing this.” You get off the bed to pick your robe off the hanger it’s on, and you wrap yourself up in it as if it will protect you from your own emotions.

Ten scrambles up from the bed, the sheets gathering at his waist. “Y/N, tell me why. I thought we...”

“I love you. I am in love with you. That’s why.” You cross your arms and look at him angrily. You want to cry, and you don’t know if you’ll be able to stop yourself if you do. You feel very small in this moment.

“...What?” He looks at you as if he’s been slapped, his eyes widening.

“I hate this, Ten. I hate it when we go somewhere and you call me kitten and everyone thinks we’re together. I hate how you always want to touch me, even when it’s not sexual—especially when it’s not sexual. I don’t want to know how it feels to have your hand in mine or your fingers on my cheek. I hate it how you wake me up in the morning like this, when you look at me like…” Your voice catches, and you belatedly realize that you are almost shouting. “...like this is more than what it really is.”

Ten’s face is a storm of emotions, and if you didn’t know any better, you might even say he looks frightened or panicked. What could he be afraid of? If anything, you should be terrified that everything is now ruined between you. “But...Y/N, we agreed to—not take things further.”

“Ten, you are the one always taking things further than they need to be. Stop treating me like I’m your girlfriend when all you want is sex! I don’t want to do this with you anymore.”

You expected him to be more upset about this, maybe even angry, but he seems untethered. It’s as if you’ve just left him out at sea with no knowledge of how to swim. Your words seem to spark some kind of realization in him, though you don’t know what that is.

“I’m...sorry if you misunderstood me, but it wasn’t my intention to make you think we were going to be together.” He speaks weakly, like he feels bad about what he’s saying. Maybe he thinks you’re pitiful and is trying to handle you with kid gloves to avoid hurting your feelings, and that thought makes you even more upset. Maybe you would’ve preferred it if he’d just gotten angry.

“Misunderstood…” You don’t know whether to yell or cry. “But what am I supposed to think when you…” You try to search for the words, but it feels useless and ridiculous. How can his actions not be obvious to him? “Just leave, please.”

So you watch him gather his clothes, redress, and leave your place. There’s a hesitation before he passes through your bedroom door, but in the end he just says I’m sorry again. It is still not enough and not the answer you want to hear, so you let him go for the sake of your own sanity.

You let the tears drip only after he’s gone, feeling like you’ve just experienced a breakup. The thought of the relationship-that-never-was makes you sniff angrily again. When you sink into your bed, the sheets pulled over your head, you try to convince yourself that you do it because you’re tired and not because the linens still smell like him.

The next two months after that day are the most awkward and annoying ones of your life.

Much to your own surprise—because you were sure everything would end in flames and rubble after that rejected confession—you and Ten try to go back to some semblance of your previous friendship. However, every interaction is strained and weird; he never acknowledged your confession again after it happened, and you refused to do so to avoid being rejected for a second time. You can’t shake the feeling that every one of his glances is filled with some odd sympathy, as if he just can’t believe you’ve gotten yourself into this unrequited love nonsense. There’s an even stranger anxiety in his demeanor, too. A nervousness you are unable to assign a meaning to.

You try to distract yourself from it all with hobbies; you even adopt new ones. You’ve never cared much about knitting or collecting postcards or scrapbooking, but you do those things now just to fill in the empty spaces and quiet the mess of your mind. You don’t have to wonder about what Ten is doing, because you already know; Kun keeps dry begging for your help, as if you want to hear about any of Ten’s business in the first place.

“To put it lightly, we’re dying in here. Maybe if you could talk—”

“Oh please. Sounds like he’s having fun with his new buddies, and who am I to stop him. Like he’ll listen to shit I have to say,” you say dryly.

“Having fun, sure, but I’m not. There was the guy he brought home last week—and the girl I caught him in the living room with even before that. And the others,” Kun sighs wearily.

Jealousy curls like a snake in the pit of your stomach, but you dig your heels in and try to throw it to the side. “Tch. Tragic, and also not my problem. If you’re that worried about noise complaints, talk to him yourself. Would hate to hear about y’all getting kicked out.”

“I’m not necessarily concerned about that, I’m talking about him sleeping with all these people because you two—”

“Oh, damn. I can’t hear shit. Looks like you’re breaking up. Talk to you later!” You feel a little bad about hanging up on Kun, but the last thing you want to do is talk to him as if he’s your therapist and discuss the mess between you and Ten that was never truly resolved. And as far as you can discern, Ten is not thinking about you in that way anymore.

Rolling your eyes, you toss your phone away and roll over in your bed with your face in the sheets, trying for the hundredth time to not think about what Ten is doing with people who are not you.

One night when you’re hanging out at WayV’s dorm and attempting to pretend there isn’t some weird tension between you and your (former?) best friend, Yangyang and Xiaojun talk you into going to the club. Ten tells you all he will meet you there later, and it makes you roll your eyes—because you know he has plans to pick someone else up, but also because everything he does lately makes you roll your eyes—but you’re also glad you won’t have to sit awkwardly next to him in the car on the way over.

The club is dark and hot and pungent with the smell of alcohol. Once you are inside, you suddenly feel a little lost within all the chaos. You also realize you don’t want to let Xiaojun out of your sight—Yangyang has already bounced off somewhere with someone he knows, otherwise you might’ve clung to him similarly—because you don’t want to be left alone, so you grip his hand and he squeezes back, pulling you onto the dance floor amongst the crowd of bodies. 

You aren’t sure when Ten shows up. One moment he’s nowhere to be found, and the next moment he is right there, attracting your eyes like a magnet out of all the other people in the club. While you’re in the mass of people with Xiaojun, dancing and trying to empty your mind of anything important, you spot something you would rather not see, and it makes your body come to a standstill.

Some girl is talking to Ten at the bar—maybe the same one Kun says he’s been seeing lately, you aren’t completely positive about it—and pressing her body against his. He’s likewise leaning into her, giving her that same look he’d lavished on you months ago. The one only reserved for lovers. It was never exclusively for you, you know that, but seeing it directed to someone else again after everything that’s happened only incenses you.

She whispers something into his ear and kisses the corner of his mouth, and he pinches her chin to kiss her back, full on the lips this time.

You turn your head away from them with your mouth screwed up. Xiaojun stops dancing when he sees what you’ve seen, and he looks at you with a frown. “I think I should leave.” Your voice sounds watery, and you hate reacting like this. Life would be a lot easier if you could just Bad Bitch your way out of this and forget about him on the other side of the room with some girl you don’t know from Adam, but you can’t.

“Wait.” Xiaojun grips your shoulders with a pleading expression. He acts like he’ll say something more but then abandons whatever that thought is and says instead, “I’m sorry, Y/N. Please don’t kick my ass for this.”

“Huh?” 

Xiaojun kisses you. 

You stand there unmoving and bewildered for a few long seconds, and it’s awkward. You think you know what he’s trying to do though, and it’s fucking nonsensical because Ten has clearly moved on from you so why bother, but you shut the rational part of your brain off and respond to the kiss anyway. It is surprisingly easy to reciprocate; Xiaojun is attractive, and he kisses you intimately, like you’re both true lovers instead of two people attempting a cliché scheme. His hands are on you, one on your nape and the other on the small of your back, though maybe slightly lower than it needs to be for this little act. When his tongue parts your lips, slick and hot and faintly mint-flavored, you begin to wonder if this is all just acting.

Then it all abruptly ends when a sharp voice cuts through the air.

“So you two are hooking up and didn’t think to tell me?” Ten stands in front of you both looking unimpressed, and you are genuinely surprised by this.

Xiaojun’s mouth moves aimlessly—his lips are noticeably shinier from your lip gloss—and you can guess he didn’t think far enough ahead to consider what he’d say if Ten really did respond to his impulsive trick.

“Fuck you!” you blurt out, and they both look at you. “I don’t need to tell you a damn thing.”

“Y/N, for fuck’s sake—he’s my groupmate! You don’t think that’s important to mention?”

“What do I owe you? You’re not my man, and we barely even act like friends anymore.” His face falters when you say this; a nerve has been struck.

“If you fucking hate me, just say so Y/N; I didn’t think you’d go this far.”

Xiaojun gives a feeble attempt to jump in. “Now wait, this wasn’t her—”

You laugh, though your expression is marred with anger. “Hate you? That’s the last thing I ever did, but you didn’t want what I offered.”

Ten looks pained at that. “You don’t understand, I…”

The rest of his words are lost to you as the song changes and the music’s volume rockets up further, and you have no choice but to shuffle closer to Ten to narrowly avoid being bowled over by a couple who dances too near to you, oblivious to their surroundings. This puts you close enough to him to feel the heat radiating off his body, to smell the hint of sweat mingling with his cologne, and you think it might’ve been better to just get knocked over.

Unbeknownst to you, Ten’s hand had instinctively reached for your back to steady you, though he stopped himself from touching you just before his fingertips made contact. Suddenly, it dawns in his mind that neither of you have touched each other in quite some time, hardly even in a platonic way, and this knowledge disappoints him.

“I think we should go outside,” Ten says, staring at you intently. It’s a look that’s far too serious for the context of standing in a hot and sweaty club, and it makes you feel peeled apart, much like that first time you both had sex. Xiaojun has turned his eyes elsewhere in a laughable attempt to look like he’s searching for Yangyang; he’s caught between your tension and feeling much like he’s witnessing something he’s not quite supposed to be seeing.

And even though you are angry with Ten and want him to shut the fuck up and explain himself all at the same time, you still find yourself staring back, your gaze catching on the way the lights glint on the smooth skin of his exposed chest. “Fine.”

--

A few minutes later, you’re sitting in the passenger seat of Ten’s car. His phone buzzes with an incoming call, and then a text message. And then another. You both watch the phone vibrate on the console until it falls into one of the cupholders.

Because it doesn’t seem like he’ll speak first, you say, “I think she must be calling for you. Go tend to your little girlfriend.”

“She’s not my girlfriend.”

You shrug. “I don’t know. Go see what she wants.”

“I don’t care.”

You shift your head a little to glance at him, but you won’t yet give him the satisfaction of your full attention. “Now you don’t care? Didn’t look that way earlier...”

“None of that meant anything.”

“Oh…the same way with us, then. I get it.”

Ten grips the steering wheel and leans his head on it like he’s tired. “No. It’s not the same as us.”

“What’s different?”

“I can’t fucking forget about you,” he scowls. “I can’t forget how you taste, or how you look when you wake up in the morning, how you say my name when you’re happy or sad, how pretty you smell right out of the shower, how your mouth falls open in that cute way when you’re asleep and dreaming about something, or how you ask me to tie your scarf at night because you don’t feel like doing it.”

You sit back against the seat, unsure what to think of that revelation. “So what does all that mean. You miss the fucking and pretending? Because you experienced all those things and still only ever wanted to be friends.”

He sits up again to look at you. “No, it means I miss you and I love you and I’m a dumbass.” The way his voice softens reminds you of one of those chocolate candies with caramel in the middle, and you sigh shakily. Some unconscious part of you has already made up its mind about how this will turn out.

“Yes you are,” you agree instantly, although your heart pounds. You stare at the blackened tail-lights of the car in front of you and don’t know how to feel or what to say. Everything feels like a live wire right now, like the situation might explode no matter what move you make. Not the kind of explosion that destroys, though—the kind that clears the way for something reborn. “...I had to kiss Xiaojun for you to realize you felt that way? That was never even my plan.”

“Maybe I can be a little oblivious sometimes. And...I tried very hard to distract myself from...thinking about us.” 

“You could’ve just told me.”

“I thought you might’ve moved on or wouldn’t want anything to do with me anymore.” Ten slides his hand over top of yours where it rests in your lap, though it is a tentative move. “When was the last time we shared our dreams with each other?”

“You’re getting all sentimental now.” You look down at his hand on yours, and for the first time in months, it is the one thing that makes sense to you. “I don’t know. Definitely before any of this mess happened.”

“I miss you.” He squeezes your fingers tightly where they’re entwined with his. “Do you still love me?”

“Ten, please. As if I could stop,” you respond softly.

A quiet moment passes between the two of you. Finally, you turn your head to look at him, his silhouette illuminated by streetlights and the club’s neon signs, and he chooses that moment to lean towards you.

You hold your free hand up to his face. “Huh...no. You kissed that girl.”

He gives you an incredulous look. “And you kissed Xiaojun, but do you see me complaining?”

“Then we’re both even. But I ain’t kissing you tonight.”

Ten sits back in his seat and sighs, although there is a tiny smile on his lips. “Ugh. You kill me.”

You snort and tighten your grip on his hand, feeling the imprint of his rings against your skin. “But, you can still come home with me. I’ve missed just having you around...or whatever.”

He smirks. “Tell me how much you missed me on the ride over.”